Sunday, January 28, 2018
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE RACIST AGAINST AN ANCIENT PEOPLE?
Anyone who is honest about
recovering the historical, Jewish Jesus has to be torn between two tasks. One
is to be accurate and fair about the evidence. That is the relatively easy
part, provided you can face your own prejudices that will distort the evidence.
If you can take that first step of owning up to the things that interfere with
a clear look at the evidence, you are on your way to seeing what really
happened.
But clarity about the facts will
get you nowhere if you do not confront the much harder second task. That is to
address the lack of self-awareness on the part of scholars who prefer ideology
over the evidence, who prefer power over truth (which I spoke about in my last
post for December). Scholars hate it when they are accused of bias in the way
they present the evidence and conceal evidence. But if you don’t do it, you can
be clear as daylight about the evidence and no one will see it, if their
prejudices and lack of self-awareness about this cloud everything up.
How is it possible to even get
straight the context of Jesus’s Jewish culture if scholars continue to
misrepresent it and have no self-awareness of what they are doing? Pick up
almost any book on the historical Jesus and what you get over and over again is
that 1st century Judaism had three main components: Temple, rituals,
and purity concerns. The frank thing to say about this is that it is a lie. Scholars
tell it because they want to believe it.
The three above-named items were some of the
accoutrements of ancient Judaism, but they were not the main course. The single
most important thing about ancient Jewish culture is that it was a struggle for
constitutional government, a struggle in which Jesus very much took part. There
is no historical Jesus scholar that I know of who will tell you this. (I go
into this in detail in True Jew.)
Their power tells scholars that
they can tell lies about Jewish culture and get away with it because there is
an atmosphere that is eager to believe in certain ideologies about ancient Jews
and in the ideology that Jesus was superior to them. Is it possible to be
racist against an ancient people? Many people would probably say no because the
point of racism is to deny civil rights and material well-being to specific
groups, and in the case of an ancient people, this is obviously not an issue.
But the dead are the most vulnerable group of all. They cannot rise up to
protest the lies that are told about them. Telling lies about the dead is, in a
sense, good practice for carrying out racism against contemporary groups.
Racism is very much about attacking people who are perceived to be vulnerable.
Racism against the ancients is a practice run. For that reason alone, we should
be very interested in exposing it.
It also has to be said that racists
do not really believe in the inferiority of others. They know claims of
inferiority are hogwash. But they also know a profounder truth: You can create
inferiority. You can make people believe they are inferior. Yes, such
psychological torture is possible and is the chief skill of racists. They can
undermine the self-confidence of any human beings, individually or on a group
level, by bombarding them and the general public with lies about their inferiority.
People are not inferior but can be made to feel inferior if racists are
relentless about spreading false charges against them.
This might seem to contradict
what I said above about racism against ancient peoples. After all, since they
are dead and gone, the ancients cannot be made to feel inferior. But I think
that those who practice racism against ancient Jews—no matter how innocently
they do it, no matter how unintended their racism is, which just contributes to
their lack of self-awareness—they like to imagine that ancient Jewish leaders
can be made to feel the sting of inferiority, and they further like to imagine
that Jesus was their proxy, making his fellow Jews feel distinctly inferior.
To practice racism against
ancient Jews maligns Jesus as much as it maligns his people. And unless we
confront how prevalent this is in historical Jesus scholarship, we will never
get anywhere. But then that’s the point of power and lack of self-awareness,
isn’t it? To put a halt to any progress in historical research,
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
