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[BARIIS&BASTOO_BOY]

GHOSTS

I first started researching the historical Jesus in the late 1970s for about a year and a half, then dropped it for 18 years before I returned to it in September 1996. I have been at it ever since. Early on in this second round, long before “ghosts” occurred to me as a metaphor for this history, I thought that the traditional story of Jesus’ death could be described as a morality play with a cast of caricatures. I still think it is a useful way of looking at it. It helped me see things more clearly.

Strictly speaking, “caricature” is not accurate, though I use it in certain places in my book. A caricature exaggerates certain features of a person, but in this case we are dealing with completely fictional attributes, though the characters themselves are real enough.

Most scholars still think Barabbas was a violent revolutionary of some sort. That’s the first caricature I undo in the morality play of Jesus’ death (in which Jews play all the evil roles). But it is not really a caricature as it is more likely that Barabbas was a peaceful person who had nothing to do with any violence or rebellion. Similarly, scholars describe Judas as a traitor (whether they believe he is real or invented), but that false label is not an exaggeration of some quality he possessed. Rather, Judas was Jesus’ loyal friend to the end, not a traitor at all.

It was not until 2002 that it finally hit me that “ghost” was really a much better metaphor for everything in this story. First of all, for the true story of Jesus’ death which survives as a ghostly presence in the Gospels, then for his Jewishness and for all the other individuals in his story, and finally for the entire history of Jewish-Christian relations.

The search for truth never reaches perfection and it does not come all at once in a neat little package. Preconceptions lift only a bit at a time. “Caricature” is somewhat inaccurate but it helped dissolve some preconceptions. Then the metaphor of ghosts presented itself to me many times before I finally succumbed to its charm and its power to reveal what this history has been about.

Leo Pinsker, a 19th century Russian-Jewish Zionist, was one inspiration. He identified antisemitism (or Judeophobia, as it was sometimes called) as essentially a fear of ghosts. (See Chazan and Raphael, 160-74, for a condensed version of his famous essay of 1882, Auto-Emancipation.) Pinsker said, “The world saw in this [Jewish] people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. The ghostlike apparition of a living corpse ... could but strangely affect the imagination of the nations ... It is this fear of ghosts, the mother of Judeophobia, that has evoked this abstract, I might say Platonic hatred ... ” (ibid., 163-64). He also thought that this fear of ghosts went so deep as to be innate and incurable, except that the only cure might be if the Jews could acquire a body again, that is, a state.

It was Susan E. Shapiro’s essay “The Uncanny Jew: A Brief History of an Image” (Judaism, Winter 1997, 62-78) which first brought Pinsker’s remarks to my attention. She reviews how often the image of the Jews as the walking dead appeared in 19th century writing.

I carried this in my head and heart for a long time before it finally hit me how right this metaphor is. The other influence was Tom Waits’ song “Tom Traubert’s Blues”. In it, he sings “the streets aren’t for dreaming now/ manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories/ they want a piece of the action anyhow.” I must have heard this song, one of my favorites, a hundred times before it occurred to me that “A Ghost Selling Memories” might be the title of my book. I changed it to The Ghost in the Gospels, but it was Waits’ song that prodded me out of my stupor.

Ghosts abound in this history. They are invisible but not so invisible that they don’t serve the purpose of frightening people. The true story of Jesus’ death became a ghost very early on. People such as Judas and Barabbas were turned into apparitions. Only their outlines were preserved. The real Pharisees and the real priests became ghosts of their former selves. Jesus’ Jewishness, which the Gospels speak to on almost every page, was also banished into a wispy life. It still has the capacity to make Christians fear that he will lose his uniqueness. And Jews themselves were almost turned into ghosts. Racism or antisemitism is the power, or the attempt, to turn a people and their culture into a ghost. All these tendencies are connected.

Some of it began with Paul. Paul never hated his own religion, Judaism, or his people, the Jews. His antisemitism has been greatly exaggerated, as a few authors recognize (John Gager, Krister Stendahl, Stanley Stowers, Lloyd Gaston). But Paul was worried that gentiles would continue to be attracted to Torah Judaism instead of his vision of Christ. Torah Judaism was a threat to what he was telling gentiles about Christ. He had to downplay the vitality of Torah. Only Christ has the life force. Paul was among the first to teach gentiles to be afraid of Torah Judaism -- first, to be afraid of it as something that did not have the power to save them and second, for those who did choose Christ, to be afraid of it as competition.

That fear of Judaism played a significant role in the development of antisemitism. Paul would have been horrified by the later deprecation of Judaism and mistreatment of Jews. But he was one of the first to attempt to turn Torah Judaism into a ghost -- something less vital -- so that his vision of Christ could outshine it and appeal more to gentiles. Later Christianity would take it further.

The process that Paul helped to begin could also be put this way: In creating something new, he felt he had to make Torah Judaism unimaginable to gentiles. That’s the process Christianity took further. What does it mean when the leaders of one people try to turn another people into a ghost? It means they want to make the life of that people unimaginable to their own people. Turning Judaism and Jews into ghosts means making the Jewish way of life and Jewish sensibilities about God and Hebrew scripture unimaginable to the Christian mind and heart. In so doing, Jesus the Jew becomes unimaginable (he still is for most scholars).

Deaden the imagination and all questions become impossible -- questions about history, about the other, about the origins of your own culture. Only power is possible in such a world. Power and questions do not mix. Although Church authorities and scholars did not succeed completely, they did largely succeed in one respect: Almost everything about the Jewish Rabbi Joshua became lost to the Christian people, even though he is right there in the Gospels -- so lost that the very idea of recovering him became frightening.

Isn’t all racism and prejudice like this? Heterosexuals don’t want to imagine the life of homosexuals. Men don’t want to imagine the life of women. Whites don’t want to imagine the lives of blacks. By making Jesus/Joshua the Jew more imaginable for Christians, I hope that Judaism will become more imaginable and, in this way, we can begin to defeat not only racism against Jews but all racism.

How well I know that there are powers in the world that will not want this to happen and that will always try to prevent any act of imagination from happening -- because imagination is the act of imagining reality, as it is without ghosts dulling your vision. Not for nothing did Paul Cézanne say, “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” Anything freshly observed would set off a revolution.

A racist worldview prevents us from imagining reality. If clerical leaders could banish Jews to a nether world existence, then scholarly and theological leaders could also suppress the true story of the very Jewish rabbi from Galilee. Forgetting that Judaism is a positive religious force in the world and forgetting that Jesus was a Jew go hand in hand. The demeaning of Jews and Judaism and the cover-up of historical truth go hand in hand.

Susan Shapiro quotes Maurice Blanchot, a French writer: “ The anti-Semite ... commits himself to a limitless movement of refusal. No, truly, excluding the Jews is not enough, exterminating them is not enough; they must also be struck from history, removed from the books through which they speak to us ... ” (“Uncanny”, 74). I would emphasize that the very Jewish Gospels are such books. Their Jewishness has been practically obliterated by a racist worldview.

This point Blanchot has made is extremely important. Racism is not just the attempt to turn a people into a ghost in the present. It is also the attempt to go back in history and make a ghost of their ancestors and ancient culture. I spell out some of the details of how the scholarly world does this in RACISM IN GOSPEL SCHOLARSHIP. But in general terms, I can say the following.

Academic scholarship plays a game that is very much in the service of certain political and religious powers. Academic power looks at it this way: If we make the real history and the real culture disappear, we can then create our own version. This applies not just to Jews but to other peoples as well -- peoples who have been colonized or enslaved or subjugated in one way or another. Their history is reduced to a ghost.

All forms of imperialism and racism have this link: We must never let a people control the way their own history is told; we fight for power over the future so that we can control the past. As Milan Kundera said in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past” (Kundera, 22; if you have another translation of this book, these thoughts should still be at the end of Chapter 17). Notice that Kundera points out that it is the life of the past that irritates us. Hence, changing the past means changing its full life into a ghost.

I am not sure whether racism/imperialism wants to control the future in order to control the past, or whether it seeks to control our reading of the past so that it can maintain a tight grip on the future. Either way, the abuse of power in the present is intimately connected to an abuse of power in the study of history.

The Gospels are a part of Jewish history, but their very Jewishness has been erased and forgotten. As I said above, I would include them in the books Blanchot referred to. This forgetting was accomplished by a racist worldview which was so encouraged that it became natural, second nature, invisible, so that no one would have to think about it anymore. The real ghosts in all this long story are that racist worldview and the powers that sustain it.

That racist way of thinking has slipped in and out of the consciousness of western civilization for 2,000 years. It made itself invisible in order to more effectively control this story. The most effective power in the world is invisible power. It is my aim to make all the ghosts in this story more solid. Turn them all into solid flesh. Jesus the Jew. The Pharisees. The priests. That racist worldview that tried to make us forget them all. Give them all the substantial body that was their historical reality. No more ghosts. No more hiding. No more sneaking in the dark. More light on everything. No more of the secret fears that have held us back. It’s quite a dream. Because the forces that turn everything into ghosts are so strong. They will never let you escape and freshly observe anything.

What is a Jew studying the Gospels? A ghost selling memories (to steal that image from Tom Waits). Once upon a time, there was a Jew named Jesus, named Joshua, a Rabbi Joshua of Nazareth, who had no fear of the liveliness with which many Jews studied Torah -- because he was such a Jew himself and every word out of his mouth tells this story. And other Jews had no fear of him and tried to protect him from Roman violence. What could be more ghostly than to get a culture to remember what has never been part of our memory. Tell me I’m not a dreamer. Tell me I’m not licking a wound that will never heal (Waits again). Sometimes I think that’s all I’m doing.



Copyright 2002, 2003 L. Zitzer

[BARIIS&BASTOO_BOY]

GHOSTS

I first started researching the historical Jesus in the late 1970s for about a year and a half, then dropped it for 18 years before I returned to it in September 1996. I have been at it ever since. Early on in this second round, long before “ghosts” occurred to me as a metaphor for this history, I thought that the traditional story of Jesus’ death could be described as a morality play with a cast of caricatures. I still think it is a useful way of looking at it. It helped me see things more clearly.

Strictly speaking, “caricature” is not accurate, though I use it in certain places in my book. A caricature exaggerates certain features of a person, but in this case we are dealing with completely fictional attributes, though the characters themselves are real enough.

Most scholars still think Barabbas was a violent revolutionary of some sort. That’s the first caricature I undo in the morality play of Jesus’ death (in which Jews play all the evil roles). But it is not really a caricature as it is more likely that Barabbas was a peaceful person who had nothing to do with any violence or rebellion. Similarly, scholars describe Judas as a traitor (whether they believe he is real or invented), but that false label is not an exaggeration of some quality he possessed. Rather, Judas was Jesus’ loyal friend to the end, not a traitor at all.

It was not until 2002 that it finally hit me that “ghost” was really a much better metaphor for everything in this story. First of all, for the true story of Jesus’ death which survives as a ghostly presence in the Gospels, then for his Jewishness and for all the other individuals in his story, and finally for the entire history of Jewish-Christian relations.

The search for truth never reaches perfection and it does not come all at once in a neat little package. Preconceptions lift only a bit at a time. “Caricature” is somewhat inaccurate but it helped dissolve some preconceptions. Then the metaphor of ghosts presented itself to me many times before I finally succumbed to its charm and its power to reveal what this history has been about.

Leo Pinsker, a 19th century Russian-Jewish Zionist, was one inspiration. He identified antisemitism (or Judeophobia, as it was sometimes called) as essentially a fear of ghosts. (See Chazan and Raphael, 160-74, for a condensed version of his famous essay of 1882, Auto-Emancipation.) Pinsker said, “The world saw in this [Jewish] people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living. The ghostlike apparition of a living corpse ... could but strangely affect the imagination of the nations ... It is this fear of ghosts, the mother of Judeophobia, that has evoked this abstract, I might say Platonic hatred ... ” (ibid., 163-64). He also thought that this fear of ghosts went so deep as to be innate and incurable, except that the only cure might be if the Jews could acquire a body again, that is, a state.

It was Susan E. Shapiro’s essay “The Uncanny Jew: A Brief History of an Image” (Judaism, Winter 1997, 62-78) which first brought Pinsker’s remarks to my attention. She reviews how often the image of the Jews as the walking dead appeared in 19th century writing.

I carried this in my head and heart for a long time before it finally hit me how right this metaphor is. The other influence was Tom Waits’ song “Tom Traubert’s Blues”. In it, he sings “the streets aren’t for dreaming now/ manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories/ they want a piece of the action anyhow.” I must have heard this song, one of my favorites, a hundred times before it occurred to me that “A Ghost Selling Memories” might be the title of my book. I changed it to The Ghost in the Gospels, but it was Waits’ song that prodded me out of my stupor.

Ghosts abound in this history. They are invisible but not so invisible that they don’t serve the purpose of frightening people. The true story of Jesus’ death became a ghost very early on. People such as Judas and Barabbas were turned into apparitions. Only their outlines were preserved. The real Pharisees and the real priests became ghosts of their former selves. Jesus’ Jewishness, which the Gospels speak to on almost every page, was also banished into a wispy life. It still has the capacity to make Christians fear that he will lose his uniqueness. And Jews themselves were almost turned into ghosts. Racism or antisemitism is the power, or the attempt, to turn a people and their culture into a ghost. All these tendencies are connected.

Some of it began with Paul. Paul never hated his own religion, Judaism, or his people, the Jews. His antisemitism has been greatly exaggerated, as a few authors recognize (John Gager, Krister Stendahl, Stanley Stowers, Lloyd Gaston). But Paul was worried that gentiles would continue to be attracted to Torah Judaism instead of his vision of Christ. Torah Judaism was a threat to what he was telling gentiles about Christ. He had to downplay the vitality of Torah. Only Christ has the life force. Paul was among the first to teach gentiles to be afraid of Torah Judaism -- first, to be afraid of it as something that did not have the power to save them and second, for those who did choose Christ, to be afraid of it as competition.

That fear of Judaism played a significant role in the development of antisemitism. Paul would have been horrified by the later deprecation of Judaism and mistreatment of Jews. But he was one of the first to attempt to turn Torah Judaism into a ghost -- something less vital -- so that his vision of Christ could outshine it and appeal more to gentiles. Later Christianity would take it further.

The process that Paul helped to begin could also be put this way: In creating something new, he felt he had to make Torah Judaism unimaginable to gentiles. That’s the process Christianity took further. What does it mean when the leaders of one people try to turn another people into a ghost? It means they want to make the life of that people unimaginable to their own people. Turning Judaism and Jews into ghosts means making the Jewish way of life and Jewish sensibilities about God and Hebrew scripture unimaginable to the Christian mind and heart. In so doing, Jesus the Jew becomes unimaginable (he still is for most scholars).

Deaden the imagination and all questions become impossible -- questions about history, about the other, about the origins of your own culture. Only power is possible in such a world. Power and questions do not mix. Although Church authorities and scholars did not succeed completely, they did largely succeed in one respect: Almost everything about the Jewish Rabbi Joshua became lost to the Christian people, even though he is right there in the Gospels -- so lost that the very idea of recovering him became frightening.

Isn’t all racism and prejudice like this? Heterosexuals don’t want to imagine the life of homosexuals. Men don’t want to imagine the life of women. Whites don’t want to imagine the lives of blacks. By making Jesus/Joshua the Jew more imaginable for Christians, I hope that Judaism will become more imaginable and, in this way, we can begin to defeat not only racism against Jews but all racism.

How well I know that there are powers in the world that will not want this to happen and that will always try to prevent any act of imagination from happening -- because imagination is the act of imagining reality, as it is without ghosts dulling your vision. Not for nothing did Paul Cézanne say, “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” Anything freshly observed would set off a revolution.

A racist worldview prevents us from imagining reality. If clerical leaders could banish Jews to a nether world existence, then scholarly and theological leaders could also suppress the true story of the very Jewish rabbi from Galilee. Forgetting that Judaism is a positive religious force in the world and forgetting that Jesus was a Jew go hand in hand. The demeaning of Jews and Judaism and the cover-up of historical truth go hand in hand.

Susan Shapiro quotes Maurice Blanchot, a French writer: “ The anti-Semite ... commits himself to a limitless movement of refusal. No, truly, excluding the Jews is not enough, exterminating them is not enough; they must also be struck from history, removed from the books through which they speak to us ... ” (“Uncanny”, 74). I would emphasize that the very Jewish Gospels are such books. Their Jewishness has been practically obliterated by a racist worldview.

This point Blanchot has made is extremely important. Racism is not just the attempt to turn a people into a ghost in the present. It is also the attempt to go back in history and make a ghost of their ancestors and ancient culture. I spell out some of the details of how the scholarly world does this in RACISM IN GOSPEL SCHOLARSHIP. But in general terms, I can say the following.

Academic scholarship plays a game that is very much in the service of certain political and religious powers. Academic power looks at it this way: If we make the real history and the real culture disappear, we can then create our own version. This applies not just to Jews but to other peoples as well -- peoples who have been colonized or enslaved or subjugated in one way or another. Their history is reduced to a ghost.

All forms of imperialism and racism have this link: We must never let a people control the way their own history is told; we fight for power over the future so that we can control the past. As Milan Kundera said in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past” (Kundera, 22; if you have another translation of this book, these thoughts should still be at the end of Chapter 17). Notice that Kundera points out that it is the life of the past that irritates us. Hence, changing the past means changing its full life into a ghost.

I am not sure whether racism/imperialism wants to control the future in order to control the past, or whether it seeks to control our reading of the past so that it can maintain a tight grip on the future. Either way, the abuse of power in the present is intimately connected to an abuse of power in the study of history.

The Gospels are a part of Jewish history, but their very Jewishness has been erased and forgotten. As I said above, I would include them in the books Blanchot referred to. This forgetting was accomplished by a racist worldview which was so encouraged that it became natural, second nature, invisible, so that no one would have to think about it anymore. The real ghosts in all this long story are that racist worldview and the powers that sustain it.

That racist way of thinking has slipped in and out of the consciousness of western civilization for 2,000 years. It made itself invisible in order to more effectively control this story. The most effective power in the world is invisible power. It is my aim to make all the ghosts in this story more solid. Turn them all into solid flesh. Jesus the Jew. The Pharisees. The priests. That racist worldview that tried to make us forget them all. Give them all the substantial body that was their historical reality. No more ghosts. No more hiding. No more sneaking in the dark. More light on everything. No more of the secret fears that have held us back. It’s quite a dream. Because the forces that turn everything into ghosts are so strong. They will never let you escape and freshly observe anything.

What is a Jew studying the Gospels? A ghost selling memories (to steal that image from Tom Waits). Once upon a time, there was a Jew named Jesus, named Joshua, a Rabbi Joshua of Nazareth, who had no fear of the liveliness with which many Jews studied Torah -- because he was such a Jew himself and every word out of his mouth tells this story. And other Jews had no fear of him and tried to protect him from Roman violence. What could be more ghostly than to get a culture to remember what has never been part of our memory. Tell me I’m not a dreamer. Tell me I’m not licking a wound that will never heal (Waits again). Sometimes I think that’s all I’m doing.



Copyright 2002, 2003 L. Zitzer

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[Mad_CarteL]

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[BARIIS&BASTOO_BOY]

i am Fine sweet pumpkin just talking about a a nice research i found on Ghosts

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[quote="Mad_CarteL"]Phuckin hell waam wid u net addicts
Allow beggin safe mandem like tha....the fact is uz a small time biatch full time snitch[/quote]


YEA U GOT THAT IN ONE SENTENCE..A ROUND OF APPLAUSE EVERY1

BUT ERRRM I WOULD OF SAID...BIG TIME B1TCH AND A SMALL TIME SNITCH ........<-----BUT IM COOL WITH IT ANYWAY

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[BARIIS&BASTOO_BOY]

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[quote="BARIIS&BASTOO_BOY"]^^^^ make that a Huge ****[/quote]