In Israel’s Other Temple: Research Reveals Ancient Struggle Over Holy Land Supremacy, we learn that the Samaritans and Jews have a common and competitive history. The Samaritans at one time were the dominant Israelite tribe with a spectacular temple that was the political and religious center of the region. Jerusalem at the time was sparsely populated and a relatively inconsequential sideshow.

Geography being a form of destiny, the Samaritans had the misfortune of being in the north where they bore the harsh brunt of Assyrian invasions. Samaria was devastated and many of its people fled 30 miles south to Jerusalem, which grew in size and importance. Leaders in Jerusalem sensed and seized opportunity, finishing the job started by the Assyrians: they destroyed Samaria and the original temple.

Mount Gerizim -- Site of Samaritan/Israelite Temple

They were not able, however, to destroy all the books and several older (i.e., Samaritan) versions of the Torah survived. These older versions tell a quite different story from the newer and revised versions written by the victors from Jerusalem:

[W]hich Torah is the original? Until recently, the generally accepted school of thought was as follows: In the fourth century BC, the Samaritans split off as a radical sect. In the Bible, they appear as outsiders and idol worshipers; they are evil. The parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37) offers a rather atypical portrayal of a member of this sect.

The historian Titus Flavius Josephus, himself a Jew, mentions that the apostates erected a shrine “in all haste” in the year 330 BC, as a rather dilettantish attempt to emulate the Temple in Jerusalem.

Increasingly, though, it looks as though the Bible has handed down a distorted picture of history. Papyrus scrolls recovered from Qumran on the Dead Sea, as well as a fragment of the Bible that recently surfaced on the market for antiquities, necessitate a “complete reassessment,” says Professor Stefan Schorch.

At first — so much is clear — the Samaritans had the upper hand. Indeed, compared with Jerusalem, [the Samaritan temple on] Mount Gerizim enjoyed significantly older rights: In the great tale of the history of the chosen people, the mountain plays a key role.

Abraham, the progenitor of the Israelites — who, according to legend, roamed through the Orient as a shepherd around 1500 BC — stopped there because God had appeared to him in a wondrous vision. Later, Jacob the patriarch traveled there to build the original shrine.

In the fifth book of Moses, the mountain summit finally earns a prominent place in biblical history: After the flight from Egypt, the Israelites wandered through the Sinai desert for 40 years. At last, they reached the Jordan River from the east. Their old and weary leader gazed across the river to the promised land, where “milk and honey flow.”

Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking possession of the promised land.

Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine “made of stones” on Mount Gerizim and coat it with “plaster.” Indeed, he said, this is “the place that the Lord has chosen.”

That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem’s priests probably spent a good deal of time revising [after subjugating the Samaritans and destroying the Gerizim temple], everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a “chosen place.”

The word “Gerizim” has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on “Ebal.” “By naming the mountain of the curses,” says Schorch, “they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy.”

[Torah scholar] Stefan Schorch dates the intervention to around 150 BC. The researcher stops short of calling it fraud, though, preferring to label it an “adaptation of the Bible to their own religious view.”

There is obviously a great deal at stake here, and I expect that the scholars and archaeologists working on these issues will be attacked from all directions. Their work will upset both Jews and Christians, albeit for curiously different reasons.

As the scholarly investigation continues and attacks are made, I think it important keep cui bono in mind at all times. Who is doing the attacking and what benefit do they derive from what may be the newer, revised, and mythical (hi)story?

By “what pertains to human beings by nature,” I mean what is essential and universal for human beings, at least since the Axial Age beginning circa 800 b.c. and probably since the Neolithic era beginning circa 9500 b.c. I make claims about anthropological universals, which should apply to human beings in all other cultures, not just Christendom or the West.

This simply won’t do.

Let’s start with the fact that if we are searching for human “nature,” we can’t start at the end. This is what Smith does when he concatenates history and begins his story with the Axial Age or perhaps even the Neolithic transition. For anthropologists, the Axial Age is like yesterday and the Neolithic the day before.

Fully modern humans had been roaming the earth for several tens of thousands of years before some settled into the domestic and religious routines of Neolithic or agricultural life. If we are seeking human “nature,” doesn’t it make sense to look for it among those people? Don’t they have “natural” history? Doesn’t that history tell us something fundamental about what humans are (or can alternatively be) absent the powerful social patterning of modern societies?

It’s not surprising that Smith would start his search for anthropological “universals” and human “nature” with the Axial Age. The very (contested) notion of “essences” derives from the Axial strand that began with Plato and culminated in Christianity. There is an apt genealogical basis for Nietzsche’s comment that Christianity is “Platonism for the people.”

There were of course other Axial strands and places in the world where Axial movements had little or no impact. In those places, usually out of the main commercial way and relatively untouched by post-Neolithic modernity, life carried on in ways that resembled the deep past which Smith has chosen to ignore. In these places too we might find something important about the possibilities and idiosyncracies of human “nature.”

With such an inauspicious beginning to his essay, it’s not surprising to find that Smith’s conception of human “nature” is parochial. His view of human “essence” is not a timeless universal but is a situated and timely view from somewhere. That somewhere happens to be Notre Dame, a place where the concerns and prejudices of the post-Enlightenment Christian West are often projected onto the world and others as “universal human nature.” These concerns and prejudices are neither universal nor natural.

While I can agree with Smith that humans naturally generate supernatural ideas, this default is due to ordinary operations of the brain-mind. Humans aren’t, as Smith claims, naturally religious because we need to make truth claims, problem solve, create meaning, or act morally. These needs, which Smith calls strong tendencies, are precisely those which arose after (and in conjunction with) the Neolithic. They are not, therefore, universal in either time or space.

If you are quixotically seeking “anthropological universals,” the first place to look is in the deep or prehistoric past. The next would be in those societies that were relatively untouched by Neolithic modernity and Axial movements. Had Smith done this, he would have found that his supposed universals aren’t universal.

Smith’s error here is a common one which I recently wrote about while gently criticizing Czech moral economist Thomas Sedlacek’s argument that humans are naturally greedy. This is an historically challenged fallacy of the post hoc ergo propter hoc variety:

If we are talking about the human condition since the advent of agriculture, Sedlacek’s story has a great deal of validity. Sedlacek errs, however, in asserting that greed — always wanting more — is an “innate natural phenomenon” that marks the “beginning of our history.” This is a common error whether we are talking about economic history or religious history.

It arises from the illusion that everything essentially began with the Neolithic transition and “civilization.” As this myth goes, there was no history or society for the people who hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years before settlements and cities. But these people, and some of their descendants who continued foraging until recently, had history. This history suggests that greed — always wanting more — is not an “innate natural phenomenon.”

While there are pan-human tendencies based in common neurobiology, classifying these as “natural” or “universal” or “essential” is an enterprise fraught with agendas and difficulties.

SPIEGEL: Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?

Sedláček: Mankind’s oldest stories tell us that greed is always Janus-faced. It is an engine of progress, but it’s also the cause of our collapse. Being constantly dissatisfied and always wanting more seems to be an innate natural phenomenon, forming the heart of our civilization. The original sin of the first human couple in the Garden of Eden was the result of greed.

SPIEGEL: Not of temptation and curiosity?

Sedláček: Desire and curiosity are sisters. The snake merely awakened a desire in Eve that was already dormant inside of her. According to Genesis, the forbidden tree was a feast for the eyes.

SPIEGEL: Just like the suggestive images of modern advertising.

Sedláček: Eve and Adam grab the opportunity and eat the fruit. The original sin has the character of excessive, unnecessary consumption. It is not of a sexual nature. A desire for something she doesn’t need is awakened in Eve. The living conditions in paradise were complete, and yet everything God had given the two wasn’t enough. In this sense, greed isn’t just at the birthplace of theoretical economics, but also at the beginning of our history. Greed is the beginning of everything.

SPIEGEL: So evil is the result of insatiability?

Sedláček: The demands of people are a curse of the gods. In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora, the first woman, who opens her jar out of curiosity, thereby releasing poverty, hunger and disease into the world, tells the same story as the Bible. In Babylonian culture, the Gilgamesh epic shows how desire rips man out of the harmony of nature…..The economics of equilibrium are doomed to failure. Eve’s desire — in economic terms, her demand — will never subside. And Adams’s offer to toil by the sweat of his brow will never be enough.

If we are talking about the human condition since the advent of agriculture, Sedlacek’s story has a great deal of validity. Sedlacek errs, however, in asserting that greed — always wanting more — is an “innate natural phenomenon” that marks the “beginning of our history.” This is a common error whether we are talking about economic history or religious history.

It arises from the illusion that everything essentially began with the Neolithic transition and “civilization.” As this myth goes, there was no history or society for the people who hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years before settlements and cities. But these people, and some of their descendants who continued foraging until recently, had history. This history suggests that greed — always wanting more — is not an “innate natural phenomenon.”

Despite its faults, Marshall Sahlins’ classic essay “The Original Affluent Society” remains instructive on these issues. People everywhere and at all times haven’t been driven by greed. Given this fact, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that supernatural sanctions haven’t always surrounded greed. It was the reformist Axial Age religious movements, responsive to the destructive aftermaths of unfettered greed, that made it a spiritual and hence moral issue.

All this aside, there are less misogynist ways to read the Edenic myth. Sedlacek saddles Eve with the original sin of greed. I read it differently. As I see it (or because it suits my purposes), Eve is the courageous heroine who chose knowledge. She wasn’t the passive victim of temptation or seduction. There is no shame in that.

"Eve in the Garden" by Anna Lea Merritt (1885)

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

At this point, the interviewer — perhaps sensing Walser has just made a personal confession that is not generalizable — asks the obvious question: Why?

Walser responds:

Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

While we shouldn’t be fearful to find that our ancestors were wrong or a bit crazy, Walser is right to sense that this remains an interesting question. He is carrying on, without much luck it appears, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Barth, and Nietzsche.

I get the sense that Walser’s empathetic range is limited and he is projecting, but judge for yourself.

When asked about the relationship between religions and WoW, Bainbridge noted that WoW religions aren’t taken seriously, which led him to this:

The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?

This is an interesting way of putting things. Bainbridge seems personally troubled by the “horrendous” possibility that religions are factually false.

There is a long tradition of considering this possibility and asking what it would mean if religions are false. Greek philosophers pondered the question and came to different conclusions. Plato favored illusions. Marx was untroubled by them. Nietzsche was much troubled by religious falsity or the metaphorical possibility that God was dead.

I also find curious Bainbridge’s question: What would science do if religions are false? My sense is not much. Humans routinely harbor all kinds of false beliefs, which science acknowledges and studies. Religious beliefs shouldn’t come in for any special treatment or dispensation.

Later in the interview, Bainbridge comments:

The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it’s possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people’s hopes can be expressed in something that’s acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.

It seems fairly certain there was no distinction between faith and fantasy in the past. These ideas hadn’t even been formulated. The very concept of “faith” is historically recent. Although the history of “faith” is complex, the idea that religion is a matter of belief or non-belief arose conjunction with the realization that ideas could be demonstrated to be either true or false, and that there were competing belief systems.

Once it was realized that ideas about the supernatural can be true or false and that not all these ideas can simultaneously be true, belief-choices had to be made. Hence the origins of “faith.”

In yet more ancient times, before the Neolithic transition, the supernatural wasn’t a matter of “belief” or “faith.” It was a way of (falsely) perceiving and (beneficially) making sense — what Nurit Bird-David aptly calls relational epistemology.

These answers aren’t surprising given our embeddedness in a culture whose dominant form of religion claims that life and death acquire meaning only within its milieu. Aside from the obvious objection that religion can intensify the fear of death for those who worry about hell and predestination, there is another: religions focused on meaning in life and purpose in death (i.e., some kind of afterlife) are relative newcomers to the supernatural world. They are post-Neolithic.

The domestication of plants and animals had profound consequences which can be summed with a series: sedentism, surplus, specialization, stratification, slavery, and sickness. Life in agricultural societies is fundamentally different from life in foraging societies. It is only in the former that people spend inordinate amounts of time wondering about the meaning or purpose of life and death. The previously summed series can have this existential effect.

None of this is to say that foraging or nomadic lifeways don’t present their own sets of challenges, because they do. These concerns, however, typically aren’t existential. Life among kin, however harsh, doesn’t present as absurd, dislocated, or senseless. There is a reason why hunter-gatherer ethnohistories don’t record people contemplating or despairing over “the meaning of it all.” This reason has nothing to do with intellectual abilities or the progress of thought. It has everything to do with the lifeways and conditions which spawn these kinds of questions.

Having said all this, there is little doubt that such questions arose after agriculture and became acute with industrialization. For many, such as Leo Tolstoy, even the consolations of religion were not enough to quell the twin fears of meaning and mortality. In this riveting piece on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jordan Smith discusses Tolstoy’s novella and its influence:

The story’s literary merits were never in doubt, but its status as thanatology took some time to develop. It failed to register with European and American psychologists for most of the 20^th century, probably because Freud’s brand of psychoanalysis emphasized dreams, sex and childhood, relegating death largely to the background.

But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.

Tolstoy’s story also imprinted on Irvin Yalom, the Stanford psychiatrist whose therapy seeks to ameliorate isolation and meaninglessness:

Yalom relies on The Death of Ivan Ilych in two important books. In Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Yalom writes, “No one has ever described the deep irrational belief in our own specialness more powerfully or poignantly than Tolstoy . . . through the lips of Ivan Ilych.” According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”

Nearly thirty years later, Yalom again turned to Tolstoy and Becker in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly,” he writes (emphasis in original).

It would be churlish to argue that existential angst isn’t real or that death isn’t cause for doubt. Since the Neolithic, religions (especially the Axial movements) have been grappling with meaning and mortality. This doesn’t mean, however, that humans have always been haunted by these questions or that religions originated to address them.

Post Postscript

In this piece on death and fear, Stephen Cave states: “This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. That religions are very much a product of our yearning for immortality is perhaps obvious.” Taking this as a universal and ahistorical given, Cave then discusses how Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam deal with death.

This illustrates my historical point perfectly well. These Axial traditions are, in their own ways, much concerned with death and continuing life or immortality. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these relatively modern religions speak to the evolution of supernatural beliefs or that these faiths somehow account for the origins of supernaturalism. They don’t.

The death terror and death responses are unique to certain kinds of societies and religions which grow out of these are not human universals. These religions grew from societies in which death was occurring in frequencies and ways never before seen in human history. It makes sense that they would respond to these vastly increased scales of death.

In keeping with a persistent Pagels theme, she laments the fact that steely-cold (Nicene) Christianity won out over mystical-warm (Gnostic) Christianity. While sympathetic, Gopnik has a sharp eye for realpolitik:

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues.

The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

For it to become the Religion of (Roman) Empire, early Christianity had to be tamed and institutionalized. Its fate was domestication for purposes of power and consumption.

Baptism of Emperor Constantine

The story perfectly illustrates how “my right interpretation” trumps “your wrong interpretation” by claiming my interpretation is not really an interpretation whereas your interpretation is “ignorant.” I’m not sure who is more ignorant here, the reporter or the minister:

The Bible is one of the most beloved books in America. Yet it is also one of the most misused, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in this country, according to the Rev. Jim Keck. And it is this dichotomy — a nation so devoted to Scripture and yet so ignorant of what the Bible truly says — that is the basis for Keck’s lecture, “The Bible in America.”

Keck, who holds a doctorate in ministry, said this complete devotion and ignorance of Scripture has long been a concern, but perhaps no more than today when churches and politicians use dueling interpretations of the Bible to vilify, justify and demonize those who hold other beliefs and values. Christian ignorance of its most revered book has left America in a divisive, dangerous and very unChristian-like place, Keck said.

“It’s an interesting disparity — we have this huge affective emotional embrace of Scripture and yet we are fairly ignorant biblically,” Keck said. That ignorance becomes dangerous as churches declare battle lines over the role — and words — of Scripture, he said.

It was not always this way. “Early colonial society was Scripture saturated,” Keck said. People read the Bible at home. Parents read the Bible to their children. Teachers taught it in the classroom. Bible stories were a central part of school primers, the McGuffey Reader and the Noah Webster spellers, Keck said. “People were so deeply immersed in Scripture and Bible knowledge that their view of the world through Scripture was central,” Keck said. “Learning the Bible was a moral underpinning for society.”

The 1880s brought the Bible wars. Bible education was removed from public schools and churches became the place for religious education. Different denominations offered differing interpretations — and those differences sometimes led to bloodshed.

“One would have thought Christians would dutifully read the Bible, but they didn’t,” Keck said. “Once society became secularized, Christians dropped the ball. Now there are a lot of biblically illiterate people who do not hear the high call of Scripture.”

People expect the church to teach and interpret the Bible for the congregation. The American entrepreneurial zeal drives churches to compete for members under the assumption that its interpretation of the Bible is correct and therefore they are especially faithful, Keck said.

Speaking bluntly, Keck calls it “marketing crap. That’s what happens when churches get into interpretive wars. Churches create scandals and controversies over Scripture, and people are not biblically aware enough to weed through it on their own. They can only hear the slogans. They cannot interpret it. That’s how you engage if you don’t have the biblical knowledge.”

And it is setting the United States down a damaging and contentious path. “These Bible arguments of American churches are a horrible diversion from what really matters in the Bible. The Bible, in its fullness, is calling us to the reality of God, the importance of personal morality and social justice, and how to be a better person.”

But the lessons of Scripture are lost in political issues of abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women to the priesthood and more.

“It is an evasion of the real higher calling Scripture talks about,” Keck said. Far too often, political and moral stands are based on a single passage of Scripture interpreted in isolation.

“There is a high noble call in Scripture to love your neighbor, economic justice and love God. I deeply believe America needs that higher call,” Keck said. So what is the answer? “Churches have to do a better job of bringing people more deeply into a knowledge of the Bible,” Keck said. “At the very least, churches need to stop the slogans and competing with one another.”

“America has to get back to the Bible in a different way. In a way that honors the validity of other religions and the pluralism in our culture,” Keck said. “The only way to understand how to be a Christian is a higher fidelity to Scripture.”

There is so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to begin. While this is something perhaps better handled by my discourse-savvy friends over at Religion Bulletin, a few observations are in order:

– The minister imagines a time and place, the nostalgic old-timey days, where everyone read the bible without interpreting it. It’s as if the bible just inscribed itself on minds without being interpreted and there were no different interpretations. There was never such a time or place. All reading is interpretation.

– The minister, without irony, bemoans differing interpretations and then proceeds to offer his own interpretation which he anoints as authoritative with words like “true” and “real” and “fidelity” and “deep.” These are code words which mean only that the minister believes his interpretation is right and others are wrong.

– The minister repeatedly acknowledges there are different interpretations of the bible yet never acknowledges that his particular understanding of the bible is also an interpretation. His interpretive lessons (“we can’t read passages in isolation”) lead to interpretive conclusions (“the importance of personal morality and social justice”).

I could go on but you get the point. The minister’s doctoral training apparently didn’t include lessons in interpretation or discourse. The credulous reporter failed to ask the minister why his interpretations are better than others and why those other interpretations are “ignorant.”

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

• The Gnostic Gospels
• Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
• The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

Pagels’ well-deserved appeal is a bit perplexing. Christians and non-Christians read her books. The former are invariably challenged and the latter always enriched. It is a rare kind of balancing act, impelled at all times by piercing and impertinent questions. I love reading her stuff and am looking forward to her forthcoming book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations.

Pagels recently previewed the book in this splendid video lecture, which is long (over an hour). There is also a transcript, from which I have excised the following as a teaser:

——————————————-

I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you’re talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book?

The evidence suggests that John was a Jewish prophet. He was living in exile around the year 90 of the first century. We can’t understand this book until we understand that it was written in war time, or shortly after war. John was a refugee, apparently, from the Jewish war that had destroyed his home country, Judea, started, as you may know, in year 66 when Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire.

When John travelled through the provinces of the Roman Empire, particularly in the province called Asia Minor, which is now Turkey and Syria, John would have seen that every evidence that the kingdom that had come with power wasn’t God’s kingdom. It was Rome.

John says it was while he was in that area, right near Ephesus, that he first heard a divine voice, and had a terrifying vision in which Jesus said that Israel’s God is about to come and destroy the evil powers of the world once and for all. What John did in the Book of Revelation was draw on the cultural resources of his own people to create, if you like, anti-Roman propaganda.

When John of Patmos asks, “How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?” he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today’s Babylon, which is Rome, although it’s raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John’s book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn’t yet been invented. John never uses the term Christian.

[W]hat made this book so appealing, and for whom, that it was included in the New Testament and proved so influential? I mentioned this book was very controversial when John wrote it. And it’s not surprising that the people who championed this book during the next hundred to 200 years were followers of Jesus who were experiencing or witnessing Roman persecution first hand. They were living under threat of being arrested, tortured, executed, for atheism and treason. During those dangerous times, many of them found in John’s prophecy hope that Rome, which was of course indomitable, was going to just fall and collapse at the end of the world.

[W]hen Emperor Constantine shifted the Roman world toward Christianization, you might have expected that this book would get left in the dust, with other books of disproved prophecy. Many of them did. Over several decades, after Constantine and his successors became the patrons of the Christian Bishops, a lot of Christian leaders began to draw up a list, a canon, of authorized books. Canon means a standard. It’s a measure you hold up to see what’s a standard. And many of them drew up lists of books.

What’s interesting to me is that, well, the earliest account we have is by a friend and counselor of Constantine, Eusebius, Bishop of Palestine, Caesarea, and he says in a very early account, well, he has a list of the recognized books. And he says, and if it’s right, if it seems right to you, well, The Book of Revelation, we could add to that. Then he has a list of disputed books, and then it puts at the end of the disputed books, none of which are now in the New Testament. Well, if it seems right, maybe The Book of Revelation; because it’s one of the most disputed books. We don’t know. It’s very highly disputed.

We have only five lists that remain from the year 350 to the year 400 of canon books, and you can see that the Bishop of Jerusalem, the Counsel of Bishops in Asia Minor, Gregory of Nazianus, this one’s the Fathers of the Church and other bishops, they all have many books that are now in the New Testament. But every single list leaves out The Book of Revelation very deliberately, except the one list that happened to be the list that was adopted. And that book is included on Athanasius’ list, the Bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt.

[W]hat made Athanasius’ take on Revelation different? Was it that he could actually reinterpret all the prophecies. Instead of taking John’s prophecies as referring to God’s victory over evil powers embodied in Rome, he said, well, you can’t take it literally. We’re going to apply John’s vision of cosmic war to my lifelong battle, which is a lifelong battle to establish a Catholic church which is a Catholic church endorsed by the Roman Empire. This will become the church of what later becomes the Holy Roman Empire.

Athanasius was trying to create a Christian communion, which was supposedly universal Catholic, and he insisted that the war between the forces of good and the forces of evil is not against Rome, but it’s against deviance and Christians who oppose the new Catholic church, either Pagans, later against Jews, and also against those he called maniacs and heretics.

Athanasius says, well, the beast is really not about Rome. The whore is not about Rome. The beast and the whore represent heresy. And when Jesus divides the saved from the damned, it’s really the Orthodox Christians being divided from Pagans, Jews and heretics. And that is the way he pictures it throughout all of his writing. I mention this only because his spin on these prophecies shows us, gives a clue about how this book has survived for a couple thousand years.

It’s very clear that John had very specific targets in mind when he was writing. For example, if you read about a great mountain that suddenly erupts, and is thrown into the sea and pollutes the waters for days, he’s thinking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened in the year 79, about ten years before his writing. And everybody would know that. And if he’s writing about the great beast whose human number is six hundred and sixty-six, you know that he’s either thinking about the imperial name of the emperor Nero, who was the one you’d choose for the worst possible emperor, or Domitian, who was ruling at the time John wrote. He had very specific targets in mind.

[John] couches his meaning in images that could be easily deciphered by his contemporaries, but also hidden, because it was dangerous to attack Rome directly. In this kind of dreamlike image, those images, as you know, have been plugged in to almost any conflict ever since. They speak less to the head than to the heart, and to very intense emotions that shape our dreams.

(End of My Brief Excision)

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My own reading of Revelation isn’t very dreamy, except to the extent that nightmares are dreams.

Isn’t it ironic that Athanasius made the case for canonization or inclusion in the Bible by arguing that Revelation should be interpreted metaphorically, and today there are many millions of people who interpret it literally?

Otherwise, there is a great deal more to Pagels’ lecture and I encourage you to watch the video in its entirety or read the whole transcript. It looks like Pagels’ next book will be another success.