Mark 11:23, Seneca, and Earthquakes

For my write-up today on Robert Grant’s Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought, I’ll focus on Grant’s comments regarding Mark 11:23, which states (in the KJV): “For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”

Grant reads Mark 11:23 in light of Zechariah 14:4, which states: “And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.”  Grant notes that the Hebrew word for “toward the west” is literally “to the sea”.  Grant’s point is that Jesus in Mark 11:23 is talking about the fulfillment of eschatological promises about the moving of mountains.  Presumably, in the same way that Jesus through his ministry was fulfilling eschatological promises in the Hebrew Bible about (say) the blind seeing, so likewise did Jesus believe that his disciples would carry out other eschatological promises through their faith.

Grant contrasts the attitude in Mark 11:23 with that of the first century Roman Stoic Seneca, who in Scientific Problems said: “Countless ‘miracles’ move and change the face of the earth in various places, bring down mountains, raise plains, swell valleys, raise up new islands in the deep.  It is worth while to investigate the causes from which these things happen.  You may ask, ‘What will the value of their endeavor be?’  The greatest value of all, to know nature.”

Grant believes that there is a difference between Seneca and Jesus: “The event, an earthquake, is presumably the same in each case.  Seneca sees in it an occasion for scientific investigation or philosophical speculation; Jesus looks forward to it as an event in which the hand of God will be revealed.”

I guess one could then ask the question: Could an earthquake (not all earthquakes, but an earthquake) be both a sign caused by God, and also something natural, since God can use nature?  In my opinion, if an earthquake is the result of natural causes that build up, that somewhat undermines the notion that God is simply causing earthquakes by snapping his fingers.

Miracle-Less Gospels; Jesus the Magician?; Divinization

I finished Howard Clark Kee’s Miracle in the Early Christian World.  I have three items.

1.  On page 292, Kee states that the Bultmann school liked the Gnostic Gospels (including the Gospel of Thomas) and upheld them as the oldest sources for us to access the historical Jesus because these Gospels consist largely of sayings and they lack miracles, which the Bultmann school deemed to be embarrassing.  Rudolph Bultmann himself, after all, asked how we in the modern age can believe in miracles!  I like the concept of a Gospel that relies on teachings and sayings, rather than things that are hard to believe.  At the same time, many of the New Testament scholars whom I have read deem the Gnostic Gospels to be late (in that they appear to assume the synoptic Gospels) and inauthentic in terms of what the historical Jesus was like.  I have to admit, however, that I have not read much Karen King or Elaine Pagels.

2.  On pages 268-271, Kee talks about Celsus’ criticisms of Jesus’ miracles, and Origen’s response to those criticisms.  Celsus essentially states that Jesus was a magician who did his “miracles” in alliance with demons.  Celsus compares Jesus with “sorcerers who profess to do wonderful miracles…who for a few obols make known their sacred lore in the middle of the marketplace and drive demons out of men and blow away diseases and invoke the souls of heroes” (quotation of Celsus on page 268).

Origen responds that this was not so because (1.) a magician would not try to instill in people a teaching about the fear of God, and (2.) Christianity opposed magic.  Origen acknowledged that miracles might occur among the Greeks (Contra Celsum 5.57), but he said that the fact that sorcerers invoke Jesus’ name shows that the name has power (Contra Celsum 2.49).  Origen also affirmed that the resurrection of Jesus surpassed previous miracles, even though the risen Jesus did not appear publicly as Celsus would have liked, but rather he appeared only to the spiritually-worthy who were prepared to see him (Contra Celsum 2.61-63).

On pages 211-212, Kee discusses Morton Smith’s book, Jesus the Magician.  Smith argued that Jesus was a magician who ate flesh, drank blood, and participated in “nocturnal lustrations in the nude with his circle of male followers” (Kee’s summary).  But Smith contends that Jesus’ role as a magician has been obscured under subsequent layers of redaction, as the Christian editor made Jesus into a miracle worker like figures in the Hebrew Bible.

Was Jesus a magician?  At the moment, I am skeptical about Jesus eating flesh, drinking blood, or engaging in those “nocturnal lustrations” that Smith talks about.  But there are occasions when Jesus heals through certain rituals, such as spitting on a blind man’s eyes (Mark 8:23) and anointing a blind man’s eyes with clay he made out of spit and dirt (John 9:6).  Are these acts of magic?  Why perform a ritual, when Jesus can heal by word?

3.  In an excursus, Kee talks about human beings becoming divine.  He quotes Plato’s statement in Republic 6.500.C-D that “the lover of wisdom by keeping company with the divine and orderly becomes himself divine and orderly in so far as it is possible for a human being” (page 298).  Kee also refers to Aristotle’s principle that a man with political insight be followed as a god among men, for whom no law exists.  This interested me because it gave me insight into divinization in the ancient world: that a person in this life can become divine through wisdom.

Paying for Access to God

What stood out to me in my latest reading of Miracle in the Early Christian World was something that Howard Clark Kee says on page 140:

“However gracious and beneficent Isis may have been, formal entrance into the ranks of her cult devotees was on a cash-in-advance basis only.  There were no social or economic restrictions on participation in the cult, as is evident in the remark made in passing that the crowd in the procession on the occasion of Lucius’s transformation consisted of ‘throngs of those initiated into the divine mysteries, men and women of every rank’ (11.10).  At the conclusion of the Ploiaphesia and the summoning of the conclave of the pastophoroi, prayers were delivered from a liturgical book ‘for the prosperity of our great emperor, the senate, the knights and the whole Roman people’ (11.17)—-scarcely what might be termed a subversive agenda.  The book ends with the testimony that the man who had to sell his clothes in order to pay his initiation fee to the cult of Osiris began to enjoy life in two ways: ‘I was illumined with the nocturnal ecstasies of the supreme god,’ and he began to prosper as a result of his substantial income as an advocate (11.28).  It is not at all surprising that details of Lucius’s experience—-including the brush with death and the passage through the elements (11.23)—-should reappear in a modern middle-class movement such as Freemasonry.”

What I like about the religions within the Bible and based upon the Bible is that they democratize access to the divine: one does not have to pay money to experience God, for God regards even a poor person who needs God’s help.  At the same time, there is a notion in the Hebrew Bible that people can make vows as a way to get God to help them, and that they repay those vows (often an animal) when God answers their prayers or delivers them.  Does that concept imply that people need to pay God to receive God’s help?  Or is the purpose of that concept simply to give people a way to say “thank you”?

Pre-Enlightenment Skepticism about Miracles

I started Howard Clark Kee’s Miracle in the Early Christian World.  In this post, I’ll highlight something from page 2:

“Disbelief in miracle and dismissal of it as chicanery or fraud are not modern conceits.  Skepticism about miracle goes back to classical Greece, as Plato’s relegation of the Corybantic cures to the realm of psychological alleviation of phobias and anxieties attests.”

A commonly-held narrative is that people were gullible and credulous about alleged miracles prior to the Enlightenment, whereas the Enlightenment tended to seek naturalistic explanations.  That narrative may have some truth in it, but things are more complex than that.  For one, as Kee notes, there was skepticism about miracles before the Enlightenment.  Josephus probably was not one who totally bracketed out the supernatural, but he often sought a naturalistic or a rationalistic explanation for miracles in the Bible.  Second, there have been people even after the time of the Enlightenment who believe in miracles.

Messiness and Chaos; Judah Halevi

1. In my assigned reading of L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson’s Scribes and Scholars today, I read the authors’ discussion of textual criticism. They referred to the stemmatic method, which aims to arrive at the “correct” reading of a text, the text as it was originally written down. The stemmatic method compares texts in order to determine which is correct (e.g., what’s the majority reading?). The assumption is that there’s an original text, which later scribes copied and mis-copied. The stemmatic method’s model is rather vertical, in that it usually assumes that a scribe is copying one text.

But things aren’t quite so simple, the authors contend, for there’s horizontal work going on. Scribes in ancient and medieval times did not always copy one text, for they compared different copies, and they put what they considered “good readings” and “interesting variants” into their manuscripts. You know the eclectic texts that some scholars love to criticize—the modern editions of an ancient text that draw from this manuscript and that manuscript, as the compiler sees fit? Well, there are some old manuscripts that do this, as well! Textual copying and transmission could be quite messy. How can we even arrive at an original text, with that kind of messiness in the equation?

Of course, I may be leaving some with the impression that we can’t know anything and that all is chaos. I doubt it’s that bleak. Ancient texts agree, and there are many cases when their disagreements are minor, concentrated in such areas as grammar and spelling. But then there are times when texts disagree on what they are saying. Reynolds and Wilson refer to manuscripts of Herodotus that edit out the dirty stuff! Can we say these are wrong because they’re minority manuscripts, or stray manuscripts? But even a conservative friend of mine said that the number of copies of a particular manuscript doesn’t mean it’s accurate, for a group can make a bunch of copies of a bad manuscript.

I’m back to chaos again! I can’t write myself out of it. Fortunately, there are plenty of scholars who don’t think everything is bleak (right?).

2. In Bringing the Hidden to Light, I read Raymond Scheindlin’s essay, “The Song of the Silent Dove: The Pilgrimage of Judah Halevi.” Judah Halevi was a Jewish thinker who lived in the eleventh-twelfth centuries. Two things stood out to me. First, Halevi regretted not learning more when he was younger, for, when he was older, he was busy being a doctor. Second, Halevi wrote beautiful poetry, but he didn’t believe that it adequately communicated what he wanted to say. In his mind, he was clumsy with words.

I identify with some of this (well, not the beautiful poet part).

Scribes and Scholars 1; How Many Plagues?

1.  At the Hebrew Union College library today, I read the first 86 pages of L.D. Reynolds’ Scribes and Scholars. 

Reynolds talks about the Alexandrian method of text criticism, which marked with an obelos the parts of a text that it deemed spurious.  Why would a critic deem part of the text to be spurious?  Parts of the text that displayed undignified language or conduct were considered spurious, for example, the goddess Aphrodite in the Illiad (3:423-6) carrying a seat for the human Helen.  Then there were parts of the text that didn’t flow well with the rest of the story, and they were marked as spurious.  The latter criterion overlaps with the text criticism of today.

I encountered interesting people in today’s reading.  There was Crates of Mallon, from the second century B.C.E., who broke his leg in a sewer and used his time of forced convalescence to give lectures on poetry.  There was Probus, a first century C.E. character, who was disappointed because he didn’t get a military promotion, and so he turned his attention to the old authors he studied in school, who by that point were “out of fashion in Rome”.  He became a prominent text critic.  When God closes a door, he opens a window!  Or, as Tom Hanks says in Castaway, you don’t know what the shore will bring!

Reynolds talked about the ambivalence of Christians towards the classics.  Some Christians said that only learned Christians should study the classics, meaning that the Christian masses should avoid them.  And yet, Jerome and Augustine said that Christians should freely use the insights of the classics, as long as they utilize them within a Christian framework.  Origen said that he was open to the study of the classics, as long as they didn’t deny the existence of a god or divine providence.

Under Julian, an anti-Christian emperor in the fourth century C.E., Christians were banned from teaching the classics.  (There may be more nuance to that, but so I have heard.)  A Christian named Apollinarius then devised a Christian curriculum, which used Homeric-style poetry to narrate the history of the Jews, and transformed the Gospels and the Epistles into Socratic-like dialogues.  But Apollinarius’ curriculum did not last, for, before you knew it, a Christian emperor took Julian’s place, and Christians could teach the classics again.

Reynolds doesn’t buy into the notion that Christians burned pagan texts.  He believes there’s no evidence for that, and he points out that even some of Julian’s writings were still around when Christians held power.  The texts may have vanished on account of their not being used.

2.  In Bringing the Hidden to Light, I read Marc Brettler’s “The Poet as Historian: The Plague Tradition in Psalm 105.”  Brettler’s argument (if I’m reading him correctly) is that Psalm 105 draws from the priestly and the Yahwistic narratives about the plagues.  But Psalm 105 holds that there were seven plagues, not ten.  Brettler speculates that the Passover Haggadah emphasize that there were ten plagues to counter another popular tradition: that there were seven. 

Prosopon (for the Antiochenes)

I read my friend’s notes about Diodorus’ (fourth century C.E.) description of the Antiochene school of biblical interpretation, which is literal.  One key term for the Antiochenes is “prosopon”, which (in my friend’s words) “is the point of view of the speaker (David speaking from the prosopon of Hezekiah).”

I think this means that there are times when David speaks from the perspective of a future figure, such as Hezekiah and Jesus, as if David is a prophet.  Acts 2:25-30 presents David speaking as a prophet, foretelling the resurrection of Christ.  Yet, David speaks in the first person, as if he is taking the perspective of Jesus.

Irrational Passions from a Rational Faculty

Today, I read my friend’s notes on Neo-Stoicism.  The Neo-Stoics believed that there were four passions: pleasure, desire, fear, and sorrow.  They didn’t think that these passions proceeded from an irrational faculty, though.  Rather, they held that the rational faculty is making an error, the same way that our mathematical mind can make mathematical mistakes.  In the case of the passions, our rational faculty is treating indifferent things—wealth, honor, power, and pleasure—as if they are good, when actually they can harm us and are outside of our control.  We should be valuing the virtues alone.

Earlier Stoics, such as Zeno and Chysippus, likewise thought that the passions are mistaken judgments.  But Posidonius went with the Platonic view that an irrational part of the soul was the source of the passions.

The Neo-Stoic position reminds me of Augustine’s belief that evil comes from good, since good was what we started out with, God having made all things good at the outset.  For the Neo-Stoics, the passions proceeded from the rational faculty—something good—making a mistake, by valuing things that seem to be good as if they actually are good.

Philo Ends Up with a Trinity?

Today, I read my friend’s notes on Hellenistic Jewish Interpretation.  He says that, according to Philo, God created the kurios (lord) on the seventh day, and that the logos was in between them.  The kurios orders everything once it is made.  I thought that Philo believed the logos did that, but there may be more nuance in Philo’s position than I am seeing.  So Philo has God, a logos, and a kurios.  Sounds like a trinity—although Philo holds that the kurios was a created being.

Origen and Pagan Exegesis

I read my friend’s notes on Origen today.  He said that Origen, in his interpretation of Scripture, followed the techniques of pagan exegesis in six ways: text-criticism, explanation of words, explanation of points or facts, metrical and stylistic criticism, identification of the person speaking in the text, and clarifying the Bible with the Bible (the pagans did this with Homer).

But is this distinctly pagan?  It sounds like the sort of exegesis that many interpreters do.