Nice Peanuts ref, though.
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Does it all have to be yes or no, black or white, true or false?
Must be simpler for those who just cast all that complexity aside, pick a side and stick to it. Neuro, Steefen–and, I’m sorry to say, yourself.
And every religious fundamentalist in the world, and boy are you outnumbered. 😉
So I took a look and Maurice Casey’s book on this subject. We don’t have a physical copy at the library, just an electronic edition.
I think he makes a questionable choice, opening by saying that basically everybody other than him has been operating under conditions of extreme ignorance. Probably one reason why his ideas haven’t gotten more traction. But overall, the ideas are good.
It’s hard to summarize, particularly since (as with Roger David Aus) so much of his argument is tied up in a strong knowledge of Aramaic sources. He believes, as does Aus, that Mark’s gospel had written Aramaic sources that are now lost. I don’t believe this myself, I don’t state it as something I know to be true. I merely suspect it might be true, because I find it difficult to believe there weren’t enough literate Aramaic-speaking Christians in the first few decades after the crucifixion who would want to start shaping the narrative into something a religion could form around.
Greek proved to be a better medium for preaching to pagans, though Aramaic was hardly just a language spoken by Palestinian Jews. Aramaic began to die out, and without people to copy the books, they disappeared. Is the theory. And the thing about that theory is, it leads to a lot of potentially valid explanations for many passages in Mark’s gospel that are otherwise difficult to understand. (And of course the later gospel authors largely failed to understand them.) We don’t have Q, but many believe it existed. Difference here is that with Mark’s gospel, we don’t have earlier narratives to compare and contrast it with. Without Matthew and Luke, nobody would be talking about Q.
Casey basically says the opposite of Ehrman. Ehrman says Jesus was referring entirely to a cosmic judge of humanity, and the statements where he seems to be referring to himself as the Son of Man are inauthentic. Casey says the Son of Man sayings that are authentic are precisely the ones where he’s referring to himself. However, what Jesus meant by that was not that he was the one and only Son of Man, and the soon-to-be cosmic judge of humanity. It’s an honorific, and he’s aware there have been others who have merited it. When he says the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, it’s a rueful expression of the hardships faced by one who serves God unstintingly. That statement really makes no sense if applied to a celestial judge. I have to say, that’s a convincing argument. And it’s unlikely to be something made up later on, precisely because it’s so confusing when taken in the context of later beliefs about Jesus.
(Truthfully, there is a voice in the gospels–the real Jesus, peeping out from behind all the filters. Some things attributed to him just sound like him. Others do not. It’s just a feeling you get. But the substance behind it is that sometimes what Jesus said was very inconvenient for all the people who came after him.)
Both Casey and Ehrman believe it has to be one or the other, mortal servant of God who can perform miracles through faith alone, or Cosmic Judge of Humanity who willl institute the Kingdom. I’m inclined to think it could have been both (beginning as the first, morphing into the second as Jesus began to feel the stress of his quixotic mission), but if I had to choose one, I’d probably lean a bit towards Casey’s explanation right now. That being said, his stating at the end of the book that he has now solved the problem for all time smacks a bit of hubris. We’ll see over time if his ideas get traction. At this time, still a zero consensus topic.
Thanks for the recommendation, Robert. Now here come the nitpicks. 🙂
godspell thanks for comment on Crossan thread
regarding that Casey’s book, I m personally disinclined to read a book described as holding definitive answer to any problem, so I am happy you have provided an overview. I will probably read last 2 volumes of Meier’s books first when/if I get a round to them
I am not really opposed to the idea as you suggest that Jesus used the term ‘son of man’ both self-referentially as well as apocalyptically, but it seems like most (or a lot of) scholars like to say one usage is historical and the other not so.
For those scholars like Casey they should, I feel, provide a plausible hypothesis of how the ahistorical usage originated after Easter.
Bart, and I think Stephen, seemed to imply that, for example, post Easter Jesus historical(?) comments such as
“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the I has no place to lay his head.” changed to
“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
Though of course that is possible, it doesn’t exactly sound reasonable too me (it seems like it would imply the authors are explicitly trying to be deceitful).
If you recall how or if Casey explains the origination of how he considers the ahistorical apocalyptic usage originated, I would be curious to hear.
secondly another comment on your theory that Jesus believed the/his transformation from regular guy to cosmic son of man was to occur via his sacrificing his life.
If that was his belief why should he not just commit suicide as have done I think I recall some Buddhist monks do with self immolation. If I really held a belief that my sacrifice would usher in God’s Kingdom, I hope I would prefer to kill myself, rather than provoke another person to commit a sin of murder or even homicide . . .
tompicard I’m not saying much more than post-Easter the movement was towards privileging Jesus’ position not diminishing it and that it would be odd if that didn’t include the ‘Son of Man’ sayings. After Easter who among the believers would be saying that Jesus was not the Son of Man?
The idea that Jesus predicted his own death is pretty clearly a response to the scandal of the crucifixion. Mark claims that his death was the plan all along so naturally it didn’t take him by surprise. But this is doubtful especially if Jesus thought himself to be the Messiah because the only concept of the Messiah he had available to him was a triumphalist one. As far as we can tell Christians invented the suffering messiah in response to the cognitive dissonance of Jesus being thought of as both Messiah and crucified criminal. Christianity was formed out of that cognitive dissonance and the Jesus of Faith was created by it. I suspect the most surprised person at the crucifixion was Jesus himself.
tompicard said
secondly another comment on your theory that Jesus believed the/his transformation from regular guy to cosmic son of man was to occur via his sacrificing his life.If that was his belief why should he not just commit suicide as have done I think I recall some Buddhist monks do with self immolation. If I really held a belief that my sacrifice would usher in God’s Kingdom, I hope I would prefer to kill myself, rather than provoke another person to commit a sin of murder or even homicide . . . s
No, I don’t see how anyone of Jesus’ mindset would consider suicide an option–it’s not his death, per se, but rather the manner of it.
The Romans were committing a whole lot of murder. They didn’t need much temptation, as anyone who reads their bloody history knows.
Stephen said
tompicard I’m not saying much more than post-Easter the movement was towards privileging Jesus’ position not diminishing it and that it would be odd if that didn’t include the ‘Son of Man’ sayings. After Easter who among the believers would be saying that Jesus was not the Son of Man?The idea that Jesus predicted his own death is pretty clearly a response to the scandal of the crucifixion. Mark claims that his death was the plan all along so naturally it didn’t take him by surprise. But this is doubtful especially if Jesus thought himself to be the Messiah because the only concept of the Messiah he had available to him was a triumphalist one. As far as we can tell Christians invented the suffering messiah in response to the cognitive dissonance of Jesus being thought of as both Messiah and crucified criminal. Christianity was formed out of that cognitive dissonance and the Jesus of Faith was created by it. I suspect the most surprised person at the crucifixion was Jesus himself.
That could have been dealt with in the gospels by a resurrected Jesus telling them why the crucifixion had to happen.
Why have him tell them beforehand, and depict them as being too stupid to understand?
Because they did feel stupid for not understanding. Because he did tell them he was going to die, and why wouldn’t he believe that he was, given what happened to John?
The way the story is told definitely is a reaction to the crucifixion, we agree there. But there’s a difference between saying that and saying Jesus told them he’d be an earthly king soon. He never told them that, or they would have stopped believing in him after it failed to occur.
That could have been dealt with in the gospels by a resurrected Jesus telling them why the crucifixion had to happen.
You mean like Luke 24:13–35? A story which makes no sense if Jesus had already predicted his suffering and death.
Why have him tell them beforehand, and depict them as being too stupid to understand?
Because he didn’t tell them beforehand and Mark has to explain their shock? It was all part of the plan from the beginning! We were just too stupid to understand it at the time.
…wouldn’t he believe that he was, given what happened to John?
There’s no evidence of any messianic association with John. John was considered a prophetic figure, even by Josephus. Many of the prophets had sorry ends. The only concept of the Messiah available to Jesus was the traditional triumphalist one. If he thought he was the Messiah then he would be vindicated by God who would destroy his enemies. The suffering Messiah was invented by Christians to explain Jesus’ death.
The way the story is told definitely is a reaction to the crucifixion, we agree there. But there’s a difference between saying that and saying Jesus told them he’d be an earthly king soon. He never told them that, or they would have stopped believing in him after it failed to occur.
Well from hints in the tradition many did fall away. But you’re forgetting the experience of the Resurrection. This justified everything that had gone before.
Can’t be bothered to copy/paste/italicize, so keep up.
Sure it does. Jesus has to repeat it to them AND for the people reading this, or having it read to them–Luke thought Mark was too subtle for the larger audience, and he had a point.
But you are making my point for me. They didn’t need to believe Jesus had said it before. Luke read Mark, remember? Jesus said SOMETHING before, and they are reinterpreting it later, but he never said he’d be king, and he probably did make some rather pessimistic statements regarding his life expectancy, and what is hard for you to believe about that? Oh right, he’s a naive religious fanatic. Who was also a prodigy–but not a genius. (No, I am never letting that go.)
The question that you keep ducking is why they had all these visions Bart talks about if Jesus had predicted unqualified victory and there was only defeat. They had those darker prophecies of his lurking around in their minds, and they said “Oh, this is what he meant!” Not exactly, but closer than “I will be made king.”
And of course none of them became kings, had any temporal power at all, and yet Jesus’ prophecy that they would rule the twelve tribes were not edited out. Why? Because Jesus really thought they would be kings (in some sense), but didn’t think he’d be one, because he believed he was going to die. As John had died, and it really does not matter for our purposes who did or did not believe John was Messiah. Jesus revered John, and if John could be killed, so could he.
If you think I’m forgetting the resurrection, you are not paying attention. I’m explaining it. Jesus said things that could be interpreted (correctly, incorrectly, I dunno) as meaning that he would die and rise again. The specifics shall always elude us, but the uptake is that you had a group of people in deep shock and despair, thinking back over what he’d said, trying to make sense of it, maybe missing some meals. Their minds had been prepared, and whether Jesus intended this or not is beside the point. He’d made too powerful an impression to just be forgotten. They had loved him too much to let him go. So they brought him back. And told themselves this is what he meant all along, but if he hadn’t given them some hint that it could work out this way, that wouldn’t have happened.
The odds that Jesus didn’t know he could be killed are basically zero. We agree he didn’t think he was God, and we agree he didn’t think he was God’s begotten son. So he knew the truth. All men are mortal.
godspell said
tompicard said
comment on your theory that Jesus believed the/his transformation from regular guy to cosmic son of man was to occur via his sacrificing his life.
If that was his belief why should he not just commit suicideNo, I don’t see how anyone of Jesus’ mindset would consider suicide an option–it’s not his death, per se, but rather the manner of it.
maybe unnecessary comment just to make sure no confusion:
I am not saying that in Jesus’ mindset he would likely consider suicide. that is of course incredibly unlikely, merely saying that it is even more unlikely that he would intentionally seek death at the hands of others as means of accomplishing his messianic mission – in my opinion.
If Jesus had really predicted his death and suffering why was it such a shock to his disciples? The shock reverberates throughout the entire New Testament. Paul’s entire theology flows from this shock. Mark invented the Gospel genre to explain this shock. As far as the Resurrection, you mistake cause for effect.
I don’t think he predicted crucifixion, for one thing. John was decapitated, nobody in the OT was ever crucified. For another, you’re forgetting that if they believed he was Messiah, they wouldn’t believe it was possible that could happen.
As for the Resurrection, you mistake effect for cause. 🙂
tompicard said
maybe unnecessary comment just to make sure no confusion:
I am not saying that in Jesus’ mindset he would likely consider suicide. that is of course incredibly unlikely, merely saying that it is even more unlikely that he would intentionally seek death at the hands of others as means of accomplishing his messianic mission – in my opinion.
I’m not aware of a single instance of somebody with a messianic vision committing suicide.
Are you?
Suicide by cop, let’s call it.
So you basically live to split hairs. Well, I suppose everyone needs a hobby. Have you tried stamp collecting? 🙂
Not a religion in the world that would refuse to bury soldiers who died on ‘suicide missions’ in consecrated earth. Martyrs who put themselves into situations where death was inevitable were not considered suicides by Christianity at any time. You put your life in God’s hands, and God decides. Quite different from ending that life yourself. Which I personally do not consider a sin, except perhaps against one’s self. It depends on the circumstances, and probably no one has a right to judge.
Except you. 🙄
I suddenly felt the need to look up the attitudes towards suicide in the ancient world.
Roman pagans didn’t see a problem with it, unless you were accused of a serious crime (that might lead to your property being confiscated), a soldier, or a slave. All of which had to do with not cheating the state or wealthy people out of their rightful due. (Such charming people, patricians. Their legacy lives on today.)
Jewish attitudes have always been mixed, and we don’t really know much about what Jews thought of it in Jesus’ time. The Talmud forbids it, however that doesn’t necessarily apply to mass suicide for political or religious reasons, as at Masada.
Christianity would eventually make it a mortal sin. And how much of that was due to the story of Judas hanging himself, I wonder? The way his corpse swelled up and burst. Potter’s Field.
In any event, if we posit that Jesus knew (or at least guessed) his actions would lead to his death, he still wouldn’t be the direct instrument of his own demise, and if he believed he’d be taken up into heaven to perform a different form of service to God, it obviously would not count as depriving God of his life–least of all if he believed it was God’s will that he die in defiance of an evil temporal authority, as his teacher John had done. It wouldn’t be an act of despair or turning his back on his obligations. Therefore, not suicide in the sense we generally use. After all, Samson knew he was going to die when he brought down the temple, taking the foes of Israel with him.
Now was that so hard to figure out?
I have made it almost halfway through Maurice Casey’s book The Solution to the Son of Man Problem. I will try to finish more of it soon, though preparing to teach my own classes this fall might leave marginal time for it. I have read enough to form a preliminary view.
Casey’s exegesis depends a very great deal on his own particular skills to reconstruct Aramaic originals for sayings of Jesus. This I am not able to judge. I work with texts in other languages and generally like close linguistic and intertextual readings and what can be learned from them, so I am open to Casey’s general approach. What he says about the expression “son of man” in Hebrew and Aramaic sources seems consistent and reasonable. And his reading of Daniel 7, which identifies “one like a son of man” with Israel, seems entirely plausible, and not controversial in scholarship any longer.
My main curiosity regarding his reading of The Similitudes of 1 Enoch and some of his reconstructed Jesus sayings is the following. His main argument seems to be that the very general and sometimes “self-referring” nature of the Aramaic expression “son of man” precludes us from believing that there is a “son of man concept,” a belief in a titular “son of man,” that can be found in these texts. Even assuming his linguistic reconstructions are correct, I wonder if this major inference does what narrow linguistic readings sometimes do–namely miss the forest because of the trees.
I state this in terms of “wonder” because I am not making a strong claim to this effect, but am only expressing a suspicion. The reason I say this is because, again even if Casey’s reconstructions are linguistically accurate, there must still be something of significance in the fact that the expression “son of man” is transformed from referring symbolically to Israel as a whole in Daniel to referring to the person of Enoch who will preside over God’s Kingdom in The Similitudes. In addition, in the sayings recorded in Mk. 8:38, Mt. 10:32-33 and Lk. 12:8-9, even if Jesus uses “son of man” here to refer to himself, and not a separate personage, in his function as a witness for people at the least Judgment, this still makes of Jesus a very special apocalyptic/eschatological figure, and thus doesn’t seem to have the merely self-referrential idiomatic function of Aramaic idiom that the expression does seem to have in other sayings of Jesus. As soon as “the son of man” refers not to human beings in general or merely self-reflexively, but identifies an individual person who apparently has special eschatological significance, I think it is hard to argue that this shift produces no “son of man concept” at all. So, again, even if Casey’s representations of the original Aramaic forms of Jesus’ sayings is correct, that alone does not settle the issue of whether Jesus believed himself to be ushering in the immanent overturning of worldly powers to the Kingdom of God.
Casey also appears, if I have read him correctly, to believe that there are a number of genuine sayings of Jesus in which he predicts his own suffering and death. I take those claims to be at least quite controversial, and at least to me they are historically counter-intuitive. But I have little time at the moment to get into that huge issue with the attention it deserves.
In any case, many thanks for the recommendation of Casey. I enjoy reading the book and have learned a number of valuable things from it. Hopefully I can finish it in the foreseeable future.
While he’s not a bad writer, it’s inherently difficult to follow an argument relating to a language even many scholars in this field aren’t deeply familiar with. You have to take a lot on faith, but it’s kind of hard to dispute that you can’t understand Jesus and his followers without knowing a great deal about the language they conducted their daily affairs in–and that remained the primary language of the new cult for several decades after its founding. And I find it deeply unlikely there were no Christian texts written in that language. Even if all the disciples were illiterate, they would have had literate converts very soon afterwards, and those would have been a vital part of the community.
I thought his arguments often made a lot of sense. Jesus probably did start off using Son of Man in a more general descriptive sense, as opposed to a title only he had. It doesn’t work to say that an angelic judge from heaven has nowhere to lay his head. He’s talking about flesh and blood humans, of which he himself is just one.
However, what we must recognize is that Jesus’ thinking would have been evolving rapidly during his ministry. Even legitimate sayings of his are still just fragmentary snapshots. It’s like saying we know everything about Sappho from the few bits of poetry we have left. Much is suggested, there is a personality there we can perceive, but the deeper motivations and insights we can mainly only guess at. So entirely possible he began to gravitate towards a different understanding of Son of Man towards the end of his life–and Casey agrees that Jesus probably did sense the end coming. Because how could he not?
BDEhrman
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Robert