Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth

by Burton L. Mack

arcane.

facticity

Telling stories about one another is what we do.

Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light.

Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable.

all of the early myths about Jesus were attempts to paint him and his followers in acceptable colors from the Israel epic.

Priests were a professional intellectual class concerned with the well-being of society as a whole.

The Maccabean dynasty, also called Hasmonean after their family name, lasted only eighty years, from 142 to 63 B.C.E.

A strong reaction against the Hasmonean control of the temple among some priestly families in Jerusalem resulted in the withdrawal of these priests to a barren shelf above the Dead Sea and their establishment of a commune at Qumran.

Athens was not the city where all the institutions and intellectual achievements characterizing Greek culture originated. Homer and the early philosophic traditions had their home in Ionia, the games at Olympus, and the art of rhetoric in the Greek colony at Syracuse.

Then as now, democracy was not easily transplanted in other lands.

They did not demand ideological loyalty of their provinces, only cooperation with their Roman governors and the payment of taxes (hence procurator, meaning both governor and procurer).

The Romans were more efficient than ruthless. They had no desire to create either fear or loyalty on the part of their subjects.

Myth is the way we humans have of saying that the world was already there.

the famous contrasting pair: kings and tyrants. “Tyrant” meant autocratic, self-serving, and bad, while “king” became an abstract ideal for the perfect ruler.

The Stoics had succeeded in reducing the entire system of cosmos, polis, and anthropos to the status of a psychological metaphor.

For other thinkers, especially those with cultural roots in the eastern Mediterranean provinces, radical individualism was hardly an answer.

Theirs was a social anthropology that placed high value on family, kinship, genealogy, tradition, purity, social justice, cultic law, and religious piety.

Hesiod,

Biblical scholars count four major revisions of the epic before the deportation of Jews in 587 B.C.E.

Galilee happened to be a perfect place to experiment with social critique and try out new ideas about a better way to live.

Lake of Genneseret (or Sea of Galilee)

David did add Galilee to his kingdom, it is true, and the old stories tell about the tribes of Naphthali, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, and Dan settling there. However, these stories also say that the tribes of Israel were not able to drive out the indigenous inhabitants.

The people who lived in Galilee were Galileans, not Syrians, not Samaritans, not Jews.

He must have been something of an intellectual, for the teachings of the movements stemming from him are highly charged with penetrating insights and ideas. He also must have been capable of suggesting ways to live with purpose in the midst of complex social circumstances. But he was not a constructive, systematic thinker of the kind who formulate philosophies or theologies.

the interweaving of two themes that mark the genius of the movement. One is a playful, edgy challenge to take up a countercultural lifestyle.

marked by humor,

The closest analogy for this kind of invitation to live against the stream is found in Cynic discourse of the time. It does appear that Jesus was attracted to this popular ethical philosophy as a way for individuals to keep their integrity in the midst of a compromising world.

The other theme is an interest in a social concept called the “kingdom of God.”

the ways it was used show that something of a social vision appeared in t...

The kingdom of God referred to an ideal society imagined as an alternative to the way in which the world...

The kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus was not an apocalyptic or heavenly projection of an otherworldly desire. It was driven by a desire to think that there must be a better way to live together than the present state of affairs.

electrodes short-circuited, and Jesus started a movement. Everything essential was present in the package: social critique, alternative social vision, divine sovereignty, and personal virtue.

From this early period we can identify five different groups of Jesus people from whom we have some documentary evidence, plus a “family of Jesus” group for which there are only a handful of clues, and the congregations of the Christ to which we shall turn in the next chapter.

No early Jesus group thought of Jesus as the Christ or of itself as a Christian church.

The first followers of Jesus were not interested in preserving accurate memories of the historical person. Jesus was important to them as the founder-teacher of a school of thought.

the matter of first importance was the teaching, not the historical teacher, and the matter of second importance was to imagine that the teacher had actually lived in accordance with his teaching.

It is very important to realize that these movements developed as schools of thought, not as religious communities of the kind that gathered in celebration of the Christ myth.

Q puts us as close to the historical Jesus as we will ever be.

the people of Q were fully preoccupied with questions about the kingdom of God in the present and the behavior required if one took it seriously.

It is a picture of life in the public arena of first-century Galilee,

The lifestyle of the Jesus people bears remarkable resemblance to the Greek tradition of popular philosophy characteristic of the Cynics.

gadflies

Popping pretensions and pointing up the foolishness of normal standards of honor and shame were exactly what everyone expected from the Cynics.

two conceptual problems had to be solved in order to make such a revision work. One was that the Jesus people were accustomed to thinking of Jesus as a wisdom teacher and now needed to imagine him as having also been an apocalyptic prophet.

The other was that, having experienced failure and having postponed the fulfillment of their vision until a final day of vindication, the community was now in need of being very sure they were on the right track.

Both of these conceptual problems were solved by imaginative revisions of their picture of Jesus and his place in the epic history of Israel.

Explicit instruction was not the object.

the Pharisees had no official authority over any Jewish institution.

a progressive sect engaged in redefining what it meant to be Jewish in the shadow of the temple’s end.