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In the recent volume Atonement and Comparative Theology, Catherine Cornille emphasizes how Christ’s passion encapsulates many potent thematics, including evil, agency, sin, soteriology, anthropology, and eschatology (“Introduction,” 2021). This study builds on this generative focus by examining the betrayal and death of Jesus from within two highly contextualized presentations of this Christian account: the Old Saxon Heliand and the Homerocentones of the Empress Eudocia, considering how both might reflectively negotiate with varied experiences of trauma.
Such intra-religious attention is fruitful for identifying the “ends” of contextualization—that is, the enculturated politics often at work in religious permutation and how this might serve as a cypher for traumatizing experiences. Comparative theology has sometimes found itself scrutinized for not taking enough stock of the long shadows of colonialism thrown by the theological academy (see Tiemeier, 2010). In response, comparative theologians have increasingly allowed their work to pinpoint elements of political theology, as well as possible resources for praxis in relation to psychological and sociological realities (see Makransky, 2022; Rhodes; 2022). Such attentiveness to the political keeps comparative analysis anchored in the concrescence of material and social life; as Kristin Johnson Largen has recently written: “Grounding comparative theology in cultural and socio-political considerations will not ‘dilute’ the intellectual rigor of the discipline; rather, it will deepen it” (2022, 277).
Such attention should also champion psychologically-informed reading in its critical sense. As Dorothee Sölle once wrote (in response to Rudolf Bultmann): “[We] have no right to disregard the interests” that produce a given theology “which means concretely that we must raise the questions originally posed by Karl Marx. Whose interest is served?” Indeed, such a question “locates the political nature of theology and includes any theory of human experience” (Hewitt, 2019, 488). In short, all theological contextualizations serve an interest, and these expressions of theology may serve oppressive or emancipatory ends (Hewitt, 2019, 487; Tiemeier, 2010, 140-142); that is, they may recapitulate trauma and re-instantiate it, or they may provide a therapeutic release. In the Christian tradition, few narratives harbor more potency for these dynamics than the betrayal and death of Jesus (see Bartlett, 2018; Kotsko, 2010). This study argues that the tools of trauma-informed heremeneutics allow this dual-trajectory to be unearthed. In what ways is traumatization, at either the collective or individual level, negotiated via the reinterpretation of authoritative religious texts (see especially Emanuel, 2021; Carr, 2014; Boase & Frechette, 2016)?
A possibly oppressive and re-traumatizing portrayal of Christ’s passion emerges in the Old Saxon Heliand, a paraphrastic gospel harmony written in the mid-800s following decades of war between the Christian Franks and pagan Saxons. Robust contextualization affects nearly every detail of this gospel narrative, in which Jesus is identified as a “chieftain” and his disciples as his warrior-companions. Despite longstanding interpretations that the Heliand was intended to present a pastoral or even liberative theology to the recently subjugated Saxons (Murphy 1995; Brock & Parker, 2009, esp. 240-244), the recent work of Samuel Youngs suggests a more manipulative political focus, seeing in the Heliand a “transcript of submission” (2021). Christ’s sacrificial death is contextually blended with indigenous Saxon ideas related to inescapable and all-determining wurd (fate). Jesus’ fate is his violent capture, humiliation, and execution, mirroring the actual collective trauma of many oppressed Saxons.
A possibly therapeutic and emancipatory rendering of Jesus’ death appears in an even older text, the Homerocentones of Empress Eudocia. This version of the gospel is a cento, a “stitching,” in which an entire literary work is assembled using only lines from Homer. The ingenuity of the composition is matched only by its theological boldness, as Karl Sandnes details in his recent monograph: “The Homeric lines offer more than epic embellishment of biblical stories…. Jesus is also transformed theologically due to the richness of Eudocia’s text” (Sandnes, 2022, 17). But the poem’s artful proclamation and theological audacity are fundamentally contextualized by Eudocia’s own recent past, in which she had left the court of Theodosius II after seemingly being framed for adultery and conspiracy. Eudocia’s Christ is defiant and eloquent in the face of his betrayers, maintaining the injustice of his circumstances in the midst of socialized traumatization.
This study elucidates how both works evidence the fruitfulness of religious reflection when it attends to the politicized nature of intra-religious contextualizations and how such contextualizations might cypher the experience of trauma. Whether it is the conquered chieftain of the Heliand or Eudocia’s defiance of her own exile, the plasticity of these trauma-informed renderings illuminate not only the aesthetic range of Christian themes and images, but also their moldable power across a variety of charged cultural and personal contexts.
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References
Anthony Bartlet, Cross Purposes. Bloomsbury, 2018.
Elizabeth Boase & Christopher Frechette, Bible Through the Lens of Trauma. SBL Press, 2016.
R.N. Brock and R.A. Parker, Saving Paradise. Beacon Press, 2008.
David Carr, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins. Yale, 2014.
Catherine Cornille, “Introduction,” in Atonement and Comparative Theology. Fordham, 2021.
Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology. Wiley, 2010.
Sarah Emanuel, Trauma Theory, Trauma Story. Brill, 2021.
Paul Hedges, “The Science of Religion, Comparative Religion, Mission, and the Birth of Comparative Theology,” in A Companion to Comparative Theology. Brill, 2022.
Marsha Aileen Hewitt, “Critical Theory” in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Wiley, 2019.
Adam Kotsko, The Politics of Redemption. Bloomsbury, 2010.
Kristin Johnston Largen, “Riches Line the Path: Hindu-Christian Comparative Theology,” in A Companion to Comparative Theology. Brill, 2022.
John Makransky, “Buddhist and Christian Liberation Epistemology to Empower Compassionate Social Action,” in A Companion to Comparative Theology. Brill, 2022.
Ronald Murphy, The Saxon Savior. Oxford, 1995.
Jerusha Tanner Rhodes, “Toward a Comparative Feminist Theology,” in A Companion to Comparative Theology. Brill, 2022.
Karl Olav Sandnew, Jesus the Epic Hero. Lexington, 2022.
Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier, “Comparative Theology as a Theology of Liberation,” in The New Comparative Theology. Bloomsbury, 2010.
Samuel J. Youngs, “A Transcript of Submission: Jesus as Fated Victim of Divine Violence in the Old Saxon Heliand.” Religions 12(5), 2021.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper posits that constructive theologies of interpersonal trauma are often cyphered through religious texts and reflections. This is illustrated via a comparison of the betrayal of Christ in two unique and highly contextualized gospels. The first, the Old Saxon Heliand, depicts Jesus as a conquered chieftain, submissive to his fated agony, potentially intending to domesticate the rebellious ethos of the recently conquered Saxons. The second example emerges from a criminally understudied text, the Homerocentones of the Empress Eudocia. She presents a defiant Christ, who levels a poetic condemnation of Judas and other evildoers and thus reflects facets of Eudocia’s own character and possibly aids in her own internal adjudication of her unjust banishment from the imperial court. Such trauma informed reading produces fresh understandings of how collective and individual traumatization can be navigated within the resources of a scriptural tradition and its varied contextualizations.