More from Miles. It is interesting. However, the meaning he and other moderns impose on history can never reflect the actual meaning experienced by the participants. We impose meaning from a satellite viewing of the facts; they from behind each tree and cave.
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"Why did God become a Jew and subject himself to public execution by the enemy of his chosen people? He did so in order to confess that, by choice or of necessity, he was a god disarmed. He knew that genocide against his chosen people was imminent and that he would do nothing to prevent it. The one thing he could choose to do, as the Jew he became, was to break his silence about his own scandalous inaction.
God revealed to the seer Daniel at the court of the king of Babylon that when Babylon fell, the kingdom of God would not come immediately. Instead, there would come—in a succession symbolized by a series of beasts in Daniel’s vision (Dan. 7)—the kingdoms of the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks of Alexander the Great. Only then would God’s kingdom come, symbolized in the vision by “one like a son of man.” But as the Gospel opens, instead of God’s kingdom, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and the iron fist of this new Babylon is tightening around Judea in the last decades before a catastrophic rebellion. If, as the Book of Daniel makes clear, God foresees the historical future in detail, then he knows that he will not rescue his people from the defeat that lies ahead. Rome, enraged by Jewish rebelliousness, will perpetrate genocide, and God will do nothing. The one thing he can do—and does do as Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son—is break his silence about his own inaction.
The word genocide above refers to the ferocious escalation of violence that took place in the generation immediately after the execution of Jesus, an escalation that came to its first climax with a Jewish revolt against Rome in 66-70 C.E. The Jews were a formidable opponent for imperial Rome. They were, more than is sometimes remembered, populous, well organized, well financed, and passionately motivated. Rome did not finally defeat them and suppress their revolt until after it peaked for a second time, in 132-135 C.E. After this final Jewish revolt, an uprising led by another Messiah, Simon Bar Kokhba, Rome changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina and made it a capital offense for any Jew to set foot in the erstwhile City of David. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel then came to an end for fully eighteen centuries.
Rome’s imperial agenda did not extend to the extermination of all the Jews of the empire. In that one regard, the Roman suppression of world Jewry’s bid for freedom differed from the Nazi “Final Solution” of 1941-45. In two other regards, however, Rome’s victory in its sixty years war with the Jews may plausibly bear the grim designation genocide. First, the Roman intent in destroying the Jewish Temple was to end the distinctive national life that the Jewish people had led as an empire within the empire. Second, the portion of the world Jewish population that perished in the first of the Jewish Wars alone is comparable to the portion that perished in the Nazi shoah.2
Contemporary estimates of the world Jewish population in the first century 3 range from a low of 5.5 million to a high of more than 8 million. Of these, 1 million to 2.5 million lived in Palestine; 4.5 million to 6 million lived in the diaspora. In the years before the doomed uprisings, the Jews of the Roman Empire, notwithstanding worsening oppression within their homeland, were more numerous, more powerful, and better organized within the greater multinational social order of their day than were the Jews of Europe before the outbreak of World War II. Their remarkable unity—all Jews looking to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital and all supporting the Temple by the payment of a Temple tax—mimicked the organization of the Roman empire itself. This political coherence was admired by the other, less autonomous peoples of the empire, but it was understandably suspect in the eyes of the imperial authorities themselves.
Perhaps because of latent Roman resentment of Jewish success within the empire, not to mention various officially conceded Jewish legal exemptions and privileges, the Jewish revolts were put down with exceptional violence. The first-century historian Josephus, a Romanized Jew, reports 4 that 1.1 million died in Titus’s siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The Roman historian Tacitus estimates six hundred thousand dead. Though many modern historians have regarded these numbers as exaggerations, Josephus in reporting his figure recognizes that it will seem incredible and explains that Passover pilgrims from the diaspora had swollen the resident population of Jerusalem to a degree that, though not out of the ordinary for this pilgrimage city, might well seem unbelievable to outsiders. He then engages in a surprisingly modern back-calculation from the number of animals slain for the feast—256,500—to a Passover population of 2,700,200 at the time the siege began.
Jerusalem in that era, it must be remembered, was like Mecca in our own: the site of an astounding annual concentration of pilgrims, overwhelmingly male, for whose ritual purposes an equally astounding number of animals were slaughtered. When the Roman siege began, the temporary population of Jerusalem was further swollen by refugees from parts of Palestine where Roman forces had already, and with great force, been putting down the Jewish rebellion for three full years. In view of all this, the large casualty figures quoted by Josephus and Tacitus are not as implausible as they might otherwise seem. 5
Even adjusting those figures downward, however, it seems clear that the first-century slaughter of the Jews of Palestine was large enough to be comparable in its impact to the twentieth-century slaughter of the Jews of Europe. The destruction of the Temple in and of itself would have had a major psychological impact, but this loss came coupled with staggering casualties; mass enslavements and ensuing depopulation in the promised land; and, not least, the memory of hideous atrocities. Generally faulted for obsequiousness toward Rome, Josephus does not flinch from reporting terror-crucifixions outside the walls of Jerusalem—mass crucifixions aimed at driving the defenders of the city to despair and panic—or from reporting that when some of the defenders did flee, Roman mercenaries took to disemboweling them in search of swallowed gold coins until stopped by the Roman commander himself.
Tales like these bear comparison with the grisliest from the Nazi concentration camps. The memory of them, combined with so devastating a loss of life in the promised land and with major pogroms against the Jews in a number of Roman Empire cities, can scarcely fail to have raised many of the radical or desperate questions about God that, to some, seem to have arisen for the first time in the twentieth century. As for radical or desperate answers to those questions, one seems to have been the Christian vision of the divine warrior self-disarmed.
Historically, there is little doubt that the Jews who rose against Rome expected that their God would come to their assistance, as he had in the historic victories whose celebration remains central to Judaism. There can be equally little doubt that these rebels, as they imagined the God who would assist them, imagined him as knowing the future in detail. This is the image of God expressed so vividly in the Book of Daniel. Literary criticism attending to the character of God within the Old Testament and the New is free to accept this understanding of God (as well as the time and place of the Book of Daniel as given in the text) and then to stipulate about God, as we have done earlier in this book, that, from the Babylonian exile onward, his character is such that he knows the future in the detailed way that human beings know the past.
Yet to imagine a first-century Jew imagining God in this way, even before the disastrous Jewish Wars, is to imagine a Jew in distress. Instead of the predicted kingdom of God, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and its oppressiveness dwarfs that of all previous oppressors. What was a devout first-century Jew reading the Book of Daniel in a trusting, straightforward, pre-critical way to think as he or she noted its disconfirmation by events? Had God been mistaken? Had he failed to foresee the rise of Rome? Some such crisis of faith could easily have occurred. What the radical reversal in the divine identity implied by the pacifist preaching of Jesus suggests is that a Jewish writer of powerful imagination projected this crisis of faith into the mind of God transforming it into a crisis of conscience. God had broken his own covenant, and the fact that he had broken it had to matter to him. He knew he should have stopped Rome. He knew he had not done so. From that simple notion, a composition of enormous complexity could be derived.
A good many historical critics, it should be noted, have based their reading of the Gospels on speculation about the historical consciousness of Jesus. Beginning with Albert Schweitzer in 1901, many have believed that Jesus—living under Roman rule, intensely aware of Jewish tradition, and experiencing what we would now call cognitive dissonance between the two—inserted himself into the received mythology of his day by personifying the “Son of Man” image of Daniel 7 and then identifying himself as the personage in question. Jesus believed, Schweitzer concluded, that by his own agency and, finally, his own death, Rome would fall, history would end, and God’s Kingdom would be established for all time.
More recent scholarship tends to believe that this and related, more or less learned scriptural identifications were made not by Jesus during his lifetime but only about Jesus after his death. So it may well have been, yet the protagonist of the Gospels as we encounter him on the page acts as if he has made these identifications himself; and on this literary datum may be grounded an interpretation in which historical speculation about the remembered mind of Jesus yields to literary speculation about the imagined mind of God at that historical juncture. For literary purposes, in other words, it does not matter whether the historical Jesus referred to himself as “Son of Man” or not, so long as the literary character Jesus Christ does so on the page. Nor need it matter that the effect this character produces on the page, as the page is read today by some contemporary interpreter, may not have been intended by all or even by any of the writers who produced the Gospels. It is proper to a literary classic that it touch readers generation after generation, century after century, in ways that transcend the intentions of the originating author or authors.
But having gone thus far in claiming proprietary space for a literary reading of the Gospels, let me immediately concede that nonhistorical readings vary in the degree to which they are informed by history. A fantastical or mystical or morally didactic reading, for example, might prescind almost entirely from historical information. The reading offered here admits history roughly to the extent that it is admitted in the interpretation of a historical novel. Moreover, though one does not read a historical novel in order to extract history from it, a general awareness of historical time and geographic place colors and contributes to the aesthetic effect, which, as interpreted, may be historically suggestive without entailing any outright historical claim.
Against the usual Christian spiritualization of the Old Testament, the interpretation offered here is a relative materialization of the New Testament, in which God’s land-and-wealth-and-offspring promises to the Jews are expected to remain on his mind—which is to say, on Jesus’ mind—and in which they are allowed, without shame, to remain on his hearers’ minds as well. What such an interpretation of the Gospels suggests about the historical situation behind them is that a theodicy—a moral justification of the behavior of God—whose plausibility had survived several centuries of fluctuating foreign oppression finally came into crisis under the steadily worsening Roman oppression of the first century.
According to the received theodicy, first formulated after Israel was conquered by Assyria and Babylon, that double defeat did not mean what it seemed to mean. The Lord’s victory over Egypt had been a real victory, but his apparent defeat by Assyria and Babylonia was not a real defeat. No, Assyria and Babylonia were actually tools in the hands of the Lord, who, far from defeated, was in perfect control of events and merely punishing Israel for its sins. Painful as it might seem to accept the claim that a national god who had once been so favorable had now turned hostile, the alternative was the loss of that god as a potential future support and protection. Since Israel’s sense of itself as a people had become inseparable from its sense of covenant with the Lord, life with him even in an angry and punitive mood was preferable to life altogether without him.
By the expedient of attributing its enemies’ victories to the action of its own god, Israel saved that god from suffering the same kind of defeat that Israel itself had suffered. But the price of this expedient was high. It required a massive inculpation of the people of Israel—a blaming of the victim, if you will—and an uncomfortable emphasis on anger and vindictiveness in the characterization of the god. Even at the start, these features of the theodicy were felt to be so costly that it was necessary to add, when presenting it, that God would not always conduct himself thus. Israel’s national good fortune would be restored before long, and with it a much happier relationship between the god and his people.
But for how many centuries of continuing oppression, especially as different oppressors succeeded one another, could this revision of the covenant remain adequate? The historical suggestion implied by the literary reading of the Gospels offered here is that for a significant segment of the Jewish population, a further revision came to seem necessary. It became necessary to concede the obvious and to redefine the Lord as a god whose return to action as a warrior was not just delayed but altogether canceled, and then to adjust his warlike character accordingly. Not the least part of this adjustment was a revision of his relationship to the other nations of the world; for if the Lord could no longer function effectively as anybody’s enemy, then he was necessarily everybody’s friend. And if his covenant love was now indiscriminate and universal, then so also must be the love of his covenant partner.
Israel, as God’s partner in the original covenant, was expected to demonstrate its status as such by its exclusive devotion to the Lord. As the new covenant is proclaimed, Israel’s sin, its infidelity and failure to be exclusive in its devotion, is more forgotten than forgiven. The God who will no longer reward or punish his covenant partners as he once did can no longer require of them what he once required. Henceforth, it is not their devotion to him but their devotion to one another and, even more remarkably, to strangers that will signal their status as his. To the extent that they keep this one commandment, to that extent the divine warrior will be excused from ever again taking up arms. Israel will have no enemy because no one will have an enemy other than Satan, the enemy of all.
God Incarnate does indeed understand himself to be, as to his human identity, the “Son of Man” of Daniel 7. But in this capacity, rather than establish the Kingdom of God by military force, he preaches military renunciation: He urges his followers to turn the other cheek. Going dramatically beyond even that, he reveals what he will not do—what no one must any longer expect him to do—by going without protest to his own execution on the gallows of the oppressor. The covenant revision is communicated, in sum, not only by prophetic preaching but also by a traumatic, cathartic, climactic, and, not least, ironic sacred drama in which the central role is played by God himself.
Did the historical Jesus actually foresee the worst for his nation, despair of anything like divine rescue, and then—by a bold but conceivable modification of Israelite prophecy—infer that, rather than the prophet of God, he was God himself become incarnate to turn the bad news into an ironic kind of good news? As noted, the all-but-universal assumption on the part of contemporary historical critics is that others turned Jesus into Christ and then into God after his death.
I myself, rather than suppose that Jesus was a simple preacher drafted, as it were, against his will into a larger role, find it historically more plausible to suppose that he was complicitous in his own mythologization, a messenger who intended somehow to become the message, a provocateur who stimulated others to further provocation. Israel Knohl in The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Michael O. Wise in The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Christ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999) claim, on evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, to have identified historical figures who, before Jesus, believed themselves or were believed by their followers to be divine, suffering messiahs. One need not accept the exact identifications they propose to recognize that, on the evidence they adduce, the idea of combining these elements—divinity, suffering, and messianism—had grown religiously plausible in Palestinian Jewry well before its Christian enactment.
The new research has attracted as much attention as it has because a chasm separates the claim that the Messiah must suffer from the far bolder claim that the suffering messiah is God Incarnate. And, to be sure, even though Jesus makes this claim in the Gospel of John and notwithstanding the new historical evidence, it remains possible that the idea behind this claim may not in fact have emerged until decades after his death—that is, until closer to the time when the Gospel of John was written. A careful and conservative scholar, the late Raymond E. Brown, asked forty years ago in his great commentary on John
whether there is any likelihood that Jesus made such a public claim to divinity as that represented in [John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I AM”], or are we dealing here exclusively with the profession of faith of the later Church? As a general principle it is certainly true that through their faith the evangelists were able to clarify a picture of Jesus that was obscure during [his] ministry. However, it is difficult to avoid the impression created by all the Gospels that the Jewish authorities saw something blasphemous in Jesus’ understanding of himself and his role. There is no convincing proof that the only real reason why Jesus was put to death was because he was a social, or ethical, reformer, or because he was politically dangerous. But how can we determine scientifically what the blasphemous element was in Jesus’ stated or implied claims about himself? In the clarity with which John presents the divine “I AM” statement of Jesus, is he making explicit what was in some way implicit? No definitive answer seems possible on purely scientific grounds. 6
There, as it seems to me, the matter still rests. I am content, however, to leave further discussion of this point to the historians, for the myth of God’s turning material defeat into spiritual victory is no less remarkable as the creation of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries after his death than as his own creation. The spectacle of the Lord of Hosts put to death by the enemy ought, in principle, to have ended forever a covenant predicated on the Lord’s ability to protect his friends and defeat their foes. In practice, for those who made the commemoration of that awful spectacle a covenant ritual, its meaning was that a new covenant between God and mankind had taken effect that was immune to defeat, a covenant that could withstand the worst that Satan, standing (as in the Book of Revelation) for all historical enemies past or future, could inflict. Whatever provoked this adjustment of the idea of covenant (and scholars, significantly, are unanimous that the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.), it is a theodicy conceptually analogous to the adjustment made when the victories of Assyria and Babylonia were defined as the punitive actions of God. What the revision creates, in the end, is a new theodicy, a new way of maintaining that there is still a god and that he still matters in the face of historical experience to the contrary.
While I was at work on this book, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s right-wing Shas party, created a scandal by suggesting in a sermon that the Jews who suffered and died in the Nazi Shoah may have died because of Jewish sin.7 When this statement came up in conversation in Los Angeles, a friend of mine recalled with anger and sadness that, as a boy in the 1940s, he had heard the rabbi in his orthodox shul preach this interpretation of the Shoah not just once but repeatedly. Reactions against such statements—my friend’s sorrow and the scandal that erupted in Israel over Ovadia Yosef—are, of course, as much a part of contemporary Jewish thought as are the statements themselves, but the sorrow and the scandal are instructive for anyone attempting to make sense of Jesus.
How did the divine warrior end up preaching pacifism? Christian theology has tended to speak of this change as spiritual growth in God, though rarely using a phrase like “spiritual growth.” The answer suggested here is that God made a new human virtue of his divine necessity. God was under spiritual duress. He found a way to turn his defeat into a victory, but the defeat came first. For some, to be sure, no divine defeat is so devastating as to extinguish forever the hope of victory. But for others, considering the number and magnitude of the defeats, a different conclusion has seemed inevitable: If God must be defined as a historical-time, physical-world warrior whose victory has simply been postponed indefinitely, then there might as well be no such god. Indefinite postponement is tantamount to cancellation. Effectively, after such a conclusion, the only choices left are atheism or some otherwise unthinkably radical revision in the understanding of God.
This is a question that is called with devastating starkness in Elie Wiesel’s Night:
The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice in myself answer: “Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows…” 8
If God will not rescue us, then is there a god? If there is and he still will not rescue us, then is he a weakling or a fiend? It should go without saying that Wiesel did not write this scene as an apology for Christianity. But the scene cannot fail to evoke the Crucifixion for Christian readers, and Wiesel cannot have failed to notice and intend this.
In sum, the disarmament of the divine warrior in the first century mirrors, though with different consequences, his disarmament in the twentieth century. The epigraph to The Prophets, 9 the most widely read of the books of the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most influential Jewish theologian of the twentieth century, is:
To the martyrs of 1940-45
All this has come upon us,
Though we have not forgotten Thee,
Or been false to Thy covenant.
Our heart has not turned back,
Nor have our steps departed from Thy way…
…for Thy sake we are slain…
Why dost Thou hide Thy face?
--from Psalm 44.
Heschel had every reason to think of these lines—from the earlier quoted Psalm 44—when thinking of the martyrs of 1940-45, but other Jews nineteen centuries before him, thinking of other martyrs, had no less reason to turn to the same Psalm; and what one of them, whether or not the one in question was Jesus himself, may have gone on to imagine was a scene like the gallows scene in Night, a scene in which the Jew on the gallows, this time, was truly God himself."
NOTES
2 I use this Hebrew noun, which means simply “catastrophe,” by preference to the more usual Holocaust, a word which some find offensive because its original setting is in the Jewish religion itself. Shoah is the noun most commonly used in Israel to refer to the slaughter of the Jews of Europe during World War II.
3 Estimates have been lowered somewhat in the past generation, but not in a way that would affect the claim that the Roman and the Nazi shoahs bear comparison. Writing in 1971, Salo W. Baron estimated the Jewish population within the borders of the Roman empire at just under 7 million, with slightly more than a million others living outside its borders, mostly to the east; the Jewish population of Palestine he placed at not higher than 2.5 million (Encyclopaedia Judaica [New York: Macmillan, 1972], vol. 13, p. 871). Paul Johnson writes “Though it is impossible to present accurate figures, it is clear that by the time of Christ the diaspora Jews greatly outnumbered the settled Jews of Palestine: perhaps by as many as 4.5 million to 1” (A History of Christianity [New York: Athenaeum, 1976], p. 12). Subsequent estimates generally fall between these extremes. Thus, Wayne Meeks in The First Urban Christians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983) estimates 1 million Jews in Palestine, 5 million to 6 million in the diaspora.
4 Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, book 6, chapter 9, section 3.
5 Cf. Salo W. Baron:
“The figures transmitted by such distinguished historians as Josephus and Tacitus ranging between 600,000 fatalities and 1,197,000 dead and captured are not quite so out of line as they appear at first glance. Jerusalem’s population had been swelled by countless numbers of pilgrims from all over the Dispersion and refugees from the provinces previously occupied by the roman legions.” (Ibid.)
6 Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, Anchor Bible Series, vol. 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 367-68.
7 John F. Burns, “Israeli Rabbi Sets Off a Political Firestorm Over the Holocaust,” The New York Times, August 8, 2000, sec. A., p.100.
8 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1982), p. 79; originally published in 1958.
9 Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, Volume II (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975, © 1962). A more recent, psychologically shaped Jewish theology is found in David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Theological reflection on these passages seems almost inevitably, in our day, to yield a theology of protest. Literary reflection on them in the first century may have yielded at least a protest in pantomime. |
