The birth of Christianity: discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus 0060616598

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Tlie Birth of CH R ISTIAN ITY DISCOVERING WHAT HAPPENED IN THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EXECUTION OF JESUS

John Dominic Crossan

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THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY: Discovering What H appened in the Years Im m ediately A fter the Execution o f Jesus. Copyright © 1998 by John Dom inic Crossan. A J 1 rights reserved. Printed in the United States o f America. N o part o f this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case o f brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, N ew York, N Y 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, N ew York, N Y 10022. Bible quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the N ew Revised Standard Version o f the Bible, copyrighted © 1989 by the Division o f Christian Education o f che National Council o f Churches o f Christ in the U .S.A . Used by permission. HarperCollins Web site: http://www.harpercollins.com H arperCollins®,

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FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1999 Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crossan, Dominic. T h e birth o f Christianity : discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution o f Jesus / John D om inic Crossan. — 1st ed. p.

cm.

includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISB N : 9 7 8 -0 -0 6 -0 6 16 6 0 -1 I. Tide. B R 129.C 75 27O.I— DC2I

1998 97-32526

10 11 12 R R D (H ) 20 19 18 17 16

In memory o f my younger brother,

Daniel Joseph Crossan, Jr.

C O N T E N T S

Preface: Prologue: P art I

T h e Lost Years T h e Content o f Y our Vision

xiii

C ontinuation and Reconstruction

Chapter 1

Voices o f the First Outsiders

Chapter 2

Reconstructing Earliest Christianity

Part II

ix

3

. 19

M em ory and O rality

Chapter3

T h e M ystique o f Oral Tradition

49

Chapter 4

D oes M em ory Remem ber?

59

Chaptery

A T ale o f T w o Professors

69

Chapter 6

Chasm or Interface?

&5

P art III

G ospels and Sources

Chapter 7

Adm itting Gospel Presuppositions

Chapter 8

Relating Gospel Contents

m

Chapter 9

C om paring Gospel Manuscripts

121

P art IV

M eth odology and A n thropology

Chapter 10

T h e Problem o f M ethodology

Chapter 11

Cross-Cultural A nthropology

Part V

95

m m

H istory and A rch eology

Chapter 12

Judeo-Rom an History

177

Chapter 13

Galilean Archeology

209

v iii

Part VI

+

CO N TEN TS

Kingdom and Eschatology

Chapter 14

A Com parison o fT w o Early Gospels

239

Chapter 17

Apocalyptic and Ascetical Eschatology

-257

Chapter 16

Ethical Eschatology

273

Part VII

Healers and Itinerants

Prologue:

The Meaning o f Healing

293

Chapter 17

Negating Apocalyptic Eschatology

305

Chapter 18

Affirming Ethical Eschatology

317

Epilogue:

The Social Status o f Jesus

345

Part VIII

Teachers and Householders

Chapter 19

Criticizing the Householders

355

Chapter 20

Controlling the Itinerants

363

Chapter 21

Interpreting the Commands

383

Chapter 22

A Divided Tradition

407

Part IX

M eal and Com m unity

Chapter 23

The Com m on Meal Tradition

423

Chapter 24

Communities o f Resistance

445

Part X

Story and Tradition

Chapter 27

The Other Passion-Resurrection Story

481

Chapter 26

Exegesis, Lament, and Biography

527

The Character o f Your God

575

Epilogue: Appendixes

587

Bibliography

607

Subject Index

633

Author Index

643

Text Index

647

PREFACE

The Lost Years

If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. Luke 16:31 This book is about the lost years o f earliest Christianity, about the 30s and 40s o f the first century, about those dark decades immediately after the execution o f Jesus. Those years are cloaked in a silence similar to that shrouding Jesus’ own early life. Where did Jesus go, it is sometimes asked, in those decades before he emerged to public life as a fol­ lower o f John the Baptist? He went, it is sometimes answered, to India and learned wis­ dom. I no more believe that story than that he went to Ireland and learned Gaelic. Be that as it may, there is, for earliest Jesus and earliest Christianity, a parallel period of empty years and darkened decades. But it is more surprising to have such lost years for a social movement than for an individual person. It is not at all unusual that the ancient record o f a personal life should begin at full maturity. The emperor Augustus, who died on August 19 o f 14 c . e ., left his autobiography to be inscribed on bronze tablets in front o f his mausoleum in Rome. That story began with the words "at the age o f nineteen.” Neither does Luke 2:46-47 pierce the lost years o f Jesus with any historical information. At the age o f twelve, Jesus was found by his parents "in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” Josephus records a similar precocious sit­ uation for himself in his Life 9: "While still a mere boy, about fourteen years old, I won universal applause for my love o f letters; inasmuch that the chief priests and the leading men o f the city used constantly to come to me for precise information on some particu­ lar in our ordinances.” But how does it happen that the early years o f Christianity are so shrouded in silence? The obscurity o f the 30s and 40s can be emphasized by the comparative bril­ liancy o f the 50s. For that later decade we have the letters o f the apostle Paul. From them we know about Christian communities in four Roman provinces, Galatia and Asia in central and western Turkey, and Macedonia and Achaia in northern and southern Greece. From them we learn about urban churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Eph­ esus. From them, with sociological analysis wedded to theological exegesis, we can almost fill a small library on the personalities and problems o f the Corinthian congrega­ tion alone. From them we catch glimpses o f past events in the 30s and 40s at Damascus,

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PREFACE

Antioch, and Jerusalem. From them we catch glimpses o f future plans for the 60s in Italy and Spain. From them, above all else, we receive the temptation to gloss speedily over the 30s or 40s and move swiftly to those better-documented 50s. This book intends to resist that temptation and to ask instead these questions: What forms o f Christianity were present in the 30s for Paul the persecutor, before he became Paul the apostle, to persecute? What forms o f Christianity were present before Paul, without Paul, and even if Paul had never existed? There is an obvious objection. Do we not have precious information in what we call the Acts of the Apostles about those lost years o f the 30s and 40s? We do indeed, but with several difficulties. First, it is hard, without independent vectors, to separate history from theology and tradition from redaction in that writing. Second, Luke gives us a very gen­ eral picture. It is like a summary of 1944-1945 asserting that the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy and pushed eastward to Berlin. That is absolutely true, but—apart from omitting details such as Bastogne—it says nothing about the Russians pushing westward toward the same destination. It describes the past in a way that renders the future incomprehensible. Luke's Acts of the Apostles moves Christianity on the west­ ward Jerusalem-to-Rome axis with nothing said about northward Syriac or southward Coptic Christianity. Third, you would know from that text about Christianity in Jerusalem, but you would know nothing about Christianity in Galilee. In fact, when you put together Luke and Paul on the 30s and 40s, you would conclude that Christianity operated exclusively from Jerusalem. This book intends to give equal attention to Chris­ tianity in both Galilee and Jerusalem. It also refuses to replace the old ascendancy o f Jerusalem with a new one of Galilee. Both, then, not either. There are no documents from those 30s and 40s dated as Paul's letters are to the 50s. How, then, is reconstruction possible or anything new worth saying about those decades? It is a question of new method and new material. My new method is an interdisciplinary combination of anthropological, historical, archeological, and literary disciplines. It estab­ lishes the sharpest possible context before any Christian text is studied within that matrix. My new material is obtained from the earlier strata or larger sources o f Christian texts we already have available to us. It is especially significant where two independent early Chris­ tian texts share common traditions that must, therefore, be earlier than either o f them. But no matter what sources or texts I am using, they are always used to illumine the Christianity o f the 30s and 40s in the Jewish homeland. That is what this book is about. My title is The Birth of Christianity, and that requires two explanations. First, about the word birth. Conceptions are usually more private and hidden than births. Christian­ ity's conception was the kingdom-of-God movement as Jesus and his first companions lived in radical but nonviolent resistance to Herod Antipas's urban development and Rome's rural commercialism in Lower Galilee of the late 20s. Christianity's birth was in that movement's continuation as those same companions wrestled not only to imitate Jesus' life but also to understand Jesus' death. This book is about that birth. It presumes conception but does not go on to growth or maturity. Birth, in other words, is the 30s and the 40s. Now about the word Christianity. If you can hear that term only as a religion separate from or even inimical to Judaism, you are not hearing it as intended in this

BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY

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XI

book. I use Christianity to mean Christian Judaism, just as I use Essenism, Pharisaism, or Sadduceeism to mean Essene Judaism, Pharisaic Judaism, or Sadduceean Judaism. They are all divergent, competing, and mutually hostile options within the Jewish homeland as it struggled to withstand Greek cultural internationalism and Roman military imperial­ ism. What was Christian Judaism before Paul and without Paul? I conclude with Luke 24:13-33, which summarizes in a single paragraph what it will take me a whole book to develop. Two Christians travel from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. One is named and male; his companion, unnamed, is presumably female, given the protocols o f Mediterranean patriarchy. The risen Jesus joins them on their journey. But the road to Emmaus is not the road to Damascus. This is an apparition without blinding light or heavenly voice. This is a vision without slow demonstration or immediate recognition. Even when Jesus explains the scriptures about the suffering and glorification o f the Messiah, the travelers do not know who he is. But then they invite the stranger to stay and eat with them. He does not invite them. They invite him. As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, "Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over." So he went in to stay with them. (Luke 24:28-29) You will notice how that invitation is emphasized. The pair have presumably arrived at their village home and, but for the invitation, the stranger would have passed on and remained unrecognized. The pair are, in terms to be used later in this book, itin­ erants who become householders, but it is invitation that leads to meal that leads to recognition. "Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight," as 24:31 puts it. Resurrected life and risen vision appear as offered shel­ ter and shared meal. Resurrection is not enough. You still need scripture and eucharist, tradition and table, community and justice; otherwise, divine presence remains unrecog­ nized and human eyes remain unopened. That is exactly what this book is about.

PROLOGUE

The Content o f Your Vision

"Gnosis” or "Gnosticism ” is [a] . . . form o f religion in late antiquity___ A clear-cut definition o f this "religion ofknow ledge” or o f "insight” , as the Greek w ord gnosis m ay be translated, is not easy, but should at least be briefly sug­ gested at the very outset. W e shall not go far w rong to see in it a dualistic reli­ gion, consisting o f several schools and movements, which took up a definitely negative attitude towards the world and the society o f the time, and pro­ claimed a deliverance ("redemption” ) o f man precisely from the constraints o f earthly existence through "insight” into his essential relationship, whether as “soul” or "spirit” ,— a relationship temporarily obscured— with a supramundane realm o f freedom and o f rest. [It] spread through time and space, from the beginning o f our era onwards, from the western part o f the N ear East (Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Asia M in o r).. . . One can almost say that Gnosis fol­ lowed the Church like a shadow; the Church could never overcom e it, its influence had gone too deep. By reason o f their com m on history they remain two— hostile— sisters. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, pp. 1-2, 368 It all began with the vision o f a dead man, a dead man still bearing the wounds o f an execution as horrible as hate could devise and contempt accomplish. And it happened outside the city walls, where dogs and crows waited for an unburied body. There w as also a story. It told o f a community, conceived in heaven but bom on earth. It told o f a kingdom standing in opposition to the other kingdoms o f the world. It told o f an individual, Peacemaker and Lord, Savior and Son o f God, who proclaimed that kingdom’s advent as gospel, good news for all the earth. I f you had heard that vision and that story in the early first century, would you have believed it? If yo u heard that vision and that story in the late twentieth century, w ould yo u believe it? And what, in first or twentieth century, would such b elief entail?

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PROLOGUE

The Vision o f a Dead Man T h e souls o f the dead could certainly interact with the living and w ith each other, in w ays exactly analogous to normal life. Instances abound in which the dead w ere touched and touched others-----The souls o f the dead, though described as impalpable, seem not to notice this m inor modification; they live and act exactly as do the living, even alongside the living-----A ny Semitic or Greco-Rom an soul could appear to the living, still bearing the rec­ ognizable form o f the body. Any soul could pass through closed doors, give preternatural advice, and vanish. Did Jesus appear to and instruct his disci­ ples after his crucifixion? So Patroklos appeared to Achilles, Sam uel to Saul, the elder Scipio to his grandson, as did num erous others to their survivors. Did the resurrected Jesus eat broiled fish, and a meal with his disciples? A ny soul could, and often did, eat with friends and relatives in the repasts o f the cult o f the dead, a practice perhaps especially com m on am ong Christians. Gregory J. Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered, pp. 58, 67 The story that began with a vision o f a dead man was heard as choral hym n, read as national epic, and seen as marble frieze within the Rom an Em pire. But the inaugural vision that began the story took place over a thousand years ear­ lier, on the night the Greeks burned T ro y to the ground. In book 22 o f H om er s Iliad, Achilles slew the Trojan hero Hector, and other Greek warriors stabbed his naked corpse. Achilles had taunted the dying Hector that "the dogs and birds will maul you, shame your corpse___ [T]he dogs and birds will rend you— blood and bone." A fter he died, Achilles brought Hector's body back to the G reek encampment as described in Robert Fagles's translation (554-555): Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet, he knotted straps o f rawhide through them both, lashed them to his chariot, left the head to drag and m ounting the car, hoisting the fam ous arms aboard, he whipped his team to a run and breakneck on they flew, holding nothing back. And a thick cloud o f dust rose up from the m an they dragged, his dark hair swirling round that head so handsome once, all tumbled low in the dust— since Z e u s had given him over to his enemies now to be defiled in the land o f his ow n fathers. O nly the abject pleas and supplicant hum ility o f H e cto rs father, Priam, king o f T ro y , m oved Achilles to surrender the body for honorable burial by its ow n

THE CONTENT OF YOUR VISION

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people. And that is h ow the Iliad ends: with the lam ent o f Androm ache, Hecuba, and Helen, the three w om en closest to Hector; w ith funeral pyre, golden ossuary, and deep, h ollow grave; and with, in the poem 's last lines, "a splendid feast in H ector's honor.” But where H om er's Iliad ends, V irgil’s Aeneid begins. Ju liu s Caesar w as assassinated in M arch o f 44 because aristocratic republi­ cans thought he planned autocracy. Octavius, his nineteen-year-old adopted son and legal heir, deified Caesar in January o f 42, defeated A ntony and Cleopatra in Septem ber o f 31, and w as declared Augustus in January o f 27 b .c .e . Octavius was also Peacem aker, Benefactor, Savior, and Son o f God. He w as even Lord o f time itself, so that his birthday on Septem ber 23 w ould becom e N e w Y ear's D ay in the Rom an province o f Asia M inor, because, in the w ords o f that calendrical decree (Danker 217), "the birthday o f our god signalled the beginning o f good news (euaggelion) for the w orld because o f him .” That, how ever, w as thirty years after the crucial exchange in 27, w h en Octavius gave the senate back m ost o f the provinces and they gave Augustus back m ost o f the legions. H e w as n o w what Caesar m ight have been, suprem e autocrat, even if called b y w h atever nam e one chose to disguise that obvious fact. But neither deity nor po w er had been enough to protect Caesar from assassination. W hat Augustus needed (to solidify the legions and pow er he n ow had) w as artists and propaganda. Virgil's Aeneid is superb poetry. It is also superb propaganda. It tells the story o f the Rom an people, especially the story o f the Julian clan up to and including Caesar, Augustus, and their families. It all begins long before that, though, with the Trojan male Anchises and the G reek goddess Aphrodite. Aeneas is the human-divine or mortal-immortal child o f that union, and it is to him that H ector appears with the Greeks already inside the walls o f the doom ed city. This is that vision, from book 2 o f the Aeneid, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation (43): In sleep, in dream, H ector appeared to me, Gaunt w ith sorrow , stream ing tears, all tom — As by the violent car on his death day— A nd black w ith bloody dust, His puffed-out feet cut b y the rawhide thongs. Ah god, the look o f him! H o w changed From that proud H ector w ho returned to T ro y W earing Achilles' arm or, or that one W h o pitched the torches on Danaan ships; His beard all filth, his hair matted w ith blood, Show ing the w ounds, the m any wounds, received Outside his father's city walls.

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PROLOGUE

Aeneas, "child o f the goddess," flees T roy, taking w ith him his father Anchises and his son Julus. T h ey eventually arrive in Italy, and the rest is, i f not exactly history, at least magnificent poetry. Virgil's great poem , unfinished at his death in 19

b .c .e .

after ten years o f work, celebrated "the Trojan C a e s a r.. . .

Ju liu s [Caesar] his name, from Julus handed dow n" (13), linked heaven and earth, connected T ro y and Rom e, and gave the Roman people and the Augustan principate a divine origin and a mythic destiny. Those preceding paragraphs make a very simple point. T h e general M editer­ ranean culture w ould find nothing impossible about that vision o f H ector to Aeneas. Nothing in that story w ould have raised a first-century eyebrow . T h e dead existed in the realm o f Hades or Sheol and could reappear thence to the liv­ ing. Thus, although Hector’s body had flamed to ashes on a Trojan funeral pyre, his "body" was still visible and recognizable to Aeneas. T h at the dead could return and interact with the living was a com monplace o f the Greco-Rom an world, and neither pagans nor Je w s w ould have asserted that it could not hap­ pen. That such interaction could generate important processes and events, as with Hector saving Aeneas to found the Rom an people and the Julian ascen­ dancy, was also a commonplace. Y ou did not expect the dead to return from Hades simply to say hello. You could easily say that such a return did not happen this time or that time. You could not say that it never happened anyw here or could never happen at all. That is a first pointer toward the core problem o f this book. N ow on to a second pointer.

Visions Then, Visions N ow Others, too, are visited. [Dale M urphy’s] m other looks out the bedroom w indow one day and sees Murph ambling dow n their street in huge deck boots. Som eone else spots him in traffic in dow ntow n Bradenton. From time to time Debra dreams that she sees him and runs up and says, "D ale, w h ere’ve you been?" And he w on 't answer, and she’ll wake up in a cold sw eat, remem bering. Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, p. 214 N ot only were visions and apparitions an accepted and even commonplace pos­ sibility in the early first century, they are also an accepted and even commonplace possibility in the late twentieth century. In a paper presented to the 1995 spring m eet­ ing o f the Jesus Seminar, Stacy Davids summarized recent psychiatric literature on grief and bereavement. "Review o f well-conducted studies o f the past three decades shows that about one-half to eighty percent o f bereaved people studied feel this intuitive, sometimes overwhelming presence’ or ‘spirit’ o f the lost p erson .. . .

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These perceptions happen most often in the first few months following the death but sometimes persist m ore than a year, with significantly m ore w om en than men reporting these events-----T h e American Psychiatric Association, author o f The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders-P/, considers these phenomena (when ‘one hears the voice of, or transiently sees the image of, the deceased per­ son’) as non-pathological. Th ey are viewed as com mon characteristics o f uncompli­ cated grief, and not attributable to a mental disorder.. . . Part o f the w o rk o f grief entails repeated, monotonous recalling o f the events leading up to the death, as the m ourner undergoes a restless need to ‘make sense’ o f what happened, to make it explicable, and to classify it along with other similar events___ During this process, accurate recording and telling o f the dead person’s life is o f utmost importance to the bereaved" (3-6). As I w rite this Prologue, Sebastian Ju n ger’s pow erful elegy for those w h o go dow n at sea is deservedly high on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfic­ tion. It centers on the Andrea Gail, a seventy-two-foot steel swordfisher out o f G loucester that disappeared w ith all hands o ff Sable Island east o f N ova Scotia, O ctober 28 ,19 9 1, in w aves one hundred feet high. " I f the m en on the Andrea Gail had sim ply died, and their bodies w ere lying in state som ew here, their loved ones could m ake their goodbyes and get on w ith their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared o ff the face o f the earth and, strictly speaking, it’s ju st a matter o f faith that these m en will never return" (213). That com m ent and the epigraph above tell us w hat can happen today in contem porary Am erica after any death— but especially after a sudden, tragic, or m ysterious one— as intimates m ourn their beloved dead. There are dreams and there are visions. Dale M urphy, w ho disappeared on the Andrea Gail, left a three-year-old son, an ex-wife, and a m other behind him. His son "w akes up scream ing in the middle o f the night" because "D ad dy’s in the r o o m .. . . D addy w as ju st h e r e .. . . D addy w as here and told m e w hat happened on the boat" (214). H opes and fears, dreams and nightmares, visions and apparitions are not the sam e as delusions and hallucinations. I f you w ake up scream ing because a giant figure is ready to attack you, that is a nightmarish dream. Y our spouse reassures you , saying it is ju st a bad dream, urging yo u to go back to sleep. And you do. But i f yo u call 9-1-1 that night to report an intruder and sum m on

adt

the next

day to put in a security system , you are m oving from dream into delusion. It is part o f reality to know which is which. I f you com e dow n from the mountaintop and report a revelation from the Archangel Michael, you have seen an appari­ tion. I f yo u keep insisting that Bigfoot-with-W ings is up there and that everyone should go to see it, you are beyond vision and into hallucination. It is part o f reality to know which is which. T h e present discussion is not about delusions

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and hallucinations, about losing touch with reality, and neither is it about tricks and lies, about losing touch with honesty. Trance and ecstasy, vision and appari­ tion are perfectly normal and natural phenomena. Altered states o f conscious­ ness, such as dreams and visions, are something com m on to our hum anity, som ething hard-wired into our brains, something as normal as language itself. T h ey w ere recognized as com mon possibilities in the early first century, and they are still recognized as such in the late twentieth century. And only w hen their hum an normalcy is accepted can a proper response be offered. That response should not be, W e deny the fact o f your vision. It should be, Tell us the content o f your vision. And then w e will have to judge, not w hether yo u had it or not, but whether w e should follow it or not. By now the problem at the heart o f this book should be clear. Asked about the birth o f Christianity, most people might say som ething like this: Jesu s’ fol­ lowers thought that he was the Messiah, but then he was executed and buried. Later his tomb was found em pty and he appeared to his form er com panions as risen from the dead. Christianity w as b o m on Easter Sunday, the seventeenth day o f the month Nisan in the year 30 c.E. It is the resurrection o f a dead man that explains the pow er o f Christianity’s birth and grow th, spread and triumph, across the Rom an Empire. Here, how ever, is the problem. W hy, against that early-first-century context, does vision, apparition, or resurrection explain any­ thing, since such events w ere not considered absolutely extraordinary let alone com pletely unique? And w hy, in this late-twentieth-century context, do they explain anything if things are still the same? There was an easier time w hen antiChristian secularists could claim that visions and apparitions o f the dead w ere sim ply lies at worst and delusions at best. There was an easier time w hen proChristian fundamentalists could respond that there w as only this one unique case in all o f human history where a human being had risen from the dead. Both sides admitted the abnormality o f such events: one side said these events could n ever happen; the other side said they had happened only once. T h ey w ere twin sides o f the same rationalist coin. T h at first century lacked not only a clear separation o f church and state, it also lacked a clear separation o f heaven and earth. Turn for a second from the end to the beginning o f Jesu s’ life. Christianity said, according to Luke 1:26-38, that Je su s w as b o m o f M ary and the H oly Spirit, o f a hum an m other and a divine Father. Paganism could not respond in rebuttal that such was quite impossible. Pagans knew , after all, o f the birth o f Aeneas from a divine m other and a hum an father. C loser to hom e, there w as the claim that Augustus him self w as conceived from a divine father and a hum an mother. Atia spent the night in A pollo’s tem ple, the god visited her in the guise o f a snake, and "in the tenth month after

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that Augustus w as b om and w as therefore regarded as the son o f Apollo," according to Suetonius’s The Lives o f the Caesars: The Deified Augustus 94:4 (Rolfe 1.267). Against such a background, the best paganism could offer to refute Luke w as this, from Celsus’s late-second-century On the True Doctrine: "A re w e to think that the high G od w ou ld have fallen in love w ith a w om an o f no breed­ ing?" (Hoffm ann 57-58). Not, It could not happen, but It could not happen to a peas­ ant woman. In a w orld w here gods and goddesses, spirits and im m ortals regularly interacted physically and sexually, spiritually and intellectually w ith human beings, the conception o f a divine child and the vision o f a dead person are nei­ ther totally abnorm al nor com pletely unique events. So h ow do visions and apparitions, even if factual and historical, explain the birth o f Christianity? Y ou could and should object that it is not as simple as all that. In his first let­ ter to the Corinthians, Paul explains the resurrection o fje su s as the beginning o f the general resurrection at the end o f the world. As a Pharisee, Paul believed in such an apocalyptic resurrection and concluded that it had already begun with Jesus. W e often say that for Paul the end o f the w orld w as imminent. It is m ore accurate to say that for Paul the end had already begun; only its final consum m a­ tion w as imm inent. T h at is w h y, in 1 Corinthians 15, he can argue quite logically that Je su s’ resurrection and the general resurrection stand or fall together. I f there is no resurrection o f the dead, then Christ has not been ra ise d .. . . Fo r i f the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been ra ised .. . . But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits o f those w ho have died. (1 Corinthians 15:13,16 , 20) It never occurs to Paul that Jesu s’ resurrection m ight be a special or unique privilege given to him because he is Messiah, Lord, and Son o f God. It never occurs to Paul that Jesu s’ case might be like the case o f Eli jah, w ho w as taken up individually to live w ith G od but w ithout any wider, com m unal, or cosmic effects. Risen apparitions are, for Paul, not about the vision o f a dead man but about the vision o f a dead m an w h o begins the general resurrection. It is, in other words, an apparition w ith cosm ically apocalyptic consequences. All o f that is quite correct, but it only serves to intensify the question: W hy, against that first-century background, did the vision o f a resurrected Jesu s make Paul and other Christians conclude that this w as the beginning o f the end and not ju st a personal gift for Jesu s alone? T here are other problem s with the standard understanding o f the birth o f Christianity offered above. I mention them here but do not think any o f them is as significant as the one I have been emphasizing. T h ey all arise only on the

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presum ption that w e are reading literal rather than symbolical, and historical rather than theological, descriptions o f the risen Jesus. First, it is difficult to rec­ oncile Paul's list o f people to w hom Jesus appeared after the resurrection (i Corinthians 15:5-8) with those o f the evangelists as they conclude their gospels. Second, it is difficult to reconcile those gospel accounts am ong them selves w ith regard to time, place, and content. Third, it is quite likely that none o f those gospel accounts is describing visions at all. W hat happened to Paul w as certainly a vision, but those gospel accounts are m ore about establishing an authority than about receiving an apparition. Finally, the gospel accounts indicate ve ry serious theological disagreements between each other on the necessity or validity o f such visions. In an earlier preparation for his ow n resurrection visions, Luke 16:31 gave this solemn warning: “I f they do not listen to M oses and the prophets, nei­ ther will they be convinced even if som eone rises from the dead.” Th ose prob­ lems are all important ones and I do not disregard them, but they are not the m ajor one that haunts this book. I f w e w ere to say that visions and apparitions, divine conceptions and bodily resurrections do not ordinarily happen, then w e could conclude that the gospels record typical hum an delusions about things that never happen or that they record unique divine accounts o f events that happened only once. But m y prob­ lem going into this book is that such arguments are certainly invalid for the early first century and probably invalid for the late twentieth century. Visions o f risen corpses or apparitions o f resurrected bodies are not uniquely special. T h e ques­ tion, then, is what is special about any given one? W hat is the content o f your vision, the challenge o f your apparition?

Dualism and Inconsistency T here is no longer Je w or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer m ale and female; for all o f you are one in Christ Je s u s .. . . In the one Spirit w e w ere all baptized into one body—Je w s or Greeks, slaves or free— and w e w ere all made to drink o f one Spirit. Paul, Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12:13 Som e Christians (whether Jew ish or Gentile) could declare that there is no G reek or Je w , no male or female. N o rabbinic Je w could do so, because people are bodies, not spirits, and precisely bodies are marked as male or fem ale, and also marked, through bodily practices and techniques such as circum cision and food taboos, as Je w or G reek as well. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel, p. 10

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I begin this book, then, with a problem or, i f you prefer, a presupposition. It is not a religious or a theological presupposition but an anthropological and an historical one. It is not enough to say that the vision o f a dead man birthed Chris­ tianity, because that, at least in the first century and probably in every century since, is not special enough o f itself to explain anything. Neither is it enough to say that the vision o f a dead man was interpreted as the start o f the general resur­ rection and that interpretation birthed Christianity. T h at only rephrases the prob­ lem: W h y w as this m an s resurrection, as distinct from any and all other ones, understood as such a beginning? From that problem as presupposition I draw this hypothesis: the birth o f Christianity is the interaction betw een the historical Jesus and his first com panions and the continuation o f that relationship despite his exe­ cution. This book, therefore, attempts an historical reconstruction o f that interac­ tion, that continuation, and the reasons that one led to the other. Its focus is on birth not grow th, on those years before and especially after Jesu s’ crucifixion, on those w h o w ere with him beforehand and continued within him afterward. It is about the years before Paul; in other words, it concerns what w as there for Paul to persecute. And that last point requires som e careful consideration. I include Paul not in the birth o f Christianity but rather in its grow th and developm ent. T h at is neither a deliberate insult nor a calculated disparagement. M y decision is based on four factors, o f which the last is the crucial one. First, I do not think Paul w as as im portant theologically or historically in the first Chris­ tian century as he w as in the sixteenth Christian century, and that later im por­ tance often blocks our ability to assess his original significance. Second, w e tend to m ove m uch too swiftly from the historical Jesu s in the 20s (where w e have no contem porary texts) to the historical Paul in the 50s (where w e do have contem­ porary texts). W hat happened in the 30s? W hat do w e imagine happened in the 30s? Third, I sense profoundly different results betw een those w h o start with Paul and then go back (or refuse to go back) to the historical Jesu s, and those w h o start w ith Jesu s and then go on (or refuse to go on) to Paul. I put it as a chal­ lenge: I f you begin with Paul, you will interpretJesus incorrectly; i f you begin with Jesus, you w ill interpret Paul differently. T h e reason for that b elief lies in m y fourth (and m ost basic) point, w hich I w rite in dialogue w ith the fascinating and provocative w o rk o f D aniel Boyarin, as sum m arized in the above epigraph to this section. W hen a traditional society is confronted w ith imperial modernization, it can choose rejection or assimilation. But it can never take either option absolutely. It is alw ays a case o f w here, when, what, and w h y to renounce or accept that alien intransigence. It is alw ays a case o f w hat is superficial and what is basic, o f what is negotiable and w hat is intolerable. It is alw ays a case o f who decides that differ­ ence and how that difference is decided. B y the first com m on-era century, ancient

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traditional Judaism w as under increasing pressures not ju st from Rom an com ­ mercial exploitation in the age o f Augustus but from G reek cultural dom ination since the age o f Alexander the Great. Modernization for m any then w as Hellenization— G reek internationalism—just as modernization fo r m any now is Americanization. Is that a matter o f jets, computers, communications? Is it a m atter o f sex, drugs, violence? Is it a matter o f freedom, democracy, justice? Is it a matter o f materialism, individualism, secularism, capitalism? H o w exactly can a venerable traditional society negotiate acceptance and rejection w hen faced w ith social, economic, and military domination? But, especially, h ow can it withstand overwhelm ing cultural imperialism: Paul speaks, in Galatians 3:28, o f "Je w and G reek,” not o f "Jew and Rom an.” In a 1994 book Daniel Boyarin labeled Paul “ a radical Je w ” and sum m arized his purpose like this: "[1] Paul was motivated by a Hellenistic desire for the One, which among other things produced an ideal o f a universal hum an essence, beyond difference and hierarchy. [2] This universal humanity, how ever, w as predicated (and still is) on the dualism o f the flesh and the spirit, such that while the body is particular, marked through practice as Je w or Greek, and through anatomy as male or female, the spirit is universal. [3] Paul did not, how ever, reject the body— as did, for instance, the gnostics— but rather prom oted a system whereby the body had its place, albeit subordinated to the spirit” (7, m y num ­ bers). Later, the first two points o f that thesis are repeated verbatim, but there is a different final point: "[4] The strongest expression o f this Pauline cultural criticism is Galatians and especially 3:28-29" (181). Those are, in other words, the four m ajor and sequential points o f his powerful thesis. W atch, now , as Judaism and Hellenism clash deep in Paul's sensibility, and—without condescension at this safe distance—judge which you think is winning on the issue in question. That dualism o f flesh and spirit derived from a pervasive Platonism in Paul's contem porary culture. “Various branches o f Judaism (along with m ost o f the surrounding culture) became increasingly platonized in late antiquity. By platonization I m ean here the adoption o f a dualist philosophy in w hich the phe­ nom enal w orld was understood to be the representation in matter o f a spiritual o r ideal entity which corresponded to it. This has the further consequence that a hierarchical opposition is set up in which the invisible, inner reality is taken as m ore valuable or higher than the visible outer form o f reality. In the anthropol­ o gy o f such a culture, the human person is constituted by an outer physical shell w hich is non-essential and by an inner spiritual soul, which represents his [sic] true and higher essence” (59, ric original). T h at hierarchical dualism o f spirit over flesh form ed a spectrum from bodily neglect through bodily denigration to

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bodily rejection. T h e flesh could be to the spirit as its distracting mansion, its nom adic tent, its decrepit abode, or its filthy prison cell. Th ose w ere all points, h ow ever, along the sam e dualistic scale. Paul w as not as radically dualistic as w ere the Gnostics, but he had “as thoroughgoing a dualism as that o f Philo," the contem porary Jew ish philosopher from Alexandria— that is, "the body, while necessarily and positively valued b y Paul is, as in Philo, not the hum an being but only his or her house or garm ent” (59). Boyarín insists that Paul’s dualism “ does not imply a rejection o f the body” (59) and "does not abhor the body” (64); it "makes room for the body, h ow ever m uch the spirit is m ore highly valued” (185). Paul stands, h ow ever, on a very slippery Hellenistic slope. T h at dichotom y betw een a monism o f necessarily enfleshed spirit and a dualism o f accidentally enfleshed spirit needs som e precise descriptive terminology. I f w e are talking only about Christ, it underlies the distinction betw een incam ational and docetic Christology. T h e form er gives Jesu s a full, normal, hum an body; the latter gives him only an apparent body (dokein, means “ to seem ” in Greek). It is, as it w ere, a body for the jo b , like those assumed b y the Greco-Rom an gods and goddesses for business purposes on earth. I f w e are talk­ ing only about Christianity, it underlies

the distinction o f

Gnostis against

C hurch cited from R u d olf in this Prologue's epigraph. It also underlies the m ore accurate distinction o f Gnostic Christianity against Catholic Christianity, which em phasizes at least that both are options within Christianity. But that latter for­ m ulation has becom e so contaminated by apologetics and polemics, b y accusa­ tions o f heresy and claims o f orthodoxy, that it is no longer helpful except for name-calling. T h at underlying dichotom y is, in any case, far older and wider than Christianity. It w as there betw een traditional and Hellenistic Judaism before Christianity ever existed. And it is here today w h erever flesh is separated from spirit, flesh is then sensationalized, spirit is then sentimentalized, and both are thereby dehumanized. I call that m onism o f enfleshed spirit sarcophilia and that dualism o f flesh against spirit sarcophobia, from the G reek roots for flesh (sarx), love (philia), and fear (phobos). T h e terms are created on the analogy o f sarcophagus, the m arble coffin o f antiquity, from flesh (sarx) and eat (phagein). W e are dealing, therefore, w ith a profound fault-line in W estern consciousness, w ith the great divide betw een a sarcophilic and a sarcophobic sensibility. Boyarín understands correctly that none o f this has to do with "a Hellenistic Judaism which is som ehow less pure than a putative ‘Palestinian’ Judaism ” (6). It is not as i f all o f Palestinian Judaism w as sarcophilic and all o f Hellenistic Judaism w as sarcophobic. It w as a difference not in geography but in ideology. It depended, w herever you lived, on whether you accepted or rejected that Platonic

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dualism and in what form or to what degree you did so. Boyarín parallels Paul w ith Philo, but in case you think that dualistic ideology is only for Diaspora Je w s, I insert an example from Josephus, a Palestinian contemporary. It is a rather stunning example o f Platonic dualism, o f the spirit’s transcen­ dence over the body, and o f the flesh’s irrelevance to the soul. It is a speech placed by Josephus on the lips o f Bleazar, leader o f the besieged rebels atop Masada at the end o f the First Roman-Jewish W ar in 74 C.E. T h e Rom ans under Flavius Silva had built up a huge ramp against the isolated mesa-like rock fortress, and the end was now in sight. The defenders decided to kill their fam i­ lies and then themselves. Eleazar encouraged them to prefer death to slavery: For it is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity; but so long as it is imprisoned in a mortal body and tainted with all its miseries, it is, in sober truth, dead, for association with w hat is mortal ill befits that which is d ivin e.. . . But it is not until, freed from the w eight that drags it down to earth and clings about it, the soul is restored to its proper sphere, that it enjoys a blessed energy and a pow er untrammelled on every side, rem ain­ ing, like God Himself, invisible to human eyes. (Jewish War 7.344,346) That speech is not Eleazar speaking to his fellow rebels, o f course, but Jo s e ­ phus speaking to his fellow Romans. But it is hard to find a m ore precise form u­ lation o f the superiority o f soul over body and o f spirit over flesh. T h e question, for first-century Jew s, was not whether you lived in Palestine or the Diaspora or w hether you spoke Greek or Aramaic, but w hether you had absorbed ideologi­ cally that Hellenistic dualism, as had Philo, Paul, and Josephus. H ow does that apply, for Boyarín, to Paul’s three distinctions o f ethnicity, class, and gender, negated for Christians in Galatians 3:28 ("There is no longer Je w or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” )? Against such a dualistic background those three negated distinctions could apply to the person-as-soul rather than to the nonperson-as-flesh. T h ey could apply to ritual present or heavenly future but not to contemporary society or social reality. Y ou could easily imagine a Platonizing or Hellenizing Paul asserting that such physical or material disjunctions had nothing w hatsoever to do with the soul, the spirit, the true hum an being. T h ey were as irrelevant before G od or in Christ as the color o f one’s hair or the shape o f one's toes. That is the w ay Boyarín explains Paul. "W hat drove Paul was a passionate desire for human unification, for the erasure o f differences and hierarchies between human beings, and . . . he saw the Christian event, as he had experienced it, as the vehicle for this transformation o f hum anity” (106). But if that was all Paul had done, if he had been consistently

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Hellenistic, w e w ould still be yawning. His Jew ish and Hellenistic genes fought not to a com prom ise but to an inconsistency. A com prom ise might have said that the flesh is to be kept in its inferior place but is never to be totally rejected. An inconsistency is som ething else, and that is w hat happens to Paul. This is it. He takes that first distinction o f Je w and Gentile out o f the soul and puts it onto the body, out o f the spirit and onto the flesh. H e takes ethnicity-negation out into the streets o f the Rom an cities, but he does not take class-negation or gen­ der-negation outside in the sam e w ay. H e does not say for ethnicity, as he does for class and gender, that it is irrelevant before G od religiously and spiritually but should be m aintained physically and socially. The contradiction is not that he took all three spiritually but that he took one physically as well as spiritually. I f the Je w /G re e k distinction w ere taken spiritually, it w ould m ean that inside both w ere equal and that outside neither w as significant. It w ould make no difference, then, to be circumcised Je w or uncircumcised Greek. It w ould make no differ­ ence, one way or the other. T o be not circumcised w ould be no better or w orse than to be circumcised. But, to put it bluntly and practically, i f Paul had had a son, he w ou ld not have circumcised him. Even though Galatians 5:6 and 6:15 insist that "neither circumcision nor uncircumcision” is important, not to cir­ cum cise was im portant for Paul. Circum cision is caustically termed m utilation in 5:12. Paul had earlier broken with Jam es, Peter, Barnabas, and everyone else over m inim al kosher observance so that Jew ish Christians and pagan Christians could eat together at Antioch in Galatians 2:11-14 . Boyarín is quite right that Paul has com prom ised betw een his Judaism and his Hellenism by adopting not a radical (rejection o f flesh for spirit) but a moderate Platonic dualism (subordination o f flesh to spirit). It is not that compromise I emphasize but the inconsistency with w hich he applies it to Galatians 3:28. W h at is needed, from Paul then or Boyarín now , is to meditate on the differ­ ence between those three differences. And in that meditation, the presence o f the class distinction is crucial. You could, for example, preserve difference without hierarchy in the case o f ethnicity and gender. But not in the case o f class. For class, difference Is hierarchy and hierarchy is difference. T h e rich are different from the poor: they have m ore m oney. T h e free are different from the slaves: they have m ore pow er. Had Paul negated all three distinctions physically and m aterially in the urban streets o f Rom an cities, his life w ou ld have been as short as that o f Jesus. Boyarín does not see that inconsistency in Paul. It is an inconsis­ tency that allows Paul to negate Je w /G re e k to the fullest physical extent concern­ ing circumcision and kosher practice w hile negating slave/free and m ale/fem ale in a far m ore spiritual manner. T h e inconsistency on those three distinctions in Paul is m atched by a similar one in Boyarín himself.

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In m y above epigraph from his 1993 book, Carnal Israel, Boyarin mentions only the first and last o f Paul’s three distinctions from Galatians 3:28. He cites eth­ nicity and gender but omits class. That could have been ju st a passing emphasis and omission w ere it not for what happens in his 1994 sequel, A Radical Jew , w hich is a total interpretation o f Paul based on Galatians 3:28, which he calls "m y key for unlocking Paul” (23). In that second book he repeatedly, consistently, and w ithout excuse or explanation omits the middle term class to concentrate exclu­ sively on ethnicity and gender. The distinction o f class is singled out for emphasis once— "there is no slave or free in Christ” (5)— with specific regard to Paul’s let­ ter to Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus. All three distinctions are mentioned together a few times— for example, "in baptism, all the differences that m ark o ff one body from another as Je w or G re e k ,. . . male or female, slave or free, are effaced" (23), or again, “ Behind Paul’s ministry w as a profound vision o f a humanity undivided by ethnos, class, and sex” (181), and again, "In Galatians Paul seems indeed to be wiping out social differences and hierarchies betw een the genders in addition to those that obtain between ethnic groups and socioeco­ nomic classes” (183). But that is about all there is on the class distinction in a book that discusses brilliantly those o f ethnicity and gender. I emphasize that point, for both Paul and Boyarin, because if you think about the difference between those three differences, and you think about the difference between difference and hier­ archy, you will have to face these questions: If you can have differences o f ethnic­ ity and gender without hierarchy, can you do the same for class? H o w is class dif­ ferent from ethnicity and gender? Despite that reservation, how ever, Boyarin’s Pauline thesis has one other very telling critique, one other very impressive proposal. Because that "com m on dualist ideology . . . has characterized western thought practically since its incep­ tion,” there "is . . . nothing striking in claiming that Paul w as such a dualist; if anything the bold step that I am making is to claim that the Rabbis (as opposed to both earlier Hellenistic Je w s and later ones) resisted this form o f dualism” (85). Boyarin uses the term rabbis or rabbinic Judaism “ only w ith regard to the second century and onw ard" (2), and the resistance o f these rabbis to Platonic dualism is w h at he m eans by a "rejectionist” rather than an "assimilationist” reaction to Hellenization (7). “ O f course,” he says, “ the Rabbis also believed in a soul that anim ates the body. T h e point is, rather, that they identified the hum an being not as a soul dw elling in a body but as a body animated by a soul, and that m akes all the difference in the w orld” (278 note 8). I agree w ith those statements and admit that m y ow n personal sensibility also rejects hum an dualism in any shape or form it m ay take. On this point I stand with Judaism and against Hellenism. I do not find com promise feasible in this

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case because, while radical and moderate Platonism m ay differ in theory, they usually result in the same effects in practice. W e are, for me, self-conscious flesh that can, paradoxically, negate not only the legitimacy o f its flesh but even the validity o f its self-consciousness. But w e nonetheless remain self-conscious flesh. I find Platonic dualism, be it radical or moderate, to be ultimately dehumanizing. I admit this openly, because both author and reader have to answ er fo r their ow n sensibility before continuing this discussion. W here are you on this point? Th is is w h y I w an t to be very careful about Jesu s and Paul. Boyarín knows that “ Paul’s entire gospel is a stirring call to hum an freedom and autonom y" (199). And Stephen Patterson has recently written about “ the continuity betw een Paul and the sayings tradition [in the gospels] precisely in terms o f the tradition o f social radicalism they both share" (1991:35). I agree w ith both those state­ ments. T h at is not m y criticism o f Paul. And m y objection is not ju st to Paul’s blazing inconsistency in taking the first o f his three distinctions, ethnicity, but not the other tw o, class and gender, all the w a y dow n to the depths and all the w a y out to the streets. It is this: the Platonic dualism that had influenced Philo, Paul, and Josephus had not so influenced Joh n the Baptist, Jesus, an d jam es, nor, I im agine, the Essenes and the Pharisees before the rabbis. Start w ith Paul and yo u w ill see Jesu s incorrectly; start w ith Jesu s and you will see Paul differently. In this book, therefore, I bracket Paul to concentrate on a Christianity that had to be b o m before he could notice its existence and persecute its presence.

The Bodily Resurrection o f Jesus T h e G ospel stories m ention a gentle enshrouding, a m agnanim ous laying out, and a loving tombside vigil; but a lim ed pit is m uch m ore p ro b ab le.. . . Lim e eats the body quickly and hygienically. Therefore w e find virtually no skeletal remains o f the thousands crucified outside Jerusalem in the first cen­ tury. . . . T h e hungry little ones, alw ays w ith the church, are the reason w h y the resurrection o f Jesu s m ust be affirmed as bodily, absolutely, for Christian faith. T here is no room for the nice w edge o f m etaphor to slip in betw een them, w h o are the body o f the Risen Lord, and the real Jesus. Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord, pp. r8o, 275 T w o points from the preceding section are still relevant for this one. First, Paul’s com prom ise. I agree w ith Boyarín that Paul w orked out a compromise betw een traditional Judaism and m odem Hellenism on cosmic dualism. The flesh is to be subordinated to but not rejected by the spirit. In practice, h ow ever (even i f not in theory), radical and m oderate dualism m ay look very m uch alike. Second, Paul's inconsistency. There is an inconsistency in Paul’s application o f

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that com prom ise to the three distinctions o f ethnicity, class, and gender. In this section, that com promise creates another inconsistency. (I do not use terms such as compromise or inconsistency w ith any sense o f superiority or condescension, by the w ay, because they designate what, for Paul, w ere powerful and generative forces created by swim m ing hard in the riptides o f history. W e should not, how ever, simply repeat those processes but should develop further their profoundly human challenge.) Paul is still at Ephesus in the early 50s C.E., but now he is writing westward to the city o f Corinth rather than eastward to the region o f Galatia. Som e o f his Corinthian converts are proper Platonic dualists w ho have no problem with Jesus as resurrected soul or immortal spirit. But how can he possibly have a body, and w hy would he want one in any case? W hy tell a prisoner he will get back his cell for all eternity? W ho needs an immortal burden? Soul yes, body no. Spirit yes, flesh no. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul begins by enumerating all the apparitions o f the risen Jesus. But, having recited them in 15 :1-11, he never mentions them again throughout the rest o f the argument in 15:12-58. The reason is quite clear. T h e Corinthians know all about visions and apparitions and w ould not dream o f denying their validity. O f course the shades return from below w ith visible and even tangible bodies. O f course the immortals, bom o f hum an and divine parents and assumed am ong the gods and goddesses after death, return from above w ith visible and even tangible bodies. O f course the gods and goddesses assume bodies to contact mortals, to make love, to make war, to make conversation. But those are seeming-bodies, play-bodies, in-appearance-only bodies. T h ey are not made from flesh and blood but from ether and air. Notice, by the w ay, that w e use body and flesh more or less interchangeably but that a Hellenistic sensibility could easily concede that divinities, immortals, or spirits had bodies but not flesh. It is som ew hat like our special-effects movies today. Som etim es w e see body but not flesh, as it w ere. Those dinosaurs do not digest. In what follows, Paul is trying to hold on to something clearly important for him— but watch, once again, h o w com prom ise begets inconsistency. T h e question could not be clearer, in 15:35: "But som eone w ill ask, ‘H o w are the dead raised? W ith what kind o f body do they come?” ' Paul interweaves tw o answers, one fairly conventional, the other m ore challenging. T h e conventional one claims that there are lots o f different body-types. T h e stars, for exam ple, m ove, so they are perceived b y those in Paul's day as living beings w ith bodies. B ut their bodies are immortal, unlike our own. T here is even, Paul claims, such a thing as "a spiritual body.” Most Hellenistic hearers w ould consider the bodies o f apparitional divinities as "spiritual” rather than "physical" ones, to be hung up like clothes, as it w ere, at the end o f the operation. N ew ones, different ones,

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vegetable, animal, or mineral ones, w ere created as needed. But, as you read Paul's response, w atch also for another answer, the m etaphor o f sowing: Fool! W hat yo u sow does not com e to life unless it dies. And as for w h at you sow , yo u do not so w the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps o f w heat or o f som e other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind o f seed its ow n body. N ot all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for hum an beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. T here are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glo ry o f the h eavenly is one thing, and that o f the earthly is another. T h ere is one glory o f the sun, and another glory o f the m oon, and another glory o f the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is w ith the resurrection o f the dead. W hat is sow n is perishable, w hat is raised is imperishable. It is sow n in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in pow er. It is sow n a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body, (i Corinthians 15:36-44) T h e m etaphor o f multiple body-types emphasizes only difference, but the m etaphor o f sow ing emphasizes both continuity and divergence. W hat is sow n is both absolutely the sam e and com pletely different from w hat is reaped. Y ou do not sow a fish and reap a bird. You so w a seed and reap a specific ear o f grain. T h at is the present inconsistency that I see arising from Paul's Platonic com pro­ mise. T h ere is, o f course, spiritual continuity betw een the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Christ. N obody at Corinth is debating that. But is there bodily continu­ ity— that is, physical and material continuity—betw een them? Paul w avers in response. I f you focus on those different body-types, the answ er is no: Jesu s once had a physical body; Jesu s n ow has a spiritual body. If yo u focus on the seed m etaphor, the answ er is yes: Jesu s is n ow both totally the sam e and absolutely different. T h e Corinthians probably focused on that "spiritual body” and under­ stood it as m eaning a body, air-woven as it w ere, like those that divinities, im m ortals, and shades assumed for hum an contacts. T h ey w ou ld have been reassured o f that interpretation w hen Paul concluded w ith this com ment: W hat I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot in­ herit the kingdom o f God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15:50) T here might be different types o f bodies, but there w as only one type o ffleshand-blood. body. It w as flesh and blood that bothered the Platonic dualist; spiritual bodies w ere quite acceptable. In all o f that, I can hold on only to Paul's seed

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metaphor, because there, for a moment, the compromise is negated and his tradi­ tional Judaism speaks aloud. The seed that is sown and the grain that is produced are both same and different and are in unbroken material and physical continuity. But that is only a passing Jewish-Jewish inconsistency in a generally HellenisticJew ish explanation. Nevertheless, since I m yself find Platonic dualism, in any degree and by whatever name, to be fundamentally dehumanizing, I hold on to that inconsistency and ask what else, besides such dualism, is at w o rk in Paul. T h e epigraph to this section combines tw o statements from Sawicki. O ne suggests that a limed pit was the most likely fate o f Jesu s1 crucified body. T h e other insists that the bodily resurrection o f Jesus is an absolute for Christian faith. I agree with her that Joseph o f Arimathea is m ost likely a fervent hope for the best rather than an historical description o f w hat happened. But I also agree w ith her on that second statement. I am not totally sure I understand all she implies by it, how ever, so I formulate it here as I see it. The earthly Jesus was not just a thinker w ith ideas but a rebel w ith a cause. H e was a Jew ish peasant with an attitude, and he claimed that his attitude w as that o f the Jew ish God. But it was, he said, in his life and in ones like it that the kingdom o f God was revealed, that the Jew ish God o f justice and righteousness w as incarnated in a world o f injustice and unrighteousness. The kingdom o f G od was never ju st about words and ideas, aphorisms and parables, sayings and dia­ logues. It w as about a w ay o f life. And that means it was about a body o f flesh and blood. Justice is always about bodies and lives, not just about w ords and ideas. Resurrection does not mean, simply, that the spirit or soul o f Jesu s lives on in the world. And neither does it mean, simply, that the companions or follow ers o f Jesu s live on in the world. It must be the embodied life that remains powerfully effi­ cacious in this world. I recognize those claims as an historian, and I believe them as a Christian. There is, then, only one Jesus, the em bodied Galilean w h o lived a life o f divine justice in an unjust world, w h o w as officially and legally executed by that w orld’s accredited representatives, and w hose continued em pow ering presence indicates, for believers, that God is not on the side o f injustice— even (or especially) imperial injustice. There are not tw o Jesuses— one pre-Easter and another post-Easter, one earthly and another heavenly, one w ith a physical and another w ith a spiritual body. There is only one Jesus, the historical Jesu s w h o incarnated the Jew ish G od o f justice for a believing com m unity com m itted to continuing such incarnation ever afterward. W ith that understanding, I accept Paul’s seed metaphor as very helpful. From seed to grain is a combination o f som ething absolutely the same and yet totally different. So too with resurrection. It is the same Jesus, the one and only historical Jesu s o f the late 20s in his Jew ish hom eland, but n o w untram m eled b y

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time and place, language and proxim ity. It is the one and only Jesus, absolutely the sam e, absolutely different. He is trammeled, o f course— then, now , and alw ays— b y faith. Bodily resurrection has nothing to do w ith a resuscitated body com ing out o f its tomb. And neither is bodily resurrection ju st another term for Christian faith itself. Bodily resurrection means that the embodied life and death o f the historical Jesu s continues to be experienced, by believers, as pow erfully efficacious and salvifically present in this world. That life continued, as it always had, to form com m unities o f like lives. In the light o f all that, the title o f this section should be not “T h e Bodily Res­ urrection o f Je su s” but “T h e Fleshly Resurrection o f Je su s.” I tend to use those w ord s interchangeably, but Paul m ost certainly did not— and it is n o w clear w h y he would not. W hen, therefore, he says that "flesh and blood” cannot enter the kingdom o f God, a g u lf in sensibility opens up betw een him and Jesu s (and betw een him and m e, to be honest). For Jesus, anyone incarnating divine justice on earth w as “ flesh and blood” entering the kingdom o f G od. Paul is also in contradiction to the declaration in Jo h n 1:14 that “ the W ord becam e flesh and lived am ong us.” T h e “W ord” — Logos, in Greek— is the intelligibility o f the w orld , the rationality o f the universe, the m eaning o f life, as revelation o f the D ivine Mind. And Jo h n says that W ord becam e not ju st body but flesh, not ju st the special-effects body o f standard Greco-Rom an divine visitations, but the one and only flesh and blood o f full and norm al hum an existence. T h e Word becam e flesh; that is to say, the divine m eaning o f life is incarnated in a certain hum an w a y o f living.

The Plan o f This Book D etailed investigation o f econom ic conditions lie beyond the scope o f this book, though w e shall consider a few points . . . in connection w ith the cost o f m aintaining the tem ple and the priesth o o d .. . . T h e general assessment o f econom ic conditions lies outside the range o f this book, but I shall discuss taxes, since otherwise w e misunderstand the place o f religious dues in the entire system. E. P. Sanders, Judaism, pp. 120,159 T h e preceding sections indicate a very basic question that pervades this book. It is alw ays there betw een the lines or behind the scenes. H o w do you understand a hum an being? Is it as enfleshed spirit, self-conscious flesh, a m onis­ tic interaction that can be distinguished but not separated? O r is it spirit against flesh, spirit over flesh, a dualistic separation w ith flesh at best a distraction and at w o rst an imprisonment? M y ow n sensibility accepts, as I told you, that form er

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option, although accepts is too w eak a w ord for som ething over which I have so little control. I do not know whether it comes from being Irish or being Rom an Catholic or being both. It is, in any case, irrevocably there. It is also a sensibility that I find in traditional Judaism w hen it is not influenced b y Hellenistic dualism. One result o f that monism is that, ju st as you cannot separate spirit from flesh, neither can you separate religion and politics, justice and society, theology and economics. W hat is w rong with the above epigraph, for example, is not that Sanders’s book explains religion w ell but neglects economics. It is that he cannot explain religion without economics— unless, o f course, religion is about a ritual and a ceremonial that has forgotten what it symbolizes or celebrates. But the Jew ish God is a god o f justice and righteousness in a covenant, under a law , in a land, with a people o f justice and righteousness. You cannot explain the "practice and b e lie f’ o f such a Judaism separated from its "econom ic conditions.” I f you try, you will have a book about Judaism in the period dated "63 B.C.E.-66 c .E .” — that is to say, a hundred years o f a religion— that does not prepare you fo r three terrible revolts against the Rom an Em pire in the next hundred years. T h e tradi­ tional Judaism that begot both the historical Jesus and earliest pre-Pauline C hris­ tianity did not separate spirit from flesh or flesh from spirit. Neither, therefore, did it separate religion from politics, ethics from economics, or divinity from humanity. T h ey interpenetrated one another and w ere understood only in that interaction. You could distinguish, o f course, but you could not separate. M y original name for this book w as Life After Jesus— a title suggested b y m y wife, w ho had her own personal interpretation o f w hat it meant. I liked it very m uch because, apart from Sarah’s meaning, I saw tw o others appropriately inter­ w oven within it. The first meaning o f after was temporal and chronological. T h e book is about h ow those w ho w ere there with Jesus before his execution contin­ ued with him after it. W hat happened in the interaction betw een Jesu s and his first companions that even Rom an crucifixion could not terminate forever? Josephus said their love continued. Tacitus said their contagion spread. W hy? W hat in that original interaction made continuation from before to after possible o r even inevitable? The second m eaning o f after is paradigmatic and unitive. W hat does it m ean to go after Jesus or to follow after Jesus? Does he have som e m onopoly on the kingdom o f G od so that he alone can enter? Or is it about a w a y o f life that he has show n as possible and invited all to continue? M y editor, Jo h n Loudon, thought that title too enigmatic, and I agreed w ith him that The Birth o f Christianity w as clearer in intention and communication. But I w ou ld ask you , as yo u read this book with that new title, to rem em ber the old one as well. T h e birth o f Christianity is about life after Jesus in both those senses.

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T h e present title needs very careful explanation. W hen m ost people see the term Christianity, they think about a religion quite separate from Judaism . That is an accurate description o f the present situation, but it is hopelessly w ron g for the early first century. I could speak o f the kingdom-of-God m ovem ent, the Jesus m ovem ent, or the Christ m ovem ent, or I could use som e other term that w ould be historically accurate and w ould keep us from thinking o f a religion separated from Judaism , but none o f these options w ould face the core problem . W hen­ ever I use the w ords Christian or Christianity in this book, I intend a sect within Judaism . 1 refer to Christian Judaism ju st as I might refer to Pharisaic Judaism , Sadduceean Judaism , Essene Judaism , apocalyptic Judaism , or any other o f the m anifold sects and factions in that first-century Jew ish hom eland as it struggled to maintain its ancient traditions against G reek cultural internationalism and Rom an econom ic com mercialization. N o matter w hat those groups said about one another or did against one another, no matter h o w imperial and economic pressures from the outside splintered national and religious cohesion on the inside, theirs w as an intra-Jewish debate. N o matter w hat any group said about another group (or even all other groups), no matter h ow people criticized their fellow Je w s for follow ing any group but theirs, the confrontation w as never an attack on Judaism from outside but an attack on other Je w s from inside. It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke aw ay from Judaism . It is m ore accurate to say that, out o f that matrix o f biblical Judaism and that m aelstrom o f late Second-Tem ple Judaism , tw o great traditions eventually em erged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism . Each claimed exclusive conti­ nuity w ith the past, but in truth each w as as great a leap and as valid a develop­ m ent from that com m on ancestry as w as the other. T h ey are not child and par­ ent; they are tw o children o f the same mother. So, o f course, w ere Cain and Abel. T h at other w ord in m y subtitle, birth, is equally important. I distinguish birth from growth in order to focus on that earliest continuation from before to after the execution o fje su s. It is easier to m ove on swiftly to expansion, to the Pauline letters and cities o f the 50s w here w e have dated texts and contem porary sources. But w e are then, as Boyarín correcdy claim ed above, into a Judaism Hellenized by Platonic dualism, and w e m ay not even have noticed the transi­ tion from a Judaism not so Hellenized. I repeat that there is no clear distinction betw een Palestinian Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism . All Judaism in the first cen­ tury w as Hellenistic Judaism . But, although that older geographical distinction w as never valid, another m ore ideological one is always valid. W ho rejected and accepted Hellenization? And, since that is m uch too b ig a question, I repeat it in

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the limited context established by Boyarin. W here within first-century Judaism w as the Hellenistic dualism o f flesh and spirit accepted and follow ed, and w here w as it rejected and resisted? In focusing on the birth, I intend to em phasize that as the underlying question o f this book. Earliest Christianity, as I reconstruct it in the villages o f Galilee and the streets o f Jerusalem , is not H ellenized into Platonic dualism. That is the deep structure o f this book. Its surface structure is organized around four key questions for reconstruct­ ing the continuity from the historical Jesus to earliest Christianity, fo r describing the birth o f Christianity itself. The first question, in Part I, is why do it at all? W hy not simply accept the basic story given in the last chapters o f the canonical gospels— Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John— and the first chapters o f the Acts o f the Apostles? The second question, in Parts II and III, is where do I find m y sources? If I am not writing a synthesis o f those intracanonical sources, w hat other sources do I have? W here do I get m y data? I surely do not have n ew docu­ ments dated to the 30s or 40s that nobody else knows about, so w here do I derive m y information? The third question, in Parts IV and V , is how do I do it? Granted that why and that where, what method do I use and w hat is the m ethod­ ological justification for that approach rather than som e other one? T h e fourth question, in Parts VI through X, is what do I find w hen m y method is applied to the materials available? One o f the most striking results is a distinction betw een tw o great inaugural traditions, the Life Tradition in Parts VI through VIII and the Death Tradition in Parts IX and X. The Life Tradition, with its emphasis on the sayings o f Jesus and on living within the kingdom o f God, is centered in Galilee and goes out from Galilee. The Death Tradition, w ith its emphasis on the resurrection o f Jesus and on lives lived in expectation o f his return, is cen­ tered in Jerusalem and goes out from Jerusalem . Although that latter tradition was often elevated to ascendancy in the past and the form er tradition hardly rec­ ognized at all, the present challenge is not to reverse that discrimination but to emphasize both traditions equally. Another m ajor challenge is to see w h at they have in com m on and to recognize the Com m on Meal Tradition as basic to them both. Christianity's birth, in other words, took place in tw o different locations, but there is only a single mother, the meal whose com m unal sharing renders the Jew ish G od o f justice present on earth.

PART I

C o n tin u a tio n a n d R e c o n stru c tio n A candid but rational inquiry into the progress and establishment o f Chris­ tianity m ay be considered as a very essential part o f the history o f the Roman em pire. W hile that great body was invaded b y open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and hum ble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds o f men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived new vigou r from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner o f the Cross on the ruins o f the Capi­ tal. . . . But this inquiry, h ow ever useful or entertaining, is attended w ith tw o peculiar difficulties. T h e scanty and suspicious materials o f ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age o f the church. T h e great law o f impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the im perfec­ tions o f the uninspired teachers and believers o f the Gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults m ay seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. But the scandal o f the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph o f the Infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom, but likewise to whom, the D ivine Revelation w as given. T h e theologian m ay indulge the pleasing task o f describing Religion as she descended from H eaven, arrayed in her native purity. A m ore m elancholy duty is im posed on the historian. H e must discover the inevitable m ixture o f error and corruption w hich she contacted in a long resi­ dence upon earth, am ong a w eak and degenerate race o f beings. Our curiosity is naturally prom pted to inquire by w hat m eans the Christian faith obtained so rem arkable a victory o ver the established religions o f the earth. T o this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answ er m ay be returned; that it w as ow in g to the convincing evidence o f the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence o f its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the w orld, and as the w isdom o f Providence frequently condescends to use the passions o f the hum an heart, and the general circumstances o f mankind, as instrum ents to execute its purpose, w e m ay still be permitted, though with becom ing submission, to ask, not indeed w h at w ere the first, but w h at w ere the secondary causes o f the rapid grow th o f the Christian ch u rch ?. . . In the course o f this im portant, though perhaps tedious, inquiry, I have attempted to display the secondary causes which so efficaciously assisted the truth o f the Christian re lig io n .. . . It w as by the aid o f these causes— exclusive zeal, the immediate expectation o f another world, the claim o f miracles, the practice o f rigid virtue, and the constitution o f the prim itive church— that Christianity spread itself with so m uch success in the Rom an empire. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. i, pp. 382-383, 430

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C O N TIN U A TIO N AND R E C O N ST R U C T IO N

W hen the Jew ish historian Josephus and the pagan historian Tacitus de­ scribed Christianity, they noted four consecutive points: movement, execution, con­ tinuation, and expansion. M y earlier books The Historical Jesus and Who Killed Jesus? w ere about, respectively, that m ovem ent and that execution. This is the next step, and it is strictly limited to continuation; it is not about expansion. It is about the birth o f Christianity, not the growth o f Christianity. It is about, in Gibbon’s terms, "the dark cloud that hangs over the first age o f the church" and not about “ the triumphant banner o f the Cross on the ruins o f the Capital.” But Gibbon knows a fifth point not dreamed o f by either Josephus or Tacitus— namely, Christianity's final domination over the Roman Empire. Gibbon writes with clenched teeth about Christianity and bared teeth about Judaism . From those five points, movement, execution, continuation, expansion, and domination, I focus in this book, as I said, on continuation, on the linkage betw een the historical Jesus and earliest Christianity that is for me the birth o f Christianity. It is, o f course, a continuation o f a movement after and despite an execution. Part 1 indicates m y strictly limited focus for this book. It explains the contin­ uation I address and discusses why it is worth considering. (Afterward will come the where o f sources in Parts II and III, the how o f methods in Parts IV and V , and the what o f results in Parts VI through X.) Part I has tw o chapters. Chapter i establishes the continuation that I intend in Part I's title. It is that o f Jesu s' first companions from before to after his crucifixion. (By companions I mean not so much named individuals as their com munal structures and organi­ zational systems.) W hat happened afterward to those w h o w ere there from the beginning? W hat can w e say about that earliest possible and closest discernible continuation? In addressing those questions, Chapter i does not look at the his­ torical Jesu s alone or at the first Christian communities alone; rather, it seeks to probe the earliest interfaces between them. W hen I wrote The Historical Jesus in 1991 , 1 did not think it necessary to defend the validity o f that enterprise. I considered historical Jesu s research an established part o f the scholarly landscape. I concentrated there on the how o f methods and the what o f results. Granted the scholarly consensus that Jesus materials are origi­ nal, traditional, and evangelical, all together in glorious undifferentiation, how do you distinguish those strata with some academic integrity? And, granted that methodological how, what do you get as the end result? I never asked the why question. I ask it here and now in Chapter 2. Is historical Jesus research necessary fo r Christian faith? I do not ask, Is the historical Jesus necessary to Christian faith? That could mean the "real" Jesus known only to G od or the “gospel" Jesu s known only to faith. I ask instead, Is the Jesu s reconstructed by scholarly integrity necessary for Christian faith? M y answer in Chapter 2 is: for m onistic and sarcophilic Christianity yes, for dualistic and sarcophobic Christianity no.

CHAPTER i

V O I C E S OF T H E FIRST OUTSI DE RS Chronologically the first pagan to mention Christians w as Pliny in h i , after him Tacitus in 115 and then Suetonius after 122. From am ong these three Pliny describes a situation in h i a .d ., and Tacitus deals w ith the fire o f Rom e in 64 a .d . But Suetonius in addition to N ero's persecution [in a .d . 64], refers to an incident [in a .d . 49] w hich is interpreted by som e as having to do with Christianity prior to the fire o f Rom e. Stephen Benko, "Pagan Criticism o f Christianity During the First Two Centuries a .d .,” ANRW 2.23, p. 1056 T h ree pagan Rom an authors, w riting within a few years o f one another at the start o f the second century, agreed com pletely and emphatically on the nature o f the Christian religion. Pliny w as a correspondent o f Tacitus and a friend o f Suetonius, the form er both imperial governors from the highest eche­ lons o f the aristocracy, the latter an im perial secretary from its middle reaches. T h ey concurred that Christianity w as a “ superstition” and differed only on the m ost appropriate negative adjectives to accom pany that pejorative term. These are their considered judgm ents: “ a depraved and excessive superstition” (superstitio prava, immodica) “ this contagious superstition” (superstitionis istius contagio) Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Letters 10.96 “pernicious superstition” (exitiabilis superstitio) Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Annals 15.44.3 “ a n ew and m ischievous [or: magical] superstition” (superstitio nova et malefica) Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives o f the Caesars: Nero 16.1 For those first pagan outsiders, Christianity w as, cum ulatively, a depraved, excessive, contagious, pernicious, new , and mischievous superstition. Religion, to put it bluntly, w as w h at aristocratic Rom ans did; superstition w as w hat others did— especially those unseem ly types from regions east o f Italy.

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A Depraved Superstition Cicero is generally thought to be the most representative o f the great writers o f the late Republic, and his letters provide the most revealing inform ation about his times. It is 150 years before the Empire has its letter-writer in Pliny. H e has left a m ore faithful and less prejudiced picture o f Rom e as he knew it than did any o f his contemporaries, and in him w e can see best h ow a Rom an o f his class lived and thought at the turn o f the first century. Betty Radice, The Letters o f the Younger Pliny, p. 12 A m ong aristocratic Rom an writers, w e learn most about earliest Christianity from Pliny the Younger, so called to distinguish him from his uncle, Pliny the Elder, commander o f the western Mediterranean fleet, w h o died during V esu ­ vius's eruption in 79 c.E. The em peror Trajan sent the younger Pliny as his em er­ gency legate to Bithynia-Pontus on the Black Sea’s southern coast, a disturbed province that had brought official charges against its tw o preceding governors. He arrived there in the late sum m er o f m but w as dead, business unfinished, within two years. In the midst o f his tour he encountered accusations against the Christians in a city o f northern Pontus. These attacks w ere probably put forw ard by pagans w hose temples and sacrifices w ere economically damaged by

Christian

monotheism. The reversal o f that social situation is, at least, the good result Pliny reports from his actions (Radice 1969:2.404-405). ’T is certain at least that the temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented; and the sacred festivals, after a long intermission, are again revived; while there is a general demand for sacrificial animals, which for som e time past have met with but few purchasers. From hence it is easy to imagine what multitudes m ay be reclaimed from this error, if a door be left open to repentance. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) I cite in great detail the report he sent back to Trajan about that situation, as w ell as the imperial reply to his queries. It is an extraordinary interchange. In reading it, recognize that this is the m om ent w hen pagan Rom e chose the offi­ cial program o f reaction that w ould eventually lead to Christian victory. Pliny's actions developed over tw o stages. First, those Christians w h o had been denounced to him w ere brought before his tribunal (Radice 1969:2.401-403).I I interrogated them w hether they w ere Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat o f capital punishm ent; i f they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For w h atever the

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nature o f their creed m ight be, I could at least feel no doubt that contum acy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement. T here w ere others also pos-' sessed w ith the sam e infatuation, but being citizens o f Rom e, I directed them to be carried thither. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) Th ose first trials w ere probably o f the m ore obvious leaders, m ore distin­ guished m em bers, or m ore aggressive proponents o f local Christianity. The impression is left that these all confessed and died as m artyrs. And their ac­ cusers w ere apparently nam ed and known individuals. But then som ething hap­ pened that m oved the process to a second and m ore serious stage (Radice 1969:2.402-403). T h ese accusations spread (as is usually the case) from the m ere fact o f the m atter being investigated and several form s o f the m ischief came to light. A placard w as put up, w ithout any signature, accusing a large num ber o f per­ sons b y nam e. Th ose w h o denied they were, or had ever been, Christians, w h o repeated after m e an invocation to the Gods, and offered adoration, w ith w ine and frankincense, to you r image, which I had ordered to be brought for that purpose, together with those o f the Gods, and w h o finally cursed Christ— none o f which acts, it is said, those w h o are really Christians can be forced into perform ing— these I thought it proper to discharge. Oth­ ers w h o w ere nam ed by that inform er at first confessed them selves Chris­ tians, and then denied it; true, they had been o f that persuasion but they had quitted it, som e three years, others m any years, and a few as m uch as twenty-five years ago. T h ey all worshipped you r statue and the images o f the Gods, and cursed Christ. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) A t this point Pliny w as doubly alarmed. T h e num bers involved w ere very large, and interrogations, even under torture, had produced nothing o f a crimi­ nal nature. T here was no evidence o f magic, orgy, incest, cannibalism, or any o f those evils usually attributed to deviant cults by mainstream pagan religion. It w as time to refer the w hole matter to Trajan and his advisers back in Rom e. Pliny asked three questions. Rom e gave three answers— but not exacdy to the sam e three questions. T here w as also one question that Pliny did not ask but T rajan answered, rebuking him implicitly and som ew hat condescendingly in the process (Radice 1969:2.400-407, num bers added). Pliny to Trajan: H aving never been present at any trials o f the Christians, I am unacquainted w ith the m ethod and limits to be observed either in exam ­ ining or punishing them. [1] W hether any difference is to be made on account o f age, or no distinction allowed betw een the youngest and the adult; [2] w hether repentance admits to a pardon, or i f a m an has been once

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a Christian it avails him nothing to repent; [3] whether the m ere profession o f Christianity, albeit without crimes, or only the crimes associated there­ w ith are punishable— in all these points I am greatly doubtful-----I therefore adjourned the proceedings, and betook m yself at once to your counsel. F or the m atter seemed to me well worth referring to you,— especially consider­ ing the numbers endangered. Persons o f all ranks and ages, and o f both sexes are, and will be, involved in the prosecution. For this contagious superstition is not confined to the cities only, but has spread through the villages and rural districts; it seems possible, how ever, to check and cure it-----[M u lti­ tudes may be reclaimed from this error, i f a door be left open to repentance. (Pliny, Letters 10.96) Trajan to Pliny: The method you have pursued, m y dear Pliny, in sifting the cases o f those denounced to you as Christians is extrem ely proper. It is not possible to lay down any general rule which can be applied as the fixed stan­ dard in all cases o f this nature. [1] N o search should be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty they must be punished; [2] with the restriction, how ever, that w hen the party denies h im self to be Christian, and shall give p roof that he is not (that is, by adoring our Gods) he shall be pardoned on the ground o f repentance, even though he m ay have form ally incurred suspicion. [3] Informations without the accuser's nam e subscribed must not be admitted in evidence against anyone, as it is intro­ ducing a very dangerous precedent, and by no means agreeable to the spirit o f the age. (Pliny, Letters 10.97) That description by Pliny is rather extraordinary. If I had read it in a Christian writing, I probably would have attributed it to missionary exuberance or num eri­ cal propaganda. Christian numbers are said to be large enough to dam age pagan econom y and society. They are also spread across rank, age, sex, and location. But that is also a quite extraordinary imperial reply. Trajan’s first response is an indirect reply to Pliny's third question. It implicitly responds that the very nam e o f Christian is itself a crime, like being a m em ber o f an illegal group. But, on the other hand, these "criminals" are not to be searched out. T rajan's second reply is a direct response to Pliny’s second question. Christians are to be par­ doned i f they repent and recant. Finally, Trajan gives no reply to Pliny’s first question, instead implicitly rebuking him for m oving at all on anonym ous accu­ sations. Christianity, clearly, is a very special sort o f crime! That im perial reply established three principles that w ould guide 150 years o f official im perial policy tow ard Christianity. D o not go searching for Christians. Do not punish them if they repent. D o not accept anonym ous accusations. W hen, in the m iddle o f the third century, that policy w as changed to investigative persecution, it w as far too

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late for Rom an paganism. But, in any case, w ith hum an decency triumphing over legal logic, it shows us Pliny, Trajan, and Rom e at their best. In the process o f explaining to Trajan that he had found absolutely no evi­ dence o f evil acts within Christian assemblies (in fact, the reverse), Pliny gives us this precious description o f at least one local form o f that religion within a hun­ dred years o f the death o f Jesu s (Radice 1969:2.402-405). [The accused Christians] w ere in the habit o f meeting on a certain fixed day before it w as light, w hen they sang in alternate verses a hym n to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but n ever to com m it any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their w ord, nor deny a trust w hen they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it w as their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake o f food— but food o f an ordinary and innocent kind. Even this practice, how ever, they had abandoned after the publication o f m y edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations. I judged it so m uch the m ore necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance o f torture, from tw o fem ale slaves w h o w ere styled deaconesses but I could discover nothing m ore than depraved and excessive superstition. (Pliny, Letters 10.96)I I take tw o points from that description. First, those tw o unnam ed dea­ conesses w ere tortured presum ably to death, for, since they had nothing evil to admit, h ow , short o f death, w ou ld the torturers know w hen to stop? But Pliny was, am ong Rom an aristocrats, as decent as you could imagine and, am ong Rom an governors, as good as yo u could find. "Several hum ble people,” notes Betty Radice, “had reason to be grateful to him: his old nurse for a small fa r m ,. . . a school-friend o f C om um for a substantial sum to raise his social sta­ tus, . . . a friend's daughter for a d o w r y ,. . . and a valued freedman for holidays abroad in search o f better health” ; and he w as ready “ to reduce his tenants' rents w h en tim es w ere bad . . . and make concessions to the contractors w h o stood to lose w h en the grape harvest w as a bad o n e ,. . . and [he] once seriously consid­ ered introducing the experiment o f rent paym ent by share o f produce” (1963:23, 24). T h e deaconesses w ere dispatched sum m arily and are m entioned in Pliny’s letter only to prove the accuracy o f his information. T h at torture in pursuit o f inform ation w as carried out by as hum ane a Rom an govern or as w e have on record. Rem em ber Pliny and those deaconesses, therefore, w henever yo u think about Pilate and the peasant Jesus. Jesu s w as not m uch above these w om en's sta­ tus in official eyes, and, in any case, Pilate w as no Pliny. T h e second point is m ore to m y present concern. In the above account any reader w ou ld easily conclude that Christians took their nam e from Christ. The account gives vital inform ation about Christian life and liturgy from at least one

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com er o f the Rom an Em pire in the early second century, but it does not tell us w h o this Christ is, where he came from, or how Christians w ere connected to him. W e do not get that information from Pliny, the first o f our three pagan out­ siders, and neither do w e get it from Suetonius, the third one. For the identity o f Christ and the connection from Christ to Christians, w e depend, am ong those three authors, on Tacitus alone.

A Spreading Contagion For Tacitus, in certain respects an utter fool, only the few thousands o f his ow n circle really existed. Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations: 50 b .c. to a . d. 384, p. 58 Tacitus may have been the greatest o f the Rom an historians and the last great mind o f Roman paganism. Ronald Mellor, Tacitus, p. 163 First came the full m oon o f mid-summer; then came the fire, in the night between Ju ly 18 and 19 o f 64

c .e .

T h e fire started among the shops, stores, and

taverns at the west end o f the Circus M aximus and surged dow n that great race­ course, like four-horse chariots out o f their holding stalls, funneled through tim ­ bered tiers and open spaces along the valley between the Palatine to the north and the Aventine to the south. At the east end o f that valley the fire turned northward through another valley, this time between the Palatine and the Celian, and was finally stopped after six days by a deliberate firebreak at the foot o f the Esquiline. Then it broke out again in a separate area north o f the Capitoline hill and for three days threatened but did not penetrate into the open spaces o f the Cam pus Martius, whose public buildings housed the terrified hom eless o f R om e’s inner city. After those nine days, only four o f Rom e’s fourteen regions w ere left unharmed, three had been totally destroyed, and the other seven had been severely damaged. But the great temples on the Capitoline, the ancient buildings in the Forum, and possibly the tenemented slums o f the Subura w ere all untouched. In describing this fire, Tacitus mentions the Christians, and in explaining them tells us about Jesus. Tacitus saw clearly the open and m ore superficial evil in persons and individ­ uals but not the hidden and m ore profound evil in structures and systems. And because o f that he sought the roots o f Rom an decline not in her em pire but in her em perors, never recognizing the latter as but the form er’s personification. In his Histories, written in the first decade o f the second century, he had chronicled the decline and fall o f the Flavians, R om e’s second imperial dynasty, from

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Vespasian to Dom itian betw een 69 and 96. In his Annals, written in the following decade, he repeated that process for the Julio-Claudians, R o m e's first imperial dynasty, from Tiberius to Nero between 14 and 68. In the form er account he never m entioned Jesu s and summarized the state o f Palestine betw een 14 and 37 by com m enting, in Histories 5.9.2, that "under Tiberius all w as quiet/' But in the latter account, w hile discussing N ero in Annals 15.44.2-3, he m entioned Rom e's great fire in Ju ly o f 64. T h e terrified population looked for a scapegoat and found one in N ero himself, absent from Rom e at coastal Antium (now fam ous as Anzio) w hen the fire started. Nero him self imm ediately passed the blam e on to “ a class o f men, loathed for their vices, w h o the crow d styled Christians," possibly because those Christians w ere most heavily concentrated in tw o sw am py valley areas left untouched b y the fire, inside Trastevere o ff the V ia A urelia to the w est and outside Porta Capena o ff the Via Appia to the southeast. Tacitus explained w h o Christians w ere in terms o f their connection to Jesus, in Annals 15.44 (Jackson et al. 4.282-283, m y num bers and headings): [1. Movement] Christus, the founder o f the name, [2. Execution] had under­ gone the death penalty in the reign o f Tiberius, by sentence o f the procura­ tor Pontius Pilatus, [3. Continuation] and the pernicious superstition w as checked for the m om ent, only to break out once m ore, [4. Expansion] not m erely in Judaea, the hom e o f the disease, but in the capital itself, w here all things horrible or shameful in the w orld collect and find a vogue. First, the movement. Tacitus w as rather laconic on this first point, so it is not totally clear from that sentence alone w hether Jesu s him self founded the m ove­ m ent before his death or his supporters did so after it. Next, the execution. In the course o f six campaigns at coastal Caesarea, seat o f the Rom an occupation authorities in the Jew ish hom eland, an Italian archeo­ logical expedition discovered in 1961 a relocated and reused dedicatory block o f local lim estone containing those same tw o imperial nam es in Latin. E ven in its present ve ry dam aged condition, the first line mentions a "Tiberieum ," appar­ ently som e edifice dedicated to that em peror, the second and third lines name "[Pojntius Pilate” the "[prejfect o fju d a e a " as the dedicator, and the fourth, oblit­ erated line m ust have had som e verb like made, gave, o r dedicated. Tacitus simply retrojected the title o f procurator, current from the time o f the em peror Claudius betw een 41 and 54, back onto Pilate, w h o w as actually prefect at that earlier period. T hen, the continuation. T h at third phrase clarifies his preceding sentence. T h e execution o f Jesu s was intended to stop a m ovem ent already begun by him, but it failed to do so. For Tacitus, continuation w as like the progression o f a

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disease thought to have been eliminated by medicine. Execution had failed its purpose, but that made Christ founder o f the name o f Christian. Finally, expansion. Tacitus let his distaste and contempt for Christianity dis­ play itself here m ost openly. Not only did the m ovem ent continue in Ju daea, but it spread all the w ay to Rom e itself, where everything rotten arrives eventually. And there, had Tacitus but known it, lay the future. In Finnegans Wake Ja m es Jo y ce , playing with the expression to make a long story short and thinking o f Tacitus on Ireland rather than on Christianity, called him "o u r w rongstoryshortener.” Exacdy. Tacitus, alone among those first three pagan outsiders, tells us briefly but clearly about Christ, his movem ent, and his execution, and how , despite that sentence, the m ovem ent not only continued but expanded all the w a y from Judaea to Rom e itself. Those same four points w ere also noted even before the end o f the first century by another outsider, not pagan this time but Jew ish , the historian Flavius Josephus.

An Unbroken Love Flavius Josephus, or Joseph ben M atthias. . . [is] certainly the single most important source for the history o f the Jewish people during the first century c.E. Harold W. Attridge, “Josephus and His W orks,” p. 185 Josephus . . . can invent, exaggerate, over-emphasize, distort, suppress, sim ­ plify, or, occasionally, tell the truth. Often w e cannot determine w here one practice ends and another begins. Shaye J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome, p. 181 Both Tacitus and Josephus w ere aristocratic historians, one from the R om an consular nobility, the other from the Jew ish priestly elite. Both lived to their early sixties, but Cornelius Tacitus, bom around 55, was the younger contem po­ rary o f Flavius Josephus, bom around 37. Both remained profoundly faithful to their origins— Tacitus to the senatorial ideals o f the Rom an republic, Joseph us to the sacerdotal ideals o f the Jew ish theocracy. But both could have been accused o f collaboration w ith imperial tyranny, and both w ould have replied that such w as preferable to suicide. For, when others die for speech, those w h o live through silence m ust at least rem em ber and record. So Tacitus: "W e should also have lost ou r m em ory along w ith our voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence” (Agricola 2). And Josephus: "N ever m ay I live to becom e so abject a captive as to abjure m y race or to forget the traditions o f m y forefathers” (Jew ish W ar 6.107).

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T h ey could even have m et at Rom e, because there, betw een the 70s and 90s under the new Flavian dynasty, Tacitus’s career w as ju st beginning and Joseph us’s w as com ing to a climax. If they had met, they w ou ld probably not have liked one another, even if the demands o f aristocratic honor and the dic­ tates o f im perial patronage made polite respect m uch w iser than open contempt. Tacitus, w ith both general ethnocentrism and specific anti-Semitism, claimed that “ tow ard every other people they [the Jew s] feel only hate and enm ity” (His­ tories 5.5.1). But Josephus defended his people for having “ law s . . . t h a t . . . teach not im piety, but the m ost genuine p ie ty ,. . . [which] invite m en not to hate their fellow s, but to share their possessions” (Against Apion 41). T h ey w ere, how ever, in com plete agreem ent on one small item concerning Jesus, w ith about forty w ords in Tacitus’s Latin and sixty in Josephus’s Greek: there w as a movement, there w as an execution, there w as a continuation, and there w as an expansion. But that Jesu s item is given in passing, w ith each w riter prim arily interested in larger imperial events and broader historical horizons. Tacitus’s interest w as in dynastic degeneration, imperial corruption, and h ow “ the souls o f tyrants . . . show bruises and wounds . . . [from] cruelty, lust, and m alice” (Annals 6.6). Josephus’s interest w as in procuratorial m isgovem ment, popular reaction, and h ow those disturbances led eventually to open revolt against R om e in the Jew ish homeland. But both o f them made the same four points about Jesu s, and that is m y present concern. T w o preliminaries pre­ pare for a look at that Josephan text. First, overlap. Joseph us’s tw o m ajor w orks—Jewish War, written in the late 70s and early 80s o f the first century, and Jew ish Antiquities, written in its early 90s — overlap on the history o f the period from the mid-i6os b . c .e . to the early 70s c.E. T h ey give, in other words, tw o versions o f events in the Jew ish hom e­

land during m ost o f that first century. Absences, changes, and divergences betw een those twin accounts must alw ays be assessed carefully to understand bias, prejudice, and purpose. In the section about Pontius Pilate in Jewish War 1.16 9 -177, he notes only tw o popular disturbances brought on b y his m isgovem ment. N othing at all is said about Jesus. In retelling that sam e period in Jewish Antiquities 18:55-89, Josephus m akes tw o m ajor changes, and these are significant for the context o f his Jesu s story. Second, context. He first enlarges the Pilate disturbances to three, closing w ith a n ew one that cost Pilate his jo b and could w ell have cost him his life if the em peror Tiberius had not died before he reached Rom e for judgm ent. That set o f three Pilate disturbances is similar in that the authorities involved are all to blam e for the troubles. But then Josephus inserts, betw een those older tw o items in 18.55-64 and the n ew er final one in 18.85-89, three m ore disturbances in 18.63-64, 65-80, and 81-84. This second set is also similar, but in the opposite w ay

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to the first set. N o w it is not the authorities but the protagonists w h o seem m ore to blam e for the disorders. The first in this new set concerns Jesus, and that is quite appropriate since he appeared under Pontius Pilate. But the next tw o inserts are quite strange. T hey both involve disturbances, to be sure, b ut in Rom e rather than Jerusalem . In one story priests o f the Egyptian goddess Isis assist a libertine aristocrat in seducing a high-bom Rom an m atron nam ed Paulina. T h e guilty priests are crucified and their temple is destroyed as a punish­ ment. In the other story “ a certain Je w , a complete scoundrel, w h o had fled his ow n country because he was accused o f transgressing certain laws and feared punishment on this account" (18.81), conspired to defraud an aristocratic Je w ish proselyte named Fulvia o f gifts designated for the Tem ple at Jerusalem , and the result was that “ the whole Jew ish com m unity" (18.83) was ordered to leave Rom e as punishment. The juxtaposition o f Pilate disturbances and Rom e distur­ bances, o f those criminal fraud stories and the Jesus story, gives the latter a rather negative context. W as that Josephus's purpose and design? Is the story o f Jesus to be judged by association with the tw o incidents that follow it? Jesu s, the Isis priests, and the Jew ish “ scoundrel" m ay w ell have been, for Josephus, three warnings o f how public disturbances and official punishments m ay be caused by individual religious malfeasance. Third, text. Even if the context has been deliberately arranged to cast som e negative reflection on the Jesus story, the text itself, in Jewish Antiquities 18.63-64, is quite carefully neutral. But, above all, notice those same four elements found earlier in the Tacitus summary: [1. Movement] About this time there livedjesus, a wise man, i f indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one w h o wrought surprising feats and w as a teacher o f such people as accept the truth gladly. H e w on o ver m any Je w s and m any o f the Greeks. He was the Messiah. [2. Execution] W hen Pilate, upon hearing him accused by m en o f the highest standing amongst us, had con­ demned him to be crucified, [3. Continuation] those w h o had in the first place com e to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, fo r the prophets o f God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about him. [4, Expansion] And the tribe o f the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. Joseph u s's account is m ore detailed than Tacitus's, but notice the sentences I have italicized above. T h ey are so patently Christian that som e scholars explain the entire section on Jesu s as a later Christian insertion. H ow ever, even if C hris­ tian editors delicately inserted those italicized phrases later to m ake the descrip­ tion m ore positive, the basic content o f the passage is most likely original. O nce the questionable phrases are omitted, w h at remains is in a style and language

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characteristically Josephan. That rem aining description is so studiously neutral that I w onder if Josephus w rote w ith a careful eye on Christians and Je w s in his contem porary Rom e m ore than on their predecessors o f o ver sixty years earlier. T h at possibility arises not ju st from the impartiality o f his description but from that m ention o f "m any Je w s and m any G reeks/’ T h at surely bespeaks the histori­ cal situation o f the Rom an 90s rather than o f the Palestinian 20s. 1 turn n o w to the four components o f Josephus’s description. First, the move­

ment. Jesu s is nam ed and termed a "w ise man,” as w ere, earlier in Jewish Antiqui­ ties 8.53 and 10.237, both Solom on, "a wise man endowed w ith every virtue,” and Daniel, "a w ise m an and skilful in discovering things beyond m an’s pow er and know n only to G od.” Jesu s’ wisdom was manifest, for Josephus, in both deeds and words, in both actions and teachings. T h e sequence o f that duality, with actions first, is probably worth noting. Josephus describes Jesu s’ actions with a G reek phrase translated here as surprising feats. Those are the same G reek words used in Jew ish Antiquities 9.182 to describe the activities o f the prophet Elisha: "H e w as a man renow ned for righteousness and one manifestly held in honour by God; for through his prophetic pow er he perform ed astounding and marvellous deeds [or: surprising feats], which w ere held as a glorious m em ory b y the H ebrew s.” I take as an example o f such surprising feats or m arvelous deeds the im m ediately subsequent story told by Josephus, m ore or less from 2 Kings 13:20-21: "Som e robbers threw into the grave o f Elisha a man w hom they had murdered, and w hen the corpse came into contact with his body, it was restored to life . . . [for] after death he still had divine power. . . Josephus also describes Jesu s as a "teacher o f such people as accept the truth gladly.” That audience is qualified am biguously, since the Greek w ord translated as "gladly” could also be translated as "easily” in the sense o f "m uch too easily.” Josephus used that same G reek w ord earlier in Jewish Antiquities 17.329 for the gullible followers o f a man masquerading as H erod the Great's executed son Alexander: “T h ey willingly [or: gladly, eagerly] believed his stories.” All in all, how ever, Josephus offers a much m ore helpful sum m ary than Tacitus's laconic comment. Next, the execution. Josephus adds im portant new information here as well. T h at phrase, "m en o f the highest standing” (literally: the first m en am ong us), could, in itself, refer to either the priestly or lay aristocratic leadership in the Je w ­ ish hom eland, but in this case it may lean slightly tow ard that priestly possibility. In Jew ish Antiquities 18.120-123 Vitellius, the pagan govern or o f Syria, accompa­ nied b y H erod Antipas, the Jew ish tetrarch o f Galilee and Perea, was going to m arch w ith the Syrian legions through "the land o f Ju daea.” T h ey w ere entreated not to do so by “ m en o f the highest standing” since their military standards bore offensive pagan images. Vitellius agreed and even w en t up him self to sacrifice at Jerusalem . In that particular case, at least, "m en o f the highest standing" must

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surely mean the high-priestly authorities. But in itself the term sim ply designates aristocrats, leaders, authorities. In the Arabic Book o f the Title, a history o f the w orld written around the middle o f the tenth century by Agapius, M elkite bishop o f Phrygian Hierapolis in Asia Minor, there is a citation o f this text from Josephus, but all it says is this: “Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die." T h at is, how ever, more likely a paraphrase o f the fuller version rather than an independent, m ore original, and m ore accurate one. Thus, for Josephus, there w as a conjunction, on the highest level, o f Jew ish aristocratic accusation and Rom an imperial execution. Then, the continuation. Josephus’s description o f the third step is, once again, quite neutral and impartial after you rem ove, as I do by italics, those later Chris­ tianizing interpolations. He explains the continuation not as a spreading conta­ gion but as an undying love. Finally, the expansion. Tacitus noted that Christians are so called after Christ. Josephus says they are so called after “him” — that is, after “Jesu s," the only nam e he had already mentioned. Maybe, o f course, he just expects his readers to kn ow that Jesus was called by his followers the Anointed One— Christ in G reek, Mes­ siah in Hebrew or Aramaic. There is also another possibility. Later, in Jew ish Antiquities 20.200, Josephus tells how, he [Ananus, the high priest] convened the judges o f the Sanhedrin [in 62 c.E. during the interregnum between the prefects Festus and Albinus] and brought before them a man named Jam es, the brother o f Jesu s w h o w as called the Christ, and certain others. In that text he says that Jesus “was called the Christ." That is a neutral, not a credal, statement. It is possible, therefore, but not much more, that he had used a similar expression in the opening phrases o f his earlier mention o f Jesu s in 18.63-64 and that Christian interpolation had changed "H e was called the Christ” into the confessional assertion “He was the Christ.” Maybe, at best. A m ong those four earliest outsiders, Pliny and Suetonius tell us about C hris­ tians but not about Christ. Only Josephus and Tacitus tell us about Jesu s or Christ and the continuation from him to Christianity. That continuation is w h at this b ook is about. But it is about very special and precise form s o f continuation.

A Focus on First Continuation T h e m ost startlingly idiosyncratic o f all the followers o fjesu s known to us cam e from a w orld that barely touched at any point on the experiences o f

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those w h o preached in the cramped and explosive countryside o f Palestine. Paul o f Tarsus w as a G reek-speakingjew o f the Diaspora. He w as even, apparently, a Rom an citizen. His missionary jou rneys took him to cities deep in the hinterland o f western Asia Minor. In the early 50s, he lingered, for periods o f years at a time, in the great pagan cities o f the Aegean— Eph­ esus, Thessalonica, Philippi, and Corinth. He w as executed at Rom e, in the faraw ay capital o f the Empire, around 60 a . d . Peter Brown, The Body and Society, p. 44 O n one perfectly valid level all tw o thousand years o f Christianity, all o f Christian cult and culture, history and theology are a continuation o f Jesu s con­ fessed as the Christ. On another perfectly valid level the first three hundred years in that preceding epigraph are a continuation o fje su s confessed as the Christ. On a final perfectly valid level that first century summarized above b y Josephus and Tacitus is a continuation o fje s u s confessed as the Christ. But this b o ok is not an account o f tw o thousand, three hundred, or even one hundred years. It is, instead, a probe o f the earliest and closest continuation discernible, the continuation from before to after crucifixion, the continuation that includes both those moments and focuses on their connection. It asks, W hat happened to Jesu s' first com panions in the days and weeks, months and years imm ediately after his execution? It asks, W hat happened to believers in the kingdom o f G od w hen the God o f that king­ dom did not prevent Jesu s’ crucifixion? It asks, W hat was there before Paul or w h at w as there for Paul to persecute? And that focus demands a w ord about Paul himself. This b ook does not include a study o f Paul, although it certainly includes elem ents from his life, his letters, and especially his pre-Pauline traditions. That lack is quite deliberate, but I do not intend it as an indirect attack on Pauline the­ ology. I am com pletely convinced that his thought represents a perfectly valid and very early continuation from Jesu s to Christianity in a very different context from that o f the historical Jesus. But I have program m atically omitted him from this b ook for tw o reasons. One reason is that I seek to focus disciplined recon­ structive imagination on those w h o started w ith Jesu s before his death and con­ tinued with Jesu s after his execution. It is the continuity o f Jesus’ companions from before to after Calvary that is my concern. W hat strands o f tradition, I ask, am ong all the available ones, show that precise continuation? Another reason is that the secure presence o f Paul’s authentic letters seduces historians to skip rather hastily o ver the early 30s and m ove m uch too swiftly into the late 30s, 40s, and 50s, the decades for w hich those texts are extrem ely precious witnesses. Let me give tw o examples o f that last phenom enon, because it w as they, m ore than

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anything else, that persuaded me to reimagine the Christianity that w as there before Paul, without Paul, and apart from Paul; that persuaded me to investigate w h at w as there for Paul to persecute, what would have been there had he never existed, and what continued into the future as though he never had. M y tw o examples, taken from recent books on early Christianity, w ere chosen not because they are bad but because they are very, very good books. The first book is by W ayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World o f the Apostle Paul, published in 1983. “ Paul was a city person,'* he asserts in opening his first chapter. "The city breathes through his language. Je su s’ parables o f sowers and weeds, sharecroppers, and mud-roofed cottages call forth sm ells o f manure and earth, and the Aramaic o f the Palestinian villages often echoes in the Greek. W hen Paul constructs a metaphor o f olive trees or gardens, on the other hand, the Greek is fluent and evokes schoolroom m ore than farm; he seem s m ore at hom e with the clichés o f Greek rhetoric, drawn from gym nasium , sta­ dium, or w orksh op .. . . In those early years, then, within a decade o f the cruci­ fixion o f Jesus, the village culture o f Palestine had been left behind, and the Greco-Roman city became the dominant environment o f the Christian m o ve­ m ent" (1983:9, n). I leave aside for now the fact that new ly spread manure in the countryside probably smelled much better and certainly did far less dam age to human health than the fetid stench o f unsewered city tenements and alleys. I concentrate instead on the swiftness o f that passage from Aram aic to G reek and from Palestinian village to Roman city. M y question is this: H o w did that hap­ pen, and happen so swiftly— within a decade o fje su s’ death? T h e problem is not h o w Christianity spread from one Rom an city to another but h ow it m oved from Galilean villages to Roman cities at all. H ow , in other words, did it ever get out o f those villages? M y point is not that Meeks should have faced that problem o f the transition from village to city. I emphasize only that it is still there as a problem and that it is the one that concerns me in this book. T h e second book is by Rodney Stark, The Rise o f Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, published in 1996, which establishes a pow erfully clear dis­ tinction betw een sects and cults. “ Sect m ovem ents . . . occur by schism w ithin a conventional religious body when persons desiring a m ore otherworldly version o f the faith break aw ay to 'restore' the religion to a higher level o f tension w ith its en viro n m en t.. . . Cult movements, on the other hand, are not sim ply n ew organizations o f an old faith: they are new faiths, at least new in the society being exam ined" (33). Furtherm ore, sects appeal especially to those " if not the dispos­ sessed, at least o f low er social standing than those w ho stick w ith the parent b o d y,” but cults “ must draw upon the m ore privileged for their recruits” (33, 34). T h ose preceding distinctions are preparatory to this passage: "D u rin g his m inistry, Jesu s seems to have been the leader o f a sect m ovem ent w ithin

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Judaism . Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath o f the Crucifixion, there was little to separate the disciples from their fellow Jew s. H ow ever, on the m orning o f the third day som ething happened that turned the Christian sect into a cult m ovem ent. Christians believe that on that day Jesu s arose from the dead and during the next forty days appeared repeatedly to various groups o f his follow ­ ers. It is unnecessary to believe in the Resurrection to see that because the apos­ tles believed in it, they w ere no longer just another Jew ish sect. A lthough it took time for the fact to be recognized fully (in part because o f the im m ense diversity o f Judaism o f this era), beginning with the Resurrection Christians w ere partici­ pants in a new religion, one that added far too m uch n ew culture to Judaism to be any longer an internal sect m ovem ent. O f course, the com plete break betw een church and synagogue took centuries, but it seem s clear that Jew ish authorities in Jeru salem quickly labeled Christians as heretics beyond the bound­ aries o f the com m unity in the sam e w ay that M oonies are today excluded from Christian associations” (44-45). Y ou w ill notice the qualifications needed to support that instant sect-to-cult transformation: “ it took time for the fact to be recognized fully” and “ the com ­ plete break betw een church and synagogue took centuries.” But the core ques­ tion is this: Did any such instant transformation happen? Since all those involved w ere Je w ish sectarians, w ere they not experiencing or describing som ething w ithin their norm al range o f Jew ish presuppositions? Is it not ju st as likely that Christianity's double appeal (and double nonappeal) was as a sect inside Judaism but as a cult outside paganism? Eventually it had to setde for one or the other, but that happened slow ly and diversely, at different times and places, in diver­ gent steps and processes. Once again w e are m oving m uch too swiftly, as with M eeks from village to city, so now w ith Stark from sect to cult. M y point, once again, is not that Stark should have faced that problem o f transition from sect to cult. I emphasize only that it is still there as a problem and that it is the one that concerns m e in this book. Th ose tw o cases help m e to see m y ow n question m ore clearly. It is this: What continuation can we discern between the companions o f Jesus before and after his execution? W hat w as it like for those w h o w ere there before the crucifixion to be there after it? W hat w as it like for them in the early 30s? W hat traces have they left for us to discern in later texts? W hat trajectories have they created for us to exam ine in later documents? T h at is w h at I m ean b y first continuation. It is the continuation from before to after, the continuation o f both before and after. I could also state the problem in a m ore personal w ay. This book is the closest possible sequel I can im agine and the closest possible continuation I can create to m y earlier w ork, The Historical Jesus: The Life o f a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. It is not concerned with the historical Jesu s alone or w ith Christian origins alone but

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w ith their interface, w ith the continuation from one to the other for Je su s’ first com panions. T h e objection, how ever, is obvious. H ow can I say anything at all about those earliest years? Is it not w iser to m ove, with Meeks, Stark, and m ost others, swiftly and smoothly on to Paul and the late 30s, 40s, or 50s? W h y even try to reconstruct that primordial continuation? Why?

CHAPTER 2

RECONSTRUCTING EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY I shall assume that there w ere 1,000 Christians in the year 4 0 . . . . 40 percent per decade (or 3.42 percent per year) seems the most plausible estimate o f the rate at which Christianity grew during the first several centuries.. . . So long as nothing changed in the conditions that sustained the 40-percent-a-decade grow th rate, Constantine's conversion would better be seen as a response to the massive exponential w ave in progress, not as its cause___ T h e projections reveal that Christianity could easily have reached half the population [almost 34 out o f 60 million people] by the middle o f the fourth century without miracles or conversions en masse. The Mormons have, thus far, traced the same growth curve, and w e have no knowledge o f their achieving mass conversions. Rodney Stark, The Rise o f Christianity, pp. 5, 6 ,10 ,14 T h e above epigraph offers one w ay o f reconstructing early Christianity, at least in terms o f its numerical expansion. The reconstruction depends, o f course, on those earliest numbers being fairly accurate. It also uses comparative sociological data to double-check the expansion in terms o f contemporary parallels. W hether those fig­ ures are correct or not I leave for others to decide. I cite them here simply as an example o f reconstruction. But no matter how done or h ow validated, it is an exam­ ple o f historical reconstruction, and that raises, especially today, the following ques­ tion: Why is the historical study o f Christianity's birth possible, valid, and necessary?

History and Story A you ng w om an named Ann described h ow she recovered in therapy m em o­ ries o f terrible satanic ritual abuse at the hands o f her parents, and also discov­ ered that she harbored multiple personalities. Fam ily videotapes and photos show ed Ann, prior to therapy, as a vibrant you ng w om an and a budding you ng sin g e r.. . . “ I don't care if it's true,” asserted Ann's therapist, Douglas Sawin. “ W hat's important to me is that I hear the child's truth, the patient's truth. T h at's w hat's important. W hat actually happened is irrelevant to m e.” Asked about the possibility that a client's report is a delusion, Sawin did not flinch: “ W e all live in a delusion, ju st m ore or less delusionary.'' Daniel L. Schacter, Searchingfor Memory, pp. 262-263

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Forget for a m om ent about the historical Jesus, Christian origins, the first continuation from one to the other, or companions’ lives from before to after Jesu s' execution. Think instead o f that preceding epigraph. It is a particularly horrible example, to be sure. It is bad enough if such abuse happened to Ann; it is w orse if it happened and no redress was possible. But it is surely w o rst o f all— for herself, for her family, for her society— if her therapist finds the distinction betw een fact and fiction, fantasy and history, o f no importance w hatsoever. In telling that incident from the recent “ m em ory wars” in the United States, Schacter footnoted that "objective or ‘historical truth’ . . . becom es im portant when, as in Ann’s case, a multimillion dollar law suit is filed against the alleged perpetrators” (344 note 28). But surely, even for therapy (or especially fo r ther­ apy), and apart from potential or actual lawsuits, there is a suprem e difference between actual and delusional stories. And it is necessary to decide w hich is which. History matters. And history is possible because its absence is intolerable. History is not the same as story. Even i f all history is story, not all story is his­ tory. Imagine this purely hypothetical case. In the courtroom, faced w ith a m an accused o f double murder, the defense and the prosecution tell very different stories. In one the man is a murderer w ho must be condemned. In the other he is an innocent w ho has been framed. Both attorneys are highly com petent and entertaining storytellers, but only one o f the two stories they share in that court­ room is history. The other is mistake, fiction, invention, lie. A t the end, w h en the man walks out o f the courtroom, he is either a freed m urderer or a fram ed inno­ cent. He cannot be both. Maybe w e will never know for sure w hich version is history-story and which is story-story. But w e know that only one version is cor­ rect. And our decency, morality, and humanity demand that w e never say it is all relative, perspective, hype, and spin, or that, since w e cannot know for sure, it does not matter at all. This is m y working definition o f history: History is the past reconstructed interac­ tively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. There are times w e can get only alternative perspectives on the same event. (There are always alternative perspectives, even when we do not hear them.) But history as argued public recon­ struction is necessary to reconstruct our past in order to project our future. I return now, but against that background, to the historical Jesu s and C hris­ tian origins. Here the objection is m ore pointed. W e have, leaving aside other materials, four accounts o f the historical Jesus from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jo h n . And all o f them tell us about continuation from before to after crucifixion (at least for the first few days). Likewise w e have four accounts o f the historical Tiberius, the imperial ruler under w hom Jesus w as crucified— accounts by V elleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius. The canonical stories are all by anonym ous authors, none o f whom knew Jesus personally but all o f

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w h om w rote before the end, o f the first century. T h e im perial accounts are by one first-century historian w h o slogged with Tiberius through his G erm an and Pannonian campaigns and b y three w ho w rote in the second or third centuries. I f one em phasizes h ow different Jesu s appears in M ark and Jo h n , it could be countered that Tiberius is equally different in Paterculus (w ho worshiped the ground he w alked on) and in Tacitus (who hated the air he breathed). Further­ m ore, for Christian origins w e have the Acts o f the Apostles, w hich describes earliest Christianity from the 30s to the 60s. There, surely, is the history I seek, and all I have to do is read it carefully and thoughtfully. T h e problem is that, slow ly but surely across the past tw o hundred years o f scholarly research, w e have learned that the gospeb are exactly w h at they openly and honestly claim they are. T h ey are not history, though they contain history. T h ey are not biography, though they contain biography. T h ey are gospel— that is, go od new s. Good indicates that the news is seen from som ebody's point o f view — from , for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation. News indicates that a regular update is involved. It indicates that Jesu s is con­ stantly being actualized for n ew times and places, situations and problems, authors and com m unities. The gospels are written for faith, to faith, and from faith. W e have also learned that M atthew and Luke used M ark as a source. So w e can now see, b y com paring M atthew and Luke with their Markan source, the sovereign freedom w ith which the evangelists adopted and adapted, added and om itted, changed and created the very w ords and deeds o f Jesu s himself. And if, as m any scholars n o w think, Jo h n is dependent on those three synoptic authors, that creative freedom is alm ost as great as w e could possibly imagine. That term synoptic, by the w ay, indicates h ow easily M atthew, Mark, and Luke can be placed in parallel columns and seen synoptically— that is, at a single glance. Fur­ therm ore, w hat w e presently separate as the gospel o f Luke and the Acts o f the Apostles w as first written as twin volum es o f the same gospel. Together— and they must be read together— they tell h ow the H oly Spirit first m oved w ith Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and then m oved w ith the apostles from Jerusalem to Rom e. T h e good new s, for Luke-Acts, is that the H o ly Spirit m oved headquar­ ters from Jerusalem to Rom e. T h e H oly Spirit, apparently, did not cross the Euphrates to the north or the Nile to the south but only the M editerranean to the west. Each o f those twin volum es, and one no m ore or less than the other, is theology rather than history. It is our problem if w e w anted journalism . W e received gospel instead. But it is all that hard-won understanding o f the nature o f gospel in general and the relations betw een gospels in particular that raises the historical problem . W hat do w e know about Jesu s and earliest Christianity through historical reconstruction— that is, through evidence arguable as public discourse?

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As I noted earlier, when I w rote The Historical Jesus in 19 9 1 1 did not think it necessary to defend the validity o f that enterprise. I considered such a study an established part o f the scholarly landscape. I still do, o f course, but n o w it is also necessary to give reasons. After m ore than twenty-five years o f study, I see three reasons w h y historical research is necessary both into the life and death o f Jesu s and also into those first days, weeks, months, and years o f earliest Christianity.

The Historical Reason It indeed seems that the recent w ave o f attempts to recover the historical person ofjesu s o f Nazareth unwittingly mirrored a m ovem ent that reached its apex in N ew t Gingrich's “Contract with Am erica." There is a consider­ able m ovem ent from the very guarded steps, taken by Germ an scholars in the first two decades after W orld W ar II, to the confidence o f the last fifteen years, especially in the United States, the victorious leader o f the capitalist world. It is perhaps no accident that almost all the m ajor recent w orks on the historical Jesus have been produced by American scholars. Helmut Koester, “The Historical Jesus and the Cult o f the Kyrios C h r is to s p. 14 The first reason is historical, and I propose it in debate with recent articles b y Dieter Georgi and especially Helmut Koester. It is the M allory principle, but applied to historical figures rather than high mountains. People climb Everest because it is there; people study Jesus because he is there. Jesus and his first co m ­ panions are historical figures and can be studied historically by anyone w ith the appropriate competence. That says no more or less about those early Christians than could be said about Socrates and his opponents or about Ju liu s Caesar and his assassins. There is always, o f course, a general difficulty when contem porary present looks at distant past. It is not that we are that different from them, as if all o f us w ere a single unified we and all o f them a single unified they. T here is probably as m uch divergence am ong modem-us as there ever was am ong ancient-them. T w o individuals from different locations in our present contem porary w orld m ay be far m ore distant from one another than two individuals from different tim es in ancient and m odem worlds. That is not the problem. T h e problem is that we know what happened, we know how it all turned out, at least from then to now . We know the future o f their past. H ow , for example, could w e recon­ struct the crucifixion o fje s u s as i f w e did not know gospel descriptions, artistic visualizations, musical celebrations, and tw o thousand years o f Christian w o r­ ship? W hat m akes it all even, o f course, is that w e do not know the future o f ou r own present. As w e internalize our predecessors' ignorance o f past-to-present,

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w e becom e aware o f our ow n ignorance o f present-to-future. But that is nothing m ore than the general problem and general gift o f any ancient history. Th ere is also a special problem when religious b elief or disbelief, com m it­ m ent or distaste, love or hate is involved. W riting alm ost a century ago w hen the search for the historical Jesu s was already in mid-course, Albert Schweitzer divided researchers into haters and lovers, “for hate as w ell as love can w rite a Life o f Je su s" (1969:4). He first described the Jesus-haters and their w ork: "T h e great­ est o f them [the Lives o f Jesus] are written with hate___ It w as not so m uch hate o f the Person o f Jesu s as o f the supernatural nimbus w ith w hich it w as so easy to surround Him , and w ith w hich He had in fact been surrounded. T h ey w ere eager to picture H im as truly and purely human, to strip from H im the robes o f splendour w ith which He had been apparelled, and clothe H im once m ore w ith the coarse garments in which H e had walked in Galilee. And their hate sharp­ ened their historical insight. T h ey advanced the study o f the subject m ore than all the others put together" (1969:4). He is speaking especially o f Herm ann Sam uel Reim arus, w h o lived from 1694 to 1768 but was published anonym ously only after his death. H e is also speaking o f David Friedrich Strauss, w h o lived from 1808 to 1874 and w as published at the start o f his university career— an achievem ent that im m ediately ended it. Schweitzer next described the Jesuslovers: “ But the others, those w ho tried to bring Jesus to life at the call o f love, found it a cruel task to be honest. T h e critical study o f the life o f Jesu s has been for theology a school o f h o n e sty .. . . It w as fortunate for these m en that their sym pathies som etim es obscured their critical vision, so that, w ithout becom ing insincere, they w ere able to take w hite clouds for distant m ountains" (1969:5). A re hate and love, polem ics and apologetics, the inevitable alternatives fo r his­ torical Jesu s research, and, if so, does not each option prejudice the evidence in equal but opposite directions? Jesu s was received by both b elief and disbelief, by both acceptance and indifference, by both worship and crucifixion. Is it not possi­ ble to bracket either response today and reconstruct what it w ou ld have been like to bracket it tw o thousand years ago? W hat did he say and do that begot such divergent responses? T h ose tw in difficulties do not make reconstructions invalid. T h ey only make them hard. But strange things happen to historians w hen the subject is Jesus. One exam ple w ill suffice. I cite it to emphasize that, if historical reconstruction is often a minefield, historical Jesus reconstruction is all mine, no field. In a 1992 article D ieter Georgi applied to biblical exegetes the sam e sort o f historical criticism that w e ourselves apply regularly to our ancient texts. He argued that Reim arus’s concerns, for example, w ere not ju st personal or em o­ tional idiosyncrasies but w ere driven by social and historical forces beyond not only his control but even his knowledge. T h at all began, h ow ever, long before

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Reim arus “in the southern and western Europe o f the eleventh and twelfth cen­ turies." From those inaugural moments, "life o f Jesus theology developed further in close interplay with the socioeconomic and ideological evolution o f the E uro­ pean bourgeoisie, as one o f its motors as well as its conscience. T h e form ation o f conscientious and responsible burghers called for an ideal that w as able to inspire and direct individuals who would represent and shape the new societal vision. T h e evolving life o f Jesus theology would provide that germinal stimulation" (56). And that social impetus continued right into the middle and late twentieth cen­ tury. “The origin o f the so-called N ew Quest [for the historical Jesus] in the early 1950s, its rather explosive spread, not only in Germ any but also worldwide, and its continuing life were and still are a complete surprise for the historian at least on the surface. There were no new methods or truly new methodological insights, no new texts or any other new historical evidence that had direct bearing on the problems o f historical authenticity o f the Jesus tradition.. . . For the N ew Quest the kingdom o f God remains central— the theme that since the Middle Ages had remained so fertile for the development o f bourgeois consciousness.. . . I observe the main cause in the continuous social and historical situation o f the w hole quest for the historical Jesus, that is, its location within the evolution o f bourgeois con­ sciousness, not just as an ideal but as an expression o f a socioeconom ic and po­ litical momentum. The contemporaneity o f the N ew Quest with the end o f the N ew Deal and the restoration o f the bourgeoisie in the United States and Germany after W orld W ar II and within the confines o f a burgeoning marketoriented Atlantic community is not accidental” (80, 82, 83). T w o immediate comments. First, I do not know h ow such a sw eeping thesis could be verified or falsified. It has the advantage o f being beyond disproof, the disadvantage o f being beyond proof. But, in any case, even if it w ere absolutely true, it simply shows that socioeconomic factors and religious em phases inter­ penetrate one another. And that is surely correct. Second, G eorgiJs analysis remains descriptive rather than prescriptive. W hatever he him self thinks about the rise o f the Euro-American middle-class bourgeoisie or the developm ent o f scholarly research on the historical Jesus, his review is neutral in tone and im par­ tial in depiction. I presume that, even if his analysis is totally correct, description is not indictment. H elm ut Koester has accepted Georgi's argument and extended it beyond description toward indictment. First, he cites G eorgi’s conclusion and concurs w ith it: “T h e return o f interest in the life o f Jesus after W orld W ar II can there­ fore be seen as the consequence o f the restoration o f the bourgeois establish­ m ent, in w hich the life o f an important individual provides the role m odel fo r either its m oral justification or its, albeit revolutionary, criticism" (1995:14; co m ­ pare I994b:539). By the w ay, i f historical Jesus research furnishes a life that can

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both m orally justify and radically criticize middle-class values, it is surely well w orth investigating h ow such a contradiction is possible. T o pursue that ques­ tion w ou ld probably tell us a lot about the historical Jesu s and earliest Christian­ ity, about ourselves as historians or Christians, and about everything else in betw een. Second, Koester, in the text that serves as epigraph to this section, expands G eorgi’s review o f historical Jesu s research up to its contem porary North Am erican context. I am not sure I understand that application, but the association w ith N ew t Gingrich and the "Contract w ith A m erica" does not seem a com pliment. Finally, Koester concludes another recent article like this: "Politi­ cal, social, and environm ental problems o f our age w ill not be cured through the ever renew ed search for the exem plary personality o f Jesu s and his wisdom , in order to legitim ize the individual's search for perfection and success. A n ew paradigm that defines the perimeters o f a new w orld that is not exploitative and that also includes the voices o f people outside o f the W estern w orld m ay eventu­ ally liberate us from the quest for the historical Jesus. It m ay appear then that the com parison o f Paul’s proclam ation o f G od's failure in the w orld o f hum an affairs as the turning point o f the ages in comparison with the success o f Augustus's eschatological imperialism is a m ore w orthw hile topic than the quest for the his­ torical Jesu s” (1994^544-545). T h at is clear enough and quite correct about Paul’s proclamation. Rom e had officially crucified Jesu s under a governor’s legally m andated and imperially approved right-to-execute. But the Jew ish G od o f cosmic justice w as on the side o f Jesu s and therefore against Rom e, despite all its utopian propaganda about A ugustus's divine descent, his personal divinization, and his establishment o f Rom an fertility, prosperity, and peace. D ivergent eschatological visions w ere at w a r w ith one another, Christian gospel at w ar w ith Rom an gospel. Koester is perfectly right about that. But w h y set the historical Paul against the historical Jesus? W hat i f historical Jesu s research is not about the "individual's search for perfection and success" or about Jesu s’ ow n “ exem plary personality" but is about the “ n ew w orld " o f the Jew ish G od incarnated as hum an justice opposing the pagan G od incarnated as Rom an imperialism? W h y set the historical Jesus, because w e have to reconstruct him, against the historical Paul, as if w e did not have to reconstruct him? In m aking those com ments, how ever, I am deeply aware o f divergent sensi­ bilities betw een Koester and myself. I am Irish and Rom an Catholic; he is G er­ m an and Lutheran. Furtherm ore, w e lived in very different worlds in the 1940s, and I w as in the far safer (but not necessarily the m ore honorable) location, the protected lee o f a rejected empire. That does not m ake either o f us right and the other w rong, but it gives us different religious, political, and autobiographical sensitivities. I do not undertake historical Jesu s research as a quest for “ the great

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hum an or even superhuman personality” (1992:13) or for the " ‘uniqueness’ o f Je su s’ w ord s and ministry” (1994^541). N or do I see, as Koester does, the specter o f H itler inevitably haunting such study. As an example, he rejects the term "Jesus m ovem ent” with this explicit comparison: "Th e w ord 'church' seem s to h ave ve ry negative connotations; ‘m ovem ent' seems to be preferable today. I cannot help but remem ber that Hitler and the National Socialists called their endeavor a ‘m ovem ent’ (1992:6 note 14). And again later, but even m ore point­ edly: "T h e term ‘m ovem ent’ has problematic political overtones— one m ay recall the [Nazi m ovem ent].. . . E. Schlissler Fiorenza . . . uses the designation ‘Jesu s m ovem ent' throughout her book [In Memory o f Her] and characterizes it as 'an inner-Jewish renewal m ovem ent’” (19943:544, and note 19). I ask, fo r others less involved to answer, Is that association o f Nazi movement and Jesu s movement a fair or even decent comment? I admit, finally, to suspecting those who insist that Jesus cannot be recon­ structed historically. And I am equally suspicious whether that assertion is made openly and initially or is the implicit conclusion to listing all the difficulties involved. W hy is Jesus, alone o f all historical figures, so covered by a cloud o f unknowing and a cloak o f protective invisibility? That assertion o f historical agnosticism seems but a negative w ay o f asserting unique status and transcen­ dental dignity. If Jesus is but a figure like Zeus, historical reconstruction is quite obviously absurd. If Jesus is but a figure like Hamlet, historical reconstruction is equally absurd. The form er lives only in myth, the latter only in literature. Jesu s m ay live in both those realms too, but he also lived in history. O r that, at least, is the first historical question to be asked about him.

The Ethical Reason W hat the historian or exegete cannot hope to do by historical research is to resolve w hat are really philosophical questions (e.g., w hether miracles do take place) or theological questions (e.g., whether God has indeed acted in this particular "m iracle," thus calling people to faith). Such questions, w hile im portant, simply go beyond the realm o f history proper. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2, p. 220 T h e second reason is ethical, and I propose it in debate w ith the ongoing m ultivolum e w o rk o f Jo h n M eier on the historical Jesus. This ethical reason operates on tw o different but connected levels. One level concerns h o w w e reconstruct, as historians, and it focuses on the present. T h e other concerns h o w w e believe, as Christians, and it focuses on the past. Together they concern the ethics o f public interpretation o f the past.

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I f gospel w ere parable, with Jesus challenging our faith as does the Good Samaritan, this reason w ould not hold. If gospel w ere theology, w ith Jesus speak­ ing as divine w isdom from the throne o f God, this reason w ould not hold. But Christianity has always claimed an historical basis, so this reason presses. W hen, in our gospels, are the evangelists m aking and we reading historical statements, and when are they m aking and we reading theological ones? Th ose italicized words underline the twin aspects o f m y ethical reason for historical Jesu s research. I give one example, concerning the divine conception o f Jesu s, as a case study to raise the general problem. Jo h n M eier concluded, concerning the historicity o f that account that, "b y itself, historical-critical research simply does not have the sources and tools available to reach a final decision on the historicity o f the vir­ ginal conception as narrated b y M atthew and Luke. One's acceptance or rejection o f the doctrine will be largely influenced by one's ow n philosophical and theolog­ ical presuppositions, as w ell as the weight one gives Church teaching. Once again, w e are rem inded o f the built-in limitations o f historical criticism. It is a useful tool, provided w e do not expect too much o f it” (1.222). I am m ore uneasy than I can say w ith that serene disjunction. T o say that Jesus is divine or Son o f G od is theologically beyond historical p ro o f or disproof. That seems to me absolutely correct. It is a m atter o f faith— that is, o f the theologically based interpretation o f history's meaning. But to say that he had no earthly father and that M ary con­ ceived him virginally is an historical statement open, in principle, to p ro o f or dis­ proof. Th ose are matters o f fact and open to historical discussion. T h e conception o f Jesu s is told b y the evangelist Luke w riting in the 80s o f the first century. It is a m iracle o f divine and hum an conjunction, a child con­ ceived from a divine father and a hum an mother. It occurs w ithout the participa­ tion o f any hum an father. In the sixth m onth the angel Gabriel w as sent by G od to a tow n in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a m an w hose nam e w as Joseph, o f the house o f David. T h e virgin’s nam e w as M ary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with yo u .” But she w as m uch per­ plexed by his w ords and pondered w hat sort o f greeting this m ight be. The angel said to her, "D o not be afraid, M ary, for you have found favor with God. And now , you will conceive in y o u r w om b and bear a son, and you w ill nam e him Jesus. H e will be great, and will be called the Son o f the Most H igh, and the Lord G od w ill give to him the throne o f his ancestor David. H e w ill reign o ver the house o f Jacob forever, and o f his kingdom there w ill be no end.” M ary said to the angel, "H o w can this be, since I am a virgin?" T h e angel said to her, "T h e H oly Spirit w ill com e upon you , and the pow er o f the M ost High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be b o m w ill be holy; he w ill be called Son o f G od.” (Luke 1:26-35)

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T h at text makes claims that are historical, that are em pirically verifiable, at least in part and in principle. It does not speak just o f God but o f a w om an , M ary, w h o belongs to this earth and to its history. H o w does the historian respond? One reaction is to insist that any negation is just as theological as affir­ m ation and that neither is historically acceptable. Historical reconstruction m ust stand m ute before such transcendental claims. T h ey are beyond historical verifi­ cation or falsification, and the proper reaction is to bracket them historically w ithout either affirming or denying them. The other reaction is to contend that there has never been adequate empirical p roof for such claims throughout past or present history and that the story, and others like it, should not be taken liter­ ally. This reaction also asserts certain physical consistencies for which exceptions w ould have to be publicly proved rather than privately asserted. H old any deci­ sion between those two positions and read this second story. The conception o f Octavius, Augustus-to-be, is recorded by the Rom an his­ torian Suetonius in his Lives o f the Caesars, written during the first quarter o f the second century. This divine conception took place over h alf a century before that o f Jesus. As he prepares to narrate the em peror's death, Suetonius pauses to record the omens that indicated his great destiny in birth and life as w e ll as death. This is how his mother, Atia, conceived him (Rolfe 1.264-267): W hen Atia had come in the middle o f the night to the solemn service o f Apollo, she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, w h ile the rest o f the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent glided up to h er and shortly went away. W hen she awoke, she purified herself, as i f after the embraces o f her husband, and at once there appeared on her body a m ark in colors like a serpent, and she could never get rid o f it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths. In the tenth month after that A ugustus w as b o m and w as therefore regarded as the son o f Apollo. (The Deified Augustus 94.4) A ugustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and hum an con ­ junction o f Apollo and Atia. H ow does the historian respond to that story? A re there any w h o take it literally or even bracket its transcendental claim s as beyond historical judgm ent or empirical test? Classical historians, no m atter h o w religious, do not usually do so. That divergence raises an ethical problem fo r m e. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augustus and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and m iraculously or all o f them should be accepted m etaphorically and theologically. It is not m orally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is m yth; ours is history but yours is lie. It is even less m orally acceptable to say that indi-

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rectly and covertly b y m anufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one's ow n story. This, then, is m y problem , and 1 repeat that it is an ethical one. AntiChristian or direct rationalism says that certain things cannot (or, m ore wisely, do not) happen. T h ey are so far beyond the publicly verifiable or objectively provable consistencies o f our w orld that, w hatever their value as m yth or para­ ble, fable or story, they are not to be taken as fact, event, or history. It is easy, o f course, to m ock that attack, but w e all live b y it every day, especially w here oth­ ers are involved. (W here are you on aliens or Elvis?) Pro-Christian or indirect rationalism admits that those same types o f events usually do not occur but insists that in one absolutely unique instance they did. A divine conception or a bodily resurrection, for example, has happened literally only once in the w hole history o f the w orld. T o Jesus. W hen Christians as historians bracket from discus­ sion or quarantine from debate those specific events but not all other such claims, past and present, they do som ething I consider unethical. But that raises the second aspect o f m y ethical problem. W e kn ow from the above examples, and dozens like them, that the earliest Christians lived in a w orld not yet bedeviled by either direct or indirect rational­ ism, a w orld w here divine conceptions w ere quite acceptable, w here, in fact, divine and hum an, eternal and temporal, heaven, earth, and Hades w ere m ar­ velously porous and open to one another. They could never have argued that Jesu s w as uniquely singular because divine conception had happened to him alone in all the w orld. T h ey could not and they did not. T h at is the second and m ore fundam ental aspect o f the ethical problem. W hen we read them as saying that the historical Jesu s is uniquely unique and that such events happened only to him, we are m isreading them. But let m e be very clear, they were making claims for their Jesus, and those claims were com parative o ver against all other such claims. T h at w as precisely their point. W here, they asked, do you find the divine especially, particularly, or even uniquely present? Is it, for example, in Augustus, a Rom an em peror backed b y fabulous colonial wealth and massive m ilitary pow er, or in Jesus, a Jew ish peasant child poor enough to be b o m in som ebody else’s stable? W here do you find yo u r God? Choose. W e cannot live w ithout group ideology (or, i f yo u prefer, theology), b ut w e m ust be able to keep it in dialectic w ith public evidence— if, that is, w e make claim s to such data. M y ow n position as an historian trying to be ethical and a Christian trying to be faithful is this: I do not accept the divine conception o f either Jesu s or A ugustus as factual history, but I believe that G o d is incarnate in the Jew ish peasant p overty o f Jesu s and not in the Rom an im perial p o w er o f Augustus.

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The Theological Reason I f it can be demonstrated that Jesus did tw o different things, it is not there­ fore legitimate to understand those things in light o f each other, as though they w ere mutually interpretive. The reason for this is clear: w e lack kn ow l­ edge o f all the other things Jesus said and did that provide the only real con­ text for the interpretation o f specific deeds and sayings. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus, p. 130 The third reason is theological, and I propose it in debate with Luke T im othy Johnson’s 1996 book, The Real Jesus. But, precisely to respond to that book, I offer it as a Christian to a fellow Christian and within the specific m odel o f the N e w Testament gospels themselves. This dispute, how ever, is also o f interest to any­ one who has absorbed enough individual dualism to think o f spirit-soul resid­ ing in body-flesh as in a lovely distracting house, a rundown m otel room , o r a ghastly prison cell. This is for me the most important reason w h y historical Jesu s research is necessary. I offer it as a challenge within Christian faith, w ithin the Christian canon, and within Christian theology. It is based quite deliberately and conservatively on the nature o f the canonical gospels. Luke Tim othy Johnson’s book The Real Jesus argued, as its subtitle said, that the "quest for the historical Jesus” was "misguided” and that it denied the "truth o f the traditional gospels.” Johnson claimed, first, that the "real” extended far beyond the "historical” and could never be fully or properly grasped by history’s limited strategies. That is absolutely true, but— being true o f everyone in gen ­ eral— it is irrelevant for anyone in particular. At a televised debate from N e w Y ork’s Trinity Institute on M ay 1, 1996, for example, Johnson said that his o w n w ife exceeded as real what he could know about her as history. O f course, w e do not even know our ow n "real” selves in that omniscient sense. But the term real com es from advertising, not scholarship— Coke is the real thing— and it is calcu­ lated to make debate impossible. So, with the stipulation that the reality o f any hum an being far exceeds what can be known publicly or argued historically, I prefer to retire the phrase "real Jesus” and revert to what scholarship has alw ays discussed: the “ historical Jesus” — that is, the past Jesus reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. Joh nson claimed, next, that "good historical method” could establish "that Je su s existed as som ething m ore than a fictional character— the sheer production o f ancient literature interpreting him and referring to him suffices to show that— but w e can have confidence about such fundamental issues as the tim e and place o f his activity and the m anner o f his death, as well as some clues as to the charac­ ter o f his activity" (117, 126). But Johnson then denies validity to "pushing past

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the fram ew ork” he has ju st advocated and, in the process, negates the possibility not only o f historical Jesu s reconstruction but, in effect, o f all past and even pres­ ent history. T ake that quite representative sentence cited in the epigraph above. It denies the validity not only o f historical reconstruction but o f everything else as well, from ordinary everyday knowledge to crucial juridical decision. In historical reconstruction, yo u present you r best public argum ent that certain words, deeds, events, or happenings can or m ust be legitim ately connected in order to understand w h at happened. (The accused said that he w o u ld kill the deceased, w as seen leaving his house after his death, had blood in his c a r .. . . ) That is true for scholars reconstructing a past event ju st as it is fo r ju ro rs decid­ ing a present guilt. And no am ount o f epistemological uncertainty can preclude the ethical necessity o f such judgm ents. W e never know it all, not o f the past and not o f the present, not o f others and not even o f ourselves. Y et w e have no choice, even (or especially) amidst such uncertainty and insecurity, but to recon­ struct the past that w ill serve as basis for our preconstructed future. Since, h ow ever, Joh nson argues as a Christian and a Rom an Catholic, I respond to him ultim ately not ju st w ith those preceding generalities, but also w ith a three-step theological and canonical counterproposal. A F O U R F O L D T Y P O L O G Y O F G O SP E L S I ask you , first, to consider four different types o f gospels, four different w ays o f telling the Jesu s story within early Christianity. It is not a case o f four different gospels— M atthew , Mark, Luke, and Joh n — within the present N e w Testam ent canon. Rather, it is a case o f four different types, w ith those four canonical gospels as but one single type. T hree preliminaries: First, I deliberately use a rather vagu e term, types, rather than a m ore precise term, genres, because there m ay be several different genres involved in a given type. Second, this typology places an emphasis not ju st on content but even m ore especially on form , and indeed on the point w here form becom es content; w here the m edium becom es the message. Finally, it is not significant for m y present concern w hether or not a given text explicitly calls itself a gospel. W hat is important is w hat type o f text is used to tell the story o f Jesu s as good news. I give each type a descriptive title. Sayings Gospels. T h e first type, sayings gospels, includes collections prim arily o f the w ords o f Jesus. These consist generally o f aphorisms, parables, and short dialogues. Inci­ dents, insofar as they are present, emphasize the w ord rather than the deed. T h ere are, for example, few m iracle stories, no birth tales, no passion narratives, and no risen apparitions. T h e classic examples from the m iddle o f the first cen­ tury (about w hich much, m uch m ore later) are the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. The form er is a hypothetical written source discovered during the last century

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in the gospels o f M atthew and Luke. The latter is an actual written document dis­ covered during this century in the sands o f Egypt. Biography Gospels. T h e second type, biography gospels, is represented by the four canonical gospels. I emphasize not only that there are four but that all belong to the sam e single type. In this set Jesus is located back in the late 20s o f his first-century Je w ­ ish homeland, but he is also updated to speak or act directly and im m ediately to n ew situations and communities in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Th ere is an absolute lamination o f Jesus-then and Jesus-now without any distinction ofjesus-said-then but Jesus-means-now. In Mark, for example, Jesus confesses and is condem ned while Peter denies and is forgiven, but those specific events— dated, say, to the year 30— speak directly and w ere created precisely for a persecuted com m unity in the year 70. You should have behaved like Jesus, the message reads, but even i f you behaved like Peter, there is still mercy and forgiveness from Jesus himself T h is lam ina­ tion explains w hy the four canonical gospels could turn out so different even though they w ere copying from one another. Indeed, one might w ell w on d er w h y the early Christians kept all four, given that anyone could see the quite obvious differences. The reason becomes clearer, how ever, w hen w e consider the next type. Discourse Gospels. The third type, discourse gospels, begins where the preceding type ends. W hile biography gospels detail the life o f Jesus and end with his resurrection, discourse gospels begin after the resurrection and go on from there. Jesu s appears to the disciples, and the narrative continues in a m ix o f m onologue and dialogue, o f questions and answers between them and him. T w o examples w ill suffice. The first example is the late-first-century or early-second-century Apocryphon o f James from a codex discovered at Nag Hamm adi (1,2) in 1945 (NHLE 30-37). T h e tw elve disciples [were] all sitting together and recalling w hat the Savior had said to each one o f them, whether in secret or openly, and [putting it] in books— [But I] was writing that which was in [my book]— lo, the Savior appeared, [after] departing from [us while w e] gazed after him. A n d five hundred and fifty days since he had risen from the dead, w e said to him . . . . But Jesu s said___ T hey all answered____ He said____ [etc.] (Apocryphon o f Jam es 2.9-29) In discourse gospels it is the risen Jesu s w h o speaks and the disciples, especially Peter and Jam es in this case, w h o ask questions. But the striking feature is n ot ju st that dialogue or discourse phenom enon but the fact that it all takes place after the resurrection.

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T h e second exam ple is sim ilarly set after the resurrection, but n o w the ques­ tioners are Bartholom ew , M ary, M atthew, Philip, and Thom as. It is 77 ie Sophia o f Jesus Christ, also from N ag Ham m adi (III,4) and dated to the latter h alf o f the first century (NHLE 222-223): A fter he rose from the dead, his tw elve disciples and seven w om en contin­ ued to be his follow ers and w ent to Galilee onto the m o u n tain .. . . [T]he Savior appeared, not in his previous form , but in the invisible spirit. And his likeness resem bled a great angel o f lig h t.. . . And he said: “ Peace be to you! M y peace I give to y o u !” And they all marveled and w ere afraid. T h e Savior laughed and s a id .. . . Philip s a id .. . . The Savior sa id .. . . [etc.] (The Sophia o f Jesus Christ 90.14-92.6) I f biography gospeb give us tw enty chapters before the resurrection, discourse gospels give us tw enty chapters afterward. Biography-Discourse Gospels, T h e title given to the fourth and final type, biography-discourse gospels, empha­ sizes its polem ically hybrid aspect. Once again tw o examples will suffice. But the content o f those tw o examples is very different. T h e first example is the Epistula Apostolorum (or Epistle o f the Apostles). T h e discourse part o f this document is far longer than its biography part, but the epistle tries, as it w ere, to subsume dis­ course within biography. T h e second example is John ’s Preaching o f the Gospel The biography part o f this docum ent is slightly longer than its discourse part, but it tries, as it were, to subsum e biography within discourse. T h e mid- to late-second-century G reek Epistula Apostolorum, extant n ow only in fairly early Coptic and very late Ethiopic translations (NTA 1.252-278), devotes nine o f its fifty-one present units to biography: Epistula Apostolorum 3-i2a sum m a­ rize in swift outline the canonical gospel accounts o f Jesu s' w ords and deeds, life and death, burial and resurrection. This outline is actually a catalogue o f mira­ cles. It begins w ith the virginal conception and Bethlehem birth, mentions Jesus studying letters but know ing them already, and then goes on to recount the sto­ ries o f the w edding at Cana, the w om an with a hem orrhage, the exorcism o f Legion into the swine, the w alking on the waters, and the multiplication o f loaves and fishes. It concludes w ith the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and Archelaus (Antipas?), the burial, the w om en at the tom b (and Jesu s' appearances to them), the disbelief o f the disciples, and, finally, Jesu s' appearance to them, despite the doubts o f Peter, Thom as, and A ndrew . In these few sections, the life and death o fje su s is swiftly summarized. But all the rest— Epistula Apostolorum 13-51— is a postresurrectional dialogue w ith repeated interchanges betw een the risen Jesu s (“he said” ) and the apostles

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(“ w e said” ). Here, in 12a, is the point where biography gospel converts sm oothly into discourse gospel (NTA 1.256): But w e [touched] him that w e might truly know whether he [had risen] in the flesh, and w e fell on our [faces] confessing our sin, that w e had been [un]believing. Then the Lord our redeemer said, "Rise up, and I w ill re­ veal to you what is above heaven and what is in heaven, and yo u r rest that is in the kingdom o f heaven. For m y [Father] has given me the p o w e r to take up you and those who believe in m e .. . . W e an sw ered .. . . T h en he an sw ered .. . . W e sa id .. . . [etc.] (Epistula Apostolorum 12) Jesus even foretells, in Epistula Apostolorum 31-33, that Paul w ou ld persecute the church and be converted to become apostle to the pagans. T h e entire dis­ course section is between Jesus and the disciples as a choral "w e,” w ithou t any individuals singled out as questioners. The second example o f this hybrid type is an early-second-century source usually called John’s Preaching o f the Gospel, now embedded in the Acts o f John 87-105 (NTA 2.179-186). It is a beautiful text that merges those twin types in an extraordinary way. In the first part, Acts ofJohn 88b-96, the earthly life o f Jesu s is sum m arized, but with an emphasis on the unreality o f his body. This unreality is show n b y four points, each o f which is mentioned twice (NTA 2.180-181). First, Jesu s' b o d y is polymorphous and ever-changing. The sons ofZ eb ed ee see Jesu s on the shore, but at first Jam es sees a "child" and John sees a "m an . . . handsome, fair, and cheerful-looking.” Later, as they beach their boat, Joh n sees Jesu s as “ rather bald(headed) but with a thick flow ing beard,” while Jam es n ow sees "a yo u n g m an w hose beard was just beginning.” Second, John "never saw Jesu s' eyes closing, but alw ays open." One night, in fact, while Joh n was faking sleep, he saw "another like him com ing dow n" to Jesus. Third, Jesu s' body w as both small and huge. "H e sometimes appeared to m e as a small man w ith no good looks, and then again as looking up to heaven.” Thus, for example, on the M ount o f T ra n s­ figuration, Jesu s' "head stretched up to heaven,” but w hen he turned about h e "appeared as a small man.” Fourth and finally, Jesu s' body "had another strange (property); w hen I reclined at table he would take me to his ow n breast, and I held him (fast); and sometimes his breast felt to me sm ooth and soft, but so m e­ times hard like rock.” And again, a second time, “ I w ill tell yo u another glory, brethren; sometimes w hen I meant to touch him I encountered a m aterial, solid body; but at other times again w hen I felt him, his substance w as im m aterial and incorporeal, and as if it did not exist at all.”

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T h e second part, Acts o f John 97-101, takes place at the crucifixion itself. And in this gospel, consequent on that bodily unreality, it is not the reality o f Jesus w h o suffers and dies, except, as Jo h n insists, in sym bol (NTA 2.184-185): And so I saw him suffer, and did not w ait by his suffering, but fled to the M ount o f O lives and w ept at w hat had com e to pass. And w h en he was hung (upon the Cross) on Friday, at the sixth hour o f the day there cam e a darkness o ver the w hole earth. And m y Lord stood in the m iddle o f the cave and gave light to it and said, “Joh n, for the people b elow in Jeru salem I am being crucified and pierced w ith lances and reeds, and given vinegar and gall to drink. But to yo u I am speaking, and listen to w hat I speak. I put into yo u r mind to com e up to this m ountain so that you m ay hear w h at a disciple should learn from his teacher and a m an from God. (Acts o f John 97) T h at sounds like the postresurrectional Jesu s beginning a standard discoursetype gospel, but, in this instance, pre-Easter and post-Easter have no m eaning since there is only one Jesu s w h o both is and is not ever embodied. Je su s’ expla­ nation insists on this paradox (NTA 2.186): Y o u hear that I suffered, yet I suffered not; and that I suffered not, yet I did suffer; and that I w as pierced, yet I w as not wounded; that I w as hanged, yet I w as not hanged; that blood flow ed from m e, yet it did not flow ; and, in a w ord, that w h at they say o f m e, I did not endure, but w hat they do not say, those things I did suffer. (Acts o f John 101) T h ere are, Jesu s explains, tw o crosses: the Cross o f W ood, on which his unreality suffered, and the Cross o f Light, on which his reality continues to suf­ fer. T h e form er is the transient passion o f body. T h e latter is the permanent pas­ sion o f God. G od has been, as it w ere, dismembered, and his parts, like frag­ ments o f light, scattered within bodies here on earth. Until all those m em bers return hom e, G od is in suffering, impaled, as it were, on a Cross o f Light. T h e third part, Acts o f John 102-104, begins with the ascension o f Jesus: “ [H]e w as taken up, w ithout any o f the multitude seeing him ." Jo h n then concludes w ith a com m entary o f his ow n. His basic interpretive principle is this: "I held this one thing fast in m y (mind), that the Lord had perform ed everything as a sym bol and a dispensation for the conversion and salvation o f m an.” Hence those stun­ ning paradoxes above: Jesu s did not really suffer on the Cross (o f W ood) but he alw ays suffers on the Cross (o f Light). And the form er is the sym bol o f the latter. Sim ilarly, says Joh n, the present persecution o f our bodies is important as sym ­ bol for the persecution o f our spirits; the form er m ay place us on a Cross o f

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W ood , but w e are always, with God, on a Cross o f Light. W e are alw ays part o f the passion o f God. Hence this profoundly beautiful and terribly poignant con­ clusion (NTA 2.186): (Let us worship) him w ho was made man (apart from) this body. And let us watch, since he is at hand even now in prisons for our sakes, and in tom bs, in bonds and dungeons, in reproaches and insults, by sea and on dry land, in torments, sentences, conspiracies, plots and punishments; in a w ord, he is w ith all o f us, and with the sufferers he suffers himself, (my) brethren . . . being the God o f those who are imprisoned, bringing us help through his ow n compassion. (Acts o f John 103) That preceding gospel version might strike a contem porary reader as exceedingly strange, but that very strangeness reveals most clearly w h at is at stake in the fourfold typology. A W A R OF G O SPE L T Y PE S That fourfold typology is not a placid inventory o f gospel possibilities b u t a w ar o f gospel types. Understanding that w ar, at the center o f w hich is the clash between biography gospels and discourse gospels, requires some background k n o w l­ edge o f an even m ore basic and ancient debate. First, there was a profound fault line in much o f ancient thought betw een, on the one hand, body, flesh, or the material world, and, on the other, soul, spirit, or the immaterial world. There is an immediate problem w ith establishing proper terms for that disjunction, for the views o f those w ho accepted it and for the view s o f those w ho rejected it. In what follows, therefore, I insist on the pri­ m ary importance o f concepts rather than just terms. But as you w ill recall, I p ro ­ posed the terms sarcophobia and sarcophilia for those opposing sensibilities w h en this subject was first mentioned in the Prologue. The anti-body view point, bodyagainst-spirit disjunction, or sarcophobic sensibility involved a spectrum from the flesh as irrelevant or unimportant for the spirit, through the flesh as an im pedim ent or distraction for the spirit, to the flesh as inimical or evil fo r the spirit. A t one end o f that spectrum was a philosophical anthropology negating flesh as the clinging distraction or degrading downfall o f spirit. A t the other end o f the spectrum w as a mythical cosm ology negating flesh as the stultifying n ar­ cosis or evil opponent o f spirit. T h e pro-body viewpoint, body-and-spirit con ­ junction, or sarcophilic sensibility opposed that spectrum at w h atever point w as appropriate for debate. Second, there w as another presupposition built upon that preceding one. Som e m odem s m ay live in a w orld w here im m ortal and mortal, h eavenly and

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earthly, divine and hum an are rather transcendentally separated from one another. N ot so, in general, for the ancients. T h eir w orld w as filled w ith gods, goddesses, and spirits w h o assumed divergent shapes and figures, w h o assumed and changed bodies as w e assume clothes and change styles. Gods and god­ desses, for exam ple, could appear in any material, animal, or hum an form appro­ priate for the occasion. But all such bodies w ere not really real. T h ey w ere only apparently real. T h ey w ere like the interchangeable puppets o f a single pup­ peteer. C ould and did gods or goddesses becom e incarnate? O f course. T h ey did so regularly, differently, and realistically, so that mortals could not recognize the unreality o f those apparitional, illusional bodies. But did they really becom e incarnate? O f course not! T h e irrelevance o f hum an flesh, on the one hand, and the unreality o f divine flesh, on the other, presented earliest Christianity with a serious and profound problem concerning Jesus. Th ose believers w ere poised on that giant fault line in the ancient w orld, a fault line that involved the w h ole material w orld and all humans in it but w as n o w focused on Jesus. W e m ight think to ourselves, O f course Jesu s w as hum an, but w as he divine? T h ey had the opposite problem. I f they believed that Jesu s w as divine, the question became, H o w could he be human? H o w could his body be real rather than apparitional and illusional? W as it not ju st a seem-to-be body? Th ere w as no point in responding that people saw, heard, or even touched his body. F or all those things could be arranged, as it w ere, by resident divinity. One obvious answ er has been brilliantly explored b y G regory Riley (1998). Jesu s could be explained not as god or spirit but as hero, as the offspring o f a divine and hum an conjunction, him self therefore half-human and half-divine but really and truly each half. H e could, as such, ascend after a real and true death to take his place am ong the heavenly imm ortals. But if one o f the ancients wished to m ove beyond Jesu s as hero to Jesu s as spirit or Jesu s as god, the unreality o f his flesh and the apparitional illusion o f his body w ould have seem ed inevitable concom i­ tants. I f Jesu s w as divine, w as his body real and incamational in the sense o f fully and validly enfleshed, or w as his body unreal and apparitional, only seem ingly enfleshed, a docetic body (from G reek dokein, "to seem")? One w ay o f describing that clash o f interpretation is to speak o f incamational as against docetic Chris­ tianity. Another w a y is to speak o f catholic as against Gnostic Christianity but, as w e saw earlier in this book's Prologue, it is probably w iser not to use those terms because they are n ow laden with too m uch historical controversy and too little descriptive accuracy. But there existed then and still exists today a specific dichotom y that m ust be nam ed as accurately as possible. O nly then is it possible to kn ow on w hich

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side do ancient authors and m odern readers stand. T h at great fissure in W est­ ern consciousness cuts through paganism, Judaism , and Christianity, and it extended its pow erful dichotom y from time past to time present, from the ancient w o rld to our contem porary culture. Because o f its im portance, then and n o w , this book's Prologue gave it a special name. It is the disjunction o f m onastic and sarcophilic sensibility w here the human being is flesh-spirit con­ ju nction as against dualistic and sarcophobic sensibility w h ere the hum an being is flesh-spirit separation. That disjunction is as present today as it w as tw o millennia ago. That disjunction contains a spectrum o f options from one extrem e to its opposite. And that disjunction about the reality and im portance o f Jesu s' flesh, that is, about the importance o f the historical Jesu s, best explains the clash o f gospel types. It explains how biography gospels, the programmatic gospels o f sarcophilic Christianity, and discourse gospels, the programmatic gospels o f sarcophobic Christianity, opposed one another. It also explains h ow sayings gospels, w h ich were earlier and could have moved in either direction, w ere doom ed by that very ambiguity. They would end up incorporated into either o f those opposing types, with the Q Gospel m oving in one direction and the Gospel o f Thomas m o v ­ ing in the other. It explains, finally, those hybrid biography-discourse gospels. On the one hand, the Epistula Apostolorum "mimics a form o f revelation literature which was popular among many gnostics attempting to com bat its opponents with their own theological weapons," as Ron Cam eron put it (132). If, in other words, sarcophobic Christians used discourse gospels, sarcophilic Christians could respond with biography-discourse gospels. On the other hand, the Acts o f John S7-105 had the earthly or biographical Jesus as unreal and docetic, albeit as sym ­ bolically significant, as one could imagine. W hen, therefore, the canon has four examples o f the biography gospel type, it m akes norm ative not only those four but that very type. Biography gospels insist on the utter embodied historicity o f Jesus while discourse gospels find that em pha­ sis radically misplaced. By the way, in case you still find this all v e ry strange, let m e ask you a question. If you w ere guaranteed five minutes w ith Jesu s but had to choose between five from history long ago or five from heaven right now , w hich w ou ld you choose? T H E C A N O N IC A L G O SPE LS AS N O R M A T IV E T Y P E Before proceeding, a short time-out for confession is required. I adm it im m ediately that m y ow n religious sensibilities are irrevocably w ithin sar­ cophilic Christianity rather than within sarcophobic Christianity. I prefer, in other words, biography gospels over against either discourse gospels or biography-

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discourse gospels. But I can make that admission w ithout denying Christian status to sarcophobic Christians, w ithout describing them unfairly or unjustly, and without thinking that persecution is the best form o f persuasion. I w ill also admit that the history o f Christian theology often seems to m e but the long, slow vic­ tory o f sarcophobic o ver sarcophilic sensibility. M y challenge, h ow ever, is a theological one from within canonical normativity. H o w exactly are those fo u r gospels as a single type norm ative fo r Christians who invoke their authority and seek to live within that heritage? It is not just their content that is norm ative but especially their very form. T h ey are not simply four discourses b y the risen Jesus, each giving absolutely orthodox and officially approved doctrines. Such texts, no matter h ow unimpeachable their content, w ere not canonically acceptable, and that decision w as a fateful one for Chris­ tianity’s future and m y present concern with the birth o f Christianity. Each o f those canonical gospels goes back to the historical Jesus o f the late 20s in his Je w ­ ish hom eland, b ut each o f them has that Jesus speak directly to its ow n im m edi­ ate situation and com m unity. In every case, as I noted before, there is a dialectic o f then-and-now, o f then-as-now— that is, o f the historical Jesu s then as the risen Jesus now . It is not the historical Jesus alone then and not the risen Jesu s alone now , but the tw o as one within a contem porary faith. It is alw ays that same pro­ cess, but alw ays w ith slightly or m assively divergent products. Think, fo r exam ­ ple, o f h ow different the A gony in the Garden appears in M ark 14, w hich has no garden, and in Jo h n 18, which has no agony. But still that dialectic o f then and n ow continues to hold. M y proposal is that the canonical gospel type is normative primarily as that dialectical process. Those gospels created an interaction o f histori­ cal Jesu s and risen Jesus, and that interaction must be repeated again and again throughout Christian history. I take the canonical gospels as norm ative m odel for all subsequent Christian discourse— that is, for the dialectic o f Jesus-then as Jesus-now . T h ey are norm a­ tive not only as product (what they do) but even m ore profoundly as process (how they do it). T h ey alw ays go back to the one and only historical Jesus, the Jesu s o f the late 20s in his Jew ish homeland. That one Jesu s m ay be experienced as risen Je su s through divergent modes, through justice and peace, prayer and liturgy, meditation and mysticism , but it must alw ays be that Jesu s and no other. T here is, in other w ords, ever and always only one Jesus. T h e Easter issues o f Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, April 8, 1996, all had cover stories on the historical Jesus. Newsweek had the caption "Rethinking the Resurrection: A N ew Debate A bout the Risen Christ.” It was written across a picture o f Jesu s rising heavenward, arms uplifted, hands facing outward. W hat struck m e im m ediately as strange w as the com plete absence o f

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any w ounds on those clearly visible hands and feet. I failed to realize that they had m istakenly taken Jesus from a transfiguration instead o f a resurrection painting. T here w ere, o f course, no wounds on that Vatican w o rk b y Raphael, because it depicted an event before the death o f Jesus. U.S. News & World Report, on the other hand (no pun intended), had a correct picture. Its cover had the cap­ tion “ In Search o f Jesus: W ho was he? N ew appraisals o f his life and m eaning?” written across Jesus as depicted in a Bellini painting o f the resurrection w ith the w ound in Jesu s' right hand clearly visible. There is, I repeat, ever and always only one Jesus. For Christians that is the historical Jesus as risen Jesus. And the test is this: Does the risen Jesu s still carry the wounds o f crucifixion? In Christian gospel, art, and mysticism, the answ er is clearly yes. But those wounds are the marks o f history, and to understand them you have to know about his death. But to understand the death, y o u have to know about his life. Unless you know otherwise, Jesus might have been a crim i­ nal meeting appropriate sentence, or his executioners might have been savages operating from sheer random brutality. W ith those canonical gospels as inaugu­ ral models and primordial examples, each Christian generation m ust w rite its gospels anew, must first reconstruct its historical Jesus with fullest integrity and then say and live what that reconstruction means for present life in this w orld. History and faith are always a dialectic for sarcophilic Christianity. P u t other­ wise, its insistence on the resurrection o f Jesu s’ body is m y insistence on the per­ manence o f Jesu s’ history. But then, now, and always it is a history seen b y faith.

Our Own Faces in Deep Wells Others taunt m e with having knelt at well-curbs A lw ays w ron g to the light, so never seeing D eeper dow n in the well than where the w ater Gives m e back in a shining surface picture M e m yself in the summer heaven, godlike, Looking out o f a wreath o f fem and cloud puffs. Once, w hen trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Th rough the picture, a something white, uncertain, Som ething m ore o f the depths— and then I lost it. Robert Frost, "For Once, then, Something” (91)

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There is an oft-repeated and rather cheap gibe that historical Jesu s researchers are simply looking dow n a deep w ell and seeing their ow n reflections from below. I call it cheap for three reasons. First, those w ho use it against others sel­ dom apply it to themselves. Second, it is almost impossible to im agine a recon­ struction that could not be dismissed by the assertion o f that gibe. Y our Jesu s is an apocalyptic: you are bem used b y the approaching millennium. Y o u r Jesu s is a healer: you have been hearing Bill M oyers. Y our Jesus is an ecstatic: yo u are inter­ ested in brain chemistry. W hat could anyone ever say that w ould not fall under that ban? Third, those w h o repeat the taunt so readily m ust never have looked dow n a deep w ell or heeded Em ily Dickinson's warning (3.970, no. 1400): W hat m ystery pervades a w e ll!... But nature is a stranger yet; T h e ones that cite her m ost H ave never passed her haunted house, N o r simplified her ghost. Im agine tw o alternative and opposite modes o f historical reconstruction, one an impossible delusion, the other a possible illusion. T h e possible illusion is narcissism. Y o u think yo u are seeing the past or the other w hen all you see is y o u r o w n reflected present. Y ou see only w h at w as there before yo u began. You imprint y o u r ow n present on the past and call it history. Narcissism sees its own face and, ignoring the w ater that show s it up, falls in love w ith itself. It is the first o f the tw in im ages in Frost's poem . It is when, the w ater Gives m e back in a shining surface picture M e m yself in the sum m er heaven, godlike, Looking out o f a w reath o f fern and cloud puffs. T h e impossible delusion is positivism. It imagines that yo u can kn ow the past w ithout any interference from yo u r ow n personal and social situation as knower. Y ou can see, as it w ere, w ithout y o u r ow n eye being involved. Y ou can discern the past once and for all forever and see it pure and uncontaminated by that discernment. Positivism is the delusion that w e can see the w ater without our ow n face being m irrored in it. It thinks w e can see the surface w ithout simul­ taneously seeing our ow n eyes. It is the second o f the twin im ages in Frost's poem . It is w hen, even if only once, uncertainly, possibly, and vaguely,

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I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Th rough the picture, a something white, uncertain, Som ething m ore o f the depths— and then I lost it. But, I w ould ask, i f the poet's face is white, how did it see “ through the pic­ ture” o f itself “ a something white” that was also “beyond the picture” ? Maybe what it saw was its own face so strangely different that it did not recognize it. T h at introduces a third image not given but provoked by Frost's second im age. T here is, therefore, a third alternative, and I'll call it interactivism, w h ich is, incidentally, the w ay I understand postmodernism. T h e past and present m ust interact with one another, each changing and challenging the other, and the ideal is an absolutely fair and equal reaction between one another. B ack to the well: you cannot see the surface without simultaneously seeing, disturbing, and distorting your own face; you cannot see your ow n face w ithout sim ultaneously seeing, disturbing, and distorting the surface. It is the third im age beggin g to be recognized behind the two overt ones in Frost's poem. W hat the poet saw w as his own face so strangely different that he did not recognize it as such. It w as, indeed, “something white” and "something m ore o f the depths.” But it w as not “beyond the picture” or even “ through the picture." It w as the picture itself changed utterly. That is the dialectic o f interactivism and, as distinct from either narcissism or positivism, it is both possible and necessary. T w o exam ples, both review ing classical scholarship, may help as illustrations and warnings. The first example concerns the historical reconstruction o f the Rom an em peror Augustus. Ronald Mellor frames his book on Tacitus w ith these co m ­ ments about four great interpretations o f Rom e's transition from republican to imperial rule: "The greatest Roman historians o f the last tw o centuries— Gibbon, M ommsen, Rostovzteff, and Syme—wrote with passion as they saw connections betw een Rom e and their own times___ Edward Gibbon, a child o f the French Enlightenment which affected his views o f religion, was issued in ‘Bow dlerized’ editions in Victorian England; Theodor Mommsen, the only professional histo­ rian to w in the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote a passionate, m ulti-volum e History o f Rome in which Caesar became the inevitable solution to republican R om e's dilemma as Mommsen him self yearned for a strongman to resolve the chaos o f nineteenth-century Germany; Michael Rostovzteff brought his flight from revolutionary St. Petersburg to bear on his Social and Economic History o f the Roman Empire (1926)— a glorification o f the Rom an municipal bourgeoisie; and Sir Ronald Sym e's The Roman Revolution (1939) looked at the rise o f Augustus through the spectacles o f a liberal w h o saw on his visits to Italy the names and trappings o f Augustan Rom e used b y a new dux, Benito Mussolini, and wished to expose in a very Tacitean w a y the thuggish similarities betw een the tw o regim es” (45,164). In

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all those cases pow erful sociopersonal interactions betw een past and present resulted in tow ering achievements, works w e call classical in both senses o f that term. And, o f course, their multiplicity serves as a corrective each on the other. T h e second example concerns the historical reconstruction o f earliest Chris­ tian art. Thom as M athews discusses ‘h o w the Em peror M ystique cam e to be the controlling theory for explaining the development o f Christian im agery,” and he asserts that "the need to interpret Christ as an em peror tells m ore about the histo­ rians involved than it does about Early Christian art. The formulation o f the the­ ory can be traced to three very bold and original European scholars in the period between the wars; the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, a G erm an Je w o f a well-todo merchant family; the H ungarian archaeologist Andreas Alfóldi, son o f a coun­ try doctor; and art historian André Grabar, a Russian emigré, w hose senatorial family held important posts under the last C z a rs .. . . I f there is a single com m on thread uniting the life and w o rk o f these three great scholars, it is nostalgia for lost empire. T h e three imperial states in which they w ere raised, and which they fought valiantly to defend, they saw crumble ignom iniously in the horrible chaos o f the First W orld W ar and its consequences. The glory o f the czars, the might o f the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian emperors, could never be restored” (i6, 19). M athews judges that interaction o f present and past to have misinterpreted early Christian art and then draws an explicit analogy between his ow n corrective reconstruction and the "quest for the ‘historical’ Jesus, an enterprise that verged on reducing him to the product o f wishful thinking on the part o f his first disci­ ples. Since Christ w rote nothing himself, the historian is necessarily limited to sift­ ing through the distorted impressions o f a circle o f people w h o w ere very deeply affected b y their experience o f him. The Christ o f Early Christian art is quite as elusive as the ‘historical’ Jesus. As in the written sources, so in the visual m onu­ ments Christ has m any guises, depending on w h o is visualizing him. W e are faced, then, w ith the difficult task o f understanding as far as possible the impres­ sion Christ made on people w hen they, for the first time, w ere seeking to repre­ sent him. Hitherto he had existed only in the hearts o f believers, in the visions o f mystics, in the w ords o f preachers; now he has to have a life in stone and paint” (21-22). Historical reconstruction is always interactive o f present and past. Even our best theories and methods are still our best ones. T h ey are all dated and doom ed not just w hen they are w ron g but even (and especially) w hen they are right. T h ey need, w hen anything important is involved, to be done over and over again. T h at does not make history worthless. W e ourselves are also dated and doom ed, but that does not make life worthless. It just-m akes death inevitable. I have tw o corollaries from that understanding o f interactivism. A first corollary concerns the term search or quest. You m ay have noticed that I do not speak o f the search for the historical Jesus or o f the quest for Christian

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origins. T h o se term s seem to indicate a positivistic process in w h ich w e are going to attain an answ er once and for all forever. That is not h ow I n o w im ag­ ine the process. I speak instead o f reconstruction, and that is som ething that m ust be done o ver and over again in different times and different places, by different groups and different communities, and by every generation again and again and again. In order to emphasize that viewpoint, I talk hereafter only o f reconstruct­ ing the historical Jesus as best one can at any given place and time. Recently N. Thom as W right spent very many pages distinguishing three quests for the historical Jesus. The First Quest lasted from Reim arus to Schweitzer, in round numbers from 1700 to 1900. The Second or N e w Q uest w as proposed by Ernst Kasemann in 1953 as a reaction to the bracketing o f the histori­ cal Jesus in the w ork o f his teacher, R udolf Bultmann. But I think it fair to say that no N ew Quest ever took place, no Second Search ever follow ed that m ani­ festo. Wright proposes, however, that many contemporary scholars, including myself, are simply on a “renewed 'N ew Q uest/" W e are, therefore, part o f the discarded past. The Third Quest is actually composed o f about tw en ty scholars, including W right himself. He invented that title ju st for that group because that “is where the real leading edge o f contemporary Jesus-scholarship is to be foun d” (1996:84). Unable to decide whether that cartography is am using im pertinence or annoying arrogance, I limit m yself to tw o b rief comments. Positivist delusions haunt such terms as search or quest. The historical Jesus, like the H o ly G rail, is to be found once and for all forever. That is not h ow I see it. Furtherm ore, I w o n ­ der w h y W right does not simply put people like m yself into a T h ird Q uest and his group into a Fourth Quest. Or, put another w ay, does W right im agine a Fourth Quest for the future, and then a Fifth, and a Sixth, etc., etc., etc.? P osi­ tivist delusion also haunts the term third? In Indo-European folklore, the third time is closure, finish, completion. The hero m ay fail twice but w ill succeed the third time. That happens, unfortunately, only in folklore and fairy-story. A second corollary concerns method. I insist that Jesu s reconstruction, like all such reconstruction, is always a creative interaction o f past and present. But w hat keeps that dialectic o f us and them as even and honest as possible? M ethod, method, and once again method. Method will not guarantee us the truth, b e­ cause nothing can do that. But method, as self-conscious and self-critical as w e can make it, is our only discipline. It cannot ever take us out o f our present skins and bodies, minds and hearts, societies and cultures. But it is our one best hope for honesty. It is the due process o f history. And that brings m e back once again to W right. I think that w e are in agreement on w hat he calls “ critical realism ” and I call "interactivism ,” but w e differ on h ow that concept w orks in practice. M y answ er is by developing a m ethod that protects y o u r subject not from con­ versation but from violation, not from discussion but from disfigurem ent. T h at

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is w hy, for exam ple, I gave my com plete inventory o f the Jesu s tradition broken down in terms o f independent attestation and stratigraphic location as appendix to The Historical Jesus. W right, h ow ever, finds that “ despite the postm odern tone which predominates in the book, the massive inventory o f m aterial is bound to look like a thoroughly m odernist piece o f w ork, appearing to lay firm, alm ost positivist, foundations for the main argument o f the book” (1996:50). A postm od­ ern sensibility— that is, an equal awareness o f y o u r ow n and yo u r subject's his­ toricity— does not preclude but demands attention to method. As due-process keeps the legal interaction o f defense and prosecution fair, so due-m ethod keeps the historical interaction o f past and present honest. But there is not in m y w o rk any presum ption that the historical Jesu s or earliest Christianity is som ething you get once and for all forever. And that is not because Jesu s and Christianity are special or unique. N o past o f continuing importance can ever avoid repeated reconstruction. This, then, is m y challenge, sarcophilic as distinct from sarcophobic Chris­ tianity is a dialectic betw een history and faith. T h at dialectic has its norm ative m odel in the canonical gospel-type and its paradigmatic instances in those four gospel-texts. T h ey show , across the 70s, 80s, and 90s o f that first century, h ow Jesus-then becom es Jesus-now , h ow the historical Jesus becom es the risen Jesus, and how , w hile yo u can have history without faith, you cannot have faith w ith­ out history. In every generation, the historical Jesu s m ust be reconstructed anew, and that reconstruction m ust becom e by faith the face o f G od for here and now . I f that seem s too strange, consider this parallel situation. W ithin Christianity the Bible is the W ord o f God made text, ju st as Jesu s is the W ord o f G od made flesh. It w ould have been quite possible for Christian tradition to have declared som e one, single, given manuscript o f the Bible to be official and canonical. Imagine that had happened, for example, to the Codex V at­ icanus, a fourth-century vellum copy o f 759 leaves, three columns per page, 42 lines to the column. Imagine that had been declared to be the immutable and inspired W ord o f G od w ith its three-column pages manifesting forever the m ys­ tery o f the Trinity. T here might have been discussion on w hat to do about the indignant scribe w h o added in the left-hand margin o f Hebrew s 1:3 this succinct com m ent on an earlier colleague's work: “ Fool and knave, can’t yo u leave the old reading alone, and not alter it” (Metzger 1981:74). But it w ould have made no dif­ ference w hat tattered fragments or total texts survived from earlier times in the Egyptian sands. It w ould have made no difference w hat academic scholars or tex­ tual critics thought w as historically a m ore accurate original text. T h e Codex V at­ icanus w ou ld have been it, once and for all forever. The W ord o f G od made text w ou ld have been safe from the vagaries o f history, the excavations o f archeolo­ gists, and the surprise discoveries o f peasants or shepherds.

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Instead o f that option, I have on m y desk the fourth revised edition o f The Greek New Testament, published by the United Bible Societies in 1993. It gives the closest a com mittee can come to the original text with the alternative readings in footnote apparatus. It grades any disputed reading from A to D "to indicate the relative degree o f certainty in the mind o f the committee for the reading adopted as the text.” Bruce Metzger explains the committee's grading as follow s: "T h e letter {A} signifies that the text is virtually certain, while {B} indicates that there is som e degree o f doubt concerning the reading selected for the text. T h e letter {C} means that there is a considerable degree o f doubt w hether the text o r the apparatus contains the superior reading, while {D } shows that there is a v e ry high degree o f doubt concerning the reading selected for the text. In fact, am on g the {D } decisions sometimes none o f the variant readings com m ended itself as original, and therefore the only recourse was to print the least unsatisfactory reading" (i97i:xxviii). I believe, as a Christian, in the W ord o f God, not in the words o f specific papyri or the votes o f specific committees. But fact and faith, history and theology intertwine together in that process and cannot ev er be totally separated. As with the W ord o f God made text, so also with the W ord o f G o d m ade flesh. Historical reconstruction interweaves with Christian faith, and neither can substitute for the other. I insist, how ever, that it did not have to be that w a y . It is sarcophilic as distinct from sarcophobic Christianity that gave out hostages to history. It is now too late for it to repent, and I, for one, w ould not w an t it to do so. But I also wonder about this: Is the history o f Christianity and especially o f Christian theology the long, slow victory o f sarcophobic over sarcophilic C hris­ tianity?

P A R T II

M e m o ry a n d O ra lity The "G reat Events” o f the past are designated as such by people external to most local societies, and certainly all peasant societies___ Ju st because historians regard N apoleon as w orth rem em bering and discussing, other people are not required to think in the sam e w ay, or, indeed, to com m em orate any Great Events at all. (This is certainly true as far as peasants are concerned, fo r . . . they tend to stress their social identity through images o f resistance to the state, which are peculiarly unlikely to get into Great Events history.) T h ere is a m ore specific reason w h y such choices are important, too: they show that these differ­ ences in com m em orations are internal to communities, and not im posed from outside, w hether b y literature or schooling or the media, w hich w ou ld all have made m em ories m ore hom ogeneous, and w ou ld scarcely have failed to stress the Revolution and Napoleon. This cannot be repeated too often: h ow ever much a novel or a schoolteachers story can affect the content o f a m em ory o f an event held b y an individual or even a social group, it will have m uch less effect on which sorts o f events social groups will characteristically choose to com m em ­ orate, which are linked to deeper patterns o f id en tity.. . . Peasants do not, unfor­ tunately, spend m ost or even m uch o f their time revolting. But revolts are useful for our purposes, if for no other reason than that it is at such times that outside observers (particularly before this century) bother to w rite dow n anything peas­ ants actually say. W hat they say about the past at such times tends to fall into certain broad types. One is the com m em oration o f past local resistance itself, m ost notably resistance against the state (revolts against landlords— w hich w ere an yw ay often sm aller in scale and m ore tem porary— do not seem to produce the same long-term resonance and narrative force in local societies). Another is the rem em brance o f a Golden Age o f ju st royal rule over the country concerned, in the name o f w hich the peasants are resisting present rulers w h o are less just. A third is the m ore legendary nobility . . . which can serve as an im age o f absolute justice, m uch m ore divorced from time and place. A fourth, still m ore distant, is the millenarian im age o f divine justice at the very beginning o f time, set against which no hum an society can ever be w h olly legitimate. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 96,108-109 Parts II and III are a tandem set picking up from Part I and preparing for another tandem set in Parts IV and V . That preceding Part I explained the earli­ est continuation that I intended to reconstruct betw een the historical Jesu s and Christian origins— namely, the continuation o f Jesu s’ com panions from before to after his execution. It also explained the why o f that focus, w h y I considered that

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study w orth undertaking despite all its obvious difficulties. A fter why com es how, but in betw een com es where. How has to do with m ethodology— that is, w ith the logic o f m y method, with the reasons behind m y use o f this rather than that method. But it is where I get m y materials and the type o f materials I get that determ ine m y method. So I m ove from why in Part I through where in Parts II and III to how in Parts IV and V. T h e materials or data appear as either the memories o f oral tradition or the texts o f scribal transmission, and that duality corresponds to m y distinction betw een this Part II and the next Part III. Part II concerns m em ory, orality, and the delicate interaction between orality and literacy in a prem odem society that is millennia away from universal orality in the past, but also millennia aw ay from universal literacy in the future. Part II has four chapters. Chapter 3 looks at recent claims about peasant m em ory and oral transmission in the earliest Jesus tradition and focuses on implicit presuppositions that are neither theoretically justified nor m ethodologi­ cally verified. Chapter 4 considers m em ory itself, especially in terms o f experi­ mental psychology. Is m em ory recollection or reconstruction? Is it based on actual facts, personal desires, or social patterns? Is it most accurate w h en it is most certain, w hen it has visual images to collaborate its recall, w h en it can remem ber more and m ore details to fill in the general scenario? If, in other words, you claim that what Jesus said or did was remembered, w h at th eory o f m em ory do you presuppose? Chapter 5 m oves from m em ory into orality and lit­ eracy based on classical studies from the 1930s. H ow , on the one hand, does the m em ory o f epic poetry w ork for illiterate but traditional bards? H o w does it actually work? H ow , on the other hand, does the m em ory o f short narratives w ork for literate but m odem students? H ow does it actually work? C hapter 6, finally, is a short concluding section that proposes delicate interface rather than yaw ning chasm betw een orality and literacy in societies w here there is only, say, 3 to 5 percent literacy. For, in the w hole history o f the world, there h ave been hum an societies without literacy, but there have been none w ithout orality. T h e choice, therefore, is not between orality or literacy, but betw een orality w ith o u t literacy or orality with literacy.

CHAPTER 3

T H E M Y S T IQ U E OF O RA L T R A D I T I O N Perhaps illiterate people have particularly good m em ories to com pensate for being unable to w rite things down, ju st as the blind are popularly believed to have especially keen ears or sensitive fingers. Such argum ents m ust be re jec ted .. . . And w hile it w ou ld be logically possible to argue that literacy and schooling m ake m em ory w orse, the fact o f the m atter is that they don’t. On the contrary: cross-cultural studies have generally found a positive rela­ tion betw een schooling and m e m o ry .. . . Skilled perform ances b y oral poets are found only in nonliterate societies because the concept o f poetry itself changes w h en literacy a p p ea rs.. . . Literal, verbatim m em ory does exist, nevertheless. It m akes its appearance w henever a perform ance is defined by fidelity to a particular text. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed, pp. 241-242 H ow w ere Jesus materials transmitted in the forty years that elapsed from the death o f Jesus to the writing o f Mark’s gospel in 70

c . e .?

H o w did they continue to

be transmitted thereafter until the canonical foursome became normative within Catholic Christianity after the middle o f the second century? The standard answer is oral tradition, and comparative examples are then cited to affirm its existence and influence, its possibility and accuracy. Here is one recent example o f that answer. “T h e overw helm ing probability is that most o f what Jesu s said, he said not twice but tw o hundred times w ith (o f course) a m yriad o f local variations,” according to N. Thom as W right. That seems quite reasonable and unexception­ able. Therefore, W right continues, “the only thing standing in the w ay o f a strong case for Jesu s’ teaching being passed on effectively in dozens o f streams o f oral tradition is prejudice" (1992:423). He amplifies that theme later b y suggesting that “ this provides a w indow on a w orld o f which, perhaps surprisingly, Crossan says nothing, for all his repeated emphasis on Jesus and his early followers as coming from peasant stock. It is the w orld o f informal but controlled oral tradition-----It enables us to explain, without as yet having recourse to com plex theories either o f synoptic relationships or o f a freely expanding tradition, the w ay in which again and again the story comes out slightly differently, but the sayings remain m ore or less identical___ Ironically, therefore, b y agreeing with Crossan upon

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the vital importance o f setting Jesus in his Mediterranean peasant culture, w e h ave reached a conclusion which radically undermines Crossan's o w n historical reconstruction’ (1996:134-136). If, for example, w e have divergent versions o f an aphorism in the four canonical gospels, it could be explained as four divergent Jesus-tellings o f the same saying. It could, o f course. But it could also arise from a single stream o f dependent and developing tradition— from, in other w ords, M atthew and Luke developing Mark, and John further developing that triple syn­ optic tradition. Nothing at all is achieved by calling that latter suggestion a preju­ dice; and, once the scribal dependence suggestion has been proposed, argued, and accepted by a vast majority o f scholars, opponents cannot simply ignore or deride it. Th ey must take it on frontally and disprove it. Scribal dependence could be wrong, but then so could the opposite explanation o f oral independence. A ny study o f the transition from the historical Jesus to earliest Christianity must, therefore, face this question o f oral tradition, and that is w here I begin this reconstruction. I bring to this question, how ever, certain presuppositions about the distinction between oral tradition, oral transmission, and oral sensibility, which I can best describe initially through autobiographical background.

Tradition, Transmission, Sensibility Oral tradition was a fickle mistress with whom to flirt. But scholars could call in to their help the "fantastic memories” so "w ell attested” o f illiterate people. T h ey felt that a text could remain from one generation to another unaltered, or altered only by inconsequential lapses o f memory. This m yth has rem ain­ ed strong even to the present day. The main points o f confusion in the theory o f those scholars . . . arose from the belief that in oral tradition there is a fixed text which is transmitted unchanged from one generation to another. Albert Bates Lord, The Singer o f Tales, pp. 9-10 W hen I was in gram m ar school, m y family lived in Naas, about tw en ty m iles w est o f Dublin. During the Second W orld W ar petrol was restricted to profes­ sional necessity, so our Vauxhall car spent six years with its wheels rem oved and its axles on upturned butter-boxes in the garage. In those earless days w h en I w as about nine or ten years o f age, m y father and I w ent for long walks along the main Dublin road. He recited poetry to me, and I learned it by heart. It w as not great poetry, but the going price for Kipling’s "Gunga Din”— w hole, entire, and correct b y the end o f the w alk—was sixpence. M y father is gone now ; so is the sixpenny piece, and so is the Naas-Dublin road as once it was. But I still recall large snatches o f that poem , and with its recital come back the houses and fields o f that road, the voice, smile, and walking-stick o f m y father.

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Though the poem stays with m e, w hat I experienced on those w alks w as not oral tradition, h ow ever. It w as only oral transmission. M y father and I both pre­ sumed a written text, a scribal tradition. It w as in a book at hom e, and both our versions w ere certified against that archetype. A ny disputes could be checked against that original, uniform version. The process w as scribal tradition transmit­ ted orally and received aurally. Both o f us operated within scribal, not oral, sensi­ bility. If w e had operated within a scribal register but w ith an oral sensibility, w e would have considered that written version to be ju st another perform ance com ­ parable w ith ou r ow n (and in no w a y norm ative for it). But the w ords on the page controlled absolutely ou r remem brances and our repetitions. It w as scribal tradition transmitted orally and received aurally within a scribal sensibility. W hen I w as eleven m y fam ily m oved to D onegal as m y father becam e manager o f Ballybofey's Hibernian Bank (now gone also). I w en t to a centrally located boarding school, St. Hunan’s College in Letterkenny, w hich had a large com ponent o f native speakers o f Irish. All our classes (except English) w ere in Irish, and nonnative speakers like m yself w ho wanted to im prove our Irish went to certain regions around the w est coast o f Donegal in the sum m ers to live with Irish-speaking families. It w as still possible in those days to find individuals, illit­ erate in both Irish and English, w ho had received orally and passed on orally the ancient epic tales o f Ireland. Such a process was, in the fullest sense o f the word, oral tradition. It w as the tradition repeated in creative perform ance by individu­ als w h o had learned their craft not as students from books but as apprentices from masters. T here w as no single archetypal or uniform version, but a multi­ form or pluriform perform ance from a traditional narrative matrix. M eanwhile, back at school w e learned by heart at least ten lines o f Irish poetry and ten lines o f English poetry or Shakespearean soliloquy for each day's class. M em orization w as the presupposition o f discussion, since w e w ere trained to argue not from the b ook but from w hat w e knew b y heart. W hen w e took the country-wide and government-set intermediate or final high school exams, for instance, w e w ere expected to argue for or against propositions concerning that poetry, "quoting freely" from m em ory. That w as m arvelous education, but it had nothing w hatsoever to do w ith oral tradition. W e gave, in class, the oral rendition o f w hat w e had m em orized from written text, and w e gave, in examination, the scribal rendition o f that sam e memorization. Oral tradition in which the tradition is received orally and transmitted orally (often by illiterates) within the discipline o f creative perform ance is a different world from scribal tradition transmitted orally within the discipline o f exact (as best w e could!) memorization. Th ose experiences left m e w ith a very great respect for oral tradition. W e, after all, traveled to listen to those storytellers; they did not travel to listen to us. But I learned early the difference betw een oral tradition and oral transmission

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and betw een scribal and oral sensibility. I also learned early that tradition is not ju st gossip, rum or, or even mem ory. But terms must be used carefully and exactly. W hat those native Gaelic speakers on D onegal’s Atlantic coast retained and perform ed w as oral tradition. You could call any given enactm ent the oral transmission o f that oral tradition. The poetry I memorized on walks w ith m y father was the oral transmission o f a scribal tradition: he had read and m em orized from a book, he repeated it to me orally, and I m em orized it from his voice. T h e poetry and soliloquies I memorized in high school w ere the scribal transmission o f a scribal tradition. Those native speakers operated w ithin oral tradition, transmission, and sensibility. Neither I, m y father, nor m y teachers did. Correct, for us, was what the book said. Correct, for them, w as h o w the tradi­ tion operated. It is possible, o f course, to imagine som eone operating w ithin a scribal tradition but having an oral sensibility. Such a person w ou ld treat a w rit­ ten version as just another performance o f the poem or story, and, even as they were memorizing or transcribing it, they could perform it anew. Is it correct, then, to describe the earliest transmission o f Jesu s m aterials as oral “ tradition”? H ow exactly did such a tradition work? And, if oral tradition is not the best name for the process, how did any o f the historical Jesu s’ w o rd s and deeds survive into earliest Christianity (if, in fact, they did)?

Evidence of Orality Som e m ore recent scholarship reflects] a w ay o f view ing early Christianity and the gospel traditions that takes it as highly probable that traditions origi­ nally existed in oral form, and the writing dow n o f the synoptic, or canonical gospels, did not exhaust th e m .. . . The problem in m aking such a claim is that it cannot be demonstrated, as likely as it m ay seem. Oral tradition, as real as it m ay have been, is uncontrollable and ephemeral unless it survives to us in written form. Dwight Moody Smith, "The Problem ofjohn and the Synoptics,” pp. 152-153 It is hard for me to imagine m ore confusion and misinformation than accom ­ panies current presuppositions about memory, orality, and literacy in connection w ith the Jesu s traditions and the gospel texts. I choose tw o exam ples from a recent and massive study on The Death o f the Messiah b y Raym ond E. B ro w n to indicate some o f those presuppositions. But first a word o f background. T here are five early versions o f the passion o f Jesus still extant, in the gospels o f M atthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Peter. Those first four have alw ays been

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available in com plete accounts within the N ew Testam ent, but the last one was only discovered in fragm ented papyri from Egypt within the last hundred years. M y examples concern the interaction o f m em ory, orality, and literacy in deter­ mining the relationship b etw een those five texts. T h e first exam ple involves the dependence o f M atthew and Luke on Mark. A large consensus o f gospel scholarship agrees that M atthew and Luke used M ark as one o f their main literary sources and that they did so independently o f one another. In terms o f our but not their w orld, they copied or plagiarized from him. That explains w h y the order o f their accounts follows his sequence o f events and w h y the content o f their accounts develops his version o f events. That hypothesis, in other words, explains w h y, when, and w here they agree together with Mark. But w h at about those places w here they agree together against Mark? W hat about those cases w here M atthew and Luke are copying from M ark but both contain an elem ent not present in Mark? Scholars call those cases the minor agreements o f Matthew and Luke against Mark, and they are an objection (but not an insurmountable one) to that general theory o f M atthean and Lukan depen­ dence on Mark. H ere are tw o instances o f such m inor agreem ents from the account o f Jesu s’ trial before the Je w ish authorities. One instance records w h at happened to Jesus after he w as declared guilty and w as being abused b y those around him: M atth ew 26:67

Lu ke 22:63

M ark 14:65 Som e began to spit on him,

N o w the men w ho w ere

and struck him; and som e

to blindfold him, and to

holdin gjesus began to m ock

slapped him, saying,

strike him, saying to him,

T hen they spat in his face

him and beat him; they also blindfolded him and kept asking him,

"Prophesy to us, yo u Messiah!

"Prophesy!”

"Prophesy!

The guards also took

T hey kept heaping many

him over and beat him.

other insults on him.

W h o is

W h o is it th a t stru ck y o u r

it that stru ck y o u ? ”

M atthew and Luke each make their ow n separate changes on their Markan source, and that represents no theoretical problem. But h ow does one explain those italicized words, representing verbatim the same five w ords in Greek, found in both M atthew and Luke but not in Mark? A nother instance records w hat happened to Peter after his triple denial o f Jesu s as he recalled the prophecy o f Jesus:

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M atth ew 26:75

M ark 14:72

Lu ke 22:61

T h en Peter remembered

T hen Peter remembered

Then Peter rem em bered

w h at Jesu s had said:

that Jesus had said to him,

the w ord o f the Lord, h ow

"Before the cock crows, you

"Before the cock crows twice,

"Before the cock crow s today,

w ill deny me three times.”

you will deny me three times.”

you will deny m e three tim es.”

And he broke down and wept.

A n d he w e n t ou t a n d w e p t

he had said to him,

A n d he w a i t

out a n d

w ep t

bitterly.

bitterly.

Once again, Matthew and Luke each make their ow n separate changes on their Markan source, and that represents no theoretical problem. But h o w does one explain those italicized words found in both Matthew and Luke b ut n ot in Mark? And once again w e are dealing with verbatim the sam e five w o rd s in Greek. Even that w ord wept, which is in all three texts, has the sam e case in Matthew and Luke but a different one in Mark. M y present interest is not in the solution to the m inor-agreem ents problem in general (or even to those instances in particular). I ask only w h eth er oral m em ory has anything to do with solving the problem, and, m ore im portant, whether claiming such a solution betrays a misunderstanding o f m em ory, orality, and literacy. In The Death o f the Messiah, Brown solved those preceding cases by proposing oral tradition. Matthew and Luke, in other words, knew not only M ark’s written text (which they had in front o f them) but also an oral tradition o f the sam e events— a tradition that contained the italicized words (44-45, 784, 857). T h u s the solution to “W ho is it that struck you?” is “ the oral approach . . . [as] the key to important agreements between Matt and Luke w ho scarcely w orked on texts totally isolated from the w ay these stories continued to be narrated orally am on g Christians” (579)- And that is also the solution to "And he w ent out and w ept bit­ terly,” because “ even after drawing upon Mark, in a popular narrative like this which w as surely told and retold, both evangelists w ere influenced b y oral tradi­ tion, and in that tradition an emotional phrase like this w as already fixed” (609, 611 note 43). This presumes that oral versions o f an event (if such existed) w ere so syntactically fixed that they could override the syntactically fixed written versions. It presumes, in other words, that those oral versions w ere so verbally precise that they could add a five-word verbatim sequence at one point in a scribally copied version without otherwise disturbing its original content. I find that proposal very unlikely for two reasons, which I give here as theses to be developed in w hat follows. First, m em ory is creatively reproductive rather than accurately recollective. Second, orality is structural rather than syntactical. Apart from short items that are retained magically, ritually, or m etrically verb a­ tim, it rem em bers gist, outline, and interaction o f elements rather than detail,

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particular, and precision o f sequence. "E ven in cultures which k n o w and depend on writing but retain a living contact w ith pristine orality, that is, retain a high oral residue, ritual utterance itself is often not typically verbatim /' as W alter Ong noted. "T h e early Christian Church remem bered, in pretextual, oral form , even in her textualized rituals [words o f the Last Supper], and even at those very points w here she w as com m anded to rem em ber most assiduously" (65). T h at is a very striking example: the w ords o f eucharistic institution from the Last Supper are not cited w ord-for-word the sam e within the N ew Testam ent itself. All o f this w ill require m uch m ore explanation in w h at follow s. But, for now, 1 ask, On w hat general theories or empirical studies o f oral m em ory are Brow n’s conclusions based? On w hat general theories or em pirical studies o f the interaction betw een orality and literacy are Brow n’s conclusions based? W here did they com e from? T h e second exam ple intensifies those questions. It involves the dependence o f the Gospel o f Peter (GPet in the quotes that follow) on the canonical or N ew Testam ent gospels as proposed, once again, by Brow n (1994). I return to this sub­ ject in Chapter 25, but it is o f such importance that I cite four different assertions o f it here. A first exam ple: " G P et. . . draws on the canonical Gospels (not neces­ sarily from their written texts but often from memories preserved through their having been heard and recounted orally)" (1001). A second example: " GPet m ay have heard a reading o f M att or o f M ark and have written from m em ory o f that oral com m unication rather than from a written copy" (1057). A third example: “ GPet is best explained in terms o f the author's know ing the canonical Gospels (perhaps b y distant m em ory o f having heard them)" (1306). A fourth example: "GPet had [no] written Gospel before him, although he w as familiar w ith Matt because he had read it carefully in the past and/or had heard it read several times in com m unity w orship on the Lord's D ay, so that it gave the dominant shaping to his thought. M ost likely he had heard people speak w h o w ere familiar with the Gospels o f Luke and Joh n— perhaps traveling preachers w h o rephrased salient stories— so that he knew som e o f their contents but had little idea o f their stru ctu re.. . . I see no com pelling reason to think that the author o f GPet w as directly influenced b y M a r k .. . . Intermingled in the GPet author's mind w ere also popular tales about incidents in the passion, the very type o f popular material that M att had tapped in com posing his Gospel at an earlier period" (1334- 1335). A fifth and final example: " GPet . . . w as not produced at a desk by som eone w ith written sources propped up before him but b y som eone w ith a m em ory o f w h at he had read and heard (canonical and noncanonical) to which he contributed imagination and a sense o f drama" (1334-1336). I have argued against this sort o f interpretation in earlier books (1988,1995)* and, for now , I wish only to emphasize its presuppositions about m em ory,

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orality, and literacy. It claims that, having heard or read the gospels o f M atthew , Luke, and John, but w orking from “distant m em ory" rather than direct scribal copying, the author o f the Gospel o f Peter produced the text w e discovered so ve ry recently. In an earlier formulation o f that position, Brown was quite aw are o f the problem s it might raise. “ [T]he phenomena visible in GP [the Gospel o f Peter] seem to demand . . . oral dependence o f GP on som e or all o f the canonical G o sp e ls.. . . If the objection is raised that this introduces the uncontrollable into the discussion o f dependence, so be it. T o o often scholars transfer their desk situ­ ation w ith Gospel copies propped up before them into the ancient church” (1987:335). That position— that the author o f the Gospel o f Peter w as dependent on the canonical gospels, but only from “ distant m em ory” — is not, h ow ever, “ uncontrollable.” You can still ask questions. W hat theory o f m em ory, fo r exam ­ ple, lies behind that position? M em ory is often impossible to predict beforehand but usually quite possible to explain afterward. Since w e have the texts o f Matthew, Luke, and Joh n available to us, w e should be able to explain h o w the Gospel o f Peter remembered as it did. W hy, then— at least in general— did it retain this, omit that, and change something else? An example m ay clarify m y objection. During Senate W atergate hearings in 1973 , John Dean testified that he had met Herbert Kalmbach in the coffee shop o f

the M ayflower Hotel in Washington, D .C., and thence gone directly to his room upstairs. But the hotel register did not record Kalmbach’s presence on the day in question. Maybe, Dean responded, he used a false name? But, as it turned out, Kalmbach was registered that day at the Statler Hilton Hotel in W ashington, and it had a coffee shop called the M ayflower Doughnut Coffee Shop (Loftus and D oyle 30). Although w e m ay not always be able to explain the vagaries o f m em ­ ory so neatly as in that case, w e must be ready to offer some explanation fo r the Gospel o f Peter’s som ewhat strange and even perverse m em ory o f those passion narratives heard or read in the past. I recall this com ment from Jam es Fentress and Chris W ickham's Social Memory: "M emories have their ow n specific gram ­ mar, and can (must) be analysed as narratives; but they also have functions, and can (must) also be analysed in a functionalist manner, as guides, w h eth er uniform o r contradictory, to social identity" (88). What, then, is the logical coherence, n ar­ rative gram m ar, and social function o f Peter’s m em ory in Brow n’s hypothesis? Brow n compounds that difficulty when he offers the follow in g "con tem p o ­ rary com parison” in support o f his theory about the origins o f the passion story in the Gospel o f Peter. "L et m e suppose that w e selected in our o w n century som e Christians w h o had read or studied Matt in Sunday school or church education classes years ago but in the interim had not been reading their N T . Y et they had heard the canonical passion narratives read in church liturgies. Also th ey had

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seen a passion play or dramatization in the cinema, on T V , or on the stage, or heard one on the radio; and they had attended a church service w h ere preachers w ere using imagination to fill in PN [passion narrative] lacunae and w ere com ­ bining various Gospel passages, e.g., a G ood Friday three-hours or Seven-LastW ords service. If w e asked this select group o f Christians to recount the passion I am certain that they w ould have an idea o f the general outline, but not necessar­ ily be able to preserve the proper sequence o f any particular G o s p e l.. . . T h ey would rem em ber som e catch phrases . . . one or tw o o f his sayings ('w ords') on the cross . . . the m ore vivid Gospel episodes . . . characters like Pilate, Herod, and the high priest.. . . T h ere w ould be a tendency to portray m ore hostiley the enemies o f J e s u s . . . . And amid the remem brances o f the passion from the G os­ pels there w ou ld be an adm ixture o f details and episodes not in the Go sp e l s . . . . In other words, w e w ould get from our test group o f Christians m odem parallels to GPet” (1336). In other words, the Gospel o f Peter's rem em brance o f things past w ould be exactly like that o f any ordinary group o f Christians chosen m ore or less at random and asked to recall the passion narrative. That assertion cries out for experimental testing. As a minim al but unscien­ tific test, w rite out you r ow n rem em brance o f the passion story and see if it reads at all like the Gospel o f Peter. As a m aximal but still unscientific test, I once asked m y undergraduates in a general-education class at DePaul University to w rite m e their recollections o fje s u s ’ passion story, including the arrest, trial, exe­ cution, and burial. I told them that it w as an experiment that I w ould explain m ore fully after they had com pleted it. T hey w ere prom ised five final-grade points no m atter w hat they w rote but w ere asked to guarantee m e in writing that they w ould not ask anyone for help or look up any biblical sources. T h ey w ere sim ply to w rite m e that story as they rem em bered it. I received about thirty-two summaries. There w ere some rather amusing details. Quite a few spoke about "Pontius Pilot," and one mentioned "the trader Judas." One student remembered "something about Jesus descending into hell to check it out,” and another said that, in the Garden o f Gethsemane, Jesus asked God “if there was any other w a y to go about his pretty morbid situation. The answer by Almighty God was, nope.” There w ere also a few understandable transpositions. One said that the dyingjesus "told Peter (?) to be a son to his mother (Mary)," and another said that “ M ary cleaned the body and wrapped it in clean linens.” Here is one complete example, chosen both for brevity and some interesting details: E ven though I have been educated at a Catholic Gram m ar School, High School, and now College, I can honestly say I do not rem em ber much. I will though try to recall the Arrest, Trial, Execution, and Burial o f Jesu s in as m uch detail as possible.

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W hat I do rem em ber about the Arrest o f Jesus is that Ju das betrayed Jesu s. Judas w as one o f Jesu s' disciples and betrayed him anyw ay. H e cam e to a tow n one day where Jesus was preaching and healing people and arrested him in front o f the w hole crowd. Judas and som e m en captured Jesu s and took him aw ay to what is known as the trial. T h e Trial o f Jesus was quite short from what I rem em ber. T h e y took Jesu s into a room and questioned him about his identity. Som e priest asked Jesu s if he really w as the Son o f God, and Jesus replied “yes" and that did it. T h e crowd was shouting “crucify him ", they thought he w as an im postor. Their decision was to kill him which led to the Execution o fjesu s. I remember the Execution ofjesus as being very sad. I was taught that Jesu s was stripped o f his clothes, and hung on a cross with nails pounded through his hands and his feet. Also, they placed a crown o f thorns on his head and beat him. I do not remember who tortured him, but I do remem ber that he w as horribly abused. They did this in order to see if God would rescue his Son. One o f Jesus' disciples had buried him in a tomb. T h e people in the to w n had guards watching the tomb, because Jesus proclaimed that he w o u ld rise from the dead. Sure enough he did rise from the dead and the w h o le to w n was shaken up. Not many believed he was the Son o f God, until now . Neither in that summary nor in any other one did anybody com e up w ith anything even remotely resembling the passion version o f the Gospel o f Peter. N obody said anything about a crucifixion under H erod Antipas rather than Pontius Pilate or about one conducted by Jew ish people rather than R o m an sol­ diers. And nobody said anything about a resurrection taking place clearly and visibly before Jew ish authorities and Rom an soldiers. I would, in fact, challenge Brow n to produce any such contemporary remembrances o f the passion as he proposed to explain the strange memories in the Gospel o f Peter. And that brings m e back to m y core objection: W hat theory o f m em ory or rem em brance under­ girds those claims by Brown? Put another way, how should they be tested? The answer is very obvious, but it involves com bining social-scientific criticism with older methods such as historical and literary criticism in studying biblical texts. That is the only w ay to discipline claims about the intersection o f m em ory, orality, and literacy based on assumed com m on sense, personal intu­ ition, or hypothesis unaccompanied by either theoretical foundation o r experi­ m ental confirmation. W hat, in other words, do w e leam about the intersection o f m em ory, orality, and literacy from oral fieldworkers operating inductively, o r from social psychologists operating experimentally? It is time to confront the m ystique o f the oral Jesu s tradition with som e hard and inductive data fro m checked experience and controlled experiment.

CHAPTER 4

DOES M E M O R Y R EM EM BE R? Experiments have show n that simply repeating a false statem ent o ver and over leads people to believe that it is true. Likewise, w hen w e repeatedly think or talk about a past experience, w e tend to becom e increasingly confi­ dent that w e are recalling it accurately. Som etim es w e are accurate w hen w e recount frequently discussed experiences. But w e are also likely to feel m ore confident about frequently rehearsed experiences that w e rem em ber inaccu­ rately. Retrieving an experience repeatedly can make us feel certain that w e are correct w hen w e are plainly w rong. The tenuous correlation betw een a person’s accuracy and confidence is especially relevant to eyewitness testi­ m ony. W itnesses w h o rehearse their testim ony again and again in inter­ view s w ith police officers and attorneys m ay becom e extrem ely confident about w h at they say— even w hen they are incorrect. This consequence o f rehearsal is especially important because num erous studies have show n that juries are pow erfully influenced by confident eyewitnesses. Daniel L. Schacter, Searchingfor Memory, p. in Alm ost everything that com m on sense tells us about m em ory is w rong. And recently in North A m erica ruined reputations, shattered lives, and destroyed families have been the price o f that com m on sense. N ow here has our m isunder­ standing o f m em ory been so clearly and terribly demonstrated as in w hat w e now call "false m em ory syndrom e” but should alw ays have know n as "ordinary m em ory syndrom e.” M em ory is as m uch or m ore creative reconstruction as accurate recollection, and, unfortunately, it is often impossible to tell w here one ends and the other begins. W e usually w o rk from either or both w ith the same serene and implacable confidence. Com m on sense tells us that, apart from deliberate lying, eyewitnesses are the best p ro of o f guilt; and the m ore closely involved they are, the better their witness. It tells us that traumatic events, and especially those o f maximum personal involve­ ment, are hardest to forget, are most indelibly recorded in mem ory. It tells us that everything is recorded somewhere in m em ory even though w e m ay not be able to find it easily or ever. Here, then, are three situations o f m em ory at work, given to offset com m on sense’s confidence. Th ey are all derived from sources cited or exper­ iments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, a professor o f psychology at the University o f Washington and an expert witness in court cases on the dangerous deceits and

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confident inaccuracies o f memory. M y point in what follows is not that w e rem em ­ ber som e things and forget other things, or that w e remember the important things and forget the unimportant things, or that w e remember the main events and fo r­ get the specific details, or that w e remember the core but forget the periphery (w ho determines which is which?). Those features o f m emory are understood in theory i f not always properly assessed in practice. M y point is how much fact and fiction, m em ory and fantasy, recollection and fabrication are intertwined in rem em bering. And h ow nobody, including ourselves, can be absolutely certain which is which, apart from independent and documented verification. Not even w hen w e ourselves are remembering about ourselves.

Fact Becomes Non-Fact The laboratory evidence makes it plain that emotion aids m em o ry for som e sorts o f material within an event, but undermines m em ory fo r other sorts o f material. Daniel Reisberg and Friderike Heuer, in Affect and Accuracy in Recall, p. 183 The first situation o f m em ory that w e will address involves the m ove from fact to non-fact. It is a process w e all know about but whose theoretical implications w e seldom face. W e remember an event and mistake the details. It happens all the time. But w e may recite those details just as securely as w e record the event. C a sei. Jack Hamilton was pitching for the California Angels against T o n y Conigliaro o f the Boston Red Sox on August 18, 1967, in Fenway Park. A t the age o f twenty, some three years before that game, Conigliaro led the American League w ith thirty-two homers. At twenty-two he was the youngest batter to reach one hun­ dred homers. But at twenty-three he was hit by a first-pitch fastball from Ham ilton that crushed the left side o f his face, fractured his cheekbone, dislocated his ja w , and so damaged his vision that it eventually terminated his career. It w as a Friday-night game, the first o f four in the Angels’ last visit to Boston for that season. Conigliaro was batting sixth in the Red Sox lineup and it was the fourth inning, no score, tw o out, nobody on. W hen Tony Conigliaro died o f kidney failure in 1990 after roundthe-clock nursing care since a heart attack in 1982, D ave Anderson o f the New York Times interviewed Jack Hamilton about that fateful pitch (Tuesday, Feb. 27; p. B9). Hamilton remembered it as a day game because "I tried to go see him in the hospi­ tal late that afternoon or early that evening but they were just letting the fam ily in." H e also remem bered his manager leaving it up to him whether to accom pany the team for its next series in Boston that same season. (He said he went.) A nd he remembered that "it w as the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score w as

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2-i, and he w as the eighth hitter in their batting order. W ith the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” There is, o f course, no question about the fact o f that accident. But, even though Ham ilton admitted that "I'v e had to live with it; I think about it a lot,” he got five details w ron g in his recollection o f w hat happened. It w as a night not a day game; it w as the A ngels’ last time in Boston that season; the batter w as sixth not eighth in the lineup; the score w as o-o not 2 -1; and it w as the fourth not the sixth inning. A ll o f those are, o f course, very m inor and quite typical m em ory mistakes. But notice three features o f that example. E ven (or especially) in such a traumatic experience, the details are not protected b y the indelible nature o f the event itself. Further, there is no clear distinction in Ham ilton’s m em ory betw een correct and false details, even though, in this case, w e have the independent abil­ ity to check and make that distinction for ourselves. Finally, there m ay be a logic to those mistakes in m em ory. Ham ilton denied m otivation tw ice in the inter­ view: “ I know in m y heart I w asn’t trying to hit him” and “ I had no reason to throw at him .” In general, his m em ory mistakes tended to support those claims, exonerating him from any suspicion o f malice rather than accident. Hamilton also rem em bered details that shifted blam e elsewhere: "H e’d been hit a lot o f times,” Ham ilton said. "H e crow ded the plate.” As Ham ilton rem em bered and “ had to live w ith it,” C onigliaro’s injury and his ow n innocence fused not ju st to recollect the event accurately but to repro­ duce the event appropriately. "T h e general principle," as Daniel Schacter wrote recently, "that m em ories are not simply activated pictures in the mind but com ­ plex constructions built from multiple contributions . . . also applies to em otion­ ally traumatic m em ories” (209). Case 2. People, w e are told, can recall with great accuracy w here they w ere and w hat they w ere doing w hen they first heard the new s o f President Kennedy’s assassination on N ovem ber 22, 1963, or the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion on Jan uary 28, 1986. Those cases enlarge that individual m em ory o f a traumatic pitching accident to a general rem em brance o f a traumatic national disaster. In 1977 tw o experimental psychologists, Roger Brow n and Jam es Kulik o f Harvard

University, coined the term "flashbulb m em ories” for recollections o f "the cir­ cumstances in w hich one first learned o f a very surprising and consequential (or em otionally arousing) event” (73). A flashbulb m em ory is “ very like a photo­ graph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each o f us found him­ se lf w hen the flashbulb w as fired” (74) and is “fixed for a very long time, and con­ ceivably perm anently, varying in com plexity w ith consequentiality but, once created, alw ays there, and in need o f no further strengthening” (85). T h ey even claim ed a special biological mechanism for the specially vivid and detailed clarity

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o f such specially imprinted memories. Thus, for example, thirteen years after President Kennedy's assassination, only i percent o f their respondents had for­ gotten the circumstances in which they first heard about it. U nfortunately, h o w ­ ever, there w as no w a y to test the detailed accuracy (as distinct from the detailed im agery) o f those memories. No baseline o f m em ory had been im m ediately established against which later memories could be tested for inconsistency. T h e m orning after the Challenger explosion, the 106 students in P sychology io i

("Personality Developm ent” ) at Em ory University filled out questionnaires

on h ow they had first heard o f the disaster. That established a baseline fo r their m em ories within twenty-four hours o f the event itself in Jan u ary o f 1986. T h en , in October o f 1988, the forty-four o f 106 students still at E m ory w e re reques­ tioned (only 25 percent remembered the original questionnaire!) and their tw o answers compared. Finally, in March o f 1989, follow-up interview s w e re given to the forty students willing to participate in the final phase o f the experim ent. Here is one example o f two questionnaire answers from the sam e subject: Report o f M em ory

R ep ort o f M em o ry

A fter 24 hours (Ja n . 1986)

After 2 V i years (Oct. 1988)

I was in m y religion class and some people

W hen I first heard about the explosion 1 w as

walked in and started talking about [it]. I

sitting in m y freshman dorm room w ith m y

didn’t know any details except that it had

room m ate and w e w ere w atching T V . It cam e

exploded and the schoolteacher's students

on a news flash and w e w ere both totally

had all been watching which I thought was

shocked. I was really upset and I w en t upstairs

so sad. Then after class I went to m y room

to talk to a friend o f mine and then I called

and watched the T V program talking about

m y parents.

it and I got all the details from that.

T h at case, as the researchers explain, was not unusual: "[N ]one o f the endur­ ing m em ories was entirely correct, and . . . m any w ere at least as w id e o f the m a r k . . . . [TJhose questionnaires revealed a high incidence o f substantial errors” (Neisser and Harsch 9, 12.). One other student, for example, w h o later recalled hearing the news from a girl who ran screaming dow n her dorm corridor, had actually heard it in the cafeteria and been too sick to finish her lunch. A n oth er student later thought she had been at hom e with her parents w h en it happened, although she had actually been on campus. W hen those second versions w ere compared w ith the first ones fo r accuracy and graded on a 0-7 scale for m ajor (location, activity, informant) and m in or (time, others) attributes o f the event, "the mean was 2.95, out o f a possible 7. E leven subjects (25%) w ere w ron g about everything and scored 0. T w en ty-tw o o f them (50%) scored 2 or less; this means that i f they w ere right on one m ajo r attribute, they w ere w ron g on both o f the others. Only three subjects (7%) achieved the

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maximum possible score o f 7; even in these cases there w ere m inor discrepancies (e.g., about the time o f the event) betw een the recall and the original report. W hat m akes these lo w scores interesting is the high degree o f confidence that accompanied m any o f them ” (18). Confidence in the inaccuracy is surely much m ore disquieting than the inac­ curacy itself, and the visual vividness w ith which the inaccuracy w as recalled w as even m ore disquieting. T h e m ean for accuracy w as 2.95 out o f 7, as I noted; the mean for confidence w as 4 .17 out o f 5, and the mean for “ visual vividness” was 5.35 out o f 7! In the instance given above, for example, the subject rated the confi­

dence o f her 1988 m em ory at a 5 ("absolutely certain” ) for location, activity, infor­ mant, others and at a 4 for time (2:00 or 3:00

p . m .,

rather than 11:39

a . m . e s t ).

Its

actual rating w as 0 on all counts. In the follow-up interviews after the twin questionnaires had been compared, the researchers made another significant discovery. The subjects' m em ories for their second-version accounts remained "rem arkably consistent” betw een Octo­ ber o f 1988 and M arch o f 1989, and w hen the researchers tried to help the subjects recover their first-version accounts, they found that "none o f [their] procedures had any effect at all” (Neisser and Harsch 13). Even w hen subjects w ere shown their ow n original reports, they never "even pretended that they n ow recalled what w as stated on the original record. On the contrary, they kept saying, 'I mean, like I told you, I have no recollection o f it at all' or ‘I still think o f it as the other w ay around.’ As far as w e can tell, the original memories are ju st gone” (21). Flashbulbs illuminate but also blind: at least in this one case w here checking was possible, neither visual vividness nor confident assertion bore any strong relation­ ship to accuracy.

Fiction Becomes Fact A healthy distrust o f one's m em ory, and o f m em ory in general, is not a bad idea. W hen all is said and done, m em ory is selective; the m em ory machine is selective about w hat gets in and selective about h ow it changes over t i m e . . . . W e seem to have been purposely constructed with a mechanism for erasing the tape o f our m em ory, or at least bending the m em ory tape, so that w e can live and function w ithout being haunted by the p a s t . . . . The malleability o f hum an m em ory represents a phenom enon that is at once perplexing and vexing. It means that our past might not be exactly as w e rem em ber it. T h e very nature o f truth and o f certainty is shaken. It is m ore com forting for us to believe that som ew here within our brain, h ow ever well hidden, rests a bedrock o f m em ory that absolutely corresponds w ith events that have passed. Unfortunately, w e are simply not designed that w ay. Elizabeth F. Loftus, Memory, pp. 147,190

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T h e next situation involves the m ove from fiction to fact. In the exam ples cited for the preceding situation, the core phenomenon was alw ays factually cer­ tain. Ham ilton struck Conigliaro and effectively terminated his career. President Kennedy died, the Challenger exploded, and people heard about those events. T h e details got lost and w ere replaced by mistakes. Confidence exuded illegiti­ m ately from core to periphery. But at least the central events actually to o k place and w ere remembered. In the following examples, how ever, a fictional story is transmuted b y m em ory into a factual one. C asei. There is a very famous footnote in one o f Jean Piaget's books on childhood. Piaget is discussing w h y w e have no memories o f our very earliest years, and in that context tells the following story: “ There is also the question o f m em ories which depend on other people. For example, one o f m y first m em ories w o u ld date, if it w ere true, from m y second year. I can still see, m ost clearly, the fo llo w ­ ing scene, in which I believed until 1 was about fifteen. I w as sitting in m y pram , which m y nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, w hen a m an tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me while m y nurse b ravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policem an w ith a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the w hole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. W h en I w as about fifteen, m y parents received a letter from m y form er nurse saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Arm y. She wanted to confess h er past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given as a rew ard on this occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, m u st have heard, as a child, the account o f this story, which m y parents believed, and p ro ­ jected into the past in the form o f a visual m em ory, which w as a m e m o ry o f a m em ory, but false. M any real memories are doubtless o f the sam e order” (187-188 note 1). Notice that last bit: reconstruction, visualization, and even n ew ly "rem em bered” details do not guarantee accuracy. Lie had becom e m em ­ ory; fiction had becom e fact. Case 2. A scene from the 1944 m ovie A Wing and a Prayer focused on the three-m an crew o f a navy torpedo bom ber in the South Pacific. As the crippled plane plunged dow nw ard and the gunner prepared to parachute, the pilot said to his w ounded and imm obilized radioman, “ W e’ll take this ride together." In a byline from “A Flying Fortress Base, England, Feb. 1 , 1944/' Ja c k T ait recorded a similar story in the New York Herald Tribune, but now it was one gunner w h o stayed w ith another trapped gunner: "Take it easy, w e ’ll take this ride together.” H e adm it­ ted that he could not verify the story except as one “ circulating at this base that

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has almost becom e a legend.” T h at qualification w as om itted w hen the Reader's Digest condensed the story in its issue o f the follow ing April. Ronald Reagan told that story as an historical fact during his 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns and then repeated it, on D ecem ber 12,19 83, to the annual convention o f the Congressional M edal o f H onor Society in N e w Y ork City. T h e story involved the pilot and ball-turret gunner o f a B-17 o ver the English Chan­ nel: “ He took the b o y's hand and said, ‘N ever mind, son, w e 'll ride it down together.' Congressional M edal o f H onor, posthum ously aw arded.” That last point, how ever, w as open to verification, and w hen Lars-Erik Nelson, W ashington bureau chief o f the New York Daily News, checked the 434 Medal o f H onor citations from W orld W ar II, he found no such act o f heroism recorded anywhere. Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes, w hen questioned about the story’s accuracy, said, “ If you tell the same story five times, it's true.” President Reagan, w h o had seen A Wing and a Prayer and w as a regular follow er o f Reader's Digest, claimed that he recalled “ reading a citation” recom m ending a medal for such a heroic act while he w as him self in the arm y (Cannon 58-60). It is unnecessary to claim that Reagan could not tell fiction from fact or pro­ paganda from history. W hat happened in his m em ory w as not as unusual as w e might like to think. Fiction had becom e fact and w as thereafter impervious to criticism. W ho could prove there had been no such citation recalled from Reagan's arm y days? But, on the other hand, w h o believes there was one?

Non-Fact Becomes Fact Could it be that Eileen's m em ory [allegedly repressed for twenty years, o f her father, G eorge Franklin, having murdered her best friend Susan Nason in Foster City, near San Francisco, on September 22,1969] was put together by an overactive, fantasy-prone imagination, w ith bits and pieces o f the fac­ tual story supplied by new spaper reports, television accounts, and num erous conversations that took place o ver the years? Elizabeth F. Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth o f Repressed Memory, p. 93 This third situation involves the m ove from non-fact to fact. It concerns not invented details o f an event but the invention o f an event itself. It is clearly the m ost disquieting o f the three instances, but it does no m ore than bring those pre­ ceding ones to their logical conclusion. C a sei. Elizabeth Loftus describes another psychologist’s experiment on rem em ber­ ing classmates from high school— an experiment that continued for m any ses­ sions o ver days and even months. "T h e longer they tried to rem em ber, the m ore

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nam es they came up with. The graph opposite shows one person’s progress at rem em bering her classmates” (1980:130). That graph plotted the “n u m b er o f recall sessions” (=10) against the "num ber o f [correct] nam es recalled” (=220). T h at is extrem ely impressive: 220 correct names out o f a possible 600, after ten hours o f trying. But the graph also showed the number o f "fabrications” (=100). "T h e subject w ho kept recalling m ore names with each attem pt also produced m ore false constructions or fabrications. M any times the fabrication w as the nam e o f an actual person, but from a different class or different part o f the w om an’s life. A substantial number o f the names people rem em bered w e re fab­ rications. In this study, by the tenth hour o f recall almost h alf o f the n ew ly gen­ erated names were false” (1980:133). In a controlled experiment such as this, w ith a documented database, it was possible, o f course, to verify m em o ry and to record 220 right and 100 w rong out o f 600. In ordinary life, h ow ever, such fabri­ cations are non-facts that easily became facts. Casez. Loftus also describes an experiment o f her own— one that she devised to assess the possibility o f creating in children a whole, traumatic, false m em o ry and having it taken thereafter as fact. T o avoid any ethical im propriety, the trau­ matic incident had to be tem porary and have a happy ending: “W ou ld it b e pos­ sible to make someone believe that they w ere lost in a shopping m all as a child when, in fact, they had never been lost in a shopping mall?” (Loftus and K etcham 1994:96). The experiment, which w as but a preliminary probe for a m ore scientif­ ically controlled one to follow, involved five people, aged from eight to fortytw o, w ho were told by a family mem ber that they had been lost at around five or six years o f age in some large building complex. In all cases the false m em o ry w as accepted as true and embellished immediately with n ew ly invented details. “ T h e subjects’ willingness to expand on the m em ory and provide details that w ere not even hinted at in the initial suggestion seemed to indicate that the m em ory was very real indeed” (99). One example will suffice. A n older brother presented his fourteen-year-old sibling w ith a single­ paragraph description o f four childhood events, three true and one false. H e w as asked to w rite about all four events every day for five days and record anything he could rem em ber about each. I f he could not rem em ber, he w as sim ply to record that fact. Here is the false m em ory followed by the b oy’s com m ents on it fo r each o f the five days: It w as 1981 or 1982. I rem em ber that Chris w as five. W e had gone shopping at the University City shopping mall in Spokane. After som e panic, w e found Chris being led dow n the mall by a tall, oldish man (I think he w as w earin g a flannel shirt). Chris was crying and holding the m an’s hand. T h e m an

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explained that he had found Chris w alking around crying his eyes out ju st a few moments before and w as trying to help him find his parents. Day 1: I rem em ber a little bit about that man. I rem em ber thinking, "W ow ! H e’s really cool!” Day 2: That day I w as so scared that I w ould never see m y fam ily again. I knew that I w as in trouble. D ay3: I rem em ber M om telling m e never to do that again. Day 4: I also rem em ber that old m an’s shirt. D a y y I sort o f rem em ber the stores. Chris also recalled a conversation w ith the man— "I rem em ber the m an ask­ ing me i f I w as lost”— and rem em bered that he had had balding hair and glasses. Chris freely em bellished his m em ory o f the false event (even though, about one o f the true events, he kept saying for five days, "I still can’t rem em ber” ). Chris’s mother, on the other hand, consistently maintained over the five days that she could not recall the event. On the fifth day, for example, she said, “ For som e rea­ son I feel guilty about this, that I can’t rem em ber” (97-99).

Memory Against Mystique Studies o f the Jesu s tradition within the N ew Testam ent, which spans decades only and not generations and which is the cherished property o f only a m inority . . . w ould . . . fall within the realm o f oral testimony and not o f oral tradition. 0 ivind Andersen, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, p. 17I

I do not suggest that w e never rem em ber anything correctly. That w ould be absurd. N either do I suggest that m em ory is but another name for imagination, or that w e make it all up under the influence o f suggestion and society. That w ou ld also be absurd. But all those preceding cases serve, first, to mitigate the serene com placency o f com m on sense about m em ory and, second, to w arn us that, w hile w e do certainly rem em ber, w e rem em ber by a reconstructive process. T h at reconstructive process mixes recollected facts from an actual hap­ pening with ones seen, heard, or im agined from similar happenings. T h at recon­ structive process recalls gist rather than detail, core rather than periphery— and som ebody m ust then decide which is which. (In an eyewitness identification o f a m urderer, for example, is a beard gist or detail, core or periphery?) That recon­ structive process often claims equal accuracy and veracity for w hat w e actually recall and fo r w h at w e creatively invent. But w h at is most important for here and n ow is to place this chapter on

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m em ory, on w h at experimental psychology can show and cognitive n eu ro ­ science can explain, in tension with C hapters, "Th e Mystique o f Oral T radition .” Recall B row n’s use o f oral tradition to explain those m inor agreem ents o f M atthew and Luke against M ark in the passion narratives. Recall also his expla­ nation o f the Gospel o f Peter as m em ory o f hearing or reading the N e w T estam en t gospels in the distant past. On what theory o f m em ory can y o u claim that a w riter using a written source overrides that written version w ith a syntactically precise recollection from oral tradition? On w hat theory o f m em o ry can you explain the differences between Peter and either Matthew, Mark, Luke, o r Jo h n as Peter's inexact recollections? H o w and w h y did that reconstruction co m e out as it did? Take another example. Jam es Dunn, writing about the m ultiplication o f the ■ and fishes, notes that "in every case where a number is given, there is pre'ement between all four Gospels— 2,000 d en arii. . . 5 loaves and 2 fish . . . . . . 12 baskets o f fragments” (363). From that perfectly correct observaaws the following conclusion: "T h e fixed points seem to h ave been *s; the other details o f agreement are m ostly contingent on them and ost inevitably be involved in the unfolding o f a story roun d these : this is precisely what w e w ould expect in oral tradition— fixed points which the Christian retelling the story w ould elaborate in his ow n so that while language and other detail might diverge, and diverge quite . :edly . . . the substance o f the story remained constant” (364). But do hum an m em ory and oral tradition operate by recalling such numbers exactly and recre­ ating the story around them, or by remem bering the story’s core, gist, o r outline and recreating those numbers in performance? And i f the latter case is m ore likely, the absolute persistence o f those specific numbers in both intra- and extracanonical versions must indicate very early ritualization o f the story. M aybe, how ever, a group unable to write and therefore m uch m ore depen­ dent on oral tradition has different or better m em ories than w e have. A ll those cases cited above w ere contemporary ones from within a scribal culture. Since the culture o fje su s was between 95 and 97 percent illiterate, m em ory and orality m ay have interacted in w ays quite different from the m odem w orld. It is neces­ sary, next, to look at the intersection o f m em ory, orality, and literacy. But I alw ays presum e in w hat follows that this chapter has warned us to b e v e ry , very careful about m em ory, even w hen it is most sure o f itself. I do not think that eyewitnesses are alw ays w rong; but, for example, i f eyewitness testim ony is a prosecution's only evidence, there is always and intrinsically a reasonable doubt against it. Always. A s Jo h n Bohannon and Victoria Sym ons put it, "In studies o f eyew itness testim ony, the most favorable estimates o f the correlation betw een confidence and accuracy are about .40" (67).

CHAPTER s

A T A L E OF T W O PRO F ES SO RS It was m y privilege to study w ith Milman Parry [1902-1935] during the period, so prem aturely cut short, w hen he w as teaching Classics in H arvard C o lle g e .. . . N o one w h o knew Parry is likely to forget his incisive pow ers o f formulation or to underrate the range and depth o f his cosm opolitan mind. He has been appropriately hailed, by an em inent archeologist, as the D arw in o f oral literature. Harry Levin, in the Preface to Albert B. Lord, The Singer o f Tales, n.p.

It was from Cam bridge [University] that [Sir Frederic C.] Bartlett launched his quixotic challenge to the m em ory establishment o f the 1920s and 1930s. He w as convinced that his contemporaries understood neither the purpose nor the nature o f m em ory, and that standard laboratory procedures just obscure its real characteristics. His challenge w ent alm ost unheard for 40 years, from the publication o f Remembering (1932) until this decade [the 1970s], but it is unheard no longer. LJlric Neisser, Memory Observed, pp. 3-4 This chapter is about tw o professors w ho published profoundly important research on the intersection o f m em ory, orality, and literacy in the early 1930s. But, as the above epigraphs note, Parry's theories and experiments generated a m ajor academic industry from the very beginning, w hile Bartlett's theories and experim ents w ent m ostly ignored until very recently. I pair them here, how ever, to establish and emphasize the param eters o f that intersection betw een m em ory, orality, and literacy.

Homer in a Balkan Coffeehouse T h e hum an accom plishm ent o f lengthy verbatim recall [fifty w ords or m ore] arises as an adaptation to written text and does not arise in cultural settings w h ere text is unknow n. T h e assumption that nonliterate cultures encourage lengthy verbatim recall is the mistaken projection by literates o f text-dependent fram es o f reference. Ian M. L. Hunter, in Progress in the Psychology o f Language, p. 207

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I first m et H om er in a classical high school in Ireland betw een 1945 and 1950. W e read him in Greek, cribbed him in English, and translated him into Gaelic (there w ere no cribs or ponies in Gaelic). And w e knew, w ith adolescent preci­ sion, h ow to translate so that the teachers could never be sure w hether it w as the G reek w e did not know or the Gaelic. Certain set phrases, repeated w ith pre­ dictable if not numbing regularity, remain with me to this day. I recall none o f them in Gaelic, some o f them in Greek, and all o f them in English. M aybe they seemed less strange and memorable in Greek or Gaelic— languages that w ere som ewhat strange to us in any case. For example: the H om eric heroes w e re "the well-greaved Greeks” ; the morning was "the rosy-fingered daw n” ; the A egean w as "the wine-dark sea.” But even if Greek warriors w ore good bronze leg-guards and so were always "well-greaved,” surely the dawn o f a G reek m id-winter is not always "rosy-fingered” and the sea o f a Greek mid-summer is not alw ays "w inedark.” W hy are those set and repeated phrases so typical o f H om eric poetry? That question was the focus o f Milman Parry's master's thesis at the U n iver­ sity o f California (Berkeley) in 1923 and his m ajor and m inor doctoral theses at the University o f Paris (Sorbonne) in 1928. Parry spoke o f such phrases as “ tradi­ tional epithets” or "form ulae” and studied them in terms o f H om eric m eter and style. In that same year, 1928, Matija Murko gave three lectures fo r the Sorbonne's Institute o f Slavic Studies on contemporary popular epic p o etry in Yugoslavia. Parry's son Adam, w ho edited all his father's w o rk in one 1971 v o l­ um e, has noted that "it m ay have been M urko and his w o rk that first suggested to Parry the possibility o f finding in a living poetry an observable analogue to the poetry o f H om er” (xxiv). In any case, it was the creative juxtaposition o f ancient H om eric style and m odem Balkan technique that led Parry to his basic con ­ clusion that both phenomena arose from popular epic poetry perform ed orally by a traditional "singer o f tales.” Parry's fieldwork in Yugoslavia during 1934-35 brought back to Harvard over 12,500 texts— songs b y singers and talks w ith singers taken either through dictation or on over 3,500 twelve-inch alum inum phonograph records. He had just begun a b ook called The Singer o f Tales w h en an accidental gunshot brought life and research to an end. Albert Bates Lord, w ho had studied with Parry at H arvard and accom panied him to Yugoslavia in 1934 - 35 , chose that same title, The Singer o f Tales, fo r the i960 publication o f his ow n 1949 doctoral dissertation in the D epartm en t o f C om parative Literature at Harvard. He also extended the Balkan field w o rk in to Albania in 1937, Yugoslavia again in 1950-51, and Bulgaria in 1958-59. T h e ParryLord contention, in com paring ancient H om eric and m odem Slav tradition, is "that a com prehension o f oral poetry could com e only from an intim ate k n o w l­ edge o f the w a y it w as produced; that a theory o f composition m ust be b ased n o t on another theory but on the facts o f the practice o f the poetry,” as L o rd p u t it in

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the Forew ord o f his ow n book. Specifically, h ow does the Serbo-Croatian tradi­ tion o f epic song by illiterate perform ers, a tradition still alive in the 1920s and 1930s, actually work? And, w hen Parry and Lord transcribed their perform ance into written form at, w as that w hat som ebody else had done long ago for Homer? M ore generally, h o w do illiterate poets produce thousands upon thou­ sands o f lines on demand? H o w do they remember? D o they recall thousands o f lines verbatim? H o w do they compose? PE R FO R M IN G T H E T R A D IT IO N In the beginning is the tradition. It gives performers three structural elements with which they w o rk creatively, dynamically, and interactively. First o f all, it gives them the general stories, the overall narratives. Bosnian Muslims tell, for example, “ o f the olden times, o f the deeds o f the great m en o f old and the heroes on both sides in the time w hen Sulejman the Magnificent held empire. Then was the empire o f the Turks at its highest. Three hundred and sixty provinces it had, and Bosnia w as its lock, its lock it was and its golden keys, and a place o f all good trust against the foe” (Parry 1974:13). Next, it gives them the themes, which can be mixed and matched into those story frames. Standard themes, for example, are the ruler's council, the arm y's muster, or the wedding’s guests. Finally, and m ost especially, it gives them hundreds o f formulae, set phrases that can also be mixed and matched to form those themes and thence those stories. A formula, in Parry’s definition, is "a group o f words which is regularly em ployed under the sam e met­ rical conditions to express a given essential idea” (Lord 30). But lest this all sound mechanistic and automatic, here is a set o f variations on a formula about mounting one’s horse, culled from various places (52-53): T h en he m ounted his winged horse. Then he m ounted his bedouin mare. W ell, she m ounted her white horse. Then they m ounted their horses in the courtyard. T h ey m ounted tw o post horses. W ith a cry to Allah, he m ounted and departed for Budim. D ulic m ounted his brow n horse. T h ey m ounted their ready horses. The formula, with its rhythms carved deep below conscious memory, is the heart o f traditional oral epic poetry. But once again, lest this sound like mechanical juxtaposition rather than creative virtuosity, here are twin versions o f the same moment in the same story by the same singer recorded fifteen years apart (Lord 62):

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H alil B ajg o ric recorded in 1935

H alil B ajgoric reco rd ed in 1950

A dark Arab heard o f this

A black Arab heard o f this

Across the dark blue sea, the deep,

Across the sea, dark blue, deep,

And he m ounted his bedouin mare,

That Stocevic Alija had died,

Black as a raven she was.

And he secured him self and his m are.

Recall, also, that those fluid patterns in Serbo-Croatian epic are supported by using the giisle, a one-stringed mandolin-like instrument played on on e's lap w ith a bow . The gusle supplies the rhythmic beat for ten-syllable lines into w hich those fluidly set formulae can be swiftly inserted while com posing at about ten to twenty lines a minute. T w o cases will serve as illustrations and prepare an understanding o f what "ten thousand lines verbatim” m eans in traditional oral performance for illiterate epic bards.

Casei. Petar Vidič, o f Stolac in Hercegovina, was, according to Lord, "n o m ore than an average singer . . . the type o f singer w h o m ust carry the brunt o f the transmission o f the art” (Lord 113). H e is, in other words, a typical rather than an extraordinary example. The Parry collection at Harvard n ow contains fo u r full versions o f Marko and Nina ofKostur from that artist, as follows (71, 236-241): x. Parry no. 6: dictated August, 1933, with a total o f 154 lines 2. Parry no. 805: dictated December 7,1934, with a total o f 234 lines 3. Parry no. 804: recorded D ecem ber 7,1934, w ith a total o f 279 lines 4. Parry no. 846: recorded December 9,1934, w ith a total o f 344 lines Those divergent line-totals warn us immediately that the sam e sto ry even from the same singer is not the same each time. And, for com parison, tw o v e r­ sions o f it w ere recorded from another singer, Halil Bajgoric, as follow s: 5. Parry no. 6695: recorded (disc) in 1935, with a total o f 464 lines 6. Lord no. 84: recorded (wire) in 1950, with a total o f 209 lines A detailed comparison is even more interesting. Besides those fo u r full v e r­ sions noted above, Petar Vidič did tw o shorter trial runs (Parry nos. 803a, 803b) o f the first tw enty lines in preparation for the recording in Parry no. 804. H ere are those six versions o f the story's opening stanzas (Lord 74-75):

A T A L E OF TWO PR O FESSO R S

Parry # 6 [8 lines] Marko Kraljcvid

is drinking wine

With his old mother,

And with his true love, And with his only sister.

Parry #8033 [9 lines] Marko Kraljcvid arose early In his white wellbuilt tower In Prilip the white city, He arose and drained his coffee, And began refined brandy; With him was his old mother, His old mother it was. And next the mother Kraljevic’s wife, And next his wife the well-adorned Andelija.

Parry #8o3b (7 lines] Marko Kraljevid arose early In his white wellbuilt tower, Before dawn and white day.

Parry #804 [7 lines] Marko Kraljcvic arose early In his white tower o f stone.

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Parry #805 (6 lines] Marko Kraljevid arose early In Prilip in his white tower,

Parry #846 [5 lines] Marko Kraljcvid arose early In his white tower o f stone,

And next him his old mother.

And next him his old mother.

And next the mother his true love, And next his love his sister Andelija.

And next his mother his true love. And next his love his true young wife [mistake for sister]

He arose. began his brandy, And Marko drained the brandy. Next to him his old Next to him his old mother, mother,

Next to his mother his true love,

Next his mother his true love,

And next to his love, the welladomed Andelija. This was his true sister.

And next his love, the wcll-adomed Andelija.

When Marko had drunk his wine, Then Marko brimmed the glass T o the health o f his old mother, And his love and his only sister.

He toasted them in clear brandy

These openings, varying from five to nine lines, indicate quite clearly how the form ulaic possibilities appear and reappear creatively. But even nos. 803a and 803b, dictated in preparation for 804 on the same day, show no attempt to m em ­ orize in w h at w e w ou ld call verbatim fashion. Case 2. I f Petar Vidic w as an ordinary singer, Abdullah (or Avdo) M eôedovic w as an extraordinary one. N ikola Ivanov Vujnovic, Parry's field assistant from 1933 to 1935 * said o f him in 1939, "W hen A vdo is no longer am ong the living, there will

be no one like him in singing." A fter M eôedovic died in 1955 at about age eightyfive, Lord agreed w ith that assessment: “ It m ay well be that he w as the last o f the truly great epic singers o f the Balkan Slavic tradition o f oral narrative song" (Parry 1974:11-12). I f H om er w as the ancient Greek Singer o f Tales, A vdo M eôe­ dovic “is our present-day Balkan Singer o f T ales" (Lord, Forew ord). H e w as bom around 1870 and had follow ed his father into butchering animals and singing songs by the time he w as fifteen. H e picked up Turkish during nine years in the arm y but never learned to read or w rite in any language. His superiority as a per­ form er was a thing o f both quantity and quality.

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Quantity. M ededovic had a repertoire o f fifty-eight epics. In 1935, w h en he considered him self som ew hat past his peak, he recited nine epics for Parry and Lord w ith a total o f 44,902 lines recorded and 33,653 dictated. In 1950-51, w hen Lord returned to Bijelo Polje, M ededovic recorded three m ore epics w ith a total o f 18,168 lines. That brings his transcribed songs to just below 100,000 lines. Fur­ therm ore, tw o o f the longest songs in the Slavic tradition o f oral epic are tran­ scribed from his repertoire in 1935, one at 12,323 and another at 13,331 lines. “ Avdo could sing songs o f about the length o f H om er’s Odyssey. An illiterate butcher in a small town o f the central Balkans w as equaling H om er’s feat, at least in regard to the length o f song” (Parry 1974:8). Quality. In 1935 Lord deliberately set up an experiment w ith M ededovic. Another singer, Mumin Vlahovljak o f Plevlje, perform ed a son g o f 2,294 lines that the listening M ededovic had never heard before. Then Parry, w ith o u t w arn ­ ing, asked Mededovic if he could repeat the performance. H e addressed his ve r­ sion courteously to his “ colleague M um inaga,” but his repetition ran to 6,313 lines (Parry 1974:11). That almost-three-fold expansion is exemplified in the twin descriptions o f the tale’s hero, Bedragic Meho, as those original full versions are summarized by Lord (223): Betiragic Meho by Mumin Vlahovljak [description of Meho: 11 lines in original full version]

Beciragic Meho by Avdo Mededovic [description o f Meho: 34 lines in original full version]

T h e poor orphan Meho was at the foot o f the

N ear the poor o f the tavern sat a sad young

assembly, near the door.

man.

H e w ore only cotton pants and shirt, but he had a fine sash and

plumes, but only cotton trousers and a silk

He did not w ear breastplate o r helm et with

tw o beautiful golden pistols.

shirt; over his fine sash w as an arm s belt in which were tw o golden pistols. (They are described.) He hung his head and gazed at the

N obody in the assembly offered him coffee or tobacco or a glass. H e gazed sadly at the company.

a gh a s.

N obody spoke to him nor offered him a glass. His heart was wilted like a rose in the hands o f a rude bachelor.

A som ew hat similar difference appeared in tw o versions o f The Wedding o f Smailagic Meho, perform ed b y M ededovic himself, as transcribed first for Parry in 1935 and then, w ith no intervening perform ance, for Lord in 1950. T h e story o f M ehm ed (or Meho), son o f Smail, ran to 12,323 lines in the form er but only 8 ,4 88 lines in the latter version. B y 1950 M ededovic w as m uch older, sicker, and w eaker. Nonetheless, as Lord noted, that length w as still "a prodigious undertak­ ing w hich few , i f any, younger m en could have accom plished" (Parry 1974:11).

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PERFO RM ER M EETS REC O RD ER It is clear from the preceding cases that before a H om er and a MeQedovic found a literate transcriber, they operated in a medium that w as traditional in story, them e, and form ula, structural and rhythmic in com position, and cre­ atively m ultiform in presentation. But here is a very interesting postscript on the subject o f verbatim repetition, o f word-for-word and line-for-line accuracy, at that very intersection o f m em ory, orality, and literacy. In the four follow ing examples, w atch h o w literate scribe and illiterate poet talk past one another on that subject. W atch h o w the very words same and not different are not the same but different for each speaker. W atch, especially, a certain nervousness or even trucu­ lence as the singer wrestles w ith the writer. He recognizes his doom. Case 1. T h e singer, D em o Z ogic, told Nikola Vujnovic, Parry's research assistant in the Balkans, that one Ram adan he had heard another singer, Sulejman Makic, sing a song he had never heard before and that he had been able to repeat it him ­ self the v e iy next night (Lord 27); N: W as it the sam e song, w ord for w ord and line for line? D: T h e sam e song, w ord for w ord and line for line. I didn’t add a single line, and 1 didn't m ake a single m istak e.. . . N: T ell m e this: I f tw o good singers listen to a third singer w h o is even bet­ ter, and they both boast that they can learn a song i f they hear it only once, do y o u think that there w ou ld be any difference betw een the two ve rsio n s?. .. D: T h ere w o u ld ___ It couldn't be otherwise. I told you before that two singers w o n 't sing the same song alike. You can already see in the contradiction between those interchanges the clash o f oral and scribal imagination: "w ord for w ord and line for line” has changed m eaning from the illiterate D em o to the literate Nikola. And that last line sounds m ildly truculent, as if D em o knows that "the same” is a different concept for each speaker. Actually, both Makic's and Zo gic's versions were recorded b y Parry and, as Lord underlines, "they are recognizable versions o f the sam e story,” but “ they are not close enough . . . to be considered ‘exactly alike'” (28). O f course not. But Z ogic w as not lying, because, fo r him, verbatim simply m eant traditional. A literate actor can m em orize and perform thousands o f lines o f epic poetry. An illiterate singer can also m em orize and perform thousands o f lines o f epic poetry. Both m ay claim exact and even verbatim fidelity. But betw een them stands the presence o f written text, and thereby m emorization, perform ance, and exactitude take on different meanings in each case.

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Case 2. In another instance, Avdo M eSedovic w as discussing with N ikola V ujn ovic tw o singers from w h om he had heard the same story (Parry 1 9 7 4 7 3 ): A: . . . [T]here w asn't any difference between them that I could tell. N: A: N: A: N: A: N: A: N: A:

T h ey sang it ju st the same? T h ey sang it exactly alike. Y ou mean everything exactly alike? Everything. No m ore than ten w ords' difference in the w h ole thing. But I'll bet the decoration o f the song w as different, n o w w asn 't it— the things that they dressed up in the song? That's ju st what I mean— it wasn't. Nothing different at all? Nothing, so help me, no m ore, no less. Is it at least possible that you do it a bit m ore amply than they did? W ell, m aybe I decorate it better.

At this stage, and even w ithout the transcript evidence o f those tw o other singers' version, w e can take it absolutely for granted that the differences exceeded ten words. But in all such discussions, it is necessary to rem em ber M eSedovid's announced principle that “w hichever is the better is the true one” (Parry 1974:60). C asej. Although m any illiterate Balkan bards w ere operating in a purely oral tradi­ tion at the time o f Parry and Lord’s research, w riting was, o f course, a fact o f life all around them. Lord warned o f this problem: "Th e collector even in a country such as Yugoslavia, w here published collections have been given m uch attention for over a century, som e o f which have becom e alm ost sacrosanct, m ust be w ary; for he will find singers w h o have m em orized songs from these collections” (Lord 14). Once you m em orize from a written text, you are no lon ger an oral artist but a scribal artist perform ing orally. Here, how ever, there is a v e ry deli­ cate interface betw een the oral and the scribal, and it brings us back to A vdo M eSedovic and The Wedding o f Smailagic Meho. H o w did he first hear this story o f treachery b y the Christian vizier o f Buda against the M uslim sultan o f the T u rk­ ish em pire in the middle o f the sixteenth century? T h e questioner, as usual, is Nikola Vujnovic (Parry 1974:74): N : H o w about The Wedding o f Smailagic Meho? A: Let's see— did I tell you about h ow I heard it from a songbook? N: From a songbook? A: Yes.

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N: I believe you did. W ho read it to you? A: H ivzo Dzafic. T h ere was a lad here in the slaughter house, w h o got it from so m e w h e re .. . . N: H o w m any times did he read it to you? A: Five or six times. N: Did you ever hear anyone sing it to the gusle. A : No. N: A re you sure you never heard it sung by anyone at all?— yes. A: N o, I didn't. But M e6edovic treated the scribal version heard orally ju st as i f it w ere another oral version. H e inform ed his questioner that his rendition w as longer, “yes, m ore, by at least tw ice” ; and, as Lord emphasized in praising the originality o f his adaptation, “ m agnificence is the keynote o f A vdo's expansion” o f the pub­ lished text (Parry 1974:13). A w e ek o r so later, in August o f 1935, Nikola Vujnovic w ent on to question H ivzo D zafic about the songbook he had read to Avdo M eSedovic T h e sub­ ject once again is "sam e” and “ different,” but watch the respondent's hesitations (Parry 1974:77): N : D id he [M ededovic] sing it ju st the w a y it w as in the poem , or did he sing longer than that? H : N o, no, ah— so to speak, he, uh— , he sang it all exactly as it is in the book, but w h at I m ean to say is that it got to be quite long by the time he w as through w ith it because you see, it uh— , it doesn't take as much tim e to read it as it does to sing it. N : O f course. But do you suppose there w as possibly som e difference, that he m ight have added som ething here or there? H : Oh, I couldn’t ju d g e that at all. N : So there w asn ’t anything added? H : On m y w ord o f honor, I didn't notice anything to criticize-----[I]t’ s the sam e w a y in the b ook as it is w hen he sings it. If I w ere to take the book, and open it like this while he w as dictating, I'd see exactly the same thing there w ith m y eyes as h e'd said. It is as if the respondent w ere saying, “T h e singer is good. If to be good m eans it’s the exact sam e version, then that it is; if to be good means it's differ­ ent, then that it is. W hat do you w ant m e to say?” Case 4. Finally, in an earlier conversation in Ju ly o f 1935, Nikola Vujnovic was again questioning A vdo M eSedovic about his art. "One o f the lads” read The Siege o f Osjek

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to him "several times” from a songbook. He then sang it before a large crow d in the coffeehouse (Parry 1974:66): W hen I had finished the song, the waiter brought me a cup o f tea and a dim e. I asked him: "W ho ordered this?" He said: "Th e lieutenant o ver there wishes to honor you with the tea." And sure enough, there he w as sitting up b y the chimney. "And the dime is so you can buy tobacco.” I said: "G iv e him m y thanks.” He called to me from where he sat: "O ld fellow , are y o u liter­ ate?” All this happened only year before last. "N o, I'm not.” "So y o u don't read the newspapers?” "N o .” "Bravo! I’m here all the w ay from Lauz, and here’s the songbook with this song in it. T h e w ay I read it, yo u h aven ’t made a single mistake.” There the stage is fully set for the eventual triumph o f literacy o ver orality. A t a first stage, with Hom er, for example, there w as only the tradition o f rhyth­ mic epic narrative, and while it was, o f course, traditional in story, them e, and formula, it was pluriform in composition, combination, and perform ance. At a next stage, writing and literacy have entered the picture, but the oral poet still treats a written text as just one am ong m any possible perform ances. But am bigu­ ities now abound, and intrusive scribal questioners ask not w hether that perfor­ mance is better or worse but w hether it is verbatim or not. Finally, w ritin g tri­ umphs, and even oral creativity defends itself as verbatim exactitude. T h ere is som ething terribly sad about Avdo M ededovic's pride in recounting a com pli­ m ent that dooms his craft to inevitable irrelevance. But, o f course, there w ould be sadder events than that in store for the Balkans and for the tow n o f Sarajevo, w here H ivzo Dzafic bought his songbooks.

Memory in a Cambridge Laboratory Oral stories in their written form m ay be unusually schematic o r even sum ­ m arized versions o f any given retelling. T h e schema only preserves the o ver­ all form o f the story while allowing an individual narrator to elaborate details according to individual interests and purposes. Jean M. Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson, “ Remembrance o f Things Parsed,” p. 113, note 1I I turn n ow from Milman Parry to Frederic Bartlett in this tale o f tw o profes­ sors studying m em ory inductively in the early thirties o f this century. W h at Parry discovered about the m em ories o f illiterate singers operating in an oral, epic, and rhythm ic tradition has, for all practical purposes, nothing w hatsoever to do with the m em ories o f illiterate peasants operating within the Jesu s tradition. In fact,

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the very term "oral tradition” cannot be used o f the tw o transmissions without inviting serious misunderstanding and misapplication. T o propose that Jesu s and his first companions, precisely because they w ere illiterate peasants, w ould have shared special m em ory capacities akin, for example, to Parry’s Balkan bards, is to ignore the presence o f centuries-old tradition in the Balkan case and o f total n ew ­ ness in the Jesu s case. If, on the other hand, the traditions about Jesu s had stayed alive for centuries prim arily am ong illiterate Galilean peasants, their transmission might well have developed procedures analogous to those used by a H om er o r a M ededovic. In this case, how ever, Bartlett’s experiments m ay be m ore useful than Parry’s in assessing correctly the role o f m em ory in the transmission o f Jesus materials. And, w ith Bartlett, I return once m ore to a severely critical assessment o f m em ory's accuracy, even (or especially) w hen it is most emphatic, assured, cer­ tain, and secure o f itself. Bartlett’s experim ents involved the recall o f eight different stories either by various subjects after differing lengths o f time, which he termed repeated repro­ duction, or b y various subjects w h o had transmitted the story from one to another, w hich he term ed serial reproduction. T h e story used as his main example "w as adapted from a translation by Dr. Franz Boas o f a North American folk­ tale” (Bartlett 64). I w ent back, how ever, to check Bartlett's source in Boas and found tw o interesting details. Boas's original publication attributes the story to Charles C ultee o f B ay Center, W ashington, speaking in Kathlamet, the dialect o f Upper C hinook used farthest dow n the Colum bia River, and it summarizes the story like this (Boas 161): T w o m en are m et b y a canoe, the occupants o f which invite them to jo in in a w a r expedition. One o f them refuses, the other one goes, and in com bat is w ounded, though he does not feel any pain. T h e people carry him hom e and he discovers that they are ghosts. The next m orning he dies. But here is a ve ry interesting detail ignored by Bardett. "In order to ascertain the accuracy o f his m ode o f telling,” records Boas, "I had [‘T h e W ar o f the G h o s ts ']. . . w hich he [Cultee] had told in the sum m er o f 1891 repeated three and a h alf years later, in D ecem ber, 1894___ T h ey show great similarity------ " (Boas 5). W e have, therefore, for that story, twin versions from 1891 and 1894 (Boas 182-184, 185-186). T h at allows us not only to com pare Boas’s twin versions with one another but also to com pare both o f them w ith Bardett's transcription. Since m y subject here is the interface betw een m em ory, orality, and literacy, I found that com parison quite interesting. H ere are the endings o f Boas's 1891 and 1894 versions and o f Bartlett’s 1932 transcription, which never mentions that duality. T h e section describes the death o f the man w ho w ent with the ghosts.

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"T he W ar o f the Ghosts" (1891) He told it all, and then he be­ came quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down. Something Mack cam e out o f his mouth a nd blood cam e out o f h is anus.

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"The War of the Ghosts” (1894) Then he told them about it. Daylight came in the house. Then he fell down dead.

"The War o f the Ghosts" (1931) He told it all, and then he be­ came quiet. When the sun rose he fell down.

Blood cam e out o f his mouth,

S o m eth ing black cam e out o f

a n d som ething black cam e out

h is

mouth.

o f his anus.

His face became contorted.

His face became contorted. He was dead. The people jumped up and cried. He remained dead.

The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. It looked like salal berries. His friend was well. He did not die, because he did not accompany the ghosts.

Notice tw o m inor details in the section I italicized. T h e changes betw een 1891 and 1894 are typical oral variations. The structure persists in m em ory: som e­ thing comes out at both ends. But the elements can be freely organized in perfor­ mance: black/m outh and blood/anus becom e blood/m outh and black/anus. One could also imagine tw o other equally valid perform ances o f that sam e struc­ ture: blood/anus and black/m outh or black/anus and b lood /m ou th . Th ose changes are perform atory variations, the free play o f elem ents (black, blood, mouth, anus) within a fixed structural pattern (something com es from both ends o f the hum an body). But look now at Bartlett's version. T h at is not the free vari­ ation o f oral performance but the deliberate change o f scribal copying. C all it hermeneutical not perform atory variation, the effect o f deliberate change rather than random performance. I presume, in other words, that it represents a ges­ ture o f delicacy, a m inor censoring o f the story's transmission, a decision that the anus has no place at Cambridge. But the oral difference betw een 1891 and 1894 as w ell as the scribal change between Boas and Bartlett are further w arnings o f h ow delicate is that place w here m em ory, orality, and literacy intersect. R E P E A T E D R E P R O D U C T IO N In this first set o f experiments, twenty subjects— thirteen w om en and seven men— initially read the story through twice at their normal reading rates (Bardett 65, 79). T h ey w ere then asked for written reproductions alm ost im m ediately, and for consequent reproductions at divergent intervals o f hours, weeks, months, and years. Bartlett, o f course, gives not only the full narrative o f 'T h e W ar o f the Ghosts" but also complete versions o f his subjects' several reproductions. Y ou can read fully, for example, h ow Subject P reproduced the story im m ediately and then after a fortnight, a month, tw o months, and, finally, tw o and a h alf years. But the extreme param eters o f this experiment are established by tw o individuals.

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Subject W had not reproduced the story after his first or im m ediate version until he tried it again six and a h alf years later. H e w rote the story from long­ distance m em ory using b rief num bered items in such a w ay that one can see his actual process o f recall and reconstruction, invention and rationalization. "This is a brilliant exam ple o f obviously constructive rem em bering/' Bartlett comments. "Th e subject w as ve ry pleased and satisfied with the result o f his effort, and indeed, considering the length o f the interval involved, he is rem arkably accurate and detailed. T h ere is a great deal o f invention, and it w as precisely concerning his inventions that the subject w as most pleased and most certain. T h e totem, the filial piety, the pilgrim age— these w ere what he regarded as his m ost brilliant re-captures, and he w as alm ost equally sure o f the black forest, once it had com e i n .. . . It w ill be noticed that the story as he constructed it is full o f rationalisa­ tions and explanations, and m ost o f the running com ments o f the subject con­ cerned the inter-connexion o f the various elements and w ere directed to m aking the w h ole narration appear as coherent as possible” (78). I am not sure if "rem arkably accurate” is rem arkably accurate. Totem , filial piety, pilgrimage, and dark forest are all pure inventions, and what Subject W does is brilliantly create a totally different story based on his recall o f canoe, w ar party, and two "brothers” (in the original story they w ere "tw o young m en"), one dying with "som ething black from m outh." It is hard to give a m ore classic example o f accu­ rate remembrance as creative transformation. Subject C involved an even longer timespan: ten years. In the original story the tw o you n g protagonists w ere from "Egulac” and they w ent "up the river to a tow n on the other side o f Kalam a." But, as Bartlett records, “ Sooner or later, the proper nam es dropped out o f all the reproductions, with the single exception o f the one in w hich they seemed, after ten years, to be the only readily accessible detail. As a rule, before they entirely disappeared, they suffered change. Egulac becam e Em lac, Eggulick, Edulac, Egulick; Kalama becam e Kalamata, Kuluma, Kam ac, to give only a few o f the variatio n s.. . . The subject (C) read the story in the spring o f 1917. In 1919 she unexpectedly saw m e pass her on a bicycle and im m ediately afterwards found herself m urm uring ‘Egulac’, 'Kalama*. She then recognised m e, and rem em bered reading the story, and that these names w ere a part o f the story. In the sum m er o f 1927 she agreed to try definitely to rem em ber the tale. She w rote dow n at once ‘Egulac* and ‘Calam a’, but then stopped and said that she could do no more. Then she said that she had a visual image o f a sandy bank and o f tw o m en going dow n a river in a boat. There, how ever, she stopped” (82,78). Subjects W and C are beautifully extreme cases. One rem em bers a few details and constructs a totally different but very detailed and coherent plot from

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that residue. T h e other rem em bers almost nothing but the tw in place nam es, w hich everyone else changes or omits. That serves to w arn us that, w ith regard to individual m em ory, scientific prediction is impossible beforehand even i f plau­ sible explanation is possible afterward. I think, for example, that I could not have predicted, but I can probably explain, h ow Egulac becam e Eggulick. From those experiments in repeated reproduction, Bartlett gives fourteen conclusions, tw o with subdivisions (93-94). T h ey are too long fo r full citation, so I offer here those items that are the most important fo r m y present purpose. First o f all, "accuracy o f reproduction, in a literal sense, is the rare exception and not the rule.” Second, "with frequent reproduction the form and item s o f rem em bered detail very quickly becom e stereotyped and thereafter suffer little change,” but "with infrequent reproduction, omission o f detail, sim plification o f events and structure, and transformation o f items into m ore fam iliar detail, m ay go one indefinitely, or so long as unaided recall is possible.” Third, "in all succes­ sive remembering, rationalisation, the reduction o f material to a form that can be readily and 'satisfyingly' dealt with, is very prom inent.” Bartlett also em pha­ sizes that "several o f the factors influencing the individual observer are social in origin and ch aracter.. . . [M]any o f the transformations . . . w ere directly due to the influence o f social conventions and beliefs current in the group to w h ich the individual subject belonged” (118). I conclude with this perm anent w arn in g on m em ory as creation: "A n observer w h o had com pleted one o f his reproductions [after six weeks] casually remarked: ‘I’ve a sort o f feeling that there w as som e­ thing about a rock, but I can't fit it in'. He gave the m atter slight consideration and finally rejected the notion. T w o months later, w ithout a w ord o f com m ent or explanation, the rock took its place in the story. There w as no ro ck in the original” (91).

SERIAL REPRODUCTION A s you w ould probably expect, matters do not get better in m o vin g from repeated to serial reproduction. As the story was passed along one chain o f ten subjects, for example, details that did not fit expectations w ere regularly omitted, and others w ere rationalized until they did fit expectations. B y the end, on the level o f the general story, "no trace o f an odd, or supernatural elem ent is left: w e have a perfectly straightforward story o f a fight and a death.” B y the end, on the level o f specific detail, Egulac became M alagua, M om apan, M om bapan, and, finally, the Bay o f Manpapan (120-125). H ere is another example along that tenfold chain. In the original story the yo u n g m an w h o had fought alongside the w ar party o f ghosts w as wounded, returned hom e, and told everybody about the fight. In Bartlett's 1932 transcrip­

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tion, the tale concluded: "W hen the sun rose he fell down. Som ething black came out o f his m outh. His face becam e contorted. T h e people ju m ped up and cried. H e w as dead” (65). T h e story, in other words, began "on e night" and ended "w h en the sun rose." But this is h ow that terminal incident w as trans­ form ed as it passed from one recounter to another along a chain o f ten individu­ als (127, m y numbers): 1. W hen the sun rose he fell down. And he gave a cry, and as he opened his m outh a black thing rushed from it. 2. W hen the sun rose he suddenly felt faint, and w hen he w ould have risen he fell dow n, and a black thing rushed out o f his mouth. 3. H e felt no pain until sunrise the next day, when, on trying to rise, a great black thing flew out o f his mouth. 4. H e lived that night, and the next day, but at sunset his soul fled black from his m outh. 5. H e lived through the night and the following day, but at sunset his soul fled black from his m outh. 6. H e lived during the night and the next day, but died at sunset, and his soul passed out from his mouth. 7. B efore the boat got clear o f the conflict the Indian died, and his spirit fled. 8. B efore he could be carried back to the boat, his spirit had left this world. 9. H is spirit left the world. 10. ("N onsense," said one o f the others, "you will not die.” ) But he did. T h o se exam ples o f serial reproduction result in this inevitable judgm ent from Bartlett: "Serial reproduction norm ally brings about startling and radical alterations in the material dealt with. Epithets are changed into their opposites; incidents and events are transposed; names and numbers rarely survive intact for m ore than a few reproductions; opinions and conclusions are reversed— nearly every possible variation seems as if it can take place, even in a relatively short series. A t the sam e time, the subjects m ay be very w ell satisfied w ith their efforts, believing them selves to have passed on all important features w ith little o r no change, and m erely, perhaps, to have omitted unessential matters" (175)In studying Bartlett's experiments w ith either repeated or serial reproduc­ tion o f "T h e W ar o f the Ghosts" and other stories, it is hard to avoid his basic conclusion about “ the constructive character o f recall” (176), and I emphasize that his term constructive clearly means “ creative" or "inventive." "H um an rem em bering is norm ally exceedingly subject to error. It looks as if w hat is said to b e reproduced is, far m ore generally than is com m only admitted, really a construction, serving to justify w hatever impression m ay have been left by the

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original. It is this ‘impression', rarely defined with m uch exactitude, w hich most readily persists. So long as the details which can be built up around it are such that they w ould give it a reasonable' setting, most o f us are fairly content, and are apt to think that what w e build w e have literally retained” (175-176). I have now com e full circle to where this chapter began. F rom students at Cam bridge University in the first quarter o f this century to students at Em ory University in the last quarter o f this century, experiments agree in w arning us that m em ory is much less accurate than w e think and that it may be least accurate when it is most secure. Do w e conclude, then, that m em ory is a radical failure? M em ory is a totally flawed human system? M em ory is a pure delusion? N ot at all. On the one hand, its function is to link us with the past in such a w a y that w e can survive the present and project the future. It does that adm irably. On the other hand, w ere a m em ory to retain everything it had heard or seen, our hum an system might shudder into immobility. And w ere it not program m ed to organize and reorganize the past, to recreate and reinvent the past, w e w ould probably be frozen in time and place forever. “ Our m em ory system s,” as Daniel Schacter sums them up, “do a remarkably good jo b o f preserving the general contours o f our pasts and o f recording correctly m any o f the im portant things that have happened to us. W e could not have evolved as a species otherw ise___ Yet our stories are built from many different ingredients: snippets o f w h at actu­ ally happened, thoughts about what might have happened, and beliefs that guide us as w e attempt to remember. Our memories are the fragile but pow erful prod­ ucts o f what w e recall from the past, believe about the present, and imagine about the future” (308). N one o f that argues against the existence o f mnemonists, o f individuals oth­ erwise normal or abnormal who can perform feats o f extraordinary m em ory (which can be checked only against a fixed or scribal archetype, o f course). The Latvian m nemonist whom cognitive psychologists call V P read Bartlett’s tran­ scription o f “ The W ar o f the Ghosts” and then (having been given no warning that he w ould be asked to repeat it), reconstructed it, w hen asked, after one hour, then after six weeks, and finally after one year. His last tw o recalls correcdy retained 55 percent o f the nouns and 49 percent o f the verbs from the original (Neisser 1982:392, 396-398). Exceptions, how ever, prove the rule. But there is, as w e have seen, a profound difference between ten thousand lines perform ed from oral tradition and ten thousand lines memorized from written transcription.

CHAPTER 6

C H A S M OR I N T E R F A C E ? It w ould seem that the discovery o f the psychodynamics o f prim ary oral cul­ tures produced in som e contem porary W estern intellectuals an orality bias rather than a chirographic b ia s .. . . One appropriates the concept o f prim ary orality from cultures w ith no knowledge w hatsoever o f writing, and trans­ fers it all too easily to biblical Israel and Qumran, early Christianity and rab­ binic Judaism , thus gratuitously introducing into those milieus the figment o f a gaping dichotom y betw een oral tradition and written transmission. This procedure stands in need o f revision. Shemaryahu Talmon, in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, p. 149 W here does all o f that leave us? It leaves us with the need to go very, very carefully. I f the transition from historical Jesu s to earliest Christianity depends prim arily on m em ory, w e need to indicate clearly what theory o f m em ory w e are using in our analysis and w hat practice o f m em ory w e are observing in our evidence. I f w e invoke oral tradition, w e need to explain in detail h ow the Jesus m aterials becam e a tradition and w hat evidence w e have for the controls that m ake a tradition m ore than gossip, rumor, hearsay, or even m em ory. If w e speak o f oral transmission an d /or aural reception, w e need to be precise about w h at the ear retained from hearing texts read or words spoken. But, against all o f that background, tw o distinctions will be especially important throughout the rest o f this book. A first distinction is betw een matrix and format. An example m ay help to clar­ ify that distinction. As I ask yo u three questions, answer them to you rself before y o u read on, but w atch y o u r mind at w ork as you do so. First question: D o you rem em ber som ebody saying som ething about fearing fear? Second question: Do yo u recall w hether the speaker was for or against fearing fear? Final question: W h at exactly and precisely did that person say? Matrix is that unphrased struc­ ture in m em ory that tells you President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned a D epression-devastated Am erica (in his first inaugural address, I think) that only fear itself w as to be feared. But notice that even to describe that matrix I had to form ulate it sequentially and syntactically. In our heads w e have, as it w ere, a w h irlin g concom itance or simultaneous dance o f (no order!): do not fear, Roosevelt, fear itself, Depression. You might even lose Roosevelt and the

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D epression but still recall som ebody, sometime, w arning against fearing fear itself. Format, on the other hand, is the exact and individual form ulation. W hich, if any, o f the follow ing did Roosevelt actually say? T h e only thing there is to fear is fear itself Fear itself is the only thing there is to fear. T here is nothing to fear but fear itself Fear alone is all there is to fear. Those options could, o f course, be multiplied. For “ there is” yo u could put "yo u have” or “w e have," and so on. W hat was actually said is, “ T h e only thing w e have to fear is fear itself." That is the scribal uniform, the only correct quota­ tion o f Roosevelt’s challenge. But, for an oral tradition, there is no uniform, there is only oral multiform. There are multiple, equally valid w ays o f saying and resaying that phrase. A single matrix or core structure gives us a perform atory multiform. But, note well, a formulation that asserts one should fear fear itself is not another multiform but a simple g o o f—oral, scribal, or whatever. I give another example, but now from the Jesus tradition. In oral discourse Jesus makes a conjunction that his hearers rem em ber as a strange and disturbing equation o f children and kingdom. Think o f that conjunction, in w h atever order, as the matrix. Jesu s m ay have said it a dozen different w ays o r a dozen different times. But each time w ould have demanded an acceptable syntactical sequence, not ju st the utterance o f two isolated words in w h atever order. T h in k o f that plurality as multiform. The hearers’ m em ory, how ever, is not o f a syntactically sequential phrase but o f a structurally interactive relationship. It is a m atrix, not a saying, that is recalled. Notice, o f course, that even to articulate it in minimal form at I had to decide which term came first. In m em ory, h ow ever, the twin terms could stay simultaneously present. But to articulate them , either in speech or in writing, one m ust choose a specific sequence. H ere are a few exam ples: Choose children first: Choose kingdom first: C hoose negative format: C hoose positive format: Choose main verb: C hoose opening:

“ Children fill the kingdom ." “The kingdom contains only children.” “ Unless you are a child, yo u will not enter the kingdom." “ Children are those w h o enter the kingdom.” “ Enter" or “ obtain” or "possess” or "receive.” “W hoever” or “Th ose w h o ” or “ I f anyone.”

T h e concept o f matrix helps explain all the variant form ats o f this saying (and others) n ow present in our gospels. Orality retains a m atrix based on that

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surprising conjunction o f children and kingdom and form ulates its articulation anew each time (though, o f course, one formulation m ay becom e habitual for a given individual). T h en literacy writes it dow n and checks all future formats against that established original format. N one o f that justifies the presumption that there could be a multiform with­ out som e controlling structure, that there could be oral multiform without tradi­ tional matrix. In discussing m y book The Historical Jesus, W erner Kelber, for exam­ ple, com ments on that example: "Th e fourfold independent attestation o f the say­ ing on "Kingdom and Children' suggests an underlying ‘central and shocking' metaphor that goes back to Jesus'' (Crossan 1991:269). The question is whether w e can grope our w a y through tradition to the mind o f Jesus by reconstructing a core complex. M ust not any such reconstruction remain speculative? . . . T o collect and place side b y side all written versions o f a dominical saying and to trace a trajec­ tory back to the core structure, will give us something that had no existence in oral or textual form . E ven if w e managed to extract a pattern com m on to all existing versions o f a saying, w e w ould have succeeded m erely in conjuring a structuralist stability that b y oral, historical standards is a fictional construct" (1994:149). (I italicized the rhetorical m oves in that passage.) I agree that w e end up with a fictional construct, o f course, but so what? Even in an absolutely pure oral culture (with writing not yet invented), there must be som e w ay o f recognizing versions o f the same theme, plot, or story as distinct from different themes, plots, or stories. Call that structtiralist stability, if you wish, but it is sim ply h o w w e recognize another version o f a joke w e know as distinct from a brand-new joke. And it certainly does exist in m emory as matrix for the variants uttered orally or recorded scribally. I can imagine a dozen versions o f the Greek epic about the Trojan W ar and also a dozen versions o f the Gaelic epic about the Tain Bo Cuailnge, but none o f the form er is a variant o f the latter (or vice versa). Y ou can talk, no doubt, at some transcendent degree o f abstraction, about a com­ m on demand for the return o f one's claimed possession, about a Greek king named Menelaus demanding the return o f his beautiful wife and an Irish queen named Medb demanding the return o f her magnificent bull. I admit to some interest in com paring epics so diversely engendered, but, for here and now, I ask something m ore simple: W hat identifies one oral multiform from another? H o w does one pay equal attention to the multi and the form? H ow does one distinguish the tradition from the performance? H ow does one recognize the performance o f this traditional unit from the performance o f that traditional unit? There has to be a matrix or core structure that makes, for example, the Iliad not a multiform o f the Odyssey, the kingdom /children saying not a multiform o f kingdom/violence. A second distinction is between chasm and interface. Is the relationship b etw een oral and scribal culture best seen as chasm or as interface? T here is, o f

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course, a certain therapeutic necessity and strategic benefit in shocking us out o f o u r scribal prejudices by asserting a forceful orality-versus-literacy rift, a great divide betw een oral culture and written culture. W erner Kelber, fo r example, adm its that if the "emphasis in [his 1983 book] fell on that division, it w as because a n o vel approach requires a strong thesis” (1994:159). The sam e purpose and ju s­ tification might also be offered, I suppose, for that preceding em phasis on perform atory multiform to the almost total exclusion o f traditional matrix. B e that as it m ay, the great divide-understanding o f orality versus literacy w ill n ot w ork because, while there have been oral cultures without literacy, there h ave been no literate cultures without orality. T h e divide, great or gradual, is not oral ver­ sus literate but oral alone versus oral and literate together. T h at point has been asserted in several very important studies across the last decade. H ere are four recent examples. The first example is from Brian Stock in 1983: "There is in fact no clear point o f transition from a nonliterate to a literate so ciety.. . . T h e change [is] not so much from oral to written as from an earlier state, predom inantly oral, to various combinations o f oral and written” (9). The second example is from Brian Street in 1984: "[As distinct from an ‘autonomous' model] an 'ideological' m odel o f literacy . . . concentrates on the overlap and interaction o f oral and literate m odels rather than stressing a 'great divide’” (2-3). The third example is from Ja c k G o o d y in 1987: “ It is a mistake to divide ‘cultures' into the oral and the written: it is rather the oral and the oral plus the written, printed, etc. This being the case, fo r the individual there is always the problem o f the interaction betw een the registers and the uses, between the so-called oral and the written traditions” (xii). T h e final example is from Jam es Fentress and Chris W ickham in 1992: “ T h e m ere fact that a society has acquired the ability to represent its knowledge in written form s does not mean that that society has ceased to be an oral culture as w ell. W e rem ain an oral society, and the w ays in which w e pattern our social m em ory continue to reflect, albeit in altered forms, the same practices and thought processes o f prelit­ erate cultures. W riting m ay absolve us o f the need to learn com plex mnem otechniques; it does not absolve us o f the need to speak” (46). Throughout this book, therefore, I will be w orking not w ith chasm b ut with interface, not with a great divide between oral and scribal w orlds but w ith their manifold interaction and with the delicacies required by that dialectic. I conclude with an example o f w hat I mean by oral-scribal interface, from a w orld both distant and close to that o f Jesus and his contem poraries. In Angela’s Ashes, a boyhood m em oir o f luminous horror, Frank M cC ourt recalls the last days o f his friend Patricia Madigan. T h ey m eet in Lim erick’s F ever Hospital, w here he is recovering from typhoid at ten and she is dying from diphtheria at fourteen. T h ey talk back and forth from one room to the other, and "she reads

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m e part o f a poem w hich I have to rem em ber so I can say it back to her early in the m orning or late at night w hen there are no nuns or nurses around.” T h ey are w orking day by day, stanza by stanza through the poem ’s suspenseful narrative about “ the highw ay m an” w h o came riding “up to the old inn-door.” But before they are finished, the nurse m oves Frank upstairs because "diphtheria is never allowed to talk to typhoid.” Patricia dies two days later, and Frank wonders h ow the poem ended. Seam us, w h o sweeps out the wards, “ doesn't know any poetry at all especially English p o e tr y .. . . Still he'll ask the men in the local pub where there's alw ays som eone reciting som ething and he’ll bring it back to m e.” Later Seam us reports that a “ m an in his pub knew all the verses o f the highway-m an poem and it has a ve ry sad end. W ould I like him to say it because he never learned h ow to read and he had to carry the poem in his head. H e stands in the m iddle o f the w ard leaning on his mop and recites” the concluding stanzas. "N o w i f y o u w an t to kn ow any m ore poems, Frankie, tell me and I’ll get them from the pub and bring ’em back in m y head” (196-201). T h at is one w ay the del­ icate interface o f oral and scribal transmission operates. This book is about som e other w ays.

P A R T III

G o sp e ls a n d S o u rce s As regards the parables and the sayings . . . there is . . . no reason to suppose that each story w as told on one occasion only. On the contrary, it seems most likely that they w ere repeated over and over again— sometimes in identical words, som etim es w ith variations. (Thus the parables o f the Great Supper and the M arriage o f the K in g s Son have every appearance o f being the same story, varied to suit the occasion; the parables o f the Talents and the Pounds offer a similar "doublet” , as do the similes o f the Improvident Builder and the Im provi­ dent King.) W e need not imagine that the appearance o f the same story in differ­ ent contexts argues any inaccuracy or contradiction, or that the version o f one Evangelist is m ore authentic than that o f another. T h e teacher w h o thought o f such a story as that o f the G ood Samaritan or the Prodigal Son w ould be foolish indeed to confine it to a single audience. H e w ould repeat it over and over, till his disciples knew it b y heart in all its variation s.. . . It must be rem em bered that, o f the fo u r Evangels, St. Jo h n ’s is the only one that claims to be the direct report o f an eye-witness. And to any one accustomed to the imaginative handling o f docum ents, the internal evidence bears out this claim. T h e Synoptists, on the w hole, report the “ set pieces” , it is S t.Jo h n w ho reports the w ords and actions o f the individual, unrepeated occasion, retrieving them from that storehouse o f trained m em ory w hich, am ong people not made forgetful by too m uch pen and ink, replaces the filed records and the stenographer’s note-b o o k.. . . All through, in fact, the G ospel o f St. Jo h n reads like the narrative o f an eye-witness filling up the gaps in m atter already published, correcting occasional errors, and adding material w hich previous writers either had not rem em bered or did not know a b o u t.. . . In m od em m em oirs written by real people about another real person w e should expect ju st that sort o f diversity which w e find in the Gospels----Take, fo r exam ple, the various accounts o f the Resurrection appearances at the Sepulchre. T h e divergences appear very great on first sig h t.. . . But the fact remains that all o f them, w ithout exception, can be made to fall into place in a single orderly and coherent narrative w ithout the smallest contradiction or diffi­ culty, and w ithou t any suppression, invention, or manipulation, beyond a trifling effort to imagine the natural behaviour o f a bunch o f starded people running about in the dawnlight betw een Jerusalem and the Garden. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Bom to Be King, pp. 26-29 Parts II and III are a tandem set looking at the materials, the where that con­ nects the w hy o f Part I to the how o f Parts IV and V. Part II w as concerned with m em ories and oral tradition. Part III is concerned w ith manuscripts and scribal

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transmission. W hat about the written gospels as sources for reconstructing the historical Jesus, Christian origins, and especially the closest interface discernible betw een them? Part III has three chapters. Chapter 7 looks at the inevitable need fo r histori­ cal judgm ents about the nature, number, contents, and relationships o f the extant gospels as preparation for doing historical reconstruction on Jesu s and ear­ liest Christianity. W hat are m y present presuppositions from the past history o f scholarly research on the gospels? Chapter 8 considers dependent and independent gospels and looks at h ow w e can determine dependence or independence betw een tw o gospels. It also considers extracanonical as well as intracanonical gospels— that is, those outside as w ell as inside the official or canonical N ew Testam ent. Should both be used for historical reconstruction? Should either be privileged o ver the other? W hat are m y own answers to those questions? Chapter 9 acknowledges that the preceding questions have becom e increas­ ingly controversial and that debates about them have becom e increasingly polemical. Is there any relatively objective evidence indicating h o w gospels now inside or outside the canon w ere seen before there ever w as a definitively closed canon? There are three aspects that cut across our inside/outside distinction, and tw o o f those aspects point toward a centralized authority w ith both intracanoni­ cal and extracanonical gospels falling under that unified control. T h o se twin aspects are the very early Christian preference for the codex o ver the scroll, and the equally early Christian use o f abbreviations for certain k ey theological expressions. I chose the epigraph to Part III carefully and deliberately. It w as w ritten over fifty years ago by som eone w ho was a scholar, a novelist, and a playwright. Because it breathes com m on sense in every line, even suggesting an alternative interpretation seem s to indicate the eccentricity o f scholarship seeking to over­ throw the norm alcy o f intelligence. A llow m e, h ow ever, tw o m ore autobio­ graphical details before proceeding. For m ost o f m y adult life, as I mentioned before, I taught prim arily under­ graduate, required, general-education classes at D ePaul University in Chicago. W h enever w e touched on the four gospels, which w as usually at som e speed and in passing, the students found biblical research on the source relationships between the gospels blissfully unbelievable. W h y not take them m ore or less as D orothy Sayers did in that epigraph? Y ou have four versions o f the sam e event, and all you have to do is integrate them into a synthetic w h ole. Or, conversely, yo u have different versions o f the same event because the speaker said the same thing in different w ays at different times. W h y do I not take the gospels like that?

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W hat separates m y presuppositions about the gospels from those o f m y stu­ dents, or m y conclusions about the gospels from those o f a D orothy Sayers? I spent the 1960s poring o ver the four gospels in parallel columns, w ord after w ord and unit after unit, day after day and year after year. I was studying the scholarly hypothesis that som e o f those gospels had used others as their sources— in other w ords, I w as doing source-criticism— and in the end I found it absolutely convincing. I w as also, presum ing that first hypothesis, testing out a second one: you could get a very good glimpse into the heart and mind o f an author by w atching h ow a source w as edited or redacted— that is, by doing redaction-criticism. (I know , b y the w ay, that others had m ore interesting times in the sixties, but I spent them in a monastery, w here alternative activities w ere som ew hat curtailed.) In any case, those tw o processes— source-criticism and redaction-criticism— w ere the tw in sides o f the same coin. T h ey stood or fell together; they confirm ed or disconfirmed one another. Another term, traditioncriticism, could be used to describe the fuller process in which they fitted. I f Unit A (the source) w as used b y Unit B (the redaction), a continuing tradition w as devel­ oping. T h e basic validity o f that double process is the m ajor presupposition to be outlined in this section. I f it is w rong, any historical reconstruction o f Jesus and his follow ers built upon it is m ethodologically invalid. Ditto, o f course, for any alternative hypothesis. It is the scholarly conclusions o f tradition-criticism, hard w o n by gospel scholarship o ver the last tw o hundred years (but also confirmed b y m y o w n personal study), that separates me from the simplicity o f com m on sense that here, as elsew here, can becom e uncommon nonsense.

CHAPTER

7

A D M I T T I N G GOSPE L PRESUPPOSITIONS T h e m uch-vaunted "norm al critical tools” , particularly form-criticism, are being tacitly (and in m y v ie w rightly) bypassed in the search for Jesus; enquiry is proceeding by means o f a proper, and often clearly articulated, m ethod o f hypothesis and verification .. . . [M]uch o f the impetus for formcritical and redaction-critical study came from the presupposition that this or that piece o f synoptic material about Jesu s could not be historical; in other words, that an historical hypothesis about Jesus could already be presupposed w hich dem anded a further tradition-historical hypothesis to explain the evi­ dence. If, h ow ever, a viable alternative historical hypothesis, w hether about Jesu s or about the early church, is proposed, argued out, and maintained, the need for tradition-criticism within the search for Jesus (to say nothing about its undoubted value in other historical enterprises) could in principle be substantially reduced and altered in sh a p e .. . . [A]ll sorts o f things in the gospels which, on the Bultmannian paradigm, needed to be explained by com plex epicycles o f Traditionsgeschichte [tradition-criticism] turn out, after all, to fit com fortably within the ministry ofjesu s. N. Thomas Wright, Jesus and the Victory o f God, p. 87 First, presuppositions are not, as used in this section, dogmatic or theological acts o f faith. T h ey are simply historical conclusions reached earlier but taken for granted here. Fuller argum entation about them has already been done on previ­ ous occasions and is publicly available from such earlier study. N o reputable scholar uses such presuppositions w ithout at least rechecking them. T h ey are necessary, h ow ever, because w ithout them one w ould have to start from scratch every tim e on every thing. Second, nobody can avoid presuppositions, although you can avoid these in favor o f those. Y ou can refuse m ine and choose your own. In historical Jesus research, nobody can avoid presuppositions about the gospels— about their num ber, their nature, and their relationships. And nobody can dismiss another's presuppositions using the grounds that they are ju st that. Presuppositions can be rejected only b y judgm ents o f inadequacy, illegitimacy, or invalidity. T h ey will then be replaced by other presuppositions, w hich will be argued as m ore ade­ quate, legitim ate, and valid.

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Third, i f there is a large consensus about certain aspects o f the gospels, you can check, accept, and presum e that m ajority opinion. A m ajority opinion is not necessarily right, o f course, but, i f you disagree with it, yo u should argue against it and not just ignore it. It is not sufficient simply to accuse it o f bias, prejudice, paranoia, or delusion. Fourth, superstructures are built on top o f foundations. Conclusions and decisions about the historical Jesus are built, by everyone, atop their presupposi­ tions about the gospels. Mistakes about foundations can bring superstructures tum bling down either partially or totally. But, on the other hand, one w a y to test foundations or presuppositions is to build atop them as heavily as possible and w atch for the cracks to appear. Presuppositions are being constantly tested by the structures built on top o f them. W rong presuppositions, w ro n g conclusions. Same judgm ent for me, you, and everyone else. All historical Jesus research, I repeat, works within certain presuppositions about the gospels— about their number, nature, and relationships. But whatever they are, let this be absolutely clear: a little Egyptian child playing tom orrow on the edges o f the Libyan desert could dig up a papyrus-filled ja r that w ould make all those presuppositions obsolete and force scholarship to start all over again. In the meanwhile, and pending such little-child leadership, this section lays out presuppo­ sitions about the gospels that will be important for what follows about text in Parts VI through X o f this b o ok My purpose in this section, then, is to emphasize the inevitability o f presuppositions by looking at the w ork o f N. Thom as W right on the historical Jesus as summarized in that preceding and the tw o succeeding epigraphs.

On Bypassing Previous Scholarship Schweitzer said that Jesu s comes to us as one unknown. Epistem ologically, if I am right, this is the w rong w ay around. We com e to him as ones unknow n, craw ling back from the far country, where w e have w asted ou r substance on riotous but ruinous historicism. But the swinehusks— the "assured results o f m od em criticism”— reminded us o f that knowledge w hich arrogance had all but obliterated, and w e began the jou rn ey hom e. N. Thomas Wright, Jesus and the Victory o f God, p. 662 W right speaks in those tw o epigraphs o f "the m uch-vaunted ‘norm al critical tools'” and o f the " ‘assured results o f m odem criticism /” and his quotation m arks prepare you for their dismissal. That is his first point. T h ere are three m ain historical procedures involved, and I mentioned tw o o f them in m y preced­ ing section. Source-criticism seeks to determine if and w h at genetic relationships exist betw een texts. W ho used w hat as a source? Redaction-criticism, reversing

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that process, seeks to determine the authorial developm ent o f such sources. W hat omissions, additions, and changes w ere involved in the redaction o f an earlier source by a later author? Form-criticism seeks to determine the forms in which oral units w ere transmitted and to correlate them with the situations that produced and used them. A form , for example, might be an aphorism, a parable, a dialogue, a debate, and so on. All those procedures com e together under the general heading o f tradition-criticism (or transmissional analysis), which attempts to trace the genetic relationship and historical trajectory o f large and small units o f tradition about Jesu s. T h at synthetic w o rk is based, o f course, on combined conclusions about form s, sources, and redactions. Can a scholar bypass all that previous w o rk and the presuppositions it developed about the gospels? You could certainly oppose it, argue against it, and declare publicly and accurately yo u r o w n alternative conclusions as new presuppositions. I do not think, h ow ­ ever, that yo u can bypass it. W right's second point is that those procedures are all illegitimate because they presum e a prior hypothesis about Jesus. That is flatly incorrect. M any ear­ lier scholars thought that such procedures w ould bring them back directly and autom atically to the historical Jesus. That did not and never will w ork. If M atthew used Mark, it does not follow that M ark gives you the historical Jesus. But it does follow that, in those places where he is copying Mark, M atthew gives y o u the historical M ark and not the historical Jesus. Those analytical procedures stand o r fall by them selves. T h ey do not stand or fall by the intentions or expec­ tations, theological visions or historical program s o f those w h o invented or first used them. T h ey cannot be "bypassed,” and neither can they be dismissed as based "o n the presupposition that this or that piece o f synoptic material about Je su s could not be historical." T h e form er is unwise. The latter is untrue. A third point proposes an alternative to building on such tradition-criticism. W right proposes to offer a m ajor hypothesis about the historical Jesus and then verify it by determ ining h ow w ell it explains all the data available. I return to see h o w this m ight w o rk below , but, for now, let us look at h ow it w ould discrimi­ nate betw een the follow ing tw o reconstructions. Ed Sanders announces the principle that “ the synoptic gospels are to be preferred as our basic source o f inform ation about Jesu s” (1993:73). W right does not announce a similar hypothe­ sis in theory but seems to use it in practice. The "Index o f Ancient Sources” at the back o f his b ook has twenty-five columns o f references to the three synoptic gospels but only one colum n o f references to John. I think that emphasis is cor­ rect, but, on W right's n ew m odel o f hypothesis and verification bypassing prior historical conclusions about the gospels, w h y should it be followed? W hy not hypothesize that Joh n had it historically correct, that Jesu s spoke in long discourses m aking absolutely transcendental claims about himself, and that the

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synoptics broke that all down into safer, simpler, smaller form s and contents? T h at is, after all, the equally plausible hypothesis o f D orothy Sayers in the epi­ graph to Part III. I do not think that the latter claim works as a hypothesis— it has already failed in testing for most scholars— but it is certainly a possibility. O r again, w h at about Stevan Davies's recent hypothesis that Jesus w as an ecstatic healer w h o taught others h ow to meet God in ecstasy (1995)? Jesu s h im self spoke Johannine-like when in ecstasy and synoptic-like w hen not in ecstasy. That explains both those traditions as equally primitive and also explains that wide swath o f Spirit-possessed trance in the primitive church. It is easy to m ock that theory by laughingly claiming that it gives new m eaning to the phrase "kingdom on high." But what is w rong with it as hypothesis and verification? The final point is rather suprem ely ironic. T h e single nam e m ost associated with those historical methods and analytical procedures ju st m entioned, with what is known in German as Traditionsgeschichte and in English as traditioncriticism, is R udolf Bultmann. But he is even m ore fam ous for the theological positions and historical overview s that he built over, under, around, and through those procedures. For example, he interpreted m ythological or eschatological language as existential challenge or personal decision, and he privileged the w ords o f Jesus to the almost total exclusion o f his deeds. M any scholars, m yself included, accept those analytical procedures but reject the w id er theological or even historical fram eworks in which they are imbedded. W right rejects it all as one composite and contaminated whole. Therein lies a suprem e irony. Bultmann was a Lutheran Protestant w ho looked in the gospels and found tradi­ tion. W right is a Anglican Catholic w ho looked in the gospels and found scrip­ ture. I think Bultmann was correct. Tradition w as there before, in, and after the gospels. You cannot bypass it.

Hypothesis and Verification N obody grum bles at a book on Alexander the Great if, in telling the story, the author "harm onizes" tw o or three sources; that is his or h er jo b , to advance hypotheses which draw together the data into a coherent fram e­ w o rk rather than leaving it scattered. N. Thomas Wright, Jesus and the Victory o f God, p. 88 W right's alternative proposal is hypothesis and verification, but w ithou t any prior judgm ents about sources and traditions. "It is vital that this point o f m ethod be grasped from the o u tse t.. . . [T]he task before the serious historian o f Je su s is not in the first instance conceived as the reconstruction o f traditions about Jesu s, according to their place within the history o f the early church, but

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the advancem ent o f serious historical hypotheses— that is, the telling o f largescale narratives— about Jesu s himself, and the examination o f the prima facie rele­ vant data to see h ow they fit.” H e uses the example in the epigraph above to show w hat he means, and he footnotes the following com m ent from the histo­ rian J. M ichael W allace-Hadrill: "I believe that the literary sources exaggerate when I can catch them out, but otherwise I give them the benefit o f the doubt___ One should not approach any o f them in a spirit o f resistant scepticism” (1996:87-88). “ O therw ise,” as W right adds later, “ ‘critical history' becom es m ere paranoia, insisting on conspiracy theories and unable to see the w ay that the real evidence is pointing” (105). All o f that sounds, as did Sayers’s words earlier, quite sanely obvious and quite obviously right. D ivergent versions o f the same saying or parable, event or incident, are explained by W right on the perfectly plausible presum ption that Jesu s w ou ld have said and done the same things in slightly dif­ ferent w ays in different places and on different occasions. Here is an example, h ow ever, to com plicate matters. Rem em ber, from Chapter 2 o f this book, that just as w e have four bio­ graphies o f Jesu s from M atthew, Mark, Luke, and John, w e have four biogra­ phies o f the em peror Tiberius, under w hom Jesus was crucified, from Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius. Imagine, now, classical historians reconstructing the life o f Tiberius from those sources. T h ey would, as W right notes fo r Alexander, w o rk out a critical but synthetic harmonization o f all four accounts. But im agine, next, a com plicating situation. Suppose that som e, many, m ost, or all classical historians cam e to the following scholarly conclusions: First, Velleius Paterculus w as not a contem porary o f Tiberius but w rote in the very early 70s. Second, Tacitus and Suetonius both copied rather m assively from Paterculus but changed, omitted, and added to his accounts for their ow n quite discernible purposes. Third, D io Cassius copied from all three o f his predeces­ sors, using those last tw o sources even m ore radically than they used the first one. T h at w ou ld certainly change everything. If the analysis o f source and redac­ tion cam e up w ith that stream o f tradition, then any form o f harmonization w o u ld be ruled out com pletely. A unit found in all four sources, for example, w o u ld be valueless as an historical datum in the last three and could be studied only in its first appearance. Each author could, o f course, have other indepen­ dent sources available for other details. But, in such a situation, their massive dependence on a single source w ould underline their historical limitations. Let m e em phasize tw o side issues before continuing. I f that w ere the actual situation w ith those four classical historians, I w ould not presume that they w ere all cheats o r liars. M aybe that w as the w ay they thought history should be written— as a genetically linked stream o f tradition, with later historians rewriting earlier ones. A n d neither w ou ld I presum e that the final version was valueless. Even if it had

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only copied data and absolutely no new facts o f its ow n, it m ight still produce an interpretation m ore persuasive than all those preceding ones put together. T h at im aginary classical scenario is an actual biblical one. A vast m ajority o f scholars in this century considers that M ark w as used b y M atthew and Lu ke as a m ajor source, and an equal m ajority in this century has sw u n g from one side to the other and back on those three synoptic gospels as the m ajor source fo r John. F o r those scholars, am ong whom I include myself, there is no possibility o f ignoring sources, redactions, and traditions in the gospels. Decisions about them m ust be made, and those decisions then becom e presuppositions fo r later research on the historical Jesus and the birth o f Christianity. It does not actually make any difference what paranoia or suspicion, w hat m otivation or prejudice, w hat theological position or even historical presumption m ay have led to those conclusions. The only question finally is, Are they valid? I f I hated Tacitus and intended to destroy his reputation by showing that he had copied m assively from Paterculus, that actually is irrelevant. I f I detested classicists and w anted to show that they were all misguided fools, that also is irrelevant. In the final analy­ sis, there is only one important point: Are w e or are w e not dealing w ith geneti­ cally independent versions? You understand, o f course, that this is not som e legal plagiarism case, but an attempt to discern w here w e have independent attesta­ tions and where w e have dependent traditions. Nothing, therefore, that W right says, often quite correctly, about the specific theological m otivations or even the general historical overview s o f those w ho first advocated or n o w use gospel sources, redactions, and traditions can invalidate those processes in them selves. Presuppositions about gospel materials, therefore, w ill crucially dictate and control one’s m ethod for research on both the historical Jesu s and earliest Chris­ tianity. Those presuppositions will touch on the nature and function o f the gospels but also on the contacts and relationships betw een them. Ju s t im agine, in conclusion, three very different models for such functions and contacts. Imagine that yo u w ere hearing about the gospels for the first time and had, as yet, no conclusions about them. Any one o f the follow ing m ight be y o u r initial hypothe­ sis, to be tested against the data, and no one o f them could be invalidated at the start ju st because it is a hypothesis. First, the gospel authors are like four witnesses giving legal testimony. All are doing their level best, as if in a court o f law, to tell you exactly what happened as fully as they can remember it. There m ay be slight divergences, but that only proves the normal vagaries o f memory. The described phenomenon is surest w here all four agree. In this model, the reconstruction o f the historical Jesus should depend on that consensual stratum, that fourfold agreement, for its most secure data. Threefold, twofold, or single attestation would supply the successively less secure data.

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Second, the gospel authors are like four scholars doing basic research. Each author goes back to the data in the past and, while not ignoring earlier work, seeks each time to w rite a brand-new and m ore accurate report. In that model, the later the w riter, the m ore historical the account will be. On that understand­ ing o f the four gospels, the latest stratum w ould give the m ost secure data about the historical Jesus. Third, the gospel authors are like four historians conducting oral interviews. If, in this oral history, their subject played variations on certain themes in different times and places, the collectors w ould end with different versions not just from vagrant m em ories but from parallel occasions. On that understanding o f the four gospels, all versions are equally correct. Diversity simply indicates that Jesu s said or did the sam e thing in slightly different ways. Fourth, the gospel authors are like four evangelists rewriting earlier tradition. There are tw o separate points to that description, gospel and tradition. I have already touched on that first point twice before, but it bears repetition because it is basic to this book. An evangelist is someone with good news to impart. Good indicates that the news is seen from som ebody’s point o f view, from the Christian Jew ish rather than the Rom an imperial interpretation. News indicates that a regular update is involved. It indicates that Jesus is constandy being actualized for new times and places, situations and problems, authors and communities. But that second point is equally important. W e are dealing with a continuing and a developing tradition, but it is a continuing or developing tradition that seems to swallow whole its predeces­ sors. Later gospels totally absorb the earlier one that they used as sources. Th ey absorb them, redact them, and thereby transform them. For example, the C om ­ m on Sayings Tradition, about which much more later, is absorbed into the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. The Q Gospel and Mark are absorbed into Matthew and Luke. T h e synoptics are absorbed, partially or totally, into John. If that is your view o f the gospels— and it is mine— the problem o f the historical Jesus pushes you back and back along that absorptive path to the earliest stratum o f the tradition. M y point in all o f this, I repeat, is not to debate these specific presuppositions but, first, to emphasize that one must have some set o f gospel conclusions and, second, to show you w h at m y ow n are and w h y I hold them. I f you take the intracanonical gospels as four independent witnesses to the historical Jesus, you w ill act one w a y on that presupposition. If you take the intracanonical gospels as basically a linked stream o f tradition, you will act differently on that presupposi­ tion. A ny w o rk done on a w ron g presupposition will be seriously weakened or even totally vitiated. Granted all that, then, what are m y ow n presuppositions about the gospel traditions, and h ow do those presuppositions justify m y method­ ological focus on the earliest layer o f that tradition for historical Jesus research?

CHAPTER 8

R E L A T I N G GO SP E L C O N T E N T S Crossan’s insistence that all Jesu s traditions— from apocryphal as w ell as canonical writings— m ust be put on an even footing appears as simple fairmindedness and intellectual rigor: he will demand that every strand o f tradi­ tion prove itself! But closer examination suggests that the gam e is fixed. Crossan’s rem arkably early dating for virtually all apocryphal materials, and his correspondingly late dating for virtually all canonical materials, together w ith his frequent assertion that the extracanonical sources are unaffected by the canonical sources and therefore have independent evidenciary value, rests on little m ore than his assertions and those o f the like-minded col­ leagues he cites. H e never enters into debate with those w h o do not share such view s. T h e position, in other words, is presumed, not proved. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus, p. 47 As you can see from that epigraph, the use o f both intracanonical (canonical) and extracanonical (apocryphal) gospels is rather controversial. The charge o f having "fixed” the evidence is the most serious accusation one scholar can make against another. T h at indictment serves to introduce the problem o f relating gospel contents, assessing gospel relations, deciding whether any gospels are, in w h o le or part, dependent on other gospels, and comparing intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. I repeat, once again, that you must decide yo u r presup­ positions about gospel traditions before reconstructing either the historical Jesus o r earliest Christianity. Everyone must. Everyone does.

Dependent and Independent Gospels M y guess w ou ld be that w e have tw o versions o f the great supper parable, tw o versions o f the talents/pounds parable, and tw o versions o f the beati­ tudes, not because one is adapted from the other, or both from a single com ­ m on written source, but because these are tw o out o f a dozen or m ore pos­ sible variations that, had one been in Galilee with a tape-recorder, one might have “ collected” . A nyone w h o suggests that this is not so must, I think, either be holding on doggedly to the picture o f the early church which I crit­ icized in the first volum e [The New Testament and the People o f God], or be in

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thrall to a highly dogmatic view o f scripture, or simply have no historical im agination for w hat an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, w ould lo o k like. N. Thomas Wright, Jesus and the Victory o f God, p. 170 T h at epigraph tells us that W right does not accept the existence o f w hat other scholars call the Q Gospel as the best explanation for the tw in b ut divergent versions o f the three 'units” (cited above) found in M atthew 2 2 :1-10 = Luke 14:16-24 (the parable o f the great supper), M atthew 25:14-30 = Luke 19 :12-27 (the parable o f the talents/pounds), and M atthew 5:3-4, 6, 11- 12 = Luke 6:2ob-26 (the beatitudes). He has, in other words, different presuppositions about gospel sources and redactions. I intend these three examples and w h at follow s not as debate on those presuppositions but rather as an indication o f h o w gospel pre­ suppositions necessarily dictate methods and models for research on the histori­ cal Jesus and earliest Christianity. The first question concerns dependent and independent gospels. H o w can you tell i f one gospel is or is not dependent on another? W hat happens, fo r exam ple, i f you have twin texts that are too similar in order an d /o r content for coinci­ dence to serve as an explanation? There are four possible explanations w h y tw o texts might be too similar for sheer coincidence. T h e first tw o in vo lve a com ­ m on source (oral or scribal) used independently o f one another b y later authors. T h e second tw o involve literary dependence (direct or indirect) o f a later author on an earlier one. Common Oral Matrix. One explanation is that they are both actualizations o f a com m on oral matrix. Here is a classic example o f that possibility involving a gospel and non­ gospel text: L u k e 12:35 (Rsv)

Didache 16 :1

Let you r loins be girded

Let your lamps be not quenched

and you r lamps burning.

and you r loins be not ungirded.

T h e core o f the oral matrix is those tw in sym bols o f readiness in no set order. Actualizations m ust then choose either lam ps/loins o r loins/lam ps as sequence, and either positive (“be” ) or negative ("be not” ) as form ulation. I pre­ fer that explanation to direct dependence o f either text on the other. Common Literary Source. A nother explanation for such twin texts is that they are both dependent on a com m on literary source. H ere is a classic example o f that possibility:

R E L A T I N G G O SPE L CO N T EN T S

Matthew 3:7-10 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood o f vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy o f repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root o f the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

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Luke 3:7-9 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood o f vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy o f repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

That indictm ent b y Jo h n the Baptist, over sixty words in Greek, is verbatim the sam e in M atthew and Luke except for four very m inor changes (all subject to textual debate). Th ose tw in versions are not the independent actualizations o f an oral m atrix b ut the very, very faithful reproductions o f a written source. That source, about w hich m ore below , is the Q Gospel. Notice, o f course, the diver­ gent introductions that precede the attack. But w h at i f som e com m on source, be it oral matrix or written text, is not an adequate explanation? W hat if one text is dependent on the other? H o w do you tell w hen that is so and w hich one has used the other? W hat, for example, has convinced a vast m ajority o f scholars that M ark w as used by M atthew and Luke rather than any other explanation o f their remarkably similar order and content? Th ose three gospels, to repeat an earlier statement, are so similar that they can easily be placed in parallel columns and seen at a glance—hence their usual tide o f the synoptic gospels. T here are certainly no easy answers to that question (as if the shorter o r longer w ere alw ays first, or the better-written or worse-written w ere alw ays first). T h e process is m uch m ore complicated in theory and much m ore controversial in practice. D ire c t L ite r a r y D e p en d en c e.

This explanation m ust be supported by tw o mutually supportive arguments: one is genetic relationship and the other is redactional confirmation. Genetic relation­ ship means that certain elements o f order and content that are characteristically M arkan are found in M atthew and Luke. W e are not talking o f general tradition com m on to all three gospels but o f specific editorial aspects o f Markan sequence o r style w hose presence in those other tw o texts indicates copying. W hat w e are seeking, as it w ere, are M arkan literary fingerprints or Markan theological

dna

present w ithin the gospels o f M atthew and Luke. Here is a classic exam ple o f that possibility.

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O ne o f the m ost peculiarly distinctive Markan com positional devices has been called an intercalation or sandwich. The device has tw o elem ents. First, liter­ ary presentation: Event A begins (Ar), then Event B begins and finishes (B), and finally, Event A finishes (A2). Second, theological meaning: the purpose o f the intercalation is not mere literary show; it presumes that those tw o events— call them the "fram ing event” and the "insert event” — are m utually interactive, that they interpret one another to emphasize M ark's theological intention. It is this com bination o f literary structure and theological im port that m akes those inter­ calations peculiarly if not uniquely Markan. T here is fairly wide agreement on the follow ing six cases as exam ples o f Markan intercalations: 5 :2 1 - 2 4

6 :7 - 1 3

1 1 :12 - 14

3 :2 2 - 3 0

5 :2 5 -3 4

6 :14 - 2 9

3 :3 1- 3 5

5 :3 5 -4 3

6 :30

3 :2 0 -3 5

14 :1- 2

1 4 :5 3 - 5 4

1 1:15 - 19

1 4 :3 - 9

1 4 :5 5 - 6 5

11:2 0 - 2 1

14 :10 - 11

1 4 :6 6 - 7 2

Several scholars agree on those six instances but add others as well. For example, Frans Neirynck gives seven examples (1972:133), John Donahue also seven (42 note z, 58 - 59 ), and Jam es Edwards nine (197-198). "The Evangelist," as T o m Shepherd

summarizes Mark’s purpose from those six cases, “has brought tw o stories together and yet held them apart in contrast to one another to produce an interpretation.” In 14-53-72, for example, there is a supremely ironic contrast: "Jesus gives a faithful confession o f his Messiahship and receives the sentence o f death [A1 + A 2]. Peter denies his Lord three times and saves him self from suffering [B]” (523, 532). W hat reassures m e that the device does not m ove from either M atthew or Luke into M ark but vice versa is the fact that, as Edw ards notes, " o f M ark’s nine sandwiches, M atthew retains M ark's A-B-A pattern five times and Lu ke retains it four tim es” (199). It is probably fair to say that both M atthew and Lu ke consider it a rather strange phenom enon and often eliminate it quite ruthlessly. Take, fo r exam ple, the w a y M ark intercalates the Tem ple’s sym bolic destruction in 11:15 -19 within the fig tree’s cursing in 11:12 -14 and w ithering in 11:2 0 -2 1. That structure tells us h ow M ark interprets Jesu s’ som ew hat enigm atic Tem ple action. It is a sym bolic destruction o f the Tem ple, ju st as the cursing o f the fig tree is a real one. It is a case o f destruction not cleansing, according to Mark. Luke, how ever, om its the w hole fig tree incident; and M atthew , w h o includes it, has cursing and withering happen together in 21:18 -19 ("A nd the fig tree with­ ered at once” ), but after the Tem ple action in 21:12 -13 and separated from it by the intervening events in 21:14-17. It is the presence o f such specific, personal, or com positional elements, be they order or content, topic o r style, that is the surest evidence o f the dependence o f one text upon another.

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T w o footnotes. First, the presence o f such individual com ponents o f one gospel in another m ust be checked carefully in case after case so that the argu­ ment is finally cum ulative. Second, no conclusions on dependence are absolute or beyond debate, since all such decisions are, in effect, w orking hypotheses or operational theories. But, in effect, you cannot not have them, for that is itself but another w orking hypothesis! Redactional confirmation supports genetic relationship. It is not really a second proof but a w a y o f testing som e postulated genetic relationship. If, for reasons such as those given in the preceding example, you postulate Matthean and Lukan dependence on Mark, you should be able to explain every omission, addi­ tion, or alteration in M atthew and Luke over their Markan source. Because, o f course, w e still have M ark. For m any scholars, including myself, it was the success o f such endeavors in redaction-criticism that served retroactively to confirm the historical prim acy o f Mark. Joseph Fitzmyer, for example, noted over twenty-five years ago that this argument from successful usage is "a valuable, but extrinsic, criterion for judging the worth o f this hypothesis” (1970:134; 1981-1985:65). But n ow a problem starts to appear. It has to do with the difference between proving a positive as against proving a negative, the difference between arguing fo r dependence as against arguing for independence. G o back to that Markan intercalation exam ple. W hat if M atthew and Luke had so disliked that device that they had both rem oved it completely? W here w ould w e be then? Because the texts do include intercalation, w e have an argument for their dependence on M ark. But i f they did not have it, w ould w e have an argument for their indepen­ dence from Mark? It is quite often taken for granted that the genetic relationship argum ent w orks equally for positive and negative situations. But it cannot do so w ith equal security, ju st as physical evidence can prove guilt but its lack cannot prove innocence. W hat happens when, unlike that synoptic situation, w e have tw o texts too close for sheer coincidence or simple divergent perform ance but lacking specific traits o f one in the other? In d ir e c t L ite r a r y D e p en d en c e.

T h at question presses because recendy Raym ond Brown has questioned w hether the synoptic model o f direct literary dependence should be the unique or even dom inant m odel for dependency relations. In that model, w e can imagine M atthew and Luke w orking with Mark’s text directly before them, whether on their w riting desk or read to them b y slave, servant, or colleague. It is precisely because M atthew and Luke copied M ark rather closely that w e have been able to obtain a m assive scholarly consensus on their dependency. But w hat if, as Brown suggests, an audior had heard or read another text and w rote it from m em ory m any years later? As w e saw earlier, that is h ow he judges the Gospel o f Peter to be

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dependent on the gospels o f Matthew, Luke, and John. It depends on those canonical versions, "not necessarily from their written texts but often from m em ­ ories preserved through their having been heard and recounted o rally"— that is, b y "distant m em ory o f having heard them” ; in other words, the G ospel o f P eter w as not produced "at a desk by someone with written sources propped up before him ” (1994:1001, 1306, 1336). Let me call that a case o f in d irect litera ry dependence. Rem em brance o f a text heard or read years before w ould m ost likely lack any peculiar, individual, or personal identifying traits found in the original— such as the Markan intercalations. Som ebody today, for instance, rew riting M ark from m em ory and not knowing about the importance o f the intercalations, w ould probably not even recall their presence. That w ould make impossible an argu­ ment from genetic relationship even w here such existed. A re w e at an impasse in such a case? Not exactly. W e still have that second argum ent m entioned above, that o f redactional confirm ation. If w e postulate an author w riting from distant m em ory o f a text heard or read, w e should still be able to do redaction-criticism on that presumption. H ow and w h y did that author rem em ber in that way? W hat theory o f m em ory explains the production? W hat literary an d /o r theological pur­ poses explain the final composition? I return to this difficulty in Chapter 25.

Intracanonical and Extracanonical Gospels The earliest gospel traditions and gospel writings contain the seed o f both . . . later heresy as well as later orthodoxy. For the description o f the history and developm ent o f gospel literature in the earliest period o f Christianity, the epithets "heretical” and "orthodox” are meaningless. O nly dogm atic prejudice can assert that the intracanonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin and thus to historical priority. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. xxx [I am not] sympathetic to a simplistic tendency to regard extracanonical w orks as the key to true Christianity as contrasted w ith a narrow-m inded censorship represented by the N ew Testament. Raymond E. Brown, The Death o f the Messiah, p. 1347I I am deliberately using neutral terms to describe tw o sets o f gospels. I use in tracan o n ical and extracanonical rather than m ore judgm ental ones such as canon­ ica l and a p ocryp h al or orthodox and heretical. This is not a question o f which

gospels I o r anyone else accepts as m ore religiously significant or theologically valid. It is sim ply an attempt to handle all the historical evidence fairly and accu­ rately. T o study the G ospel o f Thom as, for example, and to decide that it contains canonically independent but heavily redacted early Jesu s tradition, does not

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mean, fo r me at least, that it is som ehow better or m ore norm ative than any one o f the intracanonical gospels, which also contain early Jesus tradition and are also heavily redacted. It is simply there and must be investigated. Y ou m ay get, how ever, a sense o f h ow controversial this discussion is by noting the tone o f those preceding epigraphs. W hen terms like "dogm atic prejudice” and “narrow ­ minded censorship” enter the discourse, any hope for useful academic debate is long gone. P R E SU P P O SIT IO N S A B O U T T H E IN T R A C A N O N IC A L G O SP E LS I have (and w ou ld like to sum m arize here) three presuppositions concerning relations betw een the intracanonical gospels. By presuppositions I do not mean positions beyond current debate or even future change. Neither do I mean theo­ logical com m itm ents. Rather, I m ean historical judgm ents based on present evidence and requiring constant future testing against new theory, method, evi­ dence, or experience. I have learned these presuppositions from scholarly tradi­ tion, have studied them internally, have tested them externally, and have found them consistently m ore persuasive than their alternatives. But i f they are wrong, then everything based on them is questionable; and if they are proved wrong, then everything based on them will have to be redone. In the m eanwhile, I must take a position on questions o f gospel sources and relations in order to do histori­ cal study, because not to do so is simply to do so differently. F ir s t P re s u p p o s itio n .

In 1789-1790 the G erm an scholar Johann Jakob Griesbach explained the genetic relationship betw een the three synoptic gospels by proposing that M atthew cam e first, M ark copied from M atthew, and Luke copied from them both. T h at theory is still accepted today by scholars such as Hans-Herbert Stoldt in G erm any and W illiam Farm er in the United States. But in 1835 Karl Lachmann argued for a different genesis: M ark came first, and both M atthew and Luke copied from him (but independently o f each other). That theory is held today by a fairly m assive (but b y no means total) consensus o f contem porary critical scholarship. M y first presupposition, then, is the validity o f Markan priority, the th eory that M ark w as used by M atthew and Luke as the first o f their m ajor con­ secutive sources, I presum e, o f course, that scholars w orking within a consensus study the data, check the evidence, and confirm the conclusions for themselves. I also presum e that adopting an hypothesis means continuing to test it against on e's continuing research. But it is probably fair to say that M ark's genetic prior­ ity w ithin the synoptic tradition is the consensus basis for m odem historical criti­ cism o f the gospels. T o claim chronological or even genetic priority is not, o f course, to claim religious or theological priority. Furtherm ore, I make no argu­ m ent that consensus m ust be right or that the lone dissident is thereby w rong. I

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sim ply say that one must make a decision, one w a y o r the other, on M arkan prior­ ity and then w o rk on that presupposition. W rong there, w ro n g thereafter.

Second Presupposition. In 1838, Christian Hermann W eifie developed some earlier ideas o f Friedrich Schleiermacher and suggested that M atthew and Luke used another m ajor con­ secutive source besides Mark. Then, in 1863, Julius Holtzm ann gave this source a nam e or designation: A , short for A o y ia , the G reek w ord for "sayings [o f Jesus]." Finally, in 1890, Johannes Weiss, writing about the Beelzebul controversy in M atthew 12:22-32 = Luke 11:14-26, argued that they had not derived that incident from M ark 3:22-27 but from another com m on source (source is Q uelle in Ger­ man), nam ely Q, for short, as cited by Frans Neirynck (1982:686). It is, however, rather demeaning to call Q simply a source, as i f it had no integrity, continuity, or theology o f its own. It is hardly correct to define som e­ thing by its later usage rather than b y its prim ary purpose. Im agine, fo r example, calling our second intracanonical document not the gospel o f M ark b ut the Syn­ optic Narrative Source. Thus, "in recent years,” as Frans N eirynck has observed, “some North American scholars have suggested introducing the term ‘gospel' in the designation o f Q with its full name: the Sayings G ospel Q ” (19953:421). 1 belong to that group but, since the Gospel o f Thom as is also a sayings gospel, I pre­ fer to call Q the Q Gospel. That serves to respect its textual and theological integrity (Q as gospel) but also to remind us that w e kn ow it only b y scholarly reconstruction (Q as source). An aside. The point here is not what certain texts nam e them selves. The Q docum ent does not call itself a gospel— but then, neither do M atthew , Luke, and Joh n. T h e point is what scholars name such texts. Is there bias in privileging our first four canonical texts as gospels even w hen they lack that sam e title b ut refus­ ing it to others even w hen they contain the same content? Is there bias, on a m ore prosaic level, in never italicizing the titles fo r the intracanonical gospels— those o f M atthew, Mark, Luke, and John— but in alw ays doing so fo r the extracanonical gospels, such as the Gospel o f Thom as or the G ospel o f Peter? T h e only neutral w a y to control scholarly bias that I can think o f is to accept Helm ut K oester’s double suggestion. Put positively, w e should include w ithin "gospel lit­ erature . . . all those writings which are constituted b y the transm ission, use, and interpretation o f materials and traditions from and about Jesu s o f N azareth." Put negatively, w e should exclude documents that “ are not related to or constituted b y the continuing developm ent o f sources containing m aterials from or about Je su s o f N azareth” (19903:46,47). Back, in any case, to the Q G ospel. T h e Q G ospel, therefore, is a hypothetical docum ent w h ose existence is per­ suasively postulated to explain the am ount o f non-M arkan m aterial found with sim ilar order and content in M atthew and Luke. T h at postulate does not have

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the massive consensus that Markan priority has, but it is certainly a m ajor schol­ arly conclusion. E ven within that shared conclusion, how ever, there is a grow ing difference betw een those w h o regard the Q Gospel as a m ajor gospel text and those w h o accept its existence and contents but not its significance and implica­ tions. Jo h n M eier, for example, accepts its presence in M atthew and Luke but concludes, "I cannot help thinking that biblical scholarship w ould be greatly advanced i f every m orning all exegetes would repeat as a mantra: fQ is a hypo­ thetical docum ent w hose exact extension, wording, originating com m unity, strata, and stages o f redaction cannot be known” ’ (1994:2.178, m y italics). But how does he kn ow that those things cannot be known unless he has entered into detailed debate w ith the alternative quarter-century o f scholarship that runs, for exam ple, from Robinson (1971) to Kloppenborg (1990) and extends into both the Society o f Biblical Literature’s Q Seminar and the International Q Project? Fur­ therm ore, there is another and even m ore basic mantra that those same exegetes should utter each m orning on rising: “ Hypotheses are to be tested.” And you test them b y pushing, pushing, pushing, until you hear som ething crack. Then you exam ine the crack to see h ow to proceed. Q was quite acceptable as long as it w as nothing m ore than a source to be found within the safe intracanonical con­ fines o f M atthew and Luke. But now the Q Gospel is starting to look a little like a T ro jan horse, an extracanonical gospel hidden within tw o intracanonical gospels. I f certain scholars have held all noncanonical gospels to be late and dependent, w h at w ill they do w ith a noncanonical gospel that is not only early and indepen­ dent but on w hich tw o intracanonical gospels are themselves dependent? M y second presupposition, then, accepts the existence o f the Q Gospel , the theory that it w as used b y M atthew and Luke as the second o f their m ajor consecutive sources. I also take very seriously and am profoundly indebted to all o f that recent Q scholarship. If it is w ron g on Q, then so am I on the historical Jesus and earliest Christianity. T h e sam e applies, o f course, to those w h o deny the Q G o sp el’s existence in theory or ignore its significance in practice. W e all build on

ou r presuppositions and w e all stand or fall on their validity.

Third Presupposition . M y third presupposition, which is m ore complicated, concerns the relation­ ship o f Jo h n to the three synoptic gospels. This is a problem on which scholar­ ship has oscillated strongly from one alternative to the other within this century. D w igh t M oody Sm ith has given a very thorough review o f that process, and this is his sum m ary: “A t the beginning o f the century, the exegete or com mentator could safely assum e Jo h n ’s knowledge o f the Synoptics. W e then passed through a period o f a quarter o f a century or m ore (1955-1980) in w hich the opposite assum ption w as the safer one: Joh n was perhaps ignorant o f the Synoptics, cer­ tainly independent o f them. W e have now reached a point at w hich neither

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assum ption is safe, that is, neither can be taken for granted” (19923:189). A delbert D enaux, introducing the published papers o f an international m eeting on Joh n and the synoptic gospels at Belgium 's Leuven University in 1990, claim ed, m ore strongly, that there was now "a grow ing consensus that the author o f the Fourth G ospel w as related to and/or in one w ay or another dependent u pon one or m ore o f the Synoptic Gospels” (viii). M y ow n position presumes both independence and dependence. T h a t is not ju st a silly attempt to have it both w ays but a necessary conclusion from m y own research. In the early 1980s, w orking on the aphorisms o f Jesu s fo r In Fragm ents, I found those in Joh n to be independent o f the synoptic gospels (i983:x), b ut in the late 1980s, w orking on the passion and resurrection o f Jesu s for T h e C ross That Spoke, I found the opposite to be true (i988:xii-xiv). I consider that Jo h n ’s gospel

developed over certain m ajor stages. First, there w as an independent collection o f miracles and aphorisms that w ere creatively integrated so that the miraclesigns represented as physical events (bread, sight, etc.) w h at w as announced by the aphorism-dialogues as spiritual events ("I am the bread, light,” etc.). Second, pressure from groups accepting the synoptic gospels as the dom inant Christian model resulted in the necessity o f adding Joh n the Baptist traditions at the start and passion-resurrection traditions at the end o f a gospel w hich, left to itself, would have begun with that magnificent hym n at the start in Jo h n 1:1- 18 (with­ out the Baptist, o f course) and concluded with that equally m agnificent discourse o f Jesu s at the end in Joh n 14-17. Third, pressure from groups accepting Peter as the dominant Christian leader necessitated the addition o f Jo h n 21. Is all o f that absolutely secure and definite? O f course not. But once again, a scholar has to decide and to w ager the general validity o f future w o rk on that decision, what­ ever it is and w hichever w a y it is taken. Take the passion narrative in Joh n as seen by tw o m ajor scholars fo r a spe­ cific example o f that preceding problem. Raym ond B row n ju d ges that Jo h n is independent o f the synoptic gospels: “Joh n did not use any o f the Synoptic PNs [passion narratives] in writing his own account." H e then builds his magisterial passion com m entary on that presupposition and explicitly acknow ledges the im portance o f his independence hypothesis: "Since M ark and Jo h n w ro te inde­ pendently o f each other, the agreement o f their PNs is often an im portant indica­ tor o f preG ospel order and stories” (1994:92-93). M aurits Sabbe, on the other hand, in a series o f articles ju st as finely detailed and fully docum ented as B ro w n 's book, concludes that the combination o f direct dependence and literary creativity is the best explanation for Joh n ’s relationship to the other three gospels (1991:385, 513; 1995:219). On the death o f Jesu s in Jo h n i9:i6b-42, for exam ple, he argues that "the hypothesis o f a direct dependence upon the Synoptists, com­ bined with a certain am ount o fjoh an n in e literary creativity, appears to be the

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most probable explanation for the similarities and dissimilarities betw een the Fourth and the antecedent Synoptic Gospels" (1994:34). I agree w ith Sabbe rather than Brow n on the dependence o f the passionresurrection sections o f Jo h n but am not yet convinced about the dependence o f the miracle-discourse sections, and I leave them aside for now . W h y with Sabbe rather than Brown? For tw o reasons— one negative, one positive. Brow n mocks "the picture o f the Johannine evangelist w orking directly on the written Marcan PN [passion narrative], m aking dozens o f inexplicable changes o f order and words, and thus producing the very different PN that appears in Jo h n " (1994:83). But since, as w e ju st saw , he him self introduced the possibility o f indirect rather than direct literary dependence, he cannot any longer presume that Jo h n ’s only mode o f synoptic usage m ust be direct (desktop) copying. It could be literarily dependent but filtered through distant m em ory, repeated liturgy, profound m ed­ itation, literary and theological creativity, or all o f the above. T h at is the negative aspect o f this issue, but the positive is m ore important for m e. Recall those Markan intercalations given above (p. 106) and focus on the last exam ple in that list. W hat M ark did was intercalate Jesu s’ confession under trial in 14:55-65 (—B) betw een the beginning in 14:53-54 (“ A 1) and ending in 14:66-72 (= A 2) o f Peter's denials. Since Mark’s com munity is repeatedly warned about persecution, the point o f that sandwiched juxtaposition is very clear. Take Jesu s as y o u r m odel for brave and open confession o f the truth under trial. But, if you deny Jesu s under pressure and even curse him to prove yo u r innocence, there is still hope for repentance and forgiveness. Surely a very consoling double m essage about Christians w h o died bravely through confession and/or Christians w h o survived safely through denial. T h at A ’-B-A2 inclusion o f M ark 14:53-72 is retained in M atthew 26:57—75 but elim inated in Luke 22:56-71, w here Peter’s denials in 22:54-62 simply precede Je su s’ confession in 22:63-71. But here is the important point: Jo h n not only pre­ sents the sam e A*-B-A2 pattern, he intensifies it by having one denial precede (18:13-18) and tw o others follow (18:25-27) Jesu s' confession (18:19-24). His pur­ pose w as probably not ju st to contrast Jesu s and Peter, as M ark did, but also to contrast Peter and ''the other disciple": Sim on Peter and another disciple follow ed Jesus. Since that disciple was kn ow n to the high priest, he w ent with Jesus into the courtyard o f the high priest, but Peter w as standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, w ho w as know n to the high priest, w ent out, spoke to the w om an w h o guarded the gate, and brought Peter in. T h e w om an said to Peter, "Y ou are not also one o f this m an’s disciples, are you?” He said, "I am not." (John 18:15-17)

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It is significant that nothing is said about that other disciple w h o is presum ably the sam e as the Beloved Disciple, denying Jesus! T h e transference o f that pecu­ liarly or even uniquely Markan literary-theological structure from M ark 14:53-72 into Jo h n 18:13-27 persuades me to accept, at least as a w orking hypothesis, the dependence o fjo h n 's passion account on Mark's. H ence m y third m ajor presupposition about the intracanonical gospels is that Jo h n is dependent on the synoptic gospels at least and especially fo r the pas­ sion narratives (here I agree with Maurits Sabbe [1991: 355-388, 467-513; 1994; 1 9 9 5 ]) and for the resurrection narratives (with Frans N eirynck [1982: 181-488; 1 9 9 1 - 571-616]). Once again, if that is wrong, everything I build on it is invalid.

And again, the same goes for the opposite position.

PRESUPPOSITIONS ABOUT THE EXTRACANONICAL GOSPELS Exacdy the same principles used in determining relations b etw een the intra­ canonical gospels are used for those between intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. For direct literary dependence: in this situation, genetic relationship is estab­ lished by finding specific stylistic traits o f one gospel w ithin another gospel and using redactional confirmation to explain w h y that latter version used the form er as it did. In the absence o f such traits giving evidence o f direct literary depen­ dence in either direction, independence m ay be hypothetically proposed. For indirect literary dependence: in this situation, w here no specific stylistic traits o f one gospel are present in another, redactional confirmation is the only m ethod avail­ able to argue in either direction. Those principles w ill be exem plified in w h at fol­ low s, but an even m ore basic problem must first be faced. Fixing the Evidence? W h y is it necessary to make a distinction here betw een intracanonical and extracanonical gospels i f exactly the same principles establish dependence or independence am ong them all? Go back and read the epigraph to this section, a passage from Luke Johnson's book The Real Jesus, with its accusations that m y m ethod is “ fixed” ; that I have given an early date and independent status to "vir­ tually all apocryphal materials" and a correspondingly late date and dependent status to “virtually all intracanonical m aterials"; and that m y on ly arguments are citations from “like-minded colleagues.” Som ething clearly happens to colle­ gial courtesy, scholarly integrity, and academic accuracy w h en extracanonical gospels enter the debate. But, since principles and not ju st polem ics are con­ cerned in that indictment, let me use it to review m y m ethodology. First, it is very, ve ry serious to charge that another scholar has "fixed " his

j

j

research m ethodology. O ur only integrity as scholars is n ot to b e right and cor­ rect but to be honest and public. "Fixing" data entails a deliberate intention to

;

deceive. W h en one scholar accuses another o f fixing the eviden ce, som ebody

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has lost his integrity. O thers w ill have to decide w hether it is Joh nson or myself. Second, I do not give a "late dating for virtually all intracanonical materials.” I date them all ju st as everyone else does (within, o f course, those three presup­ positions m entioned above). T here is a full inventory o f the Jesu s tradition in Appendix 1 to T h e H istorical Jesu s, and, where applicable, Paul is always in first place since his authentic letters are most securely dated to the 50s. Paul, there­ fore, ends up in fourteen out o f the twenty-nine units w ith m ore than triple inde­ pendent attestation in m y earliest stratum (1991:434-436). 1 also date the Q Gospel to those sam e 50s, w hich I take to be the consensus position o f experts on that text, as revealed in this example: “T h e entire development o f Q . . . m ust be dated w ithin the first three decades after the death o fje su s" (Koester 1990:170). Neither do I give a “ remarkably early dating for virtually all apocryphal mate­ rials.” In fact, I don’t even address m ore than a small fraction o f them: the Apoc­ rypha is a huge body o f material, and I left the vast m ajority o f it aside, having judged it to be either dependent on or aware o f the intracanonical gospel texts. Here, alm ost at random, are four examples o f such dependence: the Epistu la Apos­ tolorum, the In fan cy Gospel o f Thom as, the Protoevangelium o f Ja m es, and the Gospel o f the N azaroeans. But I also singled out four extracanonical gospel texts that I judged

to be crucially im portant for understanding the Jesus tradition. Three w ere inde­ pendent o f the intracanonical texts: the Gospel o f Thom as, the Egerton Gospel, the Secret G ospel o f M ark . T h e fourth text, the Gospel o f Peter, is dependent on the intra­

canonical texts but also contains an independent source, which I termed the Cross Gospel (like the Q Gospel within M atthew and Luke). Because o f the importance o f

those four gospels for m y historical Jesus research, I published F ou r O ther Gospels in 1985 and explicitly argued m y position on dependence or independence for each one o f the four. I cannot, how ever, claim originality for any o f those asser­ tions; though controversial, to be sure, they have been around ever since those docum ents w ere discovered in 1945,1934,1958, and 1886-1887 respectively. D w ight M oody Smith, for example, cautiously summarized the situation concerning those four gospels in 1992 by saying that "in each case, the arguments for independence from , as distinguished from priority over, the intracanonical gospels have a certain plausibility, and Crossan is by no means the first or only scholar to advance them .” He found in current research on the extracanonical gospels "a tilting in the direction o f affirming their traditional and churchly roots as givin g them an equal standing with the intracanonical gospels, which, so to speak, w on out o ver them in the struggle that gave birth to the N ew Testam ent canon. Despite reservations about specific positions taken, I believe that this effort to see the origins o f the intracanonical and apocryphal gospels together, as one process, is a useful one” (1992^151-152).

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In any case, by the time I had finished Four O ther G ospel s, I kn ew that the pro­ posed Cross Gospel in particular, and the larger Gospel o f Peter, w as so important for understanding the development o f the passion and resurrection stories that it w ould need a book all to itself. In 1988, The Cross T h at Spoke presented a scholarly defense o f m y position on the relationship o f the extracanonical Gospel o f Peter to the intracanonical passion-resurrection narratives. (When I need to establish a position, I write a book, not a footnote.) But it is rhetorical overkill, putting it mildly and kindly, to describe an early dating o f those four texts (or, in the case o f the Gospel o f Peter, o f a source within it) as an "early dating for virtually all apocryphal materials.”

Scholarly debate must continue, o f course, on all those positions. Third, I do, o f course, quote from "like-minded colleagues.” I am, for example, profoundly indebted to experts on the Q Gospel, from Robinson to Kloppenborg, as mentioned above, and to experts on the Gospel o f Thom as, from Koester to Patter­ son, just to mention colleagues in this country. If their w o rk is basically wrong, then so is mine.

Assessing the Evidence. As an illustration, and because the Gospel o f Thom as is so im portant fo r what immediately follows, I focus on it here as an example o f h ow I assess (not fix) the evidence. M y position on it represents a fourth m ajor presupposition about the gospel sources available for reconstruction o f the historical Jesu s and earliest Christianity. The Gospel o f Thomas is, first o f all, not a hypothetical necessity (as the Q Gospel is) but an extant document available partially in Greek (in fragments from three dif­ ferent manuscripts) and frilly in Coptic (in a translation from a single manuscript). T h e G reek fragments w ere discovered by Grenfell and H un t in 1896-1897 and 1903-1904 at ancient Oxyrhynchus (1897; 1898; i904ab). W h at they found, w ithout anyone then knowing it, was fragments from the G ospel o f T h o m as in its original Greek. These are the three papyri w ith their van H aelst catalogue num ­ bers and dates: #593: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654 = Gos. Thom . Prologue and 1-7 #594: Papyrus O xyrhynchus 1

= Gos. Thom . 26-33 (with 77b attached to 30)

#595: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655 -

Gos. Thom . 24 and 36-39

P. Oxy. 654, n ow in London’s British Library, is a single fragm ent from a reused scroll, dated to the middle o f the third century. P. Oxy. 1, n o w in O xford’s Bodleian Library, is a single fragment from a codex, dated to the start o f the third century. POxy. 655, n ow in Harvard's Houghton Library, is eight fragments from a papyrus scroll, dated to the start o f the third century. The dates, o f course, are for the time the manuscripts w ere copied and not for the time the gospel itself w as com posed.

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Grenfell and H unt gave ve ry decisive conclusions about the text contained in their P. O xy. 1. T h ey did not know , o f course, that it w as part o f the G ospel o f Thom as, but I cite their sum m ary because, in m y judgm ent, it is absolutely accu­

rate for that gospel as a w hole. T h ey made "four points: (i) that w e have here part o f a collection o f sayings, not extracts from a narrative gospel; (2 ) that they w ere not heretical; (3) that they w ere independent o f the four Gospels in their present shape; (4) that they w ere earlier than

a .d

. 14 0 ,

and might go back to the

first century" ( 18 9 8 , 2 ; see 18 9 7 , 1 6 - 2 0 ) . I emphasize that those fragments w ere from three differen t copies o f the Gospel o f Thom as, which indicates a fairly high popularity for that text (at least in second-century Egypt). T h e Coptic translation w as discovered in 1945 by a group o f Egyptian peas­ ants digging for nitrate-rich fertilizer at the base o f the Jabal al-Tarif cliff near m odem N ag Ham m adi, about 250 miles south o f Oxyrhynchus, also on the west­ ern bank o f the Nile. It w as part o f what became known as the N ag Hamm adi Library, tw elve full codices and part o f a thirteenth containing fifty-two tractates in all. T h e G ospel o f Thom as, for example, is tractate 2 o f codex 2, and the name is given not w ithin the tractate’s ow n prologue but separately, at the end (Robinson 1979). It is n o w preserved in the Coptic M useum in Old Cairo. (Coptic designates the Egyptian language as eventually written with the Greek alphabet and several other special letters. But it also designates Egyptian Christianity, w ithout w h ose venerable antiquity all those intracanonical and extracanonical papyri w ou ld never have existed, been buried, to be but recently discovered.) Second, here is w h y I ju dge it to be independent o f the intracanonical gospels (1985:35-37 = 1992:17-19). I f it w ere in direct literary dependence— that is, i f the author o f the G ospel o f Thom as had had the intracanonical gospels available w hen w riting— you w ou ld expect som e influence from their individually specific order and content in the Thom as composition. O n o rder: In 1979 Bruno de Solages placed the sayings in the G ospel o f Thom as

in one colum n in its order, and their equivalents as they appear in each o f the intracanonical gospels (as w ell as Q) in other columns in their order. H e then drew lines betw een the equivalent versions o f the same saying. W hat resulted w as a total mess o f lines show ing absolutely no com m on order anywhere. On content: In 1966 Jo h n H. Sieber’s doctoral dissertation at Clarem ont Grad­ uate School focused not on com m on traditional materials in the G ospel o f Thom as and the synoptics but on individually specific stylistic or redactional details in the synoptics, to see i f those items appeared in Thom as. He concluded that "there is very little redactional evidence, i f any, for holding that our Synoptic Gospels w ere the sources o f T hom as’ synoptic sayings. In the great m ajority o f cases there is no such evidence at all" (262). The same conclusion, reached via a similar rigorous m ethodology> appeared in another Clarem ont dissertation— that o f

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Stephen J. Patterson in 1988. He concluded that, "w hile T hom as and the synoptic texts do in fact share a large body o f com m on material, there is neither a consis­ tent pattern o f dependence o f one text upon the other, nor a substantial am ount o f agreem ent in the w a y each text ordered the material they share” (1993:16). But what if one raises the possibility o f indirect literary dependence— that is, the possibility that the author o f Thom as created a collection o f sayings after having heard or read the synoptic gospels in the distant past? Then the emphasis shifts, o f course, from Thom as's lack o f any redactional order or content derived from syn­ optic sources to Thom as's own redactional intention and com position. W h y did the author choose those sayings rather than all the others available fo r inclusion? W hy, to give a specific example, did the author manage to hear or read that set o f beatitudes in Matthew and Luke and rem em ber them as the discrete ones given in the Gospel o f Thomas 54 (poor), 68-69:1 (persecuted), and 69:2 (hungry)? T h e Gospel o f Thom as is fairly unique am ong extracanonical gospels proposed as canonically independent because it is not a fragm entary but a com plete text. One w h o is not persuaded o f its independence will hardly be persuaded o f the independence o f any other extracanonical text presently available. In 1978 the late G eorge M acRae concluded that "it n ow appears that a m ajority o f scholars w h o have seriously investigated the matter have been w o n o ver to the side o f 'Thom as' independence o f the intracanonical Gospels, though these scholars hold a variety o f views about the actual history o f the com position o f the 'Gospel o f T hom as” ' (152). Be that as it may, the theory o f T hom as’ s intracanonical inde­ pendence is now strongly enough supported by experts that one can begin to build on it and thereby to test it further. That is w hat I have done in the past and intend to do in even greater detail below. M eth o d a n d D ebate.

In conclusion, the debate has never been, despite Jo h n so n ’s exaggeration, that som e scholars, m yself included, take "virtually all" o f the extracanonical Jesu s traditions as early and independent, and "virtually all" o f the intracanonical texts as late and dependent. The fact is that a very sm all num ber o f extracanoni­ cal gospel sources have been proposed as canonically independent b y some scholars, m y self included, while opposing scholars declare a ll extracanonical texts to be late and canonically dependent. Apart from detailed argum ents in spe­ cific cases, I have one initial problem with that general conclusion. O nce certain scholars— for example, N eirynck in Belgium (1989) or Meier (1991-1994:1.114-139) in the United States— have declared every extracanonical gospel so far discovered to be canonically dependent, on w h at principles might any future discovery be assessed differently? M y ow n principles fo rju d g in g direct litera ry depen den ce are these: genetic relationsh ip is established by the presence o f

individually specific order or content from independent into dependent text, and

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redactional confirmation is established by showing where, how , and w h y the dependent text changed the independent one. Indirect literary dependence is, o f course, m uch m ore difficult for arguments in either direction, since genetic relationship is generally precluded in this case. All that is left is redactional confir­ mation o f w h atever option is chosen. Thus, for example, i f there is som e sort o f indirect literary relationship betw een the Gospel o f Peter and our intracanonical gospels, be it in one direction as source (Crossan 1988; 1995) or in the opposite direction as digest (Brow n 1987; 1994), one must be able to explain b y redactional confirmation h o w an author got from the independent to the dependent one(s). This, then, is m y challenge: On w hat principles might any future extracanonical text be ju dged as canonically independent b y those w ho have thus far refused that position to all past ones? Put another way: H ow could yo u r position ever be falsified? M y ow n theory on the Gospel o f Peter, for example, could be falsified to m y satisfaction i f som ebody could explain an author w ho knew the intracanoni­ cal passion-resurrection accounts and came up with that version o f them. I have mentioned four separate source presuppositions in this chapter, and two m ore will be added in Chapters 21 (the Didache) and 25 (the Gospel o f Peter). But for ease o f reference I give you all six o f them immediately. These six crucial decisions about sources form the foundation o f this book. Here they are in summary: Presupposition 1: The Priority o f Mark. M ark is a m ajor source used by both M atthew and Luke. Th is is the basis for all m odem critical gospel research, because w e can com pare all three texts and thence understand processes o f gospel com position, tradition development, and "history” creation. Presupposition 2: The Existence o f the Q Gospel. The Q Gospel is the other m ajo r source used b y both M atthew and Luke. It is a gospel in its ow n right, w ith textual, generic, and theological integrity, and not ju st their source. It is also possible to discern redactional layers within its compositional history. Presupposition 3: The Dependence o f John. Joh n is dependent on the synoptic gospels for its initial narrative fram es about the Joh n the Baptist and for its termi­ nal fram es about the passion and resurrection o fjesu s. It also has an independent tradition o f sayings and miracles, in which the physical miracles becom e signs o f spiritual realities. Presupposition 4: The Independence o f the Gospel o f Thom as. T h e Gospel o f Thomas is independent from any and all o f the four intracanonical gospels. It was com posed originally without their use (before their existence?), but there m ay be m in o r traces o f their influence during later transmission and transcription. Presupposition 5: The Independence o f the Didache. This is not a gospel but a com ­ m unity rule, and it presents a fascinatingly different insight into an early Christian com m unity quite different from those glimpsed in the letters o f Paul. I consider it to be entirely independent o f any one or all o f our four intracanonical gospels.

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Presupposition 6: The Existence and Independence o f the Cross Gospel. There

exists within the present Gospel o f Peter a consecutive source, which I term the Cross Gospel for convenience (the name is irrelevant; call it Source X, if you pre­ fer). The Cross Gospel is a passion-resurrection narrative quite different from that in Mark. Of these six crucial presuppositions about sources, three concern intracanonical texts and three concern extracanonical texts. Some we have just seen, and some are still to come. None of them is original, and none is infallible. In gen­ eral, they get more controversial as you descend the list. But no scholar who works on the reconstruction of the historical Jesus or earliest Christianity can avoid making a decision on each of those items. Wrong anywhere there, wrong everywhere thereafter. And that holds for everyone.

CHAPTER 9

C O M P A R I N G GO SP E L M A N U S C R IP T S There are two stigmata of Christian texts . . . the early and consistent use of the codex and the n o m in a sacra . . . . It is not at all surprising that some of our earliest Christian manuscripts should be of the Old Testament. What is sur­ prising is that the format in which they are written should be the codex and not the roll; this startling break with Je wish tradition implies, I think, that these early manuscripts of the Old Testament had been preceded by specifi­ cally Christian works with which the new format originated.. . . N om ina sacra as a term in Greek and Latin paleography denotes a strictly limited number of words, at most fifteen, the sacral character of which, intrinsic or contextual, is emphasized by abbreviating the word in question, normally by contraction [first and last letters], occasionally in the earliest period by sus­ pension [first letters]. A horizontal line is placed above the abbreviation as a warning that the word cannot be pronounced as written, as it was in docu­ ments with numerals, and where, as is usual, contraction is used, the treat­ ment of the end of the word is governed by strict rules. Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society, and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, pp. 19, 20, 26

Prior to any reconstruction of the historical Jesus or the birth of Christianity, historians must have already made their own historical judgments about the relationships among a ll the early gospels, about dependence and independence between them, and about possible sources hidden within them. Granted that necessity, and granted also the polemical tone of current scholarly discussion, is there any relatively objective evidence that might be introduced into the debate? Can we catch a glimpse of what is now divided into intra- and extracanonical any such division existed? (In what follows, by the way, note carefully the difference between writing m ateria b, such as plant papyrus or animal parchment, before

and writing fo rm a ts, such as roll-like scroll or book-like codex.) There are three common aspects of the earliest gospels that cut across that later distinction. Gospels, both inside and outside the present canon, show equally early dates for extant manuscripts, equally clear preferences for papyrus codices, and equally set usages for sacred abbreviations. Those last two points will require fuller explanation as we proceed, but they are extremely important,

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because together they indicate that som e centralized authority controlled the creation o f those earliest gospel manuscripts.

Common Early Dates T h e distinction between Biblical and non-Biblical texts w ou ld not h ave been so obvious to the users o f these as it is to us, and both the Egerton G ospel and the Shepherd o f Hermas might have been regarded as indistinguishable from the canonical books o f the N ew T e stam e n t.. . . T h e distinction be­ tw een Biblical and non-Biblical works is, at any rate in the second century, to som e extent anachronistic. Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth o f the Codex, p. 42 The term papyrus, which appears repeatedly in these chapters, nam es a w rit­ ing material made from pressed plant pith. T . C . Skeat offers this succinct description o f h ow the substance w as manufactured: "T h e plant gro w s w ith its roots subm erged in water, from which the jointless stem, triangular in section, rises to a height o f 10-15 feet, ending in a tuft o f flow ers. F or the m anufacture o f papyrus the plant was cut down and the stem w as divided into sections, the length o f which determined the height o f the papyrus roll w hich w as to be made. From these sections the outer rind w as stripped off, and the soft pith, while still fresh, cut lengthwise into thin strips. These strips w ere laid side by side, slightly overlapping, on a hard surface, and a second layer w as laid over them , the strips running at right angles to those in the first layer. T h e tw o layers w ere then consolidated by ham m ering and pressing, and then dried. T h e sheet thus form ed w as then trimmed, and the surface sm oothed w ith pum ice and bur­ nished w ith rounded polishers o f shell or ivory. Finally, a num ber o f sheets were pasted together w ith flour paste to make long lengths w hich w ere then rolled up for storage or transport" (1969:55). In a m ore recent article on the price o f papyrus, Skeat estimated that "papyrus left the factories in standard rolls o f 20 sheets,” about 12 inches high by 136 inches long; and w hile “ the daily w age o f a labourer in the 1st century

a.d .

very rarely exceeded 1 drachm a,” the price o f

such a scroll w as "2 drachmas in the mid 1st cent,

a .d .”

(1995:88-89).

E X C A V A T IN G R U B B ISH DUM PS A t the end o f the third century, Oxyrhynchus, 250 miles south o f Alexandria, w est o f the Nile, on the edge o f the Libyan desert, w as a w alled city w ith five gates, a theater that seated 11,200 spectators, and the honorific title o f "illustrious and m ost illustrious.” A t the end o f the nineteenth century, O xyrhynchus— mod­ em E l Bahnasa— was, in the words o f Eric Turner, "a w aste o f rubbish mounds

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and deep-blown sand . . . [a] pillaged and wrecked site, where buildings had been quarried for stone dow n to their foundations and their position w as marked, if at all, by no m ore than lines o f chips in the sand" (1952:80). T o this site in 1896 the newly created Graeco-Rom an Account o f London's Egypt Exploration Fund sent two Oxford University archeologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell (1869-1926) and Arthur Surridge H unt (1871-1934), in very deliberate search o f papyri. T h ey dug trenches twenty-five feet deep through those ancient rubbish dumps and exca­ vated for six seasons, one in 1896-1897, the rest between 1903 and 1907. The vast hoard o f papyri they discovered, am ong them fragments from three different Greek copies o f the G ospel o f Thom as, is still under slow but steady publication in volum es o f T h e O xyrhynchus P ap yri, now numbering over fifty and counting. T h ey w ere racing against other diggers, the Egyptian peasants w ho used that papyrus-enriched earth to fertilize their gardens and fields. Fifty years later and another 250 miles south along the Nile, such diggers found the N ag Hammadi codices in a sealed ja r buried beneath the Nile-side cliffs. That race between scholar-diggers and farmer-diggers has been amusingly described b y the British poet and dramatist T o n y Harrison in a 1988 play titled The Trackers o f O xyrhynchus. One o f the Grenfell and Hunt papyri contained about half o f a lost com edy by Sophocles called T he Trackers. Harrison remade those four hundred broken lines creatively for a one-performance world premiere in the stadium at Delphi in Greece. He did so b y writing Grenfell and Hunt, trackers o f papyri, and the Egyp­ tian fellaheen, trackers o f fertilizer (sebakh), into the fragmented play about the satyrs, trackers o f Apollo’s lost lyre. He put these words on Grenfell’s lips (1990:10):

Papyri! Insects gnaw them. Time corrodes and native plants get potted in a mulch o f Pindar’s Odes!

Horrible to contemplate! How can a person sleep while Sophocles is rotting on an ancient rubbish heap? Our fellaheen, though, are not entirely sure if Menander's not more use to them as manure! They ferret for fertilizer, and Hunt and I track for philosophy and drama in nitrogenous sebakh. Spinach now flourishes from the pulped-up roll that held still hidden secrets of Sappho’s soul. A ll diggers and trackers have, no doubt, their own integrity and validity, but the "crate after crate’’ and "load after load” that Grenfell and Hunt shipped back to England m ay stand here as introduction and background to m y present focus on form at and style in the earliest Christian papyri. It would, by the w ay, take m assive opposing evidence to change the general picture that has em erged so far.

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C H R IS T IA N PA PY R I T h e earliest manuscripts o f the N ew Testam ent are all on papyrus, and scholars count them to date as Papyrus i to Papyrus 99 or

to -number in the ongoing roster o f N e w Testam ent papyri, the general (but often v e ry fragm entary) con­ tent o f each, and an identification as either c (codex) or s (scroll):

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Early 2nd century:

(i)c

#462

2nd century:

( 2 )C

#426

Ju deo-R om an History Cross-Cultural A nthropology

Latest Layer Intermediate Layer ▼ Earliest Layer

T h e first stage establishes the sharpest possible reconstruction o f the con­ text. T h e second stage establishes the earliest possible layer o f the tradition. The third stage establishes the tightest possible linkage between that context and that text. In this b ook Parts IV and V are about the context, Parts VI through X are about the text, and the w hole book is about their conjunction. But first a few prelim inary observations. Context. W h y begin w ith context? T h e sequence is crucial, although also a little artificial.

It presum es, o f course, som e general or preliminary text/context basis. I do not start, for example, w ith nineteenth-century Dublin as context. I know that I can­ not elim inate text from m y mind or even from context. (H ow, without text, w o u ld I even kn ow w h at context Jesus belongs in?) But, for a while, I place it in brackets, as it w ere, and turn to context. T h e main reason is that, w hen I turn later to text, I w ill be taking elements out o f their present contextual positions in, say, the Q G ospel, the Gospel o f Thom as, Mark, John, or wherever. Th ere must be

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som e validly established context into which I relocate them , or they may becom e meaningless words and deeds. Th ere w ill have to be, eventually, an interaction o f context and text, but the context m ust be there first. T h e next question is w hat context? By context I m ean the sharpest possible reconstruction o f the 20s in Lower Galilee. I do not m ean the M editerranean w orld in general, the Rom an Empire in general, Judaism in general, o r even the Jew ish hom eland in general. All o f that is important, but I need, as context, the most detailed available image o f that very specific place and time. The final question is how to obtain that context? I do so b y building up three ever more specific and detailed layers o f data, one on top o f the other. But remem ber, this process is both interdisciplinary and interactive. I begin w ith the widest and most general fram ew ork given by cross-cultural anthropology. What, for example, does such macrosociological analysis conclude about agrarian empires and peasant societies view ed across time and place? T h e next step is to place history within or atop that general anthropological fram ew ork and to watch especially for points where the tw o layers lock hard into one another. H ow did, for example, Jew ish tradition in the Jew ish hom eland react to Rom an imperialism in the first century o f the com m on era? A nd h o w did that agree or disagree with expectations from cross-cultural anthropology? T h e final step is to locate Low er Galilean archeology within and atop that historical layer. A rcheol­ ogy emphasizes material remains and history em phasizes textual remains, so I leave them deliberately in creative tension. But once again, I am looking espe­ cially for hard locks between archeological data and both historical and anthro­ pological data. An example, though I ju m p ahead o f m yself, m ay help. Cross-cultural anthropology indicates that peasant unrest and resistance escalates as agrarian empires increase their com m ercializing activities and take peasant land (not just peasant surplus). H istory concludes that the Rom an Em pire in the first common-era century w as in an econom ic b o o m (insofar as ancient economies could boom) under Italian peace and A ugustan prosperity. But history also details steady and increasing peasant unrest in the Je w ish h om e­ land o f that same period. Is that due to com mercialization? And, finally, w as there com mercialization in Low er Galilee b y the 20s, or w as that region a forgot­ ten backw ater stagnating outside the econom ic boom ? T h e result from that first or context stage is the sharpest reconstruction possible o f the late 20s in Lower Galilee obtained by the hierarchical overlay o f those three disciplines. T h at process allows, o f course, for added disciplinary layers, fo r divergent disciplinary view s, and for different disciplinary interactions in future research. W hat it does not allow for is the exclusion o f anthropology and sociology or the avoidance o f archeology.

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Text. I do not think, after tw o hundred years o f experimentation, that there is any w ay, acceptable in public discourse or scholarly debate, by which you can go direcdy into the great mound o f the Jesus tradition and separate out the historical Jesus layer from all later strata. You can, as mentioned above, do so if you have already decided w h o Jesu s was. That works, o f course, but it is apologetics rather than research. Recall, for example, that criterion o f discontinuity mentioned above in the discussion o f Jo h n M eier’s work. That criterion presumes that Jesus is dif­ ferent from all other Jew s. Then it argues that no other Je w says or does some specific w ord or deed in the text. Therefore, it concludes, that w ord or deed is from Jesus. But that is a vicious circle rather than an interpretive spiral. You can, h ow ever, w ith academic integrity, argue to what is the earliest dis­ cernible stratum o f the tradition. That, in effect, is what the last tw o hundred years o f gospel research has been doing. But any such stratification presum es a w hole range o f decisions about sources and relationships. You might be w rong on any or all o f those decisions, but then so might yo u r opponent. There is, in any case, no w a y to avoid m aking decisions and risking error. But that argument from stratification m akes one very important presupposition. W hy earliest and not latest? W h y earliest and not commonest? W hy earliest and not all? M y answ er presum es w h at w as seen in Part III. Gospel tradition, from the general scholarly consensus o f tw o hundred years o f research (as profiled in Chapter 9), is a highly genetic process. It is because, for example, the Q Gospel and M ark are absorbed m assively into M atthew and Luke that those earlier texts receive spe­ cial emphasis. If all the gospels w ere mutually independent texts, the earliest m ight be o f no significance at all.

Conjunction. This method asks, finally, whether there is a tight linkage between that sharpest image of context and that earliest layer of text. If there is, that is the best reconstruction of the historical Jesus and his companions presently available. Does that earliest layer speak from and to the situation of the 20s in Lower Galilee? If it does, that is the best reconstruction of the historical Jesus and his companions presently available. One final comment. A model is a conceptual map, a conscious framework that, because it is conscious, can itself be changed, abandoned, or replaced, and, as framework, can organize, interpret, and even predict the data it contains or imagines. Our choice with models is not whether to use them or not but whether to use them self-consciously and self-critically or to let them use us willingly or unwillingly. The value of a multicultural, cross-cultural, or comparative model is that it helps us discipline the inevitable tendency to take one’s own perfectly valid but particular experiences and erect them all too swiftly into human universals.

CHAPTER ii

CROSS-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY One fact impresses itself on alm ost any observer o f agrarian societies, espe­ cially on one w h o view s them in a broadly comparative perspective. This is the fact o f m arked social in equ ality. W ithout exception, one finds pronounced differences in pow er, privilege, and honor associated with m ature agrarian economies. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege, p. 210 (his italics)

Lenski’s . . . agrarian societies include societies where merchants have becom e so pow erful that they are no longer purely traditional but comm er­ cia liz ed or m ore or less m odem , like the late Rom an em pire___ I distinguish trad itio n a l aristocratic em pires from m ore or less ‘m odem ' com m ercialized, colonial, and industrial societies. John H. Kautsky, The Politics o f Aristocratic Empires, pp. 20, 21 (my italics) In this chapter I explain the basic anthropological template that undergirds m y interdisciplinary m odel. This is the first step in the first stage o f the method. It has three equally im portant components: an anthropology o f class, o f gender, and o f resistance. In m y earlier research for T he H istorical Jesu s, I used only an anthropology o f class, but an anthropology o f gender and o f resistance must be included as w ell, M arianne Sawicki, for example, noted that Lenski's m odel has nothing at all about gender (19943:12 note 6). T h at is absolutely correct; it is a m odel fo r social class. But I do not intend to lose what I learned from it (Lenski) in developing an equal emphasis on gender (Rogers) and on resistance (Kautsky).

Anthropology o f Class Class, then, essentially a relationship, is above all the collective social expres­ sion o f the fa c t o f exploitation (and o f course o f resistance to it): the division o f society into econom ic classes is in its very nature the w ay in which exploita­ tion is effected, w ith the propertied classes living o ff the non-propertied. I adm it that in m y use o f it the w o rd “ exploitation” often tends to take on a pejorative colouring; but essentially it is a “value-free” expression, signifying

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m erely that a propertied class is freed from the labour o f production through its ability to maintain itself out o f a surplus extracted from the prim ary pro­ ducers, w hether by compulsion or by persuasion or (as in m ost cases) by a m ixture o f the two. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, “Karl Marx and the History o f Classical Antiquity,” p. 26 I use the term social class as de Ste. C roix does in that epigraph, and as N orm an Gottwald did in his 1992 presidential address to the Society o f Biblical Literature: "Social classes m ay be said to exist w h en ever one social group is able to appropriate a part o f the surplus labor product o f other groups. In such a situ­ ation o f exploitation, wealth and pow er accrue disproportionately to those w ho are able to claim and dispose o f w hat others produce. T h o se w h o have this pow er o f economic disposal tend also to have political predom inance and ideo­ logical hegem ony” (1993:4). M y basic paradigm for a cross-cultural anthropology o f class is w h at I call the Lenski-Kautsky model. This model combines tw o equally im portant elements. One is Gerhard Lenski's typology o f hum an societies based on eco lo gy and tech­ nology and locating agrarian society on a continuum that m o ves from gatheringhunting to industrial societies. Another is Jo h n K autsky’s distinction, within Lenski's agrarian societies, between traditional and com m ercializing types (the Rom an Em pire being an example o f the latter type). I take those tw o elements one at a time below— but first a rather obvious objection. Is the choice o f this model a prejudicial option? Is there som e other model that w ould force me in a totally different direction? I considered one other macrosociological study as a possible alternative m odel to the Lenski-Kautsky synthesis, but it w ould not have changed anything significant fo r this book. That alternative is Shauel Noah Eisenstadt’s recently reissued volu m e on The Political Systems o f Empires. Eisenstadt is "concerned w ith one m ajor type o f political sys­ tem, nam ely, with the centralized historical bureaucratic em pires or states* am on g whose "m ost important examples” are “ the R om an and Hellenistic em pires” (11). But his focus is especially on political relationships am ong the upper levels o f social stratification; the low er levels are m entioned alm ost in passing. H e knows, o f course, that in a state such as the R om an Em pire, "agricul­ tural producers” are divided into different strata: "(1) the aristocracy and gentry; (2) independent peasants; and (3) various types o f tenants and semi-servile, dependent rural classes controlled by the lords and gen try” (34). H e also knows, o f course, in terms o f stratification, that "low est o f all com e the peasantry” (82), that "num erically, the middle and low er peasant groups w e re the largest part o f the rural population,” and that "the peasantry carried the greatest burden o f tax­ ation and o f m ilitary m obilization" (207). Nevertheless, in an extrem ely detailed

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seven-page Table o f Contents at the start o f his book, those peasants are m en­ tioned only once, under the rubric "Th e Place o f the Peasanriy in the Political Struggle." (They are placed last in a list o f eight similar titles describing "Th e Place o f " bureaucracy, arm y, aristocracy, religious and cultural groups, profes­ sional elites, the urban econom ic and social group, and the gentry "in the Politi­ cal Struggle" [x].) In the book itself, the peasantry receives only four pages (207-210). Is that all one need say about the peasantry, the vast m ajority o f the w orld's population in recorded history? But I do not find anything in Eisenstadt’s m acrosociology o f Rom e am ong political empires that disagrees, for m y pur­ poses, w ith Lenski's m acrosociology o f Rom e am ong agrarian empires or Kautsky’s o f Rom e am ong com m ercializing empires. 1 return, therefore, to consider the twin com ponents o f that Lenski-Kautsky model.

MARKED SOCIAL INEQUALITY Gerhard Lenski’s typology has several powerful advantages, especially within the ecology-technology matrix o f which it is a part (189-296). First, Lenski is prim arily concerned w ith the distributive process, with w ho gets w hat and w hy, in the various types o f societies human ingenuity has devised. Second, that focus on h ow the material surplus is handled lets him balance the twin w arring em phases o f functional and conflictual analysis within the social sciences. Func­ tionalists em phasize com m on interests, com mon advantages, consensus, and cooperation; conflictualists emphasize dividing interests, domination, exploita­ tion, and coercion. Lenski synthesizes both approaches, and surely both together are m ore accurate than either one alone. Third, he divides human societies, on the basis o f ecology and technology, into gathering-hunting, simple horticul­ tural, advanced horticultural, agrarian, and industrial societies. W ithin that typology, for exam ple, the Rom an Em pire w as an agrarian society, characterized b y the w heel, sail, iron plow , harnessed animal power, basic m etallurgy, and (to repeat from the epigraph to this chapter) "m arked social inequality” (210). Agri­ cultural

productivity

increased,

elite

appropriation

o f peasant surpluses

increased, and inequality betw een the producers and the takers increased. That increase in social inequality w as facilitated by three distinctive features. T h e first one w as urbanization; “[T]he norm al pattern in reasonably m ature agrarian soci­ eties involves a multiplicity o f fairly large and relatively permanent urban cen­ ters” (199 note 30). T h e second feature w as monetization: "[W ]ith the develop­ m ent o f m onetary system s, debts could be extended further and money-lending could provide yet another instrument for controlling the peasants and separating them from the surplus they produced” (207). The third feature w as scribalization: “ [W jriting also served to widen the traditional g u lf between the ruling classes and the com m on people by introducing a m ajor cultural distinction

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b etw een the literate m inority and the illiterate m ajority. In agrarian societies lim­ ited literacy w as the rule” (208). Finally, the m odel is not built up deductively from theoretical presuppositions but inductively from historical studies and detailed analyses o f empirical societies. It is those fo u r features that give the Lenski m odel its tremendous descriptive and persuasive pow er.

The model divides agrarian societies into upper and lower strata, and these are the classes proposed by Lenski on either side of that great divide: Ruler Governing Class

Peasant Class

Retainer Class

Artisan Class

Merchant Class Priestly Class

Unclean and Degraded Class Expendable Class

He comments, concerning the Ruler and the G o vern in g Class, “ O n the basis o f available data, it appears that the governing classes o f agrarian societies probably received at least a quarter o f the national income o f most agrarian states, and that the governing class and the ruler together usually received not less than half. In som e instances their combined income m ay have approached two-thirds o f the total” (228). In other words, 1 to 2 percent o f the population to o k 50 to 65 percent o f the agricultural productivity. The Retainer Class contained those m ilitary and bureaucratic hierarchies w hose prim ary purpose was to support and defend the G o vern in g Class. W ith­ out the assistance o f the retainers, that tiny m inority G o vern in g Class could hardly have controlled the vast m ajority on w hose extracted surplus they lived in luxury. Though retainers represented only about 5 percent o f the population, through sw ord and pen they rendered the w h ole surplus-appropriation process possible. Collectively they w ere indispensable, individually they w e re expend­ able, and (even i f the pen w as mightier than the sw ord) it w as only from the mil­ itary rather than the scribal retainers that the R u ler and G o vern in g Class w ere ever really threatened. T h e Merchant Class probably evolved upw ard from the Peasant Class. D epending m ore on market than authority relations, m erchants could often out­ flank those in the Governing Class to acquire considerable w ealth and even pow er. E ven w hen they w ere at their most successful, h ow ever, their wealth was usually translated back into land. That meant that the M erchant Class retreated back, w h en ever possible, into the Governing Class. As a result, m erchants never becam e an actual middle class in antiquity. T h e Priestly Class, 'la st but not least am ong the privileged elements in agrarian societies,” owned, for example, 15 percent o f the land o f E gyp t in the

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and 15 percent o f the land o f France in the eighteenth cen­

tury C.E. (256-257). I return to this class later in m y discussion o f resistance and its leadership. The Peasant Class, that vast m ajority o f the population, w as held “at, or close to, subsistence level" (271) so that their appropriated surplus could support elite conspicuous consumption. Those appropriations could reach cum ulatively as high as “ tw o thirds o f the total crop" (267)- But “ the religions o f the East, especially H induism and Confucianism, w ere compatible with extremes o f exploitation in a w a y that Judaism and Christianity w ere not; the form er left the peasantry m ore defenseless than the latter” (276-277). The Artisan Class “w as originally recruited from the ranks o f the dispos­ sessed peasantry and their noninheriting sons and w as continually replenished from these sources. Furtherm ore, despite the substantial overlap betw een the wealth and incom e o f the peasant and artisan, the median income o f artisans apparently w as not so great as that o f the peasants” (278). Peasant artisans w ere lower, not higher, than peasant farm ers in social class. T h e Unclean and D egraded Class is the term Lenski uses for groups such as, for example, the "untouchables” in Hindu society. This class included those w h o, like porters, miners, and prostitutes, “had only their bodies and animal energies to sell and w h o w ere forced to accept occupations which quickly destroyed them ” (281). It is, in fact, hard to distinguish them from the nextlow est group, the Expendable Class, except where they perform ed functions at once "necessary” as w ell as “ obnoxious or offensive,” such as tanning (280). T h e Expendable Class is the terrible tide given by Lenski to the very bottom o f this social structure. It “ included a variety o f types, ranging from petty crimi­ nals and outlaw s to beggars and underem ployed itinerant workers, and num ­ bered all those forced to live solely b y their wits or by charity” (281). W h y was this class maintained, and w hat w as its structural purpose in society? T h e expla­ nation is as terrible as the tide: “ Despite high rates o f infant mortality, the occa­ sional practice o f infanticide, the m ore frequent practice o f celibacy, and adult m ortality caused b y w ar, famine, and disease, agrarian societies usually produced more people than the dominant classes found it profitable to employ” (281-282). W hat w as the origin o f those in the Expendable Class? T hey “w ere seldom able to m aintain norm al m arriages, and ow ing to infanticide, malnutrition, disease, and deprivation, seldom reproduced themselves,” but such "high death rates w ere usually offset by the steady stream o f n ew recruits forced into [their] ranks from the classes im m ediately above [them]. These recruits w ere largely the sons and daughters o f p oor peasants and artisans w ho inherited little m ore than the shirts on their backs and a parental blessing” (282-283). W hat did expendables do? “ It seem s safe to say that illegal activity w as the best hope o f those w h o fell into this

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class, and for the poorest peasants as w ell” (282). W hat w as their number? "The b est estim ate . . . is that in norm al times from 5 to 10 per cent o f the population foun d itself in this depressed class, with the figure rising as high as 15 per cent on so m e occasions and falling alm ost to zero on others" (283). One final point. Y ou will notice h ow m uch space I gave to the Expendable Class. T h e reason is that that class is the systemic price required to hold as much as possible o f the peasantry at subsistence level. Some will rise above that level; m o re m ust fall below it. At the end o f his tw o chapters on agrarian societies Lenski appended a two-page "note on distributive justice.” I quote at length from those pages because they indicate different forms o f evil that, h ow ever inter­ twined and interactive, must be kept distinct: “ On the whole, agrarian societies give the impression o f gross injustice in the distributive realm. As w e have seen, a small number o f individuals enjoyed immense luxury, consuming in a single day goods and services sufficient to support large numbers o f the com m on people for a year. At the same time a considerable portion o f the population w as denied the basic necessities o f life and w as marked out by the social system for a speedy demise. It does not take much imagination to conceive o f a m ore equitable method o f distribution. H ow ever, w hen the demographic factor is introduced into the analysis, w e suddenly discover that the problem w as never so simple as it sometimes seems to those o f us w ho live in the comfort o f a m odem industrial society. Despite the ravages o f w ar, famine, plague, and other disasters, and despite the influences o f infanticide, abortion, monasticism, and prostitution, those segments o f the population which w ere at, or above, the subsistence level continued to produce m ore offspring than could be em ployed except by a steady reduction in privilege. Thus, barring an effective method o f controlling fertility, which no agrarian society ever discovered, there seems to have been no alterna­ tive to the existence o f a class o f expendables, as harsh as such a statement may sound to m odem ears. T h e most that could have been achieved, had the elite per­ mitted it, w as the tem porary elimination o f this class for the short time it would take population grow th to eliminate the economic surplus” (295). In case that is all too abstract, I give an example from Charles M orris's recent sum m ary description o f Ireland's Great Famine in his b o ok American Catholic. "F o r a b rief time early in the nineteenth century, life m ay have

approached the idyllic even for Irish-speaking peasants___ Irish prosperity touched o ff a frightening rural population explosion. Between 1779 and 1841» largely because o f the improved, potato-based countryside diet, Ireland's popula­ tion increased b y an alm ost incredible 172 percent, and Irish peasant life came to b e dom inated b y a desperate scrabble for plots o f land to gro w potatoes----C arefu l estim ates are that 2.5 to 3 million Irish w ere in a state o f semistarvation m o st years before the Great Fam ine” (31,32). Then came the potato blight o f the

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late 1840s, the “ coffin-ships” to Canada with a general record o f one-third dead in passage and another third dead after arrival, and continued imm igration in the next decades. O n the eve o f the Great Famine there w ere 9 million people in Ire­ land. B y the end o f the century Ireland's “population stabilized at 4 million, or about the sam e as in 1750” (36). Ecological evil does not excuse the systemic evil o f colonial m isrule that m ade disaster inevitable and restoration impossible. Sys­ temic evil does not excuse the personal evil o f Lord Palmerston o f Sligo, w ho paid passage fo r all his tw o thousand peasants, dumping them (many naked, starving, and diseased) on the docks o f N ew Brunswick, and thereby got his lands back for grazin g and his w elfare assessments vastly reduced. I im agine, from all o f that, three widening circles o f evil. The first circle is personal and individual. An example is a master brutalizing a slave, an owner beating, raping, o r killing a slave. The second circle is structural and systemic. An exam ple is a w h o le society built on slave labor and considering the entire process ideologically appropriate or even natural. The existence o f that second circle does not ju stify anything in the first one. Systemic evil does not excuse personal evil. But neither does personal goodness obliterate systemic evil. No amount o f private alm sgiving can excuse the public injustice that necessitates it. The third circle is ecological or cosmic. It is w hat Lenski described in explaining the Expendable Class. W ithout exploitation and oppression by the Roman Empire, there w o u ld h ave been ecological disaster in the Mediterranean basin. Does that ju stify the oppression? This book wifi argue that Jesus is concerned primarily w ith system ic rather than individual evil, but that third specter o f ecological dis­ aster w ifi alw ays b e there in the background.

AGRARIAN COMMERCIALIZATION John Kautsky distinguishes two different subtypes within Lenski's agrarian empires: “Lenski’s . . . agrarian societies include societies where merchants have become so powerful that they are no longer purely traditional but commercialized o r m ore o r less m odem , like the late Roman em pire-----I distinguish traditional aristocratic em pires from m ore or less 'm odem ' commercialized, colonial, and industrial societies” (20, 21, m y italics). For Kautsky, "ancient Athens and Rom e . . . are com m ercialized” agrarian empires (25 note 31).

I accept Kautsky’s distinction of traditional or commercialized as a friendly amendment to the Lenski model of agrarian societies or empires. Put blundy: in a traditional agrarian empire, the aristocracy takes the surplus from the peas­ antry; in a commercializing agrarian empire, the aristocracy takes the land from the peasantry. The former devours the industry and productivity of the peasantry, the latter their very identity and dignity. Commercialization moves them

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in increasing num bers dow n the terrible slope from small freeholder to tenant farm er to day-laborer to beggar or bandit. In discussing traditional agrarian empires, Kautsky repeats over and over again, like a definitional drumroll, that aristocrats "live o ff" peasants (4, 6 ,18 , 24). T h is is, o f course, the proper relational or interactional understanding o f the term peasant, w hich is not simply a romantic or nostalgic w o rd for “farm er," let alone a polite term for “ rustic,” “yokel,” or “ country bum pkin.” A peasant is, quite simply, an exploited farmer. Kautsky is not persuaded by claims o f mutual­ ity. It is “ a very one-sided relationship: the aristocrat takes and the peasant g iv e s .. . . [G en e rally there is no reciprocity in the relationship betw een peasant and aristocrat” (no, 113). But aristocracies usually m ask exploitation as reciproc­ ity, claiming law, order, peace, and protection as returns for the peasantry’s appropriated surplus. T h ey seldom say, W e are bigger and stronger than you. Therefore, w e will take you r surplus and prevent others from doing so. D o you have a problem with that? The m ajor advantage o f Kautsky’s distinction has to do with peasant revolts, rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions. His thesis is that such events pertain much m ore to com mercialized than to traditional agrarian or aristocratic empires. In traditional empires, the peasantry and aristocracy lived alm ost in different worlds; apart from expropriation o f surplus as rents, tolls, taxes, or labor demands, the latter interfered but little in the lives o f the form er. In commercial­ izing empires, the incidence o f resistance rises steadily, and the reason is not dif­ ficult to understand. T h e aristocracy can raise taxes only to a certain point, can push peasants below subsistence levels only to a certain volum e, before insurrec­ tion occurs. But what if the aristocracy could take over the peasant lands and reduce the peasants to tenants or laborers on lands they once ow ned as their fam ily inheritance? N ot just increased taxation but increased indebtedness would lead inevitably to land expropriation as debtors becam e insolvents and mort­ gages becam e foreclosures. Hence Kautsky's m ajor and repeated thesis: “ State­ m ents in the literature asserting or implying that peasant revolts occurred or w e re even com m on in aristocratic empires are typically the result o f a failure to distinguish clearly betw een traditional aristocratic empires and societies subject to so m e com m ercialization . . . [for] such revolts break out only in the aftermath and presum ab ly as a consequence o f commercialization___ [Peasant] rebellions begin to occur in the early stages o f commercialization___ [They] seem to break o u t w ithin a century o r tw o o f the transition from traditional aristocratic empire to com m ercialization . . .

[but] remain relatively rare . . . even in com m ercial­

ized societies" (280, 281, 288, 289,291). T h e prim ary index that he gives for this m ove from traditional to com m er­ cializing em pires is the alienability o f land. “ Land becom es alienable and a

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com m odity only under the impact o f some commercialization, as happened in G reece, in R om e, in the Chinese empire, and in medieval Europe" (273); and again, “ the alienability o f land . . . [means that] landless peasants m ay develop, dependent on and exploited by those who acquired their land . . . [as a] conse­ quence o f com m ercialization . . . [and this] is deeply upsetting to peasants for­ m erly engaged in subsistence agriculture on their own land" (291). In a traditional agrarian em pire, land is a familial inheritance to be retained by the peasantry. In a com m ercializing agrarian empire, land is an entrepreneurial commodity to be exploited b y the aristocracy. Rural commercialization, land expropriation, and peasant dispossession are m ore or less synonymous. And as they increase, so also does the incidences o f peasant resistance, rebellion, or revolt. In the steady-state operation o f a traditional agrarian empire, the peasants see the aristocracy as som ething like a natural evil. Drought and flood, disease and disaster, death and taxes, subsistence living and appropriated surplus seem part o f a natural cycle that one need not like but cannot change. A too brutal local expropriation m ay, o f course, result in an equally brutal local reaction, but that ou tcom e is usually both defensive and desperate. Commercialization, on the o ther hand, m akes it terribly clear that things can change, and are, in fact, changing—fo r the worse. But, peasants then ask, if things can change for the w o rse, can they not also change fo r the better? T h at explains w h y peasant reactions to commercialization are, as Kautsky notes, "typically also characterized by chiliasm and utopianism, involving farreaching dem ands for equality and the end o f aristocratic exploitation" (308). Peasants w h o have accepted subsistence living and appropriated surplus for cen­ turies sm ell the w h iff o f doom in commercialization and reach not just fo r the restoration o f traditional exploitation but for radical, utopian, and egalitarian visions o f an ideal world. "O nly the changes to which commercialization subjects peasants m akes them capable o f believing that they can bring about social change. H avin g suffered adverse changes, they can demand favorable ones, and these m ay n o w go far beyond the restoration o f older forms o f exploitation all the w ay to com m unistic utopias" (318). Those are, o f course, visions o f revolution rather than ju st rebellion, visions o f a w orld without any exploitation and oppression rather than one sim ply restored to form er and traditional levels o f each.

Anthropology o f Gender Ranking society is characterized by inequalities in production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, although these are not as marked as in strati­ fied society----- W hat caused ranking to develop? The existence of egali­ tarian relations in some societies precludes the pop-science answer that

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inequalities arise from the competitiveness o f hum an n a tu re .. . . One line o f reasoning follow ed by m any anthropologists is that the beginnings o f hierarchical organization must have had something to do w ith population g r o w th .. . . An alternative hypothesis for the developm ent o f ranking, and the m ore likely one in our view, is that the grow th o f trade w as critical----Th is did not mean the disappearance o f egalitarian traditions, but it did m ean an unequal access to important resources that undermined the eco­ nom ic structure o f egalitarianism .. . . Egalitarian gatherer-hunter bands and com m unal village horticulturalists all engaged in som e trade, but critical to the developm ent o f ranking w ould be the point w hen such trade becam e important enough to lead to specialization and the consequent reorganiza­ tion o f production relations. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, Introduction to Women and Colonization, p. 13

There is always the danger that anthropological observers will unconscious­ ly impose their ow n cultural presuppositions on the society they are observing and describing. There is also the com plem entary danger that informants will cooperate in such delusions by telling questioners w hat they w ant to hear. If, for example, male anthropologists from male-dominated societies look at and ask about female-male relations in other societies, will they see and hear only what they take to be hum anly normative?

WOMEN IN PREINDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES T o discern such bias it is often necessary to read betw een or behind the lines o f male descriptions o f female-male relations. H ere are tw o exam ples o f such counter-reading, both involving the Montagnais-Naskapi o f eastern Canada's Labrador Peninsula, as cited by Eleanor Leacock (26-27,39-40). T h e first tw o reports, one from the 1630s and the other from the 1890s respectively, agree closely on the jobs undertaken by the w om en and ju dge them as servile drudgery: T h e w om en . . . besides the onerous role o f bearing and rearing the children, also transport the game from the place where it has fallen; they are the hewers o f w ood and drawers o f water; they make and repair the household utensils; they prepare food; they skin the game and prepare the hides like fullers; they sew garments; they catch fish and gather shellfish for food; often they even hunt; they make the canoes, that is skiffs o f marvelous rapidity, out o f bark; they set up the tents wherever and whenever they stop for the night— in short, the m en concern themselves with nothing but the more laborious hunting and the w agin g o f w a r-----Their wives are regarded and treated as slaves.

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The sexes have their special labors. Women perform the drudgery and bring home the food slain by their husbands, fetching wood and water, tanning the skins, and making them into clothing. The labor of erecting the tents and hauling the sleds when on their journey during the winter falls upon them, and, in fact, they perform the greater pan of the manual labor. They are considered inferior to men, and in their social life they soon show the effects of the hardships they undergo. Those two repons must be read alongside these other accounts from, respectively, the same times and sources. They indicate accuracy in description despite prejudice in understanding: W o m en h ave great p o w e r .. . . A man m ay promise you something and if he does not keep his prom ise, he thinks he is sufficiently excused when he tells y o u that his w ife did not w ish him to do i t . . . . The wom en know what they are to do, and the m en also; and one never meddles with the w ork o f the o t h e r .. . . M en leave the arrangement o f the household to the wom en, with­ out interfering w ith them ; they cut and decide and give away as they please w ith o u t m akin g the husband angry. I have never seen m y host ask a giddy y o u n g w o m an that he had with him what became o f the provisions, although th ey w ere disappearing very fa s t.. . . The choice o f plans, o f under­ takings, o f jo u rn eys, o f winterings, lies in nearly every instance in the hands o f the h ousew ife. A n am using incident occurred within a stone's throw o f Fort Chimo. An Indian had his clothes stripped from him by his enraged wife. She then took the tent from the poles, leaving him naked. She took their property to the canoe, w h ich she paddled several miles upstream. He followed along the b an k until she relented, w hereupon their former relations were resumed, as th ough nothing had disturbed the harm ony o f their life. The man w as so severely plagued by his comrades that for many days he scarcely show ed his head out o f the tent. But the phrase "th eir property” is precisely the problem. As Leacock com ­ m ents, "T ran slatin g the incident into the terms o f political econom y, w om en retained control o ver the products o f their labor. These w ere not alienated, and w o m e n 's production o f clothing, shelter, and canoe covering gave them con­ com itan t practical control and influence; despite formal statements o f male dom ­ in an ce that m ight be elicited by outsiders” (40). If the description is accurate, it can be read against the presuppositions o f the male describer and even used to disconfirm them .

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T h e preceding quotations are from a set o f feminist studies on wom en and colonization focusing on gathering-hunting societies but including some advanced horticultural groups as well. T hey “illustrate the reality o f female-male comple­ m entarity,” as editors Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock explain, and they “docu­ ment the dash between this egalitarian principle and the hierarchical organization that European colonization brought about in many parts o f the w orld" (io). A bout twenty years ago Martin King W hyte reported the results o f a controlled-sample investigation o f ninety-three preindustrial societies that set out “ to examine in a general cross-cultural study h ow a wide range o f aspects o f the status o f w om en relative to men varies, and then try to explain w h y the sta­ tus o f w om en is higher in some societies and lo w er in others" (12). O f those preindustrial societies, about one-third w ere nomadic gathering-hunting cul­ tures, another one-third w ere “peasant communities within com plex agrarian dvilizations," and a final one-third w ere in between those other tw o types (5). Here are three m ajor conclusions from that five-year research project (167, 170, 172-173):

The first conclusion denies the daim that male-over-female domination is uni­ versal. “We do not find a pattern of universal male dominance, but much variation from culture to culture in virtually all aspects of the position of women relative to men. Our findings do lead us to doubt that there are cultures in which women are totally dominant over men . . . [but] there is substantial variation from sodeties with very general male dominance to other societies in which broad equality and even some specific types of female dominance over men exist." The second conclusion denies that there is a single, unitary status of women. “One can no longer assume that there is such a thing as the status of women cross-culturally. Nor can one assume that a favorable position for women in any particular area of social life will be related to favorable positions in other areas. Nor can one search for the best indicator of the status of women, or for the key variable that affects the status o f w om en___ In other words, each aspect o f the status, roles, and relationship o f w om en relative to men must be examined and explained separately, unless further research show s a cross-cultural reality that is v e ry different from the patterns w e have discovered."

The third conclusion compares women in simple and more complex prein­ dustrial societies and “shows the strongest and most consistent results. In the more complex cultures, women tend to have less domestic authority, less inde­ pendent solidarity with other women, more unequal sexual restrictions, and per­ haps receive more ritualized fear from men and have fewer property rights, than is the case in the simpler cultures. At the same time women in these more com­ plex cultures tend to have more informal influence and perhaps somewhat more joint participation with males.. . . On balance, and even with allowance for the

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fact that not all of our scales have clear status implications, the lot of women would seem to be somewhat better in the simpler societies in our sample than in the more complex ones.” The preindustrial spectrum of simple to complex soci­ eties is specified in these words: "Both preliterate hunting bands and communi­ ties in settled agrarian empires are included." Since my present interests concern women in first-century Galilee—that is, women in “peasant communities within complex agrarian civilizations”—I am led to wonder what can be said about their precise situation. How, in other words, do class and gender intersect one another as equal variables in the specific case of peasant women? W O M E N IN P E A S A N T SO C IE T IE S Susan C arol Rogers has proposed a theory o f peasant pow er distribution and peasant sexual differentiation based on field experience in a French peasant vil­ lage fo r six m onths in 1971 (with short returns in 1972 and 1973) and on feminist anthropological literature about similar situations. In a first article, in 1975, she focused on tw o different types o f pow er distribu­ tion w ithin peasant society. One is overt, direct, symbolical, and formal. The o ther is covert, indirect, real, and informal. Rogers argued that "although peasant males monopolize positions o f au­ thority and are show n public deference by wom en, thus superficially appearing to b e dom inant, they w ield relatively little real power. Theirs is a largely pow er­ less authority, often accom panied b y a felt sense o f powerlessness, both in the face o f the w o rld at large and o f the peasant community itself. On the other hand, w ithin the context o f peasant society, wom en control at least the m ajor portion o f im portant resources and decisions. In other words, if w e limit our investigation to the relative actual pow er o f peasant men and wom en, eliminat­ in g for the m om ent those sources o f pow er from the outside world which are b eyo n d the reach o f either peasant men or wom en, wom en appear to be gener­ ally m ore pow erful. A t the same time, the 'symbolic* pow er o f men should not b e underestim ated, nor can it be left unexplained" (1975728-729). Think, for exam ple, o f tw o aspects o f peasant society. Men, let’s imagine, h ave public-political responsibility and wom en, let’s imagine, have privatedom estic responsibility. But peasant society has, by definition, no public-political p o w e r w ithin itself for m en to exercise, and domestic activity, far from private, "is o f prim ary econom ic, political, and social importance so that a w o m an ’s p o w e r in this sphere extends to the village at large” (1 9 7 5 7 3 3 )- Rogers concludes that "w h a t w e see operating in peasant society is a kind o f dialectic, a delicately balanced opposition o f several kinds o f pow er and authority: overt and covert, form al and inform al, direct and indirect. For this reason, I w ould suggest that the

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m odel o f one sex group in a 'prim ary, or dominant role and the other in a ‘sec­ o n d ary’ one is specious and ignores the complexity o f the situation” (1975:746). It m ay w ell be precisely because peasant men are relatively powerless that peasant w o m en accord them public deference and formal respect. Peasant w om en have actual power-as-control. Peasant men have "m ythical" power-as-status. In a second article, in 1978, Rogers built on that form er one. She n ow focused on tw o different types o f sexual differentiation within peasant society. T h e first, behavioral differentiation, has to do with gender-specific roles, jobs, and responsi­ bilities. Som e o f those differences com e from nature, som e com e from culture, som e com e from the delicate interface o f nature and culture, and most come from w here the culture masquerades as nature. The second is ideological differen­ tiation, which concerns not just separation o f roles and responsibilities but, more profoundly, separation o f the sexes themselves into almost twin species. Behav­ ioral differentiation means w om en and men have different jobs. Ideological differ­ entiation means w om en and men are different species. Apples and oranges, let us say, are both behaviorally and ideologically different. Which, then, is better than the other? Apples, no doubt, think apples are better. Oranges, ditto. Rogers proposes that behavioral sexual differentiation, in which "each sex acts out different roles, participates in different activities, and so on,” is "evi­ dently universal.” N ot so w ith ideological sexual differentiation, b y which "males and females view themselves as fundamentally different from each other, e.g. as separate entities or species. W here they are ideologically differentiated, each sex m ay be expected to have its ow n perception o f the universe, values, goals, and so on (within the overarching basic values o f the so ciety).. . . T h at is, w om en, for exam ple, w ill consider som e male-controlled resources relatively unimportant, and value highly their own, while m en hold the opposite valuation” ; or "male resources m ay be publicly recognized as most important by both sexes, and pri­ vately belittled by one or both” (1978:154-155). That distinction is important because, in the contem porary North American ideal, w e tend to deny the valid­ ity o f both differentiations and therefore m ay not bother to distinguish or even acknow ledge them. Be that as it m ay, it is especially difficult for us to under­ stand, for example, societies where both those differentiations are forcibly and openly present. But it is precisely such societies that are Rogers's main concern. It is w h en there is a combination o f both behavioral and ideological differen­ tiations that “ a balance o f pow er is most likely to occur . . .

[since] the two

groups . . . are perceived as tw o different things . . . related dialectically, at once opposed to each other, and equally dependent upon each o th e r.. . . That first pattern . . . is the m ost com m on cross-culturally, and the one in which a

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dom inant/subordinate relationship between the sexes is least likely to occu r." T h e second pattern involves behavioral without ideological differentiation, and here "a hierarchical relationship between the sexes—with a clear imbalance o f p o w e r— becom es m ore probable. Here, it is believed that males and females are fundam entally the s a m e .. . . T h e resources controlled by one group, how ever, are likely to be m ore highly valued by both. Because differential access to control o f resources is not firm ly grounded in differential ideology, behavioral differenti­ ation m ay b e perceived as unjust, immoral, or illegal, at least by the sex group w ith o u t access to highly valued resources" (1978:155-156). R ogers finds that first combination present "in traditional European peasant societies" and also "in pre-colonial W est African societies," but "evidence o f a transform ation to the second pattern m ay also be found in these two world areas" (1978:157). T h e change from first to second pattern— that is, from dia­ lectical to hierarchical female-male relationships— was especially associated with "colon ization in W est Africa and industrialization in Europe." Obviously that change w as not in w o m en 's favor, but Rogers makes the same very interesting qualification in each case. W ith regard to colonization in West Africa: "Although economic growth induced b y colonization initially upset the balance o f power in wom en's favor, there is som e indication that with integration into wider economic systems, men m ay take o ver and surpass w om en in the control o f formerly feminine resources. T h e y m ay thus attain a m ore powerful position than wom en." With regard to industrialization in Europe: "As industrialization takes over the countryside, peas­ ant m en lose control o f their resources, or these are devalued by the group as a w h o le, w ith a subsequent rise in the relative value o f wom en's resources, and a p o w e r im balance favoring wom en. Male control resurfaces, with new resources, m ost notably those relating to integration in a larger group" (1978:158-159). Initially and temporarily, then, peasant w om en confronted with foreign or domestic com ­ m ercialization m ay be slightly better o ff than peasant men. That, by the w ay, is the poin t w h ere anthropology o f class and gender intersect most forcibly for m y pres­ ent concerns. T h e Lenski-Kautsky model indicates commercialization (as in the first-century Rom an Empire) as regular prelude to peasant resistance and rebel­ lion. B ut colonization as w ell as industrialization are simply forms o f commercial­ ization, the form er both ancient and modem, the latter a relatively contemporary type. I f R ogers's analysis is correct, the initial stages o f colonial commercialization in L o w e r Galilee, for example, w ould have left peasant w om en in a temporarily b etter position than peasant men. That fact would be very important to our under­ standing o f the peasant w om en companions ofjesus.

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Anthropology of Resistance Inasm uch as peasants have a sharp appreciation o f their relations with rural elites, they have no difficulty in recognizing w hen m ore and m ore is required o f them and less and less is given in return. Peasants are thus not m uch subject to “ mystification” about class relations; they do not need out­ siders to help them recognize a pattern o f grow ing exploitation which they experience daily. This does not mean outsiders are inconsequential. On the contrary, they are often critical to peasant m ovem ents, not because they convince peasants that they are exploited but because, in the context o f exploitation, they m ay provide the power, assistance, and supralocal organi­ zation that helps peasants act. It is thus at the level o f collective action that the typically small scale o f peasant social life constitutes a disability, not at the level o f assessing relations. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, pp. 173-174 The Lenski-Kautsky model indicates that peasant resistance escalates as rural commercialization encroaches on the traditional peasant w a y o f life, breaches the safety net o f kinship relations and village contacts, and changes the land from inalienable fam ily inheritance to negotiable business com m odity. But in that model, and also in the Eisenstadt citations given above (as well as in every other cross-cultural anthropologist I have read), the problem o f leadership arises as soon as peasant resistance is mentioned. It arises especially in terms o f leadership from classes above the peasantry, from the "outsiders” mentioned in the above epigraph from Jam es Scott. In m any or even most cases, those scholars are thinking o f m ilitary revolts and o f leadership from dissident retainer or aristocratic classes. I w ant, how ever, to broaden the question o f resistance and leadership to include ideology as w ell as army, scribal as w ell as martial situations. W hat if priests, prophets, scribes, bureaucrats, or retainers, acting institutionally or charism atically, instigate an ideological revolution? As you read the following quotations on peasant resistance and outsider leadership, do not imagine only m ilitary retainers leading peasant armies. R E S IS T A N C E A N D L E A D E R S H IP M y first quotation is from Kautsky himself. "T h e lack o f suitable leadership am on g the peasants o f the traditional villages [is] another reason for the absence o f organization and hence o f revolts reaching beyond at most a few neighboring v illa g e s .. . . Tow nspeople, given their different environm ent and experience, m ay h ave developed such attributes, like skills in com m unicating with and orga­ nizing strangers, and they m ay have the requisite material resources to practice

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these skills. For uprisings to spread widely and to maintain themselves, such skills and resources of outside leaders are required to overcome the localism of peasants----- It appears that all peasant revolts that spread beyond local confines in societies undergoing commercialization or modernization from w ithout did so under nonpeasant leadership or in alliance with nonpeasant m ovem en ts.. . . I f peasant revolts could spread only because o f nonpeasant leadership, then the absence o f such leadership in traditional aristocratic empires may be a m ajor rea­ son for the virtual absence o f peasant revolts transcending local confines in such em pires. C om m ercialization and, m ore recently, modernization from without are fo llo w ed b y peasant revolts not only because they affect the conditions under w h ich peasants live but also because they produce revolutionary groups in the tow n s, b ring the peasants in contact with them, and make them available as the peasants’ leaders” (304,306). T h at m akes a very interesting point. Commercialization (and ай that comes w ith it) disturbs not only traditional peasant life but also traditional town or even city life. W hat if, for example, it relativizes the importance o f our priests, negates the value o f our temples, changes the validity o f our laws, customs, and morals? W hat if I am a lower-order scribe whose livelihood has been endangered by a change in the dominant language to facilitate international commerce— a change, say, from Aram aic to Greek? Dissident priests or scribes may become leaders for dissident peasants or artisans. And that is a rather dangerous combination. Once again from Kautsky: “ [T]he outsiders who can formulate more far-reaching pro­ gram s and demands on behalf o f peasants, who can visualize achieving a world dif­ ferent from the existing one, w ho can lead a proactive movement are themselves a product o f commercialization and modernization” (309). That is a very important point, and 1 underline its structural implications. The systemic dislocations created b y com m ercialization both create an environment conducive to peasant resistance o r rebellion and supply the dissenting retainers who will become its leaders. T h e second quotation is from Eisenstadt. Notice how it envisages various fo rm s o f resistance leadership, even i f only in passing: “The peasantry becam e politically active only rarely. E ven when it did, it did not usually becom e active independently, b ut m ostly in conjunction with other groups and strata, like the

army or religious movements___ [The peasants] often took part in rebellions, and som etim es even inaugurated them, under the leadership either o f their ow n p eo p le o r o f alienated bureaucrats, gentry, or religious leaders” (207-208). Once again the dangerous com bination is an alienated peasantry with leadership not ju s t fro m itself b ut from alienated retainers, be they scribes or priests. T h e last quotation is from Eric Robert W olf’s classic study o f peasants: "T h e em ergen ce o f a com m on myth o f transcendental justice often can and does m ove

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peasants into action as other forms o f organization cannot, but it provides only a com m on vision, not an organizational framework for action. Such myths unite peasants, they do not organize them. If sometimes the peasant band sweeps across the countryside like an avalanche, like an avalanche, too, it spends itself against resistance and dissolves if adequate leadership is not provided from without” (108). All o f the above quotations focus on h ow peasant resistance or revolt can break out o f localism and regionalism, usually under nonpeasant leadership. IN T E R L U D E FO R A N E X A M PLE Lest those multiplied quotations seem too abstract, I pause to give one con­ crete example o f what they are talking about. I do not, by the w ay, find anything romantically wonderful about peasant revolt or rural terrorism. But neither do I find anything romantically wonderful about the imperial exploitation that breeds those acts. Brutality brutalizes. The case is taken from Michael Beames's fascinating study o f Peasants and Power. The time and place is early-nineteenth-century Ireland in the decades between the end o f the Napoleonic W ars and the start o f the Great Famine. In those years there was “ a gradual process by which external pressures w ere forcing the Irish peasantry onto smaller and more insecure holdings with the eventual threat o f descent into a rural lumpenproletariat” o f beggary and/or banditry (127). That external pressure was commercialization or land-jobbing. "'Lan d jobbers' view ed land as a commodity to be acquired and held according to commercial criteria. W hiteboys [rural rebels], on the other hand, regarded it not only as an essential means o f subsistence but the resource around which peasant social rela­ tionships w ere based and thus something over which the peasantry had a right to exercise control" (137-138)- The response to that external pressure, across the coun­ try, w as rural terrorism involving various groups with different names in different places; but the term Whiteboys became the generic name for violent resistance involving, first, warning or threat, and then, if that failed, arson or assassination. Ireland was, in those years, a legally constituted part o f Great Britain, so var­ ious British com missions w ere assigned to solve that situation. W e thus have the records o f diverse individuals giving testim ony about those events and can actu­ ally hear the voices o f the peasantry itself. T h e follow ing statements from three different people (recorded by the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Condition o f the Poorer Classes in Ireland in 1836 and cited in Beames [126-127]) give a glimpse o f their sense o f m oral outrage: [A County Galway laborer named Ward:] And it’s that that m akes m en dis­ turbed and unlaw ful w hen they see themselves, and them that are about them , turned adrift: in the world; it is that that brings "Terries” [Whiteboys]

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into the country. T h ey m ay as well take my life when they have taken m y land; w h at's an existence w ithout a place (i.e. a holding). [A County Galway laborer named Byrne:] About three years ago a man who had held a farm eight or nine years, and had paid his rent up to the last farthing, w as turned out, though he offered the same rent, as the man that was put in his place. T h e “ Terries” [W hiteboys] came (they would come from Clare for revenge) and sw o re the new com er to give up the land; he didn’t keep his oath; in a w e e k ’s tim e a man came at twelve o ’clock in the day; he sent into the h ou se fo r Flanagan, and w hen he came out to him, where three or four o f his o w n labourers w ere standing, the strange man drew out a pistol and shot him . [A Queen’s County dispossessed tenant:] The poor would rather lose their lives, w h en driven to such desperation, than quietly submit to be ejected from their lands, for they have no other means o f living, and if they once give up their land, they w ou ld be starving wanderers through the world, as even their relations and form er friends would turn their backs upon them, consid­ ering them as an encumbrance; w hen the poor ejected tenant applies to them , and tells them o f his misfortune, they turn a deaf ear to him, unless it is to urge him to revenge him self upon his oppressors. T h e govern m ent knew , o f course, exactly what was at stake in such resis­ tance— especially in the peasants’ moral claims about social justice. Lord N o rb u ry, fo r exam ple, had spelled it out with admirable clarity twenty-five years earlier, as cited b y Beam es (138): [T h e principle o f laissez-faire economics] is the first principle in a com m er­ cial country and the first consequence o f national prosperity, that property should b e in a state o f perpetual transfer and circulation. T o check this natu­ ral progress, to avert this perpetual m otion in the great machine o f hum an society, no legislature, h ow ever strong or powerful has been ever rash or stron g enough to attempt; and w hatever the wisest o f men and best o f go v­ ernm ents w o u ld trem ble to undertake as practicable, and w ould reject as undesirable, these m ob legislators and banditti reformers have announced as the law o f their association, and enforce the observance o f that law b y tor­ ture and m urder. Land they say, shall never rise, and property shall never change its possessor. T o all ranks are their mandates equally directed, to the rich and to the poor. A n aristocracy for w h om land is an entrepreneurial com m odity clashes fiercely and profoundly with a peasantry for whom land is an inalienable livelihood.

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G iven that dash in early-nineteenth-century Ireland, w ho offered leadership to the peasants in those years o f rural terrorism? Not dissident aristocrats, rebel­ lious gentry, or recalcitrant clergy, but village schoolmasters— which in those days m eant ''hedge” schoolmasters, w ho taught in the open air. I quote once again from Beames (61): T h e hedge schoolmasters w ere independent o f control b y state, church or local squire, they w ere reliant upon the support and goodw ill o f the peas­ antry. T o an extent the "people” controlled their ow n ed u cation .. . . W hether or not these schoolmasters actually participated in the W hiteboy m ovem ents is perhaps less important than the fact that they provided an alternative focus, a different source o f authority and education for the peas­ antry from landlord, priest and parson. Given their close involvem ent with and dependence on the peasant com munity, it seems highly probable that they acted as a catalyst for the articulation o f peasant grievances. A t the very least, their contribution to W hiteboyism must have been to teach the authors o f threatening letters h ow to write. Though a hedge schoolmaster, even one recalling the Celtic tradition o f the itinerant poet-scholar, w as fairly low am ong the Retainer Class, the combination o f dissident teacher and dissident peasants is alw ays dangerous, especially on the ideological level. T H E P R IE S T L Y C LA SS R E V ISIT E D I return, in the light o f those considerations o f leadership, to look in more detail at w hat Lenski says about the Priestly Class. This serves both to conclude this chapter on cross-cultural anthropology and to create a hard lock with the next one on Judeo-Rom an history. Lenski’s division o f the Retainer Class and the Priestly Class needs to be reconsidered for use in this present study. T h e reasons are both internal and external. On the internal side, there is a slight but significant w arning o f difficulty as one m oves from Lenski’s description o f those classes in his text to their depic­ tion in his visual model. In the description they are clearly differentiated from one another as "the Retainer Class” (243-248) and "the Priestly Class” (256-266), b ut in the m odel they appear together as "retainers and priests” (284). O n the external side, recent scholars o f earliest Christianity, using Lenski's classification, seem to have sensed this same problem. In 1991 D avid Fiensy adapted the Lenski m odel to "the social structure o f Palestine in the Herodian period.” Fiensy's diagram places the high-priestly families am ong the Governing Class, and “bailiffs, tax farm ers, and governm ent bureaucrats” am ong the Retain­ ers (158). T h at adaptation is accepted, with population percentages added, in

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D ennis D uling’s 1994 edition o f Norm an Perrin’s N ew Testam ent introduction (56). Lenski’s Priestly Class seems to have disappeared (except, o f course, for those few priestly aristocrats at the very pinnacle o f pow er within the G overning Class). But, in that process o f evolution, something more important than a cate­ go ry w as lost. W h at w as lost w as the potential for the Priestly Class, as defined by Lenski, to initiate ideological revolt against aristocracy or royalty in the name o f divinity itself. It is necessary to consider in very great detail what Lenski means by the Priestly Class. "Strictly speaking, this term refers only to those w ho mediate rela­ tions b etw een G od, or the gods, and men through the performance o f sacrificial rites. I shall use the term m ore broadly, however, to include monks, ministers, rabbis, im am s, and all other religious leaders whose livelihood and status in soci­ ety w e re dependent prim arily on their leadership role in the religious system. T h e nature o f the priestly class varied considerably from one agrarian society to another. . . . Because o f all these variations, it is extremely dangerous to general­ ize about the role o f the priestly class. It m ay even be that the nature o f this class w as the m ost variable feature o f importance in agrarian societies, when viewed from the standpoint o f the distributive process” (256-257). In other words, the Priestly Class involved anyone w ho, institutionally or charismatically, officially or popularly, claim ed religious authority and leadership in an agrarian society. W h y is the Priestly Class so disparate and difficult to contain even in typological generalization? O n the one hand, it w as very much to the advantage o f Ruler and G overn­ in g Class that the Priestly Class legitimated their authority "to separate the com ­ m on people from the m ajor part o f what they produced” (260), and it was very m uch to the Priestly Class’s advantage to have the political elites protecting their rights, em bellishing their temples, and even paying their salaries. On the other hand, there w as alw ays "the fact o f divided authority” (261). That is the root o f the problem . T h e Priestly Class claimed a divine mandate even without any force, coercion, or violence; and the Ruler or Governing Class, even w hen also claim in g a divine mandate, did so with the army standing always at the ready. N o m atter h o w agrarian societies m ay differ in handling that division (or even in attem pting totally to negate it— say, with priest-rulers or temple-states), it is a lw ay s present, like a giant fault line in the authority structure. And it is along fau lt lines that earthquakes occur. F o r Lenski, therefore, the Priestly Class, unlike the Retainer Class, is defined n o t b y service to the Ruler or Governing Class but by service to the divine or transcendental m andate that they claim to have and to fulfill. But w h at if that divin e m andate involves a concern for social justice and hum an compassion? W ith o u t in any w a y denying the extent to which the Priestly Class has been

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co-opted or com prom ised even in traditions recognizing such a mandate, Lenski asserts that these religious leaders "played a unique role am ong the privileged classes in agrarian societies. In a type o f society in which m en o f pow er saw to it that there w as a massive flow o f goods and services from the m any to the few, som e m em bers o f the priestly class managed to slow this m ovem ent and even to stimulate a small flow in the opposite direction. In this respect, the priestly class tended tofiinction as the preserver o f the ancient Redistributive Ethic o f primitive soci­ eties, where the accumulation o f goods in private hands had served as a form o f commu­ nal insurance rather than as private property. The extent to w hich the priestly class perform ed this important function varies considerably from religion to religion, and within religions from century to century and area to area. O f all the factors responsible for this variation, the most important seems to have been the actual content o f a faith and the degree to which G od was believed to be concerned with social justice” (266). The Priestly Class means religious leadership, whether w e are dealing with priest or prophet, visionary or teacher, institutional or charismatic individual, official or popular personage— as long as the claimed authority is transcendental or divine. Lenski’s Priestly Class covers all those w h o claim to be religious leaders in an agrarian society, all those whose assertion o f authority is not intrinsically dependent on Governing Class or Ruler, all those w hose loyalty to aristocratic exploitation is alw ays a little suspect (at least in a society w here religion is con­ cerned w ith social justice). In the first-century Jew ish hom eland, then, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Joh n the Baptist, and Jesu s all belonged to Lenski's Priestly Class— a result so confusing that a modified classification is clearly needed. M y proposal is to keep the term Retainer Class— since, in general, the retainer's role is to support the Governing Class—but to envisage three groups within it. (In all three cases, watch the ambiguity necessitated by that support o f those in power; I f the Governing Class needs the Retainer Class, w h y are the retainers not the gov­ ernors?) T h e first subgroup is military retainers, including all those skilled in vio­ lence, and ranging from army to police to enforcers. T h e danger connected with this group is obvious: W hat if they rebel or attempt to usurp governing preroga­ tives? But o f course, whenever they do it, they must also reveal the naked force and coercion by which the entire system is sustained, whatever its moral justification. T h e second subgroup is religious retainers, including all those skilled in divinity, ranging from priests to prophets, from ordained ministers to popular charismatics. T h e danger, once again, is obvious: W hat if, in the name o f their sacred power, they turn on Ruler and Governing Class? W hat about, in Lenski's apt phrase, "the fact o f divided authority” (161), o f a loyalty split between earth and heaven? T h e third subgroup is scribal retainers, including all those skilled in literacy or

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accountancy, ranging from bureaucrats to lawyers. Any danger from them will probably arise in conjunction with one o f those other rwo subgroups— unless, o f course, they m ove to claim the status o f military or religious retainers in their own right. T h e point in these modifications is not to establish little taxonomic boxes b ut to em phasize the structural ambiguity, first, o f the entire Retainer Class as such and, second, that o f the military, scribal, and religious subgroups always interacting w ithin it. In all o f this I am primarily interested in systemic fault lines, and I especially do not w ant to lose Lenski’s emphasis on the fault lines within w h at he term ed the Priestly Class. He him self noted that "on many occasions, especially in the Judaic-Christian tradition, though not there alone, the priestly class opposed tyranny and injustice and supported the needs and interests o f the w eak er elem ents o f society," and did so from "the tradition embodied in the W estern religions that G od is above all a God o f justice and that His awesome p o w e r w ill b e used to punish the unjust” (263). O ne final point. T h is is another case where the Lenski-Kautsky model and the Eisenstadt m odel are in com plete agreement, but as usual the latter is much m ore general than the form er. Eisenstadt notes that "in most o f the societies studied, the value system s o f the m ajor religions w ere sufficiently differentiated to contain a strong ingredient o f universalistic and/or transcendental orienta­ tions. T h e y thus constituted potential sources o f autonomous orientations, o f change, and o f d isse n t.. . . T h e latent predilection for change that characterized so m e o f the religious institutions, orders, and groups explained their frequent participation in ‘radical’ social and political movements— e.g., in peasant upris­ ings, and in urban m ovem ents and conspiracies” (190). A transcendent mandate can often ju stify a political or social situation. But it can also turn it upside down. C le rg y and aristocracy, h ow ever named, differentiated, or combined, represent divergen t sources o f pow er, and that social fault line cannot be eliminated w ith­ o u t eradicating either religion or politics. Probably not even then.

PART V

H isto ry and A rch eolo gy G overnm ents, Theocracies and Armies are, o f course, stronger than the scat­ tered peasants. So the peasants have to resign themselves to being dominated, but th ey cannot feel as their ow n the glories and undertakings o f a civilization that is radically their enem y. T h e only wars that touch their hearts are those in w hich they h ave fought to defend themselves against that civilization, against H istory and G overnm ent, Theocracy and the Army. These wars they fought under their o w n black pennants, without military leadership or training and w ith o u t hope, ill-fated w ars that they were bound to lose, fierce and desperate w ars, incom prehensible to historians.. . . But the myth o f the brigands is close to their hearts and a part o f their lives, the only poetry in their existence, their dark, desperate epic. E ven the appearance o f the peasants today recalls that o f the brig­ ands: they are silent, lonely, gloom y and frowning in their black suits and hats and, in w inter, black top coats, armed w henever they set out for the fields with gun and axe. T h e y have gentle hearts and patient souls; centuries o f resignation w e ig h on their shoulders, together with a feeling o f the vanity o f all things and o f the overbearin g p o w er o f fate. But when, after infinite endurance, they are shaken to the depths o f their beings and are driven by an instinct o f self-defense o r ju stice, their revolt knows no bounds and no measure. It is an unhuman revo lt w h ose point o f departure and final end alike are death, in which ferocity is b o m o f despair. T h e brigands unreasonably and hopelessly stood up for the life and liberty o f the peasants against the encroachments o f the State. By ill luck they w e re u nw itting instruments o f History, and History, quite outside their ken, w a s w orkin g against them; they w ere on the w rong side and they came to destruction. But through the brigands the peasants defended themselves against the hostile civilization that never understands but everlastingly enslaves them; instinctively they looked on the brigands as heroes. The peasant w orld has neither govern m ent nor arm y; its wars are only sporadic outbursts o f revolt, d o o m ed to repression. Still it survives, yielding up the fruits o f the earth to the conquerors, but im posing upon them its measurements, its earthly divinities, and its language. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, pp. 137-140

T h e general conclusion from Part IV was that peasant dislocations created b y rural com m ercialization increase the possibility or inevitability o f resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Building directly on that preceding Part IV, Part V considers Je w ish tradition and Rom an history on a collision course at that pre­ cise po in t o f incipient rural commercialization in the first century. W hat happens

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w h en Rom an urbanization and its concomitant re aliz atio n finally reach Lower Galilee? Part V has tw o chapters. Chapter 12 probes w hat w ent so terribly wrong b etw een im perial Rom an policy and traditional Jew ish religion in the first two hundred years o f their interaction. The constitutional traditions o f Judaism involved a G od o f justice and righteousness in covenantal relationship with a people o f justice and righteousness under a law o f justice and righteousness in a land o f justice and righteousness. That God could not be other, and that people should not be other. G od's Law was not a m atter simply o f divine will or divine com m and but o f divine nature and divine character. In sacred law , in prophetic critique, and in scribal wisdom , this G od stood against oppression and exploita­ tion, against indebtedness, enslavement, and dispossession, against everything that increased inequality and destroyed equality. Land, as the basis o f life, was not ju st a com m odity for normal entrepreneurial manipulation: the land be­ longed to God; G od's people w ere all tenants on divine property. Then along came Rom an imperialism, which sought land for com m ercial exploitation as well as territorial expansion. Jew ish tradition clashed predictably with that Rom an policy. And it clashed not only because peasants usually resist rural com ­ mercialization but also (and especially) because Jew ish peasants had a long and sacred tradition o f such resistance. Chapter 13 places the third and final layer on m y interdisciplinary model for context. Granted those anthropological and historical layers, there is still a fur­ ther question. W as Galilee simply a Rom an backwater o f no value for urbaniza­ tion or commercialization? Archeology indicates precisely w hat w as happening in L o w er Galilee in the first twenty years o f the first com m on-era century. H erod Antipas w as m oving to urbanize L o w er Galilee as his father, H erod the G reat, had done earlier in Judaea and Samaria. The rebuilding o f Sepphoris and the creation o f Tiberias represented centers for rural com mercialization, and w ith their advent, anthropology, history, and archeology came together at the precise point w here resistance could be expected. T h e time and place w ere now read y for the baptism-in-the-Jordan m ovem ent o fjo h n and the kingdom-of-God m ovem en t o fjesu s.

C H A P T E R 12

J U D E O - R O M A N HISTORY T h e notion o f social justice was deeply rooted in the commandments and the oral law as they had developed over 1200 years, whatever might be the differ­ ences o f interpretation among the Jew s, differences that tended to derive from the class origins o f the interpreters___ The basic problem o f moral values and practices that the Jew ish people had evolved over the centuries, and their close union o f m orality and com mon identity produced a national consciousness that far exceeded that o f its neighbors in solidarity and roots. An important part o fje w ish legislation, m oreover, regulated such vital matters as local govern­ ment, slavery, land ownership, cultivation, Sabbath, debt, and contributions to the central shrine— all o f which had economic implications___ It is well to note that the organized resistance that became the driving force o f the Jewish revolution o f 66-74 was generated by a strongly religious and ethical concep­ tion— that the earth belonged to the Divinity—the first protestant declaration o f faith. This faith evoked resistance to an unjust economic situation, and the resistance intensified the confiscation and eviction and the growth o f the land­ less, w hich com posed the greater part o f the active resistance movements. Shimon Applebaum, '‘Josephus and the Economic Causes o f the Jewish War,” pp. 237-238, 256-257 T h e phrase Judeo-Roman in the title o f this chapter is not exactly a standard one. B ut I w ant, in this discussion, to focus as closely as possible on the interac­ tion b etw een Rom an imperialism and traditional Judaism in the Jew ish hom e­ land. T h e general background is the Hellenistic world, the cultural cosm opoli­ tanism and econom ic internationalism resulting from Alexander’s conquests o f the eastern M editerranean toward the end o f the fourth century b .c . But I focus h ere especially on Judeo-Rom an relations in the Jew ish homeland. T h a t land had been under pagan imperial domination since the sixth century b .c .e .

T h e Rom ans w ere not its first imperial overlords. W hat, then, w en t so

u tterly w ro n g betw een Rom an policy and Jew ish tradition? Think about these roun d num bers: W ithin the first four hundred years o f foreign control, under the Persian E m pire and its G reek replacements, there w as only a single revolt, at the v e ry end o f that period. But within the first two hundred years o f Rom an control there w e re three m ajor revolts, one under Nero and Vespasian in 66-74, another under T rajan in 115 -117 , and a final one under Hadrian in 132-135. In m ore detail:

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208 years (539-331 b .c . e .) 29 years (331-302 b .c .e .)

no revolts

U nder Greco-Egyptian Empire

104 years (302-198 b .c .e .)

no revolts

U nder Greco-Syrian Empire

31 years (198 -167 b . c .e .)

one revolt

U nder Rom an Empire

172 years (63 B.c.E-135 c .e .)

three revolts

U nder Persian Em pire U nder Alexander and generals

no revolts

T h e three terrible wars against the Roman Em pire resulted, respectively, in the burning o f the Tem ple, the destruction o f Egyptian Judaism , and the paganization o f Jerusalem . The first and last revolts took place in the Jew ish homeland itself. T h e middle one spread from Egypt and Cyrene to Cyprus, Palestine, and even as far as Mesopotamia. There are always several reasons for widespread revolt leading to all-out war, but w h y did Jew ish relations w ith Rom e— specifi­ cally with Rom e— deteriorate so badly and end up so disastrously? The basic stratum o f cross-cultural anthropology from the Lenski-Kautsky model emphasized h ow commercialization provoked peasant resistance in agrar­ ian empires. It also considered Rom e as an example o f such commercialized agrarian empires. T h e next step is to establish a hard lock betw een anthropology and history within m y m ethod’s interdisciplinary design. T h at hard lock is rural commercialization, which the Rom an Em pire accepted as manifest imperial des­ tiny and m uch o fje w ish tradition rejected as divinely forbidden injustice. In this chapter, then, I look first at the general social structure o f the Rom an Empire and then at Jew ish traditions about rural commercialization.

Better Slave Than Peasant? T h e Rom an Em pire w as the most complete preindustrial system that has ever existed with the possible exception o f dynastic China. Stephen L. Dyson, "A Classical Archaeologist’s Response to the ‘New Archaeology,” ' p. 10 T h e m ost oppressed social strata in the Roman em pire w ere the fairly poor and im poverished sections o f the rural population. A m ong those sectors those w h o suffered w orst w ere not the slaves on the latifundia [plantations], w h o w ere o f value to their masters and w ere at least regularly fed, but the m ass o f nom inally "free" peasants, w h o w ere w ithout means o f support and w h o , in the provinces, often also lacked the privileged status o f a Rom an citi­ zen. F or exam ple, the life o f the "free" country-dwellers o f Ju daea or Egypt w as far w orse than that o f the slaves on [an Italian] estate. Géza Aîfôldy, The Social History of Rome, pp. 145-146

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G eza A lfold y has given a specific historical model o f the Rom an Em pire’s social structure (1985:146), and it can easily be superimposed on the general anthropological m odel o f Gerhard Lenski seen earlier (1966:284). One advantage o f A lfo ld y ’s historical m odel is its clear distinction o f the upper and low er classes. T h ere w as no m iddle class in antiquity. There was, o f course, a spread o f wealth across the entire spectrum from very high to very low, but middle wealth did not entail m iddle class. T h e d e a r dividing line was, in agricultural terms, between those w h o possessed land that others worked for them and those who worked their land for them selves (even if the working family could also afford seasonal help or perm anent slaves). A n oth er advantage o f this model is its delineation o f the distinctions and anom alies in the upper classes o f the early Roman Empire. There, indeed, were latent the seeds o f disaster, not so much in the distinctions as in the anomalies. R om e began its im perial existence while still a republic governed by two consuls replaced annually. T h ink o f them as twin kings for a year, with all the advantages o f kings, and w ith the disadvantages mitigated by twin and fo r a year. But the w ritin g w as already clearly on the wall in the 80s b .c .e ., when Lucius Cornelius Sulla returned from the conquest o f Greece and Asia Minor with enough booty to pay one m illion legionnaires for one year. That gave a new meaning to the term fo r one year. H o w could consuls control such warlords, and what was to stop consuls o r ex-consuls becom ing warlords themselves? The choice was b etw een perm anent civil w a r or established monarchical rule (but without that adjective!). B y the late 30s, Octavius, adopted son and designated heir o f Julius C aesar, w a s ready to becom e Princeps and Augustus, less than king in name and m ore than king in fact. S o m e idea o f ancient m onetary values is helpful in appreciating what fol­ lo w s. T h e best w a y to understand those values is by looking at costs and prices from the period in question, rather than attempting to translate ancient monies into contem porary currencies. Listed below are a few examples (culled from Sperb er 190; D uncan-Jones 10 -11, 208, 34^-350). Amounts are all given in sester­ ces. B ear in m ind that four Rom an sesterces w ere the equivalent o f one Rom an denarius, o r one G reek drachma, or a quarter Jew ish shekel. N o rm al salary for a day-laborer:

1-3 sesterces a day

C o st o f m aintaining an urban slave:

350-500 sesterces a year

Price for an unskilled slave:

600 sesterces (minimum)

Stipend fo r a freed slave:

850-1,000 sesterces a year

S alary o f a Rom an soldier:

900 sesterces a year

S ala ry o f a m ajor provincial governor:

1,000,000 sesterces a year

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Pliny the Younger, with a capital o f about 20 million sesterces, left donations fo r freed slaves that w ould have produced between 850 and 1,000 sesterces for each one per year. That m ay be taken, therefore, as a basic subsistence allow ­ ance fo r one year. A t the very apex o f the Alfóldy model w ere the em peror and his dynastic fam ily. Im m ediately below him was the Senatorial Order, w hose 600 members, distinguished by the broad purple stripe on their togas, had to have a minimum capital o f i million sesterces (which, at 6 percent, would have produced 600,000 sesterces annually). B elow the Senatorial Order was the Equestrian Order, so called because originally their cavalry horses w ere subsidized by the state. This order was dis­ tinguished by the narrow purple band on its togas, and each o f the 20,000 mem ­ bers had to have a capital o f at least 400,000 sesterces. Their wealth and pow er depended, as did that o f the senators, on civil and m ilitary appointments, on the ownership o f land, and on money-lending; especially for them, wealth and pow er also depended on various commercial, industrial, fiscal, and business operations. Therein lay a first anomaly: equestrians could end up far more wealthy than senators, for whom , in theory at least, those last occupations were beneath their dignity. And a second anomaly: W ould the em peror, w h o might well be from the Equestrian Order himself, prefer to trust them m ore than the senators, w ho retained, after all, som e nostalgic m em ories o f their own lost power? Beneath the Equestrian Order as such (but often identical with it in specific cases) was the Councilor or Decurión Order. This w as not an empire-wide order but simply the separate elites o f each city, usually involving about too members o f the council and the magistrates. There w ere probably betw een 100,000 and 150,000 decurions across the 1,000 or so cities o f the Rom an Empire, and the capi­ tal requirements to hold that position ranged anyw here from 20,000 to 100,000 sesterces. Rem em ber numbers, how ever: "If w e add up the num ber o f senators, equites, and decurions without equestrian status, w e arrive at a total o f no more than 200,000 adult males: these, together w ith their w ives and children, amount to no m ore than 1 per cent o f the total population o f the em pire” (147). So A lfó ld y's "upper strata” (the three orders described above) and "lo w er strata" represent, respectively, 1 percent and 99 percent o f the Rom an Empire. I have already drawn attention to one anom aly in the A lfóldy model: the top­ m ost equestrians could be far wealthier than the low er senators. There are two other even m ore anom alous social categories: C aesars Fam ily and Freed Slaves. T h e em perors m anaged the empire as if it w ere an extended household, so that the enslaved and freed members o f "Caesar's Fam ily” often achieved enormous p o w e r and wealth. E ven if you belonged to the Senatorial, Equestrian, or

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C ouncilor Orders, yo u r access to the emperor might well be through financial, legal, o r political departments controlled by enslaved or freed bureaucrats. Such a situation could but decrease aristocratic loyalty to the new imperial system. E ven apart from that anom aly, the very possibility o f people w ho w ere rich but freed created a social problem, not o f course for them but for the elite orders theoretically above them. It must be remembered that Roman conquests had produced hordes o f slaves as intelligent, cultured, and educated as their captors— and often far m ore so. Imagine conservative Roman landowners who kn ew that m uch m oney could be made in business ventures but did not want to dirty their hands, risk their reputations, or display their ignorance by trying to m ake that m oney. T h ey ow ned smart slaves, captured in the East, who were w e ll versed in com m ercial operations. T hey gave them peculia, amounts o f m o n ey w ith w hich they could trade and bargain as if they were their own, but all profits had to be split betw een slave and master. (Obviously masters could order the slaves to transact business for them with no peculia agreement, but car­ rots w o rk better than sticks in such circumstances.) Finally, when the slaves had m ade enough profit o f their own, they could buy freedom for an agreed price. T h is u sually happened at about 30 years o f age, the bad news being that the average adult age at death w as then 38.8 years for a man and 34.2 for a woman (M orris 74), a statistic badly skewed by the fact that about one-third o f live births w e re dead b y 6 and two-thirds by 16 (Cam ey 8 8 ). F reedom o r manum ission from a Roman citizen conferred Roman citizen­ ship on the freed slave. Only about 25 percent o f the Roman Empire's members w e re citizens in that early first century o f the common era, and it has been sug­ gested that freed citizens m ight have been as high as 80 percent o f that body. Freed slaves w ou ld alw ays be designated as freed rather than freeborn and w ould alw ays o w e certain duties to the patronal household that had granted freedom, but an y children b o m after manumission would be freeborn Roman citizens. N o w o n d e r that, as A lfoldy said in the epigraph to this chapter, it was often better to b e a R o m an household slave than a free Jew ish peasant. But once again, the social anom aly o f the rich freed people whose wealth exceeded their pow er and w h o se p o w e r exceeded their status cast shadows all over the theoretical distinc­ tions o f the Rom an aristocratic elite. It was, o f course, a very good situation for en slaved and freed, but could a system long survive when it had m ortgaged the lo ya lty o f those it still kept at its pinnacle? T h at, in briefest summary, was the Roman social system. One general com ­ m en t about it before turning to the Jewish homeland. Stephen Dyson has done v e ry thorough research on native revolts against Roman imperialism. Because he is prim arily interested in the tribal societies o f the W est rather than the ancient soci­ eties o f the East, he does not address such areas as Greece or Judaea. He concludes,

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h ow ever, that “ the process o f Romanization produced severe social and economic tensions which drove the native populace to repeated expressions o f rebellion----T h e tensions produced by the contrast o f different economic life styles w ere a m ajor factor in rebellion throughout Roman history" (1975:171). Rom an imperialism meant not just taxation o f an economy already in place but the commercialization o f the local economy for more taxes and revenues in the future. H o w w ould that program fit with the Jewish tradition in the Jewish homeland?

A Thirst for Divine Justice W e can see a tension within the attitudes toward land tenure in the ancient Near East. On the one hand, there was the recognition that land w as a unique resource that must receive special regulation in order to prevent the ruin o f the people. On the other hand, there was a m ovem ent tow ard greater individual freedom in the use and disposal o f the land, allow ing for the possibility o f latifundism [agribusiness] and the pauperization o f masses o f people. It appears that the ancient Near East was pulled in the latter direc­ tion, and it was in such a context in which Israel came into being. Jeffrey A. Fager, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee, p. 27I I begin with a few preliminary points. There are three elem ents in this sec­ tion that cannot be separated from one another, although w e often try to do so. Divine righteousness, social justice, and ritual purity are interw oven in Jew ish tradition like three strands o f one and the same rope. No m atter w h ich term is used, all three are presumed. Term s like righteousness, justice, or purity are biblical words whose repetition may have numbed us to their meaning. T h at num bing (or even dumbing) o f our minds will be the m ajor problem in this section. Throughout it I will emphasize how words and ideas that w e m ay hear as exclu­ sively religious or theological were originally such, but w ere econom ic, political, and social as well— all those many aspects intertwined together. T o em phasize that conjunction, I did not entitle this section “A Thirst for Social Ju stice," w hich w ould have been a perfectly valid heading, but "A Thirst for D ivine Ju stice," w hich is an even more accurate one. The subject is the justice o f G o d fo r this earth. And h ow does one know that God is just? Because G od stood against the Egyptian Em pire to save some doomed slaves. God does not sim ply prefer Je w s to Egyptians. God does not simply prefer slaves to masters. T h e only true G od prefers justice to injustice, righteousness to unrighteousness, and is therefore G od the Liberator. That very ancient Jew ish tradition w as destined to clash p ro ­ foundly and fiercely with Roman commercialization, urbanization, and m on eti­ zation in the first-century Jew ish homeland.

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Another prelim inary point. I concentrate in what follows on biblical texts, on the constitutive and norm ative documents o f Judaism itself. I realize, o f course, that those texts can beget violently conflicting interpretations and that class, for instance, plays a crucial difference in h ow one interprets and applies G od's justice on this earth. On the one hand, it is rather easy to be in favo r o f justice and righteousness. F ew individuals, groups, or divinities proclaim them ­ selves against such virtues or in favor o f injustice and unrighteousness. But, on the other hand, the biblical texts indicate repeatedly what exactly such justice entails. And the logic behind that divine justice is human equality, a radical egali­ tarianism that show s itself not in abstract manifestos but in specific laws. Let m e explain exactly w h at I mean through a comparison between Athens and Jerusalem , betw een G reek philosophy and Jew ish theology. Forty years ago Karl Polanyi w rote that the Greek philosopher Aristotle, w ho lived betw een 384 and 322 b .c .e ., must “be seen as attacking the problem o f m an’s livelihood w ith a radicalism o f which no later w riter on the subject was capable— none has ever penetrated deeper into the material organization o f m an's life. In effect, he posed, in all its breadth, the question o f the place occu­ pied by the econom y in society” (66). N ot all economic historians would agree w ith that judgm ent. Joseph Schumpeter, in a w ork published just before Polanyi’s accolade, found Aristotle full o f "decorous, pedestrian, slightly mediocre, and m ore than slightly pompous com m on sense" (57). Be that as it m ay, Aristotle taught that justice meant inequality. M oses Finley summarizes his idea o f justice like this: "T h e distribution o f equal shares am ong unequal per­ sons, or o f unequal shares am ong equal persons, would be unjust. The principle o f distributive justice is therefore to balance the share with the worth o f the per­ son” (1970:29). Or, to put it m ore bluntly, from Finley quoting Marx: “ ‘G reek society w as founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality o f m en and o f their labour p o w e r. That natural inequality is funda­ m ental to Aristotle’s thinking is beyond argument: it permeates his analysis o f friendship in the Ethics and o f slavery in the Politics” (1970:38). Slavery w as natural. Therefore, inequality w as natural. And, therefore, distributive justice dem anded inequality. C om e back, now , from the philosophers o f Greece to the theologians o f Israel. You will not find in the H ebrew Bible any manifestos announcing that all people or even all Je w s are equal. Neither will you find assertions that slavery is unnatural or against the will o f God. But you will find there decrees and deci­ sions, threats and promises that make sense only on the presumption that the ju s­ tice o f G od strives insistently against inequality am ong G od’s people. I f indebted­ ness, enslavement, and dispossession are simply the vagaries o f life, as natural as drought, disease, and death, w h y does God seek to curtail indebtedness, control

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enslavem ent, and reverse dispossession? W hy is the thrust toward equality and egalitarianism some sort o f fundamental ideal? Again, the Hebrew tradition did not proclaim philosophical manifestos about equality. But without that as its deep presumption, its w ords and deeds against the growth o f inequality make no sense. The problem is, o f course, that w hen God is revealed by freeing doomed slaves from im perial control, the future is set on a collision course with domination, oppression, and exploita­ tion— even when those actions are exercised by a people on itself. In the biblical texts, accusations o f injustice are made against the rich and pow erful within Judaism itself. That is because Jew s w ere then in charge o f their o w n people and land. In the postbiblical texts, accusations o f injustice are made against the pagan nations, the great empires, and the imperial gods. That is because they w ere then in charge o f the Jewish people and the Jew ish land. But what is alw ays at stake is the Jew ish God o f justice, who stands against injustice, against unjust individuals, against unjust empires, and against unjust gods. Justice as equality is dem anded not just by God’s decree but by God’s character, and it is up to hum an beings to figure out how that works in practice. A final preliminary point. Many scholars now talk about Judaism s in the plu­ ral rather than the singular. Such a term rightly emphasizes the plurality and diversity o f that religion in the first common-era centuries. It also reacts appro­ priately against the tendency to retroject later norms o f orthodoxy back onto a much m ore variegated earlier period. On the other hand, there m ust h ave been something that held those several Judaisms together, som ething w ithin w hich opposition to one another made sense. For m y present purpose, I do not w an t to argue for or against a term such as Judaisms. W hat I describe b elow m ay be co m ­ m on or basic Jew ish identity in the Jew ish homeland, or it m ay be ju st one strand am ong many. It is, in any case, the strand that concerns m e, and it does not seem to be marginal, peripheral, or idiosyncratic. It comes from deep w ithin the constitutional documents o f the Jewish people. T H E A N C IE N T N E A R EA ST It is emphatically clear, from Leon Epsztein in 1986 to Moshe W einfeld in 1 9 9 5 , that the ancient Near East’s presuppositions about divine, royal, social, and popular justice are the background for certain ancient Jewish traditions. "Thanks to the dis­ coveries o f the last two centuries,’’ says Epsztein, "it is possible to demonstrate from the texts the existence o f a general aspiration towards justice extending o ver the various regions o f the ancient Near East---- The quest for justice which appears in Israel has analogies to that which appeared among its neighbors. T h e H ebrew notion o f justice can be compared with Maat [in E g y p t]. . . the deity, daughter o f the sun god, Re, symbol o f good order, o f the true state o f nature and society as it

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has been fixed by the creative act---- W e find distant antecedents for the biblical word-pair mishpat/tsedeqa [justice/righteousness], which is not an abstract formula but a notion profoundly bound up with the specific life o f the people o f Israel. . . in Babylon and am ong the western Semites" (45). Similarly, Weinfeld's study o f "the practice o f righteousness and justice in the socio-political realm" argues that it "refers primarily to acts on behalf o f the poor and less fortunate classes o f the people . . . car­ ried out by means o f social legislation, initiated by the kings and the ruling circles." He can therefore compare "the performance o f justice and righteousness . . . by the rulers o f Israel with the establishment o f . . . righteousness in Mesopotamia and the proclamation o f ‘freedom’ in Egypt. These social institutions were usually intro­ duced by the kings w hen they ascended the throne or at other decisive times in the history o f the nation" (8-9). In the following texts, from Mesopotamia through Ugarit into Egypt, there is, for example, an explicit mention o f justice for widows and orphans, o f special divine and therefore royal protection for those no longer protected by paternal linkage into kinship safety nets. A similar emphasis appears in all three sections o f the Hebrew Bible: for example, in the Law (at Exodus 22:21-24), in the Prophets (at Zechariah 7:9-10), and in the Writings (at Job 24:3,9). In M esopotam ia, in the first centuries o f the second millennium

b.c .e .,

the

Prologues to the ancient law codes mention how the gods and goddesses called the king to be protector o f justice. Lipit-Ishtar, in the first half o f the nineteenth century

b .c .e .,

w as "called . . . to the princeship o f the land in order to establish

justice in the land," and he "established justice in Sum er and Akkad . . . caused righteousness and truth to exist; brought well-being to the Sumerians and Akka­ dians.” A century and a h alf later, Hamm urabi o f Babylon was "nam ed . . . to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong m ight not oppress the w eak . . . that justice might be dealt the orphan (and) the w id ow . . . to give justice to the oppressed” (A N E T 15 9 ,16 1,16 4 ,17 8 ). In Ugarit, im m ediately north o f Israel-to-be in the fourteenth century

b .c . e .,

there is a poem about one Yassib the Lad, w ho determines to usurp the throne o f his father, Keret the Noble. In "T h e Legend o f King Keret,” he announces the good new s to his father (AN ET 149, slightly modified): Hearken, I pray you , Keret the Noble! Listen and incline you r e a r . . . . You have let yo u r hand fall into mischief. You ju dge not the cause o f the w idow , N or do you adjudicate the case o f the wretched; You drive not out them that prey on the poor; You feed not the fatherless before you, T h e w id o w behind yo u r back.

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H aving becom e a brother o f the sickbed, A companion o f the bed o f suffering, Descend from the kingship— I'll reign; From your authority— I'll sit enthroned. The text breaks o ff soon after that proposal, with Keret praying that the god break Yassib's head, the goddess his pate. (You can see, by the w ay, w here the Bible got its traditions o f poetic parallelism.) In Egypt there is one particularly interesting parabolic story from the Middle Kingdom o f the twentieth to the eighteenth centuries

b .c .e .

Called “ T h e Pro­

tests o f the Eloquent Peasant,” it describes how a peasant nam ed Khun-Anup obtained justice directly from the chief steward o f Egypt. He had been beaten and despoiled o f his produce-laden donkeys by one Thut-nakht, w h o tricked the beast into eating a mouthful o f standing grain. Thut-nakht w as an im portant per­ sonage, vassal o f the chief steward, Rensi, so he ignored the peasant's pleas. But Khun-Anup went directly to Rensi himself, upbraiding the ch ief stew ard for his slowness in response (ANET 408-409): Because you are the father o f the orphan, the husband o f the w idow , the brother o f the divorcee, and the apron o f him that is motherless. Let me make your name in this land according to every good law: a leader free from covetousness, a great man free from wrongdoing, one w ho destroys false­ hood and brings justice into being, and w ho comes at the cry o f him w h o gives v o i c e. . . . Do not plunder o f his property a poor man, a w eakling as you know him. His property is the (very) breath o f a suffering man, and he w h o takes it away is one who stops up his nose. You w ere appointed to conduct hearings, to judge between two men, and to punish the brigand, (but) behold, it is the upholder o f the thief which you would be. One trusts in you , whereas you are become a transgressor. You w ere appointed to be a dam for the sufferer, guarding lest he drown, (but) behold, you are his flow ing lake. Rensi eventually gives in, arrests Thut-nakht, confiscates his property, and gives it all to Khun-Anup as restitution. C R E A T IO N , EXO D U S, ESCH ATO N N one o f those Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, or Egyptian parallels dim inishes in any w a y the far, far m ore serious way in which righteousness and justice, espe­ cially as protective o f the widows and the orphans, thlq poor and the w retched, w ere taken in the Bible. There it was the righteousness o f the one and only covenantal G od that was at stake. There it was the justice o f Israel's continued existence in G o d 's land that was at stake. And it all began as early as this text:

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Fo r I have chosen him [Abraham], that he m ay charge his children and his household after him to keep the w ay o f the Lord by doing righteousness and justice; so that the Lord m ay bring about for Abraham what he has prom ised him. (Genesis 18:19) Righteousness and justice com e from God to Abraham, and the divine prom ises to his progeny are contingent on establishing and maintaining that righteousness and justice on earth. Tw ice, once at the start and again at the end o f his book, Moshe Weinfeld sum m arizes G od's establishment o f righteousness and justice on three special occasions: at the Creation, at the Exodus, and at the Eschaton. "T h e appearance o f G od to ju dge with righteousness in the past, present and future thus signifies: (1) the redem ption o f the earth and all its creatures during the Creation; (2) the redem ption o f Israel from the enslavement o f Egypt, the granting o f the Law at Sinai (social redemption), and the salvation o f Israel from its enemies in Canaan; (3) the redem ption o f Israel and the nations in the eschatological future” (21). Here are exam ples o f those three paradigmatic moments, all from the Psalms: T h e w ord o f the Lord is upright, and all his w ork is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full o f the steadfast love o f the Lord. By the w ord o f the Lord the heavens w ere made, and all their host by the breath o f his m outh. He gathered the waters o f the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. (Psalm 33:4-7) Mighty King, lover ofjustice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in J a c o b . . . . He spoke to them in the pillar o f cloud; they kept his decrees, and the statutes that he gave them -----The Lord works vindication and justice for all w h o are oppressed. He made known his w ays to Moses, his acts to the people o f Israel. (Psalms 99:4,7; 103:6-7) Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees o f the forest sing for jo y before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is com ing to judge the earth. H e will ju dge the w orld w ith righteousness, and the peoples with his truth. (Psalm 96:11-13) W einfeld reverts to that sum m ary in conclusion: "G od, the ruler o f the uni­ verse, proclaims ‘freedom ’ and ‘liberation— that is perform s [righteousness and justice]," first, at the dawn o f Creation, then at the exodus from Egypt, and, finally, “ in the [messianic] future, w hen H e shall reign o ver the entire earth" (205-206). It is hardly possible to overemphasize that central tradition. T h e Jew ish

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people w ere in covenant with a God w ho had delivered them from oppressive slavery and imminent extermination under Pharaoh in Egypt. T h at G o d was, therefore, a divinity that freed the oppressed— unlike foreign gods and god­ desses, w ho w ere divinities that had enslaved them. Had G od intended but to relocate slavery and injustice? Had God effected a primordial deliverance only to allow a later one equally intolerable? Under another Pharaoh? E ven under a Pharaoh from among their own people? T H E LA W It is often claimed, especially in Christian commentaries, that the prophets spoke for the inner spirit and for justice but that the priests held for the external law and for worship. Some Jews, no doubt, failed to live up to covenantal righ­ teousness, but it was not simply the prophets who did and the priests w h o did not. Indeed, as Norman Gottwald put it, "L aw and Prophets w ere to becom e tw o sepa­ rate and firmly delimited collections o f authoritative writings, constituting the first and second divisions o f the three-part Hebrew Bible. Despite the division betw een the two collections, it is nonetheless evident that these two sets o f traditions inter­ acted intimately within the institutional life o f Israel over approximately eight cen­ turies from ca. 1050 to 250

b .c .e ."

(1985:458). But what is especially important in

what follows is that when the priests articulated traditional law, they did not substi­ tute holiness and purity for justice and righteousness, they combined them both together. Indeed, that combination o f justice and purity in the Holiness C ode at Leviticus 25 contains one o f the most radical proposals for social equality anyw here in the entire Bible (or anywhere else?). W e are dealing with three main legal collections, and they can be correlated with the periods o f prophetic criticism in the succeeding unit. One is the Covenant Code in Exodus 20:22-23:19, which derived from the northern half o f the Jew ish homeland in the ninth century, the period o f socioeconomic injustice attacked by Elijah and Elisha. Another is the Deuteronomic Code in Deuteronomy 12-16, which w as brought southward after the destruction o f that northern half at the end o f the eighth century. It was then adapted for the surviving southern half o f the Jewish homeland in the seventh century, around the time o f Jeremiah. A final text is the Holiness Code in Leviticus 17-26, which derives from priestly circles in that southern half in the same seventh-century period. I focus on four major points from those law codes, noting especially how those points reach their climax under priestly control and emphasis in the Holiness Code. It is there that we can see most clearly how righteousness and ju s­ tice combine with holiness and purity. One could always debate, then or now , what should be placed in the category o f justice-purity, but such debates do not validate the separation o f justice from purity or the reduction o f justice-purity to purity alone. The four points to be studied are rest, indebtedness, enslavement, and dispossession.

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Establishing Rest I place this element first because it is somewhat striking in its unexpected­ ness. It concerns the sabbath day and the sabbath year. The idea o f sacred days set aside for divine worship, communal celebration, and special festivals is utterly ordinary and com pletely com m on to both pagan and Jew ish tradition. But the idea that every seventh day must be set aside as sacred rest is distinctively and uniquely Jew ish. It derives from the rest o f G od as completion and climax o f cre­ ation. It is not due to any hum an designation and is therefore beyond human con­ trol. But w h y should rest be so important: Rest from what? Rest for what? T h e sabbath day is mentioned in the Covenant Code and again in Deuter­ onom y, but not w ithin the Deuteronom ic Code itself. W atch the results and thereby infer the reasons for that day o f sabbath rest. Six days you shall do y o u r w ork, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that you r ox and y o u r donkey m ay have relief, and your hom ebom slave and the resident alien m ay be refreshed. (Exodus 23:12) O bserve the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord yo u r God com ­ manded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any w ork—you, or yo u r son or y o u r daughter, or you r male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any o f you r livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that yo u r male and fem ale slave m ay rest as w ell as you. Rem em ber that you w ere a slave in the land o f Egypt, and the Lord your G od brought you out from there w ith a m ighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord y o u r G od com m anded you to keep the sabbath day. (Deuteronom y 5:12-15) T h e sabbath day represents a tem porary stay o f inequality, a day o f rest for everyone alike, for animals and humans, for slaves and owners, for children and adults. W hy? Because that is h ow God sees the world. Sabbath rest sends all alike back to sym bolic egalitarianism. It is a regular stay against the activity that engenders inequality on the other days o f the week. T h e sabbath year is to years as the sabbath day is to days. Every seventh year is also special. It represents another stay against inequality. Notice, once again, h o w its reason is form ulated in that earliest Covenant Code. F o r six years you shall sow you r land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year yo u shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor o f y o u r people m ay eat; and w h at they leave the w ild animals m ay eat. Y ou shall do the sam e w ith yo u r vineyard, and with you r olive orchard. (Exodus 23:10-11)

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Leaving land periodically fallow to have minerals replenished by animal pas­ turing and organic manuring is not particularly unusual. But what exactly is im ag­ ined in that law? Léon Epsztein suggests that the land “ could not have been left fallow. It w as cultivated, but once the harvest was reaped, it w as not taken in; the co m w as left spread on the ground to be there for those w h o needed it___ [I]t is improbable that this measure was applied to all Israel at the sam e tim e; it is m ore probable that each farmer adopted the measure at regular intervals in rota­ tion” (132). Norman Habel claims, to the contrary, that "the land sabbath, unlike the fallow law, applies to all arable land during the sabbath year; every seven years all agriculture is to cease in the land" (103). That seems a m ore correct reading o f the law, especially since Josephus records the follow in g decree o f Julius Caesar in 47 b .c .e . concerning taxes from the Jew ish hom eland: Gaius Caesar, Imperator for the second time, has ruled that they shall pay a tax for the city o f Jerusalem, Joppa excluded [included?], every year except in the seventh year, which they call the sabbatical year, because at that time they neither take fruit from the trees nor do they sow. (Jewish Antiquities 14.202) I leave aside exactly how the sabbath year was done, emphasizing instead the reason given for why it should be done. Cereal, olives, and grapes belonged, as it were, not just to their owners but to the indigent poor and even the w ild beasts. The land belonged to God and therefore fundamentally to all residents alike. The formulation o f sabbath year rest in the Holiness C ode is even m ore striking. It repeats what was said in the Covenant Code but adds and em phasizes something else in first place. The land itself deserves a rest. This is not a question o f human fallowing but o f divine hallowing. W hen you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sab­ bath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years yo u shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh y ea r there shall be a sabbath o f complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the after­ grow th o f you r harvest or gather the grapes o f your unpruned vine: it shall be a year o f complete rest for the land. You m ay eat what the land yields during its sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, yo u r hired and yo u r bound laborers w ho live with you; for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in y o u r land all its yield shall be for food. (Leviticus 25:215-7) Rest puts everything, even the land itself, back in a state o f stasis, equity, equality. T here is one interesting corollary to that emphasis. The poor have rights

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not just to alms or handouts but to the land and its produce. Here is another exam ple from the book o f D euteronom y, outside the code section proper. It is also in the Holiness Code. W hen you reap you r harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the w idow , so that the Lord you r G od m ay bless you in all your undertakings. W hen yo u beat y o u r olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the w idow . W hen you gather the grapes o f your vine­ yard, do not glean w hat is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the w idow . (D euteronom y 24:19-21) W hen you reap the harvest o f you r land, you shall not reap to the very edges o f your field, or gather the gleanings o f your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes o f your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10) T h e untouched com er, the dropped produce, and the seventh-year yield belon g to the poor b y right. In the words o f Leon Epsztein, the Holiness Code offers the poor "a chance o f sharing in the very act o f production ’ (1x3), not just in the act o f consum ption. T h ey get a right and a share not just an alms and a handout. T h e rest that indicates ideal equality and temporarily reverts everyone to that egalitarian m om ent has three great opponents: indebtedness, enslavement, and dispossession. Rem ission for all three o f those problems was w ell known in the ancient N ear East on the occasion, for example, o f a new king or a new dynasty ascending the throne. W hat is o f importance here is h ow those occa­ sional remissions w ere ordained regularly in Israel and w ere deeply imbedded there in the covenant relationship betw een God, Law , People, and Land. T here the implem entation w as not left to hum an decision or timing but w as estab­ lished by divine com m and based on the very nature o f Israel’s God. Controlling Indebtedness T h e stasis or rest o f equality could be broken and inequality developed through debt. W hether through laziness or incompetence, drought or famine, disaster or death, one fam ily occasionally needed to borrow from another. The la w codes tried to control i f not eliminate the inequality o f gro w in g indebtedness in several w ays, including the forbidding o f interest, the controlling o f collateral, and the establishment o f remission. Let’s look at the first o f these, the forbidding o f interest. Interest w as forbid­ den on loans to Jew ish neighbors and to the resident alien poor but not to

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foreign m erchants or investors. Since the latter took interest on Jew ish loans, interest could be taken from them in return. "W hen Israelites b o rro w from for­ eigners w hose civil legal codes permit interest taking . . . the borrow ers suffer ‘dam ages’ from the standpoint o f Mosaic law ,” according to Barry Gordon. "It w ou ld be equitable and just, then, that equivalent compensation fo r those dam­ ages is taken when Israelites assume the role o f lender" (412). T h e injunction is stated succinctly in the Covenant Code and in D euteronom y (but outside the Deuteronom ic Code): If you lend money to m y people, to the poor am ong you, yo u shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them . (Exodus 22:25) You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. (D euteron­ om y 23:19) But that injunction is greatly expanded in the Holiness Code. T h at code also makes explicitly clear that the interest forbidden includes both pre-interest, due when the loan is given out, and post-interest, due w hen the loan is paid back: If any o f your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on you , you shall support them; they shall live with you as though resident aliens. D o not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, b ut fear y o u r God; let them live with you. You shall not lend them yo u r m on ey at interest taken in advance, or provide them food at a profit. (Leviticus 25:35-37) It was, o f course, very easy, even in the absence o f interest, to get m ore and m ore deeply in debt. Hence the next step was at least som e control o ver credi­ tors and what they could do with pledges given as collateral. T h e second step, then, was the controlling o f collateral to avoid oppressive o r vengeful actions. The Covenant Code is, as usual, quite succinct. Its form ula­ tion is expanded in Deuteronomy (but again not in the D euteronom ic C ode itself). I f you take y o u r neighbor's cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes dow n; for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in w h at else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to m e, I w ill listen, for I am compassionate. (Exodus 22:26-27) N o one shall take a mill or an upper millstone in pledge, fo r that w o u ld be taking a life in pledge-----W hen you make your neighbor a loan o f an y kind,

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you shall not go into the house to take the pledge. You shall w ait outside, while the person to w h om you are making the loan brings the pledge out to you. I f the person is poor, you shall not sleep in the garm ent given you as the pledge. Y ou shall give the pledge back by sunset, so that yo u r neighbor m ay sleep in the cloak and bless you; and it will be to your credit before the Lord y o u r God. (D euteronom y 24 :6 ,10 -11) T h e third step, finally, w as the remission o f debts. The Deuteronomic Code took the idea o f the seventh-year rest and, in a som ewhat extraordinary m ove, applied it to debt. Rem itting debt followed the same pattern as forbidding inter­ est. It did not apply to the foreign merchant from whom , since he demanded interest o f you , you could demand interest in return. It was not present in the Covenant C ode but w as invented b y the Deuteronom ic Code as part o f the sab­ bath year liberation. E very seventh year y o u shall grant a remission o f debts. And this is the man­ ner o f the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it o f a neighbor w ho is a m em ber o f the commu­ nity, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed-----If there is am ong you anyone in need, a m em ber o f your com m unity in any o f your towns w ithin the land that the Lord you r God is giving you, do not be hard­ hearted or tight-fisted tow ard you r needy neighbor. You should rather open yo u r hand, w illingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it m ay be. Be careful that you do not entertain a m ean thought, thinking, "The seventh year, the year o f remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neigh­ bor w ith hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you , and you w ou ld incur guilt. G ive liberally and be ungrudging w hen you do so, for on this account the Lord you r G od will bless you in all yo u r w o rk and in all that you undertake. Since there will never cease to be som e in need on the earth, I therefore com mand you, "Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in you r land.” (Deuteronomy 15:1-2, 7-11) I I leave aside, once again, h ow that w as all arranged— or even if it w as ever applied in practice. Martin Goodm an, how ever, has pointed to evidence that it w as applied in the first century. H e cites the institution o f the prosbul, w hich w as connected to Hillel in that century. This w as “ a public declaration before a court b y a man seeking a loan that he w ould accept his legal duty to repay the m oney even after the advent o f the Sabbatical Year.” There also seems to be reference to the sabbatical year "w ithin one o f the loan agreements o f the early second century

a .d

.

found in the Judaean desert" ( 19 8 7 :5 7 -5 8 ). In any case, once again, I

emphasize the legal ideal regardless o f the actual practice.

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Liberating Enslavement Individuals or families could sell themselves into slavery or be enslaved by their creditors when debt became too desperate. W e are still talking about indebtedness, in other words—but now at an extreme. Freedom o f slaves was ordained for the sabbath year in the Covenant Code. A difference w as made betw een male and female enslavement because the fem ale as concubine required special protection. W hen you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the sev­ enth he shall go out a free person, without de bt. . . . W hen a m an sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. I f she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let h er be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal w ith her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights o f the first wife. And i f he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, w ithout paym ent o f money. (Exodus 2 1:2,7-11) No such distinction is made in the Deuteronomic Code, w hich im agines release for slaves o f either gender in the sabbatical year. But this code also ordains forms o f severance payment for the released slave and w arns against stinginess: I f a mem ber o f your community, whether a H ebrew m an o r a H eb rew wom an, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year yo u shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from y o u a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out o f you r flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus givin g to him som e o f the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed y o u . . . . D o not consider it a hardship when you send them out from yo u free persons, because for six years they have given you services w orth the w ages o f hired laborers; and the Lord your God will bless you in all that yo u do. (D eu teron ­ om y 15:12-15,18) T h at phrase “male slave" is simply "him " in H ebrew and should b e taken inclusively to include male or female. Reversing Dispossession W e are again talking about indebtedness as it creates a desperate situation— this time not enslavem ent but dispossession, the loss o f that land, w hich w as the ultim ate guarantee for loans. One’s ancestral inheritance from G o d w as n eve r to

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be perm anently alienated. One's land was not a com m odity available for a fair exchange or a good price. Deuteronom y, for example, warns against any change o f ancient boundary lines or markers: You m ust not m ove you r neighbor's boundary marker, set up by form er generations, on the property that will be allotted to you in the land that the Lord you r G od is giving you to possess. (Deuteronomy 19:14) "C ursed be anyone w ho m oves a neighbor’s boundary m arker." All the people shall say, “A m en!" (Deuteronom y 27:17) But w hat i f dispossession did happen? It should not happen, but what if it did? The Holiness C ode established something that is as special to it as the remis­ sion o f debts is to the D euteronom ic Code. It ordains a sabbath o f sabbath years, a super-sabbath, a special Jubilee Year in the fiftieth year after seven sets o f seven years. Y ou shall count o ff seven weeks o f years, seven times seven years, so that the period o f seven w eeks o f years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trum pet sounded loud; on the tenth day o f the seventh month— on the day o f atonem ent— you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all yo u r land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim lib­ erty [deror] throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one o f you, to your property and every one o f you to y o u r fam ily. T h at fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself pro­ duces. In this year o f jubilee you shall return, every one o f you, to yo u r property___ T h e land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with m e you are but aliens and tenants. (Leviticus 25:8-13, 23) The idea o f proclaiming liberation is not at all unique to Israel. It fits once again into the ancient N ear Eastern background. As Moshe W einfeld noted, the announcem ent o f “ 'liberation' (andurdru) during the Neo-Assyrian period en­ tailed the return o f exiles to their homes, the restoration o f towns and tem ples, the release o f prisoners, etc. In Egypt, as well, ‘release’ was expressed in the liber­ ation o f convicts, rebels and various other guilty parties, and in particular in the return o f exiles to their hom es” (12). But there is, as alw ays, a striking difference w ith Israel. In his recent study o f the Jubilee Year, Jeffrey Fager com m ents that "kings often proclaim ed a ‘release’ that included the manum ission o f slaves, the cancellation o f debts and the return o f lost land. H o w often or w ith w h at

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regularity such edicts were proclaimed is still unknown, and there is no evidence that they occurred with the automatic regularity called fo r b y the biblical jubilee” (25). But what is especially important for the biblical ideology is that last sentence in Leviticus 25:13: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; w ith me you are but aliens and tenants.” That sets Israel apart from the liberation practices o f either Mesopotamia or Egypt. Once again these stand or fall together: God, Law, People, and Land (and the Covenant binding them), and a ceaseless pull toward equality resulting at least in a ceaseless pull against increas­ ing inequality. There are, however, two m ajor questions about that text. First, what was the purpose o f the Jubilee Year? And notice, by the w ay, that it started on the D ay o f Atonement. Here, at least, the answ er is quite clear. From Léon Epsztein: " . . . in order to restrict the creation o f latifundia, [that is,] to prevent the concentration o f rural properties” (133). From N orm an Habel: "The policy provided a mechanism for deterring in the short term and prevent­ ing in the long term land monopolies o f latifundialization, the process o f land accumulation in the hands o f a few landowners to the detriment o f peasant farm ­ ers" (105). From Jeffrey Fager: "It attempted to restrict the latifundism w hich w as prevalent in the ancient Near East in order to keep the m eans o f production evenly distributed among independent families” (88). Or, as Isaiah 5:8 said, it w as intended to defeat "you who join house to house, w ho add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst o f the land!" It wanted to stop the transformation o f multiple peasant smallholdings into single large landownerships, to deter the eradication o f the fam ily farm and the creation and extension o f latifundism or agribusiness. That, o f course, put divine tradition on a collision course with rural commercialization. Second, was the Jubilee Year ever implemented? This is a m ore delicate and difficult question than the preceding one. One could answer in the negative and still miss the entire point. Léon Epsztein, for example, says that "it is not certain that the Jubilee Year was ever applied in Israel" (134). Both N orm an Habel and Jeffrey Fager agree, but with much more nuanced responses. N orm an H abel con­ cludes that "there is no clear evidence that the jubilee program w as ever im ple­ mented on a regular basis according to the agenda outlined in Leviticus 25. This lack o f historical evidence, however, does not negate the significance o f the jubilee as an ideological symbol o f a radical land reform program prom oting the rights o f the peasant” (107-108). Fager makes a similar point, em phasizing it repeatedly. H e rejects the choice o f either actual practice or utopian ideal and insists that the jubilee was described as something that could be done in this world even i f it never were. "The jubilee can be seen not so much as a utopian concept o f another w orld (even though its regulations may be economically impractical), but as a statement that proper distribution o f land can be attained and maintained

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within the confines o f this w orld___ The priests did not spiritualize the law so much that it becam e a mere abstraction; land was to be distributed equally am ong the people and maintained in that way. H ow ever, the jubilee w as seen as a catalyst to that process, not the process itself; it was a signal to the people, lead­ ing them towards a proper relationship with the land___ The jubilee as w e n o w have it occupies a ‘middle ground' between practical regulation for everyday exis­ tence and idealistic vision o f a world that does not exist” (80-81, m , 115). I f the priests w h o created that legislation had wanted m erely to set up a utopian ideal, they w ould hardly have made the Jubilee Year occur only every fifty years. For utopia, w h y not every seven years? And neither w ould they have made this striking qualification: I f anyone sells a dw elling house in a walled city, it m ay be redeemed until a year has elapsed since its sale; the right o f redemption shall be one year. If it is not redeem ed before a full year has elapsed, a house that is in a walled city shall pass in perpetuity to the purchaser, throughout the generations; it shall not be released in the jubilee. But houses in villages that have no walls around them shall be classed as open country; they m ay be redeemed, and they shall be released in the jubilee. (Leviticus 25:29-31) T h e point is clear. W e are to protect peasant farms and rural villages, though w e m ay do as w e please w ith the commercialized real estate o f walled cities. The Jubilee Year may be utopian ideal, but it is so formulated ¿is to be actually possible. Josephus, in fact, records h ow to do it with three examples that have no bib­ lical basis: [W hen the Jubilee Year arrives] the vender and the purchaser o f the site m eet together and reckon up the- products o f the site and the outgoings expended upon it. Then if the proceeds are found to exceed the outgoings, the vendor recovers the estate; but if the expenditures preponderate, he m ust pay a sufficient sum to cover the deficit or forfeit the property; if, lastly, the figures for revenue and expenditure are equal, the legislator restores the land to its form er possessors. (Jewish Antiquities 3.283-284) T h at too m ay all be dreaming. But it is not derived from the biblical text and it at least im agines h ow contracts might be handled at the Jubilee. It could be done. It should be done. So w hat happened w hen it was not done? T H E PRO PH ETS I have deliberately put this section in second place to the preceding one. It is alm ost a cliche that the biblical Jew ish prophets demanded social justice as

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covenantal responsibility. They did not suggest it as a nicer w a y to live together. T h e y did not propose it to create a kinder, gentler country. Social justice w as for them the hum an face o f divine justice. "If," as Leon Epsztein insists, “ they had been asked w hether they considered themselves prim arily to be religious reform ers or social reformers, they would probably have protested violently against the distinction” (92). Th ey would have been right. T h e one and only God, the God o f righteousness and justice, made a covenant w ith a people o f righteousness and justice to live in a land o f righteousness and justice under a law o f justice and righteousness. The Jew ish prophets w ere not, in other words, inventing something new and transient. They w ere demanding som ething old and permanent in new circumstances. A Tradition o f Relentless Criticism As soon as the Jew ish people had a king o f their own, they had a prophet to invoke the justice o f the covenantal God as charter for that m onarch's rule. T h e prophet Samuel warned the people before Saul was anointed as their first king: He will take the best o f your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth o f your grain and o f y o u r vin e­ yards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. H e will take y o u r m ale and female slaves, and the best o f your catde and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth o f your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because o f your king, w hom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Sam uel 8:14-18) All o f that was but the normalcy o f royal privilege in the ancient N ear East. But, as God informed Samuel, accepting that style o f rule meant rejecting G o d ’s style o f rule. You could not have a monarch o f injustice and inequality under a God o f justice and equality. "They have rejected me from being king o ver them ,” as G od said to Samuel in 18:7. They have chosen injustice and oppression o ver ju s­ tice and liberation. It was, o f course, utterly possible to oppose that anti-monarchi­ cal ideology with a pro-monarchical one. In Psalm 2, for example, the ruler can be called by God to be both king and emperor, to be anointed as Son o f G od and King o f Zion. But, despite such defenses, prophetic criticism would not go away. Food and Life. Recall the widows, orphans, poor, and afflicted w ho w ere supposed to be the special concern o f divinity and monarchy from M esopotam ia through Ugarit into Egypt. In the northern pan o f the Jew ish homeland during the ninth cen­ tury

b .c .e .,

the prophets Elijah and Elisha opposed foreign gods and royal injus­

tices as tw in sides o f the same coin. But they did not simply talk about w idow s

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and orphans, they did som ething about them. And their deeds, not ju st their words, w ere rem em bered. Recall in what follows that in a patriarchal society "w idow s and orphans” are a fixed pair. Both are systematically vulnerable as lacking norm al m ale protection— the w idow lacking a husband, the "orphan” lacking a father. In 1 Kings 17:8-16 a poor w idow with a single orphan son is dying o f hunger. Elijah m iraculously and continuously replenishes the w idow ’s meal and oil. Then, in 17:17-24, her son dies and Elijah miraculously raises him to life again. A similar but m uch m ore developed set o f miracles is recorded o f Elijah’s succes­ sor, Elisha. In 2 Kings 4 :1-7 a poor w idow with only some oil in her house is about to lose h er tw o children as slaves to creditors. Elisha miraculously fills every ja r she can find w ith oil and she pays her debts. Then, in 4:8-37, he prom ises a son to a w ealthy but barren w om an and later raises him from the dead w hen he dies o f sunstroke. But those tw o prophets not only helped widows and orphans, they also ruthlessly opposed the local pagan god Baal and toppled a Jew ish dynasty that had accepted his worship. All o f that w ent together, from their view point. T h e Jew ish god Yahweh w as a divinity demanding traditional righteousness and justice. T h e pagan god Baal presumed a far less egalitarian society. D ifferent divinities begat different monarchies, and those begat different rights and justices. T h ere is, how ever, one very significant story where foreign divinity and dom estic injustice com e clearly together. The Jew ish king Ahab was married to a Phoenician princess nam ed Jezebel, and as part o f what he considered sensible foreign relations, he com bined the worship o f God, the covenantal deity o f his people, w ith that o f Baal, the fertility-bringing deity o f the local pagans. In 1 Kings 21:2 King Ahab asks Naboth for his vineyard, "that I m ay have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near m y house; I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, i f it seems good to you, I will give you its value in m oney.” That might seem fair enough to us. T h e king does not exercise royal right or em inent dom ain; he does not simply take it. Instead, he offers either exchange or m oney for it. Naboth replies, in 21:3, "Th e Lord forbid that I should give yo u m y ances­ tral inheritance." Ahab dejectedly gives in, but Jezebel has Naboth accused o f cursing G od and the king. A fter he is stoned to death for that crime, his vineyard becom es a royal possession. T h e fundamental clash in that episode is betw een land as com m odity to be sensibly bought and sold or land as ancestral inheri­ tance never to be alienated from the family. The form er is Jezebel’s pagan pre­ supposition; the latter is Naboth’s Jew ish tradition. Selling land is right and ju st am on g pagans, under Baal; holding land is right and ju st am ong Je w s , under G od. But what, then, about business as usual?

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Poor and Needy. A round 760 b .c .e . the prophet Amos was appalled by the w idening discrep­ ancy betw een rich and poor in the boom ing prosperity o f Jero b o am II's thirtyyear reign over the northern half o f the Jew ish homeland. In the follow in g quo­ tations, notice the word-pairs he uses (my italics): righteous and needy, p o o r and afflicted, needy and poor. It is for those people that he demands that other wordpair, justice and righteousness. Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions o f Israel, and for four, I w ill not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair o f sandals— they who trample the head o f the poor into the dust o f the earth, and push the afflicted out o f the w ay; father and son go in to the same girl, so that m y holy name is profaned; they lay them selves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge; and in the house o f their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed. (Am os 2:6-8) Ah, you that turn justice to worm wood, and bring righteousness to the ground! . . . T hey hate the one w ho reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies o f grain, you have built houses o f hew n stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, b ut yo u shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are y o u r transgressions, and h ow great are your sins— you w ho afflict the righteous, w h o take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. (Amos 5:7,10 -12) H ear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor o f the land, saying, “W hen will the new moon be over so that w e m ay sell grain; and the sabbath, so that w e m ay offer wheat for sale? W e w ill m ake the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit w ith false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair o f sandals, and selling the sweepings o f the wheat." The Lord has sworn b y the pride o f Jaco b : Surely I will never forget any o f their deeds. (Amos 8:4-7) N otice the very specific details o f those indictments. T h ey are n ot gener­ alities about practicing justice or about protecting those lacking the norm al defenses o f fam ily relations and village connections. T h ey get dow n to com m er­ cial transactions in which "smart” landowners or merchants can defraud “ dum b” peasants o r w orkers with false weights and measures.

The Critique Continues. A m os w as not alone in those accusations. In the 250 years from around 750 to 500 B.C.E., pow erful imperialistic states m oved westward from M esopotam ia against the Jew ish homeland. The resurgent Assyrian Em pire destroyed the

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northern h alf o f the country under Sargon II in 721 b .c .e . A fter the Assyrians suc­ cumbed to the Babylonian Empire, the southern h alf o f the Jew ish hom eland was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 b .c .e . and its leadership taken into exile around Babylon. But then the Persian Empire captured Babylon in 539 b .c .e . and sent the exiled Jew ish aristocracy back to restore their country, capital, Tem ple, and ancestral law . It is against that long imperial background that w e hear the relentless drum beat o f prophetic demand for social justice— that is, for divine justice on earth. T h e tradition extends from Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah in the sec­ ond half o f the eighth century, through Jerem iah at the end o f the seventh cen­ tury, into Ezekiel and Zechariah at the start and end o f the sixth century. Here is a single instance from each o f those prophetic voices. Notice that the attack is alw ays from God. T h e speaker claims not personal viewpoint but divine man­ date, based, o f course, on covenantal relations and ancient traditions. A trader, in w hose hands are false balances, he loves to oppress. Ephraim has said, "A h, I am rich, I have gained wealth for myself; in all o f m y gain no offense has been found in m e that would be sin.” I am the Lord your God from the land o f Egypt; I will make you live in tents again, as in the days o f the appointed festival. (Hosea 12:7-9) T h e Lord enters into judgm ent w ith the elders and princes o f his people: It is you w h o have devoured the vineyard; the spoil o f the poor is in your houses. W hat do you mean b y crushing m y people, by grinding the face o f the poor? says the Lord God o f hosts. (Isaiah 3:14-15) T h ey covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.. . . Should you not know justice?— yo u w h o hate the good and love the evil, w ho tear the skin o ff m y people, and the flesh o ff their bones; w ho eat the flesh o f m y people, flay their skin o ff them, break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like m eat in a kettle, like flesh in a caldron. (Micah 2:2; 3:ib-3) Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand o f the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no w rong or vio ­ lence to the alien, the orphan, and the w idow , or shed innocent blood in this place___ W oe to him w h o builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper room s by injustice; w h o makes his neighbors w ork for nothing, and does not give them their w a g e s .. . , Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it w as well with him. He judged the cause o f the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? says the Lord. But your eyes and heart are only on your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood, and for practicing oppression and violence. (Jerem iah 22:3,13,15b-i7)

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Th u s says the Lord God: Enough, О princes o f Israel! Put aw ay violence and oppression, and do what is just and right. Cease your evictions o f m y people, says the Lord God. You shall have honest balances, an honest ephah, and an honest bath. The ephah and the bath shall be o f the same m easure, the bath containing one-tenth o f a homer, and the ephah one-tenth o f a hom er; the hom er shall be the standard measure. The shekel shah be tw enty gerahs. T w enty shekels, twenty-five shekels, and fifteen shekels shall m ake a mina for you. (Ezekiel 45:9-12) Thus says the Lord o f hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the w idow , the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another. (Zechariah 7:9-10) That consistent tradition, from around 750 to 500

b .c .e .,

repeats the same

themes over and over again. It is not the eccentric vision o f an individual here or there but the constant vision o f a tradition involving this G od, this people, this land, this justice. The Prophets as Bleeding Heart Liberals. Morris Silver has written a fascinating counter-indictment o f the biblical Je w ­ ish prophets. He claims that they were inventing a n ew religion o f social justice. Furthermore, "just as love for social justice can be accom panied by hatred o f human beings, so universalism can be transformed into corrosive self-hate. Both tendencies are evident in the writings o f Israel's classical prophets” (129). Finally, this is his concluding summary: “ By the beginning o f the eighth century, Israel and Judah [the separated northern and southern parts o f the Je w ish hom eland] had been projected into a glittering era o f prosperity and p o w e r .. . . Since an appreciable num ber o f Israelites became men o f means, it is not surprising that the eighth and seventh centuries reverberated with the call for social ju s t ic e .. . . H ow ever, as an economist and social scientist, I can testify that w h atever its pre­ sum ed m oral virtues, the advice o f the classical prophets w as destructive from the standpoint o f economic affluence and political strength" (246-248). T h e clas­ sical prophets, in other words, brought on by their policies the destruction they prophesied. T h ey said, in effect, If you do not establish justice, y o u w ill be destroyed. But the people were destroyed because they did. T w o m ajor points, in reply. First, it is easy and tempting to dismiss Silver's claim as an indirect attack on the American welfare system. In speaking o f Am os, for example, he draws explicit attention to the fact that "the central im age is one familiar to m odem Americans, namely the blight o f poverty am id affluence” (124). Next, “M odem liberalism . . . is the closest contemporary analog to the pro­ gram o f the prophets,” and "not unexpectedly, the prophets opposed expansionist

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militarism and patriotism" (129). Finally, he admits to "som e trepidation, for it is predictable that som e o f you will angrily slam this book closed and accuse m e o f such as ‘importing the twentieth century into ancient Israel' or engaging not in historical scholarship, but in a conservative polemic against liberal social reform ­ ers'" (134). But, be all that as it m ay, and apart from presuppositions and inten­ tions, what about arguments and conclusions?

Second, then, is that a good case against classical Jewish prophecy? One objection. The prophetic message was utterly traditional and deeply rooted in covenant faith and Jewish monotheism. The prophets were not radical liberals but, if anything, conservative traditionalists. Another objection. A 250-year-iong insistence indicates that their message was not exactly accepted, followed, or widely practiced. A final objection. Nothing anyone could have done or not done in the Jewish homeland would have deterred imperial foreign policy com­ ing out of the Mesopotamian plains or the Nile delta. But if the Jewish homeland was almost certainly destined for imperial domination in any case, it may have been more important to have a tradition for which people would live and die, a tradition that insisted that such imperial domination was not right and not just. That is how a people survives not just in the short run but over the long haul. Why Set Justice Against Ritual? T here is one elem ent in that 250-year prophetic tradition demanding justice in the nam e o f covenantal m onotheism that needs special attention. It has often been misinterpreted, especially since the Reformation. Protestant scholars som e­ tim es insisted on the prophetic statements against cult and ritual as an equivalent to their ow n opposition to Rom an Catholicism. I give you here examples from five o f the prophets mentioned above. Once again, notice that it is G od w h o is rejecting ritual in the absence o f righteousness and dismissing worship in the absence o f justice. T h e prophets speak for God. H ear this w ord, you cows o f Bashan w ho are on M ount Samaria, w ho oppress the poor, w h o crush the needy, w ho say to their husbands, "Bring som ething to drink!” . . . C om e to Bethel— and transgress; to Gilgal— and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, yo u r tithes every three days; bring a thank-offering o f leavened bread, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people o f Israel! says the Lord G o d .. . . I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in yo u r solem n assemblies. E ven though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings o f well-being o f yo u r fatted animals I w ill not look upon. Take away from me the noise o f y o u r songs; I will not listen to the m elody o f your harps. But let justice roll dow n like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Am os 4:1, 4-5; 5:21-24)

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For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6 :6 ) H ear the w ord o f the Lord, you rulers o f Sodom! Listen to the teaching o f our God, you people o f Gomorrah! W hat to me is the m ultitude o f y o u r sac­ rifices? says the Lord; I have had enough o f burnt offerings o f rams and the fat o f fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood o f bulls, or o f lam bs, or o f goats. W hen you come to appear before me, w ho asked this from yo u r hand? Trample m y courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling o f convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Y our new m oons and yo u r appointed festivals m y soul hates; they have becom e a burden to m e, I am weary o f bearing them. W hen you stretch out your hands, I will hide m y eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I w ill not listen; yo u r hands are full o f blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves d ean ; rem ove the evil o f your doings from before m y eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead fo r the widow. (Isaiah 1:10-17) "With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow m yself before G od on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? W ill the Lord be pleased with thousands o f rams, with ten thousands o f rivers o f oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit o f m y body for the sin o f m y soul?” He has told you, О mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require o f you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to w alk hum bly with your God? (Micah 6:6-8) For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, i f you truly act ju stly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the w id o w , or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your ow n hurt, then I wifi dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave o f old to yo u r ancestors forever and ever. (Jerem iah 7:5-7)

That last example from Jeremiah is particularly striking and can serve as a fit­ ting summary and climax. Here is the context. In the year 609 b .c .e ., with the Assyrian Empire in its death throes, Jerem iah w ent into the Tem ple o f Jerusalem and announced that G o d w o u ld abandon that place i f the people persisted in social injustice: W ill you steal, murder, com mit adultery, swear falsely, m ake offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then com e and stand before m e in this house, which is called by m y nam e, and say, "W e are

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safe!"— only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, w hich is called by m y nam e, becom e a den o f robbers in you r sight? You kn ow , I too am watching, says the Lord. (Jerem iah 7:9-11) You think, says Jerem iah in the name o f God, that you are safe, no m atter w hat foreign god you worship or what social injustice you practice, as long as you make it regularly to the Tem ple in Jerusalem . You feel secure, he says, like robbers w h o have made it safely back to their den. (An aside. In terms o f Jesus and the Tem ple m uch later in history, please note that a den o f robbers is not w here robbers rob others but where they run for safety when they have robbed others elsewhere.) T h e threat is clear: use m y Tem ple to avoid social justice and I will destroy m y Tem ple. That oracle, by the w ay, almost cost Jerem iah his life. Priests and prophets accused him, in 26:11: "This man deserves the sentence o f death because he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your ow n ears.” But the royal officials and "all the people” answered them, in 26:16: "This m an does not deserve the sentence o f death, for he has spoken to us in the name o f the Lord our God.” But w h y is there that alternative o f ritual or righteousness, o f cult or justice? Com m entators usually insist that this is prophetic hyperbole, that the prophets actually dem and both worship and social justice, rather than one or the other. T h at is certainly true, but still the question presses. W hy not put it that w ay: G od demands both/and rather than either/or? But notice that while there is no problem in finding biblical prophetic statements in which God rejects worship in the absence o f justice, there is not a single biblical statement in which G od rejects justice in the absence o f worship. There is m ore involved here than both/and. W hat is it? W orship, ritual, cult, and Tem ple are not just the celebration o f the covenantal G od but the celebration o f that God as liberator from oppression and domina­ tion, slavery and death in Egypt, into a land where opposites reign, a land o f righ­ teousness, justice, and freedom. The Jew ish cult celebrates that God o f that justice. And such a God is w orthy o f liturgy and worship, worthy o f feast and celebration. But such celebration in the absence o f social justice is sheerest hypocrisy. Y ou can­ not say: you r ritual is right but you must add on your righteousness. In Jew ish tra­ dition, ritual ritualizes justice, worship worships the God o f justice. O f course, as that God insists, justice is paramount, and without it ritual is hypocrisy. And w h at o f justice without ritual? Can that be? The bond betw een ritual and justice is tightly w oven indeed. Those w h o diminish or abandon ritual must guard against w eakening or losing justice at the same time. W hen much, m uch later Christianity left aside Jew ish ritual, did it also leave aside Je w ish justice and, thereby, the Je w ish God?

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T H E W R IT IN G S I begin with an example from the book o fjo b written at som e tim e betw een the early sixth and late fifth centuries b .c .e . A s you read this single verse, watch w h at content you are imagining in your mind. Jo b him self is speaking in 29:14: I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; m y justice was like a robe and a turban. Those tw o lines are in poetic parallelism. Just as "put on . . . clothed” paral­ lels "a robe and a turban,” so also "righteousness” parallels "justice.” "Righteous­ ness” and "justice” are two different words for the same reality; and as seen ear­ lier, they appear repeatedly in the Bible as a tandem set. W hat are yo u imagining as the content o f that twin set? W hat does it mean? At the start o f the book God acknowledges, in 1:8, that Jo b has "n o one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God, and turns a w ay from evil.” Later, in the present context, Job is describing h ow it w as before calam ity befell him and how he was revered by young and old, honored b y nobles and princes. Why? Because, in 29:12-17, I delivered the poor who cried, and the orphan who had no helper. The blessing o f the wretched came upon me, and I caused the w idow 's heart to sing for jo y. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; m y justice was like a robe and a turban. I w as eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I championed the cause o f the stranger. I broke the fangs o f the unrighteous, made them drop their prey from their teeth. T h e fuller context gives us the content o f righteousness and justice in this pas­ sage. Y ou m ay judge for yourself whether Jo b ’s acts w ere w h at y o u had im ag­ ined. Notice, o f course, that they are acts, not ideas, and that w e m ight call them acts o f social justice, that is, o f divine justice for earth. W hat is right and what is just are covenantal commands for Israel and are there­ fore divine imperatives for the entire creation. Morris Silver argued, as you will recall, that the prophetic demand for social justice ruined the economic prosperity, social

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strength, and military power o f ancient Israel But he also found "that the sorialjustice theme penetrated the literature o f prayer and wisdom” (178). It is found, to put this all more broadly, not only in the Law and the Prophets but in the Writings as well. In other words, it is in all three major divisions o f the Hebrew Bible. In the b ook o f Proverbs the poor are sometimes mentioned as a category to be played o ff against the rich in a proverbial rather than an ethical mode— for example, in 10:15; 13'7\ 15:15; 18:23; 19:4; 19:22. But there are also texts like these: Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the Lord pleads their cause and despoils o f life those w ho despoil them. (Proverbs 22:22-23) Do not rem ove an ancient landmark or encroach on the fields o f orphans, for their redeem er is strong; he will plead their cause against you. (Proverbs 23:10) In the Psalm s you find, o f course, that tandem mention o f justice and righ teousness. It is, first and above all, the attribute o f God, in Psalms 33:5; 89:14; 96:13; 97:2; 99:4. But thence it is supposed to be an attribute o f the earthly king as G od's representative, in Psalm 72:1, 7. Finally, it must be an attribute o f every­ one, in Psalms 106:3; 112:5-6. Here is one example from each o f those three cases: [O Lord,] righteousness and justice are the foundation o f your throne; stead­ fast love and faithfulness go before you. (Psalm 89:14)

Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son. May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice. May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righ­ teousness. May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliver­ ance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. (Psalm 72:1-4) H appy are those w h o observe justice, w ho do righteousness at all times. (Psalm 106:3) Y o u also find m ention o f the orphan and the oppressed in Psalm 10:18, o f the poor and the needy in Psalms 12:5 and 72:12, o f interest and bribery in Psalm 15:5, o f the w e ak and the orphan in Psalm 82:3, and o f the w idow , stranger, and orphan in Psalm 94:6. T here is one magnificent psalm that can serve as climactic sum m ary o f those preceding ones. G od is seated amid the divine council o f the gods. H e accuses them o f divine malpractice in not establishing justice on earth, dem otes them from the level o f im m ortal gods to that o f m ortal princes, and takes o ver control o f the universe. I cite the entire Psalm 82:1-8:

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G od has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst o f the gods he holds judgment: "H o w long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? G ive justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right o f the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand o f the wicked." T h ey have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk around in darkness; all the foundations o f the earth are shaken. I say, “You are gods, children o f the Most High, all o f you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince." Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you! That, finally, is most clear. It is not that Israel’s God is one am ong m any or even one over many gods. Israel’s God is the one true God o f all the earth and all the nations because this alone is a God o f justice and righteousness fo r those systemically vulnerable, for the weak, the orphan, the low ly, the destitute, and the needy. This God stands against injustice and wickedness because that is the nature and character o f this God. The gods and their nations have failed the wretched o f the earth.

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GALILEAN ARCHEOLOGY A rchaeology, o f course, has been fascinated by empire since the very begin­ ning o f the discipline's history, as research into the Assyrian, Aztec, Inca or Rom an cases, am ong m any others, serves to demonstrate. Yet for most o f this history, it has been the élite, palace-based cultures, with their ‘Great Traditions,' w hich have dominated archaeological attention: royal iconogra­ phy, im perial architecture and prestige goods as specific objects o f curiosity and connoisseurship. Today, instead o f focusing upon the perquisites o f the victor, archaeologists are engaging with the effects o f imperialist expansion upon subject peoples, generating a new kind o f ‘archaeology o f imperialism.’ A battery o f archaeological techniques is being turned upon issues such as shifting levels o f exploitation, changes in economic and social behavior, acculturation, and resistance. Settlement studies, often made possible for the first time as a result o f archaeological survey, have in m any cases proved particularly crucial indicators o f the life o f a conquered population. Susan E. Alcock, Graecia Capta, p. 5 C onsider w h ere w e are at the m om ent in this discussion o f m y interdisci­ plinary m ethod for establishing context as sharply as possible. I have outlined the basic o r anthropological layer with an emphasis on class, gender, and resistance. T h e m ajor conclusion is that peasant resistance tends to develop m ore and m ore intensely as agrarian empires becom e m ore and more commercialized. In other w ords, the variables o f rural commercialization and peasant rebellion are correl­ ative. Such w as the status o f the Rom an Em pire at the time o f Augustus’s peace and prosperity. It w as com mercializing rather than traditional. It w as interested not ju st in holding territory and taking taxes but also in developing territory and increasing revenues. Upon that general anthropological basis, I superim posed the m ore specific tradition o f Judaism , with its insistence on a G od o f justice and righteousness holding a people to justice and righteousness b y a law o f justice and righteousness in a land o f justice and righteousness. A nthropology and his­ tory lock hard together at the point o f rural commercialization, since Rom ans see land as entrepreneurial com m odity and Je w s (some? all?) see it as divine gift. I understand, even at this point in the discussion, w h y relations betw een im perial Rom ans and colonial Je w s in and around the Jew ish hom eland m ight becom e both desperate and disastrous.

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T h at conjunction o f anthropological and historical data explains not only the three great revolts between 66 and 135 c .e . but, preceding them, the frequency o f disturbances detailed so w ell in the w ork o f Richard H orsley (1985). From the death o f H erod the Great in 4 b .c .e . until the first revolt, there w ere constant signs o f lower-class resistance to Roman imperial pow er in the Jew ish homeland. Protesters gathered, again and again, to make unarmed pleas before the secondrank Rom an prefect o f Palestine or the distant but first-rank Rom an govern or o f Syria. Sometim es they were effective in their protests; som etim es they w ere slaughtered. Prophets gathered large groups o f followers and led them out into the desert so that they could cross the Jordan into that land, w hich G o d would then give back to them from the Romans as o f old from the Canaanites. Since they w ere expecting divine deliverance and not hum an violence, these prophets and their followers were usually unarmed. Always they w ere slaughtered. Ban­ dits increased in number as farmers were forced o ff their lands through debt or disaster and chose the option o f banditry in the hills rather than b eggary on the roads. Messiahs arose, invoking the ancient ideal o f D avid and proclaim ing w ar against Rom e in the name o f God. M y next and final step is the superimposition o f archeology, and especially Low er Galilean archeology, on those two previous strata. A nthropology has indicated for us the general conditions within which peasant resistance or rebel­ lion m ay arise, and it has shown, in the specific case o f the com m ercializing Rom an empire, that such conditions were present. But w ere those conditions actually and particularly present in early Roman Galilee? W hat i f everything just cited from peasant anthropology and Jew ish tradition w ere true, b ut there w as neither the slightest evidence o f commercialization in Galilee in the first third o f the first century nor the slightest changes in Galilean culture in the hundred years from the arrival o f Herod the Great to the First Rom an-Jewish W ar? W hat i f all the evidence showed Galilee as a rural backwater which neither the Rom an Em pire nor the Herodian dynasty had found worthy o f exploitation? H o w does the early Rom an culture look to Galilean archeology, especially when that data is superimposed on the cross-cultural anthropology o f agrarian empire and peasant society? It is a very good time to ask such questions. In his doctoral dissertation, Jon athan Reed sum m ed up the present situation o f Galilean archeology b y not­ ing, "D u rin g the past decade there has been an explosion o f n ew excavations in and around Galilee. In the past few years the spade has been set to the ancient cities o f Tiberias, BethsaTda, Gaba, and Caesarea Philippi. Other excavations on their initial phase are being conducted at Hippos and Jotapata. Several m ajor sites have also been re-excavated using m odem field methods: C apernaum , Sepphoris, and Scythopolis. The Galilean villages o f Gush H alav, K efar Hananya, Khirbet Shem a', M eiron, and Nabratein have also been exam ined fo r the first

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time. T h e archaeological record o f Hellenistic and Rom an Galilee has finallyreached a critical mass that N ew Testament scholarship must address" (19943:6-7). But there is one initial problem to be faced before I can use Galilean archeology— a problem that will continually complicate the process o f interdisciplinary integra­ tion in this chapter.

Options in Archeology A rchaeology, w e contend, is an interpretative practice, an active interven­ tion engaging in a critical process o f theoretical labour relating past and pres­ ent. It is entirely misleading to pose the problem o f understanding and explaining the past in terms o f either a purely factual representation tied to the past and purged o f subjective “bias", or a presentist quest for liberation from the dogm atic burden o f the archeological record through unrestrained fictionalizing and m ythologizing. Interpretation is an act that cannot be reduced to the m erely subjective. A ny archaeological account involves the creation o f a past in a present and its understanding. Archaeology in this sense is a perform ative and transformative endeavour, a transformation o f the past in terms o f the present. This process is not free or creative in a fic­ tional sense but involves the translation o f the past in a delimited and specific manner. T h e facts o f the case becom e facts only in relation to convictions, ideas and values. H ow ever, archaeology would amount to an exercise in nar­ cissistic infatuation i f it only amounted to a deliberate projection o f present concerns onto the past. T h e archaeological record itself m ay challenge what w e say as being inadequate in one m anner or another. In other words, data represents a netw ork o f resistances to theoretical appropriation. W e are involved in a discourse mediating past and present and this is a tw o-w ay affair. Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Re-Constructing Archaeology, pp. 103-104 T h at is a rather long and involved epigraph. Here are a few aphoristic sum ­ m aries o f its thesis. Ian Hodder put it this w ay, in the book's Forew ord: “ All archaeological texts re-present the w orld o f today in the past" (xvi). Shanks and T illey them selves rephrased it in a later book in these words: "A rchaeology, as cultural practice, is alw ays a politics, a m orality," and again, "A rcheology is noth­ ing i f not critique” (1988:212, 213). T h at understanding o f archeology is identical to m y ow n understanding o f history at the start o f this book. And that, o f course, is no coincidence. Both are attem pts to wrestle closely and honestly with postm odernism 's correct assertion that the object know n is changed by the subject know ing it. H ow , then, do w e ch a n a course betw een objectivism and subjectivism, betw een historicism and

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relativism , betw een positivism and narcissism? M y ow n answer, as you already kn ow , is that the present must reconstruct the past in openly admitted interac­ tion so that each will challenge and change the other. And w e m ust conduct that interaction by argued evidence in public debate. It is that public debate rather than any prior confession (I am white, European, male, heterosexual, Christian, allegedly living, etc.) that counts. All o f that, as you know b y n ow , com es down for me to method, to making one's method as self-conscious and self-critical as possible and to displaying it in a manner that makes debate as pointed and pre­ cise as possible. Be that as it may, the view o f archeology in that epigraph is the last o f three current methodological options outlined b y M arianne Saw icki in a very provocative recent article: The first and oldest type is called classical, historical, or pre-processual arche­ ology. At its worst it tended toward cultural looting— taking, but thereby som e­ times saving, ancient artifacts from colonial or Eastern countries for im perial or Western museums. But even its best it was often “ text-driven,” so that its “ out­ comes tend to corroborate whatever version o f the past has com e dow n in the texts,” although “ it has sometimes corrected the historical texts that inspired it." The most serious problem, however, is that “ this kind o f archeology is not criti­ cal o f its own assumptions,” according to Sawicki (1994:319,320). The next type is processual archeology, the so-called n ew archeology o f the 1960s and 1970s. Its focus was especially on prehistory, w here, by definition, no texts w ere available to be confirmed or denied. "In the university, this archeol­ ogy became one o f the branches o f anthropology rather than o f classics or his­ tory.” Although worked out especially for textless prehistory, it w as used as w ell fo r texted history, allowing material remains to offer checks and balances to ver­ bal remains. But this above all: “ It also opens access to the m aterial remains o f the vast m ajority o f people w ho did not leave us any texts” (1994:320). T h at is crucially important. “ Because the texts represent the elite sectors o f society, ‘pre­ history’ lasts until the present for most w om en and m any other non-elite groups. T h e reconstruction o f the lives o f eighteenth-century factory w orkers, for instance, em ploys many o f the same excavation techniques that are used for reconstructing the lives o f ancient hunter-gatherers” (1994:334). This n ew style o f archeology emphasizes empirical, material causality operating w ithin integrated system s or processes (hence the name processual). Sawicki's exam ple is also a crit­ icism : "O n this interpretation, the 'because' o f the existence and location o f a great city such as Sepphoris would be given in terms o f food supply and climate. A ll other social and creative factors would ultimately reduce to those physical conditions” (1994:322). T h e third type, post-processual archeology, has been, since the early 1980s, a deliberately critical or corrective reaction to that preceding type. “ Post-

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processuaJists assert that historical agency and self-interested strategy are the key terms in archeological understanding. M oreover they insist that today's scientific strategies are com parable to and interactive with the very social strategies o f the past that are under investigation. Archaeologists’ ow n social statuses— deter­ mined, for example, b y the gendered assignment o f their labor or by their politi­ cal organization— are in play whenever those archaeologists are at work. Thus 'science* is subjective, and only through its subjectivity is its objectivity achieved’* (1994:322). A ny reconstruction o f the past is interactive with the pres­ ent. O ur ow n personal and individual, social and cultural positions in terms o f race, color, creed, gender, class, and everything else as well, are at play in such reconstruction. "T h e post-processuals . . . argue [that] archaeology is an ideologi­ cal enterprise done in the present to serve present interests.. . . The dimensions chosen for m apping the past are the very ones that are significant, and therefore hotly contested, in today’s societies.. . . Reconstruction o f the past is a compo­ nent o f the social construction o f the presen t.. . . So-called subjective factors are not ‘noise on the line’ for archaeological data transmission; they are the line itself” (1994:323,330). I consider that to be absolutely correct. But where does one go from there? Is it enough to preface all w ork with an autobiographical confession? Sawicki sees the problem all too clearly. She has three conclusions. One is that "the dif­ ferences betw een processual and post-processual archaeology matter little in the field or in the lab, but becom e significant at the point when a synthetic account o f a past society is attempted.” (But that is exactly the point w here I am now. H o w can L o w er Galilean archeology build an overall image o f that past place and time?) Another conclusion is that "post-processualism does not offer an internally coherent theory and does not seem able on its own to escape a debili­ tating relativism " (1994:323). T h at is, o f course, the moral black hole threatening all o f postm odernism . A final conclusion offers a theoretical solution. T h at threew ay debate leaves archeology in a state o f theoretical unrest, but Sawicki sug­ gests that "it is m oving tow ard a chastened realism," which she describes very aptly as "planting both feet firmly in scientific processual archaeology while bending into the w ind o f post-processualism” (1994:32.3. 324)- One minimal aspect o f such chastened realism w ould be for archeologists to pay at least som e atten­ tion to cross-cultural anthropology, even if not to postmodern epistemology. But w hat does all o f that have to do with Low er Galilean archeology on the 20s o f the first century as the third layer o f m y own interdisciplinary m odel for obtaining the sharpest possible context for the historical Jesus and the birth o f Christianity? First o f all, I am w orking w ith a general model for context because, without one, I can interpret data alm ost at will. Second, all three levels o f m y m odel are

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interactive with one another and potentially corrective o f each other. Third, within that interaction I still presume a certain hierarchy o f stratification: from anthropology, through history, to archeology. Both history’s textual remains and archeology’s material remains are located for me within general anthropological or macrosociological matrixes. Fourth, I have one m ajor problem in this chapter. As 1 read the published results o f recent Galilean archeology, I find a strange phe­ nomenon. Scholars do not simply describe what they have found but also give interpretive social commentary on that data. That com m entary is often som e­ w hat caustically critical o f what someone like m yself might say about the histori­ cal Jesus. But where does their wider social matrix com e from? W here did they get it? Let me give an example. Suppose w e agree that there w as extensive urban­ ization in Low er Galilee in the first quarter o f the first century? H o w do you decide, in general, whether that was good or bad news for the local peasants? And, be it good or bad, was it so for most, many, or only som e o f them? H ow would you answer that question archeologically? And, if you do not kn ow h ow to answer it by specific archeology, should you answer it b y general anthropol­ ogy? Should you, at least, know that such general answers exist and m ust be pre­ sumed pending specific objection? W atch very carefully, therefore, what I do in this chapter. I choose three basic emphases o f recent Galilean archeology. In each case I use an epigraph from the Lenski-Kautsky model— that is, from anthropology— that should, at least, sensitize the archeologist to possible general interpretations o f the data dis­ covered. Next, I look at their general interpretation o f that data and especially at the social conclusions they announce after it or presum e before it. Finally, m y overarching point is that what the archeologists have discovered fits very well, often despite their own assertions, with the Lenski-Kautsky m odel o f com m er­ cialization precipitating resistance. A final com ment. I am not a field archeologist. I lived for tw o years betw een 1965 and 1967 at the French Biblical and Archeological School ju st north o f the D am ascus Gate o f Jerusalem 's Old City. I visited as part o f m y studies all the m ajor archeological sites not only in Jordan and Israel but from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Iran, from Greece and Turkey to M orocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. I am deeply grateful for the difficult w ork o f N ear Eastern archeologists and appreciate, as an outsider, their financial, logistical, and especially political prob­ lem s. I respect their archeological conclusions, which I often have tim e to read only in popular sum m ary and which I accept on the level o f straightforw ard data. M y present disagreements are with their social conclusions, w h ich seem to contradict general anthropological ones and which w ould therefore need specific argum ents and proofs to substantiate them.

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Countryside and City Another im portant characteristic o f agrarian societies was the regular and widespread occurrence o f urban communities . . . [which] never constituted m ore than io per cent o f the total [population o f an agrarian empire], and in som e instances accounted for less than 5 per cent___ [But] despite this fact, the residents o f urban centers usually dominated agrarian societies politi­ cally, econom ically, religiously, and culturally. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege, pp. 198, 200 M y first exam ple concerns the general relationship o f city and countryside within the Lenski-Kautsky m odel for ancient agrarian as distinct from later industrial or postindustrial societies. That model warns us against presuming that the term peasants is simply an archaic and nostalgic term for farmers or that peasants w ere isolated rural cultivators in those societies. It is possible, in reaction to the rural romanticism o f Ernest Renan’s The Life o f Jesus, w hich situated him “ in the midst o f [the] green hills and clear fountains” o f his "beloved Galilee” (118), to situate him instead in an equally romantic urban environm ent. In Jesus and the Forgotten City, Richard Batey describes how “ Sepphoris rises like a shining Cam elot” (80) and imagines Jesus over there for regu­ lar attendance at its theater. But in betw een those equally unreal extremes, what do w e kn ow o f rural-urban relations in the time and place o f Jesus and, m ore pointedly, w h at do w e kn ow about peasants and cities, then and always? Think, first o f all, about cities. Jam es Strange has been leading one o f the expeditions digging at Sepphoris in Low er Galilee for over a decade. In a m ethodologically program m atic essay, he uses a startlingly benign term for Rom an urbanization in Galilee. H e calls it an "urban overlay” (19923:31), but he also mentions "the city as a sym bol o f pow er” (19923:53 note 41). He is extremely clear on the fact that "m aterial culture is a product o f the conceptual and sym ­ bolic w orld from which it springs” (19923:29) and that "the symbols o f specifi­ cally Rom an culture, som etim es on a co-opted Hellenistic base, include baths, hippodrom es, theaters, amphitheaters or circuses, odeons, nymphaea, figured wall paintings, statues, triumphal monuments, temples (Augustea, Tiberia), etc." (19923:33, m y italics). Consider, how ever, that first item, baths, especially in its Rom an cultural sym bolism . A ndrew Wallace-Hadrill, introducing a series o f 1987 consultations betw een archaeologists and historians on city and country in the ancient w orld, notes the sym bolic interaction o f water, aqueduct, and bath: “The relationship [o f tow n and country] is m ore visible if w e picture the tentacles spread out by the Rom an town into its hinterland in the form o f aqueducts [rather than roads]: sym bolically siphoning o f f . . . the resources o f the land into

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the urban centre, to feed the public baths where the imported w ater acts as a focus o f sociability, and as a symbol o f the 'washed' and civilised w a y o f life that rejects the stench o f the countryman. Implicit in the aqueduct is a dynam ic o f pow er, flow ing between country and town; and i f w e wish to represent the dynam ic as exploitative, w e may extend our picture to the sew ers to which the w ater eventually flows . . . as an image o f the wasteful consum ption o f the city” (x). Even if the peasants did not miss that water, the high material visibility and great cost o f aqueducts underlined another flow from country to city, that o f taxes and supplies. In an essay from that same 1987 consultation, M ireille Corbier adds, “Am ong the images which evoke the w ay cities siphoned o ff resources from their territory, w e m ay briefly recall tw o centripetal m ovem ents: the chan­ nelling o f w ater and the stockpiling o f grain” (222). Sym bols represent som ething other than themselves. So which, one might ask, w as the better sym bol o f ancient rural-urban interaction, the apparently two-w ay road or the clearly one­ w ay aqueduct? Think, next, about peasants. It is important never to confuse a general term such as rural or isolated or farmer with a technical term such as peasant since, for cross-cultural anthropology, an isolated or absolutely rural peasant is a contradic­ tion in terms. I explained quite clearly what the term peasant means in m y book on Tiie Historical Jesus: The Life o f a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (125-128) and again in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (25). Peasant is an interactive term for farm ers w ho are exploited and oppressed— a definition presum ing that som e­ w here there must be exploiters and oppressors. That definition is contained within the Lenski-Kautsky model as well. Note the epigraph to this section and recall Kautsky's insistence, mentioned earlier, that aristocrats “ live o ff” peasants. Granted that they so live off, where, then, did they live off? In cities, o f course. In agrarian empires, peasants and elites imply, in other words, peasants and cities. A peasant without a city is simply a happy farmer. T o rephrase Kautsky: cities "live o f f ’ peasants. And the exceptions, as usual, prove the rule: "T h ere are,” as Lenski notes, "a few instances o f agrarian societies in which urban com m unities w e re w h olly or largely absent, as in parts o f early m edieval Europe, w h en the breakdow n in the political system led to the near disappearance o f urban life” (199 note 30). Theoretically, o f course, castle aristocrats could "live o ff” peasants ju st as w ell as city aristocrats could, but those castles w ould sim ply end up fight­ in g one another, so a city w ould be needed as the place w here elites could con­ gregate to com pete with one another in conspicuous consumption rather than in continual warfare. But w h at about peasants in Galilean archeology? Jam es Strange argues, at the start o f the essay ju st mentioned, against the proposition that “ G alilee was especially suited to a rural or peasant style o f life” (19923:28) and insists, at the

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end, that "it is no longer possible to affirm the extreme, that the earliest Christian m ovem ent originated in a simple rural atmosphere” (19923:47). He is absolutely correct that Jesus, the kingdom-of-God movement, and earliest Christianity all arose in the urban-rural interchange o f Low er Galilee. But urban-rural inter­ change is already and alw ays contained in the term peasant itself. There can be rural w ithout urban but not urban without rural. Even the Romans could not eat marble. And there cannot be peasants without urban-rural interaction (to use a benign expression). Nothing that Galilean archeology has discovered about the urbanization o f L o w er Galilee in the early Roman period militates against its basi­ cally peasant society— unless, o f course, one mistakenly presumes that peasantry m eans isolated farm ers in a rural backwater. T h at sam e misunderstanding o f the term peasant reappears in a later essay, w h ere Strange asks about archeology's ability "to tell us anything about the social realities o f first century Galilee" (1994:88). His reply seems once again to presum e that the term peasant precludes artisans and/or that peasant artisans are som e type o f better-off entrepreneur. "Archaeological surveys o f the Galilee and other regions o f ancient Palestine confirm that large farmhouses, presumably o f w ealth y land ow ners, dot the landscape. It is premature to make firm estimates o f h ow m uch o f the land w as in the hands o f wealthy land owners, but it is enough to be form ative in the unfolding o f social reality in the first century. From archaeological surveys in Galilee it is possible to posit another dimension o f social reality. It seems that there are more farmers on small plots o f land than those plots w ill support. This suggests that the small land ow ner had to w ork for som ebody else at least part o f the time, or else develop a specialty on the side w hich could be marketed. Thus the simple designation peasant' for this social stratum is misleading, since these people appear to have also been artisans and sm all entrepreneurs as w ell as agricultural laborers. This fact o f life appears to have enforced a diversification in social roles that remains largely unrecognized in m od em scholarship” (1994:89). But the Lenski-Kautsky model already includes the perm anent squeeze that, at best, forces peasant farmers to be also peasant artisans or, at w orst, forces peasant farmers to becom e only peasant artisans. And it never presum es that n ew cities turn unhappy peasants into happy entre­ preneurs. In all o f this I speak about systems and structures rather than about individuals and persons. M y point is not that archeology must obey anthropol­ ogy but that a cross-cultural anthropological model w ould w arn Strange that w h at he is clearly describing above about large and small plots is the quite pre­ dictable result o f com m ercialization through urbanization and that the equally predictable result is heightening tension betw een peasant and city. I find, by the w ay, a similar confusion concerning the peasantry in other Galilean archeologists. Eric Meyers, in his most recent article on Galilean

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regionalism, says that "the isolation o f the Low er Galilee in view o f the Roman road system and trading patterns is simply a datum that cannot be sustained. It goes w ithout saying that most o f ancient Palestine outside the urban centers reflected the peasant or agricultural life style” (1985:117). But peasants are not sim­ ply outside the city. T hey are the necessary basis for its power. M eyers, at least, recognizes that "during the Roman period the settlements o f Sepphoris and Tiberias exacerbated tensions between the peasantry and townspeople” (1985:118). Similarly with T om Longstaff. He notes, first, that "Galilee em erges as an area transformed by the presence o f Roman cities and influenced by Rom an insti­ tutions and ideals. Sepphoris . . . provides a particularly good exam ple o f h o w the process o f urbanization affected a mixed population, both in the city itself and in its dependent villages___ It is no longer possible to think o f Jesu s as a simple peasant from Nazareth (dare one say ‘a good old country boy'?) nor to describe the disciples as "hillbillies from Galilee'” (14). All o f that is as correct as its opposi­ tion o f peasantry and urbanization is inadequate. But once again, Longstaff at least recognizes that, "while [his] essay argues that the influence o f Rom an urban­ ization was all-pervasive, it should not be understood to romanticize urban cul­ ture. While urban culture offers many advantages, there are disadvantages as well. Urbanization often brings with it a measure o f oppression. T h e gap between the wealthy and the poor is frequently widened. Those w h o thrive in the city often do so at the expense o f those in the dependent villages w h o do not” (14). Although words such as often andfrequently mute som ewhat the systemic or struc­ tural injustice o f peasant-city relationships, that at least warns against m oving from the rural romanticism o f Renan to the urban romanticism o f Batey. Three final comments on peasants and cities. From Robert Redfield: "T h ere w ere no peasants before the first cities. And those surviving prim itive peoples w h o do not live in terms o f the city are not peasants” (31). From G eorge Foster: “T h e prim ary criterion for defining peasant society is structural— the relation­ ship betw een the village and the city (or the state)" (8). From M oses Finley: "T h e peasant was an integral element in the ancient city” (1977:322). It is necessary, once and for all, to stop confusing isolated with rural with peasant and to start tak­ ing the term peasant as it is used in cross-cultural anthropology. O therwise exegetes w h o use cross-cultural anthropology and archeologists w h o do not will sim ply talk past one another forever. Peasants and cities go hand in hand. They are the necessarily twin sides o f an oppressive or exploitative system.

Sepphoris and Tiberias A ll o f the m ore advanced agrarian societies resembled a tree or plant w ith a system o f feeder roots spreading over a vast area, tapping the surplus and

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m oving it, by stages, to the ultimate consumers, the urban population. A t the outer limits o f this system w ere thousands, even hundreds o f thousands, o f small peasant villages, each typically containing a few hundred residents___ On the one hand there w as a steady flow o f goods from the peasant villages to the urban centers. In return, the villages received certain services o f a political, cultural, religious, educational, and commercial nature___ Thus these relationships which developed between the villages and the urban cen­ ters w ere essentially sym biotic in character, but with definite overtones o f p a rasitism .. . . This relationship was parasitic to the extent that the military superiority o f the urban-based elite forced villagers to yield m ore o f their crops or to accept less in return for them than they would have if the two parties had bargained from a position o f equal political strength. However, since villager participation w as not simply a function o f coercion, the rela­ tionship cannot be regarded as purely parasitic. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege, pp. 205-206 M y second example asks, against the general background o f the Lenski-Kautsky model, what one might expect when two cities are built or rebuilt within about twenty miles and twenty years o f one another in an agrarian empire. That model warns us against presum ing that new cities are good news for the local peasants. T h e 470 square miles o f Low er Galilee, rich with grain and cereal on valley floor and w ith vine and olive on hillside slope, consist o f four alternating hillvalley lines running in a generally west-east direction. The village o f Nazareth, located in a basin at slightly o ver 1,100 feet on a range that rises in places to 1,600 feet, overlooks the southern approaches to Low er Galilee. The city o f Sepphoris, about an hour’s w alk to Nazareth's northwest, sits on its ow n 325-foot hillock w est o f the T ir’an valley and south o f the much larger Beth Netofah valley. At the eastern end o f that sam e T ir'an valley is the city o f Tiberias. But Sepphoris and Tiberias w ere tw o cities, one rebuilt and the other built, within tw enty miles and tw enty years o f one another. W hat did their new or renewed presence m ean for the local peasants? H ear in the background these comments from the 1987 con­ sultations m entioned in the preceding section. From Corbier: "T h e d ty , w h er­ ever it existed, w as the basic unit for tax-collection'’ (231). From W allace-Hadrill: "Urbanisation is the unmistakable result o f Roman control" (249). But especially this introductory sum m ary from the latter: "T h e empire is seen as a chequerboard o f cities, each w ith its ow n set o f dependent communities; ju st as the pow er and w ealth o f the individual landlord depended on his ability to extract rents and profits from his tenants and workforce, so the po w er and w ealth o f each city depended on the extraction o f taxes, rents, and dues from its o w n net­ w o rk o f villages and settlements, while Rom e herself depended on the extraction o f taxes from the provinces and their com ponent cities" (xiv).

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Think, for a moment, about the population density o f those tw o n ew cities, especially in light o f studies by Jonathan Reed, and com pute a hectare as about tw o and a half acres (or 10,000 square meters). "In Galilee," says Reed, "the ruins at Sepphoris cover an area o f 60 hectares, and the ruins o f Tiberias cover almost 80 hectares. The extent o f these two Galilean cities' ruins does not com pare to the four m ajor cities in this area o f the Levant— Tyre, Ptolemais, Caesarea Maritim a, and Scythopolis, which are all well above 100 hectares. But the extent o f Sepphoris and Tiberias’ ruins extend well beyond any other site in Galilee, as w ell as the Herodian sites on Galilee’s periphery: The ruins atop Bethsaida’s tell, the site fashioned into Julias by H erod Philip, cover only 10 hectares; Gaba, built b y H erod the Great for his retired cavalry, measures 14 hectares. T h e size o f the larger villages in Galilee is comparably, at most 17 hectares for first century Capernaum, and o f the smaller villages, at most 5 hectares fo r Gath Hepher. Other small sites in the Galilee, such as hamlets or nucleated farm s, cover only a single hectare or less" (Reed 19943:68-69). But how do you get from hectares to people? You must first know , as accu­ rately as possible, the site circumference. H ow big w as it at the time in question: H ow many hectares? You must then decide what density o f population could be expected at such a site: H ow m any people per hectare? Mistakes or disagree­ ments on either or both points can result in widely divergent conclusions on a large, unwalled, early-first-century Low er Galilean village such as Capernaum , as evidenced by these conclusions from first Reed (1992:15) and then M eyers and Strange (59): Capernaum: 17 hectares = 100-150 persons per hectare = 1,700-2,550 persons Capernaum: 30 hectares = 400-500 persons per hectare = 12,000-15,000 persons In terms o f hectares and people, the standard and best-preserved models for Rom an cities are Ostia, Rom e’s densely populated port at the Tiber’s mouth, with its three- to five-storied apartments, and Pompeii, on the Bay o f Naples, a m ore norm ally populated Italian city with one- and two-storied buildings. Here, from Reed, are the most probable populations for those paradigmatic cities (1992:12-14): Ostia: 69 hectares

= 435 persons per hectare

= 30,000 persons

Pompeii: 64 hectares = 125-156 persons per hectare = 8,000-10,000 persons Even with around the same dimensions, those two cities had widely divergent population densities— divergent, in feet, by a factor o f around three to one. Like Ostia and Pompeii, as Reed notes, "Sepphoris and Tiberias w ere walled cities, which drives up the population density. Historical and ethnographic comparisons show

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that as a rule walled settlements are more densely populated than open settlements. In the former sites, growth is accommodated by either increasing the number o f rooms at the expense o f their size, and by adding buildings with more than one story. Indeed, at the sites o f Sepphoris and Tiberias, most building foundations w ere massive and supported m ore than one story, while unwalled sites in the Galilee tend to have crudely made foundations and walls in domestic quarters that could not have supported a second story” (19943:69-70). Hence his proposed figures: Tiberias:8o hectares = 300 persons per hectare = 24,000 persons Sepphoris:6o hectares = 300 persons per hectare = 18,000 persons Reed later corrected those figures for Sepphoris: “A m ore recent estimate by J[am es] Strange o f the U SF [University o f South Florida] Excavations at Seppho­ ris puts the area enclosed b y the walls at just under 50 hectares—but he notes that the ruins beyond the wall to the southeast may extend up to another 50 h e cta re s.. . . I f w e assume a population density o f 300 persons per hectare for the w alled city o f Sepphoris and only 175 for the inhabited area outside the walls, then Sepphoris w ould [like Tiberias] have also had a population o f around 24,000” (і 994Ь:2 із ). In sum m ary, then: Sepphoris: 50 hectares (inside walls) = 300 persons per hectare = 15,000 persons 50 hectares (outside walls) = 175 persons per hectare = 8,750 persons But even w orking w ith his earlier Sepphoris population, Reed had noted that "a population o f 18,000 w ould require the produce o f the entire Beth Netofah and T ir’an valleys [to the north and east, respectively], as w ell as the land along the N ahal Sippori [to the west]” (19943:71). I f that was the "impact on agriculture" o f Sepphoris alone, w hat w ould have been the impact when tw o such cities, Sep­ phoris and Tiberias, w ere built within about twenty years and twenty miles o f one another? “ In terms o f food alone," as Reed concludes, “ the agricultural prac­ tices o f Galilee w ere com pletely realigned and stretched with the foundation o f these tw o cities. T h e picture o f numerous self-sufficient farms or hamlets in Galilee radically changed. The entire agricultural focus turned to feeding Seppho­ ris and Tiberias" (19943:70). But what would the peasants have thought o f those tw o cities and o f w hat they w ere doing to their livelihoods and their lives? W ould m ore and closer cities have been good or bad news for the local peasants?

Jonathan Reed asks that question himself but cannot answer it from material remains alone: “How would the indigenous Galilean population react to Sepphoris and Tiberias? The attitudes and sentiments are not discernible in the archaeological record" (19943:94)- But even apart from cross-cultural anthropology, comparative

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archaeology might warn us against accepting, against that deficit, the normative view point o f urban elites. Here is an archeological example o f h ow not to accept such viewpoints uncritically. In studying “ ‘Romanisation'— the effects that Rom an rule had on the eco­ nom ics and societies o f the ancient Mediterranean," Jo h n Patterson focused on tw o mountainous regions, Samnium in the central Italian Apennines and Lycia in southeastern Turkey, to test the hypothesis that there is a general structural relationship between "three important facets o f town-country relations— public building in the towns, settlement change in the countryside, and the mobility show n by those members o f elites who acquired their wealth in the countryside, but spent it principally in the towns" (147, 148). I focus here on the second ele­ ment, on rural setdement change as small peasant freeholders yielded before "the increasing agglomeration o f rural estates" owned by urban elites (155). "T h e problem then arises o f what this change actually meant in practice fo r the com ­ mon people w ho owned or occupied these estates. Various possibilities could exist: that the peasants remained on the land as tenants o f the larger proprietors, living in poor and squalid circumstances; or that they left the land to becom e bandits . . . or departed the land altogether to go to the city" (155). I presum e, speaking systemically rather than individually, that none o f those three options is a particularly happy one for the peasants involved. Could an archeologist ask, regarding Sepphoris and Tiberias, a question similar to that asked by Patterson regarding Samnium and Lycia? Is any relationship discernible betw een city grow th and rural consolidation? And i f smaller rural plots are being unified into larger holdings, can one legitimately infer something about w h at those cities w ere doing to the "livelihoods and lives" o f the peasants (and thereby to their "attitudes and sentiments" about them)? W e can note, in any case, that Sepphoris is never mentioned in the gospels and Tiberias is mentioned only in John, once directly in 6:23 and tw ice indirectly in 6:1 and 21:1. W hy is that? Andrew O verm an asks this obvious question (and answ ers it as well): "W hy do these cities [Tiberias, Magdala, and Sepphoris] not figure m ore prominently in the gospel tradition?. . . W e w ou ld posit that the absence o f these significant and unavoidable urban centers relates to the issue o f p o w e r w hich these centers represent and possess" (1988:167). H e repeats that conjunction o f city and power again in a m ore recent article: "I w o u ld suggest that the designation city has mostly to do with power, w hether econom ic, politi­ cal o r sy m b o lic .. . . In no w ay do I suggest that everyone w as com fortable with the freight o f this sym bol. I do say though that most people in the Galilee were fam iliar w ith the sym bol and its implications, as w ell as its concrete economic and cultural ram ifications-----Any hypothetical program for the Jesu s m ove­ m ent, o r an analysis of. parables or aphorisms in the Gospels, should take

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account o f this inform ation from the Galilean material w orld” (1993:47-48). All o f that is absolutely correct, but I w ould ask whether the phrase "not com fortable w ith" m ight not be too benign a formulation for the reaction o f those w ho m ay have opposed Rom an urbanization because it dislocated the traditional peasant w ay o f life and pushed individuals from poverty into destitution, from small landow ner into tenant farm er, from tenant farmer into day-laborer, and from day-laborer into beggar or bandit.

Peasants and Artisans Even at the village level [in agrarian empires] a measure o f specialization w as not uncom m on, since in the agricultural off-season peasants w ere fre­ quently obliged to turn to handicrafts to make ends meet, and in time cer­ tain villages developed a reputation for superior skill in the production o f som e particular com m odity. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege, p. 204 This is m y third example, and in som e ways it is the most important one. T h e reason for its importance (if I m ay look ahead) is that Jesus was probably a peasant artisan rather than a peasant farmer. But m aybe peasant artisans are bet­ ter o ff than peasant farmers? M aybe in villages specializing in this or that craft, urbanization could vastly increase the customer base and therefore be good rather than bad for the peasant artisans' livelihood? T h ere is one ve ry specific Galilean case that has been used to suggest that the relationship o f cities to peasants was relatively beneficial, since peasants could use the city as a m ajor trading partner. M y point is, once again, that a prior awareness o f cross-cultural anthropological data— for example, from the LenskiKautsky m odel— w ou ld tem per not the possibility o f village-to-city trade but any too-hasty generalizations about city-to-village benignity in agrarian societies and em pires. M A T E R IA L D E S C R IP T IO N A N D SO C IA L C O N C LU SIO N It is necessary, first o f all, to see clearly the material data in its ow n integrity. T h en , and only then, can social conclusions be discussed concerning the implica­ tions o f that data. T h e material data in question concerns the ceramics industry o f a ve ry specific Galilean village, Kefar Hananya. (I have taken the liberty in w h a t follow s to spell that nam e consistently as Hananya.

Clay and Ceramics. Pottery fragm ents are practically indestructible, and the clay in those shards can be traced b y neutron activation analysis (which I imagine as som ething like

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for pottery) back to the ground or clay-location w hence it came. It carries

on it, in other words, the traces o f ancient local trade routes. D avid AdanBayew itz s 1985 doctoral dissertation at Jerusalem ’s H ebrew U niversity used that scientifically precise process to trace the source or provenience o f com mon household pottery in Galilee, w est o f the lake, and Gaulanitis (the m odem Golan Heights), east o f the lake, from early Roman to early Byzantine times. He found, as summarized in an article jointly authored with Isadore Perlm an, that "the b ulk o f the common household pottery used in Rom an Sepphoris [from about 50 b .c .e .

to 430

c . e .]

belongs to tw o distinct provenience groups. T h e first group

[Rom an Galilee I], including the m ajority o f the com m on kitchen w are o f the city, w as made at Kefar Hananya. The second group [Rom an Galilee II] includes the common Galilean storage-jars o f the period, specialty bow ls and jugs . . . [and was] manufactured at the pottery-making centre o f Shikhin, adjacent to Sepphoris. Both o f these pottery provenience groups, accounting for the m ajor­ ity o f the common pottery used in Rom an Galilee, w ere produced in tow n or vil­ lage manufacturing centres, and not by the important cities o f the Galilee" (170). This is an extraordinarily important study, both in its general methods and in its specific conclusions with regard to Galilee and especially to Sepphoris. Most o f the Galilean pottery came, for half a millennium, from tw o villages: Kefar Hananya, m odem Kafr Inan, due east o f Acco-Ptolem ais on the precise border between Upper and Low er Galilee (but closer to the G olan Heights than the Mediterranean coast), and (Kefar) Shikhin, identified by Jam es Strange in 1988 with some ruins about a mile northwest o f Sepphoris (1992^351). There are tw o conclusions that Adan-Bayewitz draws from his superbly col­ lected and clearly presented ceramic data. The first one is m inor and involves an internal contradiction. The second one is m ajor and involves an external contra­ diction.

Manufacture and Distribution. T h e m inor conclusion concerns the relationship betw een m anufacture and distribution. W hat role did Sepphoris and Tiberias play in the distribution pro­ cess? If, for example, they w ere important for distribution, w as that good or bad for the village-based manufacturers? "There is good reason," says AdanB ayew itz, "to suspect that the marketing o f Kefar H ananya w are b y itinerant potters w as probably not an important means o f distribution. T h e predom inance o f K efar H ananya w are in cities and villages 25 km. from the m anufacturing cen­ ter cannot easily be explained except in terms o f central-place m a rk etin g .. . Likely central m arket places for Kefar Hananya pottery include the Galilean cities o f Sepphoris and Tiberias" (1992:233). That conclusion seem s to m e in flat contradiction w ith his ow n clearly described data.

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W ere Sepphoris and Tiberias central markets for the sale o f Kefar H ananya ware? W as the village production brought to those cities because they w ere distri­ bution centers for its marketing? I f they w ere such centers, village ceramicists and other village artisans m ight well have considered those cities to be good new s for business, m eaning that urbanization would have struck them as a predominantly positive phenom enon. In Adan-Bayewitz’s view, the sale and distribution o f Kefar H ananya w are w as concentrated not in and from that manufacturing village itself but from those tw o new Galilean cities, each about fifteen miles away. But here is a striking objection to that claim based on his own data. If that village pottery was sold from those central city markets, one would expect the diminishing presence o f its shards to have radiated outward from them rather than from the main man­ ufacturing village itself. Y et the archeological evidence and Adan-Bayewitz’s own insistence indicate that "although Kefar Hananya ware is plentiful throughout the Galilee, a decrease in the relative quantities o f Kefar Hananya ware is evident w ith increasing distance from the manufacturing centre” (1990:158, m y italics), that "the relative quantity o f Kefar Hananya ware recovered at Galilean sites is inversely related to the distance o f the site from the manufacturing center” (1992:219, m y italics; and see graph o f percentage found versus distance traveled in 1992:212). In other words, “ the pottery w as marketed unidirectionally from Kefar Hananya, the place o f its manufacture, to the site where it was recovered, its place o f use” (1992:247, m y italics). As I read and understand that data, Kefar Hananya pottery w as sold and distributed, be it b y pickup or delivery, from the village itself and not from central markets in Sepphoris and Tiberias. M y conclusion is that, even i f the presence o f those cities increased the customer base for ceramics, it did not seem to change the distribution process. That claim must be left to one side as a distraction, one w a y or the other.

Pottery and Exploitation. T h e m ajor conclusion drawn by Adan-Bayewitz is, for m y present purpose, m uch m ore im portant. A t the end o f both the co-authored article and his book, A dan-Bayew itz m akes a ve ry specific social comment. It is done alm ost in pass­ ing, but its term inal location gives it a certain climactic importance. T h e article concludes like this: "T h e quantitative distribution o f Kefar Hananya w are, on the one hand, and the direct m arketing to the consumer o f pottery at Kefar Hananya and Shikhin . . . , on the other, do not seem consistent with the picture, com m on am on g som e scholars, o f the exploitation o f the Galilean peasant by the urban w ealthy. Finally, there seems to be a misconception am ong certain scholars that rural Galilee w as exclusively agricultural in the early Roman period. T h e present evidence contributes tow ard a m ore accurate perspective o f the Galilean econo m y " (1990:171-172). T h e book makes the same point w ith the same words:

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"It m ay also be noted that the distribution pattern o f Kefar H ananya w are does not seem consistent with the picture, com m on am ong scholars, o f the exploita­ tion in the early Rom an period o f the Galilean peasant by the urban wealthy” (1992:219). M aybe, then, the arrival o f tw o cities, rebuilt Sepphoris and new ly built Tiberias, w as not at all bad news for the Galilean peasants. W as it simply an opportunity for increased trade, for larger markets? Should w e im agine not unhappy peasants but happy potters, not oppressed farm ers but enhanced traders? Urbanization, in other words, could be good for such artisan villagers. T o test that possibility, I look closely at Adan-Bayewitz’s material descriptions and social conclusions, not only in themselves but especially from the viewpoint o f cross-cultural ceramic anthropology. C ER A M IC T H E O R Y A N D C U L T U R A L PR O C ESS There is a m ajor disagreement between those just-cited social conclusions and the conclusions reached in Dean Arnold's 1985 cross-cultural anthropological w ork on Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process. This disagreem ent is all the m ore striking in view o f Adan-Bayewitz’s repeated references to A rnold in his own book (1992:235-238). It was, in fact, those references that prom pted m e to read Arnold for myself. Since this disagreement touches on peasant exploitation under urban domination, it is the one that concerns me m ost in the present con­ text. I presum e that Kefar Hananya is not simply an exploited artisan village, capi­ talized, controlled, and overtaxed from outside. It seems m uch m ore likely that its mid-Galilean position enabled it to control its ow n destiny and distribute its products m ostly from producer to consumer with minimal interference. But does that change the general picture o f peasant exploitation in Galilee? W hat, in other words, is the relationship between ceramic production and agricultural land? D oes the peasant potter deliberately and willingly abandon the life o f peas­ ant farm er for the presumably more lucrative possibilities o f entrepreneurial activity? T h at is not exactly what the cross-cultural anthropology o f pottery seem s to indicate. Recall, from above, the position o f artisans as "dispossessed peasantry” accord­ ing to the Lenski-Kautsky model. It is against that background that I read Arnold's thesis "that there are certain universal processes involving ceramics that are tied to ecological, cultural or chemical factors. These processes occur in societies around the w orld and can provide a solid empirical (as opposed to speculative) base for inteipreting ancient ceramics. On a more modest scale, the book presents crosscultural regularities which relate ceramics to environmental and non-ceramic cul­ tural phenom ena . . .

[and answers] the question w h y does pottery m aking

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develop in an area and w h y does it evolve into a full-time craft” (ix-x). His book presents, in other words, a cross-cultural anthropology o f pottery making: “The b o o k w ill attempt to provide cross-cultural generalizations about the relationship w h ich can be applied to m any different societies in the present and the p a st.. . . By deriving generalizations from m odem cultures, it is possible to understand and explain h o w ceramics articulate with the rest o f culture and environment. By applying these generalizations to the past, it is possible to develop a more precise interpretation o f h o w archaeological ceramics relate to an ancient environment and culture” (16). But if you map the material descriptions from Adan-Bayewitz against the ceram ic anthropology o f Arnold, you arrive at very different social con­ clusions. T h e system s o f ceramic production m ove, according to Arnold, from house­ hold production, through household industry and workshop industry, into largescale industry. In reading the following descriptions, notice h ow population pressure and the concom itant loss o f subsistence farming force peasant farmers to becom e peasant artisans. They are not drawn to that change by entrepreneurial oppor­ tunity but are forced to it by agricultural necessity. That is the crucial point for me.

Types o f Ceramic Production. T h e first type o f ceramic production is household production. “All adult fem ales have learned the craft and have the same potential to make pots” (226). Each hom e m akes its ow n pottery for itself, and since females are tied to the h om e b y children, they are the potters. T h e second type is household industry. “ Population pressure forces m en into the craft and the social position o f the potters thus decreases because o f their lim­ ited access to or ow nership o f agricultural land . . . [and it] also forces farmers to go further and further aw ay to obtain suitable agricultural land-----A t a distance o f 7-8 km s . . . travel to their fields becom es uneconomic and people m ay prefer to exploit resources like ceram ic raw materials closer to their h o m e s.. . . Pottery m aking in the household industry mode o f production is thus an adaptation o f a population to specific kinds o f non-agricultural resources; it is an adaptation to land which is lim ited or poor agriculturally, but which has ceramic resources” (226-227). T h e third type is workshop industry. "Population pressure has largely, i f not com pletely, elim inated agriculture as a subsistence base for the potters. Subsis­ tence activities do not conflict w ith pottery m aking and thus males are potters since they have no alternative means o f subsistence. Once direct food produc­ tion ceases, the potter's fam ily is dependent on the craft for a living, and the risks inherent in m aking pottery m ust be reduced in order to have a reliable in c o m e .. . . In order for the potter to realize increased control over the process, capital investm ent in innovations is necessary (such as constructing a shed for

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form ing and drying pottery, building a kiln, and buying or m aking molds or a wheel). Because potters in the household industry [the second m ode o f produc« tion] are poor and economically marginal, most potters cannot afford the capital investm ent that these innovations require and are therefore forced to hire them« selves out to those w ho have th e m .. . . This change rem oves pottery production from the household and thus totally eliminates w om en from the pottery making p ro c ess.. . . Because o f the low status o f pottery m aking and the economic marginality o f potters in a household industry [the second m ode o f production], potters do not often choose to develop a m ore intensive craft, but rather prefer to enhance their status. T hey m ay ultimately abandon pottery m aking for a m ore prestigious and lucrative occupation as a middleman or the ow n er o f a pot­ tery workshop. Thus, the development o f a workshop m ode o f production with capital investment (needed for obtaining innovations and paying w orkers on a regular basis) is a pattern initiated by higher status individuals w h o are either outside o f pottery making com pletely or socially and econom ically marginal to the craft” (227-229). The fourth type is large-scale industry. It is "characterized b y substantial capi­ tal investment in production for a maxim um output and minim al cost per unit. The regulating effects o f weather and climate are totally elim inated[,]. . . innova­ tions have . . . maximized efficiency[f] . . . production is full-time for the entire year[,] . . . w om en are totally eliminated[,] . . . potters are men[,] . . . [and] full­ time production requires extensive distribution o f pottery to provide rem unera­ tion for the potter to buy food” (231).

Agriculture and Ceramics. I take it for granted that Kefar Hananya production is not in the first or fourth system. It must, then, be in the second or third system, w here fo r Arnold it is population pressure and the unavailability o f agricultural land adequate in quantity an d/or quality that forces people to make use o f available ceramic resources. It is not that the availability o f such clay resources convinces them to give up adequate subsistence farm ing and take up the daring life o f business entrepreneurs. H ere are a few explicit statements from Arnold, over and above the ones ju st cited on pottery making’s evolution from small-scale household to largescale com m ercial production. He proposes as a "general principle” that "w h en a population exceeds the ability o f the land to sustain it (and thus exceeds its carry­ in g capacity), there is m ovem ent into other occupations like pottery m aking" (168). T h u s, for exam ple, "it is not unusual that pottery m aking and other crafts are a secondary choice to agriculture and resorted to by people w ith p o o r qual­ ity, insufficient or no land. W hile agriculture provides food directly to a family, craft production does not, but requires additional labor and greater risks than

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agriculture-----It is not unusual, then, that pottery making, as an indirect subsis­ tence technique, is the result o f population pressure and not a desirable occupa­ tion fo r m ost farm ers-----[Ojnce there is a better living with agriculture or m ore secure o r steady w ork, pottery m aking is abandoned” (193). Again: "Potters w ho are dependent on their craft for a living make pottery only out o f economic necessity [so that] w h en better economic opportunities exist they abandon the craft" (194). And yet again: "Except for those who make pottery only for their ow n use, people probably w ould not choose to become potters if the subsistence (e.g. agricultural) base w as adequate” (200). E veryth in g I have ju st cited from Arnold (and even certain sections o f AdanBayew itz’s w ork, w h ere he him self refers to Arnold's book) warn strongly against generalizations from Kefar Hananya’s pottery making that deny the gen­ eral peasant society o f Galilee or the general exploitation o f that peasantry in the early R om an period. Such inaccurate or even romantic generalizations could have been disciplined b y a specific model, such as Arnold’s cross-cultural anthro­ pological one for ceram ic production. T hey could also have been disciplined by a m ore general cross-cultural anthropological m odel for agrarian empire, such as the Lenski-Kautsky m odel itself. Jon ath an Reed notes, "I am unsure h ow to evaluate, from the archaeological sources, the perceived quality o f life o f such villagers as might have worked at Kefar H ananya. But w hether they w ere content or not with their relationship can not be gauged b y the archaeological record” (19942:81 note 90). Is that really the best w e can do? Or have w e simply not tried to do better. It is surely possible to bring anthropology and archeology to bear on such a question. W illiam D ever articulated the challenge alm ost tw o decades ago: "It would be an oversimplifica­ tion to say that traditional N ear Eastern historical archaeology was giving w ay to the m ore characteristic anthropological archaeology o f prehistorians and N ew W orld archaeologists, but the rapprochement between orientations form erly thought antithetical is p ertin en t.. . . M ore fundamental still is the question o f w hether the archaeology o f the ancient Near East should be historically or anthropologically oriented— or b o t h . . . . This dichotomy is, o f course, in many w ays a false one, but at the very least the presuppositions o f anthropological archaeology, draw n largely from prehistory, must be examined and applied both critically and selectively to the archaeology o f the N ear East, which has a history, based both on artifactual remains and an abundance o f literary sources, going back 5,000 years" (15, 21). T h e m ost adequate answers come from an interdisciplinary conjunction o f all three factors— from anthropology, history, and archeology together. Anthropol­ ogy tells us w hat to expect from peasants under rural commercialization. Archeol­ ogy tells us about rural commercialization through Antipas's urbanization

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processes in Low er Galilee in the early first century. History tells us something like this, from Keith Hopkins, introducing a book o f essays specifically on trade in the ancient economy: “ In the first two centuries

ad,

proportionally fewer food-

producers were growing more food than ever before for m ore non-agricultural prod ucers.. . . Agricultural productivity increased, above all because o f the increased pressure o f exploitation. T w o types o f exploitation need to be distin­ guished. First, agricultural slaves w ere forced to w ork longer than free men and w ere given, on average, more land to w ork than many free peasants could afford to own. Secondly, free peasants and owners o f slaves w ere forced to w ork harder in order to produce taxes for the state, and in a significant minority o f cases to pro­ duce rent for the legal owners o f land which they w orked___ [T]he total amount and the proportion o f total production extracted from prim ary producers in taxes and in rent increased. In other words, the screws o f exploitation tightened” (i983:xvi, xvi-xvii, xix). But history also tells us that the Jew ish people believed in a covenantal God o f justice and righteousness, in equity and equality in a land that belonged to God. W hen that anthropology, that history, and that archeology come together, w e have the situation o f Low er Galilee in the 20s o f the first com ­ mon-era century— as sharply as it can be defined.

Peasants and Scribes The Gospel o f Thomas and Q share the following social features: literacy and a scribal mentality, a probable setting in village or tow n life, a group organiza­ tion that did not entirely withdraw from the larger w orld o f which it consti­ tuted a part, and a group mentality characterized m ore than anything else by the adoption o f a particular understanding o f the w orld and a corresponding ethic. M oreover, both documents w ere com posed in a context in which increased exploitation o f the countryside and peasantry b y the urban elites contributed to considerable social disintegration and econom ic distress (such as debt, dispossession, tenancy, impoverishment, and hunger). Both groups respond to this crisis by adopting a highly critical stance towards ordinary social conventions and political structures, a critique o f wealth, an inversion o f norm al values, and a rejection or critique o f urban-based religious institu­ tions. William E. Arnal, “The Rhetoric o f Marginality,” pp. 491-492 C hristopher Seem an has raised a terribly obvious but seldom-asked ques­ tion: W h y w as it that the Jesu s m ovem ent em erged in L o w er Galilee during the reign o f H erod Antipas, rather than at som e other time and place? W h y in G alilee rather than in Judaea, and w h y in L ow er rather than in U pper Galilee? W h y under Antipas rather than under his father, H erod the G reat, w h o ruled

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from 37 to 4 b .c .e ., or under his half-nephew, Agrippa I, w h o ruled from 40 to 44 C.E.? And, since Antipas ruled between 4 b .c .e . and 39

c e .,

w h y in the late 20s

rather than in any other period o f that long reign? W hy precisely there; w h y exactly then? Or, broadening Seeman's question: W hy did two m ovem ents arise in the late 20s o f that first common-era century in the two separated regions o f A ntipas's territory: Jo h n 's baptism m ovem ent in Perea (east o f the Jordan) and Je su s' kingdom -of-God m ovem ent in Galilee (to its northwest)? Seeman finds the an sw er in Antipas's urbanization program for Low er Galilee: “The political, eco­ nom ic, and dem ographic consequences o f Antipas' city foundations generated a n e w social situation for the Galilean peasantry. The Jesus faction emerged in response to that situation, acquiring influence among the peasants by representing their interests” (84). Anthropology, history, and archeology combine to predict som e form o f peasant resistance in Low er Galilee by the late 20s. It came with Jo h n and Jesu s. But by the late 60s, the situation was much worse. Josephus, defending his role in Galilee during 66-67 C.E. at the start o f the First Rom an-Jew ish W ar, tells h ow the Galilean peasants attacked (or tried to attack) both Sepphoris and Tiberias. Notice this text's doubled mention o f hatred, detestation, and extermination (my italics): I marched w ith such troops as I had against Sepphoris and took the city by assault. T h e Galilaeans, seizing this opportunity, too good to be missed, o f venting their hatred on one o f the cities which they detested, rushed forward, w ith the intention o f exterminating the population, aliens and all. Plunging into the tow n they set fire to the houses, which they found to be deserted, the terrified inhabitants having fled in a body to the citadel. T hey looted everything, sparing their countrymen no conceivable form o f devastation-----

As, however, they refused to listen to either remonstration or command, my exhortations being overborne by their hatred, I instructed some of my friends to circulate a report that the Romans had made their way into another quar­ ter of the city with a large force . . . that . . . I might check the fury of the Galilaeans and so save Sepphoris.. . . Tiberias, likewise, had a narrow escape from being sacked by the Galilaeans . . . [who] loudly denounced the Tiberians as traitors and friendly to the king [Agrippa II], and [requested] permis­ sion to go down and exterminate their city. For they had the same detestation for the Tiberians as for the inhabitants of Sepphoris." (Life 374-384) T h o se renew ed or new city elites in Sepphoris and Tiberias needed land in the surrounding countryside, and that meant the possibility o f force and violence as w e ll as the actuality o f loans and debts, mortgages and foreclosures. Betw een peasants and cities in agrarian empires stands (how ever cloaked in reciprocity or m asked in mutuality) the presence o f raw pow er and military force. But w ere

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only peasants involved in such resistance at the time o f Jo h n or Jesus? The dis­ cussion o f that question serves as both a conclusion to Parts IV and V and an introduction to Pans VI and VII. It is clear that Antipas’s urbanization w ould create peasant dislocation and dispossession resulting, most likely, in various forms o f resistance. But m y inter­ est in this final section is not- on resistance just am ong the peasant class but also on resistance am ong Lenski's so-called Retainer Class (discussed in Chapter n). It involves, therefore, that very dangerous combination o f peasant discontent and retainer leadership. W hat, in other words, about the scribes in all o f this? It is, o f course, alw ays possible for individuals to resist injustice even w hen their own particular class interests are not threatened. It is especially possible (if not inevitable) in the Jew ish tradition o f a G od o f justice. But, apart from that, what effect did Antipas’s policies have on scribal retainers— that is, on those who could read and write, record and file, manage and administer his governm ent even at the low est levels o f the bureaucracy? Think, for a moment, o f exactly w hat Antipas's policy is against the general background o f Rom an domination and Herodian collaboration. His father, Herod the Great, had ruled the entire country for over thirty years w ith the offi­ cial title “ King o f the Je w s.” He w as from Idumea, ju st south o f Judea, a territory annexed and converted to Judaism a scant century earlier. But he m arried a Hasmonean princess named Mariamme and thereby linked him self publicly with m ore original Jew ish tradition and m ore authenticjew ish royalty. It w as an asso­ ciation too close, how ever, for his paranoia: he executed M ariam m e in 29 b .c .e . and their tw o sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, in 7 b .c .e . T w o building projects, am ong the vast num ber he carried out, stand out; both w ere going on simultane­ ously in the teens b .c .e . On the one hand, for pagans he built a large city at Straton s T o w e r on his country’s mid-Mediterranean coast, gave it a magnificent protected harbor, placed a temple to Rom e and Augustus on a centrally located hill, and called it all Caesarea. On the other hand, for Je w s he began an equally m agnificent reconstruction o f Jerusalem 's Tem ple, which w as barely finished before it w as destroyed in 70

c .e .

In the very last days before his death, Herod

altered his will to nam e Archelaus and not Antipas as his heir. W hen he died in 4 b .c .e .,

there w ere arm ed uprisings in all areas o f his country, and it took the Syr­

ian legate and his legions to restore Rom an control. Augustus accepted Herod’s w ill only in part. He gave the middle and southern sections o f the country— Idum ean, Ju daea, and Samaria— with their annual income o f 600 talents, to Archelaus, but w ith the title ethnarch (people ruler) not king (royal ruler). Antipas go t G alilee to the north and Perea east o f the Jordan, with their incom e o f 200 talents, b ut received only the title tetrarch (section ruler). Philip, a third son, got territories still farther north and east, with incom e o f 100 talents and another

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tetrarch title. W h en Archelaus was dismissed in 6 c .E ., Augustus appointed not Antipas, as he m ight have hoped, but a Roman prefect as governor o f the coun­ try's central and southern regions. T o be Antipas w as to be sorely disappointed. But also to be carefully cau­ tious. H e restored his capital o f Sepphoris, devastated in the rebellions at the death o f H erod the Great. And he waited for the death o f Augustus, which came in 14 c.E. T h en he began im m ediately to build an entirely new capital on the w estern shore o f the Sea o f Galilee, completing it by 18 or 19 c.E. It facilitated access to the tw in halves o f his disconnected territories, no doubt, but if that w e re the only benefit, it should not have taken him around twenty-five years to im agine it. Augustus is gone, Tiberius is emperor, and the new capital, with A ntipas’s first m inted coins, is called Tiberias. Herod the Great had Caesarea as his n ew capital on the coast; Antipas would have Tiberias as his new capital on the lake. Both w ere nam ed for the ruling Roman emperors. The logic o f his pol­ icy is clear. M aybe under Tiberias he could become king o f the whole country, ju st as his father had been under Augustus. But he him self was the son o f Herod and the Sam aritan, Malthace, so a Hasmonean connection was needed. Some­ tim e in the late 20s C .E . he rejected his Nabatean w ife and married Herodias, wife o f his half-brother Philip. She w as a granddaughter o f the executed Hasmonean M ariam m e and daughter o f the executed Hasmonean Aristobulus. It was all too late, h ow ever, and Antipas, even though he ruled a decade longer than his father, n ever obtained the kingship. He died in exile about as far west as Caligula could send him . Back, h ow ever, to Tiberias. T h e existence o f Sepphoris and Tiberias, two cities rebuilt or built within about twenty miles and twenty years o f one another in the alm ost five hundred square miles o f Low er Galilee would, as seen above, put serious strains on peasant life and create serious changes in agricultural dis­ tribution. But w hat, precisely, about that change o f capital from Sepphoris to Tiberias? H o w w ou ld that affect the scribal class involved in the city itself and in its surrounding villages? This is Josephus’s description o f the founding o f Tiberias: T h e n ew settlers w ere a promiscuous rabble, no small contingent being G alilean, w ith such as w ere drafted from territory subject to him and b rou ght forcibly to the new foundation. Some o f these w ere magistrates. H erod accepted as participants even poor men who w ere brought in to join the others from any and all places o f origin. It was a question w hether som e w e re even free w ithout cavil. These latter he often and in large bodies liber­ ated and benefited (imposing the condition that they should not quit the city), b y equipping houses at his ow n expense and adding new gifts o f land.

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F o r he knew that his settlement was contrary to the law and tradition o f the Je w s because Tiberias w as built on the site o f tombs that had been obliter­ ated, o f w hich there w ere m any there. And our law declares that such set­ tlers are unclean for seven days. (Jewish Antiquities 18.38) T h at m akes Tiberias sound like a very strange city. It is founded in per­ manent, not ju st seven-day-long, impurity. It is force-filled w ith ex-peasants (“ Galileans") and ex-slaves. Even som e o f the administrators had to be brought there forcibly. Allowance must be made, o f course, for the problem s Josephus had w ith the low er classes in Tiberias during his short tenure as Jerusalem 's mili­ tary representative there in 66-67 c.E. In reading the above description, w e must also rem em ber w hat happened to Josephus him self in Tiberias: The second faction (stasis) com posed o f most insignificant people, was bent on w ar [against R o m e ].. . . Jesus, son o f Sapphias, [was] the rin glead er. . . o f the party (stasis) o f the sailors and destitute c la ss.. . . The principal instigator o f the mob w as Jesus, son o f Sapphias, at that time ch ief magistrate o f Tiberias, a knave with an instinct for introducing disorder into grave mat­ ters, and unrivalled in fom enting sedition and revolution. W ith a copy o f the laws o f Moses in his hands, he now stepped forward and said: “ I f you can­ not, for you r ow n sakes, citizens, detest Josephus, fix y o u r eyes on your country’s laws, which you r com mander-in-chief intended to betray, and for their sakes hate the crime and punish the audacious crim inal." (Life 34, 66, 134 - 135)

Y ou can hardly expect a fair description o f a city from which Josephus barely escaped w ith his life. Still, even allowing for all o f that, Antipas's n ew Tiberias m ust have dislocated not just peasant farmers but also scribal retainers. Peasants, alm ost by definition, are illiterate. W illiam Harris estimated that “ the likely overall illiteracy level o f the Rom an Em pire under the principate is alm ost certain to have been above 90%” (22). M eir Bar-Ilan noted the “ data for illiteracy gathered from different societies in the first h alf o f the 20th century: T u rk ey in 1927: 91.8% ; Egypt in 1927: 85.7%; South Africa in 1921: 90.3%: India in 1921: 90.5%; Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia before 1950: above 90%” (4 7 )H e asked, rhetorically (but in agreement with Harris's figures), “ C an ’t a tentative conclusion be draw n that in ancient ‘traditional’ societies the rate o f literacy was less than 10% ?" (47). He then focused the question dow n to the first centuries C.E. in the Je w ish hom eland, concluding that "com parative data show that under R o m an rule the Jew ish literacy rate im proved in the Land o f Israel. H ow ever, rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate w as less than 3%. Th is lit­ eracy rate, a sm all fraction o f the society, though lo w b y m odem standards, was

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n ot lo w at all if one takes into account the needs o f a traditional society in the past" (56). Je su s w as a peasant from a peasant village. Therefore, fo r m e, Jesu s w as illiterate until the opposite is proven. And it is not proven but sim ply pre­ su m ed b y Luke, w h en he has Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah in the syna­ g o g u e at N azareth in 4:16-20. But those early gospel texts mentioned in A m al's epigraph (and central to the next tw o parts o f this book) are, o f course, written texts. So even i f Jesu s w as a peasant talking to peasants, others besides peasants w ere listening. It w as not peasants w ho wrote those two gospels, the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Jo h n Kloppenborg drew attention to this some time ago with regard to the Q Gospel. Speaking o f its earliest layer, he notes tw o clues to its social location: "The first clue is the perhaps surprising fact that neither the Temple nor the priesthood n or purifications nor kashruth [purity rules] nor Israel’s epic history nor the Torah figures im portantly as a redemptive medium for this layer o f Q ___ [W]e encounter only sheer confidence in the immediacy o f divine presence in the ordi­ nary and the availability o f G od’s benefaction without the need o f other media­ tors. . . . A second clue is the frequency o f sayings that idealize poverty and the sim ple life and that w arn against the acquisition or service o f wealth" (1991:84). H e does not think that the "audience o f the formative stratum consisted o f peasant-farm ers, agricultural laborers, and itinerant hand-workers" since “ the visi­ ble and overt social radicalism o f Q seems atypical o f peasant protests. A much m o re likely setting for this stage o f Q is am ong those w ho might anachronistically b e term ed the 'petit bourgeois' in the low er administrative sector o f the cities and villages” (1991:85). W illiam A m al concurs with that judgm ent for both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas in the epigraph to this section. He describes such scribal radicalism as a "countercultural position in response to the increasing exploitation o f the countryside by the urban wealthy, an intensification o f the m arket reflected in and necessitated by Antipas’ recent establishment o f Tiberias and Sepphoris as administrative centers" (491). Since Jesu s did not— and, in m y opinion, could not— write, and since the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas are written texts, I formulate the hinge betw een Parts IV -V and V I-V II o f this book as follows: Jesus’ kingdom-of-God movement began as a movement o f peasant resistance but broke out from localism and regionalism under scribal leadership.

P A R T VI

K in g d o m and E sch ato lo gy T h e heart o f the issue is that rigorous asceticism was deviant, and deviance w as dangerous. Strident, and often obstreperous, practitioners o f physical asceti­ cism w ere deem ed suspect by the political, social, and cultural authorities o f the age, and such apprehension put the practice o f physical asceticism under a cloud o f suspicion generally. This mistrust o f ascetics stemmed from their being per­ ceived as radicals expressing discontent with the status quo, advocating norms and values antithetical to the accepted social and political order, and claiming a personal authority independent o f the traditional controls o f their society and cul­ ture. Put sim ply, they w ere seen as a threat to the continued and peaceful exis­ tence o f the Rom an Empire. T h e conflict between asceticism and authority hinged on social and cultural issues___ Popular reputation translates into per­ sonal pow er. In the sam e w a y ascetics, on the basis o f their austere and selfdisciplined lives, could challenge the authority o f political leaders, social norms, and cultural traditions, and set themselves up as authorities in their own right.. . . Conservative m en o f culture within the Church found radical Christian ascetics objectionable in the same w ay as their counterparts outside the Church. Within Christianity, the ascetics, with their claims to charismatic authority, posed the same sort o f threat to hierarchical authority as they did to the institutional authority o f the state. Faced w ith a similar conflict, Christianity effected a similar resolution. Conser­ vative Christian missionaries developed a w ay o f sidestepping the "hard sayings” o f the gospels— the p roof texts o f the radical ascetics—by spiritualizing the ideals o f poverty, chastity, and equality. In this they borrowed the concepts o f apatheia and ataraxia [imperturbability] from the Stoics, making virtue more an internal question o f attitude than an external matter o f physical practice. These ideals w ere thus stripped o f their radical social character and their threat to the social order. This also allowed Christianity to appeal to many more people o f higher rank and property than i f it had attacked their riches and status in plain material terms. It showed that [as Clem ent o f Alexandria named his book] the "rich man could, indeed, be saved.” James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue, pp. xiii-xiv, 2,188 Parts IV and V established the immediate context for Jesus and his companions as clearly and sharply as possible. It is time, finally, to see the text that must be put in conjunction with that very specific context. That takes up the rest o f the book. Part V I looks at tw o o f the earliest extracanonical gospels that w e have available: the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Each o f them w as described separately in C hapter 8 , and they will now be considered together across the three chapters o f this Part VI. Neither gospel is dependent on any o f our

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intracanonical foursom e (although, o f course, the Q Gospel is n ow present within M atthew and Luke and is “ intracanonicar in that sense). T h ey are also indepen­ dent o f one another, though linked together in several w ays. Chapter 14 begins with an anthropological reminder o f the importance o f lists as orality cedes to literacy, as rem em bered oral tradition gives w ay to recorded scribal version. That leads into a comparison o f those very list-like gospels, the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, in terms o f their formal structure, their constitu­ tive genre, their parallel content, and their proposed stratification. These gospels are clearly not biographical narratives like the canonical gospels, so h ow are they constructed and organized? Is there any overall genre or type o f writing into which they both fit? H o w does it happen that both gospels have about one-third o f their content in com m on (a high percentage for tw o documents not copying from one another), and what is the nature o f the material special to each? The chapter concludes with a correlated stratification o f the tw o gospels, emphasizing how they have divergently redacted their com m on content. Chapter 15 establishes the m eaning o f eschatology and continues into a very precise description o f the twin types o f eschatology present in the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Those divergent eschatologies are described as apocalypti­ cism and asceticism in Chapter 15. In other words, the com m on material found in those twin gospels— that shared one-third— is redacted by each gospel vari­ ously— in either, both, or neither o f those tw o eschatological directions. But that com m on material itself—the thirty-seven units that constitute w hat I call the C om m on Sayings Tradition— does not favor either o f the tw o eschatologies. Chapter 16 is a preliminary discussion o f a third type o f eschatology, the one present in the C om m on Sayings Tradition itself. It proposes and explains the term ethical eschatology for that third type, which is neither apocalyptic eschatol­ o gy as in the Q Gospel nor ascetical eschatology as in the Gospel o f Thomas. That chapter prepares for Part VII, which is a detailed study o f the Com m on Sayings Tradition in terms o f that proposed eschatology. G o back, for a moment, to the epigraph, which w as carefully chosen to be surprising. Biblical scholars are used to terms like apocalyptic eschatology as a way o f proclaim ing G od's impending judgm ent on an unjust w orld. But what about form s o f socially critical asceticism, first pagan and then Christian, as described in that epigraph? Is that another type o f eschatology? H o w do apocalypticism and asceticism relate to one another? That epigraph is there to start us thinking about that question from this point on. Finally, this Part V I is in dialogue with foundational research from Helmut K oester to Stephen Patterson on the Gospel o f Thomas and from Jam es Robinson to Jo h n K loppenb org on the Q Gospel I write w ith gratitude and appreciation for their sem inal w ork.

C H A P T E R 14

A COMPARISON OF T W O EARLY GOSPELS A s a w h ole the sapiential speeches o f Q are not concerned with the question o f law and tra d itio n .. . . Such a situation can be assumed to have existed during the first years after the death o f Jesus anywhere . . . the question o f the law , triggered by the Pauline mission, was not yet a concern. A Greekspeaking environm ent is m ore likely than an area o f towns and villages in w hich the predom inant language was A ram aic.. . . It is . . . tempting to assum e that the redaction o f Q took place somewhere in Galilee and that the docum ent as a w hole reflects the experience o f a Galilean community o f fol­ lo w ers o f Jesu s. . . . T h e entire development o f Q, from the first collection o f the sayings o fje s u s and their assembly into sapiential discourses to the apoc­ alyptic redaction and, finally, the pre-Matthean redaction, must be dated w ithin the first three decades after the death ofjesus. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, pp. 162,164,170

T h e text [o f the Gospel o f Thomas] dates to a period in which authority was still personal, or dependent upon a leader’s personal charisma and powers o f persuasion, and not yet apostolic properly speaking-----All o f this would sug­ gest a date close to P a u l. . . or to Mark___ [T]he basic Thom as collection w as already in existence w hen the Prologue, Thom 13, and Thom 114 w ere added, presum ably still in that early period o f jostling personal claims to authority. Precisely w hen this Thom as layer was added, or how extensive it w as, m ay n ever be known. One might perhaps speculate that it coincided, m ore or less, w ith the m artyrdom o fjam es in 62 c.E. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, pp. 116-117 Y ou w ill recall from the discussion o f the gospel traditions in Chapter 8 that I accept, as scholarly presuppositions, both the canonical independence o f the Gospel o f Thomas and the written existence o f the Q Gospel. I f those positions are basically invalid— i f the Q Gospel does not exist or the Gospel o f Thomas is canoni­ cally dependent— then so is this section completely invalid. (Likewise, o f course, for the opposing positions.) But if m y positions are correct, w hat follows? I n ow extend those presuppositions following proposals b y scholars such as Koester

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and Patterson on the Gospel o f Thomas and Robinson and Kloppenborg on the Q Gospel T h e paired epigraphs above give approximate dates for the two gospels and indicate w h at I m ean by "early” in m y chapter title.

In the Beginning Was the List [T]he most characteristic form [in the early phases o f written cultures] is som ething that rarely occurs in oral discourse at all (although it sometimes appears in ritual), nam ely the list. Jack Goody, The Domestication o f the Savage Mind, p. 80 Orality knows no lis ts .. . . Indeed, w riting w as in a sense invented largely to make something like lis ts .. . . Lists begin w ith writing. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 98, 99,123 The list is, perhaps, the most archaic and pervasive o f genres. It has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Jonathan Z . Smith, Imagining Religion, p. 44 This anthropological section on lists prepares for a consideration o f two fun­ damentally important early Christian list-like texts, the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel But to begin, think, for a moment, about lists and listing. I f a group o f biblical students w ere to say, "Jesus spoke in parables, for e x a m p le,. . . ” and then named ten parables, that ten w ould be, in content and sequence, different for all o f us (and even different for each o f us on different occasions). W e could, I sup­ pose, describe all such ad hoc sets as oral lists, but w e w ould have to be very careful about the m eaning o f that expression. W hat w e have in our heads is a coded mess (or matrix, if you prefer) o f stuff that w e can process into a list o f w h atever type is needed for w hatever purpose. W e have, as it w ere, a heap in the head but a list on the lips. I f w e always cited a fixed sequence o f parables, it w o u ld m ean that w e w ere thinking scribally rather than orally, and it might be better to describe such fixed sets as scribal lists given orally. Such a fixed oral operation, apart from magic, ritual, or other short and tightly controlled form u­ lations, w ould not and could not occur before the conception o f a fixed and w ritten form at or sequence had been created— that is, before the arrival o f liter­ acy on a given scene. In one sense, therefore, and even allow ing for the loose usage ju st mentioned, the term oral list is som ew hat am biguous and might better b e avoided. In strictest usage, an oral list is som ething o f a contradiction in term s, as Ja c k G ood y em phasized in the book from which I took m y first epi­ graph for this section. H e noted that initial literacy m ay contain "lists o f individu­ als, objects or w ord s in a form that m ay have no oral equivalent at all” (1 977 -%6)-

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T h e re is a chapter in his book entitled "W hat’s in a List?" from which I take the fo llo w in g com m ents: “ Particularly in the early phases o f written cultures in the first fifteen hundred years o f m an’s documented history, [bureaucratic] materials are often presented in a form which is very different from that o f ordinary speech, indeed o f alm ost any speech. And the most characteristic form is som e­ th in g that rarely occurs in oral discourse at all (although it sometimes appears in ritual), n am ely the lis t .. . . Lists are seen to be characteristic o f the early uses o f w ritin g, b ein g prom oted partly by the demands o f complex economic and state organization, partly b y the nature o f scribal training, and partly by the ‘play’ ele­ m ent, w h ich attempts to explore the potentialities o f this new medium. They represent an activity which is difficult in oral cultures and one which encourages the activities o f historians and the observational sciences, as well as on a more general

level

favouring

the

exploration

and

definition

o f classificatory

s c h e m e s .. . . T h e l is t . . . increases the visibility and definiteness o f classes, makes it easier fo r the individual to engage in chunking, and more particularly in the hierarchical ordering o f information which is critical to much recall” (80, 108, h i ).

W h en, therefore, w e are dealing with the interface between the oral and the

w ritten — especially the initial transition from oral to written in earliest Christian­ ity— w e should pay close attention to lists in all their various permutations and com binations. I turn, then, to tw o gospels that contain some o f the earliest Christian w rit­ ings outside the authentic Pauline letters. Those documents are the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel, and they read like lists— or, if you prefer, lists o f lists, or lists o f sayings centered around Jesus.

Format and Structure T h e use o f catchwords is itself an organizing principle, with its own internal lo g ic .. . . A t any rate, catchword association is the principle upon which the sayings in the G ospel o f Thom as w ere originally collected. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel o f Thomas andjesus, p. 102 W h at types o f literary organization does Q exhibit? Perhaps the most obvi­ ous form is topical. Sayings are not simply strung together but gathered into coherent groupings___ It is clear that the Q sayings have been organized thoughtfully into topical groupings. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation o f Q, pp. 90, 92 T h e first com parison w e w ill consider between the tw o gospels is in the for­ m al structure o f both documents. H o w are they organized and unified? W hile the fo u r intracanonical gospels have narrative and biographical fram eworks,

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these tw o extracanonical gospels lack that type o f overall organization. What type o f structure do they have? G ospel o f Thom as T h e Gospel o f Thomas contains 114 units in the now-standard scholarly num­ bering, and that external num bering follows certain internal indices. The 114 num bered units are easily distinguished, in that each begins w ith either a state­ m ent by Jesu s or a com m ent to Jesus. But the artificiality o f that construction is evident from the fact that m any o f those now-num bered units contain several independent sayings within them. I f yo u count multiple versions o f the same saying separately, that brings the count to 146 sayings in all. H ere, for example, is the Gospel o f Thomas 111:1-3 : Jesus said, “T h e heavens and the earth will roll up in y o u r presence, and w hoever is living from the living one w ill not see death.” D oes not Jesus say, “ Those w ho have found themselves, o f them the w orld is not w orthy” ? That unit contains both a direct (“Jesu s said” ) and an indirect ("D oes not Jesu s say” ) com bination o f tw o sayings. T h e overall collection o f the Gospel o f Thomas has the minim al possible orga­ nization— namely, connection by w ord links or catchword associations. Those verbal links have been noted repeatedly, from Garitte in 1957 (63-64) to Patterson in 1993a (100-102). Garitte cited thirty-five instances, while Patterson gave sixtyfour involving links betw een tw o sayings (fifty-two examples), three sayings (ten examples), or even four sayings (two examples). But verbal links sometimes develop into form al and even topical ones. Verbal L in ks. H ere is an exam ple o f w ord linkage betw een tw o, three, and four units, in the Gospel o f Thomas 25-26, 20-22, and 96-99, respectively, links bolded: 1. Jesu s said, “ L o ve y o u r b roth er like you r soul, protect that one like the pupil o f y o u r e y e .” 2. Jesus said, “You see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but you do not see the beam that is in your ow n eye. W hen you take the beam out o f your own eye, then yo u will see dearly to take the speck out o f your brother’s eye.” 1 1. T h e disciples said to Jesu s, “T ell us w hat the kingdom o f heaven is like.” H e said to them , “ It is lik e a mustard s e e d . . . ” 2. M ary said to Jesu s, “ W hat are you r disciples like?” H e said, “ T h ey are like little children . .

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3. Je su s saw som e babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are lik e those w ho enter the kingdom . . . ” 1. 2. 3. 4.

Je su s [said], "T h e kin gd om o f the Father is like [a] w o m a n . . . " Je su s said, "T h e kin gd om o f the [Father] is like a w o m a n . . . ” Je su s said, "T h e kin gd om o f the Father is like a person . . . ” T h e disciples said to him, "Your brothers and your mother are standing outside." H e said to them, "Those here who do what my Father wants are m y brothers and m y mother. They are the ones who will enter my F a th e rs k in g d o m .” V erb al linkage, therefore, can extend across two, three, or even four o f our

present nu m bered units. Form al Lin ks, T h e first three units in that last complex show not only verbal but also for­ m al linkage. V erses 96-98 o f the Gospel o f Thomas are connected, in other words, n ot o n ly b y com m on w ords but by their common form as parables. There is a sim ilar set o f three parables in the Gospel o f Thomas 63-65; these have verbal, for­ m al, and probably even topical linkage: 1. Je su s said, "T h ere w as a rich person . . . [parable o f the rich farmer]. W h o ev e r has ears should hear.” (63) 2. Je su s said, "A p erson w as receiving gu ests. . . [parable o f the feast]. B uyers and m erchants [will] not enter the places o f my Father.” (64) 3. H e said, "A . . . p erson ow ned a vin eyard . . . [parable o f the tenants]. W h o ev e r has ears should hear.” (65) T h e linkage is verbal ("person” ), formal (parables), and topical (wealth). All three w a rn against w ealth— that is, against a preoccupation with normal worldly activities. T h a t topical unity is underlined by having all three parables conclude w ith an extraparabolic com m ent o f which the first and last are the same. But such topical o r even form al complexes are very unusual in the Gospel o f Thomas. V erb al com plexes or catchword associations are much more usual. It m a y b e significant that w ord linkage or association by catchword occurs both internally w ithin and externally between units. It may also be significant that it does not occur every time. M aybe internal linkage indicates oral transmis­ sion and external linkage indicates written transmission? It should be emphasized h o w v e ry difficult it is to find examples o f such combinations in independent texts. Y et such independent attestations are the only w ay w e can be sure that com binations go back to either oral transmission or written tradition. It could w e ll b e that those com binations w ere created ad hoc as m em ory prompted

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either oral speaker or scribal author to com pose clusters o f those sayings for dis­ cussion. "In this case,” as Steve Patterson com ments, "the catchwords will not h ave been part o f any conscious design on the part o f the editor, but simply the result o f his or her ow n process o f rem em bering” (19933:102). Q Gospel T h e Q Gospel is much m ore organized than the Gospel o f Thomas in its gen­ eral structure, and it is not so m uch verbal or form al associations as topical con­ nections that dominate the com position. As Jo h n Kloppenborg has noted, “Not only are the sayings grouped into several topically coherent clusters, there is also a measure o f unity and coherence am ong the several clusters as well as logical and thematic developm ent throughout the course o f the entire collection.” If one compares its structure with that o f the narrative gospels, o f course, it still seems very episodic and alm ost random, but in terms o f its ow n genre (on which m ore below), "it ranks w ith the m ost sophisticated literary products o f its class” (19873:89). Kloppenborg, w h o insists "that the Q sayings have been orga­ nized thoughtfully into topical groupings,” proposes fourteen such groupings (19878:92): Jo h n ’s preaching o f the C om ing One

=

The tem ptation o fjesu s

=

Q 4:1-13

Jesu s’ inaugural serm on

=

Q 6:2ob-49

John, Jesus, and "this generation”

=

Q 7:1-10,18-28; (16:16); 7:31-35

Discipleship and mission

=

Q 9:57-62; 10:2-4

On prayer

=

Q 11:2-4,9-13

Controversies w ith Israel

=

Q 11:14-52

On fearless preaching

=

Q 12:2-12

On anxiety o ver material needs

=

Q I2 :(i3 -i4 ,16-21), 2 2 -3 1, 3 3 -3 4

Preparedness for the end

=

Q 12:39-59

T w o parables o f grow th

=

Q 13:18-19, 20-21

T h e tw o w ays

=

Q 13:24-30,34-35; 14:16-24,26-27;

V arious parables and sayings

=

17:33; 14:33-34 Q 15:3-7; 16 :13,17 -18 ; 17:1-6 Q 17:23-37; 19:12-27; 22:28-30

T h e eschatological discourse

Q 3 7 - 9 ,16 -17

N ote that it is n o w custom ary to designate a unit in the Q Gospel— say, Luke 3:7-9, 16 -17 = M atthew y .7 -1%— simply as Q 3 :7 - 9 , 16-17. But in every case, the exact content m ust be reconstructed by com paring both Luke and Matthew. T h at, for exam ple, is w h at the International Q Project under Jam es Robinson and his colleagues is all about.

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T h e general unity and even organization within each o f those groupings is fairly clear, but the overall sequence between them is much less evident. For exam ple, the first four topical units and the final one are in fairly obvious ju x ta ­ position. N o t only are those segments unified internally by topical content, they are also unified externally by chronological constraints: John comes before Jesus at the start, and the apocalypse comes at the end. You might almost think from that b eginning that a biographical framework was about to appear. But when y o u lo o k at the central segments in Kloppenborg's list, there is no compelling reason fo r overall sequence. Those segments could be moved around among them selves w ithou t any change o f importance. If the Gospel o f Thomas is a list w ith m o stly verbal connections, a few formal ones, fewer topical ones, and no overall structure at all, the Q Gospel is a list o f lists with mostly topical connec­ tions in each list but w ith some overall structure as well. Do not presume, by the w a y , that a lack o f structure is a sign o f compositional incompetence. It may instead b e an im perative o f theological vision. Maybe it is not for humans to overorganize divine wisdom?

Genre and Destiny It is difficult to find a single suitable translation for Xcryoç [logos] and its plu­ ral X ó y o i [logoi], for the term covers a wide spectrum o f meanings. The English term word com es nearest in providing a comparable breadth. It not only designates an individual vocable, whose plural then designates a wordb y-w o rd sequence o f v o ca b le s,. . . it can also designate a whole statement, in such expressions as "a w ord for today,” or "a word to the wise is suffi­ cient.” T h is usage corresponds to the use o f the term word to designate the s e lf in re-sponsible com m itm ent, in such expressions as “ to give one's w o rd ” ; "to be as good as one's w ord.” Jam es M. Robinson, " logoi sophon," pp. 7 3 -7 4 note 9 T h e second comparison between the two gospels is their common genre. This w as recognized o ver thirty years ago by Jam es Robinson in a seminal article on the com m on generic identity o f the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel (1971)Robinson called the genre "W ords o f the Wise” or “ Sayings o f the Sages.” He pointed to the genre’s origins in scribal traditions from Mesopotamia and Egypt that had flow ed into Jew ish collections, such as those in the biblical book o f Proverbs. T h e sm aller collections in Proverbs 30 and 31, for example, begin respec­ tively w ith “ the w ords o f A gur son ofjakeh ” and “the words o f King Lemuel.” The genre's trajectory continued thence into both Judaism and Christianity. Once into Christianity, it split into Catholic and Gnostic streams. The Q Gospel, for instance,

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continued into the synoptic tradition, adopting the narrative, biographical format o f Catholic Christianity’s classic gospel format. The Gospel o f Thomas, on the other hand, ended up within the Thom as tradition, adopting the dialogue-and-discourse form at o f Gnostic Christianity’s classic gospel format. There are, however, two im portant qualifications to Robinson’s very persuasive proposal on the genre o f the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. First, there is nothing intrinsically either Jew ish as against Christian, or Catholic Christian as against Gnostic Christian, about the genre termed Sayings o f the Sages. “ It has been pointed out repeatedly,” notes Jo h n Kloppenborg, "that apart from Gos. Thom, none o f the other examples o f the genre shows any gnosticizing tendency” (i987a:i3). T h e form al openness o f a sayings collection m akes it easily pulled in diverse directions, but those external pulls are not internal drives. W hat eventually happens to them derives from social usage and not from inevitable generic proclivity. Seen after the fact, o f course, history always looks like destiny. Second, Sayings o f the Sages, the generic title proposed by Robinson, places these gospels in the sapiential traditions o f the ancient N ear East in general and o f Judaism in particular. But that requires careful specification. W isdom or sapi­ ential (from sapientia, Latin for wisdom ) traditions are the special ideology o f teachers, scribes, and bureaucrats within aristocratic states or agrarian empires. As such they are often assumed to be necessarily and conventionally pro­ establishment. T h ey are taken to be inevitably supportive o f those elite institu­ tions that em ploy scribal talents with their educated ability to read and write, count and record, manage and administer. Under the extrem e pressures o f Hel­ lenistic internationalism and Rom an imperialism, all aspects o f tradition in the Je w ish hom eland underwent a certain radicalization in the centuries immedi­ ately before and after the com m on era. T h e legal traditions w ere radicalized first b y the Pharisees and then by the rabbis in declaring a dual Torah or double Law, one written and one oral, both stem m ing alike from M oses at Sinai. The prophetic traditions w ere radicalized b y apocalyptic seers and authors declaring a double era o f history, the present evil era soon to be destroyed and the imminent era o f justice and righteousness soon to be established b y God. T h e sapiential traditions w ere radicalized by declaring a double w isdom — not ju st the ordinary everyd ay w isdom o f norm al hum an life but also a radical w isdom whereby one lived divine justice in an evil world. I return to that last point below in discussing the eschatology o f the twin gospels. It cannot be presumed, in other words, that sapiential scribes o r even sapiential traditions are always conservative and never radical. M em bers o f the genre Sayings o f the Sages need not end up in Gnosti­ cism , on the one hand, and they can end up in radicalism, on the other.

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Content and Stratification A m o n g the sayings o f the Gospel o f Thomas that have parallels in the synop­ tic gospels, b y far the largest number are sayings that Matthew and/or Luke has draw n from the Synoptic Sayings Source [Q]. There are at least thirty-six sayings that belong in this category, possibly as many as forty-five, if one includes the Q -M ark overlaps and those sayings that Luke may have drawn fro m Q, although there are no Matthean parallels. On the other hand, there are only fourteen sayings that the Gospel o f Thomas shares with Mark (sev­ enteen i f the Q -M ark overlaps are counted), thirteen that it shares with M atth ew only, and six that have parallels only in Luke___ Q contains the largest n u m ber o f parallels to the Gospel o f Thomas by any co u n t. . . [yet] it is ob viou s that the Gospel o f Thomas cannot simply pass as a variant or as an early form o f the Synoptic Sayings Source [Q], nor is it possible to con­ sider Q as the source o f any o f the sayings o f the Gospel o f Thomas. Never­ theless, the consideration o f Q parallels in the Gospel o f Thomas is as instructive as it is puzzling i f [this question is] asked: T o which layer o f the d evelopm en t o f Q do the parallels in the Gospel o f Thomas belong? Helmut Koester, "Q and Its Relatives,” pp. 55-56 T h e third com parison between the two gospels— and the most important— concerns the stratification o f content in each one and especially in the connec­ tion b etw een that process for both o f them. Stratification refers to evidence o f successive layering o f content within a text. The study o f stratification involves discerning w h ere later material has been added to earlier material. The question h ere is w h eth er there are direct connections between discernible stratification processes in the Q Gospel and in the Gospel o f Thomas. T h e num bers given in the section epigraph above will be refined as I pro­ ceed, b u t their gross-level differences will hold valid: far m ore o f the content o f the Gospel o f Thomas is paralleled in the Q Gospel than in any other early Christian docu m ent that w e n o w know. That high parallelism in content is a first indica­ tion o f som e relationship closer than similar structure and com mon genre. Ques­ tions o f stratification will both increase indications o f close relationship and fill o u t its details. But that epigraph succinctly outlines the problems o f this section. First, the greatest num ber o f parallels in content is between the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Second, neither o f those gospels is derived from the other. T h ird , it is "puzzling’' w hen one tries to correlate the stratification o f the Q Gospel w ith the parallel in the Gospel o f Thomas. That is precisely w here the prob­ lem lies. W h at is the relationship between earlier stages o f those twin gospels? K o ester states the difficulty elsewhere like this: “The materials w hich the Gospel o f Thomas and Q share m ust belong to a very early stage o f the transmission o f

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Je su s’ s a y in g s.. . . Thus, the Gospel o f Thomas is either dependent upon the earli­ est version o f Q or, m ore likely, shares w ith the author o f Q one or several very early collections o f Je su s’ sa y in g s.. . . T h e close relationships o f the Gospel of Thomas to Q cannot be accidental.. . . T h e Gospel o f Thomas is either dependent upon Q ’s earlier version or upon clusters o f sayings em ployed in its composi­ tion” (19903:95, 150). This section, then, attempts to solve that "puzzling” ques­ tion o f the correlated stratigraphy o f those tw o gospels. PARALLEL CO N TENT M y first step is to look at that com m on content in the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas and to emphasize h ow striking is the am ount o f parallel mate­ rial involved. I use three sets o f parallels to build up the case. A first set o f parallels is betw een the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel. This set is the most significant for m y purpose in this book (see Appendix iA): 28% (37 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in the Q Gospel 37 % (3 7 out o f 101 units) o f the Q Gospel has parallels in the Gospel o f Thomas.

T h at first set o f com parisons also means that 72 percent (95 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas does not have any parallels in the Q Gospel (see Appendix 2A) and that 63 percent (64 out o f 101 units) o f the Q Gospel does not have paral­ lels in the Gospel o f Thomas (see Appendix 2B). But, for m y immediate purposes, about one-third o f each gospel has parallels in the other, and that high ratio should be com pared w ith the next tw o sets o f parallels. A second set o f parallels is between the Gospel o f Thomas, the Q Gospel, and M ark’s gospel, but watching that difference betw een w h at the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel them selves have in common— namely, 37 units (Appendix 3A)— and w h at each has in particular— namely, 95 units (Appendix 3B) and 64 units (Appendix 3C), respectively: 30% (11 out o f 37 units) o f w h at is com m on to the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel has parallels in Mark. 17% (16 o f 95 units) o f w h at is particular to the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in M ark. 19% (12 ou t o f 64 units) o f w hat is particular to the Q Gospel has parallels in Mark-

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T h o se are also very interesting statistics. In terms o f the com m on material, w e again see about one-third o f it having parallels in Mark (although, to be sure, th at is a v e ry sm all part o f M ark's overall gospel). But even what is particular to the Gospel o f Thomas and to the Q Gospel has, in each case, about one-fifth o f that separate m aterial paralleled in Mark. A third set o f parallels can be seen between the Gospel o f Thomas and other sources, such as Special M atthew (Appendix 4A), Special Luke (Appendix 4B), and Jo h n (Appendix 4C): 12 % (16 ou t o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in Special M atthew . 7% (9 ou t o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in Special Luke. 9% (12 ou t o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in John. T h e m uch lo w er statistics in that third set o f parallels help to emphasize the h igh er ratios in the earlier sets, especially the first. The large amount o f common m aterial in the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel is more striking in contrast to these lo w e r statistics. T h at commonality, o f course, continues to press the close relationship b etw een these tw o gospels already seen in terms o f formal structure and constitutive genre. O ne question before proceeding. Could there be some documentary or writ­ ten source com m on to both these gospels that might explain the large amount o f parallel data? T h at seem s most unlikely, largely because o f the absolute lack o f an y co m m o n order or parallel sequence in the w ay the common material is presen ted in the tw o gospels. Recall, for contrast, that one argument for the exis­ tence o f the Q Gospel as a documentary source is the amount o f com m on seq u ence for its contents as used by Matthew and Luke. In this present case, h o w e v e r, i f y o u com pare those com mon sayings within their sequential posi­ tions in the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, there is no common pattern. N ei­ th er is there any reason w h y tw o gospels so loosely organized w ould have n eed ed to revise an original com m on pattern were it present. But all that parallel content o r com m on material, especially in the absence o f a documentary source, fo rces the issue o f correlative stratification. W hen and h ow did these twin gospels interact w ith one another?

CORRELATIVE STRATIFICATION I lo o k here at three proposals concerning stratification in the tw o gospels. T h e first proposal is that o f Joh n Kloppenborg for the Q Gospel T h e second

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proposal is that o f W illiam A m al for the Gospel o f Thomas. The third is that o f Stephen Patterson for both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas together. Patterson's suggestion, the first fully correlated stratification for both gospels together, w ill be basic for m y argum ent in this book. I consider the first two pro­ posals to be correct, but they will have to be integrated into Patterson’s analysis rather than the reverse. I am, in any case, deeply grateful and profoundly indebted to those three scholars for their detailed studies. T h ere are actually divergent m odes o f stratification involved in the three proposals. T h ere is, first, compositional stratification, the sequence in which two or m ore layers o f materials are inserted into a finished composition. Layer A was com pleted, and later Layer B w as added to it. But that tells you nothing one way or the other about the com parative dates o f those layers. It tells you only about the successive m om ents w h en an author brought them together. There is, second, traditional stratification, the sequence in which a tradition was created. Layer A existed, and later Layer B w as developed. Jo h n Kloppenborg has empha­ sized that his ow n stratification o f the Q Gospel is com positional and not tradi­ tional. "T o say that the w isdom com ponents w ere form ative for Q and that the prophetic judgm ent oracles and apophthegms describingjesus’ conflict with 'this generation' are secondary is not to imply anything about the ultimate traditionhistorical provenance o f any o f the sayings. It is indeed possible, indeed probable, that som e o f the materials from the secondary com positional phase are domini­ cal or at least every old, and that som e o f the form ative elements are, from the standpoint o f authenticity or tradition-history, relatively young. Traditionhistory is not convertible w ith literary history, and it is the latter which w e are treating h ere" (19873:244-245). In other words, som e o f the materials that an author used as the first layer o f a com position could be created at that very m om ent, and som e o f the ones inserted as a second layer could have been there from lon g before. The stratification o f a writing’s composition is not the same as the stratification o f a tradition’s history. In w h at follow s, both Kloppenborg and A m al are speaking primarily about com positional stratification. Patterson, how ever, is concerned with the more fun­ dam ental question o f traditional stratification, and so am I. Neither o f us thinks y o u can autom atically convert one into the other. On that point, Kloppenborg is absolutely correct. But the m ajor significance o f Patterson's stratification, in dis­ tinction from that o f Kloppenborg or A m al, is that it allows the question o f the tradition's trajectory to be raised as forcibly as possible. Q G ospel A p o w e rfu l and persuasive stratigraphy o f the Q Gospel text has been offered by Jo h n K loppenb org (1987a). Building on earlier studies by D ieter Liihrmann in

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1969 and A rnold Jacobsen in 1978, he proposed three main strata in the gospel: a sapiential layer (Q r), an apocalyptic layer (Q2), and a biographical layer (Q3), com bin ed in that sequence. Here is his summary: “The formative com ponent o f Q consisted o f a group o f six ‘wisdom speeches’ which were hortatory in nature and sapiential in their mode o f argumentation. This stratum was subsequendy expanded b y the addition o f groups o f sayings, many framed as chriae [short, pith y sayings that are given a brief introduction or setting], which adopted a criti­ cal and polem ical stance w ith regard to Israel. The most recent addition to Q seem s to h ave been the temptation story, added in order to provide an aetiology and legitim ation for Q 's radical ethic, but introducing at the same time a bio­ graphical dim ension into the collection’ (19878:317). A sapiential saying appeals to co m m o n reason or w isdom , to that which is at least theoretically available to all. It says, L o o k b efore you leap; or, W hoever fears G od will be happy. An apoc­ alyptic say in g appeals to special information or revelation. It says, Repent, for the end is near; or, W atch, for you know not the day nor the hour. T h e first or form ative stratum is sapiential, composed o f six wisdom speeches. T h ese are directed inward to those who have already accepted the king­ d o m o f G od ; they are characterized by persuasion rather than recrimination, preach in g rather than polemics; and they have “ important similarities in implied audience, constituent forms, motifs and themes and even structure and argumen­ tation” (19878:243). A typical example is Jesus’ inaugural sermon, announcing “an ethic w h ich responds to the radical character o f the kingdom" (19873:190). This n o w appears as the Serm on off the Mount in Luke 6:2ob-49 and, in greatly expan ded form , as the Serm on on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. T h e second stratum is apocalyptic, composed o f five judgment speeches. T h e se are directed outw ard to those w ho have refused the kingdom o f God; th ey are characterized b y recrimination rather than persuasion, polemics rather than preaching; and, once again, “ the presence o f common forms (especially pro ph etic sayings and chriae), shared motifs and agreement in projected audi­ en ce unite these five com plexes” (19873:170). A typical example is Jesus' final ser­ m o n , annou ncing “ the prophetic proclamation o f coming judgm ent . . . to the u n co n verted , w arn in g them to repent before the catastrophe overtakes them” (19873:166). T h is n o w appears as the apocalyptic discourse in Luke 17:23-37 and, co m b in ed w ith M ark 13, in M atthew 24:26-41. T h e third stratum is introductory and biographical, com posed o f the story o f Je s u s ' three tem ptations in the desert located immediately after the account o f Jo h n the Baptist in the original Q Gospel and now present in Luke 4 and M a tth e w 4. Its purpose, m ost likely, was “ to illustrate and legitimate the mode o f b e h a v io r and the ethos o f the Q group. As hero and leader o f the Q com m u­ n ity , Je su s pro vid ed an exam ple o f the absolutely dependent, non-defensive and

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apolitical stance o f his follow ers” (19873:256). T h at term apolitical means, o f course, not operating by the politics o f a w orld w hose po w er is evil and whose dom inion is dem onic. It is im portant to note that Kloppenborg’s analysis is not simply circular, as if he had decided that sapiential m aterials cam e first and apocalyptic second, and arranged things accordingly. W hat he did w as first note the distinction in terms o f form , content, and audience betw een those tw o sets o f sermons, one sapien­ tial and the other apocalyptic, and then note that it w as the latter that broke into the form er's finished products, and not the reverse. One example will suffice. C om pare the form and content o f the four beatitudes that start Jesus’ inaugural serm on in the Q Gospel as n ow visible in Luke 6:2ob-23 = M atthew 5:3-4. 6, n -12. T h e first three beatitudes concerning the poor, hungry, and sad are very similar to one another. But while the fourth, concerning the rejected, fits in general with the preceding three, it is in detail totally different from them. Notice the different form at and content used in the fourth: “ Blessed are you w hen . . . on account o f [Jesus] . . . rew ard in heaven . . . so done to the prophets before you.” That last phrase, and m aybe even som e o f the preceding ones, read like “an insertion into an originally sapiential collection" ofbeatitudes (19873:243). Gospel o f Thom as Leaving aside, for here and now , that brief, initial, biographical introduction (Q3)> the tw o m ajor layers in Kloppenborg’s stratification o f the Q Gospel are the sapiential (Q1) and the apocalyptic m aterials (Q2). W illiam A m al has suggested a som ew hat similar two-step process for the Gospel o f Thomas, but in his approach the successive layers are not sapiential and apocalyptic but sapiential and Gnos­ tic. (I let that designation Gnostic go for the m om ent but return to it for more detailed discussion below.) It is, A m al argues, "the form al and thematic inconsistency o f each o f these tw o m ain strands [the sapiential and the Gnostic] that suggests a stratification rather than a unitary or aggregation m odel for the docum ent’s composition. It is evidence o f an effort to im pose redactional consistency on the document as a w h o le that allow s us to discern the hand o f the redactor and distinguish it from the rem ains o f the earlier collection which he m odified" (476). Each strand, in other w ord s, is a consistent w hole, and it is the Gnostic that has been imposed on the sapiential rather than vice versa. T h e first o f those tw o main strands or strata “ m ay be characterized, like the m aterials in Q, as w isdom sayings, both in form and content" (476). This strand includes parables, beatitudes, and aphorisms as w ell as imperatives with or with­ ou t m o tive clauses. It uses "argum entative com parisons, explicit or im plicit.. • and observations about and appeals to nature, ordinary experiences, and com-

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m o n sense” (476). But ju st as Kloppenborg's sapiential layer in the Q Gospel con­ tains n o t regu lar b ut radical wisdom— contains, as it were, a counterwisdom to c o m m o n sense and ordinary attitude— so also here. "All, or nearly all, o f the o b servatio n s m ade in this vein are inversionary (without being esoteric) while th e y also appeal to com m on sense and wise observation" (476). Am al calls this "in ve rsio n ary w isd om ” (479) and cites these 32 units as the clearest examples o f this stratum : the Gospel o f Thomas 3,5, 6, 9 ,14 ,16 ,20 ,2 6 ,31,34 -36 ,4 2,4 5 , 47,54,55, 57, 63-65, 74, 76, 86, 89, 95-98, X07,109, no (478 note 17). Here is an example: Je su s said, "L e t one w h o has found the world, and has become wealthy, ren ou n ce the w orld .” (Gospel o f Thomas no) T h e second o f the tw o main strands is imposed on that former stratum. "In contradistinction to the sapiential layer, another body o f sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is characterized by a gnostic orientation, manifested most trenchantly in th eir in vocation o f gnostic mythological motifs” (478). Inversionary or radical w isd o m has n o w becom e esoteric or Gnostic wisdom. Am al places 20 units most secu rely in this stratum : the Gospel o f Thomas 11, 13 ,15 ,18 , 21-22, 27-28, 49-50» 51, 60, 61, 83, 84, 10 1, 10 5,10 8 , in , 114 (479 note 32). Here is an example: Je su s said, "B lessed are those w h o are alone and chosen, for you will find the kin gd om . F o r yo u have com e from it, and you will return there again.” Jesus said, “ I f th ey say to you , ‘W here have you come from?’ say to them, ‘W e h ave co m e fro m the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’ If they say to you, ‘Is it yo u ?’ say, 'W e are its children, and w e are the chosen o f the living Father/ I f th ey ask y o u , ‘W hat is the evidence o f your Father in you?’ say to them, 'It is m otion and rest.’” (Gospel o f Thomas 49-50) T h a t is the strongest indication o f Gnosticism in the Gospel o f Thomas. Those q u estion s derive, presum ably, from the archons, those hostile powers guarding the su ccessive spheres o f the heavenly cosmos and seeking to prevent the soul’s return to the L ivin g Father whence it came. The Gnostic is told h ow to answer th eir questions and so pass safely on its w ay home. I return to the question o f this g o sp e l’s G nosticism in Chapter 15. Common Sayings Tradition E ach o f those stratifications is very persuasive, and if those two gospels were quite independent texts, there would be no problem. But how are those stratifica­ tions correlated w ith one another? M y answer accepts, with gratitude and appre­ ciation, the sem inal w o rk o f Stephen Patterson on the comparative stratigraphy

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o f the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas (1993b). I have gone over his suggestions in great detail and will indicate differences I see as I proceed. But, let m e em pha­ size once again, the basic and very important idea is his. T h e first step establishes the existence o f that com m on corpus o f materials noted earlier. Patterson begins w ith what he calls the C om m on Tradition and I adapt slightly to call the Com m on Sayings Tradition. It is that corpus o f m ateri­ als com m on to the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. I count-those units m ore conservatively than Patterson, ignoring ones that could be in the Q Gospel but are not securely present there (Appendix 1: Preliminary Note). This is, therefore, for m e that Com m on Sayings Tradition (Appendix iA): 28% (37 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel o f Thomas has parallels in the Q Gospel. 37% (37 o f 101 units) o f the Q Gospel has parallels in the Gospel o f Thomas. W e do not italicize that phrase, the Com m on (Sayings) Tradition, because, unlike the situation with the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas, w e are not pre­ suming a documentary source or a written text. The second step establishes the redaction o f that com m on corpus o f m ateri­ als. Patterson noticed that those 37 units show very interesting differences in h ow each gospel accepts, uses, and adapts them. T h ey are, in other words, redacted quite divergently by each gospel according to its ow n particular theol­ ogy. For Patterson, those theologies are apocalypticism for the Q Gospel and Gnosticism for the Gospel o f Thomas. There are three w ays in which a traditional unit can be redacted in line w ith the basic theology o f a document such as the Gospel o f Thomas or the Q Gospel. First, in broadest focus, the general direction or overall context o f each gospel changes everything within it. That general context directs the interpretation o f every single unit according to the major thrust o f the entire docum ent. Y o u read isolated parts in the light o f the whole. Second, in narrow er focus, the immediate context— the units ju st before or after that traditional unit— serve to b rin g it into line w ith their ow n understanding. The juxtaposition alone m ay do this even w ithout direct or specific connection. Third, in closest focus, there m ay be spe­ cific or internal change within the very wording o f the traditional unit itself. Patterson focuses especially on internal change as the best index for redactional change o f com m on materials in each document. Those com parisons help us to see h o w the 37 units o f the Com m on Sayings Tradition are m oved or not m oved in different directions in each gospel.

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The third step establishes the typology o f that com m on corpus o f m aterials as it is or is not redacted internally toward Gnosticism in the Gospel o f Thomas or toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. There are four different "types" involved. The statistics regarding redaction o f these types, summarized below , are strik­ ing— especially the final one (Appendix iB): T ype 1: 24% (9 out o f 37 units) is redacted in the Gospel o f Thomas but not in the Q Gospel. T ype 2: 8% (3 out o f 37 units) is redacted in the Q Gospel but not in the Gospel o f Thomas. T ype 3: 19% (7 out o f 37 units) is redacted in both the Gospel o f Thomas and in the Q Gospel. T ype 4: 49% (18 out o f 37 units) is redacted in neither the Gospel o f Thomas nor the Q Gospel. T w o elements, by the w ay, are particularly helpful in assessing redactional developments from the Com m on Sayings Tradition into the Q Gospel and/or the Gospel o f Thomas. First, there are often independent parallels in other early Christian texts, especially in M ark’s gospel (Appendix 3A). That is an external help in assessing what is redactionally specific to either the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas. Further­ more, there are often multiple versions o f the same unit in the Gospel o f Thomas itself (Appendix 5). In those cases one version is much closer to that in the Q Gospel and the other (or others) m ove away from it toward a specifically Thomistic theol­ ogy. That is an internal help in assessing the trajectory o f change within the gospel. These conclusions, I repeat, are based on a detailed analysis o f all 37 items. I agree com pletely w ith Patterson on the inevitable conclusion: the original Com­ mon Sayings Tradition contained neither Gnosticism nor apocalypticism but required redactional adaptation toward either or both o f those eschatologies. As Patterson con­ cluded, "In Q and Thomas w e have the remnants o f an early Christian tradition in which emphasis w as placed on Je su s’ words; this tradition is thus in the broadest sense sapiential. In its later manifestations— in Thomas and Kloppenborg’s Q2— this early sapiential orientation gave w a y to theological paradigms better known from later Christian generations: Gnosticism and apocalypticism, respectively. But questions linger. I f Q and Thomas lie on diverging trajectories each grounded in, yet m oving aw ay from , an early sapiential tradition, what can be said about this early tradition itselfr" (1993^194).

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That last question will be the burden o f Part VII, because that “ early tradi­ tion” in the unredacted Com m on Sayings Tradition is the first text I intend to put in conjunction with the context already established in Parts IV and V o f this book. But before that, I want to look m ore closely at those terms, apocalypticism and Gnosticism, to make them as precise as possible in terms o f the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, and then to ask what other type o f theology— som ething nei­ ther apocalyptic nor Gnostic— is found in that Com m on Sayings Tradition.

C H A P T E R ly

A P O C A L Y P T I C AND A S C E T I C A L ESCHATOLOGY "Eschatology” and "apocalyptic” . . . w ere initially used in Jesus studies to refer to the end o f the w orld o f ordinary history. But subsequent scholarship in this century has given the terms m any different senses. “ Eschatological” can be used m etaphorically in a non-end-of-the-world sense: as a nuanced synonym for "decisive,” or as "world-shattering,” or to point to the telos o f history entering history but not in such a w ay as to end history. Even "apoc­ alyptic," w e are discovering, need not refer to the end o f the world; some apocalyptic literature describes experiences o f another world (visions or other-worldly journeys) and does not refer to the imminent end o f the world o f ordinary history. Thus, there is considerable terminological confusion in the discipline. F or exam ple, I have heard one scholar argue that Jesus’ mes­ sage w as eschatological but not apocalyptic, that is, concerned with a deci­ sive change in history, but not w ith the end o f the world. I have heard another scholar argue that Jesu s’ message was apocalyptic but not eschato­ logical; that is, grounded in the experience o f another world, but not con­ cerned w ith the end o f this world. Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, pp. 8-9 This chapter is som ething o f an interlude between the preceding and suc­ ceeding chapters. M y focus is still on those twin texts, the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, and especially on that Com m on Sayings Tradition that they both share. But I pause here to establish terms and types within eschatology. The above epigraph warns us, quite accurately, about "terminological confusion” surrounding that topic in historical Jesu s research. M y attempt here is to discern the root o f that confusion and, w hether successful there or not, to clarify very precisely m y ow n usage in w h at follows. O f crucial importance for m e is the sharpest possible delineation o f the divergent eschatologies present in the Q Gospel, the Gospel o f Thomas, and the Com m on Sayings Tradition. From the very beginning o f m y ow n research, I have insisted that the histori­ cal Jesu s w as eschatological but not apocalyptic, although it has alw ays been dif­ ficult for m e to put a m ore positive nam e on that nonapocalyptic eschatology. M y first book about Jesus, In Parables (1973), distinguished prophetic from apoca­ lyptic eschatology in terms o f "ending a w orld" as against “ destroying the globe”

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(25-27). Throughout the last twenty-five years I have continued to hold that Jesu s w as both eschatological and nonapocalyptic and have searched for the best w a y to articulate positively his nonapocalyptic mode o f world-negation. This present discussion is but one m ore attempt at defining m y o w n term inology as clearly as I can before proceeding. M y purpose is not to force others into my ow n term inology but to clarify m y own and to invite others to do likewise.

Eschatology as Genus W hen they used what w e might call cosmic imagery to describe the com ing new age, such language cannot be read in a crassly literalistic w a y without doing it great violence___ Far m ore important to the first-century Je w than questions o f space, time and literal cosm ology w ere the key issues o f Tem ple, Land, and Torah, o f race, econom y and justice. W hen Israel's G o d acted, Jew s would be restored to their ancestral rights and w ou ld practice their ancestral religion, with the rest o f the world looking on in aw e, an d/o r making pilgrimages to Zion, and/ or being ground to pow d er under Jew ish fe e t .. . . Within the mainline Jew ish writings o f this period, covering a wide range o f styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence thatJew s were expecting the end o f the space-time uni­ verse. There is abundant evidence that they . . . knew a good m etaphor w hen they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological sig­ nificance o f cataclysmic socio-political e v e n ts.. . . T h ey believed that the pres­ ent world order would come to an end— the w orld order in which pagans held power, and Jew s, the covenant people o f the creator god, did not. N. Thomas Wright, The New Testament and the People o f God, pp. 284, 285,333 The w ord eschatology refers, literally, to discussion about the eschata, the G reek term for the “last things.” But is it the last things o f the physical earth or o f the hum an world? Is it an ending o f space and time or o f p o w er and domination? Is the result earth up in heaven or heaven down on earth? In the above epigraph W right insists that, in that distant Jew ish and Christian past, such language referred to cataclysm ic events such as the fall o f great nations or the end o f im pe­ rial pow ers and the subsequent triumph and ascendancy o f G od's people. T h at interpretation is in keeping with the usual view o f eschatology, w hich includes the idea that such an ending comes through divine or transcendental causality, be it from angels or ancestors, spirits or demons, gods or God. A t first glance, then, eschatology means the same thing as apocalypse. T h at lat­ ter w o rd refers, literally, to an apokalypsis, the G reek term for a special divine revelation (particularly about an imminent ending o f world), and it usually includes the idea o f goodness vindicated and evil eliminated. C on tem porary

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scholarship, therefore, regularly uses the adjectives eschatological and apocalyptic to designate exactly the same phenomenon. But, on the other hand, that sam e contem porary scholarship speaks also o f realized eschatology and o f present escha­ tology, w h ich it m ust be differentiating from some other type o f eschatology— usually apocalyptic eschatology (even when the adjective apocalyptic is not appended). T h at confusion show s up as w ell in the use o f the term apocalyptic as both noun and adjective. W hen using it as a noun, w e speak simply o f apocalyptic rather than o f apocalypticism. W hen using it as an adjective, w e speak o f an apocalyptic scoiario or an apocalyptic sect. As a noun, apocalyptic can stay equal to eschatology, b ut as an adjective it m ust be subordinate to it (or at least to something else that it qualifies). T h e only w a y I can resolve that confusion is to take eschatology as a genuslevel term and place future, apocalyptic, present, realized, or any other type o f eschatology as a species-level distinction under that umbrella. I do not use genus and species here in any profoundly theoretical, taxonomically exact, or even gram m atically precise w ay. I simply intend an upper-level term and its lowerlevel subterms. A nd I insist that, in such a case, one lower-level term should not be privileged above all the rest by being implicitly or explicitly equated with the upper-level one. I use those terms in the following very general sense: There are birds (genus) and there are crow s and swallow s (species). You should not get into an argum ent w here one says, "Th at's a bird,” and the other responds, “No, that's a crow .” Upper-level terms should not be confused with lower-level terms. Taking eschatology as a genus or upper-level term accords, actually, with scholarly practice in using phrases such as realized eschatology, thorough-going eschatology, imminent eschatology, present eschatology, future eschatology, and even (som etimes but not consistently) apocalyptic eschatology. It also helps us see h ow easily one m ight m ix and match different types o f eschatology, how easily one might slip or slide from one to the other, h ow readily a visionary might propose one type and an audience hear a different one. But to take eschatology openly and explicitly as a genus means that one must define it as such apart from and before any species are m entioned. So here goes. Eschatology is one o f the great and fundamental options o f the hum an spirit. It is a profoundly explicit no to the profoundly implicit yes by which w e usually accept life’s normalcies, culture’s presuppositions, and civilization’s discontents. It is a basic and unusual world-negation or rejection as opposed to an equally basic but m ore usual world-affirmation or acceptance. For myself, left to myself, I w ould prefer to bury the term eschatological and use instead a term such as worldnegation. But I presum e that eschatological is here to stay, so I continue to use it. In m y ow n usage, the concept and term eschatological has three necessary com ­ ponents. First, it indicates a vision and/or program that is radical, counter-cultural,

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utopian, or this-world-negating. It presumes that there is something fundamentally w rong w ith the w ay o f the world—not something that could easily be fixed, changed, or improved, but something so profoundly and radically w ron g that only something profoundly and radically opposite could remedy it. Second, the m an­ date o f that vision and/or program is taken to be divine, transcendental, supernat­ ural; that is, it does not simply derive from natural or hum an forces or ideas. Eschatology is, as it were, a divinely mandated utopia, a divine radicality. Third, depending on why one announces that radical and cosmic no and how one intends to live out that no in a fundamentally negated world, there are various types and modes o f the eschatological challenge. Those types are species o f the genus-level term eschatology, or world-negation. Three such species will becom e important as I proceed. Let me state again that m y intention is not to force others to use these expressions but rather to clarify the concepts I am using and the terms I accept for them. If others disagree with m y concepts and/or terms, I ask only that they clar­ ify their own positions as fully as I attempt to do here. It is important, how ever, that w e distinguish the significant concepts involved and not ju st argue over differ­ ent words for the same concepts. Against that general background, I look next at the theologies o f the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas to specify as precisely and accurately as possible the types o f eschatology they contain. That will take up the rest o f this chapter. Then, in the next chapter, I will suggest the type o f eschatology present in the Com m on Sayings Tradition. W e already know, from our b rief lo o k at Patterson's fourfold redactional typology in the previous chapter, that the C o m ­ m on Sayings Tradition's eschatology is not that o f the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas; it is a third type o f eschatology. But first, then, w h at about the escha­ tologies o f our tw o sayings gospels?

Apocalyptic Eschatology [In Q 1] discipleship is conceived in the most radical social and personal terms. It is rigorous in the extreme . . . involving separation from fam ily and rejec­ tion o f the norm s o f m acro-society. . . and preparedness for poverty, h om e­ lessness and m a rty rd o m .. . . M ore positively, it is understood as im itation o f the m erciful and generous G o d . . . and as "following'' or "listening to” or "com ing to” Jesus. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation ofQ, p. 241 In any accounting o f Q, sapiential elements play a m ajor role. It is difficult to m iss the pervasive eschatological tenor o f those w isdom elem ents. But it is

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another question w hether the term apocalyptic is an accurate characteriza­ tion for the redeploym ent o f these wisdom materials. John S. Kloppenborg, “Symbolic Eschatology and the Apocalypticism o f Q,” p. 291 I begin w ith a short discussion on apocalypticism in general as a w ay to reit­ erate a description from m y earlier book on The Historical Jesus (103-106). This brief section is based on tw o recent articles, each giving a definition o f apocalyp­ ticism— one too narrow and the other too broad. They will serve, therefore, as an introduction to apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. Unemployed Wisdom. A bout tw enty years ago, Jonathan Z . Smith deliberately moved back from Jew ish and Christian apocalyptic materials to look at earlier Babylonian and Egyptian m odels, including especially "a variety o f full blown apocalypses from Egypt, spanning a period o f alm ost tw o millennia." He proposed the following definition, based on those materials: "Apocalypticism [is] wisdom lacking a royal patron. (A definition which will serve at least to question both the 'lachrymose theory' o f apocalypticism as grow ing out o f a situation o f general persecution and the popular recent theory that it reflects lower-class interests.). . . Apocalyp­ ticism is W isdom lacking a royal court and patron and therefore it surfaces dur­ ing the period o f Late Antiquity not as a response to religious persecution but as an expression o f the traum a o f the cessation o f native kingship. Apocalypticism is a learned rather than a popular religious phenomenon. It is widely distributed throughout the M editerranean world and is best understood as part o f the inner history o f the tradition within which it occurs rather than as a syncretism with foreign (m ost usually held to be Iranian) influences" (1975:141,1 4 9 , 154 - I 55 )A few qualifications, especially about that parenthetical remark concerning lower-class interests and situations o f persecution. Our written texts display, by definition, the scribal interests o f learned retainers or priests. It is another ques­ tion w h at popular rather than scribal apocalypticism would have looked like. There is no reason to presum e that the Great Tradition (that is, the tradition o f the tiny elite minority) did not have an equivalent in the Little Tradition (that is, the tradition o f the vast peasant majority) concerning apocalypticism. In any case, w h en Smith constructs w hat he calls “ a model Egyptian apocalypse,” he emphasizes that the w ithdraw al o f royal patronage is linked with the fact that "foreigners have appeared and are acting as if they w ere Egyptian" and notes that the ideal future involves the hope that "the foreigners shall be driven out" (1975*142.-143). I w ou ld consider foreign domination to be a form o f persecution and even concede that those so oppressed might w eep as well as w rite. Sm ith's definition is m uch too narrow.

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Perceived Deprivation. Adela Yarbro Collins wrote m ore recently that "apocalyptic faith often cor­ relates w ith

marginality,

cognitive

dissonance,

and

relative

deprivation.

‘M arginality’ is a sociological term referring to the social status o f an individual or group as anomalous, peripheral, or alien. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ refers to a state o f mind that arises when there is significant disparity betw een expectations and reality. ‘Relative deprivation’ is a closely related social-scientific term. Simple or absolute ‘deprivation’ describes the plight o f those affected b y unmistakable catastrophes and disasters, o f ‘the poorest o f the poor.' ‘Relative deprivation’ identifies the self-understanding o f those whose expectations or perceived needs are not being satisfied” (1992.306). I w ould want, how ever, even before proceed­ ing, to distinguish medically between perceived deprivation and patent paranoia and to balance m orally the experience o f p h o n a l or com m unal desperation and the imagination o f cosmic catastrophe as its solution. Collins also notes that apocalyptic scenarios can be invoked not only to sub­ vert but also to support the status quo. ‘‘Those partial -o the view o f apocalypti­ cism as socially revolutionary might ask whether the rhetoric supporting the social order has as good a claim to be called apocalyptic as th e opposing the cur­ rent order” (1992:307). Such pro-establishment usage often happens, as in medieval Christian apocalypticism, when counter-apocalypticism turns offensive scenarios into defensive ones. It can, o f course, be used in both directions, and that too has a long history. Jew ish prophecies in Daniel 2 and 7, written arcund 165 b . c . e ., looked to a Fifth Empire, after that o f the Babylonian, M edean, Per­ sian, and G reek dominations. In that ideal future God w ould give po w er to his ow n persecuted people under their angelic protectors. But Caius Velleius Paterculus, writing his Compendium o f Roman History in the early decades o f the first century C .E ., cited Aemilius Sura, writing in the early decades o f the second century

b . c . e .,

as explaining how the four empires o f the Assyrians, Medes,

Persians, and Macedonians ceded place to a Fifth Em pire as “ w orld po w er passed to the Rom an people” (1.6; Shipley 14-15). Such usage b y those in p o w er should not lead to Collins's conclusion that "the function o f apocalyptic literature and rhetoric m ay be described as the attempt to interpret the times in the universal fram ew ork o f the true m eaning o f reality and history and to m ove its audience to adopt that interpretation and to live in accordance w ith it" (1992:306, 307. 3 0 8)T h at is, o f course, a description o f religion in general and not o f apocalypticism in particular. I f Sm ith’s definition is too narrow, Collins’s is n o w too broad. Apocalypticism is the counterattack o f those w ho perceive them selves to be m arginalized religiously and/or theologically, spiritually an d/or m aterially, politi­

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cally an d/or econom ically, at a level too profound for any less radical solution. The disease is fatal; only transcendental intervention can effect a cure. It is against such an understanding that I consider apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. R adical Wisdom. Joh n Kloppenborg describes the eschatological message o f Q 1 within the Q Gospel in terms o f the social radicality o f the kingdom o f God. About the beati­ tudes, he notes, "T h ey pronounce blessing upon a group defined by social and economic circumstances: poverty, hunger, sorrow and persecution___ The beati­ tudes are 'anti-beatitudes’: they stand in contrast to the views o f the conventional wisdom that those w h o dwell in affluence and safety are blessed___ Seen in this light, the Q beatitudes, while not typically sapiential in content, could well be characterized as the 'radical wisdom o f the kingdom '___ Both the beatitudes and the admonitions [in Jesu s' inaugural sermon in Q] are sapiential forms infused with eschatological content; both evince the presence o f the kingdom, its radical nature and its radical demands” (19873:189). Later that same phrase is extended to describe the entire sapiential stratum o f Q 1 within the Q Gospel: "W ith some justi­ fication this stratum o f Q could be termed 'the radical wisdom o f the kingdom o f God.' T h e dawning kingdom motivates the radical ethic o f Q, and in turn the com m unity m em bers, by their mode o f symbolic action (voluntary poverty, non­ violence, love o f enemies, etc.), point to the presence o f the reign o f God among them” (19878:242). This means, as mentioned earlier with regard to Robinson’s generic title, Sayings o f the Sages, that "in contrast to the generally conservative com portm ent o f the [wisdom] instruction, Q presents an ethic o f radical discipleship which reverses m any o f the conventions which allow a society to operate, such as principles o f retaliation, the orderly borrowing and lending o f capital, appropriate treatment o f the dead, responsible self-provision, self-defense and honor o f parents” (19878:318). Again: “The sapiential speeches in Q, by means o f their radical com portm ent, serve a properly kerygmatic function and point to the radical nature o f the kingdom which is in the process o f manifesting itself. C orre­ spondingly, the imperatives specify the type o f radical ethic which is the charac­ teristic o f those w h o have responded appropriately to this new reality” (19873:320-321). Notice, once again for future reference, that Kloppenborg’s "radi­ cal w isdom ,” like A m al’s "inversionary w isdom " seen earlier, is not just a matter o f Jesu s' w ords or even faith in Jesu s’ words; rather, it is a matter o f accepting Jesu s’ lifestyle, follow ing Jesu s' program, and thereby living within the radicality o f God’s kingdom here and now . But what happens to this radical wisdom or sapiential eschatology o f Q 1 w hen Q2 is added onto it? Put another w ay, is the apocalypticism o f Q* the same as that o f Paul before it or Mark after it?

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Prim ary or Secondary. E ven w hen Q2 is added to Q 1 and the entire Q Gospel is proposing an apoca­ lyptic eschatology, it is more additive than constitutive, m ore corrective than determ inative, m ore secondary than prim ary. It is, in other words, a rather dif­ ferent brand o f apocalyptic eschatology from that o f Paul or Mark. I use the terms primary and secondary to distinguish the tw o types o f apocalypticism, but w hat is at stake in this distinction? Is the apocalypticism essential or peripheral? D oes it say, The end is imminent and therefore you m ust do this; i f it w ere not imminent, you would not have to do it. Or, You must do this, w hether the end is imminent or not; but you had better do it because it is com ing soon. T h e for­ m er says not to buy a mortgage because the end is com ing soon. T h e latter says not to rob a bank because the end is com ing soon. Apocalypticism, in the second understanding, is added on as a coercive and cosmic threat to obtain obedience to what one should be doing in any case. Kloppenborg calls this second or Q2-type apocalypticism symbolic eschatology (1987b). Notice, once again, that confusion o f term inology, but n o w (from the passage used as an epigraph to this section) with eschatology and apocalyptic as opposing concepts: "In any accounting o f Q, sapiential elements play a m ajor role. It is difficult to miss the pervasive eschatological tenor o f these w isdom ele­ ments. But it is another question whether the term apocalyptic is an accurate characterization for the redeployment o f these w isdom m aterials.. . . [I]t is important to ask w hether the presence o f an eschatological horizon justifies the label 'apocalyptic'" (1987^291-292). Kloppenborg argues that "Q uses threats o f judgm ent and unsettling apocalyptic metaphors, not because it speaks from an apocalyptic situation' o f anomie but because the sym bolic character o f apocalyp­ tic language could be turned to Q's particular aims" (1987^304). T h e basic m es­ sage o f the Q Gospel is still that o f Q 1, but now Q 1 is buttressed by the threatening sanctions o f Q2. “ Perhaps the most surprising o f all is Q 's restraint w h en describ­ ing the 'positive' outcom e o f eschatological intervention. W hile there is a virtual avalanche o f im ages concerning the judgm ent and destruction o f the impenitent, there is no m ention at all o f the resurrection and only passing references to the motifs o f cosmic transformation, re-creation, restoration, and the like" (1987:299)D avid Seeley has recently made a very similar point. In the Q Gospel, “ futur­ istic eschatology never appears in those passages w here the ethics and values on w h ich a com m unity might be based are set forth. Instead, w ith tw o exceptions [Q i2:54-56 and Q 17:40-41,] it appears only in those situations w h ere the ethics and values h ave already been set forth, but have encountered som e sort o f resis­ tance. . . . E ven in the tw o exceptions, there continues to be no link betw een futuristic eschatology and social form ation.” Furthermore, “ w hen one seeks out

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Q passages w hich do contain ethics and values, they are resistant to being read in futuristic, eschatological term s/' His conclusion, like Kloppenborg's, is that "futuristic eschatology w as a late development in the Q com munity, which w as built up w ithou t it. . . . Later on, after the community encountered resistance by outsiders and doubts b y insiders, it employed futuristic, eschatological threats” (144-145,152-153). T h e Q Gospel apocalypticism is certainly different from Pauline or even M arkan apocalypticism , but I do not find symbolic eschatology a very useful term to underline that distinction. I prefer apocalyptic eschatology for all three authors, distinguishing primary apocalyptic eschatology for Paul and M ark from secondary apocalyptic eschatology for Q2. I insist, o f course, that those terms are not judg­ m ents but descriptions. I have no presumption that prim ary is som ehow better than secondary. It is ju st different. Secondary apocalypticism is like a cosmic sanction— believed in, o f course, but added on as one's prim ary and essential m essage is refused and rejected. You had better listen, it says, or else you will be punished at any m om ent and without warning. M y term, therefore, for the com­ pleted Q Gospel is secondary apocalyptic eschatology, but by that I mean exactly the sam e concept as is described by Kloppenborg’s phrase symbolic eschatology. It is the presence or absence o f that theology that will determine in what follows w h en texts o f the C om m on Sayings Tradition have or have not been redacted w ithin the Q Gospel

Ascetical Eschatology T h e C hristology, or Jesusology, o fT h o m a s . . . derives from a naive applica­ tion o f m anifold [Jew ish] W isdom speculation to J e s u s . . . . Thom as’ sophiological C hristology [i.e., based on Jew ish wisdom speculation] existed prior to or in ignorance o f w h at m any call gnosticism .. . . [I]t can be considered gnostic in no m eaningful sense. Stevan L. Davies, The Gospel ofThomas and Christian Wisdom, pp. 146-147 Gnosticism seem s to provide the most likely theological fram ew ork within w hich to understand the esotericizing trend one finds throughout Thom as. It m ay be seen in a num ber o f sayings unique to Thom as, whose m eaning has becom e alm ost entirely opaque. But m ore importandy, it can be seen in the m anner in w hich T hom as treats a num ber o f sayings known also from the synoptic tradition. Stephen J. Patterson, Tire Gospel ofThomas and Jesus, p. 227 W hat exacdy is the theology o f the Gospel ofThomas 7 This is a m uch m ore dif­ ficult question than the preceding one concerning the theology o f the Q Gospel

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T h e view s given in those epigraphs are diametrically opposed to one another: it is not Gnostic for Davies; it is Gnostic for Patterson. Yet those tw o books are the best, clearest, and most thorough English-language interpretations o f this gospel. T here are actually tw o separate aspects to that disagreement— the second one, to m y mind, even m ore important than the first. The first question is w hether the theology o f the Gospel o f Thomas is Gnostic or non-Gnostic. T h e second question is whether that theology, be it Gnostic or non-Gnostic, is theoretical or practical. It may be helpful, before I begin that discussion, to repeat Kurt Rudolph’s defi­ nition o f Gnosticism, given as the epigraph to this book’s Prologue: "This 'religion o f knowledge’ or o f ‘insight’, as the Greek w ord gnosis m ay be translated, is . . . a dualistic religion, consisting o f several schools and movements, which took up a definitely negative attitude towards the world and the society o f the time, and pro­ claimed a deliverance (‘redemption’) o f man precisely from the constraints o f earthly existence through ‘insight’ into his essential relationship, whether as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ ,— a relationship temporarily obscured—w ith a supramundane realm o f freedom and o f rest. [It] spread through time and space, from the beginning o f our era onwards, from the western part o f the Near East (Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor) to central and eastern Asia and Mediaeval Europe (14th ce n t.).. . . One can almost say that Gnosis followed the Church like a shadow; the Church could never overcome it, its influence had gone too deep. By reason o f their com m on history they remain two— hostile— sisters” (1983:2,368). Presum ing som e such def­ inition o f Gnosis, should the Gospel o f Thomas be considered as gnostic, as a text o f gnostic Christianity? I now continue the discussion under three rubrics.

Future or Past. If your experience of the present world finds it radically amiss, you can only

go, in terms of time, either to future or to past to find that ideal or utopian world whose existence profoundly subverts present normalcies and fundamentally crit­ icizes present actualities. Negation of the present world goes either backward or forward in time to locate that perfect otherworld alternative. The Q Gospel, for example, could look forward to the end and imagine its perfect world through apocalyptic eschatology. But the Gospel o f Thomas chose the opposite path: it went backward to a perfect beginning rather than forward to a perfect ending. Begin with Jewish speculation about divine Wisdom and remember that, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, wisdom is a feminine noun: T h e Lord created m e [Wisdom] at the beginning o f his w ork, the first o f his acts o f long ago. A ges ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning o f the earth. (Proverbs 8:22-23)

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Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me [Wisdom], and for all the ages I shall not cease to be. (Sirach 24:9) F o r she [W isdom ] is a reflection o f eternal light, a spotless mirror o f the w ork ing o f God, and an image o f his goodness. (Wisdom 7:26) H old together creation, wisdom, light, and image, reread the creation account in Genesis i : i - 2 : 2 against that background, and apply those readings to Jesus and to Christians. G o d begins, in Genesis 1:3, by saying, " ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” So Jesu s says in the Gospel o f Thomas 77:1, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from m e all came forth, and to me all attained.” God ends his creative proclam ations, in Genesis 1:26-27, by saying, "L et us make humankind in our im age, according to our likeness,” and the story concludes, in Genesis 2:2, w ith these w ords: "[ 0 ]n the seventh day God finished the w ork that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the w ork that he had done.” So the Gospel o f Thomas 50 can present a small catechetical summary o f Christian existence derived from God, light, image, and rest: Jesu s said, " I f they say to you, ‘W here have you come from?’ say to them, ‘W e have com e from the light, from the place where the light came into being b y itself, established [itself], and appeared in their im age.’ If they say to you, 'Is it you?’ say, ‘W e are its children, and w e are the chosen o f the living Father.' I f they ask you, ‘W hat is the evidence o f your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is m otion and rest/” (Gospel o f Thomas 50:1-3) But w hat about Genesis 2-3? W hat about the story o f the first sin, the fall, and the expulsion from Eden? T o get back to that inaugural moment o f creation, o f w isdom and light, o f m otion and rest, you would have to get back before the story o f the fall. It w ould be necessary to get back before sin— better still even ear­ lier, before that androgynous being called Adam-the-Earthling was split into Adam-the-male and Eve-the-female. It w as that primal and as-yet-undivided being w ho w as made in G od ’s image. It was those split beings, Adam and Eve, w ho sinned, fell, and w ere expelled from paradise. The ideal state imagined b y the Gospel o f Thomas is that o f the primordial human being, Adam as one, as single and unsplit, as neither male nor female, as asexual. First came split, thence came the sexes, thence cam e sin. T h e Gospel o f Thomas is about returning to that inau­ gural m om ent at the dawn o f creation, before sin, before serpent, before split. It is about paradise regained from the past, not about parousia awaited in the future.

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Sapiential or Gnostic. All o f the preceding discussion is absolutely within the realm o f Jew ish wis­ dom speculation focused on cosmic origins as told in Genesis 1-3 and now applied to Jesu s and Christians. Stevan D avies is perfectly right to emphasize that background, and nobody has done it better than he has. H e is also technically correct to call it, not an eschatology about eschata, or last things, but a protology about prota, or first things. Both eschatology and protology, how ever, involve radical world-negation, and the term eschatology can be used fo r both as long as one recognizes that present time can be negated equally by looking to past beginnings or to future endings. But there is still the basic question o f w hether the eschatology (or protology) o f the Gospel o f Thomas is sapiential or Gnostic. Here is the evidence. First, the Gospel o f Thomas w as discovered within a Gnostic library at N ag Hammadi. That fact proves, h ow ever, not h o w it was written but how it was read. Other non-Gnostic collections o f sayings, such as the Teachings ofSylvanus and the Sentences o f Sextus, w ere also found am ong those codices, not to speak o f a section from Plato’s Republic. Second, its trajectory continued into the Book o f Thomas the Contender and the Acts o f Thomas. T h at fact proves where it w as going but not where it came from . Third, the Gospel o f Thomas certainly lacks the full theology o f later Gnosticism . It has, as D avies says, “ the lack o f Manichean or Marcionite dualism, the absence o f any m ythol­ ogy o f Sophia’s fall or o f Christ’s ascent or descent through hostile realm s popu­ lated by inimical Archons” or spirit-rulers (1983:146). Patterson, o f course, agrees with that assessment: “Thom as is not a full-blown gnostic gospel” (19933:227). His final and rather careful description is this: “W hat w e have in T h om as is a book which stands between the wisdom collection on the one hand, and the gnostic revelation dialogue, in which the redeemer reveals to his follow ers secret w ords o f knowledge (gnosis) on the other. It therefore helps to docum ent that very important, though m urky point o f modulation betw een Je w ish w isdom (and other N ear Eastern traditions which make use o f the descending/ascending redeem er mythos) and Gnosticism” (19933:227). W hat w e need to do is not continue an unproductive debate betw een G nos­ tic versus non-Gnostic but see if it is possible to describe the theology o f the Gospel o f Thomas in such a w ay that it could later go in either direction. A nd here a second and m ore serious disagreement about theory or praxis arises betw een D avies and Patterson. Its consideration m ay help to settle this first disagreem ent about the text’s being Gnostic or non-Gnostic.

Theoretical or Practical. The question is whether the Gospel o f Thomas advocated a purely internal renunciation of material goods and worldly interests but allowed or presumed their full external usage (accompanied, of course, by spiritual detachment), or

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w hether it dem anded specific social actions, such as asceticism and celibacy. W as the return to a pre-split stage at the dawn o f creation effected precisely b y celi­ bate asceticism? D avies thinks that "the degree to which this renunciation is to govern social behavior is debatable. ‘I f you do not fast as regards the world, you will not find the kingdom ' (saying 27) probably advocates avoiding the ordinary perspective on the w o rld in favor o f the preferred perspective, i f fasting is o f this intellectual variety, it m eans that one cannot hold tw o contradictory perspectives simultane­ ously. In other w ords, the w orld cannot be understood to be the kingdom and, at the sam e tim e, not to be the kingdom. Since fasting from food is disapproved twice (sayings 14, 104) and no ascetic praxis is otherwise recommended, fasting from the w orld m ust not be considered asceticism" (1992:673). I disagree. The reason tem porary fasting on this day or that is negated in the Gospel o f Thomas, along w ith all other ordinary piety, is that it is not nearly radical enough. One does not tem porarily fast from bread; one permanently fasts from the world. My ow n w orking hypothesis, therefore, is that worldly renunciation in the Gospel of Thomas involved very specific praxis— namely, celibate asceticism. It may be left open w hether all Thom as Christians observed such rigor or whether there was, as is com m on in such world-negating religions, a differentiation between the m inority o f the perfect and the elect (the spiritual elite who accepted full external renunciation) and the m ajority o f ordinary believers (who accepted, at best, an internal detachment). In any case, on this point, Patterson is much more persua­ sive than D avies. Patterson proposes at the start o f his book that "the dominant ethos am ong Thom as Christians w as a kind o f social radicalism . . . including (though not pri­ marily) hom elessness, w illful poverty, begging, the rejection o f family and local piety, and a critique o f the political powers that be" (19933:4). He repeats that thesis at the book’s conclusion: “ [In the Gospel o f Thomas] the rejection o f apoca­ lyptic eschatology in favor o f the notion that the kingdom might be actualized here and n o w coordinates w ell w ith the social radicalism o f this m ovem ent. Social radicalism is the attempt to live out o f an alternative reality, an alternative dominion. As such, it is the praxis o f a theological vision” (19933:214). It is practi­ cal not ju st theoretical, physical not just mental, material not just intellectual. It is o f the body and not ju st o f the mind. It touches society not just as an idea but as an action. Furtherm ore, for Patterson “ this is not realized eschatology, it is actualized eschatology. I f the kingdom is to exist at all, it is up to Thom as Christianity to make it exist, to be the leaven (Thom 96), to shine in the w orld (Thom 24), to enable people to see the kingdom in its full potential ‘spread out upon the earth’ (Thom 113). In this w a y the kingdom is present, it is real. It must be tended, lest

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it slip aw ay (Thom 97); it must be kept in shape, w ell practiced (Thom 98)” (19933:210). In that sense the better term might be realizable or actualizable escha­ tology rather than either realized or actualized. It is som ething potential and pos­ sible, not ju st actual and accomplished. Term s such as Patterson's "social radical­ ism” for the Gospel o f Thomas and Kloppenborg s “radical w isdom ” for the Q Gospel help flesh out what Koester termed the "realized eschatology” o f those twin texts. Even m ore important, though, they indicate that eschatology w as realized or realizable not just in the words but in the deeds o f Jesu s and his com ­ panions. It w as actualized or actualizable not ju st in the ideas but in the lives o f Jesus and his companions. It w as an eschatology present in the w isdom o f social radicalism. I agree strongly with Patterson against D avies that the theology o f the Gospel o f Thomas had public social consequences. Next, the social radicalism o f the Gospel o f Thomas involved celibate asceti­ cism. “I f eschatology,” as Patterson continues, “ is a m ythological challenge to the world as it exists, the mythological expression o f hope for som ething better, asceticism offers a real, present challenge to the world. It calls into question the ways o f the world, its standards, its goals, its notion o f w h at is m eaningful in life. Thom as Christianity's social radicalism, as a form o f asceticism, has precisely this effect" (i993a:2ii). Finally, it is quite possible to derive celibate asceticism from the type o f Je w ­ ish speculations about wisdom 's role in Genesis 1-3 that w as seen above. Y ou could even claim that celibate asceticism w as an im perative hidden within those texts and that esoteric or secret wisdom was involved. But the Gospel o f Thomas seeks to find such hidden wisdom not only in Genesis 1-3 but in the w ords o f Jesus, so that they becom e themselves a source o f hidden w isdom . In other words, for the Gospel o f Thomas, ascetic world-negation is also esoteric, secret, hidden. T h e text demands, in its opening words, that one understands “ the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didym os Judas T hom as recorded,” for, as Jesu s said, “ W hoever discovers the interpretation o f these sayings w ill not taste death.” It is necessary at this point to distinguish such esoteric ascetical eschatology from ordinary ascetical eschatology. In that latter theology one aban­ dons the w orld because it is too tempting or distracting. Such an ascetical escha­ tology m ight appeal to com m on sense or even to rational-choice theory. It m ight argue that it is obviously m ore 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 o f Thomas is esoteric ascetical eschatology, a world-negation based on secret w isdom dem anding celibacy as return to the unsplit state o f the Primal Androgynous Being. Som e thoughts in sum m ary. The debate over Gnostic versus non-Gnostic status for the Gospel o f Thomas is not productive. As D avies has dem onstrated

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quite adequately, that gospel can be totally understood within Jew ish specula­ tion about creation, wisdom , and Genesis 1-3— and could have been so under­ stood even if Gnosticism had never existed. On the other hand, since Gnosticism did exist, it is hard not to see in the Gospel o f Thomas what Patterson has called "rudim entary Gnosticism /’ even while admitting that "the extent o f [its] gnosticizing character is not yet fully charted” and that it "is not a full blow n gnostic gospel” (19933:218, 133, 226). It is, in fact, precisely a borderline text that could have been pulled either toward or aw ay from gnosticism. It was, as history unfolded, pulled m ore in the form er direction. I find, how ever, that it is much m ore helpful to define it in terms that specify m ore closely than Gnostic or nonGnostic its precise form o f world-negation. It is, as I have noted, esoteric ascetical eschatology, and it is the presence or absence o f that theology that will determine in w hat follow s w h en texts o f the Com m on Sayings Tradition have been re­ dacted (or not) within the Gospel o f Thomas.

C H A P T E R 16

ETHICAL ESCHATOLOGY H e com es to us as One unknown, without a name, as o f old, by the lake­ side, H e cam e to those m en w h o knew Him not. He speaks to us the same w ord: "F o llo w thou m e!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for ou r tim e. H e com m ands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be w ise or sim ple, H e w ill reveal H im self in the toils, the conflicts, the suffer­ ings w h ich they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable m ystery, they shall leam in their ow n experience W ho He is. A lb e r t S c h w e it z e r ,

T h e Q u e s t o f th e H is t o r ic a l J e s u s ,

p. 402

T o recall w h ere w e are, connect Pattersons fourfold typology for the redac­ tion o f the C om m on Sayings Tradition (discussed in Chapter 14) with the two eschatological theologies o f the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. The statistics w ou ld n o w read like this: T yp e 1: 24% (9 out o f 37 units) is redacted toward esoteric ascetical eschatol­ o gy in the Gospel o f Thomas but not toward secondary apocalyp­ tic eschatology in the Q Gospel. T yp e 2:

8% (3 out o f 37 units) is redacted toward secondary apocalyptic eschatology in the Q Gospel but not toward esoteric ascetical eschatology in the Gospel o f Thomas.

T y p e 3 : 19% (7 out o f 37 units) is redacted both toward esoteric ascetical eschatology in the Gospel o f Thomas and also toward secondary apocalyptic eschatology in the Q Gospel. T ype 4: 49% (18 out o f 37 units) is redacted neither toward esoteric ascetical eschatology in the Gospel o f Thomas nor toward secondary apoca­ lyptic eschatology in the Q Gospel. T h at data presses the question already asked by Patterson: " I f Q and Thomas lie on diverging trajectories each grounded in, yet m oving aw ay from , an early sapiential tradition, w h at can be said about this early tradition itself}” (1993^194).

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N egatively, w e already know what that "early tradition” is not. It is neither eso­ teric ascetical eschatology nor secondary apocalyptic eschatology. Positively, then, w h at is it? That is m y prim ary question in this chapter: W hat ideology or th eology or eschatology is present in the Com m on Sayings Tradition? In answer I identify w hat I term ethical eschatology, a doctrine w hose presence in the C om ­ m on Sayings Tradition I will demonstrate in Part V II. But first, here in the con­ cluding chapter to Part VI, I want to introduce and think about this third type o f eschatology. I very deliberately chose both the epigraph above and the next one below from Albert Schweitzer, w ho lived from 1875 to 1965. In 1906 he published a review o f preceding historical Jesus research (reissued in 1969) and pronounced it flawed to the core because it refused to face the eschatological vision o f Jesus. 1 begin with Schweitzer because he points forcibly to the twin difficulties in under­ standing that eschatology. First, he him self equates the terms apocalyptic and eschatology, and he does so without any explicit discussion. (He generally uses the term eschatology, but in such a w ay that it means apocalyptic.) Indeed, the termi­ nological and even logical confusion seen in Chapter 15— confusion that has per­ vaded contemporary discussion o f eschatology and apocalypticism— stems in no small measure from Schweitzer himself. Second, while he describes Jesu s as a misguided apocalyptic eschatologist, he still thinks it quite possible to follow Jesus; indeed, he finds it mandatory for the Christian to do so. T h e epigraph above cites the closing lines o f his pow erful 1906 classic. But are his w ords just climactic gush, romantic peroration, Renan in German? For this is the question they invoke: W hat type o f eschatology is both inaccurate and im perative, both misguided and mandatory, both w rong and right at the sam e time?

Out o f Europe M en feared that to admit the claims o f eschatology w ou ld abolish the signifi­ cance o f His words for our time; and hence there w as a feverish eagerness to discover in them any elements that might be considered not eschatologically co n d ition ed .. . . But in reality that which is eternal in the w ords o f Jesu s is due to the ve ry fact that they are based on an eschatological w orld view , and contain the expression o f a mind for which the contem porary w orld w ith its historical and social circumstances no longer had any existence. . . . Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, m odem theology is determ ined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching o f Jesus. T herein lies its w eakness. T h e w orld affirms itself automatically; the m odem spirit cannot b ut affirm it. But w h y on that account abolish the conflict betw een m o d em life, w ith the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a w h ole, and the world-negating spirit ofjesu s? W hy spare the spirit o f the individual m an

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its appointed task o f fighting its w ay through the world-negation o fje s u $, o f contending w ith Him at every step over the value o f material and intellec­ tual goods— a conflict in which it may never rest? . . . This general affirma­ tion o f the w orld, how ever, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianized and transfigured by the personal rejection o f the w orld w hich is preached in the sayings o f Jesus. A lb e r t S c h w e itz e r ,

T h e Q u e s t o f th e H i s t o r i c a l J e s u s ,

p . 40 2

T h e w ord s I italicized in that epigraph are basic to m y argument. In the first paragraph Schw eitzer sets up a dichotomy between Jesus' eschatological mes­ sage and those m odem s w h o refuse to accept it as such. But the next paragraph switches the dichotom y to one between the world-negating message o f Jesus and the w orld-affirm ing interpretation o f m odem researchers. Schweitzer reiter­ ates that disjunction a few times within that same paragraph. On the one hand, there is the ‘ world-accepting ethic . . . world-affirming sp irit. . . general affirma­ tion o f the w o rld ” from m odem s. On the other, there is the “ world-negating spirit . . . world-negation . . . personal rejection o f the w orld” from Jesus. For Schweitzer, then, eschatology and world-negation are synonyms. Schweitzer, h ow ever, also interjects the term apocalyptic into this debate. On the one hand, he uses eschatology and apocalyptic to mean the same thing, refer­ ring on subsequent pages to, first, “ the eschatology o f the time o f Jesus” (1969:368) and, then, “ the apocalyptic m ovem ent at the time o f Jesus” (1969:370). On the other hand, in betw een, he distinguishes between “two eschatologies”— one prophetic, w ith Elijah as hero, and one apocalyptic, with Daniel as hero. He distinguishes them b y claim ing that apocalyptic eschatology is created by “ exter­ nal events,” w hile prophetic eschatology is created by "great personalities” (1969:369-370), a distinction w hose romanticism would probably not hold up w ell to close scrutiny. But, leaving that explanation aside, w e now have (1) escha­ tology used as a genus w ith at least tw o species (apocalyptic and prophetic) and (2) eschatology used as a synonym for one o f those species. That, I think, is the root o f our definitional problem . Y o u cannot have it both w ays; yo u cannot, under any definitions, have apocalyptic equal to apocalyptic eschatology equal to eschatology. W hen yo u attem pt to do so, you privilege one species as equal to its genus. Schw eitzer reconstructed a Jesus w h o was quite w rong about the imm inent end o f the w orld and w as quite mistaken in his attempt to force the hand o f G od b y going deliberately tow ard m artyrdom in Jerusalem . This is his ju stly famous description o f that delusion: "T h ere is silence all around. T h e Baptist appears, and cries: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom o f H eaven is at hand.' Soon after that com es Jesus, and in the know ledge that H e is the com ing Son o f M an lays hold o f the w heel o f the w orld to set it m oving on that last revolution w hich is to bring all

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ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throw s H im self upon it. T h en it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead o f bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body o f the one immeasurably great Man, w ho was strong enough to think o f H im self as the spiritual ruler o f mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign” (1969:370-371). All o f that is clear enough, but, having interpreted Jesu s as flatly w ro n g in his mission and message, Schweitzer did not respond by leaving the Christian church. He responded by leaving imperial Europe. And this, in his ow n words, w as how his friends reacted: “W hat seemed to m y friends the m ost irrational thing in m y plan was that I wanted to go to Africa, not as a m issionary, but as a doctor, and thus when already thirty years o f age burdened m yself as a begin­ ning with a long period o f laborious s t u dy . . . . I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to w ork without having to talk. For years I had been givin g m yself out in words, and it was with jo y that I had followed the calling o f theological teacher and o f preacher. But this new form o f activity I could not represent to m yself as being talking about the religion o f love, but only as an actual putting it into practice” (1933:114-115). The irony is, o f course, that he would not have been accepted as a mission­ ary. He was barely accepted, because o f his historical criticism o f the N e w Testa­ ment, even as a doctor. The Paris Missionary Society's C om m ittee had recently turned down a missionary “because his scientific conviction did not allow him to answer with an unqualified Yes the question w hether he regarded the Fourth Gospel as the w o rk o f the Apostle John.” W hen Schw eitzer w as invited to appear before that same committee to be examined on his orthodoxy, he declined. Jesus, he said, had conducted no such examination on his first disciples. H e had only asked them "to follow H im ." As a com prom ise, Schw eitzer agreed to visit the com m ittee members individually and allow theological questions on that basis. H e w as eventually accepted, but with tw o conditions. H e w as not to confuse the missionaries with his learning or the natives w ith his preaching (1933:138-139). That w as Schweitzer in 1913. N ow let me back up to an earlier point in his autobiography. T h e idea o f going to Africa had been in his m ind for a long time. It w as “ conceived so long ago as m y student days. It struck m e as incom prehensi­ ble that I should be allowed to lead such a happy life, while I saw so m any people around m e wrestling with care and suffering. Even at school I had felt stirred w h enever I got a glimpse o f the miserable hom e surroundings o f som e o f m y schoolfellows and com pared them with the absolutely ideal conditions in which w e children o f the parsonage at Günsbach lived___ I could not help thinking con­ tinually o f others w h o w ere denied that happiness b y their material circumstances

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or their health. Then one brilliant summer morning at Gunsbach, during the W hitsuntide holidays— it was in 1896— there came to me, as I awoke, the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter o f course, but must give som e­ thing in return for i t . . . . I would consider m yself justified in living till I w as thirty for science and art, in order to devote m yself from that time forward to the direct service o f hum anity. M any a time already had I tried to settle what m eaning lay hidden for m e in the saying o f Jesus! ‘W hosoever would save his life shall lose it, and w hosoever shall lose his life for M y sake and the Gospels shall save it.’ N o w the answ er w as found. In addition to the outward, I now had inward happiness” (1933:102-103). His first thought was "som e activity in Europe,” and he worked there for a time, educating "abandoned or neglected children” and helping "tram ps and discharged prisoners” (1933:103-104). This social work, which he did in conjunction with scholarly research, did not surprise anyone. W hat his friends found som ew hat scandalous, as he admitted above, was giving up theological investigation for medical study and Europe for Africa. Schweitzer's ow n life warns us that his apocalyptic eschatology may not be as simple as w e think. He summarized Jesu s’ message, in one o f the quotations above, as announcing the arrival o f the kingdom o f God, "that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close” (1969:370). I take that to mean the end o f the space-time universe. After that consummation, only some sort o f heaven or hell could be imagined. N o life on this earth, how ever ideal or utopian, could be proclaim ed by such a vision. W e have, if I understand Schweitzer’s Jesus correctly, not heaven on earth but earth in heaven. But Schweitzer, having described Jesu s’ vision as flady wrong, offered us the first epigraph above, that famous closure to his book on the search for the historical Jesus.

Those words, however, are only words—powerful and beautiful words, to be sure, but still just magnificent crescendo to a magnificent book. But we also know what Schweitzer had intended to do for a full decade before he ever wrote those words—what he ultimately d id do. He did not leave Christianity because Jesus was wrong; he left Europe because Jesus was right. And, in case we might miss the point, he reminds us in his autobiography that he left home "on Good Friday 1913” (1933:210). He went to Lambarene, inland from the Atlantic coast and just south of the equator on the River Ogowe, in what was then the French colony of Gaboon. He and Helen Bresslau, whom he married in 1912, went at their own expense to spare the Paris Missionary Society any financial burden. But they had to obtain subsidies somewhere, and that meant “a round of begging visits among my acquaintances,” during which “the tone of my reception became markedly differ­ ent when it came out that I was there, not a visitor but as a beggar” (1933:136). Ju d gin g b y Schweitzer’s com m itm ent to service, Jesu s’ challenging “worldnegation” w as profoundly right, even though its apocalyptic or eschatological

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expression w as misguided and even deluded. That world-negation demanded o f Schw eitzer a very precise response. W hen his friends asked w h y he had not cho­ sen to be a missionary in Africa or a doctor in Europe— in other words, why, specifically, a doctor in Africa— he explained that it w as all very personal and indi­ vidual. It w as not political or social. Nevertheless, it had, at base, to do with ethics and injustice, with the intuition that hum an inequality cannot simply be ignored or accepted. I am being very careful not to make Schweitzer a liberation theologian ahead o f his time. He did not say that European greed had created African mis­ ery. He did not raise economic, political, and social issues. H e did not act in radi­ cal protest against European imperialism (which, w hen he left for Africa, had about six more months to live before it brought dow n on itself horrors as insuf­ ferable as any it had earlier inflicted on its colonies). H e did not say that he was withdrawing from the colonial evils created by his country and his continent and that, in protest against them, he was heading o ff to heal w h at they had hurt. It was not apocalyptic eschatology that sent the Schweitzers to Africa, although in 1913 the European world was staggering toward Arm ageddon. It w as not ascetical eschatology that sent them there, although their lives in Africa w ere probably harder than those in many monasteries. I need another term for w h at it was, and ethical eschatology is the best I can discover. I repeat that this eschatology is, as it w ere, a personal and individual ending-of-one's-world, but its logic, w hether Schweitzer knew it or not, pointed beyond itself. He knew that it pointed back to Jesus, but he did not say that it pointed toward resisting system ic evil in politi­ cal and economic (not just in personal and individual) w ays.

Jesus, Schweitzer might have said, was completely right and completely wrong about eschatology. Schweitzer, I would say, was completely right and completely wrong about Jesus. But, in both cases, it is the right that was determi­ native, the wrong that was irrelevant. Schweitzer called his autobiography Out o f M y Life and Thought, and that order is significant. Did Schweitzer get the histori­ cal Jesus right or wrong? In his thought he got him wrong, but in his life he got him right. And so, most appropriately, he received the Nobel Prize not for litera­ ture but for peace.

Itinerant Radicalism Their ethical radicalism makes Jesus’ sayings absolutely impracticable as a regu­ lative for every-day behavior. So we are faced all the more inescapably with the question: Who passed on sayings like these by word of mouth over a period of thirty years and more? Who took them seriously?. . . The sayings tradition is characterized by an ethical radicalism that is shown most noticeably

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in the renunciation of a home, family, and possessions. From the precepts that have to do with these things, we can arrive analytically at some conclusions about the life-style that was characteristic of the people who passed on the texts-----We can now formulate our thesis: the ethical radicalism of the sayings transmitted to us is the radicalism of itinerants___ It is only in this context that the ethical precepts which match the way of life can be passed on without being unconvincing-----And that was possible only for homeless charismatics. G e r d T h e is s e n ,

S o c i a l R e a l i t y a n d th e E a r l y C h r i s t i a n s ,

p p . 36, 37, 40

The words I italicized in that epigraph indicate why I chose the term ethical eschatology for the perspective found in the Common Sayings Tradition. That

new label combines, as it were, the "eschatology” of "world-negation” from Schweitzer with "ethical radicalism” from Theissen. Lest you imagine, by the way, that I am inventing some unique theology for a unique Jesus, let me assure you that I find ethical eschatology in the nonviolent resistance to structural evil put forward by such diverse people as the Jain Mahatma Gandhi, the Catholic Dorothy Day, and the Protestant Martin Luther King, Jr. If enough people lived like they did—lived in nonviolent protest against systemic evil, against the nor­ malcies of this world’s discrimination, exploitation, and oppression—the result would be a new world we could hardly imagine. That is eschatology—possibly the only real type available to us. But, in any case, back to Theissen. Although I am adapting his language, my ethical eschatology is somewhat different from his ethical radicalism. I emphasize

initially, however, my great respect for his foundational work on this subject and my profound gratitude for his contribution. When Theissen introduced this subject almost twenty-five years ago, he dis­ cussed earliest Christianity in the Jewish homeland using words translated as "itin­ erant radicalism,” “ethical radicalism,” “wandering charismatics,” and "charismatic begging.” Later he also drew attention to the similarities between those itinerant preachers and the Cynic missionaries of the first two centuries (1992:33-59)- But he also emphasized the local communities who supported those itinerants, devoting one chapter in his Sociology o f Early Palestinian Christianity to the "wandering charismatics” and a second one to "the sympathizers in the local com m unitiesIn that book, he noted that "there was a complementary relationship between the wandering charismatics and the local communities: wandering charismatics were the decisive spiritual authorities in the local communities and local communities were the indispensable social and material basis for the wandering charismat­ ics-----It is impossible to understand the Jesus movement and the synoptic tradi­ tion exclusively in terms of the wandering charismatics. In addition to them there were ‘local communities’, settled groups of sympathizers” (1978:7,17).

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Richard H orsley criticizes Theissen's analysis on several m ajor points. First, he finds his sociological basis too conservative to handle adequately the radical critique o f society stem ming from Jesu s’ program . “ W hat appears in the Gospel traditions to pose a sharp challenge to the ruling groups o f the society is transformed, b y means o f functionalist sociology, into a m ovem ent supposedly striv­ ing to control conflict and maintain the social system " (1989:39). A sociology emphasizing conflict and resistance w ould have been m ore useful for Theissen than one emphasizing functional harm ony and structural balance. Second, despite using the w ord complementarity to describe the relationship between itinerants and householders, betw een wandering charismatics and local supporters, Theissen seems regularly to privilege those itinerant charismatics as som ehow m ore important, m ore significant, and even m ore Christian. And yet, as Horsley notes, there are key sayings that “give regulations fo r the w ay in which traveling preachers and healers are to obtain support from local com m u­ nities. T hey thus provide for a sort o f elementary division o f labor within the nascent Jesus m ovem ent. There is simply no justification in the sources for Theissen’s writing . . . as if the Jesus m ovem ent consisted prim arily o f wandering charismatics. Similarly, Theissen's contention that the w andering charismatics are the key to understanding the Jesus m ovem ent is simply not borne out by the evidence" (1989:50). That is surely correct. W hen Jesus tells people to do the same he is doing in crucial sayings to be seen below— for exam ple, the Q Gospel in Luke 10:4-11 or Mark 6:7-13— there is an interaction o f eating and healing, o f itinerants and householders, o f the destitute and the poor. Third, concerning those last-mentioned sayings, H orsley contends that "the 'mission’ would thus appear to have m ore to do with the revitalization o f local com m unity life than with a new, itinerant ‘w ay o f life’ as an object in itself. The key seems to be the purpose and pattern o f the itinerancy as focused on social renewal, not an individual life-style o f self-sufficiency and independence" (1989:117). T h at is, once again, quite correct, and I consider b elo w h o w precisely that 'revitalization o f local community life” actually operates within the dialectic o f itinerant and householder. Finally, in terms o f Theissen’s parallels between the kingdom-of-God m ove­ ment and the Cynic movement, Horsley states that "whereas the Cynics lived with­ out hom e and possessions as an intentional 'w ay o f life,’ the delegates o f Jesus left hom e, possessions, and family behind temporarily as an unavoidable but m ore inci­ dental matter necessitated by their mission" (1989:117, m y italics). That, I think, is but h alf right. There is, as w e shall see below, a clear difference between the symbolic attire o f the Cynic itinerants and that o f the kingdom itinerants. For the former, tak­ ing a knapsack and staff indicated personal self-sufficiency. For the latter, not taking a knapsack and staff indicated communal dependency. So far so good. But did all those

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fierce and terrible sayings about home, family, and possessions mean only temporary departures and transient abandonments? That brings up a much m ore telling critique and a m uch better explanation o f what was actually at stake. A bout a decade before Horsley, W olfgang Stegemann criticized Theissen's itinerancy proposal on an even m ore fundamental issue. Did those itinerants leave hom e, fam ily, and possessions voluntarily at the call o f Jesus, or had they lost them all already? W as Jesus demanding dispossession or presuming it? “The concept o f ‘ethical norm s' (or ‘ethical radicalism’) assumes that voluntary renunci­ ations are in question h e r e .. .. The ‘lack o f possessions’ means for Theissen a ‘renunciation o f possessions’ and not simply the situation o f the poor person w ho has nothing. T h e abandonment o f family . . . is not the result o f some social constraint but an ‘ethical’ consequence o f the call to discipleship. For this reason Theissen ju stly com pares the early Christian wandering charismatics to the wan­ dering C ynic philosophers. These two movements, as Theissen sees them, did not m ake an ethical virtue out o f social necessity (beggary), but took real beg­ gary as the m odel for their ow n deviant behavior” (155). T h at presses hard on the basic issue. W as this itinerancy voluntary in origin? Did it begin as som e form o f freely chosen renunciation? W as it, in other words, asceticism? Stegem ann suggests an alternative reading, which is better than Theissen’s voluntary abandonment or H orsley’s temporary abandonment o f nor­ mal life. “T h e first followers o f Jesus, like their master, w ere from the poor and hungry, not as the result o f any renunciation o f possessions but because in fact they possessed nothing” (166). He suggests that m odem well-off exegetes may find that difficult to take, because criticism is then “voiced not by ethically moti­ vated heroes o f renunciation but by probably very unattractive characters” (166). T o be accurate, h ow ever, Theissen him self had mentioned (but not emphasized) that sam e point, not in his original 1974 essay but in a 1977 article: “ It has no doubt b y n ow becom e clear that most socially uprooted people came from the middle classes. It w as the people w ho had declined into poverty, rather than the people b o m in poverty, w h o set out to pass their lives beyond the boundaries o f normal life, or even to seek for w ays o f renewing society” (1992:88). W hile that term "m iddle classes” m ay be inaccurate for first-century realities, the distinction betw een “ declined” or “b o m ” into poverty is crucial for understandingjesus and his first com panions. I accept, therefore, Theissen’s proposal and Stegemann s emphasis that the kingdom-of-God m ovem ent began by making “an ethical virtue out o f social necessity”— that is, by refusing to accept the injustice they w ere experiencing as normal and acceptable to God. Those first itinerants were, like Jesus himself, pri­ marily dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, or sharecroppers. T h ey w ere not invited to give up everything but to accept their loss o f everything as judging not

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them but the system that had done it to them. It was ethical to accept the aban­ donm ent o f such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy. This understanding will be clarified in studying individual units from the C o m m on Sayings Tradition in the next chapter. Before w e turn to that, though, I w ant to look in conclusion at apocalypticism, asceticism, and ethicism as modes o f eschatology separate from one another but capable o f diverse combinations w ith one another.

Apocalypticism, Asceticism, Ethicism The conflict over, and eventual triumph of, asceticism should not be cast in terms o f a debate on the holy, or o f a reaction against rationalism and a rise in superstition and credulity, but in terms o f the nature o f po w er in society. On the one side is structure, institution, authority, and accepted norms, on the other is inspiration, individualism, charismatic leadership, and alternative val­ ues. So long as the latter nexus was perceived as antithetical to and destruc­ tive o f the former, the radical ascetic, w ho was the locus o f these phenom ­ ena, would remain suspect and an enemy to the prevailing social order.

James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue, p. 185 Eschatology is divine radicality. It is a fundamental negation o f the present w orld's normalcy based on some transcendental mandate. In the tradition with which w e are involved, that transcendental mandate w as the w ill or law o f the covenantal God o f Judaism . That God, as w e saw in Chapter 12, w as a God o f justice and righteousness for all the earth, a God w ho stood on the side o f the oppressed against the oppressor, a God w ho opposed system ic evil not because it w as systemic but because it w as evil. In that tradition the kingdom o f G od w as alw ays an eschatological challenge. It stood against the kingdom o f injustice and undermined, in vision and program, its seem ing inevitability. T h e prim ary indication that the Com m on Sayings Tradition w as eschatolog­ ical is that it, like the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas after it, speaks repeatedly o f the kingdom o f God. This is the evidence in sum m ary statistics (with the details given in Appendix 6): Gospel o f Thomas

17 instances in 132 sayings

13%

Q Gospel

10 instances in 101 sayings

10%

C om m on Sayings Tradition

4 instances in 37 sayings

11%

T h at is a relatively constant percentage across those three sources. A nd it show s, above all, that the kingdom— be it o f God, o f the Father, or o f the h eav­

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ens— w as solidly there in the tradition from the earliest evidence w e have. (All those qualifications, b y the w ay, indicate the same reality.) Kingdom eschatology did n ot arise in either the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas. It was already there in the C om m on Sayings Tradition. W e are, in other words, dealing with three divergent eschatologies o f the kingdom o f God. D IS T IN C T IO N A N D C O M B IN A TIO N Apocalyptic eschatology (or apocalypticism) negates this world by announcing that in the future, and usually the imminent future, God will act to restore ju s­ tice in an unjust world. W hether the result will be earth in heaven or heaven on earth can rem ain quite vague and open. W hether the space-time universe o f ordinary experience w ill continue or not can also remain vague and open. But tw o aspects are not negotiable i f apocalypticism is intended. One aspect is that the prim ary event is an interventional act o f God. Hum an actors m ay certainly be im portant in preparation, by their sufferings, in initiation, by their symbolic activities, or even in cooperation, b y military action under angelic or divine con­ trol. All o f those hum an details m ay be open for discussion, but what is not debatable is that som e intervening act o f overwhelm ing divine pow er is im ag­ ined and invoked. In plain language, w e are waiting for God. T h e other aspect that is not negotiable is the total absence o f evil and injus­ tice after the apocalyptic consum m ation takes place. It will not be just a case o f kinder, gentler injustice but o f a perfectly just world. There will be no evil or evildoers in this postapocalyptic world. One could imagine an apocalyptic revela­ tion o f G od such that all humans thereafter w ould freely and voluntarily live together in perfect justice, peace, and love. W illingly and without constraint. That is, after all, h o w theology has always explained human free will in an afterthis-life heaven. But that is not the standard apocalyptic scenario for the unjust. There is all too often a transition from justice to revenge, a divine vengeance that results in hum an slaughter. W hen those two aspects are combined, apoca­ lyptic eschatology alm ost inevitably presumes a violent God w ho establishes the justice o f nonviolence through the injustice o f violence. That m ay w ell be under­ standable in particular hum an circumstances. That m ay w ell be understandable w hen a genocide o f them from above is invoked to prevent their genocide o f us here below . But all too often, be it o f pagans by Jew s or o f Je w s b y Christians, apocalypticism is perceived as a divine ethnic cleansing whose genocidal heart presumes a violent G od o f revenge rather than a nonviolent G od o f justice. Ascetical eschatology (or asceticism) negates this w orld by withdrawing from normal hum an life in terms o f food, sex, speech, dress, or occupation. It m ay be personal, as w ith herm its or anchorites, or communal, as w ith nuns and monks. It m ay be conducted privately so that nobody else knows about it o r done

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publicly so that everyone knows about it. It m ay be practiced in small caves w ithin the emptiness o f the desert or lived behind high w alls in the midst o f the city. Because it involves celibacy, if enough people accepted the ascetic vision, this hum an w orld w ould quite surely and definitely com e to an end. Ascetical eschatology postulates a divine vocation and, indeed, requires constant divine em pow erm ent to be hum anly tolerable. I m yself was a m onk for tw enty years in a Rom an Catholic medieval order, and it was understood that, during the firsty ea r novitiate, one w ould not be allowed hom e for any fam ily funerals. Even a parent’s funeral belonged “ to the w orld,” and w e no longer did. W e w ere "ou t o f this world.” That was in 1950, and observance was strict. (In 1951, com ing from Ireland to the United States, I was sent on the first berth available. It happened to be second-class on the Queen Mary. That too w as out o f this w orld.) T here are many different explanations for the need for ascetical eschatology. T h e world could be intrinsically evil as the product o f an evil creator. It could have becom e evil because o f human injustice. It could be good but simply inferior to higher realities. The material world and the physical body could be taken as distractions to mind, soul, or spirit. Though reasons and explanations can differ, even funda­ mentally, the lifestyle o f celibate asceticism remains the sam e. O ne withdraws from the world’s norm alcy by abstaining totally from sex and procreation and abstemiously from food or drink and from speech or conversation. Ethical eschatology (or ethicism) negates the world by actively protesting and nonviolently resisting a system judged to be evil, unjust, and violent. It is not a question o f this group or that government needing some changes or im prove­ ments. Ethical eschatology is directed at the world’s normal situation o f discrimina­ tion and violence, exploitation and oppression, injustice and unrighteousness. It looks at the systemic or structural evil that surrounds and envelops us all and, in the nam e o f God, refuses to cooperate or participate any longer in that process. Instead, it sets out to oppose systemic evil without succumbing to its ow n violence. In ethidsm , as distinct from apocalypticism, God is waiting for us to act. And in ethicism, as distinct from apocalypticism, God is not a violent God. Ethicism is present w her­ ever nonviolent resistance to structural evil appears in this world. And the courage for it derives from union with transcendental nonviolence. It was present, for ex­ ample, in these tw o cases from before and after the ministry ofjesus: Unarm ed Je w s gathered before the prefect Pilate at the Rom an headquarters in Caesarea, probably in 26 or 27

c .e .,

to protest his introduction o f imperial

im ages on m ilitary standards into Jerusalem . A fter five days o f peaceful dem on­ stration, Pilate called in his troops; how ever, according to Joseph us in the Jewish W ar 2.174, "the Je w s, as by concerted action, flung them selves in a body on the ground, and exclaim ed that they w ere ready rather to die than to transgress the la w .” In a separate incident, unarm ed Je w s gathered before the governor

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Petronius, w h o planned, with a force o f two or three legions, to place a statue o f the em peror Caligula in Jerusalem 's Temple. Faced with that impending desecra­ tion in 4 0

c .e

.,

a “ vast m ultitude" o f men, wom en, and children confronted

Petronius at Tiberias in Low er Galilee. They told him, again according to Jo s e ­ phus in the J e w is h W a r 2 .19 7 . that to proceed he would first have “to sacrifice the entire Je w ish nation; and that they presented themselves, their wives and their children, ready for the slaughter." That is the voice o f ethical eschatology. I draw tw o corollaries from that understanding o f ethical eschatology. One corollary is n ever to separate the death o f martyrdom fro m the life o f resistance. Martyr­ dom is a public witness in which official authority unleashes its full destructive p o w er on an individual conscience. But it is an unfortunate necessity, an unwanted inevitability o f conscientious resistance to systemic evil. Otherwise, resistance itself colludes w ith the violence it opposes. Such collusion may entail, minimally, desir­ ing or provoking m artyrdom (but every martyr needs a murderer). It may entail, maximally, the hunger-striker or the suicide attacker. Such collusive actions may o r m ay not be hum anly ethical, but they are not eschatologically ethical. Another corollary is to separate the victim fro m the martyr. I say that in deliberate disagree­ m ent w ith H elm ut Koester s vision o f “Jesus the Victim” from 1992. If Jesus had been killed at random in a punitive sweep by the Syrian legions through Lower Galilee, he w ould be a victim. There are, in fact, many w ays one can be a victim, and they are usually sad and tragic. Jesus, however, was not a victim but a martyr. Pilate got it right: he w as subversive, he was dangerous— but he was far more sub­ versive and far m ore dangerous than Pilate imagined. Th ose three types o f eschatology— apocalyptic, ascetical, and ethical— are not, o f course, the only possible ones. T h ey are simply the ones involved in the present discussion. It w as necessary, first o f all, to see those three types o f escha­ tology as quite clearly distinct. N o w that w e have done that, certain possibilities becom e m ore evident. First, it is possible to slide easily from one specific type to another within the overarching genus o f eschatology. Second, it is possible for a speaker to emphasize one type and for individuals or groups to hear other types. Third, it is possible for speakers and hearers, writers and readers, to make certain combinations across those three types. Here, for example, are certain possible combinations. Apocalypticism and asceticism could easily be combined. Since G od's ju d g­ ment on this w orld is imm inent, withdrawal from its normalcies might be w ise o r even necessary. T h e apostle Paul is an example o f that combination:I I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grow n short; from n ow on, let even those w h o have w ives be as though they had none, and those w ho m ourn as though they w ere not mourning, and those w h o rejoice as

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though they w ere not rejoicing, and those w ho buy as though they had no possessions, and those w ho deal with the world as though they had no deal­ ings w ith it. For the present form o f this world is passing away. (i Corinthi­ ans 7:29-31) Paul practices a combination o f apocalypticism and asceticism, or at least ascetic celibacy, but he commends rather than com mands it to others. Asceticism and ethicism could also be easily combined. A t the start o f Part V I and again earlier in this chapter, I used epigraphs from Jam es Francis’s very insightful study o f Subversive Virtue, about the conflict in Rom an paganism betw een asceticism and authority, which came to a head in the second century C.E.

On the one hand, Christians did not invent apocalypticism; they adopted it

from Judaism. On the other, Christians did not invent asceticism; they adopted it from paganism. “ It is vital to keep this in mind,” as Francis insists, “lest Christian asceticism be portrayed as an utterly new phenom enon to the Rom an world, and the important point o f its familiarity to pagan observers— and thus the preju­ dice o f suspicion against it—be overlooked” (183 note 1). At a basic level, o f course, asceticism is inherently a threat to social normalcy, since it bespeaks another world antithetical to the presum ed inevitabilities o f this one. But it can, h ow ever paradoxically, be co-opted to support this world. A Christian conqueror, for example, could establish a m onastery w here ascetics prayed for the success o f his military campaigns. Such co-option w as exacdy w h at pagan societies and Christian communities m anaged to do w ith their ascetics by the third century. "Th e same so n o f controversy that took place in broader imperial society between ascetic radicals and authoritarian conservatives occurred within the Church itself,” as Francis argued; “and ju st as pagan society ultim ately found a w ay to incorporate the radicals into its ranks, so did the Church. In both, radical ascetics w ere shorn o f their threat, liminized, heroized, and transformed from rivals to authority (whether o f em peror or bishop) into allies o f that authority and paragons o f its values. Seen in this perspective, Chris­ tian monasticism amounts to an institutional domestication and incorporation o f radicalism— a theory that w ould profoundly affect the study o f Church history” (188). It w ould indeed. But it is precisely that combination o f asceticism and ethi­ cism , rather than ju st asceticism alone, that makes asceticism socially subversive in practice. I f authorities, religious or political, can dissociate asceticism from ethicism, asceticism can easily be co-opted practically (even i f not theoretically) into supporting established norm alcy no matter h ow violent that m ay be. This, then, is the key question: Is asceticism an abandonment o f the w orld 's injustice o r sim ply an alternative lifestyle chosen without any such criticism? And if it starts as the form er, can it be converted to the latter?

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T h e m arriage o f apocalypticism and ethicism is a much m ore difficult and delicate issue. Can they be combined? As long as apocalypticism involves a God w h o uses force and violence to end force and violence, they cannot be com ­ bined; one has to choose between them. This is implicit in m y terminology. Ethicism, short for ethical eschatology, is ethical radicalism with a divine m an­ date based on the character o f God. W hat makes it radical or eschatological ethics is, above all else, the fact that it is nonviolent resistance to structural violence, ft is absolute faith in a nonviolent God and the attempt to live and act in union w ith such a G od. I do not hold that apocalypticism and asceticism are not ethical. O f course they are. It m ay also be ethical to go to w ar in the name o f an aveng­ ing God. But all ethics is not eschatological or divinely radical. Ethical eschatol­ o gy is, by definition as I see it, nonviolent resistance to systemic violence. A n attendant issue here is the difference between divine revenge and divine justice. R evenge and justice lie close together in our human hearts and are pro­ jected thence, in equally close conjunction, onto our God. It seems to me, how ­ ever, that Je su s distinguished the kingdom-of-God m ovem ent from the baptism m ovem ent on precisely that point. It m ay well have been the absence o f an avenging G o d before, during, or after Jo h n the Baptist's ow n execution that con­ vinced Je su s o f a different type o f God— the nonviolent God o f a nonviolent kingdom , a G o d o f nonviolent resistance to structural as w ell as individual evil. V IO L E N C E A N D N O N V IO L E N C E One point m ust be emphasized. I reject emphatically and absolutely any hint that the G od o f Judaism w as a G od o f violent force and the God o f Christianity w as a G od o f nonviolent love. Both religions have taken violence and nonvio­ lence from their G od into their traditions and onto their streets. But the question o f ethical eschatology or ethicism derives ultimately from the nature, character, and identity o f the Jew ish G od as seen in the law codes, prophetic criticisms, and Psalm texts o f Chapter 12. M aybe ethical eschatology was not alw ays evident, but it w as alw ays there. T h at last point bears emphasis because o f the ancient libel that the Old Testa­ m ent and Judaism are about revenge and violence while the N ew Testam ent and Christianity are about justice and love. In strictest truth, those disjunctive options cut across Judaism , across Christianity and, for that matter, across Islam as well. It is not enough to say that each religion reveres the same God. The m ore profound issues are where, in each religion, w e have a God o f violence or a G od o f nonvio­ lence and how that G od and/or that G od’s people respond to the initial presence o f imperial violence (whether b y miracle, by martyrdom, or by revolt). Let m e illustrate m y point w ith four Jew ish documents written against im pe­ rial dom ination, religious persecution, and the Tem ple’s desecration across tw o

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hundred years o f steadfast resistance in the Jew ish hom eland. I have chosen these texts som ew hat at random. T h ey start, in 1 and 2 Maccabees, w ith resistance to Syrian imperialism under Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the m iddle 160s

b .c . e .

and end, i n j and 4 Maccabees, with resistance to Rom an imperialism under Gaius Caligula in the early 40s C.E. T h e first example is 1 Maccabees, written at the end o f the second century or start o f the first century b .c .e . Here the response to imperial violence is local vio ­ lence— military revolt in the form o f guerrilla w arfare and pitched battle. T h e sit­ uation is Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ attempt to unify the Jew ish hom eland into his Greco-Syrian empire, the collaboration o f some Jew ish aristocrats w ith his design, and the revolt o f the Hasm onean family, nicknamed the Maccabees, against their plans. 1 Maccabees records the successes o f three M accabean genera­ tions from 167 to 134 b .c .e . and does not mention God at all. I f divine help is pre­ sumed, it is left totally implicit. T h e revolt w as militarily m ost successful and established a Jew ish dynasty in the Jew ish hom eland for a hundred years— that is, until the relentless eastward expansion o f Rom e w as ready for the next stage in 63 b .c .e . A second example is 2 Maccabees, abbreviating a larger w o rk from the first h alf o f the second century

b .c .e .

The response depicted here combines all three

possible solutions to imperial oppression: divine miracle, courageous martyrdom, and military revolt. The historical situation is the same as above, but it is recorded only from 167 to 161 b .c .e . First, miracle. In 2 Maccabees 3, one Heliodorus, acting on behalf o f the Syrian monarch, attempts to rob the Tem ple treasury in Jerusalem . H e is flogged to the ground by angelic intervention, and only the prayers o f the high priest "grant life to one w h o w as lying quite at his last breath." Next, martyrdom. In 2 Maccabees 6-7, an old man and a m other w ith seven sons refuse to equate Zeus with Yahweh and suffer m artyrdom rather than submit to breaking traditional Jew ish food laws. Finally, revolt. In 2 Maccabees 8-15, G od is im plored “ to hearken to the blood that cries out to him " and then, but only then, do m artyred deaths guarantee Maccabean victories. All three paradigmatic responses are present in 2 Maccabees, but there is also a certain necessary sequence: from miracle through martyrdom to revolt. A third exam ple is 3 Maccabees, written possibly in the 40s C.E. after Caligula’s threat to Egyptian Judaism had been ended by his assassination. This response is miracle once again, but o f a much m ore lethal nature than that ju st seen in 2 Mac­ cabees 3. T h e story records an attempted pogrom o f Egyptian Je w s under P to lem y IV Philopator at the end o f the third century b .c . e . T h e drink-crazed ele­ phants that are to m assacre the Je w s "turned back on the arm ed forces that fol­ lo w ed them and they began to trample them dow n and destroy them " (6:21). T h e king im m ediately repents, frees and feasts the Je w s, and even allows them

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to punish their fellow s w h o had defected from Judaism under the royal persecu­ tion. "In that day they put to death more than three hundred men; and they kept the day as a jo y fu l festival, since they had destroyed the profaners" (7:15). In this response b y miracle, imperial violence is stopped by divine violence and consum ­ m ated w ith hum an violence. A fourth exam ple is 4 Maccabees, written possibly around the same time as 3 Maccabees. T h e response illustrated here is martyrdom, so just as all three solu­ tions— miracle, m artyrdom , and revolt—were present in 2 Maccabees, w e now have each given separate emphasis in a text to itself: miracle in 3 Maccabees, mar­ tyrdom in 4 Maccabees, and revolt in 1 Maccabees. W e are, it would seem, dealing w ith basic hum an options o f resistance. The author o f 4 Maccabees sets out to prove that “ devout reason is sovereign over the emotions” (1:1), that, for example, "as soon as one adopts a w a y o f life in accordance with the law, even though a lo ver o f m oney, one is forced to act contrary to natural w ays and to lend without interest to the needy and to cancel the debt when the seventh year arrives. If one is greedy, one is ruled b y the law through reason so that one neither gleans the harvest nor gathers the last grapes from the vineyard. In all other matters we can recognize that reason rules the emotions” (2:8-9). But, above all other arguments, there is an even m ore expansive description o f those martyrs just seen in 2 Mac­ cabees 6-7. N ot only have those deaths conquered emotion by reason and pleasure by w isdom , they have conquered torture by suffering and tyranny by endurance. And they have done so in the public arena. Paradoxically, precisely, and publicly, as the tyrant w ins, he loses; as the martyr loses, she wins. By martyrdom, tyranny is "conquered" (1:11), "nullified” (8:15), "defeated" (9:30) and "paralyzed" (11:24). In the w ords o f Brent Shaw, the Maccabean martyrs defeated the pow er o f violence b y "the conscious production o f a rather elaborate conception o f passive resis­ tance” or, better, b y "active resistance through the patient body” (288,300). A ll three responses to oppression illustrated above came out o f the same Je w ish tradition and w ere there by the first century. Revolt, from banditry to bat­ tlefield, presum es hum an violence, w ith or without assistance from divine vio ­ lence. Miracle, from individual intervention to apocalyptic consummation, could presum e divine nonviolence (those elephants could have all fallen asleep) but m ore usually presum es divine violence, with or without assistance from human violence. Martyrdom, alone am ong these responses, accepts human violence and opposes it nonviolently, although o f course it too can invoke future divine vio­ lence as retribution. W hen, how ever, it presumes a nonviolent God, it cannot m ake such an invocation. M artyrdom , in any case, is the ultimate and public act o f nonviolent resistance to violent authority, and by its ow n individual nonvio­ lence it lays bare the corporate violence it confronts. M artyrdom is, therefore, the final act o f ethical eschatology.

P A R T VII

H ealers and Itin eran ts [T h ere are] evil rum ours and reports concerning shameless men, w ho, u n der pretext o f the fear o f God, have their dwelling with maidens, and so expose them selves to danger, and walk with them along the road and in solitary places alone. . . . Others, too, eat and drink with them at entertainments allow ­ in g them selves in loose behavior and much uncleanness— such as ought not to b e am on g believers, and especially among those who have chosen for them­ selves a life o f holiness. Others, again, meet together for vain and trifling conver­ sation and m errim ent, and that they may speak evil o f one another; and they hunt up tales against one another, and are idle: persons with whom w e do not a llo w y o u even to break bread. Then, others gad about am ong the houses o f vir­ gin brethren or sisters, on pretence o f visiting them, or reading the Scriptures to them , or exorcising them. Forasmuch as they are idle and do not work, they pry into those things which ought not to be inquired into, and by means o f plausible w o rd s m ake merchandise o f the name o f Christ.. . . N o w w e , i f G od help us, conduct ourselves thus: with maidens w e do not dw ell, n o r h ave anything in com mon with them; w ith maidens w e do not eat, n o r drink; and, w here a maiden sleeps, w e do not sleep; neither do wom en wash o u r feet, n o r anoint us; and on no account do w e sleep where a maiden sleeps w h o is unm arried or has taken the vo w [of celibacy]: even though she be in so m e other place i f she be alone, w e do not pass the night there. M oreover, if it chance that the tim e for rest overtake us in a place, whether in the country, or in a village, o r in a tow n, or in a hamlet, or wheresoever w e happen to be, and there are found brethren in that place, w e turn in to [them . . . and] they set b efore us bread and w ater and that which God provides, and w e . . . stay through the night w ith them . . . But the w om en and the maidens will wrap their hands in their garm ents; and w e also, with circumspection and with all purity, our eyes looking upw ards, shall w rap our right hand in our garments and then they will com e and give us the salutation on our right hand wrapped in our garments. P s e u d o -C le m e n t o f R o m e , Two Epistles

C o n c e r n in g V i r g i n i t y ( A N F

8.58, 61)

Part V I established the differences between apocalypticism, asceticism, and ethicism, as eschatological options. You can have one without the other, but you can also com bine them in different w ays or even slide from one to the other. F ro m n o w on, though, the emphasis will be on ethical eschatology within the C o m m on Sayings Tradition. Parts V II and VIII form another tandem set representing a dialectic or inter­ active relationship betw een the destitute and the poor, betw een the itinerants

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and the householders, between those who bring healing and those w h o offer eat­ ing. T h at dialectic is present as far back as I can go into the earliest kingdom-ofG od m ovem ent, and I consider it constitutive for that program . Part VII focuses on those itinerant healers in the C om m on Sayings Tradition as w e m ove deeply into the world o f text. All now stands or falls on detailed readings o f specific sayings from that extrem ely early tradition. I begin this part with a Prologue on healing, because o f that subject’s im portance fo r this entire section. T h e kingdom o f G od is not an idea in the m ind but an action on the body. The first question, therefore, is the m eaning o f healing— especially o f physical healing as bodily resistance, the basic nonviolent resistance that places God on the side o f those injured by exploitation, malnutrition, and disease. Chapters 17 and 18 discuss the ethical eschatology o f the C o m m o n Sayings Tradition. In Chapter 17 the Com m on Sayings Tradition negates the apocalyptic eschatology in the Baptist tradition, but it does so w ith respect and appreciation. Nevertheless, the baptism m ovem ent o f Joh n and the kingdom -of-God m o ve­ ment o f Jesus are alternative solutions to the same problem . In Chapter 18 the Com m on Sayings Tradition affirms the lifestyle o f the kingdom m ovem ent, whereby God's presence is made clearly manifest on earth. I conclude this Part VI with an Epilogue on the social status o f Jesus, because o f its implications for the social status o f at least some o f his companions. M y point here is that i f Jesu s was a day-laboring rural artisan— that is, a marginalized or dispossessed peas­ ant—he is in the same status as those itinerants. He is one o f them , but he is also leading them into resistance to the systemic evil o f Rom an com m ercialization which is the opposite o f the kingdom o f God— that is, the w ill o f the Je w ish G o d for all the earth.

PROLOGUE: T H E M E A N I N G OF H E A L I N G African Am ericans w h o must suffer discrimination in silence have higher blood pressure than those w ho can afford to challenge racist treatment. The finding m ay explain w h y blacks as a group have such high rates o f stroke, heart disease and kidney failure. Time magazine, "Health Report: The Bad News," November 4,1996, p. 20 In Part I o f this book, I spoke about history as an interaction between pres­ ent and past, as a reconstruction o f the past that cannot be absolutely stopped b ut only m ethodologically disciplined from imposing our present selves on past others or from dom inating here-and-now over then-and-there. T h e present is alw ays at an advantage over the past, because the present knows what did hap­ pen to the past but the past could not know what w ould happen to it. H ow can the present not feel superior to the past, given that very knowledge alone? How, in other words, can the challenge strike at least as hard from them to us as from us to them? It can do so, o f course, because the past's unknown future reminds us that our present's unknow n future puts us in exactly the same blind position. Here is a case w here the honesty o f that interaction must be openly faced. In the follow ing section I speak o f Jesu s and his companions as healing others. W hat exactly did that m ean for them, and what does it mean for us in engage­ ment with them? I am not satisfied with explanations that say something like this: those ancient people had strange or even weird ideas, but w e must just accept and describe them. Or this: they have a right to their superstitions and we must not disparage them. W hen explained like that, no ancient ideas can chal­ lenge us. T h ey sim ply confirm our superiority and our more adequate know l­ edge o f h ow the w orld w orks. Indeed, w e are especially to be admired in that w e refrain from external contem pt even w here internal condescension m ay be pres­ ent. T h ey talked about evil spirits and demonic forces responsible for sickness and death. W e speak o f sanitation and nutrition, o f bacteria and germ s, o f microbes and viruses. H o w are they not w rong if w e are right, and vice versa?

Healing and Curing Illnesses are experiences o f disvalued changes in states o f being and in social function; diseases, in the scientific paradigm o f m odem medicine, are abnor­ malities in the structure and Junction o f bodily organs and system. Leon Eisenberg, “ Disease and Illness," p. n

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A key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotom y betw een tw o aspects o f sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a m alfunctioning o f biologi­ cal an d /o r psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psy­ chosocial experience and meaning o f perceived disease. Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context o f Culture, p. 72 Scholars w orking in medical anthropology, com parative ethnomedicine, and the cross-cultural study o f "indigenous” healing have proposed a distinction betw een airing disease and healing illness. Those preceding epigraphs are tw o clas­ sical descriptions o f that dichotomy. T o further distinguish the tw o components, w e could say that the surgeon is better at curing disease w hile the shaman is bet­ ter at healing illness. And that might be all right, o f course, if those tw o processes w ere always totally separate. In explaining that distinction to undergraduate students at D ePaul Univer­ sity as a background for discussion o fjesu s as an indigenous healer, I w as usually met with obedient disbelief— that is, take it down, give it back, forget it. Until the m ovie Philadelphia came along, and then the classroom silence w as palpable. The protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, had

a id s ,

a disease caused by a virus

that attacks the immune system. This disease m ay som eday be curable, either by a vaccine that destroys the virus or by a drug that controls its effects. But the m ovie was not about the disease, which for Hanks could not be aired, but about the illness, for which healing was possible. The illness involved the m an's ow n reaction to his disease, as w ell as the reactions o f his lover, his fam ily, his em ployer, his lawyer, and o f society at large through the justice system . H e w as fired by his em ployer not just because he had

a id s

but because he had becom e

infected as a homosexual, and he successfully sued his firm for that discrimina­ tion in court. In Philadelphia the distinction betw een airing disease and healing ill­ ness w as devastatingly obvious. But so also was the interactive loop betw een the twin processes o f disease and illness. The patient's im m une system w as actually under attack on tw o fronts. The stress o f being fired served, as it alw ays does, to put one's im m une system in danger. On the other hand, strong support from lo ver and fam ily, law yer and jurors, strengthened that im m une system and counteracted the stress. That story made sense o f the distinction and show ed h o w one could have successful healing where no successful curing w as possible. It also show ed how , in other places and times, w here curing w as n ot generally possible, healing might still be very important. That opened up serious class­ room discussion about the necessity o f having both processes equally available in an adequate health-care system. But, as Arthur Kleinm an and Lilias H . Sung argue, although “ ideally, clinical care should treat both disease and illness . . .

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m odern professional health care tends to treat disease but not illness; w hereas in general, indigenous systems o f healing tend to treat illness, not disease” (1979:8). M y contem porary undergraduates had one other m ajor difficulty w ith this topic, even w h en the disease/illness distinction became clear and acceptable. T h ey w ere very willing to speak about mind over matter in connection w ith that distinction: they seldom spoke o f mind over matter as a w ay to cure disease, bur they often used that concept to interpret healing and to understand h ow healing could help in curing. M uch o f what w as said was quite correct, but the discus­ sion never m oved to societal questions dealing with society over mind over matter. W hat happens w hen social forces, political situations, or economic con­ ditions cause the unhealth, be it disease and/or illness? H o w does mind over m atter w o rk then? In the P h ila d elp h ia case, you can see where society could become involved in the illness subsequent to the disease. If, for example, the legal system supported the patient’s em ployers in his dismissal, and if society at large exercised other dis­ criminations against him, society w ould be exacerbating the illness and thence, through increased stress, the disease. But society did not cause the disease in the first place. Som etim es, though, it does. W hat o f those cases where society causes o r allows disease to happen in the first place, perhaps by fostering conditions that put people at risk? Arthur Kleinman, in a subsequent book, introduces a third term, sickness, and defines it as “the understanding o f a disorder in its generic sense across a population in relation to macrosocial (economic, political, institu­ tional) forces. Thus, w hen w e talk o f the relationship o f tuberculosis to poverty and malnutrition that places certain populations at higher risk for the disorder, w e are invoking tuberculosis as sickness; similarly, when w e discuss the contri­ bution o f the tobacco industry and their political supporters to the epidemiological burden o f lung cancer in North America, w e are describing the sickness cancer. N ot ju st researchers but patients, families, and healers, too, m ay extrapolate from illness to sickness, adding another wrinkle to the experience o f disorder, seeing it as a reflection o f political oppression, economic deprivation, and other social sources o f hum an m isery" (1988:6). Society (and its systemic structures) can not only exacerbate the illness that follows from a disease, it can create the sickness that leads to disease.

The point is not to get lost am ong those terminological variations on unhealth, but to realize the inevitable interaction between them. Society at large makes sickness m ore likely to attack this rather than that individual or class; and, w hen the disease strikes, the responses from patient, family, friends, em ployers, and society at large vastly affect h ow the illness progresses. It is possible to have unhealth arising from any one, any tw o, or all three o f those aspects— sickness,

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disease, illness— b y w hatever names they are called. Som e o f health and unhealth can be a case o f mind over matter. But m uch m ore o f it is a case o f soci­ ety over mind over matter. And w hat can be done about that?

Healing and Faith T h e Epidaurian collection [o f cures from the fourth century b .c .e .] . . . clearly reflects the Classical, Hippocratic idea that the body itself, i f left to its ow n devices, would naturally tend to a balanced condition o f health, providing no environmental (external, i.e. "foreign") factors in terfered .. . . It is very interesting to note that it is precisely where such an ideology is least satisfying, in cases o f chronic disabilities o f generally healthy people (blind­ ness, deafness, infertility, paralysis— the overw helm ing m ajority o f [Epidau­ rian] afflictions), that w e see divine intervention. Lynn R. LiDonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions, p. 3 This, then, is a simple fact o f our own modern-day experience: certain people, apparently once ill, are now well; they claim that they w ere sud­ denly cured by divine power; and no adequate medical explanation o f the cure can be found. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, p. 516 In that preceding example o f the a id s patient in the m ovie Philadelphia, healing o f the illness was brought about by the supportive companionship o f those important to the patient. His stress was alleviated, his immune system w as strengthened, and the ravages o f the disease were delayed if not destroyed. That is certainly not the best one could wish, but neither is it the worst one could imagine. Thus support­ ive companionship can be seen as a first level o f healing. In the case o f T o m Hanks's character, it could only postpone inevitable death. But with some form s o f chronic or long-term pain— especially psychosomatic ailments, w here stress or oppression, strain or exploitation have resulted in somatization or em bodim ent o f the general distress as a specifically localized problem— supportive companionship can slow ly but surely eliminate the disease itself. Rodney Stark, speaking o f ancient epidemics, gives the following statistic: "M odem medical experts believe that con­ scientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by twothirds or even m ore" (89). I cite that to remind us that supportive companionship could be crucial even for epidemic diseases. T h ere is, h ow ever, another mode o f healing that is ve ry effective fo r certain people, under certain circumstances, with certain diseases, in certain places, and at certain times. I am speaking here o f healing and even curing by religious faith.

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In the m ovie Philadelphia, as far as I can remember, religious faith w as not a factor. T h ere it w as simply a case o f supportive human companionship. But what about transcendental religious faith? Faith heals, and that’s a fact. Apart from intentional fakes or tricks, aside from deliberate quacks or charlatans, faith heals or even cures some people o f some illnesses or diseases under some circumstances. In 1960 I visited the Roman Catholic healing shrines o f the Virgin M ary at Lourdes in France and at Fatima in Portugal. In 1965 I visited the pagan healing shrines o f the god Asklepios at Epidaurus in Greece and at Pergam um in Turkey. I rem em ber being struck by the general sim ilarity betw een the ailments involved in stories o f healing at all those shrines (as w ell as by ailments whose reminders could be seen: there were m any crutches at the back o f the grotto at Lourdes, for example, but no pros­ thetic limbs or em pty coffins). Similarly, Lynn LiDonnici’s list o f fourth-century b .c .e .

votive offerings at Epidaurus includes this rather laconic one (96-97):

A 16. Nicanor, lam e. W hen he w as sitting down, being awake, some boy grabbed his crutch and ran away. Getting up he ran after him and from this he becam e well. One can, o f course, rationalize or psychologize the seventy or so tales o f healing in the Epidaurian inscriptions. M y G reek guide at Epidaurus extolled G reek culture and spoke o f ancient gods, priests, and miracles. M y Turkish guide at Pergam um ignored G reek culture and spoke o f ancient doctors, psychiatrists, and patients. One can also, according to one’s taste, je er at ancient credulity or sneer at m odem skepticism. Neither response is particularly helpful. Real people w ith real ailments— including paralysis, blindness, deafness, dumbness, growths, and wounds—w ere clearly healed at Epidaurus. The patients, having read the m iracle inscriptions o f those healed before them, spent the night in a special building called the Abaton. T h ey hoped for a dream through which or in which Asklepios w ould heal them so that they could awake healthy in the morning. Com pare, then, these tw o testimonials, again from LiDonnici (84-85, iio - i i i ,

slightly simplified):

A 1. Kleo w as pregnant for five years. After the fifth year o f pregnancy, she came as a suppliant to the god and slept in the Abaton. As soon as she had left it and w as outside the sacred area, she gave birth to a son w h o, as soon as he w as bom , w ashed him self at the fountain and w alked about w ith his mother. After this success, she inscribed upon an offering: “T h e w on der is not the size o f the plaque, but the act o f the god: Kleo bore a burden in her stomach for five years, until she slept here, and he made her w ell.”

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B 14. A w om an from Troizen, concerning children. This w om an , sleeping here, saw a dream. It seemed to her the god said that she w ou ld have a fam­ ily and he asked whether her wish w as for a male or a fem ale, and she said she wished for a male. A fter this, within a year a son w as born to her. In that first case, a miraculous ailment obtains a norm al cure. In the second case, a normal ailment obtains a miraculous cure. But, w h atever about that sec­ ond instance, no am ount o f psychologizing explains the first condition. Five-year pregnancies do not happen, and it is not just post-Enlightenment rationalism to say so. W hat happens in such cases is simply this: devotional inflation. Real heal­ ings and even real cures do take place. W om en like Kleo w h o have lost all hope bear children, for example. After such healings, oral tradition from devotees, shrine propaganda from locals, and scribal enthusiasm from priests regularly escalate the details. A ll such miracles must get bigger, better, and m ore startling. That is inevitable from their role as witness to transcendental intervention. I have three conclusions so far. First, society and individual, disease and ill­ ness, healing and curing always intertwine together, be it delicately or brutally. Second, supportive companionship and/or religious faith can heal illness and, by so doing, even cure disease, but only in certain cases. W e m ay not be sure o f the present or future limits o f such healing, but w e all make certain decisions about where they are every day o f our lives. Third, healing stories tend to increase and becom e m ore extraordinary rather than decrease and becom e m ore banal. And now on to one final issue: W hat role does healing have, w h at form s can healing take, in situations where social context creates the ailm ent rather than simply exacerbating its presence after an independent arrival?

Healing and Resistance I f the personal is defined by social categories, can w e ever identify m atter w hich does not reflect social ideology? This question is throw n into particularly sharp re lie f w hen w e consider the m ost private religious docum ents that sur­ vive from antiquity, usually referred to as magical or curse inscriptions. Even these sources, however, are increasingly regarded as reflecting a w ay o f dealing w ith the personal strain resulting from social and ideological pressures. Lynn R. LiDonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions, p. 3 Arthur Kleinman records the experience o f a twenty-nine-year-old internist, Lenore Light, "w ho comes from an upper middle class black family and w orks in an inner-city ghetto clinic." She tells, in her own words, h ow she w as revolutionized by the first encounter with "our black under class; the poorest, the most miserable,

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the most chaotic, and oppressed and oppressive reminder o f where w e have all o f us com e from. It has radicalized me; it is a revolutionary encounter with the social sources o f mortality and morbidity and expression. The more I see, the more appalled I am at how ignorant I have been, insensitive to the social, economic, and political causes o f disease. W e learned about these things in the abstract in med school. Here it is a living reality, a medical hell. What w e need is prevention, not the Band-Aids I spend m y day putting on deep inner wounds. Today I saw an obese hypertensive m other o f six. N o husband. No family support. No job. Nothing. A w orld o f brutalizing violence and poverty and drugs and teenage pregnancies and— and ju st plain mind-numbing crises, one after another after another. W hat can I do? W hat good is it to recommend a low-salt diet, to admonish her about control o f her pressure? She is under such real outer pressure, what does the inner pressure mat­ ter? W hat is killing her is her world, not her body. In fact, her body is the product of her world. She is a hugely overweight misshapen hulk who is a survivor o f circum­ stances and lack o f resources and cruel messages to consume and get ahead impos­ sible for her to hear and not feel rage at the limits o f her world. Hey, what she needs is not medicine but a social revolution" (1988:216-217). Reading the epigraph from Time magazine at the start o f this Prologue in the light o f that internist's expe­ rience, I emphasize the contrast between those who must suffer racist discrimina­ tion “in silence" and those who “can afford to challenge" it. In such situations o f sickttess, is resistance a form o f healing? I leave aside “ conventional" healing for a moment, then, to focus on resis­ tance to discrimination, oppression, marginalization, and exploitation. In the m id-seventies Eugene Genovese, speaking o f slavery in North America, noted that "accom m odation itself breathed a critical spirit and disguised subversive actions and often em braced its apparent opposite— resistance." He went on to distinguish the tw o ends o f that continuum o f resistance with open “ insurrec­ tion" at one pole and "day-to-day resistance to slavery" at the other. But all o f that continuum in all its parts “ contributed to the cohesion and strength o f a social class threatened b y disintegration and demoralization” (597-598). T h at idea o f oppressed people resisting along a continuum from the most covert to the m ost o v e n action w as em phasized as a cross-cultural phenomenon b y Jam es C. Scott at around the sam e time. I take three m ajor points from his w o rk across the last tw enty years. T h e first point is the antithetical relationship between elite and peasant tradi­ tions. T h e G reat (or scribal) Tradition o f the elites and the Little (or oral) Tradi­ tion o f the peasants are not ju st com plex versus simple versions o f one another. M ovin g from Europe to Southeast Asia and noting the Little Tradition's com ­ m on reaction to such disparate variants o f the Great Tradition as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, Scott argued very persuasively that peasant culture and

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religion are actually an anti-culture, qualifying alike both the religious and the political elites that oppress it. It is, in fact, a reflexive and reactive inversion o f the pattern o f exploitation com m on to the peasantry as such. This is a powerful insight, and I quote Scott at length: “The popular religion and culture o f peasants in a com plex society are not only a syncretized, domesticated, and localized vari­ ant o f larger systems o f thought and doctrine. T h ey contain alm ost inevitably the seeds o f an alternative symbolic universe— a universe w hich in turn makes the social world in which peasants live less than com pletely inevitable. M uch o f this radical symbolism can only be explained as a cultural reaction to the situa­ tion o f the peasantry as a class. In fact, this sym bolic opposition represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It is as if those who find themselves at the bottom o f the social heap develop cultural forms which promise them dignity, respect, and econom ic com fort w hich they lack in the world as it is. A real pattern o f exploitation dialectically produces its own symbolic mirror image within folk cu ltu re.. . . T h e radical vision to w hich I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enorm ous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions o f which they p a rtak e .. . . A t the risk o f overgeneralizing, it is possible to describe some com m on features o f this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society o f brotherhood in w hich there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions o f rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. W here religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition o f rank and status m ay w ell include the elimination o f religious hierarchy in favor o f com m unities o f equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in com m on and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. T h e envi­ sioned utopia m ay also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as w ell as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred w ill disap­ pear. W hile the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation o f the future, it often harks back to a m ythic Eden from which mankind has fallen a w a y" (1977:224-226). T h e second point is the distinction, at either end o f a continuum , betw een overt and covert resistance. This is an extrem ely important distinction, because open resistance b y insurrection or revolt is only the tip o f the iceberg. It is, h ow ­ ever, all that gets into the record kept by the elite, since hidden resistance is, by definition, som ething those in pow er are not supposed to recognize. “ M ost sub­ ordinate classes throughout most o f history have rarely been afforded the luxury o f open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity w as danger­ ous, i f not su icid al.. . . F or all their importance w hen they do occur, peasant rebellions— let alone revolutions— are few and far betw een. T h e vast m ajority are crushed u n cerem on iou sly.. . . For these reasons it seem ed to m e m ore im portant to understand w hat w e might call everyday form s o f peasant resis-

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tance— the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those w ho seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them. M ost form s o f this struggle stop w ell short o f outright collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary w eapons o f relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimula­ tion, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These . . . forms o f class struggle . . . require little or no coordination or planning; they make use o f implicit understandings and informal netw orks; they often represent a form o f individual self-help; they typically avoid any direct, sym bolic confrontation with au th ority.. . . W hen such stratagems are abandoned in favor o f m ore quixotic action, it is usually a sign o f great despera­ tion" (i985:xv-xvi). But covert resistance uses the “ weapons o f the weak . . . the tenacity o f self-preservation— in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts o f noncom pliance . . . in resistant mutuality, in the disbelief in elite homilies, in the steady grinding efforts to hold one's own against overwhelm ing odds— a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better” (1985:350). T h e third and final point distinguishes once m ore “between the open, declared form s o f resistance, which attract most attention, and the disguised lowprofile, undeclared resistance that constitutes the domain o f infrapolitics.” It then goes on to identify three different aspects or strata o f that covert resistance. The first stratum is ideological resistance through the "developm ent o f dissident sub­ cultures" such as millennial religions, myths o f social banditry and class heroes, world-upside-down im agery, and myths o f the ideal king. The next stratum is status resistance through a “hidden transcript o f anger, aggression, and disguised discourses o f dignity," such as tales o f revenge, carnival symbolism, gossip, and rumor. T h e final stratum is material resistance through “everyday forms" such as “poaching, squatting, desertion, evasion, foot-dragging” (1990:198). M y proposal is that there is a close correlation between those three strata o f covert resistance and the processes o f healing. This is particularly true where unhealth (especially sickness) leading to disease derives from social discrimina­ tion, exploitation, and oppression. That brings me back to the epigraph about disease and unresisted discrimination and to that black internist w h o wanted not just medical diagnosis but social revolution. I think she was on the right track. There is a third process o f healing besides the two already mentioned (though it can, o f course, intertwine w ith them): besides supportive companionship and reli­ gious faith, the practice o f covert resistance can contribute to healing. (As an aside, while such resistance is covert and disguised to the oppression it opposes, it is quite obvious to those w h o practice it.) W e can understand w h y people w ent to Asklepios or M ary for healing, but how did people decide to go to Jesu s for healing, and/or h ow did Jesu s know he could heal? W atch, in w h at follows, h ow ideological resistance-healing m oves

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from the ideological level o f the kingdom o f God through the status level o f the companionship o f the kingdom to the material resistance-level o f eating together. H ealing involves directly both sickness before and illness after disease; and thereby, but only thereby, does it touch disease itself.

Healing and Miracles [One] observation on miracles and the m odem mind concerns w h at might be called the academic sneer factor. If a full debate on the possibility and reality o f miracles w ere to take place on American university campuses today— a highly unlikely event— such a debate w ould be tolerated in m any quarters only with a strained smile that could hardly m ask a sneer. Before any positions w ere articulated or discussed, the solemn creed o f m any uni­ versity professors, especially in religion departments, w ou ld be recited sotto voce: “ No m odem educated person can accept the possibility o f m iracles.” John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, p. 520 All o f that preceding material m ay be disappointing to som e readers. Did not Jesus confront a diseased or even a dead person and b y a w ord eliminate disease or eradicate death itself? W hat about miracles? Is all that medical anthropology but a hidden negation o f their possibility? I begin with a brief comparison o f m y ow n position in The Historical Jesus against that o f John Meier in A Marginal Jew . W e are in substantial agreement on three key conclusions about the historical Jesus. Jesus was both healer and exorcist, and his followers considered those actions miracles. But no single healing or exor­ cism is securely or fully historical in its present narrative form , although historical kernels m ay be discernible in a few instances. Furthermore, as M eier notes, “ most o f the so-called nature miracles seem to stem from the early church, but the story o f Jesu s feeding the multitudes may reflect a special meal Jesus held during his public ministry” (2.13). But there are also two problems left for discussion. . H ere is one problem. M eier criticizes the presum ption that m odem s cannot believe in miracles, citing a 1989 Gallup poll proving that 82 percent o f N orth Am ericans do so believe. He is quite right: o f course people believe in miracles. E very time I buy groceries I read the covers o f various tabloids as I w ait at the checkout counter. T h ey are filled, apart from diet, gossip, and scandal, w ith m onsters, prophecies, and miracles. In contem porary N orth A m erica w e are once again as close as w e have ever been to the entrepreneurial free-trade m arket in religious experiences that characterized the Rom an Em pire. But that m eans that, n o w as then, w e will have not to deny but to discriminate.

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The argum ent cannot any longer be that o f the village atheist w h o disbelieves miracles for everyone, past, present, and future, including Jesus. T h e argument cannot any longer be that o f the pious pastor who disbelieves miracles for every­ one besides Jesu s and for all other religions besides Christianity. The argument will have to be about what is at stake in claiming this about Jesus rather than about, say, Elvis Presley. It w as easier, even if wrong, to say that miracles do not happen and that therefore Jesus did not perform them. It is more difficult to admit that miracles happen all over the world’s religions but that this is w hy Jesus’ miracles are peculiarly significant for us Christians. Gallup polls are not enough. T h ere is another problematic area. Meier puts it like this: “Ju st as a historian m ust reject credulity, so a historian must reject an a priori affirmation that mira­ cles do not or cannot happen. That is, strictly speaking, a philosophical or theo­ logical proposition, not a historical one” (2.11). But there is, actually, not a tw ofold but a fivefold problem: theological, literary, epistemological, historical, and ethical. And before proceeding, let me give you m y ow n definition o f a mira­ cle. A miracle is a marvel that someone interprets as a transcendental action or manifes­ tation. T h ere m ust be, first, not a trick or a deceit but a m arvel or a wonder— som ething that staggers current explanation. There must be, second, certain individuals o r groups w h o interpret that marvel as an intervention by ancestors, spirits, divinities, o r God. But now comes that fivefold problem. • T h e theological problem is that to claim miracles can or cannot happen is, I agree, an ideological statement. The negation is as theological as the affirmation, and debates betw een them should recognize that fact. • T h e literary problem is to make sure that texts are making claims o f mira­ cle rather than using som e sort o f metaphorical language. Aesop’s fables, for exam ple, are not claiming miraculous discourse by animals in ancient Greece. • The epistemological problem m ay be the most intransigent o f all. If one accepts a closed universe in which the current we know all that could hap­ pen norm ally or naturally, then miracles would be clearly knowable as w h atever we cannot explain. That w ould be abnormal or supernatural. But as long as w e live in a confusedly open universe where even our securest knowledge is relativized b y its being ours, it is hard to see h ow to know a om arvel from a miracle. T h e irony is that only rationalists can really believe absolutely in miracles as objectively evident. • T h e historical problem is simply whether, in this or that particular case, a miracle, so defined, did or did not happen. • T h e ethical problem is also very difficult. It reverts to that second reason for historical Jesu s research proposed in Chapter 2. It is not ethical for an historian

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to give special protection and privilege to Christian miracles but not to all others, ancient and m odem . H o w does an ancient historian distinguish the miraculous divine-human conception o f Augustus from that o f Jesus, and h ow w ould that same person assess similar claims if m ade today? T o claim a miracle is to make an interpretation o f faith, not ju st a statement o f fact. The fact open to public discourse is the m arvel, som ething that is assessed as neither trickery nor normalcy. One m ay, o f course, disagree on that historical level. But then there is the theological level, w hich accepts or rejects that m arvel as a miracle. I cannot see h ow miracle status can ever be proved or disproved, because o f the epistemological problem o f an open universe and the relativities o f our own knowledge about it. But it is very significant w hich events a faith interprets as miracle and which it does not, because that reveals w h at m anner o f God one worships. Finally, even for believers and even w ithin a theological fram ework, faith in an epiphanic God is not the same as faith in an episodic God. T h e former is a permanent divine presence periodically observed by believers. The latter is an absent presence periodically intervening fo r believers. I myself, in sum m ary, believe in an epiphanic rather than an episodic God. T o say, therefore, that the healings or exorcisms o f Jesu s are miracles does not mean for me that only Jesus could do such things but that in such events I see G od at w o rk in Jesus. God, for me, is one w h o resists discrimination, exploita­ tion, and oppression; w ho is, for example, on the side o f a doom ed people rather than their imperial masters at the Exodus and on the side o f a crucified Jesu s rather than his imperial executioners at the resurrection. And, in the reciprocity o f open eating and free healing to be seen in Chapter 18, I see that sam e G od at w o rk —in the healing and in the eating as nonviolent resistance to system ic evil.

CHAPTER 1 7

N EG A T IN G APOCALYPTIC ESCHATOLOGY W andering radicalism does not proclaim the (future) coming o f the kingdom, it brings it directly to the front door. W ith the knock o f the itinerant radical, the old w orld has already passed away, and the kingdom o f God has arrived. Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, p. 211 Th is chapter and the next one form a tandem set. T hey are a pair, tw o sides o f the one coin, as it w ere. This chapter is the negative; the next chapter is its positive com plem ent. In this first or negative section I intend to show that the C om m on Sayings Tradition knows about apocalyptic eschatology from the teaching o f Jo h n the Baptist and, respectfully but definitely, negates his program in favo r o f the kingdom -of-God program. The Com m on Sayings Tradition is, in other w ords, anti-apocalyptic but not anti-eschatological. A first indication o f its eschatological thrust is its emphatic retention o f the concept o f the kingdom o f God. It opposes one interpretation o f that visionary program rather than the very program itself. But, in this first chapter, w e do not get much further than that negative opposition. It is not at all clear w hat is the positive content o f this king­ dom until w e get to the next and com plem entary chapter. T h ere are three sayings to be considered in the Com m on Sayings Tradition’s negation o f apocalyptic eschatology, and their presence in that tradition is extrem ely significant. By opposing apocalyptic eschatology, they prove that it w as present at the time they negated it. There is, in other words, counterevi­ dence to any claim that a nonapocalyptic eschatology came first and an apoca­ lyptic one developed only later. The earliest nonapocalyptic eschatology I can find is already an anti-apocalyptic one. In the beginning was Jo h n the Baptist, not Jesus. T h e first saying, Into the Desert, is extremely complimentary to John. The Q Gospel retained it as such, but the Gospel o f Thomas rem oved Jo h n ’s nam e entirely and changed its ending completely. The second saying, Greater Than John, dis­ placed the Baptist in favor o f the kingdom's least m em ber and w as accepted in that form by both gospels. Those first tw o units, taken together, serve to establish

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the negative contrast betw een the baptism and the kingdom m ovem ents. The third saying, When and Where, is the most interesting o f the three units, with redactional activity fast and furious all around it. T h e saying points to an alterna­ tive eschatological program — one that is present rather than future— but it does not give m uch positive content to that alternative. INTO THE D ESERT T h e first o f the three Com m on Sayings Tradition units to be considered in this chapter is Into the Desert (Appendix iA : #32). It is a T yp e 3 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted both toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas and toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 7:24-27— that is, Luke 7:24-27 = M atthew 11:7-10 — and in Gospel o f Thomas 78:1-3. There are no parallel versions anywhere else to help the analysis. It is the same unit o f tradition, but with a striking difference betw een those tw o sources. Only the Q Gospel applies the saying to Jo h n the Baptist; the Gospel o f Thomas does not. The important question, therefore, is w hether that application w as present in the Com m on Sayings Tradition itself. Q G ospel. There are slightly different versions in M atthew 11:7 -10 and Luke 7 :2 4 ^ 2 7 , but there are no substantive problems. Here is the w ording in the Q Gospel: Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: "W hat did y o u go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? W hat then did you go out to see? Som eone dressed in soft robes? Look, those w h o put on fine clothing and live in luxury are in royal palaces. W hat then did yo u go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and m ore than a prophet. T h is is the one about w hom it is written, ‘See, I am sending m y m essenger ahead o f you, w h o will prepare you r w ay before yo u .’” (Q Gospel 7 :24 ^ 27 ) T h at version has tw o separate parts. There is, first, a rhetorical climax o f three questions and answers: what?/reed (implausible!); w hat?/aristocrat (impossible!); what?/prophet (inadequate!). The first tw o answ ers— and even the third one— are incorrect, because John is not just a prophet but more than a prophet. T here is, next, that concluding citation in 7:27. It com bines Exodus 23:20 and M alachi 3:1 so that G od's angel-messenger is now interpreted as Jo h n prepar­ ing the w a y for Jesus. T h ere is a ve ry strong consensus that Q Gospel 7:27 w as added on later to a Q Gospel 7:24-26 com plete in form and content w ithout it. T h e citation appears, fo r exam ple, w ithout that triple rhetorical question in M ark 1:2-3. But, in any case, the presence o f 7:27 has made 7:24-26 even m ore em phatically and explic­

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itly apocalyptic. As Kloppenborg concluded: “Q 7:27 explicitly identifies Joh n as the precursor o f Jesu s and implicitly identifies him with Elijah redivivus. Thus Jo h n 's role is interpreted eschatologically: as the messenger o f Yahw eh, and as one w ith a positive, if subordinate, function in the inauguration o f the kingdom " (19873:109). It w ould be hard, in any case, not to interpret "m ore than a prophet” as m eaning the final prophet, the end-time prophet, or even, maybe, the Mes­ siah. But, once 7:27 is appended to 7:24b-26, "m ore than a prophet" means sim­ ply "preparer for Jesu s.” T h e Q Gospel redacts the saying even more explicidy as apocalyptic eschatol­ ogy b ut also placesjo h n as subordinate to Jesus. G o sp el o f T h o m as.

T h e saying in Gospel o f Thomas 78 is very different from the Q Gospel parallel in both content and form , especially in the lack o f any reference to John the Baptist (and, o f course, in the absence o f any biblical citation): Jesu s said, “W h y have you come out to the countryside? T o see a reed shaken by the wind? And to see a person dressed in soft clothing, [like your] rulers and yo u r pow erful ones? T h ey are dressed in soft clothing, and cannot understand truth.” (Gospel o f Thomas 78:1-3) T h e problem is clear. T h e Q Gospel applies the saying to John; the Gospel o f Thomas does not. W hat w as in the Com m on Sayings Tradition for that unit? Leaving aside the question o f the biblical citation, was Joh n the Baptist there from the beginning or not? Did the Q Gospel add in the reference to Jo h n the Baptist, or did the Gospel o f Thomas rem ove it? H ere are tw o opposite answers to that question. Helmut Koester thinks that Jo h n the Baptist w as added in by the Q Gospel: “As it appears in the Gospel o f Thom as, [the saying] has no explicit relationship to Joh n the Baptist. It could be understood as a general statement about the exclusion o f the rich, and Q 's use o f this saying in the context o f sayings about Joh n the Baptist m ay be secondary” (i99ob:58). In sum m ary, Koester believes that the Q Gospel added it in; the Gospel o f Thomas did not rem ove it but simply reflects the original version. Gerd Theissen, on the other hand, argues that the very mention o f “ reed” links the saying explic­ itly w ith H erod Antipas. His argument is that "the reed appears on Herod Antipas’ first coins, w hich he had minted for the founding o f his capital dry, Tiberias (ca. 19

c .e

.).

. . . T h e first (and oldest) type o f coin very probably shows a

reed (Canna communis) on the obverse” (1992:28-29). T h e contrast betw een Joh n and Antipas w as present, therefore, in that saying from its earliest existence. In sum m ary, Theissen believes that the Q Gospel did not add the Jo h n reference in but sim ply reflects the original version; the Gospel o f Thomas rem oved it.

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In that debate, I prefer Theissen to Koester. E ven if his "reed’' argument is too specific, it is hard to imagine this saying except in som e conjunction with the conflict betw een desert and palace, betw een Joh n and Antipas, and most likely after the form er's execution by the latter. I f one simply w anted a general rebuke o f aristocratic luxury, it is hard to see what desert and reed have to do as an intro­ duction to that criticism. I conclude, therefore, that Jo h n the Baptist w as con­ nected to this unit in the Com m on Sayings Tradition and w as retained and intensified b y the Q Gospel. T h e version in Gospel o f Thomas 78 is best seen as a totally truncated version o f the com m on tradition behind the tw o gospels, which, h ow ever, must have been quite close to that now visible in the Q Gospel T h e tight three-part rhetori­ cal construction is now destroyed. Only the first elem ent is given completely, with explicit question and explicit answer (what?/reed!); the second one is reduced to implicit question and explicit answer (aristocrat?!); and the third dis­ appears com pletely behind a criticism o f those aristocrats. It is as if the entire preceding part had been sw allow ed up in an almost separate and independent aphorism: “Your rulers and you r powerful ones are dressed in soft clothing, and cannot understand truth.” P ow er and luxury are n o w opposed to truth and asceticism. In itself, that saying is com pletely in line with other sayings particular to the Gospel o f Thomas— sayings that emphasize the true w ealth o f poverty and the false wealth o f power: Jesus said, "Let one who has becom e w ealthy reign, and let one w h o has pow er renounce [it]." (Gospel o f Thomas 81:1-2) Jesu s said, "Adam came from great pow er and great wealth, but he w as not w orth y o f you. For had he been w orthy, [he w ould] not [have tasted] death.” (Gospel o f Thomas 85:1-2) Je su s said, "L et one w ho has found the world, and has becom e wealthy, renounce the w orld.” (Gospel o f Thomas no)

Conclusion. T h e C om m on Sayings Tradition knows the Baptist’s apocalyptic eschatology as evidenced by Into the Desert. The Q Gospel accepts it and redactionally em pha­ sizes it. T h e Gospel o f Thomas rejects it and redactionally eliminates it. Jo h n is not even m entioned in Thomas, and the saying becom es a general but som ew hat strained adm onition against pow er and luxury. I em phasized the w o rd knows in that opening sentence. T h e next unit shows that the C om m on Sayings Tradition both knows and opposes the Baptist’s apocalyptic eschatology.

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G R E A T E R TH AN JO H N T h e second unit in the Com m on Sayings Tradition that concerns and negates apocalyptic eschatology is Greater Than John (Appendix i A: #20). It is a T ype 3 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted both toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas and toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 7:28— that is, Luke 7:28 = Matthew 11:11— and in Gospel o f Thomas 46:1-2. T h ere are no other extant examples. The preceding complex, Into the Desert, and the present one, Greater Than John, appear sequentially in the Q Gospel b ut appear separately in Gospel o f Thomas 78 and 46. In this case, however, the Gospel o f Thomas has no problem with naming John the Baptist. Q G o s p e l.

T h e tw in versions in M atthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28 have no substantive differ­ ences betw een them. Here is the wording in the Q Gospel: I tell you , am ong those bom o f w om en no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom o f G od is greater than he. (Q Gospel 7:28) It is, o f course, one thing to declare John subordinate to Jesus as his divinely appointed precursor. It is quite another to say that the least in the kingdom is greater than Joh n. Suprem ely high praise, as just seen in Q Gospel 7:24-27, is fol­ low ed here b y suprem ely high praise in 7:28a and then stem negation in 7:28b. Kloppenborg puts the contradiction like this. On the one hand, in Q Gospel 7:24-27, "John . . . belongs alongside Jesus as a precursor, not outside the king­ dom as the representative o f a bygone epoch” ; but, on the other hand, Q Gospel 7:28 "em phasizes the greatness o f the kingdom by asserting that even the great­ est representative o f the old order, John, paled in comparison with i t . . . . It relativizes Jo h n b y relegating his function to an era prior to the kingdom and indeed [possibly] to a realm outside the kingdom” (19873:109-110). It m ust be em phasized that this unit is very, very unusual within the Q Gospel It is not sim ply a m atter o f exaltingjesus above Jo h n within the kingdom, but o f exalting the least one explicitly inside the kingdom over Jo h n implicitly outside it. But that negation is now fram ed in the following sequence o f units: 1. 2. 3. 4•

Into the Desert: Greater Than Jo hn : Kingdom and Violence: Wisdom Justified:

Matt. 11:7-10 Matt. 11:11 Matt. 11:12 -13

= = =

Matt. 11:16 -19

=

Luke 7:24-27 Luke 7:28 Luke 16:16 Luke 7:31-35

T h e exact location o f Kingdom and Violence is som ew hat uncertain, but I leave it there for the m om ent. W hat is most significant in that sequence o f three

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o r four units is its clim ax in Wisdom Justified. That unit places Joh n and Jesus together, beyond any question o f difference or superiority, as twin “ children o f W isdom ” rejected alike by “ this generation.” That is an understanding o fjo h n in scant accord with Q Gospel 7:28, and it necessarily casts reflective light back on those preceding units. In sum m ary, therefore, Q Gospel 7:28b within, first, Q Gospel 7:28, within, next, Q Gospel 7:24-35, and within, finally, the Q Gospel itself, could be tolerated because its stem negation w as contextually muted. But the presence o f Q Gospel 7:28 warns us that the Q Gospel knew a tradition asserting that the baptism m ove­ ment o fjo h n w as incompatible w ith the kingdom m ovem ent o f Jesus. G o sp el o f T h o m as.

The presence o f a parallel to Q Gospel 7:28 in Gospel o f Thomas 46:1-2 proves, o f course, that Joh n the Baptist w as known to the Gospel o f Thomas, as hypothe­ sized to explain Gospel o f Thomas 78:1-3 in the preceding unit. But, unlike that case, there is no elimination o f the Baptist in this instance: Jesus said, “ From Adam to John the Baptist, am ong those b o m o f w om en, no one is so much greater than Joh n the Baptist that his eyes should not be averted [literally: be broken]. But I have said that w h o ever am ong you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will becom e greater than Jo h n .” (Gospel o f Thomas 46) The most significant difference from the Q Gospel version is that phrase “ will know the kingdom” in Gospel o f Thomas 46:2. First, the saying is quite complete without it. Next, it is not the usual verb that describes one’s relationship to the kingdom in the Gospel o f Thomas. W e have, for example, “ enter” the kingdom in 22:2, 3, 7; 99:3; 114:3; “ find” the kingdom in 27:1; 49:1; and "is far from ” the king­ dom in 82:1. Finally, the theme o f knowing is very characteristic o f the Gospel o f Thomas. In other words, the saying is already being m oved, but delicately and minim ally, along the trajectory particular to that gospel’s esoteric and ascetical eschatology.

Conclusion. T h ere w as a tension between John the Baptist and Je su s w ithin the C o m ­ m on Sayings Tradition itself. It does not occur only at the redactional level o f either the Gospel o f Thomas or the Q Gospel. At that level, the form er em phasizes it w h ile the latter m utes it. It is, m oreover, a tension betw een a Je su s w h o praises Jo h n profoundly in one saying, such as Into the Desert, and both praises and dim inishes him profoundly in another, such as Greater Than John. Jo h n is greatest am o n g prophets and m ore than a prophet. But he is below the least in the kingdom . It is not that he is least in the kingdom , because then he w ould

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clearly be in it. Jo h n the Baptist is not in the kingdom at all. T h at seem s to indi­ cate that there w as already an anti-apocalyptic theology operative within the C o m m o n Sayings Tradition itself. But that puts it negatively. W hat w as it posi­ tively? A ll o f that serves as overture to the next complex, which m entions the positive alternative but still does not fill it out with m uch content. T h at still aw aits the next chapter. W HEN AND W HERE T h e third saying in the Com m on Sayings Tradition that concerns and replaces apocalyptic eschatology is When and Where (Appendix iA : #2). It is a T ype 3 say­ ing (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted both toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas and tow ard apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. It is an extremely com plex unit involving multiple independent sources. It appears, from the Com ­ m on Sayings Tradition, in the Q Gospel as Q 17:23-24— that is, Luke 17:23-24 = M atthew 24:26-27— and, with three or even four versions, in Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4; 3:1-3; 5 1:1-2 ; and 18:13. It also appears independently in Mark 13:21-22 = M atthew 24:23-24 and in the special source used in Luke 17:20-22. There are, in other w ords, four m utually independent sources, not to speak o f multiple ver­ sions w ithin the Gospel o f Thomas itself. My focus, o f course, is on the Com m on Sayings Tradition, and I look at other versions only to sharpen that focus. Here are the sources and versions involved (in the order o f their discussion below): Source 1: (Q Gospel) Source 2: (Mark)

Matt. 24:26-27 M ark 13:21-23

= Luke 17:23-24 = Matt. 24:23-25

Source 3: (Special Luke) Luke 17:20-21 Source 4: (Gos.Thom.) Gos. Thom. 113:1-4 = 3:1-3 = 5i:i~2 = 18:1-3 W h at m akes this com plex so important is, first, the multiple num ber o f inde­ pendent sources and, second, the fourfold alternative versions in the Gospel o f Thomas. I look at those multiple sources and versions in five steps to build up the argum ent as clearly as possible: (1) the Q Gospel and Mark; (2) Special Luke and the Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4; (3) Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4 and 3:1-3; (4) Gospel o f Thomas 5 1:1-2 and 18:1-3. Q G o sp el and Mark. T h e tw in versions o f the Q Gospel in M atthew 24:26-27 and Luke 17:23-24 are quite different. Luke has a general "lo, here” and "lo, there,” but M atthew has a specific “lo, in the desert” and "lo, in the secret cham bers.” T h ere is noth­ ing particularly substantive in those differences. I give the passage in the Lukan format:

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T h ey w ill say to you , “ Look there!” or “ Look here!” Do not go, do not set o ff in pursuit. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son o f M an be in his day. (Q Gospel 17:23-24) T h e version in M ark 13:21-23 has no corresponding parallel in Luke, but M atthew follows M ark closely in M atthew 24:23-25 before com bining it with the Q Gospel version in M atthew 24:26-27. Here is the Markan version: And if anyone says to you at that time, “ Look, here is the M essiah!” or “ Look, there he is!”— do not believe it. False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, i f possible, the elect. But be alert; I have already told you everything. (M ark 13:21-23) When that Q Gospel text is compared with Mark, three points stand out. First, there is a common structure involving (a) some verb o f saying w ith the subject left vague in the singular (“ anyone” ) or plural (“they” ); (b) double “lo” or “ look” with disjunctive local specifications, such as here/there, there/here, or there/there; (c) single (Mark) or, m ore likely, double (Q Gospel) prohibition: "do not, do not.” Sec­ ond, the advent in the Q Gospel is that o f the Son o f Man, while in M ark it is that o f the Christ. Third, the Q Gospel forbids such expectations because the arrival o f the Son o f Man will be sudden and unexpected, like lightning. It is future, but it will happen too fast for watching. M ark says that such statements proclaim “false” Christs, but the only reason is given much later, in 13:32: “About that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Special Luke and G o s p e l

o f T h o m as.

T h e next tw o units for comparison are the special material in Luke 17:20-21 and Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4. It is possible that w hat I have term ed Special Luke 17:20-21 is actually from the Q Gospel, retained b y Luke but om itted b y M atthew. Since I am em phasizing what is most securely com m on to both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas I prefer to consider it as Special Luke w hile acknowledging that it could be from the Q Gospel. Here are the tw o texts: O nce Jesu s w as asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom o f G o d w as com ­ ing, and he answered, "Th e kingdom o f God is not com ing w ith things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!' or ‘T h ere it is!' For, in fact, the kingdom o f G od is am ong you.” (Luke 17:20-21) His disciples said to him, “W hen will the kingdom come?” “ It w ill not com e b y w atching [=looking] for it. It will not be said [or: T h ey w ill not say], ‘Behold, here!' or ‘Behold, there!' Rather, the kingdom o f the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it." (Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4)

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T h o se tw o units are very similar in content. T h ey have the sam e questionand-answ er form at, and the reply corrects a "when com e?" with an "already h ere." T h e form er questioners are "the Pharisees''; the latter are "the disciples." T h e an sw er has three parts: the kingdom cannot be awaited or expected; there w ill therefore be no "look here or look there"; because the kingdom is already present. It is implicit from the very question that at least the questioners do not recognize the kingdom 's presence among them, but that point is made explicit in Gospel o f Thomas 113. I have looked at four sources so far: the Q Gospel, Mark, Special Luke, and Gospel o f Thomas 113. All agree that when people say look/look, they are wrong. But w hile in the Q Gospel and M ark it is the advent o f the Christ or the Son o f M an that is awaited, in Special Luke and Gospel o f Thomas 113 it is the advent o f the kingdom that is expected. G o s p e l o f T h o m a s 3 an d 113.

T h e saying in Gospel o f Thomas 3 has both Coptic and G reek versions. The latter is in P. O xy. 654, lines 9-16 (Attridge 1989:114, 126). Since there is no sub­ stantive difference betw een them, I give only the form er version. Gospel o f Thomas 113 is extant only in Coptic. Here are the passages: Jesu s said, “ If you r leaders say to you, ‘Behold, the kingdom is in heaven,' then the birds o f heaven w ill precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you. W hen you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you w ill understand that you are children o f the living Father. But if you do not kn ow yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are the poverty. (Gospel o f Thomas 3:1-5) His disciples said to him, “W hen will the kingdom come?” “ It will not com e by w atching [=looking] for it. It w ill not be said [or: T h ey will not say], ‘Behold, here!' or ‘Behold, there!’ Rather, the kingdom o f the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” (Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4) E ven apart from the addition o f 3:4—5*s “when you know ," the similarities and differences b etw een 3:1-3 and 113:1-4 are very significant. First, with regard to form . That first unit is an implicit dialogue but an explicit antagonism. Jesus and his unspecified hearers are on one side, and “your leaders” are on the other side. Those hearers can hear from their leaders incor­ rectly but from Jesu s correcdy. The second unit is an explicit dialogue but an implicit antagonism. Presum ably those w ho “ do not see" the kingdom ’s presence

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fail because they are "w atching/looking” for its advent. But 113:1-4 taken even by itself implies that “ the disciples” are am ong those “people” w h o cannot see the kingdom 's presence; otherwise, they w ould not have asked that question. In addi­ tion, because o f the terminal position o f 113:1-4, one gets to it only after reading a lot o f other dialogues in which the disciples are clearly on the w ron g side. Second, with regard to structure. In 113:1-4 there is a double “behold/here” and “behold/ there,” followed by a contrasting alternative "rather [or: but].” In 3:1-3 that structure appears as a single but unbalanced “behold/heaven” and “- / s e a ” followed by "rather [or: but].” Is that com m on construction just coinci­ dence, or are both those sayings diversified versions o f the same basic unit? I answer tentatively in the affirmative because o f the delicate parallels in form and structure just mentioned. Furthermore, the m ove seem s to be from 113:1-4 toward 3:1-4— that is, from criticism o f “people” to criticism o f “leaders” and from the somewhat clearer “the kingdom o f the Father is spread out upon the earth” to the somewhat more enigmatic “the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.” Third, w ith regard to rhetoric. T h e text in 113:1-4 is flat and factual. The kingdom is not to be expected because it is here already. T h e problem is not to await its future arrival but to recognize its actual presence. But clearly there are “people” w h o do not acknowledge that presence but still aw ait its advent. There is also an implication in the very question itself (“ W hen w ill the kingdom come?” ) that the disciples do not realize it is already present before them. But that point is certainly not emphasized. In 3:1-3, on the other hand, the rheto­ ric is polemically derisive, especially w hen com pared w ith other usages o f heaven/land/sea searches to emphasize impossibility, futility, or lack o f neces­ sity. T h e closest structural parallel is this one concerning the covenant com ­ mandm ent o f G od in Deuteronomy: Surely, this com mandment that I am com m anding yo u today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that yo u should say, “ W ho will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that w e m ay hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "W h o will cross to the other side o f the sea for us, and get it for us so that w e m ay hear it and observe it?” N o, the w ord is very near to you; it is in y o u r m outh and in y o u r heart for you to observe. (Deuteronom y 30:11-14) T h at is a ve ry close parallel: covenant/kingdom is not distant (heaven/sea) but close, not there but here. The derisive tone, o f course, appears m uch m ore evident (birds/fish) in 113:1-4. Needless to say, that derision is cheap polemics and no m ore. But it is interesting that once opposing “leaders” are m entioned, the level o f the argum ent becom es nastier and shallower.

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In term s o f content, it is possible that 3:1-3 and 113:1-4 are tw o totally sepa­ rate sayings m aking, each in its own w ay, a similar point. But I think it m ore probable that they are tw o versions o f the same structural unit: the kingdom o f G o d is not here or there in the future but here and now in the present. But som e, be they "people" or "leaders," do not accept that position. G o sp el o f T h o m as

18 and si.

I turn n ow to another set o f tw o sayings. Read these with the form er set still in mind. H is disciples said to him, "W hen will the rest for the dead take place, and w h en w ill the n ew w orld come?" He said to them, “ W hat you look for has com e, but you do not know it.” (Gospel o f Thomas 51:1-2) T h e disciples said to Jesus, "T ell us h ow our end will be." Jesus said, "H ave yo u discovered the beginning, then, that you are seeking after the end? For w h ere the beginning is, the end will be. Blessed is one w ho stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.” (Gospel o f Thomas 18:1-3) In term s o f form both sayings are explicit dialogues, but there is little struc­ tural parallelism. In terms o f rhetoric both responses are corrective— the former m ockingly so, the latter emphatically so. In terms o f content the twin dialogues are quite different: one asks about “ our end" and the other about "the rest o f the dead" and "the new w orld ." T h ey agree only on that verb “know .”

Matrix and Development. I see those seven texts as the varied developments o f a single matrix. T o m ake that clearly visible, I emphasize the com mon elements in them. Here are the texts, w ith developm ent to the left and right o f that com mon matrix in the middle:

Q Gospel (Reconstructed) Son o f M an

M ark

say behold tw in places not/not rather

— C o m m o n M a tr ix —

(M ark 13:21) (Luke 17:20-21) (G T 113:1-4) when when Kingdom Kingdom Christ(s!)

behold tw in places

—Gospel o f Thomas— (351— 5)

(5I!I-2)

(18:1-3)

when Kingdom com e

come observing

come looking

say behold twin places

said [say] behold twin places

say behold

rather

rather

am ong

spread

rather within /out

not see

know

look

twin places

not/not

not know know

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That matrix saying can be seen most clearly in Special Luke 17:20-21 and Gospel o f Thomas 113:1-4. The only difference worth noting is the latter's concluding phrase "and people do not see it.” But that only makes explicit what is already implicit in the very question itself ("when” ). From that com m on matrix, the unit develops in three different directions. The first two are rather similar. M ark applies the saying to the advent o f false Christs, the Q Gospel to the advent o f the Son o f Man. But the development in the Gospel o f Thomas is most intense and instructive. There are both verbal, formal, and structural links as w ell as very striking dif­ ferences across those Gospel o f Thomas texts. I place the four sayings in that left-toright sequence because I propose that as their basic development. T h e core saying is 113:1-4. Its structure (say/behold/rather) reappears in 3:1-3, but its form (dia­ logue) reappears in 51:1-2. Those verbal changes, how ever, reflect profound theo­ logical changes. First, the sequence starts with looking for a future kingdom (wrong) as against recognizing a present kingdom (right) but concludes with seek­ ing the end (wrong) as against discovering the beginning (right). Second, the sequence m oves from the impersonal to the personal: 113:1-4 is about "them ,” but all the others are about "you .” Third, and most significant, w e begin w ith out­ siders or "people” (literally: men) not "seeing” what they look for as already pres­ ent before them but end with insiders or "disciples" not “know ing” w hat they look for as already present before them. Finally, separate sayings about "knowl­ edge” (hence "know ” above) are added on as Gospel o f Thomas 3:4-5 to 3:1-3 and as 18:3 to 18:1-2. There is hardly a more obvious case o f a prt-Thomas saying still visi­ ble terminally in 113 but also developed within Thomas to m ean esoteric wisdom and hidden knowledge— externally by the addition o f 3:4-5 to 3:1-3, internally by changes within 51:1-2, and both internally and externally in 18 :1-2 ,3 .

Conclusion. I interpret When and Where along with Into the Desert and Greater Than John within the Com m on Sayings Tradition. It opposes the sort o f apocalyptic escha­ tology represented by Joh n the Baptist. It is accepted and redacted in the Q Gospel so that it does not negate apocalyptic eschatology but rather confirms it. T h e event w ill be too sudden even for anticipatory signs. It is accepted in the Gospel o f Thomas and then slow ly but surely redacted into its ow n esoteric ascetical eschatology. T h at means, how ever, that neither o f those gospels represents its original meaning. Each had to redact it in different directions. Put negatively, and in conjunction w ith those tw o other com m on sayings, it denies the validity o f apocalyptic eschatology. Put positively, it indicates that the kingdom o f God is present upon the earth already. But how is it present? T h e answ er is in the units studied in the next chapter.

C H A P T E R 18

AFFIRM ING E T H I C A L ESCHATOLOGY T h e body is a m odel which can stand for any bounded system. Its bound­ aries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The b o d y is a com plex structure. The functions o f its different parts and their relations afford a source o f symbols for other complex structures. W e can­ not possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva, and the rest unless w e are prepared to see in the body a sym bol o f society, and to see the pow ers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the hum an body. M a r y D o u g la s ,

P u r ity a n d D an ger,

p. 115

In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary w ay o f initiat­ ing and m aintaining human relationships.. . . [0]nce the anthropologist finds out w here, when, and with w hom the food is eaten, just about every­ thing else can be inferred about the relations am ong the society’s m em ­ bers. . . . [T]o kn ow w hat, w here, how, when, and with whom people eat is to kn ow the character o f their society. P e t e r F a rb an d G e o r g e A r m e la g o s , Consum ing Passions, p p . 4, 2 1 1

In traditional societies, for instance, health care systems m ay be the major m echanism for social control. A r t h u r K le in m a n ,

P a t i e n t s a n d H e a le r s i n t h e C o n t e x t o f C u l t u r e ,

p . 41

T h is chapter m ust be read as the positive complement o f the preceding neg­ ative one. W hat is the kingdom o f God if it is neither apocalyptically nor ascetically eschatological? It is m arked by what I have termed ethical eschatology, a divinely m andated and nonviolent resistance to the norm alcy o f discrimination, exploitation, oppression, and persecution. T h e three epigraphs above are the cross-cultural anthropological bases for this chapter, and their relevance will becom e clearer as I proceed. The founda­ tional principle is the sym bolic interaction o f body-as-microcosm and society-asm acrocosm proposed by M ary Douglas. Y et what does that interaction mean?

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H ow , for example, does a society’s understanding o f itself becom e mapped onto its regulations for the bodies within it? You can w ork with this other body but not eat with it, or you can eat with this other body but not m arry it. W ithin that inter­ action, tw o phenomena will be particularly important on the m esocosm ic (or inbetween) level. Eating and healing involve bodily interaction. T h ey are not just about individual bodies as separated microcosms. Neither, though, are they about society as a larger macrocosm. T h ey are perfect examples o f that m esocosm ic level where bodies come together and where society is sym bolized by that interaction. I used three units in the last chapter to establish the anti-apocalypticism o f the Com m on Sayings Tradition: Into the Desert, Greater Than John, and When and Where. I use three different units here to establish its replacem ent: Blessed the Poor, Hating One's Family, and Mission and Message. Ju st as When and Where w as o f primary importance in the previous chapter, so is Mission and Message here. BLESSED THE POOR The first o f the three Com m on Sayings Tradition units to be considered in this section is Blessed the Poor (Appendix iA : #22). It is a T y p e 4 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted neither tow ard asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas nor toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. It m ust be seen in conjunction with two other beatitudes (Appendix iA : #28, #29): B le s s e d th e P o o r :

G o s.

Thom .

54

Q : L u k e 6:20

=

M a tt. 5:3

B le s s e d th e P e r s e c u t e d :

G os.

Thom .

68 = 6 9:1

Q : L u k e 6 :2 2 -2 3

=

M att. 5 :1 1 - 1 2

B le s s e d th e H u n g r y :

G o s.

T h o m . 6 9 :2

Q ; L u k e 6 :2 1a

=

M att. 5:6

This chapter looks only at that first beatitude. But all three refer to the same reality: the poor are the hungry are the persecuted or oppressed. But first a few prelim inary w ords about beatitudes.

Beatitudes. A beatitude is a declaration not just o f secular or hum anly accredited happi­ ness but o f religious or divinely approved happiness. It is a declaration that som eone or som ething is blessed by God. The classic translation “blessed” m akes that transcendental source m ore evident than m od em ones such as “ happy" or "to-be-congratulated.” In any case, that generic designation creates certain expectations against its cultural background. T w o main points are im por­ tant for the present example. T h e first point concerns internal structure. Beatitudes often have a two-part structure involving, in the first pan, a declaration o f w h o or w h at is blessed and, in the second, the reason that they or it is blessed, as in Psalm 128:1-2:

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Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, w ho walks in his ways.

Reason:

You shall eat the fruit o f the labor o f your hands; yo u shall be happy, and it shall go well with you.

T h e second point concerns external structure. Beatitudes are often found in pairs, and that external poetic parallelism is often mirrored by an internal one within each blessing, as in Psalm 32:1-2: Happy are those w hose transgression is forgiven, w hose sin is covered. Happy are those to w h om the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in w hose spirit there is no deceit. But beatitudes can also appear in a series, with from three to as many as nine cases. For exam ple, am ong the 15,000 fragments o f about 550 manuscripts found in C ave 4 at Q um ran near the Dead Sea, there is one catalogued as 4Q525 (DSST 395). It has five beatitudes on the pursuit o f divine wisdom still extant, and there m ay have been several m ore lost at the beginning o f the fragment. That com ­ pares with the three beatitudes in the Com m on Sayings Tradition and the four originally present in the Q Gospel— the latter now retained as four in Luke 6:2ob-23 but expanded to nine in M atthew 5:3-12. Q G ospel. This version o f the beatitude is neutral with regard to the declaration (“blessed the poor” ) in both Luke 6:20b and M atthew 5:3, but the form er gives the reason in the second-person plural with “ you ,” while the latter gives it in the third-person plural w ith "they.” One must, therefore, decide which was in the Q Gospel text. I m yself prefer the second-person-plural format, because that is found for both declaration and reason in the fourth Q Gospel beatitude, Blessed the Persecuted, in Luke 6:2-23 = M atthew 5:11-12. Blessed are you w h o are poor, for yours is the kingdom o f God. (Q Gospel 6:20b) Could that variation o f "yo u ” and "they” in these beatitudes have developed from an initial first-person formulation: "Blessed [are w e] poor, for ours is the kingdom o f God"?

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G o sp el o f T h om as. T h e beatitude Blessed the Poor in Gospel o f Thomas 54 has the characteristic two-part structure involving a declaration o f w h o or w h at is blessed and the rea­ son that they or it is blessed: Jesu s said, “ Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom o f heaven.” (Gospel o f Thomas 54) The declaration is neutral (“blessed the poor” ); only the reason is explicitly formulated in the second-person plural w ith “yo u .” T h e P o o r o r th e D estitu te?

W e have one very serious impediment to a contem porary understanding o f that ancient beatitute. H ow should w e translate and understand the G reek w ord in the phrase "blessed are the ptochoi” ? (1 am not, b y the w ay, presum ing that Jesus spoke Greek, only that those w ho recorded or interpreted him kn ew the appropriate words to use.) Here is the problem, as analyzed in the extrem ely helpful doctoral dissertation o f Gildas Hamel. First, the m ost com m on w ords for the needy in the H ebrew Bible are ani and ebyon. "T h e difference . . . w as in the immediacy o f need. W hereas the ani w as pressed by debts and dependent upon the good grace o f an em ployer or creditor, the ebyon needed to be helped at once if he was to survive" (5). Those terms, how ever, often appear as a tandem set— as they do, for example, in these representative cases: You shall not withhold the wages o f poor [ani] and needy [ebyon] laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens w ho reside in yo u r land in one o f yo u r towns. (Deuteronom y 24:14) H ear this, you that trample on the needy [ebyon], and bring to ruin the poor [ani] o f the land. (Amos 8:4) T h e m urderer rises at dusk to kill the poor [ani] and needy [ebyon], and in the night is like a thief. (Job 24:14) Classical G reek usage had also tw o words for the needy: penes (w hence our term penury) and ptochos. Once again, "the latter referred to a m ore severe, and the form er to a less severe, form o f poverty” (1983:6). T h e term penes w as applied to "all those people w h o need to w ork in shops or in the fields and w ere conse­ quently w ithou t the leisure characteristic o f the plousioi [rich], w h o w ere free to give their tim e to politics, paideia [learning], and w ar” ; but the "ptochos w as on the m argins, and recognized by everyone as s u c h .. . . P oor and rich belonged to the sam e w o rld and placed themselves on a com m on, ever sliding scale, but beg­

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gars could not. T h e ptochos was someone who had lost m any or all o f his fam ily and social ties. He often was a wanderer, therefore a foreigner for others, unable to tax for any length o f time the resources o f a group to which he could con­ tribute ve ry little or nothing at all" (1983:8). A representative example o f that dis­ tinction appears in a com edy o f Aristophanes first staged in the spring o f 388 b .c .e .

One character, Chrem ulos, asserts that the poor person (penes) and the

beggar (ptochos) are but the same thing. A personified Poverty emphatically defends h erself from that calumny in The Plutus, lines 552-554 (Rogers 1924: 3.414-415): 'T is a beggar alone w ho has nought o f his own, nor even an obol possesses. M y poor man, 'tis true, has to scrape and to screw and his w o rk he m ust never be slack in; T h ere'll be no superfluity found in his cot; but then there will nothing be lacking. W e are dealing, quite obviously, with slippery, sliding terms often relative to speaker and class, but the general conclusion o f Ham el is clear and correct: “ T here w ere tw o broad categories for which our words ‘poverty’ and ‘indigence' are approximations. T h e w ider category included all those with some income, but w ithout the means, especially leisure, necessary for such social activities as entertaining, education, political and religious se rv ice .. . . The narrower cate­ go ry included all those w h o had lost this minimal degree o f security and w ere dependent for their food, clothing and lodging on organized charity and the evo ­ cation o f feelings o f pity" (1983:344). That distinction betw een poverty and destitution was much m ore absolute in rural than in urban situations. There the great divide between the poor and the destitute coincided generally w ith that betw een the landed peasant and the landless peasant, and especially betw een the landed peasant and the dispossessed peasant. On one side w ere the fam ily farmers, how ever small their plots might be. On the other w ere the tenant farmers, sharecroppers, day-laborers, and b eg­ gars. W henever, in the N ew Testam ent, you read the term poor in English, it is destitute in Greek. T h e term poor denoted the vast m ajority o f the world, and one m ight boast o f belonging to the hard-working poor as distinct from the idle rich. N obody, in that w orld or in any ever since, boasted o f beggary. This, then, is the proper translation: “ Blessed are the destitute." And that is w h at requires explana­ tion on, sim ultaneously, the religious and economic levels. W e tend to think o f "poor” or “ destitute” as either spiritual and religious or social and economic. But, as w e saw earlier w ith justice and righteousness, biblical

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usage favors words that are emphatically and absolutely both at the same time. T h is is a similar situation. Term s such as poor and destitute m ust be taken both socially and spiritually, both religiously and econom ically. A n d that combined focus raises questions that are structural and systemic, not ju st individual and personal. There is no biblical delusion that the poor and the destitute are person­ ally better and holier than the rich and the powerful. But since the biblical God is a G od o f justice and righteousness w ho prefers slaves to oppressors, to be poor or destitute gets you special protection and concern. You cannot take those terms as only economically indicative, but neither can yo u take them as only reli­ giously indicative. Thus, for example, w hen we read that qualification "p o o r in spirit" in M atthew 5:3, we tend to take it as exclusively spiritual. T h e poor in spirit are the humble, those w ho recognize their spiritual poverty before God. There is, of, course, no such qualification in Luke 6:20b or Gospel o f Thomas 54, which means that "in spirit" is best taken as Matthean redaction. I f "the poor” are understood only spiritually, it makes no difference w h eth er the text is phrased as "the poor” or "the destitute” ; for humans standing spiritually before God, both terms mean the same thing. But it m akes a w orld o f difference which term you use w hen you are speaking both econom ically and socially as well as spiritually and religiously— and especially w hen you are speaking o f spirit and religion because o f society and economics. Conclusion. I focused here on the beatitude for the destitute, but destitute equals hungry equals persecuted (in the sense o f oppressed, exploited, and rejected). A ll three beatitudes speak to the same situation. This is an instance w h ere hearing Jesu s in personal and individual rather than in structural and system ic term s begets seri­ ous misunderstanding. Does Jesus think that the destitute are all good people and that the aristocrats are all evil ones? D oes he have som e delusion about the rom antic charms o f homelessness? God is for the destitute and pow erless not because they are individually good but because their situation is structurally unjust. G od is against the rich and powerful not because they are individually evil but because they are systemically evil. The Jew ish G od has no preferential option for the poor; rather, the Jew ish God has a preferential option fo r justice. H ATING O N E'S FAMILY T h e second o f the three Com m on Sayings Tradition units to be considered in this section is Hating One's Family (Appendix iA : #23). It is a T y p e 1 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas but not tow ard apocalypticism in the Q Gospel It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 14:25-26— that is, Luke 14:25-26 = M atthew 10:37— and as twin versions in Gospel ofThotnas 55:i-2a and 101.

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There are several sayings ofjesu s about the family whose virulence is striking even in the context o f a full canonical gospel, where they might get lost in a larger text. Apart from ones such as Blessed the Womb and Jesus’ True Family (Appendix 2A: # 7 1, #86), which are in the Gospel o f Thomas but not in the Q Gospel, there are tw o such sayings in the Com m on Sayings Tradition (Appendix i A: #6, #23): Peace o r S w o rd : H a t i n g O n e ’s F a m i l y :

G o s .T h o m .16 G os. T h o m .

Q : L u k e 12:51-53 =

5 5 :1-2 3 and 10 1 Q : L u k e 14:25-26 =

M att. 10:34-36 M att. 10:37

Both o f those are Type 1 sayings. For now, though, I look only at the latter one. Q G osp el. T here are differences betw een the Lukan and Matthean versions o f this beat­ itude, but nothing substantive is at stake. This is m y proposal for the original Q Gospel version: If anyone does not hate his ow n father and mother, he cannot be m y disci­ ple; and if anyone does not hate his brother and sisters, he cannot be my dis­ ciple. (Q Gospel 14:26) T h e Q Gospel’s redacted versions cite different family members. M atthew has tw o sets o f kinfolk: “ father and mother, son and daughter." Luke has three sets o f kinfolk: “ father and mother, w ife and children, brothers and sisters.” W hat did the original Q Gospel have? T h e first set o f kinfolk— “ father and m other"— is quite secure. The second set m ay be redactional in both cases, but in different ways, as Stephen Patterson sug­ gests (19933:45). M atthew, on the one hand, placed Hating One’s Family in 10:37 imm ediately after Peace or Sword in 10:34-36, so that the combination o f “ father, mother, son, daughter” m ay have infiltrated from the latter into the form er text. Luke, on the other, m ay have added in "w ife and children" to his Q Gospel source ju st as Luke 18:29b added in "w ife" to his Markan source (Mark 10:29). T h e third set o f kinfolk— "'brothers and sisters"— omitted by Matthew but retained by Luke, w as most likely what alone followed “ father and m other" in the original Q Gospel. G o sp el o f T h o m as. T h e r e a re t w o se p a ra te v e rsio n s, o n e v e r y clo se to th e

Q Gospel a c c o u n t an d

o n e m o v in g c le a rly a lo n g its o w n q u ite se p ara te re d ac tio n al tra je c to ry :

Jesus said, “ W h oever does not hate father and m other cannot be a disciple o f m e, and w h oever does not hate brothers and sisters, and bear the cross as I do, will not be w orth y o f me. (Gospel o f Thomas 55:1-2)

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W h oever does not hate [father] and m other as I do cannot be a [disciple] o f m e, and w h oever does [not] love [father and] m other as I do cannot be a [disciple] o f me. For m y m other [ . . . ], but m y true [m other] gave me life. (Gospel o f Thomas 101:1-3) Y ou can easily see in that second version h ow Gospel o f Thomas 52:1-2 is first sum m arized in 101:1 and then adapted to a new interpretation in 101:2-3. Instead o f an earthly (false) mother w ho brings one into the realm o f death and darkness stands a heavenly (true) mother w ho brings one into the realm o f life and light. T h e earthly family is little better than a house o f prostitution: Jesu s said, “W hoever knows the father and the m other w ill be called the child o f a w hore.” (Gospel o f Thomas 105) On the other hand, in the Gospel o f Thomas Jesu s' true m ale parent is God the Father. He speaks o f “ the things o f my Father” in 61:3, o f “ the places o f my Father" in 64:12, o f “the will o f my Father” in 99:3, and o f “ the kingdom o f my Father” in 99:4. And Jesus' true female parent is W isdom the M other, as above in 101:3. Simi­ larly, for example, the Acts o f Thomas, a text o f Edessa in Syria dated to the third century and continuing the traditions found in the Gospel o f Thomas, has the apos­ tle Thom as pray to Jesus and conclude with these w ords (NTA 2.356): W e glorify and praise thee and thine invisible Father and thy H o ly Spirit and the M other o f all creation. (Acts o f Thomas 39) For the Com m on Sayings Tradition, therefore, I look only at Q Gospel 14:26 and Gospel o f Thomas 55:1-2 and 101:1, ignoring 101:2-3 entirely. H o w is that rather savage attack on the family to be explained? It is, o f course, even m ore surprising against the background o f traditional peasant society, w h ere fam ily farm and fam ily cooperation w ere morally and physically, socially and econom ically fun­ damental. T h e ordinary answer is that faith is even m ore fundam ental than fam ily, that Jesu s is forcing people to believe in him over against even their ow n fam ily, or that he is criticizing the hierarchical inequalities o f society m icrocosm ically pres­ ent in the fam ily itself. But is there something else at w o rk here as well? Rural com m ercialization dislocates peasant life and greatly w eakens the peasant family itself so that it can no longer protect its members as it breaks into isolated indi­ viduals each seeking their own survival. Jesus is not speaking to the well-off, advising them to give up their possessions— advocating asceticism, in effect. He is speaking especially to dispossessed peasants seeking to restore their dignity and security in the nam e o f God. In the same w ay, he is not speaking prim arily

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to strong peasant families and trying to break them apart for or against himself. H e is speaking especially to those whom family has failed and is substituting for that lost grouping an alternative one, the companionship o f the kingdom o f God. M y proposal, therefore, is that Jesus and his first companions w ere not destroy­ ing families w h o w ere viable but replacing families who w ere not. One final point. There is no mention o f husband versus wife in the C o m ­ m on Sayings Tradition, the Q Gospel, or the Gospel o f Thomas, but only in the Lukan redaction o f Hating One’s Family. Only opposition to parents and to sib­ lings is specified elsewhere. Neither is there any husband-versus-wife wording in the Peace or Sword saying mentioned earlier. Only opposition between the gener­ ations is specified there. T h at agrees with another very strongly attested saying o f Jesus: Against Divorce (Appendix 2B: #54). If one wished to break up families, setting husband against w ife and w ife against husband w ould be the fastest route. But Antipas’s urbanization struck hardest at the responsibility o f parents fo r children and o f siblings for one another. It is the debris o f totally or partially dispossessed peasant families that are invited into the fictive kinship or new fam­ ily o f the kingdom under a Father w h o can withstand even Rom an commercial­ ization. Conclusion. Hating One’s Family, along with Peace or Sword, confirms m y proposal that Jesu s' prim ary focus w as on peasants dispossessed by Rom an commercialization and Herodian urbanization in the late 20s in Low er Galilee. The itinerants as the just-recently-dispossessed destitute and the householders as the possibly-soondispossessed poor are brought together into a new family, a companionship o f em pow erm ent that is the kingdom o f God. It does not break families apart but regroups those families tom apart already (or soon to be tom apart across the generations). M ISSION AND M ESSAGE The last o f the three C om m on Sayings Tradition units to be considered in this section is Mission and Message (Appendix xA: #5). It is a T yp e 3 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted both toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas and tow ard apocalypticism in the Q Gospel I gave it pride o f place in m y earlier w o rk The Historical Jesus, saying that it indicated "the heart o f Jesu s' program ” and adding, " I f that is incorrect, this book will have to be redone" (304). It is still, for m e, the most important unit for understanding the historical Jesus, the C om m on Sayings Tradition, and the continuity from one to the other. It is w here I see the continuation from the historical Jesu s to his first companions m ost clearly and even physically. I interpret m any am biguous sayings and open aphorisms from the C om m on Sayings Tradition in the light o f this com plex. It is

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also, for m e, the clearest evidence that Jesus and his earliest com panions had not ju st a vision but a program , not ju st an idea but a plan. H ere, clearly, the king­ dom o f G od is not about me but about us, not about individuality but about society, not about heaven but about earth. It is about divine justice here below. But even apart from all that, the unit demands special emphasis for several independent reasons. First, it is about words and deeds together. It is, in fact, about deeds mandated in words. It is therefore a good place to bypass the dreary debate about the ascendancy o f words over deeds or deeds over w ords in historical Jesus research. T w o examples, one each w ay. M y Jesu s Sem inar colleague Burton Mack emphasizes words or teachings. The first tw o pages o f his book on the Q Gospel mention "teachings” eight times, as in this example: “ It m akes a difference whether the founder o f a m ovem ent is remem bered for his teachings, or for his deeds and destiny. For the first followers o f Jesus, the importance o f Jesu s as the founder o f their m ovem ent was directly related to the significance they attached to his teachings” (1-2). E. P. Sanders emphasizes deeds or "facts.” His w ork, seek­ ing "the securest eviden ce^ ]. . . is based primarily on facts about Jesu s and only secondarily on a study o f some o f the sayings material” (1985:3, 5). T h e securest evidence, surely, is neither words without deeds nor deeds without words, but words and deeds coming together most profoundly. That com bination indicates that Jesus did not have just a powerful vision but also a practical program , not just a personal or individual lifestyle but a communal and social plan. Second, this unit is present not only in the C om m on Sayings Tradition. It is also found directly in Mark and indirectly in Paul. Furtherm ore, it is also im por­ tant for the Didache, a document whose reactions to this program w ill receive much fuller study in the next chapter. This unit is, as I understand it, the heart o f the C om m on Sayings Tradition. Its presence m akes that corpus coherent and helps all the other units fall into place. Third, this is the unit where text m oves into closest conjunction w ith context, and therefore where m y method succeeds or fails m ost fully and absolutely. But this third point depends on that second one. I f this unit is but peripheral to the C om m on Sayings Tradition and not, as it w ere, its heart, then any conjunction w ith the context w ould not be significant in any case. So, in w h at follow s, watch this unit as central and watch also the conjunction o f it and the other C om m on Sayings Tradition units with the proposed anthropological, historical, and arche­ ological context proposed earlier. I begin b y looking separately at the three versions o f this saying in the Gospel o f Thomas, the Q Gospel, and Mark. Next, I consider the com m on elem ents in all three (or at least tw o) o f those independent accounts. Finally, I d raw som e gen­ eral conclusions from those comparisons.

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The Three Versions G o sp el o f T h o m as.

T h e version in Gospel o f Thomas 14:4 is about as b rief as possible, and it is probably there not so much for itself as for what follows and interprets it in 14:5. T h at m akes it, h ow ever, all the more significant. It is only there residually, as it w ere, hanging on by its fingertips. It must, therefore, be earlier tradition. Jesu s said to them, “ I f you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if yo u pray, yo u will be condemned, and if you give alms, you will harm your spirits. W hen y o u go into any country and walk from place to place, when the people receive you, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them. For w h at goes into you r mouth will not defile you; rather, it is what com es out o f y o u r m outh that will defile you.” (Gospel o f Thomas 14:1-5) T h e Gospel o f Thomas repeatedly denies validity to the most basic aspects o f traditional Jew ish piety and purity. But in each case notice the positive that accom panies the negative judgm ent: I f you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom. If you do not keep the sabbath as sabbath you will not see the Father. (Gospel o f Thomas 27:1-2) His disciples said to him, "Is circumcision useful or not?” He said to them, “ If it w ere useful, their father w ould produce children already circumcised from their mother. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has becom e profitable in every respect.” (Gospel o f Thomas 53:1-3) So also here. T h ere is a negation o f fasting, praying, almsgiving, and foodpurity codes. All o f that norm al spiritual discipline is inadequate against the radi­ cal demand o f celibate asceticism. W hat is fascinating, how ever, is how , even against a totally divergent theo­ logical background, the basic elements o f the unit are still present: itinerancy, eating with those w h o receive you, and healing their sick. There are even slight but significant indications that this is a regular rather than an unusual and a rural rather than an urban phenom enon. Focus on that phrase “w hen you go into any country and w alk from place to place.” T h at w ord “when” indicates a regular sit­ uation or a norm al occurrence. And that phrase “w alk from place to place" uses a specific G reek loan-word m eaning the countryside as distinct from the city, so that a m ore literal translation w ould be, with Layton, "travel in the (country) places” (1987:383), w ith M eyer, “w alk through the countryside” (1992:29), or, w ith Patterson, “ w alk about in the countryside” (19933:131). T h at radical itiner­

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ancy was, in other words, m ore normal than special and m ore rural than urban. But, despite m y title for this complex, Mission and Message, I underline Patter­ son’s com m ent that “ originally the ideal o f radical itinerancy w as not necessarily linked with early Christian ‘mission’ at all but rather had m ore the quality o f a perm anent m anner o f living, a life-style advocated b y the Jesu s m ovem ent” (19933:132). That point will reappear with the Q Gospel. Q G ospel. This is a classic instance o f a unit that is found in both the Q Gospel and in M ark and that therefore posed a problem to M atthew and Luke, w h o used those twin sources. Their obvious options w ere duplication, elim ination, or conflation; they could, in other words, keep both, choose one and om it the other, or com ­ bine both into a single coherent unity. In the present instance M atthew chose conflation in M atthew 9:37-10:14, while Luke, fortunately fo r us, chose duplica­ tion in Luke 9:1-6 and 10:4-11. These are the parallel versions:

Q G o s p e l:

M ark:

L u k e 1 0 :4 - 11 = M att. 1 0 : 7 , 10 b , 1 2 - 1 4 M a rk 6 : 7 - 1 3 = L u k e 9 :1-6

= M att. 10 :1, 8 - io a , n

W hat that means, how ever, is that w e must depend ve ry heavily on the Mis­ sion and Message version in Luke 10 :4-11 to recreate the Q Gospel original. I give it here along with the immediately subsequent verses in Q Gospel 10:12-15, which will be important as w e proceed. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. W hatever house you enter, first say, “ Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there w ho shares in peace, you r peace will rest on that person; but i f not, it w ill return to you. Rem ain in the same house, eating and drinking w h atever they pro­ vide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not m ove about from house to house. W henever you enter a town and its people w elcom e you , eat w h at is set before you; cure the sick w ho are there, and say to them , "T h e kingdom o f G od has com e near to you.” But w henever yo u enter a tow n and they do n ot w elcom e you, go out into its streets and say, “ E ven the dust o f yo u r tow n that clings to our feet, w e wipe o ff in protest against you . Y et know this: the kingdom o f God has come near.” (Q Gospel 10:4-11) “ I tell you, on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town. 'W o e to you , Chorazin! W oe to you, Bethsaida!' For i f the deeds o f pow er done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they w ould have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But at the judgm ent it w ill be m ore tolera

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ble for T yre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades." (Q Gospel 10:12-15) T h at is, o f course, a much m ore developed text than the one just seen in Gospel o f Thomas 14:4» but the same three key elements o f itinerancy, eating with those w h o receive you, and healing their sick are all clearly present once again. T h ere are also entirely new elements, such as the dress and equipment com ­ mands, the difference betw een house and city, and especially the mention o f the kingdom o f G od as present. M ark. As m entioned earlier, M ark’s version was conflated with that o f the Q Gospel in M atthew b ut kept as a separate incident in Luke 9:1 -6 . It is not all in direct dis­ course, as in Gospel o f Thomas 14:4 and Q Gospel 10:4-12. Instead, tw o sections o f indirect discourse fram e a smaller central one in direct address: He called the tw elve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority o ver the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no m oney in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on tw o tunics. He said to them, “W herever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place [literally: thence]. If any place will not w elcom e yo u and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake o ff the dust that is on y o u r feet as a testimony against them." So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. T h ey cast out many demons, and anointed with oil m any w h o w ere sick and cured them. (Mark 6:7-13) T hree sm all items o f Markan redaction are immediately evident. One is an emphasis on both exorcisms and healings, as earlier for Jesus so now for the T w elve: He cured m any w h o w ere sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he w ou ld not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. (M ark 1:34) He had cured m any, so that all w ho had diseases pressed upon him to touch him. W h enever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell dow n before him and shouted, “Y ou are the Son o f G od!” (M ark 3:10-11) Another item is the demand for repentance as a prerequisite for accepting the kingdom o f God. Since, for Mark, it came first in humility and hiddenness, it demands a radical change, a repentance (metanoia in Greek), in order to accept it as such. H ence, that inaugural summary:

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Jesu s came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news o f God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom o f God has com e near; repent, and believe in the good new s." (Mark 1:14b—15) T h e final small change is the allowance o f staff and sandals, tw o items so norm ally expected that their permission certifies an earlier negation. And, o f course, w e already saw that negation o f sandals in Q Gospel 10:4. Such permis­ sions guarantee that those prescriptions w ere not idealistic rhetoric. Jesu s said sandals or staff w ere forbidden, and his com panions actually tried but found it too difficult; Jesus then had to "say" sandals or staff w ere permitted. Luke, faced with "no sandals” from Q Gospel 10:4 and "sandals" from M ark 6:9, simply om it­ ted any mention o f them in his parallel Luke 9:3. Th ose sm all Lukan changes are reassuring because, apart from sm oothing out such contradictions, Luke's strat­ egy was to stay relatively close to his Markan source in Luke 9 :1-6 and to his Q Gospel source in Luke 10:4-11. The Common Elements Itin e ra n ts a n d H o u seh old ers.

Itinerants and householders are the official terms I use for those who arrive and those who receive them in the three texts. T h ey are also, to underline their importance, used in the titles o f Parts VII and VIII. Recall the context fo r a moment. Anthropology, history, and archeology cam e together to form a pic­ ture o f rural commercialization and Rom an urbanization against Jew ish tradition and peasant resistance in Low er Galilee during the 20s o f the first com m on-era century. W hat that process meant was not ju st taxation o r even heavy taxation. Taxation w as nothing new and may not have been any w orse then than at any other time during hundreds o f years o f imperial control. W h at that process m eant w as a com plete dislocation o f peasant life, fam ily support, and village security. Som e peasants, o f course, did quite well at the expense o f others. But, fo r those others, it meant certain indebtedness, possible enslavem ent, and proba­ ble dispossession. It meant a m ove from subsistence on a small fam ily farm to the status o f tenant farmer, landless laborer, beggar, or bandit. T h at com m ercial­ ization process set against one another those poor peasants w h o m ight be dispos­ sessed tom orrow and those destitute peasants w ho had been dispossessed yester­ day. It is those destitute landless ones and poor landed ones that the kingdom -of-God m ovem en t brings together as itinerants and householders. E a t in g a n d H e a lin g .

T w o points are o f importance here. First, the program Jesu s outlines is not about alm sgiving. It is not about food handed out to beggars at the door. Jesu s could h ave inaugurated a kingdom o f beggars, but that is not w h at all three texts

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agree in emphasizing. Second, given that the program is to be a reciprocal expe­ rience rather than almsgiving, what is the logic o f that reciprocity? itinerants n eed food, o f course, but would not a handout suffice? Everyone needs healing, o f course, but w h y do householders need it in particular? T h e itinerants look at the householders, which is what they w ere yesterday o r the day before, w ith envy and even hatred. The householders look at the itin­ erants, w hich is w hat they m ay be tomorrow or the day after, with fear and con­ tem pt. T h e kingdom program forces those two groups into conjunction with one another and starts to rebuild peasant community ripped apart by commercializa­ tion and urbanization. But just as that eating is both symbolic and actual, so also is that healing both sym bolic and actual. I understand that process, o f course, against the earlier background on the meaning o f healing. W hat the itinerants b rin g is ideological, symbolic, and material resistance to oppression and exploita­ tion, and that— precisely that— is healing. Such resistance cannot directly cure dis­ ease, as vaccines can destroy viruses or drugs can destroy bacteria, but resistance can heal both sickness and illness and thus sometimes indirectly cure disease. A c c e p ta n c e a n d R e je c tio n .

I correlate here tw o disjunctions: acceptance/rejection and house/dty.W hat is significant about these disjunctions is how they mesh with one another. As you m ove from house to city, the rhetoric about rejection escalates quite brutally. All three texts agree on the possibility o f rejection. But it is at very best implicit in Gospel o f Thomas 14:4 w ith the phrase "w hen the people receive you .” T h at implies that they m ight not, but nothing more is said about it. In M ark both possibilities are m ore explicitly present. There can be accep­ tance, "w h erever y o u enter a house” in 6:19, and rejection, “ if any place will not w elcom e yo u ” in 6:11. Listeners are told not to respond aggressively but w ith a gesture alm ost com ic in its dismissive reaction. In the Q Gospel, h ow ever, the theme o f acceptance or rejection meshes closely with that o f house and city. But the situation at the house in Q Gospel 10:6 ("And if anyone is there w h o shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it w ill return to yo u ” ) seems much milder and less violent than that in the city in Q Gospel 10:12 ("I tell you, on that day, it will be m ore tolerable for Sodom than for that tow n” ). And the rhetoric continues to escalate against spe­ cific places, such as Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum in the imm ediately suc­ ceeding Q Gospel 10:13-15. T h at is a very striking duplication o f acceptance and rejection, first for the house in Q Gospel 10:5-7 and then for the city in Q Gospel 10:8-12. Notice, for contrast, that M ark mentions only a "house” in 6:10 for acceptance and a vagu er “place” in 6:11 for rejection. W hat does that dichotom y o f house and city and the escalating rhetoric o f acceptance and rejection indicate in the Q Gospel?

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M y proposal is that the Q Gospel text tells us not only about what was planned but also about what w as experienced. It records not only the program o f Jesu s but also the effects o f that program . And, above all, it recounts w hat hap­ pened in the m ove from houses and hamlets to tow ns and cities. A program originally directed at houses— that is, at the courtyards in the narrow alleys o f small hamlets— m oved on to cities and m et there w ith a m uch m ore aggressive rejection. Things got nastier all around. T here are, in other words, tw o succes­ sive historical stages represented in that Q Gospel text, one to houses and one to cities. T h at is why, for example, there are tw o mentions o f eating, in Q Gospel 107 (house) and Q Gospel io:8 (city).

Power and Authority. In a 1992 doctoral dissertation at Em ory University, W ern er Kahl undertook a detailed com parative analysis o f about 150 stories o f "m iraculous restoration to health or to life" in Jew ish, pagan Greco-Rom an, and Christian traditions up to the year 100 C.E. I focus here on just one point from that very com prehensive study. He distinguished three types o f miracle workers, depending on w hether they appeared as bearer ( b n p ), petitioner ( p n p ), or mediators ( m n p ) o f numinous power. H e looked, in other words, at w hether m iracle w orkers effected healing by their ow n inherent authority or by praying to or invoking the p o w er o f som e other divine being. In appraising Jesus as healer and m iracle-worker, Kahl identi­ fied him as a

bnp

rather than a

pn p

or a

m n p.

On the one hand, "M oses, Elijah,

Elisha, Hanina, Peter, and Paul are usually depicted as m en w h o are able to acti­ vate their god by means o f prayer.. . . This distinction is even m ore pronounced in comparison with the apostles in Acts. Peter and Paul have to invoke the ascended Jesu s or refer to his name in every case o f a healing m iracle" (90, 101). On the other hand, "Yahweh, Jesus, Asclepios, and Apollonios incorporate a divine pow er in th em selves.. . . Jesus incorporates the healing p o w er personally, functioning as the means o f God's healing a ctiv ity .. . . Jesu s generally appears as a

bnp

in the gospels. Unlike the O T prophets, the rabbis, and the apostles in Acts,

he does not need to come before his god as a suppliant, or refer to a

bnp

mightier

than h im self w henever he wants to effect h ea lin g .. . . A s w ith Asclepios and A pollonios, Je su s’ superhuman ability is due to divine d e sce n t. . ( 9 0 , 9 5 » *02)Y ahw eh, G od o f Israel, and Asklepios, god o f healing, are transcendent fig­ ures, so that puts Jesu s o f Nazareth and the contem porary A pollonios o f Tyana in a ve ry special light. "Jesus was generally conceived o f as an immanent bearer o f num inous pow er, and . . . in this regard he could best be com pared with A pollonios o f T yana; to both figures w ere also attributed a great num ber o f heal­ in g m iracle stories. In fact, the tw o characteristics (being an immanent bearer o f num inous p o w e r and having more than one healing miracle story attributed to it)

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are shared only by Jesu s in the gospels and Apollonios in Philostratus' Vita. Since Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii dates from around 220 C.E., it is evident that the de­ scription o f Jesu s in the gospels is distinct from the other extant contem porary traditions o f the first century

c .e .

insofar as the

bn ps

o f those stories are transcen­

dent figures" (326-327). It is notew orthy that Jesus does not tell his departing companions to heal by praying to G od for help or to heal by invoking Jesus’ own name. You could argue, o f course, that all o f that is implicit, that they operate, as it were, with bor­ row ed p o w er and tem porary authority. M y point is simply that this expected emphasis is not explicitly present. Jesus heals, and they are told to go do the same. T h o se preceding four points— itinerants and householders, eating and heal­ ing, rejection and acceptance, pow er and authority— arise in the Com m on Say­ ings Tradition and in M ark as well. There is an additional point on dress and equipm ent that is found only in the Q Gospel and Mark. I mention it in conclu­ sion since it w as possibly present in the Com m on Sayings Tradition but omitted b y the Gospel o f Thomas. I do not put any weight on it, how ever, citing it here only for com pletion. It simply confirms something already evident— namely, that reciprocity o f eating and healing and the difference between generous alms­ giving and open com mensality. But before turning to a discussion o f dress and equipm ent, I need an aside on the ancient philosophy called Cynicism An A side on Cynicism. D iogenes o f Sinope lived from 404 to 323 b .c .e ., and his longevity might be considered an argum ent for his lifestyle. He w as a student o f Antisthenes, who w as a student o f Socrates. T h e term cynic, from the Greek w ord for dog, reflects the deliberate disdain w ith which Cynics provocatively flouted the normal con­ ventions o f hum an life. Their philosophy w as above all else populist and practi­ cal rather than elitist and theoretical. T hey not only practiced what they preached, their practice w as their preaching and their preaching was their prac­ tice. T h ey w ere to be found m ore in marketplace and temple courtyard than in study hall and classroom . "T h e Cynics sought happiness through freedom ," as Farrand Sayre sum m ed them up. “T h e Cynic conception o f freedom included freedom from desires, from fear, anger, grief and other emotions, from religious or m oral control, from the authority o f the city or state or public officials, from regard for public opinion and freedom also from the care o f property, from con­ finement to any locality and from the care and support o f w ives and children----T h e Cynics scoffed at the customs and conventionalities o f others, but w ere rigid in observance o f their ow n. T h e Cynic w ould not appear anyw here without his wallet, staff and cloak, which m ust invariably be w orn, dirty and ragged and w orn so as to leave the right shoulder bare. He never w ore shoes and his hair

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and beard w ere long and unkempt” (7,18). Notice the sym bolic catechesis o f that garb for later discussion. T h ere has been much discussion recently on the relationship betw een the historical Jesu s (or the Q Gospel or early Christianity) and practical Cynicism. T w o recent articles that agree quite correctly on m any o f the problem s and excesses o f those comparisons com e up, nevertheless, w ith greatly divergent conclusions in their final sentences. On the one hand, from Hans D ieter Betz: "In conclusion, are further investigations o f the hypothesis w o rth doing? In the light o f the criticism above, the reply to this question can only be a conditional but resounding yes. Even if in the final analysis the slogan o f ‘Je su s the Cynic' should turn out to be a contradiction in terms, m any o f Jesus* sayings w ould appear in a different light, as w ould those o f Cynics, and historians and exegetes w ould learn an im m ense am ount in the process'* (474-475). On the other hand, from Paul Rhodes Eddy: "T h e evidence that can be m arshaled against the Cynic thesis warrants the conclusion that, w ith regard to the ongoing search for a viable model for the reconstruction o f the historical Jesu s, one m ust look else­ w here” (469). I make six points to clarify m y ow n position. First, i f Cynicism had never existed, nothing w ould change in m y reconstruction o f Jesu s as a Mediterranean Jew ish peasant. I use the doctrine o f Cynicism com paratively but do not need it constitutively. 1 have never considered a Cynic Jesu s as som e sort o f replacement fo r a Jewish Jesus; indeed, I find that idea little short o f absurd. M y reply to the Cynic hypothesis was and is: if you want to im agine a C ynic Jesus, go ahead, but yo u better imagine a Jew ish peasant Cynic (1991:421-422). Som e, to my chagrin, took that as postulating an ancient social type rather than a m odem scholarly construct, took it as a literal description rather than as a paradoxical challenge. Second, w hether Galilean urbanization brought Cynicism to Sepphoris an d /o r whether Jesus actually knew about Cynicism are questions beyond p ro o f or disproof. N ot only has no direct or genetic link betw een Cynicism and Je su s been either proved or disproved, I am not sure h o w it could be verified or negated w ithout new evidence. Third, it is on the level o f our understanding—on the level, that is, o f comparative religion— that I find C ynicism ve ry illum inating fo r the historical Jesus. Fourth, I find the general com parison o f C ynicism 's and Je su s ' anti-materialist and anti-imperialist criticism to be helpful. I w ou ld use the term ethical eschatology to describe both those program s and that comparison helps m e to distinguish them from ascetical or apocalyptic eschatology. I am utterly aw are that each arises from different traditions about ve ry different gods and that, i f they did not, equation rather than com parison w ou ld be dem anded. Fifth, it is especially in the sym bolic catecheses o f their dress codes that com parison is

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m ost instructive. I find this very illuminating, even if Jesus knew nothing what­ so ever about Cynicism , and I return to it immediately below . Finally, granted that a listening Jew ish peasant would have considered Jesus som e sort o f a prophet, w h at w ould a listening pagan peasant have considered him to be? “ H e’s a prophet, like our Elijah!” “ H e’s a cynic, like our Diogenes!" W ho's Elijah?” “W h o ’s Diogenes?” If, in other words, pagans heard Jesus speaking about the kingdom o f God, h ow w ould they have understood his program? Some sort o f Cynicism , surely.

Dress and Equipment. Recall Sayre’s description o f the typical Cynic dress and equipment given ju st above: “ w allet, staff and cloak, which must invariably be w orn, dirty and ragged and w orn so as to leave the right shoulder bare." W hat is there translated as “w allet" is the G reek term pern, which w e might call a knapsack but which, in any case, w as functionally a begging pouch. It was where itinerants kept what­ ever they w ere given. It declared and symbolized their self-sufficiency. They had all they needed on their hip. T h ey did not need house or shelter, family or kin­ folk. But that is precisely w hat Jesu s’ companions do not carry. T hey are no-pera people, h ow ever that term is translated in our English texts. It has been sug­ gested that Jesu s is distinguishing his group from the Cynics, as if onlookers w ou ld catch that subtle difference. M aybe Jesus had never heard o f Cynicism. Or m aybe he knew all about it and was adapting its dress code to his ow n quite dif­ ferent program . In any case, the no-knapsack dress code is symbolically correct for his program , in which itinerants are not self-sufficient but interdependent w ith the householders. In other words, the interdependency o f itinerants and householders established by that eating and healing conjunction is symbolically dram atized by the com mands about dress and equipment. The no-sandals m an­ date em phasizes their poverty. T h e no-knapsack mandate emphasizes their inter­ dependency. T h e no-staff mandate emphasizes their vulnerability, their defense­ lessness, their nonviolence.

Conclusion. I consider this unit central for an understanding o f the Com m on Sayings Tradi­ tion. It is also the place where that text locks hardest in conjunction with m y context. T h e peasant dislocation resulting from Antipas's urbanization in Low er Galilee is reflected directly in those itinerants. Th ey are not general or perennial beggars, although there m ay be som e beggars included among them. Th ey are not freehold­ ers and probably not tenants either. They are dispossessed and now landless labor­ ers, close to but not yet beggars. T hey are the expendables. T hey are the other side o f commercialization in a land that belongs to God. I take, therefore, the following disjunctive pairs as a series o f correlative terms all pointing to the same situation:

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AND

ITIN ERANTS

landless laborers

and

landed peasants

itinerants

and

householders

eating

and

healing

destitute

and

poor

enough bread for today

and

no debt for tom orrow

This is the great and terrible divide in peasant life. T h e kingdom m ovem ent focuses not just on the permanent existence o f that great divide but on its increasing and widening presence in Antipas's Galilee during the 20s

c .e .

N ever

forget that context o f rural commercialization pushing peasants from landed to landless status— in other words, from poverty to destitution. Think o f those itin­ erants not as beggars bom and bred to destitution, surviving and dying in desti­ tution. Think o f them as increasingly dispossessed peasants forced o ff their lost farms into survival on the roads o f the countryside or in the streets o f the cities. It is, I will argue, on that precise and contem porary divide that Jesu s took his stand, and it is against that divide that he proclaim ed the kingdom o f God. Like all the prophets before him, he spoke o f justice and righteousness in a very spe­ cific situation o f injustice and unrighteousness. Situation alw ays focuses but does not exhaust such challenges. One final point. I have no presumption that w hat is prim ary is alw ays better than what is secondary, or that what is original is better than w h at is derivative. The historical Jesus or earliest Christianity, as constructed by ou r best endeavors, could well be realities to be opposed from our contem porary view point. It is vision and program that are determinative for that judgm ent. And w hat must be asked most specifically is whether the kingdom o f God denotes a realm o f dom i­ nation or one o f em powerm ent. But Jesu s' com panions can do exactly w hat Je su s him self w as doing. The kingdom is not his m onopoly; it is fo r anyone with courage enough to accept it. Jesus announces its presence, its abiding, perm a­ nent possibility. H e does not initiate its existence. He does not control its access. It is the kingdom, not o f Jesus, but o f God. It is the w ill o f G o d for Israel and therefore for earth. It is not a new idea from God. It is not a change in divine plan. It is not a new strategy in transcendental justice for this w orld. Imagine, as an alternative example, that Jesu s had settled dow n w ith his fam ­ ily at Nazareth or w ith Peter at Capernaum and had sent out disciples to bring or send back to him those in need o f healing or teaching. T h at w o u ld have sym bol­ ized a G o d o f dom ination and a kingdom o f control and m astery. I f that w ere the historical Jesu s I had discovered, he w ould be prom oting dom ination— kinder and gentler, to be sure, than Caesar's, but still dom ination and n ot em pow er­ m ent. E ven the term disciples is probably not the proper term fo r that inaugural com m unity. It presum es a master and students, a teacher and pupils. A nd even

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though teaching can be em powerm ent rather than domination, it can also be the opposite. I prefer, therefore, in the light o f those three seminal texts, to describe the kingdom o f G od not as a discipleship o f equals, with Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (189), but as a companionship o f empowerment. Disciples (or students) can all be equal with one another and still subordinate to a teacher. The root ques­ tion is w hether God, and hence the kingdom o f God, and thence Jesus as the announcer o f its permanent availability, are to be seen within a model o f domi­ nation or em powerm ent. T H E C O M P A N IO N SH IP O F T H E KIN GD O M I term the group around Jesus the Companionship o f the Kingdom. The term companions is deliberately chosen in preference to disciples, which is simply the G reek w o rd for students. W hen a teacher sends out students on their own and tells them to speak exactly, act exactly, and live exacdy as their teacher does, they have graduated from students to companions. Those companions are not told to bring everyone back to Jesus, as if he alone had the kingdom o f God. T h ey are told to live in a certain w a y and thereby enter or live that kingdom’s presence ju st as Jesu s him self is doing. Th ey are also told to invite others to do likewise. I have, by the w ay, no fixed number in m y mind for that companionship. M ark 6:7 has tw elve, w hich recalls the twelve tribes o f Israel descended from Jaco b in Genesis 49:28 and the tw elve elders chosen by Moses in Deuteronom y 1:23. N o num ber from the Q Gospel is recoverable behind Luke 10:1, which has seventy or seventy-two. Even Luke’s original number is textually uncertain, but a change from seventy-tw o to seventy is more easily explained than the oppo­ site. T h e num ber seventy recalls the full progeny o fjac o b ’s sons in Exodus 1:5 or D euteronom y 12:22 and also the seventy elders chosen by M oses in Exodus 24:1 or N um bers 11:16. N either do I presum e a single sending: I imagine, rather, a per­ m anent process, w ith Jesu s as the m oving center o f a changing group. The m en­ tion o f "b y pairs” in both M ark 6:7 and Q Gospel 10:1 is very significant, by the w ay, because it means that w om en could also participate, traveling either in twos or singly w ith a man; both custom and safety concerns kept w om en from traveling on their own. M y ow n understanding o f those around Jesus, o f that companionship in the kingdom o f G od, is in serious disagreement on tw o m ajor issues w ith the recent w o rk o f E. P. Sanders on Judaism and onjesu s. Tax Collectors and Sinners T h e first problem is Sanders’s failure to distinguish betw een invective and portrayal, betw een calling som ebody names and describing som ebody’s program.

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Je su s is often im agined as gathering around him the rejected or marginalized o f society, those ostracized for moral, physical, or occupational reasons. This im age is often interwoven w ith hints or assertions that his contemporary Ju d aism w as som ehow reluctant to offer forgiveness, m ercy, or understanding to such outcasts. On that issue, I have tw o important agreem ents and one equally im portant disagreement with Sanders. I agree with Sanders’s understanding o f the phrase "tax collectors and sin­ ners." He says that the term w e translate as sinners is "virtually a technical term. It is best translated 'the wicked’, and it refers to those w h o sinned willfully and heinously and who did not rep en t.. . . Tax collectors, m ore precisely, w ere quis­ lings, collaborating with Rom e. The wicked equally betrayed the G od who redeemed Israel and gave them his law. There was no neat distinction between ‘religious' and ‘political’ betrayal in first-century Judaism ” (1985:177, 178). Later he changed his understanding o f tax collectors (that is, toll or customs collectors), say­ ing that they were condemned not as "collaborators" but as “ charging too much, and thus o f preying on the populace as a matter o f course" (1993:229). T h e phrase "sinners and tax (toll) collectors" indicated those w h o w ere "systematically or fla­ grantly . . . living outside the law in a blatant m anner," those w ho “ systematically and routinely transgressed the law " (1993:227, 236). T h ey w ere, for example, "the wicked" who were oppressing "the weak, the orphan, the low ly, the destitute, and the needy" in Psalm 82 (cited in Chapter 12) as God deposed the gods from cosmic government for malpractice in office. W ith that I am in com plete agreement. I also agree with the w ay he has cauterized, I hope forever, assertions that Je su s’ contemporary Judaism did not and w ould not accept repentance from and offer forgiveness to such people. He asks rhetorically, "Is it a serious proposal that tax collectors and the wicked longed for forgiveness, b ut could not find it within ordinary Judaism ?" And he responds correctly, “T h ere w as a universal v ie w that forgiveness is always available to those w h o return to the w a y o f the Lord,” so that " if Jesus, by eating with tax collectors, led them to repent, repay those w h om they had robbed, and leave o ff practicing their profession, he would h ave been a national h e r o .. . . It is simply inconceivable that Je w ish leaders w o u ld have been offended if people repented, and this is a cliché w hich should be dropped from Christian scholarship” (1985:202-203, 272-273). T h at statement, lo n g overdue, is absolutely true and deserves frequent quotation. Early-firstcentury Judaism , and any other Judaism before or after it, did not need lessons from Je su s on the elimination o f impurities, the forgiveness o f sins, or the mercy o f G od. It had had all o f that firm ly in place for a ve ry long time. But what, then, was left fo r Jesus to do that caused trouble? Sanders m akes three claims about Jesus in response to that question that are as “ inconceivable" as those anti-Jewish claim s he has rightly and ju stly condemned.

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First, he understands Jesus as a prophet o f Jew ish restoration. Despite that understanding, however, he repeatedly (varying the wording across several pages) m akes this assertion: "There is very little evidence which connects Jesus directly w ith the m o tif o f collective, national repentance in view o f the eschaton___ [Tjhere is not a significant body o f reliable sayings material which explicitly attributes to Jesu s a call for national repentance___ [T]here is no firm tradition w hich show s that he issued a call for national repentance in view o f the coming end, as did Jo h n the Baptist-----[I]t seems that he did not make thematic that Israel should repent and mend their w ays so as to escape punishment at the judg­ m ent” (1985:108,

h i,

112 ,115). This is the fullest statement o f that thesis: "The great

themes o f national repentance and God’s forgiveness, shown in restoring his repentant people, are prominent in all the literature that looks towards Jewish restoration. Jesu s fits somehow into that view o f God, the w orld and his people; but his m essage curiously lacks emphasis on one o f the most important themes in the overall schem e” (1985:113). That "somehow” is never explained, except by say­ ing that "the teaching attributed to Jesus is markedly individualistic, as we have seen in discussing repentance” (1985:117). I agree with that data but not with its explanation. I f yo u believed that imperial oppression was divine punishment for Jew ish sin, y o u w ould have to call for Jew ish repentance prior to God’s deliver­ ance. I f yo u did not, you would not. The data supports the interpretation that Jesu s did not think imperial oppression was a divine punishment. It was simply an injustice that the Je w s and God would have to resist as best they could. Jesus, and probably m ost peasants, knew exactly where the fault lay, and they did not blame on Jew ish sin w h at came rather from Roman greed. But that first misunderstand­ ing about Jesu s' silence on repentance prepares for this second misunderstanding. Second, Sanders interprets that saying about tax collectors and sinners in this w ay: "It is quite possible (in fact . . . quite likely) that Jesus admitted the wicked into his com m unity without making the normal demand o f restitution and com ­ mitm ent to the l a w .. . . Jesus offered the truly wicked— those beyond the pale and outside the com m on religion b y virtue o f their implicit or explicit rejection o f the com m andm ents o f the God o f Israel— admission to his group (and, he claimed, the kingdom) i f they accepted him ” (1985:203). That is not just a passing idea or fleeting thought. It gets an entire chapter to itself (1985:174-211) and is repeated program ­ matically throughout the rest o f the book. It is described as "the one distinctive note which w e m ay be certain marked Jesus’ teaching,” as “ the undeniably distinc­ tive characteristic o f Jesu s’ message,” as "a central aspect o f Jesus’ message,” as "the most distinctive aspect ofjesu s’ message” (1985:174, 271,323). Sanders sees that "aspect ofjesu s message” as parallel to the Tem ple in im por­ tance: "Jesus offended m any o f his contemporaries at two points: his attack on the temple and his message concerning the sinners” (1985:293). It is likewise parallel to

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the kingdom in importance: “W e can know the main themes o f his particular mes­ sage w ith assurance. T h ey are summarized by the words 'kingdom ' and 'the w icked '" (1985:322). None o f that is withdrawn in his later book, although he notes that “ this suggestion has been unpopular” and “is not w hat most readers will expect" (1993:230, 235). “Jesus thought and said that the wicked w ho followed him, though they had not technically ‘repented,' and though they had not becom e righ­ teous in the w ay required by the law, would be in the kingdom, and in fact would be ‘ahead' o f those who were righteous by the la w .. . . [I]f they accepted him and his message, God would include them in the kingdom— even though they had not repented and reformed in the w ay the law requires" (1993:235-236). Third, if that was actually Jesu s’ position, he repudiated thereby not only the Law o f God and Judaism but the m oral basis o f alm ost all religious life, secular law, and human decency. It w ould seem, thereafter, quite irrelevant to deny “ that there w ere any substantial points o f opposition betw een Jesu s and the Pharisees (that is, with the Pharisees in particular, as distinct from the rest o f Jew ish Palestine)" or “ that there was no substantial conflict betw een Jesus and the Pharisees with regard to Sabbath, food, and purity law s” (1985:264, 265). That m ay well be true, but a God, a kingdom, a Jesus, or a com m unity that welcom es sinners without restitution, repentance, or purpose o f am endm ent has so funda­ mentally repudiated the Law o f Judaism that all else is not w orth discussing. It is almost like praising a serial killer for paying his traffic fines. W hat Sanders has done is simply replace one libel with another. H e replaces the claim that Judaism had no acceptance fo r repentant sinners with the idea that Jesu s had acceptance fo r unrepentant sinners. H ow did he come up with an idea like that? Sanders is acutely aware o f h ow Christians have both trivialized and brutal­ ized Judaism in descriptions down through the centuries. H e is correct in his com m ents on that point, and, late as it is, that Christian practice m ust be stopped for the future and repented for the past. That process o f libel had already begun in the N e w Testam ent, with Christian Je w s attacking every sort o f non-Christian Je w w h o opposed or rejected them. Their attacks and accusations had all the accuracy o f political rhetoric in a contem porary election cam paign and m ust be taken precisely as such. But there w ere also counterattacks against them, and those w ere ju st as unfair and inaccurate. It w as ju st as possible, for exam ple, to attack Jo h n the Baptist or Jesus, label them derisively, and accuse them o f all sorts o f appropriately libelous misconduct. Both sides are, in other words, not describing programs but calling names. For name-calling to w ork, o f course, it must be based on som e connection with reality. Nam es and accusations, therefore, tell us something about w h at the individual is doing, but only within the protocols o f rhetorical abuse. In Am erica, in the 1950s, one could be accused o f consorting w ith com m ies and traitors sim ply for advocating civil liberties and hum an rights.

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Jesu s w as accused o f being insane in Mark 3:21 and o f being possessed in M ark 3:22. Th ose accusations are polemical name-calling, not neutral character description. But they tell us something nonetheless; they suggest that perhaps Je su s healed in ecstatic trance. Here is another example. In the Q Gospel both Jo h n and Je su s are attacked, but in opposite ways: For Jo h n the Baptist has com e eating no bread and drinking no wine, and yo u say, "H e has a dem on"; the Son o f Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, "L ook, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend o f tax collectors and sinners!" (Q Gospel 7:33-34) T h at text contains precious information and serious misinformation, and it is the latter that seduced Sanders into his strange conclusion about Jesus. The first h alf o f each verse tells us something factual and historical about John, Jesus, and their contrasting program s. The second half o f each verse is vituperative nam e-calling. T h ere should, therefore, be no more serious historical discussion about Jo h n the Baptist as possessed than about Jesu s as glutton and drunkard, friend o f tax collectors and sinners. Similarly with the accusation against Jesus in Jo h n 8:48 that "y o u are a Sam aritan and have a demon.” There need be no seri­ ous discussion about the ethnic identity or possessed state o f Jesus. Finally, there is a text w h ere Jesu s speaks o f Joh n the Baptist in terms o f tax collectors and prostitutes: Jesu s said to them, "T ru ly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are goin g into the kingdom o f G od ahead o f you. For Joh n came to you in the w a y o f righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change y o u r minds and believe him ." (Matthew ai:3ib-32) That passage, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with the present discus­ sion, although it is often cited as i f it did. Those named individuals could be seen as com ing to Jo h n in repentance, which w ould not be a case o f name-calling at all. Similarly, M ark 2:13-17 has Jesus say that "he came not to call the righteous, b u t sinners.” Sinners are "called," o f course, to repentance and not to continued or increased sinning. In case there is any misunderstanding, Luke expands his M arkan source b y saying that Jesu s "cam e not to call the righteous, but sinners to r e p e n t a n c e in his parallel 5:32. Later on (19:1-10) Luke gives a clear example o f such repentance in the case o f Zacchaeus, identified as tax collector and sinner. W hat has happened here is a confusion between w hat Bruce Malina and Je ro m e N eyrey describe as “ calling Jesus names” and what Sanders describes as Jesus* program m atic actions. Think o f this example. If you w ere a white racist

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looking at a black man and a white w om an sitting together at a whites-only lunch-counter in the American early sixties, what w ou ld yo u call him and what w o u ld you call her? And would that be calling names and slandering people or describing individuals and defining programs? In conclusion, therefore, the idea o f Jesu s consorting w ith repentant sinners because his contem porary Judaism w ould not accept them in the name o f God is profoundly w rong about Judaism . But the idea o f Jesu s consorting w ith unrepen­ tant sinners because he him self w ould accept them in the nam e o f God is ju st as profoundly w rong about Jesus. There should never be serious historical debate on Jesus accepting unrepentant tax collectors, sinners, or prostitutes unless there is also serious historical debate on Jesus as a lunatic, a dem oniac, a glutton, a drunkard, and a Samaritan. Individual Evil and Systemic Evil The second m ajor issue on which I take strong exception is Sanders's failure to distinguish between individual or personal evil and system ic or structural evil, a distinction emphasized frequently in this book. First, Sanders argues that “ the Sadducees w ere on average upright Je w s; and, against the general opinion, I think that this is true o f the aristocracy as w ell." His principle is that “ individual immorality, such as greed or sexual promiscuity, does not necessarily make a person a bad le a d e r.. . . W e m ay even have, in the person o f Ananias, an example o f personal im m orality and reasonable diligence w hen in office” (1992:337). He exemplifies this by referring to Roosevelt and Kennedy as unfaithful husbands but not thereby bad presidents. That is all quite true, but Sanders has the problem turned com pletely around. W e are not talking about personal or private evil and public or systemic good but about personal or private good and public or systemic evil. The question is not w hether the poor are individually good and the rich are individually bad but w hether and to what degree their relationship is systemically evil. Rem em ber N aboth’s vineyard. The question is not w hether Ahab or Naboth w as personally ju st but w hether dispos­ session o f ancestral land was structurally just. Sanders continues: “Today, m any o f us— not ju st bishops— have spare bed­ room s in our houses, while others are homeless. Th ose o f us w ith spare bed­ room s should do m ore. I am still unwilling to say, h ow ever, that people who have b ig houses are necessarily wicked" (1992:338). Agreed, once again, on the level o f personal or individual wickedness. But that vast Jew ish tradition, from prophets and priests to sages and rabbis, w as not ju st about personal piety but about structural justice. Personal justice asks, Should yo u beat, rape, or brutalize y o u r slave? System ic justice asks, Should slavery exist? But, as far as I can see, Sanders does not even glim pse that difference. T h e closest he gets to it is to

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claim that one could be a bad person but a good administrator. He never asks w h eth er one could be a good person but an evil administrator. He never distin­ guishes betw een personal or individual evil and structural or systemic evil. Read the follow ing judgments: "I rather like the chief priests___ I even find things about H erod to like-----I rather like the Pharisees____ Mostly, I like the ordinary people . . . " (1992:493-494). W hat is w rong with those comments, apart from a som ew hat grating condescension, is that they are irrelevant to the situa­ tion. A ll involved m ay have been "likable" as individuals or groups, but that does not explain the systemic problem that made some o f them hate or kill the others. N o w read the follow ing judgments: On Herod the Great, King o f the Jew s: “ H erod w as, on balance, a good k in g .. . . Herod w as a good king, on balance" (1993:19, 21). On H erod Antipas, tetrarch o f Galilee and Perea: “ Antipas was a good te tra rc h .. . . Antipas was on the whole a good ruler" (1993:21, 93). On Caiaphas, high priest o f Jerusalem ’s Temple: “Joseph Caiaphas was a success___ Caiaphas w as pretty decent” (1993:27, 265). The point, once again, is not whether those ju dgm ents are valid or invalid. T h e point is that systems are reduced to personalities and structures are equated with individuals. Pilate may have been a saint, but G o d could still stand against him, for some Jew s, as the embodiment o f system ic Rom an injustice. Second, the roots o f that problem go deep into Sanders’s misunderstanding o f religion in general and Judaism in particular. It is that same misunderstanding that allowed him, in the preceding case o f the tax collectors and sinners, to argue that Jesu s faithfully observed G od’ Law on issues o f the sabbath, food, and purity but negated it on acceptance o f flagrant evildoers without demanding repentance, restitution, or conversion. Here are the tw o key statements. In a chapter on “The C om m on People," he says that “ detailed investigation o f economic conditions lies beyond the scope o f this book" (1992:120); and in a chapter titled “Tithes and T axes," he says that “ the general assessment o f economic conditions lies outside the range o f this book" (1992:159). M y point is not that Sanders is complete on reli­ gious thought and practice but inadequate on economic affairs. And neither do I expect him to be an ancient economic historian. But how , within Jew ish tradition, can you separate religion from politics, ethics from economics, commercializa­ tion from conscience? H ow , for example, could you discuss the Holiness Code's repossession o f property, even as theoretical ideal or utopian dream, without rais­ ing econom ic questions? There is nothing as un-Jewish as a separation o f land from covenant, economics from religion, and ritual from justice. In conclusion, Jesu s' kingdom m ovem ent was not, on the one hand, about practicing asceticism. T h at is a luxury for those w h o have food and shelter, m ar­ riage and children to abandon. N or, on the other hand, was it about gathering

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general outcasts, marginalized m orally by sin, physically by impurity, or socially b y occupation. T h e kingdom m ovem ent was precisely focused on the destitute and the dispossessed— that is, on those groups w h o proliferate in any peasant society under rural commercialization. That was, in this case, Low er Galilee under Antipas's urbanization o f Sepphoris and Tiberias in the first twenty years o f that first common-era century. In so focusing, the kingdom m ovem ent was acting absolutely out o f the heart o f Judaism , absolutely in obedience to the covenantal God o f justice and righteousness. That w as signaled explicitly by the nam e under which Jesus acted: the kingdom o f God— in other words, the will o f G o d for this earth here and now. I remind you, finally, o f Gerhard Lenski’s term fo r those w ho dropped below peasant farmers or rural artisans, and o f his esti­ mate for their incidence: “The best estimate . . . is that in norm al times from 5 to 10 per cent o f the population found itself in [the Expendable Class], with the fig­ ure rising as high as 15 per cent on som e occasions and falling alm ost to zero on others” (283).

EPILOGUE: T H E SOC IAL ST AT US OF JE SUS W e anticipated that the existence o f the state, o f which peasants are by defi­ nition a part, w ould exert an influence on the form o f family life by virtue o f the fact that the state limits the local uses o f pow er and freedom to expand. W e thought, h ow ever, that the influence o f the state would essentially be constant: i.e., chat state organization as such, and not the form, character or political policies o f the particular state, would be the determinative influ­ ence. O ur data [from forty-six peasant communities] suggest otherwise. T h ey suggest that the family structure is influenced directly or indirectly by the character o f the dominant outside fo rce s.. . . Our analysis demonstrates that w hile the fam ily structure relates to the character o f land use and pro­ ductive activity o f the peasant farmer, it is to a very great degree manipu­ lated by the external influences o f the m ore powerful urban sectors o f the state o f which, b y definition, the peasant is a part. W alter Goldschmidt and Evalyn Jacobson Kunkel, “The Structure o f the Peasant Fam ily," p. 1070

H ere is one extrem e for life as an artisan. It is the proud epitaph o f a freed im perial slave, n o w a Rom an citizen, and possibly still operating with patronal capital. T h e translator calls it the “ onerously honorific epitaph o f a Roman car­ penter” (Dessau 3.750, #7237; Burford 18-19): (M emorial) to Tiberius Flavius Hilarión, freedman o f Tiberius, decurión o f the collegium o f carpenters in the 15th lustrum, inspector o f the ballot-box for the elections in the 16th lustrum, quinquennial officer o f the collegium o f w oodw orkers in the 17th lustrum, honoured in the 18th, twice censor for appointing officials in the 19th and 20th, and judge among the chosen twelve from his rank (?) in the 22nd. This monum ent was put up by Claudia Prisca to the best o f husbands. Th ose dates are given in terms o f numbered lustra. A liistrum was the fivey ea r term for the tw o censors, the most senior Rom an magistrates. These offi­ cials regulated m em bership in the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders as well as citizenship in Italy and the provinces. Tiberius Favius Hilarión obviously did all right as a carpenter, an urban artisan. But what w as it like to be a rural artisan? W hat does it m ean to call Jesu s a “ carpenter” ?

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A Peasant Artisan In m ost agrarian societies, the artisan class w as originally recruited from the ranks o f the dispossessed peasantry and their noninheriting sons and was continually replenished from these sources. Furtherm ore, despite the sub­ stantial overlap between the wealth and incom e o f the peasant and artisan, the median income o f artisans apparently w as not so great as that o f the peasants. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege, p. 278 In that epigraph, which takes us back to the cross-cultural foundations o f context in this book's method, Gerhard Lenski is thinking prim arily o f urban rather than rural artisans. H e estimates that if "urban populations numbered only 5 to 10 per cent o f the total population, then the artisan class could not have numbered m ore than 3 to 7 per cent." Furtherm ore, "m an y w ere so poor that they w ere unable to marry, with the result that the sex ratio in agrarian cities was sometimes badly out o f balance" (278). Urban artisans, in general, w ere not better o ff than peasants; in other words, Tiberius Flavius Hilarión was an anomaly. And that hardly bodes w ell for rural artisans. This small unit is almost a miniature o f m y book's method. I begin with con­ text in cross-cultural anthropology and end w ith text in the N e w Testament. W hat anthropological guidelines, then, do w e have for im agining a peasant arti­ san? I cite evidence from several different authors. T eodor Shanin connects peasants and rural artisans. H e delineates peasant society through four characteristics: "(1) the peasant fam ily-farm as the basic unit o f multi-dimensional social organization; (2) land husbandry as the main means o f livelihood directly providing the m ajor part o f the consum ption needs; (3) spe­ cific traditional culture related to the w a y o f life o f sm all com m unities; (4) die ‘underdog' position. The domination o f peasantry b y o u tsid ers.. . . T h e political econom y o f peasant society has been, generally speaking, based on expropriation o f its ‘surpluses' by pow erful outsiders, through corvee [forced labor], tax, rent, interest, and terms o f trade" (197^:294-296). In other words, a peasant is simply an oppressed and exploited farmer. But Shanin also lists "m ajo r marginal gro u ps" connected to the peasantry. The first is "agricultural labourers w ho lack a fam ily farm " and w o rk on a large estate. T h e second is "rural inhabitants who d raw their main means o f livelihood from crafts and trades, but w h o live in peas­ ant environm ents and often w o rk some land, e.g., rural craftsmen” (1971^297)Y o u could talk, then— across a peasantry— o f peasant farm ers, peasant laborers, and peasant artisans. Rem em ber that category o f the marginal peasant for future reference.

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G eorge Foster also connects peasants, rural artisans, and even fishers within the sam e definition. He answers the question "W hat is a peasant?” (while intro­ ducing readers to peasant society) by including in that term not only agricultural­ ists but "oth er small-scale producers, such as fishermen and rural craftsmen" (4). T h e reason is his insistence that "like most anthropologists, w e agree that peas­ ants are prim arily agriculturalists, but w e also believe that the criteria o f defini­ tion m ust be structural and relational rather than occupational. For in most peas­ ant societies, significant numbers o f people earn their livings from nonagricultural occupations. It is not what peasants produce that is significant; it is how and to whom they dispose o f what they produce that counts” (6). And that structural relationship is not a very benign one. "Peasants are not only poor, as has often been pointed out, but they are relatively p o w erless.. . . Peasants know that con­ trol o ver them is held in some mysterious fashion by superior powers, usually residing in c itie s .. . . It is noteworthy, too, that whatever the form o f control held by the elite, they usually drain o ff most o f the economic surplus a peasant creates, beyond the necessity for a bare subsistence living and for local religious expenditures” (9). H enry Landsberger does not speak about peasant artisans as distinct from peasant farm ers. H e is, in fact, reluctant even to use the term peasant, because its "form al definition . . . is so thoroughly confused” (6). He focuses, how ever, "on those ‘rural cultivators' (for on that, everyone is agreed) who occupy relatively lo w positions on various critical dimensions . . . especially . . . economic and political ones . . . having to do with the control o f [1] the relevant economic and political ‘in p u ts '. . . [2] the ‘transformation process' within the econom y and the polity . . . and [3] the degree o f benefit derived from the 'output' o f each o f these sectors o f society” (10-11). W hether that is definition or not, it is exactly the same understanding o f the peasantry used elsewhere in this book, be it from Lenski or Kautsky, Scott or W olf, Shanin or Foster. But its formulation gives Landsberger the ability not only to delimit the peasantry externally from other social groups b ut also to stratify it internally within itself. Thus he emphasizes the “vertical stratification w ithin the peasantry— the relation o f those better-off to the worseo ff [which] has often been a central issue for those concerned themselves with peasant m ovem ents and uprisings” (15). Hence differentiations o f “ ‘higher’ ve r­ sus ‘lo w e r , or ‘m ore’ versus ‘less’” within the peasantry are crucially important for his analysis, w hich is specifically focused on "peasant unrest” (13). T h e distinc­ tion, fo r exam ple, betw een "sharecropper" and “landless labourer” is highly sig­ nificant for him, because "in our scheme landless labourers (who, incidentally, m ay differ greatly am ong themselves) are simply groups at zero point in the con­ trol o f the key resources o f land and capital (though not necessarily at that point either in hum an skills or managerial capacity)” (13-14)- A peasant artisan, if not

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exactly at that same zero point, is dangerously close to it and m ay be only politely or semantically different from a landless laborer. Such internal differentiation, no doubt facilitated and exacerbated by external exploitation, is emphasized b y many other recent scholars. Frank Cancian, for example, argues that peasant homogeneity from an external view point m ust be matched with heterogeneity from an internal one: "Th e internal heterogeneity o f peasant communities is an important key to understanding the econom ic behavior o f the people who live in them— even when there are at the sam e time local cus­ toms that seem to promote socioeconomic hom ogeneity" (152). And W illiam Roseberry brings that heterogeneity inside the family itself: "Peasantries are gener­ ally characterized by marked social differentiation,” which m ay occur even within the same household, especially as "the m ix o f farm w o rk and off-farm w o rk is unevenly distributed within the household,” so that parents m ay stay on the fam ­ ily farm while siblings have to w ork elsewhere” (123). T h at w ould, o f course, have serious implications for the integrity o f the peasant fam ily itself, especially i f its younger members became, in effect, absent urban laborers. A nd there would always be an interaction between increasing commercialization from outside and increasing differentiation from inside peasant communities and families. I append one specific example o f that cross-cultural generality, lest all o f this get too abstract. Kazimiertz D obrowolski described traditional, oral, peasant cul­ ture in southern Poland before its emancipation in the m iddle o f the last century by noting that "the village population . . . w as divided into several landow ning classes as well as into different types o f landless peasantry.” Landed and landless, the basic distinctions, w ere broken down as follows: “A m o n g the landed peas­ antry there w ere owners o f full fields, h alf fields, h alf a rola (another type o f field), quarter-rola, owners o f forest-recovered fields, and finally ow n ers o f quite small plots. The landless population w ere differentiated into craftsm en, village labourers w ho either had a household o f their ow n, or a room and food pro­ vided by a rich peasant for whom they had to w ork” (293-294 note 1, w ith Polish items omitted). In that description the sequence o f the groups indicates the gen­ eral hierarchy within a traditional peasantry. It is equally necessary, therefore, to emphasize, externally, w h at distinguishes peasants from other classes in terms o f power, and, internally, w h at distinguishes peasants am ong themselves in terms o f status. “T h e old peasant culture in South­ ern Poland at the close o f the feudal era . . . w as a highly differentiated culture, both socially and economically; its social contrasts w ere often considerable, espe­ cially those w hich existed between rich peasants and the village poor. Th u s there w ere great differences in the sizes o f farms and the num ber o f cattle, in the inte­ rior o f peasant cottages, furniture, implements, food, dress e t c .. . . In addition, there w as a strong pressure exerted by the rich peasants on the p o o rer section of

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the com m unity (the landless and village labourers) which aimed at debarring them from using such elements o f culture which the rich claimed as their sole prerogative. Yet it was the poor w ho played a very conspicuous part in the creation o f cultural v a lu e s.. . . It was they w ho provided the great m ajority o f craftsmen-carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, weavers, blacksmiths, potters. The village proletariat produced a large number o f folk-artists, sculptors, painters, ornament makers, tailors, singers and players, saga-tellers and folk-writers" (290-291). I n ow turn from that general context to a specific text about Jesus. Though it is not from the C om m on Sayings Tradition, I introduce it here because it will, in any case, haunt the background to the following discussion o f units from that corpus. The G reek text o f M ark 6:3 records that Jesu s' contemporaries asked incred­ ulously about him, “ Is not this the tekton?" W e usually translate that term as car­ penter, which creates a problem for our contem porary imagination. The question is not what that term means for us but w hat it meant within a peasant economy in the early-first-century Jew ish homeland. M ark locates the scene in the syna­ gogue at Nazareth, and he is followed in that detail by both Matthew and Luke. Jo h n , w h o locates it in the synagogue at Capernaum , is probably giving an inde­ pendent version o f that local reaction to Jesus. I give all four texts here, but I am especially interested in h ow M atthew and Luke rephrase their Markan source: Is not this the carpenter, the son o f M ary and brother o f Jam es and Joses and Judas and Sim on, and are not his sisters here with us? (Mark 6:3) Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his m other called Mary? And are not his brothers Jam es and Joseph and Sim on and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? W here then did this m an get all this? (Matthew 13:55-56) Is not this Joseph 's son? (Luke 4:22) Is not this Jesus, the son o f Joseph, whose father and m other w e know? (John 6:40) That is a very interesting change in M atthew 13:55 and Luke 4:22. Each in its ow n w a y avoids saying that Jesus was a carpenter. M atthew shifts the term to Joseph, and Luke avoids it entirely. This is m y question: D o they find Jesus-ascarpenter som ew hat offensive, and is that the reason for those changes? T h e fol­ lo w in g parallel case prompts an affirmative answer. M ark 10:35 has "Jam es and John, the sons o f Zebedee,” ask, w ith ineffable obtuseness, for first seats in the kingdom immediately after Jesus has described his

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impending passion in terrible detail. It is hard to miss the aw ful inappropriateness o f that reaction. W hat do Matthew and Luke do with it? M atthew 20:20 saves their dignity by changing the passage to a request from “ the m other o f the sons o f Zebedee.” It is now not the sons themselves but their m other w h o pleads for first seats on their behalf. And Luke simply omits the entire unit. H e follows M ark 10:32-34 (the unit just preceding the first-seats request) in his ow n 18:31-34, ignores Mark 10:35-45, and then follows Mark 10:46-52 (just after the request) in his ow n 18:35-43. As earlier with Jesus as carpenter, so here with Jo h n and Jam es as dumb and dumber, Matthew and Luke use exactly the same procedure to solve a Markan embarrassment. In both cases, Matthew transfers the problem from son(s) to par­ ent while Luke omits either the problematic w ord or the entire problematic unit. I conclude that neither o f them deemed carpenter an appropriate designation for Jesus. The reason, by a conjunction o f context and text, is that a tekton or peasant arti­ san is but a euphemism for a dispossessed peasant, for a landless laborer.

A Marginal Jew Unless “the peasants” can be understood in terms o f their internal differenti­ ation along economic and other lines, it m ay appear that they consist entirely o f the prey; in fact, some are com m only am ong the predators. . . . while peasants are, from one point o f view , the underside o f a society, from another they include both exploiters and exploited, and cannot be fully understood, i f w e take for granted that they are econom ically (and cultur­ ally) homogeneous. Sidney W. Mintz, “A Note on the Definition o f Peasantries,” pp. 94, 96 Jo h n M eier's ongoing multivolume study o f the historical Je su s calls him "a m arginal Je w ” in its title, and that phrase is explained quite clearly in the first vo l­ um e (1991:1.6-9). M eier was implausibly attacked for it b y M artin G oodm an, w hose review found that “the six ways in which Jesu s w as m arginal in the soci­ ety o f His day,” as proposed by Meier, are all "specious” (1991:3). H e w as im plau­ sibly defended for it by Raym ond Brown, w h o said that "o n the im plicit point that Jesu s w as not identifiably an adherent o f any o f Jo seph u s' three sects o f the Je w s (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes)” that term “ is surely right” (1994353 note 54). T h at criterion would make the overw helm ing m ajority o f all first-century Je w s m arginal. W hat is needed, as so often in such disputes, is som e discipline from the social sciences. WTiat, there, does marginal mean? Seventy years ago Robert Park argued that "on e o f the consequences o f m igration is to create situations in which the same individual— w h o m ay or may not be o f m ixed blood—finds him self striving to live in tw o diverse cultural

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g ro u p s .. . . This is the 'marginal m an\ . . . It is in the mind o f the marginal man that the moral turmoil which new cultural contacts occasion manifests itself in the most obvious forms. It is in the mind o f the marginal man— where the changes and fusions o f culture are going on— that w e can best study the pro­ cesses o f civilization and o f progress' (1928:881, 893). Park repeated that term a few years later, referring to this "cultural hybrid" as “the so-called marginal man, i.e., the individual w h o finds him self on the margins o f tw o cultures and not fully or perm anently accom m odated to either" (1931:109). About a decade after that original article, Everett Stonequist used the term "m arginal m an” in the title o f a book both dedicated to Park and introduced by him. In his introduction, Park defined "the marginal m an" as “ one whom fate has condem ned to live in tw o societies and in two, not m erely different but antagonistic cu ltu res.. . . He is . . . an effect o f imperialism, economic, political and cultural” (i937:xv, xviii). But Park also noted that Stonequist's book was, despite its subtitle (A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict), less concerned with “ a personality type, than with a social process, the process o f acculturation" (xviii). Stonequist’s ow n definition o f the "m arginal m an" is "the individual who through m igration, education, marriage or som e other influence leaves one social group or culture without m aking a satisfactory adjustment to another [and] finds him self on the margin o f each but a m em ber o f neither . . . one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between tw o (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions o f these worlds, one o f which is often 'dom inant' over the other; within which membership is im plicitly i f not explicitly based upon birth or ancestry (race or nationality); and w here exclusion rem oves the individual from a system o f group relations” (2-3, 8). T h e examples cited involve both racial and cultural hybrids arising from the interaction o f Europeans w ith Africans, Indians, and Asians. But there is still great emphasis on personality type rather than social process, as is indicated by the ve ry term "m arginal m an." A m ore recent study speaks not o f "the marginal man” but o f “ marginality,” and that definition is n ow much, m uch better. Gino Germ ani distinguishes explicitly, first o f all, "betw een marginality as a phenomenon at the level o f per­ sonality (marginal personalities), and marginality as a social situation, the form er being a psychological and cultural problem while the latter w as usually consid­ ered the result o f historic and structural conditions.” That eliminates a large am ount o f the individualism, psychologism, and romanticism o f the original "m arginal m an" emphasis. Next, he defines marginality as "the lack o f participa­ tion in those spheres which are considered to be within the radius o f action an d /o r access o f the individual or group. Marginality is im puted through a com ­ parison betw een a de facto situation and a certain model: the role set w hich the

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individual or group should play according to given a priori principles” (9). Or again: "W e m ay define marginality as the lack o f participation o f individuals and groups in those spheres in which, according to determined criteria, they might be expected to participate. By participation w e mean the exercise o f roles conceived o f in the broadest sense” (49). In other words, marginality (or marginalization) is the lack o f an expected social participation. Theoretically and quite correctly, there­ fore, one could imagine a marginalized king am ong kings ju st as w ell as a marginalized peasant among peasants or even beggar am on g beggars. Finally, Germ ani emphasizes that “many authors differentiate the phenom enon o f poverty from that o f marginality. T h ey argue that though they are usually asso­ ciated, they should be analytically differentiated since m arginality can exist w ith­ out poverty, or with less poverty than in participating sectors. T h is distinction is related to the distinction between tw o sectors o f the popular or lo w er social strata: those which are established (have a relatively stable occupation or job , live in normal w orking class or peasant houses, even i f it is a slum and living standards are quite low), and the population socially located outside o f the strati­ fication system, as sort o f outcasts, on the m argin o f the global society and its class system including its lowest strata” (7). In Germ ani’s general understanding, and especially in that last specific quo­ tation, a dispossessed peasant— one forced o ff the farm b y debt, for exam ple— is marginalized. The point is not that he w as or is poor but that he can no longer participate as expected among his fellow peasants. I f Jesu s w as a dispossessed peasant trying to survive as a rural artisan or landless laborer, he w as a m arginal­ ized peasant. (By the way, I prefer the term marginalized to marginal n ot to be politically correct but to be politically accurate.)

P A R T VIII

Teachers an d H o u seh o ld ers The transmission o f Jesus sayings in the early Christian com m unity is a soci­ ological problem particularly because Jesus gave no fixed, written form to what he said. A written tradition can survive for a time even w hen it has no bearing on the behavior o f m en and wom en, or even if the tradition's intention runs counter to that behavior. But oral tradition is at the m ercy o f the interest and concerns o f the people w h o pass it on and to w hom it is addressed. Its survival is dependent on specific social conditions. T o mention only one o f these: the people w h o pass the tradition on must in som e w ay or other identify with that tradition .. . . W e can now formulate our thesis: the ethical radicalism o f the say­ ings is the radicalism o f the itinerants.. . . T h e radicalism o f their wandering life goes back to Jesu s himself. It is authentic. Probably m ore o f the sayings must be "suspected” o f being genuine than m any a m odem skeptic would like to think. But the Jesu s tradition is authentic in a different, transferred sense as well. It is existentially authentic. It w as practiced. So the w andering charismatics w ere a widespread phenomenon in early Christianity. As far as numbers go, the local congregations w ere certainly much stro n g e r.. . . M ost socially uprooted people came from the middle classes. It was the people w h o had declined into poverty, rather than the people bom in poverty, w h o set out to pass their lives beyond the boundaries o f normal life or even to seek w ays o f renew ing society. Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians, pp. 35,40, 45; pp. 64, 88 (from

essays originally published in 1973 and 1977) Part VII show ed that there was, from the earliest evidence I can find, a dialectic o f itinerants and householders going back to the time o f the historical Jesu s. T h e kingdom o f God w as made present not just in the itinerants but in the interaction o f itinerants and householders, in a new com m unity o f healing and eating, o f shared material and spiritual resources. T h e itinerants expected and received external opposition and even persecution. But did they also encounter internal opposition— dissent and criticism from those w h o had already accepted them? W as there resistance not only by non-Christians from outside but by Christians from within the kingdom-of-God m ovement? And did that internal negation give a far greater sense o f failure to the itinerants than any external one ever could? Part VII gave the voice o f the itinerants; Part VIII gives the voice o f the householders. In Part VII the itinerants spoke out; in Part VIII the householders

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talk back. For the itinerants w e have the Q Gospel docum ent, for the household­ ers w e have the Didache document. Both o f those texts are m uch later than the C om m on Sayings Tradition, with which I am prim arily interested, but I use their later interaction to find in that earlier tradition evidence that such tensile dia­ lectic w as there from the very beginning. In a w a y such tension w as surely inevitable. W hat happens when itinerants tell householders to abandon every­ thing, as they have done? It is easy to imagine w hat those w h o oppose them will do. But what will those w ho receive them do? In w h at follow s, 1 am reading the Didache to imagine some o f its developed responses as inchoately present w hen the very first itinerant was greeted by the very first householder in peace. W hat validates that act o f imagination is one o f m ost radical sayings o f Jesus, Give Without Return. It is found in the Com m on Sayings Tradition at 0 Gospel 6:30— that is, Luke 6:30 = M atthew 5:42— and at Gospel o f Thomas 95. But it is also found in a climactic position and with a careful com m entary in Didache 1:5a (Appendix iA: #35 = Appendix 7: #4). Chapter 19 shows that in the Q Gospel, as early as Jesu s' inaugural serm on in Q 1, the itinerants are criticizing the householders as those w h o confess the Lord but do not obey him, w ho hear him but do not do w h at he asks. T h ey are not speaking against outsiders who do not hear but against insiders w h o hear but do not act accordingly. That is clear enough, but then w e w ade into m urkier waters. Some o f those insider-critical sayings in the Q Gospel are found already in the Com m on Sayings Tradition, but, o f course, w ithout the Q Gospel context which determines their meaning. Do they have the sam e insider-critical focus even at that earlier stage? Chapter 20 shows the Didache’s householders m o vin g carefully and deli­ cately both to accept and to contain itinerant radicalism. T h ey do so b y establish­ in g their ow n com munally approved teaching, but also b y m aking clear rules for itinerant prophets w ho visit the community. T h at is a first and fundamental m o ve o f containment. Chapter 21 addresses the second and even m ore im portant m o ve o f contain­ m ent. T h e m ost radical sayings involving imitation o f G o d ’s nonviolent charac­ ter on earth are carefully integrated into the Didache’s basic catechism , and one is told to “ do w hat you can” about them. But, above all, radical despoliation, as in that Give Without Return saying, becomes transmuted into salvific alm sgiving, so that h aving nothing is translated into sharing everything. C hapter 22 is a connective pivot between the tradition o f Je su s’ life in these Parts VII and VIII and the tradition o fje su s’ death in the succeeding Parts IX and X . It is presented prim arily in dialogue with past and present w o rk b y Helmut Koester.

CHAPTER i 9

CRITICIZING THE H O U SE H O LD E R S T h e group as a whole m ay enter into an antagonistic relation with a power outside o f it, and it is because o f this that the tightening o f the relations am ong its m em bers and the intensifications o f its unity, in consciousness and in action, occur. Georg Simmel, "Conflict, " p. 191

Such "searching for the outside enem y” (or exaggeration o f the danger w hich an actual enem y represents) serves not only to maintain the structure o f the group, but also to strengthen its cohesion w hen threatened by a relax­ ation o f energies or by internal dissension. Sharpness o f outside conflict revives the alertness o f the membership, and either reconciles divergent ten­ dencies or leads to concerted group action against the dissenter. Lewis A. Coser, The Functions o f Social Conflict, p. 106 Th ose epigraphs are from classic sociological works on the dynamic interac­ tion betw een external threat and internal cohesion in small struggle-groups. The presence, exaggeration, or even creation o f an external threat assists in establish­ ing internal unity and controlling internal dissent within the group itself. "There are,” as C oser concludes, "shifting gradations between the exaggeration o f a real danger, the attraction o f a real enem y, and the complete invention o f a threaten­ ing agent” (no). But, o f course, a siege mentality m ay also generate besiegers. T o call outsiders enem ies m ay often turn strangers into foes or force them from contempt to oppression, from discrimination to persecution. W hen you read through the Q Gospel you find reiterated attacks on "this gen­ eration.” Kloppenborg, for example, makes those units the defining characteristic o f the gospel's second, apocalyptic, or Q2 layer (1987a: 102-170). Is "this generation’ actually reading those descriptions o f itself? O f course not. O r again, recall those w oes uttered in Q Gospel 10:13-15 against Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, three towns in a small triangle around the northern shores o f the Sea o f Galilee. W ere those towns hearing those attacks on themselves? O f course not, once again. But the above proposals from Simmel and Coser help to understand the internal

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purpose o f such external diatribes. Think o f its situation within a peasant cul­ ture undergoing the severe disruption o f rural commercialization. "Traditional [i.e., oral] culture manifested a tendency towards uniform ity/' as Kazimiertz D obrowolski concluded. "It was expressed in the social pressure towards a com­ mon, unchanging pattern o f social institutions and ideological contents within par­ ticular classes or village groups. The individuals w ho deviated from the commonly accepted pattern o f behaviour obtaining within their respective classes or groups, met with such repressive measures as ridicule, reproach, m oral censure, ostracism or even the application o f official legal sanctions" (291). T h e Q Gospel might some­ times exaggerate that external opposition, but it did not need to invent it. Strong opposition from outsiders and to outsiders is ve ry clear in the C om ­ mon Sayings Tradition. It warns about strong external opposition, for example, in such sayings as Carrying One's Cross and Blessed the Persecuted (Appendix iA : #24, #28). It also asserts a rather general opposition against the Pharisees in On Hinder­ ing Others (Appendix iA : #16). But I now ask a m ore precise question: Is there evidence in the Com m on Sayings Tradition itself that there w as already internal dissent within the communities involved? Apart from extra-Christian resistance, was there intra-Christian resistance as well? I rephrase the question in the light o f those sociological epigraphs: Is outside opposition em phasized to control internal opposition? W hat evidence is there, in other words, that those itinerants seen in Part VII w ere meeting with dissent from Christian householders?

Internal Dissent in the

Q G o sp e l

Conflict w ith outsiders, as Lewis Coser has shown, actually serves a positive and constructive purpose as a means to define m ore clearly group bound­ aries, to enhance internal cohesion and to reinforce group id e n tity .. . . Thus, w hile ostensibly directed at the "out-group," these polem ical and threaten­ ing materials function in fact to strengthen the identity o f the "in-group" and to interpret for them the experience o f persecution, rejection, and even the failure o f their preaching o f the kingdom. John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation ofQ, pp. 167-168 Kloppenborg describes the beatitudes that open Je su s’ inaugural serm on in Q Gospel 6:2ob-23 as "'anti-beatitudes’ [that] stand in contrast to the v ie w s o f the conventional w isdom that those w ho dwell in affluence and safety are blessed/ T h ey are a "program m atic statement” o f "the 'radical w isdom o f the kingdom .' But, he continues, “ other examples o f such radical w isdom are to be found in the im m ediate context: in 6:27-35, 36-38, 39-45" (19873:188-189). T h at is not exactly accurate. Th is Q Gospel serm on breaks down into tw o rather clear halves. The

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first half in Q Gospel 6:23-35 is the manifesto o f the kingdom 's radicality. Kloppenb o rg is perfectly correct on that point. And the tone there is alm ost rhapsodic or even ecstatic. But the second half, in Q Gospel 6:36-45, is ordinary, everyday, non­ radical wisdom . And the tone there is critical and censorious. Here are the units involved in that second half: As Your Father

Q6.36

(Appendix 2B: #8)

Jtidgmentfor Judgment

Q 6:37a

(Appendix 2B: #9)

Measurefor Measure

Q 6:38bc

(Appendix 2B: #10)

The Blind Guide

Q 6:39

Disciple and Servant

Q6:40

Speck and Log

=

Gos. Thom. 34

Q 6:41-42

=

Gos. Thom. 26

(Appendix iA: #10)

=

Gos. Thom. 45

(Appendix iA: #19)

(Appendix i A: #13) (Appendix 2B: #11)

Trees and Hearts

Q 6:43-45

Invocation Without Obedience

Q 6:46

(Appendix 2B: #12)

Rock or Sand

Q 6 :4 7 - 4 9

(Appendix 2B: #13)

As you m ove through those sayings from beginning to end, three details becom e steadily clearer. T h e first is that the sayings are directed against dis­ sent from inside rather than outside the com m unity. T h e second is that the dissent in volves leaders or at least ideals for the com m unity. T h e third is that the dissent involves hearing and doing as against hearing and not doing. Behind Q Gospel 6:36-49 y o u m ust hear the criticisms m ade against the itinerants by the householders even as you read the itinerants countercriticizing the house­ holders in defense o f them selves. The saying in Q Gospel 6:36 about the Father as model o f m ercy is a program ­ matic overture to the entire second h alf o f the sermon. It leads into a warning against judging others in Q Gospel 6:37-38 (that is, do not you judge us). T h at is the first w arning o f internal dissent, but it becom es explicitly internal as w e pro­ ceed. The Blind Guide saying in Q Gospel 6:39 focuses that som ewhat general criti­ cism into a w arning against blind leaders and blind followers (that is, you are blind). That is then specified in Q Gospel 6:40 by asserting that disciples cannot im prove on their teacher (that is, you should not try); it is enough to be like him. T h at countercriticism then continues into Speck and Log as w ell as Trees and Hearts in Q Gospel 6:41-45 (judge yourselves first; you are bad people). Th ose coun­ tercriticisms in Q Gospel 6:36-45 m ay read like rather banal and proverbial wisdom , but they are used here in an internal debate over follow ing or not fol­ low ing the radical w isdom ju st proclaim ed in Q Gospel 6:2ob-35Finally, then, the last tw o aphorisms, in Q Gospel 6:46-49, make the precise point o f criticism and countercriticism extrem ely clear. Kloppenborg com ments that “ many sapiential instructions end (or som etim es begin) with descriptions o f

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the rew ards which await those w ho attend to the instructions, and the conse­ quences for those w ho do not" (19873:186). H e gives several examples. I cite two o f them, one from a biblical book and the other from a popular philosophical treatise o f that time (19873:186-187): Therefore w alk in the w ay o f the good, and keep to the paths o f the just. For the upright will abide in the land, and the innocent w ill rem ain in it; but the wicked will be cut o ff from the land, and the treacherous w ill be rooted out o f it. (Proverbs 2:20-22) If you pay attention and understand w hat is said, yo u w ill be w ise and happy. If, on the other hand, you do not, you will becom e foolish, unhappy, sullen and stupid and you will fare badly in life. (Cebes’ Tablet 3.1) There is, then, nothing surprising about a sapiential serm on such as Q Gospel 6:2ob-49 ending with disjunctive sanctions, w ith sayings that prom ise reward and benefit or threaten punishment and damage. In this case, though, those dis­ junctive sanctions are made extremely precise: W hy do you call me “ Lord, Lord,” and do not do w h at I tell you? I w ill show you what someone is like w h o comes to m e, hears m y w ords, and acts on them. That one is like a man building a house, w h o dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been w ell built. But the one w h o hears and does not act is like a man w ho built a house on the ground w ith o u t a foundation. W hen the river burst against it, im m ediately it fell, and great w as the ruin o f that house. (Q Gospel 6:46-49) T h at conclusion is as clear as one could want. It is not about outsiders w arned and insiders praised. It is not about outsiders refusing Je su s' w o rd s while insiders accept them. It is about insiders— that is, about those w h o confess Jesu s as Lord within the kingdom community. W ithin that very com m unity there are those w h o hear and do while others hear and do not. T h at is, all hear but only some do. Furtherm ore, those who hear and do not criticize those w h o hear and do. A nd Q Gospel 6:46-49 concludes the countercriticism o f those w h o hear and do against their intracom m unity opponents. In other words, the second h alf o f the serm on in Q Gospel 6:36-49 concerns dissent within the kingdom com m unity o v e r the rad­ ical kingdom w isdom announced in the first half, in Q Gospel 6:2ob-35. T h at is all fairly clear and certain, but only three o f those sayings, The Blind Guide, Speck and Log, and Trees and Hearts have Gospel o f Thomas parallels. O nly

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those three, therefore, are certainly present in the C om m on Sayings Tradition. Because o f that 1 offer here only a tentative hypothesis— namely, that those three sayings are evidence for internal dissent even at the stage o f the C om m on Say­ ings Tradition.

Internal Dissent in the Common Sayings Tradition Q 6:39-45, o f course, takes particular aim at teachers (actual or imagined) w h o do not fo llo w je su s in his radical lifestyle and ethic. But there is no com ­ pelling reason to suppose that 6:39-42 is formulated with outsiders and opponents in mind. J o h n S. K lo p p e n b o r g ,

T h e F o r m a t io n o f Q ,

p. 185

T h e B lind G u id e. T h e first o f the three sayings in this set is The Blind Guide (Appendix iA: #13). It is a T yp e 4 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted neither toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas nor toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 6:39b— that is, Luke 6:39b = M atthew 15:14b— and in Gospel o f Thomas 34. These are the twin texts: Can a blind person lead a blind person? W ill not both fall into the pit? (Q Gospel 6:39) Jesu s said, “ I f a blind person leads a blind person, both o f them will fall into a hole." (Gospel o f Thomas 34) T h e self-contradictory image o f the blind guide “ was a com monplace in the ancient w orld ," as Kloppenborg notes w ith examples (19873:184), so the signifi­ cant issue is not ju st w hether Jesu s cited this proverb but what the context might have been. W as it, for example, internally or externally directed? W as it warning for insiders or invective for outsiders? The context in M atthew 15:12-14 directs the saying specifically against the Pharisees. But the Q Gospel context, as in Luke 6:39b, directs it internally against teachers within the com m unity "w ho do not emulate their master . . . w h o try to outstrip their m aster b y judging others," as Kloppenborg sum m arizes its m ean­ ing (19873:184). Gospel o f Thomas 34 could be read either internally or externally, but lack o f context m akes it impossible to decide. There is not, h ow ever, any explicit link to the Pharisees as there is, for example, in Gospel o f Thomas 39:1-2 and 102. All in all, therefore, the saying's meaning in the C om m on Sayings Tradi­ tion is m ore likely to be internal admonition than external accusation. But it also

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seem s to bespeak a situation o f debate about h ow one follow s, teaches, or imi­ tates Jesu s rather than a situation within the life o f Jesu s himself. Sp eck and Log. The second o f the three sayings in this set is Speck and Log (Appendix iA: #10). It is a T ype 4 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted neither toward asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas nor toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel. It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 6:41-42— that is, Luke 6:41-42 = M atthew 7:3-5— and in the Gospel o f Thomas, with both Coptic and Greek versions, as Gospel o f Thomas 26 and P. Oxy. 1, lines 1-4. But only the very end o f this saying’s Greek version is extant, since the fragmented P. Oxy. 1 begins at that point. Here are the three texts: W hy do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to you r neighbor, “ Friend, let m e take out the speck in your eye,” w hen you you rself do not see the log in yo u r own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out o f yo u r o w n eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out o f yo u r neighbor’s eye. (Q Gospel 6:41-42) [ . . . ] and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in yo u r brother’s eye. (Gospel o f Thomas 26:2b [Greek]) Jesus said, "Y ou see the speck that is in you r brother’s eye, but y o u do not see the beam that is in your ow n eye. W hen yo u take the beam out o f yo u r ow n eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out o f y o u r brother’s eye.” (Gospel o f Thomas 26:1-2 [Coptic]) T h at central sentence from "h ow ” to ‘’hypocrite!’’ in Q Gospel 6:42a has no parallel in Gospel o f Thomas 26, which parallels only the first and third sentences. I read that saying as countercriticism from the Q Gospel’s radical proponents against those w h o oppose them from within the Christian com m unity. T re e s and H earts. T h e last o f the three sayings in this set is Trees and Hearts (Appendix iA : #19)It is a T yp e 4 saying (Appendix iB); that is, it has been redacted neither tow ard asceticism in the Gospel o f Thomas nor toward apocalypticism in the Q Gospel It appears in the Q Gospel as Q 6:43-45— that is, Luke 6:43-45 = M atthew 7:16-20 and M atthew 12:33-35— and in Gospel o f Thomas 45. These are the tw in texts: N o good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear go o d fruit; for each tree is know n by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, n or are grapes picked from a bramble bush. T h e good person ou t o f the good treasure o f the heart produces good, and the evil person ou t o f evil treasure

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+

3^1

produces evil; for it is out o f the abundance o f the heart that the mouth speaks. (Q Gospel 6:43-45) Jesu s said, "G rapes are not harvested from thorn trees, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they yield no fruit. A good person brings forth good from the storehouse; a bad person brings forth evil things from the corrupt store­ house in the heart, and says evil things. For from the abundance o f the heart this person brings forth evil things." (Gospel o f Thomas 45:1-4) I I

am, once m ore, reading that saying against internal or intra-Christian dis­

sent within the C om m on Sayings Tradition. Like the tw o preceding sayings, it is still internal dissent that is at stake in their Q Gospel usage. Its secondary usage in M atthew 12:33-35, how ever, directs it externally against those accusing Jesus o f demonic possession.

C H A P T E R 20

CONTROLLING THE ITINERANTS The silent m ajority o f those w ho awaited the com ing o f the kingdom were careworn and decent householders, long used to the punctilious rhythms o f Jew ish life. Secure in their moral horizons, they w ere in no position to allow the painfully assembled fabric o f their social person— their w ives, their chil­ dren, their kinfolk, and the few ancestral fields that they would inherit when they buried their father— to evaporate at the call o f the wandering few. Christian com m unities w here such men came to the fore w ould look at the world around them in a very different m anner from those w ho imagined that, on the open road, they already breathed the heady air o f the kingdom. Peter Brown, The Body and Society, p. 44 So far the discussion has m ostly involved tw o texts, the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, as w ell as the Com m on Sayings Tradition, out o f which they both developed in very different w ays. I now add a third and equally important text, the Didache. I place this new text in tensive dialogue with the Q Gospel, but at an earlier stage than the finished document w e now have in M atthew and Luke. For exam ple, both the Didache and the Q Gospel contain secondary apoca­ lyptic eschatology, but, while the latter expects the advent o f the Son o f Man, the form er awaits the arrival o f the Lord G od (with no mention o f the Son o f Man or the Lord Jesus). It is as if the Didache knows the Q Gospel at a stage som ewhere in between the C om m on Sayings Tradition and the final Q Gospel itself. Recall that in the preceding chapter the Q Gospel criticized som e Christians in 6:46 for calling Jesu s "Lord, Lord” but not doing w hat Jesu s wanted and warned them in 6:47-49 about hearing but not doing.. That is the voice o f the radi­ cal itinerants reproaching the settled householders. But in the Didache, the con­ servative householders get to answ er back, both respecting and containing the radicalism o f those itinerants. Those three texts— the Q Gospel, the Gospel o f Thomas, and the Didache— w ere hidden from sight for centuries in very different w ays. T h e Q Gospel was hidden in the gospels o f M atthew and Luke. T h e Gospel o f Thomas w as hidden in a sealed ja r near the Nile-side cliffs. T h e Didache w as hidden in a manuscript codex, along w ith six other early Christian texts, in an ancient library. O ver one hundred years ago, about a decade after the Didache’s discovery and alm ost im m ediately after its publication, Philip Schaff gave this description

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o f its location: "T h e Jerusalem Monastery o f the M ost H o ly Sepulchre is an irreg­ ular mass o f buildings in the Greek quarter o f C on stan tin ople.. . . It belongs to the Patriarch o f Je ru sa le m .. . . The Jerusalem M onastery possesses, like most convents, a library. It is preserved in a small stone chamber, erected for the pur­ pose and detached from the other buildings. It receives scanty light through two strongly barred windows. Its entrance is adorned w ith holy pictures, it contains about a thousand bound volum es and ‘from four hundred to six hundred manuscripts/ as the present superior, the archimandrite Polycarp, informed a recent visitor ‘with characteristic indefiniteness/ A m on g the books o f this library w as one o f the rarest treasures o f ancient Christian literature. It is a collection o f [seven] manuscripts bound in one volum e, covered w ith black leather, carefully written on well preserved parchment by the same hand, in small, neat, distinct letters, and numbering in all 120 leaves or 240 pages o f sm all octavo (nearly 8 inches long by 6 wide)" (1-2). The scribe w ho copied those seven texts signed the last le a f as “ Leon, notary and sinner," and dated that completion to Ju n e 11, 1056. T h e first o f the seven was A Synopsis o f the Old and New Testaments, attributed to St. Jo h n Chrysostom . That single title w as h ow the library’s catalogue listed this, its m ost ancient hold­ ing—not a title calculated to excite m uch interest. A fter goin g unnoticed by scholars w h o checked the library in the 1840s and 1850s, the codex w as finally dis­ covered in 1873 and published in 1883 by Archbishop Philotheos Bryennios, then Metropolitan o f Serrai in Macedonia. Philip SchafF described Bryennios as “ next in rank to the Patriarch o f Constantinople, and the Bishop o f Ephesus, and usu­ ally residing in Constantinople, in a narrow, unpainted, w o o d en house o f four stories, opposite the entrance o f the patriarchal church and a few steps from the Jerusalem Monastery. He is probably the most learned prelate o f the G reek Church at the present day” (8). The Didache, then, w as a sm all text, fifth am ong others m ostly much larger than itself, lost in a small library in the Fen er section o f Istanbul, halfw ay up the west side o f the Golden H orn. N o w k n o w n as C odex H ierosolym itanus 54, that volum e was rem oved to the Patriarchate at Jeru salem in 1887, w here it remains. Earlier Coptic and Ethiopic versions also exist for a few chapters o f this text. Especially im portant are tw o Greek fragments, Papyrus O xyrhynchus 1782, dated to the “late fourth century” and published b y Grenfell and H u n t in 1922 (12-15). T h ese tiny scraps, about tw o inches by tw o inches apiece, contain verses i:3C-4a and 2:7-3:2. Despite small differences, the w ord in g on those scraps is very close to Bryennios's text. That is very important confirm ation fo r the basic accu­ racy o f C odex Hierosolym itanus 54, given the g u lf o f centuries b etw een it and the earlier fragm ents.

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Training Pagans The G reek word didache makes reference to the training which a mastertrainer (didaskalos) imparts to apprentices or disciples. In classical Greek, bas­ ket weaving, hunting with a bow, and pottery making represent typical skills transmitted under the term didache-----[I]t is significant to note that the verb didaskein— customarily translated as "to teach"— was not used when the mere transmission o f information was implied___ In our contemporary society, “ teaching” is associated with classroom instruction, and, in the popular mind, this often evokes the passing on o f information from professor to student. The w ord "training," on the contrary, has the advantage o f suggesting the dynam­ ics o f an apprenticeship wherein novices gradually and progressively enlarge their skills by submitting themselves to a master-trainer (didaskalos). Aaron Milavec, “The Pastoral Genius o f the Didache,” p. 107 T h e only full manuscript o f the Didache bears tw o titles. The first one, in the usual translation, is “ The Teaching o f the T w elve Apostles," written with four dots in a diamond pattern before and after. On the next line is a longer title: “ The Teaching o f the Lord Through the T w elve Apostles to the Nations [i.e, Pagans]." T h at is the last w e ever hear o f those T w elve Aposdes; whenever apos­ tles are mentioned in the text, they simply designate those sent (apostellein in Greek) from one com m unity to found another one elsewhere. Those titles, in other words, w ere added to this originally anonymous document from such places as Acts 2:42 ("the apostles' teaching” ) and M atthew 28:19 ("make disciples o f all nations” ). T h ey do not help us at all in determining the purpose o f the Didache. An abbreviated title such as "T h e Teaching" does, how ever, especially when translated w ith M ilavec as "T h e Training.” T R A IN IN G A N D C O M M U N A L SP L IT T h e Didache is neither epistle nor gospel but com m unity rule— manual o f discipline or church order. That is the first and most important factor in deter­ mining the w ork's purpose. That is also its very special importance. It lets us see, probably as best w e ever w ill, h ow an early Christian com m unity regulated its life. But there is also another factor, the specific occasion that necessitated the establishment o f this discipline in written form at at precisely this time. W hy was this specific training program required now rather than earlier or later? T h e four m ajor divisions o f the Didache are noted by m ost commentators, but Aaron M ilavec, w hose w o rk on the text is extrem ely sensitive and whose translation (and bracketed interpolations) I am using, has also noted the different percentages involved (1989:101):

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I

II

( i : i - 6 :2 ) :

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The training program for new members, or the T w o W ays (44% )

(6:3-10:7): Norm s for eating, baptizing, fasting, praying, eucharistizing (24%)

III

(11:1-15:4): Regulations for testing various classes o f visitors (22%)

IV

(16:1-8):

Closing apocalyptic appeals (10%)

That second section has several clues about the social situation that pro­ duced this written text. First, there are three m ajor subjects flagged by similarstyle openings: Concerning food, take . . . (6:3) Concerning baptism, baptize thus . . . (7:1-4) Concerning eucharist, eucharistize thus . . . (9:1-10:7) Each subject gets an increasing length o f attention, from one to four to twelve verses. But that first subject, with a format less similar than the other two, is som e­ what surprising in such a prominent location. It reads in full (M ilavec 1989:96): Concerning food, take what [kinds o f food which] yo u are able [to bear], but absolutely abstain from the meat offered to idols for this is servitude to gods o f the dead. (Didache 6:3) W hy is the food question so important that it is put in first place? I hold that question, for a moment, to consider another point that m ay help answ er it. That baptismal section in 7:1-4 ends with a com mand about fasting, w h ich is then word-linked (fasting) with the next tw o also-word-linked com m ands (hypocrites) as follows (Milavec 1989:96-97): Prior [to baptism], let the one baptizing, then one being baptized and all w h o are able [to do so] fast for one or tw o days beforehand. D o not let y o u r fast take place in the manner o f the hypocrites. F or they fast on the second and fifth [day] o f the sabbath. You, on the other hand, fast during the fourth [day] and the [day] o f preparation [for the sabbath]. Likew ise, do not pray like the h yp ocrites but like the Lord com m anded in his go o d new s. Pray thus: [The O ur Father]. Pray thus three times per day. (Didache 7:4-813) A nother question n o w joins that form er one concerning food. W h o are the hypocrites? They fast on M ondays and Thursdays, but w e fast on W ednesdays and Fridays. W e pray the Our Father thrice daily, and they presum ably do not. W h at is at stake in all o f this? That mention o f ‘hypocrites’ and that intransigent separation o ver details o f fasting and praying seem primarily intended to establish firm boundaries betw een

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an us and a them. But who are they? W e are not dealing with Christian Je w s against non-Christian Jew s or with Christian pagans against Christian Jew s. The Didache, in fact, is a very clear example o f a text that is both totally and profoundly Jewish and totally and profoundly Christian. W e are dealing, more likely, with a fairly recent split within the Didache group itself. Perhaps in correlating those preceding items— the emphatic position and relative freedom o f the food regulation in 6:3, the double mention o f hypocrites in 8:1-3, a n d the quantitative emphasis on training in i : i - 6 :2 (in the so-called Part I)— w e can learn more about the Didache split. M ilavec brings those three points together by focusing them around the inclusion o f pagan converts in the Didache com munity. This is the social situa­ tion or com m unal crisis that generated the document itself. Je w s w ho became Christian w ou ld already know the basics o f Jew ish ethics and piety, but what about Gentile converts? I f Christian pagans w ere not living up to the ethical stan­ dards o f Christian Jew ish converts, could the latter continue to associate with them? And, in any case, h ow w ould food regulations be maintained in common meals o f Christian pagans and Christian Jew s? “Ju dgin g from the basics covered in the initiation program , how ever, one can surmise that Gentiles w ere being accused o f practicing the pagan w ays that they w ere supposed to have left behind. T h e pastoral genius o f the Didache is that it proposed to put into place tw o novel program s w hich w ould attack the very source o f these outbursts o f righteous anger. This w as effected in tw o w ays: (1) by demanding o f all fu­ ture Gentiles a systematic training in the basic standards o f conduct which the Lord requires o f them [ i : i - 6 : 2 ] , and (2) by requiring a w eekly confession o f faults against these basic standards prior to the com munity Eucharist [ 1 4 : 1 - 2 ] ” ( 19 8 9 :12 3 ) .

T h at training program w ould establish a com m on level o f ethical

accountability for all converts, but it w as needed especially for pagan ones— those w ho, unlike their Jew ish counterparts, had to be reminded (for example, in Didache 5 :2 ) that “ not being merciful to the poor, not w orking for him w h o is oppressed w ith toil” or "turning aw ay the needy, oppressing the distressed” or being "advocates o f the rich, unjust judges o f the poor” w as "altogether sinful.” That prelim inary training program and its subsequent w eekly confession o f faults should have sufficed so that Christian pagans and Christian Je w s could live together. And, as w e see in m ore detail below , the Didache's discipline is basically a Christian Jew ish training program for Christian-pagan converts. But even that program w as not enough to reassure som e m em bers o f the com m unity that eating together in open com mensality w as n o w appropriate. T h ey must have demanded stricter food regulations than those given in 6:3. As Milavec notes, "M inim ally, how ever, one can judge that the Didache does give evidence o f an inter-Jewish schism that has already taken place. The actual historical

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causes and terms o f this in-house disagreement are not given or discussed. It is suspicious, how ever, that the ruling respecting foods form s the first order o f com m unity business. Might this indicate that the ‘hypocrites’ are those JewishChristians w h o have been unwilling to relax the traditional food regulations im posed upon Gentiles?” (112). This is very similar to the situation concerning food regulations for the mixed Christian com m unity o f converted Je w s and pagans at Antioch as described in Galatians 2 :11-13 and Acts 15:28-31. Luke describes it as an amicable agreement, but Paul says the com prom ise was “hypocrisy.” That is the more radical calling the m ore m oderate position hypocrisy. A similar case arose in the Didache, but n o w it is the m oderate calling the m ore conservative position hypocrisy. There are, o f course, im portant issues at stake in all those cases, but calling one’s opponents hypocrites probably did not help to do anything but confirm separation and solidify boundaries. SE R E N IT Y A N D CO M M U N A L C O N T R O L Those twin instances o f name-calling in Didache 8:1-3 are all the m ore striking amidst this document’s prevailing serenity. That serenity is evident, fo r example, in the regulation about foods just seen in Didache 6:3. O nly one thing is absolutely forbidden— namely, participation in pagan banquets w h ere one’s food is shared with pagan gods. W ith regard to anything else, "[T]ake w h at [kinds o f food which] you are able [to bear].” That is an example o f the “ D o w h at y o u can” prin­ ciple, which is abrogated only when something absolutely indispensable is at stake. Take, for another example, something as important as baptism al initiation into full community membership when the training program is com plete. This is Didache 7:1-3. in the system o f analytical lineation used b y M ilavec (1989:96): [A] Baptize in the name o f the Father and the Son and the H o ly Spirit, [1] in running water. But if you do not have running w ater, baptize in other [than running] water. [2] And if you are not able to do so in cold w ater, [then do so] in w arm water. [3] But i f you do not have either, pour w ater on the head three times, [B] in the nam e o f [the] Father and o f [the] Son and o f [the] H o ly Spirit. T h e external frames o f Father, Son, and H oly Spirit tell us w h at is not ne­ gotiable. T h e internal distinctions o f running or still w ater, cold or w arm w a­ ter, im m ersion or aspersion processes are quite negotiable. Whatever, says the Didache. This com munity will not split up into running-baptizers against stxQbaptizers, warm -baptizers against cold-baptizers, im m ersers against aspersers. T h at confirm s, o f course, that the split with the "hypocrites” w as not o ver this-

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day or that-day fasting, this-time or that-time praying, but over things much more profound w hose divisiveness was simply manifested in those distinctions. That prevailing sense o f peaceful consensus was recently underlined by Ian Henderson. He spoke o f "the coolness o f normative tone in Didache, its sapiential imperatives notwithstanding." He saw “its argumentative goal as more eirenic than polemic or even didactic," and he summarized it as "a deliberately low-key eireni­ con." He concluded that, historically, “it indicates a much less conflictual response to substantially the same range o f symbolic stresses attested in canonical sources, a normative calmness that is probably underrepresented in early Christian literature (and its interpretation)” (292, 294). Given that the Greek word for peace is eirene, eirenic and eirenicon are good words to describe the peaceful rhetoric that pervades the Didache. Henderson is quite correct that this peaceful aspect is all the more strik­ ing against our earliest Christian letters, and he exemplifies that “normative calm­ ness" especially with regard to orality and literacy. This text, he says, “remains a book essentially about the normativity o f various kinds o f speech, a text which, though written and dependent on written sources, takes in itself no cognizance o f w ritin g.. . . Didache argues for the complementarity o f diverse authorities by receiv­ ing them conversationally and pragmatically rather than ideologically.. . . [T]he symbols chosen for this task are therefore preferentially and not only accidentally or subliminally those o f speech and action rather than those o f a more literary logic. Thus from a point o f view o f literary purism, Didache must always seem enigmatic i f not inarticulate___ Didache’s overall poetic effect, characteristic also o f oral sensi­ bility in general, is a simultaneity o f impressions leading not to critical, ideological clarity but to decent, pragmatic accommodation___ Didache suggests the possibility o f creating or re-creating an atmosphere in which the variety o f normative lan­ guage m ay be simultaneously and cumulatively, not hierarchically, maintained" (293, 304-305). It is not at all that the Didache considers nothing worthy o f stem dis­ agreement. But, on the other hand, only those items receive it that deserve it. The Didache accepts the primacy o f living and doing over speaking and writing, the ascendancy o f life and action over voice and text. It is about h ow to live in Christian community, and it is always tolerant except where intolerance is absolutely demanded and articulated. It is that consensus on lived reality that keeps the oral sensibility so evident even in a written text. It bespeaks matters worked out in faceto-face encounter and then summarized in a written text rather than imposed by a written text from outside or above. It is the serenity o f achieved consensus. G E N D E R A N D C O M M U N A L E Q U A L IT Y D uring the session on “W om en and the (Search for the) Historical Jesus" at the Society o f Biblical Literature’s 1996 annual m eeting in N ew Orleans, Deborah Rose-Gaier presented a paper on "T h e Didache: A C om m unity o f

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Equals.” She began with a small but significant item. T h e training com ponent o f the Didache— the so-called T w o W ays ( i : i - 6 : 2 ) — addresses the W ay o f Life with gendered neutrality to "m y child” (Greek tektion) in 3:1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 4:1. In the b o o k o f Proverbs, by contrast, the student is consistently addressed as "m y son." W hen the advice given applies equally to females as w ell as to males, the New Revised Standard Version reads "m y child” instead o f the older and m ore literal "m y son.” That is rather like our changing "H e w h o hesitates is lost” to "Anyone w h o hesitates is lost.” There is a significant difference, though: in the case o f Proverbs, "m y son” is not so much inaccurately subsum ing both sexes chauvinistically under the male title as accurately reflecting the engendered priority o f male over female education in the w rite rs w orld. T h at is rather obvious in Proverbs 5, which forms an interesting contrast w ith Didache 1-6 . T h e context is a slightly paranoid warning against the Strange-W om an as distinct from the W ife-W oman, so that the gendered "m y son” (not the ungendered "m y child” ) is necessary in 5:1,7 , and 20. Here, for example, is Proverbs 5:20: W hy should you be intoxicated, m y son, b y another w o m an and em brace the bosom o f an adulteress? This verse, where a married m an is warned a w ay from "an adulteress” rather than being warned against becom ing an adulterer himself, highlights the contrast w ith the Didache; the latter, in offering training fo r both fem ales and males, reveals not a hint o f misogyny. Furthermore, when the Didache speaks about household relationships there is a striking lack o f anything about w ives and husbands. It forbids, on the one hand, infanticide (specifying "murderers o f children” ) and pederasty (specifying "corrupters o f the creatures o f God") in 5:1. It com m ands, on the other hand, these intrahousehold relations (Milavec 1989:95): Y o u w ill not relax control over your son or you r daughter, but yo u w ill train them to reverence the Lord from their youth. Y ou w ill not angrily com ­ m and you r m ale slave or your female slave w h o trust in the sam e G o d [as yo u ] lest they fear not the God w ho is over yo u all. Fo r he [G od] does not com e to call [someone] in recognition [o f status], but [he calls] those on w h o m he placed his Spirit. But you slaves, you will be subm issive to yo u r m asters as i f [you w ere being submissive] to the im age o f G od, [both] in respect and in fear. (Didache 4:9-11) T h e ethical codes o f household relations in other early Christian docum ents usually m ention husbands and w ives, parents and children, ow n ers and slaves.

CONTROLLING

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Paul to the Ephesian community: W ives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord___ Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right___ And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction o f the Lord. Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in single­ ness o f heart, as you obey Christ___ And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both o f you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (Ephesians 5:2.2; 6 :1,4 ,5 ,9 ) The basic direction in that passage is obedience o f inferiors to superiors accom panied by kindness o f superiors to inferiors. Implicit in that direction is the absolute assumption that w ives, children, and slaves are the inferiors. The Didache, on the other hand, mentions only children and slaves. "Th e remarkable aspect regarding the household in the Didache rem ains/’ in Rose-Gaier’s words, “ the extent to w hich it does not concern itself w ith rendering a household code whereby w ives are subordinated to their husbands" (9). Finally, the Didache has no injunctions against w om en in any o f the roles it mentions. One could, o f course, argue that men w ere exclusively in charge o f all those activities in the Didache tradition, so nothing further had to be said about it. But the Pauline and post-Pauline tradition had to command against wom en teaching and, in fact, against them teaching men:

W om en should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. I f there is anything they desire to know , let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a w om an to speak in church. (1 Corinthians 14:34-35) Let a w om an learn in silence w ith full submission. I permit no w om an to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep sile n t.. . . Y et she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, w ith m odesty. (1 Tim othy 2 :1 1 - 1 2 ,15a) In the light o f that situation, the Didache’s total silence about submission o f w ives to husbands and about their nonparticipation in leadership roles points m ore likely to Rose-Gaier's conclusion that "there are no prohibitions recorded against w om en as trainers, baptizers, eucharistizers, apostles, prophets, or teach­ ers so it m ust be assumed that these functioning roles within the com m unity w ere open to w om en” (12).

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T H E F IR S T R U R A L CH RISTIA N S? W hen you consider Henderson’s "norm ative calm ness” or Rose-Gaier's "radical equality" in the Didache— especially in contrast w ith so m any other early Christian texts— the question presses: W hy is it so different? You cannot reply that it indicates "Christian” equality o ver "Jew ish” inequal­ ity. The Didache, while admitting pagans into its Christian com m unity, is pro­ foundly Jew ish. In many instances, from eucharistic celebration in Didache 8-9 to apocalyptic consummation in Didache 16, it is still for closer to its Jew ish roots than Paul is, for example, in 1 Corinthians 11 and 15. N o r w ill it do to presum e that the Didache's community is som ehow m ore particularly virtuous than other Christian communities. What, then, makes it so different? First, w e sometimes talk about the public spaces belonging to m en and the private ones to w om en in the ancient world. And, o f course, public is much more important than private! Rose-Gaier quotes this com m ent by the Jew ish philosopher Philo o f Alexandria (citing Yonge 611): There are tw o kinds o f states, the greater and the smaller. A nd the larger ones are called really cities; but the smaller ones are called houses. A nd the superintendence and management o f these is allotted to the rw o sexes sepa­ rately; the men having the governm ent o f the greater, w hich govern m ent is called a polity; and the w om en that o f the smaller, w hich is called oeconom y. (Special Laws 3.170) T h at puts men in charge o f "politics” and running the govern m ent and w om en in charge o f "economics” and running the household. But earliest Chris­ tianity w as far m ore involved with the household than w ith the governm ent. W hether it liked it or not, therefore, w om en w ere extrem ely im portant in its organizational basis in house-based com munities and house-based churches. It w as a question o f authority and power. At later stages, as Christianity m oved m ore and m ore into the public and governm ental sphere, m en had actively to retake such control from wom en. W om en, as Luke 10:38-42 put it, should pas­ sively listen like M ary rather than actively administer like M artha. Second, the Didache may derive from a rural rather than an urban situation. It m ay stem from the consensus o f rural households rather than the authority o f urban patrons. W illy Rordorf and Andre Tuilier, w riting in a m ajor French series, located the Didache in northern Palestine or western Syria, but n ot in the capital city o f Antioch. They noted that the text is addressed to "rural communities o f converted pagans" (98). It "reveals a Christianity established in rural com m uni­ ties w h o have broken with the radicalism o f earlier converts” (too). It "speaks prin­ cipally to rural milieus converted early on in Syria and Palestine and no doubt

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furnishing the first Christian communities outside o f cities" (128). Kurt Niederwim m er, how ever, writing in a m ajor German series, considered it still possible that "the Didache could derive from an urban m ilieu," but he agreed that it was not from the great metropolis o f Antioch (80). It is not enough, in any case, sim­ ply to note the mention o f "firstfruits" in Didache 13:3-7, since that could indicate urban-based landowners. M y own preference for a rural over an urban setting comes not from those few verses but from the Didache’s rhetorical serenity, ungendered equality, and striking difference from so m any other early Christian texts.

Controlling Prophets The prophets are not actually the leaders o f the com m unity since the Didache continually invites the Christian assembly to make collective deci­ sions and, because o f that com munal address, it deliberately uses "yo u " in the plural. Willy Rordorf and André Tuilier, La doctrine des douze apôtres (Didache), p. 64 At this point it w ould seem that the Didache com munity has matters under full com m unal control. It has in place a complete training program for new and especially pagan converts. That is clearly outlined in the T w o W ays o f Didache i : i - 6 :2 .

And that moral catechesis forms the basis for examination o f conscience

and confession o f faults. The W ay o f Life concludes like this (Milavec 1989:95): Within the congregation [ecclesia], you will confess your transgressions, and you will not go to you r prayer with a bad conscience. (Didache 4:14a) In a later text that confession is located before the Sunday eucharist, on, lit­ erally, "the Lord’s day o f the Lord” (Milavec 1989:100): On the [day] belonging to the Lord, gather together and break bread and eucharistize, first confessing your faults. (Didache 14:1) T h e com m unity has established its basic moral code and has established a w ay to keep all accountable to it before the group. But there is still one m ajor problem. W hat about itinerants w h o come from outside the community? H o w are they to be contained and controlled? It is necessary to be quite clear about the problem. It is not simply one o f Chris­ tian visitors w ho receive periodic hospitality but who have no particular claims to pow er or authority over the community. The problem is not about travelers and hospitality but about itinerants and authority. Thus the Didache makes an explicit

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distinction between "travellers" and "prophets," the latter being its term for my "itinerants.” It is very clear on how to handle "travellers.” Here is Didache 12:1-5. Notice its carefully divided cases as translated and delineated by Milavec (1989:99): L et everyone w ho comes in the name o f the Lord be received [hospitably]. [A] Then, w hen you have tested him (or her), you w ill kn ow [whether he or she is good or evil], [B] for you will have the understanding o f the right and o f the left [i.e., o f good and o f evil]: [ia] If, on the one hand, the one com ing is a traveler passing through, help him (or her) as much as you are able. [ib] But he (or she) will not remain with you for m ore than tw o or three days, i f there is [some] necessity. [2a] On the other hand, if [the one coming] wants to settle am ong you and knows a trade, let him (or her) w o rk and eat. [2b] If someone does not know a trade, use your ow n judgm ent to determine how he (or she) should live with you as a Christian without being idle. [C] If someone does not wish to cooperate, he (or she) is a Christ-peddler. Be on guard against such ones. W hat a startlingly exact term: a “ Christ-peddler.” In G reek it is Christemporos, combining the roots from which w e get Christ and emporium. T h e com m unity knows already about the distinction between a Christianos and a Christemporos, betw een a Christ-person and a Christ-hustler. It knows about the possibility o f such hustling, guards prudently against it, but does not solve it w ith a "N o Solici­ tors" sign outside the household. "Travellers" and even "Christ-hustlers" are under control. Th ey are taken care o f in five verses. They are not the problem . T h e itinerants w ho receive extensive and repeated attention are those w h o com e w ith divine authority, w ho come in the name o f God. And the problem is not ju st those itinerant authorities but, much more profoundly, the authority o f itinerancy itself One aspect o f that itinerancy must alw ays be kept in m ind fo r w h at fol­ low s. Ju st as didache means practical training for Christian life and not ju st abstract learning for Christian belief, so will itinerant authorities be ju d g ed not prim arily on w h at they say but on what they do. I f w e think, for exam ple, o f prophets only as those w h o talk in the name o f God, w e m ay m iss the Didiache's understanding o f prophets as those w ho act in the nam e o f God. Itinerant authorities com e, for the Didache, in three types: apostles, prophets, and teachers (trainers). And you could alm ost describe the Didache as the slow and careful ascendancy o f teacher (trainer) o ver prophet and apostle. But it is m o re accurate to describe it as the ascendancy o f the didache, the teaching or

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training itself, over teacher, prophet, or apostle. But it is all done very slow ly and very carefully. In the end, how ever, the com munity will prevail and com munal consent will control even the pyrotechnics o f itinerancy. IT IN E R A N T T E A C H E R S W ith the m oral program detailed in Didache i-6 and the ritual program detailed in Didache 7-10 , itinerant teachers or trainers are easily controlled in Didache 11:1- 2 (M ilavec 1989:98): W h o ever com es and trains you in all these previously said things, receive him: [A] But if the one training, turning [aside], should train [you] in another tradition (didachen) for the purpose o f undermining [the above], do not listen to him. [B] But i f his training fosters righteousness and understanding o f the Lord re­ ceive him as the Lord. (An aside. D o not take the male pronouns in this and other Didache quotes as contradiction o f the text's gender neutrality. Such pronouns generally tell us about the gender o f the G reek nouns involved— apostle, prophet, or trainer, for exam ple— rather than indicating the sex o f the individuals involved.) This passage is very clear. T h e com munity has its ow n didache, its ow n m oral and ritual training program clearly articulated in Didache 1-10 , so that the itinerant trainers mentioned next, in Didache 11:1-2 , must submit to it or be indicted by their divergent didache as undermining the official one. Furthermore, on that secure basis the community is ready and willing to let itinerant trainers settle down and be supported by the com munity's firstfruit dona­ tions in Didache 13:2. So too with prophets, in Didache 13:1,3-7 (Milavec 1989:99): [A] E very true prophet w ho wishes to setde am ong you deserves his food. [B] Similarly, a master-trainer also deserves, like the laborer, his food. Didache 13:2 is actually imbedded in 13:1-7, which concerns itinerant prophets w h o settle dow n perm anently in the com munity. I return to that section w hen considering the prophets, below. IT IN E R A N T A P O S T L E S Itinerant apostles are also relatively easy to prevent from disturbing the com m unity. Apostles, as mentioned above, are sim ply prophets on their w ay to found new Christian households or communities elsewhere, and they are sup­ ported by already established ones while on their jou rn ey. Since their designa­ tion means ones sent, they are, b y definition, on their w ay through to elsewhere.

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T h ey can, according to Didache 11:4-6, stay only one or tw o days and take only bread until the next night’s lodging (Milavec 1989:98): Let every apostle w ho comes to you be received as the Lord: [A i] But he will not remain m ore than one day, and, i f there is som e necessity, the follow ing [day] as well. [A2] But if [he should remain] for three, he is a false prophet. [Bi] But when the apostle departs, he should take nothing except the bread [which he needs to tide him over] until he finds lodging. [B2] But if he requests m oney, he is a false prophet. W ith apostles, unlike prophets and trainers, there is no discussion about set­ tling down in the community. A settled-down apostle is an ex-apostle. IT IN E R A N T PR O PH E T S Third, finally and 'most importantly, there are the itinerant prophets. B e­ cause this issue is m uch m ore difficult, the text returns to focus on itinerant prophets four separate times: in Didache 10:7, in 11:7-12 , in 13:1, 3-7, and in 15:1-2. D idache 10:7. The first time the prophets appear is in Didache 10:7. A t the end o f tw o detailed chapters on the proper prayers for the eucharistic celebration in Didache 9:1-10:6 comes this final injunction (Milavec 1989:98): Turn to the prophets [in order to permit them] to eucharistize as m uch as they wish. (Didache 10:7) T h e minimal interpretation o f that phrase is given b y M ilavec: “ T h e text implies that the community completed its eucharistic prayers and then turned towards the prophets allowing them to offer the prayers unique to them selves as often and as much as they wished___ This points in the direction o f indicating w hat m ust have been unique about prophetic prayer, nam ely, that their prayer spontaneously flowed from the Spirit which inspired them on the occasion and not from a pre-arranged formula which they m em orized in advance" (1994:121). T h e m axim al alternative is suggested by Kurt N iederw im m er. "T h e prophets (as liturgists) had the right to formulate the eucharistic prayers quite freely so that they w ere not limited to those fixed models" (205). D id ach e 11:7-12. T h e next m ention o f prophets is in Didache 11:7-12 , w h ich is a m arvelously delicate and intricate dance o f containment. T h e basic principle concerning itinerant prophets is very clear, but notice its em phasis on beh avior (tropoi or

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"characteristics’*), a term that should not be taken just as ethically good behavior but as continuity w ith Jesu s' own ethically radical behavior. Here is the core principle, in Didache n:7-8a (Milavec 1989:98): And do not either test nor pass judgm ent on every prophet w ho speaks in the spirit: [A] For every sin will be forgiven, but this sin will not be forgiven; [B] [Furtherm ore,] not everyone w ho speaks in the spirit is a [true] prophet, but only i f he has the characteristics [tropoi] o f the Lord. That is a rather startling and som ewhat contradictory principle. Do not ju dge prophetic utterance unless the prophet lacks the lifestyle o f the Lord. The G reek w ord tropos (plural tropoi) is translated, in a standard lexicon, as "manner, w ay, kind, guise, w ay o f life, turn o f mind, conduct, character." W e could restate that principle, then, as follows: the lifestyle o f the Lord is determinative. T h e Didache has a calculatedly ambiguous use o f Lord to mean “ the Lord G od" an d/or “ the Lord Jesu s.” Ian Henderson termed Lord “ the Didache’s ambig­ uous theo-/christological sym bol” (296). But in this case the emphasis is on the Lord Jesus. W hat is fascinating, how ever, is the text’s presumption that the Didache com m unity m em bers know the lifestyle o f the Lord Jesus and can use it to ju dge the validity o f itinerant prophets. It is not ju st a matter o f knowing this o r that saying o f the historical Jesu s but o f knowing the basic w ay o f life that he lived while on earth. Itinerancy is modeled and must stay modeled on Jesus. Examples 1 and 2. N ext follow four examples, in Didache n :8 b -i2. The first tw o exam ples give criteria by which one can judge a prophet to be false, in u :8 b -io (M ilavec 1989:98-99): [C] From his characteristics [tropoi], then, will the false and the true prophet be known: [1] And every prophet designating, in the spirit, a table [fellowship to be convened] shall not eat therefrom. If he does, he is a false prophet. [2] E very prophet training [you] in the truth, if he does not do the things he trains [you to do], is a false prophet. The first case is m ore interesting than the second one, which involves simple hypocrisy. It presum es the norm al situation o f the eucharistic cerem ony as com ­ munal meal. T h e eucharist is, in other words, both liturgical celebration and actual meal. It celebrates, as Jesus did, the G od o f justice w h o gave the earth and its food equally to all. But while the better-off members o f the Didache com m u­ nity w ould have eaten adequately at hom e in any case, the eucharist meant a decent meal for the poor or even destitute members o f the com m unity. It was,

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therefore, the com m unity that established the times and places for such eucharis* tic rituals. B y the time o f Didache 14:1, the set time w as once a w e ek on Sunday, the Lord's day. But what if itinerant prophets called a eucharist for the benefit o f the com m unal poor? Simple: if you call it, you do not participate in it. T h e possi­ bility o f self-interest is thereby precluded. Notice, as ever, the delicacy o f the Didache’s discrimination. It does not say, There w ill be no such meal. It says instead, The prophet will not eat from it. Example 3. The third example is very hard to understand, but it helps us see the difference between prophet and teacher. W ith a prophet w e are looking pri­ m arily at performance, at lifestyle, at sym bolic catechesis, and not ju st at teach­ ing, word, or saying, even when utterances are backed b y divine revelation. Here is Didache 11:11 (Milavec 1989:99): [3]

Every tested and true prophet w ho acts in vie w o f the cosm ic m ystery o f the church but does not train others to do w h at he h im self is doing, he shall not be judged before you, [a] for he has his judgm ent before God, [b] for, in such a w ay, the ancient prophets also acted.

This is the exact opposite o f the preceding example. T h at directly forbids the prophets training others to do what they themselves do not do. T h is indirecdy forbids them training others to do w hat they them selves do. But the m eaning is also m uch m ore complicated, enigmatic, and even deliberately cryptic. W hat does it m ean to act "in view o f the cosmic m ystery o f the church” so that others should neither judge nor imitate? It is obviously som ething both surprising and also shocking for the ordinary Christian. Gerd Theissen suggests that "this is probably an allusion to w o m en w h o accom panied the wandering prophets, and w hose relations w ith them w ere not unequivocal. Sexual abstinence was no doubt an official requirem ent. H ow ever, the passage is still a mysterion for us too” (1992:41). O ther com m entators agree w ith this general idea: W illy R ordorf and Andre T u ilier describe this earthly reflection o f heavenly reality as “ a 'spiritual m arriage’ b etw een a prophet and a sister” (187); Kurt Niederwim m er also describes "a spiritual m arriage or betrothal b etw een a prophet and his female com panion" (221). T h e celibate "m arriage” o f a fem ale and a male prophet is an earthly sym bol o f the h eaven ly m arriage b etw een G od (Christ) and the Church. I think that proposal is quite correct, but I w o n d er a little about such terms as "sister” and "com panion.” In such a “ spiritual m arriage” are n ot both indi­ viduals equ ally prophets? T h e only w a y a w om an could h ave b een in vo lved in the earliest Je su s m ovem ent as an itinerant prophet, given the cultural situa­

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tion o f the day, was i f she traveled w ith a male as his "w ife” (or in som e other acceptable fem ale role). As long as she was with a male, nobody w ou ld have really cared about the relationship or bothered to ask about it. Such com pan­ ionship did not threaten patriarchal dom ination in any w ay; a w om an accom ­ panying a m an could be servant or slave, sister, mistress, or w ife w ithout male chauvinism caring enough even to ask for definition. T h at is h ow w e should also understand Paul's m ention o f a "sister w ife" in i Corinthians 9:5, the "tw o by tw o " behind M ark 6:7 and Luke 10:1, and Cleopas's unnam ed com panion on the road to Em m aus in Luke 24:13, 18. It is fascinating to w atch the Didache handle the problem : do not dare to ju d g e them, but do not learn to imitate them either. G ently, delicately, carefully lines are being draw n betw een itiner­ ant and householder, betw een the sym bolic catechesis o f the form er and the settled didache o f the latter. It is hard not to w onder, across tw o thousand years o f Christian history, w h ere else that principle o f do not judge but do not imitate m ight have been usefully invoked. It is, in any case, one o f the suprem e exam­ ples o f the Didache's irenic tone o f "norm ative calm ness," as Ian Henderson so accurately put it. T here is one interesting footnote to that mysterious text. A Coptic papyrus containing Didache io:3b-i2:2a, dated to the end o f the fourth or start o f the fifth century, w as bought in 1923 for what was then the British M useum and cata­ logued as British Library Oriental Manuscript 9271. F. Stanley Jon es and Paul A. Mirecki offer a photographic reproduction along with an excellent transcription, translation, and com m entary on this document. T h ey conclude that "this sheet w as originally cut from a roll o f papyrus in order to serve as a double-leaf in a codex," but instead it w as used "as a space for scribal exercises" (87). It was, in other words, a rather casual copying o f that section o f the Didache for purposes o f writing practice. Stephen Patterson, on the contrary, considers it the end o f an earlier edition o f the Didache, which concluded precisely at 12:2 (1995:319-324). In any case, although the docum ent is a translation, it is centuries older than our only full text o f the G reek Didache and is therefore very important. And the G reek text it translated could go back even into the third century. I f that is cor­ rect, British Library Oriental Manuscript 9271 w ould be the earliest piece o f the Didache now extant. Here is Didache n :n as translated b y Jones and Mirecki (55, 57), but I have taken the liberty o f delineating it as above to make com parison easier: [3]

E very true prophet, having been approved, having taught and testified to an orderly tradition in the church, those am ong you should not judge him, [a] but his ju dgm ent is w ith God. [b] Thus did the prophets o f the (old) times.

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Y o u will notice that "the cosmic m ystery o f the church” is n o w "an orderly tradition in the church.” That erases anything suspiciously im proper about those prophetic actions but creates another problem in its place. W h y, n ow , would anyone w ant to judge such persons, w h y is their ju dgm en t left up to God, and w h at do the ancient prophets have to do w ith them? "Perhaps,” suggest Jones and Mirecki, "the easier reading o f ‘having taught and testified to an orderly tra­ dition in the church’ (as supported by the Coptic text) is to be preferred o ver the enigmatic and classically problematic G reek phrase ‘though he enact a worldly m ystery o f the church’” (68). I w ould presum e the exact opposite. T h e Coptic translation either does not like or does not understand that "cosm ic m ystery" and replaces it with something both known and liked— nam ely, "orderly tradi­ tion.” The m ore difficult text, w hatever it meant, is the earlier one. T h at w ould also render doubtful Patterson’s proposal that the Coptic fragm ent represented an earlier and shorter edition o f the Didache. Example 4. Finally, there is the fourth example. Relatively straightforw ard, it links backward with the opening preamble in 11:7 on speaking "in the spirit," with the first example in 11:9 on asking for others only, and w ith that last exam ­ ple in 11:11 on not judging. It brings fitting closure to the series (M ilavec 1989:99): [4]

W hoever says in the spirit, "G ive m e m oney o r any other thing,” yo u will not listen to him. But i f he says to give to others w h o are in need, let no one judge him.

The prophets can ask for a eucharistie m eal in 11:9 and m o n ey or anything else in 11:12, but only for others, never for them selves. It is delicately unclear at the end o f 11:12 whether one should give w h atever the prophets dem and even fo r others. T h e Didache leaves it open and w ou ld probably answ er, i f directly asked, Do what you can, as in 6:1 on teaching, 6:2 on food, and 12:2 on hospitality. D idach e 13 :1,3~y. This is the third time the text comes back to the prophets. It is clearly a new situation not envisaged in that earlier series in Didache 11:7 -12 . W h at i f a prophet wants to settle dow n and stay in the com m unity as a prophet? T h is is quite ac­ ceptable (M ilavec 1989:99-100): [A] E very true prophet who wishes to settle am ong yo u deserves his food. [B] Sim ilarly, a true master-trainer also deserves, like the laborer, his food. [C ] A s a consequence: [1]

taking every first fruit o f the produce o f [your] w in e press and thresh­ ing floor and o f [your] cattle and sheep,

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[a] you will give this first fruit to the prophets for they are your high-priests. [b] But if you do have a prophet, give it to the poor. [2] I f you make a batch o f dough, take the first fruit [o f your baking] and give it according to the rule [governing first fruits]. [3] Sim ilarly w hen you open a ju g o f wine or o f oil, take the first fruit and give it to the prophets. [4] Similarly with money, clothing, and every possession, take whatever first fruit which seems appropriate to you and give in accord with the rule. Firstfruits are not exactly the same as alms. T h ey belong to those who receive them. T h e recipients have a designated share in the produce itself. The text in Didache 13:1, 3-7 originally spoke only about settled-down prophets. Didache 13:2 w as added to apply the same principles to settled-down teachers, as seen earlier. D idach e 15:1-2. The fourth passage concerning prophets links them again with teachers, but in these verses both w ere there from the beginning. It is, once again, classic Didache in its delicacy (M ilavec 1989:100): Elect for yourselves, then, bishops and deacons w h o are w orthy o f the Lord: [A] [Let these be] m en w h o are unassuming, not greedy, honest, and have been tested, for they also are perform ing for you the official service o f the prophets and the master-trainers. [B] D o not hold them in contempt, then, for they are honored b y you in com pany w ith the prophets and master-trainers. In the Didache's experience, itinerant prophets and teachers have ceded to settled prophets and teachers, but now new er leadership from bishops and dea­ cons is envisaged. These leaders are not fully accepted as yet; everything about those verses breathes transition and change. T h e obvious advantage o f the new system is permanent actuality over charismatic possibility, and it seems linked especially w ith the eucharistic celebration on Sundays by the “ therefore” o f Didache 15:1 after the preceding 14:1-3. Once again, o f course, the Didache pro­ ceeds gently and delicately. Even after all o f that, how ever, the com m unity is not secure against the radi­ calism o f itinerant prophets, w h om it is quite willing to accept and revere but also wishes to contain and control. Those preceding passages gave the Didache’s com m unity control o ver prophetic actions. T h e spiritual po w er and authority o f

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itinerant prophets w ere not negated; prophets w ere accepted and respected still, but they w ere also contained and controlled. T h ey w o u ld not be allow ed to w reck the com m unity and then m ove on to repeat the dam age elsew here. But w h at if itinerant prophets insisted that it w as the Lord Jesu s w h o dem anded this or that action? Think, for a moment, about the insistence on "Jesus said” in both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. For w hom w as that significant? I f follow ­ ers o fje su s said that to strangers, the listeners w ould sim ply ask, “W h o is Jesus?” or "W hy should w e care what he said?” But said to those already Christian, the phrase w ould have a profoundly challenging effect. T h o se w h o had said, "Lord, Lord,” responding in faith, would be disturbed i f told that they had disobeyed that same Lord by what they did. H ow , in other w ords, could the Didache com ­ m unity contain and control the most radical sayings attributed to Jesu s by his itinerant followers? That is the next chapter.

C H A P T E R 21

INTERPRETING THE COMMANDS In the Synoptics w e are told the rules given to the first Christian missionar­ ies. T h e Didache gives the rules for dealing with these people. Gerd Theissen, Social Reality and the Early Christians, p. 41 (from essay originally published in 1973) There are three linked questions that arise as w e consider the Didache as part o f a larger body o f early Christian writings. First, what, in general, is the relation­ ship o f the Didache to the three synoptic gospels? Is it dependent on them or independent o f them? Second, what, in particular, is the relationship o f Didache i:3b -2:i, som etim es termed the text’s “ evangelical section," to Matthew, Luke, the Q Gospel, and any earlier source o f those documents? Third, how does the Didache connect w ith that other earliest tradition in Paul's letters? O f those three problems, the first tw o are addressed in this chapter, and the final one will reap­ pear later in Chapter 23.

The Independence o f the D id a ch e There is only one instance in which sayings quoted in the Didache are cer­ tainly draw n from written gospels: Didache 1:3-5. This passage is a compila­ tion o f sayings from the Serm on on the Mount, but with distinct features o f harmonization o f the texts o f M atthew and Luke. It is an interpolation that must have been made after the middle o f the 2nd century and cannot, there­ fore, be used as evidence for the original compiler’s familiarity with written gospels. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 17 The Didache show s no evidence o f know ing either the Pauline or the Johannine tradition. But does it know the synoptic tradition? Is it dependent on one or m ore o f the gospels o f M atthew, Mark, and Luke? Or is it com pletely indepen­ dent o f them all? T w o different sets o f scholars have studied the Didache and, w ith quite divergent focuses, have arrived at equally divergent conclusions con­ cerning its relationship w ith one or m ore o f the synoptic gospels. One set o f researchers has been prim arily interested in w hether Didache say­ ings w ere or w ere not dependent on the gospels o f M atthew, Mark, or Luke, and

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their studies have led to an almost total impasse. W e n o w have on the table four m ajor options. A first opinion holds that the Didache is totally independent o f the synoptic gospels. Richard Glover concluded forty years ago that "the Didache does not bear witness to our gospels, but quotes directly from sources used by Luke and M atthew” — that is to say, "from their com m on source,” the Q Gospel (12,25, 29). A second opinion holds that the Didache is totally dependent on the synoptic gospels. Christopher Tuckett's address to the thirty-sixth Biblical C olloquium at the University o f Louvain, given in 1986 and published in 1989, concluded that the synoptic parallels in the Didache "can be best explained i f the D idache presup­ poses the finished gospels o f M atthew and L u k e .. . . [ It ] . . . is prim arily a witness to the post-redactional history o f the synoptic tradition. It is not a witness to any pre-redactional developments” (230). A third opinion also goes back forty years to an early w o rk o f H elm ut Koester (1957), which was further developed a decade later by Bentley Layton (1968). T hey held, as in the above epigraph, that the Didache is totally indepen­ dent o f the synoptic gospels except for Didache i:3b -2:i, w h ich is a later insertion into the completed text. That later insertion derived from harm onizing together the different versions o f certain sayings in M atthew and Luke. A fourth opinion is m ore complicated than the others. C layton Jeffo rd, for example, concluded that the Didache knew both "a tradition o f sayings materials that w ere similar in nature to those materials which w ere collected in the Say­ ings Gospel Q and in the Marcan Gospel” but also "the Synoptic G ospels in som e final literary form (or some harm ony o f those Gospels)” (142). Such divergent results are not derived from disagreem ents o ver m ethodol­ ogy. Tuckett states the basic principle m ost clearly: " I f m aterial w hich ow es its origin to the redactional activity o f a synoptic evangelist reappears in another w ork, then the latter presupposes the finished w o rk o f that evangelist” (199)T h at is the crucial principle for determining dependency, as discussed earlier in Chapter 8 . But that principle works best w hen w e have M atthew and Luke using M ark as a source, since w e ourselves still have all three texts in front o f us. W e can then determ ine, by comparison with Mark, w h at exactly is redactional in their texts. W e can see with relative clarity h ow each edits its M arkan source. T h e principle works worst, however, w hen w e have M atthew and Luke using the Q Gospel as a source. W e know the Q Gospel itself fo r sure only when M atth ew and Luke agree exactly in their separate presentations o f it— w hen, in o ther w ords, they fail to redact it at all. If one but not the other redacts it, or if both redact it differently, w e lose any secure base text for com parison and can­ not be sure w h at w as in the Q Gospel and w hat w as done to that gospel by either o r both evangelists. Although w e can, in som e cases, be quite certain that a say­

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ing was in the Q Gospel because w e have redacted versions o f it in both M atthew and Luke, w e m ay be unable to determine the exact w ording o f it in the Q Gospel. T h at less-than-certain result m ay be quite adequate for general purposes, but it is quite inadequate if one needs to compare a precise w ord or phrase from the Q Gospel with som e other text. And that is exactly the situation we are in w ith Didache i:3b -2:i. T h e parallels from that section o f the Didache appear in the Q Gospel as M atthew 5:3913-42, 4413-48 = Luke 6:27-30, 32-36; however, those verses are so different that it is notoriously difficult to decide for sure the sequence and content o f that Q Gospel section. Judging, therefore, by tw o such careful analyses as Koester's and Tuckett's, it m ay be alm ost a lost cause to approach the Didache along that narrow focus. There is, how ever, a different possible approach. Another set o f researchers has been prim arily interested in the Didache itself—and as a whole, so that relations w ith the synoptic gospels arise only within that w ider and m ore complete fram ew ork. In general, many o f those scholars have concluded that the Didache is totally independent o f synoptic tradi­ tion and should be studied in its ow n right and in its ow n entirety and integrity. H ere are a few representative examples o f that scholarship. Jean-Paul Audet, in his 1958 com m entary for the Etudes Bibliques series, found three successive stages in the text, dating them all to the years between 50 and 70 C .E . T h e first level in Didache i:i-3a; 2:2-5:2; 7:1; 8 :1-11 was composed before any written gospel. T h e second level in Didache 11:3-13:2; 14:1-16:8, written by the same author under later and different circumstances, knew only some written proto-gospel o f pre-Matthean tradition. But even the third level in Didache 1:313-2:1; 6:2-3; 7:2-4; 13:3, 5-7 (with 1:4a and 13:4 added even later) knew none o f our present canonical gospels (104-120). T w o m ore recent French schol­ ars, W illy R o rd orf and André Tuilier, in a 1978 com m entary, agreed with Audet on the Didache's independence from our canonical gospels but opted for only tw o redactional layers, Didache 1-13 and Didache 14-16. Then, in a 1981 article, R ordorf concluded, against Audet, that Didache 1:313-2:1, while clearly an interpo­ lation, w as not so m uch a late and additional as an early and constitutive inser­ tion. Hence, for example, w hen he asked in the title o f a 1992 article, "D oes the Didache Contain Jesu s Tradition Independently o f the Synoptic Gospels?” he answered h im self affirmatively, but based on those earlier studies. Jonathan D raper came to a similar conclusion o f independence, but his 1985 article on "T h e Jesu s Tradition in the Didache” w as derived, once again, from a com m en­ tary situation— from his 1983 doctoral dissertation at Cam bridge University enti­ tled “A C om m entary on the Didache in the Light o f the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related D ocum ents.” Finally, tw o recent North Am erican scholars have also agreed on the Didache’s independence, but once again from holistic considerations

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o f the text's ow n compositional rhetoric. Aaron Milavec insists that the Didache is not just a quarry for synoptic parallels but that it has "its ow n agenda, its own logic, its ow n passionate concerns” (1989:90), and he considers 15:1-2 (on bishops and deacons) to be the only later interpolation. Ian Henderson emphasizes "the independence and priority o f composition-critical (i.e., poetic and rhetorical) ques­ tions over against historical and sociological judgm ents— h ow ever legitimate the latter m ay be” (285) and concludes that “ the unity o f poetic sensibility and rhetori­ cal function does tend to favor a relatively simple redactional history, despite the text's diversity” (305-306). That survey does not indicate a closed case on the Didache’s synoptic depen­ dence. Kurt Niederwim m er's 1989 com m entary is rather agnostic on the w hole subject. He concludes that the Didache’s final version, in general, kn ow s som e written gospel, but he adds that "the ju ry is still out” on w h eth er it is canonical M atthew or an unknown extracanonical text (77). Didache i:3b -2 :i h e describes as a redactional interpolation “o f uncertain origins” (115). In m y ow n earlier work, The Historical Jesus, I accepted the argum ents o f Koester and Layton that only Didache i:3b -2:i w as dependent on synoptic tradi­ tion and that it was a much later insertion derived from harm onizing M atthean and Lukan versions o f the sayings involved. I thought, at that tim e, that it w as the best solution. Layton's explanation w as that "the concern o f the author, or rather, compositor, o f the Didache passage— his choice o f m aterial once having been made— seems to have been primarily stylistic, to the exclusion o f any over­ riding theological or scholarly interests— a fact w h ich perhaps sets him apart from his colleagues. It is such concern for style and form that appear to control the relationship between the Didache verses and their postulated sources” (351)T h at insertion was made "after a .d . 150 ca. into a form o f the Didache already pub­ lished som e fifty or a hundred years earlier,” he concluded, because "w ithin the circles in which the first edition o f the Didache circulated, only b y the tim e o f the interpolation had Christianity felt itself to be clearly differentiated from the m atrix o f Jew ish teaching within which it arose" (1968:381-382). Layton 's article showed, and showed rather brilliantly, how such a harm o­ nization o f the Matthean and Lukan versions o f the sayings in Didache i:3b -2:i could have been done. But i f it was done and why it w as done are even m o re pre­ lim inary problem s. I now see four basic objections to his interpretation. First, it is necessary to postulate a Christian-Jewish com m unity’s w ritten constitution operating fo r fifty to a hundred years w ithout any such Je su s tradition in its offi­ cial training program . That might be feasible: one could respond that it w as the “w a y s" (tropoi) and not the "w ords” (logoi) o f the Lord Je su s that w ere norm ative fo r this com m unity. (You will recall an emphasis on the "w a y s" o f the L o rd from m y earlier discussion o f Didache 11.8.) But then, second, som ebody w h o knew

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M atthew and Luke changed the Didache only b y adding in the few sayings in i:3b -2:i. N othing w as added to change its eucharistic ritual or its apocalyptic expectation to agree w ith those gospels. Next, by the time o f that postulated insertion, those gospels w ere taking on normative status, yet the inserter harm o­ nized them rather freely. The result, in effect, is a third version rather than a simple harmonization, and, as Layton notes, style seemed to be foremost in the inserter s mind. Finally, there is no indication that those inserted sayings came from Jesu s or from the gospel o fjesu s. T h ey are never cited as such. It w as not, how ever, primarily those objections that changed m y mind. It w as focusing on the w ider question o f the Didache’s overall purpose and integrity, and not ju st focusing on the narrow er question o f its synoptic depen­ dence or independence, that changed m y ow n position. It was especially the w orks b y M ilavec and Henderson that revolutionized m y ow n understanding o f the Didache, and I recom m end them as the best introduction to a new and more profitable w ay o f studying that document. M y present w orking hypothesis, then, is that the Didache, and especially i:3b -2:i, is totally independent o f any o f the synoptic gospels (see Appendix 7). But that position only intensifies the problem o f the relationship betw een that section o f the Didache and the synoptic texts.

A Radical Mini-Catechism Passive resistance is actually a specifically peasant contribution to politics w ith a long history___ T h e existence o f a relationship between the basic fea­ tures o f peasant society and passive resistance seems evident. Teodor Shanin, “Peasantry as a Political Factor,” pp. 258-259 I f Didache 1:315-2:1 w as simply a much later insertion from sayings in M atthew and Luke (Koester i99oa:i7), especially as harmonized by som e rather pedantic stylist (Layton 1968), that section w ould be o f very minimal interest. If, h ow ever, it is independent from those canonical texts, it becom es extrem ely important. Layton him self indicated one aspect o f that importance: “ I f written sources cannot be postulated, the w a y is open to label i:3b -2:i as the recording o f a branch o f oral tradition independent o f M atthew’s or Luke’s casting o f the Ser­ m on on the M ount. Thus a fragm ent o f a potentially 'pre-Matthean Christian tradition and, indeed, one o f a som ew hat different theological view point from that o f the N T parallels w ould have been recovered and could be used as a source for study o f the earliest Christian com munity, especially if one dates the Didache itself to the first century” (1968:345). But there is another importance as well. I f Didache v.jfo-zn is independent, say, o f the Q Gospel, it can then be com ­ pared w ith it. T h at com parison is w hat interests m e here.

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CONTENT T h ere are several sayings within Didache i:3b -2:i w hich not only have paral­ lels in M atthew and Luke but whose sixfold linkage parallels a sixfold linkage from the inaugural sermon o f Jesus in the Q Gospel I follow here the reconstruc­ tion o f the International Q Project accepting the Q Gospel sequence as Luke 6:27-36 rather than Matthew (Robinson et al. 1994:496-497). T h e closest compari­ son, in other words, is between the sequences in Didache i:2b -5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36. Here are the sayings in the Didache sequence: Didache

Luke

Matthew

(1) The Golden Rule:

1:2b

6:31

7:12

(2) Love Your Enemies:

1:3b

6:27-28,35a

5 :4 3 -4 4

(3) Better Than Sinners:

1:3b

5 :4 5 -4 7

(4) The Other Cheek:

1:4b

6:32-35 6:29

(5) Give Without Return:

1:5a

6:30

5:42

(6) As Your Father:

1:5a

6:36

5:48

Gos. Thom. 6:3a

5:38-41 95

That comparison indicates some form o f very close relationship betw een the linked series o f six sayings in Didache i:2b-5a and the linked set o f six sayings in Q Gospel 6:27-36. There is, first o f all, no com m on sequence. If the Didache sequence is given as numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, then the Q Gospel sequence is, as reconstructed, num ­ bers 2, 4, 5, 1, 3, 6. I intend, o f course, no presum ption that either sequence is norm ative over the other but consider the com m on m aterial across four points. The first point is The Golden Rule itself. In Didache 1:2b it is in negative form u­ lation and second-person singular, but in Q Gospel 6:31 it is in positive form ula­ tion and second-person plural (Milavec 1989:92): Didache 1:2b

Q Gospel 6:31

All those things which you do not

D o to others as you w o u ld have

want done to you, do not do to another.

them do to you.

T h e second point is Love Your Enemies and Better Than Sinners. H ere are the texts w ith their plural "you ” italicized (Milavec 1989:92): Didache 1:3b

Q Gospel 6 :27-28 , 32^35

(1) Bless those w ho curse you;

(1) L ove your enem ies,

(2) pray fo r your enemies;

(2) do good to those w h o hate you,

(3) fast fo r those w h o persecute you.

(3) bless those w h o curse you,

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(4) pray for those w h o abuse you. (4) W hat merit [is there] for loving

If you love those w h o love you,

those w h o love you? D on't the

what credit is that to you? For even

Gentiles do this?

sinners love those w ho love them. I f you do good to those w h o do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

You, on the other hand, must

But [you] love yo u r enemies, do

love those w h o hate you, and

good. . .

you will not have a [single] enemy. Both Love Your Enemies sayings have a basic fourfold structure. It is bless, pray, fast, and love in the Didache, but love, do good, bless, and pray in the Q Gospel. And both those sayings connect to Better Than Sinners sayings, that is, to a comparison with outsiders— either pagans or sinners— as motivation. T h ey are challenged, as Christian Jew s or as Christian ex-pagans, to do better than pagans: if the latter love their friends, they must love their enemies. T h e third point, The Other Cheek and Give Without Return, is actually another single and fourfold saying. Here are the texts, with "yo u ” n ow always singular and with the masculine to be taken inclusively (Milavec 1989:92): Didache 1:4 -53 (1) If som eone gives you a slap on yo u r right cheek, turn the

Q Gospel 6:29-30 (M atthew 5:39b-42) (1) If anyone strikes you on the [right] cheek, offer the other also;

other [cheek] to him also, and you w ill be perfect. (2) i f som eone presses you to go one mile, go with him for tw o [miles];

(2) and from anyone w ho takes aw ay your coat do not withhold even your tunic.

(3) if som eone takes your coat, give him also you r tunic; (4a) if som eone takes from you your goods, do not reclaim them, for

(3) [and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile] (4b) G ive to everyone w h o begs from you;

you are not able [to do so]; (4b) give to every person w h o asks anything o f you and do not make

(4a) and if anyone takes aw ay your goods, do not ask fo r them again.

any counter-demands. The square-bracketed materials under Q Gospel 6:29-30 are found only in M atthew and so are not securely from the Q Gospel "W hether the verse belongs

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in Q or not could not be decided with a grade higher than D ,” according to the International Q Project (Robinson et al. 1994:497). I think that it probably was in Q Gospel 6:29-30 and that Luke omitted it, but its presence or absence does not change the overall meaning. In this case the fourfold sequence is much closer in both sayings. It is cheek, mile, coat, and goods in the Didache and cheek, coat, (mile?), and goods in the 0 Gospel. Only the central two are reversed. T h e fourth and final injunction is

doubled, but the meaning is not the same in each half. One in volves not refusing those w ho ask (4b); the other involves not resisting those w h o take (4a). The fourth point, the saying As Your Father, is the m ost problem atic but also the most important. The first difficulty is reconstructing the original Q Gospel text. Here are its twin versions: Luke 6:36: “ Be merciful, just as you r Father is m erciful.” Matthew 5:48: "Be perfect, therefore, as you r heavenly Father is perfect.” Luke never uses “merciful” again, but M atthew uses "perfect” once m ore in 19:21, where the rich man is told to give all his possessions to the destitute “ if you wish to be perfect.” That usage is redactionally M atthean o ver his source in M ark 10:21. The International Q Project prefers “ merciful” as the original Q Gospel adjective (Robinson et al. 1994:497). W e do have, h ow ever, the follow in g paral­ lels, following M atthew rather than Luke: Didache 1:4b and 5a2

Q Gospel 6:36 (fro m M atth ew 5:48?)

. . . and you will be perfect.

Be perfect, therefore,

. . . for the Father wishes that his

as y o u r h eavenly Father is perfect.

goods be shared with everyone. I f the Didache is independent, I think that is too m uch fo r coincidence. But, in any case, God—be it as “ merciful” or as "perfect” — is the m odel for hum an action in both Q Gospel 6:36 and Didache 1:5a1. IN T E R P R E T A T IO N C om m on to Didache i:2b-5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36 is a m ini-series o f linked sayings involving four basic points, as w e have ju st seen. N o w that w e have read and com pared those points, here is a m ore detailed appraisal. T h e first point encountered in this portion o f the Didache, The Golden Rule, requires som e special attention. The saying appears in negative form at in Didache 1:2b and Gospel o f Thomas 6:3 ("D o not do unto others” ), and in positive

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format in Q Gospel 6:31 ("D o unto others"). It appears with the singular "y o u " in Didache 1:2b and the plural "you ” in Gospel o f Thomas 6:3 and Q Gospel 6:31. The saying appears not only in those Christian texts, o f course, but also in purely Jew ish texts from before and after them. In the book o f Tobit, for example, dated to the fourth or third century b.c .e ., Tobit advised his son Tobias in 4:15, "W hat you hate, do not do to anyone." Another example is attributed to Hillel, an older contemporary o f Jesus, in Shabbath 31a o f the Babylonian Talmud, completed by the seventh century

c .e .:

"W hat is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor;

that is the w hole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof: go and learn it." The m ost important question, however, is not plural or singular, positive or negative, which all amount to the same thing in any case. It is whether the aphorism is taken as forbidding offense only or as abo forbidding defense. Does it mean, Since you do not w ant others to attack you, do not attack others yourself? Or, Since you do not w ant others to attack you, do not attack them back, even in self-defense? Is it about nonaggression or about nonviolence? Is it against offense or also against defense? In m any cases, it m ay not be clear how radically the injunction is intended or taken. But in the present case and context o f Didache i:2b-5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36 , 1 can only interpret it as commanding absolute non­ violence. In fact, the w hole point o f this mini-catechism is to interpret The Golden Rule as radically as possible. The second basic point is a fourfold saying in plural-you format that specifies quite explicitly the nonviolence enjoined by the general aphorism. Four aggres­ sive actions o f attack must receive four counteractions not only, negatively, o f nonattack but, positively, o f loving, blessing, praying, fasting or doing good for the attackers. The third point, another fourfold saying (this time in singular-you format), illustrates or exemplifies the preceding saying. That change from plural to singular is found in both Didache i:3b-4 and Q Gospel 6:27-29, as is the sequence o f the two fourfold sayings. T h ey could, o f course, be separated and their sequence reversed, as in M atthew 5:38-42 and 5:43-48, but that presumes the quite different climactic structure o f those six antitheses in Matthew 5:21-48. In the original mini-series, the second foursom e w ere concrete examples o f the first foursome in practice. The fourth point involves som e insecurity in reconstructing the Q Gospel text o f Luke 6:36 ("m erciful") = M atthew 5:48 ("perfect"). W hatever the original Q Gospel adjective, all form s reflect the admonition o f Leviticus 19:2b: "Y o u shall be holy, for I the Lord you r God am holy." That makes the character, nature, or being o f God the norm ative m odel for hum an action. W hen Didache 1:4 speaks o f being "perfect” and 1:5a speaks o f what "the Father w ishes,” is that just two different w ays o f form ulating the model? I consider the independent presence o f

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“perfect” and “ Father” -as-norm in both Didache and the Q Gospel (M atthew) too strong for coincidence and therefore indicative o f an original emphasis. W e have, then, behind Didache i:2b-5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36 a radical minicatechism built around an absolutely nonviolent interpretation o f The Golden Rule derived from God the Father as m odel o f that perfection. Its content involved those four points, but they could be arranged in diverse sequences depending on rhetorical presentation. One could, for exam ple, start w ith The Golden Rule as first principle or end with it as final clim ax. W hether that mini­ catechism represents oral or scribal tradition is impossible to say fo r sure. T h at is another w ay o f saying that neither can be ruled out for sure. O RIG IN M y proposal is that the radical mini-catechism in Didache i:2b -5a com es from the itinerant prophets and represents their manifesto, as it w ere. Perhaps accom ­ panied by an accusatory "Jesus said,” it m ay w ell have represented a bill o f par­ ticulars against those w ho said "Lord, Lord” or "heard and did not do," as m en­ tioned in Q Gospel 6:46-49 . 1 offer tw o arguments for that position, one here and another in the next section. In 1989 Ronald Piper published a very persuasive analysis o f sm aller sayingsclusters in the earlier, sapiential, or Q1 layer o f the Q Gospel. H e proposed six rela­ tively clear examples with the following fourfold structure: “ (1) Each collection begins with a rather general aphoristic sa y in g .. . . (2) T h e opening saying is then usually followed by a general maxim in statement form w hich provides ostensi­ ble support for whatever is being encouraged.. . . (3) T h e third stage o f the apho­ ristic sayings-collections is frequently marked by a com plete change o f im agery and the presentation o f two sayings which are similar in them e but different in illustration. The hallmark o f this section is the rhetorical question fo rm u latio n .. . . (4) T h e final unit o f the aphoristic collection alw ays provides the key fo r inter­ preting the m eaning” (61-63). He also concluded, quite correctly, that “ these are not haphazard collections o f aphoristic sayings; they display a design and argument unique in the synoptic tradition” (64). Piper's sixth and most tentative example is Q Gospel 6:27-36. It is, o f course, his m ost difficult case, because, as seen above, the differences betw een M atthew and Luke result in no "consensus as to w hat the original sequence m ight have been" (78). It seem s to me, however, that the aphoristic collection o r radical mini-catechism behind Didache i:2b-5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36 fits quite w e ll into Piper s fourfold structural sequence if one accepts all those fo u r elem ents I sug­ gested above. H ere is h ow I would apply his w ords to that collection. First, there is the "general aphoristic saying," The Golden Rule. N ext, there is a "general m axim ” but in im perative form, Love Your Enemies. F ollow in g that is a "com plete

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change o f im agery," The Other Cheek and Give Without Return, which contain, in the Q Gospel but not in the Didache version, "the h allm ark . . . rhetorical question form ulation" about the Gentiles or sinners. Finally, G od as m odel is the conclu­ sion that “provides the key for interpreting the meaning” o f the w hole complex. W hat w ould the householders o f the Didache have done if itinerant prophets had used such a radical mini-catechism? T h ey might have cited it as the “words" (logoi) o f Jesus, or, m ore likely, seen it as summarizing the “ w ays" (tropoi) o f Jesus, that is, the lifestyle they had accepted in imitation o f his own. W hat did the householders do? T h ey first glossed it with Didache 1:5b-6 and then embed­ ded the w hole within the T w o W ays— the training program in Didache r.1-6.2. T h e next tw o sections give the details o f that containment.

Redemptive Almsgiving Redem ptive alm sgiving as a doctrine functions for the theological benefit o f the rich but for the material benefit o f the poor. It was the rich w ho strug­ gled to gain entry into the k in gd o m .. . . A tradition that once ridiculed the idea that a w ealthy man could enter the kingdom o f God actually came to regard w ealth as a blessing, a potential means o f redem ption.. . . Alm sgiving provides a ransom for sin. Roman Garrison, Redemptive Almsgiving in Early Christianity, pp. 10 -n , 15 The first step in containing the radical abnegation o f Didache i:2b-5a is to interpret it w ith Didache 1:5b-6 . T h e four injunctions in Didache 1:4 are prefaced with the com m and to “keep aw ay from fleshly and bodily attachments," but the fourth is surely the hardest o f all. Indeed, the com mand to give without return incorporates the three preceding ones. If one w ere able to do that, then turning the other cheek, giving the other garment, or going the other mile w ould hardly be too difficult. T h at final injunction is also the only one o f the four that is securely present in the C om m on Sayings Tradition, as evidenced by both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas: [Jesus said], “ If you have m oney, do not lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to som eone from w hom you will not get it back." (Gospel o f Thomas 95:1-2) Notice h ow the second h alf o f that aphorism is m uch m ore radical than the first one. T h at sam e duality o f m ore and less radical reappears in Q Gospel 6:30 as given by Luke but not by Matthew: G ive to everyone w h o begs from you; and if anyone takes aw ay y o u r goods, do not ask for them again. (Luke 6:30)

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G ive to everyone w ho begs from you, and do not refuse anyone w h o wants to b orrow from you. (Matthew 5:42) In M atthew both halves say the same thing, but in Thomas and Luke the sec­ ond h alf is m uch m ore radical than the first. In Didache i:4b-5a it is the reverse: the first h alf is the m ore radical one. And it is precisely this second or less radical part that receives a detailed gloss in Didache 1:5b-6 . T h at m o ve from 1:4b through 1:5a to 1:5b-6 indicates h ow the Didache"s com m unity understood and practiced this hard commandment o f total self-desfoliation. I give the text o f Didache 1:5-6 (Milavec 1989:92, slightly adapted) in parallel with another early Christian version o f that "ru le" (entole) and com m entary, from Mandate 2 o f the Shepherd ofHermas, dated from R o m e around the y ea r 100 C.E (Lake 2.73): Didache 1:5a-6 [A] Give to every person who asks anything o f you and do not make

Shepherd ofH erm as, M an d ate 2 :4 -7 [A] Do good, and o f all y o u r toil w hich G od gives you , give in sim plicity

any counter-demands, fo r the

to all w h o need, n ot doubting to

Father wishes that his goods he

w h om yo u shall give and to w h o m

shared with everyone.

not: give to all, fo r to all God wishes gifts to be made o f his own bounties.

[B] Blessed is the one w ho gives

[C] H e therefore w h o gives is innocent;

according to this rule (entole),

for as he received from the Lord

for that one is blameless.

the fulfillm ent o f this m inistry, he fulfilled it in sim plicity, not doubt­ ing to w h o m he should give o r not give. T h erefore this m inistry ful­ filled in sim plicity w as honourable before God. H e therefore w h o serves in sim plicity shall live to God.

[C] W oe to the one w ho receives:

[B] Th ose then w h o receive shall ren­

for, on the one hand, if someone

der an account to G o d w h y they re­

w h o is in [real] need receives, he

ceived it and for what. For those w ho

is blameless; but, on the other

accepted through distress shall not

hand, som eone w ho is not in

be punished, but those w h o accepted

[real] need w ill be called to

in hypocrisy shall pay the penalty.

account as to w h y that one received and w ith w hat results. Placed in prison [by God, one] w ill be exam ined [as to w h y such

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things w ere done] and will not leave from there until one has paid the last penny [o f illegitimately received alms]. [D] Concerning this [giving], it has

[D] Keep therefore this commandment

been said: “ M ay your alms

(entole) as I have told you, that your

[i.e., the metal coin] sweat in

repentance and that o f your family

yo u r hands until yo u know to

m ay be found to be in simplicity.

w h om you are giving it." That is another mini-catechism involving aphorism plus commentary, but the parallelism betw een those versions is much too close for coincidence. Each o f them mentions "the rule" (entole in Greek), and the citation is very similar in each instance (see m y italics in A above). T h e com mand is not cited from Jesus but from God, and the reason for the com m and is that all good things come from God and are given to some for sharing with all. Each commentary focuses on the receiver and the giver, w ith that order in one (BC) and the reverse in the other (CB). T h e conclusion is quite different in each case (D). In other words, a very similar and set-format combination o f rule plus com­ mentary is found in tw o documents, one from rural Syria and the other from urban Rom e. T here might be som e direct connection, as there is between Didache i:2b-5a and Q Gospel 6:27-36. That direct connection is not just dependent on those texts, how ever, but derives from the general dialectic o f itinerants and household­ ers throughout the Didache. I am not, therefore, as sure o f a direct connection in this second case. But what is much more certain is that this mini-catechism derives from deep in the earliest interface between Judaism and Christianity as Christian Judaism. It show s a dialectic between itinerants and householders in which the radical desfoliation o f the farmer is muted and delicately transformed into fervent almsgiving b y the latter.

The Two Ways The Teaching o f the Apostles . . . is totally lacking in art or genius, and seems to attempt to foist the essence o f the old legalism upon the n ew religion, reduc­ ing its living faith to the keeping o f a set o f rules. Edgar J. Goodspeed, The Apostolic Fathers, p. 1 The T w o W ays is too often put forward as a prim e exhibit o f the "degener­ acy" o f the Christian m ovem ent in the postapostolic era. Supposedly it is an example o f the repressive moralizing o f the spontaneous faith o f the earliest

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AND

HOUSEHOLDERS

c h u rc h .. . . It m ay rather be a legitimate extension o f a form w hich is the product o f primitive Christianity's pronounced ethical concern. M. Jack Suggs, "The Christian Tw o W ays Tradition,” p. 73

A pronounced ethical concern derived, be it noted, from its Jew ish roots, and often endangered as it got too far aw ay from them. T h is is the second o f those tw o above-mentioned steps through which the Didache contained the radi­ cal sayings o f itinerant prophets. It embedded all o f Didache i:ab -6 within a very traditional form o f moral catechesis known as the T w o W ays— the ethical w ay o f life versus the unethical w ay o f death. This tradition usually has a four-part structure, as summarized by M argaret McKenna: Introduction, W ay o f Life (or positive deeds), W ay o f Death (or negative deeds), and C onclusion (189-190). The format is intensely dualistic and antithetical, but that antagonism can range from cosmic ontology to human morality. The T w o W ays teaching is found in both Je w ish and Christian texts and comes, as emphasized above, from the form er into the latter tradition. I give tw o Jew ish examples from the immediate pre-Christian centuries, citing only their opening lines. T h e first comes from the Rule o f the Community (or Serek ha-Yahad, in Hebrew), found am ong the Dead Sea Scrolls in the first cave discovered at Qumran (hence the abbreviation by which it is know n, iQ S [.D SST 6]). T h e sec­ ond, from The Testament o f Asher in The Testaments o f the Twelve Patriarchs, is a set o f fictionalized farewell speeches from Jaco b 's tw elve sons m odeled on his own departing speech in Genesis 49 (OTP 1.816-817): G od . . . created man to rule the w orld and placed w ithin him tw o spirits so that he would w alk with them until the m om ent o f his visitation: they are the spirits o f truth and o f deceit. In the hand o f the Prince o f Lights is dom in­ ion o ver all the sons o f justice; they w alk on paths o f light. A nd in the hands o f the Angel o f Darkness is total dominion over the sons o f deceit; they w alk on paths o f darkness. (Rule o f the Community 3:17-21) G od has granted tw o w ays to the sons o f men, tw o mind-sets, tw o lines o f action, tw o models, and tw o goals. Accordingly, everyth in g is in pairs, the one o ver against the other. The tw o w ays are go o d and evil; concerning them are tw o dispositions within our breasts that choose b etw een them. (Testament o f Asher 1:3-5) T h at general Jew ish tradition is then taken o ver into Christian Je w ish texts in the first com m on-era century. Here are tw o Christian exam ples, again citing only their opening lines. The first is from the G reek Epistle o f Barnabas (Lake

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i.401); the second is from the Latin Teaching o f the Apostles or De Doctrina Apostolorum (Goodspeed 5). There are tw o W ays o f teaching and power, one o f Light and one o f D ark­ ness. And there is a great difference between the tw o W ays. For over the one are set light-bringing angels o f God, but over the other angels o f Satan. And the one is Lord from eternity and to eternity, and the other is the ruler o f the present time o f antiquity. (Epistle o f Barnabas i8:ib-2) There are tw o w ays in the world, that o f life and that o f death, o f light and o f darkness. O ver them are set two angels, one o f right (aequitatis), the other o f w rong (iniquitatis). M oreover there is a great difference between the two ways. (Teaching o f the Apostles 1.1) W hen you put those tw o Christian texts alongside the tw o preceding Jewish ones, you can see h ow cosmic and angelic dualism can be present or absent, in a spectrum from Rule o f the Community 3:17-21 and Epistle o f Barnabas i8:ib -i2, through Teaching o f the Apostles i.r, into Testament o f Asher 1:3-5. The Teaching o f the Apostles will be o f great importance as I proceed. The T w o W ays traditions depicted in the Teaching o f the Apostles, the Epistle o f Barn­ abas, and the Didache all go back to a com m on source. But the Teaching o f the Apostles is m uch closer to that lost original than are the other tw o texts. Rem em ­ ber that for future discussion, because it is against that general background and especially that final text that I consider the T w o W ays in the Didache. Didache 1-6 is a classic example o f the T w o W ays tradition. Applying Margaret McKenna’s four-part structure, cited earlier, w e can break that passage down into its components: Introduction in 1:1, W ay o f Life in 1:2-4:14, W ay o f Death in 5:1-2, and Conclusion in 6:1-2. But it is also quite clear that Didache i:2b-6, those two mini-catechisms discussed above, has been inserted into a preset formulation o f that T w o W ays tradition. This can be shown by a comparison o f the opening o f the Teaching o f the Apostles with that o f the Didache: Teaching o f the Apostles 111- 2 :2

Didache 1:1-2.12

[A] T here are tw o w ays in the world,

[A] There are tw o w ay, one o f life and

that o f life and that o f death,

one o f death, but there is a great

o f light and o f darkness. O ver

difference betw een the tw o w ays,

them are set tw o angels, one o f right, the other o f w rong. M ore­ over there is a great difference betw een the tw o ways.

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[B] T h e w a y o f life is this: first, you

[B] The w ay o f life is this: first, you will

shall love the eternal God who

love the G o d w h o made you ; sec­

made you, second, your neighbor

ond, y o u r neighbor as yourself; all

as yourself Moreover, anything

things which you do not want done

that you would not have done to

to you, do n ot y o u do to another.

you, you shall not do to anyone else. [C] N ow the meaning o f those words

[C] The teaching o f these w ords is this:

is this: [Insertion o f Didache v f b - i :1] [D] You shall not commit adultery,

[D] You w ill not m urder, yo u w ill not

you shall not commit murder, you

com m it adultery, you will not com­

shall not bear false witness, you

m it pederasty, y o u w ill not forni­

shall not corrupt a boy, you shall

cate, you will not steal, you will not

not commit fornication, you shall

use magic, yo u will not use sorcery,

not practice magic, you shall not

yo u w ill not com m it abortion nor

use enchanted potions, you shall

infanticide, y o u w ill not covet the

not m urder a child by abortion,

goods o f y o u r neighbor, [etc.].

nor kill one w hen it is bom , you shall not desire any o f your neighbor's goods, [etc.]. Neither o f those versions is directly dependent on the other. Both, as R ordorf and Tuilier argue (27-28), are dependent on a com m on source. But while Teach­ ing o f the Apostles i :i - 2 : 2 follows closely the opening o f that source, Didache 111-2 :2 adds in those twin mini-catechisms discussed above. W h y did it do that? One explanation seen already is that o f Bentley Layton. O riginally "n o sharp difference was yet felt between a special Christian exegesis (that o f the Serm on on the Mount) o f the command to love G od and one’s neighbor (Didache 1.2) and that o f the Hellenistic synagogue.” But the insertion o f Didache i:3b -2 :i was intended to differentiate “ Christianity . . . from the m atrix o f Je w ish teaching within which it arose” (1968:382). T w o objections, one m inor, one m ajor. T h e m inor objection is that the insertion is not attributed to Jesu s or even to "the Lord,” the Didache’s usually ambiguous term fo r Jesu s an d /o r G od. The "ru le" in Didache 1:5a is that o f "the Father.” T here is nothing particularly Chris­ tian about that. But the m ajor objection is m uch m ore significant. T h e contents o f that insertion is, to a large extent, already present in the T w o W ays passage even before the insertion o f Didache i:3b-2:i. T h e follow in g section, fo r example, appears in the W ay o f Life at Didache 4:5-8, and w e can be sure it w as originally there since it is also in Teaching o f the Apostles 4:5-8 (G oodspeed 6). I give it, as usual, in M ilavec’s translation and delineation (1989:94):

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Do not extend your hand [when it comes time] to receive and then w ithdraw it [when it com es time] to give: [A] if you possess something due to the w ork o f yo u r hands, you will give it [to the com munity] JbrtJie atonement o f your sins. [B] You will not hesitate to give, and you will give without murmuring, for you will know who is the good paym aster o f the wages [on the last day]. [C] You w ill not turn yourself aw ay from the needy, but yo u will share everything with you r brother, and you will not claim anything for you r exclusive use, for, i f you are sharers in the im m ortal [things], h ow much m ore in the mortal. Those commands are as strong as the ones in the insertion. Stronger, in feet, if you consider that phrase I italicized (about which more below). And those positive commands in the W ay o f Life are repeated as negatives in the W ay o f Death in Didache 5:2a (Milavec 1989:96): not being merciful to the poor not w orking for him w ho is oppressed with toil turning aw ay the needy oppressing the distressed advocates o f the rich unjust judges o f the poor altogether sinful In the light o f those passages, to claim that the insertion o f Didache i:3b -2:i com pleted an inadequate source or “ Christianized" a "Jew ish" source is not very plausible. M y alternative proposal is that the insertion w as intended prim arily to absorb within the com m unity's training program the most radical sayings o f the itinerant prophets, their m ost challenging defense o f lifestyle differences from the householders. T h e Didache’s T w o W ays tradition already contained a version o f The Golden Rule in 1:2b and its detailed interpretation in 2:2-4:14 (using, b y the w ay, the singular “you ” ). From those itinerant prophets it took their radical mini-catechism w ith The Golden Rule and their interpretation (using the plural “you"). T h eir conjunction explains the intrusive plural “y o u ” in Didache 1:3b. But h ow exactly did that insertion contain the radical content o f those sayings?

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First, it included them under com munal control as part o f their consensual training program for new converts. Second, it interpreted the desfoliation o f pos­ sessions (easier, no doubt, for those w ho had none) as heavy and repeated almsgiv­ ing. Third, it did not cite them as "w ords" o fje su s. I do not presum e any deceit in that process. The itinerant prophets validated them selves prim arily in their lifestyle imitation o fje su s' "w ays," and the householders form ally accepted that norm , as w e saw above, in Didache 11:8 . 1 do not kn ow to w h at extent they and their hearers considered any saying, w hether attributed to Jesu s or not, as simple verbal articulation o f actual practice. Jesus "said” this b y "d oin g" that. But, in any case, it comes from "the Father" in Didache 1:5, and that is w h at counts. But there is a fourth detail that is the heart o f the matter. Any T w o W ays tradition is inherently disjunctive and antagonistic. It presents you with a W ay o f Life versus a W ay o f Death. N o in-between or half-and-half positions are proposed. It is an absolute either/or split, and it can reach from human ethics to cosmic spirits to divine beings. Com pare, then, the follow ing two endings o f the T w o W ays traditions as given in the Didache and the Teaching o f the Apostles (which is as close as w e can get to the form er’s unredacted source): Teaching o f the Apostles 5:21-6:1, 4

D idache 5:2 -6 12

[A] Abstain, m y son, from all these

[A] M ay you be delivered, m y children,

things.

from all these things. [B] W atch, lest anyone turn y o u aw ay

[B] And see that no one leads you astray from this Teaching;

from this w a y o f teaching, since

otherwise, you will be taught

such a person teaches yo u w ithout

outside the true instruction.

regard fo r God; [C2] for, on the one hand, if y o u are able to carry the [entire] yo k e o f the Lord, yo u w ill be perfect; but, on the other, i f y o u are not able, undertake that w h ich yo u are able [to bear].

[C1] I f you do these things daily with reflection, you will be near the Livin g G od but i f you do not do them, you will be far from the truth. N otice in passing (but recalling Rose-Gaier's earlier point about the gen­ dered equality o f the Didache), that difference in address betw een "m y children and "m y son."

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M y main point, how ever, concerns a comparison o f those twin conclusions. First, both agree in [A] on concluding the W ay o f Death with a general injunc­ tion against "all these things." Next, both agree in [B] on a w arning against any­ one teaching apart from the T w o W ays discipline just detailed. Finally, how ever, comes a very striking difference. The Teaching o f the Apostles ends in good, dis­ junctive T w o W ays style in C 1. It is an either/or with God and the truth on only one side o f that choice. There are no in-betweens, no other options, no alterna­ tive selections. But, in C2, Didache 6:2 omits any mention o f that dichotomy and ends, instead, w ith a choice not between absolute Life and Death but between relative "being perfect" and "doing what you can." Those latter options must certainly not refer to such deeds as magic or sorcery, abortion or infanticide, for­ nication or adultery, theft or murder. Those, surely, are not "D o what you can" situations. T h at distinction betw een "being perfect” and “ doing what you can" refers, I suggest, to that earlier insertion at the start o f the Didache's T w o Ways teaching. That initial redactional insertion in i:3b -2:i corresponds to this final redactional insertion in 6:2, and the opening “ You will be perfect" in 1:4 corre­ sponds w ith the closing “You will be perfect" in 6:2. It is those radical commands from the itinerant prophets that are accepted but contained, cited but controlled by that serene distinction betw een perfection and adequacy. W hen com pared with an earlier Christian version o f the T w o W ays tra­ dition, such as the Teaching o f the Apostles, the Didache’s somewhat permissive conclusion is extrem ely surprising. And that surprise is confirmed by a later Christian version o f the T w o W ays given in a document that uses the Didache as a source. T h e Apostolic Constitutions is a church-order document from the late fourth century that quotes the Didache as the basis for Book 7:1-32 (Funk 1.386-423). It cites, paraphrases, omits, and expands on its Didache source, but here is all it gives from Didache 6:2 (Funk 1.404): See that no one leads you astray from piety. Do not turn, it says, to the right or to the left from it, that in all things you m ay know w hat to do. W here you turn from the way o f piety, you w ill be impious. (Apostolic Constitutions 7:19) That paraphrased version picks up only seven G reek words from Didache 6:2 (italicized above) and omits any mention o f perfection versus adequacy. W e are back again with a proper T w o W ays disjunction betw een piety and impiety. H ere, h ow ever, a cautionary note is necessary. The Didache is w illing to be gentle and delicate in demanding full perfection o f everyone. It is willing to take a "D o w hat you can" stance on these m ost difficult challenges. But it is not willing to create tw o classes o f Christians, the "perfect” ones and the "ordinary" ones. All alike are called to perfection and should get as close to it as possible.

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O ne m ust take very seriously, therefore, this final w arning in the apocalyptic sec­ tion that concludes the Didache (Milavec 1989:100): T h e w h ole time o f your faith will not be o f any use to yo u if, in that last m om ent, you are not perfected. (Didache 6:2) Because that " y o u ' is plural, the saying presses a little harder on the com ­ m unity as a w hole than on isolated individuals. Still the Didache, even while containing those radical sayings within its ow n protective teaching, does not consider "perfection" something only for charismatic elites. It is som ething for all to strive after by doing "w hat you can.” Let us return for a moment to the subject o f redemptive almsgiving, to address one final and very difficult question that this section has raised. Recall that recent phrase from Didache 4:5 about almsgiving as "atonement for one's sins,” which I italicized above. The very idea o f almsgiving comes not from Greco-Rom an pagan­ ism but from Judaism. And so does the idea that alm sgiving can be atonement for one's sins, can gain remission from sins before God. It is from Judaism that early Christianity obtained both those ideas. But belief in redem ptive alm sgiving fits there in some tension with belief in the redemptive death and resurrection o f Jesus. The retention and emphasis on redemptive almsgiving in early Christianity requires explanation beyond the obvious one o f Jew ish tradition. T here w ere also all those hard sayings about poverty and possessions in the gospels. T h ey could not be exactly ignored, but neither could they be exacdy followed. Luke 6:20b says, "Blessed are you who are poor,” and 6:24 says, "W oe to yo u w h o are rich.” But the Shepherd ofHermas, in Similitude 2:10, has this: "Blessed are they w h o are wealthy and understand that their riches are from the Lord, for he w h o understands this will also be able to do some service" (Lake 2.147). And 2 Clement 16:2 agrees w ith this: “Blessed is every man who is found full o f these things; for alm sgiving lightens sin” (Lake 1.155)- W e have, as it were, mediated Luke’s dichotom y w ith a n ew beatitude: Blessed are you rich who give alms to you poor. Judaism , how ever, knew not just about redem ptive alm sgiving b ut also about divine justice. Those texts seen earlier in Chapter 12 did n ot speak ju st o f alm s but also o f rights. T h ey did not simply demand alm s fo r the indebted, enslaved, and the dispossessed. T h ey also demanded that those statuses b e abro­ gated at least every so-many years. Here, then, is the problem . Is alm sgivin g on the side o f justice or injustice? But h ow could one dare to criticize alm sgiving w h en people are in desperate need and demand instant or im m ediate relief? And h o w could one dare to criticize alm sgiving w h en alm sgivers m ay then desist all too readily o r eagerly from any generosity at all? Yet it m ust be said that alm sgiv­ ing can co ver o ver chasms o f systemic injustice and structural inequity. That, in

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fact, m ay be the only logic that makes redemptive alm sgiving religiously valid in the sight o f God. It is actually restitution, as it w ere, o f stolen goods. Alm s m ay be necessary, but it is equally necessary not to confuse them with justice.

Words and Ways o f the Lord T h e Oral phase o f the Jesus tradition is now forever lost. T h e spoken word is transitory b y nature and exists for but a moment. It lives on only in the m em ory o f the audience and its recovery is entirely dependent upon the accuracy o f that m em ory to bring it back into being___ Even the written tradition continues to be edited and improved. This warns us against assum­ ing that the Gospels offer a directly transcribed orality: the tradition may have been thoroughly textualized and altered in the transmission process, a process that did not end with the synoptic evangelists!. . . It has not been possible to establish even one instance w here a chain o f oral sayings has reached tw o literary authors independendy___ T h e unconscious— and uncritical— evolutionary m odel o f sequential tradition (oral then written) must give w a y to a m ore sophisticated acknowledgem ent that these two "phases" o f tradition are far m ore interrelated than is often acknowledged. Barry W. Henaut, Oral Tradition and the Gospels, pp. 295, 296-297,299,303 (my italics)I I conclude w ith tw o final thoughts on the Q Gospel and the Didache— one concerning sayings and oral tradition, the other concerning sayings and com m u­ nity formation. The first point, then: sayings and oral tradition. T h e problem just mentioned in the epigraph links all the w ay back to earlier parts o f this book. By the end o f Part II, you knew that I had very little confidence in peasant m em ory or oral trans­ mission as it is usually invoked to explain the early decades o f the Jesus tradition. If there w ere only oral m em ory at work, then the historical Jesus would probably be lost to us forever. B y the end o f Part III, you knew that I considered certain early sources, such as the gospels o f Q, Thomas, and Mark, to be independent o f one another. But even i f those sources had pointed back before themselves to orality rather than textuality, or at least to some delicate interface between orality and textuality, such oral m em ory had already been rendered questionable in Part II. This epigraph from Barry Henaut seems, therefore, an epitaph for historical Jesu s research. It is taken, in fact, from a concluding chapter entitled "O ral Tradi­ tion: T h e Irrecoverable Barrier to Jesu s," which upgrades to im perative R udolf Bultm ann's proposal to place "the name 'Jesus' alw ays in quotation m arks and let it stand as an abbreviation for the historical phenom enon w ith w hich w e are concerned" (295, 305). I consider, as mentioned earlier, that suggestions to put

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the nam e o f Jesus in quotation marks or to surround Je su s w ith a cloud o f unknow ing are attempts to protect him, alone in all the w orld, from publicly argued evidence and historically conditioned reconstruction. Historical Jesus agnosticism is simply epistemological uniqueness, the negative historical side o f a positive theological issue. W hy is Jesu s m ore unknow able or less reconstructable than any other ancient person about w h om data has survived? Leaving that aside, however, I agree absolutely that the invocation o f an oral tradition about Jesus that is fortunately beyond disproof but unfortunately beyond p roof is not a very good strategy o f reconstruction. But notice those two phrases that I italicized in the epigraph: “ spoken w o rd " and “ oral sayin gs/’ It is this emphasis on words and sayings that I w ant to discuss here. I ask w hether remembering his sayings or imitating his life is the prim ary m ode o f continuity from the historical Jesus to those w ho walked around w ith him and rem ained around after him. The Didache, as w e have ju st seen, did not even cite his sayings as his. But it used as a criterion o f authenticity the w ays (tropoi) rather than the w ords (logoi) o f the Lord. Continuity w as in mimetics rather than in m nem onics, in imi­ tating life rather than in remembering words. Let me take a concrete example. I think it is as likely as anything historical ever is that Jesus said, “ Blessed are the destitute.” But even i f that w ere a direct quotation, its meaning could have changed as the saying w as cited and transmit­ ted. It could, for example, have m oved from ethical into ascetical or apocalyptic eschatology. M y confidence in reconstructing the historical Jesu s does not derive from accuracy o f m em ory or even validity o f interpretation am on g his first com ­ panions. It comes from them and Jesus living a com m on lifestyle that incarnated the kingdom o f God on earth. W ithin the continuity o f that lifestyle, such a say­ ing could have been remembered because it w ou ld have been regularly used. But even i f the saying was created after Jesu s’ death— or even i f all thirty-seven sayings o f the Com m on Sayings Tradition w ere so created— they w o u ld still be adequate summaries o f attitude because o f that lifestyle continuity. If, how ever, nobody else had lived like the historical Jesu s and continued to do so after his execution, then, indeed, the w ay back w ould be closed forever. T h e second point concerns sayings and com m unity form ation. Earlier, in Chapter 15 , 1 quoted from both Koester and Kloppenborg on the divergent escha­ tologies o f the sayings tradition and the Pauline tradition. A lthough, in the past, the Pauline tradition was often taken as uniquely norm ative in earliest Christian­ ity, it is not n ow useful to react by elevating the C o m m o n Sayings Tradition into a n ew ascendancy. T h e present challenge is to hold on equally to them both, to see their connections as well as their separations, to explain both o f them as pres­ ent within the sam e earliest Christianity, and to reconstruct the historical Jesus using both those vectors.

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Koester proposed that, instead o f historical Jesus research, "the prim ary focus would have to be the investigation o f Christian beginnings itself” and that "such investigation would have to start with the earliest available evidence, that is, with the genuine letters o f Paul and with the Synoptic Sayings Source [the Q Gospel], or even its earliest layer o f composition [Q1]. It must be admitted at once that these two oldest sources present the scholar with a conundrum___ There is no agree­ ment am ong the oldest witnesses about the significance and value o f Jesus' words, deeds, and fate for the message that his followers proclaim” (1994^540, 541). I note, in passing, that I m yself do not find that divergence such an "conun­ drum” as Koester does. Both traditions are eschatological. Both are ultimate chal­ lenges from the Jew ish G od to human injustice, currently exemplified by its Roman em bodiment but not exhausted, o f course, by that or any other incarna­ tion. One tradition finds that eschatology incarnated in Jesu s’ life o f nonviolent resistance to Roman exploitation, thereby making the kingdom o f God available for anyone with the courage to emulate his program. The other finds that escha­ tology incarnated in Jesus’ death by official Roman execution, which is negated by a G od w h o 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, how ever, Koester has pointed to a very important dichotom y as far back as w e can get in the Jesus tradition. W hen, how ever, w e think o f the Pauline letters, w e can see immediately h ow they are instrumental in com m unity creation and conservation. But when w e speak o f the Q Gospel, what type o f com munity are w e imagining? A written text indicates, no doubt, som e form o f organization, but what type is it? “The Q com m unity,” writes Koester, "stood in a demonstrably direct continuity to Jesu s’ ow n ministry— indeed the members o f this community seem to have emulated Jesu s' behavior.” But what type or mode o f "com m unity” does that indicate? "T h e most plausible explanation,” responds Koester, “ seems to be that ‘com m u­ nity’ for these disciples w as identical with the relationship o f wandering ascetics to each other. M oreover, sayings assigned to the Sayings Gospel Q, especially in its earliest stage, tend to emphasize the self-denial o f the wandering missionary and the ascetic prescriptions for an elite group. It m ay therefore be doubted w hether this religious 'm ovem ent' w as able to establish viable com m unity struc­ tures that could function in conform ity or in opposition to the existing organiza­ tion o f the society” (19943:543,545)Karen King and Stephen Patterson have raised a similar question with regard to the Gospel o f Thomas. King argues that “ the term 'kingdom ' is a code w ord for com m unity” (1987:95), but Patterson replies that “ there is little in Thom as that provides for com m unity organization or structure: there is no Thom as com ­ m unity per se, but rather a loosely structured m ovem ent o f wanderers." He

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concedes, h ow ever, that "a Thom as m ovem ent” so described “w o u ld not be incom patible w ith King's thesis” (19933:151 and note 123). It depends, actually, on w h at one means by community. 1 agree w ith Koester and Patterson that the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas do not derive from settled and located com m uni­ ties similar to those in the Pauline tradition. W e are dealing, I agree, w ith con­ nections rather than communities. Radicals do not organize easily any m ore than anarchists institutionalize readily. But, o f course, w ritten texts indicate som e minimal form o f cooperation and som e minim al type o f organization. Actually, however, even the situation with ju st the “w o rd s” o r “ sayings” o f Jesu s is som ewhat m ore complicated. Across twenty-five years o f publications Koester has emphasized, concerning such texts as the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, that, for example, “faith is understood as b elief in Je su s' words, a b elief which makes what Jesus proclaimed present and real for the b eliever” (1971:186), and again, most recently, that “ the presence o f Jesu s w as tangible in the words he had spoken” or that “ wandering preachers . . . w ere proclaim ing salvation through the words o f Jesus” (19943:543, 544). I italicize that repetition o f words because, even if w e had only those words, w e w ou ld kn ow , from the C om m on Sayings Tradition studied in Chapter 18, that they involved a reciprocal program o f eating and healing, o f householders and itinerants, o f destitution and poverty. W e do not have just the sayings o f Jesus, but even i f that was all w e had, those words themselves are not just words about words but words about deeds; those say­ ings are not just about vision but about action. Faith is not just in words but in the God who through words demands deeds. W hether each group likes it or not, itiner­ ants and householders are locked together in dialectic b y Jesu s himself. The king­ dom o f God is not in either group alone but in their interaction. But for interaction to occur, both groups must continue to exist. T o look at the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas alone is to look at a half-picture or a half-community. It is the Didache that gives us our best glimpse o f the other half o f that picture and that com m unity.

C H A P T E R 22

A DIVIDED T R A D I T I O N There are only few traces, if any, o f the kerygma (as understood b y Paul and Mark) in som e o f the earlier collections [ofjesus* sayings]. But this does not imply that they had no particular theological purpose; no doubt, this pur­ pose w as som ehow related to the earthly Jesus, w h o was the speaker and/or actor in a large part o f this tradition.. . . Such collections w ere made accord­ ing to principles and patterns which have no relation to the pattern o f the classic passion-resurrection creed and the "gospel" produced b y it___ If the kerygm a o f the passion and resurrection played no role, h ow much do such different (and perhaps m ore primitive) documents relate to the "historical Jesus" as content or origin o f the tradition? Helmut Koester, "One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels," pp. 165-166 This chapter is a very important connective between the preceding tandem Parts VII and VIII and the succeeding tandem Parts IX and X. Those former parts followed one very early tradition, that o f the sayings o f Jesus and the lifestyle they demanded. I traced the sayings from the historical Jesus, through the C om ­ mon Sayings Tradition, and into, on the one hand, the Q Gospel and, on the other, the Gospel o f Thomas. I also looked at the Didache, which crosses the Q Gospels trajectory at a very early stage— certainly closer to its Com m on Sayings Tradition roots than to its finished apocalyptic consummation emphasizing the Son o f Man. M y prim ary focus was not so much the full trajectory o f that tradi­ tion but the earliest continuation from the historical Jesu s to his first com pan­ ions. T h at dialectic o f itinerants and householders, still visible in those later w rit­ ten texts, goes back as early into the tradition as I can trace the evidence. It goes back into the life o f the historical Jesus; it is, in fact, the program o f the kingdom o f G od itself. Parts IX and X look at another tradition, one based not in rural Galilee but in urban Jerusalem . In studying that tradition I will be in constant dialogue w ith the w o rk o f Helm ut Koester. The purpose o f this pivotal chapter is to look at his position on those tw o traditions. From Koester's epigraph above I take only its distinction betw een “ collec­ tions o f Jesu s' sayings" and "the kerygm a o f the passion and resurrection.” That is w hat I m ean by a divided tradition. W hether the form er is "perhaps m ore prim itive" than the latter is possibly insoluble and probably irrelevant. M ore or less prim itive, earlier or later— that is not the point. T h at epigraph is from thirty

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years ago, but Koester has repeated its key point in later w ork. W ith regard to the Gospel o f Thomas: "The basis o f the Gospel o f Thomas is a sayings collection w hich is m ore primitive than the canonical gospels, even though its basic princi­ ple is not related to the creed o f the passion and resurrection. Its principle is nonetheless theological. Faith is understood as b elief in Jesus* w ords, a belief w hich makes what Jesus proclaimed present and real fo r the believer” (1971:186). W ith regard to both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas: "O ne o f the most striking features o f the Gospel o f Thomas is its silence on the m atter o fje s u s ’ death and resurrection— the keystone o f Paul’s m issionary proclam ation. But Thom as is not alone in this silence. The Synoptic Sayings Source (Q), used by M atthew and Luke, also does not consider Jesu s’ death a part o f the Christian message. And it likewise is not interested in stories and reports about the resurrection and subsequent appearances o f the risen Lord. T h e Gospel o f Thomas and Q challenge the assumption that the early church w as unanim ous in m a k in g je su s’ death and resurrection the fulcrum o f Christian faith. Both docum ents presuppose that Jesu s’ significance lay in his words, and in his w ords alone” (19903:86). Joh n Kloppenborg has also emphasized that earliest Christianity involved what I have ju st called a divided tradition, and he agrees w ith K oester's descrip­ tion o f that division as between Jesus sayings and passion-resurrection kerygm a. He insists, m oreover, and quite correctly, that w h atever term is used fo r the passion-resurrection faith type in earliest Christianity— be it kerygm a or procla­ mation, soteriology or salvation, theology or eschatology— that sam e term must likewise be used for the very different message o f the Q Gospel faith type in earli­ est Christianity. The Pauline message should not be privileged in any w a y above the Q Gospel message. Nor, o f course, vice versa. T h ey both represent ve ry early but divergent visions o f Christian salvation. In K loppenborg's w ords: " I f [the Q Gospel] is not merely parenesis [catechetical supplem ent] b ut preaching o f the eschatological event itself, w e must either posit tw o som ew hat asym m etrical ‘kerygm as’ [preachings o f the eschatological event] existing side by side in the sam e churches, or alternatively presume that Q 's ‘kerygm a’ derives from circles different from those which created the ‘Crucified and Risen L o rd ’ kerygm a----Q h a d a n u n d e rsta n d in g o f so te rio lo g y w h ic h w a s a t v a r ia n c e w i t h th e p assio n k e r y g m a , th e a lle g ed cen tre o f C h ristian t h e o l o g y . .

. . Q [is] a n in d e p e n d e n t

k e r y g m a r e fle c tin g a 'se co n d sp h ere ’ o f C h ristia n t h e o lo g y ” (19 8 7 8 :2 2 ) . In m y o w n u n d e rsta n d in g , I rep h rase th o se tw in trad itio n s o f th e s a y in g s a n d o f th e p a s s io n -r e s u r r e c tio n as the tw in trad itio n s o f j e s u s ’ life a n d o f j e s u s ’ d e a th . T h e y a re , fo r m e , t w o sid es o f a sin gle coin .

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The Tradition ofjesus' Life In the understanding o f Jesus' words o f wisdom as a revelation providing life and freedom — this seems to be the case in the earliest compositional strata o f Q— an eschatological dimension o f these words seems to be hardly detectable. That is open to question. Good arguments can be brought for­ w ard for the eschatological implications o f these wisdom sayings. H e lm u t K o e s te r , “ T h e H is to r ic a l Je s u s an d th e H is to r ic a l S itu a tio n o f the

Q uest," pp. 540-541

That divided tradition has never meant for Koester that the sayings tradition is not theological or, indeed, eschatological. Both traditions are eschatological, and Koester's long insistence on the validity and value o f the sayings tradition is reme­ dial rather than hierarchical. He does not exalt it over the passion-resurrection eschatology but, in the presence o f the latter’s eventual theological normativity, pleads for the sayings tradition's historical existence and importance. He speaks o f a form o f realized eschatology in the various sayings gospels. He finds that eschatol­ ogy in Q1 (the earliest stratum o f the Q Gospel), for example: "It cannot be argued that Q originally presented Jesus simply as a teacher o f wisdom without an escha­ tological m essage," although, following Kloppenborg's stratification, “ the eschato­ logical orientation o f the original composition o f Q [Q1] is distinctly different from the apocalyptic perspective o f the redactor" [Q2] (19908:150, m y italics). He also finds realized eschatology in the sayings collections behind both the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel, which do not “reflect a purely proverbial wisdom orientation: rather, prophetic sayings are included which incorporate the wisdom material into the perspective o f a realized eschatology, centered upon the presence o f revelation in the words o fjesu s" (19908:95). There is, in that quotation, som e o f the terminological confusion between eschatological and apocalyptic noted at the start o f Chapter 15. W hat is the relation­ ship betw een an “ eschatological orientation" and an “ apocalyptic perspective"? Although Koester repeatedly uses those terms— especially the form er one— he never explains their m eaning or their relationship. Furtherm ore, Koester repeat­ edly speaks o f “ the "w ords o f Jesu s" in the realized eschatology o f the sayings tradition. T h at is the term used in m ost o f the preceding quotations, for exam ­ ple. It is alm ost as if the content o f those words was irrelevant. Jesu s is present, as it w ere, in their very utterance. But should that emphasis be on the words o f Jesu s or the life ofjesu s? Is it rem em bering (or even repeating) his w ords or imi­ tating and replicating his life that is eschatological?

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O ther scholars w ho w ork on the sayings tradition w ith sim ilar historical pre­ suppositions to Koester's have agreed with his basic point— nam ely, that there is a profoundly divided tradition in earliest Christianity. T h ey do not, how ever, explain the eschatology o f the sayings tradition as being about words; they focus, rather, on lifestyles. T w o examples will suffice, both o f them touched upon in Chapter 15. Joh n Kloppenborg insists, as just noted, that there w e re originally tw o primi­ tive kerygmas, tw o early proclamations o f salvation, tw o separate spheres o f Christian theology. But he also holds that this other kerygm a is eschatological but not apocalyptic: "In any accounting o f Q, sapiential elem ents p lay a m ajor role. It is difficult to miss the pervasive eschatological tenor o f those w isdom elements. But it is another question whether the term apocalyptic is an accurate characteri­ zation for the redeployment o f these w isdom m aterials” (1987^291). H e repeat­ edly identifies that sapiential eschatology as "the radical w isd om o f the Kingdom o f G od” (19873:189, 242,318) and explains it by saying, fo r exam ple, that “ the sapi­ ential speeches in Q, by means o f their radical com portm ent, serve a properly kerygmatic function and point to the radical nature o f the kingdom w hich is in the process o f manifesting itself. Correspondingly, the im peratives specify the type o f radical ethic which is the characteristic o f those w h o h ave responded appropriately to this new reality” (19873:320-321). Sapiential eschatology or radi­ cal wisdom is a matter not just o f words but o f lives, not ju st o f sayings but o f lifestyles. And the m odel is not just the historical Jesu s b ut G od. “Discipleship . . . is understood as imitation o f the merciful and generous G o d . . . and as 'fol­ lowing* or ‘listening to* or ‘coming to* Jesu s” (19873:241). T h e case is similar with Stephen Patterson. H e does n ot speak o f a divided tradition or o f two kerygmatic proclamations, one based on the life, the other on the death o f Jesus. His emphasis is rather on the com m on basis o f those tw in tra­ ditions, and he finds that commonality in “ social radicalism ." T h at is w h ere the Pauline tradition and the Jesus tradition intersect fo r Patterson. “ One m ay see the continuity between Paul and the sayings tradition precisely in term s o f the tradition o f social radicalism that both s h a re .. . . Paul shared w ith the Jesus m ovem ent its social radicalism; he simply could not arrive there b y the same route. For them, the reign o f G od w as present in the spoken w ord ; fo r Paul it becam e real only w hen one could accept the cross as one's o w n death to the w o rld ” (1991:35, 39-40)- That same term “social radicalism ” reappears repeatedly in Patterson's book on the Gospel o f Thomas (19933:4, 241). It is also quite clear that m ore than “ the spoken w ord” is involved in such radicalism , in Patterson s v ie w . It is w o rd acted out in life that counts. "This is not realized eschatology, it is actualized eschatology. I f the kingdom is to exist at all, it is up to Thom as C hristianity to m ake it exist,” and Thom as Christians do this b y lives o f celibate

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asceticism— an asceticism that "offers a real, present challenge to the world. It calls into question the w ays o f the world, its standards, its goals, its notion o f w hat is meaningful in life. Thom as Christianity's social radicalism, as a form o f asceticism, has precisely this effect" (19933:210, 211). Those tw o visions o f the eschatology o f the sayings tradition as Kloppenborg's "radical w isdom o f the Kingdom o f God” or as Patterson's "social radicalism" are necessary correctives to Koester's almost contentless emphasis on "the words o f Jesu s" in that tradition. Instead o f the words o f Jesus, w e must speak o f the radi­ cal life o f Jesus. And instead o f the death o f Jesus, w e must speak o f the imperial crucifixion o f Jesus. Then, in both Jesu s' imitated lifestyle and in Jesus' resur­ rected deathstyle, the Jew ish God o f justice and righteousness stands radically— that is, eschatologically— against injustice and exploitation. But, since Koester him self did not follow that route, the sayings tradition and the cross-resurrection tradition seem to have com e into intolerable tension for him in his recent arti­ cles. H e n ow exalts the passion-resurrection tradition over and even against the sayings tradition.

The Tradition o f Jesus' Death The history o f Christian beginnings demonstrates that it was most effective to establish and to nurture the com m unity o f the new age without any recourse to the life and w o rk o fje su s o f Nazareth. All that was needed was a ritual (the eucharist) and a story, nam ely the story o f Jesu s’ suffering and death and, o f course, hym ns o f mythic poetry. H e lm u t K oester, "T h e H istorical Je su s and the H istorical Situation o f the Q u e st," pp. 5 3 5 - 5 3 6

As I understand his earlier w ork, Koester's point about tw o separate, very early Christian traditions did not intend to exalt one over the other. His heavy emphasis on the sayings tradition w as simply an attempt to restore balance against the alm ost exclusive emphasis on the death and resurrection tradition. But n o w there is a deliberate denigration o f the form er tradition in favor o f the latter in Koester's recent work. On the one hand, his view s on the sayings tradition seem exactly the same as alw ays. In the Q Gospel, "the presence o fje su s w as tangible in the w ords he had spoken," and in the Gospel o f Thomas, "w andering preachers . . . w ere proclaim ­ ing salvation though the w ords o fje s u s" (1994^:543, 544)- Then, how ever, comes a profound criticism: "W hile the essential elements, which are constitutive for the establishment o f a com m unity, are missing in the tradition o f sayings and in the writings it produced, witnesses for the understanding o f groups o f believers

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as com m unity are abundant in the Pauline Corpus and in the canonical gospels in their final form " (19948:546). T o that claim o f a lack o f com m unity in the sayings tradition, I offer a single-word reply: Didache— that is, the com m unity behind the document studied earlier. It was, b y the w a y , a com m unity with far greater serenity than anything w e find in the Pauline churches. E ven i f the itin­ erants in the Q Gospel could not or did not w ant to establish their o w n settled com munities, could and did householders do so in tensive dialectic w ith the radicalism o f itinerant prophets in the Didache? T h at is, in any case, the point I have been arguing throughout the Part VIII. There is, how ever, another factor operating in K oester's recent hesitancy about "the tradition o f Jesu s' sayings"— som ething besides that tradition's sup­ posed inability to create communities. First, in connection w ith the w isdom tra­ ditions behind both the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas, he notes that "som e scholars see a close affinity o f this wisdom tradition to the secular preaching o f Cynic philosophers" (19948:542). He footnotes, am ong others, to Burton Mack. Second, "M ack’s w ork epitomizes also the general tendency that denies any eschatological elements in Jesu s' m essage" (1995:14). Finally, "W e have to ask ourselves, whether our search for the historical Jesu s is not actually predeter­ mined by the conditions o f the cultural paradigm that dom inates the second h alf o f our century in the W estern w orld___ That is m ost clearly evident in the aver­ sion to eschatology. Perfection and success o f the self, w h eth er in political, industrial, moral, or religious terms, cannot conceive o f a genuinely eschatologi­ cal message— except for the syndrome o f ‘rew ard and punishm ent,’ that m iser­ able residue o f an eschatological tradition. W hile nobody w an ts to take political eschatology seriously today— it is in fact perceived as a threat— v e ry few people, on the other hand, are willing to eliminate social concern” (1994^539). (I should note that Mack's w ork strongly validates the sayings tradition over the passionresurrection tradition. In his view they are not ju st tw o separate b ut equally valid traditions.) A few comments. T o equate "secular" and "C y n ic" in the ancient w orld or to use "secular” in describingjesus is profoundly w ro n g— and that applies to any­ one w h o uses the term “secular" in those contexts. T h e religious dim ension o f ancient life w as too utterly embedded in its econom ic, political, and social dim ensions to allow for the distinction o f "secular" and "sacred” that som e today take fo r granted as normal. On Ju n e 3 , 1 7

b .c .e

.,

a choir o f fifty-four girls and boys

san g a hym n com posed by Horace in celebration o f A ugustus's n ew w orld order as the golden age com e round at last. In Latin the w o rd age is seculum, so the h ym n w as called "C arm en Seculare” ; now , h ow ever, "Secu lar H ym n " would rin g rather false to us, and "N e w Age H ym n” w o u ld not sound m uch better. A fair translation m ight be "Eschatological H ym n ," a song in praise o f Augustan

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peace, cosm ic fertility, and imperial eschatology. Furthermore, the Cynics were not secular but religious and eschatological, but in the exact opposite sense to Augustus’s triumphalism. T hey subscribed, in fact, to a pagan style o f ethical eschatology. You are free to dislike them if you wish, or even to dislike all o f Greco-Rom an paganism. You are not free, how ever, to say that Cynicism was secular. It w as simply a pagan eschatology with an anti-imperialist and anti­ materialist drive based on totally different divine principles from similar Jewish and Christian eschatologies. I f Burton Mack or others argue that either Cynicism or Jesus is secular rather than eschatological, the best response is to argue that they are quite w rong— but without negating either the Cynic philosophy or the Jesus tradition in the process. Finally, there is that last statement setting political eschatology against social concern. Those terms are equivalent, in m y under­ standing, for the historical Jesu s and for the Jew ish God whose kingdom he pro­ claimed. Social justice as divine mandate necessarily involves political, social, and econom ic eschatology. (And to m y ear, b y the w ay, "social concern" is a rather feeble w ay o f expressing divine justice for earth.) It is alm ost as if, in the light o f those three concerns in general and Burton Mack in particular, Koester is seeking to distance him self not only from Mack but from his ow n earlier analysis o f the tradition o fje su s’ sayings (and even from that very tradition itself). That is, o f course, fiercely ironic, since nobody has done m ore to establish that tradition than Koester himself. It is now much too late to dismiss or even denigrate it. W hat is needed, how ever, is to give both those traditions equal consideration, not to exalt one over the other, not to set one against the other, and not to separate one from the other m ore than w e should. In any case, I now leave that aside to focus on Koester’s m ore positive analysis o f that second tradition. He builds a pow erful picture o f earliest Christianity as a deliberate coun­ terempire to Rom an imperialism. "There are tw o things that Julius Caesar and Jesus o f Nazareth have in com m on. Both w ere murdered, and both received divine worship after their death. There is another interesting parallel. Neither Augustus nor Virgil w rote a life o f Caesar, nor did Paul w rite a life o f Jesus" (199^:535). T h at is not, o f course, ju st a series o f accidental coincidences. Both sides are claim ing the arrival o f the eschatological or golden age. That funda­ mental parallelism is, therefore, a profound antagonism: tw o eschatological pro­ gram s clashing with one another. Christianity knew that from the beginning and clearly. Rom e knew it from the beginning but unclearly. Koester develops that basic antagonistic parallelism over four inaugural aspects: ritual, myth, story, and com munity. In the Rom an case, cultic ritual began in 42

b .c .e

.

w hen the assassinated

Julius w as declared divine and Octavius, his adopted son, becam e "divi filius,”

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son o f a god. In 27 b .c .e . Octavius was declared "A ugustus," not quite divine but close enough for now . In 14

c .e .,

within a month o f his death, A ugustus was

declared "divus” in his own right, son o f a god and a god as w ell. A mythological h ym n w as mentioned by Koester above. Augustus had it: in 17 b .c .e ., as I m en­ tioned, H orace’s "Carm en Seculare" acclaimed Augustus as descended, across m ore than a thousand years, from the Trojan Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite or Venus. Virgil, w ho died tw o years earlier, had told the epic story behind that mythical acclaim in his Aeneid. R eversing H o m er’s sequence o f heroic wars and hom eward wanderings, he brought Aeneas, son o f Anchises, and Aphrodite-Venus, from T ro y to Italy as ancestor o f the Ju lian clan. "T h e eschatological story o f the Augustan age w as told b y V irgil in his Aeneid, which anchored the new age in the distant past; it becam e the Rom an national epic. T h e followers o f Jesus in the churches o f Paul told the story o f Je su s’ suffering and death; this story also reached back to the past o f Israel as it cast the narrative in the words o f the singers o f Psalms and o f the prophets" (1994^535). T h e cult, myth, and story o f Augustan eschatology can be seen today in R o m e at the Ara Pacts Augustae, the Altar o f Augustan Peace, reconstructed from original and copied fragments and now relocated betw een the T ib er and the Julio-Claudian M ausoleum. It is all there in marble, from fertile Earth Goddess, to A eneas sacri­ ficing, to Augustus and his family. Finally, as Koester concludes, Augustus used pow er and authority while Paul used letter and persuasion to build tw o quite dif­ ferent types o f community. Koester is completely correct that m yth, ritual, and story are constitutive o f com m unity, but there is no need to give them to only one o f those tw in tradi­ tions, to the passion-resurrection tradition but not to the sayings tradition. In any case, as w e shall see, they have both com m on elem ents and divergent develop­ m ents that indicate that both traditions could generate and support com m unity life. In w hat follows, therefore, I seek, negatively, not to privilege one o f those tw in traditions over the other and, positively, to em phasize connections and sim­ ilarities w here those are present. I am not, in other w ords, im agining tw o ideo­ logically opposed traditions.

Rural and Urban Christianity I f Paul and his followers seem to have avoided the em pire’s villages and countryside, Jesu s him self seems to have avoided the t o w n s .. . . But instead o f the Palestinian countryside, [the Acts o f the Apostles] actually fo llo w the m ission in the cities o f the Graeco-Rom an w orld and end up w ith Paul a prisoner at Rom e. The Palestinian countryside w h ere Je su s had travelled and taught in fact disappears com pletely from all N e w T estam en t s o u r c e s .. . . It

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must be stressed, how ever, that although urban and rural Christianity repre­ sent tw o different types o f the new religion— the form er m ore conservative and tending to compromise with secular power, the latter m ore subversive and with social reformist tendencies— their conflict but rarely came out into the open. Dim itris J. Kyrtatas,

The Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities, pp. 92, 95

It is necessary, then, to distinguish two traditions in earliest Christianity, one em phasizing the sayings o f Jesus and the other emphasizing the death and resur­ rection o f Jesus. W e should not privilege one over the other, as I have said— not the death and resurrection over the sayings, as in past theology, nor the sayings o ver the death and resurrection, as in present reaction. There should be no overt ascendancy o f either o ver the other. Furthermore, w hatever descriptive term is used for one, be it proclam ation or kerygma, tradition or gospel, the same term should be used for the other. In other words, there should be no covert ascen­ dancy o f either over the other. Finally, m y ow n preferred terminology is the Life Tradition and the Death Tradition. That form er phrase presumes that Jesus' say­ ings w ere a question not o f m em ory but o f imitation, not o f aphorisms to be recited but o f lives to be lived. T h e latter phrase presumes that Jesus' death was alw ays dyadic, w as alw ays a dialectic o f persecution and vindication, execution and resurrection. The Life Tradition and the Death Tradition could be distinguished as north­ ern and southern traditions. T h at works w ell in the form er case, where the Q Gospel, the Gospel o f Thomas, and the Didache can all be plotted on geographical trajectories from Galilee into Syria. It does not w ork so well for the southern tra­ ditions, which m ove from Jerusalem to Damascus and Antioch at a very, very early date. T h ey could also be distinguished as rural and urban traditions. That w orks better for both as long as rural is not taken to mean isolated illiteracy, on the one hand, or bucolic delusion, on the other. In any case, and h ow ever one names or distinguishes those twin traditions, it is important— I cannot stress this enough— not to privilege one over the other too heavily, set one against the other too readily, or separate one from the other too absolutely. T h e future o f Catholic Christianity belonged to neither o f them alone but to both o f them together. Dimitris Kyrtatas’s w ork, cited as epigraph above, has the signal advantage o f taking that distinction o f rural and urban Christianity seriously and trying at least to imagine both forms. T h e birth o f Christianity took place precisely on that fault line and involved both rural Galilee and urban Jerusalem as early as the evi­ dence lets us see w hat actually happened. Kyrtatas associates the distinction o f rural and urban w ith that o f revolutionary and conservative: "F ew questions

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about early Christianity have caused greater disagreem ent than the question o f its social standing. Practicing Christians historians and theologians have always been divided as to whether early Christianity w as a revolutionary o r a conserva­ tive m ovem ent. Today, much m ore easily than in the past, it is com ing to be accepted that Christianity was both revolutionary and conservative. T o accept this, how ever, is to reject the traditional view that there ever existed such a thing as a single early Christian M ovem ent or Church” (89). But it is not ju st a stan­ dard case o f rural-revolutionary becom ing urban-conservative. T h ere is, instead, a m ore complicated development. "In the early second century, w h en Christian­ ity emerges again into history after N ew Testam ent tim es, it w as already an urban religion. Culturally, socially, theologically, Christianity becam e adapted to needs and systems o f thought o f the cities.. . . It w o u ld therefore seem reason­ able to conclude that when Christianity reached the countryside o f the Rom an world in its new form, it was socially, culturally and theologically marked b y urban predispositions. W e find, how ever, that this w as not so. A s soon as Chris­ tianity came into contact with the w orld o f peasants and villagers, m uch o f its original nature w as revived. W e have no idea in w h at w a y and to w h at extent this happened, but there are reasons to believe that the original m essage devel­ oped in the countryside o f Palestine, and though allegorized b y church leaders was once again understood by people living under sim ilar conditions o f material existence and exploitation by city dwellers” (93-94). The tradition o fje su s’ life and example filled Parts V II and V III o f this pres­ ent book. That o fjesu s’ death and vindication w ill fill Parts IX and X. But there is a leap involved in the m ove from one o f those tandem sets to the other. It is a leap that I wish to acknowledge but not to overem phasize to the point o f m ys­ tification. Christianity was possibly present in R om e itself b y the late 40s and w as certainly present by the mid-5os. The possibility stem s from the em peror Claudius’s decree expelling Je w s from Rom e in 49 because o f disturbances "at the instigation o f Chrestus [~ Christus? = Jesus?],” as Suetonius recorded in The Lives o f the Caesars: The Deified Claudius 25.4 (Rolfe 2.53). T h e certainty stem s from P aul’s letter to the Roman community, written from C orinth around 55. If you m ove, as in that epigraph above, from Jesu s in the tiny ham lets o fje w is h Low er G alilee to Paul in the great metropolises o f the pagan Rom an Em pire, the leap seem s unim aginably great and m iraculously inexplicable. B ut there w ere stages in betw een, stages that were not successive evolutionary m oves b ut sim ultane­ ous options and overlapping developments. L ook, fo r a moment, at the range o f hamlets, villages, tow ns, cities, and m etropolises involved. Think also o f the differences in class o f leadership as you m o ve up that locational hierarchy, from peasants to scribes to scholars. Recall w h at w as seen in Chapter 13 about calculating site dim ensions and population

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densities in antiquity. Even when, as in walled cities, that first variable is firmly established, that second m ay vary widely am ong scholars. I warn you, for exam ­ ple, that calculations o f the total population o f the Jew ish hom eland in the first century have ranged from one to six million, and calculations o f its Jew ish com ­ ponent have ranged from one-half to five million (Byatt 51-52). I am using these population statistics as rough indicators o f increasing locational power, prestige, and importance: I. H am let/V illage Level Jesu s is from Nazareth, “ a hamlet o f little m ore than a hundred" people (Malina and Rohrbaugh 295). II. V illag e/T o w n Level T h e Q Gospel curses (in Q 10:13-15) places such as Capernaum, with 1,700 people (Reed 1992:15). III. C ity Level Pre-Pauline situation involving Dam ascus (45,000), Jerusalem (80,000), and Antioch (150,000). IV. M etropolis Level Pauline situation involving Corinth (100,000), Ephesus (200,000), and Rom e (650,000). The num bers for those first tw o levels are relatively secure. The population o f Jerusalem at 180 hectares and 444 people per hectare (Broshi 14) makes it denser even than Ostia, and that figure is probably twice too large. The numbers in the last tw o levels are simply cited as given (Stark 131-132). M y point is simply to emphasize that the "first urban Christians” w ere certainly not in the Pauline churches. Christians w ere in Dam ascus before Paul was converted; w e know that because he persecuted them there. T h ey w ere in Jerusalem even before that. And from Jerusalem some m oved to Antioch, capital o f the Rom an province o f Syria. It is one o f the m ajor strengths o f Kyrtatas's study, cited in the epigraph above, that he attempts to pay equal attention to countryside and city, to rural as w ell as urban Christianity, to the Little Tradition and to the Great Tradition. M y m ove from Parts VII and VIII to Parts IX and X is a m ove from rural to urban sit­ uation, from the villages o f Galilee to the city ofjeru salem . W ithout that m ove, a m ove outw ard to the great pagan cities w ould be inexplicable. It is on Jerusalem , therefore, that these final parts will concentrate.

P A R T IX

M eal and C o m m u n ity W e have [in the ancient Mediterranean] a society marked by tw o features. T h e first has been exhaustively studied and evoked with tones o f understandable disapproval: there is a direct and unveiled link between wealth and the pow er to draw to oneself, w ith varying degrees o f unabashed brutality, a share o f the lim ­ ited goods o f others. In the eastern Mediterranean, the fight for the control o f w hat little agrarian surplus there w as was usually at its most remorseless within range o f the great towns. The victims w ere almost inevitably the peasantry; and the result w as a chronic condition o f shortage and malnutrition, always ready to tip over into fam ine and epidemics. If abundance existed, it could only be found am ong the rich and their clients in the towns. The second aspect is less wellknown: the pervasive linking o f status and diet. P ow er w as the pow er to eat. T h e divisions o f society coincided transparently with gradations o f access to foodstuffs: m ore food, m ore varied and better-prepared at the top; less food and less varied towards the b o tto m .. . . This is an age w here thought about eating w as, inevitably, a form o f second thought about society and its blatant divisions. H o w to break the iron grip o f shortage? Inevitably, the best and most stunning miracles refer, not to the millennial hope o f restoring the lost generosity o f the earth, but to the far m ore difficult feat o f persuading the harder hearts o f men to open u p .. . . In this process o f persuasion, apocalyptic topics played a discreet role in m olding the expectations and sensibilities o f contemporaries___ It m ay be that one o f the deepest changes o f mentality associated with the rise o f Christianity in the Mediterranean w orld is the rise to prominence o f one single meal (the Eucharist), which, though heavy with associations o f interper­ sonal bonding in a single human society, was carefully shorn, from an early time, o f any overtones o f organic, non-human abundance. Previously, a widespread fram e o f m ind had tended to take for granted the solidarity o f any settled com ­ m unity around the rare commodities o f food and relaxation, and had intended, through m om ents o f high and leisurely eating, to shame the dull w orld o f N ature out o f its accustomed stinginess. Everything that w e know about the fes­ tivals o f the Christian Church in Late Antiquity shows the resilience o f the old m entality___ Only a shrill elite o f clerics opposed the M editerranean urge for the banquet___ Indeed, in the straitened world o f the Mediterranean, the king­ dom o f H eaven had to have som ething to do with food and drink. Peter Brown, "Response,” pp. 18-20,22-23 Throughout Parts IX and X I am in debate with recent articles by Helmut Koester. Our disagreements here are not so much about what w e have discovered

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as about the meaning o f it. The heart o f this disagreement is m y refusal to privi­ lege one o f those tw o veiy early traditions, the Life Tradition and the Death Tradi­ tion, over the other or, indeed, even to separate them too absolutely apart. It is very tempting to do so, but future research demands that w e refuse that tempta­ tion. Furthermore, if their separations and connections cause us unease or refuse intransigently to come together in unity, w e had better not solve that dilemma too easily or too soon. Part IX has two chapters. Both o f those chapters— C hapter 23 on ritual meal and Chapter 24 on community life— focus on the earliest Jeru salem com m unity. In Chapter 23 I look at the ritual meal in tw o separate traditions, as Eucharist and as Lord’s Supper. The form er derives from the Q Gospel tradition, as seen in Didache 9-10. The latter derives from Jerusalem tradition, as seen in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Similarities betw een those tw in traditions point to a basic but developing meal tradition, one that I term the C o m m o n M eal Tradi­ tion. There is a parallel here with the Com m on Sayings Tradition, but there are also two m ajor differences, despite the similarity in title. First, the C om m on Meal Tradition is basic to both the Life Tradition (focused on the sayings and life o f Jesus) and the Death Tradition (centered on the passion and resurrection o f Jesus). It has, therefore, a far m ore profound presence than that o f the C om m on Sayings Tradition, which is basic prim arily to the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Furthermore, those gospel redactions change the C o m m o n Sayings T ra­ dition in diametrically opposed directions: the Q Gospel is apocalyptic, w hile the Gospel o f Thomas is anti-apocalyptic. T h e C om m on M eal T radition as seen, on the one hand in Didache 9-10 and on the other in 1 Corinthians 10 -11, does not receive such antithetical development. It is m ore, indeed, like a single process, from Didache 10 (food and drink) to Didache 9 (cup and bread) to 1 Corinthians 10 (cup/bread) to 1 Corinthians 11 (bread/body and cup/blood). It w ou ld be hard, h ow ever, to imagine the opposite direction taking place— that is, 1 Corinthians 10 - 11 developing through Didache 9 into Didache 10. In usin g the term C om m on M eal Tradition in what follows, I intend both to parallel it and to differentiate it from m y earlier term, the Com m on Sayings Tradition. W hat is o f prime importance for m e in the C o m m o n M eal Tradition is the fu ll and normal m eal that, as communal share-meal, sym bolized the presence o f a sharing G od in both the life and death o f Jesus. I use that term share-meal in dis­ tinction from regular family-meals or rotating host-meals. I w ill, as w e proceed, distinguish three types: patronal, com munal, and societal share-m eals. M y pri­ m ary focus w ill be on communal share-meals as the earliest location o f the Chris­ tian m eal tradition. All o f that content o f Chapter 23 w ill be presum ed w hen I turn to com m unity life in Chapter 24. A m eal ritualizes a certain type o f com m u­ nity. I do not im ply, as one m ore dreary attempt at denom inational triumphal­

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ism, that Christian Jew ish community in Jerusalem w as uniquely unique. I com ­ pare, therefore, Essene Jew s and Christian Jew s, not to claim any direct genetic connection but to consider forms o f radical com m onality and com munal resis­ tance to imperial commercialization in first-century Jew ish communities. I append an autobiographical footnote to the epigraph above. I have never been unwillingly hungry in all m y life. I was five when the Second W orld W ar broke out in Europe, but politically neutral and minimally rationed Ireland had enough food so that hunger w as not a wartim e reality. At boarding school, betw een 1945 and 1950, food was never a problem in quantity, though it certainly w as in m onotony. I can still smell Friday’s fish and the inevitable tapioca pud­ ding that w e called frogspawn and seldom ate. After an Irish boarding school, an American m onastery w as no problem at all. I said “ unwillingly hungry” in my opening sentence. As a m onk I fasted on Fridays, in Advent, and in Lent. That w as done willingly, and, in any case, tem porary hunger from what is there is never the sam e as permanent hunger from what is not there. In m y life's experi­ ence, therefore, food has always been available if I wanted it, when I wanted it, and in as great a quantity as I wanted. I f I think at all about food, it is more in terms o f diet and fitness than in terms o f hunger and want. As I w rote that paragraph, I decided on an experiment. In an earlier chapter I mentioned Angela’s Ashes, Frank M cCourt’s m em oir o f his Irish childhood, a book that relocates Yeats's line “a terrible beauty is b o m ” from the national to the individual level. M cCourt, w h o grew up in destitution, writes about difficult circumstances in language that soars the spirit and sears the conscience. I opened the book at random seven times in a row , and som ew here on those facing pages there w as alw ays som ething about food. I stopped after seven checks, but you can try it for you rself to see h ow w ell it works. If I had written a childhood m em ­ oir, food w ould not have been a theme o f such recurring inevitability. If it w ere there at all, it w ould probably be about getting too much special stuff this or that time rather than about not getting enough basic stuff all the time. But then I did not grow up hungry. Meal as actuality or meal as metaphor cannot resonate the same for tw o such disparate life experiences. T h e eucharist-as-meal or heaven-as-banquet falls a little flat for those w h o have alw ays been w ell fed. W hat does messianic banquet m ean for us, not as messianic but as banquet? If you surveyed North American images o f heaven, h ow m any w ould emphasize food and drink—enough or m ore than enough o f it— as a prim ary metaphor? I f I think about a meal, I do not think, Good, there will be enough for me to eat. I f I think about a banquet, I do not think, Good, there will be more than enough for me to eat. In the latter case— banquet rather than meal— I probably think not o f food but o f dress. Is a business suit acceptable, or is a tuxedo required? Is it ordinary tie or black tie?

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In Chapters 23 and 24, therefore, those o f us w h o have alw ays been well nourished must w alk carefully. W e must, first o f all, take that epigraph very seri­ ously. W e must, second, keep together flesh and spirit, body and soul, religion and politics, theology and economics. G od's L a w alw ays em braces those dichotom ies together; for example, food is about justice and justice is about God. T h e kingdom o f God is about food and drink— that is, about divine justice fo r material bodies here on material earth. W e do not live b y bread alone. But bread is never alone.

C H A P T E R 23

T H E CO M M O N M E A L T R A D I T I O N Paul's calling must be dated in the year 35 c.E.t perhaps even two or three years earlier. There are com pelling reasons to give a very early date to the Christianity that Paul knew, w hen he was called as a missionary, and whose traditions and rites he accepted and faithfully continued. These traditions are the prim ary evidence for the earliest churches, while m any features derived from the canonical gospels that one is accustomed to ascribe to the early Palestinian Christianity probably had not even com e into existence at the time o f Paul’s c a ll.. . . As far as the churches o f Judea and Jerusalem are con­ cerned, the traditions preserved in the Pauline Corpus are probably a better witness for their praxis than any sayings and narratives preserved in the Syn­ optic tradition. H e lm u t K oester, "Je su s' Presence in the E a rly C h u r c h /' pp. 54 7-548 , 550

Koester did not explain his choice o f the w ord presence in that article's title, but I take it as a deliberately w ider and m ore inclusive term than, say, resurrec­ tion. T h e reason for m y interpretation is found in the headings o f the article's first tw o sections. T h e first section is called “The Tradition o f Jesu s’ Sayings," which refers to the fact that within the Q Gospel, for example, “ the presence o f Jesu s w as tangible in the words he had spoken” (19943:541, 543). But in discussing the Q Gospel or the Gospel o f Thomas, Koester could not have replaced presence w ith resurrection in that sentence, since resurrection is not basic to those texts’ understanding o f Jesus. The second section is entitled “Jesu s’ Presence in the Churches o f Jerusalem and Antioch. T h e Pauline Evidence" (19943:541, 546). In that case, to the contrary, presence could be replaced with resurrection. That second heading could be taken to mean: first, the churches o f Jerusalem and Antioch; next, the churches o f Paul. Koester, how ever, uses it to mean: the Pauline evidence for the churches ofjeru salem and Antioch. That rep­ resents a crucially important principle for me. I have not extended this book into Pauline theology or the Pauline churches, as I have noted, but I do include the Jerusalem com m unity within its focus on the companions o f Jesu s and the birth o f Christianity. I accept the use o f what Koester calls “ the Pauline evidence” — that is, the evidence o f received tradition that Paul proclaims— as a w indow onto the earliest Jerusalem com munity. W hen, for example, Paul speaks against Corinthian meal practice, I read him not for Corinthian m eal practice but for

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Jeru salem meal practice; not for the present Corinth custom s he criticizes but for the past Jerusalem customs that he opposes to them.

A Typology o f Share-Meals T h e purely symbolic meal o f m odem Christianity, restricted to a bite o f bread and a sip o f wine or juice, is tacitly presupposed fo r the early church, an assumption so preposterous that it is never articulated or acknowledged. R obert Je w e tt, “ T e n em en t C h u rch es and P au lin e L o v e F e a sts," p. 44

That epigraph adds another dimension to our distance from the Com m on Meal Tradition, be it in Jerusalem, Antioch, or anyw here else. It is another facet rendering understanding almost impossible. It is not ju st that som e Christians get too much normal food; it is that all Christians get too little eucharistic food. The Christian Eucharist is today a morsel and a sip. It is not a real meal. Y ou m ay reply, o f course, that such is sufficient to symbolize the presence o f Jesu s and G od in the community o f faith. But w h y symbolize divinity through a m edium o f food that is non-food? M aybe non-food symbolizes a non-Jesus and a non-God? Notice, there­ fore, the ambiguity in Jew ett’s phrase “symbolic m eal." O f course the Eucharist is a symbolic meal. But does that mean it should be a morsel and a sip symbolic o f a real meal or a real meal symbolic o f God’s presence? And w hat m akes that real m eal so sym ­ bolic? W hat makes that real meal any different from a real m eal in any grateful Christian home? That question is at the heart o f this Chapter 23, and its answer connects to Chapter 24’s discussion o f both Essene and Christian communities. M y proposal is that those meals w ere real meals as share-meals. T h e com m u­ nity shared together whatever food it had available, w hich both sym bolized and ritualized but also actualized and materialized the equal justice o f the Je w ish God. I am, as that epigraph indicates, especially indebted to recent w o rk b y Robert Je w ett for the distinction to be explored below betw een the C om m on M eal T ra­ dition as either patronal or communal share-meal. And, ju st to give a third example, I also look at a societal share-meal in Greco-Rom an paganism . T h at triad estab­ lishes a typology within which the Com m on M eal Tradition can be located. P A T R O N A L SH A R E-M EA LS In one o f the very few places where Paul cites a saying o f Jesu s, he disobeys it and then defends his decision to do so. He is, in context, absolutely correct in that decision. But w e have, as usual, to read Paul’s response and im agine what it is he is responding to. W riting from Ephesus to the com m unity at Corinth betw een late 52 and early 55, he says, in 1 Corinthians 9:3, that "this is m y defense to those w h o w ou ld examine m e.” Their accusation is that he is w o rk in g to sup*

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port him self rather than depending entirely upon their generosity. And that, as they probably said to him, is despite the fact that, according to i Corinthians 9:14, “ the Lord com manded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their liv­ ing by the gospel." That is, o f course, exactly the situation w e saw from the his­ torical Jesu s and the itinerant prophets o f the Q Gospel and the Didache. Paul has been accused o f not following that model and maybe even o f not having enough trust to let him self be so dependent. Gerd Theissen w rote a very insightful com m entary on that situation over twenty years ago (1982:27-67). He notes, first, that w e are dealing with depetidency-as-command from the Lord in 1 Corinthians 9:14. But before Paul cites dependency there, he mounts up multiple examples o f dependency-as-privilege in 1 Corinthians 9:5-13. He uses particular Christian examples from the other apostles, the brothers o f the Lord, and Cephas. He uses general human exam­ ples from the arm y, the vineyard, and the flock. H e uses specific legal examples from the ox, the temple, and the altar. Since, therefore, command has been reinterpreted as privilege and duty as right, Paul can decline that privilege and right as follows: W e have not made use o f this right, but w e endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the w ay o f the gospel o f C h rist.. . . 1 have made no use o f any o f these rights . . . that in m y proclamation I m ay make the gospel free o f charge, so as not to make full use o f m y rights in the gospel. (1 Corinthians 9:12b, 15 ,18 ) That is rhetorically very clever, but what justifies it ethically? Theissen argues that there w ere "tw o types o f primitive Christian itinerant preachers, to be distinguished as itinerant charismatics on the one hand and com munity orga­ nizers on the other. T h e m ost important difference between them is that each adopts a distinctive attitude to the question o f subsistence. The first type arose in the social circumstances o f the Palestinian region. T h e second, represented by Paul and Barnabas, arose in the m ovem ent o f the mission into Hellenistic terri­ tory. Both types w o rk side by side but come into conflict at Corinth" (1982:28). I do not underestimate the differences betw een the tiny hamlets o f the east­ ern M editerranean and the great cities around the Aegean Sea, but there are tw o m ajor problem s w ith that analysis. First, both types o f preachers appear together at Corinth, so it m ay not be useful to distinguish them as Theissen does. It is pre­ cisely the presence and acceptance o f the “ Palestinian" type in "H ellenistic" terri­ tory that puts Paul on the defensive in his ow n com m unity. Second, Paul him self is quite ready to accept subsidies for his mission— for example, from the Philippians in northern Greece.

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I rejoice in the Lord greatly that now at last you have revived yo u r concern for m e; indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it. Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have___ You Philippians indeed know that in the early days o f the gospel, when I left Macedonia, no church shared with m e in the matter o f giv­ ing and receiving, except you alone. For even when I w as in Thessalonica, you sent me help for m y needs more than once. (Philippians 4 :10 -11,15 -16 ) That first instance o f Philippian support w as around the y ea r 50; the second was around 55. Paul mentions that support to the Corinthians in a letter written around the same time as that to the Philippians: I robbed other churches b y accepting support from them in order to serve you. And when I was w ith you and w as in need, I did not burden anyone, for m y needs w ere supplied by the friends w h o cam e from M acedonia. So I refrained and w ill continue to refrain from burdening y o u in any w ay. (2 Corinthians 11:8-9) W e have, therefore, to presume that Paul refused support because o f som e specific problem at Corinth rather than because o f general principles separating community organizers from itinerant charismatics. W h at w as that problem? Theissen, in fact, points to an alternative solution: Consider you r ow n call, brothers and sisters [adelphoi]: n ot m any o f you w ere w ise by human standards, not m any w ere pow erful, n ot m any w ere o f noble birth. (1 Corinthians 1:26) But to say "not many” is to say "som e.” T here w ere, in other w ords, some rel­ atively or comparatively well-to-do members in the Corinthian com m unity. Paul also mentions, in 1:14-16, that he him self baptized only Crispus, Gaius, and the household o f Stephanas at Corinth. But in Acts 18:8-9 Crispus is "the official o f the synagogue,” in Romans 16:23 Gaius is "host to m e and to the w h o le church,” and in 1 Corinthians 16:15-17 the household o f Stephanas "d evoted them selves to the service o f the saints” and Stephanas him self visited Paul at Ephesus. "It thus appears,” as Theissen notes, "that Paul confined his baptizing to a few influential and im portant members o f the com munity” (1982:55). O n the other hand, “ C h loe’s people” in 1 Corinthians 1:11 "are likely to have been slaves, since m em ­ bers o f a fam ily w ou ld have used their father’s nam e, even i f he w e re deceased (1982:57). A m ajor problem at Corinth, therefore, w as the "struggle for position w ithin the congregation, carried on prim arily by those o f high social status (1982:56). W h at faced Paul at Corinth w as som ething probably n ew — namely,

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com peting patronal possibilities, not many but therefore some well-to-do m em ­ bers vying w ith one another for positions o f authority based on patronage. Paul refused to subm it him self to such patronage and was attacked in turn for his refusal. H e was, they said, disobeying the com mand o f the Lord. I f that analysis is correct, there had to be a concomitant problem at Corinth's eucharistic meals. Paul brings up this subject with a flat accusation: "W hen you com e together, it is not really to eat the Lord's supper." He develops this over four steps in i Corinthians n. 1. Criticism (11:17-22): "F o r w hen the time comes to eat, each o f you goes ahead w ith your ow n supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. W hat! D o you not have homes to eat and drink in?” 2. Tradition (11:23-26): Institution o f the Lord's Supper "on the night he was handed o ver.” 3. Commentary (11:27-32): Unw orthy participation in the Lord's Supper is w h y “ m any o f yo u are w eak and ill, and som e have died.” 4. Criticism (n:33-34a): “W hen you com e together to eat, w ait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at hom e, so that w hen you com e together, it will not be for yo u r condemnation." Those double fram es with their very specific criticism o f "not waiting” make it possible to see rather clearly w hat w as the problem. W e are talking about a patronal share-meal in w hich one o f the wealthier members hosts the entire com ­ munity. This is the typical situation o f the house church. On the one hand, Paul clearly presum es that there are those w ho have food to eat at hom e and need not com e to the Lord's Supper for sustenance. T h ey are the haves. On the other hand, those haves "sh ow contempt for the church o f G od and humiliate those w h o have nothing." Th ose latter are the have-nots. The Lord’s Supper is sup­ posed to be a patronal share-meal in which haves and have-nots can eat food together in com m on, but, o f course, all or most o f the food and drink must com e from the haves. W hat happens, how ever, is that the nonworking haves can arrive before the w orking have-nots and eat together w hatever they bring or their host prepares for them. W hen the have-nots arrive, there is nothing left for them, hence “ one goes hungry [the have-nots] and another becom es drunk [the haves], as Paul put it. I return b elow to consider the logic o f Paul's reply in the sections nam ed tradition and commentary within those frames o f criticism. C O M M U N A L SH A R E -M EA LS

James Packer's fascinating studies of Ostia, Rome's port at the Tiber s mouth, can serve as an introduction to this section (1967; 1971)- Ostia’s population "probably

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did not exceed 27,000” at the time o f Paul. Its upper-end aristocracy w as about five hundred people housed in only ”22 mansions scattered throughout the site,” and its lower-end aristocracy was about tw o thousand people housed in apartment build­ ings looking into a central garden. Everyone else— the other 90 percent— lived in upper-level tenements, with either shops or factories on the ground floor. Shops averaged 1.7 rooms and were actually themselves shop-apartments (1971:70). Those tenements or insulae (literally: islands) were usually four or five stories high, and "the higher one went in a Roman building, the w orse conditions becam e” (70 note 30). The reason was that the higher the floor, the greater the subdivision for its renters. W e should not think o f individual apartments as dw ellin g places in ou r sense o f the word. People did not eat or live in them; they did n ot co o k o r defecate in them; they simply slept and stored in them. "T h e m ajority o f Ostian flats w ere not homes in the m odem sense o f the world. T h ey w ere not equipped to take care o f all the physical needs o f their inhabitants, and, save for [garden apart­ ments], they w ere probably not used to entertain friends. T h e y w o u ld have served m erely for household life and for the storage o f fam ily property. T h e pat­ tern o f Ostian streets suggests that the real life o f the com m unity w as lived out­ side individual dwellings. Shops bordered alm ost every street, and the apparent lack o f kitchens in most Ostian houses m ay indicate that m any shops supplied the inhabitants o f the surrounding buildings w ith partially o r com pletely pre­ pared food and drink” (1971:73). Shop-apartments, in other w ords, w e re a m ajor public-private location. Furthermore, lest w e think o f O stia's apartm ents as inhu­ manly crowded, w e must remem ber that "in ancient Ostia alm ost all the require­ ments o f the vast m ajority o f citizens w ere taken care o f outside the hom e. Thus, in som e sense, the w hole city constituted a single, com plex habitation o f which the individual residence was perhaps the least im portant part. Ancient Ostia represents com munal living on a massive scale, w h ich b y its v e ry intensity and public nature is entirely foreign to the m od em W estern conception o f pri­ vacy" (1971:74). Ostia is fairly indicative o f norm al Rom an city life, w ith some shining m arble and much stinking slum. But in w h at follow s, rem em ber those shop-apartments on the ground floor o f insulae. Robert Je w ett has recently suggested another form o f the L o rd 's Supper: com m unal share-meals in tenement churches. I think that this is a pow erfully persuasive proposal. W e should now take those tw o m odels— patronal sharem eals in house churches and com munal share-meals in tenem ent churches— as ends o f a spectrum that has all sorts o f com binations and perm utations in betw een. "It is likely that the m ajority o f early Christian converts lived in the insulae o f the inner cities rather than in private v illa s .. . . 90% o f the free popula­ tion and an even higher percentage o f the slave population in the cities o f the

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em pire lived in apartment blocks called insulae. T h e upper floors o f the four- and five-story apartment blocks typically contained cubicles o f about io square meters, representing the space for one fa m ily .. . . [There was] a population den­ sity o f 300 per acre for the residential areas o f the city o f Rom e, alm ost 2.5 times higher than twentieth century Calcutta and 3 times higher than Manhattan" (1993:26). Je w e tt’s proposal is that Christian cells met together within those insulae with mutual rather than patronal support. Each brought what he or she could to the com m on meal, and thus all were assured, no matter what happened, o f at least one Eucharist— one thanksworthy meal, say— per week. Je w ett points to a section in Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians as the prim ary direct evidence for that proposal. That letter is probably not an authen­ tic letter o f Paul’s, but, in that case, its later situation makes the verse even more striking. N ow w e com m and you, beloved, in the name o f our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep aw ay from believers w ho are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; w e w ere not idle when w e w ere with you, and w e did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor w e w orked night and day, so that w e might not burden any o f you. This was not because w e do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even w hen w e w ere with you, w e gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For w e hear that some o f you are liv­ ing in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. N o w such persons w e com m and and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their w o rk quietly and to earn their ow n living. (2 Thessalonians 3:6-12) I I have italicized the frames about "living in idleness" in 3:6 and 3:11. But what is w ron g with living in idleness if you can afford to do so? The answer is evident in that other phrase I italicized between those frames: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. Je w ett emphasizes that, in terms o f form, the statement is a sen­ tence o f casuistic law and that, in terms o f content, "the creation o f the regulation required a community that was eating its meals together, fo r whom the willingness or unwillingness to work was a factor o f sufficient importance to require regulation, and in which the power to deprive members o f food was in fact present.. . . A kind o f Christian com m une or cooperative is required, in which meals w ere being shared on a regular basis, and for which the refusal to w ork posed a significant threat” (1993:38, italicized phrase w as underlined in original). Notice, o f course, that the problem is the "unwillingness” to w ork and not the inability to find w o rk or the incapacity to do work. I f food w as supplied patronally, it w ould be irrelevant w hether clients w orked or not. But if food was supplied m utually, anyone

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unw illing to w ork (and thereby unable to contribute som ething to share) was, as the Didache said, a Christ-hustler. Theissen suggests the term “love-patriarchalism” fo r patronal share-meals in house or villa settings (1982:37). Je w e tt proposes the term “ love-com m unalism ” for those communal share-meals in tenem ent or apart­ m ent settings (1993:33). But since the term "love” tends to be trivialized by over­ use, I emphasize that the w ord had a very precise and specific m aterial m eaning fo r Paul: it meant share with one another. And the ability so to share w as evi­ dence that they were, in the w ord Paul coined for 1 Thessalonians 4:9, “ Godtaught” people. God is a god w ho shares. Furtherm ore, w h en Paul describes Christians with the Greek root adelf, w e should translate not ju st as sisters and brothers but as sharers. That is what the term meant for him and them. SO C IE T A L SH A RE-M EA LS I append this third type— societal share-meals— as an exam ple o f h o w things could have been done but w ere not done in Essene or Christian Jew ish sharemeals. The societal share-meal is exemplified by the m eal protocol o f an ancient burial society. Even m ore horrible than the experience o f isolation and loneliness in ancient (and any?) life w as the possibility o f abandonm ent and nonburial in death. I f you had a family and i f they could afford it and i f they survived you , they would, no doubt, perform the proper pieties and obsequies at y o u r death. But h ow long could such care and m em ory last? Because the answ er, all too often, w as “not long enough,” there stood, betw een close fam ily and distant society, the funerary association, with titular deity, w ealth y patronage, and members, eating and drinking together w hen alive and guaranteeing one another's proper burial, adequate mourning, and continued rem em brance w hen dead. T h e bylaw s o f one such funerary society w ere discovered in 1816 at Lanuvium , m od em Lanuvio, outside Rom e on the southw estern reaches o f the Alban Hills. T h e Latin text is in Dessau (3.737-739, #7212), w ith an English translation in Lew is and Reinhold (2.273-275). The details are precise and fascinating. T h e group w as founded on January 1 o f 133 C .E . under the patronage o f a local magistrate named Lucius Caesennius Rufus. It w as dedicated to the goddess D iana and to the deified Antinoiis, the em peror H adrian's catamite, drow ned in the N ile three years before. T h at gave them divine, divinized, and hum an patronage. On M ay 28 o f 136

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the group w as en d ow ed b y its m agis­

trate-patron w ith fifteen thousand sesterces, which w as to supply interest o f four hundred sesterces payable twice a year, once on A ugust 13, birthday o f Diana, and again on N ovem b er 27, birthday o f Antinous. (For that and w h at follows, calculate m onetary values at one denarius = four sesterces = sixteen asses [coins,

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not donkeys]; and think o f seventy sesterces as a m onth's subsistence allowance for an adult male.) At that same time, the group’s bylaw s w ere inscribed forever on the inner portico o f the local temple dedicated to Antinoiis. Such groups w ere officially licensed by the Roman senate, and that decree w as recorded at the start o f that temple inscription: These are permitted to assemble, convene, and maintain a society; those w ho desire to make monthly contributions for funerals m ay assemble in such a society, but they m ay not assemble in the name o f such a society except once a month for the sake o f making contributions to provide burial for the dead. T h e Lanuvium Benevolent Society met once a month for a business ses­ sion, and m em bers w ere enjoined to bring up "any com plaint” at those meet­ ings so that "w e m ay banquet in peace and good cheer on festive days.” Those days w ere six in all: the birthdays o f Diana, Antinoiis, Lucius Caesennius Rufus, and Rufus’s brother, mother, and father. Fines w ere set at four sesterces for a "disturbance," tw elve sesterces for “ speaking abusively or causing an uproar,” and tw enty sesterces for "using abusive or insolent language to a quinquennalis at a banquet." (The quinquennalis w as the ch ief officer with a five-year term.) T h e bylaw s begin with “ It w as voted unanim ously” and continue through tw elve m ore “ It w as voted fu rth e r. . . " rules. T h ey are alm ost evenly divided betw een prescriptions for burials and prescriptions for meals. This is the open­ ing set: It w as voted unanim ously that w hoever desires to enter this society shall pay an initiation fee o f ioo sesterces and an amphora o f good wine, and shall pay m onthly dues o f 5 asses. It was voted further that if anyone has not paid his dues for six consecutive months and the com mon lot o f mankind befalls him, his claim to burial shall not be considered, even if he has provided for it [the arrears] in his will. It w as voted further that upon the decease o f a paidup m em ber o f our body there will be due him from the treasury 300 sester­ ces, from which sum will be deducted a funeral fee o f 50 sesterces to be dis­ tributed at the pyre [am ong those attending]; the obsequies, furthermore, will be perform ed on foot. Only those in arrears and suicides w ere precluded from that guaranteed funeral service. One o f the m ost interesting aspects o f this society is that it included slaves, freed slaves, and freeborn members. H ere are tw o specific rules for the enslaved and the freed:

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It w as voted further that if a slave m em ber o f this society dies, and his mas­ ter or mistress unreasonably refuses to relinquish his body for burial, and he has not left written instructions, a token funeral cerem ony will be h e ld .. . . It w as voted further that i f any slave m em ber o f this society becom es free, he is required to donate an amphora o f good wine. So m uch for funeral rites. W hat about those festive meals? M em bers had to take turns supplying a meal for the society: Masters o f the dinners in the order o f the membership list, appointed four at a time in turn, shall be required to provide an am phora o f go o d w ine each, and for as m any members as the society has a bread costing 2 asses, sardines to the num ber o f four, a setting, and w arm w ater w ith service. . . . It was voted further that if any master, in the year w h en it is his turn in the membership list to provide dinner, fails to com ply and provide a dinner, he shall pay 30 sesterces into the treasury; the m an follow in g him on the list shall be required to give the dinner, and he [the delinquent] shall be required to reciprocate w hen it is the latter’s turn. Privilege within the society came from service rather than status. T h e quinquennalis did not have to be master o f the dinner and received a double share o f it during the five-year term. The current "secretary and the m essenger” w ere likewise exempt and got a share and a half, as did past quinquennales. That, h ow ­ ever, was sanction as well as honor. The privilege presum ed that those officials had "administered the office . . . honestly” and w as given in the expectation that others w ould "also hope for the same by properly discharging their duties.” T h e current quinquennalis, on the other hand, had “ on the festive days o f his term in office . . . to conduct worship with incense and w ine . . . clothed in w hite, a n d . . . on the birthdays o f Diana and Antinoiis he is to provide oil fo r the society in the public bath before they banquet." T h e Lanuvium Benevolent Society’s dinner w as not a patronal m eal— as if, for exam ple, Lucius Caesennius Rufus had invited the m em bership to villa or tem ple for a free feast. Neither was it a communal m eal in w h ich everyo n e shared equally w h atever they had. It was a societal meal in w hich paid dues guaranteed certain collegial rights and duties, and its fairness w as protected b y decency and hum anity carved in stone. And it included, w ithout any particular fuss, the enslaved, the freed, and the freeborn together in one group. T h e question, h o w ­ ever, is this: D id com m unal meals implicitly or explicitly criticize society in a w a y that patronal or societal meals did not? W as it precisely the communal shar­ ing o f Essene o r Christian meals that made ordinary food and drink sacred, that m ade an ordinary m eal into the presence o f the Jew ish God?

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The Communal Share-Meal Th ere is good evidence that Jesus celebrated com m on meals with his disci­ ples and frien d s.. . .Jesu s' common meals resulted in tw o different cultic m eal traditions which w ere developed independently o f each other: (i) the tradition o f the Didache, in which the eucharistie prayers express the eschato­ logical consciousness o f the congregation; (2) the tradition that is preserved in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 and in Mark 14, in which the religious significance o f the m eal is expressed in the words o f institution. In both traditions, the eschatological orientation is evident. It must be assumed that this eschato­ logical com ponent derives directly from Jesu s himself. Helmut Koester, "The Historical Jesus and the Cult o f the Kyrios Christos,” p.15 I am once m ore in debate with Helmut Koester. Recall, first o f all, the epigraph to this chapter, which expressed his principle that "as far as the churches o f Judea and Jerusalem are concerned, the traditions preserved in the Pauline Corpus are probably a better witness for their praxis than any sayings and narratives preserved in the Synoptic tradition" (19943:550). That is w h y in looking at Paul's received tradi­ tion I am still primarily concerned with the Jerusalem community and not with Pauline communities. Next, connect that epigraph with the one just above, which states that there are two separate meal traditions, one in Didache 9-10 and another in 1 Corinthians 10 -11. You would conclude at that point, putting both epigraphs together, that Paul received his own meal tradition in 1 Corinthians 10 -11 from Jerusalem. But then there is this following statement: "It is quite possible that the Jerusalem celebration o f the common meal had more the character o f a messianic banquet and w as primarily oriented toward the expectation o f the coming o f Jesus as the Messiah. The meal prayers and liturgy o f a Jewish-Christian church, which are preserved in Didache 9-10, m ay mirror the practice o f the Jerusalem church----The messianic banquet o f Jerusalem (and o f the Didache) may not have included the words o f institution, as they are known from Paul and from the Synoptic Gospels" (19943:550-551). That connects Didache 10 -11 with the Jerusalem tradition and 1 Corinthians 10 -11 with an Antioch tradition, thus providing "evidence for the close relationship o f the eucharist celebration ofjerusalem and Antioch'’ (19943:551). But would it not be m ore likely, on Koester’s own principles, that Didache 9-10 is the eucharistie meal o f the rural sayings tradition and 1 Corinthians 10 -11 is the eucharistie meal o f the urban passion-resurrection tradition? That is, actually, what he himself suggested in a m ore recent essay: "Th e community o f Q did not direedy contemplate the significance o f the death o f Jesus, and certainly not in terms o f expiation for sins. Bread, however, and the feeding o f all w h o are hungry . . . are undeniably emphasized in Q. The eucharistie prayers o f the Didache, which also

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do not imply an interpretation ofjesu s' death, could well be assigned to the heirs o f the com m unity o f Q” (1996:349). That, in any case, is the position I intend to follow. T h e C om m on Meal Tradition appears in twin but separate developm ents as Didache 9-10 (from the Q Gospel tradition) and as 1 Corinthians 10 -11 (from the Jerusalem tradition). Th ose tw o separate eucharistie traditions are as old as w e can trace the evi­ dence. T h e core difference between them is this. One tradition, that in Paul and Mark, involves a ritual meal institutionalized by Jesu s h im self and connected w ith his ow n execution. The bread and w ine are separated from one another to symbolize the separation o f Jesu s' ow n body and blood b y execution. T h e other tradition, that in Didache 9-10, has none o f those connections, and its prayers are extremely similar to standard Jew ish prayers. Furtherm ore, both traditions show stages o f development even within themselves. Paul and M ark agree that it w as a Last Supper, but Paul, unlike Mark, com m ands repetition fo r rem em brance, and Mark, unlike Paul, explicitly describes it as the P assover m eal. T h e earlier Didache 10:3 speaks only about "food and drink” together, b ut the later Didache 9:2-3 separates, in this sequence, "the cup” and "the bread.” T h e full sequential stages o f those traditions have been w orked out b y W illi M arxsen (1970; 1992) and Joh n Riggs (1984; 1995). I presume the basic validity o f their research, but it is not m y present concern. Neither is m y present concern to com pare those tw o traditions and assert one over the other, as if, som ehow, the Didache w ere preferable to Paul or vice versa. I consider them, historically and theologically, to be equally valid ritualizations o f the historical Jesus' meal tradition. Indeed, there seem s an inevitable m ove from Didache to Pauline tradition. I f you actively insist that open com mensality is the kingdom o f God, that food and drink, the m aterial bases o f hum an life, m ust be equally available to all by G od's com m and, y o u should be ready for som e form o f social elimination. Because open com m ensality and official execu­ tion are concomitants, the Lord’s Supper is both about G o d 's ju stice and the price for attempting that justice here below . All o f that is presum ed as valid, but m y present concern is with the C om m on M eal Tradition itself. Its careful consideration w ill indicate that those tw in developm ents in Didache 9 -10 and 1 Corinthians 10 - n are actually quite close to one another. I n o w look at five elements o f the C om m on M eal Tradition: actual meal, shared m eal, biblical Jesus, symbolic unity, and apocalyptic sanction. T h ese ele­ m ents are com m on to Didache 9-10 and 1 Corinthians 10 - n ; indeed, they predate both those versions, indicating the earliest ritualization o f the historical Jesu s’ o w n m eal tradition after his death. I am especially interested in the Com m on M eal Tradition as involving a communal share-meal But that focus raises a couple o f questions. First, w as the Eucharist originally a full supper o r a token meal;

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and, i f full, when did it change to token and w hat w as lost in that change? Is there a difference betw een a real meal ritualized as sym bolic o f divine realities and an unreal meal, morsel and sip, symbolic o f a real meal sym bolic o f divine realities? Second, whether full or token, w as it sym bolic o f com munal sharing as divine command? Is that what makes the meal holy and sacred? Is that what m akes it a Eucharist— that w e are thankful for a G od whose justice demands a shared earth? Is that what makes it the Lord's Supper and not just our supper? W ith those questions in mind, I turn now to the five elements. A CTU A L M EAL T h e first element in the Com m on Meal Tradition undergoes a similar change in both the Didache and i Corinthians, and that change is important because it points to w hat w as originally there beforehand. T h e change can be seen m ost clearly in the difference, first, betw een Pauline tradition and Corinthian practice in that com m unity and, second, betw een Didache io and Didache 9 in that document. Corinth. T h e first example o f this change takes us back to Paul’s Corinth and to his criticism o f its eucharistic practice seen above. You will recall that Corinthian practice, especially as interpreted b y Theissen, had created the sequence o f meal and ritual, w hich allowed the Corinthian Christians to separate the share-meal from the ritual-meal. T h ey probably argued that they w ere faithful in the later rit­ ual to the bread/body and w ine/blood symbolization taught them by Paul and that the prior m eal w as not part o f the Lord's Supper anyway. As nonworkers (haves) they could therefore come early and eat a full meal before workers (havenots) arrived late and found only symbolic bread and wine. Corinthian practice was, as early as the 50s, the first clear signs o f separation between full meal and ritual action. This is Paul’s response. Notice the sequence o f italicized words: For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night w hen he w as betrayed [literally: handed over] took a lo af o f bread, and w hen he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is m y body that is for you. D o this in remembrance o f m e.” In the same w a y he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in m y blood. D o this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance o f m e.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25) W hat exactly is the logic o f Paul’s response in that citation o f tradition already given to them but n ow repeated for the present problem? Notice h o w the ritualization o f bread and the parallel ritualization o f w ine take place before and after the meal. Paul insists that the sequence is not, as in Corinthian practice,

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m eal + ritual o f bread/body and cup/blood but, as in the pre-Pauline tradition, ritual o f bread/body + meal + ritual o f cup/blood. T h ere is, in other words, no w a y to separate meal from ritual. The Lord's Supper is both fully m eal and fully ritual. And, says Paul, Jesus him self instituted that process and com m anded that it be done that w a y “in remembrance o f him .” Y ou w ill understand that, even though I do not accept the historicity o f such a Last Supper, I accept com pletely Paul’s understanding o f the initial ritualization o f the m eal tradition and his accu­ sation that the Corinthian haves betrayed its intention. Paul w a s absolutely cor­ rect to insist that symbolism and reality should go together, that the Eucharist should involve a fo il but communal share-meal, and that anything else w as not the Lord’s Supper but business as usual. A ve ry sim ilar transition w ithin the eucharistic share-meal from symbolic full meal to sym bolic token m eal can be discerned in the Didache, although it is not as crudely evident as at Corinth. D idache. The point here is a delicate comparison betw een the earlier Eucharist de­ picted in Didache io and the later one in Didache 9. First, though, a prelim inary case as introduction. W e already caught glimpses o f the Didache’s Eucharist as a communal share-meal in discussions above concerning the prophets and the des­ titute. Recall this example (Milavec 1989:99, m y emphasis): If [the one coming] wants to settle am ong yo u and kn ow s a trade, let him (or her) work and eat. If someone does not know a trade, use y o u r o w n ju d g ­ ment to determine how he (or she) should live w ith y o u as a Christian w ith ­ out being idle. (Didache 12:3-4) The context, in Didache 12:1-5, is the distinction b etw een a Christianos and a Christemporos, between a Christ-ian and a Christ-hustler. But the logic I find behind those verses is exactly the same logic Je w ett found behind 2 Thessalonians 3:10b. T h e form er says, If you work, yo u eat. T h e latter says, I f y o u don't w ork, you don’t eat. Both stipulations must presume a communal share-meal or they make no sense. And notice, o f course, that the problem for both texts concerns one w h o is “ not willing” to work, with the sam e G reek verb in 2 Thessalonians 3:10b and Didache 12:5. That logic o f work-share-eat draw s attention to certain dif­ ferences b etw een the eucharistic prayers in Didache 9 and 10. T h ose differences are emphasized by the sim ilar fourfold structure and simi­ lar dividing refrains in both the earlier Didache 10 and the later Didache 9. In w hat follow s, w atch those similarities and differences w ithin co m m o n structures and refrains, because the latter makes the form er even m ore palpable. T o assist com ­ parison, I italicize those com mon words and refrains. C om pare, first, the twin introductions (M ilavec 1989:97):

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Didache 10 :1 (earlier version)

Didache 9 :1 (later version)

And after having been filled

Concerning the Eucharist,

[by the eucharistie banquet],

eucharistize thus: . . .

eucharistize thus:. . . The w ord "filled" in 10:1 is the ordinary, everyday verb for a true meal. The sequence is clearly meal + ritual, but the meal is a real one at which satiety was possible. T h at crucial phrase is missing from 9:1. Can w e presum e a full meal before those ritual prayers, and, if so, w h y that change? Next, com pare these linked and doubled thanksgivings, which I read in the light o f those divergent opening phrases, because, o f course, "to give thanks" is "to eucharistize" in G reek (Milavec 1989:97): Didache 10 :2 -4 (earlier version) (1) We give you thanks, holy Father,

Didache 9:2-3 (later version) (1) First concerning the cup:

for yo u r holy name which you

We give you thanks, our Father,

have made to dwell in our hearts.

For the holy vine o f David, your

And for the faith and under­

servant,

standing and im m ortality which you have revealed to us

which you have revealed to us

through Jesus, your servant.

through Jesus, your servant.

Glory to you forever. [Amen!]

Glory to you forever. [Amen!] (2) Next, concerning the breaking [o f

(2) You, Alm ighty Monarch, have created all things for the sake o f

the loaf]: W e give you thanks, our Father,

yo u r name. You have given food

For the life and the understanding

and drink to people for their

which you have revealed to us

pleasure, so that they might give you thanks. And, to us, you have graciously given spiritual food and drink and eternal life through Jesus, your servant.

throughjesus, your servant.

For all [these] things, w e give you thanks, because you are powerful [on our behalf]. Glory to you forever. [Amen!]

Glory to you forever. [Amen!]

Didache 10:2-4 is about physical "food and drink" given by G od "to people for their pleasure.” But it is also sym bolic o f spiritual food and drink giving faith, understanding, and im m ortality to Christians. T h e basis for that sym bolism is

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still a full share-meal, and, o f course, it is "through Je su s" w h o is identified as the "servant” (pais) o f God. Didache 9:2-3, how ever, m entions and separates, in this sequence, the cup to be passed and shared, the bread to be broken and shared. M aybe there is still a full meal involved, but if so, it is far less explicit. M y suspi­ cion is that ju st as the eucharistic prayers get shorter as y o u m o ve from Didache j o

to Didache 9, so does the eucharistic menu. I have looked only at the first tw o parts o f those tw in fourfold structures in

Didache 9-10 to make a single point. T h e C om m on M eal T radition involved originally a full meal ritualized precisely as such. T h e specific b rea d /w in e or body/blood ritualizations were not intended to rem ove that reality and should not have done so. That did not happen for Paul, but it did happen fo r the Corinthian haves, and it also seems to have happened in the m o ve from Didache 10 to Didache 9. The point in all o f this is not w h eth er ritualizations are done before, during, or after the meal but whether the m eal itself is an intrinsic part o f the eucharistic symbolism. Bread and w ine should sum m arize, n ot substitute for, the Eucharist; otherwise, it is no longer the Lord's Supper. SH A RED M E A L The second element in the Com m on Meal Tradition is equally im portant. It is both an actual meal and a shared meal. T h ere is an em phasis not ju st on bread but on breaking the bread, and that is sym bolic o f sharing b y passing it around. The bread is not, as it w ere, just there on the table. It is broken and passed around. There is also an emphasis not ju st on the w in e but rather on the cup. I take that also as symbolic o f sharing, since the cup can b e passed around. T h e w ine is not just there. It must be taken from a com m on cup. In Didache 9:2-3, cited just above, what is actually m en tion ed is a ritual: “ First concerning the cup,” and “Next, concerning the breaking [o f the lo af].” Strictly speaking, wine and bread are not even m entioned. W h at is noted is cup(-passing) and (bread-)breaking. There is a sim ilar situation in Paul, but n ow , o f course, there is a conjunction o f m eal and death. In this first text, the order is cup and bread, as in Didache 9:2-3, but in the second one, as seen already, it is bread and cup. T h e cup o f blessing that w e bless, is it not a sharing in the b lo o d o f Christ? T h e bread that w e break, is it not a sharing in the body o f Christ? (1 C orin thi­ ans 10:16) T h e L o rd Je su s . . . took a lo af o f bread, and w h en he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is m y body that is for you . D o this in rem em bran ce o f m e .” In the sam e w a y he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “T h is cup is

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the new covenant in m y blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in rem em ­ brance o f m e." (i Corinthians 11:23-25) I do not presume, o f course, that everything at the share-meal operated like that. It is simply a case that passed cup and broken bread ritualized the entire meal as a com munal share-meal. But they symbolized a reality whose material manifestations w ere on the table before them. B IB L IC A L JE S U S The third element in the Com m on Meal Tradition is deliberately designated by that rather strange title "biblical Jesu s.” Both developm ents connect the meal to Jesus himself, but it is to a Jesu s embedded in the sam e specific scriptural back­ ground. Both 1 Corinthians 11 and Didache 9 -10 refer to Jesu s in connection with Isaiah 53. There are tw o key words involved in that connection. T h e first one is in Paul’s opening to the received and transmitted tradition in 1 Corinthians 11:23 above. It concerns "the Lord Jesu s on the night w hen paredideto.” That Greek verb, paredideto, should not— em phatically not—be translated as "betrayed.” It means, literally, "handed over," and, since it is in the passive voice with no agent mentioned, it means "handed o ver by G od.” T h e second key w ord is in Didache 9-10. In both the earlier and later eucharistic prayers o f the Didache, G od is called "the Father" and Jesu s is that Father's “pais” in Didache 9:2 and 10:2,3. Those are reiterated refrains: "through Jesus, you r p a is ” That G reek noun means both ser­ vant and child, with context usually determ ining which is being emphasized. The significant point is that both paredideto and pais point back to the so-called Suffer­ ing Servant in Isaiah 53. But first som e background. The book o f Isaiah contains three originally independent prophetic collec­ tions. The first part, in chapters 1-39, comes from Isaiah o f Jerusalem between 740 and 700 b .c .e . The second part, in chapters 40-55. is called Deutero-Isaiah. It comes from an anonymous prophet toward the end o f the Babylonian Exile between 550 and 540 b.c .e . The final part, in chapters 56-^6, called Trito-Isaiah, is by another anonymous prophet at the beginning o f the Persian Restoration between 540 and 500 b .c .e . It is with Deutero-Isaiah that I am presently concerned. W hen the Babylonian Em pire destroyed Jerusalem and its Tem ple in 587 b . c . e .,

the Jew ish aristocracy w as taken into exile around Babylon, and to judge

from the stories in Daniel 1-6 , som e o f them becam e Babylonian bureaucrats while remaining loyal Jew s. Deutero-Isaiah is located in those dangerous final years o f the Babylonian Em pire’s death throes. It asserts that the Jew ish exiles should not support the Babylonians but should conspire w ith the Persians against them. Four poem s, called the Songs o f the Suffering Servant, appear in

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Isaiah 42:1-6; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:23-53:12. The Servant is Israel and the prophet, insofar as both are persecuted by Babylonian power, betrayed by Jew ish col­ laboration, and then liberated through Persian intervention. This is Norm an Gottwald’s summary o f that situation: “A strong odor o f political conflict surrounds the acclamation o f Cyrus [Isaiah 44:28; 45:1, 13] and the hostile treatment o f the ser­ vant. Given the individual thanksgiving form o f chap. 53, there is good reason to hypothesize that the actual imprisonment, persecution, and deliverance o f a histori­ cal contemporary, most likely the prophet himself, has been em ployed as a m icro­ cosm o f the macrocosm o f Israel's fate insofar as the people's suffering has exceeded its deserved punishment. And that some o f this suffering w as inflicted on Je w s b y fel­ low Jew s is not at all surprising in context___ That som e Je w s w ere profiting from supporting Babylonian hegemony while other Jew s w ere active in a pro-Persian underground preparing for Cyrus's seizure o f Babylon w ould be one m ore instance o f the structurally embedded conflicts o f interest in which prophets and other lead­ ers had been involved from the very origins o f prophecy" (1985:500). All o f that is quite likely except for one point. The Servant-as-author m ay not have escaped death except insofar as his hopes were realized in the Servant-as-Israel. But, in any case, Christians much, much later, whether they knew that historical background or not, could easily see close parallels between the fate o f the Servant and o fjesu s. The first o f those parallels is the use o f the w o rd pais (“ servan t") in the Greek Septuagint translation o f the follow ing H eb rew texts, w ith G o d as speaker in all three cases: Here is m y servant, whom I uphold, m y chosen, in w h o m m y soul delights; I have put m y spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the n a tio n s.. . . H e says, “ It is too light a thing that you should be m y servant to raise up the tribes o f Jacob and to restore the survivors o f Israel; I w ill give yo u as a light to the nations, that m y salvation m ay reach to the end o f the earth ." . . . See, m y servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. (Isaiah 42:1; 49:6; 52:13) Similar allusions to the Suffering Servant lie behind Jesu s as G o d ’s servant (puts) in Acts 3:13 and 16 and 4:27 and 30, where the context is his death and resurrection. T h e second parallel is the use o f the same verb as in paredideto (“ handed o ver") in the G reek Septuagint translation o f the fo llo w in g H e b rew texts, w ith G o d as agent in both cases: A ll w e like sheep have gone astray; w e have all turned to ou r o w n w a y , and the Lord handed him over for our s in s .. . . Therefore I w ill allot h im a portion w ith the great, and he shall divide the spoil w ith the strong; b ecause his soul w as handed over to death, and was num bered w ith the transgressors; y e t he

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bore the sins o f many, and w as handed over for their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:6,12) Similar allusions to the Suffering Servant m ake "hand o ver" the chosen verb for Mark’s prophecies about Jesu s' passion in 9:31 and 10:33, for Ju das's action in 3:19 and 14:10-44, for the high-priestly action in 15:1 and 10, and for Pilate’s action in 15:15. T o be "handed over” w as an expression not just for Jesus, but for John before him in 1:14 and for Christians after him in 13 :9 ,11,12 . The third element in the Com m on Meal Tradition was that connection to Deutero-Isaiah's Suffering Servant through "servant/child" in the Didache and through "handed over" (by God) in the pre-Pauline tradition. But that common element means that Jesu s’ death, while explicitly present in 1 Corinthians 10 -11, is implicitly present even in Didache 9-10. SY M B O LIC U N IT Y The fourth element in the C om m on M eal Tradition was noted by Koester: “ Paul shares w ith the meal prayers o f the Didache . . . that the bread symbolizes the unity o f the church” (i994a:55i), that "the bread [is] a sym bol o f the gathering o f the com m unity into one” (1996:349). T h at sym bolism appears in the later Didache 9 and not the earlier Didache 10, as you can see in this third section o f those twin eucharistie prayers (M ilavec 1989:98): Didache 10:5 (earlier version)

Didache 9:4 (later version)

Rem em ber, Lord, you r church,

Ju st as this broken [loaf] was scat­

[remember] to deliver it from all

tered [as grain] on the hills, and,

evil and to perfect it in you r love,

having com e together again, it

[and, in the end]

becom es one,

Gather this sanctified [church]

So m ay you r church be gathered

from the four winds,

[on the last day]^rom the ends o f the earth

into your kingdom which

into your kingdom.

you have prepared for her. For the power and the glory are

For the glory and the power are

yours forever. [Amen!]

yours fo rever. . . [Amen!]

Both texts refer to an apocalyptic ingathering o f the church n o w scattered across the world, but only Didache 9:4 uses the bread as sym bol. As the grain comes together into one loaf, so m ay the church be gathered apocalyptically into one. W hat is interesting, how ever, is that Paul em phasizes the bread not ju st as symbolic o f future but also o f present unity:

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Because there is one bread, w e w ho are m any are one body, for w e all par­ take o f the one bread, (i Corinthians 10:17) M any grapes become one cup o f wine. M any grains becom e one lo a f o f bread. T h e symbolism o f many becom ing one is in the v e ry ingredients o f the m eal itself. But they serve to underline the unification o f the shared meal. If there is no sharing on earth, w h y should there be sharing in heaven? A P O C A L Y P T IC SAN CTIO N The fifth and final element in the Com m on M eal Tradition w as also noted by Koester. In an earlier article, he w rote o f an agreem ent b etw een the eucharistic traditions o f the Jerusalem community as reflected in D idache 9 -10 and those o f the Antioch community as reflected in Paul. "T h e m eal prayers and liturgy . . . preserved in Didache 9-10, m ay mirror the practice o f the Jeru salem church. H o w ­ ever, the eschatological orientation is equally strong in the L o rd 's Supper form u­ lary o f Paul that he inherited from the church o f Antioch” (19943:551). But in a more recent article he says, m ore correctly I think, that the Q Gospel and Didache traditions, on the one hand, and “ the Pauline w ords o f institution,” on the other, “share outlook into the future” (1996:349). It is, actually, a specifically apocalyptic rather than a generally eschatological outlook, but the basic point is quite correct. W e have already seen the first three parts o f the parallel fourfold structure still evident in both Didache 9 and 10. H ere, then, is the final part (M ilavec 1989:98): Didache 10:6 (earlier version)

D idache 9:5 (la te r ve rsio n )

(a) Let the gift [o f the kingdom] com e and let this world pass away! (b) Hosanna to the G od o f David! (c) I f anyone is holy, let him (or her) enter!

(c)

Let no one eat o r drink from y o u r Eucharist except those w h o are baptized in the nam e o f the Lord,

(d) I f anyone is not, let him (or her) repent!

(d) for the Lord has said concerning this: "D o not give dogs w h at is holy.”

(e) Maranatha ( -C o m e Lord!). A m en. T here are three sentences present in Didache 10:6 (abe) but absent from Didache 9:5. There are also striking differences betw een the G reek text in Codex H ierosolym itanus 54 and the Coptic version in British Library O riental M anu­ script 9271 (Jones and Mirecki 53).

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The first sentence reads "Let the gift come and let this world pass aw ay!" in the Greek but "Let the Lord come and let this cosmos pass aw ay" in the Coptic (Jones and Mirecki 53). The former could easily be "a scribal error," reading charts (gift) for feyrios (Lord), so that, as Riggs suggests, the Coptic "is to be preferred" (1984:90). T h e second sentence reads "H osanna to the G od o f D avid!" in G reek but "Osanna to the House o f D avid!" in Coptic. Riggs prefers "G o d " rather than "H ou se” as m ore original (1984:90). I f you read “ G od o f D avid," how ever, that “ Lord" before and after it refers to God as well. If you read "H ouse o f David," those titles could refer m ore precisely to Jesus. A change from a theocentric to a christocentric apocalyptic understanding could best explain that transition, in other words, and "G od o f D avid" w ould therefore be the m ore likely original reading. The final sentence is "Maranatha. Am en” in G reek but “T h e Lord came! A m en" in Coptic. That Aram aic phrase can be read as “Marana tha, ” meaning "O ur Lord, com e!" or as “Maran a t h a m eaning “ O ur Lord has com e." Riggs suggests that both translations catch different facets o f the Aramaic: "Jesus is present in the com m unity (actual present-Sacrament) betw een the moments o f his life (historical perfect-incarnation) and his imm inent retum-Parousia" (1984:97 note 46). W hat is fascinating, how ever, is that the same Aram aic expression is also found in Paul's conclusion to his first Corinthian epistle. Furthermore, there too the prayer is accompanied by an exclusionary clause: Let anyone be accursed w h o has no love for the Lord. Marana tha [O ur Lord, come]! (1 Corinthians 16:22) In both usages the Aram aic prayer terminates the unit. Finally, although Didache 9:5 has no such terminal apocalyptic com ment, it does have the balance o f inclusion and exclusion com m on to 1 Corinthians 16:22 and Didache 10:6. W hy is that condemnatory clause in three places, and w h y is it imm ediately associated with maranatha in tw o locations? The conjunction betw een eucharistic meal and apocalyptic consum m ation was already explicitly present in Paul: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, yo u proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11:26) It was also explicitly present in Didache 9:4 and 10:5, which pray for the apoc­ alyptic ingathering o f the single church n ow scattered across the w orld. W hy, then, this special conjunction o f apocalyptic prayer and inclusion/exclusion from

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the meal? Rem em ber that the conjunction m ust stem from the C o m m o n Meal Tradition and not just from either Paul or the Didache alone. It m ust com e, in other w ords, from the early Jerusalem com m unity. W hy? W e are back, I suggest, with the "Christ-hustlers” o f Didache 12:3-5, w ith those w h o do not w ork and therefore should not eat from the com m on eucharistic share-meal. That is, as w e saw, the sam e problem behind 2 Thessalonians 3:6-12. That inclusion/exclusion clause applies specifically to those w h o are abusing the sacred share-meal. It is holy food because participants com m it th em ­ selves to sharing together as the Father taught them through his servant Jesu s. Apocalyptic consummation stands as sanction against those w h o abuse the h oly share-meal either from below (with the Didache7s freeloaders) o r fro m above (with the Corinthian patrons). As sociologist Rodney Stark put it, "free-rider problem s are the A chilles' heel o f collective activities.. . . This perverse dynam ic threatens all groups engaged in the production o f collective goods, and it pertains to social and psychic benefits such as enthusiasm and solidarity no less than m aterial resources" (174, 176). W hat the Didache calls "Christ-hustlers” Stark calls "free-riders.” B ut w h a t Paul discovered at Corinth w as that, even if have-nots could hustle C hrist fo r fo od and drink, haves could also do so for pow er and prestige. Paul found that latter possi­ bility m ore serious. The Com m on Meal Tradition m ay look to a Last Supper in the past, to a com munal meal in the present, or to a messianic banquet in the future— or, quite validly, to all o f those at the same time. But it can n eve r get a w a y from this: it is in food and drink offered equally to everyone that the presence o f God and Jesus is found. But food and drink are the material bases o f life, so the L o rd ’s Sup per is political criticism and economic challenge as w ell as sacred rite and liturgical worship. It m ay be all right to reduce it from a full eat-and-drink m eal to a token nibble-and-sip m eal as long as it still sym bolizes that sam e reality— nam ely: Christians claim that God and Jesus are peculiarly and especially present w hen food and drink are shared equally am ong all.

C H A P T E R 24

C O M M U N IT IE S OF R E S I S T A N C E Because o f their anxious desire for an im m ortal and blessed existence, think­ ing that their mortal life had already com e to an end, [the Therapeutics] leave their possessions to their sons and daughters . . . to other relatives . . . [or] to their companions or friends-----N o one o f them m ay take any food or drink before the setting o f the sun . . . and som e . . . can endure . . . for three days w ithout even tasting i t . . . and som e . . . will scarcely at the end o f six days taste even necessary f o o d . . . . T h e possession o f servants or slaves [they hold] to be a thing absolutely and w holly contrary to nature___ Expla­ nations o f the sacred scriptures are delivered by m ystic expressions in alle­ gories. . . . [In an annual ritual, possibly at Pentecost] they all stand up together, a n d . . . w hen each chorus o f the m en and each chorus o f the w om en has celebrated separately by i t s e l f . . . they jo in together, and the two becom e one chorus. Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 13, 34, 70, 78, 85 (Yonge 698-706) By communities o f resistance I mean groups w hose style o f communal life was a calculated rejection and replacement o f the entrepreneurial greed o f Roman commercialization. M y prim ary concern in this section is with the Essene com munities in the Jew ish hom eland. But that epigraph concerns an early-first-century Jew ish com ­ munity near Lake M areotis outside Alexandria. T h e description was written by the Jew ish philosopher Philo, w h o lived betw een about 25 b .c .e . and 50

c . e .,

and

belonged to a rich and pow erful Alexandrian family. He adapted Platonic dual­ ism, in which material objects (the body, for example) are but pale and rather feeble reflections o f spiritual realities (the soul, for example), so that the H ebrew scriptures could be read allegorically. That com m unity, called Therapeutics (from a G reek verb m eaning both to heal and to worship) w as com posed o f both female Therapeutrides and male Therapeutae. T h e group had a daily ritual prac­ ticed in isolation, a w eekly ritual practiced in segregated togetherness, and an annual ritual practiced in full com m unity. The above epigraph is given as a warning for us to be very careful in reading Hellenized and specially Platonized descriptions o f the Essenes in the Jew ish hom eland. Philo has interpreted the com m unity in terms w holly understandable to a G reek audience and, indeed, wholly understandable to his ow n mind, w here G reek has w o n out o ver Je w at

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v e ry profound levels o f sensibility. W hen Philo, or Jo sep h u s for that matter, describes the Essenes, w e should com pare their explanations v e ry critically with any self-descriptions now available from Qumran.

The Essene Communities Unless they are careful to act in accordance w ith the exact interpretation o f the law for the age o f wickedness: to separate them selves from the sons o f the pit; to abstain from wicked wealth which defiles, either b y prom ise or b y vow , and from the wealth o f the temple and from stealing from the p o o r o f the people, from making their w idow s their spoils and from m urdering orphans; to separate unclean from clean and differentiate b etw een the h oly and the common; to keep the sabbath day according to the exact interpreta­ tion, and the festivals and the day o f fasting, according to w h at they had dis­ covered, those who entered the new covenant in the land o f D am ascus; to set apart holy portions according to their exact interpretation; for each to love his brother like himself; to strengthen the hand o f the poor, the needy and the foreigner; for each to seek the peace o f his brother and not com m it sin against his blood relation; to refrain from fornication in accordance w ith the regulation; for each to reprove his brother in accordance w ith the pre­ cept, and not to bear resentment from one day to the next; to keep apart from every uncleanness according to their regulations, w ith o u t anyone defil­ ing his holy spirit, according to what God kept apart fo r them . Damascus Document (A) 6:14-7:4. (D5 ST 37) W hen w e compare the group in that epigraph w ith the one in the im m edi­ ately preceding epigraph, w e seem to be in different w orlds. Y et it w o u ld n ot be at all difficult to connect the concerns o f those "w h o entered the n ew covenant in the land o f Damascus” with the Jew ish traditions seen m u ch earlier in C hapter 12. W hen w e read Philo or Josephus describing the Essenes b elo w , then, w e m ust be ve ry careful with their Hellenistic interpretations o f Je w ish actions, especially w hen those actions were designed specifically to oppose the Hellenization o f Je w ish traditions. W as celibate asceticism, i f present, prim ary for Essenes o r only for Philo and Josephus? And is earlier Je w ish celibacy, i f present, the sam e as later Christian celibacy? Is time or place m ore significant fo r the form er and endurance or permanence m ore significant for the latter? E S S E N E S IN P H IL O In Every Good Man Is Free 75-91 (Yonge 689-690), Philo describes the Essenes in the Je w ish hom eland, "in number som ething m ore than fo u r thousand in m y opinion,” as living "in villages, avoiding all cities on account o f the habitual law ­

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lessness o f those w h o inhabit them" (75). T h ey have nothing to do with war, com m erce, or slavery, that last evil being against "the ordinances o f nature” for the Essenes, as it w as for the Therapeutics (78-79). H o w do those com munities work? Like this (Yonge 690): In the first place, then, there is no one who has a house so absolutely his ow n private property, that it does not in some sense also belong to every one: for besides that they all dwell together in companies, the house is open to all those o f the same notions, w ho com e to them from other quarters; then there is one magazine am ong them all; their expenses are all in com ­ mon; their garments belong to them all in com m on; their food is common, since they all eat in messes; for there is no other people am ong which you can find a com m on use o f the same house, a com m on adoption o f one mode o f living, and a com m on use o f the same table m ore thoroughly established in fact than am ong this tribe: and is not this very natural? For whatever they, after having been w orking during the day, receive for their wages, that they do not retain as their ow n, but bring it into the com m on stock, and give any advantage that is to be derived from it to all w h o desire to avail themselves o f it. (Every Good Man Is Free 85-86) There is also, Philo continues, special care given to the sick and the aged (87). A bove all, they "devote all their attention to the moral part o f philosophy, using as instructors the law s o f their country which it w ould have been impossi­ ble for the hum an mind to devise without divine inspiration” (80). T h ey also practice "a continued and uninterrupted purity throughout the w hole o f life" (84). That last point is made m ore explicit in another essay. This text is entitled Hypothetica: Apology fo r theJews, n ow extant only as quota­ tions in Eusebius's w ork The Preparation fo r the Gospel 11:1-18 , an apologetical trea­ tise composed betw een 314 and 318 c.E. (Yonge 742-746). T h e description o f Essene life is very similar to that in the first essay, although the Essenes n ow "dw ell in many cities o f Judaea, and in m any villages, and in great and populous com muni­ ties" and are "all full-grown men, such as are no longer carried aw ay by the impetuosity o f the passions” (11:1,3). But while everything else in the tw o essays is quite similar and even parallel, there is now this new information (Yonge 746): They repudiate marriage; and at the same time they practice continence in an eminent degree; for no one o f the Essenes ever m arries a w ife. (Hypothet­ ica 11:14) Philo continues w ith a virulently misogynistic diatribe against w om en, reaching the som ew hat illogical conclusion that to be bound by m arriage— that

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is, b y "the necessary ties o f nature . . . [is to] becom e a slave instead o f a free m an” (11:14-17). But, leaving such invective aside, Philo's Essenes are, unlike his Therapeutics, an exclusively male order o f ascetic celibates w h o w o rk in the w o rld at peaceful occupations, pool their incom es to live a v e ry frugal com m on life, and study their sacred writings not in solitary isolation b ut in com m unal gathering each sabbath. E SSE N E S IN P U N Y Pliny the Elder concludes his description o f the Je w ish hom eland b y w o rk in g southward along the western shore o f the Dead Sea. H e m entions first the Essene settlement, then south o f it (infra) Engedi, and further south (inde) the rocky fortress o f Masada. His description o f the Essenes m anages, in a single sen­ tence, to agree and also to disagree with those preceding accounts in Philo. I cite Pliny’s text from the very useful collection o f Essene-related classical references by Verm es and Goodm an (33): T o the w est [o f the Dead Sea] the Essenes have put the necessary distance between themselves and the insalubrious shore. T h e y are a people [gens] unique o f its kind and admirable beyond all others in the w h o le w orld , w ith ­ out w om en and renouncing love entirely, w ithout m on ey, and h avin g for company only the palm trees. (Natural History 5.73) Despite this celibacy, continues Pliny, their num bers h ave rem ained con­ stant for "thousands o f centuries” because “ a throng o f n ew co m ers” is alw ays ready to repent o f "their past lives.” Leaving exaggerations aside, that agrees w ith Philo about ascetical celibacy but locates only a single grou p o f Essenes in one specific but unnamed location. A similar assertion, h o w ever, is recorded indirectly from another first-century source. D io Cocceianus, nicknamed Chrysostom os for his golden-m outhed oratory, lived betw een about 40 and 112. He was b om at Prusa in Bithynia and w as prose­ cuted there in in by that same Pliny the Younger w h o m w e sa w prosecuting Christians in Chapter 1. Although he w as another first-century author, the fol­ lo w in g com m ent is n o w extant only in a biography b y Synesius o f C yren e, com ­ posed around 400, as given in Verm es and G oodm an (59): Also som ew here he praises the Essenes, w ho form an entire and prosperous city near the Dead Sea, in the centre o f Palestine, not far from Sodom . (Dio 3.2) T h e location o f the Essenes w as not named b y Pliny the Elder, and neither w as their "prosperous city” named by D io in Synesius's account. O nce again,

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how ever, you w ould presume that the Essenes w ere congregated in ju st one place near the Dead Sea. ESSE N E S IN JO SE P H U S Josephus mentions the name Essenes fourteen times across three o f his w rit­ ings. There are strong similarities between his com ments and all the preceding descriptions, but also tw o rather striking differences. His longest and m ost detailed description is in Jewish War 2.119 -16 1, but there is also an important shorter one in Jewish Antiquities 18.18-22. Except for one point to be mentioned later, he agrees basically with Philo, even on the detail that “ there are m ore than 4,000 w ho behave in this w ay" (Jewish Antiquities 18.20). He agrees with Philo that the Essenes "occupy no one city, but settle in large numbers in every tow n" (Jewish War 2.124) and that they live a common life in which “ each gives w hat he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange som ething useful to h im self' (Jewish War 2.127), or, in other words, that "they put their property into a com m on stock" (Jewish Antiquities 18.20). He agrees with Philo that “ m arriage they disdain to protect themselves from w om en's w antonness" (Jewish War 2.121); they "neither bring w ives into the com m unity nor do they ow n slaves, since they believe that the latter practice contributes to injustice and that the form er opens the w ay to a source o f dissen­ sion" (Jewish Antiquities 18.21). But he also adds very m any details not given by Philo— for example, that "they carry nothing w hatever with them on their jo u r­ neys, except arms as a protection against brigands" (Jewish War 2.125). N o provi­ sions are necessary because they are guaranteed local hospitality by other Essenes. Josephus also adds precise descriptions o f their daily life, hierarchical order, and restrained speech, as w ell as their cultic prayers, meals, and purifica­ tions. The tw o daily meals are sacred repasts taken in special garments and begun and ended with prayers from a “priest” (Jewish War 2.128-136): there are "priests to prepare bread and other food" (Jewish Antiquities 18.22). T h at priestly presence, by the w ay, is a very significant n ew detail. Josephus also adds specific details about h o w new m em bers becom e Essenes, h ow com m unal discipline is maintained, and h ow purity and sabbath restriction are very stricdy observed am ong them (Jewish W ar 2.143-149). But there are also tw o elements contradictory to those earlier reports in Philo and Pliny. First o f all, there is a set o f references to individual Essenes, and none o f those individuals is leading a village life, let alone an isolated life. T h ey m ay be ascetical celibates, but they are also deeply involved w ith p o w er and governm ent, w hether as prophets, dream-interpreters, or m ilitary com m anders. A s described by Josephus, the Essenes are city phenom ena. T h e four references to individuals span about 170 years. In 105 or 104

b .c .e .

there is "Judas o f the

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Essene group [genos], w ho had never been known to speak falsely in his prophe­ cies” (Jewish Antiquities 13 .3 11)- In the middle o f the first century

b .c . e

.

there is "a

certain Essene named Menahem, whose virtue w as attested in his w h o le conduct o f life and especially in his having from G od a forekn ow ledge o f the futu re” (Jewish Antiquities 15.373). In *°6 c .E ., there is "a certain Sim on, o f the sect [genos] o f the Essenes,” w ho interpreted the dream o f Archelaus (Jew ish W ar 2.113 = J e w ­ ish Antiquities 17.346). Finally, in late 66 C .E ., “Jo h n the E ssen e,” com m anding northwestern Judaea in the revolt against Rom e, died in an assault on the coastal city o f Ascalon (Jewish War 2.567; 3.11,19 ). The second difference is even m ore interesting. Philo, Pliny, and Jo sep h u s (in Jewish War 2.120-121 and Jewish Antiquities 18.21) agree on frugality, com m unality, and ascetical celibacy for the Essenes. But then com es this surprising co m ­ ment from Josephus: There is yet another order o f Essenes, which w hile at one w ith the rest in its mode o f life, customs, and regulations, differs from them in its v ie w on m ar­ riage. T h ey think that those w ho decline to m arry cut o ff the ch ief function o f life, the propagation o f the race, and, w hat is m ore, that, w ere all to adopt the same view , the whole race w ould very quickly die out. (Jew ish W ar 2.160) But, Josephus continues, since they m arry not fo r pleasure b ut fo r children, they m arry only w om en w ho are already certainly m enstruating, and they do not have intercourse during pregnancy, “ thus show in g that their m o tive in m ar­ rying is not self-indulgence but the procreation o f children” (2.161). T h at raises this m ajor question. Does the term Essenes refer to m ale ascetics livin g in co m ­ munal isolation only, or also to those w h o m arry, raise fam ilies, and are associ­ ated with towns, cities, and spheres o f government? E SS E N E S IN SID E Q UM RAN For almost two hundred years before its destruction b y the Rom an legions in 6 8 c .E .,

a Jew ish community lived in caves, huts, or tents around a central com plex

o f communal buildings later called Khirbet Qumran on the D ead Sea’s northwest­ ern shore. That community is almost certainly the Essene group m entioned by Dio and Pliny. (Engedi, for example— one o f the landmarks used b y Pliny— is twenty miles south o f Qumran, and Masada is thirty-one miles south.) B etw een 1946 and 1956, not only w as their communal center excavated, their hidden library was recovered from eleven nearby caves. That literary treasure ranges from relatively full manuscripts to tattered fragments. There are, for exam ple, the first seven manuscripts from C ave 1 and the Temple Scroll from C ave 11. B ut there are also six hundred fragments o f seventy different manuscripts from C ave 1 and fifteen

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thousand fragments o f 550 different manuscripts from C ave 4. H o w does this new information, from excavated complex to recovered library, compare with those first-century descriptions given above? On the one hand, as Todd Beall has shown quite clearly, it is possible to w rite a detailed com m entary on the longer Josephan texts about the Essenes using those new ly discovered Qumran texts. Here are tw o comparisons between Josephus and the Rule o f the Community, discovered in C ave 1 at Qumran (iQS). A m inor example concerns spitting: "T h ey are careful not to spit into the midst o f the com pany or to the right," in Jewish War 2.147. “ T h e person w ho spits in the course o f a m eeting o f the Many [the full com m unity] shall be punished thirty days," in Rule o f the Community 7.15 (DSST n). A m ajor exam ple concerns eating: "B efore the m eal the priest says a prayer, and none m ay partake until after the prayer,” in Jew ish War 2.131. "And when they prepare the table to dine or the new w ine for drinking, the priest shall stretch out his hand as the first to bless the first fruits o f the bread and o f the new w ine," in Rule o f the Community 6:4-6 (D SST 9). Furtherm ore, as Beall notes, "there is archaeological evidence for the common meal at Q um ran as well. D e V aux [its excavator] has identified the largest room in the ruins o f Q um ran as a refectory. This identification is supported b y the existence o f a pantry for crockery adjoining the large room , containing m ore than one thousand vessels needed for eating" (57). The Rule o f the Community was found am ong a set o f texts stored in a sealed jar whose security indicated their very precious status (DSSP 1.1-107). But besides that full copy from C ave 1 (iQS), ten fragmentary copies w ere recovered from Cave 4 (4Q255-264), and a final possible but very fragmentary copy w as found in Cave 5 (5Q11). That com munity order presumes a congregation o f male, celibate ascetics, presumably at Qumran itself. There is nothing about marriage, procreation, or children in it. That agrees with preliminary excavations in the main cemetery located between the communal complex and the shoreline. All its graves w ere in rows on a north-south axis, and a random sample o f twenty-six graves yielded only adult male skeletons. But one grave separated from the others held a female skele­ ton. Excavations in smaller cemeteries to the east, north, and south o f the main one turned up graves with one male, four children, and six females. H ow ever those wom en and children are to be explained, the ordered ranks o f parallel graves in the central cemetery indicate, most likely, a male, celibate com m unity at Q um ­ ran. T hey led a totally communal life with all possessions and decisions, all prayers and meals held in communal but hierarchical mutuality. It is m ost likely, in other words, that all Qumranites w ere Essenes, but w ere all Essenes Qumranites? W hat about Philo and Josephus agreeing that Essene communities existed in m any different locations? A t Q um ran the m ain cem e­ tery’s eleven hundred graves indicate a com m unity betw een a hundred and fifty

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and tw o hundred at any given time. W hat about Philo and Jo sep h u s agreeing that they num bered over four thousand? E SS E N E S O U T SID E Q UM RAN In the Qumran library there w ere also multiple copies o f another com munityorder document or rulebook, the so-called Damascus Document (D SSP 2.4-79). It exists in eight fragmentary copies from Cave 4 (4Q266-273), one from C ave 5 (5Q12), one from Cave 6 (6Q15), and tw o copies, one quite lon g (CD-A) and the other much shorter (CD-B), from outside Qumran. Th ose last tw o copies are not from ancient but from medieval manuscripts, the form er from the tenth, the latter from the twelfth century. T hey w ere discovered by Solom on Schechter in 1896 among 100,000 other fragments in the genizah (or old-book repository) o f Cairo's Ezra Synagogue— hence its coding as C D , the Cairo Damascus Document. Th ose multiplied copies indicate the importance o f both rulebooks within the Q um ran library, yet the two documents indicate rather different situations, one inside and one outside the Qumran settlement. As Geza Verm es puts it, “T h e C om m unity Rule legislates for a kind o f monastic society, the statutes o f the D am ascus Rule for an ordinary lay existence___ There can be only one logical conclusion: this w as a single religious m ovement with tw o branches" (1985:87,106). The Damascus Document is remarkably different from the Rule o f the Commu­ nity, although, o f course, it demands the same strict observance o f G o d 's L aw . Todd Beall notes tw o words, for example, that are significant in the Damascus Document but are never mentioned in the Rule o f the Community: the w ord “ camp(s)" appears fifteen times, the w ord “ city" three tim es, and those places “seem to point to groups o f the sectarians living in areas outside o f Q um ran” (49). Those places are called “ camps" from the inaugurally h oly and nostalgically ideal desert encampments o f the Israelites en route to the Prom ised Land. In addition, the Damascus Document imagines an overseer fo r each cam p, as w ell as one responsible for all the camps. That official has a special H e b rew title va ri­ ously translated as the guardian, examiner, or inspector. T h ere is, fo r exam ple, an assem bly “ o f the camps" but also “ o f all the cam ps" (C D 12:23, 14:3), and there is “ the Inspector o f the cam p" but also “ the Inspector w h o is o v e r all the cam ps" (C D 12:7, 14:9). W e can conclude, in other words, that there w e re m an y m ore Essene com m unities than that isolated one at Q um ran, and those others lived as com m unities within towns or cities. T h ey could have been, on the one hand, am ong Gentiles, for “no-one should stay in a place close to gentiles on the sab­ bath” (C D 11:14-15). T h ey could have been, on the other hand, in Je ru sa lem itself, fo r "n o m an should sleep with his w ife in the city o f the tem ple, defiling the city o f the tem ple w ith their im purity" (CD 12:1-2). But h o w did their co m m u n al life w o rk in those “ encam pm ents” far from Qumran?

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W hat about common property, that "placing o f his possessions in com m on," legislated in Ride o f the Community 6:22? There is nothing about full com munal life in the Damascus Document. But there are many rules for entering and staying in the com munity as well as for being accused, judged, and sentenced within it. There must, therefore, have been far more communal living than is indicated at first glance, although com mon property or pooled wages are not presumed (DSST 44): This is the rule o f the M any, to provide for all their needs: the salary o f two days each month at least. T h ey shall place it in the hands o f the Inspector and the judges. From it they shall give to the orphans and with it they shall strengthen the hand o f the needy and the poor, and to the elder who [is dy]ing, and to the vagabond, and to the prisoner o f a foreign people, and to the girl w h o has no protector, and to the unma[rried w om an] w ho has no suitor; and for all the works o f the company. (Damascus Document 14:12-17) That is, in effect, a tithe o f one's salary as alms to be administered by the com m unity’s leaders. Otherwise, private property was the normal situation. W hat about celibate asceticism? T h e Damascus Document explicitly imagines marriage and children (DSST 37, 45): And if they reside in the camps in accordance w ith the rule o f the land, and take w om en and beget children, they shall w alk in accordance with the law and according to the regulation o f the teachings. (Damascus Document 7:6-8[A] and I9:2-4[B]) The tw o preceding quotations indicate that those Essene communities in­ cluded orphans and prisoners, poor and needy, children and adults, w ives and husbands, celibates w h o did not wish to remain so, and possibly, o f course, celibates w ho did. T h ey w ere, in other words, ordinary people trying to lead extraordinary lives in an ordinary world. A similar presum ption o f marriage appears in the Rule o f the Congregation (DSSP 2.108-117), extant in only one fragmentary copy but included in the same manuscript as the main version o f the Rule o f the Community. This third rule is for "the congregation o f Israel in the final days” (iQ Sa = iQ28a i:i), but it involves children, w om en, and men. It also legislates specifically about m arriage for one who has grow n up in the com m unity (DSST 126): W hen they com e, they shall assemble all those w h o com e, including chil­ dren and w om en, and they shall read into their ea[rs], all the regulations o f the covenant, and shall instruct them in all its precepts, so that they m ay not stray in their [errors]___ H e shall not [approach] a w om an to kn ow her

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through cam al intercourse until he is full tw enty years old, w h en he knows [good and] evil. Then she shall be received to give w itness against him (about) the precepts o f the law and to take his place in the proclam ation o f the precepts. (Rule o f the Congregation 1:4-5, 9 - n ) W hat could a wife witness against her husband? She could w itness w hether "h e lay with her w ho sees the blood o f her menstrual flo w ” (C D 5:7), fo r exam ­ ple, and, i f Josephus was right about m arried Essenes, w h eth er they had inter­ course during pregnancy. W hat about ritual meals? There is nothing in the extant Damascus Document similar to that summary statement in the Rule o f the Community that "th ey shall eat together, together they shall bless, and together they shall take counsel” (iQ S 6:2-3). But the following comparison between those tw o rules persuades m e that the encampment Essenes had sacred meals ju st as did the Q um ran Essenes. The Qumran Rule o f the Community has decrees about the progressive twoyear initiation into the full com munity know n as the M any. D urin g that first year o f testing, "he must not touch the pure food o f the M an y” (iQ S 6:16), and during that second year, "he must not touch the drink o f the M any” (iQ S 6:20). Thereafter, and b y communal vote, he enters into full m em bership "fo r the law , for the judgm ent, for purity and for the placing o f his possessions in com m on ” (iQS 6:22). The same H ebrew w ord is translated as “pure fo o d ” and “ pu rity” in those sentences, and it seems clear, from the contexts, that they indicate the rit­ ual meal o f the community. Furthermore, there are these tw o sanctions m en­ tioned later (D S S T 10, n): I f one is found among them w ho has lied know ingly concerning goods, he shall be excluded from the pure food o f the M any for a y ea r and shall be sen­ tenced to a quarter o f his bread. . . . And if he has spoken angrily against one o f the priests enrolled in the book, he will be punished fo r a y e a r and shall be excluded, under sentence o f death, from the pure fo od o f the M an y. (Rule o f the Community 6:24-25; 7:2-3) It is that sam e H ebrew word once again— the "pu rity” or the “pu re fo od” o f the ritual m eal. A question in passing: Does that first decree indicate that not all Q um ran m eals w ere sacred ones but that the offender w as excluded from the periodic ritual meals and limited even at the regular meals? O r does it m ean that all Q um ran meals w ere sacred ones but that the offender g o t o n ly a quarter o f w h at w o u ld have been considered a regular m eal fo r outsiders? T h ere is nothing specific about the com m unal or sacred m eal in extant copies o f the Damascus Document. But similar sanctions are m en tion ed that pre­ sum e its existence (DSST 41):

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If they are two, one and one, who testify about a different m atter [in which a man sins against the law], the man is only to be excluded from the pure food on condition that they are trustworthy, and that on the same day on which he saw him, he denounces him to the Inspector. And concerning riches, they shall accept tw o trustworthy witnesses. And one, to exclude from the holy food. (Damascus Document 9:21-23) T h e same H ebrew w ord is used for the “purity" o f pure, holy, or sacred food as previously in the Rule o f the Community. Furthermore, another same Hebrew w ord is used for "goods” (iQS 6:25) and for "riches" (CD 9:22) in both texts, so that the subject is lying about w hat one owns, be it property or salary, in rela­ tionship to com m unal obligations. All in all, therefore, I presum e that the com­ munal, ritual, or sacred meal w as practiced not only at Qumran—w here, despite Josephus, it may not have been every meal— but also in the local Essene commu­ nities as well. ESSE N E S IN JE R U S A L E M Josephus interrupts his description o f Titus's troop dispositions around Jerusalem in M ay o f 70 c.E. in order to explain the city's fortifications. He starts with the first wall, "m ost ancient" and “ well-nigh im pregnable," at its northwest com er and runs it first due east to the Tem ple and then due south to the Hinnom Valley. He describes that southward leg as descending "past the place called Bethso to the gate o f the Essenes” (Jewish War 5.145). A t that point the wall m oved eastward across the Tyropeon Valley and eventually northward along the slope o f the Kidron V alley to the Tem ple. The Gate o f the Essenes, in other words, w as at the southwestern com er ofjeru salem 's old first wall. For over a decade, beginning in 1977, archeologist Bargil Pixner supervised excavations at and around what he judges to be that Gate o f the Essenes. It is located in the Protestant Cem etery on the southern slope o f M ount Zion , with the Benedictine Abbey and Church o f the Dormition to the north and then, even far­ ther north, the present southern wall o f the Old City. Three different gates have stood on that same site, their superimposed bottom sills still clearly visible. The topmost sill is from the fifth to seventh centuries c.E., the cruder middle sill is from the third to fourth centuries C.E., and the bottom sill is from before Jerusalem ’s destruction in 70 c.E. “ W e did manage, how ever, to extract som e ceramic sherds from beneath the lowest, and therefore earliest, o f the three sills. C om ing from a sealed-off, undisturbed location, the sherds provided a reliable indication o f the date o f the first gate at the site. All our experts agreed that the pottery beneath the lowest threshold predated 70 c.E., the year o f the destruction o f Jerusalem by the troops o f the Rom an general Titus, son o f Em perior Vespasian. W e had little

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doubt that this was the gate Josephus called the gate o f the Essenes.. . . The socket, in which the wings o f the gate turned, remains in situ, perfectly round and sm ooth, suggesting that the bottom o f the hinge w as made o f metal. T h e Gate o f the Essenes w as destroyed in 70

c .e

.

when Titus’ Rom an legionnaires razed

Jerusalem " (27, 29). That gate "must have been inserted into an already existing w all" (27), and there are indications that the w o rk w as done by Rom an engineers w orking for Herod the Great, possibly as early as 30 b .c . e . " T o construct the gate, builders made a breach in the existing wall. Then they dug a sew age channel (dis­ covered by Bliss [in the 1890s]) that ran along a street leading from the interior o f the city and emptied into the Hinnom Valley, south o f M ount Zio n . Lim estone slabs o f fine workmanship cover the channel as it passes beneath the gatew ay. When the doyen o f Israeli archaeologists, the late Benjamin M azar, visited us, he remarked that only the workm en o f Herod the Great [37

b .c .e

.

to 4

c .e

.]

w ere

likely to have achieved such stonecutting perfection” (28). There is one final fascinating point. Pixner asks the obviou s topographical question: "W h o would have built a gate at this unlikely location, on the shoulder o f a ravine descending into the H innom Valley, atop a hill so steep that the gate could only be reached on foot?” (31). W hy w as a gate added precisely there? Recall that, as Josephus described the southern leg o f that old first w all, it w en t "past the place called Bethso to the gate o f the Essenes" (Jew ish W ar 5.145). W here or what is Bethso? "Since the 19th century,” says Pixner, “ m ost scholars have agreed that the term ‘Bethso’ derives from the H eb rew beth-soa, o r latrines” (84). A t this point some background is necessary, to help us place this n ew infor­ mation. It is very significant background, because it w arn s those o f us thinking from viewpoints in Hellenistic asceticism or Christian m onasticism that Je w ish Essenism is not exactly either o f those phenomena. T here w as this traditional law for the desert encam pm ents as Israel jo u r­ neyed from Egypt to the Promised Land: Y o u shall have a designated area outside the camp to w h ich y o u shall go. W ith y o u r utensils you shall have a trowel; w h en y o u relieve y o u rse lf out­ side, yo u shall dig a hole with it and then cover up y o u r excrem ent. Because the Lord y o u r G od travels along with you r cam p, to save y o u and to hand o v e r y o u r enemies to you, therefore you r camp m ust b e h oly, so that he m ay not see anything indecent am ong yo u and turn a w a y fro m you . (D eu teronom y 23:12-14) T h e Essenes applied that law to their cam p com m unities, to Q u m ran as sub­ stitute Jeru salem , and, o f course, to Jerusalem itself as the T e m p le ’s u rb an exten­ sion. Josep h u s m entions defecatory purity explicitly:

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A candidate anxious to join their s e c t . . . [is presented] with a small hatchet . . . [On the sabbath they do not even] go to stool. On other days they dig a trench a foot deep with a mattock— such is the nature o f the hatchet which they present to the neophytes— and wrapping their mantle about them, that they m ay not offend the rays o f the deity, sit above it. T h ey then replace the excavated soil in the trench. For this purpose they select the m ore retired spots. And though the discharge o f the excrements is a natural function, they make it a rule to wash themselves after it, as if defiled. (Jewish War 2.137, 148-149) There is nothing explicit about such defecatory purity in either the Rule o f the Community or the Damascus Document, but it does appear in tw o other very important Qumran documents. T h e first one is the War Scroll— in H ebrew Milhamah— discovered in Cave 1 at Qumran, hence its coding as iQ M (DSSP 2.80-203). There are also six related fragments and one similar fragm ent from C ave 4 (4Q491-497). This is a preQumran text im agining the great apocalyptic battle between the Sons o f Dark­ ness under Belial and the Sons o f Light under God. Here the term community des­ ignates Israel as a w hole and not just the Essenes as a sect (D S S T 100): And no you ng b oy or any w om an at all shall enter the camps when they leave Jerusalem to go to war, until they return. And no lame, blind, para­ lyzed person nor any man w h o has an indelible blemish on his flesh, nor any man suffering from uncleanness in his flesh, none o f these will go out to w ar with t h e m . . . . And there will be a space betw een all their camps and the ‘place o f the hand’ o f about tw o thousand cubits. (W ar Scroll 7:3-7) W hat is at stake in those decrees, o f course, is not battle discipline or military hygiene but ritual purity. T h ey are to go into battle like priests into the Tem ple. Latrines, therefore, must be about one thousand yards from their encampments. The second docum ent is the Temple Scroll from C ave 11. T h e main copy, coded as n Q T a or nQx9, is the longest o f all the scrolls, but there is also a frag­ mentary copy, coded as n Q T b or 11Q20. It gives, w ith G od speaking in the first person, a definitive Law for Jerusalem , its Tem ple, and its king, according to pre­ sumably Essene ideals (D SST 138): T hey shall make m y temple holy and respect it, for I dw ell am ong them. Y ou shall make latrines for them outside the city, w here they are obliged to go, outside, to the North-east o f the city: houses with beam s and w ells within them into which the excrement shall drop; they shall not be visible from a total distance from the city o f three thousand cubits. (Temple Scroll 46:11-13)

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It is, once again, a question not o f urban hygiene b ut o f T em ple-city purity. D efecation is forbidden anywhere in Jerusalem , as is sexual intercourse: “Anyone w h o lies with his wife and has an ejaculation, for three days shall not enter any­ w h ere in the city o f the temple in which I shall install m y n am e" (iQ T a 45:11-12). Locations, directions, and measurements in the Temple Scroll should not be pressed too far, as if one could correlate its details w ith actual Je ru sa lem topogra­ phy. The point is not that the Temple Scroll’s ideal latrines need to be equated with actual Bethso any more than that its ideal city gates (w hich w ere twentyone feet wide [n Q T a 41:14]) need to be equated w ith the actual Essene Gate (which w as nine feet wide). The point is this: the presence o f the Essene G ate at that rather difficult topographical location and o f latrines outside the w alls and to the northwest is best explained by postulating an Essene Q uarter im m ediately inside the southwestern com er o f the city's old first w all. T h at H erodian-style Essene Gate m ay even have been constructed specially for them so that they could observe the Law as faithfully as they desired. ESSEN ES IN H IST O R Y You will recall from the beginning o f Chapter 12 that fo r 372 years the Je w ish homeland had been not a king-state but a Tem ple-state. It w as ruled externally by first the Persian Empire and then, after Alexander, b y its G reco-local replace­ ments in Egypt or Syria. It w as ruled internally b y Je w ish high priests legitim ated by traditional dynastic descent from Aaron at the tim e o f M oses through Z a d o k at the time o f Solomon. After Alexander had H ellenized their w o rld , the Je w ish hom eland w as caught between those w arring Hellenistic em pires to its south and north, but it was also threatened even m ore insidiously b y H ellenistic m onoculturalism and international commercialism. T h at placed increasin g external and internal strain on the very existence o f the Je w ish people in coven an t w ith a G od o f justice and purity in a land o f justice and purity. A n d it placed the high priesthood itself in the very eye o f the Hellenistic storm. In the early decades o f the second century

b .c . e

.,

the Je w ish hom eland w as

under Syrian control. But the Syrian Em pire w as under m ilitary pressure from Rom e, steadily expanding on Syria's w estern front, and from E gypt, alw ays threatening on Syria's southern front. The Je w ish hom eland w a s vital to Syria, both fo r tribute to pay o ff Rom e and for security to w ard o ff E gypt. B ut attem pts to integrate it econom ically and politically into the Syrian E m p ire kept founder­ ing on religious and theological obstacles. In the 170s the legitim ate high priest w as Onias III, but rivals— first Jason from within his o w n fam ily and then M enelaus from outside it— promised Antiochus IV Epiphanes o f Syria greater tax

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revenues if they w ere appointed high priest and allowed to turn Jeru salem into a full G reek city (Antioch South, as it were). W hat follow s is a rather terse s u m­ mary o f the situation, but there is a fuller account in z Maccabees 4. In those days certain renegades came out from Israel and misled many, say­ ing, "L et us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since w e separated from them many disasters have com e upon us." This proposal pleased them, and some o f the people eagerly w ent to the king, w ho autho­ rized them to observe the ordinances o f the Gentiles. S o they built a gym na­ sium in Jerusalem , according to Gentile custom, and rem oved the marks o f circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. T h ey joined with the Gen­ tiles and sold themselves to do evil. (1 Maccabees 1:11-15) Finally, the Syrian m onarch decided to solve Jew ish disagreements on that program o f political am algam ation b y enforcing religious integration. If Jewish religion stood in the w ay, then Jew ish religion itself w ould have to go. Profana­ tion o f the Tem ple by Syrian paganism and destruction o f the faithful by Syrian persecution began in 167 b .c .e . T h e Hasm onean fam ily o f Jew ish priests, nick­ named the Maccabees, led the Jew ish counterattack, and within three years they defeated the Syrians, retook Jerusalem , and purified the Tem ple. Then, for one hundred years— until the Rom an general Pom pey took Jerusalem in 63 b.c .e .— an indigenous Jew ish m onarchy ruled the Jew ish homeland. But they also declared them selves to be high priests. Instead o f restoring the traditional and nonroyal high priesthood, the Hasmoneans themselves became a n ew and royal high priesthood, first w ith Jonathan in 160-142 and then with Sim on in 142-134 b.c .e .

That was, for som e Je w s, w orse than the Syrian persecution itself. I f the

high priest w as illegitimate, h ow could the Tem ple service be valid, the covenant betw een people and G od be maintained, and the linkage betw een earth and heaven be certified? The Essenes arose within that general background in the first h alf o f the sec­ ond century b . c . e ., and the Qum ran com m unity is particularly connected to that situation o f high-priestly illegitimacy. T h eir revered early leader, the Teacher o f Righteousness (that is, the true, proper, or right teacher) w as opposed both externally by the W icked Priest (that is, those illegitimate H asm onean high priests in turn) and internally b y the Man o f the Lie (that is, another leader w ho turned m any possible follow ers aw ay from the Teacher o f Righteousness). That very specific background is crucially important for understanding the Essenes, and it leads into the next and final point concerning them.

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E S S E N E E SC H A T O L O G Y Recall those different types o f eschatology m entioned in Chapters 15 and 16. Think, first, about ascetical eschatology. W hen Philo and Jo sep h u s explain the Essenes, they emphasize celibate asceticism or ascetical eschatology, and they base it, mildly in Josephus but virulently in Philo, on m isogyny. T h at emphasis on celibate asceticism is, how ever, m uch m ore their H ellenism than their Judaism speaking. W hen you read, for example, the Rule o f the Community, the Damascus Document, or the Rule o f the Congregation, celibate asceticism does not seem the most important concern. Argum ents about w h eth er the Q um ranites were fully celibate for the whole o f life, tem porarily celibate fo r a part o f life, or terminally celibate for the end o f life seem also a little beside the point. T ake, for example, the preamble to the Rule o f the Community. It has a w h o le series o f “in order to” phrases that outline the purpose o f their com m unity. H ere are the opening ones in iQ S 1:1-7 (D SST 3, m y italics): in order to

seek God [with all (one’s) heart and w ith all (one’s) soul;

iti order] to do w hat is good and ju st in his presence as com m anded by means o f the hand o f Moses and his servants the Prophets; in order to

love everything which he selects and to hate everyth in g that he rejects;

in order to

keep oneself at a distance from all evil, and to b ecom e attached to all good works; to bring about truth, ju stice and uprightness on earth and not to w alk in the stubbornness o f a gu ilty heart and o f lecherous eyes perform ing every evil.

There is nothing anywhere about “in order to practice asceticism ” or

in

order to observe celibacy.” The Qumranites w ere, first o f all and ab o ve all, seek­ ing to live faithfully the purity and holiness o f G od in a w o rld p ecu liarly im pure and unholy. It w as justice and righteousness, not celibacy and asceticism , that w as on their minds and in their hearts. Furtherm ore, since their o w n high priest­ hood and those priests w ho supported it w ere no longer pu re and h o ly according to G od's L a w for priests, all Essenes w ould live that purity and holiness fo r them and instead o f them. A ll else followed from those intentions. Think, next, about apocalyptic eschatology and rem em ber that distinction betw een prim ary and secondary apocalypticism. In the fo rm er case, the end-tim e is the only reason yo u do something— say, abandon h om e, fam ily, and posses­ sions. I f the end w ere not imminent, you w ould not do those things. In the latter case, the end-time is simply a sanction to enforce w h at y o u should b e doing in any case— say, observe justice, holiness, and purity. I f the en d w e re not

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imminent, you w ould still be required to do those things. Reading the Qumran War Scroll, for example— with its climactic battle betw een good and evil, light and darkness, God and Belial at the end o f days— you can easily see the Essenes in general and Qumran in particular as apocalyptic eschatologists. But turn, once again, to the Rule o f the Community or the Damascus Document. Are those rules in effect only because it is the end-time? Or should everyone be follow ing them in any case, be it end-time or not? T h e Rule o f the Community, for example, describes the ordinary meal o f the Qumran com munity in 6:4-6 (D SST 9). T h e Rule o f the Congregation "in the final days” describes the end-time meal with the Messiahs present in 2:17-20 (DSST 127). T h e only difference between the eschatological and the regular m eal at Qumran is that the Messiahs (apparently) bless the food and drink first. A footnote. Ju st as Christian Je w s interpreted the general mes­ sianic expectation as one Messiah but tw o comings, so the Essene Je w s inter­ preted it as tw o Messiahs but one coming. T h eir twin Messiahs w ere a priestly one and a lay one, separated in that authoritative order, an obvious rebuke o f Hasm onean king-priests, combined in that authoritative order. Think, finally, about ethical eschatology. W hat is emphasized for the Essenes is a life radically submissive to the L aw o f God. Shared possessions, be they total or partial, and com m on meals, be they regular or special, are indica­ tive o f that life. So, o f course, is priestlike purity as fully as one can practice it. It seems to me that the term ethical eschatology is m ore accurate than either ascetical or apocalyptic eschatology for the basic ideology o f the Essene lifestyle. But in that ideology it is impossible to separate ritual and m orality, justice and purity. Here is one example o f that impossibility. The Halakhic Letter is another very important Qumran docum ent detailing differences in legal interpretation betw een the w riter and som e unidentified recipient. It begins by saying that "these are som e o f our regulations [concerning the law o f G]od” (1:3-4) and ends by repeating that "w e have written to you some o f the w orks o f the Torah w hich w e think are good fo r you and for your people, for in yo u [we saw] intellect and knowledge o f the T o rah .” It has been given a H ebrew title, Miqsat Maaseh ha-Torah (or Some Works o f the Law), hence coded as 4Q M M T but derived from com bining 4Q394-399 into a single com pos­ ite text (DSST 77-85). The first item, how ever, even before those itemized legal rulings, concerns the solar calendar: "T h e year is com plete, three hundred and sixty-four days” (1:2)— that is, tw elve months o f thirty days plus four extra days after each trimester. But w h y is that so important? Is it sim ply quibbling to estab­ lish difference, to create an

ms

against them? W hat is at stake in the calendar?

W hat has calendrics to do with ethics? People live in coordinates o f space and time, o f here and now , and G od is the Lord o f time and space. But for the Je w s o f that day, it had becom e progressively

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m ore difficult to see God as Lord o f space with Mediterranean Sea, hom eland, city, and Tem ple under pagan or impure control. God as Lord o f tim e becam e, then, proportionately m ore and more important. The Tem ple authorities used a lunar calendar similar to the surrounding pagans. The Essenes counterused a solar-lunar calendar based on the fact that G od created the sun, m oon, and stars on the fourth day o f creation— that is, on our Wednesday. The first day o f the N e w Y ear there­ fore had to be on a Wednesday (and always on a W ednesday). Both Qum ranites and other Essenes, as w e know from Damascus Document 6:18-19 (D SST 37), observed a quite different calendar from the rest o f their fellow Je w s. T h at is w h y, for example, the Wicked Priest could attack the Teacher o f Righteousness "during the rest o f the D ay o f A tonem en t. . . the day o f fasting, the sabbath o f their rest” (iQpHabn:6-8; D SST 201-202). It was the Teacher's but not the Priest's D ay o f Atonement. In conclusion, what? It is still not clear w hat relationship the o ther Essene communities had to Qumran or it to them. W as Q um ran ju st one am o n g m any, first am ong equals, or some sort o f ideal or even jurisdictional m othercommunity? W hy w ere there so m any copies o f key texts found in the caves, especially in C ave 4, which seems to have been the principal library? I f Q um ran was a copying center— the Essene Publishing C om pany, as it w e re— w h y are there hundreds o f different scribal hands evident in the scrolls? O r w a s Q um ran always the central community so that other Essenes fled there w ith their o w n documents before Vespasian's legions? M y point in all o f this is not to narrow Essene identity to one m onolithic option but to open it up fully across the widest possible spectrum . T h e Essene com munities w ere radical attempts to live faithfully and fully the L a w o f G od, in justice and righteousness, in purity and holiness, w h en everyone around them , from their own high priests to their ow n people, w as failing to do so. O ne could disagree w ith that judgm ent and still honor its integrity. It is against that background that I now lo o k at another early-first-century com m unity, the C hristianjew s around Jam es the Ju st in Jeru salem .

James the Just T h e outcom e o f the conflict between teachers and bishops had im portant social consequences. I f the school had prevailed, the Christian com m unities w ou ld have assum ed an intellectual character, w ith little place fo r the uned­ ucated. T h e circles o f Clem ent and Origen, as they appear fro m th eir w rit­ ings and the scanty prosopographic evidence given b y Eusebius, consisted o f people w h o already had G reek learning and w h o w ere som etim es students o f philosophical schools. T h e monarchical episcopate, on the o th er hand,

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was m uch m ore effective in bringing together m em bers from all social classes, learned or illiterate, and uniting them under the authority o f a strict hierarchy. T h e episcopate asked not for wisdom or education but for disci­ pline. T h e subordination o f the school to the bishop, as at Alexandria, pre­ served m uch o f the intellectual character o f the Christian com m unities and hence favoured the participation o f educated and w ealthy people— without, how ever, excluding the poor and underprivileged. Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, The Social Structure o f the Early Christian Communities, p. 145 If you read only Paul’s letters you w ould know— from Galatians 1:18-19 or 2:11-12, for example— that both Simon "the Rock" (Peter in Greek, Cephas in Ara­ maic) and Jam es "the Lord’s brother” w ere important figures in early Christianity. If you read only the canonical gospels you w ould know that Peter was very important but you w ould know Jam es only as one am ong the siblings o f Jesus named in passing in M ark 6:3. I f you read a non-Christian source such as Josephus, however, you w ould know only tw o individuals in earliest Christianity: one is Jesus him self and the other is his brother Jam es. You w ould not know, for exam­ ple, that Peter or Paul had ever existed. Jam es the brother o f the Lord, Jam es the Just, Jam es ofjeru salem , Jam es by whatever name requires very special attention. The preceding epigraph concerns institutional tensions between bishopleader and scholar-teacher w hen Demetrius and his successors w ere rulers o f the Alexandrian church and Clem ent or Origen headed its catechetical school between the mid-second and mid-third centuries. M y intention in quoting it is not to retroject the monarchical episcopate back to the early first century with Jam es o fjeru sale m . I use it, rather, to introduce this question: W hat mode o f pow er and authority did Jam es have, and w hat w ere the sociopolitical advan­ tages and disadvantages o f that mode? JA M E S IN JO SE P H U S W e saw in Chapter 1 w hat Josephus says about Jesus. But w hat he says about Jam es, the brother o f Jesus, is much, m uch longer. I f w e kn ew nothing save these tw o texts, Jam es w ould probably seem the far m ore im portant person. His execution w as enough to topple a high priest: Upon learning o f the death o f Festus, Caesar sent Albinus to Ju daea as procu­ rator. The king [Agrippa II] rem oved Joseph from the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to this office upon the son o f Ananus, w h o w as like­ wise called Ananus___ The younger Ananus . . . w as rash in his tem per and unusually daring. He followed the school o f the Sadducees, w h o are indeed m ore heartless than any o f the other Je w s . . . w hen they sit in judgem ent. Possessed o f such a character, Ananus thought that he had a favourable

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opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus w as still on the w ay. And so he convened the judges o f the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man nam ed Jam es, the brother o f Jesus w h o was called the Christ, and certain oth­ ers. H e accused them o f having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those o f the inhabitants o f the city w h o w ere considered the m ost fair-minded and who w ere strict in observance o f the law w ere offended at this. T h ey therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him , for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step [in convening the Sanhedrin], to order him to desist from any further such actions. Certain o f them even w en t to m eet Albinus, who was on his w a y from Alexandria, and inform ed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin w ithout his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily w rote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him. King Agrippa, because o f Ananus' action, deposed him from the high priesthood which he had held fo r three months and replaced him with Jesus the son o f Damascus. (Jewish Antiquities 20.197-203) There are three important points to make regarding this text. First, Ananus was not just the high priest. He was from a most important high-priesdy family. His father, Ananus the Elder, was high priest from 6 to 15 C .E ., and is know n to us from the gospels as Annas. The elder Ananus was father-in-law o f Joseph Caiaphas, high priest from 18 to 36 c.E., a figure also known to us from the gospels. H e was furthermore the father o f five other high priests, Eleazar, Jonathan, Theophilus, Matthias, and Ananus the Younger (above), and the grandfather o f Matthias, high priest in 65 c.E. Ananus the Younger, in other words, cam e from a family that dominated the high priesthood for most o f that pre-66 first century, w ith eight high priests in sixty years. Second, because (in the interregnum betw een Rom an governors in 62 c.E.) he convened a Sanhedrin for a capital case and had Ja m es and som e others put to death, Ananus the Younger brought dow n on him self the w rath o f the Herodian ruler Agrippa II and the Rom an govern or Albinus. Finally, Josephus names Ananus a “Sadduccee" and those w h o opposed him as ones "strict in observance o f the law ," which probably means Pharisees. T h e execution o f Jam es and the others was assumed into that rivalry, and it w as sufficient to have Ananus deposed after only three months in office. Jam es, h ow ever, m ust have had som e public standing or his name would hardly have been recorded; in fact, he is identified as "the brother o f Jesus who w as called the Christ." W h y w as Jam es so significant a figure that Pharisees, presumably, could unseat a high priest on his account? W hat else do w e know about Jam es before his execution in the early 60s?

JAMES IN PAUL P aul becam e a Christian three to five years after the crucifixion o fje s u s, and he visited Jeru salem three times thereafter— once in the late 30s, again in the late

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40s, and finally in the late 50s. In writing to the Galatians, he insists that he is a full apostle sent by a revelation o f God and Jesus rather than a subapostle sent by a com m ission o f the Jerusalem church and its leaders. He did not go to ask their permission for what he was doing, and when he eventually w en t to see them it w as ju st for a visit with the leaders: T h en after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed w ith him fifteen days; but I did not see any other apostle except Jam es the Lord's brother. (Galatians 1:18-19) I f you date the execution o f Jesus to 30 and the conversion o f Paul to 35, then the first Jerusalem visit took place in 38. You w ould think from that formulation that Peter (Cephas) w as m ore important than Jam es at that time, at least from Paul's point o f view . T h e second visit is much m ore significant and took place, if Paul is dating both events from his conversion, in 49: Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, tak­ ing Titus along w ith m e .. . . But even Titus, w h o was with me, was not com pelled to be circumcised, though he w as a G reek . . . and when Jam es and Cephas and John, w h o w ere acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and m e the right hand o f fellowship, agreeing that w e should go to the Gentiles and they to the cir­ cumcised. T h ey asked only one thing, that w e rem em ber the poor [ptochon], which w as actually what I was eager to do. (Galatians 2 :1,3 , 9 ,10) At issue w as w hether male Christian pagans had to be circumcised at con­ version, and Titus w as a visual aid for the negative viewpoint. T here w ere Chris­ tian Je w s, termed "false brethren” by Paul in Galatians 2:4, w ith an affirmative viewpoint, but they w ere not supported by the leaders, n o w named with Jam es in first place. Since G od's Law w as not a menu from which one could pick and choose, h ow could that have been justified? Only in a context o f apocalyptic con­ sum m ation, as Paula Fredriksen has shown: "W hat place, i f any, do Gentiles have in such a kingdom? W e can cluster the material around tw o poles. A t the negative extrem e, the nations are destroyed, defeated, or in som e w a y subjected to Israel___ A t the positive extreme, the nations participate in Israel’s redem p­ tion. T h e nations w ill stream to Jerusalem and worship the G od o f Jacob together w ith Israel" (1991:544-545). Gentiles w ill no longer be pagans, but nei­ ther w ill they have to becom e Jew s. “W hen G od establishes his Kingdom , then, these tw o groups w ill together constitute ‘his people'; Israel, redeem ed from exile, and the Gentiles, redeemed from idolatry. Gentiles are saved as Gentiles:

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they do not, eschatologically, becom e Je w s " (1991:547). Y ou can, h ow ever, sense a tension even within that m ore benign program for spiritual conversion rather than physical extermination. Gentiles do not becom e Je w s , b ut neither do they rem ain pagans. W hat is a nonpagan Gentile? W hat m inim ally o r m axim ally must those pagans do? And w ho decides? A t the Jerusalem Council, in any case, the im m ediate question o f m ale G en ­ tile circumcision was resolved. But a far greater one w as created, because there w as now a double mission, one to Je w s led b y Peter and one to pagans led b y Barnabas and Paul. That w ould have w orked w ell i f Je w s and pagans had lived in completely isolated enclaves. And if only Christian Je w s preached to Je w s and Christian pagans to pagans. It was magnificent as apocalyptic idealism . But h o w would it w ork as practical program? Apocalypse, after all, is easier to im agine as a divine instant than a human process. In a great city like A ntioch, fo r exam ple, would there be two separated communities, one o f Christian pagans and another o f Christian Jew s? And, apart from that case, h ow w o u ld Je w s such as Barnabas and Paul treat their ow n Jewishness in contact w ith pagans? Those unresolved issues soon erupted at Antioch, w h ere a com bined co m ­ munity o f Christian Je w s and Christian pagans w ere eating together w ithout observing the kosher commandments in the Law o f God. But w hen Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people cam e from Jam es, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept h im self separate for fear o f the circumcision faction. And the other Je w s jo in ed him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas w as led astray b y their hypocrisy. But w hen I saw that they w ere not acting consistently w ith the truth o f the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, " I f you , though a Je w , live like a Gentile and not like a Je w , how can yo u com pel the G entiles to live like Jew s?" (Galatians 2:11-14) Jam es presum ed that Christian Je w s w ou ld observe the L a w w h ile Christian pagans w ou ld not. But in a combined com m unity, such as that at A ntioch, Chris­ tian Ju daism had to prevail over Christian paganism. P eter and Barnabas pre­ sum ed that kosher regulations w ere no longer im portant, one w ay or the other. It w as not im portant to follow them, but neither w as it im portant to not follow them . H ence, before Jam es's intervention, they ate w ith pagans like pagans. A fter it, they w anted everyone, including pagans, to eat like Je w s . Paul called that hypocrisy; they probably considered it courtesy. Paul, in any case, refused to give in, found h im self isolated, and, in m y view , w en t w estw ard, n ever to return to Antioch.

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All o f that emphasizes two m ajor points concerning Jam es. He w as the authoritative leader o f the Jerusalem mother-church, which w as operating two m ajor missions, one to the Je w s and one to the pagans. He w as a Christian Je w w h o believed that Jesu s w as the Messiah but also followed the full Jew ish Law . T h at explains, negatively, w hy, unlike Stephen in the early 30s or Jam es, son o f Zebedee, in the early 40s, Jam es was not attacked, persecuted, or executed until the early 60s. It does not fully explain, positively, w h y he w as so strongly defended b y non-Christian Je w s after his execution. He w as clearly important for Christian Je w s. But w h y w as he important for non-Christian Jew s? He observed the Law? H e did, o f course, but so he should have, w ith all other Jew s. W hat is special about that? JA M E S IN E U SEB IU S Eusebius, bishop o f Caesarea, lived between 263 and 339 and saw Christianity pass from persecuted cult to imperial religion. His History o f the Church, published in successively longer versions during the first quarter o f the fourth century, is hampered, as Tim othy Bames puts it, "by his inability to contemplate theological development” ; as a result, "his account o f the internal history o f the Church and o f Christian literature is less a coherent narrative than a series o f disconnected notes” (132). One o f Eusebius’s sources is Hegesippus's five-book Memoirs, dated around 150, and from its last book he cites the following about Jam es (Williamson 99-100): Control o f the Church passed to the apostles, together with the Lord’s brother Jam es, w h om everyone from the Lord's time till our own has called the Righteous, for there w ere m any Jam eses, but this one was holy from his birth; he drank no w ine or intoxicating liquor and ate no animal food; no razor cam e near his head; he did not smear him self with oil, and took no baths. H e alone w as permitted to enter the H oly Place, for his garments w ere not o f w o o l but o f linen. H e used to enter the Sanctuary alone, and w as often found on his knees beseeching forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew hard like a cam el’s from his continually bending them in worship o f G od and beseeching forgiveness for the people. Because o f his unsurpassable righteousness he was called the Righteous and Oblios— in our ow n language ‘Bulw ark o f the People, and Righteousness’— fulfilling the declarations o f the prophets regarding him. (History o f the Church 2.23) Hegesippus describes Jam es as under a lifelong nazarite vo w . T h e tem porary version o f this v o w is described in Num bers 6:1—21, but lifelong versions are described for Sam son in Judges 13:5 and 14 and 16:17 and for Sam uel in 1 Sam uel 1:11 and 22. T h e nazarite, like the high priest in Leviticus 2 1:11, is forbidden to

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becom e impure by touching a corpse, even to b ury his o w n parents. Further­ m ore, Jam es, as a nazarite, is treated like a priest and allow ed to enter the H oly Place— m aybe even, although the Tem ple’s topography seem s confused, to enter the H oly o f Holies itself, as the high priest w ou ld on the D ay o f A tone­ ment. From all o f that I take only one element as probably historical: Jam es w as fam ous for his asceticism. A second element is possible: Ja m es w as a nazarite. I label that second element possible rather than probable because H egesippus could have inferred it from Acts 18:18 and 21:24, w here, in a context I return to below , Jam es tells Paul to join four others undergoing purification at the end o f their tem porary nazarite vows. A third element, Jam es as priest-privileged or even high-priest-privileged, I leave aside as overenthusiastic. T h ere is, I recognize, a strong inclination to discard that entire story because o f its im aginative expan­ sions, but I retain its core for one reason: the com bination o f historical fact and apologetica] expansion that occurs here with regard to Ja m e s’s life also occurs with regard to Jam es’s death. For that execution Eusebius cites from the eighth book o f the lost Outlines by Clem ent o f Alexandria, w h o lived betw een about 150 and 215 (Williamson 72,99): [Jam es] the R ig h teo u s. . . was thrown dow n from the parapet and beaten to death with a fuller’s club.” . . . So they killed him , seizing the opportunity for getting their ow n w ay provided by the absence o f the governm ent, fo r at that very time Festus had died in Judaea, leaving the province w ithou t g o v ­ ernor or procurator. H ow Jam es died has already been show n by the w ords quoted from Clement, who tells us that he w as throw n from the parapet [o f the Tem ple] and clubbed to death. (History o f the Church 1.1, 2.23) Eusebius knows, presumably from Josephus (w hom he cites on other m at­ ters), about the interregnum at the death o f Festus, and he kn ow s about the exe­ cution o f Jam es. T h e death is factual, the details apologetical. So also w ith his life. T h e asceticism is factual, the details are apologetical. I am presum ing, there­ fore, that Jam es was an ascetic, be it nazarite-style or not. In such a context, o f course, kosher observance would not have been too difficult. Asceticism w ould be, as it w ere, ultra-kosher observance. Paul and Eusebius, together, indicate w h y Ja m es w as so im portant to both Christian and non-Christian Jew s. But w hat about those “ certain others" w h o died w ith him? W as there any corporate dim ension to that execution? W hat about the Jeru salem com m unity in connection w ith Jam es?

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The Jerusalem Community T h e rule which I dare to enact and declare, Is that all shall be equal, and equally share All wealth and enjoyments, nor longer endure T h at one should be rich, and another be poor, T h at one should have acres, far-stretching and wide, And another not even enough to provide H im self w ith a grave: that this at his call Should have hundreds o f servants, and that none at all. All this I intend to correct and amend: N o w all o f all blessings shall freely partake, One life and one system for all I will make. Arisotphanes, The Ecclesiazusae, 590-594 At the start o f 393 b .c .e . Aristophanes' com edy The Ecclesiazusae, or Women in Charge, w as enacted for the first time at Athens. Its plot imagines wom en instead o f m en as the new rulers o f the city, and communal ownership instead o f private property as the new economics o f the city. T h e great comedian takes the communalism o f Plato's ideal Republic, limited there to certain aspects o f leadership, and lam poons it by applying it to everything and everyone as in those lines cited above (Rogers 1924:246, 300-301, last line slightly adapted). Blepyros, for exam ­ ple, asks his w ife Praxagora about sex, love, and marriage, wondering if “ all w om en and m en w ill be com m on and free." H ow can preferences for the most attractive or choices o f the m ost desirable be precluded even if "n o marriage or other restraint there will be” ? Praxagora explains that before individuals can choose the m ost attractive, they must first accept the least desirable as well. She judges this “ a nice democratic device” and “ a popular system as ever was tried” (lines 6 11-6 30). The idea o f absolute communalism o f m oney, land, and sex was easily imagined and easily mocked. It is interesting, how ever, that male control and private property, or female control and com munal ownership, should stand or fall together for Aristophanes and his audience. I cite that text as epigraph to indicate h ow easy it is to m ock and deride attempts at hum an equality through com m on property and shared possessions. Maybe derision is appropriate, but it is also appropriate to ask w h o gains by such derision. In any case, I leave Aristophanes’ words there as a warning.

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A N E G A L IT A R IA N COM M U NITY? T h e second h alf o f Luke’s two-volum e gospel is n o w called the Acts o f the Apostles, and its theological intention is clearly proclaim ed in Acts 1:8. The book is about the H oly Spirit’s m ovem ent from Jeru salem through Ju daea and Sam aria and thence out to the ends o f the earth, or at least to Rom e as the w orld’s center. It is about the change in the H oly Spirit’s headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome. Against that background Luke describes the Jerusalem com ­ munity as follows: All w ho believed w ere together and had all things in com m on; they w ould sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44-45) That is a rather swift and passing description fo r som ething so radical, but Luke repeats it later on, giving m ore details. T here are three sections in this later account. The first one m ore or less repeats the earlier claim. T h e second and third sections give positive and negative examples o f the process at w ork. [1] N ow the whole group o f those w ho believed w ere o f one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership o f any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great pow er the apostles gave their testi­ m ony to the resurrection o f the Lord Jesus, and great grace w as upon them all. There w as not a needy person am ong them, fo r as m any as ow ned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds o f w hat w as sold. T h ey laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. [2] T here was a Levite, a native o f Cyprus, Jo seph , to w h o m the apostles gave the nam e Barnabas (which means "son o f encouragem ent” ). H e sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the m oney, and laid it at the apos­ tles’ feet. [3] But a man named Ananias, with the consent o f his w ife Sapphira, sold a piece o f property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back som e o f the pro­ ceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet. "Ananias,” Peter asked, “w h y has Satan filled your heart to lie to the H o ly Spirit and to keep back part o f the proceeds o f the land? W hile it rem ained unsold, did it not rem ain you r own? And after it was sold, w ere not the proceeds at y o u r dis­ posal? H o w is it that you have contrived this deed in y o u r heart? Y o u did not lie to us but to God!” N ow when Ananias heard these words, he fell dow n and died. A nd great fear seized all w ho heard o f it. T h e yo u n g m en cam e and wrapped up his body, then carried him out and buried him. A fter an interval o f about three hours his wife came in, not know ing w hat had happened. Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you and you r husband sold the land fo r such

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and such a price.” And she said, "Yes, that was the price.” Then Peter said to her, "H o w is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit o f the Lord to the test? Look, the feet o f those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. W hen the young men came in they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear seized the whole church and all w ho heard o f these things. (Acts 4:32-5:11) H o w is that claim to be assessed? Is that an im aginary com munity that never existed as such? Is it unhistorical and dream y idealism? Is it just Luke's insistence on the peaceful and serene life o f the earliest Jerusalem community? They had, he says, not only a com m on purpose and intention; they had common posses­ sions as w ell. D oes that description, h ow ever idealized, point to some serious attempt at radical com m onality in the earliest Jerusalem Christian community? You could, on the one hand, point to that sanction in Qumran's Rule o f the Community seen above: “ I f one is found am ong them w ho has lied knowingly concerning goods, he shall be excluded from the pure food o f the Many for a year and shall be sentenced to a quarter o f his bread” (iQS 6:24-25). So maybe Ananias and Sapphira are fact? You could, on the other hand, point to Aristophanes’ com edy, also seen above. Praxagora intends to apply her new pro­ gram by creating a com m on fund o f "silver and land” into which all must con­ tribute everything they own and out o f w hich all will receive whatever they need. But what, her husband Blepyros asks, i f som ebody holds back not land, which w ou ld be difficult to hide, but "talents o f silver and Darics o f gold,” which w ould be m uch easier to conceal? W hy do that, she responds, w hen all have w hatever they w ant in any case? (lines 596-607). In any account o f commonproperty initiation, that seems an obvious question: W hat i f som ebody cheats? So m aybe Ananias and Sapphira are fiction? In a recent essay, S. Scott Bartchy argues for the basic historicity o f Luke’s account against the background o f honor and shame, patronage and clientage, real kin and fictive kin in the Mediterranean world. On the one hand, “Joseph Barnabas is regarded first o f all as one o f the significant patrons in the Jew ish Christian com munities in Jerusalem ” (315). On the other, "Ananias and Sapphira not only dishonored and shamed themselves as patrons but also revealed them ­ selves to be outsiders, non-kin” (3x6). That is true enough. Th ose are respectively positive and negative examples o f patronal sharing. It is also very true that, in both his volum es, Luke pushes hard for increased alm sgiving, greater patronal support, and the responsibility o f Christian haves for Christian have-nots. W hether, therefore, as fact or fiction, Ananias and Sapphira are the negative patronal foils for Joseph Barnabas’s positive im age. But is patronal sharing the

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only type possible, and was it the only type available to that Jeru salem com m u­ nity? "T h ose disciples o f Jesus w ho had com e to Jeru salem from Galilee would m ost likely have had to resort to w orking as day laborers to earn their ow n liv­ in g,” as Bartchy notes (315). Could there not have been another type o f sharing, not patronal but communal, a sharing o f w hatever one had w ith others in a like position? Ju st as w e saw in Chapter 23 that there w ere patronal and communal share-meals, were there also patronal and communal share-possessions? In any case, I hold on to that distinction and do not equate all sharing w ith patronal sharing. Communal sharing is a far m ore radical criticism o f com m ercialized com munity than patronal sharing, because the m ore individual alm sgiving is increased, the m ore systemic injustice is ignored. Patronal sharing (alms) is an act o f power. Communal sharing is an act o f resistance. Recall from above that Essene communalism could range from donating one's entire property at Qumran to donating a minimum o f tw o days' salary per month in the other communities. I think o f that communalism as a spectrum from maxi­ mum to minimum, but, whatever its specific details, it indicates that a holy Law for an unholy time demands modes o f communal sharing. I emphasize, how ever, that sharing means both giving and taking. If, for example, one depends absolutely on the community, one must give absolutely to the com m unity. Similarly, with Jerusalem. I leave open whether "all things in com m on” should be taken absolutely or relatively. I propose that there was a serious attempt to establish w h at w e could call share-community to which one gave, at maximum, all one had or, at minimum, all one could. Against that background, the fault o f (fictional?) Ananias and Sapphira w as lying to the community, claiming to have given all w hen som e w as withheld. But that was a practical not just a theoretical lie. T h ey w ere n o w taking from the community as i f they no longer had any resources o f their ow n. T h e 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 claim ing an absolute gift w as also claiming an absolute right, an absolute right to receive w h at one needed, an absolute right to share in the eucharistic share-meal o f the com m unity. 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. W hat I see in both cases, with the Essene Jew s and the Christian Jew s, is a thrust tow ard establishing sharing community in reaction against commercializing community— an effort made, o f course, to live in covenant with God. It is, in any case, the collection fo r the poor that convinces m e to take Luke's "all things in com m on" not as im aginary idealism o r even patronal sharing but as communal sharing.

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T H E C O L L E C T IO N FO R T H E PO O R The important question is not whether everyone in the Jerusalem com m u­ nity gave up everything but whether there was a serious attempt to live com m u­ nally together. T h e question, in other words, is whether this was the urban and Jerusalem equivalent to that rural dialectic o f eating and healing seen in Parts VII and VIII o f this book. W hat convinces me to take that communalism seriously is som ething w e learn about from Paul quite directly and from Luke quite obliquely. Som e background is necessary to understand this argument, and in present­ ing it I critically integrate data from both the Lukan Acts and the Pauline epistles. Som e Je w s had long imagined an apocalyptic scenario in which pagans were saved and justified without becom ingjew s, as I cited earlier from Paula Fredriksen: “ Eschatological Gentiles . . . those w h o would gain admission to the Kingdom once it w as established, would enter as Gentiles. T h ey w ould worship and eat together w ith Israel, in Jerusalem , at the Tem ple. The G od they worship, the G od o f Israel, will have redeemed them from the error o f idolatry: he will have saved them— to phrase this in slightly different idiom— graciously, apart from the w orks o f the L a w " (1991:548). But h ow exactly would that w ork itself out dow n here on earth? If God and G od's Law w ere not to be trivialized, Gentiles w ould have to cease being Gentiles before any such com m on meal could occur. Even i f they did not have to becom e Je w s, they would certainly have to becom e ex-pagans— that is, ex-Gentiles. And what was, minimally or maximally, involved in being an ex-pagan? W hat w ould be required? If they w ere excused “ from w orks o f the L aw ,” w ho w ould define such “works” ? For example, was not belief in the one true God, the first commandment, the very first w ork o f the Law? It w as certainly possible to debate intensely this or that interpretation o f G od’s Law , but h o w could it be possible to choose between this or that part o f G od’s Law? All o f those questions came to a head in two incidents recorded by Paul in Galatians 1-2 , w ith all original animosities fully displayed, and by Luke in Acts 15, w ith any original animosities firmly rem oved. W e saw the details o f those inci­ dents above— details that are now background for m y present concern. The last item from the Jerusalem Council recorded by Paul is this agreement: T h ey asked only one thing, that w e rem em ber the poor (ptdchon), which w as actually w hat I w as eager to do. (Galatians 2:10)

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I f w e had only that single sentence, it w ou ld be hard to k n o w exactly w h at it m eant. But it is clear from other texts that m oney from Christian pagan co m m u ­ nities w as to be collected for the benefit o f the Christian Je w ish com m unity o f Jerusalem . That is the easy part. T h e difficult part is w h eth er this w as sim ple poor-relief— monies intended to relieve destitution am o n g Jeru salem 's Christian Je w s and, beyond them, non-Christian Je w s— or w h eth er it w as intended to sup­ port the Jerusalem community itself under the theologically charged nam e o f the P oor Ones. I f w e are speaking only o f poor-relief, w h y should the p o o r o f Jerusalem take precedence over the poor o f Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi, C orinth, or any other Christian pagan community? W h y w o u ld the Christian p o o r o f Jerusalem be in any worse straits than the Christian p o o r o f any other city? I am inclined, therefore, to consider that the collection w as prim arily fo r the Jerusalem com munity itself and that they called them selves the P oor Ones. It seems to me, how ever, that such a title required som e form o f com m onality, some type o f com munal lifestyle, som e degree o f difference betw een the Je ru ­ salem com munity and other Christian com munities. Think, for a moment, o f the annual Jew ish collection fo r the T em ple at Jerusalem . T h e m oney involved w as the annual half-shekel or didrachmon "tax levied on all Je w s over the age o f twenty, including freedm en and proselytes" (GLAJJ 1.198) for the Tem ple in Jerusalem . T h at annual subvention w as fo r the public cult o f the Tem ple. It was not a collection fo r the p o o r o f Jeru salem , and, if such had been proposed, the same obvious question w o u ld probably have been asked: W ere there not Jew ish poor in every city, and should not each city take care o f its own? Similarly, I w ould argue, the collection fo r the P oor Ones w as in support o f something quite public: the Jeru salem com m unity as eschato­ logical ideal, with its paradigmatic lifestyle o f com m unal sharing. O nly som ething as important as that can account for the am ount o f space given to the collection. T h e references in Paul's letters are explicit and extensive. T h o se found in the Acts o f the Apostles are once again problematic, h ow ever. Lu ke certainly knows traditions about the collection, but he either does not k n o w w h at he has or he does not w ant to admit what he knows. H e does not h ave a single explicit w ord about the collection, but he has several crucial references that can apply only to it. H ere are the m ajor texts (but notice that Luke m akes sense only if yo u know w h at is happening from Paul): Promise:

Gal. 2:10

Collection:

1 Cor. 16:1-4; 2. Cor. 8-9

Acts 11:27-30

Delivery:

Rom . 15:30-31

Acts 20:4

Disaster:

Acts 21:17-26

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T h e promise w as made at the Jerusalem Council in Galatians 2:10. T h e col­ lection w as taken up in four Roman provinces: Galatia, Asia, M acedonia, and Achaia. Paul’s plans for the collection involved tw o steps. First, each com m unity w ould collect what it could every Sunday. Second, tw o accredited representa­ tives w ould eventually accompany Paul to Jerusalem with each province’s dona­ tion. Paul’s fears for the outcome o f the collection’s delivery are poignantly clear as he writes to the Rom ans from Corinth in the winter o f 55 to 56: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love o f the Spirit, to jo in me in earnest prayer to G od on m y behalf, that I m ay be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that m y ministry to Jerusalem m ay be acceptable to the saints. (Romans 15:30-31) There is a double danger in Jerusalem . Non-Christian Je w s could consider Paul a traitor w h o had defamed G od’s Law by claiming that neither Jew s nor pagans should observe it. Christian Je w s could consider him at least a danger and possibly even a traitor as well. T hey could refuse to accept the collection as col­ lusion w ith a position they did not accept. Luke, not Paul, tells us what hap­ pened: Jam es and all the elders . . . said to him, “You see, brother, how many thou­ sands o f believers there are am ong the Jew s, and they are all zealous for the law. T h ey have been told about you that you teach all the Je w s living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. W hat then is to be done? T hey will cer­ tainly hear that you have come. So do what w e tell you. W e have four men w ho are under a vow . Join these men, go through the rite o f purification with them, and pay for the shaving o f their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yo u r­ self observe and guard the law ." (Acts 2 1:17 ^ 2 4 ) Paul w as told, I presume, that the collection w ould not be accepted unless he used som e o f it as Jam es and the elders demanded. I am not sure h ow they form ulated those conditions. According to the speech made b y Luke, Paul w ould have been a hypocrite to have accepted the collection since he him self did not "observe and guard the law ." But, as Luke tells the story, Diaspora Je w s attacked Paul in the Tem ple for having brought a pagan inside the forbidden area; he was arrested, and executed four years later in Rom e. N o w on der Luke, i f he knew about the collection, did not w ant to describe too clearly w hat had happened. Paul hoped it w ould hold together Christian Je w s and pagan Je w s on the level o f charity rather than o f theology. It did not do so, and it cost him his life.

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M y purpose in discussing the collection is to see i f it casts any light on the Jeru salem com m unity. It is certainly another indication that Ja m es and the C hris­ tian Je w s in the Jerusalem com munity w ere Law -observant. G o d 's L a w w as still binding on them as Christian Jew s. But m y point is that the Jeru salem com m u­ nity could not have expected such administrative “ service fo r the saints" unless their lifestyle w as som ehow special, unless they could ju stify their title o f the Poor Ones by a communal existence similar to that o f an Essene encam pm ent. Such communities lived God's L a w fully and faithfully through sharing goods, possessions, and salaries according to w h atever rules they adopted. A n d a com ­ m on meal was both the powerful symbol and actual heart o f that com m onality. The Jerusalem church w as a share-community w ith a com m unal share-meal as its cultic center. It w as also an apocalyptic com m unity, and that explains w h y it was where it was— in Jerusalem and not, for exam ple, still in G alilee. T h e imminent apocalyptic consummation w ould take place in Jeru salem ; it w o u ld be there that Jesus w ould return. Finally, that com m onality w as m irrored in the ecstatic experience recorded in Acts 2: W hen the day o f Pentecost had come, they w ere all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush o f a violent wind, and it filled the entire house w here they w e re sitting. D ivided tongues, as o f fire, appeared am ong them, and a tongue rested on each o f them. All o f them w ere filled with the H oly Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4) Luke once again interprets against his data. T h at w as n ot instant Berlitz, in which all began to speak unlearned foreign languages. It w as "speaking in tongues," tongue-speaking rather than word-speaking— that is, prolonged and ecstatic utterances involving meaningless words. Participants, num bered at 120, w ere identified as both men and w om en in Acts 1:14 -15 . But notice that the Spirit cam e dow n on all alike— divided itself up, as it w ere, to fill all m em bers equally so that they all responded in the same w ay, w ith a single vo ice o f ecstatic non­ speech. It w as a Spirit that shared itself equally for a com m u n ity supposed to do likewise.

PART X

S to ry an d T rad ition [One] assumes that there was once an older historical report which was later supplem ented w ith materials drawn from scriptural prophecy___ There are, h ow ever, serious objections to this hypothesis. Form, structure, and life situation o f such a historical passion report and its transmission have never been clarified. T h e alternative is m ore convincing: In the beginning there was only the belief that Jesu s' suffering, death, and burial, as w ell as his resurrection, happened "according to the Scriptures" (i C or 15:3-4). The very first narratives about Jesus’ suffering and death w ould not have made the attempt to rem em ber what actu­ ally happened. Rather, they w ould have found both the rationale and the con­ tent o f Je su s’ suffering and death in the m em ory o f those passages in the Psalms and the Prophets which spoke about the suffering o f the righteou s.. . . [In] the teaching and preaching o f the earliest Christian communities . . . the passion o f Jesu s from the very beginning w as probably never told without the fram ework o f such scriptural reference. Helmut Koester, "Apocryphal and Canonical Gospels,” pp. 127-128 It is inconceivable that they [the T w elve] show ed no concern about what happened to Jesu s after the arrest. True, there is no Christian claim that they w ere present during the legal proceedings against him, Jew ish or Roman; but it is absurd to think that som e information was not available to them about w h y Jesu s w as hanged on a c ro s s .. . . Thus from the earliest days available historical raw material could have been developed into a PN [passion narrative] extending from the arrest to the burial, no matter what form it might receive in the course o f evangelistic use and h ow it might have been embellished and added to by Christian imagination. Som e scholars, how ever, insist that the evangelistic enter­ prise means that Christians had no interest in historical raw material w hether or not it w as a vaila b le .. . . T h e first followers o f Jesus w ould have know n many things about crucifixion in general and alm ost surely som e o f the details about Jesu s’ crucifixion, e.g., w hat kind o f cross w as em ployed. Nevertheless, w hat is preserved in the narrative is m ostly w hat echoes Scripture (division o f garments, offering o f vinegary wine, final words ofjesus). Raymond E. Brown, The Death o f the Messiah, pp. 14-15 In Parts VII and VIII o f this book the life and program o f the historical Jesus w as traced through the Com m on Sayings Tradition and into its separate redac­ tions in the Q Gospel and the Gospel o f Thomas. Those texts reflected prim arily the voice o f the itinerants, the prophetic radicals w h o cited Je su s’ w ays and w ords in

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justification o f their own lives. T h eir necessary correlatives w ere the household­ ers, such as those in the Didache, w h o accepted the prophetic challenge but also controlled its disruptive radicality. W hat is m ost striking th roughout that entire trajectory is its complete silence about the death and resurrection o f Jesu s. The tradition studied in Parts IX and X, while em phatically interested in Je su s' death and resurrection, is equally silent about his life and program . In C hapter 23 I noted that the Com m on Meal Tradition links both those trajectories at a very profound level, possibly even the most profound level. In Chapters 25 and 26 I look at another profound linkage betw een those tw in trajectories, n o w not with regard to meal but with regard to story. It is not a story o f Je su s' individual perse­ cution and vindication, since that is present only in the passion-resurrection tra­ dition. It is a story, in mythic hym n and biographical narrative, o f collective perse­ cution and collective vindication. In this final Part X, the focus is on the story about the death and resurrection o f Jesus. There are always tw o aspects under discussion; separate but connected, they must be studied in this order: sources and origins. T h e first question: W hat dependent and independent sources do w e have fo r this story o f Je su s' death and resurrection? The second question: W hat origins m ust be postulated to explain the source relationships revealed? Those questions m ust be approached in that order, because any conclusion on origins will be based on the an sw er on sources. If, for example, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Joh n, and the Gospel o f Peter w e re identi­ fied as five independent sources for that story, origins w o u ld be interpreted in one w ay. If, how ever, those five versions w ere all traced to a single line o f dependent and copied tradition, very different origins w o u ld h ave to be pro­ posed. Furthermore, just as the Gospel o f Thomas w as crucial fo r an understand­ ing o f the tradition o f Jesu s’ life, so the Gospel o f Peter is crucial fo r the tradition o f Jesu s' death. One is the fifth gospel for the Life Tradition; the other is the fifth gospel for the Death Tradition. Chapter 25 asks tw o questions. First, is there a consecutively narrated and canonically independent account o f the death and resurrection o f Jesu s now em bedded in the Gospel o f Peter? That first italicized phrase— consecutively nar­ rated— excludes random and disconnected units o f tradition. It asks about a sequential story with a beginning, middle, and end, w ith integrity as a text, iden­ tity as a genre, and depth as a theology. T h at second italicized phrase— canoni­ cally independent— excludes dependence on our present fo u r canonical gospels. (There is no presum ption that such an account w o u ld thereby be historically m ore accurate or theologically m ore profound than one or all o f the canonicals.) T h e second question is a far wider one: W here does such a story com e from? Is it, in m y term s, history remembered— that is, a record, h o w ev e r adapted and devel­ oped, o f w h at happened to Jesu s such as a cam era m ight h ave recorded were

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such available at the time? Or is it, again in m y terms, prophecy historicized— that is, the brute facts o f execution made into story from a tissue o f biblical texts, types, patterns, and models on all levels o f the narrative? Chapter 26 depends directly on the answers given to those tw o questions in the preceding chapter. If all is basically history remembered, then o f course it inevitably appears as story. Not all story is history, but all history is story. One w ould not ask, in that understanding, W hy is the passion-resurrection account a story? W hat else could it be? But if you understand it as prophecy historicized, then a n ew question presses hard on that interpretation: W hy or h ow did it ever becom e such a story? W hat or w ho turned exegesis into narrative? A few w ords about the two-part epigraph above. First, there are three con­ tem porary N orth Am erican scholars involved in those paragraphs: Brown, Koester, and myself. I intend here, as mentioned earlier, to continue the debate betw een those three authors throughout this Part X. I will underline where we disagree, especially where such disagreement is profound and intractable. But I want to see also w hether there are any glimm ers o f agreement or any possibili­ ties o f understanding betw een our opposing opinions. Second, bew are the rhetoric o f that second epigraph. T h e opening phrase o f Raym ond B row n's quotation— “ showed no concern” — confuses the issue, which is not concern but knowledge. W hat did Jesu s’ companions know about the passion events? T h e issue is further confused when Brow n (in text not included above) interweaves concern and knowledge, first denying that "the earliest followers o f Jesus knew or cared nothing about what happened” (16) and then refusing to descend “ into the nihilism o f assuming that no w riter knew or cared about any­ thing that happened in Jesu s’ passion” (1361 note 20, m y italics). It is not a ques­ tion o f care or o f concern. It is a question o f what Jesus' companions knew and, more important, w hat they needed to express in the passion-resurrection story. Furthermore, going back to the epigraph, the debate is not over could but over did, not over w hat could have happened but what, in one’s best historical recon­ struction, did happen. Finally, in Chapters 25 and 26 m y focus is always on the story o f the passion and resurrection. B y story I mean a consecutive narrative and not ju st a confes­ sional statement. By passion and resurrection I mean a story that alw ays includes both accusation and justification, danger and deliverance, persecution and vindi­ cation, defeat and triumph. Even i f there w ere earlier stages w hen the emphasis was not on a crucified person resurrected by God, the story w as alw ays about an innocent one vindicated b y God. It was never, never, never sim ply a passion story. W henever, therefore, in these final chapters, I speak o f the story, it is always an abbreviation for the passion-vindication story.

CHAPTER 2j

T H E O TH E R PASSIONR E S U R R E C T I O N ST OR Y [1] G P e t. . . had a source besides Matt, namely, a m ore developed account o f the guard at the tomb. (That point is also supported b y the consecutiveness o f the story in GPet.) T h e supplying o f the centurion’s name, the seven seals, the stone rolling o ff by itself, the account o f the resurrection with the gigan­ tic figures, the talking cross, the confession o fjesu s as G o d ’s Son by the Je w ­ ish authorities, and their fear o f their ow n people— all those elements could plausibly have been in the m ore developed form o f the story known to the author o f GPet and absent from the form known to Matt. [2] GPet had [no] written Gospel before him, although he w as familiar with M att because he had read it carefully in the past an d /o r had heard it read several times in com m unity worship on the Lord's Day, so that it gave the dom inant shaping to his thought. Most likely he had heard people speak w h o w ere fam iliar with the Gospels o f Luke an djohn — perhaps traveling preachers w h o rephrased salient stories— so that he knew some o f their con­ tents but had little idea o f their stru ctu re.. . . I see no com pelling reason to think that the author o f GPet was directly influenced b y Mark. Raymond E. Brown, The Death o f the Messiah, pp, 1307, 1334-1335 Raym ond Brow n is extremely clear on his source presuppositions for the pas­ sion-resurrection story. First, with regard to the three synoptic gospels: "M ark is the oldest o f the Synoptic Gospels and . . . Matt and Luke drew the outline, sub­ stance, and m uch o f the wording o f their PNs [passion narratives] from M ark's" (1994:40). Second, w ith regard to the synoptics an d jo h n : "I shall w ork w ith the thesis that Jo h n w rote his PN [passion narrative] independently o f M ark’s" (1994:82). T here are, in other words, tw o independent and consecutive written sources for the story, one in M ark and the other in John. I agree w ith Brow n on the synoptic gospels. T h at position, as he said, is "clearly the m ajority vie w am ong scholars" (1994:40). I explained that v ie w in Chapter 8 as the first o f m y six m ajor source presuppositions in this book. I dis­ agree with him on his second position, how ever. T here is n ow a split in scholar­ ship about Jo h n 's dependence on or independence from the synoptic gospels, and Brow n and I com e dow n on opposite sides o f that debate. As I explained in

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that same Chapter 8, John’s dependence on the synoptics for its passion-resurrection story is m y third m ajor source presupposition in this book. But the final source decision on the passion-resurrection story is the relationship o f the extracanonical Gospel o f Peter to the intracanonical gospels. T h at w ill be m y sixth m ajor source presupposition in this book. I focus, in this chapter, on the points w here B ro w n and I com e closest together on that relationship. I show Brow n’s position in the epigraph ju st above, numerically emphasizing its main components. W e actually agree on tw o basic points. First, the Gospel o f Peter is a late and com posite docum ent— that is, a second-century composition that includes both intracanonical and extracanonical sources. Second, the Gospel o f Peter contains a consecutive and canonically inde­ pendent source that constitutes about h alf its content. O nce again, as alw ays, and for everyone: w rong on sources, w rong on reconstructions.

Composite Document [In the Gospel o f Peter] old statements are suppressed, or w ilfu lly perverted and displaced: new statements are introduced w hich b ear their condem na­ tion on their faces. Nothing is left as it was before. H ere is "H istory as it should be” : “Lines left out” o f the old familiar records. A nd no one w h o will take the pains to compare sentence by sentence, w o rd b y w ord , the n ew "Lines left out” w ith the old "Line upon Line,” w ill fail to return to the Four Gospels with a sense o f relief at his escape from the stifling prison o f preju­ dice into the transparent and the bracing atm osphere o f pure sim plicity and undesigning candour.,. . . And so the n ew facts are ju st w h at they should be, i f the Church’s universal tradition as to the suprem e and unique position o f the Four Canonical Gospels is still to be sustained b y historical criticism. J. Armitage Robinson, "The Gospel According to Peter,” pp. 3 1-3 1 One hundred years after that som ew hat strident assessm ent o f the Gospel o f Peter, Brow n gives a much m ore balanced sum m ary: " GPet is a gospel reflecting popular Christianity, i.e., the Christianity o f the ordinary people not in the m ajor center o f Antioch, where public reading and preaching w ou ld have exercised greater control, but in the smaller towns o f Syria___ GPet w as not heterodox, but it incorporated many imaginative elements that w en t beyon d the canonical g o s p e ls .. . . [It] belatedly supplied us w ith a fascinating insight into h o w dram ati­ cally som e ordinary Christians o f the early 2nd cent, w ere portraying the death o f the Messiah. Beneath the drama, in its ow n w a y GPet proclaim ed that Jesu s was the divine Lord, victor over all that his enemies could do to him b y crucifixion (1345-1348). W hat, in between those opposite reactions, is the Gospel o f Peter?

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It is not a necessary hypothesis, like the Q Gospel, but an extant text, like the Gospel o f Thomas. It exists in the Codex Panopolitanus or Codex Cairensis 10759, a large fragm ent o f sixty verses copied onto a parchment codex dated betw een the seventh and ninth centuries, which was discovered at ancient Panopolis in Egypt, and published separately in 1892 by Urbain Bouriant and Adolfe Lods. It also exists as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2949, tw o tiny scroll fragments o f three verses dated to the late second or early third centuries, discovered at ancient O xyrhynchus in Egypt, and published by R. A. Coles in 1972. Careful com par­ isons o f both texts have been made by Dieter Luhrm ann (1981) and Ja y Treat (1990). It is clear that there are differences in the com m on material between those tw o versions, but few er than, for instance, in the com m on material betw een the G reek and Coptic versions o f the Gospel o f Thomas or the Greek and C optic versions o f the Didache. In all cases, w e have to w ork, how ever tenta­ tively and hypothetically, with what w e have available. T h e larger text w as already fragmentary even w hen copied along with other texts into a pocket-book for eternity buried in the grave o f a Christian monk. It begins in the middle o f Jesus' trial and ends at the start o f what might be a risen apparition at the Sea o f Galilee. Since that broken-off ending mentions “ I, Simon Peter,” the docum ent has been equated by scholars w ith that against which Bishop Serapion o f Antioch w rote his treatise on The So-Called Gospel o f Peter in the last decade o f the second century. Eusebius o f Caesarea says that Serapion "w rote to refute the lies in that document, which had induced some members o f the Christian com m unity at Rhossus to go astray into heterodox teachings.” But he then cites a long paragraph from Serapion that indicates a som ewhat more am biguous judgm ent (W illiamson 252): I have been able to go through the book and draw the conclusion that while most o f it accorded w ith the authentic teaching o f the Saviour, som e pas­ sages w ere spurious additions. (History o f the Church 6.12) Am biguity, one could say, w as destined to stalk this text from its first nota­ tion, and Serapion’s ambivalence still hangs over it like a cloud. Scholars even have a distinctive w a y o f citing it: by chapter and verse, yes— but, unlike canoni­ cal citations, the verses continue across chapters. W e have, for example, Gospel o f Peter 8:28-33 follow ed by 9:34-37 follow ed b y 10:38-42, and so on. Since its publication in 1892, the first and narrow er scholarly question has been the relationship betw een the Gospel o f Peter and the canonical gospels. But there is also a second and w ider question. W hat w as the redactional purpose o f the author? N o m atter h ow one answers the first question, the second m ust also

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b e addressed. If, for example, it w as a later condensed version o f the canonical versions, what is the logic o f its conflation: w h y w as this om itted, this changed, and this added; what is the compositional intention o f the final product? H o w have scholars answered that first question across the last one hundred years? Individuals have advocated each one o f the three logically possible posi­ tions. First, the Gospel o f Peter is canonically dependent. Second, the Gospel o f Peter is both canonically dependent and canonically independent— that is, it contains both intracanonical and extracanonical traditions. Third, the Gospel o f Peter is canonically independent. I underline that triple response because it is often sum m arized as only a double one o f dependence or independence. Actually, those first two options were there right from the start. The third option arrived m uch later. First, the Gospel o f Peter is canonically dependent. T h at is the position o f the Cambridge scholar J. Armitage Robinson, quoted in the epigraph above. His 'le c ­ ture on the ‘Gospel according to Peter was given in the Hall o f Christ’s College on the 20th o f November, three days after the text w as first seen in Cam bridge,” and the Preface o f its published version was dated D ecem ber 1— all in 1892, the very same year that Bouriant and Lods published the prelim inary transcription o f the newly discovered text (7-8). Robinson decided on “ the unmistakable acquaintance o f the author with our Four Evangelists___ He uses and misuses each in turn____ He uses our Greek Gospels; there is no p ro o f (though the possibility o f course is always open) that he knew o f any Gospel record other than these” (32-33). Second, the Gospel o f Peter is both canonically dependent and canonically independent. It conflates both intracanonical and extracanonical traditions. I entided this section “ Com posite D ocum ent” to em phasize that second option. T h e position was staked out (almost as speedily as the first) b y the Berlin profes­ sor A dolf von Hamack. His addresses on the Gospel o f Peter to the Prussian Academ y o f Sciences w ere given on N ovem ber 3 and 10, and his b o o k ’s Preface has a publication date o f Decem ber 15— again in 1892. First, vo n H a m a ck con­ cludes that the Gospel o f Peter contains data from the intracanonical gospels, but it is unclear from his comments w hether such data w ere obtained b y direct literary borrow ing, by indirect oral knowledge, or sim ply b y the use o f com m on tradi­ tions. He concludes, second, that the relationship w ith M ark is m ost probable, that w ith M atthew is less probable, and the order o f declining probability contin­ u es w ith Luke and then Joh n or even Jo h n and then Luke. Third, he claim s that the text also contains independent traditions that “ should n ot be collectively dis­ m issed even over against their intracanonical counterparts” (47). It w as Robinson w h o divided the document into fourteen m ini-chapters and H am ack w ho divided it into sixty verses. Every time w e cite the text w e com bine their sepa­ rate divisions and recall that inaugural division o f opinion about it. Third, the Gospel o f Peter is canonically independent. O ver thirty years after

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Robinson's trenchant dismissal o f the gospel's value, Percival Gardner-Smith’s com m ents w ere just as biting. "A book so absurd and fantastic seems unworthy o f serious attention" (1925-19263:255). The author o f that gospel, noted GardnerSmith, "had m any faults, he was credulous, muddle-headed, incompetent, and possibly heretical" (1925-1926^407). Nevertheless, despite those criticisms, GardnerSmith's tw o articles argued that "the strength o f the evidence for the dependence o f 'P eter' upon the canonical gospels has been greatly overestimated, and on the other hand, not enough has been made o f the independent features o f the Petrine narrative which are very difficult to explain on the hypothesis o f literary dependence” (1925-19263:270). He concluded that the Gospel o f Peter "did not know the w o rk o f Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jo h n " but that Peter and they w orked from “ the floating traditions with which they w ere familiar and made o f them the best narratives they could" (1925-19263:270). W ith that contention, all three possible positions are in place. And I emphasize, once again, that there are three such positions, not just the usually highlighted first and third. There are three positions, to be sure, but the first position has always been the dom inant or m ajority viewpoint. The first option, dependence, appears in older com m entaries (from Swete in 1893 through Vaganay in 1930 to Mara in 1973) and in m ore recent review articles (from Green in 1987 and Neirynck in 1991 through Charlesworth and Evans in 1994 to Kirk in 1994 and Van Voorst in 1995). T h e third option, independence, is clearly a minority opinion. It appears espe­ cially from D enker in 1975 through Koester in 1980a and 1990a (and his students, Johnson in 1965 and Hutton in 1970) to D ew ey in 1989,1990, and 1995. The second option, conflation o f dependence and independence, is a minority amid a minor­ ity opinion. W hy, then, do I even bother arguing it against such a strong oppos­ ing majority? Put another w ay, what would persuade me that the first, m ajority option is correct? W hat w ould falsify the second or third options for me? M y answ er is simple. This w ould persuade me: any adequate explanation o f h ow an author got from one or m ore o f the canonical gospels to the Gospel o f Peter as n o w extant. W h y and h ow was it actually composed? You will recall from Chapter 8 that genetic relationship and redactional confirmation are the criteria norm ally used for arguing a source. First, do you find canonical

dna

pres­

ent in the Gospel o f Peter? I m yself answer yes to that question, but I see genetic evidence in only certain parts o f it. Second, what about all the rest? W hat is the redactional purpose or editorial intention o f the whole? T w o possible redactional explanations are, for example, the vagaries o f m em ory an d/or the needs o f theology. The form er solution, redaction b y m em ­ ory (discussed earlier in Chapters 2 and 8), is Brow n's answer. M y objection is still the same. E ven bad m em ory has its logic, so w h y does the Gospel o f Peter com e out the w a y it does? W hy, especially, does it rem em ber so m uch material

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that w as never canonically present in the first place? T h e latter solution, redac­ tion b y theology, has two main possibilities. One is D ocetism , the desire to diminish the reality o f Jesu s’ bodily existence, a problem yo u w ill recall from Chapter 2. But, if that was the plan, it was, as Je rry M cC ant has show n, a rather dism al failure. Another and much m ore plausible intention is anti-Judaism. In other words, the Gospel o f Peter m ay omit, conflate, and expand the canonical gospels to increase the attack on som e other Je w s or even on all other Jew s except those for whom it was written. I leave that possible intention aside for n ow but will return to it in detail below. In books published in 1988 and 1995, 1 argued three connected but separable points about the Gospel o f Peter. I give them in w h at I consider the ascending order o f historical and theological importance. First, the Gospel o f Peter is a careful combination o f tw o passion-resurrection stories, an extracanonical one (where Jesus was buried by his enemies, to w h om he later appeared) and an intracanonical one (where he was buried by his/rienAnd at the same hour the veil o f the temple in Jerusalem w as rent in tw o. 6:11And then they drew the nails from the hands o f the L o rd and laid him on the earth. And the w hole earth shook and there cam e a great fear. 6:22Then the sun shone (again), and it w as found to be the ninth hour. (Gospel o f Peter 1:1-6:22)

T w o comments on that unit. First, it is exactly the story needed to explain how Jesus died and w hy his tomb needed guarding. T h e Rom ans have nothing at all to do with the condemnation or crucifixion. It is done under H erod’s com m and in 1:2 but by “the people" in 2:5b. After the m iraculous death signs, h ow ever, there is a breach between "all the people” and the Jew ish authorities in 8:28. T h at results in the latter’s fear that, if the disciples manage to revive Je su s’ body, people might “ suppose that he is risen from the dead and do us harm " in 8:30. So the tomb is guarded, Roman and Jewish authorities see the actual resurrection, and the latter plead for a cover-up lest “ they fall into the hands o f the people o f the Je w s and be stoned" in 11:48. There may be, I repeat, another and n o w com pletely lost first part o f that consecutive and independent source in Gospel o f Peter 8:28-11:49, but the m ost economical solution is that it is Gospel o f Peter 1:1-6:22. M y second comment concerns that section in 2:3-53 italicized above. It is exactly the same redactional device seen earlier in 11:44 about w hose function Brow n and I agreed. There it served as an authorial preparation for joining the extracanonical guards-at-the-tomb story with the intracanonical women-at-thetom b story. Here it serves as an authorial preparation for jo in in g the extracanonical Herod-in-charge and burial-by-enemies story w ith the intracanonical Pilate-incharge and burial-by-friends story. That extracanonical source in 1:1- 2 and 2:5b-6:22 had the Jew ish authorities burying Jesus out o f obedience to Deuteronom y 21:22-23, which forbids crucified bodies on crosses overnight. T h at intracanonical

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source follows immediately after 1:1-6:22 in 6:23-24 as the account o f Jesus' burial by Joseph o f Arimathea, which is canonically derivative (because the "linen" from Mark 15:46 = Matthew 27:59 = Luke 23:53 is in Gospel o f Peter 6:24a and the "garden" from Joh n 20:41 is in Gospel o f Peter 6:24b). Here are the parallel redactional devices: Consecutive extracanonical source:

1-2 and 2:5b-6:22

8:28-11:42 and 11:45-49

Preparatory redactional linkage:

2:2-58

11:43-44

Consecutive intracanonical source:

6:23-24

12:50-13:5

I argue, therefore, for the same redactional hand and sam e authorial purpose behind both those complexes. M y ow n proposed Cross Gospel source (by whatever name) involved a threeact drama: T h e first act is the Crucifixion and Deposition in 1:1-2 and 2:sb-6:22. The second act is the Tom b and Guards in 7:25 and 8:28-9:34. The third act is the Resurrection and Confession in 9:35-10:42 and 11:45-49. Brow n has accepted the last tw o o f those acts, and must presume some initial first act (which I claim is most econom ically present right there in the Gospel o f Peter itself).

Anti-Jewish Text T h e people as a w hole [pas ho laos] answered, “ His blood be on us and on our children!" Matthew 27:25 W hen the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, "C ertainly this m an was innocent [dikaios]/’ And w hen all the crowds w ho had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned hom e, beating their breasts [ta stethe hypestrephon]. Luke 23:47-48 All the people [ho laos hapas] w ere m urm uring and beating their breasts [koptetai ta stethe], saying, "If at his death these exceeding great signs have com e to pass, behold h ow righteous [dikaios] he w as!” Gospel o f Peter 8:28I I return n ow to a point mentioned above but postponed until now . Is that proposed source within the Gospel o f Peter (which I call the Cross Gospel fo r easy reference) intensely anti-Jewish? That is asserted repeatedly in the scholarly liter­ ature, although it is seldom clear whether "anti-Jewish” m eans Christian pagans w h o are against Je w s or Christian Je w s w h o are against all other Je w s except themselves. I think m yself that "anti-Jewish" should be used only w h en speaking

i

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o f pagans or ex-Jews who attack or oppose Judaism . I w ill use the term "antiJe w ish ” here, how ever, because others do so and I have to discuss their claims. But w hat exactly ¿s the proper term for a statem ent such as this from Paul to his Thessalonian converts? For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators o f the churches o f God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for yo u suffered the sam e things from your ow n compatriots as they did from the Je w s, w h o killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease G o d and oppose every­ one by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they m ay be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the m easure o f their sins; but God's wrath has overtaken them at last, (i Thessalonians 2:14-16) Both persecutors and persecuted in Thessalonica are Thessalonians. Both persecutors and persecuted in Judaea w ere Je w s. Paul is surely not “ anti-Jewish” or even “ anti-Judean"; but, even though “ the churches o f G o d in Christ Jesu s that are in Judea” included Judaean Jew s, Paul uses the term “Je w s ” in a sw eep­ ing and indiscriminate manner. “Je w s ” com es to m ean all those other bad Je w s except us (few?) good ones. Be that as it m ay, I return to the claim that the Gospel o f Peter is intensely m ore anti-Jewish than the canonical gospels, especially w here that claim is an explanation for its redactional content and authorial intention. Three examples will suffice. SA D IST S A N D H Y P O C R IT E S The first example is from an article by Alan Kirk. H e proposes that the Gospel o f Peter reads rather than remembers the canonical gospels and changes, adds, or omits from them for “special religious concerns” that “have coerced the narrative in its ow n distinctive directions” (574). Or again: “T h e author w as driven b y special con­ cerns and tendencies which guided the production o f the narrative and led to the reshaping o f the Lukan (and Matthean, Markan, and Johannine) material” (577). Those concerns, directions, and tendencies w ere to increase the anti-Jewishness o f the story. Thus, in the story o f the good thief, the author is "driven b y an antiJew ish Tendenz___ [T]he intention was to focus on the evil actions o f the Je w s . . . to focus the narrative upon the ‘villainous Je w s’" (578 and note 23); it is "sadistic, hard-hearted Jew s w ho inhabit the narrative” (582). And, in the story o f the non­ breaking o fje su s’ legs, the author "is interested in putting the Je w s in as bad a light as possible” so that "the Jew s are depicted as the cruel torturers and m urderers o f Jesu s and as dour legalists" (582). That, if it works, is a com plete redactional explana­ tion o f the Gospel o f Peter. The author reads “the texts o f the N e w Testam ent gospels" (574) and conflates them selectively for greater anti-Jewishness.

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T h e second example is from The Death o f the Messiah once again. For Brown, the Gospel o f Peter is more anti-Jewish than any o f the canonical gospels, a feature that indicates that it is later than they are, is popular rather than official, and is also heterodox rather than orthodox. Here are a few representative examples; "In the later GPet, where one finds a popularization freer from the controls o f the standardized preaching and teaching discernible in much o f Matt, the antijewish feeling is even m ore unnuanced" (63). Again: "This w ork . . . is sharply more antijew ish than the canonical Gospels" (834). And again: "Th e antijewish senti­ m ent . . . is m uch more prominent in GPet than in the canonical Gospels” (1065). Finally: “ I w ould hope that today Christians w ould recognize another heterodox tendency in GPet: its intensified antijewish depictions” (1347 note 62). T h e third example is from a doctoral dissertation by Susan Schaeffer. She finds the anti-Jewish tone even more virulent than does Brown. This is very important, because that tone determines for her the document's function and set­ ting in the second century. Here are a few examples. (Notice especially the final one.) "T h e Je w s are revealed as cruel, murderous, hypocritical, and stupid” (i99ia:226). Again: "[T]he GosPet’s portrait o f the Je w s is scathing. T hey are depicted as being sadistic, foolish, and hypocritical” (244). Finally: “The GosPet also implies that the Jew ish leaders themselves might have believed in the resur­ rection but that they are afraid o f being stoned b y the Je w s (11:49)» that is by those w h o have not becom e apostates [Christians].. . . In their last official act in the gospel (as far as w e know it), the Jew ish leaders seem w eak and almost pitiable. In the background, behind their actions, stands a murderous, faceless force o f apostate-hating Jew s. If actual persecution is in the background, the GosPet could have com e from the post-Bar Cochba period, ca. 135-140 c.E.” (254-255). JE W IS H A U T H O R IT Y A G A IN S T JE W IS H P E O PL E I have tw o basic arguments against those assertions o f increased anti-Jewish­ ness in the Gospel o f Peter. M y first argument is that they are flatly w rong. Focus, for example, on the three acts in that consecutive source I call the Cross Gospel in the text given above: Act 1: Crucifixion and Deposition

“

Gos. Pet. 1:1- 2 and 2:5b—6:22

Act 2: Tom b and Guards

=

Gos. Pet. 7:25 and 8:28-9:34

A ct3: Resurrection and Confession

— Gos. Pet. 9:35-10:42 and 11:45-49

In Act 1 it is “ the Je w s ” and not the Rom ans w h o condem n Jesu s, it is H erod not Pilate w h o is in charge o f the crucifixion, and it is "th e (Jew ish) people" not the Rom an soldiers w h o abuse and execute him. O nly here is Pilate fully inno­ cent and capable o f true hand-washing, a gesture som ew hat hypocritical in

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M atthew ’s account, where he supplies the executioners. So far claim s o f increased anti-Jewishness and increased pro-Romanism seem absolutely correct. And if the story stopped at that point, the Gospel o f Peter w ould certainly be the m ost antiJe w ish o f the five passion accounts. It is the Jew ish "people,” after all, w ho directly crucifyjesus! But then, at the start o f Act 2, som ething very strange happens— som ething that m ust be read within the unfolding narrative developm ent. W ithout that "popular” crucifixion, this second step w ould not have happened. T h e m ar­ velous signs at the death ofjesu s result in this reaction: Then the Je w s and the elders and the priests, perceiving w h at great evil they had done to themselves, began to lam ent and to say, "W o e on ou r sins, the judgm ent and the end ofjeru salem is drawn nigh.” (Gospel o f Peter 7:25) At this point all participants recognize that they have done som ething evil. But, as Act 2 continues, that acknowledgm ent begets a split b etw een Je w ish authorities and Jew ish people. The authorities know they h ave done w ron g, know that they will be punished; but, far from being repentant, they seek guards from Pilate for Jesu s’ tomb lest the people harm them (in, as noted, a v e ry aw kw ard sentence): But the scribes and Pharisees and elders, being assem bled together and hear­ ing that all the people w ere m urm uring and beating their breasts, saying, “ If at his death these exceeding great signs have com e to pass, behold h o w righ­ teous he was!” — The elders w ere afraid and cam e to Pilate, entreating him and saying, "G ive us soldiers that w e m ay w atch his sepulchre fo r three days, lest his disciples come and steal him aw ay and the people suppose that he is risen from the dead, and do us harm .” (Gospel o f Peter 8:28-30) N otice, by the w ay, the logic o f their position. W h y "fo r three days” ? I agree w ith B row n ’s interpretation: "In the GPet storyline the w ish to safeguard the burial place Tor three days’ (8:30) need im ply only that after such a period the im poster w ou ld surely be dead” (1994:1309 note 55). Recall this different version: T h e ch ief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, "Sir, w e rem em ber w h at that im postor said while he w as still alive, ‘A fter three days I w ill rise again.' Therefore command the tom b to be m ade secure until the third day; otherw ise his disciples m ay go and steal him aw ay, and tell the people, ‘H e has been raised from the dead,’ and the last deception w o u ld be w o rse than the first.” (M atthew 27:6215-64)

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O nly in Matthean redaction at Matthew 12:38-40 have the authorities heard Je su s’ three-day resurrection prophecy— a developm ent that allow s a quite dif­ ferent logic. There a three-day watch is necessary lest the disciples steal the corpse and “ tell the people" a lie about resurrection. In Gospel o f Peter 8:30 the problem is quite different. Only after three days— that is, on the fourth day, as w ith Lazarus in Joh n 11:17— is someone surely and certainly dead. Guards are needed until that point o f possible resuscitation is securely past. If the disciples w ere to resuscitate Jesus (or so it goes in the minds o f the authorities), the people, in their present state o f mind, might assume resurrection. Th ey would not even need to be told by the disciples! Because o f the repenting people, then, the Je w ish authorities enlist Rom an help in guarding the tomb. A crucial distinction is now established between Jew ish authorities and Je w ­ ish people, and this distinction reaches a climax in Act 3. Both Rom an and Jewish authorities are actually at the tomb and witness the resurrection o f Jesus. The Rom an authorities confess Jesus, but the Jew ish authorities conspire with Pilate to deceive their ow n people: Then all cam e to him, beseeching him [Pilate] and urgently calling upon him to com m and the centurion and the soldiers to tell no one what they had seen. "F o r it is better for us," they said, “ to make ourselves guilty o f the greatest sin before G od than to fall into the hands o f the people o f the Jew s and be stoned." Pilate therefore commanded the centurion and the soldiers to say nothing. (Gospel o f Peter 11:47-49) A story m ust be read in its narrative entirety, from “the people” in 2:5b through “ all the people" in 8:28 and into "the people o f the Je w s" in 11:48. T h e result o f this consecutive account is, first, to make “the people” extrem ely guilty; next, to make them extrem ely repentant; and, last, to make them extrem ely dan­ gerous to their ow n authorities. I reject categorically Schaeffer's interpretation o f that last cited unit. She claims that the Jew ish authorities are afraid to acknowl­ edge the resurrection lest their ow n people stone them for becom ing, as it w ere, Christian apostates. That is profoundly w ron g and reads the text against its ow n narrative logic. T h e Jewish authorities actually believe in the resurrection, because they witness it. But they decide to com mit the terrible sin (which they admit is such) o f not announcing that triumph lest the Jewish people stone their ow n authorities for leading them astray over Jesu s’ crucifixion. M y reading o f the Gospel o f Peter, therefore, is that it is m ore anti-Jewish with regard to the authorities than any o f the canonical gospels b ut also m ore proJew ish w ith regard to the people than any o f them. I do not, o f course, take that as straightforward history. It is religious polemics and theological apologetics.

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Still, it confirm s that anti-Jewishness is not an adequate explanation o f the Gospel o f Peter's redactional purpose. L et m e repeat the narrative core o f that account, w h ich sets Je w ish people and Je w ish authorities in opposition to one another. It is not sim ply a m atter o f onlookers repenting, as in m y epigraph from Luke 23:47. It is a story about the Je w ­ ish authorities knowing the truth o f Jesus' resurrection and lying to protect themselves from their own people, who are dangerously ready to believe such an event. N arrative logic holds closely to that basic theme. The authorities lead the people into cruci­ fying Jesus. All see the death miracles and recognize w h at they have done. T h e people repent and strike their breasts. Seeing that, the authorities obtain Rom an soldiers and guard the tomb. Because o f that, they are there to w itness the resurrection-ascension o f Jesus leading out from H ades those other h oly Je w s w ho died before him. Know ing the full truth, and afraid lest those they led astray— that is, "the people o f the Je w s "— m ight stone them , they obtain a coverup from the Rom an authorities. That is the story, and it is alm ost im possible to break up its consecutive cohesion. But there is nothing w h atso ever like that in the canonical gospels. I turn next to a scriptural pattern or biblical m odel through w hich that story could have been developed. This generic paradigm w as proposed to explain M arks passion-resurrection account. M y point is that it explains the Cross Gospel just as w ell (or even better).

Biblical Model T h e protagonist is a wise man in a royal court. M aliciously accused o f violat­ ing the law o f the land, he is condemned to death. But he is rescued at the brink o f death, vindicated o f the charges against him , and exalted to a high position (sometimes vizier, sometimes ju dge or executioner o f his enemies), w h ile his enemies are punished.. . . In the W isdom o f S o lo m o n and the ear­ lier stages o f the tradition that can be extrapolated from it, three im portant changes occur. 1) T h e exaltation scene is greatly expanded through the use o f m aterials from Isaiah 13,14 , and 52-53. 2) T h e protagonist is, in fact, put to death. 3) H e is exalted to the heavenly court, w h ere he serves as a vice­ regent o f the heavenly king. The roots o f those latter tw o developm ents are inherent in the servant theology o f Second Isaiah. George Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Im m o rtality, a n d E te rn a l L ife in In tertesta m en ta l J u d a is m , p. 170 In his 1967 H arvard dissertation, published in 1972, N ickelsburg drew atten­ tion to a generic pattern in Jew ish texts involving the persecution and vindica­ tion o f righteous or innocent people. T h e archetypal m odel w as, h ow ever, the

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pagan Story o f Ahiqar, “ one o f the best known and m ost w idely disseminated tales in the ancient Mediterranean world," with manuscript evidence dating back to the fifth century

b .c .e .

(OTP 2.479). Ahiqar w as a scholarly minister under

Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, seventh-century monarchs o f the Assyrian Empire. W hen his nephew Nadin falsely accused him o f treason, he escaped death only because the executioner owed him a favor. He was later vindicated and restored to pow er, and the evil Nadin was punished. It is a story o f innocence vindicated, in a court situation where the king eventually restores the innocent one and pun­ ishes the guilty one. T W O V A R IA T IO N S O N V IN D IC A T IO N Pagan m odel and Jew ish imagination combined to create tw o different varia­ tions on that archetype. The key distinction is w hether vindication happens in the present or in the future, before or after death. T h e first variation is present in these seven cases: Joseph accused by Potipar’s w ife in Genesis 39-41; Tobit accused by “ one o f the m en o f Nineveh" in Tobit 1:18-22; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego accused by “ certain Chaldeans" in Daniel 3; Daniel him self accused by “the presidents and the satraps" in Daniel 6; “ all Je w s ” accused by Haman in Esther 3; Susanna accused by the elders in Susanna; and Egyptian Je w s accused b y the king him self in 3 Maccabees 3. In all those w isdom tales, those falsely accused are saved before death by divine assis­ tance or miraculous intervention. T h e second variation is present in three cases. One is the Suffering Servant o f Isaiah 52-53, seen already in Chapter 23. Another is the m artyrdom o f the m other 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 o f the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal o f life" in 7:9, or "the Creator o f the world . . . will in his m ercy give life and breath back to you again" in 7:23. A final case is in Wisdom 2-5, w hich uses Isaiah 52-53 to criticize that classical deliverance from death before death, replacing it with deliverance from death after death. "W isdom 2:4-5 differs from the w isdom tale and agrees w ith Isaiah 52-53/’ as Nickelsburg says. “ In the w isdom tales the rescue o f the hero prevents his death. In W isdom o f Solom on, he is rescued after his death" (1972:66). Here is the voice o f the ungodly persecutors in that last case: Let us see i f his w ords are true, and let us test w h at w ill happen at the end o f his life; for i f the righteous m an is G od’s child, he w ill help him , and will deliver him from the hand o f his adversaries. Let us test him w ith insult and torture, so that w e m ay find out h ow gentle he is, and m ake trial o f his

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forbearance. Let us condemn him to a sham eful death, for, according to w h at he says, he will be protected. (Wisdom 2:17-20) T h ey propose, as it were, a test case on the validity o f court tales o f divine protection for those unjustly accused. But that is not h o w G o d w orks; those are not “ the secret purposes o f God.” This is G od's approach: But the souls o f the righteous are in the hand o f God, and no torm ent will ever touch them. In the eyes o f the foolish they seem ed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their go in g from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight o f others they w ere punished, their hope is full o f im m ortality. (Wisdom 3:1-4) Persecutors will have to admit, not in this w orld but in the next, that the righteous one has “been numbered am ong the children o f G o d ” and that they themselves have "strayed from the w a y o f truth,” according to Wisdom 5i5-6's conclusion. It is probably fair to conclude that before-death vindication is older and more pervasive than after-death exaltation. In a 1980 article Nickelsburg applied all o f that to the passion story in M ark 14-15. He worked with a very com plete profile fo r the genre to which he assigned it, involving twenty-one motifs and concluded “ that alm ost all the co m ­ ponents o f our genre [the vindicated-innocence w isdom tale] are present in the Markan passion narrative” (165). T h e m ost problem atic m otifs, h ow ever, are those that involve deliverance: rescue, vindication, exaltation, and acclam ation. Nickelsburg finds those motifs realized by M ark in fo u r places. T h e first is in 15:17-18, where Roman soldiers m ock Jesu s as king o f the Je w s. T h e second is in 15:26, where the charge attached to the cross announces the king o f the Je w s. T h e third is in 15:38-39. where the Tem ple veil is tom and the R o m an centurion confesses Jesus. But the fourth place is m ost em phasized, and it has to contain three different motifs within its single verse (rescue, vindication, exaltation). Y ou will see the Son o f Man seated at the right hand o f the P o w er, and co m ­ in g w ith the clouds o f heaven. (Mark 14:62) Spoken in response to the high priest, these w ords announce both the final exaltation o f Jesu s and the final punishment o f those w h o persecute him. Nickelsburg's analysis o f M ark 14-15 is very persuasive: that is exactly h o w M ark sees Jesu s' public vindication. At the im m inent apocalyptic consum m ation, all w ill see his exaltation, but for now only believers can see it b y faith. Fo r Mark, Je su s' vindication is very close to that in Wisdom 2-5, the second o f the tw in varia­ tions o f the suffering-righteous model. Jesus is saved not before but after death, and

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persecutors will realize that fact only in the future. Since Jesu s did in fact die, the sto ry cannot, strictly speaking, be told on the model o f that first variation (where the righteous one is saved before death). Still, the Cross Gospel source in the Gospel o f Peter does the best it can to realize that first variation. Jesus dies, enters Hades to liberate ‘them that sleep," and exits at their head in the very presence o f his enem ies. T h e Jew ish authorities then "sin" by covering up the resurrection while the Rom an authorities "convert" by admitting that Jesus is the Son o f God. In term s o f generic constraints w e have, therefore, tw o investments: Suffering-righteous model (variation i, present vindication): Suffering-righteous model (variation 2, future vindication):

Cross Gospel Mark 14-15

I do not argue that one o f those variations is better than the other, but I do w an t to stress their basic difference. In addition, I w ant to raise the issue o f rela­ tionship. A re those texts simply tw o independent variations o f the basic model? T h ey are at least that, but are they more? Is M ark a criticism o f the Cross Gospel variation ju st as Wisdom 2-5 is a criticism o f the court-tale variation? I leave that question aside until the next chapter, to raise a different one here. T h ere is, as w e saw , a C om m on M eal Tradition that developed separately in the Life Tradition in Didache 9 -10 and in the Death Tradition in 1 Corinthi­ ans

io - i i

,

serving as a profound linkage betw een those tw in traditions. I ask

n o w w h y there is no com parable passion-resurrection linkage. There is cer­ tainly a passion-resurrection story in the Death Tradition— the Cross Gospel, for exam ple. W h y is there nothing similar in the Life Tradition— the Q Gospel, for example? C O M M U N A L P E R SE C U T IO N , C O M M U N A L V IN D IC A T IO N Jo h n Kloppenborg accepts the presence o f those tw o great early Christian traditions, the Life Tradition and the Death Tradition, as w e saw in Chapter 22. But he has also raised the question o f their relationship on precisely this point o f passion-resurrection faith. "Th e Q docum ent," he says, "reflects in som e im por­ tant w a y the theology o f a ‘second sphere’ o f prim itive Christianity uninfluenced by the kerygm atic assertion o f the saving significance o f Je su s’ death and resur­ rection," but, o f course, that “ ‘second sphere’ o f Christian tradition . . . w as chronologically in fact the first” (1990:71, 73)- T o avoid any hint o f ascendancy, I rephrase his terms first sphere and second sphere, referring instead to the double sphere o f earliest Christian faith and tradition. But his point stands, raising the question o f the relationship betw een those double spheres (or those twin tradi­ tions) w ith regard to the passion-resurrection o f Jesus. Is the passion-resurrection component simply present in one and absent in the other?

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Th is is his answer: "It is not sim ply a matter, then, o f Q ’s silence in regard to the pre-Markan passion account (if there ever w as one), b ut o f the use o f a quite different explanation o f suffering and the conceptualization o f suffering and vindi­ cation in corporate terms. In Q w e seem to be at a ve ry prim itive stage o f theolo­ gizing the experience o f persecution. Je su s’ fate evidently w as not yet an issue which required special comment. Parenthetically, it m ight be observed that Q's com m unal /corporate theologizing is com parable to that posited by C rossan for his ‘Cross Gospel,’ although there is no evidence o f Q ’s dependence on the ‘Cross Gospel’ either. Indeed it m ight be argued that Q ’s corporate interpreta­ tion o f suffering is a factor in the ‘Cross G ospel’s’ deploym ent o f m otifs from the wisdom tale in an inclusive, com m unal w a y ” (1990:81-82). T h e Q Gospel and the Cross Gospel share a communal rather than a personal and a corporate rather than a private understanding o f persecution and / or vindication. T h ey share, but differently, the pattern o f the w isdom story as established b y Nickelsburg. Q Gospel. I begin with the Q Gospel. In the preceding section I described N ickelsburg’s genre o f the vindicated-innocence w isdom tale. K loppenborg show ed that "while Q has m any o f the elements o f the w isdom tale, it consistently deploys these elements in relation to the collective experience o f the com m unity, which evidently sees itself as continuing the w o rk o f the prophets” (1990:79). T h ere is no presumption, o f course, that the Q Gospel does not k n o w about Je su s’ death, but it is not theologically interested in any "privatistic interpretation o f persecu­ tion, ordeal and vindication,” since it considers that "persecution and death are the ‘occupational hazards’ o f the envoys o f G od or Sophia” (1990:79, 80). The heart o f the Q Gospel's theology is that divine W isdom , personified as Sophia, has repeatedly sent prophets to recall her people to G o d ’s L aw : T h e W isdom o f God said, “I will send them prophets and apostles, som e o f w h om they will kill and persecute,” so that this generation m ay b e charged w ith the blood o f all the prophets shed since the foundation o f the w orld, from the blood o f Abel to the blood o f Zechariah, w h o perished b etw een the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it w ill be charged against this gen era­ tion. (Q Gospel 11:49-51) In particular, to "this generation’’ she sent both Jo h n and Jesus, and, despite their rejection, “W isdom is vindicated by her children,” as Q Gospel 7:35 puts it. She is vindicated by them because, despite their persecution or even execution, they rem ain faithful to her command. Such a theology does not m ean that Jo h n and Jesu s are ju st tw o more among many before and after them. N either does it mean that Jo h n is just as important as Jesus, especially since “ Q 10:21-22 m akes Jesu s func­

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tionally equivalent to Sophia" (1990:88). But it does mean that Jesu s can never be considered alone— not in persecution and not in vindication. In fact, the m ore he is equated w ith W isdom herself, the m ore he must send out prophets to do the sam e as s/h e does. Patrick Hartin has also emphasized that corporate rather than private understanding o f persecution-vindication in the Q Gospel "T h e traditions related to D ivine Sophia in the Sayings Gospel Q are understood predominandy in a collective sense (and not an individualistic sense)___ [W]here one would have expected to find references to or reflections o f a passion theology, nothing occurs. Q has a totally different conception o f suffering and vindication. It is far m ore a communitarian, rather than individualistic, experience” (161). W e are so accustomed to the Markan passion-resurrection account that it is alm ost impossible for us to imagine an alternative mode o f describing or theolo­ gizing about the Death Tradition. But the Q Gospel forces us to imagine such an alternative theology, one in which Jesus, h ow ever exalted, is never isolated. W e have to imagine a communal persecution and a communal vindication, as Kloppenborg reiterated in a m ore recent article: "W hile Q used elements o f the 'w isdom tale' to rationalize persecution and rejection, it neither used the psalms o f lam ent [Psalms 22, 42, 69, 109] nor did it privatize the interpretation o f Jesus* death as an expiatory d e ath .. . . Q shows that the development o f a passion nar­ rative w as not inevitable and encourages one to look for multiple origins o f early Christian attempts to render plausible and meaningful the facts o f persecution and death" (1996:332). Cross Gospel. I n ow turn to the Cross Gospel as a passion-resurrection story preserved within the Gospel o f Peter. In The Cross That Spoke I noted that "alm ost every sin­ gle verse describing the Passion o f Jesus in the Cross Gospel contains an implicit allusion to texts o f the H ebrew scriptures describing the suffering o f Israel's per­ secuted righteous ones” (386-387). These are the m ajor examples: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 78.

The authorities at the trial in Gos. Pet. 1:1 from Psalm 2:1 The abuse and torture in Gos. Pet. 3:9 from Isaiah 50:6-7 and Zechariah 12:10 T h e death am ong thieves in Gos. Pet. 4:10a from Isaiah 53:12 T h e silence in Gos. Pet. 4 : 10b from Isaiah 50:7 and 53:7 T h e garments and lots in Gos. Pet. 4:12 from Psalm 22:18 T h e darkness at noon in Gos. Pet. 5:15 from A m os 8:9 The gall and vinegar drink in Gos. Pet. 5:16 from Psalm 69:21 The death cry in Gos. Pet. 5:19 from Psalm 22:1 M y conclusion w as that “ in the Cross Gospel the Passion is not ju st exclusive,

personal, and individual with Jesus but inclusive, com m unal, and collective for

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b o th Jesu s and the holy ones o f Israel. This means, h ow ever, that the resurrec­ tion m ust also be communal and collective or else the ancient prom ises o f vindi­ cation and exaltation for those earlier m artyrs rem ain unfulfilled and w h at use then are further promises for the future?” (387). T h at is w h at m akes the extraor­ dinary scene in Gospel o f Peter 10:39-42 so important. T h at text, given above in full (p. 488), describes Jesus arising at the head o f "them that sleep,” leading out the holy ones w ho are released from Hades in his trium phant train. T h ey form a great cruciform procession behind him— hence m y Cross Gospel title— and respond to G od’s question about their deliverance w ith a choral yes. M y 1988 conclusion still stands: "Jesus did not die alone and neither did he rise alone. T h e holy and righteous ones o f Israel w ere alw ays present in that process. H e died in their passion, they rose in his R esurrection .. . . H e died in their pain, they rose in his glory” (388). It is inadequate to state that the Life Tradition has no story plot about Je su s’ passion-resurrection. W hile that is true, it is m uch m ore significant that both the Life Tradition and the Death Tradition share a story pattern— the general persecution-vindication theme, w ith its emphasis on com m unal rather than indi­ vidual persecution and on corporate rather than personal vindication. Jesu s, o f course, w as steadily exalted over others within that pattern, b ut he w as not origi­ nally isolated from others within it. Furtherm ore, that story pattern shared by the great inaugural traditions underlies the historical plot in the Cross Gospel, the corporate destiny in the Q Gospel, and the mythical h ym n in Philippians 2:6 -11. The next point is to seek an historical setting for that Cross Gospel composition. M y conclusion will involve a response similar to the one I m ade to N ickelsburg in this present section. He argued for the narrative genre o f vindicated innocence behind the composition o f M ark’s passion-resurrection account. I found that his proposal worked as w ell or better for the Cross Gospel In the next section G erd Theissen proposes an historical setting in the early 40s for a hypothetical source in M ark’s passion-resurrection narrative. I find that his proposal w o rk s as w ell or better for the hypothetical Cross Gospel.

Historical Setting T aking for granted that narratives are marked by the conditions under which their narrating community lives, w e wish to develop the hypothesis that the choice, shaping, and stylizing o f traditions into a connected Passion account w as especially feasible in the 4 0 s.. . . Under Agrippa I the conditions could have existed in which accounts o f the Passion o f Jesu s could exaggerate the role o f the Jew ish court beyond historical reality [at the tim e o f Je s u s ] .. . . Probably w e can limit the phase in which this Passion tradition underw ent its

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critical shaping still more: it could well have been com posed in light o f the persecutions that occurred during Agrippa I's reign (41-44 C .E .). Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context, pp. 189, 193, 198 In the vie w o f most scholars Mark gives the earliest extant account o f the passion story. M any commentators go on to seek and propose a pre-Markan ver­ sion, h ow ever, believing that Mark did not create that entire story in the early 70s. According to prevailing opinion, he must have worked from some earlier version. In Appendix IX o f The Death o f the Messiah, Brow n adapted from Marion Soards a list o f authors w ho distinguished pre-Markan passion sources from their present Markan redaction, and he presented thirty-four o f them in tabular and parallel-column format. Brown concluded that "the sharp differences among them suggest that the project is self-defeating, for no theory will ever get wide or enduring acceptance” (1994:23). Neirynck (1994^408) criticized the list’s alphabet­ ical rather than chronological order, pointing out that it made it m ore difficult to assess influences and add new suggestions, such as that o f Adela Yarbro Collins. It does seem , how ever, that thirty-four examples are m ore than enough to estab­ lish B ro w n ’s point: proposals for a pre-Markan passion source derived from the M arkan text itself have been mutually self-defeating. T h at is not very consoling for someone like myself, who is proposing a prePetrine source, the Cross Gospel, in the Gospel ofPeterl W hat chance does an extracanonical source have if an intracanonical one has never achieved a glimm er o f consensus? Maybe, however, the Cross Gospel is the very pre-Markan source that scholars keep postulating. When I first read Nickelsburg’s analysis o f the genre o f the wisdom tale applied to Mark, it struck me immediately, as stated above, that it made even better sense applied to the Cross Gospel Jesus, there, is vindicated in the sight o f his enemies, who are forced to concede the truth before a neutral ruler. And Pilate confesses in Gospel o f Peter 11:46 just as, for example, Darius does in Daniel 6:26-27. Exactly the same point applies to Theissen’s analysis as summed up in the epigraph above. It is from a chapter entided "A M ajor Narrative Unit (the Passion Story) and the Jerusalem Com m unity in the Years 40-50 C.E.” (1991:166-199). He is proposing "a precanonical Passion story” (1991:168), but his

argument works quite accurately for the Cross Gospel itself as derived from the Jerusalem community in the very dangerous period under Agrippa I. A G R IP P A I A N D T H E JE W IS H T E M P L E The only w ay to date and locate a source such as the Cross Gospel is to extrapo­ late from rhetorical content to social setting. W hat do w e learn from that process in this case? First, in the Cross Gospels passion-resurrection account, the Rom an

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authorities are completely innocent. T hey have no participation w hatsoever in condemnation or crucifixion; apart from som e cooperative cover-up after the res­ urrection, they are totally free o f both responsibility and guilt. H ere, at least, Pilate can wash his hands and declare his innocence without hypocrisy. Second, the Je w ­ ish authorities are not just totally responsible, they are totally guilty. T h ey know the truth and hide it deliberately from their ow n people. Third, "all the people," led by their authorities to crucify Jesus, are so repentant after his death miracles that they would have believed the resurrection and stoned their leaders w ere it not for that cover-up. That is not, o f course, the historical situation o f Easter Sunday. N or is it the historical situation at any other time. But at w h at tim e and in what place would that have been a credible scenario? W hen and w h ere w ou ld it have so cohered with communal experience that a group w o u ld have accepted it as a believable story? I do not ask about just one o f those factors b ut about all three o f them together, at the same time and place. T h e Rom an authorities are totally guiltless. The Jew ish authorities are totally guilty. T h e Jew ish people w ou ld all be Christians if only their leaders had not lied. W here do all three com e together simultaneously? A t the time I w rote The Historical Jesus I thought pro-Rom an Sepphoris in Herodian Galilee w as the m ost likely location fo r the creation o f such a story (1991-387). I now find the time and place that Theissen proposed for his preMarkan passion source the more likely location for my proposed Cross Gospel source: in the Jerusalem community at the time o f Agrippa I in 41-44 C.E. Agrippa I was the grandson o f H erod the G reat and the H asm onean princess M ariam me, but he lived almost exclusively in the im perial household at Rom e from age five to age fifty, under the em perors Augustus and T ib eriu s and along­ side the emperors-to-be Caligula and Claudius. In the last years o f Tiberius he w as imprisoned for an indiscreet rem ark desiring the em peror’s speedy replace­ m ent b y Gaius Caligula. Six months later, w ith Tiberius dead and Caligula enthroned, Agrippa w as released, given the northern territories o f Philip in 37 and the central territories o f Antipas in 39. Finally, in 4r, after C aligula’s assassi­ nation and the enthronement o f Claudius, the rest o f the Je w ish hom eland w as added to his kingdom. He w as now king o f the Je w s, like his grandfather H erod the Great; and, i f all w ent well, he might som eday be A grippa the G reat. H e was, to be sure, already fifty years o f age. But Tiberius had b ecom e em peror at fiftysix and ruled for another twenty-three years. Caligula, on the other hand, had becom e em peror at twenty-nine and lasted only fo u r years. T h e future w as open and, in any case, he w as now Jew ish king o f the entire Je w ish hom eland. D aniel Schwartz’s carefully critical and m agnificently detailed study concludes that Agrippa w as not involved in any subversive activity but that he w anted to be "R o m e ’s m ost important man in the East." F or that he needed to cultivate the R om an em peror Claudius far more than he w ould and to placate the Syrian gover­

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nor Marsus far m ore than he could (143-144). Agrippa w as the last hope o f averting disaster between Roman power, the Jewish homeland, and even the Jew ish Dias­ pora. And it does not seem that the brevity o f his reign w as w hat made that hope hopeless. This is Schwartz’s very perceptive judgm ent: "Agrippa's short reign seems to be most notable due to two interrelated ironies. On the one hand, under Agrippa all o f Palestine was re-united under a Jew ish monarch— only to allow all o f it, rather than a third as formerly, to return to direct Roman rule after his death. In other words, while it briefly appeared that through Agrippa Judaea could avert the steamroller o f Roman history, it turned out that he helped smooth its path. And, on the other hand, a man who knew better than anyone that the fate o f Judaea, and o f the Jew s o f the Mediterranean world, w as dependent upon Rome, was stubbornly view ed by too many people as harbinger o f the type o f antiRom an Jew ish nationalism embodied by some o f his ancestors. The hopes which w ere raised by his enthronement, and which refused to die with him, contributed to the faith which led to the great rebellion o f 66-73 C.E., and to catastrophe” (175). T h at is certainly correct as the long-term retrospective view. But imagine h ow things looked to Jerusalem ’s Christian Jew ish com m unity in the first years o f the 40s. H o w did that present look to those w h o did not know its future? They w ould have know n about Agrippa from events at Jerusalem , which, in Schwartz’s rereading o f Josephus, should be kept to separate dates in 38 and 41 (11-14). In 38, Agrippa returned from Rom e to the Jew ish homeland. Josephus records and rather clearly distinguishes three separate actions. T h e first action had to do w ith his piety: On entering Jerusalem , he offered sacrifices o f thanksgiving, omitting none o f the ritual enjoined by our law. Accordingly he also arranged for a very considerable num ber o f Nazirites to be shorn [paying, that is, for the ritual at the com pletion o f their vow s o f ascetic self-negation]. M oreover, 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 o f iron w ith which his royal hands had been bound [by Tiberius], as a rem inder o f his bitter fortune and as a witness to his reversal for the better, in order that it m ight serve as a p roof both that greatness m ay som etim e crash and that G od uplifts fallen fortunes. (Jew ish Antiquities 19.293-294) T h e second action had to do with his authority, and I return to this point below. T h e third had to do w ith his popularity: The king recompensed the inhabitants o f Jerusalem for their goodwill to him by remitting to them the tax on every house, holding it right to repay the affection o f his subjects with a corresponding fatherly love. (Jew ish Antiquities 19.299)

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Be that fatherly love or practical politics, Agrippa w as preparing for a far grander role than royal heir to Philip's tetrarchy, w hich w as all he had obtained at that time. I return now to that question o f authority. Josephus records A grippa's second action as the removal o f the high priest Theophilus and his replacem ent by Sim on Cantheras. That, how ever, w as a change not ju st o f individuals but o f families. Herod the Great had chosen high priests from the fam ily o f Boethus, w h o was both a father-in-law to H erod and a high priest from 23 to 5 b . c . e . Once the Romans took over direct control o f the Jew ish hom eland's southern h alf in 6 c . e .,

the governors chose high priests alm ost exclusively from the fam ily o f

Ananus (or Annas), as w e saw earlier. There w as Ananus h im self in 6-15, Eleazar in 16-17, Caiaphas in 18-36, Jonathan in 36-37, and Theophilus in 37-38. But in 38, Agrippa rem oved the family o f Ananus and replaced it w ith that o f Boethus. T h e point was symbolically quite clear: direct Rom an rule is on the w a y out and another Herod the Great is on the w a y in. All o f that m ay have looked like good new s fo r the Christian com m unity in Jerusalem . Schwartz maintains that “there w as no Rom an g o vern o r in Ju daea under Gaius, but that the province w as instead attached to Syria” (65). T h at would have given the high priest very great local po w er, and it m ay w ell have been under the Ananides Jonathan or Theophilus that Stephen w as killed. Schwartz thinks, how ever, that he w as executed under their Agrippa-appointed replacement, the Boethian Simon Cantheras. H e is correct to note “ the glaring absence o f the Rom an governor” (72) in Stephen's death, but that also applies to Jonathan and Theophilus in 36-38 as w ell as to Sim on Catheras in 38-41. A fter w hat certainly happened to Jesus under Caiaphas, an Ananide son-in-law, and probably happened to Stephen under Jonathan, an Ananide son, A grippa's ascen­ dancy m ay well have seemed relatively good new s to Jeru salem 's Christian com ­ m unity in 38, especially when he departed once m ore fo r R o m e in 39. But all that changed in the sum m er o f 41. A G R IP P A I A N D T H E C H R IST IA N C O M M U N IT Y In 41, w hen Agrippa again returned to Jerusalem , everyth in g had changed. In the fall o f 39 Caligula ordered his statue erected in Jeru salem 's T em p le, and only the procrastination o f the Syrian legate Petronius, the intervention o f Agrippa him self, and the assassination o f Caligula prevented the w a r o f fall 66 starting in spring 40- But by the early sum m er o f 41, Caligula w as dead, C laudius w as em peror, and Agrippa was back in Jeru salem as king o f the Je w s . W e k n o w o f tw o events consequent upon his arrival there. First, according to Josephus, he deposed Sim on Cantheras, fro m the Bo­ ethian dynasty, and gave the office back to the Ananide dynasty. H e offered it

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first to Jonathan once again, but when Jonathan proposed his brother Matthias instead, Agrippa accepted his recommendation (Jew ish Antiquities 19,313-316). W h y did Agrippa go back to the Ananide dynasty? T here w as n ow a new em peror, Claudius, whose financial secretary w as M. Antonius Pallas, freedman o f Claudius's mother, Antonia, younger daughter o f Marc Antony. Agrippa still had ve ry pow erful friends in Rom e but so now had Jonathan. As Schwartz con­ cluded, "It is reasonable, m oreover, to suppose that Jonathan had links with Pal­ las, Felix's brother, w ho was a very influential advisor o f Claudius’’ (71), Agrippa w as w ise to accept a draw: the house o f H erod had the kingdom once again; the house o f Ananus had the high priesthood once again. A decade later, with Agrippa I dead, Jonathan was still very powerful. A t the start o f the 50s he was im portant enough to have one governor, Cumanus, banished ( Jewish War 2.245) and another governor, Felix, appointed (Jewish Antiquities 20.162). At the end o f the 50s he w as still powerful enough to be the first one assassinated by the Jerusalem sicarii, whose hidden daggers used urban terrorism against imperial collaboration (Jew ish War 2.256 = Jewish Antiquities 20.164). In any event, the return o f the Ananides w as not good news for Jeru salem ’s Christians. Second, according to the Acts o f the Apostles, Agrippa m oved not against Jam es, brother o f Jesus, but against tw o members o f the T w elve, first Jam es, brother o fjo h n , and then Peter: About that time King H erod laid violent hands upon som e w ho belonged to the church. H e had Jam es, the brother o fjo h n , killed with the sword. After he saw that it pleased the Jew s, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. (This was during the festival o f Unleavened Bread.) W hen he had seized him, he put him in prison and handed him over to four squads o f soldiers to guard him, intending to bring him out to the people after the Passover. (Acts 12:1-4) Luke uses very broad terms in 12:1, 4, and 11: "the Je w s . . . the people . . . the Jew ish people,” but, as Schwartz com ments, “i f Agrippa m eant to find favor in the eyes o f ‘the Je w s ’ (Acts 12:3), it w ould have been w ith the Sadducees that he w ould have succeeded m ost” (124 note 70). I w ould be even m ore specific. All early Christian executions, from Jesu s him self in 30, through Stephen in 37-38, to Jam es, brother o f John, in 41 and Jam es, brother o f Jesu s, in 62, w ere carried out under Ananide high priests, under Caiaphas, Jon ath an or Theophilus, Matthias, and the younger Ananus, respectively. In 41, from the view point o f the Jeru salem Christian com m unity, the Ananides w ere back in pow er and Agrippa w as on their side. I do not presum e that all o f Jeru salem s Je w s agreed w ith the execution o f Jam es (or even that all o f those w ith scribal or sacerdotal pow er did so). Peter, arrested ju st after that execution, escaped

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fro m prison by angelic intervention, but one m ight w e ll w o n d er w h at hum an intervention w as hidden behind that story. T h at is the precise background I propose for the creation o f the Cross Gospel. It lam inates the situation o f the Jerusalem com m unity under (Herod) Agrippa I in 41 back onto the situation o f Jesus under H erod Antipas in 30. T h e friends and enem ies o f 41 are retrojected to 30. Recall the three characteristic claim s I identi­ fied earlier in the passion-resurrection account o f the Cross Gospel: 1. The Romans, including Pilate, are com pletely innocent. 2. The villains are Herod and the religious authorities. 3. The “people o f the Je w s” w ould all be Christians i f only their o w n authori­ ties had told them the truth. All three o f those factors— the absolute innocence o f the R o m an authorities, the absolute responsibility o f the Jew ish civil and religious authorities, and the absolute readiness o f “the people” to becom e Christians— indicate a date in the early 40s for the creation o f the Cross Gospel. It is the Jeru salem com m unity's response to the crisis created by the com bination o f A grippa as king, M atthias as high priest, and both as concerned with the Tem ple in Jeru salem . There is one other point that supports that position. It is a tentative one, but it m ay serve to confirm that linkage betw een Agrippa I's ascendancy and the Cross Gospel’s creation. This point brings us back to that biblical persecution-vindication pattern seen earlier. As I indicated above, that pattern (and especially its w isdom -tale for­ mat) underlies the narrative logic o f the Cross Gospel But Schw artz has show n that exactly the same pattern underlies the m ajor source that Jo sep h u s used in his Jew ish Antiquities account o f Agrippa I: "T w o aspects o f [that source], nam ely, the w a y it emphasizes extreme turnabouts o f fortune and the w a y it avoids bringing God into the picture, recall tw o biblical m odels: the stories o f Joseph and Esther . . . tw o biblical stories (which are sim ilar to one another as well) w h ich also describe the successful adventures o f Je w s in im perial courts” (3 4 - 35 )B oth those stories, seen earlier as examples o f the biblical persecutionvindication pattern, involve individual Je w s w hose deliverance also in volves the deliverance o f their people. There is, as it w ere, a dialectic o f the personal and the collective in both those tales. So also w ith Agrippa and his people. H e no lo n ger "figured only as an individual, playing no significant public role” ; as Sch w artz sees it, he had becom e “ an advocate o f the Je w s o f the Em pire— w ho encountered one difficulty after another during the latter years o f G aiu s' tenure (77). A nd the persecution-vindication pattern w as ve ry obvious. A grippa was endangered b y the em peror Tiberius and within h alf a y ea r T ib eriu s w as dead.

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Egyptian Je w s w ere endangered by the governor Flaccus and within a few months he w as removed. Palestinian Je w s w ere endangered by the em peror Caligula and within a year he was assassinated. W as that biblical interpretation o f Agrippa I's fate current during his life? W as it his self-portrayal for propaganda purposes in the Jew ish homeland? Since Josephus does not have this view o f Agrippa I in his Jewish War but only in his Jew ish Antiquities, Schwartz thinks it first appeared betw een those texts— that is, "thirty or forty years, or more, after Agrippa died” (36). Be that as it m ay, two texts o f Egyptian Judaism using the persecution-vindication pattern, 3 Maccabees and Wisdom, both seen above, derive from that same lethally dangerous period o f Caligula's four-year reign. 1 think it likely, therefore, that the biblical pattern o f persecution and vindication was applied to both Agrippa I and eastern Judaism in the period betw een 37 and 41. In rebuttal, the Jerusalem Christians used the same pattern for Jesu s upon the death o f Agrippa in 43 or 44. If, then, the Cross Gospel w as created by the Jerusalem com m unity in the early 40s, is there evidence o f it anywhere else, especially in connection with that sam e com munity? M y affirmative reply comprises the next section.

Continuing Tradition One form o f second-century Jew ish Christianity [Recognitions x.33-71] does indeed have a strong connection with the primitive church. Robert E. Van Voorst, The Ascents o f James, p. 180 T h e author [o f Recognitions 1.27-71] stood in som e so n o f direct genetic rela­ tionship to earliest Jew ish Christianity. F. Stanley Jones, An AncientJewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity, p. 165 This next section requires some background. First, there existed, around the end o f the first common-era century, a man called Clem ent o f Rom e. In Vision 2.4.3 o f his Shepherd, written in Rom e around 100 c .E ., H ennas is com m anded to give his revelation to "Clem ent [who will] send it to the cities abroad, for that is his duty" (Lake 2.25). Second, there exists a letter generally attributed to Clem ent (known for that reason as 1 Clement) that w as written anonym ously around 96 or 9 7 C.E., "from the Church o f God which sojourns in Rom e to the Church o f God

which sojourns in Corinth" (Lake 1.9). Finally, there exists a large body o f pseudepigraphical Clementine literature— that is, texts attributed fictionally to Clem ent o f Rome. M y present interest is in one such text: the Pseudo-Clementines (or rather, to be m ore precise, a specific source within one o f its twin versions).

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T h e Pseudo-Clementines is a romantic novel built around the im aginary ad­ ventures o f Clement o f Rome. He is portrayed as a religious searcher w h o , dis­ satisfied w ith the various pagan philosophies, hears about the gospel, travels to Caesarea, and is baptized by Peter himself. H e then accom panies Peter as his m issionary companion. Clem ent’s parents and brothers h ave becom e separated from one another b y various disasters but are eventually reunited and baptized as well. That story is now extant in tw o separate versions from the fourth cen­ tury, the Recognitions and the Homilies. T h ey are, h ow ever, so sim ilar that they presuppose a com mon source, the Base Text (which com es from the third cen­ tury). But even within that Base Text there are several earlier sources. T h e one that concerns me is a proposed source postulated in Recognitions i. I am dependent here on tw o recent doctoral dissertations about that pro­ posed source. In 1989 Robert Van Voorst located it in Recognitions 1.33-71 (minus 44-54) and identified it with the Ascents o f James, attributed to the heretical Ebionites by Epiphanius’s Panarion, written in 377. Van V o o rst located it in a “ G reek ­ speaking Jew ish Christian com m unity living probably in T ran sjordan ," dated it “in the second half o f the second century," and described it as h avin g “ a strong connection with the primitive church” as w ell as a “ strong insistence on u n iver­ sal law-observance” (178,180). In 1995 F. Stanley Jo n es delim ited it as Recognitions 1.27-71 (minus 44-53) and identified it not as the Ascents o f Jam es but sim ply as “ an ancient Jew ish Christian source on the history o f C hristianity." H e located it “ in the direction o f Ju daea___ Jerusalem it s e lf. . . is also not out o f the question,” dated it “ circa the year 200 c.E.," and described it as h avin g “ som e sort o f direct genetic relationship to earliest Jew ish Christianity,” though he found it “ highly unlikely that [it] w ould have demanded circum cision o f the gentile believers” (159,164-166). Both o f those scholars gave sum m aries o f previous research at the start o f their books, but Jones had already published a far m o re exhaustive review in 1982. For that review and both their studies, I am deeply grateful, since I need only a very short section o f the Pseudo-Clementines and am glad to avoid getting lost forever in either its prim ary texts or its secondary literature. Recognitions 1.33-71 has three sections. T h e first section (in 1.33-44) has a his­ tory o f salvation from Abraham up to the first years o f the earliest Jerusalem com m unity. It describes a split between Je w ish people and Je w ish authorities after the death signs o f Jesus— a split that, in this account, continues to widen. T h e Christian Je w s gain so many converts that the priests challenge the T w elve Apostles and Jam es to debates in the Tem ple. T h e second section (in 1.55-69) has the Christian Je w s so prevail in the seven-day debate that “ all the people and the high priest” are ready for baptism in 1.69:8. T h en com es disaster. T h e final sec­ tion (in 1.70 -71) has Paul, appearing anonym ously as “ a certain hostile man, rush into the Tem ple, attack the imm inent conversion, cause a riotous massacre,

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and personally kill Jam es himself. Is that history? O f course not. Is that antiJew ish? O f course not. It is, however, rather viciously anti-Pauline. It com bines the persecution by Paul in the early 30s with the death o f Jam es in the early 60s. It claims that Paul is to blame for all Jew s not becom ing Christian Je w s. T h e rea­ son is Paul's theological claim that neither Christian Je w s n or Christian pagans should observe the ritual law o f Judaism— for example, circumcision fo r males or kosher practices for all. That theology is here personified in his person; and that person, not ju st that theology, is blamed for the death o f Jam es and the failure o f Christian Judaism ! That is a counter-theology that came from the earliest Jeru salem church and developed after that com m unity’s flight to Pella in Trans­ jo rd an and the destruction o f the Tem ple itself in 70 c.E. It is possible, in other words, to be early, to be Christian Jew ish, and to be very anti-Pauline. M y present focus is on Recognitions 1.41-43's account o f Jesu s' crucifixion. I rem ind y o u that it is the connection o f this with the Cross Gospel in the Gospel o f Peter and w ith the earliest Christian Jew ish com m unity in Jerusalem that is at stake in all o f this. Van Voorst sees that connection w ith the Gospel o f Peter, but Jo n es does not. So, in what follows, I use the form er’s rather than the latter’s translation o f Recognitions 1.33-71. As introduction, how ever, a few comments are necessary on the theology o f the Pseudo-Clementines. First, M oses promised the Israelites that G od w ould always send them prophets ju st like himself: I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put m y words in the mouth o f the prophet, w ho shall speak to them everything that 1 command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in m y name, I m yself will hold accountable. (Deuteronomy 18:18-19) T h at form ulation intended regular prophetic guidance, but it could also be read as looking forw ard to a unique and specific prophet-like-Moses to com e at som e future time. Second, in Recognitions 1.33-38, M oses led the Israelites out o f Egypt but kept them forty years in the Sinai wilderness to purge them o f Egyptian paganism . H e wanted, for example, to eliminate blood-sacrifice to idols— that is, to elim inate both blood-sacrifice and idols. In the end, though, he had to com prom ise and allow them blood-sacrifice, but to the one, true God. Third, Jesu s as prophet-like-Moses came to eliminate that com prom ise and to replace blood-sacrifice with water-baptism (Van Voorst I 9 8 9 *55 ): But the time began to approach for fulfilling w hat w e have reported to have been lacking in those things instituted by Moses, and for the prophet w h o m

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he predicted to appear. From the first he w arned them b y the m ercy o f G od to put an end to the sacrifices. Lest perhaps they think that at the cessation o f sacrifices there would be no forgiveness o f sins fo r them , he established baptism by w ater for them. In it they w ould be freed from all sins by the invocation o f his name, and for the future after a perfect life m ight continue in im m ortality because they had been cleansed not by the blood o f animals, but by the purification o f the w isdom o f G od. Finally, this is given as a p ro o f o f this great mystery, that everyone w h o upon believing in this prophet pre­ dicted by Moses was baptized in his nam e, shall be kept uninjured in the destruction o f w ar which hangs over the unbelieving nation and the place itself. But those w ho do not believe will becom e exiles from the place and kingdom, so that even against their w ill they m ay k n o w and o b ey G o d's will. (Recognitions 1.39 [Latin]) That terminal allusion is, definitely, to the destruction o fje ru sa le m in 70

c .e .

and, probably, to the tradition that the Christian Je w ish com m unity had fled Jerusalem for Pella in Transjordan before the disaster struck. In this theology Jesus is also “ the eternal Christ/M essiah” and “ the Lord” in Recognitions 1:43-44, but it is as prophet-like-Moses that those other titles receive their content. For­ giveness o f sins is no longer effected by blood-sacrifice but b y water-baptism . Fourth, there is one very important parallel that serves to confirm that Jesu s is the one foretold by Moses: both o f them w orked m iraculous signs and w o n ­ ders (Van Voorst 1989:56-57): Recognitions i.4 i:ib - 2 (Latin)

Recognitions i . 4 i : i b - 2 (Syriac)

For M oses indeed worked wonders

F or M oses did signs in Egypt. And

and healings in Egypt. This prophet

that prophet w h o arose even as he

like Moses, whose rise he him self

arose did signs am on g the people,

predicted, although he healed every

drove out ev ery sickness, and p ro ­

weakness and every infirmity in the

claim ed eternal life. B ut b y the folly

com m on people, worked innumerable

o f the evil stupidity o f evil persons

w onders and preached the good news

they brought crucifixion upon him,

o f eternal life, w as driven to the cross

w hich v e ry thing w as changed b y

b y w icked men. This deed, how ever,

his p o w er into grace and goodness.

w as turned into good by his power. T h ose citations exemplify the differences and sim ilarities b etw een the twin fifth-century translations from the lost G reek o f the original Pseudo-Clementines into Latin and Syriac. Jones concludes that “ w hile each o f the tw o translations has its o w n peculiar shortcomings, they w ere both carried ou t in a fairly consci­ entious m anner and are o f approximately the sam e accuracy” ; he adds, h ow ever,

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that ‘a proclivity o f the Syriac translator reveals itself in R 1.40.2 where the Syriac alone has a very negative statement about the Jew ish people" (1995:3, 49). In w h at follow s, therefore, watch carefully for different descriptions o f Jew ish opponents to see if the Syriac is always the m ore antagonistic. Fifth, those just-cited passages bring the text right up to the description o f the crucifixion o f Jesus; and just as there w ere signs, wonders, and miracles dur­ in g his life, so there w ould be the same at his death. There are actually two cruci­ fixion descriptions interrupted by a section about the Gentiles. This the logic o f the section: there w ere miraculous signs at the death o f Jesus; because o f that there w as a split am ong the people; because o f that loss it was necessary to bring in the Gentiles. This is the general sequence: Signs at Jesus’ crucifixion and split amongjewish people = Gentiles called in as replacements for unbelievers = (A 2) Signs at Jesus’ crucifixion and split amongjewish people = ( A 1)

(B)

Recognitions 1.4 1:3-4 Recognitions 1.4 2 :1-2 Recognitions 1.42:3-4

W hen I give the twin translations o f those fram es in A 1 and A2, watch two aspects v e ry carefully. First, notice the differences betw een them, especially in descriptions o f the split itself. Second, could you understand them i f you did not know som e story like that in the Cross Gospelt Do they, in other words, presume som e story rather than som e story presum ing them? Here is the first account in A 1 (Van V oorst 1989:57): Recognitions 1.4 1:3 -4 (Latin)

Recognitions 1.4 1:3-4 (Syriac)

Finally, w hen he suffered the whole

For w hen he suffered, this w hole

w orld suffered w ith him. The sun

w orld suffered with him. E ven the

w as darkened and the stars w ere

sun grew dark and the stars w ere

disturbed; the sea w as shaken and

m oved, the sea w as troubled, and

the mountains m oved, and the graves

the mountains loosened and the

opened. T h e veil o f the temple was

tombs w ere opened. T h e veil o f the

split, as if lam enting the destruction

temple w as tom as i f in m ourning

hanging over the place.

for the com ing desolation o f the place.

Nevertheless, although the whole

Because o f these things, all the

w orld w as m oved, they themselves

people w ere afraid and w ere con­

are still not yet m oved to the

strained to question them . But

consideration o f such great things.

som e, although all the people w ere m oved in their minds, did not m ove them selves to this matter.

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T h e first h alf o f that section about the cosm ic signs is ve ry similar in both translations. T h e second is quite different. T h e Latin has nothing at all about a split am ong the people. It is sim ply a m atter o f the "w o rld ” against "them .” The Syriac, how ever, has a clear opposition betw een "all the people" and "some" unidentified ones. T h e section about the Gentiles in B is an insertion. T h at is evident from the repetitive opening lines o f the fram ing sections in A 1 and A 2 about Jesu s’ suffer­ ings and the Earth’s darkness. In A 2 the text starts like A 1, b ut it continues with new content, as follows (Van Voorst 1989:58): Recognitions 1.42:3-4 (Latin) In the meantime, after he had suf­

Recognitions 1.4 2 :3-4 (Syriac) W hile he suffered, there w as dark­

fered, and darkness had overcom e

ness from the sixth hour to the

the w orld from the sixth hour to the

night. But w h en the sun appeared,

night, w hen the sun returned things

and m atters returned firm ly as they

came back to normal. W icked people

w ere before, evil ones o f the people

once m ore w ent back to themselves

returned to their w ays.

and to their old customs, because their fear had ended. For som e o f them, after guarding the

For som e o f them said about him

place w ith all diligence, called him a

w h o had suffered, and w h o w as not

magician, w hom they could not

found although they had guarded

prevent from rising; others pretended

him, that he w as a m agician; thus

that he w as stolen.

they w ere not afraid to dare to lie.

Notice that those texts are intelligible only i f you know som e sort o f story pre­ sumed behind them. The cosmic sign, darkness, w as already included am ong those in the first account, but now it is given a timespan. In both translations, the split is far less clear than in the Syriac o f Recognitions 1.41:4 above. T h e Latin has "w icked people” (all the people?) but then specifies "som e.” T h e Syriac is slighdy better. It has "evil ones o f the people” and then specifies "som e." T here are, how ever, three other differences between the Latin and Syriac versions that are m ore significant. First, both agree in very general terms about guarding, but, w hile the Syriac says Je su s w as "not found,” the Latin says they "could not p reven t [him] from rising." Second, the Latin but not the Syriac speaks about stealing the body, introducing the option that Jesu s did not rise from the dead. Third, both agree on an alternative response that negates the phrase about stealing: Je su s did rise from the dead because he was a magician. But only the Syriac introduces the them e o f deceit or lies. W hat exactly is the lie? T h e Syriac says that "th ey lied that w e w ere few er than they,” in Recognitions 1.43:1. Finally, both translations

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clarify that the priests are those evil “ some” ones and that it is “ the w hole people” w h o could end up opposing them (Van Voorst 1989:58): Recognitions 1.4 3 :1-2 (Latin)

Recognitions 1.4 3 :1-2 (Syriac)

Nevertheless, the truth was victorious

But the uprightness o f the truth was

everyw h ere. F or as a sign that these

victorious; for because they lied

things w ere accom plished by divine

that w e w ere few er than they, they

po w er, as the days passed w e w ho

w ere not upright. For b y the zeal o f

had been ve ry few becam e m any

G od w e m ore and m ore were

m ore than they b y the help o f God.

steadily increasing m ore than they.

A t last the priests becam e very much

Then even their priests w ere afraid,

afraid that, to their ow n embarrass­

lest perhaps by the providence o f

m ent, the w h ole people w ould perhaps,

God the w hole people might come

by the providence o f God, com e into

over to our faith, to their own con­

ou r faith. Sending to us frequently,

fusion. Sending to us frequently,

they used to ask us to discuss with

they asked us to speak to them

them about Jesu s, w hether he w ere

about Jesus, if he w ere that prophet

the prophet w h o m M oses predicted,

w ho w as prophesied by Moses,

w h o is the eternal Christ.

w h o is the eternal Messiah.

F o r only about this does there seem to

For only on this is there a difference

be a difference for us w h o believe in

between us, w e w ho believe in

Je su s o ver against the Je w s w h o do

Jesus, and those sons o f our faith

not believe.

w ho do not believe.

I do not, o f course, take any o f that "w hole (Jewish) people” against (Jewish) “ priests” as historical information. M y point is that it presum es som e sort o f know n story that w ou ld have made it credible as narrative— a story at least simi­ lar to the proposed Cross Gospel source in the Gospel o f Peter. In all o f early Chris­ tian literature only those suggested sources, the Cross Gospel and Recognitiorts i: 33 - 7 L have that sam e linked combination o f the signs at Jesu s' death, the guards at Jesu s' tom b, and a split betw een Jew ish people and Jew ish authorities both before and after the lied-about resurrection. V an V o o rst’s com m entary first drew m y attention to that preceding connec­ tion, and his parallel-colum n translations w ere extrem ely helpful in seeing its implications. But I have tw o important footnotes to his discussion. First, w ith regard to M atthew 27 :51^ 53 and the death signs in Recognitions 1.41:3 (A 1 above), he concludes, “As these last tw o portents are given only in M atthew , A J [.Ascents o f James = Recognitions 1.33-71] is dependent on the Matthean account, and is an expansion o f it. There seems to be no literary relation­ ship betw een A J at this point and the second-century Gospel o f Peter, w hich makes

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the rending o f the temple veil contem poraneous w ith Jesu s' death (5.20) and places the earthquake after it (6.21)" (1989:106). M atthew , how ever, far from being the basic text, is an alm ost perfect exam ple o f the unsuccessful redactional com bination o f tw o irreconcilable sources. M atthew know s about the cosmic disturbances at the death o f Jesus, as in Recognitions 1.41:3 and Gospel o f Peter 5:20-6:21, and also about the resurrection o f the holy ones along with Jesus, as in Gospel o f Peter 10:39-42. The solution is to double the shaking o f the earth and the opening o f the tombs from Friday in M atthew 27:51-52 (the h oly ones) to Sunday in 28:2 (Jesus) as well as to spread the collective resurrection from Friday (the holy ones arise) to Sunday (the holy ones arise and appear). N othing can conceal the difficulties in M atthew’s solution: The tombs also w ere opened, and m any bodies o f the saints w h o had fallen asleep w ere raised. After his resurrection they cam e out o f the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. (M atthew 27:52-53) That will not w ork, not for M atthew and not for anyone else. T o be raised is to come out o f their tombs, and that cannot happen both before and after the res­ urrection o f Jesus. Neither Recognitions 1.41:3, w here the tom b-openings happen at the death o f Jesus, nor Gospel o f Peter 10:39-42, w here the tomb-openings hap­ pen at the resurrection o f Jesus, need M atthew ’s im possible com bination. I f any­ thing, therefore, M atthew is the dependent tradition. Second, w ith regard to the split o f Jew ish people against Je w ish authorities (A2 above) Van Voorst w as quite clear in 1989: "T h e Gospel o f Peter 8:28-30 says that the effect o f the portents on the com m on people continued after Je su s’ death, and led them to conclude that he w as righteous. Th is shared m o tif o f the effect o f the portents m ay indicate that the A J is in touch at this point w ith the traditions behind the Gospel o f Peter" (107 note 36). But, in a m ore recent discus­ sion o f Recognitions 1.41:2-43:4 there is no m ention at all about the Gospel o f Peter, and only the "Latin version (against w hich the Syriac version varies little)” is given (1995:156). But, as w e saw above, the Syriac version is clearest that the split is "all the people” against “ som e,” and “ all the people" is, o f course, exactly w h at one finds in Gospel o f Peter 8:28. I agree, in other w ords, w ith that 1989 footnote and not w ith its 1995 elimination. Let m e sum m arize m y argument so far before starting the final section o f this chapter. T h e first and most basic point is that there is a canonically indepen­ dent and narratively consecutive source within the present Gospel o f Peter, w hich carefully collates that source with canonically dependent ones. T h e w h o le is a typically second-century attempt to bring discordant traditions into harm onious unity. T h at source not only contained an account o f guarded tom b and visible

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resurrection, as Brow n argues, but also (and necessarily) som e prior account o f ju rid ical execution explaining w h y a guarded tomb w as necessary. I call that source the Cross Gospel, and once again I challenge m y colleagues to explain the Gospel o f Peter w ithout recourse to some such source. If you claim, for example, that the Gospel o f Peter is based entirely on the canonical gospels, h ow do you explain that so m uch o f that text is not in them? T h e second point is in frontal contradiction with those w ho claim that such a source— or even the Gospel o f Peter in general—is anti-Jewish (and is much more so than any o f the canonical gospels). That ignores the rhetorical purpose o f the narra­ tive as a whole. It is because the Jewish people crucify Jesus that the Jewish people repent at his death signs. It is because the Jewish people repent at his death signs that the Jew ish authorities guard the tomb. It is because the Jew ish and Roman authorities guard the tomb that they see the resurrection itself. It is because they see the resurrection actually happen that the Roman authorities confess Jesus and the Jew ish authorities ‘Tie” about Jesus to protect themselves from "the people o f the Je w s.” Is that history? O f course not. Is that anti-Jewish? O f course not. T h e third point confirm s that second one. There is only one other place in early Christian literature w here I have found that same combinations o f signs at the death, guards at the tomb, and a split between "all the people” and “ the priests” about the execution and resurrection o f Jesus. That is in the PseudoClementines, in the source delineated generally as Recognitions 1.33-71. The account o f the death and resurrection in Recognitions 1.41-43 presumes some such story as that in the Cross Gospel. Those b rief references are needed to conclude the preceding signs-and-wonders parallel with Moses and to begin the succeed­ in g split b etw een people and authorities that is crucial for the debates to come. But those passing references are unintelligible without some story at least similar to that in the Cross Gospel source o f the Gospel o f Peter. Finally, recall, from above, that Van Voorst said Recognitions 1.33-71 had "a strong connection w ith the prim itive church” (1989:180) and that Jo n es said its "author stood in som e sort o f direct genetic relationship to earliest Jew ish Chris­ tianity” (1995:165). T h e m ore that source in Recognitions 1.33-71 is connected to the earliest Christian Jew ish com m unity in Jerusalem , the m ore that story in the Cross Gospel is pushed back to that same situation.

Scriptural Memory The issue o f scriptural background becomes more debatable in view s like those o f Koester a n d j. D. Crossan, w h o . . . dismiss any rooting o f the passion in Christian m em ory. Koester [19803:127] states w ith assurance that in the beginning there w as only belief that Jesus’ passion and resurrection happened

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according to the Scriptures so that "the very first narratives o f Jesu s' suffering and death would not have made any attempt to rem em ber w hat actually happened.” Crossan [1988:405] goes even further: “ It seem s to m e most likely that those closest to Jesus knew alm ost nothing about the details o f the event. T hey knew only that Jesu s had been crucified, outside Jerusalem , at the time o f Passover, and probably through som e conjunction o f imperial and sacerdotal authority." He does not explain w h y he thinks this "m ost likely,” granted the well-founded tradition that those closest to Jesu s had fol­ lowed him for a long time, day and night. Did they suddenly lose all interest, not even taking the trouble to inquire about w h at m ust have been the most traumatic moment o f their lives? Raymond E. Brown, The Death o f the Messiah, pp. 15-16 I conclude this chapter by asking about a m ore basic and important issue than sources: that o f origins. T h e most fundamental debate about the passionresurrection story is not about the problem o f sources (or h o w ou r versions relate to one another) but about the problem o f origins (or h o w that story w as first created). The problem is not about the brute facts o f Je su s’ crucifixion outside Jerusalem around Passover but about the specific details o f that consecutive story, blow by blow and w ord for w ord, hour by hour and day b y day. T h ere are two m ajor disjunctive options that I sum m arize as prophecy historicized versus his­ tory remembered. Those twin options w ere given respectively in the epigraphs from Helm ut Koester and Raym ond Brow n at the start o f this Part X. T h ey are continued in the epigraph just above. W hat is at issue in this debate? R E C O R D IN G H IST O R Y Brow n’s position, which I sum m arize as history remembered, seem s at first sight both obvious and commonsensical. Je su s’ com panions kn ew or found out w h at happened to him, and such historical inform ation form ed the basic passion story from the very beginning. Allusions to biblical precedents w ere illustrative or probative for that story, but not determ inative or constitutive o f its content. M aybe, from all the details known to them, they chose those that fitted best with such biblical precedents, but in general it w as history and not prophecy that determ ined narrative sequence and structure. Outsiders looking at that proposal m ight easily ju dge it self-evident. W e have five versions o f that story— four intracanonical and one extracanonical— and, despite m inor discrepancies, they can easily be coordinated into a single passion play. W h y w o u ld anyone suggest an alternative to history rem em bered as the basis for the passion-resurrection story? K oester's position is that, apart from the bare and brutal facts o f the cruci­ fixion itself, the narrative w as built up from biblical m odels, precedents, and prophecies. It took its specific details, its larger them es, and its overall structure

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from such scriptural sources. His general criticism o f the history-rem em bered interpretation is that the "form , structure, and life situation o f such a historical passion report and its transmission have never been clarified" (19808:127). I agree w ith Koester, as you can tell from the above epigraph, but for the follow ing tw o reasons. T h e first reason is negative, against the position o f history remembered, and it reverts to the problem o f sources. If there were, from the beginning, a detailed passion-resurrection story or even just a passion narrative, I w ould expect more evidence o f it than is currently extant. It is totally absent from the Life Tradition, and it appears in the Death Tradition as follows. On the one hand, outside the gospels, there are no references to those details o f the passion narrative. If all Christians k n ew them , w h y do no other Christians mention them? On the other hand, w ithin the gospels, everyone else copies directly or indirectly from Mark. I f one story w as established early as history remembered, w h y do all not “copy" from it rather than depend on Mark? W hy do M atthew and Luke have to rely so com pletely on Mark? W h y does John, despite his profound theological innova­ tion, depend so com pletely on synoptic information? The negative argument is not that such a history-rem em bered narrative could not have happened. O f course it could. T h e argum ent is that w e lack the evidence for its existence; and, i f it existed, w e w ou ld expect som e such evidence to be available. T h e second reason is positive, for the position o f prophecy historicized. The individual units, general sequences, and overall frames o f the passion-resurrection stories are so linked to prophetic fulfillment that the rem oval o f such fulfillment leaves nothing but the barest facts, almost as in Josephus, Tadtus, or the Apostles’ Creed. B y individual units I m ean such items as these: the lots cast and garments divided from Psalm 22:18; the darkness at noon from Am os 8:9; the gall and vine­ gar drink from Psalm 69:21. By general sequences I mean such items as these: the M ount o f O lives situation from 2 Sam uel 15-17; the trial collaboration from Psalm 2; the abuse description from the D ay o f Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. By overall frames I m ean the narrative genre o f innocence vindicated, righteous­ ness redeem ed, and virtue rewarded. In other words, on all three narrative lev­ els— surface, interm ediate, and deep— biblical models and scriptural precedents have controlled the story to the point that without them nothing is left but the brutal fact o f crucifixion itself. I need to clarify, how ever, what I mean by prophecy historicized. I do not intend the apologetical or polemical use o f biblical texts as prophecies about Jesus, as if such texts w ere uniquely and exclusively pointing to Jesus the future Messiah. Prophecy historicized m eans that Jesu s is embedded within a biblical pattern o f corporate persecution and com m unal vindication. Such texts m ay point particu­ larly or especially to Jesus, but, at least originally, they did not point privately

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o r exclusively to him. The question, in other words, is w hether those passionresurrection details derive from historical recall or biblical model? I gave the evi­ dence for that latter alternative in The Cross That Spoke and Who Killed Jesus? and shall not repeat it here. But, lest all o f this get too abstract, I give one example o f this process, one instance o f prophecy historicized, one case in w hich a text about mutual passion and mutual vindication is actualized during the crucifixion o f Jesus. It w as just mentioned as the gall and vinegar drink from Psalm 69:21. R E C A L L IN G S C R IP T U R E Psalm 69 itself has a dyadic structure o f persecution and vindication. The first and longer part in 69:1-29 is a catalogue o f sufferings from one w hose “ eyes grow dim w ith waiting for m y G od/' Then, in 69:30-36, there is an abrupt shift from pleading to thanksgiving, a sudden change from lam ent fo r persecution to gratitude for vindication. These are the transition verses: But I am low ly and in pain; let you r salvation, O G od, protect m e. I will praise the name o f G od with a song; I w ill m agnify him w ith thanksgiving. (Psalm 69:29-30) The verse I am interested in occurs in that form er section as the catalogue o f w oes gives w a y to a series o f curses against the persecutors: T h ey gave me poison for food, and for m y thirst they gave m e vinegar to drink. (Psalm 69:21) T h e sufferer receives poison (gall) and vinegar instead o f food and drink. In context it is the climax o f derision and oppression suffered at the hand o f ene­ mies. T h at is, o f course, a general m etaphor for lethal attack, but h o w can it be applied to Jesus, w h o is already being crucified? T h e Cross Gospel in the Gospel o f Peter m akes it cohere quite literally and suc­ cessfully w ith the actual situation o f execution. In that gospel, as yo u recall, it is the Je w ish people w h o crucify Jesus and then repent w h en they see the miracles that accom pany his death. But here is w hat happens before that m om ent: N o w it w as m idday and a darkness covered all Judaea. And they became anxious and uneasy lest the sun had already set, since he w as still alive. [For] it stands w ritten for them: the sun should not set on one that has been put to death. A nd one o f them said, "G ive him to drink gall w ith vin egar.” And they m ixed it and gave him to drink. And they fulfilled all things and com ­ pleted the m easure o f their sins on their head. (Gospel o f Peter 5:15-17)

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T h e m ore ancient Jew ish style was crucifixion after death, in w hich an al­ ready executed person w as impaled for demonstration purposes. Jo sh u a 10:26-27 has five enem y kings "struck down and put to death" then "hung on the trees until evening," but "at sunset Joshua commanded, and they took them dow n from the trees." T h at procedure is also codified as law: W hen som eone is convicted o f a crime punishable by death and is executed, and y o u hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; y o u shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under G o d 's curse. Y ou m ust not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving yo u fo r possession. (Deuteronom y 21:22-23) Since the Rom an m ethod was crucifixion before death, that Deuteronomic law could be follow ed only if the executed person was already dead by sunset. O therwise, he w ou ld have to be killed b y some other method before removal from the cross. T h at is exactly the point o f Gospel o f Peter 5:16, where Jesus is given a poisoned drink to finish the crucifixion speedily so that his body can be rem oved before dark. T h e food/poison (gall) and vinegar/drink is simply and necessarily collapsed into gall and vinegar—-or, in other words, into poisoned vinegar. It is that act w hich both "fulfilled all things and completed the measure o f their sins on their head.” That manages to apply the psalm verse quite literally to the death o f Jesu s. He is poisoned to death on the cross. Biblical parallels and not historical m em ories are dictating that incident’s inclusion. A com munal prayer applicable to any sufferer is actualized in Jesus. That is what I m ean b y prophecy historicized, not history remembered. R E W R IT IN G G O S P E L I conclude w ith an autobiographical incident to indicate w h y the Cross Gospel hypothesis is so im portant for m e. In the weeks before Easter o f 1995 I w as on a book tou r to prom ote Who Killed Jesus? On the evening o f W ednesday, April 5 , 1 spoke and autographed books at Barnes 8c Noble in m idtown Manhattan, 6th A venue and 22nd Street. Such events in other stores usually took place in a bay w h ere about thirty chairs could encircle the speaker, m eaning that no m icro­ phone w as necessary. But in this case, m y voice w as amplified through the entire store at seven-thirty in the evening. I did not like that process, since it forced everyone, regardless o f interests, to listen to twenty minutes on the historical Jesus. A t the end there w ere about thirty seated people w h o had com e to hear the talk and another thirty standing people w ho had arrived during it. I thought that som e o f the standers, draw n to the talk m ore by volum e than interest, m ight b e annoyed, and the first question seemed to confirm m y expectations. It

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w as clearly inimical in tone, but it w as also absolutely fair and, in the long run, extrem ely helpful for m y ow n understanding. It w en t som ething like this. Questioner: "Y ou said that the Barabbas story w as created b y M ark because, as he saw it, the Jerusalem crow d had picked the w ron g saviors, nam ely the brigand-rebels, in the w ar against Rom e that started in 66 c.E.?” Myself: "Yes." Questioner: “ M ark him self made it up? T h e choice o f Barabbas o ver Jesu s never happened? It’s not true?” Myself: “Yes.” Questioner: "T h en w h y can't you just call it w h at it is: a lie?” I cannot rem em ber w hat I said in response, but it w as probably defensive because I had never thought o f the problem that w a y before. W h y did I not call that incident or the m any others created, in m y view , b y the traditions or the evangelists, lies? T hey w ere not true, so w ere they not lies? T h e question stuck with me over the following weeks, and it w as in thinking about the Cross Gospel and not about any o f the canonical accounts that I first saw the answer. I knew I w as not afraid to call things, even gospel things, b y their proper names. I f I had thought lie w as the proper term, I w o u ld have used it. So w h y not use it? W hat had always prevented m e from doing so? I had called the claim that the Je w s killed Jesu s “ the longest lie.” But did not the gospels say ju st that? Recall the num ber o f times in this b ook that I have em phasized gospel as updated good news, rewriting the Jesu s o f the late 20s as the Jesu s o f the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I knew , o f course, that words and deeds o f Jesu s w ere updated to speak to n ew situations and problems, new com m unities and crises. T h ey w e re adopted, they w ere adapted, they w ere invented, they w ere created. But then so, o f course, w ere the friends and enemies o f Jesus. T h at I had ignored. T h e com m unity and author behind the Cross Gospel described the friends and enem ies o f Jesus at his execution as their ow n friends and enemies in the early 40s. T h e Rom ans w ere com pletely innocent then because that w as h o w they appeared now. The house o f H erod and the Jew ish authorities w ere com pletely guilty then because that w as h ow they appeared now. T h e “people o f the Je w s " w ere ready to con­ vert then because that was how they appeared now. W e m ay not like it, but that is w h at gospels do in Catholic Christianity. T h at is their generic destiny and com positional function. T hey are not straight history, straight biography, straight journalism . T h e author o f the Cross Gospel, or o f any other gospel, did n ot say this: I kn ow that the Rom an authorities crucified Jesu s, but I w ill blame the Je w ish authorities; I will play the Rom an card; I w ill w rite propaganda that I k n o w is inaccurate. I f they had done that, the resulting text w o u ld have been a lie. N o m atter h ow w eak the gospel writers w ere, or h o w threatened their exis­ tence, such a tactic w ould not have been apologetics and polem ics; it would h ave been libel and lie. T h at intuition helped m e understand h o w the Cross Gospel w as com posed. But it helped me understand as w ell the continuing nature

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o f the passion-resurrection tradition. That tradition, in m y view , developed from the Cross Gospel basis and is a single genetic stream o f transmission. N o gospel written after the w ar o f 66-73/74 C.E. is w illing to leave the Rom ans totally guiltless, as did the Cross Gospel. No matter what Pilate thinks, he supplies the soldiers for the crucifixion. Mark blames the “ crow d” in Jerusalem , M atthew blam es "all the people," and Joh n blames "the Je w s." As Christian Je w ­ ish com m unities are steadily m ore alienated from their fellow Jew s, so the "ene­ m ies" o f Je su s expand to fit those new situations. By the time o f Jo h n in the 90s, those enem ies are "the Je w s "— that is, all those other Je w s except us few right ones. I f w e had understood gospel, w e w ould have understood that. If w e had understood gospel, w e w ou ld have expected that. It is, unfortunately, tragically late to b e learning it.

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EXE GE SIS , L A M E N T , A N D BIOGRAPHY C ould one suggest that wom en, whose involvem ent with the dead body is an intim ate one (in m ost societies it is w om en w ho tend the dying, wash the corpse and dress it) need no heightened retelling o f the stories o f death to com prehend its reality or to quicken their emotional response? T h ey move from experience to art, from tears to ideas. Men, whose experience o f death is, in m an y traditional societies, less physical, in that they do not tend the dyin g o r handle the corpse except w hen they kill one another (a situation w h ich dem ands a particular relationship to the dead-as-enemy) must re-read death in art or play in order to experience it. T h e m ovem ent, in this case, m ight b e seen as the obverse o f w om en’s lamentation, one that progresses from ideas to tears. Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, p. 22 H ere is the argum ent so far. T here is a consecutive and canonically indepen­ dent passion-resurrection story, the Cross Gospel, within the Gospel o f Peter. Its present form derives from the Jerusalem com m unity in the early 40s. Its central them e o f Je w ish authorities versus Jew ish people concerning Jesu s’ passion-res­ urrection is the story presum ed by the heirs o f that Jerusalem com munity about a century later in the A scents o f Ja m e s from Recognitions 1.41-43- This final section goes in the opposite direction, not from the Cross Gospel to the Ascents o f Ja m es, but from the Cross G ospel backward into the Jerusalem com m unity o f the 30s. It focuses especially on gender roles within that community, on the interaction o f exegesis and lam ent, and on the relationship between named females and named m ales in those earliest days after the execution ofjesu s.

Biography in Lament I follow w om en ’s cultural response to historical fragmentation as they w eave together diverse social practices: dreaming, lament improvisation, care and tending o f olive trees, burying and unburying the dead, and the historical inscription o f em otions and senses on a landscape o f persons, things, and places. These practices com pose the em powering poetics o f the periphery___ For the poetics o f the periphery is always concerned with the imaginary

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dimension o f material worlds, o f things and persons made and u n m ad e.. . . T h e poetics o f the cultural periphery is the poetics o f the fragment. One thing must be made clear about the fragment. It m ay be marginal, but it is not nec­ essarily dependent, for it is capable o f denying recognition to any center. I am concerned with the global vision that emerges from the particular. T o stand in the margin is to look through it at other margins and at the so-called center itself. , C o n s ta n t in a -N a d ia S e r e m e t a k is ,

T h e L a st W o rd ,

p. i

First, did the female com panions o f Jesu s lam ent his death and mourn his execution? Second, did such activities influence the com m unal tradition? Those are obvious questions. But they w ere obvious to m e only after scholars such as Marianne Sawicki and Kathleen C orley had raised them persuasively and pow er­ fully in their own writings. Sawicki raised them in terms o f burial, tom b, and apparition within the gospel texts. "C alvary had been a quarry in antiquity, and after executions the police dumped the bodies into any convenient hole together w ith som e lim e to cut the stench. But possibly the Sanhedrin took custody o f Je su s’ corpse accord­ ing to the procedure recalled in Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5 [that is, burial in a com ­ mon criminal tomb], since the sentence o f the court w as not considered satisfied until the body decomposed [one year la te r].. . . In either case— lim ed pit or con­ fiscation— the interruption o f the dying process causes g r ie f .. . . I suggest that such grief over loss o f the body w as the starting point o f the reflection that cul­ minates in a 'finding' o f the em pty tomb and a ‘seeing’ o f Jesu s as already risen from the dead” (19943:257). Corley raised them against a w ider background in the cross-cultural anthro­ pology o f female lam ent tradition. "In m any parts o f the w orld, such as Greece, Ireland, Central America, Finland, China, the M iddle East, Africa, N e w Guinea, and Spain, w om en have in past and present tim es habitually keened and m ourned the dead. M any o f these lam ent traditions in fact sustain a poetic genre that goes back in som e cases hundreds, or in the case o f rural G reece, thousands o f y e a r s .. . . Such laments contain the details o f the story o f the death o f the d e ce a se d .. . . T h e Passion narrative itself could have its roots in the form al con­ text o f repeated, sung storytelling, which could have preserved basic details o f the tale o f Jesu s' d e a th .. . . I am suggesting that the Passion narrative had its origins in a grass-roots liturgical context dom inated b y w o m en and ordinary peop le" (chapter 7, from ms. o f forthcom ing book). In w h at follow s I am deeply indebted to both those scholars. I am com ­ p letely persuaded that there is some very basic connection b etw een female lam ent tradition and the developm ent o f the passion-resurrection story. I have

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cited those sum m aries, how ever, because I differ with them on h ow narrativelam ent tradition and passion-resurrection story interact with one another. The challenge, in any case, is h ow best to imagine that interaction. It m ust pay equal attention to anthropological expectations and to transmissional analyses o f the gospel texts and sources. T H E M O TH ER AS M A RTYR I talked in Chapter 16 about the martyrdom o f the m other and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees. T h at story, from the persecution o f the Greco-Syrian m onarch A ntiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 b . c . e ., is also told in 4 Maccabees, a text dated to b etw een 19 and 54

c .e

.

(OTP 2.534). George Nickelsburg is even more

precise on that date: “Fourth Maccabees m ay well have been written around the year 40 in response to Caligula’s attempt to have his statue erected in the Jeru salem T e m p le" (1981:226). It argues that full observance o f the Jew ish Law is true w isd om and proves the superiority o f religious reason over human em o­ tion. It is in this context that it repeats and develops the story o f m other and sons from 2 Maccabees 7 into 4 Maccabees 8-18. But there is one very special develop­ m ent pointed out b y Nickelsburg. "T h e m other o f the seven brothers, whose speeches are integrated into the narrative o f 2 Maccabees 7, is here treated in a separate section (14:11-17:6). She is the ultimate example o f the author’s thesis" (1981:225). Religious reason conquers even maternal emotion! In her 1994 doctoral dissertation Barbara Buder Miller analyzed very closely the male view point o f those stories. That viewpoint begins in 2 Maccabees 7: "In most o f the references to the young men, they are called ‘brothers.’ In only two references does the narrator refer to them as her sons (2 Maccabees 7:20, 41). In one o f her speeches, the m other uses ‘m y son* and ‘m y child' (2 Maccabees 7:27). T h e sons never speak to their m other despite her intimate speeches to them. W hen the you ng m en speak o f each other, they always use the filial term ‘brother.’ The domi­ nant use o f the ‘brother’ terminology by the narrator stresses m ale/m ale bonding, rather than the m other/son relationship’’ (147-148). And the male viewpoint contin­ ues rather dramatically into 4 Maccabees. The author dtes a lament the mother did not make in 16 :6 -11 and he frames it fore and aft with that negation in 16:5,12: C onsider this also: If this w om an, though a mother, had been fainthearted, she w o u ld h ave m ourned over them and perhaps spoken as follows: O h o w w retched am I and m any times unhappy! A fter bearing seven chil­ dren, I am n ow the m other o f none! O seven childbirths all in vain, seven profidess pregnancies, ffuidess nurturings and w retched nursings!

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In vain, m y sons, I endured m any birth-pangs fo r you , and the more grievous anxieties o f you r upbringing. Alas for m y children, som e unmarried, others m arried and w ithout off­ spring. I shall not see you r children or have the happiness o f being called grandmother. Alas, I w h o had so m any and beautiful children am a w id o w and alone, with m any sorrows. And w hen I die, I shall have none o f m y sons to bury me. Yet that holy and God-fearing m other did not w ail w ith such a lam ent for any o f them, nor did she dissuade any o f them from dying, n or did she grieve as they w ere dying. That is a rather fascinating text. It is a m an describing w h at he thinks w om en normally do and applauding the m other for not doing it. And it pre­ sumes that lament and g rief are som ehow antithetical to courage and m artyr­ dom. But M illers com m ent is ve ry perceptive: "Since the lam ent is treated with disdain by the writer, there seems som e possibility that it m ight have been com ­ posed by w om en, or at least, echo the laments o f real w o m en o f the eastern Mediterranean area. Second, the literary and sociological analyses o f G reek laments carried out b y M. Alexiou and A. Caraveli-Chaves, am on g others, offer parallels betw een this lam ent and other m odem lam ents from the eastern Mediterranean area” (288). H ere are examples o f such parallels from those tw o authors. M argaret Alexiou, in her classical study o f the G reek ritual lam ent across three thousand years from antiquity to m odernity, highlights the contrast con­ vention: "In the ancient lament, the com m onest form ula for this convention was to contrast one clause, introduced by before or then, w ith a second clause, intro­ duced by now” (166). She exemplifies from the Testament o f Job, a text dated to either the last century b .c .e . or the first century

c .e .

(OTP 1.850). T h ere is a series

o f six contrasts in Testament o f Job 25:1-8 betw een the rich past life o f Sitis, w ife o f Jo b , and her present desperate situation. Each past/present contrast ends with the sam e refrain: "N o w she sells her hair for bread." T h ere is a sim ilar contrast convention in 4 Maccabees 16:6-11: "After bearing seven children, I am n o w the m o th er o f none,” or, "Alas, I w ho had so m any and beautiful children am a w id o w and alone, with m any sorrows.” Such stylized conventions indicate that lam ents are form al, ritual, and traditional poetry. A nna Caraveli-Chaves studied the "distinct thematic units . . . conventional to lam ent poetry in particular” and identified five that appear and reappear th roughou t a com position (135-136). T h ey are intention, praise/invocation,

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history o f the deceased, m ourner’s plight, and invitation to share m ourning. It is especially w ith that third o f the "building blocks with which the singer will develop her song"— w ith the "history o f the deceased"— that I am prim arily interested in w h at follows. Here is one example o f such a lam ent, given to underline that specific aspect but also to note some others every bit as im por­ tant. H IS T O R Y O F T H E D E C E A S E D O n O ctober 25, 1984, Peter Levi read Eilis Dillon's translation o f The Lament fo r Arthur O'Leary in his inaugural lecture as the University o f Oxford’s Professor o f Poetry. "It w as com posed in Irish at the end o f the eighteenth century, and recovered in several different versions from illiterate or scarcely literate country­ m en and fisherm en in the south o f Ireland in the 1890s and later___ I think it is the greatest poem written in these islands in the w hole eighteenth cen tu ry.. . . W ith this p oem a w orld ended: w e had not known that it had lived so long" (18-19). It w as com posed b y Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill, w idow o f the murdered man. She w as "b o m around 1743, her m other w as a poet and her family had been patrons o f traditional, w andering Irish poets" (19). T h e lam ent's background is the anti-Catholic laws that Eileen's younger kinsm an D aniel O ’Connell w ou ld eventually destroy— though far too late to save A rthu r O 'L ea ry from them. T h e latter was a captain in the Austrian army, but w earin g a sw ord w as illegal for a Catholic in Ireland. He w on a horserace against A braham M orris, high sheriff o f Cork, and then refused to sell him the w inning horse w h en asked; that refusal was likewise illegal for a Catholic in Ire­ land. O n the run as an ou daw for these tw o crimes, O’Connell w as betrayed by Jo h n C o o n ey and shot b y one o f M orris's soldiers. Then a man named Baldwin, m arried to Eileen’s tw in sister, Maire, gave O ’Leary's horse to Morris. All o f those characters are nam ed in Eileen’s lament. Morris is wished "bad luck and m isfortune.” C o oney o f the "black heart" is "a piddling lout." Maire O 'Connell gets "n o bad w ish ,” but “ I have no love for her.” Baldwin is "the ugly wretch w ith spindle shanks." Eileen O ’ C onnell married Arthur O’Leary in 1767, and he w as killed in 1773 By that tim e they had tw o children, C onor and Farr, and a third "still within me / And n ot likely I'll bear it.” All o f those biographical details are mentioned in the lam ent, as are pertinent geographical locations connected to them: Killnam artyr, C ork, T oam es, M acroom , Inchigeela, Carriganima, Geeragh, Caolchnoc, Ballingeary, Grenagh, D errynane, Capling, and "all M unster." It is lyric poetry edging tow ard epic in this lam ent o f friend, lover, w ife, and m other for friend, lover, husband, and father. These are stanzas

vii

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M y friend you w ere forever! I knew nothing o f you r m urder Till your horse came to the stable W ith the reins beneath her trailing, And you r heart's blood on her shoulders Staining the tooled saddle W here you used to sit and stand. M y first leap reached the threshold, M y second reached the gatew ay, M y third leap reached the saddle. I struck m y hands together And I made the bay horse gallop As fast as I was able, Till I found you dead before me Beside a little furze-bush. W ithout Pope or bishop, W ithout priest or cleric T o read the death-psalms for you, But a spent old w om an only W ho spread her cloak to shroud yo u — Y ou r heart's blood w as still flowing; I did not stay to w ipe it But filled m y hands and drank it. I am prim arily interested here in narrative detail and biographical content in traditional lament poetry, and their relationship to the passion-resurrection tradi­ tion. But those stanzas draw attention to another and even m ore widespread aspect o f female ritual mourning. T here in stanza vm and again later in stanza xxvn Eileen laments that Arthur had no official religious m inisters to attend his death. But that is all there is to it. Nothing else in the p oem speaks o f Rom an Catholicism o r even general Christianity. T here is nothing about the resurrec­ tion o f the dead or about reunion in heaven. H ere, in fact, is h o w the poem ends in stanza xxxvi (35): A ll yo u w om en out there weeping, W ait a little longer; W e'll drink to A rt son o f Connor A nd the souls o f all the dead, B efore he enters the school—

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N o t learning w isdom or music B u t w eigh ed dow n by earth and stones. T h a t is absolutely characteristic o f ritual lament from female poets. It is not th at th ey resist or oppose official, male religion. That would be to give that alter­ n a tiv e too m uch attention or relevance. They ignore it; they bypass it; they oper­ a te o n a level far m ore physical and primitive and profound. I h ave noticed that again and again in reading those traditional lam ent p o e m s, though I have never heard a living lament, even in Ireland. But those w h o have heard them— in Greece, for example, as bodies w ere being exhum ed fro m grave to charnel house— often interpret them quite differently. Patrick L e ig h F erm o r takes that dialectic o f female lament and male religion as a simple syn cretism : "T h ere is, in practice, little belief in a conventional after-life and the re w a rd s and sanctions o f Christian dogma. In spite o f the orthodox formulae o f th e priest at the graveside it is not for a Christian eternity, for a paradise above th e sky, that the dead are setting out, but the Underworld, the shadowy house o f H ad es and the dread regions o f Charon; and Charon has been promoted from th e ran k o f ferrym an o f the dead to that o f Death himself, a dire equestrian sw o rd -w ie ld e r., . . T here is no clash in the Greek mind between these two alle­ gian ces, but a harm onious unchallenged syncretism” (54). But there is surely so m eth in g far m ore subversive at w ork in that dialectic. It is far m ore subversive b ecau se, as in the epigraph to this chapter, it is a dialectic betw een "tears” and "id eas,” and som ew here deep down inside us w e w onder if the "tears” have it right o v e r the "ideas.” A nna C araveli sees it not as serene syncretism but as sharp protest: “ Implic­ itly, in term s o f subject m atter alone, laments comprise a protest’ against the official church and the Christian doctrine o f death. T h e very notion o f death expressed in lam ents is contrary to the Christian view s o f a rew arding afterlife fo r the pious. T h e Hades o f the laments is marked by darkness and despair, and it retains its pagan name. Christian attitudes toward death preach patience, acceptance, and perseverance. Laments express despair, fear, and anger tow ard death and the deceased” (184). Th ey protest, in fact, not ju st against the injustice o f death o ver life but the injustice o f male over female. That is w h y Gail HolstW arh aft calls them "dangerous voices” and w h y male institutions, from city to state and from nation to church, have tried to restrain and control them . And n o w that the "traditional w om en’s lament has been alm ost elim inated from the m o d em w estern w orld,” w e are left, as she says, "w ithout a language to express n ot on ly the g rie f but the rage o f the living in the face o f death" (6, n ). W here does that rage go?

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Multiforms o f Mourning Like epic songs, another ancient oral tradition, the laments rely upon for­ mulaic verse structure and make use o f epithets, patterns o f repetition, m etaphoric images, and various other poetic structures, draw n from a com ­ m on stock. These formal elements serve to enrich the tradition but also func­ tion as m em ory aides and devices to serve in the com bining o f familiar with new phrases and melodies that constitutes the process o f improvisation. J a n ic e C a r o le J a r r e t t ,

T h e S o n g o f L a m e n t,

p p . 13 9 - 14 0

Laments, in the present context, are not inarticulate cries o f mourning, no matter h ow powerful, magical, or evocative such m ay be. T h ey are form al, rit­ ual, and traditional compositions that m ay, o f course, be ju st as pow erful, m agi­ cal, or evocative as that other m ode o f mourning. T h ey are, in fact, the oral, female, and lyric poetry w hose parallel is the oral, m ale, epic poetry seen earlier in this book. Both genres span thousands o f years, and they can both be seen together in H om er's Iliad. That epic starts w ith the anger o f Achilles but ends with the burial o f Hector. In the w ords o f Peter Levi, “Androm ache wails in words, briefly, eloquently and personally: H ecuba follow s m ore briefly, then, Helen, that is first the w idow , then the m other, then the sister-in-law. H ektor’s burial follows at once, and the Iliad is o v e r .. . . H om er has utterly altered the narrative o f w a r to a tragic and compassionate poetry on as vast a m oral scale as War and Peace. . . . [T]he final, essential m om ent, and the clim ax o f this vast transformation o f values, o f the w hole Iliad, is the lam entation o f the dead Hektor. H ow ever H om er m ay have cooled dow n the ritual lam ents o f w om en, which appear in a w ilder form a little earlier in the conclusion, it remains true that it w as by adapting w om en's poetry at the clim ax, and b y accepting w o m en ’s view s, that he gave the Iliad its extraordinary pow er. T h e lam entation o f Hektor is not a stray incident, nor a m erely formal closure” (13). Fem ale lam ent ques­ tions the m orality o f male heroism and o f m any other m ale characteristics and institutions as well. A t the m om ent I look at lament in preparation for som e ve ry specific ques­ tions. T h ey are the questions to be seen later in H elm ut Koester's claim that "the different versions o f the passion narrative in the gospel literature” derive from “ the oral performances o f the story in the ritual celebrations, ever enriched b y new references to the scriptures o f Israel” (1995:18). T h ey w ere seen already in the quo­ tations from M arianne Sawicki and Kathleen Corley. These, then, are the ques­ tions: A re the different versions o f the passion-resurrection in our gospels but the w ritten accounts o f oral multiforms? Are they inscribed from divergent traditions

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o f fem ale lament, especially from the narrative or biographical content o f such m ourning rituals? H ow , in other words, do female lam ent and the passionresurrection tradition relate to one another? In preparation for answ ering those questions in the next and final sections, I look here at actual oral multiforms o f fem ale laments. It is impossible to prove or disprove claims o f oral traditions that are com pletely lost. But if one has some written records o f a tradition, there m ay be sufficient evidence to prove oral multiforms at base. That was seen for the oral and epic poetry o f male performances at the start o f this book. It can now be seen for the oral and lyric poetry o f female laments in what follows. W hen w e read such poetry today in books, w e recognize another world staring us in the face from behind the written page. This is what oral multiforms look like. T H E L A M E N T O F C H R Y S A K A LL IA K A T I FO R H E R M O T H E R A n n a C araveli-Chaves studied female lament poetry in “ Dzermiathes . . . a large village, situated on the Lassithi plateau o f the island o f Crete, and the capi­ tal o f the Lassithi province" w here “moirologia (laments)— like other forms o f rit­ ual poetry— are rapidly becom ing extinct. T h e present generation o f lament poets is alm ost certainly the last." Against them stand male attitudes, “ the under­ lyin g fear o f lam ents as magic songs, songs which open up perilous channels o f com m unication betw een the living and the dead,” and m odem standards and values. H er w o rk is superbly evocative o f the social context o f those laments for "the w o m en o f the 'patriarchal' G reek village society . . . as strategies o f sur­ vival” (1980:130,131). In w hat follows I focus for m y ow n present purpose on one som ew hat m inor aspect o f her study. C hrysa Kalliakati w as an eighty-five-year-old w om an whose lament for her m other had becom e fam ous. “Both m other and daughter w ere great poets and story-tellers; both w ere skilled m idwives and medicine w om en, possessors o f a m iraculous recipe for a potion which had reputedly cured m any w om en o f infer­ tility” (1980:132). Caraveli-Chaves, a w om an participating in a w om an's network, recorded tw o versions o f the lament. The first and “passionate" one w as from A lexandra Pateraki, C hrysa Kalliakati's fifty-nine-year old daughter, in D zer­ m iathes. T h e second and "halting” one was from Chrysa Kalliakati herself, at her other daughter's hom e in Athens (1980:133-136). I code those versions as AP and C K , respectively. T h e tw in versions are classic examples o f an oral multiform even within the close constraints o f family and female tradition about the same lament. Exactly the sam e line opens them both: “ Oh slowly, oh mournfully, I will begin lamenting," but A P has thirty-nine lines while C K has forty-four lines. Here are three instances o f the similarities and differences that can be expected in such a situation.

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T h e first instance concerns the "history o f the deceased’' motif. Although ve ry similar in both versions, it is six lines separated into lines 11- 12 and lines 20-23 in AP, while it is eight lines joined together as lines 5 -12 in CK: L in e s 1 1 —1 2 an d 2 0 -2 3 (A le x a n d ra P a te ra k i)

L in e s 5 - 1 2 ( C h r y s a K a llia k a ti) b e c a u se at th e p rim e o f y o u r y o u th , y o u c lo th e d y o u r s e lf in b la c k an d th e n th e d a rk n e ss o f y o u r h eart m a tc h e d th at o f y o u r d ress;

Fate had w ritten that at the p rim e o f y o u th

b e c a u se a t th e p rim e o f y o u r y o u th fate h a d w ritte n

y o u sh ou ld lo se o u r fath er, y o u sh o u ld

th at y o u s h o u ld lo se o u r fa th er, y o u

becom e a w id o w .. . .

sh o u ld b e c o m e a w id o w .

Y o u u se d to c o m e h o m e each n igh t,

A h h o w m a n y tim e s at m id n ig h t, a fte r the

m o th e r, I say each night;

ro o ste rs h a d c ro w e d

y o u w a lk e d h o m e fro m d eliv e rie s and

w o u ld n ’ t y o u b e c o m in g d o w n th e ro a d —

m ad e dark n ess scatter.

p a le an d tire d o u t ! . . .

H o w m a n y tim es w o u ld n ’t y o u c o m e

H o w m a n y tim e s a t m id n ig h t, o n n igh ts

b a c k fro m w o r k — p ale an d tired o u t—

ste e p e d in d a rk n ess

w a y p ast m id n ig h t, n e a r d a w n , after

w o u ld n 't y o u c o m e h o m e fr o m the

ro o ste rs h a d cro w e d !

ro a d — lips s a d d e n e d an d em b ittered !

Both versions agree on the mother’s biography as that o f w idow and midwife, but AP has missed those first lines that give "an insight into the m other’s ‘heart’" and especially into the peculiar plight o f a w id ow in a patriarchal society (1980:138). Another instance concerns the "praise/invocation" motif. T h ere are four stunningly powerful lines com bining and rhym ing C hrysa Kalliakati’s w o rk as "em broidery" (xoblidstra) o f the "stars” (astra) in the sky. A P puts that superb im age at the start in lines 3-6; C K places it at the end in lines 41-44: L in e s 3 - 6 ( A le x a n d r a P a te r a k i)

L in e s 4 1 - 4 4 ( C h r y s a K a llia k a t i)

A h , m o th e r, k e e p e r o f the h o m e and

E h m o th e r, w o m a n fr o m K ritsa , eh k e e p e r

m is tre ss o f e m b ro id e ry ,

o f th e h o m e ,

y o u k n e w h o w to e m b ro id e r th e sk y

b e lo v e d sp in n e r o f th e y a m an d tw is te r o f

w it h all its stars.

th e clo th .

A h m o th e r, k e e p e r o f th e h o m e ,

E h m o th e r, k e e p e r o f th e h o m e an d m is ­

m o th e r, w e a v e r an d sp in n er

tress o f e m b r o id e ry

e v e n th e n ig h t s k y it s e lf w a s w o v e n

y o u k n e w h o w to e m b r o id e r th e s k y w ith

in y o u r lo o m .

all its stars.

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I hope it is not disrespectful to admit that I prefer C K 's terminal location but A P 's doubled rendition o f those passionately accurate lines. A final instance shows the “ m ou rners plight” motif. This gets on ly lines 13-14 in A P but lines 27-34 in C K. The difference, how ever, is far greater than tw o against eight lines. There are no parallels to any o f lines 27-40 from C K in the A P version. It is a long and stem reproach to the H oly Trinity, all the saints, and the m iraculous Virgin M ary o f Tinos Island. She vow ed offerings; they did nothing. C K w ill go to church next Sunday (but only?) to remem ber her m other bringing her to com m union long ago— that is, only “ to see m y m other." Those lines m ake up one-third o f the C K version. Does A P omit them because she is less religious or more religious than her mother? Less religious and therefore uninterested in them? M ore religious and therefore embarrassed by them? The om ission, in any case, is hardly a vagary o f mem ory. It is part o f the standard censorship o f oral repetition. T H E L A M E N T O F K A LL IO P I F O R PO ULO S T h is second exam ple com es from the other aside o f the Cretan Sea, where three fingers point southward from the G reek Peloponnese into the Mediter­ ranean. T h e m iddle finger is spined by the Taygetos Mountains and flanked by the Ionian Sea's M essenian G u lf to the w est and the Aegean Sea's Laconian G u lf to the east. T h e southernm ost part, past Outer Mani and L o w er Mani, is Inner M ani. A t its tip is C ape Tenaron, traditional entranceway into Hades. T h e fem ale dirges o f the Inner Mani are, in Fermor's words, “entire poems, long funeral hym ns w ith a strict discipline o f metre. Stranger still, the metre exists now h ere else in Greece, T h e universal fifteen-syllable line o f all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line o f sixteen syllables” (57-58). Constantina-Nadia Serem etakis is interested in "the particular optic o f Inner Mani” against the back­ ground o f “ recent anthropological literature that pluralizes the concept and tangi­ ble presence o f pow er by identifying strategies o f resistance that emerge and sub­ sist in the margins” (1991:12). I have, as in the previous case, a far more limited focus at the m om ent. It is in oral multiforms, in the three different versions she gives o f the lam ent for "the premature death, in 1932, o f a young m an [Poulos] w h o w as engaged to be married to Kalliopi, a wom an from a high-status clan. The deceased m an w as a schoolteacher, as was his fiancee. Both had studied in urban centers, and he died o f an urban disease, tuberculosis, before the marriage could occur” (130). The lament w as antiphonally performed between Kalliopi and Poulos’s m other at the graveside. Later Kalliopi married another man, w hom she also out­ lived. T h e first tw o versions o f the antiphonal lament are recorded from female relatives o f h er late husband; the third is from Kalliopi herself, "an elderly w idow now , w h o has been living in Athens (earlier in Piraeus) for decades" (130-137):

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F ro m a S e c o n d R e la tiv e

F ro m K a llio p i h e r s e lf

PomIos’s mother speaks:

Poulos’s mother speaks:

Poulos's mother speaks:

A h , m y sw eet, golden crow n ,

A h , icon o f Christ,

A h , icon o f Christ,

d id n 't I com e up to Dri

h o w am I to separate fro m

h o w am I to separate m yself

o n E aster D ay

you?

fro m you?

w ith the b ig b read rolls

T o lose bride and gro o m

I w a s pro u d o f yo u ,

and the red eggs,

and all the in-laws?

to com e to m y household

w ith a silk dress

W asn 't I co m in g Easter

as a bride

and the fat goat?

and Easter day

g a v e m e gre a t honor.

H o w can I part from y o u icon

to b rin g the fat lamb?

o f Christ?

Kalliopi responds:

Kalliopi responds:

Listen, m y sw eet m other,

Stop, m y sw eet m oth er,

I w ill m o u rn h im today,

d o n 't c ry fo r y o u r sw eet, little

y o u m elt m y heart.

y o u r o n ly cherished son,

crow n

M e, w h a t kind o f g o o d

I am n o t m o u rn in g a fiance,

cry fo r the professor

d o I b rin g y o u

fo r I hard ly cam e to kn o w

for yo u h ave no oth er child.

that y o u are w a rm ly receiv in g

him

F o r I w ill get m arried,

me?

o n e m o n th o n ly.

another professor I w ill find.

Su ch g o o d [let it go ] to the sea

H e passed fro m D ri

Fo r I, on m y part,

and to the deepest w aters.

as i f an itinerant.

h ave no need o f anything,

I, on m y part,

G en ero u s P o u lo _______ ,

m y father is a teacher,

h av e no need o f anything,

m y p o o r o n e, w o n 't yo u

m y brother is a doctor,

fo r I am w e ll in m y household,

ch an ge y o u r m ind,

I am educated m yself.

the ho u seh o ld o f m y father,

and not fo r m y sake,

I, on m y part,

fo r m y father is a teacher,

I am w e ll in m y household,

d o n 't m o u rn him as m y

m y b roth er is a doctor,

q u een I am and kira

husband

a teacher I am m yself.

in the k in g ’s palaces,

n o r as m y fiance,

I b e g y o u r pard on , please,

m y fath er is a teacher,

I o n ly m o u rn him as a brother

I am not m o u rn in g a fiance,

m y b ro th er is a doctor,

fo r w e studied together

b u t a neighbor and covillager,

I a m ed u cated m yself.

o v e r there in A reopoli.

an o n ly child.

Kalliopi responds:

Seremetakis comments that “ the w om en o f h er present affinal clan, in recounting the 1932 event, play dow n the high status o f the dead fiance's d an and the depth o f Kalliopi’s m ourning" (1991:144). It seem s to m e that Kalliopi w as already doing that in her ow n lam ent as she disengaged h erself from her dead fiancé and announced her present status and future plans fo r all to hear. M y point, h ow ever, is that those three oral versions o f the sam e lam ent sh o w exaedy the similarities and differences one w ould expect in such oral m ultiform s.

Anthropology, History, Archeology K now ledge o f the Risen Lord cannot be theoretical, detached, and visual. T h e eyes do not connect w ith Jesus, apart from practices addressing hunger

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and injustice. T h e tradition o f resurrection appearances was not originally intended to stand apart from a community that fed the hungry and observed the law s o f ju s tic e .. . . The w om en at the tomb were observing the custom s o f m ourning. T h ey w ere w eeping for Jesus. Their eyes w ere full o f tears w h en the realization hit them that Jesus was not in the grave. For the poor, fo r w id ow s, for a colonized nation, the eyes are the organs that register pain. T h e M arys w e re using their eyes in that graveyard, but not like Greeks. T h e y “ saw ” Je su s through tears-----Sixty years afterward, the churches had fo u r sanitized little stories about a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise. But it w asn ’t like that w hen it happened. G rief m ay also be a precondition for resurrection, and tears for permitting the eyes to see. M a r ia n n e S a w ic k i,

S e e i n g th e L o r d ,

p p . 9 2 -9 3

In this last chapter I bring together the various strands o f Part X, and I do so in a w a y reflective o f this book’s overall method: first context, then text in conjunc­ tion w ith it. T h e context is built up from cross-cultural anthropology through Ju d eo -R om an history into early Rom an archeology in the Jew ish homeland. H ere is that full context. ANTH RO PO LO GY T h e cross-cultural anthropological basis o f this synthesis is that preceding section on the narrational and biographical com ponent in the traditional oral poetry o f fem ale ritual lament. I w ill not repeat it here even in sum m ary but sim­ ply em phasize tw o o f its aspects: w om en lament; men complain. I have a photo in mind that can serve as sym bol o f that engendered interaction. Lorin g D anforth’s b ook on death rituals in rural Greece is a com m entary on the pow erful photos o f Alexander Tsiaras that conclude it. Plate 30 shows a cus­ tom ary exhum ation, in w hich the bones are taken from their individual grave to a com m unal charnel house ju st before the fifth anniversary o f burial. In this case, the diggers h ave w orked dow n through packed earth and broken w ood to find, first, the skull. T h e picture show s fifteen w om en around the open grave. In their center is M atinio, holding the skull in her hands. She and the skull look straight out o f the photo at the photographer and the viewer. This is the caption: “ M atinio has ju st lifted the skull from the grave and turned abruptly tow ard A lexander Tsiaras. She asked him i f he wanted to photograph her holding the skull in h er hands. A s Tsiaras photographed Matinio, she addressed him directly: 'W e ’ll all lo o k like this in the end. Som e day you'll see the remains o f your m other and father exhum ed this w ay. Som e day yo u ’ll get exhumed, then y o u ’ll look like this too.’” W h o controls that photograph? W o m en lam ent. "W hat is com m on to laments for the dead in m ost 'tradi­ tional’ cultures is that they are part o f m ore elaborate rituals for the dead, and

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that they are usually perform ed by w om en ,” as Holst-W arhaft writes. "M en and w om en m ay both w eep for the dead, but it is w om en w h o tend to w eep longer, louder, and it is they w ho are thought to com m unicate directly w ith the dead through their wailing songs-----[W ]hile in early literate texts such as the Bible and the Hom eric poems it w as proper for m en to w eep and be w ept over, it later becam e unacceptable___ Such a dialogue w ith the dead places a certain power in the hands o f w om en” (1-2, 3). A ny attempt to separate the genders— wom en in private hom e and men in public square— breaks dow n rather totally when it comes to funeral and grave, lam ent and m ourning. It is not the noise o f wailing but the pow er o f lamenting that creates tension at this point betw een wom en and men. M en complain. Ferm or speaks o f m ale reaction to fem ale lam ent primarily in terms o f mild unease. “T h e m en o f the fam ily often appear uncomfortable while all this goes on; changing feet, turning their caps nervously round and round in their fingers, keeping their eyes glued to the ground w ith all the symptoms o f male em barrassment at a purely fem inine occasion” (57). CaraveliChaves uses stronger language, speaking o f “m en's am bivalent attitude towards wom en's lamentation ranging from outright hostility to uneasy m ocking o f the tradition and, in som e cases, to thinly disguised adm iration" (130). W hat exactly is at stake in that m ale reaction? This is Danforth's explanation: “ Because a w om an 's identity depends greatly on her relationship to a man, the death o f this m an deprives her o f the crucial com ponent o f her identity___ It is for this reason that w o m en participate so much m ore fully than m en in the perform ance o f death rituals. T h e y must do so in order to continue to be w h o they w ere prior to the deaths o f the m en w h o gave their lives definition and meaning” (138). But, i f that w ere true, one w ould surely expect fem ale laments to emphasize m uch m ore the death o f fathers, hus­ bands, and sons over that o f mothers, sisters, and daughters. T h at is negated not only by the examples I cited in the previous section b ut by D anforth’s ow n case studies from a Thessalian village in north-central G reece. H e begins his book w ith Irini’s lam ent for her twenty-year-old daughter Eleni, w h o w as killed in a hit-and-run accident in Thessaloniki a m onth before she w as to begin her career as a teacher. H e combines Irini w ith Maria, w hose thirty-year-old son Kostas w as killed in a construction-site accident and buried in the grave next to Eleni. As those tw o mothers share grief and counterpoint lam ent, there is no hint that a daughter’s loss is less than a son’s, that identities derived from m en and lost with their deaths are w hat fuel female m ourning. C araveli is surely right to deny Loring’s interpretation: “ In the villages w here I did m y fieldw ork,” she says, “ narratives about female "heroes’ (w orthy m others or w ives, skilled m idwives or healers, talented singers, story-tellers, or craftswom en) constituted a fem ale

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h istory o f the village, a body o f wom en's expressive gestures, and a fem ale line o f transm ission" (1986:170). W h at is at stake in female lament is an alternative m ode o f po w er that protests the general injustice o f death over life but also the particular injustice o f m en o ver w om en . That theme appears again and again in the studies cited a b o ve, fro m A lexiou in the 1970s to Caraveli(-Chaves) in the 1980s and Serem etakis in the 1990s. Female lament poetry is not just a case o f females tem ­ p o rarily ou t o f m ale control or temporarily controlling public ritual and perfor­ m ance. Fem ale lam ent poetry is a direct social protest against oppressive male institutions, w h eth er political and economic or religious and theological. I noted ab o ve h o w fem ale laments totally ignore and bypass institutional religion. The antiphonal collectivity o f lament performance is, as Seremetakis puts it, “ a political strategy that organizes the relations o f wom en to male-dominated institutions.” It is "in critical relation to the male-dominated social order. The deployment o f pain to detach the se lf and body from residual social contexts is but a prelude to the staging o f w o m en 's reentry (as individuals and as a collectivity) into the social ord er on their ow n terms"(i99o:482, 508-509). W hen Andromache laments for H ecto r at the end o f H om er's Iliad, she does not say a w ord about his past fame as a T ro jan w arrio r o r his future fame as a fallen hero. She speaks about herself; she protests against him ; she laments as a w idow with a father-orphaned son, as one bereft o f m ale protection in a male-dominated world. She weeps not for him b u t fo r h erself and for her child. H IS T O R Y T h e Ju d eo-R om an history o f crucifixion can be summarized over four stages. T h e first stage is biblical crucifixion— the traditional Jew ish method, w h ich is quite different from the later Rom an system. Jew ish crucifixion was dead crucifixion. An executed and already-dead criminal was hung upon a cross. Crucifying after death w as the public warning in the Jew ish tradition. That style o f crucifixion is m entioned in the laws o f Deuteronom y and the conquest stories in Jo sh u a. As w e saw in the previous chapter, the law o f D euteronom y 21:22-23 com m ands that, w h en anyone “is convicted o f a crime punishable by death and is executed, and yo u hang him on a tree,” the corpse must be rem oved by sun­ set. N otice the sequence: executed and hung. Thus, for example, Joshu a took the five A m orite kings, "struck them dow n and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. A nd they hung on the trees until evening” (Joshua 10:26). T h e second stage is Rom an crucifixion. Contrary to the biblical tradition, this w as live crucifixion. T h e condemned person was affixed to the cross to die in agony and w as usually left thereafter as carrion for birds and dogs. Death after crucifying w as the public w arning in the Rom an tradition. Martin H engel, in his

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1977 book, gathered together a vast num ber o f references to Rom an crucifixion. I once looked up all those references, and I have not been able to see crucifixion in the sam e w a y since. Consider his general conclusion: “ Crucifixion w as aggra­ vated further by the fact that quite often its victim s w ere never buried. It was a stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds o f prey. In this w ay his hum iliation w as made com plete. W hat it meant for a m an in antiquity to be refused burial, and the dishonour which w ent with it, can hardly be appreciated by m odem m an” (87-88). In the Rom an author Petronius’s famous novel Satyricon o f 61 C.E., for exam ple, som e crucified rob­ bers have a “soldier, on guard by the crosses to stop anyone from taking dow n a body for burial” (111-112). It w as actually nonburial that m ade being crucified alive one o f the three supreme penalties o f Rom an punishm ent (along w ith being devoured alive or burned alive). It w as the typical execution reserved for run­ aw ay slaves and for other m em bers o f the lo w er classes w h o subverted the Roman order. Because o f the ignom iny and dishonor o f this type o f execution, it necessarily involved guarded crosses or at least severe sanctions against rem oval o f the body before death and burial o f the body after death. The third stage is H asm onean crucifixion. T h e biblical and Rom an traditions w ere clearly contradictory. It w as quite possible, in the biblical tradition, to hang the body on the cross until sunset and then rem ove it before nightfall. But how could that be done in the Rom an system, w here the person m ight not be dead by sunset, prolonged death agony w as part o f the public effect, and nonburial w as the consummation o f the procedure? Josephus says, in Jew ish War 1.97 and Jew ish Antiquities 13.380, that the Jew ish king A lexander Jannaeus crucified eight hundred o f his Pharisaic enemies in 88

b .c . e .

It w as live crucifixion, because he

“slaughtered their children and w ives before the eyes o f the still living wretches.” T h ere is a coded reference to that massacre in 4Q169, a pesher or application o f the b ook o f Nahum to the life o f the D ead Sea Essenes that w as discovered in C ave 4 at Qumran (D S S T 185-197). In fragments 3-4, colum n 1, lines 6-8, Alexander Jan naeus is called “ the Angry Lion” w h o "hanged living m en [hole in the manuscript] in Israel since ancient times.” Because o f that hole it is not certain w h eth er the text w ould have read “which w as not done” or “ w hich w as done.” But, in any case, it is live crucifixion that is in view , so it is clear that the Hasm oneans adopted Roman-style live crucifixion rather than traditional Jew ish dead crucifixion. There is nothing said about rem oval o f the bodies by sunset, and, in context, that issue does not seem a m ajor concern o f A l e x a n d e r Jannaeus. T h e fourth stage is Essene crucifixion. This involves another one o f the D ead Sea Scrolls, 11Q 19-20, the Tem ple Scroll from C ave 11, longest o f all those found at Q um ran (D SST 154-184). From w ithin this text, w hich dates from around the year 100

b .c . e

.,

G od legislates in first-person voice. In Lawrence

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Schiffm an's w ords, "T h e author/redactor called for a thoroughgoing revision o f the existing H asm onean order, desiring to replace it with a Tem ple, sacrificial system , and governm ent which was the embodiment o f the legislation o f the T o rah according to his v ie w -----The text is a polemic against the existing order, calling fo r radical change in the order o f the day, putting forward reform s in areas o f cultic, religious and political life. So the true Sitz im Leben [life-setting] o f the scroll is precisely one in which the circumstances o f real life are the opposite o f those called for by the author" (19943:50, 51). It is a divine rereading o f the Law prescribing h o w things w ill be w hen the Essenes take over Jerusalem and its T em p le, the Jew ish hom eland and its government. It refleas, as Schiffman says, h o w things are not at the m om ent o f its composition. Crucifixion is legislated for tw o crim es in 11Q 19, colum n 64, lines 7-13. One criminal is a spy who betrays his people to a foreign nation; the other is a condemned person w h o escapes and curses his people am ong foreigners. In describing w hat is to happen to these crim inals, there is an intercalation o f these phrases in 64:8-11: "You shall hang him from a tree and he w ill d ie .. . . [H]e [shall] be executed and they shall hang him on the t r e e .. . . [H]e also yo u shall hang on the tree and he will die.” That describes Rom an-H asm onean live crucifixion twice as frames around biblical crucifixion as center. And then, in 64:11-13, there follows the command for sunset rem oval from D euteronom y 21:22-23. In other words, whether one deals with dead or live crucifixion, rem oval and burial must take place before nightfall. T h at tells us, h ow ever, w h at w as not happening under the Hasmoneans (and presum ably under the Rom ans as well). A t the time o f Jesus, therefore, live cru­ cifixion m ade obedience to D euteronom y 21:22-23 almost impossible, and burial before nightfall w as, at best, a hope for future implementation under postH asm onean and post-Rom an Essene control. ARCH EO LO GY Je su s w as not the first Je w executed by Roman crucifixion outside the walls o f Je ru sa lem in the first century. N or was he the last. Josephus mentions three m ajo r incidents o f corporate crucifixion in the decades before and after Jesus. T h e Rom an go ve rn o r V arus crucified “ about tw o thousand" in 4 B.c.E. (Jewish War 2.75 = Jew ish Antiquities 17.295). T h e Rom an procurator Florus crucified "about three thousand six hundred” in 66 c.E. (Jewish War 2.307). T h e Rom an general T itu s crucified "five hundred or sometimes m ore . . . daily" in 70 C.E. (Jewish War 5.450). Y et only a single crucified skeleton has been found so far from that terri­ ble first-century in the Jew ish homeland. T ypical first-century Jew ish tombs w ere carved into lim estone rock w ith an antecham ber opening into a room containing several deep niches into w hich a b o d y could be placed at right angles to the room . Such niches w ere used over

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and o ver again once the flesh o f a given corpse had decom posed. T h e bones w ere then buried together in pits dug in the floor or w ere gathered together into bone-boxes called ossuaries. In June 1968 a complex o f four tombs w as excavated at G iv'at ha-Mivtar in northern Jerusalem . Three tombs held fifteen ossuaries containing the bones of thirty-five different individuals: eleven males, tw elve females, and twelve chil­ dren. Professor Haas o f the H ebrew University/H adassah Medical School's Department o f Anatom y has observed that "evidence o f death b y violence was found in five ca ses:. . . crucifixion . . . conflagration [two c a se s]. . . arrow wound . . . blow from a mace" and that "there w ere three cases . . . o f children w ho had died o f starvation” (38). There w as also one w om an w h o had died in childbirth ‘'because o f the lack o f a simple intervention by a m idw ife” (48). O f the tw o adults who had died from conflagration, one w as a fem ale, twenty-four to twenty-six years old, the other a male, sixteen to seventeen years old (44,46). A picture o f his left fibula shows striations indicating that “ this individual had been put on a burn­ ing rack, and left on the fire long after death” (46). This is the first century in the Jew ish homeland even before the horrors o f total w a r in 66-73/74 c .e . Ossuary 4, in Tom b I, held the bones o f one m an tw enty-four to twentyeight years old and one child three to four years old. T h e adult’s nam e, incised on the ossuary, w as Jehochanan; at five and a h alf feet, he w as "no taller than the classical mean for Mediterranean peoples” (55). H e had a cleft palate, an asym ­ metrical face, and a plagiocephalous cranium (one side m ore developed in front, the other side m ore developed in back), as can be seen in his “restored portrait” (53) . The first tw o linked abnormalities stem from “ a critical change in the m an­ ner o f life o f the pregnant w om an in the first tw o or three w eeks o f pregnancy . . . an unexpected deterioration in the w om an's diet, in association w ith psychi­ cal stress . . . produced by som e catastrophe in the life o f a well-to-do w om an” (54) . T h e third abnormality stems from "disturbances in the final period o f preg­ nancy or as a result o f difficulties in the act o f parturition” (54). H aas’s initial analysis o f the crucified skeleton w as hurried due to religious reburial priorities, and the skeleton had to be disinterred and restudied later by Z ia s and Sekeles. Here are the main points o f that reappraisal. First, there w as a bone from another adult in Ossuary 4 b y a first-century ossuary-reburial mistake. Second, the crucified m an’s arms w ere not nailed but tied to the crossbar and are pictorially depicted as bent over and behind it at the elbow s (27). Third, his legs w e re not broken to hasten death. Fourth, his feet w ere affixed separately on either side o f the upright by iron nails about four and a h alf inches long with olive-w ood squares between their heads and his heel bones. Finally, there was "no evidence o f the left heel bone” (25), but the right one still had the nail em bed­ ded in it, offering certain evidence o f crucifixion in this case. “T h e nail w as bent

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n ear its head and also at its pointed end"; after penetrating the olive w o o d and the right heel bone, it "m ay have accidentally struck a knot in the upright, thus bend­ in g the nail dow nwards. Once the body was removed from the cross, albeit with so m e difficulty in rem oving the right leg, the condemned m an's family would n o w find it impossible to rem ove the bent nail without completely destroying the h eel bone. T h is reluctance to inflict further damage to the heel led to the eventual discovery o f the crucifixion" (23, 27). That too is the first century in the Jew ish h om elan d even before the horrors o f total w ar in 66-73/74 c.E. T h at discovery emphasizes tw o points. First, how ever it was managed, be it through patronage or m ercy, bribery or indifference, a crucified person could receive honorable burial in the family tomb in the early- or mid-first-century Je w ish hom eland. T h at agrees with what w e know from Jew ish texts o f the same period. T h e Je w ish philosopher Philo observed, in his Flaecus 83, that decent gov­ ernors som etim es had crucified criminals "taken down and given up to their rela­ tions, in order to receive the honours o f sepulture” at the time o f the emperor's birthday, since “ the sacred character o f the festival ought to be regarded” (Yonge 732). T h e Je w ish historian Josephus recorded, in his Life 420-421, that he found three o f his friends crucified after the sack o f Jerusalem in 70 c.E. and implored m ercy fro m Titus. "T w o o f them died in the physicians’ hands; the third sur­ vived .” Second, w ith all those thousands o f people crucified around Jerusalem in the first century alone, w e have so far found only a single crucified skeleton— and that, o f course, preserved in an ossuary. This supports the view that burial w as the exception rather than the rule, the extraordinary rather than the ordi­ nary case. T h e next step is to place text in conjunction with that context. By text I do not m ean the entire passion-resurrection tradition but three concluding units, all o f w hich concern w om en: w om en watch the burial o f Jesus, w om en find the tom b o fje s u s, and w om en see the apparition ofjesus.

Mary and the Other Women In all fou r G ospels M ary Magdalene is the first to discover the em pty tomb. She provides p ro o f that there is no confusion about having the right tomb w h ere the right body had been buried. In tw o Gospels she is the first to see the risen Jesu s. Y et in m any w ays w e have seen the Gospels soft-pedal these elem ents. T h e evangelists seem to erase partially the w om en ’s role from the narrative. T h eir discom fort hints at h ow firm ly entrenched the tradition o f w o m en 's involvem ent m ust have been, since the authors do not feel free to elim inate it. Claudia Setzer, "Excellent Women: Female Witness to the Resurrection,” p. 268

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Y ou will recall the principle from Koester that I placed as epigraph to Chap­ ter 23: "A s far as the churches o f Ju dea and Jerusalem are concerned, the tradi­ tions preserved in the Pauline Corpus are probably a better witness for their praxis than any sayings and narratives preserved in the Synoptic tradition” (i994a:55o). The pre-Pauline traditions o f the share-meal eucharist in 1 Corinthi­ ans 10 -11 (discussed earlier), and n ow the passion-resurrection account in 1 Corinthians 15 point, therefore, to the earliest Jeru salem com m unity. A C C O R D IN G TO T H E S C R IP T U R E S I focus on r Corinthians 15 not for Pauline theology at Corinth but for prePauline tradition at Jerusalem . This is 1 Corinthians 15 :1-11: •Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters (adelphoi), o f the good news that I pro­ claimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, 2through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you— unless you have come to believe in vain. 3For I handed on to you as o f first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5and that he appeared [1] to Cephas, [а] then to the twelve. [3] ¿Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most o f whom are still alive, though some have died. [4] TThen he appeared to James, [5] then to all the apostles. [б] 8Last o f all, as to one untimely bom, he appeared also to me. *For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an aposde, because I persecuted the church o f God. I0But by the grace o f God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any o f them—though it was not I, but the grace o f God that is with me. "Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe. T h e w hole unit is framed betw een the terms proclaim and believe as repeated in 15:1 and 11, but it is obvious that Christ’s appearance to Paul h im self in 15:8-11 is not part o f his received tradition. One m ust also allow fo r som e redactional organization, whereby Paul concludes w ith "all the apostles” in 15:7b in order to prepare for him self as "least o f the aposdes” in 15.9. But granted that, i5:3h-7 is certified as tradition received b y Paul (15:3a) and thence received by the Corinthians

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(15:1b). W ithin i 5 3 b - 7 1 look first at the parallel phrases about death and resurrec­ tion in i5:3b+4b and then at the list o f appearance in 15:5-7. In i5:3b+4b the tw in phrases "died for our sins" and "raised on the third day" are cited as "in accordance with the scriptures." The phrase "fo r ou r sins" con­ nects, as K oester has noted, w ith the Suffering Servant o f Isaiah 52-53 (19943:553): B u t he w a s w ounded for our sins, crushed for our iniquities; upon him w as the punishm ent that made us whole, and by his bruises w e are healed. All w e like sheep have gone astray; w e have all turned to our own w ay, and the L o rd handed him o ver for our sins. (Isaiah 53:5-6) A s yo u w ill recall from Chapter 23, the Common Meal Tradition saw Jesus as the Suffering Servant through its use o f the noun "child/servant" (pais) in Didache 9 -10 from Isaiah 52:13 and the verb "handed over” in 1 Corinthians io -n fro m Isaiah 53:6 ,12. Since the phrase "handed over for our sins” in 1 Corinthians 15:3b also links w ith Isaiah 53:5-6, Koester is surely correct to link the Common M eal T radition and the Suffering Servant. But he goes beyond that general con­ ju n ctio n : "T h ere is strong evidence that Paul knew such a story o f Jesus' suffering and death— not as historical information but as a story that was told ‘according to the scriptures,’ and a story that made Jesus present for the participants in the cele­ bration o f the eucharist” (1994^553, m y italics). Did Paul know such a story? First, Koester speaks about the Bible’s "suffering righteous” and o fjesu s’ "suf­ ferin g and death.” I insist that it is never an issue o f persecution (by whatever nam e) b ut a balanced dyad o f persecution-vindication (by whatever names). Paul, therefore, certainly knew that narrative pattern. It is, in feet, the dyadic structure o f 1 Corinthians i5:3b+4b, now articulated as death-resurrection. Further, he cer­ tainly k n ew that narrative pattern in a mythical hymn, because that is how it appears in the pre-Pauline text o f Philippians 2:6-11. The question is this: Did Paul know

it

already

as

a story? Koester’s argument for story is primarily

1 Corinthians 11:23, which locates the institution o f the Lord’s Supper "on the night w h en he w as handed over." It is almost impossible for us to read that phrase, especially if mistranslated as "on the night he w as betrayed," without im agining behind it the entire Markan nighttime scenario from upper chamber to garden arrest. But once the Lord’s Supper is told not just as Christian ritual but as Je su s’ institution, its location as last-supper-before-death is alm ost inevitable. M aybe Paul does kn ow a story, but that single phrase is not enough to prove it. Second, K oester adduces "one further piece o f evidence for Paul’s know l­ edge o f a narrative sequence o f the story o f Jesu s’ suffering and death; it appears in the phrase o f 1 C o r 5,7, ‘O ur Passover has been sacrificed, Christ’ . . . . This

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statem ent may imply that Christ died on the day o f the slaughtering o f the Passover lambs, thus revealing that Paul follow ed the sam e dating o fje su s’ death as the Gospel o f Jo h n ' (19943:553). But that is also the sam e dating for Jesus' death as in m y proposed Cross Gospel The Gospel o f Peter 2:5b, says that Herod ‘h anded him over to the people on the day before the unleavened bread, their feast." That is to say, both Jo h n and the Cross Gospel agree, against the three syn­ optics, that Jesus died on Passover Eve, not Passover D ay. I am not convinced from those two phrases in 1 Corinthians 5:7 and 11:23 that Paul does know a death-resurrection story, but, if he does, it could w ell be an antecedent version o f the Cross Gospel There is another m ajor question concerning those parallel phrases in 1 Cor­ inthians i5:3b+4b. Even apart from Isaiah 52-53 there are ve ry m any other biblical texts and types, from single verses in Psalm s to w ider patterns o f persecution-vindication, that can be suggested behind "died according to the scriptures." But what about "raised on the third day according to the scriptures” ? One specific passage is often suggested: Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he w h o has tom , and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up. A fter tw o days he w ill revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that w e m ay live before him. (Hosea 6:1-2) In itself that is simply a standard biblical parallelism, w h ere the numerical pattern x / x + i means a few — that is, in context, a few days. It is a prom ise that G od w ill deliver them soon. W hen you think o f the m yriad biblical citations backing up “ died according to the scriptures,” that is surely a v e ry scant back­ ground for "raised on the third day according to the scriptures.” It is clear enough that w hat is actually “ according to the scriptures” is that dyad o f persecution-vindication. From Joseph to Susannah, from 3 Maccabees to 2 Maccabees, from Isaiah 52-53 to Wisdom 1-5, from the L a w through prophecy to wisdom , the persecuted are vindicated, and their deliverance is either effected before death or promised despite death. But h o w are such prom ises fulfilled, despite death? That is what the descent into hell is all about. It is about Jesu s at the head o f the com munal resurrection. It is about “ the third day,” w h en the Son o f G od is dead enough to enter Hades and destroy its p o w er forever. A first or second day might be about individual resuscitation, but the third day is about com m unal resurrection "according to the scriptures.” Recall that Brow n and I agreed in Chapter 25 on the purpose for gu ard in gjesu s' tom b “ for three days” in Gospel o f Peter 8:30. By Jew ish reckoning, a dead person is surely and securely dead only after three days. That is w hy, for exam ple, it is im portant that Lazarus

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has "already been in the tomb four days” in John 11:17. He is really and truly dead, dead, dead. T h at is also the logic o f Gospel o f Peter 8:30. I f the authorities had sim ply been afraid o f grave robbery, an empty tomb, and claims o f resurrec­ tion from the disciples, they w ould have needed to guard the tomb for a much longer tim e. Such claims could have been made at any time, not ju st within three days. T h ree days establishes that the body is really and irrevocably a corpse so that the disciples cannot resuscitate Jesus and rem ove him. Thereafter, the people, finding an em pty tom b and already repentant because o f the "exceeding great signs" at Jesu s' death, might believe all by themselves (without any apos­ tolic prom pting) that Jesu s is risen from the dead. The authorities’ plan, in other w ords, is to prevent resuscitation by the disciples from being interpreted as res­ urrection b y the people. An aside. Such thinking was quite correct until modem death certification becam e available. Peter Linebaugh has written a fascinating chapter about public hangings at T y b u m T ree in London during the eighteenth century. It addresses, am ong other things, riots between the condemned’s friends and the surgeons who wanted the body for dissection. “At times it was reasonable to regard the surgeons, not the hangm an, as the agent causing death. During the first half o f the eigh­ teenth century the cause o f death at T yb u m was asphyxia, not dislocation o f the spine. A broken neck w as decisive. Asphyxia, however, could result in temporary unconsciousness if the knot was tied, or the noose placed around the neck, in a particular fash io n .. . . Incomplete hangings without fatal strangulation were com ­ m on enough to sustain the hope that resuscitation ('resurrection' as it was called) w ould save the condemned. Life after 'death' therefore had a quite practical reality for those sent to T y b u m to hang, and for many o f them their time in Newgate before the hanging day w as spent in preparation for such ‘resurrections'” (102-104). There is, for example, the case o f W illiam Duell in 1740, who hung at T ybu m for h alf an h ou r and revived as the surgeons were about to dissect him. T h e certainty o f death is the macabre reality behind guarding a body "for three days.” Resuscitation w as a possibility— albeit remote— for at least a few days. But, as w e also saw above, Jesu s had to be truly dead to enter into Hades and release "th em that sleep" from their bondage down below. For Jesus to rise on the third day or to rise after three days meant to rise after true death and true descent into Hades. T h at meant com munal resurrection, meant Jesu s rising at the head o f the h oly ones; and, since such vindication-resurrection w as biblically prom ised, it w as "according to the scriptures.” Notice, by the w ay, that as Paul continues in 1 Corinthians 15, it never occurs to him that Jesu s' resurrection m ight be an absolutely unique and personal privilege, like Elijah taken up to G od long ago. Je su s' resurrection takes place only within the general resurrection:

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If there is no resurrection o f the dead, then Christ has not been raised___ [I]f the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised, (i Corinthians 15:13,16) In fact, the Greek verb that Paul uses for the com m unal resurrection in 15:20, "Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits o f those w h o have slept," is the same as that in Gospel o f Peter 10:42, "H ave yo u preached to them that sleep?” Jesus preaches—better, proclaims like a herald— liberation to those w h o have died in persecution and now at last are vindicated "according to the scriptures." B U RIA L, TO M B, A N D V ISIO N There was, as seen already, a com m on basis in the persecution-vindication pattern and the eucharistic meal behind both the Life Tradition and the Death Tradition. But there is no equivalent C om m on Resurrection Tradition or C om ­ mon Apparition Tradition distinguishable in both o f them. And even w hen those Life and Death Traditions cam e together in the canonical gospels, conjunction between the pre-Pauline tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 and the final chapters o f the gospels is still very difficult to establish. On the one hand, that basic sequence o f death-burial-resurrection-apparition appears w ith credal brevity in 1 Corinthians i 5 3 b- 7 and with full narrative detail in M ark 15-16, M atthew 27-28, Luke 23-24, and Joh n 19-21. On the other hand, there is not the slightest indication that the sequence or even the list o f apparitions in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 w as a tradition behind any o f our present gospel conclusions. But the m ost striking difference is this: W hile the pre-Pauline tradition speaks o f Peter and the Twelve, and o f James and the apostles, the canonical gospel texts em phasize m uch m ore the role o f Mary and the women. W e need to take a closer look at w h at that means. First, tw o men, Peter and Jam es, are nam ed in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, but no w om en are named. Here are som e maybes in that regard. Maybe Paul knew that M ary and the other w om en had found Jesu s' tom b em pty but left that fact implicit betw een : Luke 12:3 = Matt. 10:27 (12) 36. Lamp and Bushel: (1) Gos. Thom. 33:2-3; (2) Q2: Luke 11:33 = Matt. 5:15; (3) Mark 4:21 = Luke 8:16

(13) 80. The Blind Guide: (1) Gos. Thom. 34; (2) Q1: Luke 6:39 = Matt. 15:14b (14) 81. Strong One’s House: (1) Gos. Thom. 35; (2) Q2: Luke 11:21-22 (= Matt. 12:29); (3) Mark 3:27 = Matt. 12:29 (= Luke 11:21-22) (15) 82. Against Anxieties: (1) Gos. Thom. 36 = P. Oxy. 655, col. i.1-17; (2) Q1: Luke 12:22-31 = Matt. 6:25-33 (16) 84. On Hindering Others: (ia) Gos. Thom. 39:1-2 = P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.11-19; (ib) Gos. Thom. 102; (2) Q2: Luke 11:52 = Matt. 23:13 (17) 40. Have and Receive: (1) Gos. Thom. 41; (2) Q2: Luke 19:26 = Matt. 25:29; (3) Mark 4:25 = Matt. 13:12 = Luke 8:18b (18) 23. All Sins Forgiven: (1) Gos. TTiom. 44; (2) Q2: Luke 12:10 = Matt. 12:32; (3) Mark 3:28-30 = Matt. 12:31; (4) Did. 11:7 (19) 4 ** Trees and Hearts: (1) Gos. Thom. 45; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:43-45 = Matt. 7:16-20; (2b) Matt. 12:33-35; (3) Ign. Eph. 14:2b (20) 85. Greater Than John: (1) Gos. Thom. 46; (2) Q2: Luke 7:28 = Matt. 11:11 (21) 86. Serving Two Masters: (1) Gos. TTiom. 47:1-2; (2a) Q1: Luke 16:13 = Matt. 6:24; (2b) 2 Clem. 6:1 (22) 43. .Blessed the Poor: (1) Gos. TTiom. 54; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:20 = Matt. 5:3; (2b) Pol. Phil. 2:3c; (3) James 2:5 (23) 89. Hating One’s Family: (ia) Gos. Thom. 55:i-2a; (ib) Gos. Thom. 101; (2) Q1: Luke 14:25-26 = Matt. 10:37 (24) 44. Carrying One’s Cross: (1) Gos. Thom. 55:2b; (2) Q1: Luke 14:27 = Matt. 10:38; (3) Mark 8:34 = Matt. 16:24 = Luke 9:23 (25) 91. Taken or Left: (1) Gos. Thom. 61:1; (2) Q2: Luke 17:34-35 = Matt. 24:40-41 (26) 45. Father and Son: (1) Gos. Thom. 61:3; (2) Q2: Luke 10:22 = Matt. 11:27; (3a) John 3:35b; (3b) John 13:3a (27) 95. The Feast: (1) Gos. TTiom. 64; (2) Q2: Luke 14:15-24 = Matt. 22:1-13

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589

(28) 48. Blessed the Persecuted: (ia) Gos. Thom. 68; (ib) Gos. Thom. 69:1; (2a) Q': Luke 6:22-23 = Matt. 5:11-12 [except for Q2: 6:22b = 5:11b & 6:23c = 5:12c]: (2b) Matt. 5:10; (2c) Pol. Phil. 2:3f; (3a) 1 Pet. 3:14a; (3b) 1 Pet. 4:14 (29) 96. Blessed the Hungry; (1) Gos. Thom. 69:2; (2) Q1: Luke 6:21a = Matt. 5:6 (30) 50. Harvest Is Great: (1) Gos. Thom. 73; (2) Q1: Luke 10:2 = Matt. 9:37-38; (3)John 4:35 ( 3 0 9 9 - Treasure in Heaven: (1) Gos. Thom. 76:3; (2) Q>: Luke 12:33 = Matt. 6:19-20

(32) 51. Into the Desert: (1) Gos. Thom. 78; (2) Q2: Luke 7:24-27 = Matt. 11:7-10; (3) Mark 1:2-3 = Matt. 3:3 = Luke 3:4-6 = (?)John 1:19-23 (33) 10 1. Foxes Have Holes: (1) Gos. Thom. 86; (2) Q‘: Luke 9:57-58 = Matt. 8:19-20 (34) 102. Inside and Outside: (1) Gos. Thom. 89; (2) Q2: Luke 11:39-40 = Matt. 23:25-26 (35) 103. Give Without Return: (1) Gos. Thom. 95; (2) Q1: Luke 6:30,34,35b = Matt. 5:42; (3) Did. 1:4c, 5a (36) 104. The Leaven: (1) Gos. Thom. 96:1-2; (2) Q‘: Luke 13:20-21 = Matt. 13:33 (37) 107. The Lost Sheep: (1) Gos. Thom. 107; (2) Q1: Luke 15:3-7 = Matt. 18:12-14. B . R ed actio n o f C om m on Sayings Tradition in the Gospel o f Thomas and the Q Gospel Primary bold parenthetical numbers cross-reference to part A o f this appendix. Sec­ ondary bold nonparenthetical numbers cross-reference to Crossan 1991: Appendix iB. Redaction is toward apocalyptic eschatology in the Gospel of Thomas but toward ascetic eschatology in the Q Gospel. That gives the following four types: Type i: 24% (9 out o f 37 units) is redacted in the Gospel of Thomas but not in the Q Gospel Type 2: 8% (3 out o f 37 units) is redacted in the Q Gospel but not in the Gospel of Thomas Type 3:19% (7 out o f 37 units) is redacted in both the Gospel of Thomas and the Q Gospel Type 4: 49% (18 out o f 37 units) is redacted in neither the Gospel of Thomas nor the Q Gospel

T y p e 1: C om m on Sayings Tradition Redacted in the Gospel o f Thomas but N ot in the Q Gospel (1) 4. Ask, Seek, Knock: (ia) Gos. Thom. 2 = P. Oxy. 654.5-9; (ib) Gos. Thom. 92:1; (ic) Gos. Thom. 94; (2) Gos. Heb. 4ab; (3) Q1: Luke 11:9-10 = Matt. 7:7-8; (4) Mark 11:24 = Matt. 21:22; (5a) Dial. Sav. 9-12; (5b) Dial. Sav. 2od; (5c) Dial. Sav. 79-80; (6a) John 14:13-14; (6b) John 15:7; (6c) John 15:16; (6d)John 16:23-24; (6e) John 16:26 (3) 32. Hidden Made Manifest: (ia) Gos. Thom. 5:2 = P. Oxy. 654.29-30; (ib) Gos. Thom. 6:5-6 = P. Oxy. 654.38-40; (2) Q1: Luke 12:2 = Matt. 10:26; (3) Mark 4:22 = Luke 8:17 (6) 74. Peace or Sword: (1) Gos. Thom. 16; (2) Q2: Luke 12:51-53 = Matt. 10:34-36 (7) 14. Eye, Ear, Mind: (1) Gos. Thom. 17; (2) Q2: Luke 10:23-24 = Matt. 13:16-17 (15) 82. Against Anxieties: (1) Gos. Thom. 36 = P. Oxy. 655, col. i.1-17; (2) Q>: Luke 12:22-31 = Matt. 6:25-33 (23) 89. Hating One’s Family: (ia) Gos. Thom. 55:i-2a; (ib) Gos. Thom. 101; (2) Q1: Luke 14:25-26 = Matt. 10:37 (27) 9 5 - The Feast: (1) Gos. Thom. 64; (2) Q2: Luke 14:15-24 = Matt. 22:1-13 (30) 50. Harvest Is Great: (1) Gos. Thom. 73; (2) Q1: Luke 10:2 = Matt. 9:37-38; (3)John 4:35 (33) 10 1. Foxes Have Holes: (1) Gos. Thom. 8 6 ; (2) Q1: Luke 9:57-58 = Matt. 8:19-20

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T yp e 2: Com m on Sayings T radition Redacted in the Q G o sp el but N ot in the G o sp el o f T h o m as (12) 36. Lamp and Bushel: (1) Gos. Thom. 33:2-3; (2) Q2: Luke 11:33 = Matt. 5:15; (3) Mark 4:21 = Luke 8:16 (17) 40. Have and Receive: (1) Gos. Thom. 41; (2) Q2: Luke 19:26 = Matt. 25:29; (3) Mark 4:25 = Matt. 13:12 = Luke 8:18b (34) 102. Inside and Outside: (1) Gos. Thom. 89; (2) Q2: Luke 11:39-40 = Matt. 23:25-26 T yp e 3: C om m on Sayings Tradition R edacted in B oth the G o spel o f T h o m a s and the Q G o sp e l (2) 8. When and Where: (la) Gos. Thom. 3:1-3 = P. Oxy. 654.9-16; (ib) Gos. Thom. 51; (ic) Gos. Thom. 113; (2) Q2: Luke 17:23 = Matt. 24:26; (3) Mark 13:21-23 = Matt. 24:23-25; (4?) Dial. Sav. 16; (5) Luke 17:20-21 (9) 12. Knowing the Danger: (ia) 1 Thess. 5:2; (ib) 2 Pet. 3:10; (2a) Gos. Thom. 21:5-7; (2b) Gos. Thom. 103; (3) Q2: Luke 12:39-40 = Matt. 24:43-44; (4a) Rev. 3:3b; (4b) Rev. 16:15a (20) 85. Greater ThanJohn: (1) Gos. Thom. 46; (2) Q2: Luke 7:28 = Matt. 11:11 (25) 91. Taken or Left: (1) Gos. Thom. 61:1; (2) Q2: Luke 17:34-35 = Matt. 24:40-41 (26) 45. Father and Son: (1) Gos. Thom. 61:3; (2) Q2: Luke 10:22 = Matt. 11:27; (3a) John 3:35b; (3b) John 13:3a (28) 48. Blessed the Persecuted: (ia) Gos. Thom. 68; (ib) Gos. Thom. 69:1; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:22-23 = Matt. 5:11-12 [except for Q2: 6:22b = 5:11b dc 6:23c = 5:12c]; (2b) Matt. 5:10; (2c) Pol. Phil. 2:3f; (3a) 1 Pet. 3:14a; (3b) 1 Pet. 4:14 (32) 51. Into the Desert: (1) Gos. Thom. 78; (2) Q2: Luke 7:24-27 = Matt. 11:7-10; (3) Mark 1:2-3 = Matt. 3:3 = Luke 3:4-6 =(?) John 1:19-23 T y p e 4: C om m on Sayings Tradition Redacted in N eith er the G o sp el o f T h o m as N o r the Q G o s p e l (4) 33. The Golden Rule: (1) Gos. Thom. 6:3 = P. Oxy. 654.36-37; (2) Q1: Luke 6:31 = Matt. 7:12 (5) 1. Mission and Message: (ia) 1 Cor. 9:14; (ib) 1 Cor. 10:27; (2) Gos. Thom. 14:4; (3) Q‘: Luke io:(i), 4-11 = Matt. 10:7, 10b, 12-14; (4) Mark 6:7-13 = Matt. 10:1, 8-ioa, 11 = Luke 9:1-6; (5) Dial. Sav. 53b[i39:9~io]; (6) Did. n:(3)4-i2; (7) 1 Tim. 5:18b (8) 35. The Mustard Seed: (1) Gos. Thom. 20; (2) Q1: Luke 13:18-19 = Matt. 13:31-32-; (3 ) Mark 4:30-32 = Man. 13:31-32 (10) 76. Speck and Log: (1) Gos. Thom. 26 = P. Oxy. 1.1-4; (2) Q1: Luke 6:41-42 = Matt. 7 :3-5

(11) 79. Open Proclamation: (r) Gos. TTiom. 33:1 = P. Oxy. 1.41-42; (2) Q1: Luke 12:3 = Matt. 10:27 (13) 80. The Blind Guide: (1) Gos. Thom. 34; (2) Q1: Luke 6:39 = Matt. 15:14b (14) 81. Strong One's House: (1) Gos. Thom. 35; (2) Q2: Luke 11:21-22 (= Matt. 12:29); (3) Mark 3:27 = Matt. 12:29 (= Luke 11:21-22) (16) 84. On Hindering Others: (ia) Gos. Thom. 39:1-2 = P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.n-19; (Jb) Gos. Thom. 102; (2) Q2: Luke 11:52 = Matt. 23:13 (18) 23. All Sins Forgiven: (1) Gos. TTiom. 44; (2) Q2: Luke 12:10 = Matt. 12:32; (3) Mark 3:28-30 = Matt. 12:31; (4) Did. 11:7

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5 91

(19) 41. Trees and Hearts: (i) Gw. Thom. 45; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:43-45 = Matt. 7:16-20; (2b) Matt. 12:33-35; (3 ) Ign. Eph. 14:2b (21) 86. Serving Two Masters: (1) Gos. Thom. 47:1-2; (2a) Q1: Luke 16:13 = Matt. 6:24; (2b) 2 Clem. 6:1 (22) 43. Blessed the Poor: (1) Gos. Thom. 54; (2a) Q‘: Luke 6:20 = Matt. 5:3; (2b) Pol. Phil 2:3c; (3) James 2:5 (24) 4 4 . Carrying One's Cross: (x) Gos. Thom. 55:2b; (2) Q1: Luke 14:27 = Matt. 10:38; (3) Mark 8:34 = Matt. 16:24 = Luke 9:23 (29) 96. Blessed the Hungry: (1) Gos. Thom. 69:2; (2) Q1: Luke 6:21a = Matt. 5:6 (31) 99. Treasure in Heaven: (1) Gos. Thom. 76:3; (2) Q1: Luke 12:33 = Matt. 6:19-20 (35 ) io 3 * Give Without Return: (1) Gos. Thom. 95; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:30, 34, 35b = Matt. 5:42; (2b) Did. 1:4b, 5a (36) 104. The Leaven: (1) Gos. TTiom. 96:1-2; (2) Q1: Luke 13:20-21 = Matt. 13:33 (37) 107. The Lost Sheep: (1) Gos. Thom. 107; (2) Q1: Luke 15:3-7 —Matt. 18:12-14

A pp en d ix 2

Particular Sayings Tradition in the G o sp el o f T h om as and the Q G ospel This Appendix is based on Crossan 1991: Appendix iB, but see changes given in the Preliminary Note to Appendix 1 above. A . Particular Sayings Tradition in the G o sp el o f T h o m as but Not in the Q G o sp el

72% (95 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel of Thomas does not have any parallels in the Q Gospel. (1) 205. Not Taste Death: (1) Gos. Thom. 1 = P. Oxy. 654.3-5; (2) John 8:51-52; (2) 206. Knowing Oneself: (1) Gos. Thom. 3:2 = P. Oxy. 654.16-21; (2) Dial. Sav. 30; (3) 278. Man and Child: (1) Gos. Thom. 4:1 & P. Oxy. 654.21-25; (4) 31. First and Last: (1) Gos. Thom. 4:2-3 & P. Oxy. 654.25-27; (2) Mark 10:31 = Matt. 19:30; (3) Matt. 20:16; (4) Luke 13:30; (5) 279. In Your Sight: (1) Gos. Thom. 5:1 = P. Oxy. 654.27-29; (6) 207. Buried and Resurrected; (1) P. Oxy. 654.31; (2) Oxyrhynchus shroud [NTA1 1.300]; (7) 280. On Telling Lies: (1) Gos. Thom. 6:2+4 = P- Oxy. 654.36 + 37-38; (8) 281. Man and Lion: (1) Gos. Thom. 7 = P. Oxy. 654.40-42; (9) 71. The Fishnet: (1) Gos. Thom. 8:1; (2) Matt. 13:47-48; (ro) 9. Who Has Ears: (ia) Gos. Thom. 8:2; (ib) Gos. Thom. 21:5; (ic) Gos. Thom. 24:2; (id) Gos. Thom. 63:2; (ie) Gos. Thom. 65:2; (if) Gos. Thom. 96:2; (2a) Mark 4:9 = Matt. 13:9 = Luke 8:8b; (2b) Mark 4:23 = Matt. 13:43b; (3) Matt. 11:15; (4) Luke 14:35b; (5) Rev. 2 :7 ,11,17, 29; 3:6,13, 22; 13:9; (n) 34* The Sower: (1) Gos. Thom. 9; (2) Mark 4:3-8 = Matt. i3:3b-8 = Luke 8:5-8a; (3) 1 Clem. 24:5; (12) 72. Fire on Earth: (1) Gos. Thom. 10; (2) Luke 12:49; (13) 208. Life and Death: (ia) Gos. Thom. u :i-2a; (ib) Gos. Thom. 111:1-2; (2) Dial. Sav. 56-57; (14) 282. Two and One: (1) Gos. Thom. 11:2b; (15) 30. Revealed to James: (1) 1 Cor. 15:7a; (2) Gos. Thom. 12; (3) Gos. Heb. 7; (16) 73. Who Is Jesus? (1) Gos. Thom. 13; (2a) Mark 8:27-30 = Matt. 16:13-20 = Luke 9:18-21; (2b) Gos. Naz. 14; (2c) John 6:67-69; (17) 283. Fasting, Praying, Almsgiving: (1) Gos. Thom. 6:1 + 14:1; (18) 19. What Goes In: (1) Gos. Thom. 14:3; (2) Mark 7:14-15; (3) Matt. 15:10-11; (4a) Acts 10:14b; (4b) Acts 11:8b; (19) 284. Your Father: (1) Gos. Thom. 15; (20) 285. Begin­ ning and End: (1) Gos. Thom. 18:1-3; (21) 86. Before One’s Creation: (1) Gos. Thom. 19:1; (22) 287. Stones and Trees: (1) Gos. Thom. 19:2; (23) 288. Children in Field: (1) Gos. Thom. 21:1-2; (24) 75. The Harvest Time: (1) Gos. Thom. 21:4; (2) Mark 4:26-29; (25) 20. Kingdom and Children: (1) Gos. Thom. 22:1-2; (2) Mark 10:13-16 - Matt. 19:13-15 = Luke 18:15-17; (3 ) Matt. 18:3; (4) John 3:1-5, 9-10; (26) 13. Two As One: (ia) Gal. 3:27-28; (ib) 1 Cor. 12:13; (ic) Col. 3:10-11; (2) Gos. Thom. 22:3-4; (3) Eger. Gos. 5b; (4) 2 Clem. 12:1-6; (27) 289. The Chosen Few: (1) Gos. Thom. 23; (28) 21. The World’s Light: (1) Gos. Thom. 24:1-3 = P. Oxy. 655, fr.d.1-52; (2) Matt. 5:14a; (3a?) Dial. Sav. 14; (3b?) Dial. Sav. 34; (4a) John 8:12; (4b) John 11:9-10; (4c) John 12:35-36; (29) 290. Love Your Brother: (1) Gos. Thom. 25; (30) 291. Fasting and Sabbath: (1) Gos. Thom. 27 = P. Oxy. 1.4-n; (3*) *92. Drunk, Blind, Empty: (1) Gos. Thom. 28; (32) 293. Flesh As Poverty: (1) Gos. Thom. 29; (33) 77 * Two or Three: (1) Gos. Thom. 30 = P. Oxy. 1.23-27; (2) Matt. 18:20; (34) 22. Prophet’s Own Country: (1) Gos. Thom. 31 = P. Oxy. 1.30-35; (2) Mark 6:i-6a = Matt. 13:53-58; (3) Luke 4:16-24; (4) John 4:44; (35 ) 78. The

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AP P E ND I X 2

Mountain City: (i) Go*. Thom. 32 = P. Oxy. 1.36-41; (2) Matt. 5:14b; (36) 37. New Garments: (1) Go*. Tftom. 37 = P. Oxy. 655, col. 1.17-col. ii.1.17; (2a) Dial Sav. 49-52; (2b) Dial Sav. 84-85; (3 ) Eger. Go*. 5a; (37 ) 2 9 4 - Desire to Hear: (1) Go*. Thom. 38:1 - P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.2-11; (38) 83. Seeking Too Late: (1) Gos. Thom. 38:2; (2) John 7:34a, 36b; (39) 38. Serpents and Doves: (1) Go*. Thom. 39:2 = P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.19-23; (2a) Matt. 10:16b; (2b) Go*. Naz. 7; (3) Ign. Pol. 2:2; (40) 39. Plant Rooted Up: (1) Gos. Thom. 40; (2) Matt. 15:12-13; (3a) Ign. Trail 11:1b; (3b) Ign. Phld. 3:1b; (41) 295. Become Passers-By: (1) Go*. Thom. 42; (42) 296. Prom My Words: (1) Go*. Thom. 43; (43) 297. Horses and Bows: (1) Go*. Thom. 47л; (44) 87. Drinking Old Wine: (1) Gos. Thom. 47:3; (2) Luke 5:39; (45) 88. Patches and Wineskins: (1) Go*. Thom. 47:4; (2) Mark 2:21-22 = Matt. 9:16-17 = Luke 5:36-38; (46) 298. Unity and Mountain: (ia) Gos. Thom. 48; (ib) Gos. Thom. 106; (47) 299. Solitary and Elect: (1) Go*. Thom. 49; (48) 300. I f They Ask: (1) Gos. Thom. 50; (49) 42. Scriptures and Jesus: (1) Gos. Thom. 52; (2) Eger. Gos. 2.1; (3) John 5 : 3 9 - 4 7 (5 o) 301. The True Circumcision: (1) Gos. Thom. 53 ; (51) 302. Superior to World: (ia) Gos. Thom. 56; (ib) Go*. Thom. 80; (52) 90. The Planted Weeds: (1) Go*. Thom. 57; (2) Matt. 13:24-30; (53) 3°3- Blessed the Sufferer: (1) Gos. Thom. 58; (54) 304. Take Heed Now: (1) Go*. Thom. 59; (55) 305. Samaritan and Lamb: (1) Go*. Thom. 60; (56) 306. Jesus and Salome: (1) Go*. Thom. 61:2-5; (57 ) 92. Knowing the Mystery: (1) Go*. Thom. 62:1; (2a) Secret Mark ferio; (2b) Mark 4:10-12 = Matt. 13:10-11,13-15 = Luke 8:9-10; (58) 93. On Secrecy: (1) Go*. Thom. 62:2; (2) Matt. 6:3b; (59) 994. The Rich Farmer: (1) Gos. Thom. 63:1; (2) iQ?: Luke 12:16-21; (60) 46. The Tenants: (1) Gos. Thom. 65; (2) Mark 12:1-9, 12 = Matt. 21:33-41, 43-46 = Luke 20:9-16,19. (3) Herm. Sim. 5.2:4-7; (61) 47. The Rejected Stone: (1) Go*. Thom. 66; (2) Mark 12:10-11 = Matt. 21:42 = Luke 20:17-18; (3) Bam. 6:4; (62) 307. Knowing the All: (1) Go*. Thom. 6 7 ; (63) 308. From Within Yourselves: (1) Gos. Thom. 70; (64) 49. Temple and Jesus: (1) Gos. Thom. 71; (2a) Mark 14:55-59 = Matt. 26:59-61; (2b) Mark 15:29-328 = Matt. 27:39-43 = (!) Luke 23:35-37; (2c) Acts 6:11-14; (3)John 2:18-22; (65) 97. The Disputed Inheritance: (1) Go*. Thom. 72:1-3; (2) Luke 12:13-15; (66) 309. The Cistern: (1) Gos. TTiom. 74; (67) 209. The Bridal Chamber: (1) Go*. Thom. 75; (2) Dial Sav. 50b; (68) 98. The Pearl: (1) Gos. Thom. 76:1; (2) Matt. 13:45-46; (69) 310. Light and All: (1) Gos. Thom. 77:1; (70) 311. Stowe and Wood: (1) Go*. Thom. 77:2 = P. Oxy. 1.27-30; (71) 24. Blessed the Womb: (1) Gos. Thom. 79:1-2; (2) iQ?: Luke 11:27-28; (3?) John 13:17; (4?) James 1:25b; (72) 100. Jerusalem Mourned: (1) Go*. Thom. 79:3; (2) Luke 23:27-31; (73) 312. Riches and Power: (1) Go*. Thom. 81; (74) 313. Near the Fire: (1) Gos. Thom. 82; (75) 314. The Father’s Light: (1) Go*. Thom. 83; (76) 315. The Primordial Images: (1) Gos. Thom. 84; (77) 316. Adam’s Death; (1) Go*. Thom. 85; (78) 317. Body and Soul: (1) Go*. Thom. 87; (79) 318. Angels and Prophets: (1) Gos. Thom. 88; (80) 52. Yoke and Burden: (1) Gos. Thom. 90; (2) Matt. 11:28-30; (3) Dial Sav. 65-68; (81) 53. Knowing the Times: (1) Gos. Thom. 91; (2) Luke 12:54-56; (3?) Matt. 16:2-3; (3b?) Go*. Naz. 13; (4?) John 6:30; (82) 319. Then and Now: (1) Gos. Thom. 92:2; (83) 5 4 * Dogs and Swine: (1) Go*. Thom. 93; (2) Matt. 7:6; (3) Did. 9:5; (84) 320. The Empty Jar: (1) Go*. Thom. 97; (85) 321. The Assassin: (1) Gos. Thom. 98; (86) 105. Jesus’ True Family: (1) Gos. Thom. 99; (2a) Магкз:і9Ь-2і, 31-35 = Matt. 12:46-50 = Luke 8:19-21; (2b) 2 Clem. 9:it; (2c) Gos. Eh. 5; (87) 55 - Caesar and God: (1) Go*. Thom. 100; (2) Eger. Gos. 2. зас; (3) Mark 12:13-17 = Matt. 22:15-22 = Luke 20:20-26; (88) 106. Fasting and Wedding: (1) Gos. Thom. 104; (2) Mark 2:18-20 = Matt. 9:14-15 - Luke 5:33-35; (89) 322. A Harlot’s Son: (1) Go*. Thom. 105; (90) 323. From My Mouth: (1) Gos. Thom. 108; (91) 108. The Treasure: (1) Gos. Thom. 109; (2) Matt. 13:44; (92) 324- Finding the World: (1) Gos. Thom, no; (93) 325- Finding Oneself: (1) Go*. Thom. 111:3; (94) 326. Flesh and Soul: (1) Go*. Thom. 112; (95) 327. Peter and Mary: (1) Gos. Thom. 114.

P A R T I C UL AR SAYI NGS T R A D I T I ON

+

595

B. Particular Sayings Tradition in the Q G o s p e l but N ot in the G o sp el o f T h o m as

63% (64 out of 101 units) of the Q Gospel does not have parallels in the Gospel of Thomas. (1) 137 'John’s Warning: (i) Q2: Luke 3:7-98 = Matt. 3:7-108; (2) 115 [& 138]. John's Message: (ia) Q2: Luke 3:15-18= Matt. 3:11-12 = Matt. 7:19; (ib) Acts 13:24-25; (ic) John 1:24-31; (2) Mark 1:7-8; (3) 116 [& 139]. Jesus Tempted Thrice: (ia) Q3; Luke 4:1-13 = Matt. 4:1-11; (ib) Gos. Naz. 3; (4) 56. Blessed the Sad: (1) Q1: Luke 6:21= Matt. 5:4; (2) Dial. Sav. 13-14; (3) John 16:20, 22; (5) 114. Love Your Enemies: (1) P. Oxy. 1224, 2 r i, lines i-2a; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:27-28,35a = Matt. 5:43-44; (2b) Pol. Phil. 12:3a; (3) Did. igac; (6) 140. The Other Cheek: (1) Q1: Luke 6:29 = Matt. 5:38-41; (2) Did. 1:4b; (7) 117. Better than Sinners: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:32-35 = Matt. 5:45-47; (ib) 2 Clem. 13:4a [from Luke 6:32]; (2) Ign. Pol 2:1; (3) Did. 1:3b; (8) 14. As Your Father: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:36 = Man. 5:48; (ib) Pol. Phil 12:3b; (9) 118. Judgment fo r Judgment: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:37a = Mart. 7:i-2a; (2a) 1 Clem. 13:2c; (2b) Pol. Phil 2:3a; (10) 57. Measure for Measure: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:38bc = Matt. 7:2b; (2) Mark 4:24b; (3a) 1 Clem. i3:2g; (ia/3b) Pol. Phil. 2:3d; (u) 58. Disciple and Servant: (i) Q1: Luke 6:40 = Matt. 10:24-25; (2) Dial Sav. 53c; (3a) John 13:16; (3b) John 15:20; (12) h i . Invocation without Obe­ dience: (1) Eger. Gos. 3; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:46 = Matt. 7:21; (2b) 2 Clem. 4:2; (13) 142. Rocfe or Sand: (1) Q1: Luke 6:47-49 = Mart. 7:24-27; (14) 119. Distant Boy Cured: (1) Q2: Luke 7:i-2[3-6a]6b-io = Matt. 8:5-10,13; (2) John 4:4612-53; (15) 143. Reply to John: (1) Q2: Luke 7:18-23 = Matt. 11:2-6; (16) 144. Wisdom Justified: (1) Q2: Luke 7:31-35 = Mart. 11:16-19; (17) 145. Leave the Dead: (1) Q2: Luke 9:59-60 = Matt. 8:21-22; (18) 147. Lambs Among Wolves: (ia) Q1: Luke 10:3 = Matt. 10:16a; (ib) 2 Clem. 5:2; (19) 148. Cities o f Woe: (1) Q2: Luke 10:12-15 = Matt. 11:15, 20-24; (2.0) 10. Receiving the Sender: (1) Q1: Luke 10:16 = Matt. 10:40; (2) Mark 9:36-37 = Matt. 18:2,5 = Luke 9:47-488; (3) Did. 11:4-5; (4a) John 5:23b; (4b) John 12:44-50; (4c) John 13:20; (5) Ign. Eph. 6:1; (21) 66. Wise and Understanding: (1) 1 Cor. 1:19; (2a) Q2: Luke 10:21 = Matt. 11:25-26; (2b) Gos. Naz. 9; (22) 120 [& 27]. The Lord’s Prayer : (ia) Q1: Luke i i :( i )2 -4 = (!) Matt. 6:9-13; (ib) Gos. Naz. 5; (ic) Pol. Phil 7:2a; (2) Did. 8:2b; (23) 149. Good Gifts: (1) Q1: Luke 11:11-13 = Matt. 7:9-11; (24) 121. Beelzebul Con­ troversy: (ia) Qa: Luke 11:14-15, 17-18 = Matt. 12:22-26; (ib) Matt. 9:32-34; (2) Mark 3:22-26; (25) 150. By Whose Power: (1) Q2: Luke 11:19-20 = Matt. 12:27-28; (26) 57. For and Against: (1) P. Oxy. 1224, 2 r i, lines 2b-5; (2) Q2: Luke 11:23 = Matt. 12:30; (3) Mark 9:40 = Luke 9:50b; (27) 151. 77 te Returning Demon: (1) Q2: Luke 11:24-26 = Matt. 12:43-45; (2-8) 122. Request fo r Sign: (ia ) Q2: Luke 11:29-30 = Matt. 12:38-40; (ib) Matt. 16:4a; (ic) Gos. Naz. 11; (2a) Mark 8:11-13 = Matt. 16:1, 4 = Luke 11:16; (29) 152. Judgment by Pagans: (1) Q2: Luke 11:31-32 = Matt. 12:41-42; (30) 123. The Body’s Light: (1) Q2: Luke 11:34-36 = Matt. 6:22-23; (2) Dial Sav. 8 [125:18-126:4]; (31) 153. Tithing and Justice: (i) Q2: Luke 11:42 = Matt. 23:23; (32) 124. Honors and Salutations: (i) Q2: Luke 11:43 = Matt. 23:6b-7a; (2) Mark 12:38-40 = Matt. 23:5-7 = Luke 20:45-46; (33) 154. Like Graves: (1) Q2: Luke 11:44 = Matt. 23:27-28; (34) 155. Helping with Burdens: (1) Q2: Luke 11:45-46 = Matt. 23:4; (35) 156. The Prophets’ Tombs: (1) Q2: Luke 11:47-48 = Matt. 23:29-31; (36) 157. Wisdom’s Envoys: (ia) Q2: Luke 11:49-51 = Matt. 23:34-36; (ib) Gos. Naz. 17; (37) 158. Whom To Fear: (ia) Ql: Luke 12:4-5 = Matt. 10:28; (ib) 2 Clem. 5:4; (38) 159. God and Sparrows: (1) Q1: Luke 12:6-7 = Matt. 10:29-31; (39) 28. Before the Angels: (ia) Q2: Luke 12:8-9 = Matt. 10:32-33; (ib) 2 Clem. 3:2 [from Matt. 10:32]; (2) Mark 8:38 = Matt. 16:27 = Luke 9:26; (3) Rev. 3:5; (4) 2 Tim 2:12b; (40) 59. Spirit Under Trial: (1) Q2: Luke 12:11-12 = Matt. 10:19-20; (2) Mark 13:11 = Matt. 10:19-20 = Luke 21:14-15; (3) John 14:26; (41) 160. Heart and Treasure: (1) Q1: Luke 12:34 = Matt. 6:21; (42) 161. Master and Steward: (1) Q2: Luke 12:42-46 = Matt. 24:45-513;

596

+

AP P E ND I X 2

(43) 162. Before theJudgment: (1) Q2: Luke 12:57-59 = Matt. 5:25-26; (2) Did. 1:5c; (44) 163. The Narrow Door: (1) Ql: Luke 13:23-24 = Matt. 7:13-14; (45 ) 164. The Closed Door: (1) Q»; Luke 13:25 = Matt. 25:1-12; (46) 165. Depart from Me: (ia) Q2: Luke 13:26-27 = Matt. 7:22-23; (ib?) 2 Clem. 4:5; (ic?) Gos. Naz. 6; (47) 166 [& 125]. Patriarchs and Gentiles: (1) Q2: Luke 13:28-29 = Matt. 8:11-12; (48) 167. Jerusalem Indicted: (1) Q2: Luke 13:34-35 = Matt. 23:37-39; (49) 379. Exaltation and Humiliation: (1) Q1: Luke 14:11 = Luke 18:14 = Matt. 23:12; (50) 60. Saving One's Life: (1) Q1: Luke 17:33 = Matt. 10:39; (2) Mark 8:35 = Matt. 16:25 = Luke 9:24; (3) John 12:25-26; (51) 126. Salting the Salt: (1) Q1: Luke 14:34-358 = Matt. 5:13; (2) Mark 9:50a; (52) 168. Kingdom and Violence: (ia) Q2: Luke 16:16 = Matt. 11:12-14; (ib) Goi. Naz. 8; (53) 169- Not One Iota: (1) Q2: Luke 16:17 = Matt. 5:18; (54) 15. Against Divorce: (1) 1 Cor. 7:10-11; (2) Q2: Luke 16:18 = Matt. 5:31-32; (3) Mark 10:10-12 = Matt. 19:9; (4) Herrn. Man. 4.1:6b, 10; (55) 170. Woe fo r Temptation: (i) Q2: Luke 17:1-2 = Matt. 18:6-7; (56) 171. Reproving and Forgiving: (1) Q2: Luke 17:3 = Matt. 18:15; (57) 172. Unlimited Forgiveness: (ia) Q2: Luke 17:4 = Matt. 18:21-22; (ib) Gos. Naz. 153b; (58) 173. Faith's Power: (1) Q2: Luke 17:5-6 = Matt. 17:20; (59) 174. As with Lightning: (1) Q2: Luke 17:24 = Matt. 24:27; (60) 175. As with Noah: (1) Q2: Luke 17:26-27 = Matt. 24:37-393; (61) 176. As with Lot: (1) Q2: Luke 17:28-30 = Matt. 24:39b; (62) 177. Corpse and Vultures: (1) Q2: Luke 17:37 = Matt. 24:28; (63) 178. The Entrusted Money: (ia) Q2: Luke i9:(n)i2-24, 27 = Matt. 25:14-28,30; (ib) Gos. Naz. 18; (64) 179. On Twelve Thrones: (1) Q2: Luke 22:28-30 = Matt. 19:28.

A ppendix 3

G o sp el o f Thom as, Q G ospel,

and Mark

This appendix is based on Crossan 1991: Appendix iB, but see changes given in Prelim­ inary Note to Appendix 1 above. A. Sayings Tradition Common to the G o s p e l o f T hom as, the Q G o sp el, and Mark 30% (11 out o f 37 units) o f what is common to the Gospel of Thomas and the Q Gospel has parallels in Mark. (1) 4. Ask, Seek, Knock: (ta) Gos. Thom. 2 = P. Oxy. 654.5-9; (ib) Gos. Thom. 92:1; (ic) Gos. Thom. 94; (2) Gos. Heb. 43b; (3) Q1: Luke 11:9-10 = Matt. 7:7-8; (4) Mark 11:24 = Man. 21:22; (5a) Dial Sav. 9-12; (5b) Dial Sav. 2od; (5c) Dial Sav. 79-80; (6a) John 14:13-14; (6b) John 15:7; (6 c) John 15:16; (6d) John 16:23-24; (6e)John 16:26; (2) 8. When and Where: (ia) Gos. Thom. 3:1 = P. Oxy. 654.9-16; (ib) Gos. Thom. 51; (ic) Gos. Thom. 113; (2) Q2: Luke 17:23 = Matt. 24:26; (3) Mark 13:21-23 = Matt. 24:23-25; (4?) Dial Sav. 16; (5) Luke 17:20-21; (3) 32. Hidden Made Manifest: (ia) Gos. Thom. 5:2 = P. Oxy. 654.29-30; (ib) Gos. Thom. 6:4 = P. Oxy. 654.38-40; (2) Q1: Luke 12:2 = Matt. 10:26; (3) Mark 4:22 = Luke 8:17; (4) 1. Mission and Message: (ia) 1 Cor. 9:14; (ib) 1 Cor. 10:27; (2) Gos. Thom. 14:2; (3) Q1: Luke i o :( i ), 4-11 = Matt. 10 :7,10b, 12-14; (4) Mark 6:7-13 = Matt. 10:1, 8-ioa, n = Luke 9:1-6; (5) Dial Sav. 53b[i39:9-io]; (6) Did. n:(3)4-i2; (7) 1 Tim 5:18b; (5) 35. The Mustard Seed: (1) Gos. Thom. 20:1-2; (2) Q1: Luke 13:18-19 = Matt. 13:31-32; (3) Mark 4:30-32 = Matt. 13:31-32; (6) 336. Lamp and Bushel: (1) Gos. Thom. 33:2; (2) Q2: Luke 11:33 = Matt. 5:15; (3) Mark 4:21 = Luke 8:16; (7) 81. Strong One's House: (1) Gos. Thom. 35; (2) Q2: Luke 11:21-22 (= Matt. 12:29); (3) Mark 3:27 = Matt. 12:29 (= Luke 11:21-22); (8) 40. Have and Receive: (1) Gos. Thom. 41; (2) Q2: Luke 19:26 = Matt. 25:29; (3) Mark 4:25 = Matt. 13:12 = Luke 8:18b; (9) 23. AH Sins For­ given: (1) Gos. Thom. 44; (2) Q2: Luke 12:10 = Matt. 12:32; (3) Mark 3:28-30 = Matt. 12:31; (4) Did. 117 ; (10) 44. Carrying One's Cross: (1) Gos. Thom. 55:2b; (2) Ql: Luke 14:27 = Matt. 10:38; (3) Mark 8:34 = Matt. 16:24 = Luke 9:23; (11) 51. Into the Desert: (1) Gos. Thom. 78; (2) Q2: Luke 7:24-27 = Matt. 11:7-10; (3) Mark 1:2-3 = Matt. 3:3 = Luke 3:4-6 = (?) John 1:19-23. B. Sayings Tradition Common to the G o s p e l o f T h o m as and Mark but Not in the Q G o s p e l 17% (16 o f 95 units) o f what is particular to the Gospel of Thomas has parallels in Mark. (1) 31- First and Last: (1) Gos. Thom. 4:2-3 = P. Oxy. 654.25-27 (2) Mark 10:31 = Matt. 19:30; (3) Matt. 20:16; (4) Luke 13:30; (2) 9. Who Has Ears: (ia) Gos. Thom. 8:4; (ib) Gos. Thom. 21:10; (ic) Gos. Thom. 24:2; (id) Gos. Thom. 63:4; (ie) Gos. Thom. 65:8; (if) Gos. Thom. 96:3; (2a) Mark 4:9 = Matt. 13:9 = Luke 8:8b; (2b) Mark 4:23 =Matt. 13:43b; (3) Mart. 11:15; (4) Luke 14:35b; (5) Rev. 2:7, n, 17, 29; 3:6,13, 22; 13:9; (3) 3 4 - The Sower: (1) Gos. Thom. 9; (2)

598

+

AP P E ND I X 3

Mark 4:3-8 = Matt. 1з:зЬ-8 = Luke 8:5-8a; (3) 1 Clem. 24:5; (4) 73. Who Is Jesus? (1) Gos. T/iom. 13; (2a) Mark 8:27-30 = Matt. 16:13-20 = Luke 9:18-21; (2b) Gos. Naz. 14; (2c) John 6:67-69; (5) »9 - What Goes In: (1) Gos. Thom. 14:5; (2) Mark 7:14-15; (3) Matt. 15:10-11; (4a) Acts 10:14b; (4b) Acts 11:8b; (6) 75. The Harvest Time: (1) Gos. Thom. 21:8-9; (2) Mark 4:26-29; (7) 20. Kingdom and Children: (1) Gos. Thom. 22:1-2; (2) Mark 10:13-16 = Matt. 19:13-15 = Luke 18:15-17; (З) Matt. 18:3; (4) John 3:1-5, 9-10; (8) 22. Prophet's Own Country: (1) Gos. Thotn. 31 P. Oxy. 1.30-35; (2) Mark 6:i-6a = Matt. 13:53-58; (3) Luke 4:16-24; (4) John 4:44; (9) 88. Patches and Wineskins: (1) Gos. Thom. 47:4-5; (2.) Mark 2:21-22 = Matt. 9:16-17 = Luke 5:36-38 (10) 92. Knowing the Mystery: (1) Gos. Thom. 62:3b; (2a) Secret Mark f2rio; (2b) Mark 4:10-12 = Matt. 13:10-11, 13-15 = Luke 8:9-10; (11) 46. The Tenants: (1) Gos. Thom. 65:1-7; (2) Mark 12:1-9,12 = Matt. 21:33-41, 43-46 = Luke 20:9-16,19; (3) Herrn. Sim. 5.2:4-7; (12) 47. The Rejected Stone: (1) Gos. Thom. 66; (2) Mark 12:10-11 = Matt. 21:42 = Luke 20:17-18; (3) Bam. 6:4; (13) 49. Temple and Jesus: (1) Gos. Thom. 71; (2a) Mark 14:55-59 = Matt. 26:59-61; (2b) Mark 15:29-323 = Matt. 27:39-43 =(!) Luke 23:35-37; (2c) Acts 6:11-14; (3) John 2:18-22; (14) 105. Jesus' True Family: (1) Gos. Thom. 99; (2a) Mark 3:i9b-2i, 31-35 = Matt. 12:46-50 = Luke 8:19-21; (2b) 2 Clem. 9:11; (2c) Gos. Eb. 5; (15) 55. Caesar and God: (1) Gos. Thom. 100; (2) Eger. Gos. 2. зас; (3) Mark 12:13-17 = Matt. 22:15-22 = Luke 20:20-26; (16) 106. Fasting and Wedding: (1) Gos. Thom. 104; (2) Mark 2:18-20 = Matt. 9:14-15 = Luke 5:33-35. C. Sayings Tradition Common to the Q G o s p e l and Mark but N ot in the G ospel o f Thom as

19% (12 out of 64 units) of what is particular to the Q Gospel has parallels in Mark.12 (1) 115 [& 138]. John's Message: (ia) Q2: Luke 3:15-18 = Matt. 3:11-12 = Matt. 7:19; (ib) Acts 13:24-25; (ic) John 1:24-31; (2) Mark 1:7-8; (2) 57. Measure fo r Measure: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:з8Ьс = Matt. 7:2b; (2) Mark 4:24b; (3a) 1 Clem. i3:2g; (ia/зЬ) Pol. Phil. 2:3d; (3) 10. Receiv­ ing the Sender: (1) Q1: Luke 10:16 = Matt. 10:40; (2) Mark 9:36-37 = Matt. 18:2, 5 = Luke 9:47-483; (3) Did. 11:4-5; (4a) John 5:23b; (4b) John 12:44-50; (4c) John 13:20; (5) Ign. Eph. 6:1; (4) 121. Beelzebul Controversy: (ia) Q2: Luke 11:14-15,17-18 = Matt. 12:22-26; (ib) Matt. 9:32-34; (2) Mark 3:22-26; (5) 57. For and Against: (1) P. Oxy. 1224, 2 r i, lines 2Ы-5; (2) Q2: Luke 11:23 = Matt. 12:30; (3) Mark 9:40 = Luke 9:50b; (6) 122. Request fo r Sign: (ia ) Q2: Luke 11:29-30 = Matt. 12:38-40; (ib) Matt. 16:4a; (ic) Gos. Naz. n ; (2a) Mark 8:11-13 = Matt. 16:1, 4 = Luke 11:16; (7) 124. Honors and Salutations: (1) Q2: Luke 11:43 = Matt. 23:6b-7a; (2) Mark 12:38-40 = Matt. 23:5-7 = Luke 20:45-46; (8) 28. Before the Angels: (ia) Q2: Luke 12:8-9 = Matt. 10:32-33; (ib) 2 Clem. 3:2 [from Matt. 10:32]; (2) Mark 8:38 = Matt. 16:27 = Luke 9:26; (3) Rev. 3:5; (4) 2 Tim 2:12b; (9) 59. Spirit Under Trial: (1) Q1: Luke 12:11-12 = Matt. 10:19-20; (2) Mark 13:11 = Matt. 10:19-20 = Luke 21:14-15; (3) John 14:26; (10) 60. Saving One's Life: (1) Q1: Luke 17:33 = Matt. 10:39; (2) Mark 8:35 = Matt. 16:25 = Luke 9:24; (3) John 12:25-26; (11) 126. Salting the Salt: (1) Q1: Luke 14:34-353 = Matt. 5:13; (2) Mark 9:50a; (12) 15. Against Divorce: (1) 1 Cor. 7:10-11; (2) Q2: Luke 16:18 = Matt. 5:31-32; (3) Mark 10:10-12 = Matt. 19:9; (4) Herm. Man. 4.1:6b, 10.

A ppendix 4

G o sp el o f T h om as

and Some Other Sources

This appendix is based on Crossan 1991: Appendix iB, but see changes given in Prelim­ inary Note to Appendix 1 above. A . Sayings Tradition Common to the G o sp el o f T h o m as and Special Matthew 12% (16 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel of Thomas has parallels in Special Matthew. (1) 31. -First and Last: (1) Gos. Thom. 4:2-3 = P. Oxy. 654.425-427; (2) Mark 10:31 = Matt. 19:30; (3) Matt. 20:16; (4) Luke 13:30; (2) 71. The Fishnet: (1) Gos. Thom. 8:1-3; (2) Matt. 13:47-48; (3) 9 - WTio Has Ears: (ia) Gos. Thom. 8:4; (ib) Gos. Thom. 21:10; (ic) Gos. Thom. 24:2; (id) Gos. Thom. 63:4; (ie) Gos. Thom. 65:8; (if) Gos. Thom. 96:3; (2a) Mark 4:9 = Matt. 13:9 = Luke 8:8b; (2b) Mark 4:23 =Matt. 13:43b; (3) Matt. 11:15; (4) Luke 14:35b; (5) Rev. 2 :7 ,11,17 , 29; 3:6,13, 22; 13:9; (4) 20. Kingdom and Children: (1) Gos. Thom. 22:1-2; (2) Mark 10:13-16 = Matt. 19:13-15 = Luke 18:15-17; (3) Matt. 18:3; (4) John 3:1-5, 9-10; (5) 21. The World's Light: (1) Gos. Thom. 24:1+3 = P. Oxy. 655, fr. d.1-5; (2) Matt. 5:14a; (3a?) Dial Sav. 14; (3b?) Dial. Sav. 34; (4a) John 8:12; (6) 77. Two or Three: (1) Gos. Tiiom. 30 = P. Oxy. 1.23-27; (2) Matt. 18:20; (7) 78. The Mountain City: (1) Gos. Thom. 32 = P. Oxy. 1.36-41; (2) Matt. 5:14b; (8) 38. Serpents and Doves: (1) Gos. Thom. 39:3 = P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.19-23; (2a) Matt. 10:16b; (2b) Gos, Naz. 7; (3) Ign. Pol. 2:2; (9) 39. Plant Rooted Up: (1) Gos. Thom. 40; (2) Matt. 15:12-13; (3a) Ign. Trail. n:ib; (3b) Ign. Phld. 3:1b; (10) 41* Trees and Hearts: (1) Gos. Thom. 45; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:43-45 = Matt. 7:16-20; (2b) Matt. 12:33-35; (3) Ign. Eph. 14:2b; (11) 90. The Planted Weeds: (1) Gos. Thom. 57; (2) Matt. 13:24-30; (12) 93. On Secrecy: (1) Gos. Thom. 62:2; (2) Matt. 6:3b; (13) 98. The Pearl: (1) Gos. Thom. 76:1-2; (2) Matt. 13:45-46; (14) 52. Yoke and Burden: (1) Gos. Thom. 90; (2) Matt. 11:28-30; (3) Dial. Sav. 65-68; (15) 54. Dogs and Swine: (1) Gos. Thom. 93; (2) Matt. 7:6; (3) Did. 9:5; (16) 108. The Treasure: (1) Gos. Thom. 109; (2) Matt. 13:44. I have not counted 53. Knowing the Times: (1) Gos. Thom. 91; (2) Luke 12:54-56; (3?) Matt. 16:2-3; (3b?) Gos. Naz. 13; (4?) John 6:30. B. Sayings Tradition Common to the G o sp el o f T h o m as and Special Luke 8% (10 out o f 132 units) o f the Gospel of Thomas has parallels in Special Luke. (1) 31. First and Last: (1) Gos. Thom. 4:2-3 = P. Oxy. 654.25-27; (2) Mark 10:31 = Matt. 19:30; (3) Matt. 20:16; (4) Luke 13:30; (2) 9. Who Has Ears: (ia) Gos. Thom. 8:4; (ib) Gos. Thom. 21:10; ( ic ) Gos. Thom. 24:2; (id) Gos. TTiom. 63:4; (ie) Gos. Thom. 65:8; ( if) Gos. Thom. 96:3; (2a) Mark 4:9 = Matt. 13:9 = Luke 8:8b; (2b) Mark 4:23 = Matt. 13:43b; (3) Matt. 11:15; (4) Luke 14:35b; (5) Rev. 2:7, n, 17, 29; 3:6,13, 22; 13:9; (3) 72. Fire on Earth: (1) Gos. Thom. 10; (2) Luke 12:49; (4) 22. Prophet's Own Country: (1) Gos. Thom. 31 = P. Oxy. 1.30-35; (2) Mark 6:i-6a = Matt. 13:53-58; (3) Luke 4:16-24; (4) John 4:44; (5 ) 87- Drinking Old Wine:

600

+

APPENDIX 4

(1) Gos. Thom. 47:3; (2) Luke 5:39; (6) 9 4 « The Rich Farmer: (r) Gos. Thom. 63:1-3; (2) Luke 12:16-21; (7) 97. The Disputed Inheritance: (1) Gos. Thom. 72; (2) Luke 12:13-15; (8) 24. Blessed the Womb: (1) Gos. Thom. 79:1-21 (2) Luke 11:27-28 [Q1?]; (3?) John 13:17; (4?) James 1:25b; (9) 100. Jerusalem Mourned: (1) Gos. Thom. 79:3; (2) Luke 23:27-31; (10) 53. Knowing the Times: (1) Gos. Thom. 91; (2) Luke 12:54-56; (3?) Matt. 16:2-3; (3b?) Gos. Naz. 13; (4?) John 6:30. C. Sayings Tradition Common to the G o s p e l o f T h o m a s and John 9% (12 out of 132 units) of the Gospel of Thomas has parallels in John. (1) 205. Not Taste Death: (1) Gos. Thom. 1 = P. Oxy. 654.3-5; (2) John 8:51-52; (2) 4. Ask, Seek, Knock: (ia) Gos. Thom. 2 = P. Oxy. 654:5-9; (ib) Gos. Thom. 92:1; (ic) Gos. Thom. 94; (2) Gos. Heb. 4ab; (3) Q1: Luke 11:9-10 = Matt. 7:7-8; (4) Mark 11:24 = Matt. 21:22; (5a) Dial. Sav. 9-12; (5b) Dial Sav. 2od; (5c) Dial. Sav. 79-80; (6a) John 14:13-14; (6b) John 15:7; (6c) John 15:16; (6d)John 16:23-24; (6e) John 16:26; (3) 20. Kingdom and Children: (1) Gos. Thom. 22:1-2; (2) Mark 10:13-16 = Matt. 19:13-15 = Luke 18:15-17; (3) Matt. 18:3; (4) John 3:1-5, 9-10; (4) 21. The World's Light: (1) Gos. Thom. 24:1 + 3 = P. Oxy. 655, fr. d.1-5; (2) Matt. 5:14a; (3a?) Dial. Sav. 14; (3b?) Dial. Sav. 34; (4a) John 8:12; (4b) John 11:9-10; (4c) John 12:35-36; (5) 22. Prophet's Own Country: (1) Gos. Thom. 31 = P. Oxy. 1.30-35; (2) Mark 6:i-6a = Matt. 13:53-58; (3) Luke 4:16-24; (4) John 4:44; (6) 83. Seeking Too Late: (i) Gos. Thom. 38:2; (2) John 7:34a, 36b; (7) 42. Scriptures and Jesus: (1) Gos. Thom. 52; (2) Eger. Gos. 2.1; (3)John 5:39-47; (8 ) 4 5 - Father and Son: (1) Gos. Thom. 61:4; (2) Q2: Luke 10:22 = Matt. 11:27; (3a) John 3:35b; (3b) John 13:3a; (9) 49. Temple and Jesus: (1) Gos. Thom. 71; (2a) Mark 14:55-59 = Matt. 26:59-61; (2b) Mark 15:29-323 = Matt. 27:39-43 = (!) Luke 23:35-37; (2c) Acts 6:11-14; (3) John 2:18-22; (10) 50. Harvest Is Great: (1) Gos. Thom. 73; (2) Q1: Luke 10:2 = Matt. 9:37-38; (3) John 4:35; (11) 24. Blessed the Womb: (1) Gos. Thom. 79:1-2; (2) Luke 11:27-28 [Q1?]; (3?) John 13:17; (4?) James 1:25b (12) 53. Knowing the Times: (1) Gos. Thom. 91; (2) Luke 12:54-56; (3?) Matt. 16:2-3; (3b?) Gos. Naz. 13; (4?) John 6:30.

A ppendix 5

Multiple Versions of G ospel

o f T h om as

Sayings

There are 8 cases involving 18 or maybe 19 out of 132 units (14%). Note that in all cases except #6 there are also Q Gospel parallels. (1) 4. Ask, Seek, Knock: (ia) Gos. Thom. 2 = P. Oxy. 654:5-9; (ib) Gos. Thom. 92:1; (rc) Gos. Thom. 94; (2) Gas. Heb. 4ab; (3) Q1: Luke 11:9-10 = Matt. 7:7-8; (4) Mark 11:24 = Matt. 21:22; (5a) Dial. Sav. 9-12; (5b) Dial. Sav. 2od; (5c) Dial. Sav. 79-80; (6a) John 14:13-14; (6b) John 15:7; (6c) John 15:16; (6d) John 16:23-24; (6e) John 16:26; (2) 8. When and Where: (ia) Gos. Thom. 3:1-3 - P. Oxy. 654.9-16; (ib) Gos. Thom. 51; (ic) Gos. Thom. 113; (2) Q2: Luke 17:23 = Matt. 24:26; (3) Mark 13:21-23 = Matt. 24:23-25; (4?) Dial. Sav. 16; (5) Luke 17:20-21; but see also (as id?) 285. Beginning and End: (1) Gos. Thom. 18:1-3; (3) 32. Hidden Made Manifest: (ia) Gos. Thom. 5:2 = P. Oxy. 654.29-30; (ib) Gos. Thom. 6:5-6 = P. Oxy. 654.38-39; (2) Q1: Luke 12:2 = Matt. 10:26; (3) Mark 4:22 = Luke 8:17; (4) 12. Knowing the Danger: (ia) 1 Thess. 5:2; (ib) 2 Pet 3:10; (2a) Gos. Thom. 21:5-7; (2b) Gos. Thom. 103; (3) Q2: Luke 12:39-40 = Matt. 24:43-44; (4a) Rev. 3:3b; (4b) Rev. 16:15a; (5) 84. On Hindering Oth­ ers: (ia) Gos. Thom. 39:1-2 = P. Oxy. 655, col. ii.11-19; (ib) Gos. Thom. 102; (2) Q2: Luke 11:52 = Matt. 23:13; (6) 298. Unity and Mountain: (ia) Gos. Thom. 48; (ib) Gos. Thom. 106; & 173 (7 ) 89. Hating One’s Family: (ia) Gos. Thom. 55:1-23; (ib) Gos. Thom. 101; (2) Q1: Luke 14:25-26 = Matt. 10:37; (8) 4 8 * Blessed the Persecuted: (ia) Gos. Thom. 68; (ib) Gos. Thom. 69:1; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:22-23 = Matt. 5:11-12 [except for 6:23c = 5:12c]; (2b) Matt. 5:10; (2c) Pol. Phil. 2:3f; (3a) 1 Pet 3:14a; (3b) 1 Pet 4:14.

A ppendix 6

Kingdom Sayings The following statistics are intended to be as secure as possible. For the Q Gospel and the Common Sayings Tradition, the kingdom must be present in both extant versions to be counted. In those cases, therefore, there may have originally been more instances than we can now count. But here, at least, are the most secure cases. (1) Gospel o f Thomas. The “kingdom of Heaven" is found 3 times: (1) 20:1; (2) 54; (3) 114:3. The “kingdom o f the Father" is found 7 times: (4) 57:1; (5) 76:1; (6) 96:1; (7) 97:1; (8) 98:1; (9) 99:3; (10) 113:4. The ‘"kingdom" without any specification is found 7 times: (n) 3:1, 3; (12) 22:1, 3, 7; (13) 27:1; (14) 46:1; (15) 107:1; (16) 109:1; (17) 113:1- That counts repetitions within the same saying (3:1, 3; 22:1, 3, 7) as single instances and gives 17 instances out of 132 sayings, or about 13%. (2) Q Gospel. The "kingdom,” usually as the "kingdom of God" in Luke but the "king­ dom o f the heavens" in Matthew, is found as follows: (1) Luke 6:20b = Matt. 5:3; (2) Luke 7:28 = Matt. 11:11; (3) Luke 10:9, n = Matt. 10:7; (4) Luke 11:2 = Matt. 6:10; (5) Luke 11:20 = Matt. 12:28; (6) Luke 12:31 = Matt. 6:33; (7) Luke 13:18 = Matt. 13:31; (8) Luke 13:20 = Matt. 13:33; (9 ) Luke 13:28, 29 = Matt. 8:11,12; (10) Luke 16:16 = Matt. 11:12. That counts repeti­ tions within the same saying (Q 10:9, n & 13:28, 29) as single instances and gives 10 instances out o f 101 sayings, or about 10%. (3) Common Sayings Tradition. The "kingdom" is found 4 times: (1) The Mustard Seed in Gos. Thom. 20 = Q 13:18-19 or Luke 13:18-19 = Matt. 13:31-32; (2) Greater Than John in Gos. Thom. 46 = Q 7:23 or Luke 7:28 = Matt. 11:11; (3) Blessed the Poor in Gas. Thom. 54 = Q 6:20 or Luke 6:20 = Matt. 5:3; (4) The Leaven in Gos. Thom. 96:1-2 = Q 13:20-21 or Luke 13:20-21 = Matt. 13:33. That gives 4 out of 37 instances, or about 11%.

A ppendix 7

The Synoptic Independence o f D id a c h e 1:3b—2:1 In Appendix i o f The Historical Jesus, I inventoried Didache i:3b-2:i as dependent on a harmonized version o f Matthew and Luke (Layton). I have now changed that position to one o f complete synoptic independence. This changes the multiple independent attesta­ tion o f the following five sayings from that section of the Didache in my earlier inven­ tory: (i) 114. Love Your Enemies: (i) P. Oxy. 1224,2 r i, lines i-2a; (2a) Q1: Luke 6:27-28,35a = Matt. 5:43-44; (2b) Pol. Phil. 12:3a; (3) Did. iyac; (2) 117. Better Than Sinners: (ia) Q1: Luke 6:32-35 = Matt. 5:45-47; (ib) 2 Clem. 13:4a [from Luke 6:32]; (2) Ign. Pol. 2:1; (3) Did. 1:3b; (3) 140. The Other Cheek: (1) Q1: Luke 6:29 = Matt. 5:38-41; (2) Did. 1:4b; (4) 103. Give With­ out Return: (1) Gos. Thom. 95; (2) Q1: Luke 6:30 = Matt. 5:42; (3) Did. 1:4c, 5a; (5) 162. Before the Judgment: (1) Q(i)2: Luke 12:57-59 = Matt. 5:25-26; (2) Did. 1:5c.

Bibliography

Abbreviations = Anchor Bible; a f —The Apostolic Fathers (see Lake below); a n et = Anäent Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (see Pritchard below); anf = Ante-Nicene Fathers (see Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe below); anrw = Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (see Temporini and Haase below); вл = Biblical Archaeologist; вал = Biblical Archaeology Review; baso r = Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research; basp = Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists; b e t l = Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium; b l e = Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique; cbq = Catholic Biblical Quarterly; CBQMS = Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series; d ssp = Dead Sea Scrolls Project of Princeton Theological Seminary (see Charlesworth et al. below); d sst = The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (see García Martinez below); et l = Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses; GLAjj = Greek and Latin Authors onJews and Judaism (see Stem below); hr = History of Reli­ gions; HTR = Harvard Theological Review; h t s = Harvard Theological Studies; ie j = Israel Exploration Journal; iq p = International Q Project (see Robinson et al. below); jb l = Journal of Biblical Literature; je c s = Journal of Early Christian Studies; js n t = Journal for the Study of the New Testament; js o t = Journal for the Study of the Old Testament; j t s = Journal of Theological Studies; LCL = Loeb Classical Library; ndiec = New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (see Horsley, Llewelyn, and Kearsley below); nhle = The Nag Hammadi Library in English (see Robinson 1988 below); n h s = Nag Hammadi Studies; nta = New Testament Apocrypha (see Schneemelcher and Wilson below); hts = New Testament Studies; otp = The Old Testa­ ment Pseudepigrapha (see Charlesworth below); peq = Palestine Exploration Quarterly; sbl d s = Society o f Biblical Liberative Dissertation Series; sb l r b s = Society o f Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study; sn t sm s = Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series; t s = Theological Studies; t u = Texte und Untersuchungen; mvB = Tyndale Bulletin; WMANT = Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament; znw = Zeitschrift fü r die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft; zpe = Zeitschrift fü r Papyrologie und Epigraphik; ZTK = Zeitschriftfü r Theologie und Kirche. ab

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