In Tents 71 How Prophets Behave Rhetorically, or Don’t Part XI

Imagine receiving a generous prize from a Jewish organization on condition you spend three weeks in Israel. What would you do? Stephen Mitchell took it as a sign that now was the time to write the book on Jesus he had long wanted to write. That book became The Gospel According to Jesus, but he didn’t find what he need at first, he says in a young adult version called Jesus, What He Really Said and Did.

Until, that is, he went into Egypt with his Israeli guide-like Joseph, I think-and met this Bedouin man, their guide, a true patriarch from the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And when the Bedouin man stopped to pray, praying with his whole body, his prayer was so pure, so whole, Mitchell wanted to bow with him, but he didn’t know how his Muslim guide and his Israeli guide would understand “a Jew bowing to Allah,” (xviii) so he bowed in his mind.

Meeting Musa and feeling the purity of his prayer was what Mitchell needed to feel he was ready to translate. But how to proceed? From his introduction to the Gospels in a Protestant grade school he had recognized that some of their words seemed full of light, and others full of anger. He decided to follow Thomas Jefferson’s example and pick out the words of light.

(The Church quoted Jefferson in two pamphlets, a tri-fold called something like “Apostasy and Restoration of the Gospel Foretold by Ancient and Modern Prophets,” and a 1983 piece called “Apostasy and Restoration”:

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers. . . . Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger persons to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages. (Jefferson’s Complete Works, vol 7, pp 210, 257 quoted here)

Of course neither pamphlet said that Jefferson included all that nonsense about Jesus being the son of God in the deformities and caricatures. I wonder if the pamphleteer wasn’t exercising a bit of postmodern irony in standing Jefferson on his head.)

Picking out the words of radiance allows Mitchell some very good insights, but it also fractures the Gospels, picking a saying here and a story there. He says Jesus understood what all great spiritual teachers do: The kingdom of God is within you. And that’s his principle of selection–is this story/parable/saying worthy of someone who understands that the kingdom of God is within you?

Reading The Gospel According to Jesus I kept thinking about John Tanner’s Shakespeare class, summer 1984. He started by having us read a book by Richard Levin decrying what Levin calls Fluellenism, after the Welsh captain in Henry V who makes extravagant comparisons between Henry V and Alexander the Great in Act 4.

Dr Tanner cautioned us that, much as we love people like Shakespeare, Milton, Emily Dickinson and C. S. Lewis and want to make them honorary Mormons, we should remember they had philosophical and religious commitments of their own, which would look different from ours, and we need to respect that fact.

(Linda Adams had just invited me to do an editorial internship for BYU Studies and the first article I worked on was John S. Tanner’s “Making a Mormon Out of Milton.”)

Mitchell makes Jesus an honorary Zen Buddhist with no regard for Jesus’ own rhetorical, philosophical, or religious traditions and commitments. For Mitchell the idea is all-important: The Kingdom of God is within you.

As I said in # 69(?) Mitchell doesn’t include or comment on Jesus walking on the water, but in Appendix 3, “On Miracles” he has a long quote from Seung Sahn, including this paragraph:

There is a story about the great ninth-century Zen Master Huang-po. He was traveling with another monk and they came to a river. Without breaking stride, the monk walked across the water, then beckoned to Huang-po to do the same. Huang-po said, ‘If I had known he was that kind of fellow, I would have broken his legs before we reached the water. (p.304)

Neither Seung Sahn nor Stephen Mitchell asks whether comments about inflicting violence on other people are worthy of enlightened beings. They don’t need to, because they understand Huang-po’s rhetorical patterns, and the implication that there is something inauthentic about walking on water. Showing off, maybe?

But what if Jesus isn’t showing off? What if he’s replaying an episode from the early traditions of his people? Jan Shipps says in Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition that new traditions replay the history of the tradition they sprang from. Note that she doesn’t say the new tradition writes its history in terms of the parent tradition, but that it relives the tradition. Perhaps something like that is happening here.

At one point in The Four Witnesses: The Rebel, The Rabbi, The Chronicler and The Mystic Robin Griffin-Jones traces Mark’s depiction of Jesus as Moses. In Chapter 6 Jesus walks across the water like Moses crossing the Sea of Reeds. In verse 48 “he cometh unto them, walking upon the sea, and would have passed by them.”

Why pass them by? doesn’t he see them? Is the wind blowing him off course? Is he going ahead of them to coax them forward like a parent coaxing a toddler to walk a few steps? It’s always been mildly puzzling to me. Griffin-Jones connects the phrase to Exodus 33:22 

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

So Jesus is playing a double role here, first as Moses walking dry on the sea, then as he approaches the boat he becomes Yahweh, passing by the disciples, who are now playing Moses’ role. Griffin-Jones also connects this glimpse of Yahweh passing by with the opening of the veil in Mark 15:48, which allows the people to see into the holiest place in the temple, the place where the Lord appears.

Mitchell has no sense of this typology, no sense of the covenant rhetoric, no sense of the way people act as both individuals and types, no sense of the overall architecture of the Gospels he mines for his shining jewels.

I don’t say this to discount Mitchell’s love of Jesus or his insights, or the way he fractures the Gospels, extracts his shining stones and assembles them to a new Gospel. We all do that, with 2,000 years of tradition to help us fracture the scriptures.

For liturgical purposes we’ve broken the text up into small numbered chunks we print to look like separate paragraphs. And even though we aggregate the chunks into larger chunks, the aggregate often has little to do with the rhetorical structure of the larger passage.

For example, in I Corinthians 12 Paul extolls spiritual gifts then transitions to a more excellent subject matter, but instead of introducing the more excellent way the transitional verse is cut off by one of the less excellent chapter breaks in scripture, leaving us with a cryptic chapter summary statement that doesn’t refer back to anything in the discussion of spiritual gifts.

Similarly, calling Matthew, Mark, and Luke synoptic leads us to harmonize them, not considering them as separate accounts with unique viewpoints, concerns and structures.

Now I can hear some astute reader saying, “Wait a minute, if you’re arguing that as the Christian church took on a gentile identity and lost its Jewish character it also lost the key to understanding how these Jewish texts work rhetorically, how do we know they were preserved and transmitted correctly to us?”

Excellent point, but I’m not arguing that the scriptures have come to us pristine, or that we need to think of scripture as whole, complete and final. We learn from Jeremiah 36 that sometimes scripture get damaged or destroyed–cut up with a penknife and thrown in the fire, but the Lord can always commission a prophet to rewrite, restore, refurbish, renovate or update and expand what was lost.

So I’m not arguing that scriptures have come to us without the accretions Mitchell and Jefferson try to rescue them from, rather I’m testing the idea that the accretions are exegetical and hermeneutic rather than textual. That is, the accretions come from interpretive traditions developed by people who didn’t have the tools they needed to understand what the authors were trying to do, who didn’t connect the covenant blessing passages with the covenant curse passages, who saw the curse passages as the words of an angry man condemning his enemies to destruction.

So what do you do with passages talking about damnation and destruction if you consider the scriptures a guide to conduct and as closed texts that can’t be altered? That’s the tradition that developed within Christianity, including the people of Zarahemla.

I’ve just reached Mosiah 26 in The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text. Throughout Mosiah various groups have been replaying the Exodus of their ancestors, the flight into the wilderness of both Lehi and Moses. By Chapter 26 Alma and the people who fled into the wilderness from King Noah are back in Zarahemla. Chapter 25 ends with the covenant blessing in verse 24:

And they were called the people of God. And the Lord did pour out his Spirit upon them, and they were blessed, and prospered in the land.

The next verse starts the covenant curse, the counterpart to the blessing. (The two always occur together.) In this curse, the people who were too young to understand the words of King Benjamin are growing up in unbelief.

And they would not be baptized; neither would they join the church. And they were a separate people as to their faith, and remained so ever after, even in their carnal and sinful state; for they would not call upon the Lord their God.
— Mosiah 26:4

Alma doesn’t know what to do with the unbelievers, and brings them to the king, who says, verse 12,

Behold, I judge them not; therefore I deliver them into thy hands to be judged.

Neither wants to judge the people? Why? What does Mormon assume his audience knows? What does he not have to explain to them? Gordon Thomasson reminded me once that these people are living the Law of Moses and the Law of Moses has rather strict penalties for blasphemy and idolatry, and their children are among the unbelievers.

So if you have a fixed text and it tells you to kill the unbelievers, imagine the anguish you would feel. Alma pours out his anguish to God. We can imagine him asking if he must go through the congregation with a sword. The Lord replies with a covenant blessing in verses 15-21

15 Blessed art thou, Alma, and blessed are they who were baptized in the waters of Mormon. Thou art blessed because of thy exceeding faith in the words alone of my servant Abinadi.
16 And blessed are they because of their exceeding faith in the words alone which thou hast spoken unto them.
17 And blessed art thou because thou hast established a church among this people; and they shall be established, and they shall be my people.
18 Yea, blessed is this people who are willing to bear my name; for in my name shall they be called; and they are mine.
19 And because thou hast inquired of me concerning the transgressor, thou art blessed.
20 Thou art my servant; and I covenant with thee that thou shalt have eternal life; and thou shalt serve me and go forth in my name, and shalt gather together my sheep.
21 And he that will hear my voice shall be my sheep; and him shall ye receive into the church, and him will I also receive.

In 22-23 The Lord transitions to the covenant curse, verses 24-28:

22 For behold, this is my church; whosoever is baptized shall be baptized unto repentance. And whomsoever ye receive shall believe in my name; and him will I freely forgive.
23 For it is I that taketh upon me the sins of the world; for it is I that hath created them; and it is I that granteth unto him that believeth unto the end a place at my right hand.
24 For behold, in my name are they called; and if they know me they shall come forth, and shall have a place eternally at my right hand.
25 And it shall come to pass that when the second trump shall sound then shall they that never knew me come forth and shall stand before me.
26 And then shall they know that I am the Lord their God, that I am their Redeemer; but they would not be redeemed.
27 And then I will confess unto them that I never knew them; and they shall depart into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
28 Therefore I say unto you, that he that will not hear my voice, the same shall ye not receive into my church, for him I will not receive at the last day.

In 29-32 the Lord combines the covenant blessing and curse in his instruction of what to do with the unbelievers. Since the covenant blessing is to be in the presence of God and in the church, and the covenant curse is to be cut off from the presence of the Lord, the answer is to preach repentance to the unbelievers and either accept their repentance or cut them off from the church. That is, the answer is purely ecclesiastical, not civil.  Alma does not have to punish the unbelievers’ bodies, sending a sword among them.

29 Therefore I say unto you, Go; and whosoever transgresseth against me, him shall ye judge according to the sins which he has committed; and if he confess his sins before thee and me, and repenteth in the sincerity of his heart, him shall ye forgive, and I will forgive him also.
30 Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me.
31 And ye shall also forgive one another your trespasses; for verily I say unto you, he that forgiveth not his neighbor’s trespasses when he says that he repents, the same hath brought himself under condemnation.
32 Now I say unto you, Go; and whosoever will not repent of his sins the same shall not be numbered among my people; and this shall be observed from this time forward.

Alma then writes the revelation, adding to the canon of scripture others can use when they are trying to understand difficult situations. The idea that we can ask God for knowledge we lack, and add that knowledge to the body of sacred writ was lost as the early Christian church developed.

It’s highly arrogant of someone with no training in biblical Hebrew and Greek to assume he has anything to add to the conversation, but I’m excited by what I’ve been reading and learning, and have lots to share, so I’ll try to keep my arrogance humble.

Next month we’ll be looking at the birth and infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, to get some sense of what they were trying to do, or what I think they were trying to do. Next year I want to start looking at Jesus’s debates with other Jews, and what I think was happening in them, and how the words of Jesus changed their sense as Messianic Jews and gentiles combined to form a new religious tradition.

Your turn.