Paul's Lexicon

                Ever since acquiring a modicum of koine Greek, and parsing the NT texts in the language of their composers, I have been struck by the uniqueness of some of the constructs before me. I wondered if it may be simply my feeble grasp of the language. But the turns of phrase became etched into my memory and I was returning to them over and over (,over the years) to test if my intuition about them would hold.  In most cases it did and I was further encouraged by regularly finding the rarest quality among NT diviners – a frank admission of not having a clue – surrounding a number of them.  The apparent weirdness seemed then to be a datum, not just a personal feeling.  

            Mental health professionals today would immediately recognize familiar issues with Gal 2:19-20.  Paul avers that he was crucified with Christ and that it is no longer he, Paul, who lives, but Christ who lives in him.  Taken the words without affectation, Paul is being morbid. The idea he articulates attests to a process of disassociation and psychic annihilation inside the writer’s head.  Whatever the mystic dimension to the apostle’s spirit, Paul was not crucified when he wrote or dictated the letter. Whatever theology can elucidate, it cannot explain why Paul in receiving the wisdom hidden from everyone for aeons, feels compelled to present it as a testimony to necrotizing agony, in the bipolar contrasts of eternal bliss and fulfilment thrown against unforgiving, unmitigated hostility of God to his creation and the abandonment of his most ennobling project called ‘life’.  If Paul grew spiritually beyond yelding to the passions of the flesh, why the hyperbole of torturous, universal,  unappealable death ?   What does crucified with Christ mean, anyhow ? 

Actually Paul does not even say he was crucified with Christ. That is a translation made in most languages, faut de mieux.  Paul, for his part, says something more along the lines of having been co-crucified  or having shared in Christ’s crucifixion. The verb systauroō stands along a number of words showing Paul’s and his friends fondness for the sy- constructs (e.g. synergos, sygkoinōnos, synaichmalōtos, systratiōtēs, symparakaleō, sympsychos and in the deutero-Paulines: synoikodomeō, syndesmos, sympolitēs, sygklēronomos, syssōmos, symmetochos, syndoulos).  The prefix ‘sy-‘ stresses the commitment of Paul and his early imitators to their communal enterprise and the collective nature of their  mystical apprehensions. This poses little difficulty when applied to terms like workers, soldiers, servants, prisoners, or in building, or gathering together.  There is however a problem in proclaiming oneself sharing in someone’s death. This is not simply a hyperbole. Paul is not saying, rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. He says, I am greatly exaggerating when I tell you I am dead.

          The idea that Paul was overdoing, whatever it was he was doing, was most likely first resented and ridiculed by the Jewish Nazarenes. They accepted Paul’s theology of the cross but no way the moral equivalency of Paul’s suffering to the one who was crucified for real.  We have an excellent example of this in Matthew 27:44  where he lampoons Paul’s systauroō  by adding a redundant preposition syn (with) to the already prefixed word indicating that the robbers were crucified with Jesus.  The effect would be an instant howl to anyone who knew what the allusion meant.  I hold that the double sy- is of Matthean origin, and was later assimilated into Mark (15:32), as it follows the anti-Pauline ‘doublets’ in the stories of the Gadarene demoniac, the blind beggar at Jericho and the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem.  (I will explain the meaning of Matthew’s ‘doubling’ on Mark’s characters in one of the next posts). 

Beastfighting in Ephesus and such

The ‘sharing in the crucifixion of Christ’ describes Paul’s debilitating lows, and struggles with depressive psychosis.  It becomes a starting point in an abstract narrative for which he found an audience among people similarly afflicted. No doubt many found relief in the discovery their suffering had an explanation and through Paul and his acolytes was shared across the known world. No doubt that absurd as Paul’s mantras and missions spreading the good news of salvation in the impending collapse of heavens seemed to the outsiders, in the inner circle of the saints who suffered for no reason other than that they seemed to have been chosen to suffer, Paul was seen as one sent to them by God.  His gospel spelled relief and hope and restored the dignity that was being denied to them by other people and fate.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. 2 Cor 4:7-12 

The semantics in the passage are difficult but not impenetrable.  They bespeak primarily of inner struggle for the meaning of one’s existence.  It seems clear to me (as a sufferer of the disorder that I recognize struck Paul) that the apostle struggled to establish the “new normal” after his bi-polarity presented itself in an acute form. Paul found a way to make something extraordinary from a banal illness.
     

People nowadays scoff at the idea that Jesus died for their sins. It is meaningless to them and it is not difficult to guess why. Salvation is worth nothing if you don’t need it. But Paul’s teachings in his time were not for everyone despite what Acts of Apostles would claim later;  it addressed itself to a core audience of people who like himself were in need of relief from acute suffering. 

Musing over his initial episode of full-blown mania,  he reasoned if Jesus whom he badmouthed prior to his first hypermanic episode ( 2 Cor 12:2 -9) was a mad prophet because God made him mad and he was destroyed by God because of his madness, and if God was now destroying Paul, the pious, blameless, educated, as close to perfect Pharisee as you could get, and if God was destroying both Jesus and Paul for no cause other than to frustrate the vision of heavenly bliss he himself supplied to them, then life was meaningless nonsense. God would have been the perfect gentile Demiurge.  Nothing could save Paul if the sight of the Omnipotent was on him, had he accepted the shrug of the Greeks that his God was out to destroy him, just like their gods do routinely to amuse themselves in their leisure.
  

But if there was a plan and not it was not just another delusion, i.e. if the manic experience was to be interpreted to show to Paul and through Paul, that no man may boast in the presence of God, then there was hope for Paul and those afflicted like himself.  The crucified savior admittedly sounded like a crazy proposition to everyone innocent of the internal struggles that happen only to those whose brain chemistry goes out of whack and returns back to something like normal.   But lest you think that the Paul’s parallel of his suffering to Jesus’ death on the cross was a cheap hyperbole you need to know this ‘ Very commonly it is asserted’, wrote Professor Kraepelin the German diagnostician of the manic-depressive illness, ’that the disease is a greater torture than any other and that the patient’ would far, far rather endure any bodily pain than disorder of the mind’  The baptism into the death of Christ would be a powerful metaphor in the circles where Paul moved.  No doubt, it helped many of those Paul screened for his therapy.

Bart Ehrman, who is all the rage these days after he unloaded on the atheist hordes denying Jesus walked on Earth, thinks the legend of Paul and the baptized talking lion (in the pseudepigraphical Acts of Paul) , developed “out of a vague reference” to Paul’s own letters.  In 1 Cor 15:32 Paul makes the strangest claim: (RSV)“What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus?  If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Ehrman comments dryly, “He obviously survived but how ?”(Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, p. 133)  It is strange that the best known popular interpreter of the New Testament is by all appearances clueless as to the meaning of this verse. But then again Ehrman also believes (or affects to believe) that Paul met Jesus biological brother, so the issue may not be all that hot.  Not if another well known scholar of our time Dominic Crossan has convinced himself that the “beasts” were actually Roman guards who were chained to him during his imprisonment at the praetorium. θηριομαχεω which combines beast and fighting, and would likely sound as strange to a koine Greek speaker as “beastfighting” would sound to a native English speaker. Unless it was some local argot, used as a putdown. By all appearances, Crossan’s idea comes from the letter of Ignatius to Romans (5.5) but that is obviously Paul interpreted by the imagination of a later churchman with somewhat different issues, who manufactured his own context to them. That Crossan should credit this as real, is uncanny as he is the only one, to my knowledge, who correctly reads (at least some of) Paul’s imprisonments as metaphorical.   

The problem with interpreting Paul’s meaning does not seem to start with the strangely positioned verb but by the qualification he places before it εἰ κατὰ ἄνθρωπον . This is variously rendered as “humanly speaking”, “from human point of view”, “for merely human reasons” and similar pap, which makes it clear that the translators are groping in the dark.The phrase evidently stresses that seeing whatever Paul actually does as “fighting with beasts” is not his own but an external view of himself. Paul uses κατὰ ἄνθρωπον for exactly the same function in Gal 3:15, to say he speaks not as God’s plenipotentiary but in common terms. In Galatians, the phrase could be rendered more meaningfully as “in simple terms”, or “without putting a too fine point on it”.  In the context of 1 Corinthians the external POV would need to be stressed further, in order to set the verb in the intended context.  It could be “if, as they/men/people would say,…”, or “if …as the saying goes” or something in that vein. So let us see what the sentence gives when we convert the idiom: ‘How do I profit then, if,  according to popular wisdom, I was [beastfighting]  in Ephesus ? If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”.  So, by the structure of the sentence, it is clear Paul did not fight with beasts literally, but rather was seen in Ephesus in a state of mind which made people think he was wasting time fighting with the devils for an obscure cause.

                Nonetheless, metaphorical fighting with beasts had a venerable traditon among early Christians. If the mystics were laughed at as fighting imaginary predators, they would wear the insults proudly and converted them to clever insights.  Here is my reading of perhaps the most brilliant Thomasian saying (GThomas 7):

                                                 Blessed is the lion whom the man eats

                                                For the man will become like a lion

                                                And cursed is the man whom the lion

                                                eats for the lion will become like a man.

In other words, if one overcomes and masters the assaults of psychosis  one becomes enriched and strengthened by the experience of one’s restoration; if one is consumed by it one will be reduced to pathetic beastliness.  The saying was evidently popular among the early Christians, as evidenced by 1 Pe 5:8.   Paul’s saying in 1 Corinthians however does not show he was familiar with it. 

Those Who Would Save Jesus - Prologue (sketch)

Hi, everyone
     I back after a longer pause: had some other business than Early Christians on my plate.  As you can plainly see, I am a part-time apostle...the time-proved technique of keeping my sanity. 

Thanks to Bruce Dunn for the heads-up on Mark Vonnegut's memoir:  there is a connection between this hobby of mine and his dad, in that I was crazy about Kurt's writing and during my episode tried to contact him, through what I believed was a code about his whereabouts in Cat's Cradle.  I was  sort of a Dwayne Hoover chasing Kilgore Trout.  The parallel of my insane chase of Kurt Vonnegut was not available until after. I figured that a legion of nutjobs like me who believed themselves on the same karas as Kurt were likely harrassing him and that supplied the plot of the Breakfast of Champions.   I picked up Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So. I saw the beef that there were not enough questions about early Christianity.  I will write to Mark about my project.  Thanks again, Bruce. 

****

There are themes in the Prolog sketch below which more or less a repeat of the first post on the blog: it is give a quick overview of the subject matter discussed here.  Those who read the 'Not Thinking Differently' essay will notice that I changed my rendering of the anecdote by Bertrand Russell. I feel pretty sure that I saw the anecdote  in the form I gave out originally, but I could not find it even though I searched very hard.   So I changed it to the one in A History of Western Philosophy. 

****

Those Who Would Save Jesus

 

Prologue 

The idea may seem strange at first but I feel strangely assured that most people will get it - eventually.  Jesus seems to have lived on one-way salvation street: did this, taught that, cured the sick, messed with the natural law, called to repentance, and writhed on the cross for our sins. Did I say ‘writhed’ ?  It seems an unbiblical (or is it ibiblical ?) verb, but let it stand.  It is to make the point that some of us don’t actually mind seeing another human in a heart-rending agony to pay  vicariously for our improved health and prospects in the great yonder.  No, do not be fooled by the crucifix; you are not looking at a relic worshipping a random act of meaningless barbarity. You are the benefactors of God’s gift to us, his own Son whom he made insane, and killed by his own law, to show mercy to those who have faith  in it as the act of divine wisdom and atonement for their sins.  No, I am not making this up: apostle Paul said that and from this idea of Paul a religion was born that conquered the world. It may sound insane, but perhaps it is the one of the best insanities humans can hope for.  

   I say that because people who acquired the cultural reflex of condemning  Christianity, or denying  any positive influence the religion had on our civilization are blind in one eye. The beam in that eye makes them unable to see that that when Paul wrote to the Corinthians that God made Jesus sin but he knew no sin, Jesus was already dead. Nothing could change that fact.  Nothing could change also the perception of it as an act of outrageous barbarity, in people capable of feeling for another human being.

    This Saving of Jesus is sort of an experiment.  I could tell you that I had a revelation, that an oracle told me, that I too had the light in my body, but we are much older now, and locutions of this sort do not – and should not – sway anyone who is intelligent and has a healthy sense of self.  Paul may have struggled with how to present his gnosis, and not sounding like the other apostolic idiots, but we are more sophisticated and public-relations savvy.  We know from Abraham Maslow that some of us have messianic personalities.  We also  know most will end up in psychiatric care if we don’t become great leaders, artists, writers, standup comedians or find another fascinating object to occupy us other than our precious selves.  So I simply tell you this: there are certain things I know I know about the origin of Christianity. These are my internal  assurances. Whether they are believable to you or not, is not my issue. You may bless, diss, question me or ignore me. The heavens will not fall down because of my reading of the gospel and  no-one will be judged on the last day based on his or her willingness to save Jesus.  I can promise you that.  How is that for good news ?         
  
   In the earliest gospel, Mark, the spirit of the Lord swoops on (actually, into) Jesus and obliterates him as a human. From then on, Jesus, though flesh and blood is driven by the spirit.  He becomes the one who was sent to save.  From then on, there seems to be no other purpose to his existence.  He calls folks to repentance, teaches, tames nature, cures the sick, and goes to Jerusalem to fulfill his contract. He doesn’t eat except by implication until the Last Supper;  he doesn’t laugh or weep; when he gets tired and falls asleep once upon a  gospel he is awaken by the disciples because the ship is sinking and the needy guys complain when he gets groomed by a woman. He only gets kissed once and it is the kiss of death that was foretold by a scripture as it was being written. 

    If Jesus hadn’t been saved from oblivion we would have not known about him. And if you say the gospels see that differently, then you have not read the above paragraph the way it was intended to be read.  They mean exactly the same thing. No-one would have known about Jesus if  Paul and an unknown author we know as Mark  did not begin writing about him in the two genres of the New Testament: the epistle and the narrative gospel. The two of them, you will see, were the ones who took pity. They took pity on Jesus, and many like him who would have fallen into the same trap as he had, and boasted of God in God’s presence like some some of his followers did.  Paul and Mark had a solemn purpose, which was to save others from the fate of an unknown, insignificant, ecstatic Galilean prophet. All that we can be reasonably sure of, concerning him , is that he wandered  into Jerusalem in the reign of Tiberius with a small group of followers and was killed there, likely after an arrest in the precinct of the Temple.  He would have been forgotten soon, perhaps sooner than Juhayman al-Oteibi, the Saudi messianic leader who perished in the assault on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, that is,  in the age of information overload.  He, unlike the Jesus of the Nazarenes, was global news. Who remembers Juhayman now ?  Who saved him ? Jesus of Galilee did not register  a blip on the history radar, but would not be forgotten by a small community in Jerusalem outraged by the Temple priests and the hated Gentile occupiers who killed him.  Without the poor Jerusalem saints awaiting Messiah nothing would have become of the obscure drifter who apparently believed God told him the end of misery was near and the restored kingdom of Israel was at hand. The saints adopted his disciples and sent them out to preach of his martyrdom.  

   In the early days of my project,  I was somewhat naïve about the effect of my ideas.  When I told an Anglican priest I held that Christianity (like  other religions)  owes a great deal to a common mental challenge that in our day and age has a diagnosis (or two), he became upset. He told me that my little theory has obviously a simple goal, to apprehend his faith as a product of sick minds in order to declare its tenets invalid. I asked him if it would help to change his view if I told him I was diagnosed with the disorder myself.  After all, I was easily refuted by the fact I would admit to having been sick in the head myself,  if one wants to look at it that way.  He seemed to struggle with the idea for a moment but then his face lit up as if in a triumphal revelation. ‘I think I will take you up on your offer’, he said with all the philosophy he could cram into his face, as he was standing up and extending his hand.     

     It was a valuable lesson.  It helped me to understand  that any new revelation on who Jesus really was, what he really said, how he managed to keep balance when treading water on a stormy sea,  or what really happened after he walked away from the botched crucifixion will be always the same old same old.  And the reason is simply this: such noble efforts are predicated by the suggestion of Christ as the ultimate authority and oneself as the only one who really understands him.  You may rest assured that some efforts to re-invent  the wheel of the gospel will be hilarious.  Richard Dawkins for example considers God to be Delusion, and yet has run an essay titled ‘Atheists for Jesus’ on his website. He argues that Jesus was a theist with Father in heaven only because there were no brights like Dawkins to teach him the science of 10⁴⁶ monkeys at typewriters busy producing a line from Hamlet.  In another case, a gentleman by the name of Earl Doherty has recently compiled  850 page volume he considers the final proof that Jesus did not exist. But who needs such a proof, given there is no material evidence  that Jesus existed, except to those who really need to believe that ? Why would one want to go to such extravagant lengths to argue with the simpler folks who take the Bible literally and who find in Jesus their better self ?  Why ? The simple proof of Jesus non-existence would be to say tout çela est bon et bien , and do some gardening instead.  But surely, Mr Doherty knows (deep inside) that if  Jesus is Neither God Nor Man, he sure is a Suggested Authority.   Alas, to arrive at that insight the author would have to grasp  that which drives him to declare himself  the beholder of  the Ultimate Truth worthy of a book the thickness of the Bible.  As for the Anglican pastor showing me the door, I do not know what I expected: perhaps, for him to approve of my far-out reading of the Manual  of Techniques for the struggle with demons.  How could I have been so naïve ?
     In one of the revelations I cherish, Bertrand Russell tells a story in (which he got from William James)  about a man who whenever he got a sniff of nitrous oxide had the profoundest feeling that he knew and could name the ultimate secret of the universe. However, when the effect of the laughing gas wore off, he could not remember what it was. It bugged him and he resolved to write the revelation down while under the influence.  An indeed he succeeded to do that. When his brain shed the effect of the anesthetic, he found the all-important note he wrote while inside the mysterium.  It said, “the smell of petroleum pervades throughout”.      

The humorous anecdote illustrates a number of important points. First, it shows the difficulty with placing one’s trust in the productions of a pickled brain. Second, it tells us that we just don’t know what else lurks inside our skulls beyond the entity which we are asked to refer to in the first person singular past the age of three, and vouch for legally after puberty. Third, it says that our innermost self is built specifically around the denial of reality and the desire to fuse with the universe. 

Evidently, the idea that there is a mental health side to the New Testament creativity is not only not new at all but has been acknowledged by the gospels and epistles themselves, directly and indirectly. In the gospel of Mark, it is not just hostile opponents and a bemused Roman governor, but those closest to Jesus who see his new mantle of a prophet a sign of his being out of his mind. The view that Jesus was possessed by a demon is acknowledged by all gospels, and Matthew (10:25) makes explicit the charge that those who follow Jesus are as much devil-possessed as their master. Only a handful of the epistles are credited by modern scholars to those in whose name they are written, and as these forgeries do not appear motivated by simple gain but extra large would-be moral concerns for humanity in the name of a loving deity, they do give rise to questions about the head space of their authors. And these are not trivial concerns. The deutero-Pauline writer of 2 Thessalonians, goes as far as warning the recipients of his dispatch (2:2) against false writing purporting to be from us. This sort of “deep impersonation” with its implied knowledge of itself as fraud is troubling. In 2 Peter, an epistle usually placed several generations after the gospel events, the author, who I am assured by the experts  is not Peter, forswears (1:16) he is not presenting the readers with cleverly devised fables when he gives his testimony of the majesty of the Lord’s transfiguration he personally witnessed on the mountain. The same problem of “knowing one’s lie” lurks here, and with yet another twist. This pseudo-Peter goes as far as claiming that no prophecy of Scripture (of which he considers his testimony to be an example !) is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (1:20-21). 

The difficulty with the religious or ideological mindset (as this of course is not a problem unique to the Christian objects of faith) is compounded by the conviction of the believers that no valid external view of it (them) exists, or even, can exist. Paul tells his followers that the spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no-one (1 Cr 2:15). This peculiar idea had a way of propagating itself in later gospel writing. Mark while acknowledging that Jesus is looked upon as ecstatic lunatics[1], and the Holy Spirit, but effects of frank mania, immediately proscribes such a view as absolutely unforgivable taboo worse than blaspheming God himself and one that requires eternal damnation !   Mark’s Petrine editor and censor, we know as Matthew, considered it prudent to excise the concerns of Jesus’ family, while of course keeping the eschatological fatwa against maligning the spirit. Evidently, Matthew did not think the reader of his corrected gospel had the intellectual need to understand the origins of that particular idea.

It should come as no surprise then that if faith depends on the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, that even modern theology will find a way to deny that the NT texts can be penetrated and understood by independent, disinterested analysis. Here is another sample of the view that I have recounted in the story above and encountered in a number of forms and shapes. It comes from Hans Conzelmann who lamented in his Outline of the Theology of the NT back in 1968:

Attempts have been continually made to derive Paul’s theology from his experience. He himself declares that his gospel has been revealed to him. But in what sense is that to be understood ? We can get an answer only when we put the question in terms of the history of religions, not in psychological terms. For ‘inner experience’ explains nothing, it is an ‘x’ which itself needs to be explained. Attempted reconstructions of the experience are useless, as the sources are simply not there. Just as Paul has visions without making personal use of them (2 Cor 12), so he never speaks of the inner event of his conversion, but only of its theological content: his commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.

On one level I can of course sympathize with the objection of the theologian . Theology and psychology are rivals. The theologian instinctively disdains attempts to explain away the mystery that is life and its purposes, the ambition of some grand theorists of human psyche. He or she senses that people who think (they think when they write) that way, either do not think very deeply about what they say or do not really know how to align feelings to ideas. Further, and therein I believe lies the crux of the matter, whatever one can say about the creativity and activism of Paul, Mark, the people around them, and the copycats they inspired later: they were challenged and responded with what they had, and whatever one’s opinion of the cultural selectors that favoured their cosmology, and social psychology over their competitors, here we are with them in our cultural baggage.

On the other hand, I hope the problems with a theological attitude that Conzelmann’s view illustrates, are immediately visible, and hopefully not only to non-faith. Does Paul’s experience really explain nothing ? Are the reconstructions of it really useless ? Do the secular (,or religiously not-committed,) views of Paul, or classing Paul’s visitations with known mental phenomena observed medically and psychologically, automatically derogate to Christianity ? I don’t think so.  There will be ideas in Paul’s letters that we will never be able to decode by knowledge of theology, study of comparative religions, Greco-Roman history, Greek grammar, 1^st century Judaism. There will be verses in Paul  which simply boggle the mind, to wit: 

   ….when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles….

The problem with the line that Conzelmann takes is simply that Paul’s commission to Gentiles is not understandable to someone who is sane, and always has been sane.  One can rhapsodize around it, and run wild with theology but the simple test that we all use to ascertain the truth of what we are told, the I-am-thou check, will fail. What does Paul say ? God set Paul apart before he was born, God called Paul through his grace, God was pleased (no less) to reveal his Son in Paul in sending him on his way. Any competent mental health professional today reading such a presentation of self, would at once identify them as delusional ideas of reference.  Paul projects his feelings of grandiosity into God and makes himself the interpreter of the Jewish scriptures among  special groups of Gentiles, who like him believed they were hand-picked by God to save what was worth saving of humanity in an impending destruction of the world. One of the great mysteries that explains Paul’s success is that the basic structure of this delusional scenario is quite common among psychotics everywhere.  When Jesus Christ went out to tell them they had Christ in them, they already knew, or knew someone who was saying the same thing and looked sometimes crazy and sometimes not.

            That would be the sober assessment of the verses. The argument that the Greco-Roman antiquity accepted such pleadings routinely is in want of proof. Paul would have been generally despised as a devil-possessed psycho in all places he went, except in groups familiar with the phenomena of the manic spirit and its annihilating  obverse.  The historical development of the Church and its suppression of the oracular spirit as the final authority in accessing the saviour, is the best argument against the notion that the ancients in the Greco-Roman Near East were tolerant of the mentally ill.       

    For one, I know that Conzelmann’s theological mentor, Rudolph Bultmann, openly discussed the delusional nature of some of the beliefs ascribed to Jesus if there were held by a real human. So, it would appear Conzelmann’s teacher knew there are issues with the historical identity of Jesus, and to push theology out of harm’s way, he declared himself for the view that we can know nothing about Jesus with certainty, historically speaking. His pupil could not say the same with Paul, since he had Paul in his face, historically speaking, so he declared himself for the view that we cannot know anything about Paul, psychologically speaking. The sources are simply not there. This sort of approach greatly distressed Paul Tillich who warned its cumulative effect would be empty theism. As theology locks itself inside its own hermetically sealed little world, it loses touch and relevance. The attitude reminds one so much of the wife of the bishop of Oxford, who on learning of the Darwin’s theory of our biological descent exclaimed: Let us pray it is not true, or if it is, that it does not become generally known.

But the reality is that we have Paul’s letters and they reveal quite a bit about Paul, not the theologian, not the saint, but the courageous human suffering periodically from a debilitating disorder who through creative genius that dissociated a part of his person into a mythical personna, laid the groundwork for the world’s most successful religion. There are direct and oblique references in Paul’s letters to his health and with the cognitive patterns in his theology which – read together – may create a psychological profile which is reasonably close to what we may know of him, a profile which optimally would be candid but compassionate, and therefore perhaps theologically useful to some who dare to rattle the skeletons of dogma, and trying to read the texts differently. As for the rest of the New Testament, the texts, contrary to conservative belief, present an interesting window on the social psychological makeup of the early Christians and may yet shed unexpected insights on the first communities and the development of their beliefs.

       My present project then does not focus on the historical person of Jesus, but rater rather on the psychological facets of the first mystical witnesses of him, specifically the writing of Paul and Mark. Both show a strangely ambivalent posture to the historical figure. And, as I am a man known to speak his mind, let me be even more challenging.   The two saviours of Jesus, actually had a distinctly unfavourable view of his career and despised what they saw of him in the following he left behind. Yet they were strangely drawn to the figure’s earthly fate, and they explored deep, mysterious connection they felt existed between themselves and him, in the depths of ourselves which we do not understand.  
      The project started as a sort of apology to myself for going off the deep end, out of shame and frustration that comes with a sudden acquisition of a psychiatric label in a mature individual.  I had always thought of myself as a bright type,  well-read, down to earth and free of nonsense. Yes, I was thought of as eccentric, some would say very much so, but a professional concern to mental health professionals ?  Definitely no.  It was hard getting my life arranged to fit  the new normal.  My reputation was shot during what was described to me by the shrinks as an episode of hypermanic excitation. What I did and said, the way I carried on,  made everyone around fearful and distrustful of me.  As a freelancing business software designer I had built a niche of clients. It dissolved almost overnight.  Even though my creations  worked well,  I instantly lost most of my business as the word spread that I went insane.  My friends became insufferable with their patronizing solicitude. My mother wrote or called almost every day. She insisted  I return to her care in my native Prague.  On a couple of her calls,  my sister intoned.  Maggie, my ex-girlfriend,  who moved out of my apartment some three months before my episode, came to reclaim her petty possessions.  As her bag was getting filled with near-empty  jars of cosmetics, an alarm clock radio,  Ayn Rand paperbacks, and a pair of slippers she never wore, she kept glancing at me furtively,  probing  what Sally (my neighbor and mutual friend) was reporting to her about me. 

Suddenly, I had no one. No one knew me; I did not know myself.  There I was at thirty seven, a babe born again.   

    During my episode  I scribbled profusely and mailed copies of my manifestos and proposals for action to the former Canadian Prime Minister, to the Vatican, and to the White House. The world was going to be destroyed by a nuclear war which would be triggered accidentally, my dispatches revealed.  To save life on the planet,  instructions  entrusted to me by God, would have to be carried out.  To make my mission credible, I  (or rather, someone standing in the place of I) , wrote, and my credentials  beyond dispute, God chose me, an atheist, and someone who never dabbled in politics.   

    Be it as it may, I was seen talking to myself aloud in the streets.  My neighbor Sally said to me later that I looked drunk, and smelled of urine.  I remember running upstairs after she told me that and sniffing through my dirty laundry. I found nothing that reeked but the bin had a faint smell, or so I convinced myself.  Suddenly, I recalled an incident of losing bowel control during one of the terror attacks a couple of months before.  As many things in the episode, it was blocked from my memory. Now I recalled it but I could not remember what I did with the clothes I wore. I was grabbed by a surge of visceral disgust and panic.  Yes, it is confirmed, I thought, I am insane.    

    Everywhere, around me, I was finding evidence of my unsoundness.  Here was a note to Henry Kissinger, to make himself comfortable in my loft – I might be late for our appointment.  There was a Wordstar printout to John Paul II., addressing him as brother and Keeper of the Keys, informing him of my commission.  Scraps of paper with sayings, aphorisms, notes to TV celebrities, addenda to the Bible,  mathematical formulas yielding the phone number of the greatest American writer alive whom I tried to contact. I called him dear Baptist  (My phone bill was in thousands) . They seemed to come out everywhere: from inside books, from behind the bed, under the flower-pots, in between the cushions of the sofa, out of the drawers of my dresser.  One water-damaged notepad I found  under the cast-iron bathtub.  It was the  Book of Sharats,  messages or proverbs that were sent to me by God in the form of ants. The messages were decoded by eating them and then transcribed.      

I lived in a loft above a pub on a busy Montreal boulevard.  In the balanced bio-sphere of my place, the mice normally took care of the insects and the cat took care of the mice. But that summer, after Maggie left with her little predator, everything seemed to be out of whack.  It was very discouraging, and kept driving me to the edge of a precipice.  

                                                    @@@

[end of the first segment]

---

[1]  The lack of grammatical agreement is intentional and mirrors  the seeming mismatch in subjects of Mk 3:20-21. 

Mark's Magical (Circular) Mystery Tour

 The idea may not be as crazy as it first appears. Or if it is, at least I am not the first one who has seen Mark as a going in circles. I have already shown (Mark's Recursive Gospel) why I believe the original design of Mark was circular. At the end loop, the messenger of the Lord in the tomb unsuccesfully attempts to baptize the disciples into the death of Christ via their women. The body of Jesus is missing but the σομα χριστου lives in Paul's church(es) in the unio mystica of its saints with the Redeemer. The church itself is the body of Christ. The final scene of Mark (16:1-8) reveals the encrypted interpretation of Malachi 3:1, "Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek* will suddenly come to his temple**; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts..."

*/ note the explicit parallel with Iησοῦν ζητεῖτε τὸν Ναζαρηνὸν in Mk 16:6.
**/ refers to Paul's metaphor of one's body as the temple of God (1 Cr 3:16, 6:19)   

In other words, Mark fooled the uninitiated reader into thinking his reference to Isaiah the prophet was to the messenger sent before the Lord, and he artfully encouraged the misstep by annexing Isa 40:3, with John as the voice crying in the wilderness to make the path straight for the Lord. The obscuring of the Malachi verse was deliberate as it provides the vital interpretive clue to Mark's allegory as a whole and specifically to the action of the messenger of the Lord in the tomb (16:6-7).

But Mark's ruse was not as simple-minded as that ! The mention of Isaiah also strongly binds with the strange allusion to gospel in the opening verse. Why would the writing start with something that looks like a title ? I am led to believe by the cognitive structures present that the first verse of Mark looked most probably like this: "In the beginning of the gospel, as it written in Isaiah the prophet" (ἐν ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ).

We know there was only one gospel in Mark's time and it was the gospel of Paul. There is no indication there was anyone else who described his own missionary activity with what appears to have been a new verb εὐαγγελίζω (preach the gospel,  found as participle in LXX only in Isa 52:17 xref Rom 10:15) which gave the noun from which it has been derived a new context. The word 'gospel' would have been adopted in the earliest Christian communities with the understanding that it was the gospel of (Jesus) Christ. As Paul himself often dropped the descriptive tag to the word using it as standalone, and in Rom 2:16 referring to 'my gospel' I am persuaded that the association of the word with Paul was initially high and with a subtext that the word belonged to him and bespoke of his teachings. From there I reason that the mention of gospel in the first verse of Mark was not as much self-description of the text that followed but a tribute to Paul's teachings by which it was inspired. We know that ἐν ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου was a turn of phrase used by Paul in Phl 4:15. Mark would have seen his creativity as inspired by, and owing to, Paul and himself very much in the large footsteps of the master builder(see my table Paulinisms in Mark earlier in the blog). By Mark's standards gospel of Jesus Christ (the Son of God) would be too longwinded for his purpose. Paul was the ἀρχιτέκτων of the gospel (1 Cr 3:10), upon which he, Mark is called upon to build. Hence also Jesus' own profession revealed in Mk 6:3. Isaiah 44:13 describes the initial master plan of the gospel and the fashioning the figure of Christ: The carpenter stretches a line, he marks it out with a pencil; he fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house. This verse from Isaiah most likely also supplied the meaning of  Mark's  2:1, i.e. that it was reported after Jesus returned to Capernaum that he was ἐν οἴκῳ repeated as εἰς οἶκον in 3:20, and 7:17. In none of these instances Mark actually means to use οἶκος as home or house but as a code for the in-dwelling spirit.

Tale of a shared conjunction

The abrupt ending of Mark 16:8 has the potential of dramatically altering our view of the earliest Christianity. If the text of Mark was as Tischendorf presented it, the appearances of resurrected Jesus to his earthly disciples were believed to have happened not immediately after his death, but as a reaction to Mark's gospel, some forty years later. If Mark ended at 16:8, then resurrection was not an historical event but a theological concept which was first resisted and then modified in reaction to Paul and Mark by a group which has been dubiously described as Jewish Christians.

There was no single church at the outset but apparently two major independent, rival strands in the Jesus traditions, the older one disseminating the views of him by missions from Jerusalem and a newly formed one, which countered with an entirely different teachings on the meaning an death of the Nazarene prophet. Only the latter group, founded by Paul apparently accepted the cross as the symbol of Christ, renouncing the traditional Jewish messianic hope for a restored kingdom of Israel. The older group appears to have had great difficulty in accepting the purely spiritualist concept of resurrection as taught by Paul and allegorized by Mark. If this is not true then the original gospel of Mark in effect lied about the resurrection not being revealed to the disciples by Jesus, in person - postmortem. But if the women ran away from the tomb and did not share the annunciation they received, then the gospel (of Jesus Christ) reached the disciples, or those who believed in them as a source of tradition, through Mark's allegory, as Mark evidently intended. Mark's gospel is self-pointing, or recursive.

Markan exegets have often expressed incredulity at the gospel ending with a conjunction (γαρ), in what appears a syntax forced to suggest a continuation of the narrative. The grammar of the last verse (16:8) has been a subject of many discussions. My own solution at which I arrived independently but which I have learned since had been suggested by Robert Fowler (Let the Reader Understand) back in 1991 is that the conjunction actually was intended to connect the text back to the beginning. Fowler speaks of an analogy with a musical notation of coda, returning the reader/listener back to the beginning.

In my perspective, the circularity on the level of symbolism is given by two things.  One is the symmetry of the baptism by John, which in its effect brings about the descent of the Spirit into Jesus, and the baptism of the messenger of the Lord in the tomb, which in its effect causes the reader following the story, to recurse back to the beginning, if unable to read the plot:

1) Jesus acquires dual nature at the Jordan,

2) he becomes empowered by divine Spirit,

3) he acquires disciples and spiritual witness (the demons, the Twelve, Markan readers) of his ministry  - though others, including his family are convinced he has just gone off the deep end.

4) his disciples led by Peter and the Zebs (outside of the Twelve - read here) do not receive the spiritual mystery of Christ; after Peter, they come to idolize Jesus as the traditional Messiah who will restore Israel

5) but that is not what Jesus sees as his messiahship

6) the kingdom of God is not of this world

7) he must die and the witness of his resurrectional glory (the symbolism of the Transiguration) is sustained by faith 

8) that's all folks, there is no other good news (gospel) and.....

         ....if you do not have faith in the gospel, read it again, perhaps you will note on the second pass that Mark changed Malachi's 3:1 prepare my way to prepare your way, and that the messenger to be beheld, now refers to both John and the neaniskos in the tomb.  You are on your way to more discoveries on Mark's Magical Mystery Tour through the scriptures.  Just remember that Mark includes the letters of Paul as bonafide scriptures as well.

   Second, the gospel's cycle is simply given by the nature of the Spirit.  Bipolar challenge belongs in a class of mood disorders marked by a repetitive attacks. A severe manic episode is typically marked by stages where in the early phase of the episode, euphoric, over-confident, expansive and grandiose ideas and behaviours predominate. They  then morph into increasingly disorganized, agitated behaviours and experience which becomes dysphoric, finally ushering into panic attacks and severe inner torments in which the Spirit is internally perceived as a malevolent intruder and impostor, until the mental excitement subsides and the subject typically passes into depressed moods.
 
      The gospel begins with Jesus at the apex of euphoric intoxication; he is empowered by the Spirit, embarks on a chaotic tour marked by acts of large benevolence in providing cures, exorcisms, feedings and teachings of coming judgment which strangely belies a limitless potential for good that Jesus possesses (or Mark's reader is hypnotized to believe he possesses).  The anarchic fugue suddenly changes when Jesus' becomes gripped by a prophetic resolve to go to Jerusalem to be humiliated, tortured and killed.  At this juncture the Spirit animated by Jesus begins to realize the unreal, delusional, nature of the enterprise and seeks resolution of his predicament. Through the crisis, ironically plotted as the judgement of the Lord in reverse, even to the near-blowing of the allegorical cover of Paul, where Jesus is arrested "as if a robber" (ληστης) (cf. 1 Th 5:2), Jesus keeps his faith  even to the seemingly hopeless end.

Doherty’s Strange Defense of Q

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.