Chapter Four: Time to Wake Up (2): Hope Beyond Death in Post-Biblical Judaism

 [This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s 5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 3 – The Resurrection of the Son of God.]

N.T. Wright’s second chapter wherein he considers resurrection in second temple Judaism will bring out a relatively rare aspect in these blog reviews – I tend to agree with him. Wright argues that, much like Biblical views, second temple Judaism was interested in a “life after life after death.” He argues that this was a revolutionary moment that was primarily understood in apocalyptic terms. This post will simply summarize some of his key points and then show what it is that Wright is attempting to foreshadow and prove about Christian ideas (and countering false ideas).

First, Wright presents that belief in resurrection was fundamentally different from an idea of a non-bodily ethereal life directly after one dies. Rather, the hope that was presented was something that occurred at the end of days which would be very much a kingdom of God on earth in a new kind of existence. Wright argues that there were various different views of life after death, but that they were all relatively the same for this particular aspect:

If the bible offers a spectrum of belief about life after death, the second-Temple period provides something more like an artist’s palette: dozens of options, with different ways of describing similar positions and similar ways of describing different ones.[1]

 Resurrection, we must again insist, meant life after “life after death:” a two-stage future hope, as opposed to the single-stage expectation of those who believed in a non-bodily future life.[2]

The two passages present thing clearly – there was a variety of different types of writings (and there were), but in some way, there always was a view that something else was coming. I would have used the language of a “coming kingdom” more than Wright did, but the idea is essentially the same.

Wright is correct in showing that all of the expectation for a future life were revolutionary in its grandest sense. The expectation of a future life after death was popular in the sense of not just extending a life, transporting out of this life, or becoming above this life. Instead, resurrection implied a radical disruption and recreation of the sense of life itself. There is no way to express this outside the language of revolution.

The real problem was that resurrection was from the beginning a revolutionary doctrine. For Daniel 12, resurrection belief went with dogged resistance and martyrdom. For Isaiah and Ezekiel, it was about YHWH restoring the fortunes of his people. It had to do with the coming new age, when the life-giving god would act once more to turn everything upside down – or perhaps, as they might have said, right way up. It was the sort of belief that encouraged young hotheads to attack Roman symbols placed in the Temple, and that, indeed, led the first-century Jews into the most disastrous war they had experienced.[3]

Wright, in his interest in understanding the context of Judaism as focused around the problem of “exile” focuses more on the political than the cosmic, but for second temple Judaism, these things were united.

Their not having their land was accepted as a condition of the corrupted world in which they lived. They recognized that for any future life that would have things set “right” again, they could not simply exist as the political entity Israel as they did under the monarchy as before the Babylonian exile, they had to go farther and change the way living was structured. The way they would receive the land was not by conquering their foes in battle, it was through changing who and what their foes were. If they simply ceased to exist in a cosmic battle between good and evil in which good wins (as god would be directing it), then a real kingdom of God could be established.

Wright correctly points out that this ideal was thoroughly apocalyptic. The understanding of hope was fully apocalyptic in that there was an expectation that the evil in this world must be destroyed. Wright explains:

And in the middle of the texts and their subject-matter we find frequent references to the purposes of Israel’s god for his people after their death. In keeping with the genre and style of the apocalyptic writing, these references are often cryptic; but again and again the hope they express, as we might expect from the spiritual heirs of Daniel and Ezekiel, is not for a permanently disembodied immortality but for a resurrection at some time still in the future.[4]

There is a reason it is called “apocalyptic hope.” The apocalyptic is the world in which there is an expression that there is a great evil in the world that is putting down the good. This evil must be punished and destroyed. Those who are righteous are currently suffering and are to but wait until God will destroy that evil. When that happens, once for all, life will be fundamentally different. Therefore, the coming changes are in the language of judgment – the apocalyptic event is judgment upon that evil that is currently plaguing the world:

Resurrection thus belongs clearly within one regular apocalyptic construal of the future that Israel’s god has in store. Judgment must fall, because the wicked have been getting away with violence and oppression for far too long; when it does, bringing with it a great changing in the entire cosmic order, when those who have died, whose souls are resting patiently, will be raised to new life. Many of these apocalypses, as we have seen, allude to Daniel 12 in making the point. And all of them, in doing so, hold together what we have seen so closely interwoven in the key biblical texts: the hope of Israel for liberation from pagan oppression, and the hope of the righteous individual for a newly embodied, and probably significantly transformed, existence.[5]

The new existence only can occur when judgment occurs, evil will be destroyed and then Israel can truly be Israel.

Part of the effects of the destruction of Israel is that the whole people of God will be united. If they were not, then how can the readers say that the new life is any different from the previous? If that is so, then there must be a new way of dealing with the problem of death and thus the concept of resurrection is used. Resurrection is a new way of living in the future that includes everyone after the apocalyptic event:

[Resurrection] was one particular story that was told about the dead: a story in which the present state of those who had died and would be replaced by a future state in which they would be alive once more. As we noted a the end of chapter 1, ‘resurrection’ was a life after life after death, the second of two stages in the post-mortem program. Resurrection was, more specifically, not the redefinition or redescription of death, a way of giving a positive interpretation to the fact that the breath and blood of a human body had ceased to function, leading quickly to corruption and decay, but the reversal or undoing or defeat of death, restoring to some kind of bodily life those who had already passed through that first stage. It belonged with a strong doctrine of Israel’s god as the good creator of the physical world.[6]

For evil and death to be destroyed, then they had to practically destroyed for it to be a new kingdom of God.

Wright’s analysis is generally sound. It can be argued that his emphasis on the apocalyptic is overemphasizing one version of Judaism to the detriment of others. The Sadducees, for instance (which Wright does discuss as an exception to the rule)[7] held that there really was no significance to a future life at all outside of the traditional value in descendants as the focus of how to live forever. The Sadducees cannot have been the only Jews to have this view. However, a fair point can be argued that this view is certainly not left to us in surviving texts. Those who wrote and whose writings have been preserved do tend to prioritize an apocalyptic expectation – indeed, the Sadducees themselves left us no writings that have been preserved. Therefore, even if this was not the majority position, it certainly was the loudest minority that dominated the discussion at least in later Jewish though and most probably during that same period.

Wright, however, presents all of this in order to set up a dialogue that is coming – that resurrection should not be understood as something that happens directly after someone dies, but rather is something that happens at the end of days. This is not surprising for Jewish thought in the second temple period, but would be rather shocking to many modern Christians who make vague comments about heaven as if it is something that is currently being populated directly after one’s death. Therefore, Wright goes to extra lengths to counter this position that resurrection was a future expectation rather than a present reality for those who have died. Consider the following example:

In that world, nobody supposed that the dead were already raised; resurrection, as we have seen, describes new bodily life after a present mode of ‘life after death.’ So: where and what are the dead now? To this, we may surmise (and verse 9 will demonstrate it further), the Pharisees gave the answer: they are at present like angels, or spirits. They are presently disembodied; in the future, they will receive their new embodiment.[8]

Wright makes this comment to address his readers. There are very few people who think that the Pharisees would have thought that there was any type of resurrection as a present state. There are, however, many Christians who believe this. Wright here is foreshadowing his future argument about the New Testament which will show that this construct was for ancient Judaism and is the same for the New Testament. He realizes that this will challenge many evangelical Christians’ understandings and he is completely comfortable with that – in many ways that is his primary goal.

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[1] RSG, 129.

[2] RSG, 130.

[3] RSG, 138.

[4] RSG, 153-154.

[5] RSG, 162.

[6] RSG, 201.

[7] RSG, 131.

[8] RSG, 133.

Chapter Three – Time to Wake Up (1): Death and Beyond in the Old Testament

 [This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s 5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 3 – The Resurrection of the Son of God.]

The Hebrew Bible is notorious for its relative disinterest in life after death. This, of course, is only notorious because of the later Christian obsession with life after death, thereby making the silence in the Old Testament shocking. N.T. Wright explores this problem well showing how there was a general disinterest in what later Christians would be interested in with any type of life after death and anticipates that what will come later can, in some ways, be understood given the worldview of the Hebrew Bible itself.

Wright sets up the problem well. He notes that the interest in any type of resurrection was – to be generous – dormant in the Old Testament.  This, of course, is a shock to Christian groups who use resurrection as one of the most fundamental tenets. Wright explains this problem well to begin the chapter:

It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen – a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself – there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later time and texts.[1]

Aside from the pun about coming from sleep to waking up as a corrolary for death itself, I’m not sure if Wright can be quite as generous as this. Some early texts have far less a dormant idea than they basically have no idea at all. Wright explains this himself. There simply was very little to no interest in life after death for the majority of Israel:

In fact, however, an interest in ‘life after death’ for its own sake was characteristic of various pagan worldview (that of Egypt, for instance), not of ancient Israel.[2]

The interest was simply not there.

Wright correctly points out that this was not a problem for Israelites (as many seem to think it would be). A worldview that would be depressed of not having anything after death would have to be in contrast to another that thought there was life after death:

It would be wrong to give the impression that the early Israelites were particularly gloomy about all this. Only a world which had already begun to hope for something more interesting and enjoyable after death would find this vision unusual or depressing.[3]

This point that Wright makes is important for his Christian readers. Many Christians fall into the trap of thinking that without a belief in a future life in the kingdom of God, then, there could be no hope. However, that is only true if one is hoping for something else and then learns one is not going to get it.

Wright, then moves into a proof (in which this will be the first chapter to be followed by the next) that argues that resurrection did eventually become part of the worldview, it was a natural extension of the very worldview that was already present:

When belief in resurrection eventually appeared, it is best understood, as I shall argue below, not as a strange foreign import but as a re-expression of the ancient Israelite worldview under new and different circumstances.[4]

In form, this is good logic. Any development of an idea needs to be something that actually develops; not something that crops up out of the blue. While I agree with Wright in this element, I would slightly shift what precisely shifted to lead to a discussion of resurrection.

Before exploring this aspect, though, it should be noted what Wright does very well. Wright recognizes what resurrection would have meant to an Old Testament sensibility. It had to mean something that occurred after death rather than in place of death. Wright explains this clearly:

The texts we shall consider, however we understand their detailed nuances, are not speaking about a new construal of life after death, but about something that will happen after whatever ‘life after death’ may involve. Resurrection is not just another way of talking about Sheol, or about what happens, as in Psalm 73, ‘afterwards’, that is, after the event of bodily death. It speaks of something that will happen, if it does, after that again. Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life after death’, or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death.’ That is why it is misleading – and foreign to all the relevant texts – to speak, as does one recent writer, of ‘resurrection to heaven.’[5]

What Wright is arguing is that resurrection needs to be seen as a new state of something. It is not what Elijah or Enoch experienced. It is something else once the domain of death, the place of sheol, or the time of this world has to be completed. It is the step after that. This is where analogies of the dead coming out of the grave break down. While they do, they don’t come out of the grave in the sense that Lazarus did in John 11. That would simply be going through the process again – any resurrection had to be something that was a step beyond that.

Wright argues that the whole idea of life after death arose out of a rereading of God’s covenant with Israel. In this, Wright must be correct. However, his argument is that the development came from the logical extension of a theology of exile. Wright explains his perspective:

It is not difficult to see what expulsion from the garden would have meant (not only to readers, but to editors of the Pentateuch) during and after the exile in Babylon, especially in light of the promises and warnings of the great Deuteronomic covenant. Moses held out to the people life and death, blessings and curses, and urged them to choose life – which meant, quite specifically, living in the promised land as opposed to being sent into the disgrace of exile. But already in Deuteronomy there was the promise that even exile would not be final: repentance would bring restoration and the renewal both of the covenant and of human hearts. The explicit link of life with land and death with exile, coupled with the promise of restoration to the other side of exile, is one of the forgotten roots of the fully developed hope of ancient Israel. The dead might be asleep; they might be almost nothing at all; but hope lived on within the covenant and promise of YHWH.[6]

Here, Wright argues that it was exile which caused them to rethink the covenant promises in a new way that led to a conversation about life after death and in this relies heavily upon Daniel to show the interest in the rest of the chapter.

Wright here is certainly correct that it had to do with the covenant, but I am not sure exile is the best solution in this case. He leans upon Daniel, but Daniel, by many scholars, is dated to closer to the Maccabean period than the Babylonian exile meaning that it is written to a community that is comfortable (in some sense) in diaspora for over 400 years. Further, his argument that exile is death and the land is life would have been true at one period – particularly noted in the book of Exodus – it is not clear that it always would be the same.

The shift, however, was covenantal. In the Old Testament, there was one clear way to preserve immortality – through descendants. Descendants is one of the most important features in the whole of the Hebrew Bible and one of the major reasons for it was that this was the “eternal” side of the covenant with Abraham – the covenant would be for Abraham’s descendants as well as him himself. What shifted, it could be argued then, was less of a clear understanding of descent. Communities in diaspora with no hope (outside of the eschatological) of truly all uniting together in the land in the present time, then hypothesized a coming kingdom of God when all of the descendants of Abraham could finally unite in the land. While this sounds like Wright’s position on exile – and in some ways it is – there was an equally powerful drive that was motivated more by unity with ancestors so that descendants were less important.

Recall that while this was the central tenet of Old Testament religion, by the time of the New Testament, the emphasis seemed to be seriously shifted. Further, the early Jesus movement seems to have completely abandoned it. That shift in thinking cannot have been accidental. While some would argue that this was due to the cultural world of Greece and Rome, the solution was the same.[7] If the eternal promise would not be eternal through descent, then it needed to be eternal in another way. The most logical solution, then, would be life after death of some kind.

Further complication could be the influence we see so commonly in the New Testament that death was coupled with sin. If that is the case, then how could a perfect order stand for it? If it was a very natural thing that always existed, then any future kingdom would be fine with it. However, if one lived without sin (which they did think was practically – even if not logically – possible), then logically sin would not be just. If God is just, then there must be some way of dealing with this issue.

These points are not to challenge the value of Wright. Wright’s main points are very good. As said many times throughout this blog series analyzing Wright’s very popular book series, I analyze his work this way because he presents very common views far better than many of those who parrot his position. Therefore, I hope it is taken as a compliment to his work that I analyze it in this way.

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[1] RSG, 85.

[2] RSG, 87.

[3] RSG, 90.

[4] RSG, 87.

[5] RSG, 108-109.

[6] RSG, 92-93.

[7] For this shift, see Peter Brown, Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

Conflicted Feelings about Marcus Borg’s life and work

Marcus Borg has passed away. The news report can be found here. There will surely be, in the following days several pieces presented about his life and legacy. This paper is my writing this as a scholar in the field of early Christianity and the conflicted feelings that I have about what value and challenges he (and others of his ilk) have brought to the academic study of the field. There is certainly a conversation to be had about whether Borg was helpful or not for the devotional life of Christians, but that is not primarily what this post will be about. Instead, I want to consider his work for its scholarly sake.

Borg was both a scholar of the historical Jesus and an activist for progressive Christianity. He, along with John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk established and maintained the controversial Jesus Seminar which mixed these two interests. For Borg’s purely academic work (mostly in articles, less in books) his scholarship was generally academically sound. In his books, however, he often wrote for a mass audience with sometimes some wildly fantastic claims. These claims were very helpful for his interest in a progressive Christianity, but less helpful for discussion of the study of Christianity in its academic field.

Borg can be placed among a number of scholars whose work was more or less helpful for mass current movements, but rather questionably helpful for the progress of the study of Christianity. With Borg can be placed figures like John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, and Reza Aslan. These figures have clear social agendas and hope to convert their readers to their particular points of view. Frequently, when they do this, they sacrifice some academic acumen. Much like Borg, these figures, when they do truly scholarly work, are good scholars. When, however, they spend more time on challenging the mass audience to rethink their assumptions, they often sacrifice their scholarly strength to make a more shocking statement. All one has to do is to consider the difference between Ehrman’s very academic and valuable book on Christian pseudepigrapha Forgery and Counterforgery: Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics wherein Ehrman argues that pseudepigraphy was practiced as a polemical discourse for and against other pseudepigraphical texts. This tome is over 600 pages, well documented and is a boon for the academic study of religion. Then, compare that to his popular sensational book Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. In this second book, he abandons his argument that pseudepigraphy was a polemical discourse and instead just writes a book on why the mass audience shouldn’t believe the traditional authors wrote the Bible. This divergence is striking. In one, Ehrman does the hard work of furthering the conversation about the concept of authorship in antiquity; in the other, he just tries to stir up people’s convictions (both those who love the scripture and those who hate it).

Borg can be seen in a very similar light. The majority of his publications were not scholarly works. They were public appeals to a mass audience in order to stir up feelings that others may or may not have held. This was encapsulated most profoundly with the Jesus Seminar which held a council to decide which sayings of Jesus in the Gospel was more or less historical and even went so far as to create a book with the “authentic” sayings of Jesus based on some relatively vague principles. The study of the historical Jesus is an art rather than a science, but the resultant book of the process would not fit within even the academic study of the historical Jesus. It does not clearly show why certain pieces were included and others were excluded. It does not explain clearly why some key pinciples were selected. Instead, it is a book that is relatively useless in the academic sphere, but rather thought provoking for those in the public realm and certainly sold a lot of copies.

It should be briefly noted that it is not only liberal scholars who fall into this trap. Similar things could be said of Luke Timothy Johnson, N.T. Wright, and Raymond Brown. These figures also vacillate between very good exegetical and academic studies and popular works that really are not scholarly precise. Further, there are figures such as Karen Armstrong who only really work in the public sphere and never really make a contribution to the academy in any real way.

What are scholars to think of all of this? Was Borg good for the academic field of the study of religion? I would argue he was. Borg reached an audience who would have had absolutely no interest in the academic field of religion and got them interested. He brought people to the door – for the right or wrong reasons – that could challenge them to explore further into the field.

I did not care for most of Borg’s conclusions. He was either a buffoon or worse yet, just a propagandist. However, whatever he did, he got people to stop and ask questions. For the field of early Christianity, we should applaud all of these figures who take the time to try to reach a mass audience. While Borg’s conclusions were academically skeptical, the sources he dialogued with were the same sources that academics use. A vast number of people got interested in the academic field.

What is even more important is which people got interested due to Borg’s work. Borg’s work was universally despised among the conservative Christian groups. That audience was probably not reached by Borg and for the most part, his books were probably not even read. However, I am not sure this group really needed convincing that the study of early Christianity was valuable. Instead, he reached an entirely different group who were either disenfranchised to the study of early Christianity, or even more probable, those who had no interest in the first place.

Would I have preferred that Borg be more academically sound in his books? Of course I would. Elaine Pagels and Robert Louis Wilken have accomplished this  - they have written very popular books that have sold very well among laity, but retained their academic integrity. These authors, though, are rare. Few people are able to accomplish this task. Marcus Borg did not do this. While I would have preferred he act in that manner, then I am starting to critique him simply for not being exceptional. That is hardly a fair critique of someone’s career.

Some might challenge me that Borg’s conclusions were too popular and challenged the faith of some devotional Christians. That might be true. However, I would wonder if a book they read by a distant scholar really was more challenging to their faith than living within modern society where there are many who challenge faith positions of Christians. The only way that Borg could truly challenge the faith of someone is if the solution to this crisis is simply to ignore questions. As a teacher, that is not something that I can recommend. A faith seeking understanding must be the goal of Christians. Many would not find Borg all that helpful and therefore would not read his books at all. However, that does not necessarily mean Borg has done more harm than good.

The field of early Christianity is always in jeopardy. Horror stories are told of programs closing and jobs being lost. Borg’s work, then, should be applauded for making the field relevant – even if we don’t like how he made it relevant. A reader who gets interested because of one of Borg’s books very like will follow by looking at more standard scholars. That reader might well enroll in a class. No matter where one falls on the view of the historical Jesus, most all of us in the academy should believe that things that promote further education in our field are good. Borg did this. Perhaps in a way that some didn’t like, but rather than hanging him for poor conclusions, perhaps we should see the value in that he caused people to even ask questions – regardless of what conclusions he held.