2020-04-12

Symmetry in the Legends Surrounding Jesus’ Birth and Death

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by Tim Widowfield

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Early Christianities
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[Note: I’m offering the following as a diversion to get our minds off this terrible timeline. –taw]

William Blake, (1757-1827), The Resurrection, c. 1805

A few years back, I published a post concerning the date of Jesus’ birth (Why Is Christmas on the 25th of December?), in which we briefly touched on the idea of symmetry between Jesus’ birth and death. I quoted Augustine, who noted the belief, current at the time, that Christ’s conception occurred on March 25.

For He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which He was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which He was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before nor since. But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th. (Augustine, On the Trinity, Book IV, Chapter 5)

Over time, I’ve become convinced that we can gain more insight into the history of the legends applied to Jesus by examining the symmetry between the incarnation and death legends. Here are a few points to mull over. Continue reading “Symmetry in the Legends Surrounding Jesus’ Birth and Death”

The Dumbing of America

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society
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In a single Easter weekend (that still has a day or two to go) . . . .

From happy slaps on the back for the most solemn day of the Christian calendar . . . .

.

to understanding the “real” reason he has critics . . .

.

to catching up with ten-day-old news and proving he didn’t even read it anyway . . .

(I first read that “First” news in a 2nd April article of The Intercept: Coronavirus Started in China, but Europe Became the Hub for Its Global Spread. “NAMED sources” in the New York Times article are . . .

    • Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
    • Adriana Heguy, a member of the N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine
    • Maciej Boni of Penn State University
    • Trevor Bedford, an associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington
    • Sidney Bell, a computational biologist working with the Nextstrain team
    • Peter Thielen, a molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory)

.

to not knowing the difference between bacteria and viruses . . . .

So…he doesn’t even remember that antibiotics can’t touch viruses? They must have told him, they must have told him a hundred times, because that’s who he is, but I guess a hundred times he didn’t listen. (Ophelia Benson)

Jesus christ, the man is an idiot . . . . He’s never more stupid than when he pretends to be smart. (PZ Myers)

TRUMP: “Antibiotics used to solve every problem and now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten to brilliant that the anti-antibiotic can’t keep up with it. … there’s a whole genius to it … not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart.”

.

To the Dumbing of America . . . 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JohGniYph-c

 

(I have since discovered Susan Jacoby has an article titled Dumbing of America in a 2008 edition of The Washington Post. To bring her point to the level of the Presidency of the U.S. she compared George W. Bush’s “I am the decider” dismissal with F.D. Roosevelt’s invitation for his radio audience to have open maps before them so they could more completely follow his speech. Little could she expect what was to come.)

.

Every Single Thing . . . 

Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It’s not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it’s the most dangerous thing.

(Fran Lebowitz in interview with Michael Schulman, H/T Butterflies and Wheels)

2020-04-11

Gospel Parables and the “Birth” of the Messiah as a Personification of Israel

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament, Old Testament
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Other Vridar posts discussing the gospels as parables:

And Tim Widowfield’s post on the same theme in the Gospel of John:

Continuing the series . . .

Nanine Charbonnel’s [NC] last pages of her chapter on the meaning of “fulfilment” in the gospels dovetail with John Dominic Crossan’s The Power of Parable and Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus (links are to Vridar posts discussing these works) – and with any other writing that has argued that the Gospels are parables.

We know that Jesus was famous for speaking in parables but NC (like “Jesus historicist” Crossan and “Jesus mythicist” Brodie) goes further and suggests that the gospel stories about Jesus and all that he did are written as parables.

In what follows I attempt to convey some rough sketch of NC’s thesis. We will see that she delves into deeper technical reasons for reading the gospels as “parables”.

That the character of Jesus himself is a parable is most clearly seen in the Gospel of John where we read, explicitly, that Jesus is “the word”, that his appearance in flesh is a visible form of “the word”. In this gospel it is accordingly easier to grasp that “biographical” episodes of Jesus, such as his encounter with the sisters Martha and Mary, are parables whose meaning is not hidden very far beneath their surfaces. The acts of Jesus are dramatizations of the word.

Explicit and hidden

There are places in the gospels where an implied narrator informs readers that a specific thing happened as a fulfilment of an “Old Testament” prophecy. Matthew 2 contains the most memorable instances:

14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

. . . 

 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

NC writes that these explicit pointers are there to highlight for the reader the rule of the game. The fulfilment applies to the whole narrative. Parables in the mouth of Jesus ought not lead the reader to think that the gospel narrative itself is a parable. The beginning of Jesus’ public ministry as told in Luke 4 announces the fulfilment of a text that served as a major inspiration for the author of the gospel’s larger narrative:

16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Crucifixion by Leon Bonnat (Wikimedia)

The immediate narrative meaning is that Jesus is announcing that his presence before the Nazareth congregation is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. The reader knows, however, that what is being fulfilled is the entire life and death of Jesus as fleshed out through the entire gospel.

If in Luke we read Jesus’ opening words declaring that he is fulfilling the scriptures, in the Gospel of John chapter 19 we read Jesus’ last words declaring that he has fulfilled them all.

28 Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.”

The Greek words are different but the meaning is the same:

Luke 4:21 — πεπλήρωται / peplērōtai (is fulfilled)

John 19:30 — τετέλεσται / tetelestai (it is finished/accomplished)

The Gospels as fulfilment

To take a closer look at those two words: Continue reading “Gospel Parables and the “Birth” of the Messiah as a Personification of Israel”

2020-04-09

The Achievement of Bernie Sanders

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society

You may have to open Twitter to make the video work. Transcript:

It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple of years ago are now right in the middle of attention. The worst crime that he committed in the eyes of the establishment is not the policies that he was proposing; it is the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements which had already been developing (Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and many others) and turned them into an activist movement – which doesn’t just show up every couple of years to push a lever and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism, and so on. That could affect the Biden administration.

Interesting to pair this quote with a lengthier interview in Jacobin:

Noam Chomsky: “Bernie Sanders Has Inspired a Mass Popular Movement”

Here Chomsky discusses more the labour movement itself at some length. But he does repeat the words in the DemocracyNow interview with a more direct focus on what is “frightening the business class”.

The reason why Sanders is vilified in the media pretty much across the spectrum is not so much because of his policies. It’s because he has inspired a mass popular movement which doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button but is acting constantly — pressuring — to achieve changes and having some success. That’s frightening for the business class. The role of the public is to be passive spectators and not to interfere.

And on tonight’s news I heard a commentator expressing dismay at the prospect that Australia’s major airline, QANTAS, is facing the prospect of nationalization, which reminded me of a series of reflections like the following:

Will coronavirus signal the end of capitalism?

It begins with a flashback to the Black Death:

The pandemic begins in Asia, rips through the capital cities of Europe and wipes out at least a third of all human beings in its way. When it is all over, revolts begin, cherished institutions fall, and the entire economic system has to be reconfigured.

That is a short history of the Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic caused by the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which spread from Mongolia to Western Europe in the 1340s.

Because the economy then was based on local agriculture and crafts, ordinary life bounced back relatively quickly.

But, by radically reducing the number of workers, it gave the survivors increased bargaining power, which soon translated into new concepts of liberty among the population of medieval cities.

That, in turn, started a process of economic change that brought an end to the feudal system and, some argue, triggered the rise of capitalism.

The relevance of that comparison to today?

Today, capitalism faces its own plague nightmare. Though the COVID-19 virus may kill between 1 percent and 4 percent of those who catch it, it is about to have an impact on a much more complex economy than the one that existed back in the 1340s – one with a much more fragile geopolitical order, and on a society already gripped with foreboding over climate change.

And another, a thought that has often surfaced in past years but now seems an imminent possibility:

Is this the end of the liberal international order? And what might take its place?

“Every day the liberal international order seems less liberal, less international and less orderly,” says the Lowy Institute’s executive director Michael Fullilove.

He cautions against adopting a simplistic narrative that pits an insurgent China against the US.

“I personally think it will be much messier and probably more dangerous than a simple bifurcation,” he says.

And meanwhile, an ignorant, corrupt fool keeps reassuring his supporters that everything will be back to normal in a matter of weeks while they find new scapegoats to blame for anything that will dash those expectations.

 

 

2020-04-08

Further on a “Midrashic” View of the Gospels

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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Continuing from the previous post, discussing Nanine Charbonnel’s Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier . . . .

I stopped short in my last blog post when I came to NC’s comparison of the gospels with the OT books of Esther and Ruth. I complete that little section here.

The gospels are about “the end times”, as we saw. But they obviously do not employ the “end times” style of apocalyptic literature. If they have any models they are more like Esther and Ruth — two books that NC associates with “midrash”, with the “perfect illusion of historicity”. The words of Maurice Mergui in Paul à Patras are quoted. To get some helpful context I translate/paraphrase somewhat more than NC uses:

We have been examining the hypothesis of midrash. According to this hypothesis, the Gospels (including the Johannine and Pauline corpora) are midrashic elaborations that yield no basis for any historical content. This hypothesis comes up against a frequent objection. Jewish midrash usually looks like a quotation of biblical text linked to commentary. The gospels obviously do not have this form. They are narratives that look very much like historical accounts. Paul’s letters certainly have no equivalent in Jewish midrash. Therefore, the objection goes, the midrashic theory for this NT literature should be rejected.

The first objection (that midrash is inconsistent with narrative forms) falls apart when we notice that midrash does indeed know how to create forms very like narratives while giving a perfect illusion of historicity. Two examples are the books of Ruth and Esther which are “real marvels” of this register. . . .

Look at what the redactor of Esther does. He goes through the eschatological cycle. He finds a new way of relating the coming of the messiah at the climax of a crisis. This story must be told over and over in different ways so as not to let the messianic idea be lost, become empty and disappear. The story of Esther confronts readers with their own reality of the absence of God and messiah (God does not even appear in the story), of a life of exile, suffering and violence, a the real possibility of losing all messianic hope. The same story idea — the rescue at the moment of peak threat — is told anew. The story speaks of exile, of conspiracy against the Jews, the impossibility of approaching the king, the pagan festival — the story is one of “ultimate test”. Similarly with Ruth, we read again: famine, exile, union with pagans, impossibility of having a son (a messiah) — but then miraculously at the end we find the appearance or light of the messiah. In these narratives we find the messiah making his rescue at the moment of extreme tribulation.

NC’s point in citing Mergui is to stress the capacity of midrash to create a narrative illusion of being fully immersed in real events.

I think that the messianic references seen in the OT stories are overstated. The theme of Esther is surely the victory of God in the last days as he rescues his people from the brink of extinction. Messiahs sometimes appear in such narratives, perhaps, especially in the extracanonical ones, but they are optional to the central theme. Sometimes the central figure is a “Servant”, or a “Son of Man”, and sometimes these figures will evolve into or be conflated with a messianic figure. Some of us might even wonder if there is room for a new term to describe the type of “midrash” Mergui and NC speak of. But these are peripheral issues to the central arguments.

Careful readers would have noticed Mergui’s reference to the letters of Paul in the same discussion. Thomas Brodie, I think, would be most interested in Mergui’s discussion of Paul. Brodie and Mergui deny the historicity of the “Paul” behind the letters. The Paul we implicit in the correspondence is a literary persona. Mergui compares him with Moses and sees several recurrent themes in the letters to support this “midrashic” interpretation. But again, that’s another story. I’ll try to keep working on NC’s book for now.

Charbonnel, Nanine. 2017. Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier. Paris: Berg International éditeurs.

Mergui, Maurice. 2015. Paul à Patras: Une approche midrashique du paulinisme. Objectif Transmission. Kindle Edition.

2020-04-06

To Ask if Bible Events Actually Happened Guarantees the Bible Will Be Misunderstood

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament, Old Testament
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Continuing with my discussion of Nanine Charbonnel’s Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier . . . .

An earlier post in this series, Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier. Chap 3b. Creative Intertextuality, briefly touched on the ways stories in the Pentateuch came to be rewritten so that one mirrored another: e.g. Abraham and Sarah’s experience in Egypt and being expelled under duress pairs with the subsequent Exodus narrative. Deuteronomy itself is a rewriting of the earlier books of the Pentateuch. We read stories as “fulfillments” of other stories; scenario types are written as a kind of commentary on other stories, or as indicative of a deeper meaning of other stories. We see narrative “typology” within the works of the Hebrew Bible so when we find the New Testament narratives similarly drawing events and persons of the Jewish Scriptures we must understand that we are witnessing a continuation of a literary practice that was centuries old. And just as Deuteronomy was a certain kind of rewriting of the previous books so the Acts of the Apostles may have a similar function with respect to the preceding canonical gospels.

But Charbonnel goes further yet. The Incarnation itself was a literary product of the way the Hebrew language conceptualizes temporality.

At this point, I have to confess I am still grappling to acquire a fluent understanding of Charbonnel’s discussion. It involves Hebrew grammar, changes in Hebrew grammar during the Roman era and its relationship with Greek. The best I can do for now is to give some idea of the conclusion and a few details of Charbonnel’s argument but only so readers can see it “through a glass darkly”.

When reading this section of Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier I was reminded of my first lecture in French 101 at university. “If there is one lesson I want you to take away from this course, it is to understand that other people think differently” — those were the first words of the professor in that classroom and I can hear his voice still. The same lesson certainly applies to biblical Hebrew and time.

The general idea being argued is that stories (a kind of midrash) were written as if taking place in the past yet in the minds of the original storytellers and audiences they were “outside time”, “ever-present” — both future and also past but always present. (Compare the brief discussion of Hebrew “tenses” in the previous post.)

In the OT Prophetic writings the expression for “in those days” was essentially a pointer to messianic time and not a literal historical (or specific future historical time) marker. When the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke begins “in those days” it is a signal that we are reading of the messianic time spoken of in the prophets. It is not, despite our natural English translation reading and context, primarily pointing to the historical time of Augustus and Herod. To help us see what is going on here, compare the Protoevangium of James. We read there an elaboration of the nativity scenes in Matthew and Luke. The elaboration of those canonical stories fills in gaps and ties up loose ends that are left with us from the bare canonical accounts. Those “fillers” are taken from other narratives in the Jewish Scriptures, especially 1 Samuel. We read about the birth of Mary in circumstances that recall the births of Samuel and Isaac. Then we read of the childhood of Mary and her giving birth to Jesus in scenes that involve midwives and Salome and a new setting, a cave. We are reading a retelling of the canonical narratives with ideas from both the Scriptures and other interpretations presumably discussed among the author’s contemporaries. The new story is not historical. It is an interpretation constructed from attempts to answer questions about the canonical stories by weaving in new ideas from Scriptures and elsewhere. The story is about “the coming of Christ”.

I am reminded of the argument of Thomas L. Thompson about the way the stories of the Hebrew Bible were written. He is discussing what we classify as the “historical” books of the Bible.

When we ask whether the events of biblical narrative have actually happened, we raise a question that can hardly be satisfactorily answered. The question itself guarantees that the Bible will be misunderstood. One of the central contrasts that divide the understanding of the past that we find implied in biblical texts from a modern understanding of history lies in the way we think about reality.

. . . 

Chronology in this kind of history is not used as a measure of change. It links events and persons, makes associations, establishes continuity. It expresses an unbroken chain from the past to the present. This is not a linear as much as it is a coherent sense of time. It functions so as to identify and legitimize what is otherwise ephemeral and transient. Time marks a reiteration of reality through its many forms. Nor is ancient chronology based on a sense of circular time, in the sense of a return to an original reality. The first instance of an event is there only to mark the pattern of reiteration. It is irrelevant whether a given event is earlier or later than another. Both exist as mirrored expressions of a transcendent reality. Closely linked with this ancient perception of time is the philosophical idea we find captured in the Book of Ecclesiastes (1: 9-11):

There is nothing new under the sun. If we can say of anything: that it is new, it has been seen already long since. This event of the past is not remembered. Nor will the future events, which will happen again be remembered by those who follow us.

When God created the world, he created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. All of history is already included in the creation. This is also what lies behind the idea of ‘fate’, which, as a classic premiss of Greek tragedy, reflects the human struggle against destiny. The only appropriate response is acceptance and understanding.

. . .  Continue reading “To Ask if Bible Events Actually Happened Guarantees the Bible Will Be Misunderstood”

2020-04-04

Some Sites that have Helped Keep Me Sane

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society

Two videos (one based on a British song; the other an American satirist) and two cartoons (both by Australia’s Leunig). . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_tEdQvFcc

 

 

Coronavirus #2

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society

It’s hard to feel motivated to write about biblical studies. I can think of nothing less important at a time like this, especially after reading the latest news re the U.S. right now. Can there be anything more evil than using the pandemic to bolster and fuel the profit-motivated capitalist system? A federal government that stands back and watches each state fend for itself while feeding the capitalist system? That does not even qualify as “civilized”.

Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing

REAR ADMIRAL POLOWCYZK:  So FEMA is — so this product that we’re moving is primarily commercial product that would enter the commercial system and be distributed through financial business transactions between hospitals and these distributors.

Q    So, just to clarify that, that explains why states say they’re bidding like they’re on eBay, because the supplies are going to the private sector and then they have to go there to get the supplies.

REAR ADMIRAL POLOWCYZK:  That’s normally how things –that’s normally how things work, right?  So I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain and say — look, these six distributors — six, seven — they have six to seven hundred warehouses.  They have trucks to go to the hospital door every day.  We’re bringing product in.  They’re filling orders for hospitals, nursing homes, like normal.  I’m putting volume into that system.

The Ventilator Business Is Its Own Swamp Of Miscreant Corporations

This apparent profiteering should come as no surprise. Consider the poor track record of the ventilator industry. ResMed is not the only producer with a history of alleged misconduct. In fact, all the big publicly traded companies in the industry have paid millions of dollars in penalties in False Claims Act, kickback and bribery cases.

Along with ResMed, they are Philips, General Electric, Hill-Rom and Medtronic.

How Big Pharma Is Getting Ready To Blackmail Americans

The $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill that Congress hastily passed and Donald Trump signed into law deliberately creates new price gouging opportunities for drug companies.

Left out of the relief bill was language from a 1980 law that requires drug companies to charge “reasonable” prices for pharmaceuticals developed with government financial help. Companies that charge unreasonable prices, or hold back on making their inventions available, can be stripped of monopoly rights.

Without this language companies that develop coronavirus vaccines or cures using federal funding can jack up prices for any COVID-19 cure or vaccine with no legal limits. Imagine the price gouging possibilities for a life-saving vaccine or cure. All other countries with modern economies have laws to protect against price gouging.

2020-03-26

Coronavirus

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society

Many newsfeeds and tweets have freaked me out but these two remain uppermost in the “freak out” department:

The Pandemic Is Going To Cost Us $5 Trillion … Or More

We Ran the Numbers. They’re Devastating

By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief

The $1 trillion coronavirus relief package Congress passed won’t come close to making up for the damage caused by COVID-19 and the Trump administration’s lethal dawdling.

We need the government to act or we could fall into a depression rivaling the 1930s.

An 18-month crisis is widely expected. The Trump administration plan is for 18 months. That implies $5 trillion based on my calculations.

The ultimate cost of this novel virus is likely to be north of $7 trillion, assuming this pandemic endures for two years, as German public health officials warn.

and . . .

Coronavirus is spreading rapidly in the US. American culture might make it uniquely vulnerable

Now is hardly the time to be attacking opposition parties, least of all media, as if they are the ones to hold us back. I would expect a civilized society to rise above that sort of thing.

The 1930s depression did not end well for the world. History does not repeat, I know, but I do often think I see times when it rhymes.

2020-03-23

How the Gospels Became History

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by Neil Godfrey

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We discuss here the second of three parts of the chapter about "scriptural fulfillments" 
in Nanine Charbonnel's Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier . . .

. . .

The Jewish Scriptures spoke of times that were supposed to be fulfilled in coming days and in the text of the New Testament we read of those events having been fulfilled.

What is going on here? Nanine Charbonnel (NC) picks up from her earlier discussion of “midrash” and other specifically Hebrew techniques [the links below take you to posts where that earlier discussion was presented here] and begins to show how they apply to the creation of Jesus in the gospels.

 

The word of God has the power to create its own fulfilment

Readers of the Jewish Scriptures were confronted with passages such as Isaiah 55:11

. . . my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

Healing at Pool of Bethesda. (From Picryl) But here’s the problem. This sort of detail is not what we find in other works that really are historical accounts in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

There is a point of Hebrew grammar here that needs some explanation because it is quite unlike anything in English.

Our verbs have tenses, most simply, past, present and future. Hebrew verbs don’t, well not quite. Instead, they express either completed and incomplete actions, perfect and imperfect. The perfect form or completed action can be translated as the past tense: e.g. I said, I have said, etc.; the imperfect or incomplete action can be translated as either the present or future tense: e.g. I shall say, I am saying, etc.

But there’s a catch. The little consonant, waw = ו (meaning “and”), just to make it interesting, can be added to either of these Hebrew “tenses” and reverse them! So a ו added to a perfect verb (I said) turns it into a present or future tense; and a ו added to an imperfect (future tense) turns it into a past or perfect tense.

Such is my no doubt very simplistic and overly simplistic explanation of the little I have read about Hebrew and what I gleaned from NC’s discussion of that particular point.

The point is that Hebrew expressions can be ambivalent about when, or the time, they are supposed to refer to. Many of us are aware, for example, of how a passage translated in the past tense in the Bible is understood by the reader to refer to a future event.

I better stop here before I get myself in over my head. It’s a long time since I’ve attempted to learn any basic Hebrew. But I am reasonably confident that the above is more or less how Hebrew works and what NC is addressing.

And Jeremiah 1:12

Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am ready to perform My word.”

Then Jeremiah 33:

14 ‘Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will perform that good thing which I have promised to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah:

15 ‘In those days and at that time
I will cause to grow up to David
A Branch of righteousness;
He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.
16 In those days Judah will be saved,
And Jerusalem will dwell safely.
And this is the name by which she will be called:
THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.’

That “I will perform” is an instance of that waw at work: וַהֲקִֽמֹתִי֙ — so the past or perfect tense (have performed) is transformed into a present or future tense (will perform).

The Church Fathers were aware of this linguistic aspect of the Hebrew. Irenaeus explains it in his Discourse in Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, para 67:

At this point let us speak of His healings. Isaiah says thus:

He took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses: (Isa. liii. 4)

that is to say, He shall take, and shall bear. For there are passages in which the Spirit of God through the prophets recounts things that are to be as having taken place. For that which with God is essayed and conceived of as determined to take place, is reckoned as having already taken place: and the Spirit, regarding and seeing the time in which the issues of the prophecy are fulfilled, utters the words (accordingly). 

Eschatological expectation

I am not so convinced that “messianic movements” were a feature of Second Temple Judaism as I have discussed in other posts. But I present NC’s thesis here as accurately as I can. On the other hand, I do find her point about prophets at the time very interesting.

NC stresses the importance of “the intensity of eschatological anticipation” in Israel from the time of their Babylonian exile and especially through to the time of Daniel and no doubt at the time of the Roman conquest and plundering of the Jerusalem temple in 63 BCE. The great sociologist Max Weber’s testimony is brought in to emphasize the point.

Peculiar for the Israelite expectation is the increasing intensity with which paradise, or the savior prince, were projected into the future: the first out of the past, the last out of the present. This did not happen in Israel alone, but this expectancy has never become central to religious faith with such obviously ever-increasing momentum. Yahwe’s old berith with Israel, his promise in conjunction with the criticism of the miserable present made this possible. But only the momentum of prophecy made Israel to this unique degree a people of “hope” and “tarrying” (Gen. 49: 18).

(Weber, 233)

This messianic hope in the life of Israel was “messianic”. An ideal figure, an “anointed” one, was “typically Jewish”, we might say. What made the Messiah or Christ figure of Christianity so different was that this figure was to be preached to the entire world, to all nations; he transcended “the Jewish people”. Jesus will be the “anointed” (=”messiah”, “christ”) for all of humanity, not just the Jews. This is the message of “Third Isaiah” — Isaiah 56-66.

For the sake of a refresher here are some passages from those chapters (though not quoted by NC here): Continue reading “How the Gospels Became History”

2020-03-22

If Josephus Wrote About the American Rebellion . . .

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Historical Methods and Historiography, History and Biography
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From Wikimedia

In the winter of 1779 large numbers of these brigands gathered together in the hill country near Philadelphia, at a spot named Valley Forge. They were led by an ex-officer named Washington, who had been impelled by ambition to repudiate his oath of allegiance and place himself at the head of the rebels. From this favorable position they carried out raids on those peaceful farmers in the vicinity who remained loyal to the government. The brigands received much encouragement from the scribblings of a dissolute mechanic named Benjamin Franklin, now almost senile, who in consequence of having printed a number of almanacs for the lower classes considered himself a man of letters. 

Imagined by: Roth, Cecil. 1959. “The Jewish Revolt Against Rome:The War of 66-70 C.E.” Commentary, no. 27 (June): 513–22.

Josephus was a traitor. He went over to Roman side so we can imagine that he needed to justify himself in his account of events. If we read a historical narrative of the American War of Independence by Benedict Arnold we might expect a work written in the vein of the above imaginary quotation.

The point: We can’t read Josephus’s account of the war naively. It is a problem for historians to tease out “the true motives and attitudes behind the actions and personalities which we know only from Josephus’s jaundiced pages.” (Roth)

2020-03-21

The Christian Revolution: The Threefold Fulfillment of Scripture

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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Continuing with Nanine Charbonnel's Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier . . . 

. . .

We are not talking about a violent revolution but a revolution in the way the Jewish Scriptures were read, the one that launched Christianity itself, or at least Christianity as we know it to be grounded in belief in the four gospels.

Nanie Charbonnel (NC) begins the nitty-gritty of her discussion with this question of hermeneutics. The Jewish Scriptures came to be read as foreshadowings of what was to be fulfilled as reality in Christianity. (This is to be distinguished from the sort of allegorical reading Philo practised. For Christians it was important to begin with the understanding that the OT spoke of historical reality that was rather like a shadow-acting out of what was to come.) There were three types of fulfilment all bound up together:

1. The promises, the prophets, the psalms, in the OT were read as having been fulfilled in the last days which were “here and now” — the “old” Israel was replaced by a “new” and “true” Israel;

2. History itself was at an end, being completed in the “here and now” of the days of the advent of God’s works through the introduction of “Christianity”;

3. The true moral meaning of the Scriptures was found in Christian interpretation: the “old” Jewish reading of the Scriptures was barren, literal, legalistic, dominated by a God of wrath; the “new” Christian reading was life, spiritual, faith, introducing a God of love.

And all of these fulfillments culminated in Jesus.

Our “Christian tradition” has misunderstood the original meaning of this fulfilment with respect to ethics. Often we have heard and read about how Christianity introduced a “spiritual” and higher ethic than was found in the OT, so different that the advent of Christianity can be seen as the marker of a new evolutionary phase for humanity. Notice, for example, the way the word “τέλειος” has been translated in Jesus’ instruction to the rich man who wanted eternal life.

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

But the word more strictly means “fulfilled”, “completed”, “accomplished”. The idea is not that Jesus was teaching a hitherto unknown level of perfection, but that he was teaching fulfilment of an ideal, a hope.

The Prophets longed for a time when God’s rule would bring about mercy, justice, healing. The Beatitudes we read from the mouth of Jesus were not a new teaching per se but rather a fulfilment of what was once expressed as a longed-for hope. Recall Isaiah 61:

Matthew 5:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they shall be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
For they shall obtain mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they shall see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
3 To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness . . .

The “superior ethic” is in fact a proclamation of eschatology. The prophecy, the hope of the old, has been fulfilled.

We know of different ways Jews have sought to find meanings in the Scriptures by exploring and “discovering” various nuances of meaning, but when we come to early Christian interpretations of the Scriptures we have changed tracks and tended to assume that the first Christian exegetes were beginning with historical events and looking for explanations of those events in the Scriptures. The Jesuit priest Xavier Leon-Dufour, sums up this viewpoint:

Some points are accepted by all. Long before the early Christians, Scripture was referred to as the manifestation of the word of God; but we did it differently. [Other than the targumim,] sometimes we wanted to comment on the text of the Scripture to make it more alive and more assimilable: the inquiries of the rabbis ended in the midrashim. Still earlier it was declared that such a prophecy, for example that of Habakkuk, announced in its own way the events experienced by contemporaries: we know the Qumran pesher. In all these cases we therefore sought to actualize the divine Word. The first Christians did not do otherwise: for them too, the key to interpreting the events they had just experienced was found in the Holy Scriptures. . . .

Something, however, radically differentiates their practice from Jewish exegesis. What is first for Christians is not the scriptural text, but the event. If they use Scripture, it is not to comment on it according to their time; it is to better understand the events experienced by them.

(From Preface to C.H. Dodd’s French edition of According to the Scriptures, NC: 155)

The Christian approach has been to begin with the historical reality of events addressed in their gospels and to then turn to read the Jewish Scriptures as “proofs” of the divine will and acts behind those events. The irony, NC asserts, is that those events were originally created from texts that had been written (in Hebrew) as Jewish midrash or pesher.

The original church or Christians did not see themselves as some sort of substitute for Judaism; they saw themselves as a fulfilment of Israel according to God’s plan. That is how the assembly in Jerusalem at Pentecost in the opening of Acts is presented.

The New Testament is nothing more than an expression of the belief that the promises of the OT are fulfilled. The New Covenant is essentially the book of Deuteronomy, for instance, with the only difference being that what was promised in Deuteronomy is fulfilled in the NT. Jesus himself is the New Israel, the new people of God, fulfilling the law perfectly. Even his conquering of death is part of this fulfilment since this, too, was part of the hope of Israel.

The “good news” that Jesus preaches is that he himself is the “good news”. He is the kingdom brought near to all. Many readers today, including scholars, have drawn the same interpretation of Jesus’ message, but that’s where they have stopped. They have failed to go on to the next step that should follow from that point: that Jesus himself is a figure created to express that idea. The Jesus figure is created from the promises of the OT as a fulfilment of the OT. He is not a real figure to whom followers sought to attach descriptive scriptures.

What we need to examine are the hermeneutic practices in the Jewish Bible and how it came about that those techniques became confused with “prophecies” that found fulfilment in historical reality.

Charbonnel, Nanine. 2017. Jésus-Christ, Sublime Figure de Papier. Paris: Berg International.

2020-03-20

More about Second Temple Judaism

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Intertestamental History and Thought
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The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. constitutes, in most analyses, a watershed event for the Jews of antiquity. The elimination of the center, source of spiritual nourishment and preeminent symbol of the nation’s identity, compelled Jews to reinvent themselves, to find other means of religious sustenance, and to adjust their lives to an indefinite period of displacement. That trauma has pervasive and enduring resonance.

But it tends to obscure a striking fact.

Jews faced a still more puzzling and problematic situation prior to the loss of the Temple. Diaspora did not await the fall of Jerusalem. (Gruen: 66)

Erich Gruen

More Jews were scattered throughout the Levant and Mediterranean kingdoms and city-states than were living in Judea throughout the four centuries before the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E.

  • What did these diaspora Jews (or as some scholars prefer in the interests of consistency, diaspora Judeans) think of Jerusalem, the Temple, the “holy land”, and their relationship to them?

A popular idea that may have prevailed among many of us brought up in the Christian West is that those scattered Judeans felt somehow dislocated, homeless, and that they really belonged in Judea. After all, doesn’t the OT pronounce “exile” as the ultimate punishment from a wrathful deity on the Jewish people for their sins? If Judeans repented then ought not they want to “return” to Judea and live beside Jerusalem and the Temple?

Erich Gruen proposes another look at this viewpoint, a look that I think is more deeply grounded in the realities of human experience:

Yet that convention ignores a grave implausibility. It is not easy to imagine that millions of Jews in the Diaspora were obsessed with a longing for Jerusalem that had little chance of fulfillment. It seems only logical that they sought means whereby to legitimize the existence that most of them inherited from their parents and would bequeath to their descendants.¹⁴⁵ Large and thriving Jewish communities existed in numerous areas of the Mediterranean, with opportunities for economic advancement, social status, and even political responsibilities.¹⁴⁶ Did their members, as some have claimed, take recourse in the thesis that the nation is defined by its texts rather than by its location?¹⁴⁷

The dualism is deceptive. The Jews of antiquity, in fact, never developed a systematic theory or philosophy of Diaspora. The whole idea of valuing homeland over Diaspora or Diaspora, over homeland may be off the mark. Second Temple Jews need not have faced so stark a choice.

145: I. M. Gafni, Land, Center, and Diaspora (Sheffield, Engl., 1979), 19–40

146: J. Juster, Les juifs dans l’empire romain, 2 vols. (Paris, 1914).
       E. Schürer, History of the Jewish People, vol. 3.1, 1–176;
      J. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 19–81, 231–319; and
      I. Levinskaya, The Book of Acts in Its Diaspora Setting (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996), 127–93.

147: See, esp., G. Steiner, “Our Homeland, The Text,” Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4–25.
On the ambivalence of exile and homecoming in recent Jewish conceptions, see the comments of S. D. Ezrahi, “Our Homeland, the Text … Our Text, the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,” Michigan Quarterly Review 31 (1992): 463–97.

(Gruen: 67-68)

We too easily conflate our biblical knowledge with Judeans per se, wherever and whenever they are. The whole idea of being scattered throughout “the nations” was a biblical one directed at sinners in Palestine or the Kingdom of Judah and ordained to be executed by the Assyrians, first, then the Babylonians. Judeans living in various city-states in later times could scarcely relate to anyone exiled by an Assyrian or Babylonian. Look more closely at some Second Temple texts: Continue reading “More about Second Temple Judaism”

2020-03-19

How Second Temple Jews Related to their Greco-Roman World

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Intertestamental History and Thought
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From E. Gruen's chapter 2, Hellenistic Judaism, available online at DOI: 10.1515/9783110375558

Greek towns dotted Palestine along the Mediterranean coast, in the Lower Galilee, and on both sides of the Jordan. Even Jews in Judea could not isolate themselves completely from Hellenism. Many Jews, especially those in the Diaspora, even lost touch with Hebrew.

Judaism is a very elastic term. It is a mistake to imagine two types of Judaism, a Palestinian Judaism that is “pure” and “Torah” based on the one hand, and a Hellenistic Judaism on the other hand. Rich diversity was found in both.

Diaspora Jews did not confront daily angst over whether or how much to assimilate with their surroundings. They were Greek-speaking and integrated into their local communities and institutions.

Jews used Hellenistic media to express their own traditions and self-definitions.

Jewish works in Greek genres

— they wrote tragic drama modelled on the plays of Greek playwrights — Ezekiel the Tragedian (2nd C bce) wrote a play about Moses that introduced incidents that are more familiar to Hellenistic drama than the biblical story.

— they wrote epic poetry modelled on Homer — Theodotus (2nd C bce) composed a poem about the rape of Dinah and destruction of Shechem, whitewashing the biblical story but demonstrating how everything worked out according to the divine will.

Joseph and Aseneth: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_and_Asenath_(San_Marco).jpg

— they wrote novels in the vein of Greek romances — the most well known to us being Joseph and Aseneth. This novel promotes the virtue and power of Joseph and the respect Egyptians have for him, and how those who scorned him at first came to stand in awe of him and even convert to worshipping his god. Even Pharaoh prays to Joseph’s god. Relations between Jews and Egyptians is harmonious but only because Egyptians recognize the superiority of Joseph’s character and faith.

— they wrote histories modelled on Greek histories — Demetrius (late 3rd C bce) rewrote much of the biblical history but with an attempt to explain and reconcile contradictions and loose ends in the biblical narrative. Eupolemus (2nd C bce) wrote a glorification of the reign of David having him conquer everything from the Euphrates to the Taurus mountains in the north and the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. Solomon, in his account, repays foreigners who helped him build his temple by given them assistance with building their own temples to their pagan deities.

— Another text, the Letter of Aristeas (2nd C bce), presents the Egyptian king marshalling extensive resources just to have the Jewish Scriptures translated into Greek and added to the great Alexandrian royal library. The king, Ptolemy, reveres the Jewish customs and is overwhelmed by the wisdom of Jewish scribes. The Jewish scribes in fact express the noblest of Greek philosophy by speaking of moderation, avoiding extremes, etc. Greek philosophers are inferred to be inferior.

The notion of a barrier that had to be overcome between Jewish and Hellenistic cultures casts precisely the wrong image. The Jewish intellectuals who sought to rewrite their past and redefine their traditions grew up in Diaspora or even Palestinian communities suffused with Hellenism. For them it was their culture. Their ideas and concepts expressed themselves quite naturally in Greek forms. But this in no way compromised, diminished, or undermined their sense of Jewish identity. On the contrary, Jewish thinkers and writers showed little interest in the Trojan War, the house of Atreus, the labors of Heracles, the customs of the Scythians, or the love of Cupid and Psyche. They mobilized the Hellenic crafts of epic, tragedy, philosophy, romance, and historiography to reproduce the record of their own people, to convey their conventions, and to enhance their achievements. (p. 40)

Jewish Construction of Greek Culture and Ethnicity

Continue reading “How Second Temple Jews Related to their Greco-Roman World”