4th R on Christian Origins JSXnO 4R Vol 20 # 3 May-June 2007
Report from the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins (JSXnO) Spring Meeting 2007 - By Stephen J. Patterson
Explanation of colors used in voting: R true, P probably true, G probably not true, B not true.
In Miami the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins began its work in earnest.
Over the next years the JSXnO will explore how Christianity emerged in specific places, and in diverse and distinctive ways. The sessions in Miami got the ball rolling by focusing on 'the nature of the Jesus movements in the Galilee'.
One of the priorities of the seminar will be to integrate the work of archaeologists and interpreters of material culture into its deliberations.
To that end the meeting began by turning things over to Mordechai Aviam, the former District Archaeologist for the Western Galilee for the Israel Antiquities Authority, and current director of the University of Rochester's Institute for Galilean Archaeology.
Aviam's presentation set the stage for future discussions with a summary of twenty-five years of archaeological work in the Galilee.
His survey made clear the ethnic diversity of the Galilee, with predominantly Jewish settlements south and east, and more Gentile settlements in the north and west-upper Galilee.
Aviam also underscored the importance of the large towns of Sepphoris and Tiberius and the changing economic situation signaled by their appearance in the first century C.E. The traditional peasant farming of the past was giving way to a monetized, commercialized, and more centralized economic pattern.
But Aviam also emphasized the limits of archaeological work: it provides valuable information, but it cannot tell us everything we might want to know.
Archaeology was the focus of attention for the entire first day of the JSXnO.
In the afternoon the seminar considered papers from Daniel Schowalter of Carthage College, co-director of excavations at Omrit, and Marianne Sawicki, author of Crossing Galilee.
Schowalter put to the group the fundamental question of how to make use of archaeology 'in our work'. The Fellows expressed wide assent to his contention that archaeology is most useful when it serves the broad discussion of the cultural world of antiquity (red).
"Text-proofing" is almost always misleading and often just a waste of time. Schowalter's own work at Omrit, the site of a major temple complex, is a case in point. Located not far from the traditional location of Peter's confession (Mark 8:27-30), Omrit could become a popular tourist destination, like the nearby Pan sanctuary at Banias. But far more significant for our understanding of Christian origins is the possibility that the Omrit temple was a major center of the 'Roman imperial cult' in the Upper Galilee.
To understand that Galilee was not a political or cultural 'backwater' (red), but rather occupied a place of strategic importance on the empire's eastern frontier (red), casts many texts and traditions in a new light.
Sawicki's paper addressed a basic question of place: Who lived in this place? Who were the Galileans?
Following Aviam's presentation from the morning, almost all agreed with Sawicki's characterization of the Galilee as mixed, including an indigenous Israelite population, some expatriate Judeans, as well as non Judean Gentiles (red).
The Fellows also agreed that in such a mixed environment, "Judaism" was still under construction in the early years of the Jesus movement (red). (!!!)
But they rejected Sawicki's thesis that the earliest document of Galilean Christianity, Q, shows considerable interest in halacha, t.i., how to understand the Jewish tradition in light of new realities (black).
As Kloppenborg would argue the next day, whatever "Judaism" was in the Galilee, it was 'not identical to the religion of Judea', with its focus on the Temple, purity distinctions, and tithing (red).
Reading Q as a document of the Galilean Jesus movement was the subject of much of the second day's conversation, with major papers by James M. Robinson, John Kloppenborg, and Ted Weeden.
Robinson described the 'primary problem with understanding Galilean Christianity':
- no Christian sources from that time and place survive.
- Q must be reconstructed from sources more reflective of early 'gentile' Christianity.
- This means we must reckon with the fact that much of the Jewish character of early Galilean Christianity might well have been wiped out and otherwise obscured in the sources (red).
What is more, Robinson argued, most of the 'Jesus band' in Galilee would have been scattered by the events of the Jewish war, so that there is little hope of ever identifying the actual location of their activities - there will be no Corinth or Ephesus in Galilee (pink). [Corinth and Ephesus were centers of Pauline tradition]
But Aviam interjected at this point that the effects of the Jewish War may have been much less in the Galilee than further south in Jerusalem. This may account for the diminished interest in 'martyrdom' in Q, as compared with Mark or the other synoptic texts. [!!! we touched on it when talking about how Q missed greeat interest in the death of Jesus]
In the same session the seminar gave attention to John Kloppenborg's highly-regarded volume, Excavating Q, focusing in particular on chapter 5: "Reading Q in the Galilee." In response to Kloppenborg's work, the seminar reiterated its view that the Galilee, while in large measure Jewish, would not necessarily have shared a distinctly Judean view of Torah observance, the centrality of the Temple, and the practices of kashruth (kosher), tithing, circumcision, and purity.
Thus, in the debate over the religio-ethnic character of Galilee, the seminar showed a preference for Richard Horsley's position, over against, say, that of E. P.Sanders.
This attitude is reflected in Q's 'negative evaluation of the Herodian Temple', its critique of tithing, purity distinctions, and its championing of the (Israelite) prophetic traditions (red).
In this sense the 'Galilean Jesus movements' emerged as a distinctly Galilean movement of 'local renewal' (pink), though the modus operandi of the movement is not yet clear.
To the proposition that "the Jesus movements represented by Q should be treated as a cynic-like reaction to the major institutions of Judea," the seminar concurred with Kloppenborg's recommended vote: black. This probably represents a cooling of the seminar's earlier embrace of the Cynic analogy for understanding Jesus and the movements deriving from him. [thus not in favor Mack's and Crossan's view]
Ted Weeden tried to flesh out the earliest known strains in the Q-community by focusing on texts that (by Kloppenborg's analysis) belong to the earliest stratum of Q.
Weeden argued, and the seminar agreed, that in these texts the Kingdom of God, as message, and Jesus, as messenger, are the two unifying factors (red).
In this early form of the Jesus movement it was the Kingdom of God that held salvific value, not the death of Jesus (pink). [in the Fall semester course the subject of Kingdom of God in Q will be treated in greater detail 85f]
In some points, however, the seminar was more skeptical of Weeden's views. For example, to his assertion that the Q-folk would have been 'destitute, landless peasants', the seminar voted (gray), probably on the grounds that Q as a literary document, presupposes at least some who were of a more elevated social status.
To the earlier suggestion of Sawicki, however, that the "Jesus band" would have revolved around a group of wealthy women, the seminar proved equally skeptical. The social location of the Jesus movements associated with Q remains a matter of dispute.
In the final paper of the conference the seminar took up a question that will form a recurring theme in all the places the seminar chooses to explore: the presence and role of women in the early Jesus movements.
Kathleen Corley initiated this discussion with an extensive survey of the evidence for the place and role of women in the Galilee generally speaking, and for women in the Jesus movements in particular.
Drawing on traditions in both Mark and Q - especially stories of Jesus at table and stories Jesus might have told at table (parables) - Corley follows many historians of earliest Christianity in finding many women in the follower-ship of Jesus (red).
But she raised the question of 'how distinctive' this would have been. If women's life in the Galilee was anything like the lives of Jewish women in the diaspora (and it was - says Corley), then we have every reason to see women's participation in the Jesus movements as of one with the role of women generally in the living of religion. The seminar agreed (red).
Corley also affirms, however, that following the death of Jesus the role and place of women at the tables of the Jesus movement came under discussion and re-negotiation. The seminar also agreed to this (red). Clearly this discussion will continue to unfold in the months and years ahead. The JSXnO will stay with the question of Galilean Christianity for at least one more session.
In the fall it will explore more thoroughly the question of Q's 'social location', and possible 'models for understanding the social formation' that defined early Christian groups.
It will also ask how the parables of the 'Jesus tradition' might be used to describe the lives of those who first heard them, but also the issues and situations the early Jesus movements wished to examine and comment on.
It will also resume the discussion of the role of women, and will turn to the question of slaves and slavery in the utopian vision of the Jesus movements.
The discussion continues.
4th R on Christian Origins
Report of the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins Spring Meeting 2008
Stephen J. Patterson, Chair
On March 7-8 the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins gathered to take one more look at nascent Christianity in Jesus' presumed home territory, the Galilee.
In previous meetings the Seminar had considered the basic shape of the Galilean Jesus movement as an early form of Jewish Christianity (Spring 07), which would have included a number of women (Spring 07) and perhaps slaves (Fall 07), but centered around a group of displaced, low-level scribes who had taken the side of victims of the changing economic situation in the Galilee under Herod Antipas (Fall 07) [cf \Q\Fall M 2007]. But there were lingering questions. So the Seminar decided to devote one more session to Galilee. The Seminar opened with the much-anticipated plenary address from one of this generation's leading authorities on Galilee, Sean Freyne of Trinity College in Dublin.
In his paper, entitled "Tracking Galilean Jesus Followers," Freyne argued that much of what we read in Q, including its prophetic critique, the hope for Israel's restoration, its broadly-aimed sapiential strains, as well as its linguistic profile, might be better understood if we were to place it among the ethnically mixed villages of northern Galilee and southern Syria.
Freyne takes as his point of departure the question of language, and where one might expect to find the level of competency in Greek to warrant such a document as Q with its distinctly Jewish perspective. The answer may not be the villages of Lower Galilee, where the linguistic evidence for spoken Greek is slim, but rather in the ethnically mixed villages of the north, bordering on what we might think of as southern Syria, but which they would have considered part of a more expansive vision of the Land of Israel.
Locating both the language and the theology of Q in this region becomes quite plausible if one imagines the group's migration north on analogy with the flight of James' followers from Jerusalem in the 60s, as reported by the historian Eusebius.
The Q-folk would have looked back on their experience of failure among the villages of Lower Galilee and framed it within the Jewish tradition of national critique and restoration.
Freyne also made a case for locating Mark in these villages [sic!], drawing especially on the work of Gerd Theissen, who among other things relates the particularities of the Markan apocalypse (Mark 13) to the realities of Jewish life in the villages of southern Syria during and immediately following the Jewish-Roman War.
'Latinisms' that were once key to placing Mark in Rome now can be seen as quite at home also in the Roman east, and Mark's neighborhood familiarity with local places - for example, the villages of Caesarea Philippi - seem to make this gospel at home there.
Like Q, Mark embraces a version of Jewish restoration theology. But unlike Q's pronouncement of judgment on 'this generation', Mark is written more with a view to reconciliation, where the way forward in the aftermath of the Jewish-Roman War "was to include Jews and Gentiles in the one house, which was emerging elsewhere, now that the temple was in ruins."
Finally Freyne sketched out a scenario in which Q and Mark might be seen as representing similar concerns, though stated in slightly, but significantly different time frames - Q a little before the war, Mark just after, when greater urgency, nearing panic, prevailed - and making use of different genres to reflect the peculiar strategies of each.
The resulting tentative reconstruction of beginning Christianity as it moved north out of Galilee and Jerusalem into the villages of southern Syria, - Damascus, Pella and the Transjordan, and eventually Antioch, - sparked a lively discussion in which Freyne's ideas won large assent and set the stage for the next steps in the agenda of the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins.
The Seminar has been working on the assumption that Q and perhaps Mark could be mined for information about Galilean proto-Christianity, but is this so?
Are there good arguments that these texts were written in Galilee?
Joanna Dewey took up the question of where Mark was written, a subject around which a vast and recent literature has grown. After surveying the arguments, Dewey concedes that a good case might be made for locating Mark in a number of places. All caveats aside, however, Dewey was relatively confident, and the Seminar gave its mild assent, that the "rural air of Mark militates against a major urban setting such as Rome, Antioch, or Damascus" (Pink), and that its "rural setting, social location, Jewishness, and positive valence on Galilee all suggest a Galilean provenance" (also Pink).
Doubts surfaced in this discussion around the real meaning of the term Jewishness" in the Galilee, a conversation that drew the Seminar back to earlier discussion about the precise makeup of the population there.
But the most serious doubts were raised by Dewey herself, who raised once again the vexing question of language: if Mark (and Q) were written in Greek, then in an oral culture one must presume also an audience of Greek speakers ready to take in the performance of such a document. Her proposal, that Mark would have been put into writing in the area "to the north and east of Galilee" (pink), and that Q would likely have come out this area as well (pink), where there is a greater likelihood of finding villages of Greek-speaking inhabitants, thus reinforced what Freyne had argued earlier in the day.
In a related discussion, Milton Moreland raised in a more general way the method by which texts might be associated with a particular place or region - a procedure that will be critical as the Seminar considers particular sites in turn.
Moreland's discussion was framed in part to test the Fellow's response to Richard Bauckham's theory 'that the gospels were not written for specific communities in a single locale, but conceived more generally to be circulated widely among all early Christians'.
Generally the Fellows followed Moreland's recommendation in rejecting Bauckham's novel idea (pink). But the ensuing discussion of Moreland's proposed criteria for locating texts in particular places was tentative. In the end, Fellows agreed (pink) that the following categories could provide an adequate starting point for future discussions:
(1) chronology; (2) language and scribal competence; (3) demographics; (4) the presence of an earlyJesus/Christ group; (5) socio-economic/political factors; (6) independent literary references; (7) references to sites, personal names, regional events, and geographical details; (8) references to specific socio-economic/political conditions; (9) theological affinities; (10) 'socio-biographical memory', 'indigenous logic' and/or 'social map'.
On day 2 of the Seminar the Fellows turned their attention once again to the work of Jonathan Reed, whose study of the economic conditions under Herod Antipas has informed many earlier discussions of the Jesus movement in Galilee.
But in his paper for this session Reed had decided to revisit some of his convictions about the Galilean economy and test them against the current state of research on the material culture in four areas.
First, Reed still maintains that the first century witnessed a very dramatic rise in the population of the Galilee, doubling or perhaps even tripling between the years 50 BCE and 50 CE (red).
But as to the cause of this rapid growth, he is less certain: was it Herod's program of urbanization, or the natural course of events in a relatively peaceful time?
Second, on the subject of urbanization and public architecture, it must be admitted that the considerable developments in Tiberius and Sepphoris still did not measure up to the much grander projects undertaken in Jerusalem or Caesarea. Still, the presence of these consumer cities would have pressed the limits of local food production, and the cost of Antipas' building projects still would have placed a considerable burden on local populations.
Third, it turns out that the actual evidence for monetization and international trade is lacking in early Roman Galilee. This may necessitate a major shift in our understanding of the economics of empire and its impact on local populations. Still, the very existence of Caesarea Maritima, a port city built by Herod on the Mediterranean coast, makes little sense if there was no export of goods from out of the Galilean hinterlands. This is evidence that needs more analysis.
Finally, the question of social stratification under Antipas can now be refined in view of recent studies of village architecture in Galilee. Most village dwellings turn out to be modest, but competent, and in the villages of Gamla and Yodefat one even finds more elaborate residences with multiple rooms and fresco. Thus, there is no evidence that village life dramatically deteriorated under Antipas, or that village life grew poorer while urban life grew in wealth. But the social stratification in villages might itself be a telling piece of evidence.
The evidence leaves us with some unanswered questions. To begin answering them, Reed suggested we look especially at demographic studies of Antiquity. His preliminary report raised many eyebrows.
"Mean life expectancy was somewhere between 20 and 30 years;" 50% of all people died before age 5; malaria, cholera, and dysentery ran unchecked, producing dramatic seasonal mortality; "we must imagine a much younger world;" mortality rates were much higher in densely crowded cities. Urbanization did not cause population growth, but rather resulted from it, and tended to act as a check on further growth. This casts the rapid population growth and the urbanization of the Galilee in a much different light, and gives new reasons why villagers might have viewed cities with a certain amount of suspicion (red). In any event, Reed's report indicates that our understanding of life on the ground in Jesus' Galilee is still a work in progress, and is likely to remain so for some time.
In its final session the Seminar turned its attention to the work of new Seminar Fellow Melanie JohnsonDeBaufre from Drew University.
In her Harvard dissertation, Jesus Among Her Children (Harvard, 2005), Johnson-DeBaufre argued that, in the initial stages of the Jesus movement - or better, the basileia (kingdom) movement, - Jesus may not have played such a pre-eminent role.
Could it be that scholars are 'encouraged by the tradition' to see Jesus as the focal point of every story, and his identity as messiah, Son of God, etc., as the central concern of every conflict?
The Seminar considered chapter 5 of Johnson-DeBaufre's book; it is a closely argued analysis of Q 11:14-26, the Beelzebul pericope. She argued that this tradition does not reflect an argument with enemies of the Jesus movement over the real status and identity of Jesus, but an appeal for solidarity among everyone who values the "communal vision of the basileia of God" (p. 132). Key in her argument is the interpretation of Q 11:19-20:
"And if I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore, they shall be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the basileia of God has come upon you."
Johnson-DeBaufre notices that verse 19 does not cast "your sons" in the role of enemies, but that it is an appeal to see Jesus as one of them, and in verse 20 to recognize that they are all on the side of God and the basileia of God.
The Seminar found this analysis persuasive, (red): "Q presents the exorcisms of Jesus alongside the activities of other Jewish exorcists in an effort to place them all on the side of God's basileia."
Further, "Q 11:14-26 presents a controversy story concerned with socio-political cohesion rather than asserting the uniqueness of Jesus" (red).
The Seminar was thus willing to follow Johnson DeBaufre in her analysis of this passage, but it was not yet ready to shift its view of Q as a whole.
On the proposition, "As a whole, Q presents Jesus as an authoritative but not unique representative of the basileia of God," the Seminar voted (gray) - a vote that probably reflects more the partial view of the case laid before us than the potential for the idea. And it is an important idea.
In the discussion James M. Robinson made a strong case for the endorsement of the idea. If it can be shown exegetically, we must entertain the possibility that in the early basileia movement, Jesus was one among many, and not necessarily the preeminent figure he would become in the tradition. One wonders what role the untimely 'martyrdom of Jesus' contributed to his preeminent status, as history has shown to be the case in so many other instances.
This wraps up the work of the Jesus Seminar on the Jesus movement in Galilee for now. In a final session the Fellows voted overwhelmingly to follow the trail blazed by Sean Freyne's address to the Seminar, and move our focus north, to Syria, and track the Jesus movement as it migrated into the villages of northern Galilee, southern Syria, and eventually the cities of Roman Syria itself: Damascus, Antioch, and Tyre and Sidon.
The next major question before the Seminar took the Fellows back to the subject of Q. In papers by Willi Braun and William Arnal, both authorities in the study of Q the Fellows were asked to consider the identity and social location one might reasonable posit for the author(s) of Q. Both Arnal and Braun are of the view that Q was the intellectual property of small-time village scribes who ostensibly inhabited the small villages of the Roman provinces - including the Galilee - handling menial clerical duties and routine public functions requiring a little literacy. Braun summarized the theory succinctly in this ballot item: "The Sayings Gospel Q is the product of a schooled intelligence and scribal compentencies." The Fellows voted red on this, and pink on Arnal's similar proposition calling the Q folk "low-level bureaucrats of some kind, probably scribal administrators." The argument rests among other things on the apparent fact that Q was a written document (and thus requires a literate author) penned in Greek (so, someone who could write in Greek) - all less than obvious if one spends much time in the conservative scholarship that aims to undermine the Q hypothesis. Arnal spent much of his lengthy paper dismantling these challenges, and the Fellows seemed to be persuaded (Q to be understood as a Greek literary document - red). Braun argued that a number of Q sayings - blessed are beggars (Q 6:20), e.g. - reflect the "experience of perception of displacement." (pink). But the Fellows also agreed with Arnal in rejecting the notion that the people responsible for Q were destitute (black). In my view this represents a riddle: would not displaced low-level scribes be destitute, or at least relatively so? In any event, the Seminar seems to have reached bedrock on one of the earliest groups of proto-Christians. The Fellows are willing to call the Q folk a school of displaced scribes.
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