Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Night in Which He Was Betrayed

It is partly by my lot and station and partly by the season and week we now are in that I today came across not one, but two different speculative reconstructions of the trial and execution of our Lord. The first, E.P. Sanders' conviction that Jesus was condemned by the Jewish authorities not for the blasphemy of claiming to be the Son of God or to hold other messianic titles, but for his turning over the money-changers' tables in the temple, I encountered while poking around in his book Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah; he apparently discusses it more in-depth in some of his other works. The argument is not terribly far-fetched (Sanders appeals to the difference in Jewish law between blasphemy and false prophecy, and the sense of these messianic titles in pre-Christian usage) but it does come down to suspicion of the gospels on a point where they do not greatly disagree. Suspicion may well be warranted for the historian on a point where the gospels narrate events in markedly different ways, but this is not such a point.

The second account, and by far the more fanciful one, I encountered in a brief essay by Gary Greenberg, arguing that the tradition of Judas' betrayal of Jesus does not correspond to the historical reality. I will not rehearse his argument, since the essay is easily accessible by the link above, but only point out the sort of evidence he is using.

1. An argument from silence in Paul.
2. An argument from "Q Material" which assumes first, that Q exists, of course, second, that in this particular passage Matthew represents the older tradition (the fidelity of Matthew's version to the Q original is argued on the basis of Luke's attempting to re-interpret the Judas tradition, that is to say, Greenberg has very bumblingly begged the question here), and, finally, that the passage in question is to be read in a crudely literal sense and not symbolically.
3. An argument from a non-canonical gospel which Greenberg has given an incredibly early date (pre-Mark!), acknowledging 'controversy' but providing to evidence, save a citation of that universally esteemed scholar, John Crossan.
4. An argument from the semantics of paradidomi.

This claim merits further attention. Paradidomi is the verb your New Testament will translate 'betray' in the passion contexts, but Greenberg claims that it in fact never means 'betray,' but only the more neutral 'hand over' appealing to the work of William Klassen, Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus, which is available on Google Books. It is first of all unclear to me how much different the meanings of 'hand over' and 'betray' would be in the situation as the gospels describe it (for Greenberg's putative reconstruction of history it does make some difference); what we have here is purely the combat of psychologizations. Second, I have it on the authority of a New Testament scholar that many New Testament scholars are unfortunately often not as careful as they should be when appealing to evidence in Classical Greek, especially that the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon, certainly the authoritative record of the Greek language, is not always treated as critically as it ought to be in matters of classical usage. Klassen's argument is a case in point, as he addresses the three citations given in LSJ and a couple uses in papyri; this is not a thorough word study, and there is no excuse not to do a thorough word study in a language as well-attested as Classical Greek if you wish to contest a generally-held meaning.

There are more important problems with Klassen's criticism of LSJ. First of all, he has misunderstood what the lexicon is actually saying about paradidomi. Klassen claims that LSJ gives the meaning "to give a city or a person into another's hands, esp. as a hostage or an enemy with the collational notion of 'treachery, betray.'" (Klassen 47) What LSJ says is "to give a city or a person into another's hands...esp. as a hostage or to an enemy, deliver up, surrender...with collat. notion of treachery, betray..." (LSJ 1308) The words in italics indicate English words with which LSJ suggests you translate paradidomi, and the ellipses indicate examples cited from Greek literature for the given sense. It is unclear why Klassen chose to paraphrase the Lexicon entry instead of quoting it, but his paraphrase gives the impression that LSJ considers this second sense always to have the "collational notion of 'treachery, betray.'" There are a few problems with this. First, when reading an entry in a lexicon, the first meaning given is the general one, and subsequent meanings, separated by semicola, are shades of that general meaning. So when LSJ states "with collat. notion of treachery, betray," it is not stating that paradidomi in this sense always may be translated as 'betray,' but that, when it carries this "collat. notion of treachery" a proper English translation may be 'betray' instead of something more neutral. Second, there is the matter of what "collat." stands for. Klassen takes it as standing for 'collational,' as we have seen, "of or pertaining to collation," according the OED, which appears, from the citations given there, to be a word closely confined to how one presents text-critical information on the printed page; there is no hint of the lexicographical sense Klassen appears to see. On the other hand, the LSJ itself tells us that "collat.= collateral" (LSJ xliii), presumably in the sense (OED 2a) "accompanying, attendant, concomitant." (It is not my intent merely to make Klassen look like a fool; we all make mistakes. A mistake such as this, however, does seem to indicate some careless scholarship) Thus the LSJ is saying that when paradidomi, normally translated "give into another's hands," has a collateral or accompanying notion of treachery, it may be translated "betray" in order to bring out this collateral sense or overtone. A scholar familiar with the tool would not be confused here.

Second of all, he claims that all three of the citations in LSJ make no sense if we translate paradidomi as 'betray.' I confess I have not looked closely at the context of the three passages cited by the Lexicon, but the first two seem to clearly have overtones of treachery or betrayal: guards being intimidated and persuaded to hand over their fortresses (Cyropaedia 5.4.51), Antiope handing over the fortified area to Hercules because of her love for Theseus (Pausanias 1.2.1). On the third (Cyropaedia 5.1.28), I do agree with Klassen that it does not quite seem to fit, at least to my brief glance ("handing over weapons"). People may disagree on these nuances, I suppose. Klassen, however, does nothing to persuade us to trust his sense of the Greek over that of Liddell et al. when he cites the Loeb translations of the passages in question to corroborate his position (Klassen 47, notes on 59). It is an argument of absolutely no weight in questions of semantic nuance to appeal to a translation, which will necessarily pick up on some nuances and not others; translations are useful as illustrations, not as evidence. Even if Klassen's is a popular book (I am not sure of its intended audience) such an argument is unacceptable. It really does give the impression that the author merely flipped open his Loeb and looked over to the facing-page English instead of thinking through the Greek, but that certainly could not be the case.

Third, Klassen's general attitude is accusatory and there seems no reason for this. "Any lexicon," he says, "that suggests otherwise [than that paradidomi can never mean "betray"] is guilty of theologizing" (remember all this bears on the character of Judas) "than assisting us to find the meaning of Greek words through usage." (Klassen 48). I would wager it is this aggression that has prevented Klassen from treating the evidence with the proper care. Such a situation is ironic, since the evidence from LSJ, properly understood, does help his case a bit. LSJ commits only to paradidomi having overtones of betrayal or treachery, not to those concepts being central or important to it. Perhaps even the acknowledgment of an overtone is enough to render them part of the vast anti-Judas conspiracy.

As to all these speculations about 'what actually happened' in those last days that our Lord bore for us the old Adam, I find them tiresome, and threatening only insofar as they have shone great power to seduce my weaker brethren from firm faith in the God of Abraham. There are not many other fields where facts verified by many early sources would be interrogated so antagonistically. Some scholars practice such interrogation responsibly, and I only wish they would exercise themselves in soil more suited for the gospel seed, while others seem eager to propose the most fanciful reevaluations of the events. Surely such fascinations confess the power of Jesus' name. He indeed draws all people to himself, but some upon approaching the light have chosen to close their eyes and employ the imaginations, whether for fear of the heat or to feed their fantasizing vanity, I do not know. It is that light which shines from the God who is a consuming fire and not the light which he created that I will more trust to guide my footsteps. Those who testify to the former light are evangelists, those who point to the latter are historians, speculative and sound alike. To evoke the Philosopher: history I love, but I love the Church more.

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