In Other News

Continuing to bring you the latest from the Orthodox world, this offer from the Orthodox Church of Cyprus is rightfully making waves:

The head of Cyprus' influential Orthodox church, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, says he will put the church's assets at the country's disposal to help pull it out of a financial crisis, after lawmakers rejected a plan to seize up to 10 percent of people's bank deposits to secure an international bailout.


Speaking after meeting President Nicos Anastasiades Wednesday, Chrysostomos said the church was willing to mortgage its assets to invest in government bonds.


The church has considerable wealth, including property, stakes in a bank and a brewery. Tuesday's rejection of the deposit tax has left the future of the country's international bailout in question.

Whether or not anything will come of the offer--and whether or not the church's assets are enough to make a substantial difference in Cyprus's financial crisis--it strikes me as precisely the right move for the church, which has been roundly and rightly criticized from all corners and in most developed countries for being inexcusably wealthy. I wonder what kind of dent the US churches could have made in 2008 if they had made a similar offer. Of course, they didn't and lack the institutional unity to make such a gesture. No longer living in an age when the apostolic heirs can honestly say "Silver and gold I have not," the Cypriot church has made a gesture that powerfully displays the way sacrifice on a church-wide scale can influence society.

Even so, there are many who would argue that the world is becoming an increasingly churchless place no matter what denominational bodies do. This "none" movement is constituted in part by those postmodern Christians enamored of the idea that Jesus never went to church, so why should they? Launching off of a quote from Toby Mac (“Jesus didn’t hang out in the church") that appeared on the Huffington Post, Revelation rock star Rick Oster has thoroughly debunked the notion of a church-free Jesus:

Since everyone knows there was no Christian church in existence in the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, this statement is designed for its rhetorical impact, rather than its historical accuracy. Sometimes, though, rhetorical statements have a life of their own, and hearers forget the limitations of rhetoric. More probably the rhetoric of this statement was meant to emphasize the viewpoint that Jesus did not spend time associating with religious/Jewish organizations or hanging out in Jewish meeting places or chillaxing with the officialdom of Jewish religion. A fact-check of this viewpoint led me to conclude that it did not represent the whole story of Jesus.

This anti-institutional view of Jesus has a long history, but it stands in stark contrast to the picture of Jesus given us by the major writer of the New Testament, Luke, and also by John the prophet.

...To be sure, the validity of Christian ministry is determined by the authenticity of its message and accompanying lifestyle and not by its location. Bars and brothels are certainly within the purview of modern Christian ministry, but we need to be clear that this was not the fundamental approach used by Jesus. Most of Jesus’ time was spent in synagogues, in travel through the Jewish countryside, and in Jewish homes. It does not seem to have been an erratic choice when Jesus decided to give his inaugural teachings in synagogues (Lk. 4:14-15).

...We contemporary believers just might need to reconsider whether we want to recapture apostolic belief by acknowledging and confessing “that Jesus is not a parachurch Messiah” ([Oster's commentary on Revelation] p. 89), but a churchy Jesus, notwithstanding all the abuses and heresies propagated by his ostensible followers, both past and present.

Meanwhile, will Pope Francis go to Moscow? It's hard to care when you consider the momentous event that just occurred in Melfort, Saskatchewan:

Wally and Kerry LaClare raise cows on their farm near Melfort, and have seen hundreds of calves born. But last week when one of their cows gave birth, they witnessed something they've never seen before.

"Kerry came into the barn, and noticed the cow was straining a bit," said Wally LaClare. "I checked the cow and there was another calf, so we delivered it. We figured that was it, you never imagine triplets. When I came back in an hour later she was delivering her third,” he said.

The chances of a cow giving birth to triplets are so rare, about once in every 105,000 births, that a person has a better chance of hitting a hole in one.

I wonder how the chances of Orthodox-Catholic reunion stack up to that.

Breaking News: Text About Jesus' Wife Prompts Zero Controversy

There is breaking news coming out of Boston:

A Harvard professor has identified what appears to be a scrap of fourth century Egyptian papyrus that contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married, a discovery that could fuel the millennia-old debate about priestly celibacy in the Catholic church.

Of course, journalistic pot-stirring aside, this discovery will actually generate no controversy and will likely go entirely unnoticed in the debate about priestly celibacy. Why? It's not because the document is already facing serious scholarly doubts about its authenticity. It's also not because even the professor in question admits that the content of the papyrus in no way constitutes evidence that Jesus was actually married. This discovery, even if it is authentic, will mean absolutely nothing to the question of clerical celibacy because it isn't news to the Catholics. They, like everyone else remotely versed in the issues, already knows that numerous late antique heterodox sects believed that Jesus was married. They, probably rightly, lump them in with the people who thought Christ was a phantom and the people who thought, as a boy, he turned clay into pigeons.

If the Catholic Church can find a way to cope with the fact that Peter, ostensibly the first pope, was married, they can certainly ignore the fact that some fourth century fringe groups speculated that Jesus was too. And they will ignore it. And so should you.

The Feast of the Transfiguration

The Transfiguration is one of the most critical, glorious, enigmatic texts in the Gospel story, not to mention one of the most neglected. I sat in an Episcopal church yesterday morning, and no mention was made of the upcoming feast at all. (Labor Day, on the other hand, is going to be a big to-do.) The Catholics didn't even decide to uniformly celebrate it until the fifteenth century. Only the Orthodox seem to have afforded the story and its commemoration the appropriate place of importance in their corporate life.

Perhaps it's not as sexy as the various smaller, less central passages about sexual ethics or gender economics. It's certainly not as gory as the Passion. But, in spite of its gross inability to satisfy our western lust for sex and violence, the Transfiguration represents a crucial moment in the Christian narrative when God manifests Himself to the world, glorifies His Son, and declares our hope and our promise in Christ. Jesus is revealed for who he truly is, and we glimpse what we will be through conforming ourselves to his likeness.

So, to commemorate the Transfiguration--in addition to eating grapes--consider the following quotes from two great theological masters for whom the Transfiguration was central.

Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Theology, 13-14:

If a man seeks spiritual knowledge, let him plant the foundation of his soul immovably before the Lord, in accordance with God's words to Moses: "Stand here by me." But it should be realized that there are differences among those who stand before the Lord, as is clear from the text, "There are some standing here who will not taste death till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power"...To those who follow him as he climbs the high mountain of his transfiguration he appears in the form of God, the form in which he existed before the world came to be...

When the Logos of God becomes manifest and radiant in us, and his face shines like the sun, then his clothes will also look white. That is to say, the words of the Gospels will then be clear and distinct, with nothing concealed. And Moses and Elijah--the more spiritual principles of the Law and the prophets--will also be present with him.

Gregory Palamas, Triads, I.3.5:

So, when the saints contemplate this divine light within themselves, seeing it by the divinizing communion of the Spirit, through the mysterious visitation of perfecting illuminations--then they behold the garment of their deification, their mind being glorified and filled by the grace of the Word, beautiful beyond measure in his splendor; just as the divinity of the Word on the mountain glorified with divine light the body conjoined to it. For "the glory which the Father gave him," he himself has given to those obedient to him, as the Gospels says, and "He willed that they should be with him and contemplate His glory."

..It is necessarily carried out in a spiritual fashion, for the mind becomes supercelestial, and as it were the companion of him who passed beyond the heavens for our sake, since it is manifestly yet mysteriously united to God, and contemplates supernatural and ineffable visions being filled with all the immaterial knowledge of a higher light. Then it is no longer the sacred symbols accessible to the senses that it contemplates, nor yet the variety of Sacred Scripture that it knows; it is made beautiful by the creative and primordial Beauty, and illumined by the radiance of God.

Customized Christianity: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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In spite of his unorthodox view of the nature of Jesus and his divine spark, Burklo does put an appropriate stress on Jesus as the central figure in the Christian religion. It is his thought, his teachings, and his deeds which need to take critical importance rather than Calvin or Wesley or Luther or Campbell (to steal an old and mostly unfounded intra-Protestant polemic). Unfortunately, Burklo thinks that it is appropriate, for whatever reason, to be very selective about what in those human documents about Jesus are really important and which are not.

We have already observed that Burklo was prepared, inexplicably, to declare the unique passage in Matthew 5-7 the central message of the gospel and the resurrection, retold by all four gospel writers and Paul, doesn’t really matter. This is really reflective of a broader fallacy for Burklo of paradoxically trying to affirm what Jesus said and reject what he did. He admits that Jesus’ moral teachings are hard to swallow, but insists that therein lies their moral force. Then, in direct contradiction, he declares the stories about Jesus hard to swallow and therefore expendable. It isn’t just the resurrection imperiled by Burklo’s Jeffersonian attempts to purge the Bible of the unbelievable. In the course of listing all the things Jesus doesn’t mention, he points out:

The Sermon on the Mount makes no mention of believing in miracles, believing the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, believing in the Trinity or the Apostle’s Creed, or even “accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”.

Ironically, in the previous entry we noted that one of the core features of Burklo’s vision of love is healing the sick. It’s unfortunate that, in spite of that commission, Christians are being instructed to disbelieve the miraculous healing stories. Not to mention the famous reply of Jesus to John, “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” Having made clear already that he doesn’t believe in miracles and especially not in resurrection, Burklo makes Jesus a liar or at least his human biographers. If that’s the case, why should we even bother to take the all-important Sermon on the Mount all that seriously? Perhaps it is just hyperbolic or distorted or metaphorical. Perhaps turning the other cheek isn’t a hard and fast rule. Perhaps God really isn’t all that invested in the success of marriages. Of course, that’s the way Christians throughout the centuries have treated the famous sermon, but the strength, the cornerstone of Burklo’s vision of Christianity is the weight it gives the radical ethical challenges presented in the Gospel. Unfortunately, his own vision of biblical credibility compromises the integrity of his favorite passage.

It isn’t that I believe you can’t be a Christian without believing that Jesus walked on water. As someone who has taken my fair share of criticism for doubting the historicity of numerous Old Testament narratives, it would be hypocritical to impose that standard on anyone. The real problem is that the blithe way in which Burklo treats essentially all the deeds of Jesus directly contradicts and undermines the confidence he has in the moral teaching of the Gospels. There is at least a greater deal of intellectual honesty and consistency with groups like the Jesus Seminar that apply rigorous scholarly criteria to determine what the historical Jesus might actually have said, and approach the entire Gospels with a heaping dose of doubt. Burklo has decided what he wants the gospel to be—love, defined as God and the divine spark within all of us and the social justice impulse of Jesus’ recorded ministry—and invested only those passages of Scripture with credibility. It is not convincing as an objective hermeneutic, as appealing as it may be as a sanitized, politically correct incarnation of the faith.

Of course, it isn’t merely the stories about Jesus’ life that Burklo takes the knife to. He also makes no positive mention of any non-ethical teachings of Jesus or even those ethical teachings which might not fit neatly into his social gospel. That, however, is the content of my next and final complaint.

Customized Christianity: Burklo's Bible

While browsing another blog, I came across an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." Within, Rev. Burklo--the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, an ordained United Church of Christ pastor, and the author of books on progressive Christianity--lays out his vision of a Christianity which allows the adherent to pick and choose buffet style which beliefs to accept provided a set of core ethical values is maintained.

There is a great deal of commendable observation in Burklo's article, provided of course it is read in isolation of his broader argument. In particular, his assertion that the Bible is not self-aware is a sermon that I never tire of preaching. His recognition that the full scope of Christianity with its manifold traditions, doctrines, and mythology is a hard pill to swallow for many modern seekers is perhaps the defining problem for Western evangelism in today's world. The reminder that Christianity is neither an ancient legal code nor a modern political ideology is among the most necessary messages for American Christians.

Nevertheless and unsurprisingly, I find most of Burklo's points as well as his overarching message to be severely flawed, both by his own internal logic and by legitimate external standards. I am certainly not one to suggest that the Bible should be confused with a history book or, worse still, a science book. Just the opposite. Moreover, I have never been one to use the forms of creeds as tests of fellowship. Barton Stone would turn over in his grave. I admit a great deal of latitude in recognizing and drawing conclusions from the human components of Scripture, at least by majority Christianity standards. With all that said, however, I have the following objections to Burklo's vision of Christianity.

1. Burklo mistakenly implies an oppositional relationship between believing creeds, doctrines, and "fantastic stories" on the one hand and living like Christ on the other.
2. Burklo fails to make any meaningful distinction between essential and non-essential data in Scripture when suggesting what might be disregarded as non-factual.
3. Equating the "divine spark" in Christ with the divine spark in all is idolatrous, anachronistic, unbiblical, and reenforces the need for the Christological dogma found in the creeds.
4. The desire to focus only one what Jesus said and not what he did is self-defeating.
5. Burklo confuses ethics with religion, and thereby fails to grasp the comprehensiveness of Jesus' mission.

I will treat each of these more fully over the next few days, hopefully with uncharacteristic brevity, with the intent of moving toward a Christianity that can be forward thinking without divorcing itself from its past and, equally importantly, away from a Christianity which is comfortable with sentiments such as, "If [doctrines] don’t make sense to you, don’t worry about them."

Re-Reading Revelation: Encountering Jesus (Ch. 1)

Significantly, the first verse of Revelation begins by rooting the entire text immediately in Christ and his authority. The first three words (five in English) rapidly establish that what follows is not a word from John himself but "the revelation of Jesus Christ." It should not be surprising, therefore, as Jesus takes center stage that what we read in Revelation is not only a revelation belonging to Jesus but a revelation of Jesus himself. John is writing to churches that are hurting in some form or another, a fact which he makes clear in presenting his own credentials. Immediately upon the first mention of John's name, he identifies himself as the one who "bore witness," the Greek for which is quickly becomes a technical term from which we get our English word "martyr." As he starts in the first person, John again immediately identifies himself as "your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus." John knows that his audience is suffering and wants them to know that he suffers alongside them.

It is unsurprising then that for this persecuted author writing to a persecuted audience the first image of the savior for which they suffer is so crucial. After his introduction, John spends most of the first chapter describing his initial encounter with the celestial Jesus. It is immediately apparent that this is not the Jesus on whose breast John lay at the last supper, at least not in appearance. The "son of man" that John encounters is like something out of an apocalyptic prophecy with woolen hair, flaming eyes, bronze feet, and a roaring voice, audible apparently in spite of the double-edged sword protruding from his mouth. It is understandable, if a bit melodramatic, that John should all "at his feet as though dead." Frankly, the encounter would frighten most of us out of our right minds. In a single motion, however, this son of man reveals that he is the same compassionate Son of Man whom John knew. He reaches out, touches the prostrate John, and says "Fear not."

In this paradoxical image of our Lord and Savior--an appropriate title--as both terrible and merciful is the heart of the picture of Christ which will be echo throughout the rest of Revelation. It is an encounter with the divine which spoke to the heart of John, tried to the limits of endurance, and to the churches as they suffered unspecified trials. They served a Lord who was compassionate without being weak, a Savior who was terrible without being malicious. He declares his sovereignty; "I am the first and the last." He reveals his sympathy; "I died, and behold I am alive forevermore." He reiterates his promise; "I have the keys of Death and Hades." He is a suffering king, perfectly suited for a kingdom beset on all sides.

This encounter should continue to resonate with us as often as we strive for our faith, be it against worldly powers or against spiritual ones. We can be reminded by this image of Jesus, bursting dramatically onto the narrative scene of Revelation, that we do not serve an impotent Lord nor an apathetic Savior. Ours is the Christ who reveals himself to John, "who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom." He will come and will make trivial the demons which haunt us because he loves us and because he has in him the power to actualize that love. It is a message of hope not for some distant point in chronology but in a living God who is right now, in this moment, ready to bless those who read the words of his prophecy and who keep to them.

*****

For a full list of "Re-reading Revelation" posts, see Re-reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose.

The Wisdom of Blaise Pascal

This is already a long quote, but I would have quoted more if I thought anyone would read it. This is from Blaise Pascal's Pensées, secion eight:

Men blaspheme what they do not know. The Christian religion consists in two points. It is of equal concern to men to know them, and it is equally dangerous to be ignorant of them. And it is equally of God's mercy that He has given indications of both.

And yet they take occasion to conclude that one of these points does not exist, from that which should have caused them to infer the other. The sages who have said there is only one God have been persecuted, the Jews were hated, and still more the Christians. They have seen by the light of nature that if there be a true religion on earth, the course of all things must tend to it as to a centre.

The whole course of things must have for its object the establishment and the greatness of religion. Men must have within them feelings suited to what religion teaches us. And, finally, religion must so be the object and the centre to which all things tend that whoever knows the principles of religion can give an explanation both of the whole nature of man in particular and of the whole course of the world in general.

And on this ground they take occasion to revile the Christian religion, because they misunderstand it. They imagine that it consists simply in the worship of a God considered as great, powerful, and eternal; which is strictly deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which is its exact opposite. And thence they conclude that this religion is not true, because they do not see that all things concur to the establishment of this point, that God does not manifest Himself to men with all the evidence which He could show.

But let them conclude what they will against deism, they will conclude nothing against the Christian religion, which properly consists in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in Himself the two natures, human and divine, has redeemed men from the corruption of sin in order to reconcile them in His divine person to God.

The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it. The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride of philosophers, who have known God, and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the Redeemer.

And, as it is alike necessary to man to know these two points, so is it alike merciful of God to have made us know them. The Christian religion does this; it is in this that it consists.

Let us herein examine the order of the world and see if all things do not tend to establish these two chief points of this religion: Jesus Christ is end of all, and the centre to which all tends. Whoever knows Him knows the reason of everything.

Those who fall into error err only through failure to see one of these two things. We can, then, have an excellent knowledge of God without that of our own wretchedness and of our own wretchedness without that of God. But we cannot know Jesus Christ without knowing at the same time both God and our own wretchedness.

Therefore I shall not undertake here to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that nature; not only because I should not feel myself sufficiently able to find in nature arguments to convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge without Jesus Christ is useless and barren. Though a man should be convinced that numerical proportions are immaterial truths, eternal and dependent on a first truth, in which they subsist and which is called God, I should not think him far advanced towards his own salvation.

The God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, or of the order of the elements; that is the view of heathens and Epicureans. He is not merely a God who exercises His providence over the life and fortunes of men, to bestow on those who worship Him a long and happy life. That was the portion of the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and of comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom He possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and His infinite mercy, who unites Himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than Himself.

Just How Violent Is Jesus?

Someone recently directed me to this article, which is just nonsensical enough to be dangerous. The question posed is whether or not the typical representation of Jesus as a peaceful prophet and Muhammad as a violent prophet is accurate. The conclusion: Jesus is perhaps the most violent religious figure of all time.

Let me begin by stating that I do not believe that Muhammad was especially violent. The article suggests that the demonization of Muhammad relies on the depiction of him as particularly bloodthirsty. If there are those who believe that, I think that is a deeply unfounded view of history. The fact that the author of the article turns around and attempts to demonize Old Testament figures is hypocritical and equally misguided. Muhammad was not especially violent and neither was Moses or Joshua or David. They were all a quite typical level of violent for warlords or kings of their periods. (I will not go into here the hermeneutics necessary to understand the violence of Old Testament figures, as the post is primarily an issue about Jesus.) Muhammad, had he been a simple king and not a religious figure, would probably be remembered as the military and political genius who inaugurated one of the great empires in medieval if not world history. So the author is right to oppose historical misrepresentations of Muhammad.

When addressing the question of whether or not Jesus is a more violent figure, however, the author leaves the bounds of his own investigation in an attempt to make his case. It is here that the argument falls woefully short. He wants to compare the past historical actuality of Muhammad’s actions to the prophesied eschatological judgment which has Jesus as its agent. An intellectually honest answer to the question of which religious leader was in fact more peaceful requires a direct comparison with corresponding parameters. Islam, no less than Christianity, understands God to be a just God who will punish the wicked and reward the righteous. If we compare the religions in terms of their eschatological picture of the fate of the enemies of God, both are “violent” (if we want to use that word in a superficial way). If we really want to get to the root of each teacher’s character, however, then it is appropriate to confine ourselves to the actual evidence relevant to the question: the behavior and teaching, between birth and death, of each man.

These, in a brief and inadequate way, are the actual facts:

• Muhammad was a political leader who ordered, endorsed, and conducted military campaigns. He gave his disciples a framework for a future philosophy of violence which set boundaries on its appropriate use. His life and teaching led immediately to an expansive empire founded on military conquest.
  


• Jesus was a political pariah who never attacked another person, never endorsed attacking another person, and who ultimately died in peaceful submission both to God and the political authorities. He explicitly forbade violence of any kind, never retaliating for any physical affront and never intervening violently to prevent affronts against others. When his apostles behaved violently anyway, he rebuked them and corrected the damage caused. The church, adopting this teaching, was led to centuries of voluntary persecution.

Those facts cannot be disputed and are not disputed by the article. Instead, the author tries to draw deeply flawed parallels between the temporal life of Muhammad and the eschatological destiny of Jesus. The parallel becomes particularly weak when the difference between the way the two figures function in their respective religions is observed. Muhammad is believed to be the culmination of a line of prophets; Jesus is believed to be God. Acting as God in the final judgment, he is the agent of divine wrath and will naturally be presented in a way which enacts judgment on evildoers in a way roughly analogous to the way the just God of Islam will dole out justice.

As a human agent, however, the career of Jesus could not be more distinct from that of Muhammad. Only by fundamentally altering the rules of engagement can the author even begin to depict Jesus as more violent than Muhammad. Even the suggestion that Jesus’ pacifism could be a product of his political situation patently contradicts the narrative in the Gospels. Jesus is expected by his disciples to seize power and at one point a mob even tries to make him king. At every turn he rejects the possibility of political authority, finally concluding before Pilate that “if my kingdom were of this world, my followers would fight.” He redefines rather than conforms to the militaristic messianic expectations of contemporary Jews.

Ultimately, the linked article represents the same ugly polemic that “Islamophobes” use to try to discredit Islam. It is methodologically flawed and transparent in its motivation. It is possible to admit that the historical person of Muhammad was violent in a way typical and even necessary of political leaders and to realize that Jesus was nonviolent and eschewed political power without being an “anti-Muslim ideologue.” A calm, cool examination of the facts will reveal that eschatologically, Islam and Christianity have similar conceptions of God’s justice (which, in Christianity, includes the agency of Christ as a member of the Trinity) but that the actual careers of their “founders” are profoundly different on the question of violence.

Jesus: Jewish Hero Par Excellence

In working my way through Robert Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative for class, I came across a proposal of his that I found striking, though not for the reasons Alter intended it to be. He proposes that there are in the Old Testament a number of narrative type-scenes, literary motifs which are repeated so often that there repetition must be deliberate. These scenes, according to him, were so ingrained in the literary tradition that their inclusion was expected, their alteration suggestive, and their omission telling. He enumerates these six recurring motifs:

• Epiphany in a field
• Betrothal scene at a well
• Annunciation to a barren mother
• The initiatory trial
• Danger in the desert and the discovery of a well/sustenance
• The testament of the dying hero
  

In reading that list, I was struck by how clearly those motifs seem to be incorporated into the Gospel narrative. Alter alludes to this with regard to at least one of his type-scenes (or perhaps more...I admit I'm not finished reading the book yet), and I imagine that someone has written extensively on this. I have not, however, seen or interacted with that literature. So forgive me as a I fly blindly and try to work through just how I see these conventions of the heroic literature of Israel's past being incorporated and reworked into the story of Jesus to depict him as the Jewish hero par excellence.

In The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter alludes to the Christian appropriation of the annunciation theme, but does not go into detail about how it is employed or what it might mean.

Throughout the Hebrew literature, the scene is extremely familiar, even to the casual reader of the Old Testament. In Gen 11:30 we learn that Sarah is barren. In Gen 18, God appears to Abraham in the form of three men. There He announces to him that Sarah will have a child, despite being nearly 100 years old. In Gen 25, Rebekah is barren, but when Isaac prays to God, she becomes pregnant with twins. God speaks to her, explaining the fate of her two sons. 1 Sam 1 tells of Hannah's childlessness and oppression. While praying, she is approached by God's representative and who blesses her before she finally conceives Samuel. The motif spills over into Luke 1 where Elizabeth is both aged and barren, but an angel prophesies the birth of her son.

In each case, the barren mother is miraculously with child, and not only a child but one who will be a great hero in Israel's history. Alter notes earlier in his book, not in connection with these type-scenes, how even the story of Judah and Tamar can be understood as a woman taking her childlessness into her own hands. She overcomes and gives birth to a progenitor of David. Isaac, the child of promise, Jacob, the namesake of Israel, Samuel, the greatest judge of Israel and the anointer of David, and even David in a radical revision of the motif. The greatest heroes of Israel's history are conceived through the greatest miracles of God, against all odds. They are unique even before their birth.

And yet Jesus is greater. A named messenger comes to Mary and announces to her that she will give birth to the greatest of Israel's heroes, the Messiah. As had been the case with Sarah, as had been the case with Elizabeth, Mary answers with doubt. After all, she is a virgin. But the angel reminds her that the power of God overshadows all else. The God who has proved in the past that He needs neither fertility nor youth to create will prove once and for all that He alone is the Creator. In a way that was truly unprecedented, God would overcome an impediment greater than had been overcome with Isaac and Jacob and Samuel. From before his birth, the very conception of Jesus is shown to be in the line of great Jewish heroes, and yet a cut above the rest. The revision of the "barren mother" motif serves to punctuate to totality of God's power and foreshadow an epic career that would transcend any other. The virgin birth is not merely a scientific oddity, no matter how the modern mind would like to reduce it to that, but an organic link between Jesus and the heroes of Israel's past as well as a definitive statement about his place in the pecking order.

Like I said, the observation is almost certainly not novel, and doubtless you can already see the other motifs threading through the Old Testament into the story of Jesus. Nevertheless, I intend to pick this up again in another post at another time. Until then...