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The Little Apocalypse

2009-12-16T21:59:00.003-05:00

The Little Apocalypse (also known as “The Olivet Discourse”) is a passage in the Gospels of the New Testament that depict Jesus’ teachings on the end of the world. Found in the books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the story represents Jesus at his apocalyptic and predictive best, explaining how the world will come to an end in fire and destruction, amidst “wars and rumors of wars” and violent earthquakes and famines.

Much has been made over the years of these apocalyptic visions. Many theologians and apologists argue that the book of Revelation – otherwise known as the Apocalypse of John and said to have been written by the apostle John – expands on Jesus’ own “little” apocalyptic vision in the Gospels.

John’s apocalypse, of course, is much more familiar to the average person than the Little Apocalypse of Jesus. However, the story of Jesus’ apocalyptic vision has a lot to tell us not only about who Jesus was, but also about the historical context of the late first century, when the Gospel stories of Jesus were being put to parchment.

MARK’S ACCOUNT

The Gospel of Mark gives us our earliest account of the Little Apocalypse, comprising the entirety of that book’s thirteenth chapter. In Mark, the story tends to stick out like a sore thumb, and the reason for this is because Mark’s Gospel, in general, is not apocalyptically-oriented. In fact, the chapter on the Little Apocalypse represents almost the entirety of any apocalyptic theology in the Gospel of Mark. Mark’s Jesus is a wise, yet secretive rabbi, calling for repentance and purification in Israel, predicting his death and resurrection, but generally steering clear of any “end of times” language.

Thus, the Jesus we meet in chapter 13 of Mark’s Gospel seems out of place. Historical context, however, brings this dichotomy into better focus.

Mark’s version of this story begins with Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

From here, Jesus segues into a discussion of the end of times. It starts, so Jesus tells us, with “wars and rumors of wars,” earthquakes, false prophets, and great famines. These, Jesus assures us, are the “birth pains” of the end.

Jesus goes on to predict that “brother will betray brother to death” and Christians will be tried for crimes and flogged in the synagogues.

The final sign, however, will be the “desolating sacrilege” standing “where it ought not to be.” In some English versions, “desecrating sacrilege” is translated as “the abomination of desolation.” This is a reference to the apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Daniel, which include a “desolating sacrilege” in the Temple. In that book, the desolating sacrilege is an act done by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who conquered Jerusalem in 167 B.C.E. To show his derision for the god of the Jews, Epiphanes erected an altar to Zeus in the Temple and sacrificed swine on it. This action prompted the successful Maccabean rebellion, which led to a century-long “golden age” of Jewish self-rule that ended when the Roman legions arrived.

So Mark’s reference here to the “desolating sacrilege” is a clear reference to Daniel and the horrifying sacrificial desecration of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Mark’s Jesus is saying that when something like that happens again, the end of time will be near.

Jesus encourages his followers to immediately “flee to the mountains” when this happens, without so much as going inside to grab a coat. He laments how terrible it will be in that day for “those who are pregnant and those who are nursing infants.” More false messiahs will crop up working signs and wonders to deceive people.

Finally, the “one like a person” (“son of man” in many English translations) will come on the clouds to gather Christians from the “four winds.” Jesus asserts that although “this generation will not pass away” before these things happen, no one knows for sure when they will take place. Therefore, he says, “keep awake,” lest the apocalypse should sneak up on you like a master on a sleeping servant.

So what, exactly, do we make of these predictions by Jesus? Many historians, in fact, use this passage to date Mark to the early 70’s C.E., shortly after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. Thus Jesus predicts an event that the writer of Mark already knew had taken place. Did Jesus really make such a prediction? That is a matter of faith and is an issue for a theological debate, meaning it is beyond the scope of this essay. What seems fairly clear, however, is that Mark was writing during the chaos and upheaval following the Jewish-Roman war and the destruction of the Temple.

Understanding that historical context helps to focus Mark’s theological message in this passage. “Wars and rumors of wars” were something Mark and his community were living with daily. Additionally, Rabbinical Jews and Jewish Christians were beginning to war with one another, in a theological debate that would ultimately split Christianity entirely from Judaism – though it had not done so yet. Thus Mark talks about Christians being persecuted “in the synagogue,” handed over and brought to trial, rejected by their families, and “hated” by “all people.”

As for the “desolating sacrilege,” historical context would suggest this is a Markan reference to the Roman destruction of the Temple and their subsequent occupation of its ruins. If the offering of swine on an alter to Zeus offended 2nd century B.C.E. Jews enough to call it a “desolating sacrilege,” how much more so would the very destruction of the Temple itself be seen as the most unthinkable of abominations? Furthermore, Mark gives us a curious clue in the text that may indicate that the Roman destruction of the Temple is precisely what he is talking about.

From verse 14: “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.”

That parenthetical statement – “let the reader understand” – seems to be Mark’s way of interrupting the narrative of Jesus and giving a sort of “hint hint, wink wink” to his readers. It is Mark’s method for saying, “The destruction of God’s Temple, which, to our great horror, has just taken place, is what Jesus was talking about here, folks.”

This puts the entire passage into focus: Mark believed the end was at hand right there in the early 70’s C.E. The sign Jesus had predicted – the destruction of the Temple – had just happened. Wars and rumors of wars were all around. Christians were being persecuted. The entire Jewish culture, which included Christianity, was in violent upheaval. The Jews of Jerusalem had “fled to the mountains” and been dispersed following the Roman destruction of their holy city. False messiahs were cropping up everywhere. As part of his prediction, Mark’s Jesus says: “Pray that [this doesn’t happen] in winter.” In fact, the Temple was destroyed in the middle of summer, right at the end of July, 70 C.E., meaning these prayers had been answered.

Thus, Mark believed that the coming of the “one like a person” was imminent. As Jesus predicts in the passage, “When you see these things taking place, you know that [the one like a person] is near.” Soon the sun would be darkened and the stars would fall from the sky (v. 24-25) and Jesus would return to gather his disciples from the “four winds.” Thus, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” and therefore the followers of Christ should “keep awake” to make sure they are not caught unprepared.

For Mark, the end of the world was now.

MATTHEW’S ACCOUNT

Of course, nearly 2,000 years down the road, we know that Mark was wrong. The end didn’t happen in the early 70’s C.E. The world continued on, Rabbinical and Christian Jews continued to spar with one another, and Christians began to separate themselves from their Jewish brethren and expand instead among Gentiles.

About ten years later, in the early 80’s C.E., the Gospel of Matthew was written. Some evidence suggests that the earliest version of Matthew was written in Aramaic, perhaps around the same time as Mark or even earlier, and our current Greek version of Matthew is a later edition of that early Aramaic version. In any case, the final Greek version of Matthew seems to have taken form by the mid-80’s.

Like his Markan source, Matthew devotes an entire chapter to the Little Apocalypse (the chapter designations, of course, were not original to the texts but were added by later translators). Matthew’s version in chapter 24 starts out closely following Mark’s. Matthew copies much of it word for word, making only minor changes for either syntactical purposes (Mark’s Gospel is notoriously colloquial; scholar Bruce Chilton calls it “Pidgin-Greek”), or in order to gear it better towards his Jewish audience (for instance, Matthew excludes the references to Christians being “beaten in synagogues” and instead makes the persecutors anonymous; he also removes Mark’s harsh language about “[Jewish] brother betraying [Christian] brother to death”).

Matthew’s Jesus, like Mark’s, asserts that the “end will come” only after the good news has been preached.

As Matthew moves into the passage about the “desolating sacrilege,” he clears up a bit of Mark’s ambiguity. Matthew’s Jesus, for instance, specifically refers to the book of Daniel (“So when you see the desolating sacrilege…spoken of by the prophet Daniel…”), and he also specifically says that this desolating sacrilege will be “in the holy place,” which is surely a euphemism for God’s land and its Temple.

Starting in verse 26, Matthew adds in a short teaching that does not appear in Mark’s Gospel. Matthew’s Jesus again speaks of false messianic prophets and encourages his followers not to be fooled by them. He then compares the coming of the “one like a person” to lightning that flashes through the sky. Finally, he ends by asserting that “wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” The implication is that like vultures descending on a carcass, so will the “one like a person” descend on the “corpse” of Jerusalem and its destroyed Temple.

Following this short passage, Matthew picks up his Markan source again, copying Jesus’ words about the “one like a person” appearing in the clouds and calling Christians from the “four winds.” He also repeats Mark’s statements about how “this generation” will see all these predictions come to fruition.

Following this, Matthew again deviates from Mark by including a story from Jesus comparing the sudden appearance of the “one like a person” to the sudden catastrophe of the flood in the time of Noah. He goes on to say: “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.” Here, Matthew picks up Mark again and encourages his listeners to “keep awake” so that they are not surprised by the second coming.

As we saw with Mark, Matthew seems to believe that the end of the world is near. Writing some ten to twelve years later, he surely realized that Mark had not been entirely correct in assuming the end was imminent, but this does not appear to have concerned Matthew much. Clearly he agrees with his Markan source that the time is coming soon. The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple – the “holy place” now reduced to a “corpse” – was clearly believed by Matthew, as it was by Mark, to be a sign of the end of times.

Matthew is not entirely silent, however, about the fact that Jesus seemed to be taking his time fulfilling the final portion of his apocalyptic vision. Where Mark’s Little Apocalypse ends after Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake” – with the clear implication being that the second coming is about to happen – Matthew adds one more story not found in Mark.

Jesus tells a short parable about a servant put in charge of his master’s house while his master is away. If the servant does well, Jesus says, his master will be happy upon return. But if his servant decides that the “master is delayed,” and therefore begins to quarrel with his fellow servants and live the high life of worldly pleasures, then the master will “put him with the hypocrites” in the place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The point of this story, as well as its contextual necessity for Matthew, is perfectly clear: Jesus has not returned as quickly as we thought he would in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, but that is no reason to quarrel among ourselves or forget the non-worldly lifestyle that we have committed ourselves to. If Jesus returns and catches us “goofing off” as it were, we’ll be in big trouble.

It is reminiscent of a bumper sticker I once saw: “Look busy! Jesus is coming!”

LUKE’S ACCOUNT

Like Matthew, the Gospel of Luke used Mark as a primary source. Luke’s Gospel was written about ten years after Matthew’s – thus, perhaps twenty years after Mark. In chapter 21 of his Gospel, the writer of Luke repeats his own version of the Little Apocalypse of Jesus.

Like Mark and Matthew before him, Luke opens the story with Jesus predicting the destruction of the Temple: “Not one stone will be left upon another.”

Still following Mark, Luke’s Jesus predicts false messiahs and warns against them. He changes Mark’s “wars and rumors of wars” to “wars and insurrections” and this may be because by the time Luke was writing, the “wars” of the early 70’s were “rumors” no more. But where Mark states that these wars “must take place, but the end is still to come,” Luke changes the wording to: “These things must take place, but the end will not follow immediately.”

We saw above that Matthew had to deal with the fact that Jesus had not yet returned, as had been imminently expected by Mark. Writing another ten years down the road, Luke had to deal with it on an even greater scale. Thus, “the end will not follow immediately” after the “wars” (that is, the Jewish-Roman wars of the 70’s).

At this point, Luke continues on following Mark, discussing how nations will fight one another and there will be earthquakes and famines. In Mark’s account, Jesus transitions from there into discussing the persecutions Christians will suffer from their Jewish brethren (“you will be beaten in the synagogues”). Thus, for Mark, the persecutions would follow the natural disasters and Gentile wars. Yet Luke again alters Mark’s account by asserting: “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues…” Thus, for Luke, the persecution would happen before the Gentile wars, earthquakes, and famines. These things, Luke asserts, are still in the future. For Mark, these events happened in the early 70’s, when the Temple was destroyed. Mark read them as predictors of the Second Coming of Jesus. Luke, writing some 20-25 years later, sees that Mark was wrong, so he predicts different wars, and different natural disasters. In Mark, the persecutions – which were already happening when Mark was writing – were the final step before the Second Coming. In Luke, the persecutions are the first step.

Continuing on through Jesus’ Little Apocalypse, Luke follows Mark fairly closely as he describes the various persecutions Christians are facing from their enemies. When he transitions to the “desolating sacrilege” teaching, however, Luke again begins to dramatically edit Mark’s account. There is no reference at all to Daniel’s “desolating sacrilege,” and instead the text says: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, know that its desolation is near.” Luke uses Mark’s word “desolation,” but not in the prophetic context of Daniel. Furthermore, while Mark’s reference to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was secretive and vague (recall the parenthetical “hint hint, wink wink” comment to “let the reader understand”), Luke says explicitly that this is about Jerusalem and its destruction. However, by saying that Jerusalem’s desolation will be near when armies surround it, Luke is tacitly removing any notion that this event is one of the “signs” that will accompany the end of times. He makes this even more explicit when he states a few lines later that this is “vengeance” on Jerusalem in “fulfillment of all that is written.” In other words, the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans was a punishment from God for the great sin of the Jews (which, to the writer of Luke, would have been illustrated by their rejection of Jesus). The key point there, of course, is that Jerusalem’s destruction was just a punishment, and not necessarily a sign of the imminent end of times.

Luke is clearly attempting to assure his readers that there is nothing amiss; Jesus isn’t delayed. Christians (like Mark) of the 70’s only thought the end was near. But that was because they had misunderstood the events going on around them. Luke is essentially doing damage control, addressing what must have been a common concern among Christians of the 90’s: “Why hasn’t Jesus returned?” – and perhaps a common criticism from among non-Christians: “Where is this so-called Second Coming?”

Continuing through the apocalyptic sermon, Luke expands Mark’s account to have Jesus predict the dispersion of the Jews into the surrounding nations after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. He states: “There will be…wrath against this people [the Jews]. They will…be taken away as captives among all nations [that is, among the Gentiles], and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles.” Writing twenty or so years after the event, Luke displays the knowledge that could only come from hindsight. The Jews were ultimately dispersed in what came to be known as the Diaspora, their city and their nation left a ruin and inhabited by Romans. Mark didn’t know this, and Matthew may only have had a hint of it. But Luke knew it well.

As Luke transitions next into the passage about the darkening of the sun, he again redacts Mark, this time in a way that is so explicit that it makes crystal clear his purposes in doing “damage control” about the delay in the second coming. In transitioning to the discussion of signs in the sky, Mark had stated, “But in those days, after [Jerusalem’s destruction], the sun will be darkened…” In other words, these heavenly signs would commence as soon as the dust settled from the Roman war. Similarly, Matthew had stated, “Immediately after the suffering of those days, the sun will be darkened…” Luke, however, cuts out the transition all together and simply starts talking about how there will be signs in the heavens, among the sun, moon, and stars. Thus, he removes any mention of a time frame. Where Mark and Matthew made it clear that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple represented the “beginning of the end,” Luke eliminates that sense all together. For Luke, these signs from the heavens, and the subsequent coming of the “one like a person,” will simply happen at some unknown point in the future.

Luke stays fairly close to Mark throughout the remainder of the Little Apocalypse. But he has one more trick up his sleeve. We have seen that Mark and Matthew both had Jesus assure his listeners that “this generation” would live to see “all these things” taking place. Luke uses this phrase, but he again does damage control by omitting an important word. Instead of referring to “all these things” taking place, he simply says that “this generation will not pass away until everything has taken place.” This is a very subtle change, but it eliminates the implication that all these signs and wonders will happen in the immediate and imminent future. However, in reasserting the general principle that the present generation “would not pass away” until these things (“everything”) had been accomplished, Luke reassures his readers that while it has taken longer than expected, and some earlier Christians were wrong to expect it so soon, it is still just right around the corner.

CONCLUSION

A study of the Little Apocalypse shows us that Mark and his community were convinced that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple signified the “beginning of the end.” Matthew, writing a few years later, noted the delay, but still felt confident that the time was near. Luke, writing yet another decade after that, had to deal with major damage control to quell fears about Jesus’ delayed coming, but still felt confident in asserting that his generation would remain to see the end of times.

As we saw at the start of this account, the Gospel of Mark’s Little Apocalypse is unique because the majority of Mark’s Gospel does not have much in the way of apocalyptic language. An account that is largely non-apocalyptic suddenly becomes apocalyptic on a level not far beneath Revelation or the Jewish apocrypha.

Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, sprinkle apocalyptic sayings and events throughout their Gospels, making the Little Apocalypse simply a culmination of a general theme.

How can we explain this? Matthew and Luke likely used a source no longer in existence that scholars have dubbed the Q document. This document can be discerned from the content that Matthew and Luke have in common, but which is not found in Mark. It is interesting to note that this Q material is very frequently apocalyptic in nature. The fact that Mark contains almost no apocalyptic sayings outside of the Little Apocalypse, then, is a strong indication that while Matthew and Luke had access to this source, Mark did not.

Interestingly, some of the sayings included in Matthew’s version of the Little Apocalypse come from this Q document. We saw above that he adds teachings to the Little Apocalypse not found in Mark – a short parable about a delayed master, a discussion of Noah and the suddenness of the flood, and a comment about vultures gathering around a corpse. We know these came from the Q document because Luke also repeats them – though Luke does not place them in his own version of the Little Apocalypse. Instead, he peppers them throughout other portions of his Gospel, attaching them to various other teachings here and there. Furthermore, there is at least one short passage from Mark’s Little Apocalypse that Luke does not include in his own version of the Little Apocalypse, but instead places into another apocalyptic teaching from Jesus. The passage in question concerns instructions to people not to go into their houses to retrieve their belongings on the last day. In Mark, this was included in the subsection of the Little Apocalypse about the “desolating sacrilege” – that is, the destruction of the Temple. But in Luke, it is in an entirely different account, one that includes the adage about corpses and vultures – an adage, as we saw, that appears in Matthew, but not Mark.

The point to be drawn from all this is simply that apocalyptic perspectives on Jesus and his life seem to go back to the earliest days of Christianity. Numerous texts and oral traditions, imagining an apocalyptic second coming of Christ, were being passed among communities, and we can see this diverse tradition reflected in the varied apocalyptic accounts of the New Testament Gospels.

It is difficult to know for certain what sort of role apocalyptic worldviews played in Jesus’ own life and message. However, many scholars are no doubt correct in suggesting that Jesus’ message, while perhaps not as theologically well-developed and polemically-oriented as it is in the Gospels, must have contained apocalyptic expectations about the imminent end of the world and the coming of God’s kingdom. The question is just how “apocalyptic” that vision was, and whether it imagined the end coming through fire and lightning, or through peace and purity.

In any case, the idea that the “end is near” is surely one of the oldest theological presumptions in all of Christian history – an idea that seems to have been asserted in every Christian generation since the time of Jesus himself, including right up to the present day.

Driving Out Demons

2009-12-12T18:59:00.002-05:00

In the New Testament, Jesus is remembered as a miracle worker and healer, a rabbi and prophet, the son of God and the anointed one (messiah) of Israel. Among his many different hats, however, is also the role of exorcist. In the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus is seen driving out demons at least as often as he is seen healing the sick or performing nature miracles. In fact, one of his methods for healing the sick is depicted as exorcising unclean spirits that cause illness.

My purpose in this account is not to discuss the circumstances of Jesus’ various roles in the New Testament, or whether demon-possession and exorcism is real or metaphorical. It is enough for my purposes here that folks living in the 1st century certainly believed in demon possession, believed that unclean spirits were responsible for some illnesses, and certainly believed in the efficacy of exorcism.

With that established, I want to look at two specific passages in the New Testament that talk about demon possession and exorcism. These two accounts deal more with who is qualified to perform exorcisms than with the nature of the exorcism itself. We’ll look first at a story from the Gospel of Mark.

Mark 9:38-41 (NRSV):

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.”

In this story, the disciples have witnessed someone performing exorcisms in Jesus’ name, but it was a stranger – not one of their group. John informs Jesus that they tried to stop him. Jesus, however, rebukes them with the adage “whoever is not against us is for us” – in other words, we’re all part of the same team. He goes on to make the rather eye-raising assertion that anyone who does a kind thing for a Christian will, themselves, earn the rewards of a Christian.

A good theological debate could no doubt be had over that last phrase of the Markan passage, but it is secondary to our purposes here. The point Jesus makes in this story is that everyone who works in the name of Jesus is “part of the group.”

In the larger context of Mark’s Gospel, the writer’s purpose with this story is reasonably clear: Mark is addressing concerns in Christian society over competing Christian communities. It is important to remember that in the 1st century (and, in fact, well into the 4th century), Christianity did not have the sort of unified doctrine and belief that it has today. And in fact, the idea that it has unified doctrine and belief today is really an anachronism. Since the Protestant Reformation, and later the Enlightenment, Christianity has become wildly diverse, with beliefs ranging from non-theistic self-improvement to rabid fundamentalism. Most modern Christians, however, can at least agree on a few major points of Christian theology (Jesus existed, he died for our sins, he was raised, we can have new life in his name, etc.).

In the 1st century, however, Christian beliefs were at least as diverse as they are today, and probably far more so. In modern society, most Christians accept the legitimacy of other denominations. “My neighbor is a Roman Catholic and I am a Methodist, but we are brothers and sisters in Christ.” That sort of thing. Not so in the 1st century. (In fact, not so until about the 20th century). Christian groups were very exclusive and very suspicious of outsiders. Their regard for non-Christians was not very high: they were pagans and sinners worshipping offensive false gods. Yet their regard for other Christian groups was frequently even worse. As Elaine Pagels points out in her book “The Origin of Satan,” the “intimate enemy” is far worse than the outsider. While pagans were godless sinners, other Christians with different beliefs were doing the very work of Satan. Corrupting the true faith, as it were.

This connection between Satan and those “Christians who disagree with us” remained common in Christianity right up until the last hundred years or so. Of course, for some modern Christians, it still remains.

With that in mind, we turn again to the referenced passage from Mark. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Clearly Mark’s purpose in this story was to address the competition and hard feelings among Christian groups of the late 1st century (Mark was writing around 70 C.E.). While many Christians felt negatively toward other Christian groups, Mark is attempting, through the words of Jesus, to call for unity and encourage reconciliation.

In historical context, we know that by the time Mark was writing his Gospel, Paul had already lived and died and become an important figure in developing Christianity. Church tradition, in fact, holds that John Mark – a companion of Paul – later became the secretary for Peter and wrote the Gospel that bears his name based on stories from Peter. That may or may not have any historical credibility, but in any case, the writer of Mark certainly would have been familiar with Paul and the impact he had on Christianity.

In his own letters, Paul makes it clear that competing groups of Christians were already well established. He writes of false prophets and other rabbis teaching in Jesus’ name. Paul makes his negative opinion of them clear.

Yet the writer of Mark is calling for reconciliation, despite Paul’s own views about competing Christian teachers. Again, historical context explains why. As we saw above, Mark was writing his Gospel in the early 70’s C.E. At the start of that decade, the Jewish-Roman war had ended with Jerusalem destroyed, the Temple burnt to the ground, and the Jews dispersed into Gentile lands. It was a time of great social, political, cultural, and even theological upheaval within Judaism – which at that time still included Christianity. Writing in the midst of that chaos and tragedy, Mark is encouraging Jewish Christians to unite, to band together, to recognize that anyone who is not against us is for us. In essence: “We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.”

With that in mind, we turn to another exorcism story from the New Testament. This time, it comes from the writer of Acts of the Apostles.

Acts 19:13-16 (NRSV):

Then some itinerant Jewish exorcists tried to use the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this.

But the evil spirit said to them in reply, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”

Then the man with the evil spirit leapt on them, mastered them all, and so overpowered them that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.

Immediately before this story in chapter 19 of Acts, the writer had talked about the unbelief Paul encountered in Ephesus. The writer then recounts this story, suggesting that the event helped solidify faith in Paul’s message of Jesus. For the writer of Acts, only Paul and “those in the group” had the authority to perform exorcisms.

So how can one explain these competing theological messages? In Mark, Jesus says that anyone driving out demons in his name is “for us” – that is, part of the group. In Acts, it is made clear that no one but those “in the group” have the authority to do this.

Again, historical context brings the answer into focus. As we have seen, Mark was writing around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Thus, his message of reconciliation. Whoever is not against us is for us. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ.

The writer of Acts, however, was writing some twenty to twenty-five years later, in the middle of the 90’s C.E. By that time, drastic theological and cultural changes had taken place. Christianity had split violently from Judaism in the intervening years between Mark and Acts – an event reflected in many New Testament texts. In splitting from Judaism, Christianity was quickly becoming a religion of Gentiles, and Jews were increasingly seen as the enemy. Furthermore, as Christianity distanced itself from Judaism, it began to undergo a lot of dramatic theological changes. It was spreading into many new areas, and Christian groups and communities were popping up all across the Mediterranean. This inevitably led to problems not unlike what Paul addresses in his own writings – Christian groups vying for authority and primacy, and accusing one another of heresy and false prophesying.

Mark’s call for reconciliation was, apparently, either ignored or didn’t stick for long.

Thus, Acts reflects what was happening culturally during the era that the book was written. Unlike Mark, who wanted to see Christian groups reconcile, the writer of Acts clearly believed that only Paul’s Christianity was legitimate. Anyone else was a false prophet, a heretic, unable to channel the power of Jesus in exorcisms.

The nature of this perspective is evident in the polemical tone of the story itself. First, we see the result of trying to exorcise falsely in Jesus’ name: you get beaten up by the demon you are fighting and end up fleeing naked and injured. You’re made a fool of, in other words.

Second, consider the writer’s choice of words in that passage: he refers to these false prophets as “Jews.” This, of course, gives modern readers the impression that these are just more of the same Jewish enemies of Jesus and Christianity. Yet clearly the content of the story implies that they are not practitioners of Rabbinical Judaism. They may or may not have been ethnically Jewish, but that is completely beside the point: they are performing exorcisms in the name of Jesus; clearly they are Christians. Jewish Christians, perhaps, but Christians nonetheless. The important point is that these are not Rabbinical Jews that the writer of Acts is talking about. He is talking about other Christians, but he is derisively calling them “Jews” in an effort to equate them with those who had rejected Jesus (remember, again, that Acts was written during the painful separation of Christianity from Judaism). This is not unparalleled in early Christian writings. The 2nd century Christian leader Valentinus, for instance, called anyone not following his brand of Christianity a “Hebrew,” whether they were actually Jewish, pagan, Christian, or otherwise.

It may also be noteworthy to point out that no historical record, outside of Acts, makes reference to any Jewish high priest, either before, during, or after Paul’s life, named Sceva. That is true despite the fact that extremely thorough records exist covering the identities and actions of the various Jewish high priests of the 1st century.

So we are left with an obvious question: Which account do we take as “gospel”? The story of Jesus, that says we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, or the story of Sceva’s sons, that says only Paul’s version of Christianity has primacy?

I’ll leave that question unanswered and rhetorical since the theological implications lie outside the scope of my purposes here.

There is, however, another curious aspect to this double tradition of exorcisms and Christian unity.

Many readers will be aware of the fact that the same person who wrote Acts of the Apostles also wrote the Gospel of Luke. Church tradition says this person was a Gentile named Luke who was the physician for Paul. Most scholars and theologians are skeptical of this, as there is no textual evidence to support it, but what most everyone agrees on is that the person who wrote Luke also wrote Acts.

Many readers will also be aware that the writers of Matthew and Luke used the Gospel of Mark as a primary source. This is a well-established idea within modern Biblical scholarship that virtually all scholars agree upon.

One of the stories that Luke used from Mark is the first exorcism story mentioned above, where Jesus asserts that “anyone who is not against us is for us.” Thus, the writer of Luke seems to contradict himself between his two volumes: in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus asserts that anyone driving out demons in his name is “for us;” but in Acts of the Apostles, it is clear that only those “in the group” can drive out demons.

How can we explain this contradiction? Many theories may no doubt account for Luke’s change in tone, but there are two explanations that I think are most likely.

First, perhaps Luke simply made a mistake. The editing process for writers of the 1st century wasn’t exactly like it is today. There were no word processors with scroll bars and word searches to review one’s work. Furthermore, several years probably passed in between the writing of Luke and Acts. By the time he wrote Acts, the writer of Luke may simply have forgotten the story of Jesus and the exorcists, or may not have given consideration to the contradiction he was creating. Minor theological inconsistencies like that are not uncommon between Luke’s two volumes, and most can probably be explained as a result of Luke’s reliance on many different sources. He frequently copied Mark word for word, but Mark’s theology (like the theology of any single writer in the 1st century) was not always uniformly consistent with all possible accounts available at the time. We have already seen, after all, how varied Christian beliefs were in the 1st century. Luke’s minor inconsistencies can no doubt be chalked up to his use of multiple sources that would have had competing theologies.

A second possible explanation is that Luke simply changed his mind. After writing the Gospel of Luke, where he repeated Mark’s story calling for unity among Christians, Luke may have had experiences that led him to see Paul’s version of Christianity as primary among all competing groups. Thus, he illustrated that change of heart by writing a story in his second volume, Acts, that was specifically geared toward “taking back” the theology of unity he had expressed in his first volume.

Even with all that, there is still one curious aspect of this story left to analyze. As we saw above, both Luke and Matthew relied heavily on Mark as a primary source. We also saw that Luke, in the Gospel of Luke, repeats Mark’s story about Jesus and the exorcists. Matthew, however, does not repeat this story. Yet he does use a form of the adage “whoever is not against us is for us.”

The curious thing about this, however, is that Matthew turns it around into the negative. He has Jesus utter these words during a dispute with the Pharisees over his authority to cast out demons (sound familiar?). In Matthew’s version of the story, Jesus says: “He who is not with me is against me.”

Now, instead of a story about casting out demons where Jesus asserts that anyone working in his name is “part of the group,” for Matthew, Jesus uses a situation of casting out demons to argue for exclusion – whoever is not with me is against me.

This simply provides more evidence to the historical context we saw above. In the 1st century, there were many different Christian groups all vying for primacy and exclusivity, and while some writers urged reconciliation and unity, many other writers expressed their belief in the primacy of their own community’s tradition. Mark urged unity. Matthew urged exclusivity. Luke first urged unity, then later urged exclusivity.

What these stories ultimately tell us is that Christianity is, and always has been, a highly personal faith system, malleable to many different worldviews and spiritual tastes. This is, no doubt, one of the reasons for its rise to prominence and continued primacy among the various religions of the world. Christianity, by its very nature, is open to interpretation.

In my opinion, this is something that Christians should celebrate, rather than attempt to whitewash or gloss over.

The Synoptic Problem, Part II

2009-12-09T00:09:00.004-05:00

Read Part I

THE DOUBLE TRADITION

As we have seen, wide consensus exists within modern scholarship that Mark was written first, with both Matthew and Luke using Mark as a primary source. The evidence to support this is profound and compelling, while the evidence against it is very weak.

That does not solve the entire Synoptic Problem, however.

At the start of this account, I noted that all three Gospels share a significant portion of their material in common. The material shared between Mark, Matthew, and Luke is commonly referred to as the “Triple Tradition.” This material appears in all three accounts, with Mark being the originator - thus "Markan priority."

However, in addition to containing a majority of Mark’s material, Matthew and Luke also share a significant portion of material that does not come from Mark. This shared material accounts for about 25% of Matthew and Luke’s content. Since it is shared exclusively between Matthew and Luke, it is frequently referred to as the “Double Tradition.”

The stories accounting for the "Triple Tradition" make up 76% of Mark, 45% of Matthew, and 41% of Luke (the percentages are different because the lengths of these three texts are different). Additionally, stories from the "Double Tradition" account for 25% of Matthew and 23% of Luke. Among the synoptics, Luke has the most "unique" material, at 35% of his Gospel's total content.

If we accept Markan priority, as virtually all scholars do, then where did this Double Tradition material come from? Since it isn’t found in Mark, the writers of Matthew and Luke must have gotten it from somewhere else.

As with the issue of Gospel priority in the Triple Tradition, many theories abound to explain the content unique to Matthew and Luke. In fact, this issue of the Double Tradition has occupied scholars far more frequently than the issue of the Triple Tradition.

THE Q HYPOTHESIS

Beginning in the 19th century, several German scholars developed the theory that this common Matthew-Luke material came from a source no longer in existence – a source used by both Matthew and Luke in addition to their use of Mark. Based on the fact that this common material is almost exclusively made up of sayings attributed to Jesus, these scholars proposed a “Sayings Gospel” – an early text made up of sayings of Jesus, available to Matthew and Luke, but no longer in existence. This source has come to be known as “Q” – which is simply short for the German word quelle, which means “source.”

Over the years, the Q Hypothesis has become more and more widely accepted, and today many scholars base much of their work on the idea that Q existed.

A significant number of scholars, however, have been skeptical of this hypothetical source and the numerous historical conclusions that have been drawn from it. For a period of time in the early 20th century, the theory began to lose steam as scholars tended to think it was too fantastical.

However, the discovery in the 1940’s of a complete text of the Gospel of Thomas gave new life to the Q Hypothesis. Although debate continues to this day over the appropriate dating of Thomas, its discovery proved that at least part of the Q Hypothesis was true: Sayings Gospels did exist in earliest Christianity.

The Gospel of Thomas. This text was found in a cache near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. It is a 4th century text written in the Egyptian language Coptic. Most scholars date the original text of the Gospel of Thomas somewhere between 60 and 140 C.E., and originally written in Greek.

Though Thomas is definitely not the lost Q document, the text of Thomas is in the format of a Sayings Gospel. It provides some 100 or so sayings attributed to Jesus, without a chronological framework or any biographical narratives. It’s just a list of things Jesus said – meaning it is exactly like the kind of document that German scholars of the 19th century predicted in regards to Q.

In addition to Thomas’ proof that Sayings Gospels existed in early Christianity, there are a number of other strong arguments supporting the Q Hypothesis.

First, the study of Markan priority has already shown that Matthew and Luke were using other texts to create their accounts. They weren’t just making it up or using stories they knew from oral tradition. Furthermore, in the opening passage of Luke, the writer tells us explicitly that other writers have already written about Jesus, and that he is basing his account on the “investigation” of these other sources. Thus, it is not unreasonable to assume that Matthew and especially Luke might have used textual sources besides Mark.

Second, some of the sayings from Q are repeated virtually verbatim in both Matthew and Luke, indicating very strongly that these stories were coming from a textual source, and not from two different writers independently telling the same oral stories with exactly the same words.

Finally, when evaluating the Q content for its literary quality, certain literary themes become evident. One of the primary themes is apocalypticism. Q imagines God bursting violently into human time to end the material world and inaugurate the kingdom of heaven. Yet neither Luke nor Matthew’s account, outside of the Q material, is nearly so apocalyptic in its theology and eschatology (ideas about the end of the world). This indicates, then, that Q was a separate document, much more apocalyptic in nature than either Matthew or Luke’s account.

THE FARRER HYPOTHESIS

The Q Hypothesis is one that is accepted by many scholars. As we saw above, however, there are a significant number of scholars and theologians who doubt Q’s existence. Many of these scholars, instead, accept the theory put forth by British scholar Austin Farrer. The Farrer Hypothesis solves the problem of the Double Tradition by simply suggesting that Luke, writing after Matthew, used both Mark and Matthew as sources. Thus, the Double Tradition material – the material common between only Matthew and Luke – is explained by Luke’s reliance on Matthew’s account. Luke was copying Matthew.

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable argument. It follows in line with the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor. That principle states that the simplest answer is usually the right answer. In this case, it is certainly simpler to just assume Luke used Matthew, rather than to argue a hypothetical source used independently by both Luke and Matthew and no longer in existence to modern scholarship.

Some of the same arguments put forth in support of Q are also put forth in support of Lukan reliance on Matthew.

First, since some of the stories are written identically, word-for-word, in both texts, this could indicate that Luke was simply copying Matthew.

Second, when Luke tells us in his opening passage that he is using other textual sources, it is not unreasonable to assume that those other sources were Mark and Matthew (as opposed to Mark and Q).

Third, there is no obvious reference to anything like a Q document in the writings of the earliest Church fathers. If such a document existed, it was already long lost by the 2nd century.

Finally, there is the aforementioned issue of “minor agreements” between Luke and Matthew. We saw this issue earlier in support of the idea of Matthean priority in the Triple Tradition (the material common between Matthew, Mark, and Luke). It is also used to support the idea that Luke was using Matthew as a source.

Recall that the “minor agreements” argument centers on stories that are shared between all three synoptic Gospels (again, the Triple Tradition). In those shared stories, there are a number of places where Matthew and Luke use the same word against Mark. Thus, the example of Jesus and his captors: Matthew and Luke say he was “hit,” while Mark says he was “struck.” One scholar, Franz Neirynck, has identified as many as 347 instances of these “minor agreements,” including at least sixteen spots where Luke and Matthew agree on five or more words against Mark. For those who support the Farrer Hypothesis, this suggests strongly that Luke was copying Matthew - how else could one explain these frequent word agreements? Extrapolating from there, this would mean that the Double Tradition material (the stories common between Luke and Matthew but not found in Mark) didn’t come from a second text (Q), but simply from Luke copying it out of Matthew. This also would mean that Markan priority still holds, because the “minor agreements” come from Luke copying Matthew, not from Mark editing the other two.

ANALYSIS OF THE TWO THEORIES

Both the Q Hypothesis and the Farrer Hypothesis have strong evidence to support them. So which one is right?

Ultimately, unless the Q document is found, we probably won’t ever know for sure. But it does seem clear that one or the other is the correct answer, and my personal feeling is that the Q Hypothesis probably best explains all the available evidence.

Consider a few things:

First, supporters of the Farrer Hypothesis have a fairly strong argument with the “minor agreements” of Matthew and Luke. Mark wrote first, Matthew copied, and then Luke copied both Mark and Matthew, frequently using Matthew’s choice of words when telling a Markan story (thus, the "minor agreements").

However, these word agreements could easily be the result of later scribes attempting to harmonize the two accounts. We don’t, of course, have original copies of any of the texts of the New Testament. Our earliest copies are hundreds of years removed from the originals, and while numerous copies of the Gospels exist from the early Medieval period, they have a notorious lack of unanimity. Scribes were hand-copying these texts. Mistakes were to be expected and were very common. In addition, these scribes frequently edited the texts to fit their own particular theology or literary purposes. It is not outside the realm of possibility that many of the “minor agreements” of Luke and Matthew could be the result of scribal editing. Additionally, as we saw above, coincidence could account for many of the “minor agreements,” particularly considering that Mark was writing in “Pidgin-Greek” and Luke and Matthew both write in a higher form of Greek.

Second, there is the issue of no references to a Q-like document by any early Church fathers. While this is an interesting point, a lack of references by folks like Origen and Iranaeus does not preclude the existence of such a text. Early Church fathers were not attempting to provide exhaustive lists of all the Christian texts they knew about. Mostly, their discussion of non-canonical Christian texts centered on those texts they believed to be heretical. There is no reason to suppose that any early Church father would have found Q to be heretical. Furthermore, we know that Sayings Gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas, existed among ancient Christian communities, so a lack of commentary by the Church fathers may simply indicate that Q was already long lost by the time Christianity was becoming institutionalized.

Third, recall the discussion above about literary themes in the Q document. Q is notoriously apocalyptic. Almost every story from Q has an apocalyptic twist. Yet within the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, virtually no apocalypticism exists except in that Double Tradition (Q) material. If you remove the Double Tradition material, neither Matthew nor Luke could be described as texts that are apocalyptic in nature. This lends profound support to the idea that this Double Tradition material is coming from a second source that was theologically slanted toward apocalypticism, rather than from Matthew inserting these apocalyptic stories into his otherwise non-apocalyptic account and then Luke copying him. I can simply think of no good way to explain this without the Q Hypothesis.

Finally, and most importantly, there is the issue of the birth and resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke. This final point is the real “deal breaker” for me in terms of supporting the Q theory over the Farrer Hypothesis.

Anyone who reads the birth stories of Matthew and Luke will notice immediately that they differ in dramatic and profound ways. There is practically nothing similar between Luke and Matthew’s accounts of Jesus’ birth. Even the genealogy of Jesus between the two accounts is totally different. If Luke was using Matthew as a source, why does his virgin birth story vary so dramatically from Matthew’s?

The same is true of the resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke. There are hardly any similarities at all. They are essentially two completely different versions of the same story. Again, if Luke was using Matthew, shouldn’t he have followed Matthew in his resurrection accounts?

Recall that Mark’s Gospel contains no birth narrative and no resurrection narrative. Mark begins with Jesus getting baptized, and ends with the women finding the empty tomb and fleeing in terror. Luke’s birth and resurrection accounts, then, could not have come from Mark. If he also was using Matthew, one would expect his birth and resurrection stories to be at least somewhat similar, if not very similar, to Matthew’s. Yet they could not possibly be more different and still be describing the same thing. Why would Luke give precedence to Matthew on sayings of Jesus (the Double Tradition material), but totally ignore Matthew on the birth and resurrection of Jesus?

To accept the Farrer Hypothesis – that Luke used Matthew as a second source – one would have to assume that Luke found Matthew’s depiction of Jesus’ sayings to be compelling and historically accurate, but found his depictions of Jesus birth and resurrection to be totally off-base. Furthermore, since Luke clearly didn’t get his birth and resurrection stories from Matthew, then where, exactly did he get them from? Not Mark. Mark doesn’t contain any such stories. One is left, again, with hypothesizing documents that no longer exist, which Luke had access to, and which he found more compelling than Matthew’s accounts.

As I said, this last point is really the deal breaker for me. Matthew and Luke have such profoundly varying accounts of birth and resurrection that the Farrer Hypothesis of Lukan reliance on Matthew begins to break down in irreversible ways. Since the only other logical conclusion is that Matthew and Luke wrote independently but used the same secondary source for their Double Tradition material, I accept that the Q Hypothesis is the most appropriate answer to this aspect of the Synoptic Problem.

HOW IT HAPPENED

Here is how I believe the formation of the New Testament Gospels most likely took place.

The Gospel of Mark began as a collection of stories about Jesus based on the teachings of Peter. They were perhaps first written down by Peter’s secretary – a man tradition tells us was named Mark. This “Proto-Mark” was perhaps written in the early 60’s C.E.

Around 70-72 C.E., after Peter had died and after Jerusalem had been sacked by the Romans, Proto-Mark was expanded into roughly the form we have today. Its stories were categorized to fit with a portion of the Jewish liturgical calendar, thus making it a Jewish-Christian liturgical text to be used in the synagogue. It fell into circulation among Christian communities over the next ten to fifteen years.

Around 85 C.E., the writer of Matthew took the Gospel of Mark and expanded it, because Mark had only covered about six months of the Jewish calendar. Matthew may have originally been written in Aramaic. Matthew completed what Mark had started, covering all twelve months of the liturgical calendar. As part of that expansion, he included a number of sayings of Jesus that he drew from the now-lost source we call the Q document. He may also have used a third source – called “M” in scholarly circles – from which he drew his unique resurrection and birth accounts. Like Mark’s Gospel, Matthew may also have started out as a “proto” Gospel and was later expanded into the version we know today.

A few years later, around 90 C.E., the writer of Luke took up pen and parchment to write his own account of Jesus’ life. He was not familiar with the Gospel of Matthew or Matthew’s source M, but he did have the Gospel of Mark and the Q document. He also had at least one other source called “L” – representing the material that is unique to his Gospel. Like Matthew with the M material, Luke’s L material informed his unique birth and resurrection accounts.

These “M” and “L” sources, by the way, may have been textual or oral, or may have simply been the writers of Luke and Matthew developing their own Jesus stories based on their reading of the Jewish scriptures.

Finally, around 100 C.E., the Gospel of John was produced, with its writer being at least familiar with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This familiarity was most likely indirect, meaning that the writer was familiar with the content of the three synoptic Gospels, but did not necessarily have copies of these Gospels on the desk in front of him as he wrote. He also likely used a number of other sources, both textual and oral, with a heavy reliance on the traditions passed down by the apostle John and his followers.

CONCLUSION

The Synoptic Problem is one that has kept scholars busy for many centuries. Two hundred years of academic research into the Triple Tradition has overturned the long standing conclusion that Matthew wrote his Gospel first. At this point, Markan priority is well enough established that without new and profound evidence, the conclusion is not likely to change.

The theories about secondary sources, however, including the Q Hypothesis and the Farrer Hypothesis (not to mention half a dozen others that I have not illustrated here), practically beg for more research.

If the Q document is ever found, the question will, of course, be convincingly answered. But barring such a monumental archaeological discovery, the question of the Double Tradition in Matthew and Luke will continue to remain a topic of disagreement and debate for years to come in the world of New Testament scholarship.

The Synoptic Problem, Part I

2009-12-07T00:57:00.006-05:00

A 6th century text of the Gospel of Matthew

The Synoptic Problem is a long-standing debate within the field of New Testament scholarship concerning the interrelationships of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The number of different theories addressing this problem is nothing short of awe-inspiring, and attempting to wade through them can be tedious to the point of exasperation. One can imagine a sadistic New Testament professor forcing his first year graduate students to write essays on this issue, just to torture them and weed out the weaklings.

Be that as it may, the question of the interrelationships of these three Gospels is an interesting and important one – interesting from a historical standpoint, and important from a theological standpoint. For that reason, I have done some footwork on this issue and will present it here in a way that I hope will be engaging to the average Christian or average enthusiast in matters of historical importance.

THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM

To put it simply, the Synoptic Problem addresses the fact that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all very similar at first glance. These three Gospels, in fact, are called “synoptic” for that very reason: they can be “seen together;” they tell stories that seem to be seen through the same eyes.

As an illustration of this, consider the fact that about 93% of Mark’s Gospel is regurgitated in Matthew, and roughly 80% is repeated in Luke. You can essentially read Matthew or Luke and get most of what is contained in Mark. Furthermore, counting the material that Luke and Matthew share with Mark, and adding to it the material they share exclusively between themselves, Matthew and Luke have about 60% of their Gospels in common.

This diagram shows that 76% of Mark's content is regurgitated in both Matthew and Luke. This material is called the "Triple Tradition." It's present in all three Gospels. Individually, Matthew includes 92% of Mark's total content, and Luke includes 79% of Mark's total content. Additionally, Luke shares about 25% of Matthew's non-Markan content. This material found in both Matthew and Luke, and only those two Gospels, is called the "Double Tradition."

Thus, these three Gospels are “synoptic.” They can be seen together. They share a lot of the same stories.

The “problem,” then, becomes an academic and historical one: Where did this material come from, who wrote it down first, who copied from whom, and when one writer changed a story from another writer, why did they do it, what does that change signify theologically, and whose version is more authoritative?

Some of those questions, particularly the last few, are beyond the scope of this essay, but it simply helps to illustrate just how complex and far reaching this issue goes.

THE AUGUSTINIAN HYPOTHESIS AND MATTHEAN PRIORITY

From as early as the 2nd century C.E., Church Fathers such as Iranaeus and Origen had stated their belief in what is known as “Matthean priority” – that is, the idea that Matthew was the first Gospel to be written, and Mark and Luke both used Matthew as their primary source.

In the 5th century, St. Augustine of Hippo – famous for his “Confessions” – elaborated what was by then a Church tradition of Matthean priority. He argued that Matthew came first, followed by Mark, Luke, and John. If you have ever wondered why the Gospels of the New Testament are presented in that order, this is why. It’s what the Church believed was the chronological order that the Gospels were written in.

Augustine analyzed many of the similarities among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and concluded that Mark had simply “abbreviated” Matthew (Mark is, in fact, much shorter than Matthew), and that each successive writer had used the Gospels written before – thus, Mark used Matthew, Luke used Mark and Matthew, and John used all three.

Prior to the Enlightenment and the genesis of modern New Testament scholarship, this Augustinian view was more or less universally accepted.

THE STORR HYPOTHESIS AND MARKAN PRIORITY

In the late 18th century, German theologian Gottlieb Christian Storr became the first prominent theologian and scholar to break with the Matthean priority of Church tradition and suggest, instead, that Mark had been written first, and Matthew and Luke had copied from Mark.

This idea did not gain much acceptance until the 19th century, after Storr’s death. During that era, a number of primarily German scholars began working in the field of critical textual scholarship, and ultimately concluded that Storr was right – Mark was written first, with Matthew coming next and copying Mark, and Luke coming third and copying the other two.

ARGUMENTS FOR MARKAN PRIORITY

Throughout the 20th century and into the modern day, this hypothesis of Markan priority has become widely accepted among scholars and theologians alike. Pick up any book on New Testament scholarship, and the author is likely to take it as a presupposition that Mark was the first Gospel to be written.

There are a number of compelling reasons why Markan priority is now almost universally accepted.

First, Mark is the shortest of the three synoptic Gospels. Since Matthew and Luke are so much longer, it makes sense that they were expanding Mark – rather than Mark shortening Matthew or Luke, as Augustine had argued. (As an aside, the idea of a Lukan priority – that Luke was written first – is almost universally rejected among scholars.)

Related to that same argument is that Mark excludes a lot of major scenes in Jesus’ life that are found in both Matthew and Luke – most notably Jesus’ birth and resurrection. If Mark was copying from one or both of the other two, why would he leave out such important events?

Second, many scholars have noted over the years that the language of Mark’s Gospel is very primitive and colloquial. Scholar Bruce Chilton refers to Mark’s language as “pidgin-Greek.” Many people familiar with the Gospel of Mark may find this argument strange, but that is only because our modern English versions of Mark clean up his poor syntax, confusing changes in tense and pronouns, and his idiomatic writing style. In the original Greek, the Gospel of Mark is not exactly high art.

Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, exhibit a reasonably high literary quality. Thus, the argument suggests that since Mark writes in colloquial or “low” Greek, and Matthew and Luke write in literary or “high” Greek, the likelihood is that they were better trained writers, writing after Mark and “cleaning up” his language. If Mark had been using either Matthew or Luke, he would not have “dumbed down” the literary writing of his sources. On the other hand, it makes sense that Matthew and Luke would reword difficult and obtuse phrases from Mark to make them more palatable and literate.

Third, only a very small amount of material in Mark – about 3% – is exclusive to Mark. Almost every scene in Mark’s Gospel is found in some form or another in either Matthew and/or Luke. Yet those few sentences/passages that are exclusive to Mark are quite interesting. In every case, without fail, they are stories that depict Jesus in a negative light.

One such case is from chapter 3 of Mark, where Jesus’ family comes to where he is preaching, wanting to take him back home because they think he has gone crazy (literally: “beside himself”). Both Luke and Matthew omit this particular scene, despite using nearly everything else in the passage.

Another example is from Mark chapter 8, where Jesus has to try twice to heal a man of blindness. His first attempt leaves the man only partially able to see, with the man reporting that the people around him “look like trees walking around.” Again, Luke and Matthew omit this story.

What is more likely, that Mark copied Matthew, but added in a few stories that portray Jesus in a negative light, or that Matthew and Luke copied Mark and simply left out the stories that they found distasteful?

Finally, Matthew and Luke seem to be constantly “fixing” Mark’s problematic accounts. For instance, in chapter 6, Mark has the crowd say, in reference to Jesus: “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” This may not seem like a problem phrase to us, but in the patriarchal world of 1st century Judaism, a man would only have been referred to as the son of his mother if the man’s paternity were in question. Even if Jesus’ father was dead, he still would never have been called the son of Mary. Since Mark also contains no birth account (virgin or otherwise), and no reference anywhere to Jesus’ father (Joseph or otherwise), any 1st century reader of Mark would have been left with the obvious impression that Jesus was illegitimate.

When copying this scene into his own account, Matthew makes a few subtle, but profound, changes. In Matthew’s version, the crowd says: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary?”

Now it’s not Jesus who is the carpenter, but Jesus’ father – who we already know from Matthew’s birth account was a man named Joseph. And instead of being the “son of Mary,” Jesus now simply has a mother who is named Mary. Luke’s account makes a similar change, dropping the reference to his mother all together, and simply calling him “Joseph’s son.”

These are subtle alterations, but they speak volumes about who was copying from whom. Surely Mark did not change the other accounts to imply Jesus was illegitimate; clearly Matthew and Luke are the ones doing the copying and changing here.

Another example also comes from Mark chapter 6. There, Mark tells us that Jesus “could not do any miracles” in Nazareth. Jesus then marvels at the Nazorean’s lack of faith. Again, we see a subtle, but profound change in Matthew’s account. There, Jesus “did not do any miracles there because of their lack of faith.” No longer is Jesus incapable of doing miracles; rather, Jesus consciously chooses not to do any miracles because of their lack of faith.

Again, this seems to be an obvious case of Matthew changing Mark to make Jesus look better, and not Mark changing Matthew to make Jesus look worse.

In addition to all these, there are also a few scattered clues here and there. In Luke chapter 4, for instance, the writer describes Jesus teaching in Nazareth. Jesus tells the crowd that he won’t do any signs and miracles for them, like he did in Capernaum. Yet Luke’s Jesus had not yet been to Capernaum at this point in the narrative. This problem of cohesion is easily solved when one looks at Mark. In Mark, when Jesus is teaching in Nazareth, he has, indeed, already been through Capernaum working miracles and prophesying. This is a strong indication that Luke was intimately familiar with the chronology and layout of Mark’s Gospel.

ARGUMENTS FOR MATTHEAN PRIORITY

Despite all these arguments, there are still a few scholars here and there who stick by Church tradition of Matthean priority. The modern argument suggests that Matthew wrote first, followed by Luke, who used Matthew. Then Mark came third, redacting (editing) both of the others. This theory was first proposed by scholar Johann Griesbach, and is therefore referred to as the Griesbach Hypothesis.

Johann Griesbach, circa 1800

Generally, Griesbach supporters point to the fact that Church tradition, going back as far as the 2nd century, has argued for Matthean priority. Surely those 2nd century Church leaders, some of whom lived just a generation or two removed from the Gospel era, would have known what they were talking about when they asserted that Matthew was written first.

That is a reasonable argument, but it certainly is not enough to cast doubt on the very powerful arguments for Markan priority.

Another argument supporting Matthean priority relates to the so-called “minor agreements” of Luke and Matthew. These are cases where all three Gospels tell the same story, but Luke and Matthew use a word in common that Mark does not use.

For instance, in the story of Jesus being beaten by his captors, Mark says that they “struck” him in the face and demanded that he prophesy to them. Luke and Matthew both tell the same story, but instead of using the word “strike,” they both use the term, “hit” (or “smote” in the King James Version). Would they have both changed Mark’s word to the same alternate word? As the argument goes, this shows that Matthew wrote first, Luke copied, and Mark redacted.

This does not seem a very compelling argument, particularly up against the arguments in favor of Markan priority. Coincidence could easily account for such minor word agreements between Luke and Matthew.

However, the issue of “minor agreements” becomes more important in considering secondary sources used by the writers of the synoptic Gospels.

The second part of this account will, therefore, look at the issue of secondary sources in the synoptic Gospels. After looking at that, we will consider a possible scenario for how the Gospels were formed.

Read Part II

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part XII

2009-12-05T04:18:00.012-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

Read Part VII

Read Part VIII

Read Part IX

Read Part X

Read Part XI

THE DEMONIZATION OF LOUIS KESEBERG

Louis Keseberg, the most notorious member of the Donner Party

On April 17th, the fourth relief party arrived. According to a diary kept by the team leader: “Entered the cabins and a horrible scene presented itself – human bodies terribly mutilated, legs, arms, and skulls scattered in every direction.”

The historical existence of this diary, however, has been the subject of debate. It was published in a California newspaper later that year, but this paper had a record for grossly exaggerating and sensationalizing the accounts of the Donner Party.

The journal in question has never been found, and most historians doubt that it ever existed; it was supposedly written by the team’s leader – a fur tracker who was probably illiterate and certainly not educated enough to have written the flowery language the diary contains. In addition to that, the diary misspells the name of its supposed author – spelling it “Fellun” instead of “Fallon.” Most likely, this diary was invented by the newspaper that published it.

In any event, the “diary” goes on to describe at length rather ghastly discoveries on the part of the rescuers, with numerous accusations against Louis Keseberg. He is accused of raiding the dead bodies for their organs. He is accused of making soups out of livers and intestines. He is accused of eating brains and hearts. He is accused of ignoring available cattle beef, uncovered by the melting snow, in favor of human flesh. He is further accused of stealing the Donners’ money. On this account, Keseberg’s own story agrees. Keseberg stated that they accused him of stealing the money and threatened to hang him if he didn’t tell them where it was. He finally relented out of fear of his life, giving them the gold he had and telling them where he had buried the silver.

In later years, Louis Keseberg would become the most infamous member of the Donner Party, largely thanks to the sensationalist frontier newspapers of California. As the last survivor – one who had lived out of necessity for at least six to seven weeks solely on human flesh – he was vilified as a “man-eater” and cannibal. As we have already seen, he was accused of killing young George Foster for food. We have also seen that he was accused of proudly telling William Eddy that he had eaten his son. Because of the issue of the Donners' money, he was accused of staying put on purpose, despite being strong enough to leave with earlier parties, in order to loot the belongings of everyone who had died or fled. He was accused not only of stealing the Donners' money, but also of killing Tamzene Donner in order to take it. After returning to California following his ordeal, he actually sued one of his rescuers for spreading slanderous stories about him. He won the suit, but was awarded only one dollar in compensation. He became the butt of jokes and was referred to as “Keseberg the Cannibal.” Rumors were passed that he still had the “taste” for cannibalism and would frequently threaten to eat people.

There are, no doubt, several reasons why Keseberg was vilified this way. The first is that he was simply an easy target, having been the last survivor at the winter encampment – who was left to dispute his story about the Donners' money and the death of Tamzene Donner? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he was apparently one of those people who tended to leave a bad impression on others. Even before his trip with the Donner Party, acquaintances had described him in letters as “eccentric” and “unsociable.” Having traveled with him for months prior to the winter captivity, the members of the Donner Party saw that he had a violent and explosive temper. He was widely known to verbally and even physically abuse his wife. He was apparently banished temporarily from the wagon train over this. In later life, he was tried for assault on two different occasions – although with the ridicule and vilification he must have constantly received, it is little wonder he wound up in fights.

In any case, Louis Keseberg’s story is a sad one. Despite being apparently well-educated, his life seems to have been one tragedy after another. The Donner Party tragedy took both his children (he had already lost another child prior to 1846), and left him with the reputation of being a thief, liar, murderer, and mindless cannibal. Afterwards, he had eight more children; all but one predeceased him (the last lived to the age of ninety, dying in the late 1940’s). Two of these children were evidently mentally handicapped. He outlived his wife by nearly twenty years. In every new business venture he started, he was vilified and treated as a laughingstock. After serving as the skipper of one of John Sutter’s river supply boats for several years, he was said to have lost his job because the passengers feared he would kill and eat them while they slept. One passenger, in what is no doubt a much more honest account, said that during the night he could hear Keseberg crying out in nightmares. When Keseberg purchased a small hotel in Sacramento, jokes abounded about the dangers of boarding in his rooms. The hotel burned down about a year later. Sometime afterward, he bought a brewery – it was destroyed after several years by a flood. By the time Keseberg died in the late 1890’s, he was penniless and apparently homeless, dying in a hospital for the poor.

No amount of historical revision can justify Keseberg’s apparently violent temper and tendency to abuse his wife. And while it is impossible to know his motivations for certain, his decision to remain behind and not travel with the third relief party seems difficult to explain. The others who stayed were all too sick to travel, with the exception of Tamzene Donner. But Mrs. Donner is reported in numerous sources to have insisted upon staying with her dying husband. Keseberg had evidently seriously injured his foot sometime during the winter, and this was his reason for not joining the earlier refugee parties (such as the first party, which took out his wife and daughter). Patrick Breen refers twice to Louis Keseberg being sick and unable to get out of bed. But it seems that this foot injury was sufficiently healed by March that he could have left with Eddy and Foster. Yet those same accounts that tell us Keseberg was healthy enough to travel also tell us all the other outrageous stories about Keseberg boiling brains for soup. Keseberg himself insisted that his foot did not heal sufficiently until long after Eddy and Foster had left. But was he lying? Again, it’s impossible to say for sure.

Despite all those difficulties, what seems apparent is that Keseberg did not deserve the treatment he got later in life. He became the cannibalistic face of the Donner Party; he literally was never able to live that reputation down. Although he survived for nearly fifty years after the Donner Party tragedy, it’s not unreasonable to say that his life was taken from him during the winter of 1846-1847.

THE CASUALTIES

In all, forty-one members of the Donner Party met their end in the winter of 1846-1847. Additionally, two young children of the Graves family, having survived the rescue and the trip into Sacramento, died later that summer, having never recovered from their ordeal. Thus, the total casualties from the Donner Party tragedy were forty-three lives.

The Breen family was the only family group of the Donner Party to survive completely intact, including an infant that was still nursing. That infant, Isabella Breen, would become the last surviving member of the Donner Party, dying in 1935 in California.

The Breen Family

The Reed family also survived the winter in the mountains, but Margaret Reed’s mother, Sarah Keyes, died earlier in 1846, on the wagon train in Kansas.

The Reed family in the early 1850's. James is to the far left, and the woman on the far right is Virginia Reed. Mary Donner is standing on the right side of the steps in the center. There are nine people in this photograph, but two of those standing on the steps in the center of the picture are difficult to see, as they are blurred out. In the 1850's, pictures required long exposure times, and the children standing there were unable to stand still, thus resulting in a blurry, ghostly image. (Thanks to Donner historian Kristin Johnson for the identifications.)

Patty Reed in old age

All the children of George Donner’s family survived. George and his wife, however, perished in the mountains. Eliza Donner, three years old in 1846, later wrote a book about the events, the only surviving member to write a book-length account. It was published in 1911.

Eliza Donner

Eliza Donner as a young woman

George’s daughter Leanna, twelve years old at the time, became the last living member of the Donner Party old enough to remember the events, dying in 1930.

Leanna Donner

Jacob Donner went west with his wife, six children, and two stepchildren. Of those nine people, only three survived the winter. Among the dead were Jacob and his wife Elizabeth, their three youngest sons Isaac, Samuel, and Lewis, and Jacob’s stepson William Hook.

George Donner, son of Jacob. He is sometimes confused with his uncle, also named George Donner. It was his uncle who was the namesake of the Donner Party. This "young" George was 9 years old during the winter of 1846-1847.

"Young" George Donner in later life

The Murphy family was the largest single family of the Donner Party, with thirteen people. Five of them died in the mountains, and another was killed when a firearm he was cleaning accidentally discharged. Included among the dead were Levinah Jackson, the matriarch of the clan, her grandson George Foster, son-in-law William Pike, granddaughter Catherine Pike, son Landrum, and son Lemuel.

William Murphy in later life

Mary Murphy. A teenager during the winter of 1846-1847, she remained deeply troubled for many years after surviving the Donner Party tragedy, as her expression in this picture seems to indicate. She died young, at the age of 35.

William Eddy had traveled west with his wife and two children. All three of them died in the Sierra Nevada, but William survived to become one of the heroes of the Donner Party, though his exaggerated accounts would cause other survivors to dub him “Lying Eddy.”

Among the four members of the Keseberg family – immigrants from Germany – their two children both perished. Louis and his wife Philippine survived to have eight more children, but their lives were marred by stories of cannibalism that haunted Louis until his death.

Nearly as large as the Murphy family, the Graves family brought twelve people west with them, joining the Donner Party shortly after they entered Utah. Both Franklin Graves and his wife Elizabeth died in the mountains, as did their son-in-law Jay Fosdick, and their five-year-old son Franklin Jr. Son Jonathan and daughter Elizabeth survived the ordeal in the mountains, only to die later in the year from continued illness. The oldest Graves daughters, Sarah and Mary, were both married shortly after their rescue from the mountains.

Sarah Graves

Mary Graves

Both their husbands would eventually be murdered – Mary’s just a year later, in 1848, and Sarah’s about six years later in 1854. Sarah Graves was thus widowed twice in eight years, and lost both parents and three siblings to starvation and exposure, all before the age of 30. She eventually died early of heart disease at the age of 46.

William McCutchen and his wife joined the Donner Party in Wyoming. They had one child, an infant daughter named Harriet. William left the Donner Party in October to ride ahead for supplies and was not able to return until late February. In the meantime, his wife Amanda left in December with the Forlorn Hope, one of only seven to survive that group. Their daughter was left in the care of the Graves family. It’s hard to imagine how Amanda McCutchen could have left her daughter behind in the care of strangers in the frozen wilderness, but she no doubt hoped to be able to return quickly, or even meet her husband on the way, coming in the other direction. In any case, Harriett McCutchen did not survive the winter. The McCutchens would later have four more children, and Amanda would die giving birth to the fourth.

The final family of the Donner Party consisted of a German man and woman whose last name was Wolfinger. Little is known about them. Mr. Wolfinger died before the caravan reached the mountains, apparently killed by one of his assistants. His wife survived the ordeal and remarried later in life.

Traveling together with the families of the Donner Party were a number of hired hands, mostly cow herders, wagon drivers, and handymen. They totaled twenty-one in all, including two Indians sent by John Sutter to help guide Charles Stanton’s relief party. Of these twenty-one, only five survived. The dead included both Indian guides, who may have been the only two members of the Donner Party actually killed for food. Also perishing were Donner employees Charley Burger, Antonio (surname unknown), John Denton, Luke Halloran, Samuel Shoemaker, and Charles Stanton; Reed employees Baylis Williams, Milt Elliot, and James Smith; Keseberg companions Mr. Hardcoop, August Spitzer, and Joseph Reinhardt; Breen companion Patrick Dolan; and Graves wagon driver John Snyder. The high mortality rate among these teamsters is no doubt the result of families becoming more and more stingy with their own provisions once starvation and rationing began to set in. Furthermore, as workers employed to keep the cattle and drive the wagons, these men no doubt carried the burden of the hardest work throughout the time on trail and after arriving in camp. By the time the food began to run out, they were likely the first to go hungry, and the least prepared for it. Three of them, of course, died before ever reaching the mountains (Luke Halloran, Mr. Hardcoop, and John Snyder).

Jean Trudeau. Only five Donner Party teamsters survived the trip west. Two of those actually left the wagon train early and were never part of the winter entrapment. A third was a family maidservant who was not actually a "teamster" for the group. Thus, among the male teamsters who were actually stranded in the mountains with the Donner Party, Jean Trudeau was one of only two who survived. The other was a teenager named Noah James, who appears to have died just a few years later.

CONCLUSION

The story of the Donner Party has become one of the most infamous events in American pioneer history. If my own familiarity with the event, prior to starting this in-depth account, is any indication, most people’s knowledge of the Donner Party story is that it is about a bunch of people who ate each other during a winter in the mountains. This cultural “meme” is no doubt thanks to the many sensationalist accounts of the event in the years and decades after it happened.

But when one studies the history of the Donner Party, one finds not a bunch of crazed cannibals feasting on each other, but rather an account of pioneer Americans faced with unthinkable life or death decisions which, for the most part, they faced with grace, courage, and dignity. It’s a true “American” story, rife with the pioneer spirit, staring down hardships, and beating the odds.

This story forces us to question some of our most deeply held beliefs, to face one of our most deeply held cultural taboos. Many people might think that if they were faced with the same situation, they would rather expire than eat the flesh of the dead. But the Donner Party story, with its three separate recurrences of cannibalism, demonstrates that this deeply held taboo only goes as far as normative wellbeing allows. When stripped of the security of daily life and routine, and left with nothing but the choice between death and cannibalism, the Donner Party story shows us that, in fact, most – if not all – would choose the latter.

SOURCES/REFERENCES

I used a number of sources in compiling this account of the Donner Party. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, nor I have made any attempt to use an official bibliographic format, but I have included all the primary sources that informed my account.

1. New Light on the Donner Party. This site is maintained by Donner historian Kristin Johnson, and it is chock full of everything you need to know about the Donner Party story, including a detailed "chronology of events," as well as extremely well-researched biographical information about every known member of the Donner Party.

2. Donner Party Diary. This site is maintained by Donner historian Daniel Rosen. Like the site listed above, it was invaluable to me in developing my account. Several of my posted pictures, mostly of geographic areas of interest, came from Mr. Rosen's website. This website was also my source for quotations from Quinn Thornton's 1849 book on the Donner Party.

3. The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate. This is an e-book publication of Eliza Donner's book about the Donner Party. Many of the posted pictures of individuals were drawn from this site.

4. Calisphere. This website provided a number of very high quality photographs, particularly the ones of Patrick Breen and his diary.

5. California In-Doors and Out. This is an e-book of Eliza Farnham's 1856 book that discussed the Donner Party, based on interviews with the Breens.

6. History of the Donner Party. This is a late 19th century account of the Donner Party by C.F. McGlashan. As part of his research for this book, he did an extensive interview with Louis Keseberg.

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part XI

2009-12-04T22:36:00.007-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

Read Part VII

Read Part VIII

Read Part IX

Read Part X

“WE POOR HELPLESS LITTLE MITES SURVIVED”

After the Reed and McCutchen relief party left Truckee Lake with its refugees on March 2nd, those who remained at the main encampment continued to slowly starve to death. James Reed stated that he had left them with seven days’ worth of provisions, but these provisions were scant and highly rationed. Furthermore, it took nearly twice that long for any further help to arrive.

Frances Donner, who was six at the time, would later remark: “Able bodied men and women and strong children died, yet we poor helpless little mites survived.”

Frances Donner

On March 5th, several days after Reed’s party of refugees had left, two of the men he had left behind to help the victims at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek decided to leave. According to one later biographer, these two men determined that it was “sheer madness” for them to stay. Tamzene Donner, wife of George Donner, refused again to leave her sick husband’s side at Alder Creek, but talked the two rescuers into taking her three remaining children – all under the age of seven. Several sources suggest Mrs. Donner paid them to do this. However, the rescuers took them only as far as the Truckee Lake encampment, where the children were left with Mrs. Murphy and Louis Keseberg. The rescuers, with money in hand, apparently didn’t feel the urge to follow through with their agreement, no doubt believing that both George and Tamzene Donner would never make it out of Alder Creek alive.

By the following day, the storm that had passed the Starved Camp now reached Alder Creek, and during the night three-year-old Louis Donner succumbed to starvation. He was the youngest son of Jacob and Elizabeth Donner – Jacob having died several months earlier. His mother was still there at Alder Creek, and the account given by Nicholas Clark (the last of the three rescuers Reed had left behind) states that she was “frantic with grief.” She appears to have joined her son in death within a day or two.

After the storm had finally passed, Nicholas Clark succeeded in shooting a bear cub, finally providing much needed food for the emigrants at Alder Creek. Up until this time, during the second week of March, they had been primarily subsisting on human flesh since late February.

On the evening of March 10th, young George Foster perished in the Murphy cabin at Truckee Lake. Foster was the son of William and Sarah Foster, both of whom had survived the Forlorn Hope expedition.

By this time, the cabin was housing Mrs. Murphy, her son Simon, her grandson George, Louis Keseberg, and four other children, including the three Donner girls left there by the rescuers who had deserted Alder Creek.

According to later accounts, Mrs. Murphy accused Louis Keseberg of killing the child. George Foster was very ill, and Keseberg lay down with him that night to sleep. The next morning he was dead, and Mrs. Murphy believed Keseberg had killed him. It’s hard to know for sure what exactly transpired that night. It is certainly possible that Lavinah Murphy’s accusation was borne from months of physical starvation and mental exhaustion. However, Keseberg’s decision to take the child to bed with him that night also seems strange. Yet the reports we have of this event come from survivors who were no more than six years old at the time, and one account states that Louis Keseberg hung the child “on the wall” after it had died – as though to dry out the flesh. This sounds like polemics against a disliked enemy more than literal history.

In any case, George Foster was dead, and later rescuers would report that his body was cannibalized.

Around the same time that George Foster died, the other infant in Mrs. Murphy’s care – James Eddy – also seems to have perished, although we have no explicit accounts of his death. We know only that he was still alive when Reed’s party left, but was found dead when the third relief party arrived. With his death, William Eddy – who had survived the Forlorn Hope expedition – lost his only remaining family member. His wife and daughter had died a month earlier.

William Eddy

On March 12th, Nicholas Clark – still at Alder Creek – agreed to make the short trip to the Truckee Lake cabins to see if they had any news from the mountains. Since Tamzene Donner’s children had set out with the other two rescuers the day before the most recent snow storm, she feared they had been caught out in the storm. Clark returned to her with news that they had been left safe at Truckee Lake, but he reported to her that “their lives were in danger of a death more violent than starvation.” He reported that he had “witnessed such scenes of horror and suffering” at the Murphy cabin that he decided to leave right away for Sutter’s Fort. One can no doubt use one’s own imagination to figure out what he must have seen at the Murphy cabin.

Clark, together with Jean Trudeau – a Donner family employee who had joined the party in Wyoming – left again the following day, intending to return to California.

Jean Trudeau, one of the few teamsters to survive the disaster.

When they reached Truckee Lake, they ran into the third relief party headed by William Eddy and William Foster.

Biographer Quinn Thornton, writing in 1849 based on Eddy’s account:

A more shocking picture of distress and misfortune cannot be imagined than the scene they witnessed upon their arrival. Many of those who had been detained by the snows had starved to death. Their bodies had been devoured by the wretched survivors and their bones were lying in and around the camps.

Thornton goes on to say that Louis Keseberg made it a point to tell William Eddy that he had eaten Eddy’s dead son. The only thing, according to Thornton’s account, that kept Eddy from killing him on the spot was that Keseberg was so emaciated with hunger and starvation.

Thornton goes on to say that Tamzene Donner offered Eddy “fifteen hundred dollars” to take her children to safety, but Eddy refused to take even a penny, insisting instead on saving them out of his own saintly concern for their well-being.

Though Thornton’s account was the earliest of the Donner Party tragedy, written just two years later, his primary source for the account was William Eddy, and Eddy is always portrayed as the virtuous hero and savior, while the other adult male survivors are always depicted as desperate, vicious cannibals. This is no doubt the reason why some survivors of the Donner Party later came to refer to William Eddy as “Lying Eddy.”

Thornton states that Eddy’s relief party was not able to give any provisions to the camp, and instead left with the only children they could take – the three Donner girls and Simon Murphy. Thornton makes it a point to mention that Nicholas Clark – the rescuer who had been in the process of leaving when the relief party arrived – carried only his pack, leaving “[another] child of the Donners to perish.” This last child was four-year-old Samuel Donner, son of Elizabeth Donner, whose other son, Louis, had died several days earlier. Earlier in his account, Thornton had stated in regards to Clark:

Clark had gone out with Mr. Reed…under the pretense of assisting the emigrants. He was found with a pack of goods upon his back, weighing about forty pounds, and also two guns, about to set off with his booty. This man actually carried away this property, which weighed more than did a child he left behind to perish.

As always, this appears to be Thornton, through Eddy, writing polemically against another legitimate “hero” of the Donner Party. Eddy and Foster, in fact, set out on this “third relief” party to save their own sons. They brought no provisions for anyone but their own team. When they arrived and found their sons dead, only then did they agree to carry out Tamzene Donner’s children.

Left at the camp now were George and Tamzene Donner, their nephew Samuel Donner, Levinah Murphy, and Louis Keseberg. A statement by one of the rescuers with Eddy and Foster, given about two weeks later, on April 1st, said:

When I left the mountains there was still remaining at the cabins: Mr. Keseberg and George Donner the only two men; Mrs. George Donner, one child, and Mrs. Murphy. Mrs. Murphy, Mr. Donner, and the child could not survive many more days when [we] left, but Mrs. Donner and Keseberg could subsist upon the remaining bodies yet some ten days.

Thus, a fourth relief party was formed and set out immediately. The primary purpose of this party, however, was to salvage the campsite, as they did not expect to find anyone alive.

Within a day or two of the third relief party’s exit, Samuel Donner died. He was four years old. Several days after that – roughly a week after Eddy’s party left, and after another snow storm – Mrs. Murphy died. Keseberg was left alone in the Murphy cabin with only human flesh to eat.

Around the end of March, according to Keseberg, Tamzene Donner arrived at his cabin alone, telling him that George Donner - namesake of the Donner Party - had finally died. According to Keseberg’s account, she was determined to set out on foot by herself. Keseberg claimed that she told him there was money in their camp at Alder Creek, and asked him to retrieve it for her and make sure her family received it if she died and he survived. He apparently talked her into staying, however, as he goes on to say that she lay down in the cabin and fell asleep. He stated that she was freezing cold; he believed she had perhaps fallen in the Alder Creek. After falling asleep, she did not wake up again. Keseberg later said: “I think the hunger, the mental suffering, and the icy chill of the preceding night caused her death.”

Thus, Louis Keseberg was the only person left alive at the winter camps of Truckee Lake and Alder Creek. At some point, he moved from the Murphy cabin to the Breen cabin, which had been unoccupied since Reed’s party had left a month earlier. This may have been after he returned from Alder Creek. According to his account, he traveled there in early April and found about 500 dollars in gold and silver. He took the gold and said that he buried the silver beneath a tree.

Read Part XII

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part X

2009-11-29T22:55:00.009-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

Read Part VII

Read Part VIII

Read Part IX

THE “STARVED CAMP”

On March 4th, 1847, James Reed and his party of refugees - the second such group to escape from the winter encampment - reached the opposite side of the mountain pass and camped in an area that had been cleared and used by the first refugee party on their way out several days earlier.

A modern photograph of the Starved Camp location

Rations were, as always, very low, and Reed sent out three men to bring provisions back from caches he had left further down along the trail. He planned to stay in that spot for a few days until the men returned with the goods.

In his diary of this relief mission, he recorded that the people “began to fail” around this time, because even with more provisions than had been available at Truckee Lake, the refugees were still rationed to only about “one and a half pints of gruel” each day. And this was on the heels of months of starvation and four days of difficult travel over cold, snowy, wooded mountains.

In that same diary entry of March 4th, Reed noted that a storm appeared to be brewing on the horizon, and night was falling fast. He stated: “Terror, terror, I feel a terrible foreboding but dare not communicate my mind to [anyone else]. Death to all if our provisions do not come in a day or two and [a] storm should fall on us.”

Lest anyone assume this marked a moment of precognition on the part of James Reed, it is likely that he updated this diary entry later for dramatic effect, since he makes several references in it which he could not possibly have known until later (such as mentioning that the place they were camped is “now” called the “Starved Camp”).

In any case, a late winter blizzard was indeed brewing on the horizon. In an article Reed wrote a number of years later, he stated that the snow at this camp was about twenty feet deep (they would have been encamped on the firm upper crust) and that “a heavy snow storm burst upon us” that night.

A snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada

The refugees built a wall of snow as a break against the wind so that their fire would burn, then huddled around it in the lee of the wall to ride out the storm. By the following day, the storm was still raging and according to James Reed’s account, the provisions had run out. Reed makes note of the dire situation: “Hunger, hunger, [was] the cry [of] the children, and nothing to give them. Freezing was the cry of the mothers with reference to their little, starving, freezing children.”

Reed also describes the difficulty in keeping the fire lit, as it kept sinking deeper and deeper into the snowpack beneath them.

William McCutchen, one of the rescuers with Reed who had originally left the Donner Party in October on the first mission for provisions, would later recall:

The rest of the [party] were disheartened, and would not use any exertion; in fact, they gave up all hope, and in despair, some of them commenced praying. I [got after] them, telling them it was not time to pray but to get up, stir themselves and get wood, for it was a matter of life and death to us in a few minutes.

William McCutchen

Reed’s diary from the following day, March 6th, mirrors that of McCutchen:

Thank God, day has once more appeared, although darkened by the storm. Snowing as fast as ever and the hurricane has never ceased for [even] ten minutes…One of the most dismal nights I ever witnessed and I hope I never shall witness such [again]…All the praying and crying…nothing ever equaled it. Several times I expected to see the people perish by the extreme cold. At one time our fire was nearly gone, and had it not been for Mr. McCutchen’s exertions, it would have entirely disappeared. Had the fire been lost, two-thirds of the camp would have been out of their misery before morning. But as God would have it, we soon got it blazing in comfortable order and the sufferings of the people became less.

In this same entry, Reed notes that the refugees told him this storm was more violent than any they had suffered in camp on the other side of the pass. Out in the open, exposed to the elements, it is not hard to imagine why they might have said this.

Reed had expected his men to return the previous day with provisions from the cache. But as it turned out, they had come to the first cache and found it looted by animals, then went on to the second cache and found that it, too, had been partially looted by animals. In trying to get back from this second cache farther along the trail, they had been stopped by the same storm that hit Reed and the refugees.

The storm finally blew itself out during the day on March 6th, but two of the refugees were dead – Mrs. Graves and one of the Donner children, five-year-old Isaac. With the death of Elizabeth Graves, the four young children she had with her were left orphans. Their father, Franklin, had died with the Forlorn Hope.

Once the storm had cleared, Reed and McCutchen made plans to immediately head out, but they found to their disappointment that most of the refugees were not up to the task. Reed wrote later about how the entire Breen family refused to go forward, with Patrick Breen saying he would rather die in camp than on the trail. Seven-year-old Mary Donner had frostbitten feet and could not walk, and with no parents to help them along the trail, the four young Graves children were forced to remain behind with the others.

Mary Donner

Reed and his rescue party ended up leaving with only Reed’s two children, Patty and Tommy, and the teenage Solomon Donner, George Donner’s second stepson. They hoped to reach their cached provisions (they did not yet know that animals had looted them) and return to the remaining people at the Starved Camp. They left behind two adults and ten children, and since Mr. Breen was too sick to be of much help, his wife Margaret was left with the responsibility of caring for ten starving children in the freezing, mountainous wilderness.

Both Reed and McCutchen would later write that they urged the Breens not to stay behind, and James Reed eventually made Patrick Breen swear an oath before McCutchen that if any of the Breens died, their deaths would be upon Patrick Breen, and not any of the rescuers. Both Reed and McCutchen, in their later writings, failed to mention the fact that Mary Donner and the four Graves children would have been left alone had the Breen family not stayed behind – and none of those children was over the age of eight.

Over the next few days, Margaret Breen tended to her husband and the starving children. She gathered wood to keep the fire going, and broke off bits of sugar cubes to revive those who fell listless. A later writer, Eliza Farnham, whose account was based on interviews with the Breens, wrote that “they sat or laid in a kind of stupor, from which [Mrs. Breen] often found it alarmingly difficult to rouse them.”

At one point she feared that her five-year-old son James was dying. She told her husband that he wasn’t breathing, and was shocked when Patrick Breen – near death himself – said that death would make James “better off than any of us.” Mrs. Breen refused to accept this, and managed to revive her son by feeding him sugar and vigorously rubbing his hands and chest. The sugar, together with the stimulation to the lungs from the chest rubbing, no doubt saved the child’s life.

Farther down the trail, Reed and McCutchen had met up with a party sent out to supply the returning rescue teams. At the same time, a third relief party arrived led by William Eddy and William Foster, the only two men who had survived the Forlorn Hope expedition. They were traveling alone, expecting to meet the other relief parties and entice several people to go back with them. Reed, McCutchen, and their companions, however, were too weak to make another trip across the pass, and none of the men from the supply team was willing to go – even though they knew a party of starving children was camped just a few dozen miles back.

With no one to go with them, Eddy and Foster intended to go on alone, but Reed talked them in to returning to his base camp at the Bear Valley, where he promised to find other men to travel with them. Once they had reached this camp the next day, Eddy and Foster managed to entice five other men to travel, and they set out toward the mountain passes.

Back at the Starved Camp, young Franklin Graves Jr. died from starvation. The eleven remaining people were now camped together with three corpses lying among them in the snow – Mrs. Graves and her son Franklin, and Isaac Donner. Their fire had sunk so low into the snow bank that it was sitting on bare earth – a sight that the refugees found compelling and comforting. Through great effort of cutting steps in the snow, they managed to get all the survivors down to level ground, next to the fire, huddled, as it were, in a large pit in the snow. The rescuers who eventually found them stated that the pit was about twelve feet wide and twenty-four feet deep.

Revived by the fire, seven-year-old Mary Donner is said to have been the first to suggest cannibalizing the dead – yet a third example of Donner Party members reaching the point of cannibalization independently. They had been about five days with no food whatsoever, and had only a small ration of food for a few days prior to that. And prior to the start of March, of course, they had been several months with little or no provisions other than boiled animal hides and bones.

Mary Donner may have already experienced cannibalism prior to this time. It seems apparent that the folks at the Donner family encampment at Alder Creek had resorted to cannibalism a few days before the arrival of James Reed. Eliza Farnham’s 1856 account of the Donner Party – based largely on interviews with the Breens – suggests that Mary Donner, at this time, admitted that the Donners had eaten “father and uncle” back at Alder Creek, and thus she suggested cannibalizing the dead at Starved Camp. This, however, is not historically reliable because her uncle, George Donner, was not yet dead when Mary Donner left camp with James Reed and the second relief party. Furthermore, Farnham’s account suggests that Mary Donner specifically “begged” Patrick Breen to “cut a piece off” of her dead brother, Isaac, for her to eat. This has the ring of sensationalism. Finally, Farnham claims that none of the Breen family partook of any cannibalism, even at the Starved Camp, and this is simply not consistent with numerous other accounts.

In any event, cannibalism seems to have begun at the Starved Camp within a few days of the departure of Reed and McCutchen. By March 12th, when Eddy and Foster arrived, they found the bodies of Mrs. Graves, Franklin Graves Jr., and Isaac Donner cannibalized. Certainly these bodies weren’t cannibalized solely by four children under the age of eight (which would be the assumption if one believes Farnham’s account that none of the Breen family engaged in cannibalism). Furthermore, is it reasonable to assume that Mr. and Mrs. Breen cut and cooked flesh for these four children, but didn’t eat any of it themselves or offer it to their own starving children?

A photo collage of the Breen family. The youngest son, William (pictured at the top), was the only child not yet born when the Donner Party tragedy occurred. All nine Breen family members survived the ordeal.

John Stark, one of the men with Eddy and Foster, agreed to lead the refugees at the Starved Camp back to civilization, while Eddy and the others continued on to the main encampments at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek.

Stark was considered a hero by these people at the Starved Camp, as he carried all their provisions – food and blankets – on his back, and also carried several of the weaker children for much of the journey. According to later accounts, only Mrs. Breen and her teenage son John were able to walk completely unaided. Furthermore, upon finding that most of the refugees at the Starved Camp could not walk, Eddy and Foster’s relief party had voted to give them food and leave them to make their own way out of the wilderness, while they went ahead to Truckee Lake (Eddy and Foster both had young sons still at the main camp). John Stark, however, apparently found this to be cold and uncaring, and he talked two other members of the rescue party into to staying behind with him to help the victims at the Starved Camp.

Read Part XI

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part IX

2009-11-28T23:59:00.006-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

Read Part VII

Read Part VIII

REUNION

Even after being retrieved by rescuers, the hardships were not yet over for the first band of refugees. The relief party had cached most of its provisions on the mountain rather than bring them into camp, as this made traveling through the passes easier. When they returned to this cache, however, it had been ransacked by animals. The refugee party was forced to travel the first five days with only the slightest of provisions.

Several days after leaving John Denton behind, and after suffering the loss of another child in three-year-old Ada Keseberg, the refugee party met up with the second relief party coming the other direction, headed by James Reed.

For James Reed, separated from his family for the better part of five months, he was understandably relieved to find his wife, oldest daughter, and oldest son still alive. The reunion with his two remaining children – Patty and Tommy – would come a few days later after Reed arrived at Truckee Lake.

James and Margret Reed, in a picture most likely taken in the 1850's

In typical Victorian fashion, James Reed’s account of the reunion was rather phlegmatic: “Here I met my own wife, Mrs. Reed, and two of my little children. Two still in the mountains. I cannot describe the death-like look they all had.”

Reed’s account describes how everyone, young and old, begged him for food, but he gave it out only sparingly, for fear they would gorge themselves. Overeating is a serious threat to victims of starvation, as their bodies are not equal to the task of heavy digestion, and too much food can overburden the system.

These fears would be realized a few days later.

Reed and his party of rescuers moved on into the mountains, while the first group of refugees continued toward Sutter’s Fort. The rescuers kept a close watch on the provisions, which were now in abundance thanks to caches set farther back by Reed.

Despite their precautions, they were unable to keep several of the refugees from overeating. William Hook, step-son of Jacob Donner, snuck into the cache of food and gorged himself. After a night of suffering, he died the next morning. As rescuer Daniel Rhoades would later recall: “During the night…the eldest boy of the Donner family managed to eat so much dried meat that he died the next day.”

By the end of the first week of March, this first party of refugees reached Johnson’s Ranch and safety.

THE LAST RESORT

One of the interesting facts of the Donner Party story is that it involves not one, but three separate groups of people resorting to cannibalism independently of one another.

The first group, of course, was the aforementioned Forlorn Hope, a group of people forced to cannibalize their dead as they trudged through the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in an attempt to reach help. Those left at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek, however, would have known nothing of this. Yet, by the end of February, as they began to reach the same breaking point of starvation endured by the Forlorn Hope party several months earlier, they too began to consider, and then engage in, eating their dead comrades.

The first glimpse we get of this dire predicament is from the journal of Patrick Breen, on February 26th, about four days after the first relief party set out with its refugees:

Hungry times in camp. Plenty hides but the folks will not eat them. Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday [that she was thinking about] commenc[ing] on Milt[‘s body] and eat[ing] him. I don’t think that she has done so yet. It is distressing.

Levinah Murphy

“Milt,” of course, was Milt Elliot, driver for the Reed family who had died several weeks earlier. Breen goes on to say that when the rescuers were in camp, the Donner family told them that they would have to resort to cannibalism if they were not able to find some of their dead cattle under the snow. In regards to whether the Donners had yet resorted to cannibalism, he says: “I suppose they have done so [by] this time.”

On March 1st, James Reed and his party reached the camps at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek. Their first sight was similar to what was reported by the first relief party: a plain of snow, with just the slightest hint of a cabin roof showing in one region. Reed was reunited with his remaining two children, whom he found alive and well despite their failure to make it with the first party of refugees.

Of arriving at the camp, Reed later wrote: “About the middle of the next day we arrived at the [Breen cabin]. If we left any provisions here, it was a small amount, he and his family not being in want.”

The Breens appear to have been the only family of the Donner Party who never completely ran out of food. Patrick Breen’s journal makes it apparent that they continued to have at least a small amount of meat well into February. Other members of the party routinely sought them out for assistance because of this. Even when their meat ran out, they still evidently had enough animal skins to subsist for the final few weeks of February before the second relief party arrived.

Patrick Breen recorded his last entry on March 1st: “10 men arrived this morning…with provisions. We are to start in two or three days…”

In later reports provided by Reed, he admitted to finding evidence of cannibalism when he came into camp. One author, writing his account based on Reed’s notes, wrote: “Among the cabins lay the fleshless bones and half eaten bodies of the victims of famine.” That is no doubt a bit overdramatized, but it seems apparent that Patrick Breen’s fears were true: the Murphys, the Donners, and perhaps several others had resorted to cannibalism.

In one rather infamous account, Georgia Donner recalled her Aunt Elizabeth (widow of Jacob Donner) coming in and announcing that she had cooked “Shoemaker’s arm” for breakfast. Shoemaker was a Donner family teamster who had died early in the winter.

Georgia Donner (left) and Eliza Donner (right). This picture would have been taken very shortly after their return from the mountains. The woman in the center is a nanny who was not a part of the Donner Party.

This account, of course, is likely fictional. Georgia Donner was only four when the Donner Party tragedy occurred, and she was infamous for talking candidly about the party’s cannibalism, no doubt resulting from the fact that she probably didn’t personally remember much of it, or perhaps liked the attention such sensational comments brought.

Georgia Donner in later childhood

As the first rescue party had done, Reed and his group gathered all those who seemed able to make the journey across the mountain. This comprised seventeen people, including all the remaining members of the Breen and Graves families, and Reed’s two remaining children. George Donner, suffering all winter from an infection in the hand he had injured in early October, was too weak to travel. His wife refused to leave without him. They sent their remaining children on with Reed. Jacob Donner’s widow, Elizabeth, was also very sick, and she too stayed behind.

James Reed recorded that he left a week’s worth of provisions for the “Keesberger [sic] camp.” That is a reference to Louis Keseberg, who was now living in the Murphy cabin with Mrs. Murphy, her infant grandson George Foster, and the infant James Eddy, whose father had left with the Forlorn Hope and whose mother had died a month earlier. Both of Keseberg's children were already dead, and his wife had left with the first relief party. Reed also left behind three of his rescue team to gather wood and, in his words, “take care of the helpless.”

Read Part X

Kentucky Wildcats Undefeated?

2009-11-27T23:21:00.007-05:00

(For those of you eagerly following my on-going miniseries about the Donner Party, consider this post a sort of "intermission." The next installment of the Donner Party story will come tomorrow.)

College basketball fans in Kentucky have a lot to be happy about this year. After a decade of perceived underachieving with Tubby Smith, and a disastrous two years under Billy Gillispie that saw the Cats miss their first NCAA tournament since Barack Obama was a teenager, new coach John Calipari has brought talent and top-tier coaching skills to the program and reinvigorated the fan base.

John Calipari

In the preseason polls, Kentucky was ranked 4th by the AP and 5th by ESPN/USAToday. This was largely driven by the changes Calipari made in the roster, bringing in a number of talented freshmen and waving goodbye to several Gillispie-era players that realized their playing time was about to be drastically reduced.

Now at the end of week three, the team is 6-0, ranked 5th in both polls.

In looking at Kentucky’s schedule for the remainder of the regular season, it is hard not to ask yourself whether Kentucky has the chance of going undefeated in the regular season this year. I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, and I don’t intend to make any predictions about the SEC or NCAA tournaments. But I do think a good case can be made for the Cats to have a chance at ending the regular season without a loss.

First, a qualification to that prediction:

While UK undoubtedly has enormous talent, they have not yet displayed, in the first six games, the kind of cohesion and chemistry that one expects to see from a championship team (or an undefeated team). Watching them play is like watching a game of street ball. There is a lot of running and gunning, not much organized defense, a lot of turnovers, a lot of slam dunks and 3-pointers, and frequently a lot of fouls. They play exactly like you’d expect a team top-heavy with freshman superstars to play. This has led them to several “close calls” already in just the first six games against teams without nearly as much talent. Only a buzzer beater won the game over Miami of Ohio, and when they played Stanford, they were down most of the game and only pulled out the victory in overtime.

For Kentucky to have any chance at going undefeated or making a serious NCAA tournament run, John Calipari has to reign in this street ball style of play and harness the talent he’s got on his roster. He has to get the chemistry down and get the team playing like a team, and not like a group of five individuals racking up statistics. If he’s not able to do that, then what I have to say below will all be academic; if they keep playing like they’ve been playing these first six games, UK will likely find it tough to beat teams like North Carolina, Louisville, and some of their SEC rivals.

Therefore, my prediction about an undefeated season is contingent on Calipari getting a handle on this team’s talent and harnessing it to produce the kind of sharp, clean, team-oriented play that is vital for a championship-caliber team.

With that established, what exactly are the reasons why UK has a chance to go undefeated this season?

First, the aforementioned talent. This is perhaps the most individually-talented UK basketball team since at least the Rick Pitino era of the mid-90’s – maybe even of all time. At least four, and perhaps all five of their starters will almost certainly go on to have successful NBA careers. That kind of star power has been rare in the last ten to twelve years for the Cats. There are currently only nine former UK players in the NBA, and two of those are from the Pitino era.

A team with this sort of talent definitely has what it takes to go undefeated.

Second, UK has depth. This isn’t just a team with four or five really, really good starters, and seven or eight average bench players. So far this year, they have six players playing twenty minutes or more per game, and eight players seeing fifteen minutes or more per game. They are so deep that senior Perry Stevenson, who has been a starter for much of his four years at UK, is now the tenth man off the bench for John Calipari.

Perry Stevenson

Furthermore, in terms of scoring, they have three players scoring better than 2:1 in terms of points-per-minutes-played, (1 point or more for every two minutes played), and three more players scoring better than 3:1 (1 point or more for every three minutes played).

Talent combined with depth makes this a UK team that could go undefeated.

Third, UK has a veritable superstar in John Wall. Because the NBA now has a rule disallowing anyone under the age of nineteen to be drafted, top-ranked high school players are essentially required to either attend at least one year of college, or play overseas for a year. If not for that rule, Wall would have gone straight from high school to the NBA, and probably would have been one of the top two or three draft picks. As it is, he will play at UK for a year and then go into the NBA in 2010, where he will almost certainly be the number one draft pick (barring a major injury).

John Wall

As history tells us, teams that go undefeated are almost always anchored by a superstar player, surrounded by depth and talent.

Finally, there is the issue of UK’s schedule. Currently, only three teams in the SEC are ranked in the top 25, including Kentucky. The other two teams are Vanderbilt and Tennessee. Vanderbilt is barely in the mix, currently ranked 24th. Tennessee is a solid team currently ranked 11th (9th in the AP poll), but they lost this week to Perdue, which will drop them several spots in next week’s rankings.

Other than that, the SEC is thin again this year in talent. Since it has not historically been unusual for Kentucky to go undefeated in conference play, the chances of it happening again this year – considering their talent, depth, and star power – are very, very good.

That leaves the first half of the season – the non-conference portion of their schedule. Kentucky has already played and won the first six of those games. Among those non-conference teams they have left to play, only three present a serious challenge – North Carolina, Connecticut, and Louisville. North Carolina is currently ranked 12th (11th in the AP poll). They have already lost once, and will have a tough match-up next week against 2nd ranked Michigan State. If they lose that game, they will come into Kentucky next weekend with two losses already on their schedule. In either case, Kentucky is a superior team to North Carolina this year, and will play them with a home court advantage.

As for Connecticut, the 13th ranked Huskies lost today to Duke. That will drop them several spots in next week’s rankings. They will likely still be somewhere in the mid-teens when they play Kentucky on December 9th. The game will take place on the neutral court of Madison Square Garden.

Finally, Louisville is currently ranked 16th. Kentucky, however, does not play Louisville until January 2nd, and it is likely that Louisville will have moved up significantly by that time. Louisville will not play any ranked opponents until that match-up with the Cats. It is a strong likelihood that Louisville will be either undefeated or have no more than one loss when they come to Lexington in early January. Thus, by that time, they will likely be well-established with a top-10 or even top-5 ranking. The annual UK-UL game is always a fight to the finish, and the pre-game ranking or win/loss total for each team rarely predicts who will win. Last year, for instance, UK beat the Cardinals, even though Louisville was the far superior team (Louisville was a 1-seed in the NCAA tournament and went to the Elite Eight; UK didn’t even make the tournament).

Thus, with both teams potentially undefeated and in the top 5 by that time, the UK-UL game this year should be a fun one to watch. Kentucky will have home court advantage, however, and Louisville has only beaten Kentucky at home four times since the rivalry started in 1983.

In any case, those three teams – Connecticut, North Carolina, and Louisville – are the only three teams that should present a threat to UK in non-conference play. And presently, all three of them are ranked well below Kentucky in the polls. In fact, as it currently stands, Kentucky has only five ranked opponents left to play on its schedule this year, and none of them are even in the top 10. If and when Kentucky loses a game, it will be to an opponent that is ranked below them, or not ranked at all.

Given the team’s immense talent, depth, star power, and relatively easy schedule, it seems that Kentucky has a very good chance – if they get their chemistry together – of going through the regular season undefeated this year.

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part VIII

2009-11-24T23:16:00.006-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

Read Part VII

CONTACT

On February 18th, 1847, the first relief party, comprised of seven men on snowshoes, reached the camp at Truckee Lake.

A lithograph of the arrival of the first relief party; the cabins were completely buried in the snow

Patrick Breen’s account is stoic as always: “[Seven] men arrived from California yesterday evening with some provisions…[they are] gone today to [the Donner family] camp.”

Daniel Rhoads, one of the members of the relief party, wrote this account many years later:

At sunset…we crossed Truckee Lake on the ice and came to the spot where we had been told we should find the emigrants. We looked all around but no living thing except ourselves was in sight and we thought that all must have perished…Then we saw a woman emerge from a hole in the snow. As we approached her several others made their appearance in like manner coming out of the snow. They were gaunt with famine and I never can forget the horrible, ghastly sight they presented.

Virginia Reed provided a similar account:

[The relief party] reached our cabins, where all were starving. They shouted to attract attention. Mr. Breen clambered up the icy steps from our cabin and soon we heard the blessed words, “Relief, thank God, relief!” There was joy at [Truckee] Lake that night…But with the joy, sorrow was strangely blended…strong men sat down and wept. For the dead were lying about on the snow, some were even unburied, since the living had not had strength to bury their dead.

Both of these accounts, written years later, probably present an overly sentimental impression. Patrick Breen’s diary entry, written the morning after it happened, conveys numbness more than anything else. Still, there can be no doubt that the Donner Party must have regarded these men of the first relief party, arriving so many days and weeks after they were hoped for and expected, as little more than heavenly messengers.

Despite the arrival of the relief party, death continued to stalk the camp. Infant Catherine Pike, whose father had been killed several months earlier in the aforementioned gun cleaning accident, and whose mother had gone with the Forlorn Hope, had been left in the care of her grandmother. On February 22nd, Patrick Breen recorded in his diary that she had died two days earlier, and he buried her.

In addition, the relief party had left the majority of its provisions cached in the mountains above Truckee Lake. Intending to bring a party of refugees out of the camp, they needed these provisions for the return trip. So the amount of food that was actually left for those remaining in camp was insignificant indeed.

On the same day that Patrick Breen buried the young Catherine Pike, the refugee party, consisting of twenty-four of the healthiest Donner Party members (those believed best suited to survive the overland trip) headed out from Truckee Lake. Two of these refugees, Patty and Tommy Reed – both children – weren’t up to the task and had to be taken back to the Breen cabin to await the next relief.

Patty Reed, daughter of James Reed and sister to Virginia Reed

Members of this first rescued party recounted the “survivor’s guilt” of leaving so many others behind. From Virginia Reed, writing to her friend Mary a few months later:

Oh Mary, that was the hardest thing yet, to [go] and leave them there. [We] did not know but what they would starve to death…The men said they could hardly stand it – it made them all cry.

“AFTER MANY ROVING YEARS”

Among the group that left with the first relief party was an Englishman from Sheffield named John Denton. A gunsmith by trade, Denton had met the Donner family in Springfield, Illinois, and had joined them as a teamster for the journey west. A world traveler, adventurer, and apparent Renaissance man, Denton was knowledgeable on a variety of subjects from literature to botany to animal husbandry to metal and stone working. As we saw earlier, when James Reed’s mother-in-law died early in the voyage, it was Denton who kindly carved her gravestone in northeastern Kansas.

Sarah Keyes, mother-in-law of James Reed

The time at Truckee Lake, however, had weakened him, and three days into the voyage over the mountains with the refugees from the Donner Party, he became overwhelmed with exhaustion and snow blindness, and was unable to go any further. Snow blindness is essentially a sunburn of the eyes, caused by sunlight reflected from snow. It can cause temporary and even permanent loss of vision, but in the accounts of John Denton’s collapse, it was probably more of a euphemism for utter exhaustion than anything else.

According to rescuer Daniel Rhoads: “On the third day an emigrant named John Denton, exhausted by starvation and totally snow blind, gave out…We made a platform of saplings, built a fire on it, cut some boughs for him to sit upon, and left him.”

As with others who had been left behind on previous mountain expeditions, there was hope that he might catch up, or might survive until the relief party of James Reed came through, but it proved another forlorn hope. Denton was found later in the place where they had left him, sitting upright with his head bowed down to his chest.

In his pocket several pages of a journal were found inscribed with a poem. It has been suggested that this poem must have been written shortly before he died, and while it is certainly a nice thought, it is not entirely clear whether he wrote the poem there on his death bed, or perhaps many weeks earlier. In any case, it clearly represents his dream of returning to his native England after a lifetime of wandering, and his realization that it will never happen:

Oh! after many roving years,
How sweet it is to come
To the dwelling-place of early youth –
Our first and dearest home.

To turn away our wearied eyes,
From proud ambition’s towers,
And wander in those summer fields,
The scene of boyhood’s hours.

But I am changed since last I gazed
on yonder tranquil scene,
And sat beneath the old witch-elm
That shades the village green;

And watched my boat upon the brook –
As it were a regal galley,
And sighed not for a joy on earth
Beyond the happy valley.

I wish I could recall once more
That bright and blissful joy,
And summon to my weary heart
The feelings of a boy.

But I look on scenes of past delight
Without my wanted pleasures,
As a miser on the bed of death
Looks coldly on his treasures.

Read Part IX

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part VII

2009-11-22T19:51:00.007-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

Read Part VI

“HE WAS COMPELLED TO DO IT”

Back among the Forlorn Hope party, things were getting desperate. Around this time, William Eddy and William Foster got into a wrestling match over the continued suggestions of shooting someone for food.

William Eddy

Foster was intent on sacrificing someone, and Eddy had to subdue him as Foster advanced with a knife. This account, however, comes from Quinn Thornton, the sensationalist writer mentioned earlier, and other Donner Party members frequently accused Thornton and his main source William Eddy of being profound liars. Whether this fight ever took place, and indeed whether anyone in the Forlorn Hope party ever seriously considered sacrificing another emigrant for food, is hard to establish with certainty.

It does, however, appear that such discussions took place in regards to the Indians Luis and Salvadore, because it is well established that they fled in fear of their lives.

In any case, the Forlorn Hope caught up with Luis and Salvadore the day after the alleged fight between Eddy and Foster.

Accounts of what happened next vary among the survivors.

According to John Sinclair, who wrote an account of the events based on interviews with survivors, Salvadore was already dead when the party found them. Luis was near death, attempting to drink from a stream. Sinclair wrote that Luis “only lived about an hour” thereafter.

Forlorn Hope survivor Mary Graves, however, wrote that the “two Indians were killed.”

Mary Graves

Finally, there is William Eddy’s account, as told by the sensationalist Quinn Thornton:

…They came upon the Indians, lying upon the ground in a totally helpless condition. They had been without food for eight or nine days…They could not, probably, have lived for more than two or three hours. Nevertheless, Eddy remonstrated against their being killed. [William Eddy is always portrayed as the hero in Thornton’s accounts.] Foster affirmed that he was compelled to do it…Luis was told that he must die and was shot through the head. Salvadore was dispatched in the same manner immediately after…The flesh was then cut from their bones and dried.

What is definitely agreed upon by all the sources is that the two Indians died and were cannibalized. Mary Graves stated that their “flesh lasted until we got out of the snow and [got help].”

Back at Truckee Lake, the snow began falling again on the evening of January 9th. Breen records it as lasting until the 13th. This must certainly be the terrible “storme” that young Virginia Reed wrote to her friend about later that year. On January 13th, Breen wrote in his diary: “Snow higher than the [cabin]. Must be 13 feet deep. Don’t know how to get wood this morning. It is dreadful to look at.”

The Reed family had by now been taken in by others, as their cabin was unlivable since they had removed the hides from the roof for food. Virginia and some of her siblings were living with the Breens, while Mrs. Reed and her employees, Milt and Eliza, were moving back and forth between the Keseberg hut and the Graves cabin (which abutted the now unlivable Reed cabin).

“ALL UNITED IN ADMINSTERING TO THEIR WANTS”

About the time that the Truckee Lake and Alder Creek camps were in the depths of the January blizzard, the Forlorn Hope finally reached civilization. Their ranks decimated now to seven people, they came upon a series of Indian tribes around the Bear River who took them in and fed them. Quinn Thornton wrote: “As soon as the first brief burst of feeling had subsided, all united in administering to their wants. One hurried here, and another hurried there, all sobbing and weeping, to obtain their stores of acorns.”

For several days they moved among Indian tribes, then made the final drive into Johnson’s Ranch, a large settlement about thirty-five miles north of Sutter’s Fort.

A picture of the house at Johnson's Ranch, circa 1860

William Eddy reached it first, having left the party resting with one of the Indian tribes. Riders on horseback carried food and provisions back to the others, and by January 18th, all seven survivors had been brought into Johnson’s Ranch.

Of the seventeen who had originally set out from Truckee Lake thirty-three days earlier, nine were now dead (one of those, Charley Burger, had died after returning with William Murphy to the camp). They had lost eight people along the way, two perhaps intentionally. Of the dead, only Charles Stanton had avoided cannibalization, dying before that dreadful choice had been forced on the party.

One perhaps unexpected statistic from the Forlorn Hope is the fact that all the women survived. The original party had included twelve men and five women. Two of the men had turned back, and eight others had perished. The women, however, all made it through alive. There are any number of reasons why this may have happened, the least of which is simply luck of the draw. It may also, however, indicate that in the preceding months of low rations and hardships, the women were, in general, better taken care of. One modern scholar has suggested that the women had a greater survival rate because women are biologically better suited to surviving cold weather and starvation, with their lower core body temperature and lower nutritional requirements.

“EXPECTING SOME ACCOUNT FROM SUTTER’S SOON”

After the survivors of the Forlorn Hope reached Johnson’s Ranch, immediate plans were made to send rescue parties back into the mountains. This proved, however, to be difficult. Johnson’s Ranch had only a few able-bodied men (most California men were involved in a war with Mexico at the time), and because of heavy rains throughout the winter, much of the land between Johnson’s Ranch and Sutter’s Fort was waterlogged and impassable. It would be several weeks before a party could be sent with provisions.

Meanwhile, the emigrants at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek were growing more desperate by the day. The blizzard of January 9th to 13th had left their cabins and shelters completely buried in snow. On the 15th, Breen expressed hope that the party they’d sent out in December would return soon from Sutter’s Fort: “Expecting some account from Sutter’s soon.” He had no way of knowing, of course, that they were only just exiting the mountain passes, depleted by half.

On the 17th of January, Breen wrote: “Hides are the only article we depend on, we have a little meat [still]. May God send us help.”

Within a few days, the majority of the camp was living primarily on boiled animal hides and bones. Movement between cabins was treacherous and required digging tunnels through the snow and walking atop the frozen crust. Steps were carved out of the snow to lead up and down from the doorways. To an observer from a nearby mountain peak, the valley would have looked like a flat snowy landscape of indeterminate depth, with no cabins or life visible except those few souls who passed between buildings to carry news or hunt for firewood.

The Donner Party continued to hope for provisions. On January 20th, Breen wrote: “Expecting some person across the Mountain this week.” There was certainly no reason for that expectation, other than the Forlorn Hope’s long absence and James Reed’s even longer absence. It must have seemed to Breen and the rest of the Donner Party that someone must surely turn up soon.

Around January 21st, a few people from the Donner family on Alder Creek came up to Breen’s cabin with Eliza Williams – one of the Reed family workers. She apparently refused to eat the gluey residue of animal hides and bones and was hoping to find meat with the Breens. This doesn’t appear to have sat well in the Breen cabin. Patrick Breen records in his diary that they “sent her back to live or die on them.” It’s easy to imagine that the few provisions that remained at this point were being aggressively protected. In this same entry, he reported that the members of the Donner family were “all well.”

Another storm passed through on the 23rd, with Breen stating: “Blew hard and snowed all night; the most severe storm we experienced this winter,” and later, “Heard nothing from Murphy camp since the storm; expect to hear they suffered some.” A few days after that: “Those that went to Sutter’s not yet returned. Provisions getting very scant. People getting weak living on short allowance of hides.” By now, not only were they living on animal hides – with a nutritional content roughly the same as cardboard, and not nearly as easy on the palate – but they were even rationing those hides, only eating a small amount each day.

Sometime during this second storm of January, the Keseberg family’s newborn died. He had been born on the trail, probably the previous summer. Breen reports that three of the Murphy children were sick, as well as Mr. Keseberg. Landrum Murphy, the oldest Murphy son, had been in and out of delirium since the middle of the month, and he finally died on January 31st.

Around this same time, families began fighting for provisions. Breen records that the Graves family “seized Mrs. Reed’s goods,” including her remaining animal hides, and Mrs. Reed was only able to retrieve a few things (the Reeds and Graves’ had built adjoining cabins, and after the Reeds abandoned their part of the cabin, the Graves family apparently claimed their remaining belongings). Breen states with a hint of resignation: “You may know from these proceedings what our [life is like] in camp.” Later he noted:

Peggy [his wife] very uneasy for fear we shall all perish with hunger. We have but a little meat left, and only part of 3 hides has to support Mrs. Reed. She has nothing left but one hide and it is on Graves’ [cabin]. Milt [Elliot] is living there and likely will keep that hide.

He referred again several days later to this disagreement, noting that Mrs. Graves refused to give any hides to Mrs. Reed, and calling Mrs. Graves “a case” (that is, a “head case”).

Across the mountains, relief parties were making their final preparations for travel. Two parties left north-central California in early February; the second, led by James Reed and William McCutchen, left about a week after the first party.

James Reed

William McCutchen

In the meantime, the Donner Party continued to suffer. A new four-foot layer of snow fell, and five-year-old Margaret Eddy died. A few days later, her mother, wife of William Eddy, also perished. They were buried together in the snow. About the same time, Harriet McCutchen died. She was the only child of William and Amanda McCutchen. William had been gone from the Donner Party since September, when he traveled to Sutter’s Fort with Charles Stanton on the first supply trip. Amanda had left with the Forlorn Hope in December. From that time forward, the Graves family had been caring for the one-year-old Harriet, but one has to wonder how much care they were giving her as rations ran low and desperation ran high.

The deaths continued now seemingly every few days. On February 7th, August Spitzer died. He had been staying in the Breen cabin for some time.

On February 9th, a kind of stoic numbness was evident in Patrick Breen’s diary: “Pike’s child all but dead. Milt at Murphy’s [cabin], not able to get out of bed. Keseberg never gets up; says he is not able.”

That same evening, Milt Elliot died. Virginia Reed would later write this kind epitaph to his memory:

When Milt Elliott died – our faithful friend, who seemed so like a brother – my mother and I dragged him up out of the cabin and covered him with snow. Commencing at his feet, I patted the pure white snow down softly until I reached his face. Poor Milt! It was hard to cover that face from sight forever, for with his death our best friend was gone.

Read Part VIII

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part VI

2009-11-20T23:35:00.005-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

Read Part V

THE UNTHINKABLE CHOICE

Christmas day brought death for the Forlorn Hope.

Antonio died first, followed by Franklin Graves, patriarch of the Graves clan. The next day Patrick Dolan died, after throwing off his clothes in delirium and running into the snow. He was dragged back into the shelter, but died shortly thereafter. Twelve-year-old Lemuel Murphy, whose younger brother had returned to Truckee Lake on the first day, died a few hours later, also in a delirium.

In later years, the daughters of Franklin Graves claimed that he called them to his side before dying, encouraging them to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. The clear implication was that he gave them his blessing to cannibalize him. This may or may not be a true story; it certainly is easy to imagine the members of the party rationalizing their difficult decisions later. On the other hand, several accounts suggest that cannibalization was discussed before any of the Forlorn Hope had actually died: William Eddy claimed that he had suggested a duel, with the loser being cannibalized; but it was ultimately decided to let nature take its course.

Whatever the case, with four of their party now dead beside them, the remaining ten people were faced with an unthinkable decision: cannibalize or die.

Many people offhandedly suggest that if faced with having to eat another human, they’d choose starvation. I would gently point out that this is easy to say from the relative safety, comfort, and warmth of one’s own home.

Stranded there in the wilderness in what has come to be known as the Camp of Death, starving and with no hope of food, the remaining members of the Forlorn Hope cannibalized their dead comrades.

THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES

Back at the lake camp, Charley Burger, who had turned back with William Murphy from the Forlorn Hope expedition, died after falling ill. Desperation had not quite reached a fever pitch for the members of the Donner Party still in camp at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek, and Burger was buried as Baylis Williams had been several weeks earlier.

On New Year’s Eve, after writing a prayer for better fortune in the coming year, Patrick Breen wrote: “Looks like another snow storm. Snow storms are dreadful to us. Snow very deep. Crust on the snow.”

A storm brewing over Donner Pass

As the new year began, the Forlorn Hope made their way gradually out of the mountains, while the emigrants at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek slowly starved to death. On January 1st, Breen wrote: “Provisions getting scant,” and on January 3rd, “Provisions scarce.”

The next day, January 4th, Mrs. Reed set out with her daughter Virginia – then thirteen years old – to attempt a mountain crossing. They were joined by the Reed family teamster, Milt Elliot, and their maidservant, Eliza Williams (whose brother, Baylis, had died in December). The remaining Reed children were left in the care of others. The group lasted four or five days in the wilderness before returning, defeated but still alive.

On the same day Mrs. Reed and her group set out from the lake camp, the Forlorn Hope party finished the last of their human provisions, and began discussing the dire option of shooting their Indian guides for food. This was understandably met with much resistance by several members of the party, and William Eddy later stated that he warned the two men – Luis and Salvadore – about what the others were discussing. After darkness fell, the two Indians fled.

The Forlorn Hope followed their footprints the next day, and William Eddy succeeded in finding and killing a deer. The party, however, became separated during the day, with Eddy and Mary Graves out with the deer carcass in what was probably the Bear River Valley, the main group some distance back at the top of the ridge above the valley, and Jay and Sarah Fosdick back about a mile further yet. Jay Fosdick was on his last leg, and his wife had stayed behind to assist him.

The following morning, Eddy and Mary Graves dragged the deer carcass back to the others waiting on the ridge, and a small group went back to check on Jay and Sarah Fosdick. Jay had died in the night, and although they had a fresh deer carcass, they recognized that it would not last long. So, according to one early biographer, “the flesh was taken from the bones of poor Fosdick, and brought into camp.”

Another writer, Quinn Thornton, working from the stories of William Eddy, and widely acknowledged to have intentionally sensationalized the unspeakable horrors encountered by the Donner Party, wrote the account like this:

One of the emigrants, believing that Mr. and Mrs. Fosdick had died during the previous night, sent a person back to the place, with instructions to get Mr. Fosdick’s heart for breakfast…[After meeting Mrs. Fosdick on the way,] two individuals accompanied her [back to her husband’s corpse], and notwithstanding the remonstrances, entreaties, and tears of the affected widow, cut out the heart and liver, and severed the arms and legs of her departed husband.

These sorts of stories, told in the 19th century, no doubt contributed to the grisly image people to this day associate with the Donners. It seems to matter very little that it was sensationalism at best, and outright lies at worst.

Back at the lake camp, Mrs. Reed and her companions returned during the day of January 7th. According to a letter Virginia Reed wrote later that year, their decision to return was providential, because that night the camp was hit with “the worst storme [sic] we had that winter.” From other existing accounts, it seems to have been raining and sleeting throughout many of the days during the early part of January, and freezing hard at night, and the storm Virginia refers to actually hit several days later. By that time, emigrants at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek were able to move about only by tunneling through the snow. The doors and windows of the cabins and shelters had long since been covered over by snow and ice.

A passage for railroad tracks cleared through the snow during a 1917 blizzard in the Sierra Nevada

On January 8th, Patrick Breen recorded the return of Mrs. Reed and her group, then commented rather stoically: “Prospects dull.” He also commented that by this time, the Reeds had nothing but “hides” to live on.

He was referring, of course, to animal hides. The emigrants had used hides to cover the roofs of their cabins. With nothing left to eat, they took the hides and boiled them, boiling out what little fat and protein were left in the skin. This would congeal at the top of the water, and the jelly-like substance could be scooped off and eaten. According to Virginia Reed, writing as an adult: “When prepared for cooking and boiled they were simply a pot of glue.”

Cannibalism couldn’t possibly be much worse than that. They were literally eating leather.

In the aforementioned letter of May, 1847, the teenage Virginia Reed wrote: “We had nothing to eat but ox hides…we had to kill little Cash the dog and eat him. We ate his head and feet and hide and everything about him.”

Read Part VII

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part V

2009-11-18T23:02:00.006-05:00

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Read Part II

Read Part III

Read Part IV

THE FORLORN HOPE

On December 16th, 1846, yet another group set out from the encampment in an effort to make it through the mountains. This time, they went prepared. Charles Stanton and Franklin Graves had spent the previous two weeks making snowshoes. Graves, originally from the Green Mountains of Vermont, was perhaps the only member of the Donner Party familiar with winter survival in the mountains, and he knew how to make snowshoes. Using oxbows from their now useless yokes, Graves and Stanton had made enough snowshoes for a party of fifteen people to attempt crossing the mountains.

In later years, this party would come to be known as the Forlorn Hope, a euphemism usually applied to bands of soldiers chosen to lead an attack on a defended position where casualties are expected to be high.

The Forlorn Hope party consisted of the following people:

From the Graves family: Franklin Graves; daughters Mary and Sarah; Jay Fosdick, husband of Sarah.

Sarah Graves

Mary Graves

From the Murphy family: Sarah Murphy Foster and her husband William Foster; sister Harriet Murphy Pike, whose husband had been killed in the gun cleaning accident a month and a half earlier; brothers Lemuel and William Murphy, ages twelve and ten respectively.

These nine were joined by Amanda McCutchen, whose husband was with James Reed at Sutter’s Fort; William Eddy; Patrick Dolan, a family friend and traveler with the Breen family; Charles Stanton, who had already been to Sutter’s Fort and back; and Stanton’s Indian guides Luis and Salvadore, who were no doubt eager to return to their jobs with Captain Sutter.

Although only fifteen snowshoes were available, two other also joined the group. These were two teamsters named Charley Burger and Antonio. Practically nothing is known of Antonio – he was apparently a Mexican who had been hired by one of the families in Wyoming. Burger was among the German contingent, probably a teamster for the Donner or Keseberg families.

Patrick Breen records their departure on December 16th in his usual, terse style: “Company started on snow shoes to cross the mountains.”

William Murphy, being only ten years old, was chosen to make the trip without snowshoes.

William Murphy

According to his own account many years later, the party figured he was so young and lightweight that he wouldn’t sink into the snow. This proved wrong, and Murphy ended up returning to camp with Charley Burger, who also was attempting to make the trip without snowshoes.

The Forlorn Hope party left with enough provisions to last a week. This was all the camp could spare. In addition to making Sutter’s Fort and returning with more rations, the emigrants hoped that by relieving the camp of fifteen mouths to feed, their dwindling provisions might last longer.

On the first night, the Forlorn Hope made about four miles, camping at the western end of Truckee Lake. The next day, they crossed the mountain pass. Mary Graves would later describe it: “We had a very slavish day’s travel, climbing to the divide…I had a chance to observe the company ahead, trudging along with packs on their backs. It reminded me of some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs.”

The following day, December 18th, Charles Stanton began to give out, but the party moved on without him, knowing that the only chance of survival was to keep forging ahead. Stanton managed to stumble into camp several hours later. The party was traveling about five miles each day, and Stanton continued to fall behind, catching up only after the others had already camped for the night.

On the evening of December 21st, he never showed up in camp. They had left him that morning sitting at the previous night’s camp. The next day they camped early, then stayed there for two days, but Stanton was never seen again. His body was found several months later by rescue teams. His dream of a new life in California, articulated so beautifully in letters he sent on the wagon train, died there with him in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

DESPERATION SETS IN

Around the same time that Stanton disappeared in the mountains, bad news reached the families at Truckee Lake.

Milt Elliot and Noah James, both teamsters for the Donner Party, had been sent to Alder Creek back on December 9th by Charles Stanton. They took with them a letter Stanton had written to George Donner asking for a compass and tobacco to take with him on the snowshoe journey. They had never returned and the Forlorn Hope had gone ahead and left without the compass from Donner.

The emigrants at Truckee Lake had feared Elliot and James had perished attempting to get to the Donner families, but they returned on December 21st, about two weeks after they’d been sent. They brought with them news that four people had died at the Alder Creek camp – Jacob Donner and three teamsters: Samuel Shoemaker, Joseph Reinhardt, and James Smith.

Reinhardt was one of the Germans who, back in October, had stayed behind to help Mr. Wolfinger cache his wagon in central Nevada. Reinhardt had returned saying that Wolfinger was killed by Indians. On his deathbed, Reinhardt finally confessed, admitting that he had killed Wolfinger himself, no doubt because Wolfinger was reputed to be wealthy.

Evidence of the Donner Party’s increasing desperation becomes apparent in Patrick Breen’s diary at the end of December. His writing becomes more religious, and he includes prayers and exhortations to God. From December 23rd: “May Almighty God grant the request of an unworthy sinner that I am. Amen.” And again on Christmas Eve: “May God help us to spend Christmas as we ought considering circumstances.”

The party of the Forlorn Hope was faring no better. Deeply troubled by the loss of Stanton, who was essentially their guide, they made slower progress. Then, on the 23rd, they found themselves hopelessly lost in a driving storm of rain and sleet. Mary Graves later said: “We made good progress until the 8th day, when we got lost. It commenced raining and continued until the next day at night – then it commenced snowing and continued three days and nights.” They were unable to build a fire, they had no shelter, and their food had run out. They were unable to hunt because there was no game to be found. They were no longer certain they were on the right path. They were beginning to starve to death.

The rain and sleet proved to be the precursor to yet another monstrous blizzard, felt by both the Forlorn Hope and the remainder of the Donner Party at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek.

The fourteen remaining members of the Forlorn Hope got snowed down in a hastily built camp in the western foothills of the mountains. Using a technique apparently suggested by William Eddy, they sat in a close circle on a blanket, with their legs touching. Then they covered themselves completely with blankets, using their own bodies, in essence, as the structures of a tent. As the snow piled up on top of the human tent, it closed the gaps between the quilts, allowing their body heat and breath to keep them warm. According to William Eddy, they “camped” like this for the better part of two days.

Back at Truckee Lake, Patrick Breen wrote on Christmas day:

Began to snow yesterday about 12 o’clock. Snow all night and snows yet rapidly…Great difficulty in getting wood…Offered our prayers to God this Christmas morning. The prospect is appalling, but hope in God. Amen.

Virginia Reed said of that Christmas day: “Christmas was near, but to [those who were starving] its memory gave no comfort. It came and passed without observance.”

The next day, Breen recorded that this most recent blizzard dropped about two feet of additional snow, making the total snow around the camp roughly nine feet deep.

Read Part VI

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part IV

2009-11-17T22:42:00.019-05:00

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Read Part II

Read Part III

SNOWBOUND

Within just a few days of William Pike’s death, on October 27th, 1846, Charles Stanton and his two vaqueros reached the Donner Party at Truckee Meadows.

Charles Stanton, a bachelor traveling with the Donner Party

Stanton was welcomed like a prodigal son, only it was Stanton throwing the feast. His seven mule-loads of provisions was a welcome relief for the emigrants. John Breen would later write: “We traveled up the river a few days, when we met the excellent Stanton, returning with…mules and provisions…an act for which he deserves the love of every soul of that suffering company.”

Heavy clouds and winds had been looming over the mountains for some time, but Stanton assured them that the passes were clear and that there would be no problem crossing into California.

Once Stanton had arrived with provisions, those still resting in Truckee Meadows began heading along the Truckee River, southwest toward the Nevada/California border and the final run into Sutter’s Fort.

Truckee River in winter

This trek took them deep into the mountains where the threat of snow continued to loom. The caravan was spread out over several dozen miles, each little group traveling in its own miniature caravan. Elitha Donner, daughter of George, later stated: “Father was Captain of the [company] at one time but as the teams failed on the long journey we camped apart from the rest…sometimes we would be ahead, sometimes behind.”

Elitha Donner - fourteen during the winter of 1846-47

Other accounts from survivors suggest that it was rainy and cold during this part of the journey, with snow visible on the mountain peaks.

By the 30th of the month, most of the party had reached the eastern end of Truckee Lake, which today sits just to the west of the city of Truckee, California, and is known as Donner Lake.

Truckee (now Donner) Lake

In 1846, the city was not there and it was mostly mountain wilderness. Beyond the lake lay the final series of mountain passes that would lead the Donner Party to their destination.

The main pass now known as Donner Pass, looking back on Truckee Lake to the west

They were roughly 90 miles from Sutter’s Fort – a journey of three or four days in wagons with good weather.

About this same time, James Reed finally reached Sutter’s Fort, where he procured more provisions for the caravan and made plans to return to them immediately.

Sutter's Fort

He later wrote that he asked Sutter if he would “furnish…horses and saddle to bring the women and children out of the mountains…[Sutter] at once complied with the request.” Reed also met up here with William McCutchen, the party member who had originally ridden ahead with Charles Stanton, but who had remained at Sutter’s Fort because of an illness.

William McCutchen was about thirty in 1846

Reed and McCutchen now began making plans to head back to the caravan, expecting to meet them in the Bear River Valley, which lay just west of the mountain pass the Donner Party had just reached.

Their trip, however, would be delayed. According to Reed:

The second night after my arrival at Captain Sutter’s, we had a light rain; next morning we could see snow on the mountains. The Captain stated that it was…heavy for the first fall of the season.

William Graves, with the Donner Party on the other side of the pass, wrote about that first snow as well: “On the 30th of October, 1846, we camped in a pretty little valley about five miles from [Truckee] Lake; that night it snowed about eight inches deep.”

William Graves was sixteen in 1846

Fearing more snow, some of the families ahead of the main body of the caravan attempted to forge ahead through the pass.

A famous lithograph of the Donner Party attempting to get through the pass that now bears their name

In a diary that emigrant Patrick Breen began keeping on November 20th, he wrote about their arrival at Truckee Lake and their attempt to cross the mountain: “Came to this place on the 31st [of October]…we went on to the pass – the snow [was] so deep we were unable to find the road…within 3 miles of the summit [we] turned back.”

John Breen, Patrick’s son who was a teenager at the time, later gave a more detailed and stark account of the genesis of the Donner Party tragedy:

In the morning it was very cold, with about an inch of snow on the ground. This made us hurry our cattle still more…We traveled on, and, at last, the clouds cleared, leaving the towering peaks in full view, covered as far as the eye could reach with snow…We pushed on as fast as our failing cattle could haul our almost empty wagons…Daylight came only to confirm our worst fears. The snow was falling fast on that terrible summit over which we yet had to make our way. Notwithstanding, we set out early to make an effort to cross. We traveled one or two miles…At last, [the snow] was up to the axle of the wagons. We now concluded…it was impossible to advance…So we hitched to the wagons and returned to the valley again, where we found it raining in torrents…[The rain] cleared off in the night, and this gave us hopes; we were so little acquainted with the country as to believe that the rain in the valley was rain on the mountain also, and that it would beat down the snow that we might possibly go over. In this we were fatally mistaken.

The Donner Party found the mountain passes blocked with heavy snow.

From Donner Pass, looking back at Truckee Lake

They naively believed, however, that since it was raining in the valley, it must also be raining in the mountains. This led them to believe that the rain would wash away the snow, and perhaps within a few days they could make it through. They retreated back to the eastern end of Truckee Lake were a cabin had been built several years earlier. The region was relatively flat, with plenty of timber, wildlife, and available fishing. It seemed a reasonably good place to set up a temporary encampment, and the company built two more structures next to the first one.

A lithograph of the encampment on the eastern shores of Truckee Lake

Roughly 59 people holed up into those three cabins on the eastern shores of Truckee Lake. According to later accounts, the Breen family moved into the pre-existing cabin. The Murphy and Eddy families built a cabin some 150 yards away, against a rocky precipice that formed one of the walls of the structure.

The Murphy-Eddy cabin was built against this rock

About half a mile away, the Graves family and the Reed family built a third cabin, apparently much larger than the other two. Louis Keseberg and his clan built a lean-to against the Breen cabin.

The two families who were not among those at the lakeside camp were the Donner brother families. The Donners, by this time, had been bringing up the rear of the caravan. Several days earlier, the wagon driven by George Donner had broken an axle and Donner had seriously injured his hand trying to fix it. According to one of his daughters: “[His hand] was cut across the back…it was useless to him. He got it cut while repairing the wagon.”

Because of his injury and the delay the broken axle caused, the Donner families and those traveling with them ended up camped about six miles behind the rest of the party when the snows finally hit around November 1st. They were in a region known as Alder Creek, and the blizzard struck with such suddenness that they had no time to build any sturdy structures.

According to one Donner daughter: “We had no time to build a cabin. The snow came on so suddenly that we had barely time to pitch our tent.” Instead, the Donners built lean-tos of quilts and buffalo hide. One of their hired hands, a man named Jean Trudeau, later said:

The snow came on with blinding fury, and being unable to build cabins we put up brush sheds, covering them with limbs from the pine trees. It was the 1st of November, I think, that we went into that camp of snow and suffering.

Over the next several days, the emigrants at Truckee Lake made several more abortive attempts to cross the mountain passes, each time finding them completely impassible, even without the wagons. The snow continued to fall in heavy waves. From the various accounts of those first few days, the snow was anywhere from three to four feet deep.

By the 4th or 5th of November, it became apparent that the Donner Party wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. They began to hunt game and slaughter their own cattle. From William Eddy’s recollection, as told by writer Quinn Thornton: “On [November 5th, the families] commenced killing their cattle. Mr. Eddy also killed his ox.”

Meanwhile, Reed and McCutchen, despite the snow in the mountains, attempted to return to the Donner Party. The snow grew steadily deeper as they reached the Bear River Valley and proceeded into the mountain passes. Eventually, some of their horses got stranded in the snow and they were forced to abandon them. James Reed, writing in the third person for literary purposes, would later write: “They…attempted to pursue their journey on foot, [but since they had no snow shoes, they] were obliged to abandon all hope of passing the huge barrier of snow…[G]athering their horses together, they returned to the valley.”

Facing defeat and knowing there was no hope of getting through the passes before spring, Reed and McCutchen returned to Sutter’s Fort. They consoled themselves with the assumption that the Donner Party had plenty of food to last through the worst of the winter months. Reed wrote:

I also gave [Sutter] the number of head of cattle [the Donner Party] had when I left them. He made an estimate, and stated that if the emigrants would kill the cattle, and place the meat in the snow for preservation, there was no fear of starvation until relief could reach them.

Little did they know that the vast majority of the caravan’s cattle had been lost throughout October – after Reed had left – due to exhaustion and attacks from Indian tribes.

BAD GETS WORSE

“It snowed [for] eight days with little intermission after our arrival here.”

So said Patrick Breen in his diary, which he kept from November 20th, 1846, to March 1st, 1847.

Patrick Breen

The title page of Breen's diary

By the time he started his diary, the Donner Party had accepted that they would spend much of the winter at Truckee Lake, with the Donners at Alder Creek six miles away. While they knew that their provisions were not as robust as Reed and McCutchen – on the other side of the pass – believed them to be, the company must, at this point, have figured their chances were fairly good. They were holed up in cabins with plenty of clothes and animal hides and firewood to keep them warm. Food was scarce, but with rationing, hunting, and fishing, they must have believed they could make it through the worst of the winter until they could either leave or James Reed could lead a supply caravan to them. William Eddy seems to have been the hunter of the group, and he had some success early on in finding game, including the killing of a reported 800 pound bear around November 15th.

Throughout the remainder of the month, the company slaughtered its remaining cattle, as the animals couldn’t live in the snow-covered terrain, and although they had no salt for curing the meat, the bitterly cold temperatures kept the meat frozen until it was needed. In Patrick Breen’s first diary entry, from November 20th, he wrote: “We now have killed most part of our cattle, having to stay here until next spring and live on poor beef without bread or salt.”

The first entry in Breen's diary

During a lull in the weather, when most of the snow in the valley had apparently melted, a party of about twenty emigrants set out to see what the mountain passes looked like. They returned after finding twenty-five feet of snow in the passes and spending a night trying to keep a fire going on the crust atop the deep snow. As John Breen would later recall: “This report put an end to further effort…which made the prospect for men with families of small children gloomy in the extreme.”

Despite these setbacks, the Donner Party was not entirely discouraged. Near the end of the month, another party planned to set out to find a passage through the mountains. One of them was Milt Elliot, who had been the driver of the Reed Wagon. George Donner gave him a note, dated November 28th, 1846, to deliver at Sutter’s Fort:

This is to certify that I authorize Millford [sic] Elliott and make him my agent to purchase and buy whatever property he may deem necessary for my distress in the mountains for which on my arrival in California I will pay cash or goods or both.

The party never managed to leave. That night, another massive blizzard struck. On November 30th, Patrick Breen wrote: “Snowing fast…about 4 or 5 feet deep, no drifts. Looks…likely to continue…no living thing without wings can get about.” Then, the next day: “Difficult to get wood. No going from the house. Completely housed up.”

By December 2nd, Breen noted that the snow in the valley was six feet deep – no doubt over the doorways of the cabins. He appears to have still been in good spirits, however. On the 5th of December, he wrote: “Fine clear day. Beautiful sunshine. Thawing a little. Looks delightful after the long snow storm.”

Although they didn’t know it, the Donner Party was experiencing one of the worst and earliest winters in the recorded history of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean had sped across the California mainland, colliding with cold, dry air in the mountains. This led initially to a rain/snow mix, followed by drier snow that accumulated to ski-slope depths. While these sorts of weather patterns are not uncommon in the Sierra Nevada, they don’t usually happen as early as they did in 1846, or with the same intensity.

The Donner Party was literally buried under snow in the mountain wilderness. The seven mules brought by Charles Stanton from Sutter’s Fort – kept alive until now because Sutter expected them to be returned – died in the snowstorms. This, of course, was no great tragedy to the hungry emigrants of the Donner Party. The problem was that the snow was so deep they couldn’t find the carcasses to scavenge from. According to Patrick Breen, the company spent several days looking for the mules with no success. “No account of mules,” he wrote on December 6th.

As December progressed, the situation went downhill quickly. Food was running out. The emigrants had already been on strict rations for a month and were hungry and weak. The snow was so deep there was no possibility of hunting. Truckee Lake was frozen solid, and no one knew how to ice fish. Food became a commodity jealously guarded. In his diary entry of December 9th, Breen wrote: “Some having scant supply of beef. Stanton trying to [get food] for his Indians [and himself]. Not likely to get much.”

On that same day, August Spitzer, one of the teamsters of George Donner, arrived at Breen’s doorstep, having trekked several miles through the snow from the Donner family camp at Alder Creek. The Donners were apparently not willing to share their food with him any longer. The Breen family took him in, and Patrick Breen described him as “so weak [from starvation] that he cannot live without help.”

Snow continued to fall through the following days. On December 13th, Breen noted that it was now about eight feet deep on level ground.

If you look closely near the bottom, you can see the entry of December 13th, "snow 8 feet deep on the level"

Two days later, the first death occurred at the winter camp.

Baylis Williams, a hired hand for the Reed family, succumbed to the rigors of the previous few months. He and his sister, Eliza, had both worked for the Reed family for a number of years prior to the journey west. According to Virginia Reed, Baylis was in poor health even before they left Illinois. In later accounts, she asserted that Baylis died because of his pre-existing ill health: “[Baylis Williams] passed away before starvation had really set in.” In any case, Williams was buried in the snow near the Reed cabin.

Read Part V

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part III

2009-11-16T22:52:00.010-05:00

Read Part I

Read Part II

ONWARD TO THE SIERRA NEVADA

George and Jacob Donner and their families had been several days ahead of the main caravan when the incident between Reed and Snyder occurred. When Reed caught up with them, they offered to let one of their drivers, Walter Herron, go with him to Sutter’s Fort.

The caravan continued westward, and yet another member of the party succumbed to the rigors of the journey. A certain Mr. Hardcoop, a Belgian who owned a farm near Cincinnati, Ohio, and who was apparently a teamster for the Keseberg family, was unable to keep up with the wagon train, walking on foot as many of them were by this time. Around October 8th, he was left behind to rest while the caravan moved forward. According to William Eddy in the account written by Quinn Thornton, they left him “sitting under a large bush of sage…exhausted and completely worn out…his feet had swollen until they burst.” That night, fires were lit to guide him to where the wagons had made camp. Hardcoop never came and no one was willing to return for him. He was never heard from again.

The fatigue of the journey and attacks by tribes of Indians continued to take a toll on the caravan. Oxen and pack animals died of exhaustion or were stolen or shot by Indians in the night, and wagons had to be abandoned every few days for lack of teams to pull them. The families continually combined their belongings into the ever dwindling wagons and most spent the majority of the time walking rather than riding.

Emotions and tempers continued to run high. Patrick Breen, one of the few pioneers who still had a horse, had refused several days earlier to go back for Mr. Hardcoop.

Patrick Breen

William Eddy, who had encouraged Breen and others to return for Hardcoop, was still fuming over the incident. A week or so later, Breen’s horse got stuck in a mud pit and he appealed to Eddy to help him free it. According to Eddy, he “referred [Breen] to poor Hardcoop and refused.” The horse died.

William Eddy

On October 15th, an Indian raiding party killed more than twenty head of cattle from the caravan. Among those who lost all their cattle in this raid was a German man by the name of Wolfinger, who was traveling with his wife. Hardly anything is known about this couple other than their German heritage. They appear to have been traveling with the Keseberg family, who were also German. In any case, Wolfinger decided to stay behind to cache his wagon since he no longer had cattle to pull it. The company, however, had no interest in waiting for him and continued on. Two other men of the group, Augustus Spitzer and Joseph Reinhardt, stayed behind to help Wolfinger finish the job. Not much is known of these two men either, although their names give away their obvious German heritage. Reinhardt appears to have been an associate of Wolfinger’s; Spitzer – though German like the other two – was apparently a hired hand for the Donners.

Like so many other events up to this point, it is unclear exactly what took place, and the later accounts vary, but several days after staying behind to help Wolfinger cache his wagon, Spitzer and Reinhardt rejoined the caravan without Wolfinger. They told the other emigrants that their little party had been attacked by Indians and Wolfinger, who was apparently quite wealthy, had been killed. Some members of the caravan were apparently suspicious of this story – least of all Wolfinger’s wife – but there was no time to investigate and the company continued on. The truth would not come to light until several months later.

Continuing westward, the party began breaking up into smaller and smaller groups. According to John Breen:

After leaving…the Humboldt [River], the company, as if by mutual consent, dissolved or gradually separated; some wanted to stop and rest their cattle; others…were in favor of pushing ahead as fast as possible, as provisions were getting short.

John Breen, son of Patrick. John was about fourteen years old in 1846.

On October 22nd, unbeknownst to the Donner Party, James Reed and his traveling companion Walter Herron met up with Charles Stanton in eastern California, having finally made their way across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Stanton had visited Sutter’s Fort and was returning to the caravan with seven mules loaded with supplies and provisions of flour and meat. Sutter had also sent two Indian guides along with him, vaqueros named Luis and Salvadore. Stanton’s original traveling partner, William McCutchen, had stayed back in Sutter’s Fort due to illness. Reed vowed to continue on to the fort for more provisions, while Stanton and his vaqueros continued eastward back toward the Donner Party.

Walter Herron, the hired hand of the Donners who had traveled with Reed after his banishment, stayed on with another nearby wagon train due to fatigue from the difficult journey he’d had with Reed. He thus passed out of the story of the Donner Party, a convenient fact which he no doubt treasured in later life.

Meanwhile, the Donner Party had finally reached Truckee Meadows – modern day Reno, Nevada. Sitting at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, Truckee Meadows offered a good regrouping spot for the arduous mountain journey that marked the end of the California Trail.

The Sierra Nevada mountains, with Truckee Meadows (now Reno) situated in the valley.

Apparently feeling confident that their trek was almost over, and not overly concerned about the possibility of an early snow in the mountains, the caravan encamped in Truckee Meadows for the final two weeks of October, resting their remaining cattle and their understandably wearied bodies.

Around October 25th, another member of the caravan met an untimely end. The Murphy family was the largest single family traveling with the Donner Party. The widowed mother, Levinah Murphy, brought along seven children, two of whom were married with children of their own.

Levinah Murphy, matriarch of the Murphy family

These two Murphy daughters were married to men named William Pike and William Foster. The two Williams had apparently decided to head to Sutter’s Fort to gather provisions. At this point, no one knew what had become of Stanton and McCutchen or Reed and Herron, and the party was no doubt anxious about having enough provisions to get them through the mountain passes of the Sierra Nevada.

While Foster and Pike were cleaning their guns in preparation for setting out on their journey, one of the pistols misfired, shooting Pike through the back and killing him.

This picture was taken in later life. In 1846, Foster was 31.

Mary Murphy, their mutual sister-in-law, would later write: “He died in about one half hour, and in that time he suffered more than the tongue can tell.”

A portrait of Mary Murphy. She was fifteen in 1846.

Foster, apparently not wanting to travel alone and no doubt grieved at his brother-in-law’s death, remained in camp.

The Donner Party had now lost five of its members since its inception in Wyoming in late July. Most of the pioneers must have expected that the worst was over and that they would soon be settling in to new homes and towns in California.

Their expectations, of course, couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

Read Part IV

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part II

2009-11-15T21:27:00.015-05:00

Read Part I

HASTINGS CUTOFF

Heading southwest into Utah, the Donner Party found a note from Hastings stuck inside a bush along the trail. He advised them not to take the route his own party was taking – through the rocky Weber Canyon of the Wasatch Mountains in northeastern Utah. Reed and several others left the party and rode ahead to meet Hastings for advice. With the help of Hastings, Reed scouted out a slightly different course, then met back up with the Donner Party wagon train on August 10th, 1846.

The Wasatch Mountains

With James Reed piloting the group, the Donner Party made their way through the mountainous area east of the Great Salt Lake.

James Reed

James’s daughter Virginia, who was about twelve years old at the time, later said:

Only those who have passed through this country on horseback can appreciate the situation. There was absolutely no road, not even a trail…Heavy underbrush had to be cut away and used for making a road bed.

It was during the early part of August that the Graves family joined the Donner Party. Until this time, they had been part of a different wagon train several weeks behind. With the Donner Party slowed down in the mountains of Utah, the Graves’ caught up with them, swelling the numbers of the group to well over 80.

On August 22nd, after a final grueling ascent across a hill now famously known as Donner Hill, the Donner Party came into the Salt Lake valley, to the place where Brigham Young and his Mormons would plant their new holy city just a year later.

A plaque at the base of Donner Hill, near Salt Lake City

The members of the Donner Party were justifiably glad to be through the mountains, but the detour had taken a toll on the group’s unanimity. Already Hastings Cutoff was taking longer than expected, and the detour to avoid the tortuous Weber Canyon – as advised by Hastings and agreed upon by Reed – had ultimately taken the Donner Party longer to navigate, and had required extremely hard, backbreaking work.

On August 25th, a few days after reaching the flatter, desert area west of the Wasatch Mountains, the Donner Party suffered its first loss (the death of James Reed’s mother-in-law several months earlier had occurred well before the Donner Party was officially organized in Fort Bridger). Luke Halloran, a young man about whom very little is known, succumbed to tuberculosis. He had been traveling with a different group to California in hopes of finding the climate better suited to his condition. He fell ill along the way, however, and was abandoned by the group he was traveling with. George Donner had taken him in, allowing him to ride in the Donner wagons.

Continuing westward, the Donner Party trundled across the desert in the scorching heat of late August.

Satellite image of the Great Salt Lake. The Wasatch range is to the lower right of the picture. The Great Salt Desert extends along the left side of the picture.

Virginia Reed and Charles Stanton both wrote letters referring to temperatures consistently above 100 degrees. At the end of August, the party reached an area abundant with clean water, which they dubbed “Twenty Wells.” Camping there for a few days and stocking up as much as possible, they began a long, arduous trek through the waterless Salt Desert – west of modern day Salt Lake City.

The Great Salt Desert

They expected this journey to last two days. It ended up taking about ten.

Several days into the journey across the Salt Desert, the party began to run low on water and it became apparent that the cattle would have to be taken ahead to the watering holes known to exist on the other side of the salt pans. Leaving the wagons behind, the teamsters took the oxen and other cattle on ahead. The rest of the party waited for several days for them to return. When they didn’t come back, James Reed and several others went ahead to search for them. They discovered that many of the cattle had bolted upon smelling fresh water, and the teamsters had lost complete control over them. For nearly a full week the party searched for their cattle; many oxen and cows were recovered, but far more were lost. The Reed family lost more than anyone else, recovering only a single cow and a single ox. Reed was forced to abandon two of his wagons, piling necessities into the one remaining vehicle and distributing the rest among the other families. Virginia Reed would later write:

Our provisions were divided among the company. Before leaving the desert camp, an inventory of provisions on hand was taken, and it was found that the supply was not sufficient to last us through to California.

George Donner and another pioneer named Louis Keseberg were also forced to abandon a wagon each. These four wagons, left sitting in the sun in the Salt Desert, would remain there until rediscovered in the 1920’s.

Donner Party wagon remains photographed in the 1920's

After regrouping, the party finally came out of the Salt Desert, resting several days at the foot of Pilot Peak, at a spring now known as Donner Spring in northwest Utah.

Donner Spring

On September 10th, the caravan headed west again into Nevada, passing south of Pilot Peak and trundling across Nevada to intercept the California Trail that they had abandoned in Wyoming. Realizing, however, that their provisions were running low, the company decided to send two men ahead to Sutter’s Fort to gather the provisions the company would need to finish its journey. The two men who volunteered were Charles Stanton – the aforementioned Chicago bachelor who was traveling with the Donners – and Kentuckian William McCutchen, who left his wife and young daughter in the care of the Reeds.

With Stanton and McCutchen riding ahead, the caravan traveled across Nevada for the next two weeks, finally reaching the junction with the California Trail on September 26th. In a letter in July, as noted earlier, Reed had expected to reach Sutter’s Fort by the end of September. Instead, it took that long just to complete the Hastings Cutoff – a “shortcut.” It had taken the Donner Party about two weeks longer to complete the trek than the party led by Hastings, and compared to the time most parties took to follow the original route through Idaho, the Donner Party’s “shortcut” cost them a whole month.

This delay, of course, would ultimately lead to tragic consequences.

“THE MEN WERE IRRITABLE AND IMPATIENT”

Continuing now along the California Trail, the party followed Mary’s River (now called the Humboldt River) through central and western Nevada.

The Humboldt River

They were raided several times in the night by small bands of Indians, who stole cattle and oxen. Already short of these precious commodities, the company was slowed down even further, with many members now walking much of the time to relieve the burden on the depleted cattle teams.

By now, the Donner Party was understandably beginning to show signs of emotional as well as physical fatigue. John Breen, one of the children of the Breen family, would later write that “the men were irritable and impatient.”

John Breen

Because of poor decisions and some bad luck, they had already endured more hardships than the average wagon train heading along the California Trail. They were already several weeks beyond their hoped-for arrival date, and still had several hundred miles and a major mountain range to pass through before reaching Sutter’s Fort.

The first glimpse of a true breakdown in emotions occurred on October 5th, 1846. The events of that day are not entirely clear, but an argument broke out between the driver of the Reed’s wagon, Milt Elliot of Cynthiana, Kentucky, and the driver of the Graves’ wagon, John Snyder of Ohio. While ascending a particularly steep hill, Elliot’s cattle team became entangled with the team driven by John Snyder. This led to an argument which James Reed intervened in.

According to an early biography by writer Quinn Thornton – who wrote his story of the Donner Party primarily from interviews with survivor William Eddy – Snyder threatened to lash Reed with his whip, which caused Reed to produce a knife. Thornton stated:

[Reed] told Snyder that he did not wish to have any difficulty with him. Snyder told him that he would whip him “anyhow;” and turning the butt of his whip, gave Mr. Reed a severe blow upon the head, which cut it very much.

Reed responded by stabbing Snyder near the collarbone, puncturing a lung. According to Thornton’s account (as related by William Eddy), Snyder lashed Reed twice more, bringing Reed to the ground, but the damage to Snyder was already done. He died “in about fifteen minutes.”

Other accounts differ, however. Those whose sympathies lay with Snyder depicted the event as one entirely caused by Reed, who tried to cut his team in ahead of Snyder’s. William Graves, seventeen at the time and the son of Franklin Graves, for whom Snyder worked, later said:

Reed, at this time, was on the opposite side of the oxen from Snyder, and said to Snyder, “You have no business here in the way;” Snyder said, “It is my place.” Reed started toward him, and jumping over the wagon tongue, said, “You are a damned liar, and I’ll cut your heart out!” Snyder pulled his clothes open on his breast and said, “Cut away.” Reed ran to him and stuck a large six-inch butcher’s knife into his heart and cut off two ribs.

That account, of course, sounds unrealistic and melodramatic. What seems clear is that the two men got into an altercation of some sort, Snyder whipped Reed several times, Reed struck back, and Snyder ended up being mortally wounded. Other accounts from the day also suggest that Reed’s wife, Margaret, tried to stop the fight and was herself lashed by Snyder; whether on purpose or on accident is unclear.

Margaret Reed

Though he wrote often of the events of 1846-1847, Reed never gave his side of the story publically. It was apparently a touchy and difficult subject over which he must have felt enormous guilt. Writer Quinn Thornton confirmed this when he stated:

Mr. Reed, although the blood was running down over his face and shoulders from his own wounds, manifested great anguish of spirit, and threw the knife away from him and into the river.

Regardless of who was at fault or whether the killing was done in self-defense, it caused great trouble among the members of the Donner Party. Members of the Graves’ clan called for Reed to be hanged on the spot. Others acted with more moderation, assuring the Graves’ that Reed would be brought to trial upon the caravan’s arrival in California. In any case, Reed’s continued presence with the group promised to create unwanted friction, so the party voted to banish him from the caravan. Reed seems to have taken the decision with equanimity, helping first to bury the deceased Snyder, then heading off on horseback, promising to find Stanton and McCutchen –the two who had gone ahead for provisions and who had now been gone for about a month.

In the end, despite the party’s belief that Reed would stand trial for the death of Snyder, Reed was never charged or tried for any crime. This is no doubt the result of at least two reasons. First, with conflicting eyewitness accounts, it was never clear whether Reed had actually done anything other than justifiably defend himself against an attack. Secondly, after the unthinkable tragedies that would eventually befall the Donner Party, trying anyone for a crime afterward must have seemed rather silly.

Read Part III

Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, Part I

2009-11-14T11:59:00.001-05:00

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side.

DEPARTURE

On the morning of April 14th, 1846, three families from Springfield, Illinois trundled out of town in a train of nine wagons, following the California Trail. There were thirty-three people in all, including a number of teamsters hired to drive wagons and tend cattle. The group consisted of the brothers George and Jacob Donner and their families, along with the family of James Reed. Children accounted for nearly half of the thirty-three people in the group. One of those children, Virginia Reed, would later write:

Never can I forget the morning when we bade farewell to kindred and friends. The Donners were there, having driven in the evening before with their families, so that we might get an early start.

Not much is known about specific reasons why these families decided to head west, but the 1840’s were characterized by mass emigrations across the American frontier, and the Reed and Donner families no doubt had the same plans as the thousands of others who came before and after them: to find a better life in California.

Neither is much known about how the Donner families and the Reed family came to be traveling together. It has long been assumed that James Reed and George and/or Jacob Donner were friends, but there is nothing in the historical record to explicitly suggest this. Their decision to travel together may simply have been a practical one: safety in numbers.

Each of the three families took three wagons apiece – one for the family to live in, and two others loaded with provisions. These provisions would have included everything the family owned – clothes, blankets, dishes, pots and pans, toys, and six months’ worth of food – enough to get them to California. Virginia Reed mentioned that one of the Reed wagons even contained a brand new wood-burning stove. Additionally, each wagon was pulled by six to eight oxen, meaning there was a herd of over sixty animals.

The first leg of the journey brought the wagon train to Independence, Missouri, where they met up with a much larger group headed by Lexington, Kentucky native William Henry Russell. The Reeds and Donners attached themselves to this group. The Russell Party may have included as many as 1500 emigrants. They set out on the California Trail in about 250 wagons on May 12th, 1846.

THE CALIFORNIA TRAIL

Heading northwest out of Independence, the Donners and Reeds suffered their first loss when James Reed’s mother-in-law, Sara Keyes, died near Alcove Springs, Kansas.

“I am afraid your mother will not stand it many weeks, or indeed days, if there is not a quick change.”

James Reed wrote those words to his brother-in-law on May 20th, 1846, about a week or so before she died. Virginia Reed later wrote that her grandmother had been very ill before making the journey, and her other children encouraged her to remain in Illinois, but she was determined to see California before she died.

Sarah Keyes was buried with a short ceremony in Alcove Springs, and one of the teamsters – an Englishman named John Denton – carved a small gravestone for her.

A Kentuckian of Russell’s party, Edwin Bryant, wrote the following:

At 2 o’clock, p.m., a funeral procession was formed, in which nearly every man, woman, and child of the company united, and the corpse of the deceased lady was conveyed to its last resting place, in this desolate but beautiful wilderness…the grave was then closed and carefully sodded with the green turf of the prairie, from whence annually will spring and bloom its brilliant and many-colored flowers.

The wagon train of the Russell Party continued slowly across Kansas and Nebraska, following the Platte River. Around June 26th, the company arrived in Fort Laramie, in the southeastern corner of Wyoming. George Donner wrote in a letter home:

We arrived here yesterday without meeting any serious accident. Our company are in good health…Our provisions are in good order, and we feel satisfied with our preparations for the trip.

For some time, Reed had been discussing with the Donner brothers the possibility of taking an alternate route to California. Normally, the California Trail headed northward into Idaho, then back towards the southwest, through Nevada and into California. The previous year, however, a pioneer named Lansford Hastings had written a book about emigrations to Oregon and California, wherein he suggested an alternate route: cutting southward around the Great Salt Lake (through present day Salt Lake City), and reconnecting with the California Trail in Nevada.

Lansford Hastings

This became known as the Hastings Cutoff, and was believed to save some 300 miles – perhaps a month of traveling – over the normal route.

While in Fort Laramie, Reed and the Donner brothers met up with an acquaintance named James Clyman, who had just returned from California. He had traveled there earlier in the year with Lansford Hastings, and they had used Hastings’ proposed southern shortcut. Clyman advised Reed and the Donners not to use it, as it had proven to be fraught with difficulties and long desert stretches with little or no water.

The wagon train continued westward from Fort Laramie, reaching the Great Divide around the middle of July. Charles Stanton, a bachelor from Chicago who had joined up with the Donners in Missouri, wrote:

Dreams of my youth and of my riper years is accomplished. I have seen the Rocky Mountains – have crossed the Rubicon, an am now on the waters that flow to the Pacific! Should the remainder of my journey be as interesting, I shall be abundantly repaid for the toils and hardships of this arduous trip.

Charles Stanton

By the time the party reached Fort Bridger, in southwest Wyoming, Reed and the Donner brothers had decided to take the Hastings Cutoff, despite the warnings against it. Several other groups from the Russell Party had already taken the Cutoff, leading Reed to believe that a nice road would be opened for them. These travelers, numbering as many as sixty wagons, were being led by Hastings himself. Reed wrote:

Mr. Bridger informs me that the route we design to take is a fine level road, with plenty of water and grass…It is estimated that 700 miles will take us to Capt. Suter’s Fort, which we hope to make in seven weeks from this day.

Captain “Suter’s” Fort is a reference to John Sutter, already famous in California in the mid-1840’s, but destined to become famous across the country in 1848 when gold was discovered at his mill. Sutter’s Fort, located in modern day Sacramento, marked the end of the California Trail. Reed expected to reach it by the end of September.

His only concern was a waterless stretch of about forty miles along the shortcut through the desert. He seemed certain, however, that water would be found by the dozens of wagons that were already ahead of him on the trail. He wrote: “Hastings and his party are out ahead examining for water, or for a route to avoid this stretch.”

On July 31st, a group lead by Reed and the Donner brothers, and now including a number of other folks who had joined them from the original Russell Party, headed south, following the Hastings Cutoff. Among the people joining the caravan were families by the name of McCutchen, Keseberg, Murphy, and Breen. There were about seventy-five people in all, inside twenty wagons, and they had elected George Donner as the captain of the expedition.

Thus, it was in Fort Bridger, at the Little Sandy River, at the end of July, 1846, that the Donner Party was officially established.

Read Part II

Mini-Series Coming Soon

2009-11-12T04:18:00.003-05:00

Just a quick update to let all my thousands of readers (ha) know that I haven't forgotten you. I know you are out there, just waiting for my words of wisdom, and I assure you that I will not let you down.

Seriously though, I've been working on a "historical account" that has taken me much longer than originally planned.

I started it early last week, expecting it to take me a couple of nights' work, like most of my essays. But I quickly discovered that it was going to be much longer and more in depth that I had thought, and now it has expanded into what is essentially a short novella. (A novella is officially describe as being between 17,500 words and 40,000 words. The first draft of my current project is about 20,000 words. "Novella" typically describes fiction; my current project is non-fiction, of course.)

So anyway, it's long and detailed, which means I am going to make it into a sort of "mini-series." It'll definitely be the longest single account that I've ever posted on my blog, but I hope by breaking it up it'll make it easier to read and more likely that people will actually read it.

In order to build the suspense and excitement for all my thousands of readers (ha), I'm going to refrain from saying what it is about, other than to mention that it has nothing to do with religion or theology, and it centers on a major historical event of the 19th century, and includes all sorts of action and adventure and blood and guts and death. And no, it has nothing to do with the Civil War.

Hope you enjoy!

A New Take on Mellencamp's "Scarecrow"

2009-10-31T23:51:00.003-04:00

Recently, my local rock station has inserted John Mellencamp’s song “Scarecrow” into its daily rotation. This is a song I have long been familiar with, having heard it often growing up in the 1980’s. It is the title track from his 1985 album – a record that my family and I listened to frequently.

If you are familiar with this song and its lyrics, you’ll realize that it doesn’t take a musical or literary genius to figure out what he’s talking about. It’s a song discussing the plight of Indiana farmers in the early 1980’s, when crop failures and rising prices led to the bankruptcy of a number of farms, not just in Indiana but throughout the Midwest.

The song gives a gut-wrenching and intimate look at that agricultural crisis from the perspective of those who were victims of it. The accompanying music video begins with an interview of three real farmers who were suffering through the difficult times.

As I listen to this song now, so many years down the line, it has taken on a profound and provocative new meaning for me. As strange as it will no doubt sound to my readers, I hear the echoes of Jesus’ life in 1st century Galilee reflected in this song about 1980’s American farmers.

If you’re so inclined, I invite you to read the lyrics along with me and consider a few things:

Scarecrow on a wooden cross, blackbird in the barn.
Four-hundred empty acres that used to be my farm.

This opening verse provides a beautifully stark image of what has befallen the narrator’s livelihood. A farm that used to belong to him, now abandoned, owned by someone in a corporate office somewhere a thousand miles away, an old scarecrow still watching over the forlorn and empty fields, a lone blackbird roosting in the vacant barn. If you read with the heart, you can hear the narrator’s resentment echoed in that second line – four hundred acres that used to be my farm.

Similar situations had befallen countless rural Jews in 1st century Galilee. In the previous decades, Roman commercialism had spread across the Jewish homeland like poison ivy. In the first 20 years or so of Jesus’ life, the Roman cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias had been built in Galilee, right in Jesus’ backyard. Historical texts show that these towns spread Roman commercial influence deep into the heart of rural Galilee. Lands that had once been farmed by Jewish peasant landowners were overtaken by wealthy Romans and their urban Jewish accomplices. These Jewish peasants, once landowners, were now dispossessed of their ancestral land. In the best cases, these Jews worked as common laborers on the lands they once owned. In the worst cases, they were forced into beggary and banditry.

One can imagine that their feelings of resentment towards the Roman commercialism that had destroyed their livelihoods would have been every bit as profound as that expressed by Mellencamp as the narrator of this song.

I grew up like my daddy did, my grandpa cleared this land.
When I was five I walked the fence while grandpa held my hand.

In this second half of the first verse, Mellencamp provides a stark glimpse at the reason for the narrator’s deep resentment. This land is not just the narrator’s possession – like a kitchen table bought from the local furniture store – to be bought and sold; this is his ancestral land, land cleared and worked and made into a viable farm by his grandfather and father before him. This land is as much a part of the narrator’s personal identity as his own name. As a child, he even helped pace out the fence line with his grandfather – pacing out, as it were, the borders of this property that was not just fields of corn and wheat, but home and identity.

The connection here to the dispossessed Jews of 1st century Galilee is blatant to any student of Jewish history. To these ancient Jews, land and God were two sides of the same coin. The Jewish homeland, the Promised Land of the Jewish scriptures, was God’s land, entrusted to the Jews as caretakers. They felt a deep and profound and even esoteric connection with this land. Their entire theological worldview was tied up in their rights to the land they inhabited. Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last 50 years would see that this connection to land still pervades even modern Jewish identity. The Jewish people, then and now, were people of the land.

For 1st century Jews, unlike for the narrator of “Scarecrow,” it wasn’t just their father and grandfather who had shared this land, but many countless generations of Jews before them. To see it overrun by Roman commercialism – to see God’s land raped, as it were, by invaders, must have seemed like the worst sort of tragedy.

Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.
This land fed a nation, this land made me proud.
And, son, I’m just sorry there’s no legacy for you now.

This is the chorus of the song, reflecting the narrator’s deeply felt pride in the land he owned and worked. Again, this wasn’t just a possession. Nor was it even just an ancestral holding. It helped feed a nation. Without this farm and others like it, nothing else would much matter, because if you can’t eat, you can’t do much of anything.

The sense of pride felt by the Jews of the 1st century in their land would have been no less – and in fact, probably far more – deeply felt. The land had been entrusted to them by God. They were proud of it. They felt a deep affinity with it. The loss of this legacy – a legacy that defined their entire cultural identity – would have been devastating. And to see other Jews – urban Jews of Jerusalem – collaborating with this systemic evil of commercialism would have created an enormous level of resentment and contempt within the Jews – like Jesus – of 1st century Galilee.

The crops we grew last summer weren’t enough to pay the loans.
Couldn’t buy the seed to plant this spring and the Farmers Bank foreclosed.
Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land.
He said John it’s just my job and I hope you understand.
Hey, calling it your job, ol’ hoss, sure don’t make it right,
But if you want me to I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight.
And grandma’s on the front porch swing with a Bible in her hand.
Sometimes I hear her singing “Take me to the Promised Land.”
When you take away a man’s dignity, he can’t work his fields and cows.

There’ll be blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.
Blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.

In this second verse and chorus, the anger of the narrator becomes more apparent. The auctioneer attempts to deflect responsibility, but the narrator calls him on it – just because it’s your “job” doesn’t make it right. The whole enterprise, the narrator is saying, is a systemic evil, and you are a part of it.

The reaction Jesus had to the systemic evil he saw around him must have been similar. Like the grandmother who imagines the Promised Land, Jesus began to envision the kingdom of God overcoming the broken world. And he became convinced that if you were not part of the solution – part of God’s kingdom – then you were part of the problem.

The last line of this verse is especially powerful. When you take away a man’s dignity, what can you possibly expect the result to be? The Romans and their urban Jewish collaborators of the 1st century had taken away the dignity of the Jews of Galilee. They had beggared them. They had shed their metaphorical blood, leaving “blood on the scarecrow” and “blood on the plow.

To put it bluntly, the Galilean Jews were justifiably pissed. Jesus came from within that victimized world, voicing the frustrations and resentments of his people, and conceptualizing the kingdom of God, a kingdom of love, acceptance, compassion, and radical equality.

It is not hard to understand, within this context, Jesus’ famous actions in the Temple, where he is said to have “overturned the tables of the moneychangers.” The Romans and their urban Jewish collaborators had commercialized God’s land; they had taken this divinely given land away from its rightful owners so that they could turn a buck. Jesus’ actions in the Temple were symbolic to a great degree, but they no doubt also represented the “boiling over point” for Jesus. It was bad enough that they had taken the land; now they were commercializing the Temple – God’s very own house – too.

Well there’s ninety-seven crosses planted in the courthouse yard.
For ninety-seven families who lost ninety-seven farms.
I think about my grandpa, my neighbors and my name,
And some nights I feel like dying, like that scarecrow in the rain.

For me, this is the climax of the song. Mellencamp sings these words in such a way that the narrator’s anger and resentment is truly palpable. You can feel the resentment yourself, and you can understand it. At the risk of sounding like a “bleeding heart,” I’ll admit that this part of the song has, at times, brought tears to my eyes.

For Jesus, it was far more than 97 farms and 97 families. It was thousands upon thousands of Galilean Jews victimized by systemic evils. And when Jesus thought about his ancestors, and his collective Jewish name, he no doubt felt the same helplessness and bitterness that the narrator feels here.

These are the sociopolitical contexts that Jesus of Nazareth came from. Systemic evils. Hard-working people victimized and beggared by the politics and culture of empire.

I hope the irony of the image of a “scarecrow on a wooden cross” dying in the rain is not lost on anyone.

As “Scarecrow” shows us, these systemic evils are still around. Things haven’t changed all that much. I’m particularly reminded of a recent phenomenon: foreclosed homes being auctioned off by the thousands to real estate investors. Earlier this year, I heard of a foreclosed home in my neighborhood being sold “as is” for an especially low price. In anger, the homeowner had apparently spray-painted graffiti all over the walls of the house. In the news and in conversation, I’ve heard plenty of folks defend buying these homes at auction or through real estate agents: “Well, the house has already been foreclosed on. I can’t change that and didn’t have any involvement in that. As a real estate investor, it’s my job to buy and sell houses.”

Calling it your job, ol’ hoss, sure don’t make it right.

Systemic evil is still all around us. We can either live as part of the problem or part of the solution. For Christians, that means living reconciled to the world or reconciled to the kingdom of God.

Although written as a secular song discussing sociopolitical issues, “Scarecrow” is, for me, a deeply religious song, connecting me to the context of Jesus’ life and urging me to think deeply on his message and his call to love one another and fight injustice.

Here is the song and video, from youtube. I hope you’ll listen to the lyrics, and consider them through the lens I have just illustrated.

Early Christian Practice

2009-10-30T04:39:00.002-04:00

Caught up as we often in are in our daily lives, routines, and little corners of the world, we frequently fail to take the time to reflect much on our own religious practices. This is especially true for those Christians like me who have been associated with one denomination, and therefore one denominational tradition, throughout their lives.

Whatever our personal denominational preference is, we tend to think of those worship traditions as the norm. While many of us realize that these worship traditions had some starting point in the past and haven’t just existed for all time, we tend to go through life as though they did. We may fail to recognize that for the first three or four centuries of Christian history, there was basically no organized and institutionalized form of Christian practice. There were no Protestants at all, and those who would become “Catholics” represented only a small subset of the greater Christian world. Catholicism as we know it today did not come to control Christianity in principle until the mid 300’s C.E. and in practice until the 400’s C.E. That means that for the first 350 years or so of Christian history, Christianity looked remarkably different than any form of Christianity that exists today.

It might be easy to gloss that over, and we frequently do just that. When discussing ancient history, to sum up an entire block of several hundred years with just a word or two is common. Yet 400 years is a very long time. Imagine trying to sum up American history with just a sentence or two - and U.S. history only goes back about 250 years. The period of early Christianity at issue here is nearly twice that long. To those countless generations of Christians who lived during that very long period of time, their lives, beliefs, and practices certainly were not reducible to a footnote of history.

So let’s take a look at what those early forms of Christianity looked like.

FIRST CENTURY

Most of our texts in the New Testament come from the 1st century. Assuming Jesus died in roughly 30 C.E., that means the 1st century represents the first 70 years or so of Christian history. How did Christian practice look during that earliest era?

The Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper, appears to have been a ritual practiced among Christians from a very early time. It is discussed by the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, written in the 50’s C.E. His words on this are familiar to many Christians, as they are routinely spoken liturgically during Lord’s Supper celebrations.

But while the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist today consists of a simple ritualistic ceremony – performed in some churches each week, in other churches only once per month – for early Christians, it was an entire ritual meal. Paul says:

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk.

While this passage gives an interesting glimpse into a problem at the Corinthian church, in a more general sense it allows us to see what the Lord’s Supper ritual was like. It was a full meal of food and drink that the Church ate together. It was, essentially, a 1st century potluck, only with much more liturgical, ritualistic, and theological purpose.

How often did they eat this ritualistic complete meal? There is no indisputable answer, but it was almost certainly at least once a week. In the book of Acts, from roughly 90 C.E., the writer mentions that he and his companions “broke bread” on the first day of the week (Sunday). Other 1st century texts, such as the teaching text called the Didache, imply that it was a meal eaten at every gathering. The Didache calls it the “Thanksgiving meal,” and provides instructions on prayers that should accompany it. It says that Christians should gather together “every day” and “eat a meal,” giving thanks and confessing sins in the process. This same text asserts that only those who have been “baptized” can take part in this most holy of meals.

Baptism, of course, seems also to have been one of the earliest Christian rituals. The Didache instructs its congregation to baptize in cold, “living” water. “Living” water was a euphemism for running water (such as a stream or river). It conceded, however, that the still waters of a pond or lake would suffice if no living water was available. It even went so far as to permit pouring three jugs of water on a person’s head, if neither living nor still water could be found. It also asserted that both the “overseer” performing the ritual, and the new convert receiving it, should fast for “one or two days” prior to the baptism.

For the community that produced the Gospel of John, baptism was so important that Jesus is found to say: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.” For those 1st century Christians, baptism was an integral part of receiving the Holy Spirit. Luke makes this explicit when he has Jesus say, in Acts, that John the Baptist baptized with water, but Christians will be “baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The writer of 1 Peter promises that baptism is a pledge to God and part of the path of salvation.

Another aspect of 1st century Christian practice was communal living. The writer of Acts says explicitly that the earliest communities of Christians “would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” The Didache agrees: “Share all things with your brother, and never say that your possessions are exclusively your own, because if you share in eternal things, how much more in things that are temporary?”

For that same Didache community, fasting was an integral part of Christian life. The Didache instructs its listeners to fast on Wednesday and Friday of each week (explicitly saying not to fast on Monday and Thursday, since this is when “hypocrites” fast).

Prophecy and speaking in tongues is yet another early aspect of Christian practice. Paul and other New Testament writers talk about this phenomenon as part of regular worship services, as does the Didache. The Didache even gives explicit instructions about how to know true prophecy from false prophecy.

SECOND CENTURY

As we move into the second century, we have more history to work from in terms of understanding what early Christian communities looked like. It was during the second century that Gnostic forms of Christianity began to flourish, and thanks to a number of archaeological discoveries of the last 100 years or so, much of their literature is known to modern scholarship.

First, it is apparent that 2nd century Christian groups propagated a lot of “secret knowledge.” To use a modern euphemism, they were big on divine secrets. These secrets, of course, were frequently attributed to teachings Jesus had given one-on-one to various apostles. In a letter that Clement, bishop of Alexandria, wrote to a man named Theodore in the mid-2nd century, there is a discussion of what has come to be known as the “Secret Gospel of Mark.” Clement says that Mark wrote down his Gospel – presumably an early form of the one we know today – but that after Peter died, Mark came to the church in Alexandria and expanded on his book, adding in secret stories and accounts. This “secret” version of Mark was fiercely protected by the Alexandrian church, its content given only to initiates deemed spiritually worthy of receiving it.

According to Clement’s letter, however, their secret text got stolen by an opposing group of Christians called the Carpocratians. This group, in turn, corrupted the teachings of the secret text and began using it to assert ideas that Clement found highly offensive. One of these ideas was, apparently, that Jesus initiated secret teachings to his male followers in rituals that included homosexual sex.

This same group of Christians, according to a later Christian writer, had a painting of Jesus that they claimed had been made by Pontius Pilate, and which they used as part of their religious rites and celebrations.

Not all Gnostic groups were quite as bizarre as that. In the 2nd century, in fact, many scholars assert that most forms of Christian practice were essentially Gnostic. Catholic or “orthodox” Christianity certainly existed in the 2nd century, but it was not yet institutionalized and it was not the “mainstream” form of Christian practice.

Gnostics believed that the Hebrew god of the Old Testament was actually a lesser, evil god. He had created this world of sin and depravity, and now the one true God of the universe – a being completely unknowable – had sent his light into the world through Jesus so that Christians could figure out the secret, mysterious way of escaping this world of sin and returning to the ground of their perfect being. Gnosticism was an inherently “internal” religion of self-discovery leading to salvation. God is within you. It contrasted the “orthodox” view that salvation was attained through faith. God is outside of you.

Fasting continued to be a common practice among Christians of the 2nd century. The Christian leader Ptolemy, writing in the mid-2nd century, says: “Among us, external fasting is also observed, since it can be advantageous to the soul if it is done reasonably, not for imitating others or from habit or because of a special day appointed for this purpose.” This indicates that while fasting was still a common ritual, the group represented by Ptolemy did not care much for strict rules regulating days of fasting, as we saw in the Didache.

Other Christian groups of the 2nd century followed extreme forms of hedonism. Iranaeus, bishop of Lyons in the late 2nd century, writes of Christian groups that took the issue of faith and works to the extreme. These groups agreed so strongly with the notion that salvation comes solely from faith, apart from works, that they felt no compunction to follow moralistic codes. Of course, these forms of “hedonism” would seem mild to us today: eating food sacrificed to idols (a big no-no for folks like Iranaeus), sex outside of marriage, and groups of women and men living together in the same home (which Iranaeus took to mean they were obviously engaging in orgies).

Other groups took it further, however. The Cainites, who were especially enamored with Adam’s son Cain, believed so strongly that the body was a shell of evil that they pursued worldly pleasures to the full, in order to defile the sinful body and essentially destroy it.

From the Gospel of Phillip in the middle of the 2nd century, we find that the group who produced this text used three “temples” in its ritual practice. The first was called the “baptism,” the second “redemption,” and the third the “bridal chamber.” It is not clear whether the ritual in the bridal chamber included ritual sex, although this was certainly suspected by other Christians of the era. Iranaeus gives us a description of what took place there:

A few of them prepare a bridal chamber and in it go through a form of consecration, employing certain fixed formulae, which are repeated over the person to be initiated, and stating that a spiritual marriage is to be performed after the pattern of the higher [celestial beings].

These higher celestial beings were called “aeons,” and were believed to be emanations of God into the world. The bridal chamber, then, re-enacted the sexual union of these Godly emanations. The community that produced the Gospel of Phillip was probably the Valentinian community. The Valentinians were “mainstream” Gnostics who followed the hierarchies of priest and bishop, and who practiced the doctrines and dogmas of the emerging Church, but who taught a path of spiritual enlightenment beyond those organized structures. Just as Buddhist teachings are frequently likened to a raft that gets the practitioner to the other side and is then abandoned, so the doctrines and dogmas and structures of Christianity were there only for the novice. Once spiritual enlightenment had been attained, those rules and regulations could be left behind because they were no longer valuable or necessary.

During the early part of the 2nd century, we also begin to see descriptions of Christians from outside Christianity. In a series of letters sent between Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia and the emperor Trajan, we get our first “Roman” discussion of Christianity. Pliny has had some run-ins with Christians in his region, and has put them on trial. He gives us a nice glimpse at what Christian practice looked like in his region in the first decade of the 2nd century:

[Christians] were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath…When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food.

Pliny goes on to mention “two female slaves” who he refers to as “deaconesses” among the Christians.

Later in the 2nd century, we have another Roman perspective, this time from the philosopher Fronto: “They know one another by secret marks and insignia, and they love one another almost before they know one another…They call one another…brothers and sisters.” He goes on to accuse these Christians of “loving the head of a donkey” and of being obsessed with the genitalia of their priests and bishops. These are no doubt vicious rumors he has heard, and he concedes this by saying: “I know not whether these things are false.” Whether true or not, he says, suspicion of such things is fairly aroused because of Christianity’s tendency to engage in “secret and nocturnal rites.”

Fronto doesn’t stop there, however. He recounts an initiation rite of novice Christians that he says is “well known.”

An infant covered over with meal, that it may deceive the unwary, is placed before him who is to be stained with their rites: this infant is slain by the young pupil, who has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the meal, with dark and secret wounds. Thirstily – O horror! – they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together…

Might Christian groups of the 2nd century actually have practiced such things? It is difficult to say with any certainty, but the later Christian writer who quotes these passages from Fronto certainly didn’t think so.

Fronto also speaks of the meal tradition of Christianity. Like the initiation rite of child murder that he says is well known, he says their tradition of meal sharing is spoken of by people “everywhere.”

On a solemn day they assemble at the feast, with all their children, sisters, mothers, people of every sex and of every age. There, after much feasting, when the fellowship has grown warm, and the fervor of incestuous lust has grown hot with drunkenness, a dog that has been tied to the chandelier is provoked to rush and spring, by throwing a small piece of offal beyond the length of a line by which he is bound; and thus the conscious light being overturned and extinguished in the shameless darkness, the connections of abominable lust involve them in the uncertainty of fate.

Again, is it possible that some Christian groups topped off the Lord’s Supper celebration with a good old fashioned orgy? It’s possible, I suppose, but Fronto’s words sound more polemical than historical. In either case, it is clear that Christian rituals, carried on in secret and with esoteric liturgies and mysterious language, aroused suspicion in mainstream culture, and gave rise to all manner of rumor and speculation.

If we can separate polemics from history, these comments from Fronto may allow us to speculate about how some Christian groups practiced their faith in the 2nd century. Take, for instance, Fronto’s comment that Christians “loved the head of a donkey.” One might imagine Christian groups of the 2nd century re-enacting Palm Sunday as part of the Easter celebrations. That re-enactment would no doubt have included ritually riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as Jesus is said to have done in the Gospels. Perhaps this led Christians to be associated with donkeys – that most Jewish of animals.

As for obsessions with the genitals of priests, it is not out of the question to assume that some Christian groups may have fused ancient fertility cults with Christian practice. As outlined above, this was a charge made against some Christian groups by other Christian groups. Fertility cults, of course, typically engaged in various forms of ritual sex. The erect penis is known as a symbol of fertility cults from across antiquity. Fronto, with his “modern” Roman values, was righteously indignant over such superstition and ancient tribalism, much like we would be today if faced with a similar situation. In that sense, he shared the feelings of Christians like Iranaeus and other “heresy hunters” of the early Christian era.

As for the charge of cannibalism, this was, no doubt, related to the ritual of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. Perhaps Fronto’s account of cannibalism, mixed with infanticide, is a polemical fusion of the Eucharist, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac in the Old Testament. It’s difficult to imagine a Christian group (or any group, for that matter) enacting such a ritual, but Fronto is not the only one who suggests it. Church fathers writing as late as the 4th century made similar charges against some Christian groups, as we will see below.

Finally, we get an intimate glimpse at the lifestyle of some 2nd century Christians from the Christian writer Justin Martyr. Justin wrote around 150 C.E., and he is the earliest of the “Church fathers” for whom we have a significant amount of existing writings. He said the following:

We, who once took pleasure in fornication, now embrace self-control. We, who valued the acquisition of wealth and possessions above everything else, now put what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need. We, who hated and killed one another, and would not share our lives with certain people because of their ethnic differences from us, now live intimately with them.

Clearly as late as the mid-2nd century, many Christian groups were still living in the communal style of the earliest Christians a century earlier.

THIRD CENTURY AND LATER

Christian practice through these centuries seems to have mirrored much of the previous eras, though with an increase in regulation and institutionalism. Fringe groups tended to die out (especially those that condemned procreation) and mainstream groups tended to strengthen in numbers, leading to tighter structure and unity.

Discussion raged during these centuries of the nature of Jesus. While some groups insisted Jesus was equal to God, others claimed Jesus was divine in his own right, but still subject to God. Jesus’ humanity, especially, was at issue during this time. Some said Jesus was both fully human and fully God. Others asserted that Jesus was not human at all, but only appeared to be human, because God can’t suffer and die like Jesus did on the cross. Still others argued that Jesus was only human, with God simply working through him in a unique and mysterious way.

It was during this time in the 3rd and 4th centuries that Christians began using the familiar “sign of the cross” – a hand movement meant to symbolize the cross of Christ. It differed, however, from the familiar four-point movement known to Catholicism today. Tertullian, writing in the early part of the 3rd century, says:

In all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross.

This ritual movement crossed only the forehead, not the whole body, and instead of using three fingers, only the thumb was used. Furthermore, the sign consisted of only three points, not four – it mimicked the Greek letter tau, which is known to us as T.

In regards to baptismal rites in the 3rd century, early Christian writers left rather detailed accounts of how this ritual was carried out. Prayer and fasting would precede the day of baptism. The baptism itself would typically take place on Easter, with all new initiates of the previous year being baptized together. The overseer would ask the initiate if he or she renounced the devil and his angels. The initiate would respond three times in the affirmative. After that, the initiates would step naked into the water, up to their necks. The overseer would then ritually call down the spirit of God on those being baptized, and the initiates – having now received the Holy Spirit – would emerge from the water to be clothed in a robe of white linen. They would also be given ritual food – milk and honey – which not only symbolized the food of the Promised Land from Jewish scriptures, but, as scholar Elaine Pagels says, also symbolized “baby food” being given to these newborns in Christ.

During this era, we again see rather outrageous accusations against fringe Christian practice. Epiphanius, writing in the early 300’s, referred to a Christian sect he called the “Borborites” who replaced the bread and wine of the Eucharist with semen and menstrual blood, which they smeared on themselves and then consumed. This practice may have been an extreme form of a God/Wisdom duality, with menstrual blood representing female wisdom, and semen representing male divinity.

Epiphanius also accuses these Christians of infanticide and cannibalism, going so far as to say that they would kill and eat the babies created from their ritual sex acts. This sounds so similar to what we saw above from the pagan Fronto that one wonders if Epiphanius actually got the story from Fronto’s writings. That may be a possibility, but more than likely these sorts of rumors about the more fringe and secretive sects of Christianity were commonplace. It is difficult to know for certain whether they represent true ritual practices or mere rumor and polemics.

CONCLUSION

When we look at the earliest eras of Christianity – a time period spanning several hundred years – we find that Christian practice was as diverse then as it is now. Furthermore, hardly any of it resembles the rituals and liturgies that we take for granted in the modern church. We still baptize, we still eat the Lord’s Supper, and we still celebrate Easter, but our methods for enacting those ancient rituals share only the barest similarities with the earliest generations of Christians.

When I envision the earliest Christian communities – those communities for whom Jesus was only as “ancient” as Wilbur and Orville Wright are for us – I imagine a group of humble believers, separated from mainstream society, living communally and sharing all their possessions and profits with one another, meeting together at dawn on Sunday – the Lord’s Day – for prayer, prophecy, and teachings from scripture, sharing a ritual Eucharist meal each evening, greeting one another as brother and sister, crossing their foreheads in piety as they go about their daily activities, and viewing their entire existence as part of the in-breaking kingdom of God. For these earliest Christians, Christianity wasn’t just a profession of faith, it was an entire way of life, reconciled not to the world, but to God.

Christianity is a Verb

2009-10-20T01:10:00.001-04:00

The title of this essay is a phrase I have been using recently in discussions about religion and the nature of Christianity. I have frequently said that I would like to write a book by that title. More than anything, however, I’d like to live my life in conjunction with it.

Christianity isn’t a title and most certainly isn’t an entitlement. “Christian” isn’t something you are; it’s something you do. Christianity isn’t the group you align yourself with; it’s the lifestyle you lead each and every day. Church isn’t an activity center; it’s a community outreach center.

In our earliest Christian writings, texts found both within the New Testament and outside the New Testament, we find that discussions like this – discussions about the very nature of Christianity and what it means to call one’s self a Christian – go back to the earliest days of Christianity. In New Testament theology, this discussion is one that goes by the more familiar theme of “faith vs. works.”

Faith was an integral part of early church life, much as it is today. For modern Christians, “faith” generally means trusting that God exists, that Jesus was his divine son, that he died for our sins, and that he rose again after three days.

For the earliest generation of Christians, however, “faith” was somewhat different. First, the question of God’s existence wasn’t one that generally concerned people. “Atheist” in the first century typically referred to someone who believed in a different god, not someone who had no faith in any gods. Someone who believed in no gods at all would likely have been called insane, rather than atheist.

Second, the earliest Christians didn’t think of Jesus as “divine,” the way that we do today. The idea that Jesus was literally God in the flesh did not come about in Christian circles until well after the first generations of Christians. The Trinity doctrine, for instance, wasn’t formulated and adopted until the 4th century C.E. For the earliest Christians, faith in Jesus meant faith that Jesus was a uniquely “God-inspired” person; a teacher and prophet through whom God worked directly; a human being through whom one could meet and engage the spirit of God. For a Jewish Christian in the 1st century, the very suggestion that Jesus had been God himself would have been seen as the worst kind of blasphemy. It would never have even crossed their minds. For Jews, God was so completely “other” that they didn’t even write his name. They used code words – abbreviations, essentially – to refer to God.

Third, while the idea of Jesus’ atonement and resurrection was an early development in Christian history, “resurrection” had a different meaning for those earliest Christians than it has for us today. Jewish tradition had conceived of resurrection as a physical event that happens to the body; you die, you are buried, and then your body comes back to life and you rise up out of your tomb. In Jewish theology, this was an event that was expected at the end of time, when God would finally reconcile the broken world to himself.

Jewish Christians, however, came to understand resurrection quite differently. Faced with the stark reality that their teacher had been brutally and unceremoniously executed by the Romans, they came to understand that, in death, Jesus had been exalted to the right hand of God. He had died for their sins, like the Passover lamb, and had been raised up to the heavenly realms. For these earliest Christians, Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension happened simultaneously. It wasn’t until later that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension was separated from his death. So when those early Christian texts talk about resurrection, they are talking about spiritual resurrection, not bodily resurrection. When they talk about the risen Jesus appearing to people, they are talking about spiritual apparitions and religious ecstasy, not a literally dead person literally coming back to life and re-entering society. That sort of literalistic understanding of early Jewish Christian scripture is a product of later centuries and later Christians unfamiliar with the unique religious worldview of 1st century Jewish Christians.

Some of my readers may find this last point particularly difficult to accept. I recognize that and am sensitive to it. My opinion is that it doesn’t matter whether one conceives of resurrection as spiritual or physical – it might have been either one. Ultimately, it is a faith proclamation in either case, because it’s also possible that it didn’t happen at all, that Jesus just died and was dead. What is far more important is what that faith proclamation means for us as Christians.

And that ultimate meaning brings us back to faith vs. works. The apostle Paul, in his many writings now extant in the New Testament, talks a lot about faith. In a cursory examination of the NIV translation, I counted exactly 100 repetitions of some form of the word “faith” within Paul’s letters. And that was only counting the 7 letters scholars widely agree came from Paul. There are 6 or 7 others that have traditionally been attributed to him as well. Clearly faith was important for Paul.

Paul’s words about faith – particularly in Romans – have led to what I see as a major problem in modern Christianity. This is the idea that we are saved by “faith alone.” Paul argues, throughout Romans and elsewhere, that Christians are saved by faith, and not “works of the law.” This has been misunderstood in mainstream Christianity to mean that the “profession of faith” in God and Jesus is all that really matters. If you profess your faith and mean it, and if you “ask Jesus into your heart,” then you have attained salvation. Of course, there is plenty of lip service given to leading a good life, being kind to others, “living like Jesus,” and so on. But all of that is just icing on the cake. Salvation is actually attained by the profession of faith. It’s good to do the other stuff too, but it’s not required.

For me, this is a quite depressing misunderstanding of Paul, and it’s one that is unfortunately extremely common among Christians. When Paul spoke about “works of the law,” he wasn’t talking about “good deeds.” He was talking about Mosaic Law – Old Testament commandments about how Jews should live their lives. He was talking about things like dietary restrictions, lifestyle codes, circumcision, honoring the Sabbath, appropriately celebrating the various Jewish holy days, and so on. He was saying that these things don’t provide salvation because they are ultimately impossible to follow perfectly. Instead, salvation comes from God’s grace, through faith. And that isn’t just plain old faith. Paul makes it clear that the kind of faith he is talking about is “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). In other words, faith is an action, not a mere profession.

That this was misunderstood even in the earliest generations of Christianity is apparent within the New Testament itself. People came to understand that all they had to do was profess faith in Jesus, and they were set. They had their “get out of death free” card. Much of the book of James is a response to misunderstandings Christians had over Paul’s direction about faith. James attacks those who think that mere professions of faith are good enough for salvation. What good is it, James asks, if you wish someone well, but don’t actually do anything to help them? In 2:17, he says: “Faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” The word “works” in that passage is not referring to Mosaic Law. It is referring to good deeds. James is attacking the platitudes and religious stagnation he saw around him. People had their profession of faith, their conversion to Christianity, and they were content to sit on it, offering lip service at best. James says no. James says that’s wrong. James says you have misunderstood Paul. Paul was talking about Mosaic Law as it related to faith, not good deeds or lovingkindness in relation to faith. James makes clear what Paul frequently left ambiguous – that faith without good deeds and loving actions was a dead faith. It was meaningless. It served no purpose. It was, as I have said elsewhere, a windmill with no wind.

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since the time of James. Many Christians still think a profession of faith is all they need to attain salvation. Like the Christians of James’ era, they have their “get out of death free” card, and they are content to sit on it. It’s too challenging to actually follow Jesus in the lifestyle he taught. It’s too challenging to actually give ourselves away to others. And more than that, it’s not at all convenient to our modern way of life in this materialistic, individualistic western society.

Jesus showed his followers how to live for others. He showed his followers how to love one another and work together for the common good. He demonstrated how the kingdom of God is a present reality that we all can take part in. He taught that the kingdom of God is our responsibility, not some future event that we have no control over. Early Christians textualized this teaching and asserted the importance of faith working through acts of love and compassion. For Jesus and the earliest Christians, salvation was never about the future. It was about the here and now, and it was attained through acts of love.

As a Christian, I don’t engage much in absolutes. I recognize that what we know about Jesus comes from ancient texts that are wide open to interpretation. I recognize that we can’t know anything about God other than what we discern from those texts that we consider authoritative, and from our own personal religious practice – prayer, meditation, etc. I believe that God can be approached from many different religious traditions and I do not believe in claims of theological exclusivity. I feel a high level of contempt for those religious persons who claim to have the exclusive pathway to heaven, and anyone who doesn’t follow them has an exclusive pathway to hell.

For me, salvation is about life in the here and now. I have hope for an afterlife, but religion, for me, is about how we act and live together here on earth, in the present. So when I talk of “being saved” or “not being saved,” I am not talking about eschatology – that is, ideas about the ultimate destiny of humanity and the world. I am not talking about the end of the world and what will happen to humans after they die. I don’t know what happens to people after they die. Instead, I am talking about life in the present. Salvation for me, then, is expressing love for God through acts of love for others. Those two things cannot be separated. I cannot express love for God unless I am living for others, and I cannot live for others without expressing love for God. I approach this salvation through the teachings of Jesus and the earliest Christians who taught in his name. If someone approaches God from a different religious tradition, but one with ultimately the same ends, then I consider them a brother or sister in God.

For me, if a Christian is not expressing love for God through acts of love for others – that is, if they are not living for others rather than for themselves – then they are not taking part in the kingdom of God promised by Jesus. They are Christians in name only – which means they aren’t Christians at all. As James said, their faith is as good as a corpse.

Even though those words come without any underlying threat of eternal damnation and ultimate eschatological absolutes, I realize they may seem harsh. And lest I appear as a monstrous hypocrite, I will be the first to admit that I frequently fall short.

There is nothing more difficult in modern western society than to actually live like Jesus taught us to live. Our culture teaches us to pursue wealth, pursue material and personal gain, pursue power and influence and authority and status, and live for ourselves even at the expense of others. It teaches us that individualism is the ultimate expression of humanity, and reinforces the idea that if someone fails or falls on hard times, they probably have only themselves to blame. We promote charity, but we expect to get a tax write-off for doing it. We promote living Godly lives, but we expect divine blessings in the form of material gain for doing it – the age old Gospel of Prosperity. We toss a few bucks in the offering plate, give some money to the Santa Claus at the Salvation Army bucket every Christmas, and give our old, worn-out clothes to Goodwill – and we think it’s enough. We’re nice to people, we try not to be hateful, and we generally attempt to be contributing members of society – and we think it’s enough. We say our prayers, we attend worship services, and we don’t take the Lord’s name in vain – and we think it’s enough.

My argument is that it’s not enough. My argument is that the life of Christ is a life of service to others. Not service just when it’s convenient. Not service in the form of platitudes. But a real, living, active lifestyle of service for others. Living for others and not for ourselves. Putting the needs of others ahead of the needs of ourselves.

That’s salvation. That’s living as part of the kingdom of God. That’s true faith. And even if we frequently fail to live to those standards, the least we can do is try. Make the attempt. When we fail, try again. And never stop trying.

If we do that, we are following the life of Christ. We are living Christianity as a verb. If not, we are just silent windmills in a vacuum.

A Weekend With the Family

2009-10-11T00:56:00.014-04:00

I spent last weekend in Louisville with my parents and sister. Although none of us live there now, we all converged there from our various locations in order to attend the St. James Art Festival. It was also a nice time for reminiscing, as Louisville was where our family lived when I was growing up - from 1978 to 1988.

The River City

I remember going to the St. James Art Festival as a kid and really hating it. Having been back now as an adult, I see what a sharp and perceptive child I must have been.

It was like this, only 10 times more crowded

Honestly, it wasn't that bad, but the part I enjoyed most was looking at all the old Victorian houses that line the streets in that area of town. It takes place in the St. James neighborhood - hence the name - and it really is a beautiful part of Old Louisville.

We stayed downtown in the Marriott, which is a nice high-rise hotel in the heart of the city. My father got abnormally interested in an abandoned parking garage next door, and subsequently insisted that I research it and write a book about it. Apparently books about abandoned parking garages make for best sellers; I hear publishers are dying for them.

The subject of my next bestseller

We did quite a bit of driving on Saturday, going around Louisville and looking at a lot of old places, talking, laughing, reminiscing, and generally having a good time. We walked around our old church for a while, which brought back a lot of old memories.

Walnut Street Baptist Church, which is next door to a lovely eating establishment called Dizzy Whizz

We also drove out to see the increasingly famous Waverly Hills Sanitorium, which is an old TB hospital that now plays host to a Haunted House tour at Halloween, as well as tours throughout the year.

The biggest thing to scare you here are the lingering bacteria

We attempted to find the house that my father was born in, but his salmon-like sense of direction failed him and we weren't able to locate it.

On Saturday evening we went over to the Galt House hotel. We used to have Sunday brunch there after church in the 25th floor revolving room restaurant overlooking the Ohio River.

As though illustrating the changes in our family outlook since those days, on Saturday evening we had drinks in the bar. The bar is suspended over a street that runs between the two main buildings of the hotel. It was very swank. In my jeans and short-sleeve shirt, I felt uncomfortably under-dressed. The bar itself was about 30 feet long and curvilinear, shaped like an uncoiling snake, and the entire bar-top was an aquarium. So as you sit there with your drink, there are fish swimming beneath your elbows and above your knees.

While there, we discussed an enormous clock that sits across the river in Indiana.

My father always told us it was the second largest clock in the world, after Big Ben in London. We argued whether or not this was still true, and got conflicting answers on cell phone Internet searches.

If Wikipedia can be trusted, it turns out that this clock (which is at the Colgate-Palmolive plant) is the 7th largest in the world. It was built in 1906 in New Jersey and moved to the Indiana side of Louisville in 1924. At that time, it was actually the largest clock in the world. It was very quickly eclipsed by another Colgate clock, built in New Jersey in 1924 to replace the one that had just left. It fell to third place in 1933 after a Pittsburgh company built a clock that surpassed both the Colgate clocks.

As for Big Ben, it's only about half the size of the Colgate clock in Louisville. Go figure.

There was also a film festival of some type going on that night at the Galt House. The film they were showing was a recently released film called Another Harvest Moon, staring Ernest Borgnine (who we agreed must be about 132 [actually, he's 92]). Anyway, while we were sitting there, Doris Roberts - who is also in the movie - walked in and sat down at the bar with a small entourage.

For some reason, I am reminded of my mother-in-law

She is a character actress who won Emmys for playing the crazy mother on Everybody Loves Raymond. She also played the mother of Ellen Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - one of our family favorites.

All in all, it was a nice weekend of reminiscence with my family in the city of my childhood.

"Now inside that Torino is my cousin, Jackie."

The Role of Women in the Resurrection

2009-10-05T05:41:00.003-04:00

Carracci's Holy Women at the Tomb of Christ

It is frequently asserted by theologians and scholars from across the spectrum that women played a prominent role in the resurrection of Jesus. Whether one understands the resurrection as a metaphor for newness of life, a spiritual resurrection of Jesus’ soul, or a physical resuscitation of Jesus’ body, many agree that women played a central role in that original understanding.

I understand this position well because I have often made the argument myself. Our earliest Christian texts, both within the Bible and outside the Bible, depict women as having a central place in Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection. Women are said to have been close followers of Jesus and to have helped finance his ministry; women are said to have been the only ones who stayed with Jesus at his execution; women are said to have been the first people to find the empty tomb and to see the resurrected Christ; and women held positions of authority and influence in the churches of Paul.

Taken together, these things indicate strongly that women played unusually significant roles in the birth of Christianity – unusual because of its placement in an era and region that was strongly patriarchal and in which women were second-class citizens not even considered reliable enough to testify in a trial.

This history, of course, has important and vital ramifications to theology. Even in the 21st century, there are still Christian churches, denominations, and institutions that do not permit women in ministry roles. The Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, does not ordain women to be ministers or even deacons. The Roman Catholic Church does not allow women to be priests, bishops, or popes, and doesn’t even allow its male leaders to get married (perhaps women would distract them from their heavenly duties?). Many folks from among these denominations and churches regard women in ministry roles with derision. One website I found stated that “women preachers are all false prophets.”

So recognizing the important role women played, both during Jesus’ ministry, at his resurrection, and even into the early Christian era in the Pauline churches, is vitally important to modern theology. Paul couldn’t be more explicit when he refers to Phoebe, the carrier of his letter to Rome, as a “deacon” of the church. He couldn’t be more explicit when he calls Priscilla of Rome his “fellow worker” in Christ Jesus (implying that she is in an authoritative teaching role like he is). He couldn’t be more explicit when he says that the Roman church meets in her house, implying she is the leader of that church. He couldn’t be more explicit when he calls a woman named Junia an “apostle” – that is, a preacher or missionary. He couldn’t be more explicit when he refers to women prophesying – that is, providing theological guidance to congregations.

While none of that is invalidated by the discussion that follows, I want to look more closely at the common idea that women were centrally involved in the resurrection. Biblically-speaking, the Gospel writers all agree that women, and specifically Mary Magdalene, were the first to find the empty tomb. Furthermore, Matthew and John assert that Mary herself was the first person to see the risen Jesus.

This, as mentioned above, has led to common assertions that whatever the resurrection was – metaphorical, spiritual, physical – women played a central role. The argument suggests that it is inconceivable that male scribes in patriarchal 1st century Palestine would have written women into a story where they didn’t originally exist – especially one as theologically important as the resurrection – so their presence in these accounts must point to early and reliable tradition.

While I have frequently made this point myself, I recently read an argument suggesting that perhaps the story of the women at the tomb was, in fact, a literary embellishment. This came from scholar J.D. Crossan in his book, “The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus.” Crossan, by no means, suggests a diminished role of women in modern churches based on this historical reconstruction, but simply argues that the textual evidence lends credence to literary embellishment rather than “history remembered.”

First, it is important to recognize that while a person might commonly argue that “all four Gospels agree that women were involved in the resurrection,” in reality this is only a single source, and not four sources. It is an issue of confusing texts with sources. We have four texts agreeing that women were at the tomb (actually, we have five, if you count the Gospel of Peter). But only one source. That single source is Mark. Matthew and Luke both used Mark’s account as a primary source in creating their own accounts. And while John has traditionally been considered an “independent” source from the other three, scholarly trends of the last 20 or 30 years have started moving toward the conclusion that the author of John, in fact, used one or more of the other three. Having read the various arguments, I am fairly convinced that John is not independent of the other canonical Gospels.

So while all of the Gospels agree that women found the tomb, there is only a single source at play there – the Gospel of Mark.

So the obvious question is this: Did Mark base his story on some earlier tradition, either oral or written, or did he just make it up off the top of his head?

The first option would seem to be the self-evident answer. Mark must have gotten his general information on Jesus from somewhere, and it is reasonable to assume that the story of the women at the tomb was included in that earlier source.

Crossan argues, however, for the second option – that the “women at the tomb” story was a creation of Mark. More specifically, he argues that it was a theological creation of Mark. In other words, it wasn’t just willy-nilly; Mark wasn’t making stuff up for fun. He was making a theological point.

The first bit of evidence comes from our pre-Markan accounts of Christianity. Many scholars, for instance, date the non-Biblical texts known as the Didache and the Gospel of Thomas to the middle of the 1st century, several decades before Mark. Neither of those documents, however, describes the resurrection at all, with women or without. We do, however, have one, and possibly two, resurrection accounts that predate Mark – the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Peter.

As to the Gospel of Peter, while most agree that it was written down in the 2nd century, a number of scholars argue that it contains early, pre-Biblical accounts of Jesus’ passion and resurrection. Some (namely Crossan) even go so far as to suggest that an early resurrection text – dubbed the Cross Gospel – is imbedded in the Gospel of Peter, and Crossan dates that hypothetical text to about 40 C.E., thirty years before Mark. Whether you agree with that hypothesis or not, the Cross Gospel does not include any women at the tomb. Instead, it is the Romans and the Jewish authorities – the enemies of Jesus – who find the empty tomb and who see the first vision of the risen Jesus.

As to the letters of Paul, there can be little doubt that they predate Mark or any of the other texts of the New Testament. Paul has very little to say about Jesus’ resurrection, but he does give a brief description of it in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15. He doesn’t mention anything about a tomb, but he provides a list of people the risen Christ appeared to. There is no mention of any women.

So our pre-Markan sources unilaterally fail to mention anything about women and the resurrection. If women played a prominent role in the resurrection, as is often asserted, and the Gospels of the New Testament reflect that tradition, shouldn’t we find the same tradition in our earlier sources? One would think yes, but the answer is no.

The second bit of evidence comes from a look at Mark’s overall theology. For years, theologians and scholars have pointed out that Mark tends to depict the disciples in a very negative light. In Mark, the disciples are bumbling and inept, never understanding despite continual clear instructions by Jesus. They don’t seem to get it when he tells them he will be executed and resurrected. When he enters the Garden of Gethsemane to pray before his arrest, Peter, James, and John – his “inner three” – fall asleep on him. Later, Peter denies knowing him, and all the disciples flee and abandon Jesus, never to be heard from in Mark’s text again.

Mark contrasts the lack of faith and general incompetence of the disciples – and specifically of Peter, James, and John – with a story of an unnamed Roman centurion who, at the foot of the cross, proclaims that Jesus is the son of God. The disciples never got it, but a pagan Gentile did.

Mark paints an equally negative portrait of Jesus’ female followers. He makes clear that Jesus had prominent female disciples, but those women are also depicted as not understanding and having a basic lack of faith. In his story of the women at the tomb, they go there not to look for the resurrected Jesus, but to anoint his body in a burial custom. Crossan points out that this may have demonstrated great love, but it did not demonstrate great faith. Clearly the women didn’t believe Jesus when he told them repeatedly that he would be resurrected after three days.

Furthermore, when the women are instructed by the heavenly messenger at the tomb to tell the disciples to meet the risen Jesus in Galilee, the women fail to do it, and instead flee in terror.

Like the story of the Roman centurion, the unbelief and disobedience of the women in Jesus’ inner circle is contrasted by the great faith of an unnamed woman at the house of a leper who, prior to Jesus’ arrest, anoints his body with expensive unguents. Jesus heaps praise upon her for her great faith, and predicts that her story will be remembered for all time. Why did this demonstrate great faith? Because she believed Jesus when he said he would rise after three days, so she anointed his body before his burial, knowing she wouldn’t have a chance to do so afterward because he would rise again.

Mark’s literary technique is clear: the male disciples, personified by the trio of Peter, James, and John, are inept and disbelieving. They are contrasted with an unnamed male pagan who asserts that Jesus is the son of God. The female disciples, personified by the trio of Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James and Joses, and Salome, are disbelieving and disobedient. They are contrasted with an unnamed female at the home of a leper who has great faith that Jesus will rise again.

In that literary technique of Mark, a threefold theological implication to his readers is also clear. First, just because you come from a community claiming authority of one of Jesus’ inner circle, that doesn’t mean you have superiority or authority over others – after all, even Jesus’ own inner circle were inept, disobedient, and disbelieving. Second, even if you feel inept and undeserving of God’s grace, be comforted because even Jesus’ own companions were like you. Third, don’t feel unworthy if you were never a part of Jesus’ inner circle; after all, those outside of the inner circle, like pagans and humble, anonymous women, were exalted above and beyond even the inner circle.

In that literary and theological context, it makes perfect sense why Mark – despite the patriarchal society in which he lived – might have written women into a resurrection scene without any pre-existing tradition to support it.

The third and final bit of evidence is the way Mark’s account was used by later writers. It is clear from Matthew, Luke, and John, that they were basing their story of the women at the tomb solely on Mark – and not on some other oral or textual tradition.

Matthew’s account follows Mark’s almost word for word. He does, however, clearly see a problem with Mark’s negative portrayal of the women, and with the fact that there are no resurrection scenes in Mark’s account. So where Mark’s women flee from the tomb in “terror and amazement” and don’t tell anyone, Matthew’s women go with “fear and great joy” and immediately tell the other disciples – exactly as they were instructed to do. Where Mark’s women are disobedient, Matthew’s are obedient right to the letter, even going so far as to “run quickly” after being told to “quickly” go tell the disciples. Also, where there is never any resurrection appearance in Mark, Matthew has the women meet Jesus on the road, and later has the disciples meet Jesus in Galilee. Finally, where Mark’s women are demonstrating unfaithfulness by going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, Matthew’s women are simply going there to “look at the tomb,” as though to check to see if he’s risen yet. Throughout the entire scene, it is clear that Matthew is “fixing” Mark’s account – changing disobedience into obedience, unfaithfulness into faithfulness, and adding in resurrection appearances.

Luke’s changes mirror Matthew’s. The women find the tomb, but instead of disobeying, they go to tell the disciples. There are also extensive scenes in which the risen Jesus appears to the disciples (though never to the women, as in Matthew).

John’s account diverges the most from Mark, but it is clear that John was using the accounts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Mary Magdalene is again the central character, and although no other women are mentioned by name, Mary does use the word “we” when discussing the discovery of the empty tomb, implying other women were there with her. John borrows Luke’s story about Peter running to the tomb and looking inside to see the “strips of linen” discarded there. The general negativity of Mark is retained by John when Mary Magdalene doesn’t understand that the empty tomb means Jesus has risen – she believes his body has been stolen. When she finally sees Jesus, she still doesn’t get it, mistaking him for the gardener. Finally, John refers to Matthew’s account when he has Jesus instruct Mary not to “hold on” to him. In Matthew, when Mary and the other women met the risen Jesus, they “grasped his feet” and worshipped him. Since John doesn’t say anything about Mary attempting to touch Jesus, Jesus’ words only make sense in the context of Matthew’s story.

Taking these three accounts together, there is no textual evidence suggesting that a different oral or textual tradition was used by Matthew, Luke, or John in forming their “women at the tomb” stories. Luke and Matthew relied exclusively on Mark, and John relied on all three.

Thus, the three lines of evidence – the internal literary and theological clues from Mark, the total lack of any suggestion about women at the tomb in any existing pre-Markan sources, and the exclusive reliance of the later Gospel writers on Mark’s account – all suggest that Mark developed the story on his own.

Having said all that, and having presented the argument, I am still not sure where I stand. On a personal level, I very much like the idea of women having a central role in the resurrection. It helps negate a lot of stereotypes so common in Christian churches. But as a historian and essayist, I have to make sure that my personal biases don’t interfere with any neutral historical conclusions that I embrace. I may like the idea of women being involved intimately in the resurrection, and of that historical fact being imbedded in our existing accounts, but just because I want it to be true doesn’t mean that it is.

Crossan makes a powerful argument that strikes deep at the notion that there must have been an earlier source for the “women at the tomb” tradition. His argument digs at the foundational assumption that says that no 1st century male writer would have added women into an important story when there was otherwise no historical basis for doing so. In fact, one of the hallmark arguments among Christian apologists for the reliability of the Gospel stories is that they depict women in prominent resurrection roles. Since it seems self-evident that no male in the 1st century would have added such a story where none existed, the argument says that the stories must reflect a level of historical truth. I have long generally agreed with this assertion.

Yet Crossan has adequately shown how and why such a male writer might have done just that. He illustrates persuasively the literary and theological aspects of Mark’s Gospel. By writing women into the resurrection scene, Mark was not elevating women into a position of prominence; instead, he was using that scene to demonstrate that Jesus’ inner circle of both men and women were generally inept, unfaithful, and disobedient, as this served his greater theological theme.

I do have some reservations, however. First, while the argument about Mark’s literary techniques is a persuasive one, I don’t think I can call it “final.” Crossan demonstrates how negativity can be read into the scene of the women at the tomb (unfaithfulness and disobedience), but I am not sure I am convinced that this negativity was Mark’s primary goal in that scene. Other scholars have argued that this scene was liturgical in nature, based on oral tradition of women mourners at the tomb, and of the belief that Jesus had been resurrected in accordance with the Jewish scriptures. While it’s true that the women are technically being unfaithful by coming to anoint his body in a burial ritual despite his promise to rise again, and while it is true that the women are technically being disobedient by not immediately going and telling the disciples what they have seen, I am not sure that Crossan has convinced me that this was legitimately the intention of the writer of Mark. Although I count Crossan among my favorite New Testament experts, I have frequently felt that he sometimes reads between the lines a bit too much, looking for evidence that doesn’t really seem to be there. I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t another example of that.

As a rebuttal to that, however, it seems undeniable that Matthew saw the same negativity in Mark that Crossan has seen, because Matthew clearly “fixes” those negative portrayals.

Second, Crossan makes a good point that there is no evidence of any “women at the tomb” stories prior to Mark, but it’s also true that we have extremely few sources of any resurrection stories at all prior to Mark. Paul gives very few biographical details about Jesus or the circumstances of his resurrection. He does give us a list of those Jesus was said to have appeared to, and he does say that this was the tradition given to him in Jerusalem very early on, but it’s certainly possible that Paul simply left out any reference to women out of misogyny or perhaps because he was having trouble with female prophets in Corinth (as deduced from the content of other parts of the letter). As for the Cross Gospel, that is an extremely contentious hypothesis, as I indicated above, and the majority of scholars reject it. If the Cross Gospel did exist, then Crossan’s point is bolstered, because women don’t figure in the resurrection. But if it did not exist, then Crossan’s point is weakened, because it leaves us with only one pre-Markan source for the resurrection, namely the letters of Paul. That’s not much to go on considering that we are talking about 40 years of tradition prior to Mark. There were most certainly a lot of texts and oral traditions going around during those years that we no longer have access to. So just because there is no longer any existing evidence for pre-Markan stories of the women at the tomb doesn’t mean those stories didn’t exist in the first century.

In the end, whether Crossan’s argument about the “women at the tomb” story is correct or not, there can be no question that women were central figures in early Christianity, both during Jesus’ life and during the rise of Christianity after his death. Thus, whether their role in the resurrection itself was historical or legendary, that does not change the fact that women’s diminished role in Christianity, beginning in the late 1st century, was a product of male-dominated human institutions, and not any divinely-mandated secondary status of women.

The Cross Gospel

2009-09-28T02:31:00.005-04:00

The Cross Gospel is an early passion-resurrection text hypothesized by Jesus scholar J.D. Crossan as one of the primary sources behind the 2nd century Gospel of Peter, as well as the four Gospels of the New Testament.

As a “passion-resurrection” text, it tells the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection.

From a cursory examination, it seems that most accounts of the Cross Gospel go one of two ways: either they are accounts intended for a general audience that provide only a cursory explanation of the Cross Gospel without much detail (for instance, on the Internet), or they are accounts given in publications intended for academic audiences and are therefore not accessible for the average dabbler in Biblical scholarship.

My intent in this essay is to provide an overview of the Cross Gospel for armchair enthusiasts and those with a general interest in Biblical scholarship.

JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN

J.D. Crossan spent most of his career at DePaul University, where he is now a Professor Emeritus. He is widely regarded as one of the premier Jesus scholars alive today, and is both famous and infamous for his conclusions regarding Jesus of Nazareth and the history of early Christianity. Regardless of how one regards his conclusions, there are few who would disagree that Crossan is one of the most prominent, widely quoted, and widely debated New Testament scholars alive today.

THE GOSPEL OF PETER

Crossan has hypothesized what he calls the “Cross Gospel” from a study of the Gospel of Peter – a 2nd century work that has been available to scholars for more than 100 years, but which most average Christians are not familiar with.

Prior to the late 19th century, the Gospel of Peter was known only through a few references and quotations by early Church fathers, who mention it in writings from the 3rd and 4th centuries. In the 1880’s, however, a large fragment of the Gospel was discovered (like so many other lost Christian texts) in Egypt, inside the tomb of a 10th century Christian monk. That 10th century version was itself copied from just a fragment of the text, demonstrating that even in the early Middle Ages, most of the text was already lost.

The surviving text begins just after the arrest of Jesus, follows through his trial, execution, burial, and resurrection, and ends just after his tomb is found empty by Mary Magdalene and her “women friends.” It actually ends in mid-sentence, with Peter (writing in first person) going out to sea to fish together with his brother Andrew and Levi son of Alphaeus (identified in most traditions with the disciple Matthew).

Most scholars, including Crossan, agree that the original Gospel of Peter dates to the mid-2nd century – roughly 150 C.E. Eusebius, writing in the 300’s, refers to another Church historian who wrote about the Gospel of Peter around 190 C.E. So it must have already been in existence, and in wide circulation, by that time.

SOURCES FOR THE GOSPEL OF PETER

There are three obvious conclusions scholars can draw about the sources used by the writer of the Gospel of Peter. The first is that the writer depended solely on one or more of the New Testament Gospels in writing his text. The second is that the writer did not depend on any New Testament Gospel, and thus exclusively used some other source no longer in existence. The third is a combination of the first two – the writer of Peter used both New Testament sources and non-New Testament (or non-canonical) sources.

Very few scholars have argued for the second position. Most agree that the writer of Peter used one or more of the New Testament Gospels, and a fair amount argue that he also used some source not found in the Gospels and no longer in existence.

Crossan falls into the camp asserting that there are both canonical and non-canonical sources in the Gospel of Peter. He points out that if Peter is based only on canonical sources, why is there so much in the existing text that is not found in those four New Testament Gospels? A sizeable portion, perhaps more than half, of the existing Gospel of Peter has no parallels in the New Testament. It seems clear to Crossan and many others that the writer of this text was using some other source in addition to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and/or John.

THE CROSS GOSPEL

Crossan has formed the hypothesis that this “fifth source” for the Gospel of Peter is a passion-resurrection narrative no longer in existence, which he calls the Cross Gospel. He has dated this Gospel to the early 40’s C.E., roughly 10-12 years after the execution of Jesus. He has further asserted that it not only informed the passion-resurrection account of the Gospel of Peter, but was also the primitive account that informed the Gospel of Mark. Since Mark informed Matthew and Luke, and all three together informed John, Crossan has argued that the Cross Gospel is at the heart of all existing passion-resurrection narratives known to modern Christian scholarship.

This is, without question, a highly controversial view. Crossan himself has stated that when he first proposed it in the late 1980’s, it was met “with almost universal rejection” among his colleagues. I don’t think that “universal rejection” is still apparent – it seems that slowly but surely, more and more scholars are taking his proposal seriously. It remains, however, a distinctly minority view.

The primary argument against the Cross Gospel is not necessarily its existence (many scholars, as I mentioned above, agree that the Gospel of Peter uses a non-canonical source), but rather its unified content and dating.

First, as to the unified content. While many scholars argue for non-canonical sources in the Gospel of Peter, most assert that this content may have come from several sources, both written and oral, and may not represent an actual “consecutive” account (that is, an established written story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end). In other words, the content of Peter that does not come from the four Gospels of the New Testament may have been drawn from a number of different textual and oral traditions known to the writer of Peter.

Second, regarding the dating. This is perhaps the most controversial of Crossan’s arguments. Critics argue that while there may well have been some early source known to Mark which no longer exists, it is hard to equate the Cross Gospel with that Markan source.

Crossan responds to the first criticism by arguing that the material at question in the Gospel of Peter (that is, the material that does not come from the New Testament) has all the structural earmarks of a unified account – a beginning, middle, and end, as it were. If it was drawn from numerous written and textual sources, it would not demonstrate that sort of cohesion.

For instance, the text tells us that Herod Antipas, and not Pilate, ordered Jesus’ execution, and that the execution was carried out not by Roman soldiers, but by the Jewish people. Later, however, the Jewish people are stunned by the miraculous signs that take place during the crucifixion (darkening of the sun, the curtain of the holy of holies ripped in two, etc.), and appear to be on the verge of repenting and proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. The Jewish authorities, however, having witnessed the resurrection themselves (and thus, in effect, knowing that Jesus is the Messiah), plot with the Romans to cover it up, lest the Jewish people attack them for leading them to kill God’s promised Messiah.

With the exception of the miraculous signs at Jesus’ crucifixion, none of that is found in the four Gospels of the New Testament. Yet it clearly has a narrative cohesion one would expect in a single written story – and which one would not expect from a conglomeration of various written and oral traditions. The Jews execute Jesus on the orders of the Jewish authorities, the Jews are amazed at the miraculous signs during the crucifixion, the Jews are on the verge of repenting, so the Jewish authorities cover up the resurrection to keep their own people from attacking them out of anger that their authorities led them to crucify their own Messiah.

This seems to be (and is argued by Crossan to be) a cohesive and well-established written account being used by the writer of the Gospel of Peter. Furthermore, Crossan points out that while many scholars have disagreed with his Cross Gospel hypothesis, none have managed to show how a conglomeration of oral and written traditions could have resulted in the cohesive narrative found in the Gospel of Peter.

As to the dating issue, Crossan supports his date of roughly 42 C.E. by looking at the context of the story and comparing it to similar situations in Jewish-Christian history. He specifically argues that it was created in Jerusalem during the early 40’s, after Agrippa returned from Rome as the new King of the Jews.

Agrippa was a grandson to Herod the Great, but was raised in the imperial palace at Rome.

Because of those Roman connections, he eventually was given rule of a portion of the Jewish homeland in 37 C.E. Once installed, he deposed the Roman-appointed high priestly family, and re-established the priestly family that had been in favor during the time of his grandfather, Herod the Great. The Roman-appointed family, by the way, had been involved in the deaths of both Jesus around 30 C.E. and the early Christian Stephen around 37 C.E. The Christian Jews would no doubt have been pleased with Agrippa for deposing this priestly family.

Agrippa returned to Rome, however, in 39 C.E. and stayed there for two years. When he came back to Judea in 41, he was granted kingship of the entire Jewish homeland. One of his first actions was to reinstate the Roman high priestly family that he had deposed four years earlier. Shortly thereafter, he had James son of Zebedee (one of Jesus’ disciples) put to death, and arrested Simon Peter (who later escaped). Where Agrippa had been favorable in the eyes of early Christianity before, he now became its enemy.

Crossan argues that it was in this setting that the Cross Gospel was composed. He states: “The Romans were completely innocent then [at the execution of Jesus] because that was how they appeared now [in the early 40’s]. The house of Herod and the Jewish authorities were completely guilty then because that was how they appeared now. The ‘people of the Jews’ were ready to convert then because that was how they appeared now.”

THE CONTENT OF THE CROSS GOSPEL

I have already alluded to the primary content of the Cross Gospel in the points above. Pilate and the Romans are shown to be completely innocent of Jesus’ execution. Herod Antipas orders “the Lord to be taken away” instructing them to “do what I told you to do.” But who did Herod hand Jesus over to? That question is answered a few sentences later: “…he gave them over to the people” – that is, the Jewish people.

The Jewish people then run Jesus through the streets, spitting on him, hitting him with a reed, slapping his cheeks, and whipping him. They also put him in a purple robe and place a crown of thorns on his head.

Jesus is then crucified together with two criminals. The Jews (not the Roman soldiers, as in the Gospels) cast lots for his clothes. One of the criminals derides the Jews for executing Jesus. The people respond not by torturing the criminal, but by ordering that Jesus’ legs are not to be broken, so that he will die more slowly and suffer more.

By midday, the sky goes dark and the people aren’t able to tell whether it is evening or not. They fear breaking Mosaic Law by allowing a corpse to remain crucified after sunset and the start of the Sabbath. So they give Jesus a mixture of gall (poison) and vinegar to hasten his death. It works, and Jesus cries out “My Power, O Power, you have forsaken me!” The text does not actually say Jesus dies, however. Instead it uses a euphemism and says that Jesus was “taken up.”

After this, the curtain of the Holy of Holies is torn in two and there is a great earthquake. The darkness then dissipates and the sun reappears, showing it to be the “9th hour” (that is, 3 o’clock in the afternoon). The Jews are happy because they have not broken Mosaic Law.

Because of the miraculous signs during his execution and death, “the Jews,” “the elders,” and “the priests” – that is, all the Jewish people including their leaders – realize they have made a grave error and begin to “beat their breasts” and lament over the fall of Jerusalem, which must surely be coming from an angry God.

The Jewish authorities (“the scribes and Pharisees and elders”) become concerned that if Jesus’ disciples break into his tomb, revive him, and take him away, the Jews will become convinced that he has risen from the dead. So they urge the Romans to put guards at the tomb for “three days” – the time period Jews believed it took to ensure that a person was truly dead. Pilate agrees and sends a centurion named Petronius, together with his soldiers (presumably 100 of them), to guard the tomb. The Jewish elders go to the tomb as well. Once there, they roll a stone in front of it and seal it with “seven wax seals.” They then “pitch a tent” and literally camp out in front of the tomb. On the Sabbath (Saturday), large crowds come by and see the sealed and guarded tomb.

Early in the morning on Sunday, while it is still dark, there is a “loud voice in heaven.” The heavens open and “two men” descend in a shining light and approach the tomb. The stone rolls away by itself and the two men enter the tomb. The soldiers quickly wake up the centurion and the Jewish leaders and tell them what just happen. While they are telling the story, three men suddenly emerge from the tomb. The first two men are on either side of the third man, regally sustaining him with their arms the way a king might be led by his courtiers. The heads of the two men reach to the heavens, but the third man’s head goes “beyond the heavens.” The three men are being followed by “a cross.”

At this moment, a voice from heaven says: “Have you proclaimed to those who have died?” Jesus doesn’t respond, but the cross does: “Yes.”

This scene, of course, has made the Gospel of Peter and its Cross Gospel source infamous for those familiar with it. A walking, talking cross? Crossan, however, has argued persuasively that when taken in context, it is clear that the “cross” is not the cross that Jesus was crucified on, but rather a “cruciform procession” of the Holy Ones of Israel’s history that Jesus had just freed from hell. This “harrowing of hell” is an idea that has a long tradition in Catholic Christianity. The ancient Israelites, living before the time of Christ, must, by the definitions of Christian doctrine, have been in hell. So Jesus went there during his time in the tomb and freed those “Holy Ones” from their eternal torment. In the Cross Gospel source of the Gospel of Peter, Crossan argues that these freed Holy Ones exit the tomb with Jesus, forming a “cruciform procession” behind him. He uses this to argue that the earliest passion-resurrection accounts of Jesus viewed his death and vindication as a communal event rather than simply a personal event that happened to Jesus. Jesus, together with all of Israel, was vindicated upon his resurrection. Furthermore, the heads of Jesus and his courtiers are already up in the heavens because Jesus has already been exalted to God – he’s already resurrected and ascended, in other words.

After the resurrection scene, the centurion and his soldiers, together with the Jewish authorities, report to Pilate and proclaim that “truly he was God’s son.” The Jewish authorities, however, beg Pilate to cover it up and not allow his soldiers to tell anyone. The authorities fear that the people will “stone them” if they find out that they were led by the authorities to crucify the son of God. Pilate agrees.

ANALYSIS OF THE CROSS GOSPEL

The above story is what Crossan proposes was contained in the Cross Gospel. There are a number of scenes and events in the Gospel of Peter that I did not illustrate above, including a scene where Joseph of Arimathea asks for the body of Jesus, then buries it, and where Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty. These stories, by Crossan’s account, were drawn by the writer of Peter from the New Testament Gospels, and not from the Cross Gospel source.

As for the Cross Gospel itself, it is made explicit that the Jewish authorities urged the Jewish people to crucify Jesus, and then those people recognized their error and were on the verge of repenting. The Jewish authorities, fearing for their own safety, covered up the resurrection so that the Jewish people wouldn’t find out about it.

What is perhaps most significant, and unique, in that Cross Gospel text is that we have our only Christian story of the actual resurrection itself. In the four canonical Gospels, the resurrection has already occurred when the women find the tomb empty. Jesus then later appears. In the Cross Gospel, however, we have a story of the resurrection itself. Jesus is regally led out of his tomb by two heavenly men, their bodies already being exalted to heaven, followed by a procession of Israel’s Holy Ones who have been freed from the torments of hell. Furthermore, it is not the disciples or any of Jesus’ followers who witness this resurrection, but the Jewish and Roman authorities! The Jewish authorities are depicted as actually knowing from first-hand experience that Jesus rose from the dead, but covering it up to save their own skins.

The theological implications are fairly obvious there, and I alluded to them earlier in the context of Jerusalem in the early 40’s C.E.

Crossan argues that this text was the primitive passion-resurrection account used by Mark when developing his own, much more extensive, narrative. And following Mark were Matthew, Luke, and John. Thus, Crossan argues that familiar New Testament themes such as the purple robe, the crown of thorns, the beating and whipping, the two criminals – one of whom supports Jesus, the gall and vinegar, the decision not to break Jesus’ legs, the earthquakes, the harrowing of hell and the opening of the tombs of the Holy Ones, the sepulcher with a rolling stone door, the belief of the centurion, the “cry of dereliction” by Jesus on the cross, the heavenly messengers at the tomb – Crossan argues that all of this was original to the Cross Gospel, and informed the four canonical Gospels which were written after it.

Crossan, of course, does not argue for a literal interpretation of this Cross Gospel. He argues that it was theologically designed to show that the Romans were innocent of Jesus’ blood, the Jewish authorities were guilty of Jesus’ blood and of keeping the Jewish people from repenting, the resurrection of Jesus was a communal event of vindication for all rather than a personal event that happened to Jesus, and he argues finally that it was drawn not from “history remembered” but from “prophecy historicized.”

On that last point, “history remembered” would be an account drawn primarily from the memories of those who experienced it. Crossan, and of course numerous other scholars, have argued that the various Gospels of Jesus, both canonical and non-canonical, are not “history remembered,” but primarily “prophecy historicized.” That is, they are not based on memory, but are based on what the early Christians believed Jesus’ death meant, based on prophecy and scripture from the Jewish holy texts. Our accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection (including the Gospel of Peter), are unanimous in their assertion that Jesus’ followers abandoned him after his arrest. They weren’t there for the trial, the persecution, the execution, the burial, or even the resurrection. They do not reappear in our various texts until the women report that they found the tomb empty.

Most scholars, therefore, agree that Jesus’ closest companions didn’t really know what happened to Jesus after his arrest. Thus, the stories we get from Christian history are accounts drawn “according to the Scripture” (as stated by Paul), rather than accounts drawn from personal memory. Crossan argues that the same is true of the Cross Gospel, and that it was designed to fit the common Jewish wisdom stories of persecution before and vindication after execution (found in texts such as Isaiah, 2 Maccabees, and the Wisdom of Solomon). In effect, Crossan argues that the story is an early written account reflecting the early Christian belief that Jesus had been vindicated after his death and exalted to heaven by God.

CONCLUSION

As I made clear at the start, the Cross Gospel is a hypothetical text that has long been in wide contention among scholars. Many agree that the Gospel of Peter used non-canonical sources, but not all agree that this source was a single, consecutive narrative predating the Gospels of the New Testament.

The debate is sure to continue, but it is worth noting that when the hypothetical “Q Gospel” was first proposed by scholars in the 19th century, it was met with wide and almost universal rejection. Now, of course, it is accepted widely among scholars, and numerous arguments, conclusions, and historical reconstructions of early Christianity have been based upon it. One has to wonder if the Cross Gospel won’t enjoy the same sort of slow but sure acceptance in decades to come, as more information comes to light.

One thing seems sure: it will either become widely accepted, or it will finally be shown to be misguided. But for the time being – as Crossan has pointed out – no scholar has yet been able to show convincingly why and how it is wrong, or to make a counter-proposal that makes more sense.

The Text of the Common Sayings Tradition

2009-09-19T20:55:00.001-04:00

If you didn't catch my last blog post on the Common Sayings Tradition, you can read it here.

The Common Sayings Tradition is a hypothetical very early source of sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. It has been collected by comparing the Q Gospel (a source found within the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) and the Gospel of Thomas.

Both of those sources – Q and Thomas – are “sayings Gospels;” that is, they are made up of sayings of Jesus, rather than biographical accounts of his life. The 37 sayings they have in common have been dubbed the Common Sayings Tradition by scholars Stephen Patterson and John Dominic Crossan, who have gone on to assert that these sayings represent a very early thread of Jesus material, and may well be the closest we can come to knowing what Jesus actually said and taught.

Since it does not appear that any prominent source on the Internet has ever published a written text of this hypothetical source, I have decided to create one myself. To compile the list of sayings, I have used Crossan’s references, given in Appendix 1 of his 1998 book, “The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus.”

Of the 37 sayings in the CST, 18 of them have not been redacted in either Q or Thomas (meaning that the two texts stayed true to the original CST source). This doesn’t mean, of course, that the Q version and the Thomas version of these sayings are exactly word-for-word the same. Among these 18 sayings, I have tended to go with the simplest version, because the original oral tradition that would have produced these sayings would have been based on simple word formulas. Only 7 of the 37 sayings have been redacted in both texts. When one text redacted the CST, but the other did not, I have used the non-redacted material in creating my reproduction. In the case of the 7 sayings that are redacted in both sources, I have given the sayings in both forms.

Of course, no implication is intended that this is a complete list, or that anything not found in the Common Sayings Tradition is, by definition, not an authentic saying of Jesus.

THE COMMON SAYINGS TRADITION

1. So I say to you: ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

2a. [The kingdom of God] will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, “Look, here!” or “Look, there!” Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.

2b. The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.

3. Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.

4. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Don’t do the things you hate.

5. When you go into any region and walk about in the countryside, when people take you in, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them.

6. Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

7. Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.

8. [The kingdom of God] is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.

9a. For this reason I say, if the owners of a house know that a thief is coming, they will be on guard before the thief arrives and will not let the thief break into their house and steal their possessions. As for you, then, be on guard against the world. Prepare yourselves with great strength, so the robbers can’t find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come.

9b. But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

10. You see the sliver in your friend’s eye, but you don’t see the timber in your own eye. When you take the timber out of your own eye, then you will see well enough to remove the sliver from your friend’s eye.

11. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.

12. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, nor does one put it in a hidden place. Rather, one puts it on a lamp stand so that all who come and go will see its light.

13. If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a pit.

14. One can’t enter a strong person’s house and take it by force without tying the man’s hands. Then one can loot his house.

15. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you? And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

16. Woe to the Pharisees! They have taken the keys of knowledge and have hidden them. They have not entered nor have they allowed anyone else to enter.

17. Whoever has something in hand will be given more, and whoever has nothing will be deprived of even the little they have.

18. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

19. Grapes are not harvested from thorn trees, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they yield no fruit. Good people produce good from what they’ve stored up; evil people produce evil from the wickedness they’ve stored up in their hearts, and say evil things. For from the overflow of the heart they produce evil.

20a. From Adam to John the Baptist, among those born of women, no one is so much greater than John the Baptist that his eyes should not be averted. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will recognize the Father’s kingdom and will become greater than John.

20b. I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.”

21. A person cannot mount two horses or bend two bows. And a slave cannot serve two masters, otherwise that slave will honor the one and offend the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth.

22. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

23. Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

24. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

25a. Two will recline on a couch; one will die, one will live.

25b. I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.

26a. I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was granted this from my Father.

26b. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the son, and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him.

27. Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. At the time for the dinner he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, “Come; for everything is ready now.” But they all alike began to make excuses. So the slave returned and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and said to his slave, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” And the slave said, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.” Then the master said to the slave, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner.”

28a. Fortunate are you when you are hated and persecuted; where you have been persecuted, they will find no place [of rest]. Fortunate are those who have been persecuted in their hearts: they are the ones who have truly come to know the Father.

28b. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

29. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

30. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

31. Seek his treasure that is unfailing, that is enduring, where no moth comes to eat and no worm destroys.

32a. Why have you come out to the countryside? To see a reed shaken by the wind? And to see a person dressed in expensive clothes, like your rulers and your powerful ones? They are dressed in expensive clothes, and they cannot understand truth.

32b. What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who put on fine clothing and live in luxury are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.”

33. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

34. Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside [of the body] is also the one who made the outside?

35. If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you won’t get it back.

36. The Father’s kingdom is like a woman. She took a little leaven, hid it in dough, and made it into large loaves of bread.

37. The Father’s kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine and looked for the one until he found it. After he had toiled, he said to the sheep, “I love you more than the ninety-nine.”