the quixotic infidel

an end of theism …

2012-01-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

I came across this video series yesterday and I found it such a fair and honest treatment of the subject it deals with that I thought I would share it here.

It's quite brilliant.

Doherty ponders the paucity of biographical data in the Pauline epistles …

2012-01-10T07:25:00.000-08:00

The following is an appendix found (pp.662–664) in Earl Doherty's impressive monograph — Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, which nicely highlights one of the problems with the Pauline corpus regarding the historicity of Jesus.

Appendix 2

A Conversation between Paul and some New Converts

Scholarship has long suggested that Paul's silence on all things to do with Jesus' human life and career results from his "lack of interest" in the man, and his view that such things are "irrelevant" to his theology about Jesus. If we were to assume a steadfast refusal by Paul to gather or preach information on any aspect of Jesus' earthly life and teachings, we could envision something like the following scene. The setting is some rich Greek's house in one of the provinces, with a mix of converts and interested friends and bystanders gathered about Paul on a warm summer evening. Their conversation might go something like this:

DEMETRIOS (the host and owner of the house): So, Paul, tell us more about

Jesus the Savior. I have heard that he taught the people with great authority

about the coming kingdom of God, and how we should all love one another.

PAUL: Yes, I have heard rumors to that effect, but I consider such things to be

unimportant, and as it happens I am not familiar with any of his teachings.

DEMETRIOS: I see. But your mission is to gentiles like ourselves, is it not?

Surely Jesus himself included gentiles in his own ministry and directed his

apostles to go out and preach to them? I would certainly like to think that he did.

PAUL: I suppose that's possible. I don't have any first-hand information.

HERMES: You have performed signs and wonders for us, Paul. I understand

Jesus himself performed great feats over nature and once fed thousands with a

few loaves of bread. My friend Ampliatus heard about it when he was in the east.

PAUL (clearing his throat): Oh, I don't concern myself with such things, and

you shouldn't either. They're quite insignificant, and you don't need to know

about them to believe in the risen Son of God.

JUNIAS: When I heard you would be here, Paul, I told my sick mother that

perhaps you would come around to see her and expel the demon that is making

her ill. I, too, have heard from a relative in Galilee that Jesus expelled demons

and healed many people—

HERODIAN (interrupting in some agitation): Yes, the demons have been

especially active in my own household. My brother has contracted a fever, and

just last week the roof of my workshop collapsed for no reason—

PAUL (with a placating gesture): There is no doubt that evil spirits beset us on

all sides, my friends, and we must have faith that God will deliver us from them.

As to reports of healings by Jesus, perhaps he did, but then, every wonderworker

in the country makes such claims, so perhaps we should not place too

much importance on such things.

OLYMPAS: You have told us about the coming End, Paul, and I look forward

to our promised deliverance from this sorry world, but I am greatly frighted by

what may happen. Did Jesus reveal anything to his disciples about what things

would be like when he comes back from heaven?

PAUL (somewhat miffed): Who knows? Anyway, one can't rely on what those

so-called 'men of repute' in Jerusalem are spreading around. After all, they're

only fishermen. Besides, I have word on that directly from Christ himself—

AGRIPPA (a Jew): Some of my Jewish friends have heard of your preaching,

Paul, but when I invited them to join us at table, they said they could not break

their purity regulations and eat with gentiles. Did Jesus follow such strict rules

and refuse to eat with the unclean?

PAUL (exasperated): I have no idea.

CRISPUS (looking a little pained): I have a Jewish friend, too, who is a follower

of Christ. But he says that even the gentile has to be circumcised—(pained

expressions all around)—and follow every aspect of the Jewish Law if he wishes

to become a member of your faith in Christ. Is that so? Did Jesus teach that all

those Jewish practices must be followed by us gentiles?

PAUL: My friends, my friends, why all these foolish questions? What Jesus may

have said or done in the course of his life is completely immaterial. I have

information on those things directly from heaven. And I have already informed

you of the only thing that really matters, Christ's own suffering and death, and

his rising from the dead. It is these that have brought us salvation!

DEMETRIOS (hastily, sensing some perplexity and unease among his guests):

Yes, my friends, the Lord's passion is surely what we should be focusing on, and

what he went through in his terrible ordeal. Tell us about that, Paul. Was he

tortured and scourged before they crucified him?

PAUL (shrugging): I assume so. The Romans do that to everyone they crucify.

GAIUS (spitting in disgust): Yes, and they break the condemned man's legs to

make him die more quickly and painfully. I suppose they did that to Jesus?

PAUL: I don't know. I wasn't there.

ARCHIPPUS: Tell us what he said, Paul, when they put him up on the cross.

Even now the authorities are persecuting new believers in Christ and I wonder if

we'll suffer their hatred, too, just as Christ did. Did he speak? Did he stand fast?

Did he condemn them for what they did?

PAUL (curtly): I didn't ask. But let me tell you about what the Lord revealed to

me personally—

JULIA: Oh, how I envy you, Paul! You who have been to Jerusalem and could

stand on the very spot where Jesus was crucified. That would give me the

shivers. You must have felt his presence. Is that when he spoke to you?

PAUL: My dear lady, I've never been to Calvary. I couldn't find the time when I

went to see James and Peter. It's only a little hill, after all.

PERSIS: But the tomb, Paul. Did you not see that? Are there still signs of the

Lord's resurrection? Do Jesus' followers pray there every Easter?

PAUL (throwing up his hands): As to that, I couldn't say. But one tomb is much

like another, don't you think? Why fill your heads with such paltry details? We

should better focus on the eternal significance of these events—

DEMETRIOS (noting nervously that a couple of his guests had quietly slipped

away): Well, I am sure we all agree that Paul has been very enlightening on the

subject of Christ Jesus. Perhaps we should retire to the atrium for aperitifs and he

can tell us more....

recent …

2011-12-11T23:31:00.000-08:00

reading:

Jesus: Neither God Nor Man — Earl Doherty
Breaking the Spell — Daniel Dennet
Not the Impossible Faith — Richard Carrier
A Traveler's Guide to Mars — William K. Hartmann
Influence — Robert B. Cialdini

listening:

My Brightest Diamond — All Things Will Unwind
Marc Ribot — Yo! I Killed Your God
Francisca Valenzuela — Buen Soldado
Pat Metheny — Imaginary Day
J.S. Bach — Viola da Gamba Sonatas

2011-12-03T22:40:00.001-08:00

Religious symbols point symbolically to that which transcends all of them. But since, as symbols, they participate in that to which they point, they always have the tendency (in the human mind, of course) to replace that to which they are supposed to point, and to become ultimate in themselves. And in the moment in which they do this, they become idols. All idolatry is nothing else than the absolutizing of symbols of the Holy, and making them identical with the Holy itself. In this way, for instance, holy persons can become god. Ritual acts can take on unconditional validity, although they are only expressions of a special situation. In all sacramental activities of religion, in all holy objects, holy books, holy doctrines, holy rites, you find this danger which I like to call demonization. They become demonic in the moment in which they become elevated to the unconditional and ultimate character of the Holy itself.

Paul Tillich

from The Christian Scholar

p. 193

(transcribed from a speech given at Shimer College, Mt Carmel, Illinois)

2011-10-27T18:36:00.001-07:00

Idioteque

2011-10-11T22:01:00.001-07:00

Idioteque by tainoleonThe usual suspects, sans Ted, who was subbing for Tony's tragic day. Life is hard.Ó .

Bottom of a Well

2011-09-23T00:08:00.001-07:00

Recorded live on Tuesday, 20 September 2011, afternoon session.
10th cycle Jones clinicsextet:
Theo Belledin,
Mario Mendivil,
Dowell Davis,
Chris Gogh,
Ghery Fimbres,
and león

Bottom of a Well by tainoleonÓ

quote of the day …

2011-09-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

" The practical problem: Can the necessary demythologization be communicated to the congregation? And here we find a tremendous conflict. There are some people who live in the myth as a reality, without even trying to mediate it to their natural world view, which they of course share with everybody, whether or not they are scientists. Some of Bultmann’s critics say: “Look at the Catholics; they don’t need demythologization! They take all this without difficulty.” This is one group. And many Protestants are the same. The others see the incompatibility of the mythological forms if taken literally with the world view in which they naturally think and live: then they either sacrifice their honesty or throw the whole thing out the window. And often it has been thrown out long ago by their fathers or grandfathers, and they have no idea how a mythological thinking can have any meaning for them. This duality puts the ministers before a tremendously difficult alternative. Must he sacrifice the one group for the sake of the other group, who in the Pauline sense are the weak ones from whom the minister must keep hidden his greater knowledge? This is the great question which of course is also put before Bultmann, and before every scientific theology. Here the existential concern of the whole discussion becomes a real concern not only of the minister, but also of everybody who feels obliged to help anybody else in his religious difficulties. And that means that this whole discussion is far removed from being simply an academic discussion. It is a most existential discussion and one which puts each of you before a decision. "

Paul Tillich
The European Discussion of the Demythologization of the New Testament
Auburn Lecture Series at Union Theological Seminary
10 November 1952

scenes, themes, memes (moshpit perspectives) …

2011-06-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

An extraordinarily busy work schedule was followed by the sudden death of a loved one, momentarily derailing my psychic state, putting me just this side of despondency for a moment. In the meanwhile, I eked out 47th place on the biblioblog list for the month of May—a month that had surprisingly far less traffic than when I made 49th place a couple of months back. I don't understand how any of this works, so I won't even pretend to. People seem to really get into blogging, though, competitively employing strategies, vying for position. Some people take it very seriously. From my perch on the periphery I look at the playful taunting and gibing and strutting going on at the beating heart of the phenomenon, and realize what a strange subculture of people I am blessed to be a part of, albeit if only tangentially. It's the closest I come to the sort of nerd impulse in a certain kind of personality which often results in Star-Trekkies, Dungeons and Dragons geeks, comic book fans. These are variants of the same impulse, really. This nerd-complex also reminds me of watching a moshpit from a distance. In the center of the throbbing mass of entranced dancing bodies, it feels like a battle for survival, but from the edge of the whirlpool, beyond the event horizon, it can be a beautiful and cathartic experience, a lesson in human behavior, even. Some people have never seen a moshpit. They can't even imagine such a thing as a potential source of beauty. I reckon that's cool. Some people are more esthetically sedate than others; some more savvy, We can't legislate taste. Right?

Anyway . . . Next up I will write some of the thoughts I've had while exploring Hebrews It suddenly occured to me a couple of weeks ago that that epistle is the main reason why Christians are so confused about the character of their Judaic inheritance. It will close out my recently started review of the New Testament in search of judaic content. I won't deal with any of the catholic epistles (they are all clearly forgeries) or with the Apocalypsis of Saint John the Divine (don't get me started), except to say that they add nothing anyway to my search.

soon …

Ó

.

pésame …

2011-06-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

Lela Knox

6 Jul 1989 — 25 May 2011

quote of the day . . . . (guess who)

2011-05-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

"[…] every man, against his passionate resistance, becomes an object for every other man in every encounter. Existence is the continuous loss of freedom within a continuous struggle for freedom. Existence means being made an object amongst objects, a thing amongst things; it means being estranged from true humanity and trying to resist this destiny desperately and vainly."

Paul Tillich
"Existentialism and Religious Socialism"
Christianity and Society
Vol XV
1949
p. 9

The Acts Puzzle (QºM #11)

2011-05-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

Pt1 — Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11— Pt12

Robert Price has used an analogy for years to illustrate the principle of analogy as it relates to these ancient Christian texts. Imagine that you get home from work, get yourself some iced tea, and sit down on the couch and click on the remote control; the first image you see on the TV screen is that of a giant reptilian creature wreacking havoc in what seems to be Tokyo Harbor, tearing high tension cables down, scaring the bejeezuz out of helpless people on subway trains, who scream bug eyed as the creature looks in on them. What would your first reaction to these images be? It certainly would not be, "Oh! Look! CNN is on!!" No. Of course not. You are familiar with the genre of Toho Studio fame and make the right connection. Aha! A Godzilla movie! My daughter must have left the remote on the Sci-Fi channel. Right. This is the principle of analogy expressed very well.

But what if at the bottom of the screen was displayed the CNN logo, with accompanying right-to-left flowing ticker-tape below it—updating about fatalities and damage etc.? This, in a sense, is what we have in the book we know as The Acts of the Apostles. It is a tendentious, religious patchwork of different genres and styles trying to pass itself off as a historical document describing actual, real events— accurately. But the events are fictional.

Most telling in all of this recent brainstorming I've been engaging in, ironically, is the fact that the one source which explicitly claims to be a history of the apostolic tradition, is virtually silent on the very matter it purports to illuminate. Regarding the earliest period of Christianity, the narrative is meager, to my eyes. The “Twelve” are there at the beginning of Acts but they seem more like paper dolls meant to validate the story more than authentic people. They are obviously there to "testify" to the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, only to then disappear from the story altogether. Except for Cephas and James, nothing is known about either the teaching or of the eventual fate¹ of any of the supposed earliest witnesses of the life of Jesus.

Yet apologist appeals to the “martyrdom” of these seminal group of founders are still forwarded as 'evidence' of the verisimilitude of the claims of the religion. This is yet another example of consensus-based-on-conjecture that needs to be corrected if any progress is going to be made in the field of study. The book of Acts, traditionally seen as a sequel to the third gospel, seems more like the third book of a trilogy to my eyes, a trilogy from which the second book is missing(!). Acts’ sequence of the formation of Christianity leaves much to be desired. Jesus died. His companions, a school of Galilean peasant fishermen, ran and hid. Then, all of a sudden, the spirit descended upon them and, behold, they were transformed into the mighty apostolic Jerusalem community, the authority that every other church looked to as a model. But I have a problem with Acts’ brief glossing.

How did the Jerusalem community achieve this pivotal focal status? Was their authority really just magically bestowed on them one midsummer day? Why doesn‘t the Acts provide more detail? There is a step missing in the logic. How the threadbare account of such a continuity in the Acts went unquestioned through the centuries is hard to understand, given this nether-grey zone in the record. The author and/or editor(s) of the Acts succeeded in reconciling the Pauline variety of Christianity with its rival Petrine form. This done, it simply became second nature to make the inference. Voilà! Another one of the consensus-by-inertia, consensus-by-default, that I pointed to before. One of the ways that the author manages this merger of ideologies is by attributing a Jewish piety to Paul that is inconsistent with that of the epistles. Another way is by putting speeches in the mouth of Peter that are essentially pauline in content. Accurately recalling speeches, needless to say, is too much to ask from a historical record from the days before instant replay. Such documentation of what was said on a given occasion is therefore necessarily a composition of the author's own design, paraphrased according to the needs of his purpose for writing.
Writing speeches for historical characters that fit the desired sectarian/didactic function is a convention of ancient historiography. Here’s Thucydides on his technique for this:

“In this history I’ve made set speeches, some of which were delivered just before and others during the war [the Peloponnesian—Thucydides had been an eyewitness and participant]. I found it difficult to remember the precise words which were used in the speeches, which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty. So my method has been, while keeping closely to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what in my opinion was called for by each situation”²

Some Facts about Acts

We don’t know who wrote it.
Hypotheses have been raised, certainly, the first being Irenaeus of Lyons near the end of the second century. He based his attribution on the famous “we“ passages. But even if you accept those “we”s as indication that the author was some kind of seafaring companion of the historical Paul, the question must be asked: By what criteria are we justified in pinpointing Luke, specifically, among Paul’s many friends, as the author? The process likely went something like this:

—“Hmm …Let’s see, which one of Paul’s homeys was likely educated and kinda smart?……Why … LUKE !!! … Yes! …He has greek name … He was a doctor… Of course!!”

Irenaeus' methodology in linking them, though slightly better than that which he used in his mystical musing on why there must four gospels, is still just a conjecture in the end.

We simply don’t know who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. Insisting that we do is no more than apologetic posturing.
We don’t know when it was written.
Some people use those eyewitness-friendly “we”s to show that it was written in the late 80s (though I’ve seen apologists even date it as early as the 40s!) , as this would really be the latest that anyone could really believe that a companion of Paul could have been alive to write it. Whoever wrote it (presumably, this nameless old friend of Paul’s) would have been quite an old man by then. But this line of reasoning assumes without argument that in those passages the author was recounting his own experience, in the first person, and that he consciously is claiming to be Paul’s companion. The other, just-as-plausible possibility, namely that the author might have instead been quoting from one of his “many” sources (c.f. Luk 1:1), is simply ignored in its favor.

Other internal arguments for the dating of Acts are even less secure than the ones involving “we“ passages; they rely on the (just-as-tentative) dating of the third gospel in the 80s, which is somewhat uncritically accepted in another paper-doll consensus. However, I don’t think that this is quite as secure as people believe.
For some detailed explorations on thisparticular sub-topic, I recommend the following books:
- Trobisch - The First Edition of the New Testament
- Huller - Against Polycarp: In Defense of Marcion
- Mikeal Carl Parsons & Richard I. Pervo - Rethinking the unity of Luke and Acts
- Richard Pervo - The Mystery of Acts: Unraveling its Story
- John Knox - Marcion and the New Testament
- Joseph Tyson - Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle
Moreover, if those arguments that are advanced to date the third gospel to post-70 are accepted, it is not altogether clear why we must keep this “Luke-Acts” to pre-100, unless an argument from the “we” passages is introduced.

The fact is that there is no evidence from external sources for the reception of the third gospel until the middle of the second century at the earliest, and no evidence for the Acts until slightly later. This does not require a second century dating of Luke-Acts, but it does make it difficult to rule it out. Once we accept a post-70 C.E. dating to the synoptics, it's not clear to me why we should limit provenance to the first century.
There are in the Acts some verifiable historical errors. By this I don’t mean the inconsistencies and contradictions with the Pauline epistles, although there are those, too.
For example, the words put into Gamaliel’s mouth (in Acts 5:36–37) and into the tribune’s mouth (in 21:38, which seems to be a conflation of three different events, as detailed by Josephus in Antiquities 20:8:5-6,10 and in War 2:13:3-5) are problematic in this regard (the Gamaliel one is especially so, on a couple of different levels—he gets both the sequence and the time frame of the events he relates wrong).

The Westar Institute, notorious for its Jesus Seminar, which caused an inconspicuous ripple in the ordinarily insular pond of New Testament studies in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century, recently reported the findings of its newer Acts Seminar, a continuation of their earlier work on the gospels.

Among the conclusions reached by these scholars (these will come as a shock to the pious, orthodox "believer"—cover your ears if this is you) are:

*The use of Acts as a source for history needs critical reassessment.

**Acts was written in the early decades of the second century.

***The author of Acts used the letters of Paul as one of his sources.

****Except for the letters of Paul, no other historical source can be definitively identified for Acts.

*****Acts can no longer be considered an independent source for the life and mission of Paul.

******Contrary to Acts 1-7, Jerusalem was not the birthplace of Christianity. (I'd like to think on this some more later)

*******Acts constructed its story on the model of epic and related literature.

********The author of Acts created names for characters as a storytelling device.

*********Acts constructed its story to fit ideological goals.

**********As a product of the second century, Acts is a historical resource for understanding second century Christianity.

(Hat Tip to Schuck and Jive)

Richard Pervo says—and it's hard to disagree:—“Acts is a beautiful house that readers may happily admire, but it is not a home in which the historian can responsibly live.” Luke did not even aspire to write a real history (overt vouching in the opening verses notwithstanding) but rather told his story to defend the gentile communities of his day (the early 2nd century) as the legitimate heirs of Israelite religion. It's the same question that keeps popping up in this exploration; namely, Why is a group of gentile god-fearers so intent on claiming the Israelite/Judean God and the Israelite/Judean scriptures as its own?

That, I think, is the kernel in the puzzle.

For now …

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

¹ - The one exception is the mention of at least the death of James the son of Zebedee in Acts.
² - History of the Peloponnesian War

the artist formally known as John …(QºM #10)

2011-04-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Pt1 — Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 —Pt10— Pt11 — Pt12

The fourth gospel is foremost a work of art. Like most great works of art, its aim is not a representational one. Art, though often achieving a remarkable resemblance with what it seeks to represent, is not primarily about representation, it is about hyperbole. It is about using symbols to evoke psychical and/or emotional responses in an audient. The Gospel of John is the most poetic and symbolical gospell. It has by far the highest christology. Here, Jesus is not just some guy who heals and impresses folks with his prophetic acumen, he is the very Son, sent by the Father, who is simultaneously in mystical union with this Father. For a clear example of this hyper-exaltation, consider that whereas Mark’s gospel pictures Jesus as having received his messianic vocation at his baptism, and the Pauline epistles think it came at the moment of resurrection (Philippians 2), and Matthew’s gospel pictures it happening at his conception. John’s gospel raises the bar. Its author pictures Jesus as the Logos, that is, as a manifestation of the pre-existing, eternal logic of God. The use of this term in the book's opening hymn recalls Philo of Alexandria’s early (he was a contemporary of Jesus) attempts to systematize the Hebrew faith into a Hellenized form. But logos is in fact a Greek concept which informed the philosophical understanding of God and transcendence. What Philo postulated as an attribute of God, John fleshed out. John creates a poetic incarnation of this facet of God, intending to convince the early Christian communities in the eastern provinces of the empire of the divinity of Jesus. John thereby emphasizes Jesus’ “son-of-god”-ship more than the other evangelists. While the others certainly use this term for Jesus, John’s gospel elaborates on this concept, and even goes as far as to subtly equate the Son with the Father. To see the son is to see the father. To accept the son is to accept the father. This identity is one of the central motifs in the book.

While in Mark and the synoptics Jesus refuses to perform signs, the structure of John centers on the performance of these signs. These signs serve to reveal Jesus’ true identity as God himself. Through these signs, Jesus is revealed as the fulfillment of certain Jewish ideals or festivals. The previous gospels also emphasize that Jesus is the fulfillment of Judaism, but John steps it up a notch or two.

The vast majority of John is NOT paralleled in the synoptic gospels. There are no exorcisms in John. There are also no parables in John. Parables, of great importance to the synoptics as representing Jesus’ idiomatic didactic style, are completely absent in John. But perhaps the most striking dissimilarity between John and the synoptic gospels is the fact that in John’s gospel Jesus dies on the day of preparation for the Passover festival, that is, on the day that the lambs are slaughtered. In the synoptics, the last supper IS the Passover meal. This is an irreconcilable contradiction.

Despite apologist claims to the contrary, the gospel never actually claims to be authored by the beloved disciple. The author claims to have the eyewitness testimony of the beloved disciple (John 19:35), which is quite a different thing.

Who was his audience?

The primacy which this gospel had in the eastern provinces suggests that it came either from Asia Minor or possibly Alexandria. Valentinus and his disciples knew this gospel in 160 or so.¹

Three times in John characters are thrown “out of the synagogue.” This repetitive motif might reflect the friction around the turn of the first century, when the authorities in the synagogues distinguish themselves from the “Nazarenes,” who were attending the synagogues up until this point (as Jews or as god-fearers?) One of the prayers read at synagogue services was even changed at this point to reject these Nazarenes.

“For the apostates, let there be no hope. Let the arrogant government be speedily uprooted in our day. Let the Nazarenes and the heretics be destroyed in a moment … "

It distinguishes between the Nazarenes and the heretics, perhaps indicating that the Christians were never regarded as part of the “in-crowd” in the first place. It calls them “arrogant.” Commentators have suggested that these stories about getting thrown out of the synagogue are references to this emerging rabbinical antagonism.

John’s teachings about Jesus are laid out in long philosophical discourses. The emphasis on the “kingdom of God” is missing from John. As in Luke, the “spirit” plays a role, but in John, it is magnified. A distinctive feature of John‘s gospel is the emphasis on loving one another. The synoptics touch on this love when they refer to the Law (love the Lord your god, etc), but the emphasis on love, however, is not characteristic of Matthew or Luke. (It is in Paul - 1st Cor 13, however.)

The opening prologue in the Gospel of John contains many of the recurring themes throughout the gospel. Jesus is the Logos, the “word” of god, the logic of god, the self-expression of god, the wisdom of god, the utterance of god, an emanation from god. Though not so much thematically, the prologue recalls the framing of the creation story in Genesis (“In the beginning…” . . . in Genesis, god creates by uttering words). This Jesus can thus be identified with the utterance of god that was active in the creation of the world. To the Jew . . . God’s utterance IS the Torah. Thus, this is amazingly high christology compared to that of Mark‘s gospel. This prologue reflects a Hellenistic background to the gospel. The use of the Logos metaphor would have been familiar to anyone who was educated and familiar with stoic philosophy. (e.g. the god-fearers) Logos is the organizing principle of the universe. Logos is reason - rationality. Already in this prologue the themes of “life”, “light” are being unpacked (Gnostic allusions?). Jesus is an emissary sent from god, coexisting with him.

The interaction between John the Baptizer and Jesus is unique in John as well. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” he has the Baptizer say. This introduces the concept of Jesus as redeemer for human sin. We saw previously this idea in the Pauline corpus. In John, this is a key interpretation. It corresponds with John’s interpretation of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Passover festival (at least in his chronology of the last supper incident- thematically, the celebration of Passover is not about this redemption. That is more the purview of the Atonement feast - perhaps this is why the scapegoat theme is introduced - that is, as a way to bridge the gap between Atonement and Passover). The lamb, after all, denoted the emancipation of the Jews from captivity . . . More later. This also introduce the concept of the Eucharist in a way . . . For the lamb gets eaten as part of the ritual.

In the first chapter of john, you can find pretty much every single title of Jesus given in individual gospels: Son of god, son of man, the light, the messiah, the Logos. There is NO messianic secret in John. Far from it, John boasts his divine status. The structure of the gospel revolves around the “signs” which prove his divinity, and which he performs openly..

The festival of Tabernacles (tents —booths) takes place in the fall. There is drawing of water on each of the seven days during the feast of Tabernacles. Also, there is a use of Lamps and of light interfused into the celebration. On one of Jesus’ visits to Jerusalem during this festival, on the last day, Jesus proclaims, “let anyone who is thirsty come to me.” He’s not just the light, he the water of life too. These are proto-gnostic terms.

At (8:39) . . . . Jesus is accused of having a demon. He replies:

“I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you that whoever keeps my word will never see death.# The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say, ‘whoever keeps my word will never taste death; are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets also died. Who do you claim to be? If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my father who glorifies me. He of who you say, ‘He is our god,’ though you do not know him. But I know him. If I would say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep His word. Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he might see my day. He saw it and was glad.’ Then the Judeans said to him, ‘you are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am!’ … "

“I Am” was the name of God as told to Moses by the burning bush on Mt Sinai. Jesus’ little paroxysm is a poetic alliteration on this same theme. This is the christological high water mark in the Gospel of John. If the prologue wasn‘t enough to convince the reader of Jesus‘ divine element, here’s an explicit self-proclamation of Jesus as God Himself! The entire gospel seems like a succession of Jesus’ christological proclamations. After one of these, the Judean took up stones to stone him. Why didn’t they? What stops them? I mean . . . . If talking this way is what made them crucify him, . . . Why could they just stone him like they stoned any other blasphemer? Right then and there, like they did Stephen. Is there a hole in the plot here?

His last discourse at the last supper: “Truly I tell you that whoever receives one who I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives He who sent me.” He seems to like to remind them of his emissary status. This last discourse establishes a chain of command from God through Jesus through the disciples. They are now heirs to Jesus’ majesty by proxy. (does it not follow that the disciples are also equivalent to God in the same way? It's an interesting question)
In the fourth gospel, Jesus keeps repeating this self-identification with the father—ad nauseum … (Something’s wrong with this guy) But then . . . Suddenly . . . Some humility to lessen the smugness:. 'Those who believe will do greater things than me.'

Then comes the paraclete bit. In the gospel of John, Jesus descends from the father, then ascends to him and sends the paraclete (helper, comforter, spirit) on his behalf (to help with what? - it seems like the mission is the message, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan.) — Chap 17 verse 18 . . .
As you have sent me to the world, so I have sent them . . . . This is preemptively adding credibility to the apostles (the "sent-out" ones).

Next comes the arrest and execution of Jesus.
Like we already saw, Jesus dies on the day of preparation.

Question: if Jesus is the Passover lamb, what does painting the door lintel with his blood protect Israel from? If the answer is “sin” then there are mixed metaphors at work, as I hinted at earlier. The lamb doesn’t die (in other words) to make up for the sins of the people. The lamb dies to limit the angel of death’s killing spree to the Egyptians. This is a little confusing. Why mix these metaphors without explanation? It could be just the result of misunderstood Judaism.

The pattern that John uses is this: Jesus does a sign, and then he discourses on the significance of it. The elders get pissed because he’s healing on the Sabbath (this was already allowed by Torah . . . thus this charge from the authorities is highly unlikely to have been historically based). The Judean authorities were seeking to kill him, so the author of this gospel asserts, for healing people on the Sabbath and for calling god his own father. This, I think, is ridiculous, and it reflects an inadequate hyper-legalistic understanding of the Pharisees, who were used to this kind of thing and had never (not in any surviving record we have) sought the execution of a man for these things. One could imagine that they thought he was making himself equal to god, I guess, but the way it is expressed so casually and without any exposition, it seems an unlikely reaction, especially in light of Jesus saying, “I can do nothing on my own.”

I'll end for now by pointing out that there is no mention of James in the Gospel According to John.

for now …

Ó

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ - Heracleon wrote the first known commentary on this gospel circa 170.

quote of the day … (Tillich again)

2011-04-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

"It is illoyal to God not to develop scientific knowledge."

"Existential Thinking in American Theology"
Religion in Life
Summer 1941
p. 455

The Epistle of Luke - 'what Theophilus needs to know' (QºM #9)

2011-04-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

Pt1 — Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 —Pt9— Pt10 — Pt11 — Pt12

Who?

At face value, The Gospel According to Luke purports to be a long letter to a friend of the author, Theophilus, who is presumably unsure (or indecisive) about the details in Christianity's foundational story. The author aims to set the record straight for Theophilus once and for all. Viewed in its epistolary function, this gospel is unlike the others in that it is explicitly addressed to a single individual in this way, and in that it also describes the author's methods and purpose. The author of this gospel presents himself as an anthologist, an historian. This is no myth that he's relating; these things he describes are actual historical happenings, verified by "eyewitnesses." One wonders how many people were questioning the veracity of the accounts in Mark and Q at the time that Luke wrote. Apparently, there were enough to inspire him to write his "definitive" version, lest Theophilus fall prey to these detractors' doubts.

With this apologetic aim in mind, Luke explicitly claims to be using eyewitness material in order that Theophilus, “may know the truth concerning these things.” He decided to write "an orderly account," implying that the versions of the story written before his own were somehow deficient, in disarray. He doesn't specify what texts were in front of him as he wrote, but Mark and Q are surely among these sources he feels are less-than-adequate, in need of revision, of 'tidying up.'

What do we know about this author? An examination of internal evidence reveals a few things: First, his Greek is excellent, even elegant. Of all the gospels, in fact, Luke has the richest vocabulary. ¹ He is versed in political terminology and uses it accurately. He is obviously educated, familiar with the writing norms and conventions of his time.

In weaving his tale, whereas Matthew follows the form of Mark closely, Luke instead favors that of the hypothetical Q in the flow of his narrative. Some of the central organizational themes in Luke include: a concern with outcasts; the “Spirit” as a "character" in the gospel; the centrality of Jerusalem, and, ironically, the simultaneous centrality of gentiles as co-inheritors in God’s salvation scheme. While seems to have some knowledge of Judean ideas, especially regarding the soteriological messianism mentioned previously, his repeated insistent championing of the gentiles as co-inheritors of God's salvation makes it very likely that he is of the gentile variety of Christian. Even when some apologists attribute the other three gospels to Judean writers, as is the norm, that of Luke is often recognized as being the work of a Greek.

Where does Judaism factor in?

Luke’s genealogy, instead of going all the way back to Abraham as Matthew‘s does, goes all the way back to Adam, that is, to humanity‘s very beginning. Whereas Matthew’s birth narrative is a midrash on the Story of Moses, the birth narrative in Luke is less regal, less extravagant, more down to earth and humble. An angel announces to shepherds (not to kings or exotic Persian astrologers, as in Matthew) that the savior has come. For Luke Jesus is an Elijah-type all-inclusive savior who will save the world—the whole world, gentiles included. This stress on radical inclusivism is there from the beginning. always supporting the notion that Jesus has come not just for Jews but for all people. Old man Simeon (a Jew) recognized Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles”²when Mary and Joseph had brought him to the Temple to be circumcised.

Had there been a significant Jewish population in the community that Luke represented, I doubt that he would have stressed the gentile role in salvation so much, especially at a time (consensus says 85–90 CE) when Christians were reportedly being kicked out of the synagogues and even ritually cursed.³

Typology is as important a hermeneutic tool to Luke as it is to Matthew. But in Luke’s case the chosen typology is that of Jesus as the new Elijah, the super prophet. That character also appears and figures in the stories told in Mark and Matthew, but in those two gospels, the Elijah type is applied more to John the Baptizer, as a kind of herald of Jesus. In Luke the type is imposed on Jesus himself.

Some of the titles that the author of Luke applies to Jesus reflect some of the other Hellenistic elements he associates with him. For example, of the synoptic gospels, only Luke’s applies the title soter (savior) to Jesus. This was a common designation on many of the surviving inscriptions of ancient Rome. As part of the honor/benefactor culture of the Mediterranean region, the title would be bestowed on benefactors and sponsors. In its first century context, the word was often used literally. A savior would “save” one, from disease, from foreign invasion, from hardship, from slavery, etc. This was certainly not a new concept in the Greco-Roman world. It’s a down-to-earth salvation it implies in the Greco Roman context, not the sophisticated, convoluted other-worldly salvation that the word implies in the Christianity we grew up with. The Jews had these savior types as well (Moses, Joshua). The title was conferred on a bunch of ancient figures. Gods and leaders especially would receive it often (Pompey, Asclepius). Augustus, in fact, was regarded as a savior and as “son of god.” What’s more, the period of peace and prosperity that he was credited with ushering in was regarded by many as “evangelion,” that is, as “good news.” It may come as a surprise to many Christians, but these titles and words were inherited from a Hellenic matrix, not a Judean one..

The first time that Jesus speaks publicly after his baptism, he is given the scroll of Isaiah at the synagogue in Nazareth.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's son? ” (Luke 4:18–22)

In his interpretation, Jesus seems to be staking a claim for this exalted position as the abstract savior messiah that I profiled in part 7, the anointed one of God. Everyone is impressed by his announcement and they start to wonder at his authority. “No prophet is accepted in his home town,” he says. He thus refers to himself as a prophet in Luke, and immediately mentions Elijah (4:25).

One of the texts relevant to the Elijah typology is in Malachi:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD —.(Malachi 4:5)

Luke stresses the Elijah connection in another way by paralleling a story from 1st Kings in which Elijah visits a widow, whose son has died. Elijah raises the son from the dead. Likewise, Jesus revives a dead man upon entering the town of Nain with his disciples (7:11–16). Fear seized all those who witnessed it and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us, and god has looked favorably on his people.”

Luke is a gentile writing to a gentile Christian conscript. The central theme in Luke is the legitimization and inclusion of the gentiles. He keeps harping on it. Once again, we run into the puzzling phenomenon of someone using Jewish symbols and citations to demonstrate to gentiles that Judaism has been superseded by radical universalism (shhh . . . don't tell the rabbis!).

There is no mention of James in the Gospel of Luke, despite the gospel's emphasis on the centrality of Jerusalem in the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus.

…

For now …

Ó

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
¹- Luke uses 2055 words, of which 957 (nearly half!) are hapax legomena.— i.e. a fancy way to say that a word only appears once in a text. This is over 800 more than Matthew.
²- Luke 2:21–38 — Simeon recognizes Jesus, who has been brought to the Temple to get circumcised. Ironically, he here proclaims Jesus the savior of the uncircumcised gentiles.
³ - The addition of the "benediction against the minim," included in the Amidah, a Liturgical cycle, as the twelfth benediction. This prayer dates to around this period that consensus places the composition of this gospel, as does the hypothetical "Council of Jamnia," which was conjectured to explain this overt expulsion and open condemnation of the Christians that occurred at the time. I will have more to say about Jamnia in a future post here.

Matthew and his "Jews For Jesus" (QºM #8)

2011-04-19T03:09:00.000-07:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Most New Testament scholars feel that Matthew was likely authored by a "Jewish-Christian." I challenge that notion, though it is true that this author does intentionally use biblical citations and symbols throughout the work to evoke a Judean ‘feel’ to his story. No doubt about that. More than any other evangelist, the author of Matthew relies on matching even the most trivial aspects of Jesus’ life and deeds to what he thinks are prophetic proclamations from the Hebrew Bible, with the aim of painting Jesus as their “fulfillment.” But apart from these superficial Jewish affectations, he is not advocating an outlook that’s particularly Judean in any standout way. Matthew’s continual quoting scripture in this "fulfillment" motif has conditioned generations of Christians to see Matthew as an especially “Jewish-messianic” gospel. He imparts Jewish symbolism into every nook and cranny he can. And yet, though the symbols he uses may be those of the Hebrew Bible; the teaching ain't necessarily so.

There are undoubtedly times when the narrator of this gospel engages in some truly brilliant (in my opinion) exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures (the Sermon on the Mount, for example, is a true masterpiece). However, there are other times in the narrative when he seems to use Torah inappropriately, ambiguously—even erroneously—stretching, searching for a plausible interpretation which will advance his typological message about Jesus, the new Moses, the son of David. At these times his understanding of contemporaneous Judaism can be shown to be deficient. We will explore some of these instances shortly.

I deduced in part 6 above that Mark’s gospel was likely written by a gentile for a gentile audience. We noted that there is an overwhelming consensus that the Gospel of Mark not only preceded, but was used by, the two other synoptics in the composition of their respective gospels. Would Matthew, supposedly the most Jewish of evangelists, choose to base the version of the Jesus story that he is composing for his own community on the rather crude work of a gentile who wrote for other gentiles in the west (probably in or near Rome)?. Knowing how resistant to religious assimilation the Jews were,¹ I find it hard to believe that a pious Palestinian Jew would have chosen a flawed gentile text (flawed—else why amend it?) to be the foundation of his own recruiting manual for this purportedly Jewish sect. In fact, it could be said that Matthew composed his own version of the story precisely as a corrective to Mark’s noble attempt. He used the earlier story as a springboard for his own composition, but Mark’s Jesus is not godlike enough for Matthew. Mark’s Jesus is not “Jewish” enough for Matthew’s particular didactic needs. Mark needed an update. The fact that Mark was used as the model makes any allusions to Hebraic scripture in Matthew, however copious, feel like pretense, not just due to the author's endorsement of Mark’s gentile gospel, but especially by its inherent affront to the strict monotheism that was the prime requisite to a Judean faith. In this gospel, unlike in Mark, people actually bow down before and even worship Jesus.² Jews of that time would have immediately found the christology in the Gospel of Matthew abhorrent.

Peter (Cephas) is a favorite subject of Matthew. There are more stories about Peter in this gospel than in any other. This has led many to suggest that the author was Jewish-Christian, else why put so much emphasis on this character? We gather from Acts and from the epistles of Paul that Peter was the apostle championed by the early Judean varieties of Christianity. It makes sense if Matthew as Judean. But, then I have to ask, why is James never mentioned in this gospel except to repeat Mark’s characterization of Jesus’ family as antagonistic? Is this not a kind of double standard?

I think that the Gospel of Matthew, instead of supporting this Jewish Christianity, is the product of a group of well-intentioned but dissimulating god-fearers who had taken to posing as the rightful gentile heirs of the Judean tradition after the Galilee and Jerusalem and its environs had been destroyed and their inhabitants (the few who survived) had dispersed.

I realize the magnitude of the glacier that I am boxing here (i.e. saying that Matthew’s gospel is not really all that Judean a work to my eyes) but I find it impossibly hard to reconcile Matthew’s contents to a traditional Judean authorship. If we make a distinction betweem the form and the content of the gospel, its dissimulating aspect can be discerned. This difficulty was in fact the spark that initially set my skepticism in motion and that led me to question the validity of the traditional view of the New Testament as being the work of "Jews."

Where does Judaism factor in?

The Gospel we know as Matthew’s is a great introduction to the Jewish exegetical method known as typology. Typology is a kind of portentous symbolism, where a ‘type’ is a person or thing in the Hebrew scriptures which foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament. Noah’s flood, for example, has been interpreted as a ‘type’ of baptism in this sense. David is the perfect king. Elijah the perfect prophet. Moses the liberator. These are ‘types’, all relevant to the Jesus legend. Typology is in fact one of the most common hermeneutic lenses through which the gospels are composed and interpreted. Each evangelist had his own favorite typological setting of the Jesus story. We saw that Mark liked the book of Isaiah and saw Jesus is the suffering Son. (Matthew sees Jesus-as-Moses as the type. Luke uses Elijah.)

Matthew's sketch is highly idealized. An important thing to bear in mind in our analysis of the New Testament is that the typology that an author chooses as her compositional model will affect what her characters must do in order to fit that type. Historical verisimilitude is not the evangelist’s main compositional intention. Following the author's chosen types, everything that Jesus is portrayed as having said and done in the Gospel of Matthew will fit his particular typological mix of Jesus as the new Moses and as the New David— Jesus as liberator and as king.³ Even the very first verse in this book hails him Messiah (Christ).

The 'presence' of God is an important concept for the author of Matthew. In the opening section he talks about “God with us” and he closes the gospel with a similar bookend, having Jesus say, “I am with you always.” So Matthew already shows a considerably higher christology than the one we previously saw operating in Mark. The author of Matthew understands Jesus to be the "incarnation" more explicitly than does Mark. For Mark, Jesus became Messiah at the moment of his baptism. In Matthew, Jesus was born that way.

The central theme in the Gospel of Matthew is “fulfillment.” Twelve times in this gospel the author says ‘this was done to fulfill a scripture.’ Jesus is portrayed as the divine fulfillment of god’s plan for the salvation of Israel, as a christological incarnation fulfilling two very clear types: Moses and David. These two types are integral to Judean life and way of thinking. The “prophet unto Moses” image of Jesus in Matthew gives us a glimpse into yet another Jewish method of exegesis at work in the thinking of the early Christians, that of pesher. Pesher is a kind of esoteric, charismatic exegesis. Through pesher one seeks to find not just a deeper meaning, but also the secret meaning of any biblical passage. This approach assumes that the bible is imbued with layers of meaning beyond the literal that are applicable to future times. Pesher can be said to be a kind of “decoding” of scripture. Deuteronomy’s “prophet unto Moses” became a favorite theme in early Christian rhetoric. Jesus is believed to be the fulfillment of this supposed prophecy of the coming of a prophet. But, notwithstanding apologists' tendency to see Jesus in between every line of scripture, I fail to see how this brief verse predicts Jesus specifically. This may be valid pesher, but it is just a vague arbitrary assertion to me, a stretch of the fervent Christian imagination, a result of ad hoc quote mining, really, and not much more. It is based on nothing but a wish for scriptures to match a chosen type.

Matthew closely follows the order in which the story is told in Mark’s gospel. Interspersed throughout are five chunks of additional material that Matthew has put in, but the general structure and internal chronology is that of Mark.

The gospel opens with a chronology of Jesus that goes back to David, and, by extension, to Abraham. The author posits three sets of fourteen generations between these figures. It turns out that the number 14 spells “David” in the Hebrew alpha/numerical scheme.⁴ Coinquidink? (No. Typology.)

Though Matthew loves to quote the bible, sometimes he just gets it wrong. One famous blunder from this introductory section is his citation of Isaiah, “a virgin shall conceive.”⁵ The translators of the Septuagint (LXX) had mistranslated the Hebrew word “almah” (young maiden) into the Greek “parthenos” (virgin). The early Christians latched on to this oversight and exploited it in their zeal to portray Jesus as an incarnation of the divine. The mistranslation is the least of their problems, though, for the cited passage is not even a messianic prophecy! It describes the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Judah and the siege of Jerusalem by the combined armies of the Northern Kingdom and Syria (circa 735 B.C.E.). The child that was born to the young maiden here was a sign from God that the siege would be lifted and that Jerusalem would continue to flourish. The “prophecy” was therefore completely fulfilled about 730 years before the birth of Jesus.

It’s a double whammy— it’s both irrelevant and a mistranslation. I believe that the reason this particular citation became so pervasive in early Christianity is simply because the Christian exegetes, gentiles Greeks who saw nothing unusual about virgin births,⁶ just didn't catch on to the incongruity, as there were no Jews around to correct them (I think this absence is crucial for the big picture of Christian origins).

So the whole birth narrative is essentially a parallel of the story of Moses in Matthew. The astrologers, the slaughter of the male infants, the Egyptian connection— the correlation is inescapable.

Moreover, Jesus’ first extended speaking role in Matthew further confirms that the Moses typology is deliberate. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus speaking on “the mountain” which is associated with the giving of the Law to Moses (Ch 5). “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law …”, he says. (Was someone accusing Jesus of doing this?) Jesus' point in this discourse, is, of course, that not only do we need to adhere to the law, we need to exceed the Pharisees in this! It’s not an opposition to law, it is a gratuitous surpassing of its strictures. This elaborate and lengthy discourse on compassion is an exhortation to righteousness. The so-called ‘antitheses’ that follow, instead of opposing Torah, are a series of allusions to Torah in which Jesus stresses the need to go even deeper in one’s commitment to the Law than merely following its letter. This is to be done by not only eliminating the sins in question, but also eliminating their sources, greed, lust, rage, etc. This discourse, I would argue, has the feel of a genuine Judean midrashic thinking. Some deep thought was given to its composition. It’s the closest that the Gospel of Matthew comes to actual Judaic practice, insofar as it elucidates the law instead of elucidating Jesus‘ messianic significance. Jesus’ inaugural address is fantastic in Mathew. It is the pearl of great price. Usually in Matthew, however, when a midrash involves a prediction of the coming of Jesus instead of illuminating some point of the law, it feels like Christian exultation of Jesus more than it does genuine midrash. To my eyes, such "midrash" feels like little more than an affectation.

Chapter 12 introduces for a moment another brief but left-field typological comparison. Matthew has Jesus portray himself as Jonah this time. He is asked for signs. He refuses to give signs. This is consistent with the other synoptics.

There is one thing in Matthew that has no parallel in those other gospels, however. It highlights an extreme and pervasive animosity between the Jews and the early Christians. Matthew has Jesus say that people should listen to what the Pharisees teach, but not to behave like them, for they do not practice what they preach.

So, what do the Pharisees do that is so terrible? They tithe. They are lazy elitists. (“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees. Hypocrites!” is repeated a bunch of times). They prevent people from entering the kingdom of heaven without wanting to go in themselves. (This recalls Paul’s characterization of his Galatian opponents.) They ‘cross sea and land to make a single convert and then make that convert a child of Gehenna.’ I find this last accusation to be particularly problematic. Did the Jews really cross sea and land to convert people? This is quite an ironic charge. Have the Jews ever been known as a missionary group? Given the dearth of textual evidence in favor of this, we can only conclude that it is just more hyperbolic name-calling on the part of the author of Matthew.

It seems that at the time of composition of the Gospel of Matthew—after the destruction of the Temple—the great variegation that once was Judaism had ceased to exist. By this time it had been narrowed down to just two choices, each claiming to be the ‘real’ inheritors of the Judean tradition. These two groups had different ways of filling the spiritual/emotional void left behind by the Temple’s destruction. The Christians “spiritualized“ the temple. The rabbinics instead devoted themselves to the study of Torah, which was what had worked for them previously, the last time they had been deprived of Temple worship (i.e. during the Babylonian exile). This is, of course, an overly simplistic encapsulation of the differences between these claimants to the tradition, but it is not altogether inaccurate.

One noteworthy misunderstanding of Judaic traditions in the Gospel of Matthew comes from the trial scene before the Sanhedrin.

"And the high priest arose, and said unto him, Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witness against thee? But Jesus held his peace. And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death. Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee? " — (Matthew 26: 63– 68 cf. Mark 14: 60–65)

In this episode, the high priest is seen tearing his garments as a sign of righteous indignation at the audacity of Jesus’ response. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, to start with, the rending of his garments in this way was expressly forbidden to the high priest under the Levitical Laws.⁷ Besides this explicit prohibition in the Torah, this supposed biblical allusion is out of context. In every case in the Hebrew scriptures in which this practice of rending one's garments is referenced, it is invariably a display of deep anguish and sorrow.⁸ Nowhere in the Bible is rending of one’s garments an expression of the kind of rage or indignation portrayed in Mark and in Matthew (Luke omits this detail, perhaps he knew.). One might expect a gentile like Mark to overlook this faux pas—he deliberately co-opted a misunderstood Judean symbol to add drama to his narrative (incorrectly though it may be) to add injury to insult, so to speak—but Matthew is supposed to be the most Jewish of gospels. Surely he knew better. Right?

Apparently not.

Another uniquely Matthean feature is the infamous “his blood be on us and our children” nastiness. Some have tried to explain away the apparent anti-Semitism in this passage by appealing to its “Judean” context. The sting of this slur is supposedly lessened if we "realize" and accept that Matthew was a Jew writing for other Jews. The notorious phrase then becomes just an internal Judean spat according to this view. I don’t buy that at all, though. The fact that no one group was being singled out against a competing one in the passage is reflected in the exact phrasing the author has chosen:

και αποκριθεις πας ο λαος ειπε το αιμα αυτου εφ ημας και τα τεκνα ημων
Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’

One can argue that “all of the people” consisted of just Pharisees, but this would just be a case of special pleading. The passage is not one sect of Judeans blaming another. This is obviously a Christian blaming Jews categorically. It’s an unavoidable fact. Given the animosity between these two groups, it’s little wonder that the Jews rejected the early Christians at every turn like they did, despite the latter's claims that they followed the Torah even more closely than the Pharisees did. The conflict that was hinted at in Mark is intensified to become a full throated hatred by the time Matthew was writing. He emphasizes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Chapter 23 has a whole collection of sayings attributed to Jesus about how the Pharisees are all hypocrites.

I should add that Matthew commits more of the same kind of clumsy scriptural errors that Mark committed..Chapter 27:9, for instance, cites a Jeremiah verse that doesn’t exist.⁹

The next example is one of the biggest New Testament blunders as I see it. I hilighted its Markan variant of it in part #6 but it merits mention again, so unconvincing a piece of exegesis do I find it to be.:

“While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, ‘What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?’ They say unto him, the Son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.” — (Matthew 22:41–46)

This, as I showed before, is another double whammy. First of all, this is another example of a mistranslation gone wild. The gist of it is that the two Hebrew words translated into the same word “Lord” in Psalm 110 are two entirely different words in the original Hebrew. Therefore, this is a mistake that could only be made by someone familiar only with the Septuagint. Jesus, reported to have been a highly devout Jew who was versed in the Hebrew language and scriptures, would have known better than to equate “Yahveh” with “L’adoni” in this way, especially when all the exegesis does is reinforce that Jesus is "the one." But that’s the least of it. This episode not only betrays this mistranslation, it also portrays the Pharisees that were listening as dumbstruck by Jesus’ amazing midrashic skills. This is where the real whopper lies, in my opinion. In truth, had he said such a thing, the Pharisees whom he said it to— fanatical in their study of the scriptures, and prone to long midrashic exposition on this and all other Psalms— would have immediately corrected Jesus' semantic mistake on the spot. Anyone with a even a perfunctory understanding of Hebrew could have done so. Yet, in this gospel narrative, his mere citing of this Psalm is enough to make them all speechless and mute in astonishment. This simply never could have happened in reality.

Here I am reminded of an old Jesus film that I once saw, in which the scene of the woman caught in adultery is depicted in a similarly unfeasible, similarly untenable way. The mob, about to stone the woman, become suddenly submissive and awestruck and drops their stones at once at Jesus' calm "cast the first stone" statement. Jesus speaks and the whole universe falls on its knees, like E.F. Hutton. Only a naive and pious need to "believe" could convince one to think that their all-too-human psychological tendency to correct religious error (in particular) could be suspended so easily by the rabbis that Jesus addresses. Jesus could certainly have won an argument with his detractors, for all we know, but an argument must have ensued. That’s the point. This simplistic depiction of instant pharisaic submission is completely unrealistic. It's a cartoon. It obviously never happened as described.

What about James? . . . . . . . . . .

As in Mark, so in Matthew.

James is only mentioned once in relation to Jesus’ family’s thinking him mad. If Cephas’ ubiquity in this gospel is evidence of a Jerusalem-church origin of these traditions, then what does the almost complete silence regarding James evidence of? I mean, James was, according to Paul and to Acts (and to Thomas), the leader at Jerusalem. Why is he not, then, mentioned in Mathew at all? Seeing Cephas’ importance in this work as evidence for the continuity between James and Paul would be inadvisable, selective relevance.

In closing, my own view of Mathew is that it is the record of someone who adopted a gentile (!) story about a Jewish hero as the undergirding basis of his own reconstruction of the same story, for the purpose of making it seem more Jewish than Mark had left it. The additions he added vary from the beautifully sublime (the beatitudes) to the clueless (he apparently never met a prophecy he didn't like). But "sounding Jewish" and being Jewish are not the same thing. As I've already pointed out while surveying Paul's letters, it's one thing to point to the use of Jewish symbols and biblical citations in a work in question to appraise its Jewish pedigree, but the didactic function of the gospel as a whole betrays the superficial quality of this copious referencing of the symbols. In this regard this gospel reminds me of the contemporary evangelical movement we know as the "Jews for Jesus." Like Matthew, they have coopted the symbolism of the Judaic scripture and tradition to promote their own brand of messianism. They incorporate these symbols into their liturgies as well as their rhetoric, going as far as celebrating Passover Seders (as we speak ;) in which the homiletical portion of the ceremony is devoted to the re-interpretation of the various elements in the ritual through a definite Christian lens. By now, everyone knows that the Jews for Jesus started out and remain a Christian evangelical enterprise. The unwary might not see the ruse at play—caveat emptor and all that jazz, but that's on them. At any rate, it was after having a discussion with one of these Jews for Jesus that I started to think about the possibility that Matthew's might be an analogous misappropriation of Judaism. There are others who claim to be the true expression of the Abrahamic faith: Islam, Black Zionism, Mormonism, Rastafarianism, but the Jews for Jesus surpass them in their overt cooption of the symbolism involved. But, once again, it is one thing to include Jewish symbols in a narrative, and quite another to use such Jewish allusions to argue that Judaism has been superseded by the appearance of a godman. No amount of scriptural citation was going to convince a Jew to follow a godman. Throughout this series I have been pointing out that the evidence shows that Jews generally rejected such Christian theological innovations. Matthew may be more rich in Hebrew symbolism than its predecessor, but the godman doctrine it pitches gives it away as the gentile construct that it ultimately is at heart. How can it not be, with Mark as a wireframe?

anyway…

… for now …

Ó

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ - They would have rather died than let Caligula’s standards stand in the Temple, for example.
² - Matt 8:2, 9:18, 14:33, 15:25, 28:9, 28:17
³ - see Dale Allison's The New Moses.for a thorough exploration of the Moses typology in Matthew.
⁴ - This seems to me a kind of reverse-pesher at work as well. This kind of mystical numerology is very prevalent in later esoteric, mystical Kabbalah traditions.
⁵ - Matt 1:23 —cf. Isaiah 7:14
⁶ - Divine conception was a common attribute of innumerable hero legends. Every divine savior worth his salt had a virgin birth.
⁷ - See Leviticus 10: 6 and Leviticus 21:10

⁸ - 1 Samuel 15:22–23, and 1 Kings 11:29–35 are a couple of examples. It is sometimes accompanied by sackcloth and ashes, which are also expressions or symbols of mourning.

⁹ - The closest parallel to this citation is Zechariah 11:12–13, but even this is not quite a match.

quote of the day … (Tillich again)

2011-04-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

"[A condition of historical freedom] is the freedom for autonomous creativity (autonomous in traditional and only meaningful sense of following the laws embodied in things themselves without any encroachment either by authorities or by one’s accidental nature), that is, the freedom to follow the objective demands involved in the nature of one’s work, unrestrained by heteronomous demands coming from outside. Every creative work has its structural necessities which follow from its special nature. An artist, for instance, has the freedom for autonomous creativity only if he is free to follow the structural demands, first of his material, second of the forms of his art, and third of the special style he represents. In the same way the scholar must be able to follow the methodological demands of his material without restriction by religious or political powers. And the technical worker must be able to follow the principle of the greatest effect with the smallest means and must not be obliged to suppress or to disturb creative possibilities under the urge of political interests. Wherever this freedom is denied, man is deprived of his self-determination through history. He is enslaved and dehumanized. A judge who is not able to follow his judgment about the law and the special case to be judged has no freedom. "
.
"Freedom in the Period of Transformation"
Freedom: Its Meaning
1940
(p 132)

the would-be pillar (QºM #7)

2011-04-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Having looked at Mark in the last post, the concept of "Messiah" should be highlighted for a moment before continuing on in this survey, as it seems to be a guiding idea on the minds of the evangelists who followed GMark in telling the story of Jesus. Ambiguous though it is, t's one of the most repeated motifs. Messiah, the Hebrew word for ‘anointed,’ was a title usually reserved for priests and kings in the Jewish Scriptures; it denoted one who was favored by God in some way. The word was an adjective. The High Priest is anointed. David is God's anointed. Even Cyrus the Great, a Persian king, is deemed God's anointed at one point in the Bible's narrative.

The common view is that by the time of the Roman occupation of Judea this concept of God's anointed had acquired a soteriological aspect. We are told that the Jews would come to expect an imminent 'Messiah' (by this time a personal noun) who would free God's people from the shameful bondage of foreign rule and who would restore the glory of the old kingdom. There is only a small problem with this common image of messianic expectation in the first century: The Hebrew Scriptures never use the word "messiah" in that noun sense, it is always attached to specific individuals in the adjective sense. Of course, that there should have been a collective yearning for God to come fix things would be no huge surprise. Collective expectation of an ideal future ‘liberator’ could certainly have evolved alongside them to keep pace with the handicaps that the Judean people kept encountering in their history, so that by the Hellenistic period "Messiah" could have come to signify a coming agent of salvation who would initiate the end of history and bring about a new era..

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in 1947 we had almost no way to gauge this abstract cultural projection of a messianic savior from the standpoint of Second Temple Judaism. The dearth of textual evidence disallowed it. But the DSS were discovered, and they include many examples of at least one near-contemporary sectarian group's thinking about messianism.

There seem to be two general views of messianism represented in the DSS:

One is that the messianic era could be brought about by a slow improvement of the world, at which time God will send his redeemer.
The other is that there would be a catastrophe. God would intervene in history violently (Deus ex machina) and thus redeem his people.

This latter kind of messianism, illustrated in the Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, is also illustrated in the later Christian canonical book of Revelation. In the DSS text the sectarians imagined their role in a war which would pit them, first against other Jews, and then against all the other nations. It's the whole Gog/Magog thing. The Armageddon thing. After they have finally destroyed everyone everyone else, they will come up to Jerusalem, presumably to share in the messianic era in eternal Utopian bliss. There is some parallel with early Christian thought there, at least with that early eschatological variant of Christianity which bequeathed the Book of Revelation to us. Therefore the DSS do support the fact that this early Christian eschatology demonstrably jibes at least in quality with that of a known, contemporaneous, tributary form of Judaism (albeit a sectarian one). Some of the ideas that some scholars previously had thought to be un-Jewish elements in some of the Christian texts, did in fact have precedents and parallels in the ascetic Judaism of the Khirbet Qumran community. The DSS are invaluable to us in this respect.
But then, Revelation has always been a kind of anomaly within the biblical canon. Eusebius, Luther, Spong: all have challenged the canonicity of the ideas in this text —albeit for different reasons, It's not a stretch to say that its messianic apocalypticism is very far removed from the restrained messianism of the Gospel According to Mark, where every mention of Jesus' favored status immediately meets with a shooshing rebuke.

Mark introduces us to Jesus a different metaphor, namely the suffering son of God. Here for the first time we have definitive allusions to passages in Isaiah and in Daniel which are interpreted as predictions of this coming messianic figure. The messianic connotation of the phrase "son of God" is corroborated and paralleled in Pseudo-Daniel (aka Aramaic Apocalypse), one of the DSS. Taking off on Daniel, in this apocryphal text, there is a messianic figure, a "son of God" (bar Elohim in the original Aramaic) highlighted. This would indicate that there were some Jews in the era who clothed their messiannic figure with this familiar designation.

But it is a far cry from Messiah as coming redeemer figure to Messiah as eternal Logos. That was a Christian innovation, not a Judean one. Eventually Christianity would grow to such an extent that its messianic constructs would inform even Talmudic formulations (more a reaction to the evangelical aspect of Christianity than it is a vision arrived at independently of them). As eschatological as the DSS can be in points, nowhere is the messianic figure exalted as divine in nature.

I isolated four basic Jewish identifiers back in part 5 of this series. One commenter called them the "four pillars of Judaism." There are those that present the messianism as another pillar. But the truth is that we know less than we think we do about this rich cultural metaphor for a general yearning for God's justice.

We know there was some modicum of apocalypticism in the air. We know the Sadducees (the aristocracy) were on borrowed time as long as they remained puppets of the empire.
(As an aside: We know that donning the title of Messiah was not enough to get you killed; plenty of people had been called that before and after Jesus. The difference in his case would have probably entailed his deification—but that's for another post.)

Anyway, I think it is wise to highlight the dearth of available evidence and to be careful not to overplay the magnitude of this imagined messianic yearning in normative Judaism at the time in question. It's important to keep this in mind as we survey the New Testament looking for implicit and explicit "Judaisms."

for now …

quote of the day … (Paul Tillich)

2011-04-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Eternity is the mere opposite of time.

The Kingdom of God and History
1938 (p. 113)

"Mark's" audience … (QºM #6)

2011-04-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

We looked into the Pauline epistles to try to get a glimpse of who these death-and-resurrection Christ cultists were. What can we learn from a similar prima facie reading of the gospel material?

The Markan Community

An overwhelming majority of scholars agree that Mark was likely the earliest of the synoptic gospels. Marcan priority is one of those rare topics in biblical scholarship on which there is in fact a remarkable agreement. It’s as close to an actual consensus in historical Jesus/Christian origins scholarship as it gets. This view of gospel chronology posits that the gospel we know as Mark very probably existed before— and was used as a primary source by— the other two synoptic evangelists who later constructed their own versions of the Jesus story around Mark's basic prototype.

Who was his audience?

I have heard it remarked that all of the evangelists were Jews with the possible exception of Luke. I challenge this notion. To my eyes, Mark reveals the least Judean perspective of the four canonical gospels. Its Greek may be crude, but it’s the crude Greek of a Hellenic individual, not a Judean. Are there reasons to doubt the Judean background of the author of this work?

Yes.

The very opening verses of this gospel already contain a scriptural blunder, to start with:

“The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is written in Isaiah the prophet: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’ He is a voice calling out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord! Make his paths straight!’ "
(GMark 1:1–3)

The author is referring here not to Jesus, but to John the Baptizer, a precursor to Jesus who figures prominently in all four tellings of the Jesus story, as we all know. The author of Mark has conflated two separate biblical quotations from two separate books and has credited Isaiah as the source of both, when in fact the first half is clearly a reference to Malachi 3:1 and not to Isaiah at all. If this author was a thorough Judean, he sure was sloppy with his Torah. This could, of course, be nothing more than a simple honest mistake, but it is just one among many indications that he in fact is very probably not a Jew.

Another example reflects the author’s lack of knowledge of the geography of the Judean region, for instance:

“ Then Jesus returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the sea of Galilee …"

This would add thirty miles to the trip. Jesus would have rather ended up in Antioch had he gone by that route. It’s just plainly wrong, as any informed consultation of a biblical map will show.

Another example of Mark’s sloppy exegesis: In chapter 2 (25–27), he anachronistically names the wrong High Priest (Abiathar) in relating a story about David.¹ If he is a Jew, Mark’s scriptural acumen is consistently rusty.

Another pericope that I find problematic: In chapter 10 (6–8), Jesus quotes from both creation stories as though they are a single one. Mark has harmonized Genesis 1:27 with Genesis 2:24, and has further placed the harmonization on Jesus very lips as a corrective to Moses' pragmatic leniency. This is not just going an extra mile, as in the beatitudes, not just an exceeding of expectations, this is a direct abrogation of mosaic law. The author makes Jesus oppose Moses openly. Might not this reflect a post-"break" provenance of the text? Why do the Pharisees who confront Jesus with this question of divorce just disappear from view after the episode is related? Surely, this kind of affront would have met with much pharisaic zeal. No? Pharisees loved to argue. It was their raison d'etre. This story in GMark shows a cursory understanding of contemporaneous Judaism, which is allowed a pass for the simple reason that the author's audience is no better informed about the Jews' idiosyncrasies. As with E.F. Hutton: Jesus speaks and the Pharisees shup up, apparently shamed into silence by Jesus' compelling rapier wit. However, in a realistic Sitz im Leben Jesus could not have expressed himself in this way and lived to blaspheme another day. This story is a cartoon cell in the life of a mythic hero.

Another episode that reflects this hypo-understanding of the Sitz im Leben even more clearly is in chapter 12 (35), where Jesus is depicted as silencing the Pharisees with a single quotation from Psalm 110.

"The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. "

Such a theologically charged exegesis as Jesus' would only be truly possible if we posit that Jesus' Bible was the Septuagint, which uses the same word—"Lord"—to represent both the original "Lord" (YHVH, the god of Abraham and Moses) and "lord" (L'adonai, an honorific analogous to the still-current royal "my lord"). As an Aramaic speaker from the Galilee, Jesus' reading of the verse would have been that it is God speaking to David. This is the natural reading, but the author of this gospel is weaving christological connotations into a scripture that previously did not have them, and moreover, placing these connotations on the lips of Jesus' himself.

More relevant to our focus than this inadequate translation is the detailed fact that the Pharisees are said to be silenced by this one-liner self-referencing answer from Jesus. Jesus speaks and they are are struck dumb. Whoever wrote this episode down had absolutely no clue. That Jesus might have held his own against the Pharisees is certainly possible, but … … silence?? The Pharisees would not have responded with silence to this quantum leap on the part of Jesus. This episode simply could not have happened as described. Some argument would have ensued (in fact, Jesus didn't stand a chance). It is another cell in the life of a mythic hero, whose opponents are ideal and not real threats at all.

Another example of bad exegesis placed on the lips of Jesus is when he quotes Exodus 3:6 (Mk 12:26) to assert the resurrection of the dead. There is no reference to "the living" in the story he cites. It is an over-reaching midrash that could have—and probably would have— been engaged heatedly. That it would have seemed like a great response to anyone but a Christian initiate (much less a Jewish scribe) is unlikely.

Not only is he probably not Judean, in chapter 7:2–4, the author seems to assume that his listeners are primarily gentiles as well, else why the need to explain to them the Jewish custom of washing their hands, etc? This is a man writing about the customs of another people. He is clearly a gentile writing for other gentiles.

GMark has a relatively low christology for a gospel; his Jesus is painfully human. This gospel is constructed in such a way that the reader is privy to some information that the characters in the narrative don’t seem to have. Not even Jesus' closest companions, his disciples, have a clue. This creates a literary tension which is used to great effect in this deceptively crude gospel. There’s irony in the central question of this work: Who is Jesus? (“Who do people say that I am?”) It’s the $64,000 question. On the one hand, in this gospel the true identity of Jesus is “Son of God” or alternately (a phrase introduced and used frequently in the second half of the gospel), the “son of man“, but no one knows this secret identity, except the reader (and some demons). All that everyone else in the story, including his disciples, seems to know is that Jesus is a confusing teacher and a healer. It’s not just that they don’t know his identity; when demons proclaim his messianic status, they are told repeatedly by Jesus to tell no one what he is. This is known as the “Messianic secret” motif in Mark. Jesus finally admits that he is the holy one of God at his trial before the Sanhedrin, and later hints at it once more during his hearing with Pilate. His disciples are, of course, not present for this revelation.

While this gospel contains a series of stories which depict the Judaic authorities rejecting Jesus, there’s a relatively positive portrayal of gentiles in Mark. This work contains several stories in which the faith of gentiles surpasses that of Jesus' own disciples. The Syro-Phoenician woman‘s humorous comeback to his insult endears her to him. The Roman centurion was the first person to declare Jesus’ “sonship” with such force and clarity. The first Christian could therefore be said to be a gentile in Mark’s gospel. The audience has known all along too. In this way, Mark induces the audience to identify as fellow Christians with this gentile centurion.

Although relating a story that is set in Judea, the Gospel According to Mark seems to be a gentile hagiographic expression about who Jesus was, told for the purpose of compelling the early Christians into seeing Jesus as a specifically Jewish messianic figure. This aligns to some degree with the Pauline urgency to include the gentiles in the salvation scheme of Judaic history. Why pagans would be so compelled to co-opt the Jewish God specifically is a crucial question and it will be discussed later on.

The central theme in this work is discipleship despite the fact that it portrays all of the disciples of Jesus as blundering idiots. Dunderheads. There seems to be a veiled challenge beneath this less-than-flattering portrayal of Jesus’ inner circle. It’s as though Mark was inviting his readers to do better than the disciples had in their own lives and in their own faith.

Mark is an interesting read.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ — cf 1 Sam 21:1–7

far out …

2011-04-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

I somehow managed to eek out 49th place on the Biblioblog Top 50 last month. Who'd a'thought.

quote of the day . . .

2011-04-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

“Man is a hacker, the human essence is that of a hacker’s. We need to invade everything and use it, and then move.”

— Totonho & Os Cabra

.

the day's repertoire …

2011-03-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

I played the church service again, this time a quartet (Emerson joined us).

Today's repertoire, to give you an idea of how wide the allowed range at this gig is:

Nostalgia In Times Square (a Charles Mingus tune).
All you need is Love (Beatles - great singalong tune).
Viridissima Virga (a Hildergard Von Bingen tune that we played as a Cuban street rumba — Latin. — get it? : :-P ).
The Mother of Violence (an obscure Peter Gabriel tune from his second solo album).
Softly as in a Morning Sunrise (jazz standard).
Holy Now (an actual "Christian" tune that they like to use as a closing number so they can all sing along).

It figures I would find a church gig that I actually like to do. I get to do whatever I want and people are very expressive in their appreciation. I'll probably get to do a couple more of these in April.

baby step trepidation …

2011-03-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

I recently played my first church gig. That first gig later led to singing at a memorial service, after which I was invited to attend a meeting, a screening and interactive discussion of the Living the Questions DVD series. I knew of this series from my previous exposure to AzFCT. It features some renowned scholars and theologians espousing a very inclusive, pluralistic, positive gospel message. It includes the ubiquitous Dom Crossan in his flowy Irish cadence, Marcus Borg in his sleepy blue-eyed myst, Bishop Spong, all casual in a baseball cap speaking his trans-Christian message of love. What's not to like? So I attended two of these meeting/screenings. The second one was devoted to the topic of the pre/post-Easter Jesus dichotomy. The historical Jesus contrasted with the Christ of faith.

What I didn't realize is that this was to be the introduction to this kind of post-Bultman mythologized historical Jesus for many of the congregants in attendance. In a way I feel privileged to have witnessed their very first baby steps into a higher-critical analysis of the New Testament. As one who has been exploring Christian origins for over a decade from a historiographic areligious angle, watching average folk dipping their toe into unfathomed water, not knowing how cold or deep it goes, I found the whole experience amusing and simultaneously frustrating in that I could not really participate in the discussion. For fear of really blowing people's minds, I bit my lip throughout. (Hey! I wanna keep playing there :)

Still, I wish I could describe the look on the faces on some of the people gathered as they listened to Marcus Borg explain that his Christian faith does not depend on any physical resurrection, that insisting on such a literal interpretation is not a necessary component of faith for him. This concept is a very challenging one for a laity raised on imperative literalisms and biblicisms to wrap their head around when they first hear it. It was worth the price of admission just to be able to watch people wrestle with their sacred cows in such an open and vulnerable way.

During one of the breaks, one woman asked about the role of God's spirit in the conception of Jesus. It was as though she somehow needed Jesus to be conceived of the Holy Spirit in a virgin womb. She looked a bit sad when the pastor —who I must give a lot of credit to for being so honest in his answers to her awkward question— rightly explained to her that birth narratives appear in only two gospels and that the earliest gospel we have, that according to Mark, actually pinpoints the moment of Jesus' acquiring his spirit-divinity as the moment of his baptism, not his conception. He went on to show that the gospels that Matthew and Luke pinpoint the moment as his conception/birth as the crucial moment, and John later pushes Jesus' divine status even further back in time, ascribing eternal coexistence with G-sh to this Jesus guy. The pastor is obviously familiar with the main trends in mainstream historical Jesus studies. It is clear that Christianity for him is not so much about historical veracity as it is a mundane call to "live the questions" that this DVD series tries to focus on. The stunned woman exuded a certain melancholic demeanor when faced with the prospect that the birth narratives are essentially mythical language after all. It was a poignant moment. I felt the pastor's pain.

The DVD itself is a visually dynamic stream of bite-sized morsels of insight, strung one after another. Key phrases are stressed and highlighted. Grunge fonts abound. The layout and design tends toward the cut and paste post-MTV variety of semi-chaotic direction and editing. Seeking impact through digital manipulation of forms, through bold use of color, through subtle echoed repetitions, it is a fine, visually.striking production. Unfortunately, the flashy, piecemeal style of the presentation, perfect for the short attention span of the modern North American lifestyle, does no justice to the profundity of the subject matter. Not really. It feels more like a teen ministry show than a useful learning tool at times. It is somewhat systematic, though. At distinct points in the progtam, one is prompted to pause the DVD, and folks are asked to reflect on what they've seen and heard. Printouts contain questions to use as springboards for discussion. Given the reactions I witnessed, even though I think it is overly minimalistic in scope and content, I think it is probably all that some of the laity can take. As dreadfully cursory as the series is, if it was any deeper, I'm sure some would be too horrified by it. I mean, if they have a hard time doubting the virgin birth, wait 'til they hear what Strauss and Bauer and Loisy have to say about all the nooks and crannies in the puzzle.

Anyway, I felt like documenting this episode.

Jewish in the 1st Century . . . (QºM-#5)

2011-03-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

We've seen that the audiences that the character of Paul is addressing in the epistles that bear his name are decidedly gentile. Before continuing, after fielding a few comments regarding what we know about the limits of Jewish self-identification at the time in question, it might be a good idea to riff for a while on what we mean when we speak of a "mere Judaism" (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis) in the New Testament period. What have the Dead Sea Scrolls added to our understanding of this ancient undergirding structure that Christianity sprang from? What did it mean to be a “Jew” in the first century? What were the distinguishing hallmarks of Jewish self-identification?

Even at this preliminary level, these are tough questions. There are problems involving definition and scope that have to be faced. A whole book could be devoted to this subject alone.¹ One huge problem is the fact that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. pretty much ensured that very little remained of the contemporary historical record of the once-thriving socio-religious phenomenon that we can for the moment label simply as “Second Temple Judaism.” It wasn’t until after rabbinic exiles began to affirm their status as the rightful heirs and continuers of the Pharisaic tradition (they would eventually inform the Talmud) that any near-contemporary indication of what the pre-fall setting might have looked like could be recorded. Meanwhile, there’s a huge lacuna in the record right exactly where our eyes want to look.

Another major problem is that the Christian scriptures are in essence polemics against, and therefore not the best source of information about, the Judaism of Jesus’ (and Cepha’s and Paul’s) day. When the gospels mention the Jews, it’s the Pharisees that they single out more often than not, and even then it’s the hyper-legalistic caricature of the Pharisees that is depicted. Once a very dignified tradition, now become the favorite whipping boy of the evangelists, Pharisaism is categorically equated with hypocrisy, getting the brunt of much scorn and derision. But I think that taking the theologically motivated, myopic mischaracterization of the Pharisees that is found in these scriptural discourses at face value would not only be intellectually naïve, it would also do a huge disservice to the memory of a once highly influential religious order that was beloved in its day for its emphasis on scholarship-in-service-of-compassion. One could say that these Pharisees were the stoics of the far-East, in a way. Their moral resolve was admired by their Pagan neighbors.²

Josephus and Philo show three major forms: this Parisaism, Sadduceeism, and Esseneism. If there are ways to distinguish between different kinds within this general umbrella heading of Judaism, What was it exactly that marked these people as Jewish in their own eyes, whatever their partisan inclination might have been? What was the common denominator? The textual silence disallows for certitude, but while it is true that we must be cautious in assessing the Sitz im Leben in question (lest we place too much value on our conjectures), to the limits that our sources and our abilities permit, we must try to delineate some basic commonalities if we are to understand the curious origins of Christianity in any meaningful way.

Monotheism

The closest thing to a creedal statement in Jewish tradition is what is known as the Shema,³ a kind of Jewish pledge of allegiance directed at the people of Israel to acknowledge and to affirm that the God of Israel is One and one only. Recited daily, it is a promise to implement this faith of the ancient fathers in their daily living. This insistence on the essential unity of God is one of the most defining aspects of being Jewish in the first century (and even now). Granted, the Jews have not always been so fiercely monotheistic. It has been shown that the road to the strict monotheism that we are so used to ascribing to the Jews was in fact a fairly long hard-fought one. They got there incrementally. Not until later prophets like Jeremiah did this rigorous monotheism finally stick, but stick it did. Obviously, the history of Jewish monotheism is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that an inviolable monotheism had long been in place in the socio-religious self-identity of the Judean people by the time of the Roman occupation. Indeed, the Romans were so perplexed by the obstinacy of Jewish monotheism, apparently so respectful of their devotion to it, that they sometimes made exceptions and allowances for the religious sovereignty of the Jews in their imperial mandates. Once the Jews finally had attained a full-force universal monotheism, they became famous for it among the nations.

If monotheism was so central to Judaism, we may ask: What were the attributes of this singular Jewish God? We can form a few fundamental ground rules regarding the theology of the first century.

They are reducible to the following:

First, Yahveh is the sole creator of the universe and of this world and of everything therein.
Second, that he (this god is male) is the Lord and ruler of said creation and that, to this end, he exercises a protean relationship with it in which he interacts with, oversees, and affects it. Mankind in general has dominion over creation, but Yahveh’s people, specifically, are a kind of ‘fortunate son’ that was endowed with the Word (Torah) with which to navigate Yahveh’s plan for human history.
Third, that he has a right to exclusive worship from his people. This third attribute of the Jewish god is crucial to the collective understanding of the gentile nations concerning the Jewish people. So well known did this fastidious refusal to entertain any other gods become that the Jews were able (in time) to command exemption from participation in certain compulsory empire-cultic rituals. It became clear to the Romans that most Jews would sooner die en masse than to succumb to any demands that they either abandon their god or succumb to the rule of another. The Romans—experienced pragmatic statesmen that they were— knew that killing every fanatic in a an unruly hyper-zealous conquered province was no way to run an empire or to raise revenue or tribute, and so the conquerors soon learned to allow the Jews some semblance of religious sovereignty in the interest of imperial efficacy and smooth sailing.

That fact that their god is One and sovereign was the most vital component of their self-identity at the turn of the era. It was the definitive determinant of Jewish identity. It’s safe to say that the Jews were deeply committed to this idea of the unity and exclusivity of their god during that time. We have no reason to doubt this strict monotheism, despite its disappearance from the textual radar for a moment.

The Dead Sea Scrolls in fact reinforce this extreme monotheistic tendency and fervor. The Targum of Job (from Cave 4), for example, makes numerous changes to the traditional story for theological reasons. In chapter 38, where a whirlwind asks a number of rhetorical questions intended to portray God as sovereign over all:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? ⁴

The scene is dependent on a depiction of a kind of heavenly court (a common enough motif in Near-Eastern and biblical mythology), with the stars personified as singing and sons of god rejoicing. The Qumran targumist however is troubled by the personification. To avoid the anthropomorphism, he renders the phrase as "they shone all at once." The mention of "sons of god" in verse 7 is further problematic as it may lead to a mistaken polytheism. The targumist substitutes the word "angels" instead, making them unambiguosuly subordinate to God.

The Jews were fiercely radical in their monotheism at the turn of the era. The evidence is strong. Boyd is therefore absolutely correct in asserting that the Jews of Palestine would never have accepted the worship of a crucified god-man in their midst. I agree. This would have been a blasphemy of the highest order, probably even punishable by death.

But, can Boyd show that Jews in fact did accept this new form of Christ worship anywhere? It would be fantastically wonderful if we had the writings of any other famous Chrtistians of the day: Cephas, Barnabas, Apollos, Yacob, Thecla, anyone. They’d give us some perspective on what each of these factions theologically espoused about Jesus. But we don’t have these writings. Only the Pauline viewpoint survived. And in that perspective Jesus is already referred to as κυριος (kyrios=Lord=Yahveh). To equate a human being with the god of Israel is definitely not a very Jewish thing to do. On this we can all hopefully agree. It's important to keep in mind that when the details within the Torah were being parsed and exposited in the usual Jewish ways (midrash, allegory, pesher), there would be majority and minority opinions and conclusions that rabbis would come to, but there were limits to how far they could stretch the scriptures. One could not conclude after a given midrash, for example, that the seventh commandment of the Decalogue reads "Thou shalt commit adultery." All interpretations must fit within a consistent domain of meaning. Likewise, a Judaism that espouses the adoration and exaltation of a god-man as the ultimate superseding of Judaism looks awful suspect to me as a tenable form of "Judaism." Furthermore, as I have been stressing all along, we have no reason to think that this holy bi-nity that Paul had taken to preaching to the gentiles was subscribed to by the Jerusalem Jesusist conclave. We do, on the other hand, have many reasons to think that the Jews actually rejected the Paulinists at every turn (e.g. the author[s] of Paul's epistles' own words, the surviving textual evidence of opposition from Marcion, Epiphanius, etc . . . the Ebionites, etc—Paul wasn't considered the apostle of the heretics for nothing). For now, though, let us simply mark fierce monotheism as one of the characteristic marks a Jew in the 1st century.

People of the Book

The Torah (“law”, “instruction”), the Hebrew Bible, is essentially a self-contained library which deals with one people’s wrestling with their concept of the divine. It is a tendentious, epic tale of creation, a history of a god among his people, forever experiencing growing pains together along the way, all set in a wondrously poetic language worthy of the mysteries contained within it.

The Jews not only were the first monotheists of influence in the world; they were also the first people to vouchsafe their religious identity by means of this “book” on which they kept a record of their god’s interactions with them into the distant past and on which they staked their faith into the distant future. Sent down to God’s esteemed messengers, the prophets (seers), Torah was the portal through which God’s will was revealed to the people and, as such, it was held in a correspondingly revered position.

The Hebrew Bible lends a certain ‘concreteness’ to Judean history. It lends a physicality, a permanence to its divine mandate. Then as now, people were enthralled with the written word. Important things have always been written down. Then as now, few things sound as authoritative as:

'It is written.'

Everything that has had any kind of legal worth is written down. Oaths, for example are still commemorated in this manner. The written word is powerful because it doesn‘t allow us to forget or to overlook. The Jews could boldly back up their cultural inheritance by appealing to these ancient records. This impressed their pagan neighbors immensely, who for the most part took them seriously, even when occasionally critical of them. The Torah was the medium on which the covenant (treaty, deal) between the Hebrew god and the people was signed and sealed. The chosen people had a written receipt to back up their legitimacy. It became a very important feature of Jewish life. Methods were devised to explore its depths, mostly borrowed from the stoic philosophers, but these methods took on a brilliance of their own in the new lyrical Jewish context. Torah’s perennial mysteries were available to all those who sought to understand them. The more conservative priestly aristocracy (the counterpart Sadducees) reportedly preferred to stick to the five ‘lawful’ books of the Pentateuch, but the Pharisee school of thought, who accepted the prophets and writings, appear to have prospered. They eventually became the most influential Judaic sect both in Jerusalem and in the hinterland. The Pharisees were the people’s party at the time in question (so Josephus).

While the Sadducees still took care of maintaining the esoteric ritual aspects of the Judaic tradition, a duty bestowed to them through heredity, it was the Pharisees that took care of introducing the people into the endless cultural repository which is Torah. They did this in an open way. So open, in fact that they even tolerated the presence of gentiles in their midst. The god-fearers, these peripheral gentile hangers-on, seemed to greatly admire the ‘solidity’ of the Hebrew scriptures, the strictures of its highly refined moral codes. Gentiles, they sought to emulate the Jewish faith. They are the key to understanding the early proliferation of the Christian movement.

A crucial distinction must be made here which will become more relevant later. Unlike their proto-Christian brethren, the motives of Judeans don’t seem to have been missionary in nature. The Jews didn’t recruit people. They never had before, they had no need to as long as Judaism was a nationality, a tribal recognition, a bloodline inheritance. They saw no harm in tolerating gentiles, and in fact by the time leading up to the Revolt god-fearers were a common sight around the synagogues, but that’s different than setting off on a mission to convert the nations to a Jewish god. The orbiting god-fearer came to Yahveh of his own accord. Jews are not missionaries.

Why would gentile god-fearers feel entitled to appeal to Jewish scriptures to defend their universalist religious innovations against the stability of traditional Judaism? I think that having a book was realized to be necessary early on in this new movement. I'll have some opinions on these questions as they appear again in our discussion, Let's continue our essentials-of-Judaism-laundry-list.

Covenant

The attributes of the Jewish god, that he is Lord over his creation, and that he requires exclusive tribute from it, are the basis of the idea of a divine covenant which distinguishes the Jews as their god’s unique chosen people. The idea of an exclusive covenant between a god and a people was a peculiarity that had enormous significance for the self-understanding of the people of Judea (and of surrounding areas of Samaria and the Galilee and into the Diaspora) in the first century. The concept of “covenant” has a long history parallel to that of monotheism which has also evolved over time into its present day form.

The nature of this covenant can best be seen in some of the metaphors and analogies that are used to describe it in the Bible. Israel is Yahweh’s ‘bride.’ (Jeremiah 2:2) Yahveh is lord of the manor. Yahveh is a mother-bear (Hosea 13:8). Israel is a “holy thing belonging to Yahveh, the first of his produce.” (Jer 2:3) These and many other verses indicate that God is joined to Israel by some kind of exclusive pact.⁵

Though Yahveh had definitely taken the initiative in these dealings, he had not forced himself on an unwilling people. There is a symbiosis at work here. People were not shanghaied into the deal. They entered willingly, sacrificing, observing the appointed feasts, living lives of religious contemplation. Their cultural inheritance was a badge of honor and distinction to them.

This covenant was expressed outwardly in various ways: in the observance of feasts and of fasts, in the undertaking of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, in strict dietary discipline, and in the observance of the weekly Sabbath day. One very important way that this unique covenant was expressed was in the ritual act of circumcision (at least for boys). In the Diaspora, circumcision, kosher diets, and all of these other expressions were ways in which the community of Jews could remain tethered to the divine covenant outwardly, even zealously so, while allowing for the malleability of moral tolerance which their daily interactions with gentiles necessitated in their lives.

Of course, the downside of all of this is that all of this explicit exclusivity would necessarily breed a sense of “election” and a sense of “purity” in the people, and that would inevitably give them an air of haughtiness and superstitious rigidity in a world otherwise dominated by a pervasive Hellenistic liberalism. As a result Jews were stereotyped as aloof, bookish, pompous, cavalier, prudish.

The mere suggestion that there was a new covenant needed in order to reconcile god to man would have seemed preposterous to a Judean. The soteriological constructs contained in the Christian scriptures would have caused (and did!) much controversy. Boyd is, again, right in asserting that the Jews would never have gone for these weird teachings. But, again, he must first demonstrate that the first Christians in Jerusalem in fact accepted these teachings if his reasoning is to have any relevance.

The Temple

During the post-exilic years leading up the First Jewish Revolt, the Temple at Jerusalem, rebuilt during Herod the Great’s industrious building streak,# was both the liturgical mother-ship and the prestigious and ornate jeweled crown of the once mighty kingdom of Judea. For Jews of that time, all formal worship, all tribute, was directed toward this cultural centerpoint. Yearly pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Temple on appointed holy days of the Jewish calendar were prescribed by the prophets, whose adherence to Torah was the binding guideline for Jewish thought and conduct. Arriving in Jerusalem, pilgrims would set about ritually purifying themselves in preparation for the sacrifices they came to offer at the altar of Yahveh (sometimes from hundreds and hundreds of miles away). The sacrifices were the purview of an elite aristocratic priestly class who saw to the proper administration of this gargantuan religio-cultural-economic mechanism.

The Temple was such a central part of the religious practice and self-identity of the people of Judea in the years leading up to the First Jewish Revolt, in fact, that once the Romans razed it in the year 70 C.E. and the sacrificial aspect of this ancient tradition came to a screeching halt, the grim possibility that Judaism might be extinguished along with it became a very serious concern for Jews, both at home and abroad. What was once the single most defining outward symbol of a proud people’s cultic relationship to their god, the Temple, was now gone forever. A deep feeling of desolation must have pervaded the lives and prayers of not only the survivors of the long siege (there weren‘t many), but also of the large population of Jews that were dispersed throughout the empire. (‘If God is supposed to reside in the “Holy of Holies” in the inner recesses of the Temple—and the Temple is no more—then where the hell is God now?!’ )

This is where the Dead Sea Scrolls come in very handy. The community that compiled this impressive library in the middle of nowhere explicitly detests the contemporaneous temple authority (presumably the Hasmonean dynasty) and have established a more ascetic ("pure") theology and liturgy that bypassed the temple expression we know as normative for the period. Among all the invective thrown at the Jerusalem temple authority that is evident on most of the sectarian documents found at the Khirbet Qumran site, there is the peaceful, sedate Temple Scroll, which lays out detailed plans for the construction and running of an ideal temple, with corresponding rules of behavior … and suchlike. Without going into too much detail, the point to bear in mind is that it wasn't the insitution the Qumran sectarians objected to, obviously, but what they saw as an usurpation of the institution. This is what apparently made them pack up and split from Jerusalem's liberalisms to live in the salt of the desert.

This is supported also by what is known as the MMT Document,⁶ a letter from a group of people addressed to the high-priestly establishment at Jerusalem (circa 152 BCE). The authors of this letter assert that this Jerusalem core are following a bunch of wrong rulings on Jewish law, and they say that they have left the temple because of this, and that they will only come back if a number of these things are reversed. Again, leaving the details aside, what's important to my focus is that, even though these acetic sectarians abhorred Jerusalem's influence, they still saw value and a cultural ideal in the concept of a temple, albeit from a reformist point of view.

Of course, this had not been the only time that Jerusalem had fallen under siege and that sacrificial practice had ceased. The exile in Babylon showed the Jews that it was possible to ‘sing one’s song of Zion in a strange land’, so to speak, without a Temple in sight. A man deprived of his eyes learns to sharpen the senses he’s got left to compensate for the loss. With the temple gone, the unity of God, the importance of Torah, and strict adherence to traditional forms of expression became that much more valued as identifiers of the faith. This is where Pharisaim was forged before the temple was rebuilt by Herod. This is why I placed the temple last on this short list of essentials, because some forms of Judaism were obviously possible in contrast to this concept. It is safe to say, however, that the concept of temple was a monolithic and normative aspect of being Jewish at the time. One could oppose the temple, but it remained the focal point.

Anyway … To sum up:

We know that there was a wide variety of ways to be Jewish before the destruction of Jerusalem. There were the educated types: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes. There were also undoubtedly more folksy provincial varieties and popular, more political ones such as the Zealots. This presents us with a wide range of possible ways that people expressed their Judaism. But the threads that bind all Jews as kin seem to be:

The first commandment. Or, to borrow a phrase from another of Judaism’s offshoots, the insistence that “There is no God but god.”
He’s made a covenant with his people.
This covenant entails following the Torah.
The temple is central, at least symbolically. (Its destruction threw everything into a tailspin.)

Those are the common denominators within this diverse variety of Judeans in the first century up until the razing of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Sure, they may have argued with each other, sometimes vehemently, Sadducees about the function of Torah, Pharisees about the possibility and nature of a resurrection, but these commonalities remained.

for now . . . .

Ó

.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ - The Beginnings of Judaism: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, by Shaye Cohen is a good one.
² - There were exceptions to this near-universal admiration. Tacitus, for example, was less than friendly toward the Jews.
³ - Deuteronomy 6:7
⁴ - Job 38:4–8 (KJV)
⁵ - An excellent survey of the idea of covenant in the Hebrew Bible is found in Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea by Delbert Hillers
⁶ - Elisha Qimron gave a lecture on this document at the Biblical Archeology Society's conference in 1984 which sparked the academic surge that would eventually allow for the publication of the scrolls in their entirety. Lawsuits and everything. People are funny.

my political spectrum…

2011-03-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

Political Spectrum Quiz

My results:

My Political Views
I am a left moderate social libertarian
Left: 6.14, Libertarian: 2.92

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -5.61

My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.25

Ó

,

The Myth of Jewish-Christianity (QºM Pt4)

2011-03-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Throughout the preceding posts in this ongoing discussion, I have been suspending my disbelief just enough to allow for the authenticity of at least some core of the Pauline corpus, just as F.C. Baur had, when in fact I have come to view the ideas of the Dutch Radical school as generally correct. While some representatives of this proto-mythicist group would eventually muster the temerity to suggest that the Jesus story is probably almost entirely mythical in both form and function, the bulk of their fame (or infamy) came from their expositions on and critiques of the nature of the pauline epistles, which they (rightly) saw as a product of turn-of-the-century tensions between the emerging ecclesiastical institution and a rather more esoteric "paulinism" that resisted its authority. I am especially persuaded by what I've read from W.C. Van Manen to at least take seriously the probability that these documents that have served as the very cornerstone of such an ancient tradition which makes claims to the historicity of not a few crucial events having taken place at a certain time at a certain place, are essentially just as spurious as those that are similarly attributed to Peter, to James, or to Jude.
(No impartial scholar thinks these letters are authentic.)

So we have two sources of information regarding Christianity's birth and early formative period: the Acts of the Apostles and the pauline epistles. The historical reliability of the Acts has been the focus of much scholarship in the last century, especially as contrasted with the epistles, which at times contradict its outlined narrative. My own opinion is that Acts is likely a very deliberate attempt to synthesize the two hitherto irreconcilable rival camps into a resultant unified faith. I follow David Trobisch on this. Moreover, I follow John Knox and Joseph Tyson in their suggestion that the Acts was penned essentially an an anti-marcionite reaction. I will return to this idea later. For now, if this is so, and if we add to this mix the Dutch radical idea that the entire Pauline corpus is spurious, then we have to face a sobering possibility that we have no primary sources regarding pre-Jewish-Revolt Christianity. This is so significant a paradigm-shift that it merits repetition and highlighting:

We have no primary sources regarding pre-Jewish-Revolt Christianity.

Gloss that over at your own risk (or at your own benefit, as the case might be).

At any rate, for the sake of engaging Greg Boyd on his own playing field, I have been allowing for their authenticity because even if we downplay the many discrepancies and contradictions between the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, even if we just read them at face value, bracketing our higher-critical mind momentarily, it is pretty hard to elude the fact that Paul's intended audiences are markedly gentile.

The obviousness of this observation troubles me. I must confess that the fact that the Boyd objections, based as they are on such a demonstrably false premise, in retrospect, could have seemed like a compelling argument to me when I first heard him, now embarrasses me somewhat. There's something to be learned from every experience, though, and this one led me to a profound realization. That I fell for it at all, even for a moment, is indicative of a strange kind of cultural inertia that apparently no one is immune to.

Why is it that people tend to hold on to certain prescribed ideas about a thing even when evidence to the contrary is right in front of them? If a skeptic like me can sometimes fall prey to this kind of rehearsed irrelevant sidetracking, it's no wonder that the business of apologetics prospers like it does, sustained as it is by the general population's lack of familiarity with the texts. All our lives we in the west have heard the story of Jesus, even those of us whose parents weren't particularly religious. Just as it's not an axiom of faith to "know" that Jesus existed, it is not an axiom of faith to "know" that the early Christians were Jews. It is a part of the background noise in our civilization which, because we have no use for thinking about it outside of churchly settings, we don't pay any mind to. It's simply part of the social matrix that resulted from our peculiar historical inheritance, even though our culture is now primarily secular (functionally, at least). It seldom occurs to anyone, even skeptics, to question details such as a Bethlehem birth of Jesus, some kind of Galilean healing streak, the essential Jewishness of the authors and their readers, or his execution by Roman authorities at the instigation of the Jewish authorities. We take all these things for granted without too much consideration.

An illustrative example: I gave up the habit of watching television in 1991. Despite this fact, I can name and describe to some degree all of the four main characters in the Seinfeld television program (and probably a few of the supporting characters too) even though I spent the nineties completely television-free. When something is so pervasive, so ubiquitous in the cultural landscape, it tends to seep peripherally into your consciousness whether we care about that thing or not. Likewise, the basic outline of the Jesus legend is burned into our cultural retina, so to speak, even if we are not Christian. It is part of the cultural identity of even those who are not initiates into the religion. Being able to readily recall certain generalities about the Jesus story should not be mistaken for "knowing" they are true, however, particularly when the "remembered" bits don't match what the texts actually say.

So why is it so ingrained in us that the early Christians, Paul's communities of converts, were essentially Jews, when the epistles themselves are so obviously written to gentile audiences? Actually, it's not that hard to see why. It is because these epistles contain within them so many references and citations from the Hebrew scriptures, that we fail to see the forest for these trees being in the way. Yes, the character of Paul is infatuated with the Jewish Bible. Whatever incarnation he imagines for Jesus (it's notoriously hard to tell what he means), for him, it is all "according to the scriptures." We therefore make the mistake of interpreting this use of Jewish symbolism as though these addressed communities were Jewish, but we've already seen that this is not so. Clearly, it is "Paul" who uses the symbols and the rhetoric, not the communities he addresses.

Moreover, the symbolism and the rhetoric are problematic in themselves. As I have already mentioned¹, some scholars have argued against the authenticity of Paul's self-proclaimed pharisaism. This view was encapsulated concisely by C. G. Montefiore when he wrote :

"Either this man was never a Rabbinic Jew at all, or he has quite forgotten what Rabbinic Judaism was and is. … [on the other hand] … The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels was a critic and pathologist of Judaism. His criticisms are real: they are flesh and blood.... But the author of the Epistle to the Romans fights, for the most part, in the air" ²

It is not enough to proclaim oneself a pharisee and to quote from the Hebrew Bible and engage in midrashic affectations. If it was, then many of the modern fringe religious groups (Jews for Jesus, Rastafarians, Mormons, Black Zionists) that lay claim to being the genuine inheritors of the tradition would have more of a legitimate basis to claim such a title than they actually do. Historical research, the science of genetics, and plain common sense all give the lie to such claims. To one who would ask why Paul would "lie" about such a thing, I would respond by asking them why Joseph Smith would "lie" about such a thing. Delusional people aren't necessarily "lying," they are simply delusional. I'm sure that in his own mind Paul was quite the experienced Jew of Jews. However, his rhetoric just doesn't match his claim to such a pedigree.

Those who would make use of any argument resembling the Boyd objections against mythicism that I outlined in part 2 of this series are holding on to an outmoded and demonstrably false premise. This includes Boyd, James White, William Craig, and many others. I have learned to understand a bit of why they do—conditioned habits are a real bitch to break—but such a stance is ultimately, demonstrably, indefensible. One simply cannot appeal to Paul when asserting the "thorough" Jewishness of the early Christians.

I think this is also the case with the rest of the New Testament writings, as I hope to show in future posts.

for now . . . . .

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ — Hyam Maccoby's The Mythmaker
² — Jewish Quarterly Review 13 [1901], pp. 167, 205-6

Dan Dennett: A rebuttal to Rick Warren

2011-03-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

Paul's audiences (Quixie on mythicism #3c)

2011-03-01T19:07:00.000-08:00

Pt1 — Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt 5— Pt6 — Pt7— Pt 8— Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 — Pt12

The Roman Christians

Here for the first time in this review we have a community that Paul didn't have some hand in founding himself. The church at Rome presumably existed before Paul ever preached his peculiar brand of 'Christism' cum Judaism to them.¹

The Epistle to the Romans is a general statement of faith, a tractate by Paul in epistolary form. Like 1st Corinthians and Galatians, it mainly focuses on the idea of division among Christians. This time, however, the ethnic divisions seem to have been reversed. While in Galatia it was the Judean outsiders who took a patronizing stance, it appears that in Rome it was the Hellenists who felt that they were superior to Judeans. A curious feature of this "letter" is that the opponent(s) it at times purports to assail seem(s) more ideal than mundane. More than in any other epistle, 'Paul' is deep inside his mind on this one, trying to formulate a systematic theology of Christ as redeemer and as fulfillment. Like Jacob, one gets the feeling that Paul is wrestling with his own inner angel here.

Who were they?

There is plenty of textual and archaeological evidence of Judeans having had a presence in Rome in the first centuries of the common era. Inscriptions allows us to locate where they lived and gathered, where they were buried, and also some of the ways that they interacted with the Greeks and Romans in this the largest city in the empire. While the presence of Judeans at Rome allows for the possibility of converts from this population, we have no reason to assume so, particularly in light of Paul's reports of the hostility he encountered when he preached at synagogues. If Roman Jews represented a significant segment of the Jesus cult, little in this document can tell us about them.

Romans mentions at least one pair of Judeans in the community. Paul is apparently intimate with Aquila and Priscilla, a married couple that had converted before he had met them. Acts (Ch 18) explicitly calls them Judean (Romans does not) and adds that they had migrated first to Pontus, and then eventually to Rome. Claudius had ordered all Judeans to leave Rome, though—at least according to Acts—and so Paul met them in Corinth, where Acts says that they worked as tent makers like Paul. This would certainly provide an opportunity for their acquaintance. The Claudian exodus mentioned in Acts is a bit problematic because, though we aware of a handful of similar episodes in Roman history, none of them appear to refer to this specific 'expulsion'.² In 139 BCE the Jews were reportedly expulsed (along with the other “Chaldeans”).³ In 19 CE, there’s another exodus written of, but this one doesn't just pick on the Judeans: all immigrant troublemakers are to be expelled.⁴

The closest we come to an expulsion of the Jews is in Suetonius, writing in the early second century CE:

“Since the Judeans constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, Claudius expelled them from Rome.”⁵

.
.

This of course is a citation familiar to both historicists (who sometimes uphold it as extra-biblical evidence of Jesus) and mythicists (who rightly point out that this could not possibly be a reference to Jesus, ergo much less to his historicity). Could this be the same event that Acts is referring to? Forget what Suetonius says about Chrestus for a moment. This citation is useful to us in another way. Obviously not a reference to a historical Jesus, it still attests to some civic disturbances involving some Judeans which resulted in at least some Judeans being expelled from Rome. Dio Cassius, however, explains that expulsions would have been unpragmatic. He says that Claudius imposed restrictions on Judean gatherings, but he explicitly says the Jews were not expelled at this time.⁶ So … Were Aquila and Prisca expelled from Rome by Claudius (as Acts plainly states)?
Two possibilities exist:

Dio Cssius is right, in which case I wonder where the author of Acts got his information on this episode. Could he have gotten it from his knowledge of Suetonius? Could he, in his diligent quest for confirmation of his story, have irresistibly gravitated toward the “Chrestus” reference and made use of one of its details? The problem with this, of course, is that Suetonius wrote in the early second century, and everybody knows that Acts was written well before that. (Right, Steve? ;)
Suetonius is right, in which case I wonder why Dio Cassius is so adamant that there was no expulsion. Was he reacting to this Suetonian tradition (possibly through Christian use)?

Both possibilities are intriguing and speculative —heavy food for thought.
Let’s assume for the sake of the Boyd objections (he doesn't like it when Acts is not taken seriously as history) that the second choice is the correct one, that the Judeans had been expelled. This potentially would have left behind only the gentile variety of Christian converts at Rome, who would have proceeded to entrench their brand of Law-less Christianity as the preferable paradigm to catechize neophytes into. When Claudius later died (54 CE) and the expulsion was presumably rescinded, what the formerly influential Jewish-Christians came back to was a muscular gentile variety that was resistant to Judaizing (if this Romans "letter" is any indication).. The re-integration of the Judeans into church structures became unattainable due to the haughtiness the Greeks adopted with their newly gained positions of power and authority (so Weifel).This would be an obstacle they would never be able to surmount, especially after paulinism took over in Rome.

Acts is the only place that pinpoints Prisca and Aquila as Judeans. David Trobisch has proposed a compelling theory wherein Acts’s whole compositional modus operandus is to be a kind of cleanup crew that ties-it-all-together in a 'final authoritative edition' to finally determine orthodox authority contra Marcion (he thinks⁸ Polycarp is the best candidate for this task). According to this view Acts was written to corroborate apostolic succession and to synthesize the Pauline material with the gospels so that a homogenous orthodoxy could be arrived at between these two contrasting “styles“ of Christianity. A kind of merger. Might the mention of this couple be a linking editorial device to this end?

In the closing “say-hi-to-…” section of Romans, we have a list of twenty six people that the author sends personal greetings to. He mentions "my kinsmen." If one were to presume at face value that Paul was indeed a “Pharisee of Pharisees” based on his own say-so, as many are wont to do, it would be plausible that a familial greeting could be a reference to more "Jews" in Rome by default. But this does not necessitate them having been baptized into the new faith yet (one could imagine relatives of Paul following his lead, but our speculations can only dance us from here to there—not very far). Moreover, I can't but wonder if Hyam Maccoby might be right in his conclusion that Paul was only feigning to be a Pharisee. But, for the sake of argument, let's acknowledge it as exhibit B.

What we are left with, then, as far as the Jewishness of Paul's audience goes, as we survey this epistle, are a reference to a couple of known (from 1st Cor) companions of Paul (corroborated in Acts), and a possible “say hello to my cousins” reference in the closing of the letter. Given these, and adding the fact that the epistle reflects a community that eschews Judaizing in general, the emphasis sometimes given by apologists to the influence of Jewish Christians at Rome therefore seems like an ambitious stretch in light of the meager evidence supporting this appeal. So why the undue certainty on the part of Boyd and his colleagues? Even if there were Judeans there in the community of Christians in Rome (an allowable speculation, to be sure), we cannot escape the fact that this letter is intended for a gentile audience. Paul is castigating them for feeling superior, for “judging” over those who might still choose to observe the Jewish Law. In the parlance of today's undergrad scene, for hatin' on 'em. These people definitely ain't Jews.

Does Judaism factor in?

An big point of contention and animosity in this epistle is the Jewish system of food laws. Paul comes up with terms for those who keep kosher and for those who don’t. He calls those who keep the kosher laws “the weak” (contrasted with the “strong”, i.e. those who don’t observe any such restrictions). Paul is urging the strong not to judge the weak. To my mind, however, the terminology he uses seems contradictory, the logic is reversed. One would think that those who can refrain from forbidden foods would be the strong ones and those who indulge to be the weak, but Paul’s estimation is nevertheless turned inside-out like this. It’s a fascinating twist. One explanation for why the kosher are considered weak is because the reason they are abstaining from meat is just so they won’t chance encountering idol meat. The weak are the ones who don't realize that there ARE no other idols. In other words, Paul implies that they adhere to Torah out of a sense of superstitious loyalty and habit. I find the irony interesting. At any rate, Paul assures the Romans that all Israel will see salvation, so that judging Judeans for such things as their keeping kosher is therefore just a silly distraction.

Stylistically, the letter to the Romans once again shows that Paul’s rhetoric has deliberative elements to it. It introduces a diatribe technique which is prevalent in Romans in a way that it isn’t in the other Pauline works. Like I previously intimated, rather than revealing a real opponent, Paul here seems to set up imaginary, theoretical objections to his dialectic, telling us more about himself than about any supposed real detractors he may have encountered. He seems to be trying to clarify the distinction between Jew and gentile in his own thinking. Consequently, his main arguments center around the concept of equality for gentiles and Judeans.

The bottom line: Salvation goes to the Judean first and also to the gentile. God shows no partiality. Greeks are as condemnable as the Jews are and equally have access to God’s salvation. Greeks may be idolatrous and perverse (a common Judean stereotype of their gentile neighbors) but Judeans are no better off if they don’t submit to the “spiritual circumcision” he prescribes for these imaginary judaizers. There is no significant distinction for him. These themes are all in Romans.

As he previously had in Galatians, Paul here argues again that Abraham is the father of us all, both of those who have faith in god and of those who are circumcised. He cites Genesis 15 once more. He really likes this verse. He seems fixated on this call to faith as the gentile way in to Yahveh’s salvation. It’s the same argument as in Galatians. The chronology of the story becomes the loophole.

Baptism is the new replacement initiation rite, the entrance requirement, for him. The ritual’s description in Chapter 6 once again calls to mind a Gnostic kind of symbolism which revolves around the idea of a kind of death and resurrection which the initiate willingly undergoes. It also reveals the gentile character of his audience, as baptism was already an already existing and practiced sacrament among virtuous Judeans (see pools in Jerusalem, Masada, and Qumran). Such an intro would be as unnecessary as one for circumcision for Judeans

Chapters 9–11 show Paul desultorily citing biblical passages to argue for this essential equality of Jew and gentile. This raises the inevitable question: If we all have access to the Hebrew god in this way, why was Israel chosen Israel at all? The true Israel for Paul transcends cultural and geographic boundaries. All Israel will be saved. Why insist on Israel like this? Might this not be an anti-marcionite nod?

If not, then how do we explain Paul's obsession with the Hebrew scriptures, an obsession which reportedly failed at every encounter with real Jews? Why did Paul "settle" for gathering gentiles who accepted his marginally Jewishish theology right before the coming of the end of days instead?. It bugs Paul that Jews aren't buying his 'gospel', but his main concern (as in Galatians) is that the gentiles buy it. From this perspective Israel is stumbling, is fumbling the obvious, is in a state of denial. Ironically, it is this stumbling that has allowed salvation to finally come to the gentiles. What’s more, Paul seems to believe that all Israel will eventually come to believe in Jesus Christ some fine day. ('They'll see!')

Relation to James? . . . .

Can we know what relationship, if any, there was between these “weak ones” and the James party? Once again, that the James Christians seem to share a similar predilection for Torah observance as these people is not enough to project Paul’s cosmic christological constructs onto James. We've already seen from our look at Galatians that it is possible to be a law observing Christian independent of that particular group's influence.

Chapter 15 recalls the collection for Jerusalem poor once again. This act of charity is the thing he hopes will legitimize his mission. That his collection should not be rejected by the Jerusalem church is crucially important to Paul. Why would they reject it, though? If the traditional chronology of the letters is correct we note that he seems to grow progressively more and more stressed about being rejected by the Jerusalem Jacobites. It’s as if he knows it is going to be rejected. Why? What reason could they have? He lists some of the Christian communities that have graciously contributed to the collection for Jerusalem’s poor. (Galatia’s contribution is not mentioned, however. What happened? This is a particularly interesting oversight considering how important this collection was in that letter [chapter 2]. )

At any rate, we can conclude that the epistle to the Romans, instead of revealing the early church in that city as "thorough Jews" like Boyd asserts, is … once again … overwhelmingly gentile.

What does this mean?
Stay tuned to the same bat-channel for the exciting answer. . .

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ - Let me stress, lest someone think that I believe the books are reliable in any way, that I am allowing for the authenticity of at least the Hauptebriefe in the ongoing discussion of the pauline corpus only for the sake of argument. I am just reading it at face value to show that Boyd's objections fail even if one attributes authenticity to these documents. In actual fact, I follow Van Manen and Loman and the other radicals in thinking the whole corpus spurious.
² - Wolgang Weifel built a neat theory around this Claudius reference in a Chapter entitled : “The Jewish Community in Ancient Rome” in a collection of essays: The Romans Debate—Continued (pp 100–119) (Donfried—ed.)
³ - Valerius Maximus - Factorum et Dictorum, 1.3.3 (A contemporary of Tiberius Caesar, Valerius attributes the expulsion to a crackdown on Jewish proselytizing. Some scholars [Martin Goodman - Mission and Conversion], however, argues that Valerius has likely projected the activity of his own day onto the remote episode).
⁴ - Josephus, Antiquities, 81 — Tacitus, Annals, II.85 — Suetonius, Tiberius, XXXVI — Dio Cassius, Roman History, LVII.18.5a (Josephus says that it was as punishment for a handful of scoundrels, Tacitus implies that Rome needed to be protected from pernicious influences. If these 'outsiders' were prepared to acknowledge themselves as 'Roman', then they would have been allowed to stay. Suetonius agrees. Dio says that it was for excessive proselytizing, but, again, this is likely a projection of the conflicts in his own day onto his historical narrative [see Goodman in the preceding endnote] ).
⁵ - Suetonius, Claudius, 25.4
⁶ - Dio Cassius
⁷ - It should be noted that many scholars doubt whether chapter 16 was part of the original, shorter Romans, whether this section was originally part of another letter meant for Ephesus. I won’t digress into that dispute as it has no real value to the discussion at hand except to note that the dispute is ongoing, which may make point of Paul's having mentioned "kinsmen" moot..
⁸ - The First Edition of the New Testament

JHC still online . . . .

2011-02-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

I had posted these articles before, but the links were all broken. I am posting them again here. They present some of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical arguments for the spuriousness of the Pauline corpus:

Hermann Detering - The Dutch Radical Approach to the Pauline Epistles
Darrell J. Doughty - Pauline Paradigms and Pauline Authenticity
Robert M. Price - The Evolution of the Pauline Canon
G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga - The Spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles.
Thomas Whittaker - An Exposition of Van Manen's Analysis of the Epistle to the Romans
W. C. Van Manen - The Pauline Writings
F. C. Baur - The Epistle to the Philippians

They are really very well researched and well argued essays. I highly recommend them.

Ó

.

Paul's audiences (Quixie on mythicism #3b)

2011-02-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

The Corinthians
.
Who were they?

Corinth was a Roman colony, a place where soldiers and proud Roman citizens, drunk with the glory days of Rome, went to retire. It became quite a little bustling city. Latin culture seems to have had an elevated status there. Latin is more prominent in the inscriptions of Corinth than Greek is.

Philo mentions Corinth as one of the colonies in which Jews had established a presence¹, but, except for a single fragmentary Hebrew inscription, a partial reference to a “synagogue of the Hebrews”,² there is no archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence at Corinth. Correspondingly, we have little evidence of a Judean presence in the community being addressed in 1st Corinthians³. As in Thessalonika, the Christian population is apparently gentile (at least the Christians that are involved in the issues that are troubling Paul in the "letter" are).

1st Corinthians purports to be Paul's response to a letter he received from Corinthian Christians he refers to as πνευματικοι (pneumatikoi -spiritual ones). By examining the nature of their explicit complaints to the apostle, we get a glimpse into some of the forms that their worship took. Chapters 7–15 of 1st Corinthians are basically Paul running down their concerns and responding to them. I bracket Paul’s responses, for I am more interested in glimpsing what these spiritually superior Christians ‘believed’ than I am in Paul for now.

They seem to eschew sexual activity. They practice abstinence as a means of becoming more spiritual. They resent the licentiousness they ascribe to their Corinthian brethren. This again calls to mind a Qumran-like or Gnostic-like asceticism.
They think that they “possess knowledge.” Does this refer to their educated status or is there a Gnostic influence in Corinth? Or both? Some of the Corinthian Christians feel free to indulge in food that has previously been sacrificed to idols without thinking twice, believing it to be no harm. They’re deemed as cavalier, elitist. There is an air of superiority at play there.
Paul has a problem with the way these Corinthians have been worshipping the Judean God. He exhorts them to come up with a better system. He describes disorder in the meetings. He then lists some common activities that frequently take place during Christian worship in Corinth. He calls them ‘spiritual gifts.’ We each have our own talents, Paul says, meaning to devalue these mannerisms, but he must be cautious in his critique because he knows how important such outward displays of ecstatic reveries are to their practitioners. He doesn’t forbid them to indulge. He instead tries to make the converts see how trivial such concerns actually are in the big picture. The Corinthian pneumatikoi are into a charismatic, showy variety of worship, one in which spirits are actively involved in making things happen during their services. No soporific cadences for them! No sir. They speak in tongues. They whoop and holler. They are on fire with the spirit. There’s nothing that Paul could do to stop it, even if he wanted to, I think. Here we get to watch syncretism in the process of happening. Paul can be shown tolerating heathen practice in exchange for fidelity to his specific kerygma.
Speaking in tongues can be traced back to the worship of the ancient Asia Minor fertility deity Kybele. Pharisaism, resistant to all forms of syncretism, was especially repelled by these corybantic and orgiastic aspects of Kybelian displays of ecstasy. The Corinthian gentile Christian group that Paul is writing to, however, is likely composed of many of these former charismatic fertility cultists. Indeed, we find quite a few allusions to their licentiousness in this epistle (chapter 5, Ch 6:9–11, 7:1–6, 10:7–9). They have apparently transferred some of their enthusiastic Kybelene practices onto their new Yahveh context. (This is particularly ironic in light of their new-found celibacy.)
Finally, in Chapter 15 Paul seems to be saying that these pneumatikoi think that there’s no such thing as a bodily resurrection. We think we know Paul believes in bodily resurrection. — Don‘t they?

Kybele

All of these points of contention show that these Corinthian Christians curiously don’t seem to be too familiar with anything we can recognize as Paul’s teaching. Yet these are the very people who took the time to actually write to Paul, specifically, to see what he could do to help fix their troubles. And Paul writes back to these guys! There is a tremendous dissonance here. Why are they espousing things that are so clearly contrary to Paul’s preaching? Are they familiar with Paul’s actual preaching or merely with his reputation as an apostle? These people are fanatical freaks any way you look at it. They look sort of Gnostic to my eyes, maybe even a tad docetic. The body seems disagreeable to them, they seem to want to reject it in favor of some theomaniacal Platonic ideal. They are too radically ascetic even for the likes of Paul, but he writes to them anyway. He paints himself as a ‘ringer’ apostle that will straighten them out, but then he walks on eggshells around their ‘pentecostalistic’ tendencies. It’s weird.

It’s no wonder the Tubingen scholars found so many problems with the genuineness of the Pauline material. It is full of inconsistencies.

Where does Judaism factor in?

Corinthians reveals a mixed bag of problems of varying urgency, all of which fall fairly neatly into one general motif: division. The author of this epistle has a problem with people who think themselves socially superior to others. The wealthier Christians that host congregations in their households have been lately exploiting the shame/honor system that was part of the Mediterranean social landscape, to the detriment of group morale. They flaunt their wealth, engendering a sense of rivalry within congregations (and between them). This kind of thing was common in the Greco-Roman system of honor. You are supposed to shame your peers in order to increase your own prestige and standing in society.⁴In Paul’s view, this is not just looking down on someone, this is to mistreat them. Chapter 6 reveals that some of the Christians have even been going to court against other followers of Jesus. These were no casual spats.

Paul indicates that there are also those who think themselves religiously (spiritually) superior to others, but Judean perspectives are not in question here. In fact, if anything, the Corinthians seem to have a bit of a Gnostic tinge to them. There's nothing particularly Judean there.

If anything, 1st Corinthians gives us insight into Paul’s familiarity with advanced Greek civil rhetoric. It is replete with a kind of deliberative rhetoric that was common in civic speeches of the day. Paul seems to be rhetorically trained in a popular Greco Roman style. This letter, an argument against discord and for concord and unity, uses a popular style of discourse from Greco-Roman literature. Dio Chrysostom in his Discourse To the Nicomedians on Concord with the Nicaeans, for example, uses similar themes and techniques to deal with this same kind of honor/shame rivalry going on between one city and the next. Against discord, for unity. The similarities are self evident. Paul is definitely showing his Greek schooling in this epistle.

As another example of Paul’s familiarity with the discursive methods popular in his day, compare Paul’s use of the body metaphor to plead for unity to the language used in Livy’s rhetoric:

“They certainly considered there was no hope left, save in the concord of the citizens: that this must be restored to the state at any price. Under these circumstances it was resolved that Agrippa Menenius, an eloquent man, and a favourite with the people, because he was sprung from them, should be sent to negotiate with them. Being admitted into the camp, he is said to have simply related to them the following story in an old-fashioned and unpolished style: ‘At the time when the parts of the human body did not, as now, all agree together, but the several members had each their own counsel, and their own language, the other parts were indignant that, while everything was provided for the gratification of the belly by their labour and service, the belly, resting calmly in their midst, did nothing but enjoy the pleasures afforded it. They accordingly entered into a conspiracy, that neither should the hands convey food to the mouth, nor the mouth receive it when presented, nor the teeth have anything to chew: while desiring, under the influence of this indignation, to starve out the belly, the individual members themselves and the entire body were reduced to the last degree of emaciation. Thence it became apparent that the office of the belly as well was no idle one, that it did not receive more nourishment than it supplied, sending, as it did, to all parts of the body that blood from which we derive life and vigour, distributed equally through the veins when perfected by the digestion of the food.’ By drawing a comparison from this, how like was the internal sedition of the body to the resentment of the people against the senators, he succeeded in persuading the minds of the multitude.⁵

The body as a unity is a good metaphor.⁶ Paul’s rhetoric was right in tune with the Greco-Roman sensibilities of the gentile proselytes under his tutelage, particularly those of more refined tastes and means.

The point is: There might be Torah citations interspersed throughout this Hellenistic epistle, but there is no particularly Jewish teaching going on there.

Relation to James? . . . .

We can infer almost nothing regarding the Jerusalem James faction from Corinthians. James is listed, to be sure, among the recipients of a postmortem apparition from Jesus, but there’s nothing there that can tell us anything pertinent to our focus. The apparition of Jesus to James in Chapter 15 is often credited as describing the moment of conversion for James by Christian apologists. This verse is often used to reconcile Mark’s (Ch. 3) depiction of Jesus’ familial circumstances as hostile on the one hand, with the importance placed on James as a key figure in the nascent movement after Jesus’ crucifixion on the other. How else can we explain the continuity? James must have been converted by this post mortem appearance of Jesus that the author of 1st Corinthians describes. This finally made James a ‘believer’ according to this view. However, harmonizing Galatians with Corinthians with Acts in this way is pretty naïve, not just because the two epistles actually contradict each other and the Acts at several key points, but also because all of those books are basically partisan orthodox didactic works from the same publisher (so to speak) meant to reinforce each other’s kerygma and are therefore almost useless historiographically.

The only other attestation of this supposed event comes from the Gospel of the Hebrews, a late second century work known to Origen and partially quoted by Jerome. It not only singles James out as the very first person that Jesus appeared to after his resurrection, it also explicitly states that James had been a believer and follower of Jesus prior to his death. He had even been there at the last supper according to this work (“had drank from the Lord’s cup”—this directly contradicts the gospel stories).

So, once again, I ask: What do we know?

We know that there were class divisions within the communities that were engendering animosity among Corinthian Christians.

We know that the leadership of these communities is minimal and ad hoc.

We know there were openly charismatic pneumatikoi there who were tongue-speaking, fire-breathing, spirit-filled and celibate (at least tryin‘ like heck).

We think we know that the notorious fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians preserves a primitive proto-creed of presumably apostolic origin. But a good case can be made that, if anything, what this list of apparitions reveals is a contest between those of Peter (& disciples) and those of James (& apostles).⁷I think ths gospels will further corroborate this. But first we will look at Romans . . . .

Ó

.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹- Legatio ad Gaium 281-2

²- A crudely inscribed lintel found near the Peirene fountain (probably 4th century in origin). "At the marble steps of the Propylaeum the excavators found a heavy stone lintel on which they were able to decipher the words "Hebrew Synagogue", clearly cut out in Greek letters. The house in which Paul proclaimed the new doctrine must have stood beyond the colonnade in the region of Lechaeum street."– W. Keller, The Bible as History, p368. It was being used as a stepping stone before the inscription was discovered.
³- Acts 18 reports that Crispus was the leader of the synagogue. Paul mentions interacting with a Corinthian by this name.
⁴- Andrew D. Clarke elaborates on this system of status and honor and the influence on early Christianity at Corinth in Secular and Christian Leadership in Corinth
⁵- Ab Urbe condita II. 16, 32, 33
⁶- The metaphor was also previously used by Xenophon in Memorabilia (2.iii.18) and by Cicero in De Officiis (III.v.22)
⁷- Robert Price wrote a good piece enumerating all the redactional issues with this chapter. Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation

Paul's audiences (Quixie on mythicism #3a)

2011-02-25T13:10:00.000-08:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt 3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

In the previous post, we saw that for the 'historicist' (Greg Boyd in that case) the earliest Christians were those Jews who, despite the vehement revulsion they would have felt toward the idea of a “god-man” under normal circumstances (he clearly understands that it was against their very grain and fiber to accept such sacrilege), were somehow convinced and compelled by the ‘evidence’ (reports of Jesus’ supernatural ‘extras’ —healings, raisings, self-proclamations et al.) to now choose to abandon the strictures of their former fanatical monotheism in favor of one that allowed for this “god-man.”

If we, for the sake of argument, bracket the question of their authenticity ¹ and their chronology, and place them in the sixth and seventh decades of the first century, as current consensus does, the Pauline epistles would be the earliest record that we have of the phenomenon of Christianity. Under this scenario, already just twenty years after Jesus supposedly was killed, perhaps a few dozen thriving communities of Christians were already festooning Canaan, Asia Minor, and the northern Mediterranean—even across into Egypt—all proclaiming the peculiar christologies and soteriologies and creeds of an emerging orthodoxy. Paul knew of these communities and endeavored to travel to many of them to preach his particular gospel. His tireless labor made him a valued mentor and authority to these communities, who received his correspondences with either joy and gladness or fear and trembling, depending on whether or not they had been upholding the teachings he had given them. In addition to asking what the spiritual/theological indebtedness or relation to the original Jerusalem group was (the wellspring of it all), we would like to know who these people were that Paul was exhorting to follow this new fulfilled religion that in his eyes transcended the Torah. As we survey the epistles it is very important to keep in mind who Paul’s respective audiences were.

Boyd is absolutely certain that Paul is “thoroughly Jewish. He thinks Jewish. He talks Jewish. His letters are filled with references to the Old Testament. He presupposes a Jewish framework in all of his epistles and the congregation he’s writing to.”

Questions cue up: Do Paul’s letters bear this out? Is there a way to measure the Jewishness of Paul’s proto-Christian communities?
What about Paul’s own Judaism? Is there a way to gauge it?

Commentaries that underscore Paul’s thorough Judaism usually do so by comparing the rhetoric of the epistles to some of the popular exegetical methods available and known to be in vogue in Jewish discourse at the time. These include midrash, typology, allegory and pesher. I’ll stop to remark on some of those occasions when Paul engages in these, as this might reveal not just the extent of his “Pharisaim”, but it might also tell us what his readers were prone to accept as normative from an authority of Paul’s stature.

The New Testament is a very richly variegated text so I’m limiting my focus to a few questions relevant to the topic as I survey the epistles:

1-Who were the intended readers of the epistle to each respective community? Were they Pagans? Were they Jews? The answer to this question will affect the way we judge their understanding of the material that Paul is presenting to them as Judaism.
2- How does the preaching contained in the Pauline epistles compare/contrast with the normative Judaism of the day as we understand it?
3 - What can we glean about the James faction from them?

The Thessalonians

Who were they?

The audience of the first letter to the Thessalonians consisted of gentile pagans. Of this there can be little doubt (1:9). They were working class gentile people that Paul likely preached to at their places of work and in public.

This short epistle praises the community for holding fast to the gospel that Paul had previously handed down to them. When the Jews are mentioned in it, they sort of have a “Blue Meanies” (from Yellow Submarine) feel to them, i.e. they have a malevolent aspect; they are an enemy to run and hide from, lest they inflict harm to the apostle and his entourage. (see end of Chapter 2)

A question presents itself: Who was it that persecuted Paul, as late (presumably) as 51 C.E. or so? Who chased him from Judea to Athens? If his only crime was holding to a radical Jewish messianic belief in the face of an antagonistic and muscular orthodox Jewish opposition, why wasn’t James (or Cephas for that matter) who was reportedly espousing this same messianism, also chased out of town along with Paul? It must have been some group who either didn’t know of the truce reached at the "council of Jerusalem," or otherwise were a rogue group that just didn’t care about the truce. Perhaps the James group was persecuted as well, and we just don’t know about it, or perhaps James wasn't preaching the same stuff that Paul was at all, and was therefore left in peace by Paul‘s opponents. The only pertinent near-contemporary extra-canonical textual reference that alludes to this James sect is that of Josephus in the Antiquities. It is dubious, to be sure, but it does portray James as a respected and righteous leader of the community, not as an outcast, so I seriously doubt he was preaching “Jesus the resurrected god-man” in Jerusalem.

What traces of Judaic symbolism we find in 1st Thessalonians immediately call to mind the Qumran variety of Judaism (popularly called “Essene”), but I think that the “sons of light/darkness” ² motif (5:5), for instance, could just as easily be a trace of emergent Gnosticism or of Zoroastrian dualism. One of the things that I have learned about “Paul” as I re-read these epistles is that it is hard to peg all that he says down to one individual person’s mind. Paul seems to be as much a composite talking head as Jesus is. But that’s for another essay altogether.

So: What do we know?

We know that Paul was pleased with the Thessalonian Christians for remaining loyal to the Pauline brand. We know that some people were starting to die off before the parousia and that he surviving members were beginning to worry about their salvation. We know that Paul felt persecuted by Jews.

What do we think we know?

We tend to subconsciously equate “Jew” or “Jerusalem” with “James party” which leads to a whole parade of misunderstanding. But we’ll return to that after we take a look at some meatier Pauline letters.

The Galatians

Who were they?

The author’s reason for writing to the churches of Galatia (presumably founded by him —*4:13–15) is clear: He has just received news about certain outsider preachers who have been telling his converts that they must endure circumcision first if they are to be considered followers of Jesus#. The opponents (“Some who trouble you.”) seem to be saying to Paul’s converts, who are undeniably gentile:

‘What ?!

You guys want to be Christians but you haven’t been initiated into Judaism yet?!

Are you nuts?!’

The Galatian Christians were gentiles.³ The emphasis that the author places in this epistle on the rejection of circumcision is a dead giveaway. There would have been no need for Paul to argue against circumcision to Judeans. Chap 4 verse 8 leaves little doubt that they were former Pagans who had been initiated recently into the Jesus mysteries. There may or may not have been “Jewish” Christians in these groups, but we have no way of ascertaining this. Even if there were some, we can safely say that these were not the people who were on the author’s mind when writing this epistle. In Galatians the figure of Paul is stressed out because some of his recent converts are being sold straight-up Judaism by some unknown outsiders. He doesn’t want his darlings to be exposed to this straight-up Judaism, lest they fall away from his “true gospel.” He wants them to remain gentile. At some point in the recent past, apparently, Paul had inspired these gentiles to abandon their former Pagan ways in order to adopt his particular version of the Judean god, a vision that did not require such extreme measures as circumcision from them.

What was Paul selling at Galatia?

The gentile god fearers of Galatia seem to have been in the market for a specifically Jewish type of monotheistic expression (else, what’s a god-fearer for?). Galatians suggests that they were still ambivalent about which path to commit to. What’s more, they were responsive enough to these Judaizers to make Paul freak out about it. Perhaps Paul’s audients weren’t as committed to a Pauline Judaism as we’d like to believe. Perhaps they were eager to hear any and all Jewish viewpoints which would bring them closer to this god whose mysteries they sought to enter. Unfortunately, the Pauline rhetoric is the only viewpoint that survived.

A major advantage that the author(s) of the Pauline epistles possibly had over the Judaizer sects, what set him apart was the Greek training that he seems to have had. “Paul” knew how to talk to these gentiles about the god they had recently chosen to fear in a way that the “circumcision party” could not. Whether their newly chosen god strictly resembled the Biblical Yahveh or not (one of Marcion’s focii) was of little concern to Paul’s god-fearers. Would a neophyte know the difference? An ancient mystical tradition like Judaism is intangibly sublime, virtually unfathomable without a knowledgeable guide to help one navigate it. (Enter Paul and his glass darkly.) Paulinism offered gentile aficionados a way inside the mystery of the living god of Israel, in plain Greek, that didn’t require self-mutilation. The way of entrance into the covenant through baptism was understandably more appealing to these Pagan proselytes than was the requisite knife. This was a no-brainer.

Still, these Galatian protégés of Paul apparently were laboring under the impression that their Jesus worship was still somehow a fundamentally Jewish expression. Their wish to be adopted into the Abrahamic fold was genuine. When Paul showed up around the Diaspora synagogues preaching this new paradigm of the Judaic god, the texts say that the Jews turned him away at every synagogue. (Hell, the texts say that they near darn near killed him at a few of them!) Yet Paul was somehow still able to found a smattering of churches across a good swath of territory using this much maligned and spurned theology of his. How did he manage to build an ‘alternate’ Judaism without any Jews? If the Jews threw stones at him, who was it that bought into it? The answer has never been hidden from view. It was very likely these god-fearers, whose understanding of Judaic monotheism (and/or covenant, Torah, et al) could only be an ambitious Platonic or Stoic approximation. But no matter; these spiritual gentiles found in Paul’s all-inclusive message an attractive alternative path to this Jewish god they sought. In lieu of having no traditional Hebrew credentials (i.e. the right pedigree/bloodline), Paulinism became the loophole through which the god-fearers could at last sneak past the surgeon’s gate into Abraham’s bosom. Why adopt Yahveh? We’ll explore that question in time.

The educated Greek style that Paul exhibits throughout the corpus was attractive to the gentile god-fearers. It plays a significant role in the form of the epistles. For instance, the author employs a form of judicial rhetoric in the first couple of chapters of Galatians, where he defends his message over against his opponents by first defending the legitimacy of his apostleship. It’s a defense as well as an attack, showing good form and a familiarity with contemporary Hellenistic methods of discourse.

But Paul takes a bold step. He mixes biblical midrash into his Hellenistic rhetoric. In arguing against his opponents, he uses the authority of Torah to support his arguments for why it is unnecessary to circumcise the gentiles. This is so weird and ironic that it warrants repetition, rephrased: Paul uses Torah to explain to gentile god-fearers why gentiles need not be bound to Torah to legitimately follow the Jewish god. (Mind you, his audience is gentile, so he can pretty much say what he wants, really, and they’d be none the wiser.)

He does this with a midrash, a method of biblical interpretation whereby one searches for deeper meaning by applying a kind of logical extrapolation to a given passage, projecting from the lesser case to the greater or vise versa, for example. This method allows for a fairly wide scope of interpretation of scripture. Through it, the rabbis would openly discuss the intricacies of the law and resolve any discrepancies resulting from the peculiar, sometimes difficult phrasing of biblical passages.

The specific midrash that Paul attempts in this case involves the very first covenant that the Hebrew god ever made with Abraham in the book of Genesis. Paul focuses on two different details, both referring to this covenant, to defend his position. In Genesis 15 God promises prosperity to Abraham because of the constant faith that he has displayed. Later, in chapter 17, he demands the ritual of circumcision from male members as a sign of this special covenant with the people. Paul argues that the promise was made before the ritual had been instituted by god in order that the gentiles can be endeared to god through faith alone, without relying on external signs like circumcision. The chronology of the two parts of the contract makes a world of difference for Paul, who reasons that the one must be prior to the other not just chronologically, but also in terms of their significance for human history. If the epistle to the Galatians is anything, it is a loud cry to allow the whole world into the Jewish tent.

One aspect of the midrash process was that it is an interactive method. A midrash doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not enough to unpack and to posit a possible explanation for any given passage. Torah is a living thing. It needs to be engaged and discussed among one’s peers. Something might be a valid midrash, but it might not necessarily be a compelling one. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one. ⁴

I say this because I find it hard to believe that a moderately learned Pharisee could not have demolished Paul’s premise that the gentile has access to Yahveh prior to the Jew because of this particular sequence in Genesis (by pointing out the fact that there‘s no such thing as ‘half-a-contract’, for example). Was there no one nearby who could engage and challenge Paul’s midrash? I bet those opponents he’s complaining about could have, had they stuck around. These Judaizers were good enough talkers to rattle the Galatians enough to inspire Paul to call them “foolish” (“who has bewitched you?”) Paul’s letter gives the impression that these Galatian Christians were “of Paul”, but how committed to Paul they actually were is questionable. There would have been no need for Paul to scold them so severely for listening to an old hat argument for circumcision if their faith in his message had been secure.

Interestingly, to the naked eye, the offenders’ rationale seems to be simply the standard within Judaism. Nothing more. If Paul saw these guys as fellow followers of Jesus, it would seem that they had an understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus that differed radically from Paul’s, an understanding which he characterizes as “another gospel” (and which he double-curses). But this “other gospel” seems to have been nothing but good old normative Judaism, as far as I can tell, with, perhaps (it‘s hard to tell from the text) an added element of importance imparted to Jesus (which can be inferred from the texts, but is not implied by them). Was he a Messiah? Was he a beloved, well-remembered Rabbi? We could venture guesses, but we ultimately don’t know because all that Paul says is that these opponents wanted his gentiles to be circumcised.

Another example of Paul’s use of biblical exegesis in Galatians (4:24) is his allegory involving Abraham’s two seeds, that of Sarah and of Hagar, respectively. Allegory is simply the figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another one. In this case, the author identifies the Judeans with Ishmael, the son of Hagar, Abraham’s slave concubine, while he equates the church with Isaac, the son of Sarah, a freewoman. These two alternatives are cast as the two covenants, of the flesh, and one of spirit. Without getting too deep into Paul’s reasoning here, it should be noted how repulsive this would have sounded to a Jew. If you think that Jesus was bold for calling the Pharisees vipers, imagine how well they would have reacted to Paul saying they were sons of a slave whore girl. Had there been any schooled Jews around to riposte, Paul would have gotten quite an earful, I’m sure! The interpretation that Paul advances in this allegory could only occur to a Christian superssesionist—certainly not to a Pharisee, who have always stressed the Abraham–Isaac–Jacob–Joseph lineage in Genesis.

Hyam Maccoby wrote a whole book⁵ in which he questions Paul’s Pharisaic credentials by pointing to many of the discrepancies in Paul’s supposedly Pharisaic thought. He concludes that the apostle’s attempts at displaying rabbinic proficiency were but an idiosyncratic affectation at best. I won’t belabor the point, but I think that Mr.Maccoby may have been right.

What is the relation to James? . . . . .

Early in the epistle, in his exasperation over having to defend the validity of his apostleship, Paul relates an earlier episode in Antioch (Chapter 2), where some of James’ party, including Cephas, apparently were not keen on sharing their meals with the gentiles. He refers to these people as the circumcision party. But in telling that anecdote, he is not referring to these new Judaizing offenders. He’s merely recollecting a recent episode in his mission. While some kind of kinship is usually assumed between these Judaizers intruders in this epistle and the James group from Chapter 2, the letter never actually explicitly equates these two groups. In fact they seem to be two distinct groups upon close inspection. In light of the author’s explicit and boastful description of his “meeting” with James and the pillars in Jerusalem, for example, I find it hard to believe that anyone from the James’ party would so openly and defiantly contradict a direct ruling from James if he was truly the man in charge. If James’ authority was as far reaching as is implied in the Pauline corpus, then surely these “troublemakers” had heard of the recent “merger” (the so-called Council of Jerusalem) between the two giants (Paul and James). It turns out that the Judaizers in Galatia, however, either don’t know about the decisions taken during the council or else they simply don’t care. They preach a Torah-first faith to these Galatians, sans any arbitration or intervention or influence from James, apparently (or from Paul for that matter).

It must be stressed that Paul is not speaking to these opponents in the epistle; he’s not trying to convince them to change their ways. He is trying to convince the Galatian Christians (who are decidedly gentile) to not listen to these outsiders who insist that following Jesus demands a parallel adherence to Torah first.

Is this group’s insistence on an imperative observance of Torah sufficient reason to pinpoint them to Jerusalem? Possibly— it at least recognizes them as the Judeans they are. But were these Judaizers specifically Christian Jews from James? I strongly doubt it.

Another possibility exists. Is it not plausible that there could have been more than one “circumcision party” in Palestine at the time? This Galatian letter inadvertently reveals that it was apparently possible to be a Torah observant Jesus follower (IF they were followers of Jesus at all! —again, the texts are unclear—so much depends upon so seemingly tiny a variable) which did not look to James for authority, who eat only kosher food and honor all other Jewish religious observances. The way I see it, it would be just one more possible way of being proto-Christian in this formative gestation period from which the new religion eventually emerged.

Before moving on from the James connection to Galatians, we should again mention the collection of money for the poor in Jerusalem as it is another central concern in this epistle. It is critical, because for Paul this collection brings with it a perception of legitimacy in the eyes of the Jerusalem church. The collection would allow him to alleviate (he hopes) some situation with Jerusalem. He seems to need a more positive relationship with that group for some reason. Why does he need this legitimacy so badly? We’ll explore that below.

So . . .: What do we know?

We know that some outsiders tried to convince some of Paul’s follower’s that circumcision was a necessary component of keeping the faith.

What do we think we know?

We think we know that these outsiders were from James specifically. We think we know that they were somehow affiliated with James’ party, with whom Paul shared an awkward meal in a story he relates. Paul does call them the ‘circumcision party’, but it’s important to note that in Chapter 2 Paul is not identifying the Jacobians with this new threat. He is merely venting his frustrations in dealing with Judaizers by sharing one anecdote from his past experiences.

At any rate, we see that neither the Thessalonians nor the Galatians are the "thorough Jews" that Boyd describes in his objections.

In the next installment, we will look at the Corinthian community that Paul addressed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹ - I tend to agree with W.C. Van Manen, G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, and Bruno Bauer that it is unlikely that any of the pauline epistles are authentic. However, for the purpose of this essay, I presume at least Baur's Hauptebriefe. I include Thessalonians as well just because it is sometimes thought to be the earliest of them
² - Compare with the Dead Sea Scrolls “Rule of the Community” which elaborates on this theme.
³ - This was the conclusion reached by J. Munck in Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, and by many others
⁴ - This important subject is dealt with at length in Validity in Interpretation by Hirsch, E.D. Jr

⁵ - The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

The Boyd Objections — (quixie on mythicism #2) …

2011-02-23T23:05:00.000-08:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Because scorn seems to be the most common response to mythicism, I try to note those rare occasions when this idea non grata is actually engaged with some modicum of seriousness and professional respect by the scholar who seeks to refute it. My first encounter with this kind of level-headed approach to refuting mythicism was a debate between Greg Boyd and Robert Price a couple of years ago. Boyd has since co-authored two books with Paul Eddy — The Jesus Legend and Lord or Legend (the latter is a popular condensation of the longer and more-annotated former), which lay out a case against mythicism, an attempt at a rational and systematic approach to the topic It is clear from the onset that Boyd is a reasonable man who's willing to at least entertain the idea for long enough to offer a well-constructed argument against it based on his understanding of what he perceives to be the unlikeliness of a Jesus "legend" having taken hold like it did. It is an honest attempt to project the implications of the theory onto a working model. I think his conclusions are wrong, of course, but Boyd's stance is a huge improvement from the simple-minded dismissiveness of most of the current vocal opponents of the theory. As an example of what I mean, consider the fact that during a Q&A session at the end of the debate Boyd agreed with Price that none (i.e. "zero") of the so-called "fullfilled O.T. prophecies" held by many evangelicals to foretell Jesus' coming are at all relevant or even refer to Jesus; they are all taken out of context and are useless as evidence. Boyd correctly reasons that such a prophetic reading of these passages would require the forcing of a context onto Hebrew stories that had not been there before these gospel authors began to scour the psalms and suchlike in search of scriptural muscle to reinforce their developing tradition. Boyd does not accept these as "prophecies" of Jesus, and this shows me that he is no unthinking lemming intent on defending an indefensible party line. He's trying to be honest when faced with irrefutability. His arguments, however, are in the end as full of circular reasoning (such as when he ascribes "eyewitness" status to a gospel ), unconscious equivocation (when he misrepresents "ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου" as though it read "ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Ιησοῦ"), special pleading (when he views the will to believe as a valid epistemological tool), all the usual fallacies, as some of his less-well-mannered evangelical peers' are.

But, …

Instead of trying to catalog all of the errors in Boyd's case, I’d like to focus on just one main trajectory in it, which, if shown to be specious, I think renders the rest moot. I single it out also because it is the one and only instance where one of his arguments gave me some significant pause for a moment. When I first heard it, this was probably the strongest argument I had heard against the Christ Myth..

" First century Palestinian Judaism, I submit to you, is the single worst environment for a legend about a crucified god-man to evolve. […] First, the Jews of the first century, especially Palestinian Jews of the first century, since that was the most conservative area in first century Judaism. They deplored the idea that a man could be God. It was revolting to them. These were people that prayed the Shemmai Israel every day of their life (“Hear O Israel; the lord our God is one Lord”). If they believed anything, it was that God is God and that humans are humans and never the twain shall meet. They were all the more resistant to this idea because it was common for the pagans around them to believe in divine men, that a certain human or an emperor human was a god. As my former professor from Yale has shown in his doctoral dissertation—Carl Holloday has shown in his Oxford dissertation [on] the “Divine Man“—the more the […] Jews were encompassed by these divine man legends, the more resistant they became to them. So the question is this: How do you explain the evolution of a legend about a god-man in an environment that is completely hostile to it? Now, the problem is so severe that a number of the more liberal scholars in the twentieth century began to say ‘maybe the Christian faith, the Jesus story, wasn’t birthed on Jewish soil. Maybe it’s actually a pagan legend. They tried to make that case. It’s called the “history of religions” school. It has been, in my estimation, thoroughly discredited. Hardly anyone, even the most liberal scholars, hold to the history of religions school any more because of just overwhelming evidence against it. For one thing, you have to give the book of Acts and the gospels zero credibility—they have to be entire fabrications because they portray the story as originating on Palestinian soil, and very few scholars are willing to go that far."
"And the other thing is that the earliest advocate we have, first spokesperson we have, is Paul. And Paul is thoroughly Jewish. He thinks Jewish. He talks Jewish. His letters are filled with references to the Old Testament (OT). He presupposes a Jewish framework in all of his epistles and the congregation he’s writing to. In fact, a number of scholars have been arguing over the last twenty years especially, the Jesus story, abstracted out of a Jewish context—the OT context—makes absolutely no sense. And so for very good reasons, very few are advocating that now. The Christian faith was born on Jewish soil and that causes this tremendous problem: How do you explain how this, on a naturalistic basis, could evolve?"
“We're talking about monotheistic Jews here. They prayed to Jesus. Paul himself prayed to Jesus, often in the same breath as praying to God, the father. This is outstanding. You can show examples of how in some segments — fringe segments— of Judaism people venerated intermediate beings, but as Larry Hurtado and a number of others have argued, never did it cross the line into worship and invocational prayer. Jesus is seen as the judge of the world in Paul, but only God is the judge of the world. He is seen as being the creator of the world, but only God is the creator of the world. Paul says in Phillipians 2 that he is by his very nature God and equal with God. Scholars recognize this a being a traditional hymn, it's already in place in the early church —we're talking twenty–twenty-five years after Jesus lived [that] this is already in place— That's incredible! What explains that? We need to have an explanation for that. [He's] God over all and blessed forever in Romans, and if you accept Colossians and Titus, he is fullness of God in bodily form, and he's our great God and savior. And so the question is this: We need to have a historical explanation for […] What must Jesus have been like to have impacted Jews against all of their cultural and religious presuppositions that this man could be God?"

Before tackling this general reasoning, one minor point should be noted: Boyd’s claim that the History of Religions School (HRS) has been “thoroughly discredited” is a gross oversimplification. His characterization of the intents and methods of the History of Religions School is but a thumbnail caricature of what was in fact a highly influential movement. To hear him tell it, one would think that the HRS merely sought to discredit the church by making these comparisons to the mystery religions and other Pagan spiritual outlets of the day. In fact, the function of the school was primarily to promote the scientific examination of religion through a rigorous multi-discipline historiographical approach to the materials that utilized archeology, sociology, anthropology, comparative religion, and a host of other academic disciplines. It was invaluable for the advancement of our modern understanding of the development of religions generally, and of the origins of Christianity in particular. If the HRS was the dismal failure that Boyd asserts that it was, then someone forgot to tell Hans Conzelmann, Rudolf Bultmann, James Dunn, Geza Vermès, Mircea Eliades, Dom Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and countess other scholars who have since then sought to make sense of the history of Christianity by means of a systematic cross-discipline approach to their research. The legacy of the school is reflected in much of the work done on the Historical Jesus and Christian origins in the twentieth century and on into the twenti-first century. I’m afraid that Boyd is selling it way too short here.

Having said that, I think that Boyd does bring up an interesting undeniable fact in his objections. Judeans of the time would have invariably rejected the notion of such a failed god-man. Boyd contends that, had they not been compelled to a new faith by the portentous miracles described in the texts, the Palestinian Jews (and those dispersed throughout the provinces) would surely have rejected the crucified god-man doctrines espoused in the Pauline epistles outright as anathema to their culture. The very ‘fact’ that they ‘accepted them’ (so Boyd) is evidence that the historical and supernatural events described in the texts are ‘probably’ true. He further infers from this view that these first ‘Jewish’ believers were already promulgating these highly advanced christologies and soteriologies as early as the fifth decade of the first century. Alluring at first sight, all this revolves around a single common theme, namely the Jewish background of the story. For Boyd it is a given that the first Christians (in Jerusalem, presumably) were first and foremost Jews who found in Jesus their promised Messiah and elevated him to a status of mediator god-man. The Jews of Palestine, so says Boyd (and I would not disagree), would never have accepted or subscribed to a dying un-messianic Messiah. This is a major problem for the Christ-mythers as he sees it. But then, did Jews really accept this god-man in this way? I think the texts themselves show that they did not.

I had been reading John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes at the time that I first heard this line of argument, wrestling with what seemed to me to be Spong's forced attempt to find a liturgical continuity between Judaism and christology, and so Boyd's questions were falling on pre-sensitized ears in a way. Until that moment, I had never stopped to consider why we so easily assume that James and Cephas and all their followers were Christians in the same sense that Paul was. On what grounds can one ascribe a Pauline kerygma to a Jerusalem church? We don’t have any reliable texts that can inform us at all on the fate of the reputed disciples. The idea that they were more or less in agreement with Paul theologically could be no more than a presupposition, an unexamined given. Boyd is certainly not alone in holding to this idea. It‘s almost universal— even among liberals, even among seculars who don't care about religion. Just as we saw in part #1, here we have another example of a false consensus which is really just passive adherence to an unexplored notion. It presumes a 'given' continuity between …

… an actual, historical Jewish peasant sage (Jesus of Nazareth) whose seemingly radical teachings inspired an …
… esoteric messianic Jewish cult in Jerusalem with James and/or Cephas at its helm(s) which …

… Paul at first fiercely opposed and persecuted, but eventually converted to, championed, and insisted should include gentiles. Subject to the ‘original’ Jerusalem cult, he became the earliest known expositor and witness of this new ‘fulfilled’ Judaism, writing a series of pastoral letters to churches throughout the Diaspora, some of which he had founded himself.

This supposed continuity from normative Judaism to the Christian faith expressed in the epistles is what vouchsafes the historicity of Jesus for Boyd. His arguments depend on it. In that view Christianity is essentially a revamped form of Judaism. The earliest followers were thorough Jews who only reluctantly, eventually, allowed gentiles into their fellowship (with Paul of Tarsus as their spokesman). Later on, in the process of developing into something distinct from its “mother” religion, Christianity progressively took on a more and more Pagan flavor, until it was basically unrecognizable as any kind of Judaism anymore. This has been the traditional way to see the origing of Christianity. Our image of Paul is influenced by what we've already read in the Acts of the Apostles (the pauline corpus immediately follows Acts in the canon) whose portrayal of the Jerusalem community of devotees is not much more than an idyllic fanfare before the true hero of the story, Paul, enters the stage. But who were these people, really? What did they believe? What was the connection between Jerusalem's authority and Paul's submission to it? What was their parallel devotion to Jesus about? Simply assuming them to be equivalent based on the Acts' cursory treatment of this seminal period would be too uncritical and too simplistic a way out of the puzzle. The truth is that we just don’t know much about the so-called Jerusalem church.

I therefore challenge that presumed axiomatic continuity and find that appeals that assume a thoroughly Jewish-Christian matrix from which the Pauline variety essentially took its cue are circular, assuming that which they aim to demonstrate. I propose that if it can be shown that these presuppositions are invalidated by no more evidence than the texts themselves, then these Boyd objections, which necessarily project an advanced christology onto the Jerusalem proto-church, are rendered weightless. It is my contention that, since there are no extant contemporary records which might tell us what these original Jewish-James-Christians were all about (either liturgically or rhetorically) other than Paul's condescending (while simultaneously submissive) letters, then we have no basis for attributing any kind of christology to them, particularly in light of the existence of later traditions which can arguably be traced to this group which explicitly oppose Paul’s idiosyncratic thinking. The assumption that the “Jewish” Christianity of the Jerusalem group was akin to that which was emerging in the Diaspora in Jesus’ name (egged on by the Paulinists) although almost universally held, is invalid nonetheless.

For Boyd's objections to have any relevance, he must first demonstrate:

the ‘thorough Jewishness’ of the Pauline communities … and …
a Jacobean christology.

Lacking this, the objections are meaningless. They are incomplete, half-thought-out apologetic appeals. One must first demonstrate a continuity before one can appeal to it.

The problem is that there seems to be a hazy gap between what we know and what we think we know. We know that there were some forms of Jesus-adoration which probably preceded Paul’s missionary activity. We know that the Pauline epistles refer to one such group, that of Yacob in Jerusalem, as somehow authoritative, and that Paul desperately sought recognition and legitimatization from it. We think we know that they were ‘thoroughly Jewish’, but we just cannot escape the fact that the only textual corroboration whatsoever that we have from this proto-sect is one side of a heated (if muffled) multi-sided conversation.

I would like to stress before proceeding that it is NOT the Judean origin of the Jesus story that I doubt here. What I question is the implicit continuity that is too easily presumed between the seminal Judean messianic cult of Jerusalem and the Christianity which would later claim it as its direct ancestor. I explicitly say this in case there might be those who grasp onto some sensationalist mischaracterization of what I am actually saying here. I have no doubt that the Jesus legend started in Judea. The NT is replete with symbolism borrowed from the pages of the ancient Jewish scriptures. But it is one thing to examine the Judaic content of the texts and another to ask who the audience of this borrowed symbology within was.

These are two separate questions. In the next installment, I will try to look at the audience first..

open question . . .

2011-02-17T23:29:00.000-08:00

After having a brief discussion with someone earlier, I would like to ask a question to anyone who might be inclined to answer it:

What is a Christian?

The person I was talking to is of the opinion that one must believe in the essential divinity and pre-existence of Jesus in order to rightly be called a Christian.

This was kinda puzzling to me, because I think that, using this criteria, the author of the Gospel of Mark would be disqualified, as would many of the earliest Christians.

I would greatly appreciate any answers that may come.

Thanks in advance.
Peace

Ó

.

quote of the day . . .

2011-02-14T23:04:00.000-08:00

All the hair on the horse's tail has disappeared, but he must not be admitted to be tailless; the missing essence is not in the kitchen, the drawing room, or the attic, yet somewhere in the house it must be; and thus theology becomes an illogical suspense between the conclusion and the premises; the literalist relents, but the mystical spiritualist is firm, and the true "Word" in scripture remains unimpeached by literary and historical refutation. The husk is gone, but the invisible kernel maintains the position; although in the many pious platitudes passing current in the subject no real meaning be discernible except the broad inference of natural morality and providential superintendence, the general teleological purpose which we believe to be ever tending to good in its majestic passage through the ages, although ourselves far too limited in faculty to identify its action in special cases, or to make it directly responsible for particular occurrences or books.

[...] Strauss' great merit consists in the negative work contributed by him towards the reconstruction of theology; and it was the fitness of the "Leben Jesu" to accomplish the intellectual iconoclasm so often needed in the progress of science which provoked so much odium; since nothing irritates so much as to be convicted of ignorance as to matters confidently believed to be already sufficiently and fully known.

R.W. Mackay,

The Tübingen School and its Antecedents,

1863, pp. 172, 184–185

Quixie on Mythicism #1 - Idea Non Grata

2011-02-13T19:13:00.000-08:00

Pt1— Pt2 — Pt3a — Pt3b — Pt3c — Pt4 — Pt5 — Pt6 — Pt7 — Pt8 — Pt9 — Pt10 — Pt11 —Pt12

Mythicism, the notion that the Jesus legend might be better explained as a composite hero myth than as a biographical phenomenon— that it might be a fabric more likely woven together from syncretic strands of Mediterranean and Near-Eastern esoterica rather than from historical memory— is an idea that has resurfaced in the cultural landscape following the publication of the works of a handful of scattered writers like Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, G. A. Wells, Hermann Detering, and a few others. It is not a new notion; all of these scholars would acknowledge their debt to those now-forgotten scholars who sought to free historical New Testament scholarship from the vise grip of ecclesiastical dogmatism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using their (then) newly acquired historico-critical muscles. Once the Enlightenment had safely established the scientific paradigm as the new, preferred standard of learning and investigation to aspire to (logic replacing faith as the ultimate arbiter of truth), it was only a matter of time before the new methodologies would start to be applied to Holy Writ itself. At the time, scripture had been that which had vouchsafed the authenticity of the traditions of the ubiquitous Christian religion for eighteen hundred years. What secrets might a new scientific examination of these ancient texts reveal?

This question prompted the birth of the “higher criticism” (a.k.a. ‘historico-critical method’). In the post-enlightenment period, as inquisitive minds (Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Hermann Weisse, David Friedrich Strauss, etc.) began to engage these texts from a deductive, historiographical perspective, one requiring a temporary “willful suspension of belief” in the name of methodological honesty and neutrality, their resulting reconstructions were often very offensive to scholars and to the clergy of the time, who were quick to denounce them. People tend to get a bit grouchy when their sacred cows are taken out of their glass cases and examined too closely, so despite the diligent and exhaustive work of Strauss and Schleiermacher and those who followed their lead, it could only meet with resistance from both the church and the academy … at first. The stodgy piety and decorum of that bygone era served to ensure that the conclusions reached by the historiographic probings of these men into the origins of the Bible and of the Christian religion would be categorically shunned and reviled by their conservative peers, who were still mired in their devotional, superficial approach to the study of the Bible’s details. Among the shocking new revelations of these higher-critical scholars were:

The fact that the Pentateuch could not have been the work of a single, historical Moses. At least four individual scribes, or "schools" (for lack of a better term), spanning several centuries, were responsible for its compilation.
Similarly, the book of Isaiah, was demonstrably a conglomerate of at least three different schools.
Mark, contradicting church tradition, was likely the earliest of the gospels in the New Testament to be written.
At least several of the epistles attributed to Paul were very probably the late pseudonymous products of an emerging ecclesiastical structure.

These proverbial elephants in the middle of the room (and some others) were simply too big and too spooky for those who had authority over the parlors of the time to look at. They continued to denounce and mock those who strayed from the long-established axioms concerning the provenance and authorship of the texts, but one can only ignore an elephant for so long. It took a few generations for the usefulness of this new hermeneutic to slowly take hold, but it inevitably did take hold, and as time passed these scholars' ideas became progressively more and more accepted as valid and even as the normative interpretation of the evidence. After a great deal of exposition, dialog, and debate of the details involved, academic consensuses were eventually arrived at concerning many things which had previously believed to be otherwise. Indeed, the ideas of Strauss and later Bultmann would become the fundamental presuppositions that scholars now use as their starting place in their own investigation and analysis of these texts, even to this day. To be sure, consensus is not always arrived at, but in each of the cases I listed above, at least, after various kinds of higher criticism (redaction-criticism, textual-criticism, form-criticism, and source-criticism, among others) were applied to the pertinent texts, the consensus on these matters, though not universal (it never is), is fairly overwhelming.

With time, the conclusions of some scholars became more and more radical. F.C. Baur would found a school of thought in Tübingen that embodied this historiographic hermeneutic. If the religionist academic hierarchy found it difficult to accept Schleiermacher's opinion that Paul might have written neither of the Timothies, it was absolutely horrified when Baur suggested that out of the thirteen epistles traditionally ascribed to him, only four (both Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans) could be seen as possibly the authentic work of a historical Paul. The others could be shown to reflect a second-century synthesis of this Pauline core of four with a hazy Palestinian tradition which we know almost nothing about (its texts did not survive but we can at times see some vestigial traces of this sect in the texts that did survive).

F.C. Baur

If that wasn't enough, along came the Dutch Radical school. This group saw no reason to authenticate any of the Pauline works and discredited the lot of them. Some thought he went too far, and he had indeed gone further than anyone had before him, but when Bruno Bauer argued for the spurious nature of all the epistles, he was using pretty much the very same lines of reasoning that Baur had used to discredit Philippians, Ephesians, et. al. The Dutch school would even eventually be as audacious as to bring into question the very historicity of Jesus and of the disciples. As radical as the idea may be, if it turns out that the Pauline corpus is entirely spurious, then we in fact posses no primary sources to inform historiographic speculations on any of it. This prospect is a disturbing one for those who would base their theoretical constructs on the basic reliability and historical trustworthiness of the New Testament narratives. Bauer was crossing a kind of asymptotic line that no one had ever dared to cross before, not even Baur, who, when he came to that cliff edge, was compelled to stop by his religious sensibilities. Bauer, on the other hand, dove in with aplomb.

This was shocking. There is a big difference between on the one hand boldly pointing out that the chronology of the gospels as traditionally taught was wrong, that the gospel we know as Mark's very probably came first, and on the other suggesting that we have no primary sources whatsoever or that Jesus very probably is primarily a mythic construct. One could accept the former without it affecting one's religious commitment in the least. But to accept or to even consider the latter ideas would require, at the very least, a complete re-examination of the interrelationship between the Christian scriptures and the Christian faith they purport to historically support. In fact, the resistance encountered by the ideas of the scholars of the Tübingen and of the Dutch Radical schools was directly proportional to how mythologizing they were. Marcan priority, while an audacious idea at first, was not threatening to the faith itself, and so could reluctantly be brought up for discussion and debated without the awkwardness that the more radical ideas of Bauer produced, for example, while the idea that Jesus didn't "exist" (at least not in the way we have been taught to think he did) was ignored out of hand as a ludicrous proposition, not worthy of serious consideration. Anything that suggested the basic fictive and tendentious and syncretic aspects of the narratives got the silent treatment. The matter was never engaged, never discussed in any real depth, never debated in history departments. Simply cast aside as ludicrous from the outset, no thorough critical academic evaluation of the ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools seems to have been conducted. Is it any surprise, then, that so few 'refutations' were written?

Albert Schweitzer, who was personally acquainted with a few of the radicals, seems to be one of the only contemporaries who took these scholars seriously. He mentioned many of them in his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and even devoted whole chapters to Strauss and to Baur. Curiously, while he openly disagreed with the Tubingen school and with the Dutch Radicals, he nevertheless praised their rigorous and meticulous methodologies and obviously thought very highly of them. He respected them and considered them scholars par-excellence. Unfortunately, the focus and scope of Schweitzer’s volume did not allow for a full engagement with the arguments of these radicals concerning the Pauline corpus and the historicity of Jesus. Only a cursory summary is sketched, and in the end, he considered their conclusions to be reactionary and ideologically based, and he went on to put them in what he thought were their proper respective places in the history of historical Jesus studies. At least he acknowledged them, though, which is more than any of his contemporaries had done, and which also evinces his own particular brand of iconoclasm.

The few semi-scholarly works devoted to the "refutation" of mythicism that were penned in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth were effectively polemical over-simplifications misrepresenting the arguments in a way intended to make then seem ridiculous, or else they were exercises in circularity, or were both simultaneously. (I may address some of their specific errors as they arise in future posts in this series —this is the first post, in which I focus on mythicism as idea non grata; I focus on the gag reflex that is almost invariably the scholar's first encounter the Christ Myth. Other posts will follow as time allows. Suffice it for now to say that very little unimpassioned or non-polemic scholarly discussion has been advanced to refute the Christ myth theory.)

This is doubly frustrating. On the one hand, I’m sure that many people (I, for instance) would love to read any collection of such point-by-point refutations. On the other hand (here I finally arrive at my main point), by some unfortunate lapse in logic, the long silence the hypothesis engendered has been now co-opted by apologists, who conveniently misread it as if it were evidence of some kind of tacit agreement within the academy that the hypothesis has been discredited. The silence of a stumped room of startled exegetes has over the decades become misinterpreted as the silent ruling of some imaginary consensus. To insist that this silence is a vindication of the standard position by default, however, as some do, is an invalid and premature projection. Is there such thing as an expiration date on an ignored proposition which would render it invalid after a time? Is there a statute of limitations on the discussion of theories? An eternal green room?

That a majority of New Testament (or any other kind) of scholars have never considered that the dearth of primary sources makes the biographical legend dubious at best—that they accept the historicity of Jesus a priori — is unquestionably true. But to call this unexplored assumption a "consensus " is a glaring equivocation, a clear example of a semantic fallacy (also a variant of the etymological fallacy), where the precise meaning or implication of a word or phrase is disregarded (consciously or not) in favor of its more casual, every-day usage. Another example of this fallacy is the common use of the word "myth" to express the idea of a falsity. In an academic sense, the word "myth" denotes a complex of interrelated symbols and stories which informs the self-identity and cultural inheritance of a given people. In modern lay parlance, the word simply means "fairy-tale," or worse, "lie." Similarly, the word "consensus" in an academic sense denotes a position commonly held by an authoritative body, a viewpoint arrived at and agreed upon after the examination of the pertinent facts has been undertaken.

Are most New Testament scholars Christian?

Yes, by far. I think most do self-identify as such.

Do most of them believe that Jesus was born miraculously of a virgin?

Most of them? … Hmm … Possibly.

Do they believe that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead on that first Easter morning?

Yes, almost universally.

But are these beliefs "consensus views" just because most scholars defend them? No. They are the creedally accepted foundational axioms of a religious community, for which there is no way to determine historicity (even if these miracles really did happen!). These things have not been (cannot be, not with the texts we have to work with, at any rate) empirically demonstrated; they are simply givens. It is very important to note this distinction. A consensus is not just a majority view. Consensus implies more than passive acceptance of a given, it implies reasoned agreement after the rigorous examination of evidence. To make this a bit more clear, consider that something like 90–97% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the only shooter involved in the murder of JFK in 1963. The majority is overwhelming (frustratingly so to those who have studied the matter soberly and honestly). The consensus, that reached, for example, by the Warren Commission after careful systematic investigation of testimony and evidence, is that Oswald, acting on his own that day, shot three bullets at the presidential motorcade, two of which hit their intended victim. The distinction between these two widely divergent positions should be noted.

Yet there are those who still regrettably appeal to this kind of paper-doll “consensus.” It is often the frontline defense in a rejection of mythicism, sometimes the only one. I’m afraid that this kind of methodological leap is symptomatic of the troubling state of affairs in the field today, where arguing from an authority— in this case no more than a perceived authority—an embarrassing blunder in any scientific discipline, is given a free pass in biblical studies. Interestingly, some academics now even specialize in this sort of superficial head counting and statistical analysis in their professional work, meticulously graphing the trends in the literary output of New Testament scholars, categorizing their works individually and collectively by how they rate on a linear scale, with strict orthodoxy at one extreme and skepticism on the other. In this way they try to show that the orthodox position on any given matter is not only plausible, but normative, and therefore preferable by default.

Relying on a consensus is bad enough, to be sure, but when the consensus is just an imaginary one to begin with … well … that’s erring twice over, a puzzling phenomenon to encounter in a field that purports to be an academic enterprise. This is the sort of scholarly behavior that Hector Avalos explores in his The End of Biblical Studies, a scathing critique of the currents underlying modern New Testament scholarship (Philip Davies is another vocal critic of such practices). Then, to add insult to injury, backed by their paper-doll consensus, many "historicists" (for lack of a coined term) adopt a haughty, mocking, downright insutling attitude toward the scholars who have exhumed these long-ignored ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools, dusting them off for public perusal once more. Whenever I encounter invective language in any academic argument, a little alarm goes off in the back of my head, something like a big yellow sign on a swervy road warning me: 'CAUTION! - PASSION AHEAD.' If cogent arguments were being offered up, instead of the over-simplifications that are, I could understand frustration turning into insult. Where there should be coherent arguments against the ideas presented, I see field of such flags, and I will maintain that there would be no need for this rancor if the theory was not seen as a personal affront somehow.

It's not just faith that is jeopardized by the Christ Myth. One could tangentially argue that this out-of-hand dismissal of the hypothesis in the academic community could also be a matter of scholars subconsciously huddling together against a gathering storm, so to protect the means of their livelihood (job security can be a powerful motivating factor). And who could blame these armies of professional exegetes, really, for bracing themselves against such an imaginable end to their tenures? Moreover (and perhaps more poignantly), who really wants to believe that all the work one has devoted so much time and passion to turns out to be a house of cards in the end?

Despite vehement opposition and prejudice, in this less-than-welcoming climate, the new mythicists have appeared on the scene, undaunted, representing the scholars of old, giving the lie to this paper doll ‘consensus,’ and reminding us that the riddles and inconsistencies in the texts, the same ones that once led the old Tübingen and Dutch radicals to advance their appalling ideas, are still glaringly there, and are still as unexplored and as glossed over as ever.

To be fair, though, in closing, let me now admit that more monographs are sorely needed (on both sides of this question). Until mythicism can be expressed more cogently than it has been until now, until detractors stop with the silent treatment, the mockery, and resident scorn, this issue will continue to be the posturing dance of egos that it currently is. Let me also now admit that I fully agree that some of the frustration and rancor felt toward a certain variety of infantile cyber-clandestine uninformed trolling on the internet is indeed very much deserved, and I truly empathize with those sentiments. I myself recently had an awkward encounter with one of these cyber-souls. Unfortunately, this is the internet, where everybody and their proverbial mother can wax authoritative without having read any substantive, truly scholarly works on this (or any other) subject. But let me stress that it would be a great mistake to not discern the wheat from the chaff in this case It would be a great mistake to throw the whole mess into the flames. To categorically consider anyone who might think that mythicism is a plausible scenario to be reprehensible, or laughable, or crazy, or anti-scholarly, or what-have-you, solely on their sober acceptance or defense of that historical possibility would be to do a great disservice and an insult to many truly honest, dutiful, able, conversant, diligent, sophisticated, nuanced, credentialed, insightful, and honorable scholars of the past and of the present, who at the very least deserve the respect of their peers.

… … … … … … … … … … …

(*** I consider the "consensus" argument to be made essentially of nothing more that straw and bravado. In future posts in this series, I hope to engage some of the more substantive arguments against mythicist thought, particularly some points raised by Greg Boyd and by John Dominic Crossan, who i think have fairly coherent objections that rise above the scornful and/or simplistic mischaracterizations and other sundry reactionary barbs that are usually thrown at mythicism, This is not a series in which I will lay out the mythicist case myself, my intention is instead to address specific objections to it. Anyone interested in acquainting themselves with the main trajectories in mythicist thought should read the work of Earl Doherty and of Herman Detering, who are probably the most exhaustive modern exponents of the Ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools. Their respective bibliographies should be used as a springboard for further research.
Finally, online, a four-part podcast series by Zachary Moore lays out the case fairly well.
Happy reading/listening!) :)

before i forget …

2011-02-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

I did my first church gig this past Sunday. Shea Marshall is the director at a liberal congregation in Scottsdale and he called me to be part of an acoustic trio with him on piano and Ray Thiry on upright. One song was requested (Holy Now). One was thought about and chosen by me (Go). And the rest was decided during the rehearsal that immediately preceded the session (English Tea) or improvised during the service itself. I don't think I would be able to endure a traditional church gig, so I appreciate the opportunity to do it from time to time in this free manner in a less than oppressive religious ambiance. These are truly gentle people.

How non-traditional was it?

Well, while adjusting the settings on my amplifier (a Trace Elliot Cube), I played the theme to a Thelonious Monk tune (In Walked Bud), whereupon Shea suggested we play that during the communion procession.
We did.
This painting poetically and tangentially would remind me of the jazz inside event, except there were no thorns in sight, nothing jagged at all. (Light by Sigfried Reinhardt - 1959)
I had a great time and look forward to the next time I get to sing there. People seemed to dig it.

Ó

.

quantum angels, you say? …

2011-02-08T15:37:00.000-08:00

I'm a fan of Changing Hands Bookstore. Not only is the coolest source of new/used books near me, they host all kinds of author lectures, readings, and book signings. Jimmy Carter, Madeline Albright, Robert Bly, Sam Harris: I've had the pleasure of being in the presence of a wide range of celebrities because of this place, and I look at their scheduled events from time to time when looking for something to do in the valley. I looked today and there's a posting on their schedule for a lecture/signing by one Eva-Maria Mora (cool name) at the end of this month. She wrote a book titled Quantum Angel Healing and is on tour promoting it, I guess.

By sheer coincidence, I had just listened to an NPR report on James Randi's latest campaign to debunk homeopathic medicine. The practice of homeopathy could be dismissed as laughable and bening were it not for the fact that it is a multi-million dollar industry now. It is an industry with almost no overhead, providing and/or producing nothing (sometimes quite literally) and charging out the proverbial ying-yang for the privilege. Homeopathy is theft, or worse.

Nuff said.

Anyway, I'm contemplating attending this signing, but I fear that I might not be able to refrain from reacting. I might just spontaneouslt utter an audible paroxysmal "Bullshit!" or worse. I hope to be strong enough to hold it in until the Q & A session.
The question rises in me. Would such a thing be too rude? "What's wrong with selling hope?" one might retort. I got nothing against hope. But selling it? That's just wrong, in my opinion, especially when it's verifiably false hope. It is a predatory enterprise at heart. Desperate, ailing, real people, who need real medical help, are the targeted prey of these latter-day snake oil merchants. Is it rude to call them on their pseudo-scientific drivel? I mean … I won't be abusive; that I can promise.

Anyway. If I go, I will write about the experience. Wish me luck and strength.

Ó
.

the brainstorming simian hour . . .

2011-01-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

set for an imaginary scene #1 by Brother Jude

Ó
.

serendipity exercise . . .

2011-01-16T10:52:00.000-08:00

.

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first...... album.
3 - Go to flickr.com and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together. 5 - Post it with this text in the "caption" and TAG the friends you want to join in.

Here's my result:

It's either some airy visceral chanting or else some hardcore punk.

Ó

.

pésame …

2010-12-31T17:21:00.000-08:00

15 Jan 1941 – 17 Dec 2010

I just now heard about the passing of Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart)
Goodnight you beautiful freak.

Ó

.

The Atheism Tapes: Denys Turner

2010-12-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

.

Watch more free documentaries

The Atheism Tapes: From the other side - theologian Denys Turner

The Atheism Tapes: Daniel Dennet - Watch the Documentary Film for Free | Watch Free Documentaries Online | SnagFilms

2010-12-13T20:47:00.000-08:00

.

Watch more free documentaries

The Atheism Tapes: Daniel Dennet - Watch the Documentary Film for Free | Watch Free Documentaries Online | SnagFilms

the rise and fall (a remix) . . .

2010-11-23T13:20:00.000-08:00

2010 - mixed media on woven newsprint - 12"X16"

Ó
.

English Tea

2010-11-09T18:33:00.001-08:00

English Tea by tainoleon

Leon, Ted, Rob and Joe again

Live at CRAS Tempe 9 November 2010

LaBounty clinic

Jasmin

2010-11-07T13:28:00.001-08:00

Jasmin by tainoleon

Leon, Theo Belladin, Joe Morris, and Rob Wagener

Baró

2010-11-07T13:21:00.001-08:00

Baró by tainoleon

Leon, Theo Belledin, Joe Morris and Rob Wagener

Ó

.

Sam Harris at Changing Hands . . .

2010-11-07T01:26:00.000-07:00

I attended an appearance by Sam Harris at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe last night. He is in town to partake in a panel discussion at Gammage Auditorium (which took place today) and to promote his new book, titled The Moral Landscape. The audience was fairly variegated with an average age of about thirty-five (my estimation). At the start of this well-attended talk (about 250 people sat — another fifty or so stood) he admitted that it was his first ever bookstore speaking event. Despite this, however, he seemed very relaxed and quite comfortable throughout the lecture.

He wrote the book as a kind of response to those who would claim that a morality devoid of a religious or theological source quickly dissolves into an unintelligible subjectivism, a view popular with some religious apologists and best encapsulated by Ivan Karamazov's (a Dostoevsky character) contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted.

Harris maintains that a sense of morality can, and should, instead be simply based on a commitment to the promotion of human well-being and on a corresponding commitment to the elimination of human suffering. He notes that certain (not all) religious traditions needlessly erect obstacles to this goal. To illustrate this, he related an anecdote in which he was approached by a woman after one of his recent lectures who had taken offense at his censuring of the Taliban for their insistence— on pains of severe punishment or even death— that women be completely covered from head to toe while in public and subservient in all matters to the rule of the men in their lives at all times. The offended woman thought Harris was being a bigot in reproaching this practice. Harris suggested to her that the subjugation of half of the population of a nation into a constant state of terror was counter-productive to human well-being at its core and was therefore indeed empirically reproachable. The woman responded with, 'Who are you to judge a religious tradition like that?' Harris tried another tack, one that because more extreme would reveal the inhumanness of such doctrines. 'OK, suppose that it was required by a culture that every third child must have its eyes plucked out, would this practice seem like a reasonable one?', he asked. 'It would depend on why they were doing it,' the woman countered. Astonished, Harris continued, 'Well, maybe they have some sacred book that has a verse that states that every third child shall be in darkness or something like that.' The woman then said that in that case the practice would be justified.

Alarming as this way of thinking is, it became downright horrific when Harris revealed that this woman was no religious simpleton, but instead was a highly intelligent and distinguished scientist in her own right, who is now one of thirteen people serving on a commission that regularly advises the current president on religious matters. (He regrettably did not give her name, however.)

It is profoundly ironic that one would base her sense of morality on strict submission to the dictates of a divine being that could vicariously endorse such inarguably immoral acts. To simply claim that the divine being's ways are too mysterious for humans to comprehend is but an escape-hatch kind of reasoning which, instead of addressing the suffering and evil involved, simply sweeps it under the rug like some unsolvable dilemma.

Harris argues that we know how to distinguish that which is good from that which is bad, empirically, without need of theological concerns, and that we should be able to establish rules of conduct that correspond with this knowledge.

I am only scratching the surface of the topic here. I have already read his two previous books and find him to be a sober, eloquent, and parsimonious writer and thinker, so I plan on reading and absorbing this new book soon.

Google To Put Dead Sea Scrolls Online

2010-10-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

Google To Put Dead Sea Scrolls Online

This should finally allay the suspicions of those who smell a conspiracy which seeks to suppress their release/publication.

Ó

How not to worship (quote of the day) . . .

2010-10-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

You have felt, doubtless, at least those of you who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, that every time when I in this letter have used an American expression, or aught like one, there came upon you a sense of sudden wrong — the darting through you of acute cold. I mean you to feel that: for it is the essential function of America to make us all feel that. It is the new skill they have found there; — this skill of degradation; others they have, which other nations had before them, from whom they have learned all they know, and among whom they must travel, still, to see any human work worth seeing. But this is their specialty, this their one gift to their race, — to show men how not to worship, — how never to be ashamed in the presence of anything.

John Ruskin
Fors Clavigera, vol I, 1871, letter 12

I love this and I think it extends beyond the confines of religious matters. Though it did start here, it's a characteristic so admirable that it later spread to the rest of the world— the unwillingness to accept any authority but that of one's own conscience.

Ó
.

current . . .

2010-10-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

.
reading:

Herod the Great — by William J. Gross
They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madres (1890-1935) — by Douglas V. Meed
Cristo versus Arizona — by Camilo José Cela
The Unauthorized Version — by Robin Lane Fox

listening:

Candi Staton — Candi
Dr John & the Lower 911 — Tribal
Raymond Scott — Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights
Taksim Trio — Taksim Trio
Lisa Germano — Lullaby for Liquid Pig
Charles Mingus — The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
John Ellis — Map of Limbo

Ó
.

advice from a "mythicist" troll . . . .

2010-10-15T05:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, on another blog, I transcribed Greg Boyd's opening statements from a debate he had with Robert Price, so that I could reference it and engage it at a later time in my own study.
Yesterday someone commented on that post. I thought I would share this here as it relates to mythicism..
The comment, in its entirety:

Anonymous said...

You still have much studying to do on mythicism:

The Mythicist Position - video
What is a Mythicist?

For further explanation see,

The Evemerist vs. Mythicist Position
Astrotheology of the Ancients
The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ
Jesus as the Sun throughout History
The Gospels: A 2nd Century Composition
Zeitgeist Part 1 & the Supportive Evidence

People like this help me to understand why some get so annoyed at the mere mention of mythicism. There are some really delusional people out there on the internet who make the rest of us skeptics look bad. I mean . . . c'mon . . . really??

Zeitgeist???
Anyway, below is my response to this strange individual:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I'm a bit perplexed on several fronts here . . .

Here is someone who knows practically nothing about me, telling me that I have much studying to do on mythicism. While I agree with the gist of this statement at face value (I mean . . . who doesn't have a lot of studying to do, whether about mythicism or about any number of things, right?), I find myself taking a modicum of umbrage at this particular "anonymous" (of course) individual. It's kinda like being told by an Esteban fan that I still have a lot to learn about playing guitar. While true at its surface, it's insulting.

Clicking on the links that he or she provides here soon (and quite ironically) reveals his/her own very narrow scope of understanding of the subject matter that he/she in turn sees me as being deficient in. It seems that this person is fixated on the work of Acharya S, which I guess is no sin in itself. Hell, I've even taken some time in the past to cursorily review some of her work in my study of this subject. But this anonymous commenter seems to think that her writings are the pinnacle of mythicist thought, and has therefore stopped there, seemingly quite content that the kind of astrotheology that S espouses holds the key to this complex topic.

I have nothing against Ms. Murdock herself. In fact, I think that she is more or less correct in highlighting the role that the sun and moon (etc) archetypes have had in the long progressive history of world religions in general. She has some genuinely insightful things to say about the many parallels that clearly exist between the symbolisms used by the countless religious traditions of the world. Her work is not entirely unlike that done by Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell in the sense that such parallels can indeed be shown to exist. They form a kind of matrix in which all religious trajectories have taken root and grown out of over millenia. To deny this would be silly, but, on the other hand, to stop there, that is, to not see that the skeletal understructure of any given individual religion needs fleshing out beyond this basic thumbnail sketch comparison, as this "anonymous" person does, seems rather myopic to me.

Specifically, the origin of Christianity (the focus of my mythicist musings) simply cannot be explained away by such simple generalities. One can correctly say that human beings are "vertebrates" and still show no understanding of their detailed physiology, much less of what makes them tick.

Some advice for "Anonymous":

1- Get a name.
2- Read some other authors (I could suggest some, if you like).
3- Perhaps an introductory book on critical thinking might be useful to you as well.
4- Definitely drop the smug authoritative posture. It makes you look like an idiot.

Ó

The Sound of Science

2010-10-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

atheists/agnostics win one . . .

2010-09-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

A new Pew research poll has found that of 3412 American people interviewed, atheists and agnostics outperformed Jews, Mormons, Protestants AND Catholics in general religious knowledge . . .
read more . . .

2010-09-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

Six arrows from 15 yards.

Ó

.

Come On Up to the House . . .

2010-09-24T00:52:00.001-07:00

ComeOnUp2 by tainoleon

the one take ponies on this session were:

Joe Morris

Rob Wagener

Mike Ozuna

and i & i & i

recorded live with some BG vox improv dubbed immediately after

the effect of death on culture . . .

2010-09-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

This is a lyrical well-written documentary that explores the work of Ernest Becker and its sociological implications.

hobby-horse oblivion . . . . (part 3)

2010-09-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to the hobbyhorse topic that I raised last month (see part 1 and part 2). While I only alluded to it before, I started the topic because I am fascinated by recent exchanges between certain "mythicists" and "historicists" on the bloggosphere. To clarify, a mythicist is someone who doubts the historicity of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, while a historicist is someone who defends it.

One of the things that fascinates me most about the evolving new mythicism is how reluctant some historicist scholars are to give any credit to those whose positions they disagree with, no matter how well-researched or cogent the arguments. Even people who otherwise seem to be level-headed and rational can become reactionary, even downright hostile, when one of their long-cherished ideas regarding the historical Jesus is challenged. This hostility is certainly not new. In fact it is as old as higher criticism itself. Mythicism is, I think, just a natural consequence of applying the continually evolving methods of this higher criticism to the study of the Christian scriptures. It should surprise no one that Pandora’s box, once opened, cannot be re-stuffed.

The hypothesis has been gaining in popularity in recent years thanks to the work of a handful of scattered writers like Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, G.A. Wells, Hermann Detering and a few other scholars, all of whom stand on the brave shoulders of those now-forgotten giants (Schleiermacher, Baur, Strauss, Bauer, et al) who in previous centuries sought to free New Testament scholarship from the vise grip of dogmatic credulity using their (then) newly acquired historico-critical muscles. Despite all of their diligent work, the stodgy academic climate, coupled with the unquestioning piety and decorum of that bygone era, ensured that the shocking conclusions reached by these men—proverbial elephants in the middle of the room—were to be categorically ignored by their orthodox peers. The elephants were simply too big and too spooky for those who had any authority in the parlors of the time, so the matter was never really taken up, never discussed in any meaningful depth, never debated in the universities, never truly engaged. It was simply cast aside from the outset as folly. It is no surprise then that no thorough refutation of their claims was written, as no thorough evaluation seems to have been conducted which would validate one anyway. Academic ennui and hubris saw to it.

This is doubly frustrating. On the one hand, I’m sure that many people (I, for one) would love to read a collection of such point-by-point refutations. On the other hand, by some unfortunate lapse in logic, the long silence the hypothesis engendered has been co-opted by apologists, misread as if it were evidence of some kind of tacit agreement within the academy that the hypothesis has been discredited. It hasn’t. The silence of a stumped room of startled exegetes has over the years simply become misinterpreted as though it were the silent ruling of some imaginary consensus. To assume that this silence is a vindication of the orthodox position, as so many apologists are prone to do, is an invalid projection, for there is simply no such thing as an expiration date on ignored propositions which would render them invalid after a time, no such statute of limitations. This kind of methodological leap is symptomatic of the troubling state of affairs in the field today, in which arguing from an authority— in this case merely a perceived authority—a practice eschewed in any other scientific discipline as a rhetorical “no-no”, is now tolerated as a regular part of biblical studies. Interestingly, some academics even specialize in this sort of head counting and statistical analysis in their apologetic work, meticulously graphing the trends in the literary output of scholars, categorizing their works individually and collectively by how they rate on a linear scale, with strict orthodoxy at one extreme and skepticism on the other.# In this way they try to show that the orthodox position on any given matter is not only plausible, but normative, and therefore preferable by default. Now, relying on a consensus is bad enough. But it’s made worse still if the consensus is merely an imaginary one. I find this to be a troubling and puzzling phenomenon to encounter in a field that purports to be an academic enterprise, to say the least.

Nevertheless, the new mythicists keep moving forward, undaunted. Restatements of the old mythicist arguments have seen print in these last few decades thanks to these aforementioned scholars, giving the lie to this paper doll ‘consensus,’ and reminding us that the riddles and inconsistencies in the texts that once led the Tübingen and Dutch radicals to advance their shocking ideas, are still glaringly there, and are still largely unexplored and glossed over. Not simply marginalized, when mythicism is engaged at all by New Testament scholars these days, it is more often than not done in a haughty, condescending way. Proponents of ahistoricity are mocked as sensationalist kooks on the fringe, stereotyped as contrarians hell-bent on destroying the credibility of the holy scriptures with their heretical folly.

One can almost hear the creaky complaints from the conservative defenders of the old school in their marble towers, shaking their withered fists at the gathering rabble below:

‘OK. First, those Jesus Seminar liberals dare to come along to try to guess at what kind of mere mortal Jesus might have been, which is bad enough, but NOW here comes this crazy new Jesus-myth bunch saying something much worse, that he probably was not even a real person! I mean . . .

The nerve!

It’s an absurdity, I tell you, a real disgrace, unworthy of serious consideration. Everybody knows that Jesus existed! ’

This sort of revulsion seems to be a common first reaction to the mythicist hypothesis in the academy and in apologist hang-outs (e.g. the blogosphere). After this initial gag reflex, an established apologist algorithm for dealing with mythicists usually kicks in to play. It consists of a fleetfooted trifold combination:

first . . . a quick duck-left appeal to Paul’s letters (which presumably provide ample corroboration of Jesus as a contemporaneous historical figure), followed by:
a quick duck-right denial of any similarities the Jesus legend may share with other ancient myths and mysteries in antiquity, and finally by:. . . .
a flurry of jab-like appeals to Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc. for good measure.

Voilá!
The case is refuted. We can all go home now.
(Cue the cheering crowd track.)
Is it really, though?

I don't think so. Moreover, I think the posturing makes the would-be boxers look silly in their ill-fitting shorts and gloves.

I will continue unpacking my thoughts on this topic next time . . .

. . . # G. Habermas, whose two guiding criteria in assessing the historicity of a biblical narrative are : 1) each datum had to be multiply attested by normal critical means, preferably from more than one angle. 2) The vast majority of critical scholars had to concede the probability of this historical fact. (my emphasis) — see http://www.garyhabermas.com/vitainnuce.htm

lord, save us from your followers . . .

2010-09-18T17:18:00.001-07:00

quote of the day . . .

2010-09-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

All the hair on the horse's tail has disappeared, but he must not be admitted to be tailless; the missing essence is not in the kitchen, the drawing room, or the attic, yet somewhere in the house it must be; and thus theology becomes an illogical suspense between the conclusion and the premises; the literalist relents, but the mystical spiritualist is firm, and the true "Word" in scripture remains unimpeached by literary and historical refutation. The husk is gone, but the invisible kernel maintains the position; although in the many pious platitudes passing current in the subject no real meaning be discernible except the broad inference of natural morality and providential superintendence, the general teleological purpose which we believe to be ever tending to good in its majestic passage through the ages, although ourselves far too limited in faculty to identify its action in special cases, or to make it directly responsible for particular occurrences or books.

[...] Strauss' great merit consists in the negative work contributed by him towards the reconstruction of theology; and it was the fitness of the "Leben Jesu" to accomplish the intellectual iconoclasm so often needed in the progress of science which provoked so much odium; since nothing irritates so much as to be convicted of ignorance as to matters confidently believed to be already sufficiently and fully known.

R.W. Mackay,

The Tübingen School and its Antecedents,

1863, pp. 172, 184–185

making tangible the numinous . . .

2010-09-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

Though reportedly there was not a single cloud in sight, a thunderclap rang out in New York City at the moment of Charlie Parker's death. A few days later (three?) the words "Bird Lives" appeared graffiti'd on a nearby wall, then on others, then on more, and on and on. His fame as a true musical genius continued to spread through the decades and today he holds a distinguished place of honor in American mythology. A marginalized figure in his own lifetime, Charlie Parker was canonized as a kind of messianic symbol after his death. There's jazz before him, and jazz after; he is the zero point in that timeline. Needless to say, I see certain similarities with the Easter story (christological concerns aside) here.

A couple of posts back, I related one example from my own experience of how a particular artist or work of art (in this case, Lhasa de Sela's debut album, "La Llorona") could resonate with one's psyche to the point that one would imbue it with mystery and meaning that transcends our mundane experience. The human mind tends to see patterns and connections with this numinous aspect of existence. The sense that some of the phenomena that we experience are in a sense a kind of personalized portentous communication between some ultimate "ground of being" (Universe A) and a "being" (Human B) is strengthened by these strange synchronicities in our lives.

One of my favorite stories of this kind involves the death of Charles Mingus. After being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, Mingus and his wife Sue went down to Mexico, where they traveled in search of natural healing methods that would restore his health, to no avail. In January of 1979, at the age of 56, Mingus died at the little beach-front house that the couple was renting. On the day that he died, 56 grey whales are said to have beached themselves on the nearby beach. My spidey sense tells me that there's some storytelling going on here. Was it the exact day he died? Were there exactly 56 whales involved? How close was the beach? Did it really happen? Short of finding a yellowing copy of the small town newspaper that this story would have appeared in on the day in question , we have no way to verify the story as being factually accurate. But it's such a beautiful story that, even if not historically true, it is repeated as part of the legacy of a great artist. You see, these kind of mythologizing stories don't have to be true for them to serve as metaphors to meditate on, to edify us. Poetry and myth serve their purposes.

I think that Christianity went wrong the moment it started basing its soteriology on acceptance of the literal factualness of the events it purports to trace its roots to. I can't envisage a jazz aficionado making a statement like:
"Yeah, I know that Charles Mingus was a visionary who made contributions to the art and thought of his time, but what's really important is that 56 whales beached themselves on his front yard the day he died. That's the proof of his true worth."

When I compare this to its parallel in the kind of Jesus adoration which insists on a literal resurrection, I find the latter aficionados to be misguided, if not downright silly, really.

Ó

.