An alternate ending to “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb”
by Jon Wight
St. Paul tells Agrippa of his conversion. Stained glass window at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Va.
Many years later, probably 20 years after I gave up the investigation into the empty tomb, I was in the court of Porcius Festus, in the port of Caesarea Maritima, attending to some tax matters. I was, at that time, an old man. My liver troubled me, my skin had folded over itself as I lost weight from my intestinal troubles, and my heart was heavy with the loss of my wife and my oldest son. I was alone in the world, except for my young servant whose father had served me in earlier years.
While waiting in the city for my matters to be attended to by the new procurator, Porcius Festus, I was suddenly accosted by a Roman soldier, who ordered me to the court. “Governor Festus commands your presence.”
We marched the half-mile to the prestigious home, which also served as the procurator’s office. I had heard of — but not yet met — the famous King Herod Agrippa II, who was visiting the city with his mistress Bernice (rumored to be his sister). We entered the procurator’s chambers and I saw Agrippa across the room, seated on a throne, in a splendid robe of the finest red silk. Bernice sat next to him on a lower bench, and a scribe sat to her left with a bucket of scrolls at his feet.
A tall thin man, wearing a white robe looked up as I entered with the guard. He approached me with short steps. “You must be Nicholaus,” he said, extending his hand.
I admitted as such and the governor Festus clasped my hand. “I heard from my advisors that you were here, and that you gained some notoriety when you previously worked for Pilate, investigating those who followed Jesus after his death—is that not right?”
“It is, your eminence,” I replied, “but that was a long time ago. It is a dead story and there was a dead end to my investigation.”
“I understand,” he said, “but it appears not to be so dead after all. I beg of you to meet a new witness, who also claims to have encountered Jesus after his death. I’d like your opinion of his veracity, as this man is on trial for his life.”
I was reluctant to get involved. I was old and infirm. What did I have to gain by this? My hesitation showed, and the governor said, “Your assistance will not go unrewarded, I assure you. I understand you have some matters before this court?”
I nodded and said begrudgingly, “I am honored to help if I can, your excellency.”
“Excellent. Come then and meet my guest, King Herod Agrippa II, whose judgment I have requested also in this matter. Bring the prisoner in,” he commanded.
The order was given and shortly a bearded man with chains around his wrists was presented. I stood with Festus to the right of Agrippa, and the prisoner was directly in front of us, not six feet away. He stood calmly, his eyes slightly downcast. There was a murmur among the crowd of onlookers, as this prisoner had caused no small trouble between the Jewish priests and the followers of Jesus, and now once again the Romans were called to intervene. The priests wanted him killed, just as they had wanted Jesus condemned so many years earlier.
“Tell us your name, prisoner,” said Agrippa.
“I was born Saul, and am now reborn as Paul,” he replied. He spoke softly but with confidence. It was plain he didn’t care if he convinced us. He exuded an aura of comfort that extended to all in the room, as if he was a magnet and we were shards of iron. I stepped closer.
As this man Saul—or Paul—told his story of the bright light, and the voice of Jesus coming to him, I felt a tingling in my extremities and in my scalp. Heat rose up from my chest and my face flushed. I don’t know how or why, but I felt a profound empathy with this person — this witness — and though he told a story akin to being struck by a thunderbolt, his presence conveyed a sense of peace and acceptance that I cannot explain in my rational mind. Once encountered, I would never forget him.
After a few more questions the prisoner was dismissed and Agrippa, Festus, and I remained in silence for what seemed like ten minutes, though it was probably just one or two. Each of us seemed to have reacted in a similar manner to the prisoner in the dirty robe. At last, Festus asked the King, “Your majesty, what do you make of him? Should his sentence be death?”
Agrippa was silent for a moment. “I want to hear from this Jesus scholar first,” he said, gesturing to me. Festus nodded my way.
Still in mild shock from the encounter with Paul, I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “Your Eminences, I am no Jesus scholar, only a mere investigator. This man’s story is consistent with those of the other Jesus followers that I interviewed two decades ago, who claim to have seen or heard Jesus after his death. I have no evidence in favor of this witness, but his account struck me as truthful as he experienced it. He seems not to be a danger to Rome.”
Festus and Agrippa conferred in soft tones out of my hearing, and then Festus announced to the crowd, “This man Paul is a Roman citizen. He deserves a trial of his peers. I command that he be taken to Nero. Let him tell his story there before judgment.”
And that was the end of the affair. Within a day my matters in the court had been resolved favorably (thanks to Festus being a man of his word). I set off home. But I was not the same person as when I arrived. I was transformed by the encounter with the chained man who called himself Paul. My rational mind was the same, but my heart felt lighter. For once in many years, I was confident in my walk, and my pains receded.
Over the next few weeks, I connected with old friends and could see a new spark in their eyes. I unexplainedly gave my young servant a bonus coin and a hug on his birthday. I no longer worried about what lay ahead. Was I deluding myself in some way? Did it matter? I could not explain or justify my change in behavior, all from a chance encounter with Paul and his account of Jesus. I was entangled in this story and experienced the peace it gave me for no certain reason.
In the end I confess I have no idea what happened in the tomb of Jesus—except I know that the reverberations are being felt now all the way to Rome, and beyond. And I was glad of it.
Jon Wight is a retired university professor residing in Richmond, Va.
Historical Jesus research serves right-wing political interests, says Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza.
by James A. Bacon
Poor Dominic Crossan, he tries so hard to be one of the good guys. His Jesus, a non-violent revolutionary, preaches the liberation of peasants from their landlords, women from their masters and Jews from the Romans. His God, a deity that abhors discrimination and oppression, sides with the dispossessed. His 1st-century Rome is an empire built around systemic exploitation of the powerless. And the spread of a commercial economy under Roman dominion — the capitalism of its time — is a malignant force that corrodes traditional ways of life and drives the poor into deeper, unremitting penury. For Crossan, reconstructing the historical Jesus amounts to uncovering the voices of resistance to the forces of oppression.
For Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza the so-called Third Quest for the historical Jesus, which Crossan has done so much to popularize, is inherently flawed. Although she admires some of Crossan’s scholarship, his work is only one step removed from literalist fundamentalism, she argues in her recent book “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation.”[1] Liberal historical-Jesus scholars, like fundamentalists, “seek to ‘fix’ the pluriform expressions of Christian scriptures and traditions, the variegated texts and ambiguous metaphors of Jesus the Christ, and to filter them into a ‘commonsense,’ realistic narrative.” Historical-Jesus studies play to the fundamentalist desire to create “an ‘accurate,’ reliable biography of Jesus as a firm foundation of Western culture and biblical religion.”[2] Such studies, she insists, exhibit “elitist, anti-Jewish, colonialist, racist, and anti-feminist tendencies.”[3]
Much of Schussler Fiorenza’s latest book may sound familiar to readers of “Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet.” Indeed, she advises readers to study the two volumes in tandem. In “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation” she refers frequently back to the earlier work, filling in and updating a critique of the historical Jesus quest that she only sketched there. Schussler Fiorenza challenges not only Crossan but Bruce Malina and other “positivists” who apply the social sciences to New Testament studies. She also corrects feminist scholars whose gender studies fail to acknowledge that patriarchal domination is nested in a complex system of dominations — which she refers to as “kyriarchy” — based on class, race, ethnicity and imperialism as well as gender.[4]
Contrasting herself to scholars who refuse to acknowledge their biases, Schussler Fiorenza aspires to practice a higher level of scientific inquiry by admitting her objectives openly. Arguing that historical-Jesus research supports the mythical foundations of 21st-century kyriarchy, she says New Testament scholars should “take responsibility for the public political implications” of their research.[5] Scholarship that advances the emancipation of people from systems of dominance is worthy; scholarship that retards liberation is tainted.
Operating within this framework, Schussler Fiorenza develops her arguments on two levels: historical interpretation and contemporary analysis. In “Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet,”[6] Schussler Fiorenza the historian made a tantalizing case that a Wisdom tradition within 1st-century Judaism revered the Divine Sophia, a feminine aspect of the godhead associated with wisdom and compassion. Pushing New Testament exegesis in a daring direction, she interpreted the movement named for Jesus — one of many liberation movements active in 1st-century Judea/Galilee — as centered on Sophia. In her view, Jesus was a messenger of Sophia, though not necessarily the charismatic, driving force behind the movement as pictured in “malestream” scholarship. Schussler Fiorenza pictured the movement as heavily influenced by women. The feminine nature of Sophia was largely obliterated, however, as the forces of kyriarchy took control of the movement after Jesus’ crucifixion, replaced Sophia with patriarchal images of God the father and a male logos/Christ, then wrote the texts — the Gospels and epistles — that we must rely upon to reconstruct the movement.
One may take exception to her characterization of the Jesus movement, but her larger point seems undeniable: There was a Sophia tradition in second-temple Judaism, of which only hints and traces remain. Judaism at the turn of the millennium gave rise to an extraordinary diversity of thought not adequately reflected in our surviving sources or sufficiently appreciated by mainstream scholarship. To borrow Donald Akenson’s metaphor, the Second Temple era was “Siloam’s teeming pool” — a fecund, mutating ecosystem of religious innovation.[7]
Judged by traditional criteria of historical scholarship, however, Schussler Fiorenza’s Jesus-as-messenger-of-Sophia thesis poses significant difficulties. The evidence, as she herself admits, is largely inferential. However, in contrast to “malestream” scholars, who insist upon proving their versions of the historical Jesus, she makes less grandiose claims: She describes her thesis merely as a historical possibility, not an actuality.
Her assault on historical-Jesus methodology takes two broad directions. In one, she wrestles with the methodological issues directly, mounting a spirited challenge to the application of social-scientific models to New Testament studies. Though one may disagree with many of her conclusions, as I do, one must take them seriously. If heeded, her observations would sharpen the methodological rigor of New Testament studies.
Schussler Fiorenza’s other strategy is to judge malestream scholarship by contemporary political-ethical standards. She seeks to discredit historical-Jesus research by arguing that it buttresses the ideology of oppressive, right-wing forces around the world today. Her analysis of contemporary political economy has little to recommend it, however. Political conservatives will characterize her analysis as a pastiche of leftist cliches in which shadowy and conspiratorial forces bend the world to their ends. Even sympathizers will find her arguments short on specifics. Her dualistic formula for interpreting contemporary politics — kyriarchy versus equality; oppression versus liberation; in essence, good versus evil — grossly oversimplifies the complexities of the global economy in the 21st-century.
In sum, there seem to be two Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenzas: the New Testament scholar and worthy adversary of historical-Jesus scholarship, and the contemporary political ethicist who deals in leftist cliches. We shall address each in turn.
The Methodology of Historical-Jesus Research
Schussler Fiorenza develops a promising premise: Something must be wrong with a historical-Jesus quest that has produced so many competing versions of Jesus: Jesus as prophet, as sage, as magician, as mystic, social critic and revolutionary. What’s going on? Despite their pretensions to objectivity, she argues, the privileged, white male authors of these multiple images of Jesus are projecting their own values onto an unknowable historical figure.
For Schussler Fiorenza, scientific positivism is the methodology by which this happens. “Positivist” scholars purport to approach their research in a value-neutral manner, she claims, but in fact they arrange the historical data “in a reconstructive model that, consciously or not, is determined by the experience and interests of the scholar at work.”[8] Not only are the positivists biased, so are their sources: The New Testament texts are “androcentric,” written by men in grammatically masculine languages. The voices of wo/men are largely missing.
These are legitimate concerns. Most New Testament scholars would concede the necessity of listening to the voices of the powerless and accounting for the biases of their sources. However, Schussler Fiorenza weakens her case by mixing valid criticism with some cheap shots. Employing the rhetoric of guilt by association, she notes that scientific positivism in the 19th century played a crucial role in supporting Western European colonialism and imperialism. Cultural anthropology and ethnology, in particular, provided the justification for rule by superior Western societies over “primitive” and “inferior” indigenous ones. Even modern-day imperialists such as the U.S. government use anthropological knowledge of peasant societies to counteract resistance movements that arise from them.
While some cultural anthropologists might well have worked as apologists for Western imperialism, Schussler Fiorenza neglects to mention that others questioned “hegemonic” assumptions regarding race, ethnicity, gender roles and family structure. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a discipline that has done more to undermine traditional notions of what is “natural” in human society or has done more to attack the established order. Speaking from my grad-student experience in an inter-disciplinary history-anthropology program at the Johns Hopkins University, I know first-hand that cultural anthropologists used the tools of their profession to lay bare and criticize the impact of Western “imperialism” on indigenous societies.
The social-scientific method, I would suggest, is value neutral. There is nothing about the method that intrinsically favors the worldview of privileged white males. While individual scholars certainly do allow personal values to impair their objectivity, the process of social-scientific investigation is larger than any individual. Through peer review, scholars continually challenge and refine one another’s findings, correcting for one another’s individual biases. The process is not perfect — especially when everyone shares the same bias, as Schussler Fiorenza claims to be the case with privileged white males, but outsiders have repeatedly employed the method to devastating effect. Wielding the scientific method, newcomers have gained acceptance for any number of radical and discomfiting ideas.
Admittedly, applying the scientific method to human societies poses difficulties that natural scientists do not encounter: Social scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments with real people. Applying the social scientific method to the past is more problematic still: Social scientists cannot observe their 1st-century subjects directly. Indeed, they must grapple with historical sources that not only tend to be biased — representing the views of the elites — but leave vast lacunae in the data. As a way around these intractable problems, New Testament scholars have turned to “models” of social interactions drawn from anthropological observations of contemporary societies to suggest new hypotheses and to organize the data in novel ways.
Schussler Fiorenza gives special attention to the work of Bruce Malina and his colleagues in the Context Group for their application of social-scientific methods to the New Testament. Malina articulates a three-step process: Postulating a model, testing the model against the data, then refining the model to better account for the data. She raises three objections to this method.
1. Rather than treating its models as a set of hypothesized relationships, “social scientific Jesus research understands that a reconstructive model of, for example, Mediterranean society not as hypothesis and theory but as preconstructed fact.”[9]
2. The notion of testing models against the “facts” in the past is inherently flawed. Where do scholars get the facts? From literary texts, which are androcentric and ideological in nature. Some of the biases in the texts can be counteracted through critical analysis of the language, she concedes, but the positivists don’t engage in such an exercise — they believe that language reflects social reality.
3. In seeking data to test his models against, Malina makes some tremendous assumptions about the continuity of social structures and values across time. He projects social patterns existing in Mediterranean cultures today into the Mediterranean world of the 1st century. But one cannot presuppose that just because women are denied positions of authority in Mediterranean cultures today that they necessarily were 2,000 years ago.
Unquestionably, Schussler Fiorenza has identified three potential pitfalls in Malina’s method. Some social scientists may be tempted to make their data fit the model rather than revising the model to fit the data. Some historians may fail to correct for the biases of ancient authors and the language they used to articulate their perceptions. Some scholars may presume, without supporting evidence, that social patterns in the Mediterranean world today necessarily prevailed two millennia ago. But she has not demonstrated that they have in fact done so. Rather than dispensing with the social-scientific method entirely, it would seem to be more appropriate to admonish those scholars who fall into error when applying the approach.[10]
It’s not as if Schussler Fiorenza has an aversion to models. Indeed, she proposes her own model as a framework for New Testament studies: the struggle between kyriarchy (lord/father/master/husband) and wo/men, between the forces of domination and those of liberation. Where she sees Malina and his Context Group associates as guilty of unconsciously imposing their own privileged, white male suppositions on the data, she consciously imposes her own feminist model of kyriarchy.
Schussler Fiorenza’s model is so vague, however, that it is not terribly useful as an analytical tool. She never actually uses the kyriarchal model to organize the vast data regarding 1st-century Judea to tell us exactly how the institutions created by lord/father/master/husband functioned, in what way they were oppressive, or which features of the system the Jesus movement resisted.
If we turn our attention to just one institution, the family, numerous questions arise. Does she agree or disagree with Malina’s observation that 1st-century Judeans practiced patrilocality — a practice in which newly married couples move into the household of the groom’s family, as opposed to moving in with the bride’s family or, like contemporary Westerners, setting up their own households? Did Judeans trace their descent through the father’s lineage exclusively, or did they sometimes trace it through their mother’s family? Did they practice a sexual division of labor, with males working in the public sphere and women in the domestic? Did the laws of divorce favor men? Did inheritance patterns favor elder sons? Did brides receive dowries? Did women exercise control over their own property? Who exercised control over domestic household resources, the men or the women?
Schussler Fiorenza characterizes as “anti-Semitic” anyone who would characterize Judean society as “patriarchal,” arguing instead that kyriarchal/patriarchal forces within Judaism were in continual tension with emancipatory movements that rejected the kyriarchy. But she never tells us specifically what the points of tension were between oppressors and oppressed. What did it mean to resist kyriarchal authority in the family domain? She never hints at the wide range of possibilities. Did Judean women refuse to move in with their husbands’ families? Did they rebel against working in the household? Did they want to alter divorce and inheritance laws in their favor? Did they insist upon deriving familial status from their mothers’ lineages rather than their fathers’? She doesn’t says.[11]
But, then, Schussler Fiorenza doesn’t have to worry about specifics. In act of logical legerdemain, she holds her reconstruction of the Jesus movement to be an historical possibility and insists that the burden of proof falls upon anyone who would disagree with her: Instead of asking if it is likely that wo/men shaped the Jesus traditions, one must ask if it is historically possible and thinkable that they did so.[12]
At the same time, she also sets ground rules that make it impossible to disprove her theory. According to her logic, the androcentric New Testament texts and the masculine grammar of the ancient languages have obliterated any record of wo/man contributions to the Jesus tradition. “If one cannot prove that wo/men were not members of this group and did not participate in shaping the earliest Jesus traditions,” she writes, “one needs to give the benefit of the doubt to the textual traces suggesting that they did.”
In the final analysis, Schussler Fiorenza insists that New Testament interpretations be judged on the basis of “whether they inculcate mind-sets of discrimination or exclusion.”[13] Crossan, Malina and other positivists would never admit to condoning discrimination or exclusion, of course. Who, then, would decide whether they are guilty of such conduct? Whose ethical standards, whose judgment, would prevail? Should Crossan and Malina ever rise to defend themselves from Schussler Fiorenza’s charges, I venture to predict, the matter would never be settled. The debate over the historical Jesus simply would shift from a potentially productive discussion about history to an unproductive theological squabble that could easily turn personal and ugly. That is not a formula for advancing knowledge and understanding.
The Political Economy of Historical-Jesus Research
“Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation” is not another historical-Jesus book, Schussler Fiorenza insists. It’s an inquiry into the scholarly discourses that have converted the historical Jesus into “an article of trade and an object of spiritual consumption in the global neocapitalist market.” It is “no accident,” she writes, that “an explosion of Historical-Jesus books has occurred at a time when the media have discovered the ‘angry white male’ syndrome that fuels white-supremacist, antifeminist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant, antipeasant, neo-fascist movements.”[14]
Schussler Fiorenza implies that Historical-Jesus studies have proliferated because they serve the interests of kyriarchal structures of oppression. She ties the growing interest in the historical Jesus to the resurgence of the Religious Right. She associates the Religious Right, in turn, with “right-wing, well-financed think tanks supported by reactionary political and financial institutions that seek to defend kyriarchal capitalism.”[15] She is extremely vague, however, about how these multiform reactionary forces support one another.
Some elucidation into her reasoning can be found in her earlier work, “Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet.” Biblical history and theology — including historical-Jesus books — are part of the “master narratives” of Western culture which maintain systems of knowledge that either foster exploitation or promote liberation. Contemporary kyriarchy, as best I can understand her, employs mass media to impose its own master narrative. Religious fundamentalists, she notes, are particularly skilled at harnessing new communications technologies. Furthermore, the spread of multinational corporations in a global economy have given rise to an “informatics of domination,” which seeks to “discipline the explosion of communications technologies through the control of information.”[16]
She creates the impression that interlocking kyriarchal forces — global corporations, well-funded think tanks and the Religious Right — are collaborating to foist upon the global population an ideology that justifies oppressive systems of class, racial, ethnic and gender dominance. Although she does not state so outright, she implies that control of the mass media is the key mechanism by which the forces of oppression create mental constructs and frame political issues in an advantageous way.
In reading Schussler Fiorenza’s analysis, however, one yearns for specifics to demonstrate how the “informatics of domination” might work in the real world. Could she not, for instance, have cited Jerry Falwell, organizer of the now-defunct Moral Majority? Or Pat Robertson, president of the Christian Coalition? Both men, two of the most prominent leaders of the Religious Right in the U.S., are media savvy, politically active and astute capitalists. If her analysis has any explanatory value, it should be able to demonstrate how they — or other fundamentalists — align themselves with the forces of global capitalism to impose kyriarchal mindsets on the world.
At first blush, Jerry Falwell would seem to be a promising case study. Through his “Listen America” program, Falwell broadcasts his brand of fundamentalist conservatism through satellite, cable and more than 50 television stations nationally.[17] His religious-industrial complex in Lynchburg, Va., also includes:
Thomas Road Baptist Church
Liberty University (home base of Gary Habermas, a prominent fundamentalist historic-Jesus scholar)
Old Time Gospel Hour (broadcast on more than 100 stations in North America)
Falwell Ministries Christian Bookstore
Numerous Internet sites.
But a careful analysis of the Falwell empire would show that it does not fit Schussler Fiorenza’s model of interlocking fundamentalists and capitalists. Most, if not all, of Falwell’s enterprises are not-for-profit organizations. They are required to file public financial reports to the Internal Revenue Service. An inspection of these records probably would reveal that his enterprises are pitifully small — revenues in multiples of $10 millions — as measured by the standards of multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. The fact is, not-for-profit organizations cannot sell stock in order to raise the capital necessary to create global-scale enterprises. Relying mainly on donations from those who watch his programming, Falwell has bootstrapped his organization with minimal assistance from corporate capitalists.
Likewise, Schussler Fiorenza could have pointed to Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and probably the most successful entrepreneur among evangelical conservatives in the public eye. This year, Virginia Business magazine estimates his personal net worth at $150 million. He founded the Family Channel, which provides family fare for cable television, took the company public then sold it to the Fox Entertainment Group — part of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s massive, multinational media empire. Robertson still operates the Christian Broadcasting Network, which broadcasts news and cultural programming with a conservative religious slant, serves as chancellor of Regent University in Virginia Beach, and has invested in the Internet. Robertson also is president of the Christian Coalition, which he founded to promote conservative Christian values in government. The Christian coalition claims to have “well over a million supporters in 1,500 chapters in all 50 states.”[18]
Does Robertson’s political-media empire fit Schussler Fiorenza’s model of fundamentalists in cahoots with global capitalism? I would suggest that it does not. First of all, CBN is a niche player in the media world. Angel Watts, a CBN spokeperson, estimates CBN’s viewership around 1 million people. The network is supported by donations, not advertising. The size of CBN’s audience, its profitability and its business clout pale beside that of the networks owned by globe-spanning multibillion-dollar conglomerates such as General Electric (NBC), Disney (ABC), Viacom (CBS) and News Corp. (Fox).
Second, Robertson’s sale of the Family Channel to News Corp. is hardly an example of fundamentalists and capitalists working in concert: After the transaction, secular professionals in Hollywood wrested control over programming from the evangelicals in Virginia Beach, Va., who had nurtured the company from its infancy. From the perspective of the media giants, Robertson is a marginal player both financially and ideologically. Indeed, many executives of the big, secular media companies regard Robertson and his brand of fundamentalism with scorn. Recent derogatory remarks by Ted Turner, founder of Cable News Network, about “Jesus freaks” at CNN may be symptomatic.[19]
Robertson and CBN exist in their own parallel universe. Far from influencing the dominant forces of global capitalism, Robertson, Falwell and their fundamentalist colleagues have sought to create their own media outlets as an alternative to those forces. In the U.S., fundamentalists regard with dismay the increasing violence, profanity and sexuality in music, movies and television programming. One need not agree with their religion or politics to recognize that, far from representing the dominant “discourse” in society, fundamentalists are trying to preserve their own discourse. Far from overlapping, the interests of the Religious Right and Big Business often conflict.
Schussler Fiorenza’s analytical framework has other difficulties. She never discusses the economics of the book publishing industry — the capitalist sector directly responsible for the proliferation of historical-Jesus books.
She might find it of interest, for example, that a direct line of corporate influence can be traced from John Dominic Crossan to right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch! It goes like this:
Crossan’s book publisher is HarperSanFrancisco
HarperSanFrancisco is an imprint of HarperCollins
HarperCollins is part of the News America Publishing Group
News America is a division of News Corp., a global media conglomerate
Rupert Murdoch is chairman and CEO of News Corp.
Arguably, Crossan owes much of his reputation as the world’s leading historical-Jesus expert to the publicists at one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Undoubtedly, HarperSanFrancisco can afford to spend far more money advertising and marketing his books than Continuum, Schussler Fiorenza’s publisher, can afford to promote hers.
However, HarperSanFrancisco is only one of many companies publishing New Testament scholarship. Indeed, the field of religion publishing is so fragmented that no single entity, or agglomeration of entities, can be held responsible for the outpouring of Jesus biographies. In the United States, New Testament scholarship comes mainly from academic presses and independent publishing houses such as Eerdmans, Augsburg Fortress, Westminster/John Knox and Continuum, not global conglomerates like News Corp.
A look at The Continuum International Publishing Group, Schussler Fiorenza’s publisher, is instructive. Upon casual inspection, the company would seem to fit the profile of the kyriarchal forces that Schussler Fiorenza sees at work in the world. With editorial staffs in New York and London, Continuum is global in scope, selling its books throughout the English-speaking world. What’s more, it’s growing in classic capitalist fashion by buying small, independent publishing houses in the U.S. and Great Britain and using its economies of scale in distribution, marketing and printing to publish more profitably than its cottage-industry competitors.
But that’s only part of the story. Continuum originated as an imprint of Seabury Press, the official publishing house of the Episcopal Church, in the 1960s. Continuum split from Seabury, then affiliated with British publishers Cassell, according to Senior Editor Frank Oveis. Continuum has indeed grown by buying small, religious and academic publishing houses, says Oveis, but “in most cases, they were privately owned. The owners were getting to an age where they were wondering what they were going to do.” Most recently, Continuum picked up T&T Clark, a prestigious old Scottish publisher whose owner was looking for a buyer.
Continuum’s editors, who determine the selection of book titles, tend to share liberal-leftist views, says Oveis. The company’s best-selling book of all time is “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, an instructional manual for teaching peasants how to read by appealing to issues that matter to them like rent and land tenure. Schussler Fiorenza has been another outstanding author. Her best seller, “In Memory of Her,” has sold about 80,000 copies, he says. But the editors aren’t dogmatic. One of its titles is a historical-Jesus classic, “Jesus the Healer,” by Stevan L. Davies. Plus, thanks to T&T Clark, Continuum also owns the distribution rights in Great Britain for books penned by Historical Jesus giants such as Ben Witherington and John Dominic Crossan!
In conclusion, global capitalism is diverse and pluralistic, not a monolith bent upon maintaining the oppressive “master narrative” of Western Civilization. I would propose an alternative to Schussler Fiorenza’s thesis: There are more historical Jesus books published today than ever before because publishers, driven by the profit motive, find that people buy them. People are buying record numbers of historical-Jesus books for personal reasons — some may be dissatisfied with traditional religious dogma, while others may seek affirmation of fundamentalist beliefs — not because capitalist publishers want to reinforce kyriarchal “systems of knowledge.”
When people begin examining their faiths, I submit, a logical place to begin is to study their historical origins. What better place to start than with the historical Jesus, the man who started it all? While some people may find the diversity of opinions to be confounding, others find it stimulating. Somewhere, there’s an historical Jesus out there — or as Schussler Fiorenza would insist, an imagined Jesus — that’s right for everyone.– May 25, 2001
[1] Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza; Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation; The Continnum International Publishing Group; New York; 2000.
[4] This review will focus on Schussler Fiorenza’s critique of the “positivists.” Coming from a social location as a “privileged white male” striving for value-neutrality in my own historical analysis, I find this aspect of her writing to be of immediate concern. However, anyone interested in following controversies within feminist New Testament scholarship also will find “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation” to be of interest.
[10] Ps. 104-114, Schussler Fiorenza does apply her critique to one concrete instance for purposes of illustration: the use of a cross-cultural model of millennial movements to advance the argument that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. She starts with a model proposed by Dennis Duling, like Malina a member of the Context Group, but never tells us how Duling applies that model to the Jesus movement. In the discussion that follows, she veers between discussions of the Jesus Seminar and its controversial polling techniques, Dominic Crossan’s method for stratifying the dating of New Testament literary sources and the extensive parallels that Dale Allison — not Duling — finds between the Jesus movement and other millennial movements. Then she quotes Marcus Borg to the effect that the scholarly consensus regarding an apocalyptic Jesus is “breaking down” but never reveals the basis for his judgment, much less why — or even if — he finds the Duling/Allison typology inadequate. I happen to agree with her appraisals of the Jesus Seminar and Crossan’s stratigraphy, but I struggle to find a critique of Malina’s social-scientific method in her dissection of millennial movements.
[11] She doesn’t tell us in either “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation” or “Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet.” She is a prolific author and she may have addressed these issues in previous books, which I have not consulted. However, she does not allude to any such arguments in her footnotes of the books reviewed here. Also, I have patterned my argument after John H. Elliott’s critique of Schussler Fiorenza’s earlier work. Basing his argument largely on her earlier work Elliott argues in an unpublished paper, “The Jesus Movement was not ‘Egalitarian’ but Family-oriented: A Critique of an Anachronistic and Idealist Fallacy,” that Schuzzler Fiorenza does never explains what kind of social patterns might prevail in a “patriarchal” society.
[14] P. 14. From this quote, I understand Schussler Fiorenza to be associating Historical-Jesus studies with the “angry white male syndrome,” not the media’s discovery of that syndrome, as a literal reading of the sentence would suggest.
[17]http://www.listenamerica.net/la_site/pages/where/whermn.html. May 4, 2001. Though still regarded as a leader of the “Religious Right” political movement, Falwell folded the Moral Majority in 1989. The organization claimed to have raised $3.5 million in its final year, but anti-Falwell fund-raisers on the left probably raised far more money in direct-mail appeals to counter his activities.
[18]http://www.cc.org/aboutcca/patmessage1.html, April 27, 2001. Note the careful use of language. The Christian Coalition claims more than one million “supporters,” not members. It’s not clear how Robertson measures “supporters,” but there is nothing implausible about the figure. It should not be surprising in a country of 275 million people that one million connect with Robertson’s political philosophy. On the other hand, this number represents less than 1 percent of the electorate. Also, recent news reports suggest that donations have fallen off dramatically in the past year.
[19] On Ash Wednesday, Turner noticed several CNN employees with ashes on their forehead. “What are you, a bunch of Jesus freaks?” he reportedly said. Observers on the political left tend to underestimate the extent to which the cultural conservatism of the Religious Right is at odds with the market conservativism of the business community. The alliance between the two groups in the Republican Party is an uneasy one.
Jack Elliott thinks not. The concept of social equality did not exist in ancient Judea.
by James A. Bacon
Jack Elliott takes pride in his career of liberal activism. In the 1960s, he protested against the Vietnam War and marched in Selma, Alabama. In the 1970s, he employed Christian theology to advance the quest for social justice. Since then, he has dedicated his career to making the Lutheran Church more inclusive. A self-avowed feminist, he has advocated the equal treatment of women within the church. But as a scholar of the New Testament era, there’s one place he draws the line: He won’t change the past. No one advances the cause of justice, Elliott says, by rewriting history and pretending that Jesus and his followers were social reformers with 21st-century sensibilities.
In Elliott’s reading of history, Jesus was indeed a reformer. He preached “radical inclusiveness,” bringing into his circle the outcasts and the dispossessed of Galilean society. In place of a hierarchical and exploitive system, with temple priests and Herodian princes at the top and peasants at the bottom, Jesus preached a new family of God with a just and benevolent deity at the apex of the social order. But the notion that Jesus advocated an egalitarian society — a view promulgated by a growing number of biblical scholars and theologians over the past decade — is just wishful thinking.
Elliott advanced this interpretation March 16 at the annual meeting of the Context Group at the University of Notre Dame. His thesis — “The Jesus Movement was not ‘Egalitarian’ but Family-Oriented: A Critique of an Anachronistic and Idealist Fallacy” — was one of nine working papers presented at the conference, which is devoted to exploring social-scientific perspectives on the biblical era. The purpose of the Context Group is to test ideas before an audience of friendly, like-minded colleagues before subjecting it to rigorous, and often critical, scrutiny in a formal setting like a Society of Biblical Literature conference. Accordingly, all views expressed are tentative and subject to revision.
In the 1990s a number of prominent New Testament scholars and theologians — including such luminaries as John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Gerd Theissen — put forth the idea that Jesus launched an “egalitarian” reform movement. He respects all three authors, says Elliott in explaining his interest in the topic: “They do good stuff. But I found it odd that they thought they could find evidence of egalitarianism in the 1st century.” He found it downright disconcerting when other scholars began repeating the error. He expected that someone would correct them sooner or later, but no one did. So, he took the job upon himself.
A composite view of the Egalitarian Thesis would go something like this: Jesus rejected the stratified and exploitative socio-economic system in the Judean homeland. In preaching the Kingdom of God, he described a demolition of the social hierarchy — “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”[1] — and its replacement with a discipleship of equals. Jesus wasn’t in a position to overthrow the Romans and their Judean collaborators, but he did initiate a social revolution. He urged followers to abandon their homes, possessions and families, as he himself had done. His jarring words regarding the family, in particular — “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children · he cannot be my disciple”[2] — suggest that he repudiated the patriarchal, male-dominated family structure. He also forbade divorce, an institution that favored the rights of men over those of women. And he practiced “open commensality,” the sharing of meals with sinners and outcasts. The community of equals survived Jesus’ death in the form of homeless, itinerant preachers and the households that sheltered them, but the church reverted to traditional patriarchal and hierarchical structures within a few decades.
Elliott contends that such views impute 21st-century concepts and values to inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world. The Judeans of the 1st century lived in a society organized around politics and kinship. By monopolizing the instruments of coercion, the Romans and the local Judean aristocracy extracted wealth from the population through taxes, rents and temple tithes. Wealth trickled back down as powerful patrons acted as benefactors, bestowing wealth and favors to their clients in exchange for acclaim and support. Language reflected the social structures of the time. The ancients had words for “justice” and “fairness” and “equity,” reflecting the ideals of people receiving treatment in accordance with their circumstances and social rank, but they never articulated an ideal of social equality. People enjoyed only those privileges ordained by custom or granted as benefactions by rulers.
“There was nothing in the Greco-Roman world that would have served as an analogy or impetus for eliminating prevailing patriarchal structures and social inequity,” Elliott says. The concepts of inalienable rights, equality before the law and social-economic equality originated with the 18th-century Enlightenment and were first put into practice — imperfectly, at that — only with the American and French revolutions.
Rather than creating a community of equals, Elliott suggests, Jesus organized a movement with an alternative hierarchy in which he stood at the top and others defined their status in relationship to him. He appointed “the Twelve,” including an inner core of those first called to his mission: Peter, John and James. Of those, Peter held the highest status, although John and James also jockeyed for precedence. Even women such as Mary Magdalene who had close personal contact with Jesus enjoyed higher status than others, men or women, who did not. Among his followers, only those who traveled with him embraced a life of poverty. Others, the publicans and the Galilean women who financially supported Jesus, evidently remained wealthier than the rest.
Jesus used the metaphor of family — the traditional patriarchal family — to organize his movement. He urged behavior consistent with patriarchal family values, which, according to Elliott, included submission to the father’s will, family solidarity, mutual support and protection, forgiveness of offenses and debts, protection of the vulnerable and the integrity of marriage. Jesus’ innovation was to integrate God into a redefined family structure, Elliott says. “The new family of God was one in which all humans trusted in and relied upon God as their Father and benefactor. It was a family constituted not by ties of blood or marriage but by obedience to the heavenly father’s will. It was a family in which all who trusted in God, as did Jesus, were established and united as brothers and sisters who maintained familial solidarity.”[3]
The Jesus movement also was distinctive, Elliott notes, in its radical inclusiveness. All Judeans were eligible to receive God’s forgiveness for their sins, and all levels of society were invited into his movement. Jesus took in the poor and dispossessed. He embraced publicans, sinners and other outcasts. Indeed, in the Kingdom of God, the poor would be preeminent: The last would be first. Although Jesus anticipated a cosmic role reversal — an inversion of status — he never hinted at an abolition of hierarchy. God would simply reshuffle the individuals within the hierarchy according to the criteria that Jesus enunciated. Furthermore, Jesus never advocated an earthly program, such as redistribution of land and property for society at large, that would address inequities on a systemic basis. As Elliott observes, “Suffering and want caused by inequity were to be alleviated by generosity, almsgiving, and compassion towards one’s fellow human beings, but Jesus engaged in no campaign to eradicate altogether the causes of such disparities.”
Egalitarian theorists have succumbed to the “idealist fallacy,” Elliott concludes. They improperly infer affirmations of social and economic equality from Jesus’ statements, and then treat those inferences as evidence of actual social and economic relations. “By all means let us reform the ills of society and church,” he writes. “But let us do so with historical honesty, respecting the past as the past and not trying to rewrite it with new ideological pens.”
* * *
John H. Elliott graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Mo., the largest Lutheran seminary in the world, and then pursued graduate studies in Germany. Returning to Missouri in 1963, he was teaching New Testament studies when the civil rights movement erupted across the American South. He belonged to a group, the Council for Religion and Race, which was in contact with Martin Luther King. One night, King called the seminary, rounding up supporters for his march in Selma, Ala. Elliott skipped classes the next morning to attend the rally. “That was my baptism of fire,” he recalls. The problem wasn’t police dogs and fire hoses — it was the reaction when he came home. A lot of people didn’t believe in mixing politics and religion.
Leaving the seminary in 1967, Elliott took a job at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution located in the cockpit of the 1960s youth rebellion. “All hell was breaking loose in San Francisco,” he recalls: “flower power, free speech, the Vietnam War. I could hear Jefferson Airplane playing free concerts in the park out my [office] window.” Joining the antiwar movement, Elliott participated in demonstrations that resulted in the arrest of some of his compatriots. He remembers celebrating Eucharist outside prison, expressing solidarity with a friend inside.
Finding that he shared intellectual interests with a number of his fellow protestors — many of them from Berkeley — Elliott met with them off the streets to explore the intersection of politics and theology. They called themselves the Bay Area Seminar for Theology and Related Disciplines — BASTARDs. “I was deeply committed to liberation movements,” he says.
n his view, there were no good guys or bad guys in the Vietnam War. Theology didn’t help him make much sense of what he saw. Searching for new perspectives, he began reading widely in sociology, anthropology and political science. He asked many of the same questions as the liberation theologians active at the time, but he found they weren’t rigorous enough in their analysis. “You can’t talk about liberation in a vacuum,” Elliott says. “You’ve got to ask, what are the causes of oppression? Who benefits? Who’s being oppressed? How are they being manipulated?”
As Elliott developed a framework for answering such questions, he began applying it to the Bible. He had written his dissertation about 1 Peter, arguably the most neglected letter of the New Testament. The few scholars who had studied the document had interpreted its message along spiritual lines: Grit your teeth, hang in there, and God will take you to heaven. Viewed afresh through the lens of social analysis, 1 Peter took on a new meaning. The letter wasn’t dispensing spiritual pabulum, Elliott says, it was addressing concrete concerns of real people. The author probably was writing from Rome around 70 C.E. to 90 C.E. to a mixed Judean-gentile community in Asia Minor. Many of the church members were recent migrants to the city, resident aliens, who were looked down upon by the native inhabitants. 1 Peter’s author gave a positive interpretation to their condition, says Elliott: “I know you’re suffering a lot, but this situation can be turned to good; you are resident aliens, but you have a home with us in God.” He published his work under the title, “Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientific Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy.”
After a stint at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where as a Lutheran he found himself in the remarkable position of teaching theology to Jesuits, Elliott returned to the U.S. In 1979 he experienced a major turning point in his career: While giving an address on Home for the Homeless, he met Bruce J. Malina. Like Elliott, Malina had been exploring the social sciences for new perspectives on biblical studies. The two immediately hit it off, sparking a life-long friendship and forming the nucleus of like-minded scholars to pursue the application of social sciences in the New Testament. After a brief incarnation as the Social Facets group in affiliation with the Jesus Seminar, Elliott, Malina and their colleagues assembled annually under the banner of the Context Group. (For more about the Context Group, see the May 2001 article in the Jesus Archive.)
One of the contributions of the Context Group to the study of the historical Jesus has been to expose the anachronistic fallacies embedded in much New Testament exegesis. When reading scripture, most scholars unconsciously apply their 21st frame of reference to 1st century people and institutions. These subtle biases apply to almost every sphere of life: from politics to economics, from religion to family. Historians readily perceive the differences in outward forms: that the political structures of 1st-century Judea were undemocratic, that the Romans and the Judean aristocrats monopolized political power, and that the ruling class exercised its power to extract wealth from the weak. But few scholars appreciate the dynamics of such a society. A tendency exists to interpret the social conflicts of the era in terms with which we are familiar, such as class struggles or anti-colonial liberation movements. But the Mediterranean world operated according to the principles of a “patron-client” system in which powerful patrons developed networks of face-to-face relations with clients, exchanging gifts and protection for political support and acclaim. Individuals perceived themselves as participating in one of many pyramids of political power, not as belonging to social classes such as “the aristocracy” or “the peasantry.”
The mental frameworks that contemporary Westerners use to interpret society simply did not exist anywhere in the world before the 18th- century Enlightenment. Only when overseas exploration exposed Europeans to the incredible diversity of human cultures and civilizations did anyone begin to appreciate that different forms of social organization were possible. Only then did philosophers theorize that human behavior was shaped by social structures, that the cause of human suffering resulted from inequities in those structures, and that society could be organized so that all men could be treated equally. The ancients had no such perspective. They attributed misery and misfortune either to the folly and wickedness of men, or to the design of gods, spirits or demons acting out of very human motives. Those who thought about such matters, such as Aristotle and Plato, suggested that social differences were determined by nature, thus permanent and unalterable.
That’s why Elliott thought it strange that respected scholars began writing of Jesus as the leader of an egalitarian movement. The egalitarian theme can be discerned in earlier works, but it gained momentum in the early 1990s with the publication in 1991 of Dominic Crossan’s “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” and in 1993 with Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s “Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation.” On the basis of their prestige, other scholars began replicating the fallacy, says Elliott. “I thought it important to nip this in the bud. I waited and waited for someone else to do it, but no one did.”
Three years ago, he decided to undertake the effort himself. His essay, “The Jesus Movement Was Not Egalitarian but Family-Oriented” is the result.
* * *
Egalitarian theorists cite numerous passages in the New Testament scriptures as evidence of egalitarian impulses in the Jesus movement. In each case, Elliott argues, they misinterpret the significance of the material.
Abandonment of family, renunciation of possessions. A prevalent theme of the Gospels is Jesus’ call for disciples to abandon their family ties and obligations, give away their property, drop their occupations and trust to God for their material security. The egalitarian theorists regard these proclamations as a critique of prevailing social institutions, the family in particular. But they misconstrue what Jesus is saying, Elliott argues. Jesus wasn’t passing judgment on family structures or social institutions but enjoining his disciples to re-order their priorities in anticipation of God’s imminent reign. Jesus made these demands not of the Judean population at large but of the disciples who personally accompanied him. The success of his movement required sympathizers who maintained the means to house and feed him. Jesus’ call for his closest followers to adopt his way of life implied no desire to transform the social structure. Indeed, no society could have long remained viable for long if all its members had ceased productive activity such as farming, fishing and herding.
Homelessness of the Son of Man. Jesus’ voluntary homelessness, suggests Crossan, “symbolized the egalitarian message of the Kingdom where all are equal, and no place is dominant — and neither is any person, family or village.” This is pure inference, responds Elliott. “Crossan’s conclusion involves an unacceptable leap from having no geographical place to call home to an inferred equality of persons, families or villages.”
Jesus and Divorce. Crossan finds that Jesus’ saying on divorce implied that women should have the same rights as men in marriage. But Jesus was not expanding women’s rights, Elliott notes: He was prohibiting a practice — divorce and remarriage — that had disruptive social effects. Divorce didn’t make reconciliation impossible, but remarriage did. Unlike in contemporary Western societies in which marriage is a legal union of two individuals, marriage in Judean society represented an alliance between two families. Complicating matters upon a break-up, marriage typically involved the transfer of property through a bride’s dowry. As a consequence, divorce could lead to bitter acrimony, even feuds.
Reversal of status. According to Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus radically rejected all relationships of domination and subordination — within the patriarchal family and the hierarchical society at large. She cites the array of passages suggesting a reversal of status: “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” But Schussler Fiorenza and others mistake the reversal of status with the elimination of status. Far from preaching the obliteration of hierarchical structures, Elliott contends, Jesus’ vision required hierarchy. In God’s Kingdom, Jesus, his disciples and those who accepted his message would be elevated in stature. They would rule and pass judgment on those who had formerly persecuted them.
The New Family of God. Egalitarian theorists point to Jesus’ embrace of God’s family in place of his biological family as another rejection of prevailing social structures: “Whoseover shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.” Noting the omission of “father” from those whom Jesus accepts as his kin, Schussler Fiorenza speaks of a new “kinship of equal discipleship” and of a new family where fathers are excluded: “Insofar as this new ‘family’ has no room for ‘fathers,’ it implicitly rejected their patriarchal power and status, and thereby claims that in its midst all patriarchal structures of domination and subordination are abolished.” Far from critiquing the family structure, however, Elliott says the passage shows Jesus’ conception of the family as an institution appropriate for defining life under the reign of God. “What the saying expressly affirms,” writes Elliott, “is a redefinition of the identity of the family of Jesus and the basis for membership — not blood or marriage but obedience to the will of God.”
Open meals. According to Crossan, one of the ways in which Jesus put his egalitarian ideas into practice was through “open commensality,” expanding the circle of those with whom he ate. Says Crossan: “Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism.” Elliott takes this practice as a sign of Jesus’ inclusiveness, but finds no evidence that Jesus accorded all participants the same status at the banquet table. The Gospels never hint at an abolition of servants/slaves serving the meals or a reordering of seating arrangements that gave places of honor to those of greatest status.
Many of Jesus’ teachings presume economic and social disparity. Among the examples that Elliott cites:
Male household owners having authority over their servants. (Mark 13:34: “For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.”
Children honoring their parents. (Mark 7:10: For Moses said, honour thy father and thy mother.”
Older sons superior in social rank to younger sons. (Implied in Luke 15:11-32: parable of the prodigal son.)
Differentiated places of honor and status. (Luke 14:8-9: “When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, set not down in the highest room; lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him; And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.”
To Jesus, disparities in wealth and status were the natural order of things. As he said in Mark 14:7: “Ye have the poor with ye always.”
* * *
Preaching equality is one thing, achieving it is quite another. Even if the egalitarian theorists could make a case that Jesus articulated a vision of equality, Elliott argues, they offer very little evidence — outside the dubious example of open meals — that Jesus and his followers actually put such ideals into practice. Demolishing traditional social structures would have required far more than a one-time redistribution of property to transform social relations. It would have meant changing practices and institutions that created the inequalities to begin with. Some of these include:
The patron-client system in which patrons possessing power acquired wealth then redistributed it to clients in exchange for support and honor.
The system of patrilineal descent, in which families derived honor from their descent through the male’s lineage.
The patrilocal rule of residence, in which the wife moved into the husband’s family’s household in a subordinate position.
The prerogative of male heads of households to arranged marriage, subordinating the personal desires of the bride to the interests of the family.
Primogeniture, or the favoring of the eldest son in inheritance.
The distinction between male-gendered space (public) and female-gendered space (domestic).
Had Jesus launched a social movement that changed the way people interacted with one another, there should be evidence that he altered real-world practices. But what signs are there, Elliott asks, that the Jesus movement accorded its members equal access to power, wealth and honor? “Our egalitarian theorists have provided no such evidence because it does not exist and because such fundamental changes would have been impossible to effect.”
Rather than reinventing social institutions, Jesus adapted an existing institution — the patriarchal family — as a model for his movement. “In this family of faith,” Elliott contends, “social and economic disparities remained but were relativized by an insistence on mutual humility, mutual forgiveness, mutual aid and mutual respect.” After Jesus’ death, his followers assembled in households, even as they moved beyond the homeland of the Jews. They saw themselves as constituting a new surrogate “family of God” and defined their social relationships in family terms. These fictive family ties facilitated mutual support but also perpetuated differentiated roles and statuses.
As evidence of an egalitarian impulse in the early church, Shussler Fiorenza has pointed to Paul’s famous passage in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one.” From this passage she infers an obliteration of ethnic differences, an abolition of slavery, and a demolition of the patriarchal family. “Insofar as this egalitarian Christian self-understanding did away with all male privileges of religion, class and caste,” she wrote, “it allowed not only gentiles and slaves but also women to exercise leadership functions within the missionary movement.”
Schussler Fiorenza confuses equality with unity, Elliott retorts. The statement, “You are all one in Christ,” affirms the inclusivity of the Jesus movement. Greeks were no longer excluded from the family of God. Women and slaves were regarded as capable of making their own moral choices. But Paul did not say “You are all equal in Christ.” No one freed his slaves. Males still ruled their households. The wealthy refused to associate with the poor. Economic inequity and partiality plagued the believers addressed not only by Paul but James and 1 Peter. Even the egalitarian theorists concede that the Christian communities eventually reverted to hierarchical patterns.
Which scenario is more likely? That Jesus created social arrangements with no known precedent, that the experiment survived his death but perished without a trace within a generation, and that these wrenching social transformations left only the faintest spoor in the historical record? Or that Jesus patterned his movement upon an alternate — but existing — institution, that of the family? For Elliott, the answer is clear.
Many scholars claim the moral authority of Jesus to support their own view of the way things should be. But Elliott does not succumb to that temptation.
“I myself have been arguing for greater equality in the Church my entire professional career,” he says. But “a respect for history and the actual social reality of the early Jesus movement requires that we not confuse current ideals with past realities. It requires that we acknowledge that all societies of all times work with differing cultural constructs of reality that shaped their visions, attitudes, values and actions. As biblical interpreters, our responsibility is to read and interpret the biblical writings within their own historical, economic, social, political and cultural contexts. An erroneous and anachronistic imputation of modern notions to the biblical authors should be challenged and resisted in the name of historical honesty.”
The Jesus Archive chatted recently with Bruce Chilton about his controversial book, Rabbi Jesus. Because Chilton wrote in a popular, biographical format, keeping scholarly notes to a minimum, he did not explain in detail the reasoning behind many of his interpretations. With this Q&A we press him to explain the basis for some of his more controversial propositions.
Jesus Archive: With a title of “Rabbi Jesus,” your book courts controversy before the reader can even open it. Why did you portray Jesus as a rabbi?
Bruce Chilton: Rabbi is the designation applied to Jesus in the New Testament texts more than any other, including “son of God” and “messiah.” If you want to know how Jesus was known in his own time, both by friends and by enemies, then you have to start with the title rabbi. The book explains that a rabbi was a teacher within Judaism, recognized by the community as someone who conveyed the Torah. In later Rabbinical tradition, the title became associated with literary expertise, formal training, and ordination. This was not the case in the time of Jesus. In calling Jesus a rabbi, I’m not saying he went to a yeshiva. In the same way, we can call Peter an apostle without implying he belonged to the College of Cardinals.
JA: Scholars have long argued about Jesus’ legitimacy. You suggest that Jesus was the biological son of Mary and Joseph. He wasn’t illegitimate, as some claim, but a mamzer – someone with suspect paternity. What were the circumstances of his conception?
BC: Mary was living in Nazareth. Joseph was living in Bethlehem — the Galilean town seven miles from Nazareth, not the Bethlehem of Judea. I would conclude from Matthew 1:18 that Mary’s pregnancy became known after the families had exchanged the contract of marriage but before the couple moved into a common residence. That meant that Jesus’ paternity was suspect. Suspect paternity was designated by the term mamzer. If someone was called mamzer, it meant that his or her genealogical identity could not be known with certainty, and the result was marginalization.
JA: In your reconstruction, Mary and Joseph wind up living in Nazareth because Joseph moved into the house of Mary’s parents there, a pattern that anthropologists call matrilocal residence. But some scholars maintain that Judeans practiced patrilocal residence, in which case Jesus’ family would have ended up with Joseph’s father’s household in Bethlehem — which they clearly did not. What basis do you have for thinking that the Judeans were a matrilocal society?
BC: The Judeans (especially near Jerusalem) did practice patrilocal residence when possible, but the Galileans did not with any regularity. To some extent, that was for economic reasons, but also out of consideration for the distances women could be forced to move under a rigidly patrilocal practice. (In this case as in others, cultures turn out to be more complex and humane than anthropological theories!) The marital custom of Judaism, as reflected in Mishnah, was not to alienate a woman from her community. Mishnah lays down that you don’t move a woman from the country to the city, from the city to the country, or from Galilee to Judea, out of regard for her relationship to her family. When Mishnah talks about the circumstance of a man living with his father-in-law, special legislation is arranged for a Judean setting, but such arrangements were far from unusual in Galilee. That suggests that a man’s residence with his father-in-law was more regularly practiced in Galilee than Judea.
JA: You speculate that around age 14 Jesus traveled with his family to a festival at Jerusalem, ran away, wandered the city as a beggar, and then, in desperation, joined John the Immerser along the banks of the Jordan. This sounds like fiction, not biography. What’s the basis for this speculation?
BC: Jesus and his family are shown making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel. In that story, the family went back in a caravan and only later noticed Jesus’ absence, as if his parents belatedly and implausibly said, “By the way, where’s the kid?” That enables us to surmise that Jesus stayed in Jerusalem, and the rest of the story in Luke is a patchwork to keep the family together. The suggestion that there was an early relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus comes from the work of the German scholar, Ethelbert Stauffer. John the Baptist was a distinctive figure in the Judaism of the time. He was known for the development of a particular halakhah, how the Torah was to be applied. There was a public side of his practice, and an esoteric practice based upon the spirit of God. If John transmitted this esoteric knowledge to Jesus, as it appears he did, Stauffer suggests that we need to think of the encounter between John and Jesus as lasting much longer than the single exchange described in the Gospels. In Rabbi Jesus, I infer what must have occurred in order to produce the results we find in the texts. That early meeting between John and Jesus is the most reasonable inference. It accounts for the so-called missing years of Jesus.
JA: You suggest that the parable of the prodigal son was to some extent autobiographical: After the execution of John the Baptist in 26 C.E., Jesus returned to Nazareth as a prodigal son. What’s the basis for this speculation?
BC: The parable is so vivid, many scholars have suggested it is more than an illustrative story. Research on the parables suggests that there’s more going on here than a simple narrative of God’s Kingdom. The story has a much more developed plot line than, say, the parable of the mustard seed. It contains within it the implicit tension between the prodigal and his brother. When there’s narrative development in a parable and it involves tense family relations, that suggests Jesus is developing the parable out of his own experience.
JA: You describe Jesus at one point in his life as “shorter than the norm, overweight, and tending to baldness.” Did he whine and kvetch like Jason Alexander in Seinfeld?
BC: I saw my first complete episode of Seinfeld a couple of weeks ago, so I appreciate your allusion! Your comment reminds me of something I read while writing the book: If you want to know what Jesus looked like, look at Yasser Arafat. I thought, “No I can’t quite go there.” Actually, my description of Jesus derives from second-century patristic literature, especially Tertullian’s On the Flesh of Christ. There, Jesus is described as shorter than most, ugly and difficult to look at. At a later period, a Syrian father, Saint Ephraim, came to the conclusion that Jesus was only about four and a half feet tall. That seems a little extreme to me, but if we put Jesus in the Judean wilderness with John the Baptist at a period of life when he should have been growing, on the diet that he was likely to have enjoyed there, he wouldn’t have attained his natural height. At a later stage of his life, Jesus had a reputation of eating more than well, hence the overweight. The baldness also comes from Tertullian. Within the classical period — as in many of the commercials that come with Seinfeld — when people are referred to as ugly or not handsome, that frequently meant they were bald.
JA: Central to your biography is the notion that Jesus practiced an early form of kabbalah mysticism. Clearly, he experienced an Alternate State of Consciousness. But most scholars believe he thought of himself as being possessed by the spirit of God. What makes you think he meditated on the throne of God, which Ezekiel described as a Chariot?
BC: We have to pose the question: In what context does a person imbued with the traditions of Judaism achieve an intimate involvement with the spirit of God? Look at the narrative of Jesus’ baptism. A voice calls out, the spirit descends as a dove, the heavens split open so as to give access to the divine world. That is in accord with the way other Jewish teachers describe approaching the throne of God and how the divine presence manifests itself. All of these are instanced in Rabbinic literature, the scrolls of the Qumran, the books of Ezekiel and of Enoch. If Jesus announced that he had an intimate association with the spirit of God, we need to explain what he meant within the development of the Judaism of his time. It will not do to imagine him leaping into the language of spirit as used in the later Church, as if he were one of the Christians in Corinth that Paul writes about. There was a disciplined, meditative side to Jesus’ practice, which is frequently overlooked, because we still tend to marginalize mystical practice as if it were somehow deviant. To see this discipline operating from the very center of the Jesus movement is a challenge, but it is basic to an apprehension of Jesus in his own terms.
JA: You suggest that Jesus learned this discipline from John the Baptist. What evidence is there that John practiced mystical meditation?
BC: John’s persistent reference to the spirit of God and its coming. The scholarly consensus is that this aspect of his teaching comes from the book of Ezekiel – the promise that God would pour the spirit on Israel like water is poured. A second element, associated with the first, is John’s teaching of an impending judgment. Ezekiel links spirit, impending judgment and the presence of the Merkabah, the Chariot-throne of God. In Jesus’ baptism, the same elements are present, because that narrative represents his mastery of John’s teaching.
JA: One of the reasons that people mastered the mystical discipline of ascending through the heavens was to bind the power of angels and demons to their will. Do you see any evidence that Jesus conducted exorcisms and healings by such means – by binding Beelzebub, for instance? Could that have been the basis for the charges of sorcery against him?
BC: I would agree that the evidence of amulets and ostraca is important to developing a familiarity with exorcism in the ancient world. That permits us to perceive Jesus as quite comfortable within that idiom. On the other hand, I don’t think he uses the same methods evidenced in the magical artifacts that have been discovered — such as finding the correct formula and repeating it many times. He doesn’t use amulets or bowls. One of the elements that distinguishes Jesus, on the basis of his possession of spirit, is the ability to address an unclean spirit directly. Another is the persistent motif of the demon answering Jesus back, a struggle, a shouting match. I think it’s that side of these scenes that prompted the charges that Jesus was performing exorcisms with demonic cooperation. He was an exorcist outside the norm.
JA: What insight does Jesus’ throne mysticism give us into Jesus’ understanding of the “Son of Man” – or, as you translate it, “the one like the person”?
BC: Daniel 7 gives us a classic depiction of the angelic figure described in human terms, as “one like a person,” or “like a son of man.” Sometimes, Jesus refers to that angelic representative of Israel within the heavenly court. The angel is, for Jesus, the agent of God’s judgment at the end of time. But sometimes Jesus uses the phrase as it often is in ordinary Aramaic – as meaning “anyone,” “someone–” including himself. There is a poetry in his religious insight, which can see a person on the ground as linked inextricably to a counterpart in the divine court.
JA: After a brief stint in Capernaum, you say in Rabbi Jesus, Jesus spent four years crisscrossing Galilee, ducking in and out of neighboring provinces beyond Herod’s jurisdiction. What’s the basis for this interpretation?
BC: The Gospels report Herod Antipas’ antipathy and fear of Jesus, and his concern that he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees tell Jesus that Herod seeks to kill him. The typology of the Synoptic Gospels overall is to show Jesus active first in Galilee, then later in Jerusalem. So why do we find him outside Galilee and far from Jerusalem, in the jurisdiction of Herod Philip, in Decapolis, in the region of Tyre and Sidon? My answer is, since Jesus does not manage to expand the scope of his movement appreciably into those areas, he’s there to avoid Herod Antipas. What fascinates me is that despite the dangers of staying near Galilee and Judea he doesn’t, for example, just go voluntarily to Antioch or to Damascus, where Aramaic is spoken — much less does he venture to a Greek-speaking city, such as Alexandria! He wasn’t comfortable outside Galilee and wanted to remain in territorial Israel -– something was pushing him outside that center. That “something” was Herod Antipas.
JA: Jesus didn’t make any friends among the Temple priests either. He opposed paying the collection of the Temple half shekel. What kind of influence did the Temple authorities exert in Galilee?
BC: The attitude towards the Temple on the part of the Galileans is well described by Josephus, and it is definitely ambivalent. On the one hand, the association of the Galilean Jews with the Temple made them a part of Israel as they understood it. The God of Judea was their God as well. On the other hand, there was the recent memory that their connection with the Temple had come with a price. The Hasmoneans had to conquer many parts of Galilee to gain control of it, with what we would now call collateral damage. Josephus describes Galileans as periodically engaging in revolts, which were often against Rome but also involved the Temple, as if they wanted to assert their ownership of the Temple. I think there’s a great deal in the Gospels that reflects this ambivalent attitude towards the Temple. The choice wasn’t as simple as embracing it fully on the one hand, or rejecting it on the other. The Galileans wanted to be part of the Temple, but they clearly wanted it to be different, friendlier to their way of life.
JA: Joseph Caiaphas was consolidating his power over the Temple during this time. He took advantage of Pontius Pilate’s political weakness – the prefect’s patron, Sejanus, was out of favor with the emperor – to expel the Sanhedrin from the Temple. You base this on an account in the Babylonian Talmud, which few scholars regard as a reliable source of information for the 1st century. Why do you give it credence?
BC: Few scholars regard the Talmud as reliable – except when they do regard it as reliable! We quite rightly use the Rabbinic sources with caution. But it would be as uncritical to throw out the Talmud as to accept everything that the Talmud happens to say at face value. One must evaluate a Talmudic statement the same as one would evaluate a statement in the Gospels, or in the Hellenistic sources from the second century, and later that New Testament scholars commonly refer to (for example, to inform us about Sejanus). In the case at hand, the Talmud has no interest in contradicting the picture of the Sanhedrin as the supreme authority. But if the rabbis admit the Sanhedrin was exiled, that implies that someone within Judaism was more powerful than the Sanhedrin itself was. In other words, the rabbis had no motive to make up the story. Also, the Talmud is in accord with Josephus on a number of details like placing the Chanuth, the marketplace, on the Mount of Olives. Archaeological excavations also have confirmed much of what Talmud and Mishnah say about the dimensions of the Temple and arrangements for sacrifice.
JA: What was Caiaphase trying to accomplish by exiling the Sanhedrin?
BC: The Sanhedrin had been set up at the instance of the Romans. It was very much a part of Roman style of governing. The Romans established sanhedrins in all the major cities they conquered in Israel. The purpose was to give the Roman governor someone to talk to – someone to blame when went things went wrong. The Romans wanted a diverse constituency in the council, not out of any passion for democracy, but to represent the ruling class. The high priest would have had his own priestly constituency represented on the council, but there would also have been local aristocrats, Pharisees and other groups. The Sanhedrin was not at the beck and call of the High Priest.
Caiaphas was at an extraordinarily successful period of his life. He’d been in power 13 years. The average tenure of a high priest was only one year. With the influence of Pilate now in doubt as a result of Sejanus’ fall from Imperial favor, Caiaphas undertook two moves to make the high priesthood more influential in the Temple and Jerusalem. The first move was to get control of the area around the sanctuary by removing the Sanhedrin, which included Pharisees like Joseph of Arimathea, from their locum, the Chamber of Hewn Stone. The other was to bring the merchants of sacrificial animals into the Temple. By two moves, one political and one financial, he asserted the dominance of the high priestly party. It represented a consolidation of power personally, but also for his own class. The reason the Romans removed Caiaphas in 37 (C.E.) was that he was getting too powerful – and there were strong local objections to him. When Vitellius (the legate of Syria) intervened, he supported traditional arrangements. He returned the priestly vestments from Antonia (the Roman fortress) to the Temple. It’s likely that he reversed any other innovations Caiaphas had made and had not already fallen by the wayside, including putting the Sanhedrin back in the Temple.
JA: Caiaphas’ second power play was moving the animal sellers and moneychangers to the Great Court of the Temple. What’s the basis for this interpretation?
BC: This comes straight from the Gospels. The Gospels clearly and unequivocally report that the animals are in the outer court. At the same time, the Talmud is clear that the ordinary placement of the animal stalls is on the Mount of Olives. One scholarly solution to this discrepancy has been to discard the evidence of Gospels completely. Given what we know of Caiaphas, I think we should accept the Gospels’ account. The inference is that someone moved the animals to the Temple. The only candidate we have is Caiaphas. If Caiaphas did that, it would have been in the character of his tenure as High Priest.
JA: You visualize Jesus entering Jerusalem for the festival of Sukkoth – not Passover as portrayed by the Gospels — at the head of a throng of fired-up Galileans. They proclaimed him the messiah, yet this action provoked no response from Pilate or the priests. Some scholars have found such a scenario totally implausible. Wouldn’t Pilate have arrested Jesus then and there?
BC: I don’t think so, for several reasons. One is that, within the feast of Sukkoth, processions were a typical feature of what went on. These processions were not orderly. Mishnah, which loves order, describes people shaking their leaves, shouting out, taking their old clothing and throwing it about, priests even hitting one another with their palm branches. As prefect, you had to be concerned with arrangements for security. But if you saw a gaggle of Judeans, and a bunch of Galileans, and Parthians, and Syrians and Babylonians, all heading toward the Temple, singing in languages you didn’t understand, and the Galileans were saying something messianic in their distinctive dialect of Aramaic — no, I don’t think you’d intervene. I do not think you would know exactly what was going on. If this were an isolated procession that occurred within a different view of Gospel chronology some time before Passover, that might look bad in the eyes of a Roman prefect. My view on that goes back to T. W. Manson and Cecil Roth, the Oxford scholar. The Sukkoth argument and the Zechariah argument go together hand in hand. Jesus was fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy of a climactic sacrifice in the Temple, including Jews and non-Jews, without commercial mediators. And Zechariah 14 is explicitly a Sukkoth text.
JA: You visualize Jesus and his followers “moving in squads” in an orchestrated attack against the merchants in the Temple. Again, no response from the authorities. Do you think he caught the Roman garrison and the Temple police flat-footed?
BC: That’s a good description: They were caught flat footed. Jesus had enough people there to overcome the ordinary Temple police, but he was in no position to do anything had the Roman soldiers intervened. That’s why I do think it was a hit-and-run attack. That distinguishes it from raids on the Temple that Josephus talked about, in which the Galileans actually got inside and held the place. The attack on the vendors was much more in the nature of prophetic demonstration, to enact what the book of Zechariah predicted in its vision of God’s Kingdom.
JA: Next, Jesus slipped away, hung out in Bethany and waited for something to happen. During this time he introduced a crucial innovation: offering a meal – symbolic flesh and blood – as a sacrifice to Yahweh. You insist that Jesus was not referring to his flesh, his blood as later Christians came to believe. If he was making a symbolic Temple offering, why were people so scandalized?
BC: Because the ritual represents a replacement of the Temple and its sacrifices. This takes Jesus into the area of blasphemy, which is defined as any sort of impugning of Moses, the law, the High Priest, the Temple and the sacrifices. It makes the charge of blasphemy against Jesus understandable. But Jesus wouldn’t have thought that the wine and bread represented his personal blood, his personal flesh. Human flesh and human blood were not for human consumption at all according to any Judaic theology of the time we are aware of. This picture could have been developed only in a Hellenistic environment. That’s why many scholars say that the institution of the Eucharist was invented in a Hellenistic environment, then retrojected back into Jesus’ ministry. I can understand why they argue that. But if you look at what Jesus is saying, how he could celebrate a meal and remember the sacrificial relationship he could no longer enjoy in the Temple, you can see how it originated with him. He claimed that his meals of the Kingdom were more pleasing to his Abba than corrupt offering in the Temple.
JA: Just before the Passover, the priests finally nabbed Jesus. They held an informal inquiry. You suggest that Caiaphas asked the question, “Are you teaching that your feasts replace Temple sacrifice because you are God’s own son?” Jesus replied in the affirmative, providing Caiaphas grounds to execute him for blasphemy. None of the Gospels even hint that Caiaphas raised the issue of Jesus’ feasts. How can you justify this portrayal?
BC: Caiaphas wants to ship Jesus to Pilate and affirm, “I am not the only one to accuse him. Others agree that this person represents a danger to the public order, and therefore to Roman rule.” He cannot act simply on his own authority at this point, because the riot in the Temple had discredited him. He has enough political acumen to know he needs to get the agreement of the Sanhedrin — or, at least, a number of its members – which he has exiled. They don’t like him. He’s got to discover reasons that would give some other members of the aristocracy justification to join him in denouncing Jesus. In his interrogation of Jesus, Caiaphas develops a line of inquiry along several fronts. One is Temple practice and what kind of authority Jesus is claiming as he presumes to get into the Temple and upset arrangements there. Another aspect he is following up on – and he’s apparently well informed – is whether Jesus’ authorization has to do with divine sonship. A third strand is represented by the fact that many of Jesus’ own disciples began to leave him over his mealtime ceremony, which is why Caiaphas focuses on Jesus’ disciples and his teaching. If Caiaphas can link sonship, the attack on the Temple and strange meal-time practices, he can get other members of the Sanhedrin to oppose Jesus on the charge of blasphemy. Of course, the particulars of charges would not concern Pilate, who would simply be impressed by the depth of support for Caiaphas.
JA: What do you mean by “sonship?”
BC: The title “son of God,” like “rabbi,” has a well-established meaning in the Judaism of Jesus’ time. Long before Christianity developed its doctrine of Jesus’ unique birth, a divine “son” was someone whom God has favored with his revelation. Jesus’ conviction that he enjoyed such a relationship with his Abba was such that he believed he did speak authoritatively of God’s Kingdom, and that he could extend this divine sonship to others, whom he also taught to address God in that way.
JA: You suggest that Jesus never had a hearing before Pilate. The priests conferred with the prefect, who pronounced the death penalty in absentia. It’s one thing to say that the Gospels invented the details of the hearing before Pilate, quite another to say that they invented the fact that such a hearing took place.
BC: That’s a good observation, and you can imagine that my editors would have liked a scene of Jesus before Pilate. My decision is one I lingered over for a number of years, precisely because the Gospels are so insistent about the public accessibility of this scene. What stands against it is a familiarity with the Roman practice of crucifixion, and the low status of anyone who is not a citizen. Getting yourself a hearing under Roman law was quite difficult. From the point of view of ordinary legal proceedings, it appears that the Gospels are at variance with the other sources. I would suggest that what we see in all of these scenes with Pilate and Jesus are attempts on the part of the communities that produced the Gospels to explain that while it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, it really wasn’t their fault. This is transparent in the hand-washing scene in Matthew. These are apologetic legends with little factual content to show the constituencies of the Gospels how they can worship as God’s son someone who was killed by crucifixion; they try to exonerate Pilate and pin any blame on the Judaic leaders or the Jewish people.
JA: Throughout Rabbi Jesus, you leave the reader uncertain as to whether you regard his miracles as truly miraculous or as explainable, natural phenomena. Your theology comes through when you discuss the resurrection, which you describe as “an angelic, nonmaterial event.” In other words, Jesus really did appear to his disciples, but not in corporeal form.
BC: I’d rather put it this way: He did appear to them in bodily form, but not in the material flesh they once knew. On this question, I side with St. Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul sets out three paradigms for understanding the resurrection. He rejects two and accepts the third. The first conception that he doesn’t like is of a purely spiritual resurrection. That point of view is hopeless, he says. He personally would not endure the danger he does for the prospect of a purely ethereal, spiritual resurrection. The next view is of a carnal or fleshly — what I call material — resurrection. He poses the question: Do you think that Jesus was raised from the dead in exactly the same body he died? He in effect replies, “You fool, don’t you know that when a seed goes into the ground it doesn’t sprout unless it changes?” The third option is where he develops the idea that Christ appears in a spiritual body. By that he means that Jesus was recognizable, but that the substance of his body was spiritual.
JA: If Jesus appeared to his disciples in a “spiritual body,” what happened to his earthly body?
BC: In the earliest form of the resurrection narrative, Mark’s, the women at the tomb turned around, having been told by the angel that Jesus is risen, and not to look for him inside. They didn’t go into the tomb. It’s only with the later development of the story that the empty tomb story develops and Peter and the other disciple going into the tomb are elaborations of the story of the women. We do not have a story from the earliest period that reliably tells us what happened to the corpse of Jesus. Historically, the question of what happened to Jesus’ body is an open question.
The Jesus Archive recently visited Bryan Walsh, director of the Shroud of Turin Center outside Richmond, Va., where he lectures on the Shroud and maintains a laboratory. This summer, he has been investigating how the 1988 radiocarbon dating, which indicated a Shroud origin between 1260 and 1390 C.E., could have erred. He provided a detailed exposition of his findings at the Shroud of Turin Conference in Dallas in late October.
Jesus Archive: Radiocarbon dating proved to the satisfaction of almost everyone in the scientific community that the Shroud of Turin originated in the Middle Ages. What grounds would reasonable people have to question the results of that test?
Bryan Walsh: Radiocarbon dating is only one of the tools used to date an artifact. If you look at radiocarbon tests in archaeological datings over the past 20 years, you’ll find that about one percent of them are discarded. Archaeologists use stratigraphy, paleography, and many other methods to establish age. They use radiocarbon dating to narrow down or confirm the date of an object, but if the radiocarbon result is an outlier – if they’re anomalous – they will chuck it out. Radiocarbon dating is not infallible. For example, ten to fifteen years ago, radiocarbon tests showed a number of seashells to be tens of thousands of years old, yet they came from clams that had died only recently. It turns out that the radiocarbon reservoir that these clams grew up in was depleted in carbon-14, which caused them to be dated older than they actually were. In the case of the Shroud, there is evidence that the sample used for the radiocarbon dating was heavily contaminated, and the nature of this contamination may have affected the date derived.
JA: Contaminated? How?
BW: In 1532, fire broke out in the Sainte Chapelle in Chambery, France, where the Shroud was stored in a silver reliquary. You had a linen cloth contained in a silver box lined with wood, which was exposed to temperatures reaching 850 degrees Celsius. The way the box was kept in the wall – fitting in a slot between big blocks of stone — created a steep thermal gradient ranging from 200 degrees Celsius to 850 degrees Celsius. The wood inside the reliquary acted as a partial insulator, so the Shroud cloth was exposed to a very low oxygen environment at about 200 degrees Celsius, causing it to become slightly yellowed. But the wood was exposed to much higher temperatures. The wood went through a three-step degradation process. Above 120 degrees, it gave off water in the form of steam. Above 200 degrees, the wood went through a process of torrification, emitting carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water vapor and even a little methane. The wood on the top front portion of the box, nearest where the Shroud sample was taken from, got to more than 350 degrees Celsius. At this range, depolymerization occurs. The wood broke down and gave off all sorts of chemicals: acetyls, furfurals, aldehydes, ketones and other beasts from the carbon zoo.
JA: Bryan, I’m not a chemist. Do you mean that the wood began to burn and give off smoke?
BA: No, the inside of the reliquary was a low-oxygen environment, so combustion didn’t occur until the silver of the reliquary melted and droplets of silver fell onto the Shroud linen. But chemical changes were taking place; chemicals were being emitted, both by the wood and the Shroud linen. The pyrolytic chemical mix was exposed to the cloth for at least two hours prior to the silver melting. When the people who owned the chapel got the reliquary out of the space, they poured a bucket of water on it. The water comes from the city of Chambery in the French Alps, between two limestone mountain ranges. It’s high in calcium carbonate, sodium carbonate, aluminum sulfate, and all sorts of salts. That water was poured on the Shroud. It became superheated. It turns out that when cellulose – which the linen Shroud is composed of — is exposed to certain metallic salts at elevated temperatures, the salts act as a catalyst. As a result, the cellulose reacts with chemical products in the environment that it wouldn’t otherwise easily react with.
JA: So, it was a real chemical soup inside the reliquary. The combination of heat and salts might have incorporated carbon-14 from the scorched wood into the cellulose structure of the Shroud.
BA: Exactly. In 1996, Dr. Al Adler did some FTIR tests[1] on some threads taken from each side of the Shroud radiocarbon sample site. He found that both sets of threads were high in calcium, potassium, sodium, aluminum and magnesium salts. The salts are deposited in a gradient; the salt concentration declines as you move away from the edge of the seam on the Shroud, as if the cloth were bathed in a salt-rich solution. That conforms to my statistical analysis of data from the radiocarbon dating published in 1999 showing a similar gradient in radiocarbon measurements. Here at the Shroud of Turin Center, we’ve concluded that the salts embedded in the Shroud linen were most likely from the Chambery water source, and we’re working now on trying to understand the chain of chemical reactions that caused the carbon dating to be skewed.
JA: What makes you different from the hundreds of “shroudies” out there who will grasp at any wild theory to justify their faith in the authenticity of the Shroud?
BW: I don’t have a “faith” – a belief in things unseen — in the authenticity in the Shroud, but a desire to evaluate all the information available about it. I’ve done a lot of research personally on all of these theories, accepted some, discarded others, then looked at the science behind them. I found a substantial body of scientific evidence by scientists of good repute that point to the authenticity of the cloth. Most people – shroudies and skeptics alike — have not done that kind of research. They have not looked at the journals.
JA: If you’re right, what are the implications for Shroud research?
BW: My hope is to re-establish the Shroud as a useful and viable research field so that we can get more researchers interested in looking at its physics, history and chemistry and explain its many unique features.
JA: How do you think the image on the Shroud was created?
BW: My personal belief is that the Shroud is authentic, not a Medieval forgery. The Shroud image is unique. First, it acts as a photonegative showing the image of a crucified man on the Shroud. Second, body mapping – measuring the distance from the cloth to the body – allows you to create an accurate 3-D relief of the image. And Third, the image is very superficial. The oxidized/dehydrated fibers forming the image lie only at the very top of the linen fiber bundles. It appears that a projection of a columnated field of short-wave radiation, vertically oriented towards the axis of gravity, dehydrated and oxidized the surfaces of the Shroud cellulose fibers.
Another feature obvious on the visible light images of the Shroud is that the hands appear to be elongated. It turns out that you are looking at the bones of a human hand under the skin. You get similar kinds of imaging characteristics around the teeth and the eye sockets, indicating that whatever occurred acted like a reverse dental x-ray. It was as if the x-ray machine was placed inside the body and pointing out, and the image was left on the cloth that surrounded the radiating body. The image appears to have been made when the cloth was relatively flat, causing a misregistration of the bloodstain images in some places. Under the bloodstains there are no other image characteristics – just plain linen. That implies that the radiative image occurred when the body was no longer there, after the bloodstains had been placed on the cloth by contact. You get the flattening cloth falling through the space the body had occupied, leaving an oxidation effect on the linen. In layman’s terms, a burst of radiative energy originated from within the body, as the body disappeared, registering on the Shroud as it collapsed through the space formerly occupied by the body.
JA: Many New Testament scholars question the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and the subsequent discovery of the empty tomb. The narratives differ on essential points. Clearly, a significant amount of literary invention was going on. How do you reconstruct the events surrounding the discovery of the empty tomb and the burial linens?
BW: I don’t reconstruct them. I take the Gospel accounts as a set of observations that should conform to Jewish burial practices of the time.
JA: The Gospel of John tells us that Peter “went into the sepulcher, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.” (John 20:6-7) If Jesus were buried with a cloth around his head – a practice confirmed in John 11:44 in regard to Lazarus – how, according to your theory, did an image appear on the main burial linen, the Shroud? And how did the napkin wind up “wrapped together in a place by itself”?
BW: Our research indicates that the Jews buried a crucified man like Jesus by placing a cloth around his head while still on the cross to capture any “mingled blood” and then took the body down from the cross. They put the body of the man on a separate linen sheet and carried it to the tomb. They removed everything on his body, including the cloth over his head, wrapped him in a clean burial shroud, and placed the cloth that was over his head – and anything else bearing blood – at his feet. A head-cover cloth like this – the Sudarium of Oviedo – has been known to exist at least since the 6th century and resides in Spain today. It’s been described historically as the cloth used to cover Jesus’ face, and it’s embedded with blood and bodily fluids, but no image. The blood type, AB, conforms to that of the Shroud. The Sudarium may be the napkin referred to in the Gospels.
JA: Let’s accept your theory for purposes of argument. Trace the early history of the Shroud. Who took possession of it – Peter? The Beloved Disciple?
BW: That is a matter of intense investigation and a lot of speculation. There are several references pointing to Peter having the cloth that was over Jesus’ head. Ishodad of Merv, the bishop of the town of Merv in Turkmenistan in the 9th century, writes in his Commentaries on the Gospels that Peter, after Jesus arose from the dead, used the cloth that was over Jesus’ head as part of the ceremony where he’d consecrate priests and deacons, and also used it to heal people. That makes some sense. Go back to the Old Testament: The high priest Aaron wore a linen turban bigger than anyone else’s. It appears that Peter used the Shroud as a turban, or a mitre – he wore it on his head.
Another partial confirmation comes from a reference in the “Life of Saint Nino,” who came to Jerusalem with her parents from Cappadocia. She wanted to track down the tunic of Jesus and in her travels was captured and taken to what is now the country of Georgia. She relates of having heard stories while in Jerusalem of Pilate’s wife taking the burial cloth of Jesus with her up to her house in Pontus, near the Black Sea. In this recounting, Saint Luke took it from her and hid it, and nobody knows where. There’s another tradition that St. Luke preached in Bithynia and in Achaia, which may give some indication of where he might have hid the burial cloth. The problem with these stories is that you can’t get collaboration. But you can’t dismiss them as pure legend and bunk either. There isn’t enough data to reach a firm conclusion.
The possibility of St. Luke possessing the Shroud is interesting, by the way, because he is purported to be an artist, among other things in Christian tradition. He purportedly painted images of Jesus and his mother Mary. His reported preaching in Bithynia is intriguing because there are many Byzantine reports from the mix-6th Century of a cloth bearing an image of Jesus showing up in Kamuliana in Cappadocia. The connection between St. Luke and the images of Jesus is intriguing, and more research needs to be done.
JA: So, you’ve got these disciples claiming that Jesus had arisen from the dead. They encounter skepticism in their own ranks – doubting Thomas being the most obvious example. They encounter skepticism among their fellow Jews, not to mention the Temple authorities. If they possess this extraordinary piece of evidence – a burial shroud miraculously showing the image of Jesus – why do they not present it as proof of their claims? Why are the sources silent?
BW: There are several hypotheses. The Christians were persecuted in and around Judea. They were attracting more Jewish converts. The Jewish powers that be resented them. They had to hide whatever resources they had from possible destruction, and may have taken them out of the country for safety reasons. With the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Christians had to flee if they could. They went up to Pella in the Decapolis, taking their possessions. Some of them may have gone from there to Antioch.
After the Jewish authorities persecuted the Christians, the Romans began persecuting them – for “eating flesh,” celebrating the Eucharist. You don’t find many references to the Eucharist during that time. There’s a reason: The Christians were keeping it secret. We think the Shroud, like the Eucharist, may have been an important part of the Christian faith in the early days and was thus kept secret.
But there’s another possibility. If the image was created by radiation, and if the radiation was of a certain kind – protons or soft x-rays – there may have been no image on the Shroud for the first 100 or 200 years. The dehydrated and oxidized fibrils don’t turn yellow for some time. You need a process called carboxylation to occur. It’s possible that the early Christians kept the Shroud as a reminder of Jesus, even though they didn’t see the image for a long time. That might help explain why the earliest representations of Jesus conformed to the Hellenistic stereotype of a beardless youth, but some time around the 6th century, Byzantine iconography suddenly begins showing him as a bearded man of Judaic appearance. There are many theories but no conclusive evidence. A lot of research remains to be done.
JA: How did the Shroud end up in the hands of a French nobleman in the 1300s?
BW: The Shroud may have been in Constantinople for some time. In 1204, just before the Fourth Crusade, a French knight, Robert de Clari, describes seeing a cloth with the image of Jesus displayed every Friday rising up straight so that anyone seeing it could see Jesus’ features. John Jackson, director of the Turin Shroud Center in Colorado Springs, wrote a paper two years ago showing that the fold marks and tack marks and stains found on the Turin Shroud match a folding pattern that would have been necessary to show the image of Jesus described by de Clari, when held up straight, from the top of his head to his folded hands. The Shroud of Turin, displayed in this way, probably was the basis for the Byzantine artistic tradition called the “Extreme Humility” icon tradition. In 1204, you had the Fourth Crusade, in which the crusaders sacked Constantinople. In 1205, there’s a letter to the Pope saying that the Shroud was in Athens and that the French had it. Geoffrey de Charny’s ancestors apparently took control of the Shroud in Athens, then took it to France. All the pieces haven’t been put together yet, but I think that’s how it will settle out.
JA: Which comes first for you: Your faith in the Shroud or your dedication to the scientific method? Let’s say someone conducted another radiocarbon dating of the Shroud with the proper controls and confirmed a Medieval origin. Would you accept the findings?
BW: I couldn’t ignore them. The problem with the question you pose is that it ignores all the other data. At the end of the day, I don’t think your scenario is going to happen.
JA: What keeps you going? Is it the intellectual excitement of solving a great mystery?
BW: If in fact the Shroud bears the image of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, it is probably the most important artifact on the face of the earth. As you dig into it, you find all this history that’s fascinating. The science is fascinating. It’s fascinating from any number of angles – that’s what keeps me going.
[1] FTIR – Fourier Transform InfraRed spectroscopy, a non-intrusive method of extracting precise chemical information from small samples using infrared light.
Delving into the chemistry of the Shroud of Turin, Bryan Walsh hopes to reopen scientific inquiry into the world’s most famous religious artifact.
by James A. Bacon
Last month, Bryan Walsh spent the better part of his waking hours holed up a Benedictine monastery outside Richmond, Va. Working in a makeshift laboratory there, he placed swatches of linen fabric in a petri dish with various combinations of wood, silver and water dosed with chemical salts, and then heated his concoctions to a range of temperatures well above the boiling point. Taking careful records of mass and pH measurements, he examined the cellulose structure of the linen under the microscope for evidence of chemical interaction.
Walsh, 57, believes that the Shroud of Turin, which bears a faint image of a crucified man, is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. But in 1988, radiocarbon testing by a group of three laboratories coordinated by the British Museum dated the origin of the artifact to the 13th or 14th century. In the realm of respectable opinion, the finding relegated the Shroud to the status of a medieval forgery. “Since then,” says Walsh, “scholarly discussion of the Shroud has become almost taboo among scientific, historical and religious circles.”
With his experiments, Walsh is probing chemical transformations in the Shroud linen that might have occurred during a 1532 fire. The French noble family which owned the artifact at the time kept it in a silver and wood reliquary, which they stored in a chapel. When the chapel caught fire, rescuers doused the reliquary with salt-rich waters; water leaked into the container and contaminated the cloth. Walsh hypothesizes that heat from the fire interacted with a rich hydrocarbon fog emitted from the wood and metallic salts in the water, contaminating the linen and raising the level of carbon-14, the trace isotope measured in radiocarbon dating. A higher carbon-14 count would have corrupted the results of the 1988 test and made the Shroud appear to be of more recent origin than it really is. If he can demonstrate the mechanism by which the radiocarbon results were skewed, Walsh says, he believes he can make Shroud studies credible again.
But Walsh’s job won’t be easy. Although the semi-retired financier has a background in mathematics and chemistry, he has no standing with an academic institution. And the well-meaning efforts of “shroudies” — true believers in the Shroud’s authenticity — have cast a pall of ill repute over amateur efforts of any kind. Shroud believers have advanced a number of explanations for why the 1988 radiocarbon tests are untrustworthy, but so far none of the theories have gained currency outside a small circle. Indeed, some of it is just bad science, Walsh concedes. “A lot of people wrote kooky books. There was a lot of junk. The Shroud got associated with nonsense.”
After the 1988 radiocarbon tests, the issue seemed settled. Scientists in academic settings halted their Shroud research. Financial support for independent investigators dried up, and even the Catholic Church has been hesitant to associate itself with a movement that might prove to be an embarrassment. By the 1990s, says Walsh, only a small number of people – maybe 50 to 100 – were conducting reputable scientific and historical work on the Shroud, and they were doing it on shoestring budgets.
Even so, serious Shroud researchers – sindonologists, as they call themselves — have kept the cause alive. Plunging into Byzantine iconography, they have developed novel theories of how the Shroud might have traversed from Jerusalem in the 1st century C.E., by way of Constantinople around 1,000 C.E., to France in the 14th century, when more detailed historic documentation begins. Furthermore, scientific measurement devices have increased in sensitivity, enabling researchers to wring fresh data from old Shroud samples. When Walsh began immersing himself in Shroud research in 1998, an assault on the radiocarbon dating was already well underway.
* * *
Walsh and microscope:
Walsh has cobbled together his basement laboratory on a shoestring budget. One piece of equipment, a vacuum aspirator, is an old hospital cast-off.
Born in Ireland, Bryan J. Walsh emigrated with his family to the United States in 1949. He studied in New York City schools. Enrolling in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, he graduated from Manhattan College in 1966 with a degree in mathematics, and then joined the Air Force. Uncle Sam decided that Walsh would make a better meteorologist – every USAF base in the world has one – than a combatant. So, Walsh went back to school to study chemistry and atmospheric physics.
After his stint in the military, Walsh took a job in 1970 at a commercial bank. Rising through the ranks at Irving Trust Co., he managed the bank’s global trading in bonds and foreign exchange. In 1983, he hopped over to Morgan Stanley as Vice President and Treasurer, became a managing director and chief financial officer of the bank’s broker-dealer subsidiary, and then worked on the team that took the bank public in 1986.
The banking business paid well, but the Big Apple lost its allure. “The New York experience just got to me,” says Walsh. Living in Long Island, he tired of the hour-long commute to work and then back again, and he wearied of the hyper-competitive business environment. People were belligerent. Friends got mugged. And there was no indication whatsoever that someone like Rudolph Giuliani ever would turn the city around. In 1990, he moved to Virginia. He didn’t know anyone in Richmond, the historic state capital, but chose the city for its comfortable ambience and the presence of a good Catholic school where he could educate his youngest son. His goal was to slow down, make a little money and pursue his intellectual passions.
Walsh set up a one-man company, Salisbury Research, to investigate the interaction between solar and seismic activity. Observing that flare-ups in solar radiation coincided with increases in the number and severity of earthquakes, scientists had speculated that the sun’s radiation supercharged the magnetic field around the earth, which interacted with the iron core inside the planet, which in turn affected the earth’s crust. Walsh designed and built a variety of electronic devices for detecting extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves. Exploring the connection for two years, he demonstrated that there is a correlation between solar and seismic activity, but he could not find a relationship that was strong enough to predict when or where earthquakes would occur. The research was intellectually enjoyable but it didn’t have a commercial application, so he pulled the plug.
Walsh made some successful real estate investments in Florida, which he has since wound down. In 1996 he signed on as a director chairman of Tridium, Inc., becoming chairman in 2000. The start-up company had developed a software platform for monitoring and administering remote devices and appliances over the Internet. With his background in finance, Walsh is helping raise a second round of outside investment – no easy task in the post-dot.com era – that he hopes will provide enough cash to carry the company to profitability.
Meteorology, banking, astrophysics, the Internet – Walsh has been all over the map. What makes him think he has anything to contribute to the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection of Jesus? “To me, it’s all one big field,” he says. “It’s all connected.” Think about it: The sun throws off a solar flare. That affects the earth’s magnetosphere, which interacts with the molten core, which causes and earthquake, which shakes someone’s house off its foundation. “We’re part of a larger-than-global interconnectivity. There’s still tons to be found out.”
* * *
Devoting considerable effort to discrediting the radiocarbon tests on the Shroud, sindonologists have advanced various hypotheses to explain the 1988 findings. One theory suggests that a coating of mold and other micro-organic material skewed the dating, although skeptics have observed that the volume of organic material would have to be greater than that of the Shroud itself to account for the results.
Another hypothesis is that the radiocarbon dating, conducted independently of any earlier research on the Shroud, was based on a sample from a patch of the Shroud that had been sewn on back in the late Middle Ages. The Medieval repairmen supposedly used a micro-stitch technique that rendered the patch so invisible that it eluded detection by the scientists who selected the radiocarbon-dating sample in 1988. Walsh doesn’t rule out that possibility, but says he finds the evidence less than persuasive. The micro-stitch hypothesis certainly seems less promising than the idea, first posited a decade ago, that the 1532 fire catalyzed a chemical reaction that bolstered the carbon-14 content in the Shroud, or at least the portion of the Shroud where the sample was taken.
Dmitri Kouznetsov, a Russian scientist, published a paper in the early 1990s describing experiments in which he heated up linen in the presence of water and silver. He claimed that the linen absorbed carbon-14 from the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating measures the presence of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that appears in all living organisms. When an organism dies, it stops absorbing carbon-14. Because the isotope decays at a predictable rate, the level of carbon-14 normally is a reliable indicator of how long ago the organism died. In the case of the Shroud, the radiocarbon dating measured the antiquity of the flax that was woven into the linen cloth. The labs that dated the Shroud assumed that the relic had been chemically inert, that nothing happened to add or diminish the level of carbon-14 in the linen. Kouznetsov’s results called that assumption into question.
The Russian’s paper caused a stir. But scientists at the University of Arizona failed to replicate his results. Later, Kouznetsov was imprisoned in Connecticut on bad check charges. Although Kouznetsov has been discredited personally and his work downplayed, he sparked a new line of thinking. Now other investigators are focusing on the 1532 fire as a chemical-transforming event that could have elevated the carbon-14 level of the Shroud linen.
In two papers, Remy VanHaelst subjected the 1988 radiocarbon data to a detailed statistical analysis and disputed the British Museum’s interpretation of the carbon-14 measurements. Building on this work, Walsh presented a paper to the 1999 Shroud of Turin conference in Richmond. He showed that the carbon-14 measurements formed a gradient: The presence of the isotope was lowest at the edge of the linen sample but higher at locations closer to the center. The British Museum’s analysis “disguised the fact that there was a radiocarbon gradient on the Shroud,” says Walsh.
Walsh’s re-reading of the data suggested that the chemical characteristics of the linen had undergone some kind of transformation or hydrocarbon contamination. One hint of what could have caused the change came from Alan Adler, now deceased, whom Walsh met at the Richmond conference. Adler, a scientific advisor to the archbishopric of Turin, had conducted chemical analysis of several threads removed from the Shroud. Fibers taken from the linen subjected to the radiocarbon dating displayed the presence of metallic salts in heavy concentrations. By contrast, Adler’s analysis of sticky tape samples taken from other parts of the Shroud in 1978 showed no sign of these salts. Based on these findings as well as FTIR spectroscopy, Adler asserted that the sample used for radiocarbon dating was not representative of the rest of the Shroud. What he did not explain was how the presence of salts might have affected the radiocarbon dating.
“I wondered, how did those salts get there?” Walsh recalls. “The only thing I could think of was, when they put out the fire, they pulled the silver box out of the wall which contained it, and poured water on it. Maybe there were salts in the water.” Conducting some research on the Internet, Walsh discovered that Chambery, the French town where the Shroud was housed in 1532, is located between two limestone massifs. As documented in a number of research papers available online, the water there is high in metallic carbonate salts. “The match between the mix of the salts that Al found and the salts in the Chambery water was pretty close,” he says. The discovery convinced Walsh he was on to something.
The French owners of the Shroud had stored their treasured artifact in a silver reliquary lined with wood, then placed it in a stone slab enclosure in a Chambery chapel. When a fire broke out, the reliquary was exposed to high temperatures for as long as two hours, contaminating the linen with hydrocarbons from the wood and causing some of the silver to melt. Drops of molten silver burned through the Shroud, which was folded inside the reliquary, creating the symmetrical holes whose patches appear so visible in photographs of the artifact. When rescuers doused the reliquary to cool it off, water seeped inside, further contaminating the cloth and leaving prominent stains. Other changes occurred on a molecular level, Walsh surmises. The cellulose in the Shroud linen was exposed to superheated water containing chemical salts, which could have catalyzed a reaction with carbon compounds emitted from the scorched wood. In interacting with those compounds, Walsh hypothesizes, the cellulose absorbed enough of the volatile compounds from the wood – which contained Medieval carbon-14 – to throw off the radiocarbon dating.
Although the research he conducted over the past few months and presented at the 2001 Shroud of Turin conference in Dallas is far from conclusive, Walsh says, it seems to confirm his hypothesis. In the presence of heat and a low-oxygen environment, the wood he placed in the petri dish emitted a variety of compounds which markedly darkened the linen sample. Further, when he added a metallic salt solution, the wood emitted fluid that stained the linen. “I got linen cloth to have the same color you see at the Shroud sample site,” he says. “That could mean a lot of different things. But it suggests that I’m on the right path.”
Walsh made a number of valuable contacts at the Dallas conference that he hopes will help push his research forward. One attendee, a University of Dayton research scientist, has access to far more sophisticated testing and measuring equipment than Walsh does. Another, a Defense Department mathematician, has indicated a willingness to collaborate on more statistical analysis of the 1988 radiocarbon dating.
By demonstrating the flaws in the 1988 radiocarbon dating, Walsh hopes to persuade the curators of the Shroud, now under the care of the Archbishop of Turin, to make the relic accessible again to scientific testing. Portable measuring devices today are far more powerful than any scientific equipment available in 1988. It’s possible now to acquire a wealth of new data without harming the Shroud in the least. Spectrometric measurement systems, ranging from ultra-violet to mid-infra-red, make it possible to ascertain the precise chemical makeup of any object. Walsh would like to create a “digital catalogue” of the Shroud at high resolutions and a variety of wavelengths.
Walsh acknowledges that he’ll have to build a rock-solid case to have a prayer of opening the Shroud back up to scientific investigation, a goal the Shroud Crowd has been seeking for years. In 1998, the Turin chapel where the Shroud is housed today nearly burned to the ground; Italian authorities concluded that arson was the likely cause of the fire. Since then, there have been persistent rumors in Turin that Middle Eastern terrorists were behind the fire. Since the September 11 terror attacks, Walsh says, it will be even more difficult to gain access to the Shroud.
* * *
Thoughraised a Catholic, Walsh had never taken a strong interest in religion or spiritual matters until one mid-August evening 10 years ago. He was alone in his in-laws’ house in New York, cleaning it up and getting it ready to put on the market. He sat down in the kitchen with some books and popped a Swanson frozen dinner into the oven. Suddenly, a feeling swept over him: stillness, warmth and total acceptance. “It was like a total embrace coming from some place outside, totally unasked for,” he recalls.
Then, in the midst of that embrace, a soft male voice said, “Come back to me.”
“I was floored,” Walsh remembers. “I didn’t know what to make of it.” He handled the incident like he does most things he doesn’t understand, he says: He put it in the back of his mind to deal with later. But the call became a spiritual gyroscope, guiding his subsequent actions
When he moved to Richmond, Walsh became involved in the Catholic Church. Disapproving of the very liberal direction the Richmond diocese was taking, he began digging into church doctrine and history, which he found enthralling. At the age of 50, he began taking his religion very seriously.
One day in the mid-1990s, an old business associate called him out of the blue. The friend mentioned that he was helping out “some guy in Colorado Springs who was doing some work on some cloth that Jesus was wrapped in,” Walsh recalls. Intrigued by the conjunction of science and religion, Walsh called the man, John Jackson, one of the more prominent Shroud researchers active today. Jackson invited Walsh out to his lab and spent three days walking him through the chemistry and science of the Shroud. Fascinated, Walsh was hooked.
Back in Richmond, Walsh formed the Shroud of Turin Center as a vehicle to promote knowledge about the Shroud. The monks of the Mary Mother of the Church Abbey outside Richmond gave him space for an office, a lab and a lecture hall, where he keeps backlit images of the Shroud on permanent display. Along the way, Walsh was joined by an associate, Diana Fulbright. A former instructor of New Testament and second-Temple Judaism at the University of Iowa, Fulbright began investigating the possible influence of the Shroud on early Christian portraiture.
In 1999, Walsh and Fulbright organized a Shroud conference in Richmond, the largest such event held in the U.S. in 20 years. They brought in speakers from 14 different countries and published 26 papers analyzing the Shroud image, its history and its radiocarbon dating. Since then, they have lectured extensively, mainly to church groups visiting the abbey, while both have pursued their research.
The Benedictines have supported the Center by providing free quarters. The Center collects about $1,000 a year in donations, mainly after lectures. Otherwise, Walsh supports his research and the Center’s activities out of his own pocket. The public is fascinated by the Shroud but hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with donations, he observes wryly. “If something’s religious or spiritual, people expect it for free.”
* * *
Though dismissed by mainstream scholars as a bunch of amateurs and cranks, Walsh contends, shroudies have much to contribute to the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. When he’s not working on Shroud chemistry, he’s pursuing research on early Christian relics. Driven by her interest in the Shroud, his colleague Diana Fulbright is cataloguing early images of Jesus and comparing them to the portraiture motifs of the Greco-Roman world. Others have delved into Jewish funerary customs with the aim of reconciling the Gospel of John – which mentions a burial linen for the body and a napkin for the head – with the physical evidence of the Shroud. Yet others have probed early Christian and Byzantine literature for clues to the Shroud’s history.
If Shroud research became respectable again, Walsh says, it could inspire a wave of literary and archaeological progress. Think of the impact that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts – discovered a half century ago — have had on our understanding of the Judaism of Jesus’ era and the Gnosticism of the next generation. Similar caches could be awaiting discovery. Modern-day Turkey and Syria were home to early Christian communities in Ephesus and Antioch, yet as nations with Islamic populations, they have not been as hospitable to New Testament archaeology as Israel has been, Walsh observes. Who knows what literary treasures might have been hidden in a cave, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, during the Iconoclasm controversy in the Byzantine Empire?
Scholars don’t need to become spelunkers to shake the world of New Testament research. Greek and Russian Orthodox monasteries hold storehouses of ancient manuscripts that have never been properly catalogued and reviewed, Walsh says. The countries of the former Soviet Union have preserved a wealth of documents and artwork from the Byzantine tradition. It was never a priority during 70 years of rule under an atheistic state to sort through the material. “They don’t know what they have.”
Marc Guscin, an English ancient-language scholar living in Spain, held the attendees of the Dallas shroud conference spell-bound in October as he described a recent discovery in one of the 20 monasteries near Mount Athos. Located on an isolated peninsula, the monasteries purportedly contain 25 percent of all the ancient Greek manuscripts in existence. Delving into this treasure trove, Guscin discovered a 10th-century manuscript that used the word tetradiplon — folded four times — exclusively in relation to a cloth containing the image of Jesus. The document also referred to the legendary Edessa image as a full-sized picture on a full-length cloth. Such discoveries, suggests Walsh, support other findings identifying the Shroud of Turin with holy images of Jesus displayed in the ancient Byzantine Empire — pushing its documented history to a time well before it was purportedly fabricated by Medieval French forgers.
To Walsh, unraveling the mysteries of the Shroud is the intellectual challenge of a lifetime – a fascinating puzzle that draws from scientific, historical and ancient literary disciplines. What’s more, the implications are momentous. What research could possibly hold greater meaning for the human race than proving that the Shroud of Turin was the authentic burial cloth of Jesus? If the image were created by a burst of radiation emanating from within Jesus’ body, as Walsh believes, the Shroud would constitute physical proof of the resurrection.
Such proof would compel a lot of people to undergo a significant attitude adjustment, notes Walsh, not the least of which are the legion of Biblical scholars who have treated the resurrection “experiences” of Jesus’ followers as either a psychological phenomenon or outright legend. With rare exceptions, questors of the Historical Jesus have totally ignored the Shroud and refused to grapple with its implications for understanding Jesus and his relationship to God. If Walsh’s dream comes true, scientifically documented proof of the Shroud’s authenticity will provide irrefutable testimony of the resurrection — and become the starting point for understanding the historical Jesus.
Bruce Chilton’s Jesus, a powerful practitioner of throne mysticism, led a Galilean movement to reform the Temple cult.
By James A. Bacon
In Bruce Chilton’s appraisal, most books about the historical Jesus share a common fallacy: They fail to consider the Synoptic Gospels’ literary device of compressing the events of Jesus’ ministry into a single year. “Even the best scholarship has hopelessly confused the abbreviated structure of the Gospels with the actual chronology of Jesus’ life,”[1] he writes.
Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College, believes that much of the Gospel material is authentic in the sense that it can be traced back to events or sayings that actually happened. But that material was originally transmitted to the Gospel authors in the form of stories and sayings with little chronological context. The author of the Gospel of Mark collected that material from independent sources and shaped it into a coherent narrative.[2] By placing the stories in the sequence he did, however, Mark, like the other evangelists, often altered their significance – throwing Jesus scholars off the track centuries later.
In his recent book Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, Chilton undertook an exercise that he claims no reputable scholar had attempted before: writing a comprehensive biography of Jesus, by which he means a narrative of Jesus’ life from his birth to his death. To construct that narrative, he disaggregated the sayings and deeds contained in the Gospels and reassembled them based on inferences from Galilean and Judean culture, political events and other markers – a method he calls “generative exegesis.”
Thinking critically about the temporal dimension of Jesus’ career freed Chilton from long-held assumptions in New Testament studies and allowed him to advance a number of fresh interpretations:
Jesus’ association with John the Baptist spanned several years, not the brief encounter implied by the Gospels.
Jesus practiced an early form of Kabbalah mysticism, which he learned from John. His mastery of the discipline grew over time, leading to ever more specific visions and allowing him to convey his experiences to others. These skills took years of practice to develop.
After leaving John the Baptist, Jesus returned to Nazareth for a prolonged period and then moved to Capernaum. The Gospel story of his rejection in Nazareth compressed into a single episode a phase of his life that lasted a number of years.
Jesus spent several years evading the authorities in Galilee; his travel outside the province was far more extensive than the brief, idealized excursions suggested by the Gospels.
Jesus conducted his messianic entry into Jerusalem during the festival of Sukkoth (also known as Tabernacles), not Passover. His conflict with the high priests of the Temple actually transpired over the half-year interval between Sukkoth and the following Passover, when he was crucified.
In some instances, Chilton found strong support for his chronological reshuffling: His placement of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem during the festival of Sukkoth, he says, “fits like a glove.” In other cases, he reached more tentative conclusions based on weighing ambiguous and conflicting data. Given his decision to write “Rabbi Jesus” as a popular biography with a minimum of scholarly commentary, Chilton chose to omit the laborious logic behind his narrative sequencing — a decision that has landed him in hot water with some reviewers.[3] Readers interested in the details of his reasoning are advised to read the Question & Answer piece accompanying this profile, or better yet to consult his previous publications. Not all of the research that went into “Rabbi Jesus” has been published yet, however. As a courtesy to our readers, Chilton has permitted the Jesus Archive to reproduce an excerpt from a forthcoming essay, “The Chronology of John’s Death,” which addresses a crucial issue: The year of John the Baptist’s execution. Dating John’s death is significant because, as Chilton argues, it marks the end of Jesus’ training under John and the year he struck out on his own. A date of 21 C.E. supports a conclusion that Jesus’ ministry spanned a full decade rather than the single year portrayed in the Synoptics.
Adapting a biographical perspective also forced Chilton to grapple with Jesus’ development as a person. People are products of their environment, and Chilton rooted his Jesus in the soil of Galilee and the religious heritage of Judaism. But Jesus did not emerge, like Venus from her shell, as a prophet at the height of his powers. He underwent a process of maturation, subject to a variety of influences. His apprenticeship to John the Baptist was one. His birth as a mamzer, a child of uncertain parentage, was another. Jesus identified with the sinners and dispossessed of Galilean society, surmises Chilton, because he had been an outcast himself, shunned as a boy by village elders and prohibited from participation in the Nazareth synagogue.
The attention Chilton gives to Jesus’ psychological development is bound to stir controversy as well. Reacting to the treacly “lives of Jesus” written in the Victorian era, New Testament scholars have denied even the possibility of describing Jesus’ personality. In the mid-20th century, theologians insisted that it was futile to seek human influence on the heroic and divine figure of Jesus. “Psychologizing” Jesus was the realm of cranks and amateurs. Ironically, the biographical focus on Jesus also opens Chilton to criticism from modern-day feminists from the opposite direction: Glorifying Jesus as the heroic founder of the social movement that bears his name downplays the contributions of the men and especially the women who comprised that movement.
Historians and theologians today are more willing to examine the human side of Jesus, but many still frown on psychological analysis. Everything known about Jesus has been filtered through the writings of others. Scholars are hard pressed to agree what Jesus said, much less what his state of mind might have been. Furthermore, recent social-scientific scholarship has emphasized the gulf between 1st-century and 21st-century personality types. Any effort to reconstruct Jesus’ psychology is vulnerable to the temptation of projecting the historian’s modern, individualistic frames of reference onto a figure imbued with the mental constructs of an ancient, collectivist society.
Undeterred, Chilton believes the effort is worth the risk. He peeks through a number of windows into Jesus’ emotional state. The sources tell us that Jesus got angry. He wept. He was “moved in his entrails.” The Gospels portray a man of powerful emotion. “Most ancient biographies of which we’re aware don’t emphasize religious figures getting angry, shouting, crying, or being harsh to their disciples and critics,” Chilton says. Jesus’ frequent display of emotion was remarkable, he insists, and it’s a legitimate subject of historical inquiry.
What’s more, by adopting a biographical perspective, Chilton takes a holistic approach. Most books on the historical Jesus compartmentalize aspects of his life – his teaching, his healing, his social setting, his struggle with the authorities. At some point, each of these topics must be reconciled with one another to create a coherent whole. They must be consistent with what we can see of Jesus’ personality and what we can deduce of his personal development. And they must be organized around a plausible timeline, anchored around reliable dates, that allows sufficient time for events to unfold.
“The twentieth century saw a variety of ploys to downplay the human reality of Jesus’ life,” says Chilton. “Reference to his emotions was dismissed as psychologizing. Allowance for his creativity was accused of elitism. But if we let the sources speak in their own contexts, we can infer how he developed, and give Jesus back a life. Obviously, seeing him in historical terms does not alone resolve issues of faith, nor does it make him the only important person in the history of the Christian movement … but the time has passed when questions of faith can be evaded by denying Jesus his place in history.”
* * *
Bruce Chilton was born and raised in Long Island, N.Y. After World War II, his parents settled in Levittown, the quintessential suburban community. He describes his family as “rationalist Waspy,” attending Episcopal churches sporadically. Faith did not run especially strong in the Chilton clan. His grandfather, he recalls, was a proud atheist and member of the Masons. When Bruce was later ordained as a minister, his grandmother joked that he was the “white sheep of the family.”
As a teenager, Bruce rejected Christianity and dabbled in Buddhism and meditation. But he underwent a transforming experience in 1967, his 17th year, an event he describes in Rabbi Jesus. He was traveling through Europe with members of the World Youth Forum, a current-affairs debating club, when he found himself one oppressively hot day within the cool, dark confines of a medieval church in Dubrovnik. He was drawn to a portrait of the crucified Christ, spikes driven through his palms, blood running down his arms, his body twisted and broken. “I had a momentary but searing impression of agony,” he writes. “I was moved by the figure’s fragility in the face of a vast and violent universe, and I felt the crushing pain of our common mortality.”[4] But he also felt something beyond pain, beyond despair, though he could not define it then. Leaving the church, he drank a beer and went swimming in the Adriatic. But the image never left him. Eventually, the experience inspired him to seek ordination.
Chilton attended college at Bard College, a small, liberal arts university beautifully situated on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Although he majored in theater, he took the religion courses on offer as well. In 1971, he decided to pursue the ordination course at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. There, reading extensively in Hebrew, Aramaic and classical Greek, he discovered his love of New Testament studies.
In his Masters thesis, Chilton focused on the first exorcism story in the Gospel of Mark. “You could determine by the analysis of style that you were dealing there not only with Mark’s characteristic presentation, but an underlying Semitic source that presented the exorcism as a very contentious event,” he says. “You can see the Aramaic words coming through, the fractures in grammar and syntax.” He does not believe that Mark drew upon a written Aramaic document, as some suppose, but he does think the exorcism story reflects an oral Aramaic source, perhaps passed from Peter by means of a source to the author of Mark’s Gospel.
Ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, Chilton completed his Master of Divinity in 1974 and then continued his studies at Cambridge. He thrived under the classic European method of study. “You have an advisor and a world-class library,” he says. “They tell you to go to work, and that’s what you do!” Mastering yet two other ancient languages, Coptic and Syriac, he immersed himself in the Gospel of Thomas. One of his supervisors, Ernst Bammel, made a particular impression upon the students of his dissertation seminar. Each week, five doctoral students would present their latest work for critique by the group. “He had the best technique for motivating students to work,” Chilton recalls. “If you didn’t have any material, he’d bring out photocopies of Aramaic and Hebrew papyri for you to translate!”
At this time, the mid-1970s, there was still a strong tendency in New Testament scholarship to give only grudging acknowledgement to the Jewishness of Jesus, Chilton recalls. Theologians tended to interpret Jesus as an opponent of the Judaism of his day and to see the Christian movement as outgrowth of that rejection. But Chilton came to think it impossible to disentangle early Christianity from the Judaism that it sprang from. “I saw Christianity as a reconfiguration of Judaism rather than an effort to dispense with Judaism.”
Christianity’s roots in Judaism became all the clearer as Chilton researched his doctoral dissertation about Jesus’ concept of the Kingdom of God. He found close analogies to Jesus’ concept in the Aramaic targums, a set of documents that have been largely overlooked by New Testament scholarship. As renderings of the Hebrew Bible in the Aramaic tongue, the targums were transmitted orally for several centuries then set in writing beginning during the 4th century C.E. They did not replicate the Hebrew scriptures literally. They paraphrased, added paragraphs and inserted new concepts. Yet they are important to historical-Jesus research because they reveal an oral form of the Hebrew scriptures that circulated among Jesus and his Aramaic-speaking contemporaries.[5] Indeed, if Jesus was illiterate, as some scholars conjecture, the orally transmitted targums may have been the version of the scriptures that he knew best.
The targums include references to the Kingdom of God that the Hebrew scriptures do not, and Chilton believes they shed light on Jesus’ understanding of that concept. At the time he worked on his dissertation, Chilton says, most New Testament scholars believed Jesus thought of the Kingdom of God as a future phenomenon. Some exegetes argued, however, that Jesus considered the Kingdom to be already present. In his dissertation, Chilton argued that the dichotomy between a realized kingdom and a future kingdom was a false one: The Kingdom of God, as found in the targums and as used by Jesus, had simultaneous present and future dimensions. In Jesus’ mind, Chilton says, God had begun the process of transforming the world. The transformation was not yet complete, but it would be very shortly.
While finishing his graduate work at Cambridge in 1976, Chilton was ordained as an Anglican priest. He took a job at the University of Sheffield deep in the heart of Labour country — the Socialist Republic of Yorkshire, locals call it – where he taught New Testament and studied the targumin. During this time, he met and wed his wife, Odile. In 1985, Chilton took a position at the Yale Divinity School, but he did not stay long. He found one aspect of the academic administration particularly frustrating: The system made it exceedingly difficult to collaborate with anyone outside the Divinity school, such as his colleagues in Jewish studies. Also, with the birth of his first child impending, he faced the prospect of less time to pursue his pastoral work.
In 1987, Bard College made Chilton an offer he couldn’t refuse: The school gave him a teaching load light enough that he could continue his research, spend time with his family and act as campus chaplain. The move to Bard, as it turned out, also gave him the opportunity to work with Jacob Neusner, a leading scholar of early Rabbinic Judaism, in one of the most productive collaborations in New Testament scholarship. Not only do Chilton and Neusner teach classes together, they have co-authored and edited a number of books exploring the intersections of Christianity and Judaism. They present the New Testament scriptures not as hostile or alien to 1st-century Judaism but as writings that arose from the diverse and complex thought of Judaism. The two professors work so well as a team that students sometimes ask if they disagree about anything, Neusner chuckles. “That amused us because when it comes to politics, I think he’s off the map, and he thinks I’m off the map. I’m a mainstream Republican and he’s a far-left Democrat.”[6]
In the 1980s, Chilton’s work came to the attention of the Jesus Seminar, and he joined that high-profile organization for several years. At the time, the Seminar’s priority was to seek a consensus on which of the sayings attributed to Jesus were historical. “I found their work interesting and in many ways stimulating,” Chilton says. “We were breaking down the notion that you couldn’t know anything about Jesus.” While useful, the Jesus Seminar’s methods were limiting. The work was atomistic, he says: It focused on individual words and deeds shorn from their original contexts. No one put the authentic material into anything resembling a narrative of Jesus’ life. It was around this time, Chilton says, that he became interested in the possibility of writing such a narrative himself.
* * *
More than a decade ago, Chilton developed one of the key arguments that laid the foundation for “Rabbi Jesus.” In 1992 he published “The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program Within a Cultural History of Sacrifice,” which explored Judean sacrifices and purity practices from an anthropological and historical perspective. Two years later, he followed up with “A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles,” which demonstrated how the mealtime ritual invented by Jesus evolved into the full-blown Eucharist of the early church.
In these books, Chilton tackled one of the great challenges of New Testament scholarship: explaining the origins of the Eucharist. The Synoptic Gospels portray the ritual as originating with Jesus at the Last Supper:
“And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.”[7]
A traditional reading of Mark would suggest that Jesus exhorted his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood in a cannibalistic-inspired ritual that would have repelled most Jews. Alternatively, some exegetes have suggested that early Christians in a Hellenistic setting invented the practice but attributed it to Jesus in order to legitimize their rite. Chilton took issue with both schools of thought. He could not accept the Gospels as literal history: By urging his followers to consume his blood and flesh, Jesus would have advocated a deliberate and radical break from Judaism that is presaged nowhere else in the Gospels. Nor could Chilton agree with those who would dismiss the Gospels as Hellenistic fairy tales and recast the Eucharist as a Dionysian mystery cult. “The Gospels were no fairy tales and Jesus was no apostate,” he wrote.[8]
Chilton started with the premise that Jesus operated within a Judaic milieu. He was loyal to the Temple cult. But as a Galilean, he resisted certain forms of worship imposed by the Jerusalem-dominated parties in power: the high priests and the Pharisees. The ambivalence of the Galileans towards the dominant Judeans of Jerusalem comes through clearly in the works of Flavius Josephus, a Jerusalem priest who tried with mixed success to organize Galilean resistance to the Romans during the revolt of 66 C.E. “The Galileans are presented as enthusiastic for Israelite worship in the Temple,” says Chilton, “but they often come into conflict with the Judean authorities.”
In particular, according to Chilton, Jesus objected to a decision by the High Priest Caiaphas to relocate the market for sacrificial animals from the Mount of Olives into the Temple itself. The move made sense from a logistical point of view: Pilgrims didn’t have to worry about their animals receiving cuts, scrapes or other blemishes on the way to the Temple, where a levite could disqualify them from sacrifice. But the new arrangement deprived celebrants of the opportunity to bring their own beasts up the Temple Mount to offer to God. Caiaphas’ innovation transformed a ritual that provided the Galilean peasant an intimate contact with the Almighty into an impersonal commercial transaction. Jesus disrupted that commerce by assaulting the vendors and moneychangers and dispersing them with their wares, then escaped before he could be arrested. However, he dared not return to the Temple. Effectively exiled from the Temple and its ceremonies, Jesus introduced an innovation of his own – a symbolic mealtime offering to God.
In Chilton’s interpretation, Jesus equated bread and wine with flesh and blood – but not his own. Jesus substituted wine for the blood poured on the sacred fire of the Temple and bread for the flesh of butchered meat offered to God on the altar. His followers could atone for their sins by partaking in the sacramental meal rather than the corrupt Temple sacrifices. In performing the ritual, Jesus challenged the monopoly of the priesthood and intermediaries between man and God – bringing down the wrath of the Temple priests upon him.
It was not easy reaching this conclusion. Chilton recalls sitting in his study in the spring of 1989 when the pieces all came together. He was correcting a manuscript of “The Temple of Jesus,” “in which he had argued that Jesus had traveled to Jerusalem for the purpose of fulfilling the climatic prophecies in the book of Zechariah: entering Jerusalem on an ass and disrupting the commerce of sacrificial animals in the Temple. At that point in his thinking, though, Chilton did not recognize the full import of Jesus’ Eucharistic rite that took place at the Last Supper. Like other scholars, he had noted the similarity of the Last Supper with the mealtime fellowship Jesus had enjoyed back in Galilee. He even saw a tie-in to the universal banquet at the End of Time described by Zechariah and other apocalyptic writers. But nothing challenged his long-held belief that the meaning of the words was identical to the traditional teaching of the Church: that Jesus was offering his own flesh and blood for his disciples to consume.
Gazing out his window towards the Annandale woods, the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains beyond, Chilton ruminated upon the link between God’s Kingdom and nature. Zechariah’s prophecy promised that nature would be overturned by the final, divine revelation: The Mount of Olives would be split in two, yielding a continual flow of water to nurture the earth. That’s when it hit him: Jesus also saw nature being transformed – wine and bread becoming the blood and flesh of the sacrificial animal.
Chilton found it profoundly disturbing to think that Jesus wasn’t referring to his own blood and flesh. “My theological world was turned around,” he says. Postponing publication of The Temple of Jesus, he took time to consult with friends and ponder the idea as he celebrated the Holy Communion himself. Eventually, he became comfortable enough to begin teaching on the topic. He published the book in 1992, then even circulated his theory in a book written for church circles, “Jesus’ Prayer and Jesus’ Eucharist.”
In writing “Rabbi Jesus“ a few years later, Chilton took on the task of integrating his Eucharistic thesis into the narrative of Jesus’ life. When describing Jesus’ move from Nazareth, a village with a cashless economy, to the commercial center of Capernaum, he advanced the argument that Jesus detested money. Accustomed to a village society based on barter and the exchanging of favors, Jesus equated currency with the “mammon of injustice.” As one who regarded commerce as a blight, Jesus would have been all the more distressed to see money exchanged in the house of God.
Chilton also reconstructed crucial events that transpired between Sukkoth, when Jesus chastised the moneychangers and fled from the Temple, and Passover, when he was arrested and executed. In Chilton’s revised chronology, Jesus’ raid on the Temple initiated six months of tension with the High Priest. Enraged by the assault on his authority, Caiaphas wanted to arrest the Galilean. He took the case to the Sanhedrin, but council members were little disposed to cooperate: They were still irate at Caiaphas for having recently evicted them from their chamber of hewn stone at the Temple and transplanted them to the old marketplace. Chilton conjectures that the Sanhedrin was hamstrung by debates over the nuances of Jesus’ actions. During this same interval, Jesus introduced his mealtime rite. Though not the dining-on-the-deity rite portrayed by the early church, the symbolic sacrifice to God proved scandalous to many for usurping the role of the Temple and its priests. As indicated in the Gospel of John, a number of Jesus’ followers parted company with him. One of those was Judas, who informed the priests of Jesus’ activity and agreed to help arrest him in the hopes of having him expelled from Jerusalem.
By this point, Caiaphas had no interest in trying Jesus before the Sanhedrin. Interrogating the would-be prophet in his palace, he extracted sufficient material from Jesus to justify going directly to Pilate and demanding his execution. In a private hearing that probably did not involve Jesus at all, Caiaphas persuaded the Roman governor to crucify him on the grounds that he was a threat to public order. Displaying none of the remorse described in the Gospels, Pilate agreed. On the eve of Passover in 32 C.E., Jesus died on the cross.
* * *
Rabbi Jesus weaves a number of other fresh perspectives into the life of Jesus. In one of many examples, Chilton draws upon the Rabbinic writings to shed light on Jesus’ birth. Judging by discussions in the Mishnah, ancient Israelites conferred extraordinary importance to confirming a child’s paternity. If there were any question about the father’s identity, the worst was often assumed. The child was labeled a mamzer, the offspring of a prohibited union. Given the unusual circumstances of his birth, Jesus confronted just such a stigma.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke affirm that the circumstances of Jesus’ conception were unusual, to say the least. Even if modern-day Christians accept the notion that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Mary would have had a difficult time persuading the villagers of Nazareth that such had been the case. Chilton contends that Mary and Joseph engaged in sexual relations while betrothed but Mary’s pregnancy became evident before the marriage contract could be sealed in public. The problem in public perception arose, Chilton explains, because Joseph resided in a nearby village (Bethlelem of Galilee) and Mary became pregnant before they lived together.
Whether one hews to the doctrine of the virginal conception, accepts Chilton’s interpretation or adopts the more controversial position, occasionally argued, that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier, Jesus’ social status would have been the same: He would have been a mamzer, or “silenced one,” deprived of a voice in the public congregations that regulated village life in Nazareth. This pariah status, in turn, would have driven Jesus from Nazareth as a youth and made him sympathic to other outcasts of Galilean society, Chilton says. “Being marginalized had a huge impact on his personality.”
The Mishnah and Talmud contain extensive commentaries on the results of illicit unions, yet in 200 years of historical-Jesus study, no one had connected them to the New Testament accounts – until last year. Remarkably, says Chilton, at least two other authors, working independently, published works exploring Jesus’ mamzer roots. Says Chilton: “Mamzer had a very big year in 2000.”
Chilton also adds material from an ancient work, “In Praise of Barnabas,” which has been long dismissed as legendary. A 1998 book published by Bernt Kolleman, a German scholar, persuaded him that Barnabas preserves some authentic early traditions. The text describes a young levite named Joseph residing in Jerusalem who extended hospitality to Jesus. Despite his family’s wealth and levitical status, Joseph’s origin in Cyprus, outside the land of Israel, prohibited him from participating in the priestly administration of Temple ritual, Chilton says. An outsider like Jesus, Joseph found inspiration in the Galilean’s teachings. In turn for his hospitality, Jesus bequeathed him a nickname: Barnabas, “the son of consolation.”[9]
Perhaps most significant is Chilton’s view that Jesus practiced a form of Jewish mysticism known as the merkabah, or meditation upon the chariot throne of God. It is widely acknowledged in New Testament scholarship that Jesus entered trances when performing exorcisms and even, perhaps, when healing. But the conventional wisdom asserts that Jesus viewed himself as being possessed by the spirit of God. Chilton is the first, to his knowledge, to suggest that Jesus achieved the ability to enter these trances at will by systematically cultivating a mystical discipline.
In ancient Jewish mysticism, the adept sought to ascend through the heavens in order to gaze upon the chariot-like throne from which God, in all his awesome glory, ruled all creation. The origin of the practice can be traced at least as far back as Israel’s exile in Babylon when the prophet Ezekiel first described the Lord of Hosts surrounded by a court of angelic creatures. Over the centuries the heavenly geography grew increasingly complex, metastasizing into multiple levels, each populated by its own bestiary of fantastic creatures. The Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocalyptic literature, dating to the century before Jesus, displayed an intimate familiarity with this mystical cosmology. Extrapolating forward from these texts and backward from the Jewish Kabbalistic literature, Chilton argues that masters taught the discipline to students, passing along their knowledge. One such master was John the Baptist. His star pupil was Jesus.
The Gospels contain rich throne-mysticism imagery. At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens opened, God’s voice boomed from the heavens, and his spirit descended like a dove. Jesus spoke of “one like a human” (commonly translated as the Son of Man), a mighty angel who would carry out God’s will at the end of days. He promised the Twelve that they would sit upon thrones to judge the tribes of Israel. John and James vied for pre-eminence and the right to sit on thrones beside Jesus. Evidence of Jesus’ mystical experiences also punctuate the Gospels: the retreats to the wilderness, the temptation of Satan and the transfiguration. Chilton even sees Jesus meditating upon the chariot when performing exorcisms and seeking to rejuvenate himself.
Furthermore, Chilton insists, Jesus instructed his disciples in the work of the chariot, and it is through this practice, Chilton suggests, that the disciples encountered the resurrected Jesus after his crucifixion. The influence on Christianity was profound, though widely unappreciated. Imagery from merkabah mysticism is evident in the letters of Paul. Jesus’ mysticism contributed also to the doctrines of Gnostic Christians, though they recast the discipline in an abstract and theological way.
* * *
As Chilton looks back upon his work, he regards his explication of Jesus’ throne mysticism as one of his most original contributions to understanding the historical Jesus – almost on a par with decoding the origin of the Eucharist. In the long run, though, he hopes “Rabbi Jesus” is remembered for firmly rooting Jesus in the political and cultural context of 1st-century Judaism. “The whole issue of Jesus’ social location within Judaism,” he says, “has been highlighted in a way that’s never going to go away.”
The book has received a mixed response, Chilton concedes, but much of the criticism has been ill informed. Appearing on radio talk shows, he says, “I’ve been called impious. I’ve been called an agent of Satan.” If nothing else, the experience has confirmed to him “how central this discussion is to us culturally. … I’m happy I’m saying things so plainly.”
[1]“Rabbi Jesus”; Doubleday; New York; 2000. p. xx-xxi.
[2] Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis, gave the earliest account of the composition of the Gospel of Mark. As preserved by Eusebius in the 4th century, Papias said: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses.”
Thus, we learn that Peter never gave a “connected account” of Jesus’ life and that Mark did not write down Jesus’ deeds and sayings in order. We can conclude only that sequence and chronology of events of Mark’s Gospel – including the one-year time frame — were based on the author’s inferences and/or narrative aims. It’s conceivable that Mark sometimes did get the sequence of events right, but historians should be acutely sensitive to the probability that he often did not.
[3] Chilton’s footnote-free approach may be a blessing to lay readers, but it confounds some scholars. In a recent book review, Craig L. Blomberg, professor of New Testament studies at Denver Seminary, compliments Chilton for bringing Jesus’ Judean milieu to life, but castigates his chronology:
“Clearly Chilton feels free to reject canonical chronology and invent his own, seldom with any comment explaining his rationale. When certain episodes seem improbable, he rejects them or redefines them similarly. Completely contra the prevailing wisdom of both New Testament and rabbinic scholarship, he feels free to draw widely on Jewish traditions of the first five or six centuries of the Common Era and to assume that they were all in place in the first century and defined the Judaism of Jesus’ world. When something offends Chilton’s religious sensibilities, he rewrites the story so that the historical Jesus no longer violates them.”
[5] Some scholars have argued that the targums originated after Jesus lived but, according to Chilton, close analysis demonstrates that much of their language and interpretation is contemporaneous with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which would indicate an origin as much as a century before Jesus. Chilton translated the Isaiah targum as part of a recently completed translation of the Aramaic Bible, complete with commentary and text notes.
The band of Aramaicists is a small. New Testament scholars generally learn the Greek and Hebrew required to complete their degrees, Chilton observes. Only a few are sufficiently motivated to learn Aramaic as well. Because people study what they know, however, disproportionate attention has been given to analyzing Greek documents at the expense of Aramaic ones.
[6] Sure, teases Chilton, Neusner is in the Republican ”mainstream” – like Ulysses S. Grant!
[9] Chilton regards the nickname as evidence supporting the authenticity of the Barnabas material. Jesus, like the current U.S. president, had a proclivity for giving pet names to his followers: Peter the “rock” (Cephas), John and James the “sons of thunder,” Simon the “zealot,” and so on.
Why did Jesus consort with tax collectors? To broker relief for Galilee’s peasants, says Doug Oakman.
by James A. Bacon
“And after these things he went forth, and saw a publican, named Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he said unto him, Follow me. And he left all, rose up, and followed him. And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them. But the scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” (Luke 5:27-30).
Jesus’ proclivity for feasting with tax collectors presents a challenge to New Testament scholars. As agents of imperial Rome and its client kingdom in Galilee, publicans squeezed the poor mercilessly. Jesus sided with the dispossessed and downtrodden of Galilean society — why would he associate with the publicans who persecuted them? Who were the sinners referred to in the Gospels — prostitutes, thugs, henchmen of the publicans, perhaps? And what was going on at these feasts — was there more than the evangelist reveals?
Jesus’ association with tax collectors is firmly rooted in history, notes Douglas E. Oakman, chairman of the Religion Department at Pacific Lutheran College. References to tax collectors appear in the Gospel of Mark, in the “Q” sayings employed by Matthew and Luke, and even in the special sources unique to each Gospel writer. The Jesus movement had no reason to fabricate stories and sayings linking Jesus to a despised element of Galilean society. These passages cry out for explanation, he says.
Building on his research into the economy of the 1st century Palestine, Oakman suggests that Jesus acted as a “broker,” or mediator, between tax collectors and debt-ridden peasants. Jesus gathered the tax collectors and the peasants, whom the translators of the Gospels described to as “sinners,” around the banquet table and tried to work things out. Says Oakman: “He’s trying to get tax relief for the person in debt. Jesus’ argument to the tax collector is, ‘Show some mercy. In the name of the higher power, why don’t you help this person out?’”
As benign as such activity might seem, the authorities regarded it as seditious. In all likelihood, Oakman contends, Jesus also advocated resisting taxes through dissimulation and the manipulation of tax records. He made tax resistance and relief of debts the cornerstone of his teaching. And this teaching probably led directly to his arrest and crucifixion.
Oakman is still following this line of inquiry. His work is not yet complete, and some portions of his argument are better documented than others. But he tested this argument in March when presenting a paper to The Context Group, a loose association of scholars that apply social-scientific methods to the study of the New Testament world. In the paper, “Jesus the Tax Resister: The Meaning of Resistance and the Resistivity of Meaning in the Early Jesus Traditions,” he applied two new perspectives to the Jesus-and-the-publicans question. In one, he interpreted Jesus in the context of the prevailing patron-client economic system of 1st-century Galilee. In the other, he looked for evidence in the earliest literary stratum of Gospel material, the Jesus sayings known in New Testament studies as Q1.
The parsing of the so-called “Q” sayings shared by Matthew and Luke has emerged as one of the more fertile fields of New Testament inquiry in recent years. Scholars have long hypothesized that the sayings common to both Gospels come from the same source (in German, quelle, or q). But in the past decade, Canadian scholar John Kloppenborg has theorized that the Q sayings can be divided into three clusters, Q1, Q2 and Q3, written at different stages in the development of the early Jesus movement. The Q1 sayings were the earliest, he argues.
The authors of Q1 are unknown. Jesus’ followers were probably illiterate, so they did not compile the sayings. Kloppenborg suggests that the people most likely to have put Jesus’ words in writing would have been village notaries and scribes. Oakman starts with this hypothesis then probes deeper. Functioning as local representatives of the Herodian administration — recording loans, contracts, debt receipts, tax receipts, and other legal documents — the scribes would have paid especially keen attention to Jesus’ teachings on matters related to debt and taxes, he contends. Indeed, he suspects that the earliest Q sayings could have been recorded during Jesus’ lifetime.
Another breakthrough in Biblical studies has been the recognition that patron-client relationships, not free markets, defined the Mediterranean economy of the 1st century C.E. Rulers extracted the agricultural surplus by force — tribute, taxes, tolls, levies — then redistributed the wealth to their servants and retainers in exchange for support, favors and honor. In this system driven by personal relationships, there was a recognized role for the “broker” who mediated between patrons and the powerless. It is precisely such a role, Oakman suggests, that Jesus filled.
When Jesus preached the “kingdom of God,” Oakman says, he wasn’t spinning some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. His version of the kingdom, or basiliea, was one in which God extended his principles of justice and equity to the affairs of men — here and now, not after some divinely powered apocalypse. “Apocalyptic Judaism was an elite game, the province of scribes who could read and write about the traditions of Israel,” he says. By contrast, Jesus sought direct, concrete remedies for the woes of the poor. “He was an acute social observer and he was seeking immediate relief.”
* * *
When interpreting the lives of Jesus and his Galilean followers, Oakman finds it helpful to think like a peasant. Taking the peasant’s perspective can totally change the meaning of a text such as the Lord’s Prayer, he says. The Gospels present two variants of the prayer, one in Luke and one in Matthew. The discrepancies between the two can be explained by the different theological concerns that the evangelists brought to their writing. Did these preoccupations go back to Jesus? “I doubt it,” says Oakman. As a peasant addressing other peasants, Jesus was addressing very practical issues: “Give us this day our daily bread, release us from our debts, and don’t bring us into trial or the court, where the odds are stacked against us.”
Adopting a peasant mindset comes easily to Oakman. Raised in Iowa, he spent memorable time in the company of his maternal grandparents, Serbian peasants who had come to the United States before World War II. They remained people of the soil, surrounding their country house with orchards, a vineyard, stands of corn and a vegetable garden. His grandmother spoke only broken English, and his grandfather sang Serbo-Croatian songs that young Doug could not understand. But as he listened to stories of how his grandfather had spent time in jail for bootlegging long before, and how a great uncle had killed a man in a fight in Kansas City, he soaked up his grandparents’ way of looking at the world. “I directly experienced the honor-shame, strong-group, limited-good world of the Mediterranean peasantry,” he says. And thinking back upon how his grandfather spoke of God as a presence in their lives — “I’m going to tell you what God wants,” he’d say — he realized, “That’s the God of a peasant.”
To Oakman, it is axiomatic that Jesus was a peasant. He was born in a village in Galilee, probably Nazareth. Joseph, the patriarch of the household, was a tekton, a carpenter who probably worked for hire. Christian tradition suggests that Jesus had numerous brothers and sisters. Custom dictated the giving of dowries to the daughters and the division of the inheritance between the sons, with larger shares going to the eldest son. Even if Joseph had managed to accumulate any possessions, Jesus would have received little of his estate — indeed, nothing at all if he were illegitimate, as Oakman thinks he was. Having no property to speak of, Jesus would have departed to seek his fortune. Says Oakman: “I see him leaving the village as a surplus, peasant child.”
Jesus probably moved around Galilee, looking for employment. “I argue that he was transient for economic reasons,” Oakman says. “He had to go where the work was.” In all probability, Jesus labored on large estates like those that figure in his parables. He might have worked in Sepphoris, the capital city of Galilee only a few miles from Nazareth, which underwent a building boom in the early 1st century, and he might have labored on the Temple in Jerusalem, which employed thousands of workers during its construction. Ultimately, he ended up in the villages along the Sea of Galilee, living among the fishermen and farmers there.
* * *
There were few checks and balances to the levy of taxes system in Jesus’ Galilee. In Oakman’s analysis, systemic pressures worked to ratchet the level of taxation and other forms of expropriation — tolls, rents on land, interest, tithes to the Temple — ever higher. In 6 C.E., the Romans incorporated Judea into the province of Syria, and instituted a census to measure the population and gauge an appropriate level of taxation. Proclaiming that the Jews had no Lord but God, a certain Judas of Gamala and Saddok, a Pharisee, advocated armed resistance. The taxation, they argued, “was no better than an introduction to slavery.”
It’s not clear that anyone actually heeded Judas and Saddok at the time, though the Judean chronicler Flavius Josephus blames later insurrections on their philosophy of resistance. But their creed does highlight an important aspect of taxation in the 1st century. The notion that taxation was “an introduction to slavery” was no mere rhetorical flourish. People who fell in arrears on their taxes, whether due to crop failure or personal circumstances, often borrowed money to pay the tax collector. Failure to repay the moneylender could result in forfeiture of property if the borrower had property, or forfeiture of one’s liberty if he did not. Debtors could be literally sold into debt bondage, a form of slavery. Indebtedness was a widespread phenomenon in Galilee, Oakman argues, and relief of debts appears as a recurring theme throughout Jesus’ teachings.
The peasants of Galilee had a variety of options to protect themselves from the depredations of their rulers. Rarely did they rise in revolt. Ill armed, poorly organized and unskilled in the arts of war, they had no chance of winning a military confrontation. Sometimes they fled to the hills, living in caves as bandits and preying upon the estates of the wealthy. The phenomenon of “social banditry,” endemic throughout the ancient Mediterranean, is well documented in Galilee and Judea.
Drawing from anthropological studies, Oakman suspects that Galilean peasants also devoted considerable effort to tax avoidance. Unlike modern Americans, Galilean peasants had no social compact with their rulers: They received nothing in return for their taxes — no public works, no services, no pensions. With no stake in the system, they didn’t hesitate to lie and deceive when dealing with the tax collectors. Around the world, peasants have employed a variety of strategies, such as failing to declare land under cultivation, hiding produce, delivering grain contaminated by rocks and mud to increase its weight.[1] There is no reason to think that Galilean peasants were any different, Oakman says.
In his paper, “Jesus the Tax Resister,” Oakman reinterprets Jesus’ Q sayings as reflecting an acute sensitivity toward taxes, debts and tax/debt collection. His spin on Q is highly unorthodox, even jarring, and if viewed in isolation from the rest of his argument, would strike many readers as thoroughly implausible. However, examined through his lens of Jesus as leader of an anti-tax movement addressing the scribes who transcribed Jesus’ remarks — not necessarily to the population at large — the sayings take on a whole new meaning. For example, in Matthew 5:39-40, part of the so-called Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Traditional commentary pictures publicans or soldiers harrying peasants with physical blows. In Oakman’s interpretation, Jesus was telling the publicans to “turn the other cheek” when the peasants, in their outrage, escalate their resistance from prevarication to physical resistance.
Oakman concedes that his interpretation poses difficulties, and he’s still trying to sort out a context for the Q sayings that would make sense. He suspects that the setting may have been meals where both publicans and peasants were present. “That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
Crucial to Oakman’s reinterpretation of the Q sayings is his idea of Jesus as a broker. Where John the Baptist had exhorted publicans to “exact no more than that which is appointed to you,”[2] Jesus went a step farther: He became actively engaged in seeking restitution. Although the story of Zacchaeus falls outside the scope of his focus on Q1, Oakman says, it is illustrative of what Jesus was trying to accomplish. Zacchaeus, chief of the publicans in Jericho, invited Jesus to a banquet. There, according to the Gospel of Luke, he stood up and announced, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.”[3]
From the Gospels, it appears that Jesus and his disciples banqueted also with the publicans of Galilee. The narratives frequently allude to “sinners” as parties to these events, pairing them with the toll collectors, as in “publicans and sinners.” Traditional biblical exegesis has interpreted the sinners, or havvayim, as referring to members of disreputable occupations, particularly prostitutes, who were cultically impure or morally unclean. Modern readers might imagine publicans participating in an underworld populated by such sinful and ostracized occupations as tax collectors, moneylenders (of the loan sharking variety), prostitutes, pimps and the thugs who enforced the tax and loan collections. But Oakman suspects that modern categories of thought confuse the original meaning. He believes the word havvayim carried implications of indebtedness. Publicans took on debt when they acquired tax collection rights. Prostitutes may have been indebted to their pimps. Oakman does not exclude the possibility that disreputable elements joined Jesus and the publicans, but he thinks the word as employed by the Gospels referred to a broader category of debtor that included distressed peasants.[4]
To make sense of the meetings involving Jesus, tax collectors and indebted peasants, Oakman views Jesus in the context of patron-client relations. Patrons were powerful figures who bestowed their wealth and influence in return for gifts, favors and acclaim from their clients. Relationships were characterized by reciprocity: the mutual exchange of wealth, political influence, support and honor. Networks of patron-client obligations defined the distribution of wealth, political power and status throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Within this system, there was a recognized role for the “broker” — an intermediary who introduced the powerless to powerful individuals they otherwise could not gain access to.
As a broker, Oakman suggests, Jesus set up meetings between tax collectors and peasants. It’s obvious enough what the peasants were looking for: relief from taxes and debt. But what did the publicans receive in exchange? Oakman is still thinking this through, but he believes they sought acceptance and a different kind of human relations. Tax collectors were despised not only by the peasants they tormented but by respectable elements such as the Pharisees. As social outcasts they enjoyed no honor, one of the core values of the ancient Mediterranean world. But Jesus accepted them into his community. They gained friends in the villages,[5] won acclaim for their generosity and had the satisfaction of knowing they were conducting their lives closer to the purpose of God.
Ironically, publicans often were debtors themselves. Says Oakman: “That’s how the elites got people to do the dirty work.” Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, franchised tax-collection rights to chief publicans, who in turn sub-contracted the work to lesser tax and toll collectors. Publicans advanced the tax payments up front, often borrowing the money they needed to win the contract. It was up to the tax collectors to recoup their investments and make enough to live on. If they failed to collect sufficient taxes, they couldn’t repay their loans and they could end up in bondage themselves. Given the pressure on the publicans to collect revenue, were the inducements that Oakman’s Jesus offered — acclaim, spiritual satisfaction, acceptance by lower-ranking members of society — sufficient to win clemency for taxes owed?
Perhaps Jesus played a more active role in brokering relief than even Oakman imagines. In his article “Miracles, in Other Words: Social Science Perspectives on Healings,” Jerome H. Neyrey, a Context Group colleague, asks how exorcists and healers such as Jesus might have functioned in a patron-client economy. “Perhaps money is not exchanged between the healer and the healed, but some sort of exchange or reciprocity is expected and regularly occurs. What is it?”[6] The Gospel accounts make it clear that Jesus had no interest in accumulating personal wealth. On the other hand, notes Neyrey, he did receive honor and acclaim. “Most, but not all, healings end with some sort of acknowledgement of Jesus’ honor claims or some public confirmation of his role and status.”
Carrying this logic another step, one must consider the possibility that Jesus also bartered access and influence. His followers included wealthy Galilean women such as Mary Magdalene, Susanna and Joanna, whom he had healed of “evil spirits and infirmities.”[7] Joanna was married to Chuza, the steward of Herod’s estates, which means she probably was a member of Herod’s court. She may even have had access to Herod himself. If Luke can be believed, Herod had heard much about Jesus — not all of it bad.[8]
Not only did these wealthy women “minister unto” Jesus “of their substance” — supporting him financially — they might have utilized their influence, on Jesus’ behalf, to do favors for the tax collectors. Is not possible that Jesus parlayed his ability to exorcise demons from wealthy Galilean women into influence in Herod’s court? Is it too far fetched to think that he then reciprocated favors with tax collectors on behalf of Galilee’s powerless peasants?
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At the Context Group conference, the job of critiquing Oakman’s paper fell initially to William R. Herzog, professor of New Testament Interpretation with the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. “The recontextualization is really startling,” said Herzog. Oakman’s portrayal of Jesus as a broker between peasants and publicans challenges some deeply rooted interpretations.
While Oakman’s main thesis was attractive, Herzog said, he wondered if was it necessary to tie it to a radical re-reading of Jesus’ Q sayings. Anthropologists distinguish between the “public transcript” of the ruling elites, whose scribes left written records of their ideologies, and the “hidden transcript” of the powerless, who had every motive to conceal their rebellious thoughts, Herzog said. “Peasants do not advertise their resistance. It is to the advantage of peasants to let elites think what they want. They offer false assurance that nothing subversive is going on off-stage.” The problem with interpreting Q as Oakman does is that the peasants suddenly take their message on-stage. How plausible is it to think that Jesus would have abandoned the traditional strategy of the downtrodden and proclaimed a seditious philosophy so openly to village scribes and agents of Herod’s regime?[9]
Other scholars at the conference suggested refinements to “Jesus the Tax Resister.” Like Herzog, some questioned the way Oakman employed the Q material; others would have liked Oakman to provide more context, such as additional background about the history of tax resistance during the Herodian era. But most seemed to accept the core thesis that Jesus acted as a broker between peasants and publicans. Admittedly, this was a friendly crowd: Most of the scholars present were accustomed to refracting their analysis through the prism of patron-client relations. Oakman might receive a chillier reception among exegetes unschooled in cross-cultural anthropology.
Reflecting upon the paper a couple of weeks after the conference, Oakman said he expects to refine it this summer in anticipation of facing more hard-nosed critics at the Society of Biblical Literature. He will address the issues that Bill Herzog raises, give a fuller account of the tax regime of Roman Galilee and pay serious attention to the issues surrounding the use of Q stratigraphy.
When first hearing the paper’s title, “Jesus the Tax Resister,” Oakman recalls, his friend Jerry Neyrey kidded him: “So, Jesus was a Republican!”
“The context makes all the difference,” he responded. But if there are any big Republican donors out there who might be willing to subsidize his work this summer, please get in touch!
James A. Bacon
April 18, 2001
[1] According to James C. Scott’s study of Malay rice farmers, cited in Oakman’s paper, such measures could be highly effective: “Quietly and massively, the Malay peasantry has managed to nearly dismantle the tithe system so that only 15 percent of what is formally due is actually paid.” Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; Yale University Press; 1985.
[4] It may be possible to equate “sinners” with Oakman’s indebted peasants in quite a different way. The Judeans of Jesus’ era used the concept of sin to explain misfortune. God punished transgressions against the law by afflicting the sinner with a wide array of evils: illness, accidents, drought, poor harvests, economic setbacks. If a peasant had fallen into calamity ö owing taxes, borrowing money, living under the threat of losing his land and/or freedom ö it was a reasonable presumption that God was chastising him for some previous sin. Almost by definition, those who suffered misfortune were sinners.
[5] Jerome H. Neyrey, one of Oakman’s fellow Context Group members, cites the parable of the wasteful steward in Luke 16:1-9 in support of this idea. Fearing the loss of his job, the steward reduces the obligations of his master’s debtors so that “when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.” Says Neyrey: “No doubt there is some sense that if they are dismissed for failing to collect taxes, surely they would find aid with the non-taxed peasants.”
[6] Neyrey, Jerome H.; “Miracles, in Other Words: Social Scientific Perspective on Healings”; in Cavadini, John C., ed., Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; 1999.
[7] Luke 8:2-3. “And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, And Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.”
[8] Luke 23:8. “When Herod saw Jesus [during his trial] he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.”
[9] Although Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as proclaiming many of the Q sayings publicly in the so-called Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain, the historian cannot assume that these literary settings reflect the actual historic settings in which the words were uttered. Oakman is not convinced at all that the Q sayings were part of the “public discourse.” There is insufficient evidence to tell, he says.
Bill Warren had a very simple point to make in his paper, “Literacy and Social Strata in the Roman Empire: Identifications and Locations.” The literacy rate for the Roman Empire as a whole may have been low, around five to 10 percent. But in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean where Christianity took root it was considerably higher, perhaps 15 to 25 percent. The issue was of more than abstract interest to Warren, director of the Center for New Testament Textual Studies at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, because literacy levels had implications for how written documents like the Gospels and Epistles were written, transmitted and received in the early church.
Little did Warren imagine the lively discussion he’d set off when he presented the paper at the March 2001 conference of the Context Group. Nearly every one of the 30 scholars and graduate students in attendance had pronounced opinions on the subject. Richard L. Rohrbaugh, the Lewis and Clark College professor charged with responding to the paper, set the tone with a lively analysis. He provided an overview of the raging debate over literacy rates in Roman antiquity. Along the way, he commented on the unreliability of population estimates in the Roman world, distinguished between occuliteracy, scribal literacy and numeracy — the abilities to read, write and work with numbers — and posited some thoughts on the likely illiteracy of Jesus. Then he presented a comprehensive bibliography.
As others chimed in, the conversation ranged widely. Some were fascinated by the question of Jesus’ literacy. Citing Luke, who depicted Jesus as reading in the synagogue, they suggested that he might have been occuliterate. Others explored the possibility that the Judeans, whose culture centered on the Torah, might have enjoyed higher levels of literacy than surrounding cultures. That led to a discussion of how illiterate peasant societies transmitted knowledge of epics and sacred texts through memorization and recitation, and inspired comments on the role of writing as an administrative tool of the ruling classes and an instrument of social control. All the while, participants peppered Warren with citations of enough articles and books to keep him immersed in the subject for months.
“The feedback was interesting and helpful,” says Warren. He got insight into related controversies and ideas for developing the topic along other lines. “Hopefully, the discussion will lead to a more solid treatment of the literacy topic in a forthcoming publication in the field of New Testament textual criticism.”
The hour-long exchange of ideas was vintage Context Group. Each year, scholars submit drafts of papers for a round of friendly yet rigorous peer review before seeking publication. The feedback is incredibly valuable, notes K.C. Hanson, a founding member and an editor at Fortress Press. There is none of the grandstanding and personal put-downs he’s witnessed at other conferences. Everyone is there to help one another. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the Context conferences is the sharing of bibliographies and sources, he says. The environment is collaborative, not competitive, and members frequently wind up working on books and articles together.
The Context Group defines itself as a “working group of international scholars committed to the use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation.” Roughly half come from the United States. The rest hail from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa and Belgium. The group meets annually in the U.S., although it has held additional conferences in Scotland, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic. Most members deem themselves New Testament scholars, but the group is open to applying social-scientific perspectives to Old Testament research as well.
Though not nearly as large or well known as the famed Jesus Seminar, Context Group scholars arguably have been just as influential in shaping the direction of New Testament and historical Jesus research. While Jesus Seminar findings on the authentic words and deeds of Jesus remain controversial, even divisive, senior Context Group scholars have introduced social-scientific perspectives into biblical studies that are now transforming the vocabulary and analytical framework that others use to discuss the New Testament. The Context Group has no theological agenda as an organization, so its findings have not inspired the hostility and backlash that the liberal-leaning Jesus Seminar has encountered.[1]
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For 200 years, New Testament scholarship consisted overwhelmingly of textual analysis. To be sure, other disciplines such as archaeology were working on the fringes, and the discovery of new documents such as the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls enriched the background of Gnostic and Judean thought. But the great breakthroughs in thinking about the historical Jesus came from new methods of dealing with traditional New Testament sources: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and so on. Generations of scholars pored over the same New Testament verses pericope by pericope, line by line, word by word. Theories rose and fell on the meaning of single phrases. However, this eruption of erudition suffered from one grievous limitation: The meaning of words was determined by the 1st-century social setting of those who spoke and heard them. Until exegetes reconstructed the social context of the texts, they could not fully understand what the words meant to those who used them. Using 19th- and 20th-century categories of thought, scholars frequently missed the mark.
In the 1970s, a new generation began groping for that context. Young scholars ventured into other disciplines in search of tools that might wring fresh insight from the desiccated codices. Jack Elliott was one. A professor of the New Testament at the University of San Francisco, he had written a commentary on one of the neglected letters of the New Testament, 1 Peter. He was the first to decipher the social context of the letter, which he suggested was written by someone in Rome to recent migrants to a city in Asia Minor between 70 and 90 A.D. With a handle on the real-world social situation of the audience, Elliott says, he read the letter as addressing very concrete concerns, not metaphysical ones as previously thought. After he gave an address on the topic in 1979 at a meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association, someone came up to him and said, “We’ve got to get together.” That person was Bruce Malina, who at the time was delving into the literature of cultural anthropology for insights into the New Testament world.
Elliott, Malina and like-minded scholars met regularly throughout the early 1980s. In 1986, Robert Funk, founder of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar, invited them to create the Social Facets group under the auspices of Westar. For the next few years, the “social scientists” gathered twice a year at the same time and place as the Jesus Seminar. “We ate together, we went out together,” recalls Elliott, who chaired the group. A few individuals would attend meetings of both groups, cross-fertilizing ideas. Context Group scholars made lasting friendships with noted Jesus Seminar members like Marcus Borg and John Kloppenborg.
In 1989, however, the Social Facets colleagues parted ways with Funk. Elliott cites differences over the Jesus Seminar’s controversial methodology — voting on the authenticity of Jesus’ sayings — which Funk wanted to apply to Social Facets work. Others describe personality conflicts with Funk, whose goals for Social Facets did not coincide with those of its members. “The blowup was indeed very ugly,” says Richard L. Rohrbaugh, professor of Christian studies at Lewis & Clark College, who had served as the group’s representative on the Westar board.
The problem wasn’t personality conflict, responds Funk, but differing objectives. “The mission of Westar was to arrive at consensus results and convey those results to a broad audience in non-technical language,” he says. “We found that the Social Facets group did not want to adopt a goal-oriented agenda.” There was little helpful interchange between Social Facets and the Jesus Seminar, he adds. Given his limited resources at the time, he concluded that it was ill advised to continue to offering hospitality to a group that had little or no interest in his program.
“I invited them to arrange for their own meetings, under their own auspices,” Funk says. “It was one of the wiser decisions I have made as the director of Westar. From my point of view, the separation was not at all ugly … but actually a release from constant unhealthy and unprofitable conflict.”
The Social Facets group reorganized under the name of the Context Group. At Rohrbaugh’s invitation, the old gang rendezvoused at a Franciscan retreat in Portland, Ore., his hometown. The group functioned, as it always had, as a confederation of scholars that met to share ideas, support one another and enjoy each other’s company. No full-time directors. No ambitious collective goals. The group reconvened every spring until the Franciscans sold the retreat facility. This year, the conclave assembled at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., stomping grounds of Jerome H. Neyrey, another founding member.
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Context Group scholars are unknown to the public, but their collective work is influencing the way other New Testament scholars look at the world of Jesus and Paul. Drawing primarily upon the work of cross-cultural anthropologists, for example, they recognized that the honor/shame complex of values accurately described the value system of the ancient Mediterranean world. Cultures that share this orientation exhibit a strong group consciousness; individuals derive their personal identities and sense of self worth from their status within the group. Individuals are motivated largely by the desire to achieve honor, glory and acclaim from their peers. Accordingly, historical interpretations in which Jesus, Paul and others act like individualistic, 21st-century North Americans and Europeans are gravely flawed.
Another insight was the recognition that modern classifications of society into separate spheres of economics, politics and religion do not apply to the ancient world. Free markets working in accordance with the laws of classical economics defined only a tiny percentage of the economic transactions that took place. Relationships between individuals were defined not by money but by power. Wealth was acquired and distributed according to the principles of patron-client relations in which powerful patrons and weaker clients exchanged money, gifts, influence, favors, support and acclaim. Religious institutions such as the great Temple of Jerusalem and kinship systems did not co-exist in separate spheres: They were embedded in the patron-client system in a way that moderns would find totally unfamiliar. Without understanding the logic of reciprocity in patron-client relations, historians cannot hope to fathom how institutions functioned in the ancient world.
Another breakthrough came from the study of “alternate states of consciousness” (ASCs) such as trances and visions. Ninety percent of the world’s population lives in cultures in which trances are considered normal, notes John Pilch, who first integrated ASC research into biblical studies. Only in contemporary Western Civilization, representing 10 percent of the world’s population, do people not encounter ASCs. New Testament scholars have long noted the similarities of biblical healings, exorcisms and sky journeys to shamanistic experiences in Third World societies, but they have been reluctant to draw any conclusions about behavior 2,000 years ago from contemporary ethnographic data. In recent years, however, studies in neurophysiology have demonstrated that the human body is “hard wired” for ASCs, suggesting that findings from the anthropological literature may indeed be applicable across time and culture.
Those topics, as significant as they are, are only “the tip of the iceberg,” says Rohrbaugh. Members of the group also have imported social-scientific perspectives on purity codes, kinship patterns, pre-industrial cities, healing and health care, redistributive economics, reciprocity patterns, group formation, the evil eye, gender segregation, parenting, dyadic personality, physiognomy, anti-language, gossip networks, liminality, the concept of limited good and status-degradation rituals.
Perhaps the social-scientific perspective that has spread the most broadly is the so-called Lenski-Kautsky model of advanced agrarian societies. Combining the perspectives of sociologists Gerhard Lenski and John Kautsky, this schema describes the economic and social stratification of the Roman Empire along with its dependencies and provinces such as Galilee and Judea. According to this model, society was dominated by elites — rulers, priests, military commanders, wealthy landowners — who lived mainly in cities, towns and large estates. By means of taxes, tithes, rents, and interest on debts, the elites extracted wealth from peasants and laborers dwelling mainly in villages. The system was exploitative: The villagers received very little in return for the wealth they yielded. John Dominic Crossan has popularized the model, citing it in his influential 1998 work, The Birth of Christianity. But he was hardly the only scholar, much less the first, to do so. As part of a presentation last year to a Society of Biblical Literature seminar that included Kautsky himself, Richard Rohrbaugh identified at least 30 scholars who had used the Lenski-Kautsky model. Indeed, he and Context Group colleague Douglas Oakman were the first to introduce the work of Lenski and Kautsky to New Testament studies.
The Context Group has made a significant impact on New Testament studies in a relatively short period of time, especially considering the somnambulant metabolism of academia. The dissemination of ideas is captive to the constraints of the academic calendar and the marginal economics of small, academic presses and journals staffed by volunteers. It typically takes a year or longer to get feedback from book reviews. National biblical conferences, the most important of which is held under the auspices of the Society of Biblical Literature, are held only once a year.
The accomplishments of the Context Group are all the more remarkable considering that many of the senior scholars are employed at small, liberal-arts colleges. Malina, a prolifically published scholar often cited as the “energizer” of the group, teaches at Creighton College in Omaha, Neb. Rohrbaugh works at Lewis and Clark in Portland, Ore., Elliott at San Francisco University. The roll call of smaller institutions includes St. Olaf College, Pacific Lutheran University and Canisius College, among other institutions. The professors at these colleges bear heavy teaching loads, exercise major administrative responsibilities and have few, if any, graduate students to help them. Context members attribute their scholarly productivity in large measure to the professional friendships and collaboration engendered by the group.
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The focus of New Testament studies is tight: a 100-year time frame, an insignificant land mass in the eastern Mediterranean. Thousands of professors and graduate students have picked over the same handful of documents for two centuries, straining for new interpretations and fresh insights upon which to advance their careers. Over the past two centuries, the number of truly revolutionary breakthroughs in the field can be counted on one hand. The application of social-scientific models from other disciplines, arguably, is one — at least if judged by the rich opportunities for research and reinterpretation that have opened up as a result.
The social-science movement within New Testament studies is broad-based, of course, extending far beyond the Context Group. But there is no denying the seminal contributions of this small band of scholars. “We have really created a whole sub-discipline: social-scientific criticism of the New Testament,” says Richard Rohrbaugh. “It is increasingly being recognized by the guild as a major new advance in exegetical methodology.”
Such a statement may sound bold, even boastful today. But in time, it could well seem an understatement.
The Jesus Archive caught up with Helen K. Bond during the lazy days of August. She’d just returned from a vacation to Poland, where she’d combined a romp through the Polish countryside with a haunting visit to Auschwitz. An English transplant to Scotland, she teaches New Testament studies at the University of Edinburgh. We queried her about her recent work on Pontius Pilate and current research into the High Priest of the Jews, Joseph Caiaphas.
Jesus Archive: Ann Wroe wrote a novel about Pilate around the same time you wrote your treatise. Published by Random House, the book has received loads of publicity and sold fairly well. What’s your reaction to Wroe’s portrayal of Pilate?
Helen Bond: I like what she did with Josephus and Philo, two of our main sources about Pilate: She’s aware of the negative rhetoric in their texts. But she tends to harmonize the Gospel material, which I don’t find particularly helpful. I like the way she brought together the later pictures of Pilate, the traditions, the legend that he was born in Scotland—
JA: Scotland? Someone claims that Pontius Pilate was a Scotsman?
HB: Supposedly, he is the illegitimate son of a Roman centurion in a Roman camp, and had an affair with a local lassie. He somehow finds his way back to Rome. The interesting question about the origin of these stories is whether it was the Scots who claimed Pilate or it was it English who thought he was so bad that they claimed him for the Scots. It’s a nice idea but completely improbable. The Romans weren’t up in Scotland at that time. But it’s a nice little legend – good for the local tourist trade.
JA: Pilate is a central player in the passion narrative of all four Gospels. Outside of Jesus and Paul, he may be the best-developed character in the New Testament. Yet your book is the first academic treatment of him, in English at least. Why the lack of interest in the historical Pontius Pilate?
HB: There have been a couple of articles, but there’s been an assumption that there’s not enough to write a book about. A lot of people have doubted that there’s much in the Gospels that’s historical. Outside of the New Testament, Josephus and Philo mention him, but there’s a perception that there’s not enough to go on. I was not just looking at the historical side of Pilate, but how he was interpreted. I had more scope in my work.
JA: Yet Pilate does figure prominently in New Testament studies. Since the end of World War II, he has been depicted as a storm trooper in a toga: brutal, corrupt and vindictive towards the Jews. Is this an accurate historical picture or does it reflect the preoccupation of modern scholars?
HB: I think it is a modern creation. Everyone who interprets Pilate does so within the context of their own recent history. The events around World War II did give people a context to interpret Pilate. Also, though, there’s been a rediscovery of the works of Josephus. Josephus speaks of him harshly. And Philo even more so. The fact that these two Jewish writers speak so negatively of him reinforce the idea that Pilate was brutal, especially given that they are considered to be historical where the Gospels are not. The image of Pilate comes out of a combination of 20th century context and the works of Philo and Josephus.
JA: Why did Philo portray Pilate so harshly?
HB: He talks about him only in one of his works, The Embassy to Gaius, in the context of a letter from Agrippa I trying to persuade Gaius not to put up a statue of himself in the Jerusalem Temple. The aim of this letter is to show Caius Caligula that good emperors respect Judaism. Augustus bestowed every honor on the Jews, and he was a great man. Tiberius did, too, and he was a great man, and so on. The point of mentioning Pilate was to show that a lesser official treated the Jews in an offhand way. Once Tiberius found out about the incident, he castigated Pilate severely. As the foil to Tiberius, Pilate is characterized as everything as bad. Everybody who is antagonistic to Judaism is base, murderous, deceitful – a whole string of negative adjectives. Pilate is a literary character, feeding into Philo’s rhetoric. If you read the whole work, you see that it’s extremely apologetic and rhetorical in nature. Historically, it’s not clear that Tiberius was really so friendly to the Jews: He expelled them from Rome in 19 C.E. There is a historical basis to the episode cited by Philo – Pilate did put up some votive shields inside the governor’s praetorium. Gradually, certain groups of people within the population did take offense and Tiberius forced him to remove the shields. But I don’t think he would have been as angry about the incident as Philo made out. Otherwise, he just would have got rid of Pilate.
JA: And Josephus?
HB: Josephus handles Pilate differently in his two works. In The Jewish War, he describes the incidents of the emperor’s standards and the funding of the aqueduct, but doesn’t say anything negative about Pilate’s motives. He’s more interested in the Jewish reaction to events rather than in Pilate. In one incident (implanting the emperor’s effigy in Jerusalem), the Jewish reaction is passive and it succeeds – Pilate removes the standards. In the other (using Temple funds to finance construction of an aqueduct), the reaction is aggressive, and it doesn’t succeed and people get killed. The lesson is that resistance is futile. Passivity and diplomacy are effective. It’s in the Antiquities [of the Jews] that Josephus says Pilate was trying to destroy the Jewish law. Antiquities has a strong Deuteronomistic idea that anyone who sets himself against the Jewish law is setting himself up for a fall. Josephus says that Pilate did things against Jewish law, so he got sent back to Rome. People wrote history in a very different way back then. They used rhetoric. They wanted to shape peoples’ emotions and push their point of view. Josephus’ view is argumentative. He wanted to show that all of the Roman governors were negative to the Jews and Jewish law, part of the reason the Jews were driven to revolt in 66 C.E.
JA: How do you appraise the historical Pilate?
HB: I suppose I see him as being a competent governor. He must have been harsh to a certain extent. He did what Rome expected him to do. If there was any sign of a riot or uprising, he put it down with a firm hand. I don’t have any impression that he was deliberately aggressive. He may have been a bit insensitive. He probably came from Rome with little idea of what Jews believed, or perhaps a negative idea based on perceptions of the Jewish community in Rome. But he wasn’t deliberately provocative. It’s easy to underestimate how difficult the job was. Judea was tiny little place, but you had had Jews, Samaritans, gentiles. There were constant struggles between all of these groups. He must have managed it reasonably well. Even though Tiberius liked to leave people in a post for quite a long time, he wouldn’t have left Pilate in Judea for 10 or 11 years if he hasn’t been reasonably competent. It’s a boring picture. Everyone would like to see him as a monster. But he was probably a fairly reasonable bloke.
JA: The Gospel authors had their own reasons for depicting Pilate as they did. Many scholars have argued that Mark, writing shortly after the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem, tried to shift the blame for Jesus’ execution from Pilate to the Jewish leadership. Do you find this plausible?
HB: Not really. One question is who is actually reading Mark’s Gospel? Is he writing it so Romans will read it and think that Christianity is not threat? I don’t think so. He’s writing for a group of insiders. There’s no doubt that he wants to put a lot of the blame for Jesus’ death on the Jewish leadership. The representatives of Judaism rejected the messiah – and the fall of the Temple was the result. But I don’t think Mark is particularly positive to Rome either. His picture was shaped by his community’s persecution by Nero in the 60s. If he was sucking up to the Romans, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Luke did it much better. In Mark, there’s a parallelism between the Jewish trial of Jesus and the Roman trial: Mark wants to show that both sets of authorities, Jewish and Roman, are rejecting Jesus.
JA: Dominic Crossan, among others, has ridiculed the image in Mark’s narrative of a weak and vacillating Pilate haggling with the priests over the fate of Jesus. What other motive could Mark have had for penning such a portrait other than to exonerate Pilate and the Romans?
HB: In my reading of Pilate in Mark, I don’t see him as weak. Look at the Barabbas section. He asks the crowd, “Shall I release the King of the Jews?” By characterizing Jesus as “king of the Jews,” he’s issuing a challenge. It’s a way of finding out how much support Jesus had. You can read it as a skilful, shrewd piece of manipulation. The crowd isn’t up to the challenge. They know what Rome does to messiahs, so they say, “kill him.” Pilate gets Jesus’ followers to shout for his death.
JA: The Temple priests are integral to the story. The Gospels give them much of the responsibility for Jesus’ execution. How do you appraise their motives?
HB: Their motives were similar to those of Antipas with John the Baptist. You’ve got a holy man wandering around and attracting interest. John 11[1] isn’t far off the mark. The priests were worried that Rome would see this following, get worried and intervene. They may have worried that Jesus would do something at the Passover, make some kind of demonstration – which he did in the Jerusalem Temple. Things could escalate and get out of hand. It would be good to nip it in the bud and hope that his movement would die with him. But I don’t think they were acting with as evil intentions as is often suggested. Their motives were honorable. They genuinely did think that messianic movements like Jesus’ were detrimental to the stability of the state. They probably thought that Jesus was perverting the nation, leading people astray.
JA: You’re working now on a book about Caiaphas. He gets even worse press than Pilate. He’s typically portrayed as a collaborator. If Pilate is the Heinrich Heydrich of Roman-occupied Palestine, Caiaphas is the Quisling.
HB: The priests certainly were collaborators. The way the Roman Empire worked, the governor expected the local elite to run the province and be loyal to Roman interests. In return, they would keep their responsibilities and status. They were entirely dependent upon Rome – particularly the High Priest, Caiaphas, who had been personally appointed by the Roman governor. He was all too aware that he could be deposed at any moment. The priests were very much dependent upon Roman favor, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do as good a job as they could. Just because you’re appointed by Rome, just because you’re an aristocrat, doesn’t mean you don’t worship God as devoutly as possible. To call them collaborators is a bit one sided. They had a difficult job. They had to look after Roman interests, but they had to keep everybody happy. They had to keep an eye on what people were saying. They looked after Jewish interests as well.
JA: In his book The Ruling Class of Judea, Martin Goodman described the aristocratic factions that competed for power in the mid-1st century. Can you illuminate those rivalries at the time of Jesus?
HB: There certainly were factions: Four leading priestly families competed for high priesthood. Goodman’s work is very important for the period leading up to the revolt [in 66 C.E.] What’s different in the earlier period, before the rise of Agrippa I to the throne [in 40 C.E.], is that there’s only one high priestly house, the House of Annas. After the reign of Agrippa, the high priesthood changed hands frequently; there was competition for the office. Before Agrippa, Annas and his family dominated the high priesthood. There were only two years in which the high priesthood was given to another family. There may have been competition – other priestly families ready to jump in – but Annas and his family maintained control of the high priesthood. Caiaphas, Annas’ son-in-law, had to form alliances with other clans no doubt, he had to compromise, but his position was strong.
JA: What caused the change? How did the House of Annas lose its grip on the high priesthood?
HB: Probably because Annas himself was no longer around. I would imagine that he died around the time of Agrippa. Annas seems to have been a crucial figure, even though his son-in-law Caiaphas was high priest. John and Luke both bring him into the trial of Jesus. Annas was the power to be reckoned with, the dominating presence of that era.
JA: Bruce Chilton suggests that there was a lot more going on during the tenure of Caiaphas than suggested by Josephus or the Gospels. The High Priest exiled the Sanhedrin from its quarters in the Temple, probably in a dispute over the propriety of buying and selling sacrificial animals inside the Temple.
HB:I haven’t read Chilton, though I have read a similar theory by Eppstein, whom Chilton cites. The difficulty with this theory is that the evidence comes from rabbinic texts. It’s very uncertain as to what they’re talking about. One passage says that the Sanhedrin was ejected from the chamber of hewn stone 40 years before the destruction of the Temple. What does that mean? It could mean anything. Some people have suggested that 40 years is just a round number, not necessarily referring to the time of Caiaphas. … It’s quite likely that there were other factions, other high priestly families, whose noses were put out of joint when Annas was made high priest. But there just isn’t much to go on. Scholars aren’t even sure if there was a Sanhedrin, if a fixed council is meant by the term. Some think it could have been just an ad hoc group called by the high priest.
JA: The ultimate fate of Pilate is lost in legend. Vitellius sent him packing back to Rome after he massacred the Samaritans, but the reliable record ends there. What do you think happened to him?
HB: He disappears from history. There are all sorts of Christian accounts of what happened. One is that he became a Christian and killed himself out of remorse – he became a saint in the Coptic Church. Another is that he was anevil man, and all these evil spirits hung around his body, and he had to be thrown into a lake in Switzerland. I think he was probably just sent off on another commission. It’s not particularly surprising that we never hear from him again. He’s only known to us because of his time in Judea and his association with Jesus, as a result of which we have a number of surviving records.
JA: How about the tradition that Caligula sentenced him to death and that he died by his own hand?
HB: I’m not sure why he would be sentenced to death. When he put down the Samaritans – this guy said he was the messiah and some people followed him up the mountain with weapons – he may have been overly brutal and his soldiers overly zealous, but that’s what Roman governors did. What’s a Roman governor to do: Say, “Let’s sit down chaps and talk about this over coffee?” You can understand why the Samaritan leaders complain, and why the legate sent Pilate back. But I would be surprised if Caligula thought that was enough reason to execute him. If he had suffered this terrible end, Christian circles in Rome would have known about it and would have pointed to it as an example of God’s justice. But the traditions of his suicide date to a later time. They have all the elements of legend. It would have made my book more interesting to use that material. But is it likely? Probably not.
