Leadership Principles of Jesus - Le Donne

I like airport bookstores. They provide something of a microcosm of popular culture. If you find yourself in this petri dish and your eye is caught by books about Jesus, you will inevitably find a book about the "leadership" of Jesus. You will find these books next to books by Donald Trump and Zig Ziglar. A quick search on amazon yields dozens of such titles. Here are just a few:

Jesus on Leadership

The Leadership Style of Jesus: How to Make a Lasting Impact

The Leadership Principles of Jesus: Modern Parables of Achievement and Motivation

A Life of Impact: Leadership Principles of Jesus

Gospel Driven Leadership: 5 Non-Negotiable, Unchanging, and Eternal Principles for Leading Like 

    Jesus

I confess that I've never read one. I've looked at a few tables of contents and skimmed a page or two. I have, however, read the Gospels several times over and I can't help but wonder: what would be the market value of this book?

The Leadership Failures of Jesus 

Chapter One: Confusing People on Purpose
Chapter Two: Sowing Seeds Haphazardly
Chapter Three: Alienating Your Family in One Simple Step
Chapter Four: Enabling Lazy and Disrespectful People
Chapter Five: The Art of Pissing Off Almost Everybody
Chapter Six: Sabotaging the Longevity of Your Career
Chapter Seven: Scaring the Bejesus out of People in Graveyards

Am I missing any chapters?

-anthony

American Jesus - Le Donne

SBL Bible Odyssey Project--Chris Keith

If you haven't yet heard about the newly-launched SBL Bible Odyssey project, do yourself a favor and go to www.bibleodyssey.com.  The SBL used a NEH grant to create a massive online reference tool that makes New Testament scholarship quickly accessible for non-specialist readers.  There are a ton of entries, all written by scholars.  There are also maps and images, etc.  It's a tremendous tool for teaching and I plan to have my students use it as a first port of call in their research.  I was honored to author this entry on the Pericope Adulterae.  Congratulations to the editors and SBL on a job well done.

Shabir Ally on The Wife of Jesus

Happy Canada Day! It is only fitting that today I received an email (from Josh Mann, thx Josh) alerting me to a youtube review of my The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals. The reviewer is Shabir Ally, president of the Islamic Information & Dawah Centre International in Toronto. It is clear that Ally has given my book a close read and has grasped the key elements of my arguments. You can watch the review here:

Or you can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEL0kVUSYR4 

My thanks to Ally and to the folks at "Let the Quran Speak" for arranging this review.

-anthony

Elton John, Gay Marriage, and Jesus

Today Elton John spoke up again on the topic of Jesus. This is not the first time he's done so. In 2010 Sir Elton claimed that Jesus was a super-intelligent gay man. His comments today are much less controversial by comparison. The Guardian reports that, in John's view, Jesus would have supported gay marriage. Although, if you read the article, the headline seems to be a bit more direct than the quote:

"If Jesus Christ was alive today, I cannot see him, as the Christian person that he was and the great person that he was, saying this could not happen."

The Rocket Man is very direct, however, on the topic of Pope Francis. He loves him. Pope Francis "has taken everything down to the humility of faith.... He's stripped it down to the bare bones and said it's all basically about love and inclusiveness. That has to be encouraged by the Church of England as well."

I talk more about Elton John's Jesus in my The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals. 

-anthony

More on 2nd Temp Jewish Identity

The always interesting Krista Dalton introduces the work of Seth Schwartz. His book, as can be seen from the title, covers more than the Second Temple period.

http://kristadalton.com/who-exactly-were-the-ancient-jews-at-least-according-to-seth-schwartz/

-anthony

First Century Jews or Judeans?

Steve Mason and others have argued that the term "Jews" is anachronistic when discussing the first-century. Adele Reinhartz says not so fast.

-anthony

“Mike S.” Wins The Quest for the Real Jesus Giveaway—Chris Keith

True Random Number GeneratorMin:Max:Result:55

As the above shows, the true random number generator has spoken and the winner of The Quest for the Real Jesus is the owner of comment 55, "Mike S.":

Mike S.June 13, 2014 at 5:57 PM

Count me in! and I already follow the blog

Mike S., if you'll write to me at chris.keith@smuc.ac.uk, I'll get your information and send out the free copy of The Quest for the Real Jesus.

The Life of Brian, the Historical Jesus, and Michael Myers—Chris Keith

This past weeked was the Jesus and Brian Conference at King's College, London.  The conference was a massive success and I look forward to the published proceedings from T&T Clark/Bloomsbury.  The roster of speakers was a veritable Who's Who and one thing that I particularly liked was that the topic itself seemed to inspire a lot more informality and hilarity from the speakers, though all the presentations were thoroughly academic.  Since there was frequent quotation of Monty Python's Life of Brian, I don't think that I've ever heard more cursing from a more distinguished group and to better effect.  It was great.  If I had to pick a single favorite presentation, it would probably be Guy Stiebel's, which was not only a fascinating discussion of archaeological evidence that relates to issues in Life of Brian but also downright hilarious and included shirtless pictures of Putin (see picture), a Roman vagina (scabbard, similar to here), and Roman phallus from Masada.  There were grumblings online and among some of the attendees about the fact that, at every tea/coffee break or lunch break, the organizers put all the speakers in one room with all the attendees in another room.  I would have to add myself the number who didn't appreciate that this inhibited break-time chats with the speakers, which is typically a highlight when it comes to conferences.  But that was one drawback to an otherwise tremendous success.

I'm not going to describe every presentation in detail.  Mark Goodacre has already given a snippet of them here and here.  Instead, I want to offer just one reflection on an issue that came up really throughout the conference, namely the question of whether Brian is intended to be a Jesus figure.  I'm thus speaking into a running dialogue between Richard Burridge, who has defended the Pythons for carefully distinguishing between Jesus and Brian, and James Crossley, who has pointed out that Brian sure does seem to be functioning as something of a historical Jesus.

I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and that the answer to the question "Is Brian supposed to be Jesus or is Brian not supposed to be Jesus?" should be a deliberately ambiguous "yes."  I suggest further that this is part of the brilliance and success of the film. 

On a formal narrative level it is true that the Pythons were careful to distinguish between the character of Jesus, who is a Jesus from the Gospels, and Brian.  This is undoubtedly clear and I noted it in an earlier post as well.  In other words, when someone accuses the Pythons of making a mockery of Jesus, they can rightly defend themselves and others can rightly defend them by saying, "Yes, but Brian clearly isn't Jesus," and both defenses have been made, as was repeated at the conference.

But, to agree with a point that Crossley made, the Pythons seem to give mixed signals when they address this issue and, in my opinion, Brian most definitely is a narrative vehicle designed to get the audience to think about Jesus even if he is distinguished from the character of Jesus.  For one thing, if it wasn't the case that Brian was a Jesus-esque figure, I can hardly see why a bunch of Jesus and Gospels scholars would be gathered at KCL this past weekend to discuss the film and the historical Jesus.  As a further matter, however, I would cite an interview of John Cleese that was shown during the conference.  Cleese points out that the Gospels are funny from a particular view, and makes some funny comments about Joseph trying to explain Mary's impregnation by the Spirit to his buddies down at the pub over pints.  If I understand Cleese and the context of his comments rightly here, the movie is designed precisely to enable this type of view of the Jesus story, whereby one can ask questions and imagine historically outside the ecclesiastical boundaries of interpretation.  What the Pythons presumably realized is that they could accomplish this effect much better with someone mistaken for Jesus than they could with Jesus himself.

Needless to say, historical Jesus scholarship is also designed to enable views of Jesus other than the Gospels' views.  But this leads to an important point that Crossley made, seemingly as a side comment, during his paper.  I want to pick it up here.  He pointed out that he teaches mainly evangelicals, and all of them seem to love Life of Brian but hate historical-critical Jesus scholarship.  As someone who grew up in the Bible Belt, I can affirm the general (though not ubiquitous) truth of his observation.  I know lots of conservative Christians who love Life of Brian but not John Dominic Crossan.

Now, let me tie these previous two paragraphs together with a proposal that also helps explain why we teachers of historical Jesus scholarship love to use Life of Brian as a pedagogical tool, and especially with very conservative students:  Life of Brian functions in some (not all) ways, and for some (not all) groups, like a horror film.  Part of the thrill and rhetorical function of horror films is that they allow the audience to confront real fears in a safe space.  There really are serial killers out there, and some of them are as deranged as Michael Myers.  We know that this is actually a societal reality but it's almost too much to process it as a reality.  Confronting gruesome murder on the nightly news is categorically different from watching it on Halloween weekend at a theater and that's because of the differing genres and their relations to historical reality.  Horror films allow people to confront real fear in a context where the narrative provides boundaries for the fear, thus the frequent statement, "It's just a movie."  The horror genre is specifically designed to provide a safe space for confronting unsafe realities.  Life of Brian, though clearly not a horror film, nevertheless functions in my mind generically in a similar way with the particular audience that Crossley mentioned.  It takes Jesus out of a context of ecclesiastical sanction and places him (qua Brian) and the other characters of the Gospels in a context wherein it is not taboo to think of them in different ways.  It thereby enables--better, outright demands and seizes upon for comedic effect--the ability of the audience to conceptualize the Jesus story from the perspective that John Cleese mentioned in his interview, to think of events from the Gospels from a more day-to-day life perspective.  It's the juxtaposition of this "holy story" with day-to-life in all its silliness (or at least a distinctly Python version of silliness) that makes the film so great.  The audience, or at least one type of audience, confronts the historical Jesus in Life of Brian the way that it confronts Michael Myers in Halloween movies:  it's easier to face certain real possibilities in a genre that provides a certain distance from reality. 

To go back to Crossley's observation, this is why, I think, some conservative people love Life of Brian but not John Dominic Crossan and historical critics.  It's not that they've (in most cases) worked carefully through Crossan's work and have formed their own counter-opinions in light of their own research.  Most of them encounter Crossan only on documentaries.  Rather, it's the difference of genre and relation to claims for reality.  Due to the genre (and the legitimacy of the "Brian is not technically Jesus" defense), some Christians and others who esteem the Jesus story can laugh at Brian, but not Crossan's Jesus.  Watching Brian is like watching a horror film but reading historical Jesus scholarship is (for some) like watching the nightly news. 

Of course, and though it hardly needs saying, there are those who refuse to pay attention to the genre differences and the sophistication of what the Pythons were doing, like the Bishop of Southwark and Malcom Muggeridge.  And, with Burridge, I consider their response very unfortunate (although completely unsurprising).  There are also, of course, many for whom the historical Jesus is not something to be feared.  But I've here been trying to think through Crossley's observation about why some conservative Christians so quickly embrace Life of Brian while simultaneously rejecting historical Jesus research.

Overall, I suppose my point is simply that the question of whether Brian in Life of Brian is supposed to be Jesus somewhat misses the point.  As far as I can tell, he both is and is not a Jesus figure.  On a formal narrative level, of course he's distinguished from Jesus.  But in terms of Brian's rhetorical function in the film, I think he clearly is intended to provide the audience a view of (the historical) Jesus, and that the movie is wildly successful in providing this comedic, though certainly not uninformed by research, perspective.  "Blessed are the cheesemakers."

So What is Divestment and Why are All the Kids Talking about It?

If you've (a) been following the news this week and (b) have time for topics other than the World Cup, you might have seen that leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to withdraw funds from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions. This vote continues a series of moves (becoming more pronounced in recent years) to protest Israeli occupation in Palestine by Presbyterian leadership.

If you're interested in a thoughtful Jewish reflection on this and its impact on Jewish-Christian relations, check out this article by Larry Behrendt. Here is just a taste:

Jews have been the targets of organized Christian economic pressure for most of our shared history. Time permits only a brief discussion. ... 

In more recent history, Christians sought to harm Jews economically by means of boycotts. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, various “Christian” campaigns were organized in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe to boycott Jewish businesses. These campaigns adopted slogans such as “Don’t Buy Jewish,” “Buy Christian Only” and “Each to His Own.” Some of these campaigns worked at apparent cross-purposes. For example, shortly before World War I Ukrainians organized to boycott Jewish businesses because of alleged Jewish collaboration with Poles, while Poles organized their own anti-Jewish boycotts as a defense against alleged Jewish exploitation. 

The first Nazi action taken against Jews was a nationwide boycott of German Jewish businesses that took place on April 1, 1933. On the day of the boycott, Nazi Stormtroopers painted yellow and black Jewish stars on the windows and doors of Jewish businesses, then stood menacingly in front of these businesses, daring customers to enter. The Nazis planned and supported this boycott, posting signs in Jewish neighborhoods saying “Don’t Buy from Jews” and “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.” A week later, the Nazis barred Jews from the civil service (including the practice of law) and fired all Jewish government workers, including teachers in public schools and universities. Historians now understand these actions as the beginning of the Holocaust.

... 

Why have I bothered to recall all of this ancient history? I am not trying to suggest that last week’s vote by the Presbyterians can be equated with boycotts enforced by Nazi Stormtroopers, or medieval efforts to ghettoize Jews and Judaism. I am saying that Presbyterian divestment will be seen by most Jews as part of a long, unfriendly and determined effort by outsiders (primarily Christians) to coerce Jews, hinder Jewish aspirations, and injure and destroy the Jewish people. Jews know their history too well to be fooled into believing that anti-Jewish economic sanctions sprang into existence in 1967, and will magically disappear when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is finally resolved.

I highly recommend reading the entire article. For what its worth, Behrendt is deeply invested in the wellbeing of Christians and Christianity and is among the more fair-minded people I know.

-anthony

Have Presbyterians Earned the Right to Have an Opinion about Israelis?

No.

Check in again in another seventy years. I will have another update for you then.

-anthony

2014 Evil Conference Wrap-up—Chris Keith

On May 23 and 24, we held the 2014 Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity Conference here at St Mary's University, Twickenham.  This was the inaugural conference of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible, and as the Centre's director, I could not have been more pleased with the outcome.  We had, at any given point, between 35 and 50 people in attendance, which was ideal for our purposes.  It was big enough for discussion but small enough to talk with whomever you wanted during the breaks.  Over the two-day period, we moved in a general chronological direction, starting with Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer's paper on "evil" at Qumran and closing with Paul Middleton's paper on the role of the devil in the Acts of the Martyrs.  We had papers from established scholars as well as current PhD candidates, and attendees came from the UK, USA, Sweden, Germany, South Africa, Israel, Ireland, and elsewhere.  (We also had what I think is a first--the usage of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" at a Biblical Studies conference.  We played this song whenever coffee/tea breaks were over and needed to call everyone back to the main room.)  Of course, all the papers were excellent, but judging from the responses of the attendees, Loren Stuckenbruck's keynote address was the highlight.  I will shortly post links to some of the lectures, which will include Loren's.  We will also have those of Chris Tilling ("Paul, Evil, and Justification Debates") and Christopher Rollston  ("The Rise of the Satan in Early Second Temple Judaism").  The contributions will all be published in a forthcoming WUNT volume, which Loren and I will edit.  On behalf of my colleague in the Centre, Prof Steve Walton, I thank all those who contributed in one way or another, and especially our PhD students, David Smith, Sarah Prime, and Helen Morris, who helped make sure things ran smoothly. 

I'll also take this time to announce in an informal fashion next year's conference.  It will be on "Cities in the New Testament and Greco-Roman World."  We are still lining speakers up, and more details will be announced in due course, but it looks like it will be in late May again.  We welcome any and all to join us.

Congrats James Barker!

Congratulations to James W. Barker, the 2014 Achtemeier Recipient!

-anthony