(no subject)
Feb. 13th, 2014 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA long time ago I decided I ought to read the New Testament. Foundational text of Western Civilization and all. The funny thing is that long before I made this decision, I was able to speak more fluently about the New Testament than many Christian friends, but that's a combination of the fact that I've read a large number of theological texts and other secondary sources that talk about the New Testament and the fact that as a result of Quiz Bowl, I'm far better than the average person at talking about books I've never read. I am damn good at faking it.
So okay, I acquired a cheap Christian Bible at the Strand and started reading Mark. Mark was pretty straightforward. Then I read Matthew and Luke, which contradict each other a lot and complement each other in other places, and that was okay. Then I tried to read John. And tried and tried and tried. Could not get through John. Sometimes it was because I found the language opaque. Sometimes it was because I found the anti-semitism repulsive. Sometimes it was because I couldn't see how a scene could possibly have ever happened, and I'd get worked up trying to make sense of the impossible. The point is that for a variety of reasons I kept getting stalled, over and over, over man years.
roseandsigil counseled me to skip it and move on to Acts, because he thought I'd find Acts worked better with my brain. But my brain is still stubbornly completist, so I kept trying new approaches to make it through John.
Here is what eventually worked:
The annotated Navarre University edition of John, which has the Revised Standard Version, the Vulgate, and a very good set of annotations, from a Catholic perspective, on the text. I needed an academic Christian perspective on the text because this is a religious text and part of the context I was missing in past reads was someone filling me in on what a believer gets from reading it.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler, whose notes try to explain and contextualize the Jewish references in the New Testament. I needed desperately someone who, when John said something about how the Apostles were afraid of being kicked out of the synagogue by the Pharisees, would say "THAT WASN'T A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN." In addition to fulfilling many other purposes for me, this text served admirably in the role of reassuring me that I wasn't crazy.
I read those two texts in alternation, reading a passage in both if one didn't give me enough explanation. It still took me months of fits and starts, but I finally finished reading John.
Some thoughts
-Grah
-Argh
-I thought some of the notes about the rivalry between the Petrine Church and the Johannine Church in The Jewish Annotated New Testament were particularly interesting. John is the only gospel that names Peter as the disciple who cut off the slave's ear, for example. But then the Gospel ends with a chapter affirming Peter's status as Jesus's successor, which possibly was added later by someone else? I dunno, I thought it was interesting. The description of the footrace between Peter and John to Jesus's tomb was one of the most compelling passages in the whole book. I could imagine the whole set of emotions that both of them were experiencing, the competition but not really competition, and also the doubt and uncertainty about what this means for the Teacher and the doctrine they are still reeling from having to figure out how to keep alive in the wake of his death. If anyone knows good fic, profic or fanfic, on this scene, I would appreciate seeing it.
-I... like, I don't know how to say this. I wish there were ways I could talk back to the text. There was such fervent millennial desire for a Messiah in Jesus's time and it apparently placed a lot of emphasis on miraculous signs as proof of Messianism, but, I mean, the Torah really does not have a lot of room for the kind of prospective Messiah that Jesus is portrayed as. If miracle work and bringing people back from the dead were signs of Messianic portent, were Elijah and Elisha Messiahs, too? The Jesus that we see, particularly in John because John has such a defined structural vision of Jesus, does not look very Messianic to me.
The other gospels are messier things, loose collections of stories and testimonies of uncertain meaning. It's not entirely clear in Mark whether Jesus is actually claiming to be the Messiah or not, and it's not clear whether the redactor of Mark is making that claim either until the very end of the book. A religious seeker could read Mark or Matthew or Luke and make up their own mind about what Jesus's testimony means. John is not a book for religious seekers. It is a book consolidating a set of religious doctrines that contradict Jewish tradition.
AND I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO ARGUE WITH. One of my biggest problems in past attempts to read John was that when I would want to argue, I wouldn't have anyone to do it with. In college I sent a message to the school's Christian club saying that I wanted to do a New Testament bible study with someone in the group, because sometimes my curiosity knows no practical limits. I got a really upsetting message back saying that the students in the group did not feel qualified to conduct such a study with me, but they knew this wonderful missionary who would love to do it. :P
Theological texts are living things that are discovered in the process of study, not static texts that you just read and completely comprehend. I found reading John in isolation very, very difficult, and the annotations I used were only barely adequate as a substitute for actual conversation.
-The ahistoric nature of John's predetermined narrative was very frustrating to me. The number of times John claimed that the Pharisees did something and my response was "Um... no, they didn't. That wasn't the kind of thing the Pharisees did, or even had the ability to do." was very high. It's clear that John was written well after Jesus's death, after the destruction of the Temple. It's highly confusing to me that the Navarre suggests that John was of a priestly family. True, he is full of details about the specifics of Jewish ritual life, but the references are bizarre and usually half-wrong.
It's also very clear that abrogating the Sabbath was a thing that John thought Jesus could do. Which has always seemed to me one of the most difficult parts about Christianity, and one of the most counter-Torah ideas. But what is most interesting to me about the scenes in John where Jesus violates the Sabbath is that unlike in, say, Luke, where Jesus abrogates the Sabbath and other ritual laws for the convenience of the poor, in John Jesus abrogates the Sabbath in order to perform miracles. Luke seems to have Jesus saying that the ritual law is important, but it is less important than the moral law. John seems to have Jesus saying the ritual law is not important.
-Grah
-When I talked tofreeradical42, he said "When you're reading, don't you keep trying to imagine the original Aramaic text?" and I said "Yes! Yes, I do!" Having the Vulgate in the Navarre definitely was involved in steering my brain in that direction, by keeping me constantly reminded that the English was a translation. But I definitely kept wondering, when the text spoke of messianic ideas or made apparent allusion to Psalms or discussed problems with Temple worship, what the language of the original was. In some places it was easier than others to imagine, but it was a constant thought in my mind that this text that looks so unJewish was likely composed in Aramaic by people raised Jewish.
-Argh
- I do want to say something broader about John as a Thing, because I feel like as I write I keep alluding to it without saying it coherently. John feels very constructed, like it is more a literary object than a historical narrative. Of course all historical narratives are constructed and they pick and choose which parts to include to shape that narrative, so very clearly I am not distinguishing John well. I think what I really mean is that unlike Mark, John reads like an Old Testament book. It's a very big hermeneutical point for Rashi and other medieval Jewish commentators that the Chumash does not describe events in order. (See, all the big rants I have made over the years about how Jewish Fundamentalism is never, ever Biblical Literalism) Old Testament books tend to have plot holes when read strictly as a narrative, because the narrative is constructed for other reasons- to teach laws, to provide moral instruction, to create linkages and inferences between contiguous but seemingly unrelated themes, for many other reasons.
The Gospel of John is very much the same way. It begins big, with a rewrite of Genesis, which is philosophically about as big as you get. Rashi opens his commentary on Genesis by asking why the Bible opens with Creation, rather than with the first commandment given to Israel. He answers that the purpose is to establish God's right to establish rules over mankind. Similarly, John opens with Creation in order to establish God's right to change the rules, or rather to suggest that what seems like a change in the rules really isn't: Jesus was there from the beginning of time, and his arrival on Earth. John isn't teaching science or history when he speaks of the Beginning, he's teaching theology.
From there he progresses to a (much shorter than Matthew or Luke) series of miracle stories which almost feel like a Greatest Hits of Jesus Christ, Miracle Worker, except that's not what they are. We get the Wedding at Cana in an enlarged form, we get giving sight to the blind and we get Lazarus. The miracles John chooses are among the flashiest, but they're also among the most symbolic. The earlier ones are about the benefits that come from believing in Jesus, the later ones prefigure the Passion.
The Passion in Mark was an afterthought and I recall feeling let down by it. Matthew and Luke give fuller accounts, but in John, everything before it gears you up for the Passion, and alongside the Passion, John's explanations for what the Passion means. Jesus's sacrifice completes everything that he was sent on Earth to fulfill and nothing in John should be understood to have any other purpose except to explain how Jesus moved toward his Hour.
Ultimately this is how I understand the book. This is why I found it frustrating, and why it took me so long before I made it through it.
Anybody wanna argue with me?
So okay, I acquired a cheap Christian Bible at the Strand and started reading Mark. Mark was pretty straightforward. Then I read Matthew and Luke, which contradict each other a lot and complement each other in other places, and that was okay. Then I tried to read John. And tried and tried and tried. Could not get through John. Sometimes it was because I found the language opaque. Sometimes it was because I found the anti-semitism repulsive. Sometimes it was because I couldn't see how a scene could possibly have ever happened, and I'd get worked up trying to make sense of the impossible. The point is that for a variety of reasons I kept getting stalled, over and over, over man years.
roseandsigil counseled me to skip it and move on to Acts, because he thought I'd find Acts worked better with my brain. But my brain is still stubbornly completist, so I kept trying new approaches to make it through John.Here is what eventually worked:
The annotated Navarre University edition of John, which has the Revised Standard Version, the Vulgate, and a very good set of annotations, from a Catholic perspective, on the text. I needed an academic Christian perspective on the text because this is a religious text and part of the context I was missing in past reads was someone filling me in on what a believer gets from reading it.
The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler, whose notes try to explain and contextualize the Jewish references in the New Testament. I needed desperately someone who, when John said something about how the Apostles were afraid of being kicked out of the synagogue by the Pharisees, would say "THAT WASN'T A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN." In addition to fulfilling many other purposes for me, this text served admirably in the role of reassuring me that I wasn't crazy.
I read those two texts in alternation, reading a passage in both if one didn't give me enough explanation. It still took me months of fits and starts, but I finally finished reading John.
Some thoughts
-Grah
-Argh
-I thought some of the notes about the rivalry between the Petrine Church and the Johannine Church in The Jewish Annotated New Testament were particularly interesting. John is the only gospel that names Peter as the disciple who cut off the slave's ear, for example. But then the Gospel ends with a chapter affirming Peter's status as Jesus's successor, which possibly was added later by someone else? I dunno, I thought it was interesting. The description of the footrace between Peter and John to Jesus's tomb was one of the most compelling passages in the whole book. I could imagine the whole set of emotions that both of them were experiencing, the competition but not really competition, and also the doubt and uncertainty about what this means for the Teacher and the doctrine they are still reeling from having to figure out how to keep alive in the wake of his death. If anyone knows good fic, profic or fanfic, on this scene, I would appreciate seeing it.
-I... like, I don't know how to say this. I wish there were ways I could talk back to the text. There was such fervent millennial desire for a Messiah in Jesus's time and it apparently placed a lot of emphasis on miraculous signs as proof of Messianism, but, I mean, the Torah really does not have a lot of room for the kind of prospective Messiah that Jesus is portrayed as. If miracle work and bringing people back from the dead were signs of Messianic portent, were Elijah and Elisha Messiahs, too? The Jesus that we see, particularly in John because John has such a defined structural vision of Jesus, does not look very Messianic to me.
The other gospels are messier things, loose collections of stories and testimonies of uncertain meaning. It's not entirely clear in Mark whether Jesus is actually claiming to be the Messiah or not, and it's not clear whether the redactor of Mark is making that claim either until the very end of the book. A religious seeker could read Mark or Matthew or Luke and make up their own mind about what Jesus's testimony means. John is not a book for religious seekers. It is a book consolidating a set of religious doctrines that contradict Jewish tradition.
AND I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO ARGUE WITH. One of my biggest problems in past attempts to read John was that when I would want to argue, I wouldn't have anyone to do it with. In college I sent a message to the school's Christian club saying that I wanted to do a New Testament bible study with someone in the group, because sometimes my curiosity knows no practical limits. I got a really upsetting message back saying that the students in the group did not feel qualified to conduct such a study with me, but they knew this wonderful missionary who would love to do it. :P
Theological texts are living things that are discovered in the process of study, not static texts that you just read and completely comprehend. I found reading John in isolation very, very difficult, and the annotations I used were only barely adequate as a substitute for actual conversation.
-The ahistoric nature of John's predetermined narrative was very frustrating to me. The number of times John claimed that the Pharisees did something and my response was "Um... no, they didn't. That wasn't the kind of thing the Pharisees did, or even had the ability to do." was very high. It's clear that John was written well after Jesus's death, after the destruction of the Temple. It's highly confusing to me that the Navarre suggests that John was of a priestly family. True, he is full of details about the specifics of Jewish ritual life, but the references are bizarre and usually half-wrong.
It's also very clear that abrogating the Sabbath was a thing that John thought Jesus could do. Which has always seemed to me one of the most difficult parts about Christianity, and one of the most counter-Torah ideas. But what is most interesting to me about the scenes in John where Jesus violates the Sabbath is that unlike in, say, Luke, where Jesus abrogates the Sabbath and other ritual laws for the convenience of the poor, in John Jesus abrogates the Sabbath in order to perform miracles. Luke seems to have Jesus saying that the ritual law is important, but it is less important than the moral law. John seems to have Jesus saying the ritual law is not important.
-Grah
-When I talked to
freeradical42, he said "When you're reading, don't you keep trying to imagine the original Aramaic text?" and I said "Yes! Yes, I do!" Having the Vulgate in the Navarre definitely was involved in steering my brain in that direction, by keeping me constantly reminded that the English was a translation. But I definitely kept wondering, when the text spoke of messianic ideas or made apparent allusion to Psalms or discussed problems with Temple worship, what the language of the original was. In some places it was easier than others to imagine, but it was a constant thought in my mind that this text that looks so unJewish was likely composed in Aramaic by people raised Jewish.-Argh
- I do want to say something broader about John as a Thing, because I feel like as I write I keep alluding to it without saying it coherently. John feels very constructed, like it is more a literary object than a historical narrative. Of course all historical narratives are constructed and they pick and choose which parts to include to shape that narrative, so very clearly I am not distinguishing John well. I think what I really mean is that unlike Mark, John reads like an Old Testament book. It's a very big hermeneutical point for Rashi and other medieval Jewish commentators that the Chumash does not describe events in order. (See, all the big rants I have made over the years about how Jewish Fundamentalism is never, ever Biblical Literalism) Old Testament books tend to have plot holes when read strictly as a narrative, because the narrative is constructed for other reasons- to teach laws, to provide moral instruction, to create linkages and inferences between contiguous but seemingly unrelated themes, for many other reasons.
The Gospel of John is very much the same way. It begins big, with a rewrite of Genesis, which is philosophically about as big as you get. Rashi opens his commentary on Genesis by asking why the Bible opens with Creation, rather than with the first commandment given to Israel. He answers that the purpose is to establish God's right to establish rules over mankind. Similarly, John opens with Creation in order to establish God's right to change the rules, or rather to suggest that what seems like a change in the rules really isn't: Jesus was there from the beginning of time, and his arrival on Earth. John isn't teaching science or history when he speaks of the Beginning, he's teaching theology.
From there he progresses to a (much shorter than Matthew or Luke) series of miracle stories which almost feel like a Greatest Hits of Jesus Christ, Miracle Worker, except that's not what they are. We get the Wedding at Cana in an enlarged form, we get giving sight to the blind and we get Lazarus. The miracles John chooses are among the flashiest, but they're also among the most symbolic. The earlier ones are about the benefits that come from believing in Jesus, the later ones prefigure the Passion.
The Passion in Mark was an afterthought and I recall feeling let down by it. Matthew and Luke give fuller accounts, but in John, everything before it gears you up for the Passion, and alongside the Passion, John's explanations for what the Passion means. Jesus's sacrifice completes everything that he was sent on Earth to fulfill and nothing in John should be understood to have any other purpose except to explain how Jesus moved toward his Hour.
Ultimately this is how I understand the book. This is why I found it frustrating, and why it took me so long before I made it through it.
Anybody wanna argue with me?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-13 06:02 pm (UTC)In particular, I'm afraid I have very little knowledge of the Jewish context -- what I learned in church is from an outsider's perspective (a really outside perspective) at best, and terrible at worst; I think I might benefit a lot from the Jewish Annotated version you have; do you recommend it?
Yeah, Christianity lends Elijah overtones of the Messianic impulses in Jesus. And there's the part in Matt 17 where the Transfiguration happens, and then they talk about the scriptures about Elias coming again, and Jesus responds by basically saying, "Oh yeah, that was John the Baptist, and now I'm here." (LDS theology, as is its usual wont, dials it up to eleven and postulates Elias as a sort of title, but... umm... let's never mind that for now.)
OMG the Peter/John footrace is one of my favorite bits in the NT, period. My impression of it is totally "Yeah, so, Peter wanted to be first, the big ninny, but
Ithe disciple Jesus loved ran faster andItotally won, nyah nyah!" But... yeah, what always gets me about that scene is Mary Magdalene. How they have taken away my Lord, how she stays behind after the disciples have gone, and sees the angels, and persists with them, and with Jesus, and finally: Master. I do love that a lot.Mark reads to me a little like the early bits of Genesis, where we get the Creation, and then we get the Creation again, only not quite the same, and then we get some other random stories that connect, kinda... Mark also has that same feel to me of organically grown and post-collected. (I suppose you'll tell me that the linkages in Genesis are much stronger than they feel to me, but I really do mean this as a feeling rather than a theological statement.) Luke and Matthew feel more to me like a story, not as much as, say, Esther, but more so than Genesis. John is... a different beast, yeah. Theological.
I'm quite interested to see what you think of Paul.
I probably have more later, these are just my disjointed thoughts at present.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-13 08:12 pm (UTC)I would highly recommend the Jewish Annotated New Testament. I found it very, very useful in my reading, and readable and interesting and well put together in general.
And yeah, I know about the Messianic overtones of Elijah, which is why I also mentioned Elisha, and I really should have mentioned Joshua and Moses and Joseph and Eli and Shmuel and Nathaniel and Daniel and the variety of other figures who at one point or another in the careers performed the same sorts of miracles that Jesus did. Miracles are convincing as signs of God, but they're not convincing as signs to abrogate God's message.
Like, you know, Deuteronomy 13, which begins
1 All this word which I command you, that shall ye observe to do; thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it. 2 If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams—and he give thee a sign or a wonder, 3 and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee—saying: `Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them'; 4 thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God putteth you to proof, to know whether ye do love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. 5 After the LORD your God shall ye walk, and Him shall ye fear, and His commandments shall ye keep, and unto His voice shall ye hearken, and Him shall ye serve, and unto Him shall ye cleave. 6 And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken perversion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage, to draw thee aside out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put away the evil from the midst of thee.
Which a Rabbi pointed out to me in an anti-Christian lesson when I was about thirteen and which pretty much ruined any chance of being successfully proselytized by Christians ever after. (On the other hand, it has made me rather cynical about a lot of Talmudic lawmaking that seems to add to the letter of Torah law. My half-joke that I observe the Omer prohibition of listening to live music "unless I really really want to" stems from this verse as well. When Rabbinic Jewish law adds extra rules that aren't from the Torah, I treat them seriously for the sake of tradition, but I feel free to bend them when the situation is appropriate.)
Yeah, Mary Magdalene is fascinating there, and I loved that moment in between when Jesus speaks to her and she realizes that it's him returned, when their relationship hangs suspended in the balance.
I figure I'll probably hate Paul.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-13 08:20 pm (UTC)I'm really interested in your thoughts on Acts, too - it's basically Luke, the sequel, and there's a lot of people-other-than-Jesus-doing-miracles in it.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-13 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-14 10:06 pm (UTC)Elijah/other prophets: ....Well. Here is where I leave my knowledge of what Other Christians think. In LDS theology, at least, Elisha and Elijah are sort of lumped together, part of that mantle-being-passed-on thing. (Well, as I alluded to before, Elisha is actually supposed to be the next person who can be called by the title Elias, but again, I don't think I really want to talk about that.)
I would say -- this is neither Christian nor LDS as far as I know, it could very well be, but it's also just me trying to make sense of it -- that what makes Elijah special is, I think, the only one who is both a) carried into heaven and b) raises someone from the dead. Elisha also raises someone from the dead, but he sort of falls under the mantle of Elijah. I guess Moses makes a snake, and there's that part in Ezekiel where apparently he raises a whole army of people, but then we never really hear any more what happens to them (a whole army of people!! What happened to them? Okay, I seriously want fic about that) so I think it's taken somewhat as a vision, in practice if not in theory. (This troubles me, as it's not stated in the text that it's a vision. I'm not sure what I think about Ezekiel.) Enoch was the only other person I can think of who was carried into heaven, and I don't recall him doing any other miracles. Jesus is the inheritor of that, only goes one more in the sense that he also rises from the dead before he ascends into heaven. But also, of course, it's not just that he rose, it's that he died for our sins (which none of the prophets did).
(Why God would require a person to die for our sins is another question entirely, and one which I have never been able to answer in a way that altogether satisfies me.)
Heh. That Deut 13 passage is pretty powerful. I mean, I can tell you the appropriate Christian theological response and so can you: blah blah blah new covenant blah let us just pretend like we're both adults who would rather not insult each other here, shall we? Perhaps I shall now quote this at Christians who quote that scripture in Revelation about not adding to the book at me when explaining to me why the Book of Mormon is forbidden by the Bible. (It won't help, any more than pointing out that the NT didn't even exist as a thing when Revelation was written.)
Although I suppose that this is sort of getting at what's so argh-inducing for you (and which conversely has never bothered me, coming from a Christian background, although now maybe it will) -- I mean, John has an agenda. And that agenda is overthrowing the "old guard." (I don't mean that to be offensive -- it's how John strikes me as thinking of it.) And once you've overthrown it all, what do you really care what it says about people like you who might come along and overthrow it? It's a circular argument, but it's a consistent circular argument :P
But yes, Mark/Matthew/Luke seem much closer to Deut 13 -- like, Jesus can perform these miracles, and he does (and in at least some of them it's because he totally feels sorry for them), but he doesn't want the miracles themselves to be the Thing. LDS types like to say that miracles are all very well and good to help spark faith, but they don't retain faith.
I'd never thought about John's Jesus being about abrogating the Sabbath, but I see what you mean. Matthew's Jesus performs miracles on the Sabbath as well, but he seems to be fairly careful to argue that he does in fact fit in to Jewish tradition (whether or not his arguments are any good -- I cannot evaluate them -- but at least he tries). John's Jesus... is not concerned with that at all. John!Jesus actually kind of comes off as rather a jerk, now that I compare those passages. The worst, I think, is the part where he tells that poor guy to carry his bed, knowing that it's forbidden on the Sabbath. Come on, dude.
Can you say a little more about abrogating the Sabbath as part of Christianity? Do you mean the day getting changed? The relaxation of what is allowed/forbidden? Or...?
...yeah. You'll hate Paul. But I think it could be interesting to argue about. Acts is nice, though; it's like Luke: the sequel! With more adventures and shipwrecks! It's also the book in the NT that I know least well, so I'll have to study up.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-16 02:43 pm (UTC)Yeah, God demanding a human sacrifice for mankind's sins is really bizarre, particularly when you realize that the main import of Leviticus, the subtext that gets hammered in again and again, is that God really hates the human sacrificial cults of Canaan and is instituting this whole complicated system of animal sacrifices to make sure that nobody ever sacrifices any more children in his name. How's God's mind was changed about this is unclear to me. But like you say, we're both adults, and we all know the arguments.
Okay, yeah. When I talk about abrogating the Sabbath, I'm not talking about moving the day, because that I don't even get at all. I'm talking about how the Sabbath was imposed as a Day of Rest, a day of communion with the Lord, and it was by abstention from melacha (laborious work) that this was achieved. There's a popular maxim that "More than the Jews kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews," which works better in Hebrew because 'shomer', the word for kept, has connotations of 'watched over' or 'guarded' as well as 'kept'.
So if Jesus is saying that the Jews don't need to keep the Sabbath anymore, that's a really GIANT HUGE DEAL. But if he's just saying that the Jews are observing the Sabbath but not treating the poor well, and they should be caring more about their brothers than about the ritual law, that's something that Isaiah and a bunch of other prophets have said, and maybe Jesus is just saying it a little more emphatically (And a good Talmudic scholar arguing in Jesus's defense could probably rationalize away on a technicality why the Matthew/Luke apparent abrogations of Sabbath aren't actually violations [For example, maybe they were carrying the sticks, but the area was covered and qualified as some sort of private domain]). And that's why the difference between Matthew/Luke and John on this issue seems so huge to me, because the Sabbath is central to Jewish identity, not just Jewish practice.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-11 09:14 pm (UTC)I went back and read the John bits again, and honestly I don’t get the impression that Jesus is abrogating the Sabbath as a whole. I do think that Jesus is asserting that he is Lord of the Sabbath / God (…which is shocking enough), and so he can do whatever he likes on the Sabbath and tell (isolated) people that they can carry their beds and whatever, but it doesn’t mean that he’s saying that Jews, in general, don’t need to keep the Sabbath. I mean, I guess you could argue that he’s implying that? But I don’t get that from the text.
And in fact I would argue that Christianity, as a religion, doesn’t say that one should get rid of the Sabbath either (I mean, any more than it already talks about the spirit vs. the law etc.). Martin Luther (for instance, since I’m familiar with Lutherism) was a big fan of the Ten Commandments, which are the first thing in the Small Catechism that one has to go through before being confirmed Lutheran. It’s right there next to the Apostle’s Creed as central to Luther, keeping the Sabbath Day holy. And if you look at books written more than a hundred years ago (or researched and set then), the Christians in those books try pretty hard to abstain from laborious work on Sundays, even if they’re sloppier about it than a Jew would be.
BUT I would also argue that twenty-first-century Western Christianity has by and large abrogated the Sabbath. I would argue, however, that far from being a religious thing, this is an indication that 21st-century Christianity has given in to secularization. I was shocked, for example, when at D’s church, the pastor scheduled a Christmas shopping trip with the youth on the Sabbath. The LDS sect, as you might have gathered from this, still believes pretty strongly in the Sabbath as a day dedicated to God, and therefore abstaining from work – or causing other people to work – on the Sabbath, including housework, although cooking is usually seen as okay. And I really like the maxim you quoted, because I have found that to be so in my own life – when I have really tried to keep the Sabbath – although being the sort of heretic agnostic-ish LDS that I am, I don’t always do it to the same extent a true believer would – it’s been a great blessing to me. However, I would say that it’s not integral to LDS identity as much as to LDS practice.
God demanding a human sacrifice: I was thinking of this discussion in Sunday School this week, where we did Abraham and Isaac. Now, that story is my own personal grah argh; I just have such a hard time with it, and a hard time with the idea that it would ever have been right for Abraham to agree to sacrifice his son, or (even more) for God to demand it of him (mixed messages much, God??). And if Abraham were Isaac’s mother there is no way this story would even ever have worked, because Sarah would never have agreed to it. (And yes, I’ve read Kierkegaard. I still think it was a mean rotten thing for God to do.) But anyway. On the other hand, if one accepts that story, God sacrificing Jesus (so to speak) makes slightly more sense, sort of. But on another level I don’t like what either of those stories says about God.
LDS theology has its own interesting way of dealing with this: although we accept that Jesus died for our sins and that this was necessary, we are also taught that Jesus’ atonement came when he took upon himself all our sins at the Garden of Gethsemane, before he was crucified, and that as a result he has experienced all the pain that we have. Which I find a really comforting doctrine, although not particularly supported by Biblical text.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-14 03:47 pm (UTC)Yeah... I mean, like I said, the Rabbinic literature is very clear that if there were statistics, Moses would be Babe Ruth. But that's because the Talmud isn't interested in the specifics of the miracles, it's interested in the virtues of the man or woman. Moses is the greatest of the prophets because his personal characteristics, his humility, his leadership ability, his ability to stand between God and the people, is unrivalled. If there is a paucity of sabermetrics to back up Moses's intangibles, the Talmud is very happy to Midrashically invent miracles to pad Moses's stats.
I think resurrection from the dead is actually sort of thematically incongruent with the Chumash, really. Consider this: If there were going to be a miraculous resurrection in the Chumash, the best candidate is Abel, right? Clearly a death unsanctioned by God, and the killer was punished quite severely. [In fact, it's the only death unsanctioned by God I can think of in the whole of Chumash, with the ambiguous exception of Shechem.] If God wanted to demonstrate God's mastery over death, that would be where you would expect to see a resurrection. But such a thing is not even contemplated.
God's mastery over death is demonstrated in numerous other ways- the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, the 'death' of Enoch, the death of the Egyptian host, the death of Sodom, the death of the Flood generation, etc... But I think resurrection is not treated because it is not contextually appropriate, because it would model an incorrect attitude toward death. I'm not exactly sure I could define the inappropriateness, but perhaps it's that it suggests that a death could be unintended by God, which in the world of direct divine intervention we see in Chumash would suggest limitation's on God's power. Death in Chumash is final and it is part of God's plan. End of story.
Of course the New Testament and the Talmud were both written in an era when the Israelites/Jews were struggling with the loss of this direct divine intervention. So this opens up room for resurrection, for there to be an Hour when the things God should have done but held back on are finally to be fulfilled. Turning back death isn't a sign of greatness, it's a sign of Messiah-ness. Ezekiel's Valley of Bones prophecy isn't a thing he saw, it's a promise of future Messianic activity. Does that make sense?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-25 04:59 am (UTC)Is there a reason why death is part of God's plan but physical laws are not? Like, one might try to make that same argument about any miracle: that God has set up the world in a particular way, but perhaps that particular way (the Red Sea being in the way of Moses) was not intended by him?
It is true that one might reasonably expect Abel to be resurrected. Why not him, and why the widow's son? Would you argue that it's because the miracles of Elijah came during an ending of the direct divine intervention?
THe one thing that I must disagree on is that God's mastery over death is demonstrated by killing people. I resist that we see God's mastery by the same mechanism that any tinpot dictator could use -- well, of course, tinpot dictator can't necessarily kill from a distance, nor as many at a time, but the end result is the same.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-25 12:20 pm (UTC)There's a whole string of midrashim trying to deal with this question. They propose that God did set up all miracles in advance. For example, check out Pirkei Avot 5:9. The things in that verse constitute miraculous violations of the nature of the world, so the Midrash attempts to fix the problem by saying that they were actually included in God's plan at Creation.
I've always felt these midrashim were kind of strange. I understand why they exist, why one would want to advance this sort of argument, because clearly we're still asking these questions about God's plan and its meaning, but... the idea that God in some way relinquished or abstained from omnipotence after Creation will always be confusing to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-25 12:54 pm (UTC)I think Jesus in the Gospel of John discussing the death of Lazarus does a pretty logical job of explaining it. "So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe."
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 06:57 pm (UTC)More generally, God and his prophets began using resurrection as a theological tool when it would have resonance with the people. Because unlike other miracles, what resurrection represents is the promise of redemption. The promise that there is a world beyond this one and when we leave this world our souls live on.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-14 04:04 pm (UTC)BUT I would also argue that twenty-first-century Western Christianity has by and large abrogated the Sabbath. I would argue, however, that far from being a religious thing, this is an indication that 21st-century Christianity has given in to secularization. I was shocked, for example, when at D’s church, the pastor scheduled a Christmas shopping trip with the youth on the Sabbath. The LDS sect, as you might have gathered from this, still believes pretty strongly in the Sabbath as a day dedicated to God, and therefore abstaining from work – or causing other people to work – on the Sabbath, including housework, although cooking is usually seen as okay. And I really like the maxim you quoted, because I have found that to be so in my own life – when I have really tried to keep the Sabbath – although being the sort of heretic agnostic-ish LDS that I am, I don’t always do it to the same extent a true believer would – it’s been a great blessing to me. However, I would say that it’s not integral to LDS identity as much as to LDS practice.
So that thing which you call 'sloppiness' is what I guess I meant by abrogation. Because the Sabbath as understood by those first century Jews who formed Christianity was not a ban on 'work' as a generic thing meaning hard labor, it was a specifically understood ban on any of the forms of activity involved in building the Temple. [There are two separate Hebrew words involved. Avodah would just generally mean hard labor, whereas Melacha is the word that is used in relation to the Sabbath]
The idea that you can pick and choose how you observe the Sabbath is a Christian one, and though I know it's mostly Paul's fault, it does appear to have some origin in the way Jesus regards the Sabbath as something he can partially dispense with at will. The most puzzling choice in this regard is the one you noted: Even though cooking is singled out from all the other types of work as being specifically forbidden on the sabbath (Ex 35:3), separate from the general ban on work, Christians find that cooking is generally acceptable to them. Why? [My suspicion is that many of these relaxations of prohibitions were designed as ways to test for traitors in the midst of the Early Christians... if you were having a Sabbath meal and one of you refused to eat the cooked food, you'd know they were a Jewish spy]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-25 04:46 am (UTC)I would actually blame Peter for this one: he's the one who (in Acts) had the dream basically saying that Christians didn't have to keep kosher. It was all downhill from there ;) (But Paul, of course, takes it to the next level.)
I'm not sure medieval Christians cooked on Sundays, but I don't really know. These days, it's a cultural thing, and at least for LDS there's a strong family element in place (cooking being something many families can do together, and family things being acceptable to do on the Sabbath for LDS), but I think that's just us.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-25 12:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 05:01 pm (UTC)There's a whole passage in Paul (1 Cor 8) where he argues that it ought to be okay to eat food that was sacrificed to idols (which I'm guessing is not okay?) because the idols aren't actually real.
Taking the Lord's name in vain: I get the impression that this means something totally different to Jews than it does to Christians, no? Christians, at least in my experience, seem to think it means not saying "damn" and "fuck" (the latter of which doesn't actually have anything to do with God, of course!) And, to be perfectly fair, not saying "Oh my God!" and "Jesus Christ!" but...
Graven images: Here we run into how much I don't know about the Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity, and icons, and how icons might or might not be thought to contravene this commandment (which obviously a bunch of people have spilled a lot of ink about), but... ummmm.
Usury? I'm reaching a little, here, but isn't there a prohibition on usury within the community of faith? Every so often you get some Christian writer (C.S. Lewis, I think maybe Sayers said something or other about this) who points out that nobody in the Bible (including the NT) was really a fan, but it doesn't seem to stop anyone.
Yes, I take your comment about murder and theft, and in general the commandments that deal with how we interact with other people, but I think it's because all those do deal with other people. I think that what you say about Christians not observing any of the ritual laws is an example of how that sloppiness (well -- let me be kinder to my own religion: the cultural differences growing between Christianity and Judaism) has come into play, and that the fact that we observe the Sabbath at all is one of the last vestiges of "hey, we actually branched off of this other religion."
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-31 05:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-31 06:46 pm (UTC)Hilariously, I just finished reading Toledoth Yeshu and the end of the book suggests that Peter was sent to the Christians by the Rabbis as a mole because the Rabbis were worried that if the early Christians were allowed to remain in the midst of the Jews, it would tear the Jewish tradition apart. Peter's mission was therefore to differentiate Christianity enough that it would be clearly its own thing. Searching for more details on this theory led me to the medieval claim by Rashi's grandson Rabbenu Tam that Peter wrote Nishmat, a prayer Jews recite every Shabbat morning.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-05 05:06 pm (UTC)Ahahaha oh Ezekiel. I had a friend in college who was a film student, and he told me that his goal in life was to make Ezekiel as a special-effects laden stoner comedy. It's hard to tell what to make of anything in Ezekiel.
I mean, it's very easy to just say that everything in Ezekiel is allegory. Most of the sages whose commentary on Ezekiel I've studied basically do that, though in somewhat disingenuous fashion. They skip past most of the litigation of whether Ezekiel's visions actually happened and just ask questions like "Why does God's chariot have four faces? What does this tell us about God" The Gemara does struggle a little bit with the reality of the visions, in inimitable Gemara fashion, by trying to divide the visions of Ezekiel and Daniel into different kinds of vision as a sort of case study of the mechanics of prophecy. And I think these strange, obscure Gemaras are the source material for a lot of the esoteric Kabbalistic writings that most Jews don't pay a lot of attention to.
So, like, I honestly am not sure what Judaism says. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to believe that these visions are prophecies or parables or allegories or miracles that really happened.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-07 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-07 10:02 pm (UTC)http://www.come-and-hear.com/yebamoth/yebamoth_49.html#PARTb
The question is: Isaiah offers a clear and descriptive narration of seeing God enthroned. However, God tells Moses that men cannot see God's face and live. So how can Isaiah see God, when Isaiah is nowhere near as great as Moses?
In answer the Rabbis establish a principle "All the prophets looked into a dim glass, but Moses looked through a clear glass.". This sets out a general principle that the prophetic narrations are descriptions of visions from God, and they are hazy and subject to interpretation. Thus it's not a problem that Isaiah claims he saw God, because all he saw was God through a dim glass. (through a glass, darkly? whoops, wrong religion)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-11 09:12 pm (UTC)(through a glass, darkly, is one of Paul's things where he actually takes something like this idea and twists it around to Christianity... you are gonna hate Paul. But it's sort of neat for me to see the parallels.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-14 06:47 pm (UTC)John uses what looks to me to be the Greek translation of this device, a number of times through the Gospel. With what appears to me to be a deliberate intention to create such linkages.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-31 05:19 pm (UTC)Man, if the BoM weren't both somewhat annoying to read and probably argh-inducing from both a Jewish and Native-American viewpoint, I'd be so curious to see what you thought of it. (And I would love to do a joint reading with you if you ever thought you might be interested, though!)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-17 03:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-14 12:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-14 02:05 pm (UTC)Also, I'd be interested in Florence's thoughts on the post, if she's willing to share.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-16 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-17 03:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-19 06:13 am (UTC)I was raised in a biblical literalist setting which really pushed scriptural knowledge, in a very two-dimensional sense. The Bible was read as God's letter to all of humanity, yet there were agreed-upon ways of interpreting it that were taken as Obviously Right (WHAT PART OF SEVEN DAYS OF CREATION DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND), and preachers would frequently explicate the Greek or (less frequently) Hebrew origins of a given passage without any real comprehension of its cultural context.
I have been hesitating to respond to this because I don't know where I'm going to find the time to read along -- this is lining up to be a very full year. But it also seems like something I've been waiting for, and looking for, for a while now: an invitation to revisit the scriptures from a completely different perspective. For the past I-hate-to-say-how-many years now, it's been hard for me to even glance at the text without just seeing baggage. It's long past time for me to forgive the Bible its flaws, and learn to accept it for the thing it is, instead of expecting it to be the very different thing I was taught it was since before I could talk. So, as soon as I hit "Post Comment" I'm going to order a copy of the JANT from ABEbooks. I'll pass on Toledot Yeshu though, not for lack of interest but for lack of time and energy. How about I catch up on the gospels in JANT while you go read that? Do tell us how it goes.
As for John: I honestly have never sorted out which Gospel writer is which, in part because of the piecemeal way evangelical Christian sermons typically attack the Bible ("Today we're going to read a few verses pulled from various locations and talk about why God hates fornication"). I have heard that John is the most antisemitic of the Gospels, but I didn't really understand why until I read your post. Which makes me think I may not actually have an awful lot to contribute to this conversation, but I'd like to participate anyway. I'll have more to say once I get my JANT.
Deuteronomy 13: fascinating, and funny how no Christian ever pointed that bit out to me, with its very obvious implications.
I think nobody ever talks about Joshua 10:13 because it's embarrassing. Raising the dead, parting the Red Sea, ten plagues, knocking over walled cities: we can wrap our minds around those kinds of miracles, but... stopping the sun in the sky? Come on, we can't expect anyone to swallow that who isn't already a devout believer. Or a child.
I found the story about your college Christian club refusing to have an NT study with you to be hilarious and tragic and all too believable.
You might actually hate Paul less than I hate Paul.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-19 02:29 pm (UTC)The Bible was read as God's letter to all of humanity, yet there were agreed-upon ways of interpreting it that were taken as Obviously Right
The funny thing about Jewish tradition is that we also have agreed upon ways of interpretation that were taken as Obviously Right, and yet that never stopped us from having significant disagreements of interpretation, within the context of those rules.
And yet the thing is I find myself not infrequently defending Protestant literalist hermeneutics against atheist critics because even if I find the actual results silly or wrong, I don't actually have a problem with there being a tradition of interpretation that it is the preacher's responsibility to transmit to their flock. On the other hand, to me, if I were living in a literalist regime (which I'm not), the interesting question wouldn't be whether the Bible is literally true (WHAT PART OF SEVEN DAYS DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND) but why seven days, why those specific seven days, why this whole story is part of the Bible. If we do accept God as omnipotent and really literal, God could have created the World in a billion different ways. I just don't get very wrapped up in the significance of literalism when there are so many layers below to tear at.
The Gospels are pretty different, but obviously you can't build a religion on such a contradictory foundation, so I understand why you'd have to blend their narratives together to create Jesus's story. Actually one of the things I appreciated about the Navarre was that it showed its work about that construction process, by pointing to echoes of stories in John in Luke and Matthew, comparing them and reconciling differences. Though sometimes this was a contorted process, where the Navarre would conclude that two stories that had overwhelming similarities were describing two separate miracles.
Like
I don't think Joshua 10:13 is embarrassing, and I don't think the answer to an embarrassing part of Scripture is not to talk about it. But the only people I ever see talking about it are a strange class of scientific scholars who occupy their time with coming up with mechanistic explanations for Biblical miracles. I think their leading theory is that Joshua 10:13 describes a special sort of eclipse, which has always seemed profoundly silly to me. I don't know, Joshua is an unusual and interesting book, which is why I just sort of requested fic that talks back to it. Usually the most important takeaway from Joshua 10:13 for me is that even after Moses was gone, God remained with the Jewish people and performed miracles equal to those he performed for Moses, even though Joshua was not as great as Moses. Again, the exact literal mechanics of the miracle are less important to me than that theme.
But I'm looking forward to whatever you have to share as you read.