Nero's Minions

Nero’s Minions

NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE: VOLUME 5

SURESH A. SHENOY

Copyright © Suresh A. Shenoy 2015

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Cover Picture

Title: Nero’s Torches

Painter: Henryk Hector Siemiradzki (1843-1902)

Medium: Oil on canvas

Date: 1882

Displayed at: Sukiennice Museum, Krakow Old Town.

Dimensions: Modified for the cover

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

For

Lily Amélie, Oscar Alfonso and Quinn Robert,

The Flag Bearers of our Next Generation

The Gospel Code

‘We are Christ’s ambassadors; we know that God makes appeal through us… for the sake of Christ, to be reconciled to God.’

Paul of Tarsus, in II Cor. 5:20 (A.D. 54

‘The apostles received the Gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was God’s ambassador.’

Pope Clement, in First Epistle to the Corinthians, (A.D. 96)

‘…the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth which God wanted to be consigned to sacred writings for the sake of our salvation…’

Vatican II, Dei Verbum 11 (A.D. 1965)

‘To choose to write is to reject silence.’

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Paul’s Gentile Church

Chapter 1. The Coup by Paul’s Gentile Faction

Chapter 2. Paul’s Gentile Church

Chapter 3. A Gullible Church

Chapter 4. Paul’s Gospel

Chapter 5. Clement reaffirms Paul’s Gospel

Part 2: The Ironic Gospels

Chapter 6. Mark’s Irony takes Christ out of Christianity

Chapter 7. Christianity is fallible in Matthew’s Ironic Gospel

Chapter 8. Luke parodies the Gospel

Chapter 9. Didaché confirms the Synoptics

Chapter 10. John created Christ-Ontology

Part 3: The Gospels rejected Paul’s Church

Chapter 11. Who broke Paul’s Gospel Code?

Chapter 12. The Synoptics put Jesus of History back into Christianity

Chapter 13. Highlighting the Issues

Appendix: Authors never die

About the Author

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement I received from the readers of my books. Of my six publications, those frequently bought have given me an indication of how my research should proceed. I have followed with care what they taught me. This is particularly true of Catholica.com.au, its forum members and its editor Brian Coyne. Their critical reactions to my inputs have been immensely valuable. I thank them heartily for their contribution.

To cater for a particular audience has not been my principal concern. It was rather to clarify for myself what the true foundations of my Catholic Christian Faith were. The farther I went into the study of the four Gospels I became aware of the distinction between the fictitious Jesus the Christ or the ‘Christ of faith’ and Jesus of Nazareth or ‘Jesus of history’. The less convinced I became about the relevance of Jesus the Christ, the more my appreciation grew of the importance of the sayings and parables of Jesus of Nazareth.

The less the divinity of Christ persuaded me, the greater was my admiration for the human Jesus, the one who was like us, ‘the flesh of our flesh, the bone of our bones’. This is the direction my journey of discovery has taken. The fruits of this discovery I share with my readers, hoping that they too will find the inner peace we all seek in our spiritual life.

It has been a driving urge in me, almost with a sense of mission, to help Christians to assent to the doctrines with reason or to reject them with reason. Blind faith brings no credit either to God or to humankind.

The main insights in this study, as in my other publications, are mine. Having relied entirely on the evidence of the Greek texts themselves, I did not seek confirmation from scholars, by choice. At times, some scholars with seriously questionable opinions do get a mention in this study. However, they are of lesser significance. My bibliography includes important authors cited in my studies. I owe them heartfelt gratitude for guiding me in my intellectual journey.

I acknowledge my inspiration from the sainted Pope John XXIII, who had brought a shaft of light to the darkness into which the Catholic Christian community had descended over centuries. The shaft of light under Pope Francis has now become the bright sun and we all can see what the essence of the Christian Faith is. It is the goodness and the wisdom of Jesus of history that this great Pope is offering the world. My study has come at the right moment to confirm that the new life the Roman Church is experiencing today is indeed authentic.

To my family and friends I acknowledge my thanks for their understanding for the long periods of my reclusion. To Prakash and Kara I owe special thanks for the cover. I thank Pat Crudden for his keen interest in my research and encouragement to continue to do what I had undertaken almost a decade ago. I am much obliged to my clerical friends both Catholic and non-Catholic for their quiet support.

To Elvira, my beloved wife and confidante, I owe this and the other studies. She has been the sounding board for all the insights that came to me during odd hours. Her keen interest in our shared Faith and her reactions to the arguments I was developing in my study have been an inspiration to me. I am most grateful to Elvira.

Suresh A. Shenoy

July 2, 2015

Introduction

‘To choose to write is to reject silence,’ eloquently asserted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture at the closing of PEN World Voices Festival, New York, on 10 May 2015. Adichie is not entirely correct if you consider that probably more is written to obfuscate the truth and to promote silence through misinformation than to enlighten minds.

A decade ago, I had the urge to write The New Testament as Literature Series. I was motivated to challenge the silence that the Church had maintained for two millennia on the New Testament books. The silence was about the nature of these works and about what their authors really wanted to tell their readers. In The New Testament as Literature Series, I tackle the issues hidden or ignored by the Church by its silence.

Nero's Minionsis significant for my series. First, it marks the fifth and the definitive stage in my doctoral research into the Early Christian Studies in general and into the New Testament in particular, begun at the Australian Catholic University in the year 2000. Second, it necessarily raises a contentious issue of how damaging Paul of Tarsus had been to the early to the Church. Third, it explores why the Church had remained silent and continues to do so on the link between Nero and the Gentile Christians after the Great Fire at Rome in A.D. 64.

A Definitive Stage in Research

Let me explain the first significance for the series The New Testament as Literature. The principal area of research was the Early Christian Studies, focused mainly on the Judaean War of Flavius Josephus. There were no shortcuts to grasp the intricacies of the genre of classical history of Josephus. I went to Herodotus and his historian successors and studied their works to understand how they fitted the genre. The first thing I discovered was that they were creating a genre and evolving it at the same time through its use. It spread in a spectrum from one end as expository history to narrative history at the other with each classical historian helping to develop it.

The narrative history itself was first a blend of the fact, the fiction and the fictitious and ended with pure fiction. The genre kept evolving down from Herodotus through Thucydides, Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Titus Livy and Flavius Josephus, Tacitus and Lucian after him as discussed in The Flavian War: the Senecan Tragedy (Kindle@Amazon.com 2011).

Josephus, I was of the opinion, was being original in having structural irony of Genres Disjunction in his Judaean War. I saw rhetorical justification for it in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Quintilian considered that the use of structural irony in the Early Empire was a strategy for surviving the fatal consequences of Imperial Censorship. In the type of structural irony he used, Josephus wrote two texts in one work, namely, the history of the Jewish war in the foreground text and a five-Act tragedy in the Senecan mode in the background text. These were two different texts in two different genres with identifiable literary conventions peculiar to each genre.

Such a strategy enabled Josephus to praise his Flavian patrons as heroes in the foreground text and condemn them as villains in the background. I named it Genres Disjunction. It was a literary replication of his attitudinal disjunction towards the Flavians. While he appeared to be loyal to them, privately he condemned them as oppressors of the Judaic nation. My initial impression was that Josephus was unique in using Genres Disjunction in the Judaean War.

This conclusion called for a modification when I extended my research into the Gospel of Luke, which I suspected resembled the Judaean War. To my surprise, Luke’s two narratives, the Gospel and the Acts of Apostles followed the path chosen by Josephus for his Judaean War. The Gospel had the first part of the War narrative as its model, including the five-Act tragedy, except, Luke’s tragedy mode did not follow the Senecan mode instead it imitated the Euripidean. The Acts of Apostles closely resembled the second part of the War. That meant that Josephus was not the only one to have two texts in one work, a narrative history and a five-Act tragedy. Luke was with him too with the Gospel in the foreground text, the classical history on Josephan mode in the first background text and the classical five-Act tragedy on Euripidean mode in the second background text.

There came a further correction to my earlier doctoral conclusion. When I included Mark and Matthew’s Gospels into my research, I was convinced that it was not just Luke, but Mark, Matthew and John too had works with more than one text with their Gospels. Josephus thus became for me one of many following a practice common at the time as Quintilian had clearly acknowledged in his Institutio Oratoria.

I followed my research into the background texts of the Gospels to find that Mark had imitated Ab Urbe Condita of Titus Livy, Matthew had the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and John took Historíai of Herodotus as his model.

What surprised me most of all was that on reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with Many Faces I learnt what a monomyth was and what literary conventions constituted the genre. Campbell did not convince me with claims that he developed the genre from his wide acquaintance with world mythologies.

Homer’s Odyssey helped me to find in it the beginnings of the monomyth in the West with the three Movements: the Separation, the Transformation and the Return, with a few differences in the order of phases in the Third Movement of the Return of the Hero. Campbell had studied the Odyssey.

Mark, Matthew and Luke together showed me that the genre of the monomyth had developed before their time and well before Joseph Campbell. Together they used it as if writing in sequence with Matthew building on Mark, and Luke after them completing the whole structure of three movements and seventeen phases. The Divine Christ: Christian Myths, Mysteries and Magic (Kindle@Amazon.com 2012) is the published version of my research into the Monomyths and their role in the Gospels.

The situation as it presented itself to me was that Mark had three texts in one work, Matthew the same, and Luke had four and John had two. The issue that became pressing for me was whether the Genres Disjunction in the Gospels also reflected the attitudinal disjunction of the Evangelists as it did in the Judaean War of Josephus.

If that was true, then, they would indicate whom they criticized and for what specific reasons. Implied in this was the fear of censorship from the authorities, presumably of the Greco-Roman Church, as early as the first century. What in this Church so terrified the Evangelists that they resorted to the use of Genres Disjunction in their Gospels? What secrets lay in the historical context of the origin of the Gospels had to be far more serious than one could imagine. They demand that we identify the source of the fear of persecution within the early Church.

The Trouble with Paul

The present study is important for a second reason. It investigates into the known fact of Paul’s damage to the early Church. How damaging Paul was is an essential part of the narrative of the Acts of Apostles. A close reading of the Acts brings out what scripture scholars frequently gloss over, namely Paul’s insubordination against the Elders at Jerusalem, his relentless resentment towards them and the occasional outbursts of venom against the so-called ‘Judaizers’. These are innately linked reactions.

Paul’s personal epistles hold all the evidence we need to charge him with rebellion against the Church in Jerusalem. Despite his submission to James in A.D. 58, Paul allowed his resentment against the Elders at Jerusalem, specifically against James the brother of Jesus and Peter, to grow not merely into hatred but into an obsession for vengeance against them, if opportunity became available.

The Kiss of Death

The third significant point of the present study is that opportunity for vengeance came to Paul and his Gentile Christians as he completed his house arrest at Rome. Briefly, the argument is that Paul and his faction of Gentile Christians exploited the arson at Rome in A.D. 64 by informing on Peter and his faction of Judaic Christians. The massacre that ensued opened the way for Paul and his followers to supplant the Church led by Peter with their own known from then on as the Pauline Church.

The four Evangelists wrote their Gospels using verbal and situational irony in refutation of Paul to reject his legitimacy and reaffirming Peter as the head of the Church. To achieve this, they also used narrative analepsis in their Gospels, that is to say by projecting their current problems into the past they dramatized what Jesus would have done had he similar issues.

The present study goes beyond the words by analyzing what Paul had to say to his converts in his personal Epistles. In these personal Epistles, Paul revealed his seriously flawed personality to the extent of being psychotic. Clement confirmed Paul’s take on the Church and its beliefs. Clement, thus confirmed what it meant to be a follower of Paul and to be the head of the Pauline Church.

From Paul’s and Clement’s Epistles this study goes into how the four Gospels employ verbal and situational irony to reject Paul and the early Church. At this point, this study subsumes the conclusions of The Four Fabulists: the Literary Genres of the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles (Kindle@Amazon.com 2011) and The Divine Christ: Christian Myths, Mysteries and Magic (Kindle@Amazon.com 2012). The Didaché supports the conclusions drawn from the Synoptics and the rejection of Paul and the Pauline Church.

Nero's Minions is in three parts.

Part 1 is about Paul’s Church. In Chapter 1, I argue chronologically from events narrated in the Acts of Apostles by Luke that Paul and the Gentile Christians in association with Hellenic Jewish Christian faction resented the authority of James and Peter so much that they wanted to be free of their hold. The freeing of Paul from the house arrest A.D. 62, the murder of James at Jerusalem in A.D. 63 and the Great Fire at Rome in A.D. 64 enabled Paul and his factions to secure the freedom from the Judaic faction. The year of the Great Fire marks the founding of the Pauline Church.

Chapter 2 on Paul’s Gentile Church takes up root cause of the problems of Paul’s role as the founder of his version of Christianity. It was his vision of Fundamentalism enforced on his converts in Thessalonica, Corinth and Galatia.

Chapter 3 on the Gullible Church analyses Paul’s tendency to lie. The inability of his converts to recognize and censure his untruthfulness makes them gullible.

Chapter 4 studies his ‘first Gospel’ that he preached to his three churches through his five personal Epistles. In this so-called ‘Gospel’, the Evangelists would have discovered direct evidence necessary to subvert Paul’s preaching in their own Gospels.

Chapter 5 gives a close reading and analysis of the First Epistle to the Corinthians by a close follower of Paul, Pope Clement of Rome. Both where Clement repeated his mentor and where he ignored him, the lasting influence of Paul on the early Church and on Clement was undeniable.

Part 2 is an exposé of what the Ironic Gospels rejected of the teachings of Paul and the early Church. Chapter 6 on how Mark’s Irony takes Christ out of Christianity explains the original use of irony in the foreground text as intentional. He was the first to distinguish Jesus of history from Christ of faith. He went further in pointing out that the former was an actual person, while the latter was a literary construct. Mark pioneered the use of structural irony demonstrated how far reaching the effects of irony were both on the Gospel as a literary work and on its religious content. The significance of genres disjunction to this Gospel increased exponentially when Mark introduced the monomyth into the Synoptic Gospels. Mark’s contribution to the Gospel genre is truly exceptional.

Chapter 7 on the Gospel of Matthew, riddled with Roman Irony, helps to delve into the mind of Matthew, and follow with care how this Evangelist went about his ironic task of undermining the Davidic descent of Jesus Christ, his human parents, John the precursor and above all the twelve disciples.

The extent and the depth of the criticism of the disciples pointed to Matthew’s actual target. It turned out to be the misbehaving office-bearers of the Greco-Roman Church claiming to be the successors of the Apostles who revealed themselves as unintelligent, greedy for power and untrustworthy.

Matthew, thus, supported the Corinthian rebels who were later attacked in the Epistle of Clement, by pointing out how unworthy the Apostles were of their office and by implication how far worse their successors Bishops and Deacons, the current office-bearers.

Matthew confirmed his negative perception of Jesus as the Christ, by mythologizing his infancy, public life and passion, including his resurrection and his universal commission at the ascension.

Chapter 8 on Luke’s many-layered Gospel explains how this Evangelist continued to employ irony in the foreground text by parodying the Gospel content and its presentation. His extensive and rich use of three texts of the classical history after the Judaean War, the five-Act tragedy after Euripides and the triple monomyths was his unique contribution.

In contrast to Matthew’s indirection, Luke was more forthcoming in targeting the ‘original eye witnesses and the guardians of the word’ for their tendency to fictionalize whatever they attributed to Jesus the Christ.

Chapter 9 is an analysis of Didaché, a rare document of the first century. It supports the Synoptics overall despite its theological inconsistencies. It is the first document to approve of democratic processes in the governance of the Church. It is also the forerunner of the concept of the People of God in conflict with the hierarchic Church.

Chapter 10 is an analysis of John’s own Christ-Ontology and its impact on the Fourth Gospel. John created a new metaphysics tailored to suit the theory of the Incarnation. He undermined literalism in the reading of Scriptures through his Inverted Lexical Metaphor used frequently in his narrative. He left it to the readers to discover that the Christ-Ontology had no more solid foundation than a logical fallacy of a contradiction in terms. Being a well-educated Hellenic scholar, John could only have intended to bring down his grandiloquent Gospel like a sand castle at the edge of the tidal waters.

Finally, Part 3 deals with the Gospels as they reject Paul’s Church. Chapter 11 answers the question, ‘Who broke Paul’s Gospel Code?’ For those who have followed my New Testament Series 1-4, it will come as no surprise that each of the four Evangelists in their own way individually and together helped to break the Gospel Code. It is not the Word of God, as we learn early to believe, handed down by the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops and Deacons, containing the salvific truth In the final analysis, they are merely types of classical history with some facts and more fiction. They are at best a collection of monomyths.

Chapter 12 discusses how the Synoptics put Jesus of history back into Christianity. The Synoptics preserve the values of Jesus of Nazareth on every level of human experience, namely, the religious, the moral, the social, the legal and the material. In these values is the true face of Christianity. The Way of Jesus is what the Synoptics salvage from the wreck caused by Paul and his Gentile faction.

Chapter 13 highlights the issues discussed in the study in the form of a study guide.

The Appendix on Authors never die supports the literary critical principle that the authors embed their meanings in the text. Such meanings are accessible to readers only through the conventions of the genres in which the authors composed their works.

Select Bibliography lists works I have referred to in the study and consulted over the years.

My ideal readers are those who have followed the journey from its beginnings in The Four Fabulists: the Literary Genres of the Gospels and the Acts of Apostles to the present. They shall be thrilled with surprises that come from discoveries. They shall be more open-minded and not be hemmed in by the claims of the teaching authority of the Church that relentlessly undermine the integrity of the texts claiming to be the revealed ‘word of God’.

Nero's Minions is an exciting study accessible to all readers who