Heresy, Forgery, Novelty: Condemning, Denying, and Asserting Innovations in Ancient Judaism, by Jonathan Klawans
By David Eckel (Religion)
On the tenth day of the tenth month of the Female Fire Ox year (December 6, 1757 in the Western calendar), the Tibetan yogi Jigme Lingpa dreamt that he mounted a white lioness and was transported to the Bodhnāth Stūpa in Nepal. As he was standing in the gallery on the east side of the stūpa, he was visited by a ḍākinī, a heavenly messenger, who handed him a flat, wooden box, shaped like an amulet, told him that he was the reincarnation of one of Tibet’s earliest kings, and recited the following verse:
This is the symbol of Samantabhadra’s heart-mind,
the symbol of the great expanse of Awareness-Holder Padma,
the great symbol repository of the ḍākinīs.
When he opened the box, he found five rolls of yellow paper, along with seven crystals, the size of peas. At first he could not read the writing: the rolls were encoded in the secret language of the ḍākinīs. But another heavenly figure appeared and told him to eat them. At once their meaning was imprinted on his mind, and he reports that his awareness expanded into the great bliss-emptiness. Thus began the revelation of one of Tibet’s most important secret scriptures, the Longchen Nyingtig. [1]
Jigme Lingpa’s visionary experience is part of a long Tibetan tradition of scriptural generativity, cast in the form of scriptural discovery, where texts are found written in the features of the landscape and, even more importantly, implanted in the minds of Tibetan adepts from their experiences in previous lives. In this case, part of the revelation is that Jigme Lingpa himself is the reincarnation of the king who first received this teaching from one of Tibet’s greatest Buddhas (“the Awareness-Holder Padma”). Like scriptural productions in other religious traditions, this practice involved complex claims about religious authority, novelty and tradition, and scriptural transmission—made even more paradoxical by Buddhist views of reincarnation (Who really was Jigme Lingpa?) and the claim that the Buddha actually spoke only in silence (In what sense do Jigme Lingpa’s scrolls contain the teaching of the Buddha?)
Jonathan Klawans’s impressive volume on Heresy, Forgery, and Novelty (Oxford 2019) presents a thoughtful and engaging study of issues like these at another moment of intense scriptural generativity, during the early years of the Common Era, when the identities of “Jewish” and “Christian” tradition were being forged in complex disputes about doctrinal and textual authenticity. The life of Jigme Lingpa was still many centuries and many miles away, but he would have recognized the same struggles over authenticity, novelty, and transmission that obsessed the often-pseudonymous authors of the first and second centuries C.E.
Klawans begins his discussion of authority and innovation with the Christian heresiologists of the late second century: figures like Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 135-202), Tertullian of Carthage (c. 160-230), and Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170-235). These heresiologists accused their opponents of unfounded novelty—of “ideas whose falsehood became evident when put in proper context with older truth, as found in scripture and tradition” (Klawans 9). Tertullian made this point in his own words when he defined a heretic “as one who, forsaking that which was prior, afterwards chose out for oneself that which was not in times past” (Klawans 11). We can imagine that similar thoughts occurred to the more staid members of other Tibetan monastic lineages when they heard of Jigme Lingpa’s revelations, in spite of their artful presentation in the guise of antiquity.
It is sometimes said that the concept of “heresy” was an early Christian invention, in part because the Jewish tradition did not share the Christian impulse to define “orthodoxy” by the formulation of creeds. Moses Mendelssohn’s judgment that “Judaism was a largely creedless religion of revealed law” (Klawans 12) has, in some respects, the status of scholarly orthodoxy. Klawans draws on his deep knowledge of Rabbinic scholarship and the Jewish historian Josephus to challenge this received position. He argues that Jewish sources show their own distinctive concern for heresy, but without the same obsession with orthodoxy. With this argument, Klawans not only ties the Christian sources more closely to their Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, but also establishes one of Klawans’s most important scholarly innovations: the concept “heresy” is not simply a Christian invention.
If the Jewish tradition had a similar antipathy to novelty, how did it deal with change, especially in the period of religious creativity and scriptural innovation that we associate with the beginning of the Common Era? Was it possible to generate new scripture or scripture-like documents in the style of Jigme Lingpa? Klawans gives a fascinating answer to this question in his discussion of “Pseudepigraphy and Forging Antiquity.” The attribution of new (or seemingly new) documents to a revered historical figure is a common feature of the “inter-testamental” period. Scholars disagree about whether these texts should be classified as outright forgeries. Some argue that the act of attributing a new text to a historical figure inevitably involves an element of premeditated deceit. Others, notably Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, are more forgiving. His words are worth quoting: “The historian of religion in particular has no cause to express moral condemnation of the pseudepigraphist. The Quest for Truth knows of adventures that are all its own, and in a vast number of cases has arrayed itself in pseudepigraphic garb” (Klawans 29). Klawans refuses to take a position on this point, but he notes that the key question has to do not with the presence or absence of an intent to deceive, but with the acceptance of the works by their intended audience. This would have been true for Jigme Lingpa as well. One wonders not only how he received his texts but to whom he revealed them and how they invested him (and them) with authority.
Similar questions about the valorization of novelty come up in Klawans’s chapter on “Secret Supercessionism? Intimations of Novelty Concealed at Qumran.” Here the key point has to do with interpretation of the idea of “new covenant” in chapter 31 of the book of Jeremiah:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
The concept of a “new covenant” (bryt chadasha) appears in suggestive ways in documents associated with the community at Qumran (also known as the Dead Sea Scrolls). It has fundamental significance for the understanding of Judaism in this period, since a covenant that is truly “new” would involve a criticism or even a replacement of the “old” law embodied in the tradition of the Torah. While it is impossible to do justice to the subtlety and attentiveness that Klawans brings to his reading, not only of Jewish sources but of comparable sources in the gospels, suffice it to say that his own conclusion is that “new” is interpreted not as a rejection of the old, but as a restoration and recovery. As he says, “[t]he truth at Qumran had been revealed long before; all that was possible in the present was renewal” (Klawans 107).
In his final chapter, “Innovation Asserted,” Klawans takes up the unabashed assertions of novelty in early Christian sources. These claims are the paradoxical inversion of the rejection of novelty that characterized Christian heresiology. The gospels and the letters of Paul provide substantial grist for the argument, but the key text is the book of Hebrews, where the novelty of Christian teaching is embraced by rejecting all that preceded it. In this sense, it is “supersessionist”: it supersedes and replaces its predecessors. Hebrews picks up the language of the “new covenant” in Jeremiah 31 and hardens it into a claim that the old covenant is obsolete. This “new covenant” was then expressed in new songs and new community practices, and it was given scriptural form as a “New Testament,” in which the word “testament” functions as a variant of the term “covenant.” While the content of Christian alleged innovations may seem less novel when they are examined closely, as Klawans does so brilliantly in his final chapter, the assertion of novelty–or the rhetoric of innovation–sets the tradition apart in fundamental ways from the traditions that came before.
To conclude this review of Jonathan Klawans’s deeply researched and persuasive book, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Sir John Templeton. He had recently established the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He asked me whether I could recommend any innovations in religion that might be suitable candidates for the prize. As a callow young professor, I tried to argue that some of the greatest innovations in religion are also the most ancient. He gave me a wan smile and turned back to his soup. If Jonathan Klawans’s book had existed at that time, I would have recommended it, not as an innovation, but as a deep reflection about the complexities and ironies involved in any concept of religious innovation. Unfortunately Sir John is no longer with us to read the book. But I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone in the field of religion who is intrigued by the possibilities and limitations of religious innovation. Perhaps even Jigme Lingpa, under a different name and in a different life, will find time to pick it up and read.
[1] The story of Jigme Lingpa is told in Janet Gyatso, Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).