A manuscript I wrote recently saw publication, “Martial and the fiscus Iudaicus Once More” in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 25 (2015) 111-117.
A Pre-Proof version can be read here and the full published version can be read here.
Author: Christopher Zeichmann
SBL is right around the corner and I will be presenting at the Redescribing Early Christianity section. This year the theme is redescribing time and anachronism. Here is my abstract.
Mark’s Jesus as Post-War Subject in Pre-War Galilee
Abstract: While most scholars agree Mark was composed around the time of the Judaean War, many are reluctant to see any implications in the Gospel aside from isolated pericopae (e.g., Olivet Discourse, rending of the temple veil). This paper will suggest that in fact the conditions of Palestine after the Judaean War resonate throughout Mark. It will argue that Mark presents Jesus as a time-displaced subject from the post-War period that inhabited Galilee during the reign of Herod Antipas. In so doing, the Markan Jesus operates with an anachronistic hindsight allowing him to authorize a number of practices for the Markan readers in the post-War period, whether through explicit instruction or exemplary practices of his own. This paper will take Jesus’ discussion of tax practices (12:13-17) as its point of departure, examining anachronisms and their authorizing function. Two further examples will also be discussed more tentatively: 1) cultic reconfigurations adjusting for the loss of the temple and 2) authorizing the site of Galilee – Capernaum in particular – as the locus for refugee activity. In so doing, Jesus’ peculiar status as a post-War subject residing the pre-War period (and the continuity the Markan readers ostensibly hold with his practices) legitimates their claims in the context of post-War Jewish authenticity politics. This paper will elaborate on the functions of anachronism and time-displaced subjectivity in Markan patterns of legitimation.
A new article I wrote was recently published in The Bible and Critical Theory. It is titled “Rethinking the Gay Centurion: Sexual Exceptionalism, National Exceptionalism in Readings of Matt. 8:5-13//Luke 7:1-10”.
You can find it online here: http://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/ojsbct/index.php/bct/article/view/614
Martial, Epigrams 11.94 reads:
Your overflowing malice, and your detraction everywhere of my books, I pardon: circumcised poet, you are wise! This too, I disregard, that when you carp at my poesy ouplunder them: so, too, circumcised pet, you are wise! What tortures me is this, that you, circumcised poet, although born in the very midst of Solyma [Jerusalem], corrupt my boy. There! You deny it, and swear to me by the Thunderer’s Temple. I don’t believe you: swear, circumcised on, by Anchialus. (Translation by Walter Charles Alan)
I initially researched this passage in tandem with my work on Jewish understandings of same-sex intercourse in the early Roman period. I also suspect there is untapped potential for work on the fiscus Iudaicus as well.
The fiscus Iudaicus replaced the half-shekel Jewish temple tax after the destruction of the temple. While the temple tax was collected by Jewish authorities and used to fund the temple cult in Jerusalem, the fiscus Iudaicus was imposed by Vespasian to fund Jupiter Capitolinus – the temple of Jupiter in the city of Rome. One can only assume this was intended to cause offense and humiliate Jews after the loss in the Judaean War.
Here, Martial seems to make an oblique reference to the fiscus Iudaicus that – as far as I can tell – has never been noted before. Martial wrote mostly under Domitian’s princeps and makes a few other references to the fiscus Iudaicus elsewhere in his writings (Epigrams 7.55 and possibly Liber spectaculorum 36 [see Honora Chapman’s “Reading the Judeans and the Judaean War in Martial’s Liber spectaculorum.”]). These other references permit us to infer his demand that a Jewish rival swear by the temple of Jupiter in Epigrams 11.94 acts as a humiliating reminder of the Jewish tax’s purpose.
Some commentators want to see references to the temple’s destruction in this epigram: Louis Feldman suggests the demand that the Jewish poet swear by “Anchialus” is a corruption of “Antiochus” (i.e., Antiochus IV Epiphanes); Peter Schaefer suggests “Anchialus” is a corruption of “Archelaus” (i.e., Archelaus II). Neither of these seems particularly satisfactory to me; the traditional explanation that “Anchialus” is the name of Martial’s slave-boy (a name common among slaves) seems fairly plausible and makes sense in context.
As part of my forthcoming, and long gestating, project on homonormative and heteronormative interpretations of the Healing of the Centurion’s Slave, I endeavoured to collect all references to publications referring to possible sexual subtexts to the passage (Matthew 8:5-13//Luke 7:1-10). One obscure, but important, publication I got my hands on was Tom Horner’s annotated bibliography of relevant works called “Homosexuality in Biblical Times.” This work was a running publication and grew regularly: 6 pages as of 1977, 1 more in 1978, and a final page as of 1979. It seems to have been self-published, so it’s long out of print. Since it’s just an annotated bibliography, there isn’t any original research here, but it may be of interest to historians of interpretation and especially historians of queer interpretation.
Anyway, Horner’s little book can be found here, and my article “Rethinking the Gay Centurion:Sexual Exceptionalism, National Exceptionalism in Readings of Matt 8:5-13//Luke 7:1-10” will be out in late June via The Bible and Critical Theory.
Last night I started reading The Complete Stardust the Super Wizard, which collects the stories about a Golden Age superhero created by Fletcher Hanks. If I remember correctly, Stardust comics were produced around 1940 or so.
One story that surprised me was one wherein Stardust fought war profiteers – or at least a group that intended to profit, but were thwarted by him. This reminded me of a similar story in a Superman story from around the same time, which follows the same basic blot. The politics of the very early Superman comics were considerably different from those of Stardust – the first two or so years of Superman comics seem to depict him as a populist anarchist that goes around punching those who abuse their power (combating, e.g., spousal abuse, the prison industrial complex, union-busters), whereas Stardust is more interested in foiling the plans of those with ambitions to flat-0ut destroy the planet Earth (a sort of benevolent space deity). Even so, the overlap suggests some kind of hesitancy toward producers of equipment for warfare, a concern no doubt related to the looming threat of U.S. involvement in WWII.
Contrast this with recent cinematic depictions of Batman and Superman, both of whom are billionaires whose fortunes are sustained by the production of military equipment. I haven’t read many comics from the period shortly before or during US involvement in WWII, but I suspect that there was a significant change in attitudes around that time. Captain America #1 famously depicted the title hero socking Hitler, even before the U.S. declared war – one assumes that anything that might be seen as opposed to the war would at some point be seen as near-treasonous. The political ideology of Iron Man and Batman movies, of course, attend to a wildly different context: Batman regularly situates its hero in discourses about police militarization and Iron Man directly evokes the War on Terror.
Even as there are comic heroes in recent years who fall more toward the Stardust-Superman end of the anti-warfare spectrum, it seems Marvel’s and DC’s most valued properties do not launch extended criticisms of the military-industrial complex in the same way as in the Golden Age. They tend to be supporting characters (e.g., early Anarky) or open to revision in short order (e.g., the first two or three issues of New 52 Superman).
Here’s a blog post that interacts with an article I published about the racial politics of Superman family comics in the 1970s: http://moazedi.blogspot.ca/2014/02/lois-lane-is-curious-and-black.html
Robert Myles has yet another fantastic blog post, this time examining the entirely conventional rhetoric of subversion in historical Jesus studies.
This is good food for thought as I write about the conventionality of scholarly work on the question of taxation in the Gospel of Mark. If these scholars’ Jesus were really so radical, why are they getting published by traditional media and the consumers of these books continue their lives with no difference except feeling somewhat better about themselves? Has N.T. Wright’s work ever figured even vaguely into a political demonstration?
I will be presenting a paper at SBL in San Diego this coming weekend, titled “Centurion as Rank of Peace? Social and Ideological Underpinnings of a New Testament Trope.” It will be in the Synoptic Gospels section (S22-244) on Saturday.
Here is the abstract:
More than anywhere else in the New Testament, the passion narrative features the military and its ensigns. Strangely, the Gospels seem deeply ambivalent about the military in this section: on the one hand soldiers mock and crucify Jesus, on the other the centurion is the first person to recognize Jesus’ divine sonship and they are not responsible for his condemnation to death. This tension is often glossed over; some scholars emphasize the latter (and so must claim that the centurion’s confession indicates something other than what it seems to), while others understand the centurion’s confession as justification or anticipation of Christian inclusion of the Gentiles (disregarding soldiers’ role in Jesus’ abuse). Instead of opting for one or the other option in this dichotomy, I would like to propose that the fundamental ambiguity of the military in the New Testament is not fully appreciated, as soldiers plainly serve disparate function over the course of a single chapter in Mark. Indeed, this tension is common in the New Testament. While common soldiers are often viewed negatively in narrative portions of the New Testament, officers of the rank centurio are uniformly depicted positively (e.g., Mark 15:39, Q 7:1-10, Acts 10:1-8, 27:1-3, 43). To explain this tension, I will draw upon papyrological evidence regarding soldier-civilian relations in the Roman Near East to discern the social structures that encouraged peasants and other civilians to perceive centurions positively and common soldiers more negatively. For example, sales typically occurred via special contract that could only be characterized as extortion and low-ranking soldiers appear to have been responsible for procuring such supplies from provincials. Officers, on the other hand – especially those ranked centurion and higher – had considerably greater agency and their individual dispositions played a larger role in their public perception; they mediated conflicts between locals, determined which regions to police for thieves, and the like. By illuminating the social conditions that cultivated such understandings of the military, we are better positioned to discern the distinctive comportments New Testament authors held toward the Roman Empire and the military more specifically.
Here is the additional information I have found:
Text: [1st hand] Imp(eratori) Cae[sari divi Traiani] | Parthic(i) [f(ilio) divi Nerv]ae nep(oti) | Traiano [Hadri]ano August(o) | pont(ifici) ma[x(imo)] trib(unicia) pot(estate) XIIII | c[o(n)s(uli)] III p(atri) p(atriae) | l[eg(io) X F]reten[sis] [2nd hand] [Antoninia]na{e}
Translation: [1st hand] To the Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, son of the deified Traianus Parthicus, grandson of the deified Nerva, high priest, invested with tribunician power for the 14th time, consul for the third time, father of the country. Dedicated by legio X Fretensis [2nd hand] Antoniniana. (Trans. Avner Ecker, with slight revisions)
Provenance: Jerusalem 129-130 CE
Bibliography: CIIP 1.715
The CIIP entry, of course, precedes the discovery of the new fragment but has an otherwise exhaustive bibliography. One hopes that an errata entry will be included in an eventual supplementary volume.