Bible Books

A Lively Book About Voluntary Death

A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity

Arthur J. Droge and James D. Tabor
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992) 215 pp., $25.00

Reviewed by A. Katherine Grieb

This provocative and timely book challenges the prevailing opinion that suicide has been consistently prohibited by Jewish and Christian authors since biblical times. Arthur Droge and James Tabor show instead that the distinction between suicide and martyrdom is a polemical one dating back to Augustine in the fifth century (anticipated somewhat by Clement of Alexandria). Even the term “suicide” is unattested before the mid-17th century.

In ancient times there was no term analogous to our word “suicide,” but rather a variety of expressions in Greek, Latin and Hebrew for what Droge and Tabor prefer to call “voluntary death.” Their study traces the discussion of voluntary death from Socrates to Augustine (roughly 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.). Only since what they describe as “the Augustinian reversal” has there been a rigidly drawn distinction between suicide and martyrdom.

The history being reclaimed here is found in certain key texts: the biblical stories of Samson, Saul and his armor-bearer, and of Judas Iscariot; other cases of self-killing or reflection about the desirability of death in canonical and extra-canonical literature, including the account of the Maccabean martyrdoms in 2 Maccabees; and Plato’s account of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo and Crito.

Droge and Tabor’s study is influenced by Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934), which stressed that during the first three centuries of Christianity there was such great diversity of belief among Christian communities and believers that no one group had achieved dominance or the right to define “normative” Christianity. “Orthodox” and “heretical” were polemical terms, a means of self-definition against rival contenders. The authors also assume that since the fourth century, freewheeling debate has been stifled by theological and ethical dogmatists using prooftexts and oversimplification to maintain a dominant normative view—that suicide is a sin against God, state and self.

Readers will surely divide on the question of how accurately the authors have depicted Jesus and Paul. The authors are surprisingly confident that they can separate the historical Jesus from the Jesus who emerges in the Gospels, whom they refer to as “the Jesus of Christian imagination.” They state, as if reporting an obvious truth, that “Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed himself the messianic king and never expected to die, much less on behalf of others.” In fact the complex question of Jesus’ self-understanding is very much in dispute among New Testament scholars. Also debatable are the assertion that Paul “lusts after death” and an interpretation of Philippians 1:24–26 that compares Paul with the Roman Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus. As the authors themselves point out, there were important differences, particularly in the critical area of eschatology, between Paul and Musonius Rufus. For example, although the authors concede the importance of Paul’s view of the afterlife in his thought, their discussion hardly conveys the force of Jesus’ death and resurrection in Paul’s apocalyptic theology.^a

This fascinating and well-researched study adds a fresh impetus to the debate in our own time. Droge and Tabor grapple with a critical and timely topic in biblical and medical ethics; and their surprisingly entertaining and highly readable account reminds us that the decision to die can be a conscientious, even a noble one.

Gospel

Wilton Barnhardt
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 788 pp., $24.95

Reviewed by R. Joseph Schork

If they get nothing else from it, the readers of this sprawling novel will pile up massive frequent-flier mileage for their fictional trip. The itinerary begins in mid-June 1990 in Chicago and touches down in September at the airport nearest ‘The Promised Land,” a fundamentalist center in Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. There are intermediate stops at Oxford, Dublin, Khartoum, Gondar and Addis Ababa. Meanwhile, Professor Patrick Virgil O’Hanrahan, age 65, and his assistant, Lucy Dantan, age 28, are in hot pursuit of a late first-century. C.E. papyrus and the decipherment key to its obscure Meroitic script.

The document is the long-lost Gospel of Matthias, written by the older half-brother of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. In the novel, Matthias claims that his text of an earlier gospel has been burned by Peter. Now Mattias has dictated a second document, the wholly fictitious subject of this novel. Matthias’ “gospel” is his final testament of loss of faith—or better, the transformation of his ardor into “a small spark.”

This novel is obviously designed to appeal to readers who like fast-action, exotic-venue thrillers, here laced with a dash of apocryphal New Testament pseudo-scholarship. For the international-conspiracy fans there is an archly ecumenical Acolyte Supper at All Souls College, Oxford; a group of hyper-Jesuits (the Ignatians); the Mafia; some quite worldly Franciscans; the kind Hassami brothers (from Iraq); the millionaires Chester Merriwether (of Detroit) and Matthias Kellner (of Trier); the antiquities dealer Mustafa al-Waswasah; and at least one CIA operative.

For those more attuned to biblical studies and the history of early Christianity, the cast includes the enormously learned, humane and ubiquitous rabbi, Morey Hersch; some not very attractive apostles and an aging but sympathetic Mary Magdalene; the theology department at the University of Chicago; the Oxford Libraries; the Vatican archives; the manuscript treasures of Mt. Athos; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the Reverend Bullins’ fundamentalist Christian university, “The Promised Land.”

Gospel differs from other novels, such as Irving Wallace’s The Word and James Hall Roberts’ The Q Document, that also center around the discovery of revolutionary early Christian documents. Barnhardt actually delivers the good (or bad) news: on about 130 pages of the novel, Matthias’ text appears. Indeed, a series of what look like scholarly footnotes punctuates the text with editorial comment and information about names, dates and scriptural parallels. (Yes, the secret to deciphering the Meroitic script is revealed, but I won’t give it away.) Thus, while various experts do a lot of hypothesizing, debating and explaining in the novel, the readers are also given the opportunity to evaluate the new “gospel” itself. They will be greatly disappointed.

This book is far too long, its plot convoluted and many of its characters wildly improbable. The one likable member of the cast is Rabbi Hersch; but he too once published a vitriolic anti-Christian tract and, though generous, is not above normal cutthroat academic jealousy and duplicity.

This novel will not make the best-seller list, nor will it be the subject of a panel at the next meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. On the other hand, if you enjoy schlock fiction (as I confess I do), wait for the paperback edition. I predict that its spine will hold up to four days at the beach.

History and Prophecy

Brian Peckham
(The Anchor Bible Reference Library, New York: Doubleday, 1993) 889 pp., $35.00

Reviewed by John Priest

The subtitle of this book, “The Development of Late Judean Literary Traditions,” encapsulates the book’s fundamental thesis: “The Bible was created from the very outset as a work of literature … the product of a literate society.” Though Brian Peckham recognizes that remnants of earlier oral formulations surely existed, he argues that they cannot be reconstructed meaningfully from the texts we now have. Rather, he aims “[t]o recreate the composition of individual historical and prophetic texts, then explain their cumulative order and sequence, and to describe the editorial policies that changed the texts and transformed the traditions.”

Peckham first sets forth his relative chronology of the books of the late Judean literary tradition and then gives a brief overview of the tradition’s themes and characteristics. The core of History and Prophecy consists of very detailed analyses of the works Peckham considers to be Judean literature. The first is the “epic” (roughly, what scholars call the Yahwist strand of the Bible,^b dated by him to the mid-eighth century B.C.E.—about a century later than scholars have traditionally dated it), which is without Judean antecedents but which relies “on the classics of Greek, Assyrian, Babylonian and Canaanite literature for the outline of its episodes and basic themes.” Within the short span of 60 years, seven Judean classics emerged: Isaiah (the sequel to the epic); Amos, the Priestly (or P) commentary; the Elohist (or E) version of the epic; Hosea; Micah; and Jeremiah. Each of these works was radically revised by later editors. Pivotal to these revisions is the work of the Deuteronomist, who put together the history of Israel stretching from Genesis through 2 Kings.

Some of Peckham’s observations are problematic: the sources and dating of the “epic”; the chronology of the eighth-century prophets, especially Amos and Hosea; the early date for P; and the overly precise literary analyses of each of the books of the late Judean literary traditions. I disagree with Peckham on these issues, but I am indebted to him for raising them anew.

Despite his penchant for libraries and archives, Peckham is sensitive to the power of both history and prophecy. In a magnificent conclusion he writes, “Late Judean literature was written to be read or performed. Its authors were poets, singers orators, lawyers, priests and scholars who tried to situate the Judah of their time in the flow and scheme of history. Its audience was those who gathered in the squares, at the gates, on the walls of the city, or who met and lingered at the threshing floors, mills, and watering holes scattered throughout the kingdom. It comprised occasional drama, epic recitation, tragedy and comedy, ballads and speeches, reports and commentaries, debates and disputations, traditional stories, the stuff of books and literary appreciation.”

The style of History and Prophecy is elegant, its theses tightly and cogently argued, and its documentation copious (nearly half its 900 pages consists of notes, bibliography and indices). Biblical scholars cannot afford to ignore Peckham’s exegetical insights and his sensitivity to the compositional processes underlying the present Biblical text. There is much to reward the general reader as well, but he or she must be prepared to give the book very serious study.

Understanding the Fourth Gospel

John Ashton
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 599 pp., $24.95, paper.

Reviewed by Pheme Perkins

Modern historical criticism has transformed biblical studies by reconstructing the written sources, oral modes of expression, cultural influences and editorial steps that gave rise to the final text of the Bible. In 1941 Rudolf Bultmann published a seminal commentary on the Fourth Gospel in which he argued that John relied on two earlier sources—a “Signs [Miracles] Source” and a “Revelatory Discourse Source.” This, according to Bultmann, explained discontinuities in the text, as in the text, as successive editors linked Johannine thought to gnosticism. Bultmann’s commentary set the agenda for Johannine studies for over three decades. Recently, a new generation of scholars has lost interest in the often intractable problems of historical reconstruction and turned instead to literary and sociological methods of understanding the Bible.

In one of the best books on the Fourth Gospel to appear in the past decade, John Ashton, University Lecturer in New Testament at Oxford, argues that Johannine scholarship has lost touch with important, unsolved issues raised by Bultmann’s groundbreaking commentary. The challenge remains to reconstruct the literary, theological and social history of the Johannine material. The effort was short-circuited, Ashton argues, at crucial points and remains so. For example, parallels from Jewish and Greco-Roman literature to Johannine ideas and symbols do not solve the problem of how the Johannine image of Jesus as heavenly revealer came to dominate the Gospel. As for the more recent turn to literary analysis of the Gospel, no form of modern structuralist parallelism or narrative criticism, which seek to understand the text as it is in its entirety, can mask the very real tensions and discontinuities within the text itself. Hypotheses concerning sources and multiple editions of the Gospel are necessary if we are to read the Fourth Gospel intelligently.

Ashton takes up the challenge and traces Johannine Christianity from its origins in Jewish sectarianism to the mature community that had been expelled from the synagogue and had identified Jesus as the divine Son of God. His careful analyses of the early traditions incorporated into the Gospel shows that they were originally formulated to demonstrate Christian claims about Jesus as messiah. The polemics in John 5 through 10 provide most of the evidence we have for the ensuing period of Christian/Jewish dispute. Claims for Jesus’ divine status appear in their boldest form during confrontations with those whom John refers to as “the Jews.”

Ashton proposes to resolve the difficult problem of the identity of “the Jews” in John by referring to a powerful group that emerged from the turmoil of the Jewish revolt in the 70’s and who created what has become known as rabbinic Judaism. He suggests that this group of Jews consisted not simply of Pharisees but of a group that sought to shed that sectarian label and claimed instead to represent the descendants of Abraham. Hence, the vicious dispute in John 8. After the Johannine community’s break with this group of Jews, the community addressed itself to converting Jews in the diaspora.

Ashton’s critique of Johannine scholarship and his discussion of the early Johannine community are first rate. The concluding section, however, on the final form of the Gospel, the farewell discourses (John 13–17) and the passion/resurrection material, is less detailed and more problematic. Ashton ascribes the final content of these sections to an inspired Johannine prophet who transformed the text with apocalyptic materials.

Understanding the Fourth Gospel assumes that readers are familiar with Greek, Hebrew and modern languages. A note of caution: In my classes, less advanced students found the book difficult to use without considerable assistance.

Pseudo-Philo: Rewriting the Bible

Fredrick J. Murphy
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993) 336 pp., $49.95.

Reviewed by Robert Doran

Pseudo-Philo is a conundrum. The shorthand name refers to both the author and to the text itself, which imaginatively retells the history of Israel from Adam to the rise of David. The text, more properly called “The Book of Biblical Antiquities,” exists only in Latin manuscripts that suggest it is a translation from Greek, which in turn was based on a Hebrew original. But when would this original Hebrew text have been written? Arguments based on internal evidence, such as the attitude towards the Jerusalem Temple and sacrifice, and the lack of any mention of the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., suggest a pre-70 C.E. date. One other fascinating detail about the text is that its quotations from the Bible reflect a text earlier than the present Hebrew Bible.

But who would have written this work? The name Pseudo-Philo was given to the author simply because the Latin text was transmitted along with Latin translations of the works of the first-century C.E. Jewish philosophical exegete, Philo of Alexandria. But who wrote it and why did the author stop at the death of Saul rather than carry on to the rise to power of David?

These questions lurk only in the background of Frederick Murphy’s book. Murphy has rightly chosen to provide first and foremost a literary analysis of Pseudo-Philo before attempting to suggest answers to these questions. As such, Murphy’s book is an enjoyable, if not easy, read. According to Murphy, one should also open the Bible and Pseudo-Philo itself.^c Murphy guides the reader through Pseudo-Philo’s interpretative re-reading and re-shaping of the biblical text.

Pseudo-Philo, often emphasizes minor biblical characters. For example, the shadowy figure of Kenaz, the first of the judges in the land of Israel (Judges 3:9), becomes a full-blown character in Pseudo-Philo.

In the last two chapters, Murphy draws the threads together. He finds that Pseudo-Philo has much in common with Second Temple Judaism—God’s covenant with Israel is central, as is the notion that good is rewarded and evil punished and that idolatry must be avoided. Murphy sees in Pseudo-Philo the theme of good leadership as crucial to Israel’s well-being, and suggests that ending the narrative with Saul’s death may be an effective rhetorical strategy to force readers to ask what constitutes good leadership and whether it is present in first-century Judea.

Two other features stand out in Pseudo-Philo one is the attention given to women in the narrative; the second is the absence of any suggestion of an eschatological Messiah.

The Bible was understood in a variety of ways in pre-70 Judaism. Pseudo-Philo shows how it was understood in a way different from Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls), the historian Josephus, the Rabbis and the early Christians.