Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 59 of 288 · 20 per page

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Both Qumranites and other Essenes, as we know from Damascus Document 6:18–19 (DSST 37), observed a quite different calendar from the rest of their fellow Jews. That is why, for example, the Wicked Priest could attack the Teacher of Righteousness “during the rest of the Day of Atonement … the day of fasting, the sabbath of their rest” (1QpHab11:6–8; DSST 201–202). It was the Teacher’s but not the Priest’s Day of Atonement. In conclusion, what? It is still not clear what relationship the other Essene communities had to Qumran or it to them. Was Qumran just one among many, first among equals, or some sort of ideal or even jurisdictional mother-community? Why were there so many copies of key texts found in the caves, especially in Cave 4, which seems to have been the principal library? If Qumran was a copying center—the Essene Publishing Company, as it were—why are there hundreds of different scribal hands evident in the scrolls? Or was Qumran always the central community so that other Essenes fled there with their own documents before Vespasian’s legions? My point in all of this is not to narrow Essene identity to one monolithic option but to open it up fully across the widest possible spectrum. The Essene communities were radical attempts to live faithfully and fully the Law of God, in justice and righteousness, in purity and holiness, when everyone around them, from their own high priests to their own people, was failing to do so. One could disagree with that judgment and still honor its integrity. It is against that background that I now look at another early-first-century community, the Christian Jews around James the Just in Jerusalem. James the Just The outcome of the conflict between teachers and bishops had important social consequences. If the school had prevailed, the Christian communities would have assumed an intellectual character, with little place for the uneducated. The circles of Clement and Origen, as they appear from their writings and the scanty prosopographic evidence given by Eusebius, consisted of people who already had Greek learning and who were sometimes students of philosophical schools. The monarchical episcopate, on the other hand, was much more effective in bringing together members from all social classes, learned or illiterate, and uniting them under the authority of a strict hierarchy. The episcopate asked not for wisdom or education but for discipline. The subordination of the school to the bishop, as at Alexandria, preserved much of the intellectual character of the Christian communities and hence favoured the participation of educated and wealthy people—without, however, excluding the poor and underprivileged. Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, The Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities , p. 145 If you read only Paul’s letters you would know—from Galatians 1:18–19 or 2:11–12, for example—that both Simon “the Rock” (Peter in Greek, Cephas in Aramaic) and James “the Lord’s brother” were important figures in early Christianity.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  In his thought he got him wrong, but in his life he got him right. And so, most appropriately, he received the Nobel Prize not for literature but for peace. Itinerant Radicalism Their ethical radicalism makes Jesus’ sayings absolutely impracticable as a regulative for every-day behavior. So we are faced all the more inescapably with the question: Who passed on sayings like these by word of mouth over a period of thirty years and more? Who took them seriously?… The sayings tradition is characterized by an ethical radicalism that is shown most noticeably in the renunciation of a home, family, and possessions. From the precepts that have to do with these things, we can arrive analytically at some conclusions about the life-style that was characteristic of the people who passed on the texts…. We can now formulate our thesis: the ethical radicalism of the sayings transmitted to us is the radicalism of itinerants…. It is only in this context that the ethical precepts which match the way of life can be passed on without being unconvincing…. And that was possible only for homeless charismatics. Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians , pp. 36, 37, 40 The words I italicized in that epigraph indicate why I chose the term ethical eschatology for the perspective found in the Common Sayings Tradition. That new label combines, as it were, the “eschatology” of “world-negation” from Schweitzer with “ethical radicalism” from Theissen. Lest you imagine, by the way, that I am inventing some unique theology for a unique Jesus, let me assure you that I find ethical eschatology in the nonviolent resistance to structural evil put forward by such diverse people as the Jain Mahatma Gandhi, the Catholic Dorothy Day, and the Protestant Martin Luther King, Jr. If enough people lived like they did—lived in nonviolent protest against systemic evil, against the normalcies of this world’s discrimination, exploitation, and oppression—the result would be a new world we could hardly imagine. That is eschatology—possibly the only real type available to us. But, in any case, back to Theissen. Although I am adapting his language, my ethical eschatology is somewhat different from his ethical radicalism . I emphasize initially, however, my great respect for his foundational work on this subject and my profound gratitude for his contribution. When Theissen introduced this subject almost twenty-five years ago, he discussed earliest Christianity in the Jewish homeland using words translated as “itinerant radicalism,” “ethical radicalism,” “wandering charismatics,” and “charismatic begging.” Later he also drew attention to the similarities between those itinerant preachers and the Cynic missionaries of the first two centuries (1992:33–59).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  And once it was there, within a decade of the death of Jesus, others would compose variations on it, but nobody would ever replace it or eliminate it. EPILOGUEThe Character of Your God God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.” Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you! Psalm 82 I place Psalm 82 as epigraph to this Epilogue, repeating it from the earlier discussion of Yahweh as the Jewish God of justice and righteousness (Chapter 12). It is, for me, the single most important text in the entire Christian Bible, and it comes, of course, from the Jewish Bible. It is, for me, more important than John 1:14, which speaks of the Word of God becoming flesh and living among us. Before celebrating that incarnation, we must address a prior question about the character of the divinity involved. And that short psalm best summarizes for me the character of the Jewish God as Lord of all the world. It imagines a mythological scene in which God sits among the gods and goddesses in divine council. Those pagan gods and goddesses are dethroned not just because they are pagan , nor because they are other , nor because they are competition . They are dethroned for injustice, for divine malpractice, for transcendental malfeasance in office. They are rejected because they do not demand and effect justice among the peoples of the earth. And that justice is spelled out as protecting the poor from the rich, protecting the systemically weak from the systemically powerful. Such injustice creates darkness over the earth and shakes the very foundations of the world. Peoples and nations write constitutive texts, record constitutive histories, tell constitutive stories, and make constitutive laws. Those foundations judge everything they do thereafter. One must, therefore, be very careful about constitutive proclamations. They may come home to haunt you. So also with a religion and its God. Psalm 82 tells us how we are to be judged by God but also how God wants to be judged by us. Everything else that God says or does in Bible or life should be judged by that job description. Is this or that the transcendental justice defined in Psalm 82 at work? Or is this or that just transcendental testosterone?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It was still possible in those days to find individuals, illiterate in both Irish and English, who had received orally and passed on orally the ancient epic tales of Ireland. Such a process was, in the fullest sense of the word, oral tradition. It was the tradition repeated in creative performance by individuals who had learned their craft not as students from books but as apprentices from masters. There was no single archetypal or uniform version, but a multiform or pluriform performance from a traditional narrative matrix. Meanwhile, back at school we learned by heart at least ten lines of Irish poetry and ten lines of English poetry or Shakespearean soliloquy for each day’s class. Memorization was the presupposition of discussion, since we were trained to argue not from the book but from what we knew by heart. When we took the country-wide and government-set intermediate or final high school exams, for instance, we were expected to argue for or against propositions concerning that poetry, “quoting freely” from memory. That was marvelous education, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with oral tradition. We gave, in class, the oral rendition of what we had memorized from written text, and we gave, in examination, the scribal rendition of that same memorization. Oral tradition in which the tradition is received orally and transmitted orally (often by illiterates) within the discipline of creative performance is a different world from scribal tradition transmitted orally within the discipline of exact (as best we could!) memorization. Those experiences left me with a very great respect for oral tradition. We, after all, traveled to listen to those storytellers; they did not travel to listen to us. But I learned early the difference between oral tradition and oral transmission and between scribal and oral sensibility. I also learned early that tradition is not just gossip, rumor, or even memory. But terms must be used carefully and exactly. What those native Gaelic speakers on Donegal’s Atlantic coast retained and performed was oral tradition. You could call any given enactment the oral transmission of that oral tradition. The poetry I memorized on walks with my father was the oral transmission of a scribal tradition: he had read and memorized from a book, he repeated it to me orally, and I memorized it from his voice. The poetry and soliloquies I memorized in high school were the scribal transmission of a scribal tradition. Those native speakers operated within oral tradition, transmission, and sensibility. Neither I, my father, nor my teachers did. Correct, for us, was what the book said. Correct, for them, was how the tradition operated. It is possible, of course, to imagine someone operating within a scribal tradition but having an oral sensibility. Such a person would treat a written version as just another performance of the poem or story, and, even as they were memorizing or transcribing it, they could perform it anew.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  So in discussing Copernicus, Butterfield stressed the degree to which his theory “was only a modified form of the Ptolemaic system”; it simplified but retained the then current doctrines of spheres and epicycles, and, further, Copernicus’s teachings were enmeshed in “teleological explanations and forms of what we should call animism.” So William Harvey, Butterfield wrote, while demonstrating de novo the circulation of the blood, remained in many ways an Aristotelian, and believed in vital spirits. And Newton was intensely concerned with apocalyptic prophecies and was immersed in alchemical studies.8 Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science—whose themes historians of science of far greater technical knowledge than Butterfield’s would develop, qualify, and criticize9—is only an elementary general survey, but it is just the kind of abridgement he thought most likely to suffer from anachronistic distortion. Yet when his hoped-for contextualism appears in densely researched and fully elaborated writing, in mature works of historical scholarship, it has about it an exceptional ring of truth. So too does Frances Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, despite the criticism it has received. It is a brilliant excavation of an intellectual and cultural world that seemed, to the few modern historians before her who were aware of it, so regressive, bizarre, and ephemeral that they generally ignored it. But Yates managed to show, by dint of profound research in esoteric writings, in prints crowded with symbolic meanings, and in the subtle resonances of words and phrases, that the mingled hermeticism, cabalism, mysticism, and alchemical lore of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Rosicrucianism formed a true movement for the enlightened reform of mankind. For all its obscurities, it had links, however indirect, to the founding of the Royal Society and constituted one of the stages by which Renaissance learning evolved into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. “Like archaeologists,” Yates wrote, “digging down through layers, we have found under the superficial history of the early seventeenth century … a whole culture, a whole civilization, lost to view, and not the less important because of such a short duration.” By the eighteenth century, Rosicrucianism, which in its origins had sought to advance learning, ameliorate human suffering, and introduce a new era of universal brotherhood and goodwill, was dismissed as hopelessly archaic and obscurantist—the opposite of enlightened; but Yates showed that in the true context of its origins it was the first step in the progress of reform.10

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But I always presume in what follows that this chapter has warned us to be very, very careful about memory, even when it is most sure of itself. I do not think that eyewitnesses are always wrong; but, for example, if eyewitness testimony is a prosecution’s only evidence, there is always and intrinsically a reasonable doubt against it. Always . As John Bohannon and Victoria Symons put it, “In studies of eyewitness testimony, the most favorable estimates of the correlation between confidence and accuracy are about .40” (67). CHAPTER 5A TALE OF TWO PROFESSORSIt was my privilege to study with Milman Parry [1902–1935] during the period, so prematurely cut short, when he was teaching Classics in Harvard College…. No one who knew Parry is likely to forget his incisive powers of formulation or to underrate the range and depth of his cosmopolitan mind. He has been appropriately hailed, by an eminent archeologist, as the Darwin of oral literature. Harry Levin, in the Preface to Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales , n.p. It was from Cambridge [University] that [Sir Frederic C.] Bartlett launched his quixotic challenge to the memory establishment of the 1920s and 1930s. He was convinced that his contemporaries understood neither the purpose nor the nature of memory, and that standard laboratory procedures just obscure its real characteristics. His challenge went almost unheard for 40 years, from the publication of Remembering (1932) until this decade [the 1970s], but it is unheard no longer. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed , pp. 3–4 This chapter is about two professors who published profoundly important research on the intersection of memory, orality, and literacy in the early 1930s. But, as the above epigraphs note, Parry’s theories and experiments generated a major academic industry from the very beginning, while Bartlett’s theories and experiments went mostly ignored until very recently. I pair them here, however, to establish and emphasize the parameters of that intersection between memory, orality, and literacy. Homer in a Balkan Coffeehouse The human accomplishment of lengthy verbatim recall [fifty words or more] arises as an adaptation to written text and does not arise in cultural settings where text is unknown. The assumption that nonliterate cultures encourage lengthy verbatim recall is the mistaken projection by literates of text-dependent frames of reference. Ian M. L. Hunter, in Progress in the Psychology of Language , p. 207 I first met Homer in a classical high school in Ireland between 1945 and 1950. We read him in Greek, cribbed him in English, and translated him into Gaelic (there were no cribs or ponies in Gaelic). And we knew, with adolescent precision, how to translate so that the teachers could never be sure whether it was the Greek we did not know or the Gaelic. Certain set phrases, repeated with predictable if not numbing regularity, remain with me to this day. I recall none of them in Gaelic, some of them in Greek, and all of them in English.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  His History of the Church , published in successively longer versions during the first quarter of the fourth century, is hampered, as Timothy Barnes puts it, “by his inability to contemplate theological development”; as a result, “his account of the internal history of the Church and of Christian literature is less a coherent narrative than a series of disconnected notes” (132). One of Eusebius’s sources is Hegesippus’s five-book Memoirs , dated around 150, and from its last book he cites the following about James (Williamson 99–100): Control of the Church passed to the apostles, together with the Lord’s brother James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has called the Righteous, for there were many Jameses, but this one was holy from his birth; he drank no wine or intoxicating liquor and ate no animal food; no razor came near his head; he did not smear himself with oil, and took no baths. He alone was permitted to enter the Holy Place, for his garments were not of wool but of linen. He used to enter the Sanctuary alone, and was often found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew hard like a camel’s from his continually bending them in worship of God and beseeching forgiveness for the people. Because of his unsurpassable righteousness he was called the Righteous and Oblias —in our own language ‘Bulwark of the People, and Righteousness’—fulfilling the declarations of the prophets regarding him. (History of the Church 2.23) Hegesippus describes James as under a lifelong nazarite vow. The temporary version of this vow is described in Numbers 6:1–21, but lifelong versions are described for Samson in Judges 13:5 and 14 and 16:17 and for Samuel in 1 Samuel 1:11 and 22. The nazarite, like the high priest in Leviticus 21:11, is forbidden to become impure by touching a corpse, even to bury his own parents. Furthermore, James, as a nazarite, is treated like a priest and allowed to enter the Holy Place—maybe even, although the Temple’s topography seems confused, to enter the Holy of Holies itself, as the high priest would on the Day of Atonement. From all of that I take only one element as probably historical: James was famous for his asceticism. A second element is possible: James was a nazarite. I label that second element possible rather than probable because Hegesippus could have inferred it from Acts 18:18 and 21:24, where, in a context I return to below, James tells Paul to join four others undergoing purification at the end of their temporary nazarite vows. A third element, James as priest-privileged or even high-priest-privileged, I leave aside as overenthusiastic. There is, I recognize, a strong inclination to discard that entire story because of its imaginative expansions, but I retain its core for one reason: the combination of historical fact and apologetical expansion that occurs here with regard to James’s life also occurs with regard to James’s death.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  I myself, in summary, believe in an epiphanic rather than an episodic God. To say, therefore, that the healings or exorcisms of Jesus are miracles does not mean for me that only Jesus could do such things but that in such events I see God at work in Jesus. God, for me, is one who resists discrimination, exploitation, and oppression; who is, for example, on the side of a doomed people rather than their imperial masters at the Exodus and on the side of a crucified Jesus rather than his imperial executioners at the resurrection. And, in the reciprocity of open eating and free healing to be seen in Chapter 18, I see that same God at work—in the healing and in the eating as nonviolent resistance to systemic evil. CHAPTER 17NEGATING APOCALYPTIC ESCHATOLOGYWandering radicalism does not proclaim the (future) coming of the kingdom, it brings it directly to the front door. With the knock of the itinerant radical, the old world has already passed away, and the kingdom of God has arrived. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus , p. 211 This chapter and the next one form a tandem set. They are a pair, two sides of the one coin, as it were. This chapter is the negative; the next chapter is its positive complement. In this first or negative section I intend to show that the Common Sayings Tradition knows about apocalyptic eschatology from the teaching of John the Baptist and, respectfully but definitely, negates his program in favor of the kingdom-of-God program. The Common Sayings Tradition is, in other words, anti-apocalyptic but not anti-eschatological. A first indication of its eschatological thrust is its emphatic retention of the concept of the kingdom of God. It opposes one interpretation of that visionary program rather than the very program itself. But, in this first chapter, we do not get much further than that negative opposition. It is not at all clear what is the positive content of this kingdom until we get to the next and complementary chapter. There are three sayings to be considered in the Common Sayings Tradition’s negation of apocalyptic eschatology, and their presence in that tradition is extremely significant. By opposing apocalyptic eschatology, they prove that it was present at the time they negated it. There is, in other words, counterevidence to any claim that a nonapocalyptic eschatology came first and an apocalyptic one developed only later. The earliest non apocalyptic eschatology I can find is already an anti -apocalyptic one. In the beginning was John the Baptist, not Jesus. The first saying, Into the Desert , is extremely complimentary to John. The Q Gospel retained it as such, but the Gospel of Thomas removed John’s name entirely and changed its ending completely. The second saying, Greater Than John , displaced the Baptist in favor of the kingdom’s least member and was accepted in that form by both gospels.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  All of these historians were in some degree emotionally involved in the world they discovered, and all had what George Kitson Clark found most striking in Macaulay: “an imaginative grasp of the historical situation as a whole.” It is the wholeness of their visions, the capacity to conceive of an entire world and not merely one problem or one issue or one theme, that is the crucial element. In this imaginative capacity these historians are comparable, I believe, less to other scholarly historians than to the novelists who have created entire worlds, populated them, furnished them, traced their traumas and triumphs, their growth and decline. Faulkner, for example, conceiving a “mythical kingdom” in a county in northern Mississippi complete with an identifiable population of shopkeepers and mechanics, farmers and tenants and gentry—a county, Malcolm Cowley wrote, with “a population of 15,600 persons scattered over 2400 square miles. It sometimes seems to me that every house or hovel has been described in one of Faulkner’s novels; and that all the people of the imaginary county, black and white, townsmen, farmers, and housewives, have played their parts in one connected story.” So too the mythical but deeply real world, furnished, populated, and described with exquisite care by Proust; or the nightmare worlds of Dostoevsky, or the social universe of War and Peace. The central instinct, the crucial, necessary “genius,” if I may use that word, that lay behind the creative historiography of these immensely energetic and highly technical historians seems to me to have been a kind of literary imagination: the capacity to project, like a novelist, a nonexistent, an impalpable world in all its living comprehension, and yet to do this within the constraints of verifiable facts. I am well aware of the differences between fact and fiction, but I am as much struck by the general historical accuracy of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as I am by the visionary structure Perry Miller erected for his history. This seems to me to be the central, the fundamental element in the accomplishments of these exceptionally creative historians: their capacity to conceive not simply of a new issue here or a fresh problem there, but of a verifiable world of interconnections, of relationships which together add up to a different and better picture of the whole—more comprehensive, deeper, closer to the grain of reality—than had been seen before. But if, as I believe, this is the fundamental quality of mind that is found in their historical writing, there are other, more specific characteristics as well, closer to the substance of their work.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  In 1935, when he considered himself somewhat past his peak, he recited nine epics for Parry and Lord with a total of 44,902 lines recorded and 33,653 dictated. In 1950–51, when Lord returned to Bijelo Polje, Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] recorded three more epics with a total of 18,168 lines. That brings his transcribed songs to just below 100,000 lines. Furthermore, two of the longest songs in the Slavic tradition of oral epic are transcribed from his repertoire in 1935, one at 12,323 and another at 13,331 lines. “Avdo could sing songs of about the length of Homer’s Odyssey . An illiterate butcher in a small town of the central Balkans was equaling Homer’s feat, at least in regard to the length of song” (Parry 1974:8). Quality . In 1935 Lord deliberately set up an experiment with Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] . Another singer, Mumin Vlahovljak of Plevlje, performed a song of 2,294 lines that the listening Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] had never heard before. Then Parry, without warning, asked Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] if he could repeat the performance. He addressed his version courteously to his “colleague Muminaga,” but his repetition ran to 6,313 lines (Parry 1974:11). That almost-three-fold expansion is exemplified in the twin descriptions of the tale’s hero, Be [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] iragi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho, as those original full versions are summarized by Lord (223): Be [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] iragi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho by Mumin Vlahovljak [description of Meho: 11 lines in original full version] Be [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] iragi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho by Avdo Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] [description of Meho: 34 lines in original full version] The poor orphan Meho was at the foot of the assembly, near the door. Near the poor of the tavern sat a sad young man. He wore only cotton pants and shirt, but he had a fine sash and two beautiful golden pistols. He did not wear breastplate or helmet with plumes, but only cotton trousers and a silk shirt; over his fine sash was an arms belt in which were two golden pistols. (They are described.) He hung his head and gazed at the aghas . Nobody in the assembly offered him coffee or tobacco or a glass. Nobody spoke to him nor offered him a glass. Be [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] iragi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho by Mumin Vlahovljak [description of Meho: 11 lines in original full version] : He gazed sadly at the company. Be [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] iragi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho by Avdo Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] [description of Meho: 34 lines in original full version] : His heart was wilted like a rose in the hands of a rude bachelor. A somewhat similar difference appeared in two versions of The Wedding of Smailagi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Meho , performed by Meðedovi [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] himself, as transcribed first for Parry in 1935 and then, with no intervening performance, for Lord in 1950.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Which shocks me. In my house, personal freedom is all, amusement so hard won in that town that the right to scrabble for it is inalienable. Also in my house, cruelty was rarely so deliberate, more often the haphazard side effect of being shitfaced. I plop down at the keyboard to play the only chord I know, but Warren mentions his mother naps after lunch. He sits next to me with a wry smile. In the car he’d told me how he’d chosen poetry over his family’s penchant for law, partly to escape that preordered hamster wheel he was bred for. He’s opting for a game only history can measure his success in. (He didn’t mention how his father came home from Wall Street and read Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin.) How clear Warren’s green eyes are as he restates those to me noble convictions, and then he bends to kiss me with a mouth tasting of anise seed. Poetry will deliver him from his stultifying fate as it will me from my turbulent one. We’re sealed in that unlikely covenant already, with the vast house spread out around us as the dogs circle, tags clanking. Afterward, Warren leads me meandering through the scented rose garden and alongside the neat rows of vegetables. I think of Daddy’s pride at tomatoes staked in paint buckets on the porch under the clothesline sagging with dishrags. The tennis courts were razed for a huge pool. At the old stable—empty of horses—we feed carrots to the gray-muzzled donkeys. Once bought to keep the thoroughbreds calm, they’re fat court jesters who’ve taken over the place now the royal family’s died off. The family’s history is linked to horses. In my hometown, they’re used to cut cattle. As a kid, Warren and his sisters rode with their father before breakfast in the mornings. You had to make the high jump to get an extra serving of roast beef at dinner. Crossing the wide pantry, I spy the saucer of cookies and ask, Your mother still upstairs? Why are you whispering, sweetie? he asks, adding, Take another one if you like. How can you only eat one cookie? I say, biting down on one, then thumbing the fallen crumbs off my lip. My father’s always on some diet he can’t adhere to. It must’ve affected the rest of us, he says. Evening finds us seated at the long glossy table, half the length of a bowling alley, where his parents sit at opposite ends—his father portly in a tweed jacket with patched elbows; his mother blond and thin as a greyhound, smiling. Thank Mary for the Burgundy, Mrs. Whitbread says. You brought this? Mr. Whitbread holds his glass up. (In fact, I’d called the old bar I used to tend to find out what to bring.) It’s excellent. He takes a sip, adding, My own children think I’m rich enough to buy my own wine. I could never find one you liked, Warren says.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  One is that its picture of Pilate, meekly acquiescent to a shouting crowd, is exactly the opposite of what we know about him from Josephus. Brutal crowd control was his specialty. Another is that a custom such as open amnesty, the release of any requested prisoner at the time of the Passover festival, is against any administrative wisdom. Philo, for example, writing about a decade later, described what decent governors did for crucified criminals on festival occasions. They could postpone the execution until after the festival, or they could allow burial of the crucified by his family. He says nothing whatsoever about abrogation on demand. In Against Flaccus 81–84, an indictment of Flaccus, Roman governor of Egypt, because of the anti-Jewish pogroms during the emperor Caligula’s birthday on 31 August 38 C.E., he writes: Rulers who conduct their government as they should and do not pretend to honour but do really honour their benefactors make a practice of not punishing any condemned person until those notable celebrations in honour of the birthdays of the illustrious Augustan house are over…. I have known cases when on the eve of a holiday of this kind, people who have been crucified have been taken down and their bodies delivered to their kinsfolk, because it was thought well to give them burial and allow them the ordinary rites. For it was meet that the dead also should have the advantage of some kind treatment upon the birthday of the emperor and also that the sanctity of the festival should be maintained. But Flaccus gave no orders to take down those who had died on the cross. Instead he ordered the crucifixion of the living, to whom the season offered a short-lived though not permanent reprieve in order to postpone the punishment though not to remit it altogether. But if the Barabbas incident did not actually happen, why did Mark create such a story? It does not seem, like the Triumphal Entrance incident, to have been created to show prophetic fulfillment. What then was its purpose? Apart from massed protesters, apocalyptic prophets, and messianic claimants, there was one final group of peasant resisters in the first-century Jewish homeland. Josephus repeatedly mentions rebel bandits —for example, peasants forced off their farms who took to the hills and banditry rather than to the roads and beggary. In his classic study of that subject, Eric J. Hobsbawm calls them social bandits to distinguish them from plain robbers. They are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported….

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Here then is my cast of characters—Miller, Andrews, Namier, and Syme—and it is in their work and careers that I hope to find some clues to the nature and characteristics of creativity in historical scholarship. Other historians, of classic fame, might have been chosen. But the circumstances of research and writing were truly different in far different times and places. The historians I am talking about are people of our own time and culture who have transformed the subject they studied under conditions of life and technical demands familiar to us all. But even of contemporaries, others might well have been chosen. Still, let us make do with the four I have chosen, and try to isolate in them some, at least, of the critical elements of creativity, and by that means seek to identify essential characteristics of historical study in general, for all of us in some degree, for them in supreme measure, under present-day conditions. The first task, it seems to me, is the most difficult. It is to identify the general quality of mind and imagination that went into the writing of the four masterworks: The New England Mind, The Colonial Period in American History, The Structure of Politics, and The Roman Revolution. All are big learned works. But what sustains the labor behind such works as these is no mere love of detail and no simple instinct for beaver-like industry. These learned historians did not simply lay out information and they did not write straightforward traditional narratives, though the narratives that would follow would be written on the basis of these new foundations. Namier never wrote a sustained narrative; his history is almost entirely analytic. Syme did write a narrative of politics but, as he recognized himself, as a political story it is at times difficult to follow because of the multitude of detailed references. It is further complicated by Syme’s prose style, modeled in part on Tacitus’s Latin style. It is tightly compacted, abrupt, dense, and allusive. Andrews, it must be said, was a dutiful but dull narrator. And as for Perry Miller’s narrative prose, it might best be described as compelling and elusive. His thought—the exposition—swirls around and around like a figure skater, tracing all sorts of delicate and intricate movements, ending in a graceful conclusion. It’s all a vivid spectacle and wonderful to watch, but in the end it is sometimes difficult to figure out what exactly has happened.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The brigands unreasonably and hopelessly stood up for the life and liberty of the peasants against the encroachments of the State. By ill luck they were unwitting instruments of History, and History, quite outside their ken, was working against them; they were on the wrong side and they came to destruction. But through the brigands the peasants defended themselves against the hostile civilization that never understands but everlastingly enslaves them; instinctively they looked on the brigands as heroes. The peasant world has neither government nor army; its wars are only sporadic outbursts of revolt, doomed to repression. Still it survives, yielding up the fruits of the earth to the conquerors, but imposing upon them its measurements, its earthly divinities, and its language. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli , pp. 137–140 The general conclusion from Part IV was that peasant dislocations created by rural commercialization increase the possibility or inevitability of resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Building directly on that preceding Part IV, Part V considers Jewish tradition and Roman history on a collision course at that precise point of incipient rural commercialization in the first century. What happens when Roman urbanization and its concomitant ruralization finally reach Lower Galilee? Part V has two chapters. Chapter 12 probes what went so terribly wrong between imperial Roman policy and traditional Jewish religion in the first two hundred years of their interaction. The constitutional traditions of Judaism involved a God of justice and righteousness in covenantal relationship with a people of justice and righteousness under a law of justice and righteousness in a land of justice and righteousness. That God could not be other, and that people should not be other. God’s Law was not a matter simply of divine will or divine command but of divine nature and divine character. In sacred law, in prophetic critique, and in scribal wisdom, this God stood against oppression and exploitation, against indebtedness, enslavement, and dispossession, against everything that increased inequality and destroyed equality. Land, as the basis of life, was not just a commodity for normal entrepreneurial manipulation: the land belonged to God; God’s people were all tenants on divine property. Then along came Roman imperialism, which sought land for commercial exploitation as well as territorial expansion. Jewish tradition clashed predictably with that Roman policy. And it clashed not only because peasants usually resist rural commercialization but also (and especially) because Jewish peasants had a long and sacred tradition of such resistance. Chapter 13 places the third and final layer on my interdisciplinary model for context. Granted those anthropological and historical layers, there is still a further question. Was Galilee simply a Roman backwater of no value for urbanization or commercialization? Archeology indicates precisely what was happening in Lower Galilee in the first twenty years of the first common-era century. Herod Antipas was moving to urbanize Lower Galilee as his father, Herod the Great, had done earlier in Judaea and Samaria.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He went to Lambaréné, inland from the Atlantic coast and just south of the equator on the River Ogowe, in what was then the French colony of Gaboon. He and Helen Bresslau, whom he married in 1912, went at their own expense to spare the Paris Missionary Society any financial burden. But they had to obtain subsidies somewhere, and that meant “a round of begging visits among my acquaintances,” during which “the tone of my reception became markedly different when it came out that I was there, not a visitor but as a beggar” (1933:136). Judging by Schweitzer’s commitment to service, Jesus’ challenging “world-negation” was profoundly right, even though its apocalyptic or eschatological expression was misguided and even deluded. That world-negation demanded of Schweitzer a very precise response. When his friends asked why he had not chosen to be a missionary in Africa or a doctor in Europe— in other words, why, specifically, a doctor in Africa— he explained that it was all very personal and individual. It was not political or social. Nevertheless, it had, at base, to do with ethics and injustice, with the intuition that human inequality cannot simply be ignored or accepted. I am being very careful not to make Schweitzer a liberation theologian ahead of his time. He did not say that European greed had created African misery. He did not raise economic, political, and social issues. He did not act in radical protest against European imperialism (which, when he left for Africa, had about six more months to live before it brought down on itself horrors as insufferable as any it had earlier inflicted on its colonies). He did not say that he was withdrawing from the colonial evils created by his country and his continent and that, in protest against them, he was heading off to heal what they had hurt. It was not apocalyptic eschatology that sent the Schweitzers to Africa, although in 1913 the European world was staggering toward Armageddon. It was not ascetical eschatology that sent them there, although their lives in Africa were probably harder than those in many monasteries. I need another term for what it was, and ethical eschatology is the best I can discover. I repeat that this eschatology is, as it were, a personal and individual ending-of-one’s-world, but its logic, whether Schweitzer knew it or not, pointed beyond itself. He knew that it pointed back to Jesus, but he did not say that it pointed toward resisting systemic evil in political and economic (not just in personal and individual) ways. Jesus, Schweitzer might have said, was completely right and completely wrong about eschatology. Schweitzer, I would say, was completely right and completely wrong about Jesus. But, in both cases, it is the right that was determinative, the wrong that was irrelevant. Schweitzer called his autobiography Out of My Life and Thought , and that order is significant. Did Schweitzer get the historical Jesus right or wrong?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Second, how did Jesus fit within that Jewish matrix, which contained nonviolent as well as violent resistance to Rome? I consider that his message and program were based on nonviolent resistance for the following four main reasons. The first reason concerns Jesus and God: his nonviolent resistance to the injustice of imperialism was proclaimed in collaboration with a nonviolent God. For Jesus, collaboration with God’s kingdom now present on earth meant: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:44–45); or again: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…. Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:27–28, 35). In other words, the model for human nonviolence is divine nonviolence, God as “your Father” (Matt. 5:48; Luke 6:36). The second reason to see Jesus as a nonviolent resister concerns Jesus and Weapons. Jesus’s companions struggled with the outward symbolism of nonviolence, which he had demanded from them. Could you not carry at least a defensive weapon for your journey—a staff for a peasant or a sword for an aristocrat? Look at these no-and-yes, yes-and-no responses that indicate ongoing debate on that question within the tradition after Jesus: Weapon Do Not Use Use Do Not Use Staff Matthew 10:10; Luke 9:3 Mark 6:8 Sword Luke 22:35–36 Luke 22:37–38, 49–52 You can read over those texts and imagine the debates behind them about the use or nonuse of even a defensive weapon. For example, that earlier source for the “staff” material in Matthew and Luke—called the Q Gospel by scholars—explicitly forbids it, while the later text of Mark explicitly commands it! Both, of course, in the name of Jesus. The third reason for classing Jesus as a nonviolent resister is Mark’s story of Jesus and Barabbas, even though it is fictional parable rather than factual history. Mark wrote his version of the gospel after the Jewish revolt of 66–74 had left Jerusalem devastated and its Temple destroyed forever. His parable imagines Pilate confronted with two revolutionary figures, both publicly opposing Roman law and order. One is called Barabbas (whose name means “son of the father”) and is violent. The other is Jesus (Son of the Father) and is nonviolent. Pilate arrests Barabbas along with his followers: “A man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection” (15:7). Jesus is in prison alone—his companions are not arrested. The point of Mark’s parable is that, in 66–74 CE , Jerusalem chose the wrong savior—the violent rather the nonviolent one.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In the director’s office, Deb stands to greet us, and her shaggy dog licks Dev’s face, almost knocking him over. She holds out her slightly drawn-up hand for him, and he wastes no time in asking what’s wrong with it. She bends to fix her brown eyes level with his blue ones to explain that she got drunk and overdosed on a nasty drug called cocaine. I try to steer Dev off the subject, but Deb says, It’s normal to be curious. Anybody with a disability needs to be comfortable with answering questions about it. She holds out her arm, saying to Dev, You can touch it if you want to. He pinches it like a melon, then grabs her wrist and pulls it away from her body, as if to straighten it through his own grunting will, saying, Does that hurt? Deb says, No, it just feels tight. You were drinking cocaine, and your arm just spronged up that way? Dev wants to know. Oh, no, she says. The stuff kind of poisoned my head, and I fell down and hit it. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all. Paralyzed. Couldn’t talk, either, not even yes or no. Which dramatic bottoming out is hard to assign to one so put together as Deb. You can believe that she was married to an Oxford biochemist, that she modeled, that she ran a lab—all true. But that she drank like me and couldn’t quit? Impossible to picture. I was four or five years in and out of rehab, she tells us. On the night of my head injury, a cabdriver—actually an Indian guy I’d met in one detox—found me passed out in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He’d driven by the house and seen my car parked sideways in the driveway, gotten worried, and broken in. Dev says, What did you think when you woke up and couldn’t move? I’ll tell you exactly what it was, she says. Boy, do I need a drink . Dev giggles at this. Part of me thinks, Maybe if I’d heard this at his age, I wouldn’t have wound up such a sot. It took me a long time to learn how to talk again, she says. I could show you how to eat with a spoon, but I couldn’t say the word spoon . Over months and months in long-term rehab, she learned to speak again, then read, then write with her left hand. Let me see you walk, Dev says. She rises, and the dog rises. She walks across the room, doing a kind of swaying swagger to heft the less mobile right leg forward apace. She does it with a rock star’s prance, adding a runway spin at the end. Dev says, You walk pretty good. That leg goes a little crooked, but you go fast. She looks at me and says, Do you need to have a grown-up talk?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign” (1969:370–371). All of that is clear enough, but, having interpreted Jesus as flatly wrong in his mission and message, Schweitzer did not respond by leaving the Christian church. He responded by leaving imperial Europe. And this, in his own words, was how his friends reacted: “What seemed to my friends the most irrational thing in my plan was that I wanted to go to Africa, not as a missionary, but as a doctor, and thus when already thirty years of age burdened myself as a beginning with a long period of laborious study…. I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years I had been giving myself out in words, and it was with joy that I had followed the calling of theological teacher and of preacher. But this new form of activity I could not represent to myself as being talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice” (1933:114–115). The irony is, of course, that he would not have been accepted as a missionary . He was barely accepted, because of his historical criticism of the New Testament, even as a doctor . The Paris Missionary Society’s Committee had recently turned down a missionary “because his scientific conviction did not allow him to answer with an unqualified Yes the question whether he regarded the Fourth Gospel as the work of the Apostle John.” When Schweitzer was invited to appear before that same committee to be examined on his orthodoxy, he declined. Jesus, he said, had conducted no such examination on his first disciples. He had only asked them “to follow Him.” As a compromise, Schweitzer agreed to visit the committee members individually and allow theological questions on that basis. He was eventually accepted, but with two conditions. He was not to confuse the missionaries with his learning or the natives with his preaching (1933:138–139). That was Schweitzer in 1913. Now let me back up to an earlier point in his autobiography. The idea of going to Africa had been in his mind for a long time. It was “conceived so long ago as my student days. It struck me as incomprehensible that I should be allowed to lead such a happy life, while I saw so many people around me wrestling with care and suffering.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  In the following texts, from Mesopotamia through Ugarit into Egypt, there is, for example, an explicit mention of justice for widows and orphans, of special divine and therefore royal protection for those no longer protected by paternal linkage into kinship safety nets. A similar emphasis appears in all three sections of the Hebrew Bible: for example, in the Law (at Exodus 22:21–24), in the Prophets (at Zechariah 7:9–10), and in the Writings (at Job 24:3,9). In Mesopotamia, in the first centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. , the Prologues to the ancient law codes mention how the gods and goddesses called the king to be protector of justice. Lipit-Ishtar, in the first half of the nineteenth century B.C.E. , was “called … to the princeship of the land in order to establish justice in the land,” and he “established justice in Sumer and Akkad … caused righteousness and truth to exist; brought well-being to the Sumerians and Akkadians.” A century and a half later, Hammurabi of Babylon was “named … to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak … that justice might be dealt the orphan (and) the widow … to give justice to the oppressed” (ANET 159, 161, 164, 178). In Ugarit, immediately north of Israel-to-be in the fourteenth century B.C.E. , there is a poem about one Yassib the Lad, who determines to usurp the throne of his father, Keret the Noble. In “The Legend of King Keret,” he announces the good news to his father (ANET 149, slightly modified): Hearken, I pray you, Keret the Noble! Listen and incline your ear…. You have let your hand fall into mischief. You judge not the cause of the widow, Nor do you adjudicate the case of the wretched; You drive not out them that prey on the poor; You feed not the fatherless before you, The widow behind your back. Having become a brother of the sickbed, A companion of the bed of suffering, Descend from the kingship—I’ll reign; From your authority—I’ll sit enthroned. The text breaks off soon after that proposal, with Keret praying that the god break Yassib’s head, the goddess his pate. (You can see, by the way, where the Bible got its traditions of poetic parallelism.) In Egypt there is one particularly interesting parabolic story from the Middle Kingdom of the twentieth to the eighteenth centuries B.C.E. Called “The Protests of the Eloquent Peasant,” it describes how a peasant named Khun-Anup obtained justice directly from the chief steward of Egypt. He had been beaten and despoiled of his produce-laden donkeys by one Thut-nakht, who tricked the beast into eating a mouthful of standing grain. Thut-nakht was an important personage, vassal of the chief steward, Rensi, so he ignored the peasant’s pleas.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  For Tyler, whose career brings us a step closer to the world of modern professional scholarship, was then emerging as a major figure among American academic historians and one of the leading protagonists of the loyalists. A Connecticut-born descendant of seventeenth-century settlers in New England and a Yale graduate who had become a Calvinist minister, he had spent the Civil War years in Boston doing gymnastics to music under the tutelage of a crusading homeopathic physician, and had taken his muscular Christianity to England. There he had remained as a lecturer on homeopathy and other subjects for three formative years. He had been transfixed by the London of John Bright and Gladstone, of Lord John Russell and Disraeli, and had soaked up what he could of its cultural life. By the time he left, in 1866, he had developed a permanent interest in American history; had referred to the Revolution in his public lectures as “that unlucky quarrel” which would never have happened if the ministry had been well enough informed; and had been accustomed to use experiences of the loyalists to illustrate what he called in a lecture title “English Hallucinations Touching America.” By the time Lecky’s History of England appeared, Tyler was professor of American history at Cornell University and the noted author of a two-volume history of American literature covering the years 1607–1765. Lecky’s chapters on America gave Tyler immense pleasure. They were, he said, “by their perfect judicial fairness one of the very best means of getting the coming generation of American students out of the old manner of thinking upon and treating American history, which has led to so much Chauvinism among our people.” He had long since decided to work to the same goal in a magnum opus on the Revolution that would help overcome the deplorable “race-feud” he believed existed between the two countries as a result of the disruption of the “English-speaking race” at the end of the eighteenth century. A particularly sympathetic treatment of the loyalists was essential to his purpose in what became The Literary History of the American Revolution; and it was not artificially contrived. Tyler loved England; he regretted the Revolution; and he instinctively favored all those who sought the unity of the English-speaking peoples, in the past as in the present. He could only have been deeply grateful to the president of Cornell, a historian himself, who in writing to congratulate him on his book praised him in almost the same terms in which Tyler had praised Lecky—“a marvellous balance”; “marvellous impartiality”—and declared that “the most successful part,… the most striking part, is your dealing with the Loyalists.…[Y]ou have done the Loyalists full justice,” he added, “without going over to their side, as I feared you would do.”25