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Note: these excerpt threads are
subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority
permits
Burton Mack: "That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a 'once upon a time,' the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened. And that means that the story cannot be myth. It may help some to note (1) that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity, (2) that early Christian myth making was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation, and (3) that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstances, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested... Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their acheivements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time. Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. Telling stories is how we do our catching up, checking one another out on views and attitudes, and gathering information to justify judgements we need to make about something we call character. It does not take long before there are too many stories to recall and retell. Even in a brief family history, sorting takes place naturally over time, and only the most vivid stories are ever rehearsed. Some, however, are told again and again. These become stories that several generations might share. As the size of a social unit expands, the number of shared stories shrinks. These stories invariably become dense icons, packed with features characteristic for the people as a whole. As the past generations fade from memory, these stories are allowed to slip into a 'once upon a time' where a honing of ancestral symbols takes place..." [13-14] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT "In every case, the strategy was the same: revising the epic in light of present circumstances from a particular point of view to support a critical judgement about the present state of affairs. Historians of religion would say that these Jewish scholars followed a typical pattern of mythmaking. This pattern works in the following way. The current state of affairs is not living up to the promise of the past. The recent past comes under critique. The stories of the more distant past are rehearsed to make sure of the promise. The aim is to see the promise more clearly, more precisely, and test the reasons for having thought that it was true. This brings focus to bear upon a certain moment, epoch, or feature of the history that can serve as a key to its fundamental logic and promise. Reseen, and lifted from its ancient history as an ideal model, the figure can then be used as an image of what the people and their culture were, are in essence, or should be. The image can then be used as a contrast to the present situation in order to render a critique, provide a model for rebuilding, or project a hopeful future. In our time, this pattern of thinking can be recognized in the frequent reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the American dream, or the Constitution of the United States. In the second-temple times, the epic of Israel was a rich reservoir of ideal types, and all of them were used at one time or another in the process of mythmaking. Adam, Abraham, the covenants, Moses, the exodus, the law, the temple charter of Leviticus, the entrance into the land, David, Solomon, the building of the temple, the kingdoms, the prophets, and so forth could all be cast as icons of Israel's sociology and used for comparison and contrast with the contemporary situation. The Jews did not need to learn a new set of tricks to use their epic this way. Jews had been revising their epic history since the time of David and Solomon. Reimagining the past was their way of mythmaking..." [36] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT "The synoptic gospels include many little stories about Jesus that scholars call pronouncement stories. Jesus is depicted in a certain situation; someone questions what he is saying or doing; and Jesus gives a sharp response. In most cases, these stories are embellished in order to describe the situation, explain why the questions are raised, and name the oppenents. But even if the story turns into a little dialogue or debate, Jesus always has the last word, and it is frequently the case that the longer story can be reduced to a single exchange of challenge and response... These stories are quite similar to large numbers of anecdotes told by the Greeks about the founders of the various schools of philosophy. The Greek penchant for crisp formulation and clever rejoinder is obvious, as is the delight in quick wit and biting humor. Called chreiai (useful), anecdotes such as these were used to imagine a teacher being put the the test, saying true to his teachings, and emerging unscathed from a difficult, challenging situation. Thus chereiai where 'useful' for composing what the Greeks called a 'life' (bios, from which we get 'biography'). That is because, beneath the humor, there was another very serious function for these stories. The chreiai were capable of creating the impression of a teacher's character (ethos), the way in which one lived in accord with one's teaching by virtue of one's wisdom and even in the most trying circumstances. The chreiai created what scholars call a rhetorical situation, replete with circumstance, speaker, speech, and audience. To capture a founder's rhetorical skill and character in a single stroke with humor was quite an achievement. It meant that good chreiai could be used to put a school tradition on display... Anecdotes of the kind told about Jesus were especially frequent among the Socratic, Cyrenaic, and Cynic traditions. Since it was so, it will be helpful to compare the stories just cited with a few typical Cynic anecdotes. A game of sorts seems to have been played with the Cynics by those courageous enough to confront them. Since Cynics lived in a kind of negative symbiosis with society, espousing indifference to its conventions, but actually being fully dependent upon it for their livelihood, almost any typical situation could be turned into a trap. The trick was to catch the Cynic in some inadvertent inconsistency by pointing out his lack of complete independence from society. The Cynic reveled in these encounters, taking them as opportunities to expose normal expectations as ridiculous. Thus the anecdote was a perfect medium for distilling the nature of such exchanges. In order to win, the Cynic had to put an altogether different construction upon things as if the challenger had not understood the situation. Strategies ranged from playful put-downs, through erudite observations and insights about human existence, and biting sarcasms, to devastating self-deprecations. But the retort was always phrased with a sense of humor in order ease the blow..." [54-55] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT "There are many Jesus chreiai in the Gospel of Mark... Mark used pronouncement stories to great advantage in the contstruction of his gospel, partly because they were the appropriate building blocks for the 'life' (bios) he wanted to write, partly because they turned on conflict, a conflict basic to the plot Mark wanted to develop, and partly because they were the kind of story that Mark's own community had learned to tell about Jesus... Most of these have been identified by scholars as pre-Markan, stories that were being told in Mark's community before Mark decided to use them for his life of Jesus. These are the stories that interest us, for they make a set and can be used as a window into a branch of the Jesus movement that had rup up against the school tradition of the scribes and Pharisees. In good Greek fashion, the Jesus people of Mark's community imagined Jesus as the champion of their own school tradition, and they pitted Jesus against the Pharisees by telling chreiai. This means that they thought of themselves as disciples in the School of Jesus..." [57] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT "What a somersault, turning the page between Luke's life of Jesus and the Gospel of John. You land in the presence of God before the world was made, watching as his powerful logos (word) begins to move and create the life and light that streak through the universe changing darkness into day. An then, it isn't long before we read that Jesus was that logos! This is a totally different imaginary world from that projected by Luke's plan of history, or the law of perfection that would never change until the end of time in Matthew's gospel, or the Markan vision of the kingdom of God that would only be revealed at the eschaton. We are now in the presence of a cosmic power that pulsates throughout the world making all of time and space eternally present around us. This is the world of the cosmic Christ, one of the mythmaking options that several early Christians groups found attractive... In the Gospel of John, Jesus as the son and logos of God reveals the structure of the cosmos. In the post-Pauline school tradition, documented in the letters to the Colassians and Ephesians, the wisdom of God invites the reader to see and praise the cosmic Christ. In the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is depicted as the great high priest performing and eternal sacrifice in the cosmic temple of God. And in the Revelation of John, the dominant cosmic image is that of the city of God. A closer look at each of these will help us understand the thought invested in this kind of mythmaking and the rewards that early Christians reaped by imagining the Christ as a cosmic power... That early Christians thought of their world as an organism (cosmos), a universe pulsating with powers that both threatened to break it apart and pulled it back together, should not be thought strange. That was the way the Greeks thought of it, and everyone influened by Greek thought had learned to do the same..." [175-176] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT "John started his story of Jesus with a poem in praise of the logos, God's son and active agent in the creation of the world... According to his poem, which begins before the world was made, this logos circles around and around though a series of interlocking lines, leaving in his wake created things, life, light, and finally humankind. Then, picking up speed and spiraling down through all of troubled time and darkened space, the logos finally takes the form of a human being, and behold it was Jesus... | ...the miracle stories and the dialogues they spawn are simply seven chances for the Johannine Christians to watch and enjoy the collision of the world of enlightenment and the world of darkness, a collision they experienced everyday... the Johannine community cultivated the image of the mythological Jesus and his words as coded invitations to personal enlightenment... The monologue material, famous for its repetitious 'I am' sayings is suspiciously poetic in ways similar to the opening poem in praise of the logos. Interlocking lines pick up on a term just used, add to it another, then circle back in a rhythmic pattern that overloads the meaning of terms and frustrates clear, conceptual definitions. It gives one the impression of having been produced by collective chanting, and, as a matter of fact, one is not always sure where the voice of Jesus leaves off and the voice of the Johannine community takes over. For John, the 'I' of the mythological Jesus, the light of the world, and the 'I' of the Johannine Christian, the enlightened one who 'abides in Jesus' and 'in whom Jesus' words abide,' are, in the last analysis, one and the same." [176|182-3] WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT |