John P. Meier; Doubleday; 2001
by James A. Bacon
John P. Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament at Notre Dame University, continues his magnum opus, A Marginal Jew, with the publication of the third volume, Companions and Competitors.
In the first volume, Meier laid out a rigorous methodology for identifying the genuine words and deeds of the historic Jesus. His five criteria of authenticity, widely employed by New Testament scholars today, were useful for stripping away the legendary accretions of the early church. Meier devoted his second volume to establishing what he believed to be the core historical truth of Jesus: that he was an eschatological prophet who, after a sojourn with John the Baptist, patterned his ministry on that of the miracle-working prophet Elijah.
Meier fleshes out his portrait of Jesus in Companions and Competitors by defining him in relationship to his followers and his opponents. To tell the story of Jesus, he observes, is to tell the story of his interaction with his followers – the Twelve, his disciples and the enthusiastic crowds of Galilee – as well as his foes, the competing religious groups in 1st-century Palestine. In focusing on Jesus’ followers, Meier espies a primitive organizational structure to his movement that is often overlooked in New Testament scholarship. Then, by shifting his magnifying glass to Jesus’ opponents, Meier brings clarity to Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees. For a fourth and final volume, he defers his analysis of Jesus’ parables, his messianic self consciousness, his attitude toward Mosaic law and the reasons why he was crucified.
In Meier’s appraisal, contemporary historic-Jesus scholarship is divisible into two camps: one which emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus, seeking to understand him in light of Judean culture and religious practice of the 1st century C.E., and another that uses alien frames of reference, typically socio-economic or politico-nationalistic. As the title of his series implies, Meier stands solidly with the Jesus-as-1st-century-Jew party. In Companions and Competitors, he casts himself explicitly in opposition to members of the Jesus Seminar whose depictions of Jesus as a social iconoclast, a social revolutionary or generic Mediterranean peasant obscure his Jewishness.[1]
Meier devotes the first half of Vol. 3 to describing Jesus’ followers, whom he divides into three concentric circles in differing degrees of intimacy to Jesus: the crowds, the disciples, and the Twelve. He defines the “crowds” as those people drawn at least intermittently to Jesus’ mission and message. Contrary to those who interpret Jesus as a social revolutionary concerned mainly with the poor and dispossessed, Meier maintains, Jesus appealed to a broad cross-spectrum of the population. The Gospels tell of Jesus interacting with numerous people of substance.[2] However, as Meier also observes, the enthusiasm of the crowds did not often translate into enduring commitment to his movement. Only a tiny fraction of the people who flocked to see him became dedicated followers.
One of the most distinctive features of Jesus and his movement was that he recruited a group of committed “disciples.” As Meier notes, the use of the Greek word for disciple, mathetes, was rare in Jewish literature, found only in the writings of Philo of Alexandria prior to the time of Jesus. John the Baptist, it appears, was the first person in Palestine to gather disciples around him, and Jesus imitated him. In later years, rabbis also would gather disciples who ate, slept and traveled with their masters. But Meier emphasizes a key distinction between Jesus and the others. In apparent imitation of Elijah’s call to Elisha, Jesus “called” his disciples. They did not seek him out: He took the initiative in selecting them. Says Meier: “Jesus’ mode of acquiring disciples does seem to have been unusual, if not unique, in the Palestinian Judaism of his time.”[3] Likewise, Jesus was radical in accepting women into the ranks of his closest followers, and in demanding total commitment, including a willingness to sacrifice personal wealth and family obligations. The boundaries of discipleship were not hard and fast, however: The Gospels cite a number of well-to-do individuals – Zacchaeus the publican, Lazarus and his sisters, the anonymous host of the Last Supper – who stayed at home but supported Jesus with their hospitality.
Meier then shifts his attention to Jesus’ inner circle. Taking issue again with Jesus Seminar scholars, many of whom dismiss the 12 apostles as a creation of the early church, he contends that Jesus did, in fact, designate a select group of 12 companions to represent the 12 tribes of Israel, which would re-gather at the end of time. The symbolism of the Twelve coheres with the notion that Jesus addressed the whole people of Israel, not just the poor and downtrodden. The surest evidence of authenticity, Meier suggests, is the tradition of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, one of the Twelve. The betrayal is multiply attested by the Gospels of Mark and John, as well as the M source embedded within Matthew and the L source within Luke. “There is no cogent reason,” he says, “why the early church should have gone out of its way to invent such a troubling tradition as Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, one of his chosen Twelve. Why the church should have expended so much effort to create a story that it immediately had to struggle to explain away defies all logic.”[4]
Wrapping up his discussion of Jesus’ companions, Meier focuses on the individual members of the Twelve. There is enough material to draw a minimalist portrait of Simon Peter, he concludes, and there are shards of reliable evidence about James, John and Judas. But we know little more about the others than their names — and we can’t even be sure about a number of those. Meier does believe, however, that the elevation of the Twelve implies that selected individuals enjoyed a higher status and greater authority than the rest of Jesus’ followers. The movement was not “egalitarian,” as some historians have fancifully supposed. “What a present-day historian must not do,” reminds Meier, “is retroject modern thought about social classes, revolutionary, utopian egalitarianism, and theoretical anarchy into the mind of a 1st-century Palestinian Jew for whom Israel always had been and always would be, in one way or another, an ordered society.”[5]
Meier’s analysis of Jesus’ friends and companions comes across as measured and authoritative. He applies his criteria of authenticity with discipline, consistently distinguishing between Gospel material that can be attributed to the historical Jesus and that which originated with the early church. His command over hundreds of strands of scholarly debate is astounding: His footnotes read like mini-historiographies on even the most arcane of topics.
Yet Meier falls short of at least one stated objective: that of correcting the perspectives perpetuated by the Jesus Seminar. Meier restricts his discussion to the crowds, the disciples and the Twelve, overlooking groups that don’t fit comfortably into his classification schema. While commendably rejecting anachronistic rhetoric of class warfare and social activism, he writes as if socio-economic issues were of no import at all. To confront the Jesus-as-social-revolutionary school of thought head on, he must address the widely propagated view that Jesus’ message and mission was geared mainly to the most downtrodden elements of Palestinian society. If Jesus’ followers were not the poor and dispossessed, who were they? Who was his audience? Which elements of society did his ministry most appeal to? Meier does not address these fundamental questions.
As a glaring for instance, Meier gives short shrift to Jesus’ relationship with publicans and sinners. Who were these “sinners”? Did the term simply apply to people who had committed sins of one kind or another, a group so broad and amorphous as to be meaningless? Alternatively, was the term shorthand for a quasi-underworld assortment of chronic sinners such as pimps, prostitutes, money lenders, leg-breaking enforcers and other social undesirables who kept company with toll collectors? Or, as others have argued, did the term “sinner” describe those who were in debt? Jesus’ relationship with the publicans and sinners goes to the heart of his mission. Jesus clearly distinguished himself from other religious figures by partaking in scandalous table fellowship with these disreputable elements and then recruiting followers from among them. Was Jesus embracing the social underclass as part of his outreach to the whole nation of Israel? Or was he aligning himself with the indebted and dispossessed? Meier does not tell us.
Take another instance: In the so-called sermon on the mount, Matthew’s Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit and they that mourn. Who was Jesus referring to? A vast body of secondary literature has arisen around the assertion that the ruling class, through the exploitative mechanisms of taxes and money lending, were dispossessing the peasants of their ancestral lands on a massive scale. Jesus, in this view, directed his message of earthly social reform to this legion of disinherited, landless laborers. Although Meier argues in passing that Jesus appealed to a broad cross-section of the Judean population, he never tackles directly this socio-economic interpretation of Jesus’ mission.
In the second half of his volume, Meier shifts his attention to Jesus’ competitors, commencing with the Pharisees. The difficulty of talking about the Pharisees, he notes, is that historians are no more in agreement about their identity than they are about Jesus’. We have only three substantive sources about the Pharisees: the works of Flavius Josephus, the Gospels and the rabbinical writings. Each presents tremendous problems. Josephus’ attitude toward the Pharisees evolved over his literary career, Meier contends, and his changing biases must be taken into account. The Gospels offer a polemical view of the Pharisees, whose successors after the fall of the Temple were locked in opposition to the early church. As for the rabbinical sources, they were written so late, 200 years or more after the Second Temple era, that they are hopelessly entangled with legend.
Nevertheless, Meier concludes that it is possible to draw some useful conclusions about the Pharisees. Originating as a religious-political around 150 B.C.E., they emphasized the zealous study and practice of the Mosaic law and the careful observance of legal obligations in the areas of purity, tithing, marriage, Temple ritual and the keeping of the Sabbath. They developed a body of tradition, the so-called “traditions of the fathers” which went beyond the Mosaic Law but, even so, was incumbent upon the people of Israel to obey. And they had an eschatological bent: They believed that those who were faithful to God’s law would be resurrected from the dead on the last day and acquitted at the judgment. The Pharisees also were notable for propagating their views among the common people. Although they had lost power in the court of the Hasmonaean kings a century before, they retained a number of partisans in the upper echelons of society during the 1st century C.E. and enjoyed some influence among the broader population. They never lost their desire for power.
To Meier, it seems indisputable that Jesus interacted with the Pharisees, though the historicity of individual encounters described in the Gospels may be open to dispute. As a charismatic figure moving among the people, Jesus was far more likely to have encountered Pharisees than either the aristocratic Sadducees or the reclusive Essenes. Meier finds a number of Gospel passages involving the Pharisees to be probably historical: Jesus’ clashes over marriage and divorce, the woes he pronounced upon the Pharisees and others who rejected his message, the parable using Pharisees and toll collectors as antithetical figures, and the sympathetic reception given to Jesus by individual Pharisees. While Meier finds it likely that Jesus did engage in rhetorical combat with the Pharisees, he does not subscribe to the view advanced in the Gospel of Mark that makes the Pharisees complicit in Jesus’ death. “There is a remarkable ‘disconnect’ in the Gospels,” he says, “between Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees during the public ministry and his arrest and execution at the end of his life.”[6]
Even less is known about the Sadducees than the Pharisees, but Meier feels comfortable in describing them as “a religious movement and a political party, made up mostly of old-time aristocratic priests and laymen, focused on Jerusalem, its temple and its high priesthood.”[7] Their doctrine was more conservative than that of the Pharisees, tending to reject laws not explicitly rooted in the Pentateuch, but it was not ossified. The Sadducees undoubtedly developed their own legal traditions in areas, such as temple liturgy, not specifically addressed by the laws of Moses.
Although there is little evidence that Jesus interacted with the Sadducees to a significant degree, Meier does find the story in Mark 12:18-27, in which Jesus debated the Sadducees over the resurrection of the flesh, to be rooted in a historical controversy. In this pericope, Jesus elaborated upon his view that in the resurrection, people would be like the angels of heaven. Meier regards this as yet another confirmation that Jesus hewed to an eschatological view of the kingdom of God. “The historical Jesus believed that, at some point in the eschatological drama, past generations would rise from the dead and that faithful Israelites would share in a new type of life similar to that of the angels. … The final state of the kingdom would thus entail a transcendence of this present world, not simply an improvement of it.”[8]
Another chapter focuses on Jesus and the Essenes. Meier acknowledges that Jesus bore similarities to this group: He was celibate, embraced poverty, prohibited oaths, expressed disapproval of the ruling Temple authorities and believed fervently that God would bring his kingdom of justice and plenty at the End of Times. But Meier rejects the idea that Jesus himself was an Essene or closely affiliated to the movement. Jesus lectured against excessive concern with the minutiae of the law, an Essene obsession. He did not share the Essene preoccupation with the religious calendar. Rather than commanding his followers to shun their enemies, Jesus urged them to love them. Finally, Jesus’ movement, though not devoid of hierarchy, lacked the elaborate organizational structure of the Essenes. “Jesus and his movement were one expression of a larger phenomenon in Palestine at the turn of the era: Jewish eschatological groups with radical lifestyles, fervent hopes for Israel’s future, and tense or hostile relations with the priestly establishment in Jerusalem.”[9]
In his final chapter, Meier also clears the field of dubious claims made about Jesus with brief treatments of the Samaritans, the scribes, the Herodians and the Zealots. He provides a helpful overview of the Samaritans, an offshoot of the ancient Israelite religion never absorbed by the Jerusalem Temple, but concludes that Jesus had little interaction with them. He analyzes the role of scribes in 1st-century Palestinian society, but dismisses the impression created by the Gospel of Mark that these functionaries constituted a coherent interest group that opposed Jesus. Scribes, he says, were an occupational category that cut across all political and religious groups. The mysterious “Herodians,” referred to only fleetingly in Mark, probably referred to the officials, servants and partisans of Herod Antipas. Although they undoubtedly monitored Jesus’ activities, the incidents recounted in Mark probably were not historical. Finally, Meier dismisses the possibility that Jesus had any interaction with the Zealots, the militant revolutionaries who played a major role in the 66 A.D. revolt against Rome. The Zealots simply did not exist as an organized force in 30 C.E.
Meier’s conclusions regarding Jesus’ competitors come across as measured and reasonable. In contrast to many scholars, Meier does not force his evidence into a preconceived framework. Rather than build elaborate, speculative hypotheses, he commendably keeps his conclusions modest and restrained. But, as with his analysis of Jesus’ companions, one cannot help but be struck by his oversights. Arguably, Jesus’ most potent competitors were not the ill-defined political-religious sects such as Pharisees and Sadducees – they were the high priests of the Temple cult who instigated his execution. United by their loyalty to the Temple cult, which would have overridden any legal or doctrinal differences between Pharisees and Sadducees, the priests would have perceived the popular, charismatic figure of Jesus as threatening to their legitimacy and disruptive to public order. Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple and disrupted the transaction of Temple commerce, or at least the Gospels indicate that he did. Likewise, the high priests Caiaphas and Annas arrested Jesus, interrogated him and pressed for his crucifixion. The omission of the high priests in Companions and Competitors is so glaring that we can only hope that Meier has deferred discussion of Temple priesthood until his fourth volume, when he proposes to address the critical issue of why Jesus’ life ended as it did, “namely, by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman prefect on the charge of being the King of the Jews.”
Finally, one other group is conspicuous by its absence: the gentiles. If we seek to define Jesus in terms of his relationship to other groups, should we not examine his interaction with gentiles as well as his fellow Judeans? The Gospels recount several incidents in which Jesus expresses indifference or even contempt towards the Greek-speaking pagans living in the environs of Galilee — accounts which, given the desire of the early church to appeal to Gentiles, would have survived in narrative form only if they were substantively true. Surely, it would illuminate the nature of Jesus’ ministry to establish the extent to which Jesus shared the ethnic prejudices of his fellow Judeans and excluded Gentiles from his mission.
As a reviewer who sympathizes with Meier’s portrait of Jesus as an eschatological prophet in the tradition of Elijah, I do not mean to be harshly critical. Companions and Competitors represents solid, learned scholarship and introduces some novel perspectives. But, as one of the deans of New Testament scholarship, Meier has set the highest expectations for his work. I had hoped to see him lay utter waste to the views of those who see Jesus as having an earthly, reformist agenda. I’ll have to settle, it seems, for hoping that he will complete the task in Vol. 4.
— Jan. 2, 2002
[1] Among his like-minded companions, Meier cites Geza Vermes, E.P. Sanders, Dale C. Alison, Bart D. Ehrman, Paula Frediksen, Bruce Chilton, Jurgen Becker, N.T. Wright and Jacques Schlosser. Among his competitors, he includes John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack and Robert W. Funk.
[2] These include the toll-collector Levi; a hemorrhaging woman who had spent her wealth on many doctors; Jairus, ruler of the synagogue; a centurion in the employ of Herod; Zacchaeus, a rich Jericho toll collector; a woman who anointed him with ointment worth the annual wages of a day laborer; and various householders who hosted him and his disciples at festive meals.
[3] Companions and Competitors, p. 52
[4] Companions and Competitors, p. 142
[5] Companions and Competitors, p. 250
[6] Companions and Competitors, p. 339
[7] Companions and Competitors, p. 395
[8] Companions and Competitors, p. 443.
[9] Companions and Competitors, p. 532