Undeception

It’s common to come across the well-founded observation that Luke’s Gospel is particularly interested in highlighting the universality of the Kingdom of God. References to the outcast of society abound, including Gentiles, women, the poor, and the sick. So when I heard someone casually mention that in one of the Gospel accounts Jesus’ given rationale for the temple cleansing was, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,” I assumed with great confidence that it must have been Luke’s version.

I was very wrong! The quotation from Isaiah 56.7 occurs in all three of the Synoptics, and the only one in which Isaiah’s phrase “for all the nations” is included is the one that seemed to me the least likely.

Matthew 21.13: He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Luke 19.46: and he said, “It is written,
‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”

Mark 11.17: He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

It certainly would have made sense with Matthew’s replacement-theology-esque emphasis to include the phrase from Isaiah; ditto with Luke, for reasons cited above. Why is it, then, that both Matthew and Luke omitted this statement of high significance from Jesus’ words in this act of seminal importance, diverging from their (widely assumed) source in Mark?

Turns out, the universality of the gospel is not as rare in Mark as I had thought. Via Google Books, I found R.T. France commenting on 13.10, “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”:

Jesus’ excursions into Gentile territory (5:1-20; 7:24-8:10) and his Gentile following in 3:8 have begun to prepare us for this vision, and we have seen in 7:24-8:10 a deliberate extension of the blessings of Israel’s Messiah to the surrounding peoples. It is possible that the specific inclusion of πάντα τὰ ἔθνη in the Isaiah quotation in 11:17 is a further pointer in this direction, even if that is not the main thrust in context. Later the confession of Jesus as Son of God by a Gentile officer will be a foretaste of the universal church (15:39). But this verse (and by implication 14:9) is the most explicit indication in Mark’s gospel of the universal scope of the good news and therefore of the Christian mission, as it will be spelled out in Matthew’s final commission (28:19-20) and in the whole narrative of Luke’s second volume.[1. R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: a commentary on the Greek text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 516]

So the universality of the gospel of the Kingdom seems like an obvious recurring theme in Mark that Matthew and Luke expand upon in different ways. Mark’s interest in that idea is coincident with and even necessary for his vision of the Kingdom of God as rival to the power of Rome (as Joel discusses here et passim), for how could the kingdom over which Jesus is ruler be of smaller geographic scope than that of Rome? France goes on to argue that the eschatological gathering “from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” in 13.27 is reflective of this universal vision of God’s dominion, which also makes sense and could only be made to refer to Diaspora Jews if 1) Mark was written later than 70 or 2) the phrase or passage is a post-Diaspora interpolation.

This doesn’t answer why this key phrase was omitted in Matthew and especially Luke, where much theological hay could have been made from it. Any guesses?
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Take the test as a closed book exam. No open Bibles. This is a test of your retention of gospel stories and sayings (not a test of your ability to look things up!!).

This great 50-question test from Yeshua in Context is really something worth looking at. It ranges from fairly easy and innocuous questions:

2. Which gospel has a birth story that begins in Bethlehem, moves to Egypt, and then to Nazareth?

4. Which gospel tells the only childhood story about Yeshua we know of (post-infancy)?

19. What two figures from the Hebrew Bible appeared with Yeshua at the Transfiguration?

…to not-so-easy, potentially unsettling ones:

9. If we had only Matthew, Mark, and Luke to go on, how long would we guess Yeshua’s career was?

42. How do the gospels disagree about which day Yeshua died on?

46. T or F: The gospels say that Levi is the same person as Matthew and that Levi is one of the Twelve.

via A Gospel Proficiency Test | Yeshua in Context.

I won’t reveal exactly how much I struggled (*sigh*).

This simple test does a lot to illustrate how little we understand the texts when we refuse to take them seriously — that is, by when we assume harmony on all points and inst on coming up with clever ways of obliterating distinctions and discrepancies between the books of the Bible.

Keying off a comment from Marc on my last post, I looked at Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to him in the immediately following verses in a slightly different light.

Here are the verses immediately following those I quoted in my other post.

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Mark 10.28-31 NRSV

One interesting thing I missed in my original post was that before the scenario in question in this same chapter Jesus affirmed the Kingdom of God as belonging to “such as these” children, and then here he uncharacteristically and therefore pointedly calls his disciples “children” so as to assure them that they were not subject to his remarks. This makes it even more unlikely that the disciples were afraid of not getting in on the kingdom — only that, as Marc suggested, the kingdom wasn’t looking like such a sunny prospect as they imagined. If their worry was over their own reward, it would make sense that Jesus would reassure Peter that no one who sacrificed now would lose their reward in the future.

Another interesting thing I’ve just noticed is that Jesus is careful throughout this passage not to exclude the rich. Indeed, compared to Matthew and Luke he seems amazingly even-handed:

1) He was interested in (indeed, “loved”, v. 21) the rich young man despite his wealth.

2) He denies that it is impossible for the rich to be a part of the kingdom, because “for God all things are possible.”

3) He says that “many who are first will be last,” but that the last will more generally be first. Note also that Mark shows the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea faithfully “waiting for the Kingdom of God” [Mk 15.43].

The author of Mark was apparently careful to articulate that Jesus did not bifurcate the “greatest” and “least” down strictly socio-economic lines. Here Jesus seems to be stressing that although there is a strong correlation between the “great” in social status and “great” in pride, the kingdom order is not strictly an inversion of social status, but of attitude. The recurring emphasis almost strikes me as a corrective to what may have been a class warfare trend among the lower classes; it seems not unlikely that Mark was trying to widen the appeal of Christianity beyond the lower classes in which it originated.

Some will no doubt find it tempting  to write off Mark’s nuanced teaching as a wholly innovative accommodation to an affluent audience. Before doing that, we’d need to fully motivate this accommodation. Even the possibility of an appeal for patronage or respite from political or social pressures must be balanced against the central teachings of Jesus, and I don’t find it particularly likely that someone taken with Jesus enough to perpetuate his movement would compromise such a fundamental teaching in order to secure favor for a watered down message. Besides, if campaigning for the support of the elite was the author’s raison d’écrire, it seems he really blew it in key areas, especially when it came to the “little apocalypse” (provided it is original to Mark), which if Allison, Stark, and others are correct was a promise to defeat Rome would have been a preposterous inclusion. Moreover, that this leveling irrespective of social status was a somewhat core teaching of the Jesus Movement is affirmed by other New Testament writers who also believed that Jesus taught that God exalts the proud and gives grace to the humble but who cannot be described as hostile to the wealthy.

There seems to be an adequate reason to think that the author of Mark shows Jesus teaching such an egalitarian socio-economic order: he believed that Jesus taught it. In fact, starting with Jesus’ announcement in Mark 9.35, it seems that Mark is seeking to view all angles of Jesus’ teaching. Neither the rich nor the poor are demonized, because the author understood a focus on class or status to be missing Jesus’ point.

This does not mean that the kingdom come that Jesus proclaimed was not envisaged as having concrete social/economical/political dimensions; indeed, Jesus is reassuring Peter and the others that there would be tangible, social/economical/political rewards for the faithful, and by implication the opposite for the unfaithful. What it does mean is that faithfulness would not be evaluated by social, economical, or political dimensions, but by humility before God.

Chalk this one up to staring too closely at the text. It’s not a felicitous scenario when the material you’re analyzing for your dissertation keeps distracting you from the actual subject.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’

Mark 10.23-27 NRSV

I’ve been trying to figure out why Mark shows the disciples finding this teaching so hard to believe, first to be “perplexed” and then still more “astounded” after Jesus was obliged to restate it more explicitly. It’s hard for me to find a compelling narrative or rhetorical purpose behind the disciples’ astonishment.

They had just witnessed the rich young man’s reaction, so a clear illustration of the subject of Jesus’ statement had just been demonstrated before their eyes. The real question is why Mark portrays them as taking the news so personally. They seem almost horrified. Peter goes on to remind Jesus that they should hardly be in danger of exclusion from the Kingdom for wealth’s sake, because they had left all theirs behind to follow him.

Luke appears to pick up on this and redirects the “How hard it is…” statement to the rich man directly and then has a more vague audience (“those who heard him”) react in amazement, letting the disciples off the hook a bit, as Luke is wont to do, by allowing Peter to state more confidently, “Look, we have left our homes and followed you.”

If not a narrative purpose, it seems there would at least be an intended dramatic or rhetorical purpose. But what effect did the writer expect this to have?

Maybe Mark as a famed drama queen simply used Jesus’ disciples as props to set up this implausible scenario of despair to give Jesus a chance to still the storm with his reassurance that “…for God all things are possible.” But why use the disciples and not, as did Luke, a more general audience? Perhaps he was writing with an affluent audience in mind and chose to voice their anticipated incredulity at this hard saying by placing it in the mouths of such generally creditable characters as the disciples of Jesus. Jesus does let the rich off the hook pretty quickly. I can think of no other reason why we should draw such a conclusion about Mark’s audience, however.

There’s a good chance the author wanted to portray Jesus’ teaching as shockingly innovative in its inversion of social status in the Kingdom of God. Yet because the principle of inversion was not an out-of-the-blue doctrine in Judea, this would make it seem that the author was either out of touch with Judean apocalyptic or that he was banking on the possibility that his audience was.

One of the factors that might come into play is Mark’s oft noted pattern of showing the disciples as not quite “getting it”. It is fairly clear however that in this case it was not a lack of understanding but a clear realization of what he said that caused their reaction; this is consternation, not confusion. Why are they painted as feeling threatened by this teaching even though they clearly, even within the narrative, are exempt?

Perhaps it is an awkward attempt to kill two birds with one stone in presenting Jesus’ explosive teaching about the danger of riches while also incidentally intimating that the disciples were not at all on the same page as Jesus, even when they actually knew what he was talking about.

It’s probably multiple of these. But even stirring them in together I don’t come up with anything that can make this passage make sense. So either 1) I’m missing something or 2) the author wouldn’t win many modern writing awards for this passage. Any other ideas?

Allan R. Bevere’s blog today posted a quote from C.S. Lewis from Miracles on the general topic of the primacy of the apostolic witness. One part of the quote caught my eye.

The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christian brought: what we call the “gospels”, the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

via The Quotable C.S. Lewis #31: The Apostolic Witness

Although I would caution against reducing the “good news” to “the Resurrection” as he appears to do (Jesus proclaimed it long before he was even crucified: the “good news” is the coming of the Kingdom of God), I think this is a cracking good observation by Lewis. The historicity of the Gospels is never more important than their subject. No matter how much we know about how well they mirror historical reality, the fact remains that there would be no Gospels at all if there were not a gospel that had already been believed. The New Testament itself should be viewed as secondary to the primary apostolic witnesses and should never be viewed as the unquestionable, authoritative witness itself.

I found this to be a stark reminder of the secondary nature of the written word: the Scriptures should never be elevated to the level of the reality to which they seek to testify. Unfortunately, the bibliolatry of the modern Protestant church does just that.

Conversations with some of my closest fellow sojourners (such as Mike, Cliff, and Matthew) have often included a discussion of the following question: given our radical departure from many tenets of evangelical orthodoxy such as our rejection of inerrancy and acceptance of critical scholarship of the Bible, the theory of evolution, etc., why does our faith remain strong despite the many (if not the majority) who go along similar paths and end up losing their faith? What makes the difference?

There’s no easy answer, of course. Performing an autopsy of another person’s faith is tricky business, and will certainly require more “inside” details than our armchair analysis will be able to provide. So we usually pursue the least assuming and more promising line of inquiry, which is to examine the commonality of the experiences of those of us who hang on to faith despite its dramatically changing shape under serious scrutiny.

This is more of a “journal”, “web log” kind of post than an exposition. The following will in no way give you a complete picture: chances are that if you’re expecting this post to be an apologetic, you will be significantly underwhelmed. Nevertheless, while I was thinking about it I decided to jot down some of the factors that have contributed to my faith’s thriving (and I think many of these go for the friends I mentioned above as well, but you’ll have to ask them).  I focus here not on what makes me a theist, but what makes me persist as a Christian specifically.

Enduring interest
Obviously, an important component is that I am comfortable with (enthralled by, even) many of the teachings of Christianity, although I have since discarded so many of what more orthodox believers consider essential that they would roll their eyes to hear me say that. I have come to understand God primarily in terms of the message of Jesus, rather than Jesus’ purported actions (miracles, etc., even the Resurrection) or even in specific formulations of his message in the Gospels. In fact, I have accepted the revelation of modern scholarship that the Gospels actually represent the message of Jesus as interpreted by different and varied first century “Jesus communities”; especially considering their relatively late date (30+ years after Jesus), we have precious little reason to expect that they directly present Jesus’ message, but are, rather, later interpretations of his message.

Yet I’ve still not encountered anything that convinces me that the Gospel writers’ presentations of the man’s central message were really far afield. Indeed, despite the many differences between the Gospels, the distinctives of Jesus’ message are actually unmistakably close to one another: the first Gospel to be written already has Jesus framing his mission as the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and as MacDonald points out, what that kingdom looks like is remarkably consistent over all four Gospels (italics original, bold and bracketed remarks all mine):

What is the kingdom of Christ? A rule of love, of truth—a rule of service. The king is the chief servant in it. “The kings of the earth have dominion: it shall not be so among you.” “The Son of Man came to minister.” [both from Mark] “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” [in John, of Jesus' healing of the sick] The great Workman is the great King, labouring for his own…The lesson added by St Luke to the presentation of the child is: “For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” And St Matthew says: “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Hence the sign that passes between king and subject. The subject kneels in homage to the kings of the earth: the heavenly king takes his subject in his arms. This is the sign of the kingdom between them. This is the all-pervading relation of the kingdom.

Many now say that the Jesus of the Gospels was effectively created out of whole cloth by writers well removed from him. But this begs the very serious question never answered: why then did they all create specifically the Jesus of the Gospels? Oh sure there are differences, sometimes dramatic differences, in the Gospels’ portrayals of Jesus, but that makes similarities such as Jesus’ preoccupation with and characterization of the Kingdom of God all the more significant. One must posit a source for these traditions, and we’ve certainly no better hypothesis than that this source was someone actually teaching these things — at very least planting the seeds among his followers. Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God, which is at bottom of willful servanthood, stands as what I consider the greatest and most important philosophy in history, inspiring me and countless others to be his disciple. As I have said before, even if I found out by proof positive that Jesus never rose from the dead in any sense, I would likely still consider myself “Christian”, at least in a philosophical sense (like a “Kantian”).

Decisive experience
Ok, so I like Jesus’ teachings — so do many people of other faiths and of no faith whatsoever. Still, I consider myself a “Christian” in a more spiritual sense than that.

My childhood faith, bolstered by a community of faithful believers (and particularly my parents), was delightfully rich. Although I’ve never been one to feel or talk as though “me and God hung out today,” I have always felt “connected” with Him in a mystical sense. Somehow, He’s a person I feel I’ve met and come to know better and better, and in actuality I always feel like I’m delusional for trying to deny this even in my thought experiments, like trying to convince yourself you’re not married when you have clear memories of your wedding and subsequent marriage relationship. My experiences with God, which comprise not only emotions but also consistent and lifelong observations of positive effects of belief in myself and others I know well, have been persistently profound even though somewhat intangible. I have seen no reason not to continue using them as something of an anchor.

Intellectual disposition
One more I’m going to mention here is the influence of certain personality characteristics which may help explain my upbeat attitude toward an ever evolving faith.

An extremely important factor for me was that my experience with faith and Christian belief was always one of discovery. So when the data started coming in that convinced me of evangelical Christianity’s flaws and errors, apart from a feeling of growing isolation from my community I was more than happy to glom onto that data not so much as a challenge to but as an expression of my faith in God.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that the following never applies in the lives of the de-converted, but I know for a fact that it has influenced my lack of de-conversion. It is this: I never trusted easy answers to begin with, and so it wasn’t such a shock to have my evangelical faith overhauled by my close scrutiny. An unshakable uneasiness with simply accepting whatever was handed to me and the above mentioned thrill for the truth hunt have been prominent ever since my discovery as a seven-year-old of the discrepancy between what Genesis 1-2 says and what my book about prehistoric science said.

As Cliff is keen to point out, certainty in either direction is simply not in the cards. The dichotomy is not between doubt and faith — doubt is the qualifier that distinguishes a reasonable faith from an altogether blind faith — but between acknowledged and unacknowledged uncertainty. Christians and avowed atheists alike are simply going about their delusions of certainty in a different way. Christians who refuse to peek under the cover are not exercising faith but fear: fear of having to deal with uncertainty.  When former believers who embrace a thorough atheism as though it were the only option other than fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity, they are not exercising healthy skepticism but cynicism, or laziness at best.

In any event, when I reached the fork in the road at the end of the evangelical path I had been led down, I had two choices: I could take the path of hopeful uncertainty or continue on another (very different) path of imagined certainty. The sign over the first path said, “I’m not certain it’s true, but I love it,” and the other said, “I don’t love it because I’m not certain it’s true.” For reasons such as those described above, I chose the former, “and that has made all the difference.”

As I said, this is not meant to be persuasive but as a window into some of my musings of late. Take from it what you will.

Recently I ran across an old article¹ in the journal Language and had to smile at its similarity to a recent topic in the redaction criticism of the Gospels for which I previously noted a parallel in the translations I am studying in my dissertation.

In the Gothic translation of the Bible, at i Cor. xiii 2, we find swaswe fairgunja miþsatjau translating the Greek ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάμεν (in the English version ‘so that I could remove mountains’). I wish to call attention to the word miþsatjau of the Gothic. One is struck by the inexactitude of the translation. Μεθ-ιστάμεν means ‘to move from one place to another’, or at least ‘to remove’, ‘to move away’. Μiþ-satjau should mean ‘to place with’ or ‘beside’, almost the reverse of the meaning of the Greek word.

Of course the difference is between two closely related semantic fields. Even in Old English, the word wið, which is the source modern English with, meant more commonly ‘against’ than ‘accompanying’. One at first wonders how “with” and “against” could be so closely related. It’s actually quite simple: it comes down to spatial considerations. Spatially speaking, friends who “see eye to eye” and competitors “standing nose to nose” are virtually indistinguishable. One who leans “against the wall” is very much “with the wall”. Many of us (at least in America) will talk of “fighting with” opponents rather than “fighting against” them. This is no isolated incident: it’s decidedly cross-linguistic because of the way the human brain most typically categorizes relationships in a fundamentally spatial sense. For instance, most prepositions in Indo-European seem to have started out as spatial adverbs, most of which have gotten metaphorically used to the effect that I can in a certain sense be with a friend who actually lives across the country in the sense that we figuratively “see eye to eye”. The Greek preposition/preverb μετα(-) sometimes denotes a transfer or change of location,² analagous to Latin trans- In the verb μεθιστάμεν³ here, we have at root something like ‘stand away from’ to the effect of ‘move away’, which the Gothic translator appears to have misconstrued to mean ‘stand with‘. But this is odd: while μετα can indeed mean ‘with’, it does so much more rarely in preverbs, and this is the only instance in the Gothic Bible in which miþ ‘with’ is prefixed to a verb in such a mistranslation of Greek μετα-. Here is Rice’s assessment:

As an explanation of the passage I offer the following: The translator was the victim of a momentary lapse, and, betrayed by the sound of the Greek prefix in the form μεθα- which stood in the original text, he erroneously supplied miþ- in his translation in place of the more or less accurate af- of Luke 16.4. The respective sounds represented by miþ- and μεθα- are closer than might at first seem, for the Greek e was close, the Gothic i was open, and by this time (4th century A.D.) θ was a spirant and equal to þ.

So there you have it: translator’s fatigue. It appears Wulfila should have called it a day before beginning chapter 8! _____________________________________

¹ Rice, Allan Lake. 1933. A Note on the Gothic Bible, i Cor. xiii 2. Language, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 87-88.

² As an illustration of my earlier point about the spatial roots of prepositions, one of μετα‘s most common meanings, ‘after’, resulted when ‘a change of physical space’ got metaphorically applied to time. Thus μετα typically covered both the spatial ’change to a place hence’ and the temporal ‘change to a time hence’.

³ In this verb, underlying meta-(histami) ‘I stand’ underwent a phonologically conditioned change to meth-(istami) before the aspirated consonant h of histami.