Disappointment

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From these testimonies it is clear, that the growing influence of the Roman see was rooted in public opinion and in the need of unity in the ancient church. It is not to be explained at all by the talents and the ambition of the incumbents. On the contrary, the personality of the thirty popes of the first three centuries falls quite remarkably into the background; though they are all canonized saints and, according to a later but extremely doubtful tradition, were also, with two exceptions, martyrs.225 Among them, and it may be said down to Leo the Great, about the middle of the fifth century, there was hardly one, perhaps Clement, who could compare, as a church leader, with an Ignatius, a Cyprian, and an Ambrose; or, as a theolooian, with an Irenaeus, a Tertullian, an Athanasius, and an Augustin.226 Jerome, among his hundred and thirty-six church celebrities, of the first four centuries, brings in only four Roman bishops, Clement, Victor, Cornelius, and Damasus, and even these wrote only a few epistles. Hippolytus, in his Philosophumena, written about 225, even presents two contemporaneous popes, St. Zephyrinus (202–218) and Callistus (St. Calixtus I., 218–223), from his own observation, though not without partisan feeling, in a most unfavorable light; charging the first with ignorance and avarice,227 the second with scandalous conduct (he is said to have been once a swindler and a fugitive slave rescued from suicide), and both of them with the Patripassian heresy. Such charges could not have been mere fabrications with so honorable an author as Hippolytus, even though he was a schismatic rival bishop to Callistus; they must have had at least some basis of fact. § 51. Chronology of the Popes. I. Sources. The principal sources for the obscure chronology of the early bishops of Rome are the catalogues of popes. These are divided into two classes, the oriental or Greek, and the occidental or Latin. To the first belong the lists of Hegesippus and Irenaeus, from the second century, that of Eusebius (in his Chronicle, and his Church History), and his successors from the fourth century and later. This class is followed by Lipsius and Harnack. The second class embraces the catalogues of Augustin (Ep. 55, al. 165), Optatus of Mileve (De schism. Donat. II. 3), the "Catalogus Liberianus" (coming down to Liberius, 354), the "Catalogus Felicianus" (to 530), the "Catalogus Cononianus," based perhaps on the "Catalogus Leoninus" (to 440), the "Liber Pontificalis" (formerly supposed to be based on the preceding catalogues, but according to the Abbé Duchesne and Waitz, older than the "Liber Felicianus"). The "Liber Pontif." itself exists in different MSS., and has undergone many changes. It is variously dated from the fifth or seventh century. To these may be added the "Martyrologia" and "Calendaria" of the Roman Church, especially the "Martyrologium Hieronymianum," and the "Martyrologium Romanum parvum" (both of the seventh or eighth century). The inscriptions on the papal tombs discovered in Rome since 1850, contain names and titles, but no dates.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  As a consequence eschatology is usually loved in inverse proportion to the square of the mental diameter of those who do the loving. Calvin was the greatest exegete of his day and he wrote commentaries on nearly all the books of the Old and New Testaments, but he gave the Apocalypse a wide berth. No interpretation of this main biblical source ever won general consent as long as it was interpreted doctrinally. The wise threw up their hands; those who devoted their minds to it, often suffered from mild obsession. Our generation is the first in eighteen hundred years to understand this book as its author, or authors, meant it to be understood, and now it is one of the most enlightening and interesting books of them all. In primitive Christianity eschatology was in the centre of religious interest and thought. Today it is on the circumference, and with some Christians it lies outside the circumference. Theologians of liberal views are brief or apologetic when they reach eschatology. This situation is deeply regrettable. Perhaps no other section of theology is so much in need of a thorough rejuvenation. Those who believe in the social gospel are especially concerned in this element of weakness in theology. The social gospel seeks to develop the vision of the Church toward the future and to co-operate with the will of God which is shaping the destinies of humanity. It would be aided and reinforced by a modern and truly Christian conception about the future of mankind: At present no other theological influence so hampers and obstructs the social gospel as that of eschatology. All considerations taken from the life of the twentieth century cry out for something like the social gospel; but the ideas of the first century contained in eschatology are used to veto it. Those who have trained their religious thinking on the Hebrew prophets and the genuine teachings of Jesus are for the social gospel; those who have trained it on apocalyptic ideas are against it. This is all the more pathetic because the pre-millennial scheme is really an outline of the social salvation of the race. Those who hold it exhibit real interest in social and political events. But they are best pleased when they see humanity defeated and collapsing, for then salvation is nigh. Active work for the salvation of the social order before the coming of Christ is not only vain but against the will of God. Thus eschatology defeats the Christian imperative of righteousness and salvation. Historical science and the social gospel together may be able to affect eschatology for good. Historical criticism by itself makes it look imbecile and has no creative power. The social gospel has that moral earnestness and religious faith which exerts constructive influence on doctrine. In the first place, the social gospel can at least give us a sympathetic

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The historian, moreover, must make his work readable and interesting, without violating truth. Some parts of history are dull and wearisome; but, upon the whole, the truth of history is "stranger than fiction." It is God’s own epos. It needs no embellishment. It speaks for itself if told with earnestness, vivacity, and freshness. Unfortunately, church historians, with very few exceptions, are behind the great secular historians in point of style, and represent the past as a dead corpse rather than as a living and working power of abiding interest. Hence church histories are so little read outside of professional circles. 3. Both scientific research and artistic representation must be guided by a sound moral and religious, that is, a truly Christian spirit. The secular historian should be filled with universal human sympathy, the church historian with universal Christian sympathy. The motto of the former is: "Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto;" the motto of the latter: "Christianus sum, nihil Christiani a me alienum puto." The historian must first lay aside all prejudice and party zeal, and proceed in the pure love of truth. Not that he must become a tabula rasa. No man is able, or should attempt, to cast off the educational influences which have made him what he is. But the historian of the church of Christ must in every thing be as true as possible to the objective fact, "sine ira et studio;" do justice to every person and event; and stand in the centre of Christianity, whence he may see all points in the circumference, all individual persons and events, all confessions, denominations, and sects, in their true relations to each other and to the glorious whole. The famous threefold test of catholic truth—universality of time (semper), place (ubique), and number (ab omnibus)—in its literal sense, is indeed untrue and inapplicable. Nevertheless, there is a common Christianity in the Church, as well as a common humanity in the world, which no Christian can disregard with impunity. Christ is the divine harmony of all the discordant human creeds and sects. It is the duty and the privilege of the historian to trace the image of Christ in the various physiognomies of his disciples, and to act as a mediator between the different sections of his kingdom.

• From Quiet (2012)

  Is it how it should be?” And when the situation falls short of expectations, they form associations between the moment of disappointment (losing points) and whatever was going on in their environment at the time of the disappointment (hitting the number nine.) These associations let them make accurate predictions about how to react to warning signals in the future. Introverts’ disinclination to charge ahead is not only a hedge against risk; it also pays off on intellectual tasks. Here are some of the things we know about the relative performance of introverts and extroverts at complex problem-solving. Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them. Introverts receive disproportionate numbers of graduate degrees, National Merit Scholarship finalist positions, and Phi Beta Kappa keys. They outperform extroverts on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test, an assessment of critical thinking widely used by businesses for hiring and promotion. They’ve been shown to excel at something psychologists call “insightful problem solving.” The question is: Why? Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts’ reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, “if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task.” This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going. But introverts seem to think more carefully than extroverts, as the psychologist Gerald Matthews describes in his work. Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.” Introverts’ and extroverts’ contrasting problem-solving styles have been observed in many different contexts.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  His father, Matthew Kissinger, one of eight children, dropped out of school after sixth grade to help make ends meet, doing odd jobs, fixing cars, and selling vitamins. Matt was a voracious reader and a hard worker, but he had trouble getting ahead during the Depression. Sometimes, money was so tight that they had to rent out the bedrooms of their Shorewood bungalow while Holmer and his brother and sister slept on cots in the hallway. Christmas 1932, the same year that my mother received a dollhouse with electric lights and running water, Holmer begged for the sailor suit that he had seen in the window at Schuster’s department store in downtown Milwaukee. Oh, we could never afford that, Grandma told him. But when six-year-old Holmer bounded downstairs on Christmas morning, he discovered the little navy-blue suit with the matching hat and grosgrain ribbon nestled under the tree. He jumped up and down with glee and spent the day marching around the house, fighting imaginary pirates. His joy was short-lived. The next day, Grandma made him fold up the uniform and put it back into the box. Then they hopped on the streetcar and returned it to the store for a full refund. He was crushed. As Grandma watched my mother walk back from Communion that Sunday, she knew that her boy would be set for life if he could snare the Gutenkunst girl. So, she set the trap with help from a little unexpected inheritance, her portion of the sale of her family’s farm. Instead of investing her windfall in the stock market or parking it in a savings account, Grandma bought Holmer a red convertible, hoping that would catch my mother’s eye. Holmer, now twenty-three, had jet-black hair, piercing brown eyes, a square jaw, and chiseled looks good enough that he landed top modeling jobs in town. He didn’t need his mother’s help finding romance. In fact, he already had a girlfriend named Joan. But Grandma was going for the big payday, betting everything she had on the girl with the family fortune. By anyone’s accounting, my mother was quite a prize. A Junior Leaguer with a pilot’s license, she spoke French and studied English literature at Carleton College (two of her brothers were Princeton men). Her friends called her Curly—not for her hair (which indeed was curly) but for her toes. She had big, doe eyes, legs that could rival Betty Grable’s, and the cutest dimples Bill Kissinger had ever seen. She was quiet—shy even—but get a few martinis into her and she could belt out all the words to “Mimi the College Widow.” My mother secretly worried that Holmer was too much for her. He danced on top of bars, guzzled beer, and introduced her to his friends as Jean “Dirty Word.” It’s Guten-KUNST, she’d say, trying to hide her amusement with a scowl of false indignation.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 3 (451 – 1500) (2009)

  then became a prime bargaining counter in diplomacy when the new Sassanian Queen Boran, recognizing reality in the wake of Heraclius’s successful counterattacks, sought a peace settlement with Byzantium. The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb, and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of his Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of Chalcedonian bishops. The treaty was a triumph for Heraclius too, for it enabled him to parade his relic back in what remained of Byzantine Jerusalem after its comprehensive trashing by the Sassanian armies.52 This climax of peace between the two traditional enemy great powers in fact proved a sad irrelevance to the future. Kavad II’s murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of shortlived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghassānids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassānids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

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

  We first met Simon (Peter) in 1:16, James and John in 1:19, and the Twelve in 3:16–19. But even as the Twelve are appointed, the Leading Threesome all receive new names from Jesus in 3:16–17: “He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder).” In other words, those three disciples are emphasized as a Leadership Threesome within the Twelve—and always in that order of Peter, James, John. Those three are the chosen ones taken by Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration in 9:2 and the Garden of Gethsemane in 14:33. But, says Mark, they failed Jesus there as well—they wanted to stay on the Mount, and they wanted to sleep in the Garden. Across the three tests under present discussion Mark intends to criticize Peter, the first of the Leading Threesome, in 8:33, then the Twelve as a whole in 9:32–34, and last the other two of that Leading Threesome in 10:35–40. What, then, is the reaction of James and John to that detailed prophecy? It extends across a threefold dialogue with Jesus (10:35–36, 37–38, 39–40) and contains this incredibly insensitive reaction to his prophecy about execution and resurrection: “Grant us to sit,” they ask Jesus, “one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (10:37). And, worse still, their reaction begets this further and widening reaction: “When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John” (10:41). By now, we know that what must follow is a severely corrective response from Jesus. Here, once again, is Jesus’s response: So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (10:42–45) First, there is that explicit contrast between Gentile-style leadership and this radical revision of Jewish-style leadership. Next, that “not so” is directed specifically to the Twelve. It is their view and style of leadership that are opposed by Jesus. And the unconventional leadership style they are to exhibit is to be modeled on that of Jesus himself. Jesus is not just talking about humility, but about humility-in-power, not just about being a servant, but being a servant-as-leader. Finally, in the ancient world, it was especially those enslaved who were “ransomed,” so that a leader who ransoms you is about liberation and not domination. Think about this for a moment. The Twelve—and all others—were challenged to take up their cross and follow Jesus (8:34).

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  Judaism becomes in such discourse a negative foil: whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn’t it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category. No wonder even today Jesus somehow looks “different” from “the Jews”: in the movies and artistic renderings, he’s blond and they are swarthy; he is cute and buff and they need rhinoplasty and Pilates. Jesus and his followers such as Peter and Mary Magdalene become identified as (proto-)Christian; only those who chose not to follow him remain “Jews.” This divorcing of Jesus from Judaism does a disservice to each textually, theologically, historically, and ethically. First, the separation severs the church’s connections to the Scriptures of Israel—what it calls the Old Testament (see below, pp. 199–202). Because Jesus and his earliest followers were all Jews, they held the Torah and the Prophets sacred, prayed the Psalms, and celebrated the bravery of Esther and the fidelity of Ruth. To understand Jesus, one must have familiarity with the Scriptures that shaped him (or, as a few of my students will insist, that he wrote). Second, the insistence on Jesus’s Jewish identity reinforces the belief that he was fully human, anchored in historical time and place. This connection is known as the “scandal of particularity”: not only does the church proclaim that the divine took on human form, it also proclaims that it took on this form in a particular setting among a particular people. The church claims that divinity took on human flesh—was “incarnated”—in Jesus of Nazareth. The time and the place therefore matter. Christianity follows Jesus of Nazareth, not Jesus of Cleveland or Jesus of Mexico City; the incarnation dates to the first century, not the twenty-first. Further, the Jewish tradition into which Jesus was born and the Christian tradition that developed in his name were “historical religions,” that is, their foundational events took place in history and on earth, rather than in some mythic time and mythic place; they have a starting point and a vision for the future. To disregard history, to disregard time and place, is to be unfaithful to both Judaism and Christianity. Historically, Jesus should be seen as continuous with the line of Jewish teachers and prophets, for he shares with them a particular view of the world and a particular manner of expressing that view. Like Amos and Isaiah, Hosea and Jeremiah, he used arresting speech, risked political persecution, and turned traditional family values upside down in order to proclaim what he believed God wants, the Torah teaches, and Israel must do. This historical anchoring need not and should not, in Christian teaching, preclude or overshadow Jesus’s role in the divine plan. He must, in the Christian tradition, be more than just a really fine Jewish teacher. But he must be that Jewish teacher as well. Further, Jesus had to have made sense in his own context, and his context is that of Galilee and Judea.

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  Jews and Christians share a common history (not all of it pleasant), as two recent books, James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword and David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, make abundantly clear.3 Yet common history is not the same as common knowledge. In years of teaching about Jesus and the origins of Christianity, first at Duke University, then at Swarthmore College, and now at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, I have seen both the extent of the ignorance Jews and Christians have of each other and the unfortunate results of that ignorance. A substantial number of my Christian students view Jesus as opposed to Judaism rather than as a Jew himself. They see Judaism as a religion of law as opposed to Jesus’s religion of grace; they believe that Jews follow the commandments to earn a place in heaven; they suggest that Jews rejected Jesus because he proclaimed peace and love instead of violence against the Roman occupiers of Jerusalem. Comments from my Christians students typically begin, “Why do the Jews think . . . ” as if all Jews think alike. Christians tend to know even less of Judaism’s legacy following the time of Jesus. A number of students assume that all Jews strictly follow every single letter of Torah (the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible). I’ve even been asked where Jews in urban areas keep animals needed for Temple sacrifice; one young man inquired whether we needed to get a zoning variance for the practice. It came as no small disappointment to him to learn that animal sacrifice stopped with the destruction of the Second Temple in the mid-first century CE. I have met Christian congregants who are stunned when I tell them that many, if not most, American Jews are not fluent in Hebrew, do not know intimately the plot lines of the Bible after the book of Exodus, do not keep kosher, and do not observe the Laws of family purity, such as going to the miqveh (ritual bath). Some Christian students, and even a few Jews, are surprised to learn that Judaism has a very long and robust acknowledgment not only of an afterlife, but also of resurrection of the dead. Comparably few Christians have heard of the great Rabbi Hillel (unless they happened to stumble into a Hillel House on a college campus), Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, let alone Rashi, Maimonides, and the Baal Shem Tov. That many Jews don’t recognize these names either just makes matters worse, since Jews who don’t know who Judah ha-Nasi, also known as Judah the Prince, is (he is the man responsible for the codification of the Mishnah, the major early book of Jewish Law, ca. 200 CE ) have surely heard of the Virgin Mary, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  317. 29 David Hume, Essays, Part I, Essay VI . CHAPTER EIGHT JUSTICE THROUGH POLITICAL FORCE T HE division of the working class into a more favored and a less favored group, roughly identical with the skilled and the unskilled workers, has been previously considered. The group, which feels itself defrauded of its just proportion of the common wealth of society, but which has a measure of security and therefore does not feel itself completely disinherited, expresses its political aspirations in a qualified Marxism in which the collectivist goal is shared with the more revolutionary Marxians, but in which parliamentary and evolutionary methods are substituted for revolution as means of achieving the goal. In all industrial nations, except America, the trade unions are the source of the voting strength of this evolutionary socialism, though its political philosophy has usually been elaborated by middle-class intellectuals. In America the trade unions still adhere to the futile policy of rewarding their friends and punishing their foes in the old parties. Their failure to recognise the futility of this procedure proves how difficult it is to transfer the results of social experience from one nation to another; for the history of European industrial nations has fully discredited this kind of political strategy. Inasfar as it rests upon confidence in the adequacy of the purely economic weapons of the trade union movement it is no less fallacious. The combination of political and economic power which the dominant classes set against the worker in the modern state must be met by a combination of political and economic power. The power of the worker in the economic society (chiefly the weapon of the strike) is not adequate for the defense of his interests. It suffers from several limitations. It is lamed by the state, which under the influence of the dominant classes passes legislation to diminish the power of the strike weapon as much as possible. The use and abuse of federal injunctions in labor disputes, compulsory arbitration, the declaration of martial law and the use of troops against the strikers are a few of the many methods used by the state against the worker. Even without facing the opposition of political power, the worker’s economic weapon is weak, and is becoming weaker. It is weak because the worker is never able to match the economic resources of the owner in a dispute of some duration. He can be starved into submission.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  There was no systematic revision of the text to remove all reference to Zerubbabel. This may seem like careless editing from a modern point of view, but it has the advantage of allowing us to see several layers in the text and to reconstruct something of its history. Zechariah 7–8 The excitement and turmoil about the restoration of the monarchy that dominate much of Zechariah 1–6 disappear completely in the concluding chapters, 7 and 8. Chapter 7 reports how people from Bethel came to Jerusalem to inquire about mourning and fasting. The response attributed to Zechariah is reminiscent both of Deuteronomy and of older prophets, from Amos to Jeremiah: the Lord is not concerned with fasting, but with kindness and mercy, and the protection of the widow, the orphan, and the alien. The woes that have befallen the people are due to the fact that they have not obeyed the Law and the words of the prophets. The tone of this chapter is quite different from the visions of Zechariah and is similar to that of the sermonic prose (C) sections of Jeremiah. Zechariah 8 also brings to mind prose passages in the book of Jeremiah, especially the oracles of hope and consolation in Jeremiah 33. These hopeful predictions probably concluded the original book of Zechariah, as it was edited not long after the time of the prophet. THE CAREER OF EZRA In Ezra 7:1 the narrative jumps back to the reign of Artaxerxes. Ezra, we are told, went up from Babylon to Jerusalem in the seventh year of that king. The date is ambiguous. There were three Persian kings named Artaxerxes: Artaxerxes I (465–424 B.C.E.), Artaxerxes II (405/404–359/358) and Artaxerxes III (359/358–338). Most scholars assume that the reference in Ezra is to Artaxerxes I. The mission of Nehemiah can be dated with confidence to the twentieth year of Artaxerxes I (445), and the biblical record places Ezra before Nehemiah. Nonetheless, there are problems with this dating, and a significant minority of scholars believes that Nehemiah came first and that Ezra was commissioned by Artaxerxes II in 398. If Ezra came first, then Nehemiah came a mere thirteen years later. Yet he encountered many of the same problems that had occupied Ezra, notably the problem of intermarriage with the neighboring peoples. We should have to assume then that Ezra’s reforms were short-lived, and moreover that he had failed to ensure the security of Jerusalem by restoring the city walls. As we shall see, however, it is likely that his reforms were short-lived. Nehemiah complains that his policies were flouted when he returned to the royal court for a time between his two terms as governor. Ezra’s policies, which required widespread divorce, must have been resented by many people. Moreover, Ezra was a religious reformer, and so it is not surprising that he failed to concern himself with the city walls. The evidence is not conclusive, but the biblical order of Ezra and Nehemiah remains the more probable.

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

  The kingdom of God was made present not just in the itinerants but in the interaction of itinerants and householders, in a new community of healing and eating, of shared material and spiritual resources. The itinerants expected and received external opposition and even persecution. But did they also encounter internal opposition—dissent and criticism from those who had already accepted them? Was there resistance not only by non-Christians from outside but by Christians from within the kingdom-of-God movement? And did that internal negation give a far greater sense of failure to the itinerants than any external one ever could? Part VII gave the voice of the itinerants; Part VIII gives the voice of the householders. In Part VII the itinerants spoke out; in Part VIII the householders talk back. For the itinerants we have the Q Gospel document, for the householders we have the Didache document. Both of those texts are much later than the Common Sayings Tradition, with which I am primarily interested, but I use their later interaction to find in that earlier tradition evidence that such tensile dialectic was there from the very beginning. In a way such tension was surely inevitable. What happens when itinerants tell householders to. abandon everything, as they have done? It is easy to imagine what those who oppose them will do. But what will those who receive them do? In what follows, I am reading the Didache to imagine some of its developed responses as inchoately present when the very first itinerant was greeted by the very first householder in peace. What validates that act of imagination is one of most radical sayings of Jesus, Give Without Return . It is found in the Common Sayings Tradition at Q Gospel 6:30—that is, Luke 6:30 = Matthew 5:42—and at Gospel of Thomas 95. But it is also found in a climactic position and with a careful commentary in Didache 1:53 (Appendix 1A: #35 = Appendix 7: #4). Chapter 19 shows that in the Q Gospel , as early as Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Q1 , the itinerants are criticizing the householders as those who confess the Lord but do not obey him, who hear him but do not do what he asks. They are not speaking against outsiders who do not hear but against insiders who hear but do not act accordingly. That is clear enough, but then we wade into murkier waters. Some of those insider-critical sayings in the Q Gospel are found already in the Common Sayings Tradition, but, of course, without the Q Gospel context which determines their meaning. Do they have the same insider-critical focus even at that earlier stage? Chapter 20 shows the Didache’s householders moving carefully and delicately both to accept and to contain itinerant radicalism. They do so by establishing their own communally approved teaching, but also by making clear rules for itinerant prophets who visit the community. That is a first and fundamental move of containment.

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

  Luke 6:20b says, “Blessed are you who are poor,” and 6:24 says, “Woe to you who are rich.” But the Shepherd of Hermas , in Similitude 2:10, has this: “Blessed are they who are wealthy and understand that their riches are from the Lord, for he who understands this will also be able to do some service” (Lake 2.147). And 2 Clement 16:2 agrees with this: “Blessed is every man who is found full of these things; for almsgiving lightens sin” (Lake 1.155). We have, as it were, mediated Luke’s dichotomy with a new beatitude: Blessed are you rich who give alms to you poor . Judaism, however, knew not just about redemptive almsgiving but also about divine justice. Those texts seen earlier in Chapter 12 did not speak just of alms but also of rights. They did not simply demand alms for the indebted, enslaved, and the dispossessed. They also demanded that those statuses be abrogated at least every so-many years. Here, then, is the problem. Is almsgiving on the side of justice or injustice? But how could one dare to criticize almsgiving when people are in desperate need and demand instant or immediate relief? And how could one dare to criticize almsgiving when almsgivers may then desist all too readily or eagerly from any generosity at all? Yet it must be said that almsgiving can cover over chasms of systemic injustice and structural inequity. That, in fact, may be the only logic that makes redemptive almsgiving religiously valid in the sight of God. It is actually restitution, as it were, of stolen goods. Alms may be necessary, but it is equally necessary not to confuse them with justice. Words and Ways of the Lord The Oral phase of the Jesus tradition is now forever lost. The spoken word is transitory by nature and exists for but a moment. It lives on only in the memory of the audience and its recovery is entirely dependent upon the accuracy of that memory to bring it back into being…. Even the written tradition continues to be edited and improved. This warns us against assuming that the Gospels offer a directly transcribed orality: the tradition may have been thoroughly textualized and altered in the transmission process, a process that did not end with the synoptic evangelists!… It has not been possible to establish even one instance where a chain of oral sayings has reached two literary authors independently…. The unconscious—and uncritical-evolutionary model of sequential tradition (oral then written) must give way to a more sophisticated acknowledgement that these two “phases” of tradition are far more interrelated than is often acknowledged. Barry W. Henaut, Oral Tradition and the Gospels , pp. 295, 296–297, 299, 303 (my italics) I conclude with two final thoughts on the Q Gospel and the Didache— one concerning sayings and oral tradition, the other concerning sayings and community formation. The first point, then: sayings and oral tradition.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 3 (451 – 1500) (2009)

  optimism for a turn for the better in Christian fortunes; in addition to two hundred known manuscripts of the Latin letter written by the imaginary king between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, there were fourteen early printed editions of the letter up to 1565, and large numbers of translations into vernacular European languages.62 Nevertheless, in cold practical results, Prester John turned out to be a disappointing myth, and what it chiefly revealed was just how little Western Chalcedonian Christians knew about centuries of Christian struggle, scholarship, sanctity and heroism in another world. Western Christianity, heir to Chalcedon, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still has a long way to go before the balance is fully righted. Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the centre of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the East was nearly everywhere faced with a destiny of contraction in numbers, suffering and martyrdom which still continues. But there was one practical consequence of the fifteenth-century Latin delusion that Prester John might unite with Western Christians. The myth generated an optimism which had a vital galvanizing effect on Latin Christianity, so it played a part in that surprising new expansion worldwide which from the end of the fifteenth century led Western Catholicism and Protestantism to become the dominant form of the Christian faith into modern times (see Chapter 17). It is towards Rome that we now turn, to begin exploring how this unlikely turn of events took place.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  world-order, together using baptism to express their solemn dedication to the tasks of the Kingdom of God, and accepting their rights as children of God within that Kingdom. In those churches in which baptism is administered in infancy, confirmation would offer the next best opportunity to impress and express such convictions. In the catechumenate the ancient Church put the candidate through long processes of exorcization to expel the demon powers which had infected him in his pagan life. Those churches which practise confirmation have shifted the instruction of the catechumenate to precede confirmation; those churches which practise adult baptism are much in need of a period of systematic instruction before baptism. It would be a really rational and Christian form of exorcization to break the infection of the sinful and illusive world-order and to explain the nature of a distinctively Christian order of life. Such a restoration of its earliest meaning might save baptism from the religious and theological emptiness which now threatens its very existence. Its older doctrinal meanings have leaked away or evaporated. In the ancient Church it was closely connected with the prevalent belief in demonism. Patristic and scholastic theology bound it up with original sin. But we do not live in a realizing sense of demon powers, and original sin and baptismal regeneration seem to be marked for extinction. To say that Christ commanded it and that we must obey his ordinance, is equivalent to confessing that the act has lost its enthusiasm and its religious conviction. It is simply an order, which must be obeyed. Why not connect baptism with the Kingdom of God? It has always been an exit and an entrance; why not the exit from the Kingdom of Evil and the entrance into the Kingdom of God? That would, under right teaching and with the right people, give it solemn impressiveness. It would make it a truly Christian act. Baptism has always been dogged by superstitions, and thrust down into paganism. The individualistic interpretation of it as an escape from damnation tainted it with selfishness. Contact with the Kingdom of God would restore baptism to its original ethical and spiritual purity. The Lord’s Supper, like Baptism, has had a tragic history. The meal in the upper room at Jerusalem was the last of many meals in which Jesus had broken the bread with his friends in the close intimacy of their wandering life. The spirit of all the previous meals was in this last meal. It was pervaded by the same strong and holy feelings of friendship which make the disappointment of Jesus in the garden so pathetic. It is a question whether Jesus’ thought ran beyond the group of his friends when he asked for a repetition of the meal; it seems at least very unlikely that he purposed a cult act such as actually developed. His purpose was to create an act of loyalty which would serve to

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  about the 1587 “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, a puzzle on the order of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific. A strange allure surrounds every vanishing people—recall the wildly popular television series Lost . Or Plato’s Atlantis. Ghost ships and ghost colonies invoke a marvelous sense of timelessness; they exist outside the normal rules of history, which explains why Roanoke’s mystery mitigates the harsh realities we instinctively know the early settlers were forced to face. 8 If Roanoke is a tantalizing curio of a lost world, Jamestown, its more permanent offspring, grew to represent the Virginia colony’s origins in a way that could compete with the uplifting story of the Pilgrims. The 1607 founding of Jamestown may lack a national holiday, but it does claim a far sexier fable in the dramatic rescue of John Smith by the “Indian princess” Pocahontas. As the story goes, in the middle of an elaborate ceremony, the eleven-year-old “beloved daughter” of “King” Powhatan rushed forward and placed her head over Smith, stopping tribesmen from smashing his skull with their clubs. A magical bond formed between the proud Englishman and the young naïf, cutting through all the linguistic and cultural barriers that separated the Old and New Worlds. This brave girl has fascinated poets, playwrights, artists, and filmmakers. She has been called the “patron deity” of Jamestown and the “mother” of both Virginia and America. A writer in 1908 dubiously claimed that Pocahontas was actually the daughter of Virginia Dare, the youngest member of the Roanoke colony, making the Indian princess a child of European descent lost in the wilderness, much like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, published three years later. 9 The best-known, most recent version of the story is the 1995 Walt Disney animated film. Strikingly beautiful, unnervingly buxom, and more like a pop culture diva than a member of the Tsenacommacah tribe, Disney’s Pocahontas fabulously communes with nature, befriending a raccoon, talking to a tree; she is nearly identical to other Disney heroines Snow White and Cinderella, who also boast a menagerie of animal friends. Why? Communing with nature draws upon the potent romantic image of the New World as a prelapsarian classless society. Old tropes meld seamlessly with new cinematic forms: women in Western culture have been consistently portrayed as closer to Mother Nature, lushness and abundance, Edenic tranquility and fertility. There is no rancid swamp, no foul diseases and starvation, in this Jamestown re-creation. 10 Scholars have debated whether the rescue of Smith ever took place, since only his account exists and its most elaborate version was published years after

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  I asked Sol what he had tried thus far to feel more comfort when he and his wife were intimate. Sol proceeded to share with me a long list of treatment failures. He started by seeking help from a therapist who, when she heard about his punitive, alcoholic parents and a molestation in his youth, convinced him that he had emotional baggage that needing working through. She spent many sessions encouraging him to remember the most painful times in his life. When I asked whether he found the time with her helpful, he replied, “It made things worse. I always knew my childhood was painful. But after working with that therapist, I became my painful past. She believed that my anxiety was the direct result of my childhood experiences, and I became damaged goods. It was really depressing.” So I asked, “What did you do next?” He told me that he attended a nationally renowned sex clinic where they provided education about erectile dysfunction and offered new ways to look at his sexual difficulties with his wife. “They didn’t discuss my childhood, but they told me that I must have issues with my wife. Although I thought my marriage was on fairly stable ground, I started to explore reasons that I might be angry with her. The only thing I could think of was that she wasn’t particularly experimental in bed. Once I honed in on that and criticized her, I found myself getting angrier and angrier, and our sex life deteriorated even more. Eventually, I stopped searching for plausible resentments and said to myself, ‘My wife wants to have sex several times a week, and that’s a heck of a lot more than most guys can say.’ I felt better about her, but I still was at a loss about my sexual difficulties.” As Sol spoke, what struck me was the incredible determination this man had for finding solutions, for being close to his wife, for not giving up, even in the face of possible failure and paralyzing anxiety and unhelpful advice. I was in awe of his perseverance and the internal strength required to reject professional diagnoses that he intuitively knew would hurt rather than help him grow.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Yet again, in 21:10-14 we find a more humane discussion of the treatment of captive women. If a man takes such a woman for himself, he may not sell her thereafter, but must let her go free if he no longer wants her. Ancient warfare was savage, and little mercy was shown to captives. Nonetheless, the Deuteronomic insistence that the Canaanites be annihilated is in jarring conflict with the generally humane attitudes of the book. We shall discuss the Deuteronomic ideal of warfare and the alleged annihilation of the Canaanites further in the following chapter. Terracotta figurines of women (or the goddess Astarte?) from Iron Age Lachish and Ein Shemesh. Israel Museum. The Effects of Centralization Some of the legal innovations of Deuteronomy result directly from the law of centralization of the cult. Most immediately, the prohibition of sacrificial worship outside Jerusalem radically changed the nature of Israelite religion. On the one hand, the account of Josiah’s reform in 2 Kings 23 makes clear that up to this time there was widespread worship of Baal and Asherah, and that there were various cultic practices that Deuteronomy now deemed improper. This picture is now confirmed by archaeology, which has brought to light inscriptions mentioning YHWH’s Asherah (which is variously interpreted as a goddess or as a cultic object associated with the goddess) and over two thousand terracotta figurines depicting a nude female figure (presumably a fertility-goddess). Some of the practices suppressed by Josiah had venerable histories. The patriarchs in Genesis had consecrated places of worship that were now torn down (e.g., Bethel) and had set up pillars and planted trees by them. Objects consecrated to the sun had allegedly been set up by “the kings of Judah” (2 Kgs 23:11). Even human sacrifice could be justified by appeal to Exod 22:29 (“the firstborn of your sons you shall give to me”) and had also been practiced by Judean kings. The Deuteronomic reform, then, entailed a purge of Judean religion that brought it much closer to monotheism than it had previously been. On the other hand, the worship of YHWH was also transformed. People who lived at a distance from Jerusalem could now offer sacrifice only on the rare occasions when they made a pilgrimage to the temple. Prior to this time, meat was eaten only when it had been sacrificed (except in the case of some wild animals). In light of the difficulties created by the centralization of the cult, Deuteronomy allowed that “whenever you desire you may slaughter and eat meat within any of your towns” (12:15).

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Massachusetts for religious reasons. The tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: “American exceptionalism.” We are unique and different, and the absence of class is one of our hallmarks. Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption and good intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlantic dreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; wagon trains of hopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we are meant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in the American experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize the people involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classless society. Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are. Instead, we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth century). The quintessential American holiday was associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. Nevertheless, the “first” Thanksgiving has been given a date of 1621, when well-meaning Pilgrims and fair-minded Wampanoags shared a meal. The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who had helped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is the detail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had been kidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain. (Coerced labor of this kind reminds us of how the majority of white servants came to America.) Squanto’s friendship, alas, was a far more complicated affair than the fairy tale suggests. He died of a mysterious fever the very next year while engaged in a power struggle with Massasoit, the “Great Sachem” of the Wampanoag confederation. 7 In spite of the obvious stature of a Washington and a Jefferson, and Virginia’s settlement thirteen years pre-Pilgrim, the southern states lagged behind the scribbling northerners in fashioning a comprehensive colonial myth to highlight their own cultural ascendancy in the New World. Here’s what we have: Less a story than a mystery, there persists to this day a morbid curiosity

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Like Adam they would cling to “the tree of life” instead of “the tree of knowledge.” Throughout this work we have advocated conscious knowledge of and cooperation with this forward process; we have tried to show that our social disasters are but the modern “flood” that nature hurls upon our ignorance and inertia, and now we find it is “Bible teaching.” 1. After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward (Chap. 15). As Abram represents the Creative Principle, he is also the Creator. That there should be another Creator over and above this Creator is quite unnecessary, save to a religionizing mythologist. The only possible distinction between these two is that of genetic consciousness and its fractious energy. Since neither of these is conscious or moral, why divinify the one and satanize the other, thereby confusing all posterity? 5. And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. Since Abram is the Creator, the author in his reference to “seed” is telling us a truth we have refused to see for two thousand years, namely, that this “seed” is the planetary seed, and from it came the world and all upon it. Had this basic idea been realized and philosophically adhered to, religion would never have risen to hide from us “the cosmic facts of life.” If as some believe this promise was given only to the Jews, then it was never fulfilled, for the Jews are not numberless as the stars or the dust of the earth as per chapter 13. That promise was planetary not racial. Just here we can slay two more illusions, peculiarly Jewish. First, “The chosen people.” “How odd that God should choose the Jews!” Well, He didn’t. Throughout the Old Testament and Revelation the Jews are but symbols of the creative elements, and “the chosen people” are the elements chosen from space for this particular world. Second, “And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (22:18), repeated to Isaac (26:4). The seed here is the genetic world seed and it is this, life, not Jewry, that blesses nations. Yet it is upon this purely symbolic statement the Jews believe they bless all countries in which they dwell. Apparently Pharaoh and Abimelech did not think Abram and Isaac blessed their countries for they drove them both out. And both myth and history repeat themselves. It is this false sense of divine selection and separateness that underlies much, not all, of their tragic history. Only when they divest themselves of these illusions will they become an assimilable and acceptable part of humanity. In the following verses we see what this blind belief and ignorance of Reality can do. 14.