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)

  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 .

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

  My confidence in reconstructing the historical Jesus does not derive from accuracy of memory or even validity of interpretation among his first companions. It comes from them and Jesus living a common lifestyle that incarnated the kingdom of God on earth. Within the continuity of that lifestyle, such a saying could have been remembered because it would have been regularly used. But even if the saying was created after Jesus’ death—or even if all thirty-seven sayings of the Common Sayings Tradition were so created—they would still be adequate summaries of attitude because of that lifestyle continuity. If, however, nobody else had lived like the historical Jesus and continued to do so after his execution, then, indeed, the way back would be closed forever. The second point concerns sayings and community formation. Earlier, in Chapter 15, I quoted from both Koester and Kloppenborg on the divergent eschatologies of the sayings tradition and the Pauline tradition. Although, in the past, the Pauline tradition was often taken as uniquely normative in earliest Christianity, it is not now useful to react by elevating the Common Sayings Tradition into a new ascendancy. The present challenge is to hold on equally to them both, to see their connections as well as their separations, to explain both of them as present within the same earliest Christianity, and to reconstruct the historical Jesus using both those vectors. Koester proposed that, instead of historical Jesus research, “the primary focus would have to be the investigation of Christian beginnings itself” and that “such investigation would have to start with the earliest available evidence, that is, with the genuine letters of Paul and with the Synoptic Sayings Source [the Q Gospel ], or even its earliest layer of composition [Q1 ]. It must be admitted at once that these two oldest sources present the scholar with a conundrum…. There is no agreement among the oldest witnesses about the significance and value of Jesus’ words, deeds, and fate for the message that his followers proclaim” (1994b:540, 541). I note, in passing, that I myself do not find that divergence such an “conundrum” as Koester does. Both traditions are eschatological. Both are ultimate challenges from the Jewish God to human injustice, currently exemplified by its Roman embodiment but not exhausted, of course, by that or any other incarnation. One tradition finds that eschatology incarnated in Jesus’ life of nonviolent resistance to Roman exploitation, thereby making the kingdom of God available for anyone with the courage to emulate his program. The other finds that eschatology incarnated in Jesus’ death by official Roman execution, which is negated by a God who raised him from that death. There is no need to set Jesus’ life and Jesus’ death against one another or even over one another. It is a life so lived that led to a death so accepted. Be that as it may, however, Koester has pointed to a very important dichotomy as far back as we can get in the Jesus tradition.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  outlines the same linoleum tile over and over. David strokes his beard, saying, That is genuinely terrifying. Why’d he go out drinking? Gerry shakes his head, saying, Mood and happenstance don’t drive us to drink. Turning to Jack, he says, Explain it to the newcomers. He got drunk, Jack says, because he’s an alcoholic. We are given a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition. Without spiritual help, the lure of the drink is too much for most of us. Is he quoting something? I ask David. It’s their book, he says. The once über-logical David tells me with aficionado’s conviction that at the halfway house where he’s a current resident—and Jack a former one—there’s a hard-core book study every Sunday. I should go. Riding back to Lexington in the backseat, I sit between passed-out, openmouthed James—his breath on the side window spreading and receding like a tide—and curly-headed Jack. I think with rue of Joan the Bone’s injunction to ask the first person I saw about my marriage. I’m still angling to prove what crazy bullshit her much vaunted surrender-to-the-group concept is. Whatever Jack’s brief spells of clarity, he rarely goes to a meeting without jabbering out something nutty. So I start whispering my tale of marital woe to Jack, who sits in the hunched posture of somebody tensing against a blow. Occasionally, he’ll tug a red curl over the crease in his forehead. Eventually, I wind down and ask, what should I do? And I wait for the word salad of his scrambled cortex to spew forth. Instead, his eyes meet mine evenly, and he says—as it seems everybody says—You should pray about it. But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Moses. The night sky edges across our windows, and I’m carried inside this tank of a car. James wanting to get drunk makes sense to me, and I like how nobody rebuked him after. But there were also no-bullshit acts like not letting him speak—crazily he’d wanted to testify about his sobriety. But Gerry took his car keys, and made him sit through the meeting. It’s my life outside these oddballs that scares me. David? I say, leaning forward. Yes, ma’am. He turns down the radio. Any chance you cadged that frosting? Gross, Gerry says. You’re not gonna eat that. David unzips his backpack, flips off the frosting lid, and hands it back, saying, I feel like I should wipe the edge on my T-shirt. You know, sanitize it. Taking the can, I dig in and run my finger around the edge, then stick it in my mouth just as Gerry’s hand reaches back, hovering for the handoff.

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

  As he reached back through Western history to trace the origins and different formulations of the idea of perfection that had culminated in the crushing tyrannies of the twentieth century, Berlin thought, as always, in terms of formal discourses—texts worthy of logical analysis. For he was, in this as in all his major historical writing, a historian of ideas as only a philosopher, however nonpracticing, could be. It was the structure of ideas, their genealogies, and their implications and ramifications that chiefly interested him. It was the master thinkers among the perfectionists who mattered, their cogent, fully developed texts that deserved analysis, not the often muddled and always eclectic derivatives that were part of everyday culture. Yet it is perfectionism at that lower level—unoriginal, derivative, sometimes confused, often passionate, muddling together diverse notions and attitudes to compose guides for action—that I wish to discuss, and to suggest that at that more colloquial level there lies an earlier history of perfectionism that reveals not sources of human devastation in the search for perfection, but hope and heightened aspirations—a premodern era in which, as Quentin Skinner has written, positive liberty was “a dream, not a nightmare.”7 And further, I wish to suggest that the profound strain of perfectionism that runs through the culture of early modern Europe has a peculiar relationship to what we now think of as Atlantic history. For it was in the seemingly unconstrained amplitudes of the Western Hemisphere and not in Europe’s tightly meshed social environment, where establishments forced the expression of such yearnings into narrow interstices, that the search for perfection could find practical fulfillment in shaping the lives of ordinary people. It was there that perfectionist aspirations could fully dilate, and expanded visions could be projected into what Keith Thomas has called “action-oriented” utopias.8 Perfectionist thinking is a subject of some complexity if only because it has taken so many forms. It includes humanistic literary utopianism, prophetic millenarianism, and mystical hermeticism. They are complex in themselves, and they are not wholly distinct. Nothing important in the culture of early modern Christian Europe and America was solely secular. More’s Utopia was fresh in most literate minds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but so too were the prophecies of Daniel and the dark complexities of the Book of Revelation. Keith Thomas lists eight forms of utopianism in seventeenth-century England but finds that they cannot be distinguished from the millenarian impulse, “which relied on divine intervention and envisaged a miraculous transformation of both man and nature.…[I]t was precisely when the millenarian current was running most strongly,” he writes, “that the utopian faith in human effort was most buoyant.” Seventeenth-century millenarianism and seventeenth-century utopianism, he concludes, “were twins.”9

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Once you allow even that sliver of possibility, that crack of light, it’s not long before the stone rolls away from the tomb. Right before Easter, as our church gears up to baptize and con firm newcomers, I’m still—metaphorically speaking—staring down from the airplane door, wondering whether my parachute will open if I step out. At one point Toby asks me, Why haven’t you taken communion at any of the churches you’ve visited when you travel? Those priests don’t know if you’re Catholic or not. The idea shocks me, and I say so. Why not? He has a mischievous grin on his face. That would defile the Sacrament, insult the belief of all those people in church who’re committed to the faith. So, he says, that is sacred to you? It was, is. In the end, no white light shines out from the wounds of Christ to bathe me in His glory. Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband—or deciding whether to have a baby—there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is—at the final hour—horse dookey. You can only try it out. Not choosing baptism would make me feel half-assed somehow, like a dilettante—scared to commit to praising a force I do feel is divine—a reluctance grown from pride or because the mysteries are too unfathomable. In the back of a dark church on Holy Saturday, I sit between Dev and Toby. In the pews, everybody holds an unlit candle, and the priest comes in with the altar’s mega-candle. Stopping at the back row, he touches its taper to the charred filament on either side of the aisle. The flame’s passed one to another until we’re all holding fire in our hands. Not long after, Walt calls after a longish silence. He’d been nursing Shirley through her long battle with cancer. And other than seeing them at their son’s wedding, I’d been in scant touch till her death. On the phone, I tell him how—in conference with an obstreperous student—I was about to snap at the kid when it dawned on me that he was Huck Finn. See, I say on the phone, how I’m still channeling you? How is finding Huck Finn in your office channeling me? Don’t you remember telling me that unless you knew what was in my head, you couldn’t get Ernst Cassirer in there? Knowing the kid was Huck Finn let him be who he was with me. I remember reading Cassirer with you. And that little rat you took care of after she’d had her babies? There were so many of them, he says. I tell him how my students keep shape-shifting into characters from novels. A shy, disheveled farm kid was the young stable boy Wart about to pull a sword from a stone and become a king.

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

  The hopes which were raised by his enthronement, and which refused to die with him, contributed to the faith which led to the great rebellion of 66–73 C.E. , and to catastrophe” (175). That is certainly correct as the long-term retrospective view. But imagine how things looked to Jerusalem’s Christian Jewish community in the first years of the 40s. How did that present look to those who did not know its future? They would have known about Agrippa from events at Jerusalem, which, in Schwartz’s rereading of Josephus, should be kept to separate dates in 38 and 41 (11–14). In 38, Agrippa returned from Rome to the Jewish homeland. Josephus records and rather clearly distinguishes three separate actions. The first action had to do with his piety: On entering Jerusalem, he offered sacrifices of thanksgiving, omitting none of the ritual enjoined by our law. Accordingly he also arranged for a very considerable number of Nazirites to be shorn [paying, that is, for the ritual at the completion of their vows of ascetic self-negation]. Moreover, he hung up, within the sacred precincts, over the treasure-chamber, the golden chain which had been presented to him by Gaius, equal in weight to the one of iron with which his royal hands had been bound [by Tiberius], as a reminder of his bitter fortune and as a witness to his reversal for the better, in order that it might serve as a proof both that greatness may sometime crash and that God uplifts fallen fortunes. (Jewish Antiquities 19.293–294) The second action had to do with his authority , and I return to this point below. The third had to do with his popularity: The king recompensed the inhabitants of Jerusalem for their goodwill to him by remitting to them the tax on every house, holding it right to repay the affection of his subjects with a corresponding fatherly love. (Jewish Antiquities 19.299) Be that fatherly love or practical politics, Agrippa was preparing for a far grander role than royal heir to Philip’s tetrarchy, which was all he had obtained at that time. I return now to that question of authority . Josephus records Agrippa’s second action as the removal of the high priest Theophilus and his replacement by Simon Cantheras. That, however, was a change not just of individuals but of families. Herod the Great had chosen high priests from the family of Boethus, who was both a father-in-law to Herod and a high priest from 23 to 5 B.C.E. Once the Romans took over direct control of the Jewish homeland’s southern half in 6 C.E. , the governors chose high priests almost exclusively from the family of Ananus (or Annas), as we saw earlier. There was Ananus himself in 6–15, Eleazar in 16–17, Caiaphas in 18–36, Jonathan in 36–37, and Theophilus in 37–38. But in 38, Agrippa-removed the family of Ananus and replaced it with that of Boethus.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It’s unhip to fall to your knees, sentimental, stupid, even. But somehow I’ve started to do it unself-consciously. Behind a door, my body bends, and the linoleum rises. I lay my face on my knees in a posture almost fetal. It is, skeptics may say, the move of a slave or brainless herd animal. But around me I feel gathering—let’s concede I imagine it—spirit. Such vast quiet holds me, and the me I’ve been so lifelong worried about shoring up just dissolves like ash in water. Just isn’t. In its place is this clean air. There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open—an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there. How long passes? Somebody knocks on the door for group . I creak to my feet, feeling lucky—which I maybe haven’t felt since the early glory days with Warren—lucky for my nutburger family, and for the near-strangers who’ve carried me the past nine months. Joan, before leaving town, and Deb and Liz and Janice come every day. Most of my putative friends—writers and academics and drinking buddies—not at all. Even Joe, who’s landed back in the joint on an old car-theft charge, sends me daily missives using stamps he can ill afford. Somebody has given me a copy of a prayer attributed to St. Francis, and beginning that day, I set my dull mind to memorizing it. The prayer—which Jack of the Tinfoil Helmet first said that night going home from the meeting—now rivers through, sometimes dozens of times a day: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love…The first time I said it, I bridled against the phrase “O Divine Master” and the last two lines about eternal life, which I thought were horseshit. O Divine Master, ask that I not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying to self that we are reborn to eternal life. As I slow down inside, the world’s metronome seems to speed up, for without keen, self-centered focus on your own inward suffering, clock hands spin. Days get windstormed off the calendar. Rather than thinking about spiritual practices, arguing them out in my head, I almost automatically try them. That, I suppose, is surrender. My final few days at the hospital whipped past, so I recount them here in rough outline. I prayed to get to go to my Radcliffe meeting, and—without being asked—Mary offered to escort me on her day off.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  8 Temporary Help Come January, as part of clawing my way into the white-collar classes I mock, I sit behind the receptionist’s desk of a telecommunications firm that helped build and maintain the internet. In this age, faxes are big news. Operators still plug callers in and out of switchboards. Crawling with horn-rimmed MIT geniuses, this place is, and they’re marketing (unsuccessfully if you can believe it) the very first e-mail program. They’re almost growing too fast not to hire me, so soon I move up from receptionist ($12K) to a secretarial job I suck at ($13K). Since I need the overtime, I take up nighttime data entry for accounting. It’s staring into one of those green screens, doing corporate budgets, that I notice how high salaries rise in marketing. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands on trade shows each year, and my product-manager girlfriend informs me that nobody pays attention to the budgets. So in the company library, I read a bunch of trade magazines and essentially retype what they said needs to happen into a proposal for managing that budget. Poof, I’m a marketeer. Riding the six-thirty bus to the company in my cheap suit with my briefcase on my lap, I can pass for a normal citizen—except for scribbling poetry in a black notebook. I never thought of myself as competent in commerce, particularly, and striding through the doors lends me a new bearing. I join a corporate women’s track team, lured by the sweet prospect of fitting in as we lope around the pond at lunch hour. Me, belonging somewhere. Sliding the company credit card across a hotel desk, I radiate bourgeois integrity. For a girl bred to yank peanuts out of the ground, any desk job gives off an urban sheen. And this is the go-go eighties in a company where they slap up new cubicles every week. Meanwhile, Warren’s volunteer library job has morphed into a full-time assistant curator’s position, so we’ve moved to a tree-lined suburb where the noise quotient disturbs his work and sleep less. Financially, I’m not exactly out of the woods, but with the first health insurance I’ve ever had, I track down a therapist. Night terrors still wake me screaming twice a week, and if I have a few drinks, an image of Daddy warping into fossil form can set me on a crying jag. Every month we scrape together enough to eat out at a cheap fish house—mussels in garlic and white wine. Once, at the next table, a similarly steaming bowl is lowered in front of a Polish Nobel laureate in poetry whose public lectures we’ve been religiously going to, all goggle-eyed. We marvel at his high forehead, like that bust of Beethoven you always see. Don’t stare, Warren says. But I can’t stop looking at this laureate’s gray and diabolical eyebrows, projecting above his light eyes like a ram’s horns. He practically speeds up my heart. Do tree surgeons gape at great examples of tree surgery?