Mary Huie-Jolly
Knox College, New Zealand
Another Jerusalem
Orientation
to the holy in a dispersed cosmos
Time remembering space
Acts
Holy precincts and reproductive
blood
Works cited
To name a place "Jerusalem" is to invite perceptions of holiness. I preface responses to the Session 2 papers with another Jerusalem story.
Rua Kenana was a prophet of the Tuhoe tribe from a line of Maori faithful who received the Bible from Christian missionaries translated it, memorized and daily chanted in Maori long portions of the Psalms. Its world came into deep connection with their traditional culture. In 1906- 1916 following extensive loss of their ancestral land to European settlers, Rua began to preach a Maori millennium. "He identified the Maori with the Israelites and interpreted scripture accordingly": the British settlers corresponded to Pharaoh, he himself was the prophet and new Messiah (New Zealand Herald 10/28/98). He had prophesied that his people would acquire "fame by means of mercy" not by revenge, and he looked to the unity of British King Edward's people and his own under the law (Caplin 1990: 61).
When the land wars failed to return land to his people, he called members of his tribe dispersed through the North Island of New Zealand to return to their ancestral homeland to establish the city of Jerusalem on the mountain sacred to the Tuhoe. The mountain Maungapohatu represents their traditional gods, and each chief of the tribe is closely associated with the mana the sacred status and power of the mountain (Webster 187). To establish his leadership Rua built his house under the shadow of the mountain .
The old legends attached to the mountain remained but Rua added a new set. When he traveled he carried the Ark of the Covenant. The wooden box was strapped to a packhorse by day and "jealously guarded in a special tent erected for it at night" (Chaplin 1990: 28). The Covenant carried in the Ark was an eighteen inch thick English language Bible weighing seventy seven pounds originally a gift to New Zealand from King Edward, latterly a gift of conciliation to Rua's movement by tribes belatedly acknowledging his sacred status. In the evolving eschatology of the Tuhoe tribe, Maungapohatu mountain became linked with the idea of Zion, its geography began to include elements of Judaic and Christian traditions. For Rua Jerusalem represented esteem and shelter for the Tuhoe and their ancestral traditions and unity under law with King Edward's people. Rua made his ancestral mountain a new Zion, naming his own tribal space by the mythic space esteemed by both his people and the colonizers. The mana of the chief and the mountain were inseparable (Webster 1979:183).
But outsiders called Jerusalem "madtown". Earlier
Rua and his male followers had taken the vow of the Nazarite, never to
cut their hair or touch strong drink. When Rua was accused of selling alcohol
without authorization, he refused to appear in court. He was apprehended
by seventy armed men who converged on Maungpohatu and arrested the prophet
amid shots fired from both sides. In his messianic role Rua had been tapu,
a rope barrier within the meeting house set him apart as holy (Chaplin
1990: 68). His imprisonment led to loss of mana. The temple at Maungapohatu
was destroyed by his followers who could not bear the humiliation of seeing
it standing apart from its glory.
Orientation to the holy in a dispersed cosmos
The papers in this session deal with the question of how biblical notions of Jerusalem construct places of holiness and authority. How is the mythic construct appropriated and grounded within a the social space of particular places? Does the divine superiority of the myth undermine the blood connection to earth and ancestors and remove the particularity of local identity from the sphere of the sacred?
The range of papers, from Mishnah dialectics to Patristic architecture, persuaded me to come at responses sideways by borrowing classifications from Jonathan Z. Smith's work in comparative religious studies.
Smith identifies Jerusalem as a mythic concept of holiness with the locative map. The locative map of the world is concerned for establishing and maintaining place. The function of place keeping affirms the need to dwell in a limited world where each has in their place a given status and role (Smith 1978:150). It is most at home in hierarchies of world ordering (Smith 1978:138). Loren Crow's paper provides an excellent description of the First and Second Temples as the symbolic map of the cosmos derived from Ancient near Eastern myth, which Smith would classify as locative. The locative map derived from the Ancient Near East originated in the social practice of elites who have interest in maintaining their location, the place of privilege over agricultural society. The temple is the place of victory, superiority over the raging threats of chaos and enemies, signaled in the kingly enthronement of the deity, consolidating his reign of judgment and peace, issuing in blessings of fertility beyond the temple. To see the Jerusalem temple as a microcosm symbolizing the cosmos and procuring benefits for the cosmos, is to operate socially by valuing and replicating structures of order victorious over chaos. The myth gives boundaries to hold in place the whole map of the cosmos, and to warn "those who would venture beyond their station" (Smith 1978:150)
Though it operates within a locative world view Jerusalem, as the place of victory and blessing for the whole earth, had become a portable mythic concept, both in tannaitic Judaism and Christianity. Crow's discussion of the microcosm/macrocosm process by which "human beings participate in temple worship by extension" is related to the question of centralization and worship by extension. To what extent, he asks, was centralization around one holy space in Jerusalem ever actually the norm in Israel? Were local shrines temples in their own right, or were they extensions of Jerusalem? The discussion provides helpful background to the Second Temple period and prepares the way for Gilbert's attempt to deal with a comparable process later, after the destruction of the Temple.
That the myth became both portable and exportable was symptomatic of the social fact of dispersion. Crow notes that the Persian period demanded a new evaluation of the significance of the Temple; during this time when the function of temples was primarily to legitimate the Persian Empire no longer could it be said that God lived there; texts from the Persian period, Crow maintains, insist that God lives elsewhere. Yet I suggest the Temple itself continues to be seen as a spatial map of the cosmos.
The need to adapt to alienation and dispersion from the archaic shrine of ones ancestors was not limited to Jewish worship. Religions which had been originally tied to a geographic center with archaic traditions, become dispersed due to the political situation in Late Antiquity. In this period Smith maintains that almost every religion occurred both in its homeland and diasporic centers (Smith 1978: xiii-xv). These religions nevertheless persisted by conscious drawing on archaic models and texts; Smith documents the weakening of the inextricable relation of deity to one particular place, and the shift from celebration of deity at central shrine to appearance of deity as savior into whom one is initiated as to rescue from vulnerability concerning place, a shift negotiated by epiphanies or heavenly journeys.
In addition to the locative map, another map of the cosmos can occur in rebellion to centrality of place. It experiences social conformity to the pattern of the cosmogonic myth as oppressive, and challenges beings to break limits to create new possibilities. Smith names it "utopian", because its literally connotes the value of being in no place. The utopian purpose is salvation, rescue from the oppression of the powers that be, to construct a new order whose function is egalitarian (Smith 1978: 138).
The Jewish and Christian developments noted in Gilbert,
Moreland and Branham's papers, may at first appear utopian. When it constructs
meaning in the provinces beyond, the benefits of the Temple become accessible
outside Zion. Certainly a religion not physically present in Jerusalem
would employ some utopian elements in the transition of negotiating the
physical move from its spiritual home. Yet the signifiers are not primarily
utopian, they derive from the locative Jerusalem temple map.
Jim Flanagan (Session 1 paper) characterized spatial practice as an otherness which is open to situational change and adaptation, thus undermining predictability and closure in systems otherwise presumed and represented as linear. Discrepancies in the fit between the elements of the myth and one's social situation give rise to experimentation. Gary Gilbert's paper documents the shift from location of sacred space within the ground of the holy of holies in the Jerusalem temple to sacred time in another place re-ordered around remembrance of that sacred place. The experience of incongruity after the destruction of the temple demanded a shift in perception, the temple was no more. Nevertheless the locative perception of holiness is founded in memory of the temple in Jerusalem; it is more in the direction of utopia, giving greater value to no place; in memory and imagination it is still the center of the cosmos; it still carries a locative, place maintaining function.
Gilbert traces the imaginative process that reformulated special times and festive actions for ordering life by remembering the Temple; sacred time, distilled from no place kept alive the memory and imagination of sacred space in the provinces. Gilbert demonstrates how the experimental dialectic of rabbinic argument affected an extension of the Temple from sacred place to sacred time. The incongruity of absence in wake of destruction of the Temple is the antithesis of the place of divine presence. Remembering transcends the absence, and a new synthesis renegotiated in the imagination. The reconstruction of the temple, is no longer in sacred place but founded on the memory of sacred place, now in time in any place can be hallowed by the acts of remembrance of the holy place. Smith's comment is germane: "...Myth is best conceived not as a primordium, but rather as a limited range of elements with a fixed range of cultural meanings which are applied, thought with, worked with, experimented with in particular situations....some rely for their power on [the] discrepancy between expectation and reality and use that discrepancy as an occasion for thought" (J.Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory 308).
For Gilbert the absence, the empty space where the
temple was is the fundamental contradiction underlying the dialectic of
the Rabbis' speech. I suggest that this absence invites a freedom and levity
born of living in the face of contradiction; instead of resolving contradictions
it follows the more playful logic of a joke skirting the tension between
sacred hope and the hard facts of daily experience. Gilbert's example from
the Mishnah, Berakhot, 1.1 opens with a question "From what time in the
evening may the Shema be recited?" Three or more answers are proposed.
The rabbi's question is open to self contradiction and answered by several
voices. Different rabbis suggest new possibilities that question the original
answer. Gamaliel makes exception remembering when his sons returned from
a wedding (in the wee hours?) and not having recited the Shema. He reassured
his sons, if the dawn has not risen you can still recite the Shema. So
the interpretation shifts: the prescription is till midnight but the duration
is till dawn. The conclusion though it does not exactly resolve the apparent
and mounting contradictions, nevertheless satisfies in the manner of the
punchline of a joke: "Then why have the Sages said until midnight? To keep
a man far from transgression." Sacred time is negotiated by play in the
apparent pleasure of proposing and encompassing differences. As in genuine
conversation, the aim is not to resolve them. There is time to play with
the sacred to allow different voices to be heard. In its absence, imagination
of the Temple is spacious, with room for many Rabbis and their sons.
One might think the travelogue style of Acts would lend itself to a yet more diverse cacophony of voices. But not so. The levity of the argument from the Mishnah is striking when read alongside the history making narratives in Acts.
Milton Moreland's paper addresses the emphasis in Acts on Jerusalem as the base of authorization for early Christian expansion. Acts portrays a portable, mobile, and relatively egalitarian movement, attractive to new groups, and centered around salvific initiation into Jesus as messiah. On the surface these elements seem to affirm the rebellious impulse toward freedom and breaking barriers appropriate to Smith's utopian map of the cosmos. However, Moreland shows that its primary ideological impulse is aimed at centering and legitimating the status and authority of the new movement within the conceptual frame already associated with the Jerusalem temple. Thus I suggest it still belongs more or less within the locative map. With the seriousness appropriate to story of origins normative for identity and practice, Acts depicts the growth of the church within the frame of holy history.
Jerusalem, the central authority, approves the outward flow of blessing as the young church expands its borders. In this the Acts narratives reaffirm the locative model. But the history-like narratives incrementally build a subtle shift of alliances. Speeches encapsulating a large sweep of story identify the Jewish messianic message as light to the Gentiles, but it subtly shifts the place of the Jews to a role of rejectors and persecutors if they will not accept this version of holy history.
Moreland highlights the ideological use of narrative episodes within a grand scheme which places the leaders of the movement into authoritative typologies. The trials and miraculous deliverance of Peter, Stephen and Paul are structured on the pattern of the passion narrative trials of Jesus. Their speeches echo holy history. Acts draws, I suggest, on a type and duality more ancient than the Psalms: the just one persecuted by the ungodly. The polarity more ancient had developed into a stock plot for martyrdom in Wisdom of Solomon and Maccabees (Huie-Jolly 1998). The Acts narratives skillfully use narrative typology in order to gradually shift alliances by casting all do not agree with their message into the role of rejection and persecution of Christ. Any who do not accept the messianic claims in Acts holy history are placed, from microcosm to macrocosm, within the age old distinction of the ungodly opposed to the just. Moreland clearly shows how the Acts narratives legitimate the movement and they gradually construct a shift of allegiances.
He concludes, "Luke portrayed his Christian lineage as comprised of the most faithful Jews. Paul, like Jesus and Stephen had been wrongly accused... The reader is finally confronted with the reality that even though early Christians were truly pious they were rejected by the impious people of Jerusalem" (Moreland 16).
To claim that the Jerusalem group authorized expansionist church developments reflects a political perspective on the relative status of differing groups within the movement. The Acts narratives aim to legitimate links between the Jerusalem church and Pauline expansion and to minimize the theological diversity of the various local contexts. Compare Smith: perception of the earthly temple as a microcosm operates on a locative map of the cosmos, aiming to "overcome all incongruity by assuming the interconnectedness of all things" (Smith 1978: 308).
Moreland's secondary thesis, that the historicity of Acts is negligible, is only partly convincing. To show that Acts is overtly ideological does not necessarily imply that it is of no historical value. He could make a stronger case if he did not limit his own investigation only to Acts. Attention to the diversity of early Christian theology is another way of approaching the question. For example, the likelihood of associating this theological scheme with the Jerusalem church is called into question by the Jewish Christian tradition represented in the book of James in the New Testament. The construct of division that around a particular belief is alien to James for whom religion is not a matter siding with a concept. The key gospel issue seemed to be the practice of solidarity with the poor; polarization around accounts of the death of Jesus is absent. In later Jewish Christian documents such as the Ascents of James in the Pseudo-Clementine reflections, belief in Jesus as Messiah is the singular distinction between followers of Jesus and the Pharisees. The text depicts a meeting on the Temple steps between followers of Jesus and various other Jewish groups with whom they are enjoying respectful open ended public dialogue, only to be disrupted by a Paul. From a Jewish Christian perspective, the Ascents of James while acknowledging differences in belief does not interpret them in the pattern of rejection of belief in Jesus as persecution of the righteous by the ungodly.
In the renewed debate on Christian origins the question of whether the Acts narratives have historical value may be less fruitful than the question of their ideological influence on structuring margin and center. Perceptions of one unified and authoritative movement consistent with Pauline thought are constructed by the Acts narrative. The place and status granting device in Acts is its division of the world into believers and unbelievers in Jesus. The scheme has the locative function of authorizing status within the movement, regardless of place. The place of belonging is belief in the message. Not to accept it is to be cast in the ancient role of the impious versus the righteous, enemies versus the just. This polarity was used to vindicate Jesus as martyr in the passion narratives, it surfaces again in Acts as Peter, Stephen and Paul are cast in the role of victim of persecution after the type of Jesus while Jews who do not accept their arguments are cast as their persecutors.
Endless space is intersected by this division. Eschewing space enshrined in earth, it places Jesus within the mythic concept associated with the holy place, it relegates those who disagree to the realm of the ungodly, removed from sacred space.
In this limited sense the grand narrative of Acts replicates the locative map of the cosmos, though its orientation is around a center that establishes the place and status of adherents, albeit without concrete attachment to a particular place. Overtly concerned with legitimation of status and power it privileges the concept of a sacred center, yet it is more vocative than locative; it is predominantly verbal. The imaginative constructions of a central place of authority are a response to portable words dividing the cosmos, more than to any particular place.
Holy precincts and reproductive blood
Joan Branham's paper explores the architecture of liturgical space grounded in and derivative from a locative map of the cosmos, unlike the predominantly verbal reconfiguration of the sacred addressed by Gilbert and by Moreland. Crow's detailed study "Holy Precincts" provides and excellent background to Branham. Crow notes that no direct archaeological evidence is available and that our knowledge of both Temples' spatial construction necessarily derives from texts. On the basis of such texts, Branham suggests that the architecture exclusion of menstruating women from sacred may represent competition between the competing bloods of sacrifice and of reproduction.
She asserts that the taboo on reproductive blood is because of its potential generative and purifying power; consequently it was perceived as competition to the atoning purifying power of blood of sacrifice. She argues that the threat of competing blood is the motive for the linking menses to defilement, thus banning women in menses to no place, beyond the pale of the temple.
In responding to Branham, I assume that the architecture of the second Temple reflects a locative map associated with ancient near eastern cosmology. In his description of the first temple Crow identifies many aspects of the temple myth with fertility: the temple as house of the king, the garden, forest, and river, but the king himself is said to have ramifications for connecting God's presence with the fruitfulness of the land. Is there disjunction here? Women bear children and rear them, they are present socially, but not mythically. How does the social fact of reproduction and nurture relate to sacred space?
Divine presence of the king on the throne in the temple on earth signals divine victory and control over the chaos of enemies, thus the temple is the icon of order on earth, from whence flow outward the blessings of fertility and peace. Yet the mythic connection between the king and fertility is elusive.
I would like to place another locative cosmology alongside this one, for the benefit of comparison. Oceanic cosmology is also locative. That is, it is primarily place keeping in affirming a limited world where each has in their place a given status and role. ( see Smith 1978:150). Yet unlike Jewish and Christian sacred space, Oceanic architecture and social practice give a significant place to the power of reproductive blood.
As the Maori creation myth begins, the primeval parents Papa the earth mother and Rangi the sky father are locked in embrace, meanwhile their numerous children are squashed in between them. Crowded, almost unable to move, the children plot to separate their parents in order that they too might have room to breathe. With great effort they fling the embracing couple apart, throwing Rangi their father to the sky and papa their mother to the earth. The task of being human is to continue to hold up the space between earth and sky between Rangi and Papa. That space is charged with magnetism as sky father and earth mother seek to be rejoined in embrace.
A microcosm of the myth is acted out in the Maori social practices concerning reproductive blood. Though taboo in some social contexts, it is nevertheless assigned a sacred function in the grounding of individual, communal and cosmic identity.
In the Maori creation myth reproduction is not banished from the cosmic order; both heaven and earth are regarded as divine. Yet the microcosm of social practice imitates and internalizes the macrocosm; accordingly gender division of work and role is cosmicly regulated. Taboos concerning menstruation are rampant within Oceanic cultures. The early missionaries challenged some of these traditional customs, and reinforced others. In Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea the danger of a menstruating women handling the sacraments is a predictable plank in the case against ordination of women clergy, comparable to early Christian prohibitions noted by Branham.
Traditionally Tahitian women are not allowed to cook food, or to garden during their periods, plants growing in the earth would be endangered if cut by a menstruating woman, or people would be endangered if they ate food cooked by a woman during menses. In Tuvalu and Kiribati the first menstruation of a girl is welcomed with a great feast but thereafter for the rest of her reproductive life she is relegated to a hut outside the village during menses.
The place of reproduction within the cosmos is congruent with construction of the Maori meeting house as the center of communal life. It is understood to represent the body of the ancestors. The carved pillars represent the presence within the house of notable male and female ancestors from the tribe's genealogy who are addressed in the speeches opening every communal gathering. The roof rafters are the ribs of the body. The door, the entrance to the meeting represents the womb. In Fiji and Samoa, the lintel of the door is adorned by a grass skirt.
Likewise in Maori language and practice, the blood of reproduction is assigned a sacred cosmological space. The placenta, the sac of blood, water and membrane within the womb that carries the child to birth is gathered up whenever a child is born. The family wraps it and with ceremony places it in the earth under a tree near the homestead. This grounds the identity of the newborn child in a particular place of belonging. Anyone who misses out on this at birth is thought to gad about like a chicken not knowing where they belong. The connection between reproductive blood and the very earth itself is profound. In Maori language the same word whenua means both land and placenta; land is the macrocosm, the placenta the microcosm grounding every mother and child linguistically and mythically within the cosmic order.
Another, quite different, map shapes Israelite and Christian cosmology. Crow notes various symbols of fertility in the First Temple, but all are linked to the enthronement of the King. These are less prominent in the Second Temple. Also the sea formerly placed in the courtyard outside the created order showing chaos kept in at bay, has disappeared from the cosmos in the Second Temple; the practice of guarding sanctity by removal of all perceived as unclean far outside has been introduced. Is this as Crow suggests the removal of "ordinary reality from its midst"? Or is it a strategy of extinction of all symbols of threat from the cosmos? Is the ban on women in menses like the removal of the sea? I ask in light of Branham's hypothesis.
Branham suggests that reproductive blood is perceived as a threat. Thus menstruating women are banned from the sacred spaces of the holy of holies and the altar to avoid the threat of proximity to sacrificial blood. It makes sense that threats to the sacred may be dealt with by extinction, and non representation, in an attempt to deny them being and power. Yet due to the scarcity of reproduction in the symbolic map of the Second Temple, this part of Branham's paper is something of an argument from silence, a question more than an answer. Clearly the architecture and prohibitions concerning the Jerusalem Temple reflect the social strategy of marginalization of women from the most sacred space. Yet is the thesis of competing bloods the answer to the social disjunction? Menstruating women are distanced to no place within the temple precincts outside of the symbolic cosmic map. If the divine power of reproduction is only negatively acknowledged in the map of the temple, then where does it belong in the sacred map of this cosmos?
Most cultic practices traced by Branham reiterate
the exclusion of menstruating women from Christian sacred space. In those
which make exception, such women are at best allowed ambivalent, tentative
acceptance, as if they were men. Acceptance comes by virtue of Christ who
is powerful enough to overcome that disturbing problem of reproductive
blood, not because reproductive blood is valued on its own terms __ Heaven
forbid! __.
Pseudo-Clementine Reflections, appendix in J.Louis Martyn History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel 2nd ed. (Nashville: Abingdon) 1978.
Chaplin, G. Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Kenana and his Community at Maungapohatu 1990.
Huie-Jolly, Mary. "Was Martyrdom in the Wisdom of Solomon a Framework for Retelling Jesus' Passion?", unpublished paper presented to the Association of Biblical Studies, Aotearoa New Zealand, October 28, 1998.
The New Zealand Herald (Auckland, New Zealand) October 27, 1998.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Leiden: E.J.Brill) 1978.
Webster, Peter. Rua and the Maori Millenium (Wellington)
1979.