Thinking about Ehrman's "Demythologizing Jesus' Ethics"

Today in his blog post entitled "In Favor of Demythologizing Jesus' Ethics," Bart Ehrman raised the interesting question about the significance of Jesus' ethical worldview. Bible-believing Christians of course regularly take for granted that Jesus could be speaking globally and with complete foresight into an unchanging reality where ethical rules like stealing, murder, or fornication remain largely immoral. Of course, this is punctuated by the fact that many Christians think Jesus would have answers for abortion or homosexuality as a clinical and scientific disposition, or even fresher, the issue of stem-cell research despite the context of his world where the issues are not breached.

Ehrman writes the following as a teaser to his paid blog site. But there's enough here to think about the issue:

In previous posts, in answer to the question of whether I think that Jesus was a great moral teacher, I have said that I think the answer is Yes, but that there is a very serious caveat.  Jesus’ ethical teaching is based on a view of the world that most of us today no longer hold.  Jesus’ ethical teaching – just as all of his teaching – is deeply rooted in a form of Jewish apocalyptic thought that can be dated and localized to his time and place.   Jesus thought that the culmination of the history of God’s people, Israel, was soon to come, that the climax of all human history was at hand, that God was soon to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the powers of evil that were in control of this world to bring in his good kingdom, here on earth.   People were to live ethically in order to inherit that kingdom; and in fact, they were to begin to model the ethics of that kingdom in the here and now, so that when the cosmic judge of the earth came froam heaven, they would be saved from the wrath of God that would strike the planet before the true people of God were exalted and made rulers of the earth.

So, the short story is that I do not subscribe to this apocalyptic view myself (though I once did, in its modernized form).  I do not think there are actual cosmic forces in the world – the Devil, demons, cosmic powers of sin, and death, other principalities and powers that are wreaking havoc here.  I don’t think that Jesus was right about when the end was going to come (during his disciples’ lifetime) or how it was to come (with the appearance of the Son of Man from heaven).  I think that the entire framework for Jesus’ teaching was a form of Jewish mythology distinctive of Jewish thinkers in Jesus’ day, and that our modern world (again, except for modernized fundamentalist forms of apocalyptic thought) has a different way of looking at history, the powers who make things happen in this world, natural forces (that lead, for example, to disaster and devastation), and so on.

If Jesus’ basic world view (on which his ethics were built) does not translate into our modern world, does that mean that his ethical teaching, built on and rooted in that world view, also cannot be taken over into our modern world?  If the ethics was rooted in a system we don’t subscribe to, don’t we need to abandon not only the underlying foundation but also the structure built on it?

Ehrman admits he doesn't know. The tropological reading being entirely suggestive of an eschatological reality again, like so many things, requires we agree on the terms and conditions of what eschatology means. Ehrman uses the term "demythologizing Jesus' ethics" - a nod to Rudolf Bultmann, but he clearly is not thinking of eschatology in the sense that Bultmann does, namely an in-this-world experience that brings about existential crisis. For Ehrman, the literalist reality of a Jesus who thinks God is about to break into history as a supernatural event would be what he has in mind. As an historian this makes sense. To consider an ethical theory in a way other than one that has a literalist reality seems to grant too much to latter-day efforts by theologians to read back into Jesus' day an ethical reality that was perhaps too sophisticated to address the challenges of the kind of world he inhabited. When one thinks about Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, we may have the sense that these brilliant thinkers were simply trying to recover the biblical observations and insights of Jesus' time by channeling them through the category of theirs. I feel this as well. I could never entirely read Bultmann without a sense that he (and Tillich) thought that existentialism was something that always was. That is, wherever opportunity arose, Tillich could pick apart the pre-Socratics to find existentialism. Whether it is or is not there, perhaps the real problem was that the last century, so categorized by existentialist thought was not itself "existentialist," but given the realities of two world wars, an opportunity to "think existentially" came about. I would like to think this, and in doing so, this allows us to avoid the charge that modern ethicists are projecting a worldview on the past that wasn't there. I think this is what we can find in an affirmative reading of the existentialists like Bultmann who interpreted eschatology in an altogether unique way. And I think many theologians of our day have found traction in the idea that Jesus' eschatology was not about ushering in an "otherworld" but about bringing the kingdom to this world. Was this purely through political and ethical means. I don't think so. The idea remains how we approach scripture and how we want to read it. Enter in the very real situation of four different gospels with potentially four different communities and the way they thought of Jesus and there is a lot of opportunity for difference, a lot of opportunity to ask what we mean when we turn "Jesus' ethics" into the thought of an individual, rather than a community, the most severe of which comes in the gospel of John.

Anyway, it is a question worth thinking about and recovering. Certainly, the fact that we continue as the community of Christ to find his ideas resonating with us is reason enough.

Updates - January 2013

Much of my professional work has kept me from active blog entries recently. So I wanted to just update those who may peer into this electronic page. I just finished a review of Dr. D. Brent Laytham’s new book  iPod, YouTube, WiiPlay: Theological Engagements with Entertainment (Cascade Books, 2012). This was an excellent read and was accessible to opening a dialogue beyond the pages that contained his observations. I also have something similar in the works and so his insights were appreciated with regard to my own analysis. The review should be available in the next issue of the American Theological Inquiry.

I have had the privilege of working with some fine Bonhoeffer scholars, including Drs. James Pat Kelley, Holger Roggelin, Michael Lukens, and Philip Ziegler all of whom have promised or have provided feedback on my own Bonhoeffer manuscript. I believe that my position is a unique one with respect to an approach to ethics. Dr. Reinhard Krauss, also a well-known participant in the field of Bonhoeffer studies, will be writing the foreword to my book. This is a great honor.  My hope is to finish incorporating any necessary clarifications and have it off to the publisher by February.

Finally, I was also invited to prepare a paper for the 38th Spalding Symposium at Merton College, Oxford in April. This paper will focus on prison writing coming out of British colonial India and Nazi Germany. While there will be some component of colonial discourse theory, the challenge of this exercise is to compare two different global situations and to see how the writing from political and religious figures helps us to understand the influence of the incarcerated experience on those writing from within.

I was hoping to present a paper on Bonhoefferian ethics, the question of homosexuality and marriage to the Koinonia Graduate Student Forum at Princeton Theological Seminary in March, but alas, I submitted my abstract at the tail-end of the call for submissions. I was informed this week they had 85 entries and only a small number were invited to be presented. The paper I was planning to present there is basically finished. So I guess I’ll need to find another venue.

The Pathetic Fallacy, a Groaning Earth in Romans, and Possible Origins of Pauline Textual Exegesis

Paul’s explanation of the groaning of creation in Romans 5 may not be an original explanation for his understanding of sin, but part of a long history within rabbinical interpretation.  Appreciating this point helps us to appreciate Paul’s Jewishness and the tradition from which his words arise.

One of the most well-known midrashim (at least in Jewish rabbinic circles) with regard to creation, and which I think helps us to understand Paul’s exegesis, relies on a small nuance, that imprecision or mystery that appears in the text, often out of place, but becomes an opportunity for the creative yet arguably over-working minds of the Jewish Tannaim and sages of the earliest midrashic periods.

Christian theology has often taught that the suffering in the world that we experience and sin comes at the hands of other humans and through natural disasters. When we think of the question of the origins of evil, we often point to humanity’s first disobedience in Genesis and sometimes overlook the evidence for disobedience of creation.  The groaning creation of Paul is often read as figurative language for the absolute value of the fall of creation accompanying humanity.

The Jewish rabbinical interpretation, rather than suggesting that humanity’s fall brought about the fall of creation (as is more common in Christian theology) does something unique with the text.  In Genesis, we find that God’s punishes humanity for their disobedience, but that he also punishes the earth, causing it not to bear fruit without toil. Why is this? The theology supporting this seems to be based on a linguistic queue. In Genesis 3:11, the phrase “fruit tree that bears fruit” is replaced in Genesis 3:12 with “tree that bears fruit.”  The omission, which at first appears merely to be an unnecessary modifier since the bearing of fruit is accomplished in the latter half of the phrase, actually caused concern for early rabbinic teachers. Why in the second instance does the tree lose its attributive fruit-nature? Genesis Rabbah 5:9 attempts to resolve the inconsistency within the text. Rather than frame the modifier in verse 11 as a strange addition, they focus on verse 12, which omits the word. Here, they reason, what must have happened is that the trees were originally commanded to not only bear fruit but to become fruit themselves. When the trees actually do bear fruit but refuse to become fruit, it is accounted as disobedience. The trees themselves are possessed of will. Later thinkers like Maharal in his Gur Aryeh would assert that the trees did not possess a will but rather that God intentionally created imperfections (apparently between these verses) to challenge humanity and spur him to reliance on God. Part of the reason no doubt was given that in Genesis 1:11, God commands the fruit tree to bear fruit, saying “it is so” and then follows by praising the tree that is not itself made of fruit by saying “it is good.” Nevertheless, this form of the pathetic fallacy (attributing to non-humans characteristics generally applied to humans) is striking as an early attempt to imply a fundamental reason why God goes on to curse the earth. Though he is not explicit, Paul appears to accept this tradition, or at least the consequences that the earth has been cursed for some sort of willful disobedience, since the earth itself “groans” in anticipation of its own redemption.  Does this make Paul or the early Jewish rabbis pantheists? Probably not, as it was rather more important to resolve the text than work out the consequences of the said resolution. Nevertheless, this groaning earth, one might argue, places Paul squarely in the ebb and flow of his rabbinic contemporaries and the accepted traditions about the rebelling world that humanity occupies.  

How Luke Makes Jesus a Roman: The Custom of Dining in Luke 14

I am forever interested in the ways the Bible appropriates wisdom from the culture around it. And the Roman influence is significant as it concerns the New Testament. One of my favorite pastimes is finding obscure tracts of wisdom in Roman culture that are taken up in the scriptures. For example, Jesus’ admonition against putting new wine in old wineskins can be found in Martial’s Epigrams and so we must assume that it is far from an original wisdom saying with Jesus. So at a conference the other day on drinking and symposia in the ancient world, I ran across this passage by Horace. In ancient Greece, when men came together to recline and drink, they didn’t discriminate between rank and position (most of the time this was because the men were of equal station anyways). But in Rome, the situation is quite different. Rank, station, position are all taken into account when drinking with other men (or women, as became the case among the Romans) and were reflected in the seating arrangement. The passage below from Horace sheds light on a Roman symposium:

Nasidienus’ Dinner Party

I was there at the head, and next to me Viscus

From Thurii, and below him Varius if I

Remember correctly: then Servilius Balatro

And Vibidius, Maecenas’ shadows, whom he brought

With him. Above our host was Nomentanus, below

Porcius, that jester, gulping whole cakes at a time:

Nomentanus was by to point out with his finger

Anything that escaped our attention: since the rest

Of the crew, that’s us I mean, were eating oysters,

Fish and fowl, hiding far different flavors than usual:

Soon obvious for instance when he offered me

Fillets of plaice and turbot cooked in ways new to me.

Then he taught me that sweet apples were red when picked

By the light of a waning moon. What difference that makes

You’d be better asking him. Then Vibidius said

To Balatro: “We’ll die unavenged if we don’t drink him

Bankrupt”, and called for larger glasses. Then the host’s face

Went white, fearing nothing so much as hard drinkers,

Who abuse each other too freely, while fiery wines

Dull the palate’s sensitivity. Vibidius

And Balatro were tipping whole jugs full of wine

Into goblets from Allifae, the rest followed suit,

Only the guests on the lowest couch sparing the drink.

Horace - BkIISatVIII:20-41

So I was thinking of the way this works out in the New Testament and found this passage in Luke 14:8 in which Jesus warns those attending a wedding not to seek the highest place. The word here prōtoklisian can be translated many different ways, and you find it as “seat” in Aramaic versions, although in English versions it is usually translated as “highest room” or “place of honor.” Given the socio-context, the idea of a seat seems to make the best sense in the Galilee of Jesus as imagined by the Greek writing author of Luke.  As Willi Braun points out in his excellent book Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14, “Luke shows himself to be a master of narrative evocation of the Greco-Roman social dining scene.” That is to say, he uses the image of the Roman Triclinium, the three-sided room situated with couches on those sides and used by the Romans for socializing, drinking, and eating. And so we have example of Luke’s genius for syncretistic borrowing of situation to place on the lips of Jesus wisdom sayings about a cultural practice that relevant only to Luke's Hellenistic audience, and would have been anachronistic to Jesus' real situation.

The question of whether Jesus was acquainted with such customs is only of secondary importance and possibly not important at all. It seems more likely by those like Braun, that it is the Lukean writer, educated in his own right and writing in Greek, who was more than likely interjecting the influence of his own Greco-Roman world into Jesus’ world, and in doing so, appealing to a Gentile audience.

For more information:

Braun, Willi. Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14: Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series 85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Freedom is Not a Biblical Virtue

When we speak of freedom these days in the United States, one would think we are quoting a code of moral ethics that spans the pages of our world religions and is so robust in its conceptual underpinnings that to deny anyone their “human dignity” comes at the price of heresy.

The problem is of course that while every American President talks about freedom, and today, especially within the Republican party which uses it as a battle cry against left-leaning big government politicians, the concept has emerged as a vacuous hole, devoid of any unambiguous meaningful content.  We fight for the cause of freedom, but cannot define it. We call ourselves a nation where freedom reigns, but refuse to talk about its application except where it promotes our politics. The freedom we like is an American form. It is idealistic, but little do the ones who champion it the most know that it derives from the Enlightenment form of humanism than from a supposed divine origin.  

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, talk of freedom in the Bible does not exist. The freedom we speak of in our country is most often regarded as a civil and civic freedom, dare I say, a secular one that has been co-opted by politicians as spiritual rights. Freedom of religion is not the same as a theology of freedom in religion. And therefore, where both Democrats and Republicans remain true to this ideal of freedom they remain true to the ideals that launched in Europe hundreds of years ago in the renaissance of humanism that itself underpinned the founders’ framing of our own country.

The Bible discourages freedom. It does not opine about what a man can be in society (never mind a woman), but rather gives practical advice about minding and remembering one’s place. These references are scattered throughout the scriptures, whether it is the advice to slaves to obey their masters or mitzvot concerning the practical duties of the Levitical order, the subjugation of lepers and women. In fact, just about everywhere you look there is an underlying message of anti-individuality whether it is in rank and file order of custom, ritual, society, even lineages. Paul himself tells us that any man who thinks himself something must remember that he is nothing. Was this simply the call to avoid pride, while a thin thread of positive self-image writhed underneath the surface? Or was this the order of the day. The humble man, the one who denies himself the freedoms of self-expression, but who lives in obedience is the man who is truly free. This was the thinking of many a theologian in Germany in the last century. But it is so counter-intuitive to our American political theology that we would thumb our noses at such theological advice today.

Certainly, there are exceptions. We see David being promoted. Saul is promoted. But where those exceptions exist they are not given for the general advancement and welfare of the individuals making up the culture. Instead, they are often contextualized to fulfill God’s purpose, a purpose that time and again diminishes man to “drop in the bucket status.” Yes, David is in awe that God is mindful of him. But the question we must ask ourselves is why? Is it for our benefit or his glory? If it is for his glory, then we again run into an important theme in the scriptures.

“In a Beginning, God Created…” or Stretching Possible Interpretations of Genesis 1:1

During my first graduate school program, I did a whole paper on the interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2. Indeed, these verses have made for quite a bit of entertainment and controversy. One of my favorite possibilities alluded to in Genesis, comes with this very first phrase from the very first line: in the beginning.

Of course, this is not what the phrase says in Hebrew:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית

The root of the word is “head” reš with a bә added for effect. Scholars seem to think it means something like “at the head.” Of course the glaring problem is the absence of the definite article. But without the definite article, which would look like (ba)reishit instead of (bә)reishit, we are left with an awkward construction, namely: “in a head.”

Now perhaps it has been suggested that what is really being said is that creation began in the mind (head) of God. Other than making this a Matrix-type/Bishop Berkeley illusion of creation, the other possibility suggests that if we stay with the colloquial translation of “beginning,” we still are left with something like this: “in a beginning.” This is actually theologically consistent when one considers that the story of the flood and the rebirth was a beginning as well, and so Genesis 1:1 is not the most important beginning but is a beginning. This is also possible, if one considers that this most likely had nothing to do with creatio ex nihilo. And so God, working and fashioning pre-existing matter created “a beginning” by giving it form, the same way he creates a new beginning in the post-diluvian world. That is to say this isn’t a cosmological statement about the universe, but one about humanity’s beginning. The existence of the matter prior to its fashioning is of no interest to the author, but rather that God creates out of it a world for us. It is story thoroughly situated in our world!

There is still another possibility, and unless you are into ancient alien myths, the knights templar, and other Christian conspiracy theories, you’ll most likely not like this one, but I would caution that it is about as cogent a theory from a secular standpoint then it is to claim that Genesis 1:1 points to a scientific theory of Big Bang cosmology from the Niels Bohr particle.  That is to say, there is a modicum of faith that must be administered, in the same way one must tie any faith to his spiritual life.

Let’s propose that beyond the ancient texts, there is a God who is all-powerful and from himself begets reality. “In a beginning” may imply that there are also other beginnings, not important for us, but perhaps on other worlds. This was something I considered as I completed a very interesting independent study course on the Question of the Incarnation and Extra-terrestrial Life. After all, the vastness of the universe makes our own reality a bit absurd, even WITHIN the context of one’s faith. That God would reserve billions upon billions of galaxies for nothingness while we make up the only contingent of life would be an incredible tale. The crowd who considers that all of this is for us still seems not to have gotten past the Christocentricism and Anthropocentricism that despite science’s best attempts with Darwinism and Copernicanism remain hard at work in convincing us that we are prized creatures.

David’s question “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” need not be a statement of our solitary station in the universe or multi-verse for that matter. That God would mind anything other than himself seems an even greater statement than his minding us once you try to wrap your brain around what it means to be eternal and perfect!

The Importance Often Overlooked in the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth) and the Apologetic Motif in the Gospel of John

I had planned on writing a little something on Sukkoth this year, but the week was busy and the festival has since passed. But I still figured this might be of interest for some.

Sukkoth, known as the Feast of Tabernacles, makes an important appearance in the Gospel of John. As we are coming out of this holy time, which was commemorated on October 2, 2012 this year, I was reflecting on the importance of the event and how it ties into its most famous New Testament reference in the Gospel of John.

On the one hand, in John, chapters 7 through 9, we find a Jesus who is being pursued by the Pharisees because, as the gospel writer tells us, they want him dead. Jesus tells his disciples to go ahead of him into Jerusalem to celebrate the holy week (in Jesus’ day it was a seven day celebration), but latter makes his way there as well.

While John is no stranger to harsh depictions of the Jews, it is somewhat surprising to find those same Jews mercilessly hunting down Jesus despite the sanctity of the event, especially since during the passion they at least seem to revere the prohibition against his dead body remaining on the cross over Shabbat. The interesting correlation here is that Sukkoth commemorates the Jews’ wanderings in the wilderness when they carried with them the Ark of the Covenant while they set up a makeshift tabernacle where the ark would come to rest. With the construction of Herod’s temple, and before that Solomon’s, the Shekinah glory of God was provided a place of residence. We cannot be positive how Jews celebrated Sukkoth in the first century and most likely practices varied. At least one criterion, which depending upon whether you lived in a walled city, would determine the length of the celebration. During the years of the temple, the multi-day celebration and festivals, including a pilgrimage to Hakhel, and at least every seventh year, the faithful gathered in the Temple courtyard on the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot to hear readings, according to Deuteronomy 31:10-13. Other testimonies to the festival appear in Nehemiah, Leviticus, the Mishnah, Tosefta, and both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.

 It is interesting that the practice that comes down from the Rabbinic tradition is most commonly associated with building sukkahs, or makeshift dwellings, in imitation of the dwellings Israel’s ancestors must have inhabited as a nomadic people during the Egyptian exilic period.

Between chapters 7 and 9 in John, Jesus is chased from the Temple and finds his way to the outside where on the day after the seven-day long commemoration, he is said to have cured a blind man. There are some interesting apologetic motifs here, if indeed this was the author’s intention. In John 4, Jesus tells the Samaritan women that the true followers of God will not worship him in the temple or on the mountain (since the Samaritans believed Mount Gerizim to be the site of God’s coming to Moses and so ignored Jerusalem), but in “spirit and truth.” Therefore, Jesus’ being ousted from the temple during the time of a holy day that commemorated being “outside the temple” seems to be a symbolic but also a thematic point in the gospel of John, which of course makes sense when one considers that John, the latest of the canonical gospels was written after the Destruction of the Temple, and so was an attempt to write a narrative that downplayed the importance of the Temple in Israel’s destiny as a people.  Here then, perhaps John was eluding to the true meaning of the Feast of Tabernacles, which involved recovering a time in which those wandering in the wilderness were led by the presence of God. It is not without irony that at the culmination of this story, Jesus’ opens the eyes of a blind man, which the Pharisees who chase him out of the Temple believe he does to indict them of their own spiritual blindness. The Pharisees are indicted for working their form of Judaism from within the confines of the Temple, while John is attempting to show that the true power of God outside the temple. It is a classic Christian re-interpretation of the material.