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)

  When you take the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” (Gospel of Thomas 26:1–2 [Coptic]) That central sentence from “how” to “hypocrite!” in Q Gospel 6:42a has no parallel in Gospel of Thomas 26, which parallels only the first and third sentences. I read that saying as countercriticism from the Q Gospel’s radical proponents against those who oppose them from within the Christian community. Trees and Hearts. The last of the three sayings in this set is Trees and Hearts (Appendix lA: #19). It is a Type 4 saying (Appendix 1B); that is, it has been redacted neither toward asceticism in the Gospel of Thomas nor toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel . It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 6:43–45—that is, Luke 6:43–45 = Matthew 7:16–20 and Matthew 12:33–35—and in Gospel of Thomas 45. These are the twin texts: No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. (Q Gospel 6:43–45) Jesus said, “Grapes are not harvested from thorn trees, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they yield no fruit. A good person brings forth good from the storehouse; a bad person brings forth evil things from the corrupt storehouse in the heart, and says evil things. For from the abundance of the heart this person brings forth evil things.” (Gospel of Thomas 45:1–4) I am, once more, reading that saying against internal or intra-Christian dissent within the Common Sayings Tradition. Like the two preceding sayings, it is still internal dissent that is at stake in their Q Gospel usage. Its secondary usage in Matthew 12:33–35, however, directs it externally against those accusing Jesus of demonic possession. CHAPTER 20CONTROLLING THE ITINERANTSThe silent majority of those who awaited the coming of the kingdom were careworn and decent householders, long used to the punctilious rhythms of Jewish life. Secure in their moral horizons, they were in no position to allow the painfully assembled fabric of their social person—their wives, their children, their kinfolk, and the few ancestral fields that they would inherit when they buried their father—to evaporate at the call of the wandering few. Christian communities where such men came to the fore would look at the world around them in a very different manner from those who imagined that, on the open road, they already breathed the heady air of the kingdom. Peter Brown, The Body and Society , p.

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

  The book’s audience is forced for forty chapters to listen to bad theology encased in great poetry. We knew the friends were wrong from the start, and God certified them as wrong at the end. What, then, is left of Deuteronomy 28 and its theological certitudes as they stutter into silence? We reach the third and deepest level of the multichallenge parable of the book of Job when we focus on the second of those two debates in poetry, the one between God and Job (38:1–42:6). There are only two rounds in this much shorter set of debates: God (38:1–40:2) and Job (40:3–5) God (40:6–41:34) and Job (42:1–6) You will notice that God always speaks first, and that Job only gets a few verses of (non)response. God “answered Job out of the whirlwind” (38:1), but, considering the audience’s prior knowledge and, of course, with all due respect, that divine voice is more wind than whirl. Here is the problem that makes God more bully than mystery in this parable. Why does God never tell Job the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? The book’s hearers or readers know the truth from the very beginning: it is simply about Job’s integrity and God’s wager against Satan’s accusation. But Job is never told the truth, even at the very end. The book’s multilevel parable escalates from challenging Israel’s covenantal pride, to challenging Torah’s Deuteronomic sanctions, and finally to challenging God’s very character. In Robert Frost’s 1945 play A Masque of Reason, God admits to owing Job both divine thanks and divine apologies for a very long time. God presumes that by now Job has figured out “the part he played.” To do what? Then comes this magnificent line with which—finally—God admits to Job what it was all about, namely, “to stultify the Deuteronomist.” The book of Job rendered foolish (stultus in Latin) the absolute security of those Deuteronomic proclamations. Job is told in Frost’s play that Deuteronomic theology placed God in “moral bondage to the human race.” Before Job, God was totally involved in rewarding virtue with prosperity and punishing vice with adversity, but Job “set God free to reign.” The truth is, unfortunately, that the book of Job did not “change the tenor of religious thought,” as suggested by God to Job in Frost’s play. The book of Job became, at most, a minor speed bump on the Deuteronomic super-highway. The Deuteronomist is still alive and well when the disciples ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). And is still there today when a disaster survivor asks, “What did I do to deserve this?” Nonetheless, even if Job’s challenge did not completely “stultify the Deuteronomist” or successfully “change the tenor of religious thought,” the book of Job’s deepest challenge is emphasized in Frost’s play by how long it took God to tell Job the truth.

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

  If you read only the canonical gospels you would know that Peter was very important but you would know James only as one among the siblings of Jesus named in passing in Mark 6:3. If you read a non-Christian source such as Josephus, however, you would know only two individuals in earliest Christianity: one is Jesus himself and the other is his brother James. You would not know, for example, that Peter or Paul had ever existed. James the brother of the Lord, James the Just, James of Jerusalem, James by whatever name requires very special attention. The preceding epigraph concerns institutional tensions between bishop-leader and scholar-teacher when Demetrius and his successors were rulers of the Alexandrian church and Clement or Origen headed its catechetical school between the mid-second and mid-third centuries. My intention in quoting it is not to retroject the monarchical episcopate back to the early first century with James of Jerusalem. I use it, rather, to introduce this question: What mode of power and authority did James have, and what were the sociopolitical advantages and disadvantages of that mode? JAMES IN JOSEPHUS We saw in Chapter 1 what Josephus says about Jesus. But what he says about James, the brother of Jesus, is much, much longer. If we knew nothing save these two texts, James would probably seem the far more important person. His execution was enough to topple a high priest: Upon learning of the death of Festus, Caesar sent Albinus to Judaea as procurator. The king [Agrippa II] removed Joseph from the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to this office upon the son of Ananus, who was likewise called Ananus….The younger Ananus … was rash in his temper and unusually daring. He followed the school of the Sadducees, who are indeed more heartless than any of the other Jews … when they sit in judgement. Possessed of such a character, Ananus thought that he had a favourable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step [in convening the Sanhedrin], to order him to desist from any further such actions. Certain of them even went to meet Albinus, who was on his way from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily wrote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him.

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

  , with the Assyrian Empire in its death throes, Jeremiah went into the Temple of Jerusalem and announced that God would abandon that place if the people persisted in social injustice: Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the Lord. (Jeremiah 7:9–11) You think, says Jeremiah in the name of God, that you are safe, no matter what foreign god you worship or what social injustice you practice, as long as you make it regularly to the Temple in Jerusalem. You feel secure, he says, like robbers who have made it safely back to their den. (An aside. In terms of Jesus and the Temple much later in history, please note that a den of robbers is not where robbers rob others but where they run for safety when they have robbed others elsewhere.) The threat is clear: use my Temple to avoid social justice and I will destroy my Temple. That oracle, by the way, almost cost Jeremiah his life. Priests and prophets accused him, in 26:11: “This man deserves the sentence of death because he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your own ears.” But the royal officials and “all the people” answered them, in 26:16: “This man does not deserve the sentence of death, for he has spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God.” But why is there that alternative of ritual or righteousness, of cult or justice? Commentators usually insist that this is prophetic hyperbole, that the prophets actually demand both worship and social justice, rather than one or the other. That is certainly true, but still the question presses. Why not put it that way: God demands both/and rather than either/or? But notice that while there is no problem in finding biblical prophetic statements in which God rejects worship in the absence of justice, there is not a single biblical statement in which God rejects justice in the absence of worship. There is more involved here than both/and. What is it? Worship, ritual, cult, and Temple are not just the celebration of the covenantal God but the celebration of that God as liberator from oppression and domination, slavery and death in Egypt, into a land where opposites reign, a land of righteousness, justice, and freedom. The Jewish cult celebrates that God of that justice. And such a God is worthy of liturgy and worship, worthy of feast and celebration. But such celebration in the absence of social justice is sheerest hypocrisy. You cannot say: your ritual is right but you must add on your righteousness.

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

  The ancient Semitic mind, not unlike the outlook of many third-world people today, was not overly concerned with the principle of noncontradiction, however revered the principle may be by Western logic” (2.399). A final time: “The problem of logical consistency that the Western mind may raise with regard to the systematic writings of a Spinoza may be beside the point when dealing with an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle-worker of 1st-century Palestine. Our concern about the principles of noncontradiction might have been greeted with a curious mile by the Nazarene and his audience” (2.452). I hope I am as open to mystery and paradox as anyone around. A kingdom of God both here-already and coming-soon can be explained quite easily in, for example, the case of Paul (as I noted above). That is not the problem. But those varied excuses indicate Meier’s knowledge of a serious problem in his reconstruction. All of those defenses may be needed only because Meier’s criteria are not methodological enough to discriminate accurately between the various layers of the tradition. He ends up honestly unable to combine what are not only divergent but even opposing strata of the Jesus tradition. And this underlines my challenge. Without method, there will be no self-critical inventory of texts for the historical Jesus level or for the earliest-communities level. But with a proper method, even the interpretation of that inventory will be much more disciplined. An Interdisciplinary Method The hard fact is that we do not have the choice of whether we will use models or not. Our choice, rather, lies in deciding whether to use them consciously or unconsciously…. The most immediate benefit conferred by the use of cross-cultural models is that of inducing a form of “culture shock” in the user…. Models should have the effect of expanding rather than inhibiting one’s sense of the possible in research…. The best one is whichever gets the best results from a particular set of data for a particular problem. Models are only as good as their results. Thomas F. Carney, The Shape of the Past , pp. 5, 16, 37 First, my method is interdisciplinary, applying anthropology, history, archeology, and literary criticism to the same subject. Second, it is interactive, involving the reciprocal interaction of those disciplines with one another. Third, it is hierarchical, moving upward, as it were, from the first to the last of those four disciplines. Fourth, and above all, it involves three stages that I code with the words context, text , and conjunction . Finally, my method begins not with text but with context , as shown in this outline of the process: [image "image" file=Image00025.jpg] The first stage establishes the sharpest possible reconstruction of the context. The second stage establishes the earliest possible layer of the tradition. The third stage establishes the tightest possible linkage between that context and that text.

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

  The reason for this is clear: we lack knowledge of all the other things Jesus said and did that provide the only real context for the interpretation of specific deeds and sayings. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus , p. 130 The third reason is theological, and I propose it in debate with Luke Timothy Johnson’s 1996 book, The Real Jesus . But, precisely to respond to that book, I offer it as a Christian to a fellow Christian and within the specific model of the New Testament gospels themselves. This dispute, however, is also of interest to anyone who has absorbed enough individual dualism to think of spirit-soul residing in body-flesh as in a lovely distracting house, a rundown motel room, or a ghastly prison cell. This is for me the most important reason why historical Jesus research is necessary. I offer it as a challenge within Christian faith, within the Christian canon, and within Christian theology. It is based quite deliberately and conservatively on the nature of the canonical gospels. Luke Timothy Johnson’s book The Real Jesus argued, as its subtitle said, that the “quest for the historical Jesus” was “misguided” and that it denied the “truth of the traditional gospels.” Johnson claimed, first, that the “real” extended far beyond the “historical” and could never be fully or properly grasped by history’s limited strategies. That is absolutely true, but—being true of everyone in general—it is irrelevant for anyone in particular. At a televised debate from New York’s Trinity Institute on May 1, 1996, for example, Johnson said that his own wife exceeded as real what he could know about her as history. Of course, we do not even know our own “real” selves in that omniscient sense. But the term real comes from advertising, not scholarship—Coke is the real thing—and it is calculated to make debate impossible. So, with the stipulation that the reality of any human being far exceeds what can be known publicly or argued historically, I prefer to retire the phrase “real Jesus” and revert to what scholarship has always discussed: the “historical Jesus”—that is, the past Jesus reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse . Johnson claimed, next, that “good historical method” could establish “that Jesus existed as something more than a fictional character—the sheer production of ancient literature interpreting him and referring to him suffices to show that—but we can have confidence about such fundamental issues as the time and place of his activity and the manner of his death, as well as some clues as to the character of his activity” (117, 126). But Johnson then denies validity to “pushing past the framework” he has just advocated and, in the process, negates the possibility not only of historical Jesus reconstruction but, in effect, of all past and even present history. Take that quite representative sentence cited in the epigraph above.

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

  (Amos 8:4–7) Notice the very specific details of those indictments. They are not generalities about practicing justice or about protecting those lacking the normal defenses of family relations and village connections. They get down to commercial transactions in which “smart” landowners or merchants can defraud “dumb” peasants or workers with false weights and measures. The Critique Continues . Amos was not alone in those accusations. In the 250 years from around 750 to 500 B.C.E. , powerful imperialistic states moved westward from Mesopotamia against the Jewish homeland. The resurgent Assyrian Empire destroyed the northern half of the country under Sargon II in 721 B.C.E. After the Assyrians succumbed to the Babylonian Empire, the southern half of the Jewish homeland was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C.E. and its leadership taken into exile around Babylon. But then the Persian Empire captured Babylon in 539 B.C.E. and sent the exiled Jewish aristocracy back to restore their country, capital, Temple, and ancestral law. It is against that long imperial background that we hear the relentless drumbeat of prophetic demand for social justice—that is, for divine justice on earth. The tradition extends from Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah in the second half of the eighth century, through Jeremiah at the end of the seventh century, into Ezekiel and Zechariah at the start and end of the sixth century. Here is a single instance from each of those prophetic voices. Notice that the attack is always from God. The speaker claims not personal viewpoint but divine mandate, based, of course, on covenantal relations and ancient traditions. A trader, in whose hands are false balances, he loves to oppress. Ephraim has said, “Ah, I am rich, I have gained wealth for myself; in all of my gain no offense has been found in me that would be sin.” I am the Lord your God from the land of Egypt; I will make you live in tents again, as in the days of the appointed festival. (Hosea 12:7–9) The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. (Isaiah 3:14–15) They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance…. Should you not know justice?—you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people, and the flesh off their bones; who eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin off them, break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle, like flesh in a caldron. (Micah 2:2; 3:1b–3) Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed.

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

  491–492 Christopher Seeman has raised a terribly obvious but seldom-asked question: Why was it that the Jesus movement emerged in Lower Galilee during the reign of Herod Antipas, rather than at some other time and place? Why in Galilee rather than in Judaea, and why in Lower rather than in Upper Galilee? Why under Antipas rather than under his father, Herod the Great, who ruled from 37 to 4 B.C.E. , or under his half-nephew, Agrippa I, who ruled from 40 to 44 C.E. ? And, since Antipas ruled between 4 B.C.E. and 39 C.E. , why in the late 20s rather than in any other period of that long reign? Why precisely there; why exactly then? Or, broadening Seeman’s question: Why did two movements arise in the late 20s of that first common-era century in the two separated regions of Antipas’s territory: John’s baptism movement in Perea (east of the Jordan) and Jesus’ kingdom-of-God movement in Galilee (to its northwest)? Seeman finds the answer in Antipas’s urbanization program for Lower Galilee: “The political, economic, and demographic consequences of Antipas’ city foundations generated a new social situation for the Galilean peasantry. The Jesus faction emerged in response to that situation, acquiring influence among the peasants by representing their interests” (84). Anthropology, history, and archeology combine to predict some form of peasant resistance in Lower Galilee by the late 20s. It came with John and Jesus. But by the late 60s, the situation was much worse. Josephus, defending his role in Galilee during 66–67 C.E. at the start of the First Roman-Jewish War, tells how the Galilean peasants attacked (or tried to attack) both Sepphoris and Tiberias. Notice this text’s doubled mention of hatred, detestation , and extermination (my italics): I marched with such troops as I had against Sepphoris and took the city by assault. The Galilaeans, seizing this opportunity, too good to be missed, of venting their hatred on one of the cities which they detested , rushed forward, with the intention of exterminating the population, aliens and all. Plunging into the town they set fire to the houses, which they found to be deserted, the terrified inhabitants having fled in a body to the citadel. They looted everything, sparing their countrymen no conceivable form of devastation…. As, however, they refused to listen to either remonstration or command, my exhortations being overborne by their hatred , I instructed some of my friends to circulate a report that the Romans had made their way into another quarter of the city with a large force … that … I might check the fury of the Galilaeans and so save Sepphoris…. Tiberias, likewise, had a narrow escape from being sacked by the Galilaeans …[who] loudly denounced the Tiberians as traitors and friendly to the king [Agrippa II], and [requested] permission to go down and exterminate their city.

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

  The immediate context of the parable is the reign of David as the 1000s turned into the 900s BCE . It was, so the story starts, “the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle” (2 Sam. 11:1); but David, king of Israel, did not lead his army himself. Instead, he ordered his commander, Joab, to attack the Ammonites and besiege their capital city of Rabbah or Rabbath Ammon—today’s Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. From his palace in Jerusalem David saw a beautiful woman bathing on the flat roof of a nearby house. She was “Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite” (11:2–3), a foreign captain serving under Joab before the walls of Rabbah. David had intercourse with Bathsheba, she conceived, and, as so often since, a cover-up causes the plot to thicken—and sicken. David orders Uriah home on leave, gives him a present, and tells him to “go down to his house” and “wash his feet” (11:8). But, out of respect for the rest of the army fighting away from homes and wives, Uriah remains apart from Bathsheba. David then invites him back to eat in the palace and gets him drunk, but still Uriah will not go home to his wife. Finally, David sends Uriah back to the siege and orders Joab to “set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die” (11:15). God’s response is immediate. The prophet Nathan comes to David and tells him this parable of the Poor Man’s Lamb: There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him. (2 Sam. 12:1–4) Although a ruler should always be apprehensive at the approach of a prophet, David walks right into Nathan’s parabolic trap: Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” Nathan said to David, “You are the man!” (2 Sam. 12:5–7a) The rich man took the “one little ewe lamb” of the poor man and therefore, says David, he deserved death.

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

  Later, in 1787, the Founders returned to the problem in setting up a federalist structure for the national government, a sharing of power between the national and state governments, which we inherit. But while the federalism they invented assigned significant powers to the states, in the end the national government had, as it has, ultimate sovereignty—a fundamental fact of American constitutionalism mandated not by the Founders in 1787, who for political reasons had not dared to write absolute national supremacy into the Constitution, but by successive federal judges who saw the inescapable logic of state formation. Two hundred years later, Max Weber, analyzing theoretically the logical structures of political authority, explained that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.… The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.” Hutchinson had written that “it is essential to the being of government that a power should always exist which no other power within such government can have right to withstand or controul.”7 Yet for his insistence on the logic of sovereign power Hutchinson was vilified, charged with denying his fellow colonists the rights that were theirs. But that was a minor charge next to the firestorm of condemnation that fell on him when his views on liberties, written in private letters of 1767–69, were revealed to the public in 1773. That blistering and defining episode, from which Hutchinson’s reputation never recovered, was provoked by Franklin, who obtained the letters in London from an unknown source and then sent them to Boston with instructions to restrict their circulation to a designated few. He knew that they would eventually be published and hoped that they would divert the blame for Britain’s repressive actions from the ministry to a few “very mischievous men” in Boston, led by Hutchinson, who, Franklin and the Boston leaders would claim, had misrepresented the colonies as a community in continuous turmoil, defiant of all law and order and determined to throw off allegiance to Britain. But if that was Franklin’s plan, it succeeded only in part—not in creating a window for conciliation between America and Britain but in destroying Hutchinson’s career and in the process elevating Franklin himself to the status of a patriot hero in America. For what the letters revealed was that in 1768–69 Hutchinson had written privately to a correspondent in England that it was impossible for “a colony 3,000 miles distant from the parent state [to] enjoy all the liberty of the parent state”—that it was simply a matter of fact that there would have to be “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” in America if the tie to Britain were to be retained; and if that tie were lost, the defenseless colonies would be vulnerable to all the predatory powers at work in the world of warring nations and all English liberties would then be lost.8

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

  All of that transformed the whole issue of slavery. But in view of that, the question, it seems, becomes even more insistent: If they came so close to eliminating slavery completely, why did they stop where they did? It does not seem good enough to say that the people who wrote the Constitution were more interested in creating and sustaining the fragile Union than in running the risk of destroying it over the issue of slavery. To suggest that they knew what they were talking about is somehow to exonerate the evil of slavery: it is morally obtuse. This is no casual matter. The attacks on Jefferson over the issue of slavery have escalated astonishingly in recent years, and have overwhelmed him and the other American Founders—hence in a sense the foundations of the American nation—with charges not only of racism but of blatant hypocrisy. So Michael Zuckerman finds that the only explanation of Jefferson’s refusal, as president, to come to the aid of the revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) lay in “his antipathy to black autonomy.” Jefferson and his partisans, Zuckerman writes, could not see beyond their racist scorn for the Haitian revolutionaries and the threat they seemed to pose for white society everywhere. Jefferson, Zuckerman writes, “was a man intellectually undone by his negrophobia … he was ultimately prepared to abandon all else in which he believed—and believed passionately—sooner than surrender his racial repugnances.” No amount of contextual explanation will excuse his behavior, for Jefferson, Zuckerman concludes—going to the heart of the issue—“was not as confined by his culture as his apologists have often claimed.…[H]e was certainly not simply a sufferer of the constraints of his situation.” And Michael Lind, in a furious assault, calls Jefferson “the greatest southern reactionary,” whose tradition naturally and logically culminates in the careers of Theodore Bilbo and Strom Thurmond. “Jefferson was obsessed, in particular, by the fear that his precious Anglo-Saxon nation would be corrupted by intermarriage with nonwhites.… Every major feature of the modern United States—from racial equality to Social Security, from the Pentagon to the suburb—represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.”17 To suggest that Jefferson and his generation of Anglo-American reformers—radical but pragmatic idealists whose reforms transformed the world—were confronting without precedent or guidance the problem of racial differences in a theoretically egalitarian society, and that they were struggling with the related dilemma of bondage, an immemorial condition, in a free society, evokes Zuckerman’s bitterest condemnation. The fact that as he aged Jefferson sought increasingly to throw off the racist assumptions he had inherited, writing only six years after the Haitian crisis that blacks “are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family”—all of that pales next to what Zuckerman and others consider to have been Jefferson’s “negrophobia.”

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

  This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” That explicit rephrasing and direct application underlines what is evident in John the Baptist’s sermon when it is taken by itself and apart from its present location in the gospel sequence. John was not talking about Jesus at all but rather about the imminent advent of the avenging apocalyptic God. That cataclysmic advent is imagined with two powerful images, behind both of which stands the threat of fire. God as the Coming One is first like a forester with an ax separating good trees from bad and then like a thresher separating grain from chaff. For John’s fiery vision there are only two categories, the good and the bad, and the time is very short to decide in which category one intends to live and die. Exactly what Josephus predictably suppresses about John the Baptist is what we find about him in the gospel stories despite their own rather different theological interests in turning John into the herald of Jesus. John was an apocalyptic preacher announcing, in classical Jewish tradition, the imminent advent of an avenging God and not, like Josephus, the imminent advent of an imperial conqueror. But we still need to know more about the wilderness, the Jordan, and the connection between baptizing and remitting sins. For that we go back to Josephus once more. The Apocalyptic Drummer I have already mentioned something about the mythological trappings of the Augustan age as great poetry wrapped the new imperial reality in a mantle of ancient glory and manifest destiny. Recall those famous lines from Virgil’s Aeneid 6.851–853: Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law , To spare the conquered, battle down the proud . Now think, for a moment, how that looked from the other side, from below, from the viewpoint of the pacified, the conquered, and the battled down. Read the magnificent speech created, to his great and abiding honor, by the aristocratic Roman historian Tacitus in the Agricola 30, a biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, governor of Britain between 77 and 84 C.E . The rebel general Calgacus describes the Roman Empire just before his fatal encounter with its military might in northeastern Scotland: Robbers of the world, now that earth fails their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea: if their enemy have wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; East nor West has glutted them; alone of mankind they covet with the same passion want [poor lands] as much as wealth [rich lands]. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.

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

  As he put it, bluntly and brutally, “The great majority of the political elite sought to use the energies of the peasantry to the full, while depriving them of all but the basic necessities of life.”* Bryan R. Wilson’s Magic and the Millennium adds in a typology of peasant resistance among tribal and Third World peoples.** From among the various types he proposes, the two mentioned in his title receive maximum emphasis. They represent for me the options of, respectively, Jesus and John the Baptist. Jesus uses magic , or thaumaturgy, if you prefer a euphemism, but the only objective distinction between magic and religion is that we have religion while they have magic. Magic is especially a term that upper-class religion uses to denigrate its lower-class counterpart. Finally, there is the work of James C. Scott, which I cited earlier when discussing the peasant dream of radical egalitarianism. The epigraph of the present chapter, taken from one of his books, and the title of this section, taken from another, Domination and the Arts of Resistance , bring up another very important component of the overall model.*** The resistance of any oppressed people does not begin with revolt, although that is usually the point where oppressors first notice the problem. Imagine peasant resistance like a giant iceberg. Most of it is covert, hidden below the surface, and not visible at all to the elites against which it is carefully aimed. Scott speaks of covert resistance as material , such as feigned dumbness or deliberate laziness; formal , such as tales of revenge or rituals of aggression; and ideological , such as millennial religions, myths of heroic banditry, or world-upside-down images. We know, thanks to the powerful studies of Richard A. Horsley during the 1980s, that in the first-century Jewish homeland there were, on the overt level, such open reactions as the activities of unarmed protesters or armed bandits (about which more will be said in the next chapter) and of apocalyptic or millennial prophets and royal or messianic claimants; the latter two groups we have seen already. Such overt reactions, precisely because they are open and obvious, are usually recorded by elite observers, for example, the aristocratic Josephus. But overt resistance is always but the tip of the aforementioned iceberg, capping the mass of covert resistance without which oppressed individuals or peoples would have no human dignity, no reason to move or explode into the more overt types, which are all that get recorded by history. In Ireland, for instance, where the native Irish aristocracy had been forced into exile centuries before and replaced by a British ascendancy, there is the following legendary story. Lost English huntsman to Irish peasant in late-nineteenth-century Donegal: “Did the gentry pass this way, my good man?” “They did that, your honor.” “How long ago?” “About three hundred years ago, your honor.” That, too, is resistance—very small, relatively safe, but repeatable as story over and over again.

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

  Is it not part of an interpreter’s job to define that “somehow” as closely as possible and not simply to repeat, as if repetition were somehow explanation? It is certainly possible to reconcile a here-now and still-imminent kingdom, because that is precisely the position of Paul, and it is quite clear why he holds to it. Believing already as a Pharisee in the general resurrection at the end of time, he came to believe that the resurrection of Jesus had begun that process. Jesus was “the first fruits of those who have died,” as he said in 1 Corinthians 15:20. He was the beginning of the apocalyptic harvest, the start of the end (but not the end itself). By divine mercy, to leave time for Gentile repentance and salvation, the eschaton was not an abrupt instant but a short period. Paul’s theology of an end already started but not yet completed is perfectly clear and consistent. What, then, is Jesus’ understanding of the end as already here but still imminent? Meier is very much aware that “somehow” is not enough and that he owes his readers at least an attempted explanation. He offers three excuses, and I find their tone as significant as their content. He is more and more truculent as he moves across these three refusals to explain Jesus’ coming-soon-but-here-already eschatology. First, “the kingdom of God that [Jesus] proclaims for the future is in some sense already present. How this coheres—or whether it coheres—with what Jesus says about the kingdom soon to come remains an open question. But that further problem should not lead us to suppress or twist some of the evidence that creates the problem, all for the sake of a neat systematization that was not a major concern of Jesus” (2.423). Second, Meier claims that Jesus saw an “organic link between his own ministry in the present and the full coming of God’s eschatological rule in the near future.” But, he continues, “in my view this is all that we can say. To go beyond this minimal explanation of the kingdom present yet future is to leave exegesis and engage in systematic theology” (2.453). Third, Meier advances three times the excuse or explanation that I take as the primary one: the excuse used as the epigraph for this section. I find it not only unconvincing but condescending. The three repetitions he offers are shown here in fuller context. A first time: “Recently some critics have objected that a kingdom both future and present is an intolerable contradiction in terms. One might reply that the Semitic minds behind a good part of our biblical literature were not overly troubled by our Western philosophical principle of noncontradiction” (2:11). A second time: “[T]he kingdom that [Jesus] promised for the near future was paradoxically, in some strange way, already present in his work. To some modern minds such a paradox may seem an intolerable contradiction….

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

  They might argue, to use the three terms from above, that high priesthood and Temple now constituted infidelity and/or injustice and/or impurity. It was, in that situation, quite possible to attack the Temple itself in the name of purity itself. First, then, first-century Jews could disagree with one another on where the lines between fidelity, justice, and purity should be located. Was tolerating an imperial taxation-census so acknowledging the lordship of Caesar that it negated the Lordship of God? And if so, what should be done about it? Second, such disagreements could range from irenic debate through heated dispute to lethal attack. And disagreements could occur between sects or within factions of the same sect. In factional debates within Christian Judaism, Paul accused Peter of “hypocrisy” at Antioch in Galatians 2:13. I take it for granted that we do not accept that as a fair description of Peter (or of the peripherally accused Barnabas or James, for that matter). But have we seriously considered that Peter rather than Paul might have been right in that dispute? Have we considered how we would have adjudicated such a claim? Invective does not define character. Polemic does not describe program. They simply mark unfinished business. In sectarian debates, Christian Jews attacked Pharisaic Jews. There is only a single, secure criticism in the Common Sayings Tradition, On Hindering Others (Appendix 1A: #16). But it escalates to bitter invective and sevenfold woe in the Q Gospel at Luke 11:39–52. By Matthew 23, those woes have further escalated with a constant accusation of hypocrisy in 23:13, 15, 23, 25, 27, and 29. That polemical crescendo charts the increasing alienation of Christian Jews over against Pharisaic Jews but tells us nothing, of course, about Pharisaic programs, motives, or intentions. Neither does it help us assess fairly the relative merits of each position within first-century options or twentieth-century traditions. All such name-calling, no matter how bitter, is intra-Jewish strife in the heated atmosphere of imperial divide-and-conquest policy. It is absolutely important, after two thousand years of Christian anti-Judaism and the final obscenity of European anti-Semitism, to emphasize that point as strongly as possible. It is terribly too late to do so, but it must still be done over and over again, not to be polite, ecumenical, or politically correct, but simply, at long last, to be accurate, ethical, and truthful. Once those first two points—that first-century Jews could disagree with one another on definitions of righteousness, and that such disagreements could range from irenic debate through heated dispute to lethal attack—are firmly established, a third and most important one becomes clear. The Jewish God, and the Christian God insofar as we have not changed gods, is a God of justice by nature and character, not just by will and command. This God could be no other, and that is what Psalm 82 is all about.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But she doesn’t collapse in operatic weeping like she’s done in the past. Which is strange. She seems very still as she pats the side of the futon. She says, Sit down next to me. I’m not in the mood to cuddle and say so. Her eyes are cloudy as an ancient oracle’s. She says, I’ve made amends to you, Mary. Best I could. And that’s it? You’re sober now. I zero out your account. You want to get mad at me, she says, knock yourself out. I don’t want to get mad, Mother, I say. I am fucking mad. Well, get it off your chest, she says. So I do, pacing up and down, ranting like a Pentecostal preacher while she sits in a Buddha-esque pose studying me. Finally, I float into place next to her like a soggy balloon. She stubs out the end of her smoke and looks at me with her misted eyes. She actually shrugs. What will you have me do? she asks. There’s nothing she can do. I say so. After getting sober, you’re supposed to make up to people you’d plowed over. Mother’s sorry occupies two sentences: You know all that stuff that happened when you were little? I’m sorry about that. She doesn’t risk a joke, but I see mischief in her, some bemusement. It’s disarming about Mother, her ability to laugh at the wrong instant. Just stay sober, I say. Plus keep your grandson for one fucking hour without it being a federal case. It interferes with my serenity, she says. Lecia had gone through a similar fight where she’d told Mother, You don’t cook. You don’t clean. You haven’t had a job in forty years. What exactly do you bring to the party? The way Lecia told it, Mother had looked puzzled. She’d actually cocked her head like she was trying to remember her purpose on the planet and had finally, confidently, popped out with: I’m a lot of fun to be with. I remind her of that, saying, So what do I get? You’re a lot of fun to be with ? Basically, she says. Or look at it this way: Maybe I left you a lot of good stories to write about. Maybe you’ll make your fortune on me. Or my misfortune. Poets don’t make fortunes. Don’t be so sure, kid. I’ve been praying about it for you. I won’t inhale and hold it, I say. You know what I pray’ll happen for you? It better involve money. That you’ll get this program. For God’s sake, Mother, stop proselytizing for one day. I’m not gonna be your cliché-spouting recovery acolyte. Some kind of spiritual discipline might free you from some of this anger…. I stomp upstairs, slamming the bathroom door behind me. Mother preaching to me about discipline is more than I can abide. But over the weeks she’s with us, I can’t refute how calm she seems; funny, too—an equanimity I’ve never seen—patience, even.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  38 Lord of the Flies All men would be tyrants if they could. —Daniel Defoe One winter afternoon, waiting for Dev to come home through the snow, I hear a thrash of banging against the storm door. Running out from the kitchen, I see him fumbling with the outside handle as snowballs splatter around him. I yank open the door, and the kids scatter like mice. Dev’s cheeks are sopping and crimson, which only makes his black-lashed blue eyes brighter. They’re fixed in outrage, staring past me. When I ask how many kids there are and he tells me five, I have to stop myself from busting out the door to chase the little bastards down. Over cups of cocoa, we sit in the tiny kitchen, and he says, Why is this happening to me? in a voice so wholly exhausted, he might have been sixty. With his spoon, he’s fishing the sodden marshmallow off his cocoa. Because, I say, children are childish. You’re new to school, relatively. They’ve all grown up together. You’re the obvious choice. He stuffs the marshmallow in his mouth and ponders this before asking, Why would God let this happen? The question—the same I’d dwelled on in the past—maybe shows the effects of our nightly prayers. Because, I say, when you grow up, you’re gonna be so smart and good-looking that if something bad didn’t happen to you now, you’d be a jerk then— one of those snotty kids who thinks he’s all that. Like Dan. I’m thinking specifically of Dan, I say (I barely know who Dan is). Dev picks at the foam atop his cocoa, saying, Dan knows karate. He only invited the cool kids to his birthday. He studies the cocoa as if it were tea leaves foretelling the soggiest future. I get up and place a skillet on the stove for another supper of scrambled eggs. After a while he says, There are so many of them. I mean, the snowballs just kept coming. Isn’t there a teacher or grown-up you can appeal to at school? They act like they’re my friends in school. Then they start chasing me. I offer to start picking him up again, and he pins me with a tired look. I’m not a baby, he says. All the other kids walk home. I know, I know. Okay. We sit there listening to the wind make the windowpanes shudder. You know, I say, some people think when somebody slaps you, you should turn the other cheek. He says, face still chapped scarlet, I only have two cheeks. That night, tucking him in, I tell him how I’d been the littlest kid in my neighborhood, and because I skipped a grade and had a propensity to mouth off, they beat me up all the time. I say, You know your grandpa Pete always told me to bite them. This strikes Dev as hilarious. He says, He wanted you to bite them?

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

  I think it quite possible that Jesus went to Jerusalem only once and that the spiritual and economic egalitarianism he preached in Galilee exploded in indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of all that was nonegalitarian, patronal, and even oppressive on both the religious and the political level. Jesus’ symbolic destruction simply actualized what he had already said in his teachings, effected in his healings, and realized in his mission of open commensality. But the confined and tinderbox atmosphere of the Temple at Passover, especially under Pilate, was not the same as the atmosphere in the rural reaches of Galilee, even under Antipas, and the soldiers moved in immediately to arrest him. James the Just If you think Jesus went regularly to Jerusalem, you must explain why something happened in the Temple only that one time. If you think, like I do, that he went there only once, you must explain why he went there that one time. There are two connections between Jesus and Jerusalem apart from any pilgrimage relations with the Temple. One is his relationship with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus at Bethany, on Jerusalem’s outskirts. Please do not think I am imagining Jesus going there to raise Lazarus from the dead; you have already seen how I interpret that narrative. But that family is very special. It is a family of siblings; we never hear of a father or mother . How did Jesus know this family? Where did he meet them? Does that relationship have anything to do with his presence in Jerusalem that one time? There is another and more significant possibility that takes us back to James the brother of Jesus. Josephus tells us about the execution of James, in Antiquities 20.197–203 (my italics): Upon learning of the death of Festus, Caesar sent Albinus to Judaea as procurator. The king removed Joseph from the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to this office upon the son of Ananus, who was likewise called Ananus…. The younger Ananus…was rash in his temper and unusually daring. He followed the school of the Sadducees, who are indeed more heartless than any of the other Jews…when they sit in judgement. Possessed of such a character, Ananus thought that he had a favourable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step, to order him to desist from any further such actions.

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

  INTERLUDE FOR AN EXAMPLE Lest those multiplied quotations seem too abstract, I pause to give one concrete example of what they are talking about. I do not, by the way, find anything romantically wonderful about peasant revolt or rural terrorism. But neither do I find anything romantically wonderful about the imperial exploitation that breeds those acts. Brutality brutalizes. The case is taken from Michael Beames’s fascinating study of Peasants and Power . The time and place is early-nineteenth-century Ireland in the decades between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the Great Famine. In those years there was “a gradual process by which external pressures were forcing the Irish peasantry onto smaller and more insecure holdings with the eventual threat of descent into a rural lumpenproletariat” of beggary and/or banditry (127). That external pressure was commercialization or land-jobbing. “‘Land jobbers’ viewed land as a commodity to be acquired and held according to commercial criteria. Whiteboys [rural rebels], on the other hand, regarded it not only as an essential means of subsistence but the resource around which peasant social relationships were based and thus something over which the peasantry had a right to exercise control” (137–138). The response to that external pressure, across the country, was rural terrorism involving various groups with different names in different places; but the term Whiteboys became the generic name for violent resistance involving, first, warning or threat, and then, if that failed, arson or assassination. Ireland was, in those years, a legally constituted part of Great Britain, so various British commissions were assigned to solve that situation. We thus have the records of diverse individuals giving testimony about those events and can actually hear the voices of the peasantry itself. The following statements from three different people (recorded by the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland in 1836 and cited in Beames [126–127]) give a glimpse of their sense of moral outrage: [A County Galway laborer named Ward:] And it’s that that makes men disturbed and unlawful when they see themselves, and them that are about them, turned adrift in the world; it is that that brings “Terries” [Whiteboys] into the country. They may as well take my life when they have taken my land; what’s an existence without a place (i.e. a holding). [A County Galway laborer named Byrne:] About three years ago a man who had held a farm eight or nine years, and had paid his rent up to the last farthing, was turned out, though he offered the same rent, as the man that was put in his place.

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

  It does not mention the bad times of famine and disease, invasion and war. The Jewish peasants who lived from one hundred years before to one hundred years after Jesus, from the 60s B.C.E. to the 130s C.E. , knew bad times more often than good. CHAPTER 10THE PROBLEM OF METHODOLOGYIn my opinion, research aiming to be innovative should not be bound by strict, predetermined rules. Indeed, although the claim coming from someone born in Hungary, educated in Belgium and France and citizen of the United Kingdom by naturalization only, may strike a faintly amusing note, I pride myself on being a true British pragmatist. Methodology, no doubt irrationally, makes me see red perhaps because more than once I have been rebuked by trans-Atlantic dogmatists for illegitimately arriving at the right conclusion, following a path not sanctioned by my critics’ sacred rule book. Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew , p. 7 In the sentence before the quoted passage, Vermes mentions the “grandiloquent, but highly fashionable, label of methodology .” There is, however, nothing particularly strange about methodology in either term or concept. Method is how you do something. Methodology is why you do it that way rather than some other way. Methodology is simply the theory or logic of your method. It is the normal due-process of public discourse. I have been publishing on the historical Jesus since 1969. In all that time, I have worked on two fronts simultaneously, studying both materials and methods. On materials, I have studied parables and aphorisms as well as intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. On methods, I started with historical criticism, next incorporated literary criticism, and finally added macrosociological criticism to form an integrated interdisciplinary model. When I finally published The Historical Jesus in 1991, I intended not just to present another reconstruction of Jesus but to inaugurate a full-blown debate on methodology among my peers. I spent no time debating other views of Jesus because, without methodology, method, and inventory, one view was as valid as the other. If you can pick what you want, you will get what you need. There still is no serious discussion of methodology in historical Jesus research, and the same applies to the birth of Christianity. That does not make me very proud of myself and my scholarly colleagues. Lest that seem a little extreme, I offer one immediate example of that avoidance of methodological discussion. In 1994 Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans edited a massive and very useful survey of current research on the historical Jesus. It ran to over six hundred pages and, published by Brill of Leiden, cost around $175. It covers every obvious subject with very helpful discussion and very complete documentation. It covers every obvious subject, that is, except one: there is no chapter on method or methodology. I am not certain whether that lack indicts the volume or current scholarship. There is, after all, very little methodological scholarship in historical Jesus research to evaluate or survey.