Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 76 of 253 · 20 per page

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

  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?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Reuchlin’s opponent Hoogstraaten is being strangled with Luther’s left hand, and Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, and Peter Lombard have already been slain. At this point, Luther’s main antagonists were thought to be the scholastic philosophers and opponents of humanism. 62 The tempo of events now quickened. Each day brought news of fresh attacks by Ambrosius Catharinus, the papal nuncio Jerome Aleander, and Hieronymus Emser; as Luther put it, he felt like Hercules battling the many-headed Hydra. 63 Keeping up with the Catholic responses was taking up all his time. Armed with the bull, Eck had returned from Rome to Germany. Just how far opinion had moved within German lands was evident when he and Aleander had set out to publish it in the autumn of 1520. In Meissen, Merseburg, and Brandenburg, he managed to have it posted, with great fanfare and with an accompaniment of armed men. But as soon as his escorts left, “pious children” put up counter-notices, to such effect that Eck had to flee to a monastery. Songs were sung mocking him, letters of feud were sent threatening his life and goods, and a gang of fifty students arrived from Wittenberg who began to hound him. 64 On January 3, 1521, Luther was finally excommunicated by the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem. Luther noted what was happening with fascination, following the progress of the original bull and gathering the accounts through the spring of 1521 of its fate. 65 In Leipzig, to his surprise, the bull was ripped and dung was thrown at it; in Döblin the crowds did the same, erecting a notice saying, “The nest is here, the birds have flown!” In Magdeburg, Emser’s book was put up on the pillory. 66 It seemed that Germany was thumbing its nose at the power of the Pope. Book burnings were also in the air. In 1518 it had been the students at Wittenberg who had burned the work of the indulgence-seller Tetzel. In Louvain in 1520, Aleander managed to have more than eighty Lutheran books publicly burned by the executioner in the market square, partly by getting the councilors to seize the books from the booksellers. In Mainz late that year, however, the ritual went badly wrong. The hangman asked the assembled crowd whether the author had been legitimately condemned; they roared back that he had not been—and so he refused to light the fire, much to the audience’s delight. 67 Luther mocked Aleander for having spent hundreds of ducats buying his books to burn. But burning heretical texts prefigured burning the heretic himself: Luther knew what fate awaited him if he were to be seized by the Pope’s forces. I N J ANUARY 1546, in the depths of winter, Luther set out on his final journey, to Eisleben, the town of his birth. He was sixty-two years old.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I went to one, and it was I went here and got drunk, I went there and got drunk. In the background, I hear the blender whir as she adds, I’d sooner dip snuff. Again, Warren appears in the door, holding up the empty bottle of wine with a puzzled look on his face. I jot down on a pad that I spilled the bottle. Mother’s saying, I’m not an alcoholic, Mary. When you were little, I called the hotline that one time, and they showed up with a six-pack of beer because they assumed I’d be having the DTs. Without seizures, I didn’t make the team. They told me, You’re not an alcoholic, lady.

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  He is ready to exploit cheap labor ruthlessly and without relief. His strictures against his Hebrew labor force are insistent and uncompromising. The only thing he knows to do is to impose greater demands on the slave force and higher production quotas under increasingly difficult conditions (Exod. 5). He exhibits not a hint of awareness that his labor force consists of actual, vulnerable human persons. His incessant pressure on his slave labor force is in the interest of building “store-house cities” designed to store Pharaoh’s food monopoly so that he can accumulate a surplus on which all others are eventually dependent (1:11). He had the shrewd capacity to utilize his food monopoly as political leverage. His capacity to do so, however, depended on his ability to store the grain adequately, and for that he needed slave labor. Thus the character of Pharaoh, absolute to perpetuity, was committed to and dependent on a ruthless labor policy to protect and enhance his surplus, which he had at the expense of subsistence peasants. And then, says the narrative, Pharaoh died (2:23)! His death is a contradiction of his ideology. The ideology asserted “absolute to perpetuity.” But then he died. And with his death came dramatic relief from a policy of ruthless exploitation. What had seemed absolute was not! What had been declared to perpetuity was terminated! It turned out that these claims were patently false. The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. “Pharaoh” reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force. And characteristically such a performance ends, exposed as false, in death. It is the insistent wisdom of the narrative, always being reperformed and reasserted, that the claim of Pharaoh is a charade. It is, in its moment, every time a powerful charade; but every time it is unsustainable: “[Then] the king of Egypt died” (Exod. 2:23). And when the king of Egypt dies and repeatedly dies in many narrative performances, every time everything becomes unglued, and we learn yet again that there is nothing absolute or perpetual about such claims by the regime. THE HEBREWS

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

  I am inclined, therefore, to doubt quite strongly the veracity of Josephus’s “in arms,” and for three reasons. One, as just seen, is the Samaritan and Roman reaction. Another is the general expectation that apocalyptic prophets and their followers will be unarmed since they expect divine power to solve a sociocultural situation already far beyond human redress. It is not so much that they are pacifists as that all necessary violence will be of transcendental rather than human derivation. Their part is to reenact the ritual act that invokes the eschatological scenario—to jump-start, as it were, the apocalypse. Finally, there is the much more pejorative view of the Samaritans in the later Antiquities as compared with that in the earlier War . Pilate, in other words, was dismissed from office for excessive cruelty or unnecessary brutality, even by Roman imperial standards. And we may well suspect the same reason for Caiaphas’s simultaneous dismissal. My point is not that Pilate was a monster. He was an ordinary second-rank Roman governor with no regard for Jewish religious sensitivities and with brute force as his normal solution to even unarmed protesting or resisting crowds. Like any Roman governor he was also careful to distinguish between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the important and the unimportant, the aristocrat and the peasant. Barabbas Was Not a Robber In the New Testament gospel accounts Pilate is completely just and fair. He wished to acquit Jesus but was forced, reluctantly and against his will, to crucify him because of the insistence of Jewish authority and Jerusalem crowd. And he held lengthy discussions with Jesus during which he repeatedly proclaimed his innocence of any crime worthy of death. Here, for example, is Mark 15:6–15: Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. Then he answered them, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate spoke to them again, “Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” They shouted back, “Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. I judge that narrative to be absolutely unhistorical, a creation most likely of Mark himself, and for two reasons.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was hardly surprising when the burghers of Zwickau decided to show their mad prophet the door. So Müntzer fled to Prague with Stübner and wrote to a friend, “I am traveling the entire world for the sake of the Word.”5 He was sure that in Prague he could find a perch from which to fly to heaven, but the people of Prague weren’t buying either. But this didn’t stop him from penning his crackpot “Prague Manifesto,” a critique of the clergy combined with his mystical ravings that he scrawled on a huge yard-square sheet of paper, hoping to post it as Luther had posted his now famous theses and thereby ignite the true revolution, the one that would make people’s heads spin and usher in the millennium. But first Müntzer had to find another job. He bounced from temporary post to temporary post. In March 1522, he wrote to Melanchthon, criticizing Luther’s doctrines as too soft and wrong on several counts. He did not like Luther’s “concern for the weak.”* There was no room for compromise with those who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change. And Luther’s respect and deference to Frederick and the other princes disgusted him. Luther was too much in bed with the governing authorities. God had given his people all the authority on heaven and earth, and they must take it, by force if necessary. For his part, Luther thought Müntzer insane. All through 1522, Müntzer was beating the bushes for a permanent job as a preacher. Then, in April 1523, he pratfell nicely into a heaven-sent sinecure at Allstedt, a rural village north of Erfurt. Here he was able to bamboozle a fresh group of disciples and begin work on the metaphorical spaceship that would blast them all into another world. Allstedt was in Thuringia, in the territory of Duke John, Frederick’s brother, so from the moment Müntzer arrived, Spalatin kept a close eye on him, though they were not inclined to give him the boot quite yet. Müntzer quickly married a former nun, Ottilie von Gersen, and then went about his program of convincing his parishioners that they were the ones God had chosen as his elect. Now they must prepare to take up arms and smite those who were outside their circle. It was only logical, and there was no time to be lost. Müntzer’s confident crackers preaching drew more and more listeners, until one Sunday there were two thousand in attendance to hear his latest “sermon.”

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

  But aristocracies usually mask exploitation as reciprocity, claiming law, order, peace, and protection as returns for the peasantry’s appropriated surplus. They seldom say, We are bigger and stronger than you. Therefore, we will take your surplus and prevent others from doing so. Do you have a problem with that? The major advantage of Kautsky’s distinction has to do with peasant revolts, rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions. His thesis is that such events pertain much more to commercialized than to traditional agrarian or aristocratic empires. In traditional empires, the peasantry and aristocracy lived almost in different worlds; apart from expropriation of surplus as rents, tolls, taxes, or labor demands, the latter interfered but little in the lives of the former. In commercializing empires, the incidence of resistance rises steadily, and the reason is not difficult to understand. The aristocracy can raise taxes only to a certain point, can push peasants below subsistence levels only to a certain volume, before insurrection occurs. But what if the aristocracy could take over the peasant lands and reduce the peasants to tenants or laborers on lands they once owned as their family inheritance? Not just increased taxation but increased indebtedness would lead inevitably to land expropriation as debtors became insolvents and mortgages became foreclosures. Hence Kautsky’s major and repeated thesis: “Statements in the literature asserting or implying that peasant revolts occurred or were even common in aristocratic empires are typically the result of a failure to distinguish clearly between traditional aristocratic empires and societies subject to some commercialization …[for] such revolts break out only in the aftermath and presumably as a consequence of commercialization…. [Peasant] rebellions begin to occur in the early stages of commercialization…. [They] seem to break out within a century or two of the transition from traditional aristocratic empire to commercialization …[but] remain relatively rare … even in commercialized societies” (280, 281, 288, 289, 291). The primary index that he gives for this move from traditional to commercializing empires is the alienability of land. “Land becomes alienable and a commodity only under the impact of some commercialization, as happened in Greece, in Rome, in the Chinese empire, and in medieval Europe” (273); and again, “the alienability of land …[means that] landless peasants may develop, dependent on and exploited by those who acquired their land …[as a] consequence of commercialization …[and this] is deeply upsetting to peasants formerly engaged in subsistence agriculture on their own land” (291). In a traditional agrarian empire, land is a familial inheritance to be retained by the peasantry. In a commercializing agrarian empire, land is an entrepreneurial commodity to be exploited by the aristocracy. Rural commercialization, land expropriation, and peasant dispossession are more or less synonymous. And as they increase, so also does the incidences of peasant resistance, rebellion, or revolt. In the steady-state operation of a traditional agrarian empire, the peasants see the aristocracy as something like a natural evil.

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

  He asks in his Confessions —maybe a little defensively?—“What harm would be done if I should interpret the meaning of the sacred writer differently from the way some other person interprets?” Especially, “since many different things may be understood from these words, all of which may be true.” In other words: Since each person tries to understand in the Holy Scripture what the writer understood, what harm is done if one person understands what You, the Light of all truth-speaking minds, show that person to be true, although the author read did not understand this aspect of the truth even though he did understand the truth in a different meaning? (12.18) Maybe, then, the Good Samaritan is both riddle and example? But, if so, it cannot be both riddle-for-incomprehension, as in Mark 4, and example-for-imitation, as in Luke 10, at the same time, because imitation requires comprehension. There is also this fundamental question. Is the primary norm for the interpretation of the Good Samaritan or any of the parables “what the writer understood,” as best one can interpret it, or is the primary norm “what Jesus intended,” as best one can interpret that? We do, after all, call them the parables of Jesus, not the parables of Mark or Luke. Even more basically, I myself prefer Alice’s to Humpty Dumpty’s views on “words” and find it equally applicable to “parables.” Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking Glass gives us this very prophetic conversation on that subject: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” In the first part of this book, therefore, and especially in this chapter’s parable of the Good Samaritan, I attempt to understand the purpose and intention of Jesus rather than the interpretation and understanding of Luke . Because, although an example parable may be good, a challenge parable is a far more importantly subversive operation. Why? Because challenge parables humble our prejudicial absolutes, but without proposing counterabsolutes in their place. They are tiny pins dangerously close to big balloons. They push or pull us into pondering whatever is taken totally for granted in our world—in its cultural customs, social relations, traditional politics, and religious traditions. Challenge parables remind us, as in the final words of Gide’s parable, to “be careful on the steps.” I BEGAN THIS CHAPTER by showing what I mean by a challenge parable. For that demonstration I chose Gide’s counterparable to the example parable of the Prodigal Son. It challenges us to think more deeply and radically about “departing from home” rather than about “returning to home.” After that case study, I turned to Jesus’s most famous parable, that of the Good Samaritan. We saw it read as a riddle, an example, and a challenge parable.

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

  The list of divine enemies then continues from “Pharaoh king of Egypt, his servants, his officials, and all his people,” through “all the mixed people; all the kings of the land of Uz; all the kings of the land of the Philistines—Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod,” and on to “Edom, Moab, and the Ammonites” (25:19–21). That “land of Uz” must be somewhere toward the Negev desert and include those tribal Edomites immediately south of Judah. That is confirmed by the biblical book of Lamentations, a dirge for the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE . It warns Edom against rejoicing over Israel’s devastation, for it may be next to fall, and calls it “daughter Edom, you that live in the land of Uz” (4:21). In other words, “the land of Uz” is an enemy of Israel that includes Edom, but apparently extends much farther south into the Negev. What did the ancient Israelites actually think of the Edomites who lived in the land of Uz? Here is one prayer: “Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!’” (Ps. 137:7). Edom had rejoiced over and participated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Babylonians. And here is one prophecy: Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom:…I will surely make you least among the nations; you shall be utterly despised…. I will bring you down…. I will destroy the wise out of Edom…. You should not have rejoiced over the people of Judah on the day of their ruin…. You should not have looted his goods on the day of his calamity. (Obad. 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 13) Edom is not just an adjacent territory or even a sometime enemy of Israel. It assisted in and rejoiced over the Babylonian devastation of Israel’s capital city and sacred Temple. In summary, therefore, and immediately as the book of Job opens, Israel is challenged to imagine that the holiest—and richest—person on earth is one of its ancient ethnic enemies. You can now see clearly how the story in prose is a challenge parable directed to Israel itself. The holiest—and richest—man on earth is not a covenanted Israelite, but a hated Edomite. Our three Old Testament book-length challenge parables have escalated from a single very good Moabite—in Ruth—through a city full of very, very good Assyrians—in Jonah—to the holiest and richest man as a very, very, very good Edomite. (No surprise, then, to find later Jesus’s good Samaritan or, later still, Fielding’s good postillion.) The second and deeper-level challenge parable in the book of Job dominates the first of the book’s two debates in poetry, the one between the friends and Job (3:1–37:24). Around and around they go, as they attempt to explain the reason for Job’s sudden and terrible misfortune.

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

  The postillion hears groans from the ditch and wants to stop, but the coachman does not, saying, “We are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.” The lady wants to stop to see what the matter is, but when the postillion reports on Joseph’s nakedness, “O J-sus!” cries the lady. “A naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him.” The older gentleman agrees: “Let us make all the haste imaginable, or we shall be robbed too.” But then the lawyer intervenes—not from any motive of actual compassion or humanity, but from fear of any potential legal responsibility or accountability: He wished they had passed by without taking any notice; but that now they might be proved to have been last in his company; if he should die they might be called to some account for his murder. He therefore thought it advisable to save the poor creature’s life, for their own sakes, if possible; at least, if he died, to prevent the jury’s finding that they fled for it. He was therefore of opinion to take the man into the coach, and carry him to the next inn. The lady objects that Joseph has no clothes to cover his nakedness, and the coachman objects that he has no money to pay his fare. The lawyer once again warns of possible legal consequences: But the lawyer, who was afraid of some mischief happening to himself, if the wretch was left behind in that condition, saying no man could be too cautious in these matters, and that he remembered very extraordinary cases in the books, threatened the coachman, and bid him deny taking him up at his peril; for that, if he died, he should be indicted for his murder; and if he lived, and brought an action against him, he would willingly take a brief in it. So the coachman, “perhaps a little moved with compassion at the poor creature’s condition,” agrees to take Joseph to the nearest inn. But Joseph is so admirably modest that he refuses to enter the coach without some covering for his naked body, “to prevent giving the least offence to decency.” That final impasse is broken by this solution (my italics): Though there were several greatcoats about the coach, it was not easy to get over this difficulty which Joseph had started.

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

  The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (5:29–32) The three parables of Luke 15 are example parables showing metaphorically and illustrating microcosmically that what Jesus is doing is just common sense and that what his opponents are saying is not the normal response to such situations. All involved should rejoice when “the lost” has been found again. Maybe, then, we can expand Luke’s understanding in that chapter to all the other parables of Jesus? Maybe they are not riddle parables—against Mark 4—but example parables—with Luke 15? THAT BRINGS ME TO this chapter’s fourth question—and it echoes what I asked about Mark 4 in the preceding chapter. Is all we just saw—in Luke 15 and with other Lukan parables—Luke’s own interpretation or Jesus’s intention? On the one hand, Luke 15 is all very convincing, and you can easily wonder if it is a parable of parabling, a model for all, most, many, or just some of Jesus’s parables. On the other hand, I have one rather strong hesitation about Luke 15 even in itself, before it can become a paradigm for other parables. First, that combination of interpretive context (15:1–3) followed by the three parables of the Lost Sheep (15:4–7), Lost Coin (15:8–10), and Lost Son (15:11–32) is found only in Luke and no other gospel. Next, the parable of the Lost Sheep—and only that one from among the Lukan threesome—is present in Matthew (18:12–14). But the context there is not the external one of Luke 15:1–3 concerning “grumbling” from opponents outside the community. In Matthew it is an internal one concerning “stumbling blocks” within the community. Watch, next, how differently Matthew interprets the Lost Sheep parable. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (18:4). Next, he warns about “stumbling blocks” placed before “one of these little ones who believe” in him (18:6). Then he gives us this version of the Lost Sheep parable: [1] Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven . [2] What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. [3] So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This tremendous problem and temptation got much worse in 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV realized that the market for indulgences needn’t be confined to those millions who were alive and sinning but could extend to those multiplied millions who had already left the land of the living and were languishing in purgatory. We can only imagine the moment when Sixtus realized that as pope he was able to decree that the infinite treasury of merits could be sold not just for sins committed by people living but to people who wanted to use them to alleviate the sufferings of their relatives in purgatory. It was as if Sixtus had discovered a gleaming vein of gold as long and wide as the Tiber. He had discovered a monstrously large untapped market—the suffering dead. So suddenly the market for indulgences was dramatically increased. Every deceased parent and grandparent and brother and uncle was now someone for whom an indulgence could be purchased. And of course not only did this mean that the market had been expanded, but because these poor souls were suffering the torments of purgatory, one might dwell upon this pointedly in one’s marketing pitch too, and the indulgence preachers certainly did. What son did not want to relieve his old mother and father of the agonies they suffered on the other side? One might well skimp on oneself when money was tight, but who could deny a beloved deceased relative relief from the pain he was undergoing that very moment, while one sat there, twiddling one’s thumbs?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Anna now traveled to a nunnery in Kempten, sixty miles south, where she once more plied her “hunger martyr” arts, but the sanctified fakery was exposed there too, so she fled north to Kaufbeuren, there taking up with a widowed crossbow maker named Hans Bachman. The couple moved to Fribourg, Switzerland, where they were married in November 1514. But a few years later, in 1518, her lifetime of crimes at last caught up with her. Welser had decided to send his son, whom he had never seen, to school, and he wrote to Anna, asking her to send the boy to him. Because her son with Welser had been dead for many years, she contrived in an act of desperation to send her husband’s son instead. He was about the same age as her son with Welser would have been, had the child lived. But somehow Welser discovered this ruse, as well as the equally humiliating fact that he had been defrauded out of thirty gulden a year for many years. Furious, he sought justice and Anna was soon arrested in Fribourg and charged. After confessing to everything (without torture), she was sentenced by the court to death by burning, although the judgment was “mercifully” reduced to death by drowning. She was to be put in a sack and held under water at a certain spot in the river Saane “until the soul left her body.” This grim sentence was carried out as scheduled on May 5, 1518. So Luther’s experience with what was undeniably a celebrated and—to him—rather suspicious example of the asceticism of that time would have been one more early indication that something was rotten with the state of the medieval church. CHAPTER FOURA Monk at WittenbergWHEN LUTHER RETURNED from Rome, his brothers in the Erfurt monastery decided that despite hearing nothing encouraging from Staupitz’s superior there, they still would not submit to Staupitz’s authority. Luther was in a quandary. As he reckoned the situation, Staupitz was his superior, and he had taken a vow of obedience. So Luther refused to have anything further to do with the Erfurt rebellion against Staupitz, but this caused a deep rift between him and most of the other brethren in the monastery, one that would follow him for many years. Staupitz saw that Luther was in a difficult situation, and so he transferred him back to Wittenberg, along with Luther’s dear friend Johannes Lang, who had sided with Luther in the controversy. As far as the bitter Erfurters were concerned, it was good riddance to the pair of them. In any case, compared with Erfurt, Wittenberg was a pathetic, hickish backwater. If Luther and Lang loved Staupitz that much, they could now be near him full-time.

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

  Matthew, however, continuing his theme of Jesus as the new Moses would have called it: “The First Book of the New Torah by Jesus as the New Moses from on Top of the New Mount Sinai.” One preliminary point. For much of modern advertising, “old” is a pejorative term and “new” the accolade of excellence. It was not so in the ancient world. The “old” was the tried and true; the “new” was dangerous and suspicious. Augustus, for example, created a new dynastic monarchy while insisting he was restoring the old republic. The “new” was safest and best not as the “old” superseded and discarded, but rather as the “old” transformed and renew ed. So Matthew has Jesus say this: Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness [better: justice] exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (5:17–20) You will notice an internal challenge to “the least” inside the kingdom, but also an external one to the “scribes and Pharisees” outside it. The clash is neither Jesus versus Moses, let alone “Christianity” versus “Judaism,” but rather Christian Judaism versus Pharisaic Judaism, or, in other words, Matthew’s interpretation of the law versus that of the scribes and Pharisees. How exactly, then—in Matthew’s inaugural challenge—is the “justice” of Christian Jews supposed to exceed that of Pharisaic Jews? Matthew follows that manifesto in 5:17–20 with a set of six legal antitheses in which an older law is subsumed and transformed into a newer one. Here is a summary of the six comments in Matthew’s vision of the justice of the law brought to its fulfillment in Jesus: On murder (5:21–26): “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder.’” “But I say to you”: Do not even be angry, insult, or berate. On adultery (5:27–30): “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’” “But I say to you”: Do not even have lustful thoughts. On divorce (5:31–32): “It was also said”: Divorce is permitted.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  The Medical Message: “You Are Diseased.” Sex causes disease and pregnancy, which makes it dangerous. But if you’re ready to take that risk, sexual functioning should happen in a particular way—desire, then arousal, then orgasm, preferably during intercourse, simultaneously with your partner—and when it doesn’t, there is a medical issue that you must address. Medically. With medication. Or possibly surgery. To the extent that a woman’s sexual response differs from a man’s, she is diseased—except for pregnancy, which is what sex is for. One woman even told me that her (male) doctor said her low sexual desire was caused by her body shutting down her sex drive in order to prevent her from getting pregnant. She asked me if that’s true. Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell no, and I hope that doctor reads chapter 7. This is a newer message, dating from about the middle of the nineteenth century or later. As an example, Marie Stopes’s 1918 classic, Married Love, has this to say on the subject of intercourse: Where the [man and woman] are perfectly adjusted, the woman simultaneously reaches the crisis of nervous reactions and muscular convulsions similar to his. This mutual orgasm is extremely important… and it is a mutual, not a selfish, pleasure, more calculated than anything else to draw out an unspeakable tenderness and understanding in both partakers of this sacrament. Simultaneous orgasm can be very nice. But you know as well as I do that it is not the marker of a “perfectly adjusted” sexual experience. And yet, nearly one hundred years later, the idea of simultaneous orgasm during intercourse persists as a bogus cultural marker of “sexual excellence.” The Media Message: “You Are Inadequate.” Spanking, food play, ménages à trois… you’ve done all these things, right? Well, you’ve at least had clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, uterine orgasms, energy orgasms, extended orgasms, and multiple orgasms? And you’ve mastered at least thirty-five different positions for intercourse? If you don’t try all these things, you’re frigid. If you’ve had too few partners, don’t watch porn, and don’t have a collection of vibrators in your bedside table, you’re a prude. Also: You’re too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you’re not trying to change it, you’re lazy. If you’re satisfied with yourself as you are, you’re settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you’re a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that’s wrong, too, try something else. Forever. This is the newest message, following close on the heels of television and the birth control pill, around the middle of the twentieth century. To see an example, just look at the checkout counter of any drugstore, where magazine racks announce in bright sans serif fonts all the exciting things you could (and, it goes without saying, should) be doing in bed.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The marine says to the professor, Days three to ten suck the worst. You can do it this time. Just drink a lot of water. And call me. Build a wall around the day and don’t look over it.... The chair I fold myself into chills my ass. That tiny discomfort unplugs me again, and I fidget and rifle my purse for hand lotion. Why don’t I carry mints? There are people in the world who carry mints. But given a tin of mints, I’ll eat every single one straight off. As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who—if he can’t have too much of something—doesn’t want any of it. In the front of the room, a lady asks for a moment of silence, and people on either side of me bow their heads. Are they serious? I look over at the buff musician and his friend—heads down, plus the tweedy classics professor. Lord, I think, this is some fake Christian cult I’ve wandered into. Then a guy at the front reads some kind of warm-up, saying they’re not a sect or church, reiterating how nobody’s the boss of anybody—we’re all the same—the lie of equality that teachers tried peddling in high school, where, in fact, the reigning hierarchy would’ve tied stones to the feet of druggy teens like me and dropped us off bridges. Then a laminated list of suggestions starts circling the room, with people reading a line at a time. It sounds to me like Be good and you won’t get in trouble and Stop having fun and grow up and Tell everybody how you’re bad and face the firing squad. A woman stands at the front, saying her higher power helped her through a family wedding without drinking, though her soused-up relatives tried to force all variety of cocktail down her gullet, and it’s all I can do not to bolt out the door. Higher power, my rosy red ass, I can hear my daddy saying, and Church is a trick on poor people. I look over at the classics prof, now giving the thumbs-up sign like she’s scored a touchdown, and I think, What fun- house land have I crossed into, where the rich seek the counsel of the poor? Any minute, some snake-handling preacher might well get up and start stomp- dancing while his underage wife passes a hat. I slather on more hand lotion and sit perched on the edge of my seat like a bird on a wire. The guy at the front calls on a lady in a bouclé Chanel suit, complete with gold buttons and long chains hanging down. She might’ve stepped from the pages of Town & Country magazine. She relates how she used to tuck her vodka bottle inside a turkey carcass stashed in the basement freezer. While cooking dinner, she’d run down and yank it out and guzzle a bit.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The moral septic field that was the Vatican of the Medici seems to have existed mainly to provide material for tawdry television miniseries nel futuro. For example, when the Florentine Pazzi family had drunk its fill of papal Medici malevolence, they plotted to murder Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici in a single fell swoop—during a church service. It may well have been purely practical, because it was during the church service that they were most likely to be unprotected. The high sign to the dagger-wielding assassino was when the bell was rung to mark that holiest of holy moments during the Mass, when the host is elevated. At that sacred signal, Giuliano was bloodied sufficiently to meet his Maker instantly, but Lorenzo survived to launch more mayhem. During Luther’s years as a teenage student at Eisenach, the pope in Rome was Alexander VI, perhaps the most depraved of all the many depraved pontiffs in that nadir of the institution, and his established excesses can scarcely be believed. When his predecessor Innocent VIII died, Alexander declined to lobby for the golden throne, which was the accepted corrupt practice of that time, but simply leaped ahead of his competitors by purchasing it outright with cash. As the story goes, four muscular mules bore the extraordinary weight of reinforced panniers laden with silver. They staggered from Rodrigo Borgia’s spectacular palace to the palace of his chief rival, Ascanio Sforza, to deliver the gleaming argentine load. In his years as a cardinal, the virile pope-to-be fathered seven children, all of whom were understandably considered illegitimate. But now armed with the great powers of the papacy, he was able to officially “legitimize” whom he pleased. All that was required was his signature on the bulla, or papal bull.* Thus, with a flourish of Simon Peter’s sacred pen, the bastardi were parthenogenetically reconceived into the fold of respectable citizens and more than that, into that particularly exclusive club constituted of legitimate children of the popes. Just prior to purchasing the papacy, Alexander at the age of fifty-nine ambitiously took as his mistress one Giulia Farnese, forty-three years his junior, who already at the age of sixteen was a celebrated beauty, most renowned for her cataract of golden tresses that tumbled to the marble floors of the Vatican. Some called her “the Pope’s whore,” while cleverer detractors referred to her as “the bride of Christ.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased; but when the church intercedes, the result is in the hands of God alone.Who knows whether all souls in purgatory wish to be redeemed, since we have exceptions in St. Severinus and St. Paschal, as related in a legend.No one is sure of the integrity of his own contrition, much less of having received plenary remission.The man who actually buys indulgences is as rare as he who is really penitent; indeed, he is exceedingly rare.Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.Men must especially be on guard against those who say that the pope’s pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to him.For the graces of indulgences are concerned only with the penalties of sacramental satisfaction established by man.* They who teach that contrition is not necessary on the part of those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessional privileges preach unchristian doctrine.Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.Nevertheless, papal remission and blessing are by no means to be disregarded, for they are, as I have said (Thesis 6), the proclamation of the divine remission.It is very difficult, even for the most learned theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people the bounty of indulgences and the need of true contrition.A Christian who is truly contrite seeks and loves to pay penalties for his sins; the bounty of indulgences, however, relaxes penalties and causes men to hate them—at least it furnishes occasion for hating them.*

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So Leo one day decided that on the feast day of the Medici’s patron saints an almost inconceivably elaborate festivity called the Cosmalia should be arranged, and the grand celebration would culminate in the “burlesque coronation” of Baraballo as arch poet.15 What could be better? It would be celebrated with an impossibly grand triumphal procession that began at the Apostolic Palace off St. Peter’s Piazza, where the pontiffs have lived since it was built in 1450. It seems that everyone in Rome and far beyond was in on the sadistic prank. Baraballo’s family begged him not to participate and tried to explain to him that the elaborate ceremony was not on the level, but he madly waved them off. As far as he was concerned they were all bitterly jealous. And as though managing this baroque super gag were the principal duty of the Vicar of Christ, Leo personally oversaw every petty detail. So it was Leo’s idea that his own beloved elephant Hanno—an exotic gift from the king of Portugal—would carry Baraballo in the procession! Leo adored this short-lived pachyderm more than life itself, so the giddy notion that Hanno could participate made the childish pontiff nearly levitate for joy. The secret plan was that Hanno would carry Baraballo all the way to the Tiber and thence on into Rome proper via the Ponte Sant’Angelo (then the Ponte Adriano), with thousands cheering and choking with laughter from the sidelines, as they surely must. Leo knew that he would writhe with ecstasy at finally being acknowledged as among the greatest poets who had ever lived, though it was all of course a cruel joke at silly Baraballo’s expense. Ma come buffa! [image file=image_rsrc6KN.jpg] The self-deluded poet Baraballo making his way through Rome atop Pope Leo’s pet pachyderm. The elephant Hanno was a gift from the king of Portugal. Hanno perished not long after this episode, despite being given a powerful laxative that contained pure gold.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Prierias had made such breathtaking leaps in what passed for his theology that Luther was himself dumbfounded and, it seems, even amused. Prierias had simplistically declared things that the church had never before declared. Thorny issues that had been debated and contradicted and even deliberately glossed over were presented by Prierias as well-established facts. It was so ridiculous that Luther almost couldn’t believe it, and just as someone will sometimes retweet a vicious tweet of especial idiocy to highlight and underscore that idiocy, Luther now made his point by simply reprinting Prierias’s work, as though to say, “You’ve got to read this!” But then Luther did write a reply to Prierias and gloated that it had taken him but two days. Perhaps most tellingly of all, he did what Prierias did not. He quoted Scripture. First there was 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” And then Galatians 1:8: “Even if an angel descend from heaven and preach a gospel contrary to that you have received, let him be accursed.” Luther might have stopped there. After all, what else was there to say? But he would find something: I am sorry now that I despised Tetzel. Ridiculous as he was, he was more acute than you. You cite no Scripture. You give no reasons. Like an insidious devil you pervert the Scriptures. You say that the Church consists virtually in the pope. What nominations will you not have to regard as the deeds of the Church? Look at the ghastly shedding of blood by Julius II. Look at the outrageous tyranny of Boniface VIII, who, as the proverb declares, “came in as a wolf, reigned as a lion, and died as a dog.” . . . You call me a leper because I mingle truth with error. I am glad you admit there is some truth. You make the pope into an emperor in power and violence. The Emperor Maximilian and the Germans will not tolerate this.17 The final line was a canny, cocky shot across Rome’s bow, underscoring the prickly nationalistic issues that would come into play if Rome wasn’t more careful. We assume that Luther received Prierias’s work on August 7, the day he received official word that he must appear in Rome within sixty days. Luther well knew that the Dominicans, led by Prierias, had it out for him and that he could never get a fair trial in Rome—which he dubbed a “Lernaean* swamp full of hydras and other monsters”—so he immediately wrote to Spalatin, hoping he could persuade Frederick to push for the trial to be conducted in Germany.18 In fact, Luther wondered not only whether he would get a fair hearing in Rome but whether he would be found guilty of heresy and executed by fire. In his letter to Spalatin, he wrote that he was already (having probably received it the day before) responding to Prierias’s work and that it is “exactly like a wild, entangled jungle.”*