Bewilderment
Loss of one's bearings—the world as legible recedes faster than one can re-orient.
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But the most striking difference is this: While the pre-Pauline tradition speaks of Peter and the Twelve , and of James and the apostles , the canonical gospel texts emphasize much more the role of Mary and the women . We need to take a closer look at what that means. First, two men, Peter and James, are named in 1 Corinthians 15:5–7, but no women are named. Here are some maybes in that regard. Maybe Paul knew that Mary and the other women had found Jesus’ tomb empty but left that fact implicit between “buried” and “appeared.” (But it is certainly not ex plicit.) Maybe Paul knew that Mary and the other women had seen the risen Jesus but left them implicit among “all the apostles.” (Again, it is certainly not ex plicit.) Maybe Paul knew both those items as received tradition but omitted them because of trouble with women prophets at Corinth. (But Paul had far greater trouble with James and Peter-Cephas, according to Galatians 2:11–14, and there was even some trouble concerning Peter-Cephas in 1 Corinthians 1:12, yet Paul does not omit either man from officially received tradition.) Second, the consecutive and canonically independent source in the Gospel of Peter has nothing about women finding the tomb empty or about Jesus appearing to women. Instead, it is the Roman guards and the Jewish authorities who find the tomb empty in that Cross Gospel , and it is to them that Jesus appears. Neither of the two preceding texts mentions the women finding the empty tomb or seeing the risen Jesus. But maybe, as Claudia Setzer suggested in the epigraph to this section, male writers are deliberately reducing the importance of female witnesses. That has happened and still happens so often that it is certainly a possibility. But is it the best reading of the evidence in this case? Those twin texts just cited are the earliest extant accounts of the resurrection. When, for contrast, you look at two of the latest ones, the women are firmly present. This is from the longer ending added to Mark’s gospel in 16:9–20: Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. (Mark 16:9–14) The same happens in the final redaction of the Gospel of Peter .
You will notice the qualifications needed to support that instant sect-to-cult transformation: “it took time for the fact to be recognized fully” and “the complete break between church and synagogue took centuries.” But the core question is this: Did any such instant transformation happen? Since all those involved were Jewish sectarians, were they not experiencing or describing something within their normal range of Jewish presuppositions? Is it not just as likely that Christianity’s double appeal (and double nonappeal) was as a sect inside Judaism but as a cult outside paganism? Eventually it had to settle for one or the other, but that happened slowly and diversely, at different times and places, in divergent steps and processes. Once again we are moving much too swiftly, as with Meeks from village to city, so now with Stark from sect to cult. My point, once again, is not that Stark should have faced that problem of transition from sect to cult. I emphasize only that it is still there as a problem and that it is the one that concerns me in this book. Those two cases help me to see my own question more clearly. It is this: What continuation can we discern between the companions of Jesus before and after his execution? What was it like for those who were there before the crucifixion to be there after it? What was it like for them in the early 30s? What traces have they left for us to discern in later texts? What trajectories have they created for us to examine in later documents? That is what I mean by first continuation . It is the continuation from before to after, the continuation of both before and after. I could also state the problem in a more personal way. This book is the closest possible sequel I can imagine and the closest possible continuation I can create to my earlier work, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant . It is not concerned with the historical Jesus alone or with Christian origins alone but with their interface, with the continuation from one to the other for Jesus’ first companions. The objection, however, is obvious. How can I say anything at all about those earliest years? Is it not wiser to move, with Meeks, Stark, and most others, swiftly and smoothly on to Paul and the late 30s, 40s, or 50s? Why even try to reconstruct that primordial continuation? Why? CHAPTER 2RECONSTRUCTING EARLIEST CHRISTIANITYI shall assume that there were 1,000 Christians in the year 40…. 40 percent per decade (or 3.42 percent per year) seems the most plausible estimate of the rate at which Christianity grew during the first several centuries…. So long as nothing changed in the conditions that sustained the 40-percent-a-decade growth rate, Constantine’s conversion would better be seen as a response to the massive exponential wave in progress, not as its cause….
In all cases, we have to work, however tentatively and hypothetically, with what we have available. The larger text was already fragmentary even when copied along with other texts into a pocket-book for eternity buried in the grave of a Christian monk. It begins in the middle of Jesus’ trial and ends at the start of what might be a risen apparition at the Sea of Galilee. Since that broken-off ending mentions “I, Simon Peter,” the document has been equated by scholars with that against which Bishop Serapion of Antioch wrote his treatise on The So-Called Gospel of Peter in the last decade of the second century. Eusebius of Caesarea says that Serapion “wrote to refute the lies in that document, which had induced some members of the Christian community at Rhossus to go astray into heterodox teachings.” But he then cites a long paragraph from Serapion that indicates a somewhat more ambiguous judgment (Williamson 252): I have been able to go through the book and draw the conclusion that while most of it accorded with the authentic teaching of the Saviour, some passages were spurious additions. (History of the Church 6.12) Ambiguity, one could say, was destined to stalk this text from its first notation, and Serapion’s ambivalence still hangs over it like a cloud. Scholars even have a distinctive way of citing it: by chapter and verse, yes—but, unlike canonical citations, the verses continue across chapters. We have, for example, Gospel of Peter 8:28–33 followed by 9:34–37 followed by 10:38–42, and so on. Since its publication in 1892, the first and narrower scholarly question has been the relationship between the Gospel of Peter and the canonical gospels. But there is also a second and wider question. What was the redactional purpose of the author? No matter how one answers the first question, the second must also be addressed. If, for example, it was a later condensed version of the canonical versions, what is the logic of its conflation: why was this omitted, this changed, and this added; what is the compositional intention of the final product? How have scholars answered that first question across the last one hundred years? Individuals have advocated each one of the three logically possible positions. First, the Gospel of Peter is canonically dependent. Second, the Gospel of Peter is both canonically dependent and canonically independent—that is, it contains both intracanonical and extracanonical traditions. Third, the Gospel of Peter is canonically independent. I underline that triple response because it is often summarized as only a double one of dependence or independence. Actually, those first two options were there right from the start. The third option arrived much later. First, the Gospel of Peter is canonically dependent. That is the position of the Cambridge scholar J. Armitage Robinson, quoted in the epigraph above.
The entire discourse section is between Jesus and the disciples as a choral “we,” without any individuals singled out as questioners. The second example of this hybrid type is an early-second-century source usually called John’s Preaching of the Gospel , now embedded in the Acts of John 87–105 (NTA 2.179–186). It is a beautiful text that merges those twin types in an extraordinary way. In the first part, Acts of John 88b–96, the earthly life of Jesus is summarized, but with an emphasis on the unreality of his body. This unreality is shown by four points, each of which is mentioned twice (NTA 2.180–181). First, Jesus’ body is polymorphous and ever-changing. The sons of Zebedee see Jesus on the shore, but at first James sees a “child” and John sees a “man … handsome, fair, and cheerful-looking.” Later, as they beach their boat, John sees Jesus as “rather bald-(headed) but with a thick flowing beard,” while James now sees “a young man whose beard was just beginning.” Second, John “never saw Jesus’ eyes closing, but always open.” One night, in fact, while John was faking sleep, he saw “another like him coming down” to Jesus. Third, Jesus’ body was both small and huge. “He sometimes appeared to me as a small man with no good looks, and then again as looking up to heaven.” Thus, for example, on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus’ “head stretched up to heaven,” but when he turned about he “appeared as a small man.” Fourth and finally, Jesus’ body “had another strange (property); when I reclined at table he would take me to his own breast, and I held him (fast); and sometimes his breast felt to me smooth and soft, but sometimes hard like rock.” And again, a second time, “I will tell you another glory, brethren; sometimes when I meant to touch him I encountered a material, solid body; but at other times again when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and incorporeal, and as if it did not exist at all.” The second part, Acts of John 97–101, takes place at the crucifixion itself. And in this gospel, consequent on that bodily unreality, it is not the reality of Jesus who suffers and dies, except, as John insists, in symbol (NTA 2.184–185): And so I saw him suffer, and did not wait by his suffering, but fled to the Mount of Olives and wept at what had come to pass. And when he was hung (upon the Cross) on Friday, at the sixth hour of the day there came a darkness over the whole earth. And my Lord stood in the middle of the cave and gave light to it and said, “John, for the people below in Jerusalem I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and given vinegar and gall to drink. But to you I am speaking, and listen to what I speak.
In his Questions on the Gospels, written between 399 and 400, Augustine takes the Good Samaritan as a riddle parable and provides one of the best-known allegorical readings given to any of Jesus’s parables. It has also become an (in)famous instance of an interpretation that is at once brilliantly clever, but also brilliantly—what do I say—inadequate or incomplete or incorrect? We have just read the text of the parable, and you can see—by my italics in what follows—how Augustine picks up and interprets its every part and almost its every word: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho . Adam himself is meant. Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell. Jericho means “the moon” and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels; who stripped him, namely, of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half dead, because insofar as man can understand and know God, he lives, but insofar as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead—he is therefore called half dead. The priest and Levite who saw him and passed by signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means “guardian,” and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine, the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which he deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers are refreshed on their return from pilgrimage to their heavenly country. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle [Paul]. The supererogatory payment [whatever more you spend ] is either his counsel of celibacy or the fact that he worked with his own hands, lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him “to live by the Gospel” [2 Cor. 9:14]. (2.19) Augustine takes Mark’s allegorical interpretation of the Sower parable to its ultimate extreme with this reading of the Good Samaritan. But, of course, there is no mention about intended incomprehension for deliberate condemnation. Here are some immediate questions. Does Augustine think we could or should read all of Jesus’s parables allegorically as riddle parables? Or is Augustine quite aware that his reading is brilliantly clever, but also exegetically playful? Is his interpretation simply the freedom to be seriously playful and playfully serious at the same time?
(14:19–20) I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty, the flesh of horses and their riders—flesh of all, free and slave, both small and great.”…And all the birds were gorged with their flesh. (19:17–18, 21) We wade to that land of peace through a sea of war. Once again, does God—and now Jesus as well—establish nonviolent peace by violent slaughter? Here, then, is the problem. If both those versions of God and Jesus are in the Christian Bible—and they certainly are —how do we Christians decide between them? Or do we simply create a divine cocktail of so many parts violence and so many parts nonviolence according to theological taste? First and above all else, one answer to that problem must be discarded immediately. It is often said by Christians that the God of the Old Testament was a God of anger, punishment, and vengeance, but the God of the New Testament is one of love, justice, and peace. That answer will only work as long as you do not actually read the Christian Bible. If and when you do, you will realize that the just mentioned book of Revelation is the most relentlessly violent book in the canonical literature of any of the world’s great religions. Back, therefore, from libel and lie, to our problem. The nonviolent and violent visions of God march in tandem from start to finish throughout the entire Christian Bible. The nonviolent and violent visions of Jesus march in tandem from the beginning to the end of the New Testament. What, then, do we Christians do with that dichotomy? My answer—which is utterly and traditionally obvious—is given with a visual parable. Constantinople’s monastic Church of St. Savior in Chora is now Istanbul’s Kariye Museum. Its superb collection of mosaics and frescoes was created at the start of the fourteenth century, when the Latins were gone, the Byzantines were back, and the Muslims had not yet arrived. Above the door from the outer narthex, or vestibule, to the inner one is an image of Christ Pantocrator, that is, the “All-Powerful One,” so named even as the Byzantine emperor was called Autocrator, the “Self-Powerful One.” Both would have been haloed, by the way, but Christ’s halo is distinctively cruciform. Christ’s right hand is lifted in the traditional teaching gesture of early Christianity, with two fingers upright—symbolizing the two natures of Christ—and three fingers circled below—symbolizing the three persons in the Trinity. Christ’s left hand holds the closed Book of the Gospel and, once again, the fingers on that hand are separated into groups of two and three. Straight ahead, above the door from the inner narthex to the naos, or church proper, is another image of a seated Christ Pantocrator.
Plutarch was born in Roman Greece and, as a biographical moralist, his most famous work was the Parallel Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans . He tells about Caesar at the Rubicon twice, once in comparing the successes of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and then in comparing the failures of Agiselaus and Pompey. Plutarch’s version is less negative or positive than ambiguous. As in Lucan’s and Suetonius’s versions, Plutarch’s Life of Caesar has Caesar stop on the northern bank of the Rubicon. But moral reflection replaces any sort of apparition: When he came to the river which separates Cisalpine Gaul from the rest of Italy (it is called the Rubicon), and began to reflect, now that he drew nearer to the fearful step and was agitated by the magnitude of his ventures, he checked his speed. Then, halting in his course, he communed with himself a long time in silence as his resolution wavered back and forth, and his purpose then suffered change after change. For a long time, too, he discussed his perplexities with his friends who were present, among whom was Asinius Pollio, estimating the great evils for all mankind which would follow their passage of the river, and the wide fame of it which they would leave to posterity. (32.5–7) Plutarch also has that aphorism about the die being cast, but this Greek records it: “Let the die be cast,…[he said] with a sort of passion, as if abandoning calculation and casting himself upon the future, and uttering the phrase with which men usually prelude their plunge into desperate and daring fortunes” (32.8). Finally, having omitted those apparitions in Lucan and Suetonius, Plutarch concludes his account with this devastatingly casual postscript: “It is said, moreover, that on the night before he crossed the river he had an unnatural dream; he thought, namely, that he was having incestuous intercourse with his own mother” (32.9). Come back for a moment to Suetonius’s The Deified Caesar . He too records that same dream, but dates it to 63 BCE , when Caesar was a military treasurer in Spain. He says Caesar was dismayed by a dream in which “he thought that he had offered violence to his mother.” But, despite any Oedipal negativity, “the soothsayers inspired him with high hopes by their interpretation, which was: that he was destined to rule the world, since the mother whom he had seen in his power was none other than the earth, which is regarded as the common parent of all mankind” (7). When, therefore, that dream is transposed by Plutarch from 63 to 49 BCE and from Spain to Italy, is it—with Lucan—a warning against invasion or—with Suetonius—an invitation to world conquest? If, at the Rubicon, the “vision” of Lucan is negative and the “sign” of Suetonius is positive, the “dream” of Plutarch is profoundly ambiguous. Appian of Alexandria (ca. 95–ca. 165). Appian was from Roman Egypt.
Then, for the next twenty-five years Antipas stayed very quiet, until the 20s CE, when popular unrest against him began. So here is the problem. What did Antipas do differently in the 20s CE to cause animosity after that long and peaceful period? A Second Question . Or, better, the other side of that first question. Why did two successive movements of nonviolent resistance arise in the territories of Antipas in the 20s CE? Remember the baptism movement of John and the kingdom movement of Jesus seen already in Chapter 4. Why, with John in Perea and Jesus in Galilee, did those populist movements start precisely at that time and in that place? Why then? Why there? A Third Question . This one has multiple subquestions. Why is there so much “fishy” stuff in the gospels? Since Jesus was from inland Nazareth, why was it that “he left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea [of Galilee]” (Matt. 4:13)? Why were so many of his disciples from fishing villages and specifically from ones on the northwest quadrant of the lake? Think about just these six examples. Mary was from Magdala, whose Greek name, Tarichaeae, means “salted fish.” Peter moved from one fishing village, Bethsaida, to live with his wife and mother-in-law at another such village, Capernaum (John 1:44; Mark 1:29–30). Also, “Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter” (John 1:44). And “As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen…. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets” (Mark 1:16–19). They were called to “fish for people” (Mark 1:17). Finally, recall all those stories about fish or fishing. There are six versions of the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes—two in Mark (6:34–44; 8:1–9), two in Matthew (14:14–21; 15:32–39), and one each in Luke (9:12–17) and John (6:4–13). There is also the story of the net-breaking catch of fish told before the resurrection in Luke 5:1–9 and after it in John 21:1–14. Jesus is seldom far from boats and nets, fish and fishers, seldom far from the Sea of Galilee, which became the Sea of Tiberias. Why is that, and what does it mean? And, for our present context, what does it have to do with “Give us this day our daily bread”? The Abba Prayer is about daily bread, not daily fish. Why so much emphasis on “fish”? Jesus called Herod Antipas “that fox” (Luke 13:32), but although “that fox” planned carefully and moved slowly, he ultimately failed dismally. Throughout forty-three years of rule under three different Roman emperors, he had one driving ambition: to become like his father, Herod the Great, the Rome-appointed “King of the Jews.” Antipas’s first attempt brought him before the emperor Augustus at Rome in 4 BCE .
But the earliest hearers and the latest readers know immediately that, whatever it is about, it is not about sowing. Jesus is not trying to improve the agricultural yield of lower Galilee. It is about “away from sowing.” But whither and why? The Greek roots of “parable” combine para, “with” or “alongside,” and ballein, “to put” or “to throw.” In Jesus’s parable, “sowing” is cast alongside and compared with some other activity—but what is that other activity? And that question leads directly into the next chapter, where we will consider that Sower parable in much greater detail. We will see there how Mark tells us what—positively —it is about, granted that—negatively —it is not “about,” but “away from” sowing seed in the ground. PART I Parables Told by JesusCHAPTER 1Riddle ParablesSO THAT THEY MAY NOT UNDERSTAND NESSUN DORMA —“NOBODY SLEEPS TONIGHT ”—PROCLAIMS THE Princess Turandot in Giacomo Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, unfinished at his death in 1924. Nobody can sleep because a riddle must be solved before the dawn. Here is Princess Turandot’s tale. In the long distant past, her ancestor, the Princess Lo-u-Ling, ruled wisely and well until she was raped and killed by an invading prince. In revenge, her descendant, Princess Turandot, decreed that any man who wished to marry her must answer three riddles—failure would entail beheading, and success, betrothing. Even as the opera opens, the handsome young Prince of Persia goes to his execution with Princess Turandot’s gleeful consent. Despite that, the newly arrived Prince of Tartary declares himself ready for the three riddles. This is the first one: Princess Turandot: “What is born each night and dies each dawn?” Prince of Tartary: “Hope.” He is correct, and then comes this next riddle: Princess Turandot: “What flickers red and warm like a flame, but is not fire?” Prince of Tartary: “Blood.” Again he is correct, and it is time for the final riddle: Princess Turandot: “What is like ice, but burns like fire?” Prince of Tartary: “Turandot!” He has won the contest, but offers the princess one final way out of the marriage. If she can guess his name by morning, he will be executed and she will be liberated. Otherwise, they will marry. And so nobody is to sleep that night, as all must seek to solve the riddle of the prince’s true name. Princess Turandot tortures the servant Liu, who alone knows the prince’s name, but Liu kills herself to protect his secret. But the prince himself tells Princess Turandot that his name is Calaf and leaves his fate in her hands. Finally, then, she announces she knows his name. It is “Love” and they live happily ever after. We think today of riddles as “gotcha games,” as puns or plays on words more appropriate between children or between children and adults, where the latter must say they don’t know even when they do.
Finally, in the best riddling tradition, those parables have profoundly important consequences. Success in understanding them gains you the kingdom of God. Failure to understand them results not in physical, but in spiritual death. Here, then, is Mark on Jesus’s Sower parable—as a short drama in two acts. The first act opens at the Sea of Galilee. Jesus “got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land.” He taught them “many things in parables” (4:1–2). Notice, immediately, that plural use of “parables.” It’s worth noting because only the single parable of the Sower follows in 4:3–8 before the disciples ask him “about the parables,” again in the plural, in 4:10. Why that sequence of first plural “parables,” then the single Sower parable, and finally, once again, that mention of plural “parables”? Mark is emphasizing that this single example of the Sower is a paradigm for parables, a model for all the others. If you understand this one parable, he says, you will understand all parables. If not, you will not understand any of them. Here, then, is that paradigmatic parable (my numbers added): A sower went out to sow. [1] And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. [2] Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. [3] Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. [4] Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. (4:3–8) No further explanation of that parable is given to the crowd before the first act ends. The second act opens with Jesus leaving the crowd and speaking privately with his disciples. Then, “while he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables” (4:10). There is that second plural use of “parables.” The Sower is a parable for all parables, a parable about parables and parabling. What does Jesus say in response to the disciples’ question? Their first query was not just about the Sower, but “about the parables.” Why, they ask, use such images, figures, metaphors? Why parables? Why not open, literal, straightforward teaching? The answer from Jesus is rather shocking: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven’” (Isa. 6:10) And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable?
(Even the pope abandons the Vatican in August for cool Castel Gandolfo among the Castelli Romani in the nearby Alban Hills—a sure if minor proof of his infallibility.) That August I was grateful to receive an “obedience”—the monastic equivalent of a soldier’s “orders”—to leave Rome for Lisbon, meet an American group there, and chaplain them around the major Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites in western Europe. These included Fatima and Lourdes for the Virgin Mary, Lisieux for St. Thérèse, Monaco for Grace Kelly, and Castel Gandolfo for John XXIII. And then it happened. As our group traveled slowly by bus from Rome to Paris for its homeward flight, we stopped at Oberammergau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps to attend its Passion play, a five- to six-hour dramatization of Jesus’s final week on earth. It is performed by the villagers every decade on the decade in gratitude for deliverance from bubonic plague in 1634. It was not performed, of course, in 1940, but it returned in 1950 with both Chancellor Adenauer and General Eisenhower in attendance. In other words, what we saw in 1960 was the unchanged play that Hitler saw before his election in 1930 and again after it in 1934, for its special three hundredth anniversary. But that early September day in 1960 I had not yet read Hitler’s enthusiastic comment about it: It is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry. That obscene review came in July 1942, about the time the German armies were beginning their fateful push toward Stalingrad. But, if I did not know of Hitler’s commentary, I certainly knew the sequence of what happened in Christianity’s Holy Week from both monastic liturgy and biblical study. What I did not expect was that a story I knew so well as written text was so profoundly unconvincing as enacted drama . The play started early in the morning with Palm Sunday, and the huge stage was filled with a crowd shouting approval and acclamation for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. But by late afternoon the play had progressed to Good Friday, and that same huge crowd was now shouting condemnation and demanding crucifixion. But nothing in the play explained how the crowd had changed its mind so completely. I wondered if that infamous scene in which the crowd claims responsibility for Jesus’s death by shouting, “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” was fact or fiction. It did not seem convincing as history. What was the reason for the crowd’s change of attitude from acceptance to rejection? Could this story function more as parable than history? This insight led to others.
Next, the Twelve respond with incredible obtuseness by focusing on their own power and authority in each case. Finally, Jesus attempts to heal their blindness by teaching them how power and authority operate within the now present kingdom of God. In each prophecy, Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of Man,” that is, as the “Human One” (8:31; 9:31; 10:33). You will recall those terms from Chapter 6 and its discussion of Daniel 7. There the earth’s imperial kingdoms are animalified as feral beasts and only heaven’s eschatological kingdom is personified as “a human being” or (literally) “a son of man.” Since the Son of Man or the Human One is already present on earth in Jesus, then, of course, the kingdom of God is already present. But not, apparently, for the Twelve. Watch, now, what happens with them across three tests with each test moving from prophecy through reaction to response . The first test is in 8:31–9:1. The prophecy is that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The immediate reaction comes from Peter, who “began to rebuke him.” Peter has just proclaimed to Jesus: “You are the Messiah” (8:29). But his meaning for that “Messiah” title is not that of Jesus. Maybe it is the standard contemporary expectation of a military and/or transcendental warrior as God’s eschatological plenipotentiary? In his response Jesus “rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’” The word “rebuke” is a very strong verb for Mark. Jesus uses it, for example, in expelling demons during exorcisms (1:25; 3:12; 9:25), and here also Peter is treated as demonic, as “Satan.” Finally, Jesus expands that response to all who are present: “the crowd with his disciples.” The kingdom’s collaborative eschatology depends on others accepting their participation in the destiny of Jesus. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It is not about Jesus substituting for them, but of them participating with Jesus. Have the Twelve finally gotten that message? The second test is in 9:31–37. Once again, Jesus is “teaching his disciples…. But they did not understand.” Need I emphasize the utterly parabolic, fictional, and artificial way in which Mark is creating this triple sequence? It is, by the way, another example of Olrik’s law of three from Chapter 5, but Mark gives it—as we shall see below—a special final twist. The prophecy is: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” No new information is given beyond the former version in 8:31–32a. What is the reaction of the disciples?
From Martin Luther (2016)
Luther hoped to discover whatever he could from her, and so, when at last they met, the young monk asked this celebrated woman whether she longed to go to heaven—to die and leave this world. Of course that seemed to be the very point of all of her activities, and as far as anyone could tell, she was already halfway there. But her answer to the question shocked Luther. “Oh no!” she answered. And then, by way of explaining herself, said, “Here I know how things work, but there I don’t know what will happen.”8 Luther’s bafflement now increased. How could someone so extraordinarily holy say such a thing? But today we know how she was able to say this, because the woman who styled herself Anna Laminit, the dedicated ascetic, was a thoroughgoing fraud. The details of her life are worth dilating upon briefly, because they illustrate the absurd end of the very kind of otherworldly asceticism that Luther sought but that he would in the end reject with everything in him. The woman who came to call herself Anna Laminit was born in 1480 into humble circumstances in Augsburg, where she was raised. But because of “loose living” while still in her teen years, she was publicly thrashed on the pillory and then driven from the city. But she nonetheless returned in 1497 and was taken in by some Christians who ran a poorhouse, and here she was evidently exposed to the things of God. Thus inspired, she betook herself to reemerge as a “hunger martyr” and visionary, wearing austere black and regaling her visitors with visions of angels and Saint Anne. She soon became renowned as a living saint and was visited by the emperor himself, along with his naive and curiously childlike second wife, both of whom were thoroughly taken in by the mystical woman. This naturally provided her with an excellent reference, and thus her fame grew, such that the rich and famous suddenly beat a path to her door, seeking her counsel on matters large and small. Her influence became so great that she would often lead large religious processions of repentance through the city in which all of the local clergy, including monks and nuns, participated. A particular highlight came in June 1503, when Emperor Maximilian’s queen participated, along with her entire entourage. The queen was herself dressed in black sackcloth, holding a candle at the center of the holy spectacle. Anna’s wealthy and powerful friends showered her with gifts that because of her special religious disposition were not taxed, and the ascetic soon amassed a tidy fortune.
He was the monarch who became the once and future king in Israel’s fervent hope for God’s expected messiah-led transformation: The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. (Jer. 23:5) In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. (Jer. 33:15) That future branch from the ancient Davidic tree, this anointed one—messiah in Hebrew or christos in Greek—is the one celebrated in the magnificent vision of Isaiah 11. But watch the inclusive structure of this accolade: With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. (Isa. 11:4–5) The repetition of “righteousness” frames violence against the wicked of the earth. But that violence is also certainly a mode of divine rather than human violence, for this messiah strikes the earth and kills the wicked with mouth and breath alone. We find the same image in the Psalms of Solomon, from the mid-first century BCE . There the “Messiah,” the “Son of David,” will come “to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar; to shatter all their substance with an iron rod; to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth” (17:23–24). There, once again, the messiah acts with divine power. That raises an obvious question about the Great Divine Cleanup of the World, the eschatological kingdom of God commanded to come in the Abba Prayer of Jesus. Is it to be violent or nonviolent? Is it to abolish human violence by divine violence? If so, must God’s messianic agent for the Great Cleanup also be violent, armed with the transcendental violence of that avenging God? What, in other words, did Jesus then—and do we now—imagine as the content of “Your kingdom come”? Apart from diverse interpretations of messianic deliverance within this or that Jewish group, there was also a basic, general, and popular expectation of the awaited messiah among ordinary people. He would be the new David, a warrior leader like the old David a thousand years earlier. The new David would militarily liberate his people from their Roman oppressors now, as the old David had delivered them from their Philistine oppressors centuries before. But, now the problem becomes immediately obvious. On the one hand, all throughout the New Testament—from the first chapter of Matthew (1:1) to the last chapter of Revelation (22:16)—Jesus is proclaimed as the Davidic messiah. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the historical Jesus was not exactly a warrior prince.
Among all those long, repetitive, and fruitless arguments between Job and his friends, I focus here on how the friends assert repeatedly that, since God is just and no mere mortal may question God, Job’s sufferings must be God’s punishments for his past sins and that, if he will only confess and beg for mercy, God will certainly forgive him. They are utterly sincere in their interpretation of why Job is suffering, but why are they so certain they have the right answer? Their certainty comes from the Torah itself and, more specifically, from the book of Deuteronomy, the climactic law code in the Pentateuch. Deuteronomy 28, for instance, promises: “All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God” (28:2) and then lists twelve verses of very specific blessings including, for example: “Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your livestock, both the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock” (28:4). That same chapter goes on to warn Israel: “If you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you” (28:25). The list of curses is far longer than that of blessings. It goes on for fifty-three verses including, for example: “Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock” (28:18). Job’s four friends, or comforters, are imagined as Deuteronomic fundamentalists. They reason that when Job lost his large family, thousands of livestock, and “very many servants” (1:2–3), God must have been cursing him with punishment for disobedience. They are by-the-book Deuteronomists who believe—with the Torah—that God rewards virtue and punishes evil; those who suffer or flourish are being, respectively, punished or rewarded. All poor Job can respond—again and again—is that he does not know what sins he committed to deserve such ghastly punishments: “Teach me,” he begs, “and I will be silent; make me understand how I have gone wrong” (6:24). Ancient hearers or modern readers know, of course, that the friends are totally wrong in their analysis of Job’s situation and are forced, therefore, to wonder whether, if they are so wrong, can Deuteronomy 28 be so right. God eventually tells the friends what the book’s hearers or readers have always known, namely, that Job is totally and utterly innocent. As God finally tells Eliphaz: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:7). Job’s situation is about a divine wager on his integrity and not about a divine punishment for his sin . But, still, if the prose parable challenges Israel, the poetic parable challenges Torah.
His major argument was that God had to punish evil or else he was not a just God. At a first hearing, that seems absolutely correct: It is not proper for God to pass over sin unpunished…. It is not fitting that God should take sinful man without an atonement…. This cannot be effected unless satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, [so] it is necessary for the God-man to make it. (Cur Deus Homo? 1.12, 19; 2.6) But what if God’s justice and righteousness operate not by punishments, but by consequences? And what, then, if the focus of divine justice and the interpretation of God’s will were removed from externally added punishments and placed on internally derived consequences ? My own proposal is that, from the divine creation in Genesis 1, through the divine council in Psalm 82, and on to Hackel’s curve and King’s arc, the equitable distribution of our world is a necessity built into the very destiny of that world. We do not, it seems, get away with injustice for very long. I have profound respect for Anselm as a monk and a saint. He could easily have been martyred under William II by the end of the eleventh century. That happened to Thomas Becket, another archbishop of Canterbury, under Henry II by the end of the next century. With William and Anselm, the clash between English king and Roman pope was already heading for its consummation under Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. But, although I know that our mega-metaphors for God are always conditioned by time and place, here is what I cannot understand. Anselm was a monk for forty-nine years and an archbishop for only sixteen years. Even within patriarchal parameters, then, why not imagine God as a monastic abbot rather than a feudal lord or as a spiritual director rather than a Norman king? Monasteries were, as Anselm well understood, places for slow transformation and not for swift punishment. “How sad,” said Sophocles a millennium and a half earlier in his play Antigone, “when those who reason, reason wrong.” I have focused discussion of God’s will on Urban and Anselm in those waning years of Christianity’s first millennium. On the one hand, millions of Christians probably agree that the First Crusade and all those succeeding ones were not the will of God. On the other hand, millions of Christians certainly consider the passion (from the Latin passio, suffering) and death of Jesus to have been the eternal will of God. They would probably argue that Anselm did no more than brilliantly confirm from reason what was already clearly present from revelation in the New Testament itself. They would deny my claim that vicarious atonement was not present there, but was created much later by Anselm himself. They could easily quote texts like these: God put forward [Christ] as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.
First, even if God is—from one end of the Christian Bible to the other—a God of nonviolent distributive justice and restorative righteous ness, is that biblical God not also—or even more so—a God of violent retributive justice and punitive righteousness? How is that to be—or is to be—reconciled? Think, once again, for example, of that magnificent vision repeated verbatim in two eighth-century BCE prophets. God, the nations of the earth proclaim, “will teach us his ways that we may walk in his paths.” To what end? So that we beat our “swords into plowshares” and our “spears into pruning hooks,” so that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:2–4; Mic. 4:2–3). But, if you continue through the rest of those same chapters, that peaceful vision changes utterly. Isaiah speaks of the “terror of the Lord” (2:10, 19, 21) and of the Lord’s “terrifying the earth” (2:19, 21), and Micah describes “many nations…gathered as sheaves to the threshing floor” (4:12) and “many peoples beaten in pieces” (4:13). Worse still, that vision itself seems to have been known and repudiated by the later prophet Joel: Proclaim this among the nations: Prepare war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.” (3:9–10) Is, then, God’s nonviolent peace to be established by violent war? Is the God of the biblical tradition violent, nonviolent, or both at the same time? Furthermore, even if the incarnational or “first coming” of Jesus was certainly nonviolent, what about the violence of his apocalyptic “second coming”? Think, for example, of this sequence in the book of Revelation, in the Apocalypse that is our Christian Bible’s last book. Its final image is quite magnificent. It is, once again, a rhapsodic vision of a transfigured earth: See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more for the first things have passed away. (21:3–4) But to get to that glorious consummation where God “makes all things new” (21:5), we have scenes like these: The angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
He is clinging hard, and the bewilderment in his face tells me that all the explaining I’ve done about the move has rolled through his head like tumbleweed. I say, You’re going for a simple hip surgery, then in a few days, Lecia will ride with you to a facility where nurses can take better care of you than Mother. Yamma? Mama’s heart medication has been doubled, Daddy. A dozen times I’ve been over this, but for the first time, his expression goes quizzical, his head cants. Yamma? he says. Mama’s not here, I say. Yamma, he says, and a silly grin splays across his face, and he lets go the bed bar like a man relinquishing his hold on a life rope. Then he grabs my hand through the bars. Garfield, he says. He says this word a lot. Mother and Harold take it as a reference to the orange rascal of a cartoon cat from the funnies. Daddy has an orange cat coffee mug he can’t drink out of, and a plastic figurine that nonstop bares his teeth in a snide grin. Garfield, Daddy says. Maybe this is the day I figure out that Daddy never gave a shit about an orange effing feline in the funnies, which he used to flip past on his way to the scores. Garfield’s the name of our own street. What dimwits we are. How often did he tell me I couldn’t leave home by saying, You’re staying right here at 4901 Garfield. Garfield, he says. Which means Home. Safe. Stay. How little we ever wanted, the creatures in my family, and how hard we struggled in one another’s company not to get it.
From Martin Luther (2016)
Thomas MüntzerAll of this brings us back to the terrible story of Thomas Müntzer. Müntzer had studied in Wittenberg in 1517, when Luther was still dabbling in German mysticism, so it seems that what first attracted him to Luther, Luther soon thereafter abandoned, while Müntzer developed it further, and much further, as we shall see. It was during his time in Wittenberg that Müntzer met Karlstadt. After leaving Wittenberg, Müntzer was a pro-Luther Christian, so much so that in 1520 Luther recommended him to the pastorate in Zwickau. But there Müntzer fell in with the Zwickau prophets, Storch, Drechsel, and Stübner, and also grew close to the so-called Tuchknappen, the radical journeymen weavers of the town. It was from being in their circle that he presumably developed his ideas of a revolution of the working classes against the nobility. Müntzer’s mystical ideas were the very antithesis of Luther’s theology. Müntzer believed that in order to hear the Word of God, one must first be cleansed “of the clay of cares and lusts.”3 In other words, one must do what Luther tried and failed to do as a young monk—confess one’s way into heaven. In our own time, the Scientologists talk about becoming “clear.” In all of these cases, it is a rigorous religious program, and the results are meant to be achievable. But it never has anything to do with God’s grace and has everything to do with one’s own strenuous efforts. One must simply white knuckle up the rungs of the various spiritual stages until one has strained and striven into the very throne room of heaven. This was what the Zwickau prophets had spoken of to Luther, and it seems that they got their ideas along these lines from Müntzer. But by the time of his last days in Zwickau, Müntzer’s ideas had gotten daffier still. When Müntzer was first in Zwickau, his screw had become sufficiently loose that his sermons were often downright disturbing. During this time, Johannes Agricola wrote a strong letter to Müntzer, begging him to see that what he was saying was going too far. For example, Müntzer would from the pulpit sometimes attack people by name. Agricola made it very clear in his letter that he must stop that immediately, and his frustration with Müntzer boiled over at one point when he urgently burst into all caps, writing, “YOU BREATHE OUT NOTHING BUT SLAUGHTER AND BLOOD.”4 As he certainly did. But Müntzer was too far gone in this direction to be called back. The world was on the brink of conflagration. And God had chosen him to lead the elect into the New Jerusalem.
From Martin Luther (2016)
While in Rome, Luther climbed the fabled Scala Sancta (Holy Stairs) that were purported to be the marble stairs of Pilate’s first-century palace in Jerusalem, which stairs Jesus himself had mounted and at the top of which he heard his fate from the assembled rabble: “Crucify him!”5 It is believed that Saint Helen, the mother of the fourth-century emperor Constantine, had brought them back from the Holy Land on a relic-hunting trip in which she also somehow managed to locate and bring back the “True Cross.” Although the purportedly Tyrian marble of the Scala Sancta is now protected with a wood overlay, pilgrims can still today climb them on their knees, praying all the while, just as Luther did five hundred years ago. It was stipulated in Luther’s time that the pilgrim ascending these stairs must upon each step recite the Pater Noster (Our Father).6 Doing this would count toward decreasing the suffering of any deceased relatives in purgatory, and at the time Luther seriously lamented that his parents were still alive. What a terrible conundrum it presented! How he dearly wished his time in Rome might count toward relieving the suffering in purgatory that likely yawned ahead of them, but the fact that they yet breathed terrestrial air cut off any hope of his helping them. But happily, Luther’s grandpa Heine had departed this world in time to benefit from his grandson’s ardent piety. Luther earnestly said the Pater Noster twenty-eight times, but when at last he reached the top of this holy ziggurat, a terrible thought entered his mind. Years later, he said that as he kneeled at the top of those twenty-eight steps, with his knees still registering the coolness of their marble, he suddenly wondered whether all he had just done so obediently would have the effect that the church so authoritatively and specifically and confidently said it would. The doctrine that the church possessed the authority to make these decisions about who suffered in purgatory and for precisely how long was believed to be absolutely clear. After all, had Jesus given the keys to Peter or hadn’t he? Still, after Luther had done his twenty-eight kneeling Pater Nosters, the question somehow arose in his head whether it was all in fact as had been told him. “What if it’s not true?” he wondered. He knew at the time that this thought had come into his mind, but had it come from the devil, who caused Eve to doubt God’s promise in Eden, or was it a question provoked by a genuine desire to know the truth, which is to say, from God himself? Luther didn’t know the answer, nor could he know it, but soon enough he would endeavor to find out.