novo_testamento

Veja as possíveis razões na opinião de James Tabor, Professor na University of North Carolina at Charlotte, em seu blog The Jesus Dinasty, no post A Historian’s Take on a Different Kind of “Silent Night”.

Quem é James Tabor? Veja sua biografia aqui.

Outro texto interessante que discute o assunto é um livro de VERMES, G. The Nativity: History and Legend. London: Penguin Books, 2006, 192 p. – ISBN 038552241X.

Quem é Geza Vermes? Veja sua biografia aqui.

O filme Jesus – A História do Nascimento, da diretora Catherine Hardwicke, que chegou aos cinemas no dia 01/12/2006, foi resenhado pelo especialista em Novo Testamento Mark Goodacre no Forum da SBL. Mark Goodacre já escrevera sobre o filme em seu NT Gateway Weblog, mas esta resenha é mais completa. Leia “The Nativity Story”: A Review.

Veja também o site do filme.


Ficha Técnica
País de origem: Estados Unidos
Gênero: Drama
Direção: Catherine Hardwicke
Elenco: Alexander Siddig (Anjo Gabriel), Ciarán Hinds (Rei Herodes), Eriq Ebouaney (Baltasar), Hiam Abbass (Ana), Keisha Castle-Hughes (Maria), Nadim Sawalha (Melquior), Oscar Isaac (José), Shaun Toub (Joaquim), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Elizabeth), Stanley Townsend (Zacarias), Stefan Kalipha (Gaspar)
Fotografia: Elliot Davis Montagem: Robert K. Lambert, Stuart Levy (II)
Roteiro: Mike Rich Trilha Sonora: Mychael Danna
Estréia (Brasil): 01/12/2006
Estréia (original): 01/12/2006

Isso sempre me interessou. E, dia sim, dia não, estou azucrinando meus alunos com esta questão que sempre volta: a atuação de Jesus se dá, segundo o Novo Testamento, em um mundo rural, em ambiente bem diferente de nossas metrópoles. Pois – como naquela velha piada do garotinho paulistano, que, chegando pela primeira vez a um sítio, grita deslumbrado: “mãe, uma Knorr” ao ver uma galinha – corremos o risco de nada entender do que é ser pastor, do comportamento de um rebanho, de leões e outros animais selvagens que estão sempre rondando, do perigo e medo associado às trevas e da alegria que representa a luz, do valor do orvalho em terra árida, do bem que significa ter água corrente, da chuva que cai torrencialmente e muitas coisas mais…

Pois aproveite e aumente seu conhecimento sobre os animais que aparecem em parte da Bíblia, no caso, nos evangelhos sinóticos, lendo o post deste físico que também conhece Bíblia: Animals in the Synoptics.

O blog Davide’s Notes é escrito por Davide Salomoni, italiano de Urbino, físico de profissão, que trabalha no Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare em Bologna, Itália, e é também um estudante de “Divinity” da Universidade de Londres.

 

Animals in the Synoptics – October 02, 2006

This post started out of a bunch of simple questions I recently asked myself: which animals were familiar to the audience of the Gospels? What were their main metaphorical overtones? Did different Gospel authors choose to use different terms? Are there words peculiar to a given evangelist? Are there theological reasons for this? Geographical reasons? Reasons related to the expected audience of the text? To literary/source criticism?

As is often the case, the questions turned out to be not that simple, but gave me the opportunity to spend some good time with the texts in the original languages and with zoology, eventually providing some interesting insights (to me, at least). I decided to limit myself to the Synoptics. Be warned that there are no definite answers in this post, just notes.

When considering zoological terms, it is clear that many times we miss a familiarity with animals that was common in biblical times (and in biblical locations). This means that it is sometimes difficult for us to clearly understand even simple figurative meanings. A plain example is the sheep: to people used to tender flocks, or in general to observe sheeps around them, it is fairly natural that this animal might represent the tendency to get lost, to wander around, being exposed to all sorts of dangers. Take Isaiah 53:6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The similitude was vivid and obvious to the ancient Israelite, perhaps it is not anymore to our modern eyes.

Here’s a summary of animals explicitly mentioned in the Synoptics (you can find a table with all the occurences I found in the Greek text toward the bottom of this post):

. Mark: camel, locust, dove/pigeon, wild animal, flying animal (bird), swine, sheep, fish, small fish, little dog, worm, young ass (colt), cock, snake.
. Matthew: camel, locust, viper, dove/pigeon, flying animal (bird), dog, little dog, swine, fish, small fish, snake, sheep, wolf, fox, sparrow, big fish/whale, ass, young ass (colt), bull/ox (ταῦρος), fatted animal, mosquito/gnat, hen, birdling, eagle/vulture, young goat, cock.
. Luke: turtle-dove, dove/pigeon, viper, fish, flying animal (bird), swine, fox, lamb, wolf, beast of burden, snake, egg, scorpion, sparrow, raven, ox/cow (βοῦς), ass, hen, birdling, sheep, calf, young goat, eagle/vulture, camel, young ass (colt), cock.

There are some word changes for animals in parallel passages; to identify the passages, I shall use the Latin headings found in Aland, Synopsis Quattor Evangeliorum. I sometimes took the analysis of these loci as an opportunity to try and validate the hypotesis that Mark wrote first, followed by Matthew (who had access to Mark), followed by Luke (who had access to both Mark and Matthew) – specifically not positing the existence of Q. (Without excluding the possibility that other sources were available to the evangelists.) Again, I won’t provide definite answers here, since these, if at all possible, certainly require more serious work than these notes.

In the “tentatio” passage (Mt 4:1-11 // Mk 1:12-13 // Lk 4:1-13), Mark has the detail, not present in parallel accounts, that Jesus ἦν μετὰ τῶν θηρίων. Gundry suggests that one thing that is often overlooked is that Jesus was with the beasts (not the reverse), to indicate that while he stayed with them for the whole forty days, no harm came from them. Perhaps – and I know this is an unsubstantiated link, although maybe still a possibility – one could remember that in Himerius, Or. 39 we find that “Orpheus in the Thracian mountains, where he has no one to listen to him, θεριον την εκκλησιαν εργαζεται = forms a community for himself from the wild animals.” (quotation from the BDAG) At any rate, an interesting question is, why did Matthew and Luke leave out the “wild animals”, and supplied instead a more comprehensive account of the temptations? Certainly, Mk 1:12-13 is lacking in narrative (for example, in these verses we are not told the nature of Satan’s temptations, whether Jesus actually overcame them, and how), and Mt and Lk prefer to concentrate on the dialogue between Jesus and Satan, to show Jesus’ power over the tempter; in this sense, the detail about the “wild animals” was probably seen as unnecessary, and perhaps stressing a bit too much the permanence of Jesus among unclean creatures.
In the “petitio efficax” passage (Mt 7:7-11 // Lk 11:9-13), Luke adds the sentence ἢ καὶ αἰτήσει ᾠόν, ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ σκορπίον, not present in Matthew. The New Bible Dictionary suggests that the association between egg and scorpion may be due to the fact that “the main segment of some scorpions is fat and almost egg-shaped.” (in the same passage, fish and snake could be associated because some fish may look like snakes.) Scorpions were much feared because of their painful (although not necessarily fatal) sting – cf. Rev 9:5, καὶ ὁ βασανισμὸς αὐτῶν ὡς βασανισμὸς σκορπίου, ὅταν παίσῃ ἄνθρωπον.

In the “ne solliciti sitis” passage (Mt 6:25-34 // Lk 12:22-32), Matthew has “Look at the birds of the air” (ἐμβλέψατε εἰς τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ), while Luke has “Consider the ravens” (κατανοήσατε τοὺς κόρακας). While “birds of the air” is an idiomatic expression to mean flying animals in general, ravens are specifically voracious and unclean birds (they are scavengers like the vulture); the use of the verb κατανοεω in Luke may point to the fact that he wants the reader to attentively consider how even these despised birds are fed by God. In this sense, Luke corrects Matthew with a more precise determination of the meaning of the sentence. An interesting feature of this verse in Luke, which perhaps also refers to the fact that he corrected Matthew, is that while Matthew speaks only of birds with a generic term (πετεινον), in Luke we do find the ravens in 12:24a, but then 12:24b has πόσῳ μᾶλλον ὑμεῖς διαφέρετε τῶν πετεινῶν, i.e. perhaps Luke changed Matthew’s birds into ravens, but then left traces of the original text in the last part of the verse using the Matthean generic term for “birds” there (for consistency, one may have expected to find ravens in 12:24b too).

In the “missio discipulorum” passage (specifically Mt 10:16 // Lk 9:3), Luke has “I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves” (ἀποστέλλω ὑμᾶς ὡς ἄρνας ἐν μέσῳ λύκων), while Matthew has “I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves” (ἐγὼ ἀποστέλλω ὑμᾶς ὡς πρόβατα ἐν μέσῳ λύκων). Why this difference, i.e. ἀρήν vs. πρόβατον? The contrast between lamb and wolf is a well-attested one, cf. Is 65:25, “the wolf and the lamb shall graze together” (LXX: τότε λύκοι καὶ ἄρνες βοσκηθήσονται ἅμα) or even Homer, Iliad 22,263. Luke’s choice could refer to the Isaian passage above or to sacrificial offering, cf. e.g. Is 1:11, “I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats” (LXX: στέαρ ἀρνῶν καὶ αἷμα ταύρων καὶ τράγων οὐ βούλομαι). There is also a possible reference to the Paschal lamb (a theme much more developed in John and Revelation, though). In the same verse, Matthew also has “so be wise as serpents and innocent [or harmless, simple] as doves” (γίνεσθε οὖν φρόνιμοι ὡς οἱ ὄφεις καὶ ἀκέραιοι ὡς αἱ περιστεραί), absent in Luke. Did Luke amend Matthew to refer to Isaiah using ἀρήν (a word found only here in the entire NT) instead of πρόβατον? Note that the contrast between sheep and wolf is also attested (e.g. John 10:12, ὁ μισθωτὸς […] θεωρεῖ τὸν λύκον ἐρχόμενον καὶ ἀφίησιν τὰ πρόβατα…), and the LXX has “sheep” (for the Heb. שׂה, a word with a wide semantic latitude, i.e. sheep, lamb, goat, young sheep, young goat [BDB]) in Gen 22:8, Isaac’s sacrifice: Ὁ θεὸς ὄψεται ἑαυτῷ πρόβατον εἰς ὁλοκάρπωσιν, τέκνον, a verse perhaps providing a possible connection between the full Matthean passage and the ἀκέραιος (simplicity/innocence) of the diad sheep/child. If Luke did change Matthew, perhaps he also removed Mt 10:16b not seeing it as a meaningful addition to the flow of the sentence, while Matthew would have suggested the antiparallels sheep/wolf and serpent/dove to better convey, on the one hand, the contrast between innocent and ravenous conduct; and to underline, on the other hand, the radical changes required for discipleship (while the first diad is negative, the second is positive). Note that Matthew 10:16b is attested in Ignatius ad Polyc. 2:2, Φρονιμος γινου ως οφις εν απασιν, και ακεραιος εις αει ως η περιστερα, and in POxy 655 col. ii, 11-23, […] γει[νεσθε φρονι]μοι ω[ς οφεις και α]κεραι[οι ως περιστε]ρα[ι], cf. Evang. Thomae copt., Logion 39, “you, however, be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
In the “qui me confitetur” passage (Mt 10:26-33 // Lk 12:2-9), the zoological term used by Matthew and Luke (στρουθίον, sparrow) is the same. There is a difference in counting, though: Mt 10:29 has “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?”, while Lk 12:6 has “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” It is possible that Matthew has a reference here to the two small birds mentioned in the cerimonial of purification from leprosy of Lev 14:49ff – and it is possible that Luke wants to show that, if with one ἀσσάριον (rendered “penny”), a very small coin (the tenth part of a drachma), one can buy two sparrows, with two pennies one can buy not four (2 x 2), but five of them – to stress how little value these birds had: and still, ἓν ἐξ αὐτῶν οὐκ ἔστιν ἐπιλελησμένον ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ.

In the “ingressus triumphalis in Jerusalem” passage (Mt 21:1-9 // Mk 11:1-10 // Lk 19:28-40), Mark and Luke use only πῶλος (young ass/colt), while Matthew uses both πῶλος and ὄνος (ass). Why did Matthew add ὄνος? Note that Mark and Luke agree verbatim also in the detail – not present in Matthew – that εὑρήσετε πῶλον δεδεμένον ἐφ’ ὃν οὐδεὶς οὔπω ἀνθρώπων ἐκάθισεν. Matthew here apparently wants to remind the reader of Zec 9:9, (“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey”), and that’s possibly the reason why he added the reference to the ὄνος. One cultural bias we may have at this point is that it may seem strange to us that Jesus rode an ass, rather than a horse. But horses were associated with power and wars (cf. Rev 6:2; 19:11,14), and asses with peaceful occasions, as Zec 9:9 shows fairly well. In summary, while Luke might have decided to stick to the Markan text, Matthew seems to have amended it, removing the remark that that was a colt “on which no one has ever yet sat”, and adding the reference to the ὄνος, and the typically Matthean explanatory text in 21:4f. (Τοῦτο δὲ γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, etc.)

In the “Jesus in Jerusalem templum purgat” passage (Mt 21:10-17 // Mk 11:15-17 // Lk 19:45-46), Matthew and Mark say that Jesus “overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.” (Luke omits this part.) Pigeon here is περιστερά, a word which apparently can mean both pigeon and dove, and actually several translations (see later) have “those who sold doves” rather than “pigeons”.
First of all, let me make a few general comments about the dove. The dove is known to us – to be sure – as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, but its symbolic meaning probably originates in the Ancient Near East with a link between divinity and love; for example, in the episode of the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus (“like a dove”, ὡς περιστερὰν), Mark 1:11 has Σὺ εἶ ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός, ἐν σοὶ εὐδόκησα. In this drawing (taken from the Anchor Bible), after an old Syrian cylinder seal impression, one can see “the goddess of love [who] apparently bares herself in front of the storm-god, who strides over the mountains. A dove, which flies from her toward him, symbolizes her love for him and her readiness to make love.” (AB) In early Christianity, it is common to find the dove in connection with the idea of peace, like for example in this titulus found in a Roman catacomb. (note also the orante and the olive branch.)
Now, back to the text of Mt 21:12 and Mk 11:15, it is interesting to note that the ESV translates the same word περιστερά as “dove” in Mark 1:10, but as “pigeon” in Mark 11:15. The latter incident refers to the prescriptions of Lev 12:6,8, i.e. instructions on the purification of a woman who has conceived a male child; in particular, she is to offer a lamb, but (v.8) “if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her, and she shall be clean.” This is the ESV translation, which has “pigeon” for both Lev 12:8 and Mk 11:15, and this seems correct at least from the standpoint of consistency, since Mk 11:15 refers to the customs explained in Lev 12. Other translations, like the KJV, WEB, NRSV, do not show consistency of terms between Lev 12:8 and Mark 11:15: they all translate יונה in Lev 12:8 as “pigeon” but περιστερά in Mark 11:15 as “dove”. The NIV, on the other hand, has “two doves or two young pigeons”, thus rendering תּר as “dove” instead of turtledove (why?). A consistent translation is the Vulgate, but using the word “dove” rather than “pigeon”: “duos turtures vel duos pullos columbae” in Lev 12:8 and “cathedras vendentium columbas evertit” in Mark 11:15. I find a bit difficult to imagine how “pigeon” can be the right translation in passages like Lev 12:8, since for example Lev 1:14 clarifies that the only bird fit for sacrifice are the turtledove and יונה, and I (but perhaps that’s a cultural bias) would not easily associate pigeons with purity, given their familiarity with waste and given the fact they can easily carry diseases — doves would seem a more appropriate match. As a matter of fact, the New Bible Dictionary suggests that יונה is the “rock dove (Columba livia), which was domesticated in antiquity and has been used widely as a source of food and for message-carrying.” On the other hand, the BDAG points out that the difference between pigeon and dove “cannot be precisely determined from usage in our texts.”
Anyway, what could have happened here is that Mark had the harshest account: Jesus overturned tables, “and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple”, Mk 11:16 (καὶ οὐκ ἤφιεν ἵνα τις διενέγκῃ σκεῦος διὰ τοῦ ἱεροῦ); Matthew retained the account of the overturning of tables and seats, perhaps assuming the practice was meaningful to his readers (Lev 12:6 etc), but removed the harsh detail of Mk 11:16 that Jesus would block people from bringing anything into the temple; finally, Luke further domesticated the account, retaining only the information that Jesus “began to drive out those who sold”, Lk 19:45 (ἤρξατο ἐκβάλλειν τοὺς πωλοῦντας, compare ἤρξατο ἐκβάλλειν here with the stronger Matthean ἐξέβαλεν), and connecting back to the original (Markan?) source at verse 46, quoting Isaiah 56:7, together with Mark 11:17 and Matthew 21:13.

In the “pseudochristi et pseudoprophetae” passage (Mt 24:23-28 // Lk 17:23-24,37b) we find the word ἀετός, which is normally “eagle”. But in both passages there is apparently some confusion between eagle and vulture; in fact, ad sensum in both Mt 24:28 and Lk 17:37 ἀετός should be translated vulture, rather than eagle. It is interesting that in Hebrew too one word (נשׁר) seems to cover both meanings, perhaps due to the difficulty of identifying who’s who from a distance. Mic 1:16 has “make yourselves as bald as the eagle” (“eagle” is in ESV, NASB, KJV, RSV, NRSV, Vulgate), but eagles have their head covered with feathers, so this may be the griffon vulture, and a proper translation could then be “as bald as the vulture” (“vulture” is in NIV, WEB).

In the “negationem Petri praedicit” passage (Mt 26:30-35 // Mk 14:26-31 // Lk 22:31-34) only Mark has the detail “before the rooster crows twice”, πρὶν ἢ δὶς ἀλέκτορα φωνῆσαι. (δις is also not in the parallel Jn 13:36-38.) On the other hand, δις is found in the fragment from Fayyum, [πρι]ν αλεκτρυων δις κοκ[κυσει], but then it is fairly difficult to say whether the manuscript the fragment comes from is an abridgement of the Synoptic accounts, or rather a source upon which the Synoptics (notably Mark here) were based – in New Testament Apocrypha, Schneemelcher writes that “a secondary, indeed an abridged, rendering of the synoptic material has to be assumed, and the text must be considered an excerpt or fragment of a gospel hitherto unknown to us. The brevity of the fragment forbids sure statements of any kind: the completions also remain questionable.” (see https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/fayyum.html)

Here are some further notes about animals occurring elsewhere in the Synoptics:

To make sense of passages like Mark 5:11 and parallels, where the word χοῖρος (swine) occurs, it is well to remember the purity prescriptions surrounding the swine; indeed the herds of swines mentioned in the Gospels were kept by Gentiles (Mk 5:1, Καὶ ἦλθον εἰς τὸ πέραν τῆς θαλάσσης εἰς τὴν χώραν τῶν Γερασηνῶν), not by Jews. (We can then also understand the command not to throw pearls before swines.) The OT reference here is apparently to Isaiah 65:1-4, speaking of “a nation that was not called by my name”, where there are people who, among other despicable things, “sit in tombs, and spend the night in secret places [cf. Mk 5:2]; who eat pig’s flesh, and broth of tainted meat is in their vessels [hence the herds of swines]”.

Sometimes we have troubles even figuring out what an animal mentioned in the Bible looks like, if we are unfamiliar with it or with the zoological terms used to identify it. Now, for what regards dogs (κύων), we probably have no such problems; but, given our sensitivities of modern westerners, we may have difficulties understanding how dogs could be seen with contempt and disgust in the biblical world. If you visit cities and towns in the Near East, you will soon find out how many straw, filthy and sick dogs may be there, looking for food among waste, etc. What can be interesting is that the dog (κύων) of Mt 7:6 (Μὴ δῶτε τὸ ἅγιον τοῖς κυσίν) may be different from the little dog (κυνάριον) mentioned in the incident of the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mt 15:26f, where we might have a reference to a pet dog similar to ours, as suggested by Mt 15:27, καὶ γὰρ τὰ κυνάρια ἐσθίει ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων τῶν πιπτόντων ἀπὸ τῆς τραπέζης τῶν κυρίων αὐτῶν.

The term κῆτος (whale / big fish) is only used in Mt 12:40; it is difficult to precisely understand what type of animal was meant here. Homer and Herodotus use κῆτος for a wide range of sea animals. κῆτος is used in the passage Matthew is directly referring to, i.e. Jonah 2:1, καὶ προσηύξατο Ιωνας πρὸς κύριον τὸν θεὸν αὐτοῦ ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας τοῦ κήτους (LXX).

As for gnats (κώνωψ), the passage in Mt 23:24 only makes sense if one remembers how numerous these tiny insects may be (especially in hot climates), and that – given their impurity, cf. Lev 11:20 – a pharisaic practice was to drink water through a straining cloth (a filter), to avoid swallowing the insects. So, the Pharisees are guilty of filtering the smallest insects, but then τὴν δὲ κάμηλον καταπίνοντες, i.e. gulping the camel, the biggest known animal, which was also unclean (Lev 11:4).

There are two related terms that are sometimes both translated as “ox”, i.e. ταῦρος (Mt 22:4) and βοῦς (Lk 13:15). The BDAG states that βοῦς may mean both ox (when masculine) and cow (when feminine), in which case indeed Lk 13:15 should be “ox”. For what regards oxen and specifically ταῦροι, they were apparently widely used as sacrificial animals, as in Mt 22:4, but also in Acts 14:13 (in a pagan context) and Heb 9:13; 10:4 (in a Jewish context).

Finally, in the following table you can find the explicit occurences of animals I noted in the Synoptics (NA26/27).

E continua…

Paul and Paula: este o nome que Vision deu à entrevista que fez com Paula Fredriksen, William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University, sobre Paulo.

Mark Goodacre recomenda a entrevista para estudantes que estão começando a estudar Paulo.

 

Paula Fredriksen: Paul and Paula

David Hulme

Author and early-church historian Paula Fredriksen discusses the life and times of the apostle Paul.

Paula Fredriksen is William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. She specializes in the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, from the late Second Temple period to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In 1999 she received a national Jewish Book Award for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. Professor Fredriksen has subsequently written Augustine and the Jews, published in 2006 by Doubleday. In this interview she speaks with Vision publisher David Hulme about the life and times of the apostle Paul.

DH Some people have said that Paul wasn’t a Christian because there were no Christians in his time. How would you respond to that?

PF We think of Paul as a Christian because we’re standing on 20 centuries of Christianity’s development. But it’s clear from his own letters that he divides the world roughly into two groups: Israel and everyone else. Inside those two groups there’s almost a new precipitate, which is the community in Christ. But in terms of peoples, it’s Jews and gentiles. And his gentiles are able, through Christ, to worship the God of Israel. Taking all those things together, I would think that Paul viewed himself as a Jew.

DH Was he a “convert”?

PF We habitually think of him as “Paul the convert,” but Paul isn’t converting from Judaism to something else. He’s joining a Jewish group within Judaism. He’s a Pharisee, and then he becomes a member of this group around Jesus the Messiah. But he’s not exiting Judaism because of that.

DH In the book of Acts we read about Paul meeting people whom Luke refers to as “God-fearers.” Where do those people fit in?

PF Ancient Jews living in cities outside their own land organized their communities into synagogues. A synagogue can be a building, but it’s basically a Jewish community. And Jews living in the majority gentile culture invited interested gentiles into their communities. We know this by more than just the book of Acts, which refers to this population as “God-fearers.” There are records of ancient pagans who hear the Bible and admire it. And they can hear it, because they are allowed to go into the synagogue and listen, just as Jews could (and did) pop into the baths, the theatre, athletic competitions or law courts, where the gods of these other nations were routinely invoked. In the ancient city, “no fences” made good neighbors.

DH Ancient Judaism is a way of life, a way of looking at everything. So what would have changed for a God-fearer when he or she became convinced by Paul’s message?

PF I imagine Paul going into a Diaspora synagogue as part of the gathering that would happen on the Sabbath, and among his audience are gentiles who are interested enough in Judaism to also be there. What they hear is an extreme form of Judaism—that the Messiah has come, and that the end of the age is at hand. They’re able to understand what Paul is talking about, because they’ve heard the Bible read to them in the synagogue.

Behaviorally, what changes for them? The difference is that Paul said they must not worship their own gods anymore; that they couldn’t eat the meat that was sacrificed to their native gods anymore; that they could only worship the God of Israel through baptism into His Son, Jesus Christ. Paul (and others like him who were giving this message to these “churched” pagans—pagans who were already in the synagogue) is giving them the message that in this regard they have to act as if they’re Jews. These gentiles are being told by Paul that, as a matter of principle, they have to violate their ancestral custom and not worship their ancestral gods. They’re going to be included, as gentiles, in the final redemption.

Now in one sense, so far, that’s normal Judaism. Paul is standing on top of a centuries-long tradition that anticipates gentiles being part of the kingdom of God. Israel will be redeemed from exile, and gentiles will be redeemed from idol worship. Paul, in this odd wrinkle in time between the resurrection and the second coming, is asking these gentiles to stop worshiping idols before the kingdom is publicly established. He’s making a much more rigorous Jewish demand on his gentiles-in-Christ than the normal synagogue would make on their pagan gentile sympathizers, because he’s saying, “You must not worship your own gods any longer.” Normal synagogues never did that. It would be much more difficult, and socially destabilizing, to be a gentile-in-Christ within Paul’s movement than to be a gentile God-fearer in a mainstream synagogue community.

DH You mentioned in your 1999 book on Jesus that there were gentile tourists in Jerusalem at the Passover season. Who were those people?

PF When you have a big empire, you have internal peace and usually a good communication system, which in antiquity means roads. So if you have domestic peace, you’re able to travel.

This is what happened in the ancient world, beginning with Alexander the Great in 300 B.C.E., as well as in the Roman period. In first-century Jerusalem, Herod’s temple was built for foot-traffic control. The largest courtyard in this beautiful building was the court of the nations, and it anticipated a lot of people coming. There was a circuit of various temples that tourists could take. There’s a big, beautiful pagan temple to the god Pan up in Banias, and people would go to that temple too. The temples in Egypt were tourist attractions forever—or so it seemed to ancient peoples. And once you came to one of these sites, you showed respect to the god whose location you were visiting, because in antiquity, gods lived in their temples. The God of Israel in a special sense was present at His altar; He lived in the temple. In the Gospel of Matthew, that’s what Jesus says: he who swears by the temple swears by Him who dwells in it. So if you were a tourist, the only polite thing to do was to show respect to the god you were visiting. When pagans went to Jerusalem for the Jewish pilgrimage festival, which they did do—Josephus mentions that several of them got trapped there once the war started with Rome—they showed respect to the Jewish God. But they were still pagans.

DH This is a very different world than we’re used to seeing on film or video. What we get out of the average movie is that members of the two groups never crossed over. And yet the second-century Roman writer Juvenal satirized his own people for keeping the Sabbath, the food laws, and so forth.

PF The way most modern people get their idea of ancient history is through the movies. In the movies, Romans dress differently from everybody else. The Romans are the ones speaking with a British accent, and the good, liberty-loving slaves are speaking with American accents. It’s an oral coding for the different populations. In I, Claudius, when Herod Agrippa comes on stage after he’s been home in Palestine for a few years, he has prayer curls the way an 18th-century Polish Jew would, because the movie has only a few seconds to indicate visually who the character is. But the historical Herod, of course, would have looked just like any other Roman. And Paul, for that matter, would probably have been clean-shaven too. People dress like each other if they’re contemporary. This idea of clearly separate populations comes from trying to code these people—historically, when we try to distinguish between them, and also visually, with movies, to make it easier to tell the story. In real life, these populations all swim in the same sea. The Western Jewish population is speaking the great Western vernacular of Greek, and there’s a normal tendency to adopt local habits.

Some upper-class Romans were offended out of a sense of patriotism that Roman ancestral custom would be sullied somehow by picking up the ancestral custom of another group, and people like Juvenal or Tacitus would have been very grouchy about this, because it’s not the right Roman thing to do. But in fact, what that actually means is precisely what they’re complaining about: Romans were interested in other gods.

DH Would the first-century church have thought of itself as separate from Judaism?

PF When Paul writes to his congregations he often uses a Greek word that means “the group.” The word is ekklesia, translated “church” in English. But when we hear “church,” we think of an institution or something like that. He’s talking about a gathering. There is no Christian church in the way that there will be when Constantine decides to back one particular institution—certainly not a Christian church the way there is now. He’s talking about a gathering of people, and I don’t see any reason to imagine them no longer attending synagogue. Where else are they going to continue to hear Bible stories? Books are not privately owned, for the most part, in antiquity. There’s no reason to think that Paul’s gentiles, now that they’ve made this incredible commitment to the God of Israel by not worshiping their own gods anymore, would stop going to the synagogue and listening to the Bible. That’s how they have the vocabulary and the idea of God in history, so that they can comprehend the Christian message. I see this group that Paul designates the ekklesia as being a special subgroup within the penumbra of the Diaspora synagogue. But I don’t even think that they think of themselves as something that’s wholly other than Judaism. After all, the God that they’re gathering together to worship is precisely the God of Israel.

DH It’s been said that Paul’s been wrongly portrayed for the last 2,000 years or so. What do you make of the idea that we’ve not really known who he is?

PF People who loom large in history are very easy to misinterpret, precisely because they’re so important culturally that, in a sense, the image of the person is continually obligated to make sense to us. So this is how Paul can seem to be a Protestant; “He doesn’t like all that messy ritual,” Luther thought. Or he can very easily seem to be an orthodox Christian. Certainly, when Augustine, in the fourth century, does his commentaries on Paul, he sees him as a type of proto-Augustine.

What’s really enabled us to stop being cheated of a historically accurate image of Paul is all the work that’s been done in the past half century on late Second Temple Judaism. Seeing Paul in his Jewish context has enabled historians to understand how this man can be a passionately committed Jew and at the same time be a passionately committed apostle for the message of redemption in Jesus Christ, without being confused about the prospect. What he’s doing is precisely a radical form of Judaism. We, with the benefit of retrospect, know that this form of Judaism will eventually give rise to gentile Christianity. Paul in his own lifetime did not have the benefit of our retrospect.

DH We hear increasingly about the new perspective on Paul; what exactly is the “old” perspective?

PF The old perspective on Paul is that he became a Christian, and that that meant something other than being Jewish. It’s captured very nicely in a children’s Christian cartoon I once saw, where Paul is on the road to Damascus, and he has the Jewish male head covering—the kippa—on his head. He gets knocked down, the shining light is on him, Jesus speaks to him, and for the rest of the cartoon he doesn’t have a kippa anymore. Finished. He’s “Christian.” Christianity is so easily imagined as somehow the opposite of Judaism, because that’s how Christianity has presented Judaism to itself in the centuries long after Paul. In Paul’s lifetime, Christianity is only understandable as an extreme form of Judaism. And Paul thinks of himself as a Jew. What’s his choice? The only other option would be to think of himself as a gentile.

DH You’ve noted that the divide between Judaism and Christianity resulted from politics within the Roman Empire and Constantine’s decision in favor of Roman Christianity. Under Constantine the Sabbath was officially changed to Sunday and Christians were told not to confer with rabbis on the dating of Easter. What would Paul have made of that if he were living in that period?

PF We habitually refer to the conversion of Constantine. I think it’s more appropriate to say that under Constantine we have the conversion of Christianity. Christianity under Constantine becomes a form of imperial Roman culture. One Christian denomination is favored with his patronage. They get tax breaks. They get big, beautiful Bible codices copied at public expense. They can use the imperial post for free. They ask Constantine to kick out the leaders of the other Christian denominations in town. So the people who get the worst treatment after Constantine becomes a patron of this one church are other Christians. More Christians are persecuted after the conversion of Constantine than before, because they’re targeted by one particular branch of the church.

Paul’s first reaction to all of this would be that the type of Christianity Constantine is patronizing is very different from what Paul enunciated. The fact that Constantine’s Christianity understands itself as the only one that’s true to what Paul taught wouldn’t help the historical Paul’s shock in seeing how different Constantine’s Christianity was from his own. For one thing, when Constantine’s official biographer, Eusebius, writes about the emperor, he sees the foundation of the Christian Roman Empire as “Isaiah’s peace”—the Messianic peace promised in what we call the Old Testament. When Paul’s thinking about the kingdom of God, he’s certainly not thinking of the Roman emperor as His agent.

DH Is there any continuity between what we see in the fourth century and what might have been happening in the first, during Paul’s time?

PF Whether they are pagan or eventually Christian, these gentile populations in the Mediterranean never stop going to synagogue. But once some Christians develop an ideological commitment to the distinctive difference between Judaism and Christianity, this synagogue-going drives them crazy. We have complaints in sermons from bishops through the fourth and fifth centuries. We have law codes from ecclesiastical conferences in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. This means that Jewish synagogues, even if the bishop of their gentile-Christian neighbors is saying horrible things—calling the synagogues “whorehouses,” and saying that Satan lives in them, and that the Jews all killed Christ, and so on—these synagogues are still worshiping the God of Israel, reading the Bible stories in Greek, and welcoming their gentile-Christian neighbors and also their gentile-pagan neighbors into the community. It never stops. We think so easily of Paul abandoning the synagogue, of Jewish Christians no longer going to synagogue, of gentile Christians absolutely stopping on a dime, of the church and the synagogue as two completely different institutions from the beginning. But that picture is false.

DH Can you speak to the problem of anachronism and its effect on understanding Paul?

PF I’m a historian, and the most grave “original sin” for a historian is anachronism. What that means is that you lift something out of its historical context and put it in a different historical context, and so misinterpret it. If in addition we think of Paul as an orthodox Christian, we will only misinterpret him that much more. He’s living in a period where he’s not thinking in a Trinitarian manner. The idea of the Trinity hasn’t been conceived yet. His letters will have Jesus Christ in them; they will have God the Father in them; he will talk about the Spirit of God. Those are the textual origins that will be used to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, but Paul’s not thinking in a Trinitarian way.

People reading Paul assume that he’s hostile to Judaism because he’s the “inventor” of Christianity. In fact, he’s still imagining himself as a Jew and he’s presenting Christianity in continuity with Judaism. The fact that Paul is such a huge figure for Christianity makes it almost impossible for us not to interpret him anachronistically when we look at him, because it’s so important that his message speak immediately to modern Christianity. If we allow ourselves to see how much his message actually cohered with first-century Judaism, then we have to relinquish an immediate connection between him and us, between this ancient Jewish messianic movement and the modern church.

Fonte: Vision – Fall 2005

A Bíblia Semântica é composta por uma série de experimentos de novas tecnologias de computação aplicadas ao estudo da Bíblia. Compreende: uma Hiper-Concordância do Novo Testamento, um Índice Compósito do Evangelho, uma Base de Dados semântica de Nomes do Novo Testamento é um Blog. Site de Sean Boisen, Mestre em Linguística que trabalha com aplicações avançadas de linguagem e tecnologias de fala por computador.

New Testament Hyper-Concordance

The basic idea is to navigate the space of Scripture directly using words. Taking this idea one step further, given the text of the verse, you can just embed a hyperlink from the word in question to other verses, preserving the context. Now here’s where the idea takes off: instead of just hyperlinking one word, suppose every word is hyperlinked? This more tightly connects the information and gets you directly from the context of one verse to another with similar content (because of similar words). With some special processing to index the words, every word can link to a list of verses, each word of which is in turn hyperlinked to others, each word of which …

The Composite Gospel Index

The Composite Gospel Index (CGI) combines the four Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus into a single unified view. Instead of the traditional book/chapter/verse organization, it divides the texts into about 350 pericopes, each of which describe an event, a teaching, a parable, an interaction, or some other cohesive piece of text.

New Testament Names: a Semantic Knowledge Base

New Testament Names is a semantic knowledge base describing each named thing in the New Testament, about 600 names in all. Each named thing (an entity) is categorized according to its class, including God, Jesus, individual men and women, groups of people, and locations. These entities are related to each other by properties that interconnect the entities into a web of information, all represented in a standardized language with formal semantics, and shared on the Web with URI’s for others to use and extend. You can download it.

Blogos

A blog about God’s Word, our words meaning, communication, & technology, following Jesus, the Word made flesh.

Em Bíblical Theology, Jim West postou hoje mais uma mensagem de Lüdemann. Ele se propõe a manter um amistoso diálogo com Mark Goodacre, já que suas posições não são assim tão divergentes, como algumas ásperas palavras podem ter dado a entender.

Sob o título Agreement! Luedemann Responds to Goodacre [Obs.: link quebrado – blog descontinuado], dado por Jim ao post, está a proposta de Lüdemann:

I agree that the two of us are not as far apart as our contentious words may have suggested. I do look forward to further mutually respectful exchanges with Professor Goodacre on matters of mutual interest.

Sincerely,Gerd Lüdemann

No diálogo sobre o significado do nascimento de Jesus que se estabeleceu entre o alemão Gerd Lüdemann e o britânico Mark Goodacre, há, hoje, mais um capítulo: a resposta de Goodacre aos comentários de Gerd Lüdemann, feitos ontem, pode ser lida em seu Mark Goodacre’s NT Blog.

Leia: Response to Lüdemann

O caso Lüdemann está rendendo…

A defesa de Jim West é uma crítica do autoritarismo presente na Igreja alemã à qual pertence Lüdemann, comparando o caso de David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), punido quando lecionava na Universidade de Zurique, Suíça, com o de Gerd Lüdemann, afastado, no final do século XX, da cadeira de Novo Testamento da Faculdade de Teologia da Universidade de Göttingen, Alemanha.

Cito dois pequenos trechos da defesa de Jim West:

A very long time ago a gifted young scholar wrote an impressive, indeed, a groundbreaking work. It was a historical investigation of the Life of Jesus and it’s author was David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss was invited, as a result of that work, to teach at the University of Zurich. When conservative reactionaries got wind of the impending appointment they raised such a ruckus that the governing board (to their eternal shame so far as I am concerned), withdrew the call and pentioned young Strauss off. What had begun with the promise of a very fine academic appointment ended in bitter disillusionment. Strauss’s fury was unleashed against the religionists who, according to him, had ruined his life. He spent the rest of his life, a bitter and disappointed man, doing his best to undermine the facile historical ideology of his enemies (…)Fast forward, now, to the 20th century and change locations from Switzerland to Germany. Precisely the same sort of situation arose when Lüdemann published his work on the Historical Jesus. The same fundamentalists (with different faces but the same spirits) objected so loudly, so forcefully, so maliciously, that the esteemed people on the Board of Governors (or whatever they are in the German University system) buckled to the pressure and denied Gerd his rightful place. To their eternal shame, I might add [Obs.: o blog Biblical Theology, de Jim West, foi descontinuado].

 

Já Mark Goodacre começa seu post de hoje assim:

I have just received this response from Gerd Lüdemann to my comments on his press release (The Christmas Stories are Pious Fairy Tales) and Gerd asks if I would place this in my blog, which I am of course happy to do. I am knee-deep in grading (that’s what they call “marking” here) at the moment but I am looking forward to commenting later. The message below is as I received it from Prof. Lüdemann, with my original blog post in lower case (but combining parts of the press release and my comments) and Prof. Lüdemann’s responses in upper case.

O conhecido professor luterano Gerd Lüdemann, afastado anos atrás pela cúpula de sua Igreja da cátedra de Novo Testamento da Faculdade de Teologia da Universidade de Göttingen, Alemanha, por suas posturas consideradas hipercríticas em relação ao Novo Testamento, gera intensa polêmica às vésperas do Natal, com um press-release sobre o nascimento de Jesus e seu significado.

O texto foi publicado em sua Home Page e igualmente enviado a lista de discussão Biblical Studies ontem, dia 16 de dezembro de 2005.

São 10 itens, nos quais se mesclam afirmações históricas, exegéticas e teológicas. Algumas de suas afirmações são mais do que pacíficas para o mundo acadêmico, outras são permanente objeto de debate, e umas poucas são epistemologicamente complicadas por transitarem do histórico para o teológico, e vice-versa, sem maiores explicações. O resultado da mesclagem, em tom desafiador, é que aquece a polêmica.

Os interessados podem acompanhar o debate que se estabeleceu lendo alguns biblioblogs.

A melhor análise que vi até agora foi feita por Mark Goodacre, com o título de Lüdemann on Christmas.

Acrescento também o link para um livro publicado em 2002, editado por Jacob Neusner, e que documenta a expulsão de Gerd Lüdemann de sua cátedra.

Convém lembrar que o pesquisador foi, na verdade, transferido para a cadeira de História e Literatura do Cristianismo Primitivo na mesma Universidade, ficando proibido de lecionar Novo Testamento.

Gerd Lüdemann faleceu em 23 de maio de 2021, aos 74 anos de idade.

 

Transcrevo aqui o texto

The Christmas stories are pious fairy-tales

Press Release December 16, 2006

The biblical accounts of the birth of the Jesus, the supposed Son of God, are mere inventions and have little relation to what really happened. Historical research has demonstrated this once and for all. Ten unquestionable facts argue against their historical credibility:

1. Written centuries earlier, the quoted words of Old Testament prophets did not predict the coming of Jesus, but referred to events and persons in their past or immediate future. They would have been shocked by the notion that Jesus’ birth was the fulfillment of their prophecies.
2. The New Testament authors derived most events of the Christmas story from prophecies of the Old Testament and misrepresented their original intent in order to make them seem to point to Jesus.
3. The notion that Mary’s pregnancy did not result from intercourse with a male is a canard. The claim of a virgin birth has two sources: the mistranslation of “young woman” by “virgin” (in a passage that clearly did not refer to Jesus!), and the desire of Christians to place their revered leader on the same level as other ancient “sons of God” who were likewise born without participation of a male.
4. The reported worldwide census ordered by Caesar Augustus did not occur.
5. The reported murder of children in Bethlehem ordered by Herod the Great did not occur.
6. Jesus was born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem.
7. The angels in the Christmas story derive from primitive mythology.
8. The shepherds who kept watch over their flocks are idealized representatives of the poor and outcast, persons emphasized by Luke. They do not appear in Matthew’s story.
9. The magicians from the East are idealized representatives of the Gentiles and of eternal wisdom. They do not appear in Luke’s story.
10. The story of the star of Bethlehem is a fiction intended to emphasize the importance of Jesus – and, of course, to provide an entrance cue for the magicians from the East.

The logical conclusion is unavoidable: the Christmas stories recounted by the Bible and those Christian churches that present them as actual events have lost all historical credibility. Surely Jesus of Nazareth would not wish Christians to spread lies about him!

Göttingen, December 16, 2005

Prof. Dr. Gerd Lüdemann.