Tempest in a Tebow

This month I am offering two essays, one dealing with religion in popular culture, the other with gospel criticism. I suspect Zarathustra's diverse readership contains individuals who might have little interest in one or the other of these mini-essays, so I figured the best option was to run both.

Tempest in a Tebow

I will admit right up front that the Tim Tebow phenomenon is insignificant, but because it appears to be impossible to avoid if one watches the news (not even just the Sports segment!), I might get away with a brief comment on it here. As I understand it, this Tebow fellow drops to one knee and prays after any and every successful maneuver, right there on the gridiron, in full view of the stands. He wants to avoid claiming the glory for himself and giving the credit where it is due, to the Almighty, who, being omniscient, can scarcely be oblivious of what is happening in the game, or, for that matter, in every brothel, crack house, and Congress. Many applaud Tebow's "courageous" stand for his faith; others complain that he is imposing his religious expression on the stadium and TV audiences who do not necessarily share it. What are they supposed to do, turn off the game? They shouldn't have to. But what do you expect? This sort of piety masks its arrogance under the veil of humility: "You don't like it? Tough: it's my Christian duty to be obnoxious—take it up with God!" Yeah? Well, you can take your faith and…

I am not aware that anyone is urging that T-bone's freedom of expression ought to be curtailed by the authorities. I certainly am not. I just think of Janet Jackson and that guy that looks like an unshaven Popeye (what's his name again?) and I call his religious gesture a "piety malfunction." Actually, my critique is a purely theological one.

What I am about to say is basically superfluous given the expert comment rendered on a recent Saturday Night Live skit (available on YouTube) in which, in answer to Tebow's prayer in the locker room, Jesus himself shows up to ask the enthusiastic football player to tone it down a little. The Son of God congratulates the team on their latest victory but points out that he is doing most of the work! When Tebow invokes Jesus like a genie, Jesus answers, but wouldn't it be a little better if the team won the games on their own strength? Read the Bible, sure, but how about studying the playbook, too? This is an apt theological critique, very much akin to an SNL skit from years ago in which Sally Field plays a pious housewife asking Jesus not to let the roast burn, etc., every five minutes. Phil Hartman appears as Jesus, asking her to save the prayers for the really important matters. It is scathing because it is not a parody (a distortion for laughs) but rather a true satire (accentuating the actual absurdity inherent in a thing). The same goes for the Tebow skit. Bravo!

But some viewers didn't like it, a fact which will not exactly surprise you. Pat Robertson griped that, had such a skit been broadcast in Islamic countries, portraying the Prophet Muhammad instead of Jesus, the bombs would have been flying. I'm not quite sure what Robertson was implying with this comment: did he not-so-secretly want to issue a fatwa on the SNL cast?

What does surprise is that equal outrage came from a man one might deem Robertson's opposite number: arch-liberal Bob Beckel, one of the hosts of the FOX News talk show The Five and one-time campaign manager for Walter Mondale. Beckel said it was "despicable to portray our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" in such a manner. Bob Beckel? Bob Beckel, Obama ass-kisser? Self-proclaimed Socialist? Aren't such people supposed to be secularists, even if they occasionally try to feign religiosity in order to gull believers (Howard Dean: "My favorite New Testament book is Job")? Well you see, until recently, Bob was languishing in the grip of alcohol and drug addiction. He snapped out of it with the help of one-time Moral Majority bigwig and conservative columnist Cal Thomas, who "led him to Christ." Sounds good to me; I think it is much more important for someone to get off drugs and booze than for one to come around to my views about religion. Whatever it takes! Nation of Islam? Scientology? Whatever gets you out of a living hell.

But perhaps ultra-liberal Beckel simultaneously being a religious fundamentalist is not so incongruous after all. He is refreshingly hilarious and not given to plaster sainthood. But one sense in which he is perfectly suited for his new creed is that he, as a political apparatchik, is a veteran spin doctor, ready to put a good face on a bad reality, making the outrageous seem plausible with a straight face. He could become another William Lane Craig if he wanted. Bad evidence is just waiting for Bob to redeem it. What he could do with intractable Bible contradictions! With the authenticity of the spurious Josephus passage! Of course, he could only convince those who already want to see things his way, but that's the whole point. And he's already a master at it.

I have to admit that, from a free thought, atheist point of view, I have one reaction to Tebow's forthright faith and its conspicuous confession. Have you ever heard a friend boasting about something that hardly deserves it? A bad record album or an utterly undistinguished acquaintance? You suspect it is a variety of the inferiority complex and signals an inner shame or embarrassment they deep-down know they ought to feel. They are bluffing their way through it, hoping to bamboozle you into thinking there must be something to it after all. Cognitive dissonance reduction? Just saving face? They'd rather seem deluded than admit to themselves they're magnifying nothing. I have to wonder if that is what is happening when Tebow and other in-your-face religious athletes publicly brag about faith. I cringe; I wince. I think it is sad they are just so proud of being so ignorant. I think of Philippians 3:19, "They glory in their shame." Sort of a religious equivalent to Larry the Cable Guy.

But from a Christian standpoint, the reaction has got to be one of amazement. How can this Tebow be giving glory to Jesus when he is in the same moment disobeying him? For Jesus said (we are told), "Be careful not to practice your religion in front of others so as to be seen doing it… And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they just love to pray standing in the synagogues and the corners of the public streets so they may be on display… But when you pray, enter into your private room and, having shut your door, pray to your Father, he who is invisible" (Matthew 6 1, 5, 6). Of course, one might counter that Tebow is not publicly praying with this motivation; rather, he feels it is important to make a testimony for Christ amid an irreligious culture. But is it? Is the stadium filled with members of the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation? I doubt it. And besides, don't you think anyone who prays in public and makes a big deal of it rationalizes it this way? How can pride not enter in? "What a good boy am I!" The whole logic of the passage is to "build a hedge around the Torah," taking preventative measures lest a seemingly harmless act lead one into sin, in this case, self-righteous boasting.

And then there is the trivializing absurdity of bringing God down to the level of football while one stupidly thinks one is raising football up to God. There's a time and place for everything, as when Dietrich Bonhoeffer quipped that one really ought not to be longing for heaven while in the arms of one's spouse. Or remember when the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, when a reporter asked whether Peale thought Jesus would have looked askance at his attendance at the Super Bowl, replied, "If Jesus were alive, he'd be here today."

So says Zarathustra.

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The Problem of the Parables

You may know that I have argued that exactly none of the gospel sayings "of Jesus" stem from a historical Jesus of Nazareth, and not for the simple reason that there was no historical Jesus. No, my reasoning on that score is inductive, not deductive. My initial working hypothesis was to assume there had been such a Jesus, an itinerate holy man active during the tenure of Pontius Pilate. Following in the seven-league footsteps of Rudolf Bultmann and Norman Perrin, I scrutinized the gospel sayings, alert for signs of anachronism, borrowing from other contemporary sources, tendential constructions by the early church, prophecies from the Risen One through the lips of charismatics and apostles, and anything else that might imply inauthenticity, that the material originated post-Jesus. But at length, I found so much of it to be fatally problematical on these criteria, that I wound up regarding the estimates of the oh-so-skeptical Jesus Seminar (18% of the sayings probably authentic to Jesus) as hopeless optimistic.

Now I find myself noticing gospel texts that come near to admitting the secondary character of a lot of the material. It starts with the parables, many of which were first collected as they appear in Mark 4. These include the parables of the Sower/Soils, the Lamp, the Seed Growing Secretly, and the Mustard Seed. Matthew revises and expands the section, as we read it in Matthew 13. The new Matthean parables look to me to come from Matthew's own hand rather than from some pre-existing "M source," and the same is true of the uniquely Lukan parables (Lost Coin, Lost Sheep, Prodigal Son, Good Samaritan, Dishonest Steward, Pharisee and Publican, Unjust Judge, etc), which all share similar narrative features; in other words, no "L source."

But back to Mark. Mark 4:33-34 says, "And in many such parables he spoke the word to them, as much as they were able to grasp. And unless he had a parable he did not speak to them, but in private to his own disciples he explained everything." It suddenly occurs to me that this statement implies that whoever said it did not know of other, non-parabolic teaching of Jesus, which nonetheless abound elsewhere in this gospel and all others: aphorisms, apocalyptic sayings, straightforward admonitions, etc. The impact of this incongruous statement is comparable to the astonishing statement in Mark 8:11-12: "The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, 'Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation.'" Mustn't that verse stem from a time when people believed the incarnation was so complete that Jesus had left all divine powers behind in heaven (cf. Philippians 2:6-11)? First Corinthians 1:22 likewise says that "Jews seek signs [precisely as in Mark 8:12]… but we preach Christ crucified," which certainly implies Paul knew of no miracles ascribed to Jesus, which is why his letters never mention a single one.

My point is that Mark 4:33-34 makes the same sort of programmatic statement: there were no non-parabolic teachings circulating in the writer's day. Sure, we find non-parabolic material elsewhere in Mark, but the same is true about the miracles: Mark has plenty, even though he has preserved a saying that rules them out, justifying the absence of miracle stories in the time that saying originated. And this all in turn implies that the non-parabolic teaching was a subsequent addition, aimed at filling the perceived gap—just like the miracle stories.

But it occurred to me also that one must look again at the parables and ask if it is really plausible that people came in droves to listen to this stuff. The narrator himself tells us what the history of parable interpretation makes abundantly clear: there is no clear point to any of these parables. No one could have taken away enough meaning to keep him coming back for more. They are not like Aesop's Fables. Commentaries on Mark and tomes on the parables (and there are very many of both) offer endless possible interpretations of the parables, all of which make the parables' meaning dependent upon some larger theological system extrapolated from the gospel as a whole, or from a life of Jesus construct as a whole. Such a framework for interpretation is a chain of weak links.

And the recent readings of the parables by Dan O. Via, Bernard Brandon Scott, and Charles W. Hedrick strike me as so over-subtle and counter-intuitive that only fellow specialists playing the same exegetical game could possibly find their interpretations even plausible much less convincing. In short, I can imagine Jesus getting and keeping an audience with this lame material as easily as I can imagine anyone memorizing the whole of the Sermon on the Mount from hearing it once. Just take your head out of the text, and out of the scholarly game, and you'll agree with me.

So Jesus taught only in parables, which disallows everything else. But then he could not have taught with these parables either. It all reinforces the conclusion that there was originally no such figure as "Jesus the teacher" or Rabbi Jesus. Maybe this is why the Pauline epistles never appeal to any sayings ascribed to Jesus either. There weren't any yet. That would come later, and not from Jesus.

And remember Mark 13:11? "And when they lead you before the authorities, do not bother formulating beforehand what you will say, but whatever comes to you on the spot, say it. For you are not the speakers, but the Holy Spirit." I draw the same inference from it that Luke did in his rewrite: "I will give you a mouth and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or refute" (Luke 21:15; cf John 16:12-15: "I have many more things to tell you, but they would be too much for you to deal with now. But when that one comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you into all the rest of the truth. For he will not speak his own opinions, but he will relay what he hears, and he will announce future events to you. He will glorify me, because he will receive revelation from my treasury and announce it to you.."). In the heat of argument, don't worry: Jesus will supply the words—which then must have been simply ascribed to him, with no concern whether they were spoken by an earthly, historical Jesus, or by a post-Jesus Christian prophet/confessor. Wouldn't this be the ideal candidate for the origin of all those controversy stories in which "Jesus" reduces his opponents to silence with his clever retorts?

Nor let us forget Matthew 10:27 (a saying from the Q source, shared with Luke 12:23, where, however, it is made to have a very different point), "What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops." Remember how the gospels sometimes rationalize the late appearance (thus secondary character) of certain stories like the Transfiguration and the Empty Tomb by claiming that the Jesus-era hearers either were warned to delay reporting it (Mark 9:9-10) or just failed to report it (Mark 18:8). That's why you're hearing about it only now—yeah, that's the ticket! Doesn't it make sense that Matthew 10:27 should denote the same thing? That those who later credited their own preachments to Jesus in order to give them added clout "explained" why no one had heard them before by claiming they had first been told in secret? That is a classic Gnostic ploy, to maintain that Jesus had taught their newfangled teachings to the apostles all right, but in secret, which is why riff-raff like you never heard of them till now! Again, this, I think, is a signal within the gospels that their material is spurious.

Another comes in Luke's version of a Q saying. Where Matthew had "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me" (Matthew 10:40), Luke (10:16) has added "Whoever hears you hears me." This might easily mean the same thing, but one must wonder whether Luke's version was understood (and was intended) as a license to speak (fabricate) new words of the ascended Jesus.

So says Zarathustra

(who knows a thing or two about parables)