So, you happen to pick up a book entitled Violence, Scripture, and Textual Practices in Early Judaism and Christianity (Brill, 2009), either for your research or just out of curiosity. The book is a collection of essays on themes of violence, rhetoric, and identity formation in ancient Judaism and Christianity.

When you flip to the index, what are the key words that you would look for? Your answers will help me, the indexer!

If you’d like to see a list of chapters, take a look at the earlier version for Brill’s Biblical Interpretation journal.

My job this summer–aside from caring for my baby boy and doing research–is to work as a Research Assistant for Ra’anan Boustan by indexing a book that he is co-editing. The book is a collection of papers given at a conference that Boustan helped to organize at the University of Minnesota: “Sanctified Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Religions: Discourse, Ritual, Community.” Selected papers from that conference were then published in an edition of Brill’s Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches (17:1-2 [2009]). Now, Brill is republishing that edition as a paperback book, entitled Violence, Scripture, and Textual Practices in Early Judaism and Christianity and edited by Ra’anan Boustan, Alex P. Jassen, Calvin J. Roetzel. It will be out before SBL this fall.

Guess who’s working the index. Yours truly! I know what you’re thinking: “Indexing, huh? Isn’t that boring and tedious?” So, maybe there is a modicum of tedium in the job. But look at it this way: I get to decide what the most important concepts in this book are. I can’t just run an indexing program and be done with it. I need to be intimately familiar with the contents–intellectually, that is; not that I go perform acts of sanctified violence to understand them better.

Indexing this book in particular is a good project for me as an Anabaptist. Anabaptists, of course, are not fond of violence but they do spend lots of time thinking about it. Many of the essays in this book take a different approach than Anabaptist biblical scholars might.

I love to read a about a diversity of views, as it helps me sharpen my own thoughts on any given matter, but I have to admit my hesitation about a few of these essays. I am especially conflicted about the contributions of Kimberly Stratton, Jennifer Glancy, and Shelly Matthews.  To me, it feels as if they are “blaming” the texts of the New Testament for future use of those texts in justifying violence. They thus speak of the violent “ramifications” of the texts.

Stratton calls Jewish and Christian eschatological visions “colonial mimicry”: they internalize the language of domination that the texts were attempting to critique. Glancy claims that John uses a violent act as a “sign.” She says that Jesus’ use of a whip to drive out his fellow Jews from the temple is a “moment of violent self-revelation.” This Johannine “violence as sign” then “contributes a central building-block to the history of religious violence.” Matthews argues that the dying forgiveness prayers of Jesus and Stephen were intended to demonstrate the “heroic clemency of the speaker,” rather than actually forgive their enemies. She finds affinities with Roman discourse on clemency, “in which imperial domination is figured as beneficence toward the conquered.” [Quotes taken from the Introduction]

My issue with this sort of textual critique is context, context, context. It helps to remember that the Jesus movement was initially a minority within a minority in an Empire not always kind to minorities. The first-century followers of Jesus had not conquered anyone. Jesus did not cause any physical harm to any persons in his temple action. And the forgiveness prayers were placed on the lips of men who were being executed. That said, I think the points of Stratton and Matthews, in particular, should be weighed heavily. It makes sense to me that the authors of these texts used the rhetoric that was available to them–to enhance the meaning of their own perspectives. And can we not find some sort of violence (loosely defined) or domination in almost any sort of rhetoric? The implications–or “ramifications”–of that rhetoric usage deserves close attention.

Okay, now how shall I place “rhetoric” in the index? Hmm… back to the tedious part.