The Jesus Dynasty / James Tabor

I just returned from the thickly packed cluster of academic conferences held in San Diego, November 16th-20th–this included the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Schools of Oriental Research (ancient Near Eastern/Mediterranean archaeology), and the Biblical Archeology Society. Besides seeing many friends, hearing some interesting papers, and browsing the massive displays of new books by hundreds of publishers, I read a paper on Mary Magdalene in a joint meeting of the Early Jewish & Christian Mysticism section with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism & Christianity consultation. My assigned task was to offer a reflective review of Jane Schaberg’s important and provocative book, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (Continuum, 2004). As my readers know, I have quite a positive evaluation of this book and its importance and I had posted a blurb at this site back in March. I thought some might be interested in what I said, so I will paste in my remarks here:

My brief review is organized around three main points: The Women, the Problem, and the Ending. By “the Women,” I mean not only Mary Magdalene, but the author, Jane Schaberg as well, and a third, Virginia Woolf, who is brought along by Jane as a kind of meditative conversation partner throughout the book. Although this book is a thoroughly academic and scholarly historical investigation of Mary Magdalene, it is at the same time a sharply challenging and engaging personal narrative of Jane’s own journey in her search for the historical Mary Magdalene. She departs from the formal and structured categories common among us and bares her soul along the way. The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene is a thickly multifaceted work that resists easy characterization. It is at once carefully documented historical scholarship, meditative personal memoir, and cutting feminist critique. As such, one is hard pressed to review it with any sort of standard academic detachment. I was deeply drawn into the book at each of its many levels. I have to confess, my “heart burned within me” as I worked my way though the structured stages of her presentation. Jane has devoted a good bit of her career to the exposure of the multiple strategies of suppression of the memory of the two most important Marys in Jesus’ life—that of his mother and his companion Mary Magdalene. If you have read her courageous and important work, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, published twenty years ago, I recommend a revisiting. It is now out (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006) in an expanded paperback version that includes her personal reflections on the hostile reactions that work elicited from the small and the great in our field. As an illustration of this personal side of this book on Mary Magdalene I offer here two extended quotations, one on Woolf, the other about Schaberg herself:

“Woolf’s influence has been felt in many disciplines; but to my knowledge not yet much in Religious studies. In my own case, she functions something like the mentor I never had. ‘Consulting’ her, reading her avidly in the course of writing this book, is part of the feminist methodology I use here, infusing and refreshing the conventional methodologies of my discipline, oxygenating the masculinist atmosphere. Woolf puts me in the mood to think and write; she somehow keeps me going. She teaches the writer’s life of concentration and commitment, and makes it happier by repudiating the sacrifice of friendship, love, and simple social pleasures, for the needs of others. Scorning ‘adultery of the brain’ or ‘intellectual harlotry’ (writing what one does not want to write, for the sake of money rather than in the interests of culture and intellectual liberation), she urges connected thinking, and political savvy” (p. 32).

In this second quotation Jane reflects on the hostile reaction she received from the publication of her book, The Illegitimacy of Jesus and how her teaching in Detroit, and her surviving cancer have all had their part in the way her writing on Mary Magdalene unfolded:

“Yes I was ‘victimized’ a bit, and yes it set me back. But backlash also had the unintended effect of making me more personally and intensely interested in the process of censorship and silencing. It gave me reserves of anger and energy to draw on. I know in my bones how serious the opposition is to women’s insight, women’s revisioning. I know a little more about strategies of suppression . . . Reading from Detroit in this time is reading embedded in experiences of the deep and tangled structures of racism, sexism, poverty, classism, colonialism, and of the despair and courage displayed by those whom these structures have enmeshed. Despite my early efforts to get a ‘better’ job, I am lucky to teach in a non-elite, richly diverse classroom Virginia Woolf would approve of, where some—many—of our students are the poor (or the nearly poor, the recently poor) with whom I try to be a co-learner in the effort to demystify strategies of oppression like ‘whiteness,’ and to recognize powers of resistance . . . I belong to a group of survivors ‘privileged’ to experience my mortality: first as a young child with a heart valve problem, then in my forties with Stage 3 breast cancer. But all I remember about the latter experience is the terror of death, the striving to beat death, the will to live, the love of life. Having had to face the fear brought me no closer to an articulated faith, but only sometimes to the grasping of mantra-like phrases (‘now and at the hour of our death’ and ‘Shema’ Yisrael’) and to the presence and support of good friends. Nothing more. Nothing less” (pp. 14-16).

The essential historical problem the book addresses is captured in the subtitle: “Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament.” How does one move from, or otherwise account for or connect, the sparse accounts of Mary Magdalene in our canonical gospels with the plethora of later Mary Magdalene traditions and materials? Let’s begin with the beginning.

“And they all forsook him and fled.” This shortest line in the gospel of Mark (14:50) is as poignant as it is tragic. In five Greek words Mark dismisses the male apostles, the Twelve. Judas hands Jesus over to his enemies with a kiss, while the remaining “Eleven,” as Matthew later labels them; flee in fear, forsaking all, not to loose but to save their lives. In Mark Jesus is left utterly alone, abandoned and forsaken by all, and at the end, even by God—but not quite.

And there were also women, looking from afar; among whom were both Maria the Magdalene, and Maria, the mother of Jacob the less and Joses, and Salome; who when he was in Galilee, followed him, and served (dihko/noun) him; and many other women that came up with him to Jerusalem (Mk 15:40-41)

And so Mary Magdalene enters our history, in this earliest and most significant reference to her and the many other women who stood by the cross. These two Marys witness the burial of Jesus, according to Mark, and they, along with Salome, show up at the tomb very early Sunday morning to anoint the body with spices, only to find it missing. They are commissioned by a mysterious young man wearing a white robe to tell the male disciples and Peter that Jesus has been raised up and will meet them in Galilee. “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk 16:8). Thus Mark closes his account, with the exit of these three women as mysterious as their entrance. In Mark these women fail to fulfill their mission of proclamation, presumably that will be left to Peter and the other male disciples, who will see him in Galilee.

Nonetheless, this Markan tradition that Mary Magdalene and her Galilean women companions stood at the cross and were first witnesses that Jesus was raised is incorporated in modified ways in both Matthew and Luke. This sparse Markan tradition regarding Mary Magdalene is as limited as it is mysterious. Was it another Mary, or perhaps the same, who had anointed the head of Jesus with an expensive oil of nard two days earlier at Bethany—her deed celebrated as her perpetual memorial but her name lost or left out? Luke has an earlier scene of an unnamed woman, “a sinner,” anointing Jesus in Galilee (Luke 7:36-50). Immediately following that story he inserts Mark’s reference to the women followers of Jesus in Galilee, but he adds these women had been healed of evil spirits and disabilities, naming Mary Magdalene as one of them “from whom seven demons had gone out.” Such juxtaposition can hardly be without intention. Luke also includes these women; though he seems reluctant to even name them, as first witnesses to Jesus being raised. He makes it clear, however, that their testimony, delivered to the male Eleven, is judged as the idle talk of hysterical females. Even Celsus, a hundred and fifty years later, knows that a deluded “hysterical female,” aka Mary Magdalene, first delivered the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Mark insists on muting the first witness status of Mary Magdalene and her female companions, but that he includes it at all is quite telling. Luke lays the foundation for portraying Mary Magdalene as a sinner, hysterical and sexually threatening, the madwoman in Christianity’s attic.

Finally, I turn to the Ending. Schaberg’s final chapter, “Mary Magdalene as Successor to Jesus” is in my judgment one of the most impressive pieces of textual reading I have ever encountered. What she attempts to show is that the singular account in John 20:1-18, where Mary Magdalene encounters and speaks to Jesus in the garden tomb, preserves fragments of a tradition of Mary Magdalene as successor to Jesus—and thus, “first founder” of Christianity, in the sense of authoritative witness to resurrection faith. Whether this early tradition can be connected or not to later Christian texts that present Mary as a leading intellectual and spiritual guide, a beloved companion of Jesus and transmitter of his teachings, is a separate issue. What Schaberg shows, successfully in my view, is that the narrative structure of John 20 reflects an imaginative reuse of 2 Kings 2:1-18 where Elijah the prophet ascends to heaven, leaving his disciple Elisha as his designated witness and successor. This intimate personal appearance to Mary Magdalene, which focuses on ascent to heaven rather than resurrection of the dead per se, is parallel to, but sharply distinguished from, the more generic Synoptic accounts of angelic proclamations to the group of women.

Upon this foundation Schaberg offers a preliminary sketch of what she rather boldly labels “Magdalene Christianity,” both suppressed and lost in the Synoptic tradition, and particularly in Acts, much like the history of James and the Jerusalem community from 30-50 CE, Crossan’s “dark ages.” For some , such as Crossan, Schaberg’s reconstruction of John 20, as well as that of Schüssler Fiorenza and others, is “too optimistic” in terms of reconstructing what happened after Jesus’ death. His own reconstruction erases not only the empty tomb, but the memory of the women as first witnesses, and Mary Magdalene as his possible successor. Crossan once told Schaberg, as she recounts in her book, “Jane, if I could give you the empty tomb I would” (p. 252). Her response captures a characteristic of her wonderfully self-reflective style throughout her work: “I was stunned into silence by Crossan’s wish to ‘give’ me the narrative of the tomb; by the fact that it even occurred to him that he might. I wondered if I had to ‘take’ it. No, I knew I did.” And by that she meant she was obligated to offer her own reconstruction, attempting to be as clear about method as Crossan demands, and in particular to examine the assumptions behind his own reconstruction.

Schaberg’s academic contribution is much more than this ending. She applies her considerable analytical skills in taking the reader through the thick mass of archaeological and textual evidence related to Mary Magdalene. Her extended “profile” of Mary Magdalene in chapter four, drawn from a careful combing through all the apocryphal Magdalene materials (Nag Hammadi texts as well as the Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Peter, and fragmented sources), is one of the most sustained and thorough treatments available.

My main suggestion is that Schaberg, in considering the notion of Mary Magdalene as “companion” of Jesus, might find less dichotomy between the “intimate/erotic” and the “sexual/romantic.” Despite the desire to make Mary Magdalene the “wife” of Jesus in popular circles, as witnessed by the extraordinarily positive reception of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code among the masses, I do not think the possibility should be precluded or dismissed. Indeed, I think there are some compelling arguments that Jesus may well have been married, and if such were the case, then Mary Magdalene does indeed seem to be our best candidate. I think the recent discussion of the Talpiot “Jesus Family tomb” has opened a new set of issues in this regard, at least for me.

Schaberg has caused me to seriously rethink and supplement my own reconstruction of Jesus and his earliest followers, but most particularly, the place of the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene’s role as visionary successor of Jesus. I have begun to explore how this might relate to my reconstruction of the prominence of James and the brothers of Jesus in the early movement, and what role such a mystical/visionary understanding of Jesus earlier and separate from that of Paul and his communities, might have played in the whole.

In my book, The Jesus Dynasty, the center and focus of my understanding of the historical Jesus is that he thought himself to be heir to the royal throne of David, the Messiah, and from a Roman viewpoint the “King of the Jews.” The latter was a title Herod and his son Antipas coveted, valued, and feared, since the family had married into “royal” Hashmonean connections but could make no claim for Davidic ancestry. Josephus and Eusebius (following his source Hegisippus), tell us that the emperors Vespasian, Domitian, and Trajan, following the Revolt in Judea, were on the hunt for descendants of David. They were considered threats to Roman stability, given their potential for Messianic claims.

Ironically, Paul is our earliest literary source to Jesus’ Davidic bloodline. He epitomizes his message about Jesus in his letter to followers at Rome with the formula:

“. . . the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:3-4).

For Paul, there was indeed, a “Jesus Dynasty,” but its significance ended with the death of Jesus. It was never passed on to James or other members of the royal family, and Jesus himself, as a “flesh and blood” human being, was transformed into a life-giving spirit as glorified Son of God by his resurrection from the dead (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:45). The physical or “earthly” line of David was made completely obsolete and irrelevant, and the kingdom of God no longer had to do with realizing the “will of God, on earth as in heaven” in this present political and social world. Indeed, the “form of this world” was passing away, and even marriage and sexual identity was fast becoming obsolete, and all dealings with this world, whether social or economic, were fading away (1 Corinthians 7:31)

Paul was, however, quite interested in another Dynasty, and a different kind of “kingdom of God,” one totally outside the realm of “flesh and blood.” He believed that followers of Jesus were infused or “begotten” as “sons of God” through the Holy Spirit, and thus became brothers of Jesus, part of the heavenly “royal family,” and destined to reign as kings, sit on thrones, and wear crowns, in the future Kingdom of God. In fact, Paul even tells his socially disenfranchised followers at Corinth that they were destined to “judge the world” and rule over angels” (1 Corinthians 6:2-3, cf. 4:8).

In Paul’s view the union between the Lord and the group, i.e., the “many children of God,” was one as definitive as the sexual union of a man and a woman, resulting in a child. He quotes the book of Genesis to illustrate how one joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him, just as the case of a male and female: “as it is written, the two become one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:16-17).

For Paul none of this is metaphorical or symbolic. It is absolutely real and literal. According to Paul, being “saved,” is becoming part of a new genus within a new creation–siblings of the glorified Christ and part of God’s heavenly family. When Jesus appears in the clouds the children of this new family, and them alone, including those who might have died, will raise up into the air, through the clouds, and into the heavens. They will experience an instantaneous transformation and enthronement mirroring the heavenly glory that Jesus himself received. They will no longer be “flesh and blood,” or “dust of the earth,” but glorified spirit beings, exalted above all creation, ruling over the entire cosmos under God and their “older brother” Christ, the “firstborn” of many brothers/children.

I call this the Paul Dynasty, not because it literally has to do with Paul’s lineage–though he does metaphorically tell his followers that he has “become their father” through inducting them into this cosmic process. Rather, it is Paul’s idea of an alternative “Jesus Dynasty” in which everything “physical,” “earthly,” and historical is transferred to the heavenly realms above and beyond. The same language originally used in a Jewish Messianic context, such as “king” “son of God,” “throne” “rule” or “kingdom,” is appropriated and transformed. It is removed from its historical, social, political, and economic contexts and implications. There is no “fixing of the world,” but a resignation that the “Creation,” is hopelessly flawed and doomed, happily to soon pass away. It is a view almost wholly dependent on an imminent apocalyptic “end” to history, since people are asked to buy out of, or otherwise postpone, their stake in life itself on planet earth. Slaves can stay slaves, single folk need not marry or reproduce, evil doers can be tolerated for the short time they have left, and creative production of all kind is a vain effort (1 Corinthians 7:29-31).

The “Paul Dynasty” casts off the original messianic vision of the Hebrew prophets, that God’s will would be realized “on earth as it is in heaven,” and that peace, justice, and righteousness would spread to all nations through the example of a Servant people. But in leaving that biblical Project behind it only offers “faith” in a sudden heavenly rescue from the clouds as an alternative.

NB: There is a somewhat technical but fairly thorough review of Paul’s views on the subject, set in the wider contexts of his understanding of his apostolic mission on my University Web site: The Message and Mission of Paul.

Today is the Jewish Festival popularly known as Rosh HaShanah, literally “head of the year.” Around the world Jews are gathering in Synagogues, as this day begins the coundown of the Ten Days of Awe, leading to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement or literally “Covering.” Yet, Rosh HaShannah is the 1st day of the SEVENTH month, not the first day of the first month.  Judaism really has two “years.”  The biblical New Year is of course the first day of the first month, in the Spring, as Exodus 12: 1 plainly says: This Moon/month shall be to you the beginning of months.” That day is very significant in biblical and Jewish history and many things have taken place on Nisan 1st–the biblical New Year.  It signals “new beginnings.”

But the 7th month/moon is also the first of a kind of “legal” new year,” that had to do in ancient times with certain calculations regarding the Jubilee, the redemption of bond-servants, and so forth.  It is more of a societal New Year, much like our July and Oct “fiscal years” in our world today. And within later Jewish tradition the 1st day of the 7th month came to be remembered as a kind of “birthday of the world,” in that the Rabbis passed on the tradition that Adam was created on the 1st day of the 7th month, in the Fall, on this very day (September 22nd)–the Autumnal Equinox (though a minority view still held to Nisan 1st in the Spring).

In the Torah itself, this holy day is never called Rosh HaShanah.  Rather it gets a different name–Yom Teru’ah, that is “day of the blast.” Teru’ah in Hebrew refers to raising up a loud noise, whether a shout or the blast of the trumpet or Shofar. The meaning of the day is never specified in the Bible but the blowing of the Shofar seems to function as a kind of herald or clarion call, announcing the end of one period and the beginning of another.

What is all the more interesting about this day is that by some calculations (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, a book well worth its price as it cover many other chronological matters related to the Bible) Jesus was born on or very near the 1st day of the 7th month–based on the chronology given in the book of Luke. The calculations are complex but have to do with the time in which Zechariah, father of John the Baptizer, served in the Temple (Luke 1:8), as the “section” of priests in which he was part went on duty at a specific time of year. From that window calculations can be made as to the birth of John, followed by the birth of Jesus six months later. My own calculations, based on a computer program I use, puts the birth of Jesus in 5 B.C. very close to Rosh HaShanah, or September 22nd on the Gregorian Calendar, corresponding to the Autumnal Equinox. In some years that is still the case, as it was last year, September 22, 2006 and Rosh HaShanah coincided.

There is a fascinating Roman civic inscription dating to the year 9 B.C. that was passed by the cities of Asia to celebrate the birthday of the Emperor Augustus. It reads in part:  “Whereas, finally, that the birthday of the god (i.e. Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (euangelion) concerning him, therefore, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth, and let his birthday mark the beginning of the new year.”

It is surely more than ironic that the birth of Jesus, an insignificant Galilean peasant, living under the brutal boot of Roman occupation, just a few years later, did indeed lead to a new era, a kind of “birthday of the world,” that has paled into insignificance the birth of the celebrated Emperor Augustus.

So today in particular it seems has a double meaning, as the “birthday of the world” within Rabbinic Judaism, but for Christians, and really our entire society, the birthday of a new era, in that Jesus himself was born on or very near this day.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s moving and historic “Day of Infamy” speech on Monday, December 8th, 1941, the morning after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is still remembered by those born before 1935, and to millions of us of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946 and thereafter) was recounted firsthand by our parents as we came of age after the horrors of World War II. My father, like so many, joined the military that Monday morning. It was the most decisive geopolitical event of the 20th century and changed everything for all of us even after nearly 66 years. It is wonderfully preserved on the Web, in sound, film, and even the typed transcript from which the President read.

I have devoted my academic career to the study of Jesus and early Christianity. The 1st century AD also witnessed such a Day of Infamy. It was commemorated just last week, on Tuesday, July 24th, known by Jews as Tisha b’Av, the 9th day of the fifth month of Av on the Jewish/Hebrew calendar. It is a day of complete fasting and abject mourning, remembering the destruction of Jerusalem, including both Temples, the First and the Second, in 586 BCE and 70 CE respectively, as well as countless other sad and tragic days in Jewish history.

Over the years I have come to realize that when it comes to understanding the 1st century Jesus movement, which developed into the new religion called “Christianity,” there is no greater factor or event than the horrific destruction of Jerusalem in August of 70 CE by the Roman emperor Vespasian. Indeed, the Romans called this period caniculares dies, the “dog days of summer,” a name that has stuck until our time, falling between July 15 and August 15, and characterized by oppressively hot and sultry temperatures when all creatures become languid and forlorn. I would urge all my readers to carefully read through the account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in Josephus’ Jewish War, in a translation other than that of William Whiston, which is just too outdated (1793). The Penguin edition, though abridged, by Williamson, is one easily available alternative.

I think it would be hard to overemphasize the critical and vital importance of this watershed event in 1st century Jewish Palestine. After that date everything changed, for Jews living in the Roman empire, but most decidedly for the followers of Jesus, certainly in the Homeland, but also those scattered through the Mediterranean world. To put it succinctly–nothing was ever the same again. Jesus had died in 30 CE but his influential brother James (Jacob/Yaaqov) had taken over and offered new hope and direction for the movement. When he too was brutally murdered in 62 CE by the same family of High Priests connected to the “Godfather” Annas, the Jesus movement was absolutely devastated.

Ironically, none of our New Testament documents record the horrors of August, 70 CE, and everything we have was written either a decade before or a decade after that decisive Day of Infamy. Before that date we have the authentic letters of Paul and the Q source, dating to the 50s CE. These writings anticipate an apocalyptic climax of all things directly on the horizon. After 70 CE we get our four Gospels and other materials (later Pauline letters, Peter, John, Revelation, etc.), which are basically sketching out a vision of “post-War” existence with the “End of the Age” much delayed and postponed.

The New Testament scholar, John Dominic Crossan has called the period from 30-50 CE, before Paul’s letters, the “dark age” of Christianity, due to the lack of historical sources. In terms of the first followers of Jesus, that is, those Jewish messianists led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, the “black out” hardly ends with Paul, who had begun to propose a wholly alternative vision of the “faith” of Jesus. The double blow of the death of James and the destruction of Jerusalem, with the death and scattering of those Jerusalem witnesses who had known Jesus, effectively ended any possibility of our direct access to a non-Pauline version of things. When the “curtain” comes up after 70 CE, a modified version of Paul was clearly the “only game in town,” and hope of the “kingdom of God on earth,” with a restoration of the nation of Israel under its Davidic Messiah, was thoroughly dashed.

Jews find many historic reasons to fast on Tisha b’Av, but I am thinking it might not be such a bad idea for Christians as well, at least for those who are interested in recovering the original faith of Jesus. In some ironic way I think one can say that the “end of the age” did indeed come during those dog days of the summer of 70 CE, and whether the new age that dawned was a loss or a gain is something with which all of us have to grapple. Christian pilgrims in the time of the emperor Constantine began to travel to Jerusalem to see the holy places that had become associated with the life of Jesus. One high point of the typical pilgrimage was to stand on the Mount of Olives, gazing over the plaza where the Temple once stood. We have accounts where they joyfully celebrate the confirmation of faith they received in thinking of how the Jews who had rejected “Christ” had been justly punished by the destruction of Jerusalem and their subsequent Exile. Luke offers us such a triumphant version of things as he rewrites Mark’s “little Apocalypse,” and Matthew as he reworks Mark’s narrative of the trial of Jesus:

“For great distress will be upon the earth and upon this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:23-24)

“And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” (Matthew 27:25)

Such post-War language echoes the brutally triumphant words of Paul, written decades earlier, when he speaks of “the Jews” who killed the Lord Jesus and “displease God and oppose all men,” but “God’s wrath has come upon them at last!” (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16).

Remembering Tisha b’Av…

I have received a few really angry letters or e-mail messages from readers of The Jesus Dynasty, not very many out of thousands, but maybe a dozen or so. Most often these people have condemned me with a good degree of passion for besmirching the holiness and chastity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in my presentation of her as a Jewish woman, married and the mother of seven children. In our Western cultural tradition there is a deeply ingrained aversion to the so-called “material” world of nature, in contrast to a “higher” spiritual world beyond. This “dualistic” view of reality is transmitted to us in a thousand ways, carried historically by a dominant Christian culture heavily influenced by Platonic thinking.

In this view reality, or the “creation,” is sharply divided into two separate opposing realms. These can be characterized by a series of contrasting and non-intersecting opposites:

Material-/-Spiritual
Earthly-/-Heavenly
Visible-/-Invisible
Human-/-Divine
Mortal Body-/-Immortal Soul
Death-/-Eternal Life
Decay-/-Incorruption

In such a scheme of things there is a real problem with explaining the origin of the lower material world into which we as humans are born, as well as proposing a lifestyle that would set one on the proper course of disengagement and devaluation of the physical world, in favor of the higher and better world above. After all, humans, with their decidedly “animal” bodies, are born into a world of death, so that the divine nature within them is seen as “trapped” “imprisoned” or “fallen” into such a lower realm. In the more extreme dualistic systems, often characterized as gnostic, the creation itself is seen as the work of a lower inferior god or angelic power, not the work of the supreme God who could have no part in creating such an inferior realm, and much less in placing humans in such a hopeless state. Asceticism, or the denial of the material world and the desires of the physical body, was seen as the highest form of spirituality in that humans could shun sexuality and the pleasures of the body, detaching themselves from all that is below, in preparation for their eternal life in heaven. Birth and life in this world could be seen, ironically, as “death,” while death could be labeled as “birth,” into the higher spiritual world, a transit and escape from the lower realm. Thus the philosopher Empedecles, wrote of his own birth, metaphorically imagining his soul’s entrance into this world, “I wept, I wept, when I saw this dreadful place!” And the apostle Paul, a dedicated sexual ascetic himself, exhorts his followers: “For we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” He speaks of our “bodies of humiliation” and imagines life in a transformed heavenly body, free of decay, and of course, of sensuality and especially sexuality.

This ascetic dualistic perspective is so ingrained in our cultural baggage that it is equated by most with religion and spirituality itself. Accordingly, Jesus understood as “God in the flesh,” and Mary his mother, as the “holy mother of God” are immediately put in tension with the clear teaching of the church that both Jesus and Mary were fully human. If “incarnation” is taken seriously, in its full implications, Jesus and Mary, as subject and vehicle of this merger of the divine and the human, have to remain “human”–or almost so. But therein lies the problem. To what degree can “the divine” truly participate in the human? An ascetic lifestyle is a given, and was widely admired through the Hellenistic-Roman culture. But what about sex and death? Those were the sticklers. Christians had a tremendous problem with imagining Jesus or his mother as sexual beings, so the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary and the celibate Jesus go hand in hand. And for Jesus, and later his mother, to die and be buried, their bodies rotting and decaying, and going back to the dust, as with every other human being, became a problem as well. Heavenly life, for them at least, was finally seen to involve an “assumption” of their physical bodies, made incorruptible, directly into heaven, so that there could be no earthly remains.

Assumption by Venuti, Malta, 1896

That is why the Talpiot Jesus tomb is such a potential scandal to millions of Christians. If it could indeed be shown that the bones of Jesus were found in an ossuary, that he had a wife and a child, and that Mary, his mother, bore other children, and her bones were also buried with her son, then for many the whole structure of Christianity is threatened. Notions of perpetual virginity, lifelong celibacy, and bodily resurrection and/or assumption into heaven would each be called into question. Of course Protestants and Roman Catholics do not agree on all these matters. Although Luther and the Reformers did argue for the perpetual virginity of Mary, it is common to hear Evangelical Christians say they have no problem with Mary living a normal sexual life and having other children. And Protestants have never had a problem with finding the bones of Mary, who is assumed to have died and returned to the dust. But Jesus of course is another matter. I believe there is a deep seated aversion to thinking of Jesus as living a normal sexual life. What one might hear is that we have no “historical record” of Jesus having a wife or children, but it is clear to me, having grown up in conservative Christian circles, that much more is at stake on the “gut” level. As “fully human” as Jesus might have been, one does not get far imagining the Son of God being aroused sexually and having intercourse. Even to write of such things, as I am doing here, is just considered inappropriate and in bad taste. And how much more so for his mother? If we don’t like to think of our own parents having sex, then all the more so for the Holy Family, one and all. Perhaps that is why the wives and children of none of the apostles or brothers of Jesus are ever named in our Gospel records. It is not only a profoundly “male” story, as told by the Synoptics and John, but it is also a profoundly asexual one. But what was the reality?

Historians are left to deal with the social, cultural, and religious world of 1st century Roman occupied Jewish Palestine when they deal with any historical figure of the period, and Jesus all the more so, since understanding him in his own time and place has such an impact on our lives today. In that world of historical reality humans have fathers, and only in mythological stories, not to be taken literally, are they fathered by gods; men and women marry and have children, it is the cultural norm; and humans die and are buried together in tombs, with their bones being collected in various ways by the living in memory of the dead. Theology is one thing, history is another, and on these matters of sex, birth, and death there can clearly be a conflict but little contest. If we are after the historical Jesus, as Schweitzer saw so clearly a hundred years ago, we have to pursue the “purely historical,” and leave the mythological and the metaphorical in their proper places. And in the case of Jesus that means recovering a 1st century Jew and his family, living and dying as others Jews of the time.

The emphasis of the Torah on God’s creation declared as “very good,” with the first commandment or blessing upon humans being “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” created a real tension with Hellenistic forms of dualism and gnosticism, that devalued the world and sexuality. The world is light and life and death is realistically seen as the loss we all experience, a return to the dust. There is little if any asceticism of this type in the Hebrew Bible and celibacy of this type unknown in Jewish sources of this period.* Although Josephus says an elite group among the Essenes practiced celibacy there is no such emphasis in any of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we have to consider that Josephus is casting his portrait of this group in image of a Pythagorian philosophical school to gain currency with his Roman audience. The only Jewish celibate we know about is Paul, and in his halting defense of his position he appeals to neither Scripture nor tradition, and he fails to use Jesus as his model. The silence is pretty indicative that he is pushing something that is unconventional among the original followers of Jesus. His influences here have been shown to lie in Stoic-Cynic debates regarding the advisability of marriage and having children. Theophrastus and Epicurus, long before Paul, had already argued that married life and the pursuit of philosophy were incompatible because of the cares and responsibilities imposed upon a married man by his wife.

Jesus’ only allusion to the single life, found in Matthew 19:10-12, is really about the prohibition against divorce and taking a second wife while the first was alive, forbidden by him, echoed by Paul, and also part of the teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect. The disciples are so taken with his strict teaching in this regard that they say to him, “If such be the case, then if would be better never to marry,” and Jesus’ reply makes it clear that once married the only choice is to live together or live separately, but single. He is not discussing any kind of ascetic life here but rather offering stern warning about the inviolate and permanent nature of marriage, “til death do we part.”

From the point of view of the Torah and the Hebrew Prophets, and indeed most forms of ancient Judaism, any aversion toward the idea of Jesus and his mother Miriam living sexual lives represents a misplaced sense of “holiness.” In the Hebrew Bible the notion of ritual purity or “holiness,” that is separating the “sacred” from the “profane,” had first and foremost to do with the sanctity of the Temple. The prohibitions regarding menstruation, childbirth, seminal emissions, and contact with corpses, had nothing to do with asceticism, but with separation of these signs of “mortality” from the Temple precincts. The English translations of “clean” and “unclean” carry unfortunate and misleading connotations. The concept of “holiness,” was extended to ethical and moral “separation” from the defilements of sinful behavior, but never, in any texts, are the natural functions of the body, or sex, or the enjoyment of physical pleasures, seen as morally tainted or somehow connected to anything evil.

Theologically speaking, “incarnation” is embedded in the monistic view of the cosmos represented in the Creation Hymn of Genesis 1:1-2:3. There humans are made, male and female, “in the likeness and image of God,” with no dualistic sense of alienation from either the “physical” world or the Creator. Notions of a lost and fallen physical world, alienated from the True God Above, and in need of a “rescue mission” from Divine Son of God sent into the world below, were a long time coming. Unfortunately, in terms of Christian theology, these “entrance and exit” points for the Son of God (virgin birth, bodily resurrection & assumption to heaven), have become watch marks of orthodox dogma for many, so that being a Christian is defined in terms of whether one literally assents to such propositions rather than whether one is aligned with the message of the “Kingdom of God” that Jesus preached.

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*The evidence cited by van der Horst, “Celibacy in Early Judaism,” Revue Biblique 109 (2002) 390-402 and S.D. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in A. Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality From the Bible Through the Middle Ages, London: SCM Press, 1985, 253-288, notwithstanding.

I am getting very excited about the Biblical Archaeology Seminar I am doing with Professor Diane Lipsett of Wake Forest University this coming July 22-28 at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It is a full week with each of us giving ten lectures, plus chances to interact both formally and informally with the participants and the lecturers. If you have never been to one of these week long vacation seminars I think you will find they are truly a bonding experience. They usually draw about 25 or so participants with lots of opportunities for conversation. The first one I ever did was at Guilford College in 1990 with Professor Tom McCollough. I still see and correspond with participants of that seminar through all these years. Also, you could not choose a better setting than Asheville, NC, both in terms of nature and culture. It is absolutely one of the most wonderful areas in our country. The chance of spending a week there in July, even without the seminar, would be well worth it.

I just had an e-mail from Jeffrey Butz, author of The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity (2005) informing me that he would be attending the seminar. It will be really good to meet and talk with him. His book on James came to my attention right after I had completed my own manuscript for The Jesus Dynasty and I remember being absolutely and pleasingly surprised at how close our ideas were even though we had worked independently and had never met or heard of one another. I highly recommend his book to all my readers.

Professor Lipsett and I worked hard to design a seminar that would really get at some topics and issues that are seldom covered in courses or lectures on early Christianity. We called it: The Stuff of Life! The idea was to tap into the everyday social world of the earliest Christians, based on both textual and material evidence. As you can see below from the topics, it promises to be quite a fascinating time together. We will try to cover everything you always wanted to ask about the early Christians on the down to earth level of how they actually lived (and died!).

Here are a few details on the Program and full expanded version is available at the BAS Web site with cost and registration information. The topics are quite fascinating as you will see, and yes, we promise to answer all these questions fully :-), or at least do our best trying.

The Stuff of Life: What Texts and Archaeology Tell Us about the Everyday World of the Earliest Christians

University of North Carolina at Asheville
July 22–28, 2007

Subject Areas and Lecture Titles:

BEGINNING FROM THE END
Dead Men (and Women) Do Tell Tales: Jewish Burial in the Late 2nd Temple Period (TABOR)
Letting Stones Speak: Greco-Roman Burial Inscriptions and Social Relations (LIPSETT)
Is the Talpiot Tomb Related to Jesus of Nazareth? (TABOR)
Burial Tales and Ghost Stories: Popular Ancient Narratives about How Life Meets Death (LIPSETT)

AT TABLE AND AT HOME
Eating and Drinking with the Divine (TABOR)
Meals and Status in Homes and in House Churches (LIPSETT)
Sex and the City: Jews, Christians and Romans (TABOR)
The Problem of Desire (LIPSETT)

JESUS AND HIS FOLLOWERS IN A STRATIFIED WORLD
Was Jesus a Poor, Illiterate, Itinerant Peasant? (TABOR)
Was Celsus Right? (Were Early Christians Mostly Slaves, Women and Ignorant?) (LIPSETT)
Following the God of Abraham: How Gentiles Viewed Judaism in Roman Times (TABOR)
Making Room for the Wealthy in Early Christian Groups (LIPSETT)

PIETY AND PRACTICE
When You All Come Together in One Place: How the Earliest Christians Worshiped (TABOR)
Healers, Healing and Cure (LIPSETT)
An Early Christian “Prayer Hall” at Megiddo? (TABOR)
Texts as Sacred Objects: Scrolls, Codices and Piety (LIPSETT)

ENDS AND RETURNS
Renouncing the Stuff of Life: Asceticism in the Greco-Roman World (LIPSETT)
Living at the End of History: Practicalities, Problems and Possibilities (TABOR)
Manly Martyrs: Peter, Paul, Polycarp, Perpetua (LIPSETT)
Life Beyond this World: Death among Romans, Jews and Christians (TABOR)
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Lecturers

B. Diane Lipsett is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Divinity School at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Lipsett (formerly Wudel) teaches courses in New Testament and Christian origins, bringing a background in literary criticism and an ongoing interest in literary and rhetorical theory to her study of early Christian texts. She undertook her doctoral work at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), completing a dissertation titled Seductions of Self-Control: Narrative Transformation in Hermas, Thecla, and Aseneth. Lipsett has also published on the rhetoric of perfection in the Sermon on the Mount, and on motifs of desire and self-restraint in early non-canonical texts. She was selected one of four Regional Scholars recognized in 2002 by the Society for Biblical Literature. Born in Canada, Lipsett spent parts of her youth in Australia, Texas, and Alaska, participating in a variety of Protestant congregations. She has been actively involved in the teaching and youth ministries of many churches. She is married to Richard Vinson and has two sons, James and Christopher Wudel.

James Tabor is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is professor of Christian Origins and Ancient Judaism. Since earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1981, Tabor has combined his work on ancient texts with extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan, including work at Qumran, Sepphoris, Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, Masada, Wadi el-Yabis and, with Shimon Gibson, the “John the Baptist” cave at Suba and the recently discovered “Tomb of the Shroud” in Jerusalem. Tabor has also been heavily involved in the recent “Jesus Family Tomb” controversy. He is chief editor of the Original Bible Project that is producing a new scholarly translation of the Bible. Among his publications are Things Unutterable (1985), A Noble Death (1992) and Why Waco: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (1995). His latest book, now out in paperback, is The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (Simon & Schuster).

Location

The University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNCA) is surrounded by the majesty and charm of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The scenic, compact 265-acre mountain campus serves 3,300 students and is located one mile north of downtown Asheville, a city of 75,000 people. South Ridge Residence Hall and the new Highsmith University Center (with meeting space and adjacent dining hall) will provide for easy accessibility and maximum convenience. Downtown Asheville hums with life as people enjoy a unique mix of culture that has led this city to be dubbed the “Paris of the South.” Enjoy the Botanical Gardens, the Biltmore Estate & Winery, and the Asheville Art Museum.

One of the highlights of my time in Jerusalem last week was spending time with John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah. They were in the country filming for a upcoming Discovery television special on Jesus that is to air this Christmas. We had wanted to get together to discuss the Talpiot tomb face to face, but I had also invited him to come and spend an evening with me, Shimon Gibson, and my students to talk about his views of the “last days of Jesus,” and particularly how he reads the narratives in the Synoptics and John regarding the empty tomb of Jesus. We gathered last Saturday evening in the lovely courtyard of Beit Schmuel, the Guesthouse that is part of the “Progressive Judaism” center (known as “Reform” in the US) and spend a couple of stimulating and delightful hours together. Most of my students had read Crossan’s major books on Jesus, as we used them in a course I taught last Fall on the “historical Jesus,” so he was addressing a highly motivated and prepared group.

If there is any one thing that Crossan’s work on the historical Jesus and Christian Origins has made clear it is that everything turns on the question of method. In working with our New Testament Gospels, as well as other materials such as the reconstructed Q source, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Thomas, one has to formulate a clear understanding of how such materials will be weighed and evaluated and the methods one will use to try and get at what is historical and what is theological, mythological, or parabolic.

To those outside the field of critical biblical studies who read the Bible “literally,” it means what it says and it says what it means. But the historian must properly ask, given Mark’s core narrative of Jesus last week in Jerusalem, which sections most likely reflect actual history, and which were created by Mark or his community for theological purposes? Did Jesus ride down the Mt. of Olives on a donkey, was he examined by Pontius Pilate, did Joseph of Arimathea take him corpse and bury it in a nearby tomb, and did women visit that tomb Sunday morning and find it empty? And when Jesus speaks or teaches to what degree do we have what he actually said and to what degree are we hearing the theological memory of his followers four or five decades after his death who are passing on traditions from Jesus relevant to their own concerns and times? In other words, to what extent is Mark, our core story, reflecting the situation related to the devastation of 70 CE and the first Jewish Revolt (see Mark 13 sandwiched within the narrative), and interpreting Jesus as the Christ he came to be? Or alternatively, to what extent is Mark’s story related to the historical Jesus and his own situation 40 years earlier–and how would one know? Further, since Matthew and Luke basically follow Mark’s passion narrative, what about John? Is John an independent source from Mark, or is his heavily theologized narrative of the last days of Jesus essentially Mark written over with his own vision of things? Crossan is convinced John has no independent story but represents further theological embellishment rather than “history.” It is the “how would one know” that has to do with method. The choices scholars such as Crossan make might seem arbitrary to the casual reader, but as much as anyone in the field Crossan has sought to set forth his method and the assumptions he employs therein, and has challenged colleagues to offer critique and evaluation. And they have surely done that.

In terms of the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus as related by Mark, Crossan is very skeptical. He does not think that Jesus knew beforehand that he was to die in Jerusalem and that he purposely offered himself as a sacrifice for sins to fulfill Isaiah “Suffering Servant” image, or that he asked followers to sacramentally “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood” at a Last Supper.He has no doubt that Jesus was crucified, but he thinks the accounts of the trial before the “whole Sanhedrin,” and the scene before a somewhat sympathetic Pilate are constructed by Mark. He also is doubtful of the Joseph of Arimathea burial story. He would see each of these elements as constructed by Mark and the post-70 CE community to fit their developing view of Jesus as Christ, Lord, and Savior, much in keeping with Paul’s theology. Crossan does not think we can ever know what happened to the body of Jesus, since he understands the entire “empty tomb” narrative to be a late apologetic contruction in an effort to push a more “literal” view of the resurrection of Jesus. Here he would go to Paul, where we find the earliest traditions on faith in Jesus as resurrected, but in a “spiritual body” with appearances akin to that Paul claims he had years after Jesus’ death–not a resusitated corpse walking about but a heavenly vision of power and glory.

My own approach, method, and conclusions are quite different from that of Crossan as readers of The Jesus Dynasty know. I do consider John an independent source from Mark, though I think the author of John knows Mark’s gospel and writes his own account aware thereof. But by and large I accept the basic narrative framework of Mark as historical, i.e., Jesus rode into the city and allowed himself to be proclaimed king, he taught in the Temple all week and confronted the religious authorities, he ate a last supper in the lower city, was arrested in Gethsemane, betrayed by Judas, tried at the house of Caiaphus, taken before Pilate, crucified, and buried by Joseph of Arimathea. None of these events themselves do I have reason to doubt, though I do accept fully that Mark’s theological thread of interpretation runs through them all, and when we encounter Christological interpretation closer to Paul than to what we know of the teachings of Jesus, I agree with Crossan that we are dealing with theology not history.

One element I try to include in my book is the question of how these narrative frames fit within what we can reconstruct of Herodian Jerusalem today. In other words, how do the texts read “on the ground”? Shimon Gibson has devoted years to this subject and though we disagree on some of the “locations” or settings for a few of the events (he thinks the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is likely the place of crucifixion, I put it on the Mt of Olives), I have learned much from him. The morning after our gathering at Beit Schmuel, Gibson and I took Crossan and his wife Sarah around the Old City to highlight this “on the ground” side of the Markan story. We looked at the rock hewn tombs (now empty!) in Akeldama, the site of Pilate’s judgment seat along the Western Wall of the Old City, outside Herod’s Palace area, and of course, the Talpiot tomb, as a potential place of “secondary burial” for Jesus and his family.

Crossan in Front of “an” Empty 1st Century Rock Hewn Tomb

My impression was that being “at the scene” in these ways, including passing by the newly discovered Pool of Siloam mentioned only in John, did give Prof. Crossan some new perspectives to think about as he continues to read his texts and refine his methods. It seems to me that the “realistic” narratives that Mark and John offer, that conform so closely to what we can see today, go a long way toward supporting an approach of “eyewitness” testimony along the lines that Richard Bauckham has been developing. In other words, Mark and John have received much of their narrative framework and teaching materials from traditions and communities who lived in the place where it all happened. This would be particularly true for the “last days of Jesus,” when we get to Jerusalem, and perhaps less true for the Galilean materials. My own approach is a strange mixture in that I doubt the theological overlay but tend to trust the essential narrative framework, and ironically, I find time and time again the narrative framework helps one to peel back the later theology.

Gibson showing Dom and Sarah the original 1st century steps that led up to Pilate’s Judgment Seat at the Western Wall of the Old City

As for the Talpiot tomb, I think Dom Crossan remains curious and open, wanting to know more. He does not find the idea that Jesus would have been given such an honorable burial by devoted followers to be farfetched, and I think I was able to convince him that it is more in Matthew, who makes the tomb “belong” to Joseph the “rich man,” where one finds the theological overlay regarding Jesus’ burial, not in the burial itself, which would be expected. Sarah, Dom’s wife, seems to be quite convinced on her own that Talpiot has a high liklihood of being the “real thing.” I look forward to discussing with her some of her reasoning in this regard and how she and her husband might differ on the subject, though Crossan did issue a formal quote back in March on the subject of the Talpiot tomb in which he said it was “The final nail in the coffin of biblical literalism?” His main concern, as I understand it, is that if the tomb was disturbed in antiquity, which appears to be the case, how might that effect what we see and interpret today?

At the “garden tomb” in east Talpiot with Gibson,Dom, and Sarah Crossan

I have always found Dom Crossan to be one of the most gracious scholars in our field, despite his heatedly controversial stands. He treats his opponents with respect and it becomes obvious in any conversation with him that his views of Jesus, his teachings, his death, and his “parabolic” resurrection, are life and breath to him, not detached academic excercises. How and why Jesus lived and died deeply matters to him. His parting word to my students, when we showed him a 1st century Roman crucifixion nail, was that he would not care a whit if the bones of Jesus were found, in the Talpiot tomb or otherwise, but he would care very much if there was evidence Jesus was never really crucified and died comfortable and happy in old age–with Mark’s entire story being fiction. This reminded me of a story Norman Perrin told us at the University of Chicago back in 1972. He was pressed by conservative students who objected to the way he insisted, much like Crossan, that much of the Markan narrative was constructed and not historical. They asked him, given his minimal view of the historical Jesus, what was the bottom line with him. In other words, if so much of the passion narrative is constructed, what is the historical core, without which we would have nothing. He replied, “If it could be shown that rather than forgiving his enemies, Jesus was dragged to the cross, kicking and screaming and cursing his enemies, then everything would change.”

Jesus’ conflict with, and opposition to, the religious and political authorities of Jerusalem came to a head at Passover in the year 30 CE. Although scholars dispute the details, the corrupt high priestly family of Annas, including his son-in-law Caiaphus, and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, were the key players in the final determination of his fate–execution by crucifixion for sedition. Their involvement in his death indicates that he, like his kinsman John the Baptizer, drew attention at the highest levels of authority. Although there is no evidence that Jesus or John had collected masses or arms or laid plans for any military moves against the establishment, preaching that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” and stirring the masses toward such expectations was not considered a harmless ethereal other-worldly fantasy. It had concrete political and social implications–not the least of which was Jesus’ coronation as the rightful King of Israel, i.e., the anointed Messiah. Jesus preached the imminent and violent overthrow of the religious and political establishment by the power of God himself. This revolution was cryptically referred to as “the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13-14, 26-27), and Jesus claimed to be the direct agent of this anticipated deposal. Daniel 2:44 puts it succinctly: “And in the days of those kings (i.e., the Greco-Roman successors of Alexander) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed…It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.” The expectation was that the “people of the saints of the Most High,” would take charge as righteous rulers over a new world transformed to the ways of God. This was indeed an “earthly kingdom,” but one in which God’s will was done “as in heaven.”

The excavations on Mt. Zion (Area E), that we renewed this past week were initiated in 1978 by Magen Broshi. The area offers great promise in uncovering just what Jesus, the Galilean peasant, was up against when we talk about the religious and political establishment in late 2nd Temple Jerusalem. On the map below you can see that our excavation site, on the southeastern slope of Mt. Zion, was squarely within the city walls in the time of Jesus, whereas today we are digging just outside the present wall which dates to the time of Suleiman (16th century CE). Mt. Zion itself was the highest hill in the city, towering over even the Temple Mount and the lower city to the south. Herod’s palace was up there, as well as Pilate’s residence. Sloping down the hill, and into what is now the “Jewish Quarter” of Jerusalem, was the most coveted residential area of all Jerusalem. Our little fenced off site was prime real estate before the 70 CE Roman destruction. It was well within the city in both Roman and Byzantine times, as excavations of the southern walls and towers uncovered just this year by the Israel Antiquities Authority excavations, have shown. We visited that most significant excavation, just to the southwest of ours, and I will write about it in a later post.

Many visitors to Israel have visited the underground excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City now part of the spectacular Wohl Museum, including the Priestly Mansion and the Burnt House. These were part of the 1970 excavations in the Jewish Quarter conducted by Nahman Avigad after the Six Day War. The entire Jewish Quarter had been destroyed by the Jordanians after 1948, allowing for full scale archaeological excavations before rebuilding. What became clear was the wealth and opulent lifestyle of the aristocratic inhabitants of this area of the city, as well as their priestly devotion to ritual purity.

We have every indication and expectation that the same will be true of the Mt. Zion area we are excavating. Just this past week we were able to reach the top of the Herodian levels less than two meters below the present surface. We found coins from the period including one of Pontius Pilate, a fragment of an egg & dart stone vessel, and a stone weight, all very similar to what was found in the Jewish Quarter excavations. We are just over intact vaulted chambers that date to late 2nd Temple times and the state of preservation of the Herodian materials at this site is spectacular. The site will allow us to clarify the archaeological layers from 15th century CE back through Byzantine and Roman periods, but it promises to be particularly rich the late 2nd Temple period, just before the 70 CE destruction. It has every promise of capturing for us a “moment in time” We are discussing with the Park Authority the possibility, in the future, of presenting what we find as an archaeological park that would allow a journey “back through history” in terms of the levels of Jerusalem from present back to Iron Age times.

Here you can see the dig site and the two white sandbagged squares were we have renewed our work. The Mount of Olives is in the background with the present wall of the Old City, dating to the 16th century CE, on the left. Zion Gate is further up the hill behind the picture and the Dung Gate is below where the road bends.

This is a lovely example of the edge of a large stone vessel, used by devout Jews to preserve the ritual purity of liquids. The egg & dart decoration, as well as other finds near this one, including imported ceramic fine ware, testify to the wealth of the inhabitants of the area we are digging in late 2nd Temple times.

Director, Shimon Gibson, giving an orientation tour of the site to Stephen Pfann and the staff of the University of the Holy Land

Some of you reading this Blog will be interested in participating in the Mt. Zion excavations in the future and you can keep up with the details at our Web site: digmountzion.com. That Web site right now is just holding our name but soon we will be posting photos, a description of the history of this excavation, a report on what we were able to accomplish in our June efforts, and what we plan for the future.

I have been reading with the greatest learning and pleasure April DeConick’s book, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas. The price is a bit higher than one is used to paying for a paperback book ($40) but this is a serious academic book, yet it is written in a style and on a level that the interested non-specialist can surely follow.

I mention this because it seems to me the controversy between so-called “conservative” scholars such as Craig Evans or Ben Witherington, and more “critical” scholars such as Crossan or DeConick, on the historical value of works such as The Gospel of Thomas has really been miscast. There is no point in batting back and forth the old conundrum of which text is more “legendary” or “mythological,” Mark or Thomas, or even Q or Thomas, since all of these texts reflect the heavily theologized viewpoints of their authors/communities and no ancient texts on either the events or teachings in the life of Jesus are in any way or form “history as it actually happened” (a naive concept at best). In other words, Thomas is neither “early” nor “late,” it is both!

What I think DeConick’s work has done is provide us with a way of looking at the complex traditions that come to us in this collection of 114 saying of Jesus preserved for us in this 2nd-3rd century Copic collection we know as the Gospel of Thomas. This material as we now have it is indeed “secondary” and “embellished” and “developed” and “theological.” Even the scholars who have greatly valued this text and given it priviledge, recognize our need to read it critically. It neither dropped from heaven nor was it taken down stenographically from the mouth of Jesus.

What DeConick does is attempt to trace the developing history of this text, with its various expansions and and interpretive glosses. Not only does this allow us to see how a given saying attributed to Jesus in an earlier period was developed and recast, and what sort of community perceptions the various stages reflect, but through her groundbreaking work we are offered a glimpse back to the “original” and earliest layers of this work. DeConick identifies what she calls “kernel” sayings, and lo and behold, those materials seem to give us a rare glimpse into the Jerusalem community of James the Just, the brother of Jesus.

When I have my students read the Gospel of Thomas (take a look, it’s on the Web in various translations) in my basic course in Christian Origins they are either attracted or repelled, depending on their own presuppositions. Some find it so different and strange in contrast to what they have become used to in hearing and reading materials from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, while others find it “exotic” and appealing in that they think it offers them some mystical/secret alternative version of things that the Church has repressed and kept back from us.

Anyone who is interested in Christian Origins needs to become thoroughly familiar with the sayings traditions in the stage they are available to us through the Nag Hammadi Copic Gospel of Thomas. However, it takes some hard work, just as with the Synoptic tradition and John, to sort through the various layers and read with sensitivity and critical skills “beyond” the surface meaning of the text in its present form.

For this reason I posted DeConick’s essay about the accuracy and reliability of the New Testament gospels on this Blog last week. I think many might think her statements are too extreme, and that surely the material in the N.T. is of infinitely more value historically than a slightly “whacko” book like Thomas (a description of one of my students on an exam last semester). But this would be to miss her very valuable point. A critical reading and historical examination of the kinds of non-canonical texts she mentions, and others as well, in fact offer us the chance to construct a much fuller portrait of the movement that John, Jesus, and James inaugurated. If Acts and Eusebius are not “the story,” as I have recently written, then we have a lot of hard work before us. The good news is that much survives and I can not think of any field of historical investigation that is more exciting than Christian Origins at the beginning of this 3rd. millennium. If I may misquote/misapply the prophet Hosea: After two days he cause us to live, and on the third day he will raise us up. What an amazing time in which to live.

I few days ago I mentioned the new Forbidden Gospels Blog by Dr. April DeConick, I am posting here, with her permission, Dr.DeConick’s recent reflection on the matter of whether or not our canonical Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke & John) are inherently more historically “reliable” than those that never made it into the New Testament. I want to comment further here on this issue but I thought putting this view before my readers might be useful.
Saturday, February 3, 2007

The Accuracy and Reliability of the New Testament Gospels?
Why do so many scholars hold so strongly that the New Testament Gospels, particularly the Mark, Matthew and Luke, are more accurate and reliable for reconstructing history than the non-canonical when it was proven by Professor Wrede in 1902 (The Messianic Secret) that the author of Mark was a theologian not an historian? The New Testament Gospels (and the apocryphal Gospels) are not histories, nor are they even historiographies. They are theological treatises whose main interests are Christological.

The New Testament texts don’t have anymore intrinsic reliability for reconstructing the “historical” Jesus and Christian origins, than early non-canonical texts. The virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke are no less legendary and fanciful than the account found in the Infancy Gospel of James. The miracle stories of Jesus in the four New Testament Gospels are no less fantastic than those performed by the child Jesus in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The passion narratives in the New Testament are no less contrived in order to “prove” that Jesus’ suffering and death had fulfilled the Scripture than the crucifixion narrative in the Gospel of Peter. The account of the pre-existence of Jesus in the first chapter of John is no less mythical than the accounts of his pre-existence in the Gospel of Truth. The reports of the miraculous deeds of Peter, Paul and Philip in the New Testament Acts are no more reliable than their deeds recorded in the apocryphal Acts which bear their names. The wild apocalyptic story in Revelation is no more an account of the end of our world than equally wild descriptions found in the visions of the Pastor Hermas or the Apocalypse of Peter. The sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels are no more the verbatim words of Jesus than those recorded in the Gospel of Thomas, the Dialogue of the Savior, or the Secret Book of James. They are just more familiar to us because they have been part of the Christian tradition for so long. Has familiarity been mistaken for historicity?

Dr. April DeConick

Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University