Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: Early Christianities
Where should the possibility of pre-Christian Jewish gnosticism fit? Where should we place the dividing line between events inferred from Acts/gospels/epistles on the one hand and accounts derived from Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius on the other? Should they all be included in Biblical Studies? If so, at what point do we break off that area and begin second century sources, then those of late antiquity? Marcion is second century but has an influence on biblical works. But how can we justify all of early Christianity into late antiquity and beyond being part of Biblical Studies? Ebionites are assigned to near apostolic times but are only found in late antiquity documents. Do we need a dividing line? Where do we put documents like Odes of Solomon that are seen by some to be pre-Christian but related to what emerged as more recognizable Christianity?
One of my primary interests has been to understand how the religions of the Bible (Judaism and Christianity) and the Bible itself (both the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the Christian New Testament) came about. There are other far more important questions pressing on us at the moment and I will address those as well — but for now, it’s time to sum up what I have learned from reading through mountains of scholarly literature.
This post will only touch on the conclusions. The various roads to those conclusions, I hope, will follow — although much of the background relevant research has been posted over the years on this site.
Russell Gmirkin has published several scholarly books and articles that present a very plausible case for the the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), as well as some of the subsequent literature, being the work of authors and editors of the Hellenistic era (that is, from around 300 BC after the conquests of Alexander the Great) who were bringing together ideas and myths from the Samaritan-Judean worship of Yahweh into a new mix with Greek tropes and ideals. Such a notion is hard to accept at first if we have known nothing but the traditional Documentary Hypothesis (DH) of Biblical origins. The DH leads us to view the Bible as having is origins in the remote Iron Age (ca 1000 BCE, the purported time of David and Solomon) and through centuries of editorializing and additions it became what today we know as the “Jewish/Hebrew Bible” or the “Old Testament”. Niels Peter Lemche, according to my understanding, was the first to propose that we should rather look to the Hellenistic era (the time after the conquests of Alexander the Great from 334 BCE to his death in 323 BCE) for the origins of the Hebrew Bible. Since then, it would appear that Yonatan Adler has set out the archaeological evidence that would support the notion that the biblical religion did not emerge until the Hellenistic era.
Is the very idea that a new religious myth and a new concept of a supreme god could be “artificially” created and embraced by a mainstream of a community at all feasible? If we are to accept the view that the Hebrew Bible was an invention of scribes seeking to create a new myth of origins for disparate Yahweh worshipers (Samaritans and Judeans in particular, but also other Yahweh adherents), do we have any analogous enterprises that could help us accept that the such a development was to be expected — that it was not a bizarre outlier?
Yes we do. And not only does it exist, but it is located in the same time period and broader geographical area where we find the proposed Hellenistic origin of the Bible.
Not too long ago I attempted to illustrate the meaning of the term “Hellenism” or “Hellenistic” by pointing out that the term indicates an amalgam of Asian and Greek concepts. The Egyptian god Serapis was an invention of the Hellenistic era. This invention was an attempt to unite Greeks and Egyptians into a common community. The god had both Egyptian and Greek aspects merged into one. But there is more….
When Ptolemy I [a successor to Alexander] assumed power in Egypt, he faced the daunting task of uniting the various elements of the population—conquerors and conquered—to at least an extent where they tolerated each other. It has often been admired and extensively described how skillfully he proceeded, particularly in the perilous realm of religion, and how he managed to spare the feelings of the Egyptians without forcing the Greek spirit into the forms of Egyptian worship. As he set out to give the new center of the land a city deity—without such, no ancient foundation is conceivable, and here in Alexandria, as in Antioch, one stood entirely outside historical context, and therefore a city deity had to be created here as well—and as he began to establish a sacred center of his land in the new capital, he had to seek a god in whose worship Greeks and Egyptians could meet. No force on earth could have compelled the Egyptians to abandon their four-thousand-year tradition and turn to a Greek cult; but the king also did not want to make the Greeks Egyptians in their beliefs. Thus, it was only possible for something higher to unite both.
(Schmidt, translation from page 78 of Kultübertragungen [=Cult Transfers])
Continuing….
Those who created him must have been able to conceive of a god who had a part of the essence of each god and who therefore stood above them all; they may have had a sense that the countless gods worshiped by the world were ultimately only the emanation of a divine being, and they gave shape to this intuition and created a god whom they could interpret to the Greek as Greek and to the Egyptian as Egyptian: this was only possible if they created a universal god.
The details can wait for another post, but in short, the new god was Serapis. His statue looked Greek, but his name sounded Egyptian (a possible phonetic elision of Osiris and Apis). A myth of origin was created, too. It was declared that the first Greek ruler of Egypt (Ptolemy I) had a dream in which a numinous figure commanded him to send for a divine image from Sinope, a Greek area in northern Asia Minor. The newly created myth assured Greeks that Serapis was in many ways a familiar Greek god. Apart from looking Greek, his myth and name also contained hints of the Greek god Zeus of the underworld, or Pluto. The sound of the name Serapis, at the same time, strongly hinted at those thoroughly Egyptian deities of Osiris and Apis. So this new god was a creation of both Greek and Egyptian motifs. Its function was to bring Greeks and Egyptians together.
Serapis
But his name would hardly have been chosen if another element had not also played a role: that it was possible, through slight phonetic changes, to create the belief that the name Sarapis was simply the Greek form of the Egyptian wsr-hp (Osiris-Apis). Thus, the possibility was given to conceive Sarapis as an Egyptian god and to implant in the Egyptians the belief that they worshipped one of their ancient gods only in a new form.
And on the other hand, it has also been understood to represent the god referred to by the name Sarapis to the Greeks as a Greek one. His image shows it, and it is often emphasized in literature how closely related he is to Pluto, and in the legend that tells of his introduction from Sinope, it is even explicitly emphasized that he is none other than Pluto. And the existence of such a detailed narrative, as found in Tacitus and Plutarch, can only be explained if it was intentionally fabricated for a specific purpose: the purpose was to derive Sarapis from Greek belief.
(Schmidt 79f – translation)
On a lesser scale the Hellenistic era also witnessed the creation of many new religious myths and family cultic associations to promote the prestige of new rulers and city-states — as I referenced in another post not too long ago.
Prior to the Hellenistic era the Yahweh religion was polytheistic. Yahweh had a wife. The Bible presents Yahweh as the sole god. Genesis narrates the erection of shrines and appeals to various gods that the casual reader can easily assume are early names of the god Yahweh in the book of Exodus: El Shaddai, El Olam, El Elyon, Bethel ….
If it can be concluded that early in the Hellenistic era a new religious concept was built upon both the entrenched traditions of Greeks and Egyptians in such a way that neither tradition was offended, then it may not be too wide a step to imagine at the same time diverse Yahweh worshipers (viz. Samaritans and Judeans) constructing a narrative of mythical origins that both could embrace. The common god was, like Serapis, a universal deity, stripped of local particularizing appendages.
What of Christianity? We have here another potential analogue, also from the first two centuries of the Roman empire. In fact, the Schmidt work I quoted above came to my attention through a book by Troels Engberg-Pedersen discussing specific Greco-Roman influences on the shape of Christianity.
Photo by yours truly -British Museum
In the traditional (pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman) Persian religion that we think of as Zoroastrianism, the god Mithras was not a major character. Yet in the second century CE the worship of Mithras, through a “mystery cult”, was widespread. This was the same period for which we have clear evidence of Christian growth.
The ancient [pre-Hellenistic and pre-Roman] cults in which Mithras appeared were public; in contrast, the Roman cult was secret, a mystery religion, and such religions appeared precisely during the Roman Empire.
Without the Roman world, in fact, they would not have been possible. Previously, all religions were closely tied to specific states or peoples; one was born into one of them. . . . They primarily addressed the spiritual needs of individuals and were generally “more religious” than other cults of the time. Initiates of Isis and Mithra, like Christians, were missionaries. Regardless of their country of origin, those who accepted the premises of the new cult and wished to join were welcomed, as it constituted a spiritual homeland.
Common to all these religions is the fact that they emerged from a people who had lost their political identity . . . .
(Merkelbach, 82 – translation)
If the founder(s) of the Christian religion, whether that was Paul or another, put an innovative twist on some branch or branches of Judaism to create their new faith, and did so at the time of the early Roman empire, they were not alone. Some unknown “genius” appears to have done something similar in relation to the orthodox Persian religion to create a new cult focusing on the worship of Mithras.
The mysteries of Mithras constituted a new faith that no longer had much in common with that of the ancient Persians, except for the name of the god and some mythical episodes.
Once fixed, the system . . . did not undergo any substantial modification over time. Therefore, it cannot be the result of a long evolution but was necessarily conceived and structured in its entirety once and for all. In Geschichte der griechischen Religion (vol 2 p. 675), M.P. Nilsson states that the mysteries of Mithras were created as a whole by an unknown genius, and we can only confirm his opinion.
The place of origin of this cult is unknown, but its creator was well acquainted with the Persian religion. It will be seen how, probably very soon, the center of the new religion became Rome, the capital of the empire, from where that cult then spread to the provinces.
(Merkelbach 82f – translation)
The reference was to Nilsson, who wrote:
The conclusion is inevitable that the Mithraic mysteries are a unique creation of an unknown religious genius, who, based on certain myths and rituals selected by him and incorporating elements from the astrology prevalent at the time and from Greek beliefs, created a form of religion capable of conquering a place in the Roman world.
(Nilsson 675)
I do not suggest that Christianity mutated from Mithraism. Not at all — despite the embarrassment of some early Church Fathers attempting to grapple with a few overt similarities between the two religions. Rather, what is of particular interest is the emergence of two comparable religions around the same period and place as a result of deliberate invention to meet what were arguably comparable public needs.
If both Mithraism and Christianity were “invented” to meet certain needs of individuals who found themselves looking for a new community and identity, they may have been little different, in essence and function, from two earlier Hellenistic religions that were created to meet specific community needs of their day.
Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Paul in His Hellenistic Context. T&T Clark, 2004.
As I was recently tossing out old papers that had accumulated over past decades I was amused to come across this old “gem” of mine. I posted it back in 1996 to a discussion forum for ex-members of an old cult I had once been a member of. It has no pretence at scholarly presentation. It is simply an off-the-cuff reflection on what I had been reading at the time about how the New Testament came into being. There are details in it that I would not fully stand by today but “for old time’s sake” here is what I wrote for a select audience 28 years ago.
(The reference to the Waldensians and Cathars had particular relevance to us cult and ex-cult members of the day — we curiously believed we were their heirs in some sense.)
THE TRUE TALE OF HOW AN EAGLE, A LION, A MAN, AND A LOT OF BULL ENTERED THE CHURCH
Following is a lengthy brief summary of why most Christians today can claim Mr Irenaeus, a bishop who lived about 130-200, as the reason for their New Testament Bibles. He was the one who began the invention of the New Testament. He did this in order to have a tool to preserve the power of the catholic bishops whenever they were confronted with nuisances who wanted to base their beliefs directly on the original teachings of Christ instead of relying on the traditions and authority of those bishops.
By mid second century, Christians were a pretty diverse lot without any concept of an “inspired” New Testament canon. The sabbath-observing portion of the Palestinian church accepted only the writings of Matthew; some docetist believers only used Mark; Valentinus’ followers accepted only the gospel of John; and others who followed Paul to his logical conclusions sought to uncover the original text of Luke and rejected all else as contradictory to what Christ and Paul taught three to four generations earlier. (Note that archaeology indicates that the average life-span of a lower-class Palestinian in the first century was about 30 years — a point that puts “late eyewitness” arguments in an interesting context.) And there were other gospels, too, as well as copies of the “Teachings of Christ”. Moreover, the reason a believer tended to follow only one gospel in opposition to the others was that that believer was convinced that the others contradicted his authority, and/or was a late forgery.
Out of all this confusion (or richly rewarding diversity for the more secure?) arose a powerful threat to the power of many established bishops. His name was Marcion, a brilliant thinker who rejected “human church tradition” as his authority and who sought instead to rely only on apostolic authority. He saw that the church had corrupted some of the original texts of Paul and Luke (modern scholars in this age when knowledge has increased have come to the same conclusions) and believed only what he read in their original texts, and not the traditions that the bishops said he should believe.
Many followed Marcion and his arguments against the traditions of the catholic bishops. He became a threat to the power of these bishops. Then the bishops found a defender and saviour of their power, position and traditions in Irenaeus.
(Some who read this will by now be jumping up and down wanting to argue that Marcion was a gnostic heretic. As you wish, but my point is that he was a powerful influence in the second century church and many believers were persuaded that he was truer to the original teachings of Jesus than the traditions that had developed among the bishop-ruled church. Recall that his enemies were the fathers of those who were the enemies of the Waldensians, and the Waldensians were also accused of gnosticism.)
Irenaeus did not have the same incisive and logically detailed mind as Marcion, but he did have faith and a determination to preserve and extend the authority and traditions of the bishops over believers. Disregarding the contradictions among the various gospels he stridently argued that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John should ALL be accepted as authoritative, basically because of his assertion that the traditions that he personally accepted about them were true. (He was not interested in historical or textual research as Marcion was, and many of those traditions have since been shown to have very little merit indeed.) Of course by blanketly asserting the authority of these four, Irenaeus was also partly opening the way for most dissidents (who believed in at least one of them) to return to the fold.
And to those who did not accept the authority of the bishops, he “proved” his point by powerfully demonstrating that they coincided with the four winds and corners of the earth. But wait, there was more! Each could, with a little ingenuity, be fitted with a nicely matching mythological head — eagle, lion, man and bull. (Later generations had a lot of trouble with Irenaeus’s taste in hybrids, though, and kept swapping these heads around to try them out on different gospel torsos from the ones to which Mr I. had attached them.)
So there! This was the catholic bishop’s answer to those hard questions about contradictions in the texts and evidence of late and spurious authorship and editing. Marcion had been seeking to rely exclusively on the original teachings of one apostle. Irenaeus saw the danger of this to the authority of the bishops and used his episcopal authority to declare non-apostolic authors as authoritative, too. (e.g. Mark and the late revised edition of Luke). This showed that the apostles were not so special after all, and that the bishop-led church (not the apostles) had the right to decide what traditions, writings and doctrines people should believe. No more Marcionites or Ebionites or others who snubbed their noses at the tradition and authority of the bishops in preference for their exclusively “apostolic” authority!
And that is why today we still all believe that those four gospels alone are authoritative. (It was quite some time after Irenaeus that they actually introduced the idea that they were “inspired” or “God-breathed”. And later on, after the dust had settled, the more imaginative theologians could be given the job of making up a whole lot of stuff so that their blatant inconsistencies — and any tell-tale signs of spurious authorship and later unauthorized editing — could be “harmonized” away.)
Irenaeus carried the flag for the authority of the catholic bishops and introduced the idea that the church would eventually have to finalize a New Testament canon if the bishop’s power were to be maintained against smart-alecs who sought to uncover and rely exclusively on the original words of Christ and/or any of the apostles.
In future generations, Christians could claim that there was an undisputed tradition in the church that these four gospels were penned by two genuine, original apostles and two genuine off-siders of another two apostles. Well, there was such a tradition at least from the second century, I guess, IF one accepts that the incipient Catholic Church of the third century was the only church worth considering, and if they further acknowledge the authority and teachings of the bishops of that Church.
But even if that is the case, then one has to wonder why Irenaeus did not include a whole lot of other writings that we now have in our New Testament — if indeed there was such an indisputable tradition — not to mention why other texts he believed were authoritative were subsequently dropped and lost altogether.
Peter Kirby cites an argument for interpolation not from a source agreeing with the argument but rather from a source disposing of it. He quotes Robert Webb:
A second argument is that the nouns used for ‘baptism’ in this text (βαπτισμός and βάπτισις, Ant. 18.117) are not found elsewhere in the Josephan corpus, which may suggest that this vocabulary is foreign to Josephus and is evidence of interpolation. However, we may object that using a word only once does not mean it is foreign to an author. Josephus uses many words only once . . . .
(Webb, p. 39)
I try to make a habit of always checking footnotes and other citations to try to get my own perspective on the sources a book is referencing. If one turns to a scholar who is agreeing with the argument that Webb is addressing, one sees that Webb has presented the argument in a somewhat eviscerated form. Here is how it is presented by a scholar who is trying to persuade readers to accept it as distinct from Webb’s format that is aiming to persuade you to disagree with it.
Against this, it seems that scholars try to blur the fact that this brief passage also contains unique words unparalleled in any of Josephus’s writings, notably words that, as I shall attempt to prove, are semantically and conceptually suspect of a Christian hand — βαπτιστής, βαπτισμός, βάπτισιν, έπασκουσιν, αποδεκτός.
(Nir, p. 36)
I covered the bapt- words in the previous post so this time I look at the other two, έπασκουσιν (as in “lead righteous lives”) and αποδεκτός (as in “if the baptism was to be acceptable“) along with some others. Keep in mind that what follows is sourced from Rivka Nir’s more detailed discussion in her book The First Christian Believer, and all the additional authors I quote I do so because Nir has cited at least some part of them. (To place Rivka Nir in context see my previous post.)
The word appears in this section of the John the Baptist passage:
For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead [επασκουσιν] righteous lives and practise
justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism . . .
There are two possible interpretations here. Should we translate the passage to indicate
John was exhorting Jews to practice, labour at, lead virtuous and righteous lives and so undergo baptism?
Or
should the scene be translated to indicate that John is commanding those Jews who were known for their righteousness and special virtue to be baptized (for the consecration of their bodies, since they had already become righteous through their living prior to baptism)?
Scholarly opinions are divided. Rivka Nir takes the side of those who interpret it in the latter manner: John is addressing a sectarian group who “practise” a righteous way of living and telling them to be baptized. What is in Nir’s mind, of course, is that the author of this passage was from such a sectarian community.
That we are dealing with an elect group is equally evident in how the passage depicts John’s addressees, whom the author designates as ‘Jews who lead righteous lives and practice justice towards their fellows and piety towards God’. This description lends itself to two readings. Most read the two participles forms έπασκουσιν [lead, practise, labour at] and χρωμένοις as circumstantial attributives modifying the exhortation itself.
Nir, p. 49
It can be interpreted to mean EITHER that John is exhorting Jews to lead righteous lives OR that John is exhorting Jews who lead righteous lives to undergo baptism. In this case the Jews spoken of are initiated into a community…. (See below for the grammatical details of these two possible interpretations.)
A cult defined by righteousness
If we follow the second reading, that the passage is depicting a call for a sectarian group that is identified as “labouring at, practising” righteousness to undergo and “join in” baptism. But if that is the case, what is so distinctive about “righteousness” in this context? Here again scholarly analysis has opened up insights the lay readers like me might easily miss. Righteousness in this context is not a common morality or keeping the rules of the Pharisees or Temple authorities. It is even used in the New Testament to distinguish between the Christian “righteous” sect and the “superficially/hypocritically righteous” Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees. The same is found in the Qumran scrolls. “Righteousness” can denote a sectarian identity. Nir, pp. 50f:
John Kampen examined the term ‘righteousness’ in the Qumran scrolls. He reached the conclusion that unlike its usage in tannaitic sources to denote charity and mercy, at Qumran it denoted sectarian identity and belonging to an elect group having exclusive claim to a righteous way of life. Matthew applies this term in the same sense, in connection to John’s baptism (3.15; 21.32). as well as in the Sermon on the Mount (5.10-11), where the author urges a sectarian way of life distinguished by righteousness. In other words, righteousness marked the sectarian identity of the group and served to preserve its boundaries.56 In this passage, as with Matthew and the Qumranites, ‘righteousness’ defines the lifestyle of this elect sectarian group as well as the boundaries separating it from society at large.
56. J. Kampen. “‘Righteousness’ in Matthew and the Legal Texts from Qumran’, in Legal Texts and Legal Issues: Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies. Cambridge 1995. Published in Honour of Joseph Μ. Baumgarten (ed. Μ. Bernstein, F. Garcia Martinez and J. Kampen; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). pp. 461-87 (479, 481, 484, 486); Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition, p. 36: ‘The word δικαιοσύνη does not spill out by accident; it is Matthew’s peculiar way of designating the faith and life of Christians and of Christianity in general (cf. Mt. 5.6. 10; 6.1-4). Meier (A Marginal Jew, II. p. 61) points out the resemblance between John’s description in Josephus and in Lk. 3.10-14. which portrays him as exhorting to acts of social justice. This may be accountable to two Greek-Roman writers, Josephus and Luke, who independently of each other sought to describe an odd Jewish prophet according to the cultural models known in the Greek-Roman world. Similarly, Ernst, Johannes der Täufer, p. 257.
Those footnoted references are not the easiest for lay readers to locate but I have copied extracts from a couple of them. See below for the full passages being cited in footnote 56.
The passage does not simply say that John’s followers were obeying the Jewish traditions, but that they were “practising” a righteousness that set them apart from others and that qualified them to enter the cultic community through baptism, a baptism that would, because they were practicing this righteousness, also ritually sanctify their bodies.
A further pointer to the passage being written from the perspective of a distinctive cult practice, a cult that Nir finds signs of in Qumran, the Fourth Sibylline Oracle and various (anti-Pauline) Jewish-Christian sects, is the language used to express the disciples “coming together”, “joining” in baptism.
For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead [επασκουσιν] righteous lives and practice [χρωμένοις] justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism [βαπτισμω συνιεναι]. . . . When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused [ήρθησαν] to the highest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed.
What commentators have discerned here is that the “joining” in baptism means entering into membership of a sectarian group, indicated by the inference that the call is for all of those who practise righteousness to gather together in a (collective) baptism. See details below.
Others, too, joined : Who were the others?
According to Meier in A Marginal Jew, II, pp. 58f
At first glance, the previous concentration of the passage on “the Jews” as the audience of John’s preaching might conjure up the idea that the unspecified “others” are Gentiles. There is no support for such an idea in the Four Gospels, but such a double audience would parallel what Josephus (quite mistakenly) says about Jesus’ audience in Ant. 18.3.3 §63 (kai pollous men Ioudaious, pollous de kai tou Hellenikou epegageto). However, if we are correct that epaskousin [ἐπασκουσιν] and chromenois [χρωμένοις] in §117 express conditions qualifying tois Ioudaiois, there is no need to go outside the immediate context to understand who “the others” at the beginning of §118 are.
So Meier concludes that the “others” were from the general Jewish population coming to see the righteous community respond to John’s call for baptism, but there is also a possibility that “others” might also refer to Gentiles, as in the Testimonium Flavianum (Ant. 18.63): ‘He [sc. Jesus] won over many Jews and many Greeks’, as well as Christians: Mt. 27.42: Lk. 7.19: Jn 4.37: 10.16: 1 Cor. 3.10: 9.27.
In this passage, John says that ‘if baptism was to be acceptable [αποδεκτήν αύτώ]’ to God.60 ‘they must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body’.
What kind of baptism might ‘be acceptable’ to God?
In biblical usage, this expression relates to the sacrificial system at the temple to designate an offering accepted by God.61 In the New Testament, the compound adjective αποδεκτός, meaning ‘acceptable’, occurs in connection with sacrifices only in 1 Peter: ‘spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God’ (2.3-5). . . .
The author of this passage speaks of John’s baptism in terms paralleling the atonement sacrifices in the temple, by means of which individuals ask God’s acceptance of their offering that their sins may be forgiven. Joseph Thomas64 focused on one of the features of Baptist sects (Ebionites, Nazarenes, Elcasaites) that withdrew from the traditional temple and sacrificial worship and conceived of baptism as a substitute for sacrifices. To his mind, cessation of sacrifices and the baptismal rite are interrelated: instead of sacrifices in atonement for sins, it is holy baptism that atones for sins.65 The notion of baptism as replacement for the Jewish sacrificial system is distinctly Christian: Jesus is the expiatory sacrifice in place of the temple sacrifices and his death atones for all the sins of the world.66 By baptism, the baptized identify with Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, becoming a sacrifice themselves, and their sins are forgiven, as expounded in Rom. 6.2-6.
61. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 166, 203.
64. Thomas. Le mouvement Baptiste, pp. 280-81: J.A.T. Robinson, ‘The Baptism of John and the Qumran Community’, HTR 50 (1957). pp. 175-91 (180).
65. Thomas. Le mouvement Baptiste, pp. 55-56: Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, p. 120. On baptism in place of sacrificing al Qumran, see subsequently.
66. Eph. 5.2: Rom. 12.1.
Nir, pp. 51f
In the account in Josephus we read that for John’s baptism to be “acceptable” (αποδεκτος) it must not be used to grant forgiveness of sins but for the consecration or sanctification of the body, a function of erstwhile temple sacrifices.
Baptism, a central rite
John’s baptism was being preached and proclaimed, a point in common between Josephus and the Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew underscores the central importance of baptism when he has Jesus command his disciples to go into the world and baptize new disciples.
Moreover, other scholars have wondered why Josephus did not explain the term “baptism” here.
What would Greek and Roman readers unfamiliar with Christian sources understand by this term? They were familiar with the verb βάπτω, which means ‘to dip/be dipped’ or ‘to immerse/be submerged’, and with the verb βαπτίζω, which in classical sources denotes ‘to immerse/be submerged under water’.49 How would they understand a designation referring to someone who immerses others with this particular immersion? How could Josephus use this designation without defining it?50
Moreover, this passage uses two terms for John’s immersion: βαππσμός and βάπτισις. which Christian tradition applied as distinctive of Christian baptism. And it is only here that they occur in Josephus, diverging markedly from the terminology he applies to the Jewish ritual immersion for purification from external physical defilement.51
49. Metaphorically: soaked in wine. See Oepke. ‘βάπτω’, TDNT, I. p. 535.
50. This bewilderment was already raised by Graelz (Geschichte der Juden. III. p. 276 n. 3): and Abrahams (Studies in Pharisaism, p. 33) noted that this designation might be an interpolation. Mason (Josephus and the New Testament, p. 228) attempts to distinguish between ‘Christ’ and ‘called the Christ’, as in the latter case Josephus would not need to explain the title, and this applies to John, ‘called the Baptist’. Some argue (e.g. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 34, 168) that John’s being called by this name in the Gospels and in Josephus proves it became distinctive of John and the permanent Greek designation, hence its usage by the evangelists as well as Josephus. Indeed, John is called ‘the Baptist’ in the Synoptics, but this epithet is not attached to his name in Acts and in the Fourth Gospel.
51 To describe Jewish immersions, Josephus usually uses the verb λούεσθαι or άπολούεσθαι, as he does for the Essenes and Bannus; see K.H. Rengstorf, A Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus (Leiden: EJ. Brill. 2002). I. p. 290. But βάπτισις is a term Christian sources apply to the baptism of Christ or Christian baptism; see Athanasius Alexandrinus, Quaestiones in scripturas 41 (M.28.725A); LPGL, p. 284. Origen uses βαπτισμός for John’s baptism, but in many sources this term applies to Christian baptism in general: see Heb 6.2: βαπτισμών διδαχής; Col 2.12: ‘you were buried with him in baptism (έν τω βαπτισμώ), you were also raised with him’; Chrysostom, Hom. in Heb. 9.2 ( 12.95B). This term also applies to the repeated baptismal rites of heretical sects, e.g., Ebionites, Marcionites, etc. See LPGL, p. 288. On the possibility that John’s baptism in Josephus was also a repeated ritual, see subsequently.
Nir, p. 48
It is through discussions of such technical points that Nir argues for a Jewish-Christian provenance of the John the Baptist passage in Antiquities of the Jews. When criticisms against the interpolation view point to comparisons with specific New Testament terminology they are missing a key facet of the argument: the interpolation is said to be consistent with certain Jewish Christian practices and thus contrary to the Christian ideas represented by the New Testament.
I still have some questions about Rivka Nir’s presentation but I have tried to set it out in these posts as fully (yet succinctly) as I reasonably can. The less background knowledge we have the easier it is to be persuaded by new readings. The more we learn about the Jewish and Christian worlds in their first and second century contexts the more aware we become of just how little we really know and how vast are the gaps in our knowledge. There is little room for dogmatism, for certainty, for “belief”, in a field of inquiry where even the sources themselves are not always what they seem. That’s true of much ancient history and it is especially true of the history of Christian origins.
So where does John the Baptist fit in history?
Our most abundant historical sources are Christian. In the canonical gospels John the Baptist is the prophetic voice announcing the advent of Jesus. He is depicted variously as a second Elijah, an Isaianic voice in the wilderness, and as the son of a temple priest. Always he represents the Jewish Scriptures prophesying their fulfilment in Jesus Christ. As such, he functions as a theological personification.
If John’s literary function is to personify a theological message we might think that he could still be more than a literary figure. Could he not also have had a historical reality? Yes, of course he could. But a general rule of thumb is to opt for the simplest explanation. If we have a literary explanation for the presence of John the Baptist that explains all that we read about him in the gospels, then there is no need to seek additional explanations. If there is independent evidence for John in history then we are in quite different territory.
The earliest non-Christian source we have is found in Antiquities18.116/18.5.2 (by Josephus). If this passage was indeed penned by Josephus or one of his scribal assistants then it would be strong evidence — strong because it is independent of the gospels and in a work of “generally reliable” historical narration — that there was a John the Baptist figure in history, however that figure might be interpreted.
The passage would not confirm the gospels’ theological role of John. After all, in Josephus the JtB passage is set some years after the time of Jesus and Jesus is never mentioned in relation to John.
In the eyes of some scholars, those stark differences from the gospels stamp the passage with authenticity. This would mean that Christian authors took John from history and reset him in time to make him a precursor of Jesus. If this is how John entered the gospels then the common notion among scholars of Christian origins and the historical Jesus have no grounds on which to reconstruct a historical scenario in which Jesus joined the Baptist sect only to break away from it. John would then remain as nothing more than a theological personification of the OT pointing to fulfilment in Christ.
But if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the passage in Josephus is from a Jewish-Christian hand, then we are left without any secure foundation for any place of such a figure in history. Another proposal is that the passage is genuinely Josephan but removed from its original context where it spoke of another “John” from the one we associate with Christian tradition. What is certain is that the passage raises questions. It is susceptible to debate. It can never be a bed-rock datum that establishes with certainty any semblance of a John the Baptist figure comparable to the one we read about in the gospels.
While recently focussed on translating older works I have been overlooking other works I have translated over the years and know that some readers may find of interest. Copyright forbids me from making many of them public but I could work my way through them one by one and see what can be shared. Here is one that I completed last year — though much of it is also available on Hermann Detering’s website in a series of posts.
by “the last of the Dutch radicals”, G. A. V. D. BERGH VAN EYSINGA
CONTENTS:
FIRST PART
PREAMBLE …….8
INTRODUCTION …….9
I. GOSPELS …….35
1. The Gospel according to Matthew …….35
2. Mark …….45
3. Luke……. 51
4. John …….58
5. Peter …….66
6. Scattered Gospel Fragments…. 68
II. ACTS …….76
1. The Acts of the Apostles …….76
2. ofJohn …….83
3. Paul …….89
4. The Martyrdom of Polycarp …….91
III. LETTERS …….94
1. The Epistle of Paul to the Romans … 100
2. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians … 107
3. ” Second Epistle of the Corinthians . . 112
4. Letter to the Galatians …….115
5. “”Ephesians …….121
6. “” Philippians …. 126
7. Colossians …….129
8. Both Letters of Paul to the Thessalonians …….133
9. Paul’s Letter to Philemon ………136
10. The Pastoral Epistles …….140
11. The Letter to the Hebrews …….146
12. The Epistle of James …….152
13. The First Letter of Peter …….156
14. The Second Letter of Peter …….159
15. The Letter of Jude …….161
16. The Three Letters of John …….162
SECOND PART
LETTERS (cont’d)
17. The Letter of Barnabas …….165
18. The First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians……… 171
19. The Second Letter of Clement to the Corinthians………179
20. The Letters of Ignatius and Polycarp……..183
21. The Letter of Ptolemy to Flora…….. 194
IV. REVELATIONS……..198
1. The Ascension of Isaiah……..200
2. The Revelation of John………203
3. The Revelation of Peter……. 210
4. The Shepherd of Hermas ……..213
V. RELIGIOUS TEXTBOOKS………223
1. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles…….. 223
2. Athenagoras’ Resurrection of the Dead……. 229
VI. APOLOGETICS………233
1. The Plea of Aristides……..235
2. The Apologies of Justin Martyr……..238
3. Justin’s Dialogue with the Jew Trypho……..247
4. The Supplication of Athenagoras……….251
5. The Letter to Diognetus………….253
6. Tatian’s Speech to the Greeks…….256
7. The Octavius of Minucius Felix…….259
VII. READINGS…….264
1. A Psalm of the Nahassenen……..264
2. Benedictory Songs and liturgical texts from theActs of Thomas…….266
3. The Odes of Solomon…….274
VIII. THEOSOPHICAL AND EXEGETICAL FRAGMENTS…….281
Valentinus and his school………..281
Why did a transnational revolt, with the Jews at its centre, erupt in 116, capable of seriously challenging the Roman empire, which at that very moment had reached the phase of its greatest expansion? . . . What events, in 115 and then 116 CE, first led to Greek-Jewish clashes in Mediterranean cities, and then caused the Jews to take up arms to destroy every element of pagan culture and religion they encountered in their path?
— Livia Capponi: Il Mistero Del Tempio p.18 — translation
We continue picking out nuggets from Livia Capponi’s 2018 study. In this post we cover the main questions arising and the available sources.
Capponi points to many studies of the sources by Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev (2005). They are varied: inscriptions and archaeological finds, literary and documentary papyri, Greek and Latin authors, Christian and pagan, and rabbinic sources. Translations of them are collated in Zeev’s Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights.
The heterogeneous character of these sources complicates the work of historians as it requires the input of different disciplines, and a multiplicity of viewpoints. (p. 14 — all quotes are translations from the Italian)
Any search for the causes of the revolt surely has to begin with the defeat of the Judeans at the hands of Vespasian and Titus in 70 CE and their subsequent treatment.
Following that war, Judeans in all provinces were subject to “heavy confiscations of lands and properties” and a new tax on all who could be recognized as “Jewish”, whether Palestinian or not. From these extractions the great monuments of Flavian Rome were constructed — the Amphitheatre (Colosseum), the Circus Maximus, the arches of Titus.
According to a recent examination by the Belgian papyrologist Willy Clarisse of the tax receipts and arrears imposed on the Jews preserved in Egyptian papyri in the years 74-115 AD, the amount of confiscations and punitive impositions on the Jews between 73 and 115 AD was undoubtedly greater than scholars have long ascertained. The Jewish communities in the Mediterranean were also taxed retroactively according to burdensome and vexatious logic, which undoubtedly contributed to souring the already irreparably deteriorated relations between the imperial power and the communities themselves. (p. 16
Sources
Cassius Dio wrote his histories around 200 CE but they have come to us only in an eleventh century summary of them. That precis reads:
Trajan therefore departed thence, and a little later began to fail in health.
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put a certain Andreas at their head, and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing; many they sawed in two, from the head downwards; 2 others they gave to wild beasts, and still others they forced to fight as gladiators. In all two hundred and twenty thousand persons perished. In Egypt, too, they perpetrated many similar outrages, and in Cyprus, under the leadership of a certain Artemion. There, also, two hundred and forty thousand perished, 3 and for this reason no Jew may set foot on that island, but even if one of them is driven upon its shores by a storm he is put to death. Among others who subdued the Jews was Lusius, who was sent by Trajan. (Book 68, 32:1-3)
Eusebius‘s references have come to us piecemeal through various other sources, but the most detailed account of his that we have is in his Ecclesiastical History:
While the teaching of our Saviour and the church were flourishing daily and moving on to further progress the tragedy of the Jews was reaching the climax of successive woes. In the course of the eighteenth year of the reign of the Emperor a rebellion of the Jews again broke out and destroyed a great multitude of them. For both in Alexandria and in the rest of Egypt and especially in Cyrene, as though they had been seized by some terrible spirit of rebellion, they rushed into sedition against their Greek fellow citizens, and increasing the scope of the rebellion in the following year started a great war while Lupus was governor of all Egypt. In the first engagement they happened to overcome the Greeks who fled to Alexandria and captured and killed the Jews in the city, but though thus losing the help of the townsmen, the Jews of Cyrene continued to plunder the country of Egypt and to ravage the districts in it under their leader Lucuas. The Emperor sent against them Marcius Turbo with land and sea forces including cavalry. He waged war vigorously against them in many battles for a considerable time and killed many thousands of Jews, not only those of Cyrene but also those of Egypt who had rallied to Lucuas, their king. The Emperor suspected that the Jews in Mesopotamia would also attack the inhabitants and ordered Lusius Quietus to clean them out of the province. He organized a force and murdered a great multitude of Jews there, and for this accomplishment* was appointed governor of Judaea by the Emperor. The Greek authors who chronicle the same period have related this narrative in these very words. (Book 4, 2:1-5)
In assessing the above one must also take into account the sources these authors used, as well, and that forms a part of Capponi’s discussion. But I’ll keep to bare outlines here.
Here are the events that preceded the revolt according to Cassius Dio:
The emperor Trajan embarked on a conquest of the east, in particular the Parthians. Special tribute was given to Alexander the Great’s memory in the process. The Roman Senate bestowed on Trajan the highest honours for these “conquests”, granting him as many “triumphs” as he wished — even though he met little or even no resistance at all. Northern Mesopotamian peoples quickly submitted to him, sometimes by sending him envoys promising surrender long before he reached them. (Recall the post on Witulski’s interpretation of the white horse of Revelation.)
But after Trajan had journeyed south down as far as the ruins of Babylon the regions he had “conquered” broke out in rebellion. Garrisons Trajan had left in those places were either slaughtered or forced to flee.
Cassius Dio wrote of how Trajan was forced to turn back and violently suppress these uprisings.
At the same time the Jewish diaspora witnessed uprisings, from northern Africa through to the “recently conquered” Mesopotamia itself. Cassius Dio seems to depict the scenes of revolt as encompassing one large theatre of war from Africa to Mesopotamia.
Eusebius agrees with the above in broad outline but has a different perspective insofar as he identifies the cause of the outbreak to have been hostilities between Greeks and Judeans in Alexandria, Egypt. This violence spread to engulf all of Egypt and eventually fanned into an all-out rebellion against Rome. A related source even suggests that the massacre of Judeans in Egypt was almost total. An Armenian version of a Eusebian text contains suggestions of a Jewish source that renamed Trajan’s general Lusias as Lysias, the general of Antiochus Epiphanes of the Maccebaean era fame. Capponi interprets this piece of evidence as an indicator of how the rebels saw themselves, as re-enacting the Maccabean revolt.
Late Rabbinic sources cannot be used to reconstruct events but they can arguably be used to understand “the psychological and cultural attitudes at the time of the revolt”. These sources do not tell us about a Jewish revolt against Rome but they do testify of “unjustified repression by the Romans and of their total incomprehension of Jewish religious traditions.” (p. 35) In the Jerusalem Talmud we read the following (Sukka V 1 55a-b) where, as Capponi notes, Trajan is presented as “almost aware of being an instrument in the hands of God”:
And once in the time of Trogianus, the evil one [Capponi sees here a reversal of Trajan’s name and title, Optimus Princeps, the “best citizen”]. A son was born to him on the ninth of Ab, and [the Israelites] were fasting. His daughter died on Hanukkah, and [the Israelites] lit candles. His wife sent a message to him, saying. Instead of going to conquer the barbarians, come and conquer the Jews, who have rebelled against you.’ He thought that the trip would take ten days, but he arrived in five. He came and found the Israelites occupied in the study of the Light [Torah], with the following verse: The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth…’ (Deut. 28:49). He said to them, ‘With what are you occupied?’ They said to him, ‘With thus-and-so.’ He said to them, That man (i.e., I) thought that it would take ten days to make the trip, and I arrived in five days.’ His legions surrounded them and killed them. He said to their wives, ‘Obey my legions, and I shall not kill you.’ They said to him, ‘What you did to the ones who have fallen do also to us who are yet standing.’ He mingled their blood with the blood of their men, until the blood flowed into the ocean as far as Cyprus. At that moment the horn of Israel was cut off, and it is not destined to return to its place until the son of David will come. [translation based on Jacob Neusner’s in The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation, vol. 17 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 118-119]
The rabbis interpreted the massacres as punishment for “returning to Egypt”, contrary to biblical commands.
Other details Capponi notes of potential significance:
Jewish rebels (sicarii) who had escaped from Judea in the war of 66-70/73 CE found refuge in Egypt and Cyrene (so Josinsephus informs us) and it is reasonable to infer they carried the rebellious tradition;
Trajan earned fame or infamy from 112 CE when he “inaugurated a new dynastic policy based on the deification of his family”;
the Messianic character of the uprisings is “confirmed” in:
5 And after these things a fourth kingdom will arise, whose power will be harsh and evil far beyond those which were before it, and it will rule many times as the forests on the plain, and it will hold fast for times, and will exalt itself more than the cedars of Lebanon. 6 And by it the truth will be hidden, and all those who are polluted with iniquity will flee to it, as evil beasts flee and creep into the forest. 7 And it will come to pass when the time of its consummation that it should fall has approached, then the principate of My Messiah will be revealed, which is like the fountain and the vine, and when it is revealed it will root out the multitude of its host. 8 And as touching that which you have seen, the lofty cedar, which was left of that forest, and the fact, that the vine spoke those words with it which you did hear, this is the word.
40 1 The last leader of that time will be left alive, when the multitude of his hosts will be put to the sword, and he will be bound, and they will take him up to Mount Zion, and My Messiah will convict him of all his impieties, and will gather and set before him all the works of his hosts. 2 And afterwards he will put him to death, and protect the rest of My people which shall be found in the place which I have chosen.
[36] Then I heard a voice saying to me, “Look before you and consider what you see.”
[37] And I looked, and behold, a creature like a lion was aroused out of the forest, roaring; and I heard how he uttered a man’s voice to the eagle, and spoke, saying,
[38] “Listen and I will speak to you. The Most High says to you,
[39] `Are you not the one that remains of the four beasts which I had made to reign in my world, so that the end of my times might come through them?
[40] You, the fourth that has come, have conquered all the beasts that have gone before; and you have held sway over the world with much terror, and over all the earth with grievous oppression; and for so long you have dwelt on the earth with deceit.
[41] And you have judged the earth, but not with truth;
[42] for you have afflicted the meek and injured the peaceable; you have hated those who tell the truth, and have loved liars; you have destroyed the dwellings of those who brought forth fruit, and have laid low the walls of those who did you no harm.
[43] And so your insolence has come up before the Most High, and your pride to the Mighty One.
[44] And the Most High has looked upon his times, and behold, they are ended, and his ages are completed!
[45] Therefore you will surely disappear, you eagle, and your terrifying wings, and your most evil little wings, and your malicious heads, and your most evil talons, and your whole worthless body,
[46] so that the whole earth, freed from your violence, may be refreshed and relieved, and may hope for the judgment and mercy of him who made it.'”
¶ and the fifth book of the Sibylline Oracles. Rather than quote an unwieldy amount of text from the Oracles I will instead cite the words of John Collins, a prominent scholar in this field:
The oracles of Sib. V were written in Egypt after the destruction of the temple but probably before the Bar Kochba revolt. The main question which inevitably arises about its Sitz im Leben is its relationship to the revolt of Diaspora Jewry in 115. We cannot link the oracles directly to the revolt. However, they certainly reflect the atmosphere of nationalism and messianism which produced the revolt, and are our only documents from any strand of Egyptian Judaism at that time.
The suggestion was made by Lagrange and accepted by Fuks that the revolt had no more specific cause than the general messianic expectation of the Jews. The strong expectation of a saviour figure in Sib. V reflects this expectation and may have helped arouse it. True, the saviour expected was a heavenly being but this does not exclude the possibility of his appearing and acting on earth, as we see from the case of Bar Kochba and others. The deep pessimism of the book does not preclude recourse to action. It might in fact have been typical of the desperate attitude of the Jewish revolt.
The bitterness of complaint about the temple and the deeply pessimistic character of the book suggest that at least the central oracles, vv 52-110, 111-178, 179-285 and 286-434 [these lines can be read online at the Sacred Texts site] , were written not long after the destruction of the temples both of Jerusalem and of Leontopolis. Expectation of Nero’s return is also most likely to have flourished at this time.
However, there is reason to believe that there was some direct continuity between the ideology of the sibyl and that of the revolt. In a number of places the sibyl speaks of the destruction of pagan temples. In fact this was a notable characteristic of the revolt . . . . (Collins, p. 94)
¶ massive earthquake in Antioch (several days of severe tremors) – Trajan reputed to have “miraculously survived”:
according to the legend that circulated later, the emperor was brought out of danger by a creature of superhuman dimensions, celebrated on the coinage of 115 as “Jupiter saviour of the fatherland” (p. 23);
a passage in Baruch speaks of “a leader who escaped a war, then an earthquake and then a fire, who would be killed by the messiah” (p. 38)
Diaspora Jews and the Jerusalem Temple
It has been suggested that the Jews in the Diaspora had little interest in the temple since there is no indication that they were interested in coming to its rescue in the war of 66-70 CE. But Capponi points out with reference to Martin Goodman’s historical account that the reason they did not come to the aid of the motherland was “only because they did not suspect that the Temple might be destroyed.” (p. 42)
Main centres of the Jewish diaspora in the Roman imperial age. (Capponi, p. 129)
The Scale of Destruction
We will see in future posts that the scale of the violence was such that it posed a serious threat to the Roman Empire. Archaeological remains testify to the widespread extent of the violence. The figures we read in the literary sources are surely (hopefully) exaggerated but even so, when we read of hundreds of thousands being massacred by Jews, and of the annihilation of all the Jews in Egypt, and the evidence of surviving lists that tell us that no less than a third of the legionnaires sent to quell the uprisings were killed, we know we are dealing with a major war.
Eighty years later Greeks in Egypt continued to celebrate their eventual victory over the Jews.
Apparent Inconsistencies
So from the above information we appear to find some confusion in exactly what was happening and how the events transpired.
Cassius Dio
Eusebius
115 CE: guerilla war by the Jews in Alexandria, the rest of Egypt, and Cyrene
116 CE: erupted in full scale open revolt when Greeks massacred the Jews of Alexandria.
Jews of Cyrene, under Lucuas (Luke) marched to Egypt and ravaged countryside [why? — unclear]
Trajan sent Turbo to restore order: many battles . . . .
Trajan’s successful campaign undone when he went to Persian Gulf and areas in northern Mesopotamia that had recently submitted to him broke out in revolt.
Lusius Quietus involved in the suppression and restoring Roman rule.
Trajan ordered preemptive massacre of Jews in Mesopotamia, led by Lusius Quietus, who was rewarded for his massacres by being appointed governor of Judea.
Trajan fell ill.
The Jews of Cyrene, led by Andreas (Andrew) were in rebellion;
Romans slaughter rebels in their hundreds of thousands in Egypt.
Artemion led Jews in Cyprus in revolt — Lusius sent to crush it.
The two accounts can be harmonized if we read Eusebius as providing more detail about the origin of the outbreak. But there remains the contradiction over the order in which the Mesopotamian massacres took place. The significance of that question will become clear when we dive deeper into Livia Capponi’s investigations in further posts.
Capponi, Livia. Il mistero del tempio. La rivolta ebraica sotto Traiano. Rome: Salerno, 2018.
Collins, John J. (John Joseph). The Sibylline Oracles of Egyptian Judaism. Missoula, Mont. : Published by Society of Biblical Literature for the Pseudepigrapha Group, 1974. http://archive.org/details/sibyllineoracles0000coll.
Zeev, Miriam Pucci Ben. Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights. First Edition. Leuven ; Dudley, MA: Peeters Publishers, 2005.
How we would love to know more about the times between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. That period is surely a decisive one for how both Christianity and Judaism developed into what they are today. Some have suggested that this period saw the actual births of both Judaism and Christianity as distinct religions in the forms we recognize today.
We have Josephus to inform us about the first Jewish war of 66-73 CE. But we have no comparable contemporary historians of the Bar Kokhba war and only scant hints about “troubles” in the in-between time. We recently posted a series on Thomas Witulski’s thesis that the Book of Revelation was written in response to the events in the times of Trajan and Hadrian, in particular the days of the Bar Kokhba rebellion. In that series we saw that the red horse and its rider in the apocalypse arguably represented the widespread uprisings of Jews in the time of Trajan and the black horse and especially the pale horse depicted the horrific consequences of those revolts (around 115-117 CE).
There are different kinds of history.
There is straight narrative history that interprets known events from the reliable sources. The facts are rarely in doubt but their meaning and significance may be open to debate.
There is historical work that analytically dissects statistics.
There is investigative history that seeks to uncover “what really happened”, such as when there is an interest in settling some current controversy, such as how indigenous peoples were treated by imperial powers.
And then there are hypothetical reconstructions based on a fresh interpretation of sources. This last type is not “an established fact” in the sense we can say “Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC”, so it will be open to debate. Readers will want to know the grounds for the various details proposed and I hope to make those clear in these posts.
The historian Livia Capponi has attempted to fill in that gap with her reconstruction of events in what she describes as “a circumstantial history” (“una storia indiziaria” (p. 75). Her book is published in Italian and is titled, in English, Mystery of the Temple — the Jewish Revolt Under Trajan = Il Mistero Del Tempio: La Rivolta Ebraica Sotto Traiano (2018).
The basic argument presented is this:
Before the revolts of 116-117 CE relations between Rome and Judea were unstable but not openly hostile.
In 96 CE the emperor Nerva abolished an odious tax on Jews and initiated a policy of relative tolerance.
The next emperor, Trajan, sought the support of the Jews (as part of his efforts to safeguard his supply line in his war against Parthia) by authorizing the preparation of a road for exiles to return to Judea and a promise to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
If messianic expectations were aroused in the wake of Trajan’s policies they soon turned violent when it was learned that Trajan’s tolerance included the integration of the proposed temple into the Greco-Roman pantheon. There is evidence that Trajan and his general Lusius Quietus (we met him briefly in the post on the red horse) dedicated monuments to pagan gods in Jerusalem.
Some readers will be aware that I have expressed doubts that there were popular messianic movements extant in Judea or the Diaspora prior to 70 CE — remarks about a “world ruler from the Orient” in Josephus and others notwithstanding. (See posts listed under Second Temple Messianism.) But there is evidence that messianic hopes were alive after the catastrophe of 70 CE. Messianic pretenders do seem to appear across the landscape. Such has been my view so I was particularly keen to read Capponi’s thesis about that time.
Livia Capponi has taken a fresh look at the sources — Jewish and others, both primary and secondary — and attempted to uncover what can be learned about the feelings of Jews at this time and what was happening that led to the widespread violence and its bitter aftermath.
Above all, an attempt is made to explain how, from an initial policy of tolerance and an attempt by Trajan to mend the trauma of the loss of the Temple in 70 through Jewish initiatives, he arrived at the bloody repression of the revolt, which swept away the Jewish communities from Egypt, Cyrene and Cyprus, and which led rabbinic literature to portray Trajan as ‘the wicked one’. The compromise of the Temple was probably associated with a form of ‘integration’ of the Temple itself into the Greco-Roman pantheon, evidenced by the construction in Jerusalem of statues and monuments to the emperor and to deities such as Jupiter and Serapis. This policy, normal for the Romans, but aberrant and unacceptable to the Jews, probably explains why Trajan and his general Lusio Quieto in Jewish sources were associated with Antiochus IV Epiphanes of Syria, author of the desecration of the Temple in 167-164 BC, and the Syrian general Lysias. The Diaspora revolt was in the eyes of the Jews a new Maccabean revolt.
The hypothesis is presented and discussed through a re-reading of the historiography on the years 115-117 (in which many problems still exist, also due to incidents in the transmission of sources), and of contemporary documents (papyri and inscriptions). Finally, an attempt is made to integrate into the framework of the Western sources some suggestions drawn from texts composed in a Jewish environment, materials that are extremely difficult because they are enigmatic and expressions of a religious conception, not a desire for historical reconstruction.
(pp. 11f, translation)
I will be posting some of the details from Livia Capponi’s book over the next few weeks.
Capponi, Livia. Il mistero del tempio. La rivolta ebraica sotto Traiano. Rome: Salerno, 2018.
I have translated via machine tools Bruno Bauer’s Christ and the Caesars and made it available for all at a new page (see right margin), Bruno Bauer: Christ and the Caesars – in English. I have also formatted it as a single pdf file which is available at vridar.info.
It is a machine translation (DeepL, ChatGPT, Google Translate + some human checking from time to time) so it is not the best but it is readable — at least I found it to be so. I compared parts of it with another published translation and saw that the published book is also very close to a literal translation. A literal translation is not optimal (it is not always the easiest of reads) but this one is at least free.
ChatGPT to some extent tended to break away from the literal translation but at the cost of being too creative and even introducing what it thought should be corrections or additions to the original text! So I hope none of those creative additions slipped through to the finished product.
A few months back Neil asked me if I had any further thoughts regarding my hypothesis about a Simonian origin for Christianity. In March of 2019 I had revised it. I am happy to report that four years later I am still quite comfortable with the revision. To me it seems to best account for the many peculiarities of the New Testament and plausibly explains much that can be gleaned from the writings of the earliest heresy hunters. This post is just a summary with a few additional thoughts on the subject.
All Things to All
As I laid out in the series, the Simonians appear to have regularly co-opted the religious beliefs of others and twisted them to serve their own purposes. This involved injecting the object of their belief—Simon Megas—into the storylines of other religions and giving him the prominent role therein. Thus they, for example, made Zeus into Simon under another name, and Athena into Helen, Simon’s consort. Similarly, they apparently claimed that their Simon was the mysterious figure whose hidden descent was described in the Vision of Isaiah (chapters 6-11 of the Ascension of Isaiah).The main storyline of that writing is an ancient one, going back, as Richard Carrier points out in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 45-47), to the Descent of Inanna. But it too was modified along Simonian lines and dragged into their orbit. Most famously, the Simonians claimed that a Jesus who had suffered in Judaea was actually their unrecognized Simon. In short, the Simonians seem to have wanted their Simon to be all things to all men, and so gave free rein to their proclivity for appropriating and modifying the beliefs of everyone else.
The Gospel of Proto-Mark
CORRECTION — I originally posted an outdated view of Roger Parvus’s here — RP will be clarifying his thoughts, soon – Neil (9th March 2023).
I think that our Gospel according to Mark is a proto-orthodox reworking of an earlier Simonian version in which the Simonians were again doing their thing. I will refer to the earlier text as Proto-Mark, although it may well be the same as the mysterious Secret Mark. In it the beliefs of a group of Jews about a crucified and supposedly resurrected Jew named Jesus underwent Simonization. If I had to name its author, I would choose Basilides of Alexandria, whom even the heresy hunters acknowledge as the author of an early albeit heretical gospel. He is at the right time, the right place, had the right skills, and–most importantly—had the right mindset: delight in secrecy and enigma. This was the man who, according to Irenaeus, said “Not many can know these [teachings], but one in a thousand, and two in ten thousand,” and “Know everyone, but let none know you.”
Mark owes its enigmatic nature to Proto-Mark. That is, its Simonian author intended it to be understood only by his fellow Simonians. Its “mysteries” (Mk 4:11) were deliberately hidden from those “outside” (Mk 3:32 & 4:11). The key needed for understanding the text was Simonian belief, and that was disclosed only to the initiated. There was indeed an identification secret in Proto-Mark, but I doubt it was the so-called messianic secret. The correct answer to “Who then is this whom even the wind and seas obey?” (Mk 4:41) is Simon Megas. Only later, after the Bar Kochba revolt, or whenever the proto-orthodox became aware of the text and decided to adopt and sanitize it, was the necessary changeover to a messianic secret made.
The Pauline Letters
In regard to the Pauline letters: I still see Paul as the author of some original bare-bones letters. The bulk of the letters as we now have them, however, was likely composed by a circle of Saturnilians, a community founded by the Simonian Saturnilus of Antioch. It may even be that much of the material originally had Simon in view, and that Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, Lord Jesus, and so on were substituted when it was decided to pass the whole off as Pauline. Who was it who combined Paul’s letters with the Simonian material and formed them into a collection? My guess would be Cerdo of Syria “originating from the Simonians” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1,27,1) He is from the neighborhood of Saturnilus and is the earliest figure named in connection with the letter collection. And he it would be who likely brought them to Rome shortly after the end of the Bar Kochba revolt. “Cerdo, who preceded Marcion, also joined the Roman church and declared his faith publicly, in the time of Hyginus… then he went on in this way: at one time teaching in secret, at another declaring his faith publicly, at another he was convicted of mischievous teaching and expelled from the Christian community” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 4,11).
Was a crucifixion in heaven possible? conceivable?
But the following, again, is the cause of men’s dying: A certain virgin, fair in person, and beautiful in attire, and of most persuasive address, aims at making spoil of the princes [= archons] that have been borne up and crucified on the firmament by the living Spirit . . . .
Acta Archelai 8, describing a third century Manichean answer to the question, Why death?
What gave rise to Gnosticism from within Judaism?
Birger Pearson’s answer is very similar to what I think led to the emergence of Christianity from within Judaism. If gnostics fell away from Judaism by rejecting its god as a blind and ignorant Demiurge who gave a law that enslaved its followers to the ways of the flesh, Christianity offered a positive response to similar circumstances, a new covenant grounded in an allegorical revision of the old rather than an outright rejection of it:
One can hear in this text echoes of existential despair arising in circles of the people of the Covenant faced with a crisis of history, with the apparent failure of the God of history: “What kind of a God is this?”‘ (48,1); “These things he has said (and done, failed to do) to those who believe in him and serve him!” (48,13ff.). Such expressions of existential anguish are not without parallels in our own generation of history “after Auschwitz.”
Historical existence in an age of historical crisis, for a people whose God after all had been the Lord of history and of the created order, can, and apparently did, bring about a new and revolutionary look at the old traditions and ‘assumptions, a “new hermeneutic”. This new hermeneutic arising in an age of historical crisis and religiocultural syncretism is the primary element in the origin of Gnosticism.
Pearson, Birger. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1990. p. 51
How to explain Paul’s letters if we see signs of Philo and Seneca in them?
Hi. I’m back again, for better or for worse. Over the past few weeks I have immersed myself in reading but have finally come to a point where I need to pause and take stock. The book I have to blame for pulling me up and forcing me to stop and think afresh is König Herodes : der Mann und sein Werk by Abraham Schalit — published way back in 1969. (I don’t read German but thanks to new technologies I made short work of translating it.) Although Schalit does not address Christian origins his study of King Herod did open up for me a fresh historical perspective through which to re-interpret so much of the diverse material that makes up our earliest Christian sources.
I don’t read German, as I said, and I was of all possible ways alerted to König Herodes through my reading of an essay in another foreign language, modern Hebrew. This one was made available through an international library supply service supplemented by my text-reading and translation technologies: Levine, Israel L. “Magemoth Meshihioth Be-Sof Yemei Ha-Bayith Ha-Sheni (= Messianic Trends at the End of the Second Temple Period).” Messianism and Eschatology, edited by Zvi Baras, Zalman Shazar Centre for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1983, pp. 135–52. Now that chapter is going to have to be converted into a new post here soon since I was slightly nonplussed to see it supporting another view I have expressed here, the view that there is little evidence to support the widespread “fact” that the Jewish rebellion of 66-70 CE against Rome was motivated by messianic hopes. That’s for another time.
The key idea in Schalit’s King Herod that has sent my mind into re-examining the question of Christian origins is the thesis that the Roman imperial idea, the ideology, if you will, propagated from the time of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, met with two responses among the Judeans:
Judeans who identified themselves as necessarily separate from gentiles (think of circumcision, sabbaths, marriage restrictions) had nothing in common with the idea of a world united by the values and laws of Rome;
Judeans who opposed the exclusivity of some of their brethren and were wide open to the idea of being a full part of a common humanity.
As for the first kind, the separatists, we see their views set out in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Recall those stories of “men of God” tearing out — not their own hair, but the hair of those Judeans who married gentiles. Those were the lucky ones: Phineas plunged a spear through one racially mixed couple. Daniel refused to pray even in secret when threatened with being thrown into the lion’s den. Sabbath-keepers chose to die rather than protect themselves from an enemy army on the sabbath day. Most of us are familiar enough with the relevant stories from the Old Testament and related books.
That familiarity can perhaps cloud the full significance of a quite different view of God and humanity that is expressed in other places in the same canon. Think of the original authors and readers of stories of Ruth, of Jonah, of Job. Ruth, a gentile, married an Israelite and became the great-grandmother of King David. Job is “from the land of Uz” and he speaks to a God who in the narrative appears to have no particular relation to Israel about a question of justice common to all humanity. Jonah has to learn a lesson about God’s acceptance of gentiles who repent and become righteous without any notion of the Mosaic laws. Several Psalms, Ecclesiastes supposedly by Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach further present a universalist view of God and the human experience.
Surely we have two opposing viewpoints among these Jewish authors. The second view could well find itself at home among Hellenistic writings of philosophers. The significance of that word “Hellenistic” deserves to be pondered at this point. It refers to the cultural world that belonged to the mixing of Greek and barbarian in the wake of Alexander’s conquests of the Persian empire. The Stoic philosophy that believed in the unity of humanity could trace its roots back to Alexander’s companion Aristotle. The ideas of some Jews or Judeans were evidently at home in such a world. Others were not.
What struck me so strongly about Schalit’s Herod was that those same two viewpoints among Judeans were very much alive and uncomfortable with each other in the time we associate with Christian origins. Herod (ca 37 to 4 or 1 BCE) was an Idumean who sought acceptance as a Jew. He was also a client king of Rome who owed his life and kingship to Augustus. Though King of Judea he embraced wholeheartedly the imperial program of Augustus. At this point, we need to backtrack just a little. . .
Augustus
Augustus came to power as the final victor after a half-century of civil wars. His imperial propaganda machine went into overdrive. Augustus was the “saviour” and benefactor of “the inhabited earth”. Roman imperial rule was to become synonymous with “the good news” (it was a term of imperial propaganda) of peace, a restoration of “good old fashioned morality”, the spread of humanizing culture as expressed in the arts and literature and philosophy, and rule of law and justice for all. The Roman imperial idea took Alexander’s inheritance of uniting peoples under one divinely chosen ruler and magnified it beyond anything achieved by other successors. The Seleucid empire, for example, essentially took a “hands-off” approach towards subject peoples and let them do their own thing. Antiochus Epiphanes ran into trouble with religious zealots in Judea because he broke that tradition there.
You can probably see where I am headed with these ideas. Apologists have long posited that God prepared the world for Christianity in a way not very different from what I am proposing here — only without God and forethought.
Augustus could trust Herod to embody the full idea of the Roman civilizing mission and Herod did not fail him. Herod’s court attracted artists and intellectuals from other lands; his building program emulated the achievements in Rome itself; like Roman emperors he was the benefactor of the poor; he settled non-Jews in his Judean kingdom. But he could not have himself proclaimed as a god or even a demi-god as was the usual status of such leaders in his part of the world. He could, however, have his scribes fiddle with the genealogical records to show he was a descendant of David and hence — especially given his great accomplishments as king, expanding the borders and undertaking monumental building projects — potentially the promised Davidic Messiah. Unfortunately Herod had too many other faults to persuade enough others to that opinion. But even a powerful personality like Herod could not exist in an environment totally alien to everything he stood for.
The crucial point, it seems to me, is that Herod’s “Judaism” was in synch with that open or universalist idea we encounter in the books of Ruth, Jonah, Job, Ecclesiastes, Sirach etc. Herod failed to win the approval of the “legalists” and I cannot help but wonder if his failure was felt by others who were on his side with the more open kind of Second Temple religion.
There were evidently a significant number of Judeans who opposed their isolationist kin. And as evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls there were equally many Judeans who called down the judgment of God upon those of their kin who compromised with the Laws of Moses.
Now look again at our earliest Christian texts. Do not the gospels, certainly the Synoptic ones of Matthew, Mark and Luke, teach the highest values of the Greco-Roman culture? In case you’ve forgotten, have another quick look over
Recall the Gospel of Matthew opening up its account of Jesus by reminding readers of the sinners and gentiles — Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba — in Jesus’s ancestry.
Even recall the Roman imperial motifs in the gospels: The Gospel of Mark beginning with a line from Augustus’s propaganda about the “good news”; the imitation of emperor Vespasian’s miracles of healing the blind and lame; the inversion of the Roman Triumphal procession as Jesus is led to his crucifixion:
Recall, also, some of the earliest archaeological evidence we have for Christianity and how serene and “at home” it looks as if its creators were well-integrated members of society.
I have some sympathy for those who have attempted to locate Christianity’s origins in a Roman imperial conspiracy. But there is no evidence for such a hypothesis. There is even precious little evidence for the proposed motive behind such a conspiracy: a desire to pacify an unusually rebellious people by seducing the Jews into a religion of submission to Roman authority. The Jews were not particularly rebellious in comparison with others who chaffed at Roman rule. No, surely the initiative for a religious idea that did away with the exclusivist identity of many Judeans would have arisen among other Judeans of a different persuasion, of those who felt some embarrassment with their ethnic relatives.
How much more impetus must there have been for Judeans of that universalist mindset to present an “ecumenical” front to their pagan neighbours in the wake of the calamitous results of the Jewish wars in 70 and 135 CE.
Then recall how Jesus himself in the gospels is delineated as a fulfillment of all that can be described as the epitome of “Judaism”. I posted not long ago a lengthy series on one particular study that delves into the details of how the gospel Jesus is created out of so many texts and motifs of the Jewish Scriptures and Messianic viewpoints: Jésus-Christ, sublime figure de papier / Nanine Charbonnel
If some Judeans of the day did indeed attempt to sideline their “legalistic” family members by producing texts that unambiguously set the universalism of Ruth, Jonah, Sirach, and the rest front and foremost, they could not have done better than make a new successor to Moses, another Joshua, their focus. One might almost say that if Jesus had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him.
There is much more to add. One must, of course, account for persecutions and sectarianism in early Christian history. But the above is for now enough to set down the basis of initial thoughts on what might have led to the creation of Christianity.
There remains only one explanation: Paul believed in such a celestial being, in a divine Christ, before he believed in Jesus. — Paul, by William Wrede
I found this little book of particular interest not because of the ideas themselves but because of who wrote them. William Wrede is best known for his study of the Gospel of Mark, The Messianic Secret. I was unaware until recently that he also wrote a book about Paul. It’s available on archive.org — http://archive.org/details/Paulpaulus The link is to the English language translation. (It’s not a long book: 180 somewhat small pages only a light population of words on each.)
Wrede cannot accept that Paul himself arrived at all of his concepts and theology relating to Christ simply from meditating on what he knew of the historical Jesus. Even the ethics that Paul teaches derive from Judaism and not from Jesus, he explains. From the reports of the life of a man who existed only a few years earlier it is inconceivable, Wrede argues, that Paul could have arrived at his vision of the celestial pre-existence of the risen Jesus or so magnified the stories of the mortal man that he imagined him as a “superhuman Son of God”.
There remains only one explanation: Paul believed in such a celestial being, in a divine Christ, before he believed in Jesus. Until he became a Christian it seemed to him sacrilege to call Jesus the Christ. This man did not answer at all to the divine figure of Christ which Paul bore within him. But in the moment of conversion, when Jesus appeared before him in the shining glory of his risen existence, Paul identified him with his own Christ, and straightway transferred to Jesus all the conceptions which he already had of the celestial being—for instance, that he had existed before the world and had taken part in its creation. The man Jesus was really, therefore, only the wearer of all those mighty predicates which had already been established; but the bliss of the apostle lay in this, that he could now regard what had hitherto been a mere hope, as a tangible reality which had comeinto the world. Here again we see the great importance ofthe fact that he had not known Jesus. Intimate disciples could not so readily believe that the man with whom they had sat at table in Capernaum, or sailed on the Lake of Galilee, was the creator of the world. But in Paul’s way there was no such obstacle.
If Paul was acquainted with this divine Christ before his conversion, there must have beencircles in Judaism which held the same belief. But can such a belief in this field be really authenticated? So much is certain, that Jewish apocalyptic books are really cognizant of a Messiah, who before his appearance lives in heaven, and is more exalted than the angels themselves. This is a datum of the highest importance. Whether, however, every feature in the Pauline Christ can be explained by means of the extant apocalyptic accounts of Messiah, is a question we shall not here attempt to decide. Investigation is only now beginning to master the problem aright. The immediate point of supreme importance is the perception of this fact: that the Pauline Christ cannot be understood unless we assume that Paul, while still a Pharisee, possessed a number of definite conceptions concerning a divine being, which were afterwards transferred to the historical Jesus?
So how did it all happen in Wrede’s view?
First comes the idea of Christ. On this the whole conception of the redemption rests. For the death and resurrection of Christ are not regarded as the experiences of a man, but as the experiences of an incarnate divine being. It is upon this that their universal, world-redeemed significance depends. The key to the problem, in itself so enigmatical, why the Son of God became a man, was found by Paul in this twofold event. The idea of the redemption itself was again determined by the conceptions which the apostle brought with him. He expected his Christ to vanquish the evil powers of the world, including the demons, and to inaugurate a new condition of things. The accomplishmentof this task was found, where but in the two events of salvation? How Paul came to find it there must remain an open question. Probably these thoughts had long been definitely formulated in his mind before he was led by polemical exigencies to mint the doctrine of justification.
Not that Wrede was allowed the last word. As we would expect, others disagreed. For a two-part critical engagement with Wrede’s ideas see
Here is the final post discussing the introductory chapter of Rivka Nir’s The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist where she sets out her case for the John the Baptist passage in the writings of Josephus being a forgery.
For readers with so little time, the TL;DR version:
The baptism of John that is described in Josephus’s Antiquities is shown to be significantly different from Jewish Pharisaic baptism (Pharisee baptism was for ritual cleansing of the body independently from any call for moral purity; the Josephan John’s baptism was for bodily purity but required moral purity as a precondition);
It is also significantly different from the baptism attributed to the Essenes (and the hermit Bannus) by Josephus — for the same type of reason it was different from the Pharisee baptism);
That baptism of John appears instead to be very like baptism we read about among Jewish sectarians as in the Qumran scrolls and the Fourth Sibylline Oracle (moral purity was a precondition for the bodily sanctification effected by baptism);
That same type of baptism we read about in the Dead Sea scrolls and Fourth Sibylline continues to appear among early Jewish Christian sects as witnessed in the Pseudo-Clementines (moral purity a precondition for bodily purification) — the early Christian baptism appears therefore to have emerged from the Jewish sectarians;
The Josephan passage is polemical, apparently attacking what we associate with the orthodox Christian Pauline baptism that was a ritual performed to effect the forgiveness of sins and new spiritual life. (The Pauline and gospel baptism — especially as in the Gospel of Matthew — has nothing to do with physical purity.)
Origen appears to have not known of the John the Baptist passage in Josephus but we first read of awareness of it in Eusebius. We can conclude that the passage was inserted by a member of one of the early Jewish-Christian sects late third or early fourth century.
-o-
To refresh your memory, here again is the Josephan passage with the description of his baptism highlighted:
But to some of the Jews the destruction of Herod’s army seemed to be divine vengeance, and certainly a just vengeance, for his treatment of John, called the Baptist. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews who lead righteous lives and practice justice towards their fellows and piety toward God to join in baptism. In his view this was a necessary preliminary if baptism was to be acceptable to God. They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body implying that the soul was already thoroughly cleansed by righteousness. When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything that they did. Herod decided therefore that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising, than to wait for an upheaval, get involved in a difficult situation, and see his mistake. Though John, because of Herod’s suspicions, was brought in chains to Machaerus. the stronghold that we have previously mentioned, and there put to death, yet the verdict of the Jews was that the destruction visited upon Herod’s army was a vindication of John, since God saw fit to inflict such a blow on Herod (Ant. 18.116-19).
Not a Jewish Pharisaic Baptism
Nir sets aside any possibility that the account of John’s baptism as quoted above could be a typical Jewish Pharisee baptism of the time. The Pharisaic baptism, she explains, was entirely for the purpose of cleansing the body from ritual impurities — from contact with a corpse, skin diseases, bodily discharges, and such. It had nothing to do with moral purity or righteous behaviour. To achieve forgiveness for spiritual sins one had the sacrificial cult of the Temple.
What about those passages in the Prophets that speak about washing away sins? One of many examples:
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’ (Isaiah 1:16-20)
Some scholars have speculated that such passages were interpreted by some Jews of the day as the basis of a new baptismal ritual, one that requires repentance and spiritual purity before being immersed in water:
The similarity between the initial immersion of the Qumran community and John’s immersion probably stems from a common use of the book of Isaiah. Thus, the idea that one could be made clean in body only if one was pure in heart is probably to be derived from an interpretation of the book of Isaiah that was current among several groups in Second Temple Judaism. (Taylor, The Immerser, 88)
Such passages as these attest the early association between physical and moral purification, such as meets us in the Johannine baptism. And the ideas are close. Whoever invented the epigram “ Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” it is a fair summary of Pharisaic conceptions on the subject under discussion. (Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism, 41)
Entirely speculative and contrary to the extant evidence, replies Nir. Jewish Pharisaic baptism was for the purification of the body “from natural and unavoidable states of impurity, such as contact with a corpse”. It was not “conditioned on inner moral repentance or spiritual purification.” (p. 53) The passages in Isaiah, the Psalms, Ezekiel, Jeremiah speaking of being cleansed or washed from sins are figurative. (I would add that such passages, if interpreted as the basis of a baptism ritual, would be more likely to prompt a baptism that is contrary to the one described in Josephus’s Antiquities because those passages speak of “washing away sins”, being “cleansed from sin” — as if the washing itself performs the moral purification.)
Yes, Philo did compare physical impurity with moral impurity, but at the same time he recognized the place of sacrifices in moral cleansing.
What of the Essenes and that hermit mentioned by Josephus, Bannus?
Rivka Nir does not assume the Essenes are to be identified as the group responsible for the Qumran practices. Essenes as described by Josephus are kept separate from the group known through the Qumran scrolls.
In War 2.119-61, Josephus describes the immersions of the Essenes. They bathed in cold water (άπολούοντοα τό σώμα ψυχροΐς ϋδασιν) for ‘purification’ (εις άγνείαν), and would wash themselves before meals (129), following defecation (149), or contact with a Gentile or person of inferior status in the sect (150). About Bannus, an ascetic hermit who lived in the wilderness, Josephus recounts that he would wash himself frequently in cold water, by day and night, for purity’s sake (λουόμενον πρός άγνείαν, Life 2.11) (Nir, 55)
In response to a view found in some quarters that the Essenes’ baptism replaced the sacrificial cult, Nir explains at some length with multiple citations why such a view is based on a misreading of the original script of Josephus.
It has nothing to do with prior repentance or moral and spiritual purification: its administration requires no preaching or urging; it is no collective mass baptism and does not constitute an initiation rite into some elect group. Furthermore, the Essene and Bannus immersions were not a substitute for the sacrificial cult.
It may not be an “orthodox” Jewish baptism of the era, but Rivka Nir does see an overlap between the Josephan account and what we read in the Qumran scrolls. The key text is the Community Rule (dated by orthography and paleography between 100 BCE and 50 CE).
A Jewish-Christian Baptism
Rivka Nir’s argument is that Jewish sectarian baptisms stressing moral purity as a condition for ritually cleansing the body by immersion existed side by side early Jewish-Christian sects in opposition to the Christian baptism known to us from the Pauline tradition.
We start with the evidence for Jewish sects having a baptism in parallel with what we read about John’s in Josephus.
From https://www.textmanuscripts.com/blog/entry/11_16_deadseascrolls
Qumran scrolls
In the Community Rule 1QS 2.26-3.12 we see the same type of baptism that Josephus depicts for John — ritual cleansing of immersion into water is effective if one is first repentant:
And anyone who declines to enter the covenant of God in order to walk in the stubbornness of his heart shall not enter the community of his truth … For it is by the spirit of the true counsel of God that are atoned the paths of man, all his iniquities, so that he can look at the light of life. And it is by the holy spirit of the community , in its truth, that he is cleansed of all his iniquities. And by the spirit of uprightness and of humility his sin is atoned. And by the compliance of his soul with all the laws of God his flesh is cleansed by being sprinkled with cleansing waters and being made holy with the waters of repentance. May he, then, steady his steps in order to walk with perfection on all lhe paths of God, as he has decreed concerning the appointed times of his assemblies and not turn aside, either right or left nor infringe even one of all his words. In this way he will be admitted by means of atonement pleasing to God, and for him it will be the covenant of an everlasting Community.
Also as with the Josephan baptism of John we see the effect at a community level.
At Qumran, as in John’s baptism, justice (righteousness) was the means to purification and expiation of sins . . . And like John’s baptism, the Qumran baptism appears to have been one of the conditions for admission to the congregation: and it was similarly a collective baptism and a substitute for the sacrificial cult. (Nir, 60)
The Mandaeans live on the banks of the Tigris [see Ancient Whither for an update since Iraq war]. They must live near running water where they can practise their continual baptismal rites. When they were first discovered by [Roman Catholic missionaries] in the 17th century, and it was found that they were neither Catholics nor Protestants but that they made much of baptism and honoured John the Baptist, they were called Christians of St John, in the belief that they were a direct survival of the Baptist’s disciples [such as are mentioned in Acts 18:25ff].
(F. C. Burkitt, 1928, [1931])
Last month I posted links to recent works from a symposium on John the Baptist and expressed appreciation for a reminder from James McGrath that it might be worth taking a closer look at the Mandaean sources when searching for glimpses of “the historical John the Baptist”. This post shares what I have found of interest in my very early follow up reading.
Disclaimers:
What follows draws upon what only a handful of scholars have written about the relationship between John the Baptist and the Mandaeans. The views are debated.
I have not read the Mandaean literature, not even in translation, but am relying upon what scholars have written about that literature in summary.
What I write today may be (and probably will be) different from what I write another day.
Shimon Gibson’s The Cave of John the Baptist (New York: Doubleday, 2004) is much too facile in its summary dismissal of the Mandaeans as being of any possible relevance to the historical John (325-26). The idea that John was imported into Mandaeism in Islamic times is untenable.
(Buckley, Turning the Tables on Jesus, 296 – my emphasis)
Before I set out Buckley’s case let’s look at the one she protests is “too facile a dismissal” of a Mandaean association with a historical John the Baptist. Shimon Gibson asks and addresses the key question in The Cave of John the Baptist:
Could these Mandaeans be the descendants of the original followers of John the Baptist? And would it be possible to reconstruct the writings of the first followers of John based on an analysis of Mandaean literature?
Unfortunately, the answer is a negative one: they are definitely not the descendants of the original baptists. The name of the sect is derived from the Aramaic Manda d’Haiye, which means ‘the knowledge of life’. . . .
The excitement of early researchers suggesting possible links between disciples of John, who had in some fashion preserved his heritage, and Mandaean religious writings was quickly dashed by the scholar F. C. Burkitt who was able to show that there is nothing in the Mandaean literature that could actually predate the fifth to seventh centuries AD. Moreover, those Mandaean writings pertaining specifically to John the Baptist must reflect adaptations from the Gospels and are not alternative writings on John. . . . Some of the Mandaean writings are notably hostile towards Christianity and Jesus, who is described as the ‘prophet of lies’, as well as towards Judaism [note 10.81].
And so our journey begins. Next stop, some of the comments of F. C. Burkitt:
And a very little investigation makes it quite clear that the Mandaean hostility to Eshu mshiha[=Jesus Christ] is hostility to the fully developed post-Nicene Church. In several places ‘Christ’ is actually called ‘the Byzantine’ (Rumaia), and further we are told that the disciples of this Christ become ‘Christians’, and turn into monks and nuns who have no children and who keep fasts and never wear white clothes like the Mandaeans . . . . In a word, it is not the Christ of the Gospels, but the Christ of fully developed ecclesiastical organization and policy to which Mandaism is so hostile.
(Bukitt, 1928, 229)
An example of Manichean influence: The Mandaeans, then, rejected the Christ of the Catholic Church, born of a woman and crucified, but they accepted the Stranger who appeared in Jerusalem in the days of Pilate, who healed the sick and taught the true and life-giving doctrine, and who ascended in due course when his work was done to his own place in the world of Light. This Personage is called the Stranger, but he is no stranger to the modern student of Christian antiquity : it is clearly the Manichaean Jesus, a personage adopted by Mani from the Jesus of Marcion. In other words it is no new controversial figment of the Mandaeans. (Burkitt, 1928, 231)
What did the contemporary Churchmen say of the Mandaeans? Burkitt in Church and Gnosis:
We have now . . . an account of the Mandaeans by an ancient Mesopotamian writer, writing in the year A.D. 792. He tells us that their founder was a certain Ado, a mendicant, who came from Adiabene, i.e. from the district just north of Mosul. He further tells us that his teaching was derived from the Marcionites, from the Manichaeans . . .
There is no reason to reject the evidence of Theodore bar Konai. . . . It is important to consider how much his evidence comes to. There is a good deal in the Mandaean literature that recalls Marcionite and Manichaean teaching . . . .
(Burkitt, 1931, 102)
And that other cited reference in Gibson’s The Cave of John the Baptist?
The numerous writings of the Mandæans bear witness to the continued existence of the disciples of John for several centuries and perhaps the baptist sect in southern Babylonia at the present time, is the direct heir of John’s work in the days of the Herods. That is asserted nowadays by many weighty persons, and anyone who regards the Mandaean literature as sources can draw an attractive picture of the spiritual power which proceeded from John, and which influenced the religion of Judaism, and especially that of Jesus and His disciples. John’s circle then appears as the nursery of an early gnosis, which united Babylonian, Persian, and Syrian elements in a many-coloured mixture on a Jewish background, and grouped the whole round the ancient Iranian mythology of the first man, that redeemer who descended from heaven in order to awaken the soul bound and asleep in the material fetters of this world, and to open up for it the way to heaven.
This is very intriguing, and gives quite unthought-of perspectives, leading possibly to a new understanding of primitive Christianity; nevertheless we must put it firmly and entirely on one side. It can be shown that the Mandaean literature consists of various strata which come from widely different periods. And the latest of these strata, belonging to the Islamic era—i.e. at earliest, in the seventh century—are those which preserve the notices of John the Baptist; they are modelled on the basis of the gospel records, and distorted till they are grotesque. In the same way, the many sallies against Jesus and Christianity are quite clearly directed against the Byzantine church, and have not the least connection with primitive Christianity. The fragments of the earlier strata belong to a rank oriental gnosis which has run to seed, and have no bearing on the historical John and his disciples.
One detail in Lupieri’s work that Buckley disputes that attracted my attention concerned the Mandaean account of their ancestors having migrated from Palestine to Mesopotamia. I was unaware of such an event being a literary trope that can be traced back to the flight of Aeneas with his family from Troy immediately prior to its destruction. That a narrative is a trope does not necessarily mean it cannot also be a historical event, but if a literary-ideological pattern alone offers an explanation for a narrative and there is no independent supporting evidence for historicity then we have no need to go beyond the most economical explanation. Lupieri writes
From the point of view of a comparative analysis it means also that Mandaeanism has aligned itself with those religions that allocate a flight to their beginnings, following upon a persecution. In backgrounds linked to Judaism, this flight or original migration is characterized by a flight from Jerusalem before its destruction,53 which is then explained as a divine punishment.54The motif is well represented in Judaic traditions — for example, in the so-called “Second Book of Baruch” — but it is above all in Christian or post-Christian traditions where it has found the most ample scope for its development. Already in the Synoptic Gospels there is Jesus’ exhortation to flee to the hills, leaving Jerusalem and Judaea to their destiny of death,55 but most important of all was the legend of a flight of the entire Christian community in Jerusalem from the Judaic capital to Pella, a pagan city beyond the Jordan, shortly before the arrival of the Romans.
53. The event was so traumatic that it exercised a remarkable influence on the belief of all the religions arising from or in some way deriving from Judaism. The legends on the flights from Jerusalem are the religious parallel of the “secular” legends on the original flight-migration from a famous city of the past, afterward destroyed. This is the legend of Aeneas, of course, and of many analogies to be found here and there in virtually all cultures.
54. Also within Judaism, the only way to save the faith after the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem is to consider the catastrophe a punishment decided by one’s own God for sins committed; outside of Judaism, and in particular in Christianity and in Islam, it will be the God of each one (whether thought to be the same God as the Jews’ or not) who punished the Judaic sins.
