A Fish Story in the Talpiot Tomb

Another year, another strange suggestion from Simcha Jacobovici and James Tabor about tombs and ossuaries in Jerusalem.

Few people, or at least few scholars, looking at the images supplied have been impressed by the idea that the etched figure on a newly-published ossuary is the "great fish" of the story of Jonah. From that unlikely suggestion and some dubious interpretation of fragmentary inscriptions, Jacobovici and Tabor have sought to draw further speculative links with the early Christian movement, claiming even that this would be the first Christian art and a symbol of the resurrection.

If it's not a fish then what is it? The counter-suggestions of the first few days after the announcement tended to emphasize architectural motifs, such as a nephesh or grave monument; thus both Steve Fine and, initially, Bob Cargill. 

Those have now been supplemented, or just corrected, by comparison with other ossuaries that have cups or vases on them. This has been made easier by Jacobovici and Tabor's team offering a museum replica that makes the orientation of the image on the box much easier to see (the initial photos were taken with a robot camera).

The suggestion comes from Antonio Lombatti, whose blog shows a number of ossuaries that have vases or cups, some of which are at least generally comparable in shape. Cargill himself has drawn attention to this and now defers to it as a better suggestion than his initial thoughts about tomb markers. 

Lombatti and Cargill refer to these as "amphoras" but I am not sure this is the best description. The foot of the vessel (assuming it is that, and I do think it is) has very narrow shape often associated with an amphora, but the rest of the shape - the bulbous lower part with low-set handles, and a bell widening at the top - is much more reminiscent of a krater, the type of large vase used to mix wine at banquets. These also often had knob-like feet, as in this example:

For that matter the other vases shown in Lombatti's post have large looped handles, and are of the type often referred to as kantharoi, which are also drinking vessels, whereas amphoras were typically for storage. The small boss on the bottom of this vase is not so unlike those of the other kantharoi that Lombatti shows.

Vases of various shapes were used as grave goods in Greco-Roman settings - many of the vases now found in museums came from such sources. But at the risk of over-reading the image on the ossuary, it is the type of vase used at banquets, that has overtones of eternal festivity and bliss, as funerary art often did. Maybe recognition of the krater will help put this to rest as well.

Update: A commenter has asked about the relevance of the form to 1st century Palestine. My slightly oblique answer has been to replace the picture I originally linked to a 5th century BCE krater to a 4th century CE mosaic from Antioch, depicting one from much later; the point is that these forms were ubiquitous and persistent both in fact and in art. 

Greeks Bearing (Christmas) Gifts

The virginal conception of Jesus celebrated at this time of year is an obvious problem for sceptics; but it is also a challenge to the faithful. Very orthodox Christian theologians have struggled with the tension between stories that suggest, prima facie, that Jesus has a human mother but God for a father, and on the other hand the creedal belief that Jesus is both truly divine and truly, fully, human.

Knowledge of the biology of reproduction unavailable to the ancients underlines this problem, although anyone who tries to correlate chromosomes and Christology is going to bend biblical texts into shapes for which they were never intended. In fact ancient science might make this worse, since for many the primary or seminal characteristics of an embryo came from the male side, and the female was incubator rather than coequal contributor.

Little wonder that then or now, views of Jesus as a divine being only masquerading as a human keep recurring, or that theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer have questioned the value of the virgin birth stories while wishing to affirm the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation.

In a recent reflection the Rt Revd Professor N. T. Wright offers another version of this surprising struggle between Christian faith and virgin birth. Observing that "Jesus' birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants" and that the infancy narratives "have no impact on my reconstruction of Jesus' public agendas and his mind-set as he went to the cross," Wright nonetheless ventures into the quagmire, and gets stuck on still another problem.

For Wright the stories of Jesus' birth, like the Gospels generally, are profoundly Jewish documents. So far so good. But Wright states "there is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did". On the other hand "the only conceivable parallels [to the infancy narratives] are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modelled on them". He is referring of course to stories of Olympian gods conceiving children with mortals, often noted as as real but awkward parallels to the story of Jesus.

So the problem for Wright is a different one; not the joining of the divine and human, but the combination of Jewish and "pagan".

With this assumption in mind, Wright offers a speculative, honest, and for him uncomfortable "tradition history", that surrenders not the shape but the ultimate origin of the stories of Jesus' birth to a virgin mother to the "pagan" side of this dichotomy as it accounts for the development of the narratives:

a double move took place: from an early, very Jewish, high Christology, to a sudden paganization, and back to a very Jewish storytelling again.

Wright would probably admit that "pagan" is an unsatisfactory shorthand - but it is actually a much later and pejorative term, and serves ill to describe Greek and Roman or other Near Eastern religious belief and practice. But this is not merely a matter of rhetorical imprecision for the sake of clarity; by offering this construct of "paganism" as a sort of pole opposed to all things Jewish, Wright misrepresents the relationship between Jewish and (other) Greco-Roman culture and thought.

The Greco-Roman world should not be understood as a threatening sea lapping at the shores of a Jewish island, with Jesus and his people "fiercely" sandbagging their religious life against a rising "pagan" tide. Jews were very much a part of that diverse world, if a distinct people and culture within it, like many others. The undoubted emphasis on issues of purity and identity in ancient Jewish belief and practice implies a need to negotiate how to exist in that world, as one people among many peoples.

In fact the signs of "pagan" influence are many in ancient Judaism, and hence also in earliest Christianity. One example may suffice: the most widely-read version of the Jewish scriptures in Jesus' time was in Greek. The Septuagint (LXX), translated three hundred years or so before Jesus' time, was known to, and often quoted by, the "fiercely Jewish" NT authors including Matthew and Luke, whose infancy narratives are at issue here. The assumptions made by all sorts of scholars and other readers that the Hebrew text (which in the form underlying modern Bible translations was established later than LXX, although obviously LXX was based on the earlier Hebrew) is somehow more authoritative and canonical for Christians than LXX are very weak, if the attitudes of ancient Jews and Christians alike (including the citation of LXX in the NT) are anything to go by.

While the very fact of a Greek Bible already queers the picture of Jews maintaining a hermetically-sealed thought-world, a famous text from the Septuagint also suggests an alternative catalyst for the development of the infancy narratives.

The Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14 is:

לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם אֹ֑ות הִנֵּ֣ה הָעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את שְׁמֹ֖ו עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל

 "Therefore my Lord will give you a sign: behold the young woman will be pregnant and give birth to a son and call him Immanu-El".

LXX has:

διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον· ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ

"Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold a virgin will be pregnant and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel".

The "change" (or at least the drift) in meaning that distinguishes the two is the Greek term for a young girl, parthenos, which more directly implies virginity. The translator was probably trying to be literal, but translation is always interpretation, because languages are not constructed of equal elements. In any case, many readers of Isaiah around Jesus' time read the LXX and took its version as gospel.

N. T. Wright acknowledges this issue in passing, but bats it aside: "No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming that Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this?"

It is actually pretty obvious why the Gospel authors "invented" or otherwise used it - for just the same reasons they used the other biblical texts they interpret as Christological, to make sense of Jesus' life and identity. But if the question is "why suggest a virgin birth" then the answer is even more obvious - Isaiah said so.

Wright however persists with his uncomfortable preference for seeing the origins of the virginal conception as more closely linked to the sex lives of "pagan" gods. We cannot explore properly here whether the "pagan" myths of divine parentage really are such strong parallels to the infancy stories. The late Raymond Brown, admittedly seeking a path to belief in the virgin birth and orthodoxy, pointed tellingly to the thinness of the parallels, under scrutiny (Birth of the Messiah, 522ff). And when the issue was first raised explicitly in ancient Christianity - Tertullian, Apol 21.14 is the earliest case I know - it was in a fairly relaxed way, as though the differences were far clearer than the similarities. There is no need to exclude their influence, but this is not really so self-evident as a motive or model.

It seems Wright would rather deal with the passing discomfort of a "pagan" mythic element which intrudes into tradition history, but is then tamed by a further Jewish-Christian interpretation (see his summary above), than be stuck with the notion that the Greco-Jewish LXX, whose existence and authority undermine the whole Jewish/pagan dichotomy, was actually fundamental to how early Christians (including the most "fiercely Jewish" of them) saw Jesus and his significance. Wright is therefore trying to defend not a particular view of scripture or of the virgin birth, but a view of Jewish and "pagan" identity - a view which stems from the stark dichotomies of the apocalyptic strand of ancient Jewish and Christian literature, but which is ill-equipped to interpret that literature or the history from which it stemmed.

An alternative "tradition history" would share much of Wright's and other scholars' assumptions. Belief in Jesus' divinity begins not with stories of his birth, but with his life and teaching and the events of his Passion - it then leads to reflection both on scripture and his origins, where a "Greek-speaking Isaiah" offers the possibility of a virginal conception, whose details are then elaborated so as to provide an appropriate prologue for the Gospels.

The virgin birth points not just to the presence of divinity and humanity in Christian thought about Jesus, but also, as Wright acknowledges, to the presence of different cultural elements in early Christian literature. For him however the presence of "pagan" elements is more or less "docetic", to borrow a term from later Christological thought - it is about the ephemeral rather than the substantial elements of understanding Jesus. Perhaps, though, the Greek element is actually thoroughly and consistently incarnated too. After all, the theological high point of reflection on the incarnation is the incontestably Greek, and Jewish, and Christian proclamation:  Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος - "In the beginning was the Word".

Deciphering an Ancient Meal: Food and Identity in Early Eucharistic Practice

It can be tempting to think that Christians did not have distinctive culinary habits, or were distinguished from Jews precisely by a lack of particular concerns or rules.

There are at least two reasons for viewing such assumptions critically. One is that literary evidence makes clear a variety of preferences and avoidances among the general diversity of early Christian eating practices - even if some NT texts seem to prescribe omnivorism, it obviously wasn't that simple in reality.

The other is that nobody eats everything all the time. Or to attempt a more sophisticated rendering of the same point, note Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s observation that “where there is culture there is asceticism.” Cultures and communities do make choices about what to eat and not to eat, as well as when, where and with whom, that both reflect and create identity.

There are different scholarly understandings about the relationship between specific ritual actions, specific sacral foods and the whole of ancient Christian banquets in which these were initially set. Many have assumed there were always two distinct sorts of Christian meal ritual, a token or sacramental meal typically referred to as Eucharist, and a substantial communal meal known as an Agape. My own position, along with an increasing number of other scholars, is that attempts at distinguishing a sacramental ritual from a substantial meal at the earliest point fail because of mistaken assumptions, drawn not from the ancient texts but from later understandings of the Eucharist itself. There is no discernible difference between the communal banquets of early Christian communities and the rituals which came to be known as the Eucharist, at least in the first century or so, and the emergence of the sacramental liturgy as a distinct event is somewhat later than traditionally assumed.

Each of these views about Eucharistic development, traditional and revisionist, has at least an implied complementary position about the role food and drink themselves play in the commensal formation of identity. Accompanying the traditional view is the assumption that ancient Christians were quite unconstrained in, and hence undefined by, issues of dietary preference or avoidance in their general eating, but highly constrained in and defined by the elements of their token sacred meal, always taken to be bread and wine.

Where however the Eucharist is taken actually to be the banquet and vice versa, or at least where their relationship is seen to be organic rather than merely being joined together, then these two spheres of culinary signification, sacramental/ritual and communal/commensal are superimposed or identified, and the choice of right foods and avoidance of wrong ones is relevant both to a communal supper and/or a sacramental ritual.

Yet such an approach, considering these aspects together more than separately, may be useful even where a more traditional account of Eucharistic origins is assumed. As Mary Douglas put it in her famous study focusing on the meals of the 20th century English bourgeoisie, “the smallest, meanest meal metonymically figures the structure of the grandest, and each unit of the grand meal figures again the whole meal—or the meanest meal”.

In the case of Christian Eucharistic meals, even the most stylized medieval Mass continues to replicate the fundamental structure of the Greco-Roman symposium in its sequence of bread and cup, and to reflect ancient Mediterranean staple diet in its focus on bread and wine. So from either perspective, in Christian Eucharistic meals just as in the Greco-Roman dining tradition generally, the morphology of the meal is closely bound up with its food and drink via the expected sequence of deipnon (solid food with prominence of bread) and symposion or drinking session focused on wine. This sequence of δ + σ is the first of a number of expressions that could be used express the structural relations of food and drinks in the ancient meal but which also imply certain things about foods themselves….

[An extract from a paper given at the SBL Annual Meeting in the "Meals in the Greco-Roman World" Group, San Francisco, Nov 20 2011. This is part of a longer study applying some of Mary Douglas' ideas about meals to the ancient meal tradition and Christian eucharistic meals in particular, part of a new book project.
For further reading:

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Andrew B. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101 (1972): 61-81.]