The Bible as Literature vs. The Gospel as History

John Dominic Crossan, Render unto Caesar: The Struggle over Christ and Culture in the New Testament

How should Christians interact with politics and power? This isn’t a new question; Jesus’ own followers and opponents asked this question during his lifetime. But especially today, as Christian faith and Biblical language gets used to both support and oppose American political power, the so-called Nova Roma. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has some ideas, apparently designed to make everyone, secular and religious alike, as uncomfortable as possible.

Crossan, a Biblical historian and laicized Catholic priest, is just one among several scholars currently active who have dedicated their careers to pursuit of the phantom dubbed “the historical Jesus.” I find Crossan preferable to most because he avoids the extremes of, on one hand, academic obscurantism, or on the other, populist luridness. He uses difficult scholarly language, but always explains terminology, and propounds ideas at length, but never windily.

That doesn’t mean he’s a middlebrow popularizer. Crossan left the clergy because he became persuaded that Scripture wasn’t inerrant, that extrabiblical sources were more trustworthy than the Gospels, and that Jesus’ divinity wasn’t literal. This puts him in the awkward position of being no longer Christian, in the conventional sense, but not secular or irreligious either. He has, by all accounts, reveled in this liminal duality, guaranteed to discomfort everybody.

This volume is, I’ll admit, one of Crossan’s less accessible. His title is somewhat misleading; he addresses the “Render Unto Caesar” account, common to the synoptic Gospels, early on, then largely abandons it, more interested in a global rather than particular inquiry into First-Century political theology. Rather, he addresses, in sweeping terms, the question of how Christians could, and did, accommodate the pressures of assimilation with Roman authority.

Crossan’s first part addresses the Revelation of John. Though Crossan’s career has largely avoided apocalyptic themes, he presumably couldn’t avoid this, because the Revelation’s explicitly political, anti-Roman sentiments have been used recently by end-times theologians and political tub-thumpers. The Revelation’s violent anti-statist sentiments have often given more moderate Christians the willies, for reasons Crossan explains succinctly. This book’s triumphalism often contrasts with Gospel themes of nonviolence.

John Dominic Crossan

Then Crossan transitions into a comprehensive look into political themes in the Luke-Acts duology. Here, I admit, I nearly stopped reading. Crossan does something I haven’t previously seen in his mass-market books: he chases a rabbit trail. Crossan spends entire chapters, plural, determinedly proving that Luke the Evangelist (whom he believes isn’t Luke) wrote Luke-Acts as a single integrated work in two volumes, not two separate narratives, as sometimes postulated.

This intricate, granular analysis proves ultimately relevant to Crossan’s point, but only at some length. He presents the duology as literature, not history (or pseudo-history), and seeks the “main character” rather than defining themes. Though this message proves ultimately relevant, it does so in ways most readers won’t find relevant to spiritual inquiry or personal growth. This passage is scholarly and abstruse, in ways Crossan’s mass-market work usually avoids.

Finally, Crossan breaks down Jesus as he appears in the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. This part most accurately reflects themes found throughout Crossan’s corpus, that external sources are more trustworthy than canonical Scriptures, because they aren’t colored by Christological purpose. This makes sense from Crossan’s “historical Jesus” premise, which seeks philosophical rectitude without recourse to divine revelation. Yet I find this passage least satisfying, because it seems entirely self-directed.

By Crossan’s own admission, Josephus mentions Jesus barely ten times, John the Baptist only once, and early Christian missions never. Crossan supplements this paucity with references from other contemporary sources, like Philo of Alexandria. The ultimate outcome, though, is a Jesus grounded in history, but absent of message, a complete historical cypher. This Jesus is arguably better because he makes no demands, and receives, rather than distributes, a moral core.

Don’t misunderstand me: Crossan isn’t wrong, in the factual sense. When he spotlights the contradiction between Revelation’s violent, standoffish politics, and Luke-Acts’ more accommodationist stance, he acknowledges a friction many devout Christians have wrestled with. Crossan is palpably uncomfortable with the Gospels’ laissez-faire attitude toward historicity. He wants a factually ironclad Gospel, free from contradiction. Let’s be honest, so do seven-year-olds in Sunday School.

I think Christians probably should read this book. I believe in balanced libraries, not balanced books; though Crossan’s analysis will disappoint believers and skeptics alike, some spiritual frustration is often beneficial. Just realize going in that Crossan’s analysis reflects John Dominic Crossan, not his elusive “historical Jesus.” Crossan looks for answers, but astute readers will emerge with the real goal of learning, that is, better questions.

Children Building Cities out of Sand

Stock photo

We quickly learned how to find a place on the playground’s perimeter, the six of us, where we could build our cities made of sand. We were all in fifth and sixth grade, at a standard prefab elementary school in Southern California, one of countless identical schools in countless identical suburbs erected hastily in the building boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. But we built the cities we wanted to live in.

The playground sand was dry and granular, basically low-density road gravel, not suitable for building. That didn’t stop us. We swept it down to create a level surface, and marked out roads. Then we scooped up double-handfuls of sand and began building our elaborate urban arcologies: massive arenas for stout-hearted competitions, for instance, or grand halls for universities or laboratories or kings. Our cities were vast places of epic architecture.

We weren’t building cities, of course. We were building stories. We built the kinds of metropolises we wanted to occupy, cities designed to inspire awe and motivation. All our roads were majestic boulevards; all our buildings were vast palaces of art, science, and leadership. Utopian cities of great aspiration, where somehow, the fiddling business of cities—sewage removal and building maintenance, for instance—happened automatically, outside the story.

Nobody outside our group wanted us doing this, of course. Though we were within the playground fence, adults frequently scolded us for getting literally as far from the classroom buildings as rules permitted. They cited fatuous claims that maybe we wouldn’t hear the bell summoning us back to class, or kidnappers might leap the fence and abscond with us before adults could intervene. Don’t you want, they asked, to play over here with the other kids?

I don’t blame those teachers. Given what I now know about liability insurance and bad PR in the years following the Adam Walsh case, they were bombarded with demands to keep students safe no matter what. They meant well. They just couldn’t comprehend that the places they wanted us to play, and the games they encouraged, were noisy, crowded, and hectic. We didn’t want to run around; we wanted to build and tell stories.

I have considerably less sympathy for the other kids. Frequently, if adults didn’t compel us to abandon our stories and play “accepted” games among the crowds, other students would find ways to thwart our inventions. Sometimes they’d outright lie, claiming adults had summoned us back, with threats of punishment. Other times they just ran through our cityscapes, dragging their feet and making the maximum mess possible.

Didn’t matter much. Either way, we saw bigger kids maliciously destroy our cities, our stories.

We learned, as a result, to dream and tell stories surreptitiously. We continued building our science-fictional cities, but learned to keep one eye out for interference. Whether it came from well-meaning authority figures, or mean-spirited peers who got pleasure from destroying what we’d built, interference was always present at the margins. If our aspirations became too independent, well, then we aspired illicitly.

As a grade schooler, I enjoyed academic subjects, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy them at officially approved times. Schools have designated times to read and write, perform math or science, and the omnipresent phys-ed. Having spent time teaching myself, I understand the importance of having everybody working on the same wavelength simultaneously. In chronically short-staffed, cash-poor schools, independent learning wasn’t much of an option.

But I wanted to write when I wrote, not when my well-meaning teacher said writing was appropriate. I invented elaborate stories for myself involving math, far more interesting than the “skillz drillz” practiced in the textbooks. The approach advocated in textbooks worked, insofar as kids learned basic skills sufficiently to ace standardized tests. But only when allowed to play with words and numbers like toys, was I able to care enough to actually master the concepts.

Our sandcastle cities were the manifestation of this principle. We learned collaboration by building the cities together. We learned math by determining how high we could stack unstable playground sand to make our cathedrals of innovation. As our stories became increasingly elaborate, we learned important language arts skills, in persuading teammates why having this boulevard here, not somewhere else, served the city.

Sometimes I wonder what became of my fellow builders. The military reassigned my father every two years, so most of my childhood friends retreated to the anonymity from which they arose. How many of them are architects, storytellers, schoolteachers now?

And how many of them daily apply the skills we learned at the farthest verge, building cities out of sand?

Why Do White Supremacists Hate Abortion So Much?

Protesters outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house this week

Smarter, more informed commentators than me have spilled copious ink in the week since the leaked draft SCOTUS opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson. I won’t waste your time rehashing what better-credentialed pundits have said. I’m more interested in the realization that this opinion is deeply White supremacist. And not just in the sense that poor, non-White women have less access to family planning, and fewer resources to enact any plans.

Historian Kathleen Belew writes that the White Power movement has anchored its public relations strategy heavily on language of motherhood, particularly White motherhood. They realize that, even in America, a nation where racism remains painfully widespread, openly proclaiming for bigotry won’t sell. Even Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist behind much of our generation’s noxious racist American drum-beating, acknowledged that you can’t say that overtly anymore.

Instead, the White Power movement, which arose from nationalist propaganda during and shortly after America’s Vietnam entanglement, co-opted the “wives and mothers back home” language common in military recruitment videos. It pitched a mythology of a world in constant jeopardy from violence, starvation, and dictatorship. Anything we do, the military myth proclaims, is perforce justified, because the alternative is leaving our poor, defenseless women open to depredation and death.

Nor is this exclusively a Vietnam-era claim. Anyone old enough to remember the news coverage surrounding atrocities in places like Abu Ghraib will remember that government salespeople, and the pundits who repeat their fables unquestioningly, accepted this violence as necessary. We must kill these moral monstrosities on their home turf, the legend went, or they’ll come over here. And when they arrive, they’ll target our wives and mothers first.

Any violence, any indignity, is justified by protecting women. Womanhood, a state that is implicitly both White and maternal, is surrounded by constant threats, beset by ravages of injustice prepared to break brutally over America’s women. Thus women need defenders willing to suspend all moral standards and stoop to any violence that will protect our defenseless lady-folk against exploitation. This justifies purging any implied national impurities, which are helpfully color-coded.

Please note, this defense of womanhood isn’t value-neutral. It positions women as weak and defenseless without male intervention. For readers familiar with America’s racial history, this means women are White. As historian Ibram X. Kendi writes, American mythology positions White women as weak and vulnerable, and therefore good. It counterposes Black women as strong and self-reliant, and therefore bad. The source of this binary is murky, but no less real.

Therefore, American mythology has always coded White women as vulnerable to violence, which is defined as rape. White supremacist mythology, like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, repeatedly present White women as constantly one misstep away from rape. Any violence, no matter how disproportionate, no matter how antithetical to supposed Christian values, is justified by protecting White women.

Now I acknowledge, in a worldview where the worst possible injustice a White woman can suffer is rape, the contradiction that abortion should be restricted or banned. But in this mythology, motherhood is sacrosanct; a White woman’s foremost responsibility, to retain her standing as defenseless and therefore pure, is to give birth. Even if that birth contravenes White Supremacist beliefs about racial purity and the evils of miscegenation, that concern comes second.

That’s why, prior to the Dobbs leak, so many state-level abortion restrictions involved appeals to supposed maternal instinct. Forcing women to listen to a fetal heartbeat (although embryologists know that isn’t, by any definition, a heart) or view transvaginal ultrasounds, are unnecessary hurdles designed to tweak the supposedly muted maternal drive. See the babe, this reasoning goes, and women will melt into puddles of maternal goo.

Perhaps this explains why White supremacist groups also abhor transgendered people. American White supremacy has a rigidly defined gender script, and anybody who doesn’t conform with that script is considered dangerous. LGBTQIA+ people are, to White supremacists, even worse than self-fulfilled women. Because they can’t become, in the conventional sense, parents, they’ve abnegated the one role every person is meant to fulfill. Therefore they are unclean and need removed.

The simple fact that countless women don’t want this protection, that many women don’t consider defenselessness a state they aspire to, doesn’t faze these defenders. Women who make their own choices about motherhood violate the script, and need punished. Hard-right lawmakers may claim they’re defending fetal lives when they outlaw IUDs and investigate miscarriages. But fundamentally, it’s about preserving nationalist myths of White motherhood.

The Right Answer to a Stupid Question

Ryan Cooper, How Are You Going to Pay For That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics

We’ve all heard it, whenever we postulate any changes or reforms, no matter how nominal, no matter how piddling. “How are you going to pay for that?” President Biden’s Build Back Better platform, a mere shadow of his campaign pledges, nevertheless collapsed in part because journalists kept quoting the aggregate price tag, which was, admittedly, huge, if you sand off all context. Large dollar figures are considered project-killers in today’s political milieu.

Journalist Ryan Cooper has grown weary of pretended neutrality. He objects to the widespread American background presumption that private property needs defended at all costs. He calls this position “propertarianism” and derides it altogether. This individualist assumption that my money is more important than social good, has completely failed to deliver the goods. Privatizing collective functions, like public health and climate change, has resulted in cost bloat for inadequate services.

Cooper divides his book into two sections. The first, slightly shorter part, is a lesson in applied economics, the difference between high-minded classroom theory and how economics actually happens at street level. The market, Cooper insists, isn’t antithetical to government interference, despite what both major American political parties believe. Indeed, without government creating enforceable standards and relatively stable money, there can be no market.

One can immediately start mustering counter-arguments. Governments don’t create markets, as proven because black markets exist. Markets functioned in places like Mogadishu during the anarchic 1990s, when no functioning government existed. Admittedly, these were markedly violent markets with no backstop against fraud. But the existence of markets qua markets says nothing incontrovertible about the governments backing them up.

His second part applies his anti-theoretical economics to common American needs. Both political parties and the mainstream media have characterized health care, climate change, and labor markets as individual concerns; the fetish, for instance, for employer-provided health insurance and privatized Medicare have bilateral support. These approaches, however, have produced worse results at higher costs. The rich suffer under this inequality as much as the poor.

Ryan Cooper

Despite the promise of “smart answers” in his book’s secondary title, Cooper doesn’t offer prepackaged responses. Cooper writes primarily for progressives like himself, seeking a broad, inclusive background for economic discussions. His final chapter does include some rhetorical techniques that have worked in political messaging in other countries and other times. However, his primary goal is providing a foundation for collectivist economic thinking in an individualist culture.

Indeed, Cooper’s argumentative style throughout his book is reliant on “smart answers” in the sense of exceedingly well-informed. He quotes statistics and evidence volubly, at quantities far beyond what ordinary readers can hold in working memory. Anybody who’s tried to dispute their racist uncle by quoting stats knows that stats aren’t an ironclad justification. If somebody asks “How are you going to pay for that,” and your response runs over 300 pages, you’ve probably lost.

That said, while I, a Distributist, might debate Cooper’s finer points, he says little out-and-out wrong. He demonstrates how America’s private property morality, which we have exported aggressively, has produced substandard outcomes. America’s life expectancy, after growing for years, has been rapidly contracting, even before the pandemic (which he cites extensively). He makes a persuasive case that lack of economic solidarity is having tragic consequences in real time.

And he postulates workable alternatives with practical applications. Some of Cooper’s suggestions come from other countries, and he demonstrates how successful nations, which he calls “peer countries,” have placed necessary parts of their economy under democratic control. (That democratic control matters to him: he dislikes Marxism as strongly as propertarianism, though less volubly.) It’s important to Cooper that governments shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.

Where Cooper’s alternatives don’t have proven real-world antecedents, he carefully articulates multiple solutions. If one doesn’t work, or produces unintended outcomes, we can repair or replace it. Cooper isn’t a naïve utopian, spitballing solutions for a friction-free world. He wants to create solutions that readers, and the candidates they vote for, can apply practically, drawing on a firm foundation of proven success and consistent theory.

In his final chapter, Cooper articulates a number of rhetorical approaches progressives can use to sell these policies. We live in a world plagued with abbreviated attention spans (stats indicate you probably have already stopped reading this review). Selling innovative policies will mean reconfiguring our message machine, having evidence to support our claims, but also being equipped to penetrate the automatic defenses others put up.

Because Cooper is right. That’s a stupid question, and we need better, more useful answers ready to deploy.

What It Means To Be a Man

Lead image from the load page (click to enlarge)

Behold—the grotesque and alarming spectacle which is the 21 Convention: Patriarch Edition. Like a train derailment, I can’t make myself look away. The website promises four days of seminars, sermons, rallies, and speeches exhorting men to be more manful, in ways which the site defines only through broad comedy. The site promises to “Make Women Great Again,” and “Make Men Alpha Again,” for the low, low price of $2,500 for two for four days.

I’m uncertain how seriously to take this website. On one hand, its roster of promises includes such appalling pledges as that you, poor benighted beta male, can “Dominate Your Wife, Dominate Your Life,” and promises speeches from pastors, entrepreneurs, fitness gurus, male models, power-lifters, and more. Of twenty-five listed speakers, twenty-one are men, only five of whom are clean-shaven in their headshots. This Nuremberg-style rally promises a form of manhood premised on aggression and spectacle.

On the other hand, about two-thirds of the way down the loading page, the text suddenly reverses itself. “This page is funny,” it suddenly says; “The assault on fatherhood is not.” Apparently everything we’ve seen to this point was slapstick. This includes the pledge to Dominate Your Wife, the pastor who compares himself straight-faced to Marvel’s Thanos, and the promise that you can tune-up your wife like a malfunctioning car. What a thigh-slapper, amirite guys?

Conservatives famously enjoy saying things like this to flick people’s noses. The “Just a Joke” defense after saying something dangerously inflammatory has been a beloved technique of Rush Limbaugh, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, and Carl Benjamin. Self-described comedians love making violent statements toward disadvantaged people, then concealing the consequences of their statements behind jazz hands. Whenever somebody like me acts offended, they then act chummy with those hip enough to be in on the joke.

It’s hard to say how seriously we’re meant to take this

This broad burlesque is especially chilling to anybody who reads American religious history. Most Americans outside religious circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism, a theory that emerged from the excesses of postwar prosperity. However, as religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll writes, Christian Reconstructionists have perhaps been the militant vanguard of a strictly hierarchical, and sometimes violent, religious political movement, one which has its fingers in countless pies in American right-wing politics and media manipulation.

Ingersoll writes that, while progressives consider “patriarchy” a backward principle that hampers free people, Christian Reconstructionists see patriarchy as a God-ordained natural order, against which headstrong humans rebel. Reconstructionists believe society is organized in tiers: family supports church, while church empowers the state. A nuclear family, headed by an authoritative male lawgiver, is the foundation of all power structures. Male headship is the only bulwark against violent rebellion; empowered women literally want to overthrow society.

Reconstructionists don’t call themselves political, because they don’t endorse candidates or initiatives. But, Ingersoll writes, they advance a specific theory of political power and secular authority, which privileges those already well-protected by our paternalistic, White supremacist order. They want a hierarchical state derived from male authority, with discretion to involve itself heavily in our private lives in accordance with Levitical law, but an economic order based on Libertarian capitalism; no Year of Jubilee for them.

You thought I was kidding about Thanos, didn’t you?

It’s difficult to find meaningful information on Pastor Michael Foster, the Patriarchy Convention’s keynote speaker. He’s apparently influential enough to headline a rally, but not important enough for his personal website to appear on Google. His professional profile on his parish page shows him surrounded by his wife and seven children—sons in polo shirts, daughters in princess dresses. That encompasses two of Reconstructionist patriarchy’s hallmarks: large families, mostly homeschooled, and strictly monitored gender roles.

Well-informed critics will undoubtedly respond to me by citing women who support patriarchal social roles. Indeed, as researcher Jim Henderson discovered, it isn’t hard to find Christian women who support female disfranchisement, who are complicit in their own second-class status. But that doesn’t mean much. It’s also possible to find poor people who hate the poor, and Black people who hate racial equality efforts; that doesn’t mean we should let such people write our positions.

Pastor Foster apparently thinks it’s funny to compare himself to Thanos, destroyer of billions. Big deal, conservatives love pretending to be the villains they think their opposition calls them. Except it is a big deal, because just like Thanos, Foster can’t control where The Snap goes, or who it hurts. Like Thanos, he divides his world into allies and enemies. Which means that, if we don’t stop him now, his Snap may come for you.