The Proof of the Prudent

...The Crucible of Christians settles down to the articles, a mixed lot from a diverse selection of authors representing half a dozen nationalities, and fields of study ranging from Jewish, ancient and classical history, through archeology and architecture to Christian theology This pluralist approach has many advantages, m particular that the different writers correct each other's impressions and give varying perspectives on the material It can also, however, be terribly confusing for the uninformed reader to encounter such an assortment of approaches and opinions, especially since there is little explanation of any individual contributor's background and vocabulary Most of the articles, for instance, use Bible datings of the Higher Criticism, but Karl Shubert, in a piece on Jewish sectanan parties, dates Trito-Isaiah (or at least a part of it) as 6th-century B c , a highly questionable conclusion for a work the Higher Critics considered to be the very latest m the Old Testament (that is, about 150 B c ) Some of the articles seem quite unfamiliar as well with recent reeval-uations of New Testament sources in the light of the Dead Sea scrolls, and lean heavily on a theory of Hellenistic influence, while others have been written by men who have worked extensively with Qumran material Evidently, too, many of the writers are nonbehevers in Jesus' divinity, either through the euhemer-istic conviction that gods evolve out of historical figures, or through adherence to umtanamsm But the two articles most directly concerning Christ and his disciples are written by the Jesuit scholar Jean Cardinal Danielou, whose central preoccupation seems to be the formation (or reformation) of Judaeo-Chnst-lanity, and who blithely asserts "There is not even any reason why circumcised Jews should not profess faith in Christ this, after all, is what the Apostles were and is what they did" On the whole, though, the authors give questions regarding the nature of faith and Christ a wide berth, and try to concentrate on those circumstances which, in their opinion, helped to form and mold Christianity The major problem with the scholarship m this area is that certain preconceptions so prejudice most scholars that they cannot draw the obvious conclusions from their findings One common misunderstanding about the Bible views its events as misremembered history Thus, any character with even some human attributes is assumed to be a genuine historical figure Solomon, for instance, is almost universally supposed to be a king of unusual sophistication who built the First Temple, although there is no evidence of the existence of either him or the Temple outside of the Bible, and the contents of 1 Kings make his mythic nature obvious Nor are assumptions of this kind based on religious prejudice alone, tor A H M Jones refers in his article to the Trojan Wat as historical, religion here can clearly be discounted as the biasing factor Acceptance of the popular distortion of historical personages and events encourages further tenuous speculation into the origin of such obviously mythical creatures as the cherubim, described in Ezekiel 10 as four beings on wheels "And their whole body and their backs, and their hands and their wings, and the wheels were full of eyes round about And every one had four faces the first was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle " The notes to a picture of a Phoenician ivory describe the cherubim as "almost certainly representations of a winged figure, with a lion's body and a woman's head, which the Greeks called a Sphinx " But not only does the Sphinx display very few ot the attributes described in Ezekiel, this explanation would deny any separate mythology to the Jews, or any imaginaton beyond the misunderstanding of iconography Still another illustration m The Crucible of Christianity shows the spot in Jerusalem known as the Garden Tomb, and romantically favors it over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as Christ's tomb Why9 Because "its bare, unaltered state makes it powerfully evocative of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' buna...

...The Proof of the Prudent THE CRUCIBLE OF CHRISTIANITY: JUDAISM, HELLENISM AND THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE CHRISTIAN FAITH Edited by Arnold Toynbee World 368 pp $29 50 Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL Just in time for the period of the winter solstice, which we call Christmas, World Publishing brought out in the United States The Crucible of Christianity, an anthology of 15 articles by "authorities" on the era 200 B c -200 A D , before and after the founding of the new religion, with 556 illustrations, 158 of them in color Edited by the indefatigable Arnold Toynbee, this 10-pound wonder was intended to bring modern scholarship on the subject to a "wide-awake public," nonacadenuc but "cultivated able and serious-minded," with "a concern for the future of mankind' Toynbee goes so far as to call his intended audience "the salt of the earth," and avows that m Scotland, Finland and Iceland it "embraces fishermen and shepherds and mechanics, as well as members of the liberal professions " The mode] for this book is French popularization of scholarly work (what in France is called oeuvie de vulgarisation), and indeed, The Crucible of Christianity bears a close resemblance to the popular and vulgar Larousse dictionaries whose illustrations and price make up to the public for their lack ot serious intellectual content (One might cite in particular the Larousse Dictionary of Mythology, whose superficial coverage tells its readers not about the purposeful study of mythology, but a kmd of Jungian fairy tale designed to please the dilettante ) After Toynbee's repulsively romantic preface...

...Worse yet is a defense of a Christian relic known as the Holy Shroud of Turin, believed by some of the faithful (and, apparently, by credulous scholars as well) to be the grave wrappings of Jesus Christ The evidence for authenticity is based on such statements as "the image could have been produced on a cloth soaked in aloes by contact with a recently dead corpse of which the sweat contained concentrated urea," and that the dark stains by the wnsts ' may be blood," although the writer concludes rather lamely that the question "remains open until direct physical tests are allowed " As a matter of fact, the shroud probably appeared in the 14th century, and someone seems to have admitted to painting it In the event that it should prove to date from the 1st century, however, it would still be no venfication that the shroud belonged to Jesus, any more than the age of bones under the Vatican would show them to be relics of St Peter Theories of Jesus' Messianic role and Crucifixion differ vastly from one wnter to another in the book Toynbee himself seems inclined toward Jewish responsibility for the death, with his talk of Jesus' "unpardonable offense in rabbinical law" In addition, he quotes two ambiguous remarks attributed to Christ as denials of his divinity David Flusser and Cardinal Dan-lelou, on the other hand, are apologists tor the Jews, after an excellent evaluation of eschatological figures in the Old Testament and Apocrypha from Melchizedek to Enoch, Flusser concludes that Christian belief in Christ's divine nature sprang from two sources "Jesus' conception of himself as being the son," and his "tragic death, interpreted in terms of Jewish concepts of martyrdom " One need only point out that among his many almost identical Messianic prototypes, there seems no reason to single out Jesus as historical, and no Christian regards Christ's death as tragic Other contributors, who accept the authenticity of not only the four Pauline Epistles (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians) asserted by the Higher Critics to be certain works of the Apostle but even the late Pastoral Epistles, fall into the assumption of an early flourishing lst-century Church, whereas it is obvious that the Church described m the Epistles, early and late, is that of the 2nd century Obviously, as W C Van Manen suggested, these documents were letters written by a variety of authors, and given added authority by attribution to Paul The notion of a formed Christianity m the 1st century leads m turn to the acceptance of the Ne-ronian persecution, although even among the early Christians this event was disputed, and some writers believed Nero to be pro-Chris-tian It is equally clear that the illusion ot a unified primitive Church leads to misunderstanding of early heresies, or rather, early orthodoxy, since few of the Patriarchs would be considered orthodox by modern standards The Ciliable of Christianity is a sounder work than such recent disasters as the popular commercialization by the comparative religionist Ninian Smart, or the idiocies of Hugh Schonfield's two books on the founding of Christianity, or the silly ingenuities of S G F Brandon's The Trial of Jesus of Nazai eth, which I reviewed in these pages ("Time to Cleanse the Temple," December 2, 1968) But that makes the Toynbee book all the more misleading, in that its techniques and ideas are not as patently absurd And because its contentions—for the most part pedestrian recapitulations of conservative theories—require a knowledge of the subject to support or refute them, the common reader is apt to accept the veneer of scholarship without question Popularizations should not merely water down the standard positions on important issues and present them as the leading historical views A pluralist approach should produce controversy among its contributors, not vague harmonization, and should explore divergencies in the hope of developing a better method of scholarship The Ci liable of Christianity does not answer the questions it raises?why, for example, Christianity had such amazing success m competition with other religions of the period, it does not even raise some questions it ought to—what circumstances formed the various pre-Christian sects into Christianity, and what events added a New Testament to the Jewish Bible It is doubtful whether, with the techniques employed by its scholars, this book could answer such questions fairly For a work which attempts to analyze the formation of Christianity, both Old and New Testaments receive minimal attention, and Bible exegesis is generally lacking In one of the best articles, Robert Grant, the authority on Gnosticism, writes movingly of Ongen, the 3rd-century exegete, whose scholarship and Bible criticism have, to my mind, never been surpassed Ongen s statement that the Gospel is Jesus is too important to ignore or dismiss as simply the peculiar doctrine of one man, it is a vital concept for the believer, for the scholar, and for the histonan To the believer (and I include myself in that category) it expresses the idea that the divine Logos is one with the Glad Tidings, to the scholar and the historian, that Christianity is, in common with Judaism, a religion of the Word, and that its proper study should consist of both the scholarly examination of the Bible as a work of "sacred history" —that is, myth believed to be history—and the historical study of the people who said to their God, Thy Word is Truth...