Thoughts on the Bible (response to Bret Weinstein)

I wasn't sure where I was going with this at first, but we eventually get there anyway

Evolutionary biologist, podcaster, and all-around great guy, Bret Weinstein, recently posted a tweet that got my attention:

The New Testament is a major revision of an ancient cultural operating system.

The updated code is fundamental to the modern West which inevitably crashes without it.

Some who have retained the trappings of the prior version of the OS have quietly accepted the fundamentals of the updated system. Jews who adhere to the golden rule, and don’t believe in collective punishment, are an example. We are compatible with the West and do well in it without needing or wanting to rig the system in our own favor. We want a level playing field. But obviously many American Jews are not of this mindset. For golden-rule believing Jews, it is galling to be lumped in with those threatening the West by endlessly attempting to rig the system.

Some populations who initially applied the update, self-described Christians, are now applying patches that revert the core OS back to the pre-updated state. They are explicitly inclined to rig the system in favor of their lineages, despite that being a distinctly un-Christian thing to do. White nationalist Christians are an example of this. It’s an Old Testament mindset with Christian aesthetics and rhetoric.

As usual, Bret is onto something important here, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “ancient cultural operating system” he describes is summed up by the Arab proverb: I against my brother, I and my brother against my cousin, I, my brother, and my cousin against the world. This mentality is antithetical to the smooth functioning of the modern West’s chief institution, the nation state. In a previous essay, we discussed the difficulties faced by traditional societies trying to make the leap in Papua New Guinea.

The landscape of Papua New Guinea is extremely forbidding - high, steep mountains covered with thick tropical rainforests - and has long been an insurmountable natural barrier to political consolidation on the large island. The prospect of any single center of authority exercising power over the entire island was was nonexistent in premodern times when feet were the primary means of transportation... Even contact and interchange from one valley to the next was a tall task, and isolated microsocieties grew up all over Papua New Guinea. Over 900 mutually-incomprehensible languages are spoken on the island - one-sixth of all the world’s still-existing languages… In the Papua New Guinea highlands, most people will live their entire lives in the mountain valley in which they were born. Their social world consists of their segmentary lineage group (that is, those who share a common male ancestor), and the nearby lineages with whom their group is in dialogue or conflict.

These lineage groups, which may comprise a few dozen to a few thousand people, are called wantoks, a pidgin version of the English words “one talk” - people who speak the same language. Each wantok is led by a chief, a Big Man. Big Man is not an inherited office, but a position of responsibility and authority bestowed by community acclimation. If, in times of conflict, the Big Men tend to be physically-powerful warriors, in other times the position may be held by more physically average men who have garnered great respect and trust among their people, particularly for their ability to distribute pigs, shell money, and other goods to those who follow them.

Until the 1970s, Papua New Guinea was under the political control of Australia. When the colonizers departed, they thought to give the people a helpful shove along their path toward modernity by designing and empowering an elected multiparty parliamentary system of government. The result, as you might have guessed, was chaos.

Voters in Melanesia do not vote according to policy preferences or political ideology. They vote to install the Big Man of their wantok into the national parliament or some other position from which he will be able to direct state largesse back to his own people. The elected Big Man understands his duty to extract as many resources as possible to benefit his friends and family, without regard for the well-being of a larger nation state with which neither he nor his people feel any real sense of collective identity.

To people accustomed to a Western system of government, it is the definition of corruption for a politician to use his position to direct benefits to his friends and family; in Papua New Guinea, it is simply the way things are, and both voters and elected officials would have trouble comprehending why or how it would be otherwise.

This is the “ancient cultural operating system” at work. In Papua New Guinea, it is not only tolerated, but virtuous, to rig the system in favor of one’s own people. Bret correctly points out that this is incompatible with the modern West, but is it incompatible with the New Testament? After all, for 1,500 years, societies from Byzantium to Medieval Spain were founded on the principles of the New Testament without bearing any resemblance to the modern West. Although the principles Bret points to as the basis of the modern West - a level playing field, individual equality under the law, etc. - can, perhaps, be credibly derived from Christianity, what he is describing is merely liberalism. I asked Bret about this, and he said that he sees liberalism as the political instantiation of the New Testament system update. It brought to mind something I read by a Jewish writer - maybe Paul Berman, maybe an old Nathan Glazer bit, I can’t remember. Whoever it was, he said that the true religion of American Jewry is not Judaism, but liberalism. Or, according to Bret’s formulation, Christianity without Christ. That is what Bret means when he says that “some (Jews) who have retained the trappings of the ancient cultural operating system have quietly accepted the fundamentals of the updated system.”

Christianity without Christ sounds like an oxymoron, of course, but let’s play around with the idea a bit. After all, Jesus obtained his understanding without ever reading the New Testament, nor do the Gospels say that he became who he was by way of special revelation. In fact, Jesus was clear that everything necessary to know him was already present in the Jewish tradition in which he was raised. Christ could only have come from the Jews. Alone among all the world’s peoples, the Jews kept a record not only of their triumphs, but their defeats and catastrophes. Indeed, their defeats and catastrophes have more emotional valence in the minds of most Jews than their victories. Dwelling on your negative experiences can veer into the pathological, but empathy for the weak and victimized is most strongly rooted when you have a sense of what they’re going through - when you’re able to say, “That could’ve been me,” because at some point in the remembered past, it was you. No other society of which I’m aware went to such lengths to preserve the memory of their disasters. You read about the Assyrians, how they rose and drove their enemies before them until they were rulers of the known world, then you read about the Babylonians rising to destroy the Assyrian Empire. Next, you read about the rise of the Persians’ Achaemenid Empire, and their conquest of Babylon, and the Babylonians follow the Assyrians down the memory hole. Every defeat was told from the perspective of the victorious successor. Their traditions, the traditions of all the pagan nations, taught them to worship strength, despise weakness, and to view personal or collective suffering as a sign of the gods’ disfavor. This is what Paul meant when he said that the Gospel sounded like nonsense to the Gentiles, according to whose worldview a crucified criminal was by definition a loser, discarded by the gods and certainly unworthy of the sympathy of respectable people. I’m an old comparative religion nerd, so I find a lot to love about most of the world’s religions, but it’s a fact that only the Jews could have given us the sentiment expressed in Isaiah’s Songs of the Servant:

Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young shoot,

and like a root out of barren ground;

he had no form or majesty for which we should regard him,

and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces,

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our grief

and carried our sorrows;

yet we called him cursed,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that brought us peace,

and by his wounds are we healed.

We, like sheep, have gone astray;

We have turned, every one, to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him the inquiry of us all.

If you can write that, you can grok the Christian ethic without having to hear it from Jesus or the apostles. It was Christ who awakened the pagan nations to the suffering of the poor and downtrodden, and Christ is our necessary reminder that God is closest to those whom the world has abandoned and despised. Jews alone, I believe, were and are able to know these truths on their own - Christianity without Christ. After all, everything necessary to know and understand Jesus Christ is contained in that passage from Isaiah.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying. There is more to Christianity than the Christian ethic, so I’m not pushing some hackneyed dual covenant theology. (I’m not pushing anything at all, and I hope everyone always keeps that in mind. I’m not your pastor. We’re all friends here, just having a friendly conversation.) My point, though, is that the Jewish tradition contained all the necessary elements for the Christian worldview.

When Paul said that the Gospel was nonsense to the Gentiles, he followed it up by saying that it is a “stumbling block” to the Jews. “Stumbling block” is a translation of the Greek skandalon, which is used throughout the New Testament to describe something that causes one to sin. Why would the Gospel cause the Jews to sin? We have a hint in Romans chapter 11, when Paul tells the church in Rome that salvation being offered to the Gentiles “has made Israel jealous.” Jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably in day-to-day speech, but they are not the same. Envy means you want what someone else has, but jealousy means that you are afraid someone will take what you have. The Jews felt cheated by the invitation to salvation extended to people they thought of as enemies and oppressors. They had been expecting a warrior Messiah who would end the exile by leading them to military victory over the nations. What they got was a Messiah to lead them out of the exile by making peace and bringing them into communion with the nations.

It’s easy to understand why they reacted the way they did. After all, who doesn’t sympathize with the faithful older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son? He remained home under his father’s discipline while his dissolute brother wandered the earth, and he felt like he had earned a special place in his father’s heart. When his destitute brother returned home, the brother’s refusal to join the celebration and pretend like nothing had happened was not the correct response, but it was a very human one. In another parable, Jesus described a man who was hired to work in a vineyard. He was hired in the morning, and promised a denarius for a full day’s work. Throughout the day, the vineyard owner hires more workers for the same pay promised to the one hired at dawn. At the end of the day, everyone received one denarius, even though some had only worked a half day, and others had been hired barely an hour before day’s end. Naturally, the man hired in the morning objected, saying that he had done more than the rest, and should be compensated for it. The owner tells the upset worker that he was happy with his pay when he agreed to it in the morning, and nothing has been taken from him by paying others the same. The owner, in this case, is God, so we won’t argue with him, but part of us, the human part, shares the worker’s sense that he was somehow cheated.

Modern Christians often emphasize the parables’ purpose as instruction to the individual believer. Those who were raised in the church, for example, may see themselves as the older brother, who must not judge or resent those who come into the church later, after years of living in sin. Conversely, those who came into the church later may see themselves as the Prodigal Son, and be comforted by the lesson that nothing in their past had diminished God’s love for them. No doubt the stories can and should be read as timeless lessons to the individual, but it’s easy to forget that Jesus was not only speaking to the whole world through the Bible, he was standing before real people, in a specific time and place - first century Jews at a very critical point in their national history.

---

The Stumbling Block

Many people, even those who went to Sunday School as kids, only know a rough summary of the story told in the Old Testament, so I hope those of you who know the story well will indulge me for a minute.

(OK, I started telling the story from the beginning, and typed two full pages before I was done with the Book of Genesis. For your sake and mine, let’s begin with the founding of the Kingdom of Israel.)

So Moses has led the people out of Egypt, Joshua has led them on a genocidal conquest of Canaan, and the Israelites are finally settling down in the Promised Land. But enemies threaten on every front. They hadn’t managed to kill every Canaanite man, woman, and child, so they had the survivors to worry about. Beyond their new borders were powerful kingdoms and empires - Hittites, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and more - as well as bandits, and swarms of seafaring raiders. In order to better deal with these challenges, the people went to God’s prophet and demanded that he appoint a king. The prophet, Samuel, warned them against it, saying that although it may seem expedient today, they’ll regret it tomorrow, when their ruler is conscripting their sons for his army, and their daughters for his harem. They insist, and so God gives them a king. The first king, Saul, doesn’t last, but the second king, David, establishes a real kingdom, based in Jerusalem, in the territory allotted to his tribe, Judah.

Samuel’s warnings were almost immediately validated. Most of the kings are bad rulers. The first prophetic book, Amos, written in the 8th century BC, bemoans the decadent society Israel has become, and the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful. Strife between the tribes leads the ten northern kingdoms to renounce their loyalty to the king in Jerusalem. Finally, the powerful Assyrian empire sets upon them, laying siege to the capital of the northern kingdom, and finally destroying it around 721 BC. Next, the Assyrians made for Jerusalem, but political strife back home forced them to abandon the siege before it was consummated. The two remaining tribal fiefdoms, Judah and Benjamin, took this as proof of God’s favor. Before long, though, more prophets appeared to warn the people that they, too, had displeased God, and would soon be destroyed unless they changed their ways. The chief complaint of the prophets was that the Jews (the people of Judah) were too open and friendly to the foreign peoples among whom they lived. The most popular metaphor for their behavior is a whoring wife, and God promises in long, lurid passages to do to the Jews what any cuckolded husband would have done in the Iron Age Near East. A few kings heeded the warnings, but most didn’t, and in the 6th century BC, God sent the Babylonians to finish the job started by the Assyrians. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and tore down the Jews’ temple to Yahweh. The leadership class of Jerusalem was exiled to live near Babylon, where they could be more easily monitored. The leaders of the ten northern tribes had been exiled in similar fashion by the Assyrians, and, without their leaders, the people who remained behind intermarried and assimilated to the people around them. Those left behind in Judah did the same once their leaders were out of the picture. The Babylonians’ victory was short-lived, however. Less than a century later, the Persians crushed the Babylonians, and issued an edict permitting the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild it as a vassal state to the Persian emperor. It wasn’t independence, but it was better than nothing.

The Babylonian exile had a profound reactionary effect on Jewish culture. The question that dominated the period was how the chosen people, God’s beloved, could have fallen into such a sorry state. Ten of the twelve tribes of Israel had been destroyed and lost to history. The remaining two had been conquered and subjugated. The holy temple, God’s house on earth, had been reduced to rubble. How could this be? One loud and aggressive faction thought they knew the answer. It was not that God lacked the power to protect them, or that He had merely allowed them to be conquered. In fact, it was He who had sent the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem as punishment for the Jews’ infidelity. This faction had always been a vocal minority, denouncing the people and ruling elites for being too tolerant of the surrounding nations.¹

They were viewed by most as an extremist faction, and rarely had the ear of those in power. After the exile, however, the fundamentalists had a more receptive audience, in the same way that reactionary Muslims denouncing the cosmopolitanism of the Islamic world took center stage after the Mongol conquests. This idea became dominant among the Jews, and sweeping edits and redactions to the Old Testament were made during and after the exile to reflect the view that openness to the corrupting influence of foreigners was the cardinal sin, the one violation that would cause God to forget His promises and bring the Jews to ruin.

Still, while this xenophobic idea became the basis of Jewish religion during the Second Temple period, the fanatics remained a minority (as they are in virtually every society). Thus, when the Persians defeated the Babylonians and permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem, only a minority of the Jews in Babylon actually went. After all, every Jew under 70 years old had been born and built their lives in Babylon, and the idea of leaving the functional center of civilization to rebuild a town in a provincial backwater - well, they sent well-wishes to anyone who chose to go, but the vast majority had no desire to go themselves. The ones who did go were not a random cross-section of Babylonian-Jewish society. They were the extremists, the hardened xenophobes who’d been preaching the necessity of cultural and blood purity. You might liken them to the hardcore religious Israeli settlers expanding into Palestinian land in the West Bank. Not only is it dangerous, but it’s far from the shopping centers in Tel Aviv, so a settler has to be very committed to the cause. The Jews returning to Jerusalem from Babylon were cut from similar cloth.

When they returned, however, they were dismayed at what they found. The Jews who had been left behind - which meant the vast majority of them - had been on their own for 70 years, and had begun to assimilate and intermarry with the people around them. The two Old Testament books that deal with the return to Jerusalem, Ezra and Nehemiah, are preoccupied with the returning fanatics’ campaign against these people:

After these things had been done, the leaders came to me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them…

Seeing this, Ezra tore his clothes and threw himself to the ground in propitiatory prayer:

For we have forsaken the commands you gave through your servants the prophets when you said: ‘The land you are entering to possess is a land polluted by the corruption of its peoples. By their detestable practices they have filled it with their impurity from one end to the other. Therefore, do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them at any time, that you may be strong and eat the good things of the land and leave it to your children as an everlasting inheritance.’

Ezra and his retinue called the people to repentance, ordering them to divorce their foreign wives and disown their children. The Book of Ezra even takes care to list the names of the bloodlines that had been corrupted. Many agreed, but others, of course, resisted. They had been surviving for 70 years, and here a group of religious fanatics from Babylon had shown up and ordered them to break up their families. The Persian emperor, however, had granted the returned exiles political authority over Jerusalem and the surrounding region, so those who refused to abandon their families were simply cast out of the Jewish community.

Jerusalem and the Temple were rebuilt with funding and support from the Persian state. Still, many lamented that even though they were back in Jerusalem, they were nonetheless under the thumb of a foreign king who proclaimed himself the representative of God on earth. Jerusalem and her temple had been restored, but were a shadow of their former glory. Was this the promised restoration, or was there still another redemption yet to come?

They didn’t have long to ponder that question, though. Before long, Alexander the Great and his invincible Greek armies swept the Persians off the board. Jerusalem passed from one suzerain to another, only now without the privileges they had enjoyed under the Persians.² After Alexander died, his empire was divided among his top generals. Jerusalem was first ruled from Egypt by the Ptolemies, before passing to the Seleucids.

The Jews’ religious xenophobia made them a very hard people to rule over. The Hellenistic period saw unprecedented cultural exchange from India in the east, all the way to the Maghreb and Europe in the west. People were coming into contact with foreigners like never before. To a society intensely focused on racial and religious purity, this was not viewed as a time of opportunity, but of great danger. One of the main ways of building cultural bridges was by honoring the gods and customs of others. Refusing to do so was akin to an individual refusing to shake your hand, or, a country refusing to establish diplomatic relations with another. Jews, of course, were not only forbidden from paying respect to other peoples’ gods, they were increasingly barred from any kind of contact at all. As in any society, people varied in their degree of religious observance, but the devout Jew believed that day-to-day contacts, such touching a non-Jew, entering their house, or eating with them polluted the Jew who did it. It’s no surprise, then, that the most consistent theme of non-Jews’ writings about Jews during this period has to do with their contempt for everyone else around them.³ The Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, for example, complained that Jews “show good will toward none but their own.” A little later, the Roman Tacitus would record a similar criticism:

Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies. They sit apart at meals, they sleep apart, and though, as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women; among themselves nothing is unlawful. Circumcision was adopted by them as a mark of difference from other men. Those who come over to their religion adopt the practice, and have this lesson first instilled into them, to despise all gods, to disown their country, and set at nought parents, children, and brethren.

It’s likely that accounts written by foreigners contained exaggerations and misunderstandings, but in any case the Jews were intensely insular and xenophobic, and this led to predictably bad relations with virtually all of their neighbors. When Paul said that the Jews had “made themselves the enemies of all mankind,” he wasn’t making an ontological observation, but a straightforward sociopolitical one. This all came to a head during the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who determined to return the Jews’ insults with one of his own by placing a Greek idol in the innermost sanctum, the Holy of Holies, of the Jerusalem temple. Antiochus, though, had underestimated the Jews commitment to their bit. Under the brothers Maccabbee, Jerusalem rose up against their Greek rulers, fighting with fanatical abandon and eventually winning their independence for the first time since they were conquered by the Babylonians four centuries earlier. The moment of triumph was short-lived, however. Internal strife in Jerusalem eventually led to civil war, which raged until one faction asked the Roman general Pompeius Magnus to intervene on its behalf. Pompey was already in the process of pacifying the Levant on behalf of the Empire, and was happy to accept the invitation into Jerusalem. The Romans, like the Greeks before them, soon learned that the Jews were not easy to rule. They made unprecedented compromises with the Jews, exempting them from military service, making allowances for the Sabbath, and permitting them to avoid token differences to other gods, but these had little effect. By the time a boy child named Jesus was born of a virgin in a Bethlehem stable, the Romans still rule Judea, but the place is a tinderbox awaiting a match to ignite in rebellion. God had empowered the Maccabees to free them from the Greeks, so it was only a matter of time before He sent a new messiah to overthrow Roman rule and end the exile for good. The messiah would only come, however, if the Jews returned to strict observance of the ancient law. Violent factions such as the Zealots harassed, assaulted, and even assassinated other Jews suspected of collaborating with the Romans. Jews in Greek-majority regions, such as Jesus’ home of Nazareth, were viewed with suspicion by Jerusalem.

---

Revolution was in the air, and everyone knew that it could explode at any moment. This context is necessary to understand the hostile reaction of many Jews when a man from Nazareth came preaching reconciliation with the Gentiles. For the Pharisees and others, the Jews’ separateness had become an end in itself. They had made an idol out of their chosenness. To modern Christians, it is a matter of trivia that Jesus preached to Samaritans, healed Jew and Gentile alike, and ate with tax collectors (the hated arch-collaborators) in the homes of Gentiles. The messiah was supposed to lead them to bloody revenge against these people, not make peace with them. Jesus preached that he had not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. The Law was not an end in itself, but had a purpose - to preserve the Jews as a people whose hearts were softened to those who suffer and mourn, those who are held in contempt and despised, for God’s messiah could only emerge from such a cultural matrix. The Jews were not chosen to be elevated above the rest of mankind. John the Baptist warns the Jews not to imagine that magic DNA guaranteed them a special relationship with God, saying, “Do not say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children of Abraham.” Jesus had come to end the exile, not by leading the Jews in conquest against the Gentiles, but by healing the rift between them once and for all. This was not what the Jews had expected, and certainly not what most of them wanted to hear. The narrative leading to Jesus’ judicial murder climaxes in the Jews’ demand that Pontius Pilate free the violent revolutionary, Barabbas, and crucify Jesus instead. The Jews’ fateful choice to follow Barabbas’s path of political rebellion, and reject Jesus’ message of spiritual reconciliation, led, within a generation of Jesus’ crucifixion, to rebel against Rome, and most of those who’d heard Jesus preach lived to see Jerusalem laid waste, and the second temple turned to rubble.

Jesus brought his message to the Jews first, because only the Jews had the necessary context to understand it and bring it to the nations. As we all know, his message was rejected by all but a few of his countrymen, but those few who did accept it spread the Gospels far and wide, so that before long there were more Gentile than Jewish Christians. As prophesied in the Jews’ own holy scriptures, a man claiming to be the messiah was indeed leading people of every nation to kneel before the God of Abraham. It was a compelling enough narrative that preventing their people from converting to Christianity became a preoccupation of Jewish leaders after the destruction of Jerusalem.

---

Bret’s “ancient cultural operating system” is fueled by a grudge. The Jewish liturgical calendar is dominated by ceremonies in remembrance of the wrongs done to them by Gentile nations. This was how they kept their people on the reservation for centuries when being Jewish often carried social and legal disabilities that could be wiped away for any Jew who converted to Christianity (or, later, Islam). In another essay, I remarked on a 2021 Pew poll of American Jews, asking what they considered to be the most important aspect of Jewish identity. Far and away the most common answer was “remembering the Holocaust.” Not religious observance, not even Zionism, but “remembering what the Gentiles have done to us.” Needless to say, I agree with Bret that many Christians - most of them acting in what they believe is a righteous defense of Christianity - are making the unfortunate decision to cast aside the New Testament “system update” and revert to the “ancient cultural operating system” by remembering, to the point of obsession, the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of others, and the revenge they will take once they gain the upper hand. Christianity simply has the opposite notion: “forget what others have done to you, forgive those who have wronged you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It is a narrow path, difficult to traverse, but it is the only way out of the mental prison holding many Jews and Gentiles alike.

1. The idea that the Israelites were always monotheists, and that their dalliances with foreign gods were occasional indiscretions, is belied by the Bible itself. Throughout most of the Old Testament, were polytheists, worshiping and honoring gods common to the ancient Near East. Yahweh was a tribal god, the patron deity of the Israelites, but one among many.

2. There has been much speculation, including from Jewish historians, that the Jews of Babylon provided assistance to the Persians in their attack on Babylon. As far as I know, there is little in the way of hard evidence, though it seems a likely explanation for the special status enjoyed by the Jews in the Persian Empire.

3. The Jews themselves may or may not have understood it contempt - presumably this varied along with everything else - but it was certainly felt that way by the Gentiles.