The Meaning of Pistis Christou

N.T. Wrong has begun enumerating 100 reasons for the objective genitive translation of pistis Christou ("faith in Christ") over the subjective genitive ("faith of Christ"). I agree that the latter is faddish, but can understand to an extent why it's been embraced by even those who might normally be resistant to trends. For Paul there was a behavioral component to faith (though I wouldn't say an "ethical" one, at least not after I Corinthians), particularly in the way believers were to mystically imitate the savior. Believers die with Christ, to sin and the old epoch just as he did (Rom 6), following his example (as Jeffrey Gibson and David Seeley have argued, drawing on parallels of the noble death theme in Hellenistic Judaism and Greco-Roman literature), and when one is focusing on this aspect of Paul's thought, the subjective genitive -- the "faith of Christ" (or "faithfulness of Christ", or "fidelity of Christ"), whereby Christ can be seen as a model to be followed -- admittedly becomes alluring. But that some of Paul's thought is compatible with a subjective genitive reading of pistis Christou doesn't make the reading itself correct.

If the subjective genitive were really or primarily what Paul had in mind, we would expect him to have used (at least once, surely) Christ as the subject of the verb "believe"/"have faith", but as Thomas Tobin points out, that never happens in the 42 places the verb is found in his letters. But he did use Christ as the object of the verb in clear cases (Rom 9:33, 10:11). (Paul's Rhetoric in its Contexts, p 132). And if exegetes then desperately insist that the verb should be translated one way ("believe"/"trust"), the noun another ("faithfulness"), then they will have to contend with Francis Watson's demolition of that distinction, based on the evidence of Paul's scriptural interpretations in Rom 4:1-12 and 9:30-10:21 -- where noun and verb are seen to be interchangeable; "believing" and the response of "faith" one and the same (Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective, pp 241-244).

In one of the most careful considerations of Rom 3:21-26 I've come across, Stephen Finlan rightly notes how the subjective genitive makes for a clumsy reading of the passage (The Background and Content of Paul's Cultic Atonement Metaphors, pp 147-148). I think he's a bit too gracious in conceding Rom 4:16 to the opposition, where Paul speaks of Christians who "share the faith of Abraham". The faith of Abraham, for Paul, is faith in God/Christ; I don't see Rom 4:16 as lending itself so strongly to the subjective genitive as it's made out to. In any case, Finlan follows Dunn's lesson that

"The subjective reading tends to make all instances of 'faith' refer to Jesus' own faith, leaving us without a noun phrase to refer to the faith of believers, which is the main theme of [Galatians/Romans]... If the 'faithfulness of Jesus' is present at all, it is secondary to, and directed toward, believers' own faith-practice. After all, salvation depends on 'believing in your heart' (Rom 10:9), on 'hearing with faith' (Gal 3:5)...The 'faithfulness of Jesus' argument may be theologically interesting but cannot bear the exegetical weight it is being asked to carry." (p 148)

I'm wondering if the subjective genitive reading serves more oblique agendas. Richard Hays was, of course, the first to defend it so influentially (in his 1983 publication The Faithfulness of Christ), primarily on the basis of implied narratives in Paul's thought, which frankly I think he's way over-reading into the text. Hays later suggested (in a 1997 article, "Pistis and Pauline Theology: What is at Stake?") that objections to his proposal might be grounded in an implicit docetic Christology. But Philip Esler has countered that if anything, the problem is the other way around -- that the subjective genitive lends to proto-Arian views (Conflict and Identity in Romans, p 158). Scholars like Hays and Johnson have ironically embraced a reading that carries within it the seeds for a very un-Pauline reduction of Christ. If Jesus is more a model of faith than the object of it, then it's a short step to start making him a "buddy"/"brother" instead of the "Father" as Paul would have it.

In fact, I think any fear that the objective genitive implies docetism is as much a phantom menace as Tom Wright's phobia that literal eschatology is anti-creationist or "gnostically" dualistic. Or at least, these would have been phantom fears by ancient standards. Paul's belief that people had to put their faith in Christ didn't diminish his view of Christ's humanity -- any more than the biblical belief that the cosmos would be destroyed meant the material world was inherently bad (as Wright claims it would have). Perhaps faddish trends like the subjective genitive reading of pistis Christou, and non-literal eschatology, owe their ultimate origins to neo-orthodox apologetics: underscoring how "this-worldly" Christianity really is, in the face of modern charges to the contrary.

UPDATE: N.T. Wrong's 47th Reason needs underscoring: none of the Greek-speaking church fathers read the phrase as a subjective genitive. Mike Aubrey makes the same point.

UPDATE (II): N.T. Wrong's 94th reason is interesting. He says that proponents of the subjective genitive may be trading in a Lutheran Paul for a Calvinist Paul, if the "faith of Christ" isn't so much about changing one's belief as it is responding to a call already made by God. In other words, a hyper-Protestant fear that human belief is actually a form of works-righteousness could be operative here.

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100 Reasons Why Wrong is Right

I can't wait to see N.T. Wrong's 100 Reasons πίστις Χριστοῦ is an Objective Genitive. I favor the objective genitive reading myself, but couldn't come up with that many reasons if given 100 months to try.

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The Bifocal Vision of George Caird

According to George Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, p 256, the biblical writers

(1) believed literally that the world had had a beginning in the past and would have an end in the future

but also

(2) regularly used end-of-the-world language metaphorically to refer to that which they well knew was not the end of the world

Caird claimed that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible looked to the future with "bifocal vision" (p 258), with their near sight eyeballing a dramatic socio-political event soon to occur, with their far sight targeting the end of the cosmos. They imposed one image on the other so that their prophecies had a double-reference, an immediate historical one and a final eschatological one -- the former expressed through imagery pertaining to the latter. Thus the destruction of Babylon in Isa 13 stands as a model, or perhaps even begins, the final judgment to come over the entire world.

Caird's bifocal model applies more readily to some prophetic language than others, and it's not without problems. There are cases where I think pre-exilic apocalyptic language was intended more literally than he allows. But what's crucial to note is that Caird recognized in biblical thought a definite view of the literal end of the world. You can't say that for Tom Wright, who has run wild with Caird's ideas and denies the second half of Caird's (1) without ever making plain (at least in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series) that he departs from Caird on this particular point. Wright rejects the notion that the biblical authors believed the cosmos ("space-time universe", as he prefers) would ever be literally destroyed, reducing Caird's bifocal view of eschatology to pure socio-political upheaval -- not least on grounds because a literal destruction of the earth implies (to Wright) anti-creationism and a "gnostic" type of dualism on the part of God.

Edward Adams has critiqued Wright throughout his monograph The Stars Will Fall From Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophe in the New Testament and its World, which I'm now reading a second time for review. Adams' case against Wright is conclusive, and he's able to show repeatedly that a literal destruction of the cosmos didn't stand in tension with the biblical/intertestamental/NT view that creation was good, as Wright claims it would have. Adams also points out the difference between Caird and Wright in passing, and I was glad to see this since the two are sometimes uncritically lumped together. Caird's bifocal vision has become Wright's short-sighted one which truncates an ancient view in order to make it modernly world-friendly.

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A Fresh Look at Aslan

With the DVD release of Prince Caspian I started looking at Aslan with a fresh pair of eyes. For a serious review of the two films to date, see here (I did actually enjoy them). But for the not easily offended, here's an irreverent take on the Narnian Chronicles, with seven brand new titles.

(1) The Passion of Aslan (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). One critic claims that Mel Gibson's passion film is "the most a-religious Christ movie ever. There's one line snipped from the Sermon on the Mount, two sentences from the last supper, and that's about it for the preaching of Jesus. There's no character development, no background, just lots and lots of beatings. The movie provides little reason to sympathize with the main character, other than the fact that he's getting his ass kicked for about an hour." Adamson's film about Aslan isn't nearly as graphic and hard-hitting, but it's Gibson-for-kiddies nonetheless. Narnia is less a place for gospel wisdom and more for crusading warfare, and as in Mel's blockbuster, viewers have little reason to sympathize with the lion-king as he's getting ass-kicked, mocked, and shorn, other than because he saved an undeserving snot from the White Witch (Edmund) -- and, of course, because he's an adorably cute giant kitty.

(2) Kicking Almighty Aslan (Prince Caspian). The Narnians kick some serious almighty ass in this film -- and get their asses kicked in turn -- and, well, that's pretty much all there is to the story. To be fair, they don't have much choice since Aslan refuses to help them in any way, let alone confirm his existence. Truth be told, he doesn't seem to care a whit about what happens to his poor subjects -- justifying his indifference on the lame ground that "nothing happens the same way twice" -- appearing only at the tail end to help mop up the defeated Telmarines and congratulate the Narnians. Mountains of bloodshed could have been avoided if his majesty had deigned to show up and unleash a flood before swords were drawn, but I suppose that would defeat the purpose of so much fun, righteous, and holy ass-kicking.

(3) No One Likes a Smart-Aslan (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). Eustace Scrubb may be the most irritating smart-ass in western literature, but I don't think the poor kid deserved to be raped for it. Being molested by Aslan on the dragon's island is portrayed as his salvation, of course, but any dimwit can tell what's really going on. The lion tells Eustace to undress and then manipulates him into agreeing to be horribly violated: repeatedly clawed and torn so deeply that he thinks his heart is going to burst. Sure, he's cured of being an insufferable snot -- he's too damn terrified to be bratty anymore -- but what kind of repressed baggage will he carry around now? Curiously, for the briefest of moments at the end of story, Aslan appears as a lamb instead of a lion, for once accurately representing the gospel image of a non-violent savior -- and ironically, a more fitting image for a pedophile who comes on to kids as a benign sweetie-pie.

(4) Sitting on His Aslan (The Silver Chair). The title works on two levels -- the literal, with Prince Rilian strapped on his ass in the silver chair, and the more important metaphorical: Aslan sitting on his royal feline ass, doing absolutely nothing useful or proactive to help the kids rescue the prince (other than through cryptic riddles) or aid the Narnians against the army of the Emerald Witch. It may be objected that Aslan isn't terribly proactive in any of the books after the first (and that's indeed true), but in this story his Olympian laziness hits an all-time high. Even in Prince Caspian -- when everyone was about to give up on him -- he at least showed up at the end to help mop up the Telmarines. By now his sense of seniority is so inflated that he can't be bothered to lift a paw or claw to help anyone (other than to revive an aged Caspian who should be left to dying). Hail his majesty's ass indeed.

(5) A Horse's Aslan (The Horse and His Boy). This is about a boy who escapes to Narnia on the ass of a horse, but Aslan is the real horse's ass of the story -- even an asshole. I remember being stunned as a kid when he mauled Aravis, raking his claws down her poor back, for her past treatment of a slave. Matching cruelty, "an eye for an eye", wasn't exactly my idea of enlightened thinking even when I was young and ignorant.

(6) Going Aslan-Backwards in Time (The Magician's Nephew). The beauty to fantasy chronicles is they can be written ass-backwards, lending themselves wonderfully to prequels, and in this one Aslan is self-adulating as he always will be, setting himself up to be glorified at the dawn of time, orchestrating the creation of Narnia with completely ass-backwards scheming. He allows Jadis (the future White Witch) to escape after assaulting him -- and thus to achieve immortality by eating the forbidden fruit, whilst at the same time tempting Digory to do the same -- instead of just killing the bitch as she richly deserves and sparing future Narnians a lot of misery.

(7) An Aslan of Himself (The Last Battle). If Aslan is always in control of things as we're led to believe, then he makes a complete and utter ass of himself in the final story. An ape (Narnia's anti-Christ) dresses up a donkey as the lion-savior, and almost everyone is fooled by the disguise. The ape-ass duo set in motion enough evil and deception to give (the real) Aslan his long-awaited excuse to rain down judgment and throw unfaithful Narnians into the apocalyptic incinerator. After all, everyone now -- including the lion-king himself -- has fulfilled Paul's vision of becoming asses and fools for sake of the kingdom (II Cor 11-12).

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Augustine and the Jews

Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews apparently demonstrates that Augustine had become Jewish friendly by the time he was writing Confessions. Jim Davila calls attention to her interview with Time:

"Usually when ancient orthodox Christians said terrible things about heretics, they found even worse things to say about Jews. Until 395, Augustine had not been much different, but here he was, writing about one of the flashiest heresies of his time, and marshaling as arguments unbelievably positive things about Jews. As I read further, my scalp tingled. I had been working on Augustine for 20 years and I'd never seen anything like this before. Not only could I establish that he had changed his position, but I could locate this shift in his thinking very precisely, to the four-year period when he also wrote his monumental Confessions...

"In a fairly dark history of Christian-Jewish relations, his theology turns out to be one of very few bright lights. All of these ancient Christian-Jewish interactions are more complex and interesting than are the received ideas about them. Our lives are still shaped by this history; so it's important to get it right. And if modern Jews and Christians, attempting interfaith dialogue, find in Augustine a precedent for common ground, that would make me really happy. It would be an unintended consequence of my book. But a good one."

It's on my reading list.

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Nanos, Chartrand-Burke, and DeConick

I don't usually do "around the blogosphere" posts, but here's a trio of papers/discussions worth checking out.

(1) Mark Nanos has a new article up on his website, "The Myth of the 'Law-Free' Paul Standing Between Christians and Jews", continuing his campaign for a Torah-observant Paul. Mark's papers are always a delight to read, and especially challenging to someone like me who thinks Paul had become anti-nomian after I Corinthians.

(2) Tony Chartrand-Burke has some things to say about the Secret Mark session at SBL, declaring that he's "pleased to remain agnostic in the debate" (not good), and rather nonplussed by Carlson and Jeffery who "are not biblical scholars", and whose "readers have been convinced by them, likely because their arguments merely confirmed in their minds what they hoped would be the case and not because the readers had sufficient knowledge of the contents of the text, nor of previous scholarship on it to make an informed decision." That's an awful half-truth, as I pointed out under the reaction of Mark Goodacre, who rightly underscores the scholarly character of debunking Secret Mark, even if Carlson and Jeffery weren't/aren't professionals in the field.

(3) April DeConick has followed up on the dating session at SBL, and Mark Goodacre responded to this as well. April's most striking point is the urge for memory experiments and more familiarity with cognitive-psychology literature. "Because human memory is a factor in the transmission of materials in rhetorical environments, it behooves us to know how the human memory works and how its effects might be reflected in the various versions of sayings of Jesus that we find in the literature." She says she might post more on this subject, and I look forward to it.

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Biblical Studies Carnival XXXVI

The thirty-sixth Biblical Studies Carnival is up on Jim West's blog.

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SBL Boston

Five days in Boston went fast. Between running around downtown on Thursday and Friday -- and was it cold last week -- and attending papers/receptions from Saturday to Monday, it was over and done almost as soon as it began. If my employer could only pay for these trips, I'd go to SBL every year!

It was nice to meet folks who for years I've known through online interactions, though I didn't meet quite as many people as I'd intended. I won't report on everything I did/heard/saw, just the highlights.

Saturday opened with a great session on honor and shame, revisiting the question with respect to women. Zeba Crook was the most provocative speaker (he was introduced by Dietmar Neufeld as a "rebel", which tickled me), calling for a refinement of Malina's model which maintains that challenge-ripostes could not take place between social unequals and that women didn't challenge men publicly. Citing various sources (Pliny the Younger, ancient Egyptian letters), Crook finds enough evidence that wives could compete for honor with men and be awarded it. He suggested that instead of sweeping assumptions about honor-shame cultures, we should focus on the "public court of reputation", since that court holds all the power and is wildly unpredictable. Moreover: "The public court of reputation does not have to account for it decisions [in favor of women]. It, ironically, is a tyranny, not a democracy." The examples of Thecla challenging Alexander (Acts of Paul) and the Syrophoenician women outwitting Jesus (Mk 7:24-30/Mt 15:21-28), according to Crook, show that the public court of reputation was fickle across the Meditteranean, and that women's voices weren't muted to the degree commonly assumed. Margaret McDonald, one of the respondents, while agreeing that Malina's model is perhaps too absolute, nevertheless insisted that the public court of reputation was less fickle, more predictable and consistently patriarchal than Crook suggests. I tend to agree with McDonald (and regard the counterexamples cited by Crook as more exceptional), though I appreciate Crook's stress on the public court of reputation. He noted in passing that this focus allows us to consider subcultures that are not honor-shame per se, like sports and the military, which is something I've blogged about before when considering, for instance, the evidence mentioned by Bob Sutton for more "assholes" (belligerent macho types) in the southern United States than in the north.

At noon I had a pleasant lunch with Dale Allison at Legal Sea Foods (this would be a favorite haunt of mine if there were one in Nashua) and then it was off to the book exhibit. I wisely refrained from buying every sixth book I put my hands on (I can usually get discounts when I order through my library), but it was hard to stifle impulses.

Later that day in the synoptic gospels section, Jeffrey Gibson (an excellent speaker) gave a presentation on the "Lord's Prayer", arguing against the eschatological/apocalyptic crowd, showing with enviable ease that whatever the prayer's matrix, it wasn't the liturgy of first-century synagogues. Apparently no data supports the idea of a synagogue in Nazareth, nor that synagogues were places of prayer (only Torah reading and instruction), and that Judeans didn't feel compelled to pray in a uniform way prior to the temple's destruction. Gibson argues (as he has before) that the real matrix of the canonical "Lord's Prayer" is a fear that the disciples will become members of "this generation" -- a plea for the disciples to remain God's loyal subjects. It's a plausible enough suggestion. Though I tend to see apocalypticism wherever I look in the synoptics, I also recognize that Jesus (whether the historical or canonical) wasn't a hyper-apocalyptic machine. In some places the apocalypse is in focus; in others it's in the background (as in some of the parables). The "Lord's Prayer" could cohere with an apocalyptic message without being apocalyptic itself.

In the same session James McGrath gave a paper on the "vanished" ending of Mark, suggesting that the ending of John's and Peter's gospels may resemble something like Mark's original ending. Around this time I was going in and out of the room trying to catch bits of another session going on down the hall -- the dating of sources for early Christianity -- with speakers Mark Goodacre, April DeConick, Simon Gathercole, and Stephen Patterson. (Mark had blogged his ideas in advance.) There was a heavy turnout for that session in a room that couldn't have been smaller. Listeners were crowded outside the doors, and one could hardly hear what was going on inside. Perhaps April will recap some of her response to Mark on her blog.

On Sunday I moved around like a madman trying to catch papers in different sessions, never planting myself for too long. I heard a bit about ethnicity and Judean identity in the Persian period (from Gary Knoppers and Dalit Rom-Shiloni), before moving on to a second round of the book exhibit, then catching Mark Nanos' fine delivery of his paper on "Gentile dogs" in Philip 3 (which he had posted a while back and I blogged about here), then going downstairs a level to get a bit of the "John, Jesus, and History" group (many presenters there, including Richard Bauckham and Amy-Jill Levine), then aiming to catch Jim Davila's paper on Revelation (though he, like Goodacre and DeConick a day earlier, got stuck in one of those infernally small "Beacon" rooms at the Sheraton, and people were listening from the hallway). Later in the day I attended Chris Heard's witty debunking of The Exodus DeCoded, and I have to commend Chris for having the patience to address idiocy (as he has done in the past on his blog) instead of, as I prefer, just ignoring it. As Eric Myers (the opening speaker before Heard) stressed, there needs to be a more coordinated effort on the part of scholars to combat sensationalist claims in the media. Sensationalists have influence, after all, and do a lot of damage. I then skipped over (in spite of wanting to stay and meet Chris) to catch some of the Social Scientific Criticism of the NT section.

I capped off Sunday evening at the Duke reception, and got the surprise of seeing E. P. Sanders honored with a Festschrift (after he was toasted, he declared humorously that he doesn't even like Festschrifts). Chris Weimer managed to get his photo taken with the man, and I finally got to gab at length with Mark Goodacre in the flesh. I believe Doctor Who slipped into our conversation here and there. Weimer promises to come back at me again on the Jew/Judean issue, and we even (jokingly?) suggested a future SBL session with him as a respondent to my crusade for a change in nomenclature.

Monday morning involved a late breakfast and packing for noon checkout, so I didn't get to the morning session I'd intended to see -- "The Bible as a Construct of Scholarship", with prolific speakers like Hector Avalos, Philip Davies, and Zeba Crook. The Sheraton held my luggage long enough so that I could attend the early afternoon session on Secret Mark, however (where I got to meet Andrew Criddle). Birger Pearson spoke first, lamenting how used and abused he felt for having endorsed the authenticity of Secret Mark until he read Carlson and Jeffrey's books. Stephen Carlson went next, and his paper was flawless (in both content and delivery), envisioning a future in which a wiser academy won't be taken in by obvious hoaxes. The third speaker, Allan Pantuck, called into question Carlson's claim (in Gospel Hoax) that Smith was angry at having been denied tenure at Brown (showcasing correspondences to, from, and about Smith), but concluded cautiously. I would have liked to stay for the second half -- speakers Scott Brown, Charles Hedrick, and Bart Ehrman -- but coffee going through me (and a ride back to Nashua) called me away.

It all amounted to fun time and conversation, and I did a pretty good job of heeding Mark Goodacre's eight-point summary on how to enjoy the SBL experience in its entirety. And unlike Stephen Carlson, I didn't burn the candle at both ends, and so didn't get too wiped out!

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Paul, Jewish Tradition, Shema

Thanks to Mark Nanos for calling my attention to his recently posted "Paul and the Jewish Tradition", arguing for a very Jewish apostle steeped in the ideology of the Shema. It's vintage Nanos, portraying a different Paul from the one seen on this blog -- a faithful Jewish reformer alongside the other apostles, whose only rub with wider Judaism was the apocalyptic timetable which allowed for the early admission of uncircumcised Gentiles. (My big difference with Nanos comes at the point of 49 CE, where I see the other apostles beginning to insist otherwise, pushing Paul in more sectarian direction.) Mark presented the paper at Villanova, and it will eventually be revised and published in a Festschrift for Murphy-O'Connor and Fitzmyer. From the paper:

"I submit that the Shema of Israel is the central conviction of Paul's theology. He often refers to God's oneness in critical points in arguments. It functions theologically and polemically. But he does not really explain the Shema as much as appeal to it, suggesting that for Paul the concept of God's oneness functions at the ideological level. Its explanatory power is assumed to be self-evident... That would not work for those unfamiliar with its propositional bases, or importance in Jewish communal life and liturgy... While most interpreters of Paul and most discussions of a topic like 'Paul and the Jewish tradition' would be concerned to show how Paul emerged from the Judaism of his time, they would do so from a conceptual framework in which Paul is no longer a representative of Judaism, but of a new religion, Christianity. Instead I suggest that Paul practiced Judaism, and his groups represented a Jewish coalition upholding that the end of the age had dawned... He was a reformer, involved in the restoration of Israel, and the gathering of the nations initiated thereby." (pp 4-5)

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Goodacre's Dating Game

You have to keep an eye on Mark Goodacre. He's been dating again, in preparation for his SBL paper (with April DeConick as respondent). Check out his series so far:

(I) Preliminary Remarks
(II) Paul's Letters
(III) Synoptic Gospels (Order of)
(IV) John's Gospel
(V) Mark's Gospel
(VI) Mark's Gospel (continued)
(VII) Matthew and Luke's Gospels
(VIII) John and Thomas' Gospels

It should be a good discussion. Simon Gathercole, Stephen Patterson, and John Kloppenborg will be involved in the session as well.

UPDATE: Mark's SBL paper is now available here.

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Biblioblog Top 50

It looks like N.T. Wrong will be doing a monthly Biblioblog Top 50 List based on numbers of unique visitors. This month The Busybody crawls in at Five-Oh.

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Biblical Studies Carnival XXXV

The thirty-fifth Biblical Studies Carnival is up on Duane Smith's Abnormal Interests.

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Apparently I'm Liberal

N.T. Wrong calls me a "liberal" biblioblogger, which I suppose is accurate enough. I tend to be moderately liberal in most areas of my life. Check out his list of active bloggers, each of whom he labels "very conservative", "fairly conservative", "liberal", or "very liberal".

As a blogger said to me last night, Jim Davila being labelled "very liberal" is puzzling. (I would have said "liberal".) Nor do I understand why Mark Goodacre and Stephen Carlson are considered "fairly conservative". They're puzzle solvers more than anything. Is there really anything "conservative" about Q skepticism without Matthean priority, or recognizing Secret Mark as a hoax, or dating Galatians after I Corinthians? They don't talk politics on their blogs, so that can't be that issue.

Most others whose blogs I read seem right. Michael Bird is pegged as "very conservative", James Crossley "very liberal"; Chris Heard and Tyler Williams are each "fairly conservative"; April DeConick "very liberal"; Chris Weimer "liberal", though he team blogs with others who are "fairly conservative"; etc. It's an interesting exercise.

UPDATE: N.T. Wrong clarifies his labels.

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How Did Christianity Begin?

In this book we find Bird and Crossley in fine form, trading shots over the inadequacies of the other's account of Christian origins, never budging, never giving in when they disagree, but mercifully engaging instead of talking past each other. It's a sharp and fun debate, and I honestly can't say who wins. Two books like this were published back in '99, but they haven't aged well. Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? (Craig vs. Crossan), and The Meaning of Jesus (Wright vs. Borg), each featured an evangelical debating with a liberal Christian, but seemed chiefly concerned with interfaith dialogue. Bird and Crossley come off more historically disciplined, and the latter is secular, having no interest in Jesus as a confessional figure at all. This is where the rubber meets the road.

The authors take turns going first and responding to the other's reply across five chapters:

1. The Historical Jesus: Crossley -- Bird -- Crossley
2. The Resurrection: Bird -- Crossley -- Bird
3. The Apostle Paul: Crossley -- Bird -- Crossley
4. The Gospels: Bird -- Crossley -- Bird
5. Earliest Christianity: Crossley -- Bird -- Crossley

Crossley has the advantage of starting and ending strong -- speaking first and last in the first and last chapters, where he's at his best -- and so on whole he may seem more impressive. But Bird comes off better in the sections on Paul and the gospels, and he ties evenly with Crossley in the resurrection chapter. It's a bit like watching a boxing match between friends who get floored repeatedly, but are never down for the count. Let's see how they do.

Front and Back: Jesus and Earliest Christianity (Chapters 1 and 5)

Crossley is the alpha and omega of the book, providing a reliable guide to the historical Jesus and how Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire. He begins with the wry observation that he's sometimes mistaken for a quasi-evangelical on account of the large amount of (synoptic) gospel testimony he thinks is traceable to Jesus. My own starting assumptions are the same as his:

"I think that there is a lot of useful historical information about Jesus' life and teaching that can be gleaned from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (but not John)... I believe the following: famous terms for Jesus such as 'son of man' and 'son of God' really were being used by or of Jesus when he was alive; Jesus really did practice healing and exorcism; and Jesus really did predict his imminent death and probably thought it had some important atoning function." (p 1)

Crossley grounds all of this in Judaism, showing that there's nothing necessarily "Christian" about any of this. One can hardly argue with his general sketch: Jesus was conceived and born like any other human being (Crossley thinks his father was Joseph; I suspect he was illegitimate, but no matter). His prophetic career was driven and shaped by social upheaval in Galilee; he condemned the rich for no other reason than being rich, and promised a reversal of fortune for the poor. He forecast God's coming kingdom, but was wrong about that expectation. He was a successful exorcist-healer. He was executed by Jerusalem authorities for raising hell in the temple during a passover festival. He died a martyr, and like other martyrs his death was understood to have atoning value. Right on.

The only weakness is Crossley's claim that Jesus was a completely law-abiding Jew, based on an overwrought distinction between "biblical laws as explicitly stated in the bible" and "the interpretation or expansion of biblical law to new situations" (p 6). While I agree that Jesus was more law-observant than many confessional portraits suggest, "Torah" and "Torah-interpretation" can't always be kept so neatly distinct. But more on this when we get to the section on the gospels (chapter 4).

Bird's take is transparently confessional, going so far as to defend the virgin birth, that Jesus thought he was divine, and that he wasn't wrong about the kingdom's timetable. Crossley's rejoinder on all these points is right on the money, and as he notes, Bird's evangelical view makes him more or less obligated to argue this stuff. I was getting a very bad feeling for Bird in this chapter, but thankfully he gets better as the book goes on.

Jumping to the end, where Crossley and Bird give alternative accounts of Christianity's ultimate success, I think the former again shows more argumentative strength. Believers like to hold up what's theologically distinctive and appealing, but religions usually triumph for more mundane reasons, even accidentally. The west would have probably become Islamic if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Tours in 732 (think how different the world would be today if a very minor battle had gone the other way). Sociological accounts of Christian origins may not be the most exciting things to read about, but Crossley is right that "Bird's near-complete reliance on ideas and individual influence is odd and outdated" (p 166).

I do agree with Bird that Christian monotheism began as early as Paul and probably before (on which see below), but Crossley is right that it wasn't Jewish friendly (in my view it was a radical if understandable mutation) but found ready welcome in the Gentile world. I also think Crossley, following Casey, is at least persuasive about why Jesus was only later understood to be God in the strongest and most explicit sense: "changing social situations and the perception of socio-ethnic alienation from the Jewish community, just like the conflicts underlying John's gospel" (p 148), on top of a pagan milieu where monotheism was fluid and had a long tradition within the development of agrarian empires. If Judaism had been more missionary and less ethnic/kinship-oriented (as Crossley suggests, p 147), it could well have triumphed over the pagans before (and instead of) Christianity. In short, there was nothing inevitable about Christianity's triumph owing to theological beliefs.

In Between: Paul and the Gospel Writers (Chapters 3 and 4)

If Crossley is the alpha and omega, Bird is the mu and nu (doesn't sound flattering, I know), nailing some important ideas that came in-between Jesus and the second century. I should preface this by admitting I don't agree with Bird's overall take on Paul -- I think the apostle was anti-nomian (despite a few lame protests to the contrary in Romans), while Bird warms to Wrightian ideas about covenant-climaxes, continuity with the OT, and that the law really "hasn't been done away with" (p 91). That aside, Bird is on top of his game in discussing two crucial topics: Paul's Christology and his reason for persecuting early Christians.

Against Crossley who sees an exalted but not divine Jesus in Paul's letters, Bird sees the Jewish God himself. I agree that passages like I Cor 8:6 go beyond portraying Jesus as an exalted being, and ditto with Philip 2:6-11, where Jesus is not only exalted but worshipped as the Lord of all creation (which Bird rightly parallels with Isa 45:23). This isn't to say Paul never waxed ambiguous (or perhaps even uncomfortable) (in I Cor 15 he takes pains to subject the Son to the Father), but for him, Jesus was somehow YHWH. Not a Chalcedonian, granted, but the fifth-century Hellenized deity was easily derived from Paul's (radically mutated) Jewish personalized understanding of God.

I suspect first-century Judaism was ripe for a radical move like this on account of increased personifications. "Who God was" mattered more than "what he was", says Bauckham; and Witherington has chronicled the development of Wisdom incarnate in various ways (through texts like Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon). It was a short step to start meshing the divine and human in creative ways. The "Big Bang" theory of early high Christology (e.g. Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and Philip Esler) is to be preferred over the gradual evolution theory (e.g. James Dunn, Maurice Casey, and Marinus De Jong). While I agree with Crossley that we don't get an explicit equation between Jesus and God until John's gospel, it's implied nonetheless in Paul's letters and to a lesser degree the synoptics.

Overblown Christology and wacky messianic beliefs, however, doubtfully account for why the early Christians were persecuted so zealously. I'm confident Bird is right that the catalyst for Saul going berserk was the acceptance of Gentiles without requiring circumcision, or in other words, indiscriminate table fellowship (Crossley suggests it was only an "interpretation" of the law calling forth such zeal, to which Bird counters on p 93). Saul's zeal must have been aimed against those who were visibly threatening the integrity of Judaism with outrageous behavior -- not just professing abstract belief in wacky ideas or splitting legal hairs. Christianity was likely admitting uncircumcised Gentiles (few as they were) right from the get-go -- and only around 49 were James and Peter beginning to insist otherwise, precisely so they could survive more comfortably in a mainstreamed movement. As Paula Fredriksen explains, millenarian movements have a short half-life by necessity, and the pillars' move was an entirely understandable one. Paul's formula may have been destined to prevail in the Diaspora, but not Judea. James was pulling back on a position originally shared with Paul (indiscriminate table fellowship between circumcised and uncircumcised), to fend off threats from any more Sauls who were ready to pounce.

That was the issue at Antioch, I believe, which I've written about before (see here, for instance), and I agree with every one of Bird's objections to Crossley (p 94). Antioch was about circumcision (per Esler, Nanos, Watson), not food laws, which is why it's relevant in the context of Galatians. Paul's adversaries at Antioch weren't the "food faction", but the "circumcision faction". The issue at Antioch wasn't about what was eaten, but with whom it was eaten. It's exactly what Paul had found so offensive as a Pharisee.

When they turn to the gospels, Bird and Crossley are again focused on the question of Jesus' divinity and the Torah, and I should address Crossley's love-affair with a "completely law-abiding Jesus/Markan Jesus". As mentioned above, he bases his view on an overplayed distinction between biblical laws and their interpretation/expansion. When, save in trivial cases, does the former not involve the latter? Whether or not one is violating the First Amendment (freedom of speech), or Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), is no more self-evident to our nation of Americans today than whether or not one was violating the sabbath or the duty to honor one's parents in antiquity. The question is whether or not Jesus was perceived as violating the Torah, which he was. And as William Herzog emphasizes, it's always a question of whose Torah we're talking about: the Torah of the prophets? of the priests and scribes? of Galilean peasants? etc. Bird says as much in his rejoinder to Crossley:

"Whose standard of law-observance is [Crossley] talking about? Does he mean the sectarians from Qumran? Does he mean the Pharisees (if so, which school of the Pharisees: Gamiliel or Shammai)? Does he mean the radical allegorical interpreters that Philo refers to in Alexandria? While there was diversity of Law-observance and legal interpretation within Judaism, that does not mean that each group thought that each other's interpretation was legitimate and fitted comfortably within the boundaries of a common Judaism. The polemics that Jewish groups vented against each other would suggest otherwise... Thus it is one thing to say that the Gospels make sense as part of intra-Jewish debates about the Torah, but it is quite another thing to suggest that the view of the Torah espoused within the Church during the earliest decades of its existence were regarded by others (outsiders or insiders) as exclusively Law-observant. Did the Pharisees who debated with Jesus about hand-washing and purity laws think he was Law-observant?... Paul's belief that Gentiles do not have to be circumcised has parallels in certain pockets of the Jewish Diaspora. Did that stop others from accusing him of being anti-nomian? Of course not! If early Christianity was so Law-observant in the 'Jewish' sense that Crossley argues for, then why was James the Just put to death on the charge of being a Law-breaker?" (p 133)

Jesus himself may have believed he was fulfilling the Torah (everyone interprets their sacred traditions properly in their own minds, don't they?), but that's not the end of the story -- anymore than it was for Paul when he claimed his gospel fell in line with the calling of the prophets. His opponents easily denied his claims: what he actually taught was apostacy. Paul, of course, went beyond Jesus and explicitly dethroned the law (and I think he was largely anti-nomian in his own mind), but the analogy regarding perception still holds. If Crossley wants to insist that Jesus was "completely Torah-observant" from Jesus' own perspective -- in the same way that other Jews who found wiggle room for their questionable interpretations were -- then fine. But many would agree with that anyway.

Jesus' Body (Chapter 2)

Crossley is right about the unhistoricity of the resurrection (as if this should need spelling out in a work of history), and Bird is right about the historicity of the empty tomb. Crossley insists that visions alone gave rise to the resurrection belief, based particularly on the account of II Maccabees 7. But as Bird points out (p 68), that's not an example, because the resurrection is seen as corporate and happening at the end of history -- as is every understanding of the resurrection we know of. There was no precedent in Judaism for a single person being raised before the apocalypse, and so (in light of the fact that Jesus' martyrdom wasn't seen as a failure), based on visions alone, the disciples would have concluded that Jesus was a ghost or apparition, or that his spirit had been exalted into heaven. Visions coupled with an empty tomb, on the other hand, could have plausibly caused the disciples to revise their expectations. Which they did.

I've written too many blogposts about the empty tomb to count, but Dale Allison's arguments against and for its historicity are worth revisiting. He plays devil's advocate for both sides, because there are indeed many arguments from both sides which fail to carry weight. For instance, Bird appeals to Paul in arguing for the empty tomb (p 41), but Paul can be used either way. In listening to someone like William Lane Craig a novice could get the impression that a case for the empty tomb is so conclusive it's foolish to question it, but that's ridiculous. Arguments for the empty tomb slightly eclipse those against it on account of their concrete and evidential nature. As Allison says:

"Of our two options -- that a tomb was in fact unoccupied or that a belief in the resurrection imagined it unoccupied -- the former, as I read the evidence, is the slightly stronger possibility. The best two arguments against the tradition -- the ability of the early Christians to create fictions and the existence of numerous legends about missing bodies -- while certainly weighty, remain nonetheless hypothetical and suggestive, whereas the best two arguments for the tradition are concrete and evidential." (Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, pp 331-332)

The concrete and evidential arguments are the testimony of the women, and the simple fact that the disciples had no reason in the world to invent a premature resurrection (without an empty tomb prodding them in that direction). People create fictions in order to cope with failures and broken dreams, but in an apocalyptic context Jesus' execution wasn't seen that way. His crucifixion would have demoralized the disciples but met their expectations just the same. Jesus promised there would be suffering and death in the tribulation period, and it's a sure bet he foreshadowed his own. His followers would have gone on hoping for the apocalypse, at which point they (and he) would have been resurrected. As Bird notes, citing Allison, "the disciples were emotionally down but not theologically out" (p 45). It was the empty tomb (in conjunction with visions) that caused them to conclude Jesus was raised prematurely.

When Bird writes that any answer to the question of how Christianity began "must include the notion that God raised Jesus from the dead" (p 48), he could be taken more seriously by non-evangelicals if he just qualified it with the word "belief". The belief that God raised Jesus from the dead was important, but historians don't put two-and-two together the way the disciples did. "Belief," as Crossley says, "does not prove anything happened, anymore than lots of people believing in God proves God exists." (p 58) We'll never know why Jesus' body vanished -- though grave robbing was common enough, especially the corpses of holy/crucified men -- but we don't resort to faith confession to answer historical questions.

Conclusion

How Did Christianity Begin? is a debate to learn from, because in the end there's no clear place to lay your allegiance. Neither Crossley nor Bird explain Christian origins in a way that completely satisfies, but that's how it should be. They are each persuasive about a good deal, but about different things, and ultimately about evenly matched. I'm wondering if their discussion indicates that secular historians have an edge on the historical Jesus, evangelicals on the confessional writings of the NT. I seriously doubt it, but that seems to be how it played out in this case.

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Jesus Spawned by Parthenogenesis? (Michael Bird)

Just yesterday I posted a list of my favorite songs, one of which (Nemesis by Shriekback) gets considerable mileage out of the word "parthenogenesis". It's not often we get to hear this term used anywhere, let alone in a rock song. But also just yesterday I received my copy of Bird and Crossley's How Did Christianity Begin?, in which Bird manages to use the word on page 21, almost as if to gratify my personal thrill for coincidence. Bird writes, in defense of Jesus' virgin birth:

"What we can say for certain is that Jesus' paternity was enigmatic from the start. That is the fact that Crossley must explain and yet he does not attempt to do so other than say that historians would consider the birth accounts 'imaginative storytelling'... All I can say is that in early 2007 it was reported in the news that a female Komodo dragon named Flora conceived through parthenogenesis (i.e. reproduction without the aid of a male). I cannot help but think that if a Komodo dragon can do it, why not God?" (p 21)

Even in my richest fantasies as a devil's advocate for evangelicals, I wouldn't dream of appealing to the phenomenon of parthenogenesis (which occurs in certain plants, insects, and about 70 vertebrate species -- mostly snakes and lizards, like our Komodo dragon) to imply that a human virgin birth isn't so far-fetched. Really, Michael. I agree that Jesus' paternity is problematic, but that's easily enough accounted for by illegitimacy. (And yes, many human beings have been verifiably illegitimate.)

Well, back to the book. I'm enjoying it so far and will eventually have a review up. It turns out that Bird and Crossley each succeed in scoring zingers against each other (the above citation not being an example). Of the three chapters I've read, Crossley has the better case in chapter one (the historical Jesus), Bird and Crossley split the victory in chapter two (the resurrection) -- Bird for a persuasive case for the historicity of the empty tomb, Crossley for the unhistoricity of the resurrection -- and I'm honestly not sure who impresses more in chapter three (the apostle Paul), though I agree more with Bird about particulars, like the Antioch incident and the reasons why Paul persecuted the church. These guys are good debaters.

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Waiting for the Stars to Fall

Lorenzo DiTommaso has an RBL review of The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophe in the New Testament and Its World, by Edward Adams. Wright fans who doubt the conclusive evidence for a literal belief in the end of the world by the time of Jesus really need to read this book. It surveys both Jewish and classical literature, and even ends on a suggestion that environmental responsibility and apocalypticism aren't necessarily incompatible. I've been meaning to review it myself but have been neglecting the blog lately (and reading too much high-brow literary fiction instead).

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Why Literature Matters

Last year a book called The Top Ten presented lists of favorite literary works from 125 popular authors -- Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Tom Perrotta, Anita Shreve, to name a few. Classics and modern fiction alike fell on these lists, and when all 125 were "averaged", the ultimate top-10 list looked as follows, with Tolstoy's adulterous epic claiming the #1 slot.

1. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
6. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch, George Eliot

These were the high-brow winners, but there were many -- hundreds -- of titles appearing on one list but no others, as various as Ian McEwen's Atonement, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. (For examples of individual lists scroll towards the bottom of The Top Ten Blog.) That Anna Karenina came out as the best book of all time surprised me a bit, but that's probably just because I never got around to reading it. This month I finally did, and it left enough impact on me to blog my own pick list -- I'm going to be ambitious enough to try a top-20 -- on which Karenina certainly finds a home.

But before my list, it's worth reflecting on what qualifies as literature. "Literature" is usually understood to be writing which illuminates, surprises, and delights in a lasting and transcendent way. I used to think a lot of fiction could be considered literary since the question is so subjective. Glenn Arbery's Why Literature Matters forced me to grapple with the question more seriously. How exactly do we classify literature? The classics are a given, but modern works are endlessly debated.

Consider Tom Wolfe and Toni Morrison, each of whose novels have been hailed as literary masterpieces. Arbery thinks Morrison deserves the praise, but not Wolfe. Wolfe may be a good satirist, but that makes A Man in Full more journalistic than literary. Literature, says Arbery, has to apprehend reality on a level deeper than current politics and social issues, so that when those issues fade, the work still resonates as powerfully.

Satire can be literary (think Flannery O'Connor), but it needs to do more than "expose the follies of things" and register impatience with the world. Tom Perrotta's Little Children, for instance, is in my opinion a brilliant satire on upper-middle class suburbia, but more than that. It works on multiple levels as literature should: characters are defined by their relationship to their children, while they, in turn, remain children on the inside -- even as parents -- as they shun responsibilities and live as in a dream. They reflect a pathos particular to American suburbians, but whose dark emotions and desires take us beyond the surface-value level, and who are capable of surprising us despite how we peg them.

The world of A Man in Full, by contrast, remains flattened and lower-dimensional throughout, never reaching for the more "permanent things" in human experience. "Tom Wolfe's novels are placards of simplicity," says James Wood. "His characters only feel one emotion at a time; their inner lives are like jingles for the self. Everyone is scrawled with the same inner graffiti. As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe's characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period, or their Sad Period. But they never have them at the same time." (The New Republic, 12/14/98, pp 37,41). On top of that, his prose is almost completely devoid of aesthetic appeal. As Arbery puts it:

"I remember hearing a radio story about the way that cocaine arouses pleasure and well-being by activating L-dopa in the brain, but uses up the brain's natural chemicals to such an extent that, without the drug, the addict is left like the knight in Keats' poem, 'all haggard and woe-begone'. In the same way, Wolfe's fictional world is pumped, exaggerated, like a comic book, but the style blanks out the natural pleasure of perception. It is almost impossible to quote from A Man in Full without feeling that Wolfe used plastic and neon for his sentences instead of more expensive materials... The problem is that this kind of exaggeration, like pornography, uses up the imagination and obliterates subtlety." (Why Literature Matters, pp 9-10)

So when a book like A Man in Full is praised unduly (by The Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, and Time back in '98), it may be a sign that we've become alarmingly short-sighted. The acceptance of his kind of writing as literature is dangerous, as Wood says, not (hopefully) because anyone will be foolish enough to think this is what life is actually like, but "because readers will read it and think 'this is what literature is like'" (The New Republic, 12/14/98, p 42). Elitist as it sounds, we need to maintain better standards and prefer authors who get at complex human emotions, irony, and even contradiction, rather than posterlike "realism".

That's what makes a novelist like Toni Morrison (though perhaps not Alice Walker) so superior. Instead of using a book like Beloved to skewer social problems or angrily demand justice, she engages social drama and tests ideas by showing what happens when they naturally unfold. Paradoxes result, uncomfortable ones, and the reader is left struggling (as much as the novel's characters) with the more timeless dilemmas. Arbery again:

"Morrison does not promote the 'black experience' so much as she questions its meaning and locates it thoughtfully within an American literary tradition that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor... She finds universal qualities with her subjects, because she chooses, not Us-vs.-Them, but Us-vs.-Us situations... Rather than group grievances of race-gender-class issues, she concerns herself with revealing especially the self-contradictions... [In Beloved] slavery is the backdrop, the memory, the threat, but the drama played out is one that stems from contradictory, tragic reactions -- as in Exodus -- when the promise of freedom is both offered and deferred. And not black reactions, as though 'black' really did, in some secret depth, mean something other than 'human': the reactions of humanity in these conditions." (Ibid, pp 62,66-67)

Authors like Morrison (and Cormac McCarthy and Ian McEwan, to name others) not only address the more "permanent things", not only understand human experience in all its messy irony, they write with an aesthetic language layered with multiple meanings. Literary authors constantly struggle to find the right ways to express things on more than one level, even often against their personal preferences and tendencies -- not to bamboozle readers with impressive diction or show off sophistication, but to take their work as seriously as they want the timeless reader to take it.

Some writers, of course, are good storytellers without being literary. I've often pondered the difference between Stephen King (a great storyteller, but hardly literary) and Peter Straub (who I think achieves literary form in at least some of his books). King forcefully engages -- dare I say rapes -- our attention, with garrulous prose, while Straub teases our minds so that we really want to pay attention. Straub is clearly concerned with the art of his books, so that readers can ponder ambiguity and see through it to other levels; I'm thinking especially of Shadowland and Mystery, though others too. I've certainly enjoyed some of King's books, but aside from two (The Gunslinger and The Stand), I doubt that any qualify as literature.

But why does it matter? Literature matters, says Arbery, because ultimately what lasts is something that satisfies the imagination more than just a good page-turner or a mirror of hot social issues. Nothing about the social circumstances of the Trojan War pertain to us today, but Homer was able to take up those things, elevate them, and find what's permanent in them so that The Iliad sustains our interest anyway. The same with Tolstoy: Anna Karenina is saturated with the socio-political debates of Czarist Russia -- the relation of peasants to the land, education of the poor (and women), the question of zemstvo activism, the Serbian war against the Turks -- but Tolstoy transcended politics as he engaged it. What really hits the reader of Karenina (certainly me, recently) are the bigger and more tragic questions about life, death, religion, love, jealousy, and ambition.

There's nothing wrong with non-literary fiction when it's recognized for what it is. But when we start lumping Tom Wolfe with Charles Dickens, or Alice Walker with Toni Morrison, there's a problem -- a sure sign that we need to step back and reassess how much we're willing to allow cultural pressures determine the shape of our literary canon.

Here's my own stab at a list of literary favorites. If I could save only 20 works of literature for my home library, I'd choose the following, rated roughly in order of preference:

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.
2. Shogun, James Clavell.
3. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.
4. The Iliad, Homer.
5. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson.
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain.
7. Paradise Lost, John Milton.
8. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy.
9. Dune, Frank Herbert.
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte.
11. The Judeo-Christian Bible.
12. The King of Vinland's Saga, Stuart Mirsky.
13. The Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons.
14. Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
15. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe.
16. Boy's Life, Robert McCammon.
17. Perelandra, C.S. Lewis.
18. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.
19. Weaveworld, Clive Barker.
20. The First Man in Rome, Colleen McCullough.

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Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIV

The thirty-fourth Biblical Studies Carnival is up on Doug Chaplin's MetaCatholic.

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Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIII

The thirty-third Biblical Studies Carnival is up on Michael Halcomb's Pisteuomen.

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Bird vs. Crossley

Now this should be an interesting debate. Tune in next month when the book is released, and the bashing begins.

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Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective

Imagine a fiercely anti-Lutheran book on Paul, revised years after its author came to believe the New Perspective was equally misguided, yet ending up essentially unaltered, its thesis intact. Is that even possible? Amazingly, yes. The book is Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles -- now subtitled Beyond the New Perspective -- by Francis Watson, who gives us the same sectarian apostle as before, a Paul who believed the law had had its day and sought to theologically legitimate his church communities independent of the synagogue.

Although Watson says he's retained only "the empty shell of what he once argued" (p xii), I think that's an overstatement. True, he has repented of his enthusiasm for the New Perspective, but that hasn't effected the heart of his argument. It just happens to move us beyond the New Perspective in a way Watson didn't originally anticipate. As he says in a four-point summary:

"First, (1) the concept of 'covenantal nomism' is used to highlight the irreducible particularity of Paul's polemic against 'works of the law', rather than to promote a view of Judaism as a religion of grace. Second, (2) it is argued that divine agency plays a more direct and immediate role in Pauline 'pattern of religion' than in the Judaism Paul opposes. Third, (3) the phrase 'works of the law' is here understood to refer to the distinctive way of life of the Jewish community, but without any special orientation towards 'boundary markers' such as circumcision, food laws, or sabbath. Fourth, (4) Paul is said to advocate a 'sectarian' separation between the Christian community and Judaism, rather than an inclusive understanding of the one people of God as encompassing uncircumcised Gentiles. These emphases were all central to the first edition of this book, and I now propose that they point us beyond the New Perspective." (p 25)

How so? By underscoring the fallacies of the New as much as the Old. The New Perspective paints Paul as Jewish-friendly -- speaking against only parts of the law so as to make things easy on Gentiles -- when in fact, the apostle had no more use for the law than Luther did (if for different reasons). It paints Paul's emphasis on divine grace as readily compatible with Judaic soteriology, when in fact Judaism didn't have the one-sided emphasis on grace that Sanders claims.

In some ways the book reminds of Philip Esler's work. But where Esler uses different social identity theories to account for different situations (separation in Galatians; recategorization in Romans), Watson uses a single sociological model for both letters (sectarian), which results in problems for understanding Romans. Esler has already criticized him for this, acknowledging that the sectarian model works fine for Galatians (and is compatible with the social-psychological separation model he uses). Esler's critique:

"I have used the part of social identity theory which describes how groups maintain a sense of identity for their members by strengthening the boundaries separating them from outgroups to explain the situation in Galatia and Paul's response to it. While this is an approach to the letter derived from one area of social psychology, it would also make sense to analyze the situation using the sociology of sectarianism [as Watson does]. This theory can be usefully focused on the manner in which a group that starts as a reform movement within a dominant religious group can foster such antagonism that it eventually secedes or is expelled, thereafter having a sectarian status in relation to another group, meaning that membership of both organizations is no longer possible. This process can be observed with some clarity in both Luke-Acts and John's gospel [in addition to Galatia].

"Yet Rome is different. There is no sign in the framing passages of the letter that the Gentile Christ-followers are being pressured into accepting circumcision and the law. Nor is there any such indication in the body of the letter. Thus the particular resolution of the ethnic problem in the Christ-movement favored by the Jerusalem church ('Let these foreigners become Judeans') is not being proposed.

"This is the main reason why Francis Watson's significant attempt at a social explanation of Romans may be ultimately unsuccessful... He utilizes the model of transition from reform movement to sect (which works well on Galatians) with respect to Romans, a text to which it is not well suited... The major problem with Watson's view is whether his insistence that Paul is seeking to persuade his Judean readers to drop their Judean identity can be correlated with the data in Romans where Paul seeks to establish an overarching common identity that embraces Judean and Greek subgroup identities without extinguishing either." (Conflict and Identity in Romans, pp 131-132)

And that's really the key to Romans. It's an exceptional letter targeting Jews and Greeks in equal and alternating measure, as Paul goes through great pains to put both groups on the same playing field in different ways. Gentiles are under the domain of sin without the Torah (1:18-2:5), and Jews are under its power with the Torah (2:17-3:20). Gentile believers have been liberated from the power of sin which ruled them as immoral pagans (6:15-23), just as Jewish believers have been liberated from sin which ruled them through the law (7:1-25). Jews need to recognize that Gentiles are God's newly elect and heirs to the promises of Abraham (9:1-11:12), but Gentiles need (even more) to understand that these benefits are a means to an end -- to provoke Jews to reacquire what's really theirs (11:13-32). Paul's success depends on careful attention to both ethnic groups in the Roman church, taking them down in different ways, but without erasing their ethnic identities in the process. That's why the last thing he wants to say is, "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek" -- as he did in Galatians, when he was trying to erase Jewish identity in a sectarian/separatist fashion. Watson's insistence that Romans is addressed primarily to Jews -- that they should accept the legitimacy of the Gentiles' law-free gospel and separate from the synagogue -- while a refreshing and more plausible alternative to the New Perspective's focus on Gentile addressees, fails to make sense of the alternating strategy spotted by Esler, not to mention the exceptionally positive estimation of ethnic Israel (Watson's gloss of Rom 11 as a "comparatively irenic passage" is still the Achilles' heel of his thesis), and even more so the injunction upon Gentiles to abide by minimal Torah standards when in the company of Jews with ties to the synagogue (14:1-15:13).

It's nice to see Watson accepting Esler's theory that Antioch was about circumcision rather than dietary laws (p 85), though he can't seem to follow the logical conclusion: that this amounted to the pillars breaking their agreement. He suggests the issue of circumcision never came up in Jerusalem, that the meeting focused only on the legitimacy of missionary activity among Gentiles in general (p 102). For when circumcision became an issue at Antioch, Paul didn't accuse Peter of breaking any prior agreement, only of inconsistency with his own practice and conviction (p 103). But as I've said before, Paul couldn't accuse Peter of breaking his promise: he would have made a complete fool of himself in the context of an agonistic culture (as Esler has explained). The best he could do was charge him with "hypocrisy", even if "treachery" was the more appropriate charge.

Michael Bird, on the other hand, accepts that circumcision was addressed in Jerusalem (see pp 3-4 of his critique of Watson), but even he resists the logical conclusion (that the pillars broke their agreement at Antioch), claiming that the Jerusalem meeting "led to problems because the leaders did not foresee the problem of what happens when uncircumcised and circumcised believers engage in table fellowship". But that's incredibly unrealistic. Bird uses the example of Titus to refute Watson, and we can use the same example to refute Bird: the presence of Titus would have made the entire issue loud and obvious -- circumcision, and mixed fellowship, which were inextricably intertwined. The question of fellowship between circumcised and uncircumcised would have been on everyone's mind (eucharist fellowship was one of the most important practices in the Christian movement, for crying out loud); it couldn't possibly have been avoided.

Watson's detailed catalog of the correspondences between Gen 2-3 and Rom 7 remains the best proof that Paul was not himself in Romans 7 (pp 282-285). On the other hand, his emphasis on Rom 9-10 over Rom 11, while necessary to make his sectarian thesis work, undercuts the fact that the latter is clearly the punchline. Chapters 9-10 present a temporary scenario, while chapter 11 commands Gentiles to respect unbelieving Jews whose temporary hardening is soon to be undone. Unbelieving Israel is Paul's primary concern in Romans (as Mark Nanos has seen), completely unlike in Galatians or any other letter. The apostle's aim is to stifle Greek freedom in the hope that more unbelieving Judeans will convert to Christianity and worship as one voice (Rom 14:1-15:6; cf. 11:11-32).

Curiously, Watson isn't able to distance himself from Dunn and Wright as much as he wants to. For all his insistence that the law was obsolete -- that Paul did not retain an ethical kernel of the Torah minus its ethnic works -- he turns around and claims that Paul did pretty much exactly that in the context of Christian community. "There is according to Paul a reduced law -- a law without circumcision, dietary restrictions, cultus, or sacred days -- that remains operative in the Christian community (Rom 13:8-10). Thus it can be said that 'circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing -- all that matters is keeping the commandments of God'." (I Cor 7:19) (p 214) In other words, Paul believed in a new law fulfilled by Christians. While this is a plausible expression of Paul's view at the time of writing I Corinthians (in which Paul presents commandments and moral imperatives as having force), it finds no place in his writings after the Galatian crisis. Unfortunately, Watson dates Galatians before I Corinthians instead of after. His arguments for doing so (pp 111-112) are unconvincing, not least because I Cor 7:19 is seen to be revised by Gal 5:6: "the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love" -- again in the exact same context of circumcision, but this time with nothing said about the necessity of keeping commandments. By the time of Galatians Paul was completely through with the law: The best it ever had to offer (love of one's neighbor) was now available through an entirely different route -- the spirit. "To say that the law is fulfilled by love does not affect this conclusion... Fulfillment means that the moral demands of the law no longer have any role for Christians." (Esler, Conflict and Identity, p 334). Paul now believed in the complete replacement of the law by the spirit, rather than a continued ethical aspect of it.

While Esler's books offer (by far) the best readings of Galatians and Romans, Watson's remains the most devastating critique of the Lutheran Perspective, and now of the New as well. But what exactly does it mean to move "beyond the New Perspective"? Commenter Rick Sumner wonders if Watson's endorsement of Sanders really takes us "beyond" anything. Isn't it a step backwards? Aren't we just acknowledging that Sanders had it right before Dunn and Wright came along and tried improving on Sanders in the wrong way?

Sort of. Watson calls us to move backwards to Sanders' view of Paul (which he has always approved) but forwards beyond Sanders' view of Judaism (which he now only half-approves as a corrective to Lutheran caricatures). Of course, to move forward beyond the latter carries implications that will take us -- at least in some ways -- beyond the former. Watson ominously concludes that

"The Lutheran insistence on the centrality and radicality of divine grace is not wholly in error... The claim that Judaism is a religion of grace will prove to be at least as misleading as the older language of legalism or works-righteousness. While there should be no reversion to the Lutheran Paul of the old perspective, one does not read Paul aright merely by criticizing Luther and emphasizing Gentile inclusion." (p 346)

The Gentile issue was obviously crucial, but subordinate to a radical Christology. If we subordinate Christology to ethnicity, we kill the former and misrepresent Paul's gospel as a variant of Jewish messianism. The New Perspective has done exactly that. Watson forces us to face our eisegetical delusions: that the specter of nationalism can be as intrusive as that of legalism, and if we allow ourselves to light on a more alien Paul, perhaps, just perhaps, we'll finally be doing the apostle justice.

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The TULIP of the New Perspective

In preparation for the new edition of Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach -- now Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective, in which Francis Watson repents of his earlier enthusaism for the New Perspective -- I'm revisiting the author's essay which foreshadows this revision, explaining why we should move beyond the New Perspective. Granting many different points of view within the NP, there seem to be five common denominators, which Watson calls the TULIP of the NP:

(1) TOTAL TRAVESTY. The NP teaches that the Lutheran perspective on Paul has got him completely wrong -- that the faith/works, grace/law contrast has nothing to do with an attack on any attempt to earn salvation by human effort.

(2) UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION. The NP teaches that in ancient Judaism salvation was already understood to be by grace alone. The divine election of Israel was absolute and unconditional, and preceded the law. Law observance didn't attain salvation; it maintained it. Only by throwing off the yoke of the covenant altogether (becoming an unrepentant apostate) would a Jew be condemned.

(3) LOYALTY TO THE LAW. The NP teaches that loyalty to the law -- especially practices like circumcision, food laws, and sabbath -- wasn't a matter of crass legalism, but rather a matter of preserving ethnic identity as the elect people of God.

(4) INCLUSIVE SALVATION. The NP teaches that Paul objected to the law because it limited the grace of God to Israel (not because it constituted impossible merit-earning demands). For Paul, God was the God of Gentiles as much as Jews, and for this reason alone was Christ "the end of the law".

(5) PRESUPPOSITIONLESS EXEGESIS. The NP teaches that the Lutheran view of Paul caters to western Protestant individualism, so much that the subject of "Paul and the law" has been the most difficult area of biblical studies to liberate from eisegetical biases.

While the TULIP of the NP serves as a healthy antidote to dated and hostile caricatures of early Judaism, Watson thinks it can be deflowered on all five points:

(1) TOTAL TRAVESTY. While we should indeed consign Luther to the dustbin, we should abandon question-begging talk of a monolithic "Lutheran view" of Paul just because one entertains the idea that Paul was speaking about something other (or more) than ethnic identity markers in critiquing the law. General human effort to obey the law doesn't necessarily equate with legalism.

(2) UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION. While the NP has successfully shown that Judaism wasn't a legalistic religion (that salvation didn't have to be earned in such a way that people were left feeling insecure), it has not successfully shown that election wasn't conditional on faithful obedience to the law. Contra the NP, Israel's divine election did not precede or relativize the Torah. The law was a gift and demand at the same time -- both the expression of Israel's election and the divine demand for righteous obedience -- and Abraham was understood to be the recipient of God's promises precisely because he kept the law. The law wasn't given so that those who were already in the covenant could stay inside it; Abraham himself got into the covenant by observing the law.

(3) LOYALTY TO THE LAW. While the NP has (again) rightly shown that loyalty to the law wasn't about crass legalism, it wasn't simply about preserving ethnic identity either. Distinctively Jewish practices didn't serve only as boundary markers (though they did that too). Jewish identity wasn't understood only in negative terms or how it differentiated itself against pagans (though that was obviously part of the picture). Jewish identity was as much about inner values as overt signals.

(4) INCLUSIVE SALVATION. It's worth quoting Watson directly here: "It's true and important that Paul was concerned with the question of the scope of God's saving action in Jesus. God is not the God of Jews alone, but of Gentiles also... Yet Paul's statements about the scope of divine saving action do not by any means exhaust what he has to say about its content. Paul does not confine himself to the point that through Christ God has brought Gentiles within the scope of his covenant people... One the one hand, God commits himself unconditionally to future saving action on behalf of Abraham and the world. On the other hand, the law sets the divine-human relationship on another basis, in which divine saving action is conditional on prior human obedience to the commandments [see (2)]... How may Genesis and Deuteronomy be reconciled? The answer, for Paul, is that the law itself declares that it's own project is a dead-end. It teaches that the one who does these things will find life thereby, but it also teaches that this quest is doomed to failure." The Gentile issue may have helped dethrone the law, but Paul's sectarian Christology demolished it completely. His idea was that salvation is on another basis entirely. It's not simply that Jewish works like circumcision, food laws, and sabbath have become optional for Gentiles, with a kernel of the Torah remaining in force. The entire law is finished as an avenue for salvation.

(5) PRESUPPOSITIONLESS EXEGESIS. This is the most pretentious of the five petals, for the NP has shown itself to be as much driven by modern biases (breaking down racial barriers; respecting those of different nationalities) as the old perspective (dislike for legalism; western needs for a more direct and personal relationship with God). Perhaps when we light on a truly alien Paul, we'll finally be doing justice to him as an historical figure.

As I've said before, I still consider myself a (loose) New Perspective advocate in the sense that I think the Gentile mission caused Paul his initial grief over the law. The idea of insecure salvation has no place in historical inquiry, and to that extent "racism" trumps "legalism". But the Gentile issue quickly became subsumed within a more over-arching scheme of Christology which portrayed the law as obsolete -- not simply redefined around wider parameters for Gentile benefit. The New Perspective has failed to come to terms with this, and I think Watson (like Philip Esler) is moving us in the right direction.

My review of Watson's book will follow later. It's due to arrive in the mail today.

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Watson's New Perspective

Thanks to Michael Bird for mentioning the revised edition of Francis Watson's Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach. The early monograph was one of the first NPP books I cut my teeth on in the early '90s, and I still consider it a pretty good book. It made my list of Top 4 Books on Galatians and Romans, and I hope I'll be able to say the same for the revised version.

From Bird's review of the book:

"Watson concedes in his preface that 'I have retained only the empty shell of what I once argued' and he suggests moving 'beyond the New Perspective'. Furthermore, the insistence on Judaism as 'a religion of grace' has had its day and the creativity and diversity of Judaism cannot be reduced to any one scheme... Watson proposes a more nuanced account of what is and is not wrong with the traditional Lutheran reading and endeavors to move beyond polarity on the New Perspective and Paul."

I already have some idea of where Watson is going based on his essay, "Not the New Perspective". I too have moved "beyond the New Perspective" in some ways, though I don't think anything will ever persuade me that Paul was critiquing any attempt to earn salvation by one's efforts, or that any group of first-century Judeans were legalistic enough to be open to critique in this way. At the same time, the New perspective idea that Paul was concerned only with the scope of God's saving power does't hold water. The Gentile issue was half the picture; Paul's sectarian Christology left no room for the law at all: it was obsolete, and the best it ever had to offer was now available by an entirely different route (the spirit). But more on this later, after I've read the book.

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The Top 10 Most Critical Topics in Pauline Reseach

This is Michael Bird's list:

Why Did Saul of Tarsus Persecute the Church?
The Origin of Paul’s Gospel?
Paul and the Beginnings of the Gentile Mission
Paul and the Antioch Episode
Paul’s Problem with the Law
Paul and His Opponents
The Pauline Hermeneutic: Paul and Israel’s Sacred Traditions
The Purpose of Romans
Paul and the Parting of the Ways
The Quest for the Centrum Paulinium

Here's my own list, like Michael's rated in no particular order.

Paul's Reasons for Persecuting the Church
Paul's View of the Resurrection
The Origins of the Gentile Mission
The Antioch Incident
Paul's Relationship to Jerusalem
Paul's Relationship to the Synagogue
Paul's Critique of the Law
Paul's Meaning of "Righteousness" (and how central was the idea)
Paul's View of Salvation History (or lack thereof)
Paul's Inconsistencies and/or Evolution of Thought (reasons for)

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A Broken Metaphor (Paul and the Olive Tree)

Fans of Paul would agree that his olive tree metaphor is a brilliant creation. I love the way it so subtly and effectively undermines Gentile superiority. As Philip Esler explains it, normal grafting practice involved transplanting a wild olive tree and making it fruitful by grafting on cultivated branches. By portraying the inverse -- a cultivated olive tree with wild branches (which normally didn't bear edible fruit) -- Paul was painting an image completely insulting to Greeks, implying they were dependent on the root of Abraham (Rom 11:18), and that arrogance toward unbelieving Israelites could result in being damned forever (Rom 11:21). That's pretty clever all right.

But clever inventions have a way of trapping their creators in ways unforeseen. Consider: the argument of Rom 11:11-32 is that Israel's state of unbelief -- outlined in Rom 9:6-11:10 -- is only temporary, that most Israelites will soon get back on track and convert to Christ out of jealousy for Paul's success with Gentiles (Rom 11:11-16), and can perhaps even rely on a little help from God directly at the apocalypse (11:25-27). These unbelieving Israelites have stumbled but not fallen (Rom 11:11) -- "Have they stumbled so as to fall?" asks the apostle. "By no means!" -- and will surely be saved in the end (Rom 11:26).

So Israel is stumbling, not falling, according to Rom 11:11-32, but the problem is that Paul isn't consistent about this matter elsewhere, nor even in the argument of 11:11-32 itself. In his new essay, "Broken Branches: A Pauline Metaphor Gone Awry? (Rom 11:11-24)", Mark Nanos demonstrates how the olive tree metaphor of verses 17-24 undermines the stumbling metaphor of verses 11-12. Paul warns Gentiles that they will be "cut off" from the olive tree if they persist in ethnic pride, just as unbelieving Israelite branches have already "fallen" from the tree. Those Israelites may be grafted back in again, to be sure, but that's not what "cut off" and "fallen" imply. Nanos writes:

"The implications from Paul's portrayal of the olive tree to [warn Gentiles in harsh terms] leads to a theological development that I believe Paul did not anticipate when he created it. For it is used to describe the state of non-Christ believing Israelites as broken off, discarded, and dead branches on the ground below the tree, which clearly depicts them as having fallen. In terms of the stumbling metaphor, that is a condition Paul emphatically insisted did not apply... I believe Paul would deny that these Israelites were broken off as it has been presented in the interpretive tradition, and that he would extend this denial today if asked to describe the state of Jews and Judaism. He would instead insist in the same unmistakable terms that he communicated in the stumbling allegory...'May it never be!' The tree allegory was created with the special concern to describe the present state of the Gentile believers in Christ, and the inferences about these Israelites are (il)logical byproducts of that explanation. What we have here is a Pauline metaphor gone awry." (p 57)

That's right, and it goes awry particularly in the context of Rom 11:11-32, which is meant to undermine the supersessionist/replacement theology which Paul advocated in other places (though I think Nanos disagrees with me that Paul ever was a supersessionist). We need look back only two verses to see the problem, where the psalmist is invoked: "Let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them; let their eyes be darkened so they cannot see, and keep their backs forever bent" (verses 9-10). Yet verse 11 goes on to insist that there's nothing "forever" about this process. Judeans haven't stumbled so as to fall; they're going to be saved.

Also consider Rom 9:6, which comes dangerously close to repeating the supersessionist theology of Galatians (Gal 6:16): "Not all Israelites truly belong to Israel." Really? The entire argument of Rom 11 insists otherwise (and as both Philip Esler and Mark Nanos point out, Paul does NOT refer to the olive tree as a new Israel; in Rom 11, Israel is Israel, all the way). What Paul really means to say in Rom 9:6 is simply that "not all Israelites are currently faithful" (so Thomas Tobin, Paul's Rhetoric in its Contexts, p 327; cf. Philip Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans, p 279; cf. Mark Nanos, p 10 footnote 16). But he goes beyond what he meant to say -- natural perhaps, since he's echoing an earlier supersessionist stance.

By the time of Romans, Paul was rethinking theological dilemmas, facing new church situations, and trying to undo a nasty reputation he'd acquired. Romans 11 is a fascinating result of all this. But in trying to salvage something for ethnic Israel, Paul becomes trapped by his own ingenuity and a victim of his past. He insists that unbelieving Judeans are only stumbling and haven't fallen (Rom 11:11-16) -- but then can't help but imply the latter (Rom 11:17-24). (Tree branches can't stumble very well, can they?) Nowhere in Rom 9-11 does he want to identify the Christian movement as Israel, but he slips in Rom 9:6 and implies it anyway (echoing his earlier and more explicit Gal 6:16). Paul does the best he can, but he creates as many problems as he solves. He shoots himself (and his kinsmen) in the foot as he railroads the Gentiles. Whoever said theologians had it easy?

Do read Nanos' essay. It shows better than any other analysis how the olive tree is unable to communicate Paul's idea effectively -- that the metaphor "is itself broken" (p 50).

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The Dark, Dark Knight

"This is what you call raising the bar. Christopher Nolan sprung from Batman Begins like a man possessed — possessed with the idea of showing exactly how a city crumbles, how hope vanishes, how evil can win even as it loses. I've heard Batman: The Dark Knight described lots of different ways — it's either the Godfather or the Citizen Kane of comic films — but I prefer this: it's like Seven, but with a cape. And, honestly, I can't pay a higher compliment." (Entertainment Weekly)

It's fair to say I'm not a superhero fan. The Spiderman trilogy did nothing for me, the Fantastic Four gave me indigestion, the X-Men were embarrassing to watch, Superman should have never been made... and the less said about Joel Schumacher's approach to Batman (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin), the better. On the other hand, I did like Ang Lee's introspective Hulk movie, and Tim Burton's surreal approach to Batman (Batman, Batman Returns). These were character films, tragic as much as comic -- schizophrenic, artistic, with enough lurid ambiguity in the hero to please an elitist like me.

But nothing compares to the new Batman films (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) by Christopher Nolan, who has given the genre a complete overhaul and proven that superheroes can be about more than nerdy escapism. According to some critics, in fact, The Dark Knight isn't even suitable for kids (I would have loved it as a kid, but don't trust me: you're looking at someone who saw The Exorcist when he was 11.) It's not just the violence, but the kind of violence, even the sadomasochistic kind. More than this, there's an inner crushing spiral of despair. The Dark Knight is almost an anti-hero film, showing how vigilantes escalate terror in the name of combating it. This was foreshadowed at the end of the first film, and now comes the payoff, as archetypes like the Joker and Two-Face are born out of perverse emulation for the "hero". By the end it's clear that Batman is more a problem than a solution, and that Gotham City hasn't a whisper of hope.

The hype for The Dark Knight has centered around Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, a cold-blooded maniac who likes to put a smile on people with his knives, blow up hospitals and ferry boats, and burn mountains of money he goes to the trouble of robbing from Gotham's banks. He's a masochist too. The scene where Batman is beating the daylights out of him in a police interrogation room captures the essence of the film as good as any other. Here we have the hero giving in to self-righteous fury, torturing a prisoner, while the victim completely gets off on it. Forget Jack Nicholson's Joker in the Tim Burton film (which was actually pretty good); Ledger takes the character to a new level entirely. Nicholson attacked Gotham's residents through hairspray and makeup, laughing like a hyena all the way. Ledger is a real-life terrorist and serial killer -- and his Joker-laughter much more disciplined -- with no camp at all.

The films are entertaining, with all the action and showdowns we expect from superhero films, but also deep enough to warrant the various comparisons to The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Seven. The sequel in particular breaks formula in so many ways. Batman Begins was about the politics of fear, while The Dark Knight is about the destruction of hope itself. In the first, Bruce Wayne overcame guilt and phobia to save Gotham City from being destroyed "for its own good" (by a centuries-old organization that sacked Rome and burned London when they reached similar pinnacles of crime and decadence). Now he struggles against worse monsters he's called into existence, in the end hunted by Gotham's police as the worst monster of all.

Suffice to say that Christopher Nolan has impressed me with his revisionist approach to Batman and the whole superhero genre. The Dark Knight easily ranks among my top 40 films of all time.

Rating: 5 stars out of 5.

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