Amazon Review.

My review is here. As always, please give me a helpful vote.

In The First Messiah, Michael O. Wise claims to have unlocked the identity of the mysterious "Teacher of Righteousness," a figure mentioned in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls left behind by Essene community at Qumran. By reading very, very deeply a portion of the Thanksgiving Hymns, one of the texts in the Dead Sea Scroll collection, and filtering his reading through his understanding of the tropes common to "scripture prophets" of "crisis cults," Wise claims to discern key bits of biographical information of the person he claims was the "Teacher of Righteousness," a person who he calls "Judah" for convenience, and, also, because a "few clues" seem to suggest that name was associated with the Teacher of Righteousness. (p. 41.) Wise, however, doesn't share what those clues are, and, so, to the reader, the name "Judah" seems to be pulled out of the hat and leaves the sense that there was information - perhaps important information - about "Judah" that Wise isn't sharing.

The "Teacher of Righteousness" has been a well-known and mysterious figure ever since the early years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It has been a common-place among those aware of the basic outlines of the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Teacher of Righteousness is a kind of proto-Christ figure who anticipated Jesus of Nazareth or who Jesus of Nazareth somehow used to create his own biography. In short, the parallels between Jesus of Nazareth and the Teacher of Righteousness have been often noted, and the parallels that Wise draws between the two should be the least interesting part of Wise's book.

Wise argues that Judah, his Teacher of Righteousness, was part of the priest class that was ousted from control of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Pharisees in the mid-Second Century B.C. According to Wise, Judah challenged the Pharisees and was betrayed by his allies in the priestly class and the Judean nobility and was given a sentence of death, commuted to exile. While in exile, Wise theorizes that Judah took up the profession of "bandit" and was eventually betrayed again by his former allies, who led a Judean strike team against his encampment. Eventually, Judah died, possibly a violent death at the hands of the communities upon whom he practiced his banditry.

This is an interesting story and Wise tells it very well. Wise is a gifted prose stylist. He crafts sentences that are memorable and insightful. For example, in describing Judah's contribution to the worldview of Israel, Wise writes "This charismatic figure was able to express what many people were feeling but could not articulate. He began to caress, to shape anew, the inchoate notions of the myth dream of Israel." (p. 41.) Here's another example: "And here fortune has cracked one of her rare smiles: that remarkable document seems to have survived." (p. 66.) Another one: "For in history, it is often true that behind the profound lies the obscure." (p. 208.) Here's another observation about the ease with which one could turn bandit during the First Century B.C.: "By modern standards, ancient political control - even in the most repressive regimes - was amazingly relaxed. The problem lay with the technology: authorities of the day suffered from more technical difficulties than a third rate television network." (p. 146.)

This is both fun and beautiful writing. Likewise, Wise's descriptions of what he imagines to be the turning points of Judah's life - Judah's trial, the riot against the pharisaic rituals, etc. - are well-done, offering a "you were there feel."

The problem is, is any of it true? Wise seems to be doing an awful lot of extrapolation from the data. Wise certainly is extremely broadly read and has brought in some strong insights from obscure history and sociology to create his model of the "scriptural prophet" of the "crisis cult," and his ability to wring biographical detail from the tropes and word combinations that the author - or authors - of the Thanksgiving Hymns use is breathtaking. Wise will take a reference to, for example, "well-watered trees," link it to Isaiah 41:18 - 19, and tell us what Judah was thinking by that reference. (See p. 197.) Although I'm convinced that such interweaving is, in fact, how people with a common textual tradition went about in their reasoning, I'm not sure that we have access to all the nuances that went into what the references meant to the people involved more than two millennia ago, or, to be more precise, I'm sure that we don't have access to all such nuances, and a minor misreading can lead to major misunderstandings. So, a grain of salt seems to be in order in reading Wise.

The other reason a grain of salt seems to be in order is that Wise obliquely - as obliquely as Judah's interweaving of scriptural ideas, it would seem - notes that in the background there is a barely acknowledged but very strong dissent to his ideas among the scholarly community. So, at various points, Wise acknowledges that one portion of "Judah's ninth hymn" "has never been rightly understood." (p. 196.) Elsewhere he makes oblique references to how some position he is asserting has not been accepted by other scholars. This problem is compounded by the fact that other scholars have - presumably based on equally solid scholarship - found completely different persons to have been the Teacher of Righteousness.

But if one reads The First Messiah with a suitably skeptical attitude it is a useful source for learning about Judean society before the Roman occupation and about how to engage in a style of "deep reading" scriptural texts. It is also a useful source of information about the many crisis cults that have risen and disappeared throughout human history.

I mentioned at the outset that the least innovative part of Wise's book was the connection that Wise draws between Jesus of Nazareth and the Teacher of Righteousness. This connection has been known for decades, and Wise really has nothing to add here. Wise offers no explanation for how Jesus came to be aware of the forgotten history of "Judah." In truth, the fact that Wise has to go to such extremes of literary reconstruction to "recover" his Judah is evidence of how forgotten Judah was. It seems that no one outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls preserves any memory - and, at best, a very hazy memory - of Judah. Wise does not claim, as some have done, that Jesus was an Essene. Wise offers no suggestion for the transmission of Judah's insights to Jesus apart from the idea that Judah added to the "myth dream" of Israel, and Jesus "plugged into" this "myth dream."

Perhaps, Jesus did. But it's equally likely that Jesus read the same texts that Judah read and that the ideas that were in the air were common to both. Independent discoveries do happen. We don't have to posit a "myth dream" in order to explain how Leibnitz and Newton both invented calculus at about the same time, or how Wallace and Darwin both came up with ideas of Evolution by Natural Selection at around the same time.

The other problem is that Wise is doing the same thing that he accuses others of doing when he claims that the problem with getting to the historical Jesus is that scholars have managed to come up with many different, irreconcilable portraits of Jesus. (p. 260.) The method that these scholars use is to come up with one idea, one standard, by which they filter all the scriptural statements about Jesus. This method has the problem of creating the portrait of the Jesus that the filter assumed in the first place. Thus, a feminist theory of Jesus produces a surprisingly feminist Jesus; a Marxist theory produces a Marxist Jesus; the itinerant Cynic philosopher theory of John Dominic Crossan produces - mirabile dictu! - a Jesus who is an itinerant Cynic philosopher, etc., etc.

And Wise, for his part, assumes that Jesus is a scriptural prophet of a crisis cult, and at the end of the book describes a Jesus who is a scriptural prophet of a crisis cult. Yes, it could be true, but what have we learned? That if start with a theory we can use the theory to filter the facts to validate the theory?

Wise concludes his book with a two page reconstruction of the life of Jesus. It certainly is plausible, but the problem with it is that there is no evidence for it, outside of Wise's reconstruction of the gospels in light of his theory. In other words, like every other "search for the historical Jesus" books, Wise has cut up the actual data we have - the gospels - reconstructed the data to fit his theory, tossed the data that doesn't fit, and - voila! - come up with a portrait that fits his theory.

Here is another problem I had with the book: the issue of resurrection. As I understand it, the Pharisees were advocates of Resurrection; the priestly Sadducees didn't believe in Resurrection. My understanding comes in part from the question put to Jesus about who the woman who married seven brothers would be married to in the Resurrection. (Luke 20:27 - 40.)

Wise basically doesn't deal with Resurrection. He does mention the Hymn of Exaltation as suggesting that the "dream myth" came to assume that Messiahs would be involved in the Resurrection. Terrific, but if Resurrection is a pharisaic idea, why would their bitter opponents in the priestly class have adopted their ideas? It seems that there should have been some discussion of this issue, if Wise wanted to sell the Judah to Jesus link.

This book was recommended to me by a typical secular atheist who apparently thought that he was being very provocative and subversive to my Christian conviction in recommending the book. Reading some of the reviews, it seems that this book has been adopted by atheists as some kind of indictment of the truth claims of Christianity. It really doesn't do any of that. It is an interesting bit of speculation; a well-written contribution toward the dialogue that has to happen if we are to progress in our climb toward a greater knowledge of the past. It is most definitely not the clinching proof that Jesus was a myth.

In an ironic way, unknown to atheists, but perhaps intended by Wise, who is ordained as a minister in the Evangelical Free Church, Wise seems to weirdly vindicate the Resurrection when he describes Jesus' brilliance as a "scriptural prophet" in the model of David Koresh. When Wise describes Jesus' ability to interweave scriptural passages to answer old questions in a new way, he particularly notes Jesus interaction with two disciples near a village called Emmaus where "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things about himself in the scriptures..." and how their "hearts burned." (p. 270.) Wise offers this section, in part, to confirm that Jesus fit the model of a "scriptural prophet" with an encyclopedic knowledge of scripture because these verses, according to Wise, originated with Jesus, not his disciples.

The problem is that this passage is part of an account of one of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. And here Wise's theory has a dilemma.

On the one hand, Wise has to argue that this radical re-arrangement of scripture requiring an encyclopedic knowledge comes from Jesus because it is central to his thesis. For his theory to work, he needs "scripture prophets" as unique persons with unique charismatic gifts. The problem is that if this passage isn't from Jesus, then there is another "scripture prophet" hanging around the Jesus movement, who nobody remembers, and it's not Jesus. Wise might be able to unearth one utterly forgotten, game-changing, scriptural prophet, but unearthing two of the same would appear to move in the direction of moon-barking madness.

On the other hand, the idea that Jesus was predicting his own death before his death is entirely against his theory. According to Wise, messiahs and prophets always predict their victory; they do not predict their own defeat. It's only after they are defeated that there is a re-interpretation of the fact of the defeat by the disciples of the defeated prophet (or by the prophet, as in the case of the Millerites, insofar as the prophet is still around.)

But here we have the "scripture prophet" re-interpreting his own defeat after his defeat.

How's that possible? More important, how is that consistent with the prior 269 pages of Wise's book?

That is, how is it possible if Jesus was not resurrected?

Wise doesn't explain the conundrum, but it is one worth considering insofar as one accepts the premises and conclusions of Wise's book.