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Mar. 13th, 2004 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaWell, I've finally come to a point in Crossan's book where I differ strongly with his analysis. (I figure that at least ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badsede knew it would come eventually, LOL.)
I have been reading this book (The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus) very slowly, because every chapter presents a lot of important information and argument in a small space. It is best digested three or four pages at a time -- and it is a long book.
In the middle of the book he presents an argument regarding the way he derives, using existing texts, his information about the "Common Sayings Tradition" -- that is, the oral remembrance of Jesus' teachings and actions prior to being written down. His argument is that on one side you have Mark and the Q Gospel, upon which the gospels of Matthew and Luke were largely based. On the other hand you have documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Didache, which point to slightly different interpretations of the Jesus movement.
This Common Sayings Tradition, he argues, represents a movement that promoted what he terms ethical eschatology, the message of which might be summarized as, "God wants to see justice on the earth and God wants us to help bring that justice about by being good to one another and opposing imperial injustice." So far, so good.
His argument is that the synoptic tradition, IOW that which became the basis of orthodox Christian doctrine -- took the Common Sayings Tradition and redacted it in the direction of apocalyptic eschatology, by which he means the message that God is pissed off at the injustice in the world and is going to come down here, destroy the evildoers, and exalt the righteous. In Crossan's view, this view existed at the time of Jesus, but Jesus was opposed to it, and so this redaction was a deliberate twisting of the original message of Jesus. I would pick at a detail or two of what he presented in support of this, but on the whole I am in agreement.
Secondly, he argues that the Gospel of Thomas took the Common Sayings Tradition in the opposite direction, as it were, in favor of an esoteric ascetic eshatology that turns its back on the ways of the world as inherently evil and seeks to promote instead radical ascetism. He is right that GTh promotes radical, world-denying ascetism, but this is where I start to part company with him. I think he is overlooking evidence that the Thomas tradition was opposed to religious custom intended to distinguish Jews from Gentiles. He wants to cast early Christianity as a movement which strongly upheld Jewish identity, reacting solely to economic and political injustice. If GTh, which was written very early in the Christian tradition, was opposed to Jewish identity, his thesis would fray at the seams. It wouldn't shatter his program, but he'd have to rethink a lot of it.
What he overlooks in all this is evidence that there was a widespread movement at the time which saw the Temple and the priestly leadership in Jerusalem as part of the worldly corruption to which they were opposed. The Qumran Essenes, for example, distanced themselves from Judea and took refuge on the coast of the Dead Sea for this reason. Kurt Rudolph characterized early Gnosticism in similar terms, as a lower-class movement in political, economic, and religious struggle against authority figures in Jerusalem. It was for this reason, in fact, that the Gnostics characterized Yaldabaoth, their caricature of the God of Israel, as an imperfect demiurge whose assertion of supremacy was an act of blasphemy against the cosmic Father.
It's important to note that the Essenes and Gnostics were at this stage movements which followed in the footsteps of the Jewish prophetic tradition, which upheld the cause of widows and orphans and other dispossessed. They were not, then, anti-Semites, who hated Judaism or Jewish identity. They were instead opposed, primarily in a political way, to the priestly leadership based in Jerusalem, perhaps because they colluded to some degree with the Roman occupiers.
Because Crossan wants to root Jesus as having been firmly and solidly in the middle of the Jewish tradition, instead of a fringe radical, I'm beginning to find his analysis of certain sayings to be strained and distorted. For example, one of the most difficult sayings in the tradition is called by scholars "Hating One's Family" and goes roughly as follows: "If anyone does not hate his own father and mother, he cannot be my disciple; and if anyone does not hate his brother and sisters, he cannot be my disciple" (Q 14:26).
About this saying, Crossan writes on pp. 324-5,
I don't disagree with what Crossan wrote about "companionship" (compare "comradeship") as a deliberate alternative to family kinship. But I think his zeal to cast Jesus as a Jewish peasant revolutionary has forced him to overlook important overtones that were undeniably present -- if not in Jesus' teachings, then among the beliefs and attitudes of his followers.
badsede knew it would come eventually, LOL.)I have been reading this book (The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus) very slowly, because every chapter presents a lot of important information and argument in a small space. It is best digested three or four pages at a time -- and it is a long book.
In the middle of the book he presents an argument regarding the way he derives, using existing texts, his information about the "Common Sayings Tradition" -- that is, the oral remembrance of Jesus' teachings and actions prior to being written down. His argument is that on one side you have Mark and the Q Gospel, upon which the gospels of Matthew and Luke were largely based. On the other hand you have documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Didache, which point to slightly different interpretations of the Jesus movement.
This Common Sayings Tradition, he argues, represents a movement that promoted what he terms ethical eschatology, the message of which might be summarized as, "God wants to see justice on the earth and God wants us to help bring that justice about by being good to one another and opposing imperial injustice." So far, so good.
His argument is that the synoptic tradition, IOW that which became the basis of orthodox Christian doctrine -- took the Common Sayings Tradition and redacted it in the direction of apocalyptic eschatology, by which he means the message that God is pissed off at the injustice in the world and is going to come down here, destroy the evildoers, and exalt the righteous. In Crossan's view, this view existed at the time of Jesus, but Jesus was opposed to it, and so this redaction was a deliberate twisting of the original message of Jesus. I would pick at a detail or two of what he presented in support of this, but on the whole I am in agreement.
Secondly, he argues that the Gospel of Thomas took the Common Sayings Tradition in the opposite direction, as it were, in favor of an esoteric ascetic eshatology that turns its back on the ways of the world as inherently evil and seeks to promote instead radical ascetism. He is right that GTh promotes radical, world-denying ascetism, but this is where I start to part company with him. I think he is overlooking evidence that the Thomas tradition was opposed to religious custom intended to distinguish Jews from Gentiles. He wants to cast early Christianity as a movement which strongly upheld Jewish identity, reacting solely to economic and political injustice. If GTh, which was written very early in the Christian tradition, was opposed to Jewish identity, his thesis would fray at the seams. It wouldn't shatter his program, but he'd have to rethink a lot of it.
What he overlooks in all this is evidence that there was a widespread movement at the time which saw the Temple and the priestly leadership in Jerusalem as part of the worldly corruption to which they were opposed. The Qumran Essenes, for example, distanced themselves from Judea and took refuge on the coast of the Dead Sea for this reason. Kurt Rudolph characterized early Gnosticism in similar terms, as a lower-class movement in political, economic, and religious struggle against authority figures in Jerusalem. It was for this reason, in fact, that the Gnostics characterized Yaldabaoth, their caricature of the God of Israel, as an imperfect demiurge whose assertion of supremacy was an act of blasphemy against the cosmic Father.
It's important to note that the Essenes and Gnostics were at this stage movements which followed in the footsteps of the Jewish prophetic tradition, which upheld the cause of widows and orphans and other dispossessed. They were not, then, anti-Semites, who hated Judaism or Jewish identity. They were instead opposed, primarily in a political way, to the priestly leadership based in Jerusalem, perhaps because they colluded to some degree with the Roman occupiers.
Because Crossan wants to root Jesus as having been firmly and solidly in the middle of the Jewish tradition, instead of a fringe radical, I'm beginning to find his analysis of certain sayings to be strained and distorted. For example, one of the most difficult sayings in the tradition is called by scholars "Hating One's Family" and goes roughly as follows: "If anyone does not hate his own father and mother, he cannot be my disciple; and if anyone does not hate his brother and sisters, he cannot be my disciple" (Q 14:26).
About this saying, Crossan writes on pp. 324-5,
The ordinary answer is that faith is even more fundamental than family, that Jesus is forcing people to believe in him over against even their own family, or that he is criticizing the heirarchical inequalities of society microcosmically present in the family itself. ... Jesus is not speaking to the well-off, advising them to give up their possessions [even though he is quoted in Matthew 19:21-22 as actually doing so - SS] -- advocating ascetism, in effect. He is speaking specifically to dispossessed peasants seeking to restore their dignity and security in the name of God. In the same way, he is not speaking primarily to strong peasant families and trying to break them apart for or against himself. He is speaking especially to those whom family has failed and is substituting for that lost grouping an alternative one, the companionship of the kingdom of God. My proposal, therefore, is that Jesus and his first companions were not destroying families who were viable, but replacing families who were not.
I don't disagree with what Crossan wrote about "companionship" (compare "comradeship") as a deliberate alternative to family kinship. But I think his zeal to cast Jesus as a Jewish peasant revolutionary has forced him to overlook important overtones that were undeniably present -- if not in Jesus' teachings, then among the beliefs and attitudes of his followers.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 02:43 pm (UTC)can you elaborate more on your last paragraph, because it feels incomplete to me and i think i'm missing your point?
no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 04:15 pm (UTC)But that really is at odds with a few thing. Why would Jesus deny his guidance to someone in any other circumstance? There are many different ways he could have said, "All of you who follow me have been abandoned by family and friends." Why would he say, in response to the man who said he needed to tend his ailing father, to "let the dead bury the dead?"
I see no other way to interpret all of this, than to suppose that Jesus was an institution-rejecting radical ascetic.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 04:22 pm (UTC)He wants his readers to agree with him that Jesus was a dispossessed peasant who lead a bunch of other dispossessed peasants in righteously indignant and nonviolent resistance against Roman oppression.
This thesis which he rejected suggests that Jesus was instead a radical revolutionary and esoteric mystic who intended to make people "turn on, tune in, and drop out" -- fueled not just by righteous indignation and nonviolent resistence to Roman oppression, but also by opposition to social institutions like commerce and family. According to this thesis, he was, in short, a communist hippie.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 04:46 pm (UTC)heh. ok, gotcha. i can see that.
the historical Jesus
Date: 2004-03-14 04:53 am (UTC)Re: the historical Jesus
Date: 2004-03-14 08:48 am (UTC)I am somewhat new to "historical Jesus" research, having only been investigating this area for maybe a year or so. So I am doing a lot of catch-up reading trying to bring myself up-to-date on recent results in this area. Whether or not the scholars are on the right path, their ideas are fascinating and the debate gives us a better understanding of what happened 2,000 years ago.
Crossan's description of Jesus does parallel in some ways the wandering mendicant Cynic lifestyle, but he specifically denies that Jesus was a Cynic. He wrote, "If you want to imagine a Cynic Jesus, go ahead, but you better imagine a Jewish peasant Cynic. Some, to my chagrin, took that as postulating an ancient social type rather than a paradoxical challenge."
Witherington's sees Jesus as a sage the embodiment of wisdom-more could be written on that view
Indeed -- the parallels between Proverbs 8 and John 1 stare you in the face and dare you to argue against parallelism. Several Christian (Gnostic) sects actually saw Jesus as the embodiment of Sophia, which means that, correct or not, the idea was at least floating around even way back then.
I personally understand the historical Jesus to be an eschatological Prophet-not denying He was the Messiah and that He was the Son of God who came to die on the Cross for the sins of His people
So you more or less read the canon in a straightforward manner? I imagine you then have a less than charitable view of the Jesus Seminar's appraisal of the apocalyptic material in the NT as redaction. I think there is too much apocalyptic material in the gospels to assert that all of it is redaction. I think there is too much ascetic material in the gospels to assert that all of that is redaction, too.
As for Jesus as a vicarious atonement sacrifice, I take exception to this idea -- if I were to be Christian again, I think I could only do so via Christus Victor theology, which focuses not on the death of Jesus as atonement but on his resurrection by the Father as a victory over death.
Re: the historical Jesus
Date: 2004-03-14 04:55 pm (UTC)Re: the historical Jesus
Date: 2004-03-15 05:50 am (UTC)I think that if they were advocating atonement sacrifice as a valid way of gaining God's forgiveness, that they would perhaps have taught Christians that their transgressions after accepting the sacrifice of Jesus require additional atonement sacrifice.
So instead I'm begining to think that maybe vicarious atonement language in the NT was a theological legalism to convince Jews that there's a new covenant, it has been consecrated in the proper way, and therefore no more sacrifices in the Temple are required.
Now, if Hebrews was indeed written by Paul, as some argue, then it would be highly significant if this argument preceeded the destruction of the Temple.
Thank you for the book recommendation.
Family vs Religious Community
Date: 2004-03-13 02:51 pm (UTC)Another possible reading, I think, is that this is pointing toward the greater Hellenistic world, and thus is against the narrow political sectarian groups. There is also the family as the carrier of a lot of the religious tradition.
If this is correct, then perhaps the early Christian community that this came from was more like what would develop into the "normative" Christian community. But this brings up the question of its authenticity, even if it is included in the reconstruction of Q.
Re: Family vs Religious Community
Date: 2004-03-13 04:06 pm (UTC)The argument goes like this: though it might serve the purposes of the church for this saying to quietly vanish from scripture, it must have been so widely known as something Jesus said that they could not casually delete it.
Personally, I think it is more likely that the saying endured because it carried a connotation which has been lost in the mists of time. For example, Jesus may have called upon his followers to reject the traditional ideas of "father" and "mother" and replace them with something more egalitarian. That might be stretching it a bit, but illustrates what I'm getting at.
Another possible reading, I think, is that this is pointing toward the greater Hellenistic world, and thus is against the narrow political sectarian groups.
Perhaps. That would be in direct opposition to what Paul wrote (or is alleged to have written) about the husband being the proper source of religious instruction for the wife. I do agree though that Jesus seems to have -- in my opinion -- favored something more like "philosophical cosmopolitanism" -- exchanging one's identity as a citizen of a nation and a follower of a religion for participation in an egalitarian order of people from all national and religious backgrounds.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-14 10:01 pm (UTC)I often come back to a thought: throughout at least Christian history, most heresies are a matter of truth taken to the exclusion of truth. This is how I often feel about Crossan.
I think that we can look at the synoptic tradition and find a trend of apocalyptic eschatology. However, I think that the synoptic tradition also bears a very marked trend of ethical eschatology. And, I think that neither defines the synoptic tradition.
In a similar vein, when we look at Thomas, there is a distinct and marked esoteric ascetic eshatological trend. However, the ethical eschatological tradition is also maintained in Thomas. But I would say that in the case of Thomas, that the esoteric ascetic eschatological trend comes closer to actually defining the tradition. But, this is due largely to the greater redaction that has been done to Thomas. (I have mentioned before my opinion about the antiquity of the source and perhaps even original of Thomas but the much later date of it in the form that we have.)
But this, I think, is one of the larger problems with much of Crossan's approach to the subject. He treats much of it in an either/or manner and neglects how much it is a both/and situation .. of at least to a greater degree than I feel is accurate.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 05:40 am (UTC)I'm not sure I know exactly what your position on the Gospel of Thomas is. My own view is that we can still glimpse the original tradition therein, but that there have also been several layers of obvious redaction, and some evidence of corruption and garbling too, so bad in some places that several logia are completely unreliable.
However I think it is obvious that Crossan is eager to disprove that Jesus could have been either an apocalyptic or a mystic-ascetic, so eager that his analysis is skewed.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 09:47 am (UTC)Very similar to yours. I believe that Thomas is based largely on the same sayings source(s) or derivatives thereof that the synoptic Gospels were. These sources, or perhaps even early pure sayings source versions of Thomas itself do belong in the circa 50 AD period. However, I think that Thomas was redacted in the gnostic tradition .. more than once in fact. The text as we have it I think bears the marks of redaction in both a "proto-gnostic" tradition and a more fully fleshed gnostic tradition. The discrepancies between the Greek and Coptic are just one sign of this layering.
But I would agree that we can glipse the original. The synoptics are a vital tool for this .. even though they bear their own bias and redaction.
And I would agree with your assessment of Crossan. But of course that does not change the fact that he is a useful read .. more usefull for those who can see and account for his bias and his agenda.