Clay: Appendix 1: the SCAR

C'étaient des femmes quelconques . . .

She passes me on the street, unknown. She is standing still, deciding which way to go. She is squinting in the sun. For a moment I can see her. I can see that it was at least some months earlier she had written the word SCAR across her chest with a knife or perhaps the edge of a broken bar glass. The SCAR is permanent.

I could see the letters A and R through the opening of her blouse, but as the blouse was partially transparent I could make out, through the fabric, the other letters as well, reading SCAR in their entirety. I was left standing there as she walked away.


The word arched across her chest from the top of her right breast to the top of her left. It seems it was written with both fury and precision: the SCAR is deep, yet its letters are in proportion; the marks stand out in a rich rose color.

But she is not the type to have such a scar. Her blouse is rather fine to be framing it, and her age is perhaps 29. Her hair is long and auburn, her look calm and educated.


I find the scar irresistible on her--especially now that the perplexity of reading it has worn off and I have let her walk away to who knows where.

Why didn't I begin to talk with her? Had I, I know I would have been wise enough to talk of anything but the word there on her breast.

But even as I spoke it would have been the scar leading me to do so. It would have been evident there below her mouth even as she responded to me. Her mouth would have responded with words inevitably colored by this scar, colored rose red as my words also would have been inevitably colored.


To have an affair with such a woman, never asking about or even mentioning the word before you.


That I've been mesmerized by the sight of her becomes quite amusing when I contrast it with the fact that just before walking out onto the street where I saw her I'd been in the café reading the last pages of "Noms de pays: le nom." These are the pages in which Marcel dwells on the new generation of women, the elegance of whose manners and dress he cannot himself believe in. The contrast of two such texts read both during the same hour of a summer afternoon leads me to wonder: Can I believe both in the beauty of Proust's writing and in the beauty of the writing glimpsed on this woman's breast?

Clay: Appendix 2

[. . .] thing as "formless matter." Evil resides rather in a kind of willful coup of some part of God's creative forming. Evil is a willful coup of forms that, taking unto itself further form-like character, propels what might be called pseudo-creations. Detached from the divine, pseudo-creations bear the stamp of non-being. They ring hollow, and this hollow ringing can be recognized as their mark of provenance.


--.

APOLOGY FOR THE IDOLS
Just as the ear needs to hear words of love and anger, so the eye, if it is to be the eye of man, needs to see the idols.

The earliest recorded dream is that of a Mesopotamian woman, written down thousands of years B.C. The woman was a temple guardian. One night she dreamt that she went into the temple and saw that all the idols were gone and that the people who should have been there worshiping were gone too.

This ancient dream shows an ancient anxiety, an anxiety still with us today. We fear that the idols will go missing and that if they do there will be only empty space where they once stood. We fear that if this happens we might be voided out as well.

Our eye, having nowhere to rest in the flatness of space, begins to wander aimlessly, and in that wandering our essence is lost.

Whether of wood or stone or otherwise, man needs the idols. This doesn't mean that man worships the idols. Such is the old misguided fear of the iconoclasts. The idols merely allow man's eye to focus, which is what allows man to worship at all. The idols bring the eye to rest in order that the spirit may roam to the right places, seeking the divine.

* * *
In ancient Israel, if the prophets succeeded in extirpating the idols, the Temple became an idol. In the Diaspora, the Jews had to carry their idols with them into exile: the new idol thus became the Torah itself, a scroll containing the sacred texts. The Jews became "the people of the Book."

As for the Muslims, they forbade all representational art (i.e. idols) so that the Koran itself or calligraphed texts from the Koran could take the idols' place. Under pressure of the interdiction against idolatry, the Muslims created the world's most striking examples of manuscript illumination, works that nearly take the breath away for their subtlety and balance.

In Europe the Protestant revolution made a similar displacement: the paintings of saints and the reliquaries had to go, they said, and they lifted up the Bible in their place. Translated into the vernaculars, the Bible could henceforth hold the eye of this new people of the Book.

That the Bible is now bound in one volume, that one can clutch it, that its words have the thin but stark substantiality of black ink on paper--all this allows it to continue in its function.

* * *
Along with the other nightmares our new millennium brings us, there returns the same ancient nightmare of the missing idols. The flat computer screen with its constantly shifting contents and its hypertext links leads the eye to wander in unprecedented ways. Where and how can the eye focus? Doesn't it rather become fatigued and diverted? I myself can never read a text online. If I want to really read something I must download and print it. But like many of the faithful, I wonder about the people around me. I wonder if they may not be drifting into a Diaspora they themselves only vaguely suspect: an ultimate Diaspora away from the possibility of worship, away from man himself. Is this unduly pessimistic? Is it only a bad dream? Uncertainty and persistence. Our concentrated waiting will tell.

Clay: Appendix 4: A Letter to H.

[In August of 1996, I moved from Madison to Taipei. During my first year in Taiwan, I corresponded mainly with H., a friend of mine from graduate school.]

6/1/97,
Taipei

Dear H.:

All that simply means that something is there, something which Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other at the very least; and that it is Barnabas' own fault if he can't get any farther than doubt and anxiety and despair. --Kafka's The Castle, K. to Olga

Our ways of thinking are fundamentally different. In this letter, in a summary fashion, I will take this up. You must know these differences yourself. I think it's curious we haven't fallen out by now, that we've managed to continue communicating. Of course I will take up only my side of the bargain, because your side I can only get at secondhand.

* * *
For one thing, I am a Christian. This is something you must have already recognized, though at what level you recognized it I'm not sure. But in fact I've been a Christian since before we met.

I ought to make clear at least something about how I believe, since the fact of this belief is something you--I know this much--find hard to accept.

First of all, you should know that I am not a Christian merely out of some kind of "conservative" cultural solidarity. These kind of non-believing Christians exist by the churchful, but I'm not one of them. They have been taken in by the Enlightenment; I have not. I actually do believe in God and the soul and revelation.

I'm not of the fundamentalist mindset either. My understanding of things is quite different from the fundamentalists. The revelation, as given in Scripture and elsewhere, is not a kind of literal transcription of the truths of the divine, but is rather oblique: it points to an Otherness that can't be represented in language in any case. This is not to say, however, that I think there is nothing true about the specificity of the Scriptures. The opposite is the case. I am not a believer in cultural relativism when it comes to such things. Rather, there is a specificity in revelation. The texts of Buddhism, for example, are not part of it, or are only so in a very weak manner. The poems of the Mayans, whatever they may have been, were not part of it, or only in some weak and tentative manner. The revelation given in the Bible is not that of a particular culture, but is rather the revelation as given to man as such. This is to say it concerns the destiny of man as such, the meaning of man as such.

These few remarks begin to define what I believe, what I mean by saying I am a Christian.

* * *
You and I know each other because of our mutual concern with literature. But of course here again our thinking is fundamentally different. I have some idea of your thinking of literature from being in classes with you and from reading your dissertation proposal. My own understanding of literature has little in common with yours. I may get at my understanding of literature by beginning with what I could call the literary absolute.

For me, the texts of the Bible are literature's highest meaning. Literature's ultimate meaning is to be the textual medium of revelation. It is a matter of text, and revelation. Literature is that which results from the meeting of these two. Even the manner in which many of the most important Biblical texts came to be written--as a choosing, an editing, a kind of layering one could indicate by the metaphor of a heavily beleaguered palimpsest--even this for me makes the texts of revelation more compelling as the examples of literature. They define from then on what the word literature is to mean.

Literature for me is a question of canons even more than it is a question of rhetorical tropes. The Biblical texts are the Primary Canon and the great texts of Western literature are what I would call the Secondary Canon. They are a secondary canon because they are written after the fact of and under the dispensation of revelation. Following this understanding, the literature of classical antiquity must then constitute a Third Canon, being neither the Primary Canon nor the literature of the culture of the revelation, but being important to the formation (mainly the generic formation) of that latter literature. These remarks indicate how literature is arranged according to my understanding. If I continue reading and studying literature, it is partly in the hopes of an ever-greater understanding of the relationships holding between the major canons. This isn't to say, however, that literature is a scholar's game. If I read Villon or Dostoyevsky with particular delight, it's because these canonical writers articulate parts of a world whose general structure and meaning is founded in the revelation given in the Bible. And this is to say, for one who believes, that they articulate parts of the world as such. Thus it is that those who are not interested in the real world are not much interested in literature.

This is not an apology for the West. Of course I'm writing of the world as such in a manner that would make cultural anthropologists and the politically correct cringe. That doesn't concern me. There is in fact much offered by the West (such as the cultural anthropologists themselves) that doesn't concern the world as such. I mention current academic intellectual culture, but could choose the West's "literary" culture as well. I could take up the American Thomas Pynchon as an example.

As for the world represented in a Western writer like Pynchon, it is amusing, to be sure. It is full of interesting gags and twists, colorful and subtly modulated; the reader enjoys moving about in this world as one enjoys being taken into a film. I've once or twice suggested you read Pynchon because there's something unique in his work, something entrancing. He is, or at least for a time was, a major American writer. Ultimately, however, I don't find Pynchon's writing to be serious literature. It is not Literature. His is a flimsy world that does not recognize the bases of its being. It is one that is becoming quickly a world of mere surfaces, a dumb show of empirical data--nothingness. This is why many who seriously take up Pynchon as a subject of study will read his books five or six times, read much of the criticism, then suddenly feel a total lack of interest fall upon them. Diversion is not the stuff of life: it is rather something to keep one from taking up the stuff of life. The need for reality eventually makes one tire of such writing. But the readers around us, what do they do when they tire of a writer like Pynchon? Since so many of them are only willing to read contemporary writers, they put down Pynchon only to pick up another contemporary with similar strengths. Such writing as Pynchon's--and the West offers much of it now--shows a soul impoverished, a soul that has been seduced into believing that the dumb shows of science and technology are all there is. Intuition shut down, the soul's hearing shut down, language's revelatory power curtailed, the data of the senses organized by a logical machinery much smaller than language itself. Of course the literature arising from this general situation is comic. It is merely comic. This is to say that it is not even humorous in the stronger manner in which much of the great European literature is humorous. Don Quixote, the story of Jacob and Laban, Prince Myshkin. This latter strong humor, the possibility of this humor in man, is one of the mainstays of my understanding of man's place in the world. The critics that most interest me have all understood this humor to some degree: Bakhtin, for instance, or Benjamin.

* * *
I am a Catholic in most things, but am not certain if I am a Catholic, or rather if I can be accepted as a Catholic. At least many Catholics would probably not recognize me as such. There are things about which I believe the Catholic Church is wrong.

The Catholic Church is most crucially right in its understanding of the Mass. The Mass is the ritual that defines the destiny of man: it is the central sacrament. The Mass is the gathering around which men might eventually gather. Perhaps they will eventually gather around it. This is something the Catholic Church knows better than the other branches of the Church.

* * *
I know you must disagree with these things, and of course I can live with such disagreement.

* * *
We are both concerned with the question of how language reveals presence, but the register of the presence that language most essentially reveals--that is one basis of our difference.

* * *
That you are a secularized Jew makes you even further from me than if you were a believer in Judaism. For regardless of the gripes Jews may have with Christians, I don't have as much gripe with Jews as I do with the secular. The fact that you are a secularized Jew means to me that I have no reason to consider you other than, say, the secularized Christians all over America. This is to say, in part, that I don't know in what you consider your Jewishness resides. I know this is an infinitely discussed question, one that receives much of its immediate importance from the nightmares of the twentieth century.

The Jews as a religion are very close to the truth I follow, and their understanding of the truth of revelation is of great concern to me, much more, say, than the Zen Buddhist understanding of truth. I would never step on a Menorah, though I would certainly step on Diderot's Encyclopedia, or even Voltaire's hand. So you should know where I stand.

* * *
That you and I have managed to communicate. Perhaps it will continue. It is like Origen maintaining a correspondence with Lucretius.

* * *
ON THE EPIGRAPH--

I had read most of Kafka before, but it was only recently that I read The Castle.

Some readers find in Kafka an apparent restatement of the universe projected by the Kabbalists. Benjamin is the great exponent of this reading. Benjamin's Kafka wrote allegories of a kind of Kabbalist faith or hope. Other critics disagree by leaning on the fact that Kafka was not a "religious writer," that he was an atheist, that he was not a scholar of Kabbalism, etc. I am one of those who think that Kafka needn't have been a "religious writer" or a Kabbalist to write the kind of allegories he wrote. These allegories are Kabbalist allegories, if you will. Kafka was a Prague Jew, after all.

The dichotomy set up between a "religious writer" and a "secular writer": what does it amount to unless we are considering precisely weak writers or journalists or, again, cultural anthropologists?

The Castle seems to me, after this first reading, a kind of allegorical romance. K.'s quest is nearly fruitless--that is apparently the case--and yet K.'s life in the shadow of the Castle seems more a life than that, say, of Kafka's father in the shadow of a cash register.

Kafka's K. shows a certain daring in his quest. He is not struck with the same kind of unreasonable awe that strikes the people of the village. Threatening or not, he would be there where the Castle's power is manifested. He would know its workings and sees such knowledge as the only thing worth struggling for. Any other activity--cobbling, tanning, running an inn--is a species of biding time that concerns him not.

Does Kafka, despite his atheism, make it into what I have called the Secondary Canon? Evidently so.

Was Chretien de Troyes a "religious writer"?

E.

Clay: Appendix 5: Rimbaud and Exorcism

I.

Rimbaud's oeuvre is a pack of lies.

Rimbaud was too busy barking and howling to listen.

What kind of poet is this anyway?

An admirable teen rebellion. Beautiful blue-eyed Demiurgette. Pint-sized Promethiite.

We scribes don't give a damn for his virtuosity, his pyrotechnics.

A poet of the visual spectrum. All in all a rather more charming child of the Enlightenment than most. Toy trains, the Corpus Hermeticum, romantic oriental fetishes, obsessive inventiveness, the "new".

His color is nasty blue--the same blue as on our flags, but more fluorescent. Blue approaching the shiny blue of certain species of hornet.

Baudelaire's colors are faded gold leaf, black, purple, blood red, black, Avignon ochre, ash, ivory or ebony flesh, black, etc.

Baudelaire: the master of Latinity in our two centuries.


III. Mystique...

A clear night sky. After so much hashish--this time!--how the stars flatten out and press down upon me!

Tiring of the sky, he lies on his side near the campfire, gazing into it. --[--We know he doesn't really understand mysticism. --He has perhaps read of the Zoroastrians? --Who doesn't know of these hashishin microcosms?]--

After so much hashish--this time!--the crumbling logs heaped in the fire become for him a landscape in flames.

Off the top of the hill formed by the logs in flames, bits of ash rise with the heat; then, whirling, descend. They are tiny angels spinning in grey-white woolen robes.

On the left, a darkened log crackles and smokes. Ruts have broken into its surface: the charred remains and sounds of a battle.

On the right, embers glow in white and mystic heat: Oriental splendor! The wisdom of ages!

The fire hisses and cracks, and as the stoned youth turns to gaze upward, eyes stinging from the heat and the drug, he sees brown and black curdles of smoke rising away and rolling. --Are they the lost time of men? --Are they that which is burned away? --Are they the remains of all the struggles and nights?

The starry sky behind the campfire, the vague flicker of light against the trees, stretch down like a canvas or a basket, the whole scene collapsing into the broken perspective of hashish and medieval murals, turbulent foreground pushed up against flat background.

Down at the very bottom--wrapped round the hottest embers like a mantle of purest candy--the soft glow of blue flames: the liminal color.

Once--when I may have dared to taste!


[. . .] XI.
I understand Rimbaud. I look into him as into a mirror. I understand his shame. It is all true, all of it. It is a shame so absolute. It is the encounter. All of Europe. It is much deeper and harder than . . . It is a wretchedness in the very Shaman's Dance of Europe, a wretchedness never cleansed or appeased, for which no sacrifice . . .


[XII.
Case in point.]

Clay: Appendix 8: The Sacramentality of Writing

God formed man of the clay of the ground and then breathed into him the breath of life. The clay of the ground as material and the breathing in of the breath of life: these have been the focus of most concern in our literature and speculation. And the question of what the breath of life may be has been recurrent. But the question of the forming, the verb forming, hasn't raised our attention in the right way. And yet everyone knows--the Sumerians and Babylonians knew--that the pressing of marks into the clay was the crucial part of this forming. It was the pressing of marks, the right marks, that gave the clay the dignity needed for its reception of the breath of life.

The clay as result of this writing is clay that may receive the breath of life if only this breath be given it.

It is in this sense originally that writing is a sacrament.

Clay: Appendix 9: Inédit

Adam was a short beast, with a thin line of hair down his back, like a mane. Eve had a thin line of hair down her back; it was like a mane.

In those days, when you came into town, a stranger, you could always recognize Adam and Eve, because they were the only ones without navels.

The first writing was by Cain, who started by drawing pictures on his parents' bellies. Their bellies were smooth, and had no navels. Cain would ask them to lie back by the fire, and close their eyes, and he would draw. When he was done, they would open their eyes and look at what he had drawn.

Once Cain drew an unheard of thing. It was such a thing, that when God saw it, he let it stay on Eve's belly as punishment. God punished Eve for the evil sport she had fallen into. It could not be washed away, but stayed on Eve's belly. For they had fallen into an evil sport.

Jesus and the Ebionites: Animal Rights in the Early Church

Keith Akers: The Lost Religion of Jesus, Lantern Books, 256 pp.

In each of the four Gospels we read of Jesus entering the Temple and overturning the tables of the money changers. In John's account, it is added that he drove out the sheep and cattle. Mark and Matthew say he overturned the benches of those selling doves. Christian tradition suggests Jesus was reacting to the fact of the money changers and others having made a business of the Temple, that the spirit of prayer and worship had taken second place to a desire for profit. But is it possible Jesus' action was an attack on sacrifice as such? That the problem was not the profit being gained from selling sacrificial animals, but the whole machinery of sacrifice per se? Is it possible Jesus taught, as the Ebionites later did, that animal sacrifice was a corruption of Mosaic law and therefore must be ended?

In The Lost Religion of Jesus, Keith Akers seeks to demonstrate that ancient Jewish Christians such as the Ebionites were closer in doctrine to Jesus than the largely gentile Christianity that developed under the influence of Paul. Akers musters a barrage of hard-hitting arguments to this end. If he's right, Jesus considered himself a prophet whose calling it was to bring Israel back to God's true law, a law still present in the scriptures but burdened down and obscured by false additions made over the centuries by scribes. In this version of Christianity, Jesus and his followers would have stressed not only voluntary poverty and pacifism, both of which we find in the New Testament accounts, but also opposition to the Temple elite and the practice of animal sacrifice. Attendant on this opposition to sacrifice, Jesus and the apostles would also have been vegetarian.

To most modern Christians the argument that Jesus and the apostles were strict vegetarians sounds somewhat tendentious or even silly. But in fact it is not. Some of the earliest writings refer to central Christian figures as vegetarians, not least of which James the Just, brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church. As Akers writes:

[A] list of those described as vegetarians reads very much like a Who's Who in the early church: Peter (Recognitions 7.6, Homilies 12.6), James (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23), Matthew (Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor 2.1), and all the apostles (Eusebius, Proof of the Gospel 3.5). (132)

Akers adds to this an impressive list of church fathers who also practiced vegetarianism, including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil, Gregory of Naziance, John Chrysostom, Jerome and Tertullian. There seems little doubt that many in the early church believed a holy life meant abstention from meat. But why? And why didn't later Christianity maintain even a trace of this early practice?

Paul famously argued that no food is unclean of itself. Akers interestingly points out that the apostle was not only arguing against believers who insisted on a kosher diet. Rather, it seems, he was also arguing against a sizable contingent of Christian vegetarians. Paul writes: "Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables." (Rom. 14:1-2) Obviously the "weak men" referred to here are not simply following a kosher diet, they are vegetarians. Given that that the Epistle to the Romans was most likely written in the 50s of the first century, this line proves the existence of vegetarians among the very earliest Christians. If Akers is right, it is just this contingent that most closely followed the teachings of Jesus.

Akers insists that ancient Jewish Christianity is most characteristically represented by the sect that called itself the "Ebionites" (Hebrew "the poor ones") and argues that this sect, based on what we can learn of them from remaining sources, was strictly vegetarian.

Akers' starting position, namely that we are likely to find a more accurate picture of Jesus in the teachings of the Jerusalem church and the Ebionites than in Paul, is eminently reasonable on the surface. Jesus, after all, was a Jew among Jews, and Peter and James knew him during his lifetime, whereas Paul did not. What's more, the churches founded by Paul consisted largely of gentile believers, while the Jewish churches, represented by the Ebionites, would have had a direct cultural and religious link back to the original apostles and Jesus. Akers develops his argument on a number of fronts: he surveys the often critical portrayal of animal sacrifice in the prophets, considers likely differences between Jerusalem and Galilee as regards ritual observance, and offers close readings of New Testament texts. He even, in a later chapter, discusses the portrayal of Jesus in Muslim sources, and speculates, not unreasonably, on what may be Ebionite echoes in Islam. On the whole he shows an impressive ability as historical sleuth, particularly apt at noting connections between hints in the New Testament and what can be gleaned from heresiologists like Epiphanius. But there are problems.

Akers' first problem concerns how much we can know about the Jerusalem church or the Ebionites. Though several verses in the New Testament might be construed as arguments for the existence of vegetarianism, among them Paul's line quoted above, there's certainly no smoking gun as regards Jesus' own dietary practice. The Gospels, after all, show him eating fish and taking part in the Passover meal, while different parables refer unproblematically to eating meat or fishing. Somewhat conveniently, Akers neglects the fact that Peter and others of the first apostles were fishermen, from families of fishermen. Though he offers arguments that put the Gospel references to meat eating in question, and his arguments are not bad, still the weight of references to meat eating mean the case cannot finally be substantiated. Akers' strongest suit is in his general assertion that history is written by the winners and that, obviously, the Pauline camp won.

What can we know of the Ebionites? The most complete portrait we have comes from the 4th century work of the heresiologist Epiphanius. As usual with the heresiologists, there are good reasons to doubt the accuracy of what he tells us, or, in this case, the authenticity of the "Ebionites" Epiphanius got his information from (cf. the article by P. Luomanen, "Ebionites and Nazarenes," in Matt Jackson-McCabe ed. Jewish Christianity Reconsidered).

Nonetheless, if we accept Akers' general portrait of the Ebionites, and if the group, as he suggests, represented the purest doctrinal and practical continuation of Jesus' work, this would mean that:

1) Jesus was in favor of adherence to Mosaic law, but believed that much in the written law, being the work of mere scribes, was invalid;
2) Jesus preached voluntary poverty;
3) Jesus was a strict pacifist; followers were not to take part in military action of any kind;
4) Jesus was critical of the Temple and vehemently against animal sacrifice;
5) Jesus was a vegetarian.

According to Akers, the crucial sticking point, the element that meant the two paths, Ebionite and orthodox, could not converge, was the last one: the insistence on vegetarianism. Jewish and Gentile Christians may have been able to overcome their different assessments of the validity of the law, but the Jewish Christians' insistence on refraining from "blood" of any kind--i.e., in Akers' understanding, the killing or consuming of any creature--meant the two groups could not finally tolerate each other. It seems to me that a strict adherence to Mosaic law would have been a more serious sticking point vis-a-vis Pauline Christianity than vegetarianism.

Did Ebionite teachings really go back to Jesus and the apostles? Further, were the "Ebionites" as we see them in the heresiological record really representative of Jewish Christianity? It's hard to be certain. The earliest mention of the Ebionites comes from the second century (Irenaeus) and the most complete descriptio of them comes from the fourth (Epiphanius). Neither of these is a Jewish source. What's more, against these second and fourth-century texts, the letters of Paul and the Gospels were all written in the first century. Had Jewish Christianity really been as Akers describes it, one suspects it would have left a more distinct mark on the New Testament, regardless of gentile redactions. Though Akers makes much of the above-quoted verse from Paul and James' decision at the Jerusalem Council, do these really support his thesis of an unbroken tradition of vegetarianism going back to Jesus?

In fact there are places where Akers' book is hampered by heavy-handedness, where an obvious tendentiousness undermines the good work he does elsewhere. This almost always occurs in regards to the major axe he grinds--namely the vegetarian argument. The clearest instance of such heavy-handedness is in Akers' attempts to explain James' verdict at the Council of Jerusalem.

The story of the Council is related in Acts, how Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to discuss the problem of circumcision with the leaders of the Jerusalem church. At issue was the question of whether or not pagan Christians needed to be circumcised and, by implication, to what degree they needed to follow Mosaic law. After some discussion James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, gave his verdict: pagan converts need not be circumcised, but must follow the law on at least four points. They must

. . . abstain from the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood. (Acts 15:20)

According to Akers, this verse is somewhat mysterious. Unchastity is clear enough, he says, as is "pollutions of idols"--the latter obviously being a prohibition against eating food sacrificed to idols. But the reference to "blood" Akers finds less than clear. In his understanding, it is most likely a prohibition against killing either animals or humans: a prohibition against bloodshed, and, implicitly, in terms of diet, against eating meat. But what of "strangled"? Here Akers is quite ingenious. Since, as he claims, animals weren't strangled in the ancient world, it might very well be a prohibition against eating fish, as fish normally died by "strangulation"--i.e., once out of the water they are unable to breathe! This, I believe, is too ingenious by half. When one looks at the final results of Akers' reading, he has managed to make three of James' four injunctions into arguments for vegetarianism, almost as if James were saying that pagan converts needed to abstain from:

1) unchastity,
2) meat sacrificed to idols,
3) the meat of fish, and
4) meat

It's hard to believe the leader of the Jerusalem church would find it useful to be so redundant.

James' verdict is not nearly as mysterious as Akers implies. The prohibition against "blood" is clear in the context of Judaism. Weneed only turn to various passages in Leviticus, or to the following in Deuteronomy:

When the LORD your God has enlarged your territory as he promised you, and you crave meat and say, "I would like some meat," then you may eat as much of it as you want. If the place where the LORD your God chooses to put his Name is too far away from you, you may slaughter animals from the herds and flocks the LORD has given you, as I have commanded you, and in your own towns you may eat as much of them as you want. Eat them as you would gazelle or deer. Both the ceremonially unclean and the clean may eat. But be sure you do not eat the blood, because the blood is the life, and you must not eat the life with the meat. You must not eat the blood; pour it out on the ground like water. Do not eat it, so that it may go well with you and your children after you, because you will be doing what is right in the eyes of the LORD.(12:20-25)

Blood was considered the life principle of the animal, and as such belonged to God. It was not on any account to be eaten. This did not, however, mean animals could not be slaughtered for their meat. James' prohibition against eating things "strangled" also relates directly to the need to avoid consuming blood: if an animal is strangled the blood remains in the flesh. James' prohibitions are not, then, arguments for vegetarianism or animal rights.

Akers does have some interesting things to say on the prophets' frequent condemnation of animal sacrifice, and indeed one can find texts critical of the practice in Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah and Hosea. This suggests a longstanding debate between the priesthood, which naturally stressed the importance of its centralized cult, and the prophets, who cried out for the good works of justice and mercy and railed against the high living of the elites (priesthood and aristocracy) centered around the Temple. But Akers' suggestion that these prophetic denunciations stem from of a sense of animal rights is harder to substantiate. Were the prophets advocating strict vegetarianism? It doesn't seem likely.

The second bit of tendentiousness in Akers' book comes in the writer's depiction of Paul. For instance in chapter 10 we read:

Paul makes a number of disturbing statements often quoted to justify the repression of women and slaves that contrast with the social egalitarianism evident in the words ascribed to and behavior of Jesus. Women should keep silent in church, should keep their heads covered, and obey their husbands: "wives, be subject to your husbands," says Paul, and follows this up with "slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters". . . . (141)

Akers knows very well that most such statements (as is the case with the two direct quotes here) come from letters that are contested, which is to say that many scholars believe the words in question don't come from Paul at all. It is mere mudslinging to use things written in Paul's name to make the apostle look bad. Pseudo-Paul is not Paul: the apostle's authentic letters show an extraordinary respect for women, as Jesus also did, if the Gospel accounts are to be believed.

Akers' thesis has two parts: that Jewish Christianity was the true bearer of Jesus' teachings and that Jewish Christianity was uniformly vegetarian. To support the latter assertion he depends mainly on texts from the heresiologists, supplemented by (not always convincing) readings of biblical texts and by passages in the Clementine writings (the Homilies and Recognitions). His argument also gets substantial help from the fact that many of the early church leaders were depicted by ancient writers as vegetarians. If one sets aside the New Testament then--Akers only finds a single verse in Paul to prove vegetarianism existed in apostolic times--the portrait one gets is of an impressive amount of evidence for the importance of vegetarianism in the early church, especially in Jewish Christianity. But there are omissions in Akers' pool of evidence, omissions that don't make sense if he's really trying to piece together a profile of Jewish Christianity. What of the Epistle of James? What of the Didache?

Though probably not written by James himself, many scholars believe the Epistle of James is a product of the community of James and as such consider it an important witness to Jewish Christianity in the New Testament. Why doesn't Akers even mention the book? Is is perhaps because there is nothing it in related to Akers' dietary concerns?

As for the Didache, it is the only surviving complete work of Jewish Christianity outside the New Testament. It is dated quite early, around the end of the first century, and some scholars believe it was composed in the same community that composed Matthew, the most Jewish of the four Gospels. For Akers, the Didache should be essential evidence. Why doesn't it get so much as a footnote in his book? Again, one suspects it might be because the text doesn't offer ammunition for Akers' vegetarian argument. In the Didache's sixth chapter one finds the following:

See that no one causes you to err from this way of the Teaching, since apart from God it teaches you. For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able to do this, do what you are able. And concerning food, bear what you are able; but against that which is sacrificed to idols be exceedingly careful; for it is the service of dead gods.

As this passage may very well refer to vegetarianism, one might expect Akers to mention it somewhere in his book. But note: the passage also seems to be exhorting the believer to "do as well as you can" with dietary holiness--i.e., try to abstain from such and such food, but if you cannot, so be it. Is such flexibility regarding diet anathema to Akers, who has staked his case on the Jewish Christian movement's strict vegetarianism? Why is the Didache left out of Akers' consideration of the Jewish Christian record?

These are some of the problems I find in Akers' arguments. But I don't want to give the impression his book is not worth reading. Though flawed, The Lost Religion of Jesus is an accessible and wide-ranging treatment of the issues, biblical and otherwise, that surround the question of Ebionite Christianity and the role vegetarianism may have had in the early church. Akers is an able historical sleuth; though not a professional scholar, he's probably made some original contributions to the ongoing debates about Jewish Christianity. His arguments in the last chapter for vegetarianism are, in my view, on a solid ethical footing. That Jesus and the first apostles were strict vegetarians--of this I'm not persuaded, though I suppose it is at least a possibility. In any case, one could certainly be a Christian and believe the things Akers stresses as central. There are Christians who reject the the doctrine of the Trinity and others who reject Paul's theology. As I've written elsewhere, I believe the minimum credo defining whether one is a Christian should be something like: "Jesus is God's Messiah." In the present case, it would be possible to reverence Jesus and the Gospel depictions of him while believing, like Akers, that the Gospels as we know them have had a major theme edited out: Jesus' vegetarianism and opposition to animal sacrifice. I myself, however, remain unconvinced.

The letters of Paul and the Gospels are imperfect documents, but I believe they were composed in large measure under the real influence of the Holy Spirit. Paul had visions of and discourse with the risen Christ, and Paul's theology, though again imperfect, is based on the impact of his experiences. For me the New Testament is not, then, the attempt of charlatans to steal Christianity from the Jews, but instead the written record of a real outpouring of the Spirit, an outpouring meant to bring the Good News of the Messiah to the world. This is not a repudiation of Judaism, but a fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham: that all nations of the earth would be blessed through his seed, i.e., through the Jews (cf. Genesis 12 and 22). The degree to which Paul thought in Jewish terms has been documented in recent decades by scholars in the New Perspective on Paul movement. Akers could strengthen his appreciation for the depth (and the deep Jewishness) of Paul's thought by considering some of this work.

Check The Lost Religion of Jesus at Amazon.com

* * *Added August 7, 2009: Keith Akers offers a detailed online response to some my comments under the title "The Gorilla in Early Christianity." I agree with him that all of us, when approaching ancient texts, are gorilla-blind on a number of levels, meaning that we always underestimate the challenge of interpretation. In his post he expands on the arguments in his book. I definitely think his case is more strongly made. Am I convinced? I would say there's much that's persuasive, but that, again, there is a specificity and tradition related to the prohibition against "blood" that makes it hard to agree that Akers' interpretation is right. There is also the fact that this prohibition against blood is recorded in the Talmud as part of the Noahide laws, i.e., those laws Jews traditionally said Gentiles must follow in order to be considered righteous (at least as far as any Gentile could be considered such). Arguing for Akers' interpretation however are Jesu,s' statements in Matthew that his followers must exceed the righteousness of the tradition: "You have heard that it was said . . ., but I tell you . . . ."

http://compassionatespirit.com/Gorilla-in-early-christianity.htm

Many thanks to Keith for his comments.