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).