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The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, by Thomas L. Thompson
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From a prominent scholar, a provocative argument that the Biblical characters of Jesus and David should be viewed not as historical figures, but as embodiments of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Near Eastern traditions. Since the eighteenth century, scholars and historians studying the texts of the Bible have attempted to distill historical facts and biography from the mythology and miracles described there. That trend continues into the present day, as scholars such as those of the "Jesus Seminar" dissect the Gospels and other early Christian writings to separate the "Jesus of history" from the "Christ of faith." But with The Messiah Myth, noted Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson argues that the quest for the historical Jesus is beside the point, since the Jesus of the Gospels never existed. Like King David before him, says Thompson, the Jesus of the Bible is an amalgamation of themes from Near Eastern mythology and traditions of kingship and divinity. The theme of a messiah-a divinely appointed king who restores the world to perfection-is typical of Egyptian and Babylonian royal ideology dating back to the Bronze Age. In Thompson's view, the contemporary audience for whom the Old and New Testament were written would naturally have interpreted David and Jesus not as historical figures, but as metaphors embodying long-established messianic traditions. Challenging widely held assumptions about the sources of the Bible and the quest for the historical Jesus, The Messiah Myth is sure to spark interest and heated debate.
- Sales Rank: #1419649 in Books
- Published on: 2005-12-31
- Released on: 2005-04-12
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.37" h x 6.46" w x 9.52" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 414 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Were David and Jesus fictional or historical figures? Do their stories actually report history, or are they simply tales that use familiar mythic elements about heroic figures to turn David and Jesus into heroes for a new generation? Thompson, who challenged conventional understandings of the history of Israel in The Mythic Past, answers these and other questions in this provocative but often pedantic study. Drawing on the wealth of tales of kings and saviors in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman literature, he demonstrates that the biblical stories of David's military successes and Jesus' moral teaching are simply fictions weaving these earlier traditions into new hero stories. In addition, he reveals that the story of Jesus' resurrection was fashioned almost exclusively from the story of the dying and rising god, Dionysus. For Thompson, Jesus and David emerge merely as characters in stories that reveal the value of the good king. Although Thompson provides a valuable service by situating the Jesus and David tales in the context of other ancient Near Eastern literature, his argument that the biblical writers used such literature to write their fictions of David and Jesus is neither new nor startling. In addition, the lack of a coherent structure and a definitive conclusion lessens the effectiveness of Thompson's book. (Apr. 12)
Review
"An important work... For those of us interested in the Bible, there are innumerable insights and understandings" -- Peter Burnett Scotsman "Stimulating, controversial" The Good Book Guide "Thompson transforms the way we see the Bible" Observer
About the Author
Thomas L. Thompson is one of the leading biblical archaeologists in the world. He was awarded a National Endowment fellowship, has taught at Lawrence and Marquette Universities in Wisconsin, and currently teaches at the University of Copenhagen, which has one of the most prestigious Biblical Studies programs in the world. His book, The Early History of the Israelite People, a famously controversial book at the time, is now a standard text in the field. He lives in Denmark.
Most helpful customer reviews
84 of 91 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Insights into OT Textual World
By Amazon Customer
The Historical Jesus Quest is really composed of two quests. One involves sifting through the texts and developing methodologies for dealing with the data. The other involves situating the figure of Jesus in the proper historical context.
The battle over the proper context for Jesus has been one of least-recognized but most profound of the various struggles among New Testament exegetes. After WWII exegetes began to strongly emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus. Laudably, this was partly in response to the "Aryan Jesus" of 19th century scholarship, that eventually found its apotheosis in Nazi doctrines. However, it was also in response to the arguments of scholars from the schools of myth and comparative religions, who had argued in the period prior to the Second World War that Jesus resembled similar figures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. By reinforcing the Jewishness of Jesus and delinking him from the surrounding cultures, New Testament scholars sought to protect him from the assaults of the comparative religions school.
At first glance it is easy to mistake Thomas L. Thompson's The Messiah Myth for a revival of this school. Don't. The Messiah Myth does not attempt, as the comparative religions school did, to seek out parallels to Jesus and then link Jesus to them. Rather, Thompson attempts to recover the Greater Context: an enormous toolkit of ideas, themes, and observations that dominate the literature of the Near East, and find expression in all of its major texts, including the Bible, and in all of its major heroes, including Jesus and David.
Despite the subtitle The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson's book does not focus strongly on Jesus. The vast majority of the work consists of exploring the Old Testament and other Near Eastern texts to show that they all make use of the same complex of tropes in composing their various stories. This complex of tropes includes reversals (of rich and poor, the powerful and the peasantry, the weak and the strong), descent-ascent motifs, messiah as priest, king, and warrior motifs, and similar structures and idea familiar to readers of the Tanakh and the Christian writings. Thompson thus does not seek to show that Jesus is a myth by close analysis of the stories about him, like G.A Wells and other mythicists have done. Instead, he offers a rich new context against which the figure of Jesus can be evaluated.
Thompson opens the book with a chapter entitled "Historicizing the figure of Jesus" that is apparently intended as a critique of the various Historical Jesus figures that New Testament scholarship has produced. He observes:
* "A wary reader does well to recognize the wish fulfillment of Schweitzer's figure of Jesus. His mistaken prophet is historical primarily because he does not mirror the Christianity of Schweitzer's time. But the assumption that this mistaken prophet of the apocalypse is a figure appropriate to first century Judaism is itself without evidence. The prophetic figure Mark presented, and the assumed expectations associated with his coming, belong to the surface of Mark's text. Schweitzer did not consider why Mark presented such a figure or such expectations. Nor did he consider whether the life of such a person and the expectations of his coming in fact belonged to the historical reality of first century Jews in Palestine, or whether both expectations and figure were literary tropes. Then the figure of the messiah might express Judaism's highest values within Mark's story does not imply that either the figure or expectations about him were to be found in early first-century historical Palestine."(p6-7)
The opening chapter serves notice: the historical Jesus is an assumption, rather than a discovery, of scholarship. "Dating sayings common to Q and Thomas as an "earliest level" of sayings and suggesting a time between 30 and 60 CE for their origin is a conclusion drawn from the assumption that there was an oral tradition derived from a historical Jesus' teaching."(p11) From whence, then, stems this figure
* "As we will see in the following chapters, the most central sayings in the gospels were spoken by many figures of ancient literature. That they are "sayings of Jesus" is to be credited to the author who put them in his mouth. Many sayings the [Jesus] seminar identifies as "certainly authentic" are well-known and can be dated centuries earlier than the New Testament. The very project of the Jesus Seminar is anchored in wishful thinking. Evidence for the prehistory of these sayings is so abundant and well attested that we can trace a continuous literary tradition over millennia."(p11)
Having sounded the eschatological alarm, Thompson slowly bids the Gospels goodbye, and enters the world of the Old Testament. In the second chapter, "The Figure of the Prophet", there is much back-and-forth between the Gospel stories and the Old Testament, but by the time we get to chapter four, "The Song for a Poor Man", the Gospels have been left behind, and we plunge into a world of international texts from antiquity, each full of themes the echo, extend, comment on, and interact with, the recurring tropes that make up the Tanakh.
Thompson builds his reading of the texts by searching out themes common throughout the Near East, collecting texts from many places. Writing on the Good King, he says:
* "Some of our stories serve as memorials to the king, while others are dedications of a cult place. Thirteen of the twenty-one inscriptions are presented in autobiographical form, where the king plays the role of author as well as subject. Eight present the story of the king in the third person. The Idrimi stele (no. 13), which is engraved on a statue of the king, presents its first-person form by locating the closing lines in a cartoon balloon coming out of the king's mouth. In spite of the autobiographical form, some of these inscriptions are likely posthumous."(p157)
The themes he builds function as tropes, recurring themes that appear in texts all over the Near East.
For example, in the Near East there is a common trope: a "utopian, comprehensive, and transcendent" peace that is the goal of every king's rule. Thompson identifies this peace in many different texts (including in an appendix), including tales about Idrimi, Nabonidus, and Esarhaddon, as well as David.
At his best when building his collection of tropes, The Messiah Myth falters whenever it comes near the Gospels, giving the impression that Thompson is wielding a hammer in whose presence everything attempts to turn into nails. After establishing the existence of a trope referring to the children and the kingdom, Thompson then turns to the Gospel versions:
* "Of the six occurrences of the trope Crossan calls "kingdom and children" sayings, four are classified as independent and two dependent. Only the authority of scholarly tradition of the primacy of Mark supports the judgment that the very close variations of the saying "Let the children come to me and do not hinder them; for to such belong the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 19:14) and "Let the children come to me and do not hinder them; for to such belong the kingdom of God" (Lk 18:16) are dependent on the similar saying in Mark: "Let the little children come to me; do not prevent them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God" (Mk 10:14). This saying, nearly identical in all three gospels, clearly offers a common trope, but the primacy of Mark's version, including the phrase "kingdom of God" he shares with Luke, does not stand on its own merits. The assumption that Mark is the source for the versions of Matthew and Luke is unprovable. Similarly, that the saying in Mark is the most likely original can be shown to be without merit."(p76)
While it is quite true that any sayings tradition is ultimately an assumption of scholars, that is not the case with the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels, where scholars possess all three of the relevant texts. Thompson either does not understand, or does not care to understand, the complexities of the Synoptic problem and the way that it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of most scholars that the first gospel written was Mark. Right or wrong, the priority of Mark is a conclusion, not an assumption.
This dismissal of modern scholarly understandings means that The Messiah Myth interacts largely with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, when the most historically important Gospel is that of Mark. Thompson apparently regards these writings as largely independent, and locates their similarities in the use of common tropes rather than literary dependence. This position is indefensible, and does nothing for the book's credibility.
Nevertheless, for those of us interested in the New Testament and in the Bible in general, there are innumerable insights and understandings. Thompson writes with an assurance and erudition that commands our attention, and manages to suppress any pesky doubts that might arise when we observe his cavalier attitude toward New Testament scholarship. Using the insights he develops from the tropes he collects, Thompson is often able to correct scholarly misapprehensions:
* "Like the 'kingdom of God,' the metaphor of my father's kingdom is not apocalyptic in the sense that it implies expectations of the end of the world as Schweitzer thought. It is rather a utopian and idealistic metaphor for a world of justice. In ancient Near Eastern and biblical literature, it is related to the figure of the savior-king who, by reestablishing divine rule, returns creation to the original order."(p198)
Because Thompson functions at the level of tropes, larger themes that govern the structure of texts, there is actually little here that is useful against the figure of Jesus as a historical figure. Despite his complaints about New Testament scholarship Thompson himself provides no answers to the questions he raises. Showing that tropes are part and parcel of ancient texts simply undermines Thompson's own implicit argument against a historical Jesus, for many of the texts that Thompson uses to support his case are either about, or from, historical figures. Hence it is easy to argue that the Gospel writers simply cast their historical figure in the standard Near Eastern format, and dismiss Thompson with a wave of the broader theme. Mythicism will never advance until it begins to churn out detailed, verse-by-verse readings of the relevant texts that show precisely how they are built out of literary convention, pre-existent sayings, Old Testament passages, themes, and concepts, and literary tropes and broader mythic themes. For that purpose Thompson will provide useful insight, but no decisive view.
Despite the title, those who come to this book seeking arguments against Jesus historicism will be disappointed. But readers who pick this volume in search of new understandings of old texts will not leave the table hungry. There Thompson pours out a cornucopia which this reviewer's New Testament-oriented interests cannot hope to adequately capture. I highly recommend The Messiah Myth to anyone with a general interest in ancient Near Eastern mythology and story, including the Bible texts. For them, The Messiah Myth will be bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a ferryboat to the boatless.
29 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Less Than Convincing, But Still Useful to Some Readers
By David E. Blair
If you wish to read four hundred pages of detailed, well worked out, and adventurous exegisis of the Old Testatment as it applies to David and Jesus as myth fulfilling figures or fantasies, this should be your cup of tea. However, with an occassional tip of the hat to other ancient Near Eastern literary sources, this is what Thompson's book boils down to. Even in his essay on "The Myth of the Dying and Rising God" where one would expect a world of pagan material, Thompson's concerns are almost exclusively centered on the exegisis of OT material.
It is at this interface between OT material and the prior mythic traditions and literature of the Near East where Thompson is at his weakest. Considering his academic specialty, this is no surprise. However, his sub-title, "The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David," does not read Old Testament roots. Therefore, his project is a questionable success at best for the open minded. To his credit, he never actually indicates that it his intention to disprove a historical grounding of the figures of David and Jesus. This book should be read as massive cautionary to reading too much history into the Bible.
Other than general cranky dismissals of academics that do not agree with him, Thompson launches forth assuming that you, the reader, agree with his methodology and are up to assessing the validity of his exegisis. To fully assess and appreciate this work, the reader must be nearly as accomplished in OT exegetics as Thompson. That is a tall order. No alternative readings are supplied. Moments of crystal clarity are rare. Expect to put in a great deal of work for what you get. And what you get out of this book is directly dependent on the level of knowledge you bring to the task.
Interestingly, as would be expected, when dealing with the New Testament, Thompson spends twice as much ink on Matthew as he does on either Mark or Luke. Material on the Gospel of John is almost entirely missing. That Matthew the most "Jewish" of the gospels is most dependent on the OT should come as no great surprise. Also, in Thompson's scheme of things, the author of this gospel would have had to be as erudite as Thompson with subtle fully formed intentions regarding the use of myth and symbol. Was this the intention of the author of this particular "good news?" With a literacy rate of three percent or less in the Ancient World, this is an exceedingly problematic intent for the author of the gospel. We are better off for having this book. The only question is, will you be better informed after reading it? This book is very heavy intellectual lifting.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Very interesting
By S A Moran
Thomas L Thompson, biblical scholar of the 'minimalist' school, here turns his attention the commonality of tropes in the stories of Jesus and David as Messiahs. Never clearly defining Jesus as never existing, he, nevertheless, raises some pertinant criticisms of the quest for a historical Jesus, arguing that the gospels are a coherent whole; that Jesus' teachings cannot be separated from the miracles etc to construct a scholars' historical version of the man from Galilee.
Thompson underpins this critique by highlighting the dependence of texts on each other for tropes and metaphors; his treatment of the temple cleansing is very enlightening, how his saying conflates Isaiah and Jeremiah to contrast and show who the true pure of Israel are. He also demonstrates that the use of 'OT' texts by the gospel writers are not just for prophetic proofs of Jesus' messiahship, but to construct a theology consistent with both Judaism and other Near Eastern thought.
Very insightful, and a useful book to reference whether for or against Thompson's argument.
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