Part # 2
Making Christianity New Again: The Gospel of Veronica How can we proceed? What is necessary in order to begin? Resources for Study of the Bible There probably is no better place to turn for understanding what the Bible is all about than Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. As Ehrman has said, his students usually arrive in class fresh from Baptist Sunday School, thinking that they already have all of the answers, or, anyway, most of the answers. But he quickly disabuses them of any such idea because, as he explains on Day #1 of his introductory class on the New Testament, what he teaches is Bible scholarship, not lessons for devotional faith. And actual scholarship of the Bible is world apart from church schools where everyone agrees with every last word, probably without depth reading most of the holy book. Here is what some of Ehrman's students have said, these quotes taken from the website of Michael J. Kruger, Canon Fodder. Kruger is a professor, as well, and school president, at Reformed Theological Seminary, also in North Carolina. These comments are taken from the April 30, 2014 edition of Canon Fodder. * It was by far the most useful class I have ever taken..... I am an economics major but could not pass up the opportunity to take the class of possibly the world’s leading New Testament critic. You start by going through the Gospels and being introduced to the modern scholars' method of analyzing them (i.e. redaction criticism, form criticism etc.). Along the way he does his best to point out every saying, situation, and story that he believes is a “problem.”... * The title of the course is somewhat misleading. It indicated that you would be studying the history of the New Testament texts but that was only about one fourth of the class. The rest of the time was devoted to “critical issues” and the things in the New Testament that Bart feels are wrong or contradictory. He was quick to remind us that he was not trying to destroy anyone’s faith but every lecture was a barrage of “problems” and subtle hints that anyone who believed this stuff was foolish. Bart himself was a mixture of humor and arrogance. There were times when he was genuinely funny and lighthearted and many others where it was hard to focus on what he was actually saying because his condescending attitude was very distracting. * The reason that the class was so helpful is because it forced me to read, research and dig into the issues that were being brought up. I read many other books about the canon, the manuscript tradition and the teachings of Paul as well as countless hours of online video and audio lectures on the material. As a result, I feel extremely well equipped to defend my faith. I now have a solid foundation for understanding scholarly critiques of the Bible and how to think through what they are saying..... I do not believe that anyone should fear critical Biblical scholarship. The entire experience has resulted in my having a greater knowledge of and confidence in, the Scriptures. And for that, I am extremely grateful. After reading half of Bart Ehrman's books and viewing maybe 20 hours of his YouTube videos, everything his students have said sounds about right. His approach to the subject is, by my lights, indispensable. It is superior to anything any Evangelicals I know about have ever said. Yet it is entirely possible to disagree with some or many of his conclusions, also, just as his students regularly do. That is, Ehrman is a world class educator even if his powers of persuasion to his version of Atheism are, shall we say, not too swift. As for his classroom arrogance, this comes with the territory. As a former college teacher I fondly recall signing the Arrogance Pledge when I first became a member of the faculty at Alice Lloyd College in Kentucky, to always be arrogant, to let all your students know that they don't know anything, but that you will be a benevolent despot so they should not worry all that much. Ask any college teacher, they'll vouch for me about this. Why else would they have gone into college teaching in the first place? It is fun to be arrogant :-) However, let Bart Ehrman speak for himself. He once was an Evangelical believer and he knows that side of religious experience from the inside, which he has never forgotten. The following are remarks he made at a debate, documented at TBS -The Best Schools- website recently, where he defended the position that "The New Testament Gospels are not a reliable historical guide to the life, work, and teachings of Jesus." But Ehrman did not come out swinging, punching everyone on the nose, so to speak, to get their attention. Here were his opening remarks: "Let me say here at the outset that I consider the Gospels of the New Testament to be four of the most beautiful, powerful, moving, and inspiring books ever written. I love the Gospels. Their stories of Jesus’s words and deeds have always been and always will be near and dear to me. Among other things, I have always strived to make the values they promote and the ethics they teach the center of my moral life, and I encourage others to do likewise. For me they are the most important books in our civilization and for my own life." Those are my sentiments also, except to add something important that Ehrman did not say, namely, that I believe it is my responsibility to identify and tell others about the truths that can be found in these writings because, after all, that's the whole point of the story the Gospels tell. Yet maybe Ehrman says pretty much the same thing elsewhere. But for the record..... What he did say, when he continued was this: "That does not mean that I think they are always historically accurate. On the contrary, even though they do contain valuable historical information about Jesus’s life and death, they also contain a good deal of material that is non-historical. It is my task... [to] show why I think that is." "I should stress that the views I lay out here are not unique to me, as if I’m the one who thought all this up. On the contrary, the views I will be laying out here are those held by virtually every professor of biblical studies who teaches at every major liberal arts college or research university in North America. Take your pick: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Kansas, University of Nebraska, University of Minnesota, University of Florida, Amherst, Middlebury, Oberlin — literally, pick any top liberal arts college or state university in North America, and the views that I will be sketching here are pretty much the sorts of things you will find taught there." This is important to be aware of because "these are not the idiosyncratic ideas of some radical liberal professor with crazy ideas. These are the views shared by critical scholars around the country (and in Europe) who have devoted their lives to studying such things."' So said Bart Ehrman. Which is entirely true. Indeed, part of my own argument is that at least some modern era scholars were saying these things as far back in time as the 1950s, certainly since the 1960s, which means that divinity school grad students preparing for the ministry learned many of these facts decades ago, yet never even tried to educate their congregations to now-established facts about the Gospels and other Biblical texts. Or, anyway, very few ever made such an effort. This was never justifiable in the past and is even less excusable now. As Ehrman continued: "The Gospels are full of miracles from beginning to end. Jesus’s life begins with a miracle: his mother is, in fact, a virgin. Jesus’s ministry is one miracle after the other, as he heals the sick, casts out demons, walks on the water, feeds the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, calms the storm with a word, and raises the dead. At the end comes the biggest miracle of all: after he is dead and buried, God raises Jesus from the dead and exalts him to heaven, where he now dwells until the time when he will return to the earth in judgment." Here is the kicker: "For scholars prior to the Enlightenment, these stories were actual events of history." But the era of the Enlightenment changed everything, and bigger changes were in store in the 19th century with the rise of modern science. Which is to say that for educated men and women any thought of taking the miracle stories in the Bible at face value is close to zero. To say this a little differently, less and less people who have higher education backgrounds, who have college degrees or who at least have attended college for a few years, can possibly regard the miracle stories as anything but myths. The point of view here is that those stories may contain truths of different kinds, for example as models of good behavior, as reminders of the sacrifices of others on your behalf, and so forth. This is more than enough reason to treat these stories with some deference; in part because, if not for them we could well be worse as people, or, conversely, because of them we are better people, or more caring, or more thankful for things we might otherwise take for granted. Yet we know, from science, that miracles do not really happen, or, at most, are so uncommon that we cannot generalize about them. So, how do we re-create a faith that started out promoting numerous miracle stories? To cite Ehrman one last time in this context, we now -as a matter of routine- go to a doctor when we are sick. Science-derived medicine has proven "to be much more efficient in solving human illness than prayer and hope." And you can say something similar for astronomy, motivation for economics, meteorology, how human psychologies work, and many other areas of life. There is a worldview in the pages of the Bible that does not mesh with a worldview shaped by knowledge of the sciences. What some believers have done, of course, is to retreat into denial. For example in insisting that the world was created much as Genesis says it was and that, yes, there was a global flood which Noah witnessed from a large boat he built at God's instructions. But, contrary to Ehrman and also contrary to Evangelical true-believers, we do not need to choose between two inadequate worldviews, those of Biblical literalists and those of all-too-narrowly-focused materialist scientists. If we cannot accept literal Genesis-derived creationism, what about Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha, a short collection of religious writings that the scholars who produced the King James Version of the Bible said must be included in the book? For in Wisdom 19 we read that "as can be accurately inferred from the observation of what happened" it is clear that "land animals took to the water and things that swam migrated to dry land." Which is one of the earliest statements of a theory of evolution known. To the best of my knowledge there is only one that is earlier. Its ultimate source is a theory of the Greek philosopher. Xenophanes, whom most scholars thought had little influence, his idea dying with him in the 7th century BC. But the astute author who penned Wisdom of Solomon recognized his truth and turned it into scripture. Why, exactly, should we stick with a Genesis interpretation, especially one which many Fathers of the Church regarded as allegory, when a superior Christian (Judeo-Christian) interpretation is available just by reading a different passage in the Bible? As for the Flood story, of course it isn't literally true. Framed as an empirical theory it predicts absolutely nothing, it has no scientific value. But it also is a story that is well documented in Mesopotamian scriptures, indeed, in several versions. In the story as recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that predates the one found in the Bible by a minimum of 500 years and probably more like 1000 years, it is the Goddess Ishtar who causes the flood and who, later, regrets her decision and vows not to cause another deluge like that. But there are still other forms of the story known from India, from ancient Greece, and from a variety of so-called "primitive" peoples around the world. Which is not to say that such a flood ever happened but that the story resonates with human beings because it speaks to primeval fears, because it offers hope of human renewal despite disaster, and because it has an unforgettable moral, namely, sometimes people have something of a gift of unusual foresight, prophecy, and when they do, we ignore them at our peril. There is no excuse possible for looking at the Bible and judging it simplistically. The trouble is that most Evangelicals and other Christian believers only know how to read the Bible simplistically and most scientists and their Atheist followers also only know how to read the Bible simplistically. The Gospel of Veronica is intended to show people that there is a far better way to approach the Bible than the simple-minded way they are accustomed to. Sometimes the ignorance of Christian believers is an embarrassment. You can say the same thing for followers of other faiths, of course, but Christians often make the claim that the Bible is unique, that it has features not found in the texts of any other religion. Along with this goes the principle that the Bible is self-interpreting, that all questions about anything mentioned in its pages can be resolved by close examination of different parts of the book besides some passage before you that you do not understand; just look elsewhere in the volume. No other sources are necessary, in fact, for all practical purposes all other sources are forbidden because, so the theory goes, the texts of any other religion might lead a Christian astray. It is difficult to conceive of a more misguided viewpoint; this takes some kind of prize for anti-intellectualism and justification for 'divinely inspired ignorance.' Sometimes I watch 3ABN, the Adventist network; my MA Thesis was about the Adventist movement of the 19th century and it is one of my interests to this day. But, while the 7th Day people sometimes create interesting TV programs, like "Tiny Tots for Jesus," which is utterly charming, again and again it is painful to tune in to 3ABN. At any kind of "higher level" these are people who, while they may know the contents of the Bible like university scholars, are hopelessly clueless about how to make sense of almost any historical reference and habitually put their ignorance on display. Bad as that is, they are so sure that, after time spent in tracking down self-referential Bible passages, they do understand some difficult point. Except that if you are informed about history it is no problem at all to immediately see that they are operating on the basis of gross ignorance and wishful thinking. One of the Adventist shows is called "Table Talk." This features four "thinkers" of their denomination, men who are roughly 30 years old. Subject-for-the-day recently was the Tower of Babel. Which no-one had any idea of what it was, nor of what Babel was, or anything else about the story. So, to "explain" things the panelists speculated -guessed- about the meaning. It so happens that there are any number of good books about Babylon. My favorite was written by Joan Oates and is called, simply, Babylon. It was published in 1979 and in addition to being well written and informative, it has the virtue of many excellent images: Drawings, maps, floor plans of temples and palaces, photographs, and a chart. There are several pictures of ziggurrats, one of which, at Dur Kurigalzu, an archeological site in Iraq, has sometimes been identified with the Tower of Babel. Indeed, there is discussion of the tower in the book, everything said based on archaeological evidence. The tower was a ziggurrat, sort of a pyramid but with a chamber at its apex for Hieros Gamos religious rites. But was the ziggurrat in question constructed to reach to the heavens in order to usurp God? Only if you could say the same thing for Chartres Cathedral or Westminster Abby. In other words, the Biblical writer created what is known as an etiology, a memorable story to account for some phenomenon, in this case the diversity of human languages. But the story is what it is, both memorable and false to the facts of history and of the study of linguistics. In any case, don't expect many Christians to deign to read books like that of Joan Oates. They won't because, as they see it, they can't. They would risk compromising their immortal soul by studying anything by a "Pagan"or -worse- a heretic. This is especially pronounced in so-called "fundamentalist" churches but the close runner-ups are the Pentecostals who also have a deserved reputation for overt anti-intellectualism. How can an intelligent believer accept that viewpoint -and there are a good number of intelligent 'fundamentalists' and Pentecostals? You tell me, I really don't know. What I do know is that such an attitude is about as un-Christian as anything gets. >From references in his letters we can infer that the Apostle Paul read Pagan >philosophers, and there is clear reference to Stoics and Epicureans in Acts 17 as if Paul knew their views quite well. Also, the unknown author of Hebrews certainly was well educated which, in that era, necessarily would have meant schooling in Greek philosophy and other 'Pagan' learning. Besides, he wrote at length about Melchizedek, the "Pagan" king of (Jeru-)Salem, whom the Book of Genesis makes clear was not a Hebrew and represented some other religious tradition which Christ now represents as well, and you would suppose that the writer was reasonably well informed about that religion -probably similar to Canaanite faith of Phoenicia. He had to learn this from some non-Biblical source. But what was good for these early Biblical writers is not good enough for us? How is that supposed to make any sense? The Bible-only school of interpretation basically is a travesty. There is also this to consider: An Adventist preacher made the sweeping claim that only the Bible is based on a plethora of prophecies, indeed, that prophecies are absent from all other religious texts, hence it not only is superior it is unique. However: ( 1 ) How did the preacher 'know' this without reading other books of scripture? ( 2 ) Regardless, the assertion is demonstrably false. Although it is fair enough to note that no other book of scriptures places as much emphasis on prophecy as does the Bible, what about: Many references to the future Maitreya Buddha in Buddhist texts. References to the future Zoroastrian savior, Saoshyant, in Persian sacred literature. References to a future spiritual age in the Hindu Puranas. References to a future temple in Mormon religious texts, viz, at Independence, Missouri. References to a future semi-divine figure known as Li Hong, in Taoist texts, and References to a coming World Order in Baha'i literature. Maybe you can discount the examples of Mormons and Baha'is since they came along about 1800 years after Christ, but in the other examples this is to discuss religions that preceded Christianity by centuries. And we should not overlook the empirical fact that ancient Mesopotamian spirituality, which may also be called the Ishtar faith for the prominent role of the Goddess in this religion, was rife with prophecies. There is an entire scholarly book on the subject, published in 1997, Assyrian Prophecies by Simo Parpola of the University of Helsinki -which has perhaps the leading program in the world for the subject of Assyriology. There was a class of people in ancient Mesopotamia we would categorize as prophets or prophetesses and, while not many of the oracles they produced became scriptural, they did produce a large body of prophecies and these pronouncements were important in their religion. But there is a good deal more on this subject than one book; the scholarly literature about Mesopotamian religion includes various detailed papers about ancient prophecy. As well, both the Greeks and Romans made considerable use of religious functionaries who can be thought of as prophets or prophetesses. Hence the oracles at Delphi, at Dodanna, and elsewhere. The Romans had several different kinds of "prophets," most notably the Augurs, hence the English language words "augury" and "auspicious," and such phrases as "that does not augur well for the future." How can you -anyone- know these things unless you are willing to study the religions of the world during the years when the Bible was being written? Yet there are 'Christians' who are convinced that it is virtually sinful to do any such thing on pain of supposed hellfire and damnation. It us difficult to think of anything as ill-advised and, candidly, stupid. It may also be treacherous. What if you -somebody- was corresponding with a believer who had this view and held it as a moral imperative? The believer doesn't need to tell you anything about this, but, thinking about it, maybe you now come to the conclusion that this explains a great deal. Like why your views are often misconstrued. Maybe you explained them in detail in an e-mail all about religion but which was not read because, in the believer's opinion, that essay was an heretical document and should not be read on moral grounds. But it is OK to read a "secular" e-mail because any discussion of religion in it is incidental. In the process what you assume was understood was never understood because it was never read even when, for reasons of politeness, the impression was conveyed that, "of course I read it." To give you some idea of the problems involved. What does all of this say? That it is OK to make stuff up to pad your sermons? That you do know better but that it is OK to lie to people in your congregation? Or to be misleading to friends? That you are ignorant and don't care if you make mistakes about the historical record because you do not respect fact-based research? Or because you regard it as sinful to read something by a heretic? In so many words, nothing excuses such shortcomings, nothing at all, and to try and dignify the kind of ignorance this outlook produces on grounds of a doctrine that isolates believers from the wider world of ideas and education, is antithetical to any kind of authentic Christian faith that I can think of. It isn't just the Religious Left that can outrage me, it is also the Religious Right. Which is a point of view that should be regarded as foundational to the Gospel of Veronica. As much as it can be done, none of the mistakes of the past should be allowed to reappear in this new gospel. Writing any new gospel poses special challenges for any would-be author. Kruger's discussion of Ehrman highlights still another difficulty. Ehrman we are told , says that "the Gospels are not direct recordings of eyewitness testimony but retellings of stories that were exchanged, and thereby reinvented, among members of the Christian community of their time." Hence, while this conclusion can be disputed at least somewhat because of the existence of the "Q" document, admittedly there is only so far anyone can go. There also are a small number of agrapha, 'Jesus sayings' that were circulated orally and not written down until some point in the second century AD, but there is no guarantee that these sayings are accurate, either. Presumably a few sayings in the quasi-Gnostic "Gospel of Thomas" There are some conservative scholars who nonetheless maintain that we can know whether most if not all of the Jesus quotations in the Gospels are his authentic words, but the chief proponent of this view, Richard Bauckham, author of the prize-winning book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, has been skewered by Ehrman for his (Bauckham's ) reliance on Papias, who was not contemporaneous with Christ, and thus is someone else who simply cannot be regarded as trustworthy even if he had the best intentions in the world. So, serious questions remain and won't go away because there are no sure solutions to the problem. That is, a new gospel would, you would think, require some new sayings by Jesus. Where, though, can anyone get them? New sayings can be invented but on what basis? Keep in mind that this is serious business. Falsely attributing to Jesus words that might compromise what he actually believed should be regarded as totally out of bounds. Yet all we have, even though we should be thankful, are the canonical Gospels plus whatever the literature from Nag Hammadi might give us by way, mostly, of the Gnostics -who, however, could be wildly speculative. And that's it except for miscellaneous fragments from classical era texts of various provenances, For the moment the best that can be done is to identify this problem and look for a solution from some unknown source. It would be a great help,of course, to know how best to read the Bible, any parts of it, because our customary procedures are seriously flawed. What can anyone take from the book if the only way you know to read it is literalistically, as if everything in it basically is undiluted historical reporting? It isn't the case that all of it is biased to favor one theological worldview over another, but that some of it is biased and some consists of mixtures of reporting and theological story telling. This is the conclusion that many scholars have reached, sometimes after decades of study. The problems with the text, with each separate text, are intractable. Just about everything is a mixture of fact and fiction. Extracting what is good and blessed and true from everything else is very difficult. But if you realize what the problem is, you at least have a chance to separate the wheat from the chaff. Yet many and maybe most Christian believers aren't even at that elementary stage. A book that is invaluable in understanding the problem for what it is, is a 2010 volume by L. Michael White, Scripting Jesus, The Gospels in Rewrite. The book starts with a description of the current situation, with most Evangelicals regarding critical Bible scholarship as a grievous threat to "the truths of the Gospels." But there also is danger in the Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, which present a different kind of Jesus to us, a mystic seer who speaks in theological jargon colored by exotic mythologies about strange ethereal creatures and a demiurge and all kinds of religious concepts unknown to the New Testament. Plus, as an added bonus, we get a very sexy Mary Magdalene who never was a prostitute even if the Catholic Church of the past tried to portray her as one. Instead, Mary Magdalene was the wife, mistress, consort, chief disciple of Jesus, who possibly bore the Lord a child who was raised in France, where Mary had gone to escape persecution following Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans. All of which might be easy to brush off except that the documents are very old, just two or three centuries after the era that Jesus lived on Earth. That is, for a lot of people, including some scholars, there is a reasonable claim to authenticity for a number of the Nag Hammadi writings. Still, so far, a loose consensus prevails that most of the Nag Hammadi texts are "pious fabrications" by Gnostics with a different agenda than normative Christians. But that leaves the more serious problem of discrepancies in the canonical Bible, with the Gospels being most problematic -although the Book of Acts is also partly mythological. Of course, some of today's issues have been known for a long time. Most glaring is the curiosity that the cleansing of the temple, where Jesus drives out the money changers with physical force, occurs at the very end of his ministry in the Synoptic Gospels, viz, Matthew, Mark and Luke, while in John's gospel this major event takes place at the beginning. How can this fact be explained coherently? As for attempts to reconcile these very different accounts, such as saying that Jesus expelled the money changers twice, there is no justification for any such "solution" in the texts themselves. He did this just once. But which was it? At the outset or at the end? How we interpret the overall story of the Gospels is very different depending on our choice. You cannot wish the problem away. And what kind of person was Jesus? As Michael White put it on page 7, for the author of Matthew, he was a "teacher of Torah." In Mark he was a "misunderstood messiah." In Luke he is presented as "a philosopher and martyr similar in some ways to Socrates." In the Gospel of John he is "a heavenly man come to reveal the mysteries of God." Christians ordinarily "solve" the problem by conflating these different portraits and combining them into a composite, but it is entirely possible to look at the Gospels one by one and arrive at very unorthodox conclusions. Especially interesting, and there is some purchase of the idea among a minority of scholars, is the view that the "beloved disciple" in John's gospel is none other than Mary Magdalene, which would square with some of the views in the Gospel of Phillip found at Nag Hammadi. >From a popular culture viewpoint this could also breathe new life into the currently dormant DaVinci Code, in case you were wondering. Be that as it may, there are problems with the canonical gospels and if there is one lesson that seems to be filtering into popular culture from critical scholarship it is the fact that the discrepancies cannot be swept under the rug any more. Some incongruities may be amenable to logical solution but others are simply too vexing to be skirted around or otherwise explained away. For instance, what do you do with the "sword verses"? Sometimes Jesus tells his disciples that weapons are a bad idea and they should not arm themselves, viz., he who lives by the sword perishes by the sword. But elsewhere we are told that Jesus instructed his followers to sell their cloaks in order to buy swords. How does this add up? For some people this is not a problem, of course. They aren't all that interested in consistency, what they want is some place where they feel they belong, or where their kids will learn good morals. If the theology isn't quite what it should be, everything is perfectly OK as long as nobody talks about the problems and discusses other matters. Truth can be sacrificed for sense of security and for the sake of cherished traditions. Actual truth doesn't mean all that much compared to peace of mind and feelings of identity. But this kind of attitude is precisely what has worn thin among the young who, if I am reading things right, demand truthfulness as part of any "religious bargain" they may make. And there have always been those conscientious souls who, quaint as it may sound these days, feel betrayed unless they are satisfied that the faith they belong to is based on solid truths. As long as difficulties with scripture were never mentioned, as long as these problems were ignored or glossed over, all was well. But what happens when at least some people realize that 'the emperor has no clothes'? For example, take the problem of genealogies in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke. These lists of ancestors of Jesus are not identical. Why not? Any true genealogy should match any other true genealogy. To be sure, there have been some ingenious ways to reconcile the lists in Matthew and Luke, but in a way even if there was perfect agreement between these gospels there is a very large problem that cannot be trivialized. If either genealogy is correct, or if some blend of genealogies is correct, the result would be that Jesus' lineage presumes that his biological father is Joseph. Thus God in Heaven did not impregnate the Blessed Virgin, the deed was done the more usual way. If so, then we do not have a Son of God from birth, we have a baby who grows to manhood like anyone else. However, this does not mean that there never is a Son of God. Especially since orthodox Christian theology requires that Jesus should be divine in some sense. In other words, the one tenable solution is to accept the so-called "adoptionist" view of things. Which , until some time in the second century AD, was acceptable in the faith; some early Christians believed in exactly this, in particular the Ebionites, quite possibly survivors of the first Church when it was headquartered in Jerusalem and initially under authority of James the Just. While this is uncertain, clearly the Ebionites were very early in the history of Christian faith and they were, by all accounts, "Jewish Christians" for whom a divine incarnate Jesus would have been completely unacceptable. Bart Ehrman discussed the subject in his 2014 opus, How Jesus Became God; see pages 230 - 235. According to Ehrman's research, which you can dispute but it was quite thorough, in the very earliest period Jesus was not said to have been born of a virgin, the Greek word actually means "young woman," Mary was in her mid teens, and that was that. Such was the custom in the era, which has been true throughout most of human history. In any case, according to Ehrman, the first Christology of the original Church was what would later be known as a "low Christology." This said that while Jesus may have been destined for great things, he needed to earn whatever status he would eventually attain. You might be able to say that he was the future messiah, but this was provisional, He needed to show himself worthy of the honor. Hence, Jesus started life as we all do, as a "mere mortal." But then, at some point when Jesus was about 30 years old, God on High determined that here was, indeed, the man who deserved to become his adopted son. Which is a very different status than the view now known as "high Christology" which maintains the view that Jesus has always existed, long ago in the Heavens, aeons before he became incarnate as a human being. But this outlook was not, according to Ehrman, how it all began. A high Christology would emerge fairly early in the history of the Church, but it was not how Christianity actually started. Ehrman prefers to use the phrase "exaltation Christology" rather then "low" Christology because it is more accurate and does not sound like some kind of inferior status. And the result, God having a son upon the Earth, is the same. That is, Jesus was exalted to his new status during the episode with John the Baptist at his, Jesus,' baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended upon him. That scene in the Gospels was, in effect, an adoption ceremony. This certainly makes historical sense. Ehrman cited a recent book by Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World, which refers to customs of that time in which a Roman emperor would pass the torch of office to someone whom he had adopted to become his de jure "son." This would be someone who had proved himself in war or in official business of the state, someone who could be trusted unreservedly, who deserved the honor. A biological son might eventually have sufficient talent but nobody could be sure if we were discussing a young boy still in elementary school, or even a teen who may have potential but has no accomplishments to his name. As well, favoring a biological son can all too easily be a case of putting one's ego before the best interests of the state, pride in parentage taking the place of anything like objective judgement. Hence, for some years, each emperor adopted someone to become his successor as Caesar had adopted Octavian, who is better known to history as Augustus. This system would have made very good sense in the context of early Christianity. As Ehrman explained on page 236, we can trace the development of Christology by looking at Christian writings chronologically, starting with the oldest documents of all, Paul' s epistles. Galatians can be taken to espouse an adoptionist view even if Philippians is ambiguous. Not mentioned by Ehrman, Hebrews 1: 5 also can be read as ab adoptionist statement: "God never said to any angel, 'Thou art my son; today have I begotten thee'..." That is, the angels are eternal, Jesus came into being at a point in time and at a turning point in his life he was adopted to become God's son. Who the author or Hebrews was is not known but he was someone familiar with Paul's beliefs. The author also said, which has its own importance, 'God brings many sons to glory'; this passage is from 2: 10. It is consistent with Deuteronomy 32: 8 - 9 as well as Acts 10: 35. Galatians 4: 4- 5 says that Jesus was "born under the Law," which implies a purely human status for him at his birth. Ehrman also cited Raymond Brown, a Catholic scholar, who observed that you can follow the development of Jesus'es status by seeing what it was in Mark, the oldest Gospel, then in Matthew, Luke, and finally John. In Mark, Jesus becomes God's son at his baptism; in Matthew and Luke, Jesus was God's son from the time he was born. In John's Gospel, he is "the Son of God from before the creation." What is clear enough according to the New World Encyclopedia, is that there were at least a few adoptionists of rank in the early Church, like Theodore, bishop of Byzantium, in the second century AD. In that same period of time the Shepherd of Hermas was written and for many years it was considered for inclusion in the New Testament, and it also advanced an adoptionist viewpoint. Somewhat later, Paul of Samosta, bishop of Antioch, was another adoptionist. Other Christians perpetuated the adoptionist idea until some point in the Middle Ages; the last adoptionist of note was Peter Abelard in the 13th century. Decide for yourself. The concept of divine incarnation has its own attractiveness and we find it in pretty much fully developed form in Mesopotamia no later than about 2350 BC, in the writings of Enheduanna, who attributed incarnation to Inanna, viz., otherwise known as Ishtar. That is, the earthly Inanna, an actual historical woman who lived in about 2650 BC, embodied the heavenly and eternal Inanna / Ishtar. It was Ishtar's husband, Tammuz, originally a man like other men on Earth, who was to be "exalted" to become a God. The same Tammuz who, we are told by Ezekiel, inspired women devotees to weep and wail for him at the Temple in Jerusalem. They did this during a Jewish month that is still part of the Hebrew calendar, the month of Tamuz (just one "M" in Hebrew). The name Tammuz became westernized and was well known in the time of Jesus: Thomas. Hence, when you think about it, Doubting Tammuz, St. Tammuz Aquinas, and Tammuz Jefferson. Or if you want to be more up-to-date, Tammuz Alva Edison, Dylan Tammuz, Tammuz Brady of the New Mesopotamia Patriots, Clarence Tammuz of the Supreme Court, columnist Tammuz Friedman, Tammuz Selleck the famous actor, and novelist Tammuz Clancy. What is a shortcoming in Bart Ehrman's writings is a limitation that is common -nearly universal- among Bible scholars of just about all backgrounds. They cannot for the life of them see any relevance to the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic and that, as such, since Aramaic had been the language of the Assyrian Empire, culturally it carried over all kinds of ideas from the Assyrian past. Instead, many scholars treat the fact that Jesus was an Aramaic speaker as a curiosity, as if he communicated in Navajo, something totally unrelated to Biblical history without any possible meaning for his biography. Instead, what it did mean was that he was open, or sometimes open, to Assyrian ideas. As much of that world as can be identified today is discussed in Parpola's book, Assyrian Prophecies. And we get two passages in the Sermon on the Mount that have been identified as originating with the Story of Ahiqar, an Assyrian sage whose book of wise sayings has survived -it was discovered largely intact among texts in a library maintained by an anonymous Jew at Elephantine in Egypt. There are other problems with Ehrman. Take the comments of PJ Williams in the December 31, 2005 edition of Evangelical Textual Criticism: "...if the history of textual transmission is as Ehrman maintains it is, then it is really rather unreasonable of him to be so certain that his reconstruction of the earliest forms of the text are correct. If there were scribes who not infrequently introduced alterations into their texts, and the changes they introduced were capable of spreading across almost the entire range of manuscripts available to us, then we must be rather uncertain of what the earliest form of the text is. At one level this is what Ehrman himself maintains. And yet time and again Ehrman claims to be able to tell us what is earlier and what is later, and something of the theological convictions and motivation of those who introduced a variant in the text." The point is well taken. Let's not make use of Ehrman's research uncritically. Bible research is a minefield, it is all too easy to make mistakes and, BOOM, a carefully crafted theory blows up and has no value. This is not to say that Ehrman should be ignored. That isn't the point at all. What is the point is that he is human like the rest of us and can arrive at this wrong conclusion or that wrong conclusion. To protect against the possibility we had better be very careful, if feasible to compare the work of more than one Bible scholar with Ehrman. As it turns out, there is one other Bible scholar who is indispensable for anyone who wishes to write Biblical historical fiction -or for that matter, to say much of anything about the composition of the Gospels or the Book of Acts. Indeed, it is not too soon to say that the entire field of New Testament interpretation has become unthinkable without taking into account the work of Dennis MacDonald, a truly remarkable scholar. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
