A further look at Mark 7:1-23:

There's been some discussion on a number of blogs about Mark 7:15, kicked off by my glance at The Five Gospels. Mark Goodacre has some measured comments, as always. Steve Carlson navigates in difficult waters with his usual ease here, while Loren Rosson answers the thread with a tapestry here.

I thought more discussion of Mark 7:1-23 is in order to show why Loren Rosson's comment on Mark is probably wrong. Rosson echoes many exegetes when he writes:

"Of course, one could argue that this is "all Mark", as I'm sure Turton would, but this gives too much weight to the writer as an independent literary agent, and also misunderstands the gospel documents as (indeed) primarily literary documents, instead of oral-based catechismal texts aimed at specific communities; communities which in turn informed and influenced the texts themselves."

I disagree with each of these. The writer is not only an "independent literary agent" but a highly sophisticated one for whom each word, each phrase, is carefully placed. The original structure of Mark must have been powerfully elegant (see below). Second, as the below discussion shows, Mark is primarily, indeed, solely, a literary text intended for public reading. It is not based on oral traditions, none of which the writer knew, or the writer's pervasive use of midrash/epitomization, along with his incorporations of many conventions from Hellenistic fiction, would not have been necessary.

Mark is certainly not aimed at any specific community. The prescriptions that Jesus gives are taken from Paul and are intended to re-assure new recruits about the key aspects of this religion, which presented itself as an updated version of Judaism. For most people outside Judaism food laws and divorce must have presented real anguish. Would I have to divorce my spouse if I joined the new religion? and Who can I eat with? are questions that would worry new recruits, not old community members, whose answers they would already know (see Paul, writing from years before Mark on the conventional chronology). There is nothing about a particular community in Mark -- Jesus does not address his remarks to specific geographic locations. He is not used to legitimate particular community leadership styles or structures or particular leaders, community structures, or community practices. There is nothing on community finances, community social structures, or relations with other communities. The Gospel of Mark is a text that looks out at the world, not in toward other Christians. It is a narrative intended for baptismal or recruiting applications. Nothing would surprise me less than to discover that its writer was a hired gun; a professional brought in specifically for the task of creating this document, someone familiar with the conventions of Hellenistic novels, and well able to manupulate and transform them in the service of the new religion.

In Mark the reader is constantly confronted with the inside-outside dilemma. As the reader-response criticism of Mark has observed, sometimes the reader is inside, and sometimes he is outside. Why would any community text place the reader outside? The constant inside-outside shifting invites the reader to identify with Jesus. Fowler (1) writes:

As we continue with Mark's rhetoric, we shall see further evidence that the author is so eager to secure the reader's adherence to the Jesus of his story that he is willing to sacrifice the disciples of his story. Lest we become nervous about what Mark may be thereby asserting about the twelve apostles, the historical pillars of the early Christian church, let us recall that this narrative does not claim to be history. It is not even referentially oriented. Rather, it is pragmatically or rhetorically oriented. It is not "about" its characters; it is "about" its reader."(p80)

Mark is not aimed at a community, nor does a community lie behind it. Rather, Mark is a text that invites the reader to identify with Jesus and join the community. The key to understanding Mark, I believe, lies in how you answer the question of whether, in Mark, baptism should be regarded as a metaphor for death, or death as a metaphor for baptism.

I've ranged far afield here. Let's return to Mark 7:1-23 and use it to show that indeed, the writer was an independent literary agent of great brilliance and creativity.

The Basic Structure of the Pericope
Mark 7:1-23 lies in disputed territory, the string of pericopes known as the Bethsaida section, which many exegetes consider interpolated while others consider it Markan. Both sides are right; Bethsaida consists of material extant elsewhere in Mark and moved into that section wholesale, with some alterations, as well as material created de novo and inserted. This spring I recovered the original verse-by-verse structure of the Gospel (go here for early, annotated version). Next week I'll discuss Bethsaida in light of that. Meanwhile, on to Mark 7.

The pericope is indisputably Markan, having the writer's signature complex interior. In Mark location changes are always A brackets, and the A' bracket of the previous pericope is almost always the A bracket of the next. This pericope opens with the usual Markan location change (Mark text from RSV)

A..Now when the Pharisees gathered together to him, with some of the scribes,
....who had come from Jerusalem, they saw ..that some of his disciples ate
....with hands defiled, that is, unwashed.

........B..(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands,
.............observing the tradition of the elders; and when they come from the market
.............place, they do not eat unless they purify themselves; and there are many
.............other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and
.............vessels of bronze.) And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do
.............your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders,
.............but eat with hands defiled?"

...............C..A And he said to them,"Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites,
........................as it is written,

........................B.. `This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far
...............................from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines
...............................the precepts of men.'

...................................C..You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast
........................................the tradition of men."

...............C..A..And he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the
........................commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition!

........................B..For Moses said, `Honor your father and your mother';
.............................and, `He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him
.............................surely die';

...................................C..but you say, `If a man tells his father or his
........................................mother, What you would have gained from me is
........................................Corban' (that is, given to God) -- then you no longer
........................................permit him to do anything for his father or mother,
........................................thus making void the word of God through your
........................................tradition which you hand on. And many such things
........................................you do."

........B..And he called the people to him again, and said to them, "Hear me,
.............all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a man which by
.............going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man
.............are what defile him."

A..And when he had entered the house, and left the people, his disciples
....asked him about the parable.

The center has a paired triplet structure seen elsewhere in Mark (the Calling of Peter, James and John, for example). If you unpack it, it looks like this

A ACCUSATION
B QUOTE OF SCRIPTURE
C EXPLANATION OF HOW TRADITION IS REJECTED BY PHARISEES

This kind of complex center is the fingerprint of the true writer of Mark and is thoroughly and wholly literary. In the view of some exegetes such chiastic structures had mnemonic applications, but the complex centers of Markan chiasms is a strike against the idea that the writer accepted them from a tradition. To me they read as art for art's sake (though chiasms also functioned as text divisions in a culture without punctuation or paragraphing).

But note also how the brackets "talk to each other." The C and C' brackets are mirrors, of course, but the B and B' brackets answer each other:

B......And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?"

B'....."Hear me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him."

The wonderful thing about Mark is that when you use the proper structural rules for determining its structure, the brackets turn out to be thematically related. Previous exponents of Markan chiasms erred when they focused on thematic connections.

In any case, it is my view that this pericope has been moved in from somewhere else in the Gospel. My own guess is the famous "Jericho" hiatus in Mark 10:46.

10:46: And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimae'us, a blind beggar, the son of Timae'us, was sitting by the roadside.(RSV)

Two geographic references back-to-back is totally unMarkan and thus I side with those who say something went AWOL here (I do not believe the writer of Mark produced Mark 10:46-52 either). Mark 7:1-23 is a very likely candidate for the missing material. Note that in 7:1 the Bad Guys have come from Jerusalem to see Jesus, something very troublesome as Jesus is currently in Galilee, but far easier if they need only make an overnight trip to much closer Jericho.

There are some larger structural features that (speculatively) argue for an inclusion here as well. Ched Myers has seen Mark 10:35-7, where James and John ask whether they can sit at Jesus' right hand, as an allusion to Psalm 110. If that is true, then there is an elegant chiastic structure that flows through Mark 11 and 12. This would be a citation of Psalm 110 (Mk 10:35), Psalm 118 (Mark 11:9), Psalm 118 (12:10), and then Psalm 110 again (Mk 12:35). I can't prove it, but I suspect the scholarly analysis that puts the Gospel's center in Mark 8 is wrong, thanks to the extensive tampering. The writer's original intention was for the great backbone chiasm to anchor around the Psalm citations, and turn on the entrance to Jerusalem, which is also the natural turn in the narrative. Mark is a narrative, not a theological tract, and the story takes its fateful turn when Jesus trashes the Temple, not when Jesus is discovered to be the Messiah, something the audience in any case has known from the beginning (see Mark 1:1). Note further that not only do we get the sequence of Psalm citations, but that would flank the Temple sequence with Pauline material on both sides, in Mark 10 (divorce and food laws) and Mark 12 (render unto Casaer and command to love). This explains why none of the major chiastic structurings of Mark have gained a wide following -- the original structure of Mark has been broken up and redistributed.

Another Literary Feature
But there's another aspect of this I'd like to draw the reader's attention to (if there are any readers left!). The discussion early on focuses on eating and being defiled:

7:5: And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?"(RSV)

Most English translations avoid pointing out that what the disciples are eating is the magic bread Jesus had created in the earlier feeding miracle in Mark 6, as Gundry (2) points out. We thus bump up squarely against the problem of figurative language that I had raised in my earlier discussion of the Jesus Seminar, and which Rosson's discussion of Jesus' challenges also raise.

Many exegetes see the challenges over food -- fasting, plucking grain, eating with unwashed hands -- as reflecting history, if not as history outright. But in the Gospel of Mark food-related vocabulary is overwhelmingly figurative. It always functions on two levels. When, in Mark 7:1-5, the Pharisees accuse Jesus' disciples of eating with unwashed hands, the disciples are eating bread that Jesus has created, bread that figuratively stands for Jesus' message of the kingdom of God. The presence of supernatural items indicates that this never occurred as history and is an invention of the author; it also indicates that we are in the midst of literary complexity. On one level we have what looks like a debate over food laws, with Jesus citing Paul that it was OK to eat anything. But on another we have Jesus making a robust defense of his message (signaled by the magic bread) -- how can it be bad to hear another message? It's our behavior that counts! The debates over "fasting" have a similar thrust. The disciples of John and the Pharisees must "fast" because they have no message to listen to. But why should Jesus' disciples not hear the message, since Jesus is still on earth? Similarly, when Jesus is "plucking grain" on level perhaps he is violating the Sabbath laws, but on another, I suspect that "plucking grain" is a reference to converting Jews, a practice the Pharisees would have objected to. None of this should be interpreted as history, save as references to the history of the writer's own day, probably some time in the first half of the second century. The richness of the food references in Mark are another indicator of the writer's skill.

Conclusions
The foregoing discussion has attempted to show that the writer of Mark was a literary agent of the first water who in principle was fully capable of creating the Gospel of Mark de novo. It is my belief that the writer used the OT and Paul to create his story, and Mark 7:1-23 is another excellent example of this. Here in Mk 7:15 the writer has Jesus establish a rule similar to Paul's in Romans 14. Then, by way of explanation of what Mk 7:15 means, in Mk 7:20-23 he cites a list of sinful behaviors that echoes not one, but three Pauline texts, 1 Cor 6:9-10, Rom 1:29-31, and Gal 5:19-21.

Mark is a Pauline gospel, and its writer is a literary genius of the first rank.

References

1. Fowler, Robert. 1996. Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International

2. p348. Gundry, Robert. 1993. Mark: A Commentary on His Gospel. Grand Rapids: Erdmans.

[Christianity] [historical Jesus] [Gospel of Mark]

Carlson on the Jesus Seminar

Steve Carlson has responded to my earlier review of The Five Gospels with some thoughtful and insightful comments. Steve writes:

Rather, it is more probable to me this that the dispute is not a broadside attack, but more like the kind of "inside baseball" discussions and disputes over the application of the Torah later recorded in the Talmud. In this connection, it is not irrelevant to mention a new blog, Earliest Christian History by James G. Crossley, who argues that Mark presents Jesus as a Torah-observant Jew.

In my view the writer of Mark does not present Jesus as a Torah-observant Jew so much as creates him as an example of what a Torah-observant Jew looks like seen from the outside: Jesus is the writer's idea of what a Torah-observing Jew is. Mark's Jesus is about as much a Jew as the King of Persia in Chaereas and Callirhoe is a Persian. In Greek novelistic fiction it is a convention to act as a "guide to the exotic" for the reader, and here the writer is building his character of Jesus using items that someone on the outside would pick up. It is interesting that Steve mentions Crossley, because Crossley has written on another aspect of this pericope (Mark 7:1-23). Some early manuscripts have "pitchers, kettles and dining couches" in Mk 7:4. Crossley (2003) argues that "couches" is the correct reading. In ancient Judaism, he notes, impure objects, such as dining couches, were immersed. Crossley also argues that the writer's knowledge of this custom shows a thorough familiarity with Jewish practice.

But dunking couches is exactly the kind of exotica that would strike an author discussing Judaism from the outside. Hey! Look how weird those Jews are! They bathe couches!The writer of Mark also has Jesus cite the Shema, another Jewish marker that would be familiar to any educated person living in an Empire 5-10% Jewish. He explains Aramaic phrases as well. The collection of items there is reminiscent of the way a modern writer might describe US, citing, say, the Declaration of Independence as a core value, and then discussing one of our strange habits like rattlesnake chili cook-offs, as well as translating our strange English. The writer of Mark has Jesus preside over a Passover meal, but the content is purely Christian. This is the outsider's view -- he knows the Jews have a Passover meal, but as a non-Jew doesn't know what goes on and hence in Mark 14:12 confuses Nisan 15 with Nisan 14. So, borrowing from Paul, he provides Christian content for it. Mark 15:34 is another good example of the writer's superficiality. He translates the Aramaic and then says the bystanders got the language mixed up. Numerous exegetes have echoed Raymond Brown's (1994) analysis:

"Having heard in exotic Aramaic Jesus' words "Eloi.....," and having been told that this was misunderstood by hostile Jewish bystanders as an appeal to Elias (Greek transcription for "Elijah"), they would have assumed that th Semitic underlying the Greek form of the prophet's name was close to the transliterated Aramaic Eloi that Jesus used. That is what hearers of Mark's gospel who know no Aramaic have been doing ever since."(p1062).

The writer was someone who did not know much about Jews writing for people who did not know much about Jews, and doing so in the finest style of the ancient Greek novelist.

Crossley himself explains this another way:

Fuller aims some criticisms at some of my arguments. Against my contention that Mark's audience included Jews and gentiles who were largely law observant (I'm not too happy about the term 'proselytes' in this instance which Fuller attributes to me), Fuller asks why then does Mark have to explain Aramaic terms and Jewish custom. In response I would point out that Mark explaining Aramaic terms tells us nothing more than some people in Mark's audience not knowing Aramaic. This has no bearing on law observance. There were no doubt plenty of law observant Jews and gentiles attracted to Jewish law throughout the Roman Empire who knew little or no Aramaic. As for explaining Jewish custom, this would have been necessary for people who did not know the specifics of Palestinian halakoth which can be extremely complex for some Jews, not to mention gentiles. If my overall argument is correct this was also necessary because they were the kinds of practices Mark and the Markan Jesus were criticising.

Again in Mark 15:42 he does not appear to know when the Jewish day began. In Mark 10:19 he adds an extra commandment to the list. Was the writer of Mark a Jew? If he was, he was not a very knowledgeable one. It seems more likely that the writer of Mark was not a Jew and the Markan Jesus was not criticizing these practices. He was writing as an educated someone who understands Jews as a superficial "them."

Jesus's disputes with the Pharisees reflect the problems that Christians of the writer's own day, probably sometime in the first half of the second century, were having with the Jewish Establishment. I doubt that Mark was even in part targeted at "Jews and gentiles who were largely law observant." They may have shown up by coincidence in the audience, but I suspect that Mark was originally composed as a narrative for recruiting or baptismal initiation, and that its writer did not think of it as history. It was meant not only to be read aloud, but also to be performed, no doubt with plants in the audience to explain things as it went along, just as missionary groups today will circulate recruiters through listening audiences to deal with points made in the main appeal. Its main audience would have been gentiles unfamiliar with the Jewish texts in detail but aware that they existed and had the prestige of great antiquity.

Steve also critiques the Seminar's explanation of its choice of places to start in analyzing the words of Jesus.

Third, the explanation given for this ("Otherwise it is futile to search for the authentic words of Jesus.") is facile. Scholarship is about finding the truth or concluding that the evidence to find it is not sufficient. If the search for the authentic words is futile, scholars should say so and explain why. Otherwise, they risk behaving like the proverbial drunk looking for his lost keys under the streetlight because he can see better there instead of where he lost them.

That's exactly what the Seminar is doing: finding a streetlight. And yes, the continuing failure to develop sound methodology for sussing out the historical Jesus is a strong indication that the search is futile. At least in the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark was created off of the Old Testament and the writings of Paul, and its author knows no traditions of Jesus. It is work of fiction.

Brown, Raymond. 1994. The Death of the Messiah. Volume 1 & 2. Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday.

Crossley, James G. 2003. Halakah and Mark 7.4: "…and beds". JSNT 25.4 (2003) 433-447

[Christianity] [historical Jesus] [Gospel of Mark]

What Five Texts Would You Like to See From Early Christianity?

Michael Pahl on the Stuff of Earth muses on what ancient documents from early Christianity he'd like to see:

1. Papias' five-volume "Expositions of the Logia of the Lord,"
2. The whole "Gospel of Peter," due to its significance in some prominent historical Jesus research.
3. A whole copy of an early Greek manuscript for the "Gospel of Thomas," for the same reasons as the "Gospel of Peter."
4. The "Gospel of the Nazareans" and the "Gospel of the Hebrews," as there are many intriguing questions related to these and the canonical Gospels, especially Matthew. And while we're on these, I'll throw in the "Matthew Logia" mentioned by Papias, if it was something different from canonical Matthew.
5. The lost letters of Paul, his "Letter to the Laodiceans," or even more, his lost letters to the Corinthians, his initial letter on sexual immorality and his "difficult letter." And, while we're at it, I'll throw in the Corinthian letter to Paul which, in part, occasioned 1 Corinthians.

A good idea for a topic.....I have grave doubts that the numerous volumes attributed to Papias (along with Hegesippus) ever existed. I suspect the references to Papias are later inventions and back-interpolations. So I naturally wouldn't pick Papias. The others seem like good ideas, but I honestly doubt another Pauline letter would tell us much we didn't already know.

I don't believe in Q and I think Thomas depends on Mark, so my own list would be:

1. The whole Gospel of Peter. Very important for seeing how the Jesus story evolved -- my friend Neil Godfrey has recently used it in conjunction with Justin Martyr to argue for a pre-Mark Passion.
2. An uninterpolated copy of Josephus Wars, Antiquities, and Vita. I suspect that there has been widespread tampering, not merely in the two Jesus references.
3. Complete texts of more Greek novels currently existing only in fragmentary form, such as Ninus.. I believe they were critical for the development of the Gospel of Mark and Acts, among others.
   
4. A complete copy of the writings of Justus of Tiberias.
5. A copy of the Gospel of Mark prior to the redactions in which the original ending was removed and Bethsaida interpolated and re-arranged -- just because I love Mark.

[Christianity] [historical Jesus] [Gospel of Mark]

Widows Mite: Further Parallels

Over on Laudator Temporis Acti Michael Gilleland blogs on parallels to the Widow's Mite in ancient literature. He hasn't activated comments on his blog, so I'll just leave a point here for him to find. In addition to the sort of general parallels Gilleland has pointed out, Vespasian ordered that the two copper coins be paid to the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome after the revolt of 70. Could the writer of Mark be satirizing that order?

[Christianity] [historical Jesus] [Gospel of Mark]

Book Review: The Five Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?

The Five Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?
Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar
1993, Polebridge Press. 553 pages

About halfway through their introduction to The Five Gospels, Funk and his fellow writers refer to a passage in Mark in the midst of a description of their methodological approach to the Gospels. First they cite two understandings that should be adopted in interpreting the sayings of Jesus, one that states that the writers of the gospels expand on or interpret sayings or parables, another that says that the gospel writers revise or edit sayings.

Funk et al then go on to cite Mark 2:19-20 as an example of this. First, they claim that the followers of John and of the Pharisees fasted, while apparently Jesus and his followers did not. Mark 2:19 runs:

And Jesus said to them, "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. (RSV)

The Five Gospels writes: "This aphorism, which has no specific Christian content, may well go back to Jesus. But Mark, or someone before him, has appended a Christian expansion (Mark 2:20)."

The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. (RSV)

The Seminar interprets that addition as placed there to justify the Christian renewal of the Jewish practice of fasting, even though Jesus and his disciples did not fast. The Five Gospels even goes on to provide an excursus on page 48 that purports to demonstrate that Jesus did not fast, citing Mark 2:19, and Luke 7:33-4. Page 49 provides additional discussion.

"In applying the coherence test, the Fellows agreed that Jesus liked to eat and drink (Luke 7:33-4) and probably enjoyed weddings (he attends a wedding at Cana, John 2:1-11). Th evidence shows why Jesus seemed to many of his fellow Judeans to be a "party animal."

It is interesting to contemplate the tension between the Jesus Seminar and its conservative critics. Although the political and theological distance between the two groups is great, the methodological distance is small. Each interprets the Gospel of Mark in ways that are both overly literal and selectively so, dismissive of the characteristics of the narrative except as a vehicle for transmission of historical information. Here in Mark 2:19 the Seminar, by disarticulating the saying from the Gospel, and the two parts of the saying from each other, and treating one part metaphorically and the other literally, has created a historical fact where none exists. And that, in essence, is what is wrong with the Jesus Seminar.

Let us return to this saying. Note how, in Mark 2:19-20, the word bridgegroom is clearly figurative, indicating Jesus.

And Jesus said to them, "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. (RSV)

Similarly, the terms "guests" (literally, "sons of the wedding hall' -- the groom's attendants) is also figurative, representing Jesus' disciples. The Seminar wants to argue that in that passage the words bridegroom and wedding are figurative, but that we ought to take fasting literally. Yet the presence of food-related vocabulary in connection with Jesus and his mission throughout the Gospel of Mark provides a powerful context that indicates the meaning of fast is figurative and cannot be taken literally. Consider that in the same situation in Mark 7:24-30, where Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman have their famous discussion about dogs and scraps from the table, the Seminar does not claim that Jesus was feeding dogs from his table. Food vocabulary in Mark is a metaphor for the message of Jesus. It has nothing to do with history.

Burton Mack has pointed out that the chreia structure of this part of the pericope is masked by the apparent yoking of two sayings together. Mack (1995, p314) simplifies it thusly: challenge: Why aren't your disciples fasting? response: Who fasts at a wedding? The reader should recall that the construction of chreia was part of an education in Greek. It should also be noted that the sayings on either side of this one are both known sayings found in the larger Hellenistic or Jewish culture. In other words, given the proper context in the narrative habits of the writer of Mark, it is not difficult to see that the writer of Mark has invented this entire sequence.

In practice, the Seminar's understanding appears to be that the overall narrative context of a particular gospel does not have much weight in assessing the historicity of the sayings, observing"The evangelists frequently group sayings and parables in clusters and complexes that did not originate with Jesus." The Seminar's position is that the narratives are "embellished by mythic elements" and by "plausible fictions." The result is that the Seminar does not consult the narrative for clues as to the historicity of the sayings as often and as deeply as it should.

Although the Seminar's states that it assumes the burden of proof in demonstrating that elements of the gospels are historical, again in practice it takes as an axiom that some elements are historical, and in reailty attempts to determine which elements are historical, and which are not, based on that axiomatic assumption. The Seminar's position is not so different from its fundamentalist critics as it likes to imagine. Both are working off axiomatic positions whose difference is essentially one of degree, not of kind.

Like most scholars working on the problem of the historical Jesus the Seminar does not make many of its methodological assumptions formally clear. Its most important one, that some sayings go back to Jesus, is not explicitly stated, though it is certainly clear in the discussion that begins on page 30. Although the commentary in The Five Gospels is studded with negative criteria ("this cannot be a Jesus saying because..."), none are made explicit in the discussion at the beginning.

Several methodological assumptions are listed by the Seminar. It begins with perhaps its most important one.

Jesus' characteristic talk was distinctive.

The Seminar argues that a good example of this is Mark 7:15

14: And he called the people to him again, and said to them, "Hear me, all of you, and understand:
15: there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him."

The Seminar considers this an example of Jesus' distinctive voice. If that is true, then Jesus is speaking with the distinctive voice of the writer of Mark. The passage is most likely an anachronism that is meant to address the meal issues of a later era, which could not possibly have been so controversial had Jesus actually left a strong and memorable saying about the issue. A second problem with taking this as the authentic word of Jesus is that Jesus essentially abrogates a core Jewish law, intimately connected to Jewish identity, yet nine chapters of Mark go by and no one challenges him on this issue (although my own belief is that this passage was moved here from elsewhere in Mark). I personally am convinced that the writer of Mark knew the letters of Paul intimately, and there are two passages in Romans, 14:14 and 14:20, that could easily serve as the source for this. Whether or not one agrees with my analysis of Mark and Paul, the key point is that the Seminar can offer us no way to distinguish between distinctive voice of the writer of Mark and the distinctive voice of Jesus. Hence this assumption collapses into a kind of hopeful subjectivity.

Jesus' sayings and parables cut against the social and religious grain and Jesus' sayings and parables surprise and shock; they characteristically call for a reversal of roles or frustrate ordinary, everyday expectations

Again we run into the problem of distinguishing between the creativity of the gospel writers and the creativity of Jesus. Walter Schmithals (1997) writes:

"If the existence of an oral tradition of the parabolic teachings of Jesus can nowhere be demonstrated, however, and if we encounter the parables exclusively in literary forms, one must reckon in the main with their literary origin. The old conception that the synoptic parables, because of their originality in form and content, could have derived only from an extraordinary genius, namely Jesus, is for good reason no longer repeated today."

The greater Hellenistic context of parables also argues for a literary origin; they are found in the ancient Greek novels (there is even a parable duel in Luekippe and Clitophon) and in other ancient writings, as well as the Old Testament. Additionally, in Mark, the two major parables of the Sower and the Wicked Tenants serve to establish the framework for the narrative (the former) and the Passion (the latter). Their function is literary; their counterparts are literary. "Sowing" as a metaphor for instruction was widespread in the ancient world. One is forced to ask: who does the creativity belong to, the writer of Mark or Jesus? Well, we have concrete evidence of the former's creativity. And Tolbert has warned us about falling into the habit of studying the parables as parables of Jesus and not as parables of the writer of Mark.

The Seminar ends its discussion of its methodological assumptions by saying that

Jesus' images are concrete and vivid, his sayings and parables customarily metaphorical and without explicit application.

The Seminar cites Mark 12:17 as an example:

Jesus said to them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (RSV)

As noted earlier, the writer of Mark has most likely sourced this from Romans 13. The context is profoundly fictional. The Pharisees do not answer Jesus' cryptic comment, though they were noted quibblers and wits themselves. The ending is thus implausible, as no one seriously out to entrap Jesus would let Jesus' non-answer go unchallenged. Tolbert (1989, p251) notes that the "saying" appears to stand out simply because it is the syllogistic conclusion to an argument, and its smoothness differs from the disjointed style normal to the writer of Mark. According to Tolbert, Aristotle emphasizes that "gnomic sayings or maxims" are especially suited for premises and conclusions of enthymematic arguments (p251). In general the pericope presents the familiar structure of setting and riposte seen elsewhere in Mark. The pericope also has a beautiful structure with a typical complex Markan center:

A: So they left him and went away.
..B And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Hero'di-ans,
......to entrap him in his talk.
.....C And they came and said to him, "Teacher, we know that you are true, and care for no man;
.........for you do not regard the position of men, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay
.........taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?"
.........D A But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, "Why put me to the test?
................Bring me a coin,.and let me look at it."
.............B And they brought one.
.........D A And he said to them, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?"
.............B They said to him, "Caesar's."
......C Jesus said to them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,
..........and to God the things that are God's."
..B And they were amazed at him.
A And Sad'ducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection;

Additionally, as Brodie has argued, the story here is tracking the end of the Elijah-Elisha cycle in Kings, where the prophet is confronting the priests of Ba'al. Here, similarly, Jesus is confronting the pharisees. In short, at every level, the pericope is a fictional creation of the writer of Mark. When the reader recalls that the chreia-like feel for the saying is well within the capabilities of the writer of Mark -- indeed, within the capabilities of anyone with a Hellenistic education (moreover, he probably had Romans in front of him). The Seminar has declared the narrative an embellished tale, but then ignored the implications of that for the sayings contained within that narrative.

The problem of determining whether the distinctive voice belongs to the writer of Mark or of Jesus is only accentuated by those cases of Jesus' words rejected by the Seminar. For example, the Seminar accepts Mark 7:15 as authentic, but rejects the sayings in Mark 2:5-10. The Seminar here runs into another problem that has not been given its due in scholarly discussions of methodology, that of mixing positive and negative criteria in the same analysis. Most scholars actually use both sets (but make only the positive criteria explicit) and in every case, do not even discuss, let alone resolve, the issue of which have the most weight. In Mark 2:5-10 the Seminar felt that the words appear to be something invented for the occasion. Yet the same could be said of Mark 7:15 -- the words are invented for the "occasion" of resolving dissension over whether Jewish food laws applied to Christians. The problem of clashing positive and negative criteria also surfaces in the discussions of secular parallels. Mark 2:17, the saying about physicians not going to the healthy, was accepted as probably going back to Jesus despite secular parallels dating back centuries before Mark. Having noted that the saying has many parallels, the Fellows promptly voted to accept it because it sounded like something Jesus might say! Hence the Seminar has made Bultmann's remark that witty sayings tend to accrue to the great man come true in a new and fascinating way.

In Mark 3 the problem of the Seminar's dismissal of the narrative as a source of information on the historicity of the sayings once again appears. The Seminar accepts Mark 3:27:

27: But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder his house. (RSV)

The Seminar then commits an error quite common in such analyses, stating:

It is difficult to conceive of the early Christian community attributing this robust and colorful figure of speech to Jesus if he did not, in fact, say it.

But the Gospel of Mark was not written by a community; but by a single human being, its writer. Later individual human beings redacted it. If one assumes that the saying goes back to a community, perhaps the Seminar's claim will hold water (yet communities habitually attribute sayings to their revered figures that they never said). Once more we face the problem of distinguishing the creativity of the writer from the creativity of Jesus. The problem grows acute because the Seminar has ignored the literary aspects of the pericope. Drawing on my commentary on Mark, we will first examine the structure of the sayings surrounding this one:

A casts out demons by the prince of demons
A How can satan cast out satan?
......B kingdom divided against itself cannot stand
......B house divided against itself cannot stand
...........C satan risen up against himself and is divided,
...........C he cannot stand, but is coming to an end
......B no one can enter strong man's house plunder his goods
......B unless first binds strong man, then may plunder his house
A all sins forgiven and all blasphemies
A whoever blasphemes Holy Spirit is guilty of eternal sin

The repartee of Jesus and the scribes form a nifty little chiasm all by themselves, as is common in Mark. It is organized around pairs of paired keywords in paired lines, demons/satan, kingdom/house, concluded in the pair of lines in the center that collects the keywords satan/divided/stand into one structure. It then unrolls out with the keyword strong man/house signaling an opposition to the previous pair of kingdom/house. The final paired structure opposes demons/satan to blasphemy/holy spirit. This structure is a masterwork. Note too how the writer has framed it with remarks that mean exactly the same thing -- the passage opens with "He is possessed by Beezebul" and closes with "He is possessed by an unclean spirit." The entire passage is a literary creation from top to bottom, courtesy of the writer of Mark.

Further, at the larger level of the narrative, binding is a key theme in the Gospel of Mark. The "strong man" here might be Satan, or it might refer to Jesus. The passage exhibits thematic unity and creativity, as well as structural complexity, and a certain amount of interpretive ambiguity, worthy of any good writer. In short, there is no reason to imagine that the writer of Mark did not create that saying as well. Certainly the Seminar can offer what looks remarkably like an argument from incredulity -- we can't believe that Jesus didn't say these words -- which is not an argument at all, but an emotional appeal to the reader in the face of a conundrum. But I have no trouble attributing these words to the writer of Mark -- the rest of the passage certainly comes from him, the passage itself is replete with Markan structures and themes, and it fits into the writer's larger narrative goals.

Space does not allow for a longer deconstruction of the Seminar's approach. Nevertheless, it should be clear from the foregoing that the Seminar's historical methodology is confused, subjective, contradictory, and often inexplicable. The Seminar's claim that it can discern "the distinctive voice of Jesus" is no more valid than its conservative foes who claim that the gospels represent the testimony of eyewitnesses writing in the authentic voice of God.

Despite its many problems from the methodological standpoint, The Five Gospels is a useful compendium of commentary, arguments, and information on the Gospels. The scholars did their own translation of the Greek, which is often lively and interesting. On that basis, and as a popular work from an important group of scholars, The Five Gospels should be on every NT exegete's shelf. Sadly, though, for exegetes interested in reliable historical methodology that can recover information about Jesus' life, it offers only negative lessons.

UPDATE: Steve Carlson has some good insights in response. And Loren Rosson III takes issue with my post here.

[Christianity] [historical Jesus] [Jesus]

More Books here!

Living in Taiwan where there is only limited access to serious Bible books, I am always excited to get books from overseas. This weekend I ran up to Keelung and the NE coast of Taiwan, where I picked up Kermode & Alter's The Literary Guide to the Bible, and Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative, two books I have looked forward to reading, at a friend's house. I am also working on a review of The Five Gospels and the JSem's historical claims.

Later this summer I will prepare my work on the structure of Mark for publication. If anyone out there has a bib on chiasms, I'd appreciate a copy.

[Christianity]

Another Jesus sighting....

Jesus appears in a streetlight shadow on a tree...

People have flocked to the site since Wednesday, when a woman first claimed to see the image on the side of a tree. The image is only visible at night when the streetlight near the tree is illuminated.

Gonna have trouble selling that one on E-Bay...

Oxford Humanities Archive

This just post to H-Asia:

H-ASIA
July 12, 2005

Launching of commercial Oxford Journals Humanities Archive
-------
Ed. note: H-ASIA does not publish paid advertisements and we edit
posts to modify information from specific offers of sale to general
information notes. This announcement, however, seems, potentially,
to be of interest to many of our members and hence it's appearance.
Contact Oxford Journals for further information. FFC

From: H-Net Announcements

Oxford Journals launch Humanities Archive
Date Submitted: 2005-07-01
Announcement ID: 146909

Today Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, announced the launch of its Humanities Archive: the first of five subject-based digital backfiles to be launched by early 2006. With its earliest material dating from 1829, the Humanities Archive contains over 300,000 articles, including major papers in history, music, religion, philosophy, literary studies, and linguistics, from Volume 1 Issue 1 of each title to the end of 1995. Journals included in the
project include Essays in Criticism, English Historical Review, Past & Present, and the Journal of Theological Studies.

The project forms part of Oxford Journals' strategy to increase and improve access to scholarly information, by ensuring permanent electronic accessibility to journal content.

‘With electronic information now commonplace, readers increasingly expect to find all journal content online, whether it is today’s cutting-edge research or concepts from the more distant past. This massive digitization process addresses this growing need for older content’, said Richard Gedye, Sales and Marketing Director, Oxford Journals. He continued: ‘Our aim is two-fold: to increase the availability of important knowledge that was once previously hard to access and in danger of becoming lost; and to connect far more quickly with the people who need to read it.’

The Humanities Archive is available for purchase or on subscription from July 1, 2005.
Four further subject-based archives in Law, Medicine, Science, and Social Science will be released over the coming months. The Complete Archive, which includes all 141 journals in the subject-based Archives (with no duplication of content), and an estimated four million article pages, is anticipated to be available from January 2006. Fully-searchable article PDFs with HTML headers and abstracts, and links to similar articles in each journal are just two of the features of the collection that will make it an indispensable resource for researchers, enabling quick and easy access to both current and previously hard-to-find material. For librarians and information managers, these digital backfiles will serve to fill gaps in institutional collections, while saving valuable shelf space and staff time.

Each Archive will be available for outright purchase (either for local loading or via remote access from the Oxford Journals server) or on annual subscription. Each Archive contains material published up to December 1995. Accordingly, from 2006, a current subscription to any journal in the Archive project will include access to the full text of all volumes back to January 1996. For the majority of journals this will mean that current subscribers will gain access to at least one additional year of full-text content, since most of our journals were launched online subsequently to 1996.

There's a great yearning for knowledge out there

I post on a number of Christian forums as a resident atheist, and I get letters like this one from time to time:

Since you landed at ___ you've been instrumnental in pointing me in an altogether unexpected direction - while I'm emphatically not atheist or even agnostic - my life has been filled to overflowing with 'evidences' of God in it to even consider that He does not exist - my understandings of the New Testament etc has radically changed - thanks for that.

My experience of interacting with ordinary Christians and non-Christians is that their knowledge of the Bible is practically non-existent. There's really a great yearning, and a great gap, that NT scholars need to better fill. Not only does this fill a great need, but it has been my experience that people with robust knowledge of the Bible rarely opt for the more extremist forms of Christian religious belief.

Atwill on the TF

This posting will summarize Atwill's arguments from his new book Caesar's Messiah (my review) on the famous passage about Jesus in Josephus, the Testamonium Flavianum (TF).

First, the TF and the passages that follow it (Whiston translation). Read them closely, especially the second one.

"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him did not at first forsake him, for he appeared to them alive the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder, and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis that was at Rome. I will now first take notice of the wicked attempt about the temple of Isis, and will then give an account of the Jewish affairs. There was at Rome a woman whose name was Paulina; one who, on account of the dignity of her ancestors, and by the regular conduct of a virtuous life, had a great reputation: she was also very rich; and although she was of a beautiful countenance, and in that flower of her age wherein women are the most gay, yet did she lead a life of great modesty. She was married to Saturninus, one that was every way answerable to her in an excellent character. Decius Mundus fell in love with this woman. He was a man very high in the equestrian order; and as she was of too great dignity to be caught by presents, and had already rejected them, though they had been sent in great abundance, he was still more inflamed with love to her, insomuch that he promised to give her two hundred thousand Attic drachmae for one night's lodging; and when this would not prevail upon her, and he was not able to bear this misfortune in his amours he thought it the best way to famish himself to death for want of food, on account of Paulina's sad refusal; and he determined with himself to die after such a manner, and he went on with his purpose accordingly. Now Mundus had a freed-woman, who had been made free by his father, whose name was Ide, one skillful in all sorts of mischief. This woman was very much grieved at the young man's resolution to kill himself, (for he did not conceal his intentions to destroy himself from others,) and came to him, and encouraged him by her discourse, and made him to hope, by some promises she gave him, that he might obtain a night's lodging with Paulina; and when he joyfully hearkened to her entreaty, she said she wanted no more than fifty thousand drachmae for the entrapping of the woman. So when she had encouraged the young man, and gotten as much money as she required, she did not take the same methods as had been taken before, because she perceived that the woman was by no means to be tempted by money; but as she knew that she was very much given to the worship of the goddess Isis, she devised the following stratagem: She went to some of Isis's priests, and upon the strongest assurances [of concealment], she persuaded them by words, but chiefly by the offer of money, of twenty-five thousand drachmae in hand, and as much more when the thing had taken effect; and told them the passion of the young man, and persuaded them to use all means possible to beguile the woman. So they were drawn in to promise so to do, by that large sum of gold they were to have. Accordingly, the oldest of them went immediately to Paulina; and upon his admittance, he desired to speak with her by herself. When that was granted him, he told her that he was sent by the god Anubis, who was fallen in love with her, and enjoined her to come to him. Upon this she took the message very kindly, and valued herself greatly upon this condescension of Anubis, and told her husband that she had a message sent her, and was to sup and lie with Anubis; so he agreed to her acceptance of the offer, as fully satisfied with the chastity of his wife. Accordingly, she went to the temple, and after she hadsupped there, and it was the hour to go to sleep, the priest shut the doors of the temple, when, in the holy part of it, the lights were also put out. Then did Mundus leap out, (for he was hidden therein,) and did not fail of enjoying her, who was at his service all the night long, as supposing he was the god; and when he was gone away, which was before those priests who knew nothing of this stratagem were stirring, Paulina came early to her husband, and told him how the god Anubis had appeared to her. Among her friends, also, she declared how great a value she put upon this favor, who partly disbelieved the thing, when they reflected on its nature, and partly were amazed at it, as having no pretense for not believing it, when they considered the modesty and the dignity of the person. But now, on the third day after what had been done, Mundus met Paulina, and said, "Nay, Paulina, thou hast saved me two hundred thousand drachmae, which sum thou mightest have added to thy own family; yet hast thou not failed to be at my service in the manner I invited thee. As for the reproaches thou hast laid upon Mundus, I value not the business of names; but I rejoice in the pleasure I reaped by what I did, while I took to myself the name of Anubis." When he had said this, he went his way. But now she began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and rent her garments, and told her husband of the horrid nature of the wicked contrivance and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon Tiberius inquired into the matter thoroughly by examining the priests about it, and ordered them to be crucified, as well as Ide, who was the occasion of their perdition, and who had contrived the whole matter, which was so injurious to the woman. He also demolished the temple of Isis, and gave order that her statue should be thrown into the river Tiber; while he only banished Mundus, but did no more to him, because he supposed that what crime he had committed was done out of the passion of love. And these were the circumstances which concerned the temple of Isis, and the injuries occasioned by her priests.
I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews at Rome, as I formerly told you I would. There was a man who was a Jew, but he had been driven away from his own country by an accusation laid against him for transgressing their laws, and by the fear he was under of punishment for the same; but in all respects a wicked man. He, then living at Rome, professed to instruct men in the wisdom of the laws of Moses. He procured also three other men, entirely of the same character with himself, to be his partners. These men persuaded Fulvia, a woman of great dignity, and one that had embraced the Jewish religion, to send purple and gold to the temple at Jerusalem; and when they had gotten them, they employed them for their own uses, and spent the money themselves, on which account it was that they at first required it of her. Whereupon Tiberius, who had been informed of the thing by Saturninus, the husband of Fulvia, who desired inquiry might be made about it, ordered all the Jews to be banished out of Rome; at which time the consuls listed four thousand men out of them, and sent them to the island Sardinia; but punished a greater number of them, who were unwilling to become soldiers, on account of keeping the laws of their forefathers. Thus were these Jews banished out of the city by the wickedness of four men."

----------------------------------------------------------------

As Atwill began to consider these passages, he noted that the second one says the Temple of Isis was destroyed under Tiberius. But Josephus later records that Temple as still standing, for Josephus wrote that Vespasian and Titus had spent the night before the celebration of the completion of the Judaic war at the temple of Isis. Why had Josephus written something that he knew was false?

The second discordant note in the passages was the name of the protagonist in the second tale, Decius Mundus, or "Decius World." Decius Mus was a famous soldier, who, according to legend, was the son in a father-son pair, both of whom had sacrificed themselves in a Roman rite known as devotio. In a devotio, a Roman soldier sacrifices his own life during a fierce battle to appease the gods of both sides, and perhaps induce the enemy's gods to come over to the Roman side. He is one who sacrifices himself for the many. To Atwill, Decius Mundus looked like a parody of Decius Mus, all the more so because mundus means world, while mus denotes mouse. As Atwill notes: "If a playwright created a character named Napoleon World, it would be obvious which character in history he was lampooning. Decius was perhaps Rome's most famous war hero and all patricians were aware of his exploits." This connection is further established by the fact that the writer of the passages says that Decius Mundus had resolved to kill himself (when Paulina failed to smile on his suit), just as Decius Mus actually did. Atwill also observes that as one who died for the many, Decius Mus is a strong parallel to Jesus. Indeed, Atwill points out, in the Gospel of John Caiaphas defines Jesus' death in just that way.

Atwill then notes the very interesting fact that both tales have essentially the same plot. In both tales wicked priests trick a woman of "dignity", taking advantage of her weakness for religion. Atwill points out:

"Further, not only do both stories have the same plot, but they also contain a number of elements that are interchangeable. Both of these deceived women of dignity, amazingly, have husbands named Saturninus. Both these husbands named "Saturninus" just happen to know the Emperor Tiberius, to whom each husband goes to complain about what has been done to his wife. In both tales, among other punishments, Tiberius then "banishes" one or more of the perpetrators."

Atwill also argues that Josephus has left us another clue. First he says another sad calamity befell the Jews at Rome, and then he mentions the problems at the Temple of Isis. But in telling the tale, he reverses this order. Why is this significant? Atwill writes:

Further, at the beginning of the third story Josephus claims to be returning to an episode about the Jews "at Rome" as he had "formerly" stated.

I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews at Rome, as I formerly told you I would.

However, it was the "shameful practices at the temple of Isis" that Josephus previously claimed to have occurred "at Rome," not the episode regarding the Jews.

Josephus' last mention of the Jews was in connection with Pilate. In other words, Josephus treats the stories as though they are interchangeable.

The next oddity that Atwill flags is Paulina rending her clothing when she discovers what had happened. This is a quintessential Jewish expression of grief, one required by Jewish law in some circumstances. The problem is that Paulina is not a Jew but a noble Roman woman, a member of the cult of Isis. It is Fulvia in the other story who is the Jewish woman, but she does not rend her garments. Another instance of the strange interchangeability of the stories?

Atwill then slips another clue into place. I will let him tell the tale in his own words:

The Testimonium describes Jesus' resurrection, stating that he "appeared to them alive again on the third day." Decius Mundus also appears to Paulina on the third day. There is, of course, a difference. Whereas Jesus appears on the third day, to show that he is a God, Decius appears on the third day to announce that he is not a god. It is implausible that something as unusual as two "third-day divinity declarations" would wind up next to one another by chance.

The Testimonium contains the only non-New Testament first-century description of the life of Jesus. The probability that a mirror opposite of Jesus' resurrection, a singular event in literature, would occur by chance in the paragraph following its only historical documentation is, I believe, too low for consideration. In fact, in all of literature these are the only two stories I am aware of that describe anyone coming on a "third day" to proclaim that he is or is not a god. The only rational explanation is that this mirror-opposite parallel has, for some reason, been placed next to the Testimonium deliberately.

Furthermore, Decius is pretending to be Anubis, a god with many parallels to Jesus, as Atwill observes. Anubis was killed and resurrected, and within the cult of Isis, was known as the royal child. He was also the son of a god. Another link between the three stories Atwill notes is that they are all said to have occurred at about the same time. [Note: As Jackalope at IIDB pointed out, this describes Osiris, not Anubis. Anubis is the God of the Dead. Atwill seems to be in error here. As a God of the Dead the parody is even more biting, however.]{A friend of Atwill's posting to the same thread says that the error was caught during editing but did not get changed in the final version]

Atwill then picks up yet another parallel between the tales and early Christianity. Josephus writes:

There was a man who was a Jew, but he had been driven away from his own country by an accusation laid against him for transgressing their laws, and by the fear he was under of punishment for the same; but in all respects a wicked man. He, then living at Rome, professed to instruct men in the wisdom of the laws of Moses.

Of course, there is a historic individual who did all these things: the Apostle Paul. The wicked man of the Fulvia tale is a lampoon of Paul. What is the name of the woman in the other story?

Given the interchangeability of the elements, Atwill says, the stories must be regarded as a puzzle for the reader to solve. Where do we start? "Josephus actually has Decius Mundus state the solution to the puzzle within the lampoon:

. . . value not the business of names . . ."

The tales are interchangeable, observes Atwill: "Both women have an experience with wicked priests; both have husbands with the same name; both husbands appeal to Tiberius; and both women share the quality of dignity." We can also switch Christ from the TF into the tale: They both claim to be gods, they both make revelations regarding their divinity on the third day; and they both have made public resolutions to sacrifice themselves. The tale thus resolves into a tale with obvious parallels to Christian history: Decius (representing Rome) cannot buy a Jewish woman (representing the land of the Jews), so he tricks her, pretending to be a god (just as Jesus is a fictional Roman creation, in Atwill's view). The issue of his identity is resolved on the third day. The Jews are banished, and the Temple is demolished (recall that Josephus knows that the Temple of Isis was not actually demolished). Once the reader switches the names around, something very like history as we understand it emerges. Atwill adds: "Once the reader knows that the stories are designed to have interchangeable elements, it is not difficult to see that by switching their genders Paulina can become Paul, which completely clarifies the identity of the "Jew at Rome."

Atwill argues that the parallels and interchangeable story elements that link the TF and the two passages that follow it show that all three stories must have been created together, a claim with far-reaching effects. Atwill believes that scholars who have argued that the TF is an interpolation because of the percieved discontinuity between the previous passage and the following one are wrong. Another point in favor of their creation together can be deduced from the way the passages interrupt the story of Pilate:

18:35 Pilate arrives in Judea to abolish Jewish laws
18:55–59 Pilate introduces imperial images in the temple, causing a "tumult"
18:60–62 Pilate tries to build an aqueduct, causing another "tumult"
18:63–64 The Testimonium appears
18:65–80 The Decius Mundus story appears
18:81–84 The Fulvia story appears
18:85–7 Pilate has a confrontation with the Samaritans
18:88–9 Pilate is removed as procurator

It is easy to see that all three stories, taken together, also interrupt the flow of the narration. Their placement here as a group would then explain how it is that two "three day divinity revelation" tales happened to appear right next to each other: the design is deliberate, Atwill argues.

Atwill next turns to linguistic links between the various passages in question. I will let him tell the tale in his own words:

In the Testimonium, Jesus is described as a teacher of people who "accept the truth with pleasure." The Greek word for pleasure that Josephus uses is hedone, the root for the English word "hedonism." Scholars have puzzled over Josephus use of hedone here. Hedone usually denotes sensual or malicious pleasure, and "to accept the truth with hedone" is a strange concept. The sentence that Josephus wrote in Greek could just as well be translated "received the truth with malicious pleasure."
The verb Josephus uses in this phrase is dechomenon, which means to receive, the phrase in Greek reading hedonei talethe dechomenon. In the Decius Mundus tale, Decius also receives something with "sensual pleasure." Decius receives the plot Ide hatches to enable him to seduce Paulina with sensual pleasure—hedone, the Greek reading dechomenou ten hiketeian hedonei.
The same verb, dechomenou (meaning "to accept or receive"), is used with hedone in the Testimonium.

Another interesting use of the word hedone occurs in the introduction to the War of the Jews. There Josephus writes;

I have comprehended all these things in seven books, and have left no occasion for complaint or accusation to such as have been acquainted with this war; and I have written it down for the sake of those that love truth, but not for those that please themselves [with fictitious relations]. And I will begin my account of these things with what I call my First Chapter.

According to Atwill Whiston could not make sense of the phrase in brackets. Atwill writes:

The Greek words that Josephus uses here, hêdonên anegrapsa, do not mean "please themselves with fictitious relations" but rather please themselves with registering. When used in connection with a person, as it is here, the stem word, anagrapho, means to register or record names.

If one recalls the name-switching Atwill argues took place in this passage, the Greek of Josephus' introduction to Wars makes sense in a very illuminating way.

Implications
Atwill argues that Josephus was written to complement the Gospel tales, and that both sets of texts know of each other. This would imply that the TF is integral and original to Josephus. Assuming Atwill's insight on the relationships between these three passages is on target, several positions suggest themselves:

1. The TF is a later interpolation, along with the other two passages.
2. The other two passages were interpolated later to make fun of the TF, which is authentic.
3. All three are authentic and integral to Josephus.

Regardless of which position one accepts, Atwill's interpretation rules out Meier's reconstruction of the passage (taken from Doherty's page on the TF):

"Now about this time there lived Jesus a wise man, for he was a doer of wonderful works and a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who in the first place had come to love him did not forsake him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, continues to the present day."

Atwill's TF must contain the "third day" reference in order for it to make sense in light of the following two passages. Hence the original TF, whether inserted, or authentic and merely parodied, must have contained the '"third day" reference.

Michael

PS: Just for fun, I thought I would offer some parallels from the earlier, longer story. From some angles Josephus seems to contain several pieces, or microcosms, or parodies, of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Ide betrays Paulina..........
Judas betrays Jesus

Ide gives money to the priests..........
Judas gets money from the priests

the oldest priest goes to Paulina representing the god Anubis
the high priest interrogates Jesus representing the god YHWH

Paulina sups at the Temple with the god prior to his manifestation
Last supper on Mt Olivet facing Temple with the son of god

Paulina tells all her friends how the god appeared to her
women at the tomb tell no one

Mundus reveals his non-divine identity to Paulina
women are the first to hear of the resurrection

Paulina rends her garments when she finds out Anubis is really Decius Mundus
the High Priests rend his garments at the blasphemy of Jesus claiming to be God

the case is taken to Tiberius
the case is taken to Pilate

the priests are crucified
Jesus is crucified

The Temple is destroyed
The Temple is destroyed

Mundus acted out of love
Jesus acted out of love

UPDATE: Rod Green at in discussion at JM on the TF pointed out this article which notes that

The most problematic feature of Domitian's "love affair" with Isis, from a Josephan perspective, would probably have been the fact that Domitian, like his Flavian predecessors, linked the goddess Isis with the successful military conquest of Judaea.

It can't be a coincidence that the Temple linked with the conquest of Judaea is the place where the parodist located his tale of Jesus. The article also notes that:

Minerva stands in the center of this arch, flanked by Isis and Anubis. Above the gods is a depiction of captives chained to palm trees, a symbolic representation of Judaea's defeat and submission after the war with Rome.

The writer may have made the connection from the arch......Here's your conflation of Isis, Anubis, and Judaea all in one package. The writer is engaging in a form of Greek fiction called ekphrasis, but in reverse. In that style the writer describes a physical object, usually a painting, but sometimes a statue, or anything, which displays a mythical or religious theme, said theme bearing on the story at hand. Here the writer is reversing this practice, describing the event based on the arch of Domitian he has seen in Rome.

Technorati: [Christianity][Josephus]

Ten Commandments?

Everyone has been blogging on the Ten C's decision, so naturally, I won't. The decision on eminent domain was, I think, far more important, and outraged a much wider selection of the population. Richard Anderson nailed that decision beautifully on his Luke blog:

Now word comes from the High Court in an nuanced but not confusing opinion that it is okay for the government to take land from poor people and give it to rich condo developers. I can think of five places in need of condo developments. The reaction was quick. A jury in Alabama cleared a former CEO of charges of accounting fraud totaling $2.7 billion.

ROFL!

I finished my grading yesterday! Have a good weekend. Back next week with book reviews and articles.

The Empty Tomb on XTALK

I thought I'd take a break from inputting grades to respond to some of the talk on XTALK about the Empty Tomb. Loren Rossen argues:

"Visions without the empty tomb do not account for a resurrection belief; Tom Wright has hammered this point home repeatedly."

The reason Wright has to keep repeating this is because it is a faulty argument refuted by the reality of believer behavior. Elvis is dead and buried, but fans still see him. Rossen himself acknowledges the way belief denies reality in his remarks on Carrier's piece:

Carrier goes on to make interesting analogies to the rumor of theft reported in Mt 28:15, suggesting that Matthew blames the rumor on conspiracy ("the Jews' desire to conceal the truth") in the same way that the Heaven's Gate cult claimed the proof against their imminent spacecraft to be the conspiratal work of an earth traitor. And just as Matthew accuses Jews of paying off guards, the survivors of Jonestown accused the government of fabricating evidence and paying off forensic doctors to fabricate evidence which made them look bad. This is perhaps more plausible than many of the pious would today be comfortable acknowledging.

Repetition is one way that bad arguments like Wright's seem acceptable.

Meanwhile, inspired by the Empty Tomb, Lee Edgar Tyler writes on Price:

I recently re-read Price's article "

It is, I must say, a pretty sorry excuse for argumentation. And I am predisposed toward his conclusions, at least most of them. When a person purporting to support objective scholarship indulges in such polemics, he does more harm than good to all sides of the debate. I could go on, but I think the essay (which begins with a comparison of the Christ of evangelical Christians to the comic book character Superboy) speaks for itself. Or not.

This is, I must say, a pretty sorry excuse for argumentation. When a person purporting to support objective scholarship indulges in such polemics, he does more harm than good. I think Tyler's rhetorical polemics here speaks for themselves: Price is less interested in the comparison of Superboy to Jesus than in comparing the efforts of Superboy to vindicate his own legend to the efforts of modern apologists to save the Jesus of myth:

I remember a particular Superboy comic book in which the Boy of Steel somehow discovers that in the future, he is thought to be as mythical as Peter Pan and Santa Claus. Indignant at this turn of events, he flies at faster than light speed and enters the future to set the record straight. He does a few super-deeds and vindicates himself, then comes home. So Superboy winds up having the last laugh --or does he?

Of course, it is only fiction! The people in the future were quite right! Superboy is just as mythical as Santa Claus and Peter Pan.

This seems to me a close parallel to the efforts of Christian apologists to vindicate as sober history the story of a supernatural savior who was born of a virgin, healed the sick, raised the dead, changed water into wine, walked on water, rose from the grave and ascended bodily into the sky.

I used to think, when I myself was a Christian apologist, a defender of the evangelical faith, that I had done a pretty respectable job of vindicating that story as history. I brought to bear a variety of arguments I now recognize to be fallacious, such as the supposed closeness of the gospels to the events they record, their ostensibly use of eyewitness testimony, etc. Now, in retrospect, I judge that my efforts were about as effective in the end as Superboy's! When all is said and done, he remains a fiction.[emphasis mine]

In any case, it's a sad rhetorical trick to invite others to agree that someone must be a bad arguer by appealing to their sense of indignation that someone would dare to compare Superboy to their particular Sacred Character from the Past.

The Empty Tomb

Of course, as soon as I note that my posting will slacken, I must immediately post...

Pursuant to my review, Loren Rossen has a totally different take on the book on XTALK. Enjoy!

It's Finals Week...

I'll be in absentia for the next few days as I take care of the administrative side of teaching....man, I hate it when my work interferes with my hobby. In the meantime, enjoy some beautiful central Taiwan scenery

Book Review: The Empty Tomb

The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave
by Robert M. Price (Editor), Jeffery Jay Lowder (Editor) 545 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books (April 5, 2005)

The Empty Tomb is a collection of 15 essays by skeptical scholars on the historicity of the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection. Some two-thirds of the essays have been published in the past several years, but there are also several new works, including Richard Carrier's brilliant 100-page essay that spans the middle of the book, and completely redeems whatever weaknesses the volume may have.

The book is aimed squarely at the arguments of Christian apologists, a notion that sat very uncomfortably with the critic from Publisher's Weekly on Amazon.com, who obviously lacked both the knowledge and the patience to deal with the diversity of approaches in the book, and did not seemed to understand it at all, a fact which apparently bred resentment rather than admiration. The essays fall more or less into two groups, a set of a half dozen essays on philosophy and methodology, and another group that focuses strongly on the texts themselves, and the evidence they offer, as well as their historical and social context. The work is accessible to layman who are willing to make the effort to interact with the often complex and detailed theoretical, methodological, and evidential aspects of it.

The volume begins with three essays that explore the Resurrection from the historical and theological point of view. Robert Cavin's essay asks whether there is sufficient historical evidence to establish the resurrection of Jesus. Cavin's essay is actually an exploration of what it means to ask this question, breaking out the underlying assumptions of what "the Resurrection" means in great detail.

This is followed by Michael Martin's essay on Bayes' Theorem and the Resurrection as initially improbable. Martin explains things very clearly, and the essay is not difficult to follow. Martin makes a clever move in arguing that not only is the initial probability of the Resurrection low on the assumptions of naturalism, it is also low even if we allow supernatural events. Theodore M. Drange rounds out the opening section with a discussion of Christian theology and the Resurrection. This short essay is a response to the claims of the 19th century theologian Charles Hodge, demolishing them point by point.

The fourth article, Robert Price's article on the famous passage in 1 Cor 15 as an interpolation, begins a section that focuses on the textual evidence for the resurrection, and on early Christian history.

By far the best article in the collection is the next one, Richard Carrier's long essay on the spiritual body of Christ and the legend of the empty tomb. From the title and opening lines one might expect a dull discussion of the theology of risen bodies, but Carrier develops his theme with great fecundity, drawing evidence from ever farther afield and offering numerous insights into the gospel texts. In addition to solid methodological and textual viewpoints, Carrier's work is always full of insightful tidbits, and this one is no exception. Like me, the reader no doubt kick himself when he realizes how many times he has read Plutarch's Life of Romulus yet never spotted the parallel to the arrest scene in the Garden of Gethsemane. In addition to rapier thrusts like that into the heart of the Jesus legend, Carrier also bludgeons it with Orphic and other parallels. Unlike many who present evidence from the so-called history of religions school, Carrier is restrained in his presentation, and entirely free of the kind of triumphalism that has plagued adherents of that school of Jesus-critique. This is one essay that is destined to become a classic.

If Carrier is the brilliant Rommel, ranging across his enemy's flanks at will and unimpeded, Peter Kirby, the writer of the next piece, complements him perfectly as the competent, sturdy NCO who must direct the small-unit battles. Kirby's piece is a detailed review of the evidence from the Gospel texts, showing how it is most likely they are fictive constructions. Kirby's workmanlike piece is buttressed by copious references to a wide variety of scholarship, and should become a key source for anyone writing on this topic.

Jeffery Jay Lowder then follows with a demolition of William Lane Craig's writing on the Empty Tomb. The more-style-than-substance arguments of Craig, a well-known debater and Christian apologist, are ruthlessly exposed by Lowder in this piece.

"Taming the Tehom" is Evan Fales deconstruction of the Matthean version of the Resurrection account. Fales reads Matthew in light of both the Jonah story, other Bible legends, and myths and stories from across the Ancient Near East.

A short essay by Richard Carrier then discusses the plausibility of the theft of the body. This is also a response to apologist William Craig. Carrier shows that far from being history, Matthew's story is constructed off of Daniel 6. This piece, though only a few pages, is written in Carrier's clear and insightful style and is well worth a look.

Carrier follows this with another information-packed discussion of Jesus' burial in light of Jewish law. In this essay, a version of which was posted to Internet Infidels a while back, Carrier's review not only shows how fiction is the more plausible option for the origin of the story, but also locates the 'three-day" motif within the prescriptions of Jewish law.

Duncan and Derrett propose a model for the origin of the Resurrection story in their next piece, oddly entitled "Financial Aspects of the Resurrection." They argue that the story of the Resurrection and Ascension was invented because of the benefits it brought to the disciples and the new religion.

Robert Price's piece on William Craig's apologetics follows. This piece, highly polemical, is also very enjoyable. Price's essay dissects the underlying apologetic motives that drive 'scholarship' on the empty tomb and the Resurrection, showing how apologetics continues to inform, and distort, scholarly work on the topic.

Keith Parsons closes the long section on the nuts and bolts of New Testament texts, history, and related scholarship behind with an essay that argues that hallucinations could account for the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus. Parsons shows that apologists' objections to this theory are uninformed and poorly-argued.

Michael Martin is up next with a response to Swinburne's absurd argument that it is highly probable that Jesus was God incarnate and really was Resurrected from the dead. Martin, like Swinburne a professional philosopher, shows that Swinburne's claim is incoherent on almost every level.

Evan Fales then finishes with a philosophical look at Alvin Plantinga, reformed epistemology, and Biblical scholarship. Despite its formidable title, the piece is an accessible study of how a major Christian philosopher goes about attempting to discredit modern Bible scholarship so that he can continue clinging to beliefs that have been shown to be wrong by modern scholarship. Fales steers surehandedly through a difficult thicket of philosophical and methodological troubles.

The essays in this volume are all of very high quality and there is something here for readers of every taste. Skeptics in search of ammunition will find a plentiful supply. This idea of themed essays around topics of interest to skeptical views of early Christian history has great potential, and I look forward to further compilations of this nature from Price and Lowder.

Bart Ehrman on Da Vinci Code

Bible & Interpretation had a pointer to Bart Ehrman's interview on Beliefnet about the Da Vinci Code. Interesting opening comment from the always clear Dr. Ehrman:

The difficulty I had reading through "The Da Vinci Code" with that in mind was that most of the descriptions of ancient documents, in fact, are not factual—they’re part of his fiction. But people reading the book aren't equipped to separate the fact from the fiction.

But Dr. E! That's true of the Bible too.....people are no more equipped to pare fact from fiction in that set of texts than in the Da Vinci Code.....it's interesting to see the level of effort scholars are putting into responding to a piece of modern fiction about the Bible. One wonders why so much energy is expended on setting people straight on the Da Vinci Code, but so much less on outreach to the public on the nature of the Biblical texts themselves, and on separating fact from fiction in those texts. I interact with lay Christians every day on this topic, and it is simply astounding how little people know about them. Perhaps if scholars had put more energy into educating people originally, they wouldn't have to spend so much time setting the record straight on the Da Vinci Code.....

Which reminds me. If you haven't put your articles on the Internet, NT scholars, it is never too late!