Tag: Horsley: Bandits Prophets & Messiahs

2011-10-09

Popular Messianic(?) Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus and Beyond – Part 3

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Messiahs and messianism
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Samaritan sanctuary, Mount Gerizim
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This continues from Part 2 where I continued discussing what Richard Horsley has to say about popular messianic movements in Israel up to the time of Jesus in Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs. In the last post I covered “social banditry” in Palestine (especially Galilee) and those who were looked upon as rightful kings in the early part of the first century.

What particularly interests me is the evidence that these movements represent popular messianism. Horsley is clear: there is no evidence of popular messianism before the time of Jesus. I have read many assertions that Josephus is describing messianic movements without explicitly describing them as such. But these assertions remind me of William Scott Green’s observation that many scholars have spent a lot of time studying messianism where the word is not found. The first clearest evidence we have of popular messianic hopes relates to the period after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 c.e. When we interpret movements before then as messianic are we guilty of reading later ideas back into an earlier period?

I do not deny that any of these pre-70 movements were messianic. They may have been. But what is the evidence? Are there alternative explanations that may fit the evidence (and the evidence for the origins of popular messianism) more economically?

This post addresses the Samaritan who led followers to Mount Gerazim, Theudas and “the Egyptian”. Continue reading “Popular Messianic(?) Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus and Beyond – Part 3”

2011-07-31

Popular Messianic(?) and Bandit Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus and Beyond – Part 2

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Messiahs and messianism
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Samuel anoints David, Dura Europos, Syria, Dat...

This continues from Part 1 where I began discussing what Richard Horsley has to say about popular messianic movements in Israel up to the time of Jesus in Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs. Previous posts addressed the concept of a future messiah among the literate elites. This post considers what Horsley has to say about the way messianic movements among the general populace grew out of the ancient popularity of the institution of kingship. I have only two reservations about Horsley’s argument:

(1) ancient Israelite kingship, especially the stories of popular elections of kings, was mostly biblical myth without historical basis;

(2) Horsley can do no more than assume that there was widespread messianic hope among the masses – he offers “little or no evidence” for this. The primary evidence he does offer is the sudden outburst of rebellions at the death of Herod and again prior to the war with Rome. He believes that such rebellions are evidence that messianic hopes had lain “dormant” in the minds of the people for many generations up to those times.

So the evidence is very thin. In my last post on this topic I referred to William Scott Green’s claim that evidence for messianic hopes up till the Jewish rebellion of 66-70 is not unlike a proof-texting exercise. It has long been assumed there must have been such a hope in order to make sense of “a historical Jesus.”

The Tradition of Popular Kingship? Continue reading “Popular Messianic(?) and Bandit Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus and Beyond – Part 2”

2011-07-24

Popular Messianic Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus – Part 1

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by Neil Godfrey

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Abimelech was a son of the great judge Gideon ...
Abimelech was a son of the great judge Gideon: Image via Wikipedia

This post surveys the evidence and questions the conclusions of Richard A. Horsley (with John S. Hanson) in Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus (1999) concerning messianic hopes and movements among the common people of Palestine up to the time of Jesus. It is some years since I first read this book, and my own views have since been modified by my studies of the contributions of “minimalism” (mainly through Thompson, Lemche and Davies) to what we can securely know about the history of Palestine in the centuries up to the Christian era. So it is interesting to return to Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs with that new understanding and to read the arguments again through more informed – and more critical – eyes.

In a couple of recent posts I shared Horsley’s presentation of the evidence we have for the understanding of literary elites on the concept of “messianism” (and “Davidic messianism”) up to the early first century CE. Horsley rightly stressed the “other-worldly” theological nature of these ideas and how removed they probably were from the masses. While Horsley emphasized that these ideas were unrelated to popular ideologies, I am now embarrassed to have to say I did overstate his position on what the peasant masses did have on their minds. I had allowed by the subsequent reading of ‘minimalist’ methodologies to interfere with what I recalled of his argument, and I have to now confess that he really did claim that the masses did have some “dormant” messianic hopes after all that were activated around the time of Jesus. (I will have to return to my earlier posts and re-write a few lines.)

But in my defence I will show in this post that Horsley’s assertion here is comparable to the assertions of scholars who concede that the gospels are so overlaid with myth, theology and literary artifices that they bury from view any historical Jesus, but we have to believe there was a historical Jesus behind it all just the same. Horsley’s evidence for popular messianic hopes supposedly unlike anything we find in the elite literature of the period rests squarely upon the assumption that the Old Testament stories of Judges and Davidic Kings were genuine historical eras. The link Horsley attempts to forge between those times and the period of Jesus is, I will argue, unnatural, speculative and without unequivocal evidence.

The Tradition of Popular Kingship Continue reading “Popular Messianic Movements Up To The Time Of Jesus – Part 1”

2011-07-21

“Son of David” as an anachronism (or metaphor?) in the Gospels, Paul and Acts?

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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Updated with NT passages for reference

This follows my previous post that set me thinking along a related line. The verse for the day is Horsley’s sentence that I quoted there:

It would thus appear that the supposedly standard Jewish ideas or expectations of the messiah are a flimsy foundation indeed from which to explain early Christian understanding of Jesus.

Now if it is the case that the notion of a Davidic Messiah was something that was only on the horizon of literary elites, and if even there it was an idea to be realized only in a vague and remote future time, and if the idea of a Davidic Messiah was a metaphor and not a genetic son of David, — recall Horsley’s other observation that “Like the title ‘Messiah,’ the explicit term ‘Son of David’ simply does not occur with any frequency in Jewish literature until after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.” — then should not we raise a questioning eyebrow when we see Jesus being hailed as the Messianic Son of David in the Gospels, and when we read in Romans the claim that Jesus was a Son of David? (Son of Belial, we all know, means  a bad person, not a literal son.)

Now in my previous post I pointed out that Horsley said the idea of a Davidic messiah was very rare and confined to literary elites in the time prior to Jesus. Here I look at his discussion of these exceptions.

Qumran — the exception proving the rule

My earliest questioning as I read Horsley was related to Qumran. But here is what Horsley wrote in expectation of my question: Continue reading ““Son of David” as an anachronism (or metaphor?) in the Gospels, Paul and Acts?”

Did the Jews before Christ expect a national Messiah?

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Messiahs and messianism
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The answer is, I think, no. In this post I quote a few sections from Professor Richard Horsley‘s work Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus.

(Since there is currently a discussion under way at the Freeratio Discussion Board that relates to this question, and since this is a topic I have discussed a few times already, this is a good opportunity to bring out another work I don’t recall using as much as I should have before.)

Horsley notes that common views today about ancient Jewish beliefs about the messiah have been “heavily influenced by western christological doctrine.” (p. 89) That’s never a good sign. Religious bias getting in the way again?

He writes bluntly:

[R]ecent studies have made clear that in pre-Christian times there was no general expectation of “The Messiah.” Far from being uniform, Jewish messianic expectations in the early Roman period were diverse and fluid. It is not even certain that the term messiah was used as a title in any literature of the time. There was no uniform expectation of “the messiah” until well after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., when it became standardized as a result of scholarly rabbinic reflection. In fact, the term is relatively rare in literature prior to, or contemporary with, Jesus. Moreover, the designation messiah is not an essential element in Jewish eschatological expectation. Indeed, a royal figure does not even occur in much of Jewish apocalyptic literature. Thus it is an oversimplification and a historical misconception to say that the Jews expected a “national” or “political” messiah, whereas early Christianity centered around a “spiritual” messiah — statements frequently found in New Testament interpretation. It would thus appear that the supposedly standard Jewish ideas or expectations of the messiah are a flimsy foundation indeed from which to explain early Christian understanding of Jesus. (pp. 90-91, my emphasis)

Davidic King Not Necessarily a Son of David Continue reading “Did the Jews before Christ expect a national Messiah?”