Professional Documents
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Templo? Para ou contra construes tradicionais de pureza?), A Galileia histrica (urbanizada e helenizada? Temple-
oriented ou cosmopolita? Com uma crosta fina dos ricos explorando Massas imensas de desamparados, ou com uma
mistura saudvel de agricultura e marketing dentro de uma cultura de aldeia geralmente bem alimentada?), Eo Templo
histrico (objeto de ressentimento camponesa, preservada das elites sacerdotais, viveiro de nacionalismo, Aristocracia
quisling?) 3 .
Seis anos depois de Yale ter trazido De Jesus a Cristo , fui a Jerusalm para
1994-1995 para ensinar no departamento de religio da Universidade
Hebraica. Eu estava bem em um novo projeto sobre Agostinho e Judasmo; Eu
tinha finalmente conseguido, ento eu pensei, para me libertar
intelectualmente do tar beb da bolsa de estudos de Jesus. Dois
acontecimentos conspiraram para provar que estava errado. Primeiro, recebi
um convite para apresentar um discurso plenrio sobre o trabalho atual sobre o
Jesus histrico na reunio anual da Academia Americana de Religio /
Sociedade de Literatura Bblica. Isso me mergulhou em um intenso perodo de
leitura e releitura dos trabalhos de meus colegas que apareceram desde que eu
tinha escrito o meu. Minha concentrao exclusiva permitiu-me ver padres em
sua bolsa de estudos que, por sua vez, me fez repensar o meu
prprio. Segundo, Meu amigo Oded Irshai do Departamento de Histria Judaica
da Universidade Hebraica se ofereceu para me levar em uma caminhada pela
Jerusalm de Herodes. Ele pode ter pensado nisso como uma oferta nica, mas
no protestou contra a minha interpretao como um convite permanente. No
importava onde no antigo bairro judeu comessemos, sempre terminvamos
nas escavaes do lado sul, olhando para as enormes pedras que contornavam
o monte onde uma vez que o Segundo Templo se erguera. A experincia fsica
de estar naquele lugar me fez repensar meu trabalho anterior, tambm. Ns
sempre terminvamos nas escavaes do lado sul, olhando para as pedras
enormes que contornavam o monte onde uma vez que o Segundo Templo tinha
estado. A experincia fsica de estar naquele lugar me fez repensar meu
trabalho anterior, tambm. Ns sempre terminvamos nas escavaes do lado
sul, olhando para as pedras enormes que contornavam o monte onde uma vez
que o Segundo Templo tinha estado. A experincia fsica de estar naquele lugar
me fez repensar meu trabalho anterior, tambm.
O resultado final, talvez, era inevitvel: eu tambm acrescentei mais um
livro pilha crescente sobre o Jesus histrico. Trabalhando em Jesus de
Nazar, Rei dos Judeus (Knopf, 1999) criou para mim um promontrio crtico a
partir do qual eu poderia pesquisar erudio recente, criticar a minha prpria, e
ver de novo os problemas de evidncia e argumento que moldam o
campo. Conseqentemente, eu mudei de idia em vrias questes desde a
publicao de Jesus a Cristo. Quando Yale decidiu reimprimir o livro, meu editor
Chuck Grench generosamente me ofereceu a chance de escrever uma nova
introduo, explicando o que eu penso agora e por qu. O que se segue aqui,
ento, so meus pensamentos sobre o campo como eu vejo agora, bem como o
meu pentimento .
II.
exemplo, ou pelas leis da pureza, ou por tradies alfabticas alfabetizadas quando a sua - a "pequena" tradio - eram
"O historiador encontra a lacuna entre ele e os outros em seu mais afiado e
intransigente", observou Peter Brown. "Os mortos so irredutveis." 9 Os povos
antigos em geral, os judeus antigos em particular, viviam em um mundo
radicalmente diferente do nosso, um mundo onde a lepra ea morte se
manchavam, onde as cinzas e as guas se purificavam e onde se aproximava
do altar de Deus com purificaes, oferendas de sangue , E temor. Para
abord-los, precisamos re-imaginar seu universo, no projetar nossas
categorias de significado para eles. O passado que construmos a partir de
nossas teorias acessvel e significativo para ns, porque nosso mundo a
fonte dos critrios interpretativos. Quando nos baseamos na teoria, corremos o
risco de obscurecer ao invs de interpretar o passado de nossos antigos
sditos. Melhor, ento, Para tentar ouvir o que eles pareciam pensar que era
importante, para reconhecer como diferente de ns que eram, do que
reconfigur-los para caber nossas categorias de significado. O medo da falsa
familiaridade o incio da sabedoria histrica.
sobre moedas sem imagem um caso de estudiosos do Novo Testamento, desconhecido com os bens imobilirios do
Judasmo do Segundo Templo, mas muito familiar com os Dez Mandamentos, imaginando o que deveria ter sido o caso
11 .
Alm disso, desde 1988 eu tenho aprendido mais sobre o Templo, tanto a
partir de estudar o Judasmo EP Sanders : Prtica e Crena , e do meu tempo
em Israel. Sanders fornece medies aproximadas que do uma idia do
tamanho do lugar: a circunferncia total da parede mais externa correu para
quase 9 / 10ths de uma milha; Doze campos de futebol, incluindo stands,
podiam ser encaixados; Quando necessrio (como durante as festas de
peregrinao, especialmente a Pscoa) poderia acomodar at 400.000 fiis. 13
Esses dois fatos anmalos - Jesus foi crucificado; Aqueles mais prximos a
ele foram deixados sozinhos - me obrigou a reavaliar as tradies preservadas
no cnon do Novo Testamento e os vrios retratos de Jesus oferecidos pela
erudio atual. O tipo de cronologia implcita no Evangelho de Joo -
atualmente fora de favor na maioria das reconstrues acadmicas - emergiu
(para minha surpresa) como a chave para resolver o dilema apresentado pelos
fatos da execuo de Jesus e a sobrevivncia de seus discpulos. Apenas vrias
viagens a Jerusalm, como Joo retrata, poderia explicar como Pilatos sabia
com tanta certeza que Jesus era politicamente inofensivo: assim os discpulos
sobreviveram. E somente o que a multido de peregrinos pensava sobre Jesus -
no o que Jesus pensava sobre si mesmo - pode explicar o uso de Pilatos da
crucificao.
Indubitavelmente tal histria circulou sobre Jesus: temos isso atestado em
Marcos e Joo 15
- embora, significativamente, no em Paulo. 16
Mas por que a
histria teria comeado, se Jesus no tivesse feito tal ato? Ausente evidncia,
as especulaes abundam: Eu ofereo o meu, brevemente, aqui. Inclino-me
agora a ver a histria da ao de Jesus no Templo como uma tradio ps-70,
que aproveitou o choque da destruio do Templo de tal forma que reforou a
crena crist. Jesus tinha desaprovado o Templo de qualquer maneira (Mc
11); Ele previu sua destruio (Mc 13); O que importa a ressurreio (Jo
2); Sua destruio significa que o Reino, juntamente com o retorno de Jesus,
est prximo. Quando vem o Templo destrudo, o Jesus de Marcos confia a
sua comunidade,
III.
A misso "livre de leis" para os gentios tem sido vista no estudo do Novo
Testamento como a contribuio particular e mesmo revolucionria de Pau para
o movimento inicial. Alguns estudiosos atribuem a fonte ltima da idia aos
"helenistas", aqueles judeus de fala grega sombrios residentes em Jerusalm,
representados por Estvo, cuja histria preenche a abertura de Atos. Outros
vem a recepo dos gentios ao "povo de Deus" sem a exigncia da circunciso
e da observncia da Torah (em suma, a converso ao judasmo) como a
extenso implcita mas lgica da prpria mensagem de Jesus (mesmo quando
ele apresentado citando Levtico! ) Para amar o prximo: vizinhos amorosos,
at inimigos, devem significar amar tambm os gentios.
IV.
Como o campo da pesquisa histrica de Jesus se desenvolver no futuro
difcil de dizer. Apenas quando todas as opes interpretativas razoveis (e at
mesmo algumas razoveis) parecem esgotadas, outro livro aparece. Ser que
todo esse trabalho resultar em algum ganho lquido, algum novo insight,
alguma compreenso melhorada? Eu no sei, mas espero que sim,
particularmente no que diz respeito a duas questes relacionadas: o estudo
cristo do judasmo ea relao da teologia com a histria.
9. Brown alude aqui ao quarto / quinto sculos, mas o que ele diz igualmente
valioso para o trabalho em qualquer perodo histrico. O restante desta
passagem retribui a ateno. Brown continua: "Os homens e as mulheres do
Imprio Romano tardio viveram suas vidas a seu modo, deixaram-nos uma
prova ntida disso, sem terem pensado em nossas delicadas sensibilidades, sem
se preocuparem por um momento se suas esperanas E os medos eram
contrrios ao senso comum dos homens do sculo 20. Em resumo, salvos pelo
passar de mil e quinhentos anos da necessidade de nos tranquilizar, podiam
aparecer exatamente como eram - to estranhos quanto ns, Como
problemtico, como de difcil acesso.Explorar essas pessoas com simpatia, com
perspiccia treinada, e com uma grande medida de astcia comum, apreciar
um dos maiores [scil. Agostinho] disse: "Grande profundum est ipse
homo . . . O homem um profundo vasto. . . Os cabelos em sua cabea so
mais facilmente numerados do que seus sentimentos, e os movimentos de seu
corao "," Religio e Sociedade na Era de Santo Agostinho ", p.206 .
10. Veja a discusso de Peter Richardson e a reviso dos dados em "Por que
girar as tabelas? Protesto de Jesus nas Precintas do Templo", Sociedade de
Literatura Bblica Seminrio Papers (1992) 507-23. Richardson argumenta que
a imagem de Melkart ofendeu a Jesus.
13. Sanders, Judasmo , pp. 47-145. Ver esp. Sua carta que compara as
medidas do templo com a catedral de Salisbria eo templo Emanuel em New
York, p. 67.
18. Veja a minha discusso de Borg, Crossan e Wright sobre estas questes em
"What You See is What You Get", pp. 83f., 86-91, 94-97.
By Paula Fredriksen
William Goodwin Aurelio
Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture
Boston University School of Theology
But the people who read my book, who took my classes or wrote me letters
or invited me to speak, would not let me stay off the hook. The sweep of
subsequent Christian tradition, important as it was for understanding the shape
of the New Testament evidence, was finally not as important to them as the
historical figure of Jesus himself. Time and again in the classroom; before
church or synagogue groups of all different denominations; together with
communities engaged in interfaith dialogue; in front of nonspecialist audiences
either directly or via the television camera I was driven back onto the effort
to construct an historically coherent image of the figure whose Jewish life and
Roman death stand at the source of Christianity.
Six years after Yale brought out From Jesus to Christ, I went to Jerusalem
for 1994-1995 to teach in the religion department at the Hebrew University. I
was well into a new project on Augustine and Judaism; I had finally managed,
so I thought, to free myself intellectually from the tar baby of Jesus
scholarship. Two events then conspired to prove me wrong. First, I received an
invitation to deliver a plenary address on current work on the historical Jesus at
the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion/ Society of Biblical
Literature. This plunged me into an intensive spell of reading and rereading the
works of my colleagues that had appeared since I had written mine. My
exclusive concentration allowed me to see patterns in their scholarship that, in
turn, had me rethinking my own. Second, my friend Oded Irshai of the Hebrew
Universitys Department of Jewish History volunteered to take me on a walk
through Herods Jerusalem. He may have meant it as a one-time offer, but did
not protest my interpreting it as a standing invitation. No matter where in the
old Jewish Quarter wed start off from, we would always end up at the south-
side excavations, looking up at the massive stones circumventing the mount
where once the Second Temple had stood. The physical experience of standing
in that place got me rethinking my earlier work, too.
The end result, perhaps, was inevitable: I too have added yet one more book
to the growing pile on the historical Jesus. Working on Jesus of Nazareth, King
of the Jews (Knopf, 1999) created for me a critical promontory from which I
could survey recent scholarship, critique my own, and see afresh the problems
of evidence and argument that shape the field. Consequently, I have changed
my mind on several issues since publishing From Jesus to Christ. When Yale
decided to reprint the book, my editor Chuck Grench generously offered me the
chance to write a new introduction, explaining what I now think and why. What
follows here, then, are my thoughts on the field as I now see it, as well as
my pentimento.
II.
Who wrote the Gospels, Jews or Gentiles? No one knows, though scholars,
on the basis of internal evidence, will venture various "ethnic" identifications.
Though I was uncertain, in From Jesus to Christ I worked with an operating
assumption that at least Mark and Luke were Gentiles. The author of Matthew is
universally regarded as Jewish; for the last thirty or so years, especially after
the influential work of Louis Martyn4, so also the author of John. Arguments for
Luke can go either way, and second-century ecclesiastical tradition holds that
the author was a gentile companion of Pauls. The authors fluency with the
Septuagint, however, combined with the probable date of composition (late first
century) incline me now to suppose that he, too, was a Jew: The Bible was a
bulky collection of books scrolls, actually that would not have been
circulating or easily accessible outside of a synagogue context in this early
period.
What about Mark? Again, any answer is speculative. Ancient church tradition
identifies the author as a Gentile, a companion of Peters in Rome. Many
modern scholars likewise identify him as Gentile: he demonstrates little of the
familiarity with Jewish traditions and scriptures that Luke and Matthew so
conspicuously display, nor does he evince close (if hostile) relations with local
synagogue communities in the way that John does. On this I have changed my
mind: I had said that Mark was a Gentile; I now think that he, too, was a Jew.
If Mark were a Jew, one colleague has observed to me, he was an extremely
ignorant one. True. Ignorance of course is no respecter of persons or ethnic
groups, and not everyone in the early movement could have Pauls education.
But the very early date of the Gospels composition (some time, I still think,
shortly post-70), its scriptural underpinnings (evident especially in the Passion
narrative), and the stimulus to compose given (again, I still think) by the
Temples recent destruction all incline me to suspect that its author, too, was
Jewish.
Why does it matter? In part, because the implied social and religious location
of the author gives us a jumping-off point for speculations about his community
-- whether it, too, were Jewish, Gentile, or some mix and thus for
speculations on what they might have understood when hearing the Gospel.
And such considerations can help when evaluating recent arguments made by
some scholars that Jesus rejected and taught against the biblical laws of purity.
A Jewish audience, for example, would have a more concrete understanding of
Marks Jesus command to the cured leper to "go, show yourself to the priest,
and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded" (Mk 1:44): the order
would evoke for them the rituals of purification prescribed in Leviticus 145, and
would also conjure the (now destroyed) Temple in Jerusalem, where such
offerings had been made.
What was Jesus Galilee like? On this point current interpretive debate roars,
not least of all because of the important role played by social theory,
economics, and comparative methods in interpreting the various data, literary
and archaeological. The hope of such an approach is that, by using theory, we
can wring more information from our data. If we know from studies of
millenarianism in other cultures, for example, that perceived economic
deprivation contributes to the mentality of the movement, we could have an
interpretive grid on which to map the social realities of ancient Galilee. On this
view, Jesus' audience, to the degree that they received his message of the
impending Kingdom, would have been or felt themselves to be economically or
socially deprived, too; hence his particular appeal to the disenfranchised the
sinner, the toll collector, the prostitute, and the poor. Or, if aristocratic empires
run on the systematic and ruthless exploitation of their peasants, and the
Roman Empire had exactly this sort of class structure, then peasants within the
Empire all peasants, not just Jewish ones must have been exploited too. In
this reconstruction, Jesus when speaking to (Galilean) peasants would address
not just the poor, but the powerless and destitute. Or, if the texts and
institutions of a Great Tradition in Jesus' culture and period, literacy,
sacrifices, knowledge of Torah, or access to the Temple-- rest with an
identifiable elite (aristocratic priests, scribes and Pharisees), those
disempowered by this structure will combat their oppression with subversive
counter-traditions that are naturally not as visible in our data, because texts
and Temple are remnants from the elites. On this construction, Jesus as
peasant teacher would have spoken and acted in ways subversive of the Great
Tradition's institutions. And his followers would have responded because they,
too, felt alienated -- by the Temple, for example, or the laws of purity, or by
literate scribal traditions when their own -- the "little" tradition -- were popular
and oral, and so on7.
The method we use, in other words, by organizing our sparse data according
to its criteria, holds out the promise of helping us perceive motives or meanings
or social dynamics that are disguised, only implied, or perhaps otherwise
invisible in the record once our positive evidence runs out. The method's
application serves to provides a 'plot' by which we can organize our data into a
story: the attractions of Jesus' message, or the reasons for his execution, can
accordingly be explained by appeal to the method's criteria of meaning class
antagonism, hostility between a subversive peasant teacher and the
representatives of the Great Tradition (priests, Pharisees), and so on. Theory-
informed history has explanatory elegance.
The danger, of course, is that, absent positive evidence, we have little way
to test the conclusions the method offers us. If theory organizes data to begin
with, arguments for its validation can easily start running in circles. Before
bringing on Melanesian cargo-cults or nineteenth-century Sicilian bandits, then,
we need first to have a long hard look at Josephus, whose writings provide us
with descriptions of the Galilee both political and social. And, as E.P. Sanders
has tirelessly pointed out, what Josephus does not say matters as much as
what he does8. The Galilee in Jesus lifetime was ruled by Antipas, one of
Herods sons. Unlike his brother Archelaus to the south, Antipas enjoyed a long
and quiet reign from 4 BCE to 39 CE virtually the whole period of Jesus life.
Jews, not Romans, ran the Galilee. Had the people been near starvation,
oppressed by outrageous taxes, or had Antipas flagrantly violated Jewish Law,
we would hear the rumble in Josephus. But he says nothing, whether about
riots, religious antagonisms or discontent rising to active unrest. No Roman
troops were called in from Syria to protect their client Antipas from turmoil at
home. Josephus speaks rather of the fertility of the Galilee and of its numerous
prosperous villages(BJ 3.43).
Without the lens of imported interdisciplinary methods, then, its hard to see
economic deprivation and political oppression as an operative context for Jesus
mission. A Roman presence was virtually non-existent in Jesus Galilee, which
was administered by a Jewish ruler. And while, then as now, nobody much likes
paying taxes, we have no evidence of Galileans feeling crushed under a heavy
tax burden.
"The historian meets the gap between himself and others at its most sharp
and uncompromising," Peter Brown has observed. "The dead are
irreducible."9 Ancient people in general, ancient Jews in particular, lived in a
world radically different from our own, a world where leprosy and death defiled,
where ashes and water made clean, and where one drew near the altar of God
with purifications, blood offerings, and awe. To approach them, we need to
reimagine their universe, not project our categories of meaning onto them. The
past we construct from our theories is accessible and meaningful to us, because
our world is the source of the interpretive criteria. When drawing on theory, we
run the risk of obscuring rather than interpreting the past of our ancient
subjects. Better, then, to try to hear what they seemed to think was important,
to acknowledge how different from us they were, than to reconfigure them to fit
our categories of meaning. The fear of false familiarity is the beginning of
historical wisdom.
I had held these views myself, and present them in From Jesus to Christ (pp.
111-122, 129). While in Jerusalem, however, my confidence in this
reconstruction began seriously to erode. The first reason was from evidence
internal to New Testament texts. Paul, who knew at least several of the original
disciples of Jesus and who himself speaks with authority on coming Kingdom
and thus Christs return, never mentions such a prophecy at all when he
reviews the signs of the End. How could he not have known it? If he had, how
could he not have used it?
Further, since 1988 I have learned more about the Temple, both from
studying E.P. Sanders Judaism: Practice and Belief, and from my time in Israel.
Sanders provides approximate measurements that give a sense of the sheer
size of the place: the total circumference of the outermost wall ran to almost
9/10ths of a mile; twelve soccer fields, including stands, could be fit in; when
necessary (as during the pilgrimage festivals, especially Passover) it could
accommodate as many as 400,000 worshipers.13
I have trouble visualizing space from numbers. It was not until I started
walking around the Temple Mount that I began to understand how huge the
Temple area specifically its outermost court, around the perimeter of which,
beneath the protection from sun or storm offered by the stoa or the Royal
Portico, "those who sold" could be found must have been. Its very size
shrank the significance of Jesus putative action, and prompted the question: If
Jesus had made such a gesture, how many would have seen it? Those in his
retinue and those standing immediately around him. But how many, in the
congestion and confusion of that holiday crowd, could have seen what was
happening even, say, twenty feet away? Fifty feet? The effect of Jesus' gesture
at eye-level would have been muffled, swallowed up by the sheer press of
pilgrims. How worried, then, need the priests have been?
Finally, my confidence in the historicity of the scene in the Temple and its
role in bringing Jesus to his death steadily diminished as I contemplated two of
the few virtually indisputable facts that we have from the earliest movement.
The first concerns his death. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. His manner of
death implies a context. Crucifixion was a mode of execution that Rome
reserved particularly for political insurrectionists. If Jesus died on a cross, then
he died in a situation where Pilate was concerned about the effect that Jesus
and his message might have had on the crowds massed in Jerusalem that
Passover. But this inference runs head-on into a second, equally undisputed
fact about the earliest Christian movement: though Jesus died as an
insurrectionist, none of his followers did.14
These two anomalous facts Jesus was crucified; those closest to him were
left alone compelled me to reevaluate both the traditions preserved in the
New Testament canon and the various portraits of Jesus offered by current
scholarship. The sort of chronology implied in the Gospel of John currently
out of favor in most academic reconstructions emerged (to my surprise) as
the key to resolving the dilemma posed by the facts of Jesus execution and his
disciples survival. Only multiple trips to Jerusalem, such as John portrays,
could explain how Pilate knew with such certainty that Jesus was politically
harmless: so the disciples survived. And only what the pilgrim crowd thought
about Jesus not what Jesus thought about himself can explain Pilates use
of crucifixion. The necessary dependence on the gesture at the Temple to
explain Jesus death, hardwired into any reconstruction that keeps to the
outlines of Marks presentation of Jesus mission, diminished accordingly.
III.
Much of what I said in From Jesus to Christ I still hold: the connectedness of
the movement throughout its different phases, from Jesus through Paul to the
evangelists; the way that Paul and the different evangelists deal with the delay
of the Kingdom; the link Mark forges between the Second Coming and the
destruction of the Temple. If I had to name what I think was its most important
contribution to the debates about Jesus and earliest Christianity, I would single
out my reconstruction of the mission in the Diaspora, and why it
accommodated Gentiles from the beginning without requiring their conversion
to Judaism.
The "Law-free" mission to the Gentiles has long been viewed in New
Testament scholarship as the particular, even revolutionary contribution of Pau
to the early movement. Some scholars attribute the ideas ultimate source to
the "Hellenists," those shadowy Greek-speaking Jews resident in Jerusalem,
represented by Stephen, whose story fills the opening of Acts. Others see the
Gentiles reception into "the people of God" without the requirement of
circumcision and Torah-observance (in brief, conversion to Judaism) as the
implicit but logical extension of Jesus own message (even where hes
presented as quoting Leviticus!) to love the neighbor: Loving neighbors, even
enemies, must mean loving Gentiles too.
But the roots of the first-century Law-free mission are not Christian, nor
even Jewish-Christian. They are specifically Jewish. They grew in the soil of
apocalyptic eschatology. The belief that, at the End of Days when God revealed
himself in glory, Gentiles would repudiate their idols and as Gentiles (that is,
without converting to Judaism) acknowledge and worship the true God together
with Israel is native to ancient Judaism itself. This theme of the inclusion of
Gentiles in Gods Kingdom a theme sounded in the classical prophets,
various pseudepigrapha, the New Testament evidence, and later synagogue
prayer (the Alenu) coheres closely with the other data attesting to the
apocalyptic commitments of the first Christian generation. Inclusion, not
conversion. The first Christians realized socially what other Jews (if they
thought about the question at all) may have only anticipated sometime off in an
unknown future, because Christians believed that they lived already in an
eschatological hour, in a brief final caesura is history between Christs
resurrection and his return, when he would establish the Kingdom of his father.
Some members of the movement, such as Paul, took the inclusion of Gentiles in
the ekklesia as their mandate. Christian Gentiles are incorporated not because
they are like "righteous Gentiles" a theoretical but quotidian rabbinic
category for Gentiles who do not worship idols but because they are, within
these earliest, spirit-filled communities, eschatological Gentiles, Gentiles who
have repudiated their native traditions (or who had better! See Pauls remarks,
1 Cor 5:11) because they have been adopted into Gods people through his Son
(e.g., Rom 8, esp. v. 15).17
Gentiles qua Gentiles are included in the earliest movement, from the time it
began encountering interested Gentiles, because the earliest movement was
Jewish and apocalyptic. The Bible thinks big it begins Genesis with the
creation of the universe, and gets to the calling of Abraham only in Genesis 12
and apocalyptic thought tends to make biblical Big Thoughts bigger. More
than Israel would be redeemed: So would the Gentiles. So too would the dead,
even those who, despite Moses, had stayed in Egypt; even those who were lost
in Assyria (Isaiah 27:12-13). If God could and would redeem Israel from exile,
he could likewise redeem the Gentiles from their idolatry. After all, they were
his children too. "Is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the
nations also? Yes, of the nations also, since God is one" (Rom 3:29-30) the
fundamental principle of Torah (cf. 3:31). The ultimate redemption of the
nations along with Israel is native to this stratum of Jewish religious thinking. It
is, as Paul urges, simply the application to salvation history of the foundational
principle of the Shma.
IV.
How the field of historical Jesus research will develop in the future is hard to
say. Just when all the reasonable (and even some unreasonable) interpretive
options seem exhausted, another book comes along. Will all this work result in
some net gain, some new insight, some improved understanding? I dont know,
but I hope so, particularly with regard to two related issues: the Christian study
of Judaism, and the relation of theology to history.
To the first point first. A notable characteristic of the current phase of the
quest of the historical Jesus is the degree to which it draws upon the
accomplishments in history, historiography and archaeology that have marked
the past half-century of Jewish Studies. The more we know about Second
Temple Judaism, the more we know, if not about Jesus directly, then about his
native religious context. No serious work on Jesus places him outside that
context. And yet that continues to be the effect of many scholarly descriptions
of the Judaism of Jesus time. In too many "reconstructions," Judaism still
functions as Jesus contrasting backdrop; his contemporaries, as some sort of
moral inverse of Jesus himself. Thus: Jesus was egalitarian; his contemporaries
affirmed hierarchy. Jesus was kind to women, or the poor, or the ill; his
contemporaries scorned them. Jesus focused on ethics; they, on ritual. He
preached and lived a politics of compassion; they practiced and enforced a
politics of purity. Jesus taught a love of neighbor that extended naturally across
ethnic or racial or national boundaries; they were consumed with nationalism
and a concern for racial purity. No wonder he taught against them; no wonder
they wanted him dead.
Some scholars will soften the effect of such descriptions of Jesus Jewish
contemporaries by insisting that they intend no value judgment by them. One
group was simply hierarchical, oppressive, patriarchal, exclusionary and sexist,
the other, egalitarian, inclusive and compassionate: Nothing pejorative
intended! Or they will insist that Jesus criticized these contemporaries as an
insider, a committed Jew: to see him as anti-Jewish when such criticism is
intra-Jewish misconstrues his situation. By extension, these "reconstructions" of
Jesus contemporaries are not anti-Jewish, either: they simply clarify what
Jesus meant to say.18
What then might we see? If we look for Jesus, we will see the human being
that even the stilted metaphysics of ancient high theology insisted had to be
there. The attempt calls for a certain kind of religious courage, because it
means decoupling history from theology, and allowing each with integrity to do
their respective work. History requires the acknowledgment of difference and
the priority of ancient context. This means that, if we start in search of the
historical Jesus of Nazareth, then the person we seek will stand with his back to
us, his face toward the faces of his own generation. They, not we, were his
concern, the audience for his message. He was obliged to be intelligible not to
us, but to them.
1.Jesus the Shaman: Stevan L. Davies, Jesus the Healer (1995); Jesus the
Cynic: Gerald F. Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical
Preachers in First-Century Tradition (1988), also Cynics and Christian
Origins (1992); Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian
Origins (1988); Jesus the radical peasant reformer, especially John Dominic
Crossan, The Historical Jesus (1991) and Jesus: A Revolutionary
Biography (1994); Jesus the anti-Temple, anti-purity agitator, Marcus
Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (1994); specifically as an alienated
Galilean regionalist and social bandit, Richard Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of
Violence (1987), and, for Jesus context, Galilee: History, Politics,
People (1995); Jesus as champion of a new post-Torah anti-nationalist
Judaism, N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996).
3. Two recent examinations of John the Baptist are by Joan Taylor, The
Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (1997) and John
Meier in Marginal Jew, vol. 2, pp.19-233. On Jesus Galilee:
Horsley, Galilee; Sean Freyne, Galilee from Alexander the Great to
Hadrian (1980) and Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels (1988); and Eric Meyers,
"Jesus in his Galilean Context," Archaeology and the Galilee, ed. Douglas R.
Edwards and C. Thomas McCollough (1997). The Temple looms large in the
various reconstructions of Crossan, Borg, Wright, because all three define
Jesus mission as anti-Temple. For an historical consideration of the Temple
within late Second Temple Judaism, Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63
BCE - 66 CE (1992).
4. History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (1968); The Gospel of John in
Christian History (1978).
8. See his review of the alternating periods of peace and domestic strife
in Judaism, pp. 36-42; on Antipas and Jesus Galilee, Historical Figure, pp. 20-
22.
9. Brown alludes here to the fourth/fifth centuries, but what he says is equally
valuable for work in any historical period. The rest of this passage repays
attention. Brown continues: "The men and women of the Late Roman Empire
lived out their lives in their own way; they have left us stark evidence of this,
without having given a thought to our delicate sensibilities, without having
worried for a moment whether their hopes and fears ran counter to the
common-sense of men of the twentieth century. In short, saved by the passing
of fifteen hundred years from the need to reassure us, they could appear
exactly as they were every bit as odd as we are, as problematical, as difficult
of access. To explore such people with sympathy, with trained insight, and with
a large measure of common cunning, is to appreciate whast one of the greatest
of them [scil. Augustine] said: Grande profundum est ipse homo. . . Man is a
vast deep. . . the hairs on his head are more easily numbered than are his
feelings, and the movements of his heart," Religion and Society in the Age of
St Augustine (1972), p. 20f.
10. See Peter Richardsons discussion and review of the data in "Why Turn the
Tables? Jesus Protest in the Temple Precincts," Society of Biblical Literature
Seminar Papers (1992) 507-23. Richardson argues that Melkarts image did
offend Jesus.
11. Richardson points out as one example among the many available, M.
Borg, Jesus: The New Vision (1987), p. 174.
12. The Gospel of John presents what is recognizably the same scene, but
within an entirely different narrative chronology. Johns Jesus causes the scene
in the Temple at the beginning of mission. He criticizes "those who sold" for
turning the Temple into a "house of trade" (2:16). Finally, John interprets the
gesture as a kind of disguised Passion prediction ("Destroy this Temple, and in
three days I will raise it up, . . . but he spoke of the temple of his body"
vv.19,21). Johns Jesus is in Jerusalem more often than in the Galilee, and this
incident does not serve, as it does in the Synoptics, as the trip-switch for the
Passion.
13. Sanders, Judaism, pp. 47-145. See esp. his chart comparing the
measurements of the Temple with Salisbury cathedral and Temple Emanuel in
New York, p. 67.
14. Sanders considers these questions in his closing discussion in Jesus and
Judaism, pp. 294-340. They drive my reconstruction in Jesus of Nazareth; see
pp. 8-11.
16. I had noted this problem already in From Jesus to Christ, p. 172f.
18. I expanded this argument with full notes in "Judaism, the Circumcision of
Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2," Journal of
Theological Studies 42 (1991) 532-64. Now see also Scot McKnight, A Light
Among the Gentiles (1991) and Martin Goodman, Mission or Conversion?
(1994).
18. See my discussion of Borg, Crossan and Wright on these issues in "What
You See is What you Get," pp. 83f., 86-91, 94-97.