Tag: jane-schaberg

Jane Schaberg and the empty tomb

I recently finished re-reading The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene by the late Dr. Jane Schaberg. Jane was my Biblical Studies professor when I was an undergraduate majoring in Religious Studies back in the 1980s. Although she encouraged me to pursue graduate work in Biblical Studies, I went in a different direction. We became friends and had sporadic contact over the years.

She published The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene in 2002, and I first came across it about 2005, twenty years after receiving my bachelor’s degree. This was during a period when I was “deconstructing” my Roman Catholic religious beliefs for the second time. The first time was in my teenage years when I simply discarded it as of no interest. I returned to the faith in my mid-twenties, only to deconstruct more deliberately in my late forties.

At the time I had left my academic career in political science and belatedly began to pursue a Religious Studies degree at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA, with courses and teachers from a variety of religious orientations. I wanted to take a closer look at Christian and Buddhist religious traditions to determine what each of them meant to me at that turning point in my life.

I did a lot of reading on my own, utilizing the GTU library, and it was then that I read Jane’s two major books. It was fascinating to read her work for the first time and helpful in sorting through some of my thinking about religious texts and Catholic dogmas.

I reread her book this year, another twenty years later (!), because Mary Magdalene is a key figure in the gospel reports of the death and burial of Jesus and the discovery of his empty tomb. I felt like I was meeting Jane on an intellectual and personal level in a way I hadn’t before. It was like talking over a subject of mutual interest with an old friend.

Her unexpected gift to me was in understanding how much the figure of the “Son of Man” in Ch. 7 of the book of the prophet Daniel influenced the gospel attributed to Mark. I had to revise my page on the empty tomb once again to incorporate this insight. The empty tomb had the elements of an apocalyptic text similar to those in Daniel, with an emotionally troubled protagonist seeing something incredible, having it interpreted by an angelic figure, and then keeping quiet about it due to fear.

So I want to thank Jane for this insight, for her encouragement at different points of my life, and for her teaching me some of the basics of critical Bible study long ago. Although she died in 2012, I have encountered her again and learned from her. I don’t know whether her grave is empty or not, but I do know she is still with me on my journey.

Elaine Pagels’ new book; plus another argument vs. “mythicism”

Over the last couple of days I tore through Elaine Pagels’ new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Pagels is well known for her work on early Christianity and especially her work on the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi. The new book is meant as a culmination of her reflections about Jesus, both as a scholar and as a human being long interested in spirituality and religion. I always enjoy reading about someone else’s spiritual journey and how it may have points of intersection with mine. Miracles and Wonder is an easy read, aimed more at the general public than at scholars.

Nothing in the book changed my mind about Jesus as an historical figure, although there was some information I wasn’t aware of. I will have to go through it again more carefully and take note of points of special interest. I did notice she still talks about the Christian “communities” that the writers of the gospels were supposedly addressing, without mentioning new research such as that of Robyn Faith Walsh showing how the authors more likely were addressing a literate audience curious about Christians. Walsh did not appear in her bibliography.

I was also surprised to see her name check the late Jane Schaberg, a former professor of mine at the University of Detroit when I was an undergrad majoring in Religious Studies. Pagels relates how she and other scholars of early Christianity ignored Schaberg’s 1987 book The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, because they assumed the book was a “hostile polemic,” but that she regrets now that hasty assumption. I read the book about twenty years ago, during an earlier phase of my periodic immersion in questions on the historical Jesus, and found it, as I expected, to be a work of careful scholarship. I know from Schaberg, who I became friends with, that she received hate mail and death threats from people on account of that book.

So I recommend Pagels’ book as worth reading as a kind of combined spiritual autobiography and summary of widespread views among scholars about Jesus from an historical perspective. It doesn’t break any new ground or go very deeply into any topic, but is of course well informed on them.

On a different topic, I added another point to my list of reasons for rejecting mythicism and holding that Jesus was a real person. This is that Paul refers to Jesus as “born of a woman” and as a Jewish man “according to the flesh.” He certainly sounds like he thinks Jesus was a human being. I also rearranged the order of my several reasons to put what are probably the stronger arguments first.

Alan