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.

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

  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.

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

  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.

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

  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.

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

  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.

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

  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.

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

  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.

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

  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….

• 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.