Karel Hanhart; The Liturgical Press; Collegeville, Minnesota; 1995
by James A. Bacon
Karel Hanhart, a pastor and biblical scholar, lived as a teenager through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He experienced first-hand how the Dutch forged a cryptic tongue to communicate without being understood by the Germans. Subject people, he observes, often speak in allegorical code “for protection against foreign ears.” Such was the case, he theorizes, among the Jews under imperial Roman rule, especially after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
The Gospel of Mark, Hanhart contends, was written by a Christian Jew of the Mediterranean diaspora for other Christian Jews distraught by the devastation of their homeland. The fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple would have crushed any hope for the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. The forces of evil reigned triumphant. But Mark held out a message of hope: The destruction of the Temple was part of the divine plan, a necessary step for spreading the Gospel of Jesus beyond the people of the Covenant to all nations.
For fear of retaliation, however, Mark could not write openly against the Romans. He embedded his work with allusions comprehensible only to those steeped in the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and allegorical methods for unlocking the meaning of those scriptures. According to Hanhart, Mark can best be understood as Haggadah — a Jewish literary form in which a theological truth is brought out by means of a story — read by Christian Jews during their observance of the Passover.
In Hanhart’s interpretation, the Gospel of Mark is strewn with symbols that would have made sense to a 1st century Christian Jewish audience but the meaning of which has been lost to modern readers. Most significant of these is the story of the empty tomb: Joseph of Arimathaea burying Jesus’ body, the Galilean women discovering the empty tomb, and the proclamation by the young man in the tomb that Jesus had risen. According to Hanhart, Mark never meant this narrative, so critical to understanding the death and meaning of Jesus, to be understood as biography. The Open Tomb is a lengthy, speculative and often mind-numbing excursion into the netherworld of scriptural symbolism as Hanhart endeavors to unravel the meaning that Mark meant to convey. Among his more remarkable conclusions, Hanhart argues that Joseph of Arimathaea was not a historical figure, but an stand-in for Flavius Josephus, a high-ranking priest who had deserted to the Romans during the revolt and resided in the household of the emperor Vespasian. And the young man in the tomb was meant to symbolize none other than Paul the Apostle.
Hanhart starts with legitimate questions. Who indeed was Joseph of Arimathaea? Many scholars believe he was not a historical figure. Who was the young man at the empty tomb: an angel, a real person or a symbolic figure? Exegetes disagree. And why did the women, once they had heard the wonderful news that Jesus had risen, not share their revelation with anyone? Theories abound. Hanhart contends that all these problems are solvable once we read Mark’s empty tomb narrative as an allegory for the destruction of the Temple.
He begins with the passage in Mark 15:46 that tells of Joseph laying Jesus’ body “in a sepulcher which was hewn out of a rock.” A parallel can be found in Isaiah 22:16, which refers to a high priest, Shebna, who had offended Yahweh by cutting a tomb out of the rock: “Thou hast hewed thee out a sepulcher here as he that heweth him out a sepulcher on high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock.” Upon hearing the words “sepulcher”, “hew” and “rock”, the more sophisticated among Mark’s audience of Christian Jews would have recognized the allusion to Isaiah. They also would have immediately noted the context: Isaiah’s vision of the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Assyrians.
The women at the tomb, Hanhart deduces, function as the righteous “daughters of Zion” in Isaiah’s prophecy, personifying the covenantal community. Mark, he argues, intended for his readers to understand that they experienced a horrific vision of the destruction of the Temple. By describing them as fleeing in fear and telling no man what they had witnessed, Mark makes it clear that the destruction of the Temple was ordained even though no one in the early church (or ecclesia, as Hanhart refers to the Christian movement) anticipated it.
Hanhart concedes that his theory can’t work without explaining the role of Joseph of Arimathaea in Mark’s allegory. He gamely provides an answer which, he admits, even he initially considered too outrageous to be plausible. But he plunges forward, nonetheless. Joseph, like Josephus, belonged to the Jewish ruling class, Hanhart notes. And the name “Joseph of Arimathaea” sounds remarkably similar to “Josephus bar Matthias,” the Jewish name of Flavius Josephus. Presumably, Mark’s audience would have understood this word play. Accordingly, Hanhart interprets the meaning of Mark’s narrative as follows: By burying Jesus, Joseph/Josephus symbolically buried the body of the early Christian movement. Thus, Mark signaled that Josephus, a retainer of the emperor and possible candidate for ruler of the Judean provinces, was an enemy. Carrying his reconstruction to its logical extremity, Hanhart posits that Josephus’ father, Matthias, was none other than the high priest Matthias who persecuted the Christians during the reign of Agrippa around 40 A.D.!
Grappling with another enduring controversy, Hanhart identifies the youth who lost his linen and fled naked from the Garden of Gethsemane as the same youth who appeared at the tomb. Both, he suggests, were meant to symbolize the Apostle Paul. The allegorical presence of Paul indicated that Mark accepted the apostle’s theology, still controversial at the time, that equated the early Christian community with the “body of Christ” and new “Temple of God.”
It is impossible to distill Hanhart’s elaborate arguments into a few tight paragraphs without omitting supporting evidence or oversimplifying his arguments, so I will not endeavor to do so. However, it is worth noting that the author candidly acknowledges the dangers of his method. The legitimate task of identifying Mark’s allusions to Jewish scripture can easily descend into an exercise in what he calls “parallelomania.” Hanhart earnestly endeavors to avoid contracting such a disease, but judging from his narrative, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he has. A quick look at his theory equating Joseph of Arimathaea with Flavius Josephus will demonstrate the point.
In Hanhart’s interpretation, it is vital to depict Josephus as an enemy of the early Christian movement. But this portrait cannot be squared with Josephus’ writings. Far from criticizing the movement, Josephus described its leading figures sympathetically. Jesus he called “a wise man,” a “doer of wonderful works” and “a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.” John the Baptist, he said, was “a good man [who] commanded the Jews to exercise virtue.” Josephus did not characterize James the brother of Jesus either positively or negatively, but he recounted his stoning at the order of the high priest Ananus as an illegitimate act: King Agrippa II rebuked Ananus by removing him from the priesthood. Hanhart deals with these testimonies by ignoring them. He never addresses why the supposedly hostile Josephus, who never hesitated to lambaste his opponents in the most colorful language, could have written so dispassionately about Jesus and his associates.
Furthermore, it is impossible to maintain, as Hanhart tries to do, that Josephus was the son of Matthias the high priest who persecuted the Christians. A vain man, Josephus would not have neglected to inform his readers of such an illustrious parentage. In his autobiography, he boasted of his royal ancestry through his mother, and he traced his father’s lineage back several generations, noting that one of his ancestors had married the daughter of Jonathon the high priest. He proudly described own father, Matthias, as “eminent on account of his nobility” and a righteous man, but he never hinted that he served as high priest. Hanhart skips past this autobiographical information as if it did not exist.
In sum, it is utterly implausible to suggest that Mark meant Joseph of Arimathaea to symbolize Josephus. Once we remove this cornerstone in Hanhart’s argument, the entire edifice collapses.
Indeed, there also are grounds to question Hanhart’s basic supposition that Mark wrote in allegory about the destruction of the Temple. Mark portrayed Jesus as prophesying openly that the Temple would be destroyed: “There shalt not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” This is hardly what one would call a coded allusion meant to deceive the Romans.
According to Mark, Jesus also warned of “the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand).” In this case, Mark referred to scripture, but he did so explicitly. He did not assume, as Hanhart suggests, that his readers knew the entire corpus of the Jewish scriptures by heart: He told his readers that he was quoting Daniel. Although Mark stopped short of identifying the “abomination of desolation” with Titus — the emperor’s son who conquered Jerusalem and stood in the Temple’s Holy of Holies — he did encourage the reader to do so. Mark dared not defame the emperor’s son openly, but employing the phrase, “Let him that readeth understand,” he bluntly invited his readers to draw the connection themselves. Hanhart never explains why Mark would write so openly in one section of his Gospel then switch to allegory later on.
These flaws are so grievous that Hanhart’s effort to reinterpret Mark’s empty-tomb narrative as Passover haggadah is not likely to make a lasting impression on New Testament studies. But it would be a mistake to ignore his work entirely. Within his tome are concealed several gems of adventurous scholarship.
Among other issues, Hanhart addresses one of the mysteries of early Christian studies: How did Christians begin observing the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, as the Jews did? It is not sufficient, Hanhart observes, simply to note that the Christians chose Sunday because it marked the day of Jesus’ resurrection. The early Christians were members of the synagogue. Although they added ceremonies of their own, for years they observed Jewish law and liturgy. When did they shift to Sunday worship, and why?
The rabbinical tradition records a seemingly unrelated controversy between the Pharisees and an unidentified group called the “Boethusians” regarding the proper date to observe the Shavu’ot, or Feast of Weeks, in which the farmers would bring their first sheaves of wheat to the Temple for dedication to Yahweh. The Boethusians, who are probably synonymous with the Sadducees, held the traditional view that the date for the ceremony should always fall on the day following Passover, regardless of which date in the month it fell. The Pharisees introduced a novel reading of Leviticus that set the ceremony on a fixed date of the month, Nisan 16, regardless of which day of the week it fell. At some point before 70 A.D., the Jews shifted from the Boethusian interpretation to the Pharasaic one, but the rabbinical tradition is not clear when the change took place or what the circumstances were.
Hanhart conjectures that a change of such magnitude in the liturgical calendar would have precipitated a major struggle. Forcing recalcitrant priests and tradition-minded peasants to alter time-honored traditions might well have required the backing of the government. No Roman prefect would have risked provoking disorder by meddling in a matter of interest only to the Jews; the initiative had to have come from a Jewish ruler. Agrippa I, who ruled from 40 to 44 A.D., is the most likely candidate.
The Herodian family had intermarried with the priestly clan of Boethus since the days of Herod the Great. Immediately upon assuming the kingship of Judea, Agrippa appointed Simon son of Boethus as high priest. Shortly thereafter, there followed a sequence of events, according to the narrative in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, that are difficult to interpret. Agrippa deposed Simon and offered the high priesthood to Jonathon, of the House of Annas, who refused it on the grounds that he was not worthy of the position — an act of unprecedented modesty that may have concealed other motives. Agrippa then offered the priesthood to Matthias, who accepted the honor. Josephus provides little explanation for these events. Hanhart asks a very good question: What was all this maneuvering about? Could there have been a connection to the Boethusian controversy?
In Hanhart’s view, Agrippa saw the Christians as a threat to the established order. Though non-violent, their growing movement called for personal repentance, reform of the Temple, justice for the poor and resistance to Roman rule. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Agrippa cracked down on the movement, executing James the brother of John and throwing Peter into prison. Hanhart hypothesizes that the imposition of the new liturgical calendar also was aimed at the Christians. Hanhart suggests that Jesus’ followers used the rite of First Fruits (which took place the day after Passover under the traditional calendar) to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection, which they interpreted as the “first fruits of those who have died” and a sign of the coming general resurrection. Within a few years, their doctrine of Jesus arising “on the third day” following his Friday crucifixion committed them to a Sunday celebration. By adopting the Pharasaic calendar, Agrippa shrewdly made sure that the important First Fruits ceremony always occurred on Nisan 16 which, six years out of seven, did not fall on Sunday. By moving this popular Temple ceremony away from Sunday, the king took the spotlight away from the Christian commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection.
Hanhart’s calendar-controversy hypothesis brilliant fuses three streams of source material — Acts, Josephus and the rabbinical tradition — like pieces of a Chinese jigsaw puzzle. Standing alone, each source presents baffling problems. Interlocking, each source lends context and meaning to the other. Hanhart’s solution is so eloquent and it illuminates such an important era of early Christian/Second Temple history that it deserves far more attention than it has received so far.
Hanhart is an imaginative and creative scholar. It is a shame that he expended so much effort developing a hypothesis — interpreting Mark’s empty-tomb narrative as allegory — that takes us nowhere.
November 3, 2000