Month: July 2008

Apocalyptic was a literature of protest. Between about 150 BC and 100 AD a style of prophecy developed which remained with us ever after – a way of talking about one’s oppressor without talking about them, thus making sedition hard to prove. The New Testament book, the Revelation of Jesus Christ, or the Apocalypse in scholar-speak, is but one of many, many similar “revelations” (apocalypsis in Greek) and it very cleverly disguises who it is targeting with theriomorphic (“beast shaped”) imagery – so cleverly that most people are shocked to discover that the original target was probably Nero Caesar.

But Apocalyptic turns up in the Gospels – specifically Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21 – as what’s called the Synoptic Mini-Apocalypses. Jesus gives lurid prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem and “the End of the Age”. We also have numerous parables of Jesus which give us insight into what he thought about the End. One in particular is pertinent to the present question – the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares – which pictures the Devil as throwing weed-seeds into a field on God’s farm. The wheat and the weeds sprout, but the two can’t be separated else some of the wheat might be pulled up with the weeds. However at harvest the two are at different heights and can be cut separately, divided into two batches and kept or burnt up.

“Weeds” might sound innocuous, but the particular Greek word refers to a poisonous grass very similar to wheat, except it matures quicker and at a different height to the wheat. Even small amounts could spoil a whole harvest of wheat, sickening anyone who ate it. I’m not sure a modern person can really appreciate the life-or-death nature of ancient grain-based economies, but any loss could be disastrous for a small agricultural community in Judea, or anywhere in the old Roman Empire. An analogous situation would be the effects that drought in Australia is having on grain-markets around the world, where cheap grain is the difference between satiation and hunger in the Third World.

So what does this mean about God? Basically Jesus is saying the unjust and evil in the World can’t be removed until the End of Time, not without negative effects on the good and just. But surely God can do anything? Why not that?

More next time…

Can God be defended from the charge of the atheists that “he” is evil and stupid? That’s the challenge that the plight of Job, the afflicted righteous man, posed to faithful scribes some millennia ago.

Not long after the later Redactor (c.400 BC) the people of Israel faced new challenges when they were forcibly included in the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great – then traded back and forth between “the King of the North” and “the King of the South” – the Greek rulers of Anatolia and Egypt respectively. According to the 1st century historian Josephus the Jews cleverly convinced Alexander that his coming had been predicted in the prophecies of “Daniel” – a Babylonian exile of the 6th century who succeeded even as a repressed minority in a foreign land, much to the inspiration of Jews ever since.

But Daniel wasn’t the only culture hero from that era. A slightly earlier figure, and an originally pagan one, is Ahiqar, who lived under the 7th century Assyrians, and also triumphed as a righteous man against scheming adversaries. We have some earlier texts of non-Jewish origin that feature his tale from the Assyrians. He was rewritten as a Jewish exile in Assyria in the Apocryphal book “Tobit” where he features as a minor character. What was the appeal to Jewish scribes of both these figures, Daniel and Ahiqar? Individual heroics, but also a theological answer – God will rescue the righteous from their enemies – to the charge against God.

By the 2nd Century BC religious freedoms under the Greeks, originally negotiated with Alexander, had deteriorated badly, so much so that the last native High Priest, Onias, had been assassinated and Greek puppets, of a modernising bent, had been put in his place. Jewish culture – a life and death matter in those days – had been under pressure to become even more Greek and even less Jewish, while much of the territory of the Jews had been settled by Greeks. The pressure to assimilate was intense, and exploded into armed insurrection when the Greek King, Antiochus, proceeded to replace the Jewish altar worship to Yahweh with a sacrifice of a pig to Zeus.

Many, many righteous Jews died in the conflict… posing an even tougher charge against God’s role as “Judge of the World”, the absolute standard of Justice. So what was the answer? Move the balancing of the scales into the Next World and/or the Next Age. God would settle the accounts, rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked in the Next World and, perhaps, inaugurate a new Dawn, a new Age of Righteousness. But this wasn’t exactly new… a similar vision underpins prophecies from the 6th century onwards.

So how did the prophecies of Deutero-Isaiah, Malachi, Ezekiel and Zechariah, of a new Jerusalem under a new Deal with God become morphed into a New Dawn and a New World?

George Williams, a great evolutionary biologist, made a point about God in several of his books which deserves exploration. He had no time for arguing over the existence or otherwise of God, merely defining “God” as the creative Something which caused the world we observe. He then proceeded to demonstrate from the apparently stupid and cruel features of the biosphere that God was both unintelligent or blind to consequences, and evil, not good. Fortunately this apparent evil was off-set by an huge measure of stupidity.

I think, for many atheists and agnostics – including myself for many years – the problem with the idea of God was the character of such a being, as presented to us by the Creation, is not worthy of worship. The Cosmic Creativity seems inhuman and inhumane, and it seems better to believe that God is not a loving Father, but it merely a mindless cosmic process that doesn’t deserve the name “God”. In fact the character of God, as ostensibly believed by many of the Faithful, is antithetically opposed to the values of modern liberal democracy and humanistic society, that such a being can only be a diabolical delusion to be opposed by right-thinking persons.

But, a big “but” admittedly, the faithful have pondered the inconsistencies of believing in Divine Justice and have tried to answer the problems in many different ways. One way is the “Answer to Job” – the Theophany in the tale of Job, which answers the claim, by a righteous and afflicted man, that God is unjust by pointing out the wonders of Nature and God’s visible power in all those mighty works… which doesn’t really make a direct answer. Indirectly God is saying that God’s reasons for Job’s plight are beyond Job’s understanding just like the “big wide world” is beyond Job’s understanding.

Does that work? Many of the wonders that God shuts Job up with aren’t as beyond human understanding as they once were, and so the whole exercise – to me – rings a bit hollow. I think it rang a bit hollow to the Redactor of “Job” because the original dialogue has a start and conclusion which seem to be later accretions to the core text, and the Redactor’s conclusion has a happy ending for Job with him receiving double what he had lost. But that doesn’t really work for me, especially since Job’s children were killed.

So what did the faithful do next?…

For a long time the idea of a “Suffering Messiah” as a specific individual was assumed to be a purely Christian invention and totally unprecedented in Judaism. However, ever since the Dead Sea Scrolls were brought into the light in the late 1940s the religious opinions of Jesus’ near contemporaries have proven to be contrary to scholarly opinion. Very recent work on a 1st Century BC text written on a stone slab, Hazon Gabriel, has brought an even stronger link with Jesus to light – the expectation that a Righteous One, perhaps a Messiah, would be raised to life after 3 days!

Israel Knohl on the Messiah Before Jesus

…Knohl discusses the Hazon Gabriel as evidence for his own view that a Messiah preceded Jesus.

A PDF of a scholarly article by Knohl on the Hazon Gabriel

…Knohl discusses the dating and reconstruction of the text, in scholarly detail (i.e. with real Hebrew Words! 😉 )

New York Times article on the work… but hurry it might get ‘archived’ and cost money

…so what does it all mean?

For me, as a Christian, it explains the prophetic expectations – as so interpreted in Jesus’ time – that drew the crowds to him and shaped the faith of the first Jews who believed.

Does it damage Christ? Not in the least – how can people hope for a Risen Messiah is there is no expectation that he will do so?

So why do the Gospels claim the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus said about his dying and rising again? Good question, that has two angles – first, what did the disciples really expect of Jesus? That he would be the Triumphant Messiah who would cast out the Romans from Judea? If your long hoped for Messiah says “I’m going to be killed” then it’s only human that you won’t listen, even if you have heard prophecies like that before. Knohl claims there was a previous Messianic figure, Simon, who died c. 4 BC – and there were prophecies about him, and no apparent Rising, so perhaps that’s what the disciples are trying not to see when Jesus starts echoing his (apparently) failed precursor.

Second, how did the editors of the traditions that became the Gospels handle the original material? What really went on between Jesus and his first talmidim? Did it embarass the later Orthodoxy that has, apparently, “ret-conned” much of the Gospel account itself? Actually I have no good reason for thinking that was re-written, but it’s always a possibility.