Loading...In the Gospels conference a few weeks ago (New Insights Into the New Testament; see New Insights into the New Testament: A Biblical Conference for Non-Scholars (bartehrman.com), Candida Moss gave a fascinating presentation on (the historical) Jesus’ actual family. That is a major issue in the non-canonical Gospel I have been discussing just now in this thread, the Proto-Gospel of James.
This Gospel was very popular in Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity throughout the Ages, down to modern times; and a version of it was produced – with serious additions and changes – in Latin, that was even more influential in Western Christianity (a book now known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). In some times and places, these books were the main source of “information” that people had for knowing about Jesus’ birth and family – more so than the NT Gospels.
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I recently watched the documentary “From Jesus to Christ” which to me as a layman was a real masterpiece. In it some of the scholars discussed the proximity of Nazareth to Sepphoris and how that might have influenced the life of Jesus. Some seemed to think that Jesus was more sophisticated than an average peasant and at a higher social level. He and Joseph might have done artisan work in the city. At least one scholar thought that Jesus was trilingual, in Aramaic, Hebrew, and some Greek. What are your thoughts on all this?
I remember watching it and being struck that Dom Crossan said that Jesus obviously picked up on Greek culture in Sepphoris and then Eric Meyers came on saying that Jesus never went to Sepphoris — and the narrator didn’t point out that these two views were at odds! I completely agree with Meyers, and I don’t think there’s much chance at all that Jesus could speak anything other than Aramaic.
“These students were not, as a rule, committed to the infallibility of the Bible.”
Is the Roman Catholic Church committed to the infallibility of the Bible?
Were your Catholic students more committed to the Roman Catholic Church traditions than to the Bible?
The Catholic church obviously holds the Bible in extremely high esteem, but without the insistence on the literal interpretation of every single inerrant word; Church traditions can develop views of the Bible, so the BIble, for Catholics, is not they end of the story. And yes, most of my CAtholic students knew more about the traditoins than the Bible.
“Jerome was a major advocate of an ascetic lifestyle. A Christian should not, should DECIDEDLY NOT, indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. No rich foods, no good wine, and no sex. Preferably, no sex at all.”
So if Christian’s were to follow Jerome’s idea, then his plan was for at least Christians to completely die off?
Or was he thinking Jesus was coming very soon so no need to worry about bringing more people into the world?
My sense is that he wasn’t too worried that everyone who take him up on the idea.
Well, Isaac Newton did.
Jerome was so afraid of sexual desire that he fled to the desert, let his skin be burned black by the sun, and when he couldn’t stop dreaming of “lovely girls,” he would cry all night and beat his breast in misery. (Jerome’s Letter XXII to Eustochium). As Masters and Johnson reported in their 1970 study, something of that same attitude is still causing sexual dysfunction among some of the more traditional believers.
Given Jerome’s attitude toward sex, I have to ask how he handled Paul’s advice to the Corinthians: “if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; let them marry” (1 Cor. 7:36 NRSV). (And what does “and so it has to be” mean, anyway?)
1 Cor. 7:36 is difficult to translate because of the unusually ambiguous Greek, but it appears to mean that if a person cannot control his desires, he should get married (“so it has to be” would mean, then, “there is no other way to deal with his passions”). I don’t remember exactly how Jerome dealt with verse, but there’s an entire book devoted to the way Jerome and other ascetics read biblical passages deal with sex and restraint, written by my greatly missed friend and scholar extraordinaire, Elizabeth Clark, called “Reading Renunciation.” You may be intersted in it.
Yes, I am, thanks! I just put in a LINK+ request.
If Sepphoris was growing rapidly at the time of Jesus’ early years, many building projects,etc. why wouldn’t Jesus and his brothers go there to work and earn much more than the subsistence living they would make in Nazareth? Sepphoris was and is only 3-4 miles from Nazareth and a walk that can be done in a couple of hours?
It looks like you meant this question for Bart. I certainly don’t have an answer.
It seems like if you have a society that is fairly open and embracing of all forms of sexual variety+the society seeks a lot of it, you for whatever reason also get the opposite end of the spectrum. People who are totally turned off it and think its innately evil. I suspect some of these people are those who just cant get any, perhaps feel body shame or are traumatized by past experiences. But others seem to just see something evil in it and react strongly in the other direction. This group I feel were the most PASSIONATE early Christians for whatever reason and so they set the cultural tone for what it meant to be devoted, for 2000 years all the way until now. They had plenty of justification probably in Jesus, John the Baptist as examples for men and some material to work with in Mary.
I don’t like to speculate on the psychological reasons for the early Christian attitudes toward sex. I do observe that it was common to charge one’s political or religious opponents with sexual licentiousness, whether or not it was true. On that basis alone, I would hesitate to characterize Roman society of that period as “open and embracing.”
I’ll add that I don’t think the earliest Christians saw sex as “innately evil” but rather than they thought it unnecessary, since theirs was to be the last generation. The implication that they saw sexual activity as restricted to procreation is similar to, and may be related to, that of the Essenes and Stoics (I’m generalizing heavily here).
Notwithstanding my opening statement, I do think it possible that people in the 2nd century and on who were uncomfortable with sex may have found in Christian asceticism an excuse to avoid having any. But that is speculation.disabledupes{3738575af24d92212fd601c3a84a1718}disabledupes
What do you think accounts for it being such a strong theme in Christianity for so long
Once a theme, especially a religious theme, is established,and once it is given the weight not just of secular but of divine authority, authority that is said to be all-knowing, all-wise, eternally true, it becomes very difficult to go against it. (Look at the opposition to evolution because it goes against Genesis.)
In the matter of sex, it gets even more complicated. Christianity developed in a somewhat ascetic milieu (Stoics, Essenes, Roman polemics against real or perceived sexual excess), and took that asceticism to an extreme. (To my mind, any construct that is built around a horrifying method of execution is going to focus more on pain than on pleasure.) They also focused on the next world (in which Jesus strongly implied there would be no sex – Matt. 22:30). Another likely factor is that sex is so central to our being that control of other peoples’ sex life gives one control over the whole person. Concern for purity is also a factor – but that would require a whole book to explain!
Immaculate Mary. Perpetual Virgin. Mother of God.
Hey Mary, sorry about all the crazy stories that were made up about you.
Welcome back to humanity, sister.
You don’t have to be a freak anymore.
You reminded me of a joke. Why is it called the Assumption of Mary? Because she vanished from the story and everyone assumes she was carried bodily into Heaven.
At the suggestion of James Tabor (who presented at the NINT conference), I am reading “Jude and the relatives of Jesus in the early church” by Richard Bauckham. Though definitely an academic read, it contains much fascinating information about the various traditions covering Jesus’s brothers and sisters. I got it through interlibrary loan as copies for sale are really expensive.
Is there historical evidence that Jesus could read Hebrew texts for his understanding of the laws?
The only place in the NT where he is said to be able to read is in Luke 4. We don’t have any hard evidence apart from that — and there are serious reasons for doubting it’s historicity, since it is found only in Luke (both Matthew and Mark have the same story without mentioning Jesus reading anything) and coincides with Luke’s literary agenda; we have to then base our judgments on probabilities given what we know otherwise. It looks like 95% of the people living in Israel at the time were illiterate, and those who could read were almost entirely from upper-class families living in urban areas. Jesus was neither upper class nor urban, so it’s unlikely he was literate — but it’s *possible*! (There may have been someone in his small hamlet of Nazareth who taught him)
I apologize for the off-topic message. Bart, I wanted to ask whether Jesus believed in the existence of the soul separately from the body or if he strictly adhered to the views of ancient Jews. By his time, Jews were already exposed to ideas like Plato’s, even in books like the Maccabees, which were written over 200 years before Jesus. If he could believe in such concepts, it might be possible to attribute the words in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus to him. Why are you so sure he didn’t believe in the separate existence of the soul and the body?
He appears to have held to the common view among Jews, that body and soul could not exist separately from each other. Why do I think so? For several reasons. One is that nothing suggests that Greek philosophical ideas had crept into remote rural villages and hamlets like Nazareth; another is that Jesus does appear to have had any kind of formal education (those two go together); another is that in the recorded sayings of Jesus it is clear that he maintains a Jewish apocalytpic view of the world in general and a belief in the future bodily resurrection of the dead in particular, both of which are tied closely to the traditional Jewish view of body and soul. Finally, I can’t think of any evidence or reason to suppose otherwise. (I don’t think the parable of Luke 16 could go back to him for reasons I explain in Heaven and Hell, but even if it does, it’s a *parable* not a description of something that he thought happened).
When I was in Catholic grade school (60-70 years ago), the nuns poured on the legends from the NT Apocrypha thick and fast. One tradition was that Joseph was an elderly widower, another was the he was nineteen years old (of course, when you are eight, nineteen is elderly). No wonder we were confused.
I am now an elderly widower myself and the last thing I would want is a twelve year old girl to care for.
I hear you.
I’m reading “Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church” by Richard Bauckham. Interesting book that raises many questions. One for now (jump to the end if you want 🙂
The author relies heavily on the idea that the people for whom our Gospels were written were already familiar with many things that didn’t need to be explicitly stated. As an example, it was known by their audiences that there were several followers of Jesus named “Mary” and so they differentiate which ones are being referred to (I’ve always wondered, if few of them really existed, why make it so hard on the writing to use the same name! I write novels, I’d never have 3 or 4 characters with the same name).
Paul left out much because the recipients of his letters already knew a lot. But he was writing when the first generation was alive.
Is it common among scholars to suggest that the four gospels (at least in their original form) were witten for specific groups of people who were already familiar with, say, who were Jesus’s brothers and sisters and so didn’t necessarily need to be named – such as the names of Jesus’s sisters?
(1) I am a skeptic agnostic that find very probable that there was a Jesus born in Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary, that become an itinerant preacher. I have no idea how many brothers and sisters he had.
But, when I was a catholic, in my younger years, this is how I was told why Jesus’s “brothers” were his cousins:
Mark 6:3 says Jesus brothers were James, Joses, Jude, and Simon,
Mark 15:40 at the cross was Mary the mother of James the younger and Joses,
Matthew 27:56 at the cross was Mary the mother of James and Joses,
Luke 24:10 at the tomb was Mary the mother of James,
John 19:25 at the cross was his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas.
Jerome says Clopas was Joseph brother.
Simon, brother of James, son of Clopas, followed James as bishop of Jerusalem.
(2) In Nazareth, as was custom in old times, Coplas, his wife Mary, his sister-in-law Mary, mother of Jesus (and maybe Joseph if he was still alive), all lived in the common house of their parents and ancestors. All their children were considered brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters (ἀδελφός, οῦ, ὁ) as used by Paul and the Gospels means “of the same family”, not “of the same womb”, which was the use of the word in Mark 6:3 and John 7:5.
There is also an episode in Luke where Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and Jesus was left behind. There are no brothers and sisters here!
I still find these arguments very persuasive. I cannot see why it is wrong. Can you?
Manny5 – it seems a bit speculative. And what happened to Jude – the twin? He is not mentioned. It has always bothered me that Mary, mother of Jesus cannot grow up to be an adult female in a Jewish marriage and have 5 or 6 children. So she’s not a virgin – instead she’s a human flesh and blood mother isn’t that equally as saint-worthy.
Nicholas, So, Jesus and Jude were twins and younger than James and Joses? It is very possible!
That story of a virgin birth, childbirth in Bethlehem, and descend from David were necessary requisites for a divine Messiah.
My question is where is the fault of that argument (surely to justify the virginity of Mary)? Are any of those sentences clearly wrong?
Wasn’t there thinking, eg, St Augustine, that original sin was transmitted through sex? Was that simply the mechanism of transmission, eg, original sin was therefore present at conception? Or was the idea that sex itself was a sin and that therefore it was inevitable that babies were conceived in and/or with sin? Or perhaps both?
Traditionally the Catholic Church has not had a positive attitude toward deriving pleasure from sex. But sex itself was fine as long as it’s purpose was procreation.
Yes, this is Augustine’s view, that the sin nature was passed along in the sex act. But he was writing a couple of hundred years after the Proto-Gospel, so he’s representing a later, more developed view. (He was not proposing that sex in itself was a sin, so long as it was engaged in properly)
Isn’t a negative attitude toward sex, and asceticism in general, consistent with the idea that the soul is distinct from the body and can exist separate from the body?
Therefore, suppression of the desires of the body allows the soul to flourish?
That certainly is a view often found among ascetics.
Thank you so much for organising the conference Bart. I’m really enjoying it. I’m currently watching Goodacre’s lecture.
It was a blast!