The Secular Frontier

In previous posts I noted how in Mark we have the satire of how the crafty Jewish leaders were manipulating scripture and tradition to invent a case against Jesus. Matthew shows something similar in one of Satan's temptations of Jesus misusing scripture. In a later addition to the gospel of John, we see this same pattern repeated of Jews trying to trip up Jesus with their knowledge of scripture. Levine writes: According to John 8:2–11, a text absent from the earliest manuscripts of John and sometimes appearing in Luke 21, scribes and Pharisees bring to Jesus in the temple a woman caught in adultery, cite the “law” (the appeal is to Lev 20:10) regarding stoning adulterers, and ask Jesus for his view. Were he to say “stone her,” he would be violating Roman law (adultery was not a capital offense; in John 18:31 Caiaphas tells Pilate that “we” [Jews] are not allowed to execute); it also runs against the direction of rabbinic literature, which attempts to make capital punishment all but impos ... Read Article

I'm a little out of order today, Barber's essay being near the end of the book, but there were some things that are worth addressing now so here we go! Jesus predicting his passion and resurrection is multiply attested to throughout scripture.  However, as Ehrman points out these run contrary to the fact that Mark, despite his Pauline bias promoting the passion and resurrection, contrarily also has Jesus preach ways to salvation different from his death.  To begin his ministry, Jesus preaches the Kingdom, not himself.  He tells of the rich young man who is saved by following the law and giving his money to the poor.  This echoes the image of the sheep and goats in Matthew.  It seems then since Mark is going against his bias to portray the cross and resurrection as the salvific element, Mark has included some ideas about Jesus that go behind Paul and Mark’s use of him.  On Mark’s use of Paul see HERE .  In terms of Jesus’ death, I’d like to look at the Lord’s ... Read Article

Did Jerusalem reflect the final destination for Jesus’ ministry.  Ferda marshals a number of points in the affirmative: the so-called triumphal entry of Jesus to Jerusalem on a donkey, which all the evangelists imply or explicitly state aimed to evoke Zech 9’s prophecy about “the king” coming to Jerusalem; the troublesome “temple saying” about its destruction and rebuilding in three days (Mark 14:57–58; Matt 26:61; John 2:18–22; Acts 6:14; Gos. Thom. 71), which the evangelists handle in very different ways, with some trying to distance Jesus from it; the symbolic action in the temple that, despite its myriad interpretations, likely anticipates a new eschatological temple; the Q saying (13:34–35) in which Jesus expresses his earnest desire to “gather” Jerusalem, and laments that it was thwarted; the parable of the wicked tenants in which Jesus is sent to the vineyard and its keepers—read, the temple and its leadership—understood within the larger sweep of Israe ... Read Article

One of the key points in Walsh’s chapter is the presence of wonder (thaumazein) and how that connects Mark’s book to earlier literary models.  For example, she writes: Thus, in the Gospel of Mark we see an even more pronounced engagement with thauma-writing as Jesus elicits the same reactions from eyewitnesses in the text as Vergil’s Camilla: wonder, fear, confusion…  Following Jesus’s first appearance in Mark’s Gospel and the subsequent confusion and wonder this engenders (e.g., ethambēthēsan; 1:27), Jesus returns to his pied-à-terre in Capernaum and draws an inquisitive mob. They bring a paralyzed man to the scene and, when they are unable to enter at the door, they gain access through the roof (2:4). Jesus, “seeing their faith” (idōn … tēn pistin autōn; 2:5), while simultaneously perceiving perceiving “in his pneuma” (tō pneumati autou; 2:8) that some local grammatici (tōn grammateōn; 2:6) are questioning him, elects to reward the faithful and rebuke his doubte ... Read Article

In Matthew we read: 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?[ 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Fat ... Read Article

Jesus lived in a time and place where a few central urban centers were beginning to incorporate the surrounding rural centers, and Myles begins to ask the Marxist question of how such conditions and dynamics were ripe circumstances to birth the Jesus movement.  In regard to such class conflict, Myles points to: The basic outline of this economic situation should be familiar to most biblical scholars: within an agrarian society, the smaller propertied class, by virtue of its control of the means of production, appropriated surplus off the larger class group made up of those who worked the land and water. Exploitation usually took its form in unfree labor (including slavery, medieval serfdom, and debt bondage), as well as in the form of taxes and tribute, and, more typical for first-century CE Palestine, the letting of land and house property to leasehold tenants in return for rent paid either in money, kind, or services…Even Josephus’s account of the building of Tiberias does not shy away from cl ... Read Article

Zeichmann makes the point in Jesus’ time soldiers were not functioning as what we would understand as occupying forces: First is the counterintuitive insight that there was no monolithic “Roman army.” Rather, there were a variety of military forces in early Roman Palestine—forces that had little in common by way of purpose and demographics… There is no reason to think the historical Jesus ever encountered a legionary, despite the ubiquity of such soldiers in the popular imagination of Roman antiquity. Roughly equal in number to the legionary soldiers across the empire were auxiliaries. Auxiliaries, like legionaries, served the government of Rome but were divided into two distinct military types: cohors (speira) and ala (eilē)—infantry and cavalry, respectively—with a few mixed units termed cohors equitata as well. Auxiliary soldiers were almost exclusively noncitizens who became soldiers under the promise of receiving Roman citizenship in exchange for their military service; this citizensh ... Read Article

This essay is a general overview of synagogue life shaping the Jesus story. Runesson writes: These Jewish institutions, which were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world and, importantly, can be reconstructed based on sources both beyond and within the New Testament texts, thus provide us with a critical entry point into the world of Jesus, as he shared it with his contemporaries. Indeed, it is within these types of settings that we should locate his earliest followers too, as well as the transmission and textualization of traditions preserving his memory; “synagogues” offer us nothing less than access to important clues not only about the person but also about how his memory and message were preserved and shaped. Elsewhere, I have called this approach, through which we may also learn about ancient theology and ideology based on the institutional contexts within which they were formed, “institution criticism.” ... The bottom line is that it is hardly possible to ask the questions “who w ... Read Article

Rollens’ essay builds on the last one I talked about from Kloppenborg that examines the notion of the scribe in constructing the Jesus tradition.  She notes this argument only really pertains to the Q document, as the Gospels and Acts reflect a more sophisticated production. She writes: Regardless of where one falls on the question of the historical Jesus proper, the topic of “scribal Galilee” and the early Jesus movement is, to my mind, only relevant to Q, because when we turn to the later gospels, we are dealing with cultural expressions of a translocal movement that have lost much of their regional specificity and that have begun to show marks of more elite forms of literature. What this means, then, is that Q provides us with some of the most relevant data for understanding scribal Galilee close to the time and place of the historical Jesus and the bureaucratic perpetuation of ideas in his name. She argues what we see in Q reflects mid-level urban administrative/bureaucratic scribal ac ... Read Article

John Kloppenborg is one of the foremost experts on the "Q" source, the material common to Matthew and Luke that does not come from Mark. In this essay he tries to get beyond the notion of Jesus as the great genius to the idea that the gospel writings emerged out of substantial networks that had multiple agents contributing to the work. Kloppenborg gives the example of a Q saying that suggested influence of ancient scribes: As I have argued elsewhere, the measure-for-measure aphorism begins from the fact that seed grain was measured out (metreō) with a grain scoop (metron) and, in order to ensure parity in lending and borrowing, measured back by the same metron of the granary from which it was originally measured.35 Dozens of lease agreements prepared by scribes take the form, “I, NN, have measured out to you, NN, by the grain scoop [metron] of the third granary of Karnis, Karnis, x artabae of grain and you will measure it back to me, on (date) by the same metron of the third granary of Karanis” (o ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE In my initial post, I analyzed eight definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements. I am not satisfied with any of these definitions, so in my previous post I began to evaluate these definitions to make clear the problems I see with them. In this current post, I will continue to evaluate these definitions in relation to these three elements: AGENT/CAUSE – the person(s) or kind of being(s) or kind of thing(s) that brings about a miracle EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs In a later post, I will attempt to construct a definition that preserves the insights in the existing definitions but that avoids the various problems that I point out with these definitions. MY ANALYSIS OF EIGHT DEFINITIONS OF THE WORD "MIRACLE" Here is the table that represents my analysis of eight definitions of "miracle": THE AGENT/CAUSE ELEMENT T ... Read Article

The passage I would like to highlight in Whitlock's essay is: Historical Jesus scholarship must value multiple pieces without synthesis. We are not obligated to provide a complete, unified picture of Jesus. Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim in Toward Decentering the New Testament, for example, thoughtfully discuss “The Danger of a Single Story” when they present the diverse gospel stories and their diverse sources.46 Scholarship must avoid a single story about Jesus of Nazareth and instead present a diverse and fragmented Jesus. It's interesting if we draw a comparison between the historical Jesus and the historical Socrates. Certainly, we usually think we have an idea about the gist of what Socrates was like. His label of being a gadfly certainly encourages a portrait of the thinker nobly going around Athens and annoying people with questions. His death was a little murkier. Was he the resolute master ordering Crito to make an offering to Asclepius for the poison/cure (pharmakon) because of the t ... Read Article

This chapter was an occasion for me to reflect on Chartism and unjust death. Crossley notes for the Chartist interpretation of Jesus: Jesus’s death was regularly understood as an example of the unjust end that always awaits the benevolent reformer, though this Jesus did not always passively accept his fate. From our point of view, Jesus didn't deserve to die, like Socrates didn't either. We live in a more enlightened age. But that enlightenment was built on the corpses of those martyrs that opened our eyes to the corruptions of the system. And so, we didn't see the unjust nature of the traditional definition of marriage until we saw it do violence to LGBTQ+ rights. And for Socrates, this was the important point. Socrates' last words to Crito was to make a sacrifice to Asclepius to give thanks for the poison for the curative salve it would be opening people's eyes to the unjust nature of their society. And it worked. The injustice of Socrates' death opened our eyes to what was wrong wi ... Read Article

A couple of passages stood out to me in this essay. Firstly, characterizing Augustine's thoughts on time: In that latter masterwork, time emerged as the great divide between humans—intrinsically time-bound and, thus, caught up in confounding problems of interpretation, be it of experience, of language, or of biblical texts—and the timeless god for whom the restless soul longed (Conf. 1.1.1). I am reminded of the ancient idea that the eternal such as the Platonic forms ought to be attuned to because such a comportment brings about a calm mind (tranquillus animus) The other passage I noted from Fredriksen on Augustine concerned that Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. She writes: Christ had criticized the Pharisees not because they were too scrupulous, but because they were not scrupulous enough. Jesus, he asserts, never broke a single one of God’s commandments according to Jewish custom, “but he found fault with those around him who did” (Faust. 16.24). As ... Read Article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleNU4mAJqg&t ... Read Article