Thomas L. Thompson,
The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. NY:
Basic Books, 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
One
naturally approaches this weighty tome with excited expectation that the
king of Old Testament minimalism is going to give his customary
treatment, this time, to the New Testament. Surely, one thinks, Thompson
will dive into the debate over whether there is any evidence of
synagogues in first-century Galilee, for example. One hopes for some
substantial contribution to the Christ-myth debate. But one is
disappointed. There is much to learn from Thomas’s graceful and
symphonic treatment of ancient Middle Eastern Sacred King protocols and
related mythic-literary themes, and especially of the tragedy of the
Israelite/Jewish monarchy recounted in the Deuteronomic history (with
its anticipations in the Pentateuch and echoes in many other quarters of
scripture), but finally there is as little anti-history in the book as
there is history in the Bible.
In several previous,
brilliant studies, Thompson has demonstrated, especially through
archaeology, that the Old Testament is as devoid of any historical basis
as the Book of Mormon is. That leaves him with a big and variegated
book, or collection of books, that must have a rather different purpose
and character than we had thought. Even Von Rad, with his “theology of
recital,” presupposed a historical Israel and Judah whose national life
and history provided at least some sort of building blocks for the
fanciful epic of salvation history. The biblical bards were
commemorating, celebrating, reliving events based, however loosely, on
what their ancestors had undergone. We figured it was something like
Homer’s Iliad, based on a real Trojan War to some unknowable
degree. But, failing even that amount of historical grounding, we are
left to ask just what sort of literature is the Old Testament? Is
it all really a parable about human potential and failure? Is its
apocalyptic language really intended as timeless utopianism? Are its
sacred kings and heroes really set forth as nothing more than character
types to emulate or to eschew?
I suppose I am not ready to
give up form-criticism and its attendant urge to reconstruct some
Sitz-im-Leben for this psalm, that oracle, this etiology, etc. And
that implies that much of the Bible can function as a core sample
revealing at least hints of what was going on historically. I guess I
had rather do something like posit a Maccabean setting for the Psalms
than to make them simply abstract religious poems.
And then there is the
uneasy implication of Thompson’s work that tends not only to
dehistoricize the Old Testament but to de-Judaize it as well, as if the
second-remove abstract, figurative reading to which Gentile God-fearers
and Christians perforce resorted were really the ancient authors’
intention all along.
Thompson simply dismisses
the notion that the messianic motifs in which the gospels are steeped
reflect the apocalyptic expectations either of early Christians or of
contemporary Jews. No, they all “understood” the various prophecies and
miracle stories of both Testaments as utopian fictions and allegories of
piety. Thompson fairly sneers at the imagined bumbling of Albert
Schweitzer, foolish enough to try to discern the outlines of an
eschatologically deluded Jesus from Matthew and Mark. How could anyone,
before modern numbskulls, have so grossly misread the biblical,
messianic tradition as to imagine that the Kingdom of God might actually
dawn in fury and blessing? No, surely they knew better than literalist
moderns. And then along comes Simon bar-Kochba! He seems to have taken
it all too literally! But why should we assume the train jumped the
track with the Son of the Star? Rabbi Akiba certainly shared his
perspective, and presumably he was a fairly sharp-eyed student of
scripture—as traditionally read. And if Bar-Kochba believed in a literal
messianism, starring himself, why cannot a historical Jesus have seen
himself in the same light a century before? Not that he did, but it is
not clear why we ought to rule out the possibility.
The special pleading
argument of the book is akin to that found in James D.G. Dunn’s writings
on New Testament Christology. Having surveyed the thinking of Philo of
Alexandria, concerning a hypostatic Logos, Son of God, Heaven High
Priest, and Primal Adam, Dunn is curiously reticent to admit that Philo
had created New Testament Christology in advance, with John and Paul
simply scribbling the name “Jesus of Nazareth” in the blank. No, Dunn
argues, Philo was not talking metaphysics but metaphor. It was the New
Testament Christians who first envisioned a real heavenly Priest,
Adam, etc. Dunn is trying to protect his inherited theology, a
Christology of the genuine incarnation of a metaphysical being unknown
till the Incarnation. Thompson, on the other hand, is just covering his
hermeneutical hind end.
I have referred to
Thompson’s expert tracing of themes through this and that passage of
disparate scripture texts. We are to join him in seeing a verse in Job
shedding light on another in Kings, etc., on the basis of a theme or
even a single word used in common. Pardon me, but when I get to this
point in an exegetical argument, I start wondering just what sort of
cleverness the scholar is demonstrating. Is he discerning the Ariadne
thread sewn so carefully and so long ago for future readers? That is, is
our scholar thinking the ancient writer’s thoughts after him? Or is it
rather that the scholar is manifesting the creative and synthetic skill
of the midrashist, even the kabbalist, in atomistically splicing
together texts hitherto unaware of one another? Has Thompson unlocked
the meaning of the text? Or has he used its straw to weave together the
gold of yet another “biblical theology”?
And this observation leads
to an irony. Thompson chides John Dominic Crossan and many other
scholars for their supposed pretense of being able to tell that Matthew
and Luke utilized Mark and Q. There is no need for such hypotheses,
Thompson informs us, because the ocean of common motifs is much too wide
and deep for us to spot a similarity between text A and text B and then
to conclude that one got it from the other. He is accusing all adherents
of the any of the Synoptic hypotheses of the sin of “parallelomania.”
What strikes me as odd is that it seems to take much less proof than
Crossan can point to in behalf of Synoptic dependence theories for
Thompson to be sure that this obscure Psalm line is the basis for that
story in 1 Samuel, or that Nehemiah has a particular passage of Genesis
in mind!
In the end, I gather
Thompson is saying, a la Bruno Bauer, that someone in the Hellenistic
period saw the need for a fictive ego-ideal/personal savior and invented
Jesus to play that role. Nor does such a theory seem unlikely to me. But
I could wish for a good bit more than hints from Thompson, who has
forgotten much more of the relevant data than I will ever learn. For
instance, I need Thompson, if I am to understand his work, to explain
how the propaganda mythemes of ancient sacred kings became isolated from
any actual king or would-be king and became the basis of a complete
fiction, whether David or Jesus.
Sometimes Thompson provides
clues he does not linger to put together, and I for one find myself left
to my own devices, wondering if I am “getting it.” For instance, it
appears that the notion of Satan testing and trying the (ostensibly)
righteous is one of these sacred king motifs, something that becomes
evident once one discerns, with Thompson, that Job is pictured either as
a pagan king or in kingly terms. Satan goes to work in order to
determine whether King Job deserves the mandate of heaven. Well, that
makes one think of Satan testing King David, whispering the suggestion
that he might want to conduct a conscription census. Is he a good and
godly king who will trust in the name of Yahve rather than in horses and
chariots? Then, come to think of it, Satan challenges the status of
Joshua the high priest, the post-exilic replacement for the king, whose
costume the priests had even appropriated. So far, so good. Jumping over
to the New Testament, Jesus being tested in the wilderness by Satan
makes new sense as part of the image of Jesus as a sacred king, not
merely a saint. What about when, in Luke 22:31, Jesus tells Peter that
Satan has demanded his prerogative to sift the twelve like wheat? Does
that break the pattern? No, because Jesus has just bequeathed a kingdom
to his disciples (22:28-29), so they must attract Satan’s attention, to
see if they are worthy of sitting the promised thrones! Fascinating! But
maybe I am only doing what I half-accuse Thompson of doing: connecting
far-flung dots.
There is, I say, much to be
learned from this book, and yet in the end it mainly whets my appetite
for an extended work of New Testament minimalism by this great scholar.