TIB: Pentecost

So we're up to Pentecost, and Pentecost is huge. Often considered the "birthday of the church," it is, in the book of Acts as well as Christianity as a whole, an important story in terms of the group's sense of identity. It is a bit like the Exodus in that while the earlier stuff is clearly important, Pentecost is pivotal.

Chapter 2 takes flight with the rushing wind and the miracle of tongues. It's hard to tell, even taking the text literally, what's going on here. Are the apostles/disciples speaking different languages or are the various people groups hearing things in their own language? The text actually suggests both, and I've heard it both ways. I'm not sure it matters. Those for whom speaking in tongues is important lean toward the former; those who get freaked out by that sort of thing seem to prefer the latter. We'll just let them duke it out.

In some groups, glossolalia is such an important sign of one's salvation that the pressure to perform -- and thus the temptation to fake it -- must be incredible. Emily Dickinson rather famously refused to play along during a revival at college, which left lingering questions about her orthodoxy and her commitment. For many charismatics, speaking in tongues is a sign of God's favor as well as a portent of the end times.

For cessationists, one or both of these interpretations is problematic, rendering the glossolalia experience either dubious or diabolical. For me, the experience is plausible enough, but I am leery, for various theological and philosophical reasons, of attaching too much interpretive meaning to it. St. John of the Cross was skeptical of any kind of ecstatic manifestation (what he called "consolations") as inherently meaningful. "So you had a vision," he might say. "Whoop-de-do."

For Peter and company, however, or at least for Luke's readers, several powerful and significant interpretive frames were both available and plausible. The meaning of the story -- that is, the significance of the claim -- is threefold. One, it is a reversal of Babel; that which was scattered is being gathered back together. Two, this suggests that the ingathering, the eschatological harvest, has begun. The exile is effectively over: God has forgiven the sins of his people and redemption is nigh.

Third, and perhaps less obviously (or less consciously), glossolalia may have been a means of bypassing normal avenues of rhetoric -- avenues that were only available to the well-educated (which is to say, rich). Luke's gospel is the easiest to interpret in light of a "preferential option for the poor" and we should not expect Acts to be much different. So we have here, and in some of Paul's letters, the possibility that glossolalia afforded the poor and disenfranchised access to persuasive speech. Plus it had a certain amount of socioreligious cachet, in that the Oracle of Delphi received prophecies in the form of glossolalia.

Anyway, a bunch of Galileans are waxing eloquent in various languages, or at least people from various parts of the empire believe they're hearing their native tongue, and the crowd that has gathered thinks the Galileans in question are drunk. Because, you know, drunk people are always going around speaking foreign languages. Peter's rebuttal is classic: they can't be drunk because, after all, it's only nine o'clock in the morning. This is an answer only a drinker would give. I'm not saying he was a lush, just pointing out that it is not the possibility of being inebriated that he contests but the timing.

No, he argues, they are not drunk. Rather they are the heralds of an eschatological message: "This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel," Peter tells them, and then proceeds to quote the passage in question. I dare you -- I double-dog dare you -- to read Joel 2 and tell me with a straight face that anybody could extrapolate Acts 2 out of that. We need Peter to say "this is that" because we weren't going to come up with it on our own. Sure, the basic idea is that this sort of spectacular event is a sign, but Acts 2 is not about young men dreaming dreams and old men seeing visions.

The implication of Peter's interpretation is that the Day of the Lord is upon them. This is good news, because the Day of Lord involves forgiveness for Israel. This is also bad news, because the Day of the Lord also involves, well, locusts and stuff. But ultimately, Joel tell us, "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." That's the NIV -- the NASB says "will be delivered" and "there will be those who escape," which I think is a clearer meaning.

In both Greek and Hebrew the words we translated "salvation" are generally ones that mean being rescued from some sort of calamity. It doesn't mean "go to heaven when you die" so much as it means escaping the locusts -- or, depending on context, being smart enough to get the hell out of Dodge when the Romans descend on Judea. Same thing, really.

Those who see the events of the Jewish War -- notably the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem -- as eschatological culmination have this going for them: their interpretive rubric is consistent with Peter's. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that some of the eschatological material in the New Testament could be a way in which post-temple Christians were saying "this was that."

Whether legitimate prediction or later attribution, the desecration of the temple and the Coming of the Son of Man are clearly linked in the words of Jesus. If Roman aggression seems a strange thing to which to attribute apocalyptic inbreaking, the crucifixion is a strange way to coronate a Messianic king. Everything about Jesus is a kind of inversion, and there is a certain consistency here.

One thing that is unvoidably problematic is that this leaves us with a picture of God sending the Romans to bring judgment upon his people. It's not that there isn't Biblical precedence for this assessment, it's just that if such an interpretation seems available to a Jesus or even a Josephus, both of whom were first-century Jews and thus no more open to accusations of antisemitism than Jeremiah might have been, the claim sounds awkward on the lips of a twenty-first century American.

Some of the broader political context is helpful here. It's not that God had brought judgment on the Jews or the temple per se so much as a divine referendum on the Hasmonean claims to messianic status that prompted the rebuilding of the temple in the first place. The true Messiah comes as a different kind of king to build a different kind of temple. Part of the New Testament witness is to the settling of the debate over the legitimacy of the Hasmonean project: God answers in the negative. Thank you for playing.

Peter's invocation of the prophecy in Joel is part of a larger rhetorical strategy that declares Jesus to be the Messiah, full stop. Whatever Jesus is or was or did, that's what the Messiah was supposed to be or do. This is that. To the extent that Jesus doesn't meet people's expectations for a Messianic king, it's the expectations that need to change.

The declaration of Jesus as Messiah confirms the path of the Suffering Servant as the messianic paradigm. The declaration of Jesus as Messiah confirms the people of God in their diasporic identity over against expectations of imperial triumph. The declaration of Jesus as Messiah claims as normative the way of the Cross.

However we might connect the theological dots, I don't think that eschatological hope means that Jesus is going to show up again as a conquerer lobbing off the heads of the impious. Those who are disappointed, then and now, are simply expecting the wrong sorts of things, either because we fail to grasp how the language was used, or because we fail to grasp the extent to which early Christian thinking inverted imperialistic assumptions and thwarted triumphalistic expectations.

The Irritable Bible: Choosing Matthias

[Before moving on, an addendum to my introductory disclaimers: I am approaching these texts from the perspective of composition, which I teach, and cultural studies, which is an approach I learned as an American studies major. In terms of biblical studies or Ancient Near Eastern studies, I am at best an informed layman; as such my grasp of guild-specific concerns is naturally limited. I am also reading through a theopolitical lens deeply influenced by the work of John Howard Yoder as well as postanarchist discourse, particularly the work of political philosopher Todd May.

I'm not attempting historical reconstruction or undertaking a quest for "what really happened." I'm not sure there is such a thing. I'm more interested in what is called the "rhetorical situation": how does the text construct its audience? What kinds of appeals are at play here? What does it reveal or assume about its own cultural context? What kind of discourse community might produce (or reproduce) such a text? And so on. If at times I get a bit indulgent -- well, that's just part of my confession.]

Acts 1:12-26

The choosing of Matthias is not what I would call a critical text. Matthias himself doesn't even show up anywhere else -- not just in Acts, but the whole Bible. He's a one-off. If Acts were an episode of Star Trek, he'd be wearing a red uniform and he'd be dead before Pentecost.

It does strike me as an interesting one, however. First, I find it interesting because even though Paul will become important to the narrative later, Paul is clearly not seen as Judas' replacement. Paul is, in Acts as well as in his own writings, Apostle to the Gentiles, and thus a different breed of cat. Unless Peter was just wrong, rushing ahead to fulfill Judas' spot not realizing that God was grooming Paul for the job -- I've heard that suggested, and it fits to some extent, but that seems like something Luke would make more explicit. Some regard Acts as being a refutation of Paul's apostolate but I think this is stretching things. It seems more likely that the stage is being set not just for Paul's legitimacy but also for Paul's unique role. Luke is a Gentile, and this is probably not insignificant (in fact, it's possible that Acts is not so pro-Paul as it is pro-Gentile, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

It's also interesting because the interpretive principle on which the decision is based would have gotten Peter a failing grade in hermeneutics class. Peter quotes single verses of two different Psalms and interprets them as a specific prophecy about Judas. In context, they are rather generic imprecatory psalms about one's enemies.  There's really nothing in those texts that sets us up for Peter's reading. His use of them here, in such a specific way, is an interesting glimpse into how the New Testament interprets the Old.

A comprehensive examination of this would be interesting indeed (I think it's been done). Very often, the meaning applied to the text by early followers of Jesus is not one that seems obvious from the text itself. Part of the reason for this, I submit, is that they saw themselves in eschatologically portentious times. Big doings were afoot, and everything was potentially laden with esoteric meaning pointing to a teological culmination.

There is a circularity here that is not far removed from paranoia or conspiracy theories: the belief that something significant is going on causes one to interpret nearly everything as evidence that something significant is going on. At the extreme, even countervailing evidence can be assimilated as a kind of verification, or a lack of evidence as proof of a coverup: that's just what "they" want us to think. (In some interpretive circles this is applied to Satan.) I'm not suggesting that Peter or his compatriots were delusional conspiracy theorists; what I am suggesting is that they saw themselves at an important juncture in salvation history. Everything had meaning, and all signs pointed to their place in the grand design.

It seems to have been important to replace Judas and maintain the numerical integrity of the Twelve. Judas was not the apostle of any particular tribe -- as far as I can tell, none of the apostles were directly linked to any tribe, and that level of specificity seems to be largely beside the point. Instead, it is more that the twelve tribes were being symbolically reconstituted in the apostolate, independent of any specific association. In fact, 10 of the tribes -- the northern kingdom, or Israel proper -- were lost to the Assyrians nearly 800 years prior.

This symbolic reconstitution, then, is in some ways a means of bypassing the "Samaritan problem" from one direction, while the inclusion of the Gentiles would render it moot from another direction. Literally gathering Israel back to the land, itself part of the constellation of eschatological expectations, is transcended by way of a socioeconomic rather than geographical understanding of the Kingdom of God. We'll see more of this in Acts 2.

Perhaps Peter's example should lead us to greater tolerance; if he can use prooftexts to justify his leadership decisions, maybe we shouldn't be so hard on those today who do the same thing. What I wonder is: why don't churches that claim to be "New Testament" and insist on literal readings of the Bible make major decisions by casting lots?

The Irritable Bible: The Ascension

In Acts 1, after Luke (whoever he was) tells Theophilus (whoever he was) that his first book was a smash hit and he really should have read it, he puts in a plug for the resurrection: Jesus "showed himself" to the apostles and "offered many convincing proofs that he was alive" -- apparently just showing up after your execution isn't enough for some people.

He tells them of the promised Holy Spirit, and that it is coming, but only if they stick around in Jerusalem. And then a question comes seemingly out of left field: "Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?" In retrospect, somebody really seems to be not getting it. Jesus, the paragon of patience, simply tells them that it will come eventually, and that in the meantime they will receive power from the Holy Spirit. This sounds like a dad who, when his children ask about going to Disneyland, says "we'll see" and then immediately pulls the car into the nearest Dairy Queen. (Actually, this is not fair insofar as the pouring out of the Spirit and the restoration of Israel are much more connected than that in the eschatological thinking of Second Temple Judaism, but that comes later.)

And then Jesus ascends. Basically he floats away into the clouds. This is like a dad who buys his kids ice cream and then spontaneously combusts.

Already I'm going to get in trouble, because this passage raises questions for me that only feed my skepticism. For one, where did Jesus go? Some of the Greeks postulated a round Earth and even calculated its circumference with rather astonishing accuracy, but in Luke's corner of the world people most likely saw the earth as flat, with the heavenly host dwelling just on the other side of all that blue stuff. It makes sense, if you were going to tell a story of ascension, that the whole upward trajectory thing would be the ticket. But if God were to literally whisk Jesus away in some fashion, why go through the trouble of making it look like Jesus was headed to an over yonder that we now know doesn't exist as such? It makes more sense as a story than an event.

Even if God executed this operation in real time, however, the question remains: why? Why did Jesus ascend? More to the literary point, why tell stories of Jesus' ascension? Why claim that this is what happened? The easy, conservative answer is the one Mallory gave about climbing Everest: "because it's there." In other words, the story was told because it happened. This answer has the benefit of being both simple and obvious. I can't say that it couldn't have happened, and I'm not interested in saying it didn't. But -- Occam's Razor notwithstanding -- I think are at least two other reasons.

For the first reason, imagine I'm a Jewish man in Jerusalem somewhere in the early 30's CE, hanging out in the agora. Let's assume they have some sort of patio furniture. I'm drinking the first-century equivalent of a double redeye (two shots of espresso in a cup of black coffee). Perhaps I'm smoking the first-century equivalent of a Chesterfield, because when I put myself in stories I like to be smoking Chesterfields. And an enthusiastic young Jew approaches me and tells me the promised Messiah has come to us.

I've seen would-be Messiahs come and go, so I'm not immediately impressed. "This is good news," I say coolly as I take a drag of my Chesterfield. "So where is this Messiah, and when is the coronation?" The Messiah -- the Anointed One -- would be king, of course. That's what "Anointed One" would mean, and the word I used for "good news" would, at least in the Greek, have been used to describe the announcement of a new king. We are, in short, talking politics.

My bubbly conversation partner tells me that this new king was executed by the state, a fate not uncommon to insurrectionists and rabble-rousers. "It seems difficult," I suggest dryly, taking a sip of my double redeye, "to lead Israel to renewed greatness when you're dead."

True, this bearer of glad tidings concedes -- but he is risen! He stands there, beaming. I raise an eyebrow: I'm familiar with stories of resurrection, of death and rebirth, of the non-finality of death. It strikes me as odd in a Jewish context -- I'm more of a Sadducee -- but then I remember Judas Maccabeus and his cohorts who, when facing a certain and gruesome death, seemed to earnestly believe not only in the restoration of Israel (described by the prophet Ezekiel as a dry bones putting on flesh) but in their own, personal resurrection. Very interesting.

But now I'm a bit flummoxed by my effervescent interlocutor, because it seems he's evaded my original question: "Where," I say, trying to French inhale and failing miserably, "is this new king against whom the armies of Caesar are powerless -- this Messiah, whom death cannot defeat and the grave cannot keep?"

"He ascended!" comes the exuberant reply.

"Of course he did," I say, stubbing out my Chesterfield and draining the dark, bitter dregs of my coffee. "Of course he did."

I wrote that last bit five years ago, and I'm keeping it because it's funny. I might not be quite so cynical now, but if you think in terms of plot elements Jesus must have gone somewhere after the resurrection because he's no longer around. Having him die of old age is anticlimactic and leaves too much time -- too much biography -- to account for. I suppose he could fade away, like Yoda, but that would be more like ascending anyway. Even if God is writing this story in human history, these things have to be organized in such as way as to be coherent. Moreover, it's not like the idea of ascension, as an element in political propaganda, wasn't in the air at the time anyway, which brings me to my second reason: ascension is linked to resurrection as a claim of Christ's victory over the powers.

These are tropes available in the religious language of Second Temple Judaism. They might be more -- as C.S. Lewis argued, it may be that God was doing literally in Jesus things that we might otherwise consider myth -- but they're at least that. Whatever "really" happened to Jesus [if there is such a thing], this is the way it got narrated. Paul tells us in Colossians 2 that Jesus triumphs over the "rulers and authorities" in the Cross. The Cross is both victory and coronation. Christ's being raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father speak to his vindication, but they also validate the way of the Cross. The Resurrection and Ascension are not God's "just kidding!" to the Cross, but God's deep and abiding cosmic "yes" to cruciformity.

Folks like Crossan argue that neither uniqueness (on the Christian side) nor impossibility (on the skeptical side) were available arguments at the time in regards to these kinds of spectacular claims. Others, like N.T. Wright, argue that this is overplayed, that something had to have happened in early first-century Palestine or the Christian story never would have gotten off the ground. I confess I hedge my bets: the only "something" I can be sure "happened" is that the Christian story did get off the ground. That's enough for me.

It's possible that at the point of origin of these stories the question of literality or historicity is not even appropriate. It's possible that the equation of truth and factuality we tend to take for granted was not on the cognitive map of the early Christians, not because they were intellectual pygmies but because they lived, as I said in the last post, in a different world. We cannot pretend that we live in theirs (the usual fundamentalist assumption) any more than we can assume they live in ours (which is the classic liberal approach).

I'm also willing to say that maybe there's a difference between being honest and telling the truth. Rehearsing my skepticism, as I have done here, is honest. This is what I really think. Proclaiming Jesus as Lord, on the other hand, is telling the truth. The orthodox proclamation is that he is risen, and I can you look you in the eye and offer the liturgical response: he is risen indeed. I may have trouble with the details, but I'm doubling down on that cosmic "yes."

So Jesus ascended. What this means is that we can have confidence in the way of the Cross. It means that Jesus is a king, if a bit of an odd one, and he claims our allegiance. Caesar? Well, Caesar is just an emperor. The real power is somewhere else, and might look different than any of us -- not least the disciples -- would have guessed.

It looks like a cross.

The Irritable Bible

About five years ago I undertook a study of Acts in a series of emails for some friends. I was basically blogging on the DL; I was teaching at a Christian college at the time and wanted to go places I wasn't sure would sit well with my employers. I called my missives the "Troxell Broadsides" (which sounds pretentious, but I meant it in mostly a tongue-in-cheek way, I swear), and the study of Acts ended up being called "Broadsiding the Bible," which I rather liked. In some ways I've moved away from where I was five years ago, but in some ways I've turned back to where I was then, so I thought this might be a good place to revisit that old study and finally finish it. 

It's also a way for me to explore this turning back, to rehearse some of my thoughts on faith and belief and scripture and all that. For a little while I tried to indulge in the luxury of not caring all that much about the Bible. As I move back into a more overtly theological way of thinking about things, I no longer have that luxury. I'm no Bible scholar, but I've read a little. Neither am I a theologian, though some theologians are notorious for seeming to ignore the Bible altogether. Still, I think this will be fun.

First I need to lay out some of my assumptions about Acts. The consensus seems to be that same author wrote Luke and Acts, whether that person was really Luke or not. I think the text implies Lucan authorship, but pseudopigraphy was common enough back in the day that this sort of thing is hardly conclusive. One argument in favor of tradition is that attributing a work to an unknown like Luke seems unlikely (though writing as one of Paul's sidekicks does have a certain cache to it). Moreover, the switch from third person to first person plural in the course of the narrative, while not beyond the capacities of a clever 1st-century writer, seems an elaborate ruse. I'm torn between the skepticism of questioning traditional authorship and a cynicism that says nobody wanted to work that hard. I will assume the same person wrote Luke and Acts, and I will call this person Luke, without claiming any certainty as to the identity of the author.

My other assumption is that Luke and Acts come out of a particular community, and reflect the vision of that community -- a vision that may not be exactly the same as that of other communities that generated or influenced the books we call the New Testament. The crucial questions for me, far beyond those of historical probability, are questions of intent: why would communities tell these stories, and why would Luke choose to preserve them? Why were Luke's effort preserved when surely others were neglected or destroyed? If I'm not comfortable calling myself a theologian or a political theorist (even though my main interests are in political theology), I can't deny being a writing teacher, and thus questions of author and audience and purpose are ones I instinctively reach for. I can't shut off my curiosity about the rhetorical angles, and I'm not sure why I'd want to.

Acts -- and I would say the same for the Gospels -- is not straightforward history the way we might think of it. For one, we live in a different world. Luke's stated intent was to write an orderly account, and we need not doubt his earnestness, but he saw a different world than we would even if we were to travel back in time and capture the scene on our smartphones. Our social situation is very different. Our historical location is very different. Our context is very different. The way we see the world is very different. There are limits to the "social construction of reality" -- I'm sure a socially constructed bus would hurt like hell if I jumped in front of it -- but I do think our sociocultural context determines the interpretive horizons of our subjective experience. We have encounters and conversations with people who are, almost literally, living in a different world from our own. Imagine, then, almost two thousand years of intersubjective toothpaste that won't go back in the tube, and filter accordingly.

Because Luke lived in and saw a different world, and had different reasons for telling or repeating stories than some of the reasons we might write histories (not to mention that our own histories are always already interpretive reconstructions), and because it is quite likely that even if he was an eyewitnesss to some of the events he might describe things differently than we would had we been there, Acts is not history as we know it. A closer analog might be propaganda -- political propaganda at that, since religion and politics were not really differentiated at the time. Even in our own time, I would submit, politics is always already theological and vice-versa, but we have ways of hiding that from ourselves that would not have occurred to Luke or Paul or Jesus.

As we'll see from the text, some early Christian communities seem to have been cells of nonviolent anti-imperial resistance. They were derided as "atheists" by the Romans, not because they bore any resemblance to what we call atheism today, but because they did not show deference to the Roman gods -- particularly, of course, the imperial cult. Maybe they weren't exactly rebels, but they were dissidents of a sort, and self-consciously countercultural (which suggests that the Paris Commune might be a more apt analog to the early church than the Southern Baptist Convention, but that's not important right now).

As propaganda, Acts also seems bullish on Paul. One fairly conservative suggestion is that the text is legitimately Lucan, written by Paul's erudite physician friend as a kind of dossier for the purposes of Paul's trials before Roman authorities. This assumes a bit much for me, but the text does seem to have a feel of pro-Pauline advocacy. Luke wants Paul to be taken seriously, which suggests that the Lucan community was, in addition to being an anti-imperial group, also a Pauline one to some extent. This makes possible the suggestion that Luke is the most Pauline of the Gospels, but I haven't run across anyone trying to interpret Luke in that light.

John Dominic Crossan and Neil Elliot (among others) reject Acts as a source of information on the historical Paul -- Crossan for reasons of historical continuity and Elliot for reasons of theological continuity. In both cases Acts doesn't line up with their desire to rehabilitate Paul as a more liberal and tolerant voice than comes out in the Pauline corpus overall. This also assumes a bit much for me, though I appreciate their efforts. Acts may not reflect the historical Paul, but it certainly represents the view of a community that seems to have lionized Paul whether they've got their history right or not. Moreover, if Paul comes across as a somewhat provincial first century thinker versus a cosmopolitan postmodern liberal, I think there are probably good reasons for that.

So here's where I offer what semioticians call an "extensional bargain": if you accept the premise that Acts comes out of a community that was part of an anti-imperial movement, and keen on Paul, I can take you on a little ride. Along the way, we'll see if this premise makes sense, and to what extent we might have to modify it to be fair to the text. And we'll see where it takes us.