“The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time there were three groups of Jews, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”
“I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices always hassling Christ.”
“They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”
“He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”
“That sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at — but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”
“Who were the other two guys?”
“The Sadducees were materialists.”
“Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”
“No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world — hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”
“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”
“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in a binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”
“How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however. Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing — this pivotal separation between being and non-being — is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.
“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European word meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”
“Tell me about the third group — the Essenes.”
“They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not by miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of the body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”
“Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”
“Speculation is not in my ambit.”
“Speaking of which — Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called nam-shub. What does that mean?”
“Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian. Used in Mesopotamia from roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.”
“Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?”
“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words — very unusual.”
“You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”
“Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.
“Has anyone figured out what the word ‘nam-shub’ means in Sumerian?”
“Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”
“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”
The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’”
Something I picked up in my religion classes at Calvin College:
ReplyDeleteDespite the bad write-up that the Pharisees get in the New Testament, Jesus actually was a Pharisee. His view of the cosmos and the afterlife aligns with what the Pharisees thought, and is against what the Sadducees and the Essenes thought.
There was at the time a debate between liberal Pharisees and conservative Pharisees. Jesus seems to be firmly in the liberal Pharisee camp, (The only issue in which Jesus sided with the conservative Pharisees is the issue of Divorce.) But he is still advocating positions that were inside the Pharisee school.
PS--apologies if I'm repeating myself. I have a feeling I may have said all this before somewhere in a previous comment, but can't remember for sure.
This was the first I'd heard this proposition! So thanks for sharing. I Googled it (hey, it's a thing!), did a little scanning, then ran it by my NT Studies/Jesus Seminar buddy (who's bent an elbow with Ehrman a few times). He says it's not a theory much in favour among the current crop of Historical Jesus types, FWTW. Jesus clearly palled around with and engaged the bunch (combatively, more often than not) no matter what their stripe of Pharisaical imperative happened to be, so it's certainly not an uncalled-for equivalency. He did the same with Zealots and tax-collectors, ostensibly, so the narrative does tend to befuddle historical winnowing.
DeleteInteresting... I remember that this was in the college textbook we had at the time. (I don't now remember the name and publisher, but it was an official textbook for college New Testament courses.) So I took it as established fact. But I should have known that nothing is really established fact in this field.
ReplyDeleteWell... at the very least I think it's uncontroversial to say that the New Testament view of death and the afterlife is inline with what the Pharisees thought, and against what the Essenes and the Saducees thought.
This was just a brief exchange with my buddy, who was en route to Leuwen to further his research into whatever angle he's working these days. We are way overdue for a sit-down and catch-up, but I got the sense that he was dealing with a variation on the Adorno/Marcus issue I referenced earlier. I doubt even a field as fusty as New Testament studies is exempt from the generation landslide.
ReplyDelete