JESUS, THE ANTI-NATIONALIST
My fourth and final example of Jesus in current research draws on two sources: Marcus Borg's collection of essays, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, (43) and N. T. Wright's 1992 publication, The New Testament and the People of God.(44) Wright's book is the first of a projected five-volume study, and he has kindly shared with me the next 350 pages of typescript destined for volume two, Jesus and the Victory of God. These two scholars respond to and react against the three portraits of Jesus we've already examined, and each approves the work of the other. I've christened their creation the anti-nationalist Jesus.
I start with Borg. His essays urge three major points: First, Jesus used kingdom-language, but not eschatologically. Second, Jesus was a teacher of wisdom who practiced inclusive table fellowship, "open commensality." Third, first-century Palestine was a purity society.
This purity system, centered on the Temple, had dominated Israel since the exile.(45) At the top of this society were the purity elite: large land-holding high priestly families. Just below them came their retainers (this analytical language draws again on Lenski)--scribes, lawyers, and Pharisees--whose interests coincided with those of the elite.(46) At the bottom of the heap came the peasants: degraded, expendable, and generally "not only impoverished but also impure."(47)
Enter Jesus. He does not like this system. "Conflicts about issues of purity constitute one of the central strands of the Jesus tradition."(48) Jesus was a social prophet, engaged in radical social criticism, and, for this reason, he "threatened Jerusalem," the home of these ruling elites. The healings and exorcisms--lepers, demoniacs, tombs--show Jesus "shattering" purity taboos.(49) His use of kingdom language was part of his world-subverting wisdom. He did not intend it eschatologically. Jesus' kingdom, the goal of his mission, was the formation of a "contrast society" or an "alternative community" seeking to live in history under the kingship of God.(50) Thus, while Palestine practiced the politics of purity, Jesus preached and lived the politics of compassion.(51)
One might think, what with all the getting, spending, purifying, and sacrificing going on during the high holidays, that Jesus wouldn't be caught dead in Jerusalem at Passover. But he went because he had a plan. With Sanders, Borg holds that Jesus caused an incident in the Temple, and, again with Sanders, he agrees that this act was symbolic, but not of destruction or replacement. On that reading, Borg rightly observes, Jesus would not be indicting the Temple itself.(52) But given what the Temple stood for, how could he not? The overturned tables express a mixture of anger, protest, and indictment, a repudiation of what the Temple had become: "the center of a purity system that was also a system of economic and political oppression."(53)
Wright picks up this picture and expands it. The Temple was at the dark heart of the purity system. Defilement could not only separate someone from communal life, it also "meant dissociation from the people of the covenant god."(54) The only way to attain forgiveness--and here Wright seems to say that impurity requires "forgiveness" as opposed to purification--was to go to the Temple and perform rituals and worship.(55)
Beyond ritual purity, Judaism was also focused on "racial purity," and had been ever since the return from Babylon. Who was a pure-bred Jew? Works especially from the Roman period dwelled on race as the criterion of belonging to the true people, and this racialist emphasis was particularly instantiated in the Temple, which forbade entrance to Gentiles past the outer court.(56)
Finally, the Temple was the site of animal sacrifices. "We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that most Jews took part in the sacrificial system, but we do not know why....Was there an inner rationale?"(57) Wright detects a clue to a "sub-or semi-conscious meaning": "If the Exile itself was seen as 'death' and therefore the return from exile as a 'resurrection'," then "it is not a long step to see the death of Israel as in some sense sacrificial....Exile itself is to be understood as a sacrifice."(58) Sacrifices were thus a strange sort of historical and existential metaphor, the dramatic reenactment of the movement of judgment and salvation.(59)
First-century Jews, it turns out, had an excellent sense of the possibilities of metaphor, because this is also how they understood apocalyptic language, in particular of the coming kingdom. They knew that such words did not refer to the end of the space-time universe. "There is abundant evidence that they...knew a good metaphor when they saw one."(60) It is wrong to think that Jews took mythological language literally. Such language was part of a "complex metaphor system" that served to invest history with theological significance.(61)
Jesus sought to reform his native religion, and he had his work cut out for him. Against a tradition that excluded sick people as ritually unclean and, thus, cut off from the people of God, Jesus went out to the sick.(62) Whereas other Jews had assumed that wealth was a sign of Yahweh's favor,(63) Jesus welcomed precisely the poor and the outcast. This was the sign of the real return from exile, the new age, the resurrection coming into being.(64) In brief, Jesus also knew a good metaphor when he saw one, and this is how he used kingdom language, devastatingly misread by later historians as literal apocalyptic.
Obsessed with purity and exclusiveness,(65) bribing and wheedling God with almsgiving, prayer, and fasting,(66) Israel had made herself as unattractive as possible.(67) Jesus summoned Israel away from the rules of Deuteronomy, which in his view had been part of only a temporary phase in the purposes of Yahweh: Now, "the true people of God can be demarcated by the state of their hearts, not by taboos."(68) By coming to Jesus, people could get what they previously had to go to the Temple for: forgiveness.(69) In other words, Jesus was "inaugurating a way of life that has no further need of the Temple."(70)
But more than purity, more than sacrificial cult (however metaphorically understood), the Temple was also the center and symbol of Judaism's "violent nationalism,"(71) and this at last gives us our key to Jesus' mission and message. Jesus called his contemporaries to repent of exclusiveness, to repent of the purity obsessions, and, perhaps most of all, to repent of their violent nationalism. People had to change their life-style,(72) and if the people did not give up their militant confrontation with Rome and follow Jesus' radical alternative vision of the kingdom, then Israel's time was up.(73) "Throughout his public career, Jesus told a story in which the judgment usually associated with YHWH's action against the pagan nations would fall upon those Jews who were refusing to follow in the way that he was holding out to them."(74)
Thus, at Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to confront the Temple. Moreover, he pronounced himself to be its "actual replacement."(75) How so? Remember, everyone here understands metaphor. Jesus projected himself and his followers into Israel's own myth of persecution and vindication, exile and return: "The plot is the same, the dramatis personae different."(76) Jesus represents freedom: Jerusalem, unfreedom. Jerusalem is now Babylon. (77) And Jesus prophesies that, if Israel does not change, the Temple will be destroyed within that generation. Its fall would be his vindication.(78) The devastation of Jerusalem-Babylon will signal the end of the exile for the people of God, namely, Jesus' own followers.(79) Thus, the kingdom of God will come, here on earth in the time-space world.(80)
This hypothesis is coherent and parsimonious, offering the simplest explanation so far of the rise of Christianity: Jesus created it. We have to ask ourselves, though, Is this reconstruction plausible? First-century Judaism and Jesus' mission transmute into huge abstractions; everything mediates metaphor. We, of course, are capable of reading these texts like this, as Wright has just demonstrated. But, in principle, what evidence can we have that first-century Jews "unconsciously" or "subconsciously" thought this way too?
Perhaps, again, Jesus did think that God's Torah (that is, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) was an outdated set of taboos, but we have no evidence that he did, and, in the behavior of the later church, we actually have counterevidence. If he had taught or, mysteriously, embodied an anti-Torah message, his apostles--the ultimate link in the chain connecting the New Testament texts to Jesus of Nazareth--evidently entirely misunderstood him. On the evidence of Paul's letters, the Gospels, and Acts, these apostles chose to live in Jerusalem, worship in the Temple, and keep the festivals, the Sabbath, and the food laws.(81) Could they really have understood nothing?
This view reduces the purity codes and the operation of the Temple to a weird system combining caste and sacrament, ossifying society along class lines. This picture is simply false. Impurity is not sin. It is removed not through forgiveness (which is in any case not "dispensed" at the Temple) but through purification. Most forms of impurity could be dealt with (I paraphrase Sanders here) by a quick wash and waiting for the sun to set. Impurity was a fact of life, but not of class. The wealthiest grande dame, the fussiest Pharisee, the highest high priest would all be impure any time they (mutatis mutandis) menstruated, had a baby, had a seminal emission, or buried their dead. Again, impurity is not sin, nor did it effect normal table fellowship.(82)
The removal of corpse impurity did require a week-long process, punctuated on the third and seventh day by a sprinkling of water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer. For this, one went to the Temple. That is why, for example, pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem for Passover by the eighth of Nisan, though the holiday itself came on the evening of the fourteenth: One had to eat the Paschal meal in purity.(83) This is also probably why Jesus, arriving with all the other pilgrims, had enough time to "teach daily in the temple" in the days before the feast (Lk. 19.47). For good reason--purity-he was there one week early.
Wright calls the animal sacrifices "strange,"(84) and so they may seem to us in the modern West. In the first-century Mediterranean, however, this mode of worship was universal. It is the least peculiar thing about Judaism. According to Wright, "Early Christians offered no animal sacrifices,"(85) and again, "No Christians ever offered animal sacrifice qua Christians. Nobody ever thought that the worship of the god made known in Jesus of Nazareth required the blood of calves or lambs."(86)
If by "early Christians" Wright means "Gentile Christians," then I submit that we cannot know. Before 70, Gentiles could make offerings at the Jerusalem Temple,(87) and later Jewish tradition held that Gentiles could sacrifice to God anywhere, since they, unlike Israel, were not bound by halakhah to offer such worship exclusively in Jerusalem.(88) We have no good reason a priori to rule Gentile members of the early Christian movement out of this group. Further, the accusation in Acts 21:28-29, that Paul brought Gentiles into the Temple past their boundary, presupposes sacrifice; prayer alone could have been offered anywhere.
If however, by "the early Christians" Wright means "the first followers of Jesus," some awkward data still lie scattered around. Where does he think Jesus picked up his lamb for the seder envisaged in Mark 14? What's the point of the instruction on how the Christian should offer at the altar in Matthew 5:23-24? Why does Paul still praise the latreia, the Temple cult, in his hymn to Israel's divine privileges in Romans 9? Why, indeed, does Paul (who had no self-esteem problems) see his apostleship in terms of a "priestly service" (Rom. 15:16)? Metaphor, true, just as Christ sacrificed as a paschal lamb, but why use such images as metaphors if Jesus himself had condemned their referents as morally, socially, and religiously wrong?
To review, we have four Jesuses. We have one apocalyptic Jesus (two, counting mine, of whom I haven't spoken yet). He caused a scene in the Temple to symbolically enact a prophecy of impending redemption (Sanders). We have two non-apocalyptic Jesuses, a Cynic and a Jewish Cynic. The Cynic Jesus went up to Jerusalem as a normal pilgrim and was killed-no Temple tantrum (Mack, Seeley). The Jewish Cynic Jesus went up for the first time in his life that one Passover. Disgusted by what he saw (he had had no idea, remember, what Jerusalem would be like), he overturned the tables, thereby symbolically destroying the Temple's brokerage function (Crossan). And, finally, we have one metaphorically apocalyptic anti-nationalist Jesus who went up to Jerusalem at Passover to confront the Temple system, which he symbolically challenged, indicted and condemned (Borg, Wright).
JESUS: ANOTHER VIEW
What about my Jesus?
In 1988 I published From Jesus to Christ. My study traced the growth of apocalyptic Jewish traditions from the historical Jesus to the Christs of the early churches, especially in light of the kingdom's continuing delay. For my reconstruction, I drew particularly on Sanders' work. Thus, I had an apocalyptic Jesus who went up to Jerusalem for Passover at or as the climax of his mission. He symbolically enacted the Temple's impending destruction. The gesture implied no condemnation of his native religion but, rather, announced the imminent coming of a new Temple and, hence, as well, God's kingdom. The act brought him to the attention of the priests, who became alarmed at the potential for mass disturbance during the holiday when Pilate was in town. They facilitated his arrest, and Pilate killed him.(89)
I expanded and refined one aspect of my interpretation in a later paper, "Jesus and the Temple, Mark and the War."(90) There, I argued that both the christological strategy and the historical appearance of Mark's Gospel could be best understood if we posit that the evangelist knew of Jesus' original prophecy, and accommodated it to his own circumstances, post-70. Thus, proclaimed Mark, the generation that saw the Temple destroyed would also be the generation that saw the Son of Man coming in glory (Mark's reworking) to establish the kingdom. The Roman destruction of Jerusalem mobilized Mark to restate this traditional prophecy in order to reassure his community that everything was indeed occurring just as Jesus had said it would. They had but to endure and have faith.(91)
I thought this reconstruction elegant and, but for one awkwardness, extremely compelling. This awkwardness, however, has not gone away. How could Jesus have made such a spectacular prophecy, which Peter, John, and others must have known, and yet Paul--who knew Peter and John and who talked frequently of the coming Kingdom--never even mentions it at all?
In the time since, I have pondered Burton Mack's Myth of Innocence, with its close reading of the Markan passion material. I have corresponded with David Seeley on the way the Temple incident works in Mark. I've reflected on the superiority of the Johannine chronology(92) and passion traditions to that of the synoptics. I have read two excellent recent studies on modern apocalyptic movements, Paul Boyer's When Time Shall be No More(93) and Stephen O'Leary's Arguing the Apocalypse.(94) I have changed my mind, and I present and defend my pentimento here.
Mark's passion narrative makes up in drama what it lacks in historical probability. The priests' motivations are obscure; the two trials before the full Sanhedrin on the night of Passover beggar belief. Everything is set in motion by Jesus' action in the Temple in the days before the holiday. Once he overturns the tables (et cetera), "the chief priests and scribes...seek a way to destroy him" (11:18). The action leads directly to his trial, which provides the dramatic foil for the Gospel's sustained christological reticence: Jesus finally comes out ("Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" "I am." 14:61f.). The Temple action sets up the theological climax of the Gospel.
John needs no such device. His Jesus has preached a very high christology virtually since his first appearance. Consequently, unlike Mark, John does not need (two!) highly charged Sanhedrin trials to bear the weight of articulating Christian doctrine. His Jesus, again, had already assumed that task. The Johannine sequence of events, less dramatic, is also less improbable: Jesus comes to town, preaches, and is arrested the night before the night of Passover. He is detained briefly at the High Priest's house, where he is questioned "about his disciples and his teaching" (18:19). He, then, passes on to Pilate. The priests' motivation is clear and commonsensical: "If we let [Jesus] go on,...the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." Caiaphas continues, "It is expedient that one man should die for the people, that the whole nation not perish" (11:48,50).(95)
So what do I now think happened? Shortly after John the Baptist's execution, Jesus would have carried on preaching his message of the coming kingdom, meant literally: Justice established, Israel restored and redeemed, the heavenly Temple "not built by the hand of man" in Jerusalem, the resurrection of the dead, and so on. He gathered followers, some itinerant like himself, others settled in villages. He went up to Jerusalem for Passover--perhaps he always did; I don't know. Then, he went back to the Galilee, and continued preaching and healing. Next Passover, up again, and back again.
And then, perhaps on the third year, he identified that Passover as the one on which the kingdom would arrive. I'm guessing, of course, but for several reasons. In the (very reworked) traditions of the triumphal entrance, we may have a genuine echo of the enthusiasm and excitement of this particular pilgrimage.(96) Also, to the other side of events, we have the traditions about the resurrection. I take this fact as one measure of the level of excitement and conviction on the part of Jesus' followers. They went up expecting an eschatological event, the arrival of the kingdom. What they got instead was the crucifixion. But then, an unexpected eschatological event happened: They were convinced that Jesus had been raised.
Why? Had Jesus named that Passover as the last? Within apocalyptic movements, a specifically named date concentrates and raises eschatological attention and prompts fence-sitters to commit to the movement (I draw here on O'Leary's analysis of the Millerites in the 1840s).(97) Perhaps this is what Jesus had done. With this scenario, we do not need the Temple incident as a device to bring Jesus to the (negative) attention of the priests. He had already been to Jerusalem the previous Passover and the one before that, getting the crowds all worked up about the coming kingdom. This year, both he and the crowds seemed even more excited. How long could Pilate be counted on not to act? Thus, the secret arrest, the rushed interview with Caiaphas, or Caiaphas and Annas, and then on to Pilate and death.
Two last points. First, the disciples' experience of Jesus' resurrection points indisputably to the Christian movement's origins in the eschatological hopes of first-century Judaism--the resurrection of the dead, the vindication of the righteous. The disciples' choice to remain in Jerusalem rather than return to Galilee suggests further that they continued to expect something to happen, and soon (think of the first several chapters in Acts). And if something is going to happen, it happens in Jerusalem.
Finally, the movement from the beginning received Gentiles without requiring that they be circumcised. By mid-century, there would be a crisis. Some Christians, in the face of the kingdom's continuing delay, thought Gentile adherents should normalize their relation to Israel by converting, which, for men, meant to be circumcised. Paul refers to these colleagues as "dogs" and "mutilators of the flesh." James, Peter, and John agreed with Paul: no circumcision. No idols, and no circumcision. This pattern also points to the movement's origins in Jewish apocalyptic traditions: Eschatological Gentiles, at the end of days, were to join with Israel qua Gentiles and so to be included in the kingdom.(98) The first generation, improvising in their curious now-but-not-yet situation, incorporated Gentiles accordingly. Jesus would be back soon.
FAITH, HISTORY, AND METHOD
In conclusion, I advance three points: on the relation of faith and history, on the Christian study of Judaism, and on history and method.
First: What about history and faith, or history and theology, or Jesus and Christ? These categories still, after a century, stand in uneasy and confused relation. A Jesus securely anchored in his first-century Jewish apocalyptic context--working miracles, driving away demons, predicting the imminent end of the world--is an embarrassment. Is it sheer serendipity that so many of our reconstructions define away the offending awkwardness? Miracles without cures, time without end, resurrections without bodies. The kingdom does not come, it is present as an experience, a kinder, gentler society, mediated, indeed created, by Jesus. Then what is this kingdom language doing here anyway? As one critic has noted:
Jesus' idea of the Kingdom of God appears to be inextricably involved with a number of eschatological and apocalyptic views which theology has been accustomed to take over without critical examination. But now it is necessary to inquire whether it is really possible...to employ the idea of the Kingdom of God in the way that has recently seemed appropriate. The question arises whether "Kingdom" is not thereby divested of its essential traits and, finally, so modified that only the name still remains the same.
So Johannes Weiss, in 1892.(99)
One scholar reviewed refuted the possibility of an apocalyptic Jesus on the basis of how weird apocalyptists are now: "Most of us have heard street preachers...whose message is, 'The end is at hand, repent!' In my experience, people who strongly believe 'the end is near' sound very different from what I hear in the Jesus tradition."(100) This is not an argument. Another scholar defended the authenticity of Jesus' (fairly detailed) predictions of the fall of Jerusalem with an appeal to Josephus: Such prophecies of the Temple's destruction are "the necessary and predictable focal point of Jesus' whole prophetic ministry....Like Josephus, he claimed to see that destruction was inevitable."(101) Jesus died around 30. The Temple was destroyed in 70. Josephus, who was present at the siege, wrote his history in 77-78. Josephus' successful "prediction" cannot, thus, establish the likelihood of Jesus' having done the same thing.
And again: "If Jesus expected the end of the world, then he was mistaken."(102) But if he did, and if he was, so what? Do historians in search of Jesus of Nazareth really expect to turn up the Chalcedonian Christ? The inerrant incarnate Second Article of the Trinity, fully God and fully man without mixture or confusion, is the theological construct of a different period. If we want to find this figure in the first century, the historical Jesus is not whom we're looking for. History can be reconciled, variously, with faith, but never with anachronism.
My second concluding point concerns the Christian study of Judaism. In many of these studies of the historical Jesus, Judaism still serves as the dark backdrop rather than the living context of Jesus and the early church. Something bad had happened to Judaism after the exile, and by Jesus' time it had run completely down hill. Think of the descriptions we have been offered. First-century Judaism was economically and politically oppressive, exclusive, hierarchical, patriarchal, and money oriented. It focused excessively on ritual purity, racial purity, and nationalism, and it encouraged meanness to sick people.
Sanders' 1977 book Paul and Palestinian Judaism finally removed the Pharisees from the cross-hairs of Christian historical fantasy. But the replacement target of choice now seems to be the Temple and the biblically-mandated laws of purity. The indictment of Judaism consequently broadens from about 6,000 men (Josephus' estimate of the Pharisees' numbers) to include virtually every Jew in the first century, Jesus and his followers (to my mind, wrongly) excepted. And the old polemical opposition "law versus grace" has simply been replaced by an even more self-congratulatory antithesis, purity versus compassion.
This is not history, nor is it realistic description. It is caricature generated by abstractions, whereby a set of politically and ethically pleasant attributes define both Jesus (egalitarian, caring, other-directed, and so on) and, negatively, the majority of his Jewish contemporaries. Jesus thereby snaps nicely into sharp focus. This clarity, however, is purchased at the price of reality.
Whence this artificial and innocently insulting group portrait? In part, from those methods that specifically structure societies along lines of group or class antagonisms. These scholars then link their methodological enthusiasms to their own political commitments, most frequently an idealized (read "radical") vision of social equality. The whole package then fuses with two more traditional characteristics of New Testament historiography: the conviction of Jesus' singular moral excellence and a long cultural habit of "explaining" Christianity by having Judaism be its opposite. The result is that ancient Christian texts become statements of immediate contemporary political relevance and ancient Judaism becomes their contrasting background.
Thus, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female"--Paul's description in Galatians about oneness in Christ (3:28)--interpreted socially, is taken as a statement of Jesus' uniquely anti-ethnic, anti-hierarchical, anti-nationalistic political agenda.(103) This agenda has been generated by seeing the primary data through the lens of methods that, at the same time, unobtrusively block perception of other, messier, unobliging facts. Everything that does not fit the model drops silently away, as the method determines both the historical description and its explanation.(104) A perfect fit! History this tidy is a form of aesthetic delusion.
Consider Judaism as focused on racial purity, which in turn was expressed in the Temple regulations keeping Gentiles in the outer courts.(105) Did the priests really refuse members of the house of Adiabene entry into the Temple? Of course not. If converts enter, the operative category is not "race." Or consider the claim that Jews viewed wealth as a sign of God's favor. The ruling elites in Judea ensconced by Rome should have been more effective: these were chosen on the basis of wealth. In fact, they failed to rule, in no small part, according to Martin Goodman, because wealth did not command social esteem among Jews, among other reasons because the religious regulations mandating charity weakened the webbing of patronage.(106) Or consider the Temple as a center of virulent nationalism. How do the priests and "first men" act, according to Josephus, whenever an outbreak threatens? They try to quiet the crowds.(107) But in most of the studies we have considered, method has so controlled historical reconstruction that these nonconforming data simply disappear.
This brings me to my final point, on method and history. The methods of other fields refresh and challenge our work in our own, and I think this is all to the good. But we need to be sensitive to the utility of the method; and we can never let the method control the evidence. We--the historians--must control both.
If we relinquish control, or fail to exercise it, or so enjoy where the method is taking us that we fail to direct our own way, we risk wandering in a past exclusively of our own imagining, distant not only from our own time, but also from the reality of those ancient persons whose lives and worlds we seek to understand.