pdm@cs.uoregon.edu (peter d. mark) (02/19/91)
i'm in the middle of an interesting, provacative little book by hyam maccoby entitled "revolt in judaea: jesus and the jewish resistance". he's a jewish scholar who, by examining internal contradictions and inconsistencies in the gospels, and by consulting contemporaneous accounts of josephus and other writers about life in roman-occupied palestine in the 1st century, constructs some interesting theories and conjectures concerning certain events in jesus's life. i'm almost afraid to summarize, since it would unfairly simplify maccoby's carefully constructed arguments, but essentially the book contends that jesus was a pharisee rabbi and political activist who directed his activities toward the expulsion of the roman occupation forces from palestine. the author goes to some length to show that phrases like "kingdom of god" didn't mean then what modern christians mean by the phrase, but rather refered to a politically independent palestine, that many things in the gospels (and he goes into detailed specifics) are deliberate distortions since they were written 40 - 80 years after the death of jesus, in a language, in a country, and for an audience very different from the one jesus himself taught, lived, and addressed--and for very different purposes. i should mention that i am jewish, and so find this book highly plausible. my purpose in raising this topic on soc.religion.christian is to ask if anyone is familiar with this book by hyam maccoby, or his later one about paul called "mythmaker: paul & the invention of christianity", and has any found any serious flaws in maccoby's scholarship or any other reasons that might cast doubt on maccoby's methods and/or conclusions. my own reaction so far: maccoby's conclusions seem fairly plausible, and his arguments are carefully drawn. anyway, i'd like to know what, if any, criticisms folks on this net who are familiar with this author have of his work. thanks much. if possible, please respond via e-mail, i'm not usually a reader of this newsgroup (but i'll follow for the next few weeks for those posters who have problems e-mailing to me). peter pdm@cs.uoregon.edu [I haven't read Maccoby, so I can't comment specifically on him, but these theses have certainly been presented by others. I've seen many commentators play games with literary analysis. The games are very interesting, and may be valuable in helping us understand what perspective the Gospel writers are coming from, and in appreciating their limitations as historical sources. But the more detailed reconstructions just don't hold up. The next generation of scholars sees through them and comes up with their own gossamer constructions. (This phenomenon has been well understood since Schweitzer's book "The Quest of the Histoical Jesus" early in the Century. It examined scholarship about Jesus and concluded that generally it tells us more about the scholar than about Jesus. I am not convinced that the "new quest" has solved this basic problem, though it may have changed the form. We just don't have a good enough model of the way people think to make this sort of analysis work.) So as a matter of basic methodology my view is that if Jesus' actual message was radically different from that of the Gospel writers, I do not believe we will ever know it. The best we could hope for is to find evidence of the unreliability of the portrait in the Gospels. In fact the meaning of "Kingdom of God" is a subject on which we have better evidence than some. For a concensus scholarly view (though in nmy opinion probably too sceptical) see for example Perrin's "Rediscovering the Teachings of Jesus". Perrin argues that the way Jesus uses the Kingdom in the Gospels is sufficiently different from early Christian modes of expression (basically, for Jesus what is coming is the Kingdom, whereas for the Church what is coming is Jesus) that we can recover Jesus' own views. Like essentially all other scholarship on Jesus, Perrin sees Jesus' concept of the Kingdom as eschatological. A claim that he was basically a nationalist is out of step with current scholarship, whether Christian or otherwise. Of course Maccoby may have discovered something that no one else has seen before, but you'll forgive me if I'm sceptical. He's far from the first to do a detailed study of the differences between the Gospels. --clh]