On "The Souls of Black Folk" by W. E. B. Du Bois ***

This is the first of about ten books I've pulled from the Black Panther Reading List (https://library.pugetsound.edu/c.php?g=782488&p=5607493), which is not a list of books by or about the Black Panthers but rather a list of books, as I understand it, that the Black Panthers assigned to their members at the height of the movement. The idea of reading such a list came to me while listening to the Mother Country Radicals podcast. On that podcast, a story is recounted wherein a young recruit attending a meeting learns about becoming armed. He tells the person running the meeting he wants to be so armed; the next day, expecting some sort of weaponry, he's instead handed a stack of books: "These are your arms." So I thought it would be intriguing to read what such members were being armed with--a sort of different way to approach reading about the Panthers: read what they read.

Du Bois's book is the oldest on the list. I'm glad finally to get around to reading it and to reading his work. He's been referenced so often in other reading, it seems a shame it took me so long to get around to him.

This classic book is at its best when Du Bois gives us his historical take on the Reconstruction period. I had never read about the Freedmen's Bureau, for instance, at such length; another chapter focuses on the work of Booker T. Washington, who has long come in for a great deal of criticism for his accomodationism, and there is no exception here. There is also chapter on African American religion that I found intriguing. Du Bois spends much of his work focusing on how to improve circumstances for freedmen--via education, via political means. These discussions, alongside the history, are the most interesting.

When Du Bois veers into more personal territory, recounting visiting a poor family or having a child, I found my mind more often wandering. As with many authors of the time, he waxes poetic, with flowery language, in these situations, and I found myself more interested in the larger issues of the other essays.

That's not to say that these personal flairs don't connect to the larger themes. The penultimate chapter reads more like story than an essay. It's about a man who went north for education; his return to the South does not go well. He is seen by whites in the area as "uppity" simply for acting like a human being, often, it seems, even without intending to make some sort of political or activist stance. He's suspect to whites, because of his education, and perhaps has also become a bit "out of practice" kowtowing to southern ways. His next to final sin is daring the kids in a class he teaches to learn something of their own culture (I hear echoes or the current ban on certain "race conscious" readings in Florida--I can't believe we're still dealing with such bans one-hundred-plus years later). In the end, he finds that he can't stay, which means that the hometown locals don't receive the aid that that education he has received should have enabled for their community. It's the story of one man--one likely similar to Du Bois himself in some ways--but it makes the larger points about the difficulties presented in improving the lot of a large segment of the people of the nation. 

On “Cities of God” by Rodney Stark *****

This book is in a sense more of a critique of the manner in which historians write history than it is strictly a work of religious history. Stark, a sociologist, sets out to show how useful numbers and statistical analysis can be to historians, and the case study he uses to set out his theory is that of the growth of Christianity in thirty-one cities in the Roman Empire in the first two centuries of the Christian era.

The thirty-one cities that he chooses are those that had populations of more than thirty thousand. He uses various means to count to how popular Judaism was in each city and how popular the goddesses Isis and Cybelle were in each city. Using these numbers and the fact that some cities were ports and others inland to reach certain conclusions regarding how Christianity spread and what types of Christianity spread. He shows, for example, that it spread more quickly to places near Jerusalem and to ports. But he also shows that gnostic versions of the faith were more often tied to those cities where Isis and Cybelle were worshipped, which, he notes, suggests that gnosticism did not derive so much from within Jewish settings but from those more influenced by paganism.

Using such ideas, he proposes various reasons that Christianity caught on in popularity, including how cities are troubled places with itinerant populations, such that the Jewish faith (and by extension the Christian) offered a kind of community less often offered from the proliferating pagan faiths. He also shows how paganism hung on much longer than many historians give it credit, long after Constantine.

The study is enlightening and the text very readable, even for folks less familiar with the scholarship he seems to be critiquing.

On “The Jewish Gospels” by Daniel Boyarin *****

Boyarin sets out to show how Jewish and Christian were actually fluid terms until the fourth century—that what we think of as necessarily Jewish was sometimes Christian, and what we think of as Christian was sometimes Jewish. The idea in itself isn't terribly surprising to me, as it is one I largely share, though Boyarin's split may be a bit late, depending one the region he's talking about.

I gleaned much from the specifics in this book, however. A major portion of the work is given over to the study of the terms “Son of God” and “Son of Man” which ironically places as meaning essentially just the opposite of what we would think them to mean. “Son of God,” he shows, demonstrates Jesus's link to humanity and, specifically, to nobility, like David, or even the first man Adam. “Son of Man,” by contrast, is really about demonstrating the manner in which God has manifested himself among men; its great meaning, thus, is really about how God has come to dwell with us.

Another, later chapter focuses on Jesus's views about food. Boyarin discusses the, for me, familiar discussion regarding Jesus's usage of the term “clean” when he says that all things have been registered as such. There are two different words, both rendered “clean” in most English translations, but one has to do with purification and the other with dietary restrictions. Thus, when one reads the New Testament closely, Jesus is really talking about Pharisaical rituals, not about Biblical food laws.

Finally, Boyarin questions the popular theory among many contemporary scholars, such as Bart Ehrman, that the suffering Jesus linked to Isaiah was really understood as a passage about the nation of Israel as a whole. No, Boyarin says, some Jews, even before Jesus's time, understood that passage as being about a Messianic figure, a single person.

It's a short book, but Boyarin brings out a lot of great points on specific issues that have taken up discussions in recent scholarly works.

On “First-Century Judaism in Crisis” by Jacob Neusner ***

This work is essentially a biography of Yohannan ben Zakkai, at least with regard to what we know about him. Who was Zakkai? He was apparently one of the foremost Pharisaical rabbis after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem who helped fashion what became rabbinical Judaism.

This isn't to say that he was, early on, much of a success. He departed Jerusalem for Galilee before returning to Jerusalem shortly before its temple's destruction. He looked more to the law than to the temple in terms of importance. Hence, like many Pharisees, he was well set to take up a leadership role after the temple's fall. He managed to escape Jerusalem in the siege and to find a home in Yavneh, where he helped set up the council that would hold sway over the post-Temple faith. Neusner waxes poetic throughout most of the biography, making up with flowery language and expansive quotes from rabbinical writing for the lack of extensive, solid information about the subject. On the whole, however, he manages indeed to portray what life was like for the Jewish people in the wake of this major event.