Chapter 2

THE JESUS MOVEMENTS

THE Q COMMUNITY

urton L. Mack believes that the simple fact of the Q Document should revolutionize our picture of the early Jesus movement. Why? The people who compiled the Q Document cannot properly be called "Christians" since Q never refers to Jesus by the title "Christ." Nor is there a word about an atoning death. Jesus' death is at most implied in the saying about taking up one's cross, joining Jesus on Death Row (Matt. 10:38; Luke 14:27). The usual inference is that the disciple is following a Jesus who is carrying his own cross, but the saying does not actually say so. And perhaps the inference is not necessary, since the image might possibly be akin to that in 2 Cor. 2:14, where the image is that of Jesus as a triumphant Roman general (!) leading a parade of captured rebels to their execution: living trophies of war. Those who follow Jesus are bearing crosses, but he is not!

And there is not a word in Q about the resurrection, either. This is not exactly Christianity as we think of it. The compilers of Q seem to have regarded Jesus much as several Greek philosophical schools viewed Socrates, as a martyred sage who set the pattern for fearless preaching of the truth. Lucian of Samosata (a second-century C.E. Syrian philosopher and humorist) wrote a lampoon of one Proteus Peregrinus (The Passing of Peregrinus) who he said had first been a Cynic, then a Christian, apparently a smooth transition. In this context Lucian calls Jesus the crucified sophist."

Jesus is said to have lived in Galilee, a marginally Jewish territory which had been heavily Hellenized. Nazareth was in the middle of a dozen Greek cities. If Jesus had not been familiar with Greek popular philosophy, Mack, Downing, Crossan, and others reason, it would be a surprise.' We know of three Cynic apostles (wandering soapbox preachers) who lived in nearby Gadara: Menippus (first half of the third century B.C.E.), Meleager (first half of the first century B.C.E.), and Oenomaus (early second century C.E.), enough to establish the presence of a long-standing Cynic tradition in the region. Thus it should come as no surprise when we compare the Q sayings with the proverbs and pronouncements of the Cynics and discover striking parallels between them. Many of the sayings from both sources advise us to throw off the burdens of social respectability, family entanglements, and soul-killing mundane work. Do the birds and flowers bother with such trifles? Aren't you supposed to be smarter than them? Well, then, what are you waiting for?

Jesus is depicted in the gospels as a wanderer with no place to rest his head (Matt. 8:20/Luke 9:58). Perhaps this was the way the historical Jesus lived, perhaps not. But this is the way certain of his latter-day followers lived.2 Did they imitate Jesus, who himself was like the Cynic itinerants? Or did they get the idea directly from the Cynics themselves, and then reimagine Jesus in their own image? It wouldn't be the first time, but who knows? The Cynics wandered the roads with only a bare minimum: a cloak, a bag, a staff, precisely the list presupposed in the Mission Charge texts (Matt. 10:5-15; Mark 6:7-11; Luke 9:1-5) which stem from this group.; Cynic and Christian itinerants both claimed that God had sent them to demonstrate to others the freedom of living under the spartan freedom of the kingdom of God ("the government of Zeus"). They aimed cynical barbs at traditional religion (like Mark 7:18-19; why bother with food-purity laws when it's all going to end up in the toilet anyway?). But they also blessed those who maltreated them.

They were the wandering "brethren" or "apostles" of Matthew's gospel, the Johannine Epistles, and the Didache (a late-first/early-second-century teaching manual attributed to the Twelve). Gerd Theissen' pointed out the obvious: If there hadn't been a group of Jesus people who actually lived out all those uncomfortable sayings about giving away possessions, turning the other cheek, leaving your home and family-how would those sayings ever have survived? What Christian does not squirm hearing them? Why didn't people let them get lost to history when they still had the chance, before there was a Bible to preserve them in? Because somebody wasn't afraid to put them into effect. To repeat such sayings would even be a way of boasting of one's own credentials.

Some people were pretty impressed with their teachings, and with their apostolic lifestyle. Others were not. Theissen5 surmised that Paul had to square off against such "superapostles" in Corinth. They had (unverifiable) miracle stories and tales of visions and heavenly ascensions to share with the credulous. Dieter Georgib suggested that the "letters of recommendation" Paul derides (2 Cor. 3:1-2) were growing resumes of miracles they allegedly performed. If, as Theissen says, Paul's opponents in Corinth were some of the itinerant prophet/apostles from whose circles the Q collection came, we can make a very interesting connection. A moment ago I said how the very preaching of the radical sayings of Jesus would have underlined the radical self-denial of the itinerants themselves. They were, in effect, aggrandizing themselves even as they preached self-denial. It could have been only a small step from this to claiming full-fledged miracles (done in the last village back). That is what the superapostles did. And this means that the aretalogy form may have developed later from the same group, the itinerant apostles, as the sayings collections.

Of course, I am implying that the first miracle lists starred not Jesus but the itinerant apostles themselves! This is by no means far-fetched. Take a look at the many Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, some of which may well be earlier than the canonical Acts. In the Acts of Paul, of John, and of Thomas, the apostles are practically Christs in their own right, with their own miracles, their own martyrdoms, and even their own resurrections and empty tombs! And think of 1 Cor. 1:12, where Cephas, Paul, and Apollos are esteemed by some as full rivals to Christ himself! Once Jesus himself became the subject of an aretalogy like theirs, it would certainly be natural for the communities who supported the itinerant apostles, who memorized their (Q) sayings and their aretalogies, to combine the two, attributing examples of both to Jesus.

What I am trying to do here is to supply a few more connecting links between the pregospel forms (and their community origins) and the canonical gospels descended from them. Obviously, I think there are more connections to be made than scholars have made so far. Here is a matter I think Mack skirts: We can easily imagine that there would have been loose-knit guilds of wandering Jesus-Cynics (Theissen has described them convincingly), but Mack seems to want to reject this picture. Though emphatically arguing for the Cynic character of the Q sayings, at least those in the hypothetical earliest stratum, or earliest version, of the Q collection, he does not see them as stemming from a group of wandering preachers. He suggests instead that there were only settled communities of people who tried to live out a countercultural "social experiment." Hippie communes? Oneida? Most critical scholars don't even think the Jerusalem church, as shown in the opening chapters of Acts, really lived communally. More likely, Luke is trying to create a "myth of innocence" about a golden age of what Marx would later call "primitive communism." In other words, a myth of the "early Church" to use to scold later generations with.'

I follow Stevan L. Davies" in thinking that no settled communities could possibly have organized themselves on the principles of Q insofar as these required the renunciation of family, home, and property. Such sayings are fine for lone wolves and loose cannons-like the Cynic and Jesus movement itinerants. They are like hoboes sitting around the campfire in a train yard: a fellowship, not a community. Davies sees that there would have been communities of people who would gladly offer food and shelter to such itinerant holy men and listen to their teaching with reverence. But, like modern churchgoers, when they heard talk of celibacy, homeless wandering, and voluntary poverty, they must have silently tuned out. The best comparison would be the two-track salvation system of Buddhism. The monks alone have really embarked on the Eightfold Path to Nirvana. Life in the workaday world is too distracting for anyone but a monk to pursue enlightenment. But the laity can, by supplying the needs of the monks, gain enough merit to ensure a better reincarnation next time around (not exactly salvation, but not bad).

We see the same sort of fund-raising theology in Mark 9:41 and Matt. 10:41-42, where we are told that anyone who helps a prophet will receive a prophet's reward. Anyone who quails at the prospect of "letting goods and kindred go, this mortal life also" might jump at the chance of buying into the kingdom the easy way by offering a cup of cold water to one of the Jesus Bodhisattvas. That's all the "Q communities" had to do. And who do you think the itinerants had in mind when they exhorted their hearers to cash in possessions and give the proceeds to "the poor"? In case anyone in the congregation missed the point and started thinking of poor Lazarus in the gutter outside, he might be brought up short with another inspired saying: "The poor you always have with you. You can help them whenever the mood strikes you. But you will not always have me" (Mark 14:7). And let's not waste the ointment, shall we? The three hundred denarii would come in a lot more handy, to tell you the truth.

We know abuses like this occurred; the Didache warns congregations not to allow one of these freeloader prophets to hang around over half a week without getting a job. People began to grow more suspicious of these wildcard prophets. As the congregations became more institutionalized and bishops began to emerge, they were able to squeeze the old-time itinerants out. We have already seen Paul trying to convince the Corinthians to sever ties with the medicine-show apostles. 2 John 10 says to slam the door on them, too, though 3 John 10, apparently written by someone on the other side of the door, says not to. Matt. 25:31-46 warns readers not to neglect the needs of these gospel vagrants, the little brothers of the Son of Man. Similarly, the Didache warns about wandering prophets who tire of their vagabond existence and wish to settle down in the community: And if he wishes to settle among you and has a trade, let him work for his bread.... But if he will not do so, he is trading on Christ; beware of such" (12:3, 5).

When Mack (with Theissen, Horsley, and others) refers to "the Jesus movement," preferring it to the anachronistic term "Christianity," I can never help thinking of the Jesus movement of the 1970s in America, a kind of fundamentalist neoprimitivism that attracted many disillusioned counterculture dropouts as well as suburban church teenagers. It is interesting to observe how some of the problems of the first-century Jesus movement resurfaced in its twentieth-century counterpart. The rude and intimidating itinerants were reborn in the Children of God movement of Moses David (a.k.a. Dave Berg). "Several days a week they would witness on the beach; then on Sunday, often as many as fifty of them would invade local churches, disrupt the services, read passages from the Book of Jeremiah predicting the doom of a nation and damn the shocked congregation and minister as hypocrites."9 As for those who "trade on Christ," compare the modern Jesus movement's "gospel bum." "He is the person who travels around from one Christian {communal} house to another sometimes getting saved at each, but always getting a free meal and a place to sleep. 'It's not a bad life,' one young man named Rich told me, 'I just go from place to place, and if the Christians think you're saved too, they don't bug you. If one comes up and starts to lay a rap on me, I just pick up a Bible or close my eyes to pray. Sometimes I even talk in tongues, and they really think that's heavy."''° These modern analogies, it seems to me, go a long way to put the meat on the theoretical bones of the historical reconstructions of Theissen and others. Their Q itinerants ring true, as does their pattern of collision with the emerging authorities of settled Christian communities.

I believe we can find in this conflict the implicit point of the story of Peter's confession in Mark 8:27-29, a story Mark himself created." Jesus asks what the common people think of him. And the answers are wrong. What are those wrong answers? They all boil down to the notion that Jesus was a wandering prophet, a man with no possessions or home, like the Cynics, Elijah, or John the Baptist. But not for Mark, who refers to Jesus' "home" (Mark 2:15; 3:19b). Mark had no way of knowing what people thought of Jesus in Jesus' day; his story is not a historical report of a conversation between Jesus and Peter. But he did know that in his own day some made Jesus an itinerant prophet like the Cynics, and he didn't much like it. He has Jesus condemn it. We can even locate this hotbed of christological error: Caesarea Philippi, one of those Hellenized cities. Otherwise, why should Mark set the episode there? It is a lot like the letters of Jesus aimed at the seven churches of Asia Minor in the Book of Revelation (chapters 2-3). Jesus is made to condemn heretical goings-on in the writer's own time.

In Thomas' version (saying 13), the false estimates of Jesus are even more interesting. Jesus spurns the opinion of those self-styled believers who consider him "a wise philosopher." Bingo! A wandering Cynic. (Thomas also has Jesus reject the idea, widely held by many early Christians, that he was an angel in human form.)

So we can measure a growing tide of opposition directed to the Q itinerants. Such rejection is anticipated in the Markan Mission Charge (Mark 6:7-11; Matt. 10:5-15; Luke 10:10-12): "If any village will not receive you, shake the dust off your feet as a witness against them. I tell you, it will go easier for Sodom and Gomorrah on judgment Day than for that place!" The Spirit would supply retorts to which no comeback line could be found (Luke 21:14-15). One of these was the threatening appeal to the Son of Man: "Anyone in this generation of sinners and adulterers who is too proud to heed me and my words, well, the Son of Man won't be too proud of him when he comes in judgment! Just wait!" (Mark 8:38). The Son of Man would wipe the tear from every eye (Rev. 7:17)-and the smirk from every face! Q specialists have spotted a whole second layer of Q sayings which really pour on this sort of angry invective." That would seem to denote that a turning point had been reached: The itinerants were no longer popular, carried no more clout. Alms were drying up, doors being slammed in their faces as if they were Jehovah's Witnesses, which, come to think of it, they were!

THE PILLAR SAINTS AND THE HEIRS OF JESUS

Both of these groups seem to have been quite prominent in the early Jewish Jesus movement (they would not have used the term "Christianity"), and both of the leadership groups included James the just, the brother of Jesus. But Mack is not quite sure of the difference between the two. I think we are talking about the same group before and after 70 C.E., after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans and the hijra (flight) of the Jerusalem Jesus community to the city of Pella. While still headquartered in Jerusalem, chosen because of its biblical reputation as the Holy City of Zion, the leadership was known as the Pillars (Gal. 2:9), the community as "the saints of Jerusalem" (Rom. 15:31) or "the Poor" (Gal. 2:10-a name maintained by the Ebionite sect, a later survival of this group). The "Pillars," a term used in Islam for the five foundational religious practices, was used in Jerusalem for the three leaders James the Just, Simon Peter/Cephas, and John, son of Zebedee.

In Mark's gospel, the pair James and John are given the title Boanerges, which Mark tries to dope out as meaning "sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17), which, however, it does not seem to mean. John Allegro (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross) suggested that the title derives from an old Sumerian name for Castor and Pollux, the heavenly twins, and that it means "upholders of the vault of heaven."13 Anthony T. Hanson sees an allusion to Boaz and Jachin, the mighty pillars in Solomon's temple (1 Kings 7:21), symbolizing the pillars that supported the firmament (Job 9:6).'" Cephas or Peter, "the Rock," would refer to the great foundation stone of the world, which scribal lore located beneath the temple. So to be called the Pillars indicated quite an exalted status. We can see the same sort of godlike veneration reflected in Thomas, saying 12, "The disciples said to him, We know that you will leave us. To whom shall we go?' Jesus said to them, 'Wherever you come from, you are to go to James the Righteous for whose sake heaven and earth were created.' " ("Wherever you come from" refers to the obligation of missionary apostles to check in with a report to James in Jerusalem, another measure of his importance.)

The three Pillars seem to have been an earlier authority structure, or else a higher one, than that of the Twelve. The Twelve are never mentioned in the gospels outside redactional narrative, rewritten sayings (Matt. 19:28. cf., Luke 22:30), editorial comments, or later fabricated sayings (John 6:70; Mark 14:12-not in Matthew or Luke at this point). The three figures James, John, and Peter, by contrast, are mentioned as a group or individually several times. The trouble is that the James mentioned as one of the disciples is James the son of Zebedee, brother of John. This James is said in Acts 12:1-2 to have been executed early on by Herod Agrippa I. Did James the just take his place? Possibly, but there is some confusion over the fates of both of the brothers Boanerges. Papias, a bishop writing in about 150 C.E., said the two were martyred at the same time, in fulfillment of the prediction in Mark 10:39. Since other traditions have John live on for several decades (apparently to connect him with the very late Gospel of John), scholars have rejected Papias' tradition. But how do we know Acts' report of James' death (Acts 12:2) and the tradition of John living to a ripe old age in Ephesus were not legendary? Perhaps distinguishing "James, son of Zebedee" from "James the just" was an attempt to create two characters out of one, so as to make all the traditions sound right. John had been split into two characters ("John the Elder" and "John, son of Zebedee") in order to preserve "John" as author of both the Revelation on the one hand and the "Johannine" gospel and epistles on the other. So maybe Mark thought of the James who belonged to the inner circle of Jesus as being one of the three Pillars. Roman Catholic scholars have usually identified the two.

As for the Heirs, these were the royal household of Jesus (and James), at least as they were seen in retrospect by the Jesus group descended from them. James the just had probably always owed his prominence to the accident of his birth, functioning as the caliph, the successor of his famous brother, just as Ali, cousin and adopted son of the Prophet Muhammad, served as caliph of the Muslim community. James shared the mantle of Jesus with John and Peter as Primus Inter Pares (first among equals) as a sort of compromise with these two others who had been close associates of Jesus during his ministry and whose claims to leadership were not to be easily set aside. But after the fall of Jerusalem and the death of Peter some ten years earlier (or so tradition tells us), the only authority claim that still commanded any credibility was that of James, or rather the other surviving brothers of James and Jesus, since James, too, had been martyred. As the younger Hasmonean brothers took over leadership when Judas or Simon would fall in battle, and the descendants of Judas of Galilee took turns leading the revolution in succeeding decades, so did the brothers of Jesus and James take their turn at the helm. Simeon succeeded James. Collectively they were known as the Heirs. The desultory references to the mother and brothers of Jesus in the gospels (Mark 3:20-21, 31-35; John 7:1-7) must originally have been polemical shots aimed at this faction by rival factions who supported other apostolic leaders.

All Mack is sure of is that for the community of the Heirs and/or the Pillars, Jesus was remembered as their founder, that they kept the Jewish Law, and that they preached a gospel quite different from that associated with the name of Paul, whom they deemed a false prophet. Mack rightly suspects that the death of Jesus meant little more to them than it had meant to the Q community (and the itinerants). First, let us suppose that they at least knew of the death of Jesus. Jesus as their Messiah would have been more like Menachem Mendel Schneerson is to Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews today. My guess is that, like the partisans of Rabbi Schneerson, the community of the Pillars/Heirs would have located the resurrection of their Messiah not in the recent past but rather in the near future. Jesus would shortly rise as the beginning (the "first fruits," 1 Cor. 15:20-23) of the resurrection harvest; in other words, the beginning of the process, not some early anticipation of the resurrection happening years or decades or centuries in advance of it!

C. H. Dodd" once noted a set of interesting parallels between a number of New Testament passages dealing with Jesus' resurrection on the one hand and his second advent on the other, implying perhaps that the early Christians had not at first differentiated very clearly between the two. For instance, we find the motif of "seeing" Jesus in a climactic sense applied both to the resurrection appearances ("There you will see him," Mark 16:7, c.f., 1 Cor. 15:3-11) and to the Second Coming ("Every eye will see him," Rev. 1:7). Similarly, the motif of a reunion in which the vindicated Christ will eat and drink with his followers-after the resurrection (Acts 1:4 RSV;10:41) or at the Second Coming (Mark 15:25; Rev. 3:20; 19:9). Likewise the theme of the gathering together of Christ's elect: in the church (Matt. 18:20; 1 Cor. 5:4) or at the eschaton (Mark 13:27; 2 Thess. 2:1). Again, the royal investiture of Christ with universal dominion and power, derived from Daniel 7, is associated now with the resurrection (Matt. 28:16-18; Phil. 2:6-11), now with the Parousia (Matt. 25:31; Rev. 11:15). Dodd thought that these parallels implied an early stage when Jesus' vindication after death was spoken of in general terms that were interpreted variously as referring to a return to earthly life shortly after death and to a return to the earth from heavenly concealment, leading an angelic army in his train. In time, he reasons, each inter pretation sharpened or produced various sayings, like the ones cited here, that crystallized and specified the manner of Jesus' return one way or the other.

Dodd tactfully refrained from exploring the revolutionary implications of his suggestion, but nothing forbids us. It seems to me that for such an ambiguity as he describes even to have been possible, the early believers must not have thought the resurrection of Jesus had already happened! Cerinthus, a Jewish-Christian Gnostic of the late first century, is said to have believed that Jesus' resurrection lay yet in the future. I would consider him no innovator, but a stubborn traditionalist. It is hard to see how such a view could ever have occurred to him in the first place if the prior and universal belief had been that Jesus had long ago risen from the dead.

William Wredet6 demonstrated how Jesus was originally believed to have become the Messiah only upon his resurrection. Such an understanding is called "Adoptionism," and it certainly seems to be present here and there in the New Testament. For instance, Rom. 1:3-4, which seems to be a quotation from an earlier hymn or creed, says that Jesus had already been positioned for Messiahship, as he was "Son of David according to the flesh" but then was "declared Son of God by an act of power by the resurrection of the dead." Similarly, Acts 2:36 has Peter say to the Pentecostal crowds, "Let all Israel know for sure that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." The logic is clearly that Jesus' installation as Messiah and Lord followed, ironically, the nation's repudiation of him. Again, in Acts 13:33, Paul is shown saying, "He raised up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, 'You are my son; today I have begotten you.' " Christian faith so closely associated Jesus' resurrection with his inauguration as messianic "son" that Acts 13:33 takes a prediction of the one as being fulfilled in the other.

John A. T. Robinson showed there is reason to believe that an even earlier view was that the Risen Jesus was still not the Messiah but would have to wait to receive the title at his Second Coming, when he would do the work of the Messiah, defeating the powers of evil, as described in the Book of Revelation. Robinson pointed to still another tantalizing fragment in Acts, this time Acts 3:19-21, "Repent, therefore, and return, that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you, whom the heavens must hold until the period of restoration of all things which God spoke about by the mouth of his holy prophets from ancient time.""

In either case, the point is that early Christians would have at first expected the second coming of Jesus-his first coming as the Messiah-in the near future. But time went by and he never showed up. Eventually they decided he must already have been the Messiah, but he must have kept it a secret. That's why pretty much nobody knew about it till the Resurrection, and, in turn, that's why some assumed he had become Messiah only as of the resurrection. This scenario, though criticized by many scholars (I suspect mainly because of its disturbing implications for traditional dogma), still seems pretty cogent. But the unseen implication of it is that, since resurrection and Messiahship go together as two sides of the same coin, if Jesus' future Messiahship was pushed from the near future back into the recent past, so was his resurrection. This explains why all the resurrection narratives depict Jesus appearing only to small groups of disciples in private, and why Mark has the women at the tomb say nothing about it to anyone. In other words, part of the messianic secret was the secret that Jesus had already risen from the dead, but the news was slow in leaking out: "You mean he did rise from the dead and we just didn't know it? Yeah ... that's the ticket!"

Why does this make enough difference for me to be spending so much ink on the matter? Because one of Burton Mack's most important suggestions is that the resurrection gospel was a myth that fit the interests of some early Jesus groups but not others. It was the product of one faction of early Christianity, not the foundation of any sort of Christianity at all. Mack says that even critical scholars have been too long enchanted by the myth of the "Big Bang" model of Christian origins: Jesus rose from the dead (or at least the disciples experienced such a vision), and Christianity began to evolve in its various forms from that point. But this is what we must deconstruct. And I have been trying to explain how the resurrection doctrine may have resulted from a gradual process of rethinking on the part of a single faction of the Jesus movement. The Jesus movement was already on the scene in another form, several other forms. And not only were those forms not resurrection-centered; they may not even have been all that Jesus-centered.

But what if even this faction did not at first take for granted the death of Jesus? This is a hard question even to ask, because we are so used to thinking of the crucifixion as the necessary prelude to the beginning of Christianity. What else could a Jesus community have supposed? Let us remind ourselves of what else one particular Jesus community of no less than one billion members today supposes. Islam inherited from Christian converts in the seventh century C.E., who brought their own accustomed belief with them, the idea that Jesus had not even gone to the cross but had instead escaped and been whisked away to safety by God. These Arabian Christians must have cherished the belief for centuries; the long arm of Constantinian orthodoxy was not quite long enough to touch them out in the desert.

Muslims believe Jesus dwells in Heaven, awaiting his Second Coming, at which time he will destroy Dejjal, the Antichrist, with the breath of his mouth. But he has neither died nor risen, but only been "occulted," hidden away in safety by God until then. This is a familiar legendary motif, told in one form or another of King Arthur, Barbarossa, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and Constans, the orthodox heir of Constantine, deposed by his evil Arian brother Constantius. God would send Constans back to earth in the role of the Emperor of the Last Days." And Shi'ite Muslims came to believe the same thing of their Imams, the inspired descendants of Ali and Muhammad. Here we touch on history, not just legend. The Shi'ites were a heterodox minority in Islam, and often persecuted. They were governed by the guidance of the current descendant of Ali, the Imam (teacher). The Imam would have been a constant target of the Sunni Muslim authorities; thus he reigned from concealment, his whereabouts unknown even to the Shi'ite faithful. He would communicate with them through a chosen representative, a messenger called the Bab, or the Gate, that is, to the hidden Imam. For instance, it would be the Bab who communicated the passing of each Imam, at which time the Imam's son would take over and go into hiding. When the twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn-Hasan-al-Askari, had long fallen silent, but no report of his death came, a crisis occurred. He had no son to succeed him. Had God left the community without leadership? Impossible! So they decided the only thing they could decide: God had taken Muhammad ibn-Hasan-al-Askari into supernatural occultation, from whence he would one day return, along with Jesus, at the end of the age." Until then, as usual, his revelations would arrive via the Bab, eventually a whole series of them. Now the Babs became figures of even greater power, since, in the absence of actual physical communication with secluded leaders, they took on more the role of prophets in their own right. In the nineteenth century, one Ali Muhammad proclaimed himself the Bab, then the Hidden Imam himself, returned. This was the beginning of what would come to be known as the Baha'i Faith.20 And there have been plenty of other candidates for the position in Shi'ite history. Several of these were active in India, and it is claimed of some of these, as well as of their rival Hindu messiahs and avatars, that they did not die, escaping to heavenly concealment as well. Such docetic escapees include Birsa al Chalkad (d. 1900), Saiyid Ahmad (d. 1831), and Ram Singh (d. 1888).21

So Shi'ite Muslims believe that the same sort of supernatural occultation preserved both Jesus and Muhammad ibn-Hasan-al-Askari from the persecution of their enemies. There may be an element of truth here. It may indeed be that the community of the Pillars/Heirs only knew Jesus was no longer present. In a time of persecution, he had disappeared. Confident that God could not have abandoned him to the clutches of the wicked, they concluded that he was safe in hiding (cf. Matt. 14:13; John 7:1), communicating through his brother James, his Bab. Many gospel scholars have suggested that many powerful sayings attributed to Jesus, but which cannot really go back to him, were the work of Christian charismatic prophets who spoke in his name. The "I am" statements of John's gospel (John 4:26; 6:35; 8:12; 10:14; 11:25; 15:1) would be prime examples. And one of these is "I am the door" (John 10:9). Was this one originally a dramatic declaration of aJesus-prophet in the Johannine community? Had he declared himself the Bab of Jesus? Something like this seems to be presupposed in that gospel, where the Beloved Disciple, reclining at the bosom of Jesus at the supper (John 13:23-25), reflects the Son himself, "who is in the bosom of the father" (John 1:18) and who "has made him known" (ibid.). That unnamed disciple is himself the voice of the Paraclete (John 16:7).

And now, I think, we find ourselves on the verge of solving an ancient puzzle involving James the Just. In the traditional/legendary account of James' martyrdom as related by the Jewish-Christian historian Hegesippus and quoted by Eusebius (book II, chapter 23), James was such a devout Jewish hasid that the temple authorities sought to enlist his aid in bringing the pesky Jesus-sectarians to their senses. They put him up on a high balcony and ask him, "What is the `door of Jesus'?" It becomes obvious that James' true loyalties had been unknown to them. They go wild when he replies, "Why do you ask me concerning the son of man? He sits at the right hand of the Father." The whole scene is obviously modeled on the trial scene of Jesus himself. (John 18:2 1: "Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard me." Matt. 26:64: "You say that I am, but I tell you, hereafter you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of Power.") But I wonder if this assimilation to the gospel trial scenes is not a secondary overlay, attempting to conceal an earlier meaning. Or maybe the original meaning was no longer understood.

It may well be that originally the story had James reveal that he himself was the door, the Bab, of Jesus. "Why do you ask me concerning the son of man?" might have meant, "Why do you ask me about me?" As is well known, sometimes the Hebrew/Aramaic term "son of man" (bar-enosh/bar-pasha) was a humble way of referring to oneself, like "this humble person." Once Phil Donahue asked a Hasidic Jew about a rather delicate custom: Did Hasidic Jews really have sex through a sheet with a hole cut in it? Talk show hosts may have no sense of shame, but a pious hasid does. He responded in distress, "It is an outrage to humanity!" Phil seemed to think he was denying the whole idea, saying that such a practice would be outrageous. But he was really saying, "It is an outrage for you to ask anyone (me) such a question! It's no one else's business!"

Jesus wasn't available, but James was in easy clubbing distance. Thus his martyrdom. But was he following in his brother's footsteps? Does the story presuppose Jesus had died? Who knows? Maybe Jesus was just hidden away somewhere. Maybe this is even the original denotation of James' epithet, "the Lord's brother." As the living oracle of Jesus, maybe he deserved the same title of honor as "Judas Thomas," "Judas the Twin" brother of Jesus, since he was believed to be his image on earth.

If the community of the Pillars/Heirs did believe in the death of Jesus, how would they have understood his death? Robert Eisenman22 makes a per suasive case for Jesus having been an armed, priestly Messiah-king like Menahem, scion of Judas of Galilee and leader of the Zealots. Jesus would have died fighting in (or as a result of) the raid on the temple (Mark 11:15-18). As Burton Mack points out, the story of Jesus "cleansing" the temple is either a piece of fiction, which is Mack's own option, or it is a garbled (or edited) report of an armed assault as Robert Eisler and S. G. F. Brandon maintained, because the temple area envisioned actually covered an extent of some thirty-five acres, the equivalent of thirty-four football fields! It would have contained thousands of pilgrims, innumerable livestock stalls, and money-changing booths.23 And it was crawling with armed guards! One thing that couldn't have happened is our usual picture of a lone figure busting up a church rummage sale!

But do we have any other clues about the James wing of the Jesus movement? Perhaps we have a great deal more than we had thought. Again, I refer to the work of Robert Eisenman. It is his contention that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been dated a century too early (he is by no means alone in this belief, nor is it even a new opinion). They should be seen instead as first-century C.E. works stemming from the community led by James the just, called "the Teacher of Righteousness" or "the Righteous Teacher" in the Scrolls. Not content with bare possibilities, Eisenman sets forth a series of remarkable links between the Scrolls and numerous James traditions inside and outside the New Testament. Further comparisons between the Scrolls, the New Testament, Hegesippus, Josephus, and the Clementine Homilies tend to implicate Paul as "the Spouter of Lies" who had betrayed the community by denying the Law within the community itself. All this sounds quite close to the depiction of Paul in Jewish-Christian writings of the second century. As anyone acquainted with the Scrolls will know, the Teacher of Righteousness is said to have been ambushed, betrayed, and done to death by a "Wicked Priest." The parallel Eisenman suggests with the plot of Ananus the High Priest to trap and kill James in Hegesippus' history is a far closer one than any suggested by those scholars who insist the ciphers of the Scrolls must by hook or by crook refer to the events of the Hasmonean kings and the Pharisees and Essenes of the first and second centuries B.C.E.

It is the absence of any mention of Jesus in the Scrolls that has made it impossible for most scholars to entertain anything like Eisenman's theory (though Jacob L. Teicher24 did suggest, in a series of articles back in 1950s, that the Scrolls community were Ebionites, one branch of the so-called Jewish Christians). But what if I am right about James' prominence as the "Door of Jesus," the Bab connecting followers to Jesus the Hidden Imam? James would soon come to eclipse Jesus in the eyes of his followers. Or, as Schonfield suggested, it would have been quite natural for Jesus' followers to have regarded him in retrospect as the anointed king who resumed David's royal line, with James as his successor as Messiah, that is, Davidic king. Jesus would have receded to the status of a Deus Absconditus, a hidden God, whereas James was a living mouthpiece of divine truth. And once he was himself martyred, his centrality was assured.

Eisenman can be understood as reopening the door for the theory of Renan and others (a very popular theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even today) that Christianity began as "an Essenism." The fourth-century heresy hunter Epiphanius of Salamis preserves these startling facts: first, that there was a pre-Christian sect called "the Nazoreans" (meaning "the Observers," of the Torah), and second, that the earliest Christians were called "Jesseans," which sounds like someone's attempt to disguise the name "Essenes" by trying to connect it with Jesse, David's father, and thus reinterpreting it as a reference to the messianic "son of David" motif. Eisenman suggests that terms like "Nazoreans," "Essenes," "Zealots," and others were all interchangeable tags for the blurry cloud of overlapping Jewish "heretics," sectarians, and "enthusiasts" in New Testament times. "Jesus the Nazorean" would have denoted "Jesus the Sectarian," "Jesus the Hasid," not "Jesus from Nazareth.""

Eisenman's theory would leave us with a creatively inchoate, unstable, and diverse "early Jewish Christianity" that was not particularly centered on Jesus. He may have been venerated equally with a gallery of saints and messiahs including John the Baptist, James the Just, Simon Magus, and Dositheus (the latter two being Samaritan gurus and miracle workers said to have been, like Jesus, disciples and self-appointed successors of John the Baptist). We may easily imagine a series of schisms occurring in this movement, dividing it along the lines of the partisans of the various patron saints: "I am of James!" "I am of the Baptist!" "I am of Jesus!" (precisely as in 1 Cor. 1:11-12, where Christ is only one among several factional totems).

Splitting off and hanging out their own shingle, the "Jesus-Shi'ites" ("partisans") would have become the basis of the various later "Jewish Christian" groups known to historians as the Ebionites, the Nazarenes, the Elchasites, even the Cerinthian Gnostics. Those who favored James the Righteous Teacher relegated Jesus to the status of James' forerunner, just as the Jesus faction subordinated the Baptist to Jesus. From the James faction came the Dead Sea Scrolls which exalt their Teacher as a new Moses, bemoan his tragic death, and look forward to his return at the end of days to even the score.

And let's not forget John the Baptist. New Testament scholars from David Friedrich Strauss onward have recognized in the gospels evidence that the sect of John continued on alongside the Jesus movement for decades. For instance, Mark preserves a story in which we learn that Jesus is well known to have discarded the pious practice of fasting, a practice shared by John the Baptist's disciples with the Pharisee sect (Mark 2:18). Luke's introduction to the Lord's Prayer depicts Jesus' disciples asking him to compose a prayer for them to repeat just as John the Baptist had composed a prayer used by his followers (Luke 11:1). One need not assume these two passages represent real events in the life of Jesus. Indeed, it seems they do not. As Bultmann pointed out, in episodes where Jesus is asked not about his own conduct but about that of his disciples, we are surely dealing with a story composed in the early Church to serve as a proof text in a debate about what the church ought to do. Likewise, since Matthew and Luke both derived the Lord's Prayer from Q but have different contexts for it, it is clear Luke's introductory scene is artificial. The historically secondary character of both these passages underlines all the more dramatically that a sect of John, attributing fasting and prayer customs to him, survived for many decades alongside Christianity, at least into the time of Mark and Luke.

Similarly, both Luke and John seem to be at pains to assure readers that John the Baptist was not himself the savior, despite the hopes of many that he might have been (Luke 3:15; John 1:6-7; 3:28-30). What could be the point of such protestations if not to rebut or win over those who held John to be the Christ, not Jesus? In the Clementine Homilies we hear a debate in which John's followers argue against Jesus and claim that John himself is the Messiah. "And behold, one of the disciples of John asserted that John was the Christ, and not Jesus: 'Inasmuch,' he said, 'as Jesus himself declared that John was greater than all men and all prophets. If therefore,' he said, 'he is greater than all men, he must without doubt be held to be greater than both Moses and Jesus himself. But if he is greater than all, he himself is the Christ' " (Recognitions 1.60.1)26 There survives even today an Iraqi Aramaic-speaking baptizing community called the Mandaeans (Aramaic for "Gnostics"), though their preferred self-designation is "Nazoreans"! These people still curse Jesus as a false prophet and Antichrist (see 1 Cor. 12:3). They revere the Baptist as a true prophet, but their Messiah is a heavenly savior called Enosh-Uthra, the Angel Enosh. Enosh was the first man, the primordial human, in some ancient Hebrew creation myths, though in Genesis he has been elbowed aside by the similar figure of Adam. In short, Enosh Uthra is the Son of Man. How could a sect wind up glorifying John and cursing Jesus if it is not the result of ancient sectarian strife between two factions of a movement that had previously venerated both?

There were various Simonian and Dosithean sects in antiquity, too, but they have long since perished. I am willing to bet that all were the centrifugal fragments of an original pre-Jesus Nazorean-Essene movement to which John, James, and Jesus the Nazorean had all belonged. That any of these names should have become exclusive figureheads of their own movements must be a later development. And here we have a plausible picture of a Jewish Jesus movement that had not been Jesus-centered and that did not begin with the Big Bang of Jesus' resurrection. Contrary to Bultmann's famous theory, it did not all begin with the Easter morning faith of the original disciples.

I will return to the subject of the Galilean Christianity of the Heirs after the fall of Jerusalem in chapter 4.

THE COMMUNITY OF ISRAEL

Mack seems to include this fourth Jesus movement (counting the Pillars and the Heirs of Jesus as numbers two and three), as he does the Q community, to provide some flesh and blood context in which to place another distinct group of gospel materials. Here he has in mind a particular linked series of miracle stories that occurs twice, almost side by side, in Mark. Paul Achtemeier was the first to draw attention to the puzzle." It is hard not to notice, even on a casual read-through of Mark's gospel, that he has two versions of the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes (6:34-44; 8:1-9). What begins to emerge from closer scrutiny is a more extensive pattern. In both cases we start off with a miracle on the high seas (stilling the storm in 4:35-41; walking on the water during a storm in 6:45-5 1). Next we find sets of three healing miracles. The first sequence is the story of the Gadarene demoniac (5:1-20), the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage (5:25-34), and the raising of Jairus' daughter (5:21-23, 35-43). The second, parallel sequence is comprised of the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida (8:22-26), the exorcism of the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman (7:24b-30), and the healing of the deaf-mute (7:32-37). Each chain of stories concludes with a miraculous feeding story, the feeding of the five thousand in Mark 6:34-44, and that of the four thousand in Mark 8:1-10. The thing that strikes us first is perhaps the suspicion that a single basic sequence was passed on intact by means of a process of oral transmission which eventually allowed many of the details to change and develop, until there were (at least) two versions circulating by the time Mark encountered the tradition. They were different enough that he decided not to risk leaving either set out. Like a modern fundamentalist faced with a set of biblical contradictions, Mark may have assumed similar events happened twice. At any rate, the mere fact of the doubling of the story chain is highly significant, since it allows us to gauge the kind of variation and evolution that was possible in the oral tradition.

But Achtemeier was perceptive enough to recognize that there had to be even more to it. There must have been some special significance to someone having threaded these particular miracle tales together, and for a whole series of someone elses to keep them linked in the process of repetition, since most gospel vignettes seem to have floated around one by one. The keen-eyed Achtemeier pointed out the general similarity between the twin miracle sequences he had discovered and the Signs Source, the numbered series of seven miracles used by John as the narrative skeleton of his gospel." Robert Fortna, leading expert on the Signs Source, followed by Mack, went a bit further and suggested that the Signs Source was yet a third, somewhat reshuffled and augmented version of the same miracle sequence Achtemeier found twice in Mark. As this is hardly evident at first sight, let me briefly explain the equivalencies.

Right off the bat, it is obvious that John shares the sea miracle and the feeding of the multitude with Mark. He has 5,000 fed in common with Mark's first miracle sequence (John 6:10), while in John the sea miracle is walking on the water (6:19) as in Mark's second sequence rather than stilling the storm as in Mark's first. There are no exorcisms in John to match those of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the Gadarene demoniac, but John's story of Jesus' remote-control healing of the royal official's son (4:46-54) is a tradition-variant of Q's story of Jesus' healing at a distance of the Roman centurion's son (Matt. 8:5-13/Luke 7:1-10). This tale, as Bultmann pointed out, seems in turn to be a variant version of the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman (in Mark's second sequence)! John's story of Lazarus' resurrection (chapter 11) parallels the story of Jairus' daughter from Mark's first sequence, while John's episode of the man born blind parallels Mark's blind man of Bethsaida, from his second sequence.

Burton Mack agrees with Achtemaier that the particular miracles involved seem to echo, more than most other gospel miracles, the wonders performed by Moses and Elijah (and his double, Elisha). The two sea miracles recall Moses' parting the sea (Exod. 14), while the pair of feeding miracles mirror Moses' feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna and quails (Exod. 16; Num. 11:4-15, 18-23, 31-32) and Elisha's miraculous multiplication of food in 2 Kings 4:1-7 and 4:42-44. The Gadarene demoniac episode (Mark 5:1-20), with its sending of a herd of "Gentile" swine off the cliff into the sea, symbolizes Moses' (and then Joshua's) blitzkriegs overrunning the Canaanites, as does Jesus' initial disdain for the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:27). The shamanistic healing techniques Jesus uses on Mark's blind man (Mark 8:23) and deaf-mute (Mark 7:33-34) and on John's blind man (John 9:6) recall the sympathetic magic employed by Elisha to revive the son of the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4:32-35). The raising of Jairus' daughter (Mark 5:35-42) recalls the same miracle of Elisha's (1 Kings 7:17-24). When Jesus sends the blind man to wash in the pool of Siloam in John 9:7, we think of Elisha sending Naaman the Syrian to wash away his leprosy in the Jordan in 2 Kings 5:10. The patient attention shown by Jesus to the woman with the hemorrhage (Mark 5:32-34) parallels Elijah's and Elisha's patronage of the widows of Israel and Zarephath (1 Kings 17:8-16; 2 Kings 4:1-7).

Moses and Elijah had been active in watershed periods in the history of Israel, Moses during the time of national formation, the consolidation of the Twelve Tribes, their liberation from Egypt, and their forging a covenant with God, Elijah during the decisive contest between God and Baal for the allegiance of Israel. What would it have meant to preserve a sequence of miracles recalling (or based on) those of Moses and Elijah? Mack suggests that the Jesus community behind these miracle sequences saw themselves as something of a renewed Israel and remembered Jesus as the one who called them into being as such. In his supernatural feats he was replaying the events of the Exodus as well as those of Elijah, who, despite his great wonders, was supported by only a tiny remnant of loyal worshippers of the God of Israel. Mack sees this community as a set of groups of Jews who would never have considered themselves a holy people before, and who gratefully marveled that Jesus had thought it worth gathering and tending a herd of such mangy lost sheep. Their new selfesteem struck them as no less a redemption than that of the Exodus.

I find Mack a bit unconvincing at this point. His portrait of the "Community of Israel" smacks of the liberal Protestant romanticizing of the poor. His Jesus sounds like a first-century Jesse Jackson leading the crowds of sinners and tax collectors in a chant of "I am-somebody!" There has to have been more to it than this.

The major clue is the view of Jesus presupposed in these stories, the "Christology," if you will. Namely: Jesus is pictured like a new Moses or a new Elijah, but, pointedly, not a new David. And since the miracles happen in Galilee, I think we have a good case for locating the community who cherished such a foundation saga in Galilee and Samaria, where the concept of a Davidic Messiah cut no ice at all. These were the old regions that had constituted the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And after the harsh rule of Solomon, Israelites in the north had decided they'd given the dynasty of David more than a fair chance. They served notice that the honeymoon was over, and so was the marriage (1 Kings 12:1-20). From there on in, the biblical history went on in two parallel lines, one for the Kingdom of Israel in the north, the other for the Kingdom of Judah in the south. And it was only the southerners who eagerly awaited the revival of their monarchy by a new heir to David's throne. On the contrary, upstairs in Israel, the prospect of a new Davidic king would have been bad news, not good. They had dreams of the future, too, but their eager hopes were of a different sort. They read in Deuteronomy that God would one day send a prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:15-16). They read in Malachi that God would send them Elijah again just before the great and terrible Day of the Lord (Mal. 4:5). And neither of these figures had a thing to do with the House of David. Samaritans had developed their belief in a Mosaic prophet to the point where he had become a kind of Mosaic Messiah, called the Taheb, the restorer. He is the revealer whom the Samaritan woman expects (John 4:25, 29, 42)-and whom she believes she encounters in the person of Jesus!

We can now begin to guess the identity of the mysterious "Community of Israel" required by Mack's analysis. In fact, they fill a long-vacant hole rather nicely. We have finally stumbled upon the identity of L. E. Elliott- Binns's hypothetical "Galilean Christianity."29 Elliott-Binns felt sure that the old north-south rivalries of the Old Testament would have lingered on into the period of early Christianity. There must have been a Galilean Christianity quite different from the Judean version centered in Jerusalem. But he was at a loss to sketch in any details for the simple reason that our New Testament stems from the Jerusalem group, just as our canonical Old Testament stems from the priestly scribes of Jerusalem. We can only guess what a northern, Israelite Bible might have looked like; likewise, we are left to sheer speculation about what form early Christianity may have taken in the north.

But let's not throw in the towel too quickly. After all, the northern "E" document, the Ephraimite, Elohistic Epic, was preserved among the traditions of Judah. Deuteronomy, the reform manifesto for Judean worship and society, was based on prophetic preaching originally given in the northern shrine of Shiloh, though edited to fit the southern context. In the same way, it seems no less likely that several northern Jesus traditions would have crept into southern gospels. We can spot them if we know what to look for. These chains of Moses- and Elijah-like miracles would be an important puzzle piece. Fortna repeatedly draws attention to the purpose of the compiler of the Signs Source, preserved in John 20:30-31: "Many other signs Jesus performed in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." This version of the miracle sequence was, then, supposed to convince the reader of Jesus' Messiahship-or so the redactor thought. No doubt the redactor believed in Jesus' Messiahship for other reasons and then sought to press the miracle sequence into service for evangelistic proof. But in and of themselves, it is important to note, not one of the miracles has anything particularly messianic about it! Being a miracle worker and being King Messiah have no obvious connection. Instead, as we have seen, the inherent thrust of the stories is to parallel Jesus with Moses, Elijah, and Elisha, northern and nonmes- sianic heroes. The redactor of the Signs Source version of the miracle chain may have thought his collection of miracles proved Jesus to be the Messiah, but would not most readers more naturally have concluded, with the crowds in Mark 8:28, that Jesus was Elijah returned?

Similarly, there is that otherwise baffling episode in which we listen in on Jesus refuting the southern notion that the Messiah must be a descendant of King David (Mark 12:35-37). It would make perfect sense as a bit of polemic aimed from up north in Galilee or Samaria, by Jesus people who rejected any notion of a Davidic Messiah. Mark has preserved it for us, not because he himself rejected the (Davidic) Messiahship of Jesus (he didn'tMark 10:47-48), but simply because it was a controversy story showing Jesus trouncing his opponents. Mark didn't much care what the issue under debate was, as long as he could show Jesus silencing the scribes. But in the process he has told us more than he wanted to.

Rabbinical lore records the belief, held by some Jews, that there would be a pair of Messiahs, one from the south, the Messiah son of David, and one from the north, the Messiah son of Joseph (=the leading Northern tribes, Ephraim and Manassah). Some scholars have suggested that for Jesus to be called Joseph's son in the gospels is a later misinterpretation of Jesus' title as the Galilean Messiah. Just as "Jesus the Nazorean" need not refer to having roots in Nazareth but may instead imply membership in the pious Nazorean sect (see Acts 24:5), "Jesus son of Joseph" may be a messianic title. My guess would be that, once the southern idea of Jesus as a descendant of David caught on, someone tried to reinterpret his northern messianic identity, reinterpreting the epithet "son of Joseph" by making Joseph refer to the immediate, if adoptive, father of Jesus, instead of his remote ancestor, whose prophetic dreams promised him that the sun, moon, and stars would one day bow before him (Genesis 37:9).

The Transfiguration narrative (Mark 9:2-8), which obviously compares Jesus with Moses and Elijah, not with David, would fit in here. And the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:29-37) must reflect northern sympathies, as must Thomas saying 60, about the Samaritan carrying the lamb, whereas the anti-Samaritan sentiments of Matthew's Mission Charge (10:5) must stem from Judean circles.

We also begin to take a second look at all those scenes set in Galilean synagogues where Jesus is shown disputing with the Pharisees and tying them in knots. Our archaeological evidence, as Mack notes, gives no hint of there having been synagogues in Galilee in the first century. Nor does the pious Pharisee movement seem to have existed there until after 70 C.E., when Jews were forced out of Jerusalem and headed north. Before that, the scribes had only taunts for Galilee, calling it "Galilee of the Gentiles," denying that any prophet could appear there, calling a biblical ignoramus a Galilean ("Are you from Galilee, too? Search the scriptures and you will see that no prophet is to rise in Galilee." John 7:52), calling it "Galilee, who hatest the Torah." One rabbi, having lived there for a year or so, bemoaned, upon his return, that in all the time he had sojourned there, only once did anyone so much as ask him a single question about the Torah. Not exactly Pharisee turf, then-till decades after Jesus. Likewise, the use of the term "rabbi" for scribes and teachers seems to have become current only toward the end of the first century C.E. And yet already in Mark, Jesus is called "Rabbi," and is debating with Pharisees in Galilean synagogues! What we seem to have here is an anachronistic reading back of the circumstances of religious debate in late first-century Galilee into the time of Jesus. We see the same thing all over the text of the Koran, where the stories of Noah, Abraham, and Moses look startlingly like certain episodes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad! They seem to have had to endure the same opposition from unbelievers, even the same hecklers' jibes, as the Prophet!

I suspect that the controversy stories, which seem to delight at least as much in Jesus' rhetorical prowess as in the actual legal opinions he renders, represent the defensive reaction of the "Community of Israel" against the intrusion of Pharisaic, scribal Judaism having arrived from the south in the wake of Jerusalem's destruction. For the Galilean Jesus people, and for Galilean Jews in general, the arrival of the self-appointed experts in the Law of God, with little patience for Galilean legal laxness, would have been a lot like the arrival of the haughty priestly Exiles in Jerusalem under the leadership of the high-handed Ezra and Nehemiah, who presumed to dictate to the locals and to rebuff their leaders as heretics and half-breeds. History repeated itself, only this time the holier-than-thous (as they were at least perceived) were going into exile, not coming back from it.

This would also account for the outrageously unfair portrayal of the Pharisees and their views in some gospel controversy stories, where the Pharisees are blamed for inhumane opinions attested nowhere in rabbinical writings (more about this in chapter 4). Galileans probably neither knew nor cared what the fine print of the Torah said. All they cared about was lampooning straw men, always an easy victory to win. For the record, Burton Mack would credit these controversy stories to the next group on the list, not this one, but there might very easily be a good bit of overlap, as we will shortly see.

THE SYNAGOGUE REFORM MOVEMENT

Jewish synagogues ("meeting halls") grew up in the Diaspora, i.e., in the Jewish communities scattered thickly about the Mediterranean world. It is estimated that there were twice as many Jews living outside the Holy Land as within it. They could make pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple only so often, and they needed some kind of local Jewish magnet to prevent them from becoming totally assimilated to the Hellenistic culture about them. Hellenistic Jews had already grown rusty on their Hebrew, Greek becoming their first language as new generations were born into the cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire. For them the Hebrew Bible had become a closed book, and various Greek translations, especially the Septuagint Bible (so named for the committee of seventy scholars who legend held to have translated it) were produced to meet their liturgical needs. It was a period of massive social dislocation. There were "Diaspora" communities of every imaginable Asian race and ethnicity, and, in order to maintain their unique cultural identity, most of them formed various voluntary associations, like a local Slavonic Hall or Italian-American Association or Black Student Union today. Synagogues were part of this trend, and one can expect that religious debates raged there over questions no one in the Holy Land would even have raised.

There were both ultrazealous Jews who raised high walls between themselves and outsiders, as Hasidic Jews do today, and Jewish communities which had so largely assimilated to Hellenism that they dropped literal observance of the Law altogether! Philo of Alexandria warned the latter not to carry things so far, but others blamed him for the trend, since he himself taught that the Bible was only read right when you read it as an allegory symbolizing the truths of Platonic and Stoic philosophy. Diaspora Jews in Rome and North Africa did not mind mixing their worship of the Hebrew God with that of Dionysus, Zeus, and Attis, as the designs of ancient synagogue mosaics and burial sarcophagi demonstrate.' They figured these were just different names for the same divine beings, a conveniently ecumenical attitude guaranteed not to alienate one's neighbors, and a nearly universal opinion at the time among Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and others.

Amid this great ferment, the introduction of one more pinch of theological spice, the faith of some Hellenized Jews in the prophet-sage Jesus, made waves, but not tidal waves. Just enough distance was created between Jesus Jews and other Jews to produce an agenda for intra-Jewish debate. Mack sees Jesus as something like a Hellenized Galilean Cynic sage functioning in a largely already-Hellenized context. And indeed the Book of Acts tells us there were Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) synagogues in Jerusalem itself, and that they were the setting for theological debates among fellow Jews over the teachings of Jesus and their implications for traditional Jewish practice (Acts 6:13-14). This is a striking irony: the existence of Greek-speaking synagogues in the Holy Land for the sake of Jews who had moved to the Holy Land only to find they could not "assimilate" there! They had become too Greek to fit in! Who could need a synagogue in Jerusalem itself? It sounds like having an American embassy in Washington, D.C. Hellenistic synagogues in the Holy Land were something of a "home away from one's home away from home"!

Religious change is most often occasioned by cultural change, and those who had been through the culture-shock of Jewish survival in the Diaspora would be a ready audience for new and Hellenic-leaning liberal ideas from the sophist Jesus. Mack attributes to the Hellenistic synagogues the bulk of the gospel pronouncement stories, for two reasons. On the one hand, Jesus Jews in this social context would have had occasion to debate with Pharisees and their sympathizers on points of religious law, arguing for a looser, freer view. The conservatives would have dismissed them as "seekers after smooth things." So the content of the pronouncement stories, especially the controversy stories, would have suited them. On the other hand, the form would have been natural for them, too. Mack has demonstrated how the gospel pronouncement stories fall into the same literary type as the Greek chreia, a brief introductory setting leading up to a pithy and/or humorous saying by the sage, who thus outwits his critics.

The crucial question is, who would have been prepared to tell such stories? People with a Greek education, that's who. It was a standard school exercise to compose new pronouncement stories starring a famous philosopher as a way of showing an understanding of his philosophy. "What would Socrates or Epicurus say if someone asked him thus and so?" Whether or not the pronouncement stories of the gospels actually contain authentic sayings of the historical Jesus is a different question. Even if they do, we have to ask: Who would have related those sayings in this particular form? Because the form is culture-specific. Pronouncement stories are a Hellenistic product. So the old idea that these stories were the stock-in-trade of Aramaic-speaking Jewish disciples of Jesus from the early days is ruled out-unless, of course, those disciples were semi-Hellenized Galileans who followed a Jesus who was more than a little like Diogenes, more like Meleager than Elisha.

But then, why should we not place the pronouncement stories back among the Q communities? If we divide these, as I suggested above, into settled communities of sympathizers on the one hand and the itinerant sages on the other, it all falls into place. We can imagine the sages issuing terse proverbs, aphorisms, and fortune-cookie preachments, as well as humorous diatribes. But Q contains quite a number of pronouncement stories, and if these are scholastic exercises, I wonder if we do not owe them instead to the settled communities of Q supporters. After all, where are you going to have a school for children except in a settled community of some kind? And of course this scenario would fit the very existence of a compilation of sayings and pronouncement stories like Q. The point of such wisdom collections is, after all, to preserve such valuable wisdom when it is in danger of being forgotten because such sages are no longer as common as they once were. Q would be a later fossil of the "Cynic" Jesus movement. And since the Greek chreia was a kind of thumbnail memorial of a thinker from the more or less distant past, the presence of them in Q means it must have been compiled by the later, settled adherents of the once-numerous Jesus itinerants. There is no particular reason not to identify these settled communities of latter-day readers of Q with Mack's Synagogue Reform movement. It would neatly fit the pattern of sectarian evolution: After an initial period of radical repudiation of the parent religion, the sect becomes increasingly assimilated to its worldly surroundings, and the old "worldly" considerations begin to make belated sense after all, rather as a child grows up and sees the wisdom of his parents long after the fact. And yet the sect members cannot simply surrender their old ideals, so they accommodate them. They water them down. Even so, the Q communities would eventually have given up the romantic delusion of Jesus radicalism and settled for "Christian Realism." They would have sought accommodation with the synagogues they had earlier ridiculed. Once there, they would have stood up for the liberal Judaism of the gospel pronounce ment stories, though no longer for the sectarian radicalism of the itineracy sayings.

The same thing happened with eighteenth-century Hasidism. It began as a charismatic movement that repudiated the dead letter of scripture in favor of magnetic rebbes who personally incarnated the Torah. But in time, their youthful enthusiasm having cooled a bit, they returned to the Torah scrolls and wound up becoming super-keen scholars and keepers of the Law, as witness Hasidism today. Even so, we must picture the Q communities, tired of the self-arrogating oracles of holy freeloaders, finally closing the doors to shut out the noisy fulminations on the coming vengeance of the Son of Man. Older and wiser, they sought for ways they could hold on to some basic insights garnered from the Q sages which now substituted for the tiresome Q sages themselves. With Q in hand, they reapproached the synagogue communities, keeping mum until their membership was established in good standing. Then they began to try to leaven the dough with some of the still-pungent sayings of the Jesus prophets and sages. Or perhaps their nonconforming practices aroused anxious comments from others, a "weaker brother, stronger brother" scenario (cf., Rom. 14:1-15:6) as the Q people would have no doubt viewed it. And the answers they gave, that they imagined Jesus would have given, became part of Q. As Bultmann saw long ago31 this is why in the gospels Jesus' critics protest not his own practice but that of his disciples: "Why do they do what is unlawful on the Sabbath?" (Mark 2:24). "Why do your disciples eat with hands unwashed?" (Mark 7:5). "The disciples of John and the Pharisees' disciples fast, but your disciples do not fast" (Mark 2:18).

Martin Noth noticed the same sort of thing in the Moses stories in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers: When Moses has the spotlight, why are the apparently superfluous elders of Israel, or secondary characters like Nadab and Abihu, mentioned at all? It must be because the stories were originally about them, Moses being added only later, in order to beef up the clout of the story. The telltale clue is that one pre-Moses story survives in nearly its original form. In Exod. 5:15-19, it is not Moses and his doppelganger Aaron (himself a later interpolation intended to inject priestly interests into what must at first have been solo Moses stories) who fearlessly confront Pharaoh, but rather the unnamed foremen of the Israelite slaves. Moses and Aaron are anxiously waiting out in the hall: "Well, what did he say?"32 In the same way, Bultmann surmised that the mention of the disciples' practice, when it is ostensibly Jesus who is attacked, tips us off that the original target of the legalists' wrath was not Jesus but the early Christian community who fabricated the tale.

No one would criticize a set of theoretical categories like Burton Mack's because reality may turn out to be a bit more messy. An "ideal type" such as he is proposing is intended as a sort of dictionary definition, or a set of coordinates. Mack does not claim to have definitively mapped the landscape of early Christianities. He only means to indicate the kind of thing that must have been going on in order to give rise to the literary materials we have learned to distinguish in the New Testament. Thus what I say here is not intended to refute him, only to remind us that the reality was less cut-anddried than any theoretical model makes it look. So I see a good bit of possible overlap between those groups Mack calls the Community of Israel, the Q Community, and the Synagogue Reform Movement.

NOTES

1. F. Gerald Downing, Cynics and Christian Origins (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), pp. 146-47.

2. Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 10-15.

3. It has often been objected that the Christian itinerants in view must be distinguished from Cynics because of the gospel prohibition of the very items the Cynics allowed themselves: cloak, pouch, sandals, staff. But given the general similarity, this seems absurd, a case of the old stand-by apologetics device of "the differences are greater than the similarities." In fact, it ought to be obvious that the gospel prohibitions are themselves nitpicking attempts to distinguish Christian itinerants from their Cynic competitors, since the two were otherwise so similar as to be easily confused by the public.

4. Gerd Theissen, "The Wandering Radicals: Light Shed by the Sociology of Literature on the Early Transmission of Jesus Sayings," in Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics, and the World of the New Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 33-59.

5. Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth, trans. John H. Schutz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), pp. 28-35.

6. Dieter Georgi, The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians, trans. Harold Attridge et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p. 244.

7. Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary, trans. Bernard Noble, Gerald Shinn, R. McL. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), pp. 233-35. See also Robert L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings: History's Impact on Belief (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1972); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 187-97.

8. Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 36.

9. Michael McFadden, The Jesus Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 89. Cf., also Glenn D. Kittler, The Jesus Kids and their Leaders (New York: Paperback Library, 1972), pp. 54, 180-81, 209.

10. McFadden, The Jesus Revolution, p. 173-74. Cf., Lowell D. Streiker, The Jesus Trip (New York: Abingdon Press, 1971), p. 38; Jack Sparks, God's Forever Family (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1974), pp. 62-64.

11. Gerd Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition, trans. Francis McDonagh (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 171.

12. The same sort of frustrated retreat from missionizing to sour-grapes doomsaying can be observed quite clearly in the Nag Hammadi text The Book of Thomas the Contender.

13. John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 100-101. One need not subscribe to Allegro's inferences about the connection of this epithet to a hypothetical Soma cult among early Christians to appreciate his linguistic contribution on the meaning of "Boanerges."

14. Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, "The Foundation of Truth: I Timothy 3:15," in Studies in the Pastoral Epistles (London: SPCK, 1968), pp. 5-20.

15. C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 413-20.

16. William Wrede, The Messianic Secret, trans. J. G. C. Greig (Altrincham: James Clarke, 1971).

17. John A. T. Robinson, "The Most Primitive Christology of All?" in Twelve New Testament Studies. Studies in Biblical Theology 34 (London: SCM Press, 1962), pp. 139-53.

18. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 29-36.

19. Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi'ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).

20. Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras Hamori and Ruth Hamori. Modern Classics in Near Eastern Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 246.

21. There is a whole Valhalla of such Mahdis in Stephen Fuchs, Rebellious Prophets: A Study of Messianic Movements in Indian Religions (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1965).

22. Eisenman, "Maccabees, Zealots, Christians and Qumran."

23. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts offesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds offesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, A Polebridge Press Book, 1998), p. 121.

24. Jacob L. Teicher, "The Dead Sea Scrolls-Documents of the Jewish-Christian Sect of Ebionites,"Journal ofJewish Studies 2, no. 2: 67-99; "The Damascus Fragments and the Origin of the Jewish Christian Sect,"Journal ofJewish Studies 2, no. 3: 115-43; "Jesus in the Habakkuk Scroll,"Journal offewish Studies 3, no. 2: 53-55; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls," Journal of Jewish Studies 3, no. 3: 111-18; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls -II," Journal ofJewish Studies 3, no. 4: 139-50; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls-III," Journal of Jewish Studies 4, no. 1: 1-13; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls-IV," Journal offewish Studies 4, no. 2: 49-58; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls-V,"Journal of Jewish Studies 4, no. 3: 93-103; "The Teaching of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls-VI," Journal of Jewish Studies 4, no. 4: 139-53; "Jesus' Sayings in the Dead Sea Scrolls, "Journal offewish Studies 5, no. 1: 38-40; "The Habakkuk Scroll," Journal offewish Studies 5, no. 1: 47-59. Though J. Randall Price, Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Eugene: Harvest House, 1996), p. 374, dismisses Teicher's along with Cecil Roth's and G. R. Driver's theories as "long-refuted" and "laid to rest," this only means that those committed to a rival paradigm mounted some arguments, whether weak or strong, against their competitors and moved on.

25. In the gospels Jesus is sometimes called "the Nazarene," sometimes "the Nazorean," though no translations known to me reflect the difference. It is an important one, though, because "Nazorean" ("observer" or "guardian," i.e., of the Torah) seems clearly to denote a sect label, while "Nazarene" seems to embody a subsequent misunderstanding or redefinition. Christians could no longer imagine their Lord had himself been simply a "believer" like themselves, so they inferred that his famous epithet had denoted he had hailed from Nazareth.

26. Robert E. Van Voorst, The Ascents of James: History and Theology of a JewishChristian Community. SBL Dissertation Series 112 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 64.

27. Paul J. Achtemeier, "Toward the Isolation of Pre-Markan Miracle Catenae," Journal of Biblical Literature 89 (1970): 265-91; "The Origin and Function of the PreMarkan Miracle Catenae,"Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 198-221.

28. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. BeasleyMurray, R. W. N. Hoare, J. K. Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), pp. 6-7; Robert T. Fortna, The Gospel of Signs: A Reconstruction of the Narrative Source Underlying the Fourth Gospel. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Fortna, The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor: From Narrative Source to Present Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).

29. L. E. Elliott-Binns, Galilean Christianity (Studies in Biblical Theology 16, Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, Inc., 1956), pp. 25, 34-35.

30. Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery-Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance, trans. John E. Steely. (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978), p. 176 if.

31. Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, 2d ed., trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 16-19 if.

32. Martin Noth, "Figures Alongside Moses," in A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. Bernhard W. Anderson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 175-88.