The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (56 page)

4. For a summary of Jewish views on the afterlife, see L. Grabbe, Judaic Religion
in the Second Temple Period
(London and New York, 2000), chap. 12, “Eschatologies and Ideas of Salvation.” See also the entry “Gehenna” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Adrian Hastings, writing on “hell” in A. Hastings, ed., The Oxford
Companion to Christian Thought
(Oxford and New York, 2000), notes: “It is especially the judgement scene as described in Matthew 25:31–46, one of the most influential of biblical passages, which has established the doctrine of hell, both theologically and for public imagination.” In particular, Augustine, who reinforced the concept of eternal punishment for western Christianity, used this text as backing.

5. The quotation is taken from Court and Court,
The New Testament World,
p. 207. See this book for a discussion of all the Gospels and the contexts in which they were written. The fullest exposition of the essential Judaism of Matthew’s community is to be found in D. C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian
Judaism
(Edinburgh, 1998). Sim agrees with the traditional placing of Matthew’s community in Antioch and argues strongly that it should be seen as a sect within Judaism.

6. E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (Harmondsworth, 1993), is a good starting point. A very well illustrated recent survey is J. R. Porter,
Jesus Christ:
The Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith
(London, 1999).
The Cambridge Companion to Jesus,
ed. Markus Bockmuehl (Cambridge, 2001), has a series of essays on the quest for the historical Jesus. There is broad agreement in the Gospels over the “baptism” of Jesus by John the Baptist, although some scholars believe that Jesus was originally a follower of John’s and it was only later that the account of the baptism was developed to give him a higher status than John. The birth stories associated with Jesus are full of contradictions, and it is difficult to find any scholarly agreement, even over whether he was born in Bethlehem.

7. See R. Horsley, “Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement,” in E. Mayes, ed.,
Galilee Through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures
(Winona Lake, Ind., 1999). In his earlier work on Galilee,
Bandits, Prophets
and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus
(New York, 1985), Horsley explored the social tensions in Galilee in Jesus’ time and related his teachings to them. There is a mass of background material on first-century Galilee in E. W. Stegemann and W. Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First
Century
(Edinburgh, 1999). There was certainly a tradition of unrest in Galilee— Galileans were seen as making good fighters and providing revolutionary leaders, and many of the leaders of the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66 were from that area.

8. For the relationship between Galilean and Judaean Judaism, see the detailed study by M. Goodman, “Galilean Judaism and Judaean Judaism,” chap. 19 in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Judaism,
vol. 3. The issue is also discussed by Vermes,
The Changing Faces of Jesus,
pp. 225–26.

9. A useful introduction is to be found in the entry “Judaism of the First Century A.D.,” in Coogan and Metzger, eds.,
The Oxford Companion to the Bible,
Fuller treatments of particular groups are to be found in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Judaism.

10. The quotation on “children of light” and “darkness” comes from Dead Sea Scroll texts I QS I 3f 9f and is quoted in Otto Betz, “The Essenes,” chap. 15 in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Judaism.
The quotation on liberation comes from the same texts, 94Q521, and is from Vermes,
The Changing Faces of Jesus,
p. 17.

11. As an introduction to the concept, see the entries for “Messiah” in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds.,
The Oxford History of the Christian Church,
and Coogan and Metzger, eds.,
The Oxford Companion to the Bible.
A much fuller analysis from a Jewish perspective is to be found in chap. 13, “Messiahs,” in Grabbe, Judaic Religion. See also S. Freyne, Galilee and Gospel (Tubingen, 2000), chap. 11, “Messiah and Galilee,” where Freyne considers Messianism in a specifically Galilean context.

12. M. Allen Powell,
The Jesus Debate
(Oxford, 1999), reviews the various historical interpretations of Jesus’ life and shows just how diverse the approaches are. Frances Young’s point is made in “A Cloud of Witnesses,” in J. Hick, ed.,
The
Myth of God Incarnate,
2nd ed. (London, 1993), p. 22. It is interesting to find that the theological presentations of Jesus have not obscured his essential humanity. “They seem to say he was a goodish kind of man,” says a Victorian costermonger interviewed by Henry Mayhew in his
London Labour and the London Poor
(London, 1861–62), “but if he says as how a cove’s to forgive a feller who hits you, I should say he know’d nothing about it” (vol. 1, pp. 21, 40).

13. Fredriksen’s point comes from her
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
(London, 2000), p. 268.

14. On “the kingdom,” see the exhaustive discussion in E. P. Sanders and W. D. Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” in Horbury, Davies and Sturdy, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Judaism,
pp. 636–49. Richard Horsley’s comment is to be found in “Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement,” in Mayes, ed.,
Galilee Through the Centuries,
p. 68.

15. Sanders and Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” p. 676. Geza Vermes’ views on the “Son of Man” title, of which he has made a particular study, are summarized in his
The Changing Faces of Jesus,
pp. 38–41 and 175–77.

16. The subject is well covered by E. P. Sanders in his “Contention and Opposition in Galilee,” chap. 14 in
The Historical Figure of Jesus
(Harmondworth, 1993). The reasons for John’s execution are also discussed, pp. 93–95.

17. The responsibility for arresting Jesus has been placed by scholars on virtually every group including Jews outside the priesthood, the priesthood, and the Romans (see Sanders and Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” p. 668, for the range of interpretations), but the central role of Caiaphas, who was responsible for keeping order in the city, seems likely. Richard Horsley makes the following point:

Jesus’ agenda of renewing Israel required what must be seen as a challenge to illegitimate rulers and/or as an attempt to reach out to the rest of Israel from the capital. Israelite tradition was rich with prophetic precedents of challenge to and condemnation of—or simply laments over—the ruling institutions and their families.

“Jesus and Galilee: The Contingencies of a Renewal Movement” in Mayes,
Galilee
Through the Centuries,
p. 73.

18. The earliest representation is actually an anti-Christian taunt from a third-century graffito in Rome mocking a Christian called Alexamenos, who is shown worshipping a donkey hanging from a cross. One of the earliest “public” Christian representations, on the fifth-century wooden door of Santa Sabina in Rome, shows Christ with his arms outstretched and nail marks in them but no actual cross behind him. The elaboration of Christ’s suffering on the cross was a much later development in Christian iconography. The issue is well dealt with in Robin Margaret Jensen,
Understanding Early Christian Art
(London and New York, 2000), chap. 5, “Images of the Suffering Redeemer.” 19. See chap. 17, “Epilogue: The Resurrection” in E. P. Sanders, The Historical
Figure of Jesus
(Harmondsworth, 1993). For a traditional perspective, see Markus Bockmuehl, “Resurrection,” chap. 7 in Bockmuehl, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion
to Jesus.
In her book
The Gnostic Gospels
(London, 1980), chap. 1, E. Pagels suggests a battle for control over the resurrection experience, one in which Peter attempts to claim the earliest experience of the resurrection in order to justify his leadership of the church. This explains why Paul, who reports Peter’s claim that he was the first, is also so keen to equate his own experience on the road to Damascus with those of the disciples. Pagels suggests that the Catholic Church was to insist on the primacy of Peter’s experience of the resurrection, followed by that of the remaining Apostles, in order to sustain the idea of apostolic succession, so crucial to upholding church hierarchy and tradition.

From earliest times concerns have been raised over the credibility of the resurrection accounts. They were dismissed by pagans as “a fable or the report of a hysterical woman.” The theologian Origen (who will be discussed in detail in chap. 10) made a Platonic distinction between the few who could grasp the allegorical meaning of the resurrection, “that in the body there lies a certain principle which is not corrupted from which the body is raised in corruption”—not the same body that died but a body appropriate to the new and immortal life—and the many who could only grasp a literal explanation (that Jesus’ actual body was raised) “preached in the churches for the simpleminded and for the ears of the common crowd who are led on to lead better lives by their belief.” (See Jaroslav Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1:
The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition
(
100–600
) [Chicago and London, 1971], pp. 30 and 48.)

Powell,
The Jesus Debate,
p. 191, notes that the Jesus Seminar, a group of theologians and historians who vote on contentious issues in Jesus’ life, decided by “a large majority” that Jesus’ resurrection did not involve the resuscitation of a corpse. (Note, however, that the Jesus Seminar is regarded as radical by traditionalists.) This is in line with Paul’s view. However, if the risen Jesus was not his own corpse resuscitated, where did this go? The earliest account (Mark 16:1–8, the last verses of the original Gospel) suggests that when the disciples came across the opened tomb, there was a man in white robes inside telling them they would see the risen Jesus in Galilee. There is a possible explanation in terms of Caiaphas’ own desperate need to deal with Jesus’ followers without further trouble. So long as they believed his actual body was in the tomb, they could be expected to congregate there and keep the movement alive. There is increasing evidence, archaeological and otherwise, of “cults of the dead” in Palestine during this period, which would explain why Jesus’ tomb might become a centre of cult worship. See L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Divines,
Sages: A Socio-Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel
(Valley Forge, Pa., 1995), pp. 141–45. Taking the body out (and making it clear that it had gone by leaving the tomb open) would dissolve this possibility, but Caiaphas, anxious to settle things down while Pilate was still in Jerusalem, needed to go further. He had to find a way of persuading the disciples to return home to Galilee, out of his jurisdiction and back into that of Herod Antipas. So a messenger is left telling them that the body is gone but Jesus would rise in Galilee if they would return there. If there is any truth in this account it was, of course, essential that Jesus’ body was
not
produced by Caiaphas or his associates, as it would undermine any reason for the disciples returning to Galilee. One assumes that there would be no incentive for preserving it anyway. Matthew suggests that Caiaphas used Roman guards on the tomb so that the disciples would not take Jesus’ body away, but when the body was discovered missing, these were bribed by the chief priests to tell Pilate that the body had been taken by the disciples. There could be hidden in this story an attempt by the chief priests to cover up the fact that they had arranged the body’s removal.

Matthew’s account is repeated with elaboration in the so-called Gospel of Peter, a fragment of which was found in the nineteenth century. It probably dates from the second century A.D. Here the author talks of the elders approaching Pilate for a guard, as Matthew does (in other words, the Gospel appears to draw on an early source), but adds the detail that there were crowds around the tomb on the Sabbath following the crucifixion. The guards seal up the tomb, but that night the stone is rolled away, and three men, two of them supporting another (the body of Jesus?), are seen to emerge. As in Matthew’s Gospel, the centurion and the soldiers are commanded not to repeat what they have seen. The text of the Gospel of Peter is to be found in R. E. Brown,
The
Death of the Messiah
(London, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 1318–21.

A fuller historical study of the resurrection would need to examine the many other accounts of charismatic leaders who had been “seen” by their followers after their deaths.

20. Jewish scholars have not shared this perspective. For a Jewish view on the concept of the “suffering Messiah,” see L. Grabbe, Judaic Religion in the Second
Temple Period
(London and New York, 2000), who concludes his analysis of the texts (p. 291), including the Dead Sea Scrolls: “As far as can be determined from present textual evidence, the New Testament view of Jesus as both a messiah and one who suffered and died for the sins of his people was developed from the experience of the early church and has no precedent as such in Judaism.” He notes (p. 290) that the “servant of Isaiah 40–55 was not a messianic figure in its original context.”

21. It has been suggested that Saul adopted the name Paul, essentially a Roman name, after his conversion of Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus, Acts 13:4–12. See S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 6–8. Mitchell suggests that Sergius Paulus, who came from Pisidian Antioch in the south of the Roman province of Galatia, was the impetus for Paul’s missionary journeys to the Galatians in that after his conversion he would have been able to provide Paul with contacts, letters of introduction and other assistance.

9

1. I have drawn heavily on E. P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford, 1991), for this chapter, and this short biography provides an excellent starting point. Further sources are cited in the following notes. Paula Fredriksen sums up the problem of Paul’s enduring authority as follows: “The problem of history did not resolve itself as Paul so fervently believed it would. What arrived was not the kingdom but the Church, and Paul came to serve as the foundation for something he certainly never envisioned: orthodox ecclesiastical tradition.” From “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,”
Journal of Theological Studies
37 (1986): 31. For a recent and comprehensive introduction to Paul’s theology, see J. Dunn,
The
Theology of Paul the Apostle (Edinburgh, 1998).