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.
[2] P. 45
[3] P. 14
[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.
[5] P. 33
[6] Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza; “Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet”; The Continuum Publishing Company; New York; 1995.
[7] Akenson, Donald Harman; “Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds”; Harcourt Brace and Company; New York and London; 1998.
[8] P. 33
[9] P. 103
[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.
[12] P. 52
[13] P. 7
[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.
[15] P. 45
[16] P. 5-6.
[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.