Archive for 'Public Forum'

Several people misunderstood what I was trying to say in my post yesterday about Paul’s knowledge of Judas Iscariot.  It was probably my fault for not being clear enough.   I was *not*, decidedly *not*, trying to argue that the tradition that Judas betrayed Jesus was unhistorical.  Quite the contrary, for reasons I’ll explain in a second, I think this is a completely historical tradition.  I was simply asking whether Paul himself knew about it.  He may well have known about it.  But he gives no indication in his surviving writings that he did – either because he was in fact ignorant about it, or because he assumed his readers already knew all they needed to know about it, or because he had no occasion to bring it up in his surviving  letters, or for some other reason.

But I do indeed think that – whatever Paul did or did not know about the matter – that Jesus was betrayed by one of his own, Judas Iscariot.   In my judgment, this tradition passes all of our standard criteria for establishing authentic tradition from the life of Jesus, especially…

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Several people have asked me to comment on whether Paul shows any evidence of knowing about the tradition that Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot.   As a first step, it’s necessary to point out that Paul says very little indeed – surprisingly little – about the historical Jesus — that is, about what Jesus said, did, and experienced between the time of his birth and his death.   (Paul obviously says a *lot* about Jesus’ death and resurrection, just not much about his life.)   The following are about the only things he tells us:

• Jesus was born of a woman (Gal 4:4)
• He was born a Jew (Gal 4:4)
• He had brothers (1 Cor. 9:5); one of whom was James (Gal 1-2)
• He ministered to Jews (Rom 15:8)
• He had twelve disciples (1 Cor. 15:6)
• He held a last supper the last night of his life (1 Cor. 11:22-24)
• Paul indicates what Jesus said at that meal.
• Paul indicates two other teachings of Jesus: that Christian ministers should be paid for their work and that Christians should not get divorced (1 Cor. 7 and 9)
• Jesus was crucified

And that’s about *it*.   There are lots of speculation about why Paul doesn’t tell us more.   Did he….

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QUESTION on 1 Corinthians 15:3-5:

 ”3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters[c] at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. “

Where do you think he got his information from especially on the 500?  Many say it could only have come from Peter or James or else he made it up, which would be odd.

RESPONSE:

It’s a great question, and as with many great questions, I don’t think there’s a great answer.   There are several things we can say.   Paul did know both Peter and James, and so presumably they told him that they had had visions of Jesus.   He knew lots of other Christians who either were Christians before he was or who knew Christians who were Christians before he was.   Or who were later Christians who had heard stories that were allegedly told by Christians who were Christians before he was.

My sense is that *any* of these sources could have been his sources of information, and there is no way to evaluate why one of these sources has a better claim to being *the* source from any other source.

Several other things to note about the list.  He gives six sets of appearances of Jesus, and the six….

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OK, several readers have asked me why I don’t think the story of Jesus’  violent rejection in Nazareth, according to Luke 4:16-30, is historically reliable.   The short version is that Luke has taken a story from Mark and expanded it significantly in light of his own literary and theological interests so that the account of the attempted assassination is not multiply attested and it does not pass the criterion of dissimilarity.  It looks instead to be a story that Luke has come up with to make a point, a very important point, for his larger narrative.

First thing to note (this is frequently noted!): Luke has changed the placement of the story.  Mark, Luke’s source, places it almost exactly halfway through Jesus’ public ministry in chapter 6 (the ministry is chs. 1-10 of Mark).   For Mark it is all part of the “misunderstanding” motif: Jesus’ family misunderstands who he is (they think he’s crazy), so do the Jewish Leaders (they think he’s possessed by Beelzebub), so do his townsfolk (they think he’s simply the local TEKTON), and so do his disciples (who are clueless who he is…).  

Luke has taken the story from midway through Jesus’ ministry and has made it the very first public event in Jesus’ ministry – it happens right after he comes back out of the wilderness from his temptation for 40 days.  Why put the story at the beginning?  Because….

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QUESTION: 

If the pre-’resurrection’ Jesus and, later on, his earliest (Jewish) followers had declared Jesus to actually BE God then wouldn’t they have been kicked out of the synagogues from the start because of blasphemy? But since that did not happen (Jesus preached in synagogues and his disciples continued to go to synagogues after his ‘resurrection’ for a while) doesn’t that indicate that the earliest Christian belief did NOT contain the claim that Jesus actually was God? 

RESPONSE: 

This is a very interesting question and it has made me think for a bit.   As I look over all the material that we have, it appears to me that the early Christians *were* regularly kicked out of the synagogues for their claims about Jesus, but that Jesus himself never was.   First let me give the evidence for all that, and then deal with an important and related second issue about what those claims were exactly (this is where I’m still feeling my way a bit).

But the first thing to stress is that I don’t see any compelling reason to think that….

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Now that I have been posting on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical Jesus, I would be remiss not to mention  that one of the absolutely great scholars of modern times, one of the world experts on both the Scrolls and Jesus, died several days ago.   Geza Vermes was a formidable scholar.   Of the three major English translations of the Scrolls, it is his that I typically use and prefer.   In the 1970s he began publishing a series of books on Jesus that did more than almost anything to push for the idea that if Jesus is to be understood, he must be understood as a first century Jew.   This was something of a novel idea at the time.  It has become the standard view that virtually every Jesus scholar on the planet shares.

Vermes was a scholar’s scholar.  Professor at Oxford, he was an incredible linguist, intimately familiar with every ancient historical source of relevance, a creative thinker.    He wrote books for scholars but also books that were accessible to the educated layperson.   He was at the very top of Dead Sea Scrolls studies and Jesus studies, at one and the same time.   He died at the age of 88.

There is a fine obituary in the Economist that I can recommend: http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21578017-geza-vermes-jew-ex-priest-and-translator-dead-sea-scrolls-died-may-8th-aged    It shows that, among other things, Vermes had a very interesting life, and not always in a good way.   Born into a Jewish home in Hungary in 1924, he and his family (because of his parents) converted to Catholicism and were all baptized  when he was still a boy.   The parents had hoped that this conversion would save them from the coming onslaught of the Nazis.  It ended up saving Vermes, but not his parents.

He was accepted in the Catholic Seminary, and in 1944 he saw his parents for the last time.  They died – he never knew how or where – in the holocaust.  At the time, the seminary hid him away, so that he survived.  He was trained in Catholic circles, but eventually became disenchanted with Christianity and returned to the synagogue.

I had known about Vermes and his work since I was a graduate student in the early 1980s.   But I never met him until a couple of years ago.   He was in Chapel Hill giving a lecture, and he, his wife, and I all had a very nice and intimate dinner together.   He was soft-spoken, sharp, interesting.  He had a sense of humor and a gentle disposition.  He was interested in my work, and not just interested in talking about his own.  I was far more interested in hearing him talk – he was a legend.

It is very sad to see that he has now passed away.   The academic community has lost a real scholar with a real story to tell.

Yesterday I talked about the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for understanding Jesus and the milieu out of which earliest Christianity grew.   My basic point is that if Jesus was a Jew, then to understand him, you have to understand Jews in his world.  And the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us valuable information to that end.

I am not saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls are representative of what all or even most Jews thought at the time.   They clearly are not.  If the “Essene hypothesis” is right – and it is the view held by the vast majority of the experts (among whom I do not number myself) (and among whom they do not number me either! ) – then the Scrolls were produced by a Jewish sect that had very distinctive views of its own that were not, in many respects, shared by outsiders.   In particular, this was a group of Jews who insisted that the coming apocalyptic judgment, soon to arrive, would bring destruction not only to the hated Romans and the “obvious” enemies of God, but to many Jews as well, including the priests who were in charge of the Temple cult in Jerusalem.

This was not an unprecedented claim, but it was not a wildly popular one either (especially among the priests in charge!).   In terms of not being unprecedented: even a canonical prophet like Jeremiah….

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As we used to say back when I was a committed Christian, with respect to prayer: Be careful what you ask for!   So I asked for questions that you would like me to address, and I have been receiving them in droves.  Some of them I will be able to answer very quickly as a response to the comment itself, some I will handle in a post – or more, depending on how complicated the matter is.  (If I intend to answer them in a post, I won’t reply to the comment, just to save some time; but I’ll post the comment/question itself).   In any event, I have plenty to keep me busy now for a while!   I’ll probably address them in the order in which I received them.  For today:

Question: 

Can you write a post on how the Qumran Scrolls advance our understanding of the birth of Christianity?

Response:

This is a question that can be answered in one sentence, or in a very long and dense book or … anything in between.  I’ll go with the in between, erring on the side of the short, for the sake of the post; but if anyone has follow-up questions, I can try to deal with those as well.

If I were to do the one-sentence version, the shortest iteration I could come up with is: The Dead Sea Scrolls are….

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My plan had been to return to the blog in full force when I got back to the States but, well, I’m a little slow on the uptake.   We got back late Saturday night, and I decided to blow Sunday off.  Actually, I watched the golf tournament all afternoon.   Half way through I started feeling odd.  By the end I wasn’t good at all.   Stomach virus, probably.  Brought it back with me from Israel.  As did several other guys on the trip – four men, and none of their wives (including mine) affected.   Very strange.

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit better now but not quite 70% yet.   And I’m finding that I have little mental, as well as physical, energy.   SO, what I would propose is that this would be a very good time indeed for some of you to raise some questions for me to address on the blog, about anything having to do with the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the history of early Christianity, or anything else of relevance.   I imagine I’ll be lagging for a few days still, but it will definitely be easier for me to answer questions than to dream up things to say on my own.   So feel free either to raise anything of interest here by commenting on this post, or by writing me a private email.   I probably won’t be able to answer everything, but I’ll certainly deal with questions / issues that are particularly interesting to me and about which I have some competence.

If you’ve asked questions before and I haven’t gotten to them, feel free to try again.

As I anticipated, my last day in Israel was the real climax.   We did three things of note (and several other things not of note):  the ruins of Qumran, Masada, and the Dead Sea itself.

I was disappointed with how our tour dealt with Qumran.  At the visitors’ center they now have a rather ridiculous little film to introduce the site, but it consists almost entirely of a dramatization, in which an imaginary member of the Essene community describes his experience in the community; much of the description involves a “human interest” element, suggesting that John the Baptist may have been connected with the sect.  There is little in the film about the ancient evidence for the Essenes, and almost nothing about the modern discovery of the scrolls themselves, what they contain, why they’re significant, or the substantial debates surrounding the character of the ruins of Qumran (is it the Essenes’ community? A Roman villa? A fort?  What are the arguments?) and surrounding the relationship of the scrolls to it (what ties them to the ruins? etc.).  The film didn’t discuss at *all* what the scrolls actually were and how they….

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