Christmas is About Salvation

I was thinking about Bonhoeffer’s own approach to Christmas as I sat in church this evening. For German theologians in the mid-last century, the question of salvation was one of the major considerations found in everyone from Barth to Bonhoeffer. What came about was an original emphasis on the way the nature of atonement theology was thought of as a formal divine transaction that happened in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions to salvation as an ontological reality that separated humanity from God.

And so while the cross was certainly important, it was God taking up flesh in the person of Christ that more than anything else became the centering point for first considerations about the meaning of salvation. As Christ takes on flesh, so he takes on the concerns of humanity, our frailty, our fallenness, and the distance that by our very natures makes it impossible for us to come to God.

All of this is raised within the context of the problem of transcendence, a question that seemed more critical when the reality of the First World War made it clear to European theologians that the liberal guarantee of a confidence in the power of humanity to overcome its own moral shortcomings was a tragic overestimation. This sensitivity to the gap that divided human ability from divine being and attempt to find an answer was a way to explain how a good God could remain good despite a world that was debased of any such goodness.  

From a theological position, this meant that events like the First World War debunked the notion that commandment-based ethics (Gebot  Ethik) were the guarantees of salvation desired by humanity.

Reconciled as humanity is through this mystery, divine concern takes up humanity so that salvation does not emerge on a cross but as an act divine self-making that begins in a manger.  The realization of God’s love for us is not that Christ died for our sins, but that God took flesh to himself at all.  Salvation is found first in the Christmas story.

The Emerging Religious Landscape in America

I just got done perusing some new figures and poll information that suggest a growing population of Muslims in America and continued downward trend of mainline Catholics and Protestants. There was also a decline in those who claim Judaism as a religion. Finally, there is a rise in atheism. America is beginning to looking more and more like her European cousins every day. 

(You can read the original article here.)

As a progressive, what concerns me most are radical expressions of these minority religions taking root in American soil, and not for any reason usually given by conservative Christians who fear the loss of majority status and power. As I find radical conservative Christianity an often idealistic and sanitized vision of the divine message given to humanity, I’m no more fond of radical expressions of Islam, though I will say I don’t believe most expressions of Islam are radical. While Christianity has suffered the loss of its romanticized uniqueness and exclusivity under the microscope of modern scrutiny beginning primarily during the European Enlightenment (with Judaism soon following), faithfulness to core values of Islam as markers of truth remain strong while critical scholarship of Islam is fairly new and mostly unwelcomed.

While there is an understandable psychological fear of loss of culture, loss of identity, and the kind of pushback we witness in far-right conservative media on a daily basis here in the States, those of us who continue to be optimistic about interfaith dialogue have less to worry about.

I say this not because distinction is unimportant, but rather because I approach the question as a person who sees himself within the grip of time and from a place of historical relativity. And by relativity I mean humility – we simply don’t know it all. Our knowledge, our truths are relative in span of history.

Despite those who prize its transcendent value, it’s hard to debate the fact that Christianity has always been a religion that sees itself as a prophetic extension of another religion (Judaism) that explains some of its most important characteristics (doctrines) through the lens of Greek philosophy and neo-pagan thought. That’s not to say there is nothing original about Christianity, but far less than is often admitted by its adherents as it owes a lot of itself, its socialization, its ethical awareness, and its prophetic vitality to its neighbors.

Therefore, in seeing Christianity as a sort of syncretistic experience in antiquity, an individual involved in interfaith dialogue may not be as put off immediately by what we can learn from our neighbors if in fact one day we find Christianity to be a minority expression. If anything, we can see that Judaism lives on though it has been a minority most of its existence with sporadic periods of dominance, which were few and far between. Yet Judaism has managed to survive. It is as diverse in its expressions as Christianity is in its expressions. And this leads me to my second point; namely, that there is no one expression of Christianity for which we have to fight to protect against cultural collapse. With the amount of variety directed to major doctrines such as the virgin birth, ethics, resurrection, the way of salvation, the differences are not small or simply nuanced, but completely up for grabs. So when one thinks about the campaign to save Christianity from its cultural despisers, one wonders what Christianity he has in mind.

Merry Christmas!

Various Updates on Academic Endeavors

I haven't written anything here for a while, but I'm busy as ever and have been writing voraciously. Here's a look at the irons in the fire:

I'm finishing the third semester of graduate program in Jewish Studies, putting the last touches on a paper on the St. Louis affair of 1939, and coming into exam week.

I recently had an article I developed from a paper I presented at Oxford in April accepted to a peer-review journal and I'm planning to incorporate edits very soon.

I've finally hit the figurative "go" button on my Bonhoeffer manuscript. I expect that it will be published by the first quarter of 2014.

I've sent a proposal for a conference in New York and am awaiting feedback. While I wait, I'm in the process of preparing a second proposal for another conference in Europe.

I was recently inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, an honors leadership fraternity.

I attended AAR/SBL in Baltimore in late November. A very interesting social experiment. But I attended the two Bonhoeffer sections that I wanted to, and was happy to meet a few of the people in personal I had only encountered in their books.

Finally, I'm awaiting word on a major grant that will allow me the opportunity to explore major Holocaust sites in Europe. I'm excited about this opportunity and turned down a trip to Israel in January 2014 in hopes of landing this one.

I have a few entries I'm sitting on that I will eventually finish and post.

Until then...

The Bad Theology of Christian Internet Dating – Or What I Thought About when I Heard a Commercial for Christian Mingle.com and Claims of Divine Providence

Internet dating sites are big business. And if there is a variant offering a pure, wholesome, and morally grounded experience, you can believe there is an entrepreneuring Christian out there who will exploit the opportunity.

Find the one God intended for you. The tag line is catchy and resembles a divine ideology concerning the providence of God and his care for you. In this way, Christian Mingle.com ensures not only that signing up with their service is a biblically based venture, but also that they make a lot of money from it.

But is that tall, dark, and handsome stranger an answer to your prayers, or an answer to their pocketbooks? The question might seem unremarkable given the barrage of media that comes at us, the claims of false advertising, and the competing claims of other contenders in the Internet dating business who all tantalize us with result-driven dating solutions.

I know only one person who tried an Internet dating site, and the result was less than heavenly. But this doesn’t stop the thousands who are doing it. As a theologian, however, the question I have is whether there are problems with Christian mingles.com’s theology. Let’s explore some of the implications of their claims and measure it against a theological critique.

There are some definite problems with this theological stance of Christian mingle, from one of ignorance to downright deception. Let’s begin with the claim that God has a right partner for you. On the surface this sounds great because it draws in people of all persuasions. The psychology of setting up such a site means that not only are your diehard, cross-wearing Christians immediately attracted like moths to the flame, but wayward, nominal, and even those who are teetering on the faith can feel reinvigorated because, despite the name of the forum, it treats no one with any distinction. This open-invitation approach might be good for business (because hey, we all love God, right?) and it certain might spur people forward who have a less-than-moral take on their own faith walk, but in treating all people as one under Christ, there will inevitably be those with varying shades of Christ-likeness who will feel offended, maybe even duped, when Mr. Right tries to get to second-base on the first date! While I’m sure this is a contentious problem for all dating sites, it seems to be even more diabolic when a dater thinks that Christian mingle has her best interest in mind, only to have a date go horribly wrong. Not very “Christian” of them. But hey, are they really their brother’s keeper?

This isn’t even the real issue. From a theological standpoint, Christian mingle.com aims to capitalize on an ideological claim that should give any Christian pause. But using providence as the key to one’s interpretative matrix creates all sorts of funky scenarios in which the providence of God conflicts with other character or faith traits we are supposed to cultivate. For example, if God is a providential entity who foreknows are thoughts, feelings, and life partners, then that also implies that those who came to Christian mingle only to fail miserably or not meet the right person were destined to do so. Conversely, it may imply that if you go out to a secular site and have better luck, this too was in God’s plan. It also may imply that those who come to Christian mingle actually do not trust in God because they are trying to speed the process along themselves, hence not holding onto the truth of God’s divine providence and care for their lives. In fact, this interpretation is closer to the Bible if one recalls the story of Abraham and Sarah, who didn’t trust God so that Ishmael became the bane of Israel’s existence. Christian mingle actually undermines its business model without even knowing it due to a misleading marketing advertisement.

It also creates the problematic claim that everyone who visits the site is destined to find their life partner. This claim isn’t unique to Christianmingle.com, but it does create forced emphasis when it seems that God should be there intervening on your behalf. The problem with this approach is that it creates an all-or-nothing approach that American Protestant Evangelical circles have attached their theological robes to for more than half a century now, i.e., that the nuclear family is a biblical mandate that is completely consistent with the scriptural witness. Of course, there are multiple kinds of marriage throughout the scripture, and I’m sure Christianmingle.com would want to downplay coming to the site to look for one’s concubine if his wife is infertile. But let’s move on.
 
The brilliance is that most lay religious people are theologically inept and so questions like this will not even arise for them. That means that either Christian mingle.com is knowingly deceptive and are willfully reading one side of the scriptures with much more emphasis than accounting for other emphases or they are blissfully ignorant (the blind leading the blind). The next time you hear a commercial that tells you they have God’s plan for your life, be a little suspicious. And if that is not enough, pick up your Bible and consider all the providential commandments God gives to the murder of enemies, the destruction of nation or Paul’s wish that all remained celibate just as he was, and then put those up against all the other statements in the Bible you actually favor to see where you land on the theological carousel!

The Principle of Mesirah: Omerta in the Jewish World and Jesus' Behavior in the Gospels

Concern about turning on fellow countrymen was a fact of Jewish life. After all, as a continually conquered and subjugated people, making nice with the oppressor could easily become a way of life. Conversely, to ignore such realities could cost you your life. Jews throughout time have proven to be good at both, at least under compulsion rather than as a force of habit. Their rebellions and subjugations are well known in the historical annals of planet Earth. From the Assyrians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Muslims and beyond, Jews have continually been in a position that is a negotiation between these two poles.

The problem of conspiring with the enemy was often so deep that a word was given against committing such criminal behavior in the Talmud. Mesirah, as it was known, was the act of turning on a fellow Jew, by handing him over to Gentiles. These crimes could be against fellow Jews or against Gentiles, but either way , by those who applied this view, the sinner was looked upon as one who denied identifying features that strengthened the community bond.

A recent article by Joshua Hammerman illustrates the way in which Mesirah in contemporary times has been avoided and by doing so protected pedophiles within the Jewish community who have been given safe harbor at the cost of handing them over to the local authorities.  The Times of Israel reported on a case of such coercion in January 2013. Hammerman lays out the rabbinic origins of the practice, and in one place shows how Rashi applied the principle to Moses after he murdered the Egyptian.

Perhaps the most notorious use of the principle comes from none other than the Jewish ethicist and philosopher Maimonides, who bluntly encouraged the murder of any Jew who would go against his people, regardless of whether a moral transgression had taken place.

Yet there is another reason to give pause as we look at the life of Jesus, the Misith and friend of the Romans. In the gospels, Jesus clearly advocates a non-violent approach to the Roman occupation of his land. And while this alone may have made good strategic sense, for it spared waves of zealous men from death in full-on rebellion, there are other passages where Jesus goes beyond a mere acceptance of the reality of Roman occupation. In Luke 7, Jesus not only interacts kindly and thoughtfully with a Roman soldier but sings his praise as one who has greater faith than his own people! 

The Sermon on the Mount offers the best glimpse of a possible response to Mesirah. Jesus warns that a fellow Jew might drag off another to the Gentile courts for immoral behavior (Matthew 5:26). But rather than rebuke the practice as something that would have clearly been a kind of Mesirah, Jesus’ comments are directed at the victim of Mesirah instead of the perpetrator!  If we see these comments in light of the larger reality of revolution and oppression then the matter-of-fact way in which Jesus is said to deliver this warning begs the question of his revolutionary intent. And it seems that he is almost accepting of the practice as a way of life. In another instance (Matthew 18:15-17), Jesus seems to establish the terms for avoiding Mesirah though there is no condemnation of the practice itself. Unfortunately, this is a difficult verse to establish since it anachronistically speaks of a church that didn’t yet exist and establishes an ecclesiastical order that was most likely written back into the gospels after Jesus. For someone like Paul, however, Mesirah was clearly a transgression and act of treason.

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers? (1 Corinthians 6:1-2)

In an even stronger condemnation, Paul states Christians are to suffer evil and moral transgressions when it deals with those in the community – a principle obviously derived from a rejection of Mesirah within his own Jewish context, but applied here to the church, Paul’s spiritual Israel.

But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? (1 Corinthians 6:6-7)

One wonders how Paul might have treated the issue if a member in the church had sexually abused another’s child or murdered one of their own, but let’s move on.

Clearly the reality of Mesirah accomplished what it set out to do:  it challenged communal life by creating internal dissension. Postcolonial theory scholars like Moshe Rosman and Homi Bhadba have recognized this with regard to a methodological-historical approach to Jewish life at all intersections despite the charge of anachronism. Yet Rosman and Bhadba wrestled this insight from its colonial context and showed that while it evolves there this kind of master-servant dynamic is broader bound. To put the community at internal odds with itself is to manage a dangerous game yet at the same time increase the power structure and influence of the oppressor. Jesus’ acceptance of the practice could be seen as an unfortunate nod to its reality. But I want to argue that it could also be that in accepting its reality, there remained a way of working through it, and in doing so,  the cohesion that remained in the community was no longer reliant on numbers but on ideology and identity.  If Jesus believed in his Messianic role then sheer numbers were not as important as God’s self-identifying truth that he saw working through his life.  After all, it would be God who redeemed, and wayward Jews would not escape this reality regardless of where their loyalties. Perhaps this is what Paul also saw in his writing of Romans when he talks of Israel’s ultimate salvation.

Much of what Jesus says however gets lost when we read the Beatitudes as universal principles of conduct rather than responses to the political and social environment in which Jesus remained. The Roman principle of impressment, for example, crops up here as well as the ancient custom of how to receive and accept an insult. But these make no difference if we only read our own situation into Jesus’ world without first understanding the world in which he lived.

I think that Jesus’ bringing up of Jews hauling other Jews off to court was a contentious issue during Jesus’ time, and probably more pertinent to the context of his day than his promulgation of a universal morality being founded upon the ground of ancient Palestine where we imagine Jesus only as an ancient teacher of wisdom detached from his own world. The fact that a possible link to Mesirah is brought up in several places along with Jesus’ rather unique and matter-of-fact response could explain why such instances evoke against Jesus the charge of blasphemy even as it is believed to have been applied to his direct threat to destroy the Temple. The latter charge, in my opinion, has to be contextualized since many Jews had already abandoned the Temple’s centrality (consider Rabbi Zakkai, for example).  This means that the Temple narrative, by and large, depends upon Mesirah, and the state of affairs in which every day Jews interacted. I do believe Jesus saw himself as a messianic figure, but I don’t believe that the Temple is necessarily key to this claim. Jesus may have been radically misunderstood in his take on Mesirah, and this stirred the charges of blasphemy. But, it is in his unique response to Mesirah that Jesus can most clearly be identified as messianic, through which the Temple narrative and other responses spring out, especially if one considers that the “temple of his body” was not a physical structure, nor was it dependent upon physical entities, but upon an ideal of Israel, of the temple, and of himself.

While it might be said that such an interpretation requires a radically re-interpretation of the meaning of physical resurrection, I would only remark that I do not believe that we are confined to only one layer of meaning here. We must remember too, the “temple of his body” quote is a gloss by the gospel’s editor and not part of the narrative flow.

An Interview on Towson University's Graduate Admissions Page

Recently the Office of Communications at Towson University contacted me for an interview about my academic career. They featured the interview on their Graduate Admissions page for the start of the Fall semester this week. I'm sharing it here.
http://grad.towson.edu/news1.asp

Why Heretics are the True Inheritance of God

For those like Bonhoeffer and Barth, the depersonalization of sin was not birthed in the new language of neo-orthodoxy, but might be better rendered as a reaction to existing problems for which resolution seemed out of touch.

One such instance occurs in both Bonhoeffer and Barth, and it has to do with those for whom salvation requires special excesses not deemed fully possible for the normal believer. Those with mental deficiencies or even children, for whom the message of salvation is an impossible quandary, make the formulaic approach to sin an absurdity. These special cases are usually handled with sensitivity, but they have one grand defect: Like those they protect, they take away the universality of the reconciliation act of Christ and parcel it into participatory criteria on the one hand, and a type of universalism on the other hand for those with special conditions. This inequality should be glaring, and indeed, there have been attempts in all mainline denominations to address it adequate, usually placing it at the feet of Christ as an act of grace, that in no way takes away from the grace offered to us. But no matter how you gloss it, the problem remains, and it was Barth and Bonhoeffer with their unfailing respect for the universal consistency of God’s approach to us all, that had them rejecting the biological basis of sin, and instead appeal to a condition of sin that is tied in with all human existence, while at the same time refusing to find its location in the physicality of the person. This is a smart, if not honest, appraisal of the God of the universe. Barth’s famous repartee comes at the expense of Emil Brunner, with whom he battled and denied that the rationality of God’s revelation Brunner claimed was unveiled in the world was enough to support such cases. Bonhoeffer, following, though not acknowledging Barth’s lead, wrote about this question in the Ethics and here too rejected anything that looked like a multi-pronged approach  to the grace of God, where some, because of their natural disadvantages, are simply more privileged to eternal life, then those of us who are not.

Personally, to consider a functional normality as the criteria of free will salvation seems to me an appeal to a mechanistic rationalist’s worldview. In this case, truth is accessible to all, and it’s only a matter of us uncovering it. But like those with mental deficiencies there are other subtle indicators constantly working against us. Those who are by nature skeptical or naïve, though a medical test might not be available, have a natural inclination to dismiss or cling to the herd mentality. In all, everyone has nuanced understandings and acceptances of doctrines of faith, that can only be uncovered once we literally test them. I wonder if a test of faith were administered on paper, how many in the same congregational bodies would answer differently? For conservative evangelicals, it may simply signal there is more work that needs to be done, despite the fact that even where a belief that a greater consistency works, I’ve been in enough conservative churches and bible studies over time, to know that even the most basic understandings of the faith are subject to a wide interpretation. We must accept that as we live with one another, we live with different conceptions of God – right down to our home churches. While many liberal churches (such as my current home) get this and allow for a variety of responses to God, the logical next step is opening this to interpretations of God found in other religions. Heresy is an unavoidable reality, and it’s time that we understand when we disagree we must agree to disagree.

A Photo Reflection on Political Rebellion

August Landmesser was a Hamburg shipyard worker who refused to salute Hitler. Reportedly he was not identified until one of his children saw the photo in a 1991 German newspaper. You can read the full account and the speculations surrounding his reasons for not saluting all over the Internet.

While the photo has nothing to do with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of what Bonhoeffer did not do that leads me to make a reflection. On June 14, 1940, Bonhoeffer and best friend Eberhard Bethge were in a small café when news of the French surrender to Germany was heard on a public radio. As all were prompted to stand and perform the perfunctory Nazi salute, Bethge hesitated, telling his friend that they should do no such thing. Bonhoeffer responded sternly that it would be foolish to make such a public spectacle of themselves, even if it was right, and that an appropriate time was coming for their resistance.

This is no condemnation of Bonhoeffer’s actions as cowardice, but perhaps a commentary on the terrible penalty that would have been incurred for making such a tremendous statement. Bonhoeffer simply knew that at that time his effectiveness in his present role required the utmost secrecy.

Perhaps there are times when courage is reckless and then there are times when no one else is taking a stand so that one needs to stand. The latter reminds me of the famous photo in Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese student stood in front of the army tanks, or the burning Buddhist monk.

In the Biblical book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand up to the Persian mandate by remaining seated. Imagine someone in the U.S. not standing for the National Anthem as a form of protest! For some diehard patriots whose country can do no wrong, it would be too much to watch!

Individual acts of courage can inspire and agitate the listlessness of the masses. Unfortunately, we do not always have a roadmap or guide to tell us which ones will have the greatest effect, if any.

The Fish and the Coin in the Gospel of Matthew: A Look at the Pericope and Possible Rabbinic Origins

I was recently examining a passage that has always been a curiosity to believers and a fairytale to skeptics. Its single occurrence appears in the gospel of Matthew. In the account, Jesus is questioned regarding his civic duty to pay the Temple tax. In response, Jesus tells Peter to cast a line into the water and from the water emerges a fish with enough coin in its mouth to pay the temple for the both of them.  The passage reads as follows:

 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”

 “Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

 “From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” – Matthew 17:24-27

R. T. France comments on the passage: “The whole episode is designed not to record a miracle, but to tell us Jesus' attitude towards the payment of religious taxes." But the question of “whose tax” will remain important as we take a closer look.

The story is curious on a number of levels. On the one hand, commentators like Craig L. Blomberg are representative of a body of scholarly conservatives who see the story in terms of Jesus' rejection of Old Testament legalism. For those like Blomberg, the children of the kingdom and their exemption is not about taxes, rather it speaks to the deliberate attempt of Jesus’ to overturn halakha. Blomberg reports "This fits [Jesus’] consistent rejection of Jewish civil and ritual law; believers are now free from the Old Testament requirements."

The challenge here is one presenting the evangelist’s Jesus who is not internally at war with his own ideology. On more than one occasion, he declares that there is a righteousness in keeping Torah or in performing sacred ceremony or ritualism. We hear Jesus tell John that they must “fulfill all righteousness.” We see Jesus read from Torah to initiate his public ministry or tell the blind man to go give the offering of Moses once he is healed. We see Jesus go up to Jerusalem for Passover and find him at the waters on Sukkoth, an important part of the ritual celebration. There is also the Jesus who tells us he has not come to abolish the Torah and that as long as heaven and earth remain, not one jot or tittle will pass from it – those jots and tittles could have something to do with the matres lectionis, could be connected to midrashic statements about the use of vowels that help with the rendering of sounds, which were thought to be in the Oral tradition of Torah but rejected by Karaitic tradition. The Greek uses the words “iota” and “keraia.” Some scholars have suggested that iota may be representative of the Hebrew “yod,” and keraia may represent Greek diacritical marks or the hooks in Hebrew and Aramaic letters. It may even refer to the widely interpreted use of crowns that appear in some Torah scrolls and the Latin Vulgate, of which one Midrash expresses Ezra’s concern in being challenged by Elijah as to their origins. Or more broadly, it could refer to the idea, and a more popular option, that the Law given to Moses comes from God and God will not invalidate his words on any account.

The problem with the story remains the challenge of putting it in its proper context. If Matthew was written in the post-Temple period (after 70 CE), the idea that this is a Jewish temple tax logically means that Jesus’ identification of the children of the kingdom is one that puts those who follow him at odds with those who are non-believing Jews. That is to say, Jesus is making a very strong and deliberate break with his Jewish roots by indicting those Jews involved with the daily routine of the Temple as being those outside the kingdom of God.

But another interpretative possibility should also be considered. If one believes that Matthew is writing in the post-Temple period, he could have very well merged two realities. After the destruction of the Jewish temple, according to those like W. Carter, taxes (Fiscus Judaicus) were paid to Rome. Because Rome was in every sense a true kingdom, having come to dominate the world of its time, the tax was imposed on certain jurisdictions like Jerusalem that, while succumbing to an occupation force, did not itself allow Rome to exercise full power.  Taxes were often imposed on those provinces that did not allow Roman certain jurisdictions. To become a "part" of Rome was to avoid the Roman tax. To have Roman citizenship like Paul was to avoid taxation. In essence, while writing with regard to the temple of Jerusalem, Matthew may actually be thinking of the Fiscus Judaicus that was collected for the Jupiter Temple. This temple was razed in 69 BCE when Vespasian’s army entered Rome only a year before razing the Jerusalem temple. In either case, the argument does not rely upon Matthew reaching back into history and reinterpreting the events, since both events occur before Matthew’s writing, but a question of whether there was a mandatory Temple tax in Jerusalem or whether the monies being collected was actually for the rebuilding of the Jupiter Temple remain the question. More internal evidence from the scriptures finds that on two other occasions, Jesus is directly caught up in opposition to Roman taxes (Matthew 22:21), and in the latter instance (Luke 23:1-4) an accusation of his civil disobedience is used against him at his trial.

While New Testament scholars tend to focus on the affirmative dimension of Jesus’ mentions of kingdom as the spiritual and/or physical reign of Messiah, it may be here in Matthew that the more formal sense of being a part of the physical kingdom of Rome is more appropriate.  Of course, if Matthew is writing before 69 CE, then we are left with the problem of supernaturalism and must consider the charge of vaticinium ex eventu.

So with the interpretative possibilities in front of us for understanding Jesus’ place with the temple tax, what is this strange affair of the fish in the story and can it shed light on the story’s origin?

R. T. France writes, "I have not listed the incident of the coin in the fish's mouth (Mt. 17:27), as there is in fact no miracle recorded there: Jesus' proposal to Peter is not said to have been carried out, and it has been suggested that it was a playful comment, based on a popular story-motif found in both pagan and Jewish sources (Herodotus iii.42, b. Shabbath 119a), and not meant to be taken very seriously."

Shabbath 119a records the story of a Joseph who honors the Sabbath. He goes to a certain gentile who is warned by soothsayers to sell his property before Joseph comes because he apparently was a crafty businessman who was about to buy up his land. After this gentile sells all his land for a precious stone (a story reminiscent of Jesus’ parable one’s passionate desire for heaven), he drops the stone in the water. A fish swallows it up and later at a marketplace is sold to the same Joseph who opens the mouth and reveals the precious stone worth thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii. The moral, according to this tractate, is those who honor the Sabbath, are repaid by the Sabbath. It is in this context that one imagines Jesus’ honoring of the temple tax is that his honor is repaid by the gift of the drachma from the fish.

The challenge of dating Tractate Shabbat is the challenge of dating anything in the Talmud. We do not have enough reliable information. Though there are some that maintain much of the Talmudic tradition is old and passages like this in Mas. Shabbat probably recollect an ancient Jewish parable. Of course, there are many places in the Talmud that cross with the gospels and one finds the retellings of the parables include their own unique conclusions. And the story of fish goes through various incarnations from ancient Greek and Sanskrit literature. But the question of whether this goes back to Jesus or whether the evangelist was familiar with a version of the story and adapted it to Jesus’ situation is a tantalizing one. At best, it proves once again, that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time as much as he could be an invention of his biographers’ theological ambitions.

-------------------------------

p. 86 Jesus the Radical: A Portrait of the Man They Crucified"  R. T. France

W. Carter "Paying the Tax to Rome as Subversion Praxis: Matthew 17.24-27," JSNT 76 [1999].

On the Third Day He Rose According to the Scriptures

So in my Episcopal Mass today, I started reflecting on my Roman Catholic roots during the recitation of the Nicene Creed. I thought it was unique to the Episcopalian church that finds this distinctive reading of the Nicene Creed in the following line about Jesus’ resurrection:

“On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.”

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, we recited the version as follows:

“On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures.”

Now, as far as English translations go, the words have a different feel and even theological projection. Reading the Episcopal version, there is a sense that what happened was as it was, and the Scriptures authenticate this remembrance. But the Roman Catholic version seemed to retain a sense of the supernatural. For Jesus’ raising from the dead to life was a fulfillment, i.e., the Scriptures spoken of here seemed to refer to the Old Testament Scriptures being fulfilled in the New Testament’s record of the event. I do note that a 1850s Roman Catholic prayer book retains “according” to the Scriptures, so I can’t say with any confidence why the versions differ or why one survives in the Mass, but interesting nonetheless.

 

Remembering Peter, the Undercover Jewish Pope

Since this is the season of popes, I thought a popish story from an unfamiliar source would be fun. There is a curious legend that remains a part of the history of the Nishmat, a Jewish prayer, that most Christians would not be familiar with, though for Jews, it appears in the early morning prayers on Sabbath and also in certain holiday remembrances, and more specifically Passover.

The prayer itself, oddly enough, is commemorated in one particular commentary as the work of Peter the Apostle, here remembered as the first pope of the Church. The version from which this comes is Rabbi Simhah of Vitry’s commentary on the Nishmat who writes:

And there are those who say concerning that reprobate Simon Peter the jackass, who is the error of Rome, that he established this prayer first along with other prayers
when he was on the rock.
But God forbid, no such a
thing should occur in Israel.
And any one who says this thing,
when the Temple is built, he
shall bring a fat sin offering.

- Mahzor Vitry

Dr. Barry Freundel points out a couple things that are worth some attention concerning this association with Peter:

The designation of Peter as a jackass, comes from a reading in Exodus 13:13. Here, the name Peter is used by R. Simhah as a play on words. A "firstling" in Hebrew is the triconsonantal word רפֶּ֫טֶ, or peter.  In the context of Exodus 13:13, the verse reads:

And every firstling of an ass you shall redeem with a lamb; and if you will not redeem it, then you shall break its neck.

It’s a typical example of peshar, or as Westerners might say more derogatorily, proof-texting.  More importantly, is that Simhah lived at the time of the crusades and like many of his Jewish brethren was subject to persecution by Christians and Muslims. Simhah is pointing to a legendary account that was popular among Jews and derives from an interesting reading of Mark 8:31-33 along with Matthew 16:13-19. I will not reproduce them here, but the passages have to do with Peter’s rebuke of Jesus and then his recognition of Jesus as God’s chosen vessel. As Freundel points out, the thought was that the change expressed by Peter from doubting Jesus’ message to understanding him as part of a divine plan was not interpreted as a conversion story by some medieval Jews but was seen in the context of a more subversive plot. The legend suggests that Peter was approached by the Rabbis who helped him become the Pope in Rome because “Rabbis were concerned that early Christianity looked too much like Judaism, making it easier for the evangelists of their day to bring Jews into the Christian faith.” (Freundel 2010: 102)  So Peter was told to move the Sabbath to Sunday and get the Christians to adopt different holidays then the Jews. Incidentally, this same kind of intentional deception is recorded in another story in which Paul is told to go into all the Gentile countries and preach a Jesus that is not Jewish (see Toledot Yeshua).  

According to Freundel, Peter therefore maintains a secret Jewish identity despite being a Converso in a high office. “For those suffering persecution during the crusades, the tale of Simon Peter’s courage in the face of adversity would offer much encouragement for [the Jews] to face their own burdens as well. This might be yet another, less public, reason for the significant popularity that Nishmat enjoyed within the Jewish community in this era.”  (Freundel 2010: 105)

Reference:  

Freundel, Barry.  2010. Why We Pray What We Pray: The Remarkable History of Jewish Prayer. Israel: Urim Publications.

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Execution a Christian Martyrdom?

In her latest blog, Professor of New Testament literature at Notre Dame, Candida Moss, whose latest book challenges the authenticity of martyr/persecution narratives that come out of the ancient world and reproduce in contemporary Christian culture, draws attention to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the problem of his own hagiography.

Bonhoeffer died at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. Moss’s short entry begins with a quote from Keith Clements:

"A grim but telling footnote points out that the oft-quoted, pious 'reminiscence' of the camp doctor who 'witnessed' Bonhoeffer's execution at Flossenbürg, implying a quick and easy death following a final prayer, is now known to be untrue.  Bonhoeffer's death, like that of the seven other conspirators executed that morning in April 1945, was one of barbarically slow, repeated strangulations."

Keith Clements, reviewing Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: martyr, thinker, man of resistance, by Ferdinand Schlingensiepen (trans. Isabel Best, London:  T & T Clark, 2010), in Theology 114, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 123 (122-123).  The footnote to which Clements refers is apparently no. 8 on p. 406 (from p. 378):  "The report by the SS doctor H. Fischer-Hüllstrung, in Zimmerman (ed.), I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is apparently a lie (DB-ER 927f.).  The doctor could not have seen Bonhoeffer kneeling in his cell, neither could Bonhoeffer have said a prayer before his execution and then climbed the steps to the gallows.  There were no steps.  Fischer-Hüllstrung had the job of reviving political prisoners after they had been hanged until they were almost dead, in order to prolong the agony of their dying.  According to a Danish prisoner, L. F. Mogenson, the executions of Admiral Canaris and his group were drawn out from 6 a.m. until almost noon.  Cf. Mogenson, 'Ein Zeuge aus dem KZ Flossenbürg (A Testimony from Flossenbürg Concentration Camp)', in R. Mayer and P. Zimmerling (eds.), Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Mensch hinter Mauern.  Theologie und Spiritualität in den Gefängnisjahren (Man Behind Walls:  Theology and Spirituality in His Years in Prison), 1993, p. 107".

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Many involved in Bonhoeffer scholarship have continued to reject this story, not the least of all because of the inferences listed above, but because those who later sought out the mysterious so-called doctor H. Fischer-Hüllstrung had difficulty tracking him down except for the only known confession that found its way into Wolf-Dieter Zimmerman’s book, I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Catholic Bonhoeffer scholar Ernst Feil in his monograph Die Theologie Dietrich Bonhoeffers: Hermeneutik Christologie, Weltverstandnis, notes that until 1993, the presiding view was that the doctor’s testimony was correct, and the testimony of L. F. Mogenson helped to problematize the earlier testimony. The words that Bonhoeffer apparently uttered at the scaffold (though this was by no means the type meant for public consumption) are also difficult to place because at times they are reported, for example by Schlingensiepen to have been uttered prior to his execution in which he asked Payne Best to relay them to Bishop Bell of Chichester upon his death. However, with the words being said on the scaffold, Bonhoeffer’s execution can be deployed as a moment of good vs. evil, of Christianity vs. the world system. Of course, any martyrdom seems to rely on the motives of the executioners, and there is simply no evidence that Bonhoeffer was being killed because he was a Christian, whereas a better argument might be made for the executions of Franz Jägerstätter or Alfred Delp as martyrdoms, because both were excoriated for their associations with the Jesuits. These are important distinctions worth considering.

 Nevertheless, this story of Bonhoeffer’s final moments continues to perpetuate itself to the martyrdom cult who looks high and low to find worthy Christian heroes. Veggie Tales writer Eric Metaxas, whose New York Times bestselling biography on Bonhoeffer, which has been a hit among lay evangelicals and which relies entirely on secondhand accounts of the incident and almost entirely upon Bethge’s earlier work, considers this final speech a piece of authentic history. And unfortunately this trend continues, as I recently encountered in J. Aaron Simmon’s book God and the Other, published in 2011.

With regard to ancient and historical martyrdoms in general, Moss's most interesting point came in response to feedback on her post. One might expect that the feature of torture found in so many martyrdom accounts lends itself to the martyrdom narrative as an inextricable and salient feature. The story of Bonhoeffer, however, most likely incorrect, is that while the story retains the tag "martyrdom" in the popular imagination, the feature of torture is sanitized and Bonhoeffer's death is portrayed as quick and efficient. With the torture and perhaps even the recanting of one's faith, one has trouble making this fit comfortably.

For Dr. Moss’s original entry:

http://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2011/03/cost-of-discipleship.html

Report on My Presentation and Experience at the Spalding Symposium, Oxford University

I recently arrived back from the 38th Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions held at Merton College, Oxford University, England. My paper presentation explored the unexplored ground of prison letter writing as a theology of presence. To make my case, I compared numerous letters written between the time of the Raj in colonial India and those in Nazi Germany. I opted for this comparative analysis to press the point of the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon while at the same time locate this theological analysis precisely in its historic context, as opposed to say a fixation with a transcendental universalism.

Overall, the conference was largely taken up on the issue of secular peace building, where the religions in question were simply the historical realities wherein various problems presented themselves. Those theologians, including myself and Hindi theologian, who attempted to speak through the traditions, were perhaps the odd-men-out, as our approaches tended to call to mind that the religious basis of the conference was more than simply an opportunity to speak, but that the religious language of a conference based on religion can appropriate its own language to confront the challenges at present.

Concerning my own paper, the topic elicited a few positive comments. The one negative comment, which I believe failed to grasp the paper as whole, was concerned with my use of one individual, Veer Savarkar, whose jail letters I used briefly to suggest the way in which the penology of censorship was often confronted by various individuals. The commenter suggested that Savarkar can only be understood in his historical niche, and therefore to abstract him into such a project did not seem to exist in the realm of possibility. I simply responded that I choose from Savarkar prison letters that were not themselves political charged, and therefore, to accuse in Savarkar a political motivation that underlies all that he thought, wrote, and spoke, would be to turn him into a one-dimensional caricature. Rather, the point of choosing politicians, religious figures, and social activists, and pointing out the similarities in their writings despite their historical occasion, was precisely the point of a theology of presence, which, while historical, is not bound to the historical modus operandi.

Despite this, my paper was largely an attempt at speculative theology in the context of peace building. I’m hoping to address the comment that was brought up by the one commentator, and did indeed address most of it in a preliminary draft, but opted to remove it because of space and time considerations. The hope is to present the paper for publication through the conference’s journal ROSA (Religions of Southeast Asia).

The Judaism Behind Palm Sunday and Why Jesus Most Likely Did Not Enter Jerusalem During the Passover Week

As we are entering into Palm Sunday tomorrow, I wanted to reflect for a moment on this event as it occurred in the gospels. Christians have long been told that Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem coincided with Passover. The reason for this has profound theological implications; namely, Jesus would be the Passover sacrifice that would save men from their sins. While theologians like to place bets just on how much Jesus actually understood of his mission, more importantly, the question of whether he entered on Passover becomes important to how we can interpret a theology that for Christians relies heavily on this sequencing. But there is another explanation as well: Jesus triumphal entry had nothing to do with a hidden theology that would only be known to the faith community in its soteriological expression and was most likely a confusion of two separate Jewish holidays.

One thing everyone does agree on: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was very much a messianic event. The prophecies attached to Jesus coming into the city are taken from the book of Zechariah. Depending on which account you read (Matthew or Mark), Jesus enters into the city on one or two donkeys (also an allusion to Zechariah). The Christian tradition prefers to understand the messianic prophecies with regard to Passover, so his crucifixion takes on an entirely new meaning. While his sacrifice takes the place of the temple animal sacrifice, the messianic king does not conquer kingdoms, he comes to conquer sins. He does not establish a physical kingdom on earth but a spiritual one. Passover is also associated with the return of Elijah as the messiah. So early Christians must have thought that this would have been the most appropriate time for Jesus’s return. Jesus himself is confronted with this important Jewish belief in a few places in the gospels, a charge which Jesus deflects.

Having said all this, the problem is the tradition of Palm Sunday is probably misplaced in the Jewish calendar and has nothing to do with Passover. Rather it was most likely Sukkoth when Jesus entered Jerusalem, a festival that happens months earlier and would mean that Jesus was not arrested and held for a week, but probably much longer. In fact, it would mean that the Last Supper too would have not been a Passover Seder but rather a common meal.

The textual evidence is as follows: The people who come to greet Jesus do so with shouts of Hosannah and with palm “branches.” Why would so many people have palm branches available to them, especially since this does not show up anywhere in the Passover ritualism or in the prophecies of Zechariah? Where the use of palm fronds DO show up is during Sukkoth (Leviticus 23:40). The lulavim (כפת) are made up of unopened palm fronds used in the construction of the Sukkoth (booths) along with the symbolism of the etrog (citron) as well as other types of wild growing vegetation like myrtle. The praises of Hosanna that Jesus is confronted by as he enters the city are important to Judaism primarily at Sukkoth when the Jewish liturgical prayer cycle called the "Hosanna service" is recited each morning of the festival. Another interesting note with regard to the Last Supper is that during the Passover Seder, matzot would have been eaten, but the gospels tell us that it was bread. While this is unspecific, it might suggest that this was not the unleavened bread eaten by Jews.

So as you prepare for Palm Sunday tomorrow and the traditional Lenten calendar prepares us to enter into the week before Jesus’ execution, by observing a week between Palm Sunday and Easter as well, remember that it might have been a number of months before Jesus was actually sentenced and executed from the time he entered Jerusalem.

Is There Righteousness Outside of Christ? A Reading of Mark 2:17

I want to focus on a particular verse that has caused me to pause for a number of years.

It comes from Mark 2:17 in which Jesus says he has not come to call the righteous but sinners. The call, as it were, is to repentance, the Hebrew meaning t’shuva (to turn).

All the best translations read “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Only the New Living Translation (NLT) adds the words “who think they are” righteous. If we adopt the plain interpretation, then what this means is that Jesus was indeed acknowledging the righteous in distinction to the unrighteousness of others. How does this verse function?  Almost invariably the focus on this verse is the problem caused by the word “sinners.” Who are the sinners? Are they the tax collectors like Levi who appears in this context? Are they an amalgam of different groups?

When we consider the audience to whom Jesus is addressing his response, we see it is not his disciples, but the perpetual foils of his ministry, the Pharisees. So Jesus appears to be telling the Pharisees that he is not calling them “the righteous” but is calling sinners to salvation. We are of course not to believe that the Pharisees are righteous. After all, they continually antagonize Jesus with questions, which is not at all problematic in the rabbinical haberim tradition, but is often set up this way in the Christian scriptures due to a reading of Jesus’ special authority to make statements that we are to believe are unique even though many are rooted in Judaism. This is not to make a value judgment, but simply to say that Jesus was a rabbi of his time and would have spoken in a language that made sense to the people. This veiled accusation as we may call it pops up again in John, where Jesus heals a blind man but in turn indicts the Pharisees of spiritual blindness.

A common interpretation such as that made by conservative biblical exegete Ben Witherington III is that 17a is ironic. The Pharisees certainly can’t be righteous, but since they think they are righteous (as we can recall the exchange between John the Baptist) because they are born of Abraham, Jesus is calling them out subtly. Yet this interpretation of the data runs into problems. First it seems to create a special condition of unbelief in which Jesus is unable to win over individuals, namely those who are self-deceived. Second, if Jesus who is the embodiment of God’s salvation is not meant for everyone, we are dealing with special election. Saying some people are not even called conflicts with the larger picture of salvation we like to see when we take the New Testament as a whole. Interestingly, the NLT that adopts this reading as those “who think themselves righteous,” adopts a method of dynamic equivalence, i.e., rendering the Greek and Hebrew into “how it would be understood” by an English readership. That means the translators aren’t simply reorganizing the sentence structure to make grammatical sense of the Greek, but they are also imposing their own interpretative gloss. In either case, we’re left with a particularly demanding problem: We have a general sense that salvation is for all, at least in Pauline Christianity, for even Jesus commands his disciples not to go outside of the house of Israel. But now we have a case where we must explain why some are not worthy to be called, and the options left to us are simply that Jesus will simply have nothing to do with these kinds of self-deceived individuals who are in reality sinners themselves are that Jesus recognizes that there is a righteous element outside of his own unique call to salvation. In this second case, Jesus need not at all be speaking directly to the Pharisees, but may be speaking of a general condition of righteousness, which indeed we can see in other examples, especially with the pericope of the rich, young ruler. He acknowledges the Torah, saying that not one jot will perish from it, so that to be serious about this statement is to understand that those dimensions referring to salvation that comes by YHWH must remain real and effectual and unchanging to some extent.

The uniqueness of the salvation that we sense comes by the cross cannot be retroacted into Jesus’ earthly ministry with completely satisfactory results. This is because Jesus still acknowledges righteous behavior and behavior worthy of salvation outside himself. Acknowledging this means that when we read of another righteousness, it is a real righteousness that does indeed make sense of other verses in the theology of the Synoptics.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead - What Did Jesus Really Mean?

This is still one of my favorite explanations of a rather difficult pericope in the New Testaments. I reproduce it here. The essay comes from Gordon Franz but is largely based on work by Byron McCane (Duke University). While I don't agree with Franz's conclusion because it assumes Jesus had already established a soteriological understanding of his own death during the time of his preaching, it opens up an interesting question about different interpretations of the second resurrection in Jewish theology at the time. It may simply be that Jesus did not accept the atonement theory considered by some Jewish thinkers in the decaying flesh, though he did not assume to offer a competing explanation. Or it may be that at least during this time, the forgiveness of sins remained a matter of the Temple sacrifice, and to suggest the decaying flesh atoned for sins competed with this longstanding tradition that any traditional Jew may have rejected.

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LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR OWN DEAD

(MATTHEW 8:22; Luke 9:60)

Gordon Franz

There are two incidents recorded in the Gospels when a disciple requested a leave of absence in order to bury his father (Matt. 8:21-22; Luke 9:59-60). Although the requests appear reasonable, Jesus gave a seemingly harsh reply in each case: Follow Me, let the dead bury their own dead.

This statement is often considered a hard saying of Jesus (Bruce 1983: 161-163). Some critical scholars suggest that Jesus was encouraging His disciples to break the fifth commandment (honor your father and mother) by not giving their fathers a proper burial (Sanders 1985: 252-255). Is He really demanding this? Most commentaries suggest Jesus meant, Leave the (spiritual) dead to bury the (physical) dead (Fitzmyer 1981: 836; Liefeld 1984: 935). This interpretation, though common (Fitzmyer calls it the majority interpretation), is not consistent with the text and with Jewish burial practices of the first century AD.

Problems with the Majority Interpretation

Byron McCane, of Duke University, points out three problems with the majority interpretation (hereafter MI; 1990:38-39). First, it does not give an adequate explanation of the disciples request, Let me first go and bury my father.  The MI sees the request as a conflict of loyalties between the disciples responsibilities to their dead fathers and their commitment to follow Jesus. This minimizes the importance of the adverb first.  In each case, a disciple was requesting time to fulfill his family obligation regarding the burial of his father. Once this was discharged, the disciple would return and follow Jesus. Thus the MI does not explain the disciples request for time.

Secondly, those who follow the MI generally omit the words their own dead, because they want to distinguish between two meanings of the word dead.  Let the spiritually deal bury the physically dead.  However, the text says, their own dead, indicating that both occurrences of dead are connected in a reflexive possessive relation. There is no need to spiritualize the text regarding the dead; both are physically dead!

Finally, the MI goes against first-century Jewish burial customs. In the first century, when a person died, they normally were taken and buried immediately in the family burial cave that had been hewn out of bedrock. [For the archaeology of Jewish tombs during the New Testament period, see Rahmani 1958, 1961, 1982a]. This custom is based on the injunction found in the Mosaic Law, not to leave the corpse on an executed person on the tree overnight (Deut. 21:22-23). Two examples of immediate burials are found in the New Testament: Jesus (John 19:31) and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:6-10).

Immediately after the burial, the family would separate itself and mourn for seven days. This mourning period was called shiv�ah. It would have been impossible for the disciples to make their request if their father had just died. If they were the eldest sons, they were obligated by custom to immediately bury their fathers. If the MI is correct, the disciples would have been acting contrary to normal first-century Jewish burial practices.

An Interpretation Based on First-Century Jewish Burial Practices

McCane suggests an interpretation that is consistent with first-century Jewish burial practices (1990:40-41). After a body was placed in a burial cave, it was left to decompose. The family mourned for seven days. This initial mourning period was followed by a less intense 30-day period of mourning, called shloshim. However, the entire mourning period was not fully over until the flesh of the deceased had decomposed, usually about a year later. The Jerusalem Talmud states: When the flesh had wasted away, the bones were collected and placed in chests (ossuaries). On that day (the son) mourned, but the following day he was glad, because his forebears rested from judgment (Moed Qatan 1:5).

The final act of mourning, the gathering of the bones into a bone box called an ossuary, was called ossilegium, or secondary burial.  It is this act, I believe, that is in view in our Lord's response. [For a good discussion of secondary burials, see Meyers 1971; Rahmani 1981. On ossuaries, see Rahmani 1982b]. The disciples request and Jesus response makes good sense in light of the Jewish custom of secondary burial. When the disciples requested time to bury their fathers they were actually asking for time to finish the rite of secondary burial. Their father had died, been placed in the family burial cave, and the sons had sat shiv'ah and most likely shloshim. They had requested anywhere from a few weeks to up to 11 months to finish the ritual of ossilegium before they returned to Jesus.

Jesus' sharp answer also fits well with secondary burial. The fathers had been buried in the family burial caves and their bodies were slowly decomposing. In the tombs, along with the fathers, were other family members who had died, some awaiting secondary burial, others already placed in ossuaries. When Jesus stated: Let the dead bury their own dead, He was referring to two different kinds of dead in the tomb: the bones of the deceased which had already been neatly placed in ossuaries and the fathers who had yet to be reburied. The phrase own dead indicates that the fathers were included among the dead.

The Setting of This Saying

The Gospels record two incidents where disciples approached the Lord to request a leave of absence from following Him. The first request is recorded in Matthew 8. Jesus was about to take the Twelve across the Sea of Galilee to the Decapolis city of Gadara. Chronologically, this trip is the first recorded journey of Jesus to minister in Gentile territory. One of His disciples hesitated, probably because he did not want to go to those unclean, non-kosher pagan Gentiles.

So he made an excuse, Let me first go and bury my father.  He most likely appealed to the Jewish burial practice of ossilegium, or secondary burial, which would remove him from following the Lord for up to eleven months. Jesus saw this as an excuse not to minister to the Gentiles. As a result He rebuked him with a statement of irony and challenged the disciple to follow Him. Quite possibly this was Peter because he is known to have had a problem associating with Gentiles (Acts 10:9-22; Gal. 2:11-12).

The second incident is recorded in Luke 9:59-60. Another disciple, possibly one of the 70 (Luke 10:1, 17) was going to Jerusalem for the Feast of Succoth (Tabernacles) during the fall of AD 29. He asked to be excused for the same reason. It may be that this disciple was taking advantage of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to rebury the bones of his father in the Holy City (cf. Meyers 1971-72: 98, 99; Avigad 1962). If so, Jesus felt it was more pressing for him to go with the 70 to Perea than to rebury the bones of his father in Jerusalem.

In each case, the father had died more than a month prior and the Lord rebuked the disciples with the same stern statement.

The Reason for Jesus' Response

Why would Jesus respond in a seemingly harsh manner? The purpose of His response may have been twofold. The first purpose was to encourage the disciples to faithfully follow Him. The second purpose and perhaps more importantly, was to teach correct theology.

The concept of gathering the bones of one's ancestors is deeply embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures and reflected in Israelite burial practices (Gen. 49:29; Judges 2:10; 16:31; I Kings 11:21, 43, etc.). However, by New Testament times, the concept had taken on a new meaning. According to the Rabbinic sources, the decomposition of the flesh atoned for the sins of the dead person (a kind of purgatory) and the final stage of this process was gathering the bones and placing them in an ossuary (Meyers 1971: 80-85). Jesus confronts this contrary theology. Only faith in Christ's redemptive work on the cross can atone for sin, not rotting flesh or any other work or merit of our own (Heb. 9:22, 26; Acts 4:12; Eph. 2:8, 9). Jesus may have rebuked these two disciples rather harshly because they were following the corrupted practice of secondary burial.

Conclusion

An amplified (interpretive) rendering of this statement might be: Look, you have already honored your father by giving him a proper burial in the family sepulcher. Now, instead of waiting for the flesh to decompose, this can never atone for sin, go and preach the Kingdom of God and tell of the only true means of atonement, faith alone in Christ. Let the bones of you dead father's ancestors gather his bones and place them in an ossuary. You follow me! This interpretation allows for Jesus to have upheld the fifth commandment, takes the text at face value, and does justice to the Jewish burial practices of the first century. The interpretation is therefore consistent theologically, Biblically, and historically, and answers the critics accurately.