Dismantling Anti-Jewish Thinking in Intro to the NT?

As someone who teaches New Testament in a mid-sized liberal arts college, one of the biggest challenges I face is the insidiousness of anti-Jewish perspectives among many of my Christian, even culturally Christian, students. Students are not overtly anti-Semitic--they don't use slanderous language or ethnic stereo-types. Yet, when they read the New Testament, the Gospels in particular, they have an incredibly difficult time understanding that the depiction of Jewish groups in these texts are 1) the result of intra-Jewish conversation and conflict and 2) part of the authors' literary strategies. Students (including some adults I've had the opportunity to teach in church settings) tend to embrace the gnostic/ Marcionite perspective regarding the character of the divine. I can't even count how often I've heard a student say something along the lines of, "The God of the NT is so loving in comparison to the God of the OT." In other words, "the God" of the OT is described as vengeful, unloving, bloodthirsty, etc. My first response, as someone who's research is on the Apocalypse, is, "Have you read the Book of Revelation?" Yet, no matter how often I remind my class that "the God" of the NT is the same as the divine of the Jewish Scriptures and writings, from an early Christian and Christian perspective, there are always students who can not or will not shake this dichotomy. A-J Levine, in a speech at UNC-Greensboro a few years ago, explained that she responds to this by referencing the 23rd Psalm, an oft-memorized passage in Christian Sunday Schools: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want/ He biddeth me to lie down in green pastures/ He restoreth my soul." (Of course, when I grew up we memorized this in the KJV. Old school, represent!) Even this sometimes falls on deaf ears, as students explain that in "most of the OT" God is a big meany.

So for many students (of course not all!) the multiple depictions of the divine in the Hebrew Bible are diminished into an image of an ogre and the depictions of a wrathful and justice-seeking God of the NT are dismissed as marginal. Revelation is at the end of the canon for a reason . . . it's not really meant to be read or taken seriously. (Of course, for some students, these perspectives are held deeply because they've heard them all their lives, from church pulpits, Sunday school teachers, etc. But that's a whole other can of worms.)

In light of this, I do try to find avenues for dismantling anti-Jewish thinking in my NT courses. In fact, this is one of the "unstated goals" of my Introduction to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature course. But as I write this, I am struck by the fact that, perhaps, I need to be more upfront with this goal. Maybe it is time to name this, along with uncovering how NT texts have been used to justify slave-holding and to oppress women, as one of my central student learning outcomes. In doing this, I think I also need to find new strategies for challenging these perspectives, new strategies for unsettling this simplistic and hurtful thinking. This is one thing I hope to think about this summer as I rework my Intro syllabus. Hopefully, I can begin to share some of these here.

Books to guide me as I explore these questions:

• bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress.
• Terrance Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Traditions.
  
• Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus.

And, of course, I'm always happy for suggestions and insights.

herod's theater box

This summer I had the opportunity to visit a number of sites related to Herodian Dynasty in Israel. One of the interesting things about Herod the Great (37 BCE-4 BCE) is his relationship to the major players involved in the emergence of the Roman Empire. Initially allied with Mark Antony, after Octavian's victory, Herod courted his favor. He met Octavian at Rhodes where he turned his loyalty to Mark Antony into a positive factor, proclaiming that his loyalty would now be directed toward Octavian. After Octavian's acceptance of his loyalty, Herod built Ceasarea Maritima in the then-named Augustus' honor.

Ceasarea wasn't the only Herodian building project reflecting Roman influence. Although Herod's building at Herodium, a hill South of Jerusalem, began prior to Herod's connections to Augustus, archeologist Ehud Netzer suggests that the building project may have been part of Herod's attempt at demonstrating his sophistication to Roman elites. The site at Herodium included a luxury palace, gardens, a large bath complex and a theater. Recently, Netzer and his team, who had been searching for Herod's tomb, discovered a private theater box at the top of theater. This box has recently been featured in the National Geographic. As the images in the article reveal, the box was sumptuously painted, including faux windows and scenes of the Nile, which were especially popular among Romans. When the group I traveled with this summer met with Netzer, he showed us the box, which Zealots later turned into a kitchen, explaining that he believed Herod had this painted especially to impress his Roman guests. These paintings, in fact, are some of the few Roman paintings in Judea with human and animal figures. Other Herodian decorative arts, such as the mosaics at Masada, refrain from depicting such figures. This is something scholars have attributed to Herod's compliance with the Jewish prohibitions against images. This box potentially challenges some of the the assumptions scholars have held about Herod and his relation to Jewish tradition.

Questioning Categories: Roman Judea/ Galilee Was Really Roman

I had good intentions about blogging while I was in Israel and Jordan. But since my access to the internet was only occasional and since we spent a good deal of time on-site, my intentions weren't fulfilled. So, now that I am home, I will be processing some of what I learned (I learned more than I ever could have imagined), as I also begin to look at the next stage of my current writing project on Revelation.

The main thing I learned while in Israel was that Roman Judea/ Galilee was saturated with Roman influence. I expected Roman influence, as suggested in previous posts, yet I had no idea of how pervasive Hellenistic/ Roman culture was in ancient Judea. In graduate school, my instructors spent a significant amount of time trying to dispel the myth of an ancient Judaism that was hermetically sealed off from Hellenistic and later Roman influence. I've continued this refrain in my teaching, for example, highlighting the portions of 1 & 2 Maccabees which suggest that it was Jewish sects that embraced and promoted Hellenism (e.g. the gymnasium) rather than having it foisted upon them by Antiochus IV. Yet, I had never fully realized the number of temples dedicated to Hellenistic/ Roman deities in the region, nor had I realized all the ways that the upper classes (Herod in particular) seemed to emulate Hellenistic/ Roman trends. In other words, I think I have been holding on to the Jewish-Hellenistic/ Roman dichotomy more than I realized. It's not that the ancient forms of Judaism do not have some particularities. However, I think I'm seeing more clearly how these particularities can fit within the range of what it means to be Roman. In fact, I'm beginning to realize that my past notion of Roman-ness was not as nuanced as it could have been.


One of the things that struck me while visiting ancient sites was how marking something as Jewish had the effect of suggesting that something was religious. This was initially made clear at Massada, when we visited an area described as a "synagogue." While the term synagogue signifies to us a religious function, Jodi Magness (see above) pointed out to us that we really have no idea of whether or not the room served a religious purpose. The space does include a structure seemingly functioning as a genizah (some scroll fragments were found buried there). Other than this, there is nothing that suggests this was more or less than an assembly hall. It may have been used for religious functions, but also for political or other communal gatherings. To mark the space primarily as religious has a significance for us that might not have been present in the ancient world.

Similarly, I was curious about the labeling of mikvot as "ritual baths." Many of the sites we visited had these stepped baths which were used for immersion. Traditionally, these were used to rid oneself of ritual impurity. There is at least one extant mikvah by the Temple Mount and the cisterns from around the Temple suggest that there could have been many more. The homes in Herodian quarter in Jerusalem had numerous mikvot, since these homes were likely inhabited by priests or priestly families. Yet, in one of these homes, the mikvah was close to and looked similar to a bathing area, which included a seating area. This made me wonder why we describe the use of mikvot as ritualistic, which suggests a special significance, and not Roman baths. The importance and complexity of baths in Roman cities suggests that they were for more than hygiene and health, that they served important social and communal functions. Did they have functions that could be understood as "ritualistic" or "religious"? How do the functions of these baths relate to the functions of the mikvot? Clearly, I need to read Fagan's Bathing in Public in the Roman World to start getting a sense of the issue. The point is, for me, how we mark supposedly Jewish things as "religious" in a way that we don't when it comes to non-Jewish things or spaces. Ultimately, it raises the question of what constitutes religion . . .