At the turn of the new millennium, it may be time for everyone to reassess Jesus. I hope that the process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation will soon have progressed far enough that Jews may reexamine their automatic (and completely understandable) fear of all things Christian and acknowledge Jesus as one of their own, not as the Messiah, but as a brother who called God Abba. For Christians, it may be time to acknowledge that we have misunderstood Jesus in virtually every way that matters. As Raymond Brown was fond of remarking, if Jesus were to return to earth, the first thing we would do is crucify him again.
But whether we are Jew or Christian, believer or atheist, the figure of Jesus—as final Jewish prophet, as innocent and redeeming victim, as ideal human being—is threaded through our society and folded into our imagination in such a way that it cannot be excised. He is the mysterious ingredient that laces everything we taste, the standard by which all moral actions are finally judged. As one poet, W. H. Auden, echoing centuries of others, says affectionately and without regard to dogma or creed:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
1 The second half of the Book of Zechariah, written soon after the conquests of Alexander, abounds in Messianic references that thrilled the first Christians: the entry of a humble Messiah, astride an ass, into Jerusalem (as Jesus would enter just before his Passion); the image of sheep deserting the shepherd, interpreted as a prophecy of the disciples abandoning Jesus; the “thirty pieces of silver, the sum at which the Precious One was priced,” which would turn out to be the amount Judas would be paid for identifying Jesus to the soldiers who arrested him.
Notes and Sources
I MEAN TO GIVE HERE not an exhaustive bibliography of everything I consulted (which, given the enormous accumulation of biblical and New Testament studies over the past half century, would dangerously increase the size of this book) but a sense of what I found most valuable. As I did in Volume Two of this series, I again recommend the six volumes of The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York, 1992), now helpfully available on CD-ROM, as the best of all initial research tools. For those who prefer a more compact instrument, both The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York, 1993) and The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), the latter containing particularly well focused overviews, are also highly recommended. Other excellent sources of information for the non-specialist are the back issues of Bible Review and Biblical Archaeology Review, in both of which well-regarded scholars are invited to write for the common reader about current breakthroughs and controversies.
INTRODUCTION
In confirming my presentation of the outlook from the Janiculum, I found helpful Christopher Hibbert’s Rome: The Biography of a City (London and New York, 1985); The Blue Guide to Rome (London and New York, 1994); the Lazio volume (Venice, 1997) of the Jewish Itinerary series; and Ruth Liliana Geller’s Roma Ebraica (Rome, 1984). Giacomo Debenedetti’s small but unforgettable book about the Nazi roundup of the Jews of Rome, 16 ottobre 1943 (Palermo, 1993), is not available in an English translation, so far as I know. Livy’s history of ancient Rome, Ab Urbe Condita Libri—from which I took the description of the Celtic invaders—is available in many editions.
The title of this book is a phrase from the beautiful blessing of Jacob on his son Joseph, found in Genesis 49:26. The phrase is translated in different ways—from “the utmost bounds of the eternal hills” (Jewish Publications Society) to “the delights of the everlasting hills” (E. A. Speiser). My translation is taken from the Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate, which served for more than a thousand years in the West the same purpose that the Greek Septuagint served first in the Jewish diaspora, then in the Eastern church—as universal Bible. Jerome did not have at his disposal the Masoretic Hebrew text that has since become standard, but different versions of the Hebrew and Septuagint, which he used for comparison and correction. He translated the phrase: “desiderium collium eternorum.” Correct or incorrect, it is for me an image of the desire beyond articulation, the desire deeper than all (conscious) desiring.
I: GREEKS, JEWS, AND ROMANS
The “Axial Age,” or Achsenzeit, is a term invented by the postwar German historian Karl Jaspers in his Vom Ursprung und Zeit der Geschichte (1949), in which he proposes his theory, since then widely accepted, of an age of extraordinary worldwide creativity with the fifth century B.C. as its white-hot center.
There is no one to whom I owe more in this chapter than the great Italian Jewish scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, who knew more than anyone about just about everything—certainly about everything in antiquity. Two of his books proved especially enlightening: Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, 1971) and Pagine ebraiche (Torino, 1987), published in English translation as Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (Chicago, 1994).
For the Greek and Roman figures, I relied principally on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives for Alexander, Pompey, and Caesar and on Tacitus’s Annals and Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars for Augustus. These are available in many editions. Also helpful was a fine comprehensive study on “currents of culture and belief” by James D. Newsome, Greeks, Romans, Jews (Philadelphia, 1992).
The outstanding contemporary interpreter of Jewish apocalyptic literature is John J. Collins. I consulted his Between Athens and Jerusalem (New York, 1983), The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York, 1984), and especially The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York, 1995).
The translation of the Sibylline Oracles is by Collins. The quotations from Isaiah are taken from the King James Version (KJV): these prophecies would have sounded ancient and venerable to the ears of Jesus’s contemporaries, just as the KJV sounds to us. The quotations from First and Second Maccabees are taken from the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), as is the long quotation from the Book of Wisdom (though revised by me). The translation from the Latin of Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue” is mine.
A caution is in order concerning my choice of biblical texts to illustrate the convictions of the Jews of Jesus’s time in regard to both the possibility of an afterlife and the expectation of a messiah. My quotation from Job (taken from the Jerusalem Bible, not its successor, the NJB) may be criticized as being heavily colored by subsequent Christian interpretation. The Hebrew original would be more conservatively (and properly) translated simply to bring out Job’s belief that his case is a just one, which he hopes can be established while he is still alive, and that it is actually God who is Job’s adversary. But the translation I used was chosen not to make inferences unjustified by the original but to see this passage from Job as it was already being interpreted by Jews of the intertestamental period. Christians, to begin with, did not so much invent these adumbrations as borrow them from strains of then-current Jewish interpretation. In other words, though the body/soul dualism of the Greeks is completely absent from the text of Job, its author had—in his own time—no notion of a resurrection of the dead. But this notion was read into the text by subsequent commentators well before Christians appeared on the scene and, therefore, helped form the context of expectation into which Jesus was born. (By the fifth or sixth century A.D., rabbinical commentators, like their Christian counterparts, would come to assume as almost obvious that the soul is eternal, thus going a long way toward adopting the Greek view, but this is hardly the problematic of physical resurrection that we find the author of First Maccabees struggling with.)
Similarly, the last three lines of the first set of passages from Isaiah (these three lines taken not from the KJV but from a translation of the Vulgate, which is in its turn more de
pendent on the Greek Septuagint than on the best Hebrew texts) is invoked not to make Christian points but to point up the atmosphere of expectation in which the prophecies of Isaiah had come to be read—especially, perhaps, by diaspora Jews who read versions of the Septuagint rather than versions of the Hebrew—by the time of Jesus. The actual Hebrew, however, gives us an expectation that is abstract rather than personal: “Justice” rather than “the Just One”; “Salvation” rather than “the Savior.”
If in dealing with the Book of Isaiah I fail to mention that there is a third voice—a Trito-Isaiah—to be found in chapters 56–66, this is because this particular deconstruction has no bearing on the point I am making. I should also mention that there is a raging scholarly controversy as to whether the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) were a library of the Essenes or of some other Jewish group, and another controversy as to what the relationship of John the Baptizer and/or Jesus may (or may not) have been to the Essene community. It seems plain to me that John was more extreme in his apocalyptic than Jesus, and what he has to say certainly sounds an awful lot like much of the material original to the DSS. If the DSS were not an Essene library, they were certainly the library of an apocalyptic sect of John/Jesus’s period. Though most indications surely point in the direction of the assumptions I have made in the main text, nothing of my essential argument there would be disturbed by new findings about the provenance of John or of the DSS.
Finally, I am happy to admit that a case can be made against my claim that the Jews had “abandoned their ancestral language” by the time of Jesus’s birth. I am aware that many educated Jews were trilingual, able to read and (to some extent) speak Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic (as witness the Bar Kochba letters and the DSS themselves). But I very much doubt that such an accomplishment can be posited of the population as a whole, especially of the majority of the Galilean women and men who were Jesus’s main audience.
II: THE LAST OF THE PROPHETS
In this chapter and throughout the remainder of the book, all translations from the Greek of the New Testament (except as otherwise indicated) are mine—but with an eye to other translations, especially two at opposite ends of the translation spectrum: the New International Version (NIV), which is moderately literal, and the NJB, which in its assiduously idiomatic English sometimes approaches paraphrase.
The now-classic work on the Judaism of Jesus is E. P. Sanders’s Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia, 1985). which sets out in an English prose that any writer might envy all the major scholarly considerations, few of which I am able to treat in any detail. Sometimes more helpful to my purposes was John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew (New York, 1991–1994), the exhaustive multivolume study of the historical Jesus, still in progress, and a model of clarity. Raymond E. Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament (New York, 1997) is virtually indispensable to anyone who wishes to appreciate the New Testament, but it is especially good on the gospels, on which Brown expended so much of his life. He was, till his death in 1998, the greatest American scholar of the New Testament, probably the greatest in the world, and a man of such kindness and generosity that no one who knew him can ever forget him. Also useful (in the excursus on Mary) was an earlier work of his, The Birth of the Messiah (2nd edition, New York, 1993), as well as the anthology Mary in the New Testament (Philadelphia and Mahwah, NJ, 1978) edited by Brown et al. The remark about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable was first said (so far as I can determine) not of the Gospel but of Dorothy Day—by Theodore Hesburgh when he presented her with the Laetare Medal at Notre Dame.
There are subjects customary in biblical studies that, as some may be surprised to observe, I fail to take up in this chapter. These include, for instance, the Temple fetish of the priests and Sadducees, which, whatever their relationship to the Mosaic Law, sets them far apart from Jesus, who attacked their clerical fixations; and the controversy over what (if anything) in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke can be taken as historical. But I ask the reader to bear in mind that my purpose is not to write an introduction to the New Testament but to answer these questions: Who was Jesus? What was his effect and that of his followers on their own world? What was their impact on subsequent history? Whether or not his mother was a virgin is far less important here than what kind of mothering she gave her son. Important and even controversial subjects that do not shed light on such questions have been militantly relegated to the margins of this study or, in some cases, left unmentioned altogether.
Whether Mary’s pregnancy—following betrothal but prior to the actual wedding—would have caused a scandal is something of an open question. Joseph was certainly scandalized (since he and Mary had not yet had sex) and, according to Matthew, had to be persuaded by an angel that his betrothed was chaste. Judean Jews, who were more sophisticated than Galilean Jews, permitted sex between betrothal and marriage; Galileans did not. Since Bethlehem is inside Judea proper, Joseph’s relatives may have taken Mary’s condition in their stride, even if her Nazareth neighbors would not have done so. We just don’t know for sure. My point in this excursus is that the Christmas Story was full not so much of angel song as of ordinary human discomforts.
III: THE COSMIC CHRIST
Confirmation that Jesus, naked on the cross, was taunted sexually by a brutal crowd is not to be found in the reticent evangelists, but it is virtually impossible to imagine its not happening. The final passage from Mark’s Gospel is taken from the translation by Reynolds Price, contained in his Three Gospels (New York, 1996).
Any work by E. P. Sanders can always be recommended with high enthusiasm, in this case his most illuminating Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia, 1977) and Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia, 1983). For my treatment of Paul, I am particularly indebted to Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, whose Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford, 1996) is full of both responsible scholarship and sensible speculation. I have presented his speculations about what may have been going on at the Corinthian liturgies less conditionally than he does. I am well aware that his is but one possible interpretation, but I find that it answers more questions than any other. Also helpful to me in various ways were many other books and articles by Murphy-O’Connor (all listed in the bibliography to his Paul); I would single out especially St. Paul’s Corinth (Collegeville, MN, 1992) and The Holy Land: An Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700 (3rd edition, Oxford, 1992). In addition to Murphy-O’Connor, mention must be made of Alan F. Segal, whose Paul the Convert (New Haven, 1990) is a milestone in interfaith studies, a balanced reexamination of Paul from the perspective of a Jewish scholar, and a treasure-house of riches for the careful reader.
A wonderfully eye-opening collection that came to my attention, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA, 1997), edited by Richard A. Horsley, was useful not only in my presentation of the political aspect of Paul but in suggesting a saner-than-usual approach to the Book of Revelation. In particular, I would recommend the two essays by Neil Elliott, “The Anti-Imperial Message of the Cross” and “Romans 13:1–7 in the Context of Imperial Propaganda,” as well as Horsley’s concluding essay, “1 Corinthians: A Case Study of Paul’s Assembly as an Alternative Society.” The essays by Elliott may also be found, with additional helpful material, in his splendid overview, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, 1994). At the other end of the spectrum of reinterpretation lies the work of John Shelby Spong—for example, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco, 1991). In my opinion, Spong, the Episcopal bishop referred to in the main text, lacks the subtlety required to engage in the necessary task of “rethinking” that he sets himself. He certainly knows how to be “outspoken and controversial,” as his dust jacket proclaims, but he is tone-deaf to the deep meaning of many of the passages that he tackles so “boldly.”
I take some liberties in my portraits of Paul and Peter. There is no horse mentioned in Luke’s ac
count of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, even though it is a constant in the iconographic tradition. Likewise, the physical descriptions of Paul and Peter are based on the constant traditions of very early paleo-Christian art, which I think we can trust as deriving originally from eyewitnesses. Some might quibble with my sketch of Paul’s father, but I feel we can almost see and hear this ambitious man in his son’s words.
As in the previous chapter, my overriding purpose—of tracing cultural impact—impels me to omit certain customary subjects, such as the meaning of the collection for the Jerusalem poor that occupied so much of Paul’s attention and the even more important subject of the mode (and development) of his apocalypticism. Some may take exception to my portrayal of the Pharisees as belonging to the leisured class, preferring to see them more as a proletarian intelligentsia. (They probably did have working-class origins, but it is almost impossible to imagine them working with their hands.) The provenance of the Letter to the Hebrews, once mistakenly ascribed to Paul, is extremely tricky, as are its dating and probable audience.
Those who would pursue the New Testament connection between earthly and cosmic “powers” of evil will find no better aid than the work of Walter Wink. His influential “Powers” trilogy—Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, Engaging the Powers (Philadelphia, 1984, 1980, 1992)—is well recapitulated and even extended in his latest book, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York, 1998).
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