TRANSCRIPT OF LECTURE, DAY 3
DR. G. HOWARD MILLER
"JESUS IN AMERICAN CULTURE"
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
September 6, 2006
After class on Friday, our TA, Elizabeth, made an observation and taught me something that I didn't know about the representations of the annunciation, when the Holy Spirit descends upon Mary through the angel. Mary is obviously interrupted in the act of doing something. What is Mary doing in this picture? What had she been doing?
Reading. Elizabeth tells me that this is one ‑‑ that pictures of the annunciation are one of the few times in which we see Medieval women, Renaissance women, pictured reading. And look at this. Now, this next one I think is one where it doesn't happen, Elizabeth. Yeah ‑‑ no, there it is. Look at this. What's happening in the annunciation? What's happening when Jesus comes down? What's happening?
In the words of John, the Word, the Word, the Word became flesh. Did I tell you to say that? No. She made it up herself. Good for you.
Now, folks, if you know something that Dr. Miller doesn't know, keep it to yourself. Tell me, for god's sake. How am I going to learn. But look at this. They're all reading. Virtually every one of them ‑‑ well, not every one of them.
Okay. Any questions? All righty. So we're talking about the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity. We have Him descending, coming upon Mary. We have Him descending upon Jesus at the Baptism. We have Jesus promising his Disciples in the last days that he will send another ‑‑ a comforter.
When is the next time we see the Holy Spirit descending upon something? Pentecost. Jordan, tell us about Pentecost.
Right. Whereupon we did. Oh, by the way, I forgot, Baptism, here comes the Dove again. Look at that big hairy John the Baptist. Animal.
And when the Day of Pentecost has fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of a fire, and it sat upon each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Great words from the Book of Acts. Pentecost. The Holy Spirit.
So there are three. The Trinity. How are we going to represent the Trinity in art? A triangle. Well, that's as good as any. Interesting. We don't see many representations of the Trinity. It's hard. Let's see what we got here.
One conceit, one idea, was that something that happened in the Jewish Scriptures, the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, prefigure the Trinity. Can anyone tell me what this painting is based on? Jordan? We are told in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible at one point, that Abraham entertained three Angels unaware.
Early Christians saw that as a prefiguring of the Trinity. Well, that doesn't actually do it for me. Does it for you? But this is an interesting work. This is by the great Spanish artist, Murillo, the heavenly and earthly Trinity.
Now, who is the earthly Trinity? Come on. The Holy family, Mary, Joseph, and the boy Jesus. Who is the heavenly Trinity? God the Father ‑‑ if that's not God, I don't know who he is ‑‑ God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And what is the crux of these two Trinities that hold them together? Jesus, our man. All righty?
The Trinity. So there are three of them. The questions surrounding Jesus were the most perplexing of all the questions surrounding the persons of the Trinity. We're not going to answer these today, but we'll get them all out.
Where did he come from? In what sense was this man born? In what sense was he the Son of God? If he was the Son of God, does that mean that God has a ‑‑ finish the question. Wife, folks. We don't think about it very much, but that's a real serious question. If there's a Son of God, where the hell did he come from? Where does the Son of God come from?
Was he born, or was he created? If so, when and of what? And after Jesus returns to the Father in that other place, what was his relationship then among the three members that became the Christian Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Now over the next week we're going to be unraveling some of those questions as the early Christians tried to figure it out. But the early Christians had also two other matters that had to be resolved. The most important of them, the most pressing one involved eschatology.
Eschatology is what? The end times, questions of the last things. Much of Jesus' ministry entailed proclaiming the coming kingdom. A declaration that directly tied into, and resonated with, a powerful tradition of Jewish apocalyptics. Same thing as eschatology. End times. Apocalyptics.
In the Gospel according to Mark, in Mark 13, in a section called the Little Apocalypse, Jesus delivers an apocalyptic eschatological statement: "Verily I say unto you that this generation shall not pass till all these thing be done. Take ye heed, watch and pray, for you know not when the time is. And what I say unto you I say unto all, watch." Mark's Jesus is the earliest Jesus we have. All right? The Gospel. We're going to talk about that in a minute.
And his Gospel is an eschatological gospel. We're going to talk about that. The Apostles took Jesus' imminent return and glory for granted. The one thing you have to know to understand the writings of Paul is that he thought Jesus was going to return soon.
The second generation of Christians sw the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. as the herald of the ‑‑ [break in recording]
But did Jesus return? No. As the decades passed, Jesus did not return. So our religious tradition, folks, is based upon a failed prophecy. And Christians have to deal with the problem of the failure of the eschatological promise. You think we've got it all settled? They didn't. We have to deal with it. We're going to do it.
And then there's something else that didn't happen. The Jews were supposed to accept Jesus. Right? Did they? Some of them did. What do we call those people? Christians. But the vast majority of Jews didn't. They obstinately, stubbornly refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The failure of Israel to accept the Messiah, how do we explain that?
So for five centuries the early Christians debated all these things we've been talking about. The implications of the incarnation, the nature of the Trinity, the eschatological failure, and the Jews' obstinance.
The result of all of that in the next week, is going to be the movement from Jesus of history to the Christ of faith. The movement, the transformation from Jesus of history into the Christ of faith.
The process was a very long ‑‑ the process was a very painful experience. The issues were very complex and the outcome of the debates on all these things was always contingent, at least the historian has to grant that they look contingent.
God may have been directing it, but we can't deal with that. It looks to us like it could have gone either way. All kinds of times. It was contingent on an astounding array of personalities and historical events and developments.
Young people, it seems to me that a very careful study of the first five centuries of Christianity should humble anyone who thinks that Christianity emerged immediately in a form that fits his or her faith. Fair enough?
Now Christians didn't just have to define Jesus, did they? They had to define God. This was no small task. The most important debate about the nature of God involved his unitary nature. God existing as one being. Not as the Trinity, but God exists as one.
Much of the debate about the unitary nature of God hangs on the issue of theodicy. What does the question of theodicy involve? Your name is ‑‑ Brian. What do you mean suffering? Let's use another ‑‑ let's use a bigger word than suffering, because he's not just suffering. Evil.
Theodicy, folks, is the task of defending the goodness of God, the omnipotence of God, the all powerfulness of God, the goodness of God in the face of the existence of ‑‑ say it ‑‑ evil. Not suffering. Evil. Suffering is just part of evil.
If God is all powerful and good, where does evil come from? Now some of you are kind of philosophical buffs. You know who you are. You like to sit around and debate these kinds of things. Well, this is the big one. This is the big one.
Now, folks, this need not be a problem. If you want to explain the simultaneous existence of good and evil, what should you do with your God? Come on. What? Divide him into at least two. Make him a dual god. Folks, this happens so often. Because it's so convenient, it's so handy to have a dual god, so then you can explain, this is the god of good and this is the god of evil.
Now what kinds of dualities could you have? Good, evil. What else kind of dualities could you have with God? Light and dark. Living and dead. Well, who wants to have a dead god? What else? I see, yeah, male ‑‑ good for you ‑‑ let's just get really kinky and make one of them a girl, male and female. Folks, it's been done. For god's sake.
What else? Come on. We got to get this one out. One god is going to be something and something's going to be another. Right and wrong. Well, that's good and evil. About material and immaterial? How about material and immaterial? They never get it. Folks, they never get it. Don't worry about it.
Many, folks, probably maybe even most, early Christians favored some sort of dualism. Some are called Manicheans. What do Manicheans believe? Come on. Talk to me. I refuse to believe that in this room no one knows what the word Manichean means.
(Pause.)
Let's just forget spirit and matter, let's just say one is going to be good and one is going to be evil. How about having a good god and bad god? Then others did, in fact, throw in matter. Let's have one god be material and one god be immaterial. What were these people called? Gnostics.
Some Christians call ‑‑ and we're going to talk more about this ‑‑ Gnostics rejected the material world as evil and said that a purely spiritual divine god could not have been involved in the dirty work of creation.
So there must be a superior spiritual god who controls superior spiritual things. And then under him is an inferior material being called the demiurge who is responsible for all the dirty stuff of creation.
Now, we're in a survey course. This is all very interesting stuff, there are courses taught at UT on it. Go take them.
For 300 years Christians thought out this issue about the nature of God. But at the end of those 300 years, more or less, a uniform orthodox position had emerged by trampling down the opposition. There would be no dualism of any kind, there would be no material/spiritual deity, God would be a unitary spiritual being.
And there would certainly be no male/female duality. Actually, more about that probably next week, because not even that turned out to be a finished question.
All righty. God exists as a unitary being. He exists also mysteriously as three, but he does not exist as two. There is no duality in Him. Okay. What about Jesus? Let's turn now to the Jesus of the Gospels.
Have you gone to find a Bible? Folks, don't come talking to me about, oh, I don't understand this, if you haven't read at least the Gospel according to whom? Luke. The Gospel is an almost exclusively Christian form of biography. How many of them are there? Come on, play with me. Four. All of them are predated by the writings of Paul, or the letters that we call Paul.
But, beginning about 70 Common Era, with Mark, and through John, near the end, or the turn of the Second Century, there are four Gospels, and here are their dates. The Gospels are the survivors of a competition. They are the ones that are left. We're into survivors today, well, here are your Gospel survivors.
We now know that there were hundreds of gospels circulating. Folks, do you all know that? My god, if there ‑‑ what is the latest one we've been all titillated about? The Gospel according to Judas. How many of you read the Gospel of Judas? Anybody? Fascinating stuff.
But these four finally survived and they become canonic. What does the word canonic mean? C-A-N-O-N-I-C. What's it? It does. Officially what does it mean? All right. It means ‑‑ the canon is something that's accepted. Right? By all. There's going to be this in it, and not this. All righty?
They are all the products of a group of Christians that competed with each other. And the Gospels tell us as much about these conflicting groups as they do about the historical Jesus. Now, big statement, no one knows authoritatively who wrote any of them. I hope that you are sophisticated in your biblical studies, even if you are a conservative evangelical Christian, to know that.
No one knows authoritatively who wrote any of these Gospels. They were attributed to the apostolic generation, the guys who were with Jesus. Why would you attribute your gospel ‑‑ if you were a community and had this gospel, why would you attribute it to one of these people who were with Jesus? All right. An eye witness is reliable. It makes it authoritative. Let's say Matthew wrote it. Right? Let's say John wrote it.
The first three of the Gospels are called the synoptic gospels. Now they are similar, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are similar in many, many ways. But they are also very ‑‑ fill in the sentence? They are also what? Different. Explaining that similarity and differences is called the synoptic problem.
How can you have origin documents that are so similar but so absolutely diametrically different? How do you explain that? All righty. How are they similar? All of the synoptic gospels try to construct a narrative of the life of Jesus and his ministry.
What do they use? What do they use? What kinds of documents did they use? Letters? Probably not. What kinds of documents did they use? Trick question. Why? They didn't. Where do the gospels come from? They came from the stories. Jesus never wrote anything down. And I doubt very seriously if people who were listening to him wrote anything down. Folks, that would be weird.
Now, folks, as an ancient historian, that would be very strange. Get that down. What did they do? What did they do? Come on. What did they do? They listened. And then what did they do? They retold it. Where? Everywhere, around the fire, at home.
They retold, then some of them began to be written down. And maybe there were some documents. Do we have them? No. There may have been some though, but we don't have them.
These are the first ones that are written, that bring it ‑‑ they try to write, come on, and write it down and make some sense, a narrative out of the life and ministry of Jesus.
And especially in the case of Mark and Matthew, they also encapsulate Jesus' ministry in the terms of their own community of Christians' belief. You can tell in Matthew and Mark a lot about what these Christians apparently believe. And we're going to do that in just a sec.
The synoptics are also the same, similar, in that they present Jesus healing, teaching, and preaching. The synoptics all present Jesus as healing, teaching, and preaching. What they do not do is what John does instead. The Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, presents Jesus exclusively as proclaiming himself. The Gospel of proclamation, the I Am Gospel, the last Gospel.
So let's take these in order of composition. Virtually everyone agrees that the first of the Gospels is Mark, that Mark was written around the time of the desecration of the Temple in 70 C.E., Common Era.
It's been attributed to a man, some man named Mark. Was there a disciple called Mark? Was there a disciple called Mark? No. So who the hell was Mark? Well, there's a John Mark, and there is a Mark who is associated with the head Apostle. Who's the head Apostle? Peter. And this man's name was Mark.
The Gospel of Mark was attributed to this young man because he was a companion of Peter. So this establishes an immediate relationship not only to an Apostle, but to the most authoritative of the Apostles. The Apostle to whom Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom, according to the oral tradition.
Let's call Mark's Jesus the secret Jesus. The secret Jesus. Mark's Jesus is really weird. He keeps telling everyone, shh, don't tell anyone who I am. That's kind of weird, isn't it? And by John we have him proclaiming himself.
But in Mark, he's always telling people, don't tell anyone who I am. He tells the Disciples, converts, people he heals, to keep his identity a secret. The main theme of the Gospel is hiddenness and the failure of the faithful to recognize who Jesus is. The main themes of the Gospel is ‑‑ are hiddenness and the failure of the faithful to recognize who Jesus is.
There is no birth narrative in this first Gospel. It begins with the ministry of John the Baptist. And in its original form, it ends with the empty tomb. Only afterwards was there added a coda that presents the risen Christ.
Mark's Jesus is a man in a hurry. Mark uses the word immediately 40 times. Mark's Jesus is a healer, and most important, he is a what? Can anyone tell me? No, that's Matthew. What he's doing most of the time is doing what? No. He's working miracles. He is a magician.
The Gospel of Mark contains almost no sustained Christology, with a capital C. Can anyone tell me what Christology is? What would you think it is? If theology is the study of God, what do you think Christology might be? All righty. But it's more specific. Jordan, can you tell us what you think it might be?
(Pause.)
What kind of study? It's not just a study of Jesus' ministry. What kind of a study is it? It's a theological study. Christology is the theological interpretation of the life and ministry of Jesus. A theologically based interpretation, belief system, of the life and ministry of Jesus.
There's almost none of that in Mark, because everyone is trying to figure out who he is. But no one gets it. No one gets the inception until he's crucified.
Now no one gets it despite the fact that Jesus' identity as the Son of God is proclaimed from the heavens at the beginning of the Gospel, at the baptism. No one gets it despite all of these miracles, which he does in the name of God.
The ones who do get it in Mark are interesting. Can anyone tell me who, in fact, does get who Jesus is? What kinds of people? Not in this one. He said the women. No. No. See you're being sentimental. No. No. Not Peter. Was it?
What particular person in power? The high priest gets it. Who else in Mark calls Jesus God? The demons that he casts out. The demons know who Jesus is, thou Son of God. And who else? At the foot of the cross someone figures out who he is. The Roman ‑‑ the enemies, the high priest, the Roman Centurion, the devils, for god's sake, figure it out before the faithful do.
Whoever wrote Mark was one of the first to feel a need to assemble and bring order into the conflicting oral traditions about Jesus that emerged almost immediately after the death of the Nazarene. He writes to clarify these beliefs for his own community.
He focuses in this clarification on misunderstanding and opposition to Jesus, everybody else is wrong. By portraying the Disciples as clueless, uncomprehending, and faithless, he instructs his own community on who Jesus is. They figure it out through reading this Gospel.
The writer of Mark seems particularly eager to counter the idea that Jesus was just a leader of a bunch of musicians ‑‑ musicians ‑‑ magicians. Make that magicians. Or that he was even worse, a philosopher. He wasn't just a magician.
He writes about the time of the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., and the man who wrote Mark seems particularly eager to calm and to reassure his troubled and confused Christians at this catastrophe.
Mark's Jesus is a man of great personal authority. His favorite title for Jesus, which is also the closest he comes to a Christological formulation, is that Jesus was the Son of Man. Mark's Jesus calls himself the Son of Man.
In so doing, Mark's Jesus ties himself to the eschatological and apocalyptic traditions of Jewish culture and prophecy. And Mark's gospel is by far the most apocalyptic of the gospels. Mark's Jesus says that he will return in glory in the lifetimes of the people in Mark's community. And the community would have seen the destruction of the temple as the sign of the beginning of the end of time.
How about Matthew. The Gospel according to Matthew is the first effort to tell and entire narrative of the life and ministry of Jesus. It's Matthew who introduces an extended birth narrative. Bless his heart, it's Matthew who gives us the three Wise Men.
Matthew's Jesus is by far the most Jewish of the Jesuses we encounter in the Gospel. He might be called the Christ of the Scriptures. Others call him Jesus the Rabbi. Where Mark's Jesus is a worker of miracles, Matthew's Jesus is the capital P, Preacher.
The author of Matthew organizes the ministry of Jesus into five extended discourses, sermons. What is the most important of those sermons? Ah, bless your heart. You finally woke up. Good for you. Talk to me, come on. We're on film, for god's sake. You're dying up here.
Folks, one of the reasons I keep asking these questions is I'm trying to persuade all of you who have 97 hours from Dr. White, that these folks who have don't know anything. Other than everyone's kind of scared of me, or whatever. We'll get over that.
Folks, have you not noticed that bald-headed men are not really very mean? Dick Cheney notwithstanding. Okay. People say I intimidate them. Do I intimidate you? I don't mean to intimidate anybody. Okay? Well, actually my cat. I need to intimidate him. Doesn't work.
All right. Where were we? Sermon on the Mount. Thank you. How many times, how many Gospels present the Sermon on the Mount? How did you know the answer to that question? Uno. Only in Matthew. Does that mean it didn't happen? Who knows. But it's a fact.
But why did the others not do the Sermon on the Mount? If that was such a great sermon, why didn't Mark print it? That is part of the what? The synoptic problem. All righty.
Okay. Matthew ‑‑ the author of Matthew quotes Jewish Scriptures 60 times. He has Jesus quoting Jewish Scripture 60 times. And most of these are prophecies which are going to be fulfilled by guess who? Jesus.
Matthew's Gospel is constantly warning against false insiders. People who claim to be part of the community, but who spread false teachings and undermine its integrity. False insiders, people you think are your friends are not.
The community to which Matthew writes was almost certainly a small sect of Christian Jews who had been having some serious boundary problems, figuring out who they are, an identity issue. And one of the things that they have to do is to persuade people that they are not Jews.
Now here's something new. So not surprisingly it is in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, especially in The Passion sections, the last days of Jesus, that the Jews are most demonized. Matthew 22, check it out.
Matthew's Jesus is also an eschatological judge who will come again to destroy false Christians. Not unbelievers, but people who claim to be believers, and that is those who don't agree with Matthew's community.
Matthew's Jesus is called the Messiah a lot, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, the Son of God, God With Us. Messiah, Son of David, Son of Abraham, Son of God, God With Us. And it argues over and over again that just as only Jesus can fulfill Jewish prophecies, only Christianity can complete Judaism.
At the end, Matthew adds several post- resurrection appearances by Jesus. And with what does the Gospel of Matthew end? The Great Commission, capital G, capital C., where he sends the Disciples out to make believers of the entire world, promising them that, at the end of the Gospel what will happen? What are the last words? "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the ends of the earth." Great statement.
All righty. Moving right along. Luke/Acts. Most scholars believe that the Gospel of Luke was written by the same person who also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, that it is part of a dual, two-volume work. And most people believe that it was mostly written by a companion of Paul, and it might actually have been written by a young man named Luke.
Unlike any of the other Gospels, Luke/Acts aspires to be a work of history. It is grounded in human history. It is full of eye witnesses, and it wears its research on its sleeve. It's a real history work.
But what is it a history of? Luke/Acts is not just a history of Jesus. Luke/Acts is a history of the redemptive work of God in the world. Luke/Acts is a history of the redemptive work of God in the world. He's after big game here.
God's plan of salvation for mankind. The two books trace the plan through the ministry of Jesus, through the coming of the Holy Spirit, and then the coming of the Holy Spirit to Luke's Christian community. And that Lukian community is Christian, it is Gentile, not Jewish. Luke is writing for a Gentile Christian community.
Luke's Jesus is not primarily a miracle worker, he is not primarily a teacher. He is primarily a what? Anybody? Teacher. He's also an exemplary model, he's an ethical model. He models things for us.
And this Jesus is not isolated. He's not outside anything, he's not alienated from anything. Luke's Jesus is firmly embedded in an attentive and a supportive community. And for that community, Jesus is a teacher and a model.
Luke's Jesus is not especially rejected by the Jewish people, and he is firmly linked to the glorious Judaism of the past. Not to the troubled and defeated Judaism of the last decades of the First Century, but to the glorious past of Jewish history.
Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham. Luke traces Jesus back to whom? Adam. And if he can trace Adam ‑‑ back to Adam, to whom can he then trace him? God. His claim for Jesus then are not just for the Jews, they are universal. He continues not only Jewish history, but the history of mankind, of which he is the culmination.
Luke's birth narrative is even more elaborate than Matthew's. But instead of the Wise Men, in Luke we have the lovely story of the angelic hosts and of the rustic simple shepherds.
It is Luke who tells us the charming story of the 12-year-old Jesus disputing with the learned teachers in the temple while his parents frantically look for him. Luke's Jesus remains a pious Jew throughout the Gospel.
There is nothing apocalyptic about Luke's Jesus. He is there to teach us hearers how to live in the present world. He is full of optimism, he is patient, he is loving and kind. He is the doer of good deeds.
Luke's Gospel contains the best known of the parables, all of which teach love, mercy, and forbearance. Name a parable, it's almost certainly in the Gospel according to Luke. The Good Samaritan, the Lost Coin, Lazarus and the Rich Man, and especially which one? The parable of the Prodigal Son.
Luke's Jesus is particularly solicitous of poor people and female people. And the Gospel ends gloriously with the only account of the ascension in the Gospels. Luke's Jesus is the Christ of the Gentiles, he is the savior of all mankind.
But his saving is not eschatological, it's not apocalyptic in traditional terms. The future in Luke's Gospel is not eschatological in the future; it is on earth.
And Luke's Jesus is an ecclesiastical Christ. Ecclesiastical means church. He establishes on earth God's instrument for the salvation of mankind, a/k/a the church, and the church is now defined as a Gentile institution.
(End of recording.)