Hope

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

  It is important at the outset to consider what the prophets, in their utterances, are doing. For the most part the prophets are not doing prediction, as many more conservative interpreters are wont to think. Nor for the most part are they social advocates, as many progressives choose to think. Rather the prophets are emancipated imaginers of alternative. They are emancipated from the dominant assumptions of their society, because they know that the purposes of God cannot be contained in any such absolutizing assumptions. They are imaginers. That is, their daring words hold as possible an alternative reality that is out beyond conventional expectation and so is unthinkable and unutterable in conventional social expectation. Such reality was not available until it was uttered in their playful or searing way. The prophets invited their listeners to join in their commitment to that new reality. Their work is an alternative to the social reality that is so obviously in front of us. Thus they imagine an alternative economy and an alternative worship. They invite their listeners to depart their old assumed world to commit to the alternative. In sum the prophets imagine the world as though the God of the old traditions of promise and deliverance were yet a real character and a lively agent with a distinct will and resolve. In the presence of this God everything else takes on a different form. They are aware that in conventional society, the god assumed is not a lively agent and is not a real character who can act but is only a totem (idol) of preference. Thus their articulation of God is radically different from the assumptions of every absolutizing society. The prophets have two primary themes. First, they are very sure that political economic arrangements that contradict the purpose of God cannot be sustained. The rhetoric of the prophets concerns the judgment of God, sometimes expressed in supernatural, interventionist terms. The point is that a life constructed in ways inimical to God will sooner or later be forfeited. For the most part, those who heard the prophets refused to believe this, and engaged in denial about the loss anticipated by the prophets. Second, the prophets are voices of hope that affirm that God is a future-creating agent who keeps promises and who, against all odds, creates a new world reality that is distinct from present power arrangements. This theme of hope gives assurance that in every circumstance of loss, no matter how acute, new possibility for well-being is in the purview of God. For the most part those who heard the prophets refused to hope that the new world would be given by God and so settled in despair with their failed world.

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

  Upon the destruction of the city, the Ezekiel tradition reverses field and begins to anticipate the restoration of the city. This anticipation takes the form of a new shepherd (Davidic prince) who will care for its population (34:22–23). The restoration is presented as resurrection from the grave, when God will breathe new life on the “dry bones” of forsaken Israel (37:12). The restoration is grounded in the first-person decision of God: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 36:24–25 These several images in the book of Ezekiel are preliminary to the grand vision of a restored, cleansed temple that will be a suitable habitat for the glory of God. Thus the prophet imagines the dramatic return of God’s glory to the new, cleansed temple: The vision I saw was like the vision that I had seen when he came to destroy the city, and like the vision that I had seen by the river Chebar; and I fell upon my face. As the glory of the LORD entered the temple by the gate facing east, the spirit lifted me up, and brought me into the inner court; and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. 43:3–5 The gate of the temple is shut, and God will never again depart the temple (44:1–2). In this imaginative scenario, the new temple will be a wonder of beauty and symmetry, a habitat appropriate to God’s glory. The new temple, moreover, will be a source of life. Whereas in the old tradition, the “river of life” flowed from God’s garden, now in the new order of God’s presence, the river of life will flow from beneath the altar of the new temple (47:2). The new temple is the source of new life for the world. That new water of life will be so ample and generative that it will reach even the stagnant water of the Dead Sea; even that hopeless place will be a sustaining venue for fish (47:8–10). The most radical notion of the restoration of the Dead Sea is a vision of new life from God. It is no wonder that the name for the new city will be “The LORD is There!” (48:35). THE COMMON SITUATION We are able to see that these three “major” prophets, from very different traditions, provide very different resources through which to imagine the life and destiny of Jerusalem: •Isaiah: Jerusalem lost and renewed•Jeremiah: covenant broken and restored•Ezekiel: temple nullified and revivifiedOur reading requires that we honor these several traditions and their scenarios and not try to harmonize them.

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

  God’s judgment over nations is to lead to their final worship and obedience so that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (2:4). Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. 40:1–2 At the end of the book of Isaiah, the city is anticipated in its full, glorious restoration: But be glad and rejoice forever, in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 65:18 Thus, the book of Isaiah traces the history of ancient Israel from its catastrophic demise to its anticipated restoration, all at the behest of YHWH, who governs history and who attends to the city with intense expectation. As Christians study the book of Isaiah, we must first try to understand the message of God given through the prophet to its original audience—Jews living in a time of overwhelming tragedy and destruction. We should resist immediately using “Jerusalem” as a symbol of the life of Christ or interpreting it through a Christian lens. This is fine to do, but we should be aware when we do it and for the purposes of this study we will first try and look at what the message meant to its original audience. FIRST ISAIAH (CHAPTERS 1–39) The first part of the book of Isaiah, chapters 1–39, in a complex way is preoccupied with the demise of the city and blames the demise not on the foreign invaders but on Israel’s leaders and inhabitants. That anticipated demise (that finally occurred in 587 BCE long after the prophet) is at the hands of the Babylonian imperial army; this army, however, is said to be at the behest of YHWH, who will not sustain a city or a people that is endlessly disobedient. Important Dates 1000 BCE King David’s reign 922 BCE Israel divides into north (Israel) and south (Judah, which includes Jerusalem) after Solomon dies. 742–701 BCE First Isaiah writes. 722 BCE The Assyrians destroy and annex the north. 701 BCE Assyria does not invade Jerusalem. 587 BCE The Babylonians destroy the south and exile many leaders. 587–538 BCE The exile in Babylon. 539 BCE The Persians (now Iran) under King Cyrus conquer Babylon and then allow exiles to return and rebuild the temple.

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

  It is something potential and possible, not just actual and accomplished. Terms such as Patterson’s “social radicalism” for the Gospel of Thomas and Kloppenborg’s “radical wisdom” for the Q Gospel help flesh out what Koester termed the “realized eschatology” of those twin texts. Even more important, though, they indicate that eschatology was realized or realizable not just in the words but in the deeds of Jesus and his companions. It was actualized or actualizable not just in the ideas but in the lives of Jesus and his companions. It was an eschatology present in the wisdom of social radicalism. I agree strongly with Patterson against Davies that the theology of the Gospel of Thomas had public social consequences. Next, the social radicalism of the Gospel of Thomas involved celibate asceticism. “If eschatology,” as Patterson continues, “is a mythological challenge to the world as it exists, the mythological expression of hope for something better, asceticism offers a real, present challenge to the world. It calls into question the ways of the world, its standards, its goals, its notion of what is meaningful in life. Thomas Christianity’s social radicalism, as a form of asceticism, has precisely this effect” (1993a:211). Finally, it is quite possible to derive celibate asceticism from the type of Jewish speculations about wisdom’s role in Genesis 1–3 that was seen above. You could even claim that celibate asceticism was an imperative hidden within those texts and that esoteric or secret wisdom was involved. But the Gospel of Thomas seeks to find such hidden wisdom not only in Genesis 1–3 but in the words of Jesus, so that they become themselves a source of hidden wisdom. In other words, for the Gospel of Thomas , ascetic world-negation is also esoteric, secret, hidden. The text demands, in its opening words, that one understands “the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded,” for, as Jesus said, “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” It is necessary at this point to distinguish such esoteric ascetical eschatology from ordinary ascetical eschatology. In that latter theology one abandons the world because it is too tempting or distracting. Such an ascetical eschatology might appeal to common sense or even to rational-choice theory. It might argue that it is obviously more reasonable to spend this short life in total and exclusive preparation for an eternal next one. In such a theology no hidden or esoteric interpretation is required. But the Gospel of Thomas is esoteric ascetical eschatology, a world-negation based on secret wisdom demanding celibacy as return to the unsplit state of the Primal Androgynous Being. Some thoughts in summary. The debate over Gnostic versus non-Gnostic status for the Gospel of Thomas is not productive. As Davies has demonstrated quite adequately, that gospel can be totally understood within Jewish speculation about creation, wisdom, and Genesis 1–3—and could have been so understood even if Gnosticism had never existed.

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

  Based on those biblical psalms, our Christian prayer is full of request of God through complaint and petition. It is likewise full of gratitude to God through praise and thanksgiving. But does Christian prayer also involve empowerment by God through participation and collaboration? I turn next, as a first step toward answering that question, from the biblical psalms to the biblical prophets. I move from those who spoke to God to those who spoke for God. Something surprising happens, however, when you turn from the biblical psalms to the biblical prophets. Something strange happens when you compare those who speak to God in prayer with those who speak for God in prophecy. It is almost as if prophecy and prayer are at war with each other. But how can that be true? Firmly grounded in the divine dream of Israel’s Torah, the Bible’s prophetic vision insists that God demands the fair and equitable sharing of God’s world among all of God’s people. In Israel’s Torah, God says, “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). We are all tenant farmers and resident aliens in a land and on an earth not our own. The prophets speak in continuity with that radical vision of the earth’s divine ownership. They repeatedly proclaim it with two words in poetic parallelism. “The Lord is exalted,” proclaims Isaiah. “He dwells on high; he filled Zion with justice and righteous ness ” (33:5). “I am the Lord,” announces Jeremiah in the name of God. “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight” (9:24). And those qualities must flow from God to us, from heaven to earth. “Thus says the Lord,” continues Jeremiah. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place” (22:3). “Justice and righteousness” is how the Bible, as if in a slogan, summarizes the character and spirit of God the Creator and, therefore, the destiny and future of God’s created earth. It points to distributive justice as the Bible’s radical vision of God. “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field,” mourns the prophet Isaiah, “until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land” (5:8). But that landgrab is against the dream of God and the hope of Israel. Covenant with a God of distributive justice who owns the earth necessarily involves, the prophets insist, the exercise of distributive justice in God’s world and on God’s earth. All God’s people must receive a fair share of God’s earth. The prophetic insistence that those in covenant with a God of justice and righteousness must also live in justice and righteousness is clear enough.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But I know that day how swiftly such moments pass, how cunning, baffling, and powerful my own logic can be. My head is grinding inside like a peppermill, and by dawn, a hangover has landed a cold hatchet in the back of my skull. After horking up my stomach contents in Radcliffe Yard, I drive to the home of poet Thomas Lux and his wife. On sultry summer days, Dev played with their toddler daughter while Tom and his wife barbecued for a ragtag gaggle of writers. Since his wife toils as tirelessly as Warren, Tom and I occasionally meet in a park or meander our strollers through a mall crawl. In grad school, before he’d been domesticated, Tom outdrank every two-fisted sot who came through. His escapades were passed around with the cheap wine. A die-hard Red Sox fan, he’d once broken his toe kicking a hole in the wall after a grisly loss to Cincinnati. A girlfriend who caught him cheating dumped his clothes out the window onto a New York street. Then in a Cambridge bookstore years later, he tipped up his sunglasses to show his clear eyes while announcing to me he’d stopped drinking. That morning after my weepy crash, I stand snot-nosed before Tom and his wife in their breakfast nook, waiting for both of them to deliver some healing whap in the head. Great, Tom says instead. You’ll get sober, and your poems will get better, and your kid will grow up with a happy mother.

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

  Prophesying a generation after Haggai and Zechariah, Malachi must deal with the reality that Israel has not adequately answered the summons of his predecessors. He ponders the fact that neither priests nor people have lived up to the requirements of covenant. Like Haggai and Zechariah, Malachi continues to operate on the covenantal assumption that obedience is the precondition of blessing. But Israel has not performed obedience. It suffers from pollution and inadequate sacrifices (1:6–7). The covenant is corrupted in a way that leads to abasement (2:8). Malachi makes an appeal for community solidarity. He reminds his listeners that they are rooted in one ancestor, have one father, and are therefore mandated to one obedience (2:10). The call to repentance concerns right sacrifices and a “full tithe” that will cause the earth to flourish as a “land of delight” (3:12): I will rebuke the locust for you, so that it will not destroy the produce or your soil; and your vine in the field shall not be barren, says the LORD of hosts. Then all nations will count you happy, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts. 3:11–12 Chapter 4 joins the theme of reprimand and summons with a warning and promise of “a day” that is coming. It will be a day of judgment and purgation when evil-doers and the righteous will be sorted out (not unlike Matt. 25:31–46). Linked to that coming day is the return of Elijah, who will renovate social and familial relationships so that the judgment can be averted. At least two things are of particular interest in these final verses. First, these last verses are, in the Christian ordering of the Bible, the final words the Old Testament. The conclusion they create tells us that the Old Testament is open to the future in a radical way. God is not finished! The return of Elijah is God’s effort to avert the coming severe judgment on Israel in its failure. A second point of interest for Christians is that the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Luke, picks up on this theme and links it to the presence of John the Baptist as the forerunner of Jesus (Luke 1:17). Thus the twelve Minor Prophets, as a corpus, ends with a deep summons to fidelity and an equally deep promise that God is future-bent. Newness is coming and therefore faithful obedience is the order of the day. Present action matters for future possibility, just as future possibility repositions present action. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION What does the author mean that the Babylonian exile was not just a political displacement for the people, but an acute theological displacement as well? How did many of the prophets studied in this book address this theological displacement? What relevance do the prophets in the Bible have for our situation today? A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE PROPHETIC BOOKS OF THE BIBLE

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

  On September 11, 2001, I was beginning to teach a course on the book of Isaiah. On that day our assigned text was from Isaiah 2: For the LORD of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . against every high tower, and against every fortified wall; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The haughtiness of people shall be humbled, and the pride of everyone shall be brought low; and the LORD alone will be exalted on that day. 2:12, 15, 17 Our own shattering experience that day helped us to read the text, recognizing that such poetry of attack characteristically includes both geopolitical and theological dimensions. The book of Isaiah, in its early chapters, is propelled by a wonderment about how the beloved city of Jerusalem could come to such a sorry state. The poetry holds our attention as we ponder the conviction of the prophet that God’s purposes persist and are enacted in and through history in ways beyond our explanation. FROM LOSS TO RESTORATION This long literature of pending loss is, however, repeatedly interrupted by another word. We do not know if the interruption is the work of the prophet who may have found the hard word he had to speak unbearable and so softened it with promise. Or perhaps the sequence of judgment to promise is the work of editors who brought the prophetic oracles of Isaiah into an editorial whole. Either way, we are able to notice that the book of Isaiah, as it goes down deeply into the abyss of loss, also looks beyond the abyss to a restoration from God. In chapters 1–12, the harsh poetry of divine judgment is consistently followed (or contradicted?) by divine promise. In chapter 1 the city is condemned for its disobedience (see v. 4). But that is followed by the familiar oracle of restoration and disarmament in which, in anticipation, Jerusalem will be a pilgrim center to which all nations will come for instruction (2:2–4). The city will be a peaceable one in which war will not be learned or practiced anymore. In chapter 3 the Lord will take away all economic comfort. That prospect, however, is followed in chapter 4 by an anticipation of a restored temple that will be “a pavilion, a shade by day from heat, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain” (4:6).

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  And so they were throughout the whole of early modern Europe, impelled by the power of the Reformation and the vast efflorescence of knowledge in the Renaissance and beyond. Both created soaring hopes for the transcendence of life as it was known, ultimately for the possibility if not of reaching perfection, then of approaching ideal goals. England in the crisis years of the mid-seventeenth century was especially alight with projects for both mobilizing secular knowledge in learned and benevolent societies, often in collaboration with the most imaginative scholars and scientists of Europe, and for advancing apocalyptic hopes. “Virtually every sect,” Frank and Fritzie Manuel write in their history of utopian thought in Europe, carried its own utopia, and individuals moved easily from one circle into another, punctuating their advent and departure with an appropriate religious revelation. Men dropped in and out of groups, recanting previous errors, writing confessions and testimonials [as one radical sect sought] to distinguish itself from the teeming mass, and much energy was expended on touting the superiority of one future society over its rivals. Some utopian designs were lofty abstractions, theoretical models of the ideal by which to measure the evils of the world and speculations on radical reform in all spheres of life. But others seemed to be within the reach of possibility. Most of these, on the Continent as in England, were the work of sects determined to recover a lost Christian perfection by drawing apart to live more perfect lives in some approximation to the assumed ways of the apostles. Often the radical sectarians found the social atmosphere of their immediate localities too dense, the weight of traditional institutions and social controls too heavy to allow for local withdrawal. So they looked for refuge beyond their immediate horizons, some to distant transoceanic places, and in this they shared the visions of the humanist utopian theorists for whom imagined distances from the real world had always been a logical necessity, often involving fanciful ocean voyages to reach the perfectly imagined regime.10 For both, America’s attraction was powerful. Not only would its limitless spaces and apparent lack of restrictive social pressures provide the ideal environment for the pursuit of perfectionist lives, but the existence of its vast population of pagans, descendants no doubt of the lost tribes of Israel, now Satan’s captives, would provide the ultimate challenge for those who understood the stages of apocalyptic fulfillment. And so the perfectionist invasion began—by Catholics, by dissenting Anglicans, by German pietists, and by a range of radical Protestants, from self-absorbed seekers to those wildly impatient Fifth Monarchy militants, led by a murderous New England “fanatique,” who stormed through Restoration London crying, “Live King Jesus!” until rounded up and hanged.11

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

  “In the early second century, when Christianity emerges again into history after New Testament times, it was already an urban religion. Culturally, socially, theologically, Christianity became adapted to needs and systems of thought of the cities…. It would therefore seem reasonable to conclude that when Christianity reached the countryside of the Roman world in its new form, it was socially, culturally and theologically marked by urban predispositions. We find, however, that this was not so. As soon as Christianity came into contact with the world of peasants and villagers, much of its original nature was revived. We have no idea in what way and to what extent this happened, but there are reasons to believe that the original message developed in the countryside of Palestine, and though allegorized by church leaders was once again understood by people living under similar conditions of material existence and exploitation by city dwellers” (93–94). The tradition of Jesus’ life and example filled Parts VII and VIII of this present book. That of Jesus’ death and vindication will fill Parts IX and X. But there is a leap involved in the move from one of those tandem sets to the other. It is a leap that I wish to acknowledge but not to overemphasize to the point of mystification. Christianity was possibly present in Rome itself by the late 40s and was certainly present by the mid-50s. The possibility stems from the emperor Claudius’s decree expelling Jews from Rome in 49 because of disturbances “at the instigation of Chrestus [= Christus? = Jesus?],” as Suetonius recorded in The Lives of the Caesars: The Deified Claudius 25.4 (Rolfe 2.53). The certainty stems from Paul’s letter to the Roman community, written from Corinth around 55. If you move, as in that epigraph above, from Jesus in the tiny hamlets of Jewish Lower Galilee to Paul in the great metropolises of the pagan Roman Empire, the leap seems unimaginably great and miraculously inexplicable. But there were stages in between, stages that were not successive evolutionary moves but simultaneous options and overlapping developments. Look, for a moment, at the range of hamlets, villages, towns, cities, and metropolises involved. Think also of the differences in class of leadership as you move up that locational hierarchy, from peasants to scribes to scholars. Recall what was seen in Chapter 13 about calculating site dimensions and population densities in antiquity. Even when, as in walled cities, that first variable is firmly established, that second may vary widely among scholars. I warn you, for example, that calculations of the total population of the Jewish homeland in the first century have ranged from one to six million, and calculations of its Jewish component have ranged from one-half to five million (Byatt 51–52). I am using these population statistics as rough indicators of increasing locational power, prestige, and importance: I. Hamlet/Village Level Jesus is from Nazareth, “a hamlet of little more than a hundred” people (Malina and Rohrbaugh 295). II.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Bingo, she says. You’re not serious. That’s so puerile. Childish things for stubborn children, she says. I’m teaching again with some ease, and the writing started in the hospital plows forward. Warren and I exist like kindly intentioned siblings, though he’s putting forth more effort. On my birthday, he stuns me by gathering friends at a restaurant to holler surprise, but when he reaches for me the next morning, I roll away. The prospect scares me. Never, I think, could I kiss that handsome mouth. Whatever his reaction stays shut inside him. I follow the old advice of St. Jack of the Tinfoil, who’d counseled me to fulfill my contract unless otherwise guided. Right before I hit a year sober, Joan suggests starting a women’s group for gab of some spiritual variety—think quilting bee where we stitch on each other’s souls, autopsy where the corpses take turns carving. In my office at Radcliffe on Sunday nights, we meet—about four or five sober women trying to stay that way. Nobody operates from a formal religious construct, no church ladies or temple mavens. Joan rustles up a list of discussion topics she used in a similar group, and we start off talking about prayer. When Deb claims her regular prayer is for a joyous day filled with serenity, I say, You can ask for that? Nights I put Dev to bed, the St. Francis prayer becomes part of our ritual, in the form of call and response. I say, Where there is hatred, let me sow, and he shouts out, Love. I say, Where there is conflict, and he hollers, Pardon. Afterward, if I have trouble sleeping, I lie in a hot bath with a washcloth over my face, saying prayers I hardly believe but take blind comfort from. I’m still given to cussing any traditional notion of God. What god would deny you children? I say to Deb, for she’s enduring torturous in vitro hormones trying to conceive. Some afternoons at the house, I inflict the agonizing shots, the big needle stiff in her muscle, while in the next room, a house resident may have popped out a second or third addicted or HIV-positive baby. Deb’s calm baffles me. I’ve let go, she says. If you’ve surrendered, I say (I get maniacal in these arguments), wouldn’t you stop using the hormones and harvesting the ova? Deb says, It may not be right for me to conceive. But to pursue them and not get them will somehow turn out in my favor in some way I can’t foresee now. (Years later, Deb will divorce, and her ex will kill himself, and she’ll tell me, Now I see maybe why we could never get pregnant.) I tell the other women that Deb doesn’t even mark on her calendar when her period’s due. Her doctor does that. She needs to relinquish all control.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  I might put the difference most simply this way: I have never found a reference to a convict in any genealogy or history of an American family, nor in any other way does a single one of the forty thousand convicts sent to America appear as such. Beyond occasional registration in the initial port of entry (records that were kept erratically) and references in a few of the surviving record books of merchants and plantation owners, and beyond the ads for runaways in the newspapers, there are no records of these convicts. They seem to have faded into the general population, casting no shadows, leaving no tracks. As for their lives in America, far from suffering degradation, savage punishments, or lifelong stigmatization, they seem to have found, even in their bondage, release and a measure of freedom. For, as was remarked again and again, life in bondage in America was for them, if not more easeful, then less threatening, far healthier, and more hopeful than what they had known before. This was true also, we now know, for many convicts in Australia, but to a lesser degree, and the difference in degree is significant. For almost all of the convicts sent to the west, America proved from the beginning to be a bountiful, not a fatal, shore. The reasons for this are in part obvious. America was not a penal camp. It was a developing, increasingly genteel but labor-short society, and the punishment imposed on the convicts was, technically, not hard labor but exile for seven or more years. Convicts with a little money, by paying for their passage and other costs, could buy freedom from labor, though not from exile. Of course, since almost all of them were penniless, the great majority immediately became bond servants, and were sold along with the voluntary indentees.

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

  For example, if in front of a hypothetical Lincoln High School in America there stands a statue of that president with upraised ax ready to smash through the chains binding a slave’s feet, is that true or false? Do we not have to respond that it is not true as event but is quite accurate as process? There is nothing very surprising in all of this. The basic symbolic interaction postulated by Mary Douglas’s body/society parallelism means that social symbolism is always latent in bodily miracle and that bodily miracle always has social signification. It is very easy and indeed inevitable to move in both directions—from body to society or event to process, and from society to body or process to event. And it is very possible not to be certain at times which way one is moving. I understand, therefore, the story of Lazarus as process incarnated in event and not the reverse. I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life. But when I read John 11:21–27 I can see very clearly what the process was for that writer: Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world.” For John’s gospel, the process of general resurrection is incarnated in the event of Lazarus’s resuscitation. That is one such movement from process to event. But I can imagine peasants all over Lower Galilee who would have said with equal intensity that Jesus brought life out of death and would not have been thinking of the heavenly future but the earthly present. Life out of death is how they would have understood the Kingdom of God, in which they began to take back control over their own bodies, their own hopes, and their own destinies. How Not to Be a Patron I consider finally one special facet of Jesus’ activity, his itinerancy, and I do so against the background of Greco-Roman patronage and clientage. You will recall from the earlier discussion that, in speaking of Jesus’ open commensality, I mentioned honor and shame as a pivotal set of values in Mediterranean culture. Another pivotal set is patronage and clientage; and, if Jesus’ eating program directly negated distinctions of honor and shame, so did his healing program deny processes of patronage and clientage.

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

  The first variation is present in these seven cases: Joseph accused by Potipar’s wife in Genesis 39–41; Tobit accused by “one of the men of Nineveh” in Tobit 1:18–22; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego accused by “certain Chaldeans” in Daniel 3; Daniel himself accused by “the presidents and the satraps” in Daniel 6; “all Jews” accused by Haman in Esther 3; Susanna accused by the elders in Susanna; and Egyptian Jews accused by the king himself in 3 Maccabees 3 . In all those wisdom tales, those falsely accused are saved before death by divine assistance or miraculous intervention. The second variation is present in three cases. One is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52–53, seen already in Chapter 23. Another is the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees 7. Deliverance from death in that case is deliverance not before but after death. It is vindication not as earthly life restored but as eternal life promised. Because they died innocently in obedience to divine law, “the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life” in 7:9, or “the Creator of the world … will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again” in 7:23. A final case is in Wisdom 2–5, which uses Isaiah 52–53 to criticize that classical deliverance from death before death, replacing it with deliverance from death after death. “Wisdom 2:4–5 differs from the wisdom tale and agrees with Isaiah 52–53,” as Nickelsburg says. “In the wisdom tales the rescue of the hero prevents his death. In Wisdom of Solomon, he is rescued after his death” (1972:66). Here is the voice of the ungodly persecutors in that last case: Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected. (Wisdom 2:17–20) They propose, as it were, a test case on the validity of court tales of divine protection for those unjustly accused. But that is not how God works; those are not “the secret purposes of God.” This is God’s approach: But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.

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

  The fourth reason for concluding that Jesus’s resistance was nonviolent concerns Jesus and Pilate. This is another parable, again before Pilate, but this time in John 18:33–38. John imagines an interchange between Pilate and Jesus in which Pilate asks Jesus what he has done to be handed over to him (18:35). In Jesus’s response (18:36), notice how the key phrase is repeated twice to frame his claim: My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over…. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here. Focus on that accurate contrast between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome. Rome’s kingdom is obtained and maintained, preserved and protected by violence, but God’s kingdom will not allow violence even to free Jesus. In other words, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Pilate got it precisely right (as did Antipas with John earlier). With violent rebels, Roman officials executed the leader and as many followers as they could capture. With nonviolent rebels, Roman officials executed the leader and ignored the followers. On the level of this most secure historicity, Pilate certifies for all time that Jesus was both a revolutionary—hence a need for public, legal, official crucifixion—but also nonviolent—hence no need to round up his companions. For Jesus and for many other Jews both before and after him in that dangerous first century, nonviolent resistance rather than violent rebellion was the preferred strategy against Roman imperial control. I CONCLUDE THIS CHAPTER’S third section, on Jesus’s innovative, paradigm-shifting vision of God’s kingdom, with two codicils. The first is that, granted the shock of that interpretation, we should not be surprised that those who accepted it tried to mitigate its disruptive challenge. (That happens amid every paradigm shift. Augustus, for example, assured everyone—sincerely or insincerely?—that he was simply restoring the republic.) They said it would be over soon. The eschaton —the advent of God’s kingdom on earth—had morphed from an instant of divine intervention to a period of human-divine collaboration. But, they said, eschaton as that period would be a short one. From Paul through Mark to Revelation, the earliest Christians certainly agreed that it would all be over soon—within, say, their own lifetime. The “soon” of the kingdom’s start in the contemporary Jewish paradigm became the “soon” of the kingdom’s end in the paradigm shift of Jesus. It is possible—but not certain—that Jesus himself imagined an imminent consummation of the kingdom’s presence. But, if he did, then he—like all those others who certainly so imagined—were flatly wrong; they were off by two thousand years and still counting. The second codicil is that, in discussing how a normal or standard paradigm is finally displaced by a new or revolutionary one, Kuhn concludes that “the transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.” He quotes both Charles Darwin and Max Planck in his support.

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

  and the prophecies of Ezekiel turned from deserved doom to anguished hope. In Ezekiel 18:5–9 he summarizes what it means to be righteous before God: If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right— [1] he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, [2] does not defile his neighbor’s wife [3] or approach a woman during her menstrual period , [4] does not oppress anyone, [5] but restores to the debtor his pledge, [6] commits no robbery, [7] gives his bread to the hungry [8] and covers the naked with a garment, [9] does not take advance or accrued interest, [10] withholds his hand from iniquity, [11] executes true justice between contending parties, [12] follows my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances, acting faithfully—such a one is righteous; he shall surely live, says the Lord God. As indicated by its external frames, that is a description of one who is “righteous” before God. Within those external frames, there are three interconnected elements, and it is that interconnection that I intend to explore. The first element is found in the combination of the first and the twelfth criteria: avoidance of idolatry, and fidelity to God. Those internal frames form the basis for the entire code of righteousness. We are back with divine character, as it were. It is not the gods and goddesses of the Canaanite high places or mountain shrines who command what follows. It is Yahweh who establishes this righteousness. The second element is justice , and it is described in very specific detail in the second, and fourth through ninth criteria. Those criteria illustrate how the term justice has been used throughout my book: to describe how equity and fairness are established between human beings so that life’s dignity and integrity are maintained for all alike. The third element, found in the third criterion, is the focus of our present concern, and I have italicized it for emphasis. That criterion concerns, as we might say, purity or defilement rather than justice or sin, but it is embedded among those other items by Ezekiel without any separation or distinction. Why, on the one hand, is it so important to Ezekiel? What, on the other hand, do we mean by purity defilements, purity rules, or purity codes? Paula Fredriksen explains the meaning of Jewish “purity codes” in this summary statement. “Purity concerned not just the priests (though they did have additional rules peculiar to their station), but in principle the entire people of Israel. Some rules prohibit contact with or consumption of certain unclean animals, or eating the fat or blood of permitted ones: willful, deliberate transgression of these rules is sinful. Other purity rules focus primarily on the human body. Discharges from the genital area—menstruation, miscarriage or childbirth; seminal emissions—cause ‘impurity,’ as does contact (or even proximity to) a corpse. ‘Leprosy’ (which can afflict houses as well as persons) also conveys impurity.

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

  The story admits, in fact, that they did not have to sell their property and that, even after selling it, they did not have to hand it over to the community. But claiming an absolute gift was also claiming an absolute right, an absolute right to receive what one needed, an absolute right to share in the eucharistic share-meal of the community. All the Christ-hustlers were not in Galilee and Syria. In Jerusalem, then, as in Qumran: no deliberate lies about goods, no spurious claims to sustenance. What I see in both cases, with the Essene Jews and the Christian Jews, is a thrust toward establishing sharing community in reaction against commercializing community— an effort made, of course, to live in covenant with God. It is, in any case, the collection for the poor that convinces me to take Luke’s “all things in common” not as imaginary idealism or even patronal sharing but as communal sharing. THE COLLECTION FOR THE POOR The important question is not whether everyone in the Jerusalem community gave up everything but whether there was a serious attempt to live communally together. The question, in other words, is whether this was the urban and Jerusalem equivalent to that rural dialectic of eating and healing seen in Parts VII and VIII of this book. What convinces me to take that communalism seriously is something we learn about from Paul quite directly and from Luke quite obliquely. Some background is necessary to understand this argument, and in presenting it I critically integrate data from both the Lukan Acts and the Pauline epistles. Some Jews had long imagined an apocalyptic scenario in which pagans were saved and justified without becoming Jews, as I cited earlier from Paula Fredriksen: “Eschatological Gentiles … those who would gain admission to the Kingdom once it was established, would enter as Gentiles. They would worship and eat together with Israel, in Jerusalem, at the Temple. The God they worship, the God of Israel, will have redeemed them from the error of idolatry: he will have saved them—to phrase this in slightly different idiom—graciously, apart from the works of the Law” (1991:548). But how exactly would that work itself out down here on earth? If God and God’s Law were not to be trivialized, Gentiles would have to cease being Gentiles before any such common meal could occur. Even if they did not have to become Jews, they would certainly have to become ex-pagans—that is, ex-Gentiles. And what was, minimally or maximally, involved in being an ex-pagan? What would be required? If they were excused “from works of the Law,” who would define such “works”? For example, was not belief in the one true God, the first commandment, the very first work of the Law? It was certainly possible to debate intensely this or that interpretation of God’s Law, but how could it be possible to choose between this or that part of God’s Law?

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

  Deceivers and imposters, under the pretence of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, they persuaded the multitude to act like madmen, and led them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance . (2) Imposters and deceivers called upon the mob to follow them into the desert. For they said that they would show them unmistakable marvels and signs that would be wrought in harmony with God’s design . Felix moved immediately against the unarmed multitude, and a massacre swiftly followed. But the phrases that I have italicized are of special importance in understanding what the apocalyptic prophets were attempting to do. They were reenacting, as it were, the ancient model of Moses and Joshua leading the Israelites out of the desert and into the Promised Land around twelve hundred years before. Thus, for example, tokens or signs of deliverance is the same expression used for the plagues that Moses invoked upon Egypt before the Exodus in Antiquities 2.327. And God’s design or providence is the same phrase used for the miracle with his staff that Moses performed against his Egyptian competitors before the Exodus in Antiquities 2.286. So, despite himself, Josephus puts these prophets in Mosaic continuity. Their expectation was that such an unarmed ritual operation would persuade or compel God to reenact that inaugural deliverance, now against the Romans as long ago against the Canaanites. The specific illustration makes the typology of Moses and Joshua, of wilderness and Jordan, of crossing and victory, of human impotence and divine violence, even more clear. Once again I give the parallel texts from War 2.261–262 and Antiquities 20.169–170, as each contains significant elements missing from the other. (1) A still worse blow was dealt at the Jews by the Egyptian false prophet. A charlatan, who had gained for himself the reputation of a prophet, this man appeared in the country, collected a following of about thirty thousand dupes, and led them by a circuitous route from the desert to the mount called the Mount of Olives. From there he proposed to force an entrance into Jerusalem and, after overpowering the Roman garrison, to set himself up as tyrant of the people, employing those who poured in with him as his bodyguard. (2) At this time there came to Jerusalem from Egypt a man who declared that he was a prophet and advised the masses of the common people to go out with him to the mountain called the Mount of Olives, which lies opposite the city at a distance of five furlongs. For he asserted that he wished to demonstrate from there that at his command Jerusalem’s walls would fall down, through which he promised to provide them an entrance into the city. Once again, of course, Felix moved swiftly, and a massacre ensued, although the Egyptian himself escaped.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Plockhoy’s communal utopia was wiped out, but his ideas were not. Adopted by the Quaker political economist John Bellers later in the century, they were transmitted through him to Robert Owen, whose radical social programs they profoundly influenced. They were thereafter incorporated into Marx’s labor theory of value, cited at length by Eduard Bernstein in his revisionist writings on social democracy, endorsed by the reformer Joshua Rowntree, and studied by modern full-employment economists. In 1968 all of Plockhoy’s publications, Dutch and English, were translated into French as appendices to a treatise on Plockhoy’s cooperative utopianism and Christian ecumenism published by the École Pratique des Hautes Études.35 And if Kelpius’s Chapter of Perfection quickly disappeared, the spirit of German Pietism did not, and produced enduring communities of Mennonites, Amish, Dunkards, and Schwenkfelders. Even Matthias Baumann’s hallucinatory perfectionism had important consequences: it helped inspire the many “holiness revivals” of the nineteenth century and left traces in modern American evangelicalism.36 The search for perfection, generated in Europe’s vortex, when played out in the spatial amplitudes of the West, was the source not of monstrous tyrannies but of spiritual and moral striving. It did not become the “recipe for bloodshed” that Berlin so feared because everywhere it lacked the ultimate power to coerce. Utopianism, secular or religious, becomes a “road to inhumanity” when it is enforced by a monopoly of power—ultimate, unconstrained power in whatever form it might appear: the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism, each of which emerged through distinctive historical circumstances, to seek by violence what could not be achieved by persuasion. Did Berlin not know this? In some sense of course he did. “Two Concepts” was formally cast as a discourse on the permissible limits of coercion; “force” and “constraint” are repeatedly referred to, and Berlin denied that all historical conflicts are reducible to conflicts of ideas. But political concepts, he believed, when not subjected to rational criticism can “acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes.”37 From his embattled position in the defense of a liberal alternative to totalitarianism, the enemy was ideological perfectionism, the passionate pursuit of which he took to be the driving force behind the twentieth century’s tyrannies. No one knew better than Berlin or expressed more brilliantly the genealogy and structure of perfectionist ideas. But their threat to civilization, in the most general terms, lay not in their intrinsic malevolence but in the brutality of those who implacably imposed them: the populist thugs, the fanatical monopolists of power—beings alien to Berlin’s sensibilities, incomprehensible to his humanely inquiring mind. Appendix DATES AND PLACES OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS Essays 1, 3, 6–9 are reprinted courtesy of the sources cited; copyright of the others are held by the author. 1. “Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58, no. 1 (January 2001), 245–52.

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

  What Jesus was doing is located exactly on the borderline between the covert and the overt arts of resistance. It was not, of course, as open as the acts of protesters, prophets, bandits, or messiahs. But it was more open than playing dumb, imagining revenge, or simply recalling Mosaic or Davidic ideals. His eating and healing were, in theory and practice, the precise borderline between private and public, covert and overt, secret and open resistance. But it was no less surely resistance for all of that. A further question: Did Jesus have any type of organized social program for others to adopt and follow? We know already that he had a magnificent vision of the Kingdom of God here on earth and that by his own actions he already practiced what he preached. But were others only on the receiving end of that vision and program, or were they somehow empowered into it as active protagonists and not just passive recipients? Even as I ask that question I expect a positive answer, for one major reason. Mediterranean groupism would dictate some grouping around Jesus if his attack on familial and political communities was to make sense to his audience. What is the replacement for such communities? We saw, for example, that John the Baptist was organizing a discrete but united community of the baptized across the Jewish homeland, waiting for the advent of the apocalyptic God. What was Jesus doing on the group level, but with a very different message from a very different God? Into Whatever House You Enter There are three main texts to be considered, and it is crucial to the argument that the three are independent of one another, that two of them are sources as early as any we have, and that all three mention a close conjunction between eating and healing (italicized in the following texts). I give those three texts together because I will constantly be referring to different aspects of them throughout the rest of this chapter. (1) Gospel of Thomas 6:1 and Gospel of Thomas 14: His followers asked him and said to him, “[a] Do you want us to fast? [b] How should we pray? [c] Should we give to charity? [d] What diet should we observe?”… Jesus said to them, “[a] If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves; and [b] if you pray, you will be condemned; and [c] if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits, [d] When you go into any region and walk through the countryside, when people receive you, eat what they serve and heal the sick among them .