Donald Harman Akenson; Harcourt Brace and Company; New York and London; 1998.
by James A. Bacon
In Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, Donald Akenson chronicles the development of the Judeo-Christian literary heritage: the Tanakh (known as the Old Testament to Christians), the Jewish apocryphal literature, the New Testament, the Mishnah and the Talmuds. Recapitulating 1,000 years of literary history, Akenson does not retell Bible stories or even appraise their historical context and authenticity. Instead, he recounts how these great works of religious literature were written and, in the process, illuminates what he calls the “grammar of invention” — the patterns by which new theological ideas emerged under the mantle of ancient authority.
Akenson’s big thesis is that Judaism and Christianity descend from a common religion — the cult of Yahweh practiced between the founding of the Second Temple in 538 B.C. and its destruction in 70 A.D. — which he calls Judahism. This novel perspective challenges the traditional view of Jewish and Christian origins: rabbinical Judaism as the heir to the Second Temple religion and Christianity as a radical offshoot from it. In Akenson’s view Judahism, “Siloam’s teeming pool,” was a fecund, mutating religious ecosystem that tolerated great diversity of thought. The Second Temple era accommodated not only the proto-rabbis known as the Pharisees and the proto-Christian followers of Jesus, but a kaleidoscopic array of Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, mystics, apocalyptic movements and anonymous groups that blinked in and out of existence, leaving only their literary fossils behind.
The destruction of the Temple in the calamitous revolt against Rome obliterated Judahism’s diversity, however, and set Christianity and rabbinical Judaism onto their modern-day paths. Both of these Judahistic remnants faced the same challenge: transforming themselves from a temple-focused worship of Yahweh to a religion that had meaning without a Temple. The two groups found radically different solutions.
According to Akenson, Christians adapted by substituting Jesus for the Temple. Through a massive retro reading of the scriptures, the Christians remade Jesus from a mortal man into the son of God whose suffering upon the cross atoned for the sins of mankind. This metaphysical sacrifice of Jesus, the “lamb of God,” served the same propitiatory function as the Temple’s sacrifice of cattle, sheep and doves to Yahweh. Once the Christians achieved this insight, they projected their theological schema backwards onto the historical Jesus by means of the canonical New Testament scriptures, rendering the real man all but unrecognizable.
The Pharisees/rabbis chose another course entirely. In committing their oral law into writing by means of the Mishnah, they reproduced every imaginable detail of the Temple liturgy. In effect, says Akenson, the rabbis reinvented the Temple as a mental construct. Until such time as the Temple could be rebuilt, they declared, studying the laws of Temple service was the equivalent in the eyes of God to actually performing the services. Lacking the means ever to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews eventually acclimated themselves to the permanent reality of being a Temple religion without a Temple.
Akenson stakes out a position of profound skepticism regarding the possibility of reconstructing the historical Jesus. Rather than starting with the earliest Christian writings and tracking their evolution forward, he adopts the point of view of the “editor-inventor” of the New Testament, a heuristic stand-in for various church councils that formulated the Christian canon. This “editor-inventor” selected only those writings that were compatible with one another. The result was a cohesive, unified work — the canonical New Testament — with interlocking motifs and symbols that were consistent with the new religion’s doctrine.
Key themes found in the New Testament — the Son of God, the Messiah, heavenly ascension, incorruptibility of the spirit, dualism of light and darkness — can be traced to Second Temple scriptures. There is no need, says Akenson, to seek the influence of Greek mystery cults. Indeed, there is little need even for a Yeshua of Nazareth. Christianity could have developed the same Temple-religion-without-a-Temple theology without him.
In Akenson’s view, we can be confident that Jesus lived and died in the 1st century A.D. — his life and crucifixion are attested to by the Jew Flavius Josephus and the Roman Cornelius Tacitus — but we can be certain of very little else. Except for the letters of Paul, which say virtually nothing about Jesus the man, all the narratives of Jesus’ life were written after the destruction of the Temple. The four Gospels portrayed Jesus as having predicted the Temple’s demise and suggested that the fulfillment of his prophecy, along with his sacrifice on the cross, were all part of a divine plan. The Gospels’ rewriting of history was so extensive, Akenson contends, that very little can be accepted as accurate. Consequently, it is all but impossible to pierce the veil of the Temple’s destruction and ascertain pre-70 A.D. views of Jesus.
Akenson chastises those whom he characterizes as questors of the historical Jesus. Christian fundamentalists, secular liberals and even Jews who have undertaken the study of the authentic Jesus are on a fool’s errand. They are trying to do what cannot be done. Akenson finds value in only one criterion, of very limited value, for ascertaining the veracity of Jesus’ words and acts as depicted in the Gospels. If there are dissonant elements within the narratives, he concedes, they may indicate the presence of early traditions that survived the process of editorial revision, presumably because they were too notorious to ignore.
Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist was one of these embarrassments. The Gospel authors wanted to depict John as subservient to Jesus. They would not have invented a situation — John possessing the authority to baptize Jesus rather than the other way around — that required apologetic explanation. Accordingly, we can accept the baptism of Jesus as an authentic deed, even if we dismiss some of the legend surrounding it.
The only sayings that Akenson accepts as genuine are Jesus’ rulings on divorce, the strictness of which contrasted with his laxness towards ritual purity, the keeping of the Sabbath and other matters of law. Akenson suggests that this hyper-sensitivity toward “family breakdown” may have stemmed from accusations that he was the illegitimate son of Mary. Otherwise, Akenson grants no other quarter. One can conjecture, one can hypothesize, but no one can describe the historical Jesus with any degree of confidence.
Surpassing Wonder is lucid, eloquent and brilliantly argued. Akenson’s mastery of Biblical and Talmudic literature is breathtaking. He calls historians to account for sloppy analysis, and he compels all Argonauts of the historical Jesus to examine fundamental assumptions. But in the end, he fails. His agnosticism is too severe.
Akenson quite correctly argues that it is impossible to understand the evolution of either Christianity or Judaism without reference to the other. Yet he blithely skips over the rivalry between the co-sanguine faiths following the fall of the Temple. For a century or so following the fall of the Temple, Christians and rabbis contended for the loyalty of the Diaspora Jews. According to Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho, around the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 135 A.D., the Jews “sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilean deceiver.” Similarly, Origen quoted the work of a certain Celsus, a pagan polemicist who employed a well-articulated Jewish critique of Christianity. The Mishnah and Talmud may not have preserved knowledge of what New Testament scholar Morton Smith referred to as a “Counter Gospel,” but the Christian literature did.
Why does this matter? Because it tells us that forces other than the destruction of the Temple shaped the Christian canon. If the rabbis accused Jesus of being a sorcerer, a charlatan and the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, we can follow the tracks these charges left in the Christian literature. Guided by rabbinical accusations, we can detect the spoor of ritual magic and illegitimacy in Mark that Luke and Matthew deleted or whitewashed in their rhetorical sparring with the rabbis. These adjustments were not related to the demolition of the Temple in any way.
Furthermore, Akenson is unduly parsimonious in applying the one methodology he believes has value: the criteria of embarrassment. For instance, when Jesus sent his disciples throughout the land of the Jews, he admonished them, “Go not into the way of the gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.” (Matthew 10:5). To Christian evangelists seeking to convert gentiles 40 years later, Jesus’ indifference to local Greeks and Samaritans could not have been helpful. It is inconceivable that Matthew would have inserted this inconvenient saying into his narrative were it not substantially true. Once again, we find that we can, in fact, pull aside the Temple veil and behold what lays before 70 A.D.
One more example should suffice: the Jesus of the Gospels believed that the kingdom of God would imminently appear. According to Mark 1:15, he began preaching soon after his baptism: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” The kingdom did not appear then, however, nor did it ever in his lifetime. Indeed, it had not arrived some 37 years later when Mark wrote his Gospel. In addressing this discomforting delay, the early Christians developed a somewhat labored explanation: Jesus’ earthly tenure — the “first” coming — marked the beginning of the kingdom of God, even though it wasn’t readily apparent, and Jesus soon would return with the power of God — the “second” coming — to punish the wicked and establish God’s rule on earth. We need postulate no influence from the destruction of the Temple to account for the development of this doctrine. Indeed, the theological gymnastics required to make sense of Jesus’ unfulfilled prophecy is a powerful indication that the words attributed to Jesus were, in fact, quite accurate.
In conclusion, Akenson is a pleasure to read. His passion for the subject is infectious. By illuminating well-worn Biblical materials from a different angle, he may even inspire some useful study. There is certainly merit to his argument that the trauma of the Temple’s destruction knocked the evolution of Christian doctrine into a new trajectory. But he wanders astray when he makes the Temple the determining factor in shaping all Christian doctrine. His cause seems as doomed as that of the Zealots who died defending the Temple from destruction by Roman legions. This marvelous book, in the end, will dissuade no one from the quest for the historical Jesus.
— July 20, 2000