To many people it is surprising that Earl Doherty, the author of Jesus, Neither God Nor Man (hence JNGNM) who counts himself an atheist and someone who demonstrated that Jesus did not exist should also confess the reality of a document that no-one ever saw or talked about in antiquity, or Middle Ages, in fact no-one ever knew anything about until German theologians of the 19th century deduced its existence. The putative document is today known as “Q” as the acronym of the German word “Quelle” (source). The origin of the name itself has been the subject of numerous studies, and it seems that for the first quarter of century the name competed with the designation “Logia” (from the Greek “oracles”) referencing a futile and fading quest for an Aramaic compilation mentioned by an early church luminary Papias who himself was to write a five-volume commentary on it. As nothing was turning up on the oracles and the exegets could not even agree what “Logia” actually meant, a new problem arose after the discovery of a fragment of what we now call the Gospel of Thomas in 1897, which was dubbed “Logoi” (sayings). The focus in the search shifted from the Papias text to this finding which was the hoped-for shared source between Matthew and Luke. This document was for a while referred to as Λ (the Greek letter lambda), but soon Q became the standard, evidently to reduce the confusion that arouse around the “L” designation. That certainly happened but the proto-gospel that was thought to have been shared between Matthew and Luke, never showed up, nor anything testifying about its existence.
Doherty challenged me in an FRDB post to refute his views on Q, saying that the document stands or falls on the neutral evidence for or against it. Unfortunately, insofar as I am informed, there is no Q document to be examined. To a thinking brain, there is no evidence for Q to challenge. All we have are the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die of a long array of NT scholars that the composition of Luke is not adequately explained without Q. All other considerations fade in comparison if they are relevant at all. So, the case for Q will be made not on the evidence for or against it, but on the viability of the propositon that Luke did not know, and could not possibly have known, Matthew’s writing. It is only when this proposition is demonstrated that Q becomes the preferred, even if not necessarily the only reasonable, source explanation. All right, let us then look at the way Doherty establishes a case for Q.
The Q discussion opens Part Seven of JNGNM, titled Preaching the Kingdom of God. After introducing the gospel sourcing, Doherty moves to the brief overview of Markan priority which most of the academics accept, and those who subscribe to the two-source theory need to accept as sine qua non. Doherty does a decent job of defending Mark as the earliest gospel. However, his first few paragraphs already show some strange habits of thought.
One indeed may dispose of other models by pointing out the greater primitivity of Mark’s, incidence of agreements among gospels that show dependence on Mark, and the higher presence of Mark’s content in the other two synoptics than what either Matthew or Luke would show in a parallel test. But it is poor form to use formulas like gutted the Temptation scene, or discarded …the most prized of Christian ethics, to depict Mark under assumed Matthean priority. The Matthean sermon would not have been beyond dispute at the time of Mark’s writing, and the temptation landscapes in reality might have been compacted by Mark for all sorts of reasons. For example, one can postulate Mark as a gnosticizing shorthand of Matthew, forcing a single iteration of the empowerment-persecution cycle on Jesus ‘ministry’. The temptation is a mini-cycle of the spiritual crisis which resolves itself in Matthew with Jesus explicitly defeating the devil. In Mark (and Luke as per 4:13 ), the crisis is left to be resolved by the cross, a manoeuvre which is truer to Paul’s theology. In the case of the sermon, it is gratuitously assumed that Matthew’s account was immediately embraced and venerated by all Christians. But it need not have been. There are what looks like some heavy anti-Pauline salvos coming from the Mount (5:19 and Matt 7:1-2 seem obvious) which would have been, and likely were, resented in many communities. Matthew’s version of the sermon became a prized jewel of Christianity no doubt, but the poignant question is when.
These are just two examples right at the start of the section which should make people leery of Doherty’s habit of introducing a counter-argument by characterizing it.
The rhetorical posturing would come into full relief starting in the first paragraph on the Q Document in chapter 7 (p.310). Doherty admits there is no reference to the suggested proto-gospel to be found anywhere and that its existence merely a ‘majority scholarship’s deduction’. But prior to any discussion of the viability of the Q hypothesis, he cannot help himself announcing that the arguments for the existence of Q are ‘much stronger than those against it’. Having revealed the idea of having the sentence first, i.e. dismissing objections out of hand, the wonderland captive then proceeds ‘to the examination of [this] question’. But actually, he would not do that just yet. Before the justification of Q’s existence is offered, Doherty needs to assure the reader that ‘the exact extent of Q is still matter of debate’ and walk her through two-and-a-half pages of descriptions of the layers and get even into of actually describing the nitty-gritty for the Q’s strata of development. Then, at long last, he will examine the question of existence (p. 313). But, don’t get your hopes too high !
The first sentence of the ‘Existence of Q’ section resets the readers’ expectations for a scholarly review: ‘ Having gained an overall picture of [Q], we can digress to consider the very question of whether it actually existed or not’. Wait a minute: did he write we ‘digress’ to the ‘very question’ he promised to ‘examine’ three pages earlier ? Yes, I am afraid he did.
Now obviously - or perhaps it is not obvious to some - if I were to argue for the existence of Jesus in the same manner Doherty argues for the existence of Q, the sceptics would laugh me out of the room: ‘Some say that Jesus did not exist, but the majority of scholars disagree with this view and I will show you why shortly, but first let me give you some basic data about Jesus. He was born in Bethlehem 4 BC, and after flight from Herod’s murderous hand and return to his native Galilee, his family settled in Nazareth. At a later point Jesus moved to Capernaum, where, scholars agree, he lodged in Peter’s house……now, let us digress to the silly question of the naked existence of Jesus’.
Debating with Doherty is a frustrating business as he does not seem to grasp that among the academic points of view (unlike that of political speech, e.g.), there are finer shades of distinction and the tools in exposition simply do not, as a rule, admit careless banter of the sort he proposes.
If Only Hypotheses Support Hypotheses the House Cannot Stand.
Having introduced the modern Q skeptics Austin Farrer, Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre, Doherty, in the first issue of method he presents, wishes to dismiss the generally valid rule that a simpler explanation is preferable to the more complicated one. He states that using the Occam’s razor rule to ‘decide the day’ in this case would be incorrect. He writes: ‘it would be like a prosecuting attorney declaring the defendant guilty of the murder dismissing the defence’s claim that a third party was a culprit on the grounds that the latter is introducing an extra entity’ (p. 313). But this hopeless straw-man misstates both, the application of the logical principle, and the views of the scholars who consider Q extravagant or unnecessary. Occam made it clear in his rule that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. In the murder trial example, if relevant, the evidence of the third party’s involvement would be “necessary” to dispense justice and could not be thrown out on the principle cited. And ,by the way, prosecuting attorneys do not declare guilt or innocence of the accused in any known criminal proceedings. The self-evident function of this exercise is to remove considerations of ‘raison d’etre’ for Q, the very thing that is to be decided in the chapter. Whether choosing specifically a murder trial as illustration was designed to paint the Q dissenters and create an adverse gut reaction in his inexpert audience to their ideas, I will leave to Doherty’s readers to decide.
The next paragraph Doherty decries the reluctance to admit ‘hypothetical documents’ stating that historical research is ‘full of hypotheticals’. As an example, he offers an imagined scenario in which Mark’s gospel was not preserved and the scholars would have to guess its existence from Matthew and Luke. Again, this is a fallacious argument. One cannot compare a real document (Mark) to a hypothetical one (Q) on the basis of a scenario that is itself hypothetical. The obvious problem is the lack of verifiability of whatever result we would obtain from such speculative adventure.
Before considering the actual issues in the Q/no-Q debate, one has to establish what needs to be proven about Q for one side to prevail. Generally, both sides agree that Luke knowing Matthew obviates the need for Q. (The only notable dissenter to this point of view to my knowledge is R.H.Gundry who apparently believes Luke knew Matthew but still sees Q as a source to both.) This very simple rule was formulated in the 1950’s by Farrer. If we can defend a view that Luke did not redact Mark independently of Matthew, we may dispense with postulating Q as a document. Doherty does not say that anywhere, and it is not clear how people who are not familiar with the synoptic issues could form an informed opinion relying on the digest he provides. What are the burdens for each side to prevail in the debate ? Is the thesis of Q falsifiable and if so, how ? Specifically, what needs to spelled ahead of time is that the need for the Q stands and falls with the view of Luke’s organization of the double tradition, i.e. material common to him and Matthew but not to Mark. Doherty does not analyze such important matters. He simply rules on them, without qualification. If the double tradition shows Luke re-arranging the sequence of the Matthean materials while following the sequence of Mark’s stories, then if Luke was to know Matthew, he would in Doherty’s opinion ‘seem to take somewhat schizophrenic approach to sources’. Simple as that ! But an intelligent, thoughtful reader, would immediately have to ask herself: why would it be so hard to credit that Luke gave different weight to both gospels, considering the original script the more authoritative one for sequence ? What if there was some adverse reaction in the Pauline communities following the appearance of, and fast conquest by, Matthew which they perceived as threat to the ‘faith’ by a new campaign of the judaizing horde driven out of Jerusalem by the 66 CE war ? And isn’t Q just a too obvious smoke-screen behind which to sneak in a monolithic first-century church where everyone believed the same thing, namely that all the wisdom of ages proceeded from the mouth of Jesus Christ during his short ministry on earth ? It would appear that even though it originates in Protestant scholarship, the Q theory enthusiastically promotes the assertion of the fifth-century church man Vincent of Lerins, professing Catholic faith, “which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”.
With no definition of terms and no overview of the historical development of the Q theory, Doherty goes to work on the latest and most sophisticated of the Q critics, Mark Goodacre. Again, there would be no digest of Goodacre’s thesis (e.g. as it is spelled out in his book The Case Against Q). Instead, Doherty goes straight into reciting the University of Toronto John Kloppenborg’s attempts to refute Goodacre’s major points. There is very little which Doherty adds to Kloppenborg’s critique (taken, it seems, in its entirety from his essay, On Dispensing with Q ? Goodacre on the Relation of Luke to Matthew ). No big issue per se in Doherty’s dependence on leading Q scholar when he criticizes Goodacre, but I find problematic his taking a highly technical argument and presenting it in a trivial manner to non-specialists, in packaging which distorts both the aims of the critique and the criticized approach. I have already mentioned the accusation that Doherty makes as Kloppenborg’s interpreter, with respect to the perceived ‘schizophrenic approach’ of Luke, and there is yet another crude dohertyism at the end of the section, in which the writer asserts that if Matthew did not originate all the material (imputed to Q) but drew it from some other source, ‘then one has simply re-invented Q’. This random brainwave is not directly attributed to Kloppenborg or any of the academics mentioned in the paragraph preceding, but still. A more judicious approach would clearly separate attribution of ideas in sections where one presents commentary of someone other than himself.
Kloppenborg is complimentary to his opponent, a skill which appears to be alien to Doherty, who often gives the impression that an admission by him of skill or (God forbid) commanding argument in a rival view equals to an admission of defeat. The Q scholar from Toronto says that one of the virtues of Mark Goodacre’s book is ‘its sense of proportion and balance. Where Ropes’ proposal was little more than an aside, Farrer’s case logically flimsy, and Goulder’s exposition so full, subtle and complex, that it is accessible only to specialists, Goodacre’s argument is clearly structured, careful in its logic, and helpfully illustrated with a few choice Synoptic texts’. Indeed, as a non-specialist myself, I was delighted to find how clear-headed Goodacre’s book is, making concepts and arguments instantly available by thinking through their presentation. This is a skill I do not often see in my readings of NT scholars.
I am afraid I would not be able to say the same about Kloppenborg. He certainly gives an impression of encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject matter, and scholarly discipline in presenting his argument. But I find his arguments, and counters to Goodacre unpersuasive.
On the crucial issue of the hypothetical nature of Q, Kloppenborg proceeds in a manner that clearly inspired Doherty, but falters. He says, "Q is indeed a hypothetical document. Equally hypothetical, however, are Matthew and Luke’s dependence upon Mark, something that Meier (along with Farrer and Goulder) apparently did not think it worthwhile calling ‘hypothetical’". Unfortunately, one does not have the luxury of that line of defense. To proclaim the existence of a hypothetical document is not quite the same thing as proclaiming a hypothetical relationship between existing documents. The ensuing argument he makes for the ‘hypothetical nature’ of Mark simply fails to convince as it equates a presumed but unproven text (Q) and its organization with one (Mark) which although – true – we have received after much redactional development, but have received nonetheless. Unfortunately, the idea that the hypothetical nature of Q can be defended by arguing that all synoptic relationships are hypothetical in nature strikes me – purely on logical grounds – as a poorly disguised et-tu-quoque against Goodacre’s charging that Q enjoys undeservedly ‘the aura of received truth’.
Minor Agreements
The one hugely surprising thing in Kloppenborg’s criticism of Goodacre is his reluctance to take on the strongest argument against Q, the existence of the so-called ‘minor agreements’ between Matthew and Luke against Mark. The inevitable question needs to be answered: why are there so many points where Matthew and Luke are in unison against Mark, if one supposes they redacted him independently ? Kloppenborg waves off the question saying that there is already a lot of stuff written on that subject and he could not do it justice in the scope of the essay, and - herein the eyebrow-raiser - that the agreements do ‘not represent a problem for the MwQH (Mark without Q Hypothesis)’. This is a puzzling response to Goodacre who calls the minor agreements ‘the Achilles heel of the two-source theory’. One would expect at least some token grasp of the gravity of this issue would be offered by Kloppenborg. Doherty, however, in one of the responses where he departs from Kloppenborg and speaks for himself, did respond to the challenge of minor agreements, which of course counts as a positive.
Goodacre points out, citing E.P. Sanders and W.D. Davies, that there is hardly a pericope in the triple tradition (events recorded in all three gospels) that does not show some minor agreements. It is to Goodacre’s credit that he tempers the finding by allowing that some of the redaction was common stylistic editing which does not presuppose Luke’s dependence. However, he is just as quick to dispel attempts to wish away the ‘minor agreements’ as insignificant, sarcastically commenting against C. Tuckett that there seems to be a tendency among the Q defenders to explain the minor agreements as “minor” and the bigger ones as “Mark-Q overlap”.
If Doherty did one better than Kloppenborg in addressing the problem, he does not seem quite to grasp the trouble the Mt-Lk agreements in the triple tradition spell for the two-source theory. For example, he proceeds on the careless assumption that where ‘Lukan-Matthew material can be assigned to Q, there is no problem’. Not registering Goodacre’s sarcasm, he also forgets the name of the chapter into which he writes and its purpose. It is called ‘The Existence of Q’ and it is where he is to explain why the hypothesis of Q is necessary. One cannot assume what one sets out to prove. One cannot assume Q but must show why a simpler alternative would not work just as well. Further, the issue of agreements clearly militates against the idea that Luke did not know Matthew’s gospel. There are – generally speaking - two possibilities in explaining the overlap of the later synoptics in their dissent from the known prior source, Mark. One, they knew each other; two, there was another source preferable to both which supplied the dissenting formula or motif. This reasoning should quickly lead to another step: what does in this instance, in which one explanation is clearly more parsimonious, justify the more complicated one ?
Doherty reluctantly admits that in ‘few cases’ the agreements are ‘not that easily explained’ and that 'such agreements tend to constitute a major appeal’ for theories like Goodacre’s. But lest the babes in the exegetical woods stray from the path of the righteous, he issues a warning that we should not place much confidence in ‘specific wording between evangelists’. We have no manuscripts to go by before the 3rd century, says he. I am not sure Doherty fully appreciates the irony of some of his positions: Here he cites the lack of early gospel manuscripts to defend the existence of presumably the earliest source manuscript that gave rise to them. Does he understand the repeated charge of ‘circular reasoning’ that Goodacre raises against the Q proponents ?
The answer to Goodacre’s “most striking” parallel in the Passion narrative again discounts the import of the minor agreements. At issue is the addition of five identical words by Matthew and Luke to Mark’s account of physical assault by the Sanhedrin members on Jesus after his trial. Both add “who is it that struck you ?”. This is an extremely difficult verse in all three gospels. First off, the idea that judges would physically mistreat a prisoner looks far more like a literary ploy, than anything else. Second, what is the function of the assault in the Passion story, and further, if unrelated , why does the malevolence specifically involve Jesus’ ability to prophesy ? The intent is opaque in Mark, despite Goodacre plausibly pointing back at 10:34 as the source of malevolence against Jesus, their glee at Jesus succesfully prophesying his own earthly demise. However, Matthew’s annex, for this scenario still leaves questions, as does Luke’s insisting on the return of the blindfold, leaving aside the intent of the assault being carried out by venerable counsels of the court. Both Luke and Matthew understood there was something else at play that warranted adding to the maliciousness. Mark gives a hint in 15:10, naming ‘envy’ as the cause of meanness of the assailants, but that complicates things even more. The line added by Matthew and Luke, indicates specifically prophesying ex eventu. Suffice for the moment that the “who is it that struck you ?” derides Jesus’ in a very difficult way for an outsider to grasp, and that both Matthew and Luke would have to get the insight into Mark’s opaque intent on their own, and phrase it exactly the same way. Doherty thinks that the way out of the conundrum in this instance – since it lies outside the accepted scope of Q – is to assign it to one of the two authors and then have the other gospel pick it up in a process known as text “assimilation” which is known to have occurred in many places in many of the NT documents. But this is blatantly special pleading. The point that Goodacre makes is that the minor agreements occur everywhere, whether in the Q scope or not, so plainly it is not an answer to say that if they can be assigned to the Mark-Q overlap, we could do that, and if we can’t, we could explain them by assimilation. Again, why would we need two explanations, if one can cover both instances ?
Luke’s Order
If the agreements as a major challenge to the two-sources tradition remained unanswered by Kloppenborg and poorly handled by Doherty, the perceived lack of rigour in explaining Luke’s diffusion of Matthew’s text in his own gospel engenders a substantive response. The attack centers on what is held as the improbability of Luke mistreating the Sermon, had he found it in Matthew as it stands. Both critics of Goodacre wilfully ignore his smart pre-empting this sort of attack in exposing its confessional background. He quotes one of the founders of the two-source theory, H.J. Holtzmann, who in 1860’s asked whether it was likely that "Luke should so wantonly have broken the great structures, and scattered the ruins in the four winds” (op.cit.59). He also brings in the modern commentators G. Stanton and C. Tuckett to express similar personal incredulity. He however remains undaunted in his criticism and says that ‘this argument is felt to be persuasive’, meaning, it isn’t. And, it isn’t because at the root such statements are a pious conviction that Luke knew the feelings of the later churchmen in regard to Matthew’s Sermon and would not want to hurt those feelings. Factually, substantively, there is nothing that would have prevented Luke to adapt Matthew in close to the text that we have received.
Doherty mostly repeats what Kloppenborg says even to the trite tidbit of asserting that Luke knowing Mark first and inserting Matthew into his narratives later ‘is unprovable’. Compared to what exactly, may I ask. He complains that there is no explanation for the ‘piecemeal’ handling of the Matthean pericopes, and the subjectivity of the kinds of selectors that Luke supposedly deployed in displacing what is agreed on by almost everyone else, Matthew’s superior organization of the Q-material. I admit having certain sympathy for the criticism of Goodacre on this point for his mention of the “Luke pleasing” formula of Farrer. I think the MwQH would be better off without this sort of explanation as it is just as circular, as Holtzmann’s thesis of “four winds”. Further, it appears that no grand theory of Luke’s composition is called for here. The redaction that seems odd to the modern exegets could have been – and probably was - the function of a number of factors. Most plausible to me, is that Luke sought to devise a compromise gospel solution to squabbles between Pauline traditions and the newly arrived Jewish Christians, each prosecuting their own theological agendas. Matthew’s brilliant, ruthless demolition of the Pauline gospel monopoly proclaimed by Mark created completely new, and unexpected effects, accelerating on the one hand the unification of the churches and on the other, alienating irretrievably principled Paulinists, who on seeing a gospel with zombies walking out of tombs in Jerusalem and ravaging their communities, started an exodus into schools of docetic gnosticism.
Interestingly, Acts 1:6-7 is the only place in the New Testament that specifically concerns itself with the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Surely there was clamour for specifically that in some quarters of Luke’s community and it was not the Gentiles. And again, the downsizing of Peter by Luke against Matthew and the formula by which he receives in Luke-Acts the credit of being the church first spokesman and envoy to the Gentiles sure looks like a tradeoff for Paul’s monopoly on the later missionary conquests. Not a peep from Luke about Peter’s church ! So, strange as it may seem to the devout and the clueless today, Matthew’s brilliant verses of the sermon might have been part of the bargaining process.
Other Issues in Luke’s Redaction of Matthew
Let it be said that Doherty shows a great deal of confusion when he steps out of Kloppenborg’s protective shadow. He opines that Luke’s 8:10 failing to pick up Matthew’s 13:14-15 reference to Isaiah source saying argues for his ignorance of Matthew. But what does he know of the reason by which Luke prefers to go with Mark 4:12 quoting Isaiah 6:9 without attribution ? The omission of the ‘lest they turn and be forgiven’ in both Matthew and Luke is actually quite important and signifies likely the condition of repentance for the denial of the cross by Petrine followers is no longer an issue at the time of the later synoptics. But one cannot draw any reasonable conclusion from Luke not specifically mentioning Isaiah as Mark’s source. Goodacre makes mincemeat of the charge that Luke seems ignorant of Matthew’s modifications of Mark, which Doherty foolishly charges and badly illustrates. The fact that Luke does not pick up certain verses of Matthew cannot be construed as his being ignorant of them. Goodacre calls the argument flawed (op cit p. 52) and shows that Luke prefers the Matthean version to Mark’s in a whole slew of incidents with the John the Baptist ‘complex’, the Temptation, the Beelzebub controversy, and the Mustard Seed parable named as examples. ‘On all of these occasions’, he says, ‘the parallels between Matthew and Luke are more extensive than those between Mark and Luke’.
Doherty charges that Luke ‘failed to incorporate the material’ known only in Matthew, the co-called M verses. He would not be humoured, as John Kloppenborg was, by Goodacre's clever retort that this objection exists only in the minds of the two-source theory worshippers. Had any M (Matthew only) material been taken over by Luke, it would have become by definition Q material - with a different bone to pick. It seems that by the 2SH theorists’ rules, it is heads I win, tails you lose. At any rate, whatever Kloppenborg or Doherty can dredge on the lack of convincing argument in Luke’s motives for editing cuts, in the end it is a subjective perception. They rely on a circular argument, which will be in want of proof, until some earthen jar in a West Bank cave disgorges a scroll with Q on it. One can argue based on theological imperatives, personal aesthetics, one church vs multiple communities, but, in the end, in the absence of conclusive proof, the argument should be decided on the parsimony principle.
Next issue on the agenda is the so-called alternating primitivity. It is said (Goodacre cites two authors) that if one of the evangelists followed the other, it is “inexplicable” why in certain sayings Matthew should have the simpler form and in others, Luke. Again, this kind of pseudo-reasoning vexes people who don’t do the academic group-think, and lucid scholars who stay away from it. Why should it be unthinkable that Luke sometimes simplified or pared down Matthew’s saying and at other times doodled around it ? One reason that I can think of is that many New Testament academics never quite grasp the text on personal level and convince themselves that this or that one of their favourite teachers ‘had it right’ without thinking about it too hard. Once the opinion acquires a large ‘installed base’ of believers, it is quite capable of maintaining itself even if it is manifest nonsense.
Doherty asks naively : Can we believe that for Matthew’s “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness ?” Luke would have chosen to substitute “Blessed are you that hunger now ?”. I take the first person plural in the question, no less so than the tortured believe, to be a slip of the pen of someone who just hasn’t got a handle on the material. If Doherty bothered to take a count of the word dikaiosynē (righteousness) in Matthew and Luke he would have found that Matthew’s quill thirsted and hungered for it far more often than Luke’s. The score is seven occurrences in Matthew to one in Luke. In Matthew, then, it is not hunger (or thirst) as such but those who need to be vindicated that are blessed. In Luke it is just promise to fulfil a more basic human need. So, it just could be – could it not (?) – that we are looking here at, not as much alternating primitivity as different community ethos. It might not have been as much a ‘culling’ of the beatitudes, as Doherty describes Luke’s work on Matthew’s text, but a determined revision of the Matthean counter-claim to monopoly access to Christ that the Sermon on the Mount shamelessly proclaims for the Palestinian traditions against Mark (who just as shamelessly pushed Paul’s). The two details that Doherty generously overlooked is that Luke’s beatitudes are delivered on the Plain (i.e. by the model primus inter pares !) and that the ones blessed are addressed directly (as you, yours) whereas Matthew’s Jesus speaks on the Jewish holy mount and gives the beatitudes in the third person plural. Luke’s preference for shortening the ‘poor in spirit’ to ‘poor’ may be explained by the fact that the πτοχοι was itself a term meaning literally the needy, and a cultic designation for the Nazarenes generically (ebyonim), which actually might have been closer in meaning to ‘dispossessed’ if read as originating in Deut 15:4 . Luke’s correction of Matthew then would not be modifying the blessing but actually expanding it.
The example Doherty gives of Mark 8:38/Matthew 10:32-3/Luke 12:8-9 (p 319) also need not in bespeak of ‘primitivity’. To begin with, the example chosen is wrong ! Luke repeats a variant of the Mark’s saying cited at 9:26, so this is a special case of triple attestation to begin with. Further, the perceived primitivity of the Son of Man versus Jesus speaking in the first person singular, need not relate to Mark 8:38, but again to what might have been Luke’s community reaction to Matthew’s perceived excesses in impersonating Jesus. Note e.g. that on the Plain Luke uses the ‘I say’ formula only once and Matthew’s ‘on my account’ in 5:11 Luke renders as ‘on account of the Son of Man’ in 6:22.
Further on, there is the “editorial fatigue” question. Doherty defines the feature proposed by Goodacre correctly as a tendency of a creative editor in modifying a source text, to revert to the original, or carry over a reference to the original that contradicts the intent to modify the text. Unfortunately, he then goes on as if Goodacre proposed that the editorial fatigue itself is a phenomenon which, like the minor agreements, militates directly for Luke’s use of Matthew rather than Q. That most certainly is not the case in Goodacre’s book that Doherty quoted. What Goodacre proposed back in 1998 is something else: we can help establish Marcan priority if we find a fairly persisting pattern of fatigue in Matthew/Luke redacting Markan stories. He made some intriguing comments about applying this rule in the Fatigue in the Synoptics paper to the double tradition which he did not repeat in his book The Case Against Q published in 2002. In preparing this essay, I have exchanged e-mails with Mark Goodacre, and asked him about his decision not to push his case with the double tradition examples Doherty cites (Mt 25:14-29/Lk19:11-27, Mt 10:11-14/Lk 9:4-5). Doherty goes on for nearly a page trying to refute the alleged Matthean dependence by Luke in these stories by all sorts of irrelevant and fallacious tangents, failing to note that the fatigue is non-starter for the manner he grasps Goodacre’s argument, i.e. that the tool does not help establish which source caused the logical lapse. What Goodacre proposed was something else. Assuming that we accept the evidence of the phenom for both Matthew and Luke in the triple tradition and the two examples of Luke’s fatigue in reading Matthew, is it not curious that Matthew does not get fatigued also (!) while reading Q ? Goodacre wrote to me that no-one in the thirteen years since the paper was published has come up with an example of Matthew’s fatigue reading Q, as he does in the three recorded cases of him mishandling Mark. Conclusive ? Not by itself, no, but it is definitely curious.
Finally, we come to the issue number (7) (page 322) in which Doherty offers Kloppenborg’s confession that Q presents ‘a distinctive quality and content’, themes that he believes ‘shine out [sic] in Q as central concerns, but are not of significant interest in the rest Matthew and Luke’. If one keeps one’s head, there is not much that one can say about such pronunciamentos other than that professor Kloppenborg and Mr Doherty are certainly welcome to their opinions on the matter. But again and again: where is the business end of this ? It cannot be perceptions, oaths, visions, aesthetic preferences, and veiled pleas for unity in place of reason. All sorts of interesting things can be done with the texts, segregating portions of them based on different criteria, and then making observations about the resulting product. There are evidently traditions common to Matthew and Luke which are either ignored by, or unknown to, Mark. It is possible to segregate analytically the sayings tradition from the narrated events in the gospel background and then marvel that these ‘shine out’ as self-sustained units of tradition. But is that a sufficient proof that they are that ? Is that a sufficient proof they ever were that ? Are they self-sustained units of tradition written up in stages and in a single document, as it is asserted ?
Concluding Thoughts
I have expressed my conviction in one of my previously blogged essays (“Notes on Jesus Historicity”) that the theory of the mythical origin is not a hopeless undertaking and that the contempt shown for the idea by most of the mainstream scholars may itself be foolhardy. I have also said that a better mythical theory would be more circumspect than either G.A. Wells or Earl Doherty have been about subscribing uncritically to the analytical tools of the liberal NT scholarship. For one, it is an unwise way to try to gain respectability for an unorthodox theory. More importantly, tools like Q will ensnare a mythicist and drive him or her into a corner out of which it will be hard to fight one’s way. The theory of Q presupposes a single common tradition standing opposite to Paul one on which Matthew and Luke drew differentially. I strongly believe this itself is a myth and one which needs to be resisted. The trend was most probably exactly the opposite: an early manifold of separate traditions, Galilean, Jerusalem and Pauline which gradually came together, often through acrimonious adversity and only loosely relying on the historical background of a common founder. None of these foundation strands relied substantially on actual sayings of Jesus, but they all subscribed to oracular revelations which came to be attributed to the nominal founder through a number of transport vehicles: a sort of a metempsychosis of the Thomasian school, revelations of the risen Christ among the Paulines, and cryptically as memoirs of the apostles in the Pauline-converted Nazarenes after the first Jewish war. The last mentioned were not really reminiscences of what Jesus said but middle-of-the-night oracular visitations by him (described in the Clementine Recognitions, II.1) assigned to historical figures around him as guarantors of their genuineness.
This does not exclude the possibility that some of the gospel sayings actually go back to Jesus, the historical founder. But it appears that except for a possible handful most were supplanted by wisdom sayings, moral maxims and rulings on internal disputes which were attributed through the processes just named.
To someone not chained to brain-dead theology of pastors who file court cases against Moslem squatters in their empty churches, or new-age gurus who define progress, as Orwell did, in the manner of blue bottles feasting on a dead cat, what we believe as a culture with our own traditions does matter. What we admit as facts will forever be informed by beliefs. What these beliefs are defines who we are. In my own perspective, which is neutral to the factual facets of Jesus existence, there are some big questions that Q packages as dogma but leaves untouched by analysis. One of them is the lack of assurances that what is assigned to Q truly represents older, coherent Palestinian traditions and not often rhetorical devices of Matthew custom-made to promote agenda of his community in the difficult tugs-of-faith with the Paulines.
Why should it be believed, for example, that one of the emblematic Christian sayings ‘love your enemies’ actually originates in Jesus of the Q traditions and not in Matthew’s creative adaptation of Paul. He might have wooed and wowed the Paulines just as Mark would have in adopting the Son of Man appelation and the populist ethos of the Nazarenes in which the Jesus after receiving the Spirit from above dined with sinners (,an idea markedly un-Pauline). After all, Romans 12:20 loves ones enemies the Christian way, i.e. by being kind and solicitous to them and by so doing consign them to hell. It is just hard to fathom that Jesus would have paraphrased the Proverbs 25:21 saying and twisted it the same way as Paul did even though both believed themselves in the eschaton. Read by a psychologist, the saying betrays unmistakably a desire to hide hostility. One cannot love one’s enemies, for if one loves them he would not call them enemies and if one calls them enemies it is not because he loves them. This is just one example where a saying assigned to Q might in fact have had its origin on the opposite side of traditions.
Another candidate for revision is Q 6:41-42 ‘the speck and the beam’ saying. It is possible to see much of the mysteriously choleric end of the sermon (chapter 7) of Matthew as a concerted attack on Pauline supremacism. As I mentioned, 7:1-2 ‘judge not’ appears to attack directly the ‘spiritualist conceit’ of the Paulines referencing 1 Cr 2:15. The speck and beam saying comes immediately after it and appears to pick apart, by the syntactic structure and cognitive elements, the lampoon of the Petrines by Mark in the two-step cure by Jesus at Bethsaida. Jesus first removes the physical cause of the man’s blindness, after which the men can see but do not see in a way that makes sense. It is then that Christ provides ‘spiritual insight’ (through Paul’s gospel) after which the man sees clearly. This conceited assault on the Nazarene traditions of Jesus infuriated Matthew who brilliantly threw it back at Mark. Note the metaphoric accord between the Bethsaida cure and the Mount saying. The blind man says he sees ‘men ….as trees, walking’ in the first step of the cure. Matthew suggests first to remove a large wooden object from Mark’s eye and then he would ‘see clearly’ (referencing διαβλέπω – in Mk 8:25) in the second step, the speck in his brother’s eye.
I do not believe that this is coincidence as the pair of images following in 7:6, the giving holy things to dogs and throwing pearls before swine, also appear to attack Mark head on. In the first instance Matthew ripped into Mark for dissing the traditional saying in the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mk 7:27), and in the second as a brutally defiant retort to the demand in Mk 4:12 that the Petrines (whom the Paulines disdained as ‘psychics’ given to the passions of the flesh) repent as a condition of receiving the full insight of the gospel. There was only one gospel in Mark’s time and it was Paul’s. Matthew mocks Mark’s view of his group as Petrine psychic ‘swine’ and foresees the Pauline cries of Matthean trampling on his flawed gospel’s ‘pearls’ of wisdom.
As a third and final example I choose Q 14:27, which simply protests too much in arguing the theology of the cross does not originate with Paul, and the saying was not coined by Mark who allegorizes Paul. For if it were true that the saying about ‘taking one’s cross and following Jesus’ originated with prescient Jesus or his Galilean following then neither Paul’s blowing his top in Galatians, nor Mark’s accusing the Petrine following (still) denying the cross as the sign of Messiah makes any sense. But evidently that is not the case. One can subscribe to the ‘cynic-stoic’, or the ‘deuteronomic’ origin of the saying only if one is willing to overlook the obvious signature present in all the variants of the saying - Paul’s maxim of ‘mimesis’, central to his key teaching of the wisdom of Christ (1 Cr 1:18-31), and made explicit in a command by him (1 Cr 4:16, 1 Cr 11:1) and those who took the imitation of Paul too literally ( Eph 5:1, 1 Ti 1:6, 2:14, 3 Jo 1:11).
I have sketched briefly some interpretive angles in which Q appears to be a theoretical straight jacket. The framework simply does not fit the texts once these are analyzed independently of received wisdom. The documents deserve better analytical tools than Q, which strikes me as outmoded, redundant and counter-productive as it bars new avenues and angles of research into the gospel sources and development. That finding pits my own approach against Doherty’s. His embrace of Q is not surprising to me as I long ago spotted his passion for dogma. As someone who grew up in communist Eastern Europe during History’s implacable march to the final victory of communism, I am not fazed by the banal discovery that dogma is worshipped by many atheists just as fervently.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
In the House of James
Among the puzzling things about the early Christian history few can match Eusebuis’ silence on the Pentecost. The inaugural event of the faith, the consecration of Christ church by mass action of the Holy Spirit, an event which instantly convinced five percent of Jerusalem that the crucified Jesus was Messiah, did not make it into the encyclopaedic History of the Church. When we discussed this at Richard Carrier’s FRDB chat group, a couple years back, some people felt that this was just too much of a tall tale to be considered a historical event by a former lawyer. I was not convinced that was the reason as Eusebius had not shied away from an even more improbable event, the exchange of letters between the Abgar, the Toparch of Edessa and the Saviour, in which Jesus in Jerusalem (then still alive), blessed the ruler in writing in the manner of John 20:29 and promised to send help. So, it was not as though the bishop of Caesarea’s history was immune to the eyebrow-raising kind of affectations . Likewise, the argument that the Pentecost was well known and did not need to be further harped on, strikes me as gratuitous. It would sure seem odd if a history of the French Revolution recorded as its first important happening the creation of the Consulate, and it was explained that the preceding events, including the taking of the Bastille, were historically trivial clichés
There are probably two reasons Eusebius’s skipped the event. The larger one seems having to do with the challenge of Judaism as the senior faith. The bishop says in his introduction to his Church History that Abraham received Christ as the Word of God and predicted Christians as a nation in whom all nations were going to be blessed. (Gen 12:3, 18:18). Christians were the true heirs to the faith of the patriarch of Israel, and they practiced faith as he had done. So, said Eusebius, the teachings of Christ ‘is not new or strange but, in all honesty, ancient, unique and true’. To a fourth-century literate believer the ideas of Christ’s pre-existence did ring true and the new status of the faith as imperial religion would have convinced most doubters who did not happen to be Jewish. If Constantine chose the cross as the sign by which to conquer, then Christ talked to Abraham . It seemed perfectly logical. Actually, Paul seemed to have said as much himself (Rom 4:12-13). Justin Martyr argued along the same lines against Trypho, without even acknowledging Paul.
Despite the efforts of Eusebius to put a best face on it, Christianity in his time was a modern faith, a fact no doubt often played upon by the main proselyte rival of Christianity. Eusebius knew that, being a diligent church chronicler. He knew his church, its traditions and the texts accepted by the episcopal authority as sacred scripture inspired by God. The scripture, in this case Acts of the Apostles, gave an account of the church founding and it belied a notion that Christ’s faith stretched back millennia as Eusebius seems to have claimed. By the book, the church was founded suddenly, in Jerusalem, by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the assembled followers of Jesus of Nazareth, tried and executed there by the authorities shortly before. There were multitudes present at the event and many were so impressed with what they saw and heard, that they joined on the spot, swelling church body from the original one hundred and twenty believers to over three thousand (Acts 1:15, 2:41). Contrary to Isaiah 66:8, quoted in the History, the traditional account did declare the church was consecrated in a mass baptism, and born in a day. Yet, Eusebius’ history gave no hint of any act or event that would account for its coming into being.
The second reason for Eusebius’ wanting different beginnings for his church, is that the Pentecost was embarrassing the church. In Eusebius' time, the church was becoming Rome’s official religion, alas with only a fraction of Romans confessing Christ. The intellectuals of the empire were mostly pagan, and held the new religion in disdain as superstitious nonsense. In a few decades after the Church History was written, Julian the Apostate would mock the Christians “The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker?... Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking ‘for our sakes was the world created.’” In addition, there were internal dissensions and challenges to the imposed theological doctrines, which the church sought to suppress in search of unity and uniformity of belief in the cultural manifold of the empire.
Speaking in a tongue, or glossolalia, was a well known phenomenon in Mediterranean antiquity, and understood as one of the manifests of an individual being possessed by a god or a demon. Within the new Christian milieu, different individuals and groups claimed their own unique visions of the Redeemer based on the presence of Holy Spirit in their congregations. Possessed by the Spirit, the leading figures in the groups entered into unio mystica with Christ and claimed revelations came to them directly from the risen Lord. This was not good news for the church administrators. Already John gospel warned against the kleptēs kai lēstēs (‘a thief and a robber’), who climbs into the sheepfold to preach by means other than the door, i.e. by church-authorized access (Jn 10:1) Later in the second century, Irenaeus, the first of the Church heresiologists, expounded on the viles of certain Marcus, a magician and deceiver of the flock. It appears probable enough that this man possesses a demon as a familiar spirit by means of whom he seems able to prophesy and also enables as many as he counts worthy to be partakers of his Charis themselves to prophesy (i.e speak in tongues). He devotes himself especially to women, and those such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth, whom he frequently seeks to draw after him…(Against Heresies 1.13.3) The difference between authorized testimonies by the Holy Spirit and mindless ravings of the demon possessed, was a point of radical distinction for Irenaeus, the late second century church father and the bishop of Lyons.
By Eusebius time, the authority of the Spirit was all but gone. The Spirit was too wild and unpredictable; the church at last suppressed a big challenge in Montanism, a movement which directly ran counter to the apostolic authority. The bishop himself had unkind words on Montanus in which he revealed distaste for wanton prophesying and tongue-speaking nonsense.
Montanus, they say, first exposed himself to the assaults of the adversary (the Satan) through his unbounded lust for leadership. He was one of the recent converts and he became possessed of a spirit, and suddenly began to rave in a kind of ecstatic trance, and to babble jargon, prophesying in a manner contrary to the custom of the church which had been handed down by tradition since the earliest times. …Some that heard his bastard utterances rebuked him as one possessed of the devil,…remembering the Lord’s warning to guard vigilantly against the coming of false prophets. But others were carried away and not little elated, and thinking themselves possessed of the Holy Spirit and the gift of prophecy.
(Eusebius, Chronicle, quoted in Charismatic Chaos, John F. McArthur Jr., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1992, p.86)
I am sure Saint Peter would have been fooled by the ‘custom of the church’ and the elation of the Montanists which looked so much like that of those possessed at the Pentecost.
……these men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day; but this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: 'And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.. Acts 2:15-17
But as we know, the last days did not materialize; instead of Christ’s parousia , the Church came. Montanus and his two prophetesses Maximilla and Priscilla did not succeed in renewing the ethos of living on the edge of time, in the advent of the second coming. There would be no more homage paid to mass exhibitions of spiritual empowerment from above
Incidentally, the Pentecost event never happened anyhow. The mighty inaugural arrival of the Holy Spirit seems to have originated as an argument against Paul, who warned against wholesale displays of ecstatic verve such as he saw among the Corinthians believers: If, therefore, the whole church assembles and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? (1 Cr 14:23) Such hypothetical could have hardly come from someone who knew the church he was ostensibly part of was founded by the very event he was warning against. |
Even though the Pentecost event did not occur historically, the legendary mass action of the Holy Spirit on the congregation is nonetheless very important for the understanding of the headset of the Jerusalem messianists. The story informs us how the Jacobite community, that venerated Jesus, viewed itself even though, it is a record a from a number of generations later made by a different community for its own internal purposes.
In the proclaimed happening, all members reached the ecstatic state as it was orchestrated from above in a fulfilled promise of the risen Lord to baptize his congregation with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:5). Whether or not they all received this baptism in one place at the same time, they event testifies to the belief in the reality of the spirit and its accessibility by all the church members without distinction. All were deemed capable of achieving ecstasy, and bring themselves into states of enormous euphoric excitement that gave them utterance. The ecstatic state was not only tolerated by the community but the principal sought-after, unmediated, blissful communion with God, liberating the sectarians from the humdrum of daily cares of the world. Indeed, for the promised transports to God through Spirit and the sense of empowerment such excursions brought to members of the community, the converts were willing to part with whatever property and material goods they individually had. The novices recruited from all walks of life; the thing they had in common was dissatisfaction with the world, engulfing them at times in waves of intense despair.[1] Some of them experienced sudden breaks from melancholy into rapturous happiness, and exalted grandeur, with intensity of living, and understanding of the world, as they never knew, or thought possible. The glorious ecstasies would alas leave them and they would be left as they were before, unhappy and afflicted by debilitating spiritual sickness, that kept turning heavens above into the skies of doom. As they wandered around they found many like themselves, living at the edge of Abaddon, reaching dizzying heights of glory only to be brutally cast down and left to totter in fear of the end, wondering what it all means.
Enter Jesus of Galilee
In plotting the probable earliest historical background against the myth-making of the Acts, a few things traditionally neglected need to be considered. I have already indicated (Notes on Jesus Historicity) that some of Paul’s verses are best interpreted via recent historical figure. The earliest of the gospels, Mark, was written with aims similar to Paul, to discredit the earthly discipleship of Jesus and its false promise of a messianic kingdom on earth. Mark leaves us an important self-dating clue. In chapter 13, plotting the Pauline parousia (13:26-27) Mark’s Jesus warrants that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Mark worked with a double-tracking time system; that of the time of Tiberius and his own, and he freely mixed events from those two time frames. The little apocalypse, like so may plots in his gospel, lampooned the Petrine view of the coming messianic kingdom (into Jerusalem below) and their puerile view of it, through the apocalyptic themes borrowed from Zechariah (14). For this decoy to work Mark’s writing could not be removed beyond the living memory of Tiberius reign.
If then Mark wrote ~70CE, Paul’s conversion and activities would have been earlier than ~37CE ( the Aretas IV. marker in 2 Cr 11:34) and this means the Jerusalem missions proclaiming Jesus would have been in place some time prior to that. On this schedule, it does not seem at all probable, that a community of believers in an executed wrongdoer would have been able to establish itself in a hostile environment like Jerusalem (where their Galilean ways, and northern accent would have caused instant frictions) without some kind of a prior larger community support and protection.
In the most probable scenario, Jesus walked into Jerusalem some time 28-30CE with a small retinue and shortly after was either killed outright in the precinct of the Temple or executed later for an uproar he instigated there. Jesus’ miraculous escape from death in the Temple had at least two versions, John’s attempted stoning of him (8:59) and the Markan account where no reaction follows immediately to his destructive public rage in the Temple, as it certainly would have been the case. In the latter account, when Jesus indicates to the arresting party later that he is simply giving up to fulfil the scriptures (14:49), he is acting out a script.
Faithfully, this type of mythologem repeats itself in almost any apologia for a fallen leader by his surviving followers, who first deny he was killed (if it is possible) and then admit the death with stipulations that their hero won a short reprieve from death before succumbing to a pre-ordained fate. You may count in among them Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, the Báb, founder of the Baha’i faith, Juro Jánošík, the Slovak highlander hero, and the Sikh militant Jamail Singh Bhindranwale who was killed in the storming of the Amritsar Golden Temple in 1984. They will likely soon be joined by the latest martyr, the myth of whom still lingers in the first phase. The leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran was ambushed and killed in 2009. His corpse was displayed publicly by the Sri Lankan military. It was a case of mistaken indentity, say the Tigers.
If Jesus preached messianic kingdom, as not many people would dispute, then his killing by the authorities would have outraged the community of messianic ecstatics in Jerusalem. The disciples would have found their way to the congregation and would have been sheltered by the group. It may have been even that the Jerusalem notzrim learned that some men were taken with Jesus and demanded their release, and this would have been done to placate raw emotions, and lessen the guilt if Jesus indeed was released by the Sanhedrin to the Romans who subsequently killed him with minimum ceremony, or even without trial (as Philo told us Pontius Pilate was in habit of doing). Cephas and the Zebedees would then become a part of the assembly and eventually sent out to raise money for the brothers in the diaspora.
Based on Heb 3:1, it appears the group’s apostolic seers connected the Galilean Jesus’ ignominous death in midrash with Zechariah 3, and he became venerated as one rehabilitated in heaven, as a high priest an intercessor for the coming of messiah. The imagery is striking:
Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.
And the LORD said to Satan, "The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?"
Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments.
And the angel said to those who were standing before him, "Remove the filthy garments from him." And to him he said, "Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with rich apparel." And I said, "Let them put a clean turban on his head." So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments; and the angel of the LORD was standing by.
And the angel of the LORD enjoined Joshua,
Thus says the LORD of hosts: If you will walk in my ways and keep my charge, then you shall rule my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you the right of access among those who are standing here.
Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who sit before you, for they are men of good omen: behold, I will bring my servant the Branch.
Zech 3:1-8
In this scenario then, Jesus (Joshua) would have been apprehended by the messianic cult, not as a Messiah himself but as an instrumental in-between, an apostle (Heb 3:1) and the high priest after the order of Melchizedek (Heb 6:20, 7:17)
James the Just in Epiphanius and the Early Witnesses
I observe with amusement that Robert Eisenman in his James the Brother of Jesus, sifting through the mass confusion of Nazarene, Nazoraean, notzrim, Nazara, Nazirite, Nazaret, Naassene, Nazareth seems uninterested in the Nasaraeans, a sect no-one seems to have known anything about until they appeared in Epiphanius’ Panarion. The bishop of Salamis identified them on the list of heretics as
….. "rebels," who forbid all flesh-eating, and do not eat living things at all. They have the holy names of patriarchs which are in the Pentateuch, up through Moses and Joshua the son of Nun, and they believe in them - I mean Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the earliest ones, and Moses himself, and Aaron, and Joshua. But they hold that the scriptures of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses, and maintain that they have others. (Panarion 1:18)
The lack of interest of Eisenman is understandable because he has vested interested in re-dating of the Qumran scrolls to make them speak of the 1st century Christians. The Nasaraeans, who look like an invention of Epiphanius , on the other hand are said to pre-date Christ (Panarion 29.5.7) and worship a different Jesus (Joshua of the Old Testament). This is a fascinating piece of the puzzle. If the Medicine Chest of Epiphanius deals with Christian heresies, why would these deplorable folks even be mentioned if they do not qualify on account being earlier than Jesus Christ ? Further, in the section where Epiphanius reveals this group was before Christ he makes a point to separate them from the ascetic ‘nazirites’, the first-borns consecrated to God, like Samson and John the Baptist. What were these heretics rebelling against, if their distinguishing characteristic was that they venerated the patriarchs, Moses and Jesus namely, and abstained from meat just like James the Just, whom the bishop describes as the paragon of holiness ? Does it have something to do with their belief that scriptures were written by the Holy Spirit ?
If it was just Epiphanius, then fine, he got it wrong or his sources were unreliable. But it isn’t: all the written accounts of James have a strange property of contradicting the beliefs about him as the first Christian bishop in Jerusalem and the brother of Jesus of Nazareth. All of them.
James is first registered in Paul’s letters. However, if you read my previous essays in the blog (How Many Were the Twelve, Through the Galatians Darkly), you would know that I do not consider two of the mentions to be an authentic Paul. Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem (Gal 1:18-24) is highly suspect as Paul has no reference to James and Cephas from the first visit, when he goes to Jerusalem the second time
Paul’s 1 Cr 15:3-11 also is a later interpolation. It was inserted by the Nazorean Petrines to combat Mark’s claim on the primacy of Paul’s gospel’s proclamation of the resurrected Christ. The passage lists James as one of those of whom Jesus was seen after his death. However, despite almost all documents agreeing on an undisputed leadership of James, in this inventory of Jesus appearances, his was listed low, after Cephas, the Twelve and some five hundred brethren who had seen Jesus at one time.
The only genuine reference to James in Paul is in Gal 2:12, where men come from James to Antioch and Cephas out of fear of the great leader withdraws from Gentile tables. If you read my essay on Galatians you would see I dispute the generally held view that James the “pillar” refers to James the Just. The latter simply was too dominant figure by all accounts, and his authority over the messianic groups extended far and wide, for Paul to have referred to him as “so-called pillar”, and claimed that he “added nothing” to his stature of apostle.
Outside of Paul’s corpus , chronologically , the first mention of him comes from the Gospel of Thomas:
GoT(12) The disciples said to Jesus : "We know that You will leave from us. Who is to be our leader ?" Jesus said to them : “From wherever you are now, You are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being."
This is an oracle of Jesus, which speaks, as it presumes an unknown locale of the disciples. Jesus “leaving” the disciples refers to the cease of the spirit phenomena through which they “see” him. The saying then directs those who have had the Jesus experience and possess the oracle to go to James the Just, in Jerusalem, once the oracular powers leave them. James is the divinely mandated protector of the Jesus oracle. This saying would have made no sense if it dated after James’ death in 62. Evidently, even if the reader of this does want to maintain it is real Jesus who speaks, then it would need to be explained why he is Jesus referring to his brother by a nickname he acquired after Jesus’ death as a leader of his church.
The third historical notice - no less controversial - comes from Josephus Flavius in whose Antiquities (xx.9) James the Just was described as the brother of Jesus, called Christ. The genuinness of the writing has been disputed by many as the appellation (him called Christ - ος λεγομενος χριστος) is hardly thinkable to describe a relationship for Josephus, who notoriously did not suffer gladly all manner of fools and deceivers believing themselves to be messiahs. Second, the appellation itself is a copy of what Jesus is called in the gospel of Matthew three times and in gospel of John once. As two if these turns of phrase in Matthew come from the mouth of Pontius Pilate, it looks like the naïve interpolator believed that this is how non-believers would have refered to Jesus of Nazareth.
James in the Acts and Hegesippus
If the treatment of James in the documents quoted above seems to contradict the officially held view that he was Jesus kin and the first bishop of a Jerusalem Christian assembly, then the Acts of Apostles account of him is nothing short of mind-boggling. James the Just, the universally recognized leader of the congregation, is nowhere seen until the twelfth chapter. He appears in the story literally out of nowhere, in a casual remark by Peter, who had just been liberated from Herod’s prison by means of a literary contrivance, about whose real nature, the storyteller avers, he seemed to be confused. Peter asks that the news of his liberation be passed onto “James and the brethren” whereupon he disappears from the Acts except for a cameo appearance at the “Jerusalem conference” (15:7). James himself only speaks once in the Acts at the same gathering, giving a compromise ruling on observances among Gentile converts. The only other mention of James comes as Paul reports to him and the elders on his third missionary journey. Nothing is heard of James on that occasion. In roughly thirty years that the Acts cover, the leader of the congregation and no doubt its public face in Jerusalem has no role to play. Nothing of historical substance is remembered of him. By my reading of the Galatians (Through the Galatians Darkly) there was no “conference” and Paul did not get to see James when going to Jerusalem.
Interestingly Luke’s Acts do not seem to know anything about James as Jesus brother. Acts 1:13-14 names two groups who pray in a house in Jerusalem, the eleven apostles as one group with Jesus’ mother Mary and his brothers (και τοις αδελφοις αυτου) as the other group. The church doctrine after Jerome has been that James the Just was in fact James the Lesser ( the son of Alphaeus) who was not really a brother but Jesus’ cousin, since ο αδελφος, can indicate that. But the problem is Luke does not indicate one way or another what specific relationship he means. The apostles pray as one group with Mary and Jesus kin as another. Since James the son Alphaeus is included in one group, he cannot be a Jesus kin by Luke’s reckoning: if he Luke had known anything about the tradition he would have written instead in 1:14 and his other brothers (και ετεροις αδελφοις αυτου).
Like the Acts, perhaps the most extensive memento of James, Hegesippus’ account preserved by Eusebius in his History, also disagrees dramatcally with the church’s later revisions of James’ position vis-à-vis Jesus and the nature of his assembly.
Now some persons belonging to the seven sects existing among the people, which have been before described by me in the Notes, asked him: "What is the door of Jesus? " And he replied that He was the Saviour. In Consequence of this answer, some believed that Jesus is the Christ. But the sects before mentioned did not believe, either in a resurrection or in the coming of One to requite every man according to his works; but those who did believe, believed because of James. So, when many even of the ruling class believed, there was a commotion among the Jews, and scribes, and Pharisees, who said: "A little more, and we shall have all the people looking for Jesus as the Christ.
They came, therefore, in a body to James, and said: "We entreat thee, restrain the people: for they are gone astray in their opinions about Jesus, as if he were the Christ. We entreat thee to persuade all who have come hither for the day of the passover, concerning Jesus. For we all listen to thy persuasion; since we, as well as all the people, bear thee testimony that thou art just, and showest partiality to none. Do thou, therefore, persuade the people not to entertain erroneous opinions concerning Jesus: for all the people, and we also, listen to thy persuasion. Take thy stand, then, upon the summit of the temple, that from that elevated spot thou mayest be clearly seen, and thy words may be plainly audible to all the people. For, in order to attend the passover, all the tribes have congregated hither, and some of the Gentiles also."
The aforesaid scribes and Pharisees accordingly set James on the summit of the temple, and cried aloud to him, and said: "O just one, whom we are all bound to obey, forasmuch as the people is in error, and follows Jesus the crucified, do thou tell us what is the door of Jesus, the crucified." And he answered with a loud voice: "Why ask ye me concerning Jesus the Son of man? He Himself sitteth in heaven, at the right hand of the Great Power, and shall come on the clouds of heaven."
And, when many were fully convinced by these words, and offered praise for the testimony of James, and said, "Hosanna to the son of David," then again the said Pharisees and scribes said to one another, "We have not done well in procuring this testimony to Jesus. But let us go up and throw him down, that they may be afraid, and not believe him." And they cried aloud, and said: "Oh! oh! the just man himself is in error." Thus they fulfilled the Scripture written in Isaiah: "Let us away with the just man, because he is troublesome to us: therefore shall they eat the fruit of their doings." So they went up and threw down the just man, and said to one another: "Let us stone James the Just." And they began to stone him: for he was not killed by the fall; but he turned, and kneeled down, and said: "I beseech Thee, Lord God our Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."
And, while they were thus stoning him to death, one of the priests, the sons of Rechab, the son of Rechabim, to whom testimony is borne by Jeremiah the prophet, began to cry aloud, saying: "Cease, what do ye? The just man is praying for us." But one among them, one of the fullers, took the staff with which he was accustomed to wring out the garments he dyed, and hurled it at the head of the just man.
Conclusion
In one of the believable observations J.D.Crossan makes in his voluminous, discursive account of The Birth of Christianity, is that in the historical reconstructions historians have already made judgments about the relationships of all the early gospels, about dependence and independence between them, and about possible sources hidden within them. This is undoubtedly true. My own views are based on the analytical finding that Mark as the first gospel is wholly a Pauline allegory (Mark’s Recursive Gospel), an offer to the Petrine Nazoreans to accept the cross of Christ as the symbol of universal spirituality against clinging to illusory parochial hopes for the restorations of God’s rule in Israel. Such reading eliminates the possibility that Jesus as the crucified Messiah was known and worshipped in Jerusalem.
If then the accounts of Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles are understood as a myth of self-foundation of the Christian faith, as a retroactive fitting of facts and legends in support of such vision, a better historical grasp of the origins is surely needed.
From my perspective, instead of Eusebius’ pre-existent Christ that was the foundation of the church, it was James’ pre-existent messianist community which sheltered heterodox beliefs, bound by the ecstatic experiences of the kingdom to come. It was James the Just, perhaps by proxy, who adopted the orphaned disciples of the Galilean Yeshua, and declared him a martyred prophet of the last days, rehabilitated in heaven. It was James the Just who sent Peter, John and James the Zebedee to proclaim this Jesus on missions to the Diaspora. Their preaching of a martyr who ‘hanged on a tree’ but was seen in heaven as high priest, outraged the traditionalists in the Jewish communities, and pietists like Paul who deeply disliked and mistrusted the messianic fervour of the missions. They were not least bit inclined to root for restoration, which they thought hopelessly out of touch with the realities of the Roman empire. When Paul became an ecstatic himself, he did not change his overall view of the situation; he only declared his spiritual vision as the higher truth of Jesus’ sacrifice. In Paul’s vision there was to be no heaven on earth; there was to be resurrection in heaven for those who served God faithfully, and declared the risen Lord Jesus Christ as their guiding light.
As I indicated earlier, Cephas and the Zebedees as the “so-called pillars” were not at all the leaders of James’ community. Paul writing as late as Romans (15:31) only had hope that his collection for the Jerusalem saints was going to break the opposition to him there and convince James and his saints of his worthiness as apostle. Cephas’ apprehension of James’ emissaries at Antioch (Gal 2:12) bespeaks of high dominance of James, and the transference of his power. In analogy, Peter’s fear would have been that of a Soviet ambassador under Stalin, cowering before diplomatic couriers, who he knew were NKVD operatives. His rank compared to theirs would have not mattered a whit. There is no doubt about it: James was the master of the house because he was its foundation.
P.S. The introduction of James in the Acts despite looking disjointed, probably had a historical kernel. Herod’s random dispatch of James the Zebedee seems a ploy which gives itself away by claiming that the unexplained act pleased the Jews, encouraging him to grab Peter also. In reality, this story may have originated in the arrest of the Jesus’ retinue fleeing from the Temple and in James the Just’s securing their pardon. The heinous act of Herod on James the Zebedee, serves as a way to introduce the great leader through the back door. It could have been a literary manoeuvre as Luke might have been aware of sources indicating James died during his mission in Spain. The later claims that James' burial grounds were in Northwestern corner of the peninsula created Europe’s most famous pilgrimage destination (Santiago de Compostela). The church claims that his remains were translated to Galicia in a series of miraculous happenings.
-------------------------[1] As no literary output outside of later Christian texts exists on the Jerusalem community of James, Qumran texts were used to analyze the apocalyptic confessions: [I am] as a sailor in a ship amid furious seas; their waves and all their billows roar against me; [ there is no calm] in the whirlwind that I may restore my soul…the deeps resound to my groaning and [my soul] has journeyed to the gates of death.
QH Thankgiving Hymns, in Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Pelican, 1987, p.183
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Notes on Jesus' Historicity
I remember a sprightly octogenarian years ago lecturing on the psychology of management. He asked us suddenly in what seemed like lunging off topic: “can anyone tell me the difference between managing and obssessing ?”. After five seconds of stoned silence and puzzled looks he offered: “It’s actually quite simple: if you are managing, you consider options”.
When it comes to deciding about Jesus’ existence, very few people seem to be managing historical information. The opinions seem to more about role-playing and peer expectations, personal commitment and calculations of effect, rhetorical thumps, marketing strategies, juvenile struggles with authority, mistaking authority for argument, and plain old-fashioned talking through the hat. It is interesting to observe that it is not only the two opposing certitudes that are at loggerheads with the hazy factuality around Jesus of Nazareth but even some among the agnostics. It has become sort of a sport in some quarters to claim that nothing can be said about anything in the NT texts that even indirectly relates to questions of Jesus’ historicity. I had one gentleman learned in the languages of antiquity disputing that one may fairly infer from 2 Corinthians 5:16 that Paul knew about Jesus (in whatever form) through humans prior to his belief he received revelation from God about the purpose of his career and death. This sort of deconstructionist tactic was well handled by G. A. Wells. He was challenged by an interviewer who offered gratuitously that on what we know, “whether Jesus existed is a trivial matter, not worth writing about”. The most eloquent proponent of the non-existence theory to-date retorted: “ the manner and origin of one of the world’s largest religions is no triviality” (“Did Jesus Exist ?” 1986, p 216).
So it would appear that in the query whether Jesus had an earthly career, the need to proffer assurances by and large displaces disinterested observation. Jesus, it appears, either must have existed, or could not have existed, or it is ridiculous to hold any beliefs either way. One cannot, by the looks of it, have a reserved opinion based on an independent assessment of the texts vis-a-vis external historical data surrounding them. To extract and manage information by schemas other than the ones approved of by one of the established schools of Jesus group-think, one is immediately scorned and dismissed. Indeed, I have been accused of eisegesis by all three.
Where Jesus as myth was the received wisdom
The earliest of my troubles is worth while recounting: I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia where Jesus was Myth and that was the state-enforced wisdom. As a student at the Economic Institute, I tried to probe the Communist Party dogma in a philosophy seminar, not because I was religious, but because I was curious. Mind you, I was not curious but not yet to the point of reading the Bible. As a matter of fact, I was as good a commie atheist student as a senior in a Jesuit college would be a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. My mom was a Catholic herself but she gave up on proselytizing me. My father and I hated it when she became devotional, because it was a sure-as-hell sign that she wanted to be sick and suffering; a martyr to an obscure cause. For my dad that meant no sex, for me no TLC. So, if I had believed in God and Freud, my Oedipus would have been partly to the father in heaven and his outlaw son to whom my mom clinged when she had the blues.
But as I said, I became curious. What ignited my curiosity was a remarkable film by an Italian communist by the name of Pier Paolo Pasolini. When I saw his Il vangelo secondo Matteo (Gospel according to Matthew) I was instantly converted - not to Christianity, mind you, but to Pasolini's ethos of seeing Christianity not as an ideological rival but a part of what our civilization is made of. When I say Christianity I mean the religion stripped off of the psychobabble and intimidation. Pasolini showed it could be done. It was a remarkable vision transcending silly cliches and worn out dogmas - the Church's and the Party's.
So, when a while later I was spoon fed the final word on JC by dialectical materialism in my philosophy class, I had a dissenting point of view essentially arguing it was quite possible that Jesus in fact did exist and the religious humbug was hung on him later. This of course was contrary to the teachings of Bruno Bauer and Frederick Engels, who my skripta said proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was a literary invention. My argument, which was somewhat naively spun around the miraculous powers of the Slovak highlander hero Juro Janosik, who was a historical figure and whose trial and execution in 1713 was properly documented, was dismissed as uninformed. Further, my obstinacy earned me a pohovor (an interview) in the dean’s office - essentially an attempt to bring back a stray bolshevik sheep by barking at it. Luckily for me, the assigned sheep dog was himself inclined to communist reformism (this was 1967, the year that brought in Dubcek as a party leader and Zdenek Mlynar as his chief ideologue, the latter a roommate at the Moscow Party Cadres School to a Stavropol party boss by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev). As an added stroke of luck, he ran out of cigarettes, and was in debt as he smoked mine. The interview went well. As I freely admitted I had no research interest in the matter, and read no Greek, my deviationism was classed as harmless: I never saw his report, but I imagine it said something to the effect that comrade S. would not be fooled by superstitious nonsense; he simply keeps his mind open as every smart svazák (young communist) should.
What the NT academics believe
In a 1985 paper presented at Ann Arbor Michigan gathering , G.A. Wells, shrugged that his theory had been the object of 'amused contempt' by the NT academics. At the conference itself – a gathering of biblical iconoclasts - Wells was attacked by Morton Smith, as an 'extreme Bultmaniac'. (Bultmann himself, however, described the view that Jesus did not exist as silly). But most of the time he was simply ignored by NT scholars, or dismissed as a non-specialist in the field (He is a professor of German). Those who read his thesis claiming that most of the epistles and Paul especially knew nothing of the gospel Jesus, and the latter failed to attribute his own teachings to him, did not have much of a response. What they offered was a standard cliché that Paul did not have to acknowledge Jesus’ doings and teachings because the church was familiar with them. Whether or not Paul’s silence on the earthly Jesus, is a proof of him never existing, Paul’s refusal to know Christ according to flesh, and a desire to entertain nothing about him except his crucifixion, are surely huge issues in no way sustained by the traditional church doctrines and their academic offshoots.
So what evidence does academia believe warrants Jesus’ existence ? I would venture that most of the external ‘evidence’ for Jesus has been largely discounted. Exhibits of such as Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, simply come too late and testify not to Jesus himself but to communal beliefs about him. Most academics would concede that. Only the incessant debates about Testimonium Flavianum seem to go on, one hundred years after Schweitzer made the final point on the Josephus ‘witness’ by condemning as useless and unseemly speculations on evidence that everyone knows was tampered with.
But if the majority of scholars today do not advertise much the independent witness (-this has now become the hobby of the evangelicals, mostly) they do seem near unanimous that the internal evidence supports beyond shadow of a doubt that Jesus of Nazareth walked on the planet. They may have the widest disagreements among themselves as to what is and what is not historical and factual in the gospels, but on the lecterns and on the podcasts they sound very much alike in their affected shock and disdain of people who don’t think it is as clear-cut as that.
The “assurance” factor in Jesus’ historical reality sometimes takes on bizarre shapes. David Boulton in his fine summary of the newest Jesus questing (Who On Earth Was Jesus ?, 2008) , takes to task E.P. Sanders, one of the leading mainstream N.T. scholars of the day, for his successive but conflicting certitudes as to what in the gospels he considers “almost indisputable facts”. In Jesus and Judaism (1985) he presented the following set:
· Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist
· Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve
· Jesus confined his activity to Israel
· Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed
· Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple
· After his death Jesus’ followers continued as an identifiable community
· At least some Jews persecuted at least part of the new movement
By 1991, (The Historical Figure of Jesus) Sanders revised his stance, generously adding to the list and modifying the things of which he was certain everyone could be certain.
· Jesus was born c. 4 BC, near the time of the death of Herod the Great
· He spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village
· Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist
· He called disciples (omitting “and spoke of there being twelve”)
· He taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee
· He preached “the kingdom of God” [but “healed” is omitted]
· He created disturbance in the temple area
· He had a final meal with his disciples
· He was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest
· He was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate
· His disciples at first fled
· They saw him (in what sense is uncertain) after his death
· As a consequence, they believed they believed he would return to found the kingdom
· After his death, his believers formed a community to await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as God’s Messiah
· [The statement that parts of the new movement were persecuted by at least soe Jews is omitted].
I observe, and observe somewhat cynically, that since there were no earth-shattering discoveries in the years that intervened between the two lists, and given professor Sanders’ erudition, the revision was simply in posturing. The second list extends the “assurance” to items which are not even disguised articles of faith. A sober reader of the texts would observe, e.g. the uncanny textual agreements between Paul’s 1 Cr 11:23-25 and Lk 22:19-20, and then the quaint entree of the Last Supper motif in 1 Cr 10:16 (The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?) and would have to ponder how quickly in Paul’s writing the Eucharist was prov'd from what was only imagined in a mere chapter before.
Similarly, we have no reliable evidence for the assertion that Jesus believers 'formed a community to await his return'. The Acts have been notoriously unreliable as chronicles of historical events. Gospel of Thomas portrays James the Righteous (why would Jesus use a surname to describe his brother ?) as someone who would shelter Jesus followers after he is gone ! The foundational event at Pentecost was so embarrassing to the later church intellectuals that it was expunged from Eusebius’ History. Matthew’s derivation of Jesus epithet of ‘Nazoraios’ from ‘Nazareth’ (2:23) has no way to account for the fact that John the Baptist, was a ‘Nazoraios’ too. ( A Mandanean sect in Iraq-al-Arabi calls itself ‘Nasoraij d’Yahya’ to this day.). It is more than probable then that the Nazorean house catered to both Jesus’ and John’s following, something forced Luke to deal with by making Elizabeth and Mary relatives. And what about Hebrews 6:20 calling Jesus a 'forerunner' and a high priest (in heaven) after the order of Melchizedek 'for ever' ? Isn’t the idea that Jesus entered the Holy Place, once and for all (Heb 9:12), to act as an intercessor and mediator for a new covenant somewhat at odds with the thesis that all believers thought of him as Messiah and awaited his return ? These are just some issues which professor Sanders was either unaware of or hastily discounted when arriving at historical certitudes.
Why I am not a Jesus Myther
First off, let me tell you that I do not consider the theory that Jesus never existed inherently implausible. As a matter of fact I believe it is a close call. I can imagine a scenario in which Jesus was originally a ‘code name’ for the oracular properties of the spirit visiting on Jamesian ecstatics, telling the wiser ones (the Thomasians) how to manage the spiritual fevers and others (the Petrines) that the psychoses were previews of the world to come (in the euphoric phase) and the end of the existing world (in the annihilation mess that followed) . I can imagine Paul encountering the crazed preachers and seers of the latter group, and militating against them until he himself became one, in acquiring the experience of the intoxication by the Spirit. It is certainly not beyond pale that he developed the mantra of the cross from some as yet unknown mystical source, or distilled it from vague Platonic ideas penetrating into his social setting.
(Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, Book II, 361e5: ‘The just man…will be scourged, racked, chained, have his eyes burned out; at last after every kind of misery he will be impaled’ (tr. by W.H.D. Rouse – some translators prefer ‘crucified’)). It is worth noting in this regard that in 1 Thessalonians, the earliest Paul’s letter by the reckoning of most, the cross did not yet figure as instrument of salvation.
I imagine also better Jesus Myth theories can be built, if their authors are a little bit more circumspect. G.A. Wells has my respect and admiration for steering the debate from vague, generalized, and often misleading assertions of mythical imports and ripoffs which were alleged to account wholly for the appearance of the Christ figure. He has constructed a fine model extracting plausible conclusions from the early Christian texts themselves read in their historical context. He has carried himself with remarkable poise and dignity. However, in attempting to stay within the existing scholarly paradigm of NT studies, he in my reckoning, misjudged the import of some of its analytical tools, most importantly the assumptions around the putative Q document. Q is a purely theoretical construct which at the break of the 20th century replaced a futile search for the Matthean oracles of the Lord. Over the decades, Q has become something of an industry, the document taking on refined stratification, with dozens of new titles and scholarly articles appearing annually further elaborating it. It may seem unbelievable, but it is true, that the massive, sustained, world-wide effort that goes into the science of Q has no other utility than to justify the opinion that Luke did not know Matthew.
To my mind, it makes no sense for a mythicist to participate in the Q propagation as the activity has only one real goal: to connect the gospels – which arrived late and show a great deal of creative literary composition – to some authoritative source from which they are copied, a document (text – not oral traditions) that would lead right to the deepest stratum of Q, the hallowed Urquelle called der golden Mund Jesu. Wells was finally persuaded that he could not hold onto the reality of the Q thesis and maintain at the same time the assumed textual sources – reverently transferred – did not ultimately lead to Jesus as the origin of at least some of the sayings.
Earl Doherty, who attached a bold new theory of sublunar career of Paul’s Christ to Wells’es earlier arguments, has likewise defended Q’s necessity to the detriment of his cause. Unlike Wells, however, Doherty seems oblivious to the paradox in his stance even though it has been harped on by more than one conservative website. Why would anyone who wishes to dispute the historical existence of Jesus want to rely on an imaginary document that was not known to anyone in the ancient world: not the orthodox church, not the heretics, not to the pagan critics ? Isn’t the shoe on the other foot ? Should not Q be the prime example of vested interest in illusory objects adorning the ivory tower of contemporary NT studies ?
The other thing I have noticed about both, Wells and Doherty, is their reluctance to set aside NT passages which are very dubious to the point of being silly and can painlessly be demonstrated to contradict what the source says elsewhere. E.g. if Paul presents consistently the image of himself as one divinely appointed to testify of God's Son, then a passage in which he assigns to himself the role of reprieved scumbag on criteria otherwise unknown in the corpus, needs to be set aside - even in the absence of a textual variant. One has to have that level of confidence, if one wants a new theory !
For myself, I feel reasonably comfortable there was a historical person of Jesus. On balance it still makes more sense then to read the epistles and gospels with a single historical referent pointing to an obscure and thwarted prophetic figure who became posthumously revered in a Jerusalem messianic assembly as a martyr and intercessor for a coming rule of God in Israel. It strikes me as better to explain Paul’s ‘silence’ on Jesus deeds and words as his rejection of Jesus’ messianic teachings assumed to have been propagated by his followers out of Jerusalem after his death (likely in several flavours). Paul created the Jesus Christ heavenly persona for a theology that rejected parochial Jewish expectations for God’s kingdom on earth. He and the Jesus missionaries out of Jerusalem were proselytic rivals. Paul’s attempts to find acceptance for his ideas in James’ inner circle appear to have been unsuccessful.
What specifically do I consider in Paul historical reference to Jesus ? Those of you who have read my preceding essays know by now that I do not credit as genuine certain passages in Paul which are usually cited by the traditional theologians as proof of Paul’s acceptance of Jesus as an earthly dominus. Rom 1:3, 1 Cr 11:23-26, 1 Cr 15:3-11, Gal 1:19, Gal 4:4, all appear to be later insertions into Paul’s letters to harmonize his views either the emerging orthodox doctrines or make them more explicit in support of the same. I take seriously Paul's proscriptions on discussing Jesus in flesh, (1 Cr 2:2, 2 Cr 5:16).
There are however several genuine Pauline passages regarding the crucifixion and temporal placement of Paul’s Jesus which will be hard to crack for any mythical theory.
Gal 3:1 - O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? It is difficult to imagine that the aggressive tone Paul takes could reference a mythical scenario. Only if the execution was real and historical, can the appeal to Paul’s previous teachings sustain the insult (!) he lobs at the defecting acolytes.
Gal 6:12 - It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that would compel you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Again, if there was no historical “cross of Christ” Paul’s impeachment of the judaizers would not make sense. If Jesus was a myth everyone would have known he was a myth, and whether there was a cross in the myth would have made no difference to anyone capable of rational thought. That the judaizers would be trying to avoid persecution for an event which did not take place on earth or within living memory, just does not play out, at least not in any way that I can see. On the other hand, if Jesus was executed for breaking the law (implied by Rom 8:4, Gal 3:13), then idolizing him publicly carried risks with it – and Paul’s pointing to the hypocrisy of his proselytic rivals with respect to the law which killed their idol – and which they don’t keep anyway - could be counted on to make an impact.
1 Cr 15:20 - But now (νυνί) Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. It is possible, as G.A. Wells believes that Paul thought Jesus lived a long time ago, left no trace, and it was only in Paul’s lifetime that he had risen. It is just not very convincing that (at least) two opposing sects during one generation suddenly invoked his name and began to vie for converts.
1 Cr 2:2 I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. The qualifier καὶ τοῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον, implies that Paul did not want to hear anything about Jesus before his crucifixion when coming to preach to Corinth. Again, if “Jesus said this and Jesus did that before he was killed” was a myth and Paul knew it then I am at a loss to grasp what difference it would have made to Paul’s pitiful condition to let people talk about the hero’s mythical exploits and mythical causes of his mythical downfall leading to his mythical death. But, if the obverse is true – if Paul in the throes of a persecutory stage of mania (See Origin of My Own Interest in Early Christian Psychology in the 2010 blog) suggests that the phantom visitor of the Corinthian mystics can be placated by acknowledging him as an ordinary recently living human empowered by God post-mortem, then it is reasonable to assume Paul found relief in the schema himself, that his Jesus Christ mantras actually had a way of reducing his own agitated psychosis. And it is equally probable that Paul’s fame as a ancient precursor of logotherapy* was established because his technique seems to have worked and with some people similarly afflicted as Paul. It worked as it provided (at least some) relief to what seemed to them as a meaningless, bottomless cycle of suffering. For the therapeutic hypno-suggestion to have worked, Jesus had to have proximity to the sufferers – similar to that of Paul – proximity in their social status, education, reputation in the community at large (1 Cr 1:18-31). It is my view – and I do not hold this to be more than an opinion of one person - that Jesus’ proximity would have been temporal as well, given the underlying belief that the end was near.
/* - Logotherapy was a psychotherpeutic technique pioneered by Victor Frankl. He used paradoxical formulas and self-hypnosis – evidenced in Paul and Mark - as a way to relieve suffering in his patients. Dr Frankl developed his ideas and methods while a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, as a way of coping personally with his predicament. Frankl wrote (in Man's Search for Meaning) that he was enriched by his Nazi death camp experience because it taught him things about himself and other people that he would have had no way of knowing had he not been subjected to the protracted struggle for the bare object of his existence.
Frankl's approach, I believe, has tantalizing relevance for Early Christian psychology. It provides a vital key to the effects of paradoxical structures of cognition present in Paul's theology and Mark's narrative - the importance of finding the 'euangelion' (glad tidings) in the suffering and humiliation they received at the hands of fate and other people.
When it comes to deciding about Jesus’ existence, very few people seem to be managing historical information. The opinions seem to more about role-playing and peer expectations, personal commitment and calculations of effect, rhetorical thumps, marketing strategies, juvenile struggles with authority, mistaking authority for argument, and plain old-fashioned talking through the hat. It is interesting to observe that it is not only the two opposing certitudes that are at loggerheads with the hazy factuality around Jesus of Nazareth but even some among the agnostics. It has become sort of a sport in some quarters to claim that nothing can be said about anything in the NT texts that even indirectly relates to questions of Jesus’ historicity. I had one gentleman learned in the languages of antiquity disputing that one may fairly infer from 2 Corinthians 5:16 that Paul knew about Jesus (in whatever form) through humans prior to his belief he received revelation from God about the purpose of his career and death. This sort of deconstructionist tactic was well handled by G. A. Wells. He was challenged by an interviewer who offered gratuitously that on what we know, “whether Jesus existed is a trivial matter, not worth writing about”. The most eloquent proponent of the non-existence theory to-date retorted: “ the manner and origin of one of the world’s largest religions is no triviality” (“Did Jesus Exist ?” 1986, p 216).
So it would appear that in the query whether Jesus had an earthly career, the need to proffer assurances by and large displaces disinterested observation. Jesus, it appears, either must have existed, or could not have existed, or it is ridiculous to hold any beliefs either way. One cannot, by the looks of it, have a reserved opinion based on an independent assessment of the texts vis-a-vis external historical data surrounding them. To extract and manage information by schemas other than the ones approved of by one of the established schools of Jesus group-think, one is immediately scorned and dismissed. Indeed, I have been accused of eisegesis by all three.
Where Jesus as myth was the received wisdom
The earliest of my troubles is worth while recounting: I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia where Jesus was Myth and that was the state-enforced wisdom. As a student at the Economic Institute, I tried to probe the Communist Party dogma in a philosophy seminar, not because I was religious, but because I was curious. Mind you, I was not curious but not yet to the point of reading the Bible. As a matter of fact, I was as good a commie atheist student as a senior in a Jesuit college would be a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. My mom was a Catholic herself but she gave up on proselytizing me. My father and I hated it when she became devotional, because it was a sure-as-hell sign that she wanted to be sick and suffering; a martyr to an obscure cause. For my dad that meant no sex, for me no TLC. So, if I had believed in God and Freud, my Oedipus would have been partly to the father in heaven and his outlaw son to whom my mom clinged when she had the blues.
But as I said, I became curious. What ignited my curiosity was a remarkable film by an Italian communist by the name of Pier Paolo Pasolini. When I saw his Il vangelo secondo Matteo (Gospel according to Matthew) I was instantly converted - not to Christianity, mind you, but to Pasolini's ethos of seeing Christianity not as an ideological rival but a part of what our civilization is made of. When I say Christianity I mean the religion stripped off of the psychobabble and intimidation. Pasolini showed it could be done. It was a remarkable vision transcending silly cliches and worn out dogmas - the Church's and the Party's.
So, when a while later I was spoon fed the final word on JC by dialectical materialism in my philosophy class, I had a dissenting point of view essentially arguing it was quite possible that Jesus in fact did exist and the religious humbug was hung on him later. This of course was contrary to the teachings of Bruno Bauer and Frederick Engels, who my skripta said proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was a literary invention. My argument, which was somewhat naively spun around the miraculous powers of the Slovak highlander hero Juro Janosik, who was a historical figure and whose trial and execution in 1713 was properly documented, was dismissed as uninformed. Further, my obstinacy earned me a pohovor (an interview) in the dean’s office - essentially an attempt to bring back a stray bolshevik sheep by barking at it. Luckily for me, the assigned sheep dog was himself inclined to communist reformism (this was 1967, the year that brought in Dubcek as a party leader and Zdenek Mlynar as his chief ideologue, the latter a roommate at the Moscow Party Cadres School to a Stavropol party boss by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev). As an added stroke of luck, he ran out of cigarettes, and was in debt as he smoked mine. The interview went well. As I freely admitted I had no research interest in the matter, and read no Greek, my deviationism was classed as harmless: I never saw his report, but I imagine it said something to the effect that comrade S. would not be fooled by superstitious nonsense; he simply keeps his mind open as every smart svazák (young communist) should.
What the NT academics believe
In a 1985 paper presented at Ann Arbor Michigan gathering , G.A. Wells, shrugged that his theory had been the object of 'amused contempt' by the NT academics. At the conference itself – a gathering of biblical iconoclasts - Wells was attacked by Morton Smith, as an 'extreme Bultmaniac'. (Bultmann himself, however, described the view that Jesus did not exist as silly). But most of the time he was simply ignored by NT scholars, or dismissed as a non-specialist in the field (He is a professor of German). Those who read his thesis claiming that most of the epistles and Paul especially knew nothing of the gospel Jesus, and the latter failed to attribute his own teachings to him, did not have much of a response. What they offered was a standard cliché that Paul did not have to acknowledge Jesus’ doings and teachings because the church was familiar with them. Whether or not Paul’s silence on the earthly Jesus, is a proof of him never existing, Paul’s refusal to know Christ according to flesh, and a desire to entertain nothing about him except his crucifixion, are surely huge issues in no way sustained by the traditional church doctrines and their academic offshoots.
So what evidence does academia believe warrants Jesus’ existence ? I would venture that most of the external ‘evidence’ for Jesus has been largely discounted. Exhibits of such as Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, simply come too late and testify not to Jesus himself but to communal beliefs about him. Most academics would concede that. Only the incessant debates about Testimonium Flavianum seem to go on, one hundred years after Schweitzer made the final point on the Josephus ‘witness’ by condemning as useless and unseemly speculations on evidence that everyone knows was tampered with.
But if the majority of scholars today do not advertise much the independent witness (-this has now become the hobby of the evangelicals, mostly) they do seem near unanimous that the internal evidence supports beyond shadow of a doubt that Jesus of Nazareth walked on the planet. They may have the widest disagreements among themselves as to what is and what is not historical and factual in the gospels, but on the lecterns and on the podcasts they sound very much alike in their affected shock and disdain of people who don’t think it is as clear-cut as that.
The “assurance” factor in Jesus’ historical reality sometimes takes on bizarre shapes. David Boulton in his fine summary of the newest Jesus questing (Who On Earth Was Jesus ?, 2008) , takes to task E.P. Sanders, one of the leading mainstream N.T. scholars of the day, for his successive but conflicting certitudes as to what in the gospels he considers “almost indisputable facts”. In Jesus and Judaism (1985) he presented the following set:
· Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist
· Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve
· Jesus confined his activity to Israel
· Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed
· Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple
· After his death Jesus’ followers continued as an identifiable community
· At least some Jews persecuted at least part of the new movement
By 1991, (The Historical Figure of Jesus) Sanders revised his stance, generously adding to the list and modifying the things of which he was certain everyone could be certain.
· Jesus was born c. 4 BC, near the time of the death of Herod the Great
· He spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village
· Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist
· He called disciples (omitting “and spoke of there being twelve”)
· He taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee
· He preached “the kingdom of God” [but “healed” is omitted]
· He created disturbance in the temple area
· He had a final meal with his disciples
· He was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest
· He was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate
· His disciples at first fled
· They saw him (in what sense is uncertain) after his death
· As a consequence, they believed they believed he would return to found the kingdom
· After his death, his believers formed a community to await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as God’s Messiah
· [The statement that parts of the new movement were persecuted by at least soe Jews is omitted].
I observe, and observe somewhat cynically, that since there were no earth-shattering discoveries in the years that intervened between the two lists, and given professor Sanders’ erudition, the revision was simply in posturing. The second list extends the “assurance” to items which are not even disguised articles of faith. A sober reader of the texts would observe, e.g. the uncanny textual agreements between Paul’s 1 Cr 11:23-25 and Lk 22:19-20, and then the quaint entree of the Last Supper motif in 1 Cr 10:16 (The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?) and would have to ponder how quickly in Paul’s writing the Eucharist was prov'd from what was only imagined in a mere chapter before.
Similarly, we have no reliable evidence for the assertion that Jesus believers 'formed a community to await his return'. The Acts have been notoriously unreliable as chronicles of historical events. Gospel of Thomas portrays James the Righteous (why would Jesus use a surname to describe his brother ?) as someone who would shelter Jesus followers after he is gone ! The foundational event at Pentecost was so embarrassing to the later church intellectuals that it was expunged from Eusebius’ History. Matthew’s derivation of Jesus epithet of ‘Nazoraios’ from ‘Nazareth’ (2:23) has no way to account for the fact that John the Baptist, was a ‘Nazoraios’ too. ( A Mandanean sect in Iraq-al-Arabi calls itself ‘Nasoraij d’Yahya’ to this day.). It is more than probable then that the Nazorean house catered to both Jesus’ and John’s following, something forced Luke to deal with by making Elizabeth and Mary relatives. And what about Hebrews 6:20 calling Jesus a 'forerunner' and a high priest (in heaven) after the order of Melchizedek 'for ever' ? Isn’t the idea that Jesus entered the Holy Place, once and for all (Heb 9:12), to act as an intercessor and mediator for a new covenant somewhat at odds with the thesis that all believers thought of him as Messiah and awaited his return ? These are just some issues which professor Sanders was either unaware of or hastily discounted when arriving at historical certitudes.
Why I am not a Jesus Myther
First off, let me tell you that I do not consider the theory that Jesus never existed inherently implausible. As a matter of fact I believe it is a close call. I can imagine a scenario in which Jesus was originally a ‘code name’ for the oracular properties of the spirit visiting on Jamesian ecstatics, telling the wiser ones (the Thomasians) how to manage the spiritual fevers and others (the Petrines) that the psychoses were previews of the world to come (in the euphoric phase) and the end of the existing world (in the annihilation mess that followed) . I can imagine Paul encountering the crazed preachers and seers of the latter group, and militating against them until he himself became one, in acquiring the experience of the intoxication by the Spirit. It is certainly not beyond pale that he developed the mantra of the cross from some as yet unknown mystical source, or distilled it from vague Platonic ideas penetrating into his social setting.
(Glaucon in Plato’s Republic, Book II, 361e5: ‘The just man…will be scourged, racked, chained, have his eyes burned out; at last after every kind of misery he will be impaled’ (tr. by W.H.D. Rouse – some translators prefer ‘crucified’)). It is worth noting in this regard that in 1 Thessalonians, the earliest Paul’s letter by the reckoning of most, the cross did not yet figure as instrument of salvation.
I imagine also better Jesus Myth theories can be built, if their authors are a little bit more circumspect. G.A. Wells has my respect and admiration for steering the debate from vague, generalized, and often misleading assertions of mythical imports and ripoffs which were alleged to account wholly for the appearance of the Christ figure. He has constructed a fine model extracting plausible conclusions from the early Christian texts themselves read in their historical context. He has carried himself with remarkable poise and dignity. However, in attempting to stay within the existing scholarly paradigm of NT studies, he in my reckoning, misjudged the import of some of its analytical tools, most importantly the assumptions around the putative Q document. Q is a purely theoretical construct which at the break of the 20th century replaced a futile search for the Matthean oracles of the Lord. Over the decades, Q has become something of an industry, the document taking on refined stratification, with dozens of new titles and scholarly articles appearing annually further elaborating it. It may seem unbelievable, but it is true, that the massive, sustained, world-wide effort that goes into the science of Q has no other utility than to justify the opinion that Luke did not know Matthew.
To my mind, it makes no sense for a mythicist to participate in the Q propagation as the activity has only one real goal: to connect the gospels – which arrived late and show a great deal of creative literary composition – to some authoritative source from which they are copied, a document (text – not oral traditions) that would lead right to the deepest stratum of Q, the hallowed Urquelle called der golden Mund Jesu. Wells was finally persuaded that he could not hold onto the reality of the Q thesis and maintain at the same time the assumed textual sources – reverently transferred – did not ultimately lead to Jesus as the origin of at least some of the sayings.
Earl Doherty, who attached a bold new theory of sublunar career of Paul’s Christ to Wells’es earlier arguments, has likewise defended Q’s necessity to the detriment of his cause. Unlike Wells, however, Doherty seems oblivious to the paradox in his stance even though it has been harped on by more than one conservative website. Why would anyone who wishes to dispute the historical existence of Jesus want to rely on an imaginary document that was not known to anyone in the ancient world: not the orthodox church, not the heretics, not to the pagan critics ? Isn’t the shoe on the other foot ? Should not Q be the prime example of vested interest in illusory objects adorning the ivory tower of contemporary NT studies ?
The other thing I have noticed about both, Wells and Doherty, is their reluctance to set aside NT passages which are very dubious to the point of being silly and can painlessly be demonstrated to contradict what the source says elsewhere. E.g. if Paul presents consistently the image of himself as one divinely appointed to testify of God's Son, then a passage in which he assigns to himself the role of reprieved scumbag on criteria otherwise unknown in the corpus, needs to be set aside - even in the absence of a textual variant. One has to have that level of confidence, if one wants a new theory !
For myself, I feel reasonably comfortable there was a historical person of Jesus. On balance it still makes more sense then to read the epistles and gospels with a single historical referent pointing to an obscure and thwarted prophetic figure who became posthumously revered in a Jerusalem messianic assembly as a martyr and intercessor for a coming rule of God in Israel. It strikes me as better to explain Paul’s ‘silence’ on Jesus deeds and words as his rejection of Jesus’ messianic teachings assumed to have been propagated by his followers out of Jerusalem after his death (likely in several flavours). Paul created the Jesus Christ heavenly persona for a theology that rejected parochial Jewish expectations for God’s kingdom on earth. He and the Jesus missionaries out of Jerusalem were proselytic rivals. Paul’s attempts to find acceptance for his ideas in James’ inner circle appear to have been unsuccessful.
What specifically do I consider in Paul historical reference to Jesus ? Those of you who have read my preceding essays know by now that I do not credit as genuine certain passages in Paul which are usually cited by the traditional theologians as proof of Paul’s acceptance of Jesus as an earthly dominus. Rom 1:3, 1 Cr 11:23-26, 1 Cr 15:3-11, Gal 1:19, Gal 4:4, all appear to be later insertions into Paul’s letters to harmonize his views either the emerging orthodox doctrines or make them more explicit in support of the same. I take seriously Paul's proscriptions on discussing Jesus in flesh, (1 Cr 2:2, 2 Cr 5:16).
There are however several genuine Pauline passages regarding the crucifixion and temporal placement of Paul’s Jesus which will be hard to crack for any mythical theory.
Gal 3:1 - O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? It is difficult to imagine that the aggressive tone Paul takes could reference a mythical scenario. Only if the execution was real and historical, can the appeal to Paul’s previous teachings sustain the insult (!) he lobs at the defecting acolytes.
Gal 6:12 - It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that would compel you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Again, if there was no historical “cross of Christ” Paul’s impeachment of the judaizers would not make sense. If Jesus was a myth everyone would have known he was a myth, and whether there was a cross in the myth would have made no difference to anyone capable of rational thought. That the judaizers would be trying to avoid persecution for an event which did not take place on earth or within living memory, just does not play out, at least not in any way that I can see. On the other hand, if Jesus was executed for breaking the law (implied by Rom 8:4, Gal 3:13), then idolizing him publicly carried risks with it – and Paul’s pointing to the hypocrisy of his proselytic rivals with respect to the law which killed their idol – and which they don’t keep anyway - could be counted on to make an impact.
1 Cr 15:20 - But now (νυνί) Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. It is possible, as G.A. Wells believes that Paul thought Jesus lived a long time ago, left no trace, and it was only in Paul’s lifetime that he had risen. It is just not very convincing that (at least) two opposing sects during one generation suddenly invoked his name and began to vie for converts.
1 Cr 2:2 I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. The qualifier καὶ τοῦτον ἐσταυρωμένον, implies that Paul did not want to hear anything about Jesus before his crucifixion when coming to preach to Corinth. Again, if “Jesus said this and Jesus did that before he was killed” was a myth and Paul knew it then I am at a loss to grasp what difference it would have made to Paul’s pitiful condition to let people talk about the hero’s mythical exploits and mythical causes of his mythical downfall leading to his mythical death. But, if the obverse is true – if Paul in the throes of a persecutory stage of mania (See Origin of My Own Interest in Early Christian Psychology in the 2010 blog) suggests that the phantom visitor of the Corinthian mystics can be placated by acknowledging him as an ordinary recently living human empowered by God post-mortem, then it is reasonable to assume Paul found relief in the schema himself, that his Jesus Christ mantras actually had a way of reducing his own agitated psychosis. And it is equally probable that Paul’s fame as a ancient precursor of logotherapy* was established because his technique seems to have worked and with some people similarly afflicted as Paul. It worked as it provided (at least some) relief to what seemed to them as a meaningless, bottomless cycle of suffering. For the therapeutic hypno-suggestion to have worked, Jesus had to have proximity to the sufferers – similar to that of Paul – proximity in their social status, education, reputation in the community at large (1 Cr 1:18-31). It is my view – and I do not hold this to be more than an opinion of one person - that Jesus’ proximity would have been temporal as well, given the underlying belief that the end was near.
/* - Logotherapy was a psychotherpeutic technique pioneered by Victor Frankl. He used paradoxical formulas and self-hypnosis – evidenced in Paul and Mark - as a way to relieve suffering in his patients. Dr Frankl developed his ideas and methods while a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, as a way of coping personally with his predicament. Frankl wrote (in Man's Search for Meaning) that he was enriched by his Nazi death camp experience because it taught him things about himself and other people that he would have had no way of knowing had he not been subjected to the protracted struggle for the bare object of his existence.
Frankl's approach, I believe, has tantalizing relevance for Early Christian psychology. It provides a vital key to the effects of paradoxical structures of cognition present in Paul's theology and Mark's narrative - the importance of finding the 'euangelion' (glad tidings) in the suffering and humiliation they received at the hands of fate and other people.
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