One of the common themes in the construction of the Radical Bible is to have Jesus (or sometimes Old Testament/Hebrew Bible prophets) as the founder of socialism, or at least a key figure in its development (questions about when socialism actually emerged are largely irrelevant here—I’m only talking about a modern construction of Jesus). Marx is typically another figure in the chain of tradition which, in constructions of Englishness and Christianity, is deemed to have gone astray on the continent (e.g. in the direction of Stalin) whereas the ‘authentic’ tradition of English Radical Bible, incorporating Marx’s non-totalitarian legacy, was preserved through Winstanley, Diggers, Levellers, Blake, Chartists, Methodism and Nonconformity more generally, various figures on the Labour Left, and so on.
What is notable about this Radical Jesus (and a related
Liberal Jesus) is that he attracts people who self-identify as atheist (more
recently we might think of Douglas Adams or Richard Dawkins, or even Monty
Python) and/or politically radical (and/or politically liberal). The logic here
is that Jesus was a political radical (or a nice liberal type) ahead of his
time and his message was then distorted by ecclesiastical interpretations. And
before you start feeling smug and superior, is not the academic quest for the
historical Jesus, or NT/Biblical Studies more generally, part of a similar tendency?
One person who thought in such terms was George Orwell,
though he did have a curious period in the early 1930s when he attended his
local Anglican church. Here he is comparing Jesus and Marx which, in the grand
scheme of Orwell’s thinking on religion and the Bible, is ultimately most
representative of an English way of thinking. This is from his ‘As I Please’ column
in the Tribune, Feb. 25, 1944:
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: ‘There are no new ideas.’ Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries…In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.
James, thanks for this post. I was totally unaware of this before.
ReplyDeleteThe move to cast Jesus as a social visionary who transcends the common sense of his contemporaries is not limited to liberal thought. We see this move, for example, in many Jesus-as-genius narratives. But the liberal tendency (and here I am looking in the mirror) to make Jesus the first feminist, the first liberator, the first preacher of love, etc. is married to a tendency to make "the Jews" of Jesus' day oppressive or representative of an oppressive system. A.-J. Levine suggests that if liberal Christians had a high Christology we wouldn't need to elevate Jesus at the expense of any of his contemporaries. This is a good rhetorical move to combat anti-Judaism from liberal pulpits. But, of course, it is not going to work to combat anti-Judaism among economic theorists. Even so, I wonder if there is a parallel between the Marxist tendency toward anti-Semitism and the liberal Christian tendency toward anti-Judaism. Both seem to elevate Jesus at the expense of his contemporaries.
-anthony
Yes, a few things here. On Jesus-the-genius, that's something developing out the Enlightenment (no doubt with precursors etc.) and cross the left-right divide. There certainly *is* a liberal and leftist tendency to make Jews the bad guys in this construction and examples are not hard to find. But it is not always the case. Orwell doesn't seem to construct Jews as a negative foil for Jesus (though Orwell has some negative things to say about Jews in different contexts). Some people in this tradition are kind of ecumenical in identifying the OT prophets as both socialist and Jews with Marx as a Jew and a socialist as part of this tradition. I'm thinking specifically of Tony Benn (English socialist) here who also brought in Muhammad for good measure. I think it sometimes depends on what is foregrounded. If the construction of a socialist tradition is what you want to emphasise then it claiming Jews, Christians, Muslims, nonbelievers etc. for your tradition perhaps makes it easier to avoid making one particular religious group the implicit bad guys. I wouldn't say that there is 'the Marxist tendency' towards anti-Semitism. This isn't to say that Marxists have been pristine but that outside the obvious (e.g. Nazis) they are probably not obviously better or worse. To convince radical economic thinkers (or whatever) to avoid anti-Jewish thinking, I think pointing out that making Jews the cipher for identity politics or that Jews are somehow inherently x, y or z(for instance) is dubious to say the least.
DeleteThanks James, this is helpful. I think that the word tendency is appropriate here and I'll stick by it. This is not to say that either liberal Xns or Marxist economists are *prominently* or *mostly* x or y.
DeleteI guess the real question here is if the ideologue in question claims that Jesus was a forerunner to socialist ideals, what is the assumption of Jesus' contemporaries? Put another way, what system of thought was Jesus critiquing or transcending? Sometimes this case is made quite explicitly and to the detriment of "the Jews" and sometimes (like the block quotation of Orwell above) there is nothing set in explicit relief. Only as you say that which is foregrounded. But the question remains. If x is being foregrounded, what is y-backdrop assumed to be?
Again, fascinating!
-anthony
By the way, I just re-read the Orwell quote. I think that previously misread the "him" who is hated so much (last line) as a reference to Jesus. I now see that Orwell is probably referring to Marx. This changes my thinking of the "backdrop" and "foreground" question to some degree. Not to say that there isn't an implied backdrop this sort of understanding of Jesus - only to say that finding the assumption of a backdrop becomes more difficult. Sorry if I've confused the discussion.
Delete-anthony
Should we therefore say that Jesus and Paul's "New commandment," "new covenant," etc., was antisemitic?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, the short answer is no. The term antisemitic assumes that something like racial consciousness existed in the first century. It did not. We might get further with the question "was new cov./commandment language anti-Jewish?" Certainly a case could be made along these lines. I think that it might be better to call it a kind of supersessionism which creates the possibility for anti-Judaism. This is where things get complicated. There are several forms of supersessionism. E.g. one could say that the modern American Tea Party is a supersession of Reaganomics in that it takes key ideals from Reagan and becomes a sort of hyper-Reaganomics movement. Of course most Tea-Party types hold Reagan in high regard even in distorting his legacy. Or there is another sort of supersessionism that claims to find a key flaw in a previous system of thought and aims to destroy it in favor of a new and improved system.
Delete-anthony
Thanks for your nicely nuanced answer regarding supercessionism.
DeleteJust exactly what a socially conscious Jesus might have been rebelling against would probably include say, monarchs. Like Saul and possibly Herod. Arguments were that the Old Testament spoke against kings, and for patriarchs like Moses.
Insofar as Jesus supported the poor, against the rich, that would support socialism. And in fact that argument was used by socialists.
Interestingly, Jesus had an argument or two against much of religion too. Scribes and Pharisees and so forth. Even, arguably, the Temple. Repacing the institutional architecture, with the associative body or collective, of believers.
I am no longer certain that "religion" is a category in the first century either. If not, Jesus' arguments against the scribes et al. were probably not arguments against religious systems. I do think that you are right to bring in political power dynamics. Jesus does seem to question and challenge the various power brokers of his day. Although summarizing Jesus' basic philosophy of power is notoriously difficult.
Delete-anthony
Anthony, I'm wondering when disagreement based on personal experience becomes supersessionism which then becomes antisemitic. As you suggest, Paul wasn't criticizing Judaism based on the inferiority of its adherents. He had an experience in which faith/trust replaced, in his mind, the "key flaw" (to use your phrase) of Judaism's thought-history, which was "law."
ReplyDeleteAnd he wasn't criticizing as an outsider but as an insider, and he predicted that all of the insiders would eventually see the light in unity with a pre-determined number of gentiles.
But even this vision of individual right,justice and unity was not sufficient to overcome an attitude that developed into us and them. It seems to me that the development of prejudice is inevitable and is part of a cultural structure that allows this type of evil to course through its veins and eventually become politically acceptable, wreaking social atrocities for millennia at least since Constantine. So I'm wondering, how does intense differentiation avoid poisoning culture, or is it part of an unavoidable condition of humanity?
Gene Stecher
Chambersburg,Pa.
Gene, I am probably not qualified to answer your big-picture questions to anyone's satisfaction much less my own. FWIW, I'm not sure that I agree with your reading of Paul (as subject for another time perhaps).
DeleteAs to your observation that intense differentiation turns into prejudice which turns into social atrocities, I think that we must speak in terms of possibility rather than inevitability. Surely intense differentiation can turn into evil. The history of Christian antisemitism shows this. I'd like to believe, however, that not every misgiving creates this sort of ripple effect.
-anthony
The vision many have of a future, peaceful world, is a world in which many different ethnicities exist. But they, in spite of their often considerable differences, manage to put those differences aside, and get along. But?
DeleteNote that in some ways, every group that intensely defines itself as different, will inevitably conflict with others.
For that reason, some see a too-intensely held sense of ethnic identity, of "difference," as the real problem.
Internationalist socialism therefore might have, at times, supported not so much many opposing ethnicities. As the emergence of a new kind of common vision for all. Putting aside nationalistic and ethnic differences.
From that framework, it may be that ethnicities and nations have been the problem, and not the solution.
ReplyDeleteAnthony and Anonymous,
So why couldn’t Jesus followers access “love your enemy” and “remove the log from your own eye.” What went wrong? Did the delayed apocalypse encourage seeds of hate to grow? I tend to attribute the apocalyptic views of the NT to converted followers of JBap. What is it that prevents a major intervention into the development of hate? How can we account for this evil?
A woefully inadequate summary:
1st tier, Paul: "I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves." (Galatians 5:12)
2nd tier, Paul: if their defeat means riches for the Gentiles, now much more will their full inclusion mean." (Romans 11:12)
3rd tier, "The crowd shouted back, 'Crucify him!'" (Mark 15:13)
4th tier, “Peter (a Galilean Jew) said, "You Israelites...killed the Author of Life...I know that you acted in ignorance…" (Acts 3:12-17)
5th Tier, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt 27:25).
6th tier, “tribulations were justly imposed upon you, for you have murdered the Just One' (Justin Martyr); the Jews are “the seed-plot of all the calumny against us” (Tertullian).
7th tier, “God always hated the Jews. It is obligatory for all Christians to hate Jews.” (Chrysostom). “Jews are congenital liars” (Jerome).
8th tier, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish” (Hitler).
Gene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.
Gene, we are going to agree that this is inadequate. First, your tier system is unidirectional. Second, you're making quite a leap from ancient sources to Hitler. Third, your list includes (a) what Jews are saying about other Jews; (b) what non-Jewish Christians are saying about Jews; and (3) what a non-Christian Führer is saying about Jews. Each of these requires more attention. I would recommend this book for a more robust treatment. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition: http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Judaism-Western-Tradition-David-Nirenberg/dp/0393347915
Delete-anthony
Possibly a nuanced and non-accusatory supersessionism could help us all transcend our differences. If instituted with a little creative genius and balance.
DeletePerhaps I would one day support a new kind of very heavily revised superssionism. One that would support going beyond, "fulfilling" and discharging,among other things, conventional Christianity itself. This could not be accused of being a kind of western ethnocentrism favoring Christianity. Actually, it puts traditional Christianity into the same boat with all the other religions;as itself needing revision or supersession.
DeleteAnthony, yes its very difficult to make complicated points in the condensed language of a brief post. What I really meant by the eighth tier was the political take over of the church since Constantine. Thanks very much for the book reference, as I am unfamiliar with it. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History (2001) by James Carroll is also a good resource.
ReplyDeleteGene Stecher
Chambersburg, Pa.
Deep inside ethnic and national ideals, there is almost always, unfortunately, a native egotism, an ethnocentrism. An attempt to establish that only the particular ways of their own culture are good, and that all others are evil.
ReplyDeleteThat sentiment of course is extremely divisive. And is often the cause of wars. However, deep within most cultures, there are also more universal human values. That are more unifying.
The aim here, should be to find those unifying values in each separate group, and accentuate them. Since they are deep inside of even their own divided cultures, bringing out these elements would not deny a culture entirely. But would encourage parts of each.
So we would have not the defeat or replacement of a separate culture. But the supersession of each. We leave behind provincial divisive elements. While supercessionism will also however foreground and extend the more constructive, universal values.
Much of social science and socialism is probably embracing this positive project.
So? Bernie Sanders in 2016. (The first serious American socialist presidential candidate in many decades.)
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid that the religious can take no comfort from Orwell's analysis - except to see Christianity as the long lost brother of socialism. Which may well prove to be the greatest homecoming in history.
ReplyDelete