On Tuesday, February 23, Giovanni Bazzana, Associate Professor of New Testament at HDS, discussed his recent book Kingdom of Bureaucracy: The Political Theology of Village Scribes in the Sayings Gospel Q. Shaye J.D. Cohen, Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and Lawrence Wills, Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at the Episcopal Divinity School, will serve as respondents.
Below, Bazzana spoke about the origins of his book, how he became interested in the synoptic Gospels and apocalyptic literature, how his work contributes to and furthers current scholarship on the Gospels, and his next project— spirit possession and exorcism in the early Christ groups.
HDS: What led you to write Kingdom of Bureaucracy: The Political Theology of Village Scribes in the Sayings Gospel Q?
GB: The idea for this book came out of two intellectual and research interests of mine, which serendipitously ended up being in agreement in this case. On the one hand, I have been working for years now on the potential contribution that documentary papyri can have for the historical study of texts produced by the early Christ groups. Since some scholars have been hypothesizing for a few decades now that Q had been composed by village scribes and documentary papyri are the main source from which we can know something about the practices and the cultural interests of ancient village scribes, I thought that testing the hypothesis by more systematically examining documentary papyri in relationship to Q was a good idea. It turns out that the result of such an examination is that the reconstructed text of Q is full of linguistic and ideological features that are specific of ancient low- and middle-level bureaucrats.
A second driving impulse behind this research has been my reading of Giorgio Agamben's writing on political theology. Agamben's theoretical work has broad historiographical ambitions and is excitingly controversial, but—as far as political theology is concerned—is effective in bringing theology back into the midst of discussions concerning political organization and government as a way to diagnose and expose the roots of the malaise that is affecting liberal democracies today. Alongside the classical paradigms of authoritarian political theologies, Agamben sees also an "economic" paradigm in which the governmental work of the idle God/sovereign is carried out by a relatively autonomous and self-legitimizing (heavenly and earthly) bureaucracy. I think that this is the paradigm that one can see operating also behind the concept of God's basileia (divine sovereignty) in Q. In the book I claim that such observations explain why divine basileia is always abstract and at the same acting in Q (God is never called king in the document, as far as we can see), while the representation of its activity adopts and adapts so many aspects (such as concern for the welfare of subjects) of the ancient descriptions of ideal sovereigns.
HDS: Your current main research areas are the synoptic Gospels and apocalyptic literature. How did your interest in these areas develop?
GB: Ages ago I was an undergraduate student of Classics in Italy, and, having the need to choose an elective course in order to fill my study card for my second year at the University of Milan, I enrolled in a course on Early Christian History because the title intrigued me. Since I was a well-meaning and well-educated Italian Catholic, I did not even know that things like biblical studies or biblical criticism even existed. So, the course was an eye-opening (but also, at first, definitely horrifying) experience. From that moment on, I have been hooked up with the study of the intricate and endlessly fascinating world of these early Christ groups, about which we all talk so much, but about whom we ultimately know so little.
I like this field of study so much in particular because—with respect to other branches and areas of the ancient world—researching the early Christ movement implies (rather, needs) dealing with so many issues and questions that are deeply embedded in our contemporary life. For instance, my focus on Gospel traditions and apocalyptic literature immediately evokes the current relevancies of debates surrounding the "historical Jesus" or the impact that apocalyptic imaginations have on our world.
HDS: How will your work change how scholars interpret the Sayings Gospel Q?
GB: Hopefully, a little bit! It is difficult (better, impossible) to predict what other people will derive from the reading of one's own book (if they will read it at all). I think that Q scholarship in the last few years has been "stuck" in debating endlessly whether the hypothesis behind the existence of Q is convincing or not. There are alternatives and people have written hundreds of more or less convincing books on the redactional critical problem constituted by the three synoptic Gospels and by their relationship. In sum, there is very little new to say for anyone on this specific issue.
For those (like me) who are convinced that the Q hypothesis is solid and the alternatives are unsatisfactory, it is high time to move on to examine what is the historical significance of Q for a better understanding of Jewish Galilee in the middle of the first century CE (the time and place in which the text was arguably composed). I think that such an inquiry could provide very valuable insights not merely on the other endlessly debated issue of the "historical Jesus", but (even more importantly, in my mind) on the social and cultural profile of the people who initiated and profoundly shaped the Jesus movement after his death and resurrection.
HDS: Should we all read the Gospels a little differently now?
GB: This is even more ambitious! With the caveat that I mentioned before, I would point at two main areas where I think that we could implement better reading practices. On the one hand, the attention to documentary papyri (with their everyday, even prosaic contents) should alert us to the fact that what we have been habituated to read as metaphorical or idealized in many well-known New Testament passages might have had more concrete and even material resonances for its ancient readers and hearers.
Another thing I really care deeply about concerns how we can envisage the relationship between the authors of this document and political power. In recent years, it has become more and more common to read several texts produced by the early Christ groups as anti-Roman or anti-imperialist. This is a good move inasmuch as it alerts us to the lurking presence and influence of politics in these texts, even though sometimes it might not be immediately evident or certain interpretive traditions have habituated us to overlook it.
However, the situation is a little more complicated when one looks at it more closely. For instance, the administrators who composed Q were by the very nature of their profession deeply embedded into the governmental machine of ancient empires. This consideration should lead us to be wary of the risk of romanticizing a notion such as that of the "kingdom of God" as an egalitarian utopia (this is why the "kingdom" in the title is associated with "bureaucracy," with all the negative baggage that we tend to ascribe to the latter term). Indeed, this might remind us of the complex and often unacknowledged way in which we are entangled on situations of privilege and inequality even when we take stances that are critical of them.
HDS: What is your next project?
GB: I am currently working on a manuscript that deals with the theme of spirit possession and exorcism in the early Christ groups. This is a topic that was ostensibly of enormous importance for the lived religious experience of the early Christ followers but that the traditional tools of historical criticism have not been able to treat very well, usually resorting to reductionism by describing possession either as mental illness or as an allegory of socio-political marginalization. I am trying out a relatively new path by examining some very well-known texts (such as Jesus's exorcisms or the Pauline language of "being-in-Christ") in light of the great work that ethnographers and anthropologists have been doing in the last decades on spirit possession.
The cross-cultural comparison enables one to reconstruct imaginatively what kind of cultural practice possession might have been for the members of these Christ groups. I would like to show how possession enabled these people to relate in embodied ways with their (historical and mythical) past, to construct their subjectivities, and to exercise complicated forms of agency. Given the nature of this project, as I said above, it entails also a methodological reconsideration of the tools of traditional biblical criticism in order to expose how deeply they are grounded in modern epistemologies and how they could be reformulated in order to foster interpretive practices more attuned to the pursuit of inclusive, ecologically-minded theologies and ethics.
- by Melissa Coles, MDiv candidate