Spirituality in my opinion is a weasel word—I’m never sure what folks mean when they use it. For users it denotes a high value, pointing to fundamental interests and concerns. But what exactly does it signify?

The Dictionary

A dive into The Oxford English Dictionary (one of my favorite pastimes) outlines my dilemma. The earliest usage from 1417 ce, now antiquated, is in the phrase “Guardian of the Spiritualities,” referring to the person or body responsible for the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a bishopric or archbishopric while the see is vacant.” The entry explains that spirituality or spiritualities are “The spiritual or ecclesiastical realm,” that is, the property of the bishopric.

The second definition represents our current usage. Spirituality is “The fact or condition of being spiritual.” This usage dates from 1485. Though not a particularly helpful definition, looking up spiritual makes matters a tiny bit clearer. “Of or relating to the human spirit, and related senses.” This is a tautology since the adjective spiritual derives from the noun spirit. The sub-definition 1.I.1. makes matters somewhat clearer: “Of or relating to the immaterial part or aspect of a person or of people generally.” The next sub-definition 1.I.1.a spells out immaterial: “Relating to or concerned with the human spirit or soul, esp. considered from a religious or moral standpoint. Frequently in express or implied distinction to bodily, corporal, or temporal.” This gives us much to discuss.

Spirit and spirituality are contrasted with material. In fact, its meaning derives from this contrast. As the OED suggests, it parallels or replicates the distinction between body and soul. This presents my major issue. Is it possible to understand spirituality in a non-dualistic way or is it inherently dualistic?

Latin, Greek, Hebrew

The English word spirit is a transliteration of the Latin spiritus, which means “breath” or “wind.” Human breath is the mouth’s wind. Context determines its precise meaning. The parallel words in Greek (πνεῦμα, pneuma) and Hebrew (רוּחַ , ruah) have the same meaning. These three words (spiritus, pneuma, and ruach) by extension are translated as “spirit.” This gets a bit tricky for an English speaker. We have three separate words—breath, wind, and spirit—which have no semantic or linguistic relation. That is not true in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. They employ a single word meaning breath/wind to serve as a metaphor for the activity of the divine. Ruah, as well as pneuma and spiritus, are physical terms used to point to or serve as a metaphor for divine activity or power, a nonphysical phenomenon.

The ancients understood the divine power in terms of breath or wind. We moderns do not. We have separate words for breath, wind, and God’s power, that is, spirit or Spirit.

Ruach or pneuma (breath/wind) is a metaphor for divine power. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (emphasis in original, Lakoff and Johnson, 5) In this case, the ancients understood the power of God in terms of breath/wind. They also experienced the power of God as breath/wind. The metaphor is GOD’S POWER IS BREATH/WIND. Put another way, breath/wind structured the understanding and experience of God’s power. What is characteristic of wind and breath is characteristic of God’s power. Although wind and breath are invisible, you can feel them. Breath has heat and sometimes smell, and wind can blow you down. When a body ceases breathing, life goes out of it. These characteristics fill out the understanding and experience of God’s power or spirit.

Creation

Genesis 1:1–3 exhibits this metaphorical structuring. Let’s look at three different translations wrestling with this challenging Hebrew composition.

‍

At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,

when the earth was wild and waste,

darkness over the face of Ocean,

rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—

God said: Let there be light! And there was light. (Fox)

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (NRSVUE).

Both translations respect the metaphorical character of ruach. Everett Fox in The Schocken Bible displays his English translation in the sound lines of the Hebrew and strictly follows its grammar: the main verb is “said.” He capitalizes “Ocean,” because this is often a divine figure in ancient Near Eastern mythology. He translates ruach as “rushing-spirit,” attempting to preserve the metaphor at play but pointing to its extended sense. The contemporary NRSV translation translates ruach as “a wind from God.” This is an honest translation which emphasizes the metaphor. In a footnote, the editors note “spirit of God” or “mighty wind” as other possible translations. “A wind from God” balances well with chaos, darkness and face of the deep, evoking a strong mythical image. God’s wind flows over the primeval chaos and God brings order by speaking, “Let there be light!” Speaking is directly related to breath. Speaking is sound in breath.

The King James Version takes a different tack.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

This translation avoided the mythology of the original Hebrew in favor of abstraction (“without form and void”) and Christian concepts (Spirit of God). By capitalizing “Spirit,” the third person of the Trinity enters the scene, and the metaphor of breath/wind disappears. The King James translators have read Christian trinitarianism into their translation. Hardly a literal translation. The NRSV is much closer to a literal translation, and Fox closer yet.

Spiritual Body

Paul uses pneuma in the same sense as the Hebrew ruach. In 2 Corinthians 3:6 he concludes an elaborate argument concerning the old written covenant and a new unwritten covenant by stating: “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (KJV). The NRSVUE follows the KJV but capitalizes “Spirit:” “for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Here the NRSVUE turns pneuma into the third person of Trinity, a clearly anachronistic translation. The SV translation correctly understands the metaphor but literalizes it. “Relying on what is written kills, but the power of God’s presence gives life.” (The Authentic Letters of Paul). I would render it, “because what is written is dead, but breath gives life.” Paul makes what for the ancients was an obvious point, that a written text is dead and is only brought to life by the breath of speech. The metaphors led an ancient hearer/reader of Paul’s letter to the proper application.

Paul understands pneuma as having a bodily (physical) aspect, which, given the modern contrast between spirit and material, is impossible for us to comprehend. In 1 Corinthians 15:44, he refers to σῶμα πνευματικόν (sōma pneumatikon), usually translated “spiritual body.” For Paul, the “spirit” (God’s power or God’s breath) has a body. Paul is drawing on the second creation story.

and YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soil,

he blew into his nostrils the breath of life

and the human became a living being (Genesis 2:7, Fox)

I would translate soma pneumatikon as “a body filled with God’s breath.”

While Genesis and Paul represent an ancient common-sense view of God’s ruach or pneuma based on metaphorical thinking, Plato developed a theoretical or philosophical view. He turned a common-sense metaphorical view into a cosmological and ontological theory. In this theory, the physical world is an imperfect reflection of the higher realm of unchanging forms. Plato develops the distinction between the body and the soul, a theory in its Platonic form completely absent from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. Beginning in the late second century and the early third century, Neoplatonism had an enormous and ongoing influence on Christianity making the distinction between body and soul and saving the soul central to Christianity. This philosophical and ontological model then was imposed on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, as we have seen in the translations above.

Spirituality and Theopoetics

John Caputo has proposed theopoetics as a way beyond the essentialism of traditional theology. I will let Caputo summarize his proposal.

Theology must become theopoetics. Talking about God does not come down to concepts, propositions, and arguments. . . .Talking about God ultimately comes down to other discursive resources—images and figures, metaphors and metonyms, symbols and allegories, parables and paradoxes, stories and striking sayings, songs and dance—in which we seek to express the grip the unconditional has upon us, by which we have been seized from a time out of mind (What to believe?, 31).

I suggest that the author of Genesis 1 and Paul were engaging in theopoetics. They were thinking with the metaphor, following out the metaphor’s logic by which they live, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase. Our task is to escape the influences of Neoplatonism and re-engage with the original metaphors.

This brings me back to my problems with spirituality. First, spirituality is an abstraction and a relatively recent abstraction. So, to what does it refer? This question brings me to my second objection. Its connection to dualism taints its usage, making it unusable in my judgment. That dualism derives from the dualism of body and soul—an unsustainable dualism. It divorces us from our own life, the only life we have. The soul/body model makes the soul the true us, the body to be discarded for our true existence in heaven. This anthropology depends on a cosmology no longer sustainable. Spirituality points us away from this world. We need to focus on this world.

The ancient Hebrews and early Jesus communities used metaphors from their world to explore God’s presence and power in their experience, what Caputo names “the grip the unconditional has upon us.” That points us in the right direction. We should begin by exploring the metaphors they employed to discover the metaphors we need to explore. For me, science (Einstein and Darwin), poetry (Emily Dickenson), novels (Jane Austin, Virgina Woolf), art (Picasso), and films (Martin Sorcese) point the way forward. Fill in the parentheses with your own favorites. We can get lost in the narcissism of the present or we can discover our true place in the cosmos, our true home.

References:

Caputo, John D. What to Believe?: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Dewey, Arthur J., Roy W. Hoover, Lane C. Mcgaughy, and Daryl D. Schmidt. The Authentic Letters of Paul. A New Reading of Paul’s Rhetoric and Meaning. Polebridge, 2010.

Fox, Everett, trans. The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken, 1995.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

The Westar Institute is an academic home for the study of religion, history, and philosophy. It is a member-supported nonprofit research and education organization that bridges the gap between scholarship about religion and the perception of religion in popular culture. Westar is committed to honesty in scholarship, ensuring its readers and members acquire the critical tools needed to engage in responsible public discourse related to religion. For more information, visit https://www.westarinstitute.org/

Recently, I watched with my family the movie Elmer Gantry from 1960 starring Burt Lancaster. We were motivated to watch because Jeffrey Robbins, a Westar Scholar, included comments on the movie in his latest book. I was quite taken by the way acting on film at that time was still more like filming live theater than a movie is today. That aspect of watching the movie was interesting, but the plot was most interesting.

For those unfamiliar, Elmer Gantry is a novel by Sinclair Lewis from 1927 adapted to screen in 1960. Burt Lancaster won the only Oscar of his career in 1961 for playing the role of Elmer Gantry.

Elmer Gantry, as Jeff discusses in his book The Willing Damned (Westar Press, 2025) is a con artist who leaves his fast-paced life as a traveling sales representative for the slower but higher conning life of a religious revivalist. His life in sales gave him the gift of eloquent deception and fervent salvation pitches. He joins Sister Sharon Falconer, played by Jean Simmons, on her traveling revival tour and soon becomes the starring attraction in their duo performance. In the course of events, as they successfully establish Sister Falconer’s dream of a permanent tabernacle, Gantry falls in love with Falconer. His love becomes genuine, which is perhaps the only genuine part of his character.

Close to the end of this film, a part of Gantry’s past life emerges. He had a fling with a preacher’s daughter named Lulu, played by Shirley Jones, when he was briefly in a seminary. He more or less ruined her reputation, and for survival she turned to a life of prostitution. Their paths cross again when Gantry is still acting out his fake evangelical righteousness and directing the police to close the house of prostitution where Lulu lives. To get even for this heartless act of forcing the company of women onto the street, Lulu invites Gantry to her apartment, asks for a final kiss, has the moment photographed, and then sends the picture to the papers. Gantry is now exposed as a fraud even though in fact he is actually being righteous in apologizing to Lulu and seeking to support her after his admittedly outrageous act. Lulu’s deception works, and Gantry is ruined. But it is his honest self this time that is ruined whereas earlier it was his con-artistry self that made him successful. This sets up the scene that I want to comment on.

After his ruin, Gantry is again in front of an audience at the tabernacle. Few people are there to hear him. He walks before them to speak, but they all gang up on him. He stands there in silence while eggs, tomatoes, and other objects are thrown at him. A trumpeter comes forward and blasts a tune directly in his ears. He stands there. He is not angry but forgiving. He walks out saying nothing. He takes their hate as his badge of honor. It is the only time in the movie where he is like Jesus. Now he is an honest person who loses. He knows tragedy, and he faces it rather than trying to con his way out of it. He has integrity maybe for the first time in his life. The despicable man suddenly becomes a man of love, and the viewer suddenly feels compassion for this soul who was lost and has now found, in nothingness and in emptiness, all that the world truly has to offer—a deep peace and an unremitting love.

That is the great paradox of life. Sometimes we need to lose in order to win. Sometimes we need loss to understand love, and we need to come in second to place humanity first. In our world of winning at all costs, it would probably benefit us all to lose once in a while for the sake of common love and for the fate of our common humanity.

The Westar Institute is an academic home for the study of religion, history, and philosophy. It is a member-supported nonprofit research and education organization that bridges the gap between scholarship about religion and the perception of religion in popular culture. Westar is committed to honesty in scholarship, ensuring its readers and members acquire the critical tools needed to engage in responsible public discourse related to religion. For more information, visit https://www.westarinstitute.org/

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats

Introduction

I have been thinking about the reform of Christian religion and theology off and on for most of my academic life. I came of age intellectually and religiously during the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council and that reform movement influenced the whole course of my life. Lately this issue became more pressing, while I wrote a series of blog posts on the issue of religion and abortion in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision. A particular religious position propelled that catastrophic decision, and the outcome potentially will have a great impact on American religion

If Christian religion and theology need to change, and I think they need radical change, how can we go about it? I have come up with two rules and one question to kick off this conversation. I have framed them provocatively, but, I think, defensibly.

1. Nothing reserved.

The western monotheistic religions have understood themselves as founded on revelation, each religion having its own distinct revelation. Thus, truth resides in an unchangeable past that cannot be surrendered.

But to move forward, we must come to terms with our understanding of truth. The received tradition, understood as divinely revealed, must be subjected to critical analysis. This does not mean tradition must be rejected; only that nothing can be exempted from critical scrutiny. One cannot say, this must be accepted on faith, that cannot be doubted, this must be accepted, that need not be proved. To shield any element from scrutiny sets the stage for reactionary, authoritarian, and antidemocratic religion.

Why must this first rule be absolute? Because we cannot know in advance what critical analysis will reveal. Much in Christian tradition has already failed critical analysis. For example, the notion of divine revelation depends upon a three-story universe.

But surely, you will ask, we can’t reject Jesus Christ? What would Christianity be without Jesus Christ?

Westar Fellow Lane McGaughy has argued that there have been two quests for Jesus. The first quest for the dogmatic Jesus, Jesus the Christ, began in the third century and has continued to this day. The dogmatic quest claims to have found the Christ of faith, a unified orthodox construction of who Jesus really is. But this claim is a rhetorical strategy that serves to exclude every competing view. Upon critical inspection, the orthodox Christ of faith turns out not to be THE Christ, but multiple Christs, none of whom are necessarily rooted in the historical Jesus.

McGaughy’s second stage in the quest for Jesus is the quest for the historical Jesus that began in the Enlightenment with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). In McGaughy’s model the quest for the historical Jesus does not accompany the dogmatic quest but replaces it. Theology should therefore emerge from the historical quest, not the other way around.

McGaughy’s analysis leads to a corollary to my first rule: something cannot be historically false and theologically true. The historical Jesus did not think of himself as God. How, then, can he be God? This is a ditch I cannot cross, like the “broad, ugly ditch” of Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781).

Westar’s Christianity Seminar in its report After Jesus before Christianity recently concluded that neither Christianity nor Christians existed in the first two centuries. Those who want to defend the importance of tradition focus on the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian creeds, or the sixteenth century of reformation. Why should these define tradition? Why not the first two centuries? I have often wondered, if Jesus and Paul were not Christians, why should I be? I would want to build on traditions of Jesus and Paul as one of the resources for a new religion. But I would want to cast my net as wide as possible, without privileging any one tradition as authoritative. A religion for today requires resources, not authorities, from all the religious traditions and in alignment with a scientific understanding of truth.

2. Science cannot be rejected or ignored.

The Christian churches have failed over and over in their encounters with science. From Copernicus to Galileo to Darwin, the churches have failed to come to terms with scientific ways of knowing. Faith does not offer some alternate way of knowing. In each confrontation of religion and science, science has proven correct; religion wrong.

This outcome was predictable. In the medieval period, the Christian church dominated the political, cultural, and intellectual spheres. Theology was revered as queen of sciences. Beginning with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rise of modern science, Christianity and theology have had to forfeit their central and leading roles, often being demoted to the private realm. Conflict over place of prominence was inevitable. The churches and theology were not prepared for such a challenge. The situation is now irreversible, although bitter conflict remains.

This leads to another corollary: science has much to teach religion and theology and can serve as a resource, but religion and theology have nothing to teach science.

3. What is religion fundamentally about?

My two rules can clear ground to create a new religion and corresponding theology, one that can respond to the world we actually live in.

I take my cue from the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson: “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.” This is why religion often has much in common with art, music, and literature. They play to our sense of imagination, wonder, and amazement. Religion may meet some evolutionary need.

So what is religion? What needs should it meet? These questions beg for discussion and research.

I would point to community and ritual as fundamental for religion. We humans are social animals, so we need community. Religious community should provide safe space for us to ask who we are and how we make meaning in a world and universe that seem random and without purpose.

Ritual is the way we symbolize life transitions and acknowledge the importance of those transitions within a safe and supporting community. Traditionally, rituals sanctifying initiation, repentance, thanksgiving, marriage, and death incorporated those transitions into a myth of Christianity. Now we need rituals for birth, death, and other situations that reflect the reality of our modern world.

I would focus a new religion on praxis, the way we do things, over articles of faith, things we believe. Putting belief at the center of Christianity was a tragic mistake that drew Christianity away from its historic roots.

The Christianity Seminar discovered that the first two centuries of the Jesus movement were full of social experimentation. We are in a similar situation of social change. If a new religion is to have any chance, it will require a trial and error. The only way forward is through experimentation. Nothing should be off limits. Failure is inevitable. But without failure, there will be no success.

The Westar Institute is an academic home for the study of religion, history, and philosophy. It is a member-supported nonprofit research and education organization that bridges the gap between scholarship about religion and the perception of religion in popular culture. Westar is committed to honesty in scholarship, ensuring its readers and members acquire the critical tools needed to engage in responsible public discourse related to religion. For more information, visit https://www.westarinstitute.org/

Recently I received an email that criticized the Jesus Seminar for failing to find a factual Jesus of history. Personally, I do not speak for the seminar; no one does. It is a collection of scholars who debate with each other, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, but always working together.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about history, the historical Jesus, and to correct the impression that history is about determining facts. Specifically, asking whether Jesus is a fact is a misleading question that attempts to silence rather than enable thinking.

Asking whether Jesus is a fact usually involves three types of argument, each misleading in its own way.

One argument involves questioning whether Jesus was a historical figure at all. There is a history of arguing that Jesus was a composite myth, usually with Egyptian features, from antiquity. One of the first prominent persons to argue for this position was Alvin Boyd Kuhn. This question is misleading because it is really a question about ancient mythological patterns or types, which, of course, can be used to interpret anyone.

A second argument claims that while Jesus was an actual person, every descriptor of him is wrapped up in Christian confessions or beliefs about his divine status. Jesus as a fact of history is lost to history, but what is left is what matters: confessing Jesus as God’s Word. This argument is also misleading because it reduces the Christian gospels strictly to belief statements. Jesus as a figure of history does not matter. The act of reducing the gospels to confessions dismisses the impact the historical Jesus could have on the tradition of the church.

A third version of the argument about whether Jesus is a fact of history hits closer to home. It is an amalgam of one and two above. The argument is that while there certainly was a factual Jesus of history, in the person of Jesus the historical and the mythical are too intertwined to separate successfully. So, we have certain facts about the historical Jesus, such as that he was from Nazareth, but there are not enough facts to form a credible biography of Jesus. This argument is like the middle ground, but it is still misleading because it assumes that “facts” in history are tied strictly to physical events that exclude the core sayings of individuals or movements.

The third argument hits home because it is the most common critique set against the Jesus Seminar. All three arguments, however, are used both in scholar and layperson circles. I think these claims both misunderstand the Jesus Seminar and misunderstand the subject of history.

History is not solely about separating myths from facts. Although critical tools from science are needed to verify historical events, the act of writing history crucially involves the imagination, or re-imagination, of historical figures, times, cultures, and languages. When I was a young high school student, I unfortunately did not have very good history teachers. I found the subject boring. When I started university, I had a fantastic history teacher who introduced me to R. G. Collingwood and the task of re-imagining other times, places, structures of thinking, and life experiences. Suddenly, I found the subject of history to be fascinating. I still regard myself mainly as a philosopher of history.

The Jesus Seminar was not composed of philosophers of history. With some exceptions, all the members were biblical scholars. Yet, they also had a sense of the philosophy of history, perhaps due to the forceful presence of Bob Funk and his thorough understanding of reality as a social construction. For this latter insight, which informed Funk’s understanding of parables as metaphors, he relied on the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

The Jesus Seminar did not set out to find a factual Jesus or to produce a definitive biography of Jesus. They set out to identify the voiceprint of a historical figure. When we read from The Five Gospels or from individual writings of Jesus Seminar scholars, they were all keenly aware of how our contemporary interpretations of the world can interfere with our understanding of antiquity. Reconstructing antiquity requires the use of proven critical methods, but it is a work of art. The art involves hearing what is going on.

When it comes to the historical Jesus, the key is to hear him, not to figure out his date of birth or his favorite restaurant. It might be possible to ascertain some of these facts, but the point is to hear. Max Weber, in the early twentieth century, called this work of hearing, Verstehen, which is the German word for understanding. We cannot hear what is going on in history if we do not enter the understanding of the time we are studying.

The emphasis on hearing leads to the question about what Jesus really said. For ancient people, the gathering and the practicing of a lifestyle built around a school of wisdom led to a praxis of saying and doing. All the ancient Roman, Greek, and Jewish schools or movements were like this. They all had key collections of sayings, key leaders identified in their memories, and key practices of life.

There is merit to focusing on the factual question about what Jesus really did. The Jesus Seminar tried this question, too, but of course, the answer was practically “We haven’t got a clue” (see The Acts of Jesus). Since dealing with Jesus requires dealing with an oral culture and since ancient schools formed around sayings and wisdom figures, it is right first to attempt to hear Jesus as a voiceprint rather than as a fact.

The Jesus voiceprint is full of metaphors in the form of parables and aphorisms. Metaphors concern how we choose to think about life, but more importantly it’s not just thinking, it’s doing. Ancient schools had lots of interesting sayings, but the sayings translated into the identity of the school as a practice of its values. Even today, it is hard to think one way about life and practice another way of being in life. Ancient people, though, were still better than modern people at tying philosophy to ethics; in antiquity, a school of thought was also an ethics of being.

Metaphors in the voiceprint of Jesus open a window either to how Jesus thought about life or, at the very least, how the school to which he belonged thought. We can grasp the integrity of the life of Jesus from the metaphors that enliven his parables because the parables are ethics as much as thought experiments. We can also be challenged today to think about how those ancient metaphors can still come to life in our own way of being. This can happen when we understand that metaphors are not facts. They are calls to life thought about and acted out differently.

The genuine task of history is learning to hear the past, learning to notice the metaphors wrapped up in lessons, and learning to bring to life in our own time both lessons that should not be forgotten and lessons that should never be repeated. The focus on the voiceprint of Jesus was and remains a focus on historical wisdom, and in the end, history is about wisdom.

The Westar Institute is an academic home for the study of religion, history, and philosophy. It is a member-supported nonprofit research and education organization that bridges the gap between scholarship about religion and the perception of religion in popular culture. Westar is committed to honesty in scholarship, ensuring its readers and members acquire the critical tools needed to engage in responsible public discourse related to religion. For more information, visit https://www.westarinstitute.org/

Experimental Diversity

After Jesus Before Christianity concludes that early Jesus communities engaged in a great deal of experimentation and that most of those experiments failed. From this conclusion we have a great deal to learn.

When we examine various groups of followers of Jesus Anointed in the first two centuries, we find vast diversity, not a unified picture. They referred to Jesus using a variety of titles. Often those titles did not use Jesus’ name. Sometimes their writings cast Jesus in a central role; sometimes not. Some groups organized themselves as associations, others as supper-clubs, families, or schools. Groups typically comprised ten to fifteen people. No single name identified the various groups associated with Jesus lord and master. Some were called brothers and sisters, some slaves, some holy ones, some students or wise ones, some immigrants. Others did not use an identifying name. Despite their diversity, the various names did not include “Adherents of the Anointed (christianos)” in the first century and only rarely during the second century. Some groups encouraged experimenting in gender roles and breaking gender boundaries.

All this diversity indicates experimentation, pushing at established boundaries. While not engaged in systematic or organized experimentation, they were exploring what it meant to live into a new perspective on the god of Israel’s activity. They were making it up as they went along. Those familiar with experimentation expect failure and such was the experience of these Jesus groups.

The tradition stemming from Paul exhibits over a hundred-year period of both experimentation and the reaction to it. Paul proclaimed, “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female’” (Gal 3:28). Paul supported experimentation in boundary breaking as witnessed by his encouraging the unmarried to remain so against a culture that virtually required marriage or his treatment of married partners in reciprocal terms. (See my The Real Paul, chapter 11.) But things went too far. One man was having sex with his father’s wife (I Cor 5:1).

Later, when Paul’s letters were edited, a scribe inserted a comment forbidding women to speak in community meetings (I Cor 14:33b–38, see the comments in the Authentic Letters of Paul, 112). In the mid-second century the Pauline communities were still experimenting with gender roles. Despite its title, in Acts of Paul and Thecla the real hero is Thecla. Initially her traditional gender roles are emphasized: daughter, virgin, engaged. As the story develops, she goes on to break all of them, to the point of even dressing in male clothes. First Timothy, which belongs to the same Pauline tradition, rails against all this experimentation (1 Tim 2:9–15).

Fourth Century

A confluence of factors in the fourth century began to corral the experimentation that characterized early groups of Jesus Anointed followers. The first was the Emperor Constantine’s unexpected favoring of the Christian church.

Constantine

A run of bad emperors in the third century resulted in the deterioration of the empire’s governance and borders. This “crisis of the third century” stressed the Roman Empire so seriously that it came close to collapse. When Diocletian came to power in 284, he tried to stabilize the empire with numerous reforms that changed its shape and character. He divided the empire into western and eastern administrative units, appointing a co-emperor also with the title of Augustus. While he ruled the eastern part of the empire, his co-emperor ruled the western part. Later Diocletian appointed two junior administrators with the title of Caesar. One of those junior emperors was Constantine’s father. The four emperors were not coequal. Two were senior emperors, two were junior, and Diocletian presided among them.

Diocletian sought unity as part of his stabilization effort. One aspect of this program of unification was persecution of Christians because they resisted the empire and were a growing presence, especially in the cities of the east. His was the most widespread persecution of this group in the history of the empire and in later ages became the remembered image, the stereotype of all persecution. After he retired in 305, the only emperor to freely do so, the pace of persecution only marginally slackened.

The four-emperor model did not long survive Diocletian’s retirement. Civil war broke out and by 324 Constantine had consolidated total power. Earlier in 313 he and his co-emperor, Licinius, had issued the edict of Milan. This edict had the effect of legalizing all the religions of the empire, restoring the property of individual Christians and the Christian churches confiscated during the persecution of Diocletian.

Following his final defeat of Licinius, Constantine began to openly favor the Christian religion. He did this in two ways. First, he identified himself as a Christian. There is an oddity here. While acknowledging that he was a Christian, Constantine was not baptized until on his deathbed because he feared that in carrying out his duties as emperor, he would sin and thus would not go to heaven. Baptism immediately before death would free him of all his sins.

Second, Constantine supported Christianity from the empire’s funds, establishing a model for subsequent emperors, as well other elites. He built the first great basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome and in Jerusalem the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Constantine also commissioned Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, to produce fifty bibles. We have no evidence of a complete New Testament before this commission, but all modern bibles descend from Eusebius’s bibles.

Council of Nicaea

Like Diocletian, Constantine pursued a policy of unifying his recovering empire. But instead of persecuting Christians, he based the empire’s unity on them. He called the Council of Nicaea in 325, what would later be designated the first ecumenical council. Constantine saw the diversity of Christian churches as divisive, as did several bishops. He ordered the development of a creed to solve this problem and end the church’s division.

The Nicaean Creed permanently transformed the church. It shifted the church from praxis, what you do, to belief, what you believe. (See my blog “The Trouble with Faith.”) Christianity ceased being a traditional religion and became a “faith.” Creed and belief led to a dogmatic tradition. The church’s newfound unity made no reference to the life of Jesus or ethics.

Master Narrative

Constantine’s favoring of the Christian church came as a complete surprise. Diocletian had established an imperial policy of persecution toward the Christian churches; Constantine had in public supported that policy, and Diocletian was Constantine’s patron. Thus, Constantine’s drastic change of imperial policy was unexpected.

In the fourth century Eusebius created in his Ecclesiastical History what became the definitive story of the history of the Christian church from Jesus to Constantine, what we in After Jesus Before Christianity call the master narrative. Eusebius constructed his narrative along two tracks. First, he read into or projected the situation of the fourth century back into the previous centuries and then he interpreted those events as a preparation by God for the now favored position of the gospel and the church.

From the point of view of the fourth century, the following elements stood out to Eusebius. from the list that begins Book 1.

• “The lines of succession from the holy apostles” pasted onto the bishops.

• Heretics “through a passion for innovation” corrupted the pure teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

• “The calamities [i.e., the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple] that immediately after their conspiracy against our Saviour overwhelmed the entire Jewish race.”

• Christians were persecuted and martyred.

(from “Chief Matters to be Dealt with,” Book 1.1, Eccl.Hist.)

Although these four points summed up Eusebius’ experience, he mistakenly assumed they existed from the beginning. As a bishop engaged in ecclesiastical debates culminating in the Council of Nicaea, he saw the episcopacy as primary. The Diocletian persecution had traumatized Eusebius and his contemporaries; he assumed all followers of Jesus had experienced persecution. Eusebius blamed the Jews for Jesus’ death and believed God punished them by permitting the destruction of their homeland, foreshadowing the eventual fate of those who persecuted God’s church.

Eusebius’ description of Constantine’s restoration of Christianity casts Constantine as Moses who saved his people from Pharaoh. In Eusebius’ narrative, Constantine delivers both the empire and Christian church from a tyranny comparable to that of Pharoah’s oppression of the Hebrew people. Eusebius describes the empire under Constantine in language that recalls the empire of God.

Eusebius’ narrative fit the pieces together in a way so convincing that for the next 1,500 years it went unchallenged. For many believers it remains convincing today and represents Christianity’s master narrative. It is not history, but myth. Since traditional understandings of “the origins of early Christianity” based on the master narrative celebrate narratives of success, the experimentation and failures of the first two centuries have been ignored.

Experiment: To Be or Not to Be

Constantine’s favor shifted the Christian church from resisting the empire to reshaping itself into a reflection of the empire. The church increasingly took on imperial trappings, claiming imperial power for its bishops. The temptation to imperial power in the church eventually became irresistible. Believers ever since have sought to use the power of the empire (the state) to enforce their values. In our own time the church’s insistence on imperial power to enforce its positions has had a debilitating effect in many democracies. This was evident in the American Roman Catholic Bishops effort to force President Biden to enforce their position on abortion.

The Nicaean Creed shifted Christianity from a religion of praxis to one of faith. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History ironically made Christianity ahistorical by insisting that the church has always been the same. In this construction, change is impossible, even unimaginable. The church’s increasing imperial character, the Nicaean Creed, and Eusebius’ master narrative together have served to inhibit any change or development in Christianity. These inhibitors sought to stop experimentation and even argue that there had never been any experimentation, only degradation of the pure original truth by the innovations of the heretics.

Of course, the strategy of inhibiting change did not work. History cannot be stopped. Controversy continued, as witnessed by the continued Councils seeking to settle still more Christological controversies. Monasticism in both the East and the West challenged an increasing imperial episcopacy. But ideologically, change became increasingly more difficult and controversial.

The twentieth century saw the death of Christendom. Christianity lost the support of the state in the West. Instead of being public, religion has become a private affair, a process started by the American Constitution. Science challenged the Christian church’s hegemony in explaining reality. Every time religion has challenged science, religion has lost. In retrospect the three inhibitors caused this devastation and prevented modern Christianity from experimenting as it faced a completely new situation beginning with the Enlightenment and the ongoing scientific revolution. Instead of turning its view to the future, an imperial master narrative and a dogmatic creed focused churches on the past, a mythical past.

The experimentation of the first centuries of the Jesus Anointed groups suggests that the true state of religion should be experimentation, even wide-open experimentation. Such experimentation is the only way groups can explore the meaning of life. Without experimentation, which leads to change, failure, and occasionally success, the only alternative is death.

Disclaimer: This article is published for educational purposes as part of the organization’s commitment to fostering informed discussion of history, religion, and culture. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization, its officers, directors, or sponsors. References to contemporary events, public figures, or policy debates are included for analytical purposes only and are not intended as support for or opposition to any political candidate, party, or campaign.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is touted as the original capitalist. He is revered as a free-market economist with an expressed faith in the invisible hand. But was he really a founding libertarian icon? Milton Friedman seemed to think so,¹ but Smith only referred to the invisible hand once in his famous book, The Wealth of Nations. So, was Smith actually the epitome of laissez-faire capitalism? Let’s look closer.

Adam Smith lived when Deism was the reigning philosophy of the day. He was not religious, and he lived in a Newtonian world of natural laws. After Isaac Newton (1643–1727), religious revelation was no longer a source for scientific knowledge. Rather, nature provided all the evidence needed of the laws that govern it. In Deism, if there is a God, then God is the being who made the laws and gave the universe an originating push. After the universe was set in motion, perhaps God sustains its laws but otherwise has nothing further to do with it.

Adam Smith’s economy was a “Deist” economy. It was based on the understanding that an economy has natural laws. For Smith, the way to talk about economics was to talk about the political economy, and his famous book, The Wealth of Nations, is a book on political economy. Karl Marx, by the way, used the same analysis in his famous book, Capital.

The Wealth of Nations is a book filled mostly with descriptions of different types of land use, enterprises, and employment. It is a beautifully written book, but most certainly not captivating. Nevertheless, two things stand out. One is how Smith introduces his famous “invisible hand” to describe how individuals, pursuing their self-interest, almost secretly (without knowing) contribute to the social well-being of the whole. The invisible hand is Smith’s economic way of saying that left alone, an economy follows its own natural laws. Smith makes a lot out of how the state, when it interferes with the natural economy, makes a mess of things. When it comes to economic benefits for all, the best act of the state is to let the economy operate as nature intended.

The second interesting comment that Smith makes is how the economy is structured. He names three classes involved in the functions of the economy. These classes are, of course, the classes he perceived in eighteenth-century England. The first class is the renters: estate owners who rent their massive land holdings (think of Downton Abbey). The second is the merchants who own houses of production, like a carriage house where carriages are built. We would call this second class the capitalists (think of Henry Ford). The third class is the worker who is hired by the merchant to produce goods. We see in Smith the beginnings of labor as we know it today (think of workers on a factory floor).

Interesting points follow from Smith’s observations that should make us hesitate about classifying him as the original advocate for laissez-faire capitalism. The main one is that of the three classes Smith names (the renters, the merchants, and the workers), the merchant class (the capitalists) are the most untrustworthy. According to Smith, capitalists will lie, cheat, underpay, horde, and exploit. He is clear that the capitalist class needs to be governed by a set of rules. Even though he doesn’t think the state should interfere with trade, he is clear that the state needs to make sure the rules of the game are observed. So, yes, he does have a social conscience and a touch of socialism in his political economy analysis.

Another interesting point is that Smith is generally against tariffs, or what he called duties. He thought that duties caused inflation, unemployment, and high prices. He believed that the wealth of a nation was earned in its ability to trade on the common market, producing what it is good at producing and buying what it does not produce. Duties contradict the fundamentals of exchange because while they protect merchants, they create mercantile monopolies. In other words, they create plutocracies because there is an economic loss of competition that creates an opportunity for one company to control the domestic market.

Finally, when Smith said the state should stay out of public trade, he did not mean that the state should be invisible. He did have a role for the state, which is to ensure market thriving uplifted the poor. It has often been noted that in his writing when there is a conflict between the powerful and the poor, Smith sides with the poor every single time.²

Though personally a Deist, Smith lived in a Christian state, not a secular one, but his was a Christian state of charity, not of nationalism. Charity means that the state is concerned about poverty and should indeed act to curtail it. We do not know explicitly what guided Smith in this ethical attitude, but I’m willing to guess that one biblical passage played a role. “Whatever you have done for the least of these you have done also for me” (Matt 25:40).

Here is where theology comes in. The value of a religion is compassion. The theological imperative is justice. And whatever we think the state should or should not be, the measurement of a successful state is not money or power but the general level of well-being for all its citizens and resident aliens. Insofar as there is hunger there is, Smith thought, state failure. I think on this last point, Jesus would have agreed.

¹ Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 1–2.

² Christopher Martin, “Adam Smith and the Poor: A Textual Analysis,” in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 184 (April 2021), 837–49.

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When did “spirit” become the translation for the Greek pneuma? The answer, while not difficult, has profound implications.

The Hebrew word ruach (ר֣וּח) means wind, breath, air.

The Greek word pneuma (πνεῦμα) means wind, breath, air.

The Latin word spiritus means wind, breath, air.

The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin all have the same primary meaning. Wind, breath, and air are all aspects of the same thing and constitute the primary usage in each language. This pneumatic phenomenon has some interesting characteristics. It can be felt but not seen. The presence of breath in a mammal indicates life; its disappearance indicates death. These aspects enable wind-breath-air to function as a metaphor for the presence of the mysterious or divine. This last usage is rare.

Genesis 1:2 is a good example of this metaphorical usage.

וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

And the wind (or breath) of Elohim hovers over the face of the waters.

The creation story in Genesis 1 is a myth and Elohim’s creating powers are viewed mythologically as Elohim’s breath or wind blowing over waters to bring order out of chaos. In the next verse Elohim speaks and creates light. Speaking is also an act of breathing.

The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate translations of Genesis 1 understand this passage in the same way as the Hebrew. The breath or wind of Elohim is a metaphor expressing how the presence of the divine is active.

But something changed. The Council of Nicaea (325) defined the Trinity. Then the metaphor became a person, the third person of the Trinity: hagia pneuma in Greek and spiritus sanctus in Latin. The holy pneuma/spiritus still has a metaphorical undertone as breath, because the Nicene Creed describes its function as “[the Son] who by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” The breath is still acting in a creative way although it is hidden in modern English translations. The Nicene Creed would make more sense translated, “[the Son] who was made alive (enfleshed) by God’s breathe and Mary the virgin.” That is what the Greek and Latin really mean.

When French and English separated from Latin, instead of translating “spiritus” as breath, they transliterated it, so in French it became esprit and in English spirit. As a transliteration it lost its connection to the physical and metaphorical meaning wind/breath/air. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the lead meaning of spirit as “An animating or vital principle; the immaterial or sentient element of a person.” Merriam-Webster presents a more schematic set of definitions:

1: an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms

2: : a supernatural being or essence: such as

a capitalized : HOLY SPIRIT

b: SOUL

c: an often malevolent being that is bodiless but can become visible, specifically : GHOST

As both the OED and Merriam-Webster make evident, in English spirit has no hint of wind, breath, or air. Any sense of metaphor has disappeared.

The King James translates Genesis 1:2 “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In this translation, Spirit of God means the second person of the Trinity. Since the metaphorical and mythological sense has disappeared, the literal meaning now understands Genesis as an explanation of what happened, very different from the Hebrew version of Genesis.

Transliterations of religious terms should be prohibited. Translating would have the virtue of clarity at the risk of demythologization.

The translation of pneuma as spirit is never the best translation in the New Testament. Most often it is wrong and misleads. The lazy translation of hagia pneuma as Holy Spirit (notice with caps) has led to a profound misunderstanding of what the term means in the New Testament. It is clearly anachronistic, imposing a fourth-century meaning on first-century compositions. It obfuscates the Jewish meaning of the phrase for a fourth-century Christian one—yet another antisemitic move on the part of the church.

In a forthcoming new translation of the Acts of the Apostles, Arthur Dewey and I actually translate hagia pneuma. But you will have to await publication to discover our solutions (yes, plural).

A question asked during the Q&A of “When Jesus became Plato” (2023/01/25) occasioned this post. Someone asked about the use of “spirit,” stating that it was a twelfth-century word. I probably have the question garbled and I know the answer was fumbled. But it is a very good question.

The OED lists a translation of Genesis and Exodus (c1250) as the earliest English use of spirit. So, whoever asked the question was close about the date—thirteenth not twelfth century. And the implication of the question that spirit was a bad translation of the Hebrew and Greek was certainly correct.

*Bob Dylan @1963

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The Gospels of Matthew and Luke share a common source of Jesus sayings, which is called Q. It is usually understood that Q comes from the German word Quelle for source. It is a reference to the parallel sayings that are found in Matthew and Luke but missing from Mark. Ironically, the German scholars of the nineteenth century who discovered Q used the letter L to identify the source, L being for Logia or sayings. Today, however, Q is the common reference used.[1]

Matthew and Luke use the Q source in unique ways. Sometimes they use it verbatim, but more often they give it a twist to suit their narratives and their theologies. Scholars believe that Luke preserves Q more directly, and on this foundation, I used to believe that Matthew was more conservative than Luke. Over time, I changed my mind.

For example, I used to regard Matthew’s version of the Q saying on poverty as a sellout. In Q (Luke 6:20), the saying is direct, markarioi hoi ptōchoi (which is plural, and I translate as “happy are those in poverty”). Following the same line of translation, Matthew 5:3 has, “happy (markarioi) are those in poverty of the spirit.”

The Greek word markarios appears in Plato, particularly in the Meno dialogue (71a) where it is used comically. Socrates says to his interlocutor that “you must think I am fortunate” to know that virtue can be taught. Then, Socrates corrects this impression, saying that he does not know whether virtue can be taught because he doesn’t even know what virtue is! This is a very typical Socrates-like comment. Nevertheless, fortunate in this sentence translates makarios. We could also translate Socrates as saying, “You must think I’m lucky” (or happy or blessed).

It seems like Matthew takes the surprising Q aphorism that mixes poverty with joy and softens it as much as possible. Matthew’s Greek is makarioi ptōchoi tō pneumati, traditionally translated as “blessed are the poor in spirit.” So, in Matthew, you do not have to be poor actually; you just need to be humble–or so it seems.

For years, I felt that Matthew was a timid writer who chose not to challenge the wealthy of his age. Whereas the Q saying deconstructs the association of happiness with wealth, and whereas Q insists that “if you want to find joy, then stick your nose in poverty,” Matthew seems to say, “well, not ‘real’ poverty, just poverty in spirit.”

Gradually, after many conversations with Westar colleagues, I have changed my mind. Matthew is more radical than Luke, maybe even more radical than Q, but it is harder to hear this in translation. Matthew’s ptochoi tō pneumati is not necessarily a reference to an abstract spiritual notion of poverty. The Greek can be rendered as a reference to those “of the (tō) impoverished spirit.” This makes a difference. We hear spirit as a reference to something ethereal, some nonphysical place or quality. Spirit is vague in English. In Matthew, the attempt is to render in Greek the Jewish sense of poverty before God. It might be said that Matthew does a pretty decent job, given the options, even though something is lost in translation.

If we think of the ancient Greek culture, we can sense what Matthew wants to invoke. In Greek, the “spirit” is breath, and in philosophy particularly it is the energy of potential. The spirit motivates the mind (nous) and creates the force of the body. In both Plato and Aristotle, the spirit is directional, motivating, and properly aimed at virtue (and an improper aim of the spirit results in sin). The Apostle Paul may have shared in the same translational exercise when he uses the Greek idea of spirit to say that being in the body of Christ (or the anointed) is to share a spiritual direction (qualities and values) distinct from the Roman imperial spirit (which, of course, is a spirit without values, a spirit of sin).

When Matthew talks about “the poor of the spirit,” the reference is close to what in our terms would be those without energy, without breath, and without voice (for voice expresses spirit/breath). Matthew is talking about the de-energized, the isolated, and the abandoned whose spirit cannot move toward social standing because it has been robbed of potential. Remember, in Greek philosophy, no potential means no spirit. We might even say that the impoverished people Matthew is thinking about are those the empire has robbed both of money and of hope. The poor in the spirit are the disempowered ones who have no exit from their desperation or their hunger, but the shock is that the depth of happiness is found here.

After my enlightenment in the Jesus Seminar, I started translating Matt. 5:3 as, “Happy are the breathless ones, for they breathe the spirit of God.” This places greater attention on poverty as suffocation and on spirituality as a breath that resists the suffocation of poverty. It is as if Matthew is striking a double underline of the Q saying, not bailing out on it. And it is certain here that Matthew, not Luke, understands far more what poverty really means.

[1] Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) is credited with originating the designation Q, but it is unclear whether he meant Quelle or was just employing an arbitrary letter.

Imperial Mythology

The ancient Mediterranean world was highly stratified and hierarchically organized. Power and wealth were concentrated in less than the one percent with which we Americans are so familiar. Between 35 percent and 40 percent of the population was enslaved. Since Rome’s economy depended on enslavement, the need for more and more people to enslave fueled almost constant wars.

This violence and extreme social inequity cried out for a mythological solution. Why should some rule and others serve? The master/slave relationship provides a mythology that justifies such cruel inequity as the organizing principle for the Mediterranean world.

Aristotle deploys the myth when he asks whether slavery is against nature in his Politics.

And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled. (I.II 8, 1254a, 30)

Aristotle looks around, observes that some are meant to rule, while most are meant to be ruled, and he judges that nature intended things that way. For Aristotle, it’s obvious. The purpose of myth is to resolve conflict and its power is its ability to make the unnatural appear natural. Enslavement was natural to Aristotle, a shrewd observer of reality. Myth successfully paraded as philosophy, but the fact that it was myth was hidden. His conclusion stood without serious challenge until the Enlightenment.

The master/slave myth held throughout the Mediterranean world. Spartacus, the gladiator who led the slave revolt in Rome in 70 BCE, enslaved others once he won his freedom. Spartacus thought slavery was natural but did not think it natural for him. He thought he was one of those few destined to rule that Aristotle wrote about. His experiences of enslavement and revolution failed to change his view of slavery as justified. The myth won out.

So basic was Aristotle’s understanding of slavery as natural that he applied a master/enslaved myth to describe household organization.

The household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen. The investigation of everything should begin with its smallest parts, and the primary and smallest parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children. (Politics, I.II.1, 1253b5)

For us, a husband and wife form the household’s primary unit, but Aristotle controverts that view. The ancient household organizes around master and enslaved and the enslavement model replicates itself in husband (master) and wife (enslaved), and father (master) and children (enslaved). (See my Religious History of Abortion, 10–11, for how that myth plays out in Ephesians 5:22–24, “Wives, be subject to your husband.”)

The master/enslaved myth also organizes the emperor and his subjects, with the emperor as Master, Lord, kurios, dominus, and his subjects as his slaves. They owe him loyalty and servitude. Mythologically, the emperor deserves this status because the gods show him favor. The emperor’s duty was to ensure the gods’ favor toward the Roman people. Military victories demonstrate the gods’ continuing favor toward the emperor/master. Beginning with Augustus, only the emperor and members of his family celebrated triumphs, victory parades through the streets of Rome after major battles. All victories publicized the emperor and demonstrated the gods’ favor toward him and his subjects.

Kingdom Without a King

Against this backdrop, Jesus’ announcement of basileia tou theou, God’s kingdom or empire, takes a different approach.

• Kingdom of God is not used in the Hebrew Holy Writings. It only occurs with frequency in later rabbinic writings.

• The parables are strikingly inappropriate metaphors for a kingdom or empire.

• In Jesus’ authentic language God is never described as a king.

While English translations have traditionally rendered basileia tou theou as “kingdom of God,” more recent scholarship has argued for “empire of God” because THE basileia in the Roman world was Rome. “Kingdom” sounds heavenly, ethereal or otherworldly to us because its sense is traceable to Old English, where it means God’s eternal spiritual sovereignty (OED). By contrast, “empire” feels more threatening and this-worldly to us, perhaps because of associations with the evil empires of Star Wars and other fairy tales. This one word affects our mythology about God even before we ask what it means. As Caputo says, it’s interpretation all the way down; no “literal” translation avoids interpretation. I prefer “empire” because it reminds us that Jesus somehow correlated God’s activity to the basileia of Rome. (Caputo, Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information, vii.)

But basileia only covers half of the phrase. Jesus preached basileia tou theou, the empire of god. “God” as a translation of theos presents new problems. Whose God, Israel’s God or that of the Christians? Most would assume those are identical, but is that so? In the Christian telling, Israel’s God abandoned the chosen people. A more accurate translation of theos in the phrase basileia tou theou is “g-d,” which recognizes that the name of Israel’s g-d was not pronounced. (See my blog post “Does God Deserve a Capital Letter.”) When you read “g-d,” silently say “Adonai.”

Jesus’ audience would have understood “empire” and “g-d,” but not the combined phrase. I think Jesus told parables precisely because his audience did not recognize “g-d’s empire,” a rare and unusual phrase. A simple point, but often overlooked. His parables delivered a new, imaginative experience of g-d’s empire.

Jesus’ parables also provoked new questions: How is g-d’s empire like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds? How is it like leaven, a symbol of moral corruption? A mustard seed is the opposite of an empire and leaven is the opposite of g-d. The answer is not immediately obvious but requires imagination. The parables offer a counterintuitive, anti-mythological view of g-d’s empire. G-d’s empire is like neither the normal or default understanding of g-d (or God) nor empire. Both require reimagination, with parable as a guide.

Jesus talks about g-d only by indirection. He does not address g-d as king or, so far as we can tell, as lord/master. King parables, so frequent in the rabbinic corpus, are remarkably few among Jesus’ parables. Jesus addresses God as “abba,” father, or dad. Regardless of its translation, the word is diminutive, inappropriate for g-d, but like the invasive mustard seed, it subverts the mythical view of g-d.

Myth Rides Again

Because Jesus’ parables offer a counterintuitive, anti-mythical vision of g-d’s empire, myth’s meaning-making power reversed the metaphor’s direction. Instead of speaking against myth, mythical assumptions about g-d and empire eventually overran and overwhelmed the parable. Instead of the parable enlightening g-d’s empire, g-d and empire determined the parable’s meaning, reversing the metaphorical direction. G-d’s empire was not like the parable, but the parable was like g-d and empire.

Luke’s version of the parable makes no mention of a mustard seed’s smallness. Instead, Luke’s mustard seed grows into a tree—a biological puzzle. But the birds nesting in its branches provide a clue to solve the puzzle. The nesting birds refer to the great cedars of Lebanon, a fitting image for g-d’s empire. But a mustard plant, a weed, mocks the giant cedars of Lebanon. An audience must puzzle out what this means. But when the metaphor reverses direction, it makes a very different point. Matthew, Mark, and Thomas all use the parable to show that the smallest becomes the greatest—imperial mythology is restored. (See Complete Gospel Parallels, #84.)

Similarly, in the case of the leaven, a little leaven forms large loaves in the Thomas version of the parable (96). From a small thing, the preaching of Jesus, comes a great thing, the church. This traditional, allegorical understanding of the leaven parable occurs only in the gospel of Thomas. Is it also not odd that this traditional interpretation made Jesus the little thing and the church the big thing? Myth plays strange tricks. (See Complete Gospel Parallels, #85.)

By the time the parables show up in the gospels, their enrobing into full mythological regalia was underway. New interpretations defanged the parables’ anti-mythical thrust. The smallest became the biggest. Fathers became God stand-ins. The Samaritan was no longer an enemy but a good neighbor. Myth wins out because of its stability, the way things naturally are. Parable as anti-myth is unstable because it attacks what appears as natural. Maintaining for a long period of time an anti-mythical position, what Caputo calls a theopoetics, is difficult, if not impossible. But the effort is the only way into the g-d’s empire.

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What is the evidence that Jesus was violent or, at least, believed in a violent God? Many biblical scholars and lay Bible readers believe that Jesus warned about the end of time when God’s wrath would be poured out upon the earth. These end-of-time warnings are called apocalyptic sayings, and since these sayings involve proclaiming violence, readers assume the proclaimer is a violent messenger.1 When we ask whether Jesus was violent, we are asking whether he proclaimed a violent God who will not hesitate to destroy all enemies at the end of time.

Two types of Bible citation are consistently used to prove Jesus was a violent person who believed in a violent God. One type is warnings about the Son of Man returning to earth to inaugurate an age of judgement.2 The second type portrays Jesus as a figure whose earthly ministry involved a battle with Satan. When these two typologies are combined, the result is a picture of Jesus fighting the evils of this age and warning about a judgement to come. For the most part, to believe that Jesus was violent is to believe these two aspects (fighting Satan and being the Son of Man) defined the life of Jesus.

The sayings related to the Son of Man suggest Jesus either believed that a divine figure would soon arrive to judge the earth (with the image taken from Daniel 7:13) or that Jesus was himself the divine figure who would return after death to judge the earth. In both cases, the Son of Man is a figure who inaugurates violence, and Jesus either believed in this figure or believed he was this figure. Two gospel verses are usually cited to prove that Jesus was or believed in the Son of Man. One is Mark 13:26 where Jesus claims that the Son of Man will descend on a cloud to judge humanity, and the other is Luke 12:8–9 where Jesus warns that whoever does not acknowledge him will not be acknowledged by the Son of Man. In both these sayings, the Son of Man is a future figure who spells trouble for nonbelievers.

In the other approach to proving that Jesus was violent, his earthly ministry is defined as a fight against Satan. Here, too, a few gospel sayings are put to good use. One is Luke 11:20, a Q saying, where Jesus claims to cast out demons by the finger of God, and a second is Mark 3:27, where Jesus, accused of being demon possessed, seems to suggest that to the contrary he is the one to tie up Satan and plunder his house. It is somewhat of a stretch to read Mark 3:27 in this way, but nevertheless the verse is used to prove Jesus preached violence as the means of overcoming evil.

Neither one of these ways to prove that Jesus was violent are used in fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalist Christianity is more interested in Jesus returning to earth with violence. In fundamentalism, there needs to be a great war, an Armageddon, to establish God’s rule on earth, so fundamentalist Christianity more often appeals to Ezekiel chapters 37 and 38, where God scores a military victory, and to Revelation where God is joyfully violent when overthrowing enemies. Jesus in the gospels does not refer to Ezekiel or Revelation, but since fundamentalism prioritizes a violent Jesus returning to earth, this Jesus happily uses violence to solve problems.

There are several reasons to reject the idea that Jesus was violent. The main reason is that each of the sayings and the images above express beliefs about Jesus. The beliefs consist of proclaiming that Jesus is the Son of Man who will return on a cloud and proclaiming that Jesus’ ministry was a showdown between God and Satan. These two proclamations turn Jesus into a military general who will oversee the final cosmic battle with evil. Are these violent beliefs about Jesus really things that Jesus would say about himself? Are we to believe that the message of Jesus was to believe in Jesus?

When we get down to the most basic sayings associated with Jesus, there is no violence to highlight. “Love your enemies” is a Jesus saying few dispute that is obviously not violent. “Turn the other cheek,” however one interprets this saying, does not advocate for revenge. “How blessed are the poor,” another undisputed Jesus saying, lacks any hint of violence but instead compels compassion for suffering. The Good Samaritan parable, again however we interpret it, advocates for compassion. The most widely accepted sayings attributed to Jesus lack violent imagery, do not express beliefs about Jesus, and compel the reader to act with compassion.

The four great monotheistic religious traditions of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all hold that the first quality of God is compassion, not violence. The opening words of the Qur’an are “In the name of God, the most forgiving and the most compassionate.” The directive of Zoroastrianism is to practice good deeds, and one does so because God is good. In Judaism, to follow the Torah is to love your fellow human beings as yourself. In monotheism, to act in the name of God is to act with compassion, for God is the parent, the source of life, for all living things. To bring harm to another is to bring harm to God.

The historical evidence related to the sayings of Jesus is that Jesus followed the God of compassion. The evidence from the life of Jesus, as much as evidence from the Judaism that he would have known, is that God is compassion and that to know God is to be compassionate—a standard monotheistic teaching.

Jesus more likely advocated being compassionate as God is compassionate (Luke 6:36) than getting even with your enemies. He was more likely a figure of nonviolence (Matt 5:38–42) than a figure of violence. It is unlikely he would give glory to God for violence, and it is most likely he was not a fundamentalist practitioner of religion.

While it is difficult to know what political position Jesus might take today, it is certainly possible to know that whatever position he would take, it would not be one centered on violence.

The Westar Institute is an academic home for the study of religion, history, and philosophy. It is a member-supported nonprofit research and education organization that bridges the gap between scholarship about religion and the perception of religion in popular culture. Westar is committed to honesty in scholarship, ensuring its readers and members acquire the critical tools needed to engage in responsible public discourse related to religion. For more information, visit https://www.westarinstitute.org/

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In 324 CE, the Emperor Constantine placed an order for fifty Bibles. He couldn’t order them from the local bookstore. Such an order was a big deal.

Constantine placed his order with Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, who had a large library and scriptorium. Eusebius was proud of the imperial commission and preserved the letter in his Life of Constantine. The emperor’s order begins: “I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred scriptures (theiōn graphōn, “divine writings,” plural).”

Constantine authorizes Eusebius to draw on the empire’s resources in fulfilling this order and he can draw on imperial officials for resources. Fifty parchment manuscripts is a very large order. For the emperor the order was urgent, but it would have taken time to kill and dress the fifty to sixty sheep or goats for each codex (a total of two thousand five hundred to three thousand sheep), and many scribes to prepare skins for parchment, mix the ink, arrange the work, copy the manuscripts, bind them, and pack them up. This work is not done in a day, a week, or even a year.

Interestingly, the emperor refers in his letter to these copies as “divine writings” (theiōn graphon), while Eusebius in his introduction to this section of his Life of Constantine had referred to them as “God-inspired Words” (theopneustōn logiōn). In the first two centuries, logia (“words, sayings, or oracles”) was the common term for oral sayings of Jesus, as distinguished from written sayings. The correspondence between Constantine and Eusebius shows that they had no common way to refer to what we call the Bible. Terminology was still in flux and remained so for centuries.

For the early followers of Jesus Anointed and the authors of the eventual New Testament, “Scripture” was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew holy writings. Being Jews, these early followers maintained the term used by Greek-speaking Jews. Their term, hai graphai (plural) is a common Greek word meaning “the Writings,” it is not a specialized, religious, or technical term. It refers to Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, the threefold division of Israel’s Sacred Writings. When Jesus challenges the disciples on the road to Emmaus to understand that the Messiah must suffer, the narrator remarks, “Then, starting with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted for them every passage of the writings (en pasais tais graphais) that referred to himself” (Luke 24:27). On the other hand, “the writing” (hē graphē, singular) referred to a single verse. When Jesus reads from Isaiah in the Synagogue in Nazareth, he says, “Today this writing [verse] (hē graphē) has been fulfilled as you listen” (Luke 4:21). This common usage between Jews and the followers of Jesus marks a collection of writings as central to their religious experience, in contrast with the practice of the other Greco-Roman polytheistic religions, in which cultic practice played the central role.

Another usage among some Greek-speaking Jews was ta biblia (plural), “the books,” “the scrolls,” or “the writings.” Like hai graphai, ta biblia refers to the Septuagint. While ta biblia does not appear in the New Testament, it is widespread from the second century. John Chrysostom’s use of the phrase ta biblia to refer to both the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament” in this combined sense around 386 is the first such extant use of this term.

In late Latin, the neuter plural biblia (books) was gradually understood as a feminine singular noun (book). This understanding then passed into the European vernaculars as La Bible in French, and Die Bibel in German, both keeping the feminine gender, and in English, “the Bible,” which is a transliteration of the Latin biblia.

A grammatical shift from plural to singular has had a profound effect. A collection of books became a book, even the book. Thus “The Bible” is a medieval Christian creation. The grammatical shift from plural to singular was the first step toward the transmogrification of a collection of writings into a single thing, THE BIBLE. On this basis, medieval theologians elaborated the unitary view of scripture. The Bible has a unitary and single meaning, and a unitary and single author— God. Any contradictions were only apparent, problems to be solved. In this unified Bible, the Jewish and Hebraic character of ta biblia as a collection of many writings disappears into the Old Testament, subordinated in a new Christian scripture. The saying attributed to Augustine and endlessly repeated by medieval theologians makes the point. “The New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old is made manifest in the New.” Luther went so far as say that Christ was the sole topic of scripture.

Modern historical critical scholarship went to war with the unitary view of the Bible. The deconstruction of the unitary view of the Bible is the first step toward a historical understanding of the Writings’ parts.

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Then they returned home, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he showed up again in the temple area and everybody gathered around him. He sat down and began to teach them.

The scholars and the Pharisees bring him a woman who was caught committing adultery. They make her stand there in front of everybody, and they address him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone women like this. What do you say?” (They said this to trap him, so they would have something to accuse him of.)

Jesus stooped down and began drawing on the ground with his finger. When they insisted on an answer, he stood up and replied, “Whoever is sinless in this crowd should go ahead and throw the first stone at her.” Once again he squatted down and continued writing on the ground.

His audience began to drift away, one by one—until Jesus was the only one left, with the woman there in front of him.

Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where is everybody? Hasn’t anyone condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.” “

I don’t condemn you either,” Jesus said. “You’re free to go; but from now on, no more sinning.”[1]

The story of the Woman Caught in Adultery is one of the best-known stories in the New Testament but ironically doesn’t belong in the New Testament. The story is missing from all the major manuscript evidence.

• It is missing from the earliest papyrus fragments of Papyrus 66 (about 200 ce) and Papyrus 75 (third century).

• It is missing from the two major uncials manuscripts of Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) and Codex Vaticanus (fourth century).

Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) is the third major uncial[2] manuscript, and it is defective in this part of the Gospel of John where the story traditionally appears (John 7:53–8:11). However, a careful measurement of the defective section of this manuscript indicates that it is not large enough to have contained the story.

In the East, the story is absent from the earliest translations into Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian. No Greek church father refers to the story before the twelfth century. In the West, many early Latin manuscripts are also missing the passage.

The style and vocabulary also tell against the story. Its vocabulary differs from the rest of the Fourth Gospel. Finally, the story interrupts the natural flow from 7:52 to 8:12.

In some manuscripts the story is inserted after John 7:52, or 7:3, or after 21:25, and in some manuscripts it is after Luke 21:38. It is, indeed, a floating logion.

The weight of the manuscript and internal evidence against the inclusion of the story in the Gospel of John is overwhelming, even conclusive. It does not belong in the Fourth Gospel.

How then did the story get into the New Testament?

Read the full post on the Westar Website: https://www.westarinstitute.org/blog/do-you-know-the-story-of-the-woman-caught-in-adultery

[1] Robert J. Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press), 2010, 460–61.

[2] An uncial manuscript is a manuscript written entirely in capital letters. This was common practice in Greek and Latin right up until the eighth century.

Editorial Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are presented for educational and discussion purposes. They do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the organization. This essay is a speculative reflection on how a papal encyclical addresses issues related to artificial intelligence and society.

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the first of his papacy, tackles the AI revolution. The tech bros in Silicon Valley are not going to be pleased. The pope is more focused on the problems, less so on the benefits. He fears that we are building a new tower of Babel. Some in Washington also will not be pleased. He thinks governments have a responsibility to regulate AI and that final military decisions should not be turned over to AI. Life and death decisions are too important to turn over to a machine.

The media coverage for the most part has dealt with the encyclical’s main points. Since The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other media outlets, have provided good coverage, I am not going to summarize the pope’s main points. What interests me is how Pope Leo has made his argument.

Papal encyclicals have a definite form. Each pope must demonstrate that he is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, bringing the ancient truth to new situations. Because of this form, there is a lot of “pope quoting.” The vast majority of footnotes in Magnifica Humanitas refer to papal encyclicals or papal documents. This is very much intra-Catholic, an intra-papal discussion. The scriptures are quoted much less than popes. This is unfortunate because Pope Leo has some very valuable things to say to others than Catholics.

Magnifica Humanitas[1] is well informed about AI, although it does not footnote this. Since the encyclical is interested in engaging the larger society, not noting where the pope is getting his information is a loss. This is not a briefing document, although at times it reads like one. The pope’s interests are not in explaining AI but in ethical and societal implications. The first sentence expresses this: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (1). He addresses humanity as a group, not just Catholics. He draws upon two biblical metaphors: the tower of Babel or the New City of God. His chief concern is that we, the whole of humanity, have a choice before us. By implication, “we”—all of humanity—should make the choice, not the owners of the technology. This sentence contains the whole of Leo’s argument.

Leo makes his argument with two primary principles: the common good and the worth of the individual.

Common Good

The notion of the common good has a deep history in Catholic moral teaching, going back to Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). Aquinas followed Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a “political animal.” “Political” derives from the Greek word polis meaning city. For Aristotle, humans were meant to live in cities; by nature they are social beings who are at their best in communities. Aquinas elaborated Aristotle’s insight into a theory of the common good (bonum commune) and integrates it into Christian theology and ethics. The common good involves all acting together for the good of the group. Living in community leads to virtue as the individual seeks what is best for the whole. The community is of the highest value, not the individual. By participating in community, the individual finds true humanity. For Aquinas, tyrannical law is not really law at all because it does not seek the common good. The common good operates at the level of the family, the political unit, and ultimately the divine level since God is the universal common good.

Rerum Novarum[2] (1891, “Of New Things”) marks a major shift away from Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864),[3] a strongly reactionary condemnation of the liberalism and modernism sweeping through modern Europe. Syllabus of Errors’ reactionary attitude is summed up in its final article 80. It condemns as false the statement that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” Rerum Novarum takes up precisely these “new things.” But one pope cannot reject the statements of a former pope, especially his predecessor. One moves on, ignores the problem. When you claim infallibility, it’s hard to say you made a mistake.

Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, drawing heavily on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the common good, set the mold for papal as well as Vatican II documents on social justice. Aquinas’ common good is a chief strength of Catholic Social Teaching. When Robert Francis Prevost took the name of Leo when elected pope, he clearly signaled he was following the footsteps of Leo XIII, and his first encyclical, issued on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, clearly is in that mode.

In drawing upon Aquinas’ notion of the common good, Leo XIII also took the side of the workers. This marked a major transition on the part of the papacy. Pius IX took the side of the kings who were being deposed by the rising tide of liberalism. He identified the church, the papacy, with kings because he was a king, the ruler of a state, although a dispossessed ruler of the papal states.

Leo XIII’s taking up the workers’ cause, moving the church to the side of the workers, initiated a move followed by other popes throughout the twentieth century toward the marginalized, outcast, and a “preferential option for the poor.”

The common good is Leo XIV’s primary analytical tool for examining AI. He makes this clear from the very beginning. “Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good” (5). The encyclical poses “private” interests against the common good, decisively rejecting the notion so common in the United States that the private good triumphs over the public.

Human Worth

The second major element in the pope’s toolbox is the worth of the human being. Leo rejects the capitalist notion that worth depends on achievements or production but instead opts for “rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them” (51). This, of course, is an Enlightenment value, represented in the American Declaration of Independence that called for the overthrow of the English king: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Like the American Declaration of Independence, the pope also ties this right to the creator; “This is the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God” (52).

New Age of Slavery

At the heart of his ethical analysis Leo warns against a new form of slavery. He calls out “a technocratic and post-humanist mentality” that only regards “the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity” (172).

Leo identifies slavery with colonialism and sees its long chain supporting AI subordination, colonialism, and enslavement.

A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities. . . . In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. (173)

The pope draws a strong conclusion: “It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity” (173).

Conclusion: AI promises a new age of slavery!

The charge of slavery is particularly poignant in Leo’s argument because the church for so long had failed in its discernment of slavery as an evil. Only under Leo XIII in the nineteenth century did the Roman Catholic Church finally condemn slavery. “It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon” (176).

This is as close as you will get to a pope saying, “We got it wrong on an important moral question. Now learn from our mistake!” (Leo XIV needs to make an equally repentant confession on the church’s allowing priests to sexually abuse youths and covering it up for such a long time.)

Leo diagnoses the problem with AI. As currently set up, it is leading to a new form of slavery, an offense against human dignity. The pope also proposes a solution: the common good, not private interest. He had announced his conclusion in the encyclical’s beginning: ”let us establish standards for discernment—the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace—and let us translate these standards into practices such as responsible planning, the assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the promotion of digital literacy and guiding research and industry toward justice and peace” (14).

Make no mistake. Leo, in line with many of the modern popes, is mounting a major critique of capitalism as practiced in much of the West.

Common Ground

This encyclical is addressed to the Catholic faithful throughout the world. But Leo’s argument is not fundamentally confessional or even theological. His basic argument is philosophical. The theory of the common good derives from Aristotle and is elaborated by Aquinas as a political ethic. There is nothing specifically Catholic or even Christian about this notion. It’s a matter of reason. Likewise, the intrinsic worth of each human person is an Enlightenment value. Leo is proposing a dialogue based on common human values about what the future should be. He stated this clearly in the encyclical’s first paragraph. “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world” (1).

How far is Pope Leo willing to push his program? Is he willing to make it a priority of the American bishops? American Catholic parishes? Catholic social teaching was a major influence on the New Deal in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Is Leo willing to push that hard?

The title Magnifica Humanitas does not translate well—Magnificent Humanity does not make much sense. Leo concludes his encyclical with a reference to Mary’s Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel. I suspect he imagines a wordplay which poses the question, are we going to magnify humanity as God’s creation or enslave those who stand in the way?

A piece of trivia: this is, as far as I can tell, the first encyclical not in Latin. How times have changed since the Syllabus of Errors.

[1] The text of the encyclical is available here.

[2] Rerum Novarum is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It is available here.

[3] Syllabus of Errors can be viewed here.

The Challenge of an Ending

The Gospel of Mark originally ended abruptly at 16:8.

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid (KJV).

And once they got outside, they ran away from the tomb, because great fear and excitement got the better of them. And they didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone: talk about terrified . . . (Scholars Version)

This ending of the Gospel of Mark at 16:8 provokes a profound challenge. What is the reader to make of an ending in which the women tell no one because they were afraid? If they told no one, where did the story come from?

The authors the Gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke had trouble with Mark’s conclusion. Matthew edits the last line in Mark to read: “And they hurried away from the tomb afraid and filled with joy and ran to tell his students” (Matthew 28:8). Instead of not telling anyone, they ran to tell his students. Luke simply omits the problematic ending and adds: “And returning from the tomb, they related everything to the Eleven and to everybody else” (Luke 24:9).

Manuscripts

The manuscript evidence that Mark’s Gospel originally ended at 16:8 is convincing, but not overwhelming. The manuscripts of Mark that the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke used ended at 16:8. They follow and edit Mark’s narrative of the empty tomb until 16:8 and then go their different ways. Mark is clearly the source, and the narrative ended at 16:8.

The two oldest and most important uncial (capital letters) manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) and Codex Vaticanus (fourth century), end at 16:8. The early papyrus evidence for Mark is sparce and none for the Gospel’s ending. Clement of Alexandria (about 150–215), Origen (about 185–253), and Eusebius (about 260–340) witness to Mark’s Gospel ending at 16:8.

Matthew and Luke’s use of Mark, the manuscript evidence, and the witness of early commentators provide strong and convincing but not overwhelming evidence that Mark’s Gospel ended at 16:8.

Lost Ending?

Was the original ending lost? Is it possible that the Gospel of Mark’s original ending was somehow lost before Matthew and Luke used it? Could the last part of the scroll have been dropped, been cut off, or lost? There is one small piece of evidence for this. The final word in the Greek text is gar, a conjunction meaning “for” or “because.” Typically, gar is in the second position in its clause, as it is here, but normally not in the final position, the last word, which it also is here. Ending a scroll with gar is unusual, which would suggest there was more to come. Scholars have picked up on the final gar and the strangeness of Mark’s ending to suggest that there had to be a lost ending. But this is not necessarily so. There are examples of gar in the final position. And the strangeness of Mark’s ending is based on the fact that Matthew and Luke found it lacking and constructed new endings. But that does not mean that the original ending was lost. More recent scholarship finds Mark’s ending challenging, but not incomprehensible. Its point was to challenge the reader.

The Longer Ending Dominant

Scribes have provided several different endings to Mark, but by far the best attested is the so-called Longer Ending (verses 9–20), printed in almost every modern translation of the New Testament. Most Greek manuscripts support the Longer Ending, with the important Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) leading the pack. Many of the earliest patristic writers support the Longer Ending. Jerome followed the majority of manuscripts with his translation of the Bible into Latin (about 342–45), known as the Vulgate, which became the official translation in the West.

When the great humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, he based his Greek text on late Byzantine Greek manuscripts, the best available to him. These late Greek manuscripts all ended Mark with the Longer Ending. Erasmus’ printed text became Textus Receptus (“The Received Text”), which in turn became the basis for the first modern translations into German (Martin Luther, 1522) and English (King James Version, 1611). These hugely influential translations cemented the Longer Ending as the conclusion to Mark. Critical Greek editions and modern translations, on the other hand, have been trying to remove it or bracket it as not part of the Gospel. It took three hundred years to even start restoring the original ending of Mark’s Gospel, a testament to the power of the printing press.

Evidence Against

The Longer Ending is clearly ancient, probably from the late second century or early third century. The number of manuscripts supporting this ending is vast. If manuscripts had a vote like voters in a democratic election, the outcome would be obvious. But that is not the way it works. Most Greek manuscripts are late and witness to what was standard in the ninth to twelfth centuries. Quality, not numbers, is the determining point. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both fourth century manuscripts, are the two highest quality witnesses to the Greek New Testament. The fifth century Codex Alexandrinus is an important witness, but not of the quality of Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. If these three manuscripts agree, that is a very strong reading. But if two manuscripts agree against one, the two agreeing manuscripts’ reading is the preferred one.

Internal evidence also speaks against the Longer Ending. The vocabulary in the Longer Ending is non-Marcan. For example, apisteō, “to refuse to believe” (16:11) appears in Mark only in the Longer Ending. The description of those who follow Jesus as “who had been with him” (16:10) only occurs in the New Testament here. The transition between verses 8 and 9 is particularly harsh. 16:9 appears to start the resurrection story over again and only Mary Magdalene is present, in agreement with the Fourth Gospel from which it probably borrows the idea. The note that she is the one out of whom Jesus had cast seven demons comes from Luke 8:2, as does the reference to the Emmaus story (Mark 16:12; Luke 24:13–35). These references indicate that the Longer Ending knows the Gospel of Luke. Therefore, the Longer Ending was composed after the Gospel of Luke, which uses the Gospel of Mark as one of its sources. Therefore, yet again, the Longer Ending is a later addition to the Gospel of Mark.

Longer Ending’s Outcome

Regardless of its status, the Longer Ending has fed the Christian imagination. The image of the Master Jesus who “was taken up into the sky and sat down at the right hand of God” (16:19) is prominent in Christian art. And handling poisonous snakes and drinking poison as proof of faith (16:18) has often had tragic outcomes.

This Longer Ending has had a pernicious effect on Mary Magdalene’s reputation. Pope Gregory the Great in 591 CE used the Longer Ending to cement together his image of Mary Magadelene as a prostitute:

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. . . . It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner. (Homilies on the Gospels)

This image of Mary Magdalene is absent in the picture of Mary Magdalene in individual gospels. It comes from the male Christian imagination and is imposed on the gospels. The Longer Ending is the linchpin that draws this negative image together.

Text criticism is the discipline of comparing ancient manuscripts, like the Codices of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, to attempt to discern the original wording of a text. It may seem boring, but its results can be illuminating, transforming, and on occasion liberating.

This work is published for educational purposes. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the positions of the publishing organization, its board, or sponsors.

The author of the Fourth Gospel calls into question the notion of God as a master, the only New Testament author to face up to this issue. The author is not an abstract critical thinker but rather thinks in narrative. Therefore, the argument must be ferreted out.

Master/Slave

The Fourth Gospel employs the standard Greco-Roman master/slave model. The author of the Fourth Gospel knows the common proverb about masters and slaves: “slaves are never better than their masters” (13:16). In the story about the healing of the government official’s son (4:47–54), the official addresses Jesus with the honorific kurie, master or sir. Since this official clearly outranks Jesus, he employs the honorific because he is asking a favor of Jesus and so will be dependent on him. In a shame/honor society, his request abases him to Jesus. Jesus grants his request and while the official is returning home, his slaves report that his son lives. This story is clearly embedded in a master/slave society.

Master God

While the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) refer to both God and Jesus as kurios/master/lord, the Fourth Gospel does not refer to God as kurios/master/lord. There is one possible but instructive exception in John 12:13. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds proclaim, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! <Blessed is> the King of Israel!” In Psalm 118:26, the reference is to the God of Israel, but here it is applied to Jesus. So, what had been a reference to God now refers to Jesus.

In the Fourth Gospel, God is never referred to as the master or lord (kurios). This is surely no accident.

Sir

The most common address to Jesus is the vocative kurie, an honorific frequently translated as “sir.” Master (kurios) and son (huios) are the most prominent titles for Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, both used about fifty times. Anointed (christos) only occurs nineteen times. Kurie is used thirty-two times as an address to Jesus, while “son” is Jesus’ self-reference. Jesus never explicitly refers to himself as master, even though he is normally addressed as master/sir. The father/son model is invoked much more in the Fourth Gospel than the master/slave model and is the model for explaining Jesus’ relation to God. God is his father, not his master. Not calling God master and the absence of the master/slave model in regard to the relationship between Jesus and God is significant.

The most frequent title for God in the Fourth Gospel is “father,” one hundred and forty times. Jesus refers to himself as son fifty-five-times. The father/son model determines God’s relation to Jesus, not the master/slave model. The author of the Fourth Gospel is clearly trying to shift the understanding of God from master to father. But that is not so easy to do. The father of a household is a master, and those in his household are his slaves, whether actually or metaphorically.

Agency

The author attempts to subvert or wire around the conclusion that God the Father is a master by redefining the relation between the father and son. In conflict with the Judeans, Jesus claims, “I and the Father are one” (10:30). He elaborates on this. “If I don’t do my Father’s works, don’t believe me; if I do, even if you can’t believe in me, believe in the works, so that you’ll fully understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (10:37–38). The “works” manifest the Father’s will, the carrying out of which is the Son’s task. These statements about the relation of the Father and Son are not ontological statements, as the theological and dogmatic tradition has read them, but claims of agency. The Son is the Father’s agent, stands for and represents the Father. John Ashton (Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 312–317) explains: “In fact the king is greater than his emissary; in law the emissary is the king’s equal” (316). The Gospel of John employs agency to explain the relation between the Father and Son. The Father is greater (14:28), but the Father and Son are one (10:30). The agency model is clear in that the Son participates in the Father’s honor. “So that everyone will respect the son, just as they respect the Father. Whoever does not respect the Son does not respect the Father who sent him” (5:23; see also 13:20).

In the Fourth Gospel, agency defines the relation between the Father and the Son, but love binds them together. At the conclusion of the Nicodemus dialogue, Jesus says, “The Father loves the son and has entrusted everything to him” (3:35). “Entrusted everything to him” is agency, but agency does not result from power but love. In the standard agency model, the agent represents the power of the principal, that is, the king. Here the agent represents the Father’s love. Love is the argument against God as a slave master. The Father is a lover. And his Son is the agent of that love. (See also 3:16, commented on below).

Believer as Slave

The Fourth Gospel also reaches the same conclusion as Paul the Envoy (Apostle) does concerning the status of believers: the category of slave is inappropriate for the followers of Jesus. Also, like Paul, the author notes that sin is slavery.

Let me tell you this:

everyone who commits sin is a slave.

No slave is ever a permanent member of the family; but a son is.

So, if the son liberates you, you’ll really be free” (8:34–36).

This lays out the logic in an almost syllogism. Sin defines the slave, one who has no control but is controlled by sin. The family is the family of God. A slave is not a permanent member but subject to the master who can sell the slave off. But a son is a permanent member of the family and the heir. If the son sets you free, you are free and a permanent member of the family. What then is the believer’s status?

Friends

Jesus in his last address (chapters 13–17) lays out the believer’s status in a simple but well-constructed period. It faces the issue of slavery head on.

Below is a sound map of John 15:12–17. This is what the Greeks call a “period,” which is a sound-unit. In English a period marks the end of a sentence. The English sentence is a grammatical unit. The Greek period is a sound-unit. We read; they hear. Greek has no notion of a sentence as a grammatical unit. (For details on this process see Margaret Ellen Lee and Bernard Brandon Scott, Sound Mapping the New Testament.) The Greeks view a period (peri [around] hodos [path]) as a circuit. A period is composed of cola, short phrases that guide voice and ear, in a way similar to verse in poetry.

This is a simple but carefully constructed period. The initial cola (verse 12) is repeated in the last cola (verse 17): Love one another. This is the theme of the period. The period is made up of eight cola, which I mark out below. The cola are all doublets except for the seventh, which is elongated. This signals the period’s conclusion and it is also the commissioning cola.

1 ¹²This is my commandment to you:

you shall love each other just as I loved you.

2 ¹³There is no greater love

than to give up your life for your friends.

3 ¹⁴You are my friends

when you do what I command you.

4 ¹⁵I no longer call you slaves,

since a slave does not know what his master is up to.

5 I have called you friends,

because I let you know everything I learned from my Father.

6 ¹⁶You didn’t choose me;

I chose you.

7 And I selected you

to go out

and produce fruit.

And your fruit will last

because my Father will provide you with whatever you request using my name.

8 ¹⁷This is what I command you:

you shall love each other.

The example of love is “to give up your life for your friends.” Jesus will give up his life and in the Nicodemus dialogue Jesus had explained, “This is how God loved the world: God gave up an only son, so that everyone who believes in him will not be lost but have unending life” (3:16). Both Father and Son give up life for the life of others. The Nicodemus saying refers to “everyone,” while this period in cola 2 employs “friends,” which is the pivotal new term.

Love (agape) and friend (philos) are semantically related. They both mean “love,” but their range of meaning differs. Love is the basis of friendship in the Greek understanding.

Friendship is the solution to the problem of slavery. In cola 4, Jesus says, “I no longer call you slaves, since a slave does not know what his master is up to.” At no point in the narrative had Jesus called his followers slaves, but that is not the point. Because they now know everything he learned from the Father, love one another, Jesus and the hearers are friends, equals. The gap between them has been eliminated. On that basis Jesus commissions the hearers “to go out and produce fruit,” that is as the final cola says, “You shall love one another.” His mission from the Father becomes their mission.

The great cataloger Aristotle in books eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics had analyzed friendship. For him, “The perfect form of friendship is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue” (8.6). This demanded “equality, for both parties render the same benefit and wish the same good to each other” (8.7).

Aristotle and the author of the Fourth Gospel agree. But in one regard the Fourth Gospel goes further than Aristotle. When the Son calls the hearers friends, he brings them into the Father and Son’s love. This friendship is based on love, not power and not fear. This plays directly to the absence of God as master in the Fourth Gospel. A master operates out of fear. Fear of God is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible, but absent in the Fourth Gospel. The Father’s commandment is love one another; the example is to give up one’s life for another.

Conclusion

The Fourth Gospel has succeeded where Paul failed. While both understand that the freedom of the believer is incompatible with the enslavement metaphor, Paul is ambivalent and inconsistent in his usage. The Fourth Gospel, on the other hand, dissolves the slavery model with the friendship model. Paul in no way challenged God as a slave master. With God as a lover and friend, the Fourth Gospel revamped God as master/lord into God as father and redefined the father as based on love, not power or fear. This is a major revision of the Hebrew view of God. It had the effect of tying the Father, Son, and believers into a unity based on love. But this unity is one of agency, not ontology. Love as agency is action and mission, not being.

Love, friendship, and equality as agency play out in deeds. There are no apostles in the Fourth Gospel, only students. The community has no hierarchy. The beloved student (disciple) is not superior to other students. In Jesus’ postmortem dialogue with Mary Madgalene, he treats her as an equal. He commissions her, “go to my brothers and tell them this: ‘I’m ascending to my Father and your Father—to my God and your God’” (20:17). He calls them brothers, not students. “My Father and your Father, my God and your God” puts Mary Magadalene (and the students) and Jesus on the same level, the basis of true friendship. The text recognizes that Jesus has commissioned her when the narrator in verse 18 notes “she announced” (aggellousa) to the students the news of the resurrection. Aggelō means “to bear a message, to bring news, to announce.” It is a strong word. Aggelos, angel, or messenger is a cognate. In Lucan terms, this makes her the apostle to apostles. The Fourth Gospel, without apostles or hierarchy, has her as one of many commissioned by Jesus as Jesus was commissioned by the Father.

Educational Disclaimer:
This work is presented for scholarly and educational discussion. Interpretations offered here reflect academic engagement with biblical texts and historical sources and are not intended to prescribe doctrine, policy, or political positions.

Paul a Slave

Brandon Scott’s recent article, “Paul a Slave” (The Jesus Seminar and Beyond, April 23, 2026) sent me back to a passage I have long struggled over, Paul’s abolitionist manifesto in Gal 3:28. Scott’s focus on slavery in Paul’s letters and other Jesus material helps me to situate Paul’s writings and the Jesus movements in their time, the first centuries of the common era in the Roman empire, a thoroughgoing slave culture. I find especially helpful Scott’s observation in “Paul a Slave” and elsewhere in Scott’s writings that the master-slave relationship constituted more than a pervasive social reality; it furnished the prevailing model for all social relationships in the empire, including the family and intimate relations between men and women.

This is why Gal 3:28 has ensnared my attention. Scott uses the SV translation in the “Free at Last” section of his article: “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female.’” Scott concludes the section, “This voids every important social distinction in the ancient world.” I agree, and wonder whether there’s even more to it than Scott claims.

Translation

Scott is famously precise with translation. For this reason, I puzzled over his exegesis of Gal 3:28 in the section, “Male and Female,” which begins, “In his understanding of neither male nor female, Paul makes real gains.” Scott does not explicitly present “neither male nor female” as a translation of Gal 3:28 but his argument here refers to 3:28 as the place where “Paul replaces hierarchy with mutuality.”

But “Neither male nor female” differs significantly from the SV translation, “no longer ‘male and female,’” and it reflects a fundamental disjuncture in the English translation tradition. The ESV, NIV, and NRSV, for example, have “male and female,” while the KJV, NKJV, RSV, NAS, and even the Latin Vulgate give us, “no longer male nor female.” (Only rarely and in paraphrases do other formulations occur.) Does it matter?

The Greek text of Gal 3:28 uses two different words to distinguish Paul’s list of pairs: “You are no longer Jew nor (oude) Greek, no longer slave nor (oude) freeborn, no longer male and (kai) female.” Clearly, Paul establishes a pattern by repeating oude, a negative particle, for Jew/Greek and slave/freeborn. Then he breaks the pattern for the male/female pair with an additive conjunction, kai, for male/female. The distinction between oude (nor) and kai (and) is not ambiguous. Why then should the English translation tradition offer these two different renditions?

It might seem natural to extrapolate the neither/nor pattern Paul establishes in Gal 3:28, construing all three pairs, including male/female, in opposition to each other. But this isn’t how the Greek text reads. I wholeheartedly support Scott’s long-standing commitment to fidelity to the Greek text. So how to make sense of Gal 3:28? I find two important clues in Scott’s article.

The Clues

Although he exegetes Gal 3:28 as if it reads neither/nor, Scott’s use of the SV translation in “Free at Last” preserves the additive sense of the conjunction: “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female.’” The SV encloses “male and female” in quotation marks. Why?

The SV implies that “male and female” is a quotation from Gen 1:27 in the Greek Septuagint (LXX): “God brought humanity into existence (epoiēsen), crafting (epoiēsen) them in God’s own image. Male and (kai) female God made (epoiēsen) them” (my translation). Gal 3:28 repeats the LXX wording in Gal 3:28: arsen kai thēlu, male and female. So how does the Genesis creation story figure in Paul’s reasoning about slavery?

Scott’s article offers a second clue in his section, “A New Politics.” The section opens, “He [Paul] understands that (1) in the Anointed there are no distinctions; (2) freedom characterizes this state, not slavery.” Scott then turns to Paul’s use of the body metaphor in 1 Cor 12 to articulate “a new politics, a way of living together, that escapes the master/slave model of the ancient world.” For me, this crucial point raises yet another translation problem in Galatians.

To argue for the freedom available to those who are in the Anointed, Paul takes up the issue of circumcision in Gal 6:15. He writes, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters; all that matters is kainē ktisis.” Nor is this usage unique. Paul also writes in 2 Cor 5:17, “whoever is in the Anointed is kainē ktisis.” In most English translations, the phrase is rendered, “new creation” (sometimes “a new creature”). We have seen that Paul clearly knows the usual Greek word for “creation” (poiēsis), the word used three times in Gen 1:27, which he quotes in Gal 3:28. But Paul does not use this word in Gal 6:15 or in 2 Cor 5:17; instead, he writes ktisis.

I am always suspicious when dictionaries offer different meanings for the same word, depending on whether the word occurs in the New Testament. This is the case with ktisis. Standard Greek lexica define ktisis as “creation” only when it occurs in the New Testament. Elsewhere in Greek, the word means “foundation,” in the political sense of founding a new colony, or an “achievement” or “accomplishment.”

Translating kainē ktisis as “new creation” departs from its normal sense in Greek. It affords the convenience of spiritualizing Paul’s message to suggest some mystical state of salvation. But Paul uses markedly concrete language in Galatians where he considers circumcision and in 1 Cor 12 with his body metaphor. These are physical images that focus embodied social connections.

Scott’s discussion of “a new politics” helps me to untangle this problem. Paul’s kainē ktisis, like other uses of the word in Paul’s time, suggests that God’s vindication of the crucified Jesus constitutes the “foundation” (ktisis) of a “new” (kainē) social order.

Back to Paul and Slavery

Where does this leave the question of the translation of Gal 3:28, its implications for Paul’s understanding of enslavement, and the Genesis creation story? I applaud Scott’s attention to the political implications of Paul’s message, and I favor the SV translation, “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female,’” with its quotation marks. I would urge that the passage be interpreted in precisely that additive sense, and not as “neither male nor female.” In other words, I read Paul’s message as more radical than Scott has stated.

Paul declares that God’s vindication of the crucified Jesus constitutes a kainē ktisis, the foundation of a new social order, in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor freeborn, “male and female.” Paul’s declaration of a new creation comes not in Gal 6:15 with kainē ktisis but in 3:28 with “no longer ‘male and female.’” When Paul wipes out “male and female,” he overturns the very image of God, in whose image humanity first came into being. For Paul, “male and female” no longer reflects God’s image as it once did in the moment of creation. God’s vindication of the crucified Anointed removes gender from consideration throughout the new social order of the Anointed, alters the image of God, and constitutes a newly-created humanity. Yes, Paul “replaces hierarchy with mutuality” as Scott claims, but the implications range further than marriage relations to encompass the entire social order. Even more, Paul’s “no longer ‘male and female’” rewrites the Genesis creation story, delivering a new image of God that rocks the very foundations of the Christian theological tradition. The implications for Christian patriarchy, male ordination, and sexual ethics are profound.

Paul never addressed the questions of gender and identity that confront our culture, but I wonder how he might have done so, had the occasion presented itself. Surely Paul’s eradication of “male and female” as a depiction of God’s image would be impactful today, as two-spirit, non-binary, and trans people are subjected to violence, denied medical care, and confronted with brutal restrictions of their social participation. We cannot know what positions Paul would take in our time but the logical consequences of Gal 3:28 and 6:17 are physical, enfleshed, and not limited to bathrooms and ball fields. The foundation of the Anointed’s new social order, the kainē ktisis, ranges across the entire social, legal, and political realm and redefines God as gender-neutral. As Virginia Woolf opined nearly a century ago in A Room of One’s Own, “if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity.”

Enslaved

Scott’s article includes an important final caution: Paul went only so far in his declaration of freedom. Paul’s insight hinges on his understanding of God’s response to Jesus’s crucifixion. The freedom Paul declares occurs only in the shadow of the cross. No easy answers can be found. Being in the Anointed means never escaping crucifixion. Being enslaved to the Anointed entails real enslavement—to those Paul serves, to the pragmatic realities of his time, and to a radically new image of God.

This article is published by the Westar Institute as a scholarly contribution. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Westar Institute. Publication does not imply institutional endorsement.

A Slave

After Paul’s so called Damascus experience or as he calls it his revelation or insight (apocalysis, Galatians 1:12), he saw himself fundamentally as a slave of Jesus Anointed, enslaved by the master Anointed. Paul a slave is part and parcel of his call to be an envoy or apostle. In the address to the letter to the Romans, Paul names himself as:

(From) Paul,
a slave of (enslaved by) Anointed Jesus
called to be an envoy (apostle)
designated for g-d’s world transforming news.

Since the final two descriptors mean the same thing, we should assume that the first one is closely related.

This is the most elaborate address among Paul’s letters. Philippians also has the descriptor slave—”(from) Paul and Timothy, slaves of Anointed Jesus” (1:1). In the earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, the writers are simply, “(From) Paul and Silvanus and Timothy,” with no descriptor. Galatians and 1 and 2 Corinthians employ the single descriptor “envoy.”

As these addresses indicate, Paul closely identifies his apostleship with being enslaved. In Galatians, where his apostleship is under threat, he retorts, “If I were still looking for human approval, I would not be the Anointed’s slave” (Galatians 1:10). In a similar response to an attack on his apostleship in 2 Corinthians, he claims “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as master and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake” (4:5 NRSVUE). This shifts the master from g-d or Jesus Anointed to the audience, the community in Corinth.

Since Paul understands both Jesus and g-d as masters (kurioi), the master/slave logic is complete. An enslaved person has no control of their body or will. The master has total control. After his call, Paul sees himself as totally controlled by g-d or Jesus Anointed. The call is so overpowering, he has no choice.

Free at Last

Even though he applies the title slave to himself, he seldom applies it to those who have been baptized. For them, the category of slavery is inappropriate. The Greek phrase en christō, “in the Anointed” incapsulates his understanding of one of the two possible states of being. “In flesh” is the state before faith and “in the Anointed” is the state after faith. This is code language, starkly abbreviated.

In Galatians 3:26-28 he expands it. “Through the kind of confidence (pistis) exemplified by God’s Anointed” he concludes, “you are all now God’s adult offspring (huioi, sons)” (Galatians 3:26).

As a result of either a faithfulness like Jesus’ or baptism—for Paul they are the same thing—they are “in the Anointed,” or as the Scholars Version translation explains, they have “been baptized into solidarity with God’s Anointed.” What is it like to be baptized in Christ, or baptized into solidarity with God’s Anointed? Paul draws on the metaphor of clothing. “You have clothed yourself with the Anointed” (my translation). The SV expands this metaphor as “become invested with the status of God’s Anointed.”

Since everyone now has the status of the Anointed, Paul draws the momentous conclusion, “You are no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or freeborn, no longer ‘male and female’” (3:28). This voids every important social distinction in the ancient world. But for Paul this is true only within the community of the Anointed, not in the Roman Empire. These very distinctions continued to characterize the empire.

Still Enslaved?

Because these distinctions characterize the Roman Empire, Paul’s rule for all his communities is “each of you should continue to live the life the master has apportioned to you as you were when g-d called you” (1 Corinthians 7:17). Because Paul thought that the end was imminent, he counseled not changing one’s situation. But “if you are able to become a freedman, take advantage of it” (7:21). From this he draws his generalized conclusion: “The point is this: anyone who was a slave when called to be one of the master’s people is one of the master’s freedmen, and likewise anyone who was free when called is the Anointed’s slave” (7:22). This is the only place where he refers to others as “the Anointed’s slave.” The logic seems to be, since there really is “no longer slave or freeborn,” it makes no difference if you are free or slave. This is clearly written from a free person’s point of view. I can imagine the enslaved in his audience saying, “Easy for you to say!”

For Paul those in the Anointed, in the community, are free; those in the empire are enslaved. He makes no effort to change the Empire. It cannot change and is doomed to pass away. The promise of freedom is in the community and in g-d’s future. Paul engages in no critical analysis of slavery. Those in the Anointed are free, they are also still enslaved, only to a different master. “Thank God that although you were slaves of the power of corruption [sin] you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching with which you were entrusted, once you were liberated from that corrupting power [sin], you became slaves in the service of what is right” (Roman 6:17-18). Paul is still caught in the master/slave model and has not thought his way out of it. He admits, “I am speaking in common, ordinary terms to accommodate your limited powers of comprehension” (Roman 6:19). That is, he’s struggling. The problem is the model master/slave. Paul does not question its validity because that would challenge his fundamental understanding of society and the primary understanding of g-d as master and all humans as g-d’s slaves. It’s too deeply embedded.

A New Politics

Yet Paul has got hold of the problem. He understands that (1) in the Anointed there are no distinctions; (2) freedom characterizes this state, not slavery. He does make one major effort in 1 Corinthians 12 to envision a new politics for the community in his working out of the body metaphor as applied to the community of the Anointed. Paul begins with a physical metaphor. ”Just as the body has many parts and all of the parts, even though there are many of them, are still parts of one body, so is the body of the Anointed” (1 Corinthians 12:12). Paul employs the physical body as a metaphor for the Anointed’s body. His basic argument is that the body has many parts but is still one body. Same is true for the community “For we were all baptized by the same power of God into one body, whether we were Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and we were all invited to imbibe the same divine power” (12:13).

The body is a common metaphor in Greek political thought, where it is used to support unity, which Paul does as well, and hierarchy, which Paul does not. In common Hellenistic usage, some parts of the body are more important and rule over other parts, for example, the mind rules over inferior parts. This of course reflects and justifies the master/slave hierarchy. Paul denies this. The body has many parts, but there is only one body. All the parts are necessary. “It’s just not possible for the eye to say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you;’ or for the head to say to the feet, ‘I have no use for you’” (12:21). The body needs all of its parts. None is hierarchically superior; all are part of the body. “If one part is in pain, all parts suffer; if one part is honored, all parts celebrate” (12:26).

Notice what is missing. The Anointed is not a part, the head as in Colossians 1:18, but is the body itself. “All of you together are the body of the Anointed and individually you are members of it” (12:27). At this point, Paul breaks free of his metaphor. He is on the verge of critical thinking. He has begun to conceive a new politics, a way of living together, that escapes the master/slave model of the ancient world. He has seen the other side, but how far did he get?

Male and Female

In his understanding of neither male nor female, Paul makes real gains. In 1 Corinthians 7, when he turns to the questions about which the Corinthians have written, he first treats the relations between a husband and wife. Paul turns first to a specific situation: a man and his wife. “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife” (1 Cor 7:2 KJ). What Paul has in mind is what we sometimes call sexual urges. Because of these sexual urges he says, “each man should have one wife (lit: woman).” The word “have” is a bit tricky. It could have the sense of “to marry,” but more likely it means “to possess.” A wife is literally the possession of her husband, just as a slave is the possession of the master. This statement repeats the cultural assumption of that world as recorded in Aristotle. But then he continues: “and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Cor 7:2 KJ). The two parts of the statement are simple and set in a carefully balanced parallel.

Let each man have his own wife
Let each woman have her own husband.

As noted, the first line is the cultural presupposition of patriarchy. But as far as I can tell, the second line is unattested anywhere else in Greek literature. For a woman to possess or own her husband undoes the assumptions of patriarchy.

Paul expands on this.

To the wife the husband should give what is due,
And likewise also the wife to the husband
(1 Cor 7:3 my translation)

The economy of the Greek is striking, especially the second line: “the wife to the husband,” with “should give what is due” in ellipsis supplied from the first line. In verse 2 the two lines were set in exact parallel, stressing their parallelism, equality, and mutuality. In these two lines, wife and husband stay in the same word order, but their grammatical relationship reverses. Also, the ellipsis in the second line makes it much more succinct. The relation between husband and wife is mutual, or in the vernacular, Paul says the wife can ask for sex! And the wife is mentioned first.

Verse 4 continues this line of mutuality but with an interesting twist. “The wife does not have authority over her body, her husband does; and the husband does not have authority over his body, his wife does” (1 Cor 7:4). Again, the first part of the verse repeats the assumptions of patriarchy, and I suspect that the men in Corinth upon hearing this part of the letter said the Greek equivalent of, “Finally, he’s getting it right.” But the second part of the verse reiterates the pattern we have been observing. Paul states that the wife has authority over her husband’s body, an authority reserved in the culture exclusively for the man. Paul throughout stresses mutuality—what is true of the husband is true of the wife. This mutuality emerges from his sense of what it means to be in the Anointed or part of the body of the Anointed. This shows what it means that there is “no longer ‘male or female’.” The hierarchy of male/female relationships is set aside. The man is not the master of the woman; both have authority over the other. Paul replaces hierarchy with mutuality.

Onesimus Enslaved

In Paul’s short letter to Philemon, we have a suggestion of how far he got. He asks Philemon to welcome back his runaway slave Onesimus, implying that Philemon should set Onesimus free and charge it to his, Paul’s, account. Yet he does not directly face the master/slave problem. If “there is no longer ‘slave nor free’” in the community, but all are part of the body of the Anointed, why is Paul worried? Because Philemon is not only the head of the community in his house (a house church) but also a slave master. Paul is caught between his understanding of the body of the Anointed and the place of slavery in the Roman Empire. So, what does it mean to be free? Is it only metaphorical? Spiritual? A slogan? Paul fails to address this problem.

Paul faced a real conundrum. Those in Christ are free, freedom is the chief characteristic of g-d’s life. But Paul still envisions g-d and Jesus as masters. And there are real slave masters in the community of the Anointed Master. He is trying to think himself into a new worldview but is trapped in the Roman Empire, a world of masters and slaves. While he can imagine a life without slaves, he cannot imagine a life without a master. Is that really a free life? Paul needed, but never reached, a new image of g-d.

Coda

The Enlightenment marks the moment that breaking free of the master/slave model’s domination of political reality began. As Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Jefferson struggled and failed with this, and we are struggling with it still. Equality and freedom are not based on grace or faith, a theological principle, but on the evident worth of each human being. This Enlightenment insight cracks the problem open and leads to a new politics, democracy, not unlike Paul’s view of the Anointed’s body. Paul took the first step. The Enlightenment thinkers took the next step, and the American Constitution introduced the most important freedom enhancing political experiment in humanity’s history.

Are we living through its potential destruction?
A new image of g-d remains beyond the horizon.
We are still wrestling to free ourselves of masters enslaving others.
How long until “there is no longer slave or free”?

God the Master

Slavery is America’s original sin, but it is also deeply embedded in the Bible and the New Testament. Searching it out is an important moral imperative.

Getting Real

The King James Version (KJV) translated kurios as “lord” and doulos as “servant.” A good example of this appears in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. “Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27 KJV). The Revised Standard Version (RSV; 1952) follows the KJV: “And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.” The New International Version (NIV; 1978) shifts to master but keeps the servant: “The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.” The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV; 1989) takes the opposite tack shifting to “slave” but keeping “lord”: “And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.” Nobody seems to know what to do.

Slave

A slave is a servant, but not all servants are slaves. Since doulos has both of these senses, how to tell the difference? Context, but often context is not clear. We face yet another issue. The Roman Empire was a slave economy. It ran on and was fueled by slave power. Estimates are problematic, but between 30 and 40 percent of the population were enslaved. Slaves were ever present in all aspects of life. Cicero’s scribe Tiro was a slave. Those defeated in war became slaves. Sixty to one hundred thousand Judean slaves from Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem built the Colosseum in Rome. Slaves are everywhere and often unseen. A painting from Pompeii pictures a couple making love with a slave hovering in the background. Slaves were present at all levels of society and everywhere in the economy.

The ever presence of the enslaved argues that we should translate doulos as “slave,” unless overwhelming contextual evidence dictates “servant,” which it seldom does. Doulos as slave casts light on kurios. A kurios is a male who has power over others, that is, a master. In a slave culture, a master has power over slaves.

Modern scholars of slavery have argued that “enslaved” better represents the situation than “slave,” because someone enslaved them. They are not naturally slaves. I completely support this position. The word slave hides the person who enslaved another human being and makes slavery appear acceptable as natural or deserved.

Ancient societies disagreed with this conclusion. For them slavery was natural. When Aristotle asks whether slavery is against nature, the answer he says is easy. “And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled” (Politics, I.II 8, 1254a, 30). Although a very capable thinker, Aristotle finds it impossible to really entertain that slavery might be against nature. He thinks the answer is obvious. It’s completely natural. No problem. The authors of the biblical books made the same assumption and found no problem with slavery. Even though the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt, they enslaved others in Israel and Judea. Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt in Italy that terrified the Romans (73-71 BCE), himself enslaved captives. He opposed being enslaved, not enslaving.

This has important implications for translation. Translating doulos as “slave” agrees with the ancients’ assumptions about slavery. But they were wrong. Slavery is not natural. So, a sensitive translation would vary by context, translating doulos as “slave” and “enslaved,” encouraging a modern reader to struggle with assumptions.

In the prescript to the Letter to Romans, Paul introduces himself as the sender. Here are three translations of that prescript (Rm 1:1)

Paul a servant of Jesus Christ
Paul a slave of Jesus Anointed
Paul enslaved by Jesus Anointed

While each of these translations are technically correct, their semantic import is very different and provokes different hermeneutical responses.

Master

The Greek kurios can denote a god, YHWH in LXX, an emperor, a master of slaves, a husband. A kurios is a male who rules over others. It is a patriarchal and authoritarian word. Latins translated kurios as dominus, the head of a domus, a house. Dominus has the same semantic range as kurios. The “Dom” in Dom Corleone is an abbreviation of dominus. And Dom Corleone directly descends from the Roman Emperor as Dominus. The Mafia is a small-scale Roman Empire.

English translated kurios and dominus as “lord,” an old English word denoting “The male head of a household; a man who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves” (OED). Lord and master are synonyms. Lord, from earliest times, was also an honorific title. Master derives from the Latin magister, a master. Lord has a sense of honor missing from master. One can argue that lord as an honorific title better translates kurios when applied to God or Jesus or the emperor, and master in the case of masters and slaves. But I think there is another issue that tells against translating kurios as “lord” in favor of “master.”

Aristotle in his Politics analyzes the family as a society’s basic unit and model for the state. “The primary and smallest parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children” (Politics I.II.1, 1253b, 5). For Aristotle, the primary model for a family is master and slave, not husband and wife. The husband is the master, the wife a slave. As he argues, “The household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen.”

Aristotle employs the master/slave model for understanding and organizing society at all levels, from the family to the empire. The husband is the wife’s master, and the father is his children’s master. The emperor is the master of his subjects. The master/slave model is so central and ubiquitous that people find it difficult to question or to think outside of it.

Thinking within Slavery

A group of Jesus parables use the master/enslaved model. Stereotypes are followed. Masters are harsh, and some slaves are hardworking, while others are conniving. But there is no hint of criticism of slavery. The master/enslaved model functions as a metaphor of the empire of God. In the later and traditional allegorical interpretation of the parables, the master stands in for God. The tradition has no problem envisioning God as a slave master and believers as slaves.

The Q-Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas preserve a saying about masters and slaves. Multiple attestations argue for its authenticity. “No one can be a slave for two masters. Because he will hate one and love the other, or cling to one and despise the other. For you cannot be a slave for God and wealth” (Q 16:13, my translation). Thomas 47 reads: “Jesus said: ‘It is impossible for a man to mount two horses and to stretch two bows, and it impossible for a slave to serve two masters, otherwise he will honor the one and offend the other.’”

This saying summarizes the enslaved’s dilemma. The enslaved is the master’s property and has no free will. The Q-Gospel saying speaks of being enslaved to God and sees that as perfectly describing a believer’s relation to God. A believer is God’s slave, enslaved by God. The description of the relation between master and enslaved falls completely within Aristotle’s description.

When Jesus’ followers contest for leadership roles, a saying attributed to Jesus encourages those who want to be leaders to become instead slaves. “But whoever among you wants to become great should be your table waiter (diakonos), and whoever wants the first place should be the slave of all” (Mark 10:43–44, my translation). The saying makes a wordplay on diakonos (table waiter) and doulos (slave). Table waiting is a slave activity. This saying uses the status of the enslaved as a way of thinking about ambition among Jesus’ followers. The author of Mark’s gospel probably added a son of man saying to conclude the pericope. “For the son of man did not come to be waited on at table but to do the waiting on table and to give his life as the cost for many” (Mark 10:45, my translation). Significantly, the slave language is not directly applied to Jesus. Doulos does not fit his status as kurios.

Double-Consciousness

Jesus and his followers lived within an empire, a society, and a culture in which the master/slave model was the dominant (Latin dominus, master) organizing model. From the emperor to a father, masters ruled slaves. As Aristotle argued, this was the natural way of things. “Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.” As a result, they apparently not only did not question the model, but they used it to understand their situation. Masters think enslaving others is natural, and slaves think they should be masters. The slave is always contesting the master’s power, as many of the parables make evident. W. E. B. Du Bois and post-colonialism have examined this phenomenon under the heading of double-consciousness. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903).

Early Jesus communities experienced this double-consciousness in multiple ways. As Jews they were a conquered nation. Their “king” was a client of the Roman emperor. They were an enslaved nation. When that enslavement erupted in revolt in 68 ce, the followers of Jesus Messiah faced an acute double-consciousness. Since Rome had executed their cult hero, they were in conflict with Rome, expressed by the saying, “No one can be a slaved for two masters.” Now they had to decide where they stood on the revolt. Mark 13 attempts to work this out.

The eschatological view of the early Jesus communities turns values upside down. They stand against the values of the empire, which is expressed by “whoever wants the first place should be the slave of all.” This saying exposes the double-consciousness. They want to be first but are told to be the slave of all. Do they really? The saying’s very existence argues they did not.

The labor of the enslaved enriched the American colonies from their earliest days and slavery haunted the Constitutional Convention and ruptured the country by a civil war. Coming to terms with slavery in America has proved to be an intractable problem, even to this very day.

The traditional translation of kurios as “lord” and doulos as “servant” hide both the ancient world’s and the New Testament’s enmeshment in slavery. Jesus and his communities lived and participated in a slave culture. They employed the master/slave model as a way to think about their community life. Christians need to evaluate the impact of slavery on their religious life and language. Do we really want to address Jesus as lord and master? Are we slaves of God? What happens to Christology and theology without the master/enslaved model? Is any slave language appropriate in our religious life? What do we do with the slave language in the New Testament?

Even more, there is a reason conservative Christians and Evangelicals overwhelming support patriarchal and authoritarian leaders. The Bible at the center of their religious life supports, imbibes and imbues such values with the master/slave model. It is a major mythos in the Bible.

The various Christian churches have struggled, resisted, and raged against coming to terms with modern biblical studies. Any gain has been grudging and hard won. Jim Veitch’s Lloyd Geering: Prophet or Heretic? is an engaging study of one moment in that ongoing battle: Geering’s 1967 heresy trial in New Zealand. Although Aotearoa New Zealand is a small and at times remote country, with its own special history, yet in microcosm it offers a picture of a universal situation.

All politics are local, and so too are church situations. The Church (universal) is an abstraction. What really exists are denominations and churches. And yet, there is a universal situation based on common traditions and histories.

Galileo Galilei

The various Christian churches emerged from the late medieval period divided but strong in their individual domains. After the Second Council of the Lateran (1139) the modern configuration of the Roman Catholic Church emerged centered on the papacy, claiming for the first time papal supremacy. In the various Catholic countries, its dominance was unquestioned. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) developed a strategy centered on the papacy to counter the Protestant Reformation. Likewise, the churches of the Reformation were mostly the established churches in their respective countries. In the medieval period, theology had been the queen of the disciplines, philosophy its handmaid. The Reformation did not question this. But the rise of science, knowledge independent of the church, did.

The breakout began in earnest with the trial of Galileo Galilei in 1633 for heresy. His arguments for a heliocentric universe model were judged to be against Scripture and tradition. Scripture takes no considered position on the question, but assumes the commonsense position of its day with the earth at the center. Galileo’s real argument was with Aristotle’s understanding of perfection. Moons around Jupiter proved Aristotle wrong. The Catholic Church was consolidating its power under the new understanding of papal infallibility and after the Reformation was in no mood to deal with a challenge from upstart astronomers and mathematicians, hardly among the queen of the sciences. In one fell swoop, the Catholic Church and Christianity lost the new emerging intelligentsia.

Between Thomas Aquinas and Galileo, thinking changed. The scholastics, as well as most thinkers before them, argued deductively. The truth was revealed and from that known truth other conclusions were deduced. The model is hierarchical: the truth is on high—in the mind of God—we see only pale reflections. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas all operated with a version of this model. Galileo and scientific thinkers move from observation, gathering of the evidence, to creating a hypothesis and testing it. Students of the Bible began to bring this same scientific and hypothetical thinking to the sacred scriptures which produced new and threatening conclusions.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

Critical research on the historical Jesus began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). But the topic so alarmed him that only a few friends saw his manuscript during his lifetime. He carefully compared the four gospels and argued that since they were four independent accounts, as the tradition maintained, then someone was lying. He pointed to the apostles as the culprits. Having grown lazy in the entourage of Jesus, they invented the resurrection and that invention led to the differences.

Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing published Reimarus’ work as Fragments by an Anonymous Writer (1774–1778). Joseph Bessler in A Scandalous Jesus has shown how Reimarus’ scholarship and Lessing’s publication of it threatened the Lutheran Church, state government, and their entanglement.

Aside #1: Reimarus’ argument is foolproof. The only way around it is to argue that the gospels are not independent eyewitness accounts. Lessing was the first one to propose oral tradition as a partial solution to the problem of lying. Seeing that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts but rather that a literary relation exists between three of them (the Synoptic Problem) is the next step in dealing with Reimarus’ predicament.

David Friedrich Strauss

In 1835 a promising young German theologian, strongly influenced by Hegel, published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet in two volumes. It was a sensation and became the most important and influential study of the historical Jesus. But the outrage against David Friedrich Strauss’ work was so intense that his academic career was ruined. In 1839 he was appointed to a professorship in Zürich, but the outcry was so strong that the local government fell and he was pensioned off. Thereafter, he was never able to obtain a permanent appointment.

George Eliot published a stunning translation entitled The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined in 1846. She was twenty-seven years old and it was her first major literary work in a distinguished career.

Strauss offered a way to get beyond Reimarus’ argument that if the gospels were eyewitness accounts, someone was lying. He pioneered mythical analysis, especially of the miracles, as a third way. Strauss argued miracles were neither historical nor frauds, but an expression of early Christian faith. This argument moves towards form criticism.

Rejecting the gospels as eyewitness accounts, Strauss analyzed them as historical documents that had been shaped over time, moving towards genuine historical analysis. He also drew the distinction between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, a pivotal distinction to this day. He agreed with Reimarus that Jesus’ viewpoint was futuristic eschatology or apocalyptic, which foreshadows Albert Schweitzer. But he rejected that viewpoint as unacceptable to moderns. He favored a radical immanent eschatology. This too anticipates Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologization.

Charles Darwin

The next skirmish was Charles Darwin’s publication On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s theory of evolution not only contradicted Genesis but denied human specialness. Humans are a part of the evolutionary tree, like any other species. Nothing unique about us.

Darwin’s book was a formidable challenge, but the situation was made worse by episcopal hubris and misjudgment. Several months after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the British Association, Britain’s premier scientific society, held its annual meeting at Oxford’s University Museum. It featured a discussion of Darwin’s new book. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and a well-known speaker, challenged Thomas Henry Huxley, a proponent of Darwinism and nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog.” What exactly happened is unknown, but the gist of the meeting is clear and remembered as the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, although no actual debate occurred. Wilberforce reportedly asked Huxley through which grandparent did he claim descent from a monkey. Huxley shot back that he preferred a monkey for his ancestor to a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. Wilberforce was undone and so were the churches.

Charles Augustus Briggs

In America, Charles Augustus Briggs’s heresy trial sparked the fundamentalist reaction that continues to jolt American religion. After advanced studies in Germany where he studied higher criticism, he accepted a position at Union Theological Seminary (1891) in New York, which was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. In his inaugural lecture entitled “The Authority of Scripture,” he noted that the Bible contains errors, Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and the Westminster Confession overvalued biblical inerrancy.

The next year he was tried by the New York Presbytery for heresy. He was charged with denying biblical inerrancy, undermining the authority of Scripture, and for teaching contrary to the Westminster Confession. He was acquitted. But the following year the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church overturned the acquittal. Briggs afterward was ordained an episcopal priest and Union Theological Seminary severed its connection with the Presbyterian Church.

This was the first major confrontation between biblical literalism and modern critical biblical scholarship. Out of this clash came fundamentalism and modernism, each driving American Protestantism in opposing directions. Fundamentalism is not traditional Christianity, as it often claims, but a reaction to modernism.

If the first great schism in 1054 was between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, the second schism was the Reformation, and the third was the fundamentalist reaction to modernism. It has fractured Christianity as much as the first two schisms. The first two schisms have remained permanent. Will that be the fate of the third great schism?

Aside #2: If you studied Hebrew, you probably encountered the standard Biblical Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford) which appears with the abbreviation BDB for Brown, Driver, and Briggs. Briggs is Charles Augustus Briggs.

Alfred Loisy

Up once again is the Catholic Church. Following the long and influential reign of Pius IX, the author of the Syllabus of Errors (1869) who declared as anathema that the Pope should reconcile with modern progress, liberalism, and civilization, the reign of Leo XIII brought a cautious but significant opening to various aspects of modernity. This led a group of scholars in France, England, and Italy to explore various avenues in theology, church history, and biblical studies. The group was identified as Modernists because they sought to reconcile the ancient faith with modern thought. A leader of this group was Alfred Loisy, a Catholic priest who taught at the Catholic Institute of Paris. He had received his doctorate from the University of Paris and was current on the latest happenings in Germany.

When Adolf von Harnack published his best seller Das Wesen des Christentums (1900, in English, What is Christianity [1902]), Loisy responded with his own best seller Evangile et l’Eglise (1903, in English, The Gospel and Church [1903]). For Harnack, one of the great German historians, the historian separated the historical irrelevancies from the essence, the Geist, of a period, event, or person. He employed the analogy of separating the kernel from the husk. For him that kernel or essence of the Gospel was “God the Father and infinite value of the human soul.”

Loisy rejected this method. There was no essence. After peeling away the husk, nothing was left. Loisy preferred the analogy of a seed and tree. His metaphor was evolution. Loisy traced historical development. He agreed with Harnack that the Kingdom of God stood at the center of Jesus’ teaching. But that for him was not an essence, but a seed. As his famous aphorism proclaims, “Jesus announced the Kingdom, and what came was the Church.” That was not for him a cynical remark, as often interpreted, but a statement of historical development.

Loisy viewed himself as writing a historical apology for the development of the church and why it should change because it had always been changing. But the church was not buying it. Pope Pius X issued the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), condemning Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.” The next year, Loisy was excommunicated. He was named a professor at the Collège de France, the position formerly held by Ernest Renan.

Lloyd Geering

Lloyd Geering’s story in outline is remarkably similar, but varying in detail, to those we have reviewed. The plot’s the same, the story changes. His heresy trial was one of the most important events in New Zealand religious history and caught the attention of the whole nation.

As an undergraduate at the University of Otago, New Zealand, Geering majored in mathematics and physics, staying on for a masters. This scientific training influenced his intellectual outlook for the rest of his life. He received his theological training at Knox Hall at the same university and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He then pursued a PhD in Old Testament, again at the University of Otago. Although his education was at one university, that university was not provincial but up to date with the latest critical scholarship. Geering then took up a position as professor of the Old Testament at Knox Theological Hall in 1960 where students for the Presbyterian ministry were trained. He eventually became principal of Knox Theological Hall in 1963. This was an important position in Presbyterial circles in New Zealand.

In 1966 in a series of articles in Outlook, the Presbyterian Church’s magazine, Geering suggested that Jesus had not risen physically from the dead; to understand the resurrection in this way was to misread the gospels. He also argued that humans do not have an immortal soul. Finally, he maintained that to read the Bible literally was wrong; it should be read in its historical context.

He was charged by a lay member and a minister with doctrinal error and “disturbing the peace and unity of the church.” The Presbyterian Church’s General Assembly debated the charges. The interest was so high that the proceedings were televised, fostering much discussion within and without the church. After extensive debate, the Assembly declared that no doctrinal error had been proven. This is too simple a summary. Veitch has the details. The Assembly took no action against Geering.

But the televised trial was not the end. The next year concerns about Geering were raised in the General Assembly. Here the story becomes almost too labyrinthine to follow, although Veitch does his best to untangle the threads. Geering acted first. He accepted a position at Victoria University of Wellington, resigned from his position with the Knox Theological Hall, but remained a minister of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. He remained an important public intellectual in New Zealand and a force in the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand.

As in Briggs case in the United States, following Geering’s trial, the Presbyterians in New Zealand began to split into literalist and progressive camps. The breach has not been healed.

Geering’s story is of interest not only to those in New Zealand, but to all those interested in the ongoing efforts of Christians to come to terms with modern ways of thinking. There is no evidence that the conflict is abating. Reactionary Christianity, both in its fundamentalist and Catholic forms, is at the heart of the MAGA movement, although Trump is neither fundamentalist nor Catholic. Geering’s story indicates that a viable form of Christianity can emerge from an engagement with modern critical thought in all its forms. Not only a viable form but an invigorated form. He remains a Presbyterian minister in good standing.

The real tension is between the future and the past. Where does the truth lie? Is theology settled or yet to be discovered? Do we stand in a tradition, frozen in place? Such a place is ahistorical. The church and churches, Christianity and Christianities have always been changing, shifting, evolving, renewing themselves. History demonstrates it over and over again, despite dogma’s claim to be unchanging. Nothing is unchanging. Fundamentalism, conservatism, and traditionalism are modern positions, reactionary movements against modern scientific ways of thinking. They are not ancient positions as they claim. The only way to live in the past is to destroy the future.

Veitch’s book is important because it preserves the details for future generations to examine. Veitch has scrutinized this episode in granular detail like no previous similar episode has been examined. He knows the principles and has their archives or access to them. He understands the context in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the Presbyterian Church in Aotearoa New Zealand. He lays out the theological ferment of the 1960s. He makes available all the details. He tells the story in a thorough way in exhaustive detail. He has a point of view, forcibly presented. But, and this is an important, “but” he has gathered and presented the evidence in such a way that future generations of scholars will be able to re-examine the evidence in their own ways. A marvelous accomplishment!

As to the title, Heretic or Prophet?, is there a difference?

Works Consulted

Bessler, Joseph A. A Scandalous Jesus: How Three Historic Quests Changed Theology for the Better. Polebridge Press, 2013.

Loisy, Alfred. The Gospel and the Church. Edited by Bernard Brandon Scott. Translated by Christopher Home. Fortress Press, 1976.

Harnack, Adolf von. What Is Christianity? Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders. Harper Torchbooks, 1900.

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. Reimarus: Fragments. Translated by Charles H. Talbert. Fortress Press, 1970. (Lives of Jesus series)

Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Translated by George Eliot. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. Fortress Press, 1972.