Surely I Am Coming Late

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter sent me a link to a Facebook note by someone I take to be an evangelical Christian, arguing that when Jesus taught the nearness of the End (the final judgment, the Kingdom of Heaven, his own coming on clouds seated at the right hand of Power), he meant "near" to his own day, not two thousand years later.  He then faces the implication that Jesus and the early Christians were mistaken about an important teaching.  (You have to be logged in to Facebook to read the post, but come to think of it, most people nowadays seem to be on Facebook, so here's the link if you want to read it.)  I haven't yet followed the link to his next post on the subject, but my friend wanted my reaction to this one, so I stopped there for now.

My reaction, of course, was that the writer is correct: the New Testament writers were addressing their contemporaries, not people in the distant future. They believed that they were living in the last days, and that God, with Jesus at his right hand, would sweep away the world as they knew it and replace it with his kingdom on earth, as it had always been in the heavens. They believed that some of that first generation of believers, perhaps they themselves, would live to see it happen. Whether they accurately reflect Jesus' teachings, no one can say.  But the idea that Jesus and the New Testament writers mistakenly believed that the End would happen in their lifetimes is not this writer's discovery: all professional New Testament scholars are well acquainted with it, thanks to Albert Schweitzer's classic work The Quest for the Historical Jesus, first published in German in 1906, in English in 1910.  Schweitzer did a major revision, published in 1913, but that version wasn't available in English until 2001.  Much New Testament scholarship after Schweitzer's work was published was concerned with getting around its implications, by explaining it away or by offering an alternative theory, like C. H. Dodd's realized eschatology. 

(The most valuable thing about Schweitzer's work for me had little to do with its account of Jesus as an end-times preacher.  The bulk of the book is a critical survey of life-of-Jesus research from the late 1700s to the end of the 1800s, as shown by its original title, From Reimarus to Wrede.  Anyone who's interested in theories about the historical Jesus ought to read that part of Schweitzer's book, because most contemporary theories from The Passover Plot to The Da Vinci Code basically recycle ideas that Schweitzer described and refuted a hundred years ago.)

The writer whose post my friend referred me to never mentions Schweitzer or acknowledges that the problem he's confronting is well-known among scholars, probably because he wants to rely solely on the New Testament material he quotes, and not on scholarly interpretation.  That's reasonable, but it is worth asking why laypeople who study the Bible never seem to notice this material themselves.  It isn't because they don't rely on professional guidance: study Bibles with annotation and commentary sell well, and church-sponsored Bible study will provide you with professional guidance too.  Such commentaries will reassure the student that while there are troubling, difficult passages in Scripture, they're nothing to lose sleep over.  Churches want to build up their members' faith, not undermine it.  That tendency isn't limited to religion: most adults want schools to teach national history that will build up patriotic fervor, not undermine it, for example, nor are science courses supposed to dwell overmuch on problems with existing theories.  I've argued before that most people seem to stay in relationships much longer than they should, after it's clear that it is time to bail.  There are plenty of reasons why people behave this way; I'm interested here in a recent case.

I've often wondered how people can go on believing in prophets whose predictions have proven to be false.  The Hebrew Bible, after all, prescribes the death penalty for such a person, in Deuteronomy 18:20.  On the other hand, prophets are allowed to cover their asses. Ezekiel reported that Yahweh promised to hand the city of Tyre to the heathen King of Babylon Nebuchadrezzar (chapter 26). Later, Yahweh issued a correction: despite the hard labor of Nebuchadrezzar and his army, Tyre didn't fall, so Yahweh gave Egypt to Nebuchadrezzar instead (chapter 29). This isn't a well-known passage; I learned about it from James Barr's Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1984, 26-27). But Jesus' imminent return on clouds of glory is much proclaimed.

What would happen if someone's prophecies were falsified today?  We all heard about Harold Camping's humiliation by Jesus' failure to keep his rendezvous with destiny two years ago.  Camping fell down partly because he set a precise date, which the mainstream media obligingly publicized.  But let me tell you about a book called Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received, by one Dannion Brinkley with Paul Perry, published by Villard Books in 1994, with an introduction by Raymond Moody M.D.  (Remember the publication date: it's important.)  I heard about this book because Anne Rice was touting it, and had based parts of one of her novels on the author's experience, even citing him by name in The Vampire Armand as one of "the new spiritual explorers".  She continued to be a booster of Brinkley for years afterward.

In 1975, Brinkley says, he was struck by lightning and died, but later revived.  While he was dead he had what is now called a Near Death Experience, in which he was taken to a crystal city, where he was instructed by angelic teachers about the future.  The instruction included a detailed future history through the year 2000.  "Of the 117 revelations that he recalls," according to the book's dust jacket, "95 have come to pass."  "Revelation" is the meaning of the word "apocalypse"; Saved by the Light is an apocalypse like the one written by John of Patmos in the New Testament, or the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible, or the many non-biblical books of Revelation produced at around the beginning of the Christian era.

You can tell roughly when an apocalypse was written by noticing when its predictions stop being accurate.  Daniel, for example, purports to be the story of a Jewish youth carried away to Babylon during the exile of 586 BCE.  Like Dannion Brinkley, Daniel was given heavenly instruction about events to come, which paralleled actual history until the middle of the second century BCE.  His angelic teacher told him to seal up the book until the right time.  Most scholars today believe that the book was written around 165 BCE, and its predictions were backdated.  The same thing happens in the New Testament: in chapter 13 of the gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus predicts what will happen after his death and resurrection, culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and his return on clouds of glory.  Here too, the predictions stop being accurate after the destruction of the Temple, so it's most likely that Mark was written after that happened.  The gospel of Mark shows Jesus telling his disciples to keep his teachings secret, though there's a lot of disagreement about the significance of this.  In any case, we can again date Mark by the point at which his predictions fail.  The revelation of John is odd man out here: it takes place in the writer's present, and he's told not to seal the book, for Jesus will be returning very soon.  But that prediction, too, is false.

Dannion Brinkley didn't publish his revelation for almost twenty years.  During that time he got involved with Raymond Moody's research on Near Death Experiences.  Gradually, he says, he noticed that things he'd seen in his 1975 visions had come true: the nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl, for example (36), the collapse of the Soviet Union (37-38), growing conflict in the Middle East, increasing debt in the United States (40), the first Gulf War of 1991 (40-41), and more.  These predictions all refer to events that happened before the publication of Saved by the Light in 1994, or were vague enough not to require a lot of predictive power.  Once he turns his gaze to events after 1994, however, he's in trouble.

A second nuclear accident appeared in the box, this in a northern sea so badly polluted that no ships could travel there.  The water was a pale red and was covered with dead or dying fish.  Around the water were peaks and valleys that made me think I was seeing a fjord like those in Norway.  I couldn't tell where this was, but I knew that the world was frightened at what had happened, because radiation from this accident could spread everywhere and affect all of humankind.  The date on the picture was 1995 [36-7].

Oops.  No such nuclear accident happened.   The "bankruptcy of America by the year 2000" (40) didn't happen either.  Nor did "two horrendous earthquakes" that happened "sometime before the end of the century, but I couldn't tell where they took place ... The cost of rebuilding these destroyed cities would be the final straw for our government, now so financially broken that it would hardly be able to keep itself alive", leading to "the end of America as a world power" (40).  Nor was there "a submarine loaded with nuclear missiles" in 1993, when both "Iran and Iraq [were] in possession of nuclear and chemical weapons" (41).

I saw this submarine powering through the waters of the Middle East, piloted by people I knew to be Iranians.  I could tell that their purpose was to stop the shipping of oil from the Middle East.  They were so praiseful of God in their speech that I had the sense that this was some kind of religious mission...

Chemical warfare played a role in a horrible vision of terrorism that takes place in France before 2000.  It begins when the French [all of them? the government?] publish a book that infuriates the Arab world.  I don't know the title of this book, but the result of its publication is a chemical attack by Arabs on a city in France.  A chemical is put into the water supply, and thousands drink it and die before it can be eliminated.

In one brief vision I saw Egyptians rioting in the streets while a voice told me that by 1997, Egypt would collapse as a democracy and be taken over by religious fanatics [41].

That last one is particularly funny, because Egypt wasn't a democracy before 1997, having been a dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak -- you've heard of him, I'm sure -- since 1981.

Oh, there's more, but this is probably enough.  I don't know where the "95 out of 117 revelations" figure came from, but I'm skeptical about it.  But to repeat: like his predecessors, Brinkley begins to fail as a prophet in the early 1990s, when his book was being written and published.  It's probable, then, that the "predictions" for the years before 1994 were concocted after they'd already come true.

I looked at customer reviews of Brinkley's book on Amazon, and noticed that those who rated it positively ignored the predictions and concentrated on his account of his Near Death Experience.  That's probably why many Christians are able to ignore the New Testament's failed predictions: there's a lot more to the New Testament, and even just the gospels, than end-times predictions, so believers concentrate on what they find useful and edifying, and ignore the rest.

I also noticed that there's a new edition of Saved by the Light, published in 2008.  I can't tell from the Amazon description what, if anything, has changed from the original, and I'm not going to spend money to find out.  The customer reviews are instructive, though.  Some date from well before 2008 and so must refer to the first edition; the most recent, again, concentrate on Brinkley's Near Death Experience or on the depth of his conversion from an "S.O.B." to a New Creation in Christ.  There are some by conservative Christians who noticed Brinkley's false prophecies and are indignant that people are taking him seriously.  Only the Bible tells truth! they huff.  But the Bible also contains false prophecies, and that evidently doesn't bother them.

Evidently many people read Saved from the Light after the year 2000 without ever noticing that Brinkley's predictions hadn't panned out.  The fact that Brinkley is still out there, publishing books and conducting seminars, despite his failed predictions, is telling.  Christian apologists have often claimed that the New Testament writers must have been telling the truth, because there were plenty of hostile critics around who could have exposed them if they didn't get things right.  That's giving people too much credit, don't you think? -- especially in religious matters.  If someone exposes your falsehoods, you just accuse them of trying to undermine the faith of simple believers, you point out that Jesus was persecuted by the ungodly too, and otherwise change the subject.  People who want to believe will believe.

Prophecies of Mass Destruction

I've been meaning for a while to write more about "end-times" stuff, but it's such a big subject; the last time I sat down to write about what should be a simple topic (homosexuality and Christianity), I ended up with 500 or so typewritten pages. I learned a lot by doing that, so it was worth it. And really, this is a much smaller topic, but it lends itself to a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

Still, I'm going to duck the main event for awhile longer. Today I'm reading Elaine Pagels's newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking Penguin, 2012). Pagels got her start as a student of the Nag Hammadi "library" of mostly Christian writings that were discovered in Egypt in 1945. Her 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels established her as a popularizer of early Christianity, both orthodox and heterodox; it also made her a convenient target for reactionary Christians who wanted to stick with a medieval version of Christian history.

In the new book she tries to put the biblical Apocalypse of John (also known as the Book of Revelation; "apocalypse" means uncovering or revelation) into its historical context. I've written before about the Apocalypse and the way it makes many orthodox Christians uncomfortable even though it is in the canon; unlike the Nag Hammadi books and others, it's an official part of the Christian (though not the Jewish) Bible. Pagels isn't uncomfortable with the material, but I'm still not very happy with her account of it, though I admit that my displeasure comes down more to matters of interpretation than of major questions of fact.

For example, Pagels believes that Jesus' prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Matthew 24:1; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:5) is authentic -- that is, the gospel writers didn't invent and put the prediction into his mouth, he actually made it himself. She summarizes her reasons for thinking so.

First, because other prophets had made similar predictions before its destruction, as did Jesus ben Ananias, in the early 60s; second, because Mark's account is contradictory, claiming that Jesus was accused of having threatened to destroy the temple -- an accusation Mark insists is entirely false (Mark 14:56-58); third, when Mark admits that Jesus did prophesy the temple's destruction (Mark 13:1-2), the account of his words does not accord with what had actually happened, as one would expect with retrojected prophecy (there are stones standing upon others -- quite a few of them, to this day) [184 note 31].

I don't find this persuasive. Her first point, about earlier predictions, could just as easily support an argument that Jesus' predictions were inauthentic, especially since the example she gives also is known only from a source written after the destruction of the Temple, namely Josephus' Jewish War. The story also contains some dubious details that I won't go into now; click through, read it and see what you think. (People are apt to invent after-the-fact omens; there are people, for instance, who believe that John Kennedy went to Dallas on November 22, 1963, knowing that he would be assassinated there.) Her second point is strange, though it's true that Mark's account is contradictory. Notice that Mark's 'admission' occurs before the accusation was made against Jesus; and that a prediction is not a threat, though people are prone to confuse the two. Numerous scholars have argued that someone might have overheard Jesus' prediction and mistaken it for a threat, but this is highly speculative, and the gospel writers seem to be as confused about the matter as Jesus' accusers would have been.

In her final point Pagels seems to shoot herself in the foot. If the prediction isn't accurate, then it's a false prediction, and we know what the Bible says about false prophets. But a lot of Christians, ranging from laypeople to scholars, have assumed that it was accurate: that the Temple was totally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE as Jesus foretold it. The authors of the gospels probably never saw the extent of the destruction -- Church tradition has all of them writing far from Jerusalem, so even the most orthodox Christian has no basis for assuming otherwise -- and Mark probably didn't know whether one stone was left standing upon another. And Mark put another false prediction into the same passage, namely that Jesus would return on clouds of glory at the right hand of Power before the generation of his original followers had died off. Was that one authentic, too?

Which brings me to the main reason why the presence of an accurate prediction in an apocalyptic discourse counts against its authenticity, and not in its favor: in a typical apocalypse, most of its predictions are "retrojected," because normally an apocalypse is written from the viewpoint of someone who lived long before -- centuries in the case of Daniel or Enoch, decades in the case of Jesus. The predictions begin from the past figure's own time, and are taken from history, not prediction, until the present time of the apocalyptic writer. Daniel, for example, is supposed to have lived during the Babylonian exile (586-538 BCE), but most scholars believe that the Book of Daniel was written in the mid-to-late 160s BCE. The "predictions" in the book stop being accurate at the time of its writing, so there's no reason to believe that Daniel accurately foresaw historical events from 538 to 165 BCE; the author of the book retrojected them. (The New Testament Revelation is an exception to this pattern; the writer who was granted the visions is avowedly writing not about the distant future but about recent events and events very soon to come. He was wrong too.) So, when you find accurate predictions in an apocalyptic work, the best presumption is that they were written after the fact. Even if Jesus did predict the destruction of the Temple, he also evidently predicted his return immediately afterward; so either he got lucky, or Mark invented the prediction (or it was invented by someone Mark used as a source) and put it into Jesus' mouth.

We'll never know for certain because we don't know exactly when the gospels were written or what material their authors had to work with. Pagels agrees with many if not most other New Testament scholars that the gospels were written after the burning and desecration of the Temple in 70, which is another reason to conclude that Jesus' prediction was invented to fit the history.

A large part of the problem isn't Pagels's fault. Standard early Christian history is complicated by scholars' need to reconcile the confused and historically unreliable New Testament material with sound historical practice. So, for example, while discussing the Apocryphon (or Secret Book) of James from Nag Hammadi, she writes,

Here the author deliberately recalls -- and challenges -- what many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts. For the Book of Acts says that after Jesus died, he appeared to his disciples in resurrected form and continued to speak with them for forty days, but that then he ascended bodily into heaven: "As they were watching ... a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going ... they were gazing upward toward heaven." Traditionally, Christians have taken this to mean that after that time, those seeking access to Jesus could find it only indirectly, through "apostolic tradition," as they called the oral and written accounts that the apostles were said to have handed down for the benefit of those born too late to ever speak directly with Jesus [87-88, italics and ellipsis in original].

Ay, what a mess. I'm not sure how much of this is Pagels's account of what "many Christians believe" and how much is what she thinks the New Testament actually says. Start with the Book of Acts, which was probably written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke. Although Acts does say that Jesus ascended to heaven after forty days, it also shows Jesus appearing to various people after that time. Not only did Jesus appear "in his resurrected form" to Paul (Acts 9:3ff), which is hardly obscure, but

¹⁰ ...there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

¹¹And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth,

¹²And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

Even according to Acts, then, Jesus appeared to at least two people after he'd ascended into heaven, so what "many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts" is not what the New Testament Book of Acts says. And that's only Acts. According to the gospel of Matthew, which doesn't mention an ascension into heaven, Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, and told them, "... and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world" (28:20). If the author of Matthew had written his own Acts of the Apostles, it would probably have looked quite different from Luke's Acts. One reason Christians have been able to rely on Acts so much is that, unlike the gospels, it has no New Testament competitors for the period it covers. (Except for Paul's own writings, which are also inconsistent with Acts on numerous points.)

This is ironic, considering the wrath of orthodox Christians over scholarly and popular interest in non-canonical Christian writings like the Nag Hammadi material. They claim that they follow the New Testament writings, which are the only authoritative early Christian sources -- but in fact, much of what they believe is not what is written in the New Testament: they omit and add and reinterpret to suit their needs. Not that Pagels's account, or the non-canonical books she discusses, are authoritative either: they're just different.

(One minor, maybe technical point that keeps bugging me: strictly speaking, "revelation / apocalypse" isn't prophecy, and prophecy isn't apocalypse. Scholars usually distinguish between the two genres, and I'll try to write more about this before long. Maybe more important, as Pagels surely knows, prophecy doesn't necessarily involve prediction, especially not prediction of the far future. A prophet is a human being, not always male, through whom a god speaks. He or she may have visions, but his or her function is as a messenger from the god, and he or she usually makes threats and promises about the present or the immediate future. Jonah's announcement to Nineveh is typical: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" Jeremiah's prediction that the exile in Babylon would end in seventy years is atypical, as well as arithmetically inaccurate. The Christian claim that Jesus' career was foretold by the prophets is based on some very wild misinterpretations of the prophets. Jesus himself was not a prophet, though the concept of what a prophet was had undergone some historical change since Isaiah and Jeremiah. And I concede, grumpily, that nowadays "predict" and "prophesy" are used interchangeably, even by scholars; but in a discussion of apocalyptic writings and beliefs, it seems to me that they should be distinguished.)

This Man Must Be a Prophet

Cornel West has been lashing out at President Obama, at least partly on the grounds that Obama spends too much time around Jews and "has a certain fear of free black men…" Why, Professor West, do you know any? At The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry wrote a nice takedown, pointing out that despite his protestations, West 1) has been sniping at Obama in similar terms for years; and 2) is no position to criticize Obama for spending too much time with white folks and Jews:

This comment is utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, MA and Princeton, NJ. And it is hard to see his claim that Obama is “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they” as anything other than a classic projection of his own comfortably ensconced life at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.

Harris-Perry says that West's complaints are "deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness," and allows that he "may have had principled, even prophetic reasons, for choosing this outsider position relative to Obama," but concludes that West's vendetta "looks more like a pissing match than prophesy [sic]." I'm not sure who (besides West himself, maybe) has claimed prophetic status for West, and I'll give Harris-Perry points for evidently understanding what a prophet originally was, namely a person through whom a god speaks. (Nowadays most people confuse prophecy with prediction, foretelling the future, which is often part of the job description but isn't its core.) But whatever else I may think about the content of West's critique, it sure sounds to me like he's channeling Yahweh: the whining self-pity, the outbursts of rage over real or imagined slights, are unmistakable.

Similarly, Joan Walsh at Salon asked rhetorically, "Is this how identity politics ends?"

It couldn't possibly be that any of these people, whatever their age, race or social class, wherever they went to school, have genuine differences with the president? (Or conversely, in the case of Obama defenders being attacked racially and personally, have wonderful and sincere reasons for continuing to support him fervently.) No one can be given credit for speaking from genuine moral or political conviction anymore; everyone can be dismissed or derided with a nod to their personal background. This may be the logical end of identity politics, where ultimately we're each locked inside whatever little box we check, tiny caucuses of one, and common ground is impossible.

Walsh has a point, but "identity politics" is at best an excuse, not a reason for the ad hominem attacks that keep infecting political and other discussion. (I can't even say "in the US" there, for it isn't confined to our borders.) The Obama White House, as she surely remembers, deals with its critics in exactly the same terms, and the same tactics are standard in Western culture and its biblical background. Reasoned discourse exists aplenty, but when reason is just too much work, or you're afraid that a reasoned argument lacks punch, there's nothing like personal attacks.

Walsh concludes:

Former Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein wrote a really great piece about why he left the White House: It's pro-Obama, it's compassionate, it's fair-minded and it's also critical. This is the discussion we're supposed to be having. That West mess is a lamentable sideshow.

I agree about the sideshow part, but "pro-Obama" is identity politics.

This Man Must Be a Half-Prophet

From a comment I posted to John Caruso's blog A Distant Ocean on February 29, 2008 (yes, before Obama was even the Democratic presidential candidate):

I would expect that if we get a Dem in the White House, and he or she fails to deliver the change he or she has promised, we'll get a Republican Congress in 2010 -- just as we got in 1994, thanks to Clinton/Gore's pushing NAFTA through, and a change like the one we got in 2006, thanks to Bush's callousness and brutality to America. It'll take more than a vote to make real change happen, though. I'd expect people to retreat into apathy once more after new politicians fail to improve things, but what with this very unpopular war and a growing anger, that might not happen. If I have any hope, it's not in any candidate, but in other people. Will there be a movement worth joining? I hope so, but if so it will be probably be despite Obama or Clinton, just as the movements of the 60s were despite Kennedy.

Well, I was half-right, and considering Republican victories at the state and local levels, I think my crystal ball was working well that day. (And I need to remember and use my closing line from this comment a week later.)

This Man Must Be a Prophet

October 10, 2008, end of post:

"If Obama wins the election, the next four to eight years could make the Clinton administration look like a tea-party."
(image source)