Ball of Confusion

Write a reflection about your experience of studying the New Testament, and include any observations you might have about parallels between first century CE Palestine and your own country

The thing that I find difficult about reading the New Testament is the sense that one gets about how much struggle and conflict there has been between people of faith throughout the history of the church. Everyone has the best intentions of knowing and understanding and keeping God happy, but out of these good intentions arises a fearful attempt to control and manage faith: so much of the story of the development of the New Testament seems to be a bunfight about who was right, or who was more convinced they were right and able to assert their claims in this regard, even going as far as burning people at the stake if they didn’t like a translation of a text, or the fact that someone didn’t know their place well enough to know that they shouldn’t dare involve themselves in the business of trying to understand or talk or write about God! And so much of this conflict was over language, which in itself is completely inadequate as a means of expressing the nature of God. Good grief, what is it with people? Talk about a manufacturing fault – maybe I should write a letter of complaint to Him about that:

“Dear Sir, you could have toned down the human gut-level fight-or-flight fear instinct you programmed into your creatures. Is there any chance you can rectify the problem with the next batch before planet-wide distribution?”

The other thing that is significant is being reminded that the modern mind probably works quite differently in some respects from the minds of ancient times: I wouldn’t know how to un-80’s my head enough to begin to grasp what those old Greek ideas of divinity were all about. My love of Greek mythology I imbibed as a secondary effect of hero-worshipping Magnum and MacGyver: if the god of Hawaii had Zeus and Appollo for guard dogs on Robin Masters’ estate, and the god of the creative quick-fix-in-a-pinch knew stuff about Greek gods that could help him solve complex cat­-and­-mouse riddles put to him by his nemesis, then by Jove it made sense that I too should know at least something about Kronos, Chaos, Dyonisus, Eros, Hades and all of the rest. You never know when you might need to get yourself out of major nonsense, with nothing to help you but a bottle of wine, a charming smile and no fear of hell! So clearly I have a lot to learn before I even begin to understand how Greek thought has impacted Christian thinking.

Even though the thinking might have been quite different back then, it seems that first century Palestine was quite like modern-day South Africa: the rich and the poor we still have! We might not have kings, but we do have tribal leaders, and politicians and church officials, big business, SARS, and corporate conglomerates buying up land and leaving the poor nowhere to lay their heads. We have middle class artisans, dwindling numbers of priests and small farmers, who are still often in debt. We have the workers, the unemployed, people who have been trafficked, and the sick and disabled, who often live on grants and alms (or whatever people on the train are willing to toss into the blind singing beggar’s tin cup on a Monday morning while they wend their way to work nursing hangovers and pondering the intrigues and excesses of the weekend now past).

First century Palestinian society had:

• Sadduccees: we have the Christian equivalent in the “prosperity churches” where they preach that you reap what you sow and that material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing on your life. If you’re not reaping, you can’t be sowing in faith, brother!
• Pharisees: we have arch-conservative Catholics who know Church teaching so well that it’s clear everyone around them just doesn’t measure up to the Catechism and will contaminate their children if they aren’t homeschooled.
• Scribes: we have doctors of Canon Law.
• Zealots: we have … um… Bikers for Christ who wear their leathers and look tough on a Sunday morning breakfast run, as well as many other more anonymous people who send volumes of Christian chain letters through the email demanding that Christians must prove to Jesus how much they love him by forwarding said letters to at least 12 people who are not Christian and need to hear about Jesus before they die and go to hell. It’s violence of another sort.
• Samaritans: we have Jehovah’s Witnesses – who don’t have their own territory as such (outside of their Kingdom Halls), but who are probably at least as hated as the Samaritans were, and whose brand of Christianity strikes most Christians as false. They’re not an entirely bad bunch; I have an uncle and some cousins who count themselves among the 144,000.
• Essenes: we have Calvanists and Seventh Day Adventists, among others.
• Herod the Great, Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate: we have JZ, Julius and Judge Hlope. Ok, so they’re not quite the same thing. I couldn’t find better analogies!
• Academy of Jamnia: we have the Council of Churches.

If you think about it, everything changes so much, and yet everything remains the same. I’m starting to sympathise with the writer of Ecclesiastes: vanity of vanities, all things are vanity! What profit has man from all the labour which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.

I console myself that the last word, when all is heard, is to fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man's all; because God will bring to judgment every work, with all its hidden qualities, whether good or bad. Thanks be to God!