Ehrman's Bible

I have to quote an Ehrman passage I just read:

Jesus Interrupted, by Bart D. Ehrman, NYC 2010

The Death of Jesus in Mark and Luke
... Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Both Matthew and Luke, writing fifteen or twenty years later, used Mark as one of their sources for much of their own accounts. That is why almost all of Mark's stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, and it is also why they tell the stories. Sometimes just two agree and the third doesn't, because occasionally only one of the later Gospels changed Mark. This means that if we have the same story in Mark and Luke, say, and there are differences, these differences exist precisely because Luke has actually modified the words of his source, sometimes deleting words and phrases, sometimes adding material, even entire episodes, and sometimes altering the way a sentence is worded. It is probably safe to assume that if Luke modified what Mark had to say, it was because he wanted to say it differently. Sometimes these differences are just minor changes in wording, but sometimes they affect in highly significant ways the way the entire story is told. This appears to be true for the portrayal of Jesus going to his death.

Jesus' Death in Mark
In Mark's version of the story (Mark 15:16-39), Jesus is condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, mocked and beaten by the Roman soldiers, and taken off to be crucified. Simon of Cyrene carries his cross, Jesus says nothing the entire time. The soldiers crucify Jesus, and he still says nothing. Both of the robbers being crucified with him mock him. Those passing by mock him. The Jewish leaders mock him. Those passing by mock him. Jesus is silent until the very end, when he utters the wretched cry, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," which Mark translates from the Aramaic for his readers as, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Someone gives Jesus a sponge with sour wine to drink. He breathes his last and dies. Immediately two things happen: the curtain in the Temple is ripped in half, and the centurion looking on acknowledges, "Truly this man was the Son of God."
This is a powerful and moving scene, filled with emotion and pathos. Jesus is silent the entire time, as if in shock, until his cry at the end, echoing Psalm 22. I take his question to God to be a genuine one. He genuinely wants to know why God has left him like this. A very popular interpretation of the passage is that since Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, he is actually thinking of the ending of the Psalm, where God intervenes and vindicates the suffering psalmist. I think this is reading way too much into the passage and robs the "cry of dereliction," as it is called, of all its power. The point is that Jesus has been rejected by everyone: betrayed by one of his own, denied three times by his closest follower, abandoned by all his disciples, rejected by the priests, the passersby, and even by the two others being crucified with him. At the end he even feels forsaken by God himself. Jesus is absolutely in the depths of despair and heart-wrenching anguish, and that's how he dies. Mark is trying to say something by this portrayal. He doesn't want his readers to take solace in the fact that God was really there providing Jesus with physical comfort. He dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die.
But the reader knows the reason. Right after jesus dies the curtain rips in half and the centurion makes his confession. The curtain ripping in half shows that with the death of Jesus, God is made available to his people directly and not through the Jewish priests' sacrifices in the Temple. Jesus' death has brought an atonement (see Mark 10:45). And someone realizes it right off the bat: not Jesus' closest followers or the Jewish onlookers but the pagan soldier who has just crucified him. Jesus' death brings salvation, and it is gentiles who are going to recognize it. This is not a disinterested account of what "really" happened wen Jesus died. It is theology put in the form of a narrative.

theology put in the form of a narrative

Historical scholars have long thought that Mark is not only explaining the significance of Jesus' death in this account but also quite possibly writing with a particular audience in mind, an audience of later followers of Jesus who also have experienced persecution and suffering at the hands of authorities who are opposed to God.

authorities who are opposed to God

Like Jesus his followers may not know why they are experiencing such pain and misery. But Mark tells these Christians they can rest assured: even though they may not see why they are suffering, God knows, and God is working behind the scenes to make suffering redemptive.

God is working behind the scenes
to make suffering redemptive

God's purposes are worked precisely through suffering, not by avoiding it, even when those purposes are not obvious at the moment.

God's purposes are worked precisely
through suffering, not by avoiding it.

Mark's version of the death of Jesus thus provides a model for understanding the persecution of the Christians.

provides a model for understanding

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My King James' printed Jesus' sayings in red. Knatz.com highlighted special pk quotes in blue. Other sacred quotes, Gregory Bateson quotes, Illich; Prigogine, I left in the default setting: plain black on white. But now, at least for this post, I think I'll highlight Ehrman quotes in purple: the color of royalty.

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I transcribed the above passage manually, proofed it the best I could, posted it, and then I emailed the author to ask permission to quote his current book at length!
Backwards perhaps, but then that's me.
Ehrman responded within hours: he doesn't own the rights. Ah! So let his publisher come after me. I take it that I have the author's permission: and that matters to me one hundred times more than any technical legal "owner"!

Meantime my son offered me the e-text, so I wouldn't have to copy. Anything I add can but copied and pasted. But actually I may pause there (here) anyway. What I repeat above in purple was the point of my getting started.

authorities who are opposed to God

God's purposes are worked precisely
through suffering.

Let it suffice: for now.

Judaism, Christianity, Chrixity

Chrixian is to Christian

as Christian is to Jew:

mutually orthogonal.

The Jews are credited with founding monotheism. They honor a creation god. They'd gotten the religion with its stories going pretty well by two and a half thousand years ago. The Jews built a grand temple in Jerusalem to house this god. The Temple of Jerusalem claimed to speak for God. It's still there, it still does.

Around two thousand years ago Judaism split (I bet not for the first, or last, time). The splinter sect said that God had sent his son, Jesus, as a Messiah, to the Temple, had cleansed the Temple of degenerate practices, got arrested, scourged, crucified for his trouble. In other words, the new group was saying that the old group had lost heaven's mandate, had betrayed its charter. These Christians built new temples called churches. One church in particular became ascendant in Western Europe: the Roman Catholic Church: it's the one with the Pope.

But of course that church too splintered. Luther wanted Christians to read the Bible for themselves. (The Church knew perfectly well what trouble that could lead to.) The Pope put out a contract on Luther. But the splinters flourished, and splintered, and flourished some more. Note: the Church claims to speak for God, says that salvation is due Christians, but only through the church. Meantime splinters say salvation is due Christians ... (But ignore core Christian concepts such as Original Sin and Atonement.) (or, try to monopolize them without understand them!)

Meantime, other critics come along. Ivan Illich says that the Whore of Babylon has taken control of the Bride of Christ. The Church is in the hands of ... professionals, experts, specialists, who drink wine, have housekeepers, drive Cadillacs ... and don't understand a thing about Christ.

pk joined Illich. Now I coin the term Chrixity.

The Jews claim God; but betray God.
The Christians reclaim God; but still betray God: in the same old ways. Jesus is still on the cross, after two thousand years of torture. (The Jews (using the Romans the way Henry II used his barons) only crucified Jesus for one day!)

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I draft, post, redraft. Sometimes I see something in the first draft missing from the second draft. I'm tempted to keep both drafts. "Ms." was proposed to replace Miss and Mrs.; but it didn't: it added a third category: Miss, Mrs. or Ms.! Flaubert revised Mme. Bovary so many times he introduced new mistkaes while he erased old.

Anyone who doesn't like the chaos of my drafts, introduced infelicity compromising tightened prose, should damn well send me a budget to work with: instead of arresting me, censoring me, squashing me after crippling me (after banishing me).

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First there's the Jews: monotheists. Orthogonal to the Jews, the Christians steal their shtick, say they speak for God, mis-transcribe and reedit something they call the Bible, claiming their work is God's own.

pk repeats the same shtick: the Church betrays God, Christians are people, and people torture the bearers of God's messages. I give this vision, this metaphor, a name: Chrixity.

But I don't want to splinter. I wish I could unite. But people would have to be able to understand what's said to them first. Understanding is prerequisite to listening: and versa visa.

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I said the Jews are credited with inventing monotheism: we don't know enough of events to know what the truth is. Our records are recent, human: incomplete at best, mucked with at worst. The Jews wanted to steal the land of the people they called Canaanites; maybe they stole their one god from some other people too. I don't say they did; we don't know that they didn't. What I do know is that all of us babbling away, writing our noise down, loading it onto the electromagnetic spectrum, are kleptocrats: thieves.

Me too.

Hide & Seek

Alan Watts' The Book presented existence as a game of Hide and Seek. He credited the metaphor to the Hindus. I love it. I believe it. That is, I half-believe it. I'm not sure I entirely believe anything: not even my own theory of Macroinformation, not even Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species, not even Pythagoras' theorem. Watts developed the idea through an alien theology: give us a fresh palatte, a little independence from our brainwashing. Fine, but I wed it right back to standard western monotheism: orthodox Christianity under the Scholastics maintained that God was Real, that God was the only thing that was real: all else was illusion, mistake, error. Thus: there is God, and only God. Nothing but God. And God is spending eternity playing with himself: playing hide and seek with himself, trying to fool himself, and almost, sometimes, succeeding.

Back to Hindu symbology again. All is Vishnu. Vishnu is Shiva. Shiva is Vishnu thinking he's Shiva. Vishnu is Shiva thinking he's Kali.

God is Jehovah begetting Jesus, thinking he's a holy spirit.

OK, get it? Think it through yourself: for five or six decades. It's really good. It gets better and better. Though I was still only twenty-four or so when I made what may be my best joke with it: I told my army friend that when the world ended, when we were all incandescing radioactively, every cell of our bodies sundered and flying off in dimensions we've never heard of at velocities we can't calculate, I'm going to summon a last word, and say to the Void, "I am not amused!"

How's this for Hide & Seek? I'm going to lump metaphors!

Deep Cover & Mission Impossible

The movie Deep Cover (1992) shows Laurence Fishburne as a cop pretending to be a drug dealer. As the plot thickens we're not sure he's not a drug dealer deluding himself he's a cop. I love it. In Hide and Seek cosmology nothing is clear, except for the monotheistic axioms, and they're not really clear either. God and Satan change roles. Is Jesus a savior or a charlatan? Seems realistic, truthful to me: do you really think the cops are there to protect you? the soldiers? Or are they there to bully you, to make you pay taxes, go to school, not let on that you doubt any of the orthodoxies, while claiming to be free, independent, not a slave: certainly not a robot: absolutely not a contagion.

I gotta take a break, be back when I can. meantime: I love the Mission Impossible deep cover line "As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions": and the utter Big Brother detail, "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." Belief as atheism. Nazis with no Hitler to blame!

Mark's Mary

The Only Game in Town!

I "studied" the Bible as a child, in college, since, but it's only in the last few years that I've learned anything really significant from those seven decades of study. The society and its institutions can sabotage intelligence all they want, but sometimes something slips through. With John and Jesus murdered, a word may survive. Galileo, Darwin, Freud got attacked, ignorance, stupidity is triumphant, but somehow some intelligence, some wisdom may get through. Jesus may somehow save some of us even while the powers continue to crucify his successors, other saviors, continue to pervert talent, generosity, godliness ... genius. I showed an avid interest in the Bible. I demonstrated an eagerness to perpetuate the fundamentalism I was force fed. But the school, the church, my family, the whole culture steered me away from theology: no, we wanted doctors, lawyers, Ponzi schemers. Well, I'm a theologian anyway, just outside all the churches, outside the Republicans, and Democrats. And Communists! Outside. Near starving. That's me. But somehow an intelligent, honest Bible reader emerged from all those piled millennia of dishonesty: Bart Ehrman. He's was a child fundamentalist who actually insisted on learning some of the lessons of close textural and historical readings of the Bible nurtured in the isolation of the seminary/terrariums. (The Church may have been smarter than the Protestants say when it opposed confidence in the ability of yesterday's illiterate to properly read scripture. The Church wanted a lid on, Protestants blew the lid off, but without understanding much.)

The terrariums teach it, but the graduating pastors refuse to pass it on. The seminaries teach liberal readings, acknowledge problems, but the graduates immediatly return to their initial prejudices, and perpetuate them in the churches that hire them. The churches side-rail the intelligent, the honest; the morons control the misinformation.

Check out Ehrman's books. Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities were the first two I read. Now I'm enjoying Jesus, Interrupted too. Get your facts from him: I just want to go straight to one (set of) fact(s), known for a good while now, but not much publicized: despite Ehrman penning best sellers. Cambell got side-railed, I got side-railed; Ehrman gets lionized; but it still doesn't matter. Bishop Wilberforce will beat Darwin and Huxley over the long haul.

Ehrman is the Christian scholar who's actually reached a couple of readers with the news that the Gospel According to St. Mark is the oldest of the Bible's gospels, that it post-dates Jesus's estimated death by two-thirds of a century, that the oldest copies of it are a couple of centuries younger than that, and that the oldest Mark ends short of the Mark passed to us by churches. The oldest Mark ends its story with the opening of the tomb: then the angel tells Mary Magdalene that Jesus is risen. The angel tells Mary to go and tell the others, the disciples. But Mary is frightened, Mary goes home, Mary Magdalene tells no one! That's the "original" ending of the original Mark: that is, the oldest Mark we can deduce, can find.

If God was trying to save mankind by sacrificing himself in the person of Jesus, it sounds to me like he failed. God gave us Jesus, gave us a chance: we rejected Jesus: murdered him, then rejected the salvation. Christians are bade to bear witness. We don't. Or we do: bear witness to bullshit, to lies. To vanity. If it's vain, we'll repeat it, embellish it, embroider it. If it's tough, if its honest, if it's intelligent, if it's compatible with hard truth, we'll ignore it, sabotage it, rewrite it: till it's flattering, fits in our vanity miror.

My piece here, God's Lure, tells how it makes me sick to think that God is using me as a lure only to expose the rapacity of my fellows. I tell my girlfriends, my wife, my son, my more girlfriends ... what I promised God to try to tell people: they get it only enough to reject it, the proudly tell me that they're following Roosevelt instead, or Bush, or Rothbard, or Mises.

My girl friend sees that the Church is a liar. But she still wants to go to Church!

Gamblers have a joke that applies to Christians. The degenerate gambler is playing at a roulette table. His friend says, "Don't you know that table is crooked?" "Yes, I do," says the degenerate gambler. "Then why are you still playing at it?" "Because it's the only game in town!"

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Try this as a thought experiment: in our lab we shall for the immediate purpose take Christian symbols literally: there is a God, there is a Christ, there was a Jesus, there will be a Judgment ... Peter was a leading disciple, Peter denied Jesus, a legitimate Church made Peter its first pope ...

Now let's imagine Peter at Judgment. Let's imagine God weighing bits of evidence in a balance scales: in the Saved pan he puts Peter's eminence as a disciple, in the Damned pan he puts Peter's denial of Jesus. ... All my life I've heard jokes in which Peter is the keeper of the pearly gates: but does that make it so? Shouldn't we wait till after Judgment to see who's in heaven, what use God is making of them? If Jesus himself spent three days in hell, how long should Peter go to hell for? Should we imagine that he's out yet? ever? Maybe Peter will tend some future pearly gate.

But of course my thought experiment is just a joke, totally out of taste: because it doesn't line up with the fundamental stance of any religion: that stance which pretends to believe in a god who rubber stamps the human culture: a Big Brother bully of bullies: the bully bullies you? God will bully them! for you! a god who takes the Canaanites land and gives it to the Jews, who judges the Philistines and makes them slaves of the Jews ... who gives licence for genocide so Christians can live on Iroquois turf.

Still: try the thought experiment one step further. God judges Mary Magdalene: into the Saved pan can go lots of apocryphal traditions: she was a whore who reformed, she was Jesus' friend, she was the chief financial patron to Jesus, his ministry, and his disciples ... But: into the Damned pan God can put ... her betrayal at the end! The angel told her to tell the disciples; she didn't, she was afraid, she went home. (Or was "Mark" a misogynist maligner? like Paul?)

Imagine the President phoning the nuclear silo, saying, OK, launch. But the silo team don't launch, they cower in their barracks. The day before, the silo team was shown airbrushed in Life; today what will the media make of them?

It doesn't matter. Humans will never allow God to run Judgment. Man has already judged. We judge that your land is ours, your labor is ours, your ideas are ours, we can pay whichever royalties we feel like and not bother with those we don't volunteer. No: God is our bully on our leash. We have nothing to fear from God. Justice is political license for the church-goers.