Vridar

2009-06-21

Borg’s and Crossan’s charlatan interpretation of Paul’s command in Romans 13:1-7 (but hey, it’s only for a public audience)

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by Neil Godfrey

In a recent post I discussed Borg’s and Crossan’s attempt in The First Paul to demonstrate (through a bit of good old fundamentalist style “proof-texting”) that Paul’s gospel was essentially an anti-imperialist polemic. An obvious question to ask — and thanks to Keith for raising it — is how this sits with Romans 13 where Paul issues his well-known command for all readers to “be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” (Romans 13:1)

In my reply to Keith I had to confess that I am not persuaded that Romans 13:1-7 was original to Paul’s letter (Winsome Munro argues that it is part of a series of interpolations by “the Pastoralist”) but still, I had to check back on what Borg and Crossan say about it.

Here it is. Firstly, they insist that Romans 13:1-7 must not be read in isolation but within the context of Romans 12:14 to 13:10. Fair enough. I’m willing to try that.

But then I discover I’ve been tricked. B and C tell me not only to read the Romans passage in the context of a wider Romans passage, they actually go further, once I start, to tell me to read the Romans passage in the context of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, written some decades after Paul’s letter! Reading Romans in the context of Matthew is NOT reading Romans in context!

I am reminded once again of the jig-saw games fundamentalists play with the scriptures to justify any doctrine that happens to be the core tradition of whatever particular church! “Here a little, there a little. . . “, a passage drawn from Isaiah to justify flagrant decontextualizing of texts to create any-which doctrine one chooses.

Here’s how B’s and C’s argument goes:

1. Romans 12:14 tells readers to bless their persecutors, and Matthew 5:44 says much the same.

2. Skip now to Romans 12:21. “Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” If we are reading Romans forwards, B & C ask us to read Matthew backward to make the anachronistic parallel work. We are to compare Romans 12:21 with Matthew 5:39, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”

What would scholars say about “parallelomania” if any fundies attempted an argument like this!?

3. Then we come to Romans 13:1-7, the passage threatening any reader who disobeys the powers of government with being guilty of rebelling against the decree of God himself! To what is this a parallel in the Sermon on the Mount? Same verse as above, Matthew 5:39. How does that work? By digging out a Greek lexicon and finding meanings to parts of words that can lend support to translating them with a new nuance to do with “violent protest” that you never suspected was there from any traditional translation.

4. B and C find lines in the Liddell & Scott Greek lexicon (“the major Greek lexicon”) that the word for “resist” can be used in reference to a battle where soldiers are commanded to “oppose, withstand”. Their conclusion? “In Matthew 5:39, therefore, it means ‘to resist violently.'”

Only one or two or more problems with that explanation. It runs against the very next sentence in Matthew 5:39 where an example makes it very plain what Jesus meant here. “If anyone slaps you on one cheek, turn to him the other.” Jesus is clearly commanding something more positive than mere “non-violent resistance‘. We know what follows — give more to the one who sues you, go the extra mile for the one who compels you to go one mile. So B and C’s pedantic reliance on selective lines from Liddell and Scott is exposed as a falsehood.

B and C are scholars of the highest rank yet are writing here as charlatans!

Their arguments ring as false as Keller’s in my previous set of posts on his book.

I also checked how else the same word for resist (anti + histemi) is translated in other NT passages. One can consult them: Luke 21:15, Acts 6:10 and 13:8, Galatians 2:11, Ephesians 6:13, 2 Titus 3:8 and 2 Timothy 4:15, James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:9. Those interested can discover how often the word really does mean “violent resistance”.

5. B and C continue: “If anti + histemi is redolent of (military) violence (vridar: we have just seen this is hardly so from the above examples) anti + tasso is even more so.” (page 119).

The word in question here? “One must be subject . . .” (Romans 13:5).

How on earth can B & C possibly take a word that in context means clearly “subjection to an authority” to be “even more” redolent of “violent resistance”?! The Liddell & Scott lexicon to which they turn includes a meaning like “to set opposite to, range in battle against” — I would suggest from the context that here the emphasis is on soldiers submitting to their commanders’ orders to hold fast against the enemy. Those interested can do their own study of this Greek word in the Crosswalk Lexicon here.

6. The final parallelomania, sorry, “parallel” is the word used by B&C, is when we move on in Romans 13 to verses 8-10 and compare these with, no, not still reading backwards in Matthew, but forwards again this time, back to where we started in verse 44: Love your enemies. But this time, we are given even more parallels — Luke somewhere says the same thing! This (comparing Romans 13:8-10 with Matthew and Luke from decades after Paul) is all to help us understand the context of Romans 13:1-7!

Sure enough, Romans 13:8-10 talks about Loving one’s . . . Sorry, no. Start again. . . .

While Matthew 5:44 talks about loving one’s enemies, Romans 13:1-7 talks about loving one’s neighbours! And this is used as a “parallel” that will help us understand that Romans 13:1-7 is really about the same thing as Matthew saying somewhere that we should turn the other cheek and go the extra mile — Woops, sorry, I mean, this is really about the same thing as Matthew saying we should not “resist violently”! — Even though that Greek word clearly does not mean that most other times it is used in the New Testament. Nor does it mean that in Romans 13:1-7.

7. B and C in this way conclude that Paul in Romans 13:1-7 is “most afraid, not that Christians will be killed but that they will kill” to avoid paying taxes! “It is something that appalls him so much that — in rather a rhetorical panic (vridar: did anyone else detect a panicked tone in Rom 13:1-7??) — he makes some very unwise and unqualified statements with which to ward off that possibility.” (p. 120)

Yet B and C have just spent the last page or two trying to argue from parallels with Matthew and Luke and from selected lines in a Greek lexicon (not from other NT contextual uses of the words) that Paul was meaning exactly what he wrote! So which way do B and C mean us to take his words?

If Borg and Crossan excuse themselves for such shoddy and untenable “exegesis” because their book is for the public and not fellow scholars (few of whom would probably ever read it anyway), then I suggest they are treating their public with contempt.

This is clearly dishonest exegesis of Romans 13:1-7 from scholars of such a calibre that they really have no excuse.

Footnote:

There is a YouTube video of Crossan and Borg discussing atheism. Crossan uses a similar pedantic argument to assert that atheists are really fixated on God. His case? The word “a-theist” contains “theist”, meaning God, so if they are “a-theists” then they are fixated on God! Hoo boy! Maybe his best days are over and we should just be reading his earlier stuff?

The diverse Jewish religious environment of Paul outmatches the imagination of Borg and Crossan

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by Neil Godfrey

Following on from this previous post . . . . .

Borg and Crossan (B and C) (The First Paul) attempt to argue that despite Paul’s clear assertions that he sought to preach only “Christ crucified” and that “Jesus is Lord”, that this could not possibly have been true:

[W]e think the notion that Paul’s message was primarily or exclusively about the death of Jesus and not his life is highly unlikely. Indeed, we find it impossible to imagine. As an illustration, imagine a conversation between Paul and someone he sought to convert. Imagine, for example, Paul’s conversation with Lydia (Acts 16:13-15). (p. 126)

Borg and Crossan then portray Lydia as a very capable and intelligent woman (she was a seller of a luxury item) who was a gentile “God seeker”.

Now imagine Paul telling Lydia about Jesus. Imagine, also, that he focuses on “Christ crucified” (and also, of course, on “Jesus Christ is Lord”). One cannot imagine the conversation going very far before Lydia asks, “Well, this Jesus you talk about who was crucified and then raised from the dead, what was he like?” Paul says, “Never mind what he was like — what really matters is that he was the Son of God who was crucified and died for your sins.” Such an answer would have had no meaning for her. It would have been a conversation stopper.

For Paul to have told her about Jesus’s death would have had no meaning unless he also told her about what Jesus was like, about the kind of person he was. What was this person like who got crucified? What did he stand for that led to his execution by the powers that ruled his world and then his resurrection by God? Who was the Jesus who is now Lord? Proclaiming “Christ crucified” could not (and still cannot) exclude talking about what Jesus was like, what he taught, and what he stood for.” (pp.126-127)

It simply does not occur to many bible scholars (Borg and Crossan are not alone) who are, to a large extent, essentially supported by various Christian communities, to re-examine their historicist assumptions that force them into the position of having to make up imaginary scenarios like the one above to support their arguments. There is simply no evidence that Paul was ever obliged to, or ever did, discuss the pre-crucifixion life and character of an historical Jesus. The evidence that we do have actually speaks against any idea that he did do this. But the assumptions from which Borg and Crossan are working force them to imagine that Paul must necessarily have preached something akin to one of our four narrative gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit now that I once thanked Crossan for helping me appreciate the importance of “historical methodology”. Well, his Historical Jesus did take me a long way forward from where I had been until that time. But boy have I learned so much more since. Mostly what I’ve learned since is not that hard, really. Simply study the historians and classicists of nonbiblical ancient history and literature topics and apply their methods consistently to the biblical topics too. No favourites or disciplines with special rules to make them somehow exceptional cases. (Okay, I had several years studying ancient history as an undergraduate so I guess it’s a bit easier for me than some others. But I’m trying to share on this blog.)

What else could Paul possibly have preached?

Just what he said he preached. Christ crucified, for starters. Why is this a problem for most? Because, I suspect, we start out with assumptions of Jesus’ historicity. The gospel crucifixion scene consists of only the last few chapters of each of the gospels. It is not enough of a narrative on its own. It needs all the earlier bits like the healings, the miracles, the teachings, the crowds and conflicts, to mean anything much. But all of these are generally acknowledged as having been written long after Paul.

All this starts to make more sense when we understand that first-century c.e. Judaism was not the rigidly “monotheistic” cult that we associate with later rabbinism and today’s Jews. Whether we follow Margaret Barker and her The Great Angel : a Study of Israel’s Second God (which proposes that Judaism before the fall of the Temple in 70 c.e. contained factions that effectively still retained memories of El, Yahweh, Asherah as distinct yet all divine beings) or James F. McGrath and his The Only True God : Early Christian

Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (which argues that what passed for “monotheism” in the first century was a broader definition than we allow today), one soon learns that Judaism before the fall of the Temple was not the same as what it became in the second century.

Just a few drops to indicate the incredible diversity of Second Temple religious beliefs among Jews, which later rabbinic Judaism attempted to deny:

For some Jews, individuals such as Jacob existed in heaven before they appeared on earth, as we learn from The Prayer of Joseph.
And some wrote of subordinate heavenly beings with names like Yaoel, a contraction of Yahweh and El, as in The Apocalypse of Abraham, a text with remarkable echoes of the Gospel of John.
Some factions also dedicated themselves to the study of “hidden wisdom” and the roles of angels, as we learn from apocalyptic texts like the Book of Enoch.
Even the New Testament cannot avoid reference to these narratives of great powers in heaven, including their Enochian source, as we see in Jude.
For others, such practices had to be denounced and expunged, as we see from the survival of the texts that have since become the Jewish Bible and Christianity‘s Old Testament.
I have also discussed in depth Levenson’s exploration of how the Isaac story among some Jews apparently became transformed into a death and resurrection narrative by the Second Temple period.
And first-century Jewish philosopher Philo also speaks of the Logos as a second god.
Recall also the varied myths of Jacob’s Ladder,
and speculations that changed the original Aramaic meaning of Son of Man in Daniel.
and the “two powers in heaven” “heresy” with Metatron being found in the place of God in heaven according to visionary narratives.
and those strange references in the New Testament and other unorthodox Jewish literature to Melchizedek
and how seriously should we read take the description of a woman in Revelation being clothed with the sun — surely an obvious allusion to her divinity — who bore a child who was not crucified on earth but whisked immediately to heaven?
and the survival of the Ugaritic divinities in various forms in the apocalyptic literature, and Margaret Barker’s discussions of the distinctions between El and Yahweh even in the OT.
and the cosmic-spiritual meanings attributed to astronomical data, including within Mithraism of the same era.
and the Qumran community with texts discussing unorthodox messiahs
and Samaritan traditions, some involving John the Baptist,
and some scholars suggesting a link between Simon the Sorcerer in Acts and Paul, and Damascus traditions [link downloads a 2 MB PDF file]
and what do the above suggest about Paul’s reference to “the god of this world” who is responsible for the blindness of mankind and “the rulers of this age” or “the princes of this world“. In what sort of theological framework was he immersed?
and what did he discuss among converts about the meaning of his vision of Jesus, and the times he felt himself taken up to the different levels of heavens, and the meanings of the “marks of Jesus” in his hands, as he also mentions in his letters, and the power of angels from heaven to preach, and what he meant by Christ being revealed “in him”, and being “set forth crucified” before the very eyes of the Galatians?
To answer, these contents of Paul’s letters ought not to be overlooked as embarrassing oddities. We need to seriously consider how Christianity could have been so overwhelmingly dominated by Marcionites and Valentinians in the early second century, and that it was only as that century wore on that current orthodoxy began to gain the upper hand. Recall how the orthodox (Tertullian?) could even say that Paul was “the apostle of the heretics”.

Paul’s letters need to be read against this three-dimensional context of Jewish religious speculation and writings, not just through the two dimensional OT and modern Christianity perspective.

Once we leave behind the monochrome Judaism of our OT and begin to enter the far richer and more complex world that was first-century c.e. Judaism then Paul’s letters begin to need less creative imagination from Borg and Crossan to explain. Lydia was a capable and articulate woman who may well have been engaged by a theological-cum-philosophical discussion about powers and beings of heaven and what they offered anew for people like her on earth. Or maybe there was much allegorizing, as we find in the first gospel of Mark.

The Gospel of Mark, seen by many as reflecting the theology of Paul, allegorizes the crucifixion to indicate the overthrow of the demonic powers of this earth and the opening of the gateway (cross/ecliptic . . .) between heaven and earth, an event privatized for Jesus at his baptism, but made available to believers with the tearing of the veil (representing heaven with its pattern of stars) that had hitherto separated the place of God from the place of humankind. Paul’s cross fits in well with theologies of the overthrow of demonic or “lesser god” powers, and declaring just and saved all who believe in their “oneness with God” through the cross, symbol of giving up all their earthly desires, and symbol of the gateway between heaven and earth.

I suspect Paul taught the sorts of things he wrote about. He discussed why and how circumcision was no longer valid because of the complex meaning — hitherto a mystery, as he says — of the crucifixion of Jesus. He taught about how a new way of relating to God could be based on faith in a crucified Messiah, much as Stoics could teach of a new way of living and relating to the cosmos through the denial of the flesh (see Engberg-Pedersen — will do some posts on his work sometime). In both, new communities arose out of such teachings. All of this is lost to modern readers who are fixated on an historical interpretation of a narrative that in its original form was clearly allegorical — see my notes on Gospel of Mark on my vridar.info site.

By no means am I claiming that the above points as presented like this are proof or even linking evidence that Paul did teach something more esoteric than a biographical narrative. I can do no more in this post than point out the religious environment and suggest alternatives. There is certainly no evidence for B’s and C’s imaginative scenario — quite the contrary.

A capable, intelligent, “God-seeker” like Lydia was also immersed in this world of theological diversity, and no doubt would have been wrapped in any such discussion. The original narrator of the tale, the author of Acts and Luke, however, was a proto-orthodox Christian opposed to such speculations. For him, the literal interpretation of the narrative of Jesus was destined to replace the heretical speculations the original devotees of Paul clung to.

The crucifixion has no meaning without resurrection?

This is certainly true according to B and C. But if that was really true for Paul then one must remain at least somewhat perplexed by his frequent separate treatment of them – even sometimes discussing the meaning of the crucifixion without any reference to resurrection at all. When Paul does discuss resurrection, it is to affirm life after death and the ongoing Lordship of Jesus. These are not, contra B and C, presented as “answers” to the crucifixion. The death of Jesus has its own salvific value for Paul quite apart from any discussion of a resurrection. But this is another topic if I need to pull out the citations etc to make the point. Later. Enough blogging for one weekend.

“When Jesus went out with a loud voice” revisited – – – wikipedia footnote

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by Neil Godfrey

I earlier blogged about the “last shout” of Jesus before he left this world (When Jesus went out with a loud voice . . .) and one reader responded by saying that the shout itself was a miracle that proved the divine power of Jesus, at least to the nearby centurion. The argument is that at the point of final asphyxiation a loud shout would normally be impossible.

I personally think such a “miracle”, if that were the case, is quite anticlimactic in comparison with the sun turning black at the time of a full moon and a bodily resurrection, unless, perhaps for a physician. But since then, while reading for another blog post, I came across the following in the Wikipedia entry on Crucifixion:

Crucifixion on a crux simplex ad affixionem: drawing in a 1629 reprint of De cruce of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606): (Wikipedia)

Experiments by Frederick Zugibe have, however, revealed that, when suspended with arms at 60° to 70° from the vertical, test subjects had no difficulty breathing, only rapidly-increasing discomfort and pain. This would correspond to the Roman use of crucifixion as a prolonged, agonizing, humiliating death.

2009-06-20

“Christ crucified” — Was Paul’s message really anti-imperialist as Borg and Crossan assert?

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by Neil Godfrey

In a recent post, I mentioned a new publication, The First Paul, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I said it contained some interesting bits, but also some bits that one might suspect are arguably on the dubious side of method and logic. I discussed a positive for my first post, now for a negative.

In the first-century setting of Paul and his hearers, “Christ crucified” had an anti-imperial meaning. Paul’s shorthand summary was not “Jesus died,” not “Jesus was killed,” but “Christ crucified. This meant that Jesus had been crucified by imperial authority . . . . In Paul’s world, a cross was always a Roman cross.

Rome reserved crucifixion for two categories of people: those who challenged imperial rule . . . and chronically defiant slaves . . . The two groups who were crucified had something in common: both rejected Roman imperial domination. Crucifixion . . . carried the message, “Don’t you dare defy imperial authority, or this will happen to you.

To proclaim “Christ crucified” was to signal at once that Jesus was an anti-imperial figure, and that Paul’s gospel was an anti-imperial gospel. The empire killed Jesus. The cross was the imperial “no” to Jesus. But God raised him. The resurrection was God’s “yes” to Jesus, God’s vindication of Jesus — and thus also God’s “no” to the powers that had killed him. (p. 131-2)

I admit I have much more to read on this topic, including a few books in my personal library like the twelve year old Paul and Empire by Richard Horsley which I am embarrassed to confess I still have only half-read. So the argument of this post is restricted solely to the discussion as found in Borg and Crossan’s new popular book.

I have been recently blogging about the ostensibly pre-gospel passages about the crucifixion of Jesus (latest post here), arguing that this foundational event is entitled to be questioned as to its historical status, widespread opinion among biblical scholars notwithstanding. My conclusions differ radically from Borg’s and Crossan’s as cited above. So time to address their claims:

Paul’s shorthand was not “Jesus died” . . . Really?

Yes, “crucified” is the term used in chapters 1 and 2 of 1 Corinthians. But this is scarcely enough to persuade anyone familiar with Paul’s letters as a whole to think that for Paul the central act of the gospel embedded an intrinsically anti-imperialist message. In fact, it seems B’s and C’s claim here is based entirely on two chapters in but one of Paul’s several letters.

1 Corinthians

By the end of the letter it seems Paul decided to tone down this supposedly “anti-imperialistic” rhetoric and let the Jesus followers off the hook by reminding them that they were acting out Jesus’ death only in their ritual meals, not his crucifixion:

11: 26 . . . you do show the Lord’s death till he come.

2 Corinthians

In chapter 5 Paul writes three times that “Jesus died” without a hint of “anti-imperialist” crucifixion.

5:14 . . . if one died for all . . .

5:15a . . . he died for all . . .

5:15b . . . him who died for them . . .

Galatians

1:1 . . . who raised him from the dead . . . [darn it! Paul just missed an excellent opportunity to drive home his anti-imperialist gospel by pronouncing God’s Yes to Jesus and No to Empire: why did he not think to write, “who raised him from the crucifixion!”? What happened to God’s “yes” to Jesus and “no” to the imperial power that crucified him?]

2:20 . . . I am crucified with Christ . . . [Gosh! So Paul deserved those floggings in Acts, and he really was justifiably executed as an anti-imperialist rebel in the end?]

2:21 . . . if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain . . .

3:1 . . . Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you . . . [Why did governor Pliny not pick up on such anti-imperialist sentiment when he asked Trajan how to handle the Christians?]

5:11 . . . if I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution? then is the offence of the cross ceased. . . . [Whoah a minute here! Does Paul really mean that the anti-imperialist message of the cross can be nullified by preaching circumcision??? Yet that is what acceptance of Borg’s and Crossan’s assertion would lead to! Ditto for 6:12.]

5:24 . . . And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. . . . [So drunkenness and fornication are sending anti-imperialistic messages?]

6:12 . . . they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ. [See 5:11 above.]

6:14 . . . But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. [This passage simply makes nonsense any attempt to read into the crucifixion an anti-imperialist message.]

Romans

Maybe it was because he was writing a letter to Christians in the imperial centre of empire, but Paul makes but one solitary reference in this letter to Jesus being crucified. But hold on, the fact that he was writing to Rome should not decide the matter in this case, because in the same letter he actually says that Christians are to see themselves as subject to a daily “crucifixion with Christ”. Is he really writing to devotees living in the shadows of the imperial palace to acknowledge that they are “anti-imperialists” by their daily conduct? See 6:6 below:

5:6 . . . Christ died for the ungodly

5:8 . . . Christ died for us

5:10 . . . the death of his Son . . .

6:6 . . . our old man is crucified with him . . .

14: 9 . . . Christ both died, and rose . . .

14:15 . . . for whom Christ died

1 Thessalonians

4:14: . . . Jesus died and rose again . . .

5:9-10 . . . our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us . . .

Philippians

2:8 . . . even the death of the cross

3:10 . . . being made conformable to his death . . .

3:18 . . . enemies of the cross of Christ . . .

If “Christ crucified” were Paul’s shorthand for his gospel in order to stress its anti-imperialistic message, it appears from the above citations that this was a point he did not wish to emphasize very often, and even sometimes a wording he wanted to infuse with an alternative meaning, probably just to throw the secret police off the scent! 🙂

Did Imperial Rome really hold the crucifixion patent at the time of Paul?

The answer to this question depends on our starting assumptions. If we assume before commencing our enquiries that the Jesus story and Paul’s mission as per the Book of Acts are truly based heavily on historical accounts, then the answer will be “Yes”. Paul according to this assumption knew only Roman rule and that only Roman rulers administered crucifixion.

But if we attempt to put ourselves into the minds of first-century moderately informed people, then we will know we have to allow for the idea of crucifixion having many provenances. Popular “novels” of the era not uncommonly include a dramatic crucifixion scene as part of the adventurous plot, including:

In the influential philosophical treatise, Timaeus, Plato describes the gateway between the corruptible realm where our earth resides and the incorruptible divine realm as a cross, in reference to where the celestial equator and ecliptic intersect.

Neighbouring peoples such as the Persians and Seleucids had carried out crucifixions. I cannot know if Rome’s neighbours at the time of Paul did, but crucifixion was not unique to Rome. Jews, in particular, would have held a cultural memory of how one of their kings, Alexander Jannaeus, had crucified 800 Pharisees. Josephus records this for us.

Paul speaks of “princes of this world” as crucifying Jesus, suggesting that it was not Rome but some other powers (compare the information we glean from Daniel) responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

A near Jewish contemporary of Paul and Jesus was Philo who also wrote about the crucifixion in ways surprisingly similar to Paul’s usage — allegorically, although not with any hint of anti-imperialist connotations.

Where is Philo?

So often I see Philo referred to in scholarly studies of biblical matters in order to clarify the intellectual context of the times. Curiously he has been overlooked by B and C. Here is Philo’s paragraph 61 from section XVII of On the Posterity of Cain and his Exile:

(61) Now the soul that subjects itself to bodily compunctions has the beforementioned inhabitants. Acheman, being interpreted, means, my brother, and Jesein means “outside of me,” and Thalmein means, some one in suspense; for it follows of necessity, that the body must be thought akin to the souls that love the body, and that external good things must be exceedingly admired by them, and all the souls which have this kind of disposition depend on dead things, and, like persons who are crucified, are attached to corruptible matter till the day of their death. (62) But the soul that is united to virtue has for its inhabitants those persons who are preeminent for virtue, persons whom the double cavern has received in pairs, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebeckah, Leah and Jacob, virtues and those who possess them; Chebron itself keeping the treasure-house of the memorials of knowledge and wisdom, which is more ancient than Janis and the whole land of Egypt, for nature has made the soul more ancient than the body, that is than Egypt, and virtue more ancient than vice, that is than Janis (and the name Janis, being interpreted, means the command of answer), estimating seniority rather by dignity than by length of time.

A discussion of Philo’s allegorical use of the crucifixion image can be found on pages 186-7 of David Chapman’s Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion available on Google Books. If this Jew living under the same Roman imperial power as Paul did not associate “crucifixion” with imperialist or anti-imperialist sentiments, why should we think that Paul was compelled to do so?

Back to Borg’s and Crossan’s context of 2 Corinthians

After noting all these other passages above from the widely accepted genuine Pauline corpus, it is tempting to have a second look at the context of those passages B and C use to argue their case for an anti-imperialist message in the crucifixion.

1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness

If Paul were writing at a time of various seditions and troubles preceding the outbreak of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, how plausible is it, really, to suggest that Jews found an anti-imperialist gospel an offence of some sort? One would think from Josephus’s account of the various anti-Roman movements in the lead-up to the war that such a gospel would have been enthusiastically endorsed by a vast bulk of the Jews.

2:8 . . . [the princes of this world] would not have crucified the Lord of glory [Compare Daniel chapters 10 and 12 which reveal that there are divine or angelic Princes of Persia, Greece and Israel]

I am reminded of the claim of Jesus before Pilate in the Gospel of John 19:10-11

Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee? Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.

Paul clearly could not have had anything like the “tradition” that reached the author of the Gospel of John, since Paul speaks explicitly of plural princes of the world crucifying Jesus while the gospel has one human governer under the power of God alone or a single agent of God. More likely Paul had access to a narrative or treatise or group-think that could be traced back to Psalms 2: 2

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed. . .

(The author of the Gospel of Pilate may well have used this verse too when in the surviving opener of the manuscript he appears to have pictured Herod and Pilate sitting together at the judgement of Christ.)

Long-time anti-imperialist bias

Crossan’s earlier work, The Historical Jesus (and its popular format, Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography), was often criticized for letting show his Irish Catholic anti-

British-imperialist heritage. Methinks nothing has changed in that respect, and just as Crossan’s Jesus happened to preach Crossan’s politics, so Crossan’s Paul preaches Crossan’s politics as his gospel! How else to explain such a powerful assertion about a political message underpinning the phrase “Christ crucified” on the basis of so few citations and in defiance of so many more?

Methinks there is a stronger case for a non-historical origin for Paul’s use of the crucifixion image, but that’s another story.

But there’s more (maybe later)

I had intended the above point to have been covered in 6 lines when I started, and to follow up with B’s and C’s use of Acts and pitiful 20th century social analogies to justify their additional claims about the meaning of Paul’s message of both crucifixion and resurrection. But I’ve run out of beer and need to take a break.

Western media treatment of Iranian elections and the ongoing demonization

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by Neil Godfrey

“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation…Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

June 19, 2009 “Information Clearing House” — There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

The full article here.

Evidence of orchestration of the protests for western audiences? Iran Faces Greater Risks Than It Knows and Obama’s administration’s directive to Twitter.

And from my favourite Mid East correspondent, Robert Fisk, who gives an eyewitness account of who the demonstrators are, and what they want, and corrects a lot of misleading impressions coming through other channels that lazily rely more on official news releases and rumour:

Extraordinary scenes: Robert Fisk in Iran

Posted Wed Jun 17, 2009 11:23am AEST
Updated Wed Jun 17, 2009 12:17pm AEST

‘The authorities are losing control of what’s happening on the streets and that’s very dangerous and damaging to them’ (www.flickr.com: Shahram Sharif)

Audio: The Independent’s Middle East correspondent is defying Iran’s media ban. (ABC News)

The long-standing Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Robert Fisk, is defying the government crackdown on foreign media reporting in Iran.

As he explains, he has been travelling around the streets of Tehran all day and most of the night and things are far from quiet:

See the Australian ABC news site for the full article and audio link.

eyewitness testimony . . . . if false, they would not have said . . . . Paul teaches . . . .

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by Neil Godfrey

You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient “people say.” In all my seventy-two years and a half I have never come across such another ass as this human race is.

Mark Twain’s Autobiography

2009-06-19

The Medieval Origins of the “Christ paid the penalty for us” Gospel.

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by Neil Godfrey

I was about to start the next post in my series attempting to justify seriously questioning the “bedrock fact” status of the crucifixion of Jesus when I came across a new publication by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon.

There are some interesting enlightening details in it, and, (sorry to say, but Borg and Crossan are big enough to take and deserve it) some incredible howlers of both method and conclusions that I would never have expected in a work by scholars of such high repute. Maybe this is because they were leaning more to accessing a popular reading public than the scholarly guild with this one. I am reminded of earlier posts where I have expressed some disgust against scholars who know better yet see fit to short change their popular readership like this. For my most recent protest, see my remarks on Pagels and King in A Spectrum of Jesus Mythicists and Mythers. I’ll address one of these lower high school level howlers in a future post. But first, something good and interesting from the book. (Anyway, I guess that’s one of the reasons for my blog — to attempt to make a bit more accessible some of the thinking of scholars on these sorts of topics.)

On page 127 they write:

For many centuries, the death of Jesus has been understood by most Christians as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin, as a substitutionary atonement, as this theological understanding is called.

This way of seeing the death of Jesus is very familiar. Most Christians today, and most non-Christians who have heard anything about Christianity, think that the cross means, in slight variations:

Jesus died for our sins.

Jesus is the sacrifice for sin.

Jesus died in our place.

Jesus is the payment for sin.

For this understanding, the notions of punishment, substitution, and payment are central. We deserve to be punished by God for our sins, but Jesus was the substitute who paid the price. The issue is how we may be forgiven by God for our sin and guilt.

Then follows what must be a bombshell for most fundamentalists in particular:

But this understanding is less than a thousand years old. (p.128)

So where did it come from?

Borg and Crossan answer: It came from a theological treatise, Cur Deus Homo? = Why Did God Become Human? by Anselm of Canterbury, first published in 1097.

This is Anselm’s argument:

All people have disobeyed God. So all people are sinners.
Someone has to pay for our sin. Forgiveness means that compensation must be made for the offence or crime. If no payment was required for sin, then it would imply God does not think is anything very important.
Since God is infinite, our debt to him is also infinite. But we are finite, so are incapable of paying the price owed.
Jesus is infinite, and when he became human he could pay the full cost of the penalty for us as a substitute sacrifice. So we can be forgiven.

And this has been the understanding of Christianity in general ever since! Well, I never knew that! Just Kipling Just So story, only it’s probably true! 😉

Mel Gibson and his “patron pope”, John-Paul II who apparently loved his The Passion of the Christ movie, have both preached the same Anselm Cur Deus Homo? doctrine.

2009-06-17

Can a fundamentalist believer avoid pejorative language among friends?

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by Neil Godfrey

(slightly edited 18th june 2009)

A strongly religious friend of mine recently wrote me, in kindness, that she understood I was not the first to decide to stop following God. This may have been the only way she knew how to express something she wanted to raise with me and maybe she had no awareness of how judgmental, pejorative, such a statement really is. Did I really knowingly, with arrogance or bitterness, turn my back on a great divine power, regardless of whether I thought such a phenomenon was worthy of worship or not? Yet that’s clearly what is implied.

Because I wanted to find a way to keep our friendship on an even keel over time, I replied that no, there was no question of my choosing not to follow God, but rather, that after much study and thought, I realized the only way I could be honest with myself, and true to the best lights I had sought out, was to no longer accept the existence of God. I concluded that each of us has to walk according to the lights we have, and we are all at different places in our life’s journey.

To recast that decision, that at the time was for me a matter of integrity, and even at the time involved considerable personal cost, into an assertion that “I chose to no longer follow God”, is judgmental.

I do not address my believing friends by telling them they are superstitious, or deceived, or too closed minded and fearful to investigate their faith rationally. To do so would of course be, well, rude and judgmental. I might think such things in a general sense of many believers, but there’s a difference between addressing these issues in a general or public way on the one hand, and in addressing friends in normal day-to-day getting along on the other.

If my religious friends wish to preach a jeremiad, let them do so on a street corner or from a soapbox in a park or at their keyboards. But to bring in the pejorative language when communicating with friends only runs the risk of losing those friends over time.

Maybe part of me is becoming more sensitive as a result of living in truly multi-cultural and multi-religious Singapore. The only people I have heard of here in the news (where Buddhists and Hindus and Moslems and Christians truly do rub shoulders daily, and where the State has even decreed national holidays for each of the religions’ holy days) who have gotten into trouble over their religious practices are a couple Christians who were penalized by the courts for distributing offensive literature to peoples of other faiths (especially Moslems).

By no means do I recommend Singapore as a model society for others to follow, yet nor can I deny the good things about Singapore. There is something very encouraging about living in a society where, for most part, the different religious and ethnic groups do generally express respect, even harmony, living and working together. At least publicly there is no sign of pejorative statements made against one another. The government even has a positive option for atheists or any nonreligious people who have to fill out official forms identifying their religious status: “Freethinker”.

Now that might be the better way to approach my friend next time the pejorative language emerges. “Nope, officially you are a Christian, she’s a Buddhist, he’s a Moslem or Hindu, while I’m a Freethinker”.

In a three-way discussion with my friend, I did ask our other colleague if she was also a Christian. She replied, No, I’m a Freethinker! It has a very nice positive ring to it.

2009-06-16

Fearfully and wonderfully or weirdly and clumsily made?

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by Neil Godfrey

I suspect one part of the reason some find evolution difficult to accept is their failure to appreciate “deep time”. We can have some notion of “deep space” by looking out at the stars and through telescopes and seeing the evidence of incomprensible distances. But to appreciate “deep time” when we can only know human history of a few thousand years is not so “easy” to grasp. The evidence tells us that species have evolved through time – but we need to think of deep time. It is somehow easier for us to imagine space extending for light years into the distance than to appreciate what is meant by a few hundred million years back in time.

But the evidence is there and cannot be denied (at least not scientifically). One small facet of that evidence, from Why Darwin Matters by Michael Shermer:

“Vestigial structures stand as evidence of the mistakes, the misstarts, and, especially, the leftover traces of evolutionary history. The cretaceous snake Pachyrhachis problematicus, for example, had small hind limbs used for locomotion that it inherited from its quadrupal ancestors, gone in today’s snakes.

“Modern whales retain a tiny pelvis for hind legs that existed in their land mammal ancestors but have disappeared today. Likewise, there are wings on flightless birds, and of course humans are replete with useless vestigial structures, a distinctive sign of our evolutionary ancestory. A short list of just ten vestigial strucutures in humans leaves one musing: Why would an Intelligent Designer have created these?” (pp 17-18)

1. Male nipples

“Men have nipples because females need them, and the overall architecture of the human body is more efficiently developed in the uterus from a single developmental structure.”

2. Male uterus

“Men have the remnant of an undeveloped female reproductive organ that hangs off the prostrate gland for the same reason.”

3. Thirteenth rib

Most humans have 12 sets of ribs, but 8% of of us have a thirteenth set, just as chimps and gorillas do. We share a common ancestry with chimps and gorillas, and our 13th set is retained from the time chimps/gorillas and human lineages branched apart 6 million years ago.

4. Coccyx

This tailbone is all that is left of the tails our common ancestors had for grasping branches and maintaining balance.

5. Wisdom teeth

Before the discovery of tools and fire, hominids were primarily vegetarians. Chewing lots of plants required an extra set of grinding molars. Today our jaws are smaller, but many people still have the extra teeth.

6. Appendix

“This muscular tube connected to the large intestine was once used for digesting cellulose in our largely vegetarian diet before we became meat eaters.”

7. Body hair

Another leftover from our ancestry with thick-haired apes and hominids.

8. Goose bumps (Erector pili)

“We retain the ability of our ancestows to puff up their fur for heat insulation, or as a threat gesture to potential predators.”

9. Extrinsic ear muscles

Some of us, including yours truly, can wiggle our ears. Our primate ancestors “evolved the ability to move their ears independently of their heads as a more efficient means of discriminating precise sound directionality and location.”

(Okay, so what about those people who can curl their tongues and cross their eyes??)

10. Third eyelid

“Many animals have a nictitating membrane that covers the eye for added protection; we retain this “third eyelid” in the corner of our eye as a tiny fold of flesh.”

There are dozens more. Everyone knows our backs were not designed right. Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish includes discussions on how evolutionary genetic studies can help identify specific malfunctions that cause certain modern deformities and illnesses — and how such knowledge can help find treatments and cures.

The above are from pp 18-19 of Michael Shermer’s Why Darwin Matters (2006)

Jesus in the Gospel of John — and the Apocalypse of Abraham

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by Neil Godfrey

The way Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of John owes as much to the literary and theological culture of Jewish apocalyptic writings from the same era. Will set out the following in easier to follow table form on www.vridar.info soon.

Compare, for example, the Jewish Apocalypse of Abraham, possibly written around the same era as the gospels and other early Christian literature (parenthetic notes are mine and/or John Ashton’s (Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd ed.)– some translation variations are from R. Rubinkiewiez):

1. Then a voice came to me speaking twice, “Abraham! Abraham!” and I said, “Here I am!” And He said, “Behold it is I, fear not for I am with you, for I AM before the ages, and Mighty, the God who created the first light of the world. I am your protector and your helper.”

2. “Go, take me a young heifer of three years, and a she-goat of three years, and a ram of three years, a turtledove and a pigeon, and bring me a pure sacrifice. And in this sacrifice I will lay before you the ages to come, and make known to you what is reserved, and you shall see great things that you have not hitherto seen:

3. because you have loved to search me out, and I have named you ‘my friend.’ (The text here in fact says ‘my lover.’) But abstain from every form of food that comes forth out of the fire, and from the drinking of wine, and from anointing yourself with oil, for forty days, and then set forth for me the sacrifice which I have commanded you, in a place which I will show you on a high mountain, and there I will show you the ages which have been created and established by my word, and I will make known to you what shall come to pass in them on those who have done evil and righteousness in the generations of men.”

4. And it came to pass when I heard the voice of Him who spoke such words to me, and I looked here and there, I found no breath in me, and my spirit was frightened, and my soul seemed as departed from me, for I fell down as a stone, as a dead man upon the earth, and had no more strength to stand. And while I was thus lying with my face towards the earth, I heard the voice of the Holy One speaking, “Go, Jaoel [or Yaoel — a contraction of the gods Yahweh and El], and by means of my ineffable Name raise up yonder man and strengthen him , so that he recovers from his trembling.

5. And the angel whom He had sent came to me in the likeness of a man [cf Dan. 7:13] and grasped me by my right hand and set me up upon my feet and said to me, “Stand up Abraham, 0 friend of God who loves you; let not the trembling of man seize you! For lo! I have been sent to you to strengthen you and bless you in the name of God, who loves you, the Creator of the celestial and the terrestrial. Be fearless and hasten to Him. I am called Jaoel [or Yaoel — a contraction of the gods Yahweh and El] by Him who moves those who exist with me on the seventh expanse over the heavens, a power in virtue of the ineffable Name that is dwelling in me [cf. Exod. 23:21]. I am the one who has been given to restrain, according to His commandment, the threatening attacks of the Living Ones of the Cherubim against one another, and to teach those who carry Him, the song of the seventh hour of the night of man.

6. I am ordered to restrain the Leviathan, for every single attack and menace of every single reptile are subject unto me. I am he who has been commissioned to loosen Hades, and destroy him who stares at the dead. (This ‘staring’ is an attitude of Satan, whereby he paralyses and victimises the dead.) I have been sent to bless you now, and the land which the Eternal One, whom you have invoked, has prepared for you, and for your sake I have wended my way upon earth [For your sake I have indicated the way of the land – cf Exod. 23:20].

7. Stand up, Abraham! Go without fear; be right glad and rejoice, and I am [also rejoice] with you! For age-lasting honour has been prepared for you by the Eternal One. Go, fulfil the sacrifices commanded. For lo! I have been appointed to be with you, and with the generations that will spring from you, and with me Michael blesses you forever. Be of good cheer and go!”

Compare the remarkable similarities between God and Yaoel above and Jesus in the Gospel of John:

Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad. . . . Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” (John 8:56, 58)

But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid. (John 6:20) and Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. (John 14:27)

Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. (John 15:14-15)

Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. (John 1:50-51)

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you. (John 16: 12-15)

And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. (John 5: 27-29)

Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me. (John 7:33)

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)

As Ashton observes, the question is not who copied from whom, but that both represent a common view of Abraham and the roles and natures of heavenly beings — God and Jesus or Yaoel and the Son of Man. Both depict comforting heavenly beings who have been sent to reveal great things to those who are to be henceforth their friends, and much more.

2009-06-15

Intimations of the Death and Resurrection of the Son of Man in Daniel

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by Neil Godfrey

I owe most of the following either to John Ashton in his second edition of Understanding the Fourth Gospel or to someone he cites in there (unfortunately cannot recall which):

Firstly, the original Aramaic expression for what is generally today translated as Son of Man really means nothing more than a man-like figure or one like a man. Secondly, that original Aramaic meaning is by Christian times irrelevant since by the time of the Christian writings and Jewish apocalyptic writings of the same era, it had come to mean what it is translated as today: Son of Man.

Before the Son of Man appears

Prior to the entrance of Daniel’s Son of Man is the well-know fourth beast (the Syrian/Seleucid empire of Antiochus Epiphanes — not Rome!)

Daniel 7:19-21, 23-25

Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron, and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with his feet; . . . that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows. I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them; . . . .

Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces. . . . And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out [persecute] the saints of the most High. . . and they shall be given into his hand . . . .

The fourth beast was terrifying particularly for making war against the saints, the people of God, and martyring them.

A series of beast-like creatures had appeared. The first was “like a lion”. This eventually became “like a man”. (Dan. 7:4). The next was “like a bear”, and the third “like a leopard”. Presumably these could, technically, have been translated originally as “Son of Lion, Son of Bear, Son of Leopard, just as the successor to the fourth beast was translated “Son of Man”. I say technically, and do not suggest this translation by any means. But this makes a significant point about the original meaning of the Aramaic “man-like figure”.

If the four beasts are 4 kingdoms (Dan. 7:17), is the Son of Man any different?

The original meaning of the Son of Man

When the Most High brings low the fourth beast, Daniel is told that at that time,

the kingdom and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people, the saints of the Most High . . . . (Daniel 7:27)

This verse is the angelic interpretation of the vision Daniel had seen of the one “like a Man” replacing the fourth beast:

I watched till the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given to the burning flame . . . . I was watching in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven! He came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him, then to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom . . . . (Daniel 7: 11-13)

It is thus not difficult to interpret the original meaning of the Son of Man as a symbolic reference to the Jews or the saints once liberated from the power of the Syrian empire, particularly from Antiochus Epiphanes.

But there’s (almost certainly) more

Place this interpretation beside that other Second Temple exegesis about the offering of Isaac at the time of the Maccabean martyrdoms: see Jesus displaces Isaac and the full set of my notes from Levenson at this archive.

From Levenson, we know we have are clear evidence of speculation about a resurrection of Isaac from his sacrifice among certain Jewish circles. We can also see in the original meaning of the Son of Man in Daniel that this figure could well represent the saints rising victorious to claim the kingdom after having suffered martyrdom at the hands of the fourth beast.

As the man-like figure became reinterpreted to refer to a singular heavenly being, one like the Son of Man, do not early Christian beliefs that the Son of Man was to be delivered up and crucified and rise again suggest the strong possibility that the original interpretation of this figure in Daniel, as one representing the persecuted yet ultimately victorious saints, also carried over with the personification of the term?

And not only the Christians

As John Ashton remarks, it is really difficult to know if the Son of Man figure in Daniel is meant to be seen as an evanescent dream like waif figure, or a real angelic being. Are the beast-like creatures really mere visions or is Daniel watching heavenly creatures act out what is to happen on earth?

If the latter, then it seems that the Son of Man was seen as a literal spiritual being who was to be identified with Christ.

But this sort of speculation and evolution of interpretations of Daniel was part and parcel of strands of Jewish thinking generally at the turn of the era. Christians had a complex Jewish heritage to draw on for their theological creations.

This is topic of the next post, Jesus in the Gospel of John — and Jewish Apocalyptic

Grounds to question the crucifixion as bedrock fact, 2

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by Neil Godfrey

Following on from Reasons to Question the Historicity of the Crucifixion . . . .

By examining the supposedly earliest evidence first, and the later evidence later, (sounds silly to even have to spell out such a basic methodology) one can see how a theological idea and image eventually became historicized.

Continuing . . . 1. The earliest references to the crucifixion present it not as an historical event but as a theological doctrine, a point of faith, a matter of religious belief.

Last post looked at Galatians and 1 Thessalonians. Now for 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 1:13, 17-18, 22-25

Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? . . . . For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. . . . For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

I do not see how it is possible to read a criminal or religious trial and execution into the above references to the crucifixion of Christ, unless by overfamiliarity and divine fiat.

These are among the earliest references to the crucifixion of Jesus, according to the most widely accepted dating (that is, that the Pauline letters were composed from the mid first -century c.e.).

The notion of the crucifixion of Christ at this point is that it is a spiritual power and form of divine wisdom.

It is not as if we have any evidence that there was a real criminal trial and execution over which early disciples of Jesus were confused and embarrassed, and that they later rationalized as some form of “spiritual power” or “wisdom”. Note, it is not the resurrection that infuses spiritual power or wisdom, but the crucifixion. One could understand confused and embarrassed followers pointing to earlier miracles or the subsequent resurrection on which to rationalize and vindicate their faith. But that is not what we find here at all.

The second half of the above is even less consistent with the concept of an historical event.

The reason the Jews rejected the message of the crucifixion was because it was not a public miracle. “The Jews require a sign” — for this reason the crucifixion was “a stumblingblock”. To judge by Paul’s statements here, it is as if there never were any conflict between Jesus and “the Jews” over blasphemous claims or violations of legal codes or envy over Jesus’ abilities to pull in large crowds. As far as Paul is aware, the reason the Jews do not accept Jesus as their Messiah is because the sign of his Messiahship was not a public miracle.

Had there been an historical crucifixion somewhat along the broad outline we read in the decades later canonical gospels, surely the reason the Jews rejected Jesus was because they believed he was a blasphemer or demon-possessed deceiver and spoke against the Temple and taught people to violate of the Mosaic law.

The reason given here for the Greeks rejecting the Messiahship of Jesus is just as problematic if we insist on a gospel like narrative of a crucifixion.

Paul’s reason for the Greeks rejecting Jesus was because they could not see any philosophical wisdom in a crucifixion. Note that there is no hint in Paul’s mind that a crucifixion might actually indicate criminality of the victim.

Paul is saying that Jews and Greeks do not accept the crucifixion because it was either not a public miracle or it was not a philosophical tenet. That speaks volumes for what the message of the crucifixion was and was not. It was a theological concept claiming to be a miraculous power and secret wisdom for those who were called by God to understand. It was not an historical event involving a trial over violation of civil or religious laws.

If we insist on arguing that Paul’s view was a rationalization and attempt to deny a real historical event, then we are in danger of arguing from mere assumption and in defiance of the earliest evidence.

(I understand that sometimes later evidence can point to earlier events, but it must also be consistent with the earlier evidence. Mere assumption and hypotheses pulled out of imaginative airs cannot replace material evidence.)

1 Corinthians 2:1-2

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

Paul’s message about the crucifixion was “the testimony of God”. It was not the testimony of men or other apostles or eyewitnesses or official reports or the grapevine. It was not the testimony of a Jesus in a vision. It was “the testimony of God”.

This testimony of God was “Jesus Christ and him crucified”. Jesus Christ, and him crucified, was not from eyewitness or second or third hand historical testimony. It was a message from God.

1 Corinthians 2:7-8

But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Here Paul returns to the message or testimony of God, and the wisdom of God which he earlier explained was “Christ crucified”.

Had the princes of this world known the wisdom of God they would not have crucified Christ. Princes of the world. Not the governor Pilate of the Jews. Not King Herod or the Jewish Sanhedrin of the Jews. Pauline letters elsewhere speak of struggling against higher powers in spiritual warfare. Daniel (and apocalyptic Second Temple authors) understood Princes of this world to be angelic powers.

Of course one can interpret this to mean that the angelic powers directed Pilate to crucify Jesus. But that is to read the earlier evidence through the theology and narrative of the later evidence.

Let’s see first of all how much understanding we can gain of Paul’s message by examining it one archaeological layer at a time and slowly working our way up.

2009-06-13

Reasons to question the historicity of the crucifixion

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by Neil Godfrey

Jesus’ death by crucifixion at the direction of Pilate is very commonly cited as a “bedrock fact” of Christian history. I have previously shown that early Christianity was not united on Pilate’s role in the crucifixion: there was an early widespread belief that the Jewish King Herod was responsible. I would be very interested to hear any responses at all from those who do hold to the crucifixion itself as a “bedrock fact of history” pointing out the methodological and other fallacies behind the following series of posts demonstrating (I believe) that the crucifixion is at the very best an event of questionable historicity.

Reasons for questioning its historicity:

The earliest references to the crucifixion present it not as an historical event but as a theological doctrine, a point of faith, a matter of religious belief.
The crucifixion is itself always portrayed in canonical literature as a theological event with a theological meaning, and its power lies in its paradoxical relationship with conquest and victory. Attempts to appreciate its reality in terms of historicity or human horror are latecomers to the discussion.
The first gospel narrative of the crucifixion portrays it as a theological drama. Mark’s crucifixion is a mock Roman triumph, and teases out OT allegories. So even by the time the crucifixion is narrated as, in part, a human drama, it is shrouded in allegorical and theological trappings.
The authenticity of the first non-Christian references to the crucifixion have to be questioned on several grounds, including the fact that their existence is unknown in all other surviving records up till the fourth century.
The least controversial earliest non-Christian reference to Christianity (Pliny) fails to mention both the name of Jesus and the crucifixion.

One regularly reads among books discussing the historicity of Jesus that the crucifixion of Jesus is a bedrock established historical fact. No-one would have any reason to make up such a story about someone being crucified like a criminal or subversive, and who was nonetheless still venerated as the Messiah long afterwards, so the argument goes. There are further elaborations of this argument from “the criteria of embarrassment”. Tacitus is also regularly invoked as a pagan witness.

I would like to expand on or support each one of the above points — by examining the evidence in ways historians of nonbiblical topics normally do — and show why each ought to be considered at the very least grounds for pausing before routinely assuming that the crucifixion of Jesus was indeed “a bedrock historical event”.

1. The earliest references to the crucifixion present it not as an historical event but as a theological doctrine, a point of faith, a matter of religious belief.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.

Here the death of Jesus (we don’t know yet if it was by crucifixion or other means) is presented as an article of faith, something to be “believed” in order to believe anyone else who died will also live again. The death of Jesus is presented as a datum of faith of the same kind and nature as his resurrection. To believe in one is to believe in the other — the two are “an item” in this first testimony of the “death of Jesus”.

Galatians 2:19-3:2

For I through the law died to the law that I might live to God.

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified? This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

Galatians 6:17

From now on let no one trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

If Paul’s letter to the Galatians were the only reference to the crucifixion of Jesus I doubt that anyone could possibly conclude that it was an historical event. Even the life of Christ is as much a metaphor and theological tenet here as is the crucifixion. Paul gives no hint that there was a historical Jesus who was crucified for historical reasons. Rather, there was a death of Jesus that had a deeply personal religious, even mystical, meaning. The crucifixion was something that could be “portrayed before the very eyes” of the Galatians. Compare how Paul himself appeared among the Thessalonians:

1 Thessalonians 2:7

But we were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her children

Which brings us to back to possibly the earliest letter of Paul. Here also appears the claim that the Jews did indeed kill Jesus:

1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews:

Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men:

Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.

If there were no doubts hanging over the authenticity of this passage then the historical crucifixion of Jesus would indeed have very strong support. But there are doubts about its authenticity, including some among scholars who do not question the historicity of Jesus or the crucifixion itself:

The Jews “Who Killed the Lord Jesus”

What then are we to make of the passage in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, about the Jews “who killed the Lord Jesus”? Well, many scholars (e.g., Mack, Koester, Pearson, Meeks, Perkins, Brandon: see the Bibliography at end) have tended to make short work of it, dismissing it as an interpolation by some later editor or copyist. They do so on two grounds.

One is what they consider to be an unmistakable allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem in verse 16, an event which happened after Paul’s death. Here is the passage in its entirety, courtesy of the New English Bible:

“14You [referring to the Christians of Thessalonica] have fared like the congregations in Judea, God’s people in Christ Jesus. You have been treated by your countrymen as they are treated by the Jews, 15who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out, the Jews who are heedless of God’s will and enemies of their fellow-men, 16hindering us from speaking to the gentiles to lead them to salvation. All this time they have been making up the full measure of their guilt, and now retribution has overtaken them for good and all.”

This finality of God’s wrath must refer to an event on the scale of the first Jewish War (66-70), when the Temple and much of Jerusalem were destroyed, not, as is sometimes claimed (e.g., by R. E. Brown), to the expulsion of Jews from Rome (apparently for messianic agitation) by Claudius in the 40s. This gleeful, apocalyptic statement is hardly to be applied to a local event which the Thessalonians may or may not have been aware of several years later. Besides, Paul’s reference in verse 14 (which many take as the end of the genuine passage) is to a persecution by Jews in Judea, and even the killing of Jesus was the responsibility of Jews in that location. Offering a local event in Rome as a punishment for either crime seems somehow inappropriate. There are also those who question whether any such persecution of Christians took place prior to 70 (see Douglas Hare, The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to St. Matthew, p.30ff.), indicating that perhaps even verse 14 is part of the interpolation, by someone who had little knowledge of the conditions in Judea at the time of Paul’s letter. (Pearson, below, suggests this.)

It has been pointed out that there are no different textual traditions of 1 Thessalonians without the disputed passage. Since this is so, it is claimed, the insertion would have to have been made very early (soon after 70), when there would hardly have been enough time for the evolution from the mythical to the historical Jesus phase. But this is an unfounded assumption. Recently (see The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, Epp and MacRae, eds., 1989, p.207f.) some scholars have abandoned the old idea that the first corpus of Pauline letters was assembled no later than the year 90. They now see such a collection as coming around the time of Marcion in the 140s. Even though a few individual letters, like Romans and the two Corinthians, do seem to have been known by the turn of the century to people like Ignatius, the first witness to the epistle 1 Thessalonians in the wider Christian record (beyond the writer who used it to compose 2 Thessalonians, probably in that city) comes no earlier than that first corpus.

Thus the interpolation in 2:15-16 could have been made considerably later than 70. Even into the second century, Christian anti-Semitism remained high and the catastrophic events of the first Jewish War were very much alive in the memories of both Jew and gentile in the eastern empire. The inserted passage could have been made in the letter’s own community, before it entered the corpus. It is even barely conceivable that verse 16 refers to the outcome of the second Jewish Revolt (132-5), when Bar Kochba was crushed, Jews were expelled from Palestine, and a Roman city was built over the ruins of Jerusalem.

The second reason scholars tend to reject this passage as not genuine to Paul is because it does not concur with what Paul elsewhere says about his fellow countrymen, whom he expects will in the end be converted to Christ. The vicious sentiments in these verses is recognized as an example of “gentile anti-Judaism” and “foreign to Paul’s theology that ‘all Israel will be saved’.” (See Birger Pearson: “1 Thessalonians 2:13-16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation,” Harvard Theological Review 64 [1971], p.79-94, a thorough consideration of the question.)

We might also note that in Romans 11, within a passage in which he speaks of the guilt of the Jews for failing to heed the message about the Christ, Paul refers to Elijah’s words in 1 Kings, about the (largely unfounded) accusation that the Jews have habitually killed the prophets sent from God. Here Paul breathes not a whisper about any responsibility on the part of the Jews for the ultimate atrocity of the killing of the Son of God himself. This would be an inconceivable silence if the 2:15-16 passage in 1 Thessalonians were genuine and the basis of the accusation true.

Cited from Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle, supp03

My point is not to dismiss the likelihood of historicity on the grounds of a single debatable verse. My point is to demonstrate, here and in future posts, that by normal standards or rules of historical evidence (at least according to standards outside the guild of biblical studies) that the evidence for the historicity of Jesus is simply not “bedrock” by any means.

2009-06-10

Fundamentalist Logicide: killing word meanings (a blog post for franscisco et al)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Affection is expressed and felt in all human cultures. Empathy is found throughout the whole of humanity. Empathy and affection are human universals. One might call these expressions and feelings of love.

Tragically there was a time when I reinterpreted love to mean “keeping the commandments of God”. Francisco’s comments on my recent blog post about Joseph of Arimathea brought back shameful memories of my past in a fundamentalist type of religion. (As Darwin might have said, this is like confessing to a murder, now.) Such a definition of love is a form of logicide. It is a perversion, a destruction, of the meaning of “love”. And it causes pain.

When I left that church, the truth was made as starkly distinct as night is from day. Friends whose love I had for so many years known and felt was predicated solely on my belonging to their church and having the same ideas about God and the Bible. Once it was clear I had come to think differently, those friendships (most of them) dissolved like fairy floss in the rain. Only then did I see that it was never me that they loved, but only my active support for their belief system and way of life.

True to the “commandments of God”, which I believed was “true godly love, agape, etc” I also “put on” (as in the command to “put on the new man”) a persona of love for those “in the world”, family included. But I know I hurt them terribly when I shunned participation in certain rituals and customs that I (or my church) declared to be “pagan” or “worldly”. In hindsight, I can see that they were not being pagan or “worldly” at all, but simply following normal cultural mores that represent or signify your one’s identity with them, one’s living within their orbit of trust and fellowship. Sure rituals like that are a game at one level, but they are also human universals that mark where friendships and communities and families are supported. Participating in them, even when it might be personally tedious at times, is an act of genuine love.

Fundamentalist logicide very often (falsely) describes “human love” as either “lust” or “selfishness”. To do this, they must withdraw so totally from others so as not to attempt to know or understand them on their own terms. Rather, their view of others (outsiders) is defined (brainwashed) by a book that says “the whole world lies in wickedness”. This is not a loving thought. But to justify it, the fundamentalist must resort to actively witnessing his or her own interpretations and ways “like lights in dark places”.

I found genuine, yes, human, love, when I left fundamentalism. I came to feel in place of my old view that the world was divided into two opposing camps a sense of one-ness, identity, with all others — even fundamentalists. I even felt a one-ness with all living creatures, especially of course other sentient creatures. The natural world and our place in it awed me, in a poetic (some might have said “spiritual”) sense. Realizing how fragile we all are, and how alike we all are, and how unpredictable and heartless the natural world can be, and the shortness and pains and joys of existence, all of this gave my natural sense of empathy for others a sharper edge. It became all the more an imperative to make the most of my time here, but especially to assist others in any ways I could to also have a richer and more fulfilling existence. It’s nothing special, this sort of empathy. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. The sentiment is found throughout the most religious and non-religious places I have experienced — Cambodia, China, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Turkey, Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and others. And my job has meant I have had to work closely with people from a dizzying array of different nationalities and languages/accents and religions. Natural human affection and empathy cuts across all of these.

Preservation of the planet, and causes of peace and justice, attracted me and filled a need in me to be actively involved in an organized and meaningful (meaning truly “impactful”) way. Such causes attract all types. But they also attract many who are likewise motivated by nothing but an empathy, a love, for people, the world, and other living creatures.

I have a deeply devout Christian friend at work. We agreed to have a time to discuss our different viewpoints one evening. We exchanged frank views in friendship, but I never had the heart to point out to her all the fallacies I believed were underlying her faith. It would have hurt her too much, stressed her, provoked a negative response, etc. It would not have been a loving thing to do. I reserve my comments for a blog where anyone interested is free to take up my thoughts. But it would be unloving and arrogant of me to attempt to sit someone down and tell them where they are all up the creek without a paddle flogging a dead horse. We are all where we are at, and that’s that (Dr Seuss, presumably.)

And I still love my children more than myself, like most parents do. And my love for my partner is far deeper than lust, though I know she appreciates a bit of that too.

The tragedy is that the Francisco’s will find fault with many of my words here and judge me entirely through the bible words in their heads, and not from a position of wanting to understand or come to know me or others as we are. And the tragedy is compounded by their idea of love wreaking so much pain and discomfort on others, and their withdrawal from cooperative efforts to make this a better world, and to do even just a little bit to make life a little more worthwhile for others, even “sinners”. They may do good deeds, and nothing wrong with that, whatever the motive. But it would be better if they could step outside their persecution and the-whole-world-lies-in-wickedness God complexes.

This post won’t achieve that of course. But who knows, maybe something will be planted that at some future date, when time and circumstances are right, will begin to blossom.

A related post of mine: Why oppose godless morality?

Recommended reading: The Mind of the Bible Believer (inspiration for my use of the term “logicide”) and Leaving the Fold (See my notes on Winnell in the Book Review section and also link to her Recovering from Religion site in my blogroll)

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Neil Godfrey on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “No need. The context sets the tone, rarely a single word. I want understanding between us. By the way, with…” Jan 13, 02:50
Neil Godfrey on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “For me it is interesting that you say “Carrier frequently confuses different things. He fails to provide clear definitions of…” Jan 13, 02:38
Petr Jancar on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “Addition: ChatGPT told me “The word “vacuous” can carry a negative connotation, as it implies that something is empty, lacking…” Jan 12, 21:10
Petr Jancar on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “For me it is interesting that you say “Carrier frequently confuses different things. He fails to provide clear definitions of…” Jan 12, 20:25
Vincent Czyz on The Christos Mosaic – A Novel About the Christ Myth Hypothesis: ““Acts was a work to bring the Pauline theology and the synoptic theology together …” I agree with you on…” Jan 12, 12:41
Neil Godfrey on Jesus Mythicism and Historical Knowledge, Part 4: Did Jesus Exist?: “ChatGPT should have “reflected” on other traditions that it was Herod who crucified Jesus, or that he was stoned, or…” Jan 11, 22:57
Neil Godfrey on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “2/ You say “The one person the axiom has misled is the one who proposed the axiom in the first…” Jan 11, 22:51
Petr Jancar on The Folly of Bayesian Probability in “Doing History”: “A few points to the above three reactions of yours: 1/ No need to apologize again for the former tone…” Jan 11, 21:34
Neil Godfrey on How to Recognize a Trustworthy Consensus: “Well I did refer to it as a “rule of thumb”, not as an iron canon. I don’t see any…” Jan 11, 19:04

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What else could Paul possibly have preached?

The crucifixion has no meaning without resurrection?

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Paul’s shorthand was not “Jesus died” . . . Really?

Did Imperial Rome really hold the crucifixion patent at the time of Paul?

Where is Philo?

Back to Borg’s and Crossan’s context of 2 Corinthians

Long-time anti-imperialist bias

But there’s more (maybe later)

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So where did it come from?

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1. Male nipples

2. Male uterus

3. Thirteenth rib

4. Coccyx

5. Wisdom teeth

6. Appendix

7. Body hair

8. Goose bumps (Erector pili)

9. Extrinsic ear muscles

10. Third eyelid

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Before the Son of Man appears

The original meaning of the Son of Man

But there’s (almost certainly) more

And not only the Christians

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Continuing . . . 1. The earliest references to the crucifixion present it not as an historical event but as a theological doctrine, a point of faith, a matter of religious belief.

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1. The earliest references to the crucifixion present it not as an historical event but as a theological doctrine, a point of faith, a matter of religious belief.

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