BASILEIA

Jesus on Detachment, Part II

2009-07-29T00:42:00.008-04:00

In my last post, I talked about the need for detachment from one's family and even from one's life in the teachings of Jesus. Much more could be said about that, but today I'm going to move on to something different, namely the need for detachment from possessions.

Detachment from Possessions

Blessed (makarioi) are you who are poor (ptōchoi), for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6.20b)

The word typically translated as "poor," ptōchoi, is the plural form of the adjective ptōchos. In the Greek, it has a much stronger connotation than the word "poor." It is closer in meaning to "destitute" or "mendicant" (Bammel, πτωχός, TDNT, 6.884).

Why would those who are destitute, those who have no possessions, be called "blessed" or "fortunate" (makarioi)? Conventional wisdom, held even by many Christians, holds that wealth is a blessing. See how many Americans see their nation's affluence as a sign of God's favour. The temptation to explain this teaching away is strong indeed. We see it happening already in the New Testament, in Matthew's redactional "poor in spirit" (5.3).²

When a rich man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him to obey the commandments. When the man claims to have done this his entire life, Jesus tells him,

You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor (tois ptōchois; lit. "the destitute"), and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. (Mark 10.17-21)³

If poverty (or destitution) is inherently beneficial, then the man would not be doing anyone a favour by selling his possessions to them, or giving them his money. The recipients of the money, after all, would cease to be destitute.

What Jesus is promoting here is the voluntary letting go, the cultivation of detachment, from one's possessions. It's not that there is anything wrong with possessions, per se. It's just that they easily foster attachments, and ridding oneself of this is spiritually advantageous. One cannot be attached to one's possessions if one does not have any.

Without this radical detachment, some of Jesus’s teachings are impossible to follow:

From anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. (Luke 6.29b-30)

This is a rich passage, and I don't mean to suggest that it is simply teaching the need for detachment.⁴ Detachment, rather, is a precondition for putting it into practice.

Notes

[1] It's worth pointing out that Jesus's hearers were generally poor, but not destitute. In other words, they would not have readily identified themselves as the ones to whom the kingdom belonged. Jesus's words would have been heard more as a challenge (rather than as a consolation) by his original hearers, just like it is a challenge to us today.

[2] John P. Meier writes,

Matthew's "poor in spirit" is usually judged secondary to Luke's simple "poor." Since throughout the list Matthew shows a tendency to spiritualize, moralize, and generalize the beatitudes, turnint them into spiritual attitudes applicable to all believers, it seems likely that the addition of "in spirit" serves the same purpose here. Moreover, the bare phrase "the poor" matches better the equally bare "mourners" and "hungry" in the second and third Q beatitudes. (Marginal, 2.320-321)

[3] The historical authenticity of this story debated. Meier points out that Jesus's initial response to the man's question ("Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone" Matt 10.18) satisfies the criterion of embarrassment:

It is difficult to imagine that the post-Easter church, as it sought to win converts to its faith that the risen Jesus was Lord, Messiah, and Son of God, went out of its way to create this particular answer. Indeed, so troubled is Matthew by Jesus' reply that he changes Mark's text to the innocuous "Why do you ask me about what is good?"--which leads neatly into the reference to the Ten Commandments (Matt 19:17-18). (Marginal, 3.516)

It is also somewhat embarrassing, Meier explains, that Jesus fails to recruit the man to his cause. Additionally, the demand that the man sell everything is discontinuous with the obligations "imposed later on upon people entering the Christian church of the first generation" (Marginal, 3.517). It must be said, though, that the demands here exceed even what was apparently demanded of the Twelve. Meier asserts that "the unheard-of rigor of Jesus' condition is meant to unmask the insincerity and lack of commitment of this affluent flatterer, who knows how to kneel but not how to give." He concludes that "the criteria of embarrassment and dissimilarity argue well for the basic historicity of the incident and of Jesus' warning about the dangers of wealth, occasioned by the rich man's refusal to accept Jesus' call" (Marginal, 3.517).

[4] Walter Wink provides a nice discussion of this saying in Engaging the Powers, p.175-177. I might talk about that sometime.

Works Cited

Jesus on Detachment, Part I

2009-07-18T07:12:00.002-04:00

The theme of detachment, which is ubiquitous in the mystical and contemplative literature, is not often treated or even acknowledged in a lot of historical Jesus scholarship. I find this odd, because it's everywhere in Jesus's teachings. I originally imagined I could write a single post on the subject, but there is so much material I'm going to have to divide it up.

Hating Your Family

First up I thought I'd look at one of Jesus's more shocking sayings, which apparently comes from the Q source. This is Luke's version:

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple." (14.26)

Matthew's version is quite a bit softer:

"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." (10.37)

It is much easier to explain Matthew's as a "softening" of the original text rather than Luke's as a "hardening" of same, so Luke's version is far more likely to reflect the original.¹ As John P. Meier writes,

Both Matthew and Luke seem to have rewritten the traditional Q saying, but Matthew's redactional hand is the heavier of the two... A good deal of Matthew's version reflects his typical vocabulary, and he has changed the more primitive, Semitic-sounding, and shocking vocabulary of hating one's family into the less disturbing description of loving one person more than another. (Marginal, 3.67-68)

So, we have to recognise that Matthew's version is heavily redacted, and that Luke's is more likely to resemble the original. It makes quite a substantial difference. In Luke's version, Jesus is demanding an exclusive commitment on the part of the disciple. In the context in which Jesus taught, where family relationships had considerably greater importance than they do for many of us today, this was asking a lot. In Matthew's, there is merely a prioritisation. Since one need not leave family behind in Matthew's version, the whole point of the original saying is lost.

If we only had Matthew's version, we could probably see it as a product of the early church. Luke's version, on the other hand, seem very likely to be an authentic saying of Jesus, if only because it is so offensive.

It also coheres with a well-attested theme in the Gospels, namely that following Jesus is likely to result in conflict with one's family.² Meier has suggested that, in asking his followers to risk conflict with their families, Jesus "was simply asking them to replicate his own experience." He points to Mark 3.20-35, which indicates "that in the first Christian generation there was a tradition that the family of Jesus did not believe in his mission during his public ministry" (Marginal, 3.69). John 7.5 also supports this.

Once we accept that Jesus likely said this, we can ask the question, "What did he mean by it?"

Focus on the Family

Most of the scholarly discussion I've seen on this saying focuses on the part about hating one's family. Perhaps Jesus was simply telling his followers that leaving their homes to follow him on his itinerant ministry would entail conflict with their families, and they had to be ready for that. This would be true whether they were preaching the Gospel or selling encyclopedias.

Notice, though, that Jesus also says they must hate "even life itself." This is harder to understand if Jesus was only talking about a prolonged absence from home.

"Hate," of course, does not have the quite the meaning that we normally associate with it. Jesus is not talking about cultivating an intensely affective, negative posture toward one's existence. It refers rather to a "disowning, renunciation, [or] rejection" (Michel, "μισέω," TDNT, 4.690).

The word translated "life" is psychē, which can actually mean a lot of different things. In this instance it emphasises the whole of one's life; it embraces "everything that can make up earthly life" (Schweizer, "ψυχή," TDNT, 9.638).

What else can Jesus be talking about if not detachment? And for what purpose, if not to overcome the grasping and ignorance identified as the consequences of attachment in the contemplative traditions?

If you want to save your life, you will lose it...

This idea is reinforced by another saying found in a number of places in the Gospels. One version, from Luke, goes like this:

"Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it." (17.33)

There are no less than five parallel sayings to this in the Gospels: the Q parallel to the one just cited in Matt 10.39; Mark 8.35 // Matt 16.25 // Luke 9.24; and John 12.25. There are thus three independent sources: Mark, Q, and John.

The parallels are somewhat more elaborate, suggesting that one should not only lose one's life, but should lose it "for my sake" or "for the sake of the Gospel," or both. Meier argues that these are redactional elements (see Marginal, 3.56ff.). Among other problems is the fact that the presence of those elements upsets the parallelism of the saying. The fact that these elements are absent from Luke 17.33 and John 12.25 also carries a lot of weight: it is much easier to explain why they would be added rather than removed.

I would add that it is difficult to see how an exhortation to martyrdom for Jesus's sake could have been intelligible during his ministry. These redactional additions make a lot more sense in a post-Easter setting, when Christians actually faced violence "for Jesus's sake."

Meier understands this saying as a warning by Jesus to his followers "of the fierce and possibly fatal cost of following him" (Marginal, 3.56). Perhaps, but it seems more likely to me that he was not talking about literally dying. It is hardly clear what would be gained by literally losing one's life. If the second part is truly a negation or antithesis of the first part, then "losing" one's life should be understood as overcoming the desire to secure one's life -- that is, cultivating detachment -- and not literally dying.

This is only scratching the surface. In a future post I'll look at some other sayings of Jesus that, I will argue, are most intelligible when we take seriously the idea that he was a contemplative who taught the importance of detachment.

Notes

[1] Robert H. Stein takes a very generous approach to understanding the relationship between the two sayings:

By observing how the Evangelists used their sources, we are assisted both in interpreting difficult texts and in grasping their significance for today. An example of the former is seen in Luke 14:26, where Jesus states that to follow him one must “hate” his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters. By observing the parallel in Matt 10:37, we understand that the Evangelist knew that “hating” was an idiomatic expression for "loving less." Thus, his redactional work enables us to understand better what Luke 14:26 means. ("Redaction Criticism," ABD, 5.649)

I disagree that Matthew was clarifying rather than obscuring the meaning of the original text. Furthermore, one cannot assume that Luke understood "hating" in the same way as Matthew. It is hardly legitimate to appeal to Matthean redaction to find out what Luke actually meant!

[2] See, for example, Mark 10.29-30 // Matt 19.29 // Luke 18.29-30, as well as Matt 10.34-36 // Luke 12.51-53.

Read Part II here.

Works Cited

Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?

2009-07-04T00:53:00.010-04:00

This week's Gospel reading:

He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about among the villages teaching. (Mark 6.1-6)

There is a lot to think about here, but I'm going to focus on the part I find most interesting, which is the naming of Jesus's brothers, and the reference to his sisters.

John P. Meier discusses the issue of Jesus's siblings at some length in the first volume of A Marginal Jew (1991). He writes,

Ordinary Americans today, if they know anything about the problem, have a vague notion that Catholics hold that Jesus' "brothers" and "sisters" were really cousins, while Protestants maintain that they were true siblings having the same two parents. Actually, the theological battle lines down through the centuries have been much more complex. In the first four centuries of the Church, different views on this question were held by various Christians, who were not formally excommunicated by the Church of their day for their differing positions. (Marginal 1.318)

Meier points out that second century Christians like Hegesippus, Tertullian, and possibly Irenaus, held that the brothers of Jesus were "real brothers" (Marginal, 1.329-331).

Hegesippus -- Saint Hegesippus, as he later became known in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches -- lived from c.110-180. His "testimony about the teachings of bishops in the great cities of the Roman Empire is highly esteemed by defenders of traditional Catholic ecclesiology. Yet, such defenders are usually silent when it comes to Hegesippus' testimony about the brothers of Jesus" (Meier, Marginal, 1.329). The fact that Hegesippus believed they were real siblings doesn't necessarily mean it's true, as Meier points out. But it does tell us "what a 2d-century Father of the Church thought was true about the relatives of Jesus and what terminology he used to express his ideas" (Marginal, 1.329).

In Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, 2.23 §4, Hegesippus refers to "the brother of the Lord [ho adelphos tou kyriou], James, who was called by all 'the Just.'" While recounting the martyrdom of this "James the Just" (i.e., the James called by both Paul and Hegesippus "the brother of the Lord"), Hegesippus also mentions an "uncle" and a "cousin" (anepsion!) of Jesus (4.22 §4). Hegesippus is thus capable of distinguishing carefully between the brother, the uncle, and the cousin of Jesus. (Meier, Marginal, 1.329)

Why is it significant that Hegesippus would make such a distinction? Well, when we fast forward to Jerome (c.340-420), we find the curious idea that the "brothers" of Jesus were actually cousins.¹ The reasoning behind this argument is amusing.

To prove that the Greek adelphos ("brother") can mean "cousin," Jerome pointed to the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the OT most commonly used in the early Church. Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic have no direct equivalent for the word "cousin." The Hebrew word ʾāḥ, or the Aramaic equivalent ʾaḥāʾ were used to indicate that relationship. The LXX then translated those instances literally with the word adelphos.

Meier points out that "the number of passages where in fact ʾaḥ indisputably means cousin is very small -- perhaps only one!" (Marginal 1.325) That one example is found in 1 Chr 23.22: "Eleazar died having no sons, but only daughters; their kindred, the sons of Kish, married them" (NRSV). The word translated here as "kindred" is, in the Hebrew ʾāḥê, and in the LXX, adelphoi, literally "brothers." In the preceding verse, however, we find that Eleazar and Kish are "the sons of Mahli," and are therefore brothers, meaning that Eleazar's daughters actually married their cousins.²

The fact that we can determine that they were cousins, even though the word for "brothers" is used, is significant. We can do so because the preceding verse clarifies the relationship by showing that the fathers of their husbands were brothers. As Meier points out, "No such clarification is given in the NT texts concerning the brothers of Jesus. Rather, the regularity with which they are yoked with Jesus' mother gives the exact opposite impression" (Marginal, 1.325)

Meier also calls attention to the fact that the analogy between the Greek of the NT and that of Greek translations of the OT on this point is problematic, given their very different origins:

In the case of the Greek OT, we are dealing with "translation Greek," a Greek that sometimes woodenly or mechanically renders a traditional sacred Hebrew text word for word. Hence it is not surprising that at times adelphos would be used for ʾāḥ when the Hebrew word meant not "brother" but some other type of relative. (Marginal, 1.325)

The weaknesses of Jerome's argument become even more apparent when we consider the letters attributed to, and in most cases written by, Paul.

In Galatians 1.19, Paul refers to "James the brother of the Lord"³ (Iakōbon ton adelphon tou kyriou), and in 1 Cor 9.5 he refers to "the brothers of the Lord" (hoi adelphoi tou kyrion). Meier notes that Paul "is referring to people who are personally known to him and who are living and active in the Church even as he writes. Writing on his own, without the pressure of a set tradition or formula, Paul refers to these people as brothers, not cousins." He also points out that "there was a perfectly good word for cousin in NT Greek, anepsios, and presumably it was known to the Pauline churches, since it occurs in Col 4:10" (Marginal, 1.326).

One might argue that "brother of the Lord" was meant figuratively, as a title. Perhaps such a title originated in an Aramaic context, and was then translated literally into Greek?

Meier considers this possibility, but rejects it:

[T]he whole theory of early Christian development that claims that an earlier Aramaic-speaking Christianity was followed later on by a Greek-speaking Christianity ignores the existence of Greek-speaking Christian Jews in Jerusalem from the very beginning of the Church (the Hellenists in Acts 6). Presumably, these Christian Jews of Jerusalem, who no doubt knew James and other "brothers of the Lord" personally, called them hoi adelphoi tou kyriou ("brothers of the Lord") and not hoi anepsioi tou kyriou ("cousins of the Lord") from the very beginning. Their usage did not arise after some supposed revered Aramaic way of speaking had become fixed and traditional. (Marginal, 1.326)

Meier points to first century historian Josephus, who knew of Jesus and James independently of the Gospels, as further evidence of this. In his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus refers to "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James" (20.9.1 §200). That Josephus would refer to him as "the brother of Jesus" and not "of the Lord" shows that he was not using an "invariable title that precluded some more exact designation" (Meier, Marginal, 1.327).

Could they have been step-siblings?

The identification of the "brothers" and "sisters" as cousins does not exhaust the possibilities, of course; there may be other ways of "explaining away" the brothers and sisters of Jesus.

Another explanation, advocated by the fourth century Church Father Epiphanius, can be traced back to the second century Protevangelium Jacobi (or "Proto-Gospel of James," so-called because much of it narrates events prior to Jesus's life). This text, which Meier describes as "a wildly imaginative folk narrative that is outrageously inaccurate about things Jewish" (Marginal, 1.324), is often identified as one of the sources of the doctrine of the "perpetual virginity" of Mary. The text suggests that Joseph was much older than Mary, and had sons from a previous marriage -- including James, the alleged author of the text.⁵

Meier points out that there is not a single verififiable instance in the NT where adelphos is used to mean "stepbrother." He suggests that this is "a solution thought up after the fact to support the emerging idea of Mary's perpetual virginity, which did not become common teaching until the latter half of the 4th century" (Marginal, 1.324).

In the end, this idea suffers the same fate as Jerome's cousin theory. There is simply no evidence to support it. Meier, quoting his favourite scholastic axiom, reminds us that "what is gratuitously asserted can be gratuitously denied" (Marginal, 1.329).

Conclusion

There is much more to Meier's argument, including an extended discussion of the word adelphos in the NT, that I will not summarise here in the interest of keeping this at a reasonable length. It's worth summarising his conclusion, however, in which he applies the criteria for historicity (outlined in Part One of the book, and summarised again in subsequent volumes) to the material.

Following the criteria strictly, and thus "prescinding from faith and later Church teaching," Meier concludes that "the most probable opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were true siblings" (Marginal, 1.331).

The criterion of multiple attestation is satisfied by the fact that "Paul, Mark, John, Josephus, and perhaps Luke in Acts 1:14 speak independently of the 'brother(s) of Jesus' (or the Lord). Most of their statements yoke the brothers (and at times sisters) directly with Mary the mother of Jesus in phrases like 'his mother and (his) brothers'" (Marginal, 1.331).

The argument is further strengthened on philological grounds:

In the NT there is not a single clear case where "brother" means "cousin" or even "stepbrother," while there are abundant cases of its meaning "physical brother" (full or half). This is the natural sense of adelphos in Paul, Mark, and John; Matthew and Luke apparently followed and developed this sense. Paul's usage is particularly important because he...speaks of the brother(s) of the Lord as people he has known and met, people who are living even as he is writing. His use of "brother" is obviously not determined by revered, decades-long Gospel tradition whose set formulas he would be loathe to change... Hence, from a purely philological and historical point of view, the most probable opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were his siblings. (Marginal, 1.331-332)

Notes

[1] Meier writes that Jerome "seems to be the first Father of the Church to have suggested that the brothers of Jesus were actually cousins and that both Joseph and Mary were perpetual virgins," and he adds that the notion "that Joseph was a perpetual virgin was a novelty in the 4th century and has no basis in Scripture" (Marginal, 1.324).

[2] "Other examples of ʾaḥ for a close relation seem to refer to nephews or to a large group of more remote, undefined relations" (Meier, Marginal, 1.359n29).

[3] The NRSV translates this, "James the Lord's brother."

[4] Meier adds that Josephus "knows full well the distinction between 'brother' and 'cousin' in Greek and...even corrects the Hebrew usage in the Bible in favor of Greek precision on this point" (Marginal 1.327).

[5] The way Joseph is chosen to take Mary as his wife is quite amusing. Joseph, along with other "widowers," is called to the Temple:

And when they were gathered together, they took the rods and went to the high priest. He took the rods from them all, entered the temple, and prayed. When he had finished the prayer he took the rods, and went out and gave them to them; but there was no sign on them. Joseph received the last rod, and behold, a dove came out of the rod and flew on to Joseph's head. And the priest said to Joseph, "You have been chosen by lot to receive the virgin of the Lord as your ward" (9.1; from After the New Testament, 250).

The title image incorporates a detail of an icon of James, the brother of Jesus. I don't know anything about it, but you can see the whole thing here.

Works Cited

Why do we die?

2009-06-26T23:34:00.014-04:00

God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal.

For God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it. (Wis 1.13-15; 2.23-24)

In this week's reading from the OT (in the Catholic lectionary), we find an idea that is found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish texts, and quite frequently found in the NT -- or at least the letters of Paul.

Actually, outside of Genesis 2-3, there is little reflection on the cause of death in the Hebrew Bible. That death is the consequence of sin is not much attested, but "understanding death as a part of some original plan is far less compatible with the wide range of texts" (Richards, "Death: Old Testament," ABD 2.109).

The deuterocanonical and intertestamental books, including the Book of Wisdom, are clearer on this point.

According to ben Sira, "From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die" (Sir 25.24)

2 Baruch has, "For when Adam sinned and death was decreed against those who were to be born, the multitude of those who would be born was numbered" (23.4; OTP 1.629).¹

This idea finds a much more frequent expression in the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul. He asserts that "sin entered the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned" (Rom 5.12).² He writes, "many [have] died by the one man's trespass" (Rom 5.15). He claims that "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6.23), and argues that, "since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" (1 Cor 15.21-22). Elsewhere he refers to death as a "sentence" (2 Cor 1.9),

How literally Paul understood this connection between sin and death (that is, biological death) is difficult to say. As James D.G. Dunn points out, Paul does not necessarily think of Adam as a historical person, but uses him to represent humanity as a whole (cf. Romans 7.7-11; Theology of Paul, 95). Even so, it seems clear in Paul's writings that we die because we sin, whether this is because of the sin of a historical Adam or not.

From our perspective, this connection between sin and death is no longer tenable. Humans were never immortal, but have always shared in the mortality common to virtually all forms of biological life.³

Daryl P. Domning, in a quite brilliant article published in America several years ago,⁴ explains why death is a necessary part of life:

Life itself could not spread and evolve on a finite planet if death did not recycle space, energy and materials and cull undesirable genes for the benefit of the living. Moreover, as single cells evolved into multicellular organisms, it became necessary for some cells to self-destruct according to a precise, genetically programmed timetable in order for the organism to grow and function properly. Hence tadpoles lose their tails, a woman’s uterus sheds its lining every month, and deciduous trees annually inundate us with dead leaves. This programmed suicide of cells (apoptosis) even generates our skin, hair, fingernails and the lenses of our eyes. But it also leads to senescence, or aging.

Life has evolved to such a degree of complexity that it prohibits indefinite reproduction of cells:

[The] cost of this complexity was increased wear and tear on the DNA "instruction manuals" in each of the body's cells during a lengthier growth and life span. Constant "reading" of these "manuals" by the machinery in the body's cells, plus other sources of cumulative damage, eventually degrades the DNA molecules until they are not fit to be copied for the next generation... This senescence and death of our bodies is thus an inevitable price we pay for having evolved to a certain level of complexity.

In the near future -- next couple of weeks, hopefully -- I'm going to be exploring Paul's theology, and particularly his expression of the Fall/Redemption narrative, to see if it has any meaning in the light of evolutionary theology.

Notes

[1] Actually, this theme is repeated a couple of times in 2 Baruch: see also 19.8 and 54.14.

[2] I've altered the NRSV text, which says sin "came into the world," to show the connection between this and today's reading from Wisdom. The original Greek is eis ton kosmon eisēlthen, virtually the same as Wis 2.24 (LXX: "eisēlthen eis ton kosmon"), but the NRSV translates them differently. That Paul "certainly knew and seems deliberately to echo" the Book of Wisdom is asserted by James D.G. Dunn (see Theology of Paul, 85, and references cited there).

[3] I say "virtually all" because there are single-celled organisms that could theoretically live indefinitely, as well as some more complex organisms, like a certain species of jellyfish, that are not susceptible to the aging process.

[4] Domning has since published a book on the topic, with theologian Monica Hellwig, called Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in the Light of Evolution. Unfortunately it's really expensive ($110 USD), and I haven't got around to buying it yet.

Works Cited

The painting used in the title image is a detail from Adam and Eve, by Titian, c.1550, at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

The Son of Man?

2005-09-03T15:23:00.001-04:00

Introduction

The scholarly consensus for much of the 20th century was that Jesus proclaimed an apocalyptic message anticipating the imminent arrival of the “Son of Man.”

Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. (Matt 16.28)

It’s a somewhat embarrassing statement for many Christians, because if Jesus actually said it, it means he was in error. The good news is that most scholars no longer thing he actually said it. Ironically, the people who should be most comforted by this are unable to embrace it, as it would mean admitting that many of the sayings attributed to Jesus were actually creations of the early church.

“Son of Man” in the OT

There are a number of instances where the expression “son of man” (Heb ben ‘adam) appears in the OT that have been interpreted by some Christians as prophetic references to Christ. One example is Psalm 8.4:

What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? (RSV)

This verse is quoted in Hebrews 2.6, although in that text it does not appear to be a titular reference to the “Son of Man” (as we later find in the gospels), but simply a reference to humans in general. Which is what the expression “son of man” means: a human being, or humankind as a whole.

Another important one is Daniel 7.13:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. (RSV)

This verse is also quoted in the NT, where it is clearly interpreted as a reference to Christ (e.g. Mark 13.24-27).

On the other hand, there are a number of instances where “son of man” is not interpreted as referring to Christ:

God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should repent. (Num 23.19; RSV)

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help. (Ps 146.3; RSV)

I, I am he that comforts you; who are you that you are afraid of man who dies, of the son of man who is made like grass… (Isa 51.12; RSV)

And my personal favourite:

Behold, even the moon is not bright and the stars are not clean in his sight; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm! (Job 25.5-6; RSV)

So I guess the rule is, if it says something nice about the “son of man,” it’s about Jesus, but if it’s not nice, it’s not Jesus. It’s important to establish rules if you’re going to read things critically!

The important point is that the expression “son of man” in the OT is never used as a title.

“...one like a son of man...”

In Daniel 7, we find a description of Daniel’s visions of “four great beasts” (7.3). The first is “like a lion and had eagles’ wings” (7.4), the second one “looked like a bear” (7.5), the third one “like a leopard” (7.6), and a fourth one that was “terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong” (7.7). There is no question that these four beasts represent four kingdoms, the Babylonian Empire, the Median Empire, the Persian Empire, and the empire of Alexander the Great, respectively. So when we read about a fifth figure, the “one like a son of man,” we are not reading about a future messiah coming in judgment, but a fifth kingdom, represented in the vision in the form of a human rather than an awful beast. In order to read it otherwise you have to completely ignore the context. And even if you are willing to read it out of context, there is no getting past the fact that it refers to “one like a son of man,” which is clearly not a title.

So why did the early Christians think it was Jesus?

One answer is that “son of man” was in fact a circumlocution for “I” in Aramaic usage at the time of Jesus. It was an oblique and surrogate way of indicating the speaker’s own self. When, therefore, Jesus said “son of man,” everyone would have understood that he was referring to himself. (Crossan, Historical 241)

This suggestion comes from Geza Vermes, but has not been widely accepted, and has been “emphatically denied” by Joseph Fitzmyer, one of the world’s foremost experts in the Aramaic language (Crossan Historical 242).

The most likely scenario seems to be this: the early Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah, but recognised that he had not done what the Messiah was expected to do. Therefore he must be coming back. They also believed that he was resurrected, and given that the resurrection was expected to occur at the end of time, they naturally assumed that the end was near. It’s not difficult to see why they assumed he was coming back, and very soon.

The earliest text in the NT is 1 Thessalonians, which refers to “the coming of the Lord” (4.15) who will “descend from heaven” (4.16), and suggests that “the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4.16-17). There is no mention of the “Son of Man,” but Crossan suggests that the reference to clouds “brings up a possible background in Daniel 7:13” (Historical 244). A similar reference is found at the end of the Didache: “The Lord will come and all his saints with him. Then the world will see the Lord coming on the clouds of the sky” (16.7). Crossan suggests that both texts have interpreted Daniel 7.13 as referring to the return of Christ, but the reference to the “one like a son of man” was not what was important to them: “Put it this way: Son of Man became important because of Daniel 7:13; Daniel 7:13 did not become important because of Son of Man” (Historical 245).

Other texts quote Daniel 7.13 more closely, but maintain the atitular “one like a son of man”: Revelation 1.13 and 14.14. And those are the only two references in that text – it betrays no knowledge whatsoever of the titular “Son of Man.”

In fact, the titular usage of “Son of Man” appears nowhere outside of the gospels (with Heb 2.6 being a possible exception).

Some people have argued that the fact that the titular “Son of Man” only appears in the sayings of Jesus suggests that it was not an invention of the early church. Why wouldn’t they use it themselves? I think there is a simple answer to that: the titular “Son of Man” usually refers to Jesus when he is returning. No one in the gospel narratives knew he would be returning, because they didn’t know he was going to die and be resurrected. In fact, the whole idea of Jesus saying he was going to return on the clouds of heaven only makes sense to people who know about the death, resurrection, and ascension -- i.e., the audiences of the evangelists, not the original audiences of Jesus. It would have made little sense for one of the evangelists to have someone else refer to Jesus as the “Son of Man” when its clearly not something they are supposed to have understood.

In a Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking environment, it would have been strange to hear someone use such a common expression as a title for themselves. It would be like Jesus walking around calling himself “The Human One.” In a Greek-speaking environment, where the expression would have been unfamiliar, it could easily be turned into a title, possibly even by accident.

One more thing, though. There is one saying that is very likely authentic, which contains the expression “son of man”:

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. (Luke 9.58)

This saying is from the Q source, as it also appears in Matt 8.19-20. In both gospels, and therefore in Q also, the context suggests that it had been interpreted as a titular use of “Son of Man.” But it appears also in the Gospel of Thomas (86), without the artificial context. It certainly was not understood by the author of Thomas as apocalyptic, or it wouldn’t have been included.

Crossan writes,

The saying in Gospel of Thomas 86 asserts, and it is an assertion capable of diverse interpretations, that the human being, unlike the animal or the bird, has no fixed abode on earth. (Historical 256)

At any rate, the importance of this saying is that it suggests that Jesus did, in fact, use the expression “son of man,” and that this authentic saying was preserved in Q. Crossan suggests that “that, in conjunction with the other traditional theme of Jesus as apocalyptic judge from Daniel 7:13, facilitated the creation of Jesus speaking of himself as the apocalyptic Son of Man” (Historical 256).

Conclusion

The implications of this are enormous. I was originally planning on exploring that a little bit, but I’ve already exceed 1500 words, which is a lot more than I had planned. So I guess I’ll tackle that one some other time.

Works Cited

The Reign of God, Part Two

2005-09-02T01:15:00.001-04:00

Introduction

So last time I discussed what I call the personal dimension of the “kingdom-“ or “reign of God.” But there is also a corporate dimension, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

What the two dimensions have in common is a concern with a transformation according to the will of God.

The “will of God” is such common expression that we might not give much thought to what it means, but for present purposes we can define it simply as the way things ought to be. To live according to the will of God is to live the way one ought to live.

We are all socialised in a particular way, inheriting the conventional wisdom of our culture. We are “conformed to this world,” as Paul put it, but we can be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds, so that [we] may discern what is the will of God” (Rom 12.2). It is by this transformation that we enter the kingdom. We free ourselves from being ruled by the “wisdom of this age” (1 Cor 2.6) when we find the wisdom of God, which is “secret and hidden” (1 Cor 2.7).

What I call the corporate dimension pertains to the context in which this socialisation takes place. Conventional wisdom – the “wisdom of the world” as Paul put it (1 Cor 1.20) – is inevitably different from the wisdom of God, and so we are socialised in such a way that we will act in ways contrary to the will of God – ways in which we ought not act, in other words.

This idea is often resisted by those who have an exaggerated sense of human autonomy, and who see all objectively immoral behaviour as due to the moral failings of the individuals in question.

This is rather naïve. We can consider, for example, the existence of anti-Semitism as it has existed in different places in different times. There have been cultures where anti-Semitism was widespread, as if part of the very air people breathed. To think differently would have been considered deviant. My own culture is the opposite. Anti-Semitism is not acceptable, even if it is present in scattered individuals. The fact that I am not myself an anti-Semite has a lot to do with the culture I have inherited. So it is not due to my own moral superiority over those in anti-Semitic cultures who failed to transcend their own cultural prejudices. For all I know, if I had grown up in such a culture, I might have become an anti-Semite myself – I’d like to think I would not, but I really don't know.

So when we acknowledge that anti-Semitism (and other forms of prejudice, for that matter), are contrary to the will of God, then we can see that culture plays a big role in determining the extent to which God’s will is done on earth – that is, the extent to which the kingdom of God is present. We can also see how the failure to address elements of culture that foster prejudice and injustice can lead to great tragedy, which is often the impetus for cultural change. There is obviously a connection between the Holocaust and the unprecedented animus towards anti-Semitism that developed in its wake, for example.

Progress and Decline

Whether we think our culture is progressing or in decline will depend on our own understanding of how things ought to be. Some people will glorify some past time as a kind of golden age, and will see any movement away from that as decline. Others will consider the same period to have been repressive, and will interpret the same movement away from it as progress. Personally, I think the changes in social attitudes in the last century towards women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals is a good thing -- progress, in other words. There are some who disagree.

So this underlines the difficulty in talking about cultural change, because the same process can be understood as progress by one person, and as decline by someone else. But they can’t both be right.

Only by wisdom – by knowing the will of God directly – can one know if cultural change actually represents progress or decline. Both, certainly, are possible. But I think the “good news” is that, when one looks at the general thrust of history, things generally tend to improve.

The so-called “parables of growth” are sometimes interpreted as referring to this process. The parable of the mustard seed, for example, compares the “kingdom of God” to a small seed that grows into a great shrub that provides shelter for the birds. This parable captures two important realities. One, it points to a tendency towards progress – the kingdom is, as it were, “increasingly present,” the will of God is done on earth to a greater extent over time. Not because human nature is changing, but because cultures that influence human behaviour are reformed.

But this is not a naïve assertion of “automatic progress” as was commonly held during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. John Dominic Crossan points out that “a peasant audience hearing Jesus speak of birds attracted by the mustard plant would think immediately...‘that birds are the natural enemies of the sown’” (Historical 278; the quotation is from Douglas Oakman). The primary beneficiaries of the kingdom represent at the same time a serious threat to its growth.

Jesus and the Kingdom

Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Jesus would have agreed with this, and we can see this in the ways he challenged the social conventions that contravened the will of God.

For example, there is the practise of open commensality, that is, his open table fellowship. This is from Peter Farb and George Armelagos:

In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships… Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society’s members...To know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society. (Quoted in Crossan, Historical 403)

Jesus was often accused of eating with precisely the people you weren’t supposed to eat with. He recognised the people who were marginalised and excluded in that culture, and he showed acceptance of them in a very radical way, by eating with them. He was not doing this simply for the small number of people he could accommodate – it was a symbolic action as well, and I imagine he expected others to follow suit. He created a vision of a different kind of culture, but he didn't just preach it -- he lived, too.

So the coming of the kingdom is not strictly a divine act, but one in which human participation plays an extremely important role. I find that the Jewish mystical concept of tikkun ha-olam (“repairing the world”) is very similar to my own understanding of the corporate dimension of the kingdom, and the concept of tikkun ha-nefesh (“repairing the soul”) corresponds somewhat to what I call the personal dimension of the kingdom.

Rabbi David Cooper writes,

Although initially the ideas of mending the soul and mending the world seem different, in reality they cannot be separated; we cannot raise sparks in ourselves without raising those in the world, and vice versa. (God is a Verb 179)

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cook wrote,

The perception that dawns on a person to see the world as not finished, but as in the process of becoming, ascending, developing – this changes him from being “under the sun” to being “above the sun,” from the place where there is nothing new to the place where there is nothing old, where everything takes on new form. The joy of heaven and earth abides in him as on the day they were created. (Lights 229)

The world is continually progressing, sound thinking continues to make headway, healthy logic and the rich fund of experience are removing the roadblocks, error is diminishing, the entanglements of the imagination are being released. (Lights 274)

Mystics are often derided as excessively optimistic. The very concept of progress has become an object of scorn, and the idea that humans should put forth any effort to make things better is seen by some people as a lack of faith in divine providence. But I’ll have to explore that problem some other time, in my other blog.

Next: Why most scholars don’t think Jesus called himself the “Son of Man.”

Works Cited

The Reign of God, Part One

2005-08-27T11:52:00.001-04:00

Introduction

It is sometimes said that the early church changed the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. A lot of Christians seem to take the view that Jesus’s message – his gospel – was primarily about himself, and his status as the Messiah.

When we actually read the gospels, we find something quite different. In the Gospel of John, Jesus’s message certainly seems to be about himself and his identity, but the Synoptics paint a very different picture. The central message concerns the “reign of God” (basileia tou theou), commonly rendered in English as the “kingdom of God.”

Is this message about Jesus’s identity? According to the Gospel of Mark, the answer is clearly “no.” From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus proclaims his message that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1.15). But his messianic identity doesn’t even come up until much later, when Peter says to him, “You are the Messiah” (Mark 8.29). Jesus responds by “sternly” ordering them “not to tell anyone about him” (Mark 8.30).

So, according to Mark, the gospel can be proclaimed, even while Jesus’s identity is being kept secret. One can “believe in the good news” while remaining oblivious to the idea that Jesus is the Messiah. This doesn’t sound like traditional Christianity, but there it is in the earliest of the canonical gospels.

What the Kingdom of God is Not

There are a lot of misconceptions about what the kingdom of God represents. For a long time it was believed that the kingdom was synonymous with “the church,” which is an entirely bizarre idea – is the church something that people try to “enter by force”? (Luke 16.16). I don’t know of anyone who still holds that view today.

Another common misconception is that the kingdom refers to some kind of post-mortem state. This is understandable in the sense that it clearly has a soteriological meaning (that is, it pertains to “salvation”), and one tends to associate “salvation” with the afterlife. The fact that Matthew almost always substitutes basileia tōn ouranōn, typically translated “kingdom of heaven,” probably reinforces this idea. But the gospel evidence itself does not support it. The fact that we pray “thy kingdom come,” and not “bring me to thy kingdom when I die,” reflects the fact that the kingdom pertains to life in this world, not an afterlife in the world to come.

For much of the 20th century the kingdom was interpreted apocalyptically (Borg, Contemporary 48). [1] One contemporary proponent of this view is Bart Ehrman, who believes that Jesus expected “the imminent end of the age, an end that would involve the destruction of Israel, including the Temple and its cult, prior to the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth” (Historical 241). If this was the case, then Jesus would have been right about the Temple, but wrong about everything else. (This view was common among those involved in the “quest for the historical Jesus,” which is at least one of the reasons why that entire enterprise is shunned by most conservative Christians.)

The scholarly consensus on this latter point has dwindled in recent decades (Borg, Contemporary 48). The “coming Son of Man” sayings have been generally accepted to be “products of the early Church” (Perrin, Rediscovering 203), and the concept of imminence is largely derived from these sayings. [2] As Marcus Borg puts it,

without the coming Son of Man sayings, there is no reason to think of the kingdom of God as the imminent end of the world. “End of the world” imagery and imminence are connected together only in the coming Son of man sayings. They are not found together in the kingdom of God sayings. The texts do associate “end of the world” imagery with the kingdom (e.g., in the parables of judgment and the image of the messianic banquet); but it is not said that this is imminent. (Contemporary 54) [3]

The apocalyptic interpretation has been superceded to some extent by a sapiential interpretation, which interprets the kingdom in the light of the wisdom tradition. Both views have strengths and weaknesses, and I would suggest that the truth encompasses aspects of both.

The Kingdom as Symbol

The wide range of interpretations belies the notion that the kingdom of God can be reduced to a simple concept. Norman Perrin has suggested that it is a “tensive symbol,” that “can represent or evoke a whole range or series of conceptions” (Language 33). Borg agrees, acknowledging that the kingdom has various “nuances of meaning” (Contemporary 87). For instance, he notes that a number of sayings suggest that the kingdom is “a reality one can be ‘in’ or ‘out’ of” (Contemporary 88). On the other hand, the so-call “parables of growth” (the Mustard Seed, the Leaven, etc.) seem to indicate a process that takes place on a larger scale. There are no doubt other “nuances of meaning,” but today I’m going to focus on the relationship between the kingdom and the individual. In my next post I’ll discuss the kingdom as a process taking place on a corporate level. [4]

‘Basileia’ and Wisdom

The term basileia has a somewhat different connotation than the word “kingdom.” John Dominic Crossan writes,

I am not particularly happy with the word kingdom as a translation of the Greek word basileia, but it is so traditional that any alternative might be confusing. It is not only that king- is chauvinistic but that –dom sounds primarily local, as if we were talking about some specific site or some geographically delineated location on earth. But what we are actually talking about…is power and rule, a process much more than a place, a way of life more than a location on earth… The Kingdom of God is what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge. (Revolutionary 55)

So what does it mean for someone to “enter” the kingdom of God? The simplest answer is, by doing the will of God. If God reigns on earth, it means that God’s will is being done on earth (“as it is in heaven”). This connection is made very clear in Matthew 7.21: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

The fact that people enter the kingdom individually, and that it is not simply an event that takes place on earth for everyone at once, is indicated by a number of sayings. For example, Jesus says, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18.17). People will enter if they are poor (Luke 6.20), but the rich will have a harder time of it: “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18.25). Jesus tells the chief priests and elders in the temple that, because they did not believe John, “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going to enter the kingdom of God ahead of [them]” (Matt 21.31). The kingdom is something people enter individually, and not all at the same time.

There is more to it than simply doing the will of God, however. Interpreting the kingdom sayings in the light of the Jewish wisdom tradition makes this easier to appreciate.

There is only one explicit reference to the kingdom of God in the Old Testament, and it appears in a wisdom text: When a righteous man fled from his brother’s wrath, she (Wisdom) guided him on straight paths; she showed him the kingdom of God, and gave him knowledge of holy things. (Wis 10.10) “Seeing” the kingdom of God is thus equated with gaining wisdom.

To gain wisdom, I would argue, is to know the will of God. We read that whoever finds Wisdom “finds life, and obtains favor from the Lord” (Prov 8.35). I suspect that this is what Jesus was referring to when he said, “the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, but there are few who find it” (Matt 7.14). It comes only with a struggle: everyone who enters it, “enters it violently” (Luke 16.16). The reason is that the wisdom that we inherit through the process of socialisation – the conventional wisdom of our culture – is something from which we need to free ourselves if we are to know the will of God. Paul made this point when he wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom 12.2).

Notes

[1] Borg uses the word “eschatological” to refer to the same concept. Neither word is entirely adequate, but coining a new term isn’t something I feel up to at the moment.

[2] It’s an amusing irony that the view that Jesus was wrong about the imminent end of the world has been largely abandoned by scholars, but conservatives – who were most troubled by the idea that Jesus might have been wrong about something – cannot accept the view that has replaced it, since it would mean accepting that Jesus did not refer to himself as the “Son of Man.” I’m going to explain why scholars don’t believe Jesus referred to himself as the “Son of Man” sometime in the near future.

[3] There are two exceptions, Mark 1.15 and 9.1. The former is clearly an invention of Mark (Meier, Marginal 2.430-434), and I would argue that the latter does not imply an event, but simply that some will see during their lifetimes a reality that is already present, while others will fail to see this.

[4] This will be on Wednesday. I’m posting twice this week.

Works Cited

Go to Part Two

The New Covenant, Part II

2005-07-17T17:43:00.000-04:00

On several occasions my propensity to reject church teachings with which I disagree has been attributed to hubris, ignorance, and in one particularly memorable instance, moral perversity. And these charges are inevitably made by conservative Catholics. My error, they never fail to inform me, is in relying on my own judgment. When people rely on their own judgment, they make themselves God. And since they are inevitably not God, they fall into error.

I’ve never actually tried this before, but sometime I would like to ask one of these people why they believe what they believe. I have a hunch they would say something about the “infallible Magisterium,” or “the 2000 year-old tradition of the church.” Then I would ask, “okay, why do you believe in the church?” And they would probably say, “because it was founded by Christ.” And then I would ask, “how do you know it was founded by Christ?” And they would probably have an answer for that.

It doesn’t really matter what they say. The point is, they will almost inevitably answer with a doctrine. And you can ask why they believe it, and they will answer with another doctrine. But what is the foundation of these doctrines? It can’t be another doctrine, because that doctrine would itself have to be based on something.

The problem, of course, is that they have chosen that which they regard as the ultimate authority. They did. They have exercised their own judgment. It is simply unavoidable. Some people are resistant to this idea because it means that their entire belief system is subjective. They will point to some external authority and claim that it is the ultimate foundation of their faith, but they have to choose it. It did not choose itself for them. So, ultimately, their own judgment is the foundation of their faith. It cannot be otherwise.

So what does this have to do with the “new covenant”? Last week I pointed out that the heart, on which the law would be “written,” represents the deepest level of the self in Hebrew anthropology. Instead of following an authority, the law, written on stone tables, the new locus of authority would be the heart of the individual. And I think there are indications that this is starting to take place in theology.

Quentin Quesnell, a Catholic biblical scholar, wrote a paper entitled “On Not Neglecting the Self in the Structure of Theological Revolutions.” Quesnell draws on the thought of Thomas S. Kuhn, the much-misunderstood – by both critics and admirers alike – author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn is the one who coined the term “paradigm shift” (though not, as is often claimed, the word “paradigm” itself).

Quesnell points out that Kuhn clarified his definitions of “paradigm” in the Postscript to the second edition of that book. The first sense of paradigm is “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by a given community” (Kuhn, quoted in Quesnell 125). This is how most people understand the term, and they understand a “paradigm shift” to be any change of this “constellation of beliefs, values,” etc. But this is a rather superficial understanding of the term. Quesnell calls these changes “minor revolutions” (125).

The second, deeper sense of paradigm is exemplified by “exemplary past achievements” that “employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science” (Kuhn, quoted in Quesnell 126). Quesnell writes,

Applied to theology, it would refer to the exemplary work of the outstanding theologians from who each age derives its notion of what it is to produce an adequate theological demonstration. These paradigm-changes amount to changes in the very idea of what it is to do theology. (126)

He describes these shifts as “major revolutions.”

Quesnell suggests that these two kinds of paradigm were not distinguished in Kuhn’s original text because they tend to happen at the same time.

When Kuhn wrote about paradigm in the second sense, he inevitably illustrated his point with historical instances which were simultaneously instances of paradigm in the first sense. Readers did not always get his point. They were more struck with the achievements noted than with how they were achieved. (126)

This is also true of theological revolutions:

The new formulations of doctrine which in fact meet the great crises of Christian thought also themselves become to the next generation the exemplary past achievements which set everyone’s idea of how theology ought to be done. The open disputes at the time of major theological revolutions are about doctrines; but the doctrinal issues are in fact comparatively superficial. At a deeper level what is really in question is, What is a satisfactory theological demonstration? What does it mean to verify something theologically? … The fight, while it lasts, seems to be about a point of doctrine; but after the fight is over, one finds that the real change which has taken place is a change in the way of doing theology. (126)

Quesnell describes several major theological revolutions that have occurred throughout history. I will describe only one, as an example. The Arian controversy in the fourth century was, on the surface, a dispute over the relative status of the Son and the Father. Arius said that Jesus was the Son of God, but not God himself: however great he may have been, he was inferior to God. Arius would quote verses like John 14.28, in which Jesus claims, “the Father is greater than I,” to prove his point. The Bible, the standard by which theological orthodoxy was measured, could not solve the issue. The non-biblical word homoousion (lit. “same substance”) was necessary to explain how the Son could be equal to the Father. This was a minor revolution. The major revolution, Quesnell says, was the tacit admission “that not all issues in theology could be solved on the basis of biblical words and concepts” (126). Without this revolution, doctrines like the Trinity, described in terms of “persons” and “natures,” would never have been conceivable.

Theology has gone through several revolutions since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed, until recently, is the assumption that there is some objective norm which can serve as the foundation of theology. There were always premises – doctrines – which were not to be questioned. Theology was never truly critical. Attempts to do truly critical theology have often been met with hostility from the right.

Despite this opposition, theologians have begun to pay more attention to the subject. As Quesnell points out, there is “a growing appreciation of the fact that the self is included in any and every judgment of truth; a spreading awareness that every serious, considered affirmation is to some extent a free commitment of one’s self” (129).

Tradition will no longer be seen as an objective norm against which theology will be measured. “The past,” says Quesnell, “fulfills its role when it has formed the theologian and the community to be what they are” (132). The symbols of the tradition no longer “define something known, measurable and achieved, but point to what is to be achieved” (132).

The term “God” no longer refers to something known or understood, but becomes a heuristic category. To explain this, Quesnell uses the word “fire” as an example. “Fire,” he says, “remained the name for that which was to be explained in the days of the four elements, in the age of caloric and phlogiston, and of rapid oxidation” (132). “God” is a term that indicates the reality to be understood. “God” is the destination, not the point of departure. The unity of “subject-aware theology…comes from God not as from a norm but as from an aspiration” (133).

Works Cited

The New Covenant, Part I

2005-07-09T15:08:00.002-04:00

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jer 31.31-34)

This is, without a doubt, one of the most misinterpreted texts in the history of the church. As early as the first century, when the letter to the Hebrews was written, this has been interpreted as referring to the replacement of Judaism with Christianity. Hebrews quotes the entire passage (8.8-12), the longest quotation of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (generally following the Septuagint translation).

The author of Hebrews, commenting on this passage, writes,

In speaking of "a new covenant," he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear. (Heb 8.13)

The new covenant with Jesus is in (8.6), the old covenant with the Jews is out. This view, later called supersessionism, was explicitly rejected by Pope John Paul II, who affirmed in November of 1980 that the covenant with the Jews was "never revoked by God." Despite the protestations of a few ultra-conservatives, I think supersessionism will itself be "replaced" in Catholic theology. And thank God for that.

Of course, this inevitably raises the question: if the "new covenant" mentioned in Jeremiah isn't about Christianity, what exactly is it about?

Guy P. Couturier, in his NJBC commentary, compares the two covenants described in the text, and concludes that it is incorrect to assume that there is a "complete rupture" between the two:

Yahweh concluded both on his own initiative; both are God-centered; the people are the same in both instances; the response is manifested in the same obedience to the law, which did not change. There is no question of the promulgation of a new law. Therefore, this newness is not found in the essentials of the covenant, but in the realm of its realization and of its means. (18.89)

In other words, the content of the law is not going to change. The change happens entirely on the human side of the equation. Whereas previously the law was written on stone (that is, on something external to the people), now it is written on their hearts.

The "heart," in Hebrew anthropology, has a meaning quite different than that we are accustomed to. As Marcus J. Borg explains,

For the ancient Hebrews, the heart was not simply associated with feelings or courage or love, as in common modern usage. Rather, the heart was associated with the totality of the human psyche: not only emotion but also intellect, volition, and even perception. As a level of the self "below" our feeling, thinking, willing, and seeing, the heart impacts all of them. (1997: 113)

The heart, then, can be understood as the deepest level of a person's being. When one considers that the law represents the hightest authority, and is now being located in the heart of every individual, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how Christians in a hierarchical, authoritarian church could ever have thought this applied to them.

The understanding of authority present in this passage bears no resemblance to that which has developed in the Catholic tradition. But, as I will demonstrate in my next post, contemporary theology is definitely moving in that direction.

Read Part Two

Works Cited

Do the Pastoral Epistles Still Matter?

2005-07-03T07:51:00.000-04:00

In an article that appeared in America magazine ("On the Church," April 21, 2001), Cardinal Walter Kasper explained at length his perspective on the relationship between "the universal church and particular (local) churches." This was written in response to then-Cardinal Ratzinger's critique of Kasper's previously stated views on the subject.

Kasper's argument, in contrast to Ratzinger's subsequent response ("The Local Church and the Universal Church," November 19, 2001), was based on a critical appraisal of New Testament ecclesiology. One passage in Kasper's piece struck me as particularly interesting.

When in his principal letters Paul uses the word “church” (ecclesia) in the singular, he refers to a particular church or to a given community. When he speaks of “churches” in the plural, he refers to several local assemblies. For Paul, the one church of God comes to life in each local church. Thus there is the church of God in Corinth and so forth. The church of God is present in each of them. In the captivity letters (which in the opinion of many scholars are not by Paul), this meaning of ecclesia recedes into the background and the universal church as a whole comes into focus.

Kasper finds the ecclesiological vision he is advocating reflected in the genuine letters of Paul, and contrasts this with the ecclesiology of the inauthentic letters. Implicit in Kasper's argument is the assumption that letters genuinely written by Paul have greater authority than letters merely claiming to have been written by Paul.

For Kasper, it appears, the pseudonymous character of some of the Pauline letters diminishes their authority, at least relative to the genuine Pauline letters. That a high-ranking member of the Roman Curia has taken this position, however implicitly, seems to me quite significant.

I should point out that downgrading the authority of certain NT texts is quite different from dropping them from the canon. The question of whether that should be done is ultimately moot: they're not going to be, so there is no point of arguing about it one way or another.

Authority, however, is not necessarily the same thing as canonicity. While many people are loathe to admit that there are any contradictions within the Bible, this is not an intellectually honest position. The question arises: between two contradictory texts, which is to be preferred?

Martin Luther may have exaggerated the contradictions between the letter of James and the letters of Paul, but his way of dealing with contradictory texts is still instructive: Luther maintained the 27-book NT canon, but clearly identified Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation as less authoritative than the "main" books of the NT. They were kept within the canon, but were "officially" less authoritative. Could such a position be taken with regard to the inauthentic letters of Paul?

Officially, I don't this this would ever happen, certainly not in the Catholic Church. In practise, though, it obviously already does happen, as the example of Cardinal Kasper cited above illustrates. I think this could lead to problems, however: while many Catholics will readily accept Kasper's argument, others will reject the suggestion that the authentic letters of Paul should be preferred over the inauthentic letters, since they won't even recognise the latter as inauthentic. They will insist that the apparently conflicting ecclesiologies within the Pauline corpus are, in fact, merely apparent. In fact, they might argue, the two apparently conflicting perspectives could actually be perfectly reconciled, if we were not too sinful to see it. (Critical and pre-critical exegesis have been allowed to coexist in the Catholic Church, and I think this has contributed to a lot of conflict between Catholics -- as demonstrated by the hostility shown by some people towards Fr. Raymond Brown, for example. Critical readers often consider Brown's work to be somewhere between moderate and conservative. Precritical readers find his work somewhere between heresy and apostasy. But maybe that's a subject for another day.)

Before I conclude, I should suggest why I think the Pastoral Epistles are still important -- what was originally going to be the focus of this entry. Many people reject the Pastorals because of their overtly sexist content. The presence of such content is lamentable, to be sure, but the Pastorals do contain something positive that is sorely lacking in the rest of the Pauline corpus: a positive view of marriage and sexuality. The Catholic tradition has often taken a dim view of sex, and has always exalted celibacy over marriage. The 4th-century monk Jovinian was actually excommunicated for denying that marriage was inferior to celibacy! (His primary opponent was Jerome, whose spiteful invective Adversus Jovinianum proves, if nothing else, that even the most nasty and hateful people have a shot at becoming a "saint.")

Jovinian's arguments were drawn largely from the Pastoral Epistles. Jerome's were largely drawn from the authentic letters of Paul. Jerome may have won the fight with Jovinian, but the Pastoral Epistles forced Jerome to actually argue against scripture. Without them, it would have been no contest.

Of course, just because the Pastorals have served an important and positive role (in a limited way) in the past, are they still necessary today? Is the concept of a canon even relevant?

Works Cited

The Battle Over the Apostle

2005-06-25T02:00:00.001-04:00

Having decided to spend the next little while discussing the Pseudo-Pauline texts, I decided to look through some of the books I had to read when I took an undergraduate course on Paul a few years ago. One title in particular stood out in my memory: The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon by Dennis Ronald MacDonald. I thought it had gone out of print, but apparently it has not. It's a terrific little book (103 pages), both accessible and scholarly, and it really changed my thinking about the Pastoral Epistles.

MacDonald's thesis is that "the author of the Pastorals wrote in Paul's name in order to counteract the image of Paul as given in stories told by women" (14).

That requires some explaining. 1 Tim 4.7 says, "Avoid the profane tales told by old women." MacDonald writes,

Most interpreters have taken this verse to be nothing more than stock rhetoric used to vilify the theology of the "false teachers." Hence, modern translations diguise the reference to women: "Have nothing to do with godless and silly myths" (RSV); "Steer clear of all these stupid Godless fictions" (Phillips). Other translations retain the reference to women to preclude the possibility that the author in fact might have been objecting to women telling stories: "Leave foolish nursery tales alone" (Ronald Knox); "Have nothing to do with those godless myths, fit only for old women" (NEB). (14)

These translations obscure an important clue as to what the author of the Pastorals was opposing. In the 2nd century, there was a number of oral legends about Paul that suggested the Apostle had promoted "freedom for women to teach in the church, celibacy, and adamant opposition to Rome" (14). Some of the legends can be discerned in the apocryphal Acts of Paul, written sometime between 150 and 190 CE.

I am convinced that the Pastoral Epistles have distorted our image of Paul, even for those of us who recognize them as pseudonymous. Scholars still too often assume that the Pastoral Epistles were more or less standard expressions of Paulinism for the post-Pauline churches. But this fails to account for the tremendous diversity of ways the early church remembered the apostle, and consequently we have too often seen the apostle of freedom as the priest of social convention. The domestication of Paul in the Pastoral Epistles was not an inevitable, linear development, as is usually assumed. (MacDonald 15)

In the second century stories about Paul and the letters that were written in his name, we find two competing traditions. One that portrays as a social radical, and another that directly opposes this, portraying Paul as a champion of social convention. As an example, we can look at their respective misrepresentations of Paul's view of marriage.

The authentic Paul discouraged marriage, wishing that all were unmarried like him (1 Cor 7.7). But he did not insist that people should be unmarried (7.6), and said that those who were already married should so remain (7.10-11).

I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. (1 Cor 7.26-28)

The legend tradition took this mild disdain for marriage a step further, and portrayed Paul as one who practically forbade marriage. The proponents of a domesticated Paul challenged this by portraying him as one who encouraged marriage, suggesting that young widows should marry and bear children (1 Tim 5.14), and they even went so far as to claim that women "will be saved through childbearing" (1 Tim 2.15).

Both misrepresent Paul, but the pro-marriage tradition would be preserved as sacred scripture, while the anti-marriage tradition (which was closer to Paul on this particular issue) was consigned to "near oblivion," remembered almost exlusively by "historians who enjoy collecting early Christian esoterica" (MacDonald 97).

When we look at the historical context in which the Pastorals were written, we see that they "did not develop linearly from Paul's ministry but dialectically; that is, they were written to oppose another strand of Pauline tradition, whose legends depicted him as a social radical" (MacDonald 97). Given that both of these traditions misrepresent Paul's teachings, shouldn't the Pastorals just be forgotten, as the legend tradition was? Shouldn't they be dismissed "as nothing more than brilliant forgeries documenting the decadence of Paulinism in the second century?" MacDonald says, "No!" (99), and I'm inclined to agree with him. Click here and I'll explain why.

Works Cited

Pseudo-Paul: Letters Not Written By Paul

2005-06-23T02:45:00.005-04:00

Pseudo-Paul: Letters Not Written By Paul

I've decided to change the direction of this blog a little bit, and discuss some of the issues surrounding the pseudepigraphal letters of the Pauline corpus -- which, in English, refers to the letters written in Paul's name that were not actually written by Paul. The Pastorals (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus) are almost universally recognised by scholars as post-Pauline, and a substantial majority would say the same about 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. I'm not going to go over the arguments against Pauline authorship for these letters -- there are plenty of websites that summarise these arguments. I'm more interested in some of the implications.

Are Pseudepigraphal Texts "Forgeries"?

In the modern world, when someone writes something and attributes it to another real-life person, we call it a "forgery." Scholars are often reluctant to use this term with reference to the disputed letters of Paul:

Although written by someone else under Paul's name, the Pastorals are not forgeries." Within Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, the writing of pseudonymous epistles was a long-standing tradition. In such case [sic]
the writer sought to extend the thought of his or her intellectual master to the problems in a later day. The writer said in effect, "The master would surely have said this if faced with this set of problems or issues." It is quite likely that the original readers of the Pastorals knew very well that Paul himself was not the "actual" author and that the letters represented an effort to extend his heritage to a later generation. (Wild, 892)

This is partly nonsense, especially the part about the original readers knowing that the Pastorals were not by Paul. But this is a common posture among scholars who want to make pseudo-Pauline authorship palatable for their readers: assure them that no moral transgressions were made, that at the time this was perfectly acceptable and normal.

It is true that the practise was common in the ancient world, but the notion that it was acceptable is contradicted by plenty of evidence. As Bart Ehrman points out, "Authors throughout Greek and Roman antiquity make numerous references to the practice and issue frequent warnings against it" (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, 342). In the philosophical schools it was sometimes considered virtuous to attribute your work to your teacher, but only if the work was derived from the teacher's ideas. When we look at the Pastoral epistles, we will see that they do not present Paul's ideas at all -- in fact, they contradict Paul on a number of issues. This is one of the reasons so few scholars actually think Paul wrote them.

The main reason people attributed their work to another famous author was simply to increase the chances it would receive attention. As Ehrman points out, if you were an amateur philosopher and "you wrote your own name...no one would be much intrigued or feel compelled to read what you had to say, but if you signed your treatise 'Plato,' then it might have a chance" (342).

Texts that were discovered to have been forged, however, were not accepted. Says Ehrman,

Forgers were commonly successful because people did not always see through them. When they did see through them, they were usually not amused. Indeed, despite its common occurrence, forgery was almost universally condemned by ancient authors (except among members of some of the philosophical schools). (344)

This probably explains why some scholars insist that the Deutero-Pauline epistles (2 Thess, Col, and Eph) were the product of a Pauline "school" -- only in such a context would such an exercise have been considered acceptable. But apart from the wishful thinking of some scholars, there is no evidence that these letters were the product of such a school, or that such a school ever existed. The school has been dreamed up by scholars who need to excuse the transgression of bearing false witness by a biblical author.

Ehrman notes the reluctance of many scholars to describe the pseudo-Pauline letters as "forgeries," while also noting that

It is striking that few scholars object to using the term "forgery"' for books, even Christian books, that occur outside the New Testament. This may suggest that the refusal to talk about New Testament forgeries is not based on historical grounds but on faith commitments (either of the scholars or of their audiences), that is, it represents a theological judgment that the canonical books need to be granted a special status. (344)

I can sympathise with scholars who want to make this knowledge more acceptable to a wider audience. Maybe it needs to be sugar-coated with half-truths about the acceptability of forgeries in the ancient world for people today to accept that Paul did not write all of the letters written in his name. But half-truths are also half-lies, and I don't feel altogether comfortable with that.

Works Cited

Next: I'm going to consider the authority of the Pastorals in the light of their pseudepigraphal status. Click here.

Complete Works Cited Page

2005-05-14T14:03:00.013-04:00

Works Cited

The scripture quotations contained herein are (unless otherwise specified) from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Aland, Barbara, Kurt Aland, et al, eds. Greek New Testament, 4th Revised Edition. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1998.

Augustine. De Bono Conjugali. (online)

Borg, Marcus J. The God We Never Knew. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: A New Vision. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987.

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship. Valley Forge: Trinity Press, 1994.

Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Brown, Raymond E., SS, et al, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. 1989. London: Chapman, 2000. [Quotations from the New Jerome Biblical Commentary (cited as NJBC) are referenced by chapter and section rather than by page number.]

Bultmann, Rudolph. Theology of the New Testament. Vol. 1. Kendrick Grobel, trans. New York: Scribners, 1951.

Charlesworth, James H. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998.

Cooper, David A. God is a Verb. New York: Riverhead, 1997.

Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Couturier, Guy P., C.S.C. "Jeremiah." New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Eds. Raymond E. Brown, et al. 1989. London: Chapman, 2000: 265-297.

Domning, Daryl P. "Evil, Evolution, and Original Sin." America. November 12, 2001. (online)

Dunn, James D.G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids, Mi.: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998.

Ehrman, Bart D, ed. After the New Testament: A Reader In Early Christianity. New York: Oxford, 1998.

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium. New York: Oxford, 1999.

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. (The 3rd edition is now available.)

Freedman, David Noel. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 volumes. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Jerome. Adversus Jovinianum. (online)

Josephus. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged. New Updated Edition. William Whiston, trans. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987.

Kasper, Cardinal Walter. "On the Church." America. 184/14 (April 21, 2004): Online.

Kittel, Gerhard, ed. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. 1964. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993.

Kook, Abraham Isaac. The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems. Ben Zion Bokser, ed. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

Lonergan, Bernard. Method in Theology. 1971. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.

MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus - The Roots of the Problem and the Person. Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus - Mentor, Message, and Miracles. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus - Companions and Competitors. Vol.3. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus - Law and Love. Vol.4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.

Perrin, Norman. The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963.

Perrin, Norman. Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Rahlfs, Alfred. Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1996.

Richards, Kent Howard. "Death: Old Testament." The Anchor Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992: 2.108-110.

Sanders, E.P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. 1910. The Albert Schweitzer Library. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1998.

Tylor, E.B. The Origins of Culture. 1871. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.

Wild, Robert J., S.J. "The Pastoral Letters." The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Eds. Raymond E. Brown, et al. 1989. London: Chapman, 2000: 891-902.