Thursday, December 07, 2023
JUDAS: NOT GUILTY
Just think of it. 2000 years. That is how long Judas has been waiting to have his name cleared. Almost all scholars consider Luke 6:16 the strongest piece of evidence against him. That verse is the only place in all the Gospels which uses prodotes, the Greek word for traitor, to describe Judas. But it is both illogical and immoral to use this evidence that way. In a court of law today, it would be called leaping to a conclusion. The witness claiming this would be instructed to testify only to concrete facts (what they saw or heard). And just to be perfectly clear, for example, testifying that the defendant murdered the victim is also leaping to a conclusion. We need the details of how it was done.
The use of prodotes at Luke 6:16 is evidence that some people way back when drew this conclusion, but it is not evidence that he actually betrayed Jesus. Luke gives us no details as to how they reached this conclusion.
This is not the place to go over all the evidence concerning Judas. I do that in
the first chapter of my book True Jew j(the book is more about Jesus than about Judas).
Suffice it to say that this is more than a matter of picking apart the case against Judas. It is also about proving what actually did happen, and it certainly was not betrayal.
Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com
Thursday, November 30, 2023
A PECULIAR KIND OF EXCEPTIONALISM
Israel has set itself the ambitious goal of getting rid of Hamas and its ideology. Considering that this ideology is thousands of years old, this will be quite a formidable task. Jews are demonized as the source of all evil in the world. They are called pigs and devils. They are portrayed simultaneously as weak and as all powerful. Their very existence is an insult to Islam and their existence in the mid-East is an even bigger insult.
Many years ago, around the year 1900, an early Zionist, Ahad Ha'am predicted that in the future, there would be increased humanitarianism for all sorts of people -- for women, children, prisoners in jails, and more. Except not for Jews. Why not? Wise men, Ha'am said, will answer this way: It's simple. When we think about Jews, we forget about humanity. And when we think about humanity, we forget about the Jews. Humanity for everyone, except the Jews.
So when we talk about what is humane and anti-humane, let us not forget who are the original and continuing victims of inhumanity.
Leon Zitzer
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
WAITING
Somewhere in the Talmud, a rabbi says that those who wait also serve. He may have meant they serve God's interests or the interests of justice. Either way, it's a very generous view. But I find all this waiting very hard to do.
I believe the same rabbi (maybe R. Tarphon?) also said that it may not be up to you to finish the task, but it is up to you to begin it. I feel I've done a good job at beginning to recover the very Jewish Jesus. It will be up to others to finish the job.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
UPDATE
Not much to say. Leon has not been feeling well, but will resume blogging as soon as he can.
Thanks for your patience.
This has been posted by a friend at Leon's request.
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
GUARDING THE FLAME
In a recent interview in the NY
Times Book Review (Feb. 9), novelist Gish Jen said that what moves her most in
writing are “people guarding some small flame against considerable winds.” Whether
she was referring to characters in fiction or the authors of such books, either
way, it is a beautiful understanding of what it means to stand up for the truth
in any social context that makes it difficult to hold on to that truth. And if
it is a beautiful insight about fictional characters, it becomes even more
poignant when you realize how much it applies to people in history and to
people studying history.
“Guarding a small flame” is a
good way to describe what I have been talking about here for the last few
months. It is a fundamental truth that you cannot use an accusation to prove the
truth of the accusation. That is reasoning in a circle, it is assuming your
conclusion. You cannot use a conclusion as evidence to prove the conclusion. Conclusions
are not evidence. This fundamental truth, this small flame, is violated almost
every day in historical Jesus studies. Scroll down and you can see in my recent
posts (the first one was in Aug. 2019) how I explored this in the ways scholars
build a false case against Judas.
I recently came across another
example of this kind of false logic in the slave rescue cases that took place
in Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. These were cases where
people were put on trial for interfering with enforcement of the federal
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 or other relevant laws. Slave catchers from a
southern state would grab a person of color in a northern state whom they
claimed was an escaped slave and attempted to return them to the slave state.
In some cases, a mob would successfully help the alleged slave escape from
custody, and then they made their way to Canada. The mob did not always
succeed. Successful or not, some of these rescuers would then be charged with
violating the law.
One of the issues that might come
up at their trials was whether the person seized by the slave catchers was
actually a slave. If he or she was not a slave, then they were not a fugitive
slave and there was no violation of the 1850 Act (which was an amended and
harsher version of the original 1793 Act). In at least one case, the judge
instructed the jury that evidence that the person had been bought and sold and
otherwise treated as a slave was evidence that the person was indeed a slave,
even though there was case law that this was inadequate evidence.
That is exactly the kind of false
reasoning I have been objecting to these past few months. Evidence that someone
has been treated as a slave only proves they were treated as a slave, nothing
more. It does not prove that the person was in fact a slave. The attorneys for
the rescuers argued in vain against the judge’s false logic. The judge’s
reasoning on this point was “small and second rate,” the lead defense attorney,
Richard Dana, noted in his diary. He was trying to guard a small flame against
an ill wind.
This was the famous case of the
rescue of Shadrach Minkins, and I should note that the prosecution was
unsuccessful in these cases. There were two acquittals, three hung
juries, and one mistrial. But the judge’s instructions still stand, though I do
not believe any judge or legal scholar today would endorse the circular
reasoning of this particular instruction. Judge Judy and Judge Marilyn Milian
certainly would not.
In historical Jesus scholarship,
this sort of bad logic is still being used. That is a tragedy by any measure.
© 2020 Leon Zitzer
Saturday, January 25, 2020
LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE, NOT CONCLUSIONS
For the past few months, I have
been dwelling on one point: The statement at Luke 6:16, that Judas became a
traitor, cannot be used as a piece of evidence against him. It is part of the
historical record, that is true, but it is only a record that this accusation
was made (the only place in the entire New Testament where Judas is called a
traitor) and you can never use an accusation to prove the truth of the
accusation. It is a conclusion someone drew, but a conclusion is not evidence
of the truth of the conclusion. What a historian wants to know is what is the
evidence that supports the conclusion. Luke never tells us. Nor do any of the
Gospels.
I have focused on this because it
seems like so many scholars, almost all of them, ignore this obvious point and
merely assert that Luke 6:16 is one piece of evidence that Judas did something
bad. It has a negative ring to it and that’s good enough for them. They have
abandoned good, fundamental, scientific reasoning in favor of asserting a
prejudiced argument. It is a sign of how biased this field is.
I don’t just mean biased against
Jews, I mean biased against ancient peoples. There is a modern assumption that
ancient peoples are inferior to us, they are like children compared to us, and
therefore different standards of reasoning have to be applied to their inferior
mentality. That assumption is so wrong. The ancients were just as rational as
we are. They knew the difference between accusations and proving an accusation.
Keep that in mind.
There is another way to put this.
Being a traitor is not something one can observe (by observe, I mean see or
hear). It is exactly like the claim that someone behaved in a hostile manner.
Hostility is not an observable phenomenon. You can observe the details that
make up the accusation of hostility—e.g., nasty words that were said, shaking a
fist, pointing a weapon, throwing a punch, etc.—and hostility would be a
conclusion that summarizes this evidence. But without that underlying evidence,
hostility is just an empty charge.
The same is true for the charge
of traitor. You cannot observe it. You can observe the details that make up
betrayal, if it happened, but betrayal itself is a conclusion that sums up the
observable evidence. Observable evidence for betrayal would be things like
sneaking around, uttering words like “I’ll tell you where he is hiding if you
pay me something”, arguments that occurred between the traitor and other
members of the group before the alleged betrayal, and even signs of animosity
after the event, such as other members of the group cursing out the traitor. All
this is missing from the Gospels. Just to give one example: If anyone who knew
Judas ever said a bad word about him, all four Gospel authors failed to record
it. The negative remarks about Judas come from the Gospel authors, not from any
of the persons within the story.
Does this mean that nothing in
the Gospels counts as evidence concerning Judas? Not at all. So far I have been
dwelling on the negative point that the Gospels give us no evidence for Judas’s
betrayal. I have been doing this because distinguishing between conclusions and
evidence is such a vital thing to do in any rational discipline and the fact
that no one is willing to do it in historical Jesus studies is stunning. It
still takes my breath away. If we do not face up to this catastrophic failure
of Gospel scholarship, we will get nowhere.
Here are some of the things in
the Gospels which can be considered as evidence because they are potentially
observable, that is, if they happened and if we traveled back in time: Judas
kissing Jesus, Judas leaving the Passover table, Judas returning, Roman
soldiers in tow (from John 18:3), Judas and Jesus communicating before Judas
leaves.
The peculiar thing about all this
evidence is how ambiguous it is. None of it necessarily points in a negative
direction. Each piece could have an innocent explanation. I present the true
solution in my books (True Jew is the
more recent one and much shorter), but here I will present another hypothesis,
which is ultimately incorrect, but it shows how constricted has been scholarly
thinking in its failure to consider all the possibilities.
Suppose Judas left the table to
buy more food for the seder or to give to the poor. John 13:29 reports that is
what some of the disciples thought was going on. On his very innocent mission,
someone recognizes Judas as a member of Jesus’s group, or perhaps Judas runs
into Roman soldiers looking for Jesus. Maybe some of these people followed
Judas back to the group’s lodging or they dragged him back. Frightened by what
is transpiring, Judas embraces Jesus out of concern for his safety.
I will not here go into any
detailed explanation of why this is ultimately wrong and how an even better
theory does work. That’s for my books. What I will say here is that this simple
theory explains all the evidence I listed above. Of course, so does the theory
of betrayal. That is what I mean by the ambiguity of the evidence. The evidence
is ambiguous precisely because two opposed, or nearly opposed, theories can
explain the same evidence. That is what is so fascinating about the evidence
concerning Judas—the potentially observable stuff, not the conclusions. The
fact is that none of it points in a definite direction.
It is amazing that when it came
to evidence, they had only ambiguous things to report. It also easily explains
how some of these things, originally quite innocent, came to be perceived in a
negative way for Judas. Perhaps nothing malicious was intended towards Judas.
It may have been a case of misperceptions.
I will leave things there for the moment.
© 2020 Leon Zitzer
Saturday, December 28, 2019
ACCUSATION IS NOT PROOF
Is it wrong to belabor a point?
Some things are worth obsessing over, some not so much. I am stupefied that so
many scholars consider that a piece of evidence which shows someone was once
accused of doing something is also evidence that he actually did it. With the
swiftness of a bullet, they leap from one to the other. Such a mindboggling leap
makes it hard not to write about it over and over again.
Of course, I am talking about
Judas once more. The reason why scholars treat the accusation of traitor at
Luke 6:16 as a piece of evidence against Judas is because they know there is so
little evidence against him (indeed, none) that if this verse were excluded,
there is either nothing else or so little against him that the case falls
apart, and not just falls apart, but entirely so. All the logicians in the land
could not put this case back together again.
If all the good rules of logic
and law and science, and yes, morality, undermine your case, what else is there
to fall back on but immoral rules? And what is more immoral than to use an
accusation to prove the truth of an accusation?
Putting a man in handcuffs is not
evidence he is guilty. Reading the charges against him is not evidence of
guilt. Nor is pelting him with eggs or pelting him with epithets. You can no
more prove a man is guilty of betrayal by calling him a traitor than you can prove
guilt of murder by calling him a murderer. If it is a good rule of evidence to
follow in a court of law, it is a good rule in historical study. Name calling
is not evidence let alone proof.
An accusation standing alone is
more likely to be the result of malice or honest misperception. Accusations
need facts to back them up, details to put meat on the bare bones. Without
backup evidence, accusations are worthless for proving anything other than that
the accusation was made.
Some will argue that it is different
for historical problems. All the records of history are evidence. But history
is not an exceptional subject demanding exceptional rules. The same logic and
morality apply as are applied in other fields. An accusation recorded in a
historical document tells us that once upon a time, such accusation was made.
That is all it proves. It does not prove the accusation was correct. The
accusation all by itself does not prove whether someone based this on
observable details or whether he misperceived certain events or whether someone
just maliciously lied. Clear thinking requires that all these possibilities be
evaluated.
Rather than fight for this
clarity of thought, New Testament scholars fight for the principle that an
accusation once made and maintained for thousands of years shall not be
overthrown. Is that how we want to live
as human beings? Is this any way to learn about the past?
© 2019 Leon Zitzer
