Wayfarers, Pars Prima

Theses Towards the Politics of Resurrection: Fontes

This is a series of posts seeking to follow the prompt set forth by David Bentley Hart in his recent lecture posted to his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. I have not linked every single scriptural text for the sake of length.

1. The heart of the politics of resurrection is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Yeshua or Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet proclaiming the imminent irruption of the Kingdom of God in first-century Judea. For Jesus, the Kingdom encoded three closely connected sets of expectations in Jewish literature: the restoration of Israel as a nation; a final reckoning and/or reconciliation with the gentiles; and a renovation of the entire cosmos. After his baptism by John the Baptist, who had taken up this proclamation before him (Matt 3:2), his visionary experience of being anointed with God’s spirit and adoption or regeneration as God’s son (Mk 1:11; Matt 3:13-17; Lk 3:21-22), Jesus took up the proclamation (Grk: kerygma) of this message in the synagogues of Galilee and Judea (Mk 1:15; Matt 4:17). Combined with his proclamation was a halakha, a “path” or “going” in the praxis of the Torah, the ancestral Jewish Law which the historical Jesus kept and commanded (Matt 5:17-20). Jesus’s halakha is in many ways continuous with his immediate Jewish forbears and contemporaries, such that much of his fundamental teaching was neither totally unique to him nor marked a departure from Judaism. Instead, Jesus read the Torah in light of the eschaton he believed was upon him and his audiences: because the end was nigh, God called Israel to return to the life of Adam and Eve before the Fall, without lust, without anger, and without the hoarding of goods. The purpose of proclaiming the Kingdom and teaching its Torah in the synagogues was because the synagogue functioned in Ancient Judaism as the town hall, the meetinghouse, the institutional organ of community decision-making for Jewish villages, towns, cities, and special interest groups (like the Essenes). Therefore, Jesus’s hope was that his people would adopt his “political program” in the synagogue and begin practicing the Torah according to his interpretive authority.

2. The Kingdom of God requires a collectivist society in which the common good of each individual member is prioritized, goods are communally shared, and bonds of affection reconcile personal enmity, forgive debts, and ensure a compassionate commonwealth. The essence of Jesus’s proclamation and teachings was passed down orally in the early communities and textually in the form of documents both lost (the hypothetical Q Document, for example) and retained, particularly the Synoptic Gospel tradition beginning with Mark and expanded in Matthew and Luke and in the Gospel tradition of John. The Synoptics in particular prioritize Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom and his halakhic reading of the Torah, and record the remembered elements of Jesus’s program in the Sermons on the Plain (Lk 6) and Mount (Matt 5-7), respectively. The substance of these teachings originally concerned the quotidian conditions of Jesus’s contemporaries living in Roman-ruled Judea in the early first century CE, though the form in which we have them now reflects their circulation and reception in early communities of Jesus-followers in the Greco-Roman world several decades later. Jesus’s teachings favored the poor (Lk 6:20; Matt 5:3), the hungry (Lk 6:21; Matt 5:6), and the sorrowful (Lk 6:21; Matt 5:4), while castigating the wealthy, the full, the satisfied, and the respected (Lk 6:24-26). Jesus called for non-retaliatory reconciliation and even “affection” (Grk: agape) for personal enemies (Lk 6:27-36; Matt 5:21-26, 38-48). Jesus called for strict resistance against lustful desire (epithumia) leading to adultery (5:27-30) and no-fault divorce (5:31-32; 19:1-12; cf. Mk 10:1-12; Lk 16:18), putting him in an extreme camp of Early Jewish marital law, similar to that of the Essenes at Qumran (11QSTemple 57.17-19; CD 4.12-5.14; cf. m. Ned. 11.12 and b. Sanh. 22a). Jesus’s explicit reasoning found elsewhere in the Gospels for his strict doctrine of marriage is that in the coming Kingdom, God’s people will be like the angels, and therefore live celibate because immortal (Mk 12:25; Matt 22:30; Lk 20:36). This is also the logic of Jesus’s advice to the disciples when questioned on divorce by the Pharisees that celibacy is ultimately better than marriage, which opinion Paul also takes (1 Cor 7). But as the family was for the ancient world the principal institution of social cohesion and status, through which all other relationships were determined, Jesus’s sexual ethics also expressed in his context a radical undermining of the strictures of the social order in his day. Jesus called for the communal sharing of goods (Matt 6:1-4, 19-21, 24), for the rich to divest themselves of their wealth (19:16-29), and several of the miracles attributed to Jesus record his mass distribution of food to the Judean populace (e.g., Mk 6:30-44; Matt 14:13-21; Lk 9:10-17; Jn 6:1-14; see below, §3). In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus announces the launch of his prophetic career by appeal to the Jubilee (Lk 4:18-19; cf. Lev 25; b. Sanh. 102a), a prescribed year of debt remission in the Torah. Jesus also instructs his followers to pray for debt remission of sin on the grounds of forgiveness of debts in life (Lk 11:4; Matt 6:12), and tells parables that praise those who reduce or forgive the debts of others and deride those who do not (Lk 16:1-9; Matt 18:21-35). Reading these as part of a formal program Jesus expected local synagogues to implement, the impression is that Jesus advocated an early form of communism or economic collectivism, which Jesus made the metric of final judgment in the Kingdom (Matt 25:31-46).

3. The announcement of the Kingdom comes with an outpouring of divine life-giving power. The historical Jesus was remembered as a charismatic exorcist, healer, and thaumaturge: stories of his miracles were remembered, transmitted, borrowed, and invented in the Gospel literature about his life. Bracketing for a moment the question of whether Jesus really performed miracles, it is historically verifiable that minimally people thought he did, cognitively registered him in models of healers, prophets, holy men, and magicians in the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, and the purpose of this activity as presented in the Gospels was both to demonstrate the veracity of the message about the Kingdom and the authority of Jesus’s halakha as well as to demonstrate their principles. Many of Jesus’s remembered healings in the early community operate on the principle of a mobile station of ritual purification: Jesus comes like an extension of the divine power resident in the Temple to people whose physical conditions caused them suffering and separation from the divine presence on earth. Jesus, endowed with God’s spirit at his baptism, comes to restore Israel physically, psychologically, and spiritually, in early fulfillment of the promise of the Kingdom that the twelve tribes of Israel will be regathered in the forthcoming reign of the Son of Man (Matt 19:28). He comes to enable and demonstrate the collective form of life sketched in his halakha, as in the miracles of feeding, as well as to prove the overall truthfulness and justifiability of his teachings and activity, as in the raising of the paralytic (Mk 2:1-12). Jesus is the herald of the Kingdom of God, who comes divinely empowered not only to announce the Kingdom but also to provide its early benefactions.

4. The Kingdom of God supersedes, overwhelms, and opposes the ruling powers of the world, divine and human. The Synoptic Gospels present Jesus in conflict with the demonic realm that recognizes and fears his power as an exorcist and holy one of God empowered by God’s spirit. The Synoptic Jesus also declares that in the eschatological future, the Son of Man will come with the clouds of heaven and the divine, cosmic powers of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, which all ancient people assumed were divine beings, would be humbled before him, as would be the nations (Mk 13; Matt 24; Lk 21). The earlier literature of the Jesus Movement, the seven undisputed letters of the apostle Paul, depict Jesus’s advent in the world as a key moment in apocalyptic war between the forces of the supreme deity and the minor god who rules the present kosmos, which will conclude with an eschatological war when Jesus later returns. The Deutero-Pauline tradition represented in 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians represents this apocalyptic warfare as already concluded at the ultimate level: Jesus has already resubordinated the errant divine powers of the world in heaven, to where he has ascended and where he currently sits enthroned, even if Jesus’s followers continue to war with such powers in the heavenly realms from below. John further immanentizes the eschatological invasion motif to the career of Jesus from his baptism to the events of his suffering, death, and resurrection, through which the kosmos is judged and the “ruler of this kosmos is cast out” (Jn 12:31).

5. The realization of the Kingdom of God is the special prerogative of the Son of Man in Jesus’s proclamation. Jesus speaks about the “Son of Man” on numerous occasions in the canonical Gospels and Acts (Matt 8:20; 9:6; 10:23; 11:19; 12:8, 32, 40; 13:37, 41; 16:13, 27-28; 17:9, 12, 22; 19:28; 20:18, 28; 24:27, 29-30, 37, 39, 44; 25:31; 26:2, 24, 45, 64; Mk 2:10, 28; 8:31, 38; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33, 45; 13:26; 14:21, 41, 62; Lk 5:24; 6:5, 22; 7:34; 9:22, 26, 44, 58; 11:30; 12:8, 10, 40; 17:22, 26, 30; 18:8, 31; 19:10; 21:27, 36; 22:22, 48, 69; 24:7; Jn 1:51; 3:13-14; 5:27; 6:27, 53, 62; 8:28; 9:35; 12:33-34; 13:31; Acts 7:56). The phrase also appears in the Apocalypse of John on two occasions (Rev 1:13; 14:14). Paul, the earliest writer of the Jesus Movement, never uses it, but he clearly references it in the eschatological scenario he depicts in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 and probably also the scenario depicted in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28. In all of these cases, there are two clear primary antecedent texts: the vision of Daniel 7:9-14, and the Parables of Enoch (1 En 37-71); and in turn, the Daniel text is drawing on an influential, popular mythic image from the Baal Cycle at Ugarit. In the Baal Cycle, the god Baal ascends on clouds after his theomachy with the Sea (Yamm) and the Sea’s children (including the sea dragon Litan) to El, the “Ancient of Days” or “Father of Time,” from whom he receives universal kingship over the gods after he establishes his palace on Mt. Zaphon. With some tweaks, the same basic image recurs in Daniel: a young, junior deity, the “one like a son of man,” riding on the clouds to the Ancient of Days, receives an eternal and universal kingdom over the world. As Parables of Enoch, the Daniel Apocryphon from Qumran, the text of 4 Ezra 13:3-52, and a variety of rabbinic texts attest (b. Sanh. 96b-98b; Num. Rab. 13.14; Tanh. 6.20.1), many Jews before and after Jesus read the Son of Man character from Daniel as a messianic individual, sometimes taking on the prerogatives assigned by earlier texts of the Hebrew Bible to the Davidic kings, the high priests, and/or major prophets. In Parables, the Son of Man is also conflated with Divine Wisdom and said to be preexistent; at the end of that apocalypse, it is also revealed that the transformed, deified Enoch is the Son of Man who has existed before the ages, suggesting that the character was understood by some Jews to exist as a heavenly/earthly double (a similar dynamic is visible in the Self-Glorification Hymn from Qumran). From the perspective of the New Testament literature, it is clear that Jesus is identified with the Son of Man of Daniel and Parables; assuming that this literature reflects Jesus’s own eschatology (as implied by Paul’s statement in 1 Thess 4 that he has this scenario as a “word of the Lord,” Pauline shorthand for tradition from Jesus via the earlier apostles), it is not indisputably clear that the historical Jesus would have identified himself as the Son of Man, but it also borders on the implausible that Jesus would have thought the Son of Man a different individual from himself. In this case, the historical Jesus likely possessed messianic beliefs about himself, though he did not prioritize these in his public preaching and he does not seem to intentionally invoke Davidic models of messianism in application to himself, though they are frequently applied to him, including by Paul, the Evangelists, and John of Patmos. It is this growing expectation of Jesus’s messianic role among his followers and the populace of Judea that ultimately contributed to his death.

6. Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God is unsuccessful from the worldly perspective on the grounds of his crucifixion; it is vindicated but unfulfilled from the perspective of his resurrection; it is fulfilled but unmanifest from the perspective of the ascension; it is only fulfilled and manifest from the perspective of the parousia. From a neutral, third-party perspective, the betrayal, arrest, condemnation, suffering, crucifixion, and murder of Jesus represents at a minimum the delay of his proclamation of the Kingdom and his solidarity with a lineage of Jewish martyrs before and after him and at maximum the complete failure of that hope. When Pontius Pilate ordered the words of the titulus crucis nailed above the head of the crucified Jesus, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” the charge represents both the Roman justification for killing Jesus (the threat of Jesus as a seditionist) as well as the Roman mockery of the Jewish hope for independence from Roman provincialism and rule by prefecture. It was the experience of Jesus’s resurrection by his earliest followers that kept his proclamation of the Kingdom alive for his Movement, which became the grounds of continued belief in Jesus’s prophetic authority, his messianic candidacy or status, his divine sonship, and his lordship. In Paul, where there is no separate ascension of Jesus from the event of his resurrection, Jesus’s resurrection begins the eschaton that will only be completed with Jesus’s parousia in the eschatological future; so, too, in the logic of the Synoptic Gospels. But in Luke-Acts, the Deutero-Paulines, and the Johannine literature, the indefinitely delayed and immanentized eschaton leads to a view in which the risen and ascended Jesus is already enthroned and reigning in heaven at God’s right hand, and therefore the Kingdom of God is fulfilled though not manifest in this world (at least not yet). This awaits the parousia, whether understood as a temporally future event (as in Luke-Acts) or a heavenly reality to which the individual follower of Jesus seeks to ascend, perhaps after death (as in the Deutero-Paulines and the Johannine literature). In each of the latter three perspectives, the task of proclaiming and practicing the Kingdom falls once more to the community of Jesus’s disciples, who spent the first decades of the Movement anxiously awaiting his swift return to preside over the Kingdom of God, the general resurrection, and the final judgment.

7. The proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the announcement of a Jewish prophet to the Jewish people, first and last; its extension to the nations is to incorporate them into the life and saga of the Jewish people and of greater Israel. The historical Jesus did not seek to found a new religion; the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews speaking primarily to other Jews in Jerusalem, Judea, and Galilee and to Jews in the Diaspora. The anchor community remembered by the New Testament texts was that headed by James the Just, the adelphos of Jesus, in Jerusalem, and later ecclesiastical tradition remembers a series of Jesus’s relatives, including other siblings, leading this community until (and perhaps after?) the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. This community seems to have called itself and been known simply as “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 16:37; 18:25-26; 19:9, 23; 24:14, 22), perhaps in reference to the earlier preaching of John the Baptist to “make straight the Way of the Lord” in reference to Isaiah 40:1-2, implying that this community understood itself as following the true “Way” of living out the demands of the Torah and the Prophets, the last of whom was the crucified and risen Jesus. The first missions of the Jesus Movement into the Diaspora in Arabia, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy are to Jewish communities that already exist there, from which the Movement drew the interest of gentiles who were, for the most part, already sympathetic to Judaism to varying degrees. These missionaries (apostoloi) were not an organized guild and did not have a single common strategy, system of beliefs, or expectations for the Jews that they won over or the gentile communities that they founded. That is to say, the Jesus Movement represented the preexisting Jewish diversity of Hellenistic antiquity within its ranks, and gradually became a transethnic network of small house communities connected by itinerant missionaries and prophets. In some sense, the Jesus followers in Judea and Jerusalem continued to function as a center of gravity for the Movement in its cultural, geographic, and intellectual pluralism, but they cannot be said to exercise any kind of identifiable control over these distant communities. The Jesus Movement seems to have been mostly tolerated by the wider Jewish world of its day. In Jerusalem, Josephus tells us, James was so respected that when he was unjustly stoned to death by the high priest Ananus ben Ananus in the year 62 CE, popular outrage encouraged Lucceius Albinus to depose Ananus from office on his way to Alexandria (Ant. 20.9.1). To Jewish eyes, the community that James led, which seems to have practiced the communism demanded by Jesus’s own teaching (Acts 2:42), must have seemed radically devoted to the Torah (compare James’s own description in Acts 21:20) and therefore have merited respect, regardless of their messianic beliefs about Jesus. In fact, messianic belief was never a strict credential of Jewish identity until Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles, and so it must have been that Jesus followers throughout synagogues in Judea and the Diaspora were acknowledged as Jews on the basis of ordinary observation of common ethnic customs (circumcision, kashrut, Sabbath, monolatry, etc.), their belief in Jesus simply constituting another possibility within Jewish diversity. The only credible cause for synagogal discomfort with the Jesus Movement was its suggestion to incoming gentiles that they had to abandon the observance of their own ethnic customs en masse, exclusively worshiping the Jewish God and obeying Jesus as Jewish messiah. Second Temple Jews in general welcomed non-Jewish interest in Judaism in local synagogues without requiring exclusivity or full conversion; the encouragement to local people to abandon their gods, however, threatened the cosmic security of the state in the eyes of Greeks and Romans, and for Jews, who generally agreed that the gods of the nations were real if subordinate to the Jewish God, endangered their special status in the Greco-Roman polis insofar as the Jesus Movement could be credibly linked to enfranchisement by the local synagogue. Such people were also denied by most of the missionaries the advantages of simple Judaization and the imperial protections that came with it because they discouraged full conversion. For some, like Paul, this is perhaps because they did not believe that it was possible for a non-Jew to become a Jew, disagreeing with the Hasmonean-era logic of conversion by circumcision. Generally, it was probably just seen as impractical: given that the Kingdom was coming very soon, seeking to change one’s worldly status by the adoption or abandonment of customs was a futile gesture. This resulted in the creation of a new social category: what Paula Fredriksen calls “ex-pagan pagans,” Christ-believing non-Jews who have abandoned their cultural inheritance in favor of Jew-ish worship of the Jewish God and submission to the Jewish messiah. In Paul’s model, these non-Jews have been grafted in to the olive tree of Israel (Rom 11), such that he can talk about the patriarchs of Israel as “our fathers” (1 Cor 10:1-4) to a mostly non-Jewish audience. The very title used by Paul for these communities in Greek, ekklesia, implies their incorporation into a scriptural identity of Israel as the “assembly” of God.

8. The failure of the parousia to occur in the lives of Jesus’s followers, bringing the Kingdom of God, is what provokes the crisis of the politics of resurrection in the ongoing world. Academic consensus holds that the historical Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God would arrive during his ministry and, failing this, would be provoked by the event of his death. The experience of his resurrection by his disciples provoked the hope that Jesus would come very soon to fulfill the Kingdom’s expectations of a restored Israel, a judged and reconciled humanity, and a new cosmic age. But from the time of Jesus’s death and resurrection (28-30 CE) to the First Jewish-Roman War (66-74 CE) and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (70 CE), no visible, obvious coming of the Kingdom in power unfolded. It continued not to come in the late first century CE, when the Gospels were written (65-95 CE), nor in the early second century CE, when two more conflicts between the Jewish community and Rome, the Kitos War (115-117 CE) and the Second Jewish-Roman War or Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136 CE) brought calamity on Jews living in Syria-Palestine as well as those living further abroad in the Diaspora. Through these conflicts, the Jerusalem community of Jesus’s followers was lost (probably to the Roman sword or the Temple fire); a community of Jewish Jesus-followers settled in the north in Galilee and southern Syria alongside the emergent communities of the tanna’im, the Pharisaic/rabbinic voices preserved in the Mishnah, with whom they competed for the claim of the true continuity of Judaism; the increasingly non-Jewish communities founded by missionaries like Paul and reading the Johannine literature confected a new concept of their identity, Christianismos, “Christianism” or “Christianity,” in contradistinction to Ioudaismos, Judaism; and over the course of the second century, many of these communities began to actively define themselves as the true successors to biblical Israel to the exclusion of ongoing Judaism, while also trying to pitch themselves to the Greco-Roman world as a legitimate social entity, on the models of the collegium, a tertium genus between Judaism and Hellenism, and finally a philosophical schola with its own distinctive doctrine. The Christian reinterpretation of the Jewish-Roman Wars, especially the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, as in some sense the fulfillment of the hope of the Kingdom in the establishment of a new, Christian dispensation was part legitimacy-project, part Roman-pacification, and part mollification of failed expectation; and yet, it accurately captures a sense that was also held by then-contemporary Jews, that a corner had been turned in the history of the world with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and that God’s mode of presence in the world was in fact now different. Jewish life in Palestine, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (especially Babylonia) continued to develop in the ongoing institutions of synagogue and Torah observance alongside the rabbinic batim midrash, as generations of Jewish sages, thinkers, and practitioners competed to define Judaism for Jews at large. By the fourth century, Christianismos was the officially tolerated cult of the Roman Empire, Judaism was formally restricted but not fully suppressed by the empire, and traditional cult to the Greco-Roman and other local, ancestral gods was outlawed. Despite a brief attempt to reverse this state of affairs under the Emperor Julian (“the Apostate”; r. 331-363 CE), the Roman Empire was now a Christian Empire, proclaiming the imperially executed Jesus Christ as its patron deity, and the justification for its oppression of Jews and pagans. The mainstream Christian public, in other words, abandoned the politics of resurrection in favor of the traditional politics of the Empire, lightly painted with the Christian icon-brush, as non-Jewish Christians abandoned the strict demands of Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom, confused their relationship to Kingdom and covenant, and engaged in radical violence against perceived others, including Christians labelled “dissident.” It is from this point, then, that we no longer deal with the fontes of the politics of resurrection, but the rivi, as the pure source breaks on the rocks of ongoing history into rivulet streams.

9. There is no return ad fontes which can be permanent in the politics of resurrection. Tempting as it is to wish to return to the first, second, or third centuries, when mainstream non-Jewish Christians were not an enfranchised group, when Jewish Christians still existed testing and challenging the emerging intellectual and social boundaries of the Church Fathers on the one hand and the rabbis on the other, and when the vibrant world of ancient paganism provided an overarching context in which Jews and Christians together could be said to be fellow sufferers beneath the might of the powers that be, the failure of the parousia to occur in full means that the water flowing from the side of the pierced Jesus (Jn 19:34) must flow down from its providential moment (kairos) of emergence from the craggy rock of Golgotha and flow outwards into historical time (chronos). We must return ad fontes for the sake of remembering how the Way began; but we must also follow the Way on its path through history, for returning even to this original synthesis will undoubtedly lead to the same crisis that proved the unraveling of the first followers of Jesus and their metamorphosis into the Early Christians. At the same time, we can acknowledge honestly that the formation of Christianismos as an identity separate from and in contradistinction to Ioudaismos as a continuation of the Way or the Jesus Movement constitutes a vital betrayal of the aboriginal proclamation of the Kingdom as the fulfillment of God’s historic commitments to the patriarchs, commonwealth, and peoples of Israel and Judah. That second-century Christians such as Marcion and the gnostics Basilides and Valentinus were able to take the Jewish apocalypticism of Paul and the Johannine literature and read it, anti-Jewishly, as a statement of the inferiority or moral evil of the Jewish God, arguably one of the great interpretive crises of the second century among Early Christians (the other being the Montanist movement), is indicative of this distance from the original preaching and activity of Jesus. So, too, is the settlement for an earthly Christianized Roman Empire as the fulfillment of the New Testament’s hopes for an earth in which justice is done under the reign of God (2 Pet 3:13). Yet we cannot simplistically suggest that for the reason of these mutations the Way had ceased to be walked altogether, or that the apocalyptic waters of new creation had in fact ceased to flow, without abandoning the politics of resurrection altogether. What we are left with when we return to this first clarion call of the Kingdom, reaffirmed by Jesus’s vindication after death, is the vision that the powers that enslave the universe are not omnipotent, that their ultimate weapon of death is not final, and that God so identifies with his suffering people, his righteous martyrs—the seven brothers of the Antiochene persecution, the Danielic wise who sleep in the dust, the Holy Infants of Bethlehem, the rebels of Judas the Galilean, James the Just, the hopeful burning in the flames of the Temple, R. Akiva flayed alive while praying the Shema—as to reveal his divine wisdom for the world in the crucified Jesus, who is, against the cosmic dynameis, the very power of God (1 Cor 1:18-2:16). And if the exact substance of Jesus’s proclamation did not come to pass in the time frame he suggested, or in the lives of his disciples, but we find ourselves still compelled by the experience of his resurrection, then the Kingdom itself must require a much longer interval of time in which to unfold. We have yet to arrive at that polis where resurrection is the politeia, though we hope our Way shall yet take us there.