Readers Reply

006

Taking Money Under False Pretenses

I just finished reading my first copy of BR. What a disappointment. Why would a bunch of atheists bother to publish a journal about the Bible? If you have no faith, why not turn your attention to some other pursuit rather than taking people’s money under false pretenses?

Please cancel my subscription.

Learning from Error

I cannot imagine life without BR. Though I am probably more conservative than many of those who write those nasty letters to the editor (which we all read first), I by no means desire to discontinue receiving your periodical. No other magazine piques my interest or intellect in quite the same way. In each issue, though there are numerous attacks against the faith I hold steadfastly, I inevitably find a few nuggets of truth that strengthen my own position. I teach my own students to listen to every side of an argument. Apply what is noteworthy. Learn from those who are mistaken or who teach in error. I’ve learned a lot from BR.

Embracing Secular Nomenclature

I have been a satisfied subscriber to BR since 1988, even as I frequently “tsk, tsk” over some of the ideas put forth by some of your authors. There is, however, a nagging question in the back of my mind that I cannot put off raising any longer. In each issue for the last several years, there has been a little box on page 2 headed “A Note on Style,” which reads “B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by some of our authors and often used in scholarly literature, are the alternative designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.”

I think it would be fair to say that the terms B.C. and A.D. have virtually disappeared from the literature. Why this has happened perplexes me. I can understand why some academics would prefer a more “culturally neutral” terminology, but I cannot understand why biblical scholars and theologians, most of whom teach in seminaries and theology departments, would rush to embrace this explicitly secular nomenclature. I hope someone will be able to enlighten me about this.

Historical Jesus

Textual Gnats, Political Camels

John Dominic Crossan (“Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus,” BR 12:02) finds that the Gospels “diverge quite radically even when they record the same events.” In Mark, Jesus throws himself on the ground in his agony in the garden; in John, those who (later) come to arrest him step back and fall to the ground. A mighty divergence!

But the skepticism with which Crossan reads the gospel narratives deserts him when he comes to characterize the gospel message. The gospel, he says, in the manner of a 19th-century utopian socialist, is “the proclamation that God’s radical justice demands a world of communal egalitarianism.” For this sweeping claim Crossan cites no evidence at all.

What is it that causes Bible scholars to strain at the textual gnat, while swallowing the political camel?

Both Sides Miss the Point

I am getting tired of hearing about the discussion over the Jesus Seminar and 008the search for the historical Jesus. The reason does not lie in how interesting or important the discussion is, because it is indeed one that catches the reader’s attention and is a very key issue to Christianity. I am getting tired of it because it has turned into nothing but cheap shots from both camps.

Each side has outright refused to listen to the other. Those against the Jesus Seminar often miss the point that it is looking to see what Jesus was actually like here on earth. What did Jesus really say? Was there really a bodily resurrection? If not, then what does the resurrection story mean to us? While I disagree with a lot of the seminar’s conclusions on what really happened, I agree that even if certain things did not happen historically (such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus), they still hold meaning for us today.

On the other side of the battle, the Jesus Seminar may tend to focus too much on the historical Jesus. This “historical” Jesus is not the Jesus who should be important to Christians. The fact is, whether Jesus said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” as reported in Luke 6:20, or if he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3), makes absolutely no difference. The important thing is not what Jesus said some 2,000 years ago to a crowd but rather what Jesus says to us today while we read and listen to his word. In trying to concentrate too much on what was said 2,000 years ago, we can completely miss the true experience of Jesus in our lives.

If I want bickering and cheap shots, I can watch Clinton and Dole on the news, not read a Bible magazine.

The Crucial Questions

The adverse reactions to Luke Johnson’s article, “The Search for (the Wrong) Jesus,” BR 11:06, by John Dominic Crossan, in his article, and letter writers who objected more to style than substance (Readers Reply, BR 12:02) overlook a very important point: The remedy for scriptural fundamentalism, televangelism and the millenarian versions of Christianity is not a false, radical scholarship like that of the Jesus Seminar but the solidly based works of serious mainstream scholars.

I feel assured of the true worth and significance of the New Testament evidence by such acclaimed and respected scholars as John Meier, Raymond E. Brown, James D.G. Dunn, Joseph Fitzmyer, N.T. Wright, Abraham Malherbe, Ben Witherington III and Luke Johnson, to name a few. I am left doubtful and troubled, however, by the questionable scholarship and methodology of the Jesus Seminar participants.

The Jesus Seminar, made up of a handful (74, according to The Five Gospels) of mostly marginal North American scholars, simply cannot compare to the more then 3,500 mainline New Testament scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature who do not support the methodology and results of the Jesus Seminar, which have so enthralled the mostly uncritical and religiously illiterate news media.

A historian’s vision of the historical Jesus should answer two questions satisfactorily without minimizing the New Testament evidence, and without maximizing the value of later apocryphal writings, as does the Jesus Seminar. Those questions are: Why did Jesus arouse the opposition of both the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman political authorities so that he was put to death? Why did the Jesus movement not disintegrate after Jesus’ death (as happened to other reform movements of the time), but rather flourish and develop into the Christian church? Unsatisfactory answers to these questions will not meet the critical demands of mainstream scholars nor the faith demands of the serious Christian in the pew.

Two recent books that shed a lot of much-needed light on the debate and confusion are Ben Witherington III’s The Jesus Quest (Intervarsity, 1995), and Luke Johnson’s The Real Jesus (HarperCollins, 1996), the latter written in a much calmer style than Johnson’s BR article.

Orwellian Doublespeak

Mr. Crossan’s article reads (see “Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus,” BR 12:02), “I do not accept any of [the Gospel of John’s account of the passion] as journalistic information describing how it actually happened, but I consider it to be profoundly true nonetheless,” and it is “a truth of parabolic narrative.” Twice, Mr. Crossan states, “The canonical gospels are true as gospels.” These statements echo another Jesus Seminar member’s comment about the Atonement: “As a metaphor, it can be true (and as a Christian, I would say ‘is true’)” (Marcus Borg, “How Did Jesus Die for Our Sins?” BR 11:02).

Although Orwellian doublespeak seems to be pervasive in this group, we must never accept it. It is devious to say that “fairy tales are true as fairy tales.” A metaphor is an analogy that helps us see truth in a more vivid, often poetic, way. A metaphor can never be truth. Jesus used parables in context to highlight truth, but there is no evidence that the gospel writers (or the early Church or Josephus) ever considered Jesus Christ or the Gospels to be parables themselves.

Most apparent contradictions, like Crossan’s account of Jesus’ arrest, can easily be explained as complementary in nature and not as mutually exclusive.

Do the Gospels Contain Any History?

In Bible Review’s focus on the new quest for the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan’s article makes a good opening salvo (see “Why Christians Must Search for the Historical Jesus,” BR 12:02). But one of Crossan’s arguments has implications not even he seems to be aware of, and it points to a dimension being ignored in this new quest.

After acknowledging that different gospel portrayals of the passion may be incompatible from a “factual” point of view, Crossan turns to “a truth of parabolic narrative.” He styles the Gospels as writings aimed at presenting “symbolic truth,” thus bypassing the need to see their details as historically accurate or harmonious.

But what a can of worms this opens! If the evangelists are creating symbolical narratives and metaphorical interpretations to embody their views of spiritual truth, on what are these things ultimately based? If the Gospels don’t attempt to be “history,” are they in fact based on historical man, or, rather, on something that the earliest Christians, reflecting the outlook of the period, saw as existing only in a spiritual, mythical reality: the mystery of God’s workings in the heavenly realm, known entirely through scripture?

This would explain why Paul and all the other first-century epistle writers have nothing to say about the gospel figure, why they never identify their cosmic “Jesus Christ” with a recent, earthly Jesus of Nazareth. Laments like that of the late German scholar Herman Ridderbos, who wrote that, for Paul, “Christ appears to have significance only as a transcendent divine being,” would point to 1,900 years of fundamental misinterpretation of early Christian belief. We could jettison those inadequate, even embarrassing, explanations for the silence—that the early Church had no interest in the life of Jesus, and so on. We could accept Paul’s own word that God’s mystery about 009Christ is known through scripture and the Spirit, not through memories of any recent historical events. And we could come to understand how the idea of the “Son” and “Christ” arose from the leading religious philosophy of the era: The ultimate God works through spiritual intermediaries, like the Jewish personified Wisdom and the Greek Logos.

Synagogues

Synagogues as Places of Prayer

In “Did the Synagogue Replace the Temple?” BR 12:02, Steven Fine states, “Interestingly, Second Temple period sources do not mention synagogues as places of prayer. This might come as a surprise to many who are accustomed to a modern synagogue. Evidently, either prayer did not take place in synagogues at this time or the role of prayer in synagogue life was dwarfed by the study of Scripture.”

A contemporary source for the later part of the Second Temple period disproves this by stating, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners” (Matthew 6:5).

Steven Fine replies:

Matthew 6:5 does indeed refer to “hypocrites” who “love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by men.” The author seems to take this to be the unusual behavior of those whom he considers to be hypocrites and not necessarily the norm of synagogue experience during the first century. For more on synagogues during the Second Temple period, I refer the reader to Lee I. Levine, “The Second Temple Synagogue: The Formative Years,” in The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, ed. Levine (American Schools of Oriental Research, 1987), pp. 7–31, and the bibliography cited there.

Ezra and Nehemiah

Alternative Chronology

Sometimes our best exegetes seem to have molasses between their ears.

A king’s years can be computed from his birth or from his enthronement. Thus, the expression “the twentieth year of Artaxerxes” could mean either the twentieth year of his life or the twentieth year of his reign.

Aaron Demsky (“Who Returned First—Ezra or Nehemiah?” BR 12:02) holds, quite rightly, that Nehemiah came to Jerusalem before Ezra and therefore not (as he understands Nehemiah 1:1 and 2:1) “in the twentieth year of [the reign of] Artaxerxes.” Quite wrongly, he discards the biblical datum (in Ezra 7:7) that Ezra came to Jerusalem in 458 B.C., the seventh year of Artaxerxes’s reign.

It is quite possible to hold that Nehemiah came to Jerusalem—before Ezra—in the twentieth year of the life of Artaxerxes and also that he was with Ezra in Jerusalem for some years after the latter came, “in the seventh year of the reign of Artaxerxes.”

Demsky’s point that a sabbath year 010began in 444 B.C. is well taken. But since 458 B.C. is 14 years earlier, it also was a sabbath year. And since 33 A.D. (the year in which Jesus died) is 490 years later, it also saw the start of a sabbath year.

The indicated chronology therefore, is that Artaxerxes was born c. 484 B.C.; that he sent Nehemiah to Jerusalem in his accession year (465 B.C.), when he was 19 (in the twentieth year of his life); that Nehemiah, after 852 days (two years and four months), completed the rebuilding of the city walls in 461 B.C. Since Nehemiah (Nehemiah 5:14, 13:6) stayed in Jerusalem for 12 years (from 465 to 453 B.C.), he and Ezra were there together from 458 B.C. (when Ezra came and led the renewal of the covenant) to 453 B.C.

Aaron Demsky replies:

Mr. Egan has made an undocumented assumption, upon which he rests his own theory. As far as I know, regnal calendars were never based on the king’s birth. Does Mr. Egan know when Artaxerxes I was born? While the age of a king at the time of his accession probably was known, as we can see regarding the kings of Judah mentioned in the Book of Kings, to use it for administrative purposes would have it overlap with the reigns of his father and perhaps his grandfather and result in no little confusion for the government service and scribal corps. For further reading see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (Princeton Univ. Press, 1964) and E. J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World (Cornell Univ. Press, 1980).

Did the Years of Exile Equal the Unobserved Sabbatical Years?

I found “Who Returned First: Ezra or Nehemiah?” very interesting and persuasive. However, I was puzzled by a comment in the sidebar (see sidebar to “Who Returned First: Ezra or Nehemiah?” BR 12:02): “The author of Chronicles…makes the claim that the 70 sabbath years from the conquest of Canaan…were not observed.”

I assume the reference is to 2 Chronicles 36:21. According to my New International Version Bible, this passage speaks of the 70 years of sabbath rests after the fall of Jerusalem, as prophesied in Leviticus. Both apparently refer to the command regarding sabbath years given in Leviticus 25:3–5 and Exodus 23:10–11. Leviticus 26:34–35, not 2 Chronicles 36:21, says that the land will then enjoy the rest it did not have while Israel lived there. Neither passage says that the number of years of exile equaled the number of sabbath years missed. Nor does the arithmetic seem to support this interpretation (70 sabbath years x 7 = 490 years total; 586 B.C. + 490 years = 1076 B.C.).

Even if one adds ten years to account for the jubilee years (Leviticus 25:10–12), one goes back only to 1086 B.C. Is this the year Joshua led the people into the Promised Land, only 60 to 70 years before David is assumed to have become king? Or is this a theological approximation?

Aaron Demsky replies:

Actually 2 Chronicles 36:21 is an example of how the Chronicler juxtaposed two earlier texts to create a third, new text. His starting point was the comment of the author of Ezra (1:1), which he quotes, that Cyrus’s edict was the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s (double) prophesy of 70 years of Babylonian rule (Jeremiah 25:11–12, 29:10). Then the Chronicler paraphrases the warning in Leviticus 26:34, thus implying that the land was desolate for these 70 years because the people had not observed the sabbatical years. What is behind this association of Leviticus 26:34 and Jeremiah’s prophesies? Could it be the multiples of seven that linked these passages in the Chronicler’s mind? Perhaps. However, I would point to the prophet’s use of the same verb, shammah (desolate) as in Leviticus. In other words, the Chronicler is using a heqesh, that is, a syllogism, which is a means of midrashic interpretation, thereby creating a beautiful example of inner biblical exegesis. For further reading, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 480–481.

BR’s Columnists

Early Christians and God’s Word

I am intrigued by Helmut Koester’s column, “What Is—and Is Not—Inspired” BR 11:05, and Brian Rosner’s response in the April 1996 issue (see Readers Reply, BR 12:02). It seems dangerous to be overly dogmatic about any view of the inspiration of Scripture. It is certainly not wrong to consider Scripture inspired, but one’s view of Scripture’s inspiration should not be a criterion for faith.

Early Christians obviously thought highly of Scripture, as indicated by several references in the New Testament to searching the Scriptures and examining the Scriptures (for example, Acts 17:11). They thought that by examining the Scriptures diligently, with the guiding presence of God’s Spirit, God’s message could be received. It is not clear that early Christians held any particular theory of the inspiration of Scripture, and it is certainly not clear that they equated Scripture with the words of God. The degree of license New Testament authors used in changing the words in scriptural passages that they quoted indicates that they did not equate Scripture with God’s Word. When the terms “Word of God” and “Word” are used in the New Testament, they seem to refer to either Jesus himself (as in John 1) or God’s message of salvation through Christ (as in Acts 6:7, 12:24). The term “Word of God” does not seem to be interchangeable with the term “Scriptures” in these passages.

Early Christians were much more concerned with one’s view of God’s Spirit than with one’s view of Scripture. According to John’s gospel, when Jesus was comforting his disciples before his death, he did not say, “Don’t worry, you’ll still have the Scriptures.” Rather, he promised the Spirit. The Spirit, not Scripture, would bear main responsibility for guiding the disciples to truth (John 16:7–15).

Was “An Eye for an Eye” Ever Taken Literally?

Jacob Milgrom’s piece on Lex Talionis (April 1996) is a model of clarity and persuasiveness. I would, however, like to nudge him a bit on his statement that “the rabbis’ logic (was) better than their exegesis” in that “literal talion is intended” by the Bible. I believe there is a distinct possibility that Rabbi Karelitz (whom Milgrom quotes) was exegetically correct when he argued that the biblical author’s intention in citing the already ancient formula was not literal but rather served to emphasize the evil of the specific crimes to which it is applied in the Torah.

I have argued at more length then is here possible that in the only three cases where the talion principle is evoked in the Torah, a literal interpretation is at least questionable.¹ In Exodus 21, the context is personal injury cases that do use monetary substitution. The case for talion is cited; however, it is a strikingly rare one compared to the other cases in the section that would have more 011general application: “When men have a fight and hurt a pregnant woman so that she suffers a miscarriage but no further injury, the guilty one shall be fined as much as the woman’s husband demands…but if injury ensues, you shall give life for life, eye for eye…burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:22–25). Obviously, burns and stripes are not at issue, yet the author repeats the whole saying, which leads to the possibility that the saying was utilized more for its sobering impact than for literal applicability to the case at hand. A literal interpretation also leaves some conundrums. For example, would it not have been considered at the time more appropriate (that is, literal) to exact a retribution from the guilty party’s wife? (Note that the injured party who determines the penalty in the miscarriage clause is the husband, not the victim!)

The second recitation of the talion, (Deuteronomy 19:15–21) is also not literal retaliation but a case of ironic equivalency, for no injury in fact occurs: “If the judges find that the witness…has accused his neighbor falsely, you shall do to him as he planned to do to his neighbor. The deterrent, homiletic (rather than literal) intention behind the citation of the talion is then indicated by the biblical author: “The rest, on hearing of it, shall fear and never again do anything so evil.” Note, too, that this is a violation of the decalogue and so raises serious concerns about the whole people’s covenantal relationship, requiring purging (Deuteronomy 19:19).

The third recitation (Leviticus 24:17–21) is the only one that can reasonably be argued to be literal talion, requiring the death penalty for murder. Yet the context is that of a narrative on blasphemy. Since blasphemy, like murder and bearing false witness, is another violation of the decalogue, it may be that the author inserts the talion here, once again, to emphasize the covenantal seriousness of blasphemy. The whole community is implicated by the blasphemy of one individual and must collectively administer the punishment to purge itself. It is interesting to note that in the midst of a recitation designed to inspire awe and fear, the author not only distinguishes human life from animal life, with the latter requiring compensation rather than retaliation, but rhetorically turns the saying on its head in so doing: “Whoever takes the life of an animal shall make restitution of another animal. A life for a life!”

The legal implications of literal application of the talion are, as the rabbis of the Talmud pointed out centuries later, quite complex in practice. The biblical authors, beyond these three evocations of it in rare or extreme cases, do not feel the need to pronounce on any complications that might have arisen from attempts to apply the talion literally. This strikes me as odd, given the “case law” approach of so many of the legal passages of the Torah. I would suggest that the easiest explanation for this lack of concern with the practical details of applying the talion is that it was never intended to be applied literrally as law but remained of great use as a sort of rhetoric deterrent. If I am right, then the rabbis of the Talmud (as well as Jesus in Matthew 5:38ff.) may have been closer to the letter as well as the spirit of the Torah than subsequent Christian tradition has wanted to acknowledge.