The Question Bible Scholars Never Ask

/ Jim

Part One of three

Chris Cornthwaite has a PhD in Christian Origins from the University of Toronto. He used to be a pastor. These days he isn’t working in academia — he makes videos — and this past August he posted one whose title is the whole argument in a single line: “There’s 1 question Bible scholars never ask. Our field forbids it.” The forbidden question is not whether God exists, or whether the resurrection happened. It’s simpler than that, and for his field more embarrassing: did early Christianity borrow anything — rituals, practices, language — from the religions of the Greco-Roman world it was born into? Cornthwaite’s claim is not that the answer is yes. It’s that biblical studies has been built, method on top of method, so that the answer can never come out yes.

Here is his thesis in his own words: “It’s kosher to say that Christians borrow Greek philosophy. It’s not kosher to say that Christians borrowed from a mystery cult.”

Sit with that a moment, because once you see the asymmetry he is pointing at, you start seeing it everywhere. This is the first of three posts on his argument, because the machinery behind that one sentence took the better part of a century to build, and it deserves to be taken apart in order.

Two different rules for the same apostle

Take Paul. Open almost any serious commentary and you will find scholars saying, freely and without drama, that Paul’s language and habits of thought owe something to Stoicism — the popular Greek philosophy of his day. Nobody loses a job over it. Nobody gets a warning label. Borrowing from Greek philosophy is safe.

Now ask the same kind of question one shelf over. Paul wrote to Greek-speaking cities where the mystery cults — Eleusis, Isis, Mithras, the rest — were part of the religious furniture of daily life, as ordinary as churches are in an American town. Did any of that rub off? The room goes quiet. The same scholar, the same Paul, the same kind of question — and suddenly the standards change. Resemblance is allowed; connection is not. You may say two things look alike. You may not say one of them came from the other.

The double standard runs in the other direction, too, and Cornthwaite, following the scholar Jonathan Z. Smith, puts his finger on it: the later mystery cults may borrow from Christianity — that genealogy is fine, scholars propose it without hesitation — but Christianity itself never borrows. As he puts it, New Testament scholars have “no trouble talking about genealogy as long as it’s the genealogy that keeps Christianity safe and unique.” Genealogy, it turns out, is a one-way street, and it only runs downhill from the church.

Why would a whole field build a rule like that? Part of the answer is that the rule wasn’t built all at once. It was inherited — in large part from one famous essay that said something narrower, and more reasonable, than the use later made of it.

Sandmel, 1962: the essay behind the ban

Samuel Sandmel was a rabbi and a professor at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and in December 1961 he gave the presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature. Published in 1962 as “Parallelomania,” it became one of the most quoted articles in the entire field. Its title alone has ended more arguments than most books.

What did Sandmel actually argue? His target was a specific scholarly vice, and he named it in his definition of the term: parallelomania is “that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection.” His key word, by his own insistence, was extravagance — parallels piled up past what the evidence holds, excerpts torn out of context and pressed together until they look like borrowing, and then “source and influence” announced as if the resemblance had proved it. He was not wrong that the vice existed. The decades before him had produced comparative work of exactly that kind, and some of it was extravagant enough to embarrass everyone who came after.

Notice two things about the essay as he wrote it, though. First, his test cases were mostly comparisons within Judaism’s neighborhood — the Dead Sea Scrolls set alongside Jesus and John the Baptist, Philo set alongside Paul. He was policing claims about Jewish parallels at least as much as pagan ones. Second, he said flatly that he was not denying that literary influence exists, and not trying to discourage the study of parallels — he wanted them studied in detail: the actual words, the structures, the contexts. His demand was for better comparison, not less of it.

That is not how the field used him. On Cornthwaite’s account — and this is his characterization, offered as such — the essay was misread and redeployed: a caution about extravagance hardened into a caution against Greco-Roman comparison as such, and “parallelomania” became a word you could throw at a comparison to end the conversation instead of answering it. He notes, with some dryness, that the essay is now cited frequently by Christian apologists — a Jewish scholar’s warning about overdrawn parallels, doing duty as a shield for the claim that Christianity was never influenced by the pagan world around it. Whatever Sandmel intended, that is a use his text does not support: a man who said his key word was “extravagance” was not banning comparison. He was banning sloppiness.

The question stands

Here is the point Part One leaves on the table. Even if half the parallels ever drawn between early Christianity and the mystery cults collapse on inspection — and plenty of them do — that settles nothing about the other half, and it settles nothing at all about whether the question may be asked. A field that cannot ask “did they borrow this?” without reaching for a warning label from 1962 is not protecting rigor. It is protecting a conclusion.

Tomorrow, in Part Two: how the ban got its machinery — the rule that was already in place seven years before Sandmel’s essay, and the scholar who mapped the whole arrangement thirty years later.

Read more

The video

Sandmel and “Parallelomania”

  • Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 1 (1962): 1–13 (JSTOR 3264821; DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3264821). The full text is freely available through the biblicalstudies.org.uk PDF collection.
  • T. L. Donaldson, “Parallels: Use, Misuse and Limitations,” The Evangelical Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1983): 193–210 — the standard retrospective on what Sandmel did and didn’t say.

The scholar Cornthwaite is following

  • Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 1990) — the source of the one-way-genealogy observation; his full case is Part Two’s subject.

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