Awe

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Not long after, Dev jumps the communion line—his first show of appetite for baptism. While I’m thumbing my missal, his pal Osiris crooks a finger and Dev shoots out of the pew. I lean forward to grab his sleeve, but he jerks away. The line edges up. I hiss at him to sit down, and he ignores me. Once the line curves, I lose sight of him till both boys pop up at the altar. Before the priest, Dev stands slim and solemn. I think how ancestors on both sides of his family sought this sacrament, which is painfully carnal if you think of it. The body of the god is absorbed by the human body to nourish the spirit. Dev’s mouth pops open wide as a baby bird’s. Afterward, the boys plop down beside me whispering, their hands busy. What obscene gestures, I wonder, are they practicing? But I crane over to catch them in the middle of that old hand game: Here’s the church. Here’s the steeple. Open the door and see all the people. The game’s been passed down for decades, one kid teaching another how to bear long, adult-prescribed intervals of inertia—a lineage I belong to. While the priest speaks and the responses come out, I feel myself as an animal herded among similar animals—an echo of the homeless shelter. I think how horses in the Colorado of my youth—huddled together in the cold. At one point parishioners call out their intentions, people they want prayers said for. For my daughter whose tumor has metastasized. For the refugees from Bosnia and Rwanda. In gratitude for the safe return of my mother from Ireland… Catholics aren’t who I thought they’d be, not even close. It isn’t the ritual of the high Mass that impresses me, but the people—their collective surrender. If I can’t do reverence to that, how dead are my innards? Within a week or two, it’s turning out that I forget to bring a paperback to Mass, so obviously, I’m not just coming for Dev anymore. It’s historical interest, I tell myself, when I start reading all manner of theology. When a married couple—he a former Jesuit, she once a nun—invite me to the Peace and Social Justice Committee, I stumble onto the lay tradition of working with the poor and against political tyranny. (I know, historically, plenty of Catholics worked for tyranny.) They protest nuclear arms and host refugees from Haiti and El Salvador. Every Sunday they have some batch of parolees who need jobs, or welfare moms looking for baby clothes. Plus they argue like mad. Say what you will about Catholic dogma, like it or lump it, it sure gets people yakking it up. I confess to this couple that Jesus Himself seems sappy—a chump or fool. For all my pretense of practicing surrender, I can’t grasp signing up for crucifixion.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registered—peeking from the top of your saggy jeans—the orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid. Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episode—the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming. You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about it—a healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you. It was kind of crazy, you said. You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras . I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell. Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood. This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs . You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you . Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over. I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through. It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy. She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isn’t that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo. Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mother’s Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine —a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing. Don’t you love that? she says. It’s silly, but I love it. I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women.

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

  The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”… And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” Message of the angels to the Virgin Mary at Nazareth and to the shepherds at Bethlehem (Luke 1:31–35 and 2:10–11) The Trojan Caesar Comes Twice within a hundred years, on different shores of that cruel and beautiful Mediterranean Sea, a man was acclaimed son of god when alive and, more simply, god when dead. Octavius, however, stood at the height of the Roman aristocracy, Jesus near the bottom of the Jewish peasantry. No surprise, then, that for the former’s life story we have exact dates and precise places, and for the latter’s, neither. Gaius Octavius was born on 23 September 63 B.C.E . and became the adopted son and legal heir of Julius Caesar, who was assassinated on 15 March 44 B.C.E . After Caesar’s deification by the Roman Senate on 1 January 42 B.C.E ., Octavius became immediately divi filius , son of a divine one. But even where those secure dates were easily available, it took mythology over history, faith over fact, and poetry over chronicle to tell the tale of Octavius becoming Augustus. As early as 40 B.C.E ., after a decade of civil war, the poet Virgil wrote rhapsodically in his Fourth Eclogue of an imagined child newly born into a world newly peaceful as Octavius and Anthony were sealing future friendship at Brundisium, on the heel of Italy. This was to be that child’s future in a world of ecstatic peace: But when maturing years make you a man , Even the merchant will give up the sea , The pine will not become a trading ship , For every land will furnish everything . The soil will not endure the hoe, nor vines The pruning hook; the vigorous plowman will Release his oxen from their yokes; no dyes Will teach bright-colored falsehood to pure wool : The ram, in the meadow by himself, will blush Sweet crimson murex-color, then will change His fleece to saffron, while, spontaneously , Vermilion clothes the young lambs as they graze . But apart completely from such an ideal vision, even ordinary, everyday, normal peace would not arrive for another decade, when, off Actium, on Greece’s western coast, Cleopatra’s battle flotilla would pick up the defeated Anthony and head home to Alexandria and the asp. Virgil, combining magnificently musical poetry with consummately political propaganda, moved immediately to give Octavius and his Julian heritage a mythological genealogy worthy of the new Roman order.

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

  So too Namier’s Structure of Politics emerged from a vast mass of new data—whole archives of letters and memos of the managers of patronage, the “men of business” who served the great public figures, and the party whips and local shire and borough managers from whose intricate maneuverings a mosaic could be constructed of the pattern of political influence. The key documents are the Newcastle Papers—371 volumes of correspondence and notes in the so-called Additional MSS then in the British Museum which Namier studied for the period of his interest microscopically. His sensitive response to this documentation comes out clearly in every page of his major books. He cannot cease quoting, and quoting at length, even in his biographical studies of George III and Charles Townsend. And as for Syme—his control of the prosopographical sources is simply staggering. He seems to have memorized the entire corpus of German scholarship on family ties among the Roman elite. Without the prosopographical work of Friedrich Münzer, he wrote in the preface of The Roman Revolution, “this book could hardly have existed.” And beyond that, he went through the whole of classical literature plus official records such as the consular fasti, the inscriptions and archaeological data, with a mind capable of total recall and powerfully magnetized to any scrap of data that would show some tie among individuals, some clue to clientelae, and that would explain behavior. Thus, oriented to contexts of the past and immersed in great arrays of data never used in so concentrated a form by historians before, these historians begin their reconstructions. Reacting innocently, as it were, to the new documentation; alert to surprises; their minds skinned open and sensitive to the minutiae of the data, to any peculiarity, anomaly, oddity that might appear—to anything that does not explain itself—they start to recompose the world. Certain repetitions of words strike them as significant. For Miller: “covenant,” “preparation.” For Syme, clientela, factio—words whose repetition suddenly makes them crucial to the discussion. Once passed over lightly as commonplace in the documents, they now seem to leap out from the pages, their recurrence the evidence of a meaning previously unknown.

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

  It may be conducted privately so that nobody else knows about it or done publicly so that everyone knows about it. It may be practiced in small caves within the emptiness of the desert or lived behind high walls in the midst of the city. Because it involves celibacy, if enough people accepted the ascetic vision, this human world would quite surely and definitely come to an end. Ascetical eschatology postulates a divine vocation and; indeed, requires constant divine empowerment to be humanly tolerable. I myself was a monk for twenty years in a Roman Catholic medieval order, and it was understood that, during the first-year novitiate, one would not be allowed home for any family funerals. Even a parent’s funeral belonged “to the world,” and we no longer did. We were “out of this world.” That was in 1950, and observance was strict. (In 1951, coming from Ireland to the United States, I was sent on the first berth available. It happened to be second-class on the Queen Mary . That too was out of this world.) There are many different explanations for the need for ascetical eschatology. The world could be intrinsically evil as the product of an evil creator. It could have become evil because of human injustice. It could be good but simply inferior to higher realities. The material world and the physical body could be taken as distractions to mind, soul, or spirit. Though reasons and explanations can differ, even fundamentally, the lifestyle of celibate asceticism remains the same. One withdraws from the world’s normalcy by abstaining totally from sex and procreation and abstemiously from food or drink and from speech or conversation. Ethical eschatology (or ethicism ) negates the world by actively protesting and nonviolently resisting a system judged to be evil, unjust, and violent. It is not a question of this group or that government needing some changes or improvements. Ethical eschatology is directed at the world’s normal situation of discrimination and violence, exploitation and oppression, injustice and unrighteousness. It looks at the systemic or structural evil that surrounds and envelops us all and, in the name of God, refuses to cooperate or participate any longer in that process. Instead, it sets out to oppose systemic evil without succumbing to its own violence. In ethicism, as distinct from apocalypticism, God is waiting for us to act. And in ethicism, as distinct from apocalypticism, God is not a violent God. Ethicism is present wherever nonviolent resistance to structural evil appears in this world. And the courage for it derives from union with transcendental nonviolence. It was present, for example, in these two cases from before and after the ministry of Jesus: Unarmed Jews gathered before the prefect Pilate at the Roman headquarters in Caesarea, probably in 26 or 27 C.E. , to protest his introduction of imperial images on military standards into Jerusalem.

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

  By the start of that century, after twenty years of savage civil war, the Roman Empire had shifted its paradigm from a republic ruled by two aristocrats in office for only a year to a monarchy ruled by one dynasty in control for as long as possible. That is political paradigm shift writ large. By the end of that same century, after eight years of class warfare and colonial revolt, the Jewish homeland was devastated, Jerusalem and its great Temple were destroyed, and leadership had shifted its paradigm from Temple, priest, and sacrifice to Torah, rabbi, and study. That is religious paradigm shift writ large. In between those Roman and Judean revolutions came the Galilean revolution inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. Compared to those social earthquakes, his seemed at first but a minor surface tremor. But that is often how seismic disturbances start. In the religio-political world, Jesus was a master paradigm shifter, a supreme tradition troubler, and, for some, a divine outlier. Think, to begin with, of the following example of Jesus’s visionary challenge to his contemporary Judaism. In 1995, John J. Collins, then professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School, published The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature . Apart from minor, special, or even sectarian visions of God’s messianic agent, there was, he proposed, this standard common expectation: This concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of Israel and institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the era. There was a dominant notion of a Davidic messiah, as the king who would restore the kingdom of Israel, which was part of the common Judaism around the turn of the era.* But, since much of the New Testament was part of the “other ancient [Jewish] literature” in his book title, how does it see Jesus as God’s messianic agent? In an early comment, as striking as it is passing, Collins notes: Although the claim that he [Jesus of Nazareth] is the Davidic messiah is ubiquitous in the New Testament, he does not fit the typical profile of the Davidic messiah. This messiah was, first of all, a warrior prince, who was to defeat the enemies of Israel.† In summary, therefore, the interpretation of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah within the “Christian,” that is, “messianic,” New Testament is atypical with the common consensus on that figure in its contemporary environment. That is a paradigm shift, a revolutionary change, a swerve within the Jewish popular consensus of its time and place. THIS OVERTURE SERVES TO introduce the four governing questions for this chapter. First, what was the general biblical tradition of God’s kingdom before the time of Jesus? Next, why is that tradition described by scholars as eschatological and apocalyptic? What, in other words, is meant by an apocalyptically eschatological kingdom of God?

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

  The essays are reprinted as they first appeared except for minor revisions, omissions for sharper focus and greater clarity, and the reduction of references to the immediate occasions. Identification of the place and date of the original publications and the annotation appear in the back matter. In a few cases, I have added to the endnotes, in brackets, brief comments on how the subject has developed in the years that followed the appearance of the essays. B.B. PART ONE On History and the Struggle to Get It Right 1 Considering the Slave Trade History and Memory* I have been wondering about some way to express the importance of the Du Bois Institute slave trade database. Perhaps by analogy. Astronomers knew of the vast range of cosmic phenomena before the Hubble Space Telescope existed, but that extraordinarily perceptive eye, coursing freely above the earth’s atmosphere, has led to a degree of precision and a breadth of vision never dreamed of before and has revealed, and continues to reveal, not only new information but also new questions never broached before. So the Du Bois slave trade database, with its tracings of 27,233 Atlantic slave trade voyages, three-quarters of which succeeded in disembarking slaves in the Americas, representing more than two-thirds of all Atlantic slave voyages, has made possible a precision and breadth of documentation in the history of the African diaspora no one had thought possible before and raises a host of new questions.

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

  EXCAVATING RUBBISH DUMPS At the end of the third century, Oxyrhynchus, 250 miles south of Alexandria, west of the Nile, on the edge of the Libyan desert, was a walled city with five gates, a theater that seated 11,200 spectators, and the honorific title of “illustrious and most illustrious.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Oxyrhynchus—modern El Bahnasa—was, in the words of Eric Turner, “a waste of rubbish mounds and deep-blown sand …[a] pillaged and wrecked site, where buildings had been quarried for stone down to their foundations and their position was marked, if at all, by no more than lines of chips in the sand” (1952:80). To this site in 1896 the newly created Graeco-Roman Account of London’s Egypt Exploration Fund sent two Oxford University archeologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell (1869–1926) and Arthur Surridge Hunt (1871–1934), in very deliberate search of papyri. They dug trenches twenty-five feet deep through those ancient rubbish dumps and excavated for six seasons, one in 1896–1897, the rest between 1903 and 1907. The vast hoard of papyri they discovered, among them fragments from three different Greek copies of the Gospel of Thomas , is still under slow but steady publication in volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri , now numbering over fifty and counting. They were racing against other diggers, the Egyptian peasants who used that papyrus-enriched earth to fertilize their gardens and fields. Fifty years later and another 250 miles south along the Nile, such diggers found the Nag Hammadi codices in a sealed jar buried beneath the Nile-side cliffs. That race between scholar-diggers and farmer-diggers has been amusingly described by the British poet and dramatist Tony Harrison in a 1988 play titled The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus . One of the Grenfell and Hunt papyri contained about half of a lost comedy by Sophocles called The Trackers . Harrison remade those four hundred broken lines creatively for a one-performance world premiere in the stadium at Delphi in Greece. He did so by writing Grenfell and Hunt, trackers of papyri, and the Egyptian fellaheen, trackers of fertilizer (sebakh) , into the fragmented play about the satyrs, trackers of Apollo’s lost lyre. He put these words on Grenfell’s lips (1990:10): Papyri! Insects gnaw them. Time corrodes and native plants get potted in a mulch of Pindar’s Odes! Horrible to contemplate! How can a person sleep while Sophocles is rotting on an ancient rubbish heap? Our fellaheen, though, are not entirely sure if Menander’s not more use to them as manure! They ferret for fertilizer, and Hunt and I track for philosophy and drama in nitrogenous sebakh . Spinach now flourishes from the pulped-up roll that held still hidden secrets of Sappho’s soul. All diggers and trackers have, no doubt, their own integrity and validity, but the “crate after crate” and “load after load” that Grenfell and Hunt shipped back to England may stand here as introduction and background to my present focus on format and style in the earliest Christian papyri.

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

  (Sirach 24:9) For she [Wisdom] is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. (Wisdom 7:26) Hold together creation, wisdom, light , and image , reread the creation account in Genesis 1:1–2:2 against that background, and apply those readings to Jesus and to Christians. God begins, in Genesis 1:3, by saying, “‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” So Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas 77:1, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.” God ends his creative proclamations, in Genesis 1:26–27, by saying, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and the story concludes, in Genesis 2:2, with these words: “[O]n the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” So the Gospel of Thomas 50 can present a small catechetical summary of Christian existence derived from God, light, image, and rest: Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’” (Gospel of Thomas 50:1–3) But what about Genesis 2–3? What about the story of the first sin, the fall, and the expulsion from Eden? To get back to that inaugural moment of creation, of wisdom and light, of motion and rest, you would have to get back before the story of the fall. It would be necessary to get back before sin—better still even earlier, before that androgynous being called Adam-the-Earthling was split into Adam-the-male and Eve-the-female. It was that primal and as-yet-undivided being who was made in God’s image. It was those split beings, Adam and Eve, who sinned, fell, and were expelled from paradise. The ideal state imagined by the Gospel of Thomas is that of the primordial human being, Adam as one, as single and unsplit, as neither male nor female, as asexual. First came split, thence came the sexes, thence came sin. The Gospel of Thomas is about returning to that inaugural moment at the dawn of creation, before sin, before serpent, before split. It is about paradise regained from the past, not about parousia awaited in the future. Sapiential or Gnostic . All of the preceding discussion is absolutely within the realm of Jewish wisdom speculation focused on cosmic origins as told in Genesis 1–3 and now applied to Jesus and Christians. Stevan Davies is perfectly right to emphasize that background, and nobody has done it better than he has.

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

  We had little doubt that this was the gate Josephus called the gate of the Essenes…. The socket, in which the wings of the gate turned, remains in situ , perfectly round and smooth, suggesting that the bottom of the hinge was made of metal. The Gate of the Essenes was destroyed in 70 C.E. when Titus’ Roman legionnaires razed Jerusalem” (27, 29). That gate “must have been inserted into an already existing wall” (27), and there are indications that the work was done by Roman engineers working for Herod the Great, possibly as early as 30 B.C.E. “To construct the gate, builders made a breach in the existing wall. Then they dug a sewage channel (discovered by Bliss [in the 1890s]) that ran along a street leading from the interior of the city and emptied into the Hinnom Valley, south of Mount Zion. Limestone slabs of fine workmanship cover the channel as it passes beneath the gateway. When the doyen of Israeli archaeologists, the late Benjamin Mazar, visited us, he remarked that only the workmen of Herod the Great [37 B.C.E. to 4 C.E. ] were likely to have achieved such stonecutting perfection” (28). There is one final fascinating point. Pixner asks the obvious topographical question: “Who would have built a gate at this unlikely location, on the shoulder of a ravine descending into the Hinnom Valley, atop a hill so steep that the gate could only be reached on foot?” (31). Why was a gate added precisely there? Recall that, as Josephus described the southern leg of that old first wall, it went “past the place called Bethso to the gate of the Essenes” (Jewish War 5.145). Where or what is Bethso? “Since the 19th century,” says Pixner, “most scholars have agreed that the term ‘Bethso’ derives from the Hebrew beth-soa , or latrines” (84). At this point some background is necessary, to help us place this new information. It is very significant background, because it warns those of us thinking from viewpoints in Hellenistic asceticism or Christian monasticism that Jewish Essenism is not exactly either of those phenomena. There was this traditional law for the desert encampments as Israel journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land: You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God travels along with your camp, to save you and to hand over your enemies to you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you. (Deuteronomy 23:12–14) The Essenes applied that law to their camp communities, to Qumran as substitute Jerusalem, and, of course, to Jerusalem itself as the Temple’s urban extension.

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

  And in the long run, both processes proved lethal to the speaker—and immortal for the speaker. By now you have guessed the subject of the next and final chapter in this book’s first part. Matthew, for example, began the parable of the Vineyard Workers by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard” (20:1). And that correlation of the kingdom of God and the parables of Jesus comes up repeatedly in the gospel texts. In fact, there is a massive consensus in modern biblical scholarship on these three conclusions: first, that the fundamental message of Jesus was about the kingdom of God; second, that Jesus spoke very often in parables; and third, that he often made a correlation between kingdom and parable. That gives us the generative questions for the next chapter. Why did Jesus use such challenge parables? Is there some intrinsic connection between Jesus’s medium of parabolic challenge and his message of God’s kingdom? And, if so, what is it? CHAPTER 6The Kingdom of GodTHE CHALLENGE OF COLLABORATION ALTHOUGH HE HIMSELF DID NOT coin the term “paradigm shift,” it was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, * by Thomas S. Kuhn, then professor of the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, that made it famous. He used the term to argue that progress in the physical sciences was not a smoothly linear development, but rather a series of disruptive innovations. At any given stage there is, Kuhn proposed, a normal paradigm taken for granted and taught simply as the way it is, as science or even as reality. Then, with anomalies and misfits accumulating, normal science moves into a crisis mode . Finally, a radically alternative vision or revolutionary new model is proposed, and there occurs—often through a younger generation—a paradigm shift from the old model to the newer one, from, say, Ptolemy to Copernicus, Newton to Einstein, or biblical literalism to Darwinian evolution. (“Paradigm shifters” are much like “outliers” in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book of that same name.† They are individuals who by the interaction of chance or luck and work or study successfully challenge general tradition with a specific vision and change the world one way or another.) Although the term “paradigm shift” has been massively used, abused, and confused outside its original meaning, it is still a very useful explanatory concept not just for the physical sciences, but for many social and even human “sciences” as well. I use it in this chapter as an equivalent term for a revolutionary change, a basic tradition swerve, or a fundamentally disruptive innovation. Just think, for example, of the first century CE as a crisis of multiple religio-political paradigm shifts.

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

  Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus replied, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they stepped back and fell to the ground . (18:3–6) Cup: Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (18:10–11) Disciples: Again he asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go. ” (18:7–8) That is—from Mark to John—an absolutely extraordinary reversal. Jesus is not out of control, but totally in control. He is, in fact, managing his own arrest. His humanity has ceded overt and total place to his divinity. Notice the elements in John’s version. First of all, that vague word “detachment” is quite specific in Greek—it is speira, a cohort, that is, six hundred troops. John’s very deliberate emphasis is certified by that word’s repetition at the end of the passage: “The soldiers (speira ), their officer (chiliarchos ), and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him” (18:12). That officer is a tribune or, literally, commander of a thousand soldiers. It takes all of that to arrest Jesus—when he lets them up off the ground. Next, there is no mention by Jesus—even with total submission and obedience—of having the cup of suffering pass him by—as in Mark. Instead, there is that rhetorical question in John: “Am I not to drink the cup?” Finally, the disciples do not desert Jesus and flee, as in Mark. Instead, in John, Jesus commands those arresting him to “let these men go.” It is not that they abandon Jesus, but that Jesus protects and saves them. And that was “to fulfill the word that he had spoken, ‘I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me’” (18:9), recalling his earlier word that “not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost,” that is, Judas (17:12). What about the crucifixion of Jesus? Think of John’s account of Jesus’s death as Mark’s desolate human darkness rewritten in translucent divine light. What we have just seen in the garden is continued on the cross.

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

  That reputation is established by the advent of God’s kingdom . That advent was the will of God—from all eternity. But where did I get that climactic “eternity”? As we saw before, the prayer’s first half ended with “as in heaven so on earth” in the Greek sequence of Matthew. That “as in heaven” pointed backward to the entire first triad, name, kingdom, and will, just as “so on earth” points forward to the next triad, bread, debt, and temptation. I focus now on “as in heaven.” What does it mean? On the one hand, it simply means that heaven is in great shape—earth is where the problems are. It’s God’s earthly household, not God’s heavenly household, that is in disarray. On the other hand, it means something far more profound. Think of this question about the collaborative eschaton, the kingdom of God, or the Great Divine Cleanup of the World. Did God have a bright new idea, come up with a paradigm shift in divine vision, with the conception of Jesus around 4 BCE ? Some prophetic Jewish mystics peered across time and into the future to learn about God’s coming kingdom—recall the nighttime dream vision of Daniel 7 in Chapter 4. But others were swept ecstatically across space and into heaven to see that divine plan for God’s coming kingdom. Recall that metaphor for God as creation’s Architect from Chapter 3. That divine Architect had, as it were, a complete model of the kingdom prepared in heaven above and ready for descent below. It was like seeing the future in an architect’s office. So God could reveal the future kingdom not only to seers in a visionary message, but to mystics on a heavenly journey. Furthermore, that master model had been there from all eternity—waiting, waiting, waiting. Take Paul, for instance. He admitted, with oblique but quite definite reference to himself: I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Cor. 12:2–4) When you hear the “will of God is done in heaven,” think not just about angelic obedience; think of the eternal design of God for creation laid out there for any visiting mystic to see. God’s name, kingdom, and will come to their climax “in heaven,” that is, in their eternal intention. The metaphor I have in mind for this is a great river pushing relentlessly against a logjam. It was always there pushing, but one day it finally broke through.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther saw in this the very essence of Christian theology. God reached down not halfway to meet us in our vileness but all the way down, to the foul dregs of our broken humanity. And this holy and loving God dared to touch our lifeless and rotting essence and in doing so underscored that this is the truth about us. In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting. We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filth and require total redemption. If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our sins and are eternally dead. So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition. So it fit well with Luther’s thinking that if God were to bestow upon him—the unworthy sinner Luther—such a divine blessing, it must needs be done as he sat grunting in the “cloaca.” This was the ultimate antithesis to the gold and bejeweled splendor of papal Rome. There all was gilt, but here in Wittenberg it was all Scheisse. But the shit in its honesty as shit was very golden when compared to the pretense and artifice of Roman gold, which itself was indeed as shit when compared to the infinite worth of God’s grace. That was cheap grace, which was to say it was a truly satanic counterfeit. True grace was concealed in the honesty—in the unadorned shit—of this broken world, and the devil’s own shit was concealed in the pope’s glittering gold. The Luther scholar Volker Leppin says that there are a number of reasons to accept the idea that Luther was referring to the cloaca itself specifically. But Leppin’s principal argument comes to us via another Table Talk comment, in which Luther was talking about the wonder of music. The German is “So unser Herr Gott in diesem Leben in das Scheisshaus solche Edle gaben gegeben hat, was wird in jhenem ewigen Leben geschehen.” Leppin’s translation of this is “If the Lord in this life has provided the shithouse with such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life [where everything will be perfect and delightful]?” But by separating “in this life” and “the shithouse” with the verb “has provided,” Leppin has blunted his point. Luther’s sentence can better be translated as “If our Lord God in this life—in this shit house—has given us such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life, where everything will be perfect and delightful?” So “in this life” is clarified as “in this shithouse,” meaning in this execrable, this abominably shitty, life.6

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

  So Miller, having plunged into the mass of Puritan writings previously ignored as second-rate theology, projected an edifice of the intellect whose foundations lay deep in the soil of the Protestant Reformation. Andrews saw beneath vague generalities of Anglo-American governance an intricate network, a living, functioning world, of committees and Boards of Trade, of administrative procedures, of laws and charters and memos, and bundles of reports and notes and papers being passed from office to office, from official to official—all of which composed for him a coherent picture of a responsible empire of the English-speaking peoples. So Namier saw beneath the traditional story of Whigs and Tories, liberalism and autocracy, competing ideologies, and party rivalries a world of shifting patronage clusters, which together formed the loose and fluctuating coalitions that governed Britain. And so Syme (who had not read anything by Namier before he wrote The Roman Revolution) saw beneath the façade of a supposed legitimate constitutional settlement after the civil wars a multitude of binding personal ties among the oligarchy in Rome and their recruits from the provinces who together formed a tightly held autocratic power center dominated by Augustus that ruled an empire encompassing most of the Western world. What is the quality of mind and imagination that went into these imaginative projections? How did they make these designs of past worlds? Here the classical cases may help: Gibbon, sitting “amidst the ruins of the Capitol” “while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in [what had been] the temple of Jupiter,” and projecting from that bizarre anomaly his whole vast conception of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Or Macaulay, steeped in the novels of Walter Scott, daydreaming, “castle-building,” as we know from John Clive’s biography, with his beloved sisters, projecting imaginary worlds, imaginary speeches, and portentous events, which later in his volumes became clothed with the reality of the reign of James II and William III in the pages of his History of England.

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

  More’s utopian model, a literary text, had become “a political program circulated across the Atlantic from a radical colonist to a monarch and used to initiate a social practice.”13 But for others, equally committed to ideal goals, there were no models, literary or other, and pragmatic solutions had to be found. So the Spanish Jesuits devised “reductions” of the natives, in Paraguay most famously but elsewhere as well. They too were millenarian/utopian creations: gatherings of nomadic natives into disciplined urban communities where Christianity, hence civilization, could be inculcated in people who would thereafter become productive members of the labor force and foot soldiers in the wars of imperial expansion. But the Indians the Portuguese Jesuits faced in Brazil and the Iroquois and Hurons the French Jesuits faced in New France could not be forced, in Berlin’s phrase, “into neat uniforms demanded by the dogmatically believed-in schemes.” The indigenous cultures were too vibrant to be easily uprooted and the power of the invaders was too weak to force the natives into an ideal mold shaped by perfectionist visions. The Jesuits’ wards never fully abandoned their native cultures. They absorbed the new regimes selectively, forcing their rulers, if only for the sake of stability, to accept major aspects of the indigenous organizations.14 The search for perfection in these forms, on the background of millenarian hopes for the redemption of the Western world, was a transoceanic projection of the apocalyptic prophecies that gripped the European imagination and the associated yearnings for a return to the simplicity of the primitive church. As such it was as much French, Dutch, and German as it was Spanish and Portuguese. And above all it was English. There is no better illustration of the spatial dimensions of the search for perfection than the fortunes of the Puritans who, fleeing from ecclesiastical oppression at home, sought to establish in America a model of perfected Christianity. Everything seemed to favor their success. They had sufficient numbers and funds, administrative experience, and some of England’s finest scholars and theologians who shared a passionate belief that they were building in Massachusetts God’s “new Jerusalem,” laying “one stone in the foundacion of this new Syon.” The “great persons” of his grandparents’ generation, wrote Cotton Mather, who like Guillaume Budé had “mistook Sir Thomas Moor’s UTOPIA for a country really existent, and stirr’d up some divines charitably to undertake a voyage thither, might now have certainly found a truth in their mistake; New England was a true Utopia.”15

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

  The stirrings in North America in which Hutchinson was so fatally ensnared and which would result in the independence of the coastal North American colonies were part of much greater movements. They were local manifestations of shifts in deep-lying cultural tectonics that undermined the foundations of the whole of Atlantic civilization and led to profound transformations. The year 1776, when Hutchinson received an honorary degree at Oxford (which happened in fact on the Fourth of July), saw the publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, that flaming indictment of the whole structure of the British monarchy and aristocracy; the publication too of the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that so ironically slighted the established pieties of complacent churchmen; of Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, that probed the inner nature of political liberty and proposed a Congress of Europe; of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, that argued for the demolition of commercial regulations and the release of personal self-interest; and of Jeremy Bentham’s Fragment on Government, that aimed to overthrow the principles of the British constitution and that introduced the radical concept of utilitarianism. The year of American independence was thus a year of challenges in every sphere of British life—in ideology, politics, religion, economics, law, and the principles of international relations—but not only British life. The entire Western world felt similar tremors that would lead within a single generation to widespread transformations. The ideas of the Enlightenment, the maturing of colonial societies, and the emergence of industrial economies were eroding the foundations not only of Europe’s ancien régime but of the Western Hemisphere’s establishments as well. While the Latin American independence movements would erupt only after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, resistance to Spain’s Bourbon reforms, parallel to Britain’s colonial reforms after the Seven Years’ War, provoked patriotic aspirations among the Spanish American Creole elite and demands for home rule within an imperial commonwealth and representation in a central Hispanic Cortes. At the same time popular uprisings of the indigenous, African, and mixed-race populations erupted everywhere: in Peru, in the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru in 1780; in Colombia, in the Comunero Revolution of 1781; in Saint-Domingue, in the bloody insurrection of 1794 that convulsed the entire colonial world with scenes of plantation massacres and the threat of emancipation; and in Mexico, in the insurgency led by Diego Hidalgo and José Maria Morélos in 1810, inspired by a passion for ethnic equality.

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

  It is an honor to address the British Academy, especially in any association with Isaiah Berlin. I knew him only slightly, but I recall vividly my first encounter with him. Students at Harvard in the late 1940s had been exposed to some remarkable lecturers from abroad: Joseph Schumpeter, Hans Kohn, Erwin Panofsky. But none of them prepared me for the experience of Isaiah Berlin’s lectures. Words, ideas, references, allusions came in floods. It was overwhelming. I quickly realized, as I listened, that while I was intensely interested in his announced subject, I had no idea what he was talking about—and would have none, until I drove my own intensity level to somewhere within his range. We listened to this Paganini of the platform, as Michael Oakeshott called him, and observed him, with awe.1 But at the same time, Berlin was listening to us and observing us, with something quite a bit less than awe. And upon his return to England he wrote a three-part commentary on his experiences at Harvard, and through Harvard with the American university world in general. He liked the students, he said. They were “more intellectually curious, more responsive to every influence, more deeply and immediately charmed by everything new … and above all, endowed with a quality of moral vitality unlike any I had found anywhere else.” But he had also to say that “many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities. That is to say, their thoughts came higglety-pigglety out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant.” But there was a deeper problem. Harvard was an academic community, he wrote, “painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society”: A student or professor in this condition wonders whether it can be right for him to absorb himself in the study of, let us say, the early Greek epic … while the poor of south Boston go hungry and unshod and negroes are denied fundamental rights. He had suggested to his students that intellectual curiosity was not necessarily a form of sin, and that it was valid to pursue some branch of knowledge simply because one was interested in it. But that, they seemed to think, was a European point of view, rather exotic and perhaps slightly sinister. He had pondered all this and concluded that “this naive, sincere and touching morality, according to which … the primary duty of everyone is to help others … with no indication of what it is to help others to be or do” was leading to a view of the world as “an enormous hospital of which all men are inmates, with the obligation of acting as nurses and physicians to one another.” How, in such a world, he asked, could disinterested study flourish and the potentialities of mind and sensibility unfold?2

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

  What is heaven’s process, project, or program for our earth? That is what is outlined with the “bread,” “debt,” and “temptation” in the parallel second half of the Abba Prayer, and I now turn to explore that vision’s opening focus on “bread.” 6 Give Us Our Daily BreadGive us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11, KJV, NRSV It was called the “excavation from hell,” because, when first discovered, the first-century Kinneret Boat was the consistency of soft cheese or wet cardboard. And its necessarily swift excavation was followed by a longer and slower, but equally difficult preservation process. Lake Kinneret is a harp-shaped body of water known to Mark as the “Sea of Galilee” (1:16; 7:31), to John as the “Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias” (6:1), and to Luke, proud of his experience of the Mediterranean Sea, as simply the “lake of Gennesaret” (5:1). But, after the droughts of 1985–86, water levels were so low in the Kinneret that wide swaths of the lake bottom were visible off Magdala on the western shore. And equally visible, almost a mile north of Mary’s ancient home, was the oval outline of a sunken boat. On Friday, January 24, 1986, Moshele and Luvi Lufan, brothers from nearby Kibbutz Ginosar, discovered and protected that mud-embedded boat until official archaeologists arrived—Kurt Raveh and Shelley Wachsmann, from the Israel Antiquities Authority, but especially Orna Cohen, of the Conservation Laboratory at the Hebrew University’s Archaeology Institute in Jerusalem. They worked swiftly but extremely carefully to encase the sodden hull in a cocoon of polyurethane, fiberglass, and polyester, which enabled them to float it—yes, actually float it—to Kibbutz Ginosar’s recently constructed Yigal Allon Museum. There a crane lifted it onto dry land and, eight days later, into a specially constructed preservation tank. The boat’s timbers were about 90 percent water, which had to be slowly and carefully replaced with polyethylene glycol—the required forty tons were a gift from Dow Chemical. Fourteen years later “The Ancient Galilee Boat”—as the sign says—was finally lifted into its present display position on a stainless-steel frame in the Yigal Allon Centre on the shore of Lake Kinneret. The 8-by-26-foot boat required a minimum crew of five and could hold either ten passengers or their equivalent weight in cargo. It had four oars, a double rudder, and a square sail. It was, in fact, exactly like a boat on a mosaic excavated earlier in Magdala itself. The keel was one-third cedar—from an older boat; the other two-thirds were carob and jujube (Christ’s Thorn). The planks were of cedar and the frames of oak, but, in all, there were twelve different types of wood in the boat. In other words, it had been kept afloat by expert boatwrights working with inferior materials. Then, one day when even that was no longer possible, they stripped it of everything usable and pushed it out from their boatyard to sink in an offshore graveyard for old boats.

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

  My general proposal is that parables by Jesus during his life begot parables about Jesus after his death; and, furthermore, that the four gospels not only contain parables about Jesus, but are best understood as four discrete megaparables about Jesus. But are those gospels, acting as megaparables, to be interpreted primarily as challenge parables? That question arises because the challenge parables seen so far—either from the Old Testament or from the historical Jesus—are pedagogical rather than polemical. Even though the book of Ruth challenges ethnic absolutes, and even though the story of Jesus challenges ethnic attitudes, they do so gently and delicately. There is no character assassination or even nasty name-calling of what is being questioned or challenged. In Part II, we will have to assess whether each gospel moves beyond challenging what it opposes to attacking it bitterly or even dismissing it altogether. As parables by Jesus begot parables about Jesus, that increase in animosity from challenge through attack to dismissal may be the most striking development. To be blunt: Do the gospels as parables about Jesus push steadily beyond parable as challenge toward challenge as attack? PART II Parables Told about JesusCHAPTER 7A Hymn for the NamelessTHE PARABLE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK BY THE LATE AFTERNOON OF September 2, 31 BCE , Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt had escaped the surrounding squadrons of Octavian and Agrippa, picked up Mark Antony from his abandoned flagship, and fled with him to Alexandria and double suicide. Off Cape Actium on the northwestern coast of Greece, Octavian, son of the god Apollo by conception and son of the divine Julius Caesar by adoption, soon to be acclaimed Augustus in Latin, Sebastos in Greek—the “One to Be Worshiped”—had emerged victorious and triumphant from Rome’s twenty-year civil war. At Ephesus, capital of the Roman province of Asia Minor, the governor, Paulus Fabius Maximus, wondered what could be done to offer due thanks and appropriate honors to Augustus for saving the republic-become-empire from its orgy of self-destruction: The birthday of the most divine Caesar [Augustus]…we might justly equate with the beginning of everything—at least in practical terms—since he restored order when everything was disintegrating and falling into chaos and gave a new look to the whole world, a world which would have met destruction with the utmost pleasure if Caesar had not been born as a common blessing to all. For that reason one might justly take this to be the start of life and living, the end of regret for having been born. Augustus had saved not just Rome, Italy, or the Mediterranean, but—note my italics—“the whole world.” The governor “proposed, therefore, that the birthday of Augustus should become New Year’s Day for all the cities of Asia Minor” (modern western Turkey). The League of Asian Cities accepted that suggestion enthusiastically.