Left Behind Friday on Sunday

I've written before about my guilty pleasure taken in reading the sites of that American good old time rapture ready left behind religion. But it's with an even greater pleasure and no guilt at all that I read the Slacktivist site and especially Fred Clark's Left Behind Fridays series, in which Clark has heroically taken on the task of reading and critiquing the execrable series of novels bringing Left Behind theology to a mass market. Time zone differences mean that most of the time it's a Left Behind Saturday in this corner of the world. But every once in a while it'll be a bit later. This weekend it's a Left Behind Sunday. But it's been worth the wait. There have been times when I think the sheer weight of extremely poor theology and abominable misreadings of biblical texts have crushed even Fred, sapped his spirit.

But this week he's back in full form with TF: Bruce's Sermon, part 4. Superb analysis and critique combined with a few of those LOL moments, often almost ROFL. Here's a sample to whet your appetite:

Yes, he's been preaching for more than an hour already, but who cares about lunch, I just want to hear about what it means that John's vision makes no mention of a bow-string.

Bruce is still preaching. "We'll talk next week and following about the next three horsemen of the Apocalypse," he says, forgetting that he's already said this. "The rider of the white horse is the Antichrist, who comes as a deceiver promising peace and uniting the world," he continues, forgetting that he's already said this more than twice:

"The Old Testament book of Daniel -- chapter 9, verses 24 through 27 -- says he will sign a treaty with Israel."

Really? Let's look, shall we? Here is Daniel 9:24-27:

Seventy 'sevens' are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy. "Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven 'sevens,' and 62 'sevens.' It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the 62 'sevens,' the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one 'seven.' In the middle of the 'seven' he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.

Clear as mud, that, but that's Daniel for you.

The first six chapters of Daniel are fairly straightforward stories of Israel in exile. The final six chapters are a hallucinogenic stew of visions, numerology and wrath. That description of the second half of Daniel might also work as a description of much of Revelation, so it's not altogether unreasonable for Bruce to decide that there's some connection between the two apocalyptic nightmares, but why here? Why jump to this passage in Daniel from that passage in Revelation? What's the justification or logic or excuse?

This skipping back and forth between Revelation and Daniel is standard practice for "Bible prophecy scholars." They are, after all, reading from Scofield Reference Bibles, in which all of this cross-referencing is right there in the footnotes. Yet while this may be par for the course with prophecy preachers, it still seems to me that there are at least four reasons why Bruce's abrupt segues here from Revelation 6:2 to Daniel 9:24-27 and then back to Revelation 6, verse 3, strike me as deeply weird.

Weirder, even, than the bizarre content of the passages themselves.

First of all, there's nothing in that passage in Revelation about the horsemen that suggests any need or justification for inserting gaps into the chronology of John's strange vision.

And here's another:

You really, really don't ever want to learn enough about the esoterica of PMDism to appreciate the details of this disagreement, but it's fun to realize that Tim LaHaye isn't just using his fictional depiction of End Times events to "prove" that all non-PMDists are doomed to wrath, he also thinks this fictional depiction stands as proof that the wrong kind of PMDists are also fools and doomed to wrath. LaHaye has an ax to grind with prophecy scholars who disagree with him on the length of this allegedly prophesied peace treaty, or about when the Two Witnesses will first appear in Jerusalem, and so occasionally he turns away, briefly, from celebrating his fictional triumph over people like you and me to celebrating his fictional triumph over these dissenting PMDists.

And a last bit:

So everything we've heard so far is leading up to Bruce's big conclusion in which he explains that war is peace and peace is war. The text for his sermon warns of Conquest, War, Famine and Death***, but Bruce wants to warn his congregation that what they really have to fear is peace.

*** And also, of course, poor Hades, coming up behind on foot. Thanks to the comments from last week's LBFriday, I can no longer think of Hades in this context without getting a whole series of mental images that make me giggle. I'm fairly sure that's not the effect that John of Patmos was shooting for.

And I'll let you find the LOL moments for yourselves while I go and indulge my guilty pleasure.

Hermas and the Shepherd

One of the interesting blogs in my blog roll is Mike Heiser's Two Powers in Heaven which deals with ancient Jewish binitarian theologies and how they were taken up in Christianity. Just after Gregorian Easter/Pascha he put up a post linking to two articles by Bogdan Bucur from Marquette University. One of these, The Son of God and the Angelomorphic Holy Spirit: A Rereading of the Shepherd’s Christology, especially caught my eye given the brief discusion of the Shepherd of Hermas on an earlier post of mine here. The discussion was actually about the Muratorian Fragment and its dates and I'll quote what I had to say then:

It traditionally has been placed around those dates, primarily due to its disparagement of the Shepherd of Hermas: 'But Hermas wrote the Shepherd (74) very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome, (75) while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the [episcopal] chair (76) of the church of the city of Rome.' Albert Sundberg challenged the dating of the MF on the basis back in the 1960s and again in an article in 1973. In the '90s Geoffrey Hahnemann wrote a detailed monograph arguing that the MF was better placed in the 4th century in the East rather than 2nd century Italy as the text implies. Certainly the Shepherd had a very high standing in the early church, Irenaeus (as early as c. 175 CE), Clement of Alexandria and Origen regarded it as scriptural which would call into doubt such a late date of composition. According to my edition of the Apostolic Fathers, the date of the Shepherd is hard to establish and has been dated by some scholars to the 70s or 80s of the 1st century. It has closest parallels to the similitudes/parables of 1 Enoch which I would regard as not suporting the MF's claimed date of composition either. THe MF could be regarded as attempting to discredit the Shepherd.

Sundberg and Hahnemann argue that the MF belongs in 4th or 5th centuries as these are precisely the centuries when canonisation was taking place. THe Shepherd was still in high standing then and was included in the New Testament of Codex Sinaiticus. It also appears to have been part of the Ethiopian canon for a long time too.

Of course, many scholars have not accepted the arguments of Sundberg and Hahnemann with the net result that there is now no consensus when it comes to the dating of the MF. I myself incline to the later date just as I also incline to an earlier date for the Shepherd, or at least substantial sections of it (my edition of the Apostolic Fathers reports arguments that it is a composite of an older 1st century text and later 2nd century text, although not as late as the MF would infer).

I'm actually not going to talk much about Bucur's essay on the Shepherd but he made a couple of points which I thought I'd follow through. Given that my edition of the Shepherd postulates it as a composite text, I especially noted Bucur's observation that: "In submitting to the current scholarly consensus, I assume that the Shepherd of Hermas is a unitary text from the early decades of the second century" [p.121]. Then in a footnote he adds:

The thesis of multiple authorship, epitomized in W. Coleborne’s proposal to distinguish seven sections of the work, and six authors, all written before the end of the first century (The Shepherd of Hermas: A Case for Multiple Authorship and Some Implications, StPatr 10 = TU 107 [1970] 65–70) has been discarded today in favor of more attentive consideration of the Shepherd’s stylistic particuliarities. See the firm conclusion of Brox, Hirt (see n. 3), 32–33. Osiek has argued convincingly that the Shepherd’s “loose structure” is the result of the constant reshaping of the text in the course of oral proclamation (Shepherd [see n. 1], 13a.15b). This new approach to the text has immediate implications for the problem of dating. While the scholarly consensus seems to have settled around the year 140, with a tendency towards the earlier part of the second century (Osiek, Shepherd [see
n. 1], 2 n. 13; for a survey of opinions, see Brox, Hirt [see n. 3], 22–25), Osiek concludes on “an expanded duration of time beginning perhaps from the very last years of the first century, but stretching through most of the first half of the second century” (Shepherd, 20b). Leutzsch (Einleitung [see n. 1], 137) proposes the interval 90–130. A late first-century date of 80–100 is hypothesized by J.C. Wilson, Toward a Reassessment of the Shepherd of Hermas: Its Date and Pneumatology, Lewiston, N.Y. 1993, 60. However, this proposal stands on shaky ground, since the considerations on which it is based are themselves debated issues: the early development of monarchic episcopate in Rome, the Shepherd’s relationship to Hebrews (and implicitly, the dating of Hebrews), and the existence
of certain echoes of persecutions in the text. [121-122]

I was intrigued by Osiek's notion that "the Shepherd’s “loose structure” is the result of the constant reshaping of the text in the course of oral proclamation." I immediately thought of the Gospels as well as Revelation. And so I'm currently reading Osiek's commentary on the Shepherd of Hermas, which fortunately was in the UQ Library.

If we were Christians of the 2nd 3rd or even 4th centuries we would have regarded the Shepherd as scripture, counting it as part of the New Testament which of course those centuries was much more fluid and larger than it is today. The 4th century Codex Sinaiticus, one of the earliest complete Christian bibles ends the New Testament with the Shepherd which follows Revelation and Barnabas. The popularity of this text is attested by not only its inclusion in Codex Sinaiticus or its approval by such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, Hippolytus of Rome, Origen and, for a time, Tertullian (his attitude changing when he embraced Montanism) but also by the sheer variety of manuscript evidence. As well as Latin and Greek versions, Osiek relates that it has also been found in various Coptic versions, Ethiopic (it might also have been part of the Ethiopian New Testament for a time), Georgian and Middle Persian versions (the latter two translated from a lost Arabic version).

The Shepherd is counted as an apocalyptic text. Certainly the text recounts a variety of visions Hermas experienced, initially of a woman, identified as the Church and then for the greater part of the book by the angel of repentance or the shepherd. Again while apocalyptic, the Shepherd's emphasis is on Christian life in the here and now specifically of Hermas' time. In that sense it is more like John's Revelation which, despite its endtimes focus, is concerned with events happening in its own day. Both the Shepehrd and Revealtion are different to such texts as the Apocalypses of Peter, Paul etc which have a focus on the afterlife, heaven hell and the punishments of sinners after death. Neither the Shepherd or Revelation are interested in such otherwordly dramas. Interstingly too both the Shepherd and Revelation are confident with being prophecy in the present, the revelators are John (of Patmos) and Hermas (presumably of Rome). The later Apocalypses, like the older Jewish prophetic texts invest themselves in the authority of times past, the Apocalypses in the apostolic autority of figures such as Peter and Paul (or the Sybil), the Jewish prophetic texts in such ancient prophetic figures such as Enoch, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Daniel, Ezra, Baruch etc. But not so Revelation or the Shepherd. The figures behind them are the contemporaries of their audiences. Indeed, I think that Revelation, the Shepherd and maybe the Odes of Solomon (given that many of the Psalms were understood in the Jewish world as prophetic utterances of David) should be understood as examples of ancient Christian prophecy. Both John and Hermas speak on their own authority, the authority of their experience. The Odes were only later attributed to Solomon, perhaps because they circulated in combination with the Psalms of Solomon. The Odist never claims identity with anyone with the exception of Christ. So while anonymous there is a rather daring audacity to the Odist. At the SBL last year in Auckland I went to a presentation on the Odes at which the 'problem' of the uncertainty of whether the Odist speaks in Christ's voice or their own voice was discussed. I suggested that it might be deliberately ambiguous , a deliberate blurring f Christ and the Odist/speaker, but the presenter and others wouldn't countenance it. I however remain confident that the ambiguity in the Odes is deliberate and expresses the prophetic authority of the Odist (an authority in which the text's audience might even be able to share) but more on that another time.

But for now I'm reading Carolyn Osiek's Commentary with the translated text of Hermas and finding it quite fascinating. It is a better translation than the others I have and I find I'm quite engaging with this text. Osiek's Commentary is also a marvellous guide. I have already been struck by various features of the Shepherd and I think it a text should be more widely known. Indeed, I think it should go back into the New Testament. But I'll leave it here for now. Expect some more posts in the Shepherd in the near future