Friday, April 30, 2004
CONTENTS FOR APRIL
Only three posts:
4/28 -- Zeffirelli's film and the danger of its anti-Jewish agenda.
4/11 -- Getting Punched in the Nose by History (A Good Thing) -- or how we use tradition to erase memories (from the Gospels) and avoid that punch in the nose.
4/2 -- Making the wrong assumptions (about Jewish history and the Gospels) and creating witch trials.
Only three posts:
4/28 -- Zeffirelli's film and the danger of its anti-Jewish agenda.
4/11 -- Getting Punched in the Nose by History (A Good Thing) -- or how we use tradition to erase memories (from the Gospels) and avoid that punch in the nose.
4/2 -- Making the wrong assumptions (about Jewish history and the Gospels) and creating witch trials.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
THE DANGER OF FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI'S "JESUS OF NAZARETH"
I already have a brief essay on Zeffirelli's 1977 film on my Web site; actually, half the essay is on this and the second half offers a comparison to similar attitudes in current scholarship. I gave only a few examples of the anti-Jewish agenda of Zeffirelli's film and the degree he is willing to go to change the Gospels in order to put more anti-Jewishness into Jesus' story.
Upon reviewing parts of the film, I realize there is a lot more to be said. I will add only a few more points here.
In the Last Supper scene, just before Jesus says "This is my body" of the bread he is breaking, Zeffirelli's Jesus says that this bread no longer symbolizes the passage of our fathers from bondage to freedom. It's not in the Gospels. But Zeffirelli's message is clear. It is his way of creating a Jesus who wants to leave Judaism far behind.
Like Ernest Renan (1861) saying that Jesus ends up no longer a Jew or, more recently, Rene Girard saying that Jesus makes a decisive break with Judaism, Zeffirelli needs a Jesus who is no longer close to Judaism. He may have lived in the world of Judaism, but he is not of that world, not for Zeffirelli. And no matter how many Christians may protest and say otherwise, you cannot have a good impression of a religion that Jesus wants nothing to do with, as too many people desire to imagine about him.
When Zeffirelli's Jesus cures a Roman centurion's servant, he gives the Jewish crowd a brief speech (not in the Gospels) on how we are all the same, including Jews and pagans. It is a partial adaptation of words of Paul without considering the context of what Paul really meant.
As for the Gospel Jesus, in Matthew, he is constantly pointing out the differences between Judaism and paganism and telling his disciples to be better than pagans (Matt 5:47, 6:32, 18:17, 20:25-26; and I suppose that the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician or Canaanite woman, Matt 15:21-28, can be added as another example where Jesus expresses a distance between Jews and pagans). Jews offer a different revelation about God than pagans do. That is how the Gospel Jesus understands himself as a Jew.
Zeffirelli as a Christian ought to have appreciated this a bit because Christianity had a very low opinion of paganism. So low, in fact, that it conceived the idea of wiping it out -- something that did not occur to any Jew, and not to Jesus and not even to Paul. But Zeffirelli needs to create a Jesus who rebukes Jews for their ethnicity. He just conveniently forgets that the Gospel Jesus fully shares this ethnic outlook.
At the end of Part 1, Zeffirelli's Jesus gives a sermon (again, not in the Gospels) calling the Law (i.e., Torah) a living entity; it's not a dead thing, he says. This is exactly what Pharisees taught. They believed that the voice of the living God continued to speak in Torah. Torah is always young and new. So Zeffirelli puts a Pharisaic teaching into the mouth of Jesus without, of course, telling the audience that this is what he is doing.
It's not a bad idea in itself, as Jesus was essentially a Pharisee. But the heinous thing that Zeffirelli does is that he imputes the opposite belief to Pharisees and Jews generally. Those who dispute Jesus call the Law eternal and unchanging. It is dead for them, dead like stone tablets (an analogy that Zeffirelli's Jesus uses in this fictional sermon). What can I say? To falsify Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism like this ... words fail me. Hypocrisy and vicious calumny are not enough to describe what Zeffirelli has done.
I have said this before and will say it again: One thing that Zeffirelli and plenty of scholars make clear is that the Gospels are not anti-Jewish enough for them. That's why they have to change them. They have to rewrite the Gospels to put more antagonism between Jesus and other Jews than is really there. It's good to know that the original Gospels do not have all this anti-Jewishness in them, but it's sad to know that so many people want it there and are willing to rewrite these ancient texts to put it there.
As I say in the essay "Zeffirelli" on my site, Zeffirelli gives his film some superficial Jewishness so that his terrifically anti-Jewish program will go down easier. It is almost, but not quite, unnoticeable. This kind of theology and false history has been around a long time. Zeffirellis are a dime a dozen. What is truly shocking is that a majority of Christians seem to be very comfortable with this kind of thing.
This anti-Jewish Jesus feels so natural to many Christians that no one questions it. And certainly, no one questions how it lays a foundation for even more harmful attitudes.
It takes a lot of conditions to create a Holocaust. It does not come from just one thing. This sort of anti-Jewishness in Christianity is one of the conditions. Doesn't anyone see or fear the danger of it? It took thousands of years of this kind of teaching and falsifying of both Judaism and the Gospels to produce a Holocaust when other conditions became ripe.
Not only is anti-Jewishness in interpretations of the Gospels one of the conditions of catastrophe, but the opposite would be such a powerful preventative. If 19th century Christian scholars had not had such a horror and fear of the historical, Jewish Jesus, if instead they had taught the public to understand and celebrate Jesus' Jewishness, would the Holocaust have ever happened? I seriously doubt it. And we are still letting our opportunities slip by.
Generations from now, it could happen again. But we shrug our shoulders because we're comfortable today. Why worry about future disasters that we may be cultivating? I think it is a big mistake. Our world will not be a better place until a majority of Christians say no to anti-Jewish distortions of the Gospels, of Jesus and of the religion he loved.
I already have a brief essay on Zeffirelli's 1977 film on my Web site; actually, half the essay is on this and the second half offers a comparison to similar attitudes in current scholarship. I gave only a few examples of the anti-Jewish agenda of Zeffirelli's film and the degree he is willing to go to change the Gospels in order to put more anti-Jewishness into Jesus' story.
Upon reviewing parts of the film, I realize there is a lot more to be said. I will add only a few more points here.
In the Last Supper scene, just before Jesus says "This is my body" of the bread he is breaking, Zeffirelli's Jesus says that this bread no longer symbolizes the passage of our fathers from bondage to freedom. It's not in the Gospels. But Zeffirelli's message is clear. It is his way of creating a Jesus who wants to leave Judaism far behind.
Like Ernest Renan (1861) saying that Jesus ends up no longer a Jew or, more recently, Rene Girard saying that Jesus makes a decisive break with Judaism, Zeffirelli needs a Jesus who is no longer close to Judaism. He may have lived in the world of Judaism, but he is not of that world, not for Zeffirelli. And no matter how many Christians may protest and say otherwise, you cannot have a good impression of a religion that Jesus wants nothing to do with, as too many people desire to imagine about him.
When Zeffirelli's Jesus cures a Roman centurion's servant, he gives the Jewish crowd a brief speech (not in the Gospels) on how we are all the same, including Jews and pagans. It is a partial adaptation of words of Paul without considering the context of what Paul really meant.
As for the Gospel Jesus, in Matthew, he is constantly pointing out the differences between Judaism and paganism and telling his disciples to be better than pagans (Matt 5:47, 6:32, 18:17, 20:25-26; and I suppose that the encounter with the Syro-Phoenician or Canaanite woman, Matt 15:21-28, can be added as another example where Jesus expresses a distance between Jews and pagans). Jews offer a different revelation about God than pagans do. That is how the Gospel Jesus understands himself as a Jew.
Zeffirelli as a Christian ought to have appreciated this a bit because Christianity had a very low opinion of paganism. So low, in fact, that it conceived the idea of wiping it out -- something that did not occur to any Jew, and not to Jesus and not even to Paul. But Zeffirelli needs to create a Jesus who rebukes Jews for their ethnicity. He just conveniently forgets that the Gospel Jesus fully shares this ethnic outlook.
At the end of Part 1, Zeffirelli's Jesus gives a sermon (again, not in the Gospels) calling the Law (i.e., Torah) a living entity; it's not a dead thing, he says. This is exactly what Pharisees taught. They believed that the voice of the living God continued to speak in Torah. Torah is always young and new. So Zeffirelli puts a Pharisaic teaching into the mouth of Jesus without, of course, telling the audience that this is what he is doing.
It's not a bad idea in itself, as Jesus was essentially a Pharisee. But the heinous thing that Zeffirelli does is that he imputes the opposite belief to Pharisees and Jews generally. Those who dispute Jesus call the Law eternal and unchanging. It is dead for them, dead like stone tablets (an analogy that Zeffirelli's Jesus uses in this fictional sermon). What can I say? To falsify Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism like this ... words fail me. Hypocrisy and vicious calumny are not enough to describe what Zeffirelli has done.
I have said this before and will say it again: One thing that Zeffirelli and plenty of scholars make clear is that the Gospels are not anti-Jewish enough for them. That's why they have to change them. They have to rewrite the Gospels to put more antagonism between Jesus and other Jews than is really there. It's good to know that the original Gospels do not have all this anti-Jewishness in them, but it's sad to know that so many people want it there and are willing to rewrite these ancient texts to put it there.
As I say in the essay "Zeffirelli" on my site, Zeffirelli gives his film some superficial Jewishness so that his terrifically anti-Jewish program will go down easier. It is almost, but not quite, unnoticeable. This kind of theology and false history has been around a long time. Zeffirellis are a dime a dozen. What is truly shocking is that a majority of Christians seem to be very comfortable with this kind of thing.
This anti-Jewish Jesus feels so natural to many Christians that no one questions it. And certainly, no one questions how it lays a foundation for even more harmful attitudes.
It takes a lot of conditions to create a Holocaust. It does not come from just one thing. This sort of anti-Jewishness in Christianity is one of the conditions. Doesn't anyone see or fear the danger of it? It took thousands of years of this kind of teaching and falsifying of both Judaism and the Gospels to produce a Holocaust when other conditions became ripe.
Not only is anti-Jewishness in interpretations of the Gospels one of the conditions of catastrophe, but the opposite would be such a powerful preventative. If 19th century Christian scholars had not had such a horror and fear of the historical, Jewish Jesus, if instead they had taught the public to understand and celebrate Jesus' Jewishness, would the Holocaust have ever happened? I seriously doubt it. And we are still letting our opportunities slip by.
Generations from now, it could happen again. But we shrug our shoulders because we're comfortable today. Why worry about future disasters that we may be cultivating? I think it is a big mistake. Our world will not be a better place until a majority of Christians say no to anti-Jewish distortions of the Gospels, of Jesus and of the religion he loved.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
GETTING PUNCHED IN THE NOSE BY HISTORY (A GOOD THING) -- OR HOW TRADITION PRESERVES AND ERASES MEMORIES (TO AVOID THAT PUNCH IN THE NOSE)
How far are we from the 1st century? Not that far really. Not the immense distance that the two thousand years makes it appear. We are just a short series of lies and half-truths and full truths away.
Here are two completely different outlooks on the nature of time -- on how well the events of history fare as they travel through time to us.
The first comes from A.J. Liebling, American journalist and essayist. David Remnick had a recent piece on him in "The New Yorker" (Mar. 29). He quoted the first paragraph of Liebling's book on boxing "The Sweet Science", which had turned Remnick on so many years before when he first read it in a Paris bookstore.
Liebling is talking about the way boxers (and he names a long line of them) hand on a series of blows from one to the next, so that a punch landing on a boxer's nose today carries with it the force of a punch from a boxer of yesteryear, whether the boxer today knows it or not. Here is Liebling's conclusion in his own words:
"It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. I wonder if Professor Toynbee is as intimately attuned to his sources. The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man's arm to his shoulder."
For my money, these are perhaps three of the most gloriously put together sentences in the English language.
Now here is a totally different view from Antonio Munoz Molina's recent novel "Sepharad", which combines fiction, memoir, and the actual history of very real people (the stories of what certain men and women endured under the Nazis and under Stalin's regime). This is from pp. 92-93:
"They disappear one day, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone's memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world ... The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or ... distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey ... Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember."
The context is his recounting of a man's visit years later to a concentration camp where his mother and two sisters perished, and finding nothing but a clearing in a forest, though in fact many traces do remain -- railroad tracks, metal bowls and spoons used by prisoners -- hidden in the ground and overgrown vegetation.
It is quite a contrast to Liebling's thought, and actually, most of Munoz Molina's book belies the sentiment he expresses here. He constantly talks about the way memories are transmitted from one generation to the next, even unconsciously. He outright contradicts the above passage when he writes about a couple who are desperately trying to survive both the Nazis and the pursuit of Stalin's agents who will catch up with them one day (p. 130): "There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies."
The entire book, in fact, is an effort to make connections between the past and the present. A train trip to Madrid will remind Munoz Molina of other train trips to concentration camps or to escape from Soviet agents or of Franz Kafka going to meet his lover Milena Jesenska who would one day die in a camp. A sleepless night in a hotel room, lying next to his wife, will cause him to relive the flight and fate of a man half a century ago. Munoz Molina will wake up from a fitful sleep thinking for a moment that he is that man.
It is as if the railroad tracks and hotel rooms carry forward their memories like a series of punches on the nose. Munoz Molina wants to relive the memories of others. He wants that intimate connection to the past that Liebling wrote about and that professional scholars too often lose, though the evidence to the past is right under and plowing into their nose.
So why did Munoz Molina write that totally contradictory passage about time erasing the past? Because that is a reality too. There are forces that work to achieve this. Complete forgetting can happen if we let it. He is writing about this danger.
That man Munoz Molina sometimes confuses himself with in the middle of the night was hung in a forest more than fifty years ago, but his wife Babette survived until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a few months, she will die and then: "The face of Willi Munzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing his faith [in Communism], then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him" (p. 144). "As strange as the fact that this man once existed is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world" (p. 151).
Most of Munoz Molina's book is an attempt to fight this erasure. He seeks a faithfulness to the past greater than anything mere tradition could give us. He wants all the lost details of life to come to life again.
I have mentioned mere tradition because that is what I am leading up to: What does all this say about religious tradition? The preeminent purpose of tradition (so we are told) is to remember, to make sure the past is never lost. In truth, tradition serves quite a mixture of purposes. It does want to keep the past close. We do want to remember. We set up traditions to keep the memories alive.
But we choose -- or our leaders choose -- what should never be forgotten. It is not just magically handed to us. Somebody chooses, somebody decides. And by those choices, we also choose to discard other things. We know that has to be true because we remember by repetition and repetition serves blindness as much as it serves the seeing it wants to honor.
There are many ways of connecting to the past. Repetition is just one. We can also study and search and examine and analyze. We can struggle -- yes, actually struggle -- to look for clues and to think things through. We can remember by active looking and thinking. Not just by repeating, but by reliving the past with a very active sympathy, as Munoz Molina does.
These are excellent ways to remember. So why choose repetition? Because it is convenient, because it is easy, because it seems to cost little? Well, yes. It is as easy as watching a float in a pageant pass down the street during Holy Week.
Tradition repeats and repeats without thought. A blind man could follow it. And that's the point. Tradition wears a groove that is so well-worn you don't need to see or think your way through. You merely follow -- follow blindly -- the track. You don't have to look to the right or the left and spot that odd object hidden in the grass. Indeed, tradition -- and that means the purveyors of tradition -- don't want you to look to the right or the left.
I am afraid that tradition seeks to bury as much as it seeks to keep things in the light. In the case of traditions about Jesus' death, we know this is true. We can actually measure the gap between history and the traditions of pageant floats, Passion plays, popular films about Jesus and the like. We can measure the gap because of all the information preserved in the Gospels. Tradition often acts like overgrown weeds covering up what is really there. If you go through the Gospels carefully, you can see where tradition says ... but the Gospels say ...
Tradition says that Jesus was put on trial, a rather hostile trial, by Jewish leaders. But that's not what the Gospels as a whole say.
Mark and Matthew (really one account, as Matthew repeats Mark very closely) appear to present such a trial. But that's not what John preserves. The scene in John is so shorn of any trial-like details that probably a majority of scholars doubt that John could be said to be describing a trial. A meeting of some sort but not a trial. (Scholars, however, avoid following through on the insight. They call John's version a hearing, in order to reach a compromise with tradition, when an informal meeting would be a better guess, as ancient Judaism did not know anything like a hearing.)
Luke seems to back John up. Like John, Luke has neither a parade of witnesses against Jesus nor a final death penalty. These are important elements of a trial that are missing from Luke. Since the Marcan/Matthean trial narrative is really one source and since Luke's and John's accounts probably come from two different sources (as many scholars think because their vocabularies are so different), then the vote of all the Gospels is two to one against there having been a Jewish trial.
Not only that, but the Marcan/Matthean version contains many details that do not match up with a Jewish trial: It takes place at night and on the eve of a festival, it is conducted and concluded in less than twenty-four hours, and it is held in the house of a high priest. None of this fits the way a Jewish trial would take place. But they do make sense as features of the informal meeting suggested by John. The details in Mark and Matthew are like objects sticking up through the grass or sand. Not quite gone, not quite forgotten, but not quite remembered either, not by tradition.
Just as tradition does not quite remember that Luke and John say something different from the first two Gospels. When people say that you have to read Luke and John in the context of the real trial in Mark and Matthew, they have it wrong and backwards. What they are doing is using Mark and Matthew -- not even Mark and Matthew with all their details, but only one interpretation of them -- to erase anything different found in the other Gospels. Tradition on the matter of a Jewish trial of Jesus shoves Luke and John off the map. That is not reading the last two Gospels in context, it is just dismissing them as annoying witnesses to the past.
Tradition says that Caiaphas, the high priest in office at the time, presided over this uncordial affair. But that is not what the Gospels as a whole say.
Matthew makes it Caiaphas, while John has Annas, a retired high priest. (Luke and Mark name no one specific.) Many scholars just repeat tradition and forget, or choose to forget, that the Gospels give us this 50-50 possibility. They do not want to see that a former high priest is a distinct Gospel possibility and might indicate, like those other clues, that this was an informal, diplomatic mission to question Jesus in a helpful, friendly way, and not official judicial business.
The facts of history, the facts in the Gospels, are trying to punch scholars in the nose, but scholars use tradition to ward off the blow. Tradition says we cannot think about these things. Or more simply: We cannot think.
The same is true of Judas' story -- his story in the Gospels -- which contains many details that tradition has covered up with debris of its own making, like the green make-up covering his figure in a float that Munoz Molina describes. Think of Judas as a prisoner on a train or a truck, being sped away to some hidden location far from his origins. Before he is gone, ravaged by time and tradition, he tosses his name to us on a scrap of paper (another image from Munoz Molina's book) -- his real name, his real deed.
I'm not a traitor, he says. Indeed, Mark never uses the Greek word for betray to tell Judas' story, but a neutral word having no connotation of betrayal, and all the Gospels (with only one exception at Luke 6:16) follow suit.
I had no motive, he says. Indeed, Mark does not relate one or any conflict between Jesus and Judas (and only a late tradition in John gives Judas some sort of motive of stealing from the poor and apparently wanting to cover up this misdeed, but none of the earlier Gospel authors remember this, so John's attempt to create an innuendo against Judas here does not feel too convincing).
My fellow disciples never accused me of anything, he says. Indeed, totally missing from all the Gospels. No one ever fires any denunciations at him. Hints of his original innocence survive even in John who tells us (at 13:29) that, at the time, some thought he left the table for a good reason such as to give to the poor or to get more food for the supper.
Mark never tells us anything overtly bad about Judas. In an odd way, tradition has been faithful to this aspect of Judas' story more than people realize. There has always been an element of tradition that recognizes that the Gospels are almost completely empty of any hard facts to convict Judas. His story has been said to be inexplicable, a mystery, devoid of any motives or any other details that would make him humanly comprehensible.
Aware of this, tradition has branded him evil incarnate (the devil made him do it, as in Luke and John). But evil incarnate is, of course, not an explanation. It is merely a branding in place of an explanation. It never occurred to anyone that the neutrality, the very blandness, of Judas as a character actually could point in a direction other than evil.
So tradition has preserved something authentic about the way the Gospels tell Judas' story, but then it goes on to embellish Judas, for example, making him a revolutionary disappointed with the slow progress of Jesus' revolution. This is not in the Gospels. Or we call Judas' kiss the kiss of betrayal, but like all the details of his story, Mark tells it so neutrally, it could have an innocent explanation as much as a guilty one. Tradition reads deceit into that kiss, but it could have been a kiss seeking comfort from his rabbi.
Neutral details thrown to us on a scrap of paper, thrown to us across time. His real name, his real deed. Remember me. "[T]he melancholy of a long exile" Munoz Molina calls it in the last words of "Sepharad".
You can almost hear Judas utter these words from Munoz Molina's book (p. 118): "Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you've kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect ... Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives ... Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person's life." Think of Judas trapped in a Passion play or a pageant or a film. The clues in the Gospels can save him.
How far are we from what really happened in the 1st century? Not that far really, if you pay attention to all the clues, if you have the desire to pay attention.
Merely repeating tradition is not enough to establish an intimate connection with the past. Not for the historian. There is too much overgrowth, too much neglect.
Tradition preserves, but tradition abandons. There is a way to be more faithful to tradition than tradition itself: To remember all those bits and pieces like scraps of paper thrown from a train by prisoners who want their names and stories remembered. If you collect all those scraps of information that history has left us, you can complete tradition, you can rescue tradition from its own laziness and restore to fullness what has been abandoned, erased, exiled.
For some people, tradition may be just fine for connecting with the past. But the danger is that tradition can pass over some very important facts or alter the sense of the facts it does preserve. And we need to bring those facts back and relive them -- to get punched in the nose by them. All that is necessary is the desire to connect.
If we don't wrestle with time and history, what are we? If we don't make decisions about what is to be remembered and what will not be, what are we? Making decisions means we do not just blindly accept. It means we constantly have to rethink and redecide. We never decide once and for all. That defeats decision and thought. Decisions always have to be kept open to decide anew. That's what we do with our own lives. We always give ourselves the freedom to decide again.
And how is history, the larger biography of our civilization, any different? Why shouldn't we redefine and redecide our world by recovering those lived moments that once were so real and so close to the people we later wrapped up in stone and rigid repetition and fancy rituals and glorified pageants and images?
Why shouldn't the stories that happened breathe again? Because someone said they shouldn't? Because an official cloaked in religious authority or a scholar in a thick book said it cannot be done? Who are they to tell anyone to shut up, to stop looking, to stop breathing, to stop feeling for sounds of breath from the past? The purveyors of tradition pile up debris, clogging our head and lungs until we cannot breathe anymore.
If that breath is there in the details of ancient texts, if Judas is writing his name on a piece of paper and tossing it to us, begging to be remembered, his true deed to be remembered, why shouldn't we grab that paper and run with the news and scream his real name to all who will hear? Why shouldn't we end the melancholy of his long exile?
Once upon a time, Judas and Jewish leaders were punched in the face with a lie. Those punches land today. We can punch back and send a blow back in time to unlock the doors that were slammed shut on our memories. It is justice for the Gospel writers to make their real words live and breathe again. We shall live again, we shall live again. It is the song of all ghosts who haunt our lives still.
How far are we from the 1st century? Not that far really. Not the immense distance that the two thousand years makes it appear. We are just a short series of lies and half-truths and full truths away.
Here are two completely different outlooks on the nature of time -- on how well the events of history fare as they travel through time to us.
The first comes from A.J. Liebling, American journalist and essayist. David Remnick had a recent piece on him in "The New Yorker" (Mar. 29). He quoted the first paragraph of Liebling's book on boxing "The Sweet Science", which had turned Remnick on so many years before when he first read it in a Paris bookstore.
Liebling is talking about the way boxers (and he names a long line of them) hand on a series of blows from one to the next, so that a punch landing on a boxer's nose today carries with it the force of a punch from a boxer of yesteryear, whether the boxer today knows it or not. Here is Liebling's conclusion in his own words:
"It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. I wonder if Professor Toynbee is as intimately attuned to his sources. The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man's arm to his shoulder."
For my money, these are perhaps three of the most gloriously put together sentences in the English language.
Now here is a totally different view from Antonio Munoz Molina's recent novel "Sepharad", which combines fiction, memoir, and the actual history of very real people (the stories of what certain men and women endured under the Nazis and under Stalin's regime). This is from pp. 92-93:
"They disappear one day, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone's memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world ... The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or ... distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey ... Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember."
The context is his recounting of a man's visit years later to a concentration camp where his mother and two sisters perished, and finding nothing but a clearing in a forest, though in fact many traces do remain -- railroad tracks, metal bowls and spoons used by prisoners -- hidden in the ground and overgrown vegetation.
It is quite a contrast to Liebling's thought, and actually, most of Munoz Molina's book belies the sentiment he expresses here. He constantly talks about the way memories are transmitted from one generation to the next, even unconsciously. He outright contradicts the above passage when he writes about a couple who are desperately trying to survive both the Nazis and the pursuit of Stalin's agents who will catch up with them one day (p. 130): "There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies."
The entire book, in fact, is an effort to make connections between the past and the present. A train trip to Madrid will remind Munoz Molina of other train trips to concentration camps or to escape from Soviet agents or of Franz Kafka going to meet his lover Milena Jesenska who would one day die in a camp. A sleepless night in a hotel room, lying next to his wife, will cause him to relive the flight and fate of a man half a century ago. Munoz Molina will wake up from a fitful sleep thinking for a moment that he is that man.
It is as if the railroad tracks and hotel rooms carry forward their memories like a series of punches on the nose. Munoz Molina wants to relive the memories of others. He wants that intimate connection to the past that Liebling wrote about and that professional scholars too often lose, though the evidence to the past is right under and plowing into their nose.
So why did Munoz Molina write that totally contradictory passage about time erasing the past? Because that is a reality too. There are forces that work to achieve this. Complete forgetting can happen if we let it. He is writing about this danger.
That man Munoz Molina sometimes confuses himself with in the middle of the night was hung in a forest more than fifty years ago, but his wife Babette survived until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a few months, she will die and then: "The face of Willi Munzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing his faith [in Communism], then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him" (p. 144). "As strange as the fact that this man once existed is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world" (p. 151).
Most of Munoz Molina's book is an attempt to fight this erasure. He seeks a faithfulness to the past greater than anything mere tradition could give us. He wants all the lost details of life to come to life again.
I have mentioned mere tradition because that is what I am leading up to: What does all this say about religious tradition? The preeminent purpose of tradition (so we are told) is to remember, to make sure the past is never lost. In truth, tradition serves quite a mixture of purposes. It does want to keep the past close. We do want to remember. We set up traditions to keep the memories alive.
But we choose -- or our leaders choose -- what should never be forgotten. It is not just magically handed to us. Somebody chooses, somebody decides. And by those choices, we also choose to discard other things. We know that has to be true because we remember by repetition and repetition serves blindness as much as it serves the seeing it wants to honor.
There are many ways of connecting to the past. Repetition is just one. We can also study and search and examine and analyze. We can struggle -- yes, actually struggle -- to look for clues and to think things through. We can remember by active looking and thinking. Not just by repeating, but by reliving the past with a very active sympathy, as Munoz Molina does.
These are excellent ways to remember. So why choose repetition? Because it is convenient, because it is easy, because it seems to cost little? Well, yes. It is as easy as watching a float in a pageant pass down the street during Holy Week.
Tradition repeats and repeats without thought. A blind man could follow it. And that's the point. Tradition wears a groove that is so well-worn you don't need to see or think your way through. You merely follow -- follow blindly -- the track. You don't have to look to the right or the left and spot that odd object hidden in the grass. Indeed, tradition -- and that means the purveyors of tradition -- don't want you to look to the right or the left.
I am afraid that tradition seeks to bury as much as it seeks to keep things in the light. In the case of traditions about Jesus' death, we know this is true. We can actually measure the gap between history and the traditions of pageant floats, Passion plays, popular films about Jesus and the like. We can measure the gap because of all the information preserved in the Gospels. Tradition often acts like overgrown weeds covering up what is really there. If you go through the Gospels carefully, you can see where tradition says ... but the Gospels say ...
Tradition says that Jesus was put on trial, a rather hostile trial, by Jewish leaders. But that's not what the Gospels as a whole say.
Mark and Matthew (really one account, as Matthew repeats Mark very closely) appear to present such a trial. But that's not what John preserves. The scene in John is so shorn of any trial-like details that probably a majority of scholars doubt that John could be said to be describing a trial. A meeting of some sort but not a trial. (Scholars, however, avoid following through on the insight. They call John's version a hearing, in order to reach a compromise with tradition, when an informal meeting would be a better guess, as ancient Judaism did not know anything like a hearing.)
Luke seems to back John up. Like John, Luke has neither a parade of witnesses against Jesus nor a final death penalty. These are important elements of a trial that are missing from Luke. Since the Marcan/Matthean trial narrative is really one source and since Luke's and John's accounts probably come from two different sources (as many scholars think because their vocabularies are so different), then the vote of all the Gospels is two to one against there having been a Jewish trial.
Not only that, but the Marcan/Matthean version contains many details that do not match up with a Jewish trial: It takes place at night and on the eve of a festival, it is conducted and concluded in less than twenty-four hours, and it is held in the house of a high priest. None of this fits the way a Jewish trial would take place. But they do make sense as features of the informal meeting suggested by John. The details in Mark and Matthew are like objects sticking up through the grass or sand. Not quite gone, not quite forgotten, but not quite remembered either, not by tradition.
Just as tradition does not quite remember that Luke and John say something different from the first two Gospels. When people say that you have to read Luke and John in the context of the real trial in Mark and Matthew, they have it wrong and backwards. What they are doing is using Mark and Matthew -- not even Mark and Matthew with all their details, but only one interpretation of them -- to erase anything different found in the other Gospels. Tradition on the matter of a Jewish trial of Jesus shoves Luke and John off the map. That is not reading the last two Gospels in context, it is just dismissing them as annoying witnesses to the past.
Tradition says that Caiaphas, the high priest in office at the time, presided over this uncordial affair. But that is not what the Gospels as a whole say.
Matthew makes it Caiaphas, while John has Annas, a retired high priest. (Luke and Mark name no one specific.) Many scholars just repeat tradition and forget, or choose to forget, that the Gospels give us this 50-50 possibility. They do not want to see that a former high priest is a distinct Gospel possibility and might indicate, like those other clues, that this was an informal, diplomatic mission to question Jesus in a helpful, friendly way, and not official judicial business.
The facts of history, the facts in the Gospels, are trying to punch scholars in the nose, but scholars use tradition to ward off the blow. Tradition says we cannot think about these things. Or more simply: We cannot think.
The same is true of Judas' story -- his story in the Gospels -- which contains many details that tradition has covered up with debris of its own making, like the green make-up covering his figure in a float that Munoz Molina describes. Think of Judas as a prisoner on a train or a truck, being sped away to some hidden location far from his origins. Before he is gone, ravaged by time and tradition, he tosses his name to us on a scrap of paper (another image from Munoz Molina's book) -- his real name, his real deed.
I'm not a traitor, he says. Indeed, Mark never uses the Greek word for betray to tell Judas' story, but a neutral word having no connotation of betrayal, and all the Gospels (with only one exception at Luke 6:16) follow suit.
I had no motive, he says. Indeed, Mark does not relate one or any conflict between Jesus and Judas (and only a late tradition in John gives Judas some sort of motive of stealing from the poor and apparently wanting to cover up this misdeed, but none of the earlier Gospel authors remember this, so John's attempt to create an innuendo against Judas here does not feel too convincing).
My fellow disciples never accused me of anything, he says. Indeed, totally missing from all the Gospels. No one ever fires any denunciations at him. Hints of his original innocence survive even in John who tells us (at 13:29) that, at the time, some thought he left the table for a good reason such as to give to the poor or to get more food for the supper.
Mark never tells us anything overtly bad about Judas. In an odd way, tradition has been faithful to this aspect of Judas' story more than people realize. There has always been an element of tradition that recognizes that the Gospels are almost completely empty of any hard facts to convict Judas. His story has been said to be inexplicable, a mystery, devoid of any motives or any other details that would make him humanly comprehensible.
Aware of this, tradition has branded him evil incarnate (the devil made him do it, as in Luke and John). But evil incarnate is, of course, not an explanation. It is merely a branding in place of an explanation. It never occurred to anyone that the neutrality, the very blandness, of Judas as a character actually could point in a direction other than evil.
So tradition has preserved something authentic about the way the Gospels tell Judas' story, but then it goes on to embellish Judas, for example, making him a revolutionary disappointed with the slow progress of Jesus' revolution. This is not in the Gospels. Or we call Judas' kiss the kiss of betrayal, but like all the details of his story, Mark tells it so neutrally, it could have an innocent explanation as much as a guilty one. Tradition reads deceit into that kiss, but it could have been a kiss seeking comfort from his rabbi.
Neutral details thrown to us on a scrap of paper, thrown to us across time. His real name, his real deed. Remember me. "[T]he melancholy of a long exile" Munoz Molina calls it in the last words of "Sepharad".
You can almost hear Judas utter these words from Munoz Molina's book (p. 118): "Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you've kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect ... Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives ... Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you're a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person's life." Think of Judas trapped in a Passion play or a pageant or a film. The clues in the Gospels can save him.
How far are we from what really happened in the 1st century? Not that far really, if you pay attention to all the clues, if you have the desire to pay attention.
Merely repeating tradition is not enough to establish an intimate connection with the past. Not for the historian. There is too much overgrowth, too much neglect.
Tradition preserves, but tradition abandons. There is a way to be more faithful to tradition than tradition itself: To remember all those bits and pieces like scraps of paper thrown from a train by prisoners who want their names and stories remembered. If you collect all those scraps of information that history has left us, you can complete tradition, you can rescue tradition from its own laziness and restore to fullness what has been abandoned, erased, exiled.
For some people, tradition may be just fine for connecting with the past. But the danger is that tradition can pass over some very important facts or alter the sense of the facts it does preserve. And we need to bring those facts back and relive them -- to get punched in the nose by them. All that is necessary is the desire to connect.
If we don't wrestle with time and history, what are we? If we don't make decisions about what is to be remembered and what will not be, what are we? Making decisions means we do not just blindly accept. It means we constantly have to rethink and redecide. We never decide once and for all. That defeats decision and thought. Decisions always have to be kept open to decide anew. That's what we do with our own lives. We always give ourselves the freedom to decide again.
And how is history, the larger biography of our civilization, any different? Why shouldn't we redefine and redecide our world by recovering those lived moments that once were so real and so close to the people we later wrapped up in stone and rigid repetition and fancy rituals and glorified pageants and images?
Why shouldn't the stories that happened breathe again? Because someone said they shouldn't? Because an official cloaked in religious authority or a scholar in a thick book said it cannot be done? Who are they to tell anyone to shut up, to stop looking, to stop breathing, to stop feeling for sounds of breath from the past? The purveyors of tradition pile up debris, clogging our head and lungs until we cannot breathe anymore.
If that breath is there in the details of ancient texts, if Judas is writing his name on a piece of paper and tossing it to us, begging to be remembered, his true deed to be remembered, why shouldn't we grab that paper and run with the news and scream his real name to all who will hear? Why shouldn't we end the melancholy of his long exile?
Once upon a time, Judas and Jewish leaders were punched in the face with a lie. Those punches land today. We can punch back and send a blow back in time to unlock the doors that were slammed shut on our memories. It is justice for the Gospel writers to make their real words live and breathe again. We shall live again, we shall live again. It is the song of all ghosts who haunt our lives still.
Friday, April 02, 2004
[The two posts immediately below this are on Mel Gibson's film. It's time to move on.]
THE ASSUMPTIONS WE MAKE AND THE WITCH TRIALS THEY GIVE US
When it comes to reasoning in general about a problem, there are usually several lines of approach. There are different angles from which we can tackle the problem. We want to test different visions to see how it might affect our look at the evidence.
But not in the case of understanding the role Jewish leaders played in Jesus' death. In this case, just about everyone has decided there is only one way to look at this. There is almost a total lack of curiosity to try another angle. People do not realize the degree to which they are assuming their conclusion -- instead of basing it on a fair analysis of the evidence.
What I frequently hear is that leaders in general are corrupt. In all societies, in all cultures, political and/or religious leaders have done the kind of thing that the Jewish leaders of the 1st century are accused of having done to Jesus. In countries where there has been a foreign power in control, it is not uncommon for the native leaders to cooperate with that foreign government even to the point of helping it capture and prosecute troublemakers.
I am sometimes told that it is illogical to argue that this could not have happened with Jesus and his own leaders. Logic convicts the Jewish authorities. Human nature in general convicts the Jewish authorities. In fact, if the Jewish leaders are found to have done even one bad thing, no matter what it is (even if it is to help Romans collect taxes), then people argue that it stands to reason that they could have done this bad thing to Jesus too. Logic and human nature give us the right to argue by innuendo.
Do people realize how much this resembles a witch trial? It is a hallmark of witch trial reasoning that close attention to the facts is irrelevant. Innuendo and general assumptions carry the day.
Several times, someone has written or said to me that I cannot say, as I sometimes do, that Jewish leaders would never have turned Jesus over to the Romans and would never have even cooperated in his arrest let alone his prosecution. I base this on an utter lack in Josephus' writings of anything that even remotely resembles what allegedly happened to Jesus. But I am told that to use words like "never" or "always" (as in 'Jewish leaders always refused to help Rome get Jewish troublemakers') is a mistake. In other words, they argue that Jewish leaders out to get Jesus is a possibility and I must leave that open.
Never mind, of course, that I am fighting for openness. The possibility that others leave open is the only possibility they ever consider. So they are not really leaving anything open. They are actually fighting to make sure that my possibility is never considered. Their appeal to openness is more than a little hypocritical. As one person wrote when considering whether Jewish leaders helped to kill Jesus, she felt that one could a priori assume -- before even considering the evidence!! -- that this is a distinct possibility. But how do you know this is a proper possibility for 1st century Jewish leaders?
Here is another general approach to the problem, one that has been too long neglected. (Haim Cohn is the only writer to have ever pursued this line of thought.) As general reasoning, I submit that this is just as plausible as the other line (actually, I would argue that it is ultimately more plausible).
The Romans did not need Jewish permission or help to kill Jesus or anyone they considered potentially seditious and dangerous. So why should Jewish leaders help the Romans do something they don't need their help to do? What does it gain them? Don't they stand to lose a great deal in terms of favor with the people? They might earn some credits with the Romans, but that is meager compared to what they stand to lose.
Moreover, even the Romans would have understood that it would be better to have the Jewish leaders stay out of this. They need the native authorities as go-betweens with the population they are trying to rule. It does not do the Romans any good for Jewish leaders to do something that everyone knows will only antagonize the people. If they use Jewish help to capture one small-time troublemaker, they have solved a fairly small problem in exchange for increasing restlessness and deep dissatisfaction among the general populace. (And we know that Jesus was small potatoes to the Romans because they did not bother to arrest and execute any of his followers.)
Scholars frequently assess both Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas as fairly smart. Caiaphas was in office for 18 years under two different prefects. When Pilate came to town, he had the right to appoint a new high priest. But he kept Caiaphas on. That indicates to most scholars that Caiaphas was a pretty politically astute leader. He knew how to please. (Of course, it could also mean that Pilate was lazy, but no one ever thinks of this.) We also have no record of complaints against Caiaphas that he was particularly harsh.
Yet we are supposed to believe that, in the case of Jesus, Caiaphas and Pilate together behaved in the most stupid way possible. It was in neither one's self-interest to work together on such a trivial problem. Little to gain and so much to lose.
I think as general reasoning that this is a worthwhile approach. It might be very valuable to see where this leads and how it helps to make sense of the evidence we have. In the interests of pure science, various hypotheses should be tested. Yet in the history of this field only Haim Cohn and myself have tried it. What a shame. What a shame on Gospel scholarship that this has been ruled out altogether. That's what witch trials do. They come to their conclusions on general grounds before the evidence is ever considered. They rule out all other ways of thinking. Does anyone have a desire to challenge to this?
THE ASSUMPTIONS WE MAKE AND THE WITCH TRIALS THEY GIVE US
When it comes to reasoning in general about a problem, there are usually several lines of approach. There are different angles from which we can tackle the problem. We want to test different visions to see how it might affect our look at the evidence.
But not in the case of understanding the role Jewish leaders played in Jesus' death. In this case, just about everyone has decided there is only one way to look at this. There is almost a total lack of curiosity to try another angle. People do not realize the degree to which they are assuming their conclusion -- instead of basing it on a fair analysis of the evidence.
What I frequently hear is that leaders in general are corrupt. In all societies, in all cultures, political and/or religious leaders have done the kind of thing that the Jewish leaders of the 1st century are accused of having done to Jesus. In countries where there has been a foreign power in control, it is not uncommon for the native leaders to cooperate with that foreign government even to the point of helping it capture and prosecute troublemakers.
I am sometimes told that it is illogical to argue that this could not have happened with Jesus and his own leaders. Logic convicts the Jewish authorities. Human nature in general convicts the Jewish authorities. In fact, if the Jewish leaders are found to have done even one bad thing, no matter what it is (even if it is to help Romans collect taxes), then people argue that it stands to reason that they could have done this bad thing to Jesus too. Logic and human nature give us the right to argue by innuendo.
Do people realize how much this resembles a witch trial? It is a hallmark of witch trial reasoning that close attention to the facts is irrelevant. Innuendo and general assumptions carry the day.
Several times, someone has written or said to me that I cannot say, as I sometimes do, that Jewish leaders would never have turned Jesus over to the Romans and would never have even cooperated in his arrest let alone his prosecution. I base this on an utter lack in Josephus' writings of anything that even remotely resembles what allegedly happened to Jesus. But I am told that to use words like "never" or "always" (as in 'Jewish leaders always refused to help Rome get Jewish troublemakers') is a mistake. In other words, they argue that Jewish leaders out to get Jesus is a possibility and I must leave that open.
Never mind, of course, that I am fighting for openness. The possibility that others leave open is the only possibility they ever consider. So they are not really leaving anything open. They are actually fighting to make sure that my possibility is never considered. Their appeal to openness is more than a little hypocritical. As one person wrote when considering whether Jewish leaders helped to kill Jesus, she felt that one could a priori assume -- before even considering the evidence!! -- that this is a distinct possibility. But how do you know this is a proper possibility for 1st century Jewish leaders?
Here is another general approach to the problem, one that has been too long neglected. (Haim Cohn is the only writer to have ever pursued this line of thought.) As general reasoning, I submit that this is just as plausible as the other line (actually, I would argue that it is ultimately more plausible).
The Romans did not need Jewish permission or help to kill Jesus or anyone they considered potentially seditious and dangerous. So why should Jewish leaders help the Romans do something they don't need their help to do? What does it gain them? Don't they stand to lose a great deal in terms of favor with the people? They might earn some credits with the Romans, but that is meager compared to what they stand to lose.
Moreover, even the Romans would have understood that it would be better to have the Jewish leaders stay out of this. They need the native authorities as go-betweens with the population they are trying to rule. It does not do the Romans any good for Jewish leaders to do something that everyone knows will only antagonize the people. If they use Jewish help to capture one small-time troublemaker, they have solved a fairly small problem in exchange for increasing restlessness and deep dissatisfaction among the general populace. (And we know that Jesus was small potatoes to the Romans because they did not bother to arrest and execute any of his followers.)
Scholars frequently assess both Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas as fairly smart. Caiaphas was in office for 18 years under two different prefects. When Pilate came to town, he had the right to appoint a new high priest. But he kept Caiaphas on. That indicates to most scholars that Caiaphas was a pretty politically astute leader. He knew how to please. (Of course, it could also mean that Pilate was lazy, but no one ever thinks of this.) We also have no record of complaints against Caiaphas that he was particularly harsh.
Yet we are supposed to believe that, in the case of Jesus, Caiaphas and Pilate together behaved in the most stupid way possible. It was in neither one's self-interest to work together on such a trivial problem. Little to gain and so much to lose.
I think as general reasoning that this is a worthwhile approach. It might be very valuable to see where this leads and how it helps to make sense of the evidence we have. In the interests of pure science, various hypotheses should be tested. Yet in the history of this field only Haim Cohn and myself have tried it. What a shame. What a shame on Gospel scholarship that this has been ruled out altogether. That's what witch trials do. They come to their conclusions on general grounds before the evidence is ever considered. They rule out all other ways of thinking. Does anyone have a desire to challenge to this?
[The two posts immediately below this are on Mel Gibson's film. It's time to move on.]
THE ASSUMPTIONS WE MAKE AND THE WITCH TRIALS THEY GIVE US
When it comes to reasoning in general about a problem, there are usually several lines of approach. There are different angles from which we can tackle the problem. We want to test different visions to see how it might affect our look at the evidence.
But not in the case of understanding the role Jewish leaders played in Jesus' death. In this case, just about everyone has decided there is only one way to look at this. There is almost a total lack of curiosity to try another angle. People do not realize the degree to which they are assuming their conclusion -- instead of basing it on a fair analysis of the evidence.
What I frequently hear is that leaders in general are corrupt. In all societies, in all cultures, political and/or religious leaders have done the kind of thing that the Jewish leaders of the 1st century are accused of having done to Jesus. In countries where there has been a foreign power in control, it is not uncommon for the native leaders to cooperate with that foreign government even to the point of helping it capture and prosecute troublemakers.
I am sometimes told that it is illogical to argue that this could not have happened with Jesus and his own leaders. Logic convicts the Jewish authorities. Human nature in general convicts the Jewish authorities. In fact, if the Jewish leaders are found to have done even one bad thing, no matter what it is (even if it is to help Romans collect taxes), then people argue that it stands to reason that they could have done this bad thing to Jesus too. Logic and human nature give us the right to argue by innuendo.
Do people realize how much this resembles a witch trial? It is a hallmark of witch trial reasoning that close attention to the facts is irrelevant. Innuendo and general assumptions carry the day.
Several times, someone has written or said to me that I cannot say, as I sometimes do, that Jewish leaders would never have turned Jesus over to the Romans and would never have even cooperated in his arrest let alone his prosecution. I base this on an utter lack in Josephus' writings of anything that even remotely resembles what allegedly happened to Jesus. But I am told that to use words like "never" or "always" (as in 'Jewish leaders always refused to help Rome get Jewish troublemakers') is a mistake. In other words, they argue that Jewish leaders out to get Jesus is a possibility and I must leave that open.
Never mind, of course, that I am fighting for openness. The possibility that others leave open is the only possibility they ever consider. So they are not really leaving anything open. They are actually fighting to make sure that my possibility is never considered. Their appeal to openness is more than a little hypocritical. As one person wrote when considering whether Jewish leaders helped to kill Jesus, she felt that one could a priori assume -- before even considering the evidence!! -- that this is a distinct possibility. But how do you know this is a proper possibility for 1st century Jewish leaders?
Here is another general approach to the problem, one that has been too long neglected. (Haim Cohn is the only writer to have ever pursued this line of thought.) As general reasoning, I submit that this is just as plausible as the other line (actually, I would argue that it is ultimately more plausible).
The Romans did not need Jewish permission or help to kill Jesus or anyone they considered potentially seditious and dangerous. So why should Jewish leaders help the Romans do something they don't need their help to do? What does it gain them? Don't they stand to lose a great deal in terms of favor with the people? They might earn some credits with the Romans, but that is meager compared to what they stand to lose.
Moreover, even the Romans would have understood that it would be better to have the Jewish leaders stay out of this. They need the native authorities as go-betweens with the population they are trying to rule. It does not do the Romans any good for Jewish leaders to do something that everyone knows will only antagonize the people. If they use Jewish help to capture one small-time troublemaker, they have solved a fairly small problem in exchange for increasing restlessness and deep dissatisfaction among the general populace. (And we know that Jesus was small potatoes to the Romans because they did not bother to arrest and execute any of his followers.)
Scholars frequently assess both Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas as fairly smart. Caiaphas was in office for 18 years under two different prefects. When Pilate came to town, he had the right to appoint a new high priest. But he kept Caiaphas on. That indicates to most scholars that Caiaphas was a pretty politically astute leader. He knew how to please. (Of course, it could also mean that Pilate was lazy, but no one ever thinks of this.) We also have no record of complaints against Caiaphas that he was particularly harsh.
Yet we are supposed to believe that, in the case of Jesus, Caiaphas and Pilate together behaved in the most stupid way possible. It was in neither one's self-interest to work together on such a trivial problem. Little to gain and so much to lose.
I think as general reasoning that this is a worthwhile approach. It might be very valuable to see where this leads and how it helps to make sense of the evidence we have. In the interests of pure science, various hypotheses should be tested. Yet in the history of this field only Haim Cohn and myself have tried it. What a shame. What a shame on Gospel scholarship that this has been ruled out altogether. That's what witch trials do. They come to their conclusions on general grounds before the evidence is ever considered. They rule out all other ways of thinking. Does anyone have a desire to challenge to this?
THE ASSUMPTIONS WE MAKE AND THE WITCH TRIALS THEY GIVE US
When it comes to reasoning in general about a problem, there are usually several lines of approach. There are different angles from which we can tackle the problem. We want to test different visions to see how it might affect our look at the evidence.
But not in the case of understanding the role Jewish leaders played in Jesus' death. In this case, just about everyone has decided there is only one way to look at this. There is almost a total lack of curiosity to try another angle. People do not realize the degree to which they are assuming their conclusion -- instead of basing it on a fair analysis of the evidence.
What I frequently hear is that leaders in general are corrupt. In all societies, in all cultures, political and/or religious leaders have done the kind of thing that the Jewish leaders of the 1st century are accused of having done to Jesus. In countries where there has been a foreign power in control, it is not uncommon for the native leaders to cooperate with that foreign government even to the point of helping it capture and prosecute troublemakers.
I am sometimes told that it is illogical to argue that this could not have happened with Jesus and his own leaders. Logic convicts the Jewish authorities. Human nature in general convicts the Jewish authorities. In fact, if the Jewish leaders are found to have done even one bad thing, no matter what it is (even if it is to help Romans collect taxes), then people argue that it stands to reason that they could have done this bad thing to Jesus too. Logic and human nature give us the right to argue by innuendo.
Do people realize how much this resembles a witch trial? It is a hallmark of witch trial reasoning that close attention to the facts is irrelevant. Innuendo and general assumptions carry the day.
Several times, someone has written or said to me that I cannot say, as I sometimes do, that Jewish leaders would never have turned Jesus over to the Romans and would never have even cooperated in his arrest let alone his prosecution. I base this on an utter lack in Josephus' writings of anything that even remotely resembles what allegedly happened to Jesus. But I am told that to use words like "never" or "always" (as in 'Jewish leaders always refused to help Rome get Jewish troublemakers') is a mistake. In other words, they argue that Jewish leaders out to get Jesus is a possibility and I must leave that open.
Never mind, of course, that I am fighting for openness. The possibility that others leave open is the only possibility they ever consider. So they are not really leaving anything open. They are actually fighting to make sure that my possibility is never considered. Their appeal to openness is more than a little hypocritical. As one person wrote when considering whether Jewish leaders helped to kill Jesus, she felt that one could a priori assume -- before even considering the evidence!! -- that this is a distinct possibility. But how do you know this is a proper possibility for 1st century Jewish leaders?
Here is another general approach to the problem, one that has been too long neglected. (Haim Cohn is the only writer to have ever pursued this line of thought.) As general reasoning, I submit that this is just as plausible as the other line (actually, I would argue that it is ultimately more plausible).
The Romans did not need Jewish permission or help to kill Jesus or anyone they considered potentially seditious and dangerous. So why should Jewish leaders help the Romans do something they don't need their help to do? What does it gain them? Don't they stand to lose a great deal in terms of favor with the people? They might earn some credits with the Romans, but that is meager compared to what they stand to lose.
Moreover, even the Romans would have understood that it would be better to have the Jewish leaders stay out of this. They need the native authorities as go-betweens with the population they are trying to rule. It does not do the Romans any good for Jewish leaders to do something that everyone knows will only antagonize the people. If they use Jewish help to capture one small-time troublemaker, they have solved a fairly small problem in exchange for increasing restlessness and deep dissatisfaction among the general populace. (And we know that Jesus was small potatoes to the Romans because they did not bother to arrest and execute any of his followers.)
Scholars frequently assess both Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas as fairly smart. Caiaphas was in office for 18 years under two different prefects. When Pilate came to town, he had the right to appoint a new high priest. But he kept Caiaphas on. That indicates to most scholars that Caiaphas was a pretty politically astute leader. He knew how to please. (Of course, it could also mean that Pilate was lazy, but no one ever thinks of this.) We also have no record of complaints against Caiaphas that he was particularly harsh.
Yet we are supposed to believe that, in the case of Jesus, Caiaphas and Pilate together behaved in the most stupid way possible. It was in neither one's self-interest to work together on such a trivial problem. Little to gain and so much to lose.
I think as general reasoning that this is a worthwhile approach. It might be very valuable to see where this leads and how it helps to make sense of the evidence we have. In the interests of pure science, various hypotheses should be tested. Yet in the history of this field only Haim Cohn and myself have tried it. What a shame. What a shame on Gospel scholarship that this has been ruled out altogether. That's what witch trials do. They come to their conclusions on general grounds before the evidence is ever considered. They rule out all other ways of thinking. Does anyone have a desire to challenge to this?
