episode 63 transcipt
Ryan: This is a special opportunity, because today I get to sit in person with two guests on the podcast. Madhavi Nevader, professor of Old Testament at St. Andrew’s School of Divinity, and TJ Lang, professor of New Testament at St. Andrew's. We're sitting here in Madhavi’s office on a beautiful Scottish day, and we get to have a conversation amongst each other.
Madhavi and TJ work very closely together. They're co-writing a book right now on God, and we're going to be talking about that; but I also think it's a great opportunity for them to lead the conversation.
What just came to me would be like a way that would be helpful for me to think about these questions would be—how many different conceptions of God are there in the Old Testament?
Madhavi: Probably as many books as there are in the Old Testament, if not more. Or as many people within those books—say something like the Psalms, it's 50 different understandings.
Ryan: Within the Psalms?
Madhavi: Within the Psalms. Because the Psalms are a composite book, and individual Psalms are composite texts, and they reflect different time periods of history. Reinhard Kratz, who's a professor at Gottingen, says that the Psalms narrate the entire history of Yahwism in the Hebrew Bible, and I think he's probably right about that.
Ryan: So any word, any name can be individuated. It can be divided up into every time it's invoked, it's different. So what's the principle of individuation? What's the scale at which you're dividing up the different Gods?
Madhavi: I suppose it comes down to what is being asked of that God in any given text, and what seems to be the acknowledged scope of his power in any given text, or indeed his ability to act. In some instances it seems that this is a God who only acts on behalf of his city or only acts on behalf of his king. In other instances, it's a God who acts internationally apart from his people. And in some instances it seems to be a God who is in trouble and people are curious about why he isn't acting.
So I suppose in that sense, maybe these are just different perspectives on God. The difference between a God who is asleep in something like Psalm 44, and isn't responding to his people in exile, where they're desperately calling him to engage in history on their behalf; versus the God of one of the enthronement Psalms in the 90s where he is the puppeteer of history—those are, in my mind, two very different Gods.
Ryan: I think in the academic humanities, we're really good at complexifying things. And we're also really good in the historical humanities at multiplying, at pluralizing what everybody talks about singularly. And yet we're always going to end up having, at some scale, a sense of unity and a sense of simplicity.
So what would be the minimum number of Gods in the Old Testament that would make sense to you, according to the scale and the taxonomy that you want to apply?
Madhavi: That's a great question. Here, I think it does actually come down to divine names. We have a tendency to simplify, I think primarily because of our own traditions and the fact that the God in whom we believe is the God of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and so God just becomes this one thing. I appreciate that we are often accused of making the simple complex for the sake of having a publishing career. [laughter]
But at the same time, I think there are instances where different divine names—let's say Yahweh, the personal name for the God of Israel, and the generic term, either El or Elohim or El Elyon—there seems to be a real difference between gods in a particular verse. So something like Deuteronomy 32, I think it's 8-9—I'm a Hebrew Bible scholar, and so unlike New Testament scholars who have verses and sub verses at their fingers, but their appendix is smaller [laughter]—in this text it talks about how El Elyon divides the world, and for every god, there is a nation. And then it says, and Yahweh’s own people was Jacob. There you seem to have a distinction of gods that we can smooth over, but it's very clear in the text.
Ryan: So it's not just that these are two different conceptions of God; it is that the same person is identifying these two different gods.
Madhavi: That's exactly right. And then in that instance, one of the reasons why I spoke about the complexity of notions in the Hebrew Bible is that we're reading a text that was originally produced in a limited, polytheistic culture that turned into a monotheistic one. And we see very obvious vestiges of that polytheism in the text, not simply as imploring Israel not to worship other gods, but vestiges of the fact that there are different conceptions of how the world or the cosmos are divinely organized.
Ryan: What's the earliest instance we have of the use of Yahweh, and what does it even look like?
Madhavi: So as a personal name for a god, what's interesting about the name Yahweh is that it doesn't appear in any other god lists in the Levant at all.
Ryan: There are god lists? This is a genre?
Madhavi: Yeah, indeed. Either for the sake of translating, or for bilinguals, or indeed for kind of syncretizing gods—your storm god is this, my storm god is that, and we read each other's texts, and now I know that we're speaking about the same god.
Ryan: And where would these be found? Inscribed on clay tablets?
Madhavi: Yeah. Inscribed onto clay tablets or on stone tablets. We have lots of them from Mesopotamia and Anatolia. But what's interesting in particular is the ones from what we would call the Levant don't mention Yahweh as a god amongst gods in that part of the world. And so, whereas everybody has a Hadad or an Adad or a storm god of some description, from the extent material that we have, there seems to be no knowledge of Yahweh, or indeed a compunction to equate him with another god, even though we know that he's a storm god.
Ryan: These lists, are they full of Els?
Madhavi: Yes, there are tons of Els. There's El of this and El of that, and El of Y and El of B. And there's storm gods, and there are goddesses, and various things like that. What I think that tells us is that whatever the name Yahweh means—and let's face it, we don't actually know—is that whatever the meaning of the title is, it doesn't imply his remit, as some gods will have.
So it doesn't mean storm god. It doesn't mean El—it doesn't mean god as the name El does. Where we do find him is in a small inscription from a community of people who lived in what is present day Saudi Arabia, and he is known from two or three inscriptions. Stephanie Dalley has a set of beautiful articles about this, and it seems that that is our earliest attestation to him, sometime in the middle of the second millenium, long before there was in Israel, and long before he shows up as a divine character in what we would consider to be the Levant.
Ryan: And what language is this?
Madhavi: It's an Akkadian text, but again, he is referred to as YHW, which is how he often appears outside of the Hebrew Bible when he does. Certainly in a lot of the Aramaic texts from Egypt from the middle of the first millennium, that's how he appears—Yeho. He's not Yeho in these inscriptions, but he's YHW.
Ryan: Is he gendered male? Do they say “he”?
Madhavi: He's gendered male because the verbs are male. Absolutely. What's interesting about that is that there are two very basic conclusions. First is that whatever we want to say about him, he is not native to the Levant, which is interesting. And also, that it does corroborate, to one extent or another, certain Biblical texts that talk about him coming up from the desert, like Judges 5. That's not to say that Judges 5 is a very early text, but this notion that somehow he too came from the desert is an interesting kind of corroboration of that textual witness.
And indeed, a more interesting aspect of the Hebrew Bible, which is to insist that both Israel and Israel's God come into the land and aren't from the land.
Ryan: What's the theological significance of that, do you think? I mean, not now; what was the intended theological significance at the time of the composition of the relevant texts?
Madhavi: Here's my guess. I think there are two ways of reading that foreignness, or that foreign aspect. One is a result of the larger project in the Hebrew Bible, which is to paint indigenous inhabitants as profoundly religiously suspect. So think about all the -ites in the Hebrew Bible: they are accused over and over again of religious and moral corruption. And so I think there is a theme running throughout the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament that makes a distinction between those who are in the land and those who come into it. And even though Yahweh has claims to that land, I think there's probably a reason for saying that he too is not native.
Ryan: And that once there was a time when his name was unknown—that's a very specific periodization, right? Where does it say that this was when men began to call upon the name of God?
Madhavi: Well, first of all, we have that in Genesis; and then also, it's very, very clear in two divine name stories in Exodus to Moses, that there's this idea that there is an unfolding revelation that goes on.
Ryan: It's so fascinating. So there is a geography that corresponds to the periodization.
Madhavi: Yes. I think that's right. Not least because our authors are multiple authors, and indeed are redactors of the text who are going to give the Hebrew Bible its final shape. They are having to deal, unlike any other corpus in our possession—and this is not me saying that any of our texts are necessarily unique, that's a whole other conversation—but we have authors who are having to tell a story over time and across multiple worlds and multiple lands. And in that respect, it has a kind of an epic nature to it that we just do not have from any other corpus of literature in our possession, because they aren't trying to do that thing. They aren't trying to make a large story that begins in Genesis and ends, at least in the Hebrew Bible, with the end in 2 Chronicles. We may have law; we may have history; we may have wisdom from all of the accompanying Eastern cultures. But no one has tried to put it into a story. And in that respect, even that story that involves God—and other than Esther and Song of Songs, every book does involve God—that obviously is also going to tell a story about God, in that respect.
The thing that I want to ask T.J. is, remember when we did that class on theological anthropology, and you said the least controversial thing to say about Jesus was that he was divine?
TJ: Or it's unremarkable.
Madhavi: It's unremarkable to call someone divine, indeed to call somebody God. And I think that would be really interesting to talk about, because I think that would probably not be something that most people agree with. Because that's the debate—Oh my God, is he divine? Who cares? Of course he's divine. Who isn't?
TJ: I often emphasize with students that it is not remarkable to me, in my reading of the New Testament, that some early Christians would have extended the category of theos or God to Jesus, because it was a word that could be applied to any manner of divine being or human. It was a word that could be used for almost anything, including natural elements.
Ryan: But among Jews?
TJ: Yes. Moses is a god. Philo has Moses as a theos. Now there was, in later philosophical consideration, even an important distinction in Origen of Alexandria between theos and hatheos—that is, God without an article. So just god, maybe lowercase g, and then God with an article, the God, capital case G. So making a distinction within the category of god between a lower and a higher version of that word. But the word God, yes—it was extended to all sorts of entities.
What is remarkable in the New Testament, in the Gospels in different ways and in Paul in different ways as well, is that you have this bounded identity between Father and Son, such that—especially with the citation of Old Testament passages where Yahweh is acting—and Paul applies those passages to Jesus acting. And so what Yahweh was supposed to do, Jesus is now doing. And so the identity is bounded. So what Jesus does is Yahweh’s stuff, such that who they are and their action and their identity … I don't have a better word for you than a bounded identity.
They do not develop this with any metaphysical precision. It's just then what the God of Israel was supposed to do, Jesus does, and as such is acting in the role of that entity.
Ryan: So you mean bound together. Binding.
TJ: When Jesus acts, God acts. “I and the Father are one, and what I'm doing is what the Father's doing, and what the Father was said to be doing I am now doing.”
Madhavi: And I suppose the distinction there, which is quite interesting, is not simply that as Jesus acts, God acts; because I can trace that story all the way back to any Near Eastern cosmology, where kings act and gods act on their behalf as representatives.
TJ: And so obey the king like you would obey the god, because of course when the king's there, the god’s there.
Madhavi: Or indeed from Qumran, or some of our texts like Jubilees, where for every human thing, there is an angelic equivalent, so that there's this basic homology at work.
What I think is different in the New Testament conception which TJ has just talked about is that Jesus is doing what Yahweh does. Not that they're acting in parallel, but as the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament promises God will do, so Jesus does it. And in that sense it's not just bounded to him, as you say, he's doing Yahweh stuff. He's acting in that respect. Not as a representative, not as an earthly counterpart, but as God does, or as Yahweh does.
So in that sense it’s also profoundly different than Moses coming down the mountain with horns on, which in the ancient near east always indicates divine status. That's just another God; this is not what's happening with Jesus, at least as the Gospel narratives or Paul are narrating it.
Ryan: Is it immediate, or is it later that this particular claim to being God in this way for Jesus will set off alarm bells among monotheists? Is it immediately like, whoa, well then you're talking about polytheism! I’m on Jews, right?
TJ: I'm not going to get too technical, but this is a great question to ask in Scotland, because of the work of Larry Hurtado in Edinburg, recently deceased. Richard Bauckhamm here, maybe even Tom Wright and others. It's been a very Scottish conversation to talk about a phrase that I don't like so much anymore, Early High Christology.
What I am convinced by with the work of Larry and others, is that very early on, whatever they thought they were doing, how much they thought about what they were doing—they knew that it was okay to worship Jesus. And so these theological developments are not first theological, but based on experiential encounters, and then worship patterns, and to call on the name of the Lord—which is something you only do to Yahweh.
The curias about which Paul is talking about is the Yahweh in its Hebrew Bible context. And there, Yahweh is one. In bits of Isaiah, he's super duper worried about it. There is one. I am alone. There is no other. And all of a sudden, in the context of these yahwistic passages from Isaiah and others, you're applying that confession to the Lord, to Jesus, which is what you were supposed to do to Yahweh. And that's just what you're doing, without metaphysical clarification, but just within the context of worship—this is now what you do. It's not a question of polytheism or two gods. It's just this a sense of a bounded identity: that when you call on Yahweh and you call on Jesus, you're calling on the one.
Now we're going to have centuries long projects of trying to figure this out metaphysically, and you're going to figure out in all sorts of different ways and fight over it, and people will die. But as early as before Paul, you have these developments within religious experience and worship.
Ryan: So at what point did the name Yaweh prompt a metaphysical question?
TJ: I would say always, but what's interesting for me is when it gets translated into Greek it becomes the being one, the one who is. And all of a sudden in its Greek translation, it prompts metaphysical questioning within the context of platonic philosophy. You asked earlier about the gender of Yahweh, which is a really interesting question: in the Shema, “Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, is the one”—I'll let Madhavi translate that how she would prefer to in Hebrew, but in Greek, the word for oneness there is masculine. In John 10:30, when Jesus says that I and the Father are one—which is one of the most important statements for later Christological developments—the word for one there is neuter. It is therefore the oneness in John 10:30 that is not defined on the level of masculine/feminine gender, but a neuter oneness; which is another interesting moment where you're pressured to reflect on what is the nature of this father-son unity.
How do you want to translate the Shema, Madhavi, with respect to the oneness of God?
Madhavi: Well, in my mind, the Shema is part of a different debate, which takes us back to our conversation about the early policy of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew is ambiguous, but it can just as easily mean, “the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” It's again, part of the germination process that is going to lead to the flower of the monotheistic statements in 2 Isaiah, where we have, I am the first, I am the last. Aside from me, there is no God; there are no other gods. So in that sense, it's not a question of oneness.
Something that has been very interesting about the book that we were working on and indeed the class that we taught to kind of find our texts was precisely this, let's call it a metaphysical turn or perhaps a philosophical turn, which is what happens to our Hebrew Bible traditions when they begin to be filtered through the concerns of Greek philosophy. This is, of course, something that's been recognized for a long time; Thomism and Judaism is a debate that has been raging in our field for centuries. But it's very interesting to see how texts that mean one thing in a submitted context can mean something very different when read through either Greek lenses or once translated. Some of the language ambiguities that are provided in Greek simply don't exist in Hebrew, or even in the more complex Semitic language, which is like Akkadian. They don't force the metaphysical question, whereas I think Greek can, and then the accompanying culture that comes with the language will just go ahead and ask those questions.
Leaving Paul and Jesus out of this for the time being, you can see it immediately in somebody like Philo of Alexandra, who's a first century Jew, completely colonized, a monotheistic Jew who lives in Alexandria and has two mistresses, Greek philosophy, and his Jewish identity. [He] can speak of the single God, but because of centuries of development and the personification of wisdom like Proverbs 8, indeed the personification of Torah as we see in passages from Ben Sira, there is movement and there is room even in this notion of monotheism to have other aspects; so that again, the fact that Jesus is divine is not the problems for Jews of the first century who didn't believe him …
TJ: It's the claims that he makes vis-a-vis the Father.
Madhavi: It's the claims he makes vis-a-vis the Father. And it's not even that he's a failed Messiah. I mean, there were gazillions of failed messiahs. It's weird that he gets crucified, and yes, that is a theological scandal; but it's [over] that binding of his actions and the actions of Yahweh or the curs, that there start to be profound divisions between this group of sectarian Jews and what we might call the various strands of mainstream Judaism.
TJ: And I want to intervene with a rant. It's important to remember with these metaphysical questions that we only receive the words of Jesus and the New Testament in Greek. There are possibilities within Greek grammar and language that are just so different than what can be expressed in Hebrew Aramaic, and that activate associations with philosophical questions.
Ryan: Just to be explicit, what you're saying is that Jesus didn't speak Greek, and when we ask ourselves, what would he have used in Aramaic or Hebrew for these words, it opens up a different philosophical universe.
TJ: Well, yes. There's a famous tradition at St. Andrews for wondering about the words of Jesus in Aramaic. Someone who used to work here did that and tried to reproduce the Aramaic words of Jesus; which, happy for that to happen, but the way in which we have received the words of Jesus is in Greek.
Ryan: And that's normative within Christian theology?
TJ: Normative would not be the word. [It’s] fact. If you can find me an Aramaic version of Jesus' words, I would happily consider it and explore it. But Jesus comes to us in Greek. He comes to us in translation, and therefore he comes to us in words that intervene in philosophical debates, whether the Jesus who spoke Aramaic knew it or not.
And so I say this all the time with the question of when John 1: “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God and God was the logos.” Whether John or whoever wrote those words knew it or not, they stumbled into a massive philosophical debate about logos. I think the author probably knew a bit about that philosophical debate; but it doesn't matter. Those words intervene in it and are a serious philosophical offering about logos, creation, and the relationship of logos/reason and God. This is a major philosophical intervention.
One way of talking about the one and the many is inscribed in the father-son question, the relationship with the Father and the Son. If you go the subordinationist route, the one thing we know about fathers is there once was a time when fathers didn't have sons, and the one thing we know about sons is there once was a time when sons weren't sons, because they needed to be born. The language of birthing and generation and creation is applied to the Son as it was applied to wisdom before the Son, and other entities. So is the Son a creature, and what does that mean for the oneness of God?
One orthodox solution will be that the Father is eternally Father, and therefore the Son is eternally Son, and therefore there never was a time when there was a Father without a Son and a Son without the Father. Other reasoning will be like, the Son is logos, which is the Son is word or reason. And the Father could never have been without his reason; therefore the one God is always Father and Son and logos. So there is this one-plus-one-equals-one binitarian dynamic that the Spirit is going to get slotted into in later centuries when the first problem of Father and Son has been sorted.
But that it's always there, and there will be other attempts. Even in Philo of Alexandria in the first century, you have a Father and then you have a logos, the reason who straddles the divide between uncreated and created. This is similar to what are the standard demiurgic traditions within platonic philosophy, where you've got a principle that's above everything else; and to protect that principle from all this messiness, you have a subordinate lower principle that is called a creature, because it's generated from the principle, but then is responsible for the creation of all things and various sorts of hierarchies.
But this is precisely the philosophical question of the one and the many. And then what I'm describing is the particular Christian versions of intervening in that conversation, which are philosophically serious. This is what I wanted to say earlier: we talk about Christian theology, which I think unfortunately and harmfully amputates the serious Christian ideas from the philosophical conversations around it, of which it is informed and in which it is intervening in various and in very serious philosophical ways. I'd be happy to get rid of the word theology altogether and just talk about early Christian philosophy and the seriousness of these philosophical engagements within the ideas around them. And radical ones!
Ryan: That would then entail a substantial expansion of our current understanding of philosophy too, right?
TJ: No!
Ryan: No?
TJ: What they're doing is just philosophy. It's cosmology, it's physics, it's stuff about God. Philosophy is about a way of life in the world, and Christians have a particular and radical version of it. I'm sounding too much like an apologist.
Ryan: But that is an expansion upon the current disciplinary understanding of philosophy, unless you're Pierre Hadot or one of his followers.
TJ: I guess I am, because I don't think it's an expansion. I think what Christians and Jewish people like Philo and others are saying are just serious confrontations about physics, ethics, cosmology, with their stoic/platonic/all mixed up together neighbors. They're presenting a vision of the world and a way to live in it that becomes a pretty successful and viable option within the Roman world and beyond.
So I do, I disagree that it's an expansion of the word philosophy. These are philosophers. That's how they understood themselves. The word theology has a long and complicated history, but none of our New Testament authors or other authors, even until the fourth century, would've thought in themselves of theologians in the great sense of theologos. They were philosophers. That's just what they were.
Ryan: That's funny, because it reminds me of—this would've probably been Christmas holiday 2003, driving around town, doing errands with you, listening to Wilco, in Durham, North Carolina. And when the theologian song came on, you turned to me, you were like, listen to this, Ryan. Listen to this: theologians don't know nothing about my soul. And of course I was like, yeah, TJ, whatever. Theology is the queen of the sciences. But it seems like that has been fulfilled in your current understanding of the irrelevance of theology for early Christianity.
TJ: So, no. My complaint—and I probably should be tamer and milder and how I'm describing this—my complaint is simply how theology—using the word— annexes that discourse from the philosophical conversations about physics, ethics, cosmology. Because how to live a life in this world, what this world is, who God is, where God is, what happens when bits of God get inside you and what that means: these are just ancient, philosophical questions. And Christian theologians and Jewish Christian philosophers and Jewish philosophers were advancing really interesting and provocative visions for how to answer these questions. They belong to the fight within Platonism, stoicism, epicureanism, all these things.
I am a Christian, and I feel like I sound too apologetic right now. But in the first couple of centuries, what they achieved was philosophically remarkable. Weird ideas about physics, cosmology and ethics, and they achieved quite a bit. Look at our world today: I don't have any stoic friends who call themselves stoics and order their lives accordingly, but a lot of my friends still show up at church on Sundays.
Madhavi: To go back to the original question that Ryan had, would it involve an expansion of the notion of philosophy? I'm not sure it would, but I think it would require a little bit of humility in both of our disciplines: humility from philosophers, and I suppose to an extent classicists, to recognize that the development of thought around the person and divinity of Jesus is as philosophically complex as their Platos and their Aristotles, and that it is something as deserving of inquiry in as those two great pillars are as well. It would require from us, however, an acknowledgement that our discussions are one amongst many, and that the debates of early Christianity are near eastern, Greco-Roman debates that everybody was having, and that whilst Christianity or the debates around Christianity are intervening in this conversation, I think we have to acknowledge that it's part of the conversation in the first place.
And I think from philosophers, there would have to be academic humility, and from us, there would have to be theological humility. And perhaps we did win out—there are no stoic running about—but nonetheless …
TJ: Well, cognitive behavioral therapy I think is basically stoic.
[laughter]
Madhavi: But I think it requires all of us to sit down and think very, very carefully [about] what sort of genealogies we're creating for this material, what we're claiming to it. I spoke earlier about my frustration with people saying the Hebrew Bible was unique in this respect, the same thing with the New Testament; it drives me up the wall. Because yes, there are profound interventions in these conversations; but they are conversations. To somehow rarify these texts as separate from the cultures that produce them I think is just doing them a disservice. It's doing us a disservice, because we don't understand where we came from.
TJ: I want to talk about genealogies. Can I? Let me do this.
Ryan: Yes. I have a good follow up that'll set you up for things that’ll make your administrators happy.
TJ: Okay. This needs to be said. We've got to talk about narratives of progress and narratives of decline when it comes to accounts of Christian origins. I mentioned earlier [the] Hellenization thesis. I have friends on one side of that debate who think—even if it's like Harnack, who some people may know—who thought that if we could just peel back the husks and get to the kernel, we would understand that Christianity is about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and if we could all just get along, it's a beautiful vision for society. Now that was a noble idea to allow us to not kill one another, which we have not lived up to. But the idea that if we could just get back to Palestine and Aramaic Jesus, and we just learned to love one another, and that the developments within Christian theology and doctrine as it expanded in new cultures, new places, within new languages—not just Greek and eventually Latin, but Armenian and Syriac and Aramaic and all sorts of interesting worlds of thought ... I think one of the powerful aspects of Christianity has been its ability to embody new worlds of thought and cultures, and find new ways of thinking itself.
With respect to Hellenism, which dominates much of Western thinking, the Greek version of Christianity: I do not view it as a story of decline, but simply taking up shop and setting up tents in new cultural worlds with a new language and vocabulary for thinking itself out. Whether you like it or not, these are just historical facts. We can't undo them. How we relate to them will be a question for each individual to make up.
But I depart from my colleagues who think that if we could just go back and understand the temple, that we could figure out Jesus's relationship with the Father or something like that. I actually personally find Greek metaphysics far more familiar than temple culture. I've never been to a temple; I've never slaughtered an animal.
Madhavi: TJ always speaks so eloquently about these things, and I think what’s really important to acknowledge is that this isn't just a Christian phenomenon. I could make exactly the same statement about the Hebrew Bible. There is absolutely no reason why we should have a Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, because when the Jews were exiled to Babylon and Jerusalem was destroyed and the populations were taken into exile, whatever religion it was that they worship should have ended right there. As you know, it did with the various other nations around. And it didn't. Various people have different explanations for why that is. But one of them has to be that ability to adapt and engage and change with the situations around them. And in the case of Babylon, the great example is how to survive the experience of Babylon.
It's not the cognitive problem of a crucified man who's supposed to be the Messiah; but I think it poses similar theological problems that have to be worked out. The language in Hebrew Bible is not a philosophical language, because that's not the language of the time. But nonetheless, I would say the theological questions that were raised, or the questions that exile will raise, or a Syrian domination or Babylonian domination, or indeed the continuation of Persian domination, just constantly bombards our thinkers with ideas that they have to work out.
By the time we get to first century Judaism—of which, of course, Christianity is a part—we have the rise of apocalypticism; we have the rise of Messianism. We have the rise of eschatology, all of which had to happen in the first place, otherwise there would definitely have not been a thought space for Jesus.
And that I think is testimony to the fact that our authors, sometimes against great odds and sometimes at great expense to any number of different theological positions, just adapt as necessary.
Ryan: It seems to me then that this way of thinking, it's similar to what Remi Brague did in his book, Eccentric Culture, which was kind of his amicus brief to the EU about the status of Europe and what it means to be European. His thesis there is that to continue to consider European heritage as central to the EU is not to think of it as heritage, because what European is, is it's a constantly assimilating but then also being changed by what is outside of it. He claims that this is unique to European culture. But I think you're both making arguments—one in New Testament, one in Old Testament—that this is what happens.
It seems like divinity and Biblical studies are in this uniquely protected space right now here in the British university system, and particularly at St. Andrews. But the entire discipline at least is in a kind of demographic crisis, a crisis of broader patterns of secularization. One response is to be like, oh, well, we can be multicultural. We can do the diversity thing too. But in a way that leaves behind the disciplinary expertise.
But what you're saying is that fundamental to these traditions that we study is already a multiculturalism. And so it's not making a diversity move to say that this is profoundly relevant to our students, and this will teach our students. Because the content of what we're teaching is not Western heritage, it's not European heritage, and it's not even Christian heritage in the sense that it's not owned by Christianity, right? That's my pitch to the St. Andrews administrators the next time they're like, stop teaching your subject.
TJ: I have so much to say to that—too much to say to that! To go back to an earlier bit though: what we were describing about traditions is what I talk about as the paradox of tradition—and you could apply it to the paradox of God. The paradox of tradition is that tradition says to itself that we're still the same, we're always the same; while at the same time, [it’s] always having to change if it is to be alive, while somehow figuring out and fighting about ways to be recognizable to itself across time. It's incredibly complicated, and Christian and Jewish traditions—the ones we're most familiar with—have been exceptionally durable in their ability to claim the past, claim their heritage, while at the same time forging new modes of thought and being and ways of living and adapting in the world around them.
Now, with respect to the point about multiculturalism—is that the word you used?
Ryan: Yeah, or making a diversity play.
TJ: I mean, this is what's so exciting to me about Christianity that I study. I mentioned this earlier: we only encountered the words of Jesus in Greek, and he did not speak Greek, which is already, at the base of our tradition, an endorsement of translation, an endorsement of taking up powerful modes of thought in new cultural worlds and languages.
Our great entrepreneur of Christianity was the apostle Paul, who for some 20-30 years wandered around the Mediterranean among people whose cultures and worlds he had to learn as he moved; set up camps; somehow convinced them to destroy their gods and give themselves to an executed Galilee peasant, which is the weirdest thing I can imagine, how this was successful. And he did it. I suspect he was so successful because of his multicultural—if we want to use that word—sociological translation ability. He knew how to relate to people who were other.
And to go back to something else: Paul is my friend; he wakes me up at night. I've lived with him as a scholar for many years now. I think he also found many of these people disgusting. The non-Jewish the people he gave his life to, my guess is that early on, all of his cultural instincts would've been to despise them and to be disgusted by them. He learned to live with them, which I find personally to be an interesting tutelage to reflect on in my own life for people who I find difficult and challenging to live with.
Madhavi: I can't speak to Paul. I don't wake up thinking about Paul. But I think our discipline is at a profound point of crisis at the moment, and saying we're at a crossroads would be a nice way of putting it. I teach a class, and TJ's joined me every once in a while, on the Bible and contemporary culture, and I think that's very interesting to see just in terms of the way that the Bible is being used. But we have students who come having never really opened a Bible at this point, not knowing what's there. I think they find the complexity of the Bible compelling. It's a text that humbles me all the time. Everything about it—the moral complexity, the literary complexity, the complexity of words.
Sometimes when TJ teaches Paul in one of my creation classes, he talks about how weird Paul is. I'm sure that's right, because it's not our world. I think what we do as biblical scholars—above and beyond our own independent research, which is of course very interesting to us individually—is that we are opening up a window into a world that everybody assumes they know, and very rarely do they know it, and showing them the complexity of that.
I hadn't thought about it in the way that you put it, Ryan, but I think that's right: there's such a profound unwillingness to settle in scripture, whether that's Jewish scripture or Christian scripture. Nothing is black and white. Everything is gray. And when we try to superimpose order on it, it just always comes back at us and wins.
And that, I find as a scholar, extremely compelling. And that's why I get up and come to work every morning, because I get to read a text that is just so much smarter than I am in that respect. We've chosen the subject of God because it's something we enjoy talking about. But again, here there a hundred books about God over here on my bookshelves. The fact is that if you are trying to tell the story, and we're trying to tell one version of the story, it's actually really difficult to do so, because there are always bits that we leave out and there are always bits where we've had to simplify. And there are some points where actually, we have nothing to say to each other on this one topic, even though there are other places where we find it extraordinary, the point at which that the story just kind of continues on.
So I think that's a testimony, not just to the subject, but it's a testimony to our texts. Convincing our administrators of that is another question—they just should come to our class.
Ryan: Suppose that we were able to survey 100 Biblical study scholars around the world and ask them, what is the age of humanity? What do you think the average would be? 80,000 years, 100,000 years, 200,000 years, 400,000 years? Do they think about this?
Madhavi: No. No, that's not fair—not in circles that we now inhabit, I think is the answer. I think there are some places—if you spoke to my neighbor, Andrew Torrance; I think there are certain circles for whom that is still a very important question, because it comes down to a certain question of the veracity of Bible. But I don't see us asking that question anymore.
TJ: I also think that there are some really interesting theological questions about how we answer this with respect to creation and what science is teaching us or showing us about, if the earth or humanity is as old as it may seem. You just threw some numbers out at me that don't make sense to me. I can't even conceive of 80,000 years; but let's just pretend that something like that is approximately the case.
Ryan: Not the earth. Homo sapiens, specifically.
TJ: Yes, that’s what I mean. But prior to that, we've still got a whole lot of violence and death in the creaturely realm. Which I think is a really interesting theological question for people thinking theologically about creation and what God has done, and when this violent chaos ensued and why, and how we account for that—however you're going to give an account of Adam; from Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 and Genesis 1-2, how you're going to tell that story. I find these to be really fascinating theological questions within the domain of, let's call it Christian philosophy of the cosmos; and I find them strangely ignored.
Ryan: Would it make a difference, especially to Hebrew Bible scholars? Would it necessarily shift the historical imagination to wake up every day and think that the election of the people of Israel happened 372,000 years into human history?
Madhavi: I may not be the right person to ask this question. In fact, I know I'm not the right one to ask this question; but my gut instinct is to say probably no. I think that where we are in Biblical studies at the moment is at a place where what is important is what the election achieves, rather than when the election happened, simply because we have had to rethink so many of our historical givens that to tether the events of Hebrew Bible in actual history destabilizes that event. I think many in Biblical studies—I can't say all, but I think many in Biblical studies have turned instead to look at just the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, and try to understand that rather than trying to then map it on to our own historical narrative.
Ryan: What's the status of what I learned in graduate school, which is that the Israelite religion such as it was in various stages is an Axial Age phenomenon.
Madhavi: Well, I do love a good Axial Age.
Ryan: I mean, this is fundamental to Charles Taylor's thinking.
Madhavi: Yes, indeed. I think that there is something in the water in the second half of the first millennium BC. But it's something that I would not extend to the far east, at least I understand kind of the original Axial argument being that things are just afoot in the ancient Mediterranean. But that is not the Israelite religion; that is the move out of the Israelite religion into Judaism. And that is a very interesting conversation—that it's not the religion of the Hebrew Bible.
TJ: Wait: do you mean the religion of the Hebrew Bible, or the religion behind?
Madhavi: Certainly the second of those two—behind; and I might even make an argument that it is not the religion of the Hebrew Bible either, because not even late second temple Judaism is the religion of the Hebrew Bible. Not least because of some of these big “ologies” that develop, that turn this a religion of a first millennium group into the religions of late first millennium and early common era eschatology and philosophy.
So all of that is to say, rather around the bush, that I think something like an Axial Age is an interesting idea to think about—that there are large shifts that we see taking place. But in my mind, none of that is actually reflected in the Hebrew Bible.
Ryan: One of my all time favorite works of literature is every single story that Ted Chung has written. He's often considered a science fiction writer, but he is more like speculative fiction, and he has this story called “The Tower of Babel.” What he imagines there is that the motivation for most of the people working on the Tower of Babel is that they want to be closer to the Lord. They are devout.
Is there any potential for that? Could you give an explanation of that based on what you know of early religion?
Madhavi: Absolutely. You build a temple when you build a monument. Babylon, the bab eloni, it's just the gates of the gods in Akkadian. In that respect, any act of building is a religious statement, and all monumental building is done in the name of the gods. Absolutely. As an explanation of what, what might be going on in the Babylon story in Genesis, or behind that story, that makes perfect sense to me. Indeed, the problem in Genesis is not with the people; it's with God's objection to it. Certainly all of those stories in 1-11 to one extent or another touch on the blurring between human and divine.
People in our classes always say, oh, Adam and E were expelled because they ate the apple. That is not what Genesis says; they were expelled from the garden because now they knew that they could eat from the tree of life, having eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and now are like gods knowing good and evil. And indeed in the story of the Tower of Babel, God says, look: now there is nothing that will stop them. It's almost a kind of a divine anxiety, rather than acts of impiety, even though clearly what happens in Eden is an active human disobedience.
TJ: The thing that came to mind is the subsequent history of Christian architecture. I was thinking of Durham Cathedral where I worked, and we would picnic overlooking Durham Cathedral. You look at it and you think that in the 10th century, some people arrived there and thought, let's build something huge. We're not going to be alive when it's completed, but may the Lord come back and find us building it to Him. Which is a really interesting juxtaposition with Babel. That's not how that story is presented. But nonetheless—maybe it's Pollyannish—I have trust that those builders of those cathedrals, they wanted the Lord to find them building this to him when he came back, even if it was only a third of the way completed
Madhavi: And also, what is a ziggurat? We call it a tower, but if the basis is the ziggurat, which everybody assumes it is, people are just building sacred architecture. Going back to the cathedrals, it's interesting how many of them have stars; precisely those elements in terms of the direction of heaven—they manufacture heaven. If you look at the Duomo in Florence, they painted heaven for you right there. Forget Dante; just go look at it. There's a way of manufacturing that so it is up, but also present.
TJ: I think I've told you the story of my children with the St Andrew's Cathedral. They go to a Catholic school, and they think they're Catholic, even though they're not. It was a couple of years ago, and we were wandering around the cathedral grounds, and Penelope remembered Durham Cathedral, which is just beautiful. And she was just like, what happened to this place?
Ryan: What did happen to it? John Knox happened
Madhavi: John Knox happened.
Ryan: Oh really? It was intentional?
Madhavi: Oh yes.
TJ: John Knox preached a sermon right across the street about Jesus’s temple tantrum, and they went and they just tore it down. And I told Penelope the story of Protestantism and destruction of stuff, and she was like, I am not a Protestant. [laughter] And I said, yes you are! Anyone who would do something to that place, she wanted nothing to do with it. But yeah, it was John Knox.
Ryan: I've been learning just through reading about this deep history stuff. Some of the authors I read have been calling attention to the ways that what we know archaeologically has been so shaped by funding and by the sources of the funding. Most of what everybody thought they knew about the history of homo sapiens was based on European archeology; and now there's this huge transformation happening in the U.S. in North America, where there are all these sites that could only be paleontological sites, because humans weren't in North America before 10,000 BC.
And now that we know that they were there 20,000, maybe even 40, 60—maybe 100,000 years, archaelogists and anthropologists are going back to the paleontological sites and treating them as places where you might find human artifacts. And they're finding them!
So in the field of Biblical archeology, if you could redirect resources, what would be the new frontier?
Madhavi: Well, that's a great question. This is definitely outside of the archeological training that I've had, but in Israel, I know that there is renewed interest in early archeology of the land in a way that is before Judaism—before Jews, before God—just starting to dig sites that once upon a time, nobody would've been interested in, because they just didn't think it was important. So I think there is a lot more interest going into that area in general.
Archeology and biblical studies—and, and I can't speak for the New Testament—but certainly for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, has just been plagued by our search for the Bible. The criticism of biblical archeologists that there's a spade in one hand and a Bible and the other—quite apart from the kind of colonial aspects of [how] it was Chicago, it was Germany, the great European empires and their universities that were digging up the Holy Land. But everybody was going in search of proving the Bible, and it meant that they just destroyed evidence.
Two great examples of that: if you go to Megiddo, you see the huge Chicago cut, and they just cut through the Tel so that they wouldn't have to take the time to do layer by layer, and just destroyed it. Because you can look at layers from a huge cut like that, but of course there's nothing scientific about it. And so there's this kind of impatience for trying to find David.
Ryan: So this was even after the development of modern archeological methods?
Madhavi: Oh, yes. I mean, this was part of the development of modern archeology. They just wanted to find David.
Another great example is, because our textual record from the period is so limited, people just didn't care about the Persian period, because what could have happened in the Persian period? Well, now we know that a lot happened in the Persian period. Not least probably the collection of our Pentateuch. The actual Bible itself all took place in the prison period. But in every major site we just destroyed it, because we thought it was useless.
One place where I have dug, just as a student, was at Tel Azekah, which is dug by Tel Aviv and Heidelberg, and it was a pristine site. Nobody had dug it. It's mentioned in the Bible, and so we went in hoping that we were going to find a beautiful Babylonian or Syrian disruption layer. We found nothing of the like. We found a beautiful second millennium disruption layer, and we found an absolutely stunning Persian layer, which in this respect is a dime a dozen now.
We're not a dime a dozen—quite the opposite. It's so rare to find those things. So that's a very long winded way, Ryan, of saying that I think we have to go back to these areas, acknowledge that we've destroyed what we've destroyed, that we will never get that back; but to realize that we have to dig them layer by layer, that it's going to be expensive. It's going to take time. And we may not always find the Bible when we do. The difficulty of course, is that so much of the money for biblical archeology comes from conservative institutions in the states.
Ryan: What about just regionally, is there potential that digging in the really far east or digging in Northern Africa? It seems like, no matter how far back you go, the last 40 years of historical scholarship have shown that the world was far more interconnected than we thought. Is anybody doing that? Is anybody saying, I'm a biblical era archeologist, but I'm going to go dig in North Africa and learn everything I can learn about North Africa, and see what the potential connections are?
Madhavi: No. What they may do is they may sharpen their spade or learn their skills by doing something like Egyptian archeology. Which again, because of technological improvements, like being able to [take] satellite pictures and seeing where things are, it means that we're not just digging blindly; we kind of know where we're going. You might find Moses you mean find on Mount Sinai.
But my suspicion is that people who are being trained properly in archeology and are doing archeology at the Levant are now receiving a much wider education than they might have once upon a time. [It] doesn't start in the 12th century, when we assume Joshua came in and destroyed all the Canaanite cities. I don't think there's a way that we're gonna be able to go find Abraham; but there is a huge debate about, when we find settlements without pig bones, what does that mean? We just don't know what it means; but it's interesting that we have settlements starting at a certain period without pig bones.
So I think as a discipline, it's getting much better. But there is, there is a long way to go, and I think even more so than other fields of archeology, it is tainted by the interests of previous diggers and the implications of where the money comes from.
Ryan: TJ, where is heaven?
Madhavi: In my heart. [laughter]
TJ: Where is heaven? That is a great question.
Over the last two years, I've worried about that question in really fascinating ways. It began during the pandemic, when I was wasting my life away in a room that fortunately overlooks the sea, and one morning I arrested myself from my waste of a life watching YouTube and said, TJ, you've gotta change, man. I gave myself my own intervention, and I decided to worry about the cosmos, about the structure of the world.
And so I gathered everything I could find from the ancient world about God and about what people thought about the world, and began to wonder with them about where it was, what it was—really interested in the furniture up there. And I said “up there,” which indicates already that I've made some judgment about where it is. As I think I've already said, I am a Christian, and I say seated at the right hand is where Jesus is.
I don't know, Ryan. But what I do know is that the people that I study were really interested in the question, and they looked up to wonder. They looked at the stars and the moon, which changes—which was presumably for many of them a portal, an entry and exit point, especially for demons who were made of air and were good, often; for Christians, usually bad, and they might get inside you, which is really scary.
The sun, as I overlooked the sea, every day rises in one place and sets in another, and it's different every day; and those are also entry points and exit points for many people. If you want to get to Hades or wherever it is, Styx, you take a boat; and when you get to the end of the portal, somehow you find your way on the other side of it.
Where is heaven? Ryan, I don't know; but it's a really interesting question.
Ryan: Is it a place for who?
TJ: For who?
Ryan: For Paul.
TJ: Yeah, he went up there. So Paul is one of our great physicists—an incredibly accomplished physicist of the cosmos—because he took a trip to the third heaven. Whether he had more heavens, I don't know; he went to the third one. He wasn't sure if he went there in his body or out of his body, which is another interesting thing which has questions about physics and mind-body-soul experiences, and who you are and whether you can somehow exit yourself, or whether you've got to take your body up there and what has to happen to it.
So Paul is one of our great physicists of the cosmos, and he went up there, and he saw it; and it was such a place that he can't tell you much more about it.
Madhavi: It's a gloriously provocative question. Two obvious antecedents are Enoch, who isn't a person to whom we ascribe the birth of a religion, but he also goes up and he sees things. And of course even before that, historically speaking rather than chronologically speaking, is Ezekiel.
I think there's a concept that one can get into the heavens, plural, in Semitic tradition or the Hebrew Bible tradition that is up for debate in the New Testament. But it's a place that, as a human, one usually goes in vision form. And that's interesting to me, that there's something about the human body that means that it's very difficult to get up there. And of course there are exceptions.
TJ: But Paul's not sure.
Madhavi: Indeed. And Elijah's an exception, and Enoch’s the exception. But not even Moses goes up to heaven. He goes on top of a mountain in physical form, and then he comes back horning light.
TJ: We call these mystical—which, maybe; whatever. But I prefer to regard Paul as the David Attenborough of the heavenly realm. [laughter] He went and saw.
But these cosmologists in the ancient world, they really did think in these simply material terms. What are these demons and angels made of? What sort of ether? Can you see it? How does it change? How do they get from one place to another? Why are they so dangerous or so helpful? What do they know? Why is Hermes so fast at getting places? Where does Zeus come from? He comes from heaven and he comes from Mount Olympus. Where's Mount Olympus? Well, I don't know. We've never been to the top of it. It's up there.
These were the questions they asked, and it makes me sad for myself and all of us that we've lost a lot of the imagination to look up and look across and read the world and think about what it means and why it is the way it is.
For ancient figures, the word cosmos is the word for ornament. The world is decorated. And it's beautiful. The stars are there and they move and you can follow them and study them and think about them. And when you look at one, you ask the question, what does this mean about what they are and what God is? I mean, they shine We live in such an uncosmological world, it seems to me.
Madhavi: In that respect, David Attenborough is perfect because I think has tried to bring a lot of the beauty of the world back in his programs. The obvious two words that spring to mind when listening to you talk—first of all, you've spoken instead of your writings about this tendency to demythologize Paul. I think there's an impulse throughout biblical studies to somehow demythologize him.
TJ: Or that Paul himself was demythologizing.
Madhavi: Indeed. And to somehow strip—I don't want to say the miraculous, because that's a different conversation, but to strip the marvel from our thinkers; how they did marvel at this world, and how their experience of it, either of history or of the kind of everyday bits and bobs of life, were infused with a concept of divinity. And whether that was radical polytheism of the ancient hit Hittites and thousand gods Hatti, or this kind of complex monotheism that we've been talking about, it is profoundly sacred.
Now that isn't to get into these debates about secularity, because I think there is a conversation to be had about what constitutes the secular in the ancient world, and I think we should have that conversation; but to turn these thinkers into little versions of our impoverished selves is very boring.
It's so boring to see ourselves in all of these individuals, because they aren't us. When Jesus becomes a hipster, or when Jesus becomes a bodybuilder, or when Jesus becomes a biblical scholar—it's profoundly narcissistic; but it's also very boring, and doesn't allow that weirdness to speak.
Ryan: Madhavi Nevader, TJ Lang, thank you very much.