Recently Nick Peters brought to my attention a "response" (the quotes are deserved) to a point I made in our book Defining Inerrancy. The book Politely Rejecting the Bible: Why You Shouldn't Believe Everything the Bible Tells You (p. 50) by Dan Kapr is another in a long line of examples of why an overdemocratized publishing industry will contribute to the demise of culture. The author professes to be a "former seminarian" but in the end his self-descriptions of agony over interpretation indicates someone unable to reconcile Geislerian fundamentalism with reality. He also lists himself as a "comedian," and from the looks of his work on the Bible, he doesn't abandon that profession when he writes his books. I found out his degree was a D. Min. from New Brunswick Theological Seminary; for those who have not seen it before, I consider a D. Min to be fairly useful when it comes to academic credibility, provided your Master's thesis has a title something like, "Why Goku Yells So Loud: The Kamehameha Wave as an Expression of Diversity in Anime." (I will acknowledge an error, though I am uncertain of its genesis: Kapr's degree is an M. Div., not a D. Min., though this only makes matters worse in terms of Kapr's academic credibility.)
The case in point is his "response" to the following I wrote from DI:
The problem in a nutshell is that Matthew records that Judas died by suicide, hanging himself, whereas Luke (in Acts) reports that Judas “fell headlong,” dying as his bowels gushed open (there are other issues as well, but we will focus on this one). Traditionalist expositors resolve this paradox by claiming that Matthew and Luke offer complimentary accounts: Judas hanged himself (Matthew), but the rope broke, and his body fell and burst open (Acts). While this resolution may not be entirely unreasonable, my own response relies on certain contextual factors involving the production of literature in the first century. I would opt for the idea that this is an example of Matthew's creative use of an Old Testament "type."
Audrey Conrad, in "The Fate of Judas" (Toronto Journal of Theology [7] 1992), notes that Matthew's unique words "departed" and "hanged himself" are found in combination in another place in the Greek Old Testament:
Samuel 17:23 And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.
Conrad notes that rabbinic interpretation of Ps. 41:9 ("Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me."), thought that Ahithophel was the traitor David was describing -- and of course this same verse was applied by Jesus to Judas (John 13:18).
Conrad still thinks there are not enough parallels to reach a conclusion. But I disagree. I believe that the parallels are sufficient, and that Matthew is indeed alluding to the traitor Ahithophel in this passage, and is therefore not literally telling us that Judas indeed hanged himself, but rather, that Judas fulfilled the "type" of Ahithophel by being a traitor who responded with grief and then died. In this view, Matthew is making no statement at all about Judas' mode of death. Luke's account stands alone as a specific and literal description of what happened.
The difficulty here is that those accustomed to a Western, precision-literalist understanding of inerrancy, as traditionalists are, will frequently find this sort of answer objectionable, and say that I am somehow accusing Matthew of “lying” or “erring” in his report. But this is a response that assumes the very sort of precision-literalist reading that I am saying is not present in the text.
As it now stands, the NIV reads: So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.
My thesis is that a reader of Matthew would recognize the allusion and understand this to literally mean: So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he died a death worthy of that traitor Ahithophel.
In short, “went and hanged himself” is an allusion to Ahithophel, and Matthew’s literal message in this allusion is not about the mode of Judas’ death, but is about Judas as one who acted in history in a way similar to Ahithophel. In this, Matthew is engaging in the practice of highlighting what are called “probabilities.”
Kapr was apparently gobsmacked by this contextualized interpretation, and he does his best to rescue a literal reading, as though he were still a fundamentalist (and he apparently is). His responses are miniaturized for our convenience, and they run as follows:
One issue I see with a typological reading of Matthew’s account is that it is not incompatible with the idea that Judas literally hanged himself. Even if we suppose that the author of Matthew saw a connection between Ahithophel and Judas, it is entirely possible that their similar manners of death were part of the reason that the author made this connection in the first place.
Despite Kapr's 911 call to Fundamentalist EMS, however, he doesn't end up with even BLS services. In fact, he doesn't even get a paramedic applying a band-aid. Sure, "it is not incompatible with the idea that Judas literally hanged himself." It is also not incompatible with the idea that Judas implaed himself on a fountain pen after sticking one in the ground and leaping onto it from a clifftop. With Conrad's and my reading, what literally happened is actually beside the point. It is so much beside the point that it is a non-factor in terms of comparing it to what Luke reported. Essentially Kapr is trying to force a contradiction between Luke's literal reported account and what he now takes to be the non-typological version of history not reported as literal truth (just as typological truth) by Matthew, which means he's pitting the Bible, and an author whose genre is a model of straight historical reportage (Luke) against what would now be considered a non-Biblical (speculative, invented on his own) history written by an author (Matthew) known for his typological efforts. And if that's the game Kapr wants to play, then we can make any Bible passage historically erroneous by simply fantasizing about some contrary alternate historical event being possible too. This is Kapr's version of Lindell's "the cock crowed nine times" harmonization.
Kapr's only other "response" to the thesis presented is even sillier:
J. P. Holding and Nick Peters claim that the author of Matthew is telling us that “Judas fulfilled the ‘type’ of Ahithophel by being a traitor who responded with grief and then died.” The problem here is that the story of Ahithophel never says anything at all about his grief or remorse. Holding and Peters are reading that detail into the story.
Well yes of course. The real reason someone in a honor-shame society who betrays someone commits suicide isn't because of grief . It's because hanging yourself was a way to celebrate and show how happy you were that you were a traitor. You also decorated your body with streamers before hanging yourself and stuck a kazoo in your mouth so you could belt out Auld Lang Syne with your last gasping breaths.
The reader will note that while I did say "grief," contrary to Kapr, I did NOT say 'remorse" -- and that was for for a very good reason. However, the honor-shame aspects are likely beyond Kapr's limited knowledge obtained from Pic N' Save Bible Seminary. Kapr added "remorse" to my words and meaning because his seminary education was deficient when it came to matters of socio-cultural factors. Let's look at the key passage again:
2 Samuel 17:23 And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.
The context of what happened earlier is important. Ahithophel's advice was rejected in favor of Hushai's. One of the chief reasons for anyone in an honor-shame society to commit suicide is beccause they have been dishonored. In this case, dishonor plagued Ahithophel from more than one direction. One was that his advice as a leader and counselor was rejected. Another was that he was a traitor to David, and Hushai's advice once taken would undermine the revolt and lead to Ahithophel being even more disgraced and either killed in battle or executed. With so much shame heaped on his plate, you can darned bet he was experiencing serious "grief" over his situation. Anyone who can't see this sort of "detail" present isn't paying attention -- and also needs a serious social science education.
So in the end, Kapr is just another face in The Death of Expertise crowd.
In an attempt to excuse his inept reponse to my earlier points, Kapr now whitewashes his errors and lack of familiarity with defining contexts of the period (such as honor and shame) with a response which manages to demonstrate even more clearly why he is no better than Jim Carrey spouting anti-vaccine nonsense. That he fails to see the problem is evident from this excuse:
I make no pretensions to being a scholar, but so what? I’m engaging with the views of various Christian scholars as carefully and critically as I can. Ultimately my arguments will have to stand or fall by their own merits.
This attutude is so irresponsible that it is frankly morally repuganant. Imagine Jim Carrey saying:
I make no pretensions to being a doctor, but so what? I’m engaging with the views of various medical experts as carefully and critically as I can. Ultimately my arguments will have to stand or fall by their own merits.
Until Kapr learns that information is a tool that needs to be handled responsibly, he will never be worthy of serious consideration.
In any event, he is forced to admit in so many words that he failed to take any accounting of how honor and shame may have played a role in this story, and if he had any sense whatsoever he'd take that as a signal to quit the field and spend several years (at least 20) getting himself properly informed. But he doesn't. Instead, he digs himself deeper in a hole by claiming he wasn't actually trying as hard to demonstrate a problem with this story as I thought he was. Sorry, no. He can try that gaslighting technique on someone else.
Kapr also gaslights his way thorugh his lack of acumen by saying he isn't as bad as deserving a Tom Nichols Award because "an awful lot of scholarly resources do" appear in his bibliography. It frankly doesn't matter how wide he thinks his phylactery is; his Nichols Award is deserved for how he uses knowledge (like what Acts calls a spermologos), not how much knowldge he thinks he has gathered and thrown together in some heap that resembles a dumpster fire more than anything else. For the professed scale of his project, in fact, Kapr's phylactery is vanishingly small and not even a fig leaf covering his nakedess.
He makes only one point otherwise worth addressing. Kapr can't understand why "no one on the early church" had the same interpretation. Frankly, it doesn't matter. The early church was far from infallible, and one of the great weaknesses of the early church was a strong disconnect from their Jewish heritage. That is a weakness that would lead to never recognizing Matthew's allusion.
-JPH