The Life of a Galilean Shaman

Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective

Pieter F. Craffert

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781556350856
  9781498210799
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892502
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Historical Jesus research remains trapped in the positivistic historiographical framework from which it emerged more than a hundred and fifty years ago. This is confirmed by the nested assumptions shared by the majority of researchers. These include the idea that a historical figure could not have been like the Gospel portrayals and consequently the Gospels have developed in a linear and layered fashion from the authentic kernels to the elaborated literary constructions as they are known today. The aim of historical Jesus research, therefore, is to identify the authentic material from which the historical figure as a social type underneath the overlay is constructed. Anthropological historiography offers an alternative framework for dealing with Jesus of Nazareth as a social personage fully embedded in a first-century Mediterranean worldview and the Gospels as cultural artifacts related to this figure. The shamanic complex can account for the cultural processes and dynamics related to his social personage. This cross-cultural model represents a religious pattern that refers to a family of features for describing those religious entrepreneurs who, based on regular Altered State of Consciousness experiences, perform a specific set of social functions in their communities. This model accounts for the wide spectrum of the data ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth while it offers a coherent framework for constructing the historical Jesus as a social personage embedded in his worldview. As a Galilean shamanic figure Jesus typically performed healings and exorcisms, he controlled the spirits while he also acted as prophet, teacher and mediator of divine knowledge.

Part 1

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A Paradigm Shift in
Historical Jesus Historiography

chapter 1

Historiography beyond Positivism and Postmodernism

The Positivist/Postmodern Historiographical Continuum

Part of doing history, as Denton rightly indicates, is a willingness to participate in the world of historiographical discourse (see 2004, 8). And although that world is not uniform, there is a general agreement that it (or, at least its recent past) can be presented by means of the positivist-postmodern continuum.1 In the description of Martin:

Contemporary historiography finds itself lodged between two theoretical extremes: positivism (i.e., the vestiges of modernism), on the one hand, whereby the evidence—primarily textual—is considered to speak more or less for itself if we can only get it right, and postmodernism, on the other hand, whereby historiographical narratives might be creatively imagined (or reimagined) regardless of the question about whether there is sufficient (or, indeed, any) evidence to support the integrity of that narrative. (2004, 263)

Historiography on this continuum has been conducted within the framework of an ontology that, as Bernstein shows, has haunted Western thinking for centuries. It is an ontological predicament “where ontology never gets beyond the problematic of ‘the Same and the Other’ and always seeks to show how the other can be mastered, absorbed, reduced to the same” (1991, 306). Within such a framework, to be referred to as ontological monism, the historian’s worldview functions as the reality catalog. Ontological monism assumes a direct link or at least a continuum between the ancient and modern worlds. A common reality links the two worlds, so to speak, and for that reason, what they were talking about there (events of miraculous healings, special births, encounters with a heavenly Son of Man figure, encounters in a kingdom of God, to name only a few aspects), is assumed to belong to the world of common reality.

Other worldviews or cultural realities are disallowed the ontological status of “reality,” and everything that does not fit that catalog is regarded as primitive, mythical, fictional, or not real. Whichever explanation is adopted, “reality” is viewed as monistic, and otherness is subjugated to or incorporated into this catalog. Whatever does not conform to the historian’s reality catalog cannot be historical.

Within this ontological framework, positivistic and postmodern historiographies have developed unique configurations and practices of doing history. The components of these patterns form nested assumptions because, as Schinkel points out, the “way one thinks about reality has implications for the way one thinks about knowledge and truth. Ontology and epistemology are not philosophical islands, completely isolated, exerting no influence upon each other. On the contrary: epistemology and ontology support one another” (2004, 55).

Historiography on this continuum shares with Western thinking a second feature, which Fay describes as the “seesawing between the Scientific Attitude and the Rhetorical Attitude”:

In the former, language is something to be looked through to the Real, the given, the found; in the latter, language is something to be looked at as something which creates or structures what is called Real. The first attitude sees language as a means for getting to or connecting with what is extralinguistic; the second attitude sees language as the means by which meaningful reality is constituted. The former is referent-oriented; the latter is text-oriented. (1998, 3)2

Views on both language and reality are closely linked to the assumptions of ontological monism. Ontological monism finds expression in historiographical practices in what Tonkin describes as the “myth of realism” (1990, 25) and Malina refers to as the belief in immaculate perception: “the evidence is there for the picking, just read the sources!” (2002b, 5). Because a normative reality catalog is available, the natural veracity of any narrative is assumed while historians who use the recollections of others, Tonkin argues, “just scan them for useful facts to pick out, like currants from a cake” (1990, 25). Thus, documents are used as “transparent narrative or a quarry for facts.”3 This is a feature that postmodern historiography shares on an equal footing with traditional historiography. Historiography is conducted by simply “going there,” to the world of the other via the testimonies about what has happened and what was said.

Positivist or Traditional Historiography

The scientific basis of positivistic or traditional historiography emerged during the nineteenth century and shared the optimism of the sciences that methodologically controlled research makes objective knowledge possible. In the first half of the twentieth century it shared with other sciences a broad positivistic attitude that reality is directly knowable by means of a correct method (see Fay 1998, 2) while a good deal of naive realism, which assumed that the historian simply discovers how things were, accompanied it (see Tosh 1984, 111–17). The hallmark of this approach is that historians “know things ‘straight,’” as Wright describes it, because a picture theory of knowledge, which holds that truth is self-evident and beyond debate, underlies this position (1992a, 33). The influence of ontological monism is clearly visible here.

The basic task of the historian in versions on one side of the continuum can be described as a search for “realist factuality” or a “factual recreation or recovery of the past.” It consists of arguing whether the data are reliable and sufficient to support a specific claim or not. Here, ontological monism finds expression in what Carr describes as the “fetishism of documents . . . If you find it in the documents, it is so” (1961, 16). This naive realism is supported by the idea that the documents contain testimonies. In picking out the testimonies, it is assumed that the sources reflect historical reality; just read and evaluate the sources, and historical factuality becomes apparent. This is the belief, as Collingwood argues, behind historical criticism, which offers a solution to a problem interesting to nobody but the practitioner of this kind of scissors-and-paste history; that is, the history “constructed by excerpting and combining the testimonies of different authorities” ([1946] 1970, 257). Scissors-and-paste history, he says, is based on the notion that the documents are testimonies to be questioned about their reliability:

The presupposition of the problem is that in a certain source we have found a certain statement which bears on our subject. The problem is: Shall we incorporate this statement in our narrative or not? The methods of historical criticism are intended to solve this problem in one or other of two ways: affirmatively or negatively. In the first case, the excerpt is passed as fit for the scrap-book; in the second, it is consigned to the waste-paper basket. ([1946] 1970, 259)

In the history of historiography, the scientific attitude of positivistic or traditional historiography lasted for most of the twentieth century until it was challenged by the rhetorical attitude. During the latter part of the twentieth century the pendulum swung to what became known as postmodern historiography.

Postmodern Historiography

The basic idea of postmodern theory of history, Iggers says, “is the denial that historical writing refers to an actual historical past” (1997, 118). Without trying to give a full overview of this movement, the most significant feature certainly was an adoption of the assumptions of the Rhetorical position.

That is, they highlighted the ways historians select events to figure in a narrative account (indeed, how incidents become historical events only by being brought within a narrative framework); how historians assign significance to events by placing them into a narrative context; and how historians themselves (rather than Reality) decide the basic form which a narrative will take. (Fay 1998, 5)

This is explicit in Ankersmit’s claim that “we no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them” (1989, 137). For that reason, he says, history is like art and unlike science: “In the postmodernist view, the focus is no longer on the past itself, but on the incongruity between present and past, between the language we presently use for speaking about the past and the past itself” (1989, 153).

In postmodern historiography, ontological monism functions differently in what Fay calls “temporocentrism.” That is the idea that “the modern historian is the master of ceremonies, so to speak, in wielding the power of reality and interpretation” (1998, 5). With the interpretive turn “a new form of intellectual hubris” has emerged in some circles, “the hubris of wordmakers who claim to be makers of reality” (Toews 1987, 906). Otherness and “the others” and consequently, the past are mastered by the worldview and cultural system of the postmodern interpreter.

Despite major shifts away from traditional historiography, Lorenz shows that this kind of postmodern historiography is an “inverted positivism” that remains attached to the fundamental conceptual structure of positivism (see 1998a, 312–20). Both the “either/or logic”4 and the positivist opposition between literal and metaphorical language is maintained.5 In setting up positivist historiography for its objectivist empirical viewpoint, he argues that postmodern historiographies retain, instead of reject empiricism:

This inverted empiricism fulfills a crucial function in metaphorical narrativism because the plausibility of the fundamental theses on the fictionality of narrativity is completely dependent on its implicit contrast with empiricism . . . the identification of all interpretation with imposition, imaginary construction, and literary invention presupposes the possibility of knowledge without interpretation—and that is empiricism pure and simple. (1998a, 314–15)

The argument that historical narratives do not mirror the past in the way photographs and replicas do, presupposes this empiricist picture theory of knowledge and an empiricist theory of truth as direct correspondence.6 But as Carroll says: “Obviously, historical narratives are not mirror images of the past; in general . . . they are not even pictorial, let alone perfect pictorial replicas of anything. But why should the fact that they are not pictures imply they are fictions?” (1998, 43).

Postmodern historiography introduced a strong criticism against the “soulless fact-oriented positivism” (Iggers & Von Moltke 1973b, xii) of traditional historiography. However, as Burke points out:

It remains a pity that the majority of professional historians (I cannot speak for anthropologists and sociologists) have so far been so reluctant to recognize the poetics of their work, the literary conventions that they follow. There is a sense in which it is difficult to deny that historians construct the objects they study . . . It is equally difficult to deny the role of fiction ‘in the archives’ . . . On the other side, it is an equal pity that White and his followers, not to mention the theorists of narrative, have not yet seriously engaged with the question whether history is a literary genre or cluster of genres of its own, whether it has its own form of narratives and its own rhetoric, and whether the conventions include (as they sure do) rules about the relation of statements to evidence as well as rules of representation. Ranke, for example, was not writing pure fiction. Documents not only supported his narrative, but constrained the narrator not to make statements for which evidence was lacking. (1992, 128–29)

Historiography Beyond the
Positivist–Postmodern Continuum

Within the framework of ontological monism the historian either creates or re-creates the historical subject straight, so to speak, because of the taken-for-granted reality catalog and the accompanied belief in immaculate perception. Precisely because of criticisms such as the above, the very continuum is questioned and is being replaced by approaches that take seriously an intellectual movement that has developed during the latter part of the previous century. Instead of “a dialectical middle ground” (Fay 1998, 11), which genuinely captures the truths of both sides, there is a movement in historiographical thinking beyond this dichotomy. It is in particular the replacement of ontological monism by some form of plural...

Table of contents

• The Life of a Galilean Shaman
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1—A Paradigm Shift in Historical Jesus Historiography
• Part 2—A Model of Shamanic Figures
• Part 3—Jesus and the Shamanic Complex
• Conclusion: Someone Like a Galilean Shamanic Figure?
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography