Jesus and the Jews
To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin, in his review of my book, Revolution in Judea [Books in Review, September 1981], asserts that because the Gospels underwent “basic editing” it is impossible to arrive at any reliable conclusions about the historical Jesus. This is to overlook the fact that our knowledge of every figure of the ancient world depends on texts that require critical sifting. In the case of Jesus, we are lucky enough to have four documents which, by supplementing and contradicting each other, give grounds for scientific investigations and conclusions. We also have a wealth of documentation, by which background details can be checked, in Josephus, Philo, the Talmud, and Roman authors.
Mr. Halkin fails to understand the methods of textual criticism of the Gospels used in my book and in other works of the historical school. These methods are not arbitrary, as he supposes. When faced with contradictions in the texts, one asks, “Which is the earlier, more authentic version?,” and the answer must be one that can explain how the later version came to be added. Thus, the question of Jesus' alleged pacifism (adduced by Mr. Halkin as insoluble) demands an explanation of passages in which Jesus is shown as the reverse of a pacifist, e.g., his forcible expulsion of the moneychangers. The principle used is the well-tried one, lectio difficilis melior, i.e., the passage that goes against the grain of the narrative, or contradicts its general Tendenz, is likely to be a survival of the underlying earlier version, for it could not have been added at a late stage when the Tendenz was fully established.
Mr. Halkin's naive question as to how censorship could have allowed “incriminating passages [to] pass,” shows great faith in the competence of censors. Even in modern works, censorship is always imperfect: for example, a future historian would be able to reconstruct the importance of Trotsky in the Russian Revolution even from textbooks in which that importance has been censored out. If the historian had a series of four Soviet textbooks of different dates in which the process of censorship could be observed progressively, the reconstruction would be much easier; and this is exactly the situation in regard to the four Gospels (Mr. Halkin does not even mention the methodological importance in my book of the order in which the Gospels were written). When, further, the myth of Jesus' pacifism is given its historical explanation (the desire of the Gospel writers to avoid political conflict with Rome and to dissociate themselves from militant Jewish nationalism), the argument is complete, for all the text and its process of development has been explained, not just the parts selected as early and authentic.
These methods, especially when confirmed by technical documentary analysis, can attain a high level of probability. Mr. Halkin's approach, however, leaves contradictions altogether unexplained and inexplicable. He also gives a crude account of the process of censorship, when he supposes it to be the conscious perpetration of “blatant fictions.” As I explain, the process is much more likely to have been unconscious.
Mr. Halkin refers to what he calls the “Carmichael-Brandon-Maccoby” hypothesis, and wonders why I do not give more acknowledgment to the first two names in this designation. This shows considerable ignorance of the literature of the subject. The view that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion and that his claim to be the messiah had an anti-Roman political aspect has been held by hundreds of authors. Moreover, Mr. Halkin is wrong in thinking that the Jewish Jesus is a “modern enterprise” and “Christian scholars began it,” for a similar approach can be found in medieval Jewish authors, notably Profiat Duran and Hasdai Crescas. The whole line of thought dates from the time when Jewish scholars began to study the New Testament seriously, and found that it conflicted with the official Church interpretation of Jesus' intentions.
It is true that S.G.F. Brandon and my good friend Joel Carmichael (to whom I do refer in the book) and myself and many others all belong to an established school of thought that contrasts the historical Jesus with the Jesus of the Christian myth. While there are many vital matters on which we are agreed, there are also important differences among us. For example, unlike Carmichael and Robert Eisler (and before them, H. Rodrigues and M. Fluegel), I do not argue (despite Mr. Halkin's misrepresentation) that Jesus was a Zealot. I see no evidence of realistic military planning or activity on Jesus' part; I see him, rather, as a figure similar to Theudas, i.e., an apocalyptic messianic claimant who expected that a God-given miracle (on the Mount of Olives, in accordance with biblical prophecy) would overwhelm the Romans, accompanied by only token fighting by himself and his followers. This answers Mr. Halkin's objection that the Romans do not seem to have taken Jesus' rising very seriously; as I explain in my book, a disturbance by an excited mob would either die down quickly or could be quelled by the removal of the charismatic figure at its center, as in the case of Theudas described by Josephus. Jesus is mentioned by Josephus, contrary to Mr. Halkin's assertion, though the passage has been much tampered with by Christian editors.
Brandon, to whom I make frequent reference in my book, also sees Jesus as a Theudas-figure, but he does not stress, as I do, Jesus' kingship, and thus interprets incidents such as the Transfiguration and the Triumphal Entry very differently. Ideologically, moreover, Brandon and I are poles apart. Brandon, following Rudolf Bultmann, regards the historical Jesus as entirely lacking the theological significance of the mythical Jesus based on Hellenistic mystery-religion. While this releases Brandon to consider the historical Jesus objectively, it blinds him to the religious value of Jewish messianism, which comprises a fusion of religion and politics that the modern “liberation theology” is seeking to recover. The theological aspect of my book is dismissed by Mr. Halkin in a phrase about the “apologetic character” of my defense of the Pharisees. But my whole point is that the “political Jesus” is not, as Christians think, smaller than the otherworldly Jesus, but greater; and the Jewish concept of the messiah is superior to that of Christianity, which delivers this world into the hands of tyranny and injustice.
It is in this light that my view of the Barabbas incident should be regarded. Mr. Halkin's comment that it is “cleverly original, if not necessarily convincing” is quite inadequate to the scope of my intention, which was not merely to propose an ingenious solution to a problem. From the literary standpoint, the Barabbas incident is the center of the Gospel story, encapsulating the theme of Jewish political-minded worldliness versus Christian “spiritual” otherworldliness. The contrast reaches its height in the Jewish choice of the “robber” Barabbas in preference to Jesus the otherworldly pacifist. My argument, beginning with the fact that Barabbas' name is given in early manuscripts as “Jesus Barabbas,” and that there is no previous or later mention of him either in the Gospels or elsewhere, is that Jesus and Barabbas were originally the same person (“Barabbas” being a title, equivalent to “Son of the Father”), but were split off and given separate identities in order to detach Jesus from his political aims and his Jewish affiliation. The Jewish crowd, who actually shouted for Jesus' release, was then represented as supporting the wrong Jesus, and was therefore saddled with the guilt of the death of the true Jesus. I added that “even if one regards Barabbas as a separate historical personage . . . [he] has been the receptacle into which the unwanted characteristics of Jesus have been dumped.” Barabbas was thus the steppingstone by which Jesus was transformed from a Jewish messiah, destroyed in political conflict with Rome, into a cosmic Christ, destroyed by the Jews in their mythical role as accursed performers of the sacrificial murder which was indispensable for salvation. This transformation has provided the driving-force for anti-Semitism throughout the Christian era.
It is an urgent task to uncover the facts underlying the myth. The work has made good progress at the hands of many able investigators, despite the inevitable objections of those who like to put foward ill-informed theories about the a priori impossibility of the task. . . .
Hyam Maccoby
London, England
_____________
Hillel Halkin writes:
Although I confessed in my review that, unlike Hyam Maccoby, I am a layman when it comes to New Testament scholarship, I do not think that it is beyond my powers to comprehend “the methods of textual criticism of the Gospels used in [Maccoby's] book and in other works of the historical school.” Indeed, if anyone is methodologically confused, I am afraid that it is Mr. Maccoby himself.
Of course, as Mr. Maccoby says, “our knowledge of every figure of the ancient world depends on texts that require critical sifting”—which is why, sift though we may, such knowledge remains inevitably tenuous, especially when the texts in question are mainly or exclusively religious ones whose purpose is to exalt and mythicize their subject. In this respect, Jesus is not the exception but the rule. What, in the final analysis, is or can be definitely known about the lives and thoughts of the historical Abraham, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, or Buddha? No doubt, careful textual analysis, when correlated with the findings of history and archeology, can help us to form rational hypotheses about such men, to compare these with other hypotheses, and to evaluate the probability of their being right or wrong—in other words, to make educated guesses, which is exactly what Mr. Maccoby has done. But no matter how educated such guesses are, they are far from being “reliable conclusions,” as is demonstrated in the case of Jesus by the current state of New Testament criticism, whose practitioners, after over a century of arduous labors, still disagree on most major issues.
To get down to a number of specific points raised by Mr. Maccoby:
1. I, at least, would have to have great faith in the competence of early Christian “censors” to believe that within the space of several decades they could have successfully managed to efface the real Jesus and to substitute their own double in his place. Nor do I see how such a process, if it in fact occurred, could have been an unconscious one. If Mr. Maccoby is right about Jesus having led an anti-Roman uprising in Jerusalem, there must still have been living, at the time the synoptic Gospels were composed, many hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian Jews who were eyewitnesses to the event—at least some of whom would have sought to make known their recollections of it as members of the Jerusalem Nazarene church. According to Mr. Maccoby, either the authors of the Gospels were unaware that such eyewitness reports existed, or else, being aware of them, they conveniently “forgot” them and “unconsciously” replaced them with an imaginary account of their own. Neither of these two alternatives strikes me as being particularly likely.
2. I am cognizant of the fact that Jesus is mentioned by Josephus. Had Mr. Maccoby read my review with more care, he would have realized that the question asked in it is not, Why is Jesus not mentioned by Josephus?, but rather, Why, if an anti-Roman mob seized the Temple Mount during Jesus' last days in Jerusalem, is such an uprising not mentioned by Josephus?
3. It is simply not true that I said in my review that the belief that Jesus' career had “an anti-Roman political aspect” originated with Joel Carmichael and S.G.F. Brandon; in fact, I explicitly stated that such a belief goes at least as far back as the 18th-century work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus. What was, to the best of my knowledge, new about Carmichael's book was its claim that Jesus was the leader of an armed rebellion—an argument that Brandon took up and sought to document by an exhaustive analysis of New Testament sources that anticipates Mr. Maccoby's at numerous points.
Beyond this, Mr. Maccoby is right about Joel Carmichael: he does refer to him in his book—once, in a one-line footnote to Chapter 15. As for S.G.F. Brandon (in whose Jesus and the Zealots and The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth I am at a loss to detect the slightest trace of Bultmannism), the “frequent references” to him in Revolution in Judea consist of eight lines of actual text and nine more lines of footnotes. Nowhere does Mr. Maccoby so much as hint that the central themes of his book were articulated before him by these two men, and, while I preferred to treat this as an oversight in my review, his letter now rules out such an assumption. It is sad to see a scholar so keen to be thought original that he cannot permit himself the gesture of acknowledging a debt to his predecessors.
About one thing Hyam Maccoby does have a just grievance: in speaking in my review of a “Carmichael-Brandon-Maccoby hypothesis,” I did not point out, as I should have done, that Mr. Maccoby's conception of Jesus differs somewhat from that of Carmichael and Brandon, and that, unlike the latter, the author of Revolution in Judea attributes to Jesus' supposed anti-Roman insurgency, a purely apocalyptic-symbolic, as opposed to a pragmatic-military, significance. Yet Mr. Maccoby is far from consistent here. Thus, while disclaiming serious logistical planning on Jesus' part, he believes that Jesus and a mob of his followers were able to occupy and hold the Temple Mount for several days (no mean task in a heavily garrisoned town like Jerusalem). And, in practically one breath, he writes that “Jesus was not a Zealot” (p. 120) and that “there was no fundamental disparity between Jesus' aims and those of the militant Zealots” (p. 121). If there was no fundamental disparity, how unlike the Zealots could Jesus have been?
4. While I admired Mr. Maccoby's elegant interpretation of the Barabbas incident, I did not find it “necessarily convincing” for the simple reason that, since Jesus (Yeshu or Yeshu'a in Hebrew) was a common name in late Second Temple times, there is nothing inherently implausible about two Jesuses having come up for judgment before Pilate at the same time. (And if they did, the incident can be understood in a manner that is fully consistent with the text of the Gospels and opposed to Mr. Maccoby's theory, i.e., by assuming that the mob wanted Jesus Barabbas freed because he was an anti-Roman leader, and was willing to sacrifice Jesus of Nazareth because he was not.) This does not mean that Mr. Maccoby's version of the Barabbas story is wrong; neither, however, can it be proved right, since once more we are in the realm of “educated guesses” rather than of “reliable conclusions.”
In sum, I should like to say that, whatever my reservations about it, I tried to write a careful and by no means hostile assessment of Revolution in Judea, which, along with the work of Joel Carmichael and S.G.F. Brandon, offers a novel and interesting interpretation of Jesus' life and death. I am sorry that in his letter to COMMENTARY Hyam Maccoby could not bring himself to treat my review in the same spirit as I treated his book, and that, instead of dealing seriously with the questions that I raised, chose either to “fend them off with a straw,” as the old rabbinic saying goes, or to ignore them entirely.
