Tag: Roman

Summary and Conclusions about the Historical Jesus (Part Two)

(This is the fourteenth in a series of “mini-classes” on the historical Jesus. Together the pieces are intended to assist those who wish to “dig deeper” into the scholarly foundations of postmodern faith and to understand the methodology behind the postings on the blog site. Today’s post is the last of a two-part conclusion of the series.)

In searching for the historical Jesus, it helps to remember that we know much more about the object of our quest than ever before. Mid-twentieth century discoveries at the Palestinian locations Qum Ran and Nag Hamadi have yielded manuscripts that have acquainted scholars with previously unknown sources about Jesus. Just as importantly, developments in the fields of history, linguistics, and archeology have made us more knowledgeable about Jesus’ historical context than any previous generation. Acquaintance with such context constitutes actual knowledge about Jesus and the people with whom he interacted.

Similarly, the disciplines like sociology, economics, psychology, and political science have developed principles that describe how individuals within given networks typically act in particular circumstances. One such standard might be termed the “principle of analogy. It holds that: We should ordinarily expect to have happened in the past what routinely happens in the present as described by the social sciences.  For instance, we know that Jesus grew up under Roman oppression. About the time of his birth, the recently unearthed capital of Galilee (Sepphoris – just six miles from Nazareth) was destroyed by Roman soldiers trying to wipe out insurgent patriots. Sociologists tell us (and imperial armies act upon this knowledge) that such wars of resistance end up involving virtually the entire local population. This means that Jesus and his family were likely involved as well. All such extra-biblical information helps us better understand the historical Jesus.

Such determinations also coincide with two interpretative guidelines that have emerged from third world scholarship over the last forty years or so. One standard is called the “preferential option for the poor.” The other is “the hermeneutical privilege of the poor.” Both signal a source of knowledge of the historical Jesus that is often neglected and even denigrated by mainstream biblical scholarship.

The option for the poor highlights the biblical fact that the God of the Bible in general and of the Christian Testament in particular takes sides with the poor in their ongoing struggle with the rich. In the Jewish Testament this taking sides is evident in two of what Jesus scholar, Marcus Borg, terms the tradition’s three “macro-stories.” These are the Bible’s primary stories that fired the imaginations of Jewish people and early Christians. They are the tales that gave coherence to their interpretations of life, their relationships with God, and of sacred scripture itself. The first two of these macro-stories tell of the Exodus and the Exile. The third is what Borg refers to as the Priestly Story.

Both the Exodus and Exile stories reveal God’s preference for the poor – 13 century slaves in Egypt and 6th century exiles in Babylon. They show God’s preference for slaves over their slave-masters and for prisoners of war over their captors. For its part, the priestly story prioritizes temple worship and the priesthood. It is a narrative of sin, guilt and forgiveness mediated by an ordained priesthood. The priestly story was the object of criticism by the prophets of the Jewish Tradition including Jesus of Nazareth.

Above all, the New Testament’s Jesus story is one of God’s preferential option for the poor. In that story God is understood as literally siding with the under-classes. First and foremost, it is no accident that the Divine chooses as its site of revelation a poor person rather than a figure of royalty or priesthood. Theologically and sociologically speaking, this point of incarnation represents God’s fundamental disclosure about divine commitment. Such commitment is underlined by the words and practice of Jesus as described in all the sources of the Christian Testament. In the gospel traditions, Jesus’ program consists in bringing Good News to the poor (Lk. 4: 16-21). The Kingdom of God, he insists, belongs to the poor and persecuted (Mt. 5: 3& 10). Moreover, the beneficiaries of Jesus’ acts of healing and exorcism are overwhelmingly the poor and outcast (Mk. 1: 41; 6:34; 8:2; Mt. 9:36; 14:14 15:21-28; 15:32; 17:14-29; 20:29-34; Lk. 7: 13-14, 17: 11-19 . . .). The Final Judgment will be based on one’s attitude and actions to relieve the sufferings of the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned (Mt. 25: 31-46).

All of this means that God’s Chosen People are the poor. (Hebrew slaves in Egypt are merely the paradigmatic example of such divine preference.) What we know more than anything about the historical Jesus is his embodiment of God’s choice. Jesus is the symbol par excellence of the divine one’s preferential option for the poor.  For our purposes here, this divine fundamental option provides an interpretative principle for locating the authentic words and deeds of the historical Jesus.  Words and deeds attributed to Jesus’ favoring the poor over the rich are probably authentically his. Words and deeds placing the rich or privileged classes favorably must be interpreted in the light of their impact on the poor who are the primary beneficiaries of Jesus proclamation and practice.

God’s preferential option for the poor leads us to the second important tool of discernment. It is helpful not so much for locating the authentic words and deeds of Jesus but for interpreting them in his spirit – for getting at the underlying ideas and values of his words and actions. This is the principle of the hermeneutical privilege of the poor. This principle recognizes that the poor (i.e. our contemporaries closest in sociological position to the primary intended recipients of Jesus’ Good News) find themselves in a better position to interpret the words and deeds of Jesus than do the non-poor.

For example, when the well-to-do read Jesus’ words, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God” (Lk. 6:20), they are likely to unconsciously substitute Matthew’s less radical version (and therefore less likely to have come from the historical Jesus), “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:3). As a result, the well-off are prone to spiritualize even the surprising Lucan text. For them Jesus’ words become a promise of an after-life heaven for those who though rich are not attached to their wealth.  However, when the poor read Luke’s words, they take it as a divine pledge that God is on their side in their struggles with the rich.  Luke’s Jesus assures them that the future belongs to them precisely because they are poor, and that God’s kingdom will bring happiness to them and their children on this side of the grave.

Jesus before Pilate: His heroic refusal to name names

Readings for “Christ the King:” Dn. 7:13-14; Ps. 93:1-5; Rv. 1:5-8; Jn. 18:33b-37 http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/112512.cfm

This is the feast of Christ the King. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus declares his kingship during his interrogation before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Standard interpretations of the scene (such as in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”) present Pilate as a spiritually sensitive seeker.  It seems that Pilate had some appreciation of Jesus’ innocence and was trying desperately to free him from the rabid hatred of his Jewish adversaries.

So Pilate’s questioning of Jesus takes on a theological tone. His questions though arrogant are intellectual almost gentle and respectful. They seem sparked by genuine curiosity. Pilate asks, “Are you the king of the Jews?” In the end Pilate ponders the imponderable, “What is truth?”

The standard account goes on to say that only his personal weakness causes the Roman procurator to have Jesus scourged – to appease the fanatical Jewish leaders demanding Jesus’ blood. Yes, he was weak, but in the end the Jews were the ones principally responsible for Jesus’ death.

That’s the familiar picture: Pilate the intellectual, spiritually sensitive, looking for a way to set Jesus free, but too weak to assert his authority in the face of powerful and hateful Jewish leaders.

Problem is, the picture is profoundly at odds with the historical record. It also ignores the real reason representatives of empire engage in interrogation. As for the procurator’s personal character, Philo, Flavius Josephus, and Tacitus, tell us that Pontius Pilate was an absolutely brutal man. He had no fear of Jewish leaders. He despised them. In fact he took pains to provoke them. For instance, he knew the Jewish prohibition against idolatry and the making images, and yet he routinely paraded through the streets of Jerusalem statues of the Roman emperor who claimed to be a God. On several occasions, Pilate had his soldiers enter the Jerusalem Temple itself provocatively profaning it by their very presence.

No, Pilate was brutal. And his questioning of Jesus in today’s gospel had nothing to do with theological interest. He cared not at all for Jesus or establishing innocence. Quite the opposite. Pilate was just doing his job. If the questioning actually took place at all (and it’s doubtful that it did), it was at the hands of an imperial administrator doing what administrators do in all such circumstances from first century Jerusalem to twenty-first century Kabul. They arrest, interrogate, torture, and execute.

After all, Pilate had in his presence a man identified by local informants as a terrorist. In fact, this one (like innumerable others Pilate had questioned) claimed to be King of the Jews – obviously an insane “rival” to Caesar. What a laugh – an uneducated laborer from Nazareth!  So Pilate would have been all about arresting this “militant,” interrogating him for information about accomplices, torturing him when the initial interrogation failed, and then butchering the fool.

Moreover Jesus’ silence before Pilate had nothing to do with humility. It was instead about Jesus’ refusal to name his accomplices. So the torture began. To humiliate him, the soldiers stripped him naked – again, standard operating procedure then and now. For the soldiers this was fun.  No doubt they made crude jokes about Jews and circumcision. (Do you hear echoes of Abu Ghraib here?)

Still Jesus said nothing. So they beat him nearly to death. Thirty-nine lashes (almost no one survived that). And yet Jesus refused to name names. So they gave him the “crown of thorns” treatment. It was like water-boarding today. Still nothing – no names. It was entirely heroic on Jesus’ part.

Then they applied the final torture – the “third degree” following the first two: the scourging and “crown of thorns.” This was the ultimate torment reserved for insurrectionists – crucifixion. They’d send a detachment of soldiers to copy down any final disclosures. But Jesus said nothing to help them. His silence and acceptance of suffering and death literally saved his friends. They had been disloyal to him, explicitly denied him; they had been cowardly and weak. They had sinned against Jesus. Yet he gave his life for them. His friends would never forget that. Jesus’ heroic death saved them from their sins. It saved them from Pilate.

However, the truth is that Pilate was probably not aware of any of this. He was used to applying the third degree. The record shows he had crucified literally thousands in his time. A lot of them had claimed to be messiahs sent from God.  For him executing such delusionaries was no big deal. In fact, scripture scholar John Dominic Crossan suggests that Pilate took no notice at all of Jesus. The whole world was not watching, Crossan says. Jesus wasn’t even a blip on Pilate’s screen. The “trial before Pilate” was probably pro forma at best – possibly even a fabrication of the early church to shift blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews. After all, by the time John wrote his gospel in the final decade of the first century, Christians were anxious to court favor with Rome. In the meantime, they had been excommunicated from Judaism, and had nothing to lose by alienating Jews.

Strange then that we should be celebrating Jesus as a king today who became a victim of torture and extra-judicial capital punishment. But that’s really the point. I mean our faith tells us that Jesus was the kind of king who reigns in the Kingdom of God where everything is turned upside-down.  Jesus’ kingdom, God’s Kingdom, is truly not of this world. For instance, Jesus says, its citizens don’t respond to violence the way empire or the kingdoms of this world do. Its ethic is not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Or as Jesus put it, “If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over . . . .“  No, in the Kingdom of God non-violence reigns. And in his behavior before Pilate, Jesus himself shows the way.

As for the personal character of Jesus’ kingship . . .  God’s head of state is not what at all what the world expected. In the eyes of Roman imperialists, Jesus represented the dregs of humanity. He was a Jew – a people the Romans despised. He was poor and probably illiterate. He was unemployed and traveled about with slackers who had given up gainful employment. At least one of his companions (Simon the Zealot) was a self-declared insurrectionist. Jesus was known as a glutton, drunkard and companion of sex workers. And he was irreligious. The holy men of his own people had excommunicated him and accused him of being possessed by the devil.  Some king indeed!

And yet, according to today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel, this king as “Son of Man” will stand in judgment over all the world’s empires from the Egyptians to the Romans and beyond. According to today’s reading from Hebrews, Jesus’ blood is his “Red Badge of Courage.” It will be his ID card when he returns to judge and destroy the empires that routinely kill people like him. Paradoxically however, what destroys the empires in question is Jesus’ non-violence, his refusal to name names, his followers’ refusal to employ violence even to save their king, his own acceptance of death rather than retaliate.

What a mystery that is! And how difficult it is for us to accept and live by Jesus’ radical non-violence. We so believe in violence, force, guns, and bombs. However until we accept non-violence, we will, like everyone else, continue making this world a version of hell rather than of God’s kingdom.

How can we reverse our belief in violence and embrace Jesus’ alternative? What does non-violence look like in our families, in the workplace, in politics and economics?

(Discussion follows.)

Urinating on Corpses and Burning Holy Books

Readings for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time : Dn. 12: 1-3; Ps. 16:5, 8-11; Heb. 10:11-14; Mk. 13:24-3 http://usccb.org/bible/readings/111812.cfm

In January of this year six U.S. soldiers had themselves videotaped while they urinated on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan. In a separate incident three other soldiers started widespread riots after they publicly burned copies of the Holy Koran. Then in September the posting of an on-line film depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a deviant terrorist was blamed for other anti-US protests throughout the Muslim world costing the lives of a U.S. ambassador and three staff workers.

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In the year 168 C.E., the Greek emperor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes  invaded Palestine and devastated Jerusalem. He hated Judaism and defiled the Jerusalem Temple by offering a pig on its altar. He also erected an altar to Jupiter in the Temple.  Patriotic Jews called it “the abomination of desolation.” While occupying Palestine, Antiochus also destroyed all the copies of Scripture he could find, and made it a capital offense to possess such manuscripts. It was against Antiochus IV and the Greek occupation of Palestine that the Bible’s Book of Daniel (excerpted in today’s first reading) was written.

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On September 8th of the year 70 of the Common Era, after a six-month siege, the Roman Emperor Titus, with four Roman legions finally captured the city of Jerusalem from its Zealot defenders. Moving from house to house, the Romans destroyed everything within reach, including the City’s Temple. Palestine would not again belong to the Jews until 1947. It was the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans that Jesus predicts in today’s Gospel excerpt from Mark.

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Today’s liturgy of the word is shaped by apocalyptical writings – from the Book of Daniel in the first instance, and from Mark, chapter 13 in the second. The writings speak of wars and rumors of wars, of unprecedented suffering for all of humankind, of false messiahs and false prophets, and of the “Son of Man” coming on clouds of glory to render a final judgment.

Most of us think of such writing as describing the end of the world. And why not? That thinking is fostered and exploited by a whole industry of evangelical preachers like John Hagee who appear regularly on our television screens. The approach is foundational to the publishing success of the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

A unifying thread throughout all such understandings of apocalypse is their idea of God, who turns out to be a pathological killer. That is, the mayhem and disaster depicted in apocalypse becomes something God does to the world and the human race to bring history to a close. According to the preachers and books I’ve just mentioned, apocalypse describes a final battle between Good and Evil. The battle will be fought in the Middle East on the Plain of Armageddon. Two billion people will die as a result – including 2/3 of the Jewish people.  The remaining 1/3 will be converted to Christianity because God’s final violent revelation will be so awe-inspiring and convincing. A “Rapture” will then occur, taking all faithful followers of Christ into heaven, while leaving behind the rest of humanity for a period of “tribulation.” In all of this, God is the principal actor. As an angry father, he is finally taking his revenge for the disobedience and lack of faith of his ungrateful children – whom he loves!

Problem is: all of that is dead wrong and blasphemous in  terms of the God of love revealed by Jesus. The Rapture story, for instance, appeared for the first time only in the 19th century. In fact, apocalypse is not about the end of the world. It is about the end of empire – the Greek Empire of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the case of Daniel, and the Roman Empire in the case of Mark. The mayhem and unprecedented suffering referenced in both readings is not something God does to the world, but what empire routinely does to people, their bodies, souls and spirits, as well as to the natural environment.

Because it has ever been so with empire, today’s excerpt from Mark calls for a complete end to the politics of violence and domination. That meant obeying the command of Jesus to reject empire, but also to refuse alignment with Zealot nationalists. As the Romans under Titus approached Jerusalem between 66 and 70, Zealot recruiters traveled throughout Palestine calling on Jewish patriots to defend their homeland by joining guerrilla forces. Jesus’ counsel instead was for his followers to flee to the mountains (Mark 13:14-16). They were to do so not out of cowardice, but from apocalyptic conviction that God’s order of justice could not be established by the sword. Obeying Jesus’ direction meant that Christians were not only threatened by Romans but by Jews who accused Jesus’ followers of treason.

How should those readings affect us today whose Commanders-in-Chief repeat the crimes of the Seleucid Antiochus IV and the Roman Titus – both of whom thought of themselves as doing God’s work in destroying what they despised as a superstitious, primitive, tribal, and terrorist religion? (Yes, that’s what they thought of Judaism!) How should the readings affect us whose soldiers destroy holy sites, burn holy books and desecrate corpses just as their Roman counterparts did?

Today’s readings recommend that we adopt an apocalyptic vision. That means refusing to defend the present order and allowing it to collapse. It means total rejection of U.S. imperial ambitions and practices. It means refusing to treat as heroes those who advance the policies of destruction and desecration inevitably intertwined with imperial ambition. It means letting go of the privileges and way of life that depends on foreign conquest and vilification as “terrorists” of patriots defending their countries from invasion by U.S. forces. It means determining what all of that might signify in terms of our consumption patterns and lifestyles, and supporting one another in the counter-cultural decisions such brainstorming will evoke.

So in a sense, apocalypse is about the end of the world. The entire Jewish universe was anchored in the temple. Its defilement by the Greek Antiochus IV, its complete destruction by the Roman Titus seemed like the end of the world to the Jews. The threat of westernizing the Arab world might seem that way to the occupied Muslim world today.  And the end of the American Way of Life premised on resource wars under cover of a “war on terrorism” might strike us as the end of everything we hold dear.

However, the apocalyptic message of hope is that the passage of empire and nationalism is not really the end. Instead it represents an opportunity for a new beginning. In the words Mark put in Jesus’ mouth this morning, “Do not be alarmed . . . This is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.”

How might we support one another in letting go of imperialism, nationalism and the lifestyles dependent on them?

(Discussion follows)

Step One in the Five-Step Development of the Christian Tradition: The Human Jesus

(This is the sixth in a series of “mini-classes” on the historical Jesus. Together the pieces are intended to assist those who wish to “dig deeper” into the scholarly foundations of postmodern faith and to understand the methodology behind the postings on the blog site.)

Through the application of the method described so far in this series, the story of Jesus takes on an intensely human character unfamiliar to most. Such unfamiliarity especially arises when the principle of analogy comes into play. As already indicated, that principle holds that: We must not ordinarily expect to have happened in the past what is assumed or proven to be impossible in the present. The application of this largely negative standard leads scholars to explain away the miraculous in the ancient world in general and in the Bible in particular. In the Christian Testament, the principle is applied to reported events from the virgin birth to the resurrection, with events like the feeding of the 5000 and raising of Lazarus in between.

But there’s also a positive side to the principle of analogy. This positive side is especially important for uncovering the often neglected political and economic dimensions of Jesus’ life.  In its positive formulation I would express the principle of analogy in the following words: We must ordinarily expect to have happened in the past what routinely happens to human beings in the present.  Put otherwise, at their most basic levels human beings are highly similar across time and place. This similarity includes the interaction between the rich and the poor, and between oppressors and the oppressed.

That is, apart from local collaborators, the colonized usually resent the presence of occupation forces in their country. Workers generally resent being underpaid and exploited. They are critical of the rich whose extravagant lifestyle peasants perceive as based on their underpayment. They find interesting and can easily relate to those who criticize the rich and foreign occupiers and to descriptions of a future where such oppression is absent. Meanwhile the rich and powerful find such criticism threatening and normally try to suppress it if it mobilizes the masses.

The application of the principle of analogy in this positive meaning allows (especially politically committed Third World) scholars to connect the alleged words and deeds of Jesus to circumstances of Roman imperialism and first century Palestinian poverty, and to draw conclusions about the historical Jesus that do not generally occur to those living outside circumstances of imperial oppression. Such conclusions based on the principle of analogy assume that Roman imperialism was the most significant element of life in first century Palestine. That imperialism must therefore be kept prominently in mind when analyzing texts within the Christian Testament.

It is at this point that something called the “hermeneutical privilege of the poor” comes to the fore. The adjective “hermeneutical” refers to interpretation – of texts or of life itself. “Hermeneutical privilege of the poor” means that people living in circumstances of poverty similar to those of Jesus and his friends – especially under the violent realities of imperialism or neo-imperialism – often have a better understanding of texts about those circumstances than do those living more comfortably. Today’s uneducated poor might even have a better understanding than contemporary intellectuals and scholars.

To be more concrete . . . . We know that Palestine was a province occupied by the Romans. The rich Sadducees, the temple’s establishment of priests, lawyers, and scribes, as well as the court of Herod in Galilee were collaborators with the Romans. Jesus came from the Galilee, a section of Palestine that was a hotbed of resistance to Rome and of resentment against Jews collaborating with the occupiers. Jesus was born around the year (4 BCE) when the Romans finally destroyed Sepphoris, the capital of the Galilee. Sepphoris was located just 3.7 miles from his home in Nazareth – less than an hour’s walk. In that year of uprising, rebellion, and slaughter, Jesus’ parents gave him a revolutionary name – Yesua (=Joshua) the general who conquered the land of Canaan now occupied by Rome. Jesus’ brothers also bore significant names in terms of Jewish nationalism and ownership claims to Palestine. James was named after Jacob, the last of Israel’s three great patriarchs. Joses bore the name of Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son.  Simon (= Simeon) and Jude (= Judah) both were named after fathers of one of Israel’s 12 tribes.

On top of that, Jesus’ Mother, Miryam, is remembered by the evangelist Luke as a woman of revolutionary conviction. In her “Magnificat” poem (1:46-55), she praises the God of Israel as one who “has scattered the proud . . . brought down the powerful from their thrones . . . lifted up the lowly . . . filled the hungry with good things . . . and sent the rich away empty.”

In the light of such circumstances, and given Jesus’ evident commitment to the poor, it becomes highly likely that Jesus not merely shared the anti-Roman and anti-Jewish establishment sentiments of his family and neighbors. It also becomes likely that Jesus’ family was involved in the Jewish resistance at the very time of Jesus’ birth. After all, circumstances like the siege of a nearby town by foreign occupiers generally find everyone local somehow involved. (In fact, occupiers routinely assume such involvement and retaliate accordingly, both then and now.)

And there’s more.  The fact that nearby Sepphoris was under siege in 4 BCE carries implications about Jesus own conception.  It means that the surrounding territory including Nazareth must have been crawling with Roman soldiers at that time. Under such circumstances, the principle of analogy tells us that many Jewish girls would have been raped by those soldiers. After all, rape is a standard strategy for occupiers in all wars from first-century Sepphoris to twenty-first century Kabul. This realization makes more interesting the tradition that surfaced in the 2nd century with the pagan author Celsus. He alleged that Jesus’ “virginal” conception was the result of Miryam being raped by a Roman soldier called Panthera. (By the way, according to scripture scholar Ignacio Lopez-Vigil, the term “virgin” was snidely applied in first century Palestine to unwed mothers and victims of rape.)

(Step one will be continued next Monday)