I am reposting a link here to Thomas Verenna’s Blog, just up this morning, regarding the late breaking news of the decision of the Supreme Court of Germany regarding the case of Professor Gerd Luedemann, historian, theologian, and New Testament scholar. I have known professor Luedemann for many years and most recently have enjoyed contact with him at the initial gatherings of The Jesus Project at UC Davis (2007) and in Amherst, NY (2008). This ruling says a lot about the long arms and tight hands of Church Influence even in “secular” Europe, not only in cases such as Hans Kueng, on the Roman Catholic side of things, but now equally so in the Protestant arena.

As one non-Catholic among half a dozen others who left the University of Notre Dame back in the mid-1980s under the pressure of one of Father Hesburg’s “recatholicising” moves in the Dept. of Theology back in those dark ages, as well as having scheduled lectures on my book, The Jesus Dynasty, forbidden in the spring of 2006 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, because I had dared to suggest that Jesus had a human father, not likely Joseph, I can identify in just a tiny way with Prof. Luedemann.

Surely the structures of European theological education are of great concern to those of us on the other side of the Great Deep, in that we who work in Biblical Studies are inextricably linked in both methods and research agendas to our European colleagues.

Please help spread the world on this significant development so its issues and consequences can be more widely considered and discussed in our 21st century “post-Enlightenment” global culture.

I am finishing up a substantial article on ancient Jewish and early Christian “apocalypticism” for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Millennialism, edited by Catherine Wessinger. Although the origins and development of apocalypticism, both ancient and modern (see my book Why Waco, first chapter on-line for browsing), has been one of my central professional interests for several decades now in the course of writing htis article I have had occasion to pull out all sorts of things and poke around here and there in my previous work. One rather substantial article that might be of interest to readers of this Blog, as I mentioned here recently, was published in the December, 1999 issue of Bible Review. Please note the date and remember our “turn of the millennium” frenzy over Y2K and other matters. It is posted conveniently on my University Web site if anyone wants to take a look, titled appropriately: Why 2K?: The Biblical Roots of Millennialism.

Just the past week I was looking at some very informal and preliminary work I did on the New Testament book of Revelation, inspired by my former colleague at the University of Notre Dame, Josephine Masssyngberde Ford in her  volume on Revelation in the Anchor Bible Commentary series (now Anchor Yale Bible Commentary, edited by J. J. Collins). Although colleagues have been fairly critical of Ford’s work in this volume, and particularly her claim that the book of Revelation can be traced back to pre-Christian John the Baptizer circles, with links to Qumran and the DSS, I have found her basic insights quite compelling.

One thing I noticed in my own work on the book of Revelation is that the explicit references to Jesus/Christ, outside the letters to the churches of chapters 2 & 3, are mostly clustered in chapters 1 and 22, with few in the middle chapters, and all of these references can be easily removed without detracting in any way from the structure or flow of the passages in which they occur.  Notice carefully the bold italicized words in brackets that I am suggesting are later Christian interpolations inserted to “Christianize” a book that in its origins had nothing to do with Jesus. The original text remains intact and makes complete sense without these references:

Rev 1:1 The revelation [of Jesus Christ,] which God gave [him] to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,
2 who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.
3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near.
4 John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne,
[5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood,
6 and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.]

Rev 1:9 I, John, your brother who share with you [in Jesus] the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God [and the testimony of Jesus.]

NRS Rev 11:8 and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, [where also their Lord was crucified.]

Rev 12:17 Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God [and hold the testimony of Jesus.]

Rev 14:12 Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God [and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.]

Rev 17:6 And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints [and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus.] When I saw her, I was greatly amazed.

Rev 19:10 Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades [who hold the testimony of Jesus.]Worship God! [For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."]

Rev 20:4 Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded [for their testimony to Jesus and] for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned [with Christ] a thousand years.

Rev 22:16 ["It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star."]

Rev 22:20 The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. [Come, Lord Jesus]

Rev 22:21 [The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.]

The remaining references to the “Lord” or to the “Messiah,” such as those in 11:15, 12:10, and 20:6, are generic and fit easily into the thought world of generic late 2nd Temple Jewish apocalypticism, with nothing implicitly “Christian,” while the reference to “the Lamb” that is slain fits well into the generic image of the suffering “Son of Man,” returning triumphantly in the clouds of heaven, taken from Daniel 7:13-14, where it is understood to  be the corporate people of the “saints of the Most High,” not an individual slain messiah figure.

In contrast to these references to Jesus, that so clearly exhibit a heavy hand of Christian interpolation, one finds multiple references to the LORD God Almighty, as well as “his Messiah,” that echoes closely the language of the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible. None of these contain explicit references to Jesus and clearly exhibit a textual integrity that reflects the language and thought world of pre-Christian Jewish apocalypticism:

Rev 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the LORD God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

Rev 4:8 And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, LORD God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”

Rev 4:11 “You are worthy, our LORD and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

Rev 6:10 they cried out with a loud voice, “LORD LORD, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

Rev 11:4 These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the LORD of the earth.

Rev 11:17 singing, “We give you thanks, LORD God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.

Rev 15:3 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: “Great and amazing are your deeds, LORD God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations!

Rev 15:4 LORD, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.”

Rev 16:7 And I heard the altar respond, “Yes, O LORD God, the Almighty, your judgments are true and just!”

Rev 18:8 therefore her plagues will come in a single day — pestilence and mourning and famine — and she will be burned with fire; for mighty is the LORD God who judges her.”

Rev 19:6 Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunder peals, crying out, “Hallelujah! For LORD our God the Almighty reigns.

Rev 21:22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is LORD God the Almighty [and the Lamb.]

Rev 22:5 And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the LORD God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Rev 22:6 And he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true, for LORD, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his Messenger to show his servants what must soon take place.”

The implications of these textual factors are quite fascinating. First, it appears that one can fairly easily recover the pre-Christian version of this text, more or less, with very little change to the underlying text itself. What this would then allow is a re-reading of the book as a whole, with its references to the “Beast,” the “False Prophet,” and “Babylon” in a pre-70 CE setting. Scholars have most often applied the basic setting of the book to the reigns of the Roman emperors Nero and Domitian, with several stages of redaction in the period from 68 to 100 CE. However, since Rev 11:15 appears to be a clear reference to the city of Jerusalem, not Rome, as “Sodom and Egypt,” an entirely different line of interpretation opens up. The perspective of the authors of this primitive Ur-text is a radical disenfranchisement from the authority structures of pre-70 CE Roman destruction Jerusalem, whom they consider agents of the “Beast.” Further, the martyrs in this Ur-text are the “two witnesses,” whose slain bodies are left in the streets of Jerusalem, not Jesus the crucified messiah.

I am convinced that in the same way the basic apocalyptic texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls have as their historical reference points the parties and politics of the mid-1st century BCE, the Ur-text of revelation is most likely composed against the backdrop of local events in Judea in the 40s and 50s CE–and has little to do with Rome and its emperors. More thoughts on this line of interpretation to come.

Although it is common among both Christians and Jews to refer to the notion of “Resurrection of the Dead,” as a formal category of Apocalyptic Eschatology, the Hebrew phrase found in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish liturgical traditions, and most recently, the so-called “Gabriel Revelation,” is much more literal–namely, “to make live the dead ones.”

In this Blog I wanted to put up a few posts offering some thoughts regarding both this phrase, and the concept of “resurrection of the dead,” in late 2nd Temple Jewish materials–including early Christian. Since Christians in particular ended up making the affirmation of Jesus being “raised the third day,” so central to confessional faith, the implications of the language itself is important and far-reaching.

I begin in this post with one of the more intriguing texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fragment that has been titled “A Messianic Apocalypse” (4Q521). This text contains three rather striking features that are of particular significance for comparing the apocalyptic beliefs and expectations of the Qumran community with the emerging early Christian movement. First, the text speaks of a single Messiah figure who will rule heaven and earth. Second, it mentions in the clearest language the expectation of the resurrection of the dead during the time of this Messiah. And third, and perhaps most important for students of the New Testament, it contains an exact verbal parallel with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke for identifying of the signs of the Messiah.

First, a translation of the fragment itself:
[the hea]vens and the earth will listen to His Messiah, and none therein will
stray from the commandments of the holy ones.
Seekers of the Lord, strengthen yourselves in His service!
All you hopeful in (your) heart, will you not find the Lord in this?
For the Lord will consider the pious (hasidim) and call the righteous by name.
Over the poor His spirit will hover and will renew the faithful with His power.
And He will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal Kingdom.
He who liberates the captives, restores sight to the blind, straightens the b[ent]
And f[or] ever I will cleav[ve to the h]opeful and in His mercy . . .
And the fr[uit . . .] will not be delayed for anyone.
And the Lord will accomplish glorious things which have never been as [He . . .]
For He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead (lit. make live the dead)  and bring good news
to the poor…
(Michael O. Wise, translation)
The early Christians obviously focused on a single Messiah or Christ, a descendent of king David, whom they identified as Jesus of Nazareth (Mark 8:27-30; Acts 2:36). They clearly saw him as God’s cosmic agent, who would return in power and glory to rule heaven and earth (Mark 14:61-62; 13:26-27). They expected that the entire cosmos would come under subjection to him (Phil 2:9-10; 1 Cor 15:24-28)). They remembered him as one who had power over the demonic spirits, over disease and death, and even over the forces of nature. This exalted view of Jesus is well summed up in the Markan version of the disciples’ exclamation when he calms a storm on the Sea of Galilee: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:35-41).

But like those at Qumran, they associated other special figures and groups with the age of the Messiah. John the Baptist was of the Aaronic priesthood and was revered as a returned “Elijah,” a sure sign that the End was near (Mark 9:9-13; Malachi 4:5 [Hebrew 3:23]). The Twelve apostles were expected to sit on thrones over the regathered twelve tribes of Israel in the coming Messianic rule (Matthew 19:28). The followers of Jesus, referred to as the “elect” or “saints,” were expecting to rule over the Gentile nations and even judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:1-4). In line 11 we have a clear reference to the resurrection of the dead. Why is this so significant? Much ink has been spilled over the past few decades discussing whether or not the people who composed the Scrolls believed in the distinctively Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. We know that various Jewish groups during the Second Temple period disputed over this doctrine of the afterlife. The first references to the idea of the dead being raised occur only in very late portions of the Hebrew Bible (Daniel 12:1-3). It was a doctrine that was emerging in certain Jewish circles from the 2nd century BCE down through the 1st century CE. We see evidence of the dispute reflected in the Apocrypha and in the New Testament (2 Maccabees 12:43-45; 15:11-16; Mark 12:18-27; Acts 23:6-10). Obviously, for the early Christians, faith in the resurrection of Jesus, and indeed, of all humankind at the end of days, was a cardinal doctrine (1 Corinthians 15:12; Acts 24:15).

But what about those at Qumran? Geza Vermes, in earlier editions of his widely circulated book The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, says that the Scrolls never clearly mention the idea, and concludes that “resurrection” played no part in their eschatology (p. 56, 3rd edition). His view is commonly reflected in many standard Qumran studies. Of course, Vermes and other scholars had no access to this text until it was published in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1992. We now have an unambiguous statement that “raising the dead” was one of the key expectations of the Messianic age in this community.

Line 11 of this text also contains another highly striking feature. Indeed, it appears to be the closest and most direct linguistic parallel to a New Testament text that we have yet discovered. The line reads:

For he will heal the wounded, make live the dead,
and proclaim glad tiding to the poor.

In both Matthew and Luke we read of a deputation that John the Baptist sends to Jesus while John is imprisoned. John’s disciples ask Jesus, “Are you the coming one, or do we look for another?” The story is thus tightly framed around the question of messianic identity: what will the signs of the true Messiah be? Jesus answers:

Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the glad tiding preached to them (Luke 7:22-23 and Matthew 11:4-5).
This reply is cast in the style of a precise formula. It reflects a very early Christian expectation of the signs of the messianic age and the marks for identification of the Messiah. One indication that we have here a very early Christian tradition is that these passages from Luke and Matthew come from the source scholars have designated as Q, from the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” According to most N.T. scholars, Q was a collection of the “Sayings of Jesus,” somewhat like the Gospel of Thomas in genre, which was compiled in the middle of the first century, but before our finished Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were written.

The phrase at the end of line 11, about “proclaiming glad tidings to the poor” is a direct quotation from Isaiah 61:1, which tells of an “anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who will work various signs before the Day of the Lord. This passage is quite important in the Gospel of Luke. In fact, he highlights it as the inauguration of the Messianic mission of Jesus. According to Luke, it is this very verse from Isaiah which Jesus reads and claims to fulfill in his home town synagogue of Nazareth.

However, what is most noteworthy is that Isaiah 61:1 says nothing about this Anointed One raising the dead. Indeed, in the entire Hebrew Bible there is nothing about a messiah figure raising the dead. Yet, when we turn to the Q Source, which Luke and Matthew quote, regarding the “signs of the Messiah,” we find the two phrases linked: “the dead are raised up, the poor have the glad tidings preached to them,” precisely as we have in our Qumran text. Luke makes more than passing use of this notion of the “resurrection of the dead” as a sign of the age of the Messiah. In the two places he quotes Isaiah 61:1 he also mentions specific cases of resurrection of the dead: as Elijah once raised the son of the widow, Jesus now raises the son of the widow from Nain (Luke 4:26; 7:11-17). This is hardly accidental, as the close juxtaposition of the texts makes clear.

It is also significant that this section of the Q Source is dealing with traditions shared between the community of John the Baptist and that of the early followers of Jesus. The close connections between John the Baptist and the community that produced the Scrolls have been pointed out by many scholars. Through this Dead Sea Scroll fragment, coupled with the early Q Source of the Gospels, we are taken back to a very early common tradition within Palestinian Judaism regarding the “signs of the Messiah.” We are in a better position to speak of the common expectations of a variety of interrelated apocalyptic, sectarian, baptist groups which have fled to the “wilderness” to prepare the “Way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3; Luke 3:4; 1QS 8,9). They appear to share a specific set of expectations, and they draw in strikingly similar ways, upon a common core of prophetic texts from the Hebrew Bible and related Jewish literature.

Of course, this fragment alone does not settle our attempts to identify the people of the Scrolls—whether they should be labeled as Essenes, Sadducees, Zealots, Pharisees, Nazarenes, Ebionites, or a unique blend of their own amalgamation. However, the text does provide a most direct and significant example of a common messianic hope among the followers of John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Teacher of Righteousness.

For a fuller and more technical treatment of this text see James Tabor and Michael Wise, “4Q521 ‘On Resurrection’ and the Synoptic Gospel Tradition: A Preliminary Study,” in Qumran Questions, edited by James Charlesworth (Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 161-163.

There has been a lot of discussion of late, in the press, on the Web, and particularly in world of the BiblioBlogs, regarding the late Columbia University historian Morton Smith and his discovery, publication, and interpretation of a so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark” in 1973. According to Smith, fifteen years earlier he had come across, quite by accident, a copy of a letter of Clement of Alexandria at the Greek Orthodox monastary of Mar Saba, southeast of Jerusalem, in which Clement quoted portions of a version of the Gospel of Mark that contained additions to our canonical Mark that he, Clement, considered authentic. Thus the term “Secret Mark.” According to Clement these special additions were not to be shared with all, but only with those initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith. The clear implication was that there were two versions of the Gospel of Mark circulating in Clement’s time (early 3rd century AD), one for public distribution–presumably the version we all have today in our Bibles, and the other only to be shared with those who could understand and accept some of the deeper teachings of the “mysteries” of Christianity. Unfortunately, for us at least, Clement only quoted two short portions of “Secret Mark,” so that is all that is available to us today. The letter of Clement, with its quotations from “Secret Mark,” and an abundance of commentary, is available at Secret Mark. Smith not only considered these materials early and authentically from Mark’s original gospel, but he saw them as providing a glimpse into an underground form of Christianity, shared only with initiates, that had much to say about the real Jesus and his earliest followers.

I well remember the storm of controversy Morton Smith stirred in the Fall of 1973 with the publication of both his scholarly tome from Harvard University Press titled Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, as well as his popular summary thereof, published by Harper & Row, titled, The Secret Gospel. I was at the University of Chicago at the time, just beginning my Ph.D. work. I will never forget how the late Norman Perrin did an oral review of the Harvard volume for the weekly faculty/student forum in the Divinity School and castigated Smith in the harshest terms imaginable for his sloppy sensationalism, even hinting, way back then, that maybe Smith had “forged” the document himself. It was clear that Smith had stirred up much more than the proverbial bee in a bonnet.

Although the authenticy of Smith’s text of Clement was generally accepted by scholars and has made its way into numerous critical works and sources, the controversy among experts was generally over Smith’s interpretation thereof, rather than seriously questioning the authenticity of the text itself. More recently, however, with the publication of attorney Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax (Baylor University Press, 2005), and Peter Jeffrey’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (Yale University Press, 2006), any number of scholars have joined the “forgery” bandwagon, so that the issue of whether Morton Smith might have forged the document itself is clearly out on the table. In my view, Scott Brown, in his definitive article, “Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery,” in the Journal of Biblical Literature (122: 2003: 89-110), had addressed most of the main arguments for forgery, showing them to be baseless.

I knew Morton Smith reasonably well for close to twenty years, from my student days at Chicago until his death in 1991. Based upon our correspondence and many hours of face-to-face discussions over the years I have always been utterly convinced that the charge Smith forged this text was absurd, completely without basis, and blatantly disrespectful of the scholar I knew him to be. I continue to maintain that no one who truly knew Morton Smith and worked with him over the years would think him capable of such behavior. I am pleased to note that a most recent piece by Anthony Grafton, “Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, published in The Nation (January 7, 2009) and available on-line, argues the same, but on new evidence taken from Smith’s recently published correspondence with his life-long friend, the great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem. These letters make it clear beyond any reasonable doubt that Smith could not have forged either Clement’s letter or the passages of “Secret Mark” contained therein. The manner in which Smith’s own views and understanding of his discovery develop and change over time are clearly demonstrated in these letters, as he debates with himself the significance of the text he has found and shares his insights and his questions with Scholem. Indeed, Grafton argues that Smith’s interpretation of the Markan passages, and his subsequent conclusions regarding Jesus as a libertarian “magician,” were largely influenced by his relationship with Scholem.

Discussions of the possible relevance of the texts Smith called “Secret Mark” to our understanding of Jesus and the character of his movement will continue but I for one think we will be far ahead to drop the unfounded speculations that Morton Smith forged the texts themselves. I commend Anthony Grafton for publishing such a clear and useful article that in my estimation goes a long way in setting the record straight.

In subsequent posts I want to offer my own analysis of the significance of these texts of “Secret Mark,” given their context as part of the tradition passed on by Clement of Alexandria in the early 3rd century AD, for understanding Jesus and his early followers.