a Pauline transformation of Jewish eschatology?

I have been reading the published version of Rodrigo Morales's PhD dissertation (Duke, 2007), The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians (WUNT 2/282; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), which I'm reviewing for IBR. This is an excellent little book (only two hundred pages) that is very clearly and logically structured, cogently and carefully argued, and concisely written. As a brief introduction, Morales proceeds in three basic steps:

• First, he briefly establishes the Status Quaestionis of the role of the Spirit of God in Paul and, especially, his letter to the Galatians. At a pivotal point in the letter Paul asks, "Was it by works of the Law that you received the Spirit? Or was it by hearing of faith?" While the answer is clear (Paul simply could not be proposing that the Galatians received the Spirit via Torah-observance!), the significance of the Spirit for Pauline thought and rhetoric is not. Morales argues that the connection between the outpouring of God's Spirit and the restoration of Israel provides the key to understanding Paul's argument in Galatians.
• Second, he surveys the intersection of God's gift of his Spirit and the promise of Israel's restoration among the prophetic Hebrew biblical writings (specifically, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel) in Chapter 2 and among Second Temple Jewish texts in Chapter 3. His aim is not to identify how Paul reads either biblical or extracanonical texts but rather to assess how Paul takes up and employs themes and concepts current among (roughly) contemporaneous expressions of Jewish thought. Key among these themes are, among others, new creation and new exodus imagery, the heart and its need for renewal, and the sonship of God's people.
• Third, Morales turns to Galatians 3–4 (Chapter 4) and Galatians 5–6 (Chapter 5) to bring the material from previous chapters to bear on the exegetical discussion. I am currently at the beginning of Chapter 4, so I cannot say very much at all about Morales's hermeneutic or exegetical work. But his handling of the texts in Chapters 2–3 has been responsible and cautious, and so I don't anticipate problems here.

Except . . .

Morales makes a comment almost in passing (it's even in a footnote) regarding the shift in late-Second Temple Judaism from metaphorical understandings of "resurrection" (and of "death," too) toward literal interpretations. He says, "The key transformation that Paul brought about was the idea that one figure would be raised in the middle of history, and that others would somehow participate both anticipatorily and ultimately in that eschatological life" (79, n. 5; my emphasis). I have some problems with the phrase "middle of history," because I'm not sure that helpfully frames Paul's rhetoric. Would Paul affirm the present as "the middle of history"? Or would he see in Christ's resurrection the dawning of the new age and the fading of the old? But given the complexities of the dynamics of what are commonly referred to in Christian theology as the "now-and-not-yet" (complexities which Morales recognizes), we likely won't solve that problem here.

But I have bigger problems with the idea that this was, somehow, a "key transformation" for which Paul was responsible. I'm not at all opposed to the idea that individuals affect, sometimes dramatically, how and what their cultures think. And clearly Paul is one of those individuals. But after reading Jerry Sumney's essay, "'Christ died for us': Interpretation of Jesus' Death as a Central Element of the Identity of the Earliest Church," pp. 147–72 in Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identify Formation (FS William Campbell; Edited by K. Ehrensperger and J. B. Tucker; LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), I'm a bit more suspicious of the image of Paul-the-theological-revolutionary than I previously was.

Certainly Paul takes this idea—viz., that the future resurrection was inaugurated and even is proleptically exprienced in Christ's resurrection—and advances it considerably. But here's the question Sumney has taught me to ask: Is it really likely that the pre-Pauline church had not already developed some idea of the inaugurating/proleptic/"middle of history" resurrection of Jesus? How would the earliest Christians, whom Paul the Pharisee (who almost certainly accepted the notion of bodily resurrection in the age to come even before his experience on the Damascus road) saw fit to persecute, have connected their eschatological ideas of resurrection with the experiences of Jesus as raised "according to the Scriptures" (see 1 Cor. 15.3–5)? Is it not more likely that this was one of the ideas Paul found incomprehensible, and so he sought to stamp them out from Israel? Can't we understand the failure of the disciples to understand Jesus' so-called "Passion predictions" in Mark's Gospel (almost certainly later than Paul's letters) as suggesting that this very point caused problems for Jesus' followers prior to their experiences of Easter?

Of course, I'm only raising questions; I have very little to offer by way of answers. In many areas Paul was almost certainly theologically avant-garde. But in some areas—perhaps in many areas—Paul inherited ideas from those around him, whether Jewish, Greek, or even early (or proto-)Christian influences. In the balance of things, do we really want to think that Jesus' earliest followers had to wait for Paul to come around before they began wrestling with the connection between pre-Christ[ian] eschatological ideas about resurrection and the Easter Event? I find this very unlikely.

Still, to end on a positive note, Morales's book is very easy to read. Even if you find it difficult, the thesis he's pursuing (and the evidence he considers) is well worth the effort it takes to access his argument.

early Christian textuality

With the beginning of the semester barrelling down on us like a melodramatic steamtrain, I haven't had as much time to spend with Harry Gamble's book, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). So this morning I got up with my alarm and finished the first chapter, "Literacy and Literary Culture in Early Christianity" (1–41). As a reminder of my first impressions of Gamble's book, I especially like his discussion of early Christian literacy (2–10), and his phrase "participation in literacy" in particular. Gamble proceeds to survey the influence of Franz Overbeck, Adolf Deismann, and form-critical scholarship in scholars' understanding of early Christian literary culture—and to dismiss any strong polarization between Hochliteratur ("high literature") and Kleinliteratur ("common or vulgar literature").

From there Gamble traces "the scope and character of early Christian literature" (21–40). Here he finds a world of written texts, from those that remain from antiquity (e.g., the NT, the NT Apocrypha, etc.) to those we find referenced but that no longer survive (e.g., Paul's first [?] letter to Corinth; see 1 Cor. 5.9), and those we only infer (e.g., Q, various miracle or parable collections, etc.). He also points out, rightly, that even before these texts early Christianity was already involved with a rich textual tradition: the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and other Jewish writings.

But already there are problems. For example, Gamble takes a rather maximalist approach to detecting written sources behind the gospels. As part of that approach, he writes,

Futhermore, the extended genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke are not the sort of material to have been orally preserved; their documentary content suggests that they were in written form from the beginning, and they must have had an early and Jewish origin since they presuppose Jesus' human ancestry. (23)

Leaving aside the implication that later and non-Jewish Christians were uninterested in "Jesus' human ancestry," I'm not sure why the genealogies "are not the sort of material to have been orally preserved." Notice that Gamble isn't arguing on evidentiary grounds that these two related traditional accounts rely on one or more written sources; he's claiming that this type of tradition—records of one's ancestry—must've relied on written texts.

The problem is that this is patently and demonstrably false. Even just a quick search through JSTOR looking for the terms oral tradition, oral historiography, and genealogy turns up nearly twelve hundred hits, nearly half from 1994 and earlier. Anthropological work in Africa, Southeast Asia, among Native Americans, and elsewhere demonstrates the varied ways that diverse and sundry societies across vast temporal, geographical, and cultural expanses have taken up the past—including ancestral records—without relying upon (or without relying solely upon) written texts. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever that the genealogical accounts in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, irrespective of their historical value, must have relied on written accounts. It remains to be seen whether or not any evidence suggests they did rely on textual sources, but this is not settled a priori.

The problems continue from there. For example, in his discussion of early Christianity's relationship to the products of Jewish literary culture, Gamble writes:

Although it need not be denied that there was a period, possibly a long one, during which some Christian traditions were orally transmitted, during that same period Christians were deeply and continuously engaged with texts. Christians were from the beginning assiduous students of Jewish scriptures. This not only presumes the literacy of at least some of them, but also implies what may be called a scholastic concern and activity. (23–24; my emphasis).

I'm not sure what Gamble means by his description of early Christians as "assiduous students," but it strikes me, at least, as a bit anachronistic. Despite the hesitation in his presumption of literacy for "at least some of them," I wonder what happened to his very helpful concept of "participation in literacy" (see pp. 8–9), a phrase that among other things reminds us that even illiterate, non-literate, and otherly-literate people can have access to and make rather robust use of written tradition. This is not a trivial point, either. Gamble's assumpiton of a "scholastic concern and activity" leads him to formulate the early Christians' work with Hebrew biblical texts in terms of constructing "the textual warrants of Christian convictions and [of] making those texts serviceable for Christian preaching, apologetics, and instruction" (25). But this is only part of the picture, as those texts also (and simultaneously) participated in the construction of Christian convictions themselves—and not merely their "warrants." Like chickens and eggs, these come from each other. As a result, I rather doubt that there was any felt need to "mak[e] those texts serviceable for Christian preaching, apologetics, and instruction" because those activities were already considered the proclamation, defense, and teaching of the texts themselves!

Despite these criticisms, Gamble goes on to provide a rather helpful discussion of "the character of early Christian literary culture" (32–40) that locates early Christian texts among the informative, instructional texts of Greek scientific writing (rather than the "vulgar texts" of the papyri [á la Deismann] or the rhetorically stylized texts of ancient Greek historiography). My doctoral supervisor, Loveday Alexander, argued for just this location of Luke-Acts on the basis of Luke's prefaces (Luke 1.1–4; Acts 1.1), and Gamble makes many and useful references to her work. Most significantly—especially in light of the highly textually biased discussion I critiqued immediately above—Gamble stresses that

the earliest Christian writers participated in the rhetorical culture of antiquity and that the earliest Christain literature cannot be set outside the larger literary culture. (35)

This, I think, is much better. Early Christian writers and texts (and readers, too) participated in their surrounding rhetorical and literary cultures. Of course, written texts played vital roles in these cultures, but we should not suppose that these cultures are reducible to written texts. Instead, these cultures envelope and contextualize those texts and expand the possibility that even groups and subgroups with comparatively limited access to the texts might take up and employ the traditions they embody.

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Gambl[ing] with early Christian books and readers

I'm finally addressing a series gap in my professional reading. Considering that (i) my major work, Structuring Early Christian Memory, deals directly with media-critical issues, the significance and function of oral and written traditions in early Christianity, and issues of literacy in the ancient world, and that (ii) I've even published a more focused analysis of "orality" in "Reading and Hearing in Ancient Contexts," it's quasi-scandalous that I haven't read Harry Gamble's seminal work, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Yesterday I began to rectify the situation. And my first impression: Only ten or so pages into it, and this book has well earned its reputation.

There are, naturally, a number of excellent points that I could highlight here; as I read I find myself underlining just about every line and trying to cram my comments into the margin. Here I think I'll just comment on one particular phrase that I've come across twice in the first ten pages; there will be plenty of time later for additional comments.

One of the problems facing scholars of Christian origins concerns how to understand the tension between (i) the nearly assuredly low literacy rates across the early Roman Empire (including among Christians), rates which may have rarely if ever exceeded twenty per cent in some urban areas, and (ii) the equally secure fact that the early Christians produced, transmitted, and poured over a surprising number of texts. These latter weren't simply early Christian texts (gospels, letters, homilies, etc.) but just as importantly Hebrew biblical texts; from the very beginning Christians valued Moses, the prophets, and (to a lesser extent) the later writings.¹ The impression that texts played a vital role in early Christianity isn't simply a by-product of the dominance of written texts among the extant evidence; from the very earliest images we get of the church the presence and public reading of texts loom large (e.g., 1 Tim. 4.13; Justin, 1 Apol. 67). Gamble rightly recognizes both poles of this tension. Most early Christians—probably more than four out of every five—were functionally illiterate, and written texts played a vital role in the construction and expression of early Christian identities.

In my own research I have used a distinction between literacy (the ability to read written texts) and textuality (access to written traditions) to navigate this tension. Gamble has a wonderful phrase that I find at least as helpful, if not more, for this purpose. On two occasions he speaks of participation in literacy.

If most Christians were illiterate, it did not prevent them from participating in literacy or from becoming familiar with Christian texts. . . . Thus, although the limited extent of individual literacy certainly had a bearing on the composition, transcription, private use, and authoritative interpretation of Christian texts, it had little adverse effect on the ability of Christians generally to gain a close acquaintance with Christian literature. The illiterate Christian found in the public reading of Christian texts at least as large and probably a more consistent opportunity than his pagan counterpart to participate in literacy and become familiar with texts. (8–9)

This phrase—participation in literacy—needs to gain wider currency among scholars of Christian origins. It will help us to recognize the centrality of written texts in early Christian experiences (pace, e.g., Richard Horsley, who can be read to imply that written materials were alien things that only existed in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and other exotic places) even as we respect the rather different avenues of access available to the typical Christian, the believer who was completely unable to "take up and read" (pace the picture of early Christianity [and Judaism] Horsley is trying to displace).

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¹ Notice, for example, that when Luke enjoins gentile believers to abstain from the meat of animals offered to idols or from strangled animals, from blood, and from fornication (Acts 15.20), he bases these injunctions on the fact that "Moses, who is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath, has had in every city from generations past those who proclaim him" [Μωϋσῆς γὰρ ἐκ γενεῶν ἀρχαίων κατὰ πόλιν τοὺς κηρύσσοντας αὐτὸν ἔχει ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς κατὰ πᾶν σάββατον ἀναγινωσκόμενος (15.21)]. Whatever Luke may mean here, the obvious point is that the church as he presents it values Moses and expects new members to make ethical decisions in light of others' high valuation of Moses and his texts (ἀναγινωσκόμενος).

how little things have changed

I've assigned Steve Mason's helpful book, Josephus and the New Testament (Second edition; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), for my World of the New Testament course. Mason offers a fascinating précis of the interpretation of Josephus in early Christian writers as part of his explanation of the preservation of Josephus's writings (9–19). That interpretation exhibits a special fascination with Josephus's account of a mother who ate her infant son due to starvation during the final stages of the siege of Jerusalem (War 6.201–13). Mason briefly chronicles how early Christians writers read Josephus's description of Jerusalem's destruction apologetically, and how this reading distorted Josephus' actual account. For these writers, "Josephus's account of the war could be used as apparent proof of the Christian belief that the Jews had become God's enemies by rejecting Jesus and the claims of his followers" (19; original emphasis).

In light of how early Christians removed Josephus from his Jewish milieu and "domesticated [him] to Christian use" (16), and given the distortions that resulted from this domestication, I wonder what effects our reading of NT texts outside their Jewish milieux (and subsequent domestications?) have had on our interpretations of those texts. From our perspective, which takes Josephus's Jewishness at face value, the early Christians' ways of reading Josephus appears strange, even falsified. Might our ways of reading of NT texts eventually seem strange, even falsified?

yes, but no: reading Bart Ehrman

I'm reading Bart D. Ehrman's book (Is it a classic yet? I suspect it is.), The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), which I've assigned to my History of New Testament Interpretation students. My interest in Ehrman's work stems primarily in his careful reading of actual ancient texts (rather than modern critical editions of ancient texts), though in my exposure to Ehrman thus far I can't help but think he moves too quickly and too easily from the data to his conclusions.

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It's taking me a long time to work through this book, precisely because it takes so much effort to disentangle the helpful bits from the problematic bits. Usually I wouldn't think the effort was worth it, but when Ehrman is insightful I typically think he's very insightful. Here, for starters, are some of the points I find especially helpful, with my comments interspersed.

The documents of this new canon could be circulated, of course, only to the extent that they were copied. And they were copied by warm-blooded scribes who were intimately familiar with the debates over doctrine that made their scribal labors a desideratum. It was within this milieu of controversy that scribes sometimes changed their scriptural texts to make them say what they were already known to mean. (xii; Ehrman's emphases)

New Testament critics have become accustomed over the last two centuries or so asking how the social, historical, and rhetorical situations in which authors wrote and readers read affected the texts in question. Ehrman reminds us that, prior to Gutenberg's revolution in book-making, every stage of book-production (especially the stage[s] of scribal transmission) was subject to socio-historical and -rhetorical processes. As my subsequent comments on Ehrman's argument will bear out, I think "changed" is perhaps too strong a term (at least in the way Ehrman uses it). But certainly copying a manuscript involved clarifying the text's wording in service of its meaning. For those of us who privilege a text's wording over its meaning (which is a distinctly post-Enlightenment development; at least, this is a working assumption I bring to the table and am interested in testing throughout the course of my career), this seems a very foreign perspective on the task of "copying" a written manuscript.

A little further on, Ehrman writes about the task that "intellectual historians" (and let's be wary of the exclusionary value of the adjective here) set for themselves:

Intellectual historians may be able to adjudicate some of the historical claims of the various Christian groups—their claims, that is, to stand in basic continuity with earlier forms of Christian belief. But by their very nature the historical disciplines do not allow for judgments in any ultimate sense concerning who was "right" and who was "wrong." (12)

I think Ehrman has a rather clear sense of what history can offer us here. Historians can investigate the historical contexts and dynamics of the Christian faith, but they cannot validate (or falsify) that faith. I admit I'm a little skeptical of how he will "adjudicate some of the historical claims of the various Christian groups" precisely because Ehrman, in the words of the Washington Post's Neely Tucker, "peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether" ("The Book of Bart," March 5, 2006). That's nonsense, not because history can only confirm Christianity's truth but because historians, qua historians, aren't looking for their faith. They're looking for the realia of life in the past, and the Gospel of Thomas is as much a historical artifact as are Paul's letters (even if some of us don't look for our faith in Thomas like we do in Romans or Philippians).¹ In my experience, it's hard for both historians and theologians (including Ehrman; including also myself) to respect the boundaries that distinguish the various disciplines.

So I appreciate what Ehrman's doing, even if I'm taking a critical stance toward his book from the very beginning. And there's lots to give us pause. As one example, in Ehrman's apologia for continuing to use the labels orthodoxy and heresy, he says:

For it is a historical fact that, owing to a variety of reasons, one group within early Christianity achieved social dominance and enforced its views on other groups that had supported divergent opinions. Looked at in sociohistorical terms, orthodoxy and heresy are concerned as much with struggles over power as with debates over ideas. (12; my emphasis)

This is hardly a historical fact. At what point in Christian history (even up to the twenty-first century, let alone before the fifth) did a single, monolithic group ever come to dominate the entire Christian church? Certainly ecclesial centers tried—with varying levels of success—to exercise control over other groups; Rome was never the only church to flex its muscles when a church somewhere else began to teach or do something someone found unnerving. Rome also wasn't the only church to find its efforts to control churches in other areas successful sometimes and at other times ineffectual. My point is that not just Christianity (broadly conceived) but orthodoxy itself exhibits a surprising measure of diversity. And if so, I'm just not sure how Ehrman's thesis will pan out.

But there's still lots of book to go, and we'll have to encounter his arguments as he makes them. Hopefully we'll find much to learn from Ehrman. And where we find his argument unconvincing, hopefully we'll sharpen and refine our own argument.

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¹ Indeed, most graduate students in a program such as the one in which I teach need to realize the difference between historical and theological investigations—the different questions and modes of inquiry relevant to each, the variant traditions of thought constraining each, and the different rhetorical postures relevant (and appropriate) to each.

Heine on the ancient Church and its Bible

For the last couple weeks I've been working on a course on the history of New Testament interpretation, which is far enough afield from my own specialty to force me to research a number of interesting topics and historical figures. I'm dissatisfied with approach of the course I inherited, which provided brief synopses of how the Church has read the NT but did not require any primary readings. The approach I'm taking is to provide brief introductory comments on significant figures and then feature extended readings of actual examples of biblical interpretation from those figures.

For unrelated reasons, I picked up Ronald E. Heine's book, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), which is part of Baker's "Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church's Future" series. Heine's goal is to examine "the central role that the Old Testament played in the formation of Christian thinking and life in the early centuries of the church" (11–12). His book feeds my growing interest in the history and writings of the post-Apostolic church, and it overlaps considerably with the material I'm researching and writing for my history course.

Heine's discussion of the Hebrew Bible among early Christians highlights just how foreign contemporary (i.e., post-Enlightenment) Christianity is to its ancient counterpart. From the end of Heine's introductory chapter:

[T]here can be no doubt that there has been an erosion of the position and authority of the Old Testament in much of Protestant theology since the beginning of the Enlightenment. Protestant theology has not had a consistent position on the role of the Old Testament in the church.

We will see in the chapters that follow that the church fathers never questioned that the Old Testament held a central position in the life of the church. They did not all agree on how it should be read in order to speak to the church but, with the exception of Marcion and perhaps a few Gnostics who were not church fathers, they never thought that it should be dismissed as uncanonical or treated as second-class literature in comparison with the New Testament. Averil Cameron has correctly observed that the energies exerted by the fathers in their explanations of the Old Testament demonstrate "how tenaciously Christians" defended it in spite of the difficulties they often encountered in interpreting it. (Heine 2007: 29, citing A. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], 110)

As I read Heine's book and the writings of the Church Fathers (esp. the Ante-Nicene Fathers), I'm beginning to think that the early Christians had a clearer sense of the importance of Israel's history and texts for their own identity than they did of how that history and those texts informed and sustained their identity. Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, et al., might not have known what to do with the Hebrew Bible (though they spent a lot effort trying to figure it out), but they knew they had to do something with it. The contemporary church, perhaps, shows itself unwilling to continue the struggle to reconcile an emphatically Christian identity with that identity's foundationally Israelite (or Mosaic, or Abrahamic, or whatever) pedigree.

Biblical imagery in Ignatius' letter To the Ephesians

Yesterday as I sat in the lobby of my doctor's office I picked up Ignatius' epistle To the Ephesians (as one does). I continue to be impressed by the freedom Ignatius apparently feels vis-à-vis Hebrew biblical traditions, at least compared to the constraint (I think that's the word I want) other authors exhibited to live within a world defined by those traditions. Paul may have written his letters in Greek, and the evangelists (or someone[s] before them) may have translated the sayings from and stories about Jesus into Greek, but Ignatius seems to be transposing the gospel into another cultural-linguistic system rather than simply translating. Here, perhaps, is yet another example:

1 Ἄμεινόν ἐστιν σιωπᾶν καὶ εἶναι, ἢ λαλοῦντα μὴ εἶναι, καλὸν τὸ διδάσκειν, ἐὰν ὁ λέγων ποιῇ. εἷς οὖν διδάσκαλος, ὃς εἶπεν καὶ ἐγένετο· καὶ ἃ σιγῶν δὲ πεποίηκεν ἄξια τοῦ πατρός ἐστιν. 2 ὁ λόγον Ἰησοῦ κεκτημένος ἀληθῶς δύναται καὶ τῆς ἡσυχίας αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν, ἵνα τέλειος ᾖ, ἵνα δι᾽ ὧν λαλεῖ πράσσῃ καὶ δι᾽ ὧν σιγᾷ γινώσκηται. 3 οὐδὲν λανθάνει τὸν κύριον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ κρυπτὰ ἡμῶν ἐγγὺς αὐτῷ ἐστιν. πάντα οὖν ποιῶμεν ὡς αὐτοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν κατοικοῦντος, ἵνα ὦμεν αὐτοῦ ναοὶ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐν ἡμῖν θεὸς ἡμῶν, ὅπερ καῖ ἔστιν καὶ φανήσεται πρὸ προσώπου ἡμῶν, ἐξ ὧν δικαίως ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτόν.

1 It is better to be silent with substance than to speak and lack substance. It is a good thing to teach, as long as the speaker heeds his own words. There is one teacher who speaks and reality conforms to his word; even the things he does in his silence are worthy of the Father. 2 The one who truly possesses Jesus' word is even able to hear [Jesus'] silence, so that he is perfect and he acts in accordance with what he says but is known through the things he doesn't need to say. 3 Nothing escapes the Lord; even our secrets are at his fingertips. Therefore, let us do everything in light of his dwelling among us, so that we would be his temples and he would be our God in our midst (since that is what he is, as will be made evident to us by those things we do out of our just love for him). (Ign. Eph. 15.1–3; Greek text from Holmes 2007: 194)

Holmes listed Eph. 15.1 as one of Ignatius' few allusions to biblical traditions (2007: 174, n. 14), as I mentioned here. Ignatius' description of Jesus [!] as the one teacher who speaks reality into existence [ὃς εἶπεν καὶ ἐγένετο; hos eipen kai egeneto] echoes the Septuagint's translation of Genesis 1. For example, "Then God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light" [καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός, Γενηθήτω φῶς. καὶ ἐγένετο φῶς; kai eipen ho theos, Genēthētō phōs. kai egeneto phōs (Gen 1.3 LXX)]. This pattern of (i) God speaking [εἶπεν; eipen] and (ii) it being [ἐγένετο; egeneto] continues throughout Genesis 1 (see 1.6, 9, 11, 14–15, 20, 24). Interestingly, there is no corresponding egeneto after God eipen, "Let us make humanity in our image . . ." (1.26), unless I've missed something.

But even here, where I'd like to say that Ignatius is somewhat constrained by the world of Israelite tradition, nothing about Ignatius' language seems to capitalize on the semiotic potential of the first biblical creation account. Instead, Ignatius portrays Jesus as the one who speaks creation into existence (cf. John 1.1–5; Col. 1.15–17) and then goes on to speculate that even Jesus' silence is creative (redemptive?). Ignatius, in other words, seems to be reflecting less on the tradition of God creating the cosmos and more on New Testament traditions of Jesus, traditions which themselves do reflect more conscientiously and pervasively on, among other things, the tradition of God creating the cosmos.

But what I think is really interesting is that Ignatius could have taken up creation traditions in order to make the point he's making. The statement in Gen 1.26 that God wants to make humanity "in his image" takes aim, among other things, at polytheistic religious practices. The other nations worship images of their gods, but Israel is the image of her God. And if the images of the nations' gods dwell in man-made temples, the Spirit of Israel's God dwells among his people and sanctifies them as his holy presence. Ignatius, arrested for some unknown reason and being marched across the Roman empire to face the lions in Rome's newly built Coliseum, could have consoled himself and his readers that the Lord will avenge the desecration of his image (is anyone aware of any use of the creation accounts in this fashion among Jewish and Christian martyrological traditions?).

But instead, he turns immediately to the contrast between Jesus' creative word "in the beginning" and his redemptive silence before the Sanhedrin and before Pontius Pilate. In other words, Ignatius seems to dwell in a world colored by Hebrew biblical tradition only indirectly, inasmuch as Hebrew biblical tradition colors the texts and stories coming out of the first two or three generations of Christian activity. If I'm reading him rightly, Ignatius is reflecting consciously on various New Testament texts and only dimly, if at all, aware without any concern that those texts are indebted to the forms and expressions and significances of biblical tradition.

just some thoughts

Standard study of the gospel tradition assumed that the gospel tradition was making a break from "Judaism." But "Judaism" is an essentialist modern concept, a largely European Christian scholarly construct, like Orientalism. It is not clear that "Judaism" has any historical referent, at least not until late antiquity at the earliest. (Horsley, Jesus in Context, 110)

I'm sympathetic to Horsley's point here, especially since it comes in his discussion of "social memory and gospel traditions" (109–25). But I think he's made it a bit too bluntly (i.e., without precision), and so some refinement seems in order.

1. First, "standard study of the gospel tradition" continues to assume that "the gospel tradition was making a break from 'Judaism,'" so I question the past-tense assumed. A mere quibble, perhaps, but the contemporary awareness of (and even emphasis upon) the variegated expression of "Judaism" in the late second Temple period hasn't corrected the problem Horsley's identifying here.


2. Second, I'm not sure it's helpful to say that "'Judaism' is an essentialist modern concept," but rather that gospels and Jesus scholarship have essentialized "Judaism," and that essentialization has had some unfortunate effects on our understanding of all things Christian origins and second Temple Jewish. Again, a mere quibble, perhaps. But "Judaism" [Ἰουδαϊσμός; Ioudaismos] was a category available in the ancient, non-European world (see, of course, Gal 1.14). The problem isn't the concept but our analytical use of that concept.


3. "European" and "Christian," perhaps, but I'm skeptical that "Judaism" is "a largely . . . scholarly construct," whether or not like Orientalism. Horsley's discussion might be focused on scholarly essentializations of Judaism, and rightly so, but the problem seems rather more cultural than simply scholarly. This is yet another instance in which scholarship in the humanities has a significant opportunity to identify a blind spot in our larger cultural context, to illuminate that blind spot, and to speak meaningfully about the very real problems with which that blind spot has been associated throughout Western civilization (anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, of course, but also more general questions about how we interact with "the Other").


4. And so I wouldn't say that "it is not clear that 'Judaism' has any historical referent" prior to late antiquity (again, see Gal 1.14). Instead, I happily note the opportunity to quote The Princess Bride with respect to New Testament scholars' (and others') use of Judaism: "You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

the Jewish gospels?

Time to get back on a favorite hobby horse. In sundry ways I've been asking since 2005 what difference it makes to read the gospels as Christian literature rather than as Jewish texts (for a very blunt tool looking for such questions, see here). But I have reason to raise the question again, and I don't want to miss the opportunity.

In Craig Evans's essay, "The Jewish Christian Gospel Tradition" (in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries [O. Skarsaune and R. Hvalvik, eds.; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007], 241–77), Evans makes the following observation:

The Jewish Gospel known to Origen may be the earliest of the Jewish Gospels (or Gospel recensions), dating perhaps to the end of the first century or, more probably, to the beginning of the second. (Evans 2007: 248)

Now for some context. First, Evans is pursuing a very difficult task, viz. "to examine the theological and practical emphases, as they may be detected, in the extant fragments of materials widely recognized as Jewish Gospels, and in closely related materials" (242). And he does so carefully and with nuance. Second, Evans spends just over three pages (242–45) discussing "Matthew: A New Testament Jewish Gospel," which he acknowledges "has been traditionally viewed as the most Jewish of the four New Testament Gospels" (242). Just over a year ago I questioned the value of the label "most Jewish", and though Evans isn't asking the same types of question I am, he is sensitive to the "profound and systemic," and even "utter," Jewishness of at least the First Gospel.

But it intrigues me that, even after the decision to apply the label "Jewish" to Matthew's gospel, Evans can still describe this fragment, which he prefers to date in the early second century, as "the earliest of the Jewish Gospels" (see above). Admittedly, Evans is referring to a very specific group of texts when he refers to "Jewish Gospels," and Matthew, I suspect by virtue of being canonical, does not fit within this group. And Evans's use of "Jewish Gospels" to refer to these specific texts—traditionally the Gospel of the Nazoraeans, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews—is entirely within the mainstream of academic parlance. Keeping in mind that I'm questioning standard practices and not Evans's specific instances of those practices, How useful is our category Jewish Gospel, and what does it reveal about us that we find this label meaningful even while recognizing the "Jewishness" of (at least) Matthew?

Is this actually a problem for biblical (and especially New Testament) research? Or am I chasing vapors?

Jacob Neusner v. Jesus [of] Nazareth

I came across this very interesting article today, courtesy of PaleoJudaica. I hadn't realized Neusner wrote a book entitled, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition, but I will certainly have to get my hands on it. While I clearly disagree with Neusner's reported estimation of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I must confess that I have significantly more respect for it than for those of us who speak glowingly of Jesus' high ethical teachings without any apparent discomfort at our own appearance in its light.

messianic expectations

So I've decided to embrace this current series of posts as an admittedly parasitic series—not so much on the historical Jesus as on April DeConick's thoughts on the historical Jesus. [And, if you're following the original, a parasitic series with considerable lag time!]

At any rate, her fifth installment, Unfulfilled expectations, is a wonderful (and too brief) consideration of the question, Did Jesus' followers come to think of him in messianic terms before or after his death? She acknowledges plainly that the standard answer in the scholarly guild is clearly, After. But she offers some cogent reasons for doubting this. For what it's worth, I think she's exactly right in her argument here.

The question I have, however, concerns the premises supporting her answer (which, again, I like). She begins by noting:

There is one more impulse toward Christology that appears to me to be behind all of this. When the formation of new religious movements is studied from a sociological and psychological perspective, it is the case in prophetic movements that the death of the leader puts the community in crisis. There is a liminal period in which the movement has to reassess and if it is going to go on it has to choose new leadership and/or new direction.

I have not done the necessary research to question this assumption (regarding the death of the leader resulting in crisis), and certainly it falls squarely within mainstream scholarship. But I wonder, Does starting with the concept new religious movements (which has its own problems, especially inasmuch as the isolation of religion as a distinct sphere of life is a product of Enlightenment thinking) or of prophetic movements predispose us to ask certain types of questions and pursue certain types of answers?

Here's what I mean: As historians, we already know that Christianity (loosely conceived as groups devoted in whatever way to Jesus) survives Jesus' death and lasts (at least) for two millennia in various forms. With that knowledge already in our heads, it's easy for us to assume as matters of course that Jesus' early followers, having registered some sort of shock at Jesus' death, had to reassess their devotion to him and the factors capable of legitimating that devotion even in the shadow of the cross. What's more, given the axiomatic and even common-sensical distinction between contemporary Christianity and Judaism, their devotion to Jesus is a peculiarly Christian phenomenon (remember that Jesus-devotion is the heart of the conception of Christianity used here). So, if Christianity was going to survive Jesus' fate (and it did) as a phenomenon or set of phenomena other than Judaism (and it is), then Jesus' early followers would have had to have done x (where x names the process[es] ensuring Christianity's survival).

But these procedures assume the very thing they're trying to explain: The survival and development of Christianity. But can we really take off the table options that would have resulted in the historical disappearance of Christianity? Sure, Jesus' followers had to reevaluate their devotion to him, and they did so in terms of Hebrew biblical traditions, in order to ensure the survival of Jesus devotion. But couldn't Jesus' early followers also have abandoned their devotion to him? Answers to DeConick's question (remember: answers that she herself takes to task) tend to assume the early Christians had to rethink and reinvent Jesus, but I can't shake the sense that their decision to rethink (I hesitate, rightly or wrongly, at "reinvent") Jesus is itself a historical datum that requires explanation. In other words, the question isn't simply, How did Christianity adapt to and incorporate the events of Jesus' death into their devotion to him? but also, Why did they decide to even try to legitimate and sustain their devotion to Jesus after his very public labelling as a Roman criminal? DeConick doesn't address this question, but her comments do acknowledge that the "creation" of Jesus in the wake of the crucifixion was motivated by their devotion which must have predated his death.

POSTSCRIPT: The first centuries BCE and CE provide plenty of examples of historical movements that could not adapt, in the long term, to the "crisis" caused by their founder's death. If we can accept Acts 5.36–37 for the sake of argument, Theudas's and Judas's followers both failed to successfully reevaluate their estimation of these men, at least in terms that proved sufficiently persuasive to their contemporaries, Jews or otherwise. And similar comments could be made of a number of historical figures, including John the Baptist, bar Kokhba, the Teacher of Righteousness, etc.

SECSOR—day 3 (pt. I)

The New Testament IV meeting addressed the theme, Theological Issues in the Interpretation of the New Testament. The meeting started at 8.30 am, which wasn't really a problem, but the room had an unlocked door about three feet from the lectern, and from time to time a hapless late-arrival would open the door, take a step or two in, and realize their conspicuous location. That door should probably have had a sign on it. But otherwise, the meeting was interesting.

The first paper, "Christian Triumphalism and the Discourse of Christian Origins: The (Mis)Appropriation of the 'History of Religions School' in Contemporary Scholarship," presented by Diane Segroves (Vanderbilt University), began with the work of nineteenth-century Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ("history of religions school") co-founder Wilhelm Bousett and sought to demonstrate the (inherently?) triumphalistic perspective masked by a "scientific" approach to the history of religion (see, e.g., the problems attached to spät Judentum ["late Judaism"]). She then focused her attention on the work of the "New History of Religions School," including Martin Hengel but especially Larry Hurtado. Like me, Segroves is also looking at the consequences of the essentialization and categorization of Judaism and Christianity as distinct phenomena, though she approaches these questions from a theory of religion perspective (whereas I am trained as a biblical scholar). She helpfully distinguishes the tasks of seeking after origins (genealogy) and pursuing comparative analyses (analogy). And though she does identify some interesting (and problematic) continuities between Hurtado and Bousett, I'm not sure she's adequately accounted for the very significant differences. Of course, she only had twenty-five minutes, and she could only do so much.

The second paper, "Neglecting Widows and Serving the World? Acts 6:1–7 as a Test Case for the Promise of 'Narrative' in Theological Exegesis," presented by Joel B. Green (Fuller Theological Seminary), problematized the distinction between history and theology in Luke-Acts and attempted to show and the two not only inform one another but are pursued simultaneously in the narrative. He offers the intriguing suggestion that Luke does not narrate the apostles' delegation of "table-service" [διακονεῖν τραπέζαις; 6.2] positively, but that he views their shirking of this responsibility negatively. Green's reading takes into account the description of the community's unity (threatened in 6.1–7) as a work of the Spirit and suggests that, in Luke's point of view, the rupture of that unity was an affront (attack?) to the Spirit. This is precisely, again from Luke's point of view, what the apostles should have been concerned with. I like this. I have argued in a couple of unpublished papers that Luke has a subtle but still negative view of a number of episodes often read positively, in particular the story of Gamaliel (Acts 5) and of the split between Barnabas and Paul (Acts 15). Despite my appreciation of Green's paper, I wonder how much Luke might have been satisfied not that the disciples delegated the responsibility for serving tables but that by appointing the Seven the disciples were making provision for this to be taken care of. In other words, the apostles didn't ignore table-service, and I'm not sure Luke would have insisted that they ought to have served tables directly rather than indirectly.

The third paper, "Could it be Satan? A Narrative Ethical Reading of the Ananias and Sapphira Story, Acts 5:1–15," presented by Douglas Hume (Pfeiffer University), continued a narrative reading of the Acts (see Green's paper, above), and explored the implicit role that s/Satan and or wicked spiritual forces were at play in the Ananias and Sapphira story. I remember being reminded of Luke's demonological language for stories that in otherwise don't seem to concern demons or spirit-possession (the healing of Peter's mother-in-law [Luke 4.38–39; cf. Mark 1.29–31] and the healing of the bent woman [Luke 13.11–13]). Sadly, after that I was distracted, and by the time I came back to Hume's paper I had missed too much to really remember how he argued his point. This isn't a criticism of his paper; I think I just hadn't had enough coffee. If you know Douglas Hume, please convey my apologies.

The fourth paper, "Reinterpreting the Shema: Covenantal Theology in the Fourth Gospel," presented by Lori Baron (Duke University), was an excellent paper examining the Shema (Deut. 6.4–9) as context for John's gospel. Famously, all three synoptic gospels, and probably Paul, cite the Shema at some point. (Actually, I think the Shema is formative for Pauline theology, especially the vigor with which he defended gentile inclusion apart from circumcision, kashrut, etc.) John, however, doesn't. But Baron rightfully notes that the language of "oneness," especially as it applied to God, is rampant throughout the Fourth Gospel, and she argues that the Shema is in the background here. Well, I'm not sure Baron used the word "background," and if she did I don't like that term. Rather, I think we can examine the ways the Shema may have framed the theology inscribed in the narrative and the text's reception in the first century. In my opinion, Baron's argument sounds a lot like Daniel Boyarin's very intriguing midrashic reading of John's Prologue in Border Lines (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). This reframing of John's gospel in more thoroughgoing Jewish terms offers some intriguing possibilities for understanding the text. Baron's paper was an interesting and exciting part of that larger project.

After the New Testament IV session, there was only one more meeting before the conference ended. I debated skipping the last session, but decided against it (there were some paper titles I thought were intriguing). Then I debated leaving early (I was really missing my family at this point), but decided against it (there were only five of us in the audience, and the presenters deserved to have us there). All four papers were interesting, and I'm glad I stayed. I'll have to tell you about them. But later, in the next post.

What kind of γένος was early Christianity?

Ever since my master's thesis on 1 Peter, in which I argued, among other things, that Peter (i.e., the author, irrespective of 1 Peter's actual authorship) was writing to a mostly gentile audience and inscribing on them Jewish identity markers (e.g., 1 Pet. 2.9–10), I have been interested in the phenomena of first-century Christian identities. Lately, I've been flirting with a new, perhaps unnecessarily provocative formulation of the relevant questions. I'd be interested in any response from you.

In popular Christian lingo, we commonly say something along the lines of, "Paul's ministry among the gentiles converted pagans to Christianity directly without requiring them to first become Jews." This type of thinking about Paul is common and also affects contemporary reading of other NT texts (e.g., Acts 10–11). At its heart, of course, is the assumption (which goes largely ignored, if not unnoticed) that to become a Christian is not to become a Jew.

But is this how the labels would have been understood in a first-century context? If we were average, everyday, nameless gentiles going about our business in the agorai of any major city of the Mediterranean and someone in our family forsook the family devotion to Apollo or Artemis or any of the other gods to worship Israel's God and his crucified prophet, Jesus, would we understand this development as anything other than a conversion to Judaism? And if not (and I'm not assuming a negative answer, except perhaps for the sake of argument), is this because we, as outsiders, have an insufficient understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism? In other words, would Paul, or Peter, or the average Christian, have seen a gentile's conversion to Christianity as not being a conversion to (a form of) Judaism?

At the moment I'm reviewing Not God's People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World, by Lawrence M. Wills. His discussion of "Jew and Gentile as Other in Paul" provides a helpful discussion of a number of issues regarding the construction of the We and the Other, though the book as a whole suffers some important weaknesses. But he makes one particular comment that stood out to me for being fairly standard within New Testament scholarship and yet perhaps in serious need of rethinking. Wills says,

Immediately before and after Paul's formula of "neither Jew nor Greek" (Gal 3:28) it is emphasized that those who have been baptized into Christ are now children of God and children of Abraham. Paul, and other writers of the early church, quickly developed new language of being children of God, an extended kinship group. All ethnicity in the ancient world was understood as genealogy, and Paul bestows a new family tree on the converted gentiles. (2008: 187; my emphasis)

My problem: I realize that it won't do for us to ignore any differences between Christianity and Judaism in the first century; clearly there were differences between Jesus, Paul, and other characters in first-century Christian narratives and other Jewish figures with whom the former came into conflict. But how do we justify to ourselves and our readers the assertion that the family tree onto which gentile converts to Christianity were grafted (to echo both Wills and Paul) was new and not Jewish? How can Wills (or other NT scholars, for that matter) recognize Paul's appeal to Abraham (!) as a patriarch of the heirs of the promise and yet ignore the clearly Jewish markers delimiting Jesus' followers from others dotting the social landscape?

As a tentative hypothesis, then, I would like to test the formulation: In the first century CE (and so throughout the texts comprising the New Testament), to become a follower of Jesus was to convert to an expression of Second-Temple era Judaism (even toward the end of the century after the Temple was destroyed). I would understand the dynamics of these labels as analogous to the dynamics that would have obtained if a gentile resident of the Decapolis became an Essene and took up residence at Qumran. Clearly there are differences between Essenism and Christianity, but those differences do not amount to the former being an expression of Judaism and the latter something else altogether. Gentiles-become-Christians were gentiles-become-Jews, though other Jews (some of whom considered themselves devotees of Jesus) would have engaged Paul critically on the question of the terms of this "becoming."

What say you?