God's Ultimate Fidelity To Living Creatures - The Greatest Scandals In The Gospel

THE THEORY that the scandalous content of the Gospels gives them credibility because no one who would be making up things about a man who is asserted to be the Son of God that made belief in them harder has always made the most sense to me.    The Virgin Birth is the first of those scandals and the last and most glaring of those surround the crucifixion and the Resurrection.   The greatest of those scandalous sayings come out of the mouth of Jesus, himself. 

One of the most scandalous things in the entirety of Christianity are the doubts and fears that Jesus expressed as he knowingly approached his crucifixion are things I remember being troubled to while listening to the Passion on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday.   His begging his Father to spare him the horrible pains of crucifixion even while saying, in effect, Your will be done, not mine, his crying out the doubt that the Father was with him as he died, from the 22nd Psalm,  how could someone who was God incarnate, knowing of his own immortal Spirit, knowing he would rise from death say those things? 

One of the biggest problems I have with the modern fashion of "critical historical" analysis of the Gospels and other books of the Bible is that it refuses to admit that such things will never be subject to historical analysis or textual analysis or even theological reasoning because nothing gives us enough knowledge of what happened or how it was transmitted or recorded.   I think Luke Timothy Johnson is right when he says that, like it or not, what we have are the texts as they are and those are what any useful or important thinking about such things will have to depend on.   No amount of slicing, dicing and discarding and latter day analysis of those will ever produce something that is superior to those imperfect texts as we have them.

There is an example of that relevant to today.   As influenced by him as I was in the early 1990s, as important as his "Historical Jesus" book was to my eventual conversion,  one of the biggest problems I had with John Dominic Crossan's speculations was that, apart from the multiply attested burial of the body of Jesus, he said that the Roman soldiers would have thrown it into a shallow pit where, even if it were buried, would have been dug up by dogs and eaten by them.   I found it especially hypocritical for him to hold that because of his announced method of depending on such things as multiple attestation, testing of texts on the basis of their temporal proximity to the witnesses of the events, etc.   If something written forty or fifty years after the death of Jesus is to be held to be unreliable, even with multiple attestations, some of those admitted to be independent of each other, the speculations of a late 20th century bible scholar on the basis of stereotypes, a reconstructed "typical" anthropological, sociological cartoon of what happened - often based on far less contemporary testimony or even physical evidence - can't be any more credible than the original claims in the Gospels, in the letters of Paul, James, etc.  

Maybe it's due to my Catholic upbringing but I'm a lot more comfortable with admitting that there is a lot which is most honestly categorized as "mystery" that will always remain mystery than I am with modern reconstruction based on the pseudo-social sciences.   In terms of today's memorial,  I find the Gospel accounts to be far more credible than any deviating claims of even the most respectable of academic scribblers and babblers.   I don't think we'll ever know but I will speculate on the basis of the claim of Paul that Jesus was like us in all things except for sin.  Jesus, as the Son of God was fully human and, so, would have had to experience a real human death, a death of the worst kind, tortured intentionally, mocked and humiliated, stripped naked and put up as an icon of terror by an evil empire to frighten and control any who would oppose them. 

I think of the fear and doubt of Jesus to be the fullest measure of God's fidelity to living beings,  God expressing the understanding and experience of us at our most extreme, at our most vulnerable, at our least confident, fearing our own non-existence.   Knowing he was going to die, fearing that ultimate extinction that we all must fear in death, was the ultimate sign of God's fidelity to life, to sentient creatures, to human kind.   Seen that way, it seems to me that the Death and Resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate vindication of the entire tradition going back to the first time God is said to have found God's Creation good. 

The Trial of Jesus - An Alternative Timeline by Prof. Israel Knohl

 

On this episode,  one of most brilliant Biblical scholars of our time, Prof. Israel Knohl, grounded in meticulous research on the messianism debates in the Bible and during the Second Temple period,  argues that Jesus’s trial was in reality a dramatic clash between two Jewish groups holding opposing ideologies of messianism and anti-messianism, with both ideologies running through the Bible. The Pharisees (forefathers of the rabbinic sages) and most of the Jewish people had a conception of a Messiah similar to Jesus: like the prophets and most psalmists, they expected the arrival of a godlike Messiah. However, the judges who sentenced Jesus to death were Sadducees, who were fighting with the Pharisees largely because they repudiated the Messiah idea. Thus, the trial of Jesus was not a clash between Jewish and what would become Christian doctrines but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions—expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea—in which Jesus and the Pharisees were actually on the same side.

Knohl contends that had the assigned judges been Pharisees rather than Sadducees, Jesus would not have been convicted and crucified. The Pharisees’ disagreement with Jesus was solely over whether Jesus was the Messiah—but historically, for Jews, arguing about who was or wasn’t the Messiah was not uncommon.

Prof. Israel Knohl  is an Israeli Bible scholar and historian. He is the Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Senior Fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His books deal with the integration of scientific and archaeological discoveries with the biblical account, early Israelite beliefs, a survey of Israelite cult, and how and where the Israelites originated.

This is one of the most interesting things I've heard about the trial and execution of Jesus because it shows how the account in the Gospel of Mark shows how intimately the author understood the internal politics of the leadership in the Temple (Sadducees) and the Pharisees was exploited to guarantee a death sentence to Jesus.   It is one of the most informative things I've ever heard or read on the topic.   And it's definitely not from a Christian apologetic point of view.

Just Got Our Electricity Back

 the ice storms that used to be so rare when we had real winter are coming more and more often, it seems.   Someone was saying they didn't expect we'd get it back till Wednesday so I guess I shouldn't complain.   Though everyone does when they say they shouldn't.