A Biblical Studies Scholar from 1955 Wakes Up…
. . . after sleeping through the last half century. You have to update him (probably a “him”) on the developments in scholarship regarding apocalypticism. What do you say? That was the mental exercise we played in Boustan’s seminar yesterday.
It was interesting to try to pin down what might be this gentleman’s perspective. We need to know what he knows before we update him. So, he’s probably working under the assumption that apocalypticism is a popular or populist movement driven by an ideology formed in crisis or persecution (often compared with other “millenarian” movements). This understanding would be set up against the established–perhaps “institutionalized”–tradition.
This understanding goes back to Max Weber’s dichotomy between the priest and the prophet. The priest is embedded within the institutionalized structures and their authority is generated by their status within those structures. The prophet is imagined to be a charismatic leader, whose authority is derived simply from the leader’s own charisma. Weber has preference for charismatic leaders as the force for change in world history. He believes the early charisma is always institutionalized if the movement continues. All that to say there is an underlying bias here: prophet = good and priest = bad.
Boustan asked if this hypothetical person would “like” apocalyptic writings. There was some disagreement in the seminar about this. I thought that the fictional 50′s scholar would not like apocalyptic writings because, in general, I believe the bias of embarrassment by apocalyptic thought (See Weiss, Schweitzer, and later, Koch) would still be more likely than a Marxist Bible scholar.
Even though the apocalyptic writings would have been conceived in the tradition of prophecy (and prophecy is a good thing viz-a-viz Weber), apocalyptic would have been a kind of corruption of that tradition.
Since the 70′s, in addition to the definitional issues, we would have to update this fictional scholar on the developments in the relation between Wisdom and Apocalypticism. That is, more and more, scholars see apocalyptic literature as learned and scribal. Jonathan Z. Smith called apocalyptic literature “Wisdom without a royal patron.” And that theme is what we’ll be talking about this quarter in our seminar.
Hey, I know, let's blame it on the Jews…
Yesterday a friend of mine, who had just come back from an interfaith retreat and had picked up a cold, said, “The Jews made me sick.” Well, she was sitting in between two Jews, both with bad colds, at a dinner during the retreat and she happened to pick up what they had. But, given all the reading that I’ve been doing about the history of New Testament scholarship, it was almost a parody of some of the sadder moments in NT research. NT scholars throughout history have so often (and so easily) “blamed” the Jews for some theological problem they had.
For example, I have read in a few sources about how William Whiston (1667-1752), famous as the translator of Josephus’s works, demonstrated this tendency in dealing with the problem of Old Testament prophecy fulfillment in the NT. One of the major concerns for the early post-Reformation researchers in biblical studies was the fulfillment of prophecy. Alongside miracles, for them it was an indicator of the Bible’s divine origin. By Whiston’s time, however, much of the research on the “literal” sense of the putative “prophecies” in the Hebrew Bible was showing that these seemed to be misused by the authors of the New Testament. Read in their proper and “literal” or “plain sense” context, these were not prophecies at all, but mostly referred to historical events from their own historical situation.
Whiston’s solution? Blame it on the Jews! The early Christians used the original Hebrew texts appropriately, according to Whiston, attentive to their “literal” meaning. But then Jews, in reaction to Christian interpretations, went back and changed their own sacred Scriptures so that the literal meaning would not support the Christian claims of prophecy fulfillment.
I don’t doubt that there was back and forth between Jews and Christians and there was, at some point, some sort of “parting of the ways” between the two. I don’t doubt that such a parting led to the tweaking of some teachings on both sides of the equation (although, I’d imagine it was quite heavier on the Christian and anti-Judaism side of things). But to suggest that Jews would actually corrupt their own Scriptures to spite Christian interpretations, and to make this suggestion just so that Christians can hold onto a threatened belief in prophecy fulfillment . . . That’s just ridiculous.
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Elsewhere . . .- Blog titles beginning with "A" to "Z" on your reader Mark Goodacre
- Of making many books there is no end Chris Brady
- Free Online: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon S and C
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? II agathos
- Steven J. Friesen and the Identity of Satan’s Throne in Pergamum alan
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? agathos
- Bloomsbury buys Continuum Mark Goodacre
- Imperial America Peter J. Leithart
- C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament d. miller
- Responding to Kostenberger (with comparisons to Marshall) Jeremiah
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