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)

  This is Josephus’s description of the founding of Tiberias: The new settlers were a promiscuous rabble, no small contingent being Galilean, with such as were drafted from territory subject to him and brought forcibly to the new foundation. Some of these were magistrates. Herod accepted as participants even poor men who were brought in to join the others from any and all places of origin. It was a question whether some were even free without cavil. These latter he often and in large bodies liberated and benefited (imposing the condition that they should not quit the city), by equipping houses at his own expense and adding new gifts of land. For he knew that his settlement was contrary to the law and tradition of the Jews because Tiberias was built on the site of tombs that had been obliterated, of which there were many there. And our law declares that such settlers are unclean for seven days. (Jewish Antiquities 18.38) That makes Tiberias sound like a very strange city. It is founded in permanent, not just seven-day-long, impurity. It is force-filled with ex-peasants (“Galileans”) and ex-slaves. Even some of the administrators had to be brought there forcibly. Allowance must be made, of course, for the problems Josephus had with the lower classes in Tiberias during his short tenure as Jerusalem’s military representative there in 66–67 C.E. In reading the above description, we must also remember what happened to Josephus himself in Tiberias: The second faction (stasis) composed of most insignificant people, was bent on war [against Rome]…. Jesus, son of Sapphias, [was] the ringleader … of the party (stasis) of the sailors and destitute class…. The principal instigator of the mob was Jesus, son of Sapphias, at that time chief magistrate of Tiberias, a knave with an instinct for introducing disorder into grave matters, and unrivalled in fomenting sedition and revolution. With a copy of the laws of Moses in his hands, he now stepped forward and said: “If you cannot, for your own sakes, citizens, detest Josephus, fix your eyes on your country’s laws, which your commander-in-chief intended to betray, and for their sakes hate the crime and punish the audacious criminal.” (Life 34, 66, 134–135) You can hardly expect a fair description of a city from which Josephus barely escaped with his life. Still, even allowing for all of that, Antipas’s new Tiberias must have dislocated not just peasant farmers but also scribal retainers. Peasants, almost by definition, are illiterate. William Harris estimated that “the likely overall illiteracy level of the Roman Empire under the principate is almost certain to have been above 90%” (22). Meir Bar-Ilan noted the “data for illiteracy gathered from different societies in the first half of the 20th century: Turkey in 1927: 91.8%; Egypt in 1927: 85.7%; South Africa in 1921: 90.3%; India in 1921: 90.5%; Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia before 1950: above 90%” (47).

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

  In conclusion, therefore, the idea of Jesus consorting with repentant sinners because his contemporary Judaism would not accept them in the name of God is profoundly wrong about Judaism. But the idea of Jesus consorting with unrepentant sinners because he himself would accept them in the name of God is just as profoundly wrong about Jesus. There should never be serious historical debate on Jesus accepting unrepentant tax collectors, sinners, or prostitutes unless there is also serious historical debate on Jesus as a lunatic, a demoniac, a glutton, a drunkard, and a Samaritan. Individual Evil and Systemic Evil The second major issue on which I take strong exception is Sanders’s failure to distinguish between individual or personal evil and systemic or structural evil, a distinction emphasized frequently in this book. First, Sanders argues that “the Sadducees were on average upright Jews; and, against the general opinion, I think that this is true of the aristocracy as well.” His principle is that “individual immorality, such as greed or sexual promiscuity, does not necessarily make a person a bad leader….We may even have, in the person of Ananias, an example of personal immorality and reasonable diligence when in office” (1992:337). He exemplifies this by referring to Roosevelt and Kennedy as unfaithful husbands but not thereby bad presidents. That is all quite true, but Sanders has the problem turned completely around. We are not talking about personal or private evil and public or systemic good but about personal or private good and public or systemic evil. The question is not whether the poor are individually good and the rich are individually bad but whether and to what degree their relationship is systemically evil. Remember Naboth’s vineyard. The question is not whether Ahab or Naboth was personally just but whether dispossession of ancestral land was structurally just. Sanders continues: “Today, many of us—not just bishops—have spare bedrooms in our houses, while others are homeless. Those of us with spare bedrooms should do more. I am still unwilling to say, however, that people who have big houses are necessarily wicked” (1992:338). Agreed, once again, on the level of personal or individual wickedness. But that vast Jewish tradition, from prophets and priests to sages and rabbis, was not just about personal piety but about structural justice. Personal justice asks, Should you beat, rape, or brutalize your slave? Systemic justice asks, Should slavery exist? But, as far as I can see, Sanders does not even glimpse that difference. The closest he gets to it is to claim that one could be a bad person but a good administrator. He never asks whether one could be a good person but an evil administrator. He never distinguishes between personal or individual evil and structural or systemic evil. Read the following judgments: “I rather like the chief priests….I even find things about Herod to like….I rather like the Pharisees…. Mostly, I like the ordinary people …” (1992:493–494).

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  Some Aboriginal leaders supported this intervention and its efforts to protect women and children. These leaders were often based in major cities (not in remote communities). They were often involved in politics or academia. Many Aboriginal leaders rejected or criticized the intervention. These critics were often based in remote Aboriginal communities or had direct and ongoing relationships with those communities. In 2010 a United Nations Special Rapporteur found the intervention to be racially discriminating. He said it infringed on the human rights of Aboriginal peoples. The report acknowledged the need for emergency measures to deal with problems in remote Aboriginal communities. But it criticized the measures that limited the freedoms and autonomy of Aboriginal people (including the restrictions on access to welfare payments). Aboriginal people were denied individual and collective agency . And they were denied agency in a way that would have been offensive and unacceptable to non-Indigenous Australians. The main criticism of the intervention was the lack of consultation with Aboriginal people and community leaders. The “Little Children Are Sacred” report made it clear that the only way to deal with child sexual abuse and neglect in remote Aboriginal communities was to get local communities and leaders involved in coming up with and leading local initiatives. The report warned against “centralized” intervention and encouraged “localized” solutions. In other words, Aboriginal leaders and communities needed to be empowered to find local, indigenous, autonomous solutions to local problems. The only way to solve the problems was to make local Aboriginal peoples agents of their own destiny. Rosalie Kunoth-Monks is an Aboriginal woman from the Northern Territory in Australia. She lives in a place called Utopia, a group of sixteen Australian desert stations. She says, We have all been branded grog abusers and pedophiles. What have our Utopia people got from the intervention? A police station. And guess what? We are happy that we haven’t had any more things imposed on us. If we are going to be passive and sit back and allow ourselves to be removed from our homelands it would be better for the government people to come out here and shoot us. Wipe us out. Black fella bashing has become part of a political football in this country. It’s not fair. Give us some space. Under the intervention, we feel like we have been made separate people but we are not enemies of the dominant culture—all we want is help to grow on our own land . . . like everyone else.2 Not everything about the intervention was bad. Many traditional Aboriginal elders talk about the benefits that resulted. These included more health and education funding, more help for children and women in need, and more restrictions on alcohol and drugs. But, instead of treating Aboriginal people like they were helpless victims (or nasty perpetrators) and robbing them of their autonomy and agency, the Australian government should have done the opposite. It should have asked them what they needed.

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

  Such an interpretation may seem to destroy the miracle. But miracles are not changes in the physical world so much as changes in the social world, and it is society that dictates, in any case, how we see, use, and explain that physical world. It would, of course, be nice to have certain miracles available to change the physical world if we could, but it would be much more desirable to make certain changes in the social one, which we can. We ourselves can already make the physical world totally uninhabitable; the question is whether we can make the social world humanly habitable. Event and Tradition In terms of the original situation, therefore, Jesus’ action puts him on a direct collision course with priestly authority in the Temple. After touching a leper he can hardly turn around and tell him to observe the purity code that he himself has just broken. This is not, by the way, a case of divine law against human law, compassion against legalism, gospel against law, let alone Christianity against Judaism. It is more likely a case within Judaism of Galilean peasants against Jerusalem priests. But what we see at the transmissional level is intense apologetics seeking to bring Jesus into line with traditional biblical and legal practice—to show him, in terms of purity regulations, as an observant Jew. That explains those emotional expressions such as “anger…sternly…cast him out” in Mark 1:41 and 43 and, especially, that terminal injunction in 1:44 to “go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.” In other words, at the second or transmissional level, the story was adapted to make Jesus legally observant, something that creates a war of interpretation within the narrative itself. Finally, at the third or redactional level, as Mark records the story in his gospel, he makes one very significant final change. He himself is much more in sympathy with that legally unobservant Jesus at the story’s original level, so he adds, after the injunction to go to the Temple, a phrase translated above as “as a testimony to them.” It could be better translated with, “as a witness against them”—in other words, “to show them who’s boss.” But in either case, for Mark, Jesus is enjoining the visit to the Temple not as legal observance but as confrontational witness. Those three layers—the original, transmissional, and redactional—are constantly laminated within our gospels, but this is a classic case of all three rather clearly visible within a single text. Yet no amount of theological apologetics at the second level or even their undoing at the third level can ever obliterate the first or original level in which Jesus heals by refusing to accept traditional and official sanctions against the diseased person. Jesus heals him, in other words, by taking him into a community of the marginalized and disenfranchised—into, in fact, the Kingdom of God.

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

  11:20–24; Luke 10:12–15; from Q ) The language of Jesus escalates into violent invective in Q—and Matthew accepts it fully. Furthermore, it is no longer a question of “any place,” but of very specific and named locations. Those small Jewish villages of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum will fare worse on the day of judgment than the four Gentile cities of Tyre, Sidon, Sodom, and Gomorrah. That represents a huge increase in rhetorical violence, so that Mark is bracketed chronologically by that of the Q Gospel version before him and Matthew after him. This second case study involves refusal of any proof sign. The pattern here is exactly the same as in the preceding case. Jesus is asked to give a sign from heaven proving his identity and validating his proclamation. He is challenged to justify himself by some heavenly manifestation from God. In Mark, the response from Jesus is both absolute and laconic: The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation .” And he left them, and getting into the boat again, he went across to the other side. (Mark 8:11–13). That is a simple but very emphatic refusal to give any proof—but without any name-calling. Once again Matthew combines his two sources, Mark and the Q Gospel, so that the absolute refusal we just saw in Mark receives a single exception and—once again—condemnatory language overpowers Mark’s simple statement: Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here!” (Matt. 12:38–42; Luke 11:16, 29–32; from Q; see also Matt. 16:1–4). The Jesus of the Q Gospel is much nastier than the one in Mark, but Matthew combines them so that Q’s condemnatory language overcomes Mark’s far milder rhetoric. You can see, for example, how Mark’s “this generation” becomes “an evil and adulterous generation” in Matthew. The third case study focuses on the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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

  Once those words were published, the entire colonial world, it seemed, exploded in wrath. The New England newspapers boiled with rage at this betrayal of freedom by “vipers whose poison has already destroyed the health of your province and spilt the blood of your people.” John Adams was outraged by this “vile serpent … bone of our bone, born and educated among us.” His call for an abridgement of English liberties was so flagrant, so Machiavellian a treason, Adams wrote, that “it bore the evident mark of madness … his reason was manifestly overpowered.” The indignation spread as the letters were published and republished locally, then splashed across the newspapers in almost every colony in America. Hutchinson was burned in effigy in Philadelphia and Princeton, and compared to Cataline, Caligula, and Nero.9 But what had Hutchinson actually written? Again and again, in letters to everyone he could reach, he explained that he had never said or implied that he hoped that English liberties would be restricted, that he had wished it, only that it was a matter of logic and observable fact that the colonies’ removal from the homeland must create an abridgement of liberties—“must” in a descriptive, not volitional sense—it could not be otherwise. “I did not see how it could be helped,” he said again and again. As to the “secrecy” of these comments, there was nothing secretive about them. Had he not, in a speech to the Assembly a year earlier, said exactly the same thing? “It is impossible,” he had then so publicly said, that “the rights of English subjects should be the same in every respect in all parts of the dominions”—and no one had read treason into that statement then. The furor had been cooked up by the process by which the letters had been revealed, as if it had been the discovery of some deep-lying conspiracy to destroy the colonists’ liberties.10 There is something poignant in this crisis in Hutchinson’s career—poignant because the words that had been revealed so dramatically touched on a profound reality he sensed but did not, or could not, fully explain. What was it about the removal of Englishmen to distant lands that would necessitate an abridgement, a modification of liberties? The one explanation he offered was the fact that while Englishmen (at least some of them) participated in the election of those who ruled them, and who presumably shared their interests, Americans did not. But he implied much more than that. The entire constitutional system, he seemed to be suggesting, was somehow involved. Two hundred years later, legal scholars would be able to explain more fully the deeper basis of Hutchinson’s argument.

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

  “past-centered history” is morally objectionable as a retreat to the ivory tower and an abdication of the special public function of the historian: to promote social understanding of how the community has got to where it is.… The great patriots, entered for veneration in the nationalist canon, emerged from the devil’s advocacy of the revisionists as a rogues’ gallery … of power-hungry megalomaniacs and nincompoops. More objectionably, the catastrophic dimension of Irish history—conquest, colonization, dispossession, religious and social discrimination, immiseration—was subjected to a process of normalisation and, indeed, tacit evasion, designed to rid Irish history of its legacy of bitterness. Normalization by contextual analysis, which tends to rob the past of its moral qualities, is the heart of a technical problem—in Irish historiography as in any other. In context, the Ulster rising of 1641, traditionally understood as “the first of the great nationalist rebellions of the modern period, the first major attempt to throw off the yoke of British oppression,” can now be seen to have begun, as Aidan Clarke put it, as a conservative “preservationist movement” by “members of the propertied class” who were loyal to the English crown and who did not “display that implacable hostility towards England which characterised the contemporary stereotype of ‘the Irish.’ ” And even in its later, wilder phase, the rising of 1641 was, Clarke wrote, a momentary upheaval of “pre-modern, rural … kin-centred and backward-looking” people lacking “modern” concepts of nationality and confessional identity. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bitterness of the debate, thus formulated, on Irish history. Symposia, argumentative reviews, charges and countercharges, and detailed monographs on both sides of the issue have been published year after year, and the conceptual focus continues to center on the moral implications of contextual history. I am not saying, Desmond Fennell of Dublin wrote, that historians must reconcile factual truth with “the pattern of meaning and moral interpretation” which their predecessors, their culture, their nation, have established. I am saying, Fennell declared, that historians who do combine a factual accuracy with moral judgments consistent with their nation’s moral sense of itself contribute to the well-being of the nation, and that those not so disposed … do not. Fortunate the nation whose historians are mainly of the former kind, unfortunate the nation in which historians of the latter kind predominate.19 There is nothing peculiarly Irish about this problem. A. J. P. Taylor’s effort to reduce Hitler’s foreign policy in the 1930s to the normal practices of pragmatic European expansionists in his The Origins of the Second World War (1961) created a furor that raged for years. It is a matter of context, not morality, Taylor wrote. Hitler aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers treat smaller countries as their satellites. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.

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

  And again later, but even more pointedly: “The term ‘movement’ has problematic political overtones—one may recall the [Nazi movement]…. E. Schüssler Fiorenza … uses the designation ‘Jesus movement’ throughout her book [In Memory of Her] and characterizes it as ‘an inner-Jewish renewal movement’” (1994a:544, and note 19). I ask, for others less involved to answer, Is that association of Nazi movement and Jesus movement a fair or even decent comment? I admit, finally, to suspecting those who insist that Jesus cannot be reconstructed historically. And I am equally suspicious whether that assertion is made openly and initially or is the implicit conclusion to listing all the difficulties involved. Why is Jesus, alone of all historical figures, so covered by a cloud of unknowing and a cloak of protective invisibility? That assertion of historical agnosticism seems but a negative way of asserting unique status and transcendental dignity. If Jesus is but a figure like Zeus, historical reconstruction is quite obviously absurd. If Jesus is but a figure like Hamlet, historical reconstruction is equally absurd. The former lives only in myth, the latter only in literature. Jesus may live in both those realms too, but he also lived in history. Or that, at least, is the first historical question to be asked about him. The Ethical Reason What the historian or exegete cannot hope to do by historical research is to resolve what are really philosophical questions (e.g., whether miracles do take place) or theological questions (e.g., whether God has indeed acted in this particular “miracle,” thus calling people to faith). Such questions, while important, simply go beyond the realm of history proper. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus , vol. 2, p. 220 The second reason is ethical, and I propose it in debate with the ongoing multivolume work of John Meier on the historical Jesus. This ethical reason operates on two different but connected levels. One level concerns how we reconstruct, as historians, and it focuses on the present. The other concerns how we believe, as Christians, and it focuses on the past. Together they concern the ethics of public interpretation of the past. If gospel were parable, with Jesus challenging our faith as does the Good Samaritan, this reason would not hold. If gospel were theology, with Jesus speaking as divine wisdom from the throne of God, this reason would not hold. But Christianity has always claimed an historical basis, so this reason presses. When, in our gospels, are the evangelists making and we reading historical statements, and when are they making and we reading theological ones? Those italicized words underline the twin aspects of my ethical reason for historical Jesus research. I give one example, concerning the divine conception of Jesus, as a case study to raise the general problem.

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

  If peasant revolts could spread only because of nonpeasant leadership, then the absence of such leadership in traditional aristocratic empires may be a major reason for the virtual absence of peasant revolts transcending local confines in such empires. Commercialization and, more recently, modernization from without are followed by peasant revolts not only because they affect the conditions under which peasants live but also because they produce revolutionary groups in the towns, bring the peasants in contact with them, and make them available as the peasants’ leaders” (304, 306). That makes a very interesting point. Commercialization (and all that comes with it) disturbs not only traditional peasant life but also traditional town or even city life. What if, for example, it relativizes the importance of our priests, negates the value of our temples, changes the validity of our laws, customs, and morals? What if I am a lower-order scribe whose livelihood has been endangered by a change in the dominant language to facilitate international commerce—a change, say, from Aramaic to Greek? Dissident priests or scribes may become leaders for dissident peasants or artisans. And that is a rather dangerous combination. Once again from Kautsky: “[T]he outsiders who can formulate more far-reaching programs and demands on behalf of peasants, who can visualize achieving a world different from the existing one, who can lead a proactive movement are themselves a product of commercialization and modernization” (309). That is a very important point, and I underline its structural implications. The systemic dislocations created by commercialization both create an environment conducive to peasant resistance or rebellion and supply the dissenting retainers who will become its leaders. The second quotation is from Eisenstadt. Notice how it envisages various forms of resistance leadership, even if only in passing: “The peasantry became politically active only rarely. Even when it did, it did not usually become active independently, but mostly in conjunction with other groups and strata, like the army or religious movements…. [The peasants] often took part in rebellions, and sometimes even inaugurated them, under the leadership either of their own people or of alienated bureaucrats, gentry, or religious leaders” (207–208). Once again the dangerous combination is an alienated peasantry with leadership not just from itself but from alienated retainers, be they scribes or priests. The last quotation is from Eric Robert Wolf’s classic study of peasants: “The emergence of a common myth of transcendental justice often can and does move peasants into action as other forms of organization cannot, but it provides only a common vision, not an organizational framework for action. Such myths unite peasants, they do not organize them. If sometimes the peasant band sweeps across the countryside like an avalanche, like an avalanche, too, it spends itself against resistance and dissolves if adequate leadership is not provided from without” (108). All of the above quotations focus on how peasant resistance or revolt can break out of localism and regionalism, usually under nonpeasant leadership.

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

  When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village. (Luke 9:52–56) Here, next, is an even more lethal incident from about twenty years after the time of Jesus. In his Jewish War, the historian Josephus tells how a fight started “between the Galileans and the Samaritans” when “a great number of Jews were going up to Jerusalem to the Feast of Tabernacles and a certain Galilean was slain” as the pilgrims passed through Samaria on their way south to Judea (2.232). When the story reached Jerusalem, “it put the multitude into disorder, and they left the feast; and without any generals to conduct them, they marched with great violence to Samaria; nor would they be ruled by any of the magistrates that were set over them” (2.234). The situation became so serious that the Syrian governor had to intervene with his legionary troops. He started with crucifixions and beheadings, but finished by sending the most eminent Jewish and Samaritan leaders as well as the highest local Roman officials for trial before Caesar. “Jews,” says John 4:9, “do not share things in common with Samaritans.” Except, maybe, fighting? Think, therefore, of “good Samaritan” at the time of Jesus less as a cliché than as a challenge, a provocation, a paradox, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. My conclusion is that the Good Samaritan was not intended by Jesus as a simple example story, a straightforward moral lesson, a positive paradigm for compassionate behavior. The story presumes that compassionate help is the proper response. But the story as an example of moral behavior does not seem the primary intention of the parable as told by Jesus. It becomes an example story only in Luke’s context and interpretation. Rather, it is better understood as a challenge parable, a story that challenges listeners to think long and hard about their social prejudices, their cultural presumptions, and, yes, even their most sacred religious traditions. THIS CHAPTER’S FINAL STEP questions whether this is all a waste of time. Maybe we should simply rejoice in that diversity of interpretation and accept the parables of Jesus as riddle and example and challenge all mixed up together. Indeed, to return one final time to Augustine, that is his own almost postmodern conclusion about Jesus’s parables. This time my text is from his Confessions, written in 397–398, that is, between his earlier interpretation of the Good Samaritan as an example parable in 397 and his later interpretation of it as a riddle parable or allegory in 399–400.

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

  Anthropology of Resistance Inasmuch as peasants have a sharp appreciation of their relations with rural elites, they have no difficulty in recognizing when more and more is required of them and less and less is given in return. Peasants are thus not much subject to “mystification” about class relations; they do not need outsiders to help them recognize a pattern of growing exploitation which they experience daily. This does not mean outsiders are inconsequential. On the contrary, they are often critical to peasant movements, not because they convince peasants that they are exploited but because, in the context of exploitation, they may provide the power, assistance, and supralocal organization that helps peasants act . It is thus at the level of collective action that the typically small scale of peasant social life constitutes a disability, not at the level of assessing relations. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant , pp. 173–174 The Lenski-Kautsky model indicates that peasant resistance escalates as rural commercialization encroaches on the traditional peasant way of life, breaches the safety net of kinship relations and village contacts, and changes the land from inalienable family inheritance to negotiable business commodity. But in that model, and also in the Eisenstadt citations given above (as well as in every other cross-cultural anthropologist I have read), the problem of leadership arises as soon as peasant resistance is mentioned. It arises especially in terms of leadership from classes above the peasantry, from the “outsiders” mentioned in the above epigraph from James Scott. In many or even most cases, those scholars are thinking of military revolts and of leadership from dissident retainer or aristocratic classes. I want, however, to broaden the question of resistance and leadership to include ideology as well as army, scribal as well as martial situations. What if priests, prophets, scribes, bureaucrats, or retainers, acting institutionally or charismatically, instigate an ideological revolution? As you read the following quotations on peasant resistance and outsider leadership, do not imagine only military retainers leading peasant armies. RESISTANCE AND LEADERSHIP My first quotation is from Kautsky himself. “The lack of suitable leadership among the peasants of the traditional villages [is] another reason for the absence of organization and hence of revolts reaching beyond at most a few neighboring villages…. Townspeople, given their different environment and experience, may have developed such attributes, like skills in communicating with and organizing strangers, and they may have the requisite material resources to practice these skills. For uprisings to spread widely and to maintain themselves, such skills and resources of outside leaders are required to overcome the localism of peasants…. It appears that all peasant revolts that spread beyond local confines in societies undergoing commercialization or modernization from without did so under nonpeasant leadership or in alliance with nonpeasant movements….

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

  When Judaism imagines apocalyptic consummation, what will happen to the pagans; and when Christianity imagines apocalyptic consummation, what will happen to the Jews? If, confronted with the blinding glory of God, all convert freely not to Judaism or to Christianity but to justice and righteousness, then all is well in our religious imagination. But if we await a divine slaughter of those who are not Jews or those who are not Christians, then we are the killer children of a Killer God. It is a question, once again, of character. Is your God a God of justice or of revenge? Another footnote concerns justice as distinct from compassion and recalls what was said earlier about almsgiving. Yahweh is a God not only of justice but also of compassion. It is crucial, however, not to confuse those aspects—justice and compassion—in either God’s divinity or our humanity. It is impossible (fortunately) to have justice without compassion, but it is possible (unfortunately) to have compassion without justice. That sequence of justice and compassion is, therefore, significant. We are back, in fact, with the distinction between, on the one hand, individual good or evil and, on the other, systemic good or evil. Where there is justice without compassion, there will be anger, violence, and murder. A thirst for justice without an instinct for compassion produces killers. Sometimes they are simply believers in a Killer God. Sometimes they are assistant killers of a Killer God. But compassion without justice is equally problematic. In any unjust system, there are people needing immediate assistance. And, even in a perfectly just system, there would still be those who would need compassion. But compassion, no matter how immediately necessary or profoundly human, cannot substitute for justice, for the right of all to equal dignity and integrity of life. Those who live by compassion are often canonized. Those who live by justice are often crucified. Appendix 1Common Sayings Tradition in the Gospel of Thomas and the Q GospelPreliminary Note I count as Q Gospel only units with secure attestation in both Matthew and Luke. I also watch carefully the consensus reconstruction of the Q Gospel proposed by the International Q Project (IQP). That reconstruction requires three changes to the list of Common Sayings Tradition units that I included in The Historical Jesus (1991: Appendix 1B), bringing my earlier inventory of 102 units down to 101 units here: 102 - 2 + 1 = 101. First, there are certain units in either Matthew alone or Luke alone that may well have been accepted from the Q Gospel by one but omitted by the other author. I did not count such units in my original inventory. Second, there are other units that appear in both Matthew and Luke but in divergent contexts and, since they are also present in Mark, may possibly be from that source rather than from the Q Gospel .

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

  On the other hand, there was a movement toward greater individual freedom in the use and disposal of the land, allowing for the possibility of latifundism [agribusiness] and the pauperization of masses of people. It appears that the ancient Near East was pulled in the latter direction, and it was in such a context in which Israel came into being. Jeffrey A. Fager, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee , p. 27 I begin with a few preliminary points. There are three elements in this section that cannot be separated from one another, although we often try to do so. Divine righteousness, social justice, and ritual purity are interwoven in Jewish tradition like three strands of one and the same rope. No matter which term is used, all three are presumed. Terms like righteousness, justice , or purity are biblical words whose repetition may have numbed us to their meaning. That numbing (or even dumbing) of our minds will be the major problem in this section. Throughout it I will emphasize how words and ideas that we may hear as exclusively religious or theological were originally such, but were economic, political, and social as well—all those many aspects intertwined together. To emphasize that conjunction, I did not entitle this section “A Thirst for Social Justice,” which would have been a perfectly valid heading, but “A Thirst for Divine Justice,” which is an even more accurate one. The subject is the justice of God for this earth. And how does one know that God is just? Because God stood against the Egyptian Empire to save some doomed slaves. God does not simply prefer Jews to Egyptians. God does not simply prefer slaves to masters. The only true God prefers justice to injustice, righteousness to unrighteousness, and is therefore God the Liberator. That very ancient Jewish tradition was destined to clash profoundly and fiercely with Roman commercialization, urbanization, and monetization in the first-century Jewish homeland. Another preliminary point. I concentrate in what follows on biblical texts, on the constitutive and normative documents of Judaism itself. I realize, of course, that those texts can beget violently conflicting interpretations and that class , for instance, plays a crucial difference in how one interprets and applies God’s justice on this earth. On the one hand, it is rather easy to be in favor of justice and righteousness. Few individuals, groups, or divinities proclaim themselves against such virtues or in favor of injustice and unrighteousness. But, on the other hand, the biblical texts indicate repeatedly what exactly such justice entails. And the logic behind that divine justice is human equality, a radical egalitarianism that shows itself not in abstract manifestos but in specific laws. Let me explain exactly what I mean through a comparison between Athens and Jerusalem, between Greek philosophy and Jewish theology. Forty years ago Karl Polanyi wrote that the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived between 384 and 322 B.C.E.

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

  There is no reason to presume that the Great Tradition (that is, the tradition of the tiny elite minority) did not have an equivalent in the Little Tradition (that is, the tradition of the vast peasant majority) concerning apocalypticism. In any case, when Smith constructs what he calls “a model Egyptian apocalypse,” he emphasizes that the withdrawal of royal patronage is linked with the fact that “foreigners have appeared and are acting as if they were Egyptian” and notes that the ideal future involves the hope that “the foreigners shall be driven out” (1975:142–143). I would consider foreign domination to be a form of persecution and even concede that those so oppressed might weep as well as write. Smith’s definition is much too narrow. Perceived Deprivation . Adela Yarbro Collins wrote more recently that “apocalyptic faith often correlates with marginality, cognitive dissonance, and relative deprivation. ‘Marginality’ is a sociological term referring to the social status of an individual or group as anomalous, peripheral, or alien. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ refers to a state of mind that arises when there is significant disparity between expectations and reality. ‘Relative deprivation’ is a closely related social-scientific term. Simple or absolute ‘deprivation’ describes the plight of those affected by unmistakable catastrophes and disasters, of ‘the poorest of the poor.’ ‘Relative deprivation’ identifies the self-understanding of those whose expectations or perceived needs are not being satisfied” (1992:306). I would want, however, even before proceeding, to distinguish medically between perceived deprivation and patent paranoia and to balance morally the experience of personal or communal desperation and the imagination of cosmic catastrophe as its solution. Collins also notes that apocalyptic scenarios can be invoked not only to subvert but also to support the status quo. “Those partial to the view of apocalypticism as socially revolutionary might ask whether the rhetoric supporting the social order has as good a claim to be called apocalyptic as that opposing the current order” (1992:307). Such pro-establishment usage often happens, as in medieval Christian apocalypticism, when counter-apocalypticism turns offensive scenarios into defensive ones. It can, of course, be used in both directions, and that too has a long history. Jewish prophecies in Daniel 2 and 7, written around 165 B.C.E. , looked to a Fifth Empire, after that of the Babylonian, Medean, Persian, and Greek dominations. In that ideal future God would give power to his own persecuted people under their angelic protectors. But Caius Velleius Paterculus, writing his Compendium of Roman History in the early decades of the first century C.E. , cited Aemilius Sura, writing in the early decades of the second century B.C.E. , as explaining how the four empires of the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, and Macedonians ceded place to a Fifth Empire as “world power passed to the Roman people” (1.6; Shipley 14–15).

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Yeah, if he wasn’t around to help and they were bigger. He’d say, Lay the ivory to ’em, Pokey. That’s funny, Dev says. I kiss his shampooed head, and later, standing in the doorway as I click off the light, I briefly pray for a car that I might track down and smash the little bastards like the toads they are. I tell him I’m gonna call some of the kids’ parents, the ones I know. Don’t get them in trouble, he says. That’ll just make it worse. Downstairs, I call around but get no answers, and when finally I reach one mom I barely know, she harumphs into the phone, saying, Why do you think they’re picking on him? You think he’s innocent, I guess. My face gets hot. I say, I have no doubt that Dev is as savage as any grade school boy, but this is five against one. This is Lord of the Flies. Well, he must be doing something, she says. Out of the blue, I say, I’m from the state of Texas. What’s that supposed to mean? I know my son is gonna survive these ass-whippings no matter how many of them there are. But when it’s five against one and there’s not a grown-up to intervene, I’m gonna instruct Dev to pick up a rock or a stick and leave a mark on somebody. Let’s hope it’s not your kid. My uncle’s a lawyer, she says. My daddy’s Pete Karr, I say, and hang up. Over breakfast the next day, I tell Dev the strategy’s this: if he’s away from school, and there are that many of them, he should turn and fight. Throw down his book bag and just accept the fact that he’s gonna take an ass-whipping. Slipping his backpack on, he looks completely defeated. One ass-whipping hurts once, I says. Running home afraid every day hurts every day. Why would they ever stop? he says. Because you’re gonna pick out one of them—the closest one you can get to—and you’re gonna leave a mark. Bite the dog dookey out of him. Lay the ivory to ’em. He tries to grin, but a cloud passes over his face as he pulls his royal blue watchman’s cap on. What? I say. What’s the matter? Dan does know karate, Dev says. Do you know, I say, what would happen to Dan if you hit him full-on? What? Dev says. He’d topple like a pine. He’s a pipsqueak of a thing. You’ve got a leg as big as Dan. Dev grins all over his face. He says, Really? Absolutely. Karate or no karate. You’re twice his size. He’s out the door when he turns and hollers back, You swear I won’t get in trouble? If you hit first, you’ve lost TV for a month. That afternoon he comes in shucking off his backpack. He’d run for about a block before turning to face the pack.

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

  Instead, he offers either exchange or money for it. Naboth replies, in 21:3, “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” Ahab dejectedly gives in, but Jezebel has Naboth accused of cursing God and the king. After he is stoned to death for that crime, his vineyard becomes a royal possession. The fundamental clash in that episode is between land as commodity to be sensibly bought and sold or land as ancestral inheritance never to be alienated from the family. The former is Jezebel’s pagan presupposition; the latter is Naboth’s Jewish tradition. Selling land is right and just among pagans, under Baal; holding land is right and just among Jews, under God. But what, then, about business as usual? Poor and Needy . Around 760 B.C.E. the prophet Amos was appalled by the widening discrepancy between rich and poor in the booming prosperity of Jeroboam II’s thirty-year reign over the northern half of the Jewish homeland. In the following quotations, notice the word-pairs he uses (my italics): righteous and needy, poor and afflicted, needy and poor. It is for those people that he demands that other word-pair, justice and righteousness. Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way; father and son go in to the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned; they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed. (Amos 2:6–8) Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!… They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous , who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. (Amos 5:7, 10–12) Hear this, you that trample on the needy , and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

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

  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. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 4:1, 4–5; 5:21–24) For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6) Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! 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. 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. (Isaiah 1:10–17) “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?” 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? (Micah 6:6–8) 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. (Jeremiah 7:5–7) That last example from Jeremiah is particularly striking and can serve as a fitting summary and climax. Here is the context. In the year 609 B.C.E.

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

  Here are a few representative examples: “In the later GPet , where one finds a popularization freer from the controls of the standardized preaching and teaching discernible in much of Matt, the antiJewish feeling is even more unnuanced” (63). Again: “This work … is sharply more antiJewish than the canonical Gospels” (834). And again: “The antiJewish sentiment … is much more prominent in GPet than in the canonical Gospels” (1065). Finally: “I would hope that today Christians would recognize another heterodox tendency in GPet : its intensified antiJewish depictions” (1347 note 62). The third example is from a doctoral dissertation by Susan Schaeffer. She finds the anti-Jewish tone even more virulent than does Brown. This is very important, because that tone determines for her the document’s function and setting in the second century. Here are a few examples. (Notice especially the final one.) “The Jews are revealed as cruel, murderous, hypocritical, and stupid” (1991a:226). Again: “[T]he GosPet ’s portrait of the Jews is scathing. They are depicted as being sadistic, foolish, and hypocritical” (244). Finally: “The GosPet also implies that the Jewish leaders themselves might have believed in the resurrection but that they are afraid of being stoned by the Jews (11:49), that is by those who have not become apostates [Christians]…. In their last official act in the gospel (as far as we know it), the Jewish leaders seem weak and almost pitiable. In the background, behind their actions, stands a murderous, faceless force of apostate-hating Jews. If actual persecution is in the background, the GosPet could have come from the post-Bar Cochba period, ca. 135–140 C.E. ” (254–255). JEWISH AUTHORITY AGAINST JEWISH PEOPLE I have two basic arguments against those assertions of increased anti-Jewishness in the Gospel of Peter . My first argument is that they are flatly wrong. Focus, for example, on the three acts in that consecutive source I call the Cross Gospel in the text given above: Act 1: Crucifixion and Deposition = Gos. Pet . 1:1–2 and 2:5b–6:22 Act 2: Tomb and Guards = Gos. Pet . 7:25 and 8:28–9:34 Act 3: Resurrection and Confession = Gos. Pet . 9:35–10:42 and 11:45–49 In Act 1 it is “the Jews” and not the Romans who condemn Jesus, it is Herod not Pilate who is in charge of the crucifixion, and it is “the (Jewish) people” not the Roman soldiers who abuse and execute him. Only here is Pilate fully innocent and capable of true hand-washing, a gesture somewhat hypocritical in Matthew’s account, where he supplies the executioners. So far claims of increased anti-Jewishness and increased pro-Romanism seem absolutely correct. And if the story stopped at that point, the Gospel of Peter would certainly be the most anti-Jewish of the five passion accounts. It is the Jewish “people,” after all, who directly crucify Jesus! But then, at the start of Act 2, something very strange happens—something that must be read within the unfolding narrative development. Without that “popular” crucifixion, this second step would not have happened.

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

  As nonworkers (haves) they could therefore come early and eat a full meal before workers (have-nots) arrived late and found only symbolic bread and wine. Corinthian practice was, as early as the 50s, the first clear signs of separation between full meal and ritual action. This is Paul’s response. Notice the sequence of italicized words: For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed [literally: handed over] took a loaf of bread , and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper , saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood . Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:23–25) What exactly is the logic of Paul’s response in that citation of tradition already given to them but now repeated for the present problem? Notice how the ritualization of bread and the parallel ritualization of wine take place before and after the meal. Paul insists that the sequence is not, as in Corinthian practice, meal + ritual of bread/body and cup/blood but, as in the pre-Pauline tradition, ritual of bread/body + meal + ritual of cup/blood. There is, in other words, no way to separate meal from ritual. The Lord’s Supper is both fully meal and fully ritual. And, says Paul, Jesus himself instituted that process and commanded that it be done that way “in remembrance of him.” You will understand that, even though I do not accept the historicity of such a Last Supper, I accept completely Paul’s understanding of the initial ritualization of the meal tradition and his accusation that the Corinthian haves betrayed its intention. Paul was absolutely correct to insist that symbolism and reality should go together, that the Eucharist should involve a full but communal share-meal, and that anything else was not the Lord’s Supper but business as usual. A very similar transition within the eucharistic share-meal from symbolic full meal to symbolic token meal can be discerned in the Didache , although it is not as crudely evident as at Corinth. Didache. The point here is a delicate comparison between the earlier Eucharist depicted in Didache 10 and the later one in Didache 9. First, though, a preliminary case as introduction. We already caught glimpses of the Didache ’s Eucharist as a communal share-meal in discussions above concerning the prophets and the destitute. Recall this example (Milavec 1989:99, my emphasis): If [the one coming] wants to settle among you and knows a trade, let him (or her) work and eat . If someone does not know a trade, use your own judgment to determine how he (or she) should live with you as a Christian without being idle.

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

  She is a hugely overweight misshapen hulk who is a survivor of circumstances and lack of resources and cruel messages to consume and get ahead impossible for her to hear and not feel rage at the limits of her world. Hey, what she needs is not medicine but a social revolution” (1988:216–217). Reading the epigraph from Time magazine at the start of this Prologue in the light of that internist’s experience, I emphasize the contrast between those who must suffer racist discrimination “in silence” and those who “can afford to challenge” it. In such situations of sickness , is resistance a form of healing? I leave aside “conventional” healing for a moment, then, to focus on resistance to discrimination, oppression, marginalization, and exploitation. In the mid-seventies Eugene Genovese, speaking of slavery in North America, noted that “accommodation itself breathed a critical spirit and disguised subversive actions and often embraced its apparent opposite—resistance.” He went on to distinguish the two ends of that continuum of resistance with open “insurrection” at one pole and “day-to-day resistance to slavery” at the other. But all of that continuum in all its parts “contributed to the cohesion and strength of a social class threatened by disintegration and demoralization” (597–598). That idea of oppressed people resisting along a continuum from the most covert to the most overt action was emphasized as a cross-cultural phenomenon by James C. Scott at around the same time. I take three major points from his work across the last twenty years. The first point is the antithetical relationship between elite and peasant traditions. The Great (or scribal) Tradition of the elites and the Little (or oral) Tradition of the peasants are not just complex versus simple versions of one another. Moving from Europe to Southeast Asia and noting the Little Tradition’s common reaction to such disparate variants of the Great Tradition as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, Scott argued very persuasively that peasant culture and religion are actually an anti-culture, qualifying alike both the religious and the political elites that oppress it. It is, in fact, a reflexive and reactive inversion of the pattern of exploitation common to the peasantry as such. This is a powerful insight, and I quote Scott at length: “The popular religion and culture of peasants in a complex society are not only a syncretized, domesticated, and localized variant of larger systems of thought and doctrine. They contain almost inevitably the seeds of an alternative symbolic universe—a universe which in turn makes the social world in which peasants live less than completely inevitable. Much of this radical symbolism can only be explained as a cultural reaction to the situation of the peasantry as a class . In fact, this symbolic opposition represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It is as if those who find themselves at the bottom of the social heap develop cultural forms which promise them dignity, respect, and economic comfort which they lack in the world as it is.