1. I started a new book today, Manlio Simonetti’s Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church. Simonetti discusses the Epistle of Barnabas, which dates to the late first-early second centuries B.C.E. Barnabas (or, actually, Pseudo-Barnabas) believed that the Jews were wrong to understand the laws of the Torah in a literal sense, for the Law has a deeper spiritual meaning. On the prohibition of eating swine in Leviticus 11, for instance, Barnabas holds that it “signifies having no contact with men who behave like pigs” (14). And, for Barnabas, the ban on eating the hare is really a ban on pederasty, a sort of homosexual relationship.
That brought to mind a mock debate that I had in high school. I was in a Christian group, and we were debating whether or not homosexuality is acceptable. Of course, we all believed that it wasn’t, but we had these sorts of debates every now and then, either to prepare ourselves to give an answer for the hope that lies within us, or simply because we wanted to fill the hour with something interesting.
I was on the pro-homosexuality side, and I asked the side opposed to homosexuality why they believe on the basis of Leviticus that God condemns the gay lifestyle, when many of them eat pork, in violation of Leviticus 11. I don’t recall if any of my opponents used the standard Christian line of “that was only the Old Testament, which we don’t follow anymore”, right before pointing to passages in the New Testament that are critical of homosexuality. But one of them actually had an argument similar to Barnabas’ interpretation of the anti-pork law. “You know how some people are called pigs because of the way they act? Maybe the law’s telling us not to be like those people.” Others in that group were agreeing with her insight.
I’m not sure if what she was doing was allegory, for she was taking “pig” to be a figure of speech for a churlish person, not so much a symbol. I also doubt that she knew about the Epistle of Barnabas, but who knows? It was interesting that she and he saw the anti-pork law in a similar manner.
2. Another debate that my high school Christian group had was over whether or not Jesus was the Messiah. I was on the “anti” side, and that was when I didn’t know about the definition of almah in Isaiah 7:14, the view that Isaiah 53 applies to Israel, etc.
The leader of the “pro” side referred to Osiris, the Egyptian god who died and rose again. (That actually brings up another debate that I didn’t know about at the time: There’s dispute about whether or not Osiris was deemed a ‘dying and rising’ god” in Egypt.) She said that there are all these things throughout history that foreshadow Jesus, so Jesus had to be the Messiah. God was preparing humanity for a God who would die and rise again. My friend was drawing from C.S. Lewis, who made a similar point in his books.
My response was, “Well, how do you know that Christianity wasn’t copying from those legends?” And those were the days before I had heard of Frazer, or mystery cults, or the various “dying and rising” gods.
In my reading today of Marvin Pope’s Song of Songs (page 153), I read about the scholar Samuel Nathan Kramer’s beliefs about dying-and-rising gods. At first, Kramer denied that many of the “dying and rising” gods were types of Christ. E.M. Yamauchi concludes from Kramer’s position:
…it is clear that the identification of Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris and Baal as expressions of the same type of a rising and dying fertility god must be abandoned…Tammuz can no longer be considered a prototype of Christ. Moreover, the resurrection of Inanna-Ishtar offers a contrast and not a comparison. Whereas, according to Christian theology, Christ died as a substitute for man so that he could take him to heaven, Ishtar died and needed a substitute so that she herself could get back to heaven. Inanna, instead of rescuing Tammuz from hell, sent him there.
Later, however, Kramer wrote in 1969 about Dumuzi, the Sumerian version of Tammuz:
From Mesopotamia the theme of the dead Dumuzi and his resurrection spread to Palestine, and it is not surprising to find the women of Jerusalem bewailing Tammuz in one of the gates of the Jerusalem temple. Nor is it at all improbable that the myth of Dumuzi’s death and resurrection left its mark on the Christ story, in spite of the profound spiritual gulf between them. Several motifs in the Christ story may go back to Sumerian prototypes…Above all, as we now know, Dumuzi, not unlike Christ, played the role of vicarious substitute for mankind; had he not taken the place of Inanna, the goddess of love, procreation, and fertility, in the Nether World, all life on earth would have come to an end. Admittedly, the differences between the two were more marked and significant than the resemblances—Dumuzi was no Messiah preaching the Kingdom of God on earth. But the Christ story certainly did not originate and evolve in a vacuum; it must have had its forerunners and prototypes, and one of the most venerable and influential of these was no doubt the mournful tale of the shepherd-god Dumuzi and his melancholy fate, a myth that had been current throughout the ancient Near East for over two millennia.
From what I read in these two quotes, it seems that Kramer didn’t change his mind about the content of the legend. In both quotes, he says that Tammuz died in place of Ishtar so that Ishtar can go to heaven, thereby allowing love, procreation, and fertility to resume on earth. But, in the first quote, Kramer looks at this data and concludes that the legend is nothing like the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which states that Christ died for humanity and rose again so that we might have forgiveness, life, and a relationship with God. In the second quote, by contrast, Kramer sees a parallel: Tammuz died in place of Ishtar that we might all have life, making Tammuz a Christ-like character.
Can Tammuz be a type of Christ, when, in Ezekiel 8:14, God condemns the Israelites who practiced the ritual that honored him (Tammuz)?