Ehrman on 1 John 4.3

In the third chapter of his book, 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), Ehrman turns to "Anti-Separationist Corruptions of Scripture" (119–80). The structure of this chapter follows that of the previous chapter, beginning with a brief description of the proto-orthodox perception of the heterodoxy in question and then text-critical analyses of (potentially) relevant variant readings. As I mentioned in two previous posts, Ehrman needs to do a little more work to demonstrate that certain variants did participate in the christological polemics against which he interprets them, whether (i) to show that these variants were read the way Ehrman reads them, or (ii) that the scribe made the change in order for them to be read the way Ehrman reads them.¹

So I really enjoyed the opening text-critical discussion in this chapter. Ehrman considers at length a variant at 1 John 4.3 that has recently (in the last hundred years or so) found favor among scholars from a wide range of idealogical and/or theological perspectives (125–35). In the majority of witnesses—including every extant Greek mss—the opening of 1 John 4.3 reads, "And every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God" [καὶ πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ μὴ ὁμολογεῖ τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ οὐκ ἔστιν]. However, a number of Latin witnesses—with roots as far back as the late-second century—read, "every spirit that looses Jesus" [πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ λύει τὸν Ἰησοῦν]. Ehrman's discussion of the relevant documentary, linguistic, and theological issues (125–27; 127–30; 130–34) is excellent. Though I have a few minor quibbles here and there, Ehrman provides compelling explanations for all the relevant data.

Perhaps most significantly, the data Ehrman analyzes in the case of this variant provides exactly the kind of evidence I would like to have seen more of in the previous chapter. First, the Greek and Latin Fathers who quote 1 John 4.3 in terms of "loosing/separating" Jesus do so in polemical contexts. So even if we cannot identify the original change from "acknowledges" to "looses"—and so we cannot get at the motivations behind that change—here we clearly have a variant that did, in fact, participate in proto-orthodox debates with heterodox christological positions.

Second, Ehrman notes that a number of Fathers know and cite both readings of 1 John 4.3, including Origen, Tertullian, and Priscillian (128). The Fathers' apparent approval—simultaneously!—of both readings seems to minimize the difference between the two readings. That is, at least in some contexts, "not acknowledging" Jesus [μὴ ὁμολογεῖ] meant "loosing" Jesus [λύει]. I was very pleased to see Ehrman coming to pretty much the same conclusion:

In all likelihood [this variant] did not originate as a simple scribal error. In fact, it may well have not originated as a textual variant at all, but as a recapitulation of the text's "meaning" in the context of proto-orthodox christological polemics, that is as an interpretive paraphrase that was later incorporated as an orthodox corruption. "Not to confess Jesus" during the Gnostic controversies meant (for the proto-orthodox) to adopt a Gnostic Christology, a Christology that separated Jesus from the Christ. Anyone who accepted such a view was "not from God." (134; my emphasis)

This gets at the distinction I made in my previous post between "what the text says about Jesus," on the one hand, and "the words used to say what the text says about Jesus," on the other. Here we have a compelling glimpse of the important differences between our cultural perceptions of text as fixed sequences of words and ancient perceptions of text that allowed for significantly more fluidity. (See my discussion of the reproduction of Isa. 61.1–2, which interpolates a line from Isa. 58.6, at Luke 4.18–19 in chapter six of Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text.) Ehrman's analysis brings these important differences into clearer focus.

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¹ Of course, as I mentioned earlier, Ehrman balks at this second point precisely because of the difficulties in establishing a scribe's intentions (see pp. 28; 44, n. 110; 103, n. 55). This caveat seems to make Ehrman's work more rigorous, but in the end it allows him to include any variant he can interpret in terms of christological polemics as instances of "orthodox corruption of scripture" without having to demonstrate actual historical connections between those polemics and the variants at hand. I'm not unsympathetic to Ehrman's problem here. Since scribes never flag a reading in the NT mss they're copying and identify the reason for that reading, the evidence I would want to see likely never existed at all. Even so, given how tenuous the connection between some variants Ehrman discusses as "anti-adoptionistic" corruptions, some closer argumentation seems required.

more on "anti-adoptionistic" corruptions of scripture

As I mentioned in my previous post,  one of the problems confronting Ehrman's argument regarding specifically anti-adoptionistic changes in NT manuscripts is (and this is a little embarrassing!) identifying specifically anti-adoptionistic changes in NT manuscripts. Ehrman discusses a number of candidates under a handful of classifications, including changes that (i) resist acknowledging Joseph as Jesus' father, (ii) avoid calling Jesus "chosen," (iii) explicitly affirm Jesus as Son of God before his baptism, and (iv) blur the distinction between God and Jesus (while resisting a complete identification between Jesus and the Father). But the problem is that Ehrman never establishes the connection between some of the variants he adduces and polemics over adoptionist christologies.

Certainly Ehrman proposes that anti-adoptionist tendencies "may have effected" (95; my emphasis) this or that variant, or a change was introduced into a manuscript "presumably to mitigate its potentially adoptionistic overtones" (71; my emphasis). But his emphasis on the potential of scribal variants to function within the christological debates of the second- through fifth-centuries CE provides Ehrman with a too-easy out. What Ehrman's thesis needs is some criteria for determine whether or not this or that variant actually was motivated by theological considerations, and especially the specific theological considerations being discussed. In some (many?) instances the connections between theological debate and manuscript tradition are fairly plausible; in others they're a bit of a stretch. For example, in my view, the change in Vaticanus at Acts 10.37—in which μετὰ τὸ βάπτισμα ὃ ἐκήρυξεν Ἰωάννης ("after the baptism that John proclaimed") becomes μετὰ τὸ κήρυγμα ὃ ἐκήρυξεν Ἰωάννης ("after the proclamation that John proclaimed")—has nothing to do with anti-adoptionist polemics.¹ I'm not arguing that the text of NT documents was more stable than Ehrman suggests (though I have some quibbles in this regard, which I'll mention presently); but his explanatory model for the variation that does exist among the manuscripts breaks down, in some places quite dramatically.

But that brings us back to the question of the stability of NT traditions. I remember reading the latest edition of Metzger's classic The Text of the New Testament a couple years ago and being struck by how easily the discussion slipped between discussing changes in a particular manuscript (or manuscript tradition) and characterizing the tradition itself as fluid.² In other words, just because this or that scribe changed the text he was transcribing does not mean that the tradition, embodied in multiple manuscripts across the ancient world, had been corrupted. Sometimes a corruption will become regionally dominant; Ehrman even argues that, "[i]n several passages (e.g., Mark 1:1 and Luke 3:22) [orthodox] corruptions virtually displaced the original text" (1993: 97). But in the main changes in one manuscript did not effect changes to the tradition itself, and very often corruptions were undone when a manuscript was corrected.³ But clearly we know, despite "the orthodox corruption of scripture," that Luke 2.33 explicitly refers to Joseph as "his [viz., Jesus'] father" [ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ], despite "the majority of Greek manuscripts . . . along with a number of Old Latin, Syriac, and Coptic witnesses" (55) that replace "his father" with "Joseph" [Ἰωσὴφ].

Again, I'm not suggesting that the text of NT documents was more stable than Ehrman is arguing; clearly the wording varied from manuscript to manuscript for various and sundry reasons. But I would make two suggestions: First, perhaps we ought to seek the tradition's "stability" somewhere other than in its wording. What the text said about Jesus was more important than the words used to say it. This is a difficult distinction, especially in a cultural situation such as ours where print and electronic technology makes exact verbal reproduction a commonplace. But this distinction, I think, matters, and it matters a lot. Second, I think we need to get some sense of scope as we examine the manuscript data. If Ehrman is right that the original opening to Mark's gospel, for example, did not contain the words υἱοῦ θεοῦ ["s/Son of God"], then the dominance of that reading among the extant manuscripts may justify Ehrman's ambitious title, the orthodox corruption of scripture. But for most of the variants Ehrman analyzes we are dealing with something significantly more mundane: the orthodox corruption of this-or-that [group of] scriptural manuscript[s]. Sure, it's less sexy as a title, but it does help us understand better what we're actually dealing with here.

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¹ To be sure, Ehrman's discussion of Acts 10.37 in Vaticanus is part of a larger argument and is not focused on 10.37 alone. He's actually more interested in v. 38 and a variant found in Bezae as well as Old Latin, Syriac, and Middle Egyptian manuscripts (see pp. 68–69). But Ehrman finds confirmation of his interpretation of this variant by turning to the reading of v. 37 in Vaticanus.

2 Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (fourth edition; London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 [1964]). I have not read earlier editions of this book; I admit baldly that I am assuming certain features stem more from Ehrman's thorough revision of Metzger's text. If I were publishing these opinions in a more formal setting (rather than on my own blog), I would need to document whether the "slippage" under consideration appears only in the fourth edition or was also present in earlier editions. Of course, I see this "slippage" at work also in Ehrman 1993.

3 Corruptions were also introduced into manuscripts by later correctors, and even corrections were subject to later emendation (see, e.g., the text of Heb. 1.3 in Vaticanus). But that doesn't undermine the point I'm making. Changes introduced into one manuscript were not necessarily ultimate corruptions of that manuscript, let alone of the NT tradition it attests!

on proper types of documentation

As part of the orientation program to our in-coming MA New Testament students, I give a presentation entitled, "The Nature and Expectations of Graduate Education." In one section of that presentation I explain the difference between primary and secondary literature and the importance of becoming expert in both as part of pursuing graduate-level research. Part of the perennial problem I encounter when I grade my students' papers concerns knowing just what kind of documentation is necessary for what kind of claims. As luck would have it, I've just encountered a similar problem in an otherwise excellent published article, and I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify how we ought to engage in historical discussions of the ancient world.

In his article, "The Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–7:12)," Glen Stassen makes a fairly standard claim about alms-giving, prayer, and fasting in late-Second Temple era Judaism.¹ He writes,

Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting went together as the three traditional Jewish practices of righteousness in the first century. "The three disciplines were almost certainly traditionally associated with one another. . . ." Clearly these are "traditional righteousness, as expected. (284; citing Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:575; Weder, "Rede der Reden," 158; Davies, Setting, 305–15)

To be clear: I don't have any issue with Stassen's claim; he, like the scholars he cites, are almost certainly right. But notice what Stassen has done (rather that what he has claimed). Stassen has made a claim about how Jews in the ancient world perceived the practices of alms-giving, prayer, and fasting, and then he has cited modern historians in support of that claim. This, I suggest, is the problem.

How could Stassen have been more precise and helpful in his use of documentation? I think either of two options would have been preferable. First, Stassen could have made the claim that his documentation supported. That is, he could have said something along the lines of, "Scholars typically understand Jesus' teaching on these three practices together, which suggests that they see them as largely overlapping expressions of piety." If Stassen had cited Davies and Allison, Weder, and Davies in support of this claim, his citation would have provided examples of the very thing he was discussing.

Alternatively, Stassen could have provided documentation for the ancient phenomenon in question (viz., the association of alms-giving, prayer, and fasting together). That is, if these three practices did go hand-in-hand in Second Temple Judaic piety, then presumably we have texts that exhibit the connection between them. Certainly Matt. 6.1–18 might be one of these texts. But I would want to see other texts, whether from pseudepigraphical and/or apocryphal texts, the DSS, Josephus, Philo, etc., that make this connection and make it more explicitly than Matt. 6.1–18. These texts—and not claims made by Davies and Allison, Weder, and Davies—support the claim Stassen is making. Now, I assume that the secondary literature Stassen does cite provide references to the primary sources, but that actually exacerbates the problem rather than eases it. If other scholars have already gathered the primary evidence, then it should have been very easy for Stassen to provide references to that evidence.

Instead—and this is the point I want to make—the pattern of (a) making a claim about the ancient world and (b) supporting that claim with a reference or references to secondary sources enables us to root our historical claims in scholarly consensus rather than concrete historical data. Even when we're making fairly straightforward claims that probably are rather indicative of the ancient world (as is Stassen in this example), we need to get in the habit of more rigorously distinguishing the historical world(s) we have reconstructed in the critical mass of historical scholarship, on the one hand, from the actually historical data upon which that scholarship depends (and beyond which it extends).

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¹ Glen H. Stassen, "The Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–7:12)," JBL 122/2 (2003): 267–308.

Hans Dieter Betz and the Sermon on the Mount

Hans Dieter Betz is probably the most significant student of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7); certainly he is the most significant scholar of the Sermon alive today. Almost twenty years ago Klyne Snodgrass noted twelve publications and/or presentations Betz issued in preparation for a commentary on the Sermon.¹ That commentary, published in 1995, is 736 pages long—longer than many commentaries on the whole of Matthew's gospel!² When Betz speaks about the Sermon, he speaks with authority.

So as I ask the question (see below, in boldface; I would greatly appreciate some feedback here), I realize I'm a gnat pestering a giant of Matthean scholarship. But here goes anyway: In an autobiographical moment, Betz reveals how he became so interested in the Sermon on the Mount:

When I was working on the commentary on Galatians I noticed the unusual number of parallel references, mostly of antithetical parallels, that kept coming up between Galatians and the Sermon on the Mount.³

Does anyone else find it ironic that Betz was steered into the Sermon on the Mount via Paul's letter to the Galatians, especially in light of his strong differentiation between the Christianity behind the Sermon and Pauline Christianity? To be sure, Betz refers to finding "antithetical parallels" between Galatians and the Sermon. But I can't shake the suspicion that Betz employs an unhelpful conceptualization, made influential by F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school, that opposes a "Pauline" Christianity with a "Jewish" Christianity. Certainly "Jewish" Christians could (and did) have problems with Paulinism. But the story of Pauline scholarship in the last quarter of the twentieth century is largely the story of scholars rediscovering that the opposite of the adjective Jewish is not Pauline.⁴ Betz is not unaware of this rediscovery, but I'm not sure how his reconstruction of Christian origins on the basis of Galatians and the Sermon can stand in light of it.

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¹ Klyne Snodgrass, "A Response to Hans Dieter Betz on the Sermon on the Mount," BR (1991), 88.
² Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
³ Hans Dieter Betz, "The Sermon on the Mount: In Defense of a Hypothesis," BR (1991), 74. Betz refers to his commentary, Galatians: A Commentary of Paul's Letter to the Galatians (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979).
⁴ This is often referred to as "the Sanders Revolution" (in honor of E. P. Sanders) or, more popularly, "the New Perspective on Paul."

yet one more great turn of phrase

This is starting to look like a series. Anyway, I came across this wonderful, graphic turn of phrase in Ellen Charry's essay, "The Grace of God and the Law of Christ" (Interpretation [2003]: 34–44):

Paul's grand exposition of the Christian life is 1 Corinthians. Paul declares that God is not interested in notching foreskins on his belt, but that we keep God's commandments (7:19). (37–38; my emphasis)

identifying "anti-adoptionistic" corruptions of scripture

The second chapter of Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993) sets out to examine "Anti-Adoptionistic Corruptions of Scripture" (47–118), or changes to manuscripts of the NT meant to ward off interpretations that Jesus "became" God's s/Son (or was "adopted") at some point, whether at his baptism, his resurrection, or whatever. Ehrman well knows that identifying the motivations (theological or otherwise) of any given variant is highly problematic (see pp. 28; 44, n. 110; 103, n. 55). He therefore focuses on the function of variants: "Some changes of the text . . . function to establish the orthodox character of the text, either by promoting more fully an orthodox understanding of Christ or by circumventing the heretical use of a text in support of an aberrant teaching" (28).

Even in light of this very important nuance, Ehrman's argument runs into problems precisely on the issue of identifying anti-adoptionistic variants (whether in terms of intention or function). For example, he assumes that references to Joseph as Jesus' father could be read as implying that Jesus was not (yet) God's son, and so changes to these references represent "anti-adoptionistic corruptions." But this assumption runs into problems very early on. In his brief discussion of a Syriac translation of Matthew, Ehrman points to the variants at 1.16 and 25:

The fifth-century scribe of this manuscript was either thoughtless in the extreme or somewhat inclined to see Joseph as Jesus' actual father, for he concludes Matthew's genealogy of Jesus with the words "Jacob begot Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed the virgin Mary, begot Jesus, who is called the Christ" (Matt 1:16). Similarly, the following pericope ends not with the statement that Joseph "had no relations with her [Mary] until she bore a son," but with the curious observation that Mary "bore to him [i.e., Joseph] a son" (1:25). (54)

To be sure, Ehrman does not read this as an anti-adoptionistic corruption; instead, the variants at 1.16, 25 "were produced from carelessness rather than intent" (54). He concludes his discussion of this particular scribe's carelessness: "Since there is almost no reason to construe any of the manuscript's variant readings as original in these cases, once can only conclude that the scribe was simply inattentive to the doctrinal ramifications of some of his changes" (55; my emphasis).

Notice that Ehrman assumes here that variants "have" doctrinal ramifications; the readings in question, by themselves and (almost) ontologically, support a certain theological position even though Ehrman doesn't attribute this position to this particular scribe (remember, the scribe was careless rather than theologically motivated). After all, this same scribe apparently chose not to "eliminate the word 'virgin' (παρθένος, v. 23) or to modify the clear statements that Joseph had no sexual relations with Mary" (55). Since the variant readings at Matt. 1.16, 25 "have" their particular theological significances, the scribe responsible for these readings was either (i) advocating an adoptionist christology, or (ii) unaware of his changes' adoptionistic import. This scribe "appears to have understood his own formulation—if he understood it at all—in the sense that Joseph became Jesus' father (through adoption?), although he was not his actual father" (102, n. 48; my emphasis).

But there's a third option for understanding this scribe's admittedly peculiar transcription. (iii) Even a statement as seemingly clear as "Joseph . . . begot Jesus" do not mean what we think they mean, i.e., that Jesus was conceived via a sexual act between Joseph and Mary. Don't misunderstand; a moment of carelessness and conformity to a pattern (x begot y) may very well explain this particular text. But note that, even with the strange reading, "Joseph . . . begot Jesus," 1.16 still breaks with the regular pattern "x begot y" to explain that Joseph was betrothed to Mary. And in the very context of claiming "Joseph . . . begot Jesus," the text affirms Mary's virginal state at conception/begetting! For this scribe at least (and presumably he was not completely idiosyncratic!), Joseph "begtting" [γεννάω] Jesus did not preclude either the virgin birth or, by implication, Jesus' status as God's s/Son.

At other places Ehrman mentions variants that I simply do not see as directly relevant for the adoptionist controversy. Notice, for example, the following:

The text of Luke 3:23 would presumably have caused orthodox scribes few problems, since it explicitly states that Joseph was not Jesus' real father, but was only "supposed" to have been. Nonetheless it is striking that in two of our Greek witnesses (W 579) the genealogy of Joseph that follows is deleted altogether. It is difficult to judge what may have led scribes, either those of our manuscripts or those of their exemplars, to omit some fifteen verses from their text; but perhaps they recognized the incongruity of tracing Joseph's ancestry back to Adam in a story about Jesus, when Joseph was in fact not Jesus' father (as the text of v. 23 itself indicates).

Here Ehrman reads the alteration of a useful text for anti-adoptionistic readings as (potentially) an anti-adoptionistic corruption. This strikes me as having his cake and eating it, too; if Luke 3.23 did not equivocate on Jesus' relation to Joseph [ὢν υἱός, ὡς νομίζετο, Ἰωσὴφ], and if these two Greek witnesses excised Joseph's genealogy, then this would clearly be an anti-adoptionistic corruption. The fact, then, that "some modern scholars have seen in the genealogy an implicit challenge to the notion that Jesus had no earthly father" (56–57) does not justify reading W and 579 as anti-adoptionist corruptions. So "some modern scholars" read the Lukan genealogy as potentially adoptionistic; did anyone int he ancient world ever read Luke 3 this way? For his argument to work, Ehrman needs to adduce evidence that specific variants did function anti-adoptionistically (e.g., see Luke 2.33), not merely that specific variants can so function.

Finally, this brings up a second methodological problem with Ehrman's argument. Ehrman focuses so clearly and so intensely on individual variants that he does not address whether a particular manuscript exhibits anti-adoptionistic tendencies.¹ It's one thing to show that a given manuscript makes a change at Luke 2.33 and/or 2.48 (see pp. 55–56); it's another to show that that manuscript consistently clarifies ambiguous readings in anti-adoptionistic ways. This, apparently, is a problem for Ehrman's thesis, because he acknowledges that the scribes do not seem "to have been thoroughly consistent or rigorous in their attempts to rid the text of latent ambiguities and so to eliminate the possiblity [sic] of interpreting these texts in adoptionistic terms" (58). But Ehrman's thesis is precisely that scribes were motivated to clarify scripture, to make it say what it already meant. I, at least, find it unsatisfying that now he's willing to concede a lack of motivation in this direction. If a scribe didn't consistently change his text in a particular direction, then how can we with any confidence suppose that any specific change was meant to move the tradition in that direction?

Ironically, at this point where his thesis is the thinnest, I think Ehrman gets it the most right. Notice that he's conceding a point that undermines his larger thesis while trying to paint that point as congruent with his thesis.

[T]he majority of orthodox Christians, and presumably orthodox scribes, could live perfectly well with the text as originally written, interpreting it, that is, according to orthodox criteria and beliefs. Furthermore, the very process of transmitting texts was itself a radically conservative process. These scribes understood that they were conserving rather than creating tradition. (58)

Indeed. And however clearly Ehrman sees this, I think we can all accept that the reception of Ehrman's work—both among academics and in the popular media—has neglected this aspect of his work. That is, does anyone think of Ehrman as "that guy who thinks Christian scribes conserved rather than created the text of the NT"? Colbert could be forgiven for overlooking this aspect of his work.

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¹ Let me stress that I am dealing with Ehrman's argument up to this point (viz., p. 61); it may be that Ehrman addresses this issue at some later point. He does provide some response on p. 58, though I find his discussion there inadequate.

[Postscript: I also note the following humorous (but petty) "transcriptional" error. I appreciate how difficult it is to write and edit a book; it's impossible to spot and correct every mistake. Even so, I laughed out loud at Starbucks when I read the reference to "Revelations 2:2" on p. 36, n. 26. I'm sure Ehrman knows the actual name of John's ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΨΙΣ, but it's especially funny since every academic hates this particular error.]

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.

welcome to BIBL 5203

[This is a slightly modified re-posting from July, 2008 (the original post is available here).]

I'd like to welcome all the students enrolled in my online course, The History of New Testament Interpretation. Students can find posts specifically relevant for this course by clicking on the label, BIBL 5203, available below.

In the previous version of this course, students found the following comment regarding the concomitant dangers of biblical interpretation:

Bernard Ramm reminds us that biblical interpretation is a demanding task, since our approach and procedures must be made explicit. Quite simply, we must avoid the error of making interpretations on the basis of speculation and we must avoid making them arbitrarily and dogmatically. Proper interpretation requires allowing the text to challenge and modify our prior assumptions about its meaning. Interpretation requires a courageous commitment to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.

I would like to take a moment to make this point a bit more forcefully.

For the last few years I have been thinking on-and-off about the idea that the Bible is a "dangerous," or even "offensive" text. I don't mean "offensive" in the same sense that Don Imus or Jesse Jackson are offensive; I mean "offensive" in the way Peyton Manning or LeBron James are offensive. The biblical text moves forward; it advances; it makes claims on the lives of those who read it, and if we're not careful (and especially if we are!), we will find the text calling us into question. Though I hesitate to cite Tolkien here, Frodo's recollection of Bilbo's caution seems apt here:

Remember what Bilbo used to say: "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to."

Reading the Bible is similarly dangerous; studying the Bible only compounds the risk. For those of us who define ourselves in terms of our reading of biblical texts and who believe that problems attend not only to the wide world around us but also the hidden world inside us, the voice of God we strive to hear from the inscribed page continually threatens the safe and stable identities and identifications we have made for ourselves. Though "Protestant" does not define my attachment to Christianity (except to the extent that I am not "Catholic")—still less does the label "Reformed"—I have strong sympathies with the Reformation cry Reformata Semper Reformanda ("reformed yet always reforming" [in this context I intentionally elide Ecclesia, though I do not espouse an individualistic conception of Christianity]). I have been transformed/reformed, yes; but that transformation has not neutered the Bible or rendered me any less prone to its discipline, rebuke, and chastisement.

Surrendering to this offensive movement of the biblical text is (or ought to be) at the heart of what it means to be a confessing Christian, and especially (if not uniquely) an evangelical Christian. In this vein I was pleased to read Donna Freitas's observation, in a vastly different context, regarding students at evangelical institutions of higher education [nb: Freitas herself does not self-identify as an evangelical]:

When I tell friends and colleagues about the different groups of students who participated in this study, antievangelical prejudices surface over and over. Many people believe that evangelical Christians are not intellectual, that there is little nuance to their beliefs, and that they are not capable of sustaining a well-reasoned argument. But there is nearly as much diversity inside evangelical culture as there is outside of it. And time after time during my interviews, these stereotypes were shattered. [Two female students] epitomize the complexity of personal and religious identities common among the evangelical students I interviewed — perfect examples of the committed Christian who grows intellectually and learns to push boundaries and think hard about her place in the world because of her own and her college's intense faith commitments, not in spite of them. Although, to be sure, I met stereotypical Religious Right types, I also encountered a wide range of political persuasions. (Freitas, Sex and the Soul, 62–63; original emphasis)

Freitas may be focusing on political or ideological diversity among evangelicals, but I would like to draw attention to her comment about "the committed Christian who grows . . . because of her" faith. This is, of course, a romantic and backward-looking description of evangelical Christians, told from the perspective of their ultimate (if still ongoing) success in negotiating their identity and location within the wider world.

But from the forward-looking perspective at the beginning of biblical research (remember, this is only the beginning of the semester!) we need to realize that things look very different indeed. Researching and (hopefully) understanding the biblical text with greater clarity and sophistication does not bring comfort and succor. Rather, it augments the intensity with which the text calls us to account, highlights the situatedness of ourselves at the center of our lives as God looks on from outside, and warns ever more clearly that all that is chaff will be burned in his purifying judgment. Certainly the Bible comforts us, but the Bible's comfort is precisely that all this discomfort comes from the hands of a loving and merciful God.

As we examine how the church has read and utilized the NT texts throughout the last two millennia, we ought to be prepared to find ourselves in the highs and lows of the church's history. This finding, I hope, will add depth to our readings of the texts and resonance to the voice we hear speaking from the page and summoning us to incline our ear to his counsel.

What is a Ioudaios?

BDAG, the standard Greek-English lexicon for NT and early Christian scholarship, gives the following two extended definitions for Ἰουδαῖος, αία, αῖον:

• pert. to being Judean (Jewish), with focus on adherence to Mosaic tradition, Judean;


• one who is Judean (Jewish), with focus on adherence to Mosaic tradition, a Judean

The question of how to translate Ἰουδαῖος is a tricky one. Does it primarily delimit a set of religious and/or idealogical persuasions, and so mean Jew/Jewish? Or is it rather a geographical and/or ethnic marker, and so mean Judean? BDAG's extended definitions of Ἰουδαῖος recognize the difficulty inasmuch as give "Jewish" in parentheses, but in its glosses BDAG clearly prefers Judean to Jew (which it doesn't offer). This is, in my impression, in line with the current standard position among scholars of Second Temple Judaism, Christian origins, and the New Testament.

Even so, the preference for a geographical/ethnic referent cannot quite shake the religious/idealogical connotations. After the second definition, given above, BDAG offers the following:

Since Jerusalem sets the standard for fidelity to Israel's tradition, and since Jerusalem is located in Judea, Ἰ. frequently suggests conformity to Israel's ancestral belief and practice. in turn, the geographical name provided outsiders with a term that applied to all, including followers of Jesus, who practiced customs variously associated with Judea (note the Roman perception Ac 18:15 ['Judeans' at Corinth]; 23:28).

In his book Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Daniel Boyarin argues that "Judaism," as a religion, didn't exist before it was invented by early Christian heresiologists (beginning with Justin Martyr) as a foil against which "Christianity" could be defined. In other words, "Christianity" ≠ "Judaism," but before there was a "Christianity" there was no "Judaism." In yet other words, whereas today we think of "Jew" [Ἰουδαῖος] as a belonging to the same class as words like "Christian," "Muslim," "Buddhist," "Hindu," etc. (all of these are examples of religious adherents), before the rise of Christianity "Jew" [Ἰουδαῖος] belonged to a different class, other examples of which include "Roman," "Greek," "Persian," "Egyptian," "Asian," "Syrian," etc.

There's a lot of insight here, but we still need to exercise an inordinate amount of caution. Whereas geographical/ethnic markers today don't necessarily connote religious identity (what do "Europeans" or "Asians" or "Africans" think about God/god/the transcendent?), they clearly did in the ancient world. Being "Roman" or "Egyptian" meant something about your religious beliefs in addition to your national/ethnic identity; if you were "Roman" ethnically but not religiously, that was something to comment on (cp. the complaint against Paul and Silas in Acts 16.20–21). For example, note the description of Dositheus in 3 Maccabees 1.3:

But Ptolemy was taken out of harm's way by Dositheus, called the son of Drimylus, a Judean by race [τὸ γένος Ἰουδαῖος] who later changed his customs [μεταβαλὼν τὰ νόμιμα] and became estranged from his ancestral beliefs [τῶν πατρίων δογμάτων ἀπηλλοτριωμένος].

Surely it's significant, given the questions we've been asking about Ἰουδαῖος for over two decades, that Dositheus's status as a Ἰουδαῖος required qualification (it was "by race" only) because he wasn't a Ἰουδαῖος as the term was normally understood. He may have been a Judean, but he was no longer a Jew.

another great turn of phrase

In his discussion of the Son of Man in Luke's gospel, Benjamin Reynolds uses the following phrase (in italics). I'm not sure if this was intentional:

Also, the Son of Man's appearance on that day will be like lightning (17.24; cf. Matt 24.27), and as noted above, lightning is commonly associated with the appearance of God (Exod 19.16; 2 Sam 22.15//Ps 18.14; Ps 77.17–18; 97.4; Ezek 1.13; Hab 3.11; Zech 9.14). Strikingly, the Messiah in 2 Baruch is also depicted as lightning (53.8–9; 70.9–10). (emphasis added)¹

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¹ Benjamin E. Reynolds, The Apocalyptic Son of Man in the Gospel of John (WUNT II 249; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 75.

B. Reynolds and the Son of Man

No, not that B. Reynolds (though I'm sure Burt would produce some interesting biblical scholarship!).

This morning I started reading the published version Benjamin E. Reynolds's PhD dissertation (University of Aberdeen, 2007): The Apocalyptic Son of Man in the Gospel of John (WUNT II 249; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), which I'm reviewing for Bulletin of Biblical Research. I've only read Reynolds's Introduction (1–23), but so far I'm enjoying the book.

I do detect one methodological quirk, and I'm not sure if this constitutes a problem of any significance.¹ I would appreciate any insights on this.

In the first part of the book (25–85), Reynolds sets out to analyze the Danielic "one like a son of man" (Daniel 7) and the interpretation of that figure in Jewish apocalyptic and early Christian texts. He offers three criteria by which he chooses which texts he will include in his analysis here.

(1) Jewish apocalyptic and early Christian works that fall within the general time frame of 150 B.C. and A.D. 100 will be considered. (2) Are there clear verbal allusions to Daniel 7? (3) Is there a figure that is described in terms reminiscent of Daniel 7? These questions will be asked whether or not the phrase 'son of man' is used. (20)

It's a minor problem that the last two are questions rather than criteria, but I assume a positive answer to these questions—Yes, the text at hand clearly alludes to Daniel 7, and yes, the text describes a figure reminiscent of Daniel 7—brings a text within his purview. I'm not entirely sure, yet, how Reynolds will differentiate clear verbal references from more tenuous or obscure references; neither am I sure, yet, which terms Reynolds considered "reminiscent of Daniel 7." But I expect these questions will be answered in the coming chapters.

From here Reynolds will analyze "[t]he works that meet the three criteria, thus showing a connection to the 'one like a son of man' from Daniel 7, . . . in order to determine any similarities and differences between the various interpretations of this figure" (22). Reynolds adamantly claims that he's not trying to resurrection a synthetic, essentialized concept of "the Son of Man" in ancient Judaism; instead, he's trying to identify "common features in the interpretations of the Danielic son of man" (22).

In Part 2, Reynolds turns toward an exegetical analysis of every mention of "the Son of Man" in the final form of John's gospel. The Fourth Gospel fits at the extreme end of his delimited time frame; in fact, the Fourth Gospel set the terminus ad quem (20, ftn 85). But John does not meet Reynolds's other two criteria:

[A]lthough the Johannine Son of Man may share characteristics or features with the figure described in Jewish apocalypses (themselves significantly influenced by Daniel 7), there are no clear verbal allusions to Daniel 7 or any obvious descriptions of a figure reminiscent of Daniel 7 apart from John 5.27. (23; original emphases)

Reynolds's program is, therefore, intentionally comparative:

The characteristics of the Johannine Son of Man will be compared with any common characteristics that may emerge in the examination of the "one like a son of man" in Daniel 7 and the interpretations of this figure (Part 1). If a common set of characteristics emerges and if the Johannine Son of Man also shares these characteristics, it may then be determined appropriate to describe the Son of Man in John's Gospel as an apocalyptic figure, even if there may be no unmistakable influence from Daniel. (23)

It seems to me that Reynolds locates the Johannine Son of Man tradition within the interpretive tradition surrounding Daniel 7's "one like a son of man" rather than against Daniel 7 itself.

But here's my question: How legitimate is it for him to develop a comparative pool of data using one set of criteria, and then to map that data onto a text that doesn't meet those criteria?

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¹ I want to stress that I have only read the first twenty-three pages of Reynolds's book, so it may be that he discusses this quirk. I'm not yet sure if this is actually a problem for Reynolds's study, but as I prepare to work through Part 1 I'll be looking for him to address the issue I'm raising here.

the Old Testament among early Christians

I finished reading Ronald E. Heine's Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Evangelical Ressourcement; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). I am relatively new to Patristics and the history of Christianity beyond 100 CE, so there's a lot I don't know here. But over the last ten months or so I've been doing quite a bit of reading, among both the literary remains of post-New Testament Christianity and the scholarship thereof, and Heine's book is perhaps the most engaging and wide-ranging of my recent reading.

At 194 pages and a list price less than $22.00 [USD], there's no reason why anyone should avoid this book. Heine draws together a diverse cross-section of primary materials, from the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus, to Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. He touches on Ephrem and the Cappadocian Fathers. He treats Origen at length (relative to his treatment of other Fathers in this book).

Despite this broad scope, Heine's book exhibits a clear structure that remains in focus throughout. As the book moves from the Fathers' reading of the Law to their treatments of the Exodus, the Prophets, and the Psalms, I found myself always aware of our location within both the canon and Christian history. His treatment of such difficult topics as allegorical vs. literal hermeneutics is nuanced and even-handed. The last major chapter, "Living in the Text" (175–91), justifies the book's rather meagre cost by itself.

I would have liked to see some [more] explicit discussion of the Fathers' struggles (i) against the developing rabbinic expression of Judaism, and (ii) with theological and philosophical controversies arising within their ranks. But these discussions would likely have weighed down what is an otherwise clear, concise, and lucid text.

Heine has, in my view, provided the Church with a valuable sense of its past and its conviction that Israel's scriptures are its scriptures, that Israel's story is its story. He has also provided the Academy with a helpful way into the vast body of material that is the early Christians' reading of Israel's sacred traditions. Many of the writings from this material are readily available in print and online (see "English Sources for Exegetical and Homiletical Works of the Church Fathers" [195–97]), though too few of us—in the Church as well as in the Academy—are very familiar with them. Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church offers a helpful corrective to this problem.

Bible review

Over on Exploring Our Matrix, James McGrath has offered a helpful (and positive) review of my booty. (For those of you too unmotivated to follow the links, James has reviewed Zondervan's A Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible, not any part of my personage.) At a list price of $74.99, I can understand if this volume is beyond most people's budget. But a little online research can find it on offer—new, even—for less than $45.00.

on the psalms, again

For nearly ten years now I have been intrigued by the social aspects of individual life, or—in other words—the way the world outside us becomes the world inside us. Think, for example, of the kinds of dreams you have: what they're like, what happens in them, how they make sense until you wake up and realize they don't make any sense at all. Dreams may be the most private aspect of our lives (we never dream with other people!), and yet we all seem to have fairly similar dreams. Even more importantly, we all understand the people around us when they describe completely nonsensical dreams. This is because our private worlds—who we are inside, apart from all of our relationships with others—are formed and shaped by the same (or at least heavily overlapping) social worlds. I would suspect that the understandability of our very weird dreams begins to break down cross-culturally; if a person from sub-Saharan Africa or pre-Renaissance Europe were to describe their strangest dreams to us, we would have a harder time making "sense" of them.

This sense of the outside-world-in finds marvelous expression at the end of Ron Heine's discussion of the Psalms. Heine writes:

We can also learn from the fathers that even if we must pray the psalms in private, we still pray them in community. When I pray the psalms my voice blends in praise, petition, and confession with that of the whole people of God, whether my contemporaries or my predecessors in faith, who have lifted and who continue to lift up these prayers to God. This solidarity with the whole church in prayer includes even Christ himself, the head of the church. In this communal sense all the words of the psalms become my prayer even if I am not at the moment experiencing the joys or sufferings they express. I can lift up even the words of Psalm 22:1, which Jesus prayed on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" for I am one with the whole body of Christ, and where "one member suffers all suffer together." My prayer is one with those in seemingly God-forsaken situations who cry out for deliverance but none comes, even as Jesus cried out for deliverance in Gethsemane, when none was forthcoming.¹

Prayer in private is nevertheless prayer in community. The point of my doctoral thesis was similar: Memory in private is memory in community.² Or even more simply, Memory is community—community in the present with the past. "So it is when people think that they are alone, face to face with themselves, other people appear and with them the groups of which they are members."³

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¹ Ronald E. Heine, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Evangelical Ressourcement; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 174.
² Rafael Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (European Studies on Christian Origins; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010).

³ Maurice Halbwachs, The Social Frameworks of Memory (L. A. Coser, ed. and trans.; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49.

on the psalms

Ron Heine, on Athanasius's comments regarding the Psalms.

The unique element in the book of Psalms is that it allows the reader to get inside the personalities and events of the Old Testament as a participant; or, perhaps better said, it allows these personalities and events to get inside the reader as an emotive factor in shaping his or her life in accordance with the teachings found there.¹

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¹ Ronald E. Heine, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Evangelical Ressourcement; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 147.

reading the Prophets in the early church

I've picked up (again) Ron Heine's Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Evangelical Ressourcement; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). At the end of his chapter, "The Gospel in the Prophets" (97–141), Heine borrows an image from masonry to explain the function of the prophets among the church fathers and their understanding of the gospel.

It might be said that the prophetic texts of the Old Testament served as the mortar for the church's construction of its understanding of Christ. Mortar is not the primary material in the edifice. Bricks are the primary material. The primary material in the church's understanding of Christ is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Mortar, however, is essential to the edifice, enabling it to take form and hold together. Without the prophetic texts of the Old Testament, the early Christians would not have drawn the conclusions that they did concerning Jesus. The ancient Jewish prophetic texts that the early Christians read and wrestled with in their attempt to understand who Jesus of Nazareth had been and what his life meant for their lives lie close at hand in the Christian Bible. The early Christians were the first to make their way through these texts from a specifically Christian viewpoint.¹

One of the few things scholars of Christian origins agree upon is that Jesus' followers, historically, have read the texts of the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the gospel traditions. When God refers to "my son" in a Hebrew biblical text, early Christians hear "Jesus" (not "David," "Solomon," "Israel," or any of a number of other historical referents for that term). Heine shares that agreement (according to the quote provided above).

But we often neglect how the influence also moved in the opposite direction: Through the first four or five centuries of the church's history (and even beyond, including to the present day), the church has also—and simultaneously—understood Jesus from the perspective of Hebrew biblical traditions. If Jesus healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead, brought the nations (= gentiles) into the kingdom of God, etc., Jesus' followers insisted on understanding these activities in light of Israel's history and sacred texts.

Heine draws our attention to this point. Jesus did not simply transform his followers' exegetical and hermeneutical understandings (though he did transform them). Jesus himself was recognized and portrayed in tones and hues directly evocative of Moses, David, the prophets, et al. I dare say that without these latter, early Christians (and we, too) would not know what to make of Jesus of Nazareth.

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¹ Heine, Reading the Old Testament, 141; my emphasis.

thank you, Zondervan

The folks on Zondervan's blog, Koinōnia, announced yesterday a Hebrew + Greek Bible Giveaway, in which Zondervan solicited readers' favorite Greek or Hebrew words. They selected five winners today. My entry, included below, was one of the five. Thank you, Zondervan, for my copy of A Reader's Hebrew and Greek Bible.

My entry:

ἀποτυμπανίζω, as in Dan. 7.11 [LXX (Old Greek)]:

I was then watching the noise of the great words, which the horn kept speaking, and the beast was beaten to death [ἀπετυμπανίσθη], and its body perished and was given over to burning with fire. (NETS)

According to the abridged LSJ, ἀποτυμπανίζω means "to cudgel to death." If language develops words to describe life, why did the ancients need a single word for "to cudgel to death"?

See my earlier post for my initial discovery of this word.

an interesting dilemma

Philip Sellew's article, "Achilles or Christ? Porphyry and Didymus in Debate over Allegorical Interpretation" (HTR 82 [1989]: 79–100) provides an interesting discussion of Porphyry (the third-century CE neo-Platonist student of Plotinus, who wrote a number of important works, including Against the Christians) and his criticism of the application of allegorical interpretation to biblical texts. I found this comment particularly interesting:

It was clear to Porphyry from his extensive firsthand knowledge that there was much of value in the Jewish scriptures, especially in some of the prophetic writings, and that they in some sense proclaimed the One High God that he too reverenced. But Porphyry was also strongly repelled by much of the Bible, particularly by its anthropomorphic images of God, its frequent anti-universalistic or even ethnocentric tendencies, and by such occasional episodes as Lot impregnating his own daughters in Genesis 19. Porphyry could not understand why the Christians did not simply reject the Jewish writings as no longer being religiously appropriate. (Sellew, "Achilles or Christ," 92; my emphasis)

I am fascinated by this dilemma. Why didn't the Christians, especially in the third and fourth centuries CE, simply cut loose of the Hebrew Bible and its traditions and pursue a more thoroughgoing New Testament theology? Why were Marcion and his followers the only ones to reject the Old Testament tout court?

I'm not advocating this move for contemporary Christianity; indeed, I find it worrisome that so much of contemporary Christianity seems to be following Marcion's lead, at least practically if not in so many words. My question (in the previous paragraph) really is, Why? I know what the Christians said: that the Bible was God's inspired word, that Moses and the prophets proclaimed Christ beforehand, etc. And these answers are themselves rooted in the general treatment of the Hebrew Bible in NT texts. But given the polemical and rhetorical energy the Church and its writers expended in its first four centuries repudiating the Jews and their reading of those texts, why did the Christians view the Jews' Bible as God's witness to the gospel's advent? Though I'm no church historian, from my NT scholar's point-of-view this seems a question too rarely raised.

on great turns of phrase

I'm currently reading Virginia Burrus's article, "The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome" (Harvard Theological Review 84/3 [1991]: 229–48). The first full paragraph on p. 231 begins:

Christ and other feminist scholars have succeeded in redeeming the heretical woman, removing her from the margins of history and placing her instead at the center of a long tradition of women's struggles against patriarchal orthodoxy. (Burrus, "Heretical Woman," 231)

If it sounds like Burrus includes Christ among the "feminist scholars," that's because she does. Of course, it might help to know that she's engaging an essay written by Carol Christ.

Jerome and "our Judaizers"

I just finished reading Michael Graves's brief but very interesting article, "'Judaizing' Christian Interpretations of the Prophets As Seen by Saint Jerome," Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007): 142–56. Graves asks what, specifically, Jerome objects to as "Judaizing" given his own striking (for the early fifth century CE) views vis-à-vis Hebrew texts (vs. the LXX), rabbinic exegetical traditions, and spiritual vs. literal interpretations.

Citing Vaccari,¹ Graves identifies two aspects of Jerome's interpretive practice. First, Jerome draws upon three rather distinct perspectives in his hermeneutical discussions, (i) the historical or literal interpretive tradition associated with Antioch, (ii) the Jewish interpretive tradition, "as mediated primarily through personal Jewish teachers" (144), and (iii) the Christian mystical interpretive tradition associated with Alexandria. Second, Jerome's interest in Hebraic interpretations was closely associated with his appreciation for the texts' literal or historical interpretation.

Graves then provides examples of Jerome's interpretative practice, especially of Hebrew prophetic texts, that illustrate how these two factors relate as part of that practice. Here's the first of those examples:

A brief and clear-cut example of the spiritual and literal meanings given side by side may be found in Jerome's Commentary on Jeremiah 4:11–12, where Jerome says this about the ventus urens, the "scorching wind" which, as Jerome reads the verse, is coming in judgment: "iuxta historiam, understand the 'scorching wind' as Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed everything, but iuxta tropologiam understand the 'scorching wind' as the Adversarial Power, who, coming from the desert and the wasteland, where there is no shelter of God, tries to destroy His church." Here, Jerome gives both the "historical" and the "tropological" meanings one right after the other. As is evident, Jerome accepts both meanings as valid. (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 146–47)

Given Jerome's willingness to accept a "historical," "Hebraic" interpretation of prophetic texts (which focus on Israel and her history), how should we understand Jerome's polemical references to "Judaizing" interpretations (which, presumably, Jerome himself may have been accused of propagating)? According to Graves, Jerome accepted Hebraic interpretations only insofar as they referred to past events. Two things distinguished Jerome's interpretations from those he found unacceptable. First, Jerome insisted that every passage held some spiritual significance and was fulfilled spiritually, whether in reference to (one of the two advents of) Christ or to the church. Second, "literal" or "historical" interpretations applied to the past and not to the future.

Thus, it is not the literal meaning per se that Jerome regards as "Judaizing"; Jerome is comfortable with "literal" interpretations, provided that they assign the fulfillment of prophecy either to Israel's past history or directly to Christ. It is certainly not the futuristic aspect of the interpretations to which Jerome objects, since all prophetic texts have some contemporary or future application to Christ and the church. The problem, from Jerome's perspective, is that the "Judaizers" look for future, literal fulfillments that are not directly Christological. The particular combination of these two elements, literal and futuristic, is what Jerome does not accept. (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 151)

I'm certainly no scholar when it comes to Jerome and/or fourth- and fifth-century Christian history, but Graves's discussion is both clear and (as far as I am able to tell) insightful. How fascinating to watch elements within the Church, four centuries after Jesus, engaging "the continuing struggle . . . to determine how they relate to the promises made to 'Israel' in the Old Testament, and how the interpretation of prophetic literature intersects with Christian theology and Christian identity" (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 156).

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¹ A. Vaccari, "I fattori della esegesi geronimiana," Bib 1 (1920): 457–80.

Terminator Jesus?

Fire and property damage are never funny. But then this story reminds me of the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, in which Elijah calls down fire from heaven.

The Solid Rock Church, just off I-75 north of Cincinnati, OH, built a three-story tall statue of Jesus early in the previous decade. Everyone referred to this statue as "Touchdown Jesus" for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with American football.

This week that statue was struck by lightning and burned like Elijah's sacrifice. The images (available here) of the steel frame left behind after the fire destroyed the plastic foam and fiberglass reminded me of the classic Terminator. And can't we all imagine Jesus telling the Eleven just before the Ascension, "Hasta la vista, baby," or (wait for it . . .), "I'll be back."

Update: A colleague mentions this event on his blog.

Jesus' cross as symbol

In his discussion of symbolic interpretations of the exodus among the Church Fathers (viz., Origen and Gregory of Nyssa), Ron Heine highlights Origen's very interesting connection between the Exodus traditions and the gospel. Of course, some New Testament texts already make this connection. But I found the following very interesting:

Origen connects God's statement that he has seen his people's affliction in Egypt and has come down to deliver them from their taskmasters and from pharaoh (Exod. 3:7–8)—Origen inserts "pharaoh" into the statement—with the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. "For he did indeed set us free from Egypt and its leaders whom he nailed to the cross to make a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross." Christ is the "true Lamb," who has "freed us from the servitude of the world ruler of this present darkness." The passover lamb slaughtered in Egypt was the type. Egypt means darkness, Origen says, and pharaoh, Egypt's governor, "means dissipater, because he dissipates the works of virtue done in the light by means of his princely power." (Ronald Heine, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007], 86; citing Origen, Treatise on the Passover 47, 49 [Heine's emphases]).

Heine is discussing Origen's symbolic (= typological) reading of Egypt and Pharaoh as the world and the devil, respectively. But what caught my eye was Origen's symbolic reading of Jesus' crucified body. Notice what Origen says has been nailed to the cross: "Egypt and its leaders." This idea has its forerunner, perhaps, in 1 Pet. 2.24, which itself reads Isa. 53 symbolically in light of the salvific effects of Jesus' death. "He himself bore our sins in his body upon the tree" (ὃς τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν αὐτὸς ἀνήνεγκεν ἐν τῷ σώματι αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον; hos tas hamartias hēmōn autos anēnenken en tō sōmati autou epi to xylon). Of course, Origen hasn't abandoned the "literal" reading of the crucifixion, for Christ's victory over Egypt and Pharaoh (= the world and the devil) happened "in the cross."

It seems to me that in such short measure (Pasch. 47) Origen reads Jesus' crucified body as the instrument as well as the object of judgment. Thus the flexibility and adaptability of symbols in (some of) the Fathers' reading of the Bible, and thus the enduring power of those symbols.

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.

seat belts save families

This isn't new. But my sister sent me a link to this video, which I thought was worth sharing. [Click the video if the right side of the screen is cut off by my blog template.]

Greek question

I'm working on a brief discussion of Justin Martyr. In the course thereof, I'm citing Justin's Dialogue 100.1, which reads:

Not only in the blessing of Joseph and Judah have things been predicted in a mysterious manner of him, but also in the Gospel it is written that he said, "All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son; nor does anyone know the Son except the Father, and those to whom the Son will reveal him." (cited from Oskar Skarsaune, "Justin and His Bible," in Justin Martyr and His Worlds [edited by S. Parvis and P. Foster; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007], 71.)

My problem is that I don't have access to any printed Greek editions of Justin's text, and I can't find any online. Is anyone able to tell me the precise morphological form Justin uses that is translated by the italicized "Gospel" in the text quoted above? I suspect the text reads [ἐν] τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ (singular), but I want to be sure of that. Thanks, in advance, to anyone able to help.

that's a wrap!

I've finally finished my review of Anthony Le Donne's published PhD thesis, The Historiographical Jesus (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), and I've sent my review to the book review editor of The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. I never know whether it would be appropriate or not so share online reviews that will be published shortly, so I normally don't include my reviews here. But I suppose it won't hurt to mention the conclusion to my review.

Le Donne raises important questions facing historical Jesus scholarship in light of the recent (and ongoing) rise of “memory” as an analytical historiographic category. The driving question is no longer simply, What actually happened? (It may never have been simply that.) Jesus research increasingly finds itself wrestling with the question, How does “what actually happened” relate to the gospels’ portrayals of Jesus? The Historiographical Jesus brings into focus how typological resources both constrained the early Christians’ memory of Jesus and enabled that memory to adapt to and address an ever-evolving present.

still reading

I'm still reading Anthony Le Donne's The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), but both my reading and my commenting have slowed down considerably for a number of reasons. First, I'm currently in the eye of a hurricane (in reverse, perhaps). On the one hand, my oldest sister was married on 10 April in Phoenix, AZ; my wife was a bridesmaid, my daughter the flower girl, and I officiated. On the other hand, my youngest sister gets married this Saturday, 1 May. Only Janelle is involved (hence the in reverse comment), but this still requires serious adjustments to our schedules. Second, and much more significantly in terms of time, we have take custody of a baby girl we plan to adopt later this year. The move from one to two children has deprived me of sleep, productive work time, and (of course) time writing for the blog.

Even so, I did manage to read Le Donne's sixth chapter ("The Therapeutic Son of David" [137–83]) and his brief excursus, "The Presupposition of Davidic Descent" (185–9). Of course, the chapter depends rhetorically and historiographically on the identification of traditional trajectories, and I have registered elsewhere my objection to this approach to history (especially here). But that aside, there is much to praise in this chapter. First, I was pleased with how overlapping are his analysis of the Beelzebul controversy with my own analysis (see chapter 7 of my Structuring Early Christian Memory), even though we have very different emphases and agenda. Second, I think Le Donne is exactly right to point out that exorcisms and healings were not necessarily distinct therapeutic phenomena in the ancient world. Luke clearly blurs the distinctions between them, both in his account of the healing of Simon's mother-in-law (Luke 4.38–9) and in the healing of the bent woman (Luke 13.10–13); Le Donne focuses on Matthew's similar blurring. Third (and again, similar to my discussion of exorcisms in chapter 7 of Structuring Early Christian Memory), Le Donne draws attention to the ways the evangelists localized Jesus' exoricisms within Hebrew biblical traditions. This is no small feat, given the paucity of Hebrew biblical traditions that could be read demonologically (really, only 1 Sam 16.14-23). Even so, Matthew (as Le Donne argues) reads Jesus' exorcisms from the perspective of Isaianic therapeutic traditions (see Isa 35.5–6; 61.1–2 [LXX]), especially in Matthew 12.

historical and/or mnemonic trajectories

Okay. The fourth chapter ("Memory and Typology") of Anthony Le Donne's The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009) presents the heart of Le Donne's argument regarding trajectories (and the utility thereof) for historical Jesus research (see the section, "Mnemonic Continuity and Trajectory" [70–77]). This, as I've said elsewhere, is so far the heart of my disagreement with Le Donne's historiographical program, including his appropriation of social memory theory. On the one hand, this is a significant disagreement, since without the argument for trajectories Le Donne's book loses a lot of its substance. On the other hand, the amount of theoretical and methodological material in the book with which I agree probably surpasses 90%, and so I'm prone to minimize the significance of this disagreement. Either way, let's make sure I understand the argument rightly.

First, Le Donne is not suggesting that mnemonic trajectories enable us to move behind the extant historical data to the historical realia that generated our data. As he has argued throughout the previous two chapters, there simply is no uninterpreted historical reality behind the data, no "real Jesus" for us to get to apart from the "Jesus Remembered" (note the intentional echo of James Dunn). Le Donne isn't suggesting that there wasn't an actual historical (= real) Jesus that the early Christians remembered in their accounts of his life and teachings. But he does insist that we cannot get behind our historical data to reconstruct the real person of whom the gospels are (or claim to be) traces.

What the postmodern mind has taught us is that we must always qualify what we mean by "real." What is real is that which has been perceived and interpreted and thus refracted. But once qualified it is no longer helpful to draw a distinction between the real Jesus and the remembered Jesus. For those disciples of the first generation, the real Jesus was the Jesus of their memory. (76)

I have to admit that I agree here. We can know the Jesus whom the early Christians remembered. Inasmuch as Paul's letters, the gospels, and other early Christian texts "get Jesus wrong," we cannot know the "real" Jesus who walked and talked throughout Galilee. Inasmuch as they "get Jesus right," we can. But in both cases, we are constrained by (n.b. not "restricted to") the evidence we have, all of which has already been "refracted."

Second, Le Donne builds his case for mnemonic trajectories on the strength of his argument for memory's continuity through time. Let me say, I agree completely with his case that memories are causally related to previous perceptions and conceptions of the past (= continuity), even if each generation has to expend its own energy to come to terms with the past it inherits from its forebears. "What is vital to this model is the concept of mnemonic continuity. . . . Once a perception has been localized within a particular mnemonic category, the refractions thereafter will constitute only incremental modifications to that category" (72; my emphasis). Le Donne's point isn't necessarily that dramatic changes in conceptions of the past don't happen, but only that they happen in relation to the conceptions of the past that were received as traditional. As an example (my own, not Le Donne's), if someone were to offer the (radically revisionist) view of Jimmy Carter's presidency as "successful," they would have to do so in direct conversation with thirty-years' of conceptions of Carter's administration as inept. Such an argument couldn't simply ignore received appraisals of the late-1970s American political milieu; it would have to tackle them head-on if it hoped to find any widespread reception. Again, "Our memories demand a high degree of continuity in order to tie all of our shifting frames of meaning together. The integrity of this chain determines its reliability. I can account for where and who I am now (and why) by analyzing the continuity of this chain" (73). This is exactly right.

Third, Le Donne moves directly from memory as continuous to memory as chartable: "Memory is in a constant process of refraction. Most of the time, this refracting process remains reliably stable and therefore historically chartable. . . . Because memory refraction is constant, it is chartable and therefore historically measurable" (75, 77). Perhaps. For those moments (or instances) of refraction for which we have data available for analysis, I think Le Donne's right. We can trace the diachronic development and movement of memory—how conceptions of the past morph and mutate and migrate across time. But if I've understood Le Donne's purposes rightly, his point is that we can extrapolate beyond our data (or more accurately, before our data) and posit originating (or simply earlier) memories that explain the instances of memory we have. For example,

In order adequately to account for the origin of a mnemonic trajectory, the historian must compare and contrast interpretive spheres (i.e., mnemonic cycles) that seem to be distorting a memory in opposite directions. Once these spheres are compared and contrasted, it is then necessary to postulate how these divergent traditions relate to one another. . . . it is now appropriate to speak in terms of memory trajectories that might be triangulated to postulate a common origin. (74)

In other words (again, if I understand rightly), given . . . D E F, we can postulate A B C. The problem, I think, is that Le Donne assumes not simply continuity between memories but also predictability. And as far as I can tell, there simply isn't any predictability between our gospels, even if we accept one of the traditionally accepted models of interdependence between them (e.g., the Two-Source Hypothesis, or the Farrer Theory).

Another problem, though perhaps not as significant as the leap Le Donne makes from continuity to predictability, concerns how to identify "interpretive spheres that seem to be distorting a memory in opposite directions" (74). Here the problems are legion. Is John the Baptist's question at Matt 11.3 pulling against his deferential response to Jesus at Matt 3.13–15? If so/not, what about the parallel in Luke 7.19–20, which doesn't pull against a previously narrated Johannine confession (unless you include John's pre-natal jubilation at Luke 1.41!)? Is Jesus' question about the messiah as Son of David in Mark 12.35–37 (parr.) in tension with the Davidic overtones of Mark's account of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem (Mark 11.9–10)? Is Mark a proponent of one of these christological perspectives over the other? Was Jesus? Do the gospel's portrayal of Jesus in Elijah-like terms stand in tension with the casting of John in Elijah's light? Or should we synthesize these portrayals instead?

The problem here is rooted in the relative paucity of our data; others have pursued the kind of analysis for more thoroughly documented figures (e.g., Abraham Lincoln; see Schwartz 2000; 2008) that Le Donne proposes for Jesus. It has proven an intractable problem to identify with any level of precision how various units of the Jesus tradition relate to one another, especially those traditions that may be "distorting a memory in opposite directions." It seems to me that our reconstructed trajectories will fail us anytime the early Christians' memories of Jesus behaved in ways we might not have expected. That's not to say their unexpected memorial practices weren't continuous with practices attested elsewhere. Le Donne's case for memory's continuity (which does not equal veracity, necessarily) is well made; I have my doubts, however, about its predictability.

Χριστὸς ἐγήγερται

Happy Easter to all those celebrating.