Narrative, History, and the Bible

My title is rather broad and lacks in specificity; hence, I begin with a few definitions. “A narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.”¹ That is to say, a narrative is not a single event but is constituted by multiple events that are connected; it is a series of connected events. An event is “something that happens.” With respect to the definition of history two definitions are offered as the Google definition of history.² History is (1) “The study of past events, particularly in human affairs.” (2) “The whole series of past events connected with someone or something.” Thus, by these two definitions history is either the past connected events themselves or the study of past connected events. Essential to the Google definition of history is that events (something that happened) must be connected to other events; a single event is not history. It is rather a single datum that may potentially be history if it can be connected to other past events. Hence, modern historians consider history a narrative. By this definition the event, “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is apparently not history, since it is only a single event.

On the other hand, I think of history as what happened in the past, connected or not.³ History as the contemporary study of past events is not history unless the study happened in the past. For example, past studies of New Testament criticism I consider history because the studies happened in the past. Hence, by my definition the event in which Caesar crossed the Rubicon is history because it did in fact happen in the past.

          These two Google definitions of history (are they popular; or are they both critical and popular?) seem to regard history as showing connected events as a movement in time, whether progress or decline, as though history, as the aggregate of these events or selected events, was focused toward some ultimate goal. Hence one can identify history’s plot (its plan or main story) and write a narrative of history or of a selected history. If history is a narrative, then historians must justify their connections between events that move history forward or backward.

Let us assume that history is a narrative for the moment. Narratives may also be fictional; that is to say, the narrative may be invented, which raises the question, how does one distinguish between an invented narrative and one that is not? In some cases, it may not be possible to do so. I would test the narrative in this way. (1) Does the narrative have verisimilitude (that is does it have the appearance of being true or real)? (2) Does the narrative adhere to the reality I know (what I mean by being true or real)? (3) Are there surviving artefacts that suggest that the narrative is grounded in events that actually happened, rather than existing only in an author’s mind?

Here are three narratives that we can test with these three criteria: Gone with the Wind (1940) by the Atlanta, Georgia native Margaret Mitchell; The Civil War, A Narrative (1958, 1963, 1974), a three volume work, by the Greenville, Mississippi native Shelby Foote; and “The Death of John the Baptist” (Mark 6:14-29), a first century narrative by an unknown author.

The first narrative, Gone with the Wind, is a work of historical fiction, whose specific characters were invented and whose events never happened. Although the backdrop against which the narrative took place was historical, there are no artefacts to attest to the specific events in the narrative. The second, The Civil War A Narrative, is considered a military history of the Civil War. Foote’s characters lived during the time the events of the War took place and there are myriads of artefacts to attest that the events occurred. Thus, Mitchell’s work is shelved with other historical fiction novels and Foote’s is shelved under history, although Foote himself is a novelist.

The third narrative appears to be a mixture of historical and fictional elements. The named characters in the narrative are historical figures. That the tetrarch, Herod Antipas, killed John the Baptist is confirmed by Josephus (Antiquities 18.5.2; although Herod was not a king). That Herodias, his wife, nursed a grudge against John for criticizing her second marriage to Herod and that Herod had him (reluctantly) killed because Herodias put him in a situation where he (Herod) had to kill John is less likely than is the reason given by Josephus. The Josephus report has Herod killing John because he feared John’s popularity with the populace and thought John might foment a rebellion. Josephus’ report seems more likely to me in this regard. It is dubious that Herod would have promised half his domain to a dancer in the presence of the leading citizens of Galilee. It is also doubtful that the killing of John and the presentation of John’s head to Herodias’ daughter could have taken place so quickly, since the fortress of Machaerus, where John was imprisoned by Josephus’ account, is located in Jordan across the Dead Sea. The Capitol of Herod Antipas’ kingdom from which he governed was Tiberius in Galilee, The distance from Tiberius to Machaerus was more than a day’s journey, so the killing of John and the presentation of his head to Herodias’ daughter could not have happened with the speed suggested by the narrative in Mark.⁴ No artefacts, as far as I know, attest to this bizarre narrative plot, except the fortress Machaerus. On the whole, the story in Mark is at best historical fiction.⁵

How does it seem to you?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Google the following: “google definition of narrative.”

²Google the following: “google definition of history.” There are several other definitions; check a dictionary.

³Hedrick, “History, Historical Narrative, and Mark’s Gospel” pp. 137-40 in Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade, 2019). Or an earlier version: Wry Thoughts about Religion: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=history

⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberias#Herodian_period

⁵See the report of the Jesus Seminar for another analysis: R. W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus. What did Jesus Really do? (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 86-87.

History, Historical Narrative, and Mark’s Gospel

I begin at the beginning: what is the definition of history?
 

The definitions of history in Random House College Dictionary read as follows: history is (1) “The branch of knowledge dealing with past events”; (2) “a continuous systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc., usually written in chronological order”; (3) “the aggregate of past events”; and (4) “the record of past events, especially in connection with the human race.”  Basically these break down into three ways of viewing history: it is a branch of scientific inquiry; it is everything that happened in the past; it is a narrative reconstructing what happened in the past.  Webster’s Third International Dictionary (unabridged) agrees with these three ways of defining history but in its listing of options gives precedence to the idea that history is a narrative of events or a systematic written account comprising a chronological record.  The idea that history is principally a narrative of past events can threaten the independent reality of the lived past.

At a recent conference (Society of Biblical Literature) one panel speaker claimed: “History is only available in narrative”—I objected claiming that history was a reality in its own right completely apart from all historical narratives.  Narratives change as new information and insights become available, but the lived reality that was history is what it was, whether we can recover it or not.

History is all the millions and billions of things that have ever happened in the past—significant and insignificant, public and private, natural and arranged, remembered and forgotten, personal and impersonal, seemly and unseemly, etc.  Narratives about that aggregate of the lived past are attempts to reconstruct it—not in its aggregate totality but in what the historian considers its more significant aspects.

Bits and pieces of the aggregate that was our historical past actually survive apart from the historical narrative in the residue, artifacts, residua, and relics of the past.  These odds and ends are the raw data of history, remainders of a lived past before it was codified into the Master Narrative of a given reconstructed history.  For example, remainders of the lived past of the Battle of Gettysburg survive in such things as official lists of the dead and wounded, anecdotal reports of the battle from observers or participants, military dispatches, photos, maps, prisoner lists, scattered equipment from the battlefield, etc.  Historians rely on these bits and pieces of the lived past as well as on their imaginations to fill in gaps in the data.

History itself is something far different than historical narrative.  History consists in billions of events themselves as played out at the time—momentarily present but they then immediately become part of the lived past.  The reality that was the living moment as it was actually lived can never be recaptured, but its scattered bones (artifacts and memories) can be gathered, catalogued, and analyzed.  The historian aims to revive a given living moment by making connections between bits of data and imagining how things might have played themselves out given the data at the historian’s disposal.  Thus the historian codifies the lived past into historical narrative.  But a given historical narrative is no more “history” than a corpse is a human being.

A narrative cannot be historical if it is not informed by the residua of the lived past.  And hence a historical narrative cannot be “history” as such, but it is only an attempt at reconstructing the lived past through its residua.  A narrative about the lived past is historically reliable as a reconstruction only to the extent that it conforms to the residua of the lived past, and only to the extent that the historian’s imagination corresponds to a critical sense of what is actually real.

This way of looking at history and historical narrative has significant implications for the historical character of the Gospel of Mark, our earliest gospel in the view of a majority of modern scholars.  No residua of the lived past informs Mark’s narrative except unconfirmed oral reports, which scholars assume that Mark had at hand when composing the narrative.  Mark’s imaginative composition of the story, however, does not conform to a modern critical sense of what is real, or even to that represented by the finest history writing of the ancient past, such as is represented, for example, by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War (5^th century BCE).  Mark’s historical narrative turns out to be pious historical fiction written for the purpose of informing the reader about the origins of the gospel (Mark 1:1) preached by the Markan community in the latter half of the first century.

Many contemporary scholars, however, routinely treat Mark as though the narrative and the lived past are as Mark imagined it—in other words what Mark says happened, actually happened that way.  Thinking of history as lived past and historical narrative as an attempt to reconstruct that lived past puts Mark in its place as a questionable reconstruction of the events of the lived past of Galilee and Judea in the first third of the first century.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

John’s Gospel, History, and Fiction

There are three types of literature that are closely related in form and style: fiction, history, and gospel.  They all are narrative—that is they tell a story.  The character of two of these genres is well known: Fiction, by definition, is about things that never happened, but if it is realistic historical fiction one would have to add the following to the definition: although these things never occurred, they could have happened (in the sense that the realistic action approximates conventional reality).  History on the other hand, by definition is about things that did actually occur.

Gospel literature, according to critical scholarship, falls somewhere between the two definitions above—it is neither history nor fiction—or better, it is both history and fiction.  Gospel literature is unapologetically propaganda literature, which is enough to compromise its reliability as unbiased history, if one pauses to think about it.  Of course what we usually think of as history and fiction can also be propagandistic.  In fact they often are, and are thereby rendered unreliable for the same reason.  The historical character of the gospels is more akin to Eusebius' Life of Constantine, which is an encomium or eulogy (4^th century) written in praise of the first Christian emperor extolling his role in establishing fourth-century orthodoxy.  The encomium is not critical history, but pietistic propaganda.

I have argued in several essays that in many ways gospel narratives have more in common with fiction than history, in that gospel and fiction share many of the same techniques and conventions.  For example, ancient Greek novels frequently digress into vivid and fulsome description. In handbooks of rhetoric of the 2^nd century and later this phenomenon is called ekphrasis, "description."  Depending on who is explaining the reason for the feature, ekphrasis either digresses from the story to enhance the enjoyment of the reader (to make the narrative more vivid) or it is used to further the plot in some way.  Historical narrative, on the other hand, should not enhance data with the goal of increasing the reader's reading enjoyment, or aiding the historian's argument in some way.  If it introduces description that is not actually part of the events themselves in order to enrich the reading experience, to that extent the history is compromised as critical historical narrative.

In making a story more vivid a fiction writer often uses sensory words—words that appeal to the five senses: hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling.

In the Gospel of John there are only a few meager instances of enhancing description appealing to a physical sense:  seeing (4:35 white), (5:35 burning and shining), (20:5-7 purple), (21:7 naked [translations vary considerably]).  In an essay on colors in the Gospel of Mark (see below) I argued such meager description in Mark was likely due to the inadvertence of the author—it was just the way the author conceived what was being written that caused him to compose as he did; the author simply wrote what was in the mind's eye, so to speak.  I argued inadvertence because Mark had simply missed too many chances to enhance the reader's enjoyment with deliberate vivid language for the few color descriptions in Mark to be considered deliberate. With the exception of one other instance in John, inadvertence of the author may explain the few instances noted above.  In John 12:3, however, the author deliberately passes over into description enhancing the vividness of the narrative.  The entire passage is laced with vivid and sensual language: "Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment" (RSV).  In this instance the author of the gospel has evidentially utilized a technique of the fiction writer and appealed to the reader's physical senses of smell and touch, as well as to an economic sense by emphasizing the quality, high cost, and amount of the ointment.

The more gospel writers can be shown to use the techniques of narrative fiction, the longer will be the shadow of doubt cast over the gospels as historical narrative.

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

Hedrick, "Conceiving the Narrative: Colors in Achilles Tatius and the Gospel of Mark" Pp. 177-97 in R. Hock, B. Chance, J. Perkins, eds., Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars Press 1998).

A Chance Meeting that produced a Book

Here is something a little different. I have asked Rev. Dr. Jerry B. Cain, retired President of Judson University in Elgin Illinois, to provide a guest essay announcing the appearance of an important new book on the history of Christianity in Myanmar: by Angelene Naw, The History of the Karen People of Burma (ed. Jerry Cain; King of Prussia, PA: Judson Press, 2023).* What follows is Jerry’s review of the book for the curious reader. 

Charles W. Hedrick 

The History of the Karen People of Burma recounts the interactions of the three m’s that historians of the nineteenth century colonial period always have to negotiate—merchants, missionaries, militaries. The Karens (CAH-ren) were an animistic minority in Burma who took to the message of American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) while the majority Buddhist Burmese ignored or even persecuted him. Primed by a legend that a white man with a book would arrive on a ship from the west and show them their destiny, the Karens responded positively when Ann and Adoniram Judson disembarked from the Georgiana in the summer of 1813 with a Bible. Prophecy fulfilled!

This first generation of missionaries codified the language of the Karens (and the Burmese) setting up schools to teach them how to read and write their own language as well as English. When the British colonizers needed local bureaucrats, the Karens were skilled to fill these administrative positions often at the expense of the less-trained majority Burmese Buddhists. And the tensions grew as the British took more and more of Burma through three wars (1824-26, 1852-53, 1885) and animosity grew between the majority Burmese and the minority Karens.

Then came the twentieth century and the independence movements in India and southeast Asia. WWII stalled those independence efforts and in Burma the Karens sided with the British while the Burmese sided with the Japanese creating more hatred. Then the players changed, the war ended and independence was experienced, sort of. The story continues into the twenty-first century as both groups, Burmese and Karens, remember their sectarian and ethic struggles of the past 200 years.

Dr. Angelene Naw is uniquely qualified to describe the history of the Karen people, which is most often retold as oral history. She was born during the insurgencies of post-WWII Burma and lived her first six years in the jungles where her father was an officer for the Karen army in rebellion against the new government of Burma. Dr. Naw finished two degrees from the University of Rangoon before completing her PhD at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii. I am honored that she came to the US to teach Asian history and culture at Judson University in Elgin, Illinois, where I served as president.

The first Burmese I ever met was John Shandy, a former Buddhist monk, who was employed on the plant operations staff by Judson University. The arrival of Dr. Naw made number two from Myanmar. Soon another refugee couple came to town and the only place the Baptist church could find them a job was at the local casino. Under the leadership of Dr. Naw, who was a rock star in the diaspora Karen-American community, we gathered about 50 families and started the Karen Baptist Church of Western Chicago. (When I retired and moved to Kansas City, I affiliated with the Grace Baptist Church that hosts a Karen congregation every Sunday afternoon.)

My role in creating the book was to make Dr. Naw’s book readable for the western reading public. We had two audiences in mind for this publication, the student studying Southeast Asian history and the Karen diaspora spread around the world who will never return to Burma nor experience their desired independent nation, which they named Kawthoolei. Persecuted in Myanmar, the Karens have been emigrating to the US, Australia, Norway, Singapore, and other places from four major refugee camps in Thailand where they were settled by the United Nations. The History of the Karen People of Burma is now being translated into the Karen language to better reach these two audiences.

The History of the Karen People of Burma describes pre-colonial Burma before 1824 when the British military moved in and the impact of the American missionaries in establishing Karendom. The educational thirst of the Karen people was addressed by the missionaries creating tension between the minority Karens and the majority Burmese. The political and military intrigues of WWII between the Japanese, British, Burmese, and the Karens are described in detail because Dr. Naw and her family were intimately involved. The post-WWII political and military struggles by the Karen people take this story into the 21^st century.

Since the last military coup of February 1, 2021, the Karens have again been given the “dirty end of the stick,” as they would say. Public focus has been on the Muslim Rohingya on the western side of Myanmar but forced labor, targeted bombing, and discrimination against Christian Karens on the eastern side continues as it has for the past 200 years. Their plight has been captured in major motion pictures including a 2008 Rambo movie starring Sylvester Stallone. The story of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been told and retold with great appreciation, but there has been little political movement from the outside world. She has been sentenced to 33 years imprisonment since the 2-1-21 junta took over.

The History of the Karen People of Burma is important for anyone who wants to understand the recurring discord and dysfunction of cultural and political systems in modern Myanmar. It provides a 30,000-foot overview of the recycling military rule and futile attempts at democracy, and the recurring religious turmoil involving Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians from one who has lived it and continues to love her country with all its problems.

Jerry Cain

*For details on how to purchase the book see https://www.judsonpress.com/Products/J306/the-history-of-the-karen-people-of-burma.aspx

Romancing the Gospels

Reality, that is to say the way things are "out there all around us," is not directly apprehended by the mind.  Things "out there" are communicated to the mind indirectly through the senses (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling).  The mind processes what information the senses provide and deduces the situation "out there" from the received data. Thus, the reality that each individual perceives "out there" in society and nature is unique to the individual.

Narratives also reflect "narrative realism," which is the reality effect authors produce for the reader, whether they intend it or not.  At least five kinds of narrative realism have been used in Western literature; they are: fantasy realism, mythical realism, romantic realism, fictional realism, and historical realism.

Romantic realism describes the activities of superhuman beings in a supernatural world.  It portrays characters like us, only much better than we are in every way, in a space similar to ours, in a time of marvels.  [Hedrick, "Realism in Western Narrative," JBL 126.2 (2007): 352-53]

Romantic realism portrays a world in which the ordinary rules of nature are suspended and the extraordinary regularly occurs.  The early Christian gospels portray a narrative realism that is akin to the King Arthur legends and Harry Potter tales, and hence fit better into the category of romantic realism than into the category of historical realism.  Historical realism portrays what has actually happened in common space and time, as it can be reconstructed on the basis of empirical evidence.  The subject of history is real people and actual events portrayed in terms of natural cause and effect.

That the early Christian gospels correspond to a realism best described as romantic implies that their realism is due to how the evangelists perceived reality or chose to portray it, which is the case with any author.  The circumstances of Jesus' career, however, are not necessarily identical with the evangelists' perceptions of it.  For example, Mark, Matthew, and Luke portray Jesus performing exorcisms, but John does not perceive Jesus as an exorcist, and has no exorcisms.  It is true that historical narrative is whatever we say it is, but that statement is actually a caveat, a warning to historians that they should not be overly confident in their reconstruction of history, since it is only a reconstruction, whether others agree with it even it in part.

The early Christian gospels are not "history" in the sense of what was actually lived; they are only particular reconstructions of history.  History itself is the aggregate of the lived past; that is to say, history is comprised of all the billions of things that have ever happened in the past, significant and insignificant, public and private, natural and arranged, remembered and forgotten, personal and impersonal, seemly and unseemly, etc.  Narratives about the lived past (or selected aspects of it), on the other hand, are attempts at reconstructing the lived past—never in its aggregate totality but in what the historian considers the more significant moments of aspects of it.  Hence history is different from historical narrative.  The reality that was the moment as it was actually lived can never be recaptured, but its scattered bones (individual artifacts and memories) can be gathered, catalogued, and analyzed.  From these vestiges of the past the historian aims to revive a given "lived moment" by making connections between the bits of data and imagining how things might have played themselves out given the data at the historian's disposal.  Thus the historian attempts to codify the lived past into a reconstructed historical narrative.  But a reconstructed historical narrative is no more "history" than a corpse is a human being.

            Thinking of history as lived past and historical narrative as later reconstruction may actually free us from the idea that Jesus' "lived past" is what the evangelists said it was.  The widely differing reconstructions of Jesus by modern scholars graphically illustrate the shortcomings of the early Christian gospels as historical sources.  It is not simply a case of one is right and the others wrong; but that the sources themselves are simply flawed and cannot be trusted. [From the epilogue: Hedrick, The Wisdom of Jesus, Cascade Books, forthcoming].

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

Time-does it move forward or in Circles?

I know; it sounds like a trick question. But in the ancient world time was circular. The earth continually renewed itself through the regular recurring cycles of nature: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Such a cycle is basically “startime” (the sun is a star) produced by the rotation of the earth around the sun in our solar system giving us also, in addition to the recurring seasons of the year, the time of day: dawn, noon, sunset, night. These cycles are described as the theory of the eternal return. “The universe and all existence and energy [have] been recurring, and will continue to recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The theory is found in Indian [India] philosophy and ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics” in the Greek tradition.¹ In many ways, without modern precision, cyclical time replicates our own system of sidereal time—time as tracked by clocks, watches, and chronometers. In short, except for daylight savings time, your watch is keyed to the circle of the earth around the sun.

The Judeo-Christian view of time, on the other hand, is linear. Everything originated in God’s act of creation (Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2:4b-3:24) and moves forward toward the inevitable Day of the Lord at which moment “the heavens will pass away with a loud noise and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the works that are upon it will be burned up” (2 Pet 3:10 RSV)—and time will be no more. All events in world history, from creation to end, are believed included in this forward movement, which gives an illusion of progress in history.

Today we experience time from both of these perspectives. Reckoning time from a linear perspective and a cyclical perspective both prove useful for us in order to situate ourselves in time—e.g., hour of the day, season of the year, century provided by our linear calendar. We also experience time in other ways—as passing fast or slow, depending on how occupied we are in a given situation; as either individual and private or epochal and public—for example, one’s personal birthday celebration as opposed to the end of WWII. Life is believed to be a progressive series of such milestones or epochs—at least as we calculate time today.

The idea that time is linear is aided by a decision to distinguish the passage of time between BC (before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini—in the year of the Lord). This theological plot on time, which shifts time from circular to linear is credited to Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor in 525 AD; his system was not widely accepted until after 800AD, however. The BC/AD system of Exiguus was used to number the years in the Gregorian and Julian calendars. Our modern calendar derives from the Gregorian Calendar, which is the most widely used calendar in the world today.² Modern critical scholars change BC/AD designations to BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) in order to secularize the divisions. The segments remain essentially the same, however.

One comes to realize the core problem of time by addressing the following question: how are all personal and public epochs since the beginning of time linked so as to give us a single linear sequence of time with all events taking their place in a relentless progression toward a particular goal?³

Historians also think of the movement of history as a linear movement. History is defined as “a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events as steps in the sequence of human activities.”⁴ Historical narrative is an attempt to reconstruct the past, not in its aggregate totality, but in what the historian considers its more significant aspects. In my view, however, history itself is something other than a historical narrative.⁵ Nevertheless modern historians still see time and human history moving forward in a linear line. Yet here we are making circles around the sun locked into a solar system going no place in particular. How do you see it?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

³This argument is adapted from, and with apologies to, John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate. Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 133-136.

⁴Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (2002), s. v. “history.”

⁵Hedrick, “History, Historical Narrative, and Mark’s Gospel,” Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, Dec 22, 2013.

Religions and Religion

This essay is about something we all likely know, or at least should know. The term “religions” refers to various historical movements that captured the religious imagination of believers through human history. The term “religion” refers to these phenomena generically. Religions are only temporary manifestations. They come and go with time and competition. Religion as such, on the other hand, seems to be endemic to the human condition.

I do not know if this is because such a thing as a “God gene” exists,¹ or because human beings are simply incurably superstitious.² The God gene option explains that we are innately predisposed to religion in some form and cannot help ourselves. In other words, religion is a part of the human DNA. The second option explains that human beings cannot rid themselves of a predisposition to superstition. In other words, we seem to be naturally superstitious. Human history is awash with odd beliefs, supernatural beings, and gods that were invented to explain what were found to be unexplainable.³

            Here are two brief scenarios illustrating the rise and fall of two religions. The universal religion of Manichaeism was founded in the third century C.E. by the Iranian prophet Mani. The religion was universal in appeal and moved beyond the Mesopotamian region in which it was born. It was a successful competitor with the indigenous religions it encountered in the regions it entered before it passed from the pages of history. It survived for twelve hundred years and traces of the religion can still be seen datable to the 17^th century C.E.⁴

            Christianity, a religion that emerged in the first century C.E. successfully competed with the indigenous religions of the Roman Empire with the help of the Roman Emperor Constantine. The fortunes of orthodox Christian churches prospered under Constantine. By a decisive victory at the Mulvian Bridge north of Rome Constantine became Emperor of the Western Roman Empire in 317 and in 323 its sole ruler. His victory at the Mulvian Bridge he credited to a vision of a single cross and the words “Be victorious in this.” He sent his soldiers into battle with the sign of a cross painted on their shields. Although outnumbered they won the battle, and Rome and Africa passed under Constantine’s control. Constantine saw the hand of the orthodox Christian God in the victory and to ensure continued support by that God the church was everywhere granted freedom from persecution.  He restored church property that had been confiscated, gave privileges to the clergy, and undertook a building program in the church’s behalf. It appears that Christianity initially received preferred status by the Roman government in the competition between religions.

Christianity was a way for Constantine to unify his empire and in 325 Constantine called and presided over the first Ecumenical Council of orthodox churches at Nicea, where in a climate of theological controversy separating the churches, the Trinitarian Creed was pushed through.⁵ Constantine further directed that the orthodox Bishop Eusebius procure for the churches, which Constantine intended to build, 50 copies of the Holy Scriptures.⁶ This action forced Eusebius to decide what books he would include in the New Testament, an issue that was then still in flux, as he reports in his Ecclesiastical History.⁷

After 440 C.E. no pagan names are listed among the elite at Rome,⁸ and over time the indigenous Roman religions were driven into the countryside. Today, so far as I know, no one worships Zeus/Jupiter any longer, and the indigenous religions of the Roman empire have effectively disappeared from the historical scene.

The passing away of even one religion raises the question of the permanency of any religion—even Christianity. It causes one to ponder what is meant by the term “true religion.”⁹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene

²See, for example, Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade, 2019), 1-12, 20-22.

³Hedrick, “Forces at Work in the Garden of the Lord,” pp. 20-22 in Unmasking Biblical Faiths.

⁴Paul Mirecki, “Manichaeans and Manichaeism,” vol. 4:502-511 in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992).

⁵R. P. Davis, “Constantine I,” Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed.; 1999), 378-80.

⁶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Bibles_of_Constantine

⁷Ecclesiastical History, III, xxv.

⁸Charles Hedrick, Jr., History and Silence. Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (University of Texas; 2000), 57.

⁹https://www.quora.com/Is-Christianity-a-true-religion-1

Parsing the Resurrection of the Christ

Christian communities in the West celebrate Easter this year on Sunday March 27, but the Easter celebration in Orthodox Christianity will not happen until May 1, 2016.  Easter, as virtually everyone in this country knows, celebrates the revivifying of the dead Christ.  At some point between 26 and 36 of the Common Era Jesus was crucified near Jerusalem (Mark 15:22; John 19:17-20) under the administration of the Romans. There are no eyewitness accounts describing either crucifixion or resurrection that are contemporary with the event. The earliest mention of the resurrection is little more than a formulaic confession, which is thought to derive from the early Palestinian Christians, some 20 years or so before Paul; he quoted the brief confession in a letter (ca 50):

 

            I have delivered to you [the Corinthian Christians] as of first importance what I also received,

            That Christ died for our sins

                        according to the scriptures,

            and that he was buried,

            and that he was raised on the third day

                        according to the scriptures,

            and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve (1 Cor 15:3-5 RSV).

 

The confession is frustrating in its lack of detail.  It doesn't describe specifically what the disciples saw; did Christ appear bodily (compare, Matt 27:51-53); did they have a vision (Acts 9:10, 17), or a dream (Matt 1:20-21)?  Did they see a spirit (Luke 24:37) or a phantom (Mark 6:49)?  Perhaps they only saw his "angel" (Acts 12:15)?  The nature of the experience is conditioned by what they saw, or thought they saw.

 

            Paul himself had no personal knowledge of what had occurred earlier except for what he learned through the confessional report.  He himself claimed, however, to have had an experience similar to what is suggested by the Palestinian confession (1 Cor 15:8; Gal 1:15-16), but he does not describe this experience further (but compare another claim, 2 Cor 12:7-9).

 

            Paul's early analysis of the post-crucifixion "sighting" by the Palestinian followers of Christ finds it to be a spiritual experience, which specifically denies that the Christ was seen in some sort of bodily state (1 Cor 15:44, 50).  In short, the physical remains of the Christ had been transformed (1 Cor 15:20, 51-53), and he came forth a "life-giving spirit" (1 Cor 15:21-22, 45).

 

            Some twenty years or so after Paul, the gospel writer we call Mark in describing the origins of the gospel that his church preached (Mark 1:1) reports only that Jesus was raised (16:6); there are no reports of sightings. Only an empty tomb and the promise that he could be seen in Galilee (16:7) greeted the mourners coming to the tomb that first Easter morning; it was a terrifying experience (16:8).  Towards the end of the first century the resurrection state of the Christ has become something more substantial than a vision, dream, or bodiless spirit. In the romantic accounts of the later gospels he was described as being seen in a bodily state (Matt 28:9; Luke 24:36-43; John 20:24-29).  In the early 2nd century such statements suggesting a bodily state were seized upon to argue that "he was in the flesh even after the resurrection" (Ignatius, Smyrnaeans, 3:1-3).

 

Commentary:

 

Is the resurrection of the Christ an historical event?  A reported sighting of a dead person following his burial is not what we usually think of as an historical event—that is, as an event open to verification by a neutral third party.  The witnesses to the resurrection (Peter and the disciples, Paul, and the others he reported having seen him [1 Cor 15:6-8]) all shared faith in Jesus as the Christ, and, hence, are scarcely neutral third parties).  The historical event of Easter is that they claimed to have seen him. That they claimed to have seen him is open to historical verification. What they claimed to have seen is a part of a salvation or theological history (a history that traces out the claims of the perceived acts of God in human history).  It is not a common human experience that people are raised from the dead by the activity of God.  People that die remain dead.  Hence, it is only the claim that God has intervened in human history and performed a miracle by raising Jesus from the dead that is verifiable as historical event.  The resurrection itself is a part of a theological history.  What can be observed by anyone should not be confused with what can be seen only by a few.  In this case what the few saw they saw with the eye of faith (John 20:3-9); the many, however, see with the natural eye.

 

How do you see it?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

"Parsing": to sort into its component parts.

Roy W. Hoover, "Was Jesus' Resurrection an Historical Event? A Debate Statement with Commentary," The Fourth R 23.5 (September-October 2010): 5-12, 24.

Charles W. Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide. Studying Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 1-13.

Does John know the difference between History and Faith?

Does the flesh-and-blood author of the Gospel of John respect the difference between historical information and personal religious confession?  Or put another way: is the author aware when s/he shifts from historical description into a confession of faith?

 

            I am not proposing that we read John's mind.  The author of the gospel that readers know is a mental construct they develop in their own minds in response to reading the text.  I am asking if there are any literary features in the text, which suggest the flesh-and-blood author either was not aware of the crucial difference between historical information and confessional rhetoric, or that s/he did not regard the distinction as relevant.

 

            The answer, like everything in the history-of-Jesus research, depends on who you ask.  For example, the Jesus Seminar (JS) found that only one saying in John originated with Jesus (John 4:42).  With regard to the deeds of Jesus, the seminar only found a few features (in John 7:15; 18:12-13, 28; 19:1, 6, 18) that suggested a superficial knowledge of aspects of the historical career of Jesus.  That is a vastly different judgment from Craig S. Keener, for example, who argued that all four gospels are "historical biography" (The Gospel of John. A Commentary, Hendrickson, 2003, 33).

 

            From my perspective John's narrative frequently sacrifices history in the interest of confessional rhetoric.  For example, according to JS the cleansing of the temple in Mark 11:15-19 reflects, in part, aspects of an actual historical incident, but the JS found that the account of the same incident in John 2:13-22 was not grounded in history—in other words in John's narrative, theology trumps history.  Scholars generally think, however, that the cleansing of the temple was a historical event and Mark reported aspects of it in a more or less historical way.  Yet even the barest historical outlines of the incident are lost in John's religious rhetoric—at least according to the JS.

 

            Apparently John is more interested in right faith than in describing the career of Jesus from a historical perspective.  For example, John 1:1-18 is clearly a confessional statement.  The only bit of historical data in the section is the mention of John [the baptizer], the Judean prophet, whom the author of John co-opts as a Christian witness (1:6-8, 15), as also was the case in Matt 11:12-15, where he is not part of the Israelite old order, but part of the new (compare the parallel in Luke 16:16, where he is part of the old order).  John chapter one uses confessional language rather heavily (1:9-8, 15, 19, 20, 29, 32 34).

 

            The author interrupts the story about Jesus with confessional rhetoric in spite of the fact that it threatens the integrity of the narrative.  For example, in John 3:11 in the middle of the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus the author suddenly breaks into confessional rhetoric:  John 3:11 begins as a part of Jesus' comment to Nicodemus, but then shifts into an accusation against those who do not "receive our witness."

 

Truly, truly I say to you [singular; to Nicodemus] that we [the evangelist and his community] speak of what we know and you [plural; to his opponents] do not receive our witness (John 3:11).

 

In John 3:12 the evangelist assumes the persona of speaker to continue the criticism of his opponents: "If I (the evangelist) have told you (plural) earthly things, and you (plural) do not believe, how will you (plural) believe if I tell you (plural) heavenly things?"  Immediately following, John 3:13-21 (speaking of Jesus in third person) is spoken by the evangelist reciting the confession of the community.  At this point the engagement of Jesus and Nicodemus (3:1-10) has been completely forgotten.

 

            Once again in John 3:31-36 the evangelist shifts into confession leaving behind John's answer to his disciples about Jesus baptizing beyond the Jordan (John 3:25-30).  In these two incidents the evangelist overrides description with confession.

 

            Another similar incident is John 4:22-24.  The evangelist intersperses a community confession (4:22-24) between two dangling ends of the discussion between Jesus and the Samaritan woman (i.e., 4:21/25).  As s/he does at John 7:22 where the evangelist intrudes into a statement by Jesus in order to correct what Jesus said (this latter phenomenon is part of a much larger problem in the Gospel of John).

 

            Judging from these few incidents it appears that the flesh-and-blood author of John was more interested in confessional rhetoric than s/he was in historical description.

 

How does it seem to you?

 

Charles W, Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

Pondering Christianity's Legacy

A Millenium, hence, when the final hymn has been sung, and the last parish priest has laid by his chasuble for a final time at the close of Mass; when the only functioning baptistry is filled with dust, and the vibrant edifices of Christian worship are crumbling mausoleums housing the bodies of the faithful awaiting resurrection day, secular historians will ponder the Christian faiths of the twenty-fifth century much as historians today ponder the Greco-Roman religions of some two Millenia ago.

            I personally am unaware of any residual influence those religions of Greece and Rome play in contemporary religious life. No one today, so far as I know, calls in prayer the names of the eternal Gods of the Greco-Roman world. What remains of their crumbling temples are stark testimonies to the once great influence of their religions. What then served as their religious literature is today relegated to ancient history classes, much as might be the case with the Bible in a Millenium or so. The corridors of history are cluttered with the remains of “true” religions. (Everyone’s religion is the true religion.) This observation raises the issue of the legacy of Christianity; what will today’s Christian faiths have bequeathed to the generations after its demise and final gasp as a vital force in human life?

            Legacies are only a matter of opinion, but there is one feature sparked by the Judeo-Christian faiths that has elbowed its way into contemporary human culture as perhaps a lasting residue of Biblical, Jewish, and Christian faiths. It is the caring concern for the most vulnerable in society. Until recently, such a humane concern was even inculcated into some USA governmental programs (USAID, for example, which Mr. Trump has effectively all but eliminated) but is found primarily in innumerable private benevolent programs for the poor and disfranchised of society.

            In Hebrew Bible God was the protector of the most vulnerable in Israelite society, widows, orphans/fatherless, strangers/sojourners, and the poor.¹ For example:

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. (Exod 22:21-22 RSV)

You shall not strip your vineyards bare; neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Lev 19:10 RSV)

Christian faiths used the old covenant texts as Holy Scripture and to them added several postscripts in the form of what they called new covenant texts: gospels, letters/epistles, and an apocalypse. Within these postscript epistles/letters and gospels there is evidence that the gatherings of the earliest Christ followers continued the Israelite tradition of caring for the most vulnerable.

Jesus said, “Congratulations, you poor! God’s domain belongs to you. Congratulations, you hungry! You will have a feast. (Luke 6:20–21 SV)

In a parable: “Quick! Go out in the streets and alleys of the town, and usher in the poor, and crippled, the blind, and the lame.” (Luke 14:21 SV)

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (Jas 1:27 RSV)

First Timothy 5:9–16 reflects the existence in the second century of an organized ministry to pious church widows and Paul coordinated a collection of money to support the poor saints in Jerusalem (1 Cor 16:1–4; Rom 15:25–29; 2 Cor 8–9; Gal 2:10; Jas 2:16–17).

            Many of the references about care for the disadvantaged in the New Testament relate to those in the household of faith but at several points the concern seems to shade over into care for anyone in need (for example, Rom 12:19–20; 1 Cor 13:8–10; Gal 6:10). The clearest example of humane care for the nobodies of the world, however, is found is a story Jesus told about an unknown man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man is mugged and left beside the road half dead. Two other men, likely officials of the Judean temple at Jerusalem, pass by him with a furtive glance while a third man, a Samaritan (despised by Judeans) was moved to act compassionately. He tended the wounds of the half-dead man, and took him to an inn, where he cared for him that evening. The next day he paid the innkeeper what amounted to two day’s pay and told him “Take care of him and whatever more you spend I will repay you when I come back” (Luke 10:29b–35). The Samaritan’s abundant benevolence is simply astonishing!² The story is a product of the history of Judaism, but it has been garnered from history’s dustbins by early Jesus followers, who elevated its putative creator to divine status. It represents (in my view) the best example of disinterested benevolence that Christianity has to offer. What in your view will be the most positive legacy of Judeo-Christianity?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹M. G. Vanzant, “Orphan,” NIDB, 4.343; B. B. Thurston, “Widow,” NIDB, 5.846–47.

²The story recalls an aphorism in the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus: “Blessed are those who go hungry to fill the starving belly of another.” Gospel of Thomas 69b (my translation).

Did Jesus believe in the Christian Hell?

Some months while waiting in the gym for Herself to finish exercising, a stranger sat down across from me and asked if I was I. I confessed that I was; he asked, "Do you believe in Hell?" I allowed that I did not.¹ The brief discussion that followed was awkward. At the end he thanked me for forthrightly answering his questions, and left. I have seen him around the gym from time to time and our exchanges were superficial but always polite. Again a few days ago in the locker room he renewed the discussion: "I believe you told me you did not believe in Hell," he said. "What is your evidence?" I replied that it was by observation; I found no evidence for it. He said "I thought so." I asked, what is your evidence that Hell exists? He replied: "the Son of God"—I took his answer to mean that according to the Son of God (Jesus) in the Bible, there is such a place, and hence I replied "the Bible is a human book. We can talk about it sometime, but it will take longer than three minutes." "Have a nice swim," he said, and we parted—me to the pool and him to the bike.

 

            I previously published a blog entitled "Did Jesus believe in the Christian Heaven?"² but neglected to address Jesus' beliefs about the Christian Hell. That impossible-to-answer question runs headlong into the classic contradictions between Jesus as represented in the synoptic gospels and Jesus as represented in the Gospel of John.³ There is no mention of Hell (hades) or Gehenna (geenna) in the Gospel of John, although the synoptic Jesus (Q, Matthew, and Luke) is represented as believing in Hell.⁴ Of course we don't know what was in his head (nobody can read minds). We only know that statements about Hell are attributed to Jesus in the synoptic texts.

 

            For me the most interesting of the sayings on Gehenna is Luke 16:23, which appears in the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-26). The Jesus Seminar voted that this story did not originate with Jesus. They further voted that it had been augmented by an early Christian reference to the resurrection of Jesus (Luke 16:27-31).⁵ If someone decided that the story did come from Jesus, however, they would still be confronted by the fact that the Gospel of John mentions neither Hades nor Gehenna, and on this question one is forced to choose between John and the synoptic.

 

            There is no future fiery place of punishment recorded in John's gospel! There are hints that there will be a judgment of some kind (3:16-19; 5:24-29; 9:30), but such judgment is not overtly described. In fact judging from these "hints," judgment may not even be eschatological but rather existential. The most interesting "hint" is the description of Judas as "the son of perdition" (17:12; compare 2 Thess 2:3; Acts 8:20; 2 Pet 3:16; Phil 3:19; Isa 57:4 LXX), but the nature of the "destruction" (ἀπώλεια, apōleia) is unclear.

 

            One must remember, however, that John is not writing history but rather writing theology, and may not even know the difference between these two different writing styles,⁶ which means John is completely unreliable as a historical source. But that must not be construed as a vote for Mark's representation of Jesus as the "historical" default—for Mark's gospel is also seriously flawed as historical report.⁷ Also It must always be remembered that "the son of God" is not an actual historical figure, but rather a construct of early Christian faith based on the largely unknown historical figure, Jesus of Judea.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹See Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, "Hell does not Exist," August 29, 2015.

²Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, May 10, 2017.

³See Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, "The Gospel of John, a Revisionist Gospel?" Dec 6, 2012.

⁴Hades (Q = Luke 10:15 = Matthew 11:23; Matthew 16:18; Luke 16:23); Gehenna (Q = Luke 12:5 = Matt 10:28; Matthew 5:22, 29, 23:15; Mark 9:43 = Matt5:30, Mark 9:47 = Matt 18:19).

⁵Funk and Hoover, Five Gospels, 361-62.

⁶See Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, "Does John Know the Difference between History and Faith?" (September 21, 2015).

⁷See Wry Thoughts about Religion Blog, "History, Historical Narrative and Mark's Gospel" (December 22, 2013); and "The Problem of History in Mark" (October 1, 2016).

Who to Believe? Dissenting Voices in a Text

This essay is not about history—that is, it is not about what actually happened in the past.  It is an essay on how we create the past.  Every text contains the seeds of its own destruction; that is to say, every text contains points at which the integrity of the text breaks down and undermines itself.  In short, these points render the text ambiguous, leaving a perplexed reader to ask, what's going on here?

            Here are several examples; some are well known and others not so well known.  John 4:2 is perhaps the best known since the statements are positioned one within the other.  In John 4:1 the narrator informs the reader that it was common knowledge that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptizer.  In 4:2 a dissenting voice emerges dividing the sentence that begins in 4:1 (a subordinate clause) and concludes in 4:3 (the main clause).  Clearly the dissenting voice disagrees with the narrator.  The dissenter asserts that Jesus himself did not personally perform any baptisms, but the narrator equally assertively insists that he did perform baptisms, and that it was common knowledge that he did.  Note that translators of the text recognize the disagreement, and place John 4:2 in parentheses.  Who should we believe—the primary narrator of John or the dissenting voice that corrects the narrator?

            By my count there are at least 121 of these "clarifications" in the text of John.  Another example is found in the narrative of the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:5-14).  The reader is told that the healings Jesus performed (the narrator calls them "signs") created a sensation, and as a result a great crowd followed him (John 6:2), which the reader later discovers numbered five thousand (John 6:10).  Jesus takes 5 barley loaves and two fish and feeds this huge crowd and has five baskets of fragments left over from the barley loaves (John 6:13).  The narrator's positive climax to the feeding story is that "when the people saw the sign," they confessed Jesus as "the prophet who is to come into the world" (John 6:14).  Imagine the reader's surprise to learn a little later that the Jesus character in the narrative disagrees with the narrator's judgment: "Jesus answered them…you seek me not because you saw signs, but ate your fill of the loaves" (John 6:26).  Should we believe the narrator or the Jesus character?  Was the crowd persuaded by the sign they had witnessed or because their bellies were full (John 6:12)?

            In John 7:22 again a dissenting voice interrupts a compound sentence by the Jesus character in the narrative:  Jesus asserts to his interlocutors in the temple (the Judahites), "Moses gave you circumcision, and you circumcise a person on the Sabbath."  Translators put the dissenting statement that follows in parentheses to show that it is not part of what Jesus said to the Judahites, but rather is an aside directly addressing the reader.  The dissenting voice corrects the assertion of Jesus by saying, "not that it is from Moses but from the fathers."  Those who prepared the critical Greek text found the dissenting voice so disruptive that they set the dissenting statement off with dashes, as they also did in John 4:2.  Who should a reader of John think has provided the correct response: the Jesus character or the dissenting voice?

            The phenomenon is not limited to the Gospel of John; another interesting disagreement is found in Mark 5:22-24, 35-43.  A synagogue ruler (Jairus) implores Jesus to come heal his twelve year old daughter, who at that moment was at the point of death (5:23).   Jesus goes with him (5:24), but he is delayed by another healing (5:25-34).  At that moment Jairus received word that his daughter in the meanwhile had died (5:35), but Jesus ignored the report urging the synagogue ruler to "only believe" (5:36).  Upon arriving at the home of Jairus loud lamentations are in progress because of the child's death (5:38).  Before he sees the child, Jesus asserts to the mourners that "the child is not dead but sleeping" (5:39), and the mourners laughed at him (5:40).  When they went into the building Jesus took the child by the hand and said "arise" and immediately the girl got up (5:41-42).  Was the Jesus character correct and the girl only sleeping, or were the mourners correct and the girl was dead?  In short the problem is this: is the story about the resuscitation of a dead child (i.e., the mourners were right), or is the story about the healing of a sick child (i.e., the Jesus character was right)?

            The raw data of history are often contradictory forcing historians to choose between the more probable and the less probable.  What eventually becomes history in these judgmental situations is what a preponderance of historians decides to call history.  In the segment from Mark above the historical issue is: what is the nature of the story, a healing narrative or a story about the raising of a dead girl.  In the Gospel of John the issue is which voice is the final authority for reading John: that of the primary narrator or that of the dissenter.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

Charles W. Hedrick, "Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story" in Goehring, Hedrick, Sanders, and Betz, eds., Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990), 74-93.

 

Hedrick, "Miracle Stories as Literary Compositions: The Case of Jairus's Daughter," Perspectives in Religious Studies 20.3 (Fall 1993), 217-33.