Institutionalization of Authority and the Naming of Jesus

Dreyer

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879785
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book is about the names given to Jesus by those followers responsible for putting his words and deeds into writing-the earliest Christian scribes. In the first-century Mediterranean world, the first name of male person was his proper name. The second name indicated the family or clan to which he belonged, whereas the third name was an honorary title bestowed on him because of some achievement, good fortune, physical attribute, or special excellence.Honorary titles were bestowed on Jesus mostly after his death. Such titles were often given to sages. The titles could either amplify Jesus' wisdom and empower people, or serve as instruments of power.This book aims to demonstrate the ideological and political mystification of Jesus in the transmission of the tradition about him. It illustrates the relevance of --The social history of formative Christianity;--The evolution of the Jesus traditions;--The genre of the gospels as biography; and--The institutionalization of charismatic authority.

chapter 1

Naming Jesus—A Matter of Cultural and Political Labeling

In the middle of the previous century Thomas W Manson ([1937] 1949) wrote the book, The Sayings of Jesus in which he emphasized Q as a very old source of the teachings of Jesus from which the evangelists Matthew and Luke derived a major part of their material. According to Manson the two most certain facts in the gospel tradition are that Jesus taught and that he was crucified. In Mark Jesus is called “teacher” twelve times and four times “Rabbi,” the usual name for a teacher of Israel. Manson raised the question whether Jesus, so to speak, was “academically qualified for the title of Rabbi?” The impression left is that Jesus was deemed not a “village craftsman turned amateur theologian but rather a competent scholar who had developed heretical tendencies” (Manson 1949:11).

Though Manson takes the history of the Jesus tradition in Q and the synoptic gospels into account, these diachronic insights do not function heuristically. Diachronic exegesis means that texts are seen as the products of a writing process that takes place over a period (dia + chronos) – in other words literature that is produced in an evolutionary fashion by means of either an anonymous group who transmitted their story orally or literarily or individuals who added, modified and interpreted received traditions, and in doing so changed their meaning. An exegete who takes this process seriously is engaged in a “diachronic” discovery of plausible meanings.

However, Manson’s interpretation of the gospel traditions was rather an early example of synchronic exegesis. This means that he inferred the meaning of the traditions from what they communicated within a particular period (sun + chronos) rather than what they could have meant during earlier stages of transmission. It is such a type of interpretation that places the relevance of the theme of “Jesus as teacher” in the spotlight because it functioned within the specific social context of synagogical controversy. Manson’s conclusion was that Jesus had “authority” on account of his being a “competent scholar” and therefore he was a Rabbi.

Yet, a somewhat different picture of Jesus the teacher can also be painted. Christopher Tuckett (1996:283), for example, takes the context of conflict in which Jesus found himself, into account. According to Tuckett, “much of the Christological awareness in Q focuses on the hostility and rejection experienced by Jesus . . . and the same experiences will come to his followers.”

These views of Manson and Tuckett differ substantially. According to the first, Jesus is subject of personal agency. According to the second, Jesus is object of affected interpretation. Nearly a decade before Tuckett pointed out the development in the Q tradition from the conflict experienced by Jesus to the conflict experienced by Jesus’ followers, Vernon K Robbins (1984) explored a similar development in the Markan tradition. This was the development from the pre-Easter Jesus as teacher, to a reflection of the post-Easter Jesus movements on the relevance of Jesus’ teaching for them. Robbins discussed various aspects of this development, for example the “validation” of Jesus’ authority in order that the followers of Jesus could be prepared for their own vindication. He also indicated how “Christological titles” were used as a means to validate Jesus’ authority and vindicate the post-Easter Jesus movements.

Validation and its opposite defamation are means of social labeling, either as an act of honoring or as an act of stigmatization. In Jesus studies Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey (1988:x–xi) refer to “naming as labeling” as a “Christology from the side”, that is how Jesus would have been experienced by his contemporaries rather than how his later followers theologized about his words and deeds. One of the reasons for Jesus’ followers calling him “Teacher”, “Prophet”, “Messiah”, “Son of Man”, “Kyrios”, “Saviour” and “Son of God” could be that Jesus spoke and acted in a such a compelling way that they expressed their experience of him by honoring him with these “predicates of value” (in German: “Würdeprädikationen”).

This book explains why and how the earliest followers of Jesus attributed titles such as “Rabbi” to Jesus. It aims to do so in terms of a particular social theory. A diachronic investigation will be done and a synchronic description given of the Jesus tradition, to explain the social dynamics of such attribution. I will make use of the work of the Swedish Biblical scholar, Bengt Holmberg. In his pioneering work in the field of Pauline studies, Holmberg showed what the role of power is in the process of the ligitimation and institutionalization of authority (Holmberg 1978:125). An example of this process is when the authority of a leader is accepted as legitimate. Holmberg’s case study in this regard is Paul, an apostle of Jesus, whereas Jesus himself is the case study of this book. In a brief overview of the research of the past half a century I explore why research on Q and the synoptic gospels have changed so substantially in a time-span of fifty years.

From the perspective of postmodern values, I aim to demystify the process of the validation of authority. Jesus’ authority was grounded in his wisdom. In this regard, Anthony Thiselton (1994:453-472) suggests a useful perspective for studying the titles of Jesus. Thiselton (1994:465) “borrows” the concept of institutional authorization “from social history or from sociology”. He describes what was “implicit” about Jesus, as the state of affairs concerning the identity, role, and authority of Jesus (Thiselton 1994:461).

The model Thiselton employs to work out the concept of institutional authorization is literary theoretical rather than social-scientific. He explains the development of “implicit Christology” to “explicit Christology” in terms of “speech-act theory.”1 Thiselton argues that the “performing of acts on the basis of causal force constitutes in essence an act of power through self-assertion. On the other hand, illocutionary acts which rest on institutional roles serve the purpose as acts which point by implication away from the self to some source of authority which lies beyond the self alone (Thiselton 1994:462-463; his emphasis). With regard to the study of Christological titles, Thiselton does not attempt to work out the “evolution” or the “unfolding” of the “illocutionary” (Christological) statements about Jesus. He also does not discuss the social dynamics of institutional authorization.

I argue that the Q tradition (and Mark and Matthew) originated within the context of scribal activity. For the demystification of scribal activity, I employ conflict theory to interpret scribal activity in the Middle-East.

The general dynamics of social conflict illuminates the specific conflict situations of both Jesus and his followers. A socio-historical approach sheds light on the pre-industrial agrarian context of Jesus and his followers. Narrative criticism provides the interpretative instrument to explore the biographical nature of the gospel tradition and to explain the polemics in the plot of the relevant stories. The main objective of the book is to trace the development of the Jesus tradition from an earlier to a later context in terms of the process of the institutionalization of charismatic authority. It illustrates how through this process titles were attributed to Jesus from a post-Easter perspective in order to validate his authority.

Power is part of the process of institutionalization. My focus is on the dynamics of authority and power in the transmission of religious traditions in order to better understand the relationship between authority, institutionalization and Christological titles used for Jesus. Such a theoretical approach calls for an evolving and flexible design by means of which the Jesus tradition is interpreted ideological-critically and socio-politically. Military power and literacy were products of an advanced agrarian society. Powerful people (élite) employed scribes and soldiers (retainers) to exercise authority. Scribes, who usually came from the group of sages and seers, often used honorary titles to praise their employers.

My thesis is that scribes attributed honorary titles to the sage Jesus of Nazareth after his death. This process gained momentum after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans during the “Great Jewish Revolt” in the late sixties of the first century ce. This period became known as “formative Judaism” and “formative Christianity”. Pharisees began a process of spiritual, economic and political reformation. Destroyed and damaged cities and villages were restored. Scribes became involved in the restoration of villages. They were called “village scribes”, an Egyptian title brought to Palestine and Syria by the Ptolemaians. Their Hellenistic administrative structures were continued under Roman rule. After the battle of Actium in 31 bce the “Roman government restored free economic enterprise, but maintained the existing oppressive range of taxation, and much of the Ptolemaic bureaucratic administration” (Appelbaum 1976:704). According to Fiensy (1991:160–61), the so-called “nomes” were the basic social unit:

The land in Egypt was organized administratively for tax purposes along the lines of the ancient divisions, called “nomes”. Each nome was divided into toparchies, with the smallest administrative unit being the village. Palestine had a similar organization2 Each large administrative unit had both a military and economic overseer, and the smaller units had probably only one administrator.3 Over the entire administrative complex stood the second most powerful man in Ptolemaic Egypt, the Dioiketes, whose job was to oversee all the finances of the king, both his private estates and his tax revenues.4

These “overseers” were previously categorized as elders (presbuteroi), leaders (proestotes), first men (protoi), notables (gnoromoi), powerful ones (dunatoi), the most honourable (time, genos), and honored men (see Fiensy 1991:160–61). These names refer to people in powerful positions. Village administration in first-century Galilee, modeled after the Egyptian system, had already advanced from simple agrarian to advanced agrarian. The earlier system based on kinship structures developed into a bureaucratic organization on village level, which meant that a number of extended families were clustered together (cf. Lenski et al. 1995:182). William Arnal (2001:151–52), in his extensive study on scribal activity in antiquity, shows how the phenomenon of names used as honorable titles in the Egyptian bureaucratic tradition, was brought to Palestine by the Ptolemees and became a writing technique among the scribes. The following quote explains the process:

“This kind of phenomenon must necessarily have been somewhat variegated: more or less absent or unofficial in tiny settlements, exaggerated or formalized in larger ones, and shared by a greater or smaller number of prominent families. In the case of larger villages and towns, with several prominent families, with diverse economic circumstances and plot sizes, with tenancy, and with at least nominal attachment to an outside power (Egypt, Syria, Judea, depending on circumstances), a local administrative apparatus was required. The necessarily limited political affairs of such communities were conducted by a collection of elders, some of whom, perhaps, from time to time bore the title of village leader (komarches) or something similar, their legal affairs settled by magistrates, while their total polity and community life was expressed in gatherings of village assemblies.

Under such circumstances, even the most de facto autonomous of towns required various official and witnessed bills of sale, petitions, contracts, marriage agreements, wills, and so forth, as well as an apparatus for the administration of justice. Thus, in addition to local strong men and affluent families, a small class of literate administrators was essential to the smooth functioning of the region even prior to Roman-Herodian city building. Such a role was normally filled by the so-called village clerk (komogrammateus). We have extensive evidence from Egypt for the presence and function of these figures, and some indications that they were a feature of Palestinian village life as well. As their title indicates, their primary task was writing: composing various official documents for those unable to write; forwarding petitions to appropriate officials; ensuring the execution of legal responsibilities; and serving as witnesses, middlemen, or accountants for persons with extensive business dealings.

These administrators would not be found in every settlement and could not have been very numerous even in larger settlements. Thus a single scribe might very well have serviced a cluster of villages, and inhabitants of smaller settlements, when seeking justice, preparing documents, or pursuing other official business, had to travel to the nearest settlement that had a scribe. These duties did not occupy the scribes full-time. They were as engaged by agricultural production as their fellow villagers and were drawn from the local peasantry itself, with whom they probably, to some degree, identified. At the same time, however, their roles involved a measure of prestige and power, at least within the village and its immediate area. These administrators thus occupied a middle position between the average smallholder and the larger landowners who do...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Naming Jesus—A Matter of Cultural and Political Labeling
• Chapter 2: A Synchronic Test Case: Q and the Synoptic Gospels
• Chapter 3: The Institutionalization of Charismatic Authority
• Chapter 4: From Names to Political Titles: Jesus the Son of Man as Test Case
• Bibliography