In every ward we’ve lived in my wife and I have served in the Primary, so when we moved into my parents’ basement in Provo, we were called to the Primary, where we had also served in Seattle. One day the Primary workers were discussing activities, and my ears perked up at the name of Harvey Fletcher, since my father and I had home taught him. (Long retired, he had had a distinguished career at Bell Labs, “the father of stereophonic sound,” then served at BYU as the first dean of the College of Physics and Engineering Sciences.)
Seems he had come to visit the Primary one day to tell about his experiences in Primary, where the teachers had taken the children out to a creek, sang “Who’s on the Lord’s Side, Who?” then helped the children jump the creek to the Lord’s side. The activity had impressed him enough that he had remembered it for about 90 years, but his teachers were not the first to create an activity they hoped would help children establish their commitment to the kingdom of God.
Nor was Moses the first when he instructed Joshua to take the camp of Israel into the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, with “Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph, and Benjamin” on Mount Gerizim to shout the covenant blessings, and “Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,” on Mount Ebal to shout the covenant curses. (Deuteronomy 27:10-26, see also Deuteronomy 11:29 for the commandment and Joshua 8:33-36 for the fulfillment.
Nor was Abraham the first to memorialize the covenant in language like, “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Even Adam probably wasn’t the first when he prophesied to his posterity at Adam-Ondi-Ahman.
But Moses may have been the first to give the covenant language the format or formula it has throughout the Tanakh, and elsewhere, the two-part format that includes the covenant blessing and the covenant curse familiar in phrases like “If ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land—but if ye keep not his commandments ye shall be cut off from his presence” (Alma 37:13); “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise” (D&C 82:10); and “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:18).
Once you’re aware of this pattern you’ll see it all over the Tanakh, for example in the opening of Hosea where the Yahweh commands Hosea to name his son ”Lo-ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God,” (Hosea 1:9) , followed by the covenant blessing at the end of chapter 2:23, “and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.”
You can also see the covenant curse in the vision of desolation at the beginning of Joel 1, and the blessing in the vision of renewal at the end of Joel 2.
And it pervades Isaiah. Avraham Gileadi says it’s one of the large governing structures of Isaiah with the first half representing the covenant curse and the second half the blessing, but there is blessing language throughout the first half and curse language throughout the second. Indeed, after the sublime language of renewal in chapter 66 the book ends with a coda invoking the covenant curse.
This is the kind of prophetic rhetoric Jesus would have been familiar with, grown up with, learned from John the Baptist, and you can see it, especially in the Gospels, if you’re aware of it.
I’ll close with an example and a short comment. I’ve just finished working my way through Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus. While I was working on the July column I came to Mitchell’s commentary on the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:34-46). He offers his translation of the first half (here’s the KJV)
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
then says he regrets not being able to include such lovely words in his gospel but their context is so tied up with hate and desire for vengeance that he couldn’t. Here’s the second half from KJV:
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
The morning after I posted my July column I read Gileadi’s comment about the covenant curse and blessing as a governing structure in Isaiah. Mitchell fresh on my mind I thought, “That’s how the parable is structured. The first half, the sheep, represents the covenant blessing and the second half represents the covenant curse.” The curse is not an expression of anger. It’s an expression of the rhetorical opposites that hold the Gospel together, that put boundaries on concepts so that we don’t take them too far. If the goats part of the parable has become an expression of Christian anger and vengeance it’s because we lost the rhetorical key to understanding them. (D&C 19, especially verses 6-7, is a useful key for understanding passages related to hell and punishment.)
Mitchell doesn’t distinguish between the words ascribed to Jesus and the rhetorical purposes the later church put them to. His purpose is to sift out the genuine sayings of Jesus from the later additions of the church, and his principle of selection is, “Is this saying worthy of an enlightened being, a being who knows the great truth all enlightened beings learn, that the kingdom of God is within you?”
Not distinguishing between an utterance and any use the later church may have made of it is a trait Mitchell’s book shares with Willis Barnstone’s perceptive commentary in The New Covenant Vol. 1: The Gospels and Apocalypse.
A lot of the passages both men object to can be better understood as rhetorical expressions, or what the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament called “the exaggerated debating style of First-Century Palestine.”
I hope to say a lot more about this next month. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, and over the weekend it occurred to me that rather than being encrustations on Jesus’s words some of the rhetorically violent passages may be attempts of the early church to record–imperfectly–sayings and deeds they didn’t understand, but had come to them from their earliest records or oral traditions.
Any thoughts, orthodox, heterodox, or paradox?
There’s always something problematic about excluding evidence that make us uncomfortable or don’t fit our current understanding, whether it’s in science, literature, religion, history, or real-life interactions with others. How do you learn what you don’t already know if you exclude anything your current understanding can’t account for? It’s all the more frustrating when (as in this case) additional contemplation and study might suggest alternative ways of understanding, on a deeper level.
Thanks, Jonathan. I’ve puzzled for a long time about the lack of nuance I often see in scholarly work. Willis Barnstone says Pilate’s statement “I wash my hands of this man” is meant to exonerate Pilate. But he would never allow a student to argue that a character’s self-justification represents the author’s point of view, especially not given the 20th Century’s deep awareness of unreliable narration. Reza Aslan and Stephen Mitchell show similar shallow streaks, I think they’re assuming that the early Evangelists were unsophisticated, credulous people and any narrative sophistication comes from later accretion and editing.
That assumption reminds me of Rebecca West’s comment in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon that Tolstoy must not have known any real peasants because when he calls for art that peasants can understand he portrays them as simpletons whose lives are devoid of beauty, who have no capacity to understand complex patterns. I hope to talk more at length about this next month.