Intolerance And the Gospel: Selected Texts from the New Testament
292
Intolerance And the Gospel: Selected Texts from the New Testament
292Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781591024682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2006 |
| Pages: | 292 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d) |
About the Author
Gerd Lüdemann is a professor of the history and literature of early Christianity at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Professor Lüdemann's published conclusions about Christianity aroused great controversy in his native Germany, where the Confederation of Protestant Churches in Lower Saxony demanded his immediate dismissal from the theological faculty of his university. Despite this threat to his academic freedom, he has retained his post at the university, although the chair he holds was renamed to disassociate him from the training program of German pastors. Lüdemann is also the author of Jesus After 2000 Years, Paul: The Founder of Christianity, and The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry.
Read an Excerpt
Intolerance and the Gospel
Chapter One
Tolerance in the Old Testament, Judaism, and the Greco-Roman World at the Time of the New Testament Writings
The Jewish religion was the only religion in the East and in the Hellenistic world in which the worship of foreign gods was fundamentally regarded as apostasy and could be punished with death. -Martin Hengel
1. TOLERANCE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT AND IN JUDAISM
The earliest Christians were Jews who regarded the Hebrew Bible and its Greek translation, the Septuagint, as Holy Scripture and the God of Israel as the father of Jesus Christ. He was also their father, and had repudiated Judaism and consecrated the church by electing its members to be his new chosen people. The soon-to-be-founded Gentile Christian congregations did not change that. For even though Gentiles brought their own culture into the church, it soon took on a distinctly Jewish coloration in matters of theology. And although by New Testament times Jewish culture had been largely assimilated by the Greco-Roman world, it nevertheless clung jealously to the doctrine that Yahweh had elected Israel,a nation that therefore had an identity of its own and was an entity in itself. Whoever wants to understand "tolerance" or "intolerance" in the writings of the New Testament must try to discover both the origins and evolution of these concepts within the Old Testament and how they were understood in the Jewish world of the first century CE.
The First Commandment and Monotheism in the Old Testament
The first commandment, with its requirement to worship Yahweh alone and not to serve other gods-along with the threat of severe punishment for disobedience-dominates large parts of the Old Testament as we now have it.
Exodus 20:2-3
(2) I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. (3) You shall have no other gods besides me. (RSV)
Joshua 23:16
(16) If you transgress the covenant of Yahweh your God, which he enjoined on you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of Yahweh will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land which he has given to you. (NRSV)
2 Kings 17:5-7
(5) Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. (6) In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria.... (7) This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against Yahweh their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshipped other gods. (RSV/NRSV)
Jeremiah 11:9-11
(9) Again Yahweh said to me, "There is revolt among the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. (10) They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers, who refused to hear my words; they have gone after other gods to serve them; the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant which I made with their fathers. (11) Therefore, thus says Yahweh, Look, I am bringing evil upon them which they cannot escape; though they cry to me, I will not listen to them." (RSV)
Apart from these passages, a number of statements not only underscore the sole worship of Yahweh but also express a rigid monotheism that negates the very existence of other gods. Let a single example stand for many:
Deuteronomy 4:39
Know therefore this day, and lay it to your heart, that Yahweh is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. (RSV)
Various Manifestations of Yahweh
Now I shall sketch the historical development that led to Yahweh's claim of exclusiveness and eventually to monotheism by distinguishing the several stages of this evolution.
At the time of the two monarchies of Israel and Judah, Yahweh resembled other deities in that he appeared under different names: he was hailed not only as Yahweh of Samaria or Yahweh of Teman but also as Yahweh of Jerusalem. Thus, "it was not unusual for Israelites and Judahites to wage war against each other or enter into coalitions in his name." An even more difficult theological dilemma arose when in 722 BCE Assyria conquered Samaria, annihilated the kingdom of Israel, and thereby overcame its god Yahweh-but failed to subdue the kingdom of Judah, which acknowledged the same deity. Challenged to explain why Yahweh had allowed this defeat, the prophets answered that Yahweh himself had ordered the liquidation of Israel as punishment for its sins. To quote Reinhard Gregor Kratz,
The prophetic intimation of the catastrophe became the announcement of a total judgment brought by Yhwh, and the complaint about the chaotic conditions became an accusation and the reason for the judgment which had already taken place in Israel and was still imminent in Judah. Under the impact of the downfall of Israel, and in the face of the Assyrian expansion southwards, in this way there emerged among the prophets for the first time, or at any rate for the first time explicitly, a notion of the unity of Yhwh and his people transcending the oppositions between Israel and Judah.
The Unity of Yahweh: One God, One Nation, One Cult
The priests who composed the earliest version of Deuteronomy (UrDeuteronomy) about 621 BCE took other important steps toward the establishment of the monotheistic concept; the most important of these were the restriction of cult ceremonies to specified locations and the vesting of considerable authority in levitical priests supported by the community. This institutionalization of the unity of the cult and Yahweh, especially when reinforced for several centuries by the presence of king and Temple in Jerusalem, enabled a monotheistic Judaism to survive the loss of king, Temple, and holy city in 587 BCE. Along with his priestly supporters, Yahweh could not only survive in a new selected place, but could also return to Jerusalem. Only fifty years after the disaster of 587, the altar of sacrifice was restored, and two decades later the Temple once again proclaimed the oneness of Yahweh and his sacred cult.
Because the composers of Deuteronomy and its later editors regarded themselves as both spokesmen and wardens of Yahweh, they demanded cultic purity and strict separation from other nations. Since Israel is a holy people elected by Yahweh, it must avoid any contact with other nations. Political neutrality and religious tolerance are out of the question. Deuteronomy's isolationist and exclusivist program is the heart of its theology, and not a pragmatic addendum or an arbitrary aberration. The aim of establishing the myth of Israel's special existence and protecting it against foreign influences almost inevitably produced an ideology of war and revived, among other things, the ancient practice of ban-the devotion to destruction of all human beings and animals-which, though, assigned the fruits of victory such as gold, and the like to Yahweh-or in practice to the Temple apparatus.
Connected with the idea of the unity and purity of the cult is the doctrine of election. The other side of this coin, however, is the rejection and indeed the disapprobation of all things foreign, a rebuff that at times takes the form of a ritually based hate of everything that does not belong to Israel. The ideology of separation increased during the Exile (587-539 BCE) and was afterward further deployed to cover everything not intrinsic to the pure cultic community. We see this animus reflected in the call for the total annihilation of the Canaanites and the Amalekites, and to it belongs a psalm composed during the Babylonian Exile and crying for revenge:
Psalms 137:1, 8-9
(1) By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.... (8) O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! (9) Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! (RSV)
This separation from the hostile outside world corresponds to the close attachment to Yahweh.
Deuteronomy 6:4-5
(4) Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one; (5) and you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
On the basis of this theological standard, priestly chroniclers composed the annals of Israel and Judah found in the so-called deuteronomistic history that extends from 1 Samuel 1 to 2 Kings 25. Its writers ascribe any success or failure of the kings of Israel and Judah to the degree these rulers had championed or rejected Yahweh's demand for the centralization of his cult. And all the while, no doubt, these theological narrators "hoped for a renewal of the Davidic monarchy according to the criteria of Ur-Deuteronomy."
Yahweh's Exclusivity and the Monotheistic Faith
Since the renewal of the Davidic kingdom was impossible under either the Babylonians (612-539 BCE) or the Persians (539-333 BCE), Jewish theologians "grounded the existence of 'Israel' wholly in the relationship with God." Into the existing exodus narrative they incorporated the Decalogue, headed by the exclusionary injunctions of its first two articles. "From now on no longer the centralization of the cult but the First Commandment is the criterion by which the people of God, 'Israel,' made up of Israel and Judah, has to allow itself to be measured."
It was not long before the monolatric demand to worship Yahweh alone developed into the claim that aside from Yahweh no other gods existed. This development first becomes visible in Deutero-Isaiah.
Isaiah 44:6-8
(6) Thus says Yahweh, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, Yahweh of hosts: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. (7) Who is like me? Let him proclaim it, let him declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be. (8) Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any." (RSV)
Isaiah 45:5-7
(5) "I am Yahweh, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I gird you, though you do not know me, (6) that people may know, from the rising of the sun to its setting, that there is none besides me. I am Yahweh, and there is no other. (7) I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am Yahweh, who does all these things."
Isaiah 45:20-22
(20) "Assemble yourselves and come, draw near together, you survivors of the nations! They have no knowledge who carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save. (21) Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, Yahweh? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me. (22) Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other." (RSV)
The sense of Yahweh's distance from his people during the Babylonian Exile-or in some minds his absence and his supposed powerlessness=-abruptly changed with Cyrus's edict in 538 BCE: now it appeared that the God so recently despaired of was indeed king of the whole world, ruling over Babylonians and Persians and all other nations. Thus Yahweh became the only God, with no rival god beside him, and this claim was soon added to the prophetic books and the works of history.
The priestly writers of the sixth century also reflect a strict monotheistic viewpoint; it is strikingly clear in the very first verse of their contribution to the scriptural tradition: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The next verse shows that the priestly author has reworked ancient mythological material that presupposed a dualism between God and matter, but in the following one God's divine fiat puts everything in order: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."
Israel's Belief in God during the Hellenistic Age
The empire that Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) created in the East was held together not only by central government but also by the unity of language, customs, and culture. His overthrow of the Persian Empire made Palestine a part of the Hellenistic world and ushered in a dark yet fascinating period of Israelite-Jewish history. To this era belong the roughly 165 years between Alexander's move to the East in 334 BCE and the Hellenistic reform in Jerusalem that-inspired by Jewish circles-the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes (who became king in 175 BCE) carried out. Central to this reform was the introduction of gymnasium education.
The process began when one Jesus-he preferred to call himself by his Greek name Jason-a member of the priestly family of the Oniads, approached the king not long after his installment and offered him a large sum of money in return for being made high priest in Jerusalem. Along with this he asked the king for permission to build in Jerusalem a gymnasium following the Greek model, and to introduce a curriculum for the education and training of young men (the ephebate). "The 'gymnasium,' i.e., the sports-stadium, during the Hellenistic period formed the symbol and basis for the Greek way of life. Physical education was something alien to the Oriental, but a natural thing for the Greeks. Wherever Greeks came together, or people who wanted to be counted as Greeks, they started athletic exercises." Related to it was the ephebate, which included musical and literary subjects.
The Hellenism that Jason and his associates wanted to introduce to Jerusalem was not intended to involve apostasy from Judaism. Neither the rites of the Temple cult nor observance of Mosaic Law were directly affected, for both remained valid largely as elements of popular custom; but the legal foundations of the priestly theocracy were radically undermined. Civil order and governmental policy would no longer be the province of priests and the wise; in the future, governance would be vested in the demos, that is, the citizenry acting through the gerousia (council of elders) and the officials it appointed. The result, of course, would be to demote the priestly nobility, and it is indicative of their willingness to adopt Greek customs that this consequence was clearly understood. At any rate, Antiochus reacted favorably to Jason's proposed reforms, appointed him as high priest, and when he visited Jerusalem in 172 BCE was "welcomed magnificently by Jason and the city, and ushered in by a blaze of torches and with shouts."
Convinced of the popular indifference about which name should be used to invoke divinity, the reform Jews around Jason fostered the idea of a supranational deity. In other words, if the several Greek and Oriental gods-even when addressed by their indigenous names-ultimately derive from the One God, they are simply different expressions of monotheism. In the light of Hellenistic enlightenment, Jason and his friends identified the Greek supranational idea of deity with their own universalistic notion of the one God of Israel. "The ideal of the educated, which became common property as a result of the Stoa, was not segregation in a national religion with separatist customs, but world citizenship." The Palestinian philosopher Meleager of Gadara (b. 140 BCE) expressed the mainstream view of his educated contemporaries and those before them by exclaiming, "Stranger, we dwell in one country, the world." The supranational Greek idea of one deity living at many places seems to have transformed polytheism into an encompassing monotheism of Stoic provenance. It is clear that the Jewish "Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates," which in the first century BCE tells of the origin of the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was influenced by this Stoic monotheism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Intolerance and the Gospel by GERD LÜDEMANN Copyright © 2007 by Gerd Lüdemann. Excerpted by permission.
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