On "The Jesus Dynasty" by James D. Tabor ****

James Tabor certainly lays out a lot to think about and ties a number of odd details together, some of which I hadn't known about; the work is well written and entertaining. That said, I came to this book looking for more information on Jesus's family but expecting not to glean too much, given that I knew that Tabor's book had a particular point of view that is shocking to anyone who is a believer. Tabor, after all, is a big fan of the work of S. G. Brandon, who himself espoused certain views that dismiss large chunks of the New Testament. In Brandon's view, the Christians were Zealots, and the Gospels do their best to hide that fact from the Romans. What's more, the idea that Christians fled Jerusalem before its 70 CE destruction is dismissed as fantasy by Brandon. So this is where I figured Tabor would be coming from, but that wasn't quite true.

For James Tabor, the Jesus Dynasty is one rooted in the ministry of John the Baptist. John was to be the priestly Messiah, while Jesus was to be the kingly one. Jesus's work was a largely family one, and Jesus himself was not the son of God but son of a Roman soldier (Pantera) who possibly raped Mary. I hadn't known about this accusation/theory, but shortly later came across it in some rabbinical writings from the fifth century. Anyway, Jesus's disciples were made up of largely of family members, including four of his brothers (who share the same names as four of the disciples). John's death came as a shock, and Jesus's also. The Messiahs were dead, but they lived on in the work of Jesus's brother James, who would unite the priestly and kingly Messiah and restore Israel. The Messiah is wholly physical in Tabor's view--except insofar as the Messiah was supposed to usher in the appearance of the Godly Son of Man in glory.

James, of course, died also, as did the other relatives of Jesus, but this was Christianity, real Christianity, for the first couple of centuries, as seen in the Ebionite sect, which accepted Jesus as a prophet but not divine. It was Paul, alas, who changed Christianity into a more spiritual dynamic, with Jesus as son of God. His work colors the entire New Testament, including the Gospels, which were all written after 70 CE and the death of James. Only in the books of James and Jude, Jesus's brothers, and in the book of Q do we see truly what Jesus's minsistry was really like and what it was really about. Tabor takes Q as very much authoritative, though Q (a sayings Gospel of Jesus from which Matthew and Luke drew their various accounts of Jesus's words) is a theory and has never been found in a manuscript form; it seems a bit much to base an entire theory around.

Some other issues with the work: Tabor claims the meal Jesus had with his disciples was on Wednesday night rather than Thursday, as most Christians do; thus, Jesus died on Thursday, not Friday. He bases this on the idea that there was an annual Sabbath--a double Sabbath--as denoted in Matthew if one interprets the wording in Matthew 28:1 that way, a possible translation I hadn't earlier been aware of but something that is possible. The issue with the double Sabbath, however, as Tabor interprets it, since he places the Passover as occurring at/after Jesus's death is that at least on the Jewish calendar that has come down to us, the beginning of the days of Unleavened Bread (i.e., what is often termed Passover, though Passover is actually the day before) never happens on a Friday. Thus, Jesus could not have died on Thursday evening, unless the calendar changed between the first century and now. As I've long understood it, the First Day was actually Thursday, so Jesus died on Wednesday and has his final supper on Tuesday.

In the end, Tabor comes to the conclusion that if Christians understood these wonderful new truths about Jesus's life, there would be harmony between the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and Christians would have a new appreciation of all that Jesus did. He's write that there would be more unity between the faiths insofar as their views of Jesus would be more similar--in Judaism, he would be accepted merely as a rabbi; in Islam, he is accepted as a prophet; and without the divine status, Christians could fit in with either of those. The problem, however, is that without that divine status, there isn't really any substance for Christianity to wrap itself around. If Jesus was merely seeking a physical kingdom that would bring about God's intervention in the world and if that Jesus died and was just a man, then he would be just another failed Jewish Messianic figure. Indeed, as Paul would write, if Jesus be not raised, then Christians are still in their sins and there is no hope of resurrection. We might as well just live for the day. Tabor's idea that somehow his claims enrich Christianity, therefore, don't and can't--were they true, they just rob Christianity of all substance.

On “The Black Muslims in America” by C. Eric Lincoln ****

Lincoln's work is one of sociology more than history. Not having that much knowledge of the Black Muslim movement, I found this work very interesting and informative. That it was written from a sociological perspective, however, had some drawbacks insofar as the book was organized around topics and themes rather than chronologically. This meant, for me, that at times the work was hard to follow—that is, it was hard to remember particular points because I didn't have a narrative to pin them on.

Of course, history still makes up a large section of the work. One does eventually learn about Wallace Fard, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X, and others. Fard was the founder of it all. I don't remember much about those sections of the book, but as the book moved into the 1960s, it becomes clear that Fard comes to be seen by later Muslims as a kind of Allah incarnate. Elijah Muhammed, in turn, becomes Fard's spokesperson and prophet. The movement, in other words, takes on a kind of cultism. Malcolm X was one of the converts (all converts apparently take on the X “surname”), an important one insofar as he was able to give effective voice to Elijah Muhammed's and the movement's ideas. But as becomes plain, very late in his short life, he abandoned certain givens that the movement believed in—possibly at the peril of his life, and certainly at the rejection of him from the movement—coming to see the brotherhood of all people at the Haj.

The cultishness was one of the main things I took from the book; others were the kind of reverse racism embedded in the movement, and the manner in which the movement actually changes people's lives for good. All these things sort of go together.

A major tenet seems to be that White people are essentially the devil. The world will one day change, and God's children, the colored people, will rule and Whites will be cast off to the dustbin (or at least confined to Europe, where they belong). The Muslim movement is not integrationist. And really, in some ways, it's understandable why some minorities would be skeptical of integration, the way that it has often led not to better living conditions for minorities but to simply another manner of oppression.

The Muslims encourage good behavior from their converts, and this has led in some cases to poorer people (to which the movement largely appeals) actually making changes that positively affect their lives (e.g., drug aversion, commitment to family and work). They also encourage self-defense, even as they discourage activist sort of activities. This is in part influenced by the eschatalogical utopian viewpoint—that one day, Allah will take care of everything and Whites will fall and Black people will rise to their natural position. The counterpoint to such beliefs, however, is that it seems as if the religion is a way that actually stifles meaningful interracial achievement and solutions and attempts at meaningful change; instead, it reinforces racial strife.

The sort of eschatological thinking actually reminds me a lot of some branches of Christianity and calls to mind the way that Marx would call religion the opium of the people. The focus of the Black Muslim movement seems in many ways to have been Elijah Muhammed. What he says/believes goes. Run counter to that, and you're out of the church. Don't create trouble, in other words, in or out of church surroundings so that the movement can keep growing.

On “The Mysteries of Artemis of Ephesos” by Guy MacLean Rogers ***

Rogers sets out to discover what exactly the mystery of Artemis was—indeed, what the mystery was of such mystery cults in general. In the process, Rogers sets forth a history of Ephesus and of the Artemisian, the temple of Artemis. I have not found a book yet that tells a secular history of Ephesus from early days to end, but Rogers, via the tale of Artemis, comes closest to what I've been looking for.

The work is highly technical. Rogers tells his story and makes his point by looking at a lot of inscriptions and then deducing information from thoses. He traces the growth of the cult of Artemis and its demise by looking at the names in these inscriptions, the people listed as various kinds of priests of Artemis and of Ephesus. I found the work difficult to get into as a result,

And yet, the tale grew on me. Rogers starts with the relocation of the temple and city by Lycomedes, in part because of flooding in the original sites, back in the 500s BCE. My area of interest was largely in the early CE, and this was indeed when Ephesus began to find its biggest success, peaking around 161. And then, by 167 or so, it began its descent. Why? And why so quick? By 262, the temple was in ruins, the cult of Artemis pretty much dead.

Rogers makes the case that the temple and goddess and her cult were all about salvation. If the people served her properly with sacrifices and adoration, she would keep the city safe. When things were prospering, this meant good things for the cult. But in the 160s, the Roman Empire was hit with plague. Death raged. Add in earthquakes and other disasters, and the economics of Ephesus collapsed, but so too did faith in the goddess. Despite the tedium of much of Rogers's discusion, I felt a bit sad for the city when it finally started to head toward its destruction.

On “The Triune God” by Edmund J. Fortman *****

This work provides a quick synopsis of trinitarian thinking from the beginning of the Christian faith to the twentieth century. My interest was primarily in the first half of the book—really from the foundation of the church through the first couple of centuries—and these are the book's clearest passage. In fact, as Fortman lays out, the Trinity teaching doesn't really find full form until the time of Augustine, in the fourth/fifth century, with some major “clarifications” happening in the Middle Ages, with Thomas Aquinas.

Fortman, himself a trinitarian, does a good job providing a framework and even denoting—or admitting—that trinitarian teaching is only implied among thinkers in the first one hundred years or so. He runs through pertinent scriptures and also through pertinent passages in early writers. The doctrine would not begin to find substantial form until the beginnings of the third century, and even in that, there would be plenty to argue over for the next hundred to two hundred years. Earliest thinkers didn't spend much time trying to figure out the place of the Holy Spirit; incorporation of the spirit as a “person” within the godhead would only begin really near the end of the second century. Instead, the arguments were over how Jesus was God and how he was related to, or positioned against, the Father.

Many of the arguments seem heavily tinged in philosophy, and after Augustine, even more so. As later Catholics would affirm, the trinity is a mystery. In that sense, I'm left wondering why there's been so much attempt to explain it. As becomes clear, as the centuries go on, there really isn't a good way to explain it; the second half of the book is full of seeming nonsense speak. Our terminology doesn't have the words to express what is attempting to be said; and even some of the terminology used, such as person(a), has changed over the years such that that that older terminology is no longer even as meaningful apparently as it once was (even though no better terms have arisen). Fortman, as he discusses later thinkers, seems to affirm much of what Augustine and certain other thinkers said on the subject, but over and over I'm left wondering why so many insist on this view of God (or insist Christians hold to it), when the earliest Christian writers did not conceive of God in the same way (and thus wouldn't be Christians in the view of contemporaries). The assumption is, of course, that later writers were led to greater truths that go beyond those earlier writers—but if the doctrine is so essential, why did the early writers not have it? Are Christians perhaps arguing over and hypothesizing about the wrong thing?

On “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” by C. Vann Woodward *****

I'd long imagined this book as much longer than it is. It is referenced a lot in literature about the civil rights movement, and it turns out it was originally based off a series of lectures. That means not only short but also accessible, with minimal presentation of references. In this case, it works very well.

What one gets is a very brief account, toward the last third of the book, of the civil rights movement up through the early 1960s. All the major events are there, placed in context, which is wonderful.

But the real joy of this book, for me, was the way that Woodward blows up many of the assumptions that it's easy to have about the way that race relations came to be in the early twentieth century. He notes that actually, during antebellum years, Blacks and Whites in the South were actually quite mixed socially, especially in the city. This was different from how things were in the North, where the races were much more inclined to be socially segregated, even if not by law. This mixing actually amazed Northern visitors.

After the Civil War, this mixing didn't go away. Blacks and Whites were on intimate terms in the South, not in the North. This isn't to say, of course, that there was any sense of equality, just that there was no real impetus to force the different races into different spheres. Reconstruction didn't change this. In fact, in some ways, Reconstruction was almost a success, insofar as Black people were now able to take on political power as well.

So what changed? After the federal interest in forcing the South to treat Black folks as people, the South slowly began to impose laws that reinforced the inferior status of Black people. These laws were those that led to segregation: the Jim Crow laws. They started, in just a few states, with the forced separation of Blacks and Whites on railroad cars. But within a decade, the practice had spread almost entirely across the South, along with other rules in virtually every sphere, such that eventually there were separate places for virtually everything—food, school, water fountains, and so on. Jim Crow segregation, in other words, really didn't come to be “normal” until around 1900. By 1950, when the Supreme Court started ruling against such laws, many folks just felt like Jim Crow was the way things had always been down South.

On “The Last Thing I Heard” by Theron Hopkins (1343 words) *****

Here's a hard-luck story that manages to feel somehow genuine and authentic, the great strength of this piece. It's about a son, and about a dad who takes one too many financial hits. What happens to such a relationship in the years that follow? Read the story here at The Sun.

On “Reading John in Ephesus” by Sjef Van Tilborg***

The concept of this book is an intriguing one. Given that most scholars tend to believe that John's Gospel and letters were written in the city of Ephesus, Van Tilborg sets out to explore what readers in Ephesus would have thought of the works. In that effort, he looks at concepts like kings, gods, temple, and teachers and students, comparing the Christian and Jewish concepts with those that would have been common among residents in Ephesus. To make such comparison, Van Tilborg examines more than anything else the epigraphs that reside among the city's surviving architecture.

The results, however, I found somewhat underwhelming. One thing is that Van Tilborg writes very much for the scholarly audience. Many quotes from epigraphy are left in Greek, leaving one without a strong understanding of Greek with a lot to wonder what's being said. The cases where parallels are drawn prove generally not to be as paradigm shifting as one might wish. Ephesians respected the gods; Christians respected Jesus. Emperors were thought of like gods; Jesus was thought of like a god. And so on.

Of course, as with most books, there were occasional gems of interest, like the large number of epigraphs with John's name featured versus the much smaller number with Paul's name, suggesting that indeed John had a larger role in the city. It's these sort of things that made the book worth the effort.

From "From Slavery to Freedom" by John Hope Franklin ****

This basic history of the African American from pre-enslavement to the late 1960s is a classic on par with Lerone Bennett's. That one is arguably slightly easier reading, but this one at times has a certain poetry to it and also covers even more history. I chose to read the 1967 version (the third edition) rather than one of the many later editions that continue to come out every few years because the 1967 version would have been one the Black Panthers would have actually assigned in their later years.

Items that stood about regarding this book, as opposed to Bennett's: Franklin puts the Black United States in the context of Black America in general, so there are chapters on the Caribbean and Brazil. This gives one a better sense of the slave trade overall. Of note is the fact that in many of these other areas, the same sort of racism that became paramount to the continuation of slavery in the United States wasn't always present in some of these other colonies/nations. It's like we had to run a certain class of people down in order to continue to justify the manner in which we treated them--not so much in some other locales. A freedperson was just as much a citizen no matter the color of skin. That said, evidence doesn't always match up with such a claim. Some freedpeople joined with slaves in indepedence causes; some joined with the colonizers. It just depended. And likewise, darker skin, unfortunately, sometimes leads to racist impulses even elsewhere. In that sense, I think of the C. L. R. James book I read and how he puts African-descended people everywhere into a similar struggle.

As with Bennett's book, I also particularly enjoyed the portion of the work about Reconstruction. Bennett made clear many of the gains that were made during that period after the Civil War. Franklin doesn't seem as keen on those temporal improvements, focusing more on how short of ideal that were. What's more, he also writes a bit of the initial couple of years after the Civil War, which really in a way precede Reconstruction. It's like the South went right back to doing what it had been doing before, though with enslavement having a different name (many Confederates returned to government). The abuse heaped on former slaves is part of the reason the federal government ended up taking a firmer stand and even banning former Confederate officeholders for a time. But I hadn't ever really thought of that short gap between the war and Reconstruction; it really isn't talked about much.

The sections on the civil rights movement were interesting insofar as Franklin puts so much of that history together. I have read a lot about this period, but I realized I've rarely read about the various parts of the movement in the larger context--how sit-ins fit alongside marches alongside Freedom Bus Rides and so on. One thing I found interesting was the way that the state government tried to stop the Montgomery Bus Boycott by claiming the people were illegally interfering with business (seems utterly ridiculous: you MUST shop at/eat at/use this business--what kind of law is that?).