Contempt
Contempt is the cold emotion — not heat but a lowering of the gaze, the slight curl of the lip, the sense that something or someone has fallen beneath serious response. Where anger still believes the other can be reached, contempt has stopped believing it. Vela reads contempt as a primary emotion with a particular danger to it, distinct from the anger it cools into, and attends to what it costs both the one who feels it and the one it is aimed at.
Working definition · Cold disregard—the sense that something or someone is beneath serious response.
5055 passages · 1 Vela essay · in 1 cluster
Vela’s read on this emotion
Contempt is the most corrosive of the emotions Vela reads, and the reading does not soften that. Anger can clear the air; contempt poisons it slowly, because it has already decided the other does not merit the effort of being addressed. The writers worth following have read contempt as a verdict, and verdicts are the things relationships least survive.
The reading is densest where contempt has been organized against a group or turned against the self. The literature of stigma reads how contempt does its social work — the look that places a person below the line of full regard, aimed at the poor, the sick, the foreign, the queer. Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life maps the small social machinery through which standing is granted and withdrawn, which is the stage contempt performs on. The memoir of family harm holds the particular wound of a parent's contempt — worse, often, than a parent's anger, because contempt withdraws the relationship rather than engaging it. Self-contempt, the gaze turned inward, is the form chronic shame takes once it has built a settled stance toward its own bearer.
Contempt is not the same as anger, disgust, or hatred. Anger engages; contempt dismisses. Disgust recoils from contamination; contempt looks down from a height. Hatred is hot and attentive; contempt is cold and inattentive, which is part of why it wounds. The four overlap and the reading keeps them separate, because contempt's coldness is precisely the thing that distinguishes it.
Study and magazine
Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
Read the guidePassages
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.
Page 52 of 253 · 20 per page
5055 tagged passages
They are also spread across rank, age, sex, and location. But that is also a quite extraordinary imperial reply. Trajan’s first response is an indirect reply to Pliny’s third question. It implicitly responds that the very name of Christian is itself a crime, like being a member of an illegal group. But, on the other hand, these “criminals” are not to be searched out. Trajan’s second reply is a direct response to Pliny’s second question. Christians are to be pardoned if they repent and recant. Finally, Trajan gives no reply to Pliny’s first question, instead implicitly rebuking him for moving at all on anonymous accusations. Christianity, clearly, is a very special sort of crime! That imperial reply established three principles that would guide 150 years of official imperial policy toward Christianity. Do not go searching for Christians. Do not punish them if they repent. Do not accept anonymous accusations. When, in the middle of the third century, that policy was changed to investigative persecution, it was far too late for Roman paganism. But, in any case, with human decency triumphing over legal logic, it shows us Pliny, Trajan, and Rome at their best. In the process of explaining to Trajan that he had found absolutely no evidence of evil acts within Christian assemblies (in fact, the reverse), Pliny gives us this precious description of at least one local form of that religion within a hundred years of the death of Jesus (Radice 1969:2.402–405). [The accused Christians] were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. Even this practice, however, they had abandoned after the publication of my edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations. I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves who were styled deaconesses but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) I take two points from that description. First, those two unnamed deaconesses were tortured presumably to death, for, since they had nothing evil to admit, how, short of death, would the torturers know when to stop? But Pliny was, among Roman aristocrats, as decent as you could imagine and, among Roman governors, as good as you could find.
On this point I stand with Judaism and against Hellenism. I do not find compromise feasible in this case because, while radical and moderate Platonism may differ in theory, they usually result in the same effects in practice. We are, for me, self-conscious flesh that can, paradoxically, negate not only the legitimacy of its flesh but even the validity of its self-consciousness. But we nonetheless remain self-conscious flesh. I find Platonic dualism, be it radical or moderate, to be ultimately dehumanizing. I admit this openly, because both author and reader have to answer for their own sensibility before continuing this discussion. Where are you on this point? This is why I want to be very careful about Jesus and Paul. Boyarin knows that “Paul’s entire gospel is a stirring call to human freedom and autonomy” (199). And Stephen Patterson has recently written about “the continuity between Paul and the sayings tradition [in the gospels] precisely in terms of the tradition of social radicalism they both share” (1991:35). I agree with both those statements. That is not my criticism of Paul. And my objection is not just to Paul’s blazing inconsistency in taking the first of his three distinctions, ethnicity, but not the other two, class and gender, all the way down to the depths and all the way out to the streets. It is this: the Platonic dualism that had influenced Philo, Paul, and Josephus had not so influenced John the Baptist, Jesus, and James, nor, I imagine, the Essenes and the Pharisees before the rabbis. Start with Paul and you will see Jesus incorrectly; start with Jesus and you will see Paul differently. In this book, therefore, I bracket Paul to concentrate on a Christianity that had to be born before he could notice its existence and persecute its presence. The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus The Gospel stories mention a gentle enshrouding, a magnanimous laying out, and a loving tombside vigil; but a limed pit is much more probable…. Lime eats the body quickly and hygienically. Therefore we find virtually no skeletal remains of the thousands crucified outside Jerusalem in the first century…. The hungry little ones, always with the church, are the reason why the resurrection of Jesus must be affirmed as bodily, absolutely, for Christian faith. There is no room for the nice wedge of metaphor to slip in between them, who are the body of the Risen Lord, and the real Jesus. Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord , pp. 180, 275 Two points from the preceding section are still relevant for this one. First, Paul’s compromise. I agree with Boyarin that Paul worked out a compromise between traditional Judaism and modern Hellenism on cosmic dualism. The flesh is to be subordinated to but not rejected by the spirit. In practice, however (even if not in theory), radical and moderate dualism may look very much alike. Second, Paul’s inconsistency.
For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16) Both persecutors and persecuted in Thessalonica are Thessalonians. Both persecutors and persecuted in Judaea were Jews. Paul is surely not “anti-Jewish” or even “anti-Judean”; but, even though “the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea” included Judaean Jews, Paul uses the term “Jews” in a sweeping and indiscriminate manner. “Jews” comes to mean all those other bad Jews except us (few?) good ones. Be that as it may, I return to the claim that the Gospel of Peter is intensely more anti-Jewish than the canonical gospels, especially where that claim is an explanation for its redactional content and authorial intention. Three examples will suffice. SADISTS AND HYPOCRITES The first example is from an article by Alan Kirk. He proposes that the Gospel of Peter reads rather than remembers the canonical gospels and changes, adds, or omits from them for “special religious concerns” that “have coerced the narrative in its own distinctive directions” (574). Or again: “The author was driven by special concerns and tendencies which guided the production of the narrative and led to the reshaping of the Lukan (and Matthean, Markan, and Johannine) material” (577). Those concerns, directions, and tendencies were to increase the anti-Jewishness of the story. Thus, in the story of the good thief, the author is “driven by an anti-Jewish Tendenz…. [T]he intention was to focus on the evil actions of the Jews … to focus the narrative upon the ‘villainous Jews’” (578 and note 23); it is “sadistic, hard-hearted Jews who inhabit the narrative” (582). And, in the story of the nonbreaking of Jesus’ legs, the author “is interested in putting the Jews in as bad a light as possible” so that “the Jews are depicted as the cruel torturers and murderers of Jesus and as dour legalists” (582). That, if it works, is a complete redactional explanation of the Gospel of Peter . The author reads “the texts of the New Testament gospels” (574) and conflates them selectively for greater anti-Jewishness. The second example is from The Death of the Messiah once again. For Brown, the Gospel of Peter is more anti-Jewish than any of the canonical gospels, a feature that indicates that it is later than they are, is popular rather than official, and is also heterodox rather than orthodox.
A follower of Pompey, he was pardoned after Caesar’s victory and then condemned after Caesar’s assassination, but he escaped to become, as Menahem Stern put it, “the greatest scholar of republican Rome and the forerunner of the Augustan religious restoration” (1.207). Most of his prodigious work is no longer extant, but Saint Augustine has preserved this report (1.210): Yet Varro, one of themselves [i.e., the pagans]—to a more learned man they cannot point—thought the God of the Jews to be the same as Jupiter, thinking that it makes no difference by what name he is called, so long as the same thing is understood…. Since the Romans habitually worship nothing superior to Jupiter … and they consider him the king of all the gods, and as he perceived that the Jews worship the highest God, he could not but identify him with Jupiter. That reciprocal agreement is perfectly irenic, beautifully ecumenical, and profoundly wrong. Why wrong? Because gods too carry baggage. We know that individuals and groups, peoples and nations have historical baggage. We know that sects and cults, creeds and religions have historical baggage. We sometimes forget, though, that gods do too. It is at this point that my Epilogue connects directly to my Prologue. We are enfleshed spirit and enspirited flesh, and we meet divinity not just in abstract speculation but in historical deployment. Zeus, Jupiter, and Yahweh are not simply different names for the same ultimate reality. Zeus is not just another name for Yahweh, because Zeus grounds a Hellenistic internationalism that directly threatens Jewish traditionalism. Jupiter is not just another name for Yahweh, because Jupiter grounds a Roman imperialism that directly threatens Jewish traditionalism. But is this not just the chauvinistic exclusivity of one people against another (or even all others)? Is it not just a Jewish us against a pagan them? There is, I think, much more at stake than that. What is at stake is the challenge of Psalm 82, quoted above. What is at stake is the character of your God. This is what our God is like, says that psalm. What is your God like? I have two footnotes to the vision of Psalm 82. One footnote concerns justice as distinct from revenge and recalls what was said earlier about apocalypticism. Yahweh is a God not of revenge but of justice. I reject absolutely the ancient libel that the God of the Old Testament or of Judaism is a God of anger and vengeance while the God of the New Testament or of Christianity is a God of love and mercy. But I ask emphatically whether apocalypticism, be it in Judaism or in Christianity, is about divine justice or divine revenge. Justice and revenge dwell close together in the human heart. When we examine our conscience, we usually find them happily wedded and bedded together. We find it hard, therefore, not to project their amalgam onto God.
And the reason those groups are set in stark contrast becomes more clear by the third example. A woman declares Mary blessed because of Jesus, presuming, in splendid Mediterranean fashion, that a woman’s greatness derives from mothering a famous son. But that patriarchal chauvinism is negated by Jesus in favor of a blessedness open to anyone who wants it, without distinction of sex or gender, infertility or maternity. Finally, it is in the last aphorism that the point of Jesus’ attack on the family becomes most clear. Imagine the standard Mediterranean family with five members: mother and father, married son with his wife, and unmarried daughter, a nuclear extended family all under one roof. Jesus says he will tear it apart. The usual explanation is that families will become divided as some accept and others refuse faith in Jesus. But notice where and how emphatically the axis of separation is located. It is precisely between the generations . But why should faith split along that axis? Why might faith not separate, say, the women from the men or even operate in ways far more random? The attack has nothing to do with faith but with power . The attack is on the Mediterranean family’s axis of power, which sets father and mother over son, daughter, and daughter-in-law. That helps us to understand all of those examples. The family is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, hate and be hated, help and be helped, abuse and be abused. It is not just a center of domestic serenity; since it involves power, it invites the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point that Jesus attacks it. His ideal group is, contrary to Mediterranean and indeed most human familial reality, an open one equally accessible to all under God. It is the Kingdom of God, and it negates that terrible abuse of power that is power’s dark specter and lethal shadow. Blessed Are (We?) Beggars Turning from familial to political groupings, it is hard to imagine an aphorism initially more radical but eventually more banal than Jesus’ conjunction of blessed poverty and the Kingdom of God. Here are four versions of the same saying, from the Gospel of Thomas 54, from the Q Gospel in both Luke 6:20 and Matthew 5:3, and from James 2:5, respectively. The first example is in Coptic translation and the last three are in Greek. As you read from first to last you can see the process of normalization at work: (1) “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.” (2) “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” (3) “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (4) Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him?
There are two separate versions, one very close to the Q Gospel account and one moving clearly along its own quite separate redactional trajectory: Jesus said, “Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a disciple of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and bear the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me. (Gospel of Thomas 55:1–2) Whoever does not hate [father] and mother as I do cannot be a [disciple] of me, and whoever does [not] love [father and] mother as I do cannot be a [disciple] of me. For my mother […], but my true [mother] gave me life. (Gospel of Thomas 101:1–3) You can easily see in that second version how Gospel of Thomas 52:1–2 is first summarized in 101:1 and then adapted to a new interpretation in 101:2–3. Instead of an earthly (false) mother who brings one into the realm of death and darkness stands a heavenly (true) mother who brings one into the realm of life and light. The earthly family is little better than a house of prostitution: Jesus said, “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.” (Gospel of Thomas 105) On the other hand, in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus’ true male parent is God the Father. He speaks of “the things of my Father” in 61:3, of “the places of my Father” in 64:12, of “the will of my Father” in 99:3, and of “the kingdom of my Father” in 99:4. And Jesus’ true female parent is Wisdom the Mother, as above in 101:3. Similarly, for example, the Acts of Thomas , a text of Edessa in Syria dated to the third century and continuing the traditions found in the Gospel of Thomas , has the apostle Thomas pray to Jesus and conclude with these words (NTA 2.356): We glorify and praise thee and thine invisible Father and thy Holy Spirit and the Mother of all creation. (Acts of Thomas 39) For the Common Sayings Tradition, therefore, I look only at Q Gospel 14:26 and Gospel of Thomas 55:1–2 and 101:1, ignoring 101:2–3 entirely. How is that rather savage attack on the family to be explained? It is, of course, even more surprising against the background of traditional peasant society, where family farm and family cooperation were morally and physically, socially and economically fundamental. The ordinary answer is that faith is even more fundamental than family, that Jesus is forcing people to believe in him over against even their own family, or that he is criticizing the hierarchical inequalities of society microcosmically present in the family itself. But is there something else at work here as well? Rural commercialization dislocates peasant life and greatly weakens the peasant family itself so that it can no longer protect its members as it breaks into isolated individuals each seeking their own survival. Jesus is not speaking to the well-off, advising them to give up their possessions—advocating asceticism, in effect.
It also marked the legal boundary across which a general could not bring his army without becoming, ipso facto, a criminal, a traitor, and an enemy of the state. On that January day in 49 BCE , the death throes of the Roman republic escalated from their previous level, eighty years of savage civil discord, to a new level, twenty years of savage civil war. You could go back and date the start of it all from that moment in 133 BCE when Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the people, made this famous accusation—you will remember another version from elsewhere: The wild beasts that roam over Italy have their dens, each has a place of repose and refuge. But the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy nothing but the air and light; without house or home they wander about with their wives and children. (Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus 9.4) That started a class war that was not simply the haves against the have-nots. Rather, on one side were the populares, or “popular ones,” the have-nots led by some of the haves; on the other were the optimates, or “best ones,” the haves led by some others of the haves. It was, as civil strife became civil war, Caesar and military might for the populares against Pompey and legal right for the optimates . Athens had invented democracy and learned that, although you could have democracy and empire, you could not have them both at the same time for long. Rome had invented republic and was about to learn that, although you could have republic and empire, you could not have them both at the same time for long. I INTEND THIS INTERLUDE as a very deliberate connection and a very specific transition from challenge parables by Jesus in Part I to challenge parables about Jesus in Part II. Indeed, when challenge parables about Jesus get big enough, we call them gospels. This move from the first to the second part is, in other words, the move from parable as parable to history as parable. In Part I those challenge parables told by Jesus involve fictional characters in fictional stories . In my paradigmatic case study of the Good Samaritan, for example, Jerusalem, Jericho, and the steep descent between were—then as now—factual geography. But, still, all else is fiction, even if set in that factual location. The victim, priest, Levite, and Samaritan were all fictional. So also were the bandits, donkey, innkeeper, and those two denarii. (But, of course, even fictional stories can reveal much about general history—that there were bandits along that desert road, for example, or that the local currency was denarii rather than dollars.) But, apart from those generalities and the actuality of that precise location, parables by Jesus involve fictional characters in fictional stories . In Part II the challenge parables about Jesus will involve a much more unnerving mix of fact and fiction, history and parable.
WOMEN IN PREINDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES To discern such bias it is often necessary to read between or behind the lines of male descriptions of female-male relations. Here are two examples of such counter-reading, both involving the Montagnais-Naskapi of eastern Canada’s Labrador Peninsula, as cited by Eleanor Leacock (26–27, 39–40). The first two reports, one from the 1630s and the other from the 1890s respectively, agree closely on the jobs undertaken by the women and judge them as servile drudgery: The women … besides the onerous role of bearing and rearing the children, also transport the game from the place where it has fallen; they are the hewers of wood and drawers of water; they make and repair the household utensils; they prepare food; they skin the game and prepare the hides like fullers; they sew garments; they catch fish and gather shellfish for food; often they even hunt; they make the canoes, that is skiffs of marvelous rapidity, out of bark; they set up the tents wherever and whenever they stop for the night—in short, the men concern themselves with nothing but the more laborious hunting and the waging of war…. Their wives are regarded and treated as slaves. The sexes have their special labors. Women perform the drudgery and bring home the food slain by their husbands, fetching wood and water, tanning the skins, and making them into clothing. The labor of erecting the tents and hauling the sleds when on their journey during the winter falls upon them, and, in fact, they perform the greater part of the manual labor. They are considered inferior to men, and in their social life they soon show the effects of the hardships they undergo. Those two reports must be read alongside these other accounts from, respectively, the same times and sources. They indicate accuracy in description despite prejudice in understanding: Women have great power…. A man may promise you something and if he does not keep his promise, he thinks he is sufficiently excused when he tells you that his wife did not wish him to do it…. The women know what they are to do, and the men also; and one never meddles with the work of the other…. Men leave the arrangement of the household to the women, without interfering with them; they cut and decide and give away as they please without making the husband angry. I have never seen my host ask a giddy young woman that he had with him what became of the provisions, although they were disappearing very fast…. The choice of plans, of undertakings, of journeys, of winterings, lies in nearly every instance in the hands of the housewife. An amusing incident occurred within a stone’s throw of Fort Chimo. An Indian had his clothes stripped from him by his enraged wife. She then took the tent from the poles, leaving him naked. She took their property to the canoe, which she paddled several miles upstream.
Jesus said sandals or staff were forbidden, and his companions actually tried but found it too difficult; Jesus then had to “say” sandals or staff were permitted. Luke, faced with “no sandals” from Q Gospel 10:4 and “sandals” from Mark 6:9, simply omitted any mention of them in his parallel Luke 9:3. Those small Lukan changes are reassuring because, apart from smoothing out such contradictions, Luke’s strategy was to stay relatively close to his Markan source in Luke 9:1–6 and to his Q Gospel source in Luke 10:4–11. The Common Elements Itinerants and Householders . Itinerants and householders are the official terms I use for those who arrive and those who receive them in the three texts. They are also, to underline their importance, used in the titles of Parts VII and VIII. Recall the context for a moment. Anthropology, history, and archeology came together to form a picture of rural commercialization and Roman urbanization against Jewish tradition and peasant resistance in Lower Galilee during the 20s of the first common-era century. What that process meant was not just taxation or even heavy taxation. Taxation was nothing new and may not have been any worse then than at any other time during hundreds of years of imperial control. What that process meant was a complete dislocation of peasant life, family support, and village security. Some peasants, of course, did quite well at the expense of others. But, for those others, it meant certain indebtedness, possible enslavement, and probable dispossession. It meant a move from subsistence on a small family farm to the status of tenant farmer, landless laborer, beggar, or bandit. That commercialization process set against one another those poor peasants who might be dispossessed tomorrow and those destitute peasants who had been dispossessed yesterday. It is those destitute landless ones and poor landed ones that the kingdom-of-God movement brings together as itinerants and householders . Eating and Healing . Two points are of importance here. First, the program Jesus outlines is not about almsgiving. It is not about food handed out to beggars at the door. Jesus could have inaugurated a kingdom of beggars, but that is not what all three texts agree in emphasizing. Second, given that the program is to be a reciprocal experience rather than almsgiving, what is the logic of that reciprocity? Itinerants need food, of course, but would not a handout suffice? Everyone needs healing, of course, but why do householders need it in particular? The itinerants look at the householders, which is what they were yesterday or the day before, with envy and even hatred. The householders look at the itinerants, which is what they may be tomorrow or the day after, with fear and contempt. The kingdom program forces those two groups into conjunction with one another and starts to rebuild peasant community ripped apart by commercialization and urbanization. But just as that eating is both symbolic and actual, so also is that healing both symbolic and actual.
This is the typical situation of the house church . On the one hand, Paul clearly presumes that there are those who have food to eat at home and need not come to the Lord’s Supper for sustenance. They are the haves . On the other hand, those haves “show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing.” Those latter are the have-nots . The Lord’s Supper is supposed to be a patronal share-meal in which haves and have-nots can eat food together in common, but, of course, all or most of the food and drink must come from the haves . What happens, however, is that the nonworking haves can arrive before the working have-nots and eat together whatever they bring or their host prepares for them. When the have-nots arrive, there is nothing left for them, hence “one goes hungry [the have-nots ] and another becomes drunk [the haves ],” as Paul put it. I return below to consider the logic of Paul’s reply in the sections named tradition and commentary within those frames of criticism . COMMUNAL SHARE-MEALS James Packer’s fascinating studies of Ostia, Rome’s port at the Tiber’s mouth, can serve as an introduction to this section (1967; 1971). Ostia’s population “probably did not exceed 27,000” at the time of Paul. Its upper-end aristocracy was about five hundred people housed in only “22 mansions scattered throughout the site,” and its lower-end aristocracy was about two thousand people housed in apartment buildings looking into a central garden. Everyone else—the other 90 percent—lived in upper-level tenements, with either shops or factories on the ground floor. Shops averaged 1.7 rooms and were actually themselves shop-apartments (1971:70). Those tenements or insulae (literally: islands) were usually four or five stories high, and “the higher one went in a Roman building, the worse conditions became” (70 note 30). The reason was that the higher the floor, the greater the subdivision for its renters. We should not think of individual apartments as dwelling places in our sense of the word. People did not eat or live in them; they did not cook or defecate in them; they simply slept and stored in them. “The majority of Ostian flats were not homes in the modern sense of the world. They were not equipped to take care of all the physical needs of their inhabitants, and, save for [garden apartments], they were probably not used to entertain friends. They would have served merely for household life and for the storage of family property. The pattern of Ostian streets suggests that the real life of the community was lived outside individual dwellings. Shops bordered almost every street, and the apparent lack of kitchens in most Ostian houses may indicate that many shops supplied the inhabitants of the surrounding buildings with partially or completely prepared food and drink” (1971:73). Shop-apartments, in other words, were a major public-private location.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
A beacon of mental health, the Virgin Mary here, Pam says. One half-assed attempt. Well, I can beat that weak-assed shit. I have zero. There are some other motherfuckers I’d seriously like to kill, though. On the way back to the ward, Pam tugs my elbow, saying, I’ve got some contraband. Tell me it’s chocolate, I say, for that day’s brownies had vanished from the ward kitchen. Better than that, she says, and she draws from her sweatshirt pocket a small black Bic lighter. Then she whispers, I’ve also got a lightbulb in my room. What fun we’re meant to wreak with these items, I can’t figure out, but I’m feeling well enough to let the opaque opportunity slide.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
Then it strikes me that he’s just a shy kid from the Midwest raised to say ma’am like I do to every waitress and dry cleaner. We scuttle inside like a pair of field mice from our inept exchange. Back in my chair, the filter of my head notices how people keep talking about being grateful, as in I’m so happy to be thankful to be grateful to sit here with you nice sober folks. I look around and think, Your lives must suck worse even than mine if this constitutes fun for you. Eventually, I raise my hand high enough to get called on. I announce that I doubt I’m an alcoholic, since I never drink in the mornings, and nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me—not bankruptcy, car wreck, nor even the standard mugging. While I expect some indictment, everyone smiles that sugary smile I mistrust and nods, and the lady next to me whispers, Keep coming. At the end, when everybody grabs hands to pray, it’s like some dreary ring-around-the-rosy, and I refuse to mouth the words, instead gaping around at who’s dopey enough to go along. The musician and his friend do, and the professor. Perfectly smart people, talking to air with grave expressions. Go figure. On the way out, I pass bandana’ed David talking with great speed and animation to the musician. David’s actually holding up his finger in some Confucian posture, saying, It’s a logical fallacy that they’re telling me I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease, since this a priori implies that any citizen who denies they have this ailment is no doubt infected... Like me, he’s obviously here to educate them to their cult’s fallacious thinking. On the sidewalk, the night is cool and wet, and a few passing women hand me their phone numbers, saying call anytime, even to say hello, which feels slightly pitiful on their parts. What do they want? One says, For me, a car wreck was a yet. I mean, it just hadn’t gotten around to happening. Another says she’d wondered just like I had whether she really needed to quit drinking, but that underperforming or having a bleak inner life is a severe consequence of drinking even without an external loss like job or child. The comment stuns me in a way. Inside I say to myself, How dare you suppose I have a bleak inner life! Driving home, I check my puffy eyes in the rearview and tell myself that I look as cheerful as the next lady...don’t I? I know that I don’t, and while I sit in the driveway smoking, I can catch—almost feel zip through me—a streak of the kindness I’d witnessed at the coffee urn. Just to be on the receiving end of a warm baked item while living so fenced off from husband and community brings me up short. Maybe, I think, I do belong among that peculiar company....
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Or, best of all, the Reverend George E. Ellis, son of a rich Boston merchant and grandson of a loyalist, who quit his Unitarian parish in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in disgust at developments in both church and society and retired to a house on Marlborough Street, Boston, and to the insulating book stacks of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which he served as president for ten years. A dour man (his candid colleagues said in implacably honest tributes to him after his death), who talked in soliloquies or not at all, he had been, they correctly recorded, a “melancholy failure” as professor of theology at the Harvard Divinity School and had repaid Harvard for its lack of response by publicly striking it from the list of beneficiaries in his will. Never known to have uttered a single good word for any reforming cause, never having evinced the slightest interest in art, poetry, fiction, or music, and, on the one occasion in his entire eighty years when he was known to have quoted a phrase from Shakespeare, having quoted it wrong, he “lived in the past,” despaired of the future, and worked like a beaver on his antiquarian research and his writing—though he wrote, his candid associates confessed, in a most “cumbrous, clumsy, diffuse” style. The most that could be said for Ellis, it was firmly recorded, was that he was “sober, peaceable, morally clean … sensible, and dutiful.” And also that he “belonged to the ancient order … of privilege.”15 And that is the essential fact. The history that Ellis, Chamberlain, and Fisher wrote remains significant as an expression of opinion within a group of the highest social status and as a reflection of the challenges they felt. Their writings differ, of course, in quality and emphasis, but they share the same underlying concern, and they agreed that the Revolution, and the role of the loyalists, had been misunderstood.
He is one of them, but he is also leading them into resistance to the systemic evil of Roman commercialization which is the opposite of the kingdom of God—that is, the will of the Jewish God for all the earth. PROLOGUE: THE MEANING OF HEALINGAfrican Americans who must suffer discrimination in silence have higher blood pressure than those who can afford to challenge racist treatment. The finding may explain why blacks as a group have such high rates of stroke, heart disease and kidney failure. Time magazine, “Health Report: The Bad News,” November 4, 1996, p. 20 In Part I of this book, I spoke about history as an interaction between present and past, as a reconstruction of the past that cannot be absolutely stopped but only methodologically disciplined from imposing our present selves on past others or from dominating here-and-now over then-and-there. The present is always at an advantage over the past, because the present knows what did happen to the past but the past could not know what would happen to it. How can the present not feel superior to the past, given that very knowledge alone? How, in other words, can the challenge strike at least as hard from them to us as from us to them? It can do so, of course, because the past’s unknown future reminds us that our present’s unknown future puts us in exactly the same blind position. Here is a case where the honesty of that interaction must be openly faced. In the following section I speak of Jesus and his companions as healing others. What exactly did that mean for them, and what does it mean for us in engagement with them? I am not satisfied with explanations that say something like this: those ancient people had strange or even weird ideas, but we must just accept and describe them. Or this: they have a right to their superstitions and we must not disparage them. When explained like that, no ancient ideas can challenge us. They simply confirm our superiority and our more adequate knowledge of how the world works. Indeed, we are especially to be admired in that we refrain from external contempt even where internal condescension may be present. They talked about evil spirits and demonic forces responsible for sickness and death. We speak of sanitation and nutrition, of bacteria and germs, of microbes and viruses. How are they not wrong if we are right, and vice versa? Healing and Curing Illnesses are experiences of disvalued changes in states of being and in social function; diseases, in the scientific paradigm of modern medicine, are abnormalities in the structure and function of bodily organs and system. Leon Eisenberg, “Disease and Illness,” p. 11 A key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotomy between two aspects of sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of perceived disease.
In his own imperial Annals, recorded on a hexagonal prism, he says, “Hezekiah [King of Judah] himself I shut up in Jerusalem, his capital city, like a bird in a cage.” But the prophet Isaiah taught the caged bird to sing: Thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: “He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it…. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” (37:33, 35) Samaria, capital of the north, was destroyed and its inhabitants deported—hence the “ten lost tribes of Israel”—and Jerusalem was besieged, but not conquered. So what do you think biblical tradition thought of the Assyrians and their great capital city of Nineveh? The name “Assyria” is equated with other representative “supremely evil” places: “Woe to you, Assyria, who conceal the unrighteous within you! O wicked nation, remember what I did to Sodom and Gomorrah” (2 Esd. 2:8); “The pride of Assyria shall be laid low, and the scepter of Egypt shall depart” (Zech. 10:11). Indeed, Nineveh itself tended to be treated as a paradigm case for evil cities. A rather terrible example is in the book of the prophet Nahum, which is a long and bitter “oracle concerning Nineveh” (1:1). The text is focused gleefully on Nineveh’s—impending or accomplished?—destruction, as the Medes and Babylonians conquered the Assyrians in 612 BCE . Here are two representative examples: Nineveh is like a pool whose waters run away. “Halt! Halt!”— but no one turns back. “Plunder the silver, plunder the gold! There is no end of treasure! An abundance of every precious thing!” Devastation, desolation, and destruction! Hearts faint and knees tremble, all loins quake, all faces grow pale! (2:8–10) Ah! City of bloodshed, utterly deceitful, full of booty— no end to the plunder! The crack of whip and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end— they stumble over the bodies! (3:1–3) That is what the Old Testament actually thinks of Nineveh, for what the Assyrians had done to the northern Israelite capital of Samaria and attempted to do to the southern Israelite capital of Jerusalem. In the book of Jonah, the prophet is childishly disobedient, and the Ninevites are unbelievably obedient. Hear that story against that general biblical vision of prophets and Assyrians. Basic presuppositions and fundamental expectations are reversed. What does that do to the security and certainty of the postexilic restoration? The parable of Jonah challenges the Bible even more deeply than did the parable of Ruth. As always, in a challenge parable, popular expectations and communal traditions are serenely reversed—but only, of course, in one single story. It is particular story against general ideology, parable against myth, and pin against balloon.
From Lit: A Memoir (2009)
And we had. David was a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in philosophy I’d once been introduced to at the back of a reading by mutual pals. Some kind of genius, David’s meant to be, though his red bandana is the flag of gangster or biker, ditto the unlaced Timberland work boots. I ask him how long he’s been coming, and he says not hardly any time, and I say it’s my first go, and he asks if I get it, and I say if I got it, I wouldn’t be out here smoking. He says same with him, adding while he drank a lot, he mostly did marijuana, which can’t be so bad because it’s natural. I say—cleverly, I think—Strychnine’s natural. He concedes that’s true but also points out how, since the average pot smoker doesn’t tend to steal your TV, people don’t frown on it like they do, say, smoking crack, then plowing over the crossing guard. We stare at the cannons facing us, both agreeing we really have better places to be as we grind our cigarettes with our boot heels. Climbing the steps back to the lighted doorway, he holds the door, bowing as he says from his scruffily bearded face (this is the pre-scruff U.S.A.), After you, Miz Karr. It brings me up short—his outlaw wardrobe paired with the obsequious ma’am thing—and I say testily, Are you fucking with me? No ma’am, he says, his hands flying to his T-shirted chest. Then it strikes me that he’s just a shy kid from the Midwest raised to say ma’am like I do to every waitress and dry cleaner. We scuttle inside like a pair of field mice from our inept exchange. Back in my chair, the filter of my head notices how people keep talking about being grateful, as in I’m so happy to be thankful to be grateful to sit here with you nice sober folks. I look around and think, Your lives must suck worse even than mine if this constitutes fun for you. Eventually, I raise my hand high enough to get called on. I announce that I doubt I’m an alcoholic, since I never drink in the mornings, and nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me—not bankruptcy, car wreck, nor even the standard mugging. While I expect some indictment, everyone smiles that sugary smile I mistrust and nods, and the lady next to me whispers, Keep coming. At the end, when everybody grabs hands to pray, it’s like some dreary ring-around-the-rosy, and I refuse to mouth the words, instead gaping around at who’s dopey enough to go along. The musician and his friend do, and the professor. Perfectly smart people, talking to air with grave expressions. Go figure.
The contrast was made both in neutral terms by Jesus himself and in very inimical terms by opponents: John fasted and they called him demonic; Jesus ate and drank and they said he was “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” It is obvious why John, as an apocalyptic ascetic, was fasting, but what was Jesus doing? It is not enough to say that those opponents are simply accusing him of social deviancy through nasty name-calling. That is, of course, quite true, but why precisely those names rather than any of the others easily available? Here is another parable of Jesus, which helps answer that question and will serve to ground all of those aphorisms, dialogues, and parables concerning the Kingdom of God. It is found in the Q Gospel , but with widely divergent versions in Matthew 22:1–13 and Luke 14:15–24. It is also found in the Gospel of Thomas 64, as follows: Jesus said, “A person was receiving guests. When he had prepared the dinner, he sent his servant to invite the guests. The servant went to the first and said to that one, ‘My master invites you.’ That person said, ‘Some merchants owe me money; they are coming to me tonight. I must go and give them instructions. Please excuse me from dinner.’ The servant went to another and said to that one, ‘My master has invited you.’ That person said to the servant, ‘I have bought a house and I have been called away for a day. I shall have no time.’ The servant went to another and said to that one, ‘My master invites you.’ That person said to the servant, ‘My friend is to be married and I am to arrange the banquet. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me from dinner.’ The servant went to another and said to that one, ‘My master invites you.’ That person said to the servant, ‘I have bought an estate and I am going to collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me.’ The servant returned and said to his master, ‘The people whom you invited to dinner have asked to be excused.’ The master said to his servant, ‘Go out on the streets and bring back whomever you find to have dinner.’ Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my father.” This is one of those rare cases where the Gospel of Thomas interprets a parable. It appends, as commentary: “Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my father.” Jesus, not the host, speaks that judgment. For my present purpose, I leave aside that interpretation to focus closely on the replacement guests, the reference to which I have italicized above.
But both could have been accused of collaboration with imperial tyranny, and both would have replied that such was preferable to suicide. For, when others die for speech, those who live through silence must at least remember and record. So Tacitus: “We should also have lost our memory along with our voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence” (Agricola 2). And Josephus: “Never may I live to become so abject a captive as to abjure my race or to forget the traditions of my forefathers” (Jewish War 6.107). They could even have met at Rome, because there, between the 70s and 90s under the new Flavian dynasty, Tacitus’s career was just beginning and Josephus’s was coming to a climax. If they had met, they would probably not have liked one another, even if the demands of aristocratic honor and the dictates of imperial patronage made polite respect much wiser than open contempt. Tacitus, with both general ethnocentrism and specific anti-Semitism, claimed that “toward every other people they [the Jews] feel only hate and enmity” (Histories 5.5.1). But Josephus defended his people for having “laws … that … teach not impiety, but the most genuine piety,…[which] invite men not to hate their fellows, but to share their possessions” (Against Apion 41). They were, however, in complete agreement on one small item concerning Jesus, with about forty words in Tacitus’s Latin and sixty in Josephus’s Greek: there was a movement , there was an execution , there was a continuation , and there was an expansion . But that Jesus item is given in passing, with each writer primarily interested in larger imperial events and broader historical horizons. Tacitus’s interest was in dynastic degeneration, imperial corruption, and how “the souls of tyrants … show bruises and wounds …[from] cruelty, lust, and malice” (Annals 6.6). Josephus’s interest was in procuratorial misgovernment, popular reaction, and how those disturbances led eventually to open revolt against Rome in the Jewish homeland. But both of them made the same four points about Jesus, and that is my present concern. Two preliminaries prepare for a look at that Josephan text. First, overlap. Josephus’s two major works—Jewish War , written in the late 70s and early 80s of the first century, and Jewish Antiquities , written in its early 90s—overlap on the history of the period from the mid-160s B.C.E. to the early 70s C.E. They give, in other words, two versions of events in the Jewish homeland during most of that first century. Absences, changes, and divergences between those twin accounts must always be assessed carefully to understand bias, prejudice, and purpose. In the section about Pontius Pilate in Jewish War 2.169–177, he notes only two popular disturbances brought on by his misgovernment. Nothing at all is said about Jesus. In retelling that same period in Jewish Antiquities 18:55–89, Josephus makes two major changes, and these are significant for the context of his Jesus story. Second, context.
I TURN, FINALLY, TO this chapter’s fifth point. Granted all of that preceding analysis, and especially its fateful claims about Judaism and Christianity, what type of parable is the Gospel according to Luke-Acts? Is it an internal challenge parable like that offered by Mark to the Twelve companions and family relatives of Jesus? Or is it an internal attack parable like that proclaimed by the Christian Judaism of Matthew against the Pharisaic Judaism of his opponents? It is actually both attack and challenge, but both aspects are more externally than internally directed and both are tightly integrated. First, Luke-Acts as attack. The presentation of Jesus in Luke-Acts is, first of all, an attack parable—against the Jewish religion. It is, however, quite different from that seen already in Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus. Luke-Acts comes from outside rather than inside Judaism, because “Luke,” unlike “Matthew,” is now fully outside the Jewish religion. As a converted Gentile God-worshiper, he finds present validity in Judaism only as absorbed into and thereby replaced by Christianity. On the one hand, Luke-Acts’ attack does not have the bitterness and invective so visible in Matthew. Think, for instance, of that single accusatory word “hypocrites”: Matthew has it sixteen times (6:2–16; 15:7; 22:18; 23:13–29; 24:51), but Luke has it only twice (12:56; 13:15). On the other hand, although Matthew’s internal attack opposes Christian Judaism to Pharisaic Judaism, Luke-Acts’ external attack opposes Christianity to Judaism. As a God-worshiper, “Luke” knows Judaism and its Greek-translation scriptures very, very well, but as a Gentile (and Roman citizen?) his vision is not of a Christian Judaism or even of a Jewish Christianity, but of a Roman Christianity or even a Christian Rome. Luke-Acts is also a challenge parable—but externally to the Roman authorities. The first and major element of challenge is, of course, for Rome to accept Christianity as replacing Judaism, to grant Christianity those imperial tolerances and exemptions once accorded Judaism. That challenge is summed up in the final words of Luke-Acts, in which Paul is in Rome “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance ” (28:31). There are also, of course, several elements of ethical challenge to Rome’s standard social norms. Notice, for example, what is emphasized in the following conversion story. “In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort, as it was called. He was a devout man (from the Greek verb “to worship”) who feared God with all his household” (Acts 10:1–2a). In other words, Cornelius was a Gentile God-worshiper or God-fearer. But notice what is emphasized three times about his character: He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God….
And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. Omit, therefore, those italicized sentences. Without them Josephus’s account is carefully and deliberately neutral. He does not want, apparently, to be embroiled in any controversy about this Jesus, and such debate may have been quite possible within circles important to him at the time. So he was cautiously impartial and some later Christian editor delicately Christianized his account, but only to the extent that it was at least plausible and credible for the Jewish Josephus to have written it. Those Christian insertions, however, should not diminish the importance of Josephus’s commentary. That is how Jesus and early Christianity looked to a very prudent, diplomatic, and cosmopolitan Roman Jew in the early last decade of the first century: miracles and teachings, Jews and Greeks, our “men of highest standing” and Pilate, crucifixion and continuation. He did not, of course, mention resurrection, but he did admit that “the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” The pagan Roman witness is Cornelius Tacitus, whom we have also met before. He was writing, in the early decades of the second century, about the decline and fall of Augustus’s Julio-Claudian dynasty. He tells, in Annals 15.44, how a rumor blamed that dynasty’s last emperor, Nero, for the disastrous fire that swept Rome in 64 C.E.: Therefore to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. Instead of Josephus’s neutral language, we now have Tacitus’s intensely pejorative language. But, apart from that difference, the two outlines are in close agreement. There was a movement in Judea. Its founder was executed under Pontius Pilate. But the movement, instead of stopping, has now reached Rome itself. Neither author needs to mention Christian faith in Jesus’ resurrection to agree, one with prudent impartiality and the other with sneering contempt, that the “Christian” movement, far from being stopped by his execution, had now reached all the way to Rome itself. Think now of two different groups or emphases or even classes among Jesus’ earliest followers; one we have seen before his death and the other after it. We have, from before his execution, those missionaries who went out in imitation of Jesus’ own lifestyle, practicing free healing and open commensality. Did they all stop their activities on the day of his death? Did they all immediately lose their faith?