I have updated the post discussing Tim O’Neill’s Non Sequitur discussion of the Ascension of Isaiah.
Response #3: Non Sequitur’s Tim O’Neill presentation, The Ascension of Isaiah
2018-11-10
Updated post
Category: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
Jewish and Christian (OT and NT) works included here. Where should Philo and Pseudo-Philo be placed?
2018-10-29
Crucified on Earth? — What Did the “Ascension of Isaiah” Originally Say?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
This post is long and technical and only for those who are serious about what we can learn from the Ascension of Isaiah about early beliefs about Jesus. Richard Carrier and before him Earl Doherty drew upon scholarship about the different manuscripts to conclude that the original text had Jesus crucified in the lower heaven by demons. Roger Parvus, however, has argued a different interpretation from what we can glean from the different manuscript traditions (in particular the Ethiopic with its lengthy account beginning with Jesus’ birth to Mary and the second Latin, L2, with its “absurdly brief” account of Jesus dwelling with men, full stop) and I have copied his argument below. For the original posts in context see parts 7 and 8 at Roger Parvus: A Simonian Origin for Christianity.
As for my own views, I am withholding judgement until I collect a few more publications, in particular the ten articles or essays that Enrico Norelli published as “addendums” to his commentary: Norelli, Enrico. 1995. Ascensio Isaiae: commentarius. Turnhout: Brepols. (If anyone can help me gain access to those ten essays – I understand they are all in Italian – please please do contact me!)
What follows are copies of one small section of A Simonian Origin for Christianity, Part 7: The Source of Simon/Paul’s Gospel and the full text of A Simonian Origin for Christianity, Part 8: The Source of Simon/Paul’s Gospel (continued) — all written by Roger Parvus, not me.
–o0o–
Where?
But where, according to the Vision, did the hanging upon a tree occur? The Son will “descend into the world” (according to 9:13, in some versions of E) and “will be in the world” (per 10:7, in L2), but in no uncontroversial section of the extant text does it explicitly say which part of the world. I am inclined to think the location was understood to be on earth, not in its sublunary heaven. For one thing, 9:13 goes on to say that the Son “will become like you [Isaiah] in form, and they will think he is flesh and a man.” Earth is the home of men of flesh and so it is presumably there that the Son could expect to fool the rulers of the world into thinking he was a man.
I realize one could object that the Son’s persecutors appear to be the spirit rulers of the world and that their home was thought to be in the firmament. But it was also commonly accepted that their rule extended to earth and below it, and that they could exercise their power through human instruments. That is what we see right in the Martyrdom of Isaiah. Beliar kills Isaiah through King Manasseh:
Because of these visions, therefore, Beliar was angry with Isaiah, and he dwelt in the heart of Manasseh, and he cut Isaiah in half with a saw… Beliar did this to Isaiah through Belkira and through Manasseh, for Sammael was very angry with Isaiah from the days of Hezekiah, king of Judah, because of the things he had seen concerning the Beloved, and because of the destruction of Sammael which he had seen through the Lord, while Hezekiah his father was king. And he did as Satan wished. (Asc. Is. 5:1 & 15-16)
True, as already mentioned, parts of the Martyrdom were written after the Vision. But it is nevertheless still a quite early writing, likely dating to the end of the first century. It does not quote or allude to any New Testament writings. But it does clearly allude to the Vision and so may provide us with an indication of how that writing was understood by at least one first century Christian community. If the Martyrdom portrays the rulers of the world attacking Isaiah through a human instrument, this may very well have been the way the prophesied attack on the Son of the Vision was understood too, for he was to become like Isaiah in form (Asc. Is. 9:13) and trick them into thinking he was flesh and a man.
Another consideration that leads me to think the Son’s death in the Vision occurred on earth is the way Irenaeus speaks of Simon of Samaria. One would think, based on what Irenaeus says, that Simon knew the Vision of Isaiah and claimed to be the Son described in it. And in his account the location of the Son’s death is specified as Judaea:
For since the angels ruled the world ill because each one of them coveted the principal power for himself, he [Simon] had come to amend matters, and had descended, transformed and made like the powers and authorities and angels, so that among men he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and he seemed to suffer in Judaea, though he did not suffer (Against Heresies, 1, 23, my bolding).
In the Panarion of Epiphanius the reason why Simon made himself like the powers is spelled out. Simon is quoted as saying:
In each heaven I changed my form, in order that I might not be perceived by my angelic powers… (2, 2)
It seems to me that in the first passage Irenaeus is relaying an early claim made by Simon, and he is relaying it in the words that Simon or his followers used, not those of Irenaeus. The one “who suffered in Judaea” is not an expression that Irenaeus uses anywhere else to describe Christ. And the claims attributed to Simon in the passage look primitive.
- He doesn’t claim to be the Son who taught and preached in Galilee and Judaea;
- or who worked great signs and wonders among the Jews;
- or who gathered together a band of disciples.
- He doesn’t say he was the Christ who came to lay down his life to atone for the sins of mankind.
The limited claims attributed to him in the passage are reminiscent of the information about the Son in the Vision of Isaiah. Assuming that was Simon’s source, the place where the Son’s suffering was believed to have occurred is specified as Judaea.
–o0o–
Continue reading “Crucified on Earth? — What Did the “Ascension of Isaiah” Originally Say?”
2018-10-24
Response #3: Non Sequitur’s Tim O’Neill presentation, The Ascension of Isaiah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
This is why people like me when you read Carrier’s book you think, What the f*ck are you talking about? — Tim O’Neill
Tim spoke those words seconds before leading listeners to infer that he had checked the ancient text that Carrier was misrepresenting, the Ascension of Isaiah [Asc. Isa.].
Listeners were led to understand that only readers with superior knowledge of the texts would know Carrier was giving them false information.
So to prove that Carrier did not know what he was talking about, that the Asc. Isa. said the very opposite of what Carrier claimed, Tim quoted a passage from it.
What Tim failed to tell his viewers, and perhaps what Tim himself over time has forgotten, was that he was actually reading the same passage in the Asc. Isa. that Carrier himself quoted and discussed in his book. One did not have to turn from Carrier’s book to check the Asc. Isa. for oneself — as Tim clearly implies — but one simply had to read the so-called damning passage in Carrier’s text itself.
Tim’s claim that “only knowledgeable readers would know Carrier had no idea what he was talking about” makes no sense if Tim was alerted to the existence of the passage by Carrier himself. Tim did not draw upon his specialist background knowledge to expose Carrier’s “misinformation”. He simply read a translation of the very same text Carrier himself was quoting and discussing.
—o0o—
Tim O’Neill informs us that Richard Carrier “tries to get around the lack of evidence” for mythicism by (in part) appealing to the Ascension of Isaiah. He begins giving some explanatory background to this text:
I’m responding to the presentation between 53:00 – 59:00 of the Non Sequitur video.
Tim:
It’s a fairly obscure text and we’ve got it in fairly fragmentary form … an Ethiopian translation … in Slavonic … in Latin… So it’s quite hard for us to piece together exactly what it would have said originally, because originally it would have been written in Greek.
What Tim does not make clear to his listeners is that those translations, and even different manuscript versions in the same language, contain very different contents in places. It is not just that we have different translations of a lost Greek version that causes difficulties. The difficulties arise because of the significantly varying content in the different versions. That’s an important point that we will see Tim appears not to recognize. Tim continues:
But we can work out that it was probably written maybe in the late first century, possibly early second century. . . . That puts it around the same time the gospels were being written. . . . It’s a Christian text and it describes a vision supposedly seen by the prophet Isaiah . . . . But in this text, Isaiah sees a vision, and he sees Jesus descending from the upper heavens, from the seventh heaven, down through the various heavens, and sees him crucified, and then sees him ascend when he rises from the dead back up through the heavens. And the whole point of this text is that no-one knows that it’s Jesus because he takes on a different form as he moves through these different heavens, and then it’s not until he rises from the dead and that he ascends back up through the heavens that he reveals himself to be the messiah and in some sense divine. And so the whole point of the text is that they thought they killed him but he fooled them and as he ascends back up through the seven heavens to take his place with the throne of God again he demonstrates who he really was.
If Carrier is right, then there’s your evidence
Now what Carrier argues is that this is the smoking gun. So he argues that this is a text that as I said did not exist, which is supposedly a text that has Jesus coming from the upper heavens, descending not to earth but to the lower heavens, so to what’s called the firmament, and he gets crucified there, not on earth, and then he rises from the dead there and then he ascends back into the heavens. He gets crucified there, by demons, not on earth by human beings.
Now if Carrier is right, then there’s your evidence. There’s the evidence that there actually was a belief in a Jesus who was purely celestial and not historical; purely heavenly, and died in the heavens, not earthly, and died on earth.
I do find myself wearying of this false dichotomy between celestial and historical. Literature is crammed full of nonhistorical figures who “lived” on earth. I suspect there are many times more earthly human form mythical figures in literature than there are celestial ones.
But there’s a problem. And the problem is that actually if you’re familiar with the text — this is why people like me when you read Carrier’s book you think, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ If you actually read Carrier’s book, he says, ‘Well, he descended just to the firmament and nowhere else, and he gets crucified on a tree that’s not a real tree, it’s a kind of celestial version of a tree, and he’s never depicted as going to earth.’
The only problem is that if you actually turn to the Ascension of Isaiah you read this:
And I saw one like the son of man (that’s Jesus, the messiah) dwelling with men and in the world and they did not recognize him.
It also says that an angel talks to Isaiah saying Jesus … taking on your form; in your form, human form.
So, the text does actually have Jesus coming to earth, it actually does have Jesus dwelling among men.
Tim could not be clearer. Tim is saying that we read one thing in Carrier’s book and quite something else if we turn to the Ascension of Isaiah itself. The clear suggestion is that Carrier does not know what the Asc. Isa. says and one will not know of the “incriminating” passage unless one “went to” the Asc. Isa.I itself. Contrary to this clear inference, Carrier in fact informs readers by quoting and discussing that same passage.
But what the farnarkling is he talking about?
Continue reading “Response #3: Non Sequitur’s Tim O’Neill presentation, The Ascension of Isaiah“
2018-09-22
New (revised) paper by Hermann Detering: Odes of Solomon and Basilides
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
For those without a background in German time to dig out the online translators:
„Amatoria carmina studiose discunt“ – Basilides und die Oden Salomos
2. revidierte Fassung mit Nachtrag [=revised version with supplement]
Dr. Hermann Detering – 22. September 2018
Abstract: Despite repeated attempts, to date scholarship has failed to identify the author of the Odes of Solomon. A scholion by Augustine may provide an overlooked clue and furnishes the basis for renewed investigation. This article argues that the “amatoria carmina” attributed to Basilides by Augustine are in fact the Odes of Solomon. This article examines a series of striking parallels between the theology off the Odes and the theology of Basilides as reported by the church fathers, and it proposes that the author of the “amatoria carmina” was none other than that early
2018-08-25
Origins of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas Tales
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, dated to around the mid to later second century, strings together a series of pious and often shocking stories of the childhood of Jesus. He strikes teachers dead, brings to life clay birds, petulantly raises the dead to redeem his honour, and so forth. I have read here and there how some of these stories are taken from those of pagan gods but have not yet come across anything that addresses their origins or similarities to other stories in depth.
I did recently come across this passage:
Usually, apparent analogies in Indian childhood stories about Krishna and Buddha have been adduced. Scholars have also opted for Egyptian roots interpreting episodes in IGT as allegories of the Horus myth.3
3. Conrady, Ludwig. “Das Thomasevangelium: Ein wissenschaftlicher kritischer Versuch.” TSK 76 (1903) 377–459.
I have since seen the same Conrady citation in a couple of other works, too.
I don’t read German but I have learned to extract information I want by various manuevers with online translators and dictionaries. So all I had to do was to find an online copy of Conrady’s article, no doubt sitting in the Internet Archive given that it goes back to 1903. And I was in luck. I found it there. But then my luck ran out. The text is that Gothic or Blackletter script. That means I cannot run it through any optical character recognition (OCR) tool available to me — which I need to be able to do in order to create a text that machine translators can read.
If anyone passing by does have a similar interest in what has been written about the origins of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and also has the means/equipment to be able to convert Gothic text into more “normal” text they can download the Conrady article that I have extracted from Internet Archive (archive.org) and enabled it to be shared via Google Drive: Conrady, Das Thomasevangelium. It’s a file of approx 3 MB. The article is nearly 90 pages.
Anyone who does manage to convert it to a normal text file is very welcome to send me a copy in the meantime.
Many thanks.
2018-07-20
The Tyrannies of Paul and Jesus’ Death in Modern Studies of Christian Origins
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Recall the Gospel of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus delivering a parable of the sheep and the goats at the last judgement: Matthew 25:31-41. Now that’s a parable with a message about good works and no hint of any need to believe in Jesus or the saving grace of Jesus’ death and resurrection. What are we to make of this parable? Here is Bart Ehrman’s view:
What is striking about this story, when considered in view of the criterion of dissimilarity, is that there is nothing distinctively Christian about it. That is to say, the future judgment is not based on belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection, but on doing good things for those in need. Later Christians—including most notably Paul (see, e.g., I Thess. 4:14-18), but also the writers of the Gospels—maintained that it was belief in Jesus that would bring a person into the coming Kingdom. But nothing in this passage even hints at the need to believe in Jesusper se . . . . It doesn’t seem likely that a Christian would formulate a passage in just this way. The conclusion? It probably goes back to Jesus.
(Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, p. 136. “Coincidentally” Ehrman has posted again on this same line of argument.)
Such an argument demonstrates the power of later “orthodox” Christianity to guide the vision and judgment of a modern scholar. Ehrman relies upon the writings of Paul’s “genuine letters” and the canonical gospels to define his view of what was Christian “tradition”, even how to define Christianity.
It is all too easy to overlook the noncanonical literature that also sheds light on earliest Christianity and at the same time to forget that Paul was a disruptive presence, a most controversial figure, among other early Christians — as his own letters testify.
Another early writing from around the same time as the Gospel of Matthew is the Didache. The Didache purports to be a message by “the twelve apostles to the nations” and it at not point indicates any interest in, or even knowledge of, Jesus as a crucified figure. The eucharist is an important instruction in the Didache but it is a thanksgiving meal without any suggestion of association with a sacrament commemorating the death of Jesus.
Other scholars have also noted Q’s absence of interest in a crucified Jesus.
So to make a judgement that a saying in a gospel is not “distinctively Christian” because it does not conform to Paul’s preaching is to limit one’s view of the landscape of earliest Christianity.
It may even be of interest to note how one scholar sees the relationship between the Gospel of Matthew and the Didache:
Garrow, Alan. 2013. The Gospel of Matthew’s Dependence on the Didache. NIPPOD edition. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 243
2018-03-14
The Other (Less Bloody) Side of Christian Origins
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Immersed as we are in the heritage of the Christianity of the Crucified Christ it is easy to forget (if we ever knew) that there was another side to Christian origins. Try to imagine what gave rise to a Christianity that knew nothing of the pierced, broken body and shed blood of Jesus as the way to salvation. Imagine their sacred writings said nothing at all about the members of the church being united by eating the body and drinking the blood of their saviour but instead enjoined the following:
Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks this way.
First, concerning the cup:
We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David Thy servant, which You madest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever..
And concerning the broken bread:
We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You madest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever..
But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, “Give not that which is holy to the dogs.”
But after you are filled, give thanks this way:
We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy name which You didst cause to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which You madest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever.
Thou, Master almighty, didst create all things for Thy name’s sake; You gavest food and drink to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to Thee; but to us You didst freely give spiritual food and drink and life eternal through Thy Servant.
Before all things we thank Thee that You are mighty; to Thee be the glory for ever.
Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in Thy love, and gather it from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom which Thou have prepared for it; for Thine is the power and the glory for ever.
Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the God (Son) of David!
If any one is holy, let him come; if any one is not so, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.
That is from the Didache (did-a-kee), or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, that some (Wikipedia says “most”) scholars today date to the first century. That’s possibly around the same time Paul was writing his letters and the time the first gospels were being written.
Compare the instructions for our more familiar branch of Christianity (1 Cor. 11:23-26 NASB): Continue reading “The Other (Less Bloody) Side of Christian Origins”
2017-09-04
Meet Paul and Enoch; both come from the same place
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
| Warning: If you are looking for snazzy gotcha type parallels that demonstrate a genetic relationship between the letters of Paul and Enoch you will be disappointed. This post is not about direct imitation or identification of “a source” for Paul’s letter. The first page addresses form parallels; to see the content and ideas click “read more” to see the remainder. |
Professor James M. Scott compares two letters, one by Enoch and the other by Paul, and identifies a few points in common that help us understand a little more clearly the thought-world of both figures. Of course our real interest is in understanding Paul since we tend to see him as having more relevance to our Christian heritage than the evidently mythical Enoch.
Scott’s essay, “A Comparison of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians with the Epistle of Enoch” is a chapter in The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought (2017, edited by Benjamin E. Reynolds and Loren T. Stuckenbruck). The central argument is that both Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 92-105) share the same apocalyptic motifs in a common letter format, and that it follows that Galatians belongs to the “apocalyptic tradition” as much as does the letter of Enoch. My interest is in the shared motifs per se, and what they indicate about Paul’s intellectual world.
1 Enoch is generally thought to be made up of five texts that have been stitched together, and one of these initially discrete texts consists of chapters 92 to 105, dated around 170 BCE. If you have sufficient time, patience and interest to read those chapters and have just a vague recollection of Paul’s letter to the Galatians you will wonder how on earth anyone could see the slightest resemblance between the two. Enoch’s letter is full of Old Testament style pronouncements of prophetic woes and doom on sinners while Paul’s letter is about struggles with Judaizers coming along to his converts in Galatia and undermining the pristine faith by telling them they had to be circumcised and follow a few other Jewish observances, too. But a glance at James Scott’s publishing history shows he has spent a lot of time studying all of this sort of literature so let’s continue in faith.
First, look at some “technical” similarities to see that, despite major differences, we are comparing a works of the same genre, a letter form. (The text follows Scott’s chapter closely, though of course the table format is mine.)
| Genre | ||
| Self conscious reference to his own writing as a letter | Galatians 6:11 See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! | 1 Enoch 93:2 these things I say to you and I make known to you, my sons, I myself, Enoch.
1 Enoch 100:6 And the wise among men will see the truth, and the sons of the earth will contemplate these words of this epistle |
| Author | ||
| The superscription of both letters names the author of the letter, and then, adds an impressive description of the author: Paul is an “apostle” sent by God; Enoch is a “scribe” who writes “righteousness and truth”.
Both Paul and Enoch present themselves as authors who communicate God’s will. |
Galatians 1:1 Paul …. an apostle—[sent] not from men nor by man but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead ” This further description of who Paul is establishes from the outset the divine origin and agency of his apostolic commission, and thus, underscores his special authority. | 1 Enoch 92:1 Written by Enoch the scribe (this complete sign of wisdom) (who is) praised by all people and a leader of the whole earth. |
| Addressees | ||
| Both Galatians and the Epistle of Enoch are circular letters meant to be passed along to multiple readers in more than one location over the course of time. Enoch’s letter purports to be written in the seventh generation after Adam to be read by Jews and gentiles in the last days. | Galatians 1:2 to the churches of Galatia
|
1 Enoch 92:1 to all my sons who dwell on the earth, and to the last generations who will observe truth and peace.
|
| Both Galatians and the Epistle of Enoch address their respective readers throughout in the second person plural. | Galatians 4:19 My dear children | 1 Enoch 92-105 Enoch refers to his addressees as “my children“ |
| Salutation | ||
| In Galatians, the salutation is clearly identifiable.
The situation in the Epistle of Enoch is more complicated. The typical salutation or greeting is missing in 1 Enoch 92:1. Nevertheless, as Nickelsburg suggests, “it may be hinted at in the word ‘peace'” which comes at the end of the adscription in the same verse. |
Galatians 1:3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ
|
1 Enoch 92:1 to all my sons who dwell on the earth, and to the last generations who will observe truth and peace.
Nickelsburg also takes the final reference to “peace” in the Epistle (“And you will have peace,” 105:2) as “an epistolary conclusion.” |
| “Peace” is referenced at the beginning and ending both letters | Galatians 1:3; 6:16 | 1 Enoch 92:1; 105:2 |
| Very last word of both letters is “Amen” | Galatians 6:18 | 1 Enoch 105:2 |
Okay, that’s done with the “formalities”. We may say that technically we are comparing apples and apples. James Scott’s next section is more interesting for an insight into how much we read in Paul’s letter was part of the wider thought-world of the day and not “just Paul”. Scott turns to their common “apocalyptic elements”. Continue reading “Meet Paul and Enoch; both come from the same place”
2017-02-08
Divine Revelation Not Limited to the “Bible Canon”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Don’t think of books. Think of open databases, literary projects, both earthly and heavenly archives. Ben Sirach, for example, becomes a generative character or figurehead from whom writings flowed like canals from a river. That’s how Eva Mroczek, Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, says we should understand the way ancient Jewish scribes (Second Temple and gospel era) thought of their writings and their literary environment.
Revelation originated from the heavens and could never be grasped in all its fulness by any mortal; there was always room for more understanding and knowledge of the spiritual. There were writings that only the chosen few saints had ever seen, writings preserved in the heavens. Enoch was secreted away and continues to write until the time of the end.
A sacred writing could never be bound complete between two covers or within a single earthly scroll. There would always be room for more revelation. Of the making of books there will be no end.
An “author”, at least the inspired author, a heavenly figure perhaps, who sowed the poetry of praise or the sayings of wisdom in a mortal scribe, might spawn many varied works over time. Hence “David” could author countless psalms, only a small sample of which were ever captured for our canon. Other Davidic psalms were extant, some were composed relatively recently. They were all in a figurative sense authored by David since psalms were attributed to him as a way of fleshing out further the character and life of David. It was not so much that David’s name was attached to a psalm to impute authority to the psalm; no, it was rather that David was associated with the psalm to enrich the narrative about David, to transform David in a way to enable him to speak to a new audience. This world of attribution was not unique to the Judea’s:
In fact, such a sense of character-driven literary creativity is attested elsewhere in the ancient world, in some theories about Homer from the Hellenistic period, where the character becomes the affective centre of the poetic creation. Poetry . . . is generated from infatuation with one of the characters, who is prior to, and drives the creation of, the narrative. (p. 56)
So in the case of the Psalms of David. . .
Making psalms “Davidic” is not precisely attribution, as little evidence exists for a claim that David personally composed the psalms, but dramatisation and historicization. But this process of dramatising and historicising psalms is motivated not by the texts of the psalms themselves, but by an interest in the character who comes to animate the texts. It is the desire to reflect and elaborate on particularly compelling aspects of David’s character — David the sufferer, the penitent, the pursued — that is behind the creation of the expanded headings. Put simply, dramatising the psalms in his voice gives this David more things to say. (p. 63)
We are not only talking about the Psalms of David and the different canonical counts of these but of the wider literary world — of writings attributed to Enoch, to Solomon, to Moses, to Abraham, to Zephaniah . . . . .
In many Second Temple texts, we see an awareness of a literary world that is ancient, varied, and not fully accessible. In texts like Enoch, Jubilees, and many traditions about the patriarchs from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, we see the notion of a long history of revealed writing stretching back long before Sinai, and forming part of the stories about Israel’s ancient ancestors. We see scribes recognizing the authority and divine origin of texts like the Enoch literature, Jubilees, and these patriarchal traditions, which present themselves not as derivative of or dependent on material we now call biblical, but indeed, prior to it. And while specific texts that have come down to us, like the Enochic material, are recognizably used in other literature, early Jewish texts also mention many writings that we cannot identify with any extant texts — writings that may have been lost, like the book of Noah, or were always only imagined, like the heavenly Book of Life.11 (pp. 116f.)
The authors of the scriptures (like Jubilees and the Temple Scroll) that not part of our canonical Bible did not appear to view their work as attempts to fill in the gaps or clarify and explain the canonical texts. These non-biblical texts do not present themselves as subordinate to the Pentateuch or Prophets, buy as new revelations from a divine source. Continue reading “Divine Revelation Not Limited to the “Bible Canon””
2017-01-31
How sayings came to be attributed to . . . David, Ben Sirach, Jesus
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Continuing to read Eva Mroczek’s The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity and have come across another interesting snippet with relevance to the way the gospel-Jesus tradition took shape.
An intriguing feature found in the writings of the earliest Christian “fathers” is that frequently sayings that we know from the gospel are used by these early authors without any attribution to Jesus or the gospels. Why is that?
Well, Eva Mroczek’s discussion of the Ben Sirach sayings offers a very similar scenario along with a very plausible explanation. Ben Sirach, we have learned, is more than a flesh and blood author sitting in a room writing wise sayings. He is in fact “a representative of a tradition of wise sayings.” So a teacher who somehow developed or learned of a fresh saying that was particularly apt for the needs of his pupils might feel it notable enough to be added to an anthology of Ben Sirach sayings. There was no such thing as a single edition of a closed book of sayings by Ben Sirach. Ben Sirach served as a representative figure of a source of wisdom that flowed like channels and rivers, that grew like fruit on a tree, and so forth. Ben Sirach’s wisdom was not static but always open to new insights and understanding through the wisdom that no one person would ever be able to grasp in all its fullness.
One of many interesting passages explaining one effect of this king of fluid literary culture:
Just as David was considered not so much as the author of a book of Psalms but as an exemplary liturgist, linked to a more amorphous tradition of liturgical material, Ben Sira was considered not only as the author of a concrete and particular book but more generally as a representative of a tradition of wise sayings.
Because of this character’s reputation, new sayings “accumulated around and circulated in his name,” some of which made it into the “popular anthologies.”94
Other sayings found in Ben Sira circulated without attribution to this figure, as part of a large “amorphous body of sayings” that circulated “atomistically and anonymously.”95
Labendz summarizes this complexity: “The contents of Ben Sira were spread within the rabbinic community. They were preserved and remembered with varying degrees of accuracy, and sometimes they were conflated with other wisdom sources. The title of the work was attached to a variety of wisdom traditions, only some of which were actually in Ben Sira.”96
(p. 112, my formatting)
Gospel revisions — as we see from Mark to Matthew and Luke, and Mark to John — with variants in sayings attributed to Jesus, sayings in Fathers that appear to come from non-gospel sources yet are found in the gospels, and the anonymity of the gospels in their original form . . . . So many simplistic explanations have been popularized through “faith-based scholarship” or apologetic writings, but more enlightening explanations come from a growing understanding of the literary culture of the Second Temple era and century following.
2017-01-30
The Teacher of Righteousness and Understanding the Authority of Fiction
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
One of the books I am currently reading is The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity by Eva Mroczek and I was intrigued by her discussion of how the scholarly community have debated the historicity of the “Teacher” who speaks powerfully of his experiences in the Thanksgiving Hymns of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many scholars have identified the Teacher of Righteousness (otherwise known from the Damascus Document) as the author of these hymns. Notice, for instance, the introduction to the Thanksgiving Hymns by Wise, Abegg and Cook:
The intensely personal tone of the songs known commonly as Thanksgiving Hymns stands in sharp contrast with the rest of the scrolls. The author speaks of himself in the first person and recounts an agonizing history of persecution at the hands of those opposed to his ministry. In addition, the writer describes having received an empowering spirit granting him special insight into God’s will (1QH3 4:38), opening his ears to wonderful divine mysteries (9:23), using him as a channel of God’s works (12:9), and fashioning him as a mouthpiece for God’s words (16:17). Indeed, in col. 26, he claims that no one compares with him, because his office is among the heavenly beings. These are bold affirmations for any leader, reminiscent of various messianic claimants of both ancient and more recent history.
The unique personal presentation of the work and the self-conscious divine mission of the author have led many researchers to conclude that the psalms were written by the Teacher of Righteousness himself. Some students have attempted a more refined analysis in order to isolate “true” Teacher psalms at the center of the collection (cols. 10—16 according to one, 13—16 in the eyes of another; see Hymns 10—13,15—20,23), noting that the themes of personal distress and affliction as well as the claim of being the recipient or mediator of revelation are especially strong here. Only one thing is sure: the debate will continue.
Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr, and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, 2005. pp. 170-71.
Eva Mroczek is writing about literary/philosophical character of Ben Sirach and finds a parallel with the Teacher of Righteousness who is sometimes said to be the author of the Thanksgiving Hymns among the Dead Sea Scrolls. From pages 98 and 99:
Another example of such a rhetorical strategy is the so-called Teacher Hymns in cols. 10-17 of the Hodayot or Thanksgiving Hymns from Qumran. These first-person compositions have been read by some Qumran scholars32 as the ipsissima verba of the Teacher of Righteousness, an enigmatic figure who appears as a founder and leader of the sectarian community in some Qumran texts. The hymns, then, were imagined to be the creative autobiographical work of this putative individual, and were mined for information about this mysterious figure’s life. For example, Michael Wise has extracted from these hymns not only data about the Teacher’s life, persecution, and exile but also insights into his spiritual life—and even his name.33
But over time, as Max Grossman has shown, scholars began to question the idea that the Teacher of Righteousness is the “author” of these texts—that this figure is a historically locatable individual who can be imagined as an individual creator of the textual products of the Qumran community.34 With regard to the poetic Thanksgiving Hymns, it is doubtful that they can be used to reconstruct the historical and interior life of a specific individual. An excellent critique of the tendency to read the Hodayot as autobiography comes from Angela Harkins,35 who argues that such a reading is rooted in Romantic ideas of individual authorship that are foreign to Jewish antiquity. . . .
But no specific historical figure can be reconstructed from poetic hymns: they use familiar images and literary tropes, including first-person references to suffering and persecution that are not to be understood as biographical accounts of specific historical experiences. The “I” of the hymns can, instead, be understood in other ways . . . . The first-person voice is perhaps representative of the “office” of an inspired community leader and the ideal, exemplary teacher, rather than reflective of a specific historical personality.37 Or, as Harkins suggests, it is a “rhetorical persona” to be actualized by the reader in ritual performance: the reader embodies the “I,” and the text becomes an “affective script for the reader to reenact.”38
Okay, time to check out some of those end-notes. Continue reading “The Teacher of Righteousness and Understanding the Authority of Fiction”
2016-11-14
Bible Heroes in Heaven Before They Came to Earth
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Looking beyond the books of the Bible and into other ancient Jewish writings containing some very different views of biblical heroes can be a most interesting experience.
Have a look at The Prayer of Joseph (1st or 2nd century CE):
[1] “I, Jacob, who is speaking to you, am also Israel, an angel of God and a ruling spirit.
[2] Abraham and Isaac were created before any work.
[3] But, I, Jacob, who men call Jacob but whose name is Israel am he who God called Israel which means, a man seeing God, because I am the firstborn of every living thing to whom God gives life.
[4] And when I was coming up from Syrian Mesopotamia, Unel, the angel of God, came forth and said that I had descended to earth and I had tabernacled among men and that I had been called by the name of Jacob.
[5] He envied me and fought with me and wrestled with me saying that his name and the name that is before every angel was to be above mine.
[6] I told him his name and what rank he held among the sons of God.
[7] ‘Are you not Uriel, the eighth after me? and I, Israel, the archangel of the Power of the Lord and the chief captain among the sons of God?
[8] Am I not Israel, the first minister before the face of God?‘
[9] And I called upon my God by the Inextinguishable Name.”
Even Moses appears to have had a pre-existence in heaven before he appeared on earth to deliver the Israelites from Egypt: Continue reading “Bible Heroes in Heaven Before They Came to Earth”
2015-09-23
When God Commanded the Worship of Adam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
The Judaism prior to the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and that was the Judaism known to those responsible for the birth of Christianity was not the rabbinic Judaism that emerged in ensuing centuries. In recent years scholars Hurtado and Bauckham have attempted to defend the historical roots of contemporary Christian orthodoxy in relation to monotheism by focusing on evidence that suggests Second Temple Judaism (i.e. the Judaism prior to 70 CE) did not know of cultic worship of any figure other than The One God. Other scholars have criticized Hurtado and Bauckham for being too restricted in their selection of the evidence and for being too pedantically narrow in their question framing. One of these critics, and the latest one whose work has been added to my “to read” shelf, is Crispin Fletcher-Jones. His 2015 work is Jesus Monotheism: Volume 1. Christological Origins: the Emerging Consensus and Beyond.
While it is too early for me to outline his arguments in this post, both those contrary to Bauckham’s and Hurtado’s theses and his own interpretations and broader implications for our understanding of Second Temple Judaism, I can at least for now quote the critical section of a Latin manuscript of the Life of Adam and Eve. (I’ll save the reasons for dating this text to the pre-70 CE era and other discussions of the various language manuscript lines till later.)
What is fascinating in this text is the reason God commands all the angels to worship Adam at the time of his creation — that is, before his “Fall”. The text throws us the first time we read it if we have always assumed that the Jews had as strict and narrow a conception of monotheism as we do and as we believe they have had ever since Moses.
The account of the command to worship Adam (Fletcher-Louis points out this analogy) reads remarkably like the challenge presented to Daniel and his friends by Nebuchadnezzar:
King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold . . .
Then the herald loudly proclaimed, “Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.”
Therefore, as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp and all kinds of music, all the nations and peoples of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.
. . .
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar . . . we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3, NIV)
Setting up an image and commanding worship at its feet is a no-no — we all know that’s the rule of the God of the Bible. But think a moment about the creation of Adam who was made “in the image and likeness” of God.
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. . . “ (Gen 1:26)
Adam is the image made by God. God made him in “his” image and in “his” likeness. The angels were commanded to worship the image of God. Continue reading “When God Commanded the Worship of Adam”
2015-05-09
More on that very strange birth of Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
by Neil Godfrey
Continuing the series currently archived here . . . .
There are more interesting questions than the one I addressed in the previous post about that bizarre “birth” of Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah (Asc. Isa.). What is the point of creating such an odd explanation for how the Son of God made his entrance to the world?
Orthodox Christian theology has Jesus save the world by means of the incarnation. The Asc. Isa., however, teaches that this is not how Jesus saved and has no room for Jesus literally becoming a man. God’s will was for Jesus to rescue humanity by having him hide his glory behind a mere human appearance and so by means of this deception to defeat the angelic powers. (Norelli 1993, p. 53)
Recall how the Son of the Beloved sloughs off a layer of his glory as he passes through each of the seven heavens on his descent so that he appears no different from the inhabitants of each realm.
Notice, too, how the description of Jesus’ birth turns into a vision for Joseph and Mary:
It came to pass that when they were alone that Mary straight-way looked with her eyes and saw a small babe, and she was astonished.
And after she had been astonished, her womb was found as formerly before she had conceived.
And when her husband Joseph said unto her: “What has astonished thee?” his eyes were opened and he saw the infant and praised God, because into his portion God had come.
And a voice came to them: “Tell this vision to no one.”
So it is through revelation that Joseph and Mary understand and know that Jesus is not a man like other humans. (Norelli 1993, p. 53)
In the previous post we saw the possible link between Isaiah 53:2 and the miraculous appearance of the child. Enrico Norelli explores further the Asc. Isa.‘s sources for this scene and the message it was meant to convey.
We saw in another earlier post Norelli’s reasons for rejecting the view that the Asc. Isa. was adapting the nativity scene in the Gospel of Matthew. He argues that the Asc. Isa. was most likely written about the same time as that canonical gospel (or before it).
Comparing with the Acts of Peter
The Asc. Isa. continues (Charles’ translation): Continue reading “More on that very strange birth of Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah”