Anger

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.

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

  Two major points, in reply. First, it is easy and tempting to dismiss Silver’s claim as an indirect attack on the American welfare system. In speaking of Amos, for example, he draws explicit attention to the fact that “the central image is one familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence” (124). Next, “Modern liberalism … is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets,” and “not unexpectedly, the prophets opposed expansionist militarism and patriotism” (129). Finally, he admits to “some trepidation, for it is predictable that some of you will angrily slam this book closed and accuse me of such as ‘importing the twentieth century into ancient Israel’ or engaging ‘not in historical scholarship, but in a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers’” (134). But, be all that as it may, and apart from presuppositions and intentions, what about arguments and conclusions? Second, then, is that a good case against classical Jewish prophecy? One objection. The prophetic message was utterly traditional and deeply rooted in covenant faith and Jewish monotheism. The prophets were not radical liberals but, if anything, conservative traditionalists. Another objection. A 250-year-long insistence indicates that their message was not exactly accepted, followed, or widely practiced. A final objection. Nothing anyone could have done or not done in the Jewish homeland would have deterred imperial foreign policy coming out of the Mesopotamian plains or the Nile delta. But if the Jewish homeland was almost certainly destined for imperial domination in any case, it may have been more important to have a tradition for which people would live and die, a tradition that insisted that such imperial domination was not right and not just. That is how a people survives not just in the short run but over the long haul. Why Set Justice Against Ritual? There is one element in that 250-year prophetic tradition demanding justice in the name of covenantal monotheism that needs special attention. It has often been misinterpreted, especially since the Reformation. Protestant scholars sometimes insisted on the prophetic statements against cult and ritual as an equivalent to their own opposition to Roman Catholicism. I give you here examples from five of the prophets mentioned above. Once again, notice that it is God who is rejecting ritual in the absence of righteousness and dismissing worship in the absence of justice. The prophets speak for God. Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, “Bring something to drink!”… Come to Bethel—and transgress; to Gilgal—and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days; bring a thank-offering of leavened bread, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel! says the Lord God…. I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

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

  The Jesus of Matthew is regularly and rhetorically violent, but that is not Jesus himself; it is Matthew who is speaking . Still, we should be grateful that Matthew accurately revealed the Jesus of the challenge parable in Matthew 5 before steadily changing him into the Jesus of the attack parable in Matthew 23. What, then, comes next? Mark depicts Jesus through a pedagogical challenge parable, but Matthew has changed that image by writing a polemical attack parable. What about Luke-Acts? Why, to begin with, do I combine what we call the Gospel according to Luke with the Acts of the Apostles to speak of the Gospel according to Luke-Acts? Is that combination challenge or attack or both? And, whichever it is, to whom is it directed? CHAPTER 9Rome as the New JerusalemTHE PARABLE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE -ACTS “APHRODISIAS ,” SAID OCTAVIAN, WHEN not yet Caesar Augustus, “is the one city from all of Asia I have selected to be my own,” and its citizens carved that accolade on the archive wall of their theater. Since the Greek goddess Aphrodite was the Roman goddess Venus, from whom Augustus’s family was allegedly descended, that city was most fortunately named at that precise historical moment. Two thousand years later, Kenan Erim, who excavated the site and is buried inside the gate of Aphrodite’s temple, claimed, “Of all the Graeco-Roman sites of Anatolia, Aphrodisias is the most hauntingly beautiful.” And the poet L. G. Harvey proclaimed it “beautiful enough to last forever.” Located in ancient Caria, Aphrodisias is about 150 miles inland from the mid-Aegean coast of Turkey. In the first century, it contained a unique monumental passageway with three levels on either side. On both sides, the two top levels were adorned with bas-relief carvings that smoothly integrated Greek tradition with Roman domination. It was dedicated to the “Olympian Imperial Gods” of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Theoi Sebastoi Olympioi ). That was the only time I ever saw the imperial divinities described as “Olympian.” In the twenty-first century, Aphrodisias contains—from that ruined Augusteum or Sebasteion structure—the greatest museum of Roman bas-reliefs in the world. But my present focus is not on any of that, but rather on an inscription from the city’s Jewish synagogue discovered in 1966. It is, by the way, the longest Jewish inscription from antiquity. In the early 200s the right-hand doorpost was carved with the names of those who had donated money to that building. The full list—complete with each individual’s family relations or job description—contains 126 names identified in three classes according to their relationship to Judaism. But watch very carefully the comparative statistics of those relationships. Of those 126 persons, 69 individuals (55 percent) are Jews, 3 individuals (2 percent) are “proselytes” or converts, and 54 individuals (43 percent) are “God-worshipers.” There is only one women named, but that “Jael”—recall Judges 4–5—comes first as “sponsor” of the whole operation. Furthermore, the first 9 persons in the “God-worshipers” list are all identified as city councilors.

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

  Above all, there is that outrageously provocative comment by the owner at 5 P.M .: “Why are you standing here idle all day?” And we can imagine their reply (through gritted teeth?): “Because no one has hired us.” (Then—as now—one blames the unhired worker for laziness!) Would nobody have picked up, protested, and then debated that particular aspect of the parable? I propose—for those three reasons—that at least some, most, or all of Jesus’s audience would have raised questions not just about the owner’s generosity, but about the system’s perversity. How is it that at high harvest in the vineyards, when, with time pressing, labor should have been at an absolute premium and paying top denarius, there were so many day laborers still looking for work when it was almost sunset? Strange, is it not, how all that turned out for the owner’s and not the workers’ advantage? The intention and purpose of that challenge parable were to raise the audience’s consciousness about the distinction between personal or individual justice and injustice, on the one hand, and structural or systemic justice and injustice, on the other. If everyone talked only about the owner and not the system, Jesus’s challenge would have failed. Move on Jesus, try it again somewhere else, or remove it from your repertoire forever. Look, one final time, at those accusatory words about “idleness.” They are not actually necessary if the story is about the master’s generosity. But they are vitally necessary to provoke the audience—or at least day laborers in it—to protest against them and, thereby, raise the issue of—in my words—the distinction between personal and individual justice or injustice (the master) and structural and systemic injustice (the economy). That is a challenge parable hard—and very successfully—at work. I turn next to another parable about money—from a challenge about paying out money to one about lending out money. IN CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 I discussed several parables of Jesus for which we have only one extant version. I look finally at a parable that has three versions, two inside and one outside the New Testament. This is the parable of the Master’s Money. One version, in Matthew 25:14–30, has three characters to whom a man, departing on a journey, entrusts valuable resources for investment: It is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

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

  In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in south-central France, he gave a lurid description of what Muslims were doing to Christians in Jerusalem. “Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre,” he said (as a scribe known as Peter the Monk recorded later), “wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.” The result was that all cried out in miraculous unison: “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!” The “First Crusade” is what we now call what followed. It started with the persecution of Western Jews and ended with the slaughter of Eastern Muslims. Jerusalem fell in the middle of July 1099, and Urban II died about two weeks later. That was one vision of God’s “will.” Anselmo d’Aosta became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Philosopher and theologian, monk and bishop, mystic and saint, Anselm preferred nonviolent debate to violent crusade. His idea was to defend the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus by confronting those he called “infidels”—that is, Jews and Muslims—with reason and logic alone. He started his book Why Did God Become a Human Being? (in Latin, Cur Deus Homo? ) in 1095 while still in England. That, by the way, was the same year that the seeds of the First Crusade were planted when the Byzantine emperor begged Urban II for assistance against the Muslim Turks threatening Constantinople from as near as Nicea. Anselm finished his book in 1098 after that visit to Rome, but while still in Italy under royal exile from England. His purpose, as he tells us in the book’s prologue, was to argue against “infidels, who despise the Christian faith because they deem it contrary to reason.” To do so he would leave “Christ out of view (as if nothing had ever been known of him)” and prove “by absolute reasons” and “plain reasoning” that both the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ were necessary, so that all may “enjoy a happy immortality, both in body and in soul.” It is from Anselm’s book that we got that argument for vicarious satisfaction or substitutionary atonement outlined above. Again and again throughout his presentation, Anselm mentions the “will of God.” Here are just a few examples: It is then plain that no one can honor or dishonor God, as he is in himself; but the creature, as far as he is concerned, appears to do this when he submits or opposes his will to the will of God . (1.15) So heinous is our sin whenever we knowingly oppose the will of God even in the slightest thing; since we are always in his sight, and he always enjoins it upon us not to sin. (1.21) Since, then, the will of God does nothing by any necessity, but of his own power, and the will of that man [Christ] was the same as the will of God, he died not necessarily, but only of his own power.

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

  Furthermore, still in the last half of that internationally volatile eighth century and still in the southern Kingdom of Judah, the prophet Micah gives that same message more gently, as a human question rather than a divine indictment: Negative: With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Positive: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (6:6–8) The northern Kingdom of Israel did not survive the 700s BCE, but for the southern Kingdom of Judah the 600s and 500s moved from catastrophe to euphoria. Still, that prophetic demand for distributive justice against ritual prayer continued. The 600s BCE. The fullest exposition of that disjunction between prayer and justice appears in the prophet Jeremiah soon after the Assyrian Empire succumbed to the Babylonian Empire at the end of the 600s BCE . Jeremiah is commanded by God to stand before the gates of Jerusalem’s Temple and address the worshipers who enter there to pray. They are not to think that prayer alone is enough, that the Temple is like a den, a hideaway, a safe house for those who have robbed and despoiled the poor. “Do not trust,” God says, “in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’…Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” (7:4, 11). Notice, then, the repeated “ifs” italicized in this warning: For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. (7:5–7) On the other hand, if they continue to substitute worship for justice, God threatens to destroy the Temple itself, so that they will be unable to do so any longer. That divine threat, by the way, almost cost Jeremiah his life: “The priests and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, ‘You shall die!’” (26:8). But, eventually, “the officials and all the people said to the priests and the prophets, ‘This man does not deserve the sentence of death, for he has spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God’” (26:16). The 500s BCE.

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

  But what do the prophets say about prayer—in all its aspects, from simple words of request and gratitude to more formal acts of ritual and sacrifice? This is where something strange occurs. They do not insist—as we might expect—that God demands both prayer and justice. They do not say we must both pray with fervor and act with justice. Instead, they insist that God does not want prayer, ritual, liturgy, or sacrifice, but wants instead that righteous justice rule not only the land of Israel, but all the earth. Why put it that way? Why that negative opposition—against prayer—rather than a simple and serene assertion of the positive—for justice? Why do the prophets repeatedly set up a clash that creates a chasm between prayer and justice? And does that help or hinder this book on the Lord’s Prayer? I look first at the evidence. That rejection of ritual prayer in favor of distributive justice appears in prophets from Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, and Micah in the 700s BCE , through Jeremiah in the late 600s BCE , to Third Isaiah in the late 500s BCE. (There are, by the way, three chronologically successive sections in the book of Isaiah: First Isaiah, chapters 1–39, from the later eighth century BCE ; Second Isaiah, chapters 40–55, from the earlier sixth century BCE ; and Third Isaiah, chapters 56–66, from the later sixth century BCE. ) I emphasize those dates for Israel’s prophets because they were turbulent and even terrible years both at home and abroad. On the international level, in the period 911 to 539 BCE , the Assyrian Empire came to power and then fell before the Babylonian Empire, which rose and then in turn succumbed to the Persian Empire. On the local level, during those imperial transitions, first, the northern half of the Jewish homeland, known as the Kingdom of Israel, was destroyed by the Assyrians. Next, the southern half, known as the Kingdom of Judah, was destroyed by the Babylonians and its entire leadership taken into exile in Babylon; later, under Persian control, the exiles were allowed to return. Throughout those seismic disturbances, that prophetic challenge of distributive justice rather than ritual prayer remained constant and consistent. In what follows, therefore, watch how the negative usually precedes and even overshadows the positive. And wonder to yourself why they speak that way. Why is justice set against prayer rather than joined together with it? The 700s BCE. I begin with the prophet Amos, from the first half of that eighth century BCE . He was shocked to the soles of his peasant sandals by the ever growing inequality between rich and poor during the long rule of Jeroboam II over the Kingdom of Israel in the northern half of the Jewish homeland. His metaphors are brutal and shocking and must have seared at least the ears if not the hearts of his aristocratic hearers. But I focus here, in this first statement, on the striking dichotomy between prayer and justice.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I wrote this book to share what I’ve learned—what has helped me and what I’ve seen help other women. I wrote it for my sister and my mother, for my sister’s stepdaughters, for my nieces, and most of all for my students. I wrote it to share the science that taught me that I and my sister and my mother and my friends are all normal and healthy. I wrote it to grant us all permission to be different from one another. I wrote it because I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire rather than subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because those bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy. I wrote this book to teach women to live with confidence and joy. If you can remember even one of the ideas in this book—no two alike, brakes and accelerator, context, nonconcordant arousal, responsive desire, any of them—and use it to improve your relationship with your own sexuality, you’ll be helping me with that goal. And if you share any of these ideas with even one other person, you’ll be expanding the global space in which women can live with confidence and joy. In a way, it’s a small goal. I’m not trying to prevent cancer or solve the climate crisis or build peace in the Middle East. I’m just trying to help people live with confidence and joy inside their bodies—and maybe, just maybe, if enough people learn to live with confidence and joy, we can ultimately live in a world where everyone’s sexual autonomy is respected. Do I think that living with confidence and joy and respecting everyone’s sexual autonomy could play a role in preventing cancer, solving the climate crisis, or building world peace? Yes, actually. But that’s another story. where to look for more answersI don’t have all the answers—I don’t even have half the answers. The science is constantly growing and expanding, so more insight, more clarity will come. In this book I’ve presented some of the answers that I’ve seen help women, and I hope I’ve done it in a way that heals and renews and expands your sexuality.

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

  By analogy, says the Lukan Jesus, that is what I am doing—I am finding/saving the lost ones—“tax collectors and sinners”—and, once found/saved, nobody should grumble, but rather all should rejoice. Luke then moves from the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin to the Lost Son, to what we traditionally call the parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus begins, “There was a man who had two sons” (15:11), and the parable goes on to tell first about the younger son (15:12–24) and then about the elder son (15:25–32). The younger son asks for and receives “the share of the property that will belong to” him, but then goes into a distant country and wastes his inheritance “in dissolute living.” Later, starving in the midst of famine, he feeds pigs that eat better than he does. He decides to return home, where his father welcomes him with open arms, clothes him, and organizes a feast for him, saying, “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (15:24). The elder son returns from working in the fields, and the servants tell him about the feast in progress. Angry, he refuses to enter, and complains to his father: “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends” (15:29). The father responds: “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (15:31–32). The parable ends, and we are not told whether the elder son relents. Once again, that parable fits well with Luke’s opening context. The younger, prodigal, or lost son represents those “tax collectors and sinners” (15:1) and, like them, he has been “lost and is found” (15:24, 32). Hence, they had to “celebrate” (15:23, 32). The elder son, who “became angry and refused to go in” (15:28) to the feast, represents those Pharisees and scribes who “grumbled” because Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15:2). Indeed, all three parables—but especially that third one—metaphorically defend this earlier incident in Luke: Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them.

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

  But, in the latter gospel, once again, that same accusation escalates to all: “The Jews answered him, ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’” (John 8:48). That is attack, not challenge. Furthermore, with regard to name-calling, Jesus himself does even more of it in John than in Matthew. He had just said this to those same Jews: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (8:44). Finally, watch these different versions of the Roman trial of Jesus and the release of Barabbas in Mark and John. Mark speaks consistently of “the crowd” (15:8, 11, 15), encouraged by “the chief priests” (15:11–12), who prefer Barabbas to Jesus. But John makes this change: When the chief priests and the police saw him [Jesus], they shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.” (19:6–7) In John, the specific phrase “the chief priests and the police” is escalated to “the Jews.” In other words, and on this first point, John’s external attack is not just against Pharisaic Judaism, as in Matthew—but against Judaism itself, as in Luke-Acts. The term “the Jews” appears only a few times in the synoptic tradition—mostly as a neutral expression used by non-Jews. But in John—as in Acts—the term is sometimes used neutrally as an ethnic designation, but it more often occurs with an adversarial edge to it. MY SECOND POINT IS a short but crucial probe, like an archaeologist’s preliminary sounding on an unexcavated ancient site, into the opening words of John’s parable gospel. First of all, every gospel begins with an overture—an initial action that focuses and summarizes the entire following story. Think of them as similar to the overtures of classical operas or musical comedies, which combine themes or melodies to be heard later throughout the following drama. Think also of how those gospel overtures must have helped ancient hearers or readers confronted with wall-to-wall writing, all in uppercase Greek, without paragraphs or headings, and certainly lacking our chapter and verse numbers. Mark’s overture goes back to Isaiah’s “prophecy” about John the Baptist (1:1–3), and Matthew’s and Luke’s overtures are very different versions of the nativity of Jesus in which Matthew goes as far back as Abraham (1:1), and Luke goes all the way back to Adam (3:38). But John’s overture begins far back beyond any of those times mentioned by the synoptic authors. It begins not with John, or Isaiah, or Abraham, or Adam.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Once again we see that Luther would not brook dissent of a certain kind, namely that kind which seemed to him to be full of “the fear of man” and insufficiently full of the fear of God. He seemed to know that things ought to move forward at a certain pace and was determined to confront those who would stop that from happening. Presumably, Spalatin responded favorably to allowing the two “little books” to be printed, but he was successful in persuading Luther to let the harsh letter to Archbishop Albrecht wait a bit before he sent it. Still, Luther insisted that Spalatin forward the letter to Melanchthon so that he could edit anything that was too harsh. In persuading Luther to hold off with this letter, Spalatin had maintained that the archbishop was somehow already mending his ways, and as evidence for this he told Luther that the archbishop had released those priests he had earlier imprisoned for getting married. But Luther was clearly enraged by what he perceived as Spalatin’s lack of faith in this situation. Quite bitterly, he said, “For the Lord lives, whom you people—as is becoming to courtiers—do not trust unless he arranges his works according to your way of thinking, so that faith would no longer be necessary.”2 He had never before spoken to Spalatin as he did now, but a new seriousness and fire had come into Luther over these months. He had long ago crossed the Rubicon, and anything like Spalatin’s caution now struck him not only as offensive but almost as though it were in league with the devil against him and God’s purposes. Should one continue only to debate about the Word of God and forever refrain from action? But why do I talk to the deaf? Your mind does not believe; it is too much occupied with the affairs at court, that is, it is both too sophisticated and too timid. . . . I finally see that in this case the counsel of men must be overcome. Up to now I was hindered by them in many ways; but they vainly fear that heaven will go to pieces.3 Once back at the Wartburg, Luther in two days wrote his promised tract, A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion. He counseled in it that God could not be stopped from doing what he was already doing, so to take up arms or resort to any violence to push it along was a lack of faith and would only do the devil’s work by bringing the Gospel into ill repute. “I will always be on the side of those against whom insurrection is directed,” he wrote.4 God must do the work, and God cannot be stopped.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  She said, “It’s like one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?” Yep. That. health at every sizeWeight is just one of several things people (especially women) criticize themselves for, but it may be the most universal, with half of girls as young as three years old worrying that they might be “fat”13—and it’s certainly among the most dangerous and needless. People want to lose weight for two reasons: health and beauty. Whether you can measure beauty on a scale, I don’t know,14 but I do know you definitely can’t measure health that way, and I’m determined to bust that myth right now, once and for all. Here’s the myth as plainly as I can state it: If I know how much you weigh, I also know something about your health. And that’s wrong. The fact is, weight alone tells us almost nothing about health. The research is painfully clear, though plenty of people have a hard time accepting it—there’s been controversy about this research in the mainstream media, and even among academics, because it runs so contrary to what we’ve all been told, and it somehow feels dangerous to give people permission not to hate their bodies (despite the fact that the research I cited in the previous section proves that people are healthier when they don’t hate themselves). But if you think about it logically for two seconds, you’ll see how obviously true it is that weight is nothing more than a measure of gravity. Look: Want to lose ten pounds without diet or exercise? Cut off your leg at the knee! I guarantee, the next time you step on a scale, you’ll weigh less. Or, hey, want to lose five pounds of fat? Have your brain removed—its mass is almost 100 percent fat! You know who’s always thin? People who’ve been living in a prison camp! Quick and easy weight loss! Fly in a plane! Better yet, go into space! They don’t call it “weightless” for nothing! If that sounds glib, good. I think it’s stupid and destructive that “experts” have been telling us that we can measure our health by measuring something we can change by removing a limb, torturing ourselves, or going on a plane and measuring it up there instead. You can achieve your medically defined “ideal weight” without improving your health at all; it might even substantially impair your health! In case that’s not compelling enough and you’d like a medical opinion, let me tell you this story. One evening during the conference where I learned about Health at Every Size (HAES), I actually went on a date with a cardiologist. I told him about the conference and asked him about this specific statistic that a speaker mentioned. I said, “Dr. Date, is it true that it can be healthier to be seventy pounds over your medically defined ‘ideal weight’ than to be five pounds under it?”

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

  First, I explore the very negative attitude of Luke-Acts toward the Jewish religion; then, second, I look at the very positive attitude of Luke-Acts toward the Roman Empire. My focus will be on Jesus in the book of Luke and on Paul in Acts, but I will always be thinking of Luke-Acts as a single two-volume parable gospel. My primary example of Luke’s very negative attitude toward Judaism concerns a structural pattern established inaugurally with Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, but later extending to Paul in synagogues from Pisidian Antioch in modern Turkey to Macedonian Thessalonica in modern Greece. In both cases, watch carefully why and how that negative response is formulated. I begin with Jesus in the Jewish homeland. You will recall the difficulties experienced by Jesus in his native Nazareth and his proverbial comment that prophets are honored everywhere but in their own hometown. The story comes from Mark (6:1–6) and is copied closely by Matthew (13:54–58—with a change from “carpenter” to “carpenter’s son”). But Luke both cites that proverbial comment (4:23–24) and changes the whole story (4:16–30), so that it becomes a programmatic emphasis for all of Luke-Acts. To begin with, Luke has Jesus enter the synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath and read from Isaiah 61:1 proclaiming a jubilee year of liberation for the poor and the enslaved, the blind and the oppressed (4:16–19). I think, by the way, that this is parable rather than history, because it is extremely unlikely that Nazareth had wealth enough for both a synagogue building and prophetic scrolls. In any case, the audience’s immediate response is very good: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’” (4:22). That final question is more wonder than dismissal. But then Jesus himself initiates the overt attack: He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” (4:23–24) Why did Luke place that dismissal on the lips of Jesus rather than on those of his audience, as in Mark 6:2–3 and Matthew 13:54–57? Because Luke uses it to continue this even greater provocation—still on the lips of Jesus: But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. (4:25–27) That is, to put it bluntly, an unprovoked provocation from Jesus. It escalates the situation far beyond anything in Luke’s Markan source.

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

  God is speaking through the prophet: Negative: I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. Positive: But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (5:21–24) Once again, by the way, we find that parallelism between “justice” and “righteousness.” It reminds us that both terms mean distributive justice in the biblical tradition. Next, I turn to the prophet Hosea, in the second half of that same eighth century BCE, and we are still in that northern Kingdom of Israel. Assyrian incursions are gathering force, and the small kingdoms of Israel and Syria are seeking alliances with others against Assyria’s military might. But once again, God is speaking through the prophet with the same disjunction between worship and justice: For I desire steadfast love [positive ] and not sacrifice [negative ], the knowledge of God [positive ] rather than burnt offerings [negative ]. (6:6) It is the same message that Amos gave us, but now reduced to two terse sentences in an even poetic parallelism of positive and negative: love and knowledge of God over and against sacrifice and offerings to God. Then, still in the second half of that eighth century, but now in the southern Kingdom of Judah, that same indictment appears at the very start of First Isaiah: Negative: What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Positive: Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (1:11–17) In the biblical tradition the prophetic God demands distributive justice especially for those socially, structurally, and systemically vulnerable: widows and orphans, who lack husbands and fathers in a patriarchal society, and resident aliens, who lack familial protection in a tribal society.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Even in the face of such absurdities, it’s an incredibly persistent myth. Alain de Botton, in How to Think More about Sex, goes so far as to describe lubricating vaginas and tumescent penises as “unambiguous agents of sincerity,” because they are automatic rather than intentional, which means they can’t be “faked.” If that’s true, then when your doctor taps your knee’s patellar tendon and your leg kicks out, that must mean you actually want to kick your doctor. Or when you have an allergic reaction to pollen, you must hate flowers. Or when your mouth waters around a mouthful of moldy, bruised peach, you must find it delicious. Don’t get me wrong—you might want to kick your doctor and you might hate flowers and you might enjoy moldy, bruised peaches. But your automatic physiological processes are not how we would know that. No. Automatic physiological processes are, ya know, automatic, not sincere. And think about it from Céline Dion’s perspective. Does she want an audience’s hair to stand on end, or does she want them to say, “I got chills!” even if their hair stayed flat? Experience trumps physiology every time. But it gets worse—it gets less funny and more dangerous. If we persist in the false belief that women’s genital response reflects what they “really” want or like, then we have to conclude that if their genitals respond during sexual assault, it means they “really” wanted or liked the assault. Which isn’t just nuts, it’s dangerous. “You said no but your body said yes” is an idea that shows up both in the lyrics of pop songs and in the images at Project Unbreakable, an online gallery of sexual assault survivors holding signs with phrases said by their rapists, their families, or even police responders.20 But you know by now that bodies don’t say yes or no, they only say, “That’s sex-related,” without any comment on whether it’s liked, much less whether it’s wanted or consented to. A penis in a vagina is sex-related, though it may be unappealing, unwanted, and unwelcome. There is no desire, pleasure, or consent necessary for genital response. It’s just, “This is a restaurant,” with no comment on whether it might be a good place to have dinner. It’s an ancient fallacy, this notion that physiology can prove whether someone likes something sexual. Until the 1700s, people believed that conception was the pleasurable part of sex for a woman, so if a woman got pregnant, she must have experienced pleasure, and if she experienced pleasure, then the sex could not have been unwanted.21 Because, “She said no but her ovaries said yes.” This myth has its own degree of traction, showing up in the public discourse in the 2012 Senate race in Missouri, when Republican candidate Todd Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down,” which even Mormon Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney described as, “insulting, inexcusable and, frankly, wrong.”22

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  As we saw with the rats who had Iggy Pop blasted at them, when your stress levels are high, practically anything will cause your wanting to activate in an avoidant, “What the hell is that?” mode. But if you’re in a sex-positive context, almost anything can activate wanting in curious, “What’s this?” mode. Exactly what context a woman experiences as sex positive varies both from woman to woman and also across a woman’s life span, but generally it’s a context that’s low stress high affection explicitly erotic Remember the studies of what women say turns them on, from the start of the chapter. That stuff, and more. Because of the One Ring, which mediates all of your different emotions at once, binding them together. Olivia and Patrick are fabulous together—hilarious, charming, the kind of couple whose love is contagious; when you see them together, you fall a little in love yourself. They hug and laugh affectionately even while they’re fighting. Though only in their twenties, you can tell these two will still be making out like teenagers when they’re 103. Their main conflict was about sex: Patrick, like about 80–90 percent of people, finds that stress hits his brakes, shutting down all interest in sex—he’s a “flatliner” (more on that in chapter 4). But for Olivia, with her sensitive accelerator, stress is like fuel—she’s a “redliner.” And since they’re both graduate students, they get stressed at the same time during the semester (final exams), which means that right when Olivia’s most interested in sex, Patrick is least interested. Same context—opposite experiences. And when you put it in the context of a relationship, it gets worse, because the two styles escalate each other—when Patrick feels stressed about the fact that Olivia wants sex and he doesn’t, that increases his stress, which hits his brakes even harder. And when Olivia feels stressed about the fact that she wants sex and Patrick doesn’t, that increases her stress, which activates her accelerator even more. I call this “the chasing dynamic” (more about it in chapter 7), but Olivia had her own term for it: “Shit show.” Patrick added, “And it comes at a time in the semester when we’re both already stretched too thin and can barely feed ourselves, much less talk about our feelings. How can we fix it?” I shrugged. “Easy. Work out a plan when you’re both calm, and then use the plan when you’re stressed.” Olivia said, “Oh.” There it was again—the disappointment that waved a giant red flag over a big emotional… something. Last time I missed it. This time I caught it. “You were hoping for a different answer?” I asked. “I was sort of hoping we could fix me.” “Fix you? Are you broken?” “I guess not,” she said, “but I just… it doesn’t feel good, the out-of-controlness. I was hoping I could rein that part in, both for my own sake and so that I don’t drive Patrick up the wall.”

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

  Jesus cites instances in which two famous Old Testament prophets, first Elijah in 1 Kings 17 and then Elisha in 2 Kings 5, were sent to the aid not of Jews, but of Gentiles. The hint is that God—then and now?—prefers Gentiles to Jews. This is the result of that insult: “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff” (4:28–29). Luke created that fictional scene in the synagogue at Nazareth to make—inaugurally and paradigmatically—this theological point: Jesus was accepted initially by his fellow Jews until he claimed that God showed interest in, and even preference for, Gentiles. The result was a murderous riot. I turn next to Paul in the Jewish diaspora (outside the homeland). With Jesus—and right at the start of Luke-Acts—we are given, as we just saw, a situation in a Jewish synagogue where divine preference for Gentiles causes a lethal Jewish riot . That will certainly not keep recurring with Jesus in Luke’s first volume, but it will be a dominant motif for Paul in the second volume. Luke has even structured his account of Jesus at Nazareth as a paradigm for that of Paul at both Pisidian Antioch in the east and at Thessalonica in the west: Sequence Jesus in Luke Paul in Acts Paul in Acts Synagogue situation 4:16–17 13:14–16a 17:1–2a Scriptural fulfillment 4:18–21 13:16b–41 17:2b–3 Initial acceptance 4:22 13:42–43 17:4 Eventual rejection 4:23–28 13:44–49 17:5a Lethal attack 4:29–30 13:50–52 17:5b–9 That parallelism is crucially important for understanding—and assessing—the megaparable of Luke-Acts. Notice the precise turning points from acceptance to rejection in Acts: The next sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds [i.e., the Gentile God-worshipers from 13:43], they were filled with jealousy; and blaspheming, they contradicted what was spoken by Paul. (13:44–45; my italics) Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women [i.e., Gentile God-worshipers]. But the Jews became jealous, and with the help of some ruffians in the marketplaces they formed a mob and set the city in an uproar. (17:4–5a; my italics) Luke had, in fact, already used that “jealousy” to explain Jewish opposition to apostolic preaching in the Temple at Jerusalem: “The high priest took action; he and all who were with him (that is, the sect of the Sadducees), being filled with jealousy, arrested the apostles and put them in the public prison” (5:17–18). In summary, Luke used Jesus’s experience in the hometown synagogue at Nazareth as a preparation for what would happen to Paul in later diaspora synagogues. Judaism rejected Christianity, he claims, out of “jealousy,” because of its success with Gentiles and especially with those in-between Gentile-Jewish God-worshipers.

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

  [2] The crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. [3] But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. [4] So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. (Mark 15:6–8, 11, 15) That mini-story is parable rather than history. Mark’s purpose was to say—in retrospect after the terrible Jewish war with Rome of 66–74 CE —that Jerusalem had chosen the wrong option. It had chosen the violent revolutionary Barabbas—“son of the father”—over the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus—“Son of the Father.” But my present concern is how Matthew adopted and adapted his Markan source: [1] Now at the festival the governor was accustomed to release a prisoner for the crowd, anyone whom they wanted. At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Jesus Barabbas. [2] Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. [3] So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” [4] Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. (Matt. 27:15–16, 20, 24–26) Matthew changes Mark in two very significant and equally obvious ways. First, Mark consistently uses a singular noun, “the crowd…the crowd…the crowd,” throughout his account (15:8, 11, 15). But Matthew develops that into: “the crowd…the crowds…the crowd…the people as a whole” (27:15, 20, 24, 25). Not only does “the crowd” become “the crowds,” but they both eventually become “the people as a whole.” That final escalation is by far the most important one, because “people” is the Greek word laos, which designates not just the “people” present, but “the people as a whole” (pas ho laos ). Second, Matthew, and only Matthew in the entire New Testament, contrasts the blood innocence of Pilate (27:24) with the blood responsibility of “the people as a whole” (27:25). You can see immediately where Matthew has internally changed and externally expanded Mark. There is no evidence that he has a separate tradition on that subject. He has only Mark and his own escalation but, in this my final example, it is rhetorical violence against rather than from Jesus that Matthew emphasized. In conclusion, therefore, Matthew not only intensifies rhetorical violence by Jesus against his opponents, but, as in that final case study, the general atmosphere of ideologically based rhetorical violence is turned on themselves by those very opponents. It has taken almost two thousand years to negate the baleful implications of that single Matthean sentence and to insist that it did not and could not apply to all other Jews, earlier, later, or ever.

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

  Jesus was insisting that the world and its food—summarized as bread and wine—belonged to God and not to Rome. For that he died violently on a cross—so that “bread and wine” led to “body and blood.” It follows, therefore, that Christians participating in the Lord’s Supper are collaborating with the justice of God as revealed in the life and death of Christ. Jesus says nothing about his substitution for us, but rather invites our participation with him. “He took a cup,” for example, “and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it” (Mark 14:23). So how exactly does that work out in practice? One answer comes from Paul, writing on that very question to the Corinthians. Roman householders often gave feasts that included not only their social equals, but also their freed slaves, clients, and assorted hangers-on. That was, of course, a deliberate display of hierarchical power. But at such banquets, Roman moralists asked, should all get the same food and drink? Some said of course not. At the end of the first century CE, the poet Martial—who would eventually flee Rome for his native Spain—complained bitterly in his Epigrams about such calculated social humiliation. “Let us eat,” he demanded, “the same fare” (3.60). Others said yes, of course. One of Martial’s patrons was the very aristocratic Pliny the Younger. He insisted indignantly in his Letters that his custom was “to give all my company the same fare.” But that meant, he continued, “that my freed slaves do not drink the same wine I do—but I drink what they do” (2.6). “Social equality” there was cultural slumming. And that was the problem Paul ran into with the eucharistic meal at Corinth. The original title “Lord’s Supper” meant the Lord’s style of supper, that is, a share-meal where all alike got enough of the same food and drink. Equality in Christ meant equality in menu. It was not, of course, our symbolic morsel and sip, but a true meal. What happened at Corinth was that the drag of cultural normalcy pulled the Lord’s Supper back into Roman hierarchical expectations. When the various small Christian communities of Corinth celebrated the Lord’s Supper together at the home of a better-off member, the nonworking “haves” arrived early and ate the upper-class food and drink that they brought. When the “have-nots” arrived later after the day’s work, they had to make do with what was left. Paul is, to put it mildly, not pleased with them: When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? (1 Cor. 11:20–22) What is his solution?

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. This story has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with controlling women. Culture saw a “barrier” at the mouth of the vagina and decided it was a marker of “virginity” (itself a biologically meaningless idea). Such a weird idea could have been invented only in a society where women were literally property, their vaginas their most valuable real estate—a gated community. Even though the hymen performs no physical or biological function, many cultures have created myths around the hymen so profound that there are actually surgeries available to “reconstruct” the hymen, as if it were a medical necessity. (Where is the surgery to perfect men’s nipples?) In a sense, the hymen can be relevant to women’s health: Some women are beaten or even killed for not having a hymen. Some women are told they “couldn’t have been raped” because their hymen is intact. For them, the hymen has real impact on their physical wellbeing, not because of their anatomy but because of what their culture believes about that anatomy. a word on wordsOne more thing about genitals: The name for the whole package of female external genitalia is “vulva.” “Vagina” refers to the internal reproductive canal that leads up to the uterus. People often use “vagina” to refer to the vulva, but now you know better. And if you are standing up naked in front of a mirror and you see the classic triangle? That’s your mons (“mound”), or mons pubis. Got that? Vagina = reproductive canal Vulva = external genitalia Mons = area over the pubic bone where hair grows I’m not suggesting that you go around correcting people who use the wrong words, or picket The Vagina Monologues with signs saying, “Actually, they’re The Vulva Monologues,” but now you know what words you should use. You wouldn’t call your face or your forehead your throat, right? So let’s not call the vulva or mons the vagina. Let’s make the world a better place for vulvas. the sticky bitsVulvas have a set of glands at either side of the mouth of the vagina, called Bartholin’s glands, which release fluid during sexual arousal—maybe to reduce the friction of vaginal penetration, maybe to create a scent that communicates health and fertility status. When female genitals “get wet,” this is what’s happening. And it turns out, both male and female bodies “get wet.” The male homologue, the Cowper’s gland, just below the prostate, produces preejaculate.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  The wisdom this attempts to convey is that it’s not the size of the penis penetrating the vagina, it is the collaborative stimulation between partners (or possibly the skill of one or the other of the “sailors”) that creates pleasure and orgasm for a woman during intercourse. The fact is, it’s not the size of the boat, and it’s not the motion of the ocean either. Women just vary. Despite what you’ve learned from movies, romance novels, or porn, in reality less than a third of women are reliably orgasmic with vaginal penetration alone, while the remaining two-thirds or more are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic with penetration alone.12 Yet women ask me all the time, “Why can’t I have an orgasm during intercourse?” The reason they can’t is very likely the same reason most women can’t: Intercourse is not a very effective way to stimulate the clitoris, and clitoral stimulation is the most common way to make an orgasm happen. In fact, research has found that one reason why women vary in how reliably they orgasm with penetration is the distance between the clitoris and the urethra.13 It’s essentially a matter of anatomical engineering. So the question is not so much why some women aren’t orgasmic from vaginal penetration as it is why are some women? There are several hypotheses, but probably the two best contenders are: (a) stimulation through the front wall of the vagina of the urethral sponge (the female homologue of the prostate and the original hypothesized source of the “G-spot”); or (b) the vestibular bulbs, extending down to the mouth of the vagina from the head of the clitoris. But in the end, the answer is: People vary.14 People vary in the layout of their genitals and the sensitivity of the tissue. My guess is that both of these hypotheses have merit, but you can imagine how challenging it is to get funding to do research on women’s orgasm, so it may be a while before we know for sure. Now, if penetrative orgasms are comparatively uncommon, why do women ask about it so often? Why is it so often viewed as “the right way to orgasm”? And the answer is, of course, “Ugh, patriarchy.” Men-as-default again. Centuries of male doctors and scientists—Freud is often pointed to as a key offender here, and rightly so—claimed that orgasms from vaginal stimulation are the right, good, normal kind, and clitoral orgasms are “immature.”