“The Time Is Fulfilled”: Jesus’s Apocalypticism in the Context of Continental Philosophy 9780567684349, 9780567684769, 9780567684356

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LIBRARY OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

596 Formerly the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement series

Editor Chris Keith

Editorial Board Dale C. Allison, John M.G. Barclay, Lynn H. Cohick, R. Alan Culpepper, Craig A. Evans, Robert Fowler, Simon J. Gathercole, Juan Hernandez, John S. Kloppenborg, Michael Labahn, Love L. Sechrest, Robert Wall, Steve Walton, Catrin H. Williams

“THE TIME IS FULFILLED”

Jesus’s Apocalypticism in the Context of Continental Philosophy

Lynne Moss Bahr

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Lynne Moss Bahr, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8434-9 PB: 978-0-5676-9522-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8435-6 ePUB: 978-0-5676-8437-0 Series: Library of New Testament Studies, 2513-8790, volume 596 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For Bob the one I love

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

viii ix

1

Chapter 2 CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY ON THE MESSIANIC: WALTER BENJAMIN, JACQUES DERRIDA, AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN

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Chapter 3 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY: MESSIANIC TIME—CREATION AND SALVATION

51

Chapter 4 THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT FEAST: HOSPITALITY, TIME, AND THE MESSIANIC DISRUPTION

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Chapter 5 THE PARABLE OF THE NIGHT WATCHERS: TO WAIT AND WATCH IN THE TIME OF THE NOW

87

Chapter 6 THE THINGS WITHIN: TEMPORALITY AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD

105

Chapter 7 CONCLUSION

125

Bibliography Index of Modern Authors Index of Subjects

137 146 147

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project grew from conversations with my mentor during my doctoral studies at Fordham University, Larry Welborn, whose encouragement and advice were invaluable at every stage. I came to know Larry through my advisor at Union Theological Seminary, Brigitte Kahl, and would never have undertaken advanced work in New Testament studies in the first place without the encouragement of Hal Taussig, with whom I also studied at Union. I would also like to thank Michael L. Peppard and especially Benjamin H. Dunning, whose careful attention to early drafts of this book significantly improved the writing. My participation in Fordham’s Advanced Dissertation Seminar, under the direction of Sarit Kattan Gribetz, led to an expansion of some of the ideas and better organization of the research, and I am grateful to her and my colleagues. In receiving the Elizabeth A. Johnson Distinguished Endowed Scholarship, I was able to devote a full academic year to writing and research, and I would like to acknowledge the anonymous donor who made such dedicated and productive time possible for me. I would like to thank my parents, my in-laws, my siblings, and my sons for their support and confidence in me. Finally, and most important, I wish to thank my husband, Bob Bahr, who assumed more than his share of parenting responsibilities during the course of this project, in addition to continuing to be an inspired conversation partner for this work and all my endeavors. His encouragement to trust my ideas and abilities makes more possible than I ever could have imagined for myself. I dedicate this work to him. New York April 26, 2018

ABBREVIATIONS For ancient primary sources, I follow the system of abbreviations prescribed in The SBL Handbook of Style (ed. Billie Jean Collins et al.; 2nd ed.; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014). AThR BDAG

BTB CBQ EDB ETL HTR IDBSup JBL JJS JR JTC NTS NovT ST VC ZDK ZNW

Anglican Theological Review Bauer, Walter, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Biblical Theology Bulletin Catholic Biblical Quarterly Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by David Noel Freedman. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Harvard Theological Review Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume. Edited by Keith Crim. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962. Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Religion Journal for Theology and the Church New Testament Studies Novum Testamentum Studia Theologica Vigiliae Christianae Zeitschrift fü r dialektik Theologie Zeitschrift fü r die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der alteren Kirche

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”1 — Mark 8:29 What does it mean to profess that Jesus is the Messiah? My question follows closely on the one posed by Jesus in Mark 8:29, not only because a cluster of associations surround Messiah as a title—in its first-century context and today—but also because Jesus himself is both a historical and a theological figure and cannot be limited to either category. Because the historical sources about Jesus of Nazareth are not objective data but rather arose from memories of Jesus for particular audiences, historical Jesus research cannot be assumed as normative. Rather, as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes, early Christian texts are rhetorical constructions and as such arose from the evolving political and theological conflicts of their time. In themselves, they demonstrate that the meaning of Jesus must be continually put into new contexts, where it can be debated and reinterpreted.2 Toward this end I offer here an interpretation of Jesus’s messianic identity that is grounded in sociohistorical and literary criticism but extends beyond it, by using modern philosophical thought on the messianic as an analytical resource. By seeking intertextualities between divergent sources—ancient and modern, theological and philosophical—I offer a way through the binary that has characterized studies of Jesus as either a historical or a theological figure, and I offer one possible answer to the question that has accompanied these studies and persisted for more than 2,000 years: “But who do you say that I am?” Central to the issue of Jesus’s messianic identity is the extent to which he espoused the worldview of apocalypticism. By this term, I refer to both the firstcentury CE literary genre apocalypse and the social movement of resistance by

1. All translations from the Greek are my own unless otherwise noted. καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπηρώτα αὐτούς, Ὑμεῖς δὲ τίνα με λέγετε εἶναι; ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ Πέτρος λέγει αὐτῷ, Σὺ εἶ ὁ Χριστός. 2. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), 6–7.

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Judeans to Roman rule of Palestine that emerged in the period of Second Temple Judaism (583 BCE–70 CE), culminating in the Jewish wars. This sociopolitical worldview imagined God’s restoration and vindication of Israel, an event signaled by the arrival of the Messiah. The Jewish sources from this period, which are contemporaneous with Jesus’s lifetime, develop a variety of meanings and identities assigned to this figure, ranging from Davidic king to teacher to warrior.3 A common theme concerns the idea of time pressing in on itself, as coming to an end in an act of fulfillment that would bring God’s reign. Whether the early church imposed such material upon Jesus’s authentic sayings or he himself espoused this worldview and theological position is one of the key issues in historical Jesus studies. At stake is the historical authenticity of the claims about Jesus as Messiah, which, depending on the weight one applies to historical claims within Christianity, either diminishes or strengthens the theological meaning that might be made of this aspect of his identity. Continental philosophy—particularly in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben—offers an alternative route through the problem of Jesus’s apocalypticism, one in which the significance of the messianic as a concept comes to the fore. All three thinkers have explored the concept of the messianic for their own purposes on a range of issues, and each one addresses temporality as central to the experience of Being. For Benjamin—who, not incidentally, cites Luke 17:20–21 in one of his letters—the messianic consists in recognizing the past as determinate of the present, not in the sense of a forward progression of development but in terms of the possibility of redemption via a connection to past generations. Derrida deploys the messianic as a structure of radical alterity that continually holds open the possibility of the impossible, which he understands as constituting an “undecidable” that shifts the meaning of presence, or Being. For Agamben, the aporias of the messianic are a site of truth, in that they reveal hidden structures in the understanding of time and the human subject before the law. In these philosophical expressions of the messianic that reject any positive content, temporality is a conceptual framework that is decidedly nonlinear. As I will show in the chapters that follow, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God expresses in its own idiom a nonlinear conception of time as well, one that reveals salvation as already within humankind but that is made known through the medium of Jesus’s messianic identity. To provide an overview of the historical and literary context in which this study unfolds, I offer in this chapter three sections that address interlocking issues: the scholarly debate on Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, time in Jewish and Greco-Roman

3. In Christ Among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism, Matthew V. Novenson argues that ancient Jewish messiah texts are interpretations of Jewish scriptures. In each case, they are “creatively biblical” linguistic acts, with no single text representing “the messianic idea” in a form more authentic than any other. See Matthew V. Novenson, Christ Among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially pp. 34–63.

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texts from the Second Temple period, and Jesus’s messianic consciousness. In outlining the major scholarly positions in the debate on Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, I aim to show how underdeveloped conceptions of time limit the interpretations all sides. The overview of time in the Second Temple period indicates the diverse interpretations of time in Jewish and Greco-Roman texts from this period. Finally, a discussion of the issues surrounding Jesus’s messianic consciousness illuminates the extent to which we can discern Jesus of Nazareth’s own attitudes toward time and its contribution toward whether he understood himself as Messiah. Taken together, these foundational issues underlie the interpretation of the four apocalyptic Jesus sayings that form the core of this study, all of which integrate the exegetical findings with the messianic as a concept in Continental philosophy. In this intertextual reading strategy, I illuminate the contours of both a philosophical and a theological messianism, which, held together in tension, point toward Jesus’s identity as Messiah as revealing that the broken and fractured state of the human condition—which the linear conception of time conceals—is the means by which the Kingdom comes.

Jesus as Apocalyptic Prophet The contentiousness of the issues surrounding Jesus’s apocalypticism is no doubt exacerbated by the confused nature of the term apocalyptic and its associated meanings. In an effort toward greater precision, scholars today distinguish between apocalypse as a literary genre, as I indicated above, and apocalyptic as a social movement. Broadly defined, an apocalypse is “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”4 Besides describing the conceptual structure of an apocalypse, this definition points to how the framework of the genre invites an imaginative solution to the problems faced by the audience. Apocalypticism, on the other hand, can be seen as a social movement insofar as it “refers to the symbolic universe in which an apocalyptic movement codifies its identity and interpretation of reality.”5 Apocalypticism therefore is not limited to the content of apocalypses. Thus, John J. Collins describes a movement as apocalyptic if

4. John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1–5. 5. P. D. Hanson, IDBSup (Nashville: Abingdon, 1976), 27–34, in Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 13. See also David Helholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings on the International Colloquia on Apocalypticism (Upsalla, 1979) (Tübingden: Mohr, 1983). For recent scholarship that expands on this definition, see Benjamin E. Reynolds and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds., The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017).

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“it shared the conceptual framework of the genre, endorsing a worldview in which supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, and eschatological judgment played essential parts.” He adds that this affinity to apocalypses is always a matter of degree.6 The work of Collins and his predecessors, particularly Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss, in emphasizing apocalypticism as a critical feature of early Christianity, was made possible by the discovery in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Texts such as 1 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, and 4 Ezra all illuminated connections to the sayings of Jesus that provided more precise literary and historical contexts. These texts revealed some patterns of thought that could be used, although not unproblematically, by Christian scholars.7 For instance, Johannes Weiss in Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God analyzes the apocalyptic content of the Jesus tradition on its own terms. Refuting the claims of Julius Wellhausen and other scholars of the late nineteenth century who insisted that the Jesus sayings represent an ethical dimension in Christian piety, Weiss concludes rather that they reflect a “thoroughgoing eschatology” that is entirely otherworldly. Emphasizing Jesus’s religious perspective, he argues that the super-worldly aspect of the Kingdom necessitates that there is no inner-worldly development of the Kingdom.8 Most important, he states, “the Kingdom of God is not a matter of human initiative. The only thing man can do about it is to perform the conditions required by God.”9 Weiss emphasizes Jesus’s proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom, a feature that theologians of the time tended to diminish in a favor of the Kingdom that is to come. For Weiss, the desire that the world pass away so that God’s reign might come now is critical to Jesus’s preaching, and he offers no alternatives to the otherworldliness of Jesus’s message other than to approximate Jesus’s attitude by living “as if you were dying. We do not await a Kingdom of God which is to come down from heaven to earth and abolish this world, but we do hope to be gathered with the church of Jesus Christ into the heavenly Βασίλεια.”10 Albert Schweitzer, a contemporary of Weiss, was captivated by Jesus’s apocalypticism as well and treated it as the content undermining all attempts at retrieving the historical Jesus, a genre of literature broadly titled “Lives of Jesus” that was popular in Schweitzer’s day. In particular, he reacted strongly to studies such as William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret, which sought to expose a theological

6. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 13. 7. The eschatological content of the New Testament shows a connection with apocalypses because despite the variety of form and content in apocalypses, all of them feature a transcendent eschatology that looks for vindication that exceeds the historical situation. See Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 12. 8. Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 114. 9. Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 132. 10. Ibid., 136.

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strategy of the early church at the core of Jesus’s commands of secrecy in the Gospel of Mark, arguing that the historical Jesus had no messianic intentions. Schweitzer thought all such attempts to excise the apocalyptic content were deeply erroneous. To the many “Lives of Jesus” studies of the late nineteenth century, he writes, The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But he does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own.11

To say that Jesus has no place in a modern context may seem pessimistic, but at the end of his study Schweitzer saw the apocalyptic content, paradoxically, as the site of greatest theological potential. While most biblical scholars today no longer agree with the details of Schweitzer’s analysis, especially his assertion that Jesus willingly went to his death as a failed Messiah, his work nevertheless remains paradigmatic in his serious consideration of the prominence of Jesus’s apocalypticism in the gospel tradition. Especially relevant for our purposes, he suggests that Jesus’s apocalypticism offers a hermeneutical resource. The advent of form criticism, particularly in the work of Rudolf Bultmann in the 1930s, allowed a more precise analysis of the Jesus tradition than Schweitzer was able to achieve. In The History of the Synoptic Tradition, Bultmann includes a section on the apocalyptic and prophetic sayings in which he extracts modernizing and doctrinal elements by means of intertextual comparisons in order to locate the original forms of relevant Jesus sayings. One of his primary observations is the great extent by which the Christian tradition, down through the transmission of each Synoptic Gospel, adapted content from Jewish Apocalypses and Jewish Wisdom texts. Such a methodology contributes significantly to studying the question of Jesus’s messianic consciousness and the extent to which he was, historically speaking, an apocalypticist. Departing from Schweitzer, Bultmann claims he was not “in the strict sense.”12 Bultmann did, however, uncover some authentic apocalyptic content, which he interprets in another volume, Jesus and the Word. Characterizing this project as a “dialogue with history,” Bultmann highlights the subjectivity of the historian

11. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus 2nd ed. (1911; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 396. Also relevant for its exposition of dogmatic strategies in interpretations of the gospel tradition is Schweitzer’s The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’s Messiahship and Passion (New York: Schocken, 1964; repr., Das Abendmahl—Das Messianitäts und Leidensgeheimnis. Eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu, 1914). 12. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 109.

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and that history only speaks when the historian comes “seeking answers to the questions that agitate him.”13 To this end Bultmann brackets the issue of Jesus’s messianic consciousness, stating it is of secondary importance, and instead seeks to determine the purpose of Jesus’s teaching, not as a profession of truths but as words “that meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own existence.”14 In describing the religion of Jesus, he emphasizes hope and its tie to obedience. He writes, “Because of the close connection between obedience and hope, one particular expectation especially filled many minds: the hope that God would destroy the rule of the heathen, that He would again make of Palestine a completely holy land in which only the law of their fathers would prevail.”15 Situating Jesus within the messianic movements of the first century, Bultmann identifies his message as an “eschatological gospel—the proclamation that now the fulfillment of the promise is at hand, that now the Kingdom of God begins.”16 However, in Bultmann’s interpretation, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom concerns not the actual event, which he claims is the case in the Jewish sources, but a transcendent one that represents the “ultimate Either-Or, which constrains him to decision.”17 In other words, the Kingdom relates to the Jews’ obedience to God, “when the whole man stands behind what he does; or better, when the whole man is in what he does, when he is not doing something obediently, but is essentially obedient.”18 In this way, Jesus teaches that God’s will makes a claim on humankind, and by one’s response, one determines a present state of existence.19 This existential interpretation widens the perspective on the significance, from a theological perspective, of the apocalyptic material but diminishes the varied symbolic content of apocalypticism and its connection to Jewish messianism. Similarly, C. H. Dodd notes Jesus’s affinities with apocalypticism in Parables of the Kingdom and also emphasizes Jesus’s message as distinctive. He attends closely to Jesus’s use of imagery from the natural world as his major point of departure from the Jewish apocalypticists, particularly in Jesus’s assertion that the Kingdom of God is like the processes of nature, that it is here and now, rather than part of a transcendent realm.20 At the same time, Dodd recognizes that Jesus spoke of the Kingdom as an object of hope, as existing in an order beyond space and time that is yet to be realized on earth. To resolve this conflict, Dodd emphasizes that the most distinctive aspect of Jesus’s teachings on the Kingdom concerns the idea that it is realized in situations of conflict, that it is in process. In other words,

13. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Ermine Huntress Lantero; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 4. 14. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, 11. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Ibid., 27. 17. Ibid., 41. 18. Ibid., 77. 19. Ibid., 151. 20. C. H. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom (Welwyn, UK: James Nisbet, 1958), 22–23.

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Jesus espouses a “realized eschatology.” This idea contextualizes Jesus’s prediction in Matthew 24 of the destruction of the temple, which Dodd understands as an event that Jesus predicted based on his assessment that, given the political climate with Rome, the Jews were about to encounter divine judgment in the form of the destruction of the temple.21 Dodd attributes Jesus’s prediction with its historical corroboration by stating that “foresight is primarily insight and .  .  . predictions are primarily a dramatization of spiritual judgments.”22 As in the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, time is shortened in the intersection of a spiritual estimation and a historical moment. “Time scale is irrelevant to the ultimate significance of history,” Dodd concludes.23 In his interpretation, Jesus’s apocalyptic outlook was a frame by which the events of history took on meaning for the gospel writers and their communities. It was an expression of God’s entry into time and space.24 As with Bultmann, Dodd writes from the presupposition that the Jewish sources reveal a model for the early Christian authors that is distinguished by its dualities (heaven/earth and present/future) and made more elaborate and symbolic in the sayings of Jesus. While Bultmann and Dodd used an existential approach to interpret Jesus’s apocalypticism, the historical issues surrounding the study of Jesus were again prominent in the 1970s, when the rise of redaction criticism introduced new methodologies for investigating the literary and rhetorical strategies of the gospel authors. As a result, scholars had new criteria for assessing the historical authenticity of the gospel material, with some, such as Marcus Borg, Robert Funk, and John Dominic Crossan, taking the position that Jesus himself was not an apocalyptic prophet and must be seen under other categories, such as a sage or Cynic-like philosopher.25 Other scholars very recently, notably Bart Ehrman and Dale C. Allison, use these same methodologies to contend the opposite, arguing that apocalyptic prophet is the most historically probable identity of Jesus. One of the bases of Ehrman’s argument in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium is that apocalypticism as such was a very active and strong movement of social resistance among first-century Jews. However, he may overstate this feature of the historical context, given that John J. Collins has demonstrated that apocalyptic imagery likely does not reflect a broad social movement as such—as it can only represent the views of the literate elite and is thus better understood as symbolic content that informed movements of resistance.26 Ehrman makes much of the Son of Man sayings and incorporates them with ideas about Jesus as Messiah;

21. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom, 200. 22. Ibid., 70–71. 23. Ibid., 71. 24. Ibid., 202–03. 25. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 49–53. 26. Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17.

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but both Son of Man and Messiah, as Collins has demonstrated, refer to a range of meanings.27 By contrast, Dale C. Allison, in Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, relies less on the historical context and more on the traditions embedded in the texts themselves. His study interprets the historical Jesus within the worldview of Jewish eschatology, influenced by apocalypticism. Most helpfully—and in a departure from Ehrman—he sees a “secondary exegesis” in some of the apocalyptic Jesus sayings, which he explains as a reinterpretation of the sayings by the community that reflects their understanding that Jesus’s imminent eschatological expectation was not a mistake on his part but had unfolded within the events of his own life.28 Both of these interpretations offer valuable historical insights, but they uphold the historical-theological binary, situating Jesus’s apocalypticism squarely within the first century and hesitating to indicate any broader significance. One approach to extending the historical work is to engage the unexplored area of Jesus’s conception of time in relation to the apocalyptic content that shapes the narratives about him. As other scholars have noted, especially Dodd and Crossan, the sayings of Jesus convey a particular conception of time that relates to the parabolic form of many of his sayings, as well as his apocalyptic worldview. Intertextual comparisons with Jewish sources reveal how these features are developed in different ways. In ancient Jewish texts, historical periods are distinguished from the beginning at creation to the period of consummation, as in Daniel, which I will outline below. By contrast, in early Christian apocalypticism, the history of salvation is seen as unfolding in three stages: from Abraham to Jesus, the public life of Christ, and the Parousia. However, in the sayings of Jesus, he continually asserts that the hour is unknown. Jesus and his followers have entered the eschatological age and perceive a fundamental difference between their own time and preceding centuries.29 This sense of disconnect between the present age and the past is indebted to conceptions of time from the Second Temple period and also takes on new forms of expression, some of them Hellenistic, all drawing upon the cluster of meanings associated with the Messiah.

Time in the Second Temple Period Time is a central concept in the texts of the Second Temple period, taking on a range of meaning that builds upon biblical traditions to address the dire political and social situation of the Jews after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

27. See also John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1985). Describing the cluster of meaning around the title Messiah, Collins shows that a number of messianic paradigms emerge. He argues that there is no one composite that can be broadly applied to configurations of Jesus as Messiah. 28. Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 168. 29. Geza Vermes, Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 34.

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In many instances, such as in the Pseudepigrapha, the texts employ biblical traditions as a means of evoking and reinterpreting the historical patterns of Israel. This often serves the purpose of recontextualizing time in ways that makes the present meaningful and projects an image of a future hope. In other instances, such as in the Dead Sea Scrolls, writers rework the biblical traditions around the theme of messianic expectations. This leads to particular expressions about time that predict the arrival of the Messiah and the relation of the sect to the new age he will inaugurate. Still other writers of the period, such as Philo and Josephus, indicate the influence of Hellenism on Jewish thought, as part of a program of accommodation that is not present in the Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls. Such a distinction is notable because it suggests the extent to which conceptions of time contributed to the symbolic language of apocalypticism and its association with resistance to Hellenism. As an additional point of comparison to the Second Temple texts, Greek and Roman writers generally saw time as an entity to be put toward human purposes, but in some instances, as in Plutarch, time is an abstraction that represents the transience of human existence. It therefore has a meaning outside of human categories of reasoning, not unlike the apocalyptic texts of the period, although they express such a notion differently. All these uses of the concept of time serve the distinctive hermeneutical purposes of the writer and audience, and they are not in all cases mutually exclusive. Biblical scholars held the view until the mid-twentieth century that time in the Hebrew Bible and time in Greek philosophy represented two distinct perspectives: in the Hebrew scriptures time is linear, while in Greek philosophy, it is circular. In a critique of these positions, Arnaldo Momigliano argues that while there are significant differences in the concept of time in the Bible and in Greek writings, the biblical writers thought of time as cyclical in the annual observance of Jewish holidays, and Greek historical writers were not exclusively concerned with describing events as part of the eternal return but rather as “a series of events . . . worthy of being rescued from oblivion.”30 The differences, in other words, cannot be collapsed into distinct categories of what is biblical and what is Greek.31 The particular features of time in Jewish texts can therefore be appreciated in their particularities, as can the Greek concept of time.32 Momigliano’s essay exposed

30. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (ed. Anthony Grafton; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 190. 31. Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” 197. 32. Among the recent scholarship on this topic is the work of Sacha Stern, who, in Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, argues that there is no concept of time per se in ancient Jewish literature as far back as the Bible. Similarly, in Qumran and early rabbinic texts, there is no Hebrew word for a general concept of time. The words in the Bible that relate to time indicate periods of time related to processes or appointed times, never time as a continuum. He refutes Momigliano’s argument about time in the Bible because Momigliano links it

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some of the biases of Christian scholars for whom such rigid lines of demarcation were efficacious. To say that the concept of time is more complex than it might first appear is to say that time as a concept warrants careful consideration, that its meaning is not self-evident. In the Hebrew Bible, the concept of time is typically process oriented; it serves the theological and historiographical purposes of the biblical writers. Sacha Stern, in Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, argues that time in all cases in the Hebrew Bible carries concrete content and that it never appears as an independent entity. Rather, in regard to time, among Israelites and other premodern societies, the key idea is that of “process,” meaning “a structured or meaningful series of events.”33 Advancing a broader view, William Gallois argues that time in the Hebrew scriptures is a conceptual structure that reinforces the idea that God and time precede nature, that God is time, and that there is a difference between humankind and God. He cites Psalm 90 as emblematic of this idea, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” In this sense, time represents the presence of an invisible God. Instead of worshipping nature, which appears everywhere, the Israelites are to worship a God whom they cannot see. Thus in the Hebrew scriptures the natural world always conforms to God’s temporal scheme.34 Gallois sees this as important to the identity of Israel as separate from her neighbors, who worshipped gods of nature. Time, therefore, becomes a way of representing not only God but also the unique relation of Israel to God. The views of both Stern and Gallois acknowledge that time serves a key function in the texts by providing a conceptual framework to imbue events and the experience of time with meaning. Among the texts that best exemplify time in the Hebrew scriptures is the priestly account of the creation narrative of Genesis 1, which concerns itself with days and nights as part of God’s work, and the flood narrative, also in Genesis, when a natural process is put toward God’s purposes with humankind. Notable about both these narratives is that they structure time in a calendrical context, with the sun and moon marking the days in the creation account and the preponderance of specific dates in the flood narrative.35 The writers’ specificity indicates the idea that the natural world reflects an order signifying God’s revelation to Israel. This kind of expression took on a range of meanings and idioms in the redactional process of compiling the texts. Gershon Brin, in The Concept of Time in the Bible

mistakenly with history, which is about events and does not relate to time as an abstract concept. See Sacha Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003), 109. 33. Sacha Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 2. 34. William Gallois, Time, Religion, and History (Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited, 2007), 70–74. 35. James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time (London: Routledge, 1998), 3–5.

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11

and the Dead Sea Scrolls, examines the Hebrew terms for time, demonstrating that biblical writers sought to deploy the most precise vocabulary for their subject matter.36 For instance, ‫ רור‬designates a span of years rather than a specific point in time, while x-‫ימי‬, meaning “the days of x,” in which a personal name is given, indicates the period in which a decisive event took place. The writers also devised idioms for expressing durations of time in years and establishing two poles, as in ‫ רצ‬. . . ‫ ומ‬. . . , meaning “from . . . to . . . ” In these and other expressions, the writers articulate the history of Israel in the context of defined periods and in the service of unifying a series of historical events.37 In a further effort to imbue time with meaning, biblical writers developed the feature of periodization, which uses numerical patterns to impose an order on history. For instance, a common term is ‫שברע‬, meaning “week,” which in Gen 29:27–28 describes a unit of seven years.38 Periodization appears frequently in the apocalyptic texts of the Hellenistic period, notably, occurring first in Dan 9:24. Here the term week, ‫שברע‬, is used in the plural to speculate on the eschatological end: “Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.” In addition to Genesis, this passage refers to Jer 25:11–12, which prophesies that Jerusalem will lie in waste for seventy years. In 2 Chr 36:21 as well, the writer refers to seventy years as a time when the land “lay desolate.”39 In Daniel, the angel Gabriel explains that the 70 years are really 70 weeks of years, 490 years, which refers to Lev 25:1–55, which states that 49 years (seven weeks of years) is the longest time period in which land could be held by those not of its ancestry or that a person could be an indentured slave. In Daniel, multiplying the figure by ten adds another layer of meaning by evoking various numerical systems of the Hellenistic period that are based on decades.40 Thus the author is able to describe a large block of time in relation to the eschatological end. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, periodization occurs frequently in exegetical texts, such as 4Q180, which is introduced as “an interpretation concerning the periods made by God, all the ages for the accomplishment [of all the events, past] and future. Before He ever created them, He determined the works of . . . age by age. And it was engraved on [heavenly] tablets . . . the ages of their domination. This is the order of the cre[ation of man from Noah to Abraham, un]til he begot Isaac;

36. Gershon Brin, The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 1. 37. Brin, The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 9–10. 38. Ibid., 167. 39. Carol A. Newsom, with Brennan W. Breed, Daniel: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 291. 40. Adela Yarbro Collins, Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 83.

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“The Time Is Fulfilled”

ten [weeks (of years)].”41 Here we see a determinism inscribed on events with the use of periodization. Another notable example is the Apocalypse of Weeks in 1 En. 91–105, in which Enoch narrates an overview of history divided into weeks. As in Daniel, the author uses seven and ten to organize time schematically. Enoch specifies ten periods, with a notable emphasis on the seventh week, when “the chosen righteous” are selected. The Apocalypse of Weeks also claims that certain groups of people are selected for salvation during given periods, culminating in an elect group at the start of the eschatological age.42 The phrase end of days appears more than thirty times in the Dead Sea Scrolls but has its origin in the Hebrew scriptures. The phrase appears in Gen 49:1 and Num 24:14, both prophetic texts, and in these cases, the term refers to the future in a nonspecific sense. In the postexilic period, however, the phrase takes on an eschatological meaning and was likely understood as referring to a period of history in which Israel would be transformed. For example, in Ezekiel 38, the end of days is a time of great trial, when Gog invades Israel, an event climaxing in the complete destruction of the enemy. Similarly, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the phrase indicates a time of testing and a time of salvation, both of which point to the beginning of the messianic age. The Florilegium, for instance, states that the Branch of David will unite with the Interpreter of the Law at the “end of days.”43 Some of the texts concerned with the end time speculate on a specific end-point, but a precise calculation is never offered, even though the end was imminent. For instance, Commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab) refers to Hab 2:3: Interpreted, this means that the final age shall be prolonged, and shall exceed all the Prophets have said; for the mysteries of God are astounding. If it tarries, wait for it, for it shall surely come and shall not be late. Interpreted, this concerns the men of truth who keep the Law, whose hands shall not slacken in the service of truth when the final age is prolonged. For all the ages of God reach their appointed end as he determines for them in the mysteries of His wisdom.

Here, the prophet refers to an extended period of the end time.44 Note, however, that he does not indicate an end to time itself; rather, he imagines an ideal future that draws upon a variety of Israelite traditions, including the Davidic Kingdom and the Sinai covenant.45

41. For all translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, I follow Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2011). 42. John J. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1997), 21. 43. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 56–57. 44. Ibid. Italics in original. 45. Marc Brettner, “Cyclical and Teleological Time in the Hebrew Bible,” in Time and Temporality in the Ancient World (ed. Ralph M. Rosen; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2004), 123.

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13

By contrast to the unspecific timetable of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Damascus Document attempts to be more precise. In 20:14, we read, “From the day of the ingathering of the unique teacher until the destruction of all men of war who turned back with the man of lies there shall be about forty years.” By referring in the phrase “about forty years” to the calculation in the book of Daniel of “seventy weeks of years,” the author is likely conveying the expectation that the beginning of the messianic age would begin about forty years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness. While this passage may appear to make an effort at a precise calculation, a desire for a specific date is likely more about heightening the expectations of the community. As John J. Collins has demonstrated, there is no evidence of specific dates or counting of years or that the sect was disappointed when the predicted day passed uneventfully. Rather, in not being more specific than “about forty years,” the community could adapt to the postponement more readily.46 The term appointed times appears repeatedly in the Dead Sea Scrolls and served both practical and theological purposes. The Community Rule states, “They shall not depart from any command of God concerning their times; they shall be neither early nor late for any of the appointed times, they shall stray neither to the right nor to the left of any of His true precepts” (1QS i13–15). Such an idea reflects the religious values of the community, which required a pledge of faithfulness as a means of upholding the “new covenant” between Israel and God, which the Teacher of Righteousness, the community’s leader, had been sent to realize. Because they were convinced that they alone interpreted the Scriptures correctly, the community members pledged themselves faithfully to the community and their endeavor of studying Scripture to produce “the last interpretation of the Law” (4Q266 fr. 11).47 To these ends of obedience, the notion of “appointed times” adapts a concept of time to lend a sense of urgency to the community’s rules. In a departure from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the pseudepigraphic text 4 Ezra is an apocalypse concerned with the when of the eschaton but uses the idea of “appointed times” in the context of signs rather than actions. In a series of dialogues between Ezra and a heavenly mediator, the angel Uriel, Ezra persists in questioning Uriel about when the end will come. Uriel, however, hesitates about specific dates and times and lists several reasons for why not even he can know, saying, “When the number of those like yourselves is completed; for he has weighed the age in the balance, and measured the times by measure, and numbered the times by number; and he will not arouse them until the measure is fulfilled” (4 Ezra 4:36–37). In many of his explanations, Uriel refers to natural processes, establishing connections between childbirth and harvesting, indicating that an “appointed time” is critical to all these events but the precise time cannot be predicted. Ultimately Ezra must accept Uriel’s standpoint that the eschatological expectation must be met with a return to

46. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 68. 47. Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 69.

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“The Time Is Fulfilled”

the Scriptures and to a renewal of the covenant.48 In terms of its treatment of time, Hindy Najman has demonstrated that 4 Ezra reflects the concern of the author that the destruction of the temple signals a break from the past and a new beginning, and each of the historical reviews in visions of Ezra mediated by Uriel offers a different way of relating Israel’s past to the present.49 Unlike at Qumran, where the authors emphasize the covenant and Israel’s restoration but saw itself as a select group addressing themselves, 4 Ezra offers an inclusive vision of the future. Similarly, the Book of Jubilees addresses all of Israel by retelling the biblical story from creation until the covenant at Sinai. The author accomplishes this by way of a unique chronological system: each seven-year period is a week, and seven of these weeks, or forty-nine years, is a jubilee.50 As at Qumran and in 4 Ezra, the author of Jubilees believes that time is critical to the covenantal relationship. He states in chapter one that the abandonment of festival and Sabbath observances is chief among the sins of Israel (Jub. 1:10). The interest in weeks of years (expressed as seven years), jubilees of years (forty-nine years), and multiples of jubilees conveys time as a concept that could be organized for a theological purpose. Here, the author recasts the covenantal history of Israel from creation, rather than from the Sinai covenant, and demonstrates that the redemption of Israel is guaranteed. Such a sense of timelessness in regard to historical events, as Ari Mermelstein argues, interprets the current problems facing Israel as only a delay in the redemptive plan of God.51 Like the biblical writers and those of the Second Temple period, the Greek conception of time represents a range of views and a variety of purposes. In the early fourth century BCE, Plato describes time in Timaeus as created concurrently with heavenly bodies. The existence of time therefore depends on the existence of the cosmos. However, he does not seem to mean that time does not exist as its own entity, which Plato describes as distinguished by two aspects: χρόνος (time) and αίών (usually translated as “eternity”). He argues that eternity is the idea of which time is the “moving image.”52 By contrast, Aristotle, in Physics 410–12, argues that if time is composed of past and future, then it does not exist as an independent entity, because the past is no longer and the future is yet to be. Time therefore only exists as the measurement of motion, and since it is dependent on someone to

48. Hindy Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 19. 49. Ari Mermelstein, Creation, Covenant, and the Beginnings of Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 155. 50. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 102. 51. Mermelstein, Creation Covenant, and the Beginnings of Judaism, 89. 52. ἐἰκὼ δ᾿ ἐπινοεῖ κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος ποιῆσαι, καὶ διακοσμῶν ἅμα οὐρανὸν ποιεῖ μένοντος αἰῶνος ἐν ἑνὶ κατ᾿ ἀριθμὸν ἰοῦσαν αἰώνιον εἰκόνα, τοῦτον ὃν δὴ χρόνον ὠνομάκαμεν. Plato, Tim. 37D, Bury.

1. Introduction

15

measure it, it cannot be an “accident” but only an “attribute” of movement. In this way Aristotle rejects Plato’s view that time is an independent entity.53 The Stoic view of time is similar to the Aristotelian. In Stoicurm Veterum Fragmenta ii, no. 509, we read, “Chrysippus says time is an expanse of movement, just as when speed and slowness are measured. Or, that time is the expanse that accompanies the movement of the universe, and everything moves and exists according to time.”54 This view reflects the Stoic doctrine that only the present is real, but the present consists of past and future, as in no. 517 of the same text, “Time is destined to be that which is passing.” In other words, time is continuous and is not an independent entity. Rather, with reason, one can use time to explain natural events.55 Despite these examples, the Platonic view of time as an independent entity is the prominent view in other texts of the period. Plutarch, for instance, in the late first century and early second century CE, writes in Platonic Questions VIII that time “is neither an accident nor a quality of any chance motion but cause and means and authority of holding all things together that come to be, of the symmetry and order of the nature of the whole universe, being animate, is in motion; or rather, being motion and order itself and symmetry, it is called time.”56 He refers to Plato’s Timaeus to substantiate this claim, adding that time is “an image of god, the universe of his being,” and as such is more than motion but “motion in a purposeful fashion that involves measure and limits and revolutions.”57 Even more significantly, he writes of time in chapter 19 in the E at Delphi: What, then, is Being? It is that which is eternal, was never brought into being, is uncorrupted, to which time never brings change. For time is a thing moving and taking the form of something moving and not covering, ever flowing, retaining

53. Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 94. 54. Ὀ δὲ Χρύσιππος χρόνον εἲναι κινήσεως διάστεμα, καθ᾽ ὅ ποτέ λέγεται μέτρον τάχους τε καὶ βραδύτετους. ἤ τὸ παραχολουθοῦν διάστεμα τῆ τοῦ χοσμόυ κινήσει, καὶ κατά μὲν τὸν χρόνον κινηεῖσθαί τε ἕκαστα καὶ εἳναι. Hans Friedrich August von Arnim, Stoicorm Veterum Fragmenta (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903–1924), 164–65. 55. τος χρόνου τὸ μὲν μέλλον εΐναι, τὸ δὲ παρεληλυθός. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 138. Long adds that this doctrine established the Stoic analysis of verb tenses, in which the Stoics distinguished different temporal dimensions. He writes, “Given that the premise of language is naturally related to objective reality, it was consistent on their part to look for connexions between linguistic phenomenon and features of nature.” 56. οὐ γὰρ πάθος οὐδὲ συμβεβηκὸς ἧς ἔτυχε κινήσεως ὁ χρόνος ἐστίν, αἰτία δὲ καὶ δύναμις καὶ ἀρχὴ τῆς πάντα συνεχούσης τὰ γιγνόμενα συμμετρίας καὶ τάξεως, ἣν ἡ τοῦ ὅλου φύσις ἔμψυχος οὖσα κινεῖται· μᾶλλον δὲ κίνησις οὖσα καὶ τάξις αὐτὴ καὶ συμμετρία χρόνος καλεῖται. Plutarch, Quaest. plat. 1007B, Cherness. 57. ἐστι κίνησις ἀλλὰ ὥσπερ εἴρηται κίνησις ἐν τάξει μέτρον ἐχούσῃ καὶ πέρατα καὶ περιόδους. Ibid., 1007D.

16

“The Time Is Fulfilled” nothing. Of time we say the words “afterwards” and “before” and “will be” and “becoming,” each a confession of not being. For, in this question of being, to speak of a thing not yet come into being or already made to end is simple-minded and misplaced. When striving toward the comprehension of time, we say “it is at hand” and “it is here” and “now”; the rational development of the argument destroys it all. For “now” is squeezed out into that which is destined or that which has passed, as if we should be willing to see a point out of a force going separate ways. But if this is the case with nature, which is measured, as with time that measures, then everything that comes into being is destroyed while we relate to it by time. Therefore it is not permissible to say, even when speaking of what is or will be, “it was” or “will be”; for these are inclinations, transitions, and alternations, belonging to that which by its nature has no permanence of being.58

Thus Plutarch advances a Platonic conception of time but departs from it somewhat to indicate that our perception of time is always in the form of that which perishes. Similarly, Roman writers such as Livy and Seneca also embrace the Platonic view of time and conceive of it as passing away. Livy, a historian of the first century BCE, uses the term tempus terere, meaning “to spend time,” suggesting that he thinks of it as an independent entity.59 Seneca, of the mid-first century BCE, writes in a letter to Lucilius that he must not let time elude his grasp: “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.”60 Although the Second Temple texts described above “think with” the concept of time from the biblical tradition, two Jewish writers of the same period show the influence of Hellenistic philosophy. As part of a program of making Jewish history intelligible to a Greek audience, Flavius Josephus used Hellenistic historical

58. τί οὖν ὄντως ὄν ἐστι; τὸ ἀίδιον καὶ ἀγένητον καὶ ἄφθαρτον, ᾧ χρόνος μεταβολὴν οὐδὲ εἷς, ἐπάγει. κινητὸν γάρ τι καὶ κινουμένῃ συμφανταζόμενον ὕλῃ καὶ ῥέον ἀεὶ καὶ μὴ στέγον, ὥσπερ ἀγγεῖον φθορᾶς καὶ γενέσεως, ὁ χρόνος: οὗ γε δὴ τὸ μὲν ‘ἔπειτα’ καὶ τὸ ‘πρότερον’ καὶ τὸ ‘ἔσται’ λεγόμενον καὶ τὸ ‘γέγονεν,’ αὐτόθεν ἐξομολόγησίς ἐστι τοῦ μὴ ὄντος: τὸ γὰρ ἐν τῷ εἶναι τὸ μηδέπω γεγονὸς ἢ πεπαυμένον ἤδη τοῦ εἶναι λέγειν ὡς ἔστιν, εὔηθες καὶ ἄτοπον. ᾧ δὲ μάλιστα τὴν νόησιν ἐπερείδοντες τοῦ χρόνου, τὸ ‘ἐνέστηκε’ καὶ τὸ ‘πάρεστι’ καὶ τὸ ‘νῦν’ φθεγγόμεθα, τοῦτ᾽ αὖ πάλιν ἅπαν ἐκλυόμενος ὁ λόγος ἀπόλλυσιν. ἐκθλίβεται γὰρ εἰς τὸ μέλλον καὶ τὸ παρῳχημένον ὥσπερ ἀκμὴ βουλομένοις ἰδεῖν, ἐξ ἀνάγκης διιστάμενον. εἰ δὲ ταὐτὰ τῷ μετροῦντι πέπονθεν ἡ μετρουμένη φύσις, οὐδὲν αὐτῆς μένον οὐδ᾽ ὄν ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ γιγνόμενα πάντα καὶ φθειρόμενα κατὰ τὴν πρὸς τὸν χρόνον συννέμησιν. ὅθεν οὐδ᾽ ὅσιόν ἐστιν οὐδ᾽ ἐπὶ τοῦ ὄντος λέγειν, ὡς ἦν ἢ ἔσται: ταῦτα γὰρ ἐγκλίσεις τινές εἰσι καὶ μεταβάσεις καὶ παραλλάξεις τοῦ μένειν ἐν τῷ εἶναι μὴ πεφυκότος. Plutarch, E Delph. 392E.19, translation follows Babbitt with some modifications. 59. Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 98. 60. Sic feit, ut minus ex crastino pendeas, si hodierno manum inicieris. Dum differtur, vita transcurrit. Omnia, Lucili, alienta sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est. Seneca the Younger, Ep. 1.2–3, Gummere.

1. Introduction

17

models to recast biblical traditions, and this included a Platonic concept of time. For instance, several passages in Antiquities imply the idea of time moving forward and also that one can spend or waste time, which Sacha Stern argues Josephus borrowed from Herodotus and Thucydides.61 In Jewish War, Josephus conveys the idea that time can destroy a prophecy when he writes that the Essene Judas once exclaimed, “Οh me! now were that I was dead. Truth has died before me and one of my prophecies has been falsified. For Antigonus is alive, who should have been slain today. The place predetermined for his murder was Strato’s Tower, and that is 600 furlongs from here; and it is already the fourth hour of the day. So time frustrates the prophecy.”62 The illusions to a Greek conception of time are part of Josephus’s appeal on behalf of Judaism to a Greek audience.63 The other distinctive Jewish Hellenistic writer is Philo of Alexandria, who as a member of the cultural elite, strove to integrate the traditions of Israel into Hellenistic philosophy. His conception of time is almost entirely Hellenistic. In On the Eternity of the World, he writes, For if time is uncreated, the world too is uncreated. Why? As the great Plato says, time is shown by days and night and months and successions of years. And none of this can subsist without the movement of the sun and the revolution of the entire heavens. Therefore people who are accustomed to determine things have correctly explained that it is that which measures the movement of the universe, and since this is sound, the world is coeval with time and its original source.64

In this statement, Philo evokes the Platonic idea that there is time only insofar as there is a motion of heavenly bodies. However, to explain this view, he uses the Stoic definition of time, in which we know of time only by a measure of motion. According to Philo, there is a general measurement of every movement and also a specific moment in time that is the only time to be experienced. It is only graspable as “before” and “after.”65 In On the Eternity of the World, Philo’s view of

61. Sacha Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 100. 62. “παπαί, νῦν ἐμοὶ καλόν,” ἔφη, “τὸ θανεῖν, ὅτε μου προτέθνηκεν ἡ ἀλήθεια καί τι τῶν ὑπ᾿ ἐμοῦ προρρηθέντων διέψευσται· ζῇ γὰρ Ἀντίγονος οὑτοσὶ σήμερον ὀφείλων ἀνῃρῆσθαι. χωρίον δὲ αὐτῷ πρὸς σφαγὴν Στράτωνος πύργος εἵμαρτο· καὶ τοῦτο μὲν ἀπὸ ἑξακοσίων ἐντεῦθεν σταδίων ἐστίν, ὧραι δὲ τῆς ἡμέρας ἤδη τέσσαρες. ὁ δὴ χρόνος ἐκκρούει τὸ μάντευμα.” Josephus, J. W. 1.79, translation follows Thackeray with some modifications. 63. Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 100–01. 64. εἰ γὰρ ἀγένητος ὁ χρόνος, ἐξ ἀνάγκης καὶ ὁ κόσμος ἀγένητος. διὰ τί; ὅτι, ᾗ φησιν ὁ μέγας Πλάτων, ἡμέραι καὶ νύκτες μῆνές τε καὶ ἐνιαυτῶν περίοδοι χρόνον ἔδειξαν. ἀμήχανον δέ τι τούτων συστῆναι δίχα ἡλίου κινήσεως καὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς οὐρανοῦ περιφορᾶς· ὥστ᾿ εὐθυβόλως ἀποδεδόσθαι πρὸς τῶν εἰωθότων τὰ πράγματα ὁρίζεσθαι χρόνον διάστημα τῆς τοῦ κόσμου κινήσεως. Philo, Eternity, 10.52, translation follows Colson with some modifications. 65. S. Lauer, “Philo’s Concept of Time,” JJS 9 (1958): 39–46, 39.

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“The Time Is Fulfilled”

time calls upon the biblical tradition of God as Creator, and Philo acknowledges both the world that perishes and that which is eternal, but he makes these aspects work together rather than as indicating that the processes of nature conform to the will of God. In the same piece, he writes, “But Aristotle perhaps showed a pious and religious spirit when in resistance he said that the world was uncreated and indestructible and denounced the shocking atheism of those who stated the contrary.”66 Thus, Philo’s concept of time relies on Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian views, all of which would presumably be more familiar to his audience than the Hebrew scriptures. With the exception of Josephus and Philo, Jewish writers of the Second Temple period did not, however, favor the Greek conception of time. Indeed the earliest Jewish work in Greek, the Septuagint, rarely uses the Greek word for time, χρόνος. Instead, the Septuagint uses καιρός, meaning “season” or “right time” as opposed to a general concept of time, which is much more common in Greek texts. When χρόνος does appear in the Septuagint, it usually refers to an indefinite period of time and does not refer to time as a continuum.67 This pattern also applies to Second Temple texts originally written in Greek rather than translated from the Hebrew, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the books of Maccabees. For instance, instead of the phrase He spent time, which is common in Greek sources, 1 Macc 11:40 reads, “He stayed there for many days.” However, as might be expected, the Greek usage of χρόνος appears in the writings of Philo and Josephus.68 The texts of the Second Temple period attest to a broad range of conceptions of time. In some cases it refers to a process or indicates God’s providence, while in others it functions as an ordering principle for a series of events or for predictions of the future. It is also the object of reflection and the context by which human life has meaning. This carries over into conceptions of the Messiah as a reflection of the community’s experience. At Qumran and in the Pseudepigrapha, conceptions of time express the hopes of a community that the writers project into a future age, one in which their restoration encompasses both past and present.

The Question of Jesus’s Messianic Consciousness Accompanying the debate concerning Jesus’s apocalypticism is whether Jesus as a historical person thought of himself as Messiah. Given that there are no texts written by Jesus himself but only by his followers after his death, on the surface it might appear that the strongest position in regard to this question is to say that

66. Ἀριστοτέλης δὲ μήποτ᾿ εὐσεβῶς καὶ ὁσίως ἐνιστάμενος ἀγένητον καὶ ἄφθαρτον ἔφη τὸν κόσμον εἶναι, δεινὴν δὲ ἀθεότητα κατεγίνωσκε τῶν τἀναντία διεξιόντων, οἳ τῶν. Philo, Eternity 3.489.10. 67. See E. Eynikel and K. Hauspie, “καιρός and χρόνος in the Septuagint.” ETL 73 (1997): 369–85. 68. Stern, Time and Process in Ancient Judaism, 99–100.

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it cannot be decided. However, with the scholarly and public interest in Jesus as a historical person, it stands to reason that the task of extrapolating Jesus’s selfperception from the extant texts is a worthy task, in an effort to discern which aspects belong to him and which to the traditions about him. At the center of the issue is how one regards the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history as embodied in one figure, as both aspects constitute his identity, as I stated at the beginning of this chapter. It also involves consideration of the extent to which one person’s self-understanding can be known by another. In this task one looks to historical evidence but also beyond it, to offer an interpretation of the patterns that underlie words and deeds. The most outstanding skeptical view in regard to Jesus’s messianic consciousness—which was radical in its time, the early twentieth century—is William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret. Wrede asserts that the gospel texts cannot be taken at face value as historical documents and that Mark’s theology is the basis of Jesus’s commands of secrecy to his disciples; therefore such commands lack all historicity. He centers his argument on the Transfiguration of Mark 9:9: “And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.” For Wrede, this passage is critical because it is the only saying attributed to Jesus regarding keeping his identity secret that contains a time limit. While he agrees to some extent with other interpreters who explain it by saying this passage should be regarded as an anticipation of Jesus’s resurrection, Wrede extends this to assert that it is the key to Mark’s entire approach: Jesus’s messianic identity would be publicly disclosed at his resurrection, which constitutes a faith claim upon which Mark bases his narrative.69 Wrede writes, No one who is of the opinion that Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah will believe that while he was alive he became known as such only to the disciples. Apart from anything else this is true because his condemnation would then no longer have anything to do with the Messiah. But if incautious and talkative disciples blurted out the secret or if we suppose it to have been divined by “impressions of Jesus’s activity” then in any event it remains an enigma how he could have desired continuous concealment at all. For the rest the phrase “until he should have risen from the dead” tells us plainly enough that we are dealing here with a “viewpoint” and not with history.70

Mark’s viewpoint is that Jesus is supernatural, a claim that explains Jesus obtaining the Spirit at his baptism and the proclamation of God that he is God’s son. In addition, it accounts for demons recognizing Jesus while others do not, and for Jesus being condemned for blasphemy on the basis of his messianic title. Wrede argues

69. William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (trans. J. C. G. Greig; Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971), 67–69. 70. Wrede, The Messianic Secret, 69.

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that Mark understands Jesus as Messiah, which in his definition is a divine or semi-divine figure, and he conveys this in everything he considered essential to Jesus.71 The “person of Jesus is dogmatically conceived,” Wrede writes, and all his sayings and deeds are oriented toward the resurrection, the event that will make manifest what is in secret.72 Albert Schweitzer reacted against Wrede’s theory first in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God and later in his most well-known work The Quest for the Historical Jesus. As I’ve indicated above in the section on Jesus’s apocalypticism, Schweitzer emphasizes Jesus’s apocalyptic outlook as the basis of his identity. He explores Jesus’s messianic consciousness most directly in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, where he states that Jesus’s apocalypticism was the most eminent expression of his God-consciousness.73 As in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer argues that Jesus was fully convinced of his messianic mission and understood that even if death awaited him in Jerusalem, he must go there to face those who opposed him. Schweitzer writes, “It was then God’s will that the moral state appropriate to the Kingdom of God should be inaugurated by the highest moral deed of the Messiah. With this thought he set out for Jerusalem—in order to remain Messiah.”74 The basis of Schweitzer’s argument for Jesus’s messianic consciousness lies in Schweitzer’s conception of apocalypticism, which centers on two ages: the present and the future. Given this context, Jesus and his followers thought of themselves as living in two different states: in the pre-messianic age and in the future messianic age. This double-consciousness pervades the Jesus sayings and explains the disconnect between Jesus’s earthly ministry and post-resurrection identity. “Therefore when Jesus revealed to them the secret of his Messiahship, he did not mean that he is the Messiah, as we moderns understand it; rather it signified for them that their Lord and Master was the one who in the messianic age would be revealed as Messiah.”75 Thus Jesus understood himself as bringing the “last days” and all the afflictions that signal the beginning of the messianic age upon himself, leading, as with John the Baptist, to his death. The so-called messianic secret, according to Schweitzer, is a secret by nature of being messianic and only realized at a definite time in the future. It was therefore a conception that could only be formed in Jesus’s own consciousness.76 In more recent scholarship, the skeptical view of Wrede gained renewed fervor in the work of John Dominic Crossan, who as a member of the Jesus Seminar, was part of a group concerned with discerning the most authentic strands of the Jesus tradition. Their work stems from the form criticism of the 1940s, led by Rudolf Bultmann and his followers, who as Hans Conzelmann notes, could find

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

Ibid., 76–77. Ibid., 131. Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, 40. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 185.

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“no connecting link between Jesus and Christology” except the Easter experience of the disciples.77 In The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant, Crossan argues that the Wisdom traditions of Israel were developed alongside the apocalyptic strands and both were present at an early stage, as seen with Paul’s polemic against the “Strong” in 1 Corinthians, suggesting some Corinthians were interpreting Jesus in sapiential terms, and the Gospel of Thomas, where the disciples speculate on when the end will come and Jesus responds by saying they should not await the end but seek to discover it.78 In this way Crossan seeks to direct attention away from the messianic identity of Jesus toward the other images of him, such as Wisdom. Many of the arguments regarding Jesus’s messianic consciousness center on the use of the title “Son of Man,” a figure that appears in Dan 7:13 in an association with the end times, when Israel’s enemies would be defeated. The title appears in some forty passages in the New Testament and most important for the issue of messianic consciousness, it appears on the lips of Jesus. However, Crossan claims that Son of Man is best understood as a vague title that is linked to Daniel, but can be used in a variety of ways, namely, for “that man,” meaning in an indefinite sense. As evidence he cites 4 Ezra 13:2 and 1 En. 46:2, two texts where the term is used in reference to Daniel but toward other, more directly prophetic, purposes. While Crossan admits that the title does appear early in the tradition in the context of Jesus as apocalyptic judge—namely in Qumran, Gospel of the Hebrews, and Gospel of Mark—Crossan proposes that the early traditions also held texts in which “Son of Man” took on a general meaning. In later usage, the authors adapted the title to apocalyptic scenarios. In sum, Crossan argues that Jesus initially accepted the apocalyptic worldview of John the Baptist, but changed his response after John’s death and never spoke of himself as Son of Man.79 Thus Crossan illustrates an interplay between different clusters of ideas that identified Jesus, and that early Christian writers developed and adapted these clusters to meet their own purposes. Any messianic claims, however, originate in the tradition, not in the historical Jesus. Marcus Borg argues in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time that the selfunderstanding and message of the “pre-Easter Jesus” were non-messianic, adding that “we have no way of knowing whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah.”80 Jesus did, however, consistently point away from himself to God. Indeed his message centered on God, not on any proclamation about himself. Like Crossan, Borg focuses on Jesus’s sayings as the best evidence of the historical Jesus, and he describes Jesus as entirely non-eschatological; rather, he was a prophet who

77. Ben Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979), 177. 78. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 228–30. 79. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 240–59. 80. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 29.

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focused on the spiritual and the pursuit of wisdom.81 The parables and aphorisms of Jesus are “invitational forms of speech” intended to subvert conventional wisdom, and this style of teaching constitutes Jesus’s proclamation, not himself as signaling a new age or the coming judgment of God. In regard to sayings that evoke the theme of judgment, Borg says that they are redactional and that the notion of judgment stems from the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures. In this context, Jesus’s warnings concern not judgment or the eschaton but that spiritual blindness has consequences.82 Of the skeptical view, a focus on the sayings of Jesus illuminates the compelling content and style of Jesus’s teachings and the theological overlay of the gospel texts, which seeks to interpret his message. However, it does not go far enough in explaining Jesus’s historical distinctiveness. Most pressing, it does not adequately account for the death of Jesus and why the traditions surrounding his messianic vocation arose in the first place. In Schweitzer’s interpretation, Jesus fully embodied his messianic consciousness, and his actions, especially in Jerusalem, are the natural consequence of his self-perception. While scholars today may disagree with many points in his argument, some take up these questions with approaches that depart from Schweitzer’s—namely, with a more precise understanding of apocalypticism and the varieties of messianisms in the Second Temple period—but arrive at a similar conclusion, focusing on the patterns of action and the symbolic language of the Jesus tradition rather than relying on the sayings attributed to him. In the view of N. T. Wright, for instance, Jesus applied to himself the central claims of his proclamation of the Kingdom of God: a return from exile, the defeat of evil, and the return of YHWH to Zion. He writes, “Jesus saw himself as the leader and focal point of the true, returning-from-exile Israel. He was the king through whose work YHWH was at last restoring his people. He was the Messiah.”83 Wright argues that the term Messiah, however, does not refer in this context to a divine or semi-divine figure. First-century Judaism did not have an established notion of the Messiah according to which Jesus might or might not adhere. The central idea around any conceptions of the messianic concerned the hope of Israel, and this was expressed in a range of symbols and practices, as well as in references to the Hebrew scriptures. Chief among Jesus’s symbolic actions is the scene of Jesus in the temple just after his entry into Jerusalem. Wright reads this as an “acted parable of judgment.”84 He notes that virtually all of the texts refer to this scene as foreshadowing the temple’s destruction. Rather than a prophecy of cleansing or reform, as in the work of scholars such as E. P. Sanders and Crossan, Wright sees Jesus’s actions in the temple as a symbolic act of judgment. “The Temple, as the central symbol of the

81. 82. 83. 84.

Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 29. Ibid., 70–85. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 477. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 416.

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whole national life, was under divine threat, and, unless Israel repented, it would fall to the pagans. Furthermore, Jesus, by making this claim in this way, perceived himself to be not merely a prophet like Jeremiah, announcing the Temple’s doom, but the true king, who had the authority which both the Hasmoneans and Herod had thought to claim.”85 Furthermore, Jesus’s actions come at Passover week, when witnesses would be most likely to comprehend the meaning of his actions. Jesus acted symbolically in the temple at the same time that he presented a critique of Israel and the temple system.86 Since the Second Temple texts attest that the true authorities of Israel are not the Maccabean kings of the time but the true Davidic king, Jesus’s actions in the temple take on greater significance when viewed in light of his entry into Jerusalem, which occurs in the gospels just before the temple event. Riding on a donkey over the Mount of Olives, across Kidron, and up to the temple alludes to Zech 9:9: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; Triumphant and victorious is he, Humble and riding on a donkey, On a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim And the war horse from Jerusalem; And the battle bow shall be cut off, And he shall command peace to the nations; His dominion shall be from sea to sea, And from the River to the ends of the earth.

Connecting the messianic entry of Jesus to the temple incident, Wright cites 2 Sam 7:12–14: [YHWH said to David, through Nathan], ‘When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you . . . , and I will establish his Kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his Kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.’ Here is a man whose name is Branch; for he shall branch out in his place, and he shall build the temple of YHWH. It is he that shall build the temple of YHWH; he shall bear royal honour, and shall sit and rule on his throne. There shall no longer be traders in the house of YHWH of hosts on that day.

85. Ibid., 417. 86. Ibid.

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In both the entry into Jerusalem and at the temple, Jesus demonstrates in both symbolic and practical terms that he believed Israel would be destroyed and restored.87 John J. Collins confirms this view in The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, where he argues that Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and its alignment with Zech 9:9 conforms with the re-enactment of scriptural paradigms of eschatological prophets and also with Jesus’s execution as King of the Jews. Given that Zech 9:9 is never used as a messianic prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls or Pseudepigrapha, its use in a scriptural connection to Jesus is less likely to be an invention of the early Christian writers. Collins writes, “The incident is at least a possible case of symbolic action by Jesus that fits the mode of operation of an eschatological prophet but also implies a royal claim.”88 In the shift from prophet to king, the only explanation Collins offers is Jesus’s historic individuality. Although he may not have intended to be conceived as Messiah,89 in the symbolic actions he undertakes in Jerusalem, it is easy to see how he was thought of as such, and he does not discourage the identification.90 Jesus’s link to John the Baptist is widely acknowledged as historical, given its multiple attestations across the gospels. As Ben Meyer demonstrates, John’s prophetic self-understanding bears indirectly on Jesus’s ministry and selfunderstanding, particularly in regard to the symbolic acts by which John and Jesus pointed toward the eschatological restoration of Israel.91 Despite the commonalities of their missions and the repudiations they faced, Jesus differentiated himself from John by understanding the eschatological age as not in the future but having already begun. He conveyed this idea most memorably in his proclamation that the inheritors of the Kingdom of God are the poor without any preconditions. In Jesus’s preaching, such as in the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, the coming of the Kingdom includes all those deemed unworthy and unrighteous. As Meyer writes, “Because salvation was entirely free, repentance, rather than being a requisite condition of the gift of God, became at once the acceptance of it as a gift and an expression of thanksgiving for the gift.”92 Indeed Jesus correlates the Kingdom and repentance as attesting to God’s mercy, and this basic idea reflects Jesus’s own religious understanding of God and God’s

87. Ibid., 492. 88. Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 206. 89. This is the position of James D. G. Dunn, who argues that Jesus’s identity as proclaimer is secondary to his proclamation. He describes Jesus’s self-understanding as founded on his identity as God’s eschatological agent, holding a familial relationship with God, and on the hope that he would be acknowledged as the one to bring the Kingdom to its fulfillment and consummation. See James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christology in the Making (vol. 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 759–61. 90. Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 207. 91. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, 124. 92. Ibid., 132.

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will. In this knowledge of God’s will, Jesus expresses an idea of himself as the one to announce the restoration of Israel. This messianic claim has precedent at Qumran and in prophetic and apocalyptic texts. Meyer therefore concludes Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God was infused with Jesus’s own religious intent, and “he must have conceived of his work as an eschatological vocation.”93 In perhaps the strongest argument in favor of Jesus’s messianic consciousness, Martin Hengel points to the earliest author of the New Testament canon, the apostle Paul, who uses χριστός as an established cognomen for Jesus without qualification. In addition, Acts 11:26 refers to the young Jewish messianic sect named χριστιανοι in Antioch prior to 41 CE. Thus the attribution of “Christ,” or “Messiah,” for Jesus dates from the earliest strands of the tradition. Furthermore, and more telling, the ancient confession “God raised Jesus from the dead” has meaning only insofar as it stood beside the confession “Jesus is Messiah.” He writes, “The mere revivification of a person, or, as the case may be, his translation into the heavenly realm, establishes neither messianic majesty nor eschatological mission, nor could it, of itself, supply the content of the message of salvation.”94 The resurrection served as proof of a claim regarding Jesus’s identity that was already in play. Given that there were no rigid conceptions of the Messiah, authors used a variety of images to describe this figure. It is therefore justifiable that Jesus might use the title “Son of Man” in an enigmatic reference to himself as an expression of his authority, especially with respect to the mockery he suffered and his humility, which led to his suffering and death. This messianic identity is, in itself, a “secret,” Hengel claims, in that there is a mystery in Jesus himself and in his conduct.95 The disciples’ misunderstanding, so prevalent in Mark, can then be understood as indicative of their failure to understand his mission, and this becomes part of the memory of him.96 Drawing upon both the textual tradition and the role of memory, Hengel makes a full account for the messianic associations tied to Jesus, that they originated in his own consciousness and that the inconsistencies in the texts attest to the credibility of the messianic claims, as products of history and memory.

Conclusion As is apparent by the foregoing discussion, the concept of time is not adequately addressed in the scholarly assessment of Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, nor in regard to his messianic consciousness, despite an abundance of Jewish and GrecoRoman texts that concern time from the same historical period. The scholarly

93. Ibid., 136. 94. Martin Hengel, “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel,” in Studies in Early Christianity (trans. Rollin Kearns; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 7–10. 95. Hengel, “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel,” 59. 96. Ibid., 70.

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paradigmatic positions that do treat time conceive of it in historical categories of past, present, future, which gives rise to the tension between a Kingdom that is present or to come—the “already” and “not yet”—that constitutes the conflicting and yet most theologically rich aspect of Jesus’s proclamation. However, such a reading that views time as linear is limiting with respect to the messianic as a conceptual structure. It thereby diminishes the meaning behind the claim that Jesus is Messiah. I hope to offer a partial remedy in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 2 CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY ON THE MESSIANIC: WALTER BENJAMIN, JACQUES DERRIDA, AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN

The subgenre of messianism within cultural theory and philosophy is a notable recent development, marking a return to religion in a post-secular age.1 In Continental philosophy, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida are the most prominent contemporary proponents, but as a philosophical category, the messianic first emerged in the writings of the 1920s and 1930s of the German literary theorist Walter Benjamin. At its foundation in its most recent iteration is the question of how philosophy might be defined in an age no longer tied to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The messianic, with its paradoxical structure of being fulfilled by not being fulfilled, “discloses the openness in the failed claim to achieve the absolute event of the Messiah.”2 Thus the messianic suggests a general structure of human experience that is not limited to the religious or the secular. It thereby becomes a site of productive, even if sometimes problematic, tension. In the analysis that follows, I present the paradigmatic works on the messianic by Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben. Each one offers a distinctive perspective by which the messianic becomes a framework to understand human temporality and its contribution to Being, or presence, and all also use the messianic for their political claims. In this way all suggest a connection to the apocalyptic content of the Jesus tradition, with its aim to present Jesus as Messiah, with the accompanying clusters of theological and sociopolitical meanings. For Benjamin, the messianic represents the past as determinate of the present, not in the sense of a progression of development but in the possibility of the past to be redeemed in the present through an abiding connection to previous generations. Derrida conceives of

1. See, for example, Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); J. Aaron Simmons, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics after the Theological Turn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Linda Martin Alcoff and John D. Caputo, eds., Feminism, Sexuality and the Return to Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 2. David Ferris, “Agamben and the Messianic: The Slightest of Differences,” in Messianic Thought Outside Theology (eds. Anna Glazova and Paul North; New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 74–76.

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the messianic as the structure of radical alterity that retains the possibility of the impossible, which he conceptualizes as an “undecidable” that shifts the meaning of presence, or Being. Finally, for Agamben, the aporias of the messianic are the site of truth, in that they expose the otherwise hidden structures in the concept of time and the human subject before the law, in particular. In each of these uses of the messianic, the concept takes on a variety of expressions, all of which illuminate points of intersection and divergence with the apocalyptic content of the Jesus tradition. In a critical dialogue with my exegetical analysis of the early Christian material, these philosophical approaches yield an interpretative framework that reveals how temporality in the apocalyptic sayings can be understood as bearing on a variety of social, political, religious, and nonreligious contexts.

Walter Benjamin Scholarly interest in the figure of the Messiah and its various expressions as “messianic” and “messianism” finds its source in Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide during a failed attempt to escape the Nazis in 1940. As described by his friend, the expert on Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, Benjamin showed a deep interest in Kabbalist writings and indicated that his Jewish identity was at the core of his being.3 Such a notion is not readily apparent in his writings, however, except in a few key works, such as his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin’s precise theological positions are difficult to grasp, but as Scholem states, “Two categories above all, and especially in their Jewish versions, assume a central place in his writings: on the one hand Revelation, the idea of the Torah and sacred texts in general, and on the other hand the messianic idea of Redemption. Their significance as regulative ideas governing his thoughts

3. Scholem and Richard Wolin are among the Benjamin scholars who emphasize the influence of Judaism, especially Jewish mysticism, as foundational to Benjamin’s thought. See Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (ed. Werner J. Dannhauser; New York: Schocken, 1976) and Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Other scholars, however, such as John McCole, argue that Benjamin was as much indebted to Marxism and combined it and other seemingly paradoxical modes of thought, such as metaphysics. See John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). More recently, Werner Hamacher, Samuel Weber, and Peter Fenves all de-emphasize the influence of Judaism and instead focus on Benjamin’s philosophical and critical content. See Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time,” in Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought (ed. Heidrun Friese; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001); Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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cannot be overrated.”4 Our primary concern here is the latter, along with its connection to Benjamin’s ideas on historical time and memory, all of which relate to apocalypticism with its emphasis on the potentially positive and empowering effects of destruction. Benjamin saw these apocalyptic elements as corresponding to immanence and as integral to the history of human beings and their labor.5 He crystallizes much of this in his idea of Jetztzeit, or “Now-time,” his most significant legacy to Continental philosophy. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin advances a critique of the Enlightenment notion of the inevitable, idealized progression of humankind in history. Rather he sees history as meaningful only insofar as the present forms what he terms “constellations” with events of the past. In this way the injustices of the past may be redeemed. For instance, in Thesis IV, Benjamin writes, In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.6

At stake in Benjamin’s notion of history is nothing less than redemption of social injustices that the prevailing powers wish to forget. In his view, the Messiah can be seen as representing a paradigm by which one’s perception of the structure of time changes, and the injustices done to both the living and the dead can be rectified. Referring to Thesis XIV, in which Benjamin writes an analogous statement, “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time but time filled by the presence of the now,” Werner Hamacher explains that for Benjamin, “There is historical time only insofar as there is an excess of the unactualised, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond its particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correction, and fulfillment.”7 Messianic time is thereby distinguished by a present that corresponds to a moment of the past.8 By way of these “constellations” between past and present, a testament to the truth of humankind is possible as history. The origins of Benjamin’s theory regarding the messianic and history gain some coherence in light of how he understood his work as a literary critic. Benjamin saw in his work as a critic the paradox that the determinate and transient content of a

4. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 193. 5. Ibid., 194. 6. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 2007; reprint 1968), 255. 7. Hamacher, “’Now: Benjamin on Historical Time,” 164. 8. Ibid., 187.

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work of art can reveal something that exceeds the moment it depicts—a moment of truth. “The fluctuating historical relation between these two moments accounts for the critic’s experience of something that cannot appear, the emergence of something infinite, the truth, from something that is man-made and finite, a work of art,”9 writes Richard Wolin of Benjamin. The best example of Benjamin making this connection is Thesis IX, in which he reflects on a Paul Klee painting he owned entitled Angelus Novus. He writes, A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.10

Here Benjamin uses Klee’s painting to mediate a philosophical insight. From his position as critic, Benjamin was aware of a point of contact between art, religion, and philosophy, and this intersection creates the context for “redeemed life” in its expression of a truth.11 Indeed Benjamin saw this point of contact as exploding “every inwardness and immanence, every type of interior space” and thus in such a moment, an image is truly legible.12 Against the Kantian view that was prevalent in his day, Benjamin saw truth as reflecting an objective and divine reality, which meant it faced a constant threat from an overly rationalized concept of experience. Such a threat becomes only more urgent given the compatibility of the Kantian worldview with a society that values technology and reason above all else. By contrast, Benjamin claimed that knowledge should consist of making an object of “concrete totality of experience,” which was a religious claim that became the basis of Benjamin’s philosophy of language and later, his notion of redemption.13 Benjamin writes, “Kant completely neglected the fact that all philosophical knowledge has its unique expression in language, not in formulas or numbers. . . . A concept of knowledge acquired by reflection on its linguistic essence will create a correspondent concept of experience that will also encompass the domains whose true systematic arrangement Kant

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 30–31. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 257. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 31. Weber, Benjamin’s -Abilities, 50. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 31–36.

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has failed to grasp. The highest of these domains is called religion.”14 Notably, as Gershom Scholem points out, Benjamin’s study of Kabbalist writings had a profound impact on this aspect of his thought. In particular, he was influenced by the work of Spanish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, who was among those who developed a doctrine of language as constitutive of a divine reality.15 To arrive at the truth content of the Klee painting, Benjamin focuses on the arrested motion of the “angel of history,” an image that in his reading is a critique of a linear notion of time. The angel’s wings are spread, and he looks intently at something ahead of him. As Benjamin envisions it, the angel is staring at the piles of wreckage that constitute history. They have not piled up as a chain of events, as they would be in a linear notion of time, but rather as the result of a single catastrophe. The angel would like to “awaken the dead” and “make whole what has been smashed,” but he is prevented from doing so by a storm blowing in, making it impossible to close his wings. He therefore is propelled into the future, to which he has his back turned, and this, Benjamin claims, is what is known as “progress.” With this image and this thesis Benjamin seeks to dissuade his audience of the idea that time flows inevitably forward and things get better over time. As Leland de la Durantaye writes, “This did not mean for Benjamin that things did not get better over time; it meant that simply assuming that they would, and that those in power would see to this come what may, was the most dangerous stance one could take.”16 Benjamin envisioned a more dynamic idea of time in which one creates a present based on the past, not the future. Given that one is always in history, and its end is in the future, which always lies ahead, one must take hold of the memory of the past in order to interrupt the flow of time.17 Without such a disruption, time is “empty” and “homogenous,” as he describes in Thesis XIV. Significantly, time is also irreversible. “The wind’s strength indicates not simply the flow of time but the force of time,” writes David Couzens Hoy of Benjamin’s thesis. “Temporality, or time as experienced, is directional even if it has no particular direction or telos.”18 By this Hoy indicates Benjamin’s suggestion that one’s experience of time has force, even if there is nothing definitive it is going toward. From a political perspective, Benjamin implies that the Enlightenment view of history leads only to fatalism. Without concrete content, in which moments of the present form a “constellation” with moments of the past, human freedom has no force or meaning; it does

14. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (6 vols.; eds., Rolf Tiedmann and Hermann Schweppenhauser; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), cited in Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 20. 15. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 40. 16. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 101. 17. David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 156. 18. Hoy, The Time of Our Lives, 156.

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not attest to the injustices of the past nor does it account for the disjointed and fragmented nature of memory.19 In his last thesis, XVIII, Benjamin writes, Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.20

Here is the most concise description of Benjamin’s idea of redemption in history. It is only in one’s awareness of the “constellation” one’s historical moment forms with another that any event is historical. Thus the present always holds this potential for redeeming the past, if only one will seize it. This is what Benjamin means by the “time of the now.” Furthermore he suggests in Thesis II that it need only to be recognized as such, given how it is constitutive of human experience. He writes, “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”21 The present, then, takes its form from the claim the past makes on the present, whether in its emptiness or in its capacity for redemption. Among the many philosophers who influenced Benjamin’s thought is Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenological “reduction” led to Benjamin’s theories on both historical time and language. In Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenoligischen Philosophie, Husserl proposed that it is possible to induce a phenomenological “reduction” by switching off one’s “natural” attitude. By “natural” attitude, Husserl refers to the idea that material objects exist outside our

19. Ibid., 152, 156–57. 20. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 263. With the term historicism here and elsewhere in his writings, Benjamin criticizes those in his day who portrayed history as the inevitable forward progression of humankind. The term historical materialism, by contrast, takes account of the effects of time in a way that offers the possibility of redemption. He writes in Thesis XVI, “Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.” 21. Ibid., 254.

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consciousness and our experience of the world consists in how these things affect us. In turning off this attitude, one gains a pure receptivity, allowing the perception of things as they are, unencumbered by any presuppositions. In contrast to Husserl, Benjamin thought that this “turning off ” does not occur through the will of the philosopher but rather through a higher “power” that is represented in the shape of time. These reductive occurrences are always unanticipated and exceed any unity of individual consciousness. They therefore assume a paradoxically openended structure, one that Benjamin defines as messianic.22 Peter Fenves in The Messianic Reduction argues that Benjamin tried to understand the higher “power” of the messianic in the mathematical terms of set theory and analytical geometry. In conversations with Scholem, who at that time was studying mathematics, Benjamin remarked whether a series of years, while of course countable, were at the same time not numerable. In other words, Benjamin wanted to investigate the relationship between historical chronology and historical time. Scholem proposed some of the leading mathematical theories of the time, but ultimately Benjamin stated there was no “mathematical theory of truth,” asserting that any theory of historical time must be consistent with a theory of language.23 Through a critical engagement with Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Concept of Time in Historical Scholarship,” Benjamin solidified his view on historical chronology. While Heidegger claims in the essay that year numbers are “convenient markers,” they are senseless, since any other number could be substituted. However, the beginning of chronology demonstrates that the idea of time begins with a historically significant event. Therefore, historical scholarship, or historical chronology, is “only meaningful [bedeustam] for the theory of historical time concept from the perspective of the beginning of time-reckoning.”24 Benjamin objects, claiming in some of his writings that the designation of any year as the start makes all the subsequent numbers meaningful depending on the reigning power that establishes such a numbering convention. “For this reason, however, the year numbers are not so much historical as they are exponents of the relevant regime,” explains Fenves of Benjamin’s assertion. “If, by contrast, the beginning of the count is indeed the beginning, then historical years can be numbered. In this case, year numbers enjoy the same status as proper names.”25 In his interrogation of the nature of historical chronology, Benjamin makes the connection between language and designation. If a historically significant event must be designated as such in order for a chronology to begin, its designation as such deprives it of its meaning. “There is only one way that the event with which time-reckoning begins can remain meaningful: it must be taking place, again, this year,” writes Fenves.

22. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 2–3. 23. Ibid. 24. Martin Heidegger, Habilitationsschrift, 432, cited in Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 119. 25. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 120.

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“Every year would therefore be the first year as long as the year is historical—and not simply stipulated as such by whomever assumes power.”26 Thus Benjamin’s idea of “constellations” takes form in part out of a unification of his theory of language and his theory of historical time. In the same move, it links state power to Benjamin’s notion of the messianic and historical time. The suggestion of political or social effects in Benjamin’s work reflects the influence of Marxism and also Benjamin’s correspondence with Carl Schmitt, a constitutional theorist who was his contemporary in Weimar Germany.27 Schmitt famously wrote that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,”28 meaning that in a “state of emergency,” as in a severe economic or political crisis, the one who has the power to suspend the law is the sovereign. According to Schmitt, a political theology therefore discloses that the power of a legal order is sustained by this figure of the sovereign who is both inside and outside the law, and that the power is not intrinsic to the legal order itself.29 Indeed Schmitt’s theory formed the legal basis for the rise of Nazism. Benjamin corresponded with Schmitt and advances a critique of his theory in Theses VIII: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.30

In this statement Benjamin cites Schmitt’s theory in order to highlight that in the period in which he is writing—during the Second World War, when the Third

26. Ibid., 121–22. 27. In regard to Marxism, Benjamin wrote the “Theses” after learning of the HitlerStalin pact of August 1939. He wrote to his friend Soma Morgenstern that “Karl Marx and all of nineteenth-century socialism is but a different form of messianic faith.” See De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 368. 28. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (eds. George Schwab and Tracy B. Strong; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 58. 29. Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign also had a profound impact on Jacob Taubes, a German Jewish philosopher of religion. In lectures to theologians in Heidelberg he delivered near his death in the mid-1980s, Taubes correlates modern instances of the “state of emergency” to crises facing Jews under Roman rule in the first century and the subsequent political theology of the apostle Paul (which emerges most strongly in the Letter to the Romans). See Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (trans. Dana Hollander; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), originally published in German in 1993 under the title Die Politische Theologie des Paules (Wilhelm Fink Verlag). See also L. L. Welborn, “Jacob Taubes—Paulinist, Messianist,” in Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers: The Apostle and Contemporary Continental Philosophy (ed. Peter Frick; Philadelphia: Fortress, 2013). 30. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 257.

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Reich had emerged as the new German state—the “state of exception” is the rule, no longer the exception. Benjamin calls upon the “tradition of the oppressed” to illustrate that fascism is not a historically tenable position, given how it disregards the injustices upon which “progress” depends, and consequently is not grounded in history at all. In this way he refutes Schmitt’s support of Nazism as representing an ideal progression of human history (this was the subject of some of their correspondence).31 In regard to the theme of redemption as a task of history, “Theologico-Political Fragment” is Benjamin’s most dense and compelling expression. Only the Messiah himself “consummates all history,” writes Benjamin, “in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic.”32 While the idea that the Messiah comes of his own accord and cannot be hastened is a commonly held concept of Jewish messianism, Benjamin expands this view, claiming that the arrival of the Messiah depends on the profane order, which for Benjamin means the transient nature of earthly life. He writes, “The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness.”33 By this he means that the happiness that humankind seeks lies in the transience of human existence, the profane, not in a transcendent, otherworldly realm. He explains by showing that a dynamic relationship exists between the passing away of all that lives and the Messianic Kingdom, in which humankind is redeemed. He represents the relationship with a figure: If one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then certainly the quest for free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic direction; but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.34

Benjamin means that the profane order is outside of the Messianic Kingdom and yet is inextricably bound to it. It is indeed a human category, a distinction from “sacred” that has no intrinsic meaning.35 However, because the profane order is that which passes away, which applies to all that lives, and human beings are forever caught up in it, it is the force by which the Kingdom will come.

31. Scott Horton, “Benjamin—History and the State of Exception,” in Browsings: The Harper’s Blog, May 15, 2010, http://harpers.org/blog/2010/05/benjamin-history-and-thestate-of-exception/. 32. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing (ed. Peter Demetz; trans. Edmund Jephcott; New York: Schocken, 1986), 312. 33. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312. 34. Ibid. 35. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 382.

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Benjamin elaborates on the idea of transience in the last part of the fragment to make a claim about redemption. He links the passing away of the world, or the transience of human life, to a particular disposition of the heart and mind, which he calls an immediate Messianic intensity of the heart, which passes through misfortune, as suffering. To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.

Here Benjamin states that because of a messianic experience of time, “an immediate Messianic intensity of the heart,” one passes through suffering, a passing that is made possible because we are aware of the transience of all worldly things, and we thereby have a glimpse of an eternal order that lies behind all. The rhythm in nature reveals a “restitutio in integrum,” the restoration of the original condition of the world, and thus we imagine a kind of restitution for ourselves. For Benjamin, the messianic claim reveals itself in the transience of worldly existence, both temporally and spatially, and therefore transience is the source of our happiness, not another world beyond this one, or anything we might designate as “sacred.”36 He concludes, “To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.”37 Here we see how the work of political life intersects with the Messianic Kingdom; the reigning powers designate what is, but it is all passing away and has no meaning other than to be revealed as such, by the Messiah. From these examples, one can see that the messianic functions as a critical structure for Benjamin’s thought. In his Arcades Project, he writes, “My thinking is related to theology as blotting paper is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.”38 This suggests Benjamin wanted to conceal the theological impulse within his writing, a motive he refers to in Theses I of “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Here he alludes to the concealed presence of theology within historical materialism with a parable about a chess-playing automaton that always wins because a dwarf who makes all its moves is concealed beneath the table. “The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time,” he writes. “It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”39 However, as shown in the examples above, Benjamin deploys

36. Ibid., 375. 37. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 313. 38. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 471. 39. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 253.

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the figure of the Messiah by name in other theses and in other writings, always in the service of arriving at a truth that is not legible otherwise.40 This returns us to Benjamin’s method of mediation, which has its meaning in revealing a suprahistorical or divine truth via a concrete, material reality, or as he advances in “Theologico-Political Fragment,” through the transience of human existence.

Jacques Derrida The French philosopher Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction, a branch of critical theory that has had a profound impact across the humanities since the 1960s. Deconstruction primarily concerns itself with subverting the binaries of the Western philosophical tradition that remain largely unanalyzed, such as speaking and writing or presence and absence.41 It illuminates how these oppositional ways of thinking undermine themselves in terms internal to their own systems of thought. As a result, the concepts can be reimagined, left open for something new. To this end, John D. Caputo describes deconstruction as “the relentless pursuit of the impossible, which means, of things whose possibility is sustained by their impossibility, of things which, instead of being wiped out by their impossibility, are actually nourished and fed by it.”42 The possibility of the impossible emphasizes deconstruction’s concern with the promise of an event that cannot be anticipated, an organizing principle and structure of experience that Derrida calls “l’invention de l’autre,” the incoming of the other.43 Derrida’s best-known deconstructive discourse concerns signification in language, particularly the problem he sees in privileging the voice over writing as a more immediate discourse of truth in philosophy, which he develops in the essays in Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology. As Peggy Kamuf explains, in these early works Derrida argued that, if philosophers have always failed to account for their own medium—writing—it is because material inscription is so thoroughly consistent with the fundamental requirement of their thinking, one that is supposed by the very notion of philosophy in the West: truth or meaning as a presence without difference from itself. Whatever else it is, writing, or in general the inscription of marks, always supposes and indicates an absence.44

40. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 370–71. 41. “Jaques Derrida,” s.v., by Jack Reynolds, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http:// www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH2a. 42. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 32. 43. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 41. 44. Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.

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In these texts Derrida begins to explore the nature of meaning in regard to Being, or presence, by reworking some aspects of the theory of signification. This linguistic theory of the sign, or semiotics, was first developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and explores the nature of a sign in regard to its function as both signified (conceptual) and signifier (linguistic). Derrida sought to unsettle further the idea of a direct relation between speech and reality, or truth, by noting the gaps in systems of language, which he termed trace and différance, which, for him, mark the opening to the other that will preoccupy him in later works.45 These terms trace and différance do not identify something specific but rather stand in for what is not present or even thinkable in a system of language. Generally speaking, because he never precisely defines these terms, différance seeks to show that the sign does not represent an ultimate referent; indeed there is no ultimate referent, which Derrida represents with a play on the French word différance, which means both difference and deferral. He derives this notion from Saussure’s theory of signification, in which Saussure argues that if one were to look up a word in a dictionary, one would see a variety of definitions, each of which would direct one to consult other definitions. The meaning of the original word is thereby always deferred, and meaning is never fully present nor determined but rather unfolds within a system of signifiers. From this Derrida concludes that the resulting play of differentiating and absent alternative meanings create what appears to be a stable identity for a concept but is actually only unending deferral and a system of difference. In the neologism différance, Derrida refers to this ceaseless differentiation and also the continual deferral of meaning.46 Connected to the notion of différance, the term trace helps Derrida describe the implications of difference and deferral. In Saussure’s work, the sign retains a logocentric privilege, because the sign still refers to a given concept, even if the relationship between sign and concept is arbitrary. In Derrida’s view, because of the system of differentiation and deferral, no meaning is unmediated, and “every signifier relates to other signifiers that surround it in space and time and so we can never reach a pure thought or concept—a signified—that exists in and of itself independently of all signifiers: what is supposedly beyond language is plunged back into language.”47 Therefore, the trace, or this network of spatial and temporal differentiation, extends not only to language but to Being, or consciousness, itself. If all thought is always mediated, then, Derrida argues, nothing can be transcendent and pure. In this work Derrida undermines metaphysics and its basis on an ultimate and pure origin or cause. Instead he posits that any origin is multiple and shot through with “differences, relations, and traces of other elements.”48

45. Kamuf, A Derrida Reader, 5. 46. Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 30–31. 47. Arthur Bradley, Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 71. 48. Bradley, Derrida’s of Grammatology, 75.

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The irreducibility of trace and différance, and their way of making the desire for presence possible and yet ultimately unachievable, forms the basis of Derrida’s deconstructive work, leading to the use of the messianic as a category of thought, to which he is indebted to Benjamin. However, unlike Benjamin and, as I will show later, Agamben, Derrida does not link the messianic to specific content or in the service of a specific truth to be revealed, other than that of exposing elements of undecidability. Furthermore, he does not associate messianic with Messiah or messianism because of their connotations of a particular historical moment or person. Rather, the messianic is a universal structure of experience that takes the Messiah as a tout autre, “a just one who shatters the stable horizons of expectation, transgressing the possible and conceivable, beyond the seeable and foreseeable, and who is therefore not the private property of some chosen people.”49 Thus, one might see Derrida as interested in faith claims of the Jewish and Christian traditions, but he removes the religious content. He is most concerned with what cannot be known, seen, or named. In the refusal to limit or foreclose the messianic, Derrida follows on the work of Maurice Blanchot, who explored a kind of radical alterity in regard to time in The Step Not Beyond. Here Blanchot distinguished ordinary, lived time from a time that is devoid of the present. This is a time without the sense of the “lived time” of phenomenology: a past that is always past and a future that will never be actualized. From this idea of a future that is never realized, Blanchot conceived his idea of the step/not beyond, a movement that one must make but is persistently blocked. This disruption is a break within the conscious self, a kind of diminishing of the self that leads Blanchot toward the idea of an extreme passivity, which he associates with death.50 He writes, From which comes the thought: dying freely, not according to our freedom, but, through passivity, abandon (an extremely passive attention) by way of the freedom of dying. And still dying is not only within every power, the impossible in relation to us, that which we cannot take on freely nor suffer under coercion: dying, in the absence of present, in the lack of traces that it leaves, is too light to die, to constitute a dying. This unconstituted-unconstituting that touches on the most passive fragility, that undoes and destitutes lavishly, leaving us without recourse, discovering us and giving us over to the discovery of a passion not suffered and a discourse without words.51

Thus Blanchot sees in death a time that is a suspension of the present because it is an encounter with the wholly other; the impossible made possible. It might be

49. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 161. 50. John D. Caputo, ed., Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 77–78. 51. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond (trans. Lycette Nelson; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), 125.

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expected, but it is always sudden, and one has no authority over this encounter but must make a unique response to it.52 The idea of a relation with a wholly other, the impossible made possible, takes a more developed form for Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, where he critiques the Marxian ontological distinctions between real and unreal, economic forces and the supernatural, and especially the promise of the present and the nothingness of death. Derrida sees a spectral quality in Marxism that is constitutive of its pursuit of social and economic justice, and it has its force in the power of the dead or yet unborn to be present.53 He writes, It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those who are no longer or for those who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present. . . . Without this noncontemporeity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges itself, without the responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question, “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” The question arrives. . . . It questions with regard to what will come in the future-to-come. Turned toward the future, going toward it, it also comes from it, it proceeds from the future. It must therefore exceed any presence as presence to itself.54

The concern of Marxism for a classless society thus contains within itself a messianic structure, which contains a promise that precedes Marxist theory. This promise remains undeconstructible and undetermined, and is described by Derrida as an “alterity that cannot be anticipated.”55 This alterity creates a disjointedness of time out of which an opening to the future is made by means of the present formed by an encounter with this absolute alterity; in this structure, the desire for justice has an origin. “Present existence has never been the object of justice,” Derrida writes, of why this disjointedness is necessary. “One must constantly remember that the impossible is, alas, always possible. One must constantly remember that this absolute evil (which is, is it not, absolute life, fully present life, the one that does not know death and does not want

52. John D. Caputo, Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 77–80. 53. Ibid., 119–20. 54. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf; New York: Routledge, 1994), xix. 55. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65.

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to hear about it) can take place. One must constantly remember that it is even on the basis of the terrible possibility of this impossible that justice is desirable: through but also beyond right and law.”56 That which exceeds right and law also takes form in hospitality, a concept through which Derrida elaborates the promise at the center of Marxism. The spectral quality he sees in Marxism has an analog in the reception of a foreigner, in which one offers hospitality without holding back. He understands absolute hospitality to be paradoxical: “Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering in a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.”57 In operating as an absolute, it is a law without imperative. “A law without a law,” he writes. “If I practice hospitality out of duty [and not only in conforming with duty], this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor.”58 In the form of an absolute, this condition of impossibility is made possible, and without this experience or this potentiality, there is no basis for striving for justice.59 In absolute hospitality, one greets the arrival of the “other” without expectation. It is messianic in structure in being an encounter with an alterity that is unrepresentable by virtue of it being unforeseen and absolute. Nevertheless the experience is undeniably transformative because of the opening it makes toward what is unknown. It is like the spirit undergirding Marxism’s pursuit of justice in that “what one does not have, what the one therefore does not have to give away, but what the one gives to the other, over and above the market, bargaining, thanking, commerce, and commodity, is to leave to the other this accord with himself that is proper to him and gives him presence. Justice is the proper jointure to the other given by the one who does not have it.”60 As John D. Caputo describes deconstruction, it is based on believing; it is not cognitive but rather performative. Deconstruction does not take its final form at a truth or a vision; rather, it develops without seeing or truth, and it privileges friendship and justice over a neat resolution of theoretical disputes.61 Derrida, therefore, advances the grounds for an orientation toward Being or presence that exceeds any order of knowledge, leading to what or where we do not know.

56. Ibid. 57. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, On Hospitality (trans. Rachel Bowlby; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25. 58. Derrida and Dufourmantelle, On Hospitality, 16. 59. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 167. 60. Ibid., 26. 61. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 166.

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Giorgio Agamben Benjamin’s use of the messianic has had a major impact on Giorgio Agamben, a contemporary Continental philosopher who employs the concept extensively. Like Benjamin, Agamben is concerned with temporality and sovereignty. However, Agamben’s work is distinguished by a more overt use of religious texts, in comparison to Benjamin, and special attention to the intersection between religion and the law. The Time That Remains, Agamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, is his most developed exploration of the messianic. Stating that the epistle is the “fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition,” he argues that it needs to be rescued from 2,000 years of dogmatic interpretation.62 In particular Agamben explores Paul’s notion of messianic time, which, on his reading, carries a specificity that is often misunderstood because of its conflation with eschatological time. For Agamben, Paul’s idea of messianic time disturbs the clear distinction between two times (the present and the future) and two worlds (heaven and earth) and, most importantly, points to a disjointedness in the human relationship to time.63 This disjointedness is constitutive of the messianic, and as such, it is Agamben’s primary interest. The idea of disjointedness refers to a parable on the Messianic Kingdom in which a rabbi says that all that is necessary for the reign of peace to come is a “small displacement.”64 However, it is exceedingly difficult to achieve the displacement, and thus it is necessary for the Messiah to come, and human beings must wait. Agamben knows of this parable because Benjamin heard it from Scholem, and then wrote about it, interpreting the “small displacement” to say that in the time of the Messiah “everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”65 Agamben appreciates Benjamin’s interpretation, given its emphasis on the Kingdom as not the telos of history but introducing an aporia that makes a radical and yet small change.66 To understand how all will be the same and yet different

62. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), I. At stake in Agamben’s exegesis of Romans is to retrieve Paul’s idea of messianic time as a paradigm for historical time. He wants to understand the meaning of a messianic community because the Christian tradition has muted this aspect of Paul’s and Jesus’s message, given the desire within the church during certain historical periods to suppress the Jewish identity of both Paul and Jesus. 63. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 62. 64. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt; Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 53. 65. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (7 vols.; eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhauser; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974–89), 2.432, cited in De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 381. 66. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 382.

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is Agamben’s aim in deploying the messianic, in terms of both temporality and the law. To explain Paul’s idea of temporality, Agamben describes secular time, which is referred to in the Greek as χρόνος, as distinctive from καιρός, another Greek term for time, with a meaning along the lines of “season,” “opportunity,” or as Agamben understands it, a “contracted and abridged chronos.”67 At the resurrection, Agamben writes, Paul perceives that time contracts and starts to come to an end. However, this contracted time, which Paul refers to as the ὀ νυν καιρός, “Nowtime,” lasts until the Parousia, the full presence of Christ, the Messiah. “The latter coincides with the Day of Wrath and the end of time (but remains indeterminate, even if it is imminent),” Agamben continues. “Time explodes here; or rather, it implodes into the other eon, into eternity.”68 In this configuration, Paul’s “Nowtime” does not mark the end of time, and it does not coincide with a future eon or with secular time; it is not outside of chronological time either. This is “the time that remains,” the time that time takes to end. According to Agamben, this is messianic time, and it is the only time that can be grasped. It “is the only real time, the only time that we have.”69 Part of the difficulty of understanding such a notion of messianic time is that time is usually configured spatially, in a straight line. Agamben concedes that this move is natural enough, given that it makes time representable as a concept. However, such a configuration does not suffice because the experience of time is not representable. As Agamben argues, an accurate representation of the experience of time accounts for the gap between representation and thought, image and experience.70 To explain this phenomenon, he looks to the twentiethcentury linguist Gustave Guillame. In Temps et verbe (Time and Verb), he devises the concept “operational time” to show that every operation within the mind is achieved in a certain time. Languages do not organize themselves according to a line but rather refer the image back to the operational time in which it was constructed. This is how Guillame comes up with “chronogenetic time,” which pertains specifically to languages, to describe how in every discourse in which we represent time, another time is implied, but this is not a time that is tacked on to chronological time. “Rather it is something like a time within time—not ulterior but interior—which only measures my disconnection with regard to it, my being out of synch and in noncoincidence with regard to my representation of time, but precisely because of this, allows for the possibility of my achieving and taking hold of it.”71 This description forms the basis of Agamben’s messianic time as “the time that time takes to come to an end, to achieve our representation of time.”72

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Agamben, The Time That Remains, 69. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 67. Ibid.

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The significance of this time within time is that it highlights the disjointedness that is at the center of the messianic concept. Indeed this disjointedness has led to the aporias that Agamben identifies with current interpretations of the messianic. In Jewish thought, it constitutes a “life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished,” as Scholem famously wrote.73 Other interpreters, mostly Christian, take the position that messianic time is transitional, a time between two periods that stretches interminably into the future.74 The concept of operational time, however, illuminates that messianic time has a structure, one that in the Pauline framework exists between two times: the resurrection and the Parousia. Christian tradition describes this formulation in the Pauline concept of salvation being “already and not yet.” In this interpretation, “already” describes that the messianic event has occurred and salvation has been secured, while “not yet” describes that the fulfillment of the messianic event suggests an additional time is necessary, which is mistakenly linked to a Second Coming of Jesus, but which Paul referred to as the παρουσία. However, as Agamben insists in his reading, the term παρουσία, means “presence” and does not indicate an addition or supplement to chronological time. Rather, Paul uses this term to highlight the innermost uni-dual structure of the messianic event, inasmuch as it is comprised of two heterogeneous times, one kairos and the other chronos, one an operational time and the other a represented time, which are coextensive but cannot be added together. Messianic presence lies beside itself, since, without ever coinciding with a chronological instant, and without ever adding itself onto it, it seizes hold of this instant and brings it forth to fulfillment.75

In other words, the claim that the Messiah has already arrived means that the messianic event contains within itself another time, which is not deferred but rather is made graspable in the παρουσία.76 Agamben’s understanding of messianic time also explores Paul’s use of recapitulation as a theme. Referring to the use of the verb ἀνακεφαλαιόω77 in Eph 1:10, where the author writes, “As a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things to Christ, things in heaven and things on earth” (εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν, ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐν αὐτῷ), Agamben describes the passage as paradigmatic of Paul’s idea that in the messianic age there is a summation of all

73. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 35. 74. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 69–70. 75. Ibid., 70. 76. Ibid., 71. 77. As a rhetorical term, ἀνακεφαλαιόω generally means to “sum up,” sometimes in a commercial or mathematical context. See BDAG, 65.

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things, of all that has happened in the past. In this way a recapitulation of the past effects a fulfillment of the καιρός that anticipates the eschaton. The juxtaposition of recapitulation and πληρώμα (“fulfillment”) also occurs in Rom 13:9–10, where Paul writes that “in this word [each commandment] is summed up in this, Love your neighbor as yourself ” (ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τούτῳ ἀνακεφαλαιοῦται, [ἐν τῷ] Ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν). Most important to Agamben is the idea that the fulfillment of time relates each instant to the Messiah and is not teleological. The theme of recapitulation therefore not only functions to prefigure the future but also functions to reveal a connection between two times: past and present. In the Benjaminian sense, the events of the past then take on their true meaning.78 Agamben’s interest in the structure of messianic time undergirds his observation that to live in the Messiah, in the Pauline sense of Gal 2:20,79 requires one to abandon all identity markers of the self. He takes 1 Cor 7:29–32 as exemplifying Paul’s argument, identifying it as “his most rigorous definition of messianic life.”80 Paul writes, But this I say, brothers and sisters, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. But I wish you to be without care.81

Agamben interprets this passage, with its use of ὡς μὴ (“as not”) as representing the meaning of Paul’s sense of himself as an apostle, one called to messianic life. Agamben writes of Paul’s vocation: “Vocation calls for nothing and no place. For this reason, it also revokes the condition from top to bottom. The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation. . . . This, and nothing less than this, is what it means to have a vocation, what it means to live in messianic klesis.”82 He elaborates on the “as not” construction to show how it pushes one concept against itself and not its opposite—for instance, “weeping as not weeping”—such that it does not nullify the first reference but prepares its end. “This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of this world,” Agamben writes.83 In this “zone of absolute indiscernability between immanence and transcendence,

78. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 75–77. 79. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” 80. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 23. 81. Translation by Agamben with consultation of various translations, including King James Version, New International Version, American Standard Version, Interlinear Greek New Testament, and International Standard Version. See Agamben, The Time That Remains, x. 82. Ibid., 23–23. Italics in original. 83. Ibid., 25.

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between this world and the future world,” Paul locates and describes messianic time, a time within time.84 While the messianic is the centerpiece of Agamben’s thought about time, the concept also gains purchase in his thought about the law, most prominently in The State of Exception and the Homo Sacer series. Rather than offering a close reading and reinterpretation of a text, as in The Time That Remains, Agamben deals broadly with the religions of Judaism and Christianity, showing how the messianic operates as a limit concept of religious experience in its relation to the law. Citing Benjamin as the first to see the relation between the arrival of the Messiah and the limit of state power in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Agamben writes, “Benjamin establishes a relation between the concept of messianic time, which constitutes the theoretical nucleus of the ‘Theses,’ and a juridical category that belongs to the sphere of public law. Messianic time has the form of a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) and summary judgment (Standrecht), that is, judgment pronounced in a state of exception.”85 By way of explanation, Agamben recalls Thesis VIII, in which Benjamin writes that the “state of exception in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Here Benjamin alters Schmitt’s theory that rule of the sovereign has meaning in the exception alone (the one with the power to suspend the law is the sovereign) and makes the differentiation that in a period in which the Messianic Kingdom reigns (in contrast to Benjamin’s present historical moment), the hidden structures of the law are exposed, and the law is perpetually suspended. “In establishing this analogy,” Agamben writes, “Benjamin does nothing other than bring a genuine messianic tradition to the most extreme point of its development. The essential character of messianism may well be precisely its particular relation to the law.”86 The messianic event in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam signifies a crisis and radical subversion of the law, meaning it is a limit concept in religion, argues Agamben, in which religion confronts the problem of the law.87 Within the “problem of the law”—the paradox cited in Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign—is the problem of historical time in relation to the messianic. How does a heavenly, Messianic Kingdom manifest and sustain itself in this place and in this time? Because historical time cannot be canceled, messianic time cannot perfectly coincide with history; rather two times must occur alongside each other “according to modalities that cannot be reduced to a dual logic (this world/ other world).”88 Thus the messianic, in addition to its illumination of the hidden structures of the law, attempts to reveal the obscured foundation of historical time

84. Ibid. 85. Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of the Law in Walter Benjamin,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (trans. Daniel HellerRoazen; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 160. 86. Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” 162. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 166–68. This is further developed in The Time That Remains.

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itself, one that it is only graspable insofar as we are aware of an interior time that lies within it, as Agamben demonstrates in The Time That Remains. Historical time within a messianic framework is therefore in force without significance, just as is the law in a state of exception (a kind of “legal illegality”89). In the recent book Pilate and Jesus, Agamben explores the intersection of messianism and the law and what it reveals about the nature of truth. Focusing on the trial scenes in the Passion narrative in the Gospel of John, Agamben argues that the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus, and the suspension of judgment in which both engage, reveals not an aporia in the tradition but the contours of the messianic claim in regard to history and the law. He notes the first confrontation between Pilate and Jesus in John 18:33–34: Then Pilate entered again into the praetorium, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I?” Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Instead of responding to Pilate’s last question, Jesus describes his Kingdom: “My Kingdom is not from this world. If my Kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my Kingdom is not from here.” To which Pilate responds, “So are you a king?” Jesus’s response diverts attention from Kingdom to “truth.” He says, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is from the truth listens to my voice” (18:37). Pilate responds by saying, “What is truth?” (18:38). Agamben uses this scene to illustrate that Pilate is not referring to truth in general but to the truth of the Kingdom to which Jesus testifies. “Here it is not truth and skepticism, faith and incredulity that confront each other, but two different truths, two different conceptions of truth,” Agamben writes.90 Pilate does not wait for an answer but goes to the Jews to say that he has no reason to condemn Jesus and he asks whether, as is the custom at Passover, Pilate can release Jesus as an act of amnesty. Agamben notes that Pilate enlists this practice as a means of avoiding a verdict, because as the Roman governor of Judea he could have exonerated Jesus or suspended the trial. The crowd wants Barabbas and not Jesus, and so Pilate makes a last attempt. He has Jesus flogged and then intends to release him, but the crowd demands his crucifixion, citing the Jewish law that states it is a capital crime to claim to be the Son of God. Pilate then asks Jesus where he is from. When Jesus does not answer him, Pilate says, “Do you not know that I have the power to release you and the power to

89. Adam Kotsko, “How to Read Agamben,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 4, 2013. http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-read-agamben. 90. Giorgio Agamben, Pilate and Jesus (trans. Adam Kotsko; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 17–19.

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crucify you?” Jesus replies, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over is guilty of a greater sin” (18:8–11). The question about where he is from recalls the earlier exchange about Jesus not being from this world but of the truth. Pilate then takes Jesus out to the crowd again and says, “Here is your King,” a move that angers the crowd, and they demand his crucifixion, with the Sanhedrin insisting they have no king but Caesar. Agamben notes that Pilate continually returns to the question of whether Jesus’s kingship is heavenly or earthly; indeed it remains in question until the end of the scene.91 Pilate hands over Jesus and the title inscribed above his head is “King of the Jews,” an identification Pilate will not change to “this man said he was king of the Jews,” even though the Sanhedrin insists that he do so. Agamben dwells on the trial narrative because he is interested in the suspension of judgment it portrays. “Here two judgments and two kingdoms truly stand before one another without managing to come to a conclusion. It is not at all clear who judges whom, whether it is the judge legally invested with earthly power or the one who is made a judge through scorn, who represents the kingdom that is not from this world. It is possible, in fact, that neither of the two truly pronounces a judgment.”92 By way of an answer, Agamben poses another question. Citing the teachings of Jesus that continually enjoin others not to judge, Agamben asks why the one who does not judge must submit to judgment. Why must “the eternal kingdom be ‘handed over’ to the judgment of the earthly kingdom?”93 As Agamben understands it, the later doctrine of the church that established the dual nature of Christ—both fully human and fully divine—has its coherence in that one nature cannot justify itself by means of the other. For this reason, Jesus’s testimony to Pilate is paradoxical: “He must testify in this world that his kingdom is from another—not that he is here a simple human being but elsewhere is a God.”94 The enigmatic factor in Jesus’s testimony is not the testimony itself but the truth to which he must testify. “He must attest in history and in time to the presence of an extrahistorical and eternal reality. How can one testify to the presence of a kingdom that is not ‘from here’?”95 Agamben’s answer concerns the contradiction between justice and salvation. He writes, “Justice is implacable and at the same time impossible, because in it things appear as lost and unsavable; salvation is merciful and nevertheless ineffective, because in it things appear as unjudgeable.”96 To testify to God’s Kingdom, then, requires one to accept that what we want to save will judge us. In the fallen state of the world, it is unsavable and does not want salvation but rather justice. For this reason, justice is rendered

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Agamben, Pilate and Jesus, 26. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 45.

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according to the law, which is why, Agamben argues, Jesus died on the cross. “Here is history,” he concludes.97 The implication is that any theological justification of the profane order, as Benjamin would say, loses its ground. The juridical order remains always incompatible with the order of salvation and vice versa. In a Benjaminian move, Agamben forms a “constellation” between the trial of Jesus and contemporary political life in regard to a “state of exception.” He sees contemporary political life, in which certain rules of law are not observed (as in the case of some of President Bush’s orders after 9/11) as corresponding to Pilate’s inability to pronounce a judgment (the law is in effect but is not applicable), and yet Jesus is crucified.98 He is killed because he lived in a given time and place, and this world demands justice, not salvation. Like his predecessor Benjamin, Agamben sees the messianic as transforming a relation between human beings and the powers that act on them, but the messianic cannot arise from the earthly, profane realm; the Kingdom is not of this world. From a philosophical point of view, the Kingdom of God represents a structure of thought that exposes the limits of other concepts within human experience and thus reveals an order of knowledge not previously accessible.

Conclusion The messianic in philosophy is concerned primarily with human thought against its limits. For Benjamin and Agamben, the Kingdom signifies the paradox by which such a limit has a meaning, in itself and for the one in the midst of the paradox. Benjamin emphasizes revelation and thereby a divine reality in the shape of a truth that can be grasped despite being hidden. For Agamben, the truth emerges from aporias in which the full force of an aspect of human experience can be felt. Derrida, by contrast, sees hopefulness at the core of Being, one that cannot be reduced to any human category of thought. By virtue of its indeterminacy, this hopefulness, or anticipation, exceeds time and memory and retains the quality of the wholly other by which one’s being takes form. The chapters that follow will engage these uses of the messianic in regard to Jesus’s configuration in the gospels as Messiah and his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Each chapter will engage the philosophical writings as intertexts by which I interpret Jesus’s understanding of human temporality and Being. Considering the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts that give shape to the sayings, I describe how these apocalyptic sayings point to the messianic as a structure of human experience, one that reveals an irreducible remainder that is obscured by time as a continuum.

97. Ibid. 98. Ibid.

Chapter 3 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY: MESSIANIC TIME—CREATION AND SALVATION

And Jesus said, the Kingdom of God is like a man scattering seed upon the earth. And he sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows long; he does not know how. The earth bears fruit by itself; first the stalk, then the head, then the mature wheat in the stalk. When the crop permits, immediately he sends for the sickle, because the harvest is here.1 — Mark 4:26–29

Introduction The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE reverberates throughout the texts generated in its aftermath in a variety of ways, one of the most compelling of which concerns the concept of time. As the Jews of this period called upon the symbolic language of eschatology—and its literary and social expressions in apocalypticism, which imagines the redemption of Israel— speculations about when the eschaton might arrive figure prominently. In the mouth of Jesus, the one believed by some to be the Messiah who signaled the beginning of the new age, this strand of thought appears in proclamations that the Kingdom of God is here in some sayings and to come in others, resulting in an inconsistency that has preoccupied New Testament scholars for generations.2 Agricultural metaphors, such as those above in the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly, appear prominently in such expressions; in this case, the juxtaposition of wheat growing in progressive stages (present and ongoing) and the harvest 1. Parallel appears in Gos. Thom. 21:4. Καὶ ἔλεγεν, Οὕτως ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ὡς ἄνθρωπος βάλῃ τὸν σπόρον ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ καθεύδῃ καὶ ἐγείρηται νύκτα καὶ ἡμέραν, καὶ ὁ σπόρος βλαστᾷ καὶ μηκύνηται ὡς οὐκ οἶδεν αὐτός. αὐτομάτη ἡ γῆ καρποφορεῖ, πρῶτον χόρτον, εἶτα στάχυν, εἶτα πλήρη[ς] σῖτον ἐν τῷ στάχυϊ. ὅταν δὲ παραδοῖ ὁ καρπός, εὐθὺς ἀποστέλλει τὸ δρέπανον, ὅτι παρέστηκεν ὁ θερισμός. 2. See chapter 1 for analysis on the scholarly positions on this issue in regard to Jesus’s apocalypticism.

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(in the Jewish scriptures, a metaphor for the Day of the Lord, or judgment day of the eschaton) is an especially dramatic example. While some interpreters read the disjunction of growth and harvest as constituting “the moment” that undergirds Jesus’s ethical imperative, calling the hearers into decisive action,3 I contend the disjunction calls for more attention to the concept of time itself. As I will demonstrate below, underlying the call to discipleship—the “moment”—is a conception about time that, understood experientially, concerns salvation more than discipleship. The Jewish apocalypse 4 Ezra, which is contemporaneous with the Gospel of Mark, also presents a concern with time, inviting an intertextual analysis with the Seed Growing Secretly. In both the Markan parable and 4 Ezra, a complex set of meanings and associations regarding time emerges as the authors express different views about when the redemption of Israel will arrive. As a site of struggle between human agency and divine providence, the when is conceived differently, but in both cases it reflects an experience of the audience and the authors that has a philosophical structure, one that is illuminated by an interaction I will stage between the first-century texts and Continental philosophy on the messianic. The Continental philosophers whose work I will draw upon—Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben—each contribute a distinctive but related reflection on the experience of time in the ancient texts as it overlaps with the philosophers’ interlocking preoccupations regarding origins, sovereignty, and Being itself. In this expanded interpretive context, the agricultural metaphors of the Seed Growing Secretly illustrate the when of Israel’s redemption as always already evident, indeed as embedded within nature, or creation, itself.

The Parable The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly centers on the action on the farmer, and yet paradoxically, the most significant events of the parable have nothing to do with him. Focusing on the first part of the parable, many interpreters see this parable as addressing the theme of discipleship, as I mention above in regard to “the moment,” indicating, in this reading, that disciples should not become discouraged but trust that the Kingdom will manifest itself at the appropriate time.4 In this view, the parable emphasizes the farmer rather than the seed, suggesting that one may stand in ignorance before the mystery of the harvest, but at the same time one is invited

3. See, as representative, Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (New York: Scribner, 1972); and Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 4. See, as representative, Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 254; and Claude Pavur, “The Grain Is Ripe: Parabolic Meaning in Mark 4:26–29.” BTB 17, no. 1 (1987): 21–23.

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into discipleship.5 This interpretation builds upon the central idea of the parable of The Sower, which immediately precedes it.6 A study of the Greek vocabulary offers a rich set of metaphorical associations that expands and revises this interpretation. One of the most compelling words in the Greek text is καθέυδω—translated here as “sleep”—but which, as in Matt 8:24 and 13:25, carries a meaning of spiritual apathy. It also has the euphemistic meaning in 1 Thess 5:10 of being dead.7 Its position at the beginning of the Greek phrase in Mark 4:26 indicates that the author wished to emphasize it in regard to a kind of spiritual “deadness” or apathy.8 In this way we see Jesus’s association of the Kingdom with the call to repentance, a theme consistent with numerous other sayings of Jesus and with his link to John the Baptist. In the next full line, καθέυδω is juxtaposed with καρποφορεῖ, which describes the action of the seed. The phrase begins with αὐτομάτη, meaning “to happen without apparent cause,” referring to the growth of fruit or seeds.9 What occurs without cause to human eyes bears fruit, in other words. The unseen work of God in humankind is inevitable and sure, as certain as the wheat grows from the seed, or the bread rises from the yeast. Indeed the growth depends on the workings of God and not on any human action. The parable takes on greater momentum in describing the events surrounding the wheat attaining its fulfillment. The wheat at its mature stage is expressed in Greek with πλήρης, meaning “containing within itself all that it will hold . . . lacking nothing, complete.”10 Jesus uses the verb form of this word in Mark 1:14, in which he says, Πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς, “the time is fulfilled.” He makes this proclamation at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, just after the text notes his association with John the Baptist and John’s arrest. Even at the outset of the gospel, Mark indicates the central importance of time and the idea of a given moment as the moment for action. To reinforce this notion, Mark uses καιρὸς for “time,” which is notable in its distinctiveness from χρόνος and its association with usages in Daniel and other

5. Pavur, “The Grain Is Ripe: Parabolic Meaning in Mark 4:26–29,” 22. 6. John Dominic Crossan attributes the title of the parable to its association with The Sower and that it ought to be “The Reaper,” given its parallel to the Gos. Thom. 85:15–19: “Let there be among you a man of understanding; when the fruit ripened, he came quickly with his sickle in his hand, he reaped it. Whoever has ears to hear let him hear.” See In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1992), 83. In the Sayings Parallels, he titles the parable “The Harvest.” See John Dominic Crossan, Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the Jesus Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986). 7. BDAG, 490. 8. As is typical of Greek prose style, the important elements of a sentence are at the beginning. See J. D. Denniston, Greek Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 44. “As regards beginning and end, it is generally admitted, and is indeed beyond dispute, that the weight of a Greek sentence or clause is usually at its opening, and the emphasis tends to decline as the sentence proceeds.” 9. BDAG, 152 10. Ibid., 827.

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apocalyptic literature. Referring often to a season or specific period, it is also used to describe a present crisis, as in Rom 13:11: “Besides this, you know the time, that already it is the hour for you to wake from sleep”11 (Καὶ τοῦτο εἰδότες τὸν καιρόν, ὅτι ὥρα ἤδη ὑμᾶς ἐξ ὕπνου ἐγερθῆναι). By using the same root word for both the fullness of time and the fullness of the wheat, Mark links the wheat’s final stage of growth with Jesus’s proclamation about time being fulfilled. The wheat, in other words, manifests an optimal moment in time, a when that is now. The parable concludes abruptly, again with a reference to time with ὅταν, the particle meaning “at the time that, when, and whenever.”12 At the opportune moment, when “the crop permits,” immediately the farmer takes up the sickle. The word for “sickle,” δρέπανον, appears in Rev 14:14–19, in which we read, I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand! Another angel came out of the temple, calling in a loud voice to the one who sat on the cloud, “Take your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is ripe.” So the one who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped.13

It also appears in Joel 3:13–14: “Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. . . . For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.” Given the connection to Joel, the harvest and especially the reaping metaphor of the parable signal a theme of judgment. The juxtaposition between harvest and processes of growth indicates a concern for the when of the judgment. In this way we see the distinctively apocalyptic content of the parable, as growth and harvest metaphors occur together in such apocalypses as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, although they develop in different ways, as I will demonstrate below. To C. H. Dodd, the disjuncture between the judgment at the eschaton and progressive growth in the parables of Jesus indicates that the present crisis itself, which he interprets as referring to the destruction of the temple, marks the fulfillment of time. The growth of the seed therefore represents the inevitable progress of Jesus’s work from the prophets and John the Baptist in preaching repentance. Dodd writes, “Thus the parable would suggest that the crisis which has now arrived is the climax of a long process which prepared the way for it.”14 In this view, the growth before the event is a mysterious process that occurs without

11. Ibid., 498. See also James Barr, Biblical Words for Time (Studies in Biblical Theology; Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1962). For a detailed explication of the connection between Romans 13 and Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom, see L. L. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 29–42. 12. BDAG, 731. 13. All translations of the Hebrew Bible are NRSV translations. 14. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, 179.

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the action of any human being, culminating in a decisive moment of judgment. Dodd emphasizes that in a departure from Jewish apocalyptic sources, the harvest in Mark depends on the reapers, and in this context, Jesus calls his disciples.15 However, as John Dominic Crossan argues, a “realized eschatology,” such as in Dodd’s reading, represents a linear, chronological view of time that is misguided. Rather Crossan sees the parabolic form and its use of a “poetic imagination” in the Jesus tradition as calling hearers out of their ordinary context, especially in terms of time. This quality in itself, he argues, is constitutive of Jesus’s call for repentance. While establishing the historicity of Jesus’s proclamation in the specificity of the historical context, the parables, to Crossan, also indicate the “ontological ground” of Jesus’s proclamation. In requiring a response, a parable “creates our history and give us time, this history and this time. Time is, in both senses, the present of God.”16 Drawing upon Heidegger, Crossan argues that one way of interpreting Jesus’s parables is to attend to how a sense of time and history arises “from a response to Being which comes always out of the unexpected and unforeseen, which destroys one’s planned projections of a future by asserting in its place the advent of Being.”17 This occurrence unfolds with the interpretation of “signs,” among which the seed and harvest metaphors are prominent and operate as part of an apocalyptic vocabulary, much like in 4 Ezra, as I demonstrate below. However, in the Seed Growing Secretly, the metaphors come not from a divine mediator who then interprets them, as in 4 Ezra, but directly from Jesus, with no interpretation.

The Parable and 4 Ezra Considered a prime example of Jewish apocalyticism, 4 Ezra is dated to the late first century, around the same period as Mark. Most notable for our purposes are the ways in which the author draws upon seed and harvest metaphors to address the problem or tension between divine providence and human agency. Indeed this is an overarching concern of Ezra, the apocalyptic seer who engages in a dialogue with a divine agent, the angel Uriel. Ezra decries Israel’s state of destitution at the hands of the Romans and continually asks when Israel will be restored. Ezra says that what he really wants to understand is “why Israel has been given over to the Gentiles in disgrace . . . and we are not worthy to obtain mercy” (4 Ezra 5:23–24). Uriel responds, If you are alive, you will see, and if you live long, you will often marvel, because the age is hurrying swiftly to its end. It will not be able to bring the things that have been promised to the righteous in their appointed times, because this age

15. Ibid., 193, 198. 16. Crossan, In Parables, 31. 17. Ibid.

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“The Time Is Fulfilled” is full of sadness and infirmities. For the evil about which you ask me has been sown, but the harvest of it has not yet come. If therefore that which has been sown is not reaped, and if the place where the evil has been sown does not pass away, the field where the good has been sown will not come. (4 Ezra 4:26–29)

The passage continues with a reference to Adam as containing the first evil seed and the many evil seeds that will grow into grains of wheat that will fill the threshing floor. Here the author suggests that God has predetermined all events and that a pervasive corruption of the world is the only explanation for the current state of affairs.18 Understandably, this response offers no consolation, and indeed, Uriel reinforces the sense of hopelessness in his answer to Ezra’s question about how long Israel will have to wait. He connects the souls of the righteous awaiting the resurrection to a harvest, but to the question of when they will be vindicated, he says, “Go and ask a pregnant woman whether, when her nine months have been completed, her womb can keep the fetus within her any longer” (4 Ezra 4:40). This answer suggests an inevitability about God’s intervention at the right time, a time not known to any human, which is similar in concept to the Seed Growing Secretly. At this point in 4 Ezra, the tension between the omnipotence of God and the when of the restorative event is at the fore, particularly because it is not adequately addressed. In the verses that follow, Uriel extends the childbirth metaphor to liken those who await the resurrection to those awaiting birth, and thus the author combines the metaphor of the harvest with a concept of Mother Earth.19 Notable here is that agricultural processes have been anthropomorphized. To explain this development, Karina Martin Hogan notes that the connections between agriculture and childbirth in regard to the eschaton suggest that it is possible to know something about the end times from the signs one can observe in the natural order. Both offer evidence of divine providence.20 The childbirth metaphor, she explains, undergirds the agricultural metaphor deployed in the passages cited above by making the sowing and reaping of souls more conceptually cohesive. With the Mother Earth metaphor, people are plants; they are also fertile ground, because they are made of the same material as the earth.21 As Ezra pursues his questioning about God’s mercy in the midst of persecution, and the lack of concern on the part of God for the many that will not be saved, Uriel continually offers unsatisfying and predictable responses. The persistent questioning by Ezra and Uriel’s insistence on offering solutions culminates in Ezra’s two dream-visions, which Hogan characterizes as an “apocalyptic solution”:

18. Michael Edward Stone, Fourth Ezra (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 94. 19. Karina Martin Hogan, “Mother Earth as Conceptual Metaphor in 4 Ezra.” CBQ 73, no. 1 (2011): 72–91. 20. Hogan, “Mother Earth as Conceptual Metaphor in 4 Ezra.” 78. 21. Ibid., 80.

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a third theology and alternative to the covenantal wisdom theologies that had heretofore predominated.22 In these visions, only a divine intervention can restore Israel, but these images are accompanied by Uriel’s advice to Ezra that individuals must ensure for themselves that they will be saved in the final judgment.23 He says in 7:59–61: Consider within yourself what you have thought, for the person who has what is hard to get rejoices more than the person who has what is plentiful. So also will be the judgment that I have promised; for I will rejoice over the few who shall be saved, because it is they who have made my glory to prevail now, and through them my name has now been honored.

In the midst of Ezra’s concern about the fate of Israel, he is reassured that he will be among those saved because of his righteousness and that the harvest will indeed come, as surely as a baby is born when the womb can hold it no more. The cluster of meanings evoked by the Mother Earth concept in connection to agriculture and harvest metaphors emphasizes the role of human beings in being prepared, watching for signs. However, and most important for the distinctiveness of 4 Ezra, even this breaks down. In speeches toward the end of the text, Uriel describes the signs that will foretell the eschaton. He says, “Infants a year old shall speak with their voices, and women shall give birth to premature children at three and four months, and these shall live and dance. Unsown places shall suddenly appear sown, and full store-houses shall suddenly be found to be empty” (6:21– 22). These signs, however, “cut both ways,” as Hogan notes, in that they indicate the anticipated reversals in regard to agriculture and childbirth, and at the same time they undermine Uriel’s analogies.24 The tension between human agency and divine providence continues to persist: Uriel insists on the critical nature of the signs, and yet their reversal of natural processes undermines the evidence of God’s presence in the natural order. Thus we see an anxiety in 4 Ezra regarding a very human need to know when the moment of divine intervention will occur that is not fully resolved, other than to suggest the inadequacies of human observations. Thus we return to the Seed Growing Secretly, where the tension between human agency and divine providence—the question of when will the eschaton arrive—opens out into the form of parable. While the seeds and harvest metaphors are essential to Uriel’s argument in 4 Ezra and yet break down, they are never called into question in Mark. Indeed Jesus’s association with them may be seen as constitutive of his identity in the gospel narratives as Son of Man, particularly with the inextricable link to the sickle in the Seed Growing Secretly. Although the Markan Jesus does not identify himself as the reaper, we do well to read this verse

22. Karina Martin Hogan, Theologies in Conflict: Wisdom Debate and Apocalyptic Solution (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 38. 23. Hogan, Theologies in Conflict, 39. 24. Hogan, “Mother Earth as Conceptual Metaphor,” 81.

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with the prophecies of Mark 13:26 and 14:62.25 Indeed the signs of the eschaton appear in the gospels as evidence of a coming Kingdom, as in Jesus’s prophecies regarding the temple and the trials to be faced by his disciples.26 Notably, the signs themselves are not the Kingdom but rather they signify Jesus’s proclamation in the gospel narrative about its arrival in the near future. The present signs are then interpreted in anticipation of a particular idea of an imminent future.27 The contrast between growing and harvest in the Seed Growing Secretly lends itself to Jesus’s reluctance to assign a timetable to the coming of the Kingdom. Like Uriel, Jesus cannot say when the eschaton will arrive. All he can do is say that like the farmer, it is pointless to hurry it or try to cause it to occur. When the moment arrives, “when the crop permits,” God will not wait. As N. A. Dahl writes, “To urge that Jesus, if he were the coming one, should unfold a messianic activity would be as foolish as to press the husbandman to be active in order to make the grain grow or to reap it before the time of the harvest.”28 Thus the Seed Growing Secretly speaks of Jesus’s presence and proclamation as representing the imminent arrival of the Kingdom, but not even he could predict the precise moment of God’s reign. Nevertheless, as Uriel instructs Ezra, one must use the remaining time to prepare and to watch for the signs. The Day of the Lord could come at any moment, “like a thief in the night” (Matt 24:42–44). A parallel parable to the Seed Growing Secretly—in terms of the theme of judgment and the use of agricultural metaphors—is the Weeds among the Wheat in Matt 13:24–30: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”29

Here we can see that no one wonders whether the wheat will be harvested, but all the assembled want to know when. Like 4 Ezra, the righteous and the evil,

25. Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 119. 26. N. A. Dahl, “Parables of Growth.” ST 5 (1952): 132–66. 27. Hans Conzelmann, “Present and Future in the Synoptic Tradition.” JTC 5 (1968): 26–44, 36. 28. Dahl, “Parables of Growth,” 150. 29. NRSV translation.

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the weeds and the wheat, inevitably grow together, and both will be harvested.30 Hans Conzelmann writes, “With regard to time, all the problems are concentrated on one point, viz. to establish that the separation will take place in the future. A crucial qualification of the present is thereby indirectly established: Judgment is not a selective process carried out within history. There is nothing at all special to be said about the period between then and now; it is, qualitatively, simply an interim period.”31 This interim period does not really contain time, in other words; it is “eliminated from view as a negative entity, as the time when one cannot anticipate the judgment.”32 Although time is similarly compressed in the Seed Growing Secretly, it is not eliminated from view. Rather, the most significant event—the growth of the seed—occurs in this period of waiting and not knowing. The divine presence is marked by an absence, which is discernible only in the unseen process of growth. Expressions that compress time from the mouth of Jesus mark a notable departure from 4 Ezra. The imminent expectation of the eschaton is thereby inextricably linked to the person of Jesus, rather than existing indisputably in the future at a time only known to God. “If the kingdom is so near that it casts this shadow, then it does not confront man in such a fashion that he can still observe it from a certain distance. Instead, the ‘observer’ is at that moment completely involved.”33 Thus the call to repentance takes on greater urgency, much like Crossan argues in his view of the parables and temporality. Furthermore, in superseding the question of when, the καιρὸς is indeed fulfilled, in that the structure of one’s future has its form in the present.34 The figure of Jesus, then, might be said to embody the imminent expectation of the eschaton in his preaching of the parables. In this way we see the most dramatic break from 4 Ezra,35 in which a divine message of salvation has its authority in the angel who interprets it, rather than being selfauthenticating, as in the message of Jesus.36

30. See Robert Funk, Parables and Presence: Forms of the New Testament Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982). Of this parable, Funk writes that the reality of the Kingdom does not eliminate the powers of evil. Rather the Kingdom “comes in and through the ambiguities of the present age as something out of which existence is to be lived” (73). 31. Conzelmann, “Present and Future in the Synoptic Tradition,” 24. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. Ibid., 36. 34. Ibid. 35. 4 Ezra does employ the form of parable, but the parables are not revelatory in themselves because they require the interpretation of the divine agent. See Priscilla Patten, “The Form and Function of Parables in Select Apocalyptic Literature and Their Significance in the Gospel of Mark.” NTS 29, no. 2 (1983): 246–58. 36. P. Vielhauer, “Apocalyptic in Early Christianity: Introduction,” in New Testament Apocrypha (eds. Wilhelm Hennecke and Edgar Schneemelcher; vol 2; Louisville: Westminster, 1964), 581–642, referenced in eds. James C. VanderKam and William Adler, The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 3.

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The growth and harvest metaphors, then, are apt vehicles for expressing temporal conceptions of the eschaton. In 4 Ezra the metaphors symbolize God’s presence in the natural order and at the same time the limitations on human knowledge and observation. As signs in which reversals in the natural order occur, they break down as analogs to God’s omnipotence, and yet this move indicates the author’s struggle to reconcile the painful reality of his situation with an underlying trust in divine providence. The struggle of the author manifests itself in the persistent questioning of Ezra, representing Ezra’s unwillingness to forget those who have been lost in the destruction of the temple and all those who will not be saved in the final judgment. As Hindy Najman has stated, at stake are the souls of the righteous and the end of the evil age, as well as a promise of a divine justice to come that includes those that have been lost.37 In this way we see that present and future converge more than might be apparent on the surface. So, too, within the context of the Markan narrative, Jesus’s Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly suggests a time in which God will disclose what is hidden from view, when an absence is experienced as a presence, as I will argue in what follows.

The Parable and the Messianic The idea of an absence experienced as a presence takes form in “TheologicoPolitical Fragment,” by literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin, where “the moment” also comes to the fore alongside natural imagery. In this brief and dense text on the nature of the messianic as a concept, Benjamin describes the “rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence” and the “eternity of downfall.”38 By this he means, as he states at the outset, that “nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic.”39 The transience of worldly existence is eternal and irreducible. This quality is therefore messianic in that it marks the presence of an a-temporal mode into temporality. The “rhythm,” as he calls it, or recurrence, of the transience of all living things thus unifies all that lives as constituted by an eternal order that is not subsumed in the transience of the world. In other words, the transience of life is eternal and yet all life eventually passes away.40 The farmer in the Seed Growing Secretly observes a similar phenomenon, as Jesus describes him as not knowing how the seed grows but only that “the earth produces of itself.” The seed progresses through its stages of growth only to be harvested “when the crop permits,” signifying that reaping—or the eschatological

37. Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future, 158. 38. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 313. Benjamin was influenced with the respect to this concept by Søren Kierkegaard’s The Moment. 39. Ibid., 312. 40. Judith Butler, “One Time Traverses Another: Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment,” lecture at European Graduate School, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LA8hiT2nIAk.

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judgment—manifests the divine or eternal in the temporal mode. This event is messianic because it is contained within the transience of life, and is integral to it, but originates outside it. For Benjamin, the messianic as a rhythm of transience also diminishes the singularity of the individual. If all that lives suffers and is lost and experiences loss, then one’s own loss is diminished as part of an infinite number of losses. In an acceptance of transience, one must let go of an individualistic or self-centered viewpoint. One’s encounter with an eternal order is consequently depersonalized, and for Benjamin is therefore truly messianic in form, in that nothing historical can contain the messianic.41 To apply the “people as plants” metaphor from 4 Ezra in relation to eschatological judgment in the Seed Growing Secretly would suggest this same idea. The farmer is the only individual in the parable and, as I indicated earlier, he has no significant role to play in the events described or predicted. All are subject to the processes of nature and the moment of the harvest, which comes of its own accord. Nothing of human origin can determine this course of events. This idea also extends to what Benjamin terms world politics. By this term, he refers to the products of “world politics,” such as institutions and wars.42 He writes, “To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.” Here, Benjamin states that the products of “world politics” are built entirely on human terms and are therefore destined for destruction, “nihilism,” because they exclude nature and therefore the eternal order. In themselves they do not contain a messianic potential.43 Seen in this context, the natural imagery of the Seed Growing Secretly in relation to Jesus’s messianic identity becomes all the more apt. In these metaphors Jesus expresses the disjunction between the products of humankind—in this case, the desire to know when—and God, who is made manifest, paradoxically, in a-temporality, represented by a seed that grows by itself. Influenced by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida shares an interest in the messianic, but for him, its primary function is the singular experience of an encounter with what is wholly other, and as such it cannot be anticipated. He writes, “If I could anticipate, if I had a horizon of anticipation, if I could see what

41. Butler, “One Time Traverses Another.” For more on this feature of Benjamin’s thought, see Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.” 42. Butler, “One Time Traverses Another.” 43. In contrast to this interpretation, L. L. Welborn reads Benjamin’s reference to “world politics” as representing a dialectical relationship with the messianic. The Messiah does not come to establish a new order—one in which the sacred and profane are in opposition—but rather comes to redeem history. Therefore, Benjamin sees those who strive for the Kingdom as participating in “world politics” in that they strive under the conditions of all that will pass away (“nihilism”), and in this way bring the messianic. See Welborn, “Jacob Taubes— Paulinist, Messianist,” 69–90.

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is coming or who is coming, there would be no coming.”44 Thus the messianic for Derrida is one of the ways he understands the possibility of the impossible as constitutive of human subjectivity. In regard to the incoming of the other, he understands this encounter as always mediated by preconditions, our perceptions and experiences, and therefore we always fail to accept the other as radically other; the other can be a spouse, acquaintance, or stranger, but is not limited to these categories. This impossibility of encountering the other on its own terms does not mean that the event is inaccessible, however. Rather it is possible in that it is the (impossible) experience that constitutes our being in relationship with the other; it is in effect the means by which we each have a differentiated identity. However, that identity is endlessly deferred in having a stable or settled status because the unmediated encounter with the other never occurs.45 Unlike in Benjamin’s reading of the messianic, in which one who passes through suffering and joins others who bring the messianic, in my reading of Derrida, the farmer in the Seed Growing Secretly exhibits a singular experience. Because he “knows not how” the seed grows, he is not able to anticipate what he encounters as the agent of the seed’s growth. He therefore might be seen as in relation to a radical alterity, one that affects him as it will all others, because it brings “the moment,” the harvest.46 No attempt is made in the parable to contextualize this otherness within the framework of the farmer; he simply “knows not how” (ὡς οὐκ οἶδεν αὐτός) the seed sprouts and grows. The presence of the other as the agent of growth within the seed is marked by its absence, in the farmer not knowing how. Such a paradox of absence and presence might be seen as indicative of the revealed/concealed paradigm of the Kingdom.47 However, in Derrida’s thought on his concept of différance, which denotes the endless deferral of a stable identity, the non-arrival of the wholly other, this absence cannot be seen as a presence; it has no positive content. He writes, “différance is not. It is not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal or transcendent. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no Kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every

44. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars (eds. Paul Patton and Terry Smith; Sydney: Power, 2001), 67–68, cited in Deutscher, How to Read Derrida, 72. 45. Deutscher, How to Read Derrida, 74. See also chapter 2 of this book for a discussion of Derrida’s concept of deferral and différance. For a critique of Derrida on the concept of the tout autre, “wholly other,” see Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 46. The idea of the “wholly other” in Derrida’s work draws upon The Step Not Beyond, by Maurice Blanchot, who saw in the event of death a singular experience of an individual. The moment of death could never be known but must be encountered; thus it represents an impossibility made possible. See chapter 2 on Derrida. 47. For more on this and its political implications, see Laura C. Sweat, The Theological Role of Paradox in the Gospel of Mark (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013).

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kingdom.”48 Thus we might see the farmer’s not knowing how the seed grows as leaving open and unsettled the identity of the agent of growth. He can know that the growth occurs, that “the earth bears fruit of itself,” but he cannot say how or by what means. The implications of Derrida’s use of the messianic come to the fore in Specters of Marx, where he sees in Marxism a messianic promise in the form of the hope for a classless society that seeks justice for the living, the dead, and the ones yet to be. He writes, “Without the responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question, ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’”49 He emphasizes that this a-temporal quality allows for an openness to the future that is the basis of the desire for justice, in Marxism or any other system of thought. The foregoing discussion about the Seed Growing Secretly in relation to 4 Ezra reveals a similar emphasis on a reconception of time as necessary for the coming of the Kingdom, for the redemption of Israel. Recall that in 4 Ezra, Ezra desires to know when the eschaton will arrive, but Uriel refuses to say. Many signs are invoked as evidence of a coming judgment, but these break down as indicators, just as Jesus himself in the Seed Growing Secretly refuses to disclose a timeline. Part of Ezra’s urgency is on behalf of those already lost in the destruction of the temple, and therefore the presence of those who are already lost is a pressing concern of the author in the present and for the future of Israel. The refusal of both Uriel to Ezra and Jesus to his listeners in regard to the when of God’s judgment points to designations of time as obstructions to the presence of God. Furthermore, as I read Derrida, we only hold open the possibility of the impossible—for the messianic age, and its accompanying promise of redemption—by having no knowledge of its arrival or its workings. In this context, 4 Ezra and the Seed Growing Secretly describe not a nameable day of judgment that is the arrival of God’s Kingdom but rather an encounter of irreducible relationality, one that is endlessly deferred but nevertheless perceptible. In contrast to Derrida’s refusal to assign concrete content to the messianic, Giorgio Agamben, much like Benjamin, develops the concept as exposing the limits of human thought and institutions through those very structures, resulting in aporias that disclose hidden truths. For instance, in The Time That Remains, Agamben interprets messianic time as revealing a hidden structure in historical time; that time does not proceed in a linear fashion, as it is typically represented and described, but contains within itself another time, which allows historical time to be “grasped.”50 In a rereading of the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans,

48. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (New York: Harvester, 1984), 21–22, cited in Steven Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2009), 74. 49. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf; London: Routledge, 1994), xix. 50. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 79.

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Agamben sees Paul’s concept of the νυν καιρός, or “Now-time,” which is Paul’s term for messianic time, as not coinciding with chronological time but also not being outside of it. Rather than being identified with the “end times” or eschatological time, messianic time should therefore be seen as a time within time, a kind of contracted time that anticipates the παρουσία, the full presence of the Messiah.51 For Paul, the messianic event has already occurred, and thus Paul is writing in a time of awaiting the full presence of Christ, and he sees the “Now-time” as that which makes historical time present in a way that it wasn’t before; one can seize hold of time, because it exists alongside chronological time without being subsumed by it. Here he emphasizes self-consciousness in regard to time, which requires that the “Now-time” always occurs within chronological time.52 As I read Agamben, the Seed Growing Secretly illustrates Jesus’s simultaneous proclamation and embodiment of the “Now-time.” Even more important, Jesus’s preface of the parable with “the Kingdom of God is like . . .” signifies his orientation toward God as sovereign. Agamben, however, locates power in the concept of the messianic as having no eternal or sustained basis; there could be no “reign of God” for Agamben that could appear in time and history. Indeed a primary appeal of the messianic for Agamben is that the Messiah is a figure who transforms all worldly conditions without doing away with them. By entering this world while claiming an origin in another one, Jesus, or any event that could be called “messianic,” suspends or revokes the conditions of this world.53 For Agamben, the messianic has meaning in the aporias it introduces, thus revealing the constructed nature of systems of power. Agamben understands the constructed nature of power as having its basis in “splitting.” In psychoanalytic terms, as Colby Dickinson describes it, this is the process by which a human being develops and acquires language, thus gaining both the conscious and unconscious realms of the psyche. A human being then comes increasingly to rely on labels and categories as the basis of thought. In Agamben’s view, this leads us further away from “bare life,” a kind of infantile state before we suffer the “fracture” upon which humanity becomes divided over against all “others,” such as God, nonhuman animals, and other races and ethnicities.54 In this line of thought, Agamben follows Michel Foucault’s “archaeological” strategy. Dickinson explains, “[Agamben] is actively seeking to undo the false dichotomies of all representations, such as between the particular and the universal, or between historiography and history, which are reproduced or staged, so to speak, by the conscious/unconscious division itself. Ultimately, he intends to demonstrate how there is no primordially religious human (homo religious) underneath it

51. Ibid., 63. 52. For a critique of Agamben’s view, see L. L. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life, 35–42. 53. Colby Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 88. 54. Dickinson, Agamben and Theology, 110.

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all—there is simply a blank space which must be accepted as it is.”55 This blank space is the site of what Agamben calls “pure potentiality” or “bare life.”56 In the farmer “not knowing how,” Jesus points to a state of being that retains the Agambenian “pure potentiality.” Jesus says this is what the Kingdom of God is like, the state that in Agamben’s view, precedes our being constituted as human subjects as we normally think of them, as having language and thus, being divided. In this state we displace what seems to define ourselves and others and we are in a new kind of present state: one that, “in the disappearance of the categories governing its representation, there is nothing but the sudden, dazzling disclosure of the moment of arising, the revelation of the present as something that we were not able to live or think.”57 In the Seed Growing Secretly, the farmer need only scatter the seeds and await the harvest. The earth produces “of itself,” αὐτομάτη, while the farmer witnesses the growth of the head, the stalk growing long, and finally the head of the wheat at completion, or “fulfilled,” πλήρης. This moment of fullness is the “dazzling disclosure of the moment of arising,” as Agamben writes, the now of the eschaton. For the farmer, this moment arrives from workings that are inexplicable yet manifest in the natural world. The sense of time progressing is thereby arrested; “immediately he sends for the sickle because the harvest has come” (εὐθὺς ἀποστέλλει τὸ δρέπανον, ὅτι παρέστηκεν ὁ θερισμός). Notably, a literal translation of παρέστηκεν, describing the harvest, is “placed beside,”58 which evokes the idea of a moment becoming discernible—or made present, “has come,” in my translation—and combines the experience of spatial and temporal realms.

Conclusion The juxtaposition of the process of growth and the day of judgment, or the reaping, now invites further discussion. Read together with the Seed Growing Secretly, each philosopher illuminates a different but complementary feature of the parable in regard to the when of the eschaton. In my reading of Benjamin, what is a-temporal is made manifest in the temporal, thus suggesting a hidden structure of time. In my analysis of Derrida, the impossibility of the messianic event makes the farmer’s singular response the defining and also, paradoxically, the indeterminate factor. In my reading of Agamben, an even more fruitful tack emerges, one that emphasizes a state of being before language, when we would see the constructed nature of all

55. Ibid., 109. 56. Bare life is the term Agamben uses in the Homo Sacer series, where he describes a state of “creaturely being,” or βίος, in opposition to ζωή, or life as it is lived in the polis. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 57. Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone, 2009), 99. 58. BDAG, 778.

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that we think makes us who we are, particularly with respect to our relation to “others,” including God. In the application of the “people as plants” metaphor of 4 Ezra to the Seed Growing Secretly, Jesus imagines just such a latent possibility. In this context, God’s salvation is, inevitably and without our having to provoke it, already within us. Thus the contrast between natural growth processes and the eschatological harvest represents not a puzzling disjuncture in time but rather an exposition of the structure of time itself; that it contains an a-temporality that reveals life’s transience, that it has no self-evident meaning, and that a return to a condition before language is to live most fully in the present moment. This last view, in my reading of Agamben, underlines most emphatically the futility of all speculations regarding the when of the eschaton. Agamben suggests, with Jesus, that primordial origins—a time before time, or the dawn of creation, however that might be understood—is the site of salvation. The Seed Growing Secretly represents time as having meaning in not having meaning, by being worthy of consideration only in light of its inadequacy in regard to what the audience really wants to know. In occupying the role of Messiah, Jesus is presented as a self-authenticating divine agent, both of this world and not of this world, who embodies the kind of impossibilities that permit a conception of time that reveals its hidden structure. Drawing upon the metaphors of 4 Ezra, the parable addresses the same concerns but conceives of time as a way of illustrating Jesus’s messianic identity and the meaning of his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In addressing the question of when the Kingdom of God will reign, which is the urgent question posed by all those affected by the destruction of the temple, the Messiah holds up a seed to say the answer lies within.

Chapter 4 THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT FEAST: HOSPITALITY, TIME, AND THE MESSIANIC DISRUPTION

Upon hearing this, a certain one of those gathered said to him, “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God.” Jesus said to him, “A certain man gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time of the dinner he sent his slave out to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, it is ready now.’ But each one began to ask to be excused. The first said to him, ‘I have bought land and I must go out and see it; I ask you, accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to test them; I ask you, accept my regrets.’ Another said, ‘I have married a woman and because of this, I am not able to come.’ And returning, the slave reported this to his master. Then the householder became angry and said to the slave, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and narrow lanes of the city and bring in to this place the poor, the crippled, blind, and lame.’ The slave said, ‘Master, what you commanded has been done and there is still room.’ Then the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and walls and compel people to come in so that my house may be filled. For I say to you that none of those people invited will taste my dinner.’”1 — Luke 14:15–24 1. Parallels appear in Matt 22:1–10 and Gos. Thom. 64. Ἀκούσας δέ τις τῶν συνανακειμένων ταῦτα εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Μακάριος ὅστις φάγεται ἄρτον ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Ἄνθρωπός τις ἐποίει δεῖπνον μέγα, καὶ ἐκάλεσεν πολλούς, καὶ ἀπέστειλεν τὸν δοῦλον αὐτοῦ τῇ ὥρᾳ τοῦ δείπνου εἰπεῖν τοῖς κεκλημένοις, Ἔρχεσθε, ὅτι ἤδη ἕτοιμά ἐστιν. καὶ ἤρξαντο ἀπὸ μιᾶς πάντες παραιτεῖσθαι. ὁ πρῶτος εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Ἀγρὸν ἠγόρασα καὶ ἔχω ἀνάγκην ἐξελθὼν ἰδεῖν αὐτόν: ἐρωτῶ σε, ἔχε με παρῃτημένον. καὶ ἕτερος εἶπεν, Ζεύγη βοῶν ἠγόρασα πέντε καὶ πορεύομαι δοκιμάσαι αὐτά: ἐρωτῶ σε, ἔχε με παρῃτημένον. καὶ ἕτερος εἶπεν, Γυναῖκα ἔγημα καὶ διὰ τοῦτο οὐ δύναμαι ἐλθεῖν. καὶ παραγενόμενος ὁ δοῦλος ἀπήγγειλεν τῷ κυρίῳ αὐτοῦ ταῦτα. τότε ὀργισθεὶς ὁ οἰκοδεσπότης εἶπεν τῷ δούλῳ αὐτοῦ, Ἔξελθε ταχέως εἰς τὰς πλατείας καὶ ῥύμας τῆς πόλεως, καὶ τοὺς πτωχοὺς καὶ ἀναπείρους καὶ τυφλοὺς καὶ χωλοὺς εἰσάγαγε ὧδε. καὶ εἶπεν ὁ δοῦλος, Κύριε, γέγονεν ὃ ἐπέταξας, καὶ ἔτι τόπος ἐστίν. καὶ εἶπεν ὁ κύριος πρὸς τὸν δοῦλον, Ἔξελθε εἰς τὰς ὁδοὺς καὶ φραγμοὺς καὶ ἀνάγκασον εἰσελθεῖν, ἵνα γεμισθῇ μου ὁ οἶκος: λέγω γὰρ ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐδεὶς τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἐκείνων τῶν κεκλημένων γεύσεταί μου τοῦ δείπνου.

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Introduction The Parable of the Great Feast situates hospitality at the center of its depiction of reversals: those initially invited reject the host, and then the host rejects them, substituting for them the “poor, the crippled, blind, and lame.” Such reversals are typical of the parables of Jesus, having the effect, as John Dominic Crossan argues, of decentering the audience such that hearers, whether ancient or modern, experience a challenge to the world as they see it.2 There is an undeniable discomfort to this method, one that comes across sharply in this parable. The setting of the feast—with the accompanying appeal of food and friendship amongt peers—is interrupted by an image of the others who will take one’s place. Jesus seems to sound a warning: accept the invitation now, or it will be too late. This theme of impending judgment and the separation of the righteous from the wicked recurs throughout the Jesus tradition as one of the means by which the gospel writers seek to establish Jesus’s messianic identity. In this case, Luke draws upon the symbolism of the eschatological banquet, attested in such sources as Isa 25:6–8, where the text describes a time when the Lord will wipe away the disgrace of God’s people and they will partake of “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”3 A banquet following God’s judgment upon the wicked also appears in Second Temple apocalypses such as 1 En. 62 and 2 Bar 29:1–8. At Qumran, in 1QSa 2:11–22, also known as Community Rule, a banquet is described as taking place during the last days, when the Messiah will assemble the congregation to eat bread and drink wine. Besides these associations with end times, the banquet imagery resonates on a broad social level. Indeed meals had become a ritualized event in the Greco-Roman world by the late first century CE, as I will outline below, and were yet another context in which judgment, and notions of inclusion and exclusion, were operative. However, in the parable in Luke, those invited first to the feast refuse the invitation and others take their places, and indeed the feast itself is not narrated. While a meal as a setting for the parable evokes a variety of religious and social associations, the underlying issue in Jesus’s telling of the parable is the question of timing and of who will attend. Thus the parable unfolds within the context of an emphasis on temporality, of now. The Continental philosophers Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin all address this concept of now in their own thought on messianism. When read intertextually with Jesus’s parable, such philosophical uses of messianic temporality illuminate Jesus’s proclamation as situating hearers as participants in a disruption, or a pause, in the present. Such a disruption, as I read it, reveals a latent potentiality for the guests, a possibility for their existence, in other words, that had previously remained obscure. I offer

2. Crossan, In Parables, 80. 3. All translations of the Hebrew Bible are NRSV translations. Another reference is Ps 23:5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

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here an analysis of the parable in its sociohistorical setting, with a focus on meal practices and social status, whereby I establish some of the social and religious implications of such a messianic disruption, which I expand on in political terms in the concluding section.

The Parable Most commentators on the Parable of the Great Feast in Luke note that it appears within a self-contained literary unit.4 Jesus is attending a Sabbath meal at the home of a Pharisee leader, where he heals a man with dropsy, tells a parable about taking the lowest places of honor at a wedding feast, and then relates the Parable of the Great Feast, in which the phrase “the poor, the crippled, blind, and lame” is repeated from the earlier parable. Although variations of the Parable of the Great Feast appear in both Matthew and Thomas, the urban setting of many scenes within Luke’s gospel heightens the social tensions underlying the meal. Given that the Greek word δεῖπνον denotes a “feast” or “cultic meal,”5 the host is a man of means, and it is plausible to imagine Jesus’s audience at the Sabbath meal as urban elites and perhaps Pharisees themselves. Jesus is therefore likely addressing men who consider themselves social equals, a feature of the setting that may seem insignificant given that most meals generally take place between people of the same social class who are in a position to reciprocate.6 Then, as now, meals function as a convenient and effective way to confirm one’s place in society.7 However, the theme of reversal so prominent in Jesus’s parables overturns this assumption, and this is one of the reasons the parable is effective rhetorically. Jesus’s parables expose the presuppositions of the audience as inadequate to any notion of God’s Kingdom.8 Banquets in the Greco-Roman world were a highly influential and welldeveloped social institution by the end of the first century CE. Drawing upon

4. See, as representative, Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (vol. 3; Sacra Pagina; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991); Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, x–xxiv (Anchor Bible; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964); Richard Rohrbaugh, “The Pre-Industrial City in Luke-Acts: Urban Social Relations,” in The Social World of Luke-Acts (ed. Jerome H. Neyrey; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991). 5. BDAG, 215. 6. Halvor Moxnes argues that Luke 14 illustrates the patron-client relationship that characterized Greco-Roman social dynamics. See Halvor Moxnes, The Economy of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 128. 7. Richard S. Ascough, “Social and Political Characteristics of Greco-Roman Association Meals,” in Meals in the Early Christian World: Social Formation, Experimentation, and Conflict at the Table (eds. Dennis E. Smith and Hal Taussig; New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 62. 8. See Crossan, In Parables.

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the literary model of the meal as described in Plato’s Symposium, the banquets, which were an important feature of community formations in the Roman period,9 typically consisted of seven to twelve diners, with free men reclining on couches that were arranged around a communal table. Slaves, most women, and children all sat instead of reclining. The couches faced one another so that the guests could easily converse and share the food and drink. The first course consisted of the meal proper, followed by the symposium, or drinking party. It was customary for the guest of highest social ranking to recline to the right of the host.10 The foods consumed, in terms of quality and quantity, varied according to the resources of the host, and regardless of the commonalities that drew people together to dine, friendship was the purpose of the gathering and formed the basis of the social obligations of the members to one another.11 The issue of social ranking appears to have been prominent in the minds of banquet guests, as it emerges as a theme in several sources. Most relevant for our purposes, Jesus refers to social ranking in the parable he offers just before the Great Feast, where he instructs listeners not to sit down in the place of honor, but “sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you” (Luke 14: 8–11). Plutarch’s “Table-Talk,” written around the same time as Luke, relates a conversation between Plutarch, his brother Timon, and others regarding whether a host should encourage equality at the table. Timon argues, “If in other matters we are to preserve equality among men, why not begin with this first and accustom them to take their places with each other without vanity and ostentation, because they understand as soon as they enter the door that the dinner is a democratic affair and has no outstanding place like an acropolis where the rich man is to recline and lord it over meaner folk?”12 Here the interlocutors question whether the banquet is to conform to the structures of society or to be an encounter with its own rules.13 Emphasizing the ethics of good will among diners, Plutarch ultimately decides that friendship must prevail, and in any case, “the matter of making distinctions among one’s guests

9. See, for example, Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Matthias Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie freuhchristlicher Mahlfeiern (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1996); Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Convivality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Inge Nielsen and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, eds. Meals in a Social Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998). 10. Smith, “The Greco-Roman Banquet as a Social Institution,” in Meals in the Early Christian World, 24–25. 11. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, 55. 12. Plutarch, Quaest. conv., 1.2, 616F, Clement and Hoffleit. 13. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, 65.

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does not seem very hard. In the first place it does not easily happen that many men who are rivals in honor meet at one party.”14 These examples from “TableTalk” indicate the Greco-Roman banquet as a means by which a privileged social class could reinforce social boundaries both internally and externally. As Keith Bradley shows in his study of the Roman family at meals, “the cena allowed an opportunity, if on a smaller scale, for a spectacular display of authority and power, which could be carefully orchestrated before a select audience of people invisaged as not just the beneficiaries of personal generosity but also the interpreters of the host’s reputation to a wider social group.”15 The host and his male guests were therefore the focus of interest, rather than the members of the host’s household, because the purpose of the meal was to enhance the host’s reputation. In Luke’s parable, however, the meal serves an altogether different, subversive purpose, as I will demonstrate below. The setting of the meal among Pharisees is a significant detail that introduces its own set of social dynamics. The Pharisee who says “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God” evokes the eschatological banquet and Jesus’s messianic role, but the instruction Jesus offers appears even more pointed when we consider the Pharisaic ritual of table fellowship, which included laws regulating the cleanness of food, of the people who prepare the food, and of the objects used for food preparation. Notably, Jacob Neusner states of pre-70 CE Pharisaic dietary laws, “We find no such concentration of interest in any other aspect of everyday life.”16 We can therefore presume that the Pharisees were concerned to share food only with those like them. While the Pharisees did not make meal fellowship a focus of their group life—unlike Greco-Roman associations and the early Christians17—they did apply ritual purity laws to all their meals, even at home, as a means of setting themselves apart from others.18 Furthermore, consonant with this practice, despite their opposition to the Pharisees and other ruling elites in Jerusalem, the community at Qumran describes a messianic banquet in which the participants are called “each in order of his dignity,” meaning judges and officers, chiefs and Levites, and into which no one is allowed who is “smitten in his flesh, or paralyzed in his feet or hands, or lame, or blind, or deaf, or dumb, or smitten in his flesh with a visible blemish.”19 Here we see the exclusion of women, Gentiles, and imperfect Jews, as well as an emphasis on a hierarchy that determines the order

14. Plutarch, Quaest. conv., 1.2.617D, Clement and Hoffleit. 15. Bradley, “The Roman Family at Dinner,” in Meals in a Social Context, 50. 16. Jacob Neusner, “Two Pictures of Pharisees: Philosophical Circle or Eating Club,” AThR 64 (1982): 525–38, 534. 17. See Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist; and Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009). 18. Neusner, “Two Pictures of Pharisees,” 535. 19. Kenneth Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes: More Lukan Parables, Their Culture and Style (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 90.

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in which members are called to the banquet. Such directives distinguish insiders from outsiders; at the same time, the group becomes legible to itself by way of social ranking and by specifying outsiders.20 The ones excluded in the Parable of the Great Feast are those who would conventionally be included. The host invites his friends initially but is angered when they all refuse. The excuses offered all indicate that the friends are men of means like the host, who own land and animals, and have wives. Luise Schottroff argues that this characterization of the host points to the Torah custom of the affluent members of the community providing banquets to the poor. This reading, in which the host’s invitation to the poor reflects Jesus’s radical social ethic of meal fellowship, is consistent with overarching Lukan themes of the dynamics between the rich and poor. Drawing a parallel in Luke between meals for the poor and lending money, Schottroff writes, “People who are in a position to forgive debts should forgive debts and thus be prepared not only—as the Torah demands—to renounce interest, but even to renounce the payment of the principle” (Luke 6:34, 35). The gulf between rich and poor is described in the Gospel of Luke as a serious problem for the rich, who are directed to the Torah for guidance (Luke 16:31).”21 This interpretive framework includes Jesus’s meals with sinners as an embodiment of the messianic community (Luke 15:11–32) and the meal practices of the Christian communities as described in Acts 2:42–45 and 4:32–35. Thus Schottroff sees the parable as the story of a Jewish householder who, because of the refusal of his friends, decides to fill his house with the poor instead of his peers. Furthermore, Jesus’s prelude to the parable in 14:12–14, in which he instructs hearers not to invite their friends for a meal but instead invite the poor, the crippled, blind, and lame, reinforces the parable as illustrative of Jesus’s meal practice.22 The double invitation of the host warrants special attention. In first-century Judea, it was customary to extend this courtesy. A rabbinic commentary on Lamentations states that people of Jerusalem would only attend a banquet if invited twice (Midrash Rabbah Lam 4:2), perhaps reflecting an earlier custom. As Kenneth Bailey describes, a host must know how much meat to prepare, given the valuable commodity of meat, and so guests are obligated to appear once they have accepted an invitation. Thus the second invitation, when the slave calls out, “Come, the meal is ready,” reminds them of their commitment.23 Richard Rohrbaugh interprets the double invitation as a courtesy that allows a guest to consider whether he can afford to return the favor, emphasizing the honor-shame system that characterized social interactions during this period.24 When the guests

20. Ascough, “Social and Political Characteristics of Greco-Roman Association Meals,” 62. 21. Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, 50 22. Ibid., 51–53. 23. Kenneth Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, 94. 24. As social categories, honor and shame in the New Testament operate on both the individual and collective levels. Individually, honor is affirmed by one’s peers based on a

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all refuse with dubious excuses,25 they indicate their disapproval of the banquet. To Rohrbaugh this suggests that the parable is speaking to elites within the Lukan community who refuse table fellowship with the poor; in doing so, they may find themselves excluded.26 When the invited guests refuse, the slave recruits other guests, working his way down the socioeconomic scale. He begins with those of αἱ πλατεῖας, which are the wider streets of the city where the well-to-do interacted with tradespeople. He then goes into αἱ ῤύμαι, the narrow streets and alleys where he would find the poor. “They are persons whom the walls and gates of the central precincts of the preindustrial cities were designed to shield from view,” describes Rohrbaugh.27 When the host’s home is not yet filled, the slave goes beyond this area to those outside the city walls, along the roads and hedges (τὰς ὁδοὺς καὶ φραγμοὺς), which define the outer boundaries of fields and properties outside the city. Rohrbaugh adds, “Luke is specific in pointing to a location in the urban system that housed a particular population: the area immediately outside the city was inhabited by both outcasts and those requiring access to the city but not permitted to live in it.”28 Beggars and prostitutes, among others, constituted this population.29 As the parable indicates, the slave finds the guests for the banquet among the socially marginalized, which in Rohrbaugh’s assessment, is signified both by their literal exclusion from the confines of the city and by their poverty. According to the parable, however, these are not just the poor but also “the crippled, blind, and lame.” The grouping of the poor with the disabled is a notable textual detail indicating a broad category of weakness and vulnerability that, as Saul M. Olyan has shown, suggests “a field within which or by means of which power is articulated.” (Here Olyan quotes from Joan Wallach Scott.)30 By this, he means that the authors of the Hebrew Bible represented disabilities with particular ideologies that can be

person’s past and present behavior. Shame is directed toward maintaining honor. Honor was an acquired good in the first-century Mediterranean, meaning one comes by it at a cost to another. See EDB, 605. See also Bruce J. Malina, “Honor and Shame: Pivotal Values of the First-Century Mediterranean World,” in The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (3rd ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 27–57. 25. As Kenneth Bailey explains, all the excuses are unreasonable in their ancient Mediterranean context: with an increasing population and land a scarce resource, it would not be purchased unseen; oxen would be tested in advance, given how valuable animals were as a resource; and a wedding would not be on the same day as another feast in the same village. Furthermore, it was customary to use great restraint in speech about women. See Bailey, Through Peasant Eyes, 95–98. 26. Rohrbaugh, “The Pre-Industrial City in Luke-Acts,” 141–43. 27. Ibid., 143. 28. Ibid., 145. 29. Ibid. 30. Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.

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analyzed. In the context of the Jesus tradition, the gospel writers interpreted these patterns of representation for their own ends, depicting Jesus’s healing of the blind and the lame in particular as signifying his divine identity (e.g., John 9:1–12 and Mark 5:1–20). Tellingly, Jesus’s healing of the man with dropsy appears in Luke just before the Parable of the Great Feast, thereby connecting healing to the parable’s image of inclusiveness. The Hebrew scriptures broadly classify blindness and lameness, among other disabilities, as “defects.”31 The foundational text in this regard is Lev 21:17–23, regarding priests making sacrifices, in which we read, “No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles.” As Judith Z. Abrams explains, such a prohibition of particular priests from the altar is intended to preserve the purity of the liminal space between heaven and earth that the priest occupies. Therefore, the priest must be unblemished in the same way as the animal sacrificed.32 The exclusion of the blemished or disabled extends to the community in 2 Sam 5:8, which reads, “David had said on that day, ‘Whoever would strike down the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, those whom David hates.’ Therefore it is said, ‘The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.’” Olyan explains that this exclusion and others like it from Qumran (such as 1QSa 2:3–11) suggest the desire to prevent pollution and profanation.33 To the “defect” of blindness, some texts add that it signifies divine disfavor, an idea that stems from Deut 28:28–29: “The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind; you shall grope about at noon as blind people grope in darkness, but you shall be unable to find your way; and you shall be continually abused and robbed, without anyone to help.” In all these references, the texts stigmatize the persons afflicted in order to emphasize the singular power and authority of Israel’s god Yahweh.34 One exception to exclusion is Isa 56:3–7, which states that even the pious stranger and devout eunuch shall come to the holy mountain and the house of prayer, where “their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Here, those who would be excluded are included, thereby serving as examples of Yahweh’s mercy and compassion.35

31. Following Olyan, I designate “defects” with scare quotes to indicate the designation as incompatible with modern sensibilities regarding people with disabilities. 32. Judith Z. Abrams, Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach through the Bavir (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1998), 25. 33. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible, 115. 34. Ibid., 9. 35. Ibid., 92.

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Persons who are vulnerable because of disabilities or due to poverty suffered exclusion not only on religious grounds but also on social ones, as attested in Greco-Roman sources. One example is from Philostratus, who writes of an incident involving a blind beggar in Ephesus in the first century CE. An outbreak of plague had prompted the Ephesians to ask for assistance from the pagan mystic Apollonius of Tyana, who gathered a crowd upon his arrival in the city. Philostratus writes, After calling the Ephesians together, he said, “Take heart, since I will end the plague today.” So saying, he led them all, young and old, towards the theatre where the statue of the Averter [Hercules] stands. There it seemed that an old man was begging, craftily blinking his eyes. He carried a bag and a lump of bread in it, and had ragged clothing and a grizzled face. Apollonius made the Ephesians encircle the man, and said, “Stone this accursed wretch, but first collect as many stones as possible.” The Ephesians were puzzled by his meaning and shocked at the thought of killing someone who was a visitor and so destitute, and who was pleading with them, saying such pitiable things. But Apollonius was relentless, urging the Ephesians to crush him without pity. Some of them had begun to lob stones at him when, after seeming to blink, he suddenly glared and showed his eyes full of fire. The Ephesians realized it was a demon and stoned it so thoroughly as to raise a pile of stones on it.36

Apollonius tells the people to remove the stones and examine the beggar, and when they do so, the crowd discovers not the man but a dog “crushed by the stones and spewing foam as maniacs do.”37 Regardless of whether Philostratus describes a historical event, his portrayal of the blind beggar receiving the wrath of the crowd as the embodiment of the evil currently visited up their village indicates the status of this social position as “repulsive, defenceless and highly expendable.”38 While Greek and Roman sources do not use categories equivalent to modern ones designating disability, they do have a broad, albeit generic, vocabulary for an array of conditions, such as πηρός (“maimed”), ἀσθένεια (“weakness”), and χωλός (“lame”).39 As Nicole Kelley has shown, Greek and Roman authors mention blindness (τυφλός) most frequently and attribute it to natural as well as divine causes. Among the natural causes, the most prevalent are heredity, disease, vitamin A deficiency, and advanced age. As a divine cause, Greek myths, as in the

36. Flavius Philostratus, Vit. Appol., 4.10, Jones. 37. Robert Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the GraecoRoman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 26. 38. Garland, The Eye of the Beholder, 26. 39. Nicole Kelley, “Deformity and Disability in Greece and Rome,” in This Abled-Bodied: Rethinking Disability in Biblical Studies (eds. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 44.

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Hebrew scriptures, attribute blindness as punishment, and although such accounts are mythological and not historical, they do indicate that blindness was perceived as punishment and a sign of the gods’ disfavor.40 The Romans shared this view and, like the Greeks, linked a disability of any kind occurring from birth to the sins of the parents. Thus the child was a perpetual reminder of human wickedness and was burdened with ignominy. Robert Garland writes, “Although there is no evidence to suggest that in either the Greek or Roman world the parents of a deformed infant were subjected to any form of civil punishment, it is quite possible that they would have been disbarred, at least temporarily, from participating in civic or religious events for fear that their corrupting presence would offend the gods.”41 As for the conditions affecting the use of the limbs, these were especially abhorrent in a society that valued physical perfection as much as the Greeks and Romans, a view that comes across in the idealized human forms of Greek and Roman statues. As further evidence, pots from Corinth depict hunchbacks and people of various other disabilities and deformities performing impossible feats to the delight of the guests, indicating the derision accompanying disabled persons in social encounters.42 As the foregoing discussion shows, “the crippled, blind, and lame” constituted a category of social outcasts in the first century. Most often their exclusion resulted in extreme poverty because of their inability to sustain gainful employment, especially for the blind, while the lame might have been able to work in trades such as making pottery. Nevertheless, citing a 1990s statistic that more than 60 percent of the disabled live below the poverty line in the United Kingdom, Garland estimates that “the vast majority [of the disabled in the Greco-Roman world] led lives of grinding poverty in big cities.”43 As in the Hebrew scriptures, the Greco-Roman sources treat the disabled and the poor as one category of weak and vulnerable people. In the specific context of Jesus in conversation with Pharisees at a Sabbath meal, the Parable of the Great Feast thus makes a radical statement of inclusion, one in which the pious who expect to have a place at the eschatological banquet are substituted with the ones most despised. The reversal occurs because the ones invited refuse to interrupt their plans; they fail to see the necessity of recognizing the import of the invitation when it arrives, when the time is now. As I will demonstrate in the section that follows, the messianic as a thought structure in Continental philosophy suggests various implications of this failure, illuminating the Kingdom of God as emerging within a concept of temporality that exceeds ordinary categories—a temporality that is nonlinear and as such, redemptive.

40. 41. 42. 43.

Kelley, “Deformity and Disability in Greece and Rome,” 42–43. Garland, Eye of the Beholder, 60. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 39.

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The Parable and the Messianic Part of Jacques Derrida’s exploration of impossibility, and its relation to an encounter with the wholly other, involves the theme of hospitality. He argues that hospitality in the Western context is conventionally conditional and offered on the basis of reciprocity.44 However, the law of hospitality that governs the conditions is an absolute law. He writes, Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.45

Such an absolute hospitality might produce some undesired effects, however, including giving up too much of one’s food or even control over one’s own home. For this reason, customs and norms determine who is to be welcomed and who is not, thereby setting the conditions for hospitality. The conditions allow hospitality to function because part of its structure is an absolute, which is impossible to achieve in concrete contexts. The interdependence of the absolute of hospitality and its conditions indicates what Derrida calls broadly an aporia, a concept “without passage” because of its contradictory structure.46 From this perspective, Derrida considers the ethics of interactions between individuals. Based on his analysis of the models of hospitality from the GrecoRoman tradition, such as in Oedipus at Colonus, Derrida argues that hospitality is coextensive with ethics and that, problematically, it is based on a “conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric. It’s the familial despot, the father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality. He represents them and submits to them to submit the others to them in this violence of the power of hospitality.”47 To illustrate the extremes of such models, he cites two stories from the Hebrew scriptures that seem to “place the law of hospitality above a ‘morality’ or a certain ‘ethics.’”48 In the first, the story of Lot and his daughters (Gen 19:1–11), Lot meets two angels whom he implores to stay with him overnight in his home. Before the evening ends, the men of Sodom appear at the door and demand to see the guests, saying they want to “know them,” meaning to penetrate

44. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Defourmanette, trans. Rachel Bowlby, On Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 45. Derrida and Defourmanette, On Hospitality, 25. 46. Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy. Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 12–13. 47. Derrida and Defourmanette, On Hospitality, 151. 48. Ibid.

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them sexually. Lot instead offers his two virgin daughters, but the men of Sodom are struck blind and are “unable to find the door.” In the second example, the Levite from Ephraim in Judg 19:22–30, a man receives a traveler overnight. Other visitors surround the house saying they want to have intercourse with the traveler. The host offers to send his virgin daughter, but the visitors refuse. The guest brings the men his concubine. They rape her all night and leave her on the front doorstep in the morning, after which she dies. Once back home, the guest cuts her up into twelve pieces and sends the pieces through the land of Israel with the following message: “Has any man seen such a thing from the day the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, until this very day?” Derrida concludes On Hospitality by asking if we in the West are heirs to this tradition of hospitality, one conditioned as in these examples by accommodating the guest and engaging in reciprocity at any cost.49 Derrida does not analyze the biblical texts in detail, and most notably he omits any consideration of the women in the narratives. As Judith Still demonstrates, Derrida bases his notions of hospitality on friendships between men, in the tradition of Cicero and Aristotle, among others.50 He does, however, offer a critique of the patriarchal economy in his focus on male-centered acts of hospitality, and in an unpublished lecture, he likened hospitality to a pregnancy: We don’t know anything about it, of course, but we know enough to say to ourselves that hospitality, what works away in the bosom of hospitality, works away in it like labor, like pregnancy, like a promise as much as a threat, what settles in it, inside it, like a Trojan horse, enemy (hostis) as much as future, intestinal hostility, is indeed a contradictory conception, a contraried conception, or a contraception of expectation, a contradiction in welcome itself. And something which binds perhaps, as in the pregnancy that produced Isaac, laughter to pregnancy, to the announcement that you are having a child.51

Here Derrida likens a pregnancy to hospitality insofar as the “guest” could be awaited with joy and also unwelcome, because he or she is unknown and potentially an enemy.52 In such a simile, the bodies of women represent a model of absolute hospitality that exceeds the patriarchal economy based on reciprocity, however

49. Ibid., 153–55. 50. Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 93–124. 51. Jacques Derrida, unpublished seminar, “Hospitalitie II” (1996–1997, January 8, 1997), cited in Ginette Michaud, “Un acte d’hospitalité ne peut être que poétique Seuils et délimitations de l’hospitalité derridienne,” in Le dire de l’hospitalité (eds. Lise Gauvin, Pierre L’Hérault, and Alain Montandon; Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004), 33–60, cited in Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 128. 52. Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 128.

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much women’s bodies and sexuality are mediated by men, as in the biblical texts cited above. In the Parable of the Great Feast, Jesus implores his audience to abandon the social and religious norms that have dictated the terms of both meal-sharing and notions of piety. The men the householder thought should come do not take the opportunity, and thus the host replaces them with the most vulnerable members of society. Women were likely included in this group. While the Lukan Jesus in the parable does not specifically cite women, the historical Jesus likely would have included them, as Jesus is said to attend closely to women in other contexts, as in Matt 15:21–28 and John 8:1–11, and women were accorded a low social status in this period.53 In his reference to pregnancy as a simile for hospitality, Derrida, like Jesus in the parable, critiques the patriarchal economy of reciprocity. Furthermore, as in the Lukan parable, Derrida does not develop the gendered particularity that women as a symbol of hospitality might impart; rather women are characterized, as in Luke, as “other.” Because these references to women are only suggested and not developed, Luke and Derrida both testify to the gendered particularity of women as being of even less consequence than any other characteristic that might be deemed undesirable, such as their poverty or disability. Notably, in the parable the undesirables who take the place of the men consistently maintain their status as the “poor, the crippled, blind, and lame.” Unlike in the passage regarding the man with dropsy that precedes the parable, Jesus does not heal the dinner guests. Rather, they presumably take their places in the seats of honor. In this context, the eschatological feast unfolds with the ones who realize the moment is now, the ones who abandon the customs that set the conditions for hospitality and illuminate the absolute law by which it operates. Not only can the guests not reciprocate but also they are not transformed into the presumably unblemished status of the ones who initially refuse the messianic banquet.54 Giorgio Agamben’s book The Coming Community intersects with the Parable of the Great Feast in its vision of a community based on members who exhibit what he calls a “taking place.” Associated with his idea of “pure potentiality,” in which he imagines a state of being that consists of the self as a “bare life,”55 the “taking place of everything” denotes Agamben’s idea of the transcendent. He writes, “God or the

53. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1984), especially chapter 2. 54. In the parallel of the parable in the Gospel of Thomas, a householder decides suddenly to host a dinner and sends out four invitations that are refused. The concluding phrase in 64:12 reads, “The master said to his servant: ‘Go out to the roads, bring those whom thou shalt find, so that they may dine. Tradesmen and merchants [shall] not [enter] the places of my Father.” Rather than emphasize the inclusion of the poor, as in Luke, the parable warns those who let worldly cares distract them will not receive “true gnosis,” the teachings of Jesus. See Crossan, In Parable, 71. 55. Agamben develops the concept of “bare life” in his Homo Sacer series, which concerns the concept of sovereignty.

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good or the place does not take place, but is the taking place of the entities, their innermost exteriority. The being-worm of the worm, the being-stone of the stone, is divine. That the world is, that something can appear and have a face, that there is exteriority and non-latency as the determination and the limit of everything: this is the good. Thus, precisely its being irreparably in the world is what transcends and exposes every worldly entity.”56 Here Agamben describes an exposed state of existence that presents that which is as it is, as “irreparable” in the sense of “beyond repair” and not in need of redemption. In the Homo Sacer series he develops this idea in political terms to state that political life exists because humankind exercises violence upon itself to take up a more decisive position than its basic nature, a creaturely nature, would entail. For this reason a person enforces exclusions of others, or of parts of himself or herself, in order to maintain a will-to-power.57 By contrast, a “pure potentiality” is an exposed state—as a unique singularity without worldly categories of representation—that reveals an excess that is the mark of transcendence, of what is possible. In human terms, the site of potentiality is the “coming community,” or the community that is in the process of becoming.58 In this framework, redemption is not the expectation of an event or time to come that will bring a new and better state of affairs. Rather, this idea of redemption collapses the difference between immanence and transcendence and perceives the world both as it is and as its unfulfilled possibilities, what it could be but is not yet.59 Agamben first illustrated this idea in his essay “Bartleby, on Contingency” in Potentialities, in which he notes that some readers have seen Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener as a Christ figure.60 Bartleby continually rebuffs his employer with the phrase “I would prefer not to” and thus demonstrates to his employer that his humanity is preserved in this exercise of his will. Agamben agrees with those who say that Bartleby could be seen as a paradigm for the Messiah, but, Agamben emphasizes, Bartleby comes to redeem not what is, but what is not. As Renee D. N. van Riessen writes, Bartleby, in Agamben’s essay, comes to “cultivate sensibility for a type of community and humanity that are possible, but not yet realized. It is not Bartleby’s actions, but his insistent refusal to do what is asked, that creates a new sensitivity in the lawyer—his superior—so that the latter begins to recognize humanity as such in the insignificant person of his employee.”61

56. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14,5. 57. Dickinson, Agamben and Theology, 68. 58. Renee D. N. van Riessen, “Community and Its Other: Remarks on Giorgio Agamben’s Coming Community from a Levinasian Point of view,” ZDK Supplement Series 5: 78–97, 78. 59. Van Riessen, “Community and Its Other,” 90. 60. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, on Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 270. 61. Van Riessen, “Community and Its Other,” 91.

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The role of the Messiah, according to Agamben, is to transform the conditions of the world without doing away with them. This zone of indeterminacy, which he identifies in The Time That Remains as the temporal construct of messianic time, represents a “nullification” in which the things of the world pass away; they exist as they are but lose the meaning of their content.62 For human subjects, this means humans move toward their “pure potentiality,” as I noted above. In The Coming Community, Agamben further develops this idea with the term whatever being, a singularity of human subjectivity that is at the same time generic. In the “taking place” of each worldly entity, each transcends the world’s representations of it.63 The “bare life” of the human subject would then reveal that the representations and divisions that define human life have no ontological basis. He writes, “There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.”64 In the context of the Parable of the Great Feast, I read Agamben’s interpretation of messianic time as situating the “poor, the crippled, blind, and lame” as each occupying their places as they are but, paradoxically, not as they are in any other context. Unlike in many other pericopes of the New Testament that evoke the disabled,65 in this parable, there is no healing, as I indicated earlier. In the messianic feast that the Lukan Jesus describes, the ones who fill the places of honor come as they are, but rather than being the despised and abhorrent members of society, they take their places of honor in their particularity. Meanwhile, the ones who refused the invitation “will never taste of my dinner,” says the host (v. 24). The Lukan parable therefore abolishes the social hierarchy with the inclusion of the most despised in society rather than guests who would enhance the host’s reputation. In not transforming the guests into the pious or unblemished ones who would conventionally attend the eschatological banquet, the parable retains the particularity that Agamben cites as transcendent. The guests take their places in their particularity that in the Agambenian sense is also generic, because in doing so they signify their “pure potentiality,” each transcending the world’s representation of them. In the parable’s displacement of authority from religious and social customs to an eschatological context, under the auspices of the Messiah, it represents what Judith Butler describes as an “insurrectionary process” that challenges the “established codes of legitimacy.”66 All the ones who accept the invitation to the feast, as “the poor, the crippled, blind, and lame,” lay claim to a right that they had previously been denied. As a result, the parable reiterates a ritual or social form

62. See Agamben, The Time That Remains, especially pages 59–72. 63. Dickinson, Agamben and Theology, 88–89. 64. Agamben, The Coming Community, 44, 2. Italics in original. 65. For example, Mark 2:1–12, Matt 9:1–8, and Luke 13:10–17. 66. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 147.

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in such a way that it assumes a new meaning and signals the promise of other transformations.67 Butler describes such “reiterations” as part of the performative character of speech acts, revealing language to be insecure and susceptible to new meanings not determined by their prior contexts. She writes, “An utterance may gain its force precisely by virtue of the break with context that it performs. Such breaks with prior context or, indeed, with ordinary usage, are crucial to the political operation of the performative. Language takes on a non-ordinary meaning in order precisely to contest what has become sedimented in and as the ordinary.”68 As an example of an “insurrectionary process,” Butler cites the example of Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus, where as an AfricanAmerican woman living in the South during the era of the Jim Crow laws, she was forbidden from occupying. In riding on the bus as always but this time, in the front, Parks demonstrated new possibilities within an established custom.69 Given the subversive content of the Parable of the Great Feast, and that its setting is within a well-established social and religious custom, the telling of the parable itself within the Lukan narrative, and not just the parable’s content, participate in Butler’s “insurrectionary process.” Another way to view this break in the ordinary appears in the work of Walter Benjamin, who conceived of the messianic as a “weak” force that is part of his conception of time. By this he means that the messianic emerges from outside of humankind and addresses us as a means of fulfilling in the present what is unfulfilled in the past. It could easily be missed, in other words, as it was in the past. He writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.70

As Werner Hamacher writes, “Each possibility that was missed in the past remains a possibility for the future, precisely because it has not found fulfillment.”71 What survives from the past is what is unactualized. The recognition of this aspect of our past within our own historical moment constitutes what Benjamin calls the

67. Butler, Excitable Speech, 147. 68. Ibid., 145. 69. Ibid., 147. 70. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 254. Italics in original. 71. Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” 164.

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Jetztzeit, the “Now-time.”72 Hamacher writes, “Time—historical time—is nothing but the capability of the possible to find its satisfaction in the actual.”73 Underlying this understanding of time is the theory of chronothesis, or “timepositing,” part of the theory of enunciation of the French linguist Émile Benveniste. This theory refers to the ability of a language to refer to itself as discourse. By “discourse,” Benveniste refers to an utterance, either written or spoken, that assumes a speaker and hearer. Discourse differs from historical narration, where events are laid out chronologically, seemingly without a speaker, and “the events seem to narrate themselves.”74 Because Benveniste takes language as the foundation of subjectivity, chronothesis is the origin of the representation of time, as consciousness seeks its self-presence through language. In other words, human subjectivity takes the form of the projection of consciousness through shifts in verb tenses, or “time-positing,” chronothesis. As a consequence, the self in the process of thought is trapped in a continuum of linear time, where the present is empty and nothing more than a transition between past and future.75 Benjamin’s idea of redemption calls upon this theory in order to highlight historical time as a construct of the human consciousness that sees events as linked by causality, one that serves the ends of those with social and political capital. I read the men of the Parable of the Great Feast who initially reject the host’s invitation as trapped within this linear continuum of time and missing the opportunity to engage the “Now-time.” Because they have just been married, need to test oxen, and to view a parcel of land, they proceed through historical time still in the “possible,” but their potentiality, represented by the invitation to the eschatological feast, is unactualized. Benjamin writes, Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now,” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.76

72. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 261. 73. Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time,” 164. 74. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (trans. Mary Elizabeth Meeks; Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1966), 208. Originally published as Problémes de lingusitique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 75. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life, 19. 76. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 263. Here, Benjamin views “historicism” negatively, as a process of seeing historical events as linked in an illustration of human progress.

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In thinking through the concept of history, Benjamin describes the excess that constitutes historical time: there remains within the past that which didn’t happen but could have, and that this potentiality, as Agamben develops it, is what constitutes our sense of time as having meaning. As long as time progresses forward as a series of events, linked by causality, it remains “homogenous, empty,” Benjamin writes, rather than “filled by the presence of the Jetztzeit.”77 In looking for connections between moments in time, or “constellations,” Benjamin sees the possibility for redemption. Such a conception of time activates what has been unactualized and seizes on the potentiality, as Agamben would put it, that lies therein. Time, in this view, is nonlinear and, as such, is redemptive.78 The now that is represented by the presence of the Messiah for Benjamin is the basis of Agamben’s “pure potentiality” and Derrida’s hospitality, but the latter two emphasize the messianic as a thought structure devoid of concrete content. For Agamben, the “Now-time” is “bare life” in which all worldly representations fall away, revealing the human life as both singular and generic. In its pure immanence, it signals the transcendent. In this way Agamben conceptualizes the messianic as an aporia that shows itself as a hidden structure within the “whatever being” of all that is. For Derrida, the messianic structure of hospitality, because of its unconditionality, creates the space for an encounter with the wholly other that is otherwise impossible, given that no encounter is unmediated. The messianic is therefore an interminable holding-open of impossible possibilities that nevertheless set the conditions by which we act. In both these expressions of the messianic, the meaning of the messianic hinges on its being unrealizable under current conditions. By contrast, Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” identifies the messianic as the weak force in the present that carries the unactualized potentialities of the past; thus the “Now-time” is the time of redemption in concrete terms. Unlike in Derrida’s and Agamben’s thought, it has a content, one that Benjamin identifies as divine in the essay “Critique of Violence.” One example of the weak force characterizing divine violence acting in history is the proletarian strike, which I read as represented in the “poor, the crippled, blind, and lame” of the Parable of the Great Feast. In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin develops this idea of the proletarian strike as divine violence through his analysis of violence as the means of both making and preserving the law, which he says exposes the coerced and artificial nature of the law and of its function in

77. Ibid., 261. 78. In relation to the Gospel of Luke, such a view of time departs dramatically from reading the Lukan narrative as a program of Heilsgeschichte, which depends on a linear view of time. While the author of Luke may have adapted his sources to convey a program of salvation history, the Parable of the Great Feast is attested in other sources and is considered here as a saying of Jesus, not a paradigmatic passage of Luke’s narrative. See Hans Conzelmann, Die Mitt der Zeit: Studien Zur Theologie Des Lukas (7th rev. ed.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993).

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mediating human relations.79 Given its dependence on violence for enforcement, human sovereignty is based on a myth, in other words, that has no sustained or eternal basis. However, as a point of contrast, through the use of nonviolent means, the proletarian strike “sets itself the sole task of destroying state power,”80 and because it neither makes nor suspends the law, it is “pure.”81 It is therefore a kind of divine violence: a weak force. We might interpret the judgment of the Pharisees to exclude the most despised among them from the eschatological feast as undercut by the “divine violence” that emerges from Jesus’s mouth in the telling of the parable. The ideologies that maintained the rules—the Pharisaic food-purity laws and the Greco-Roman dining customs and social norms governing the exclusion of the disabled—are abolished in a redemptive moment, the one that is now, and that is made manifest by the presence of the Messiah among the proletariat, the “poor, the crippled, blind, and lame.” In this context, the dismantling of the power structure that the parable espouses is justified on the basis of the divine origin of this sovereignty of a weak force. The other example Benjamin offers in “Critique of Violence” is from religious traditions in their educative function, which “in its perfected form stands outside the law.”82 He says these manifestations of religion as educative are not in the form of miracles performed by God but by the “expiating moment in them that strikes without bloodshed and, finally, by the absence of all lawmaking.”83 By way of example he offers the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Given its antiquity and basis in the Hebrew scriptures, the commandment precedes any contemporary demonstration of the deed, and since the grounds for such a judgment by God cannot be known in advance, it becomes inapplicable once the deed has occurred. Such a manifestation of religion as educative thus reveals injunctions from religion as “not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility for ignoring it.”84 In the context of the parable, Jesus assumes this educative function in his proposal that the eschatological banquet includes not the community’s beloved and pious, but the despised and sinful, represented by their disabilities as manifestations of God’s disfavor. As Benjamin states of the expiatory effects of such interventions, Jesus’s inclusion of the most marginalized of society—in his illustration of such an action as the Kingdom of God—relieves the sinful ones of their burden of guilt. Most important, the feast cannot be delayed—it is now—in a moment that disrupts the linear continuum of time.

79. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 288. See also Welborn, “Jacob Taubes—Paulinst, Messianist,” 81. 80. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 291. 81. Ibid., 288. 82. Ibid., 297. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 298.

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Conclusion The Parable of the Great Feast advocates an abolishment of the worldly order maintained by the customs of meals in the first century. The customs of a Sabbath meal were religious as well as social and economic, creating an especially provocative setting for the Lukan author to stage a critique that is consistent with other Jesus sayings, particularly in the context of meal fellowship. However, as the intertextualities of the parable and the thought of Derrida, Agamben, and Benjamin show, the parable takes as its context not just the customs of meals but also the temporal structure of the messianic. The now that is the eschatological feast is open only to those who come when they are called, the ones who are willing to engage with an interruption in the normal progression of time. This interruption extends beyond a change of plans to illuminate the possibility of a new kind of subjectivity. The “Now-time” of the Kingdom of God disengages the consciousness from its entrapment in linear time, in its self-projection. The Kingdom of God that is signaled by the proper eschatological feast, in contradistinction to the one the Pharisee presumes includes only the pious (and therefore also only the physically sound), is the one taking place in the “Now-time” that is the site of redemption. It is a weak force that exposes the divisions of worldly representations, and it creates the space of an impossible possibility, in which there is no concern for reciprocity, only for what it is to be in the now.

Chapter 5 THE PARABLE OF THE NIGHT WATCHERS: TO WAIT AND WATCH IN THE TIME OF THE NOW

From the fig tree learn this lesson. When its shoots become tender and the leaves are lush, you will know that the harvest is near. And from this, when you see these things come into existence, you will know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I say to you that this generation will not pass away until these things come into existence. Heaven and earth will pass by, but these things I am saying will not pass by. Concerning this day or this hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father. Be aware, watch: for you do not know when the hour will come. It is like a man who goes on a journey, when he leaves home he puts the slaves in charge, each with his own task, and he commands the doorkeeper to be on watch. Therefore, stay awake. For you do not know when the master of the house will return. At evening or at midnight or when the cock crows, or early in the morning. Or else he may discover you asleep when he comes suddenly. What I say to you I say to all, stay awake. — Mark 13:28–371

1. Parallel in Luke 12:36–38. Ἀπὸ δὲ τῆς συκῆς μάθετε τὴν παραβολήν: ὅταν ἤδη ὁ κλάδος αὐτῆς ἁπαλὸς γένηται καὶ ἐκφύῃ τὰ φύλλα, γινώσκετε ὅτι ἐγγὺς τὸ θέρος ἐστίν. οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς, ὅταν ἴδητε ταῦτα γινόμενα, γινώσκετε ὅτι ἐγγύς ἐστιν ἐπὶ θύραις. ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐ μὴ παρέλθῃ ἡ γενεὰ αὕτη μέχρις οὗ ταῦτα πάντα γένηται. ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ παρελεύσονται, οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου οὐ μὴ παρελεύσονται. Περὶ δὲ τῆς ἡμέρας ἐκείνης ἢ τῆς ὥρας οὐδεὶς οἶδεν, οὐδὲ οἱ ἄγγελοι ἐν οὐρανῷ οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός, εἰ μὴ ὁ πατήρ. βλέπετε, ἀγρυπνεῖτε: οὐκ οἴδατε γὰρ πότε ὁ καιρός ἐστιν. ὡς ἄνθρωπος ἀπόδημος ἀφεὶς τὴν οἰκίαν, αὐτοῦ καὶ δοὺς τοῖς δούλοις αὐτοῦ τὴν ἐξουσίαν, ἑκάστῳ τὸ ἔργον αὐτοῦ, καὶ τῷ θυρωρῷ ἐνετείλατο ἵνα γρηγορῇ. γρηγορεῖτε οὖν, οὐκ οἴδατε γὰρ πότε ὁ κύριος τῆς οἰκίας ἔρχεται, ἢ ὀψὲ ἢ μεσονύκτιον ἢ ἀλεκτοροφωνίας ἢ πρωΐ, μὴ ἐλθὼν ἐξαίφνης εὕρῃ ὑμᾶς καθεύδοντας. ὃ δὲ ὑμῖν λέγω, πᾶσιν λέγω, γρηγορεῖτε.

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Introduction Embedded within the so-called little apocalypse of Mark 13, the Parable of the Night Watchers issues a warning to the audience to “stay awake,” to be on watch like the doorkeeper. Such a command concludes the long speech by Jesus in this chapter that serves as a transition between Jesus’s ministry in the preceding chapters and the Passion account that will follow.2 Indeed chapter 13 is the longest speech by Jesus in the gospel, indicating the importance of its message to Mark.3 That message, with its consoling and exhortatory emphases, addresses the historical situation of Jesus’s followers in the first generation after his death, when they suffer the destruction of the temple during the Jewish war with Rome.4 Toward this end it seeks to interpret and advance Jesus’s messianic identity, a task that, among other resources, calls upon the concept of time in the Parable of the Night Watchers. The messianic as a concept in ancient Judaism appears most prominently in chapters 17 and 18 of the Psalms of Solomon and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in both cases as reactions against the loss of Jewish sovereignty under Roman rule.5 Although the Messiah as a figure conveys a variety of meanings, the future hope of Israel is the most prevalent association.6 The idea of “end times” brought by the Messiah pertains to the restoration of Israel and the end of the evil age of foreign oppression, developed in apocalypses of the Second Temple period such as 4 Ezra, where the question of when the eschaton would arrive is pressing. The disciples put just such a query to Jesus in Mark 13 just before the passage above, to which

2. Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Historical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 337. Witherington adds that Jesus takes over the narrative in chapter 13 with predictions that are not fulfilled within the gospel itself, indicating that Mark is not only concerned with the words and deeds of Jesus in the past. 3. Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 594. 4. Gerd Theissen makes a compelling case that Mark 13 takes as its basis an earlier written source that emerged in the crisis among Judeans in 40 CE, when the Emperor Gaius Caligula ordered a statue of himself to be erected in the temple in Jerusalem. “We can conclude that as early as ten years after Jesus’s death, traditions circulating in his name were taking on new forms within Judea. The apocalyptic prophecy behind Mark 13 presumes the sayings about the future Son of Man and inserts them in a new situation, abandoning the forms of the ‘small units’ of the synopotic tradition.” See Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 125–65. 5. See Richard A. Horsley, Revolt of the Scribes: Resistance and Apocalyptic Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010). 6. See John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995); Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs; and Markus Bockmuehl and James Carleton Paget, eds., Redemption and Resistance: The Messianic Hopes of Jews and Christians in Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark, 2009).

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he responds that no one knows the hour, but when it arrives, one must be awake to not let it pass unobserved. To be asleep is to let that moment pass by, as will “this generation” and “heaven and earth,” but not “my words.” Here the Markan Jesus as Messiah, as the one whose words will not pass by, represents a conception of time that, when read intertextually with time and the messianic in the thought of Continental philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, reveals Jesus’s presence and the accompanying Kingdom of God as marking a cessation of ordinary time, one that “blows open”7 the continuum that sustains the powers-that-be. Here I will analyze the parable in its sociohistorical setting and then interpret the exegetical findings within the context of varying articulations of the messianic in the philosophers’ thought, particularly as temporality relates to acts of insurrection. My aim is to illustrate Jesus’s messianic status as signaling a disruption in the continuum of time that makes way for a new social order.

The Parable Chapter 13 of the Gospel of Mark is best characterized as an apocalyptic discourse rather than a “little apocalypse,” because although it shares some features of the literary genre apocalypse, it does not share the primary characteristic of a divine agent interpreting visions of a heavenly realm or the first-person account of a human narrator.8 Rather Jesus is speaking to four named disciples on the Mount of Olives after one of them has remarked on the temple’s large stones. Jesus replies, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown down” (v. 2). He describes famine, persecution, and sacrilege, and that the disciples must beware of those who will try to lead them astray. He then speaks of the Son of Man in the language of Daniel 7: “coming in clouds with great power and glory” (v. 26), an event indicated by the moon not giving its light and the stars falling from heaven (v. 25). Jesus finally tells of the fig tree sprouting leaves and a parable about slaves keeping watch, the passage that is our focus. Adela Yarbro Collins, analyzing the chapter’s rhetorical forms, has argued that this chapter is an indirect interpretation of the Jewish war with Rome, in which Mark aims to refute the claims of messianic pretenders and to reinforce the identity of Jesus as Messiah.9 To this end Mark calls upon the cosmic phenomenon of apocalyptic literature and the arrival of the Son of Man in a prophetic prediction about the destruction of the temple, and in the second part of the chapter, he draws

7. See Theses XV in Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 1969). 8. See Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Apocalyptic Rhetoric of Mark 13 in Historical Context,” BR 41 (1996): 5–36, 9. 9. Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 603.

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upon the naturalistic imagery of the fig tree and a slave designated as watchman to instruct and console the audience. By comparing the events of the temple’s destruction in the context of the arrival of the eschaton with events in nature and the household, the “Markan Jesus is revealing a divinely determined course of events and advocating a particular understanding of these events and a course of action in relation to them,” she writes.10 One way Mark advances the comparison is in his use of apocalyptic vocabulary that evokes the judgment of God on Israel. For instance, in the passage about the fig tree, Jesus says that “when the shoots become tender and the leaves are lush, you will know that the harvest is near” (ὅταν ἤδη ὁ κλάδος αὐτῆς ἁπαλὸς γένηται καὶ ἐκφύῃ τὰ φύλλα, γινώσκετε ὅτι ἐγγὺς τὸ θέρος ἐστίν). The reference to a fig tree recalls Mark 11, in which Jesus curses a fig tree, saying, “May no one eat fruit of you again” before entering the temple to overturn the money-changers’ tables. The next morning the disciples notice the fig tree has withered, which they attribute to Jesus’s curse. In chapter 13, Mark reinforces the connection between the fig tree and Jesus’s prediction of the temple’s destruction as a judgment of God with the fig tree’s leaves indicating that the harvest is near, or that God’s judgment upon the temple is imminent. As I demonstrate in chapter 3 on the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly, θέρος, meaning “harvest,” is loaded with eschatological associations of God’s judgment.11 Here it pertains to the temple incident in Mark 11 as a symbolic act on the part of Jesus, as E. P. Sanders has convincingly demonstrated. The incident represents Jesus’s view that God would establish a new temple. “He [Jesus] intended .  .  . to indicate that the end was at hand and that the temple would be destroyed, so that the new and perfect temple might arise.”12 The fig tree therefore is an effective metaphor to move the readers from the mythic realm of apocalyptic discourse to the concrete manifestations of Jesus’s message and its broad implications, culminating in the injunction in the Parable of the Night Watchers, which ends with “But I say to you, I say to all, stay awake,” indicating the Markan Jesus addresses not just the disciples on the Mount of Olives but all who “have ears to hear” (Mark 4:9, 23). As a response to speculations about when the eschaton would arrive, Jesus responds that “no one knows, neither the angels in heaven or the son, but only the Father.” Here the Markan Jesus may be taking up the competing eschatological interpretations of the period, advancing the idea that the arrival of the eschaton is unknown and yet within this generation,13 an idea that is also evident in such passages as Matt 10:23, 1 Thess 4:13–17, and 1 Cor 7:26–32. Thus the parable might be seen as offering encouragement and hope to Jesus’s followers who are

10. Ibid., 615. 11. See Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 344–46. Myers notes that the fig tree reference of 13:29 recalls the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly in its illustration of the harvest as a “moment of truth” for the farmer who does not know how the seed grows. 12. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 74. 13. Witherington, The Gospel of Mark, 337.

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suffering persecution as Judeans under Roman occupation. Along these lines, commentators such as M. Eugene Boring and Adela Yarbro Collins view the Parable of the Night Watchers as an allegory, in which a post-resurrection Jesus is a householder and his followers have been assigned missionary tasks as they await his return.14 Although she rejects an allegorical reading, Luise Schottroff also reads the parable as consolation in the midst of suffering, noting that the slaves’ tasks to stay awake “are transparent to the time of waiting for God.”15 Jesus’s saying that from the fig tree’s sprouting leaves they will “know that the harvest is near” evokes the eschatological judgment that precedes the bringing together and preserving of the righteous. The Kingdom of God, in the context of anticipating the time of God’s judgment, is therefore the basis of hope. “In judgment, the destruction of creation will end as a limit is set to the powers and the people who are enemies of life,” Schottroff writes.16 Much of Jesus’s prophecy as attested in the gospels came to pass during the generation after his death, in particular the series of rebellions that resulted in the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Ben Witherington III points to the use of γάρ that appears in Mark 13 in some Greek manuscripts, linking every eschatological element to its paraenetic content. This indicates that Jesus’s answer to the when question is not fully answered until the Parable of the Night Watchers; before that, the main discussion is about what will happen.17 Any indicators of the end do not dictate the timing, in other words, because no one knows the timing, not even Jesus, “since it will break in at an unexpected time, accompanied but not foreshadowed by various cosmological disorders,”18 Witherington writes. To stay awake and to watch is necessary because “wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines occur in every age of human history, and they do not necessarily carry any eschatological weight as signals.”19 For Mark, the time of threat and persecution for Judeans under the reign of Nero—the first generation after Jesus’s death—was not a period in which the world itself would come to an end, but rather the end of a Judaism centered on the temple.20 The central event representing this perspective in Mark is the crucifixion of Jesus, which Mark develops with anticipatory references to the Passion account in chapter 13. Most pointedly, verse 36 uses the participle καθεύδοντας, from καθεύδω, meaning “to sleep” or to be “spiritually indolent, to be dead”21 immediately following the reference to four watches of the night: “Therefore, stay

14. See M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary. The New Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 375. Collins, Mark: A Commentary, 618. 15. Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, 126. 16. Ibid., 127. 17. Witherington, The Gospel of Mark, 340. 18. Ibid., 341. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 341. 21. BDAG, 490.

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awake. For you do not know when the master of the house will return. At evening or at midnight or when the cock crows, or early in the morning. Or else he may discover you asleep when he comes suddenly” (vv. 35–36).22 As R. H. Lightfoot notes, such a juxtaposition of sleeping and staying awake anticipates the scene of Gethsemane in the Passion narrative of chapter 14, when the disciples fall asleep after Jesus had asked them to stay awake with him. Mark uses the same four threehour intervals to divide the period of time in the Parable of the Night Watchers as he does in the scene at Gethsemane: evening, the Last Supper; the arrest, around midnight; the cockcrow, when Peter denies Jesus the final time; and morning, when Jesus is handed over. This precise parallelism does not occur elsewhere in Mark, indicating the significance of the connection. As further evidence, Lightfoot states that the first indication of the link between Mark 13 and the Passion account is the use of παραδίδωμι, meaning to “hand over” or “betray,” in 13:9, referring to the sufferings of Jesus’s followers. In other passages in Mark, particularly in the depiction of Jesus’s arrest, it has an equally ominous association. Thus Jesus’s apocalyptic prophecy, including the Parable of the Night Watchers, and the Passion narrative depict him as both a prophet and the one who will suffer at “the Hour” of his arrest and execution.23 Mark further emphasizes the admonition to stay awake rather than sleep with the use of the Greek word γρηγορέω, “to be fully awake, watch.”24 This verb appears in Mark only in the parable and in the scene at Gethsemane. In the parable, Jesus advises followers to stay awake; at Gethsemane, they fall asleep while Jesus remains watchful and in prayer. Timothy J. Geddert writes, “In the four watches, Mark portrays Jesus as succeeding where the disciples fail in such a way that his success atones for their failure. The juxtaposition of narratives makes a subtle point about how to respond appropriately to the temptations and persecutions that post-resurrection believers would face as they awaited their master.”25 In this way, Geddert argues, Mark uses the Passion narrative to elaborate the meaning of the command to watch: it is to be a faithful disciple in a time of crisis, rather than interpreting signs, seeking protection from persecution, or predicting the moment of God’s judgment. Geddert adds, “It has to do with faithful discipleship, prayer, obedience, willingness to suffer. The Hour caught the disciples sleeping and unaware at Gethsemane; it must not happen next time. Because Jesus had

22. γρηγορεῖτε οὖν, οὐκ οἴδατε γὰρ πότε ὁ κύριος τῆς οἰκίας ἔρχεται, ἢ ὀψὲ ἢ μεσονύκτιον ἢ ἀλεκτοροφωνίας ἢ πρωΐ, μὴ ἐλθὼν ἐξαίφνης εὕρῃ ὑμᾶς καθεύδοντας. 23. R. H. Lightfoot, The Gospel Message of St. Mark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 52–55. Following the suggestion of L. L. Welborn, I identify the parable as that of the “Night Watchers” to emphasize the symbolism of nighttime in correspondence with the corruption and violence that characterize the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. 24. Thesaurus Linguae Graecea, s.v. γρηγορέω, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=23 618&context=lsj&action=from-search. 25. Timothy. J. Geddert, Watchwords: Mark 13 in Markan Eschatalogy (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 91–95.

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modelled faithful ‘watching,’ he was prepared for the arrival of The Hour, and therefore recognized its advent.”26 In earlier chapters of Mark, the word for watching is βλέπω, meaning to “see, have the power of sight,”27 suggesting a perception of meaning and truth. Toward the end of chapter 13, in the Parable of the Night Watchers, the verb for watching changes from βλέπω to γρηγορέω. As Geddert demonstrates, this change emphasizes Mark’s view that the main problem for the disciples is not their ignorance, as is commonly noted,28 but their disobedience and unfaithfulness. He adds that to watch is to act in obedience even when lacking full knowledge. The command to remain watchful and awake therefore occurs without knowledge of the time of the eschaton. Discernment and understanding occur apart from knowing “the Hour.” Indeed the parable does not explicitly state that the slave assigned to the door must watch for the master’s arrival but rather must watch on behalf of the master. The slave is to stand at watch faithfully all through the long night, just as Jesus does at Gethsemane.29 The connection between the parable and Gethsemane suggests a “politics of the cross,” at the center of Mark’s ideological discourse.30 As Ched Myers demonstrates, while the arrival of “the Hour” is unknown, with proper vigilance, Jesus’s followers will recognize it as the moment in which the cross is perceived not as defeat but as an overturning of worldly powers.31 The question of when, posed by the disciples in Mark 13:4, is answered with the command to watch in the Parable of the Night Watchers and an allusion to the cross with the parallelism with the scene at Gethsemane. “It [the cross] stands at the center of history,” writes Myers, “and is for Mark the focus of all true political discernment. Now, at the end of the sermon, he invites his readers to become truly discerning, offering a new metaphor: Gethsemane.”32 In contrast to the messianic pretenders that sought signs for the end of Israel’s sufferings, referenced in the first part of chapter 13, Mark employs predictions about the temple’s destruction as symbolizing the end of the evil age, and refers to the fig tree sprouting leaves as indicating new life after the destruction of the temple. Myers explains, “The disciples can still pray because God does not live in the temple but among those who ‘believe’; they need not be anxious when the

26. Geddert, Watchwords, 98–99. 27. Thesaurus Linguae Greacae, s.v., Βλέπω, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=2063 8&context=lsj&action=from-search. 28. As representative of this view, see Wrede, The Messianic Secret; P. W. Meyer, “The Problem of the Messianic Self-Consciousness of Jesus,” NovT 4 (1960): 122–38; and Norman Perrin, “The Wredestrasse Becomes the Hauptstrasse,” JR 46 (1966): 296–320. 29. Geddert, Watchwords, 104–06. 30. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 346. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 347.

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social world unravels, because Jesus’s words do not pass away.”33 In Myers’s reading, the parable hinges on the directive to watch at the end of chapter 13 and its link to Gethsemane. The followers of Jesus must wait and watch for the apocalyptic moment, “the Hour,” in which they will see a world no longer ruled by Rome, or the powers, because they were vanquished by Jesus’s death on the cross.34 However, the powers in Myers’s reading are never made explicit in the Gospel of Mark. As Timothy J. Geddert states, while Mark 13 refers to the fall of the temple and the end of the age, Mark does so only in symbolic and ambiguous terms, suggesting that the vindication that Jesus’s followers anticipate will not appear in the form of specific signs but rather will be visible in the ways God defeats those who reject Jesus.35 The symbolic and ambiguous representation of the powers, then, accentuates their spiritual dimensions. Walter Wink affirms this depiction, arguing that the powers in the New Testament are represented in material terms not only as religious and civic authorities but also as “something that will not reduce to physical structures—invisible, immaterial, spiritual, but very, very real.”36 The powers for the writers of the New Testament therefore are best understood as multidimensional. Recent work by Richard A. Horsley builds upon this analysis, with his view that the early Jesus movement illustrates one of the ways that ancient societies interacted dynamically with multiple powers, some of which were local and limited, while others, such as Caesar during Jesus’s time, determined the life circumstances of the populace. Often these societies experienced the major power—and its complex of political, economic, and religious authority—as an invasion by a demonic spirit, one that must be eliminated. Given this context, the prominence of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms in the gospels points to the extent to which his followers envisioned that the divine power they attributed to Jesus might extend to them, an identification that is made more direct in light of Jesus’s crucifixion at the hands of the Romans.37 Jesus’s followers, then, had recourse in their depictions of Jesus as Son of God and Messiah in their efforts to resist all that they experienced as “enemies of life,” as Luise Schottroff writes, in both terms both spiritual and material. Undergirding the powers-that-be of the Roman Empire was the institution of slavery, which by the end of the first century BCE included 33 to 40 percent of the total population.38 Most slaves were captured as part of the spoils of Roman military conquests and most worked in agriculture. Large households, however,

33. Ibid., 350–51. 34. Ibid., 351. 35. Geddert, Watchwords, 257. 36. Walter Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (vol 1; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 5. 37. See Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 205. 38. Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29.

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might assign slaves to very specialized positions, and any number of tasks might be assigned, suggesting an enormous diversity and variety among the experiences of slaves.39 Without question, however, the master exerted power over the slave in all cases, and the relationship did not involve reciprocal obligations. Keith Bradley explains, In the master-slave relationship . . . there were no restricting factors: the slave was at the complete and permanent disposal of the master and except by an act of resistance could never find relief from the necessity of obeying because there were no countervailing rights or powers in the condition of slavery itself to which the slave had recourse.40

Maintaining this asymmetrical relationship meant that to slaveholders, loyalty and obedience are the primary virtues for slaves. While these attributes may have come about in response to benevolent treatment on the part of slaveholders, Bradley’s analysis of the sources shows it was more often secured by fear, abuse, and violence. While Cicero writes of love and a wish to secure favor as the most effective means of ensuring cooperation between free men, of slaves, he writes, “But those who keep subjects in check by force would of course have to employ severity—masters, for example, toward their slaves, when these cannot be held in control in any other way.”41 Numerous sources from antiquity attest to the violence suffered by slaves, ranging from sexual exploitation to various methods of physical punishment.42 Fear, of course, is the accompanying counterpart to violence. Among early Christian texts, Ephesians, 1 Peter, and the Didache all state that a slave should obey his master with fear, indicating that this feature of Roman society maintained a strong influence. In a compelling parallel with the Parable of the Night Watchers,

39. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 4, 60. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Cicero, Off., 2.24, translation follows Miller with some modifications. 42. The standard forms of physical punishment were permanent shackling, branding, and other forms of torture and execution; literary sources such as Satires, by Horace, and Satyricon, by Petronius, describe crueler punishments. In Puteoli, an inscription describes the duties of local officials who oversaw the torture and execution of slaves. Keith Bradley writes, “While it should not be thought that all slaves in Roman society were being physically violated all the time, it is nevertheless true that all slaves were under constant pressure of exposure to punishment and that such pressure formed another aspect of the servile mentality.” See Keith Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (Brussells: Latomus Revue D’Études Latines, 1984). See also Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); Page deBois, Slavery: Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

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Columella advises land owners to avoid long absences, “for it is certain that slaves are corrupted by reason of the great remoteness of their masters, being once corrupted and in expectation of others to take their places after the shameful acts which they have committed, they are more intent on pillage than on farming.”43 He adds that owners should announce that their visits will be more frequent than they intend, “for under this apprehension both overseer and labourers will be at their duties.”44 Given this sociohistorical context, the imbalance of power between master and slave necessitated forms of resistance beyond the confines of the relationship, one of which comes across in the Parable of the Night Watchers, where the doorkeeper’s loyalty—and his obedience to a master—is put toward a purpose other than what would be intended by a householder. The slave at the door watches and waits for “the Hour” in Jesus’s parable, not for anything or anyone else but the Messiah who signals its arrival. He watches as he might to protect the household when the master departs, anxious not to be found asleep and punished, but in this case he must only anticipate the Hour, which will arrive unannounced. That the slave is the protagonist in the parable underscores its subversive content, a tactic that also appears in the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–13) and Who Has a Servant Plowing? (Luke 17:7–10), to note two examples that call upon reversals of the master-slave narrative. Here, however, the slave’s loyalty and obedience are not in service to any master other than the Hour at hand and the Messiah who accompanies its arrival. Thus the slave watches at the door for the Hour and, to extend the metaphor, will open the door to the Messiah, whom he will know as his true master. It is only he and those “with ears to hear” who will recognize when the Hour has arrived, and therefore it is for them to stay awake. The parable imagines an alternate reality and as such suggests an allegorical reading, one in which a slave is the protagonist and in which the parable functions broadly as a form of social resistance.45 Such a move is characteristic of the parables of Jesus, which often exploit the tensions between rich land owners and peasants, with absentee landlords a particularly sore point, as referenced in the Parable of the Night Watchers and the Parable of the Wicked Tenants in Mark 12. The peasants of the rural province of Galilee were in dire straits by the first century CE after being under Roman imperial domination since Pompey’s initial conquest of Palestine in 63 BCE. To achieve dominance, the Romans burned and pillaged villages and killed or enslaved the populace. Survivors were subject to indirect rule by clientkings and provincial governors, which meant paying tribute to Rome in addition

43. Columella, 1.120, Ash. 44. Ibid., 1.2.1. 45. Although Adolf Jülicher argues against allegorical readings of parables, much of his argument hinges on parables attributed to the historical Jesus. See Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). The author of Mark, however, often allegorizes parables, as in Mark 4:13–20, where Jesus explains the meaning of Parable of the Sower as representing the varying degrees to which his message is received and “cultivated.”

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to taxes to local rulers and to the temple in Jerusalem. The tributes consisted of a portion of the agricultural produce, with rates so exorbitant that peasants had to borrow to feed their families, accumulating debt to be repaid with interest. The overall picture of the social conditions of Jesus and his contemporaries is of severe poverty in service to the Roman elites, conditions they resisted with revolts in various forms, including competing prophetic and messianic movements, such as the one associated with the ministry of Jesus.46 Thus the subversive content of the parables corresponds to these movements of resistance,47 as does the use of time in Parable of the Night Watchers, as I will demonstrate below.

The Parable and the Philosophers In his work as a literary theorist, Walter Benjamin was concerned to reconceptualize time as part of his thought on history. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he criticizes historical materialism, stating that an assertion about the inevitable progress of humankind serves only those in power. By contrast, for Benjamin, history has meaning insofar as the current generation realizes a connection to a past generation, forming what he terms a “constellation,” by which a truth about an oppressed past becomes legible in the present, and thus a redemptive potential can be realized in the Jetztzeit, or “Now-time.” Expressed in political terms, time in this conception is nonlinear and susceptible to disruptions that emerge from outside the system that sustains the ruling regime. As an example, Benjamin cites the 1830 July Revolution in France, in which workers in Paris overthrew the Bourbon monarchy of Charles X and established the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the “Citizen King”: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from

46. See Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) and Richard A. Horsley, Sociology and the Jesus Movement (New York: Crossroad, 1989). 47. See Horsley, Revolt of the Scribes; William R. Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech, Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994).

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This thesis emerged from Benjamin’s discussions with his friend Gershom Scholem, with whom Benjamin tried to think through the meaning of a series of numbers with respect to time. Scholem was studying mathematics at the time, and the two discussed the meaning of the words course, number, series, and direction. As Scholem would later relate of the conversation, Benjamin’s remark concerned whether time, which has a course, also has direction. This led to Scholem trying to find a mathematical theory that explained truth as embedded in a concept of time, an endeavor in which he was unsuccessful. Benjamin, however, persevered, and responding to an essay by Heidegger, “The Concept of Time in Historical Scholarship,” Benjamin criticized Heidegger’s assessment that year numbers are historical markers and as such are arbitrary, because any number could be substituted for another. Rather, Benjamin argues that any year designated as the beginning acts as an expression of the regime that marked it as such.49 Put another way, anyone can mark the days in a way that is meaningful to him or her, but others will accept a numbering system only if a regime makes it into a convention. In terms of calendars, Benjamin extends this idea to assert in his thesis that the holidays and days of remembrance in a calendar mark a chronology that continues in a cyclical pattern; the holidays have meaning because they are observed, year after year.50 The passage of time is therefore measured according to a regime that designates holidays and festivals. When a regime is overthrown, as in the July Revolution, the act ruptures ordinary time, as the revolutionaries demonstrated by shooting at Paris clock towers. Time, in Benjamin’s assessment, contains the potential to be punctuated by moments that coalesce even though they may be separated by thousands of years. If calendars are “historical time-lapse cameras” in that they distinguish days as days of remembrance, then a revolution that overthrows a regime abolishes these days of remembrance as constituting the continuum of time. The result is that the revolutionary act punctuates time and allows the revolutionary to arrest the temporality of the powers-that-be. Benjamin named this concept Jetztzeit, or “Now-time.” In this view, a revolutionary act forms a “constellation” with an event of the past that is suppressed by the ruling regime, and the past is thereby 48. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 262. 49. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 107–20. 50. Ibid., 121–22.

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made legible and possibly redeemable in the present.51 Such a conception of time disavows any myth of progression within the flow of time or days of remembrance as having meaning in a cycle. In the allegorical reading of the Parable of the Night Watchers, which centers on the parable in its Markan context, a slave who awaits the master to return disrupts the linear continuum of time because the time of waiting and watching is associated with Jesus at Gethsemane. In forming a Benjaminian “constellation” with Gethsemane, the author of Mark construes the present period of waiting as not empty and transitional but rather infused with now, with the Hour (both of Jesus’s crucifixion and the arrival of the Messiah) that is the decisive event of Israel’s redemption. In the imagining of a doorkeeper-slave who awaits the arrival of the master-Messiah, the parable positions a slave as the one who initiates the event that signals the new order. The redemption of Israel that Jesus’s audience hopes for arrives with the Messiah—who will judge those who oppress them—and accounts for the urgency of the question of when, but the when is already occurring because of the slave’s relation to time. It is not so much that the slave must be obedient to his master who is the Messiah, but rather, in a Benjaminian reading of the parable, the slave is the one who must act in his own freedom on behalf of Israel, to open the door to the Messiah. He will do this because he sees the present moment as that which can redeem the past. Like Benjamin, Derrida sees time as foundational to any redemptive potential. However, for Derrida, time functions as an aporia that departs from the metaphysical distinctions that Benjamin makes between a-temporal and temporal.52 Building on and revising Saussure’s theory of signification in linguistics, Derrida sees time as an irreducible aporia because time is the self-deferment of time to itself. Time, in other words, is constituted by a gap between consciousness and language. Once we name a moment, it is the past. A distinctive feature of Derrida’s thought on the aporia of time is the link that he makes between the aporia of time and the aporia of law. In terms of the political implications of his formulation, Derrida’s reading of the Declaration of Independence is instructive. This document claims that the independence of the American colonies occurs by publishing this same document as signed by representatives of the United States. In effect it therefore states that the unified entity of the independent colonies predates the signatures on the document. It makes something new by claiming to initiate an event that has already occurred. To Derrida, this statement marks the necessary violence—in this case, a temporal violence in that the statement represents a disjuncture in time—that characterizes every law, because no law justifies itself.53 In making such a claim, the document denies the inescapable delay of time and conceals the violence upon which such a claim is based. By “violence,” Derrida refers to the forced instantiation of that which has no basis outside of itself,

51. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” XVIII. 52. See Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312–13. 53. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), 99–100.

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but asserts that it does. Institutions—whether political or religious—often employ the name of God to account for this concealment of the violence necessary for their existence.54 Derrida claims that this move originates in the desire to concentrate time into the present, or the “simulacrum of the instant.”55 As Richard Beardsworth argues, to reflect upon the political, for Derrida, means to consider the irreducibility of time. The experience is an aporia; it is “unpassable,” or impossible. Such an impossible experience is nevertheless critical. Indeed it is the condition of every decision and invention. The double-bind that is the aporia of time creates both the necessity for judgment, because a move must be made to attempt to resolve the aporia, and the promise of the future, because every decision is contingent and must be made again. Derrida’s thought on time therefore means that there is no temporal horizon to the passage of time. Because of time’s aporetic structure, “the impossibility is ‘now.’ ‘Now’ creates the impossibility of concentrating time into a present; ‘now’ is the fact that time, to be time, is constantly ‘out of joint.’”56 It therefore always requires a judgment and negotiation, over and over again, and continually leaves open the possibility of, in political terms, justice. In a Derrida-inflected reading of the Parable of the Night Watchers, Jesus’s slave as doorkeeper reveals—and acts within—the aporetic structure of time. As he awaits the master who is the Messiah, he is in the now, the present as a moment of decision and negotiation, not an empty transition between past and future. Will he recognize this and stay awake to open the door when the master arrives? The Markan Jesus as teller of the parable says that he must, and that he must act at the right moment, which will present itself as now, but a now that is unknowable. The time of waiting is therefore a protracted now. As in the Derridean notion of time, the now of the parable is impossible because of its unknowability, but the now is nevertheless discernible to the doorkeeper and all others who stay awake to watch, ready to create the opening by which what is entirely “other” and new will arrive. Giorgio Agamben also conceives of time as aporetic, but he develops his thought more along the lines of Benjamin than Derrida. One of Agamben’s most sustained reflections on time appears in “Infancy and History,” where he builds upon Benjamin’s critique of a linear conception of time to focus on the paradoxical image of a “state of history, whose key event is always unfolding and whose goal is not in the distant future, but already present.”57 By this, Agamben critiques the notion of time as experienced in instants that relate to a continuum. In the conventional dialectical conception of time, each instant succeeds another that,

54. Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political, 101. 55. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations d’independence,” in Jaques Derrida, Otobiographies: L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom proper (Paris: Galilee, 1984), 25. 56. Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political, 101. 57. Giorgio Agamben, “Infancy and History,” in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (trans. Liz Heron; London: Verso, 1993), 102.

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when assembled as in a row, reflects continuity and change. By contrast, a truly revolutionary conception of time, he argues, would incorporate such distinctive notions of time as those of Gnosticism and Stoicism. In Gnosticism, for example, time is characterized as truth in “the moment of abrupt interruption, when man suddenly realizes his own condition of being resurrected.”58 Stoicism offers the insight that “the liberating experience of time . . . [is] something neither objective nor removed from our control, but springing from the actions and decisions of man.”59 Similarly, Heidegger’s “moment” of authentic decision, in which Dasein experiences its own finitude, and Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit, or “Nowtime,” all advance the idea that “history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man’s servitude to continuous linear time, but man’s liberation from it: the time of history and the kairos in which man, by his initiative, grasps favorable opportunity and chooses his own freedom in the moment.”60 The operative term for Agamben is kairos, the Greek word for “opportune time” or “season,” which connotes a moment that explodes any teleology or time continuum. In Agamben’s view, we are to live into this instant; it is a time of undeniable immediacy, as if the Messiah were already here.61 Kairos in Agamben’s thought stems from Benjamin’s notion of “the now of knowability,” which is another term for Jetztzeit. Benjamin writes, “In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. .  .  . It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or that what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.”62 Although Benjamin wrote this passage in reference to a method of reading, the decisive element that Agamben seizes upon is a distinctive opportunity that arises unexpectedly. As Benjamin noted, documents of the past are more legible at certain times than others, given the “historical index” that governs them, or the “constellation” that appears between one historical instance and another.63 Leland de la Durantaye explains, “The constant shifting of perspective effected by historical change closes and opens lines of historical sight. Axes that had been blocked for centuries or longer are liberated, and long-obscured elements suddenly come to the surface of the page.”64 Originating in Benjamin’s messianic conception of history, Agamben’s kairology concerns a time of the now that, with respect to

58. Agamben, “Infancy and History,” 106. Agamben’s use of Gnostic texts does not attend to the historical viability of the category “Gnosticism” but rather takes the texts at face value as resources for his own thought. 59. Ibid., 107. 60. Ibid., 111. 61. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 101–03. 62. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (ed. Kevin McLaughlin; trans. Howard Eiland; Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 463. 63. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” theses II and XVIIIA. 64. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 114.

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human life in a social order, would nullify all worldly representations and initiate a radical authenticity for human life, one that is revolutionary in its implications, because of its liberation from time as a continuum.65 Such a time is the real “state of exception” cited by Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” He writes, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of exception in which we live is the rule.”66 By this he refers to Carl Schmitt’s declaration, “Sovereign is he who controls the exception” meaning that sovereignty is determined by the ability to suspend the law. To live in a period in which the suspension of the law is the normal state of affairs is to recognize that sovereign power does not have a basis in anything other than itself and is therefore susceptible to disruptions or being overthrown, as the “tradition of the oppressed” has illustrated in different historical periods. The oppressed who, throughout different historical periods, grasp opportunity to assert themselves against the ruling regimes illustrate this truth. Agamben imagines a conception of time that would expose the false premise by which political authorities have their power and by which all human beings have identities that separate them from one another. In The Coming Community he cites a parable Benjamin recounted in his correspondence: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”67 Agamben describes that Benjamin’s telling of parable emphasizes the transformative effect of the messianic on the world rather than an end of the world. He thus interprets the messianic as that which causes the things of the world to be as they are but not as they are, without their worldly representations. For Agamben, in The Coming Community and The Time That Remains, the messianic is not of this world but is a relation that transforms the conditions of the world by rendering them meaningless. The messianic therefore bears a revolutionary potential, the one exhibited in history in any movement of protest that exposes the false premise by which the powers assert themselves, and it appears in a nonlinear, aporetic conception of time that is infused with the now. To return to the parable, I read the Markan Jesus’s words describing the ones who watch as representing the revolutionary thinking of Benjamin’s and Agamben’s conceptions of messianic time.68 Benjamin writes, “The revolutionary

65. See Agamben, Homo Sacer and Agamben, The Coming Community. 66. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” thesis VIII. 67. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (7 vols; ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhauser; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974–89), 2.432. Italics in original, cited in De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, 381. 68. Another example from the Jesus tradition in which issues of sovereignty and exception are prominent is Mark 2:23–28, which describes the disciples plucking grains of wheat on the Sabbath. When the Pharisees criticize them, Jesus replies with a story about

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thinker summons and validates the unique revolutionary opportunity of a given political situation. But the latter no less summons and validates the thinker himself through the moment’s power to unlock a realm of the past that had up until that point remained closed.”69 Here Benjamin emphasizes that a moment in time, one that is recognized for its potential to “unlock a realm” that had been closed, is what “summons and validates” the revolutionary thinker. Presented this way, time is what creates and sustains the revolutionary impulse of the “tradition of the oppressed” and animates the agents themselves. The impulse to revolt arises from the impossibility of time, from the recognition that there is no time as a continuum in which everything keeps getting better but rather there is only now. The doorkeeper who awaits the arrival of the Messiah does not wait indefinitely for the master of the household but rather is the agent of redemption in recognizing the Hour for what it is, the passage that is now, through which the Messiah arrives.

Conclusion In the Parable of the Night Watchers, the doorkeeper watches obediently not for the householder but for the Messiah. He is “living messianically” in experiencing time not as a continuum of instants but as an aporetic experience that reflects the true structure of time. Each of the philosophers here understands that structure in different but related ways. For Benjamin, to wait for the Hour that is unknown to all except the Father, as Jesus says, is to live in the now, in which the messianic emerges as a weak force from an a-temporal realm that, as Agamben develops it, transforms the conditions of the present, nullifying them, such that a doorkeeper acts to bring the redemption of Israel. In Derridean terms, to live in the now is to reckon with the aporetic structure of time itself, to recognize that within the disjuncture of time is the potential for new possibilities for being. In addressing Jews traumatized by Rome’s destruction of the temple, the parable uses apocalyptic vocabulary and imagery to evoke a scene of judgment upon the wicked and to console the audience that this judgment is imminent. While the Hour of the Messiah’s arrival is unknown, its link to the four watches of Jesus at Gethsemane suggests Jesus’s crucifixion is the decisive event infusing the present, and that this event makes any knowledge of the Hour irrelevant; it is a moment in history that, because of the hope for Israel’s restoration and belief in Jesus’s

David eating the Bread of the Presence, which was only lawful for the high priests to eat, and sharing it with his companions when they were hungry. Jesus says, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” 69. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7.784, cited in De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 114.

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resurrection as the “first fruits of those who have died,”70 is continually under way. Jesus’s audience, the parable instructs, ought to stay awake and to watch as a means by which they will live as the doorkeeper, who by seizing the opportune moment of the now, acts in freedom, released from the continuum of time and all the powers it upholds.

70. 1 Cor 15:20–28. Paul writes, But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’ But when it says, ‘All things are put in subjection,’ it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (NRSV translation)

Chapter 6 THE THINGS WITHIN: TEMPORALITY AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, Jesus answered them, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is!’ For, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”1 — Luke 17:20–21

Introduction Jesus’s claim in Luke 17:20–21 that the Kingdom of God is “within you” is among the most evocative in the tradition, inviting speculation about its meaning since the patristic period.2 Particularly troubling is the Greek construction ἐντός ὑμῶν ἐστιν, where ἐντός represents a range of meanings, such as “inside,” “within the limits of,” and “in the midst of.”3 I have chosen to translate ἐντός as “within” to highlight the contrast between interiority and exteriority, or what is visible and invisible, which aligns the saying with its closest parallel, which appears not in the synoptics but in the so-called Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.4 The passage in 1. Parallels in Gos. Thom. 3:1, 51, and 113; Dial. Sav. 15–16. Ἐπερωτηθεὶς δὲ ὑπὸ τῶν Φαρισαίων πότε ἔρχεται ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἀπεκρίθη αὐτοῖς καὶ εἶπεν, Οὐκ ἔρχεται ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ μετὰ παρατηρήσεως, οὐδὲ ἐροῦσιν, Ἰδοὺ ὧδε: ἤ, Ἐκεῖ: ἰδοὺ γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστιν. 2. See Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 4.35, Athanasius of Alexandria, Contra Gentes XXX, and Cyril of Alexander’s Commentary on Luke, 368. Among modern scholarship, see especially Alexander Rustow, “Entos Humon Estin: Zur Deutung von Lukas 17: 20–21,” ZNW 51 (1960): 197–224; J. Ramsay Michaels, “Almsgiving and the Kingdom Within: Tertullian and Luke 17:21,” CBQ 60, no. 3 (July 1998): 475–83; and Colin H. Roberts, “The Kingdom of Heaven (Lk. XVII 21),” HTR XLI (1948): 1–8. 3. BDAG, 340. 4. “Gnosticism” is a disputed category in early Christian studies. Scholars such as Karen L. King argue that the term cannot adequately account for a movement so diverse in

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Thomas reads, “Jesus said, ‘If those who lead you say to you, “See, the kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you’” (logion 3).5 In both texts, the saying’s apparent duality between the spiritual and the material worlds may seem at first to point to the Kingdom as a purely transcendent entity and Jesus’s presence as signaling the Kingdom’s presence on earth. However, Jesus’s instruction that the Kingdom will not appear in signs but is rather “within,” suggests something else, that the Kingdom is perceptible and indeed already present in the site of one’s own interiority. Although difficult to identify and define, this domain of interiority, I submit, can nevertheless be approached by way of temporality, a route explored by philosophers since Aristotle, all of whom have pursued the relationship between Being and time.6 Among the works of modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time most fully develops an ontology of time. Heidegger’s breakthrough was to attempt to extract time from its metaphysical determination in Western philosophy, showing how Western philosophers have focused on the present—or better, presence—without reflecting on how a sense of being (Dasein, in Heidegger’s terminology) is constituted in time.7 For him, time and Being are inextricably bound, and a human subject is one who reckons with the fact of finitude to give his or her being as such its foundational meaning.8 Among contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have both, in different ways, built upon Heidegger’s work to seek new, nonbinary ways of thinking about temporality as fundamental to the human subject. Most fruitful for our purposes in regard to Jesus as Messiah and his saying concerning a Kingdom “within” is that both philosophers have used the concept of the messianic from the Jewish and early Christian traditions to their own ends, suggesting new interpretational possibilities for our passage. Following the literary theorist Walter

religious and philosophical perspectives. The term is based on the anachronistic scholarly construct of orthodoxy and heresy. See Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap, 2005). See also Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For a counterproposal, see David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5. All translations of the Gospel of Thomas from The Gospel of Thomas, trans. Thomas O. Lambdin, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (ed. James M. Robinson; 3rd ed.; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 124–28. 6. See Alexei Chernyakov, The Ontology of Time: Being and Time in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002); and Ursala Coope, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV: 10–14 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7. By metaphysics, I refer to the philosophical exploration of first causes or “being as such.” 8. David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 138, 147.

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Benjamin, who used the messianic most extensively in his thought on historical time, these philosophers propose alternatives to the reductionist tendencies of metaphysics on a range of topics. In the case of Agamben, rereading early Christian sources from his philosophical perspective reveals instances in which the texts themselves resist a metaphysics that would deny an excess of meaning that remains within the text, which he attempts to address with his conception of messianic time.9 In this chapter I interpret the exegetical findings of Luke 17:20–21 in light of the messianic as a philosophical concept, demonstrating that the Kingdom of God, and Jesus’s messianic status, is not reducible to a matter of immanence versus transcendence, or any other dichotomy, but rather is representative of an aporetic “messianic” temporal structure that is at once disruptive, restorative— and “within.” My task here is therefore to demonstrate the extent to which Luke 17:20–21 lends itself to just such a philosophical-messianic reading. Toward this aim I first outline the interpretational possibilities of the passage with respect to its position in the Lukan narrative and its connection to the Wisdom tradition and first-century Stoic philosophy. I also attend in similar ways to the parallel passages in Thomas and Dialogue of the Savior. I then expand on these findings by considering the points of intersection and departure the saying makes with the use of the messianic as a concept in the thought of Benjamin and Derrida and finally with Agamben, each of which makes a distinctive contribution to describing a Kingdom “within.”

The Saying In addition to the controversies surrounding ἐντός, Luke 17:20–21 is notable for its seeming disjuncture within the Lukan narrative. A partial explanation may be that because the parallels to the passage occur in Thomas and Dialogue of the Savior, rather than in the synoptics, it seems likely that the passage originated as an independent saying of Jesus in circulation during the oral period of transmission. Presented as a part of a dialogue with Pharisees, the saying is consistent with other controversy dialogues in the gospels, and the form critic Rudolf Bultmann identified it as a “genuine dominical saying.”10 However, following verse 21, something of a non sequitur arises that, besides ἐντός, is the primary stumbling block for interpreters: Jesus turns to his disciples to say, “They will say to you, ‘Look there! Look here! Do not go. Do not set off in pursuit. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.” Although Luke employs a parallelism to the preceding verses in the phrases to “look there, look here,” the juxtaposition of a saying about the Kingdom being “within” you in verse 21 with a saying about the Son of Man coming with lightning

9. See Agamben, The Time That Remains. 10. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, 25, 55.

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seems contradictory in regard to time. Is the Kingdom present and “within” or to come in the future with the arrival of the Son of Man? Some scholars have concluded that verses 20–21 and their position before the Son of Man saying represent Luke’s resistance to the apocalyptic discourse of the early church.11 However, more productive for our purposes than seeing the two passages in opposition is G. R. Beasley-Murray’s suggestion that they are reconciled by the verb παρατηρέω, which means “watching closely” in the sense of observing signs.12 He explains that in the apocalypses of the Second Temple period, the verb refers to God’s timetable, as in the Apocalypse of Weeks of 1 Enoch. In the New Testament, it also relates to the idea that although all time is in God’s hands, as in Acts 1:7,13 God provides signs, as in the Parable of the Fig Tree in Mathew 24, Mark 3, and Luke 21.14 Thus the saying refutes apocalyptic timetables that insist on knowing when but does not preclude Jesus’s instruction to watch for signs, which are visible to all those who seek to find them. By not saying definitively whether the Kingdom is present or future, but rather only that it is “within,” Luke retains the eschatological promise at the center of apocalyptic speculation at the same time he highlights the disruptive nature of Jesus’s proclamation, which is meant, as Rudolf Otto writes, “to shatter the dogmaticism of a finished eschatology and burst its too narrow limits.”15 Given that Luke 17:20–21 follows a story describing Jesus’s cleansing of ten lepers, the passage also suggests the Kingdom as “within” in the sense of the physical and personal effects of Jesus’s ministry. As manifestations of the Kingdom, healings and exorcisms are primary examples of the Kingdom as dynamic and discernable according not to time and place but rather as a manifestation of a divine reality that unties the bonds of worldly powers, thus their status as miracles. These events as manifestations of the Kingdom operate outside the confines of chronological time, an idea that comes across, as I mention above, in the temporal ambiguity that characterizes Luke 17:20–21 in its gospel context and other sayings attributed to Jesus in which the Kingdom is here and in others, that it is to come.16 In the case of

11. See, for example, Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teachings of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) and Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke (trans. Geoffrey Buswell; London: Faber and Faber, 1960). Conzelmann argues that the passage corresponds to the Lukan rejection of the Parousia as a legitimate question. Rather, Luke transforms eschatological judgment from the effect of a summons to the basis of his ethical thought. 12. BDAG, 771. 13. “He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.’” 14. G. R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 99. See also Rustow, “Entos Humon Estin: Zur Deutung von Lukas 17.20–21,” 201. 15. Rudolf Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man: A Study in the History of Religion (trans. Floyd V. Filson and Bertram Lee-Woolf; Boston: Starr King, 1957), 136. 16. In Aramaic, the language of Jesus, no copula would be present in the expression of Luke 17:20–21. In Greek, the text is usually rendered in the present tense, but in Aramaic

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Luke 17:20–21, that the Kingdom is “within you” extends Jesus’s inconsistency in the gospels in regard to the timing of the Kingdom’s arrival to refute the Pharisees who insist on knowing when. In addition, the passage links this teaching of the Kingdom to Jesus’s healings and exorcisms, where the Kingdom is indisputably present but experienced as discontinuous with the present situation. When, in Luke 11:20–22, for instance, the Lukan Jesus says, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come to you,” he says that in a situation of exorcism, the Kingdom has “come to you”; it is “within.” The Kingdom is present in that it has altered the interiority of the one healed and presumably those who witness the healing as well. The theme of looking inward as a means of salvation—one expression of which is Jesus’s healings—is a development of the Wisdom tradition that apparently had strong appeal in the early Jesus movement and took on a variety of forms. In the personified figure of Wisdom, which appears in Proverbs 8, the theme of seeking and finding characterizes the religious quest, especially in attaining knowledge. Inquiring after external objects is set in contrast to knowledge of one’s self. Such a theme is prominent in the Gospel of Thomas, in which the opening lines read, “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Gospel of Thomas 3, one of the parallels with Luke 17:20–21, emphasizes a contrast between external and internal as well, but at the same time, it sets them side by side, as if of equal importance. Thus in this instance, Thomas might be said to undermine the distinction between internal and external knowledge, stating that “the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.’” In this way it reflects one of the themes in the Gospel of Thomas that the light of a divine origin is revealed in worldly things, a theological position attested in another parallel to Luke 17:20–21, Gos. Thom. 113, which reads, “His disciples said to him, ‘When will the Kingdom come?’ [Jesus said], ‘It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’” Indeed there are so many variations of the seeking and finding theme that Helmut Koester concludes that these sayings belong to the development of a separate sayings source, one that may also underlie 1 Cor 1:22.17 Although Luke 17:20–21 was likely an independent saying, as Koester illustrates, its relation to the Wisdom tradition, as illustrated with its iterations in the Gospel of Thomas, accounts for its resonance and retention in the tradition. The theme of seeking and finding also undergirds ancient philosophical views that divinity existed within the human person, typically expressed as the mind

the verb would be implied and could designate present or future. See Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, 132–35. 17. Helmut Koester, “Gnostic Writings as Witnesses for the Development of the Sayings Tradition,” in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism: Proceedings of the Conference at Yale March 1978 (ed. Bentley Latyon; vol. 1; Leiden: Brill, 1980), 240–41.

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(νοῦς or λόγος).18 Early Christian writers adapted this idea for their own ends, namely to advance the dual human-divine identity of Jesus.19 The most well-known example is the Hymn to the Logos of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word (λόγος), and the Word (λόγος) was with God, and the Word (λόγος) was God.” The Gospel of John describes the Word coming into the world as light and elaborates the metaphor with Jesus healing the blind man in John 9 and his statement of 9:29, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those that who do see may become blind,”20 thus making Jesus the exemplar of the divine man. Similarly, the Gospel of Thomas uses the theme of light to symbolize the attainment of the spiritual knowledge that divinity lies within. In logion 77, we read, “Jesus said, ‘It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.’” In logion 83, we read, “The images are manifest to man, but the light in them remains concealed in the image of the light of the father. He will become manifest, but his image will remain concealed by his light.” The light imagery of Thomas is so prevalent that, as David M. Litwa demonstrates, Thomasine Christians came to see themselves as attaining a spiritual knowledge that made them “children of the light”; their aim was to become like Jesus in recognizing their divine origin.21 Here we see the idea that spiritual knowledge is hidden in the world but has outward manifestations, both in the world and in the human being, for those prepared to seek them. Gospel of Thomas 113 expresses this same idea succinctly in its picture of the Kingdom “spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” Ancient philosophical views regarding in-dwelling divinity reach back to Plato, who was likely the first to interpret the Delphic maxim—γνῶθι σαυτόν, “know yourself ”—as meaning that to know yourself is to know your soul. Within Platonic thought, to “know yourself ” is to have access to truth, the divine element within, and this occurs by turning the gaze of the soul toward its source, which is knowledge and thought. In contrast to the body-soul dualism of Platonism, first-century Stoicism reformulates the maxim to express the notion that the mind should know itself and discover its unity with the divine mind, reflecting the school’s emphasis on knowledge of the world as necessary for understanding the self as part of an all-pervading rationality.22 In this conception, self-knowledge

18. See, for instance, Plato, Tim. 30AB, Phaed. 247C–248B, Alc. maj. 1.133BC; Aristotle, De an. 1.408b20–30, Plutarch Mor. 1.943A; Philo, Deus 47. 19. This idea had not yet developed into a fully developed Nicaean or Chalcedonian theology. 20. NRSV translation. 21. M. David Litwa, “‘I Will Become Him’: Homology and Deification in the Gospel of Thomas,” JBL 113, no. 2 (2015): 440–45. 22. Hans Dieter Betz, “The Delphic Maxim ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ in Hermetic Interpretation,” HTR 63, no. 4 (1970): 465–84. See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (ed. Frédéric Gros; trans. Graham

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takes place in the world as a spiritual pursuit, one in which “knowing yourself ” is about transcending the self.23 Cicero writes, And philosophy is the richest, the most bounteous, and the most exalted gift of the immortal gods to humanity. For she alone has taught us, in addition to all other wisdom, that most difficult of all things—to know ourselves. This precept is so important and significant that the credit for it is given, not to any human being, but to the god of Delphi. For he who knows himself will realize, in the first place, that he has a divine element within him, and will think of his own inner nature as a kind of consecrated image of God; and so he will always act and think in a way worthy of so great a gift of the gods, and, when he has examined and thoroughly tested himself, he will understand how nobly equipped by Nature he entered life, and what manifold means he possesses for the attainment and acquisition of wisdom. For from the very first he began to form in his mind and spirit shadowy concepts, as it were, of all sorts, and when these have been illuminated under the guidance of wisdom, he perceives that he will be a good man, and, for that very reason, happy.24

The final phrases of Gos. Thom. 3 align with this Stoic ideal: “When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.” Seneca takes the idea even further: “We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol’s ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you.”25 In Stoic thought, to “know yourself ” cannot be limited to interiority, as it is in Platonic thought, but rather emerges from the tension between the self and the world, both of which share in the divine.

Burchell; New York: Picador, 2001) for a detailed study of “care of the self,” as developed in Greco-Roman and Hellenistic philosophy, as the basis of human subjectivity in Western thought. See also Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Belknap, 2002). For a survey of philosophy in early Christianity, see George Karamanolis, Philosophy of Early Christianity (Durham: Acumen, 2013) and Winrich Löhr, “Christianity as Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives of an Ancient Intellectual Project,” VC 64 (2010): 160–88. 23. Stephen J. Patterson, “Jesus Meets Plato: The Theology of the Gospel of Thomas,” in The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Origins: Essays on the Fifth Gospel (Leiden: Brill, 2013). For more on the influence of Stoicism on early Christianity, see Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, eds., Stoicism in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010) and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000). 24. Cicero, Leg. 1.22.59, Keys. 25. Seneca the Younger, Ep. 41:1–2, Grummere.

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The Dialogue of the Savior, another text often categorized as “Gnostic,” contains an additional parallel to Luke 17:20–21. Here, the passage contributes to the broader theme of the text, where the community seems to accept the idea of an in-dwelling divinity but has questions about the perishable body and life after death. Verse 6 reads, “Judas [said], ‘Tell [us, Lord], what was . . . before [the heaven and the] earth existed.’ The Lord said, ‘There was darkness and water and spirit upon [water]. And I say [to you, . . . what] you seek [after . . .] inquire after .  .  . [.  .  . is], within you.”26 Similar to Gos. Thom. 3, the passage makes a reference to external objects. However, in Dialogue of the Savior, the passage privileges the knowledge “within.” As the text continues, the Lord (the name Jesus is never used) explains to his disciples that the final stage of the soul’s journey and thus salvation in the Kingdom occurs after death, at the “time of dissolution” (peouoeiš empbōl ebol), which in Coptic is a euphemism for death.27 However, it becomes clear later in the text that salvation begins in earthly life because to know what is “within you” is to know your true origins, which is associated with the place of life and light. One must know his or her true origins in order to return to God, and this quest is more important than anything external. As we read in verse 35, “Whoever will not understand how he came will not understand how he will go.” Thus the Kingdom “within” corresponds to knowledge of the divine within, a knowledge to be obtained while living.28 In answer to the implicit question about why those who have achieved spiritual knowledge still die, the text emphasizes that while the elect are living, their final salvation is projected into the future in order that they might participate in the task of revelation.29 Mary, the disciple who receives high praise by Jesus in this text for her understanding, asks, “Tell me, Lord, why I have come to this place to profit or to forfeit?” (v. 60). Jesus responds, “You make clear the abundance of the revealer!” (v. 61). Thus Jesus explains that the disciples, and especially Mary, have already received salvation by their attainment of spiritual knowledge and by their baptism, but they must continue in their earthly existence as exemplars to others. In this way the disciples live into their salvation, thereby collapsing not only the temporal distinctions of past, present, and future but also the distinction between immanence and transcendence.

26. All Dialogue of the Savior translations from Stephen Emmel, trans., “The Dialogue of the Savior,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (ed. James Robinson; 3rd rev. ed.; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 246–55. 27. April D. DeConick, “The Dialogue of the Savior and the Mystical Sayings of Jesus,” VC 50 (1996): 178–81. The Dialogue of the Savior was discovered among other “Gnostic” texts in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The text is a Coptic translation of the original Greek. 28. DeConick, “The Dialogue of the Savior and the Mystical Sayings of Jesus,” 187. 29. Elaine Pagels and Helmut Koester, “Report on the Dialogue of the Savior (CG III, 5)” in Nag Hammadi and Gnosis: Papers Read at the First International Congress of Coptology, Cairo: December 1976 (ed. R. McL. Wilson; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 72.

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As these parallels to Luke 17:20–21 show, along with the Wisdom tradition and Stoic philosophy on human nature and the divine, the Kingdom “within” pertains to the interiority of those seeking salvation, and this is understood in varying ways. However, in all cases, this idea of “within” is identified indirectly and is not reducible to contrasts between inside and outside, present and future. Accessing an inner domain, where the Kingdom is said to dwell in Luke 7:20– 21, is thus not a matter of seeing the signs or knowing when it will come, but rather of contemplating an aspect of human nature that might be understood in worldly terms but always exceeds those terms. As with the arrival of the Kingdom in Jesus’s healings and exorcisms, a perception of what is “within” occurs in discontinuity with all that is presumed as abiding but is nevertheless available to all those who seek it. Similarly, the Wisdom tradition emphasizes that the Kingdom “within” is made manifest with the attainment of spiritual knowledge. The Stoics teach that coming to know the self is to know God and thus to be aware of an in-dwelling divinity. In all these examples, the Kingdom “within” is not simply an internal spiritual disposition but is rather indicative of a reality not limited to any category or temporality. The saying thus resists totalizing claims, a feature that is made even more clear when interpreted according to the productive tensions that occur between the saying and the messianic as a concept in Continental philosophy, where the theme of temporality in regard to Being comes to the fore.

The Saying and the Messianic: Benjamin and Derrida In his writings that make use of the messianic as a concept, Walter Benjamin engages metaphysics as arising out of the experience of transience rather than as part of a transcendental reality. In his conception, the messianic underscores the experience of transience without also upholding the historical conditions of this experience of transience.30 His most well-known statement to this effect is the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” a terse few paragraphs that presents the decay and demise of all that lives as the transience that is at the same time redemptive, in the here and now. He writes, Whereas, admittedly, the immediate Messianic intensity of the heart, of the inner man in isolation, passes through misfortune, as suffering. To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its

30. Annika Thiem, “Benjamin’s Messianic Metaphysics of Transience,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology (eds., Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons; New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 24.

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temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.31

In this passage Benjamin understands the messianic to be worldly existence in its finitude; indeed its eternal passing away is the site of the redemptive potential. Because all that lives must die, it holds the potential to be undone, to relinquish its claim on the present. In political terms, this would mean that the injustices of previous generations no longer have a hold on the current generation that it must rectify. Rather, the conditions of the world inevitably decline and are “undone” and as such they permanently retain the potential to be altered, to be made just. All of nature, including humankind, then, shares this messianic structure. In contrast to the Christian theologies that describe salvation as occurring to individuals and as represented by incorruptible flesh, beginning with Jesus’s resurrection as evidence of his messianic identity, Benjamin emphasizes the messianic as a concept with ethical and political dimensions,32 the structure of which is constitutively temporal, in that we perceive of the transience of the created world as occurring in a time continuum. The continuum of time is subject to interruptions, and even moments of arrest, in Benjamin’s thought on the messianic. I’ve discussed this aspect of his work in previous chapters. Here I’d like to highlight how Benjamin’s early writings attest to the development of his thought on messianic temporality, especially his essay “Metaphysics of Youth.” He writes, When the self, devoured by yearning for itself, devoured by the will to youth, devoured by lust for power over the decades to come, devoured by the longing to pass calmly through the days, kindled to dark fire by the pleasures of idleness— when this self nevertheless saw itself condemned to calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange time, and no ray of any time of immortality filtered down to it—then it began of itself to radiate. It knew: I am myself ray. Not the murky inwardness of the one who experiences, who calls me “I” and torments me with his intimacies, but ray of that other which seemed to oppress me and which after all I myself am: ray of time. . . . In that self to which events occur and which encounters human beings—friends, enemies, and lovers—in that self courses immortal time. The time of its own greatness elapses in it; it is time’s radiation and nothing else.33

By this, Benjamin states that because we ourselves constitute time, time has no eternal or immutable basis. To think of time in terms of the clock or calendar is to be “condemned,” he writes. In the face of death, described here as “no ray of any

31. Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” 312–13. 32. Thiem, “Benjamin’s Messianic Metaphysics of Transience,” 39. 33. Walter Benjamin, Early Writings (1910–1917) (ed. and trans. Howard Eiland; Cambridge: Belknap, 2011), 151.

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time of immortality filtered down,” the self realizes that “I myself am: ray of time.” Benjamin asserts that because we have the possibility of being released from time in the realization of our mortality, we have the potential of self-transcendence. This might be seen as an encounter with what is totally “other” and yet related to the self, an idea that Derrida develops, as I will discuss below. In a letter to his friend Carla Seligson in 1913, Benjamin writes, Almost everyone forgets that they themselves are the place where the spirit actualizes itself. But because they have made themselves inflexible, turned themselves into pillars of a building instead of vessels or bowls that can receive and shelter an even purer content, they despair of the actualization we feel within ourselves. This soul is something eternally actualizing. Every person, every soul that is born, can bring to life the new reality. We feel it in ourselves and we also want to establish it from outside of ourselves.34

Here Benjamin posits that the spirit is always in the process of “actualization” in the soul, a process that, if one can receive the spirit like a bowl or vessel, manifests a reality “in ourselves” and also “from outside ourselves.” In the same letter, he writes of feeling the great pleasure of his youth, one that he claims could be accessible to a person of any age. He states, “Today I felt the awesome truth of Christ’s words: Behold the Kingdom of God is not of this world, but within us.”35 In these passages Benjamin contemplates a sense of the present as a field in which a new reality emerging from what he terms “spirit” can come into being by virtue of time as constituted by thought. In his later piece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he names this concept “messianic time”36 and underscores its relation to historical memory and the possibility of redeeming the past. As in Luke 17:20–21, Benjamin illuminates the potential of the self to recognize the constraints to which a certain perception of reality takes shape. While the Pharisees want to know when the Kingdom will arrive, the Lukan Jesus says it will not come with anything observable but rather that it lies in the recognition that the knowledge they seek of God lies within, beyond the dictates of time, which have no bearing on the true condition of the self. Furthermore, as the disciples look to outward signs, Jesus says the Kingdom is “within”—or, it manifests within an earthly, transient reality but as discontinuous with it. The juxtaposition of the saying of a Kingdom “within” with reference to the Son of Man in the verse that follows—besides suggesting that when the Kingdom comes, its existence will no longer be questioned—upholds the theme of impending judgment and

34. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 55. 35. Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, 54. 36. Howard Eiland, “Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness,” in Walter Benjamin and Theology, 120–21.

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the implications of Jesus’s message to his audience. In this way the Lukan Jesus as Messiah points to the crisis that results from the recognition of the relation between the self and a noncontemporaneous Kingdom, revealing that the true self, in its worldly existence, holds the potential for a redemptive transcendence. Indeed, in Benjamin’s conception, it is within the self, with all its finitude, that the Kingdom comes. The parallels to Luke 17:20–21 in the Gospel of Thomas and Dialogue of the Savior develop this idea along the lines of an in-dwelling divine nature in humankind. Benjamin does not identify any deity as imbuing the human being with a divine nature, but he does point to the potential of self-transcendence as constitutive of the human being. Moreover, in referring to the actualization of the soul as something we feel “in ourselves and we also want to establish . . . from outside of ourselves,” he reflects Thomas logion 3: “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.” It is both of this world and not of this world, as in the Dialogue of the Savior, where the Lord tells Mary and the other disciples that before the oceans and the sky there was darkness and that what they seek is “within you.” Their final salvation occurs after death, but in the meantime, they are mediums of the revelation in their earthly existence, because they have already secured a preliminary salvation by their baptism and their pursuit of spiritual knowledge. Their future salvation is already here and now, because what they seek is “within.” In Benjaminian terms, this knowledge of the Kingdom is an act of selfactualization, in which the inevitable change and demise of all that lives points toward the potential within all creation for redemption, as Benjamin describes the messianic in “Theologico-Political Fragment.” While Benjamin’s thought reinterprets the metaphysical categories of sacred and profane, eternal and transient, Jacques Derrida expands on Benjamin’s thought with the purpose of exposing the non-ground on which all metaphysical discourse is based. Because metaphysical discourse occurs in language, this nonground that Derrida identifies precedes the absolute presence that metaphysics presupposes. As I outlined in chapter 2, Saussure’s work in linguistics demonstrates how the signifier and the signified (the word and the concept it represents, respectively) have only an arbitrary assignation. Derrida builds upon this idea to demonstrate that because the signifier is subject to repetition, it systematically cannot signify a pure presence. Derrida names this phenomenon différance, a term that notes both the difference between the signifier and the signified and the endless deferral of meaning that constitutes the relationship. Différance is not a concept per se because it is not defined by an opposition to something else; it represents both difference and deferral, but is not reducible to either.37 This kind of double movement in language of revealing and concealing—that something is and is not—disrupts metaphysics and provides the entry point for Derrida’s project of contending with what exceeds metaphysical determinations,

37. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 110.

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what he terms the tout autre, the totally other, that, as an encounter with the self, is the unstable and endlessly deferred non-basis of Being. In this way, the project of “deconstruction is, in itself,” Derrida says, “a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, or motivates it. Deconstruction is therefore vocation—a response to a call.”38 In Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Derrida’s exploration of the implications of the tout autre attends to the concept of the gift, which in its absolute form would require it never be acknowledged as such or reciprocated. To identify a gift as such destroys it because it thereby becomes implicated in an economy of exchange that abolishes its “givenness.” This concept of the absolute gift relates to Derrida’s conception of time, for which he sees no content. He writes, The temporalization of time (memory, present, anticipation; retention, protention, imminence of the future; “ecstases”’ and so forth) always sets in motion the process of a destruction of the gift: through keeping, restitution, reproduction, the anticipatory expectation or apprehension that grasps or comprehends in advance.39

By this, Derrida asserts that to be aware of time as a construct is to temporalize it—to insert oneself into time—and that this act accommodates an economy of exchange by setting the conditions of receiving and anticipating a gift, which consequently destroys the gift. Within such a horizon of expectation and reciprocation, one can never encounter that which is tout autre, or wholly other. Because the basis of human subjectivity is language, and all languages shift verb tenses to position the speaker in time,40 such an absolute gift and encounter with the tout autre is impossible. In Derrida’s thought, this impossibility nevertheless sets the conditions for the event. Derrida further develops the idea of deconstruction as a vocation, or a call, in The Gift of Death. Referring to the use Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio) makes of Matt 6:6, “your Father who is in secret,” Derrida writes, “God looks at me and I don’t see him and it is on the basis of this gaze that singles me out . . . that my responsibility comes into being.”41 The gaze of that which sees in secret, Derrida argues, sees that which Derrida cannot see or wish to disclose, that which can only be exposed by the gaze of the “wholly other.” On the basis of this secret gaze Derrida does not act in autonomy and “cannot preempt

38. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 118. 39. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit: Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 14. 40. See the discussion in chapter 4 on Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. Originally published as Problémes de lingusitique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 41. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (trans. David Wills; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91.

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my own initiative . . . [and must make] decisions, decisions that will nevertheless be mine and which I alone will have to answer for.”42 This gaze is dissymmetrical: It knows my very secret even when I myself don’t see it and even though the Socratic “know yourself ” seems to install the philosophical within the lure of reflexivity, in the disavowal of a secret that is always for me alone, that is to say, for the other: for me who never sees anything in it, and hence for the other alone to whom, through the dissymmetry, a secret is revealed. For the other my secret will no longer be a secret.

Derrida understands an encounter with the absolute other to be constitutive of his identity and any action he might take because there is an innate division within the self, he seems to say, wherein there is a summons to reckon with that which is him and not him. In the indeterminacy of the secret that constitutes Being, of that which is “always for me alone, that it is to say, for the other,” this formulation undoes the metaphysical categories of presence and absence on which a notion of Being is traditionally based. Furthermore, in his reference to the Delphic maxim “know yourself,” he concedes that self-knowledge is not a reflexive process but rather is attainable via the “secret” within that is only “for me” and known only through an encounter with that which is totally other. Derrida’s idea of Being, then, disrupts formulations that involve preconceived notions of “identity” to point toward that which is at the center of Being but which is “other” and suppressed within an individual.43 What he terms différance can be seen as the site of interiority that I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, one that escapes totalizing claims and resists temporalization. It also cannot be encapsulated by any philosophical position. Derrida says, It is true that I interrogate the idea of an eschaton or telos in the absolute formulations of classical philosophy. But that does not mean I dismiss all forms of Messianic or prophetic eschatology. I think that all genuine questioning is summoned by a certain type of eschatology, though it is impossible to define this eschatology in philosophical terms.44

In Derridean terms, the Kingdom “within” is therefore a summons to reckon with a radical alterity that constitutes Being itself, one that is groundless in that it has no stable governing referent and no transcendental signifier. Reading Luke 17:20–21 with Derrida, the saying posits a groundlessness for the interior realm in which the Kingdom is found. If the Kingdom lies “within,” in Derrida’s formulation, this interiority has no temporal horizon and is marked by an insoluble disjuncture within the self, one that as différance, yields no stable

42. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 91. 43. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 106. 44. Ibid., 119.

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meaning or significance other than that given by a context, in the system of signified meanings to which it is assigned. In this way, the Kingdom is both inside of you and outside of you, as in Gos. Thom. 3. That passage continues, “When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father.” Here, as I indicated earlier, we see Stoicizing reformulations of the Delphic maxim. However, in Derrida’s reinterpretation of the Delphic maxim in regard to God who sees in secret, he identifies self-knowledge as recognition of the false premise of all representation, even that which comprises presence. With no temporal horizon, the Kingdom in Luke 17:20–21 is always “within” as constitutive of Being itself but cannot be actualized because of the impossibility of suspending all systems of categorization and identification.

The Saying and the Messianic: Agamben While sharing Derrida’s interest in language and temporality in regard to Being, Giorgio Agamben at times has tried to distance himself from Derrida’s project of deconstruction, which, because of its focus on aporias, might be understood to render a paralysis that he seeks to overcome.45 In Language and Death, he explores the negative foundations of Being as defined in the tradition of Western philosophy, construed as humankind’s essential characteristics of possessing both the faculty of language and the faculty of death. To be both mortal and speaking is, in the words of Hegel, to be a negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is” because in life a human being always approaches death and in speaking is always dependent on language, which as a medium for thought precludes consciousness as purely present to itself.46 Agamben does not think such a characterization necessitates a lack; rather he sees a potentiality in such a negative foundation, one that he develops in his exploration of the concept of the Logos. Relating the problem of Being with language, Agamben associates the Logos of the Christian tradition with the silence of God as it is described in the early Christian writings of the Corpus Hermeticum, wherein God is invoked as “unspeakable and inexpressible” and “spoken with the voice of silence.”47 Seeing silence as a negative expression of language, Agamben notes that in the “Gnostic” Valentinian fragment Excerpta ex Theodato, silence is described as “the mother of all things that have been emitted from the Abyss. .  .  . That which it has understood, it has called incomprehensible.”48 The Abyss—which in early Christian literature is the figure of the dwelling of the Logos in Arche, the place of language—is therefore understood

45. De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 188. 46. Giorgio Agamen, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xii. 47. Agamen, Language and Death, 63. 48. Ibid., 63.

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by silence but deemed incomprehensible. Thus the Logos is an ungrounded dwelling constituting the revelation of the Christian tradition. Agamben marshals this conception as a resource for thinking past the negative foundations of metaphysics, to see the incomprehensible as the center of comprehension itself. In his thought, the silence that understands what is incomprehensible reveals a potentiality in the negative foundation of Being. That is to say, in Christian terms, that the Logos as the self-emptying of God to the world represents a paradigm for creation, not a transcendent intervention for the purpose of salvation. Put another way, all that is is formed with a negative foundation, with no positive content except that assigned by the world, with language. This negative foundation that constitutes all matter is the divine.49 While the negative foundation of Being might form one idea of God for Agamben, in The Coming Community, he envisions God slightly differently, as the “taking place of the entities, their innermost exteriority.” In the “determination and limit” of everything is that which transcends and exposes everything.50 The good, or God, is not part of another realm but things in themselves as they are, by which he means without the representations of the things. This idea of “taking place” or “whatever being” informs Agamben’s notion of “potentiality” as the proper understanding of Being. The only thing that humans have to be is their own potentiality, and thus “the only evil consists . . . in the decision to remain in a deficit of existence, to appropriate the power to not-be as a substance and a foundation beyond existence; or rather .  .  . to regard potentiality itself, which is the most proper mode of human existence, as a fault that must always be repressed.”51 Here he highlights the political implications of his thinking as he imagines humanity adopting singularities without identity. They would have a common and exposed singularity—“if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.”52 This, he says, would relieve humans of the ultimate frustration of individuality, which is life “in all its nakedness,”53 which they continually seek to overcome. He imagines the creation of such a community as the political task of the current generation: to create a community that exists without that which privileges individuality as a representation of different categories and identities. This move he says is a profanation in its revelation of things and people as only thus, and for Agamben, this is the only possibility of salvation. He writes, “The world—insofar as it is absolutely, irreparably profane—is God.”54

49. Colby Dickinson and Adam Kotsko, eds., Agamben’s Coming Philosophy: Finding a New Use for Theology (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 102–05. 50. Agamben, The Coming Community, 15. 51. Ibid., 44. 52. Ibid., 65. 53. Ibid., 64. 54. Ibid., 90.

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The only situation in which such a state of being might emerge is messianic time, a concept Agamben develops most fully in The Time That Remains.55 He offers some of the political implications of this concept in The Church and the Kingdom, an address to the Roman Catholic Church in Paris. Speaking to the church in the church, he says the church has lost is messianic vocation, that it functions like any other worldly institution instead of being aware of itself as a sojourner and foreigner, as it once claimed. The sojourning of the church does not indicate any chronological time but, as in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, it is a time after the resurrection in which another time transforms time from within. This is, Agamben says, “the time which we need to end time, to confront our customary image of time and liberate ourselves from it.” He explains, In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have.56

Thus to live in messianic time is to seize hold of the church’s vocation in which it is transformed to be made for a new use. The new use is not exclusively in the service of the ultimate things, but rather allows for proper consideration of the penultimate ones, those concerns and actions that compose the everyday. Ultimate realities, Agamben says, take place in penultimate ones. Yet the ultimate realities suspend and transform the penultimate ones such that an ultimate reality both tests and bears witness to the penultimate.57 To read Agamben with Luke 17:20–21 is to conceive of a Kingdom “within” as that sphere of interiority defined in negative terms. It is neither “here nor there” and cannot be observed with signs. It bears no indicators of the exterior world but rather is a “taking place” of the self. In not being defined by anything external to it, the Kingdom “within” reveals the self in its pure immanence, as a manifestation of God, on which terms it relates to the same potentiality in everything else. In Gos. Thom. 3, that the Kingdom is both “inside of you, and it is outside of you” emphasizes a parallelism between exterior and interior that precludes seeing the Kingdom as purely transcendent, and this knowledge, as the passage concludes, is the knowledge of one’s self as a son of God. In Gos. Thom. 3, the Kingdom manifests itself in the world—in human beings as much as all of creation—in the shared negative foundation of Being, which Agamben sees as “potentiality.”

55. See chapter 2 for Agamben’s interpretation of Paul’s messianic time. 56. Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (trans. Leland de la Durantaye; London: Seagull, 2012), 12. 57. Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 18–19.

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In another iteration of the negative foundation of Being, the saying in Dialogue of the Savior begins with the disciples asking the Lord what was “before [the heaven and the] earth existed,” to which the Lord says that there was “darkness and water and spirit upon [water]” and that what they seek is within. This description recalls the creation account of Genesis 1 and the Hymn to the Logos in the Gospel of John, where the preexistent as Logos is identified with Jesus and the creation of all things. In conceiving of the Logos as an ungrounded dwelling understood only in the silence that marks the incomprehensibility of any origin, including that of language, the Kingdom “within” presents the negative foundation of both humankind and creation. In the broader context of the Dialogue of the Savior, the saying also points toward the disciples as having already achieved salvation because of their attainment of spiritual wisdom and that they must continue to live on earth in such a state for the purpose of manifesting the revelation, or for attending to the “penultimate” things. Here, earthly salvation, procured by attaining knowledge of the Kingdom “within,” transforms the disciples from their worldly representations to bearers of the divine.

Conclusion The power of the Kingdom is transformative, as evidenced by Jesus’s healings and exorcisms, but it is not exclusively transcendent. It manifests itself in the world with its discontinuity with the world and therefore always retains an excess that escapes all classifications. As Benjamin understands the messianic, it is a temporal structure that represents “the spirit” that seeks actualization within each person’s soul as that which can bring forth “the new reality.” This “new reality” is the potentiality of the past to be experienced in the present. He sees the impermanence of the world as signaling this potential for redemption and that as such, time is constitutively messianic. Because humans constitute themselves in time, human beings are the agents of redemption. Derrida pushes the messianic structure of time further in his non-concept of différance and the lack of ground upon which Being is based. For him, a Kingdom “within” denotes that which bears no content and yet constitutes the encounter with the tout autre, which cannot take place within a temporal horizon. In the impossibility of a time in which one confronts a radical alterity, which would be a final act of redemption, time reveals a messianic structure, one that is never fulfilled and yet always retains its possibility. Agamben sees an infinite potentiality in the groundlessness of Being. For him, it points toward that which is beyond all worldly representations, a conception of God that is not transcendent but borne in the pure immanence of creation. Employing the messianic in different but related ways, each philosopher offers another angle that disrupts the governing binaries of what a Kingdom “within” might mean. These philosophical positions illuminate the Kingdom as exceeding all worldly representations and constituting a temporal structure at the foundation of Being itself. As the Kingdom comes in healings and exorcisms, in the Seed Growing Secretly, or in leavened bread, it exists “within you” in the thought that

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constitutes Being. This thought understands itself as positing its own existence, as existing in time, and this functions as a constraint as long as it occludes the reality that consciousness cannot be present to itself. This negative foundation of authentic being, Derrida says, allows an opening for that which is tout autre and indeterminate. For Agamben, such a relation is the signature of potentiality that is God. Benjamin, whose work on the messianic undergirds both Agamben’s and Derrida’s, is most helpful when he writes “I am: ray of time,” suggesting that the Kingdom as both present and to come points to the redemption of the world as emerging in the only true conception of time, which is to say, there is only now.

Chapter 7 CONCLUSION

The author of the Gospel of Mark identifies Jesus as the Messiah from the first verse, after which he connects him to John the Baptist and John’s call to repentance, concluding the prologue before Jesus’s ministry with the statement uttered by Jesus that “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has drawn near” (καὶ λέγων ὅτι Πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ). Expressed here by the Greek word καιρὸς, meaning “season” or “opportune time,” instead of χρόνος, meaning time as a progression of instants, Mark suggests that time is a structure of experience or consciousness and not an endless unfolding of discrete moments. As I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters, the construal of time as coming to an end—as pressing in on itself—in its early Christian context attests to a hope for Israel’s vindication and restoration as a response to Roman rule of Palestine, for which early Christian writers drew upon the symbolic vocabulary and imagery of apocalypticism. The Continental philosophers Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben reinterpret this conception of time as the “messianic” in their own writings, in which they propose, in overlapping and sometimes divergent ways, the extent to which the aporetic structure of time constitutes human subjectivity and creates possibilities for the conditions therein. In bringing these disparate texts together, I offer an interpretation of time’s fulfillment in the Kingdom of God as the revelation that the human being constitutes itself in time by thought, and that the Kingdom signifies that which exceeds thought. To release the hold of time is to bring the Kingdom: a process both destructive and restorative. The puzzling disjuncture of time in the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly, the subject of chapter 3 in this book, suggests the futility of the concept of time in a continuum, especially with regard to the question of when the Kingdom will come. Here the Markan Jesus describes the mysterious growth of seeds alongside the image of the harvest as referring to the day of judgment, juxtaposing the presence of the Kingdom in the seed with the coming of the Kingdom on the day of judgment. While some commentators emphasize the “moment” the scene elicits as undergirding Jesus’s commands to action and discipleship, I argue that it conveys a conception of time concerned with salvation, not discipleship. In comparisons with the contemporaneous apocalypse 4 Ezra, the agricultural metaphors of the parable relate to childbirth metaphors, offering the insight that although signs may be evident of the coming Kingdom, even these break down as

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surefire indicators. Thus both texts indicate a tension between divine providence and human agency, leading to the urgency of the question of when the Kingdom will come. The question is never directly answered in 4 Ezra, while in Mark, even Jesus cannot predict definitively when the Kingdom will come. However, because Jesus is a self-authenticating agent of revelation in the Markan narrative and represents the immanent arrival of the Kingdom even without predicting when it will arrive, time in the parable is compressed into a negative entity. Because the Kingdom’s arrival is both present and future, its advent exceeds all ordinary categories of time. In my reading of Benjamin’s thought with its intertextualities with the parable, the messianic expresses itself in the transience of the created world, in the seed growing and reaching fulfillment. For Benjamin, the growth and gradual passing away of all that lives introduces an a-temporal element into temporality, in that this passing away is eternal. This a-temporal element within temporality is constitutive of all creation even though it originates outside that realm. Thus the growth of the seed occurs in time but as a process that occurs apart from human activity; it is a force not of the world and beyond the thought of the farmer, who recognizes only that the wheat, like time in Mark 1:15, has been “fulfilled.” In Derrida’s writings, the messianic represents an encounter with a radical alterity. As such, that which is wholly “other” cannot be anticipated and yet never arrives because no encounter is unmediated by the preconditions of our experience and preconceptions. Understood in this way, the messianic always leaves open an impossible possibility, one that, even in its impossibility, sets the conditions for the encounter. Derrida’s thought on the messianic illuminates the absence of content that is the secret growth of the seed as the encounter with the wholly “other” marking the event of the parable. In this context, Jesus’s telling of the Seed Growing Secretly points to the Kingdom of God as representing an irreducible relationality that is beyond all categories of thought, including time, but is constitutive of Being. Agamben, by contrast, in his rereading of the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans, sees the messianic in more content-specific terms, as the νυν καιρός or “Now-time.” This “time within time” is that which makes historical time present such that it can be seized. The messianic time of “now” reveals the constructed nature of linear time and can be extended to expose the false premise upon which all systems of power are based. The messianic for Agamben nullifies all conditions of the world without doing away with them, revealing that all of creation is a blank space that he calls “bare life” or “pure potentiality.” The fulfillment of the wheat in the Seed Growing Secretly thus represents the “Now-time.” The growth of the seed occurs apart from human knowledge, holding within linear time another time, one that the farmer can seize in the moment of sending for the sickle, because the wheat, like time, is “fulfilled.” Thus the farmer illuminates the futility of the question of when the harvest, or eschaton, will come because the seed, and by extension all creation, already always contains its salvation. The Parable of the Great Feast, the subject of chapter 4, attests to temporality as it relates to Jesus’s meal fellowship as representative of the Kingdom of God. The parable focuses on the social and religious customs of meals, which by the

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first century CE were ritualized events that established and reinforced social status and boundaries. The setting of the feast within the Lukan narrative also evokes associations of the eschatological feast, which was reserved for the righteous, described in Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The feast itself, however, never takes place, and the parable concerns itself not only with upending certain social and religious customs but also with the timing of the feast. When it is time for the feast, the men the host first invited refuse to come because of their obligations to land, to a wife, and to oxen just bought. To find guests, the host’s slave then works his way down the socioeconomic scale, moving from the streets of the tradespeople to the narrow lanes of the poor and finally to the areas outside the city walls where he finds the “crippled, blind, and lame” who come to the feast. My analysis takes account of this group of disabled individuals as a category of particular weakness and vulnerability in antiquity, which makes a stark contrast to the unblemished and pious ones who, as among the righteous, expect to be included in the eschatological banquet. To replace the ones who would presumably attend such a feast with those most despised in society, the parable describes a reversal that hinges on the opportunity created by the “crippled, blind, and lame” coming when they are called, rather than refusing because they are engaged in other matters. In this sense, the Kingdom of God occurs within a time that is now, which is a disruption that undermines the religious and social customs governing the meal. Derrida’s use of the concept of “hospitality” is instructive in illuminating some of the implications of the parable’s focus on time. Consistent with Derrida’s interest in aporias, he conceives of hospitality as consisting of an absolute law that, although impossible to achieve in a concrete context, sets the conditions under which hospitality operates. The absolute of hospitality would offer a home or other resources to another without any expectation of reciprocity, and it would risk the scarcity of one’s own resources. By contrast, hospitality in a Western context expresses itself as a patriarchal economy based on reciprocity at any cost, whereby ethics and morality are marginalized for the sake of maintaining reciprocity. As I read Derrida, the presence of the most despised of society at the eschatological banquet reflects no concern for reciprocity but rather the guests come in their current states of low social status and are not healed or transformed. In recognizing that the time of the feast is now, they set new conditions for hospitality, ones that exceed the economy of reciprocity. Agamben’s notion of “pure potentiality” offers another resource for interpreting the Parable of the Great Feast. In this concept Agamben imagines an exposed state of existence for humankind, one in which human beings no longer designate social and/or personal identities for themselves that precipitate a will-to-power. In this exposed state without any worldly representations, a human being would reveal his or her transcendence as a pure immanence. In the parable’s abolishment of the social hierarchy in the context of the Great Feast, the guests retain their particularity, but that particularity does not bear any meaning in itself other than the “pure potentiality” that is Being. In the mouth of Jesus, the parable thereby represents what Judith Butler calls an “insurrectionary process,” by which social forms are reiterated to signify new meanings. In this reading, the messianic is that

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force acting within a given context such that the unstable structure of the social form is exposed and transformed. The implications of the now of the Great Feast come more fully into focus with the work of Benjamin, who describes the messianic as a “weak” force. In regard to time, the messianic is the fulfillment of the past in the present by way of a “constellation” between a past moment and a present one. Benjamin called this meeting of historical periods the Jetztzeit, or “Now-time.” Benjamin’s “Nowtime” envisions the possibility that within humankind is the capacity to escape the entrapment of the linear continuum of time. As an example of the weak force that can manifest itself in a “constellation,” he observed that in different historical periods, proletarian strikes have overturned state power through nonviolent means. Such actions expose the myth upon which human sovereignty is based, a myth that justifies itself with the concept of “historical progress.” Because it depends on violence to be maintained, state power has no ontological basis and is therefore susceptible to being overturned through a “weak” force that neither makes nor suspends the law. In reading the parable intertextually with Benjamin’s thought, I argue that Jesus’s telling of the parable represents a Benjaminian divine violence similar to what undergirds a proletarian strike in its abolishment of social norms in a redemptive moment that is now and disruptive of time in its ordinary sense and constraints. Furthermore, the parable also functions as what Benjamin identifies as an expiatory act that accompanies an act of divine violence, relieving the most despised of society from the guilt of sinfulness that was imposed on them by others. In recognizing that the time for the banquet is now, the “poor, crippled, blind, and lame,” and anyone else who might join them, disengage themselves from their entrapment in linear time and the social and religious customs it upholds to attend the messianic banquet of the Kingdom of God, where redemption awaits. The Parable of the Night Watchers, which I interpret in chapter 5, is the most explicitly political of the sayings in this study. Given its context in chapter 13 of the Gospel of Mark, which is indirectly interpreting the Jewish war with Rome, it calls upon apocalyptic language and imagery to assert Jesus’s messianic identity and to conceive of the Kingdom of God as the basis of hope in resisting the powers that seek to destroy the Jews. Reference to the parable of the fig tree in Mark 11 and its prediction of the destruction of the temple reinforce this emphasis, as does the reference to Jesus at Gethsemane with the descriptions of four watches of the night. A “politics of the cross,” as Ched Myers describes, is therefore in the foreground of the idea of watching for the householder’s return, a metaphor for awaiting the return of the Messiah. In this way the parable urges listeners to anticipate a time in which the powers-that-be will cease to be victorious and Israel’s redemption will be secure. That the figure of the watchman is a slave awaiting the householder adds yet another dimension to the parable’s meaning. With more than a third of the Roman population of the first century CE enslaved, the power dynamic between master and slave was one-sided and maintained by violence and fear. Only forms of resistance outside of the master-slave relationship held the potential for any results, and thus

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the parable’s subversion of the master-slave narrative is particularly effective in imagining the Messiah’s arrival as signaling the end of an evil age. In reading the parable allegorically, I interpret its subversive content to correspond to the social resistance to Roman rule that characterizes the prophetic and messianic movements of Judea in the first century CE, including the movement associated with Jesus of Nazareth. Benjamin’s criticism of historical materialism illuminates the parable as a reflection on how time functions in a revolutionary movement. Citing the July 1830 revolution in France in which revolutionaries shot at clock towers to stop time, he claims that as workers overthrew the ruling regime, they recognized that they had abolished the continuum that had maintained state power. Calendars and days of remembrance have meaning insofar as a ruling regime designates them as such; at any point, an event may occur that overthrows the regime and thus reestablishes days as meaningful. In the potential of time to be punctuated, Benjamin writes, it retains the possibility of redeeming the past in the present. Thus moments in historical periods that may be separated by thousands of years can form a “constellation,” a Jetztzeit, or “Now-time.” In the parable, as the slave awaits his true master, the Messiah, he does so in the context of the four watches of Gethsemane, forming a “constellation” between the present and the past. In living messianically in this moment of now, the slave will act as the agent of Israel’s redemption when he opens the door to the Messiah. Derrida’s use of the messianic offers another angle, one focused even more explicitly on the function of time. His thought on time emphasizes the gap between consciousness and language: once a moment is named, it is the past. Because time is impossible, or aporetic, it cannot be experienced as such. However, the aporetic structure of time creates both the necessity of decision, because time as a structure is irreducible, and the possibility of new conditions, because a decision must be made over and over again. Because of the inescapable delay of time, the concept of now is impossible and yet as such it reflects the true structure of time. In relation to the parable, Derrida’s thought underscores the slave’s awaiting the Messiah as that which will manifest the now. The slave does not view the present as an empty transition between past and future but recognizes the moment—the Messiah’s arrival—as now, as time “fulfilled.” The when of the Messiah’s arrival becomes a protracted now, in that it is a moment of decision that holds the potential for that which is new, and thus brings the redemption of Israel. Agamben also conceives of time as aporetic but describes its redemptive potential as kairology. This term draws upon the Greek word καιρός to view the structure of time as containing another time within it, a time that can be grasped by humankind in freedom, thus exposing the false premise of all worldly representation, including that of time as a series of instants. To live messianically is to live in the now, a state of being that undergirds the impulse to revolt. To undertake a revolutionary action, then, is to seize the now that is the impossible experience of time and that will disrupt time in the linear continuum that sustains the powers-that-be. Agamben’s use of the messianic illuminates the doorkeeper as one who, watching as Jesus did at Gethsemane, grasps the καιρός in its moment of

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fulfillment, realizing that it must be him who will open the door to the Messiah, and that it is he who will liberate himself. The final Jesus saying under consideration, Luke 17:20–21, speaks of a Kingdom “within” and invites an exploration of temporality as it relates to a concept of interiority. The saying offers a number of interpretational possibilities, given the semantic range of ἐντός, the passage’s apparent discontinuity within the Lukan narrative, and the temporal ambiguity introduced by the juxtaposition of the Kingdom “within” with a description in the next verse of the coming of the Son of Man. Some of those interpretational possibilities derive from the Wisdom tradition and Stoic philosophy, both of which concern themselves with the idea of an in-dwelling divinity and that self-knowledge can achieve unity with the divine. Despite the variations, all these iterations of a Kingdom “within” describe a domain of interiority indirectly, as irreducible to any category, as of this world and not of this world, a feature that is further elucidated in different ways with respect to temporality in the thought of Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben. Benjamin’s thought on the messianic in regard to temporality stems from his focus on transience. Because all that lives suffers death and decay, all the conditions of the created world can be undone and hold the potential to be made just. Naming this relation between the eternal and transient the “messianic,” he saw it as constitutively temporal because the transience of the created world occurs in a continuum of time. However, that continuum is subject to interruptions or arrest, because time is a construct of the consciousness and has no exterior and immutable basis. In the realization of our mortality, Benjamin writes, we recognize the ability to be released from time and because of this, human beings are capable of self-transcendence. In terms of Luke 17:20–21, Benjamin’s concept of the messianic corresponds to a Kingdom “within” as an illumination of this potential of self-transcendence that occurs by recognizing time as a construct of the consciousness and therefore a constraint to self-transcendence. Derrida expands on Benjamin’s work to expose the non-ground upon which all metaphysical discourse is based. Demonstrating that because of the endless deferral of meaning in any system of signification, there is no possibility of pure presence, Derrida formulates the non-concept of différance. This term denotes what exceeds metaphysical determinations, which Derrida describes as the tout autre, the “wholly other,” which is the encounter with radical alterity that constitutes the human subject. This could be called the domain of interiority of a Kingdom “within,” except that it lacks all content. To Derrida, God is that which sees him in secret, that which knows his secret, which he thinks is for himself but is only for him insofar as it is seen by the tout autre. In Derrida’s thought, a Kingdom “within” is the call of the tout autre that constitutes the self but is not of the self. Like Derrida, Agamben focuses on the negative foundations of metaphysics, but he resists the assertion that the negative foundation necessitates a lack. Taking up the concept of the Logos from the early Christian tradition, he notes that in some early Christian texts it has a dwelling place in Arche, the place of language, where it is deemed incomprehensible but understood in silence. The Logos is therefore an ungrounded revelation that is at the center of comprehension itself,

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which is language. To Agamben, the silence that understands the incomprehensible points to a potential in the negative foundation of Being. He deems this potential the divine, in that all creation shares a negative foundation and has no positive content except that which is assigned to it by worldly representations. The human being only has to be this potential, a state that occurs with Agamben’s concept of messianic time, in which we are liberated from the customary perception of time and transform ourselves in our current contexts for new purposes. In regard to Luke 17:20–21, Agamben’s thought suggests some further implications of a Kingdom neither “here nor there,” but “within.” It is made manifest in pure immanence rather than being a transcendent entity. As the silence that marks the incomprehensibility of any origin, including that of language, the “pure potentiality” of all that lives is God. In each of the sayings of this study, Jesus, the one sent by the Father,1 speaks of time as having no meaning other than that of being “fulfilled.” In the Seed Growing Secretly, the Markan Jesus emphasizes that the farmer “knows not how” the seed grows but can only observe the signs that indicate the harvest. The unseen process of growth that is the work of God occurs outside of any time known to the farmer and yet brings the wheat to fulfillment. In the parable’s use of the harvest as a metaphor for the eschaton, or day of judgment, it emphasizes that the workings of God relate God to humankind and that this is a truth that is not of this world but is made known by the Messiah. In the Parable of the Great Feast, the eschatological banquet includes only those who are free of the dictates of time. Salvation comes only to those who realize that the world precludes their inclusion at the feast. The parable subtext is that there is no present time, only now, which is a time to heed the call of God. The Parable of the Night Watchers develops this idea further, where the protracted now of the slave anticipating the arrival of his master, the Messiah, is an allegory for an insurrectionary act that redeems Israel. Finally, in Luke 17:20–21, a Kingdom “within” points to a domain of interiority as a site by which one “knows” God, but this knowledge arrives not with signs but with an acceptance of one’s divine origins, which exceed all categories of thought, including time. All these sayings illustrate, in different ways, that to posit one’s self in time—to exist in past, present, future—is to institute obstructions to the truth of life, which Jesus the Messiah reveals. The philosophical perspectives of Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben that inform my interpretations take Being as it appears in the world as foundational for their investigations, and all move in greater or lesser degrees toward a conception of the divine—one that is atheistic—to push past the aporias they encounter. While the interactions between the philosophers’ use of the messianic as a concept and the role of Jesus as Messiah in the early Christian texts may advance an understanding of temporality in both contexts, I want to emphasize that the sayings of Jesus the Messiah take Being in the world as a presupposition only insofar as it is a starting point from which to reorient the audience. As my analysis shows,

1. John 20:21 reads, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

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the sociohistorical setting of the sayings is critical to understanding how the parable is effective rhetorically as a reversal to the social norms of the day, and in the case of this study in particular, the conventional understanding of time, both in its ancient and in its contemporary contexts, as a linear continuum. However, the Kingdom of God that Jesus the Messiah proclaims “is not from this world” (John 18:36), and therefore his message continually points beyond the dictates of all that appears in the world. The French phenomenologist Michel Henry is instructive on this point. In the seventeenth century, he explains, philosophers of consciousness showed that consciousness is nothing other than “the act of self-showing grasped in itself, pure manifestation, the Truth.”2 The representation of all objects is, therefore, the phenomenon of consciousness, which means to place the object before oneself. All that is “outside” is the world, and consciousness refers to the truth of the world. As a consequence, Henry argues, any object that can be shown is always different from that object, because it only shows itself by the means of revealing specific to the world. However the object might be perceived may differ from the truth of that object. “The world’s truth,” Henry writes, “never contains the justification for or the reason behind what it allows to show itself in that truth and thus allows ‘to be’—inasmuch as to be is to be shown.”3 Because of this limitation, in which consciousness mediates all that shows itself, anything that appears to us is not perceived as it is in truth. This “outside” that reveals the truth of the world occurs in the horizon of time, where we experience a future in which we project ourselves; a present, in which we experience our current setting; and a past, in which all that has appeared recedes. This horizon of three temporal dimensions contains the world and our perceptions of it.4 Time, then, is the construct of consciousness that is the world, in which we conceive of what is in front of us outside of itself. Henry explains that any object we perceive is therefore, fractured, broken, cleaved in two, stripped of its own reality—in such a way that, now deprived of that reality that was its own, emptied of its flesh, it is no longer outside itself, in the world’s Image, but just its own skin, a simple image, in effect, a transparent film, a surface without thickness, a piece of naked externality offered to a gaze that slides over it without being able to penetrate into it or reach anything but empty appearance.5

Thus the appearance of anything we see destroys the thing it makes appear; this process is the continuum of time. We experience time as a passage, a slipping

2. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (trans. Susan Emanuel; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14. 3. Henry, I Am the Truth, 16. 4. Ibid., 17–18. 5. Ibid., 18.

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away of what is known and perceived by us. However, there is no present, because everything that appears before us is already “outside” itself; it is already devoid of its Being. The truth of the world, Henry argues, appears in time, and time destroys.6 Because phenomenology reduces Being to the truth of the world, God cannot be equated with Being. Indeed the word Being belongs to the world, to phenomenology, and to human language. As such, Henry argues that all ways of speaking of God must point toward a truth other than that of the world. This is the truth of life as self-revelation. Henry argues, If Life reveals itself not only in the sense that it achieves revelation but also because it is itself that it reveals in such a revelation, then Life is possible only because its mode of revelation ignores the world and its “outside.” Living is not possible in the world. Living is possible only outside the world, where another Truth reigns, another way of revealing. This way of revealing is that of Life.7

For Henry, Jesus as Messiah represents a radical phenomenology of Life, which is that “Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ, and for man.”8 Life, as it self-generates in God and generates the Son, is the Life from which any human has birth. The essence of the human being, for Henry, is not the human as he or she appears in the world but as the essence of the divine—“that which makes him [or her] one of the living, and that alone.”9 The fulfillment of time that marks the emergence of the Kingdom of God brings an end to time in a continuum. Time is “fulfilled” in the sense of coming to completion, to achieving its end, which Jesus describes as evidenced in a seed that grows secretly, as a feast that welcomes those who are despised, in the night watchman who acts in his freedom, and the awareness of the abiding and constitutive relation between God and humankind that is the Kingdom itself. In all these representations of the Kingdom of God, there is no past, present, or future, but only the truth that time—in which the world appears and disappears— destroys, and that the truth of life comes in the experience that is not of this world but is now. To live messianically, or in the Benjaminian Jetztzeit, is to deprive time of its power, which, as Henry illustrates of phenomenology, is the foundation upon which all worldly representations are based. In terms of Christian theology, to deprive time of its power is to disavow the truth of the world and to see one’s self as among the weakest and most exposed of the world. Such an act brings one into unity with all the vanquished of history and with Jesus of Nazareth himself, the crucified one. In A Passion for God, Johann Baptist Metz writes of Christianity as

6. 7. 8. 9.

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 29–30. Italics in original. Ibid., 101. Ibid.

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a “dangerous memory” that, as an expression of a God of the living and the dead, has a rich resource in apocalyptic thought: For the apocalyptic, God is the one who has not yet fully appeared, the still outstanding mystery of time. God is seen not as that which transcends time but as the end which is pressing in upon it, its delineation, its saving interruption. For in the view of the apocalyptic, time appears first and foremost as a time of suffering.10

For Metz, apocalypticism imagines a God identified not with the victors of history but as a God of salvation, one that transforms time from within. In the sayings of Jesus studied here, the false conception of time as a linear continuum forestalls the coming of the Kingdom. To live in the now is to abandon time as a progression of instants with no meaning and no ending but rather to see that the human being is part of the divine life, as secure in this relation as the seed that grows in secret. That divine life, as it is understood in the belief in the resurrection, embraces the living and the dead, and therefore to live released from time—for time to reach its “fulfillment”—is to live in such a way that the vanquished of the past are not forgotten but are rather redeemed, in the here and now. They no longer slip out of sight as the past but appear before us as the truth of ourselves, as the truth of now. One concrete example of this idea is the courtroom testimony of K-Zetnik, the Auschwitz survivor who, as a witness at the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, lost consciousness on the stand. K-Zetnik, a slang name for a concentration camp inmate, had survived the daily selection process for two years, after which he wrote a series of books describing conditions in the camps, through which he thought of himself as a messenger of the dead.11 On the stand, as he begins to describe Auschwitz, he falls into a kind of hypnotic trance, in which he says he sees “them standing in line” before collapsing. As Shoshana Felman illustrates in her study of trauma in the courtroom, K-Zetnik demonstrates the limits of the law and by extension of all worldly categories of human experience, including consciousness. While in court a witness is required to attest to past events and provide the context for the court to render judgment, K-Zetnik is unable to do so. He is “unable to regard the Holocaust as a past event but must relive it in the present, through the infinite traumatic repetition of a past that is not past, that has no closure and from which no distance can be taken.”12 As Felman explains, the court cannot undertake its totalizing objective in response to such testimony; the witness’s testimony exceeds the legal frame of reference. Yet, in the act of

10. Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity (ed. and trans. J. Matthew Ashley; New York: Paulist, 1997), 52. 11. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 135. 12. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 151.

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recounting events of the past and his perception of himself as the “messenger of the dead,” K-Zetnik suspends the structure of time as a continuum, and in his loss of consciousness, gives “voice” to the silenced victims. Indeed, his response is beyond language and even consciousness: it is a testimony that is not of this world.13 This testimony and its messianic inflection need not be interpreted theologically. However, within the context of this study, it illuminates how philosophical interpretations of the messianic raise the stakes of the theological implications. As K-Zetnik’s testimony demonstrates, the messianic concept points to what is beyond comprehension without giving it a name. Whether or not the messianic signifies a divine reality, it represents a relation between temporality and human consciousness that points beyond human consciousness itself. It represents a limit, or rupture, that gives expression to what is unspeakable. For both philosophers and theologians, this “beyond” is constitutive of the human being as one who posits the self in time but can never escape the delay that is time. Therefore, in terms of Christian theology, when and how the Kingdom comes is no longer a relevant question. The Kingdom of God comes by way of the human being as a limited creature, for whom consciousness cannot make itself present, but for whom “truth” is not of this world. While we insist on creating a continuum of time that accounts for our experience in totality, there is always a remainder that escapes these totalizing efforts. This remainder, in Christian terms, might be identified with the Kingdom of God, which cannot be reduced to thought, or to consciousness at all. In the sayings of Jesus in this study, the Kingdom signifies all that lies beyond the human being’s capacity to think and to use language, and it is made manifest in conditions that expose the fractured and weak state of the human condition in the world— in all the suffering of history, including, but not limited to, that of Jesus and his followers. The rupture that is the human being in time is that which brings the Messiah, whose Kingdom comes.

13. K-Zetnik testified that Auschwitz was another planet on a different cycle of time than that of Earth. The inhabitants had no names or parents. “They did not live, nor did they die, in accordance with the laws of this world,” he said. See Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 136.

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INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS Abrams, Judith Z. 74 Allison, Dale C. 7–8

Hogan, Karina Martin 56–7 Horsley, Richard A. 94

Bailey, Kenneth 72, 73 n.25 Beardsworth, Richard 100 Borg, Marcus 7, 21–2 Bradley, Keith 71, 95, 95 n.42 Brin, Gershon 10–11 Bultmann, Rudolf 5–6, 20, 107 Butler, Judith 81–82, 127

Jülicher, Adolf

96 n.45

Kelley, Nicole 75 Koester, Helmut 109 Lightfoot, R. H. 92 Litwa, David M. 110

Caputo, John D. 37, 41 Collins, Adela Yarbro 11, 89, 91 Collins, John J. 3, 7, 8 n.27, 13, 24 Conzelmann, Hans 108 n.11, 20, 59, 84 n.78 Crossan, John Dominic 7–8, 20–2, 53 n.6, 55, 59, 68

Metz, Johann Baptist 133–4 Meyer, Ben 24–5 Momigliano, Arnaldo 9, 9 n.32 Myers, Ched 90 n.11, 93–4, 128

Dahl, N. A. 58 De la Durantaye, Leland 31, 34 n.27, 101 Dickinson, Colby 64 Dodd, C. H. 6–8, 54–5

Olyan, Saul M. 73–4

Ehrman, Bart

7–8

Felman, Shoshana 134 Fenves, Peter 28 n.3, 33 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler 1, 79 n.53 Foucault, Michel 64, 111 n.22 Funk, Robert 7, 59 n.30 Garland, Robert 76 Geddert, Timothy J. 92–94 Hamacher, Werner 28 n.3, 29, 82–83 Hengel, Martin 25 Henry, Michel 132–3

Najman, Hindy 14, 60 Novenson, Matthew V. 2, 2 n.3

Rohrbaugh, Richard

72–3

Sanders, E. P. 22, 90 Schottroff, Luise 72, 91, 94 Schweitzer, Albert 4–5, 5 n.11, 20, 22 Stern, Sacha 9 n.32, 10, 17 Theissen, Gerd

88 n.4

Van Riessen, Renee D. N.

80

Weiss, Johannes 4 Welborn, L. L. 34 n.29, 54 n.11, 61 n.43, 92 n.23 Wink, Walter 94 Witherington III, Ben 88 n.2, 91 Wolin, Richard 28 n.3, 30 Wrede, William 4, 19–20 Wright, N. T. 22–23

INDEX OF SUBJECTS apocalypse Gospel of Mark 13 88–89 Jewish 5 literary genre 1, 3, 4 n.7 apocalypticism and Albert Schweitzer 20, 22 and Johann Baptist Metz 134 scholarship 1–9 apocalyptic prophet 2–3, 7, 25 Aristotle 14 bare life 64–5, 79, 81, 84, 126 2 and 3 Baruch 4, 54 Benveniste, Émile 83 Blanchot, Maurice 39, 62 n.46 Book of Jubilees 14 Cicero 95, 111 Community Rule 13, 68 1 Corinthians 21, 104 n.70 Daniel 8, 11–13, 21, 53, 89 Dead Sea Scrolls 9, 11–13, 24, 88 De Saussure, Ferdinand 38, 99, 116 Dialogue of the Savior 107, 112, 116, 122 différance 38–9, 62, 116, 118, 122, 130 1 Enoch 4, 108 eschatology 4, 8, 51, 55, 108, 118 4 Ezra Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 4, 13–14, 88 harvest metaphors 52–63, 66, 125–6 Gnosticism 101, 101 n.58, 105 n.4 Gospel of Thomas 21, 79, 105, 109–10, 116 Heidegger, Martin 33, 106 historical materialism 32 n.20, 36, 97, 129 historicism 32, 32 n.20, 83 Homo Sacer 46, 65, 79 n.55, 80

Jetztzeit 29, 83–84, 98, 101, 128–29, 133 Josephus 17 kαιρός 18, 43, 53, 64, 125–6, 129 K-Zetnik 134–5, 135 n.13 Logos

110, 119–20, 122, 130

Paul, the apostle Wisdom 21 messianic time 25, 42, 42 n.62, 43–6, 63–4, 104 n.70, 121, 126 political theology 34 n.29 Philo of Alexandria 17 Plato 14–18, 70, 110–11 Plutarch 9, 15–16, 70 resurrection apocalypticism 19–20, 25 harvest metaphors 56 messianic time 43–44, 104, 104 n.70, 114, 121, 134 Schmitt, Carl 34–5, 46, 102 Scholem, Gershom 28, 31, 44, 98 Septuagint 18 slavery 94–5, 95 n.42 Son of Man apocalypticism 7–8, 54, 88 n.4, 89, 107–8, 115 messianic identity of Jesus 21, 25, 57, 103 n.68 Stoicism 101, 110, 110 n.23 Taubes, Jacob 34 n.29, 61 n.43 tout autre 39, 62 n.45, 117, 122–3, 130 trace 38–39 Wisdom χρόνος

5, 21, 57, 107, 109, 113, 130 14, 18, 43, 53, 125