Disappointment
Letdown when reality falls short of what was hoped for or promised.
3765 passages
Study and magazine
Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
Read the guidePassages
Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.
Page 33 of 189 · 20 per page
3765 tagged passages
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
mother’s hands. By the time I had summarized all that I could remember of Theresa’s lecture, I was tired and just contributed a single sentence. “I really think we should live in our own home for once.” I handed the crystal to Sara, who agreed immediately, but our words were about as effective as a warm breeze on a hot humid day. Our parents had already made up their minds. Ray and Theresa informed us that they did not have enough money to take the time we would need to build our life in the nuclear family dynamic. Mainstream culture, they told us, prided itself on independence, competition, and autonomy. What’s more, Jane and her family were coming back in two weeks to reclaim their apartment, and we needed to begin our search right away, tomorrow in fact. First on our list was a community called Kerista in San Francisco. “They’re polyamorous,” Theresa said, beaming at all of us. I didn’t know what that meant, but I concluded that it probably wasn’t as great as she was making it out to be because Ray looked unnervingly glum. CHAPTER TWO FREE LOVE, SPIRULINA, AND ASCENDED MASTERS OF THE VIOLET FLAME –––––––––––––––––––– We arrived the following evening at the Kerista compound located in the Haight. The community members had pooled their financial resources to rent several buildings and some apartments. We were hosted, along with a few other visitors, in a spacious dining hall. Furniture had been cleared away except for several long tables set to the side. Their communal philosophy and history existed in the form of various pamphlets and brochures that lay displayed on the tables. Clothing was casual: blue jeans and t-shirts. A few people even wore overalls, the uniform of Synanon. Bandanas were popular, and many of the men and women kept their hair back in blue, red, or green cotton paisley head coverings. People arranged themselves on the floor toward the middle of the room in one big circle. To my relief, kids were not required to participate, so I wandered toward the tables to browse the literature. One black-and- white brochure showed on its cover a couple arm in arm and beaming broad smiles. The woman wore baggy overalls and had thick brown hair that looked as if it had not been brushed in a week, a bandana partially holding back her unruly locks. Her partner, a grandfatherly, pot-bellied man with a thick white beard, also wore overalls and resembled St. Nicholas, if Father Christmas had been a hippie. The caption beneath the picture stated that the two were married and enjoyed spending quality
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
Guyana. Those who did not willing drink the poison-laced punch were forced to ingest it drink poison at gunpoint, more than nine hundred people died. I’d seen pictures in TIME magazine of their bodies, men, women, children and babies, laying side by side. Synanon had been on friendly terms with The People’s Temple, donating whatever we didn’t need or couldn’t use to them. One woman who survived the massacre had come to Synanon. I wondered how she could be so trusting again. I couldn’t seem to get through to Theresa merely by begging her that we leave. “Where would we go?” she always said. “It would be tough for us to be out on our own without Synanon.” “We could stay with relatives,” I’d say. At times, she’d smile and list all the things Synanon had to offer us: food, shelter, friends, freedom from worries of survival. At other times, she was quiet, serious and nervous in response to my badgering. Her gaze would dart around as she worried about who might be listening. Yet she always concluded by making some positive statements about Synanon. I felt exasperated by my inability to get through to her. For the first time my adoration of Theresa began to develop cracks. At ten years old and approaching adolescence, I began to have a heightened awareness of my mother’s flaws as if a highlighter had been taken to every perceived imperfection in her character. She began to bother me. She seemed too dreamy, inattentive. When I spoke to her, I often had to repeat myself because she rarely listened to what I said and would become confused, picking up only the latter portion of my communication, thereby compelling me to start over again. As a younger child, I hadn’t noticed this quality of hers. Perhaps it hadn’t mattered because small children have a natural ability toward a wandering mind. Theresa kept a dream journal and liked to read to me about spiritual journeys she’d experienced in her sleep. Frankly, I found this practice to be slightly kooky. But what bothered me most was that she seemed content to remain in Synanon although it was becoming clearer to me
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
My first taste of sugar after years without it was not as great as I’d thought it would be. Though at first I was excited to receive an Oreo cookie, I could barely endure the first bite. It tasted terrible. How had I never noticed? The chocolate part was bad enough, but the icing inside tasted so sweet that I found it inedible. The fizzy lemon flavor of 7Up lingered on my tongue like watery, tangy pancake syrup. A gulp of Coca-Cola created the sensation that my teeth were dissolving in the high carbonation. Alarmed, I ran to the bathroom, opened my mouth and saw to my relief that my teeth were still intact. Doughnuts still tasted okay and some cakes did, too, but only if they were plain, without icing or frosting. Gradually my palate adapted, and once again I built up a tolerance for sugary foods, though I still care little for soda. The sudden release from years of sugar-deprivation seemed to turn the community into a horde of raving sugar lunatics. Everyone binged. Massive ice cream-eating contests became common. We’d file into the dining hall, where each person was given a giant wooden bowl large enough for four servings. We selected our flavors from five-gallon tubs, receiving two or more scoops of each flavor along with mounds of whipped cream, flavored syrups, nuts and maraschino cherries. Walking back to my table, I carried a bowl of ice cream so large and heavy it could have easily satisfied a party of six. Yet these giant overindulgent servings were small in comparison with the bowls placed before the contestants, who sat on a makeshift stage. At the announcement of “Go!” they would tuck in, shoveling the cold treat into their mouths among cheers and whistles from the audience, many of whom attempted to keep pace with the contestants. I was not a big fan of ice cream, so after a few bites I left the rest to melt into a soupy brown liquid, mildly regretting the waste. In Synanon we did everything in extremes. Disco parties were held often. Some began in the afternoon with a live production of early American Wild West culture. Dressed in our disco outfits of brightly colored polyester and Lycra spandex bell bottoms, skintight cat suits and miniskirts, with enormous platform shoes, we’d line up along the side of the road near the dining hall to watch the faux shootout. Groups of ten or twelve men dressed like vigilante cowboys from the 1800s would come galloping up on horses with holstered guns at their hips. They’d point their guns, which fired blanks, skyward, firing them off while whooping and pretending to assault one another. We stood clapping and cheering the showdown, which always ended in a duel. When one of the duelers inevitably received a mortal shot and fell to the ground, playing dead, the disco party started, with everyone rushing to the gambling rooms, which were open to all ages.
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
I couldn’t have cared less, but I was going to hear about it anyway. The more Theresa rattled on about the community, the less promising it sounded. The private school focused on activities like meditation and lessons on karma, angels, and, of course, the ascended masters. Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the head of it all, smiled wistfully in every picture. I imagined dead saints talking through her and concluded that I would petition my father to come get me if we wound up with these people. Over the course of a year, I had become increasingly irritated with Theresa, but that irritation had been recently suspended when Synanon management had threatened to keep Sara and me after our parents announced they were leaving. The idea of possibly not seeing my mother again had left me stunned and terror-stricken. Then there was the feeling of relief and exaltation when we learned that, in fact, Synanon was not going to keep us, and at long last I was finally going to leave the cult. I had been excited over our move to Santa Clara. But our immersion into mainstream society was in danger of curtailment due to the choices of Theresa and Ray. My irritation had returned. How many times had I told Theresa that I did not want to be placed in a private school? The word private held negative connotations for me. I did not want to be part of a school that had an unorthodox way of doing things. Who knew what went on in these private schools? I did not want to wind up in another educational program like Synanon, or possibly worse, this Summit Lighthouse place. Along with my exasperation over Ray and Theresa’s choices on where to live, I had begun to wonder when Theresa had become so silly, deciding everything with a crystal, giving speeches all the time about how to communicate, or the unhealthy ingredients in a cookie. These peccadilloes I was willing to overlook, but I understood on a visceral level that the choice of where to settle, if my parents got it wrong, could have serious ramifications for Sara and me. Sara flipped through her brochure, frowning, while Theresa talked about something called a violet flame, and meditating to erase negative karma.
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
shiny, purple, short-skirted uniforms. Our cheerleaders did not understand the game and burst out in disconcerting shrieks that spun the other team’s heads as we ran up and down the court. Frustrated at our ineptitude, Buddy continuously swapped us, hoping someone would know what the hell they were doing. We lost every game. We were obviously not the superior athletes that Synanon members boasted we were. In honor of our participation, one of the schools we’d played against kindly made certificates for each of us. Mine read “Mr. Frederick.” Just like Swish in the movie, no one had guessed I was a girl. Buddy lost interest in the basketball team and it folded. T CHAPTER THIRTY he Ranch IN 1980, a change in living arrangements required that the Synanon school be moved from Walker Creek to the nearby Ranch property, which until then had been living quarters solely for adults. The adults were ordered to take up residence in Walker Creek. We made the switch in staggered shifts, and I happened to be in the first wave of children. We found ourselves inhabiting half-empty buildings, having the run of the property, sparsely populated by the demonstrators and us. For the first time I was given a room that came as close to being my own space as I would ever have in Synanon. The room held two twin beds and a loft, which also had two twin beds. I was assigned to the loft and told that if I wanted to share it with another girl, I could. At ten years old, I had spent the last several years crammed into rooms with other girls, where every square inch was utilized. The long rectangular loft, with its sloping ceiling, Berber-carpeted floor and small slanted window, was a novelty. I had no desire to share it. Because there were so few of us and we were cut off from the main body of the community, a few routines, such as mandatory inspections, began to fall away. Games were played less frequently, and at times we
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
choking voice, “This is so beautiful.” Theresa placed her hand on Ray’s arm, and he turned to give her a long sappy look. Sara snorted and I ducked my head, hoping this was the extent of his emotional outburst. We were on a kiddy ride for Christ’s sake! Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly like Ray any less, my feelings would drop to a new level of disdain. The thrill of leaving Synanon had worn off and now I found myself grappling with the fact that we were all at odds with each other. My desire for normalcy, plainness, the all-American life, a template of a 1950s-like lifestyle which I’d mentally molded from years of fantasizing, clashed with Ray and Theresa’s idea of searching for a spiritual utopia. When we returned to Santa Clara, we received the news that the people from the University of the Trees had accepted our family into their community. Ray and Theresa, after some discussion, accepted the invitation, much to the relief of both Sara and me. The commune seemed a great compromise. We would live in our own home. Sara and I could go to public school while Ray and Theresa got to take advantage of the weekly meditation groups, communication seminars, and potlucks with likeminded people. Best of all, Sara and I were not required to attend any of it. The commune offered our parents jobs. Ray went to work selling negative ion generators, and Theresa was placed in a secretarial position. Get Synanon Kid Grows Up Now! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my mother for helping me to tell this story. When I first began writing Synanon Kid in 2013, she generously spent many hours on the phone with me, answering all of my questions and sharing her perspective of our peculiar past. My children have all been wonderful in taking time to read several drafts and giving me valuable constructive criticism. In 2014, I contacted Paul Morantz, the attorney who litigated Synanon on multiple counts and who Chuck Dederich attempted to murder by ordering two Synanon men to place a rattle snake in his mailbox. Paul has kept a dedicated blog of Synanon history and legal matters for many years, as well as writing two books on the cult: Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults, which features Synanon among other organizations whose leaders turned malevolent and destructive toward their members, and From Miracle to Madness, a thorough anthology of Synanon history and a careful log of every legal issue Synanon ever had. Paul was kind enough to have me over to his home and to read one of my earlier drafts over the course of an evening. He took notes, invited me back and sat with me for five hours telling me what he thought worked and what didn’t. I am very grateful for Paul’s honesty when he told me the manuscript still needed a lot of work. He was generous with his time
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
decompressing, discussing and rehashing their Synanon cult experience, remembering events that had caused them distress, remorse, or fear, and expressing long-repressed feelings. Sometimes there were exclamations of disbelief at what they had put up with and bursts of laughter at the utter ludicrousness, followed by a shaking of heads when they considered all the red flags they’d ignored. How had they not seen the obvious? Mary Ann’s parents would listen with rapt, sympathetic attention. After all, their daughter was still very much devoted to Synanon. “When will Mary Ann come to her senses?” Laila had wondered aloud, her voice a smooth honeyed baritone. Had my parents learned nothing from these table talks? My fantasies of being a nuclear family, of going to public school and coming home to my suburban abode, so near to becoming a reality, had all been dashed in a single moment when the “where to next” meeting was called on a weekday morning. Despite the fact that the apartment was well furnished, we sat on the floor on Ray’s hard meditation pillows, pulling into a tight circle, Synanon style. Cupped in her hands, Theresa held a pendulum crystal, her greenish eyes resting benignly on Sara and me as she waited for Ray, who ran a comb over his thick black hair still wet from a recent shower. He took it straight back with quick, efficient strokes. When he was finished, he pushed up his shoulders and rounded his back, demonstrating his fugitive look. “Why do we have to live in another commune?” Sara asked before Ray or Theresa could officially start the meeting. “Why can’t we live in our own home for once?” I added. We had already taken the first fragile steps of integrating into American society, even if Ray and Theresa had begun complaining as of late that it was a capitalistic machine. I didn’t know what capitalism was, but I reasoned to myself that it couldn’t be worse than living in a cult. “Nuclear family living is not up for discussion,” Ray snapped. Since we’d become a family, my dislike for Ray, which started in Synanon, had deepened, compounding almost daily. I found him
From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult
cut sometimes by half and the abolishment of snacks. Parents were told to stay away. We kids needed our space, management dictated. It mattered little to me because my mother was still in San Francisco. On weekends our free time was confiscated for various projects. We were divided into small work groups. On my first job, I washed windows along with several other girls. We were given a bucket of mildly soapy water, a squeegee, roll of industrial paper towels and a short ladder. A demonstrator took us to the first bunkhouse and washed one of the windows for our benefit, wiping every smudge and streak away with the towel in the meticulous way that all chores were done. We began on the first building, washing the windows inside and out. After an hour, my arms ached and my stomach grumbled from the hollow feeling of the calorie-restricted diet. Julia and Rachel, who were on my team, had quit and were sitting on the gravelly pathway under one of the window ledges, chatting with each other. For a moment, I stopped my work to look around. There were so many windows. It might take days to wash every window in every building. Mary, the fourth member of our team, was up on the little ladder, her thin arm swiping at the glass over and over, her nose and cheeks red from the cold and exertion. A group of boys passed us with a wheelbarrow of water repellent and wood preservative for the new jungle gym built recently in the play yard. A girl trailed behind them with a shovel. “How long do you think it might take us to wash all these windows?” I asked Mary. “How should I know,” she snapped, glancing down. “Are you going to help me?” “I’ve been working. What about them?” I pointed at the other two girls.
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
Robby frowned. “What the hell is that?” “What the hell it sound like?” Nig said. “We work together,” Dove said. “I take the black pussy. Nig takes all the white comin’ by. You a good enough stud, you can pick up on it.” “Who pays?” Robby asked. “Sometimes women; mostly men. People up on Colson Hill give us a lot of work.” Nig, still scratching, drawled, “We put in a lot of practice time.” Robby shook his head once more. “Naw. It just doesn’t sound right. I stuck my share of pussy. I like action, sure. But there ain’t no need to go after it with a lead pipe. There’s enough to go around so you don’t have to fight it down.” Dove: “You ain’t found none around here, yet.” Nig: “I like it any way I can get it.” Dove: “It’s a good job.” “Well,” Robby said. “It just ain’t for me.” Dove stood up. Nig, laughing soft and warm, rubbed Dove’s left foot with his knuckles: “But it sort of made you harden up a little, huh?” Now he Stood too. Dove: “Hope you get some the way you’re lookin’ it.” They were walking down the street. Nig: “And get under the dock before Bull catches you out here.” Robby, calling after: “Yeah, okay.” He rested his arms across his knees, watching the two walk away. Rape artists. He frowned, and reached down to arrange himself. When he looked up they were beyond the street light. — A CARTOON: UPA — One had ten. One had more. “Man, I got to get into some white pussy tonight.” He leaned on Dove’s shoulder; scratched. “You gotta give me some white pussy tonight or you ain’t shit.” “Fuck off, nigger. You sound like that fool back there. What you gonna find on the street this hour. Don’t you think about anything else?” “Naw. What you thinkin’?” “Your big black dick up some tight white cunt.” And Nig cracked up, prancing. “Hey,” Dove said, “how’d you like the one we got this afternoon.” “Which one?” “The first one.” “Oh, man! How old you think she was?” “I dunno. Thirteen. She had some big titties. For thirteen. Could throw that ass around.” Nig came back and put his arm on Dove’s shoulder. “Watchin’ her suck on your peter while I was givin’ it to her, it got me so hot I think it made me come the third time. But that little nigger bitch sure knew how to give a couple of guys a good time, huh?” He rubbed Dove’s back. “We don’t get no more pussy, an’ you gonna get fucked again.” He squeezed Dove’s left cheek. “Dove, I think you like my dick in your hole. I think you was thinkin’ about my black dick up your tight white ass hole.”
From The Tides of Lust (1973)
She stood, reaching to steady herself on the table, but even drew back there. “I’m . . . not going home, you know. When I went out I was on my way to . . . church.” Proctor raised an eyebrow. “Father Michael, he’s my advisor, there. We study together. That’s where I met . . . Catherine. She studies with him too.” “Her new priest?” “He’s not an ordinary . . . I mean, he’s been all over the country. He’s very interested in the problems of today. He . . .” “Catherine has even less tolerance for stupid priests than she has for stupid women,” He narrowed his eyes. “Her one totally accomplished talent is the corruption of both. I’ve known her a while.” “I . . . was supposed to go and talk to Father Michael tonight. But I didn’t want to.” Eyes down, up quickly. “Sometimes I think considering the world in classically theological strictures is a waste of . . . ” She looked around the room. “I shouldn’t say things like that here. It’s meaningless.” After another moment “One night when we were having coffee together, she told me I should come to The Hall of Mirrors some evening when I felt . . . disillusioned with theology.” “She didn’t give you a chance, did she? The urges are practically the same. If you’re not in the mood for one, you can be pretty sure the other won’t sit too well.” “I think I should go . . .” faltering before him. “. . . and see Father Michael, now.” “Perhaps you can convince him to try the Mirrors—I’m sorry; again. Really, I don’t disapprove of you.” He let his meshed fingers part over his navel. “I . . .” breathing now “don’t think you do.” She almost . . . no, it was still a sad expression. She backed between the tables and the bar; at the door her hands went to her hair again. “You don’t have . . . ?” Proctor turned up his hands and shook his head. “Oh,” and may have even smiled, may even have begun another word. Niger barked. She pushed quickly out the door. Niger barked again, ran forward. His forepaws hit the frosted glass. “Hey, boy!” Proctor stood. The chair overturned. Niger barked in silhouette. “Come back here, boy!” Proctor started between the tables. From the top of the stairs, the captain’s voice: “Quiet, Niger! come on up here!” Another bark. Niger wheeled back, dodged the table legs, and lolloped up the stairs. Proctor walked after him. “What was wrong with the little redheaded one who ran out of here like that? She all right?” called from the dark. Proctor stopped on the bottom step. “I don’t think she quite knew what she was getting into.” “Too bad, Doctor. Thought she might catch number seven.”
From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)
The book of Isaiah is a complex, lyrical meditation on the city of Jerusalem that is, in sequence, a catastrophic and then a glorious destiny. With its chosen king and its occupied temple, Jerusalem is accepted in the book as the epicenter of all meaning, the icon of ultimate religious possibility and of all historical prospects. At the outset of this study we may cite three texts that bespeak the story of the city of Jerusalem in which YHWH has made a singular investment and on which Israel has staked its entire faith. At the beginning of the book of Isaiah, the city is imagined as a fickle partner to God, fated to disaster: How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her— but now murderers! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them. THREE ISAIAHS? The book in our Bible called Isaiah was written by more than one person, and as this chapter makes clear, it was written during a pivotal and terrible time in Israel’s history. Much of what is now our Old Testament was written or put in its current form around this time. Scholars separate the book of Isaiah into three sections. Chapters 1–39 are ascribed to the actual prophet who lived and was named Isaiah, although future editors appear to have reworked small parts of the material we now have. He was proclaiming his message to the south (Judah and Jerusalem) from approximately 742 BCE until 722 BCE when the northern kingdom was destroyed and then annexed to Assyria. The south survived until the Babylonians destroyed it in 587 BCE. Chapters 40–66 are commonly divided into Second Isaiah (40–55) and Third Isaiah (56–66). They originated immediately before the fall of Babylon (539 BCE) to the Persians. It was shortly after this time when Jews living in Babylonian exile were permitted to return and rebuild. Therefore says the Sovereign, the LORD of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes! Isa. 1:21–24 At the center of the book of Isaiah, the city is promised relief and restoration: Themes in First Isaiah The prophet declares both judgment and salvation. God is always in control, even of other nations. God sometimes uses other nations to both punish and save Israel. After a period of suffering God will comfort and save God’s people. Real historical events are held up and connected to show God’s ways with Israel in the past, present, and future. God’s judgment is against those who deny care for the widow, orphan, and stranger.
Meier, A Marginal Jew , vol. 2, p. 520 All of that preceding material may be disappointing to some readers. Did not Jesus confront a diseased or even a dead person and by a word eliminate disease or eradicate death itself? What about miracles? Is all that medical anthropology but a hidden negation of their possibility? I begin with a brief comparison of my own position in The Historical Jesus against that of John Meier in A Marginal Jew . We are in substantial agreement on three key conclusions about the historical Jesus. Jesus was both healer and exorcist, and his followers considered those actions miracles. But no single healing or exorcism is securely or fully historical in its present narrative form, although historical kernels may be discernible in a few instances. Furthermore, as Meier notes, “most of the so-called nature miracles seem to stem from the early church, but the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes may reflect a special meal Jesus held during his public ministry” (2.13). But there are also two problems left for discussion. Here is one problem. Meier criticizes the presumption that moderns cannot believe in miracles, citing a 1989 Gallup poll proving that 82 percent of North Americans do so believe. He is quite right: of course people believe in miracles. Every time I buy groceries I read the covers of various tabloids as I wait at the checkout counter. They are filled, apart from diet, gossip, and scandal, with monsters, prophecies, and miracles. In contemporary North America we are once again as close as we have ever been to the entrepreneurial free-trade market in religious experiences that characterized the Roman Empire. But that means that, now as then, we will have not to deny but to discriminate. The argument cannot any longer be that of the village atheist who disbelieves miracles for everyone, past, present, and future, including Jesus. The argument cannot any longer be that of the pious pastor who disbelieves miracles for everyone besides Jesus and for all other religions besides Christianity. The argument will have to be about what is at stake in claiming this about Jesus rather than about, say, Elvis Presley. It was easier, even if wrong, to say that miracles do not happen and that therefore Jesus did not perform them. It is more difficult to admit that miracles happen all over the world’s religions but that this is why Jesus’ miracles are peculiarly significant for us Christians. Gallup polls are not enough. There is another problematic area. Meier puts it like this: “Just as a historian must reject credulity, so a historian must reject an a priori affirmation that miracles do not or cannot happen. That is, strictly speaking, a philosophical or theological proposition, not a historical one” (2.11). But there is, actually, not a twofold but a fivefold problem: theological, literary, epistemological, historical, and ethical. And before proceeding, let me give you my own definition of a miracle.
This is the fullest statement of that thesis: “The great themes of national repentance and God’s forgiveness, shown in restoring his repentant people, are prominent in all the literature that looks towards Jewish restoration. Jesus fits somehow into that view of God, the world and his people; but his message curiously lacks emphasis on one of the most important themes in the overall scheme” (1985:113). That “somehow ” is never explained, except by saying that “the teaching attributed to Jesus is markedly individualistic , as we have seen in discussing repentance” (1985:117). I agree with that data but not with its explanation. If you believed that imperial oppression was divine punishment for Jewish sin, you would have to call for Jewish repentance prior to God’s deliverance. If you did not , you would not. The data supports the interpretation that Jesus did not think imperial oppression was a divine punishment. It was simply an injustice that the Jews and God would have to resist as best they could. Jesus, and probably most peasants, knew exactly where the fault lay, and they did not blame on Jewish sin what came rather from Roman greed. But that first misunderstanding about Jesus’ silence on repentance prepares for this second misunderstanding. Second, Sanders interprets that saying about tax collectors and sinners in this way: “It is quite possible (in fact … quite likely) that Jesus admitted the wicked into his community without making the normal demand of restitution and commitment to the law…. Jesus offered the truly wicked—those beyond the pale and outside the common religion by virtue of their implicit or explicit rejection of the commandments of the God of Israel—admission to his group (and, he claimed, the kingdom) if they accepted him” (1985:203). That is not just a passing idea or fleeting thought. It gets an entire chapter to itself (1985:174–211) and is repeated programmatically throughout the rest of the book. It is described as “the one distinctive note which we may be certain marked Jesus’ teaching,” as “the undeniably distinctive characteristic of Jesus’ message,” as “a central aspect of Jesus’ message,” as “the most distinctive aspect of Jesus’ message” (1985:174, 271, 323). Sanders sees that “aspect of Jesus message” as parallel to the Temple in importance: “Jesus offended many of his contemporaries at two points: his attack on the temple and his message concerning the sinners” (1985:293). It is likewise parallel to the kingdom in importance: “We can know the main themes of his particular message with assurance. They are summarized by the words ‘kingdom’ and ‘the wicked’” (1985:322). None of that is withdrawn in his later book, although he notes that “this suggestion has been unpopular” and “is not what most readers will expect” (1993:230, 235).
No wonder Luke, if he knew about the collection, did not want to describe too clearly what had happened. Paul hoped it would hold together Christian Jews and pagan Jews on the level of charity rather than of theology. It did not do so, and it cost him his life. My purpose in discussing the collection is to see if it casts any light on the Jerusalem community. It is certainly another indication that James and the Christian Jews in the Jerusalem community were Law-observant. God’s Law was still binding on them as Christian Jews. But my point is that the Jerusalem community could not have expected such administrative “service for the saints” unless their lifestyle was somehow special, unless they could justify their title of the Poor Ones by a communal existence similar to that of an Essene encampment. Such communities lived God’s Law fully and faithfully through sharing goods, possessions, and salaries according to whatever rules they adopted. And a common meal was both the powerful symbol and actual heart of that commonality. The Jerusalem church was a share-community with a communal share-meal as its cultic center. It was also an apocalyptic community, and that explains why it was where it was—in Jerusalem and not, for example, still in Galilee. The imminent apocalyptic consummation would take place in Jerusalem; it would be there that Jesus would return. Finally, that commonality was mirrored in the ecstatic experience recorded in Acts 2: When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1–4) Luke once again interprets against his data. That was not instant Berlitz, in which all began to speak unlearned foreign languages. It was “speaking in tongues,” tongue-speaking rather than word-speaking—that is, prolonged and ecstatic utterances involving meaningless words. Participants, numbered at 120, were identified as both men and women in Acts 1:14–15. But notice that the Spirit came down on all alike—divided itself up, as it were, to fill all members equally so that they all responded in the same way, with a single voice of ecstatic non-speech. It was a Spirit that shared itself equally for a community supposed to do likewise. PART XStory and Tradition[One] assumes that there was once an older historical report which was later supplemented with materials drawn from scriptural prophecy…. There are, however, serious objections to this hypothesis. Form, structure, and life situation of such a historical passion report and its transmission have never been clarified.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
When the year passed and the Bridegroom failed to appear, calculations were renewed, the contemplation of numbers and symbols was intensified, and trancelike states were repeated. But gradually the brethren’s discipline weakened, their energy dissipated, and temptation drew them from their celibate state. Some defected to established churches, but others went off to more recent perfectionist sects that were multiplying across Penn’s province. Few could tolerate the fierce self-mortifying discipline required in Johann Beissel’s nearby Ephrata cloister, whose emaciated monks and nuns sought, through the demanding rites of the Rosicrucians, to achieve a higher, more perfect state of being.32 More genial were the followers of Matthias Baumann, an ignorant laborer from Lambsheim, in the Palatinate, who believed that in the delirium of an illness he had been transported to heaven where, newborn, purged of all sin, he had attained perfection and needed thereafter no intervention of church, sacraments, or any other means of grace. He was convinced that God dwelt in him as in Christ (“we are brothers,” he said) and that he had become like Adam before the Fall, incapable of sin—conditions he extended to his followers and which he urged the unregenerate to achieve. When some questioned the truth of his doctrine of perfection, he proposed to demonstrate his exalted state by walking across the surface of the Delaware River. And there was an array of semicommunistic Moravian settlements, fugitive groups of the Czech-Saxon Unitas Fratrum, which spawned dozens of obscure, short-lived utopias deep in Indian territory.33 For two centuries perfectionist projects, plants of European origins, had blossomed in the open atmosphere of the Americas, had reached for the sun, and had faded and died. But they were not without lasting effect. Their creative influence can be found deep in the cultures of later times. New England Puritanism’s once explosive radicalism was compromised into a sere orthodoxy, but Roger Williams’s uncompromised perfectionism, feared and despised by his contemporaries, proved in the twentieth century to be an inspiration for advocates of religious freedom, human rights, and enlightened democracy. Eliot’s passions were stifled and his efforts to convert and educate the natives and to modernize their way of life led to cultural deracination, but his translation of the Bible into Massachusett, “the first printed in a non-European tongue, and the first printed for which an entire phonetic writing system was devised,” together with his tracts in the natives’ language and his Indian Grammar, contributed significantly to the development of Indian linguistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.34
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
The Georgia scheme was clever and elaborate—too clever. It suffered from, indeed was destroyed by, an excess of logic. Alcohol was banned by the Georgia trustees, and so too were black slaves—because, logically, both would corrupt the diligence that the trustees hoped to develop in their charges. Private property was limited, to preclude the corruption of wealth, and the settlers were carefully screened for virtue and industry sufficient to guarantee the moral development of the community. The aim, above all, was to transform the national burden of a growing body of indigents, draining the substance of the land and contributing nothing, into the advantage of a productive colonial labor force whose moral character would be improved by hard work in a healthy environment. Though the colony of Georgia eventually succeeded, Oglethorpe’s project failed. The trustees’ principles were quickly overthrown: alcohol, slaves, and unlimited landholdings all soon appeared, and the elaborate screening process by which the worthy poor were to be sifted out from the mass of the merely destitute broke down. Modern historians estimate that perhaps one-third of the entire British population lived at or under the poverty line, but the trustees, in their twenty years of corporate existence, were able to certify and transport to Georgia only a total of 2,122 charity cases, and that with public subsidies of £155,700 (almost twice as much as the cost of Australia’s First Fleet). As the trustees’ control lapsed, the general peopling of the colony, by employees of ambitious entrepreneurs and by self-supporting homesteaders, developed in a rush. Still, the trustees’ aims were by no means repudiated. Their scheme proved to be a model for others. The Board of Trade considered seriously similar plans for the subsidized transportation of the English poor to Maine, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, North and South Carolina, and Nova Scotia—plans that were not basically different from the later assisted immigration schemes which in the nineteenth century would bring three-quarters of a million immigrants to Australia. In small matters and large, again and again, the government turned to managing the movement of people out to the western peripheries. To develop needed naval stores during the War of Spanish Succession it sent over to the Mohawk valley in upcountry New York three thousand Protestant Germans, part of a larger contingent whose migration to England the government had subsidized, some of whom were eventually sent off to Ireland. To secure its possession of Nova Scotia in 1748, after the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton had been returned to the French, the British government again turned to subsidized migration. It sent off, at great expense, to the naval base and provincial capital newly established at Halifax a first fleet—so called, in Halifax’s history—of over twenty-five hundred disbanded soldiers and sailors, London artisans, and migrant Irish. They followed that shipment with twenty-seven hundred more settlers drawn from the German states, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Lorraine.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
So, in 1974 The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson was published. The reactions were interesting, though I have to say a little disconcerting. Some American reviewers liked it, but others, as I had anticipated, said that this biography of a law-and-order conservative who struggled against popular mobs and protestors could only be a disguised defense of Richard Nixon. Still others said that in various ways I had got it wrong. Some British reviewers were kinder. Lord Blake said it was “one of the outstanding political biographies of modern times,” a remark that warmed my heart, until I recalled that among historians Robert Blake was a leading Tory. And J. H. Plumb said it was “a work of art,” which was something to put on one’s gravestone, though I had to keep in mind that Plumb had sponsored the Trevelyan Lectures in the University of Cambridge which were the basis of the book, and that though liberal in many ways, he was a friend of royalty and a brilliant narrator of their lives and times. Though the book won an award, it soon fell into obscurity, to be occasionally referred to as dubious if not mistaken on particular points by subsequent biographers of Hutchinson.4 But it was this book that I thought I would go back to when I received the American Antiquarian Society’s kind invitation to deliver the first of the Baron Lectures, a series to be devoted to retrospective views of an author’s earlier work, “describing the genesis of and response to it and reflecting on it in the current context of scholarship.” I did so because the reasons that had led me to write the book in the first place were not only still compelling in my mind but had become even more relevant in view of the flood of celebratory books on the Founders and the great expansion of our knowledge of eighteenth-century history.
Mark specifically mentions a “house” in 6:10 and then a “place” in 6:11, but one presumes that he is speaking about the same location. The Q Gospel has, however, the most striking of the three versions. In the first half, at Luke 10:5–7, a “house” destination is mentioned four times, but in the second half, at Luke 10:8–11, a “town” (literally, polis —a city) is mentioned twice. Recent scholarship on the Q Gospel , and especially the work of John S. Kloppenborg, has argued for two principal layers in the composition of that gospel. The earlier one emphasized primarily a lifestyle and missionary activity that, despite the expectation of opposition and even persecution, was remarkably open and hopeful. Later came a second one, far more dark and defensive, threatening dire apocalyptic vengeance against “this generation” for refusing to accept that missionary activity. What happened to change the community’s vision may possibly be seen in that very change from house to town , from Luke 10:5–7 to 10:8–11. What may well have happened to the communities of the Q Gospel was that a relatively successful mission to the small houses of the villages and countryside turned into a comparatively obvious failure as the missionaries moved into towns such as, for example, Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum. But Jesus’ earliest followers were sent to village houses rather than to urban centers. Commensality and Payment The move from house mission to town mission is one type of development in the history of those three key texts. Another is from commensality to payment , facilitated by the ambiguity between food as eating together and food as wages in kind . That transition was already evident in the twin versions of the Q Gospel in Matthew 10:10 (food) and Luke 10:7 (wages), as underlined above and below. Here are those texts again, as well as four others on the same subject from, respectively, 1 Corinthians 9:4, 9, and 14 (food); 1 Timothy 5:17–18 (wages); the Dialogue of the Savior 53b (food); and Didache 11:4–6 and 13:1–2 (food). (1b )…for the worker deserves his food . (1a)…for the worker deserves his wages . (2) Do we not have the right to our food and drink?…For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.”…In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.
From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)
Such was the program Plockhoy presented to Cromwell, and after his death to the new Protector and to Parliament. Its aim, he said, was the true reformation of England as the first step in the rebirth of mankind. If in England complete religious freedom were created, he assured Cromwell, “Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and other kingdoms … will easily be brought to a firm bond of unity.”27 But while his proposals stirred up much talk and some writing, there was little action. Plockhoy’s thinking began to shift. In England, he wrote, it was becoming clear that he and his adherents might well prove to be “insufferable to the world,” and at the same time the world might be “incorrigible or unbetterable as to us.” Therefore he and his people would have to establish their solidarity “in such places as are separate from other men, where we may with less impediment or hindrance love one another and mind the wonders of God, eating the bread we shall earn with our own hands.”28 But where could such a refuge be found? The authorities in his native Holland turned him away, and he had no confidence in what he heard of a nobleman’s sanctuary near Cologne. In the end, well aware that the Hartlib circle had talked of creating an ideal society (“Antilia,” “Macaria”) in Virginia or Bermuda, he decided that his perfect society would only be safe, and fulfilled, in America. He knew about that distant land through his brother who had served the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland and from a member of the Parnassan Club who had lived there for a decade and who celebrated its wonders in rhapsodic poems which he declaimed at length to his friends in the Sweet Rest Tavern.29 For this removal to their underpopulated colony the Dutch West India Company and the Amsterdam authorities were happy to provide support. So on July 28, 1663, Plockhoy and forty-one adherents disembarked at an abandoned clearing on the Delaware River, to usher in a new era in human history. What happened within Plockhoy’s perfect world in the months that followed, how fully and in what detail he was able finally, on that distant shore, to realize his so carefully defined state of perfected being, is not known. What is known is that it ended swiftly. In August 1664 an overwhelming English force seized the Dutch colony and swept across Plockhoy’s settlement like a whirlwind, stripping it bare and plundering it down “to a very nail.” Plockhoy died in the attack or soon thereafter and his utopian flock scattered among the Finnish, Swedish, German, and English frontiersmen living in primitive settlements alongside the Lenape Indians. Only his blind son is known to have survived into the next century, the last remnant of the utopia that had once stirred the minds of aspiring intellectuals in Holland and learned pansophists in England and the German states.30
I give them in what I consider the ascending order of historical and theological importance. First, the Gospel of Peter is a careful combination of two passion-resurrection stories, an extracanonical one (where Jesus was buried by his enemies , to whom he later appeared) and an intracanonical one (where he was buried by his friends , to whom he later appeared). Second, that extracanonical or enemies-version is consistently older than the intracanonical or friends-version and was used as its source. Third, that basic passion-resurrection story was not history remembered but prophecy historicized, a distinction to be explained further below. I called that extracanonical or enemies-version the Cross Gospel , to emphasize that it was an earlier source and not equivalent to the fuller and later Gospel of Peter itself. The name is unimportant; call it anything you want for purposes of discussion or even dismissal. That theory was greeted, I think it fair to say, with almost universal rejection. I have read all the counterarguments but, at the end, the Gospel of Peter is still there and still not adequately explained. It is similar to the problem with the Didache . Parts have been argued very plausibly in either direction: this or that unit is dependent or independent of the canonical gospels. But at the end the question of the whole still presses. What is the overall redactional purpose of the document as a complete entity with its own integrity? I do not withdraw any of those three major points, nor will I do so unless somebody comes up with a better interpretation of the Gospel of Peter ’s redactional intention, compositional logic, and authorial purpose. But those three points can clearly be separated, and that is what I want to do here. Looking only at that first point, and presuming the arguments given in those 1988 and 1995 books, I seek to extend rather than repeat them. I ask, therefore, a single question: Granted intracanonical sources in the Gospel of Peter , is there also a consecutive, independent, extracanonical source there as well? I am not talking about random oral traditions or scattered written fragments, but a consecutive, narrative source. That is the rock-bottom first step in my overall proposal, and I want to discover if any consensus is possible on just that point alone. I leave aside for now any overall theory, to ask only that single, preliminary question. Does the Cross Gospel , by whatever name, exist within the present Gospel of Peter? I have at the moment, therefore, a very limited object. I begin with how Brown and I agree and disagree on that single question. Independent Source Brown … comes close to Crossan’s Cross Gospel in his approach to the guard-at-the-sepulcher story [in Gospel of Peter 8:28–11:49]: the author knew an independent form of this long story, and a less developed pre-Matthean form of the same story is preserved in the Gospel of Matthew. Frans Neirynck, “The Historical Jesus: Reflections on an Inventory,” p.