Rose and Rock

Obama, McCain, Palin, Biden

2008-10-19T23:03:00.004-04:00

There are two sides to every argument. This is especially true in politics, and nowhere more so than in the United States where two parties dominate and there are, all too often, only two answers prominently offered for every question. This often descends to the point that each side demonizes, or at least scorns, the other. Each side becomes a culture unto itself, where it can become easy for any observor, like you or me, to see and read only what he agrees with. And as a moderate, that makes me wonder: do I choose one candidate, or have I come to dislike another, simply because I'm only reading and seeing things from my angle and not doing enough to dialogue with the other side? Stepping into other people's shoes, seeing things through their eyes, is an ideal I constantly fall short of, and I deeply admire it when I see that rare quality in a politician or anyone else.

I've come around to support the Obama-Biden ticket with some positive feeling of admiration and cautious hope. True, as a lifelong Democrat (albeit a kind of Reagan Democrat) I would probably have voted for that ticket anyway. But for a few years now I've been mired in such cynicism about politics that I was in danger of stepping into the booth in November and supporting Democrats as a default position. I was probably going to vote simply to repudiate the Bush years and to give my vote to the party I regarded as safer -- but it was not going to be a vote based on great consideration, much less one founded on positive, healthy emotion. I was going to pull the lever as robotically as I could, I think.

That started to change when I heard Sarah Palin's convention speech. At the time I was not particularly moved by Obama, and nothing I knew made me feel that McCain would make a bad president. In fact I still think McCain has many positive qualities and could make a good president (but I no longer think we can afford a merely good president; our situation has changed). I had heard that his VP choice was Alaska's female governor, and I thought it was, at the very least, a politically shrewd choice.

But then I listened to the speech. I did not look at her, because I was trying to finish some work on my computer -- not a task that required much focus, but enough focus to keep me turned from the screen where she appeared. And what I heard was a certain hard unforgiving energy. Vibrant, to be sure. It certainly excited the crowd. But excited crowds typically make me nervous, regardless of party, so that was no reassurance.

What I heard was the voice of someone who felt that the way to inspire people was through sarcasm and bite. Not ideas, nor policies, but something colder, though it was certainly capable of generating a lot of heat.

Of course I knew that convention speeches are empty, and that they're about exciting the faithful. So I said, let's wait and see what she has to say in a different setting, where substance is expected and called for. But, emotionally I was already an Obama supporter -- if only because I'd seen that the Republican worldview was hardening, causing perhaps my own Democratic roots to awaken.

And needless to say, when Palin did speak in later interviews, I was dismayed. And here Palin was not sarcastic or biting; she was not her convention self. She was bewildered. But I think I know, now, the common thread between the convention and the interviews. Governor Palin seems to be, not stupid, but definitely incurious. Note, I don't use that word as a mere stand-in for "stupid." I think she's smart. She's just not curious about knowledge. She's not hungry for debate -- and I mean real, free exchange of ideas, not the debate she had with Biden where there were no follow-up questions and her knowledge was not strongly tested.

She hired friends and put them into office around her as Governor, probably because she shares with George Bush a certain averseness to debate. A lack of desire to be exposed to different points of view.

She's curious about power -- how to influence people and keep them that way. That's where her intelligence has been directed. Her interviews showed someone who didn't have that drive to study questions in the hope of producing answers to questions, or finding answers in cooperation with others. Rather she showed herself painfully driven to avoid questions.

And that's why she depends on other things when it comes to politics. She feels that political disputes -- perhaps even intellectual questions -- can be solved through sarcasm or force of personality rather than ideas, or broader inclusive emotions. There's an anti-intellectualism, a hositility to ideas and indifference to facts, that I find deeply unsettling.

I am constantly impressed at how much support she has. For every knock against her, there's a defense. Her detractors can't stand her, and as with any polarizing figure, I will always wonder whether any particular judgment I make about her is too strong because I'm hearing about it from within my side of the two-sided war, with all the prejudices corresponding to that side.

However, I do know that when I heard her speech, I had not been following politics very much (aside from the Jeremiah Wright controversy), and I was about as open as I could be to the wisdom of McCain's choice of VP. I hadn't read anything from detractors yet. It was, simply, Palin in her own voice and words that alienated me.

It was about as "pure" a moment as I've ever had, observing politics.

But now, for my support of Obama, I don't have such a distilled moment. I was already driven leftward by Palin's speech, when I started really looking at Obama, really listening to him.

I will say that he is, among other things, a true contrast with everything that I've said about Palin. (The same goes for Biden). Here we have someone who has obviously studied all the issues very carefully, and who has a fine mind suited to weighing ideas. As for the heart, there is nothing in his temperament which I find to be wedded hard to ideology -- contrary to the scare tactic that pegs hims as the most liberal of liberals. He may be consistently on the left because that is his political culture, but I hear nothing from him to suggest that he is more interested in ideology than in ideas or the truth.

More to that, a senator can vote, perhaps, along party lines, far easier than a president, who has many more forces and requirements acting upon him.

It is really the Republican campaign which I find to be barren of vision, and narrow-minded, and small of heart. Here, at this moment of all moments, they want to talk about Bill Ayers?

Until very recently I could not be inspired by Obama. I knew he inspired others greatly, but I didn't know why. I always was, and remain, worried about his thin political experience. And I remain troubled that he could dismiss so many people as "clinging" to religion because they're bitter. He may have said that to please his particular listeners that day, which would be troubling (though at least he would not be worse than nearly all politicians, who do the same); he may also believe such things himself, and that would be worse.

That said, I am moved by Obama's cool temperament under fire. It even feels Christian to me -- his ability, not exactly to turn the other cheek, but at least not to retaliate heatedly (sometimes not to retaliate at all) when in a debate. And yes, I know about the ads. I'm not calling him blameless; I think TV spots in general are a cancer on the truth that all campaigns indulge in, trying to get elected. When the election is over, let's see how Obama acts towards his enemies, domestic and abroad. I'm cautiously hopeful.

Finally, I have to say this, even though I know it's not original -- but I can't not say it. The whisper campaign against Obama, to the effect that he is a Muslim, is the kind of thing that I find most dispiriting about this country. It will not lead me into cynicism, but it could if I allowed it to do so. It is cynicism itself, combined with much worse. It's a blatant disregard for facts (in this case, the fact that Obama is Christian), on top of prejudice and fear. It has been said better by others -- not least Colin Powell yesterday -- so I'll leave it at that.

As I say, I'm hopeful. We have here a man who is not afraid of ideas and not retaliatory toward people. If we don't elect this man, we'll have to elect another such human being in his place.

Kevin Rosero

Reflections forced by a birthday

2008-08-12T22:46:00.005-04:00

A little soul-searching today, on my birthday. It's difficult in a few words to say what's wrong. I've never been an extrovert, but at least in years past I used to think of people more highly than I do today. And I used to find meaning in life more readily than I do now. I am not depressed. I exercise and eat right, and enjoy many delights of the mind and heart. In many ways I'm more self-confident than ever, and I certainly don't have the crippling self-doubt of my youth. But I regard people less, and love them less. I still feel their love when I'm in their presence, but I constrict within my own mind's activities (fruitful as they may be), essentially within my ego, when I'm not with people.

And when I say "with people", I mean interacting in person. That is still joyful. But what I have done for several years now is interact more and more with people on the internet. It used to be on this blog, then on Flickr and YouTube, and always on discussion/debating forums. The forums have changed, the topics have ranged from serious to trivial, but the experience is always the same. You don't see the best of people, dealing with them on the internet. You don't see them honestly, because the anonymity makes it easy for people to be false -- or merely superficial. You can talk for endless hours about a topic -- but that is all you're getting, a person's mental operations about a certain topic, and rarely anything deeper.

What's worse is that malice comes across perfectly well in cyberspace, while good qualities are hindered. Anonymity makes it easy to express hate, and impossible to deliver genuine love. Because you're anonymous, you can express hate and disguise it, put on a pretense, make it look like you're merely disagreeing rationally with irrationality; like you're fighting the good fight, when you're actually doing something quite different. At the same time, you're limited in expressing kindness and compassion, because you're physically absent. You can't even let someone know that you're listening actively, one of the best gifts a person can give another. You can post smiley faces, jokes, kind words, etc. But that is nothing like the true warmth of a friend in front of you. Yet, if you have hate or merely distrust in your heart, it's easy to put it in words. I've seen this all too often even in Christians, which is where it is most dismaying to me. It is not restricted to any group; this is how people behave on the internet.

A lot has been written about how anonymity makes it easy for people to be hostile jerks and so forth, but I find it goes deeper than this. Yes, there's a lot of malice out there; a lot of trolls; there's a recent New York Times article about it, "The Trolls Among Us." But the problem is more subtle than trolls. I've actually had less and less interaction with trolls as I've learned to recognize them; yet I still feel empty from online interactions. A large problem for me is that I put work into what I post online, made up of analysis, or feeling, but always subtle (or as subtle as I can make it). Most of the time it doesn't draw trolls; it draws nothing. What works best in online discussion groups, what gets most conversations going, is not subtlety. You provoke conversations by saying something stupid, outrageous, something just begging to be debunked. Then people like myself get our thinking caps on and start debunking. The internet is an excellent place to mount debunking, because all you need is words and analysis; and as I keep saying, that is all you can deliver on the internet. Anything deeper than that, you can't deliver online. Real feeling, well.... imagine, for example, poetry. You can post a poem on the internet, sure. But most people are browsing quickly and will not stop to read a poem, much less to interact with it the way they might by sitting down with a printed poem in a quiet place meant for undisturbed reflection and safe emotion. The Web is a place meant for cold disposal of information, or for raucous interaction among people posing with their masks on, ready to play or to fight, but hardly equipped to see or understand one another -- much less to peer into the truth of anything.

I have not been merely a victim. If that were even half the problem, it might have been easy to solve. I've been an actor in cyberspace. I do what is meant to be done there, and I've grown quite good at it. I generate information, cold analysis; I revel in debunking. But I hardly need to say that this is all the life of the mind and not the heart -- and not even a gloriously broad section of the mind's life, but simply the slice that loves to debunk. The side that wishes to destroy, not to create.

So I find that my own capacity to understand, to listen, yes, to love, is going severely under-exercised.

Not that this is anyone's fault but my own. I simply wish that I had not let this go on for so many years.

Inventing the Flat Earth

2008-07-04T20:54:00.004-04:00

I got a book for Christmas that I read recently, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historias, by Jeffrey Burton Russell. I have wanted to write a review for this blog, but I found one in the New York Times that will do for now. My interests have ranged so far away from maintaining a blog, but I don't want to let it go completely.

Enjoy the article.

The New York Times
April 25, 1992
Beliefs
By PETER STEINFELS

The belief in a flat Earth is a modern invention, a myth that reveals a good deal about the underlying dogma of an age claiming to be scientific.

Only in the last century did the idea spread that when Christopher Columbus set sail he was challenging a belief, entrenched in theology and enforced by the church, that the world was flat. That belief, the story goes, was questioned only by a rebellious or scientifically advanced minority.

None of the documents from Columbus's day or the early accounts of his labors suggest that there was any debate about the roundness of the Earth. Yet by the end of the 19th century, the drama of Columbus versus the flat-Earth believers had become a staple of textbooks.

Even today, although many standard histories have corrected the error, the idea that Christiandom had suppressed or forgotten the Greek philosophers' discovery of a spherical world remains a fixture in educated minds and regularly re-emerges in the works of eminent scholars.

For example, a section in "The Discoverers," a popular book (Random House, 1983) by Daniel J. Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, says that "Christian faith and dogma" had inflicted on Europe at least 1,000 years of "amnesia" about the world's shape.

How did such a palpable error arise, and why did it persist? Jeffrey Burton Russell, a professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has addressed this puzzle in a small gem of scholarship written for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage.

The book, "Inventing the Flat Earth" (Praeger, 1991), is more than an investigation into a quirk of intellectual history. It effectively reverses an old question. Instead of asking why medieval thinkers so dogmatically insisted that the Earth was flat, it says we must ask why modern thinkers, in the face of so much contrary evidence, dogmatically insisted on a flat-Earth consensus that never existed.

Professor Russell makes clear that whatever the conceptions of the Earth's shape found in Genesis and the other books of the Bible, not only in antiquity but throughout the first 15 centuries of Christianity, "nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the Earth spherical."

The scholars who offered that opinion included Augustine, Venerable Bede and Thomas Aquinas. A few figures, like the influential Isidore of Seville, were ambiguous on the matter, and many, of course, were not interested in geographical issues. The uneducated may have entertained all sorts of vague beliefs, but that was true for the classical era as well.

Only five Christian writers, according to Professor Russell's scorecard, seem to have been out-and-out believers in a flat Earth. One was Lactantius, a third-century convert to Christianity who was posthumously condemned as a heretic, although his Latin style brought him renewed attention during the Renaissance. Another was Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Greek writer whose work was reviled in his own time, ignored for most of the Middle Ages and not even translated into Latin until 1706. These two eccentrics would become the chief exhibits for the flat-Earth mythology of the 19th century.

Oddly enough, a major source of that mythology was the genial American creator of Rip van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. In 1828, Washington Irving published a novelistic biography of Columbus featuring a fictitious confrontation between the brave explorer and Inquisition-ridden clerics and professors from the University of Salamanca. They pelted Columbus with quotations from the Bible and church fathers to prove that the Earth was flat. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his biography of Columbus, calls the episode "pure moonshine."

Irving the storyteller had his academic counterpart in the French historian Antoine-Jean Letronne. Letronne's influential 1834 study, "On the Cosmographical Opinions of the Church Fathers," was shaped by anti-clericalism just as Irving's imagination was colored by Anglo-American anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling. Letronne acknowledged evidence that appeared to contradict his thesis but promptly buried it as untypical. Church fathers and medieval Christians simply must have been hide-bound by prejudice and a literal reading of the Bible.

The seeds of this premise had been planted in the 16th-century controversies over Copernicus's theory putting the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the planetary system. But Copernicus's opponents nonetheless thought the Earth was ball-shaped, and for two centuries afterward the defenders of Copernicus and Galileo, as well as the many fierce critics of religion, hardly ever added belief in a flat Earth to the accusations they made against church authorities.

The heyday of the flat-Earth mythology, in fact, did not arrive until the half-century of 1870 to 1920. The reason had nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the ideological atmosphere created by the struggles over evolution. That atmosphere led authors like John W. Draper ("The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science," 1874) and Andrew Dickson White ("A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom," 1896) to recast all the past in terms of the contemporary antagonism between biblical literalism and science.

Repeatedly, these authors, like Letronne before them, treated Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes as representative while minimizing or misrepresenting all the thinkers who affirmed a spherical Earth. "The curious result," Professor Russell writes, is that these modern writers "ended up by doing what they accused the church fathers of, namely, creating a body of false knowledge by consulting one another instead of the evidence."

Myths frequently operate to confirm the myth-makers' claims of superiority, to lend legitimacy to their ouster of other groups from political or cultural power. The flat-Earth mythology, it turns out, is not a case of medieval certainty about the literal truth of the Bible. It arose as an expression of modernity's faith in scientific progress. It dramatized the claim that the intelligence of a religious past could be dismissed in the name of a scientific present.

O night divine

2007-12-18T03:31:00.000-05:00

Oh holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angels' voices!
Oh night divine, Oh night when Christ was born;
Oh night divine, Oh night, Oh night Divine.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
Here come the wise men from Orient land.
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
In all our trials born to be our friend.

He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King, Behold your King.

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

A YouTube (no, U2) Christmas

2006-12-25T16:28:00.000-05:00

This has been a deeply contented Christmas for me, but it is not easy -- nor my inclination -- to get such personal things across in public writing.

But I did want to offer something. For those who like U2, rock n' roll, Christmas, or any combination thereof, check out this video of "Where the Streets Have No Name" at YouTube.

Merry Christmas.

What Kind of Reader Are You?

2006-12-15T14:32:00.000-05:00

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

While I'm not surprised at getting this result, since it's the kind of thing that people have called me all my life, I can only say: I'M NOT WORTHY.

I read too slowly, and I am not nearly as dedicated as I should be.

And here's one thing that I've just realized, that I really rue: the internet. I used to read BOOKS, those collections of paper between a front cover and a back cover. But I find myself in the last few years sucked in, on a daily basis, by online articles: news; debates; and blogs and articles by scholars instead of the books these fine men and women have written.

As a result, despite reading fine short pieces on blogs and elsewhere, my mind is filled with a lot of garbage that never used to clog it.

The same goes for my soul.

I am currently trying to read a book about World War II. More anon.

Check out The Busybody's brief post on this matter.

Thoughts for Thanksgiving

2006-11-22T09:49:00.000-05:00

I say, then, that God is not born, not made, an ever-abiding nature without beginning and without end, immortal, perfect, and incomprehensible. Now when I say that he is "perfect," this means that there is not in him any defect, and he is not in need of anything but all things are in need of him. And when I say that he is "without beginning," this means that everything which has beginning has also an end, and that which has an end may be brought to an end. He has no name, for everything which has a name is kindred to things created. Form he has none, nor yet any union of members; for whatsoever possesses these is kindred to things fashioned. He is neither male nor female. The heavens do not limit him, but the heavens and all things, visible and invisible, receive their bounds from him. Adversary he has none, for there exists not any stronger than he. Wrath and indignation he possesses not, for there is nothing which is able to stand against him. Ignorance and forgetfulness are not in his nature, for he is altogether wisdom and understanding; and in Him stands fast all that exists. He requires not sacrifice and libation, nor even one of things visible; He requires not aught from any, but all living creatures stand in need of him.

- Apology of Aristides, c. 124 A.D.

Origen and Josephus, Part 5

2006-11-20T01:37:00.000-05:00

Can Origen tell us anything about the famous reference to Christ in Ant. 18.3.3 §63-64, the Testimonium Flavianum? I think so, though what follows is surely indirect evidence. First, the passage in question:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

Origen says that Josephus did not believe “in Jesus as the Messiah,” which sounds as if Josephus has said enough to rule out the possibility. Origen says that Josephus admitted the link between the war and the righteousness of James “against his will,” which again suggests that Josephus has made clear that his will was non-Christian. Often it’s argued that Origen knew this about Josephus simply by reading the phrase, “Jesus who was called Christ.” But there is nothing derogatory about the phrase; and if Matthew, Justin and Origen himself could be Christians and refer to Jesus as one who is called Christ, then so could Josephus. The later traditions about Josephus’s admiration for James could surely have been taken to the next step, wherein Josephus was regarded as having a similar or better attitude toward one who was greater than James. Origen wants to take that next step, but why did not he or his predecessors do so? Perhaps it was simply common knowledge that Josephus was a Jewish historian who had never converted. But that did not ultimately prevent traditions about Josephus to proceed onward to his conversion.

Origen insists that Josephus “ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet.” He seems to presuppose that Josephus knew about the death. Now this could merely indicate Origen’s confidence that Josephus, at least as a Jewish historian, and particularly as one who knows of a Jesus “called Christ,” must have known about his execution. That is perfectly possible, but again we return to the probability that Origen did not have the full texts of Josephus on hand. From where, then, would he attain his confidence that Josephus could have written that Jesus was executed by the Jewish people, just as James was? If Origen observed that Josephus had merely named Christ in connection to James, why does Origen seem confident that Josephus knew more?

I suggest that Origen did witness Josephus mentioning the execution of Christ in an original form of the Testimonium, one that reached him second-hand. The Testimonium would have provided Origen with Josephus’ only thoughts on Christ – thoughts which made it clear that Josephus was not a Christian but which suggested to Origen that Josephus could be criticized for not even calling Christ a “prophet” or attributing the war to the “conspiracy” against him. The Testimonium’s phrase “wise man” might well have prompted Origen’s desire to see the acclamation of “prophet”; and the phrase, “at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us”, could evoke the Gospel imagery of a conspiracy.

In any case, whatever form of the Testimonium that Origen knew could not yet contain Christian-sounding phrases, because those would not have allowed Origen any certainty that Josephus did not accept Christ. Such phrases must have been inserted in copies unknown to Origen or postdating him, and these became the seeds of still later traditions about Josephus becoming a Christian. Probably Origen did find the phrase “called Christ” or its equivalent, given the statement that the tribe of Christians is named after the man. (Later, traditions about Josephus developed to the point that he became a Christian, as attested in the Testimonium’s phrase, “He was the Christ.”) Whatever he did find did not affirm Christ even as a prophet, so Origen chose not to quote it in his refutation of Celsus.

To be sure, this is all indirect evidence. When an author cites another, we have direct evidence of what the other says. When an author speaks about what another has not said, we have only indirect evidence that something deemed to be insufficient was said; it may be that nothing was said.

Due to all the arguments here offered, however, I am confident that such was not the case with Josephus and Jesus.

Origen and Josephus, Part 4

2006-11-17T12:56:00.001-05:00

Having found that Origen uses a phrase exactly like one in Antiquities 20, it is natural to ask if someone took his phrase and put it there. That indeed is one possible trajectory, and comparing it with other possible ones is our next task.

There are three basic scenarios.

1. An interpolation into Ant. 20 takes place after Origen.

An early interpolation is placed into one of Josephus’ works (e.g., Wars of the Jews). This interpolation uses convincingly non-Christian language, including a phrase about Christ that resembles some references [by non-Christian characters] to Christ in the NT, and a way of identifying James (without an honorific) that is unattested in Christian literature. This interpolation contains or gives rise to a tradition about Josephus’ admiration for James the Just. For some reason the interpolation, which does not appear in surviving manuscripts, is not preserved. But Origen picks up the phrases of the interpolation and attests to the tradition about Josephus, probably doing so second-hand. A new interpolation is then made into Ant. 20, prompted by Origen’s witness and based on his or the original interpolator’s phrasing. The interpolator does not try to restore, from Origen’s words, the putative Josephan discourse about James and the war; he chooses instead to interpolate a few words into an already standing sentence in Ant. 20, one which tells of a man who shares with James the Just a death by stoning, a commonly occurring first name, and possibly a brother bearing another such first name (depending on what is proposed for Josephus’ original composition). The interpolator is not dissuaded by any differences between the James in Ant. 20 and the Christian leader about whom many traditions have probably accrued (e.g., in Hegesippus). He simply believes that Josephus wrote in Ant. 20 about James the Just without recognizing him or knowing that his brother was actually Jesus Christ (against Origen’s testimony that Josephus knew who James the Just was). Or he intends to deceive others into accepting this bare reference as authentic and valuable – even though it does little to corroborate Origen’s story or his insistence that Jesus should have been Josephus’ main subject when searching for what caused the war. This interpolation is accepted widely and survives, eventually migrating into all the manuscripts.

2) An interpolation into Ant. 20 takes place before Origen.

Soon after the publication of Antiquities, a Christian scribe chooses to interpolate a few words into an already standing sentence in Ant. 20, one which tells of a man who shares with James the Just a death by stoning, a commonly occurring first name, and possibly a brother bearing another such first name (depending on what is proposed for Josephus’ original composition). The interpolator is not dissuaded by any differences between the James in Ant. 20 and the Christian leader for whom he probably has other traditions (if he did not himself invent the man). He simply believes that Josephus wrote in Ant. 20 about James the Just without recognizing him or knowing that his brother was actually Jesus Christ. Or he intends to deceive others into accepting this reference as authentic. He chooses language that will look like the authentic writing of a non-Christian: a phrase about Christ that closely resembles the speech of some non-Christians in the recently appearing Gospel of Matthew; and a way of identifying James (without an honorific) that is unattested in Christian literature. This interpolation is accepted widely, eventually migrating into all the manuscripts. It gives birth to Christian traditions about Josephus’ admiration for James the Just. Origen attests to these traditions and reproduces the phrases of the interpolation, probably doing so second-hand.

3) No interpolation takes place.

Josephus writes in Antiquities 20 about James and a certain Jesus “who was called” Christ. His short reference gives birth to Christian traditions about Josephus’ admiration for James the Just. Origen attests to these traditions and reproduces the phrases of the interpolation, probably doing so second-hand.

It should be noted that the first two options are not yet complete, because making them so would take us far afield from the topic at hand – Origen’s bearing on the Josephus question. But we can at least point to what is missing – and there are a few things, other than the lengthier explanations that would be needed for the various implausible items I’ve highlighted in each option.

Option #1 must also make a plausible case for the first of its two interpolations. This involves finding a good place for it in Josephus’ works, proposing the interpolator’s intention, describing how he changed the text, and giving some explanation for how and why all the subsequent manuscripts returned to the text as we see it today, presumably without any of the changes leaving a trace.

If option #1 is written without that prior interpolation, the scenario grows simpler in one sense, but another problem returns. The prior interpolation offered a simple way to explain the existence of Origen’s tradition about Josephus as well as each one of its details; without the interpolation we would need another solution (see Part 1).

We would also lose a simple explanation for Origen’s un-Christian way of identifying James. Origen’s accounts seem to credit Josephus with referring to James both as “brother of Jesus who was called Christ” and “the Just.” That is easily explained if Origen got the first phrase from an authentic or authentic-sounding passage in Josephus, and got the second one from a Christian tradition that interpreted Josephus as admiring James for being a just man. But if Origen had neither Ant. 20 nor a prior interpolation, then it becomes difficult to explain why he does not simply credit Josephus with using “James the Just” and leave it at that, instead of also invoking a phrase that would not express Josephus’ admiration and that would certainly not express Origen’s own attitude toward James. Indeed as Peter Kirby notes in his essay, “Testimonium Flavianum”, we lack another instance in ancient literature where an admiring Christian, when referring to James not in passing but as his subject, identifies James as "brother of Jesus."

Finally, the first two scenarios must describe how the interpolator interacted with the original text of Ant. 20 – that is, how he regarded or disregarded the exact words that he found, and how plausibly he was able to add and delete words. This can be particularly complicated for Ant. 20, where we find a larger non-Christian story that is integral to Josephus’ narrative; it cannot easily be lifted wholesale out of the book as a Christian forgery. At best we are looking at an editing of an already standing sentence. Once that editing process is laid out, we would need a plausible explanation for how all of the changed or deleted elements were lost in the manuscript record.

What all three options are missing as I’ve written them out is a full defense of a proposed original text. The first two options do not even propose a particular original, and would need something like, “brother of Jesus, son of Damneus.” It goes without saying that the original needs to be explained as plausibly Josephan. In the case of the Damneus proposal it would be good to have a prior instance where Josephus refers to two brothers in like manner. A plausible original might be constructed, but one cannot be assumed.

Option #3 proposes that the current text is the original, and we have spent some time already looking at the plausibility of the phrase, “Jesus who was called Christ” (see Part 3). We found the construction to be plausibly Christian or Josephan, and a case for interpolation needs some probability that the construction cannot be Josephan.

Three other issues tend to be raised when this text is disputed as the original:

1. Would Josephus identify a man by his brother?

2. Would he place the brother’s name first?

3. Would he mention Jesus and his moniker without some previous fuller introduction?

Let’s turn briefly to a few verses from Josephus’ work.

Kirby cites Wars of the Jews 2.12.8 §247, where Josephus writes, “After this Caesar sent Felix, the brother of Pallas, to be procurator of Galilee.” Josephus refers to Felix as someone’s brother (he does so again in Ant. 20.7.1 §137), and never refers to Felix in the more typical convention as someone’s son. Felix’s brother Pallas is not mentioned before or after in the work, and Josephus does not even tell us that Pallas is “called” anything.

Josephus refers 25 times in Whiston’s translation of Antiquities to a man as “brother of” someone else. A case possibly similar to Jesus and James is in Ant. 18.9.1 §314, where Josephus introduces two brothers who were without a father; he refers shortly afterwards to one of them as “Anileus, the brother of Asineus” (Ant. 18.9.5 §342). But the most conspicuous example is Aaron, “the brother of Moses” (e.g., Ant. 20.10.1 §225), who is never known anywhere in Antiquities by a family relation other than his brother.

Indeed the James that Paul meets in Galatians 1:19 is one such man who lived in Josephus’ own time. He was known within his circle and probably to the public, not as the son of a named father, but as the brother of the man who began the sect in which he, James, was a leader.

As for placing the family relation first, Josephus does so commonly.Bernard Muller provides the following examples:

Wars 2.21.1 §585
“a man of Gischala, the son of Levi, whose name was John”

Wars 6.8.3 §387
“one of the priests, the son of Thebuthus, whose name was Jesus”

Ant. 5.8.1 §233
“but he had also one that was spurious, by his concubine Drumah, whose name was Abimelech”

Ant. 10.5.2 §82
“and delivered the kingdom to a brother of his, by the father’s side, whose name was Eliakim”

Ant. 11.5.1 §121
“Now about this time a son of Jeshua, whose name was Joacim, was the high priest”

What we find in Antiquities 20 is characteristic of Josephus. The reader is left to decide which of the three trajectories is best.

Part 5 will be devoted to the Testimonium Flavianum.

Origen and Josephus, Part 3

2006-11-15T16:39:00.000-05:00

Each of the three times that Origen refers to what Josephus wrote about James, he uses the phrase adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou. This is an exact match with the current text of Ant. 20 – rendered in William Whiston’s translation, quoted in Part 1 of this series, as “brother of Jesus who was called Christ”. More striking still is that Origen uses it each time when referring to what Josephus actually said. When offering what Josephus should have said, Origen’s language about Christ consists of these phrases: “Christ who was a prophet,” “not accepting Jesus as Christ,” and “conspiracy against Jesus.” When offering his own opinion about whose death caused the war, Origen refers to “Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

The situation with James is similar. Origen elsewhere identifies him by other means and in fact tends to reproduce whatever term is used by the writer he is referring to – for example by referring to Paul’s words about James and reproducing Paul’s phrase, “the brother of the Lord.” Origen does seem to report twice that Josephus called James “the Just”, which of course is not in Antiquities and may indicate what was in the developed tradition that served as Origen’s source. That scenario makes some sense, because a tradition that saw Josephus as ascribing great righteousness to James would naturally imagine him as employing the great address, James the Just.

It has been argued that Iesou tou legomenou Christou (“Jesus who was called Christ”) could be a Christian phrase because, though absent from the writings of the church fathers preceding Origen, it is found in the New Testament. The exact form of the phrase that Josephus and Origen use is not in the New Testament, but we do find slightly different forms. In Matthew 1:16, Iesou ho legomenos Christos (RSV translation, “Jesus the one called the Christ”) culminates the author’s famous genealogy, and in John 4:25 it appears without the name of Jesus, as an abstract reference to the Messiah, on the lips of the Samaritan woman during her interview with Christ. In Matthew 27:17 and 27:22, Pilate twice uses another form, Iesou ton legomenon Christon (in the RSV, “Jesus who is called Christ”). I am working without a knowledge of Greek, but a simple search of the Greek New Testament for legomenos, legomenon and legomenou turns up 22 references to names like Jesus Christ, Simon Peter, Thomas Didymus, Jesus Justus, etc., and place names like Golgotha. The same search in the longer Antiquities turns up 33 references, also including both personal and place names.

It is, in short, a common way of talking about people, and not just for a historian. Origen writes elsewhere (see Against Celsus 1.66 and 4.28) about the fact that Jesus is called “the Christ”; and Justin Martyr (First Apology, chapter 30) refers to Jesus as one whom Christians “call Christ.” This indicates that Christians, no less than a Jewish historian, could speak in an abstract tone about what Jesus was called.

However, when Origen refers to Josephus, he uses the exact words from Ant. 20. And he uses the same phrase in two separate works written years apart, so something in his mind always connects Josephus with the phrase. We have, in short, a number of indications that Origen is quoting something – either independent Christian writing, a Christian interpolation into the full work, or the original passage in the full work. As I’ve argued, it’s unlikely that he had the full work on hand, so he was probably quoting one or more independent Christian writings containing developed traditions about Josephus and the war.

How well, then, does Origen serve as a witness to the text of Ant. 20? Does the second-hand nature of his witness mean that he is possibly misrepresenting the text as it stood in his time? That is possible, but I'll turn in Part 4 to the possible trajectories for interpolations and an authentic text.

Origen and Josephus, Part 2

2006-11-11T15:57:00.000-05:00

When we ask what Origen can tell us about Josephus, an important issue is whether Origen provides actual citations, or some other witness to the text of Josephus.

It’s an open question whether Origen actually had a copy of Antiquities. He tells us that it was composed of twenty books and that the 18^th book contained a passage about John the Baptist (Ant. 18.5.2). But he does not purport to quote that passage and his summary does not contain much detail; in fact what he does say of it seems to contradict the passage as it currently stands. He refers twice to the “two books on the Antiquities of the Jews”, but the content that he refers to is actually found in another work by Josephus, the two-volume Against Apion (see Against Celsus 1.16 and 4.11). And he imputes to Josephus a view about the destruction of Jerusalem that does not appear in Antiquities. The passage about James contains nothing, of course, about the war, but many other passages in Antiquities do contain the Jewish historian's view about what caused that calamity (see e.g., Antiquities 20.8.5).

What is going on here? Could Origen have had a copy of Antiquities and still imputed that view to Josephus? What kind of reason would he have? Some scholars have suggested that Origen confused the account of James’ death in Josephus, which mentions a small punishment, with that of the second-century church historian Hegesippus, who wrote around the year 170 that Jerusalem’s destruction followed “immediately” upon the death of James. But that seems unlikely to me if Origen was familiar with the latter text or simply knew that it, or other Christian texts, contained the tradition about the war as punishment. Likewise, if Origen had a copy of Antiquities, he would have been even less likely to attribute the Christian traditions to Josephus, a Jewish historian.

Some have argued that Origen knew of or possessed a copy of one of Josephus’ works in which said views about James and the war had been inserted. But I doubt that new views were added to copies of Josephus’ works, partly because the copies we have show no sign of such an insertion, and chiefly because I do not see why many Christians at this time period would have bothered copying an immense work that was available through other means; this was not yet the time when all of Europe’s manuscripts were in Jewish or Christian hands and monks copied them.

I don’t know how many scrolls a work like Antiquities would have filled, or how long it would have taken anyone to transcribe or research it. Christians coming across references to Christian figures in large works would be less likely, I think, to copy the works whole than to copy the references and/or hand out their contents from memory.

Even today on Google you can find innumerable instances of the Christian references in Josephus’ works sooner than you will find the works in their entirety, though of course the latter is nonetheless very easy due to modern technology. That would not have been true in antiquity.

It would be the rare Christian who was interested enough in the entirety of Josephus’ works, and wealthy enough, to own full copies. Origen does not appear interested – in all his works he mentions Josephus only those few times already mentioned.

I think it’s likelier that Christians copied both Ant. 20 and, in their own manuscripts, imputed Christian views to Josephus; the Christian community must have talked and written about what non-Christians were saying just as interestedly as it does today. Origen, rather than working entirely from memory when reporting Josephus, probably had Christian manuscripts in front of him in which he found both references to Antiquities 20 and original commentary.

Origen might or might not have been able to confirm that such views were absent from Josephus’ known works. Perhaps he simply believed what the Christian writings implied or stated, namely that Josephus at some point in his life, and not necessarily in the works still known to Origen over a century later, had written such things. Origen does not, after all, state that anyone could look up Josephus’ views on James and the war, though he encourages his readers to look up what Josephus does say in Against Apion.

A similar process seems to have occurred in the next century, when Eusebius reported that Josephus attributed the fall of Jerusalem to the execution of James. Eusebius purports to quote Josephus, but against his usual practice he does not name the work or chapter:

Josephus at any rate did not hesitate to testify this also through his writings, in which he says: But these things happened to the Jews as vengeance for James the just, who was the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. For the Jews killed him even though he was a most just man. (Eusebius, History of the Church 2.23.20)

This is a very close match with Origen’s words in Against Celsus 1.47, quoted in Part 1 of this blog series. It seems that Eusebius is using Origen as a source. Eusebius then reproduces the Ant. 20 passage directly, naming the correct work and chapter; in this way, he preserved both Josephus and what Origen said about him. This would be in keeping with a common human tendency to harmonize and preserve (inoffensive) traditions rather than choose exclusively among them. And he, like the Christians of the second century (as I argue), copied Ant. 20 and transmitted in his own manuscripts the other traditions about Josephus.

Whatever Origen is referring to, he probably had it in front of him, if only for the general reason that writings about James and Jesus would not have escaped being passed around the Christian community. But there is a more specific indication that he is quoting rather than paraphrasing from memory, and we'll get to that in Part 3.

Origen and Josephus, Part 1

2006-11-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

This post is the first of a series on Origen and Josephus. The question I'm pursuing is, what can Origen tell us about the famous references to Jesus and his brother James, a.k.a., James the Just, in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews?

Here is the latter of the two references, followed by Origen's own three references to what Josephus had to say about James and Jesus.

Antiquities 20.9.1 §200-203
But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed; when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity [to exercise his authority]. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ [adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou], whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17
And this James is the one whom Paul says he saw in the epistle to the Galatians, saying: But I did not see any other of the apostles except James the brother of the Lord. And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the ‘Antiquities of the Jews’ in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ [adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou]. And the wonderful thing is that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.

Origen, Against Celsus 1.47
For in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer [Josephus], although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless-being, although against his will, not far from the truth-that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus called Christ [adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou],--the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice. Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood, or of their being brought up together, as because of his virtue and doctrine. If, then, he says that it was on account of James that the desolation of Jerusalem was made to overtake the Jews, how should it not be more in accordance with reason to say that it happened on account (of the death) of Jesus Christ, of whose divinity so many Churches are witnesses, composed of those who have been convened from a flood of sins, and who have joined themselves to the Creator, and who refer all their actions to His good pleasure.

Origen, Against Celsus 2.13
But at that time there were no armies around Jerusalem, encompassing and enclosing and besieging it; for the siege began in the reign of Nero, and lasted till the government of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ [adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou], but in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

*************************

The simplest inference from Origen’s work is that by his time, the present reference to James and Jesus in Antiquities 20 was in existence and had prompted some Christian(s) to impute to Josephus the view that the war with Rome was punishment for the execution of James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” The premise here is that this view is much likelier to have been imputed to Josephus if his works mentioned this James than if his works did not mention him at all.

It’s possible that Antiquities 20 in Origen’s time contained no mention of this James, and that Christians on their own had developed traditions about how Josephus mentioned and praised James – to the extent of having Josephus attribute the destruction of Jerusalem to his execution. But a far better explanation for such traditions is that they were built upon certain elements in the current account, where Josephus recounts how the execution of Christ’s brother was punished, in a small way and by other human beings; and where Josephus states that some fair-minded Jews regarded the execution as unjust and sought a way to rectify the wrong. These “seeds” could build eventually into the tradition found in Origen, namely that Josephus witnessed to a severe punishment from God and to the fact that the Jews themselves knew the punishment to be just.

Such an account as exists today in Antiquities 20 must have gladdened Christians, some of whom would have felt that Josephus was a possible secret friend (or eventual convert) in a hostile world. Early Christians made such claims about Joseph of Arimathea, Pontius Pilate, Barabbas, etc.

We can see the tradition building in this manner:

JOSEPHUS (Ant. 20)	ORIGEN
James is stoned by Jerusalem’s high priest	James is executed by the Jews of Palestine
Caesar’s representative threatens punishment, which is delivered by the king	God delivers (his own) punishment
Some good citizens protest the execution	Jews knew their punishment was just
James is “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ”	James is “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” and also “James the Just”
(Josephus writes all this)	All this is said to be found in Josephus

If Christians made up the traditions about Josephus without the current passage, proposed reconstructions of what Josephus originally wrote have little power to explain the later traditions. For instance, it’s doubtful that an original Josephan reference to “the brother of Jesus, son of Damneus” (this Jesus being the high priest who succeeds Ananus in the above-quoted passage) could have prompted a full-fledged belief that Josephus had extolled James the brother of Jesus. It seems far more likely that the later Christian traditions about Josephus’ attitude toward James started building whenever there appeared a Josephan reference to the Christian James.

[The following section added November 17]:

According to Eusebius of Caesarea (see History of the Church 2:23:4-18, composed circa 320), the Church historian Hegesippus, writing around the year 170, described the siege of Jerusalem as following “immediately” upon the death of James the Just. Now, Hegesippus and Josephus have similar names in Greek, and it was not unknown for the two to be confused.

This presents the possibility that second-century Christians, when recalling who had written about James and the war, could have confused the two names. Christian traditions attested in Hegesippus – the stoning of James, his great reputation for righteousness, and God’s punishment – could be attributed in casual conversation to the wrong name. Written documents making the mistake could build, possibly, into a concrete tradition, one that would be unverifiable by Origen’s time. Variously, it could simply be Origen who made the mistake.

But there are a several problems with this scenario. For one, it must have seemed prima facie unlikely to any Christian that a Jewish historian would regard God as punishing the Jewish people for the death of a Christian. Second, Origen presents Josephus as saying that the Jews themselves regarded the death of James as the cause of their sufferings, and there is very little along those lines in Hegesippus, who mentions only a single Jew protesting the execution of James ineffectively. Third, the line in Hegesippus about the siege of Jerusalem is a bare statement of fact barely implying the idea of punishment, yet Origen is certain that the historian has “searched” for the causes of the war and specifically named James as the cause. Fourth, Origen says that Josephus fails to name Jesus’ death as the cause of the war, which suggests an interaction, and specific disappointment, with a non-Christian text. To boot, Origen presents Josephus as not accepting Jesus to be the Christ – an impression that no reader could have gotten from the account in Hegesippus. And each time that Origen refers to Josephus’ account of James he uses a specific phrase not found in Hegesippus, “Jesus who was called Christ.”

The account in Ant. 20 contains a more robust idea of punishment, a presentation of influential Jews recognizing a wicked act, and the comparatively non-committal statement about Jesus who was “called” Christ. Now this does not mean that Origen’s accounts cannot be explained merely through the account in Hegesippus, the confusion of names, and the possibility that Origen composed the phrase about Christ himself when presenting the beliefs of a known non-Christian. But the details in Origen’s reports can be explained more plausibly and completely if it is postulated that he knew the account in Ant. 20 as it currently stands.

One lingering mystery for me is why Origen regarded a Jewish historian as accepting that God had punished the Jews for the death of a Christian. As a scholar and the head of a school in a city renowned for learning, he would not have been likely to conflate a major Christian historian with a major Jewish one on the basis of a similarity in names. And his accounts of James’ death suggest that he had read the account in Hegesippus, so he was likely to know who Hegesippus was and what he had said.

I suggest that the tradition about Josephus’ admiration for James did impute to him the belief about the war when a historian with a similar-sounding name wrote that the siege of Jerusalem had followed the execution of James. The newly developed tradition reached Origen several decades later, having become unverifiable. By then it surely must have extended to written forms, which could have been read as if they were paraphrases or quotes of Josephus, prompting Origen to surmise that Josephus must have written such things over a century earlier in a work that was no longer available. Origen does not, after all, state that anyone could look up Josephus’ views on James and the war, though he twice encourages his readers to look up what Josephus says about the antiquity of the Jewish people (see Against Celsus 1.16 and 4.11).

A similar process seems to have occurred in the next century, when Eusebius reported that Josephus attributed the fall of Jerusalem to the execution of James. Eusebius purports to quote Josephus, but against his usual practice he does not name the work or chapter:

Eusebius, History of the Church 2.23.20
Josephus at any rate did not hesitate to testify this also through his writings, in which he says: But these things happened to the Jews as vengeance for James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. For the Jews killed him even though he was a most just man.

This is a very close match with Origen’s words in one of the three passages above, Against Celsus 1.47, which suggests that Eusebius is using Origen as a source. Eusebius then reproduces the Ant. 20 passage directly, naming the correct work and chapter. He acted, then, just as I argue Origen and his predecessors to have done: he copied what was available to him and transmitted other traditions without citing a source.

Part 2 will deal with the question of whether Origen had a copy of Josephus on hand.

God's Country?

2006-10-17T19:04:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading an essay called "God's Country", in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, by Walter Russel Mead. The full essay can be read for free, and is well worth the time. Mr. Mead has laid out a historical overview of American Protestantism, dividing it into fundamentalist, evangelical, and liberal camps, and he offers some observations on the directions that the United States is now taking.

He paints in broad strokes, and I will summarize his argument in even broader ones. In his view, it was Darwinism above all that basically divided early American Protestantism into three types. Fundamentalista and evangelicals place great importance on Biblical literalism and Christian doctrine than do liberals, for whom Christian ethics form the core of their faith. But while fundamentalists and evangelicals both read the Bible literally, the former are the main intellectual driving force behind creationism.

Fundamentalists are basically pessimistic about the capacity for human beings to create a better world while evangelicals and liberals share the basic American trait of optimism about that or any other goal. In contrast to the fundamentalist tendency to withdraw from the world into a pure Christianity, evangelical and liberal Protestants both believe in engaging the non-Christian world; both of the latter groups believe in missionary work in the sense of service, but liberals are less at ease with proseletyzing, which is of utmost importance to evangelicals.

Mr. Mead notes that evangelicals have grown the most as a percentage of the American population, while liberal Protestants have decreased significantly. This represents a marked change from the middle and late decades of the 20th century, when liberal Protestants may be said to have been in the ascendancy among our public officials and to have promoted values that are often defined as secular humanist as much as Christian.

I am much encouraged by any effort to make distinctions among Christians, since the general impression many people in the world have is that the United States is simply becoming fundamentalist, or simply becoming Christian, or merely theocratic. Properly speaking, the country seems to be taking a turn toward its evangelical roots, which is not the bad news that many think it is. I'm glad that Mr. Mead has described the concern of evangelicals with humanitarian and human rights issues, foremost among them the abolition of slavery, but also now, under the Bush administration, such things as increased aid to Africa to combat AIDS and to end Sudan's wars; human trafficking and the sexual enslavement of women and children has also come to the fore of their efforts.

In short, evangelicals belong no less than liberals in the ethical tradition that produced abolitionism and American optimism about moral progress in the world. The same might be said about the civil rights movement, which was in many ways inspired by both liberal Protestants like Reinhold Neibuhr (a major influence on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and by evangelical faith among African-Americans.

The country is, then, not turning into a monster by becoming more "Christian," nor is it even turning away from the things of which it can be proudest. What is happening to America, at least as far as its Christianity, is not something radically new.

I do think that what is happening in a more general sense is worrisome. I mean that the United States is an empire and is behaving ever more like one. The political power that it wields in the world is what worries me, when it is wielded in such ways as to produce, for instance, the invasion of Iraq.

Of course, political power and religion do not exist separately, and there is every reason to question the relationship between the two. Religious faith, by giving us a sense that God is blessing the country and its actions, can produce over-confidence and diminish self-criticism and humility. But then, again, so can secular humanism and liberal Christian ethics. If Iraq is the great overconfident act of America during this new time when evangelical Christianity has been in the ascendent, certainly Vietnam is the counterpart for that time when American presidents were liberal Protestants who believed in moral progress.

For me it seems rather that Christian precepts, whether derived literally or liberally from the Bible and other Christian traditions, must constantly inform the country and guide it against error.

One specific worry I do have comes from something described in Mr. Mead's article: the evangelical belief that the modern state of Israel is Biblically prophesied. Mr. Mead notes that in the Bible, God promises to bless Abraham's descendants and to bless those who bless them; therefore, many evangelicals believe that God will literally bless the United States if the country blesses Israel.

I am Roman Catholic, and I have always been most comfortable, by far, with liberal Protestantism, which may be the reason that I am more comfortable with the kind of support-and-criticism that the United States once gave to Israel under administrations like Truman, JFK's, and even one so recent as the elder Bush's, rather than with the pure support that seems to exist now. And I am troubled by what Mr. Mead points out, that evangelicals are unmoved by criticism of Israel, since they just see criticism as further sign that Israel is favored by God. Even if evangelical attitudes toward Israel can be said to be more sophisticated than this, it seems what we have here is the danger of issuing a blank check to a worldly government and not letting fair criticism come through. There is a Christian tradition of just war, and it would seem to me that whatever form of Christianity is dominant needs to embrace it more -- and continue to develop it.

An article well worth reading.

Biography of Anne Frank

2006-10-02T18:42:00.000-04:00

I have recently become very ambivalent about sharing my thoughts on blogs, but I do want to say something about a book I read over the weekend, Anne Frank: The Biography, by Melissa Muller.

I am a slow reader, but this one (like a book I read last month, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts) took me less than two days to read. The style is simple and selfless, entirely in service of the subject. The book is gripping simply due to the content, which varies greatly. I felt as if I read three books, in fact. The first of these consists of the years before the Franks went into hiding. Ms. Muller tells us vividly about what was going on in Germany in the eyes of ordinary people like Anne's father, Otto. It is gripping to read, with tragic hindsight, about people's decisions in those days to leave or not to leave Germany. Their growing fear is palpable, and if you've only read the diary, it may be especially interesting for you to read about the impact on the Franks of Hitler's occupation of Holland, which took place two years before Anne began writing in her diary.

Perhaps because World War II has been a lifelong interest of mine, I flew through the first half of the book in a single brief seating. Then came the years in hiding, which is a very different part of the biography -- the second of three "books" or distinct experiences that I had. The prelude to the hiding consists of a portrait of the "external" world, in which Anne herself appears as an extroverted child, one with a personality more difficult than I had imagined, and one who was not yet aware of the larger history taking place around her; I dare say she can be the least interesting element of the first part of the biography. But once we come to the years in hiding, Anne is forced to become more introspective, and her inner life, open to us, commands your attention fully.

This part of the biography actually becomes something of a meditation on family life and human intimacy. My reading slowed down, but to my own surprise the content was actually more interesting than the large-scale historical portrait. This was really more than I had expected from a biography of one girl -- it turned into a very sympathetic account of Anne's whole family and its individual members. The discussion of a formerly unpublished diary entry concerning the Franks' marriage, which delves as well into the issue of censorship, is, I think, the highlight of the book. It is obvious that Ms. Muller is both sympathetic to the protaganists and committed to the truth, which makes the subsequent routine turn to other well-trod subjects, like Anne's own love life, appear like an anticlimax.

Still, the story does not flag, and we arrive finally at the "third" section of the biography, the account of the betrayal and the concentration camps. To say that this material is gripping is to say nothing. Yet I was sincerely disturbed by the details here. From a historical point of view, what Ms. Muller has highlighted to great effect is how everything the Nazis did was intended not just to destroy, but also to humiliate. This had already been clear in Ms. Muller's chronicling of the sequence of restrictions placed upon the lives of Dutch Jews, which are rightly described as "malevolent." Here at the close of the book we see it repeatedly, as when Ms. Muller describes the disorientation that Jewish prisoners must have felt upon disembarking from trains at Auschwitz and being greeted with high floodlights and whippings. This is large-scale history from the personal vantage point. Too often what the Nazis did, because it is analyzed in an attempt to understand how it came about and how it functioned, is remembered in the abstract, so that, for instance, the restrictions on Dutch Jews can seem merely like the necessary steps to genocide rather than the malevolent expressions of hatred that they also were.

In the end the biography, though impossible to put down, becomes very hard to read. The only negative thing I can say about the last part of the book is that it is so horrifying, it overwhelms a reader's reception of the gifts in the earlier sections; those have to be taken in again under a second reading.

There is nothing new about finding Anne Frank's story to be compelling. Millions of people have shared the same experience. What is new here is that the myth has been soaked in history. It has been set in historical detail, which makes the story stronger. Rather than destroyed, the myth, stripped of sentimentality, innacuries and other illusions, appears more attractive than ever, as historical truth.

The Seamless Garment

2006-09-26T02:49:00.000-04:00

Ben Witherington has started an interesting discussion about inconsistency in Christian principles. To that end I'd like to point out a group that is trying to stand on principles that can be called consistently Christian: The Seamless Garment.

When that trumpet sounds

2006-09-17T13:33:00.000-04:00

I walked to the river
And I walked to the rim
I walked through the teeth of the reaper's grin
I walked to you rolled up in wire
To the other side of desire

Oh where oh where will I be
Oh where oh when that trumpet sounds

- from "Where Will I Be," by Emmylou Harris
lyrics by Daniel Lanois

Book Meme

2006-08-23T17:51:00.000-04:00

Before my visit to Ecuador, Rick Sumner tagged me in the book-meme chain. After an even longer vacation from my blog (during which my thoughts about faith and life have all been too personal for publication), I think now would be a good time to do it. I don't believe in tagging, but this one is interesting.

One book that changed your life:
When War Is Unjust: Being Honest in Just War Thinking, by John Howard Yoder

One book that you've read more than once:
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
(I don't think there's any book that I've read cover-to-cover twice, but I've read large passages of this one more than once, if that counts)

One book that you'd want on a desert island:
King James Bible (with Deutero-canonical works)

One book that made you laugh:
Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling

One book that made you cry:
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Kevin Flynn and Jim Dwyer

One book that you wish you had written:
Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945, by Hubert P. Van Tuyll

One book that you wish had never been written:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

One book you are currently reading:
Jesus Remembered, by James D. G. Dunn

One book that you've been meaning to read:
Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth R. Miller

One book that you wish had been written:
A Moral Account of World War II

One book that you’ve read aloud:
Gilgamesh (David Ferry rendition)

(That last one is my own addition).

As I say, I don't believe in tagging, and no one should consider himself tagged, but here are three bloggers whose book lists I'd like to see: Phil Plait, Metacrock, and Peter Kirby.

Casting the Second Stone

2006-07-28T23:23:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow morning, Dess and I are making our first trip together to Ecuador. I have not seen my extended family in 15 years, and we're both looking forward to this tremendously. I doubt that I will be getting much internet access, or that I'll post anything here for another two weeks. When I get back, I plan to put the photos up at my Flickr page.

Pasted below is one of those articles that I'm just deeply grateful to have, even if I don't know quite how to apply them in practice. It's very relevant to what's going in the Middle East, but of course it says a lot to me about the intellectual debates in which I get embroiled. Happy reading.

******************************

New York Times
July 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t
By DANIEL GILBERT

LONG before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called “the wayback” all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.

That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”

My Jesus Puzzle review at Amazon

2006-07-23T17:12:00.000-04:00

As I wrote a few posts back, I've been composing pieces about mythicism that I hope to publish on permanent web pages rather than debating forums and blogs. I've submitted a review of The Jesus Puzzle to Amazon, and what the heck, I'll publish it here, too:

A conspiracy theory

An important test of any theory is how much evidence exists for its case. In this book, Doherty proposes that Christianity began with a celestial Christ who was thought to be crucified in a celestial realm above the earth, and that Paul’s letters as they currently stand speak only of a non-terrestrial Christ. In fact, Doherty makes this claim for all the New Testament epistles, which are thus presented as direct evidence -- people describing their own belief and thus directly attesting to the existence of the belief.

One trouble facing Doherty’s thesis is that Paul’s letters and the other early Christian documents speak of Christ’s flesh and blood, and his birth and death; they also provide other indications of a terrestrial savior. So a large part of Doherty’s book consists of arguments to the effect that all these earthly-sounding words really referred to a “spiritual” death in the heavens. A great deal of work has already been advanced against these arguments, and it does not need to repeated here, except to say that no single piece of evidence for Doherty's thesis exists which is not ambiguous. Doherty hardly denies this ambiguity, since it is his own contention that even the most terrestrial-sounding passages in the New Testament can be dismissed as metaphor rather than plain evidence for a historical Christ.

Thus, the main argument of this book is about a lack of evidence, that is to say, an argument from silence. Doherty claims that the first ancient Christians are silent about an earthly Christ. Again, much prior work has been done to show that this is far from true. What I find interesting is that an argument from silence, though difficult to make and not generally favored by historians, can be legitimate, especially if combined with positive evidence. In this case, if we could not combine it with such evidence we would face new arguments from silence that contradicted Doherty’s own, or cancelled it out: Why are the proposed believers in the celestial Christ silent about so many details of their heavenly savior? And why do we not find ancient Christians, Jews, and pagans reporting or reacting to doctrines about a celestial Christ?

In this book, Doherty deals only with the second of these two questions. He looks for ancient authors who tell us that others either believed in a celestial Christ or doubted the terrestrial Christ. Since no ancient author tells us clearly about people who doubted that Christ appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man on the earth, Doherty proposes that we can find hints of such a thing.

In Appendix 3 of this book, he quotes a letter by Ignatius of Antioch to the Magnesians, written at the start of the second century, wherein Ignatius hopes that his readers will attain “full assurance in regard to the birth, and passion, and resurrection which took place in the time of the government of Pontius Pilate” (Magnesians 11:3).

This seems to Doherty like a polemic against a celestial Christ. The principle he is using is a valid one, akin to when mainstream scholars use Paul's assurances about the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 as evidence that doubts about the Resurrection existed. But in that case, Paul tells us clearly what the doubts were. Ignatius does not, and it will be worth a little effort here to go into the details.

Ignatius says earlier in his letter that some deny the death of Christ. Today we call this the Docetic doctrine, which held that Christ merely appeared to be a human being but was actually only a spirit who appeared to die on the cross. This doctrine is well-attested because so much ancient Christian literature seeks to refute it; and Doherty rightfully regards these refutations as different from the refutation that he is looking for, the proposed polemic against a Christ who did not even appear to walk on the earth.

Yet Ignatius mentions nothing like that. He alludes to Docetism and to unspecified doctrines denying that Christ was the same as the one true God. And he refers very specifically to Judaism, just before making his assurance about the birth, death, and resurrection in the time of Pilate’s governorship of Judea. He is telling his readers, in short, to have full assurance about things that both Docetism and Judaism are known to have challenged: the nature of this or any proposed savior's birth; his Passion under the Roman leadership in a Jewish province; and his Resurrection. Doherty thinks that Ignatius is asking his readers to be “fully persuaded” of the bare facts of these things – the bare fact that they took place – but it hardly seems probable that Ignatius would be content to ask for that. He is asking his readers to attain “full assurance” about all of the Church’s interpretations and teachings concerning these things – to keep from straying into any kind of doctrinal dispute. So he writes throughout his letter.

The ambiguity of Doherty’s evidence prompts him to argue that there is so little clear evidence because orthodox Christianity changed, destroyed or neglected the evidence that was once there. He uses this argument openly in a chapter claiming that at least some second-century Christians worshipped only God and rejected all savior figures. Doherty presents the writings of Minucius Felix as a “smoking gun” to that effect, but he allows that the evidence is not as clear as we might want. He tells us that it is the best evidence that can be expected, because clearer statements would never have “reached us through 2000 years of Christian censorship” (see p. 292).

That is the conspiracy theory. Considering that Christianity has not wiped away all evidence of doctrines that it regarded as heresies, but instead has offered refutations of every heresy and preserved these refutations as a guide to the true faith, Doherty's claim is hard to believe. A conspiracy to hide the truth can take place, Christians not excepted; the record of the past can be doctored, and has been. But Doherty's specific claim is that Christianity's very first doctrines contained a purely celestial Christ, and that these doctrines have not been preserved even as heresy (with Ignatius serving as a brief and ambiguous exception). Christianity's true origin was wiped away, not merely with refutation and doctoring, but with silence.

It is hard to believe that Christian institutions and individual writers were silent about what would have been the most radical and provocative of all the heresies -- silent about an idea that, per Doherty's central thesis about how religions work, would have threatened the Church's power to a greater degree than any of the other heresies, some of which were already regarded by Church Fathers as mortally dangerous to the Church.

So Doherty proposes one additional reason to explain the silence: he suggests that the Roman war against Palestine in the year 70 C.E. uprooted or destroyed so many lives that later writers could claim that Christ had lived there in recent decades, without challenges from locals who remembered either the true situation or the beliefs of the sect that worshipped a non-terrestrial Christ (see pages 168 and 179). Doherty's picture is of a dying sect. But a fundamental claim of Doherty's idea is the pervasiveness in the entire ancient world of the belief in saviors who descended to celestial regions above the earth and experienced pain or death there. Had this sort of belief really been ubiquitous throughout the Empire, and applied to Christ as far as the church in Rome (to whom Paul addresses his longest letter), one war in Judea could not have extinguished the belief; and even in Judea it would be likely to reappear. Ignatius himself, per Doherty, is proof that the belief survived the war. But if Doherty is right, we would expect such a popular doctrine to have flourished after the war. We’d expect the orthodox sects of the Church proclaiming an earthly savior to produce some refutations. The Fathers established in Rome, the center of all ideas, would surely have encountered or heard of the celestial Christ, for Doherty does not address how the celestial Christ of Paul's Letter to the Romans was just forgotten -- except by returning to the idea of censorship.

I invite any reader attracted by this book to work out Doherty's scenario and to test it repeatedly against the available information about the time period. That's an external test. Then test it against its own premises, repeatedly, for an internal test. It is a worthy and rewarding challenge.

Proportionality in the Middle East

2006-07-20T17:49:00.000-04:00

I’d like to respond to a sample of letters sent into to the New York Times about the current conflict in the Middle East. The letters are all replies to an article from July 19, “With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion”, by STEVEN ERLANGER.

Let me first quote the article’s opening paragraphs.

JERUSALEM, July 18 — The asymmetry in the reported death tolls is marked and growing: some 230 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians, to 25 Israeli dead, 13 of them civilians. In Gaza, one Israel soldier has died from his own army’s fire, and 103 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them militants.

The cold figures, combined with Israeli air attacks on civilian infrastructure like power plants, electricity transformers, airports, bridges, highways and government buildings, have led to accusations by France and the European Union, echoed by some nongovernmental organizations, that Israel is guilty of “disproportionate use of force” in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and of “collective punishment” of the civilian populations.

Now to the letters, all published this morning.

July 20, 2006
Mideast Violence: A Grim Ledger (7 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re “With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion” (front page, July 19):

The topic of “disproportionate use of force” is being discussed in relation to Israel’s military action in Lebanon.

The justification for this accusation is that more Lebanese have died than Israelis. This bizarre calculus implies that if only more Israelis had been killed by Hezbollah rockets, there would be no moral quandary.

This argument distorts the real question. Israel should not be punished for having invested in bomb shelters and early-warning systems. These have cost the Israeli public dearly over the years.

The question is whether the goals of the military action are justified.
The goals of the present conflict are for Hezbollah to shoot as many rockets as possible into populated city centers to kill as many civilians as possible; and for Israel to uproot the terrorist infrastructure, missile launching pads and the terrorists themselves by using intelligence gathering and precise bombing.

Israel could easily root out Hezbollah by flattening all of Beirut, Tripoli, Tyre and Sidon, but it has declined to do so because this would clearly entail “excessive force.”

On the other hand, if Hezbollah had the military capability to flatten Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beer Sheva, it would do so without flinching.

Jonathan Weisberg
Jerusalem, July 19, 2006

Mr. Weisberg brings up an excellent question about a difficult issue, which I will address below.

First, though, the matter of intentions. One of the Just War criteria is Proper Intention, and I agree that there’s a place for comparing the intentions of any two combatants. I also agree that Hezbollah’s intention is the worse of the two parties. But that does not automatically make Israel’s intention, or its war as a whole, a just one. The danger in such comparisons is that each party in the war always describes the other party, or its intentions, as being worse – usually far worse. That is the nature of warfare, that each party views the other with enmity.

I cannot emphasize enough that concentrating on someone else’s intention will take away the focus from your own – it will shift your attention, and the attention of others, away from your intentions, which can only lead to unjust wars.

For the sake of argument but also with a genuine sense of common ground, I’ll go with Mr. Weisberg’s one-paragraph summary of the goals, or intentions, of Israel and Hezbollah. I think he is missing Hezbollah’s intent to provoke Israel into a large use of force, but I agree with the intentions he has listed. He asks if the goals are justified, and there is no question that uprooting terrorism is a justifiable goal (not automatically justified, of course, but justifiable).

But we have to ask if there’s a reasonable chance of success (another of the Just War criteria). Can terrorism be defeated by these methods? If the bombing campaign succeeds only in thrashing Hezbollah and temporarily moving it around the map while feeding widespread anger at Israel as well as weakening and radicalizing the moderates in the Arab world, then the campaign is not a success. Nor do I see in the current campaign a reasonable chance of anything but temporary military success.

Mr. Weisberg calls proportionality a “bizarre calculus” because it seems to ask him to be glad when Israelis die, for then he could judge that Israel was fighting a just war. I have noticed in myself a disturbing trait when analyzing wars: I have an emotional attachment to a certain party, to a certain state, and I want not to have to see it as fighting an unjust war, but I have a simultaneous detachment from the individuals dying, since I know them only as numbers. Therefore, when I heard that 8 Israelis had died in a single Hezbollah attack, after so many more deaths on the other side, I felt a momentary grief about lives being lost to bombs, but next to that was also a stronger and disturbing wave of relief. It seems to arrive because my greater concern is not for these individuals (since I do not know them as people), but for Israel’s status in the world. I want to see Israel as using force justly, and my values define that as never causing more suffering than what you suffer yourself.

There are a couple of problems here, and one is my own proclivity to read about wars through intellectual analyses and always to skip over the personal stories. But for that reason, I admire and embrace the criteria of proportionality, which takes the (inevitable) emotional calculus out of it altogether: it gives every single life a value that is equal with all others.

The other problem is nationalism, or any kind of attachment to any country. These sorts of feelings are stronger in all of us than is our typical feeling for nameless casualties. The idea that America fought a just war in World War II, or the idea that it fought an unjust one in Vietman, are deeply meaningful (not just in the positive sense) to a lot of Americans. Reports of nameless casualties just don’t compete with this – and their principal effect on us comes from their place in our emotional narratives about ourselves and the country we live in.

It is those feelings, I suggest, that can make proportionality seem like a bizarre calculus. But those feelings cannot be allowed to overwhelm the only necessary thing, which is to make decisions about war and peace with a calculus in which no life is worth less than another.

To the Editor:

So after so many years of violating international law, humanitarian law and United Nations law, unfortunately with the help of the United States, Ari Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz, feels that Israel should take advantage of the “moral high ground” it now possesses because of the actions of Hezbollah (front page, July 19).

I think Mr. Shavit should examine the extreme treatment that Israel is showing toward the innocent civilians of Gaza and Lebanon before he starts bragging about Israel’s “moral high ground.”

Ahmad Ibrahim
San Diego, July 19, 2006

My response here can be shorter. I refer to Ari Shavit’s claim of Israel’s “moral high ground.” Such a ground is reached when the other party attacks first. Yet who attacks first is far from the only question in deciding the morality of a war. Any strong party, attacked in a limited way by a weaker, faces the temptation of using the moral high ground to mount an unjust campaign.

To the Editor:

Questioning the “proportionality” of the Israeli response to attacks on its citizens mimics the absurd notion echoing in European capitals.

Would it satisfy the Europeans if more Jews were killed or wounded, thus making the casualty count more quantitatively symmetrical?

Have military victories historically been achieved when a country responds to aggression with only the exact measure of force leveled at it and no more?

Finally, if missiles and rockets were landing in your living room, just exactly how much force would you like to see directed at the bad guys to make them stop?

Daniel Adler
New York, July 19, 2006

Mr. Adler defines proportionality, not as casualties, but as the amount of force used. The question of how much force is used is perfectly legitimate, and of course he’s right that the winning party tends to use more force. The Allies of World War II, who suffered far more human losses than did their enemies, also used far more force; that was how they won. That did not make their war unjust. One of the things that made it just was that, when compared to the Axis, they directed much less force at civilians. Where and how you apply force matters greatly.

It is not necessary to ask Israel to use only the kind and the number of rockets that Hezbollah is using, and to respond to attacks, tit for tat, as they arrive. That is not what proportionality means. Such a course is a recipe for endless cycles of violence and retribution. The military, once entrusted with a war, must operate more freely than what Mr. Adler describes. The question is, where are you directing the force? Are civilians dying in great numbers? To what end? What is the result of this force, not just in a narrow military sense but also in the political and moral spheres? (For you can defeat the enemy in close combat, as the U.S. did in Vietnam, and still lose the war politically and morally).

To the Editor:

While proportionality may be a relevant measure in some situations — baseball statistics and model cars come to mind — the appropriateness of Israel’s response to the Hezbollah attacks should not be measured by the number of people who are killed in Lebanon.

Rather than seeking “an eye for an eye” or retribution, Israel is seeking to eliminate the threat of future attacks on its cities.

This response will be successful not if it is proportional, but if it results in the elimination of this threat.

In December 1941, would anyone have suggested that the United States’ response was appropriately “proportional” and complete after the first 2,400 Japanese had been killed?

Jeffrey M. Stein
Atlanta, July 19, 2006

A most interesting letter. Firstly, I do agree that eliminating the threat of a future attack is legitimate, but within limits. What I mean is that if someone points a gun at me, I am within my rights to seek means of self-defense. A policeman in such a situation has been entrusted, by society-wide agreement, with the right to shoot, even to shoot first, in self-defense. Of course, agreements do not exist across borders, which is why armies attempt to protect their own citizens by going to war against, rather than genuinely policing, entire populations. There is no good way to shoot at Hezbollah alone, and particularly at its violent perpetrators. Wars involve civilian casualties, and most of the Lebanese casualties have been civilians – which ultimately strains the comparison in which Israel intends only the destruction of combatants while Israel’s enemies intend to murder civilians (it should be remembered – for what it’s worth and no more – that the first strike of this war, in Gaza, was not against civilians but against an Israeli soldier).

As for Pearl Harbor, it must be remembered that China lost up to 20 million people because of Japan’s invasion. Pearl Harbor, which took about 2,400 lives (almost all among America’s military), was just a part of the larger war. It took place because Japan wanted to wipe out the American navy and win a free hand in conquering East Asia. Long before Pearl Harbor, the United States had opposed Japan’s aggression and taken some steps to curb it.

Japan lost far more people during World War II than the United States did in its campaign against Japan – a few million as opposed to over 100,000. If we kept these numbers but imagined Japan and the U.S. as the only nations at war, I would say that the American war against Japan was unjust – even after Pearl Harbor. All this is fantastical, of course, and it’s very hard to imagine Pearl Harbor taking place if Imperial Japan had not been the kind of nation that subdued East Asia and sought to win a free hand in conquering more.

In the real war, Japan’s enemies lost far more people than Japan did – and that inequality was already in place on the eve of Pearl Harbor. The U.S. was under no obligation to restrict its actions in the manner that Mr. Stein describes. American obligation after Pearl Harbor was to destroy Japan’s power to keep or to regain its aggressive empire.

That being said, proportionality does not allow a party in such a situation a free hand. You cannot look across the ocean at China’s losses and decide that any amount of force short of 20 million Japanese deaths would be justified. The obligation to focus on your own actions, and intentions, still binds.

Hiroshima has often been defended as the consequence of Japan’s unjust sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. I remember first reading about that sentiment as a young teenager, long before I had heard of Just War or proportionality, but the disproportion in numbers already struck me as obvious. The numbers lost at Pearl Harbor and at Hiroshima are famous, and they hardly compare.

Americans did too little, I think, to examine their own intention, their own desire to have retribution and even revenge for the cruel loss of Americans at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere.

Something similar, I think, seems to be happening to Israelis. Israel’s war against Lebanon and the Palestinians looks every day more like an unjust war.

Israel's use of force

2006-07-15T02:15:00.000-04:00

I cannot begin to express my dismay at the headlines of the last few days -- first the news that Israeli troops had entered Lebanon, then the news that Israel had imposed a naval and air blockade upon that country. I've been reading the New York Times, a paper that is friendly to Israel (as I am), yet my mind is still reeling at these actions. An entire country, under blockade, after the provocation of the killing of Israeli soldiers.

I ask myself, why? What is going on? What is the need for actions that are causing more casualties among the Lebanese and Palestinians than among the Israelis? Under what authority or rationale can this be okay?

For some years now I have been considering the idea of proportionality in Just War doctrine. A fundamental moral principle of our society is that if violence is to be returned in kind, at least the damage of the original wrong should not be exceeded. That is not our highest morality, nor is it really even a moral ideal -- it is just the least that we can expect of moral individuals and societies. The idea in its most basic form is rooted in the Bible, where ancient Israel was enjoined that an eye for an eye was proper redress; this was the idea of proportionality; the command that redress would stop there and not descend either into an endless cycle of violence or a successful act of vengeance upon a weak party by a strong.

I am no history expert, but when I do judge the wars of the past and the present I ask which side has lost the most people, and in what ways. It appears to me more clearly than ever that most wars are unjust on both sides; and that a party to a war is clearly in the wrong if it takes more lives than it loses. The chief exceptions to this rule, I think, occur when an invaded country takes up arms to defend itself against an aggressive party successfully, such that the invasion becomes more costly in human lives to the invader than to the defender. In other words, you can take more than a life for a life and do so justly, if the other party is directly responsible for losing their own lives. If they throw themselves against your defenses, there would be no shame in incurring fewer losses than the aggressor loses. See for instance, the Soviet Union's unjust invasion of Finland in 1939, a war which Finland won at a lower human cost than the Soviets incurred.

But if the exception does not apply, and you take more than a life for a life through offensive actions such as large-scale incursions or blockades, then you are no longer fighting a defensive war, which is the only kind of war that can be just. Then it is right to call the strong aggressor wrong when it tries to pass off its war as defensive, as so many unjust parties do (as indeed the Soviet Union did in 1939). This must hold even when the provocation or opening use of force may belong to the other party. It is a question of proportionality. If you start bringing death directly to more people than your own party has lost, such a war can be called defensive only in the sense that your party is reacting defensively to an unjust provocation -- and forcing the other party, of course, to react subsequently in their own defense. Such a cycle of violence may be seen as defensive by each party, but it is far from a just war.

I am unusually frightened by this turn of events in the Middle East. With fundamentalist parties (Hezbollah and Hamas) elected to power in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, and more such parties ruling Syria and Iran, I have no trouble understanding Israel's fear. It looks to me somewhat like those days before June 1967, when a coalition of Arab nations were spewing threats at Israel from all sides and then blockading Israel's ports -- a clear act of war hitting the vitals of a society and not a mere provocation (which it why it is dismaying that Israel, a country I have defended countless times in heated arguments, and visited personally, is now the one blockading Lebanon). Yet Israel's opponents in the past -- and I could be wrong about this -- do not seem to me quite so dangerous as the fundamentalists of today. On that score, perhaps, I am wrong, and simply frightened about current fears while sanguine about past events that I never experienced.

In fact, I do hope I'm wrong.

Born of woman

2006-07-12T15:01:00.000-04:00

After a 5-month hiatus I returned to the Secular Web debates at the end of June. I've written a lot about these debates in the past, but this time I'd like to concentrate more on my thoughts about the Biblical phrase in question. At least, let me start there.

Galatians 4:
4 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman (GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS), born under the Law (GENOMENOS HUPO NOMON),

5 in order to redeem those who were under the Law, so that we might receive adoption as children.

Look at "born under the Law", or GENOMENOS HUPO NOMON. It uses the verb GIGNOMAI, which can mean to to come, to become, to be, to happen. Earl Doherty understands this verb with its broad set of meanings as an ambiguous way to denote a birth. The same verb is used in the first phrase, "born of woman," GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS. Doherty argues that Ernest De Witt Burton's commentary, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (pp. 217-18), supports his argument concerning ambiguity.

However, in the last debate there was a significant concession, from a strong and longtime supporter of Doherty, to the effect that Burton did not say what Doherty took him to say. Burton actually says that if Paul had wished to express the idea of birth in the second phrase (about the law) as unambiguously as he does in the first (about the woman), he would have used a different verb, GENNAW, which has a narrower meaning of "beget" (that is, begotten under the Law). Doherty did not make this concession in the most recent debate, but I think there's a good chance he will correct his mistaken reading in the second edition of his book.

It's worth asking why Burton thought the first phrase was a clear way to denote birth, despite the use of the verb that has the broader set of meanings. He writes, "...though GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS evidently refers to birth, that reference is neither conveyed by, nor imparted to, the participle, but lies wholly in the limiting phrase." In short, the meaning of "birth" is not conveyed by the participle GENOMENON (since its verb, GIGNOMAI, means to become, to be, to happen); it is conveyed by the limiting phrase, "of woman," EK GUNAIKOS. To come from a woman evidently means (or references) birth; it does not seem possible that something else could be referred to.

Paul's verb in the passage referencing the woman does not necessarily and always mean birth, and in that sense Doherty is right; but it means birth because the woman is mentioned. It's the woman that Doherty de-emphasizes, in his emphasis on the verb. He seems taken by the idea that Paul spoke of Christ as coming from, or being made from. To him this seems to be the kind of language suited to a celestial savior who never came down to earth. However, such language suits any kind of savior. Doherty seems to have lost sight of the traditional Christian understanding that Christ did come from heaven. There would be nothing mythicist about Paul if he said that Christ came from heaven; it would not advance Doherty's case at all. John's prologue twice uses this verb to say that Christ, as a pre-existent eternal being, "became" flesh; certainly John believes in a historical Christ. Nor would there be a problem if Paul was saying that Christ simply came (without a reference to heaven or to an eternal pre-existent Christ); Mark 1:4 uses the same verb to say that John the Baptist came/appeared, as a prophet from God. But when Christ is said to come from woman, well, I hardly see where Doherty has a legitimate angle remaining.

This deficient focus on only part of the phrase is something pointed out by Ben C Smith in this post, which I'm highlighting for other reasons, as well: it contains references to Josephus' use of the same verb that Paul uses of Christ; Josephus uses it to refer to the birth of ordinary human beings. And the post is as good a place as any to examine the survey of the literature that Doherty and his challengers have been conducting. My own contribution to the survey, and to the question of why Paul uses a particular verb for Christ's birth, is at this post.

I think something very similar is going on when mythicists and historicists debate Romans 1:3-4, the only other place where Paul refers to Christ's birth (again with GINOMAI). The verses read: "... the gospel according to his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirt of holiness..." The overwhelming emphasis in the debates has been on the phrase "KATA SARKA," which is usually translated, "according to the flesh." KATA SARKA, like GINOMAI, is not a problem in itself, but focusing on it very hard, rather than equally emphasizing the reference to David, can produce an unwarranted appearance of reasonable doubt. What I mean is that Christ is said to come from the seed of David. The additional phrase according to the flesh can indeed be difficult to understand without looking at the next verse (where Paul tells us what Christ is in the spiritual sphere, after telling us what Christ is in the human sphere). But to come from the seed of David is pretty straightforward as an indicator of a human birth.

The IIDB debate has also included a discussion of whether Galatians 4:4 is an interpolation, with a response from one scholar, Hermann Detering. That part is interesting, though I've been watching the rest of the debate descend into the kind of wearying ego-battles for which I have no more tolerance; it's become difficult even to read the posts. It's easier just not to listen when it gets to this point. I hope the particular links I've given will help anyone trying to wade through the nonsense.

I hope now to get my writings on the subject of mythicism onto permanent websites rather than merely discussion boards and blogs. That means that my postings on this blog may become somewhat thin for a while.

A Pro-Life Progressivism

2006-06-27T10:44:00.000-04:00

At dot.Commonweal, a blog that I visit regularly, I found a link to an essay called, "The Coherence and Importance of Pro-Life Progressivism." It's a very interesting article, and it captures more of my own view than almost anything I typically read.

Thoughtful posts on mythicism

2006-05-24T23:11:00.000-04:00

I am currently on an unplanned but effective hiatus from writing about many of the issues I've been much concerned with, including Jesus mythicism. But a hiatus is exactly that -- it's temporary.

In the meantime, I've come across a blog post by an agnostic who has taken, not just a critical line against Jesus mythicism (I've seen that before), but a critical line that is exceptionally thoughtful and even-toned. Even so I might not mention it, except that it directly touches on some questions that I was writing about in the earliest days of this blog: the relationship of Jesus mythicism to politics; the question of whether Jesus mythicism can be referred to, particularly by its proponents, as a general thing with a common goal; and the potential that Jesus mythicism holds, or does not hold, to make a practical difference in our society.

Check it out.

I also do try to keep up with new debates at IIDB. In the past I've linked to some threads filled with too much rancor and too little real content, so I was pleased a few weeks ago to find a debate that was primarily an intellectual discussion -- with skill on both sides -- about historical methodology. The specific question was how, or whether, a responsible historian could take the text of Josephus, known to have been changed by Christian scribes, and discern what parts are genuine. From there the thread sank its teeth into a detailed discussion over whether Origen has quoted Josephus.

It will be no shock that I hold with the historicist position in that debate: that of course, discerning between the various levels of usefulness in the evidence at hand is the very business of being a historian. Throwing up one's hands is not skepticism per se, so much as rejectionism, OR the inability/unwillingness to move forward with work that is sometimes tremendously difficult and always demanding. To move forward fruitfully, and skeptically, you need training and tools, and plenty of help; otherwise you will find yourself stalled.

We all know the feeling.

New pages by Metacrock

2006-05-13T23:16:00.000-04:00

My fellow blogger Metacrock has posted some interesting new pages about Earl Doherty's mythicism. Ultimately I do not agree with his early dating of noncanonical sources and texts, but there are good critiques in his essay concerning Doherty's theories about Q -- a subject I haven't touched on here. And I do give Metacrock credit for thinking, as a Christian, outside the box, when he dates the noncanonicals early.

A Flock of Dodos

2006-05-01T22:10:00.000-04:00

I saw A Flock of Dodos earlier today as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, and I stayed for a very brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Randy Olsen. A Harvard-trained marine ecologist, Olsen fully supports the theory of evolution, but with a twist. He endorses evolution directly, but the heart of his support seems to be expressed in criticism. He likens scientists to a flock of dodos and warns that science could go the way of the dodo if it's not communicated with greater concision, personability, and humility.

It occurs to me that all three of these traits are often found in humor, or at least in varieties of humor that are not meant to ridicule. Olsen's movie is in fact concise, personable, and humble in its sense of humor. The movie gave me my first chance ever to laugh at the subject, and it's apparent that Olsen likes people and likes to laugh with them -- not at them. He asks himself in the movie whether he would want to sit down for a game of poker with some of the dry, respectable scientists that he's interviewed or with the various colorful personalities that he's found among supporters of Intelligent Design, and he has no problem expressing how much he likes the latter. He says that his first note in his research was his discovery that ID advocates were not the close-minded Bible thumpers, he implies, that he had expected.

Ultimately this is a movie about people more than evolution. At the Q&A, Olsen was asked why he didn't go more deeply into what was wrong with the concept of Irreducible Complexity, and he noted that the medium was, relatively speaking, more of a motivational than an educational tool. He said he considered adding a few minutes of hard scientific details, but he chose to raise the issue rather than try to settle it on film, which would be hard to do. As an ordinary viewer, I think that's a good approach. A different kind of documentary, perhaps for public television (as was alluded to in the Q&A), could delve into the details more fully.

And Olsen said that it would not be easy to describe in a few minutes why Irreducible Complexity was wrong, which is an indication right there that he does not consider such concepts to be on par with basic children's errors. He did mention someone else who he thought had summarized very quickly what was wrong with IC, which just showed his admiration for concision as well as his belief that evolution cannot win its debates so long as scientists are long-winded about it.

In that way and many others, A Flock of Dodos is a call, in the best sense, to popularize science. There is an idea out there that popularization of anything dumbs it down, but Olsen is just not an elitist about this. For him, popularization seems to mean a direct connecting with people. That's how you popularize among great numbers of people -- just talk to them.

And listen. Olsen spends a lot of camera time listening while ID advocates have their say; and most of these conversations, it seems, do not proceed into arguments over scientific data. Olsen is really more interested in talking to people about the controversy, which is what his movie is about. He's done a great job of teaching the controversy -- in the best sense.

He has less sympathy as he looks higher up on the food chain of ID, so to speak. The Discovery Institute comes off as a secretive, impersonable glass-windowed facade that won't speak to people -- which is true in the case of Olsen, who tried repeatedly to obtain an interview. There are also strong implications in the movie that the Institute is more a successful child of wealthy and skillful marketing than an honest broker of science. There will be food for argument here, but I have to say that my own sympathy with ID also rests with the ordinary people who are interested in it.

Even here, though, Olsen is not offering a wholly negative judgment. He does not view skillful marketing as a bad thing in itself, and he considers it essential for scientists to adapt to the current age or, well, you know the rest.

One more thing I appreciated about Olsen's take is that he does not introduce ID as originating with the Discovery Institute. He begins instead with the philosopher William Paley (d. 1805) -- who used the famous God-as-watchmaker analogy -- and introduces ID almost as if it stepped out of a tradition with deep philosophical roots and straight into the 1990s. I think he's missed, or chosen not to dwell on, the connections between creationism and ID. A Flock of Dodos does repeat the finding of the Dover trial that ID is repackaged creationism, but there is no more on that subject. In fact creationism appears in the narrative often as a contrast to ID and not as an ancestor.

Olsen's final judgment on ID is that the movement is stuck at the level of intuition and has not yet proceeded to make a scientific theory. He sees ID as residing presently in the heart (he says his own heart is with evolution), and he plainly sees its advocates as heartful, personable people. His contention that ID is not a scientific theory cannot be tested in the movie, which does not offer much scientific content -- but it is the view I hold, and I have yet to see anything from ID that counts as a rival mechanism to mutation and natural selection.

It's a good movie and worth seeing. It is not a hard-hitting movie, either in terms of teaching science or even teaching the social controversy. There is no mention of such a prominent atheist as Richard Dawkins, for example, which is something of a lack in a movie that is largely about how scientists can lose a debate which is theirs to win or lose. Still, if you've never laughed about this subject and you want to, or if you're simply interested in the subject, it's very much worth checking out.

United 93

2006-04-28T22:28:00.000-04:00

I saw this movie earlier today. It's a frightening experience to sit through, and also as sobering as you can imagine. It does not feel heroic, as many feared it would. It comes closer to a classic tragedy, except that for many reasons it does not feel like any tragedy I've seen before. The experience is so fast, and the destruction so brutal, that there's no time for reflection, only time enough to feel pity for the protagonists as they succumb first to to shock, fear and confusion, and finally to depression and desperation. It is adrenalized and not helpless desperation; enough of them do rally themselves and take action. Yet it does not feel like action-hero heroism. These passengers are not trying to save others in peril. They are simply trying to stay alive.

I don't know why that should diminish their heroism. I don't know how it can be expected of people in their situation to give much thought, if any, to the lives of potential victims outside the plane, when inside they are reeling, physically and mentally, and barely able in such a short time to perceive their own intended fate and to implement a basic counter-attack. This movie makes it clear that the passengers on United 93 did not gather themselves stoically to throw up a defiant resistance: they were prisoners implementing a plan to overthrow their captors when it became clear that their captors had no intention of letting them live.

The terrorists, too, are humanized to an extent. I do not mean that their acts are made to seem less horrible. There are many ways that movies can strip away the grossness of crimes: the standard villains of Hollywood movies are glamorized in one way or another, while their acts are sanitized; and it is also possible to make sober movies that apologize for criminals or hide their faults while focusing on other parts of their characters. None of that occurs in this movie, because it is not typical Hollywood, and it is not a documentary delving into character. We don't get either the glamorized or analyzed character of the hijackers here; but we do see them fearing pain and death. We see the most reluctant of them, their hesitant leader, making an early call on his cell phone to someone to whom he says, in his native language, "I love you." When the passengers later make anguished phone calls with similar messages, you don't think back to the hijacker's call, nor is there any possibility of confusing the radical dissimilarity of the two kinds of calls; the later calls are the most touching moments in the film, while the first is not. All the same, there is a common human link here. Hollywood provides that common ground by making its villains attractive; this movie does it simply by showing, minute by minute, relentlessly, what happened, and showing that there was a bloody conflict on that plane, not just a simplistic resistance to evil.

It is, of course, disturbing to hear, even if only in untranslated Arabic, prayers to God. The hijackers are seen constantly praying, even in the midst of action; the movie actually begins with their prayers; and I think their prayers are also the last words spoken. I found myself regretting that for many people, the first they will hear of Muslim prayers will be these prayers, spoken by violent men in the midst of their violence. That is one of the great regrets I have about our time: that so many prayers are said in prelude to war and violence. It seems, when you read the papers, or watch a movie like this, that religion is being killed by its practitioners.

At one point, a direct contrast is made between passengers praying the Lord's Prayer, and some of the hijacker's own prayers. Perhaps it's best that the prayers in Arabic are mostly left untranslated, not merely because it preserves the passengers' point of view with regard to the prayers, but also because prayers to God should be presented when they can mean something positive. And I hope that someday we do have a popular movie which does that for Muslim prayers.

It's been said that drama cannot be made out of stories where resistance appears weakly or not at all, since drama requires conflict. Perhaps it's not an accident that our first feature film about that terrible day concerns the episode where resistance was greatest. Yet, as I said, it has not been made in this movie to feel like resistance, at least not primarily. United 93 is really a docudrama about the whole day: many of its best moments, maybe even a majority, are about civil aviation and defense employees witnessing the events and trying, unsuccessfully, to catch up with them. A docudrama does not need conflict the way that a straight drama does. Instead it can build tension by laying out the events as they unfolded, from the perspective of those who witnessed them. United 93 does that superbly.

I do recommend this movie, very highly. You will not simply relive 9-11; you will have new thoughts and feelings about it, and probably new insights as well.

The Mass of Vatican II

2006-04-13T11:55:00.000-04:00

A friend has sent me a link to an article about the Roman Catholic mass, by a Father Joseph Fessio. It's very interesting, not least because it discusses what the Second Vatican Council did and did not say about recommended changes to the mass. But I also find myself agreeing with many of Fr. Fessio's points about what would constitute fruitful and active worship. Did you know that Vatican II urged the use of Gregorian chant at all masses, and that this form of chanting is thought to be close to the manner in which the Psalms were originally sung in Hebrew? I don't know why Gregorian chant has dropped away.

There are many other worthwhile topics in the article, and I imagine it can encourage reflection even for non-Catholics on what constitutes good worship.

ID debates

2006-03-30T13:32:00.000-05:00

I have been reading some excellent arguments from a biologist who believes in God and has been engaged for many years in debates against prominent creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design. His name is Kenneth R. Miller. His essay, "The Flagellum Unspun", is the best single rebuttal of ID that I have come across, by which I mean that it is accessible to the layperson but still technical enough to demonstrate specifically where ID is wrong, from the point of view of science. A more philosophical overview and rebuttal is offered in this excerpt from his book, Finding Darwin's God. But also see his home page, and particularly his page for Evolution Resources. All the links on the latter page will be useful to someone interested in this subject, but I can particularly recommend his PBS debate, for anyone seeking a place where the strongest arguments on both sides are laid out against each other succinctly.

I particularly appreciate him because he sees no necessary conflict between science and religion. This is a badly needed voice in our cultural wars.

As for my own recent debates on the subject, I can say that my position remains the same, if not stronger: ID does not offer a scientific theory, but it can be appreciated in some ways (but not others) as a social movement.

I have found this position to be easily misunderstood, so let me try to put in on record briefly.

Intelligent Design tells us that the known mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection cannot fully account for either the complexity or the diversity of living organisms. There is nothing wrong with this claim in itself. But a scientific theory must propose another mechanism. A mere criticism of the theory of evolution as insufficient does not amount to a rival theory, unless a rival mechanism can be proposed. When it is merely proposed, as in ID, that an Intelligent Designer must be responsible for the natural features of life that we cannot account for, this does not tell us at all how the Designer worked. It only tells us that a Designer is responsible. And that would be no different from non-ID, non-creationist theism, which tells us that a Designer is responsible. All theism which is reconciled to the theory of evolution tells us that the Designer worked via the mechanisms identified by Darwin and later generations of scientists. ID and creationism tell us that the Designer did not work through these mechanisms at all, but that the Designer's work can be detected wherever these mechanism fail to explain what we see. In what way the Designer worked is left undescribed. If it was described scientifically, we would have a scientific theory. Therefore, ID is not a scientific theory. It is not a scientific, mechanical description. It is an inference from scientific work, and this is commendable in that good inferences may be made from good science -- but it is a philosophical inference. It is not a theory about the mechanical, material workings of the world. It is a theory about something un-material and, presumably, unexplainable.

If such a philosophical inference were to become widely regarded as a scientific theory, it would stop scientific research wherever current explanations are deemed unsatisfactory. Some of Kenneth Miller's essays above demonstrate the answers that genetic scientists were eventually able to give to ID's questions about evolution, precisely because they kept at it. Had they merely invoked an indescribable process, they would surely have stopped looking for the scientific description that they were eventually able to obtain.

That is the danger, as I see it, of having science schoolclasses pronouncing ID to be a rival scientific theory. ID does not propose a rival mechanism/description. It proposes instead that when students have questions, they think only the thought that an Intelligent Designer is responsible for the mystery.

Now, I do appreciate some aspects of ID as a social movement. It is a movement of dissent, and as I grow older, and more aware of my own dissent from orthodoxy, I've grown to appreciate dissent. Part of the reason is that debate often moves me to understand problems more deeply. ID, strange as it may seem, moves me to understand the theory of evolution better than if there had been no challenges at all. And surely any truth that never experiences challenge will stagnate; so challenge almost always has some good benefits.

On a slightly different but related note, I can appreciate ID for challenging scientists and telling us, for instance, that scientists are not a uniquely self-critical species, and that science itself is not a uniquely self-critical enterprise. Religious faith can be extremely self-critical; and scientists can be dogmatic. Certainly, like all of us, they're inherently resistant to being challenged on basic points.

And that is where I seem to get in trouble with some opponents of ID, probably because it seems I am merely repeating the implication made by ID, and by conspiracy theories, that the establishment is resistant only, or especially, to good ideas. I actually cannot say that this is true. Human beings are often resistant to bad ideas. I've seen that in both religion and science.

My only claim is that ID and, yes, even creationism, can be viewed as complex things. As science they do not pass muster, but they also represent the public faces of millions of ordinary people who are not loonies and who have philosophical opinions on reality worth listening to, and even valid political views. (The latter is much harder for me to affirm, but I still affirm it). When such theists tell us, for instance, that they see evolution being used to push atheism, it is time to enter the conversation constructively, not time to dismiss them. That is a must in a society that values religious freedom; and it is the best basis upon which to ask for the same freedom of thought in return.

For this reason and others, I think it's wrong to refute ID by telling everyone that it is already rejected and not worth looking at. One of the ways that this gets done is by saying that ID is merely creationism, as if to say, that was already rejected, and this is no different. I don't object to the claim, in itself, that ID is creationism; that is a claim that can be discussed, and tested against observation. I find it to be a questionable claim, given the formal acceptance by ID of the earth's old age and the lack of any focus by ID on Genesis. But it's okay to debate ID's relationship to creationism. What is not okay is to make the claim as a way to make the refutation of ID easier or automatic.

My recent debates have been a profound learning experience for me, because I have been known to dismiss dissident theories in politics and religion by saying essentially, "This has already been discredited." As I note above, such a claim may or may not be true, and it's worth debating. But what I've learned is the degree to which such a claim is unconvincing in itself. It certainly braces you when you hear that something was discredited long ago. It is, in that sense, a very powerful way to induce good debate and deep learning. But that just makes it the start of the conversation, not the end. As an answer, "This has already been discredited, and all its questions have been answered," is astoundingly unsatisfying. You long to find out for yourself what actually happened; and you long for the actual answers to the questions raised by the dissenting theories. Hearing merely that the answers were given long ago does not cut it. Hearing it too often positively induces suspicion, even hostility.

In my debates I ran into an opposition to ID that was so automatic that I was assumed to be making conspiracy theories in support of ID. Even though the misunderstanding occurred with only one person and was cleared up, it was not easy to clear up, and it has left me somewhat unnerved -- all the more because, as one isolated event, it is merely anecdotal and not something that I can draw general conclusions from. What I mean is that I remain uncertain as to what happened, and to what degree I am myself to blame. What I do know is that because I was misheard in such a basic manner -- more basic than in any misunderstanding that I can recall being a part of -- I felt for the first time in my life the barest twinge of discouragement with regard to studying the theory of evolution. It was an emotional reaction, and a logical fallacy: you cannot associate a theory with the personal interactions that you have in debating it. Maybe you can judge people as people, but that is not the factor upon which the theory that they hold should succeed or fail in your judgment -- not if you mean to study it intellectually. And all of us should study the theory of evolution. I remain committed, as a Christian, to truth, which would make it impossible for me to stop listening to true science; and I remain blessed with a happy enjoyment of scientific discovery and literature. Yet I'm troubled by an experience where I sought to learn about ID, making it plain repeatedly that I did not buy ID as a scientific theory, but was told just as often that I had no cause to regard ID as science, and no cause to regard its questions as having foundation anymore.

I've learned that a sure way to drive people away from solid mainstream knowledge is to tell them that their questions are already answered, instead of simply giving the answers, and to imply in any way that their questions are merely hostile challenges akin to conspiracy theories. This is a failure to acknowledge that people have good questions. A teacher who actually knows the detailed answers is certainly free to tell his or her students that their questions are no good, or to suggest that their questions arise from something other than curiosity and a love of learning, discussion, and debate; but such a teacher would be profoundly wrong to do so. I say that if you have questions about gaps in the fossil record, then you have a good question. If you wonder why there are no stars in the photographs of the Apollo astronauts standing on the moon, you have a good question. If you want to know more about Marx's critiques of his society, you're asking good questions. And I have said this before in personal debates, but it should be worth repeating here: if you want to know why Jesus Christ had no biographies written in his own lifetime, I say you have a good question. My having good answers to these questions does nothing to make your question bad. If I take my own knowledge as evidence of your own ignorance, bad faith, or stupidity, I guarantee that I will have contributed to the perception among conspiracy theorists that elite purveyors of knowledge are controlling access to the truth.

The only bad questions are those that occur when the answer is sitting right in front of the questioner; or when the answer is sitting in a place that is easily identified and accessible. And I mean very easy, for even the slightest inaccessibility, however temporary, can warrant a friendly question or request. What is truly objectionable is when good answers are given, and people persist, usually in some open or unidentified bias, in the kind of conspiracy thinking that allows them to conclude that answers are impossible, withheld, or irredeemably tainted. That, frankly, is an attitude in whose shoes I have not been able to walk. Creationism seems to have walked there in many of its claims, and I suspect the same of ID.

For now it is simply enough for me to know that in some very important debates in my life, I now understand how unconvincing I must have been at those moments when I merely and heatedly insisted that the challenge had already been answered, as if to say, we need not look at it anymore. Anything that stops inquiry rather than encouraging it may be called a mistake.

The Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum (BAUT), where I had my recent debate, has Forum Rules that link to a certain thread as recommended reading for anyone arguing alternative theories (they're called ATM theories, or Against The Mainstream). The whole thread is useful and interesting, but this short post especially.

intelligence in the universe

2006-03-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

Some recent reflections.

We know with certainty that the universe has come to reflect upon itself in some sense because we, who are a part of the universe, reflect upon it. When we reflect upon its ultimate origins, we are left contemplating a mystery. But it hardly seems uncertain that consciousness has arisen where once there was only unconscious matter.

For the moment, let's think of unconscious matter as unintelligent and merely obeying the laws of nature. We look out on the universe and we see conditions that are, in the immediate sense, hostile to any life or consciousness that might come into contact with it. Nothing, for instance, lived in the early seconds after the Big Bang, when temperatures prevailed which were so high that atoms did not yet exist; nor do we detect the possibility of life in the much reduced infernos at the centers of present-day stars. The heat is too hostile, and so is the crushing gravity.

When we look out in the universe and back into time, or we look directly at the craters of the moon, we see a history of violent attraction between objects. The earth is a rock in a stable orbit around a star. This orbit is a remnant of a violent history; it is an orbit that allows life to grow and finally to look out upon its universe in contemplation of repeated patterns and consistent laws of nature. What we have here is matter that has moved sufficiently away from violence to achieve consciousness. What once dumbly obeyed the laws of nature and was therefore caught up in violence, now finds itself not merely aware of those laws, but also contemplating free will.

Let's acknowledge, however, that moving away from violence into quiet stability is not sufficient by itself to produce consciousness. Many objects in the universe, while no longer colliding with other objects, have ceased also to produce very much activity of their own. These cold bodies we might contrast with the intense violent activity inside stars. Neither extreme can produce or sustain life and consciousness.

Hinduism has certain Sanskrit terms describing these extremes and a middle ground: tamas, rajas, and sattwa. Tamas can be translated as inertia, though the term is not restricted to what a physicist would call inertia. Certainly, gravitational inertia would be called tamas, but the idea can also be applied to a rotten apple, decay, illness, sleep, laziness, stupidity, and death. The moon is, relatively speaking, tamasic. It is inert, or mostly so.

Rajas is all anger, power, and violent movement. The sun's nuclear fire is rajasic. So is war and aggressiveness.

Sattwa is often translated as light. What physics terms as light would be called sattwic, though the term is also used to denote lightness of foot, lightness of being; nonviolent but productive activity; and cleanliness. It denotes fullness of life, not in the broad scientific sense of everything that reproduces, but in the narrower poetic sense of that which lives beautifully. It is not the same as enlightenment, but enlightenment would be called sattwic. To say it another way, sattwa is a prerequisite for enlightenment.

Earth is not merely a rock that ultimately escaped violence; it is full of all the ingredients of life. Most of the elements of the universe are found and gathered here in sufficient abundance and stability, in an environment that is neither too hot nor too cold to produce complex activity. Here the elements interact in such a way as to produce, well, all life that we know, and all life that we are moved to call living or conscious.

Our human history is a story of coming to learn how rajas and tamas lead to death -- or to put it in the language of spirituality, how rajas by itself destroys life, and how tamas merely obeys death. Our greatest teachings remind us not to murder, steal, or give in to any vice; they teach us not to fear or obey death, and to work.

When I step back and try to meditate on God's plan for creation, I do so as a Christian; and Christ's turning the other check to evil is in my eyes the farthest along on the path to consciousness I have described. But all the great teachings, like Hinduism's ahimsa (nonviolence), seem to me to come as God's grace: ways by which God has helped us to understand the laws of nature and our relationship to them. We are no longer material merely obeying the physical laws; we are conscious of our will, and of what circumscribes it; and in being aware of these things, we become the conscious matter of the universe.

From this it follows that the violence that we perceive as natural evil, in what we call natural disasters, does not represent God's intelligence or God's intentional will, anymore than what we call man-made evil represents those things. What seems certain is that God has willed conscious and unconscious matter to co-exist, which means that the latter, being unintelligent, will drown or destroy anything weaker than itself.

The tsunami, we can say, is a part of God's intelligent creation with its natural laws, and is in that sense willed by God; but it is not the direct representative of God's will for the universe, which seems to be that consciousness arise from unconsciousness and live in its midst. Consciousness does not arise separately in a painless universe of its own, because God wills that all matter co-exist. All matter seems related, in deeper ways than the mere fact that we are made of the same stuff. The violence of nuclear fusion may be immediately destructive to life as we know it, but it is tremendously creative; it produces the elements from which all life springs; and then it directly sustains the life that comes into being.

That aspect of the relationship is clear. The obligation on the part of conscious matter toward that which is unconscious is less clear, though much has already been affirmed within the human realm: those who have seen the Light are to love the unconscious doers of evil no less than their own friends. That is clear, if controversial.

Does that extend to the natural world? Certainly, the part of the natural world that we call living calls for our respect. Perhaps that which is destructive and cancerous calls for our respect less than what is living and plainly intelligent, like humpback whales; but there is no question anymore that it all deserves to be honored as life.

And what of the nonliving material world? Is there some sense in which that matter which became human and intelligent can find an active positive meaning in co-existing with earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, floods and other material events that have no consciousness of the death that they cause? Of that I'm not sure -- not because I bear any ill feeling to this part of the natural world, but because I can't really conceive of a relationship with nonliving things.

Environmentalism has sought to invest not just animals and plants, but the material Earth itself, with a consciousness and consequent value. That consciousness does not seem to me to exist, because that which comes into contact with life and destroys it -- even while sustaining life at other times -- cannot be conscious in the sense of enlightenment. That which is destructive in the human world, such as Hitler, can be intelligent, but it is not enlightened, since it destroys when it comes into contact with life and even with knowledge; that which is destructive to consciousness in the material world can be no more enlightened. And unless we invest it with a conscious hostile intent, we cannot even call it intelligent (hence another reason that we cannot find it to represent God's intelligence).

But I do have some positive thoughts about this, which follow from realizing that there is no hard distinction between what we call natural evil and man-made evil. A plague exists right at the border of these two things. Its chief agents are not human; but they are not like the nonliving magma of a volcanic eruption, either; they are living things. And people can bring about a plague, for instance by warring with one another; or they can do very little to stop it. So if there is an unclear border between "living" and "unliving" evil, and we know already that we are called to arise from, live among, and minister to living evil, then something similar must follow with regard to what I call unliving evil.

That plainly cannot mean subjecting the earth to whatever we think is best. Such unreflective confidence would be merely falling back into the imitation of the nonliving violent history from which we arose. Any return to such history, by this paradigm, takes us away from enlightenment. To the extent that we have behaved aggressively with natural resources in the past, we have been merely acting out of our own immaturity.

What I can say tentatively is that we are called in some way to cultivate a material environment conducive to life and consciousness.

God's mind is surely a great mystery. What I observe from looking around is that God has willed us not merely to co-exist with unconsciousness, but to arise from it. In short, it is not merely a tragedy that we take injury and suffer death at times from unconsciousness; we arise from it, and for that reason live with it. Love co-exists with lovelessness, and that seems to be how God wills it.

Evolution is plainly ugly. In the early universe, we see unimaginable radiation, vacuum, supreme cold, collision; on earth we see predator and prey, and truly ugly things like cancer. It is even possible, as recently proposed, that life began in viruses.

And then we see all these things in early human history, and too many of them in the present.

We cannot look into the past and expect to find only the wonders of God’s benevolence. What we can expect to find instead is unconsciousness, and God raising consciousness from it.

Asking for ID

2006-03-15T01:34:00.000-05:00

At Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, I've been posting several comments in an ongoing discussion/debate about the nature and origins of the Intelligent Design movement. This is not a question I'm currently working on, and I doubt I can give it much time, but I would like to get a better grip on this question since it's so much in the news. And it's an important issue in itself.

The focus of my postings so far at Bad Astronomy has been whether and how ID can be classified as a form of creationism.

I've started a thread at the BAUT Forum seeking opinions on this, and would welcome any thoughts on it -- here or there, in writing or in person, or by phone, email, chat, singing telegram, carrier pigeon, whatever.

No Greater Love

2006-03-01T14:33:00.000-05:00

At Metacrock's blog, I left a few comments responding to his post about the Atonement. He holds views about how Christ saved us that might be said to fall outside the mainstream, but they're similar to my own. Yet I've never given it any sustained thought, until now, so I've been unable to articulate it, at least to myself, the way I had hoped. I have found myself struggling with verses in Scripture that can be read -- especially at moments when you're not feeling God's love -- as if God's wrath was satiated by Christ's suffering and death on a cross.

But if you enter these sorts of struggles honestly, without asking easy questions or settling for easy answers, there is a payoff, and confusion tends to give way.

The central Christian claim is that Christ saved us. At least in my adult life, I have not held the view that Christ paid a ransom for our sin, and have held that it was an act of love -- but trying in that case to explain the salvation in mere words and logic is not easy to do. In what sense can I say that Christ died for our sake?

The basic meaning of dying for someone else is that you save them from physical death. Christ said in John's gospel that no greater love exists than to lay down your life for your friends.

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends (John 15:12-13).

That is pretty straightforward. It's the sort of statement that makes you think of people saving the lives of friends and strangers at the World Trade Center, for instance. And I have been thinking a lot about this, having just finished 102 Minutes. But I will say here that the problem of evil is the single greatest challenge to Christian faith -- and that Christ's death on a cross, as an instance of evil done upon an innocent human being, should be able to offer a direct answer.

Everyone knows, of course, that Christians see meaning in suffering, beginning at Christ's cross. But I am reminded that not all Christians see the same things in Christ's death. My own current struggle with Scripture begins with Christ's statement about laying down your life for a friend. Some Christians see him as laying down his own life so that we do not have to pay for our collective sins. If I hold anything like the same view, it is not by the same route. I begin with the straightforward sense that to lay down your life for someone means that you attempt to save their physical life. No Christian will hold that Christ was telling his apostles to pay the debt of sins in others; that role, if given, is left to Christ. He seems rather to be laying out a straightforward value: the value of life in this world; and the greatness inherent in valuing your friend's life more than your own. I want to begin with that straightforward sense.

Indeed, that physical sense of saving someone is something that I think can be appreciated by theists and atheists alike; and I have tried to isolate that sense in debates before. I have, at various times, asked both atheists and theists to start regarding Christ's death on the cross by thinking of instances like the example mentioned above (helping someone survive, in a common struggle for survival, on 9-11), or in fictional examples. One that always comes to mind, because I have an affection for the book and movie, is Gandalf's act of placing himself between his friends and the Balrog. As we go into this subject, we'll see how Christ was different; but for now let's stick to the basic sense of saving someone's physical life.

In The Rise of Christianity, agnostic sociologist Rodney Stark describes how Christians and pagans reacted differently to epidemics. Pagans reacted naturally, by simply fleeing those who had fallen sick, or by expelling the sick from their homes and leaving them to die without shelter or food. Christians took care of their sick, which was one reason that their numbers in the Empire went up; Stark goes into some detail about this. The command to love one another, and the hope of an afterlife, motivated Christians to save lives, and to do so with less fear of death; those who survived the illness then developed immunities; and those who cared for others had the favor returned when they fell sick. Pagans observed Christians surviving epidemics in higher numbers, and occasionally they, too, when sick, would be taken in by Christians; all this would lead regularly enough to conversion.

Did Christ risk or lay down his life in this sense? Well, he did approach those who were sick and outcast, without treating them as unclean. But he did not die that way, and what I'm after is the meaning behind his death.

Christ announced the coming of a kingdom. Like so many of the Israelite prophets, he denounced the authorities among his people for immoral stewardship of God's children, particularly the vulnerable. He ministered to and lived among the latter, and extended them an invitation into the kingdom that largely bypassed the ordinary authorities. He had in common with Gandalf the role of escort and steward, and he led his friends on a journey, but this was not a mission in which they were asked to destroy evil -- this was simply a call to trust in the Lord and to give your life to love. It was a call to take up your own cross, certainly; but in the context of the command to love, Christ's words seem to imply the need to take up suffering for the sake of others, rather than a clarion call for his followers to defeat evil in the world. The latter is something which he saw as God's role, with himself as the chief agent. The evil would come, and he would submit to it without raising an army. The powers that be had to be satisfied -- they had to have a scapegoat to fulfill their own laws of justice. The oppressed population at large would be left alone if the powers could have such a scapegoat. Christ was, in that sense, standing between the people and whatever danger would ensue from those who felt their power threatened by his announcements and his ministry to those whom the worldly authorities did not serve.

Someone, in short, was bound to pay the ultimate price in this journey. The price was going to be exacted by evil, but its manifestation was an evil that every time and place has known -- the evil maneuverings of selfish and oppressive rulers who prefer people to remain dead in spirit so that they cause no trouble and remain in thrall to the installed powers. The price in coming alive to God and throwing your devotion to him would normally be paid by those who were largely innocent, in God's eyes, of such punishment as this fallen world repeatedly metes out. So God stepped in as our human leader, and took the brunt of the struggle, paying the highest price, while he was here in body.

This would have been a mere temporary fix if not for a few things. First, he gave us an example by which to lead. He did not call for his followers to rise up in a futile physical struggle; nor did he call for them to save him from death. The whole point was that he, as their leader, was their servant; and no servant asks his master to step into danger and make irreversible sacrifices. Christ said that his disciples were to love one another as he had loved them; that no one could show greater love than to lay down their life for friends; he said in John 14-17 that they were his friends to the extent that they obeyed his commands, and that his command was to love one another (John's gospel contains no other commands or teachings). To a people living under the constant threat of death because they wished to worship God without the interference of emperor worship and the suppression of their political freedom, he said that the right way to face the cross was to take it up meekly. Do not endanger others, or lead them into danger. Pray not to be put to the test, but if it comes, stand between friends and the evil. Forgive those who torture or execute you, and do not call for your blood to be avenged. All this produced a community which the Romans saw as peaceful; it avoided the persecution that might have been, and it saved lives. It meant that Romans would see Christians potentially as friends who were willing to treat even their abusers with kindness and respect, which was one reason that the Empire became steadily more Christianized. It offered a demonstration of how to conquer the world effectively, not through power but with loving service.

These are all spiritual lessons, but there is still more to add to the core act of temporarily saving your immediate friends' physical lives. That is the atonement.

God showed us how far his love for us extended. We would not have believed that divinity would deign to suffer as a mortal genuinely and altruistically, unless we had experienced altruistic love from a human being who had seemed genuinely to come from God, or to be God. We saw in Jesus that God wished to live as we do, and that he was willing, perhaps even that he wished, to suffer and die as we do. This was not something masochistic, but an identification with those whom he loved. Love is just a desire to be with someone, at all times -- perhaps especially, the more genuine the love is, to be with the person when times are bad and the person is alone, sick, hungry, unclothed, persecuted, or in trouble.

And a lover, besides wanting to express his love, wishes his expression to be understood -- to register. Know that I love you, Jesus says constantly in John's gospel. The Atonement is a reconciliation of two lovers -- parent and child, master and servant, or friends, or spouses -- who have been estranged because one has rejected the other. The Atonement works on many levels. It is a reunion of lovers, certainly. It is also a service done by a leader who is calling his followers to a place that they have desired but dared not reach for without help.

It is, too, an act of identification -- in more than one sense of the word. Someone can identify themselves by revealing their name, as so many lovers have in world literature. Think of Joseph revealing himself to his brothers, Viola revealing herself to her twin brother, or Odysseus revealing himself to Penelope. Think, too, of God revealing his identity and name to Moses in the burning bush; and Jesus revealing his name, "I am", in John's gospel. Someone can also reveal their true nature by word and action: and here we have countless examples from Christ's life and ministry. But above all we have the manner of his leaving life.

The Atonement works because it convinced a lover, who had often despaired of receiving favor again, that favor was being freely given; and the proof was given through sacrificial work instead of with mere promises as a false or superficial lover might give. The Atonement works to the extent that it reconciled God and humanity in love. It did save us from God's wrath, as Paul says, not because God was full of wrath when he regarded us, but because his love for us, even as sinners, was invincible (see Romans 5:8-9).

But it was not a love that was neutral. Love can't be neutral. It was a love that necessarily infused the spirit of the lover into the beloved. Paul says that we have been infused with the spirit of God -- meaning that God's love, which we studied in its example and accepted gladly in its gifting, has changed us. We have become more worthy of the love, in a sense, not through our own efforts, but simply because apart from our perfect lover, we love less perfectly.

... we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not dissappoint, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).

Christ gave us an example of a life lived in love -- and he showed us a new way to suffer or die, in love. This way we endure more than we had ever thought possible, and consequently become better people in ways we had not thought possible. Something similar in a very basic sense goes on every time that a great scholar, scientist, artist, or athlete shows that things we had thought impossible, or failed to think of at all, are actually possible through a combination of ingenuity, courage, faith, toil and endurance -- except that this went beyond example, instruction, or inspiration. Christ really made it possible by infusing us with the necessary spirit, in the way that love (not the mere feeling but its manifestation) can infuse and strengthen us. It liberated us, as love can, from self-hate, and self-struggle, and pointed us to the better struggle of serving others through ordinary sacrifice and, at times, extraordinary danger, if such is the need.

In late research for this post, I have come upon an interesting essay at the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia online, originally published in 1911. I usually link to new scholarship, but the Encyclopedia's entry for the Atonement is well worth reading for several reasons. First, it tells us that the term originally meant "at one".

The word atonement, which is almost the only theological term of English origin, has a curious history. The verb "atone", from the adverbial phrase "at one" (M.E. at oon), at first meant to reconcile, or make "at one"...

Second, it covers the centuries of debate about the Atonement. It identifies Peter Abelard (d. 1142) as the chief proponent of the idea that the Atonement was to be understood as love.

Finally, it emphasizes that the various interpretations of the Atonement have common ground and should not be pressed apart from one another, and that if Abelard's view is not the favored one of the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Atonement was of course an act of love among other things. I am thankful for this sort of perspective -- as I also am thankful for reading that the view in which Satan holds rights over human beings was long ago broken by the arguments, not only of Abelard, but of saints who disagreed with his overarching emphasis on an incarnation of love.

Yet I cannot help but feel that we run into similar problems with the mainstream view that, before Christ came, we had incurred a huge and unpayable debt which could only be paid in the blood of God, through his pain and suffering, added upon the pain already inflicted in our sins against one another. It is the idea of God, or divine justice, being satisfied by pain and suffering that I find problematic. God is owed love and obedience; and these things satisfy him. That we owe him our lives is unquestioned; that God can punish sins or evil is likewise assumed. But so much evil falls unjustly upon human beings -- there are unjust wars, for one -- that I shrink from the view that God is satisfied in any way by pain and suffering. It makes far more sense to me that disobedience to God produces evil, which results in suffering that God helps us to overcome -- as in the coming of Christ and the Holy Spirit. He gives us strength to endure the pain in a basic sense, no doubt, but God's gift is not mere comfort. It is also a challenge to us, with his grace, to overcome evil in another sense. Acting in love destroys evil at its root, in the human heart, and replaces it in the external world with loving actions. Looking after the welfare of others thwarts evil before it can fall; and standing between them and evil when it must come robs evil of its power.

I had not meant these reflections on the Atonement to slip into a discussion of such a large problem as evil. But for me, as I'm discovering by writing it out, the two are intertwined.

102 Minutes

2006-02-26T23:35:00.000-05:00

I've been revisiting 9-11 these last few weeks, after having picked up 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. Their book tells the stories of those people who were inside the towers that morning. Two individuals who appear in the book are justly famous: Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the brothers who filmed so many of the key events of that day. I saw their clip of the first plane crash when I got to a television at my parents' house on the night of September 11, and watched their documentary, "9-11", when it aired on network TV some months later. I saw it again last week after finishing 102 Minutes; and it's been a depressing visit to the past all around. There are no soft edges around these events; they still leave you with a mix of fear, adrenaline, and disgust. They leave you feeling a little less alive.

Perhaps that is due to the rawness of both 102 Minutes and "9-11" as simple documentary records. Neither is cooked into something palatable, sentimental, or political, and both are sensitively done rather than exploitative. I was not aware, while reading 102 Minutes, that the record within it contradicted any myths about the day, and I'm not even sure I'd heard of the existence of 9-11 myths, other than the conspiracy theories. Nothing I was reading seemed controversial, but Dwyer and Flynn affirm in their afterword that there are certain myths around the history of 9-11.

The authors note that in 2004, Mayor Guiliani insisted that firefighters stayed in the north tower to save people even after hearing the order to evacuate. In 102 Minutes, it's clear that countless firemen did not hear the order, their communications system having long been hampered by bureaucracy and by the infighting among the various New York City rescue departments; that the firefighters were occupied, understandably, with climbing the stairs; that most survivors saved themselves, or each other.

On the other hand, I was surprised to read that some firefighters did reach the fire. One elevator remained operational in the south tower after the second plane crashed into it, and that elevator took a few firefighters up to the 40th floor. Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer, a dynamo on the stairs, climbed another 38 floors to the impact zone, arriving at the lobby on the 78th floor by 9:51 a.m. He and a few other firefighters worked a little while longer before losing their lives in the first collapse at 9:59 a.m.

Firefighters in the north tower had been climbing longer, since the first plane impact, and some did climb as much as Chief Palmer. But without an elevator, that put them only in the 40s, perhaps the 50s. And their impact zone was higher: it began at the 94th floor. They had the full 102 minutes between the first plane and the second collapse, but they got only about halfway to the fire.

A very large crowd of firefighters, some of them suffering from chest pains and the like under loads of 60 pounds or more, were still resting on the 19th floor as the last of the interviewed survivors came down. Dwyer and Flynn note that few could have made much headway to safety, if they began evacuating.

I cannot understand why such comments as these have prompted a small number of Amazon reviewers to reject the book as unpatriotric, and in one case even to say that Dwyer and Flynn are blaming Americans rather than terrorists for the deaths. The authors explicitly lay the blame on the terrorists, and they do not stray from documenting lives to make any geo-political analysis. The loss of human life has to be studied: and if blame is put on Americans, it is only for those lives which could still have been saved after the planes hit.

And even from the nationalist perspective that prompts an occasional reader to reject the book, there is every reason to identify where Americans might have been at fault. That's because if one of the aims of terrorists is to take the lives of Americans, then we thwart their aims by protecting our own people as best we can.

I do not, however, find myself angry at the firefighters, police and medics. There is much wrong in their organizations, but there is not much wrong with them. One medic a few blocks from the towers, in the middle of his work, began sobbing because his wife had a job in the north tower. He went back to look for her. She escaped, and he did not. It's these kinds of stories that command your greatest emotions when reading, and this story haunted me more than any other.

I was surprised also to learn that most of the normal population of the towers had already arrived by the time the attack began. Dwyer and Flynn report that population at around 17,400, and they calculate that some 14,100 had arrived already (not counting the thousand or so who were in the Marriott Hotel, a place where people were killed). Popular figures based on the numbers of workers and visitors who travel in some way through the lower concourse and all seven of the World Trade Center buildings had left me assuming that something like 50,000 people would have been present in the full lengths of the towers when the planes hit. That is not so. The hijackers picked early flights, but nevertheless they endangered most of the people who put in a typical workday at the towers. Dwyer and Flynn do not say so, but perhaps the one population that was truly spared by the early flights would be the hundreds of sightseers typically present at any one time in the south tower's observatory. I was there as a child a few times; and I lunched in the plaza directly beneath the towers for a few weeks in the spring of 2000, staring upwards for a long time on one day, trying to get a sense of how massive each tower was.

Dwyer and Flynn describe the energy released in each tower's collapse as equivalent to 1% of a nuclear explosion. That is not a surprise when you think about everything that's been written concerning their size. Still, I had never regarded the 9-11 attack as falling within the nuclear scale -- despite the phrase "Ground Zero", which historically has referred to the point underneath a nuclear explosion. The energy released on 9-11 has been estimated at 600 kilotons of TNT, which includes both impacts and collapses, and perhaps also the collapse of the Marriott and the 47-story building at 7 World Trade Center. That total is actually around 5 percent of the 12,500 kilotons released upon Hiroshima.

Considering the destructive energy of the attack is one way for me to reflect on why 9-11 has been regarded as such a unique horror. Someone once told me that other people suffer 9-11 every day, and I disagree with that emphatically, for reasons that I hope will be clear. But I do believe that our country has overreacted to the attack, not in aiming to destroy Al-Qaeda but, at the very least, in linking Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda. The number of people who died at the trade center, as reported by Dwyer and Flynn, is 2,749, not including the hundreds who perished on the remaining two flights and within the Pentagon; a very similar total number of civilians were killed in Afghanistan by the campaign that toppled the Taliban. Yet when an early estimate of 3,000 Iraqi civilian deaths was reported here, an American supporter of the invasion was quoted in the New York Times as saying that this was merely justice for the 3,000 deaths on 9-11; and that strikes me as narrow-sighted in obvious ways.

The number of people who died at the Trade Center is very small compared to losses in other man-made catastrophes. Is it the shock of that morning that makes the event loom so large? Is it the uniqueness of the kind of attack, with hijacked planes as missiles? Is it the evil of an attack on a target that was populated, visited, and protected by civilians? Or perhaps the poignancy of losing so many civilians who rushed selflessly into a danger that they did not foresee? Or the international death toll? Or was it the sense we felt, as in a war, that blows were landing across a country?

Is it the height of the towers? Here we have a quality with multiple influences on our imagination. The height added labor and heroism, and a certain quixotic nature, to the rescue efforts. It added almost the same qualities to any effort to escape. It left those who were isolated above the impact zones with a terrible choice, and introduced what I consider the most awful image of the whole day -- the sight of people falling to the distant concrete below. Perhaps that sight is especially dismaying to Westerners, who have worked at such heights and looked straight down from observatories.

All of these factors influence us. But one that always sticks in my mind is the collapse of each tower. It is not merely that each tower was collossal enough to have made even a controlled demolition frightful. It is also not simply that the collapses contributed that morning to a sense of receiving four large and disorienting blows (two impacts, two collapses) in quick succession, and that each of the first three blows shocked us with new information or increasingly dreadful realizations. It is also that there cannot be many moments in history when so many lives have been snuffed out in essentially an instant. Each tower fell in about 10 seconds, and a great number of those who lost their lives did so instantly at the top.

When searching for comparisons with other disasters, I think first about the Titanic; and that comparison seems to be the most commonly used, even by Dwyer and Flynn. 1,500 people lost their lives within about 20 minutes of first slipping into the frigid Atlantic -- but not in an instant (though some unknowable number still below deck probably were drowned within seconds of one another). Tens of thousands were lost in certain firestorms during World War II, but again, not instantaneously. Similar things must be said of natural disasters. Now, when we get to airplane crashes, we do find the sudden death of hundreds -- and the first two crashes on 9-11 were among the deadliest in history, each taking the lives of a few hundred people more or less instantly. In the collapse of each WTC tower, even greater numbers of people were instantly killed and brutally buried. Perhaps the only historical instants that I find comparable are those dreadful moments when atomic flashes incinerated thousands of people and began catastrophic fires in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even measuring the historical moment as lasting 102 minutes, that is a short time for such massive loss of life. Countries throughout the world suffer far greater losses, extending into the millions, from wars and from the pestilence and famine they cause. But even in a large war, a death toll is considered unusually large when a single bomb, or two bombs, cause 100 people to lose their lives instantly or under the stresses of wounds and infection. So a quick loss of thousands from essentially two bombs leaves us haunted, and is what brings us to compare the event against the loss of a hundred thousand or more from a single atomic bomb, as at Hiroshima.

Yet some perspective is needed here, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons. There were many collapses of buildings from fires in Hiroshima; the city even suffered one of the handful of firestorms witnessed during World War II. Fire is essentially what destroyed the city -- and it's essentially what destroyed the city-within-a-city said to have existed in the vertical towers and the vast concourse below. I am not a scientist, yet it seems to me that the better comparison would be between the Hiroshima bomb's explosion and the total energy released by the impacts of the planes (Dwyer and Flynn note that the first impact registered at the Earth Observatory twenty-two miles to the north), or between the destruction wrought by subsequent fires in both places.

Any comprehensive war, without a doubt, spreads more terror and sorrow than 9-11 did. And the tsunami of December 2004 caused destruction on a scale exceeding anything done by human beings in a single morning: the earthquake itself released energy equivalent to several of the most powerful nuclear explosions ever attempted. For all these reasons, I think we need to be careful not to exaggerate the power of 9-11. Some analogies are more appropriate than others.

While reading 102 Minutes, I recalled two books more than any others: John Hersey's Hiroshima, which reconstructs that bombing from interviews with six survivors; and Walter Lord's A Night To Remember, the definitive account of Titanic's sinking. There are many more similarities with Lord's account -- particularly the attempt, by a non-participant, to keep an eye on hundreds of personal stories.

And the analogy with Titanic itself seems to be the best. Titanic was called unsinkable, and the towers were thought to be capable of surviving the impact of any civilian airliner; faulty reasoning and pride in mechanical marvels undergirded both assumptions. The White Star liner, like the WTC, has been called a city unto itself. It even took 160 minutes to sink, and thus went down in a very similar drama, offering the reader a rich prompting of the question, "What would I do?"

I am tempted to restate the common argument that Titanic's sinking drew more attention at the time, and in the twenty years since Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage, than the event warrants; and to extend the analogy to 9-11. The trouble is that Titanic's sinking was not an event driven by international politics or religion, and it was not murder or terrorism. 9-11 draws up questions which cannot be more serious. What does it mean to profess faith in God when God is used to justify murder? How can we stop political murder? What do we do about war?

We don't need the Titanic analogy, or any other, to decide the importance of the 9-11 attack. And my suggestion is that, while the human aspect is endlessly rich, as in 102 Minutes, the political and religious aspects have been distorted and blown out of proportion by calling 9-11 an act of war. It was an act of terrorism, which is something similar but not equivalent. The primary purpose of the attack was to sow great fear with as simple an effort as possible. By unleashing aggression against nation states, as if World War II were repeating itself, we've been acting on the fear that these terrorists sowed.

In the days after September 11, I wrote a personal note to the effect that any true understanding of the event would have to begin with an eye on the suffering. Say a prayer for the departed and the survivors; or if you're an atheist, just keep your compassion fixed on how the violence unfolded for the lives on the ground; then all other understanding would proceed correctly. 102 Minutes is not a religious book, but it does keep its eye on the human aspect; and it succeeds in weaning us from at least some myths. There are many more to go -- like the idea that 9-11 began World War III.

For a sample of the stories covered in 102 Minutes, there is a very good interactive feature by Dwyer, Flynn and others at the New York Times website.

Life as Science

2006-02-20T12:14:00.000-05:00

I don't usually repeat on my blog the posts I make elsewhere on the web. But earlier today I left the following comment at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, responding to an analogy he was making -- and the comment I left there just seems to touch on everything that I tend to write about, so I'm pasting it here. I'm also putting it on both my blogs, which is also something I've never done; but as I said, it touches on everything I care about.
_________________

I just want to point out some problems I see with Phil's analogy.

"Those organisms that can handle the input from their environment survive, while those that cannot deal with it fail. Those that can adapt, even marginally, to outside influence are able to better cope with whatever comes next.....

"A scientist who is too stiff, too resistant to change, will find themselves extinct if the evidence from observation becomes overwhelmingly against them.

"Evolution is a fact, both in nature and in science. If more people realized this simple truth, and the beauty inherent in it, then a lot of nonsense would become extinct as well."

Phil is talking about adapting to an environment of ideas. This seems correct; as a layperson not studying evolution myself, the theory of evolution is not a thing that comes to me apart from the ideas of others; it reaches me not as a material fact, but as an idea from the environment of ideas.

But Phil slips into talking about how people should realize that evolution is a fact in nature as well as in science: how we should adapt to the input of nature itself as well as to the input of scientists. All this is true, of course; but the way it's put is problematic. It's the environment of ideas that we're adapting to. People adapt to the ideas that are prevalent in their culture. If I'm religious and I see friendly ideas out there, and other unfriendly ones out there, I live among the friendlies and fight, or take flight from, the unfriendlies. That's how our adaptation looks: it's not so much a rational focus on mere material facts in intellectual theories; what we're interested in is whether everything we care about (including nature, or science, or God, or family, or material facts and intellectual theories) can find a friendly environment in which to grow.

And so creationists and scientists take flight from, or fight, each other, while attaching themselves to friendlies. And both sides regard their opponents as not really paying attention to facts (or at least not to the important facts).

Anyway that's how our adaption to the environment works. We adapt to cultures. We also adapt to material facts, but those tend to be facts about our present material condition, not about whether the earth existed 10,000 years ago. Cultural evolution does not favor necessarily those who have the correct theory about the past. It favors those who can find friendlies, avoid or defeat unfriendlies, adopt life-enhancing ideas (a lot of people, myself included, find religion to be life-enhancing), and influence others.

I'm certain that Phil's analogy will strike a too-broad range of religionists as unfriendly. Religionists are, after all, essentially metaphysicists (like all of us, in a sense, since we all care about much more than intellectual theories concerning material facts). An analogy likes this tells them essentially that they're maladapted creatures. I fully accept evolution, and regard both creationism and ID as wrong, so I'm not particularly vexed by all this; I happen to love Phil's work against bad thinking. But even I feel as if I'm appearing in this analogy like a maladapted creature, just for being someone who thinks that we're responsible for adapting to much more than the theory of evolution.

Like all of us, I care about things other than intellectual theories about material matter; and like creationists, I care about God and about whether my religion has friendlies or unfriendlies. I care about things other than theories about material matter, which is, for me, a problem with an analogy in which the primary thing that makes us well-adapted and destined for prosperity is not anything metaphysical (and certainly not our belief in God), but our adherence to intellectual theories about matter, as brought to us by scientists. Those theories may be correct (and evolution certainly is), but as a non-scientist dealing with much more than matter, my prosperity rests on much more than these theories; and it certainly does not rest on what these scientists have to say about God and all the rest.

If it were the case that adapting to intellectual theories about matter were the most important factor in our prosperity, scientists should have a privileged place; and what they say about anything metaphysical should trump what any non-scientists has to say. I doubt that Phil, for one, believes this; but I see his analogy as having this consequence. A different analogy, in which we're all adapting to cultures and fighting for the things we care about, puts us all on a more equal plane; and it does not suggest that we have to listen to scientists or materialists when it comes to God or religion. That is the great fear of creationists -- that evolution (besides being wrong in their view, because they follow the Bible literally) will be used to promote a worldview in which everything they care about will be marked with labels such as "irrational," "maladapted," "headed for extinction."

A little more attention should go to the cultural war, and into models explaining how we take flight from it, or fight in it; or seek a truce. It seems to me that long lifespan can be expected for all of us if we find a way not just to avoid war (flight) or win it (fight), but to defuse it.

The Googolplex

2006-02-17T11:48:00.000-05:00

The madness of the googolplex, at my other blog, Catching the Sky.

The God Who Wasn't There (addendum)

2006-02-13T15:39:00.000-05:00

Last year Brian Flemming released a film, The God Who Wasn't There, disputing Christ's existence. Reviews of the movie are not that common, and they tend to be rather short. Now we have a fuller anaylysis by GakuseiDon, a moderate Christian who has challenged key aspects of Earl Doherty's mythicist model. That model is generally regarded as the best, and it seems to be the one that Flemming follows. Don's considerable experience with mythicism has gone into the review, which extends beyond the specific claims in the movie and discusses mythicism as a broad category. The review is technically in four parts, of which the last is pending -- but it is the first three sections which deal primarily with the movie.

The first part is largely a treatment of the various parallels that are said to exist between Christ and pagan gods. Don argues something essential and easily forgotten -- that the primary sources for Christ have to be checked against the primary sources in the pagan literature. He shows that this is generally not done, and that we have essentially a set of "urban myths" floating around the internet. He offers a useful list of such parallels, and demonstrates the surprising degree to which Flemming relies on 19th century scholarship now rejected even by Doherty and his most scholarly supporters. To some extent, Flemming's work represents what might be called popular mythicism -- that broad category of mythicist claims about Jesus that have some popular appeal, regardless of whether or not the claims still appeal to intellectual skeptics.

In my own writings, I have dealt primarily with Doherty's model, because it is the one that seems to speak most to intellectual skeptics. It has been some time since I paid any attention to other models, which credulously generate parallels between numbers (numerology) and stories (indiscriminate parallels between Christian and pagan literature). Flemming himself does not dabble in numerology, but nevertheless his work succeeds in reminding me that mythicism has a life of its own apart from Doherty. It is these types of popular mythicism which are likeliest to make an appearance in a movie or DVD, even one made by a film-maker who generally follows Doherty's model and interviews Doherty himself.

Don's second section is my favorite, because it gives us a clear and convincing explanation for why the early Christian writers attempted to paint their own parallels between Christ and pagan gods. Flemming tries to build on these parallels in his movie but, as Don shows us, the pagans of antiquity did not accept them. The Roman empire tolerated those cults which were old or which showed a continuity with the past. The early Christians tried to win more respect for their religion by saying that their new movement was really nothing new, and certainly nothing deserving condemnation. So they stretched some of the similarities between Jesus' story and that of the pagan gods. And they went on to explain why the pagans did not recognize these parallels.

The third section deals with Paul's alleged silence about Christ's life. Don puts Paul's writings into perspective by describing other silences that might be seen in the ancient record -- for instance, the conspicuously late and thin literary witness to the eruption of Vesuvius. He allows that Paul's specific silences, however, might mean specific things about Paul's knowledge of Christ. And rather than treating the phrases in Paul that are usually fought over, Don focuses on statements by Paul that have received less attention. We are reminded here that Paul seems to place Christ, not in a timeless dimension, but in a historical place and time following the careers of Abraham and Moses.

And Don's overall method is a salutory one: he shows us the probability that various verses are pointing to a coherent conclusion, and he does not focus for too long on any single verse (something I can do too easily).

I highly recommend his review. Even more so, I second Don's own insistence that any reader go on to check the primary sources themselves.

Superman Returns

2006-02-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

Recently Dess and I saw the teaser for the upcoming movie, "Superman Returns." It started with Marlon Brando's voice from the first "Superman" in 1979, a movie I could hardly ever forget. Then we heard John Williams' music from that movie, and I thought for sure this was an advertisement for a revival of the Christopher Reeve version. But the images were unfamiliar -- including a new and grandly mythical Fortress of Solitude. In fact the mythic and religious aspects have been played up very strongly in the teaser. There's a shot of the young Clark Kent leaping across the disk of the sun. There's a wonderful part with the new Superman floating in space above the earth, and descending to the city below just as Superman would -- like a streaking asteroid.

But the way this has been done is what I find so moving, as a Christian. Superman descends to earth after these lines from Brando's original performance:

Even though you've been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.

They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all -- their capacity for good -- I have sent them you, my only son.

A few years ago, I rented the original "Superman" and was surprised that those lines, about the father actually sending his only son for the benefit of human beings, could have made it into the movie. I had not heard that there was anything so explicitly Biblical in the comic. It should be said, though, that I don't know the comic. And I don't mind the allusion to the Gospel -- especially when I consider that the general story of Superman has probably always contained this aspect, or evoked it.

And then there's this astonishing visual from the trailer, which needs no elaboration:

The movie will be out June 30. The trailer is here.

A survey of Christian themes in popular movies is at Hollywood Jesus.

Mythicism's recent showing

2006-01-27T16:50:00.000-05:00

Jesus mythicism has taken something of a drubbing at the Secular Web recently. In the last round of debates, Doherty complained openly that the Secular Web had changed since he last participated on the board, four years ago. He was responding to the rebuke, by the moderators, of his negative use of the word "apologist." But I have the sense, too, that his theory encounters more opponents now, and is less likely to draw favor even from where Doherty might expect it.

Doherty has described the Secular Web as perhaps the place where mythicism is most welcome and best understood. When I first joined the boards last summer, a poll of the members was taken, and I recall seeing something to the effect that 50% of the respondents were Jesus mythicists: they believed that Christianity did not begin with a human savior figure. I do not know what the numbers were four years ago, and I don't know what they might be today. But even in my short time there, I feel as if historicist arguments are being taken more seriously.

It is now almost routine for Doherty to post a new thread and to receive fairly detailed replies from three historicists (I am one of them). Shorter replies by longtime Secular Web historicists are also routinely offered. A professional scholar, an agnostic, has begun debating Doherty at the Secular Web, as I noted in my blog last week. A moderator has started offering some of the best historicist arguments. Another new historicist contributor began a thread about the same KATA SARKA question from my last blog post, and he offered an argument that drew this response from a veteran user: "I think you've just put a whole bunch of nails in the coffin of the MJ argument, at least the bit that relies on kata sarka and what Paul meant when he wrote this phrase."

As this opinion seems to concede, no single piece of evidence, like kata sarka, can disprove mythicism as a whole and prove historicism -- but I agree with him and with the original poster that the argument about kata sarka actually favoring a mythical Christ is effectively refuted.

This is not to argue that mythicism or its component arguments have never been called disproven, on these boards. I don't know about the time before I got there; I just can't remember such a confluence of confident historicist arguments in my half-year there.

I have said more than once that Doherty offers no significant concessions. He conceded in his last post that I was right to emphasize a distinction in ancient thought between, on the one hand, the temporal and changing world of history, and on the other hand, the timeless and incorrupt realm of heaven above. He said nothing about my charge that he has, at different times, placed Paul's conception of Christ's death in both places. Indeed, he has seemed to interpret Paul to mean that God sent his Son from the incorruptible realm and into (the air of) the changing world below ("God sent his Son", Gal 4:4); and yet he has interpreted Paul to be saying that Christ's death occurred in some mythical version of the past and was only recently revealed to human beings in scripture and visions. As evidence for this latter contention, Doherty uses 2 Tim 1:9-10 and Eph 3:9-11 -- passages which neither he nor most scholars believe to have been written by Paul, but which he regards as telling us, not of the pre-existence of God's Son in heaven from all eternity as in the traditional model, but of the fact that Christ's death itself took place before time began. In sum: "The redemptive work of God through Christ has been relegated by Paul and his kind to a dimension outside matter and beyond time" (The Jesus Puzzle, 118-120).

So Christ's death took place before there were any human beings around to witness it -- and yet Doherty insists on top of this, at other times, that the death took place in the sublunar air where presumably human beings were not likely to see it. It seems, on the one hand, that Doherty wants to remove Christ from history by putting him in the primordial past. That takes care of the question of time. And one would think that there is no need to locate Christ in the air if no one was believed to be around to see him. But when it comes to the question of space, Doherty does place Christ in the air above the earth, as a solution that works whenever Paul seems to say that Christ actually descended from God's throne into the world of obedient suffering and corruptible flesh for a onetime sacrifice of himself (at the hands of demons, Doherty believes; and demons were restricted to the world they ruled, namely the lower world of matter). Christ's death is said to be pre-historical when Timothy and Ephesians seem to speak of Christ having existed before the beginning of time; but his death is said to be in the air above the earth when Paul himself says that Christ was sent to us in "the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4), or when the Ascension of Isaish (which Doherty invokes repeatedly) speaks of Christ literally descending from God's spheres in a time after the death of the Biblical Isaiah in the eighth century B.C.E. (see Ascension 3:13, 9:17, 11:37-38).

This contradiction -- or convenient flexibility -- in Doherty's theory can be described in other ways. This is how I described the problem in the post to which he replied with his concession:

But Earl’s theory remains confusing, because in it, the crucifixion is sometimes described as being in the highest heaven, and sometimes in the lowest air; as one of the spiritual counterparts to the fleshly things of our world, and as one of the low, corruptible things that God’s Son had to take on in order to redeem the lowest flesh; as a thing outside of history and matter, and as a thing that Paul thought to have occurred in the sublunary air at a specific point in time (in the “fullness of time”) and presumably only a few years or decades before his own preaching and that of the Jerusalem apostles.

But Doherty did not really address any of this; he conceded only that the changeless world, wherever Paul located it, was not the same as the world of change, wherever Paul located it. He stated a few times that Paul does not give us the exact location and that the ancients themselves were confused about how the cosmos was structured. This seems to me a very bad error on two counts.

Firstly, it seems to equate the ignorance of the ancients about the actual structure of the earth and its surroundings with real confusion or disagreement on their part. Let me offer this article, "A Common Cosmology of the Ancient World," not as the final word on the matter, but as a starting point of conversation for the proposition that all the ancients, regardless of religion or culture, shared the idea that the moon and the stars were set in a dome. On top of this, there is every indication that the monotheistic Jews regarded their deity, not as a piece of the observable world of matter, but rather as a being whose home was beyond the dome that contained visible flesh, the moon, and the stars. For a start, see Genesis 1:8 and 1:14.

Secondly, even if it turns out that the ancients disagreed on such things as the exact location of the dome and on questions of what lay beyond it -- nothing, according to Pliny the Elder -- I think finally that Doherty has projected the confusion of his own model onto the ancients. Whatever Paul believed about the exact structure of the universe, it's plain that for him there was a place of perishable matter and a place of timeless perfection. Doherty intimates the same when he speaks to us about how the age was characterized by Platonism (in this case, Middle Platonism). So there were two worlds in Paul's mind: and his thoughts were given constantly to comparing the two worlds. He plainly believed, although Doherty seems to forget it, that Christ was sent from the one world into the other. So when someone charges the mythicist model with contradictory and confusing statements about where and when Paul thought the crucifixion to have occurred, it does no good to simply imply that Paul himself was confused about it. He was quite clear that it occurred somewhere in our world: that this was the whole point of the Good News.

There is something here that would not just render mythicism incoherent in the terms of the traditional models for understanding this ancient history (terms which I believe to be accurate, but which atheists often reject when considering Christian history), but which would render it incoherent upon its own terms, and which could be explained to atheists and agnostics not already committed to mythicism. I haven't quite put my finger on it. But I'm exploring a contradiction in Doherty's use of the concept of Platonic counterparts. He argues that Christ's unearthly crucifixion could be considered a Platonic "counterpart" to earthly things: a crucifixion in the air, as a counterpart for crucifixions below. Yet if Paul believed that Christ's death occurred in our world, and he was a dualistic thinker as we've have seen, then it's plain that he believed the death to no longer be a spiritual counterpart: he believed it to be one of the things of this world, which a being from another world descended to participate in. He believed this along with everyone else, for the stories of gods incarnating and making contact with our world, even participating in it, are ubiquitous. To say, as Doherty often does, that Paul believed in a Platonic "counterpart" means that he did not believe that Christ had broken into our world. An event of this world, or even one in mere likeness to those of this world, can no longer seriously be described as a spiritual counterpart to the material things of this world.

Doherty has been able to point essentially to only one ancient passage possibly expressing a belief that counterparts could exist within the world of matter. That is Ascension 7:9-10,

And we ascended to the firmament, I and he, and there I saw Sammael and his hosts, and there was great fighting therein and the angels of Satan were envying one another. And as above so on the earth also; for the likeness of that which is in the firmament is here on the earth.

This passage, besides having nothing to do with Paul, is probably also just speaking about the similarities between all the things of the changing world below the dome. Look at 6:13 and 6:15,

And the angel who was sent to make him see was not of this firmament, nor was he of the angels of the glory of this world, but he had come from the seventh heaven.... And the vision which the holy Isaiah saw was not from this world but from the world which is hidden from the flesh.

Here, "firmament" is used to describe the whole realm visible to the flesh: the air and the earth. That corresponds perfectly with the proposition that the ancients thought of flesh, and of the "angels of the glory of this world," as confined to the world below the dome, while thinking of everything above as hidden from our ordinary sight. In essence, then, Doherty's strongest piece of evidence for Platonic "counterparts" located in the air is at best ambiguous, when "firmament" is a proper way to describe the ancient conceptions of the entire sublunar realm (6:13 - 6:15), the sublunar air (7:9-10), and even the dome itself (7:28).

And Doherty has already conceded to GakuseiDon at the Secular Web (see the second paragraph of this post) that it is perhaps best to speak of the crucifixion as taking place in different regions, areas or locales of the sublunar world rather than in a separate "dimension." That word, used in The Jesus Puzzle and perhaps elsewhere, is almost certainly wrong, and I bet that it is one of the things that Doherty says he will change in any second edition of his book. Don is right to suggest that such a word confuses the issue by invoking modern popular conceptions of parallel dimensions, such as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (we could also add Narnia or Harry Potter).

For all these reasons, I am not surprised that agnostics and atheists are either opposing Doherty's sublunar crucifixion theory or increasingly finding it to be unlikely. I think the evidence from Paul's undisputed letters, leaving aside other admittedly mystical and possibly confusing New Testament writings, and other writings such as the Ascension of Isaiah, point strongly to a belief that Jesus Christ descended from the world of spiritual counterparts and into the world of change, decay, suffering and death -- and that he did so at a recent and specific point in history.

Doherty's use of biblical scholars

2006-01-16T19:40:00.000-05:00

My latest debate with Earl Doherty has not amounted to very many exchanges between the two of us, but it has occurred within a thread at the Secular Web (continued here) that includes a wide range of topics, as well as serious disagreements between many participants. It began as the continuation of a contentious debate at the Biblical Studies board between a mythicist and a historicist: the central topic was whether Doherty and his supporters had misrepresented mainstream biblical scholars. One of Doherty's supporters offered a surprising concession on his own behalf, in response to what he identified as the nuance of my criticisms; that was an important lesson to me about the potential of relaxed, nuanced dialogue.

However, my frustration with mythicism in general is growing. I pressed Doherty about several issues left over from our debate over The Ascension of Isaiah, and the result was some unenlightening drama, but no real dialogue. And I expressed more of the impatience that he has provoked in me. It's an impatience that grows as his arguments seem always to return to the same thin reeds. For example, when Paul says that Christ, as God's son from heaven, was nevertheless descended from King David in the sphere of flesh -- as Doherty says in his own translation -- we should hear Paul saying that Christ, who never descended all the way to the earth, was an Israelite, or Jewish; this was what Paul meant by saying that Christ was descended from David.

This is really the worst kind of rationalization, especially given that Paul's use of the same words elsewhere always signifies the flesh of human beings on the earth. It's the sort of special pleading that you find only in the most obtuse and self-regarding theories. All this is bad enough in Doherty, who never concedes that he has made a significant error. But what is really provocative is that Doherty hangs his theory on these thin reeds, and then always returns with undiminished confidence to the charge that Christians and other dissenters from his theory are not worth debating; that mainstream scholars will not debate him because his arguments are strong; that his arguments recall those of Copernicus; that his arguments are just part of the scholarly current in which Christianity and belief in God have been exposed as fantasies of the past. His own manner of bristling dramatically at all criticisms is tiring in a way that goes beyond mere frustration; there is something disturbing about it.

A mainstream scholar, an agnostic, took the time in this thread to debate him. Doherty rejected his arguments and ended by saying that "apologists" are not worth debating. He was challenged by another agnostic whom Doherty had once mis-labeled an apologist; a warning about the use of the word "apologist" was issued by the moderators; and when I piped in to ascertain whether this warning would apply to Doherty's pervasive use of the word, a new thread was provided to discuss whether such a label was against the forum's rules. I consider that a success of sorts, and for that reason I gave my support to another suggestion from a mythicist -- namely that the forum would regard it as an insult to compare mythicism with disreputable theories. Doherty, however, did not seem to take these developments well. He protested, in fact, that he had been insulted as a fool and a charlatan -- words that he had, insufferably, provided himself.

Finally, we had a brief post by Richard Carrier, the atheist scholar who offers cautious support to Doherty's theory. I got my first chance to engage his arguments publicly.

There was so much pugnacity and emotionalism in the thread -- not excluding myself, and even including some folks from whom I did not expect it -- that I hesitate even to link to it. But that does not mean that there was nothing of value to salvage from it, and I will try to do so here. I will not be offering a full-blown analysis of the two Biblical verses, and two scholars, in question; I will be sticking to short summaries of how these verses and scholars were argued over in the thread.

BORN OF WOMAN

In Galatians 4:4, Paul says that at a certain point in time, God sent his own Son, "born of a woman, born under the law", or GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS, GENOMENOS HUPO NOMON. Doherty was said to misrepresent some remarks by Ernest De Witt Burton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, pp. 217-18.

As I argued above, Doherty's reading just seems like a desperate stretch. And though I don't think that Doherty has lied with regard to Burton's interpretation, as he was charged with doing, I do think that his presentation of Burton is misleading, as he so often is with respect to evidence in general (which is why people must critique his work and his methods according to the information and skills at their disposal; I regret that professional scholars do not take more time to do so and that it is left to amateurs like myself).

My concluding post about Doherty's treatment of Burton explains something which I found remarkable. I don't know Greek, so a mythicist offered me a lexicon's definition of Paul's word for "born". I found that Doherty had used the general definition of the word, which can seem ambiguous, and had concluded that Paul used an ambiguous word to describe Christ's birth; but he ignored the specific applications of the word. Of persons, Paul's word always signified birth, according to this lexicon. I read that right there in the post that was offered as support for Doherty's argument. Of things, or inanimate objects (as opposed to persons), Paul's word did carry the "ambiguous" meaning ("to come into existence") that Paul was supposedly applying to Christ. But Doherty has never suggested that Paul saw Christ as a thing. When I pointed all this out, the response I got was that the general definition was ambiguous. That, I found remarkable.

Of course, an unambiguous statement that Christ was born does not tell us directly that he was born on the earth. He may have been "born" in the heavens -- except that Doherty has not given us the evidence of a deity who was thought to have been born in the heavens. He has not pointed out who the celestial woman was that Christian tradition held to have given birth to Christ. Nor has he given us an example of Paul's word being used of persons to mean something other than "born."

DESCENDED FROM DAVID

In Romans 1:3, Paul uses the words TOU GENOMENOU EK SPERMATOS DAVID KATA SARKA, or "who was born of a descendant of David in the sphere of the flesh." The scholar in this case was C.K. Barrett, in his Epistle to the Romans, p. 20.

The best thing I can say for Doherty's interpretation is that KATA SARKA has been translated by Barrett as "in the sphere of the flesh," and does not tell us, as such, that Christ was born on the earth. It tells us that he was born of a descendant of David in the sphere of the flesh. Doherty has not given us the evidence that the air above the earth, and not just the earth, was ever described as part of the sphere of flesh. He is getting by on the correct argument that the ancients regarded Sheol, the earth's surface, and everything below the region of the moon and the boundary with the first heaven as the region of change and decay.

Richard Carrier, inexplicably, told us that KATA SARKA is a most peculiar way of saying "located on earth" -- as if traditional translations of KATA SARKA ever included the word "earth." Every Greek linguist, and Doherty, agrees that SARKA means "flesh." That is Paul's point: that Christ, who was God's son from heaven, was nevertheless descended from David in the sphere of the flesh. Yet Doherty takes open encouragement from Carrier's argument about KATA SARKA, because Carrier points out that these Greek words do not give us a direct statement to the effect that Christ was born "on the earth." Indeed, Carrier is right that such a statement would probably call for other Greek words (including the word for "earth") that Paul did not use when he was making his point about Christ's fleshly lineage. But this is a false argument about KATA SARKA. No one has ever argued that Paul was using those words to make a direct statement about anything except Christ's relationship to David.

For a mythicist, the more general argument that Paul never makes a direct statement like, "Christ was born on earth," would still carry a lot of weight. Yet I would very much enjoy a conversation with a mythicist who took seriously the possibility that such a statement is not there because the earthly birth was never in question, or was never of interest apart from HOW it happened (for instance, through King David's lineage).

Mythicism has set itself up never to fail. Because Paul does not write like Josephus or other ancient historians, it is claimed that he cannot be speaking about history -- as if ancient historians were the only ones who spoke about what happened on earth. Because Paul does not give us a direct declaration that Christ was born on earth, he did not believe that Christ had an earthly birth. If such a statement were discovered tomorrow in a new ancient manuscript of Paul's, then it will be conceded (maybe, and only if the authenticity of the find is beyond doubt) that Paul believed in an earthly birth. But then, perhaps, the birth of which Paul speaks will be said to be no more reliably historical in our eyes than Zeus' birth, which was said to be in an earthly cave. And of course, it will be added that Paul needed to make such a statement about Christ's earthly birth because he was addressing people who had doubts about the earthly birth or who believed in an unearthly Christ: Paul then comes to be seen as evidence that there were Jesus mythicists out there in the ancient world.

There is no real way to falsify such a theory. As falsification, the theory will accept just the kind of statement that Paul does not give -- the kind of statement that if given, would not effectively disprove mythicism but would offer survival and even positive support.

Meanwhile, the posibility that evidence is being required which is not there because the earthly existence of Jesus was never in question gets foolishly set aside. And those who point this out are dismissed -- just as foolishly.

Christian Cadre's review of my posts

2006-01-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

This review of my recent posts about Earl Doherty's mythicism has been on the web for a while, but it occurred to me that anyone following these debates from my blog might be interested in reading it. My thanks to Chris Price, the reviewer, for looking at my posts and publishing his thoughts on them.

Minucius Felix (addendum)

2005-12-31T13:25:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday I got together with a friend, a fellow Catholic, for a snack. We usually talk about the Bible and related texts. He brought the Quran; I showed him The Ascension of Isaiah and the Octavius of Felix, and I told him about the debates I've had with Earl Doherty over those two texts.

Later that night, I worked out what I think may be the simplest argument against Doherty's interpretation of Felix:

For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God.

Octavius is here debating with Caecilius about the idea of turning an earthly being into the one true God, or "deum." His word in other passages for the pagan gods is "deus". Octavius plainly thinks that Caecilius is talking about the former kind of worship -- even though Caecilius had only said that Christian ceremonies could be explained in reference to a wicked man and to wood, and that wicked Christians worshipped what they deserved. The idea on the table, when Octavius speaks, is the deification of an earthly being as the one true God (deum). Felix knew about this idea and, as the author of the dialogue, he had Octavius respond to it.

That is not a surprise, because even Doherty says, in reference to the traditional Christian belief in a historical Christ, that by the time Felix was writing, "everyone knew what Christians now believed about their origins" (The Jesus Puzzle, 201). Felix called himself a Christian; he must have known that at least some Christians worshipped Christ, and that non-Christians regarded this as the deification of an earthly being, a mere man (and a guilty criminal). That Felix knew all this is even more likely because he talks about having once been involved in the persecution of Christians. Also, he speaks of himself as living in Rome at some point, and surely no one will argue that he did not encounter opinions there about forms of Christianity based on a historical Christ. His implied occupation in law, and his educated writing style, further support this conclusion.

Therefore, when Octavius tells Caecilius that in fact an earthly being was not believed Deum, he cannot mean that Christ was an earthly being, because Octavius and Caecilius and everyone else knew that Christ was believed Deum. Felix means only what everyone knew: that Christians believed Christ to be fully worthy of deification, and far from a criminal or mere man. Felix does, of course, go on to say how pagans have believed earthly beings (men and animals) to be gods (deus).

For Doherty, Felix is not talking about the deification of Christ per se and is merely stating in general terms that criminals and earthly beings should not be deified. Felix is saying it's incorrect that an earthly being "was able" to be believed Deum -- that is, among Felix's own sect within Christianity. He is saying to Caecilius that whatever the pagans have heard about Christians who worship somebody fastened to a cross -- and even though both the author and his pagan associates surely knew that a crucified victim was "Deum" for at least some Christians -- nevertheless Caecilius wanders far from the truth in thinking that such a being could be God for Felix's "Christians" (the only word that Felix uses to identify his own people to Caecilius).

I leave it to the reader to decide which interpretation makes more sense.

The Ascension of Isaiah

2005-12-14T16:54:00.000-05:00

I've had another another discussion at the Secular Web with Earl Doherty, though it has not amounted to a full debate. I offered a full response to his propositions, but he opted only to give a short, general reply, and the discussion has not proceeded since then. He has since posted his best arguments at this page on his website.

It started when he opened a thread concerning an ancient Christian document called The Ascension of Isaiah, in which the Biblical prophet of that name tells how he was transported from earth, by an angel, all the way up through the seven heavens. In the seventh, Isaiah sees God the Father telling his Son to descend through the heavens, and the firmament or air above the earth, all the way to the underworld of Sheol, where the Son was to defeat the angel of death (Satan).

The oldest extant versions of this document tell of Christ being put to death on earth, but Doherty believes that the original form of the document spoke about a crucifixion in the firmament. He holds with most scholars that the Ascension is a combination of three originally independent documents, appearing in the text in this order: the Martyrdom of Isaiah, the Testament of Hezekiah, and the Vision of Isaiah. We may refer to them as the Martyrdom, the Testament, and the Vision. The Testament introduces the Son's descent through the heavens and his life on earth; the Vision tells essentially the same story, but with detailed ascents and descents through the heavens. Doherty proposes that the earliest author of the Vision had an unearthly crucifixion in mind. He holds, moreover, that we can read in our current texts of the Vision a belief in a multi-tiered firmament below the first heaven -- a point upon which his theory of a crucifixion above the earth depends.

Doherty's contention that our current versions of the Vision of Isaiah were preceded by an older one is not unreasonable. Two extant sets of manuscripts of the Vision appear to be independent of each other, yet they are substantially the same -- which is very similar to the independence between Matthew and Luke, and their common dependence on an earlier version of the gospel, namely Mark. But most scholars, of course, do not share Doherty's belief that the original author of the Vision was speaking about a crucifixion in the firmament rather than on earth.

They believe, moreover, that the document is Christian, because of its references to Christ, Jesus, and "the Beloved" (an ancient reference to Christ). I note this because Doherty builds upon the work of a scholar, Michael Knibb, who thinks that the document is Christian, and who calls it such in his work; yet as I suggested in our debate, Doherty misrepresents him as opining (Doherty's verb) that all references in the document to "Christ" and "Jesus" are later additions.

As for the evidence about the crucifixion, both of the independent sets of manuscripts have the angel telling Isaiah that the Son will descend and appear in "your form." That is important because the Son takes on the form of the inhabitants of each heaven as he descends, in order to conceal himself, and he takes on the form of Satan's angels in the firmament right before the section, which Doherty believes to be interpolated, where he descends to earth and takes on human form.

Further, the second of the three internal documents, the Testament, follows the story of the Vision rather closely, down to the earthly life of Christ, and refers to the vision as Isaiah's; yet Doherty can make no case that the earthly life was interpolated later into the Testament. He passes over the opinion of scholars (particularly Knibb) that the Testament's original form, telling of Christ's earthly life and the life of the early church, dates to about the year 100, since this opinion is contrary to his proposition and to his general mythicist theory; he builds his entire case on the Vision, and on dating its report of Christ's earthly life as very late.

And I noticed verses in the Vision which may support, as I told Doherty, his unusual contention about a multi-tiered firmament, but which would sink the idea of a crucifixion above the earth. Doherty did not notice these verses as evidence for his proposition about the firmament, and he chose not to analyze them when I brought them up.

I have begun to feel strongly that he is not fundamentally interested in dialogue with others. I feel this because he started the thread on the Ascension but opted not to engage the first substantive reply he got in disagreement, or even to proceed further; because he merely cuts his best arguments from his debates on the Secular Web and pastes them on his website, without a link to the debates and without mentioning the arguments of others; because in our first debate, as I've already talked about, he chose in various ways not to engage what I wrote; because in that debate as in others, when he does engage arguments he does not concede secondary points, even to opponents who concede as much as they can; because he so often dismisses his opponents as lacking the ability or willingness to consider data fairly.

If I'm right, it helps me to understand how Doherty can come up with his theory in the first place, and maintain it by dismissing all challenges as inadequate: he does these things because he is uninterested in deeply understanding the knowledge or thinking of theists, and is interested in understanding only where their knowledge fails, not where it succeeds.

Minucius Felix

2005-12-02T14:50:00.000-05:00

Last month I finished debating with Earl Doherty about The Octavius of Felix. Before I move on from that topic, I want to present a summary case for the traditional theory that Felix called himself a Christian because he believed in Christ. I will be presenting mainly the arguments I used in the recent debate, where I stuck mainly to negative evidence. But I will be adding a new argument here about positive evidence, which will serve in part as a further response, beyond what I offered in the debate, to the argument that Doherty presented as his strongest (he has posted a summary of his best arguments here). And I will be tackling the arguments about Felix in Doherty's book, The Jesus Puzzle (I will be quoting from pp. 286-289).

First let me quote the accusation against Christians, from chapter 9 of the dialogue. Following it is the key part, from chapter 29, of the Christian's overall reply.

CAECILIUS: And now, as wickeder things advance more fruitfully, and abandoned manners creep on day by day, those abominable shrines of an impious assembly are maturing themselves throughout the whole world. Assuredly this confederacy ought to be rooted out and execrated. They know one another by secret marks and insignia, and they love one another almost before they know one another. Everywhere also there is mingled among them a certain religion of lust, and they call one another promiscuously brothers and sisters, that even a not unusual debauchery may by the intervention of that sacred name become incestuous: it is thus that their vain and senseless superstition glories in crimes. Nor, concerning these things, would intelligent report speak of things so great and various, and requiring to be prefaced by an apology, unless truth were at the bottom of it. I hear that they adore the head of an ass, that basest of creatures, consecrated by I know not what silly persuasion,-a worthy and appropriate religion for such manners. Some say that they worship the virilia of their pontiff and priest, and adore the nature, as it were, of their common parent. I know not whether these things are false; certainly suspicion is applicable to secret and nocturnal rites; and he who explains their ceremonies by reference to a man punished by extreme suffering for his wickedness, and to the deadly wood of the cross, appropriates fitting altars for reprobate and wicked men, that they may worship what they deserve.

OCTAVIUS: These, and such as these infamous things, we are not at liberty even to hear; it is even disgraceful with any more words to defend ourselves from such charges. For you pretend that those things are done by chaste and modest persons, which we should not believe to be done at all, unless you proved that they were true concerning yourselves. For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God. Miserable indeed is that man whose whole hope is dependent on mortal man, for all his help is put an end to with the extinction of the man. The Egyptians certainly choose out a man for themselves whom they may worship; him alone they propitiate; him they consult about all things; to him they slaughter victims; and he who to others is a god, to himself is certainly a man whether he will or no, for he does not deceive his own consciousness, if he deceives that of others. Moreover, a false flattery disgracefully caresses princes and kings, not as great and chosen men, as is just, but as gods; whereas honour is more truly rendered to an illustrious man, and love is more pleasantly given to a very good man. Thus they invoke their deity, they supplicate their images, they implore their Genius, that is, their demon; and it is safer to swear falsely by the genius of Jupiter than by that of a king. Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods. For your very standards, as well as your banners; and flags of your camp, what else are they but crosses gilded and adorned? Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it. We assuredly see the sign of a cross, naturally, in the ship when it is carried along with swelling sails, when it glides forward with expanded oars; and when the military yoke is lifted up, it is the sign of a cross; and when a man adores God with a pure mind, with hands outstretched. Thus the sign of the cross either is sustained by a natural reason, or your own religion is formed with respect to it.

Doherty proposes that Felix, through the character of Octavius, is saying that he does not have a crucifixion in his religion, since Octavius openly rejects the idea of deifying either criminals or earthly beings. Everyone is agreed that Felix does reject the latter two things as legitimate objects of worship. And there was no disagreement in our debate that Caecilius' accusation about worshipping a wicked man was stimulated by reports of a practice that had, as its focus, a crucified Jesus Christ. Mythicists argue that this Jesus was believed at first to be crucified in the heavens, though they concede that the belief in a historical crucifixion had arisen in time for Felix to have heard of it when he wrote his dialogue (around 200 C.E., though the date is a matter of dispute). The central disagreement therefore appears when we try to define what Jesus Christ was to Felix. Did Felix regard the crucified Jesus Christ as a criminal, and did he regard him as an earthly being? What did Felix mean by these terms? Was he speaking of wrongly accused and wicked criminals alike? What was an earthly being in Felix's mind?

Actually our debate saw another major disagreement, since Doherty argued that we just could not know what Felix's attitude was toward the original crucified victim.

We don’t know what his attitude was toward the 'crucified man' Caecilius has mentioned. Did he think Caecilius (or the pagan comments represented by the words Felix has put in his mouth) was referring to an actual historical man, or only to a story about a man? Did Felix have an opinion, let alone definite knowledge, as to whether this man had actually lived, or did he not know one way or another?

We can know, Doherty said, only that Felix was dismissing the general idea of worshipping any crucified victim, since Octavius openly rejected the worship of criminals and earthly beings.

Contrast this with Doherty's statement in The Jesus Puzzle that Felix's text is a smoking gun "pointing to a Christian denial of the historical Jesus." That is actually an argument; and some of his supporters in the debate held firmly to it, claiming that Felix regarded the crucified criminal as wicked. I think Doherty's agnosticism in the debate evades the problem, which is strange, considering his implicit concession that Caecilius' accusation arose from reports of real Christian practice. No one will argue that the accusation was invented randomly. However obliquely, a part of Felix's text is therefore referring to a real figure of Christian worship. For that reason alone we need to question Doherty's assertion that another part of the text, the Christian reply, is merely expressing a general distaste for certain things; we need to ask whether Felix's refutation of the accusation references that figure of worship too. The rationale becomes compelling when we realize that we're merely asking what Felix, who called himself a Christian, thought about a figure called Christ.

The method consists of asking what the refutation says (positive evidence) or does not say (negative evidence) about that figure.

THE NEGATIVE EVIDENCE

Octavius says that criminals do not deserve to be made into God, and that earthly beings cannot come to be regarded as God. He definitely means guilty criminals here, for he speaks of deserving. Leaving Felix aside, no form of Christianity that we know of says that Christ was a deserving criminal. So Felix's comment about deifying criminals says nothing against the central Christian figure -- unless we interpret the text to mean that Felix, uniquely among Christians, regarded Christ as a deserving criminal.

What he means by earthly beings is less clear. He says only that an earthly being cannot come to be regarded as God. He also says, however, that pagans make mortal men into gods; and so for Doherty, Felix is leaving himself open to the charge of hypocrisy. How, the argument goes, can Felix reject the deification of an earthly being and leave himself open to the charge that he worships such a being? But hypocrisy is far from the best or the only available option. In the original Latin, Felix uses the equivalent of our God/god distinction: he says that an earthly being cannot come to be regarded as "deum", but that pagans have been known to regard a mere man as "deus." So what he means is that an earthly being cannot come to be regarded as the one true God of the Christians. This would be a plain falsehood if Felix is speaking for all Christians, as he seems to be doing, and he believes that many Christians are worshipping an earthly being. If he believes that, we would expect him to say that no criminal or earthly being deserves to be regarded as God. Instead he says that an earthly being cannot come to be regarded as God -- and he rebukes Caecilius for thinking that an earthly being can achieve this regard. So unless Felix was ignorant or lying about the Christian practice that his opponent has brought up, his statement that no earthly being could ever be regarded as G0d (deum) serves nearly as proof that Felix did not regard the crucified Christ as an earthly being.

Our conclusion is that Felix has said nothing against the innocent and otherworldly Christ of Christian tradition. But there are supporting arguments in Felix's remaining statements, in which he consistently fails to criticize traditional Christianity. Doherty argues in his book that these statements do condemn Christianity as we know it:

[In chapter 21, Felix] is castigating the Greeks for lamenting and worshiping a god [a son of Isis] who is slain. Later he says [chapter 23]: "Men who have died cannot become gods, because a god cannot die; nor can men who are born (become gods) .... Why, I pray, are gods not born today, if such have ever been born?" He then goes on to ridicule the whole idea of gods procreating themselves, which would include the idea of a god begetting a son. Elsewhere [chapter 20] he scorns those who are credulous enough to believe in miracles performed by gods.

Let's take the three points in this paragraph separately: a dying god; a procreating god; a miracle-performing god.

1) Felix is denigrating paganism's cycles of dying-and-rising gods, wherein the same god was said to die and rise repeatedly. Felix sees this as nonsensical. This is the full quote from chapter 21 of the text:

Isis bewails, laments, and seeks after her lost son, with her Cynocephalus and her bald priests; and the wretched Isiacs beat their breasts, and imitate the grief of the most unhappy mother. By and by, when the little boy is found, Isis rejoices, and the priests exult, Cynocephalus the discoverer boasts, and they do not cease year by year either to lose what they find, or to find what they lose. Is it not ridiculous either to grieve for what you worship, or to worship that over which you grieve?

He does not, at any point, condemn the one-time sacrifice of God's son.

2) Felix ridicules the idea of the polytheistic gods procreating like a population -- that is clear even in the quote that Doherty uses above. Felix does not mention the idea of the one true God having an eternal Son who does not procreate. In short, he ridicules divine procreation, not divine incarnation.

3) Felix ridicules not "miracles," but the very existence of Scylla, Chimaera, Hydra, Centaurs, and men who could take on the form of birds, beasts, trees, and flowers. Doherty does not tell us this.

Doherty concludes that when Felix "makes statements which flatly contradict and even defame ideas which should be at the very heart of his own beliefs and personal devotion", we must accept that Felix did not profess these ideas, since they would "confute and confound essential Christian beliefs in his own mind" (emphasis Doherty's). But Felix did not regard these ideas, as Doherty describes them, to be central to his Christian faith; Doherty does. It's Doherty who says that one godman out of many procreated with a woman and fathered a child; that one godman out of many died on a cross and was wept over; that one godman performed strange acts in Palestine which resemble the strange acts and creatures in Homer. Christians have always believed that their salvation came about in events that were quite different from those in pagan mythology, and they've been able to point to the differences; an atheist like Doherty can try to deny the differences, but he cannot deny that Christians held the differences to be what set them apart. In doing so he is simply reading his own beliefs into the texts -- one of the easiest mistakes to make, and admittedly one of the toughest to avoid.

And what about the argument that Felix's statements would "defame" his own ideas and leave him "open to the charge of hypocrisy"? That is possible; certain pagans of antiquity, like Celsus, did say that Christian beliefs were no different from Greco-Roman beliefs. But Felix is presenting a dialogue in which the pagan is converted. The opposition to his Christian ideas is not comprehensive or even lasting. (This is a dialogue purportedly between friends). The pagan speaks first, and says little more before announcing his conversion. He has spoken calumnies about Christian character, and presented what he believes to be illogic at the heart of such doctrines as the resurrection; the reply from Octavius states that Christians are in fact virtuous, and that resurrection actually makes sense. The second "salvo" of the pagan, wherein he might be expected, if he's no friend to Christianity, to retaliate with charges of hypocrisy, never comes (though at the end of the dialogue he says he has some remaining questions, requiring deeper training, that he will leave for another day). Felix is constructing a dialogue in which a pagan friendly to Christians can be persuaded that the worst rumors are not true. That is the best description of his document, and the best explanation for why his work, unlike Origen's long refutation of Celsus, does not go into an extensive defense of what makes Christianity and of what separates its beliefs from common pagan ideas.

We can see this when we examine Doherty's only real example of negative evidence, concerning the resurrection of the dead. He finds it problematic that Felix doesn't mention the resurrection of Christ when Caecilius asks, "What single individual has returned from the dead, that we might believe it for an example?" (This paraphrase by Doherty is incorrectly presented, in quotes, as a translation, for the full text in chapter 11 reads, "...and what single individual has returned from the dead either by the fate of Protesilaus, with permission to sojourn even for a few hours, or that we might believe it for an example?"). One should note, for perspective, that Felix does not give us any events from his faith: there is nothing about Abraham, Moses, or any events at all, Biblical and otherwise. And when Caecilius wonders philosophically how men can come back from the dead if their bodies corrupt and disintegrate, Octavius gives a philosophical reply showing how the logic in the objections is invalid, and how resurrection of the dead is logical. No more is required. A discussion of further and more specific questions, as noted, is left for another day.

The negative evidence from Felix's text comes to this: Felix rejects the pagan practices, but in every case avoids rejecting their Christian counterparts. In the same way, he denies worshipping criminals and earthly beings, but he never denies the figure that most Christian sects have held to be both innocent and otherworldly -- with the exception being a few groups, to which Felix did not belong, who acknowledged only Christ's humanity.

When we leave Felix's text, there is evidence from other Chritians about what was meant by the phrase, "earthly being." I want to briefly quote one of Felix's contemporaries, Tertullian, an orthodox Christian whose work resembles Felix's at many points. He wrote between the years 197 and 220, and it is widely theorized that one of the men drew from the other's work; the consensus of scholarly opinion has shifted more than once on the question of who was prior. As I understand it, Doherty takes what is now the minority opinion -- that Tertullian drew from Felix. If Felix drew from the orthodox Christian, Doherty's statements in his book and our debate that Felix "had no truck" with such Christians makes little sense. But we should also ask in passing why the orthodox Christian, if he came later, would be inspired, in minute detail, by someone who rejected his faith. In fact, Tertullian discussed many heresies; a Christian without Christ would count as heretical.

The simplest solution is that both men worshipped Christ.

From Tertullian's Ad nationes:

The particular character of a posterity is shown by the original founders of the race--mortal beings (come) from mortals, earthly ones from earthly; step after step comes in due relation--marriage, conception, birth--country, settlements, kingdoms, all give the clearest proofs. They, therefore who cannot deny the birth of men, must also admit their death; they who allow their mortality must not suppose them to be gods.

From Tertullian's Apology:

Christ is Spirit of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is kindled... This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient times, descending into a certain virgin, and made flesh in her womb, is in His birth God and man united. The flesh formed by the Spirit is nourished, grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works, and is the Christ.

In the first quote, Tertullian speaks about pagan gods as mortal and earthly. When he comes to Christ, he speaks of Spirit, and does not call him mortal or earthly, despite the fact that Christ attained "manhood".

And this quote from Tertullian's Apologeticum clarifies some of the confusion that is felt even today about how Christians regard Christ as someone who incarnated into flesh but was not an earthly being:

Then, too, the common people have now some knowledge of Christ, and think of Him as but a man, one indeed such as the Jews condemned, so that some may naturally enough have taken up the idea that we are worshippers of a mere human being.

A century and a half later, a bishop known as Hilary of Poitiers was influenced by Felix's work -- something we learned from Andrew Criddle in the debate. Hilary's work also bears many similarities to Felix's thought. Here is a key quote from The Trinity (Book X):

In like manner Jesus Christ being man is indeed human, but even thus cannot be aught else but Christ, born as man by the birth of His body, but not human in defects, as He was not human in origin.

THE POSITIVE EVIDENCE

In Octavius' reply quoted at the top, Felix seems to be attaching a positive importance to the sign of the cross. This would be hard to believe if he rejected the crucifixion and all worship associated with it -- an insight I owe to someone else in the debate, whose Secular Web username is GakuseiDon; I'll refer to him simply as Don.

Notice the progression of Felix's thought in the passage. Felix begins by saying that such accusations as Caecilius has laid at his door do not apply to virtuous people, or indeed to anyone, unless perhaps some of the disgraceful practices were found to be done by "yourselves" -- that is, by Caecilius' own people (pagans). He proceeds to give an example: the worship of the crucified criminal. We know right away that whatever he means, he cannot mean that Caicilius' own people are guilty of worshipping a crucified victim; no evidence for such pagan worship has been found. Felix does tell us what the disgrace would be: worshipping deserving criminals and earthly beings. At this point it is his custom to name some pagan practices, in order to show that Caecilius' accusations are actually little more than projections. He gives no example of pagans worshipping deserving criminals, but he does go into the idea of how futile it is to worship "mortal man" (a kind of earthly being); and he gives examples from pagan Egypt, concerning the Pharaohs. He says why this is wrong and dishonest.

He then moves on to the second part of the original accusation, about Christians organizing their ceremonies around the "deadly wood of the cross." He says that Christians do not worship crosses or wish for them. As Don pointed out, this undoubtedly means that Christians do not wish for actual, life-size crosses. (This was a time when crucifixion was feared and had not yet been abolished). Caecilius had implied in chapter 12 that they did: "Lo, for you there are threats, punishments, tortures, and crosses; and that no longer as objects of adoration, but as tortures to be undergone." Felix replies, "you, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as part of your gods." His barb at idolatry of things made from wood is characteristically Christian; but he is trying hard also to pin the actual worship of wooden crosses on the pagans, by comparing the shape of some of their idols -- perhaps gods with arms outstretched -- to crosses. He compares some Roman trophies to the shape of a cross, and makes a point out of the fact that some trophies tend to have the figure of a human champion affixed to them. I know of no trophies in the shape of a cross, however -- a point made also by Doherty in the debate. Perhaps the Romans, who used crucifixion against non-Romans, felt the cross to be a symbol of power.

Still, Felix is getting so carried away with throwing the original accusation back at the pagans that he risks, at least in Doherty's eyes, looking like he is rejecting the Christian worship of a figure who came to be represented as a man on a cross. But he does, incidentally, gives us a piece of negative evidence that pagans did not worship crucified deities: he would mention an example of it if he could, but he is unable to find a good parallel with the Christian crucifixion.

Finally, Octavius proceeds to describe what Christians actually think. He says that "we" naturally see the sign of the cross in ships with masts stretched upward, or with oars protruding outwards to both sides; in the lifting of the military yoke; and in the image of a man adoring God with a pure mind and arms stretched out to the sides. These are all positive images in themselves, and not merely when contrasted with what he presents as the banal worldliness of pagan idolatry and sports. Whatever visual image he has in mind for the lifting of the military yoke, such freedom is extremely positive -- and there is surely a barb here at the yoke of Roman power. He ends with an enigmatic statement, possibly conciliatory, about how the sign of the cross is either "sustained by a natural reason, or your own religion is formed with respect to it." Whatever it means, we see that for Felix, the sign of the cross can be seen everywhere, and that Christians see it naturally in positive things quite different from Roman trophies and the like.

Doherty said in the debate that Felix's comments about the sign of the cross are somewhat unclear. He suggested that Felix was simply saying that the sign of the cross was so ubiquitous as to preclude being an element of proper worship. In contrast with this guess, I prefer Don's actual argument that Felix could not associate the sign of the cross with exclusively positive images if he really rejected the crucifixion of Christ as a focus of worship.

The reason for the lack of clarity, I suggest, is that Felix is introducing something not already mentioned by Caecilius. Nothing up to this point has been said about the sign of the cross -- unless we read the sign of the cross into chapter 9, where Caecilius charges, "They know one another by secret marks and insignia" -- yet Octavius wants to speak about it. Probably, though it was unclear to most pagans exactly how Christians worshipped, and though Caecilius' complaint about their private way of worshipping as overly secret was a common one, it was nevertheless known that Christians crossed themselves. (Today, too, the sign of the cross is readily known by non-Christians as a Christian signature). So Felix introduces it into his text, even though Caecilius has furnished no need to do so. If the idea is that Felix does so in order to separate himself from Christians who do cross themselves, the text would make no sense, for Felix never mentions these Christians, and associates the sign of the cross only with good things.

Doherty offered his own positive evidence in the debate, something that he called a "pattern principle." He presented it as his strongest argument, and both of his supporters seemed to feel the same way about it. I called it an argument based on a principle that in biblical studies is known as the criterion of coherence. What I meant is that Doherty sees in Felix's refutations a pattern, wherein the rumors are always rejected in their entirety, compelling the conclusion that incoherence sets in if Felix does not reject the crucified criminal entirely. I pointed out that the text only contains a rejection of deserving criminals and earthly beings -- two things that ancient Christians did not call Christ. Doherty argued nevertheless that making an exception for innocent criminals, and saying that Felix saw Christ as something other than earthly, amounts to having the author make an incomplete and even incoherent denial, rather than a consistent one.

I submit that this argument fails on its own terms. Doherty does have Felix making a serious exception. In the traditional reading, Octavius denies all that Caecilius has to say about Christian character, and he refutes the various accusations in similar but not identical ways. In Doherty's model, Octavius rejects all that Caecilius has to say about Christians, except the charge that people named as Christians worship a wicked, mortal man. Here, the dialogue's two main protagonists, a Christian and a pagan, are on common ground about something as important as an accusation. They agree that this accusation is correct with regard to some Christians, albeit not the Christians that Octavius belongs to.

And this strikes me as an unnecessary multiplication of entities. There are two groups, represented by Caecilius and Octavius, in the dialogue; there is no need to introduce a third group, still less a group that our two protagonists agree about. The point of such a dialogue is for the pagan's thinking about Christians to be refuted: there is no need to posit that in this dialogue, Felix was sneaking in a barb at fellow Christians through the pagan's words and having the Christian protagonist heartily agree with it.

If we want to test Doherty's proposed pattern, let's summarize what Felix says. In chapter 9, Caecilius had accused Christians of six shameful things, in this order: incestuous promiscuity; worshipping the head of an ass; worshipping the genitals of their priests; worshipping a wicked man and the wood of the cross; and devouring the blood of infants (he had finished by elaborating on incestuous banquets). Octavius turns to these accusations in chapter 28, and introduces these as "fables":

1) the worship of monsters
2) devouring the blood of infants
3) incestuous banqueting

#1 is his own contribution, and he says no more about it. The others he will return to later, devoting to each a full chapter (30 and 31). First he speaks about how torture of Christians never unearthed evidence to prove these fables. Then he gives individual attention to the rumor that Christians worship the head of an ass. He does not call this a fable, but a falsehood begun by demons. He asks incredulously who -- either pagan or Christian -- is foolish enough to worship such a thing, or to believe that it is an object of worship. He turns the accusation of animal worship back on the pagans, and gives some examples, before moving on to another charge, which he calls a fable: the ritual worship of a priest's genitals. He denies that Christians do this, and adds that it is the kind of thing to be found in pagan temples.

Chapter 29 opens with a statement that such things, and others generally, are not to be expected among virtuous people, or indeed anyone, unless it were discovered in the behavior of pagans. As another example, he turns to the worship of a crucified criminal -- a sixth accusation, and the last one that he comes to. He does not call it a fable or a demon's falsehood, and he does not ask incredulously who is foolish enough to make a crucified victim an object of worship. He does tell us that it's far from the realm of truth to say that a criminal could deserve to be made God, or to say that an earthly being could be believed God at all. This is Felix's most subtle refutation. He then turns the worship of earthly beings (not as deum but as deus), back upon the pagans.

His denial that Christians worship crosses might count as refutation of a seventh accusation. It is notable, not because he tries to indict paganism with the worship of wooden cross-shapes, nor even because for the first time he adds a statement about what "we" Christians actually feel -- conceding, as argued above, that his Christians value the sign of the cross. He will use such statements in subsequent chapters. It's rather his final statement here, that the sign of the cross is sustained by a natural reason and is a basis even for pagan religion, that stands out as unique in all his refutations: it seems to find a point of agreement between Christianity and paganism -- though not with anything that Caecilius himself has said. Felix, after all, is not incapable of saying that Christianity and paganism share some common ground; in chapter 18 he offers, "And they who speak of Jupiter as the chief, are mistaken in the name indeed, but they are in agreement about the unity of the power". In any case, this statement about paganism and the sign of the cross has been found enigmatic, or unclear, by all sides in the debate, which is yet another indication that this particular refutation is somewhat different from the others.

To wit: in chapter 30 Felix returns to one of the things he called "fables" -- infant immolation. He denies it and states for the third time (as with the worship of an ass, and the worship of the criminal), that such a thing could not be believed possible except as pagan acts. He proceeds to name pagan practices that can be compared to infant immolation. As in the previous chapter, he offers what Christians actually feel: he tells us about Christian horror at murder. In chapter 31 he returns to incest. He refutes the charge, speaks about incest in paganism, and for the third time adds something about what Christians feel -- in this case, how they refrain from internal lust as well as external acts like adultery. He ends with one last condemnation of pagan immorality.

I think enough has been said to show that Felix followed a pattern but mixed it up somewhat -- especially in chapter 29, where we see an initial refutation divided into two parts (about what criminals deserve and earthly beings actually achieve), and a unique affirmation of paganism's common ground with Christianity (the example being paganism's unwitting tendency to venerate the sign of the cross). This point of agreement with paganism makes sense if the sign of the cross, and not the worship of actual crosses, is a part of Felix's religion.

I submit that an argument from coherence, such as Doherty's, can support a line of reasoning independently established, but it cannot compel a conclusion. Doherty thinks that the initial refutation concerning the criminal must be seen as incoherent unless the crucifixion, crosses, and the sign of the cross are rejected entirely -- even though this only raises the question of why Felix finds the sign of the cross in uniformly positive things.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EVIDENCE

Doherty admits that the word "Christian" appears throughout the dialogue. It does; Felix embraces it. This is a ruinous piece of evidence for Doherty's theory. It serves as positive evidence of what Felix's religion was; and it prompts us to ask why he chooses to be called Christian. It also serves as negative evidence, for we should also ask why Felix does not tell his accuser, who has been hearing of Christ-worshipping Christians, that he does not belong to them. In the accusation quoted at the top, Caecilius says, "those abominable shrines of an impious assembly are maturing themselves throughout the whole world. Assuredly this confederacy ought to be rooted out and execrated." Octavius fails to make it clear that he does not belong to these great numbers; he goes on speaking for all Christians. He actually adds, "And that day by day the number of us is increased, is not a ground for a charge of error, but is a testimony which claims praise" (chapter 31).

Bear with me while I ply a parallel from the 7th century. When the Quran speaks of the error of regarding Jesus as a divinity, it says in the clearest terms, and repeatedly, that such worship is wrong and belongs to another religion. The Quran goes on to speak of "Muslims", and says that a Muslim is one who submits to God without making any error of polytheism; the Quran describes "Christians" as deifying Jesus and thus attributing partners to God. Islam speaks instead of the Unity of God. In his book, Doherty describes Felix's work as revolving around "the Unity and Providence of God and the rejection of all pagan deities, the resurrection of the body and its future reward or punishment." These are all central Muslim beliefs. So if Felix was a type of Christian who interpreted monotheism in a similar way, disallowing worship of Jesus Christ, then why does he not do as the Quran does, and say that he does not belong to the Christianity that his accuser has introduced into the discussion? Furthermore, why does he fail to call himself something else? Why does he call himself, and his people, Christian?

Someone in our debate suggested the definition of "Christian" given by Theophilus of Antioch (who wrote around the years 180-185): "Wherefore we are called Christians on this account, because we are anointed with the oil of God." In his book, Doherty highlights this same definition before discussing Felix, since "Christ" means in Greek, "the anointed one."

This argument implies that the word "Christian" came about independently of Jesus Christ (an argument that I doubt Doherty would actually propose); or that it was taken as a name by those who witnessed but did not take up the worship of Christ (also problematic, since it posits that a group will create its identity by stealing the name of another group with very different ideals and practices); or that it remained the name of those who once worshipped Christ and ceased at some point to do so. This last option seems the least problematic, but it leaves us wondering all the more why Felix does not tell his accuser about what must have been an identity-forming break with the former Christians. And why, if his "Christian" name comes from the anointing of oil or something else, does he not mention that?

In my opinion, if Felix did not worship Jesus Christ, he would not have called himself a Christian. The word was used consistently by pagan writers to denote those who followed Jesus Christ. If Felix or anyone else did not wish to be identified as such, they would have chosen other names to call themselves. I said in the debate that two such groups did exist, who did not worship or venerate Christ: Jews and pagans. Felix was not a Jew, because he speaks about Jews in the third person, as a people punished by God (chapter 33); but then again, he also rejects everything that we would call, and that Christians of that day did call, pagan.

Muslims, of course, did choose their own name, and the name of their religion. They were perhaps the exception to the rule that in the ancient world, you probably belonged to a group whose name had been given it by outsiders (Islam rejects the name, Muhammadans, given to Muslims by outsiders). Felix used a name that was probably invented by the pagan world -- but there is no evidence that pagans thought of Christians as including people who did not worship Christ. "Christian" is the pagan term for those who venerated Jesus Christ. What Doherty is implying is that Felix called himself, or others called him, a name that has always referred to Christ-worship, but that Felix did not worship Christ.

I have made these parallels with Islam only for the sake of comparison. All parallels have their problems. But leaving Islam aside, my questions about Felix concerning the name of "Christian" would remain exactly the same.

CONCLUSION

I submit that Doherty is positing a new entity in early Christianity -- a new subset of the faith -- without evidence. There is no ancient Christian writer who speaks of rejecting Christ and remaining Christian. No ancient Christian writer concerned with heresy tells us about people who called themselves Christian but did not worship Christ. Tertullian seems, like Felix, to have been a jurisconsult at Rome and may have known about him -- a fact already suggested to some degree by the close correspondences in the two men's works. Felix's work certainly suggests that he was not alone in his sect. The probability that these people were in the same city as Tertullian suggests itself strongly. Yet Tertullian says nothing about these beliefs when he discusses heresies.

For that matter, no ancient Christian writer mentions the purported heresy that Christ had never lived. But we don't need to get into that here.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2005-11-22T23:09:00.000-05:00

Last night I saw an early screening of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." This is Andrew Adamson's version of the book, which I read for the first time only about four years ago. Dess did not come with me. I push her to see a lot of movies made out of classic books, but she drew the line at this one. She just objected to seeing this classic from her childhood made into a film. And with good reason: the previews, while interesting, had certainly been filled with spectacle rather than story. Yet the movie surprised me.

It will sound like an exaggeration, but I've been growing tired of new movies, and this one went a long way to restoring my faith in them. I've been growing distinctly unsatisfied, even a little repelled, by the books and movies of Harry Potter, for instance. New movies, from Hollywood at least, try to churn your internal excitement with gore and speed -- two things that have grown wearisome. And exciting books lack a sense of grace that I can't explain specifically. But halfway through this movie, I realized how grateful I was to finally see a new movie that built up its scenes with dialogue -- and with human, rather than merely visual, beauty. The filmakers said in our Q&A session after the movie that they didn't include any gore in the battle scenes because such events were about the emotions. For the first time in my life, I actually found myself agreeing with such an argument.

You see, I don't take refuge in old movies. I like them, but I really love new movies. Whatever I go to the movies for, I hope to get it at new films. Older films often have class, but they also sometimes just have stodginess, or dated style and content. I liked this film because it was a classical-type fantasy with a grace that felt modern. It was vigorous, and unafraid of spectacle -- but it had heart. And the best part is that you don't even know it until the movie's over. If you're thinking right in the middle of the film that it has heart, often what you're actually getting is sentimentality.

The religious aspects were no more played up than in the book, I think -- they were present, perhaps, even a little less. But the film was spiritually nourishing -- again, in a way that did not reveal itself as obvious.

There was a time when I was more of a conservative Christian; and quite in love with Harry Potter, which is said to be anti-Christian. Paradoxically, now that I'm growing disappointed with Harry, my Christian faith is becoming more liberal. But in some ways I'm more deeply connected to my faith -- perhaps because I've been through a lot of doubt in the last two years or so. Whatever the case, the more I embrace my faith, the more my politics shift gradually to the left -- and the more I love what some may call old-fashioned films. I just seem to feel the need for a movie that offers grace, dignity, and commitment in the face of doubt -- which is one way to describe the story of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Go see the film. It's not a religious movie, or an old-fashioned one, or a kiddie flick. It's just friendly to children and to adult faith, while being a spectacular film and an aesthetically smart one. Not a small achievement. It deserves to make a ton of money.

Debating Doherty

2005-11-11T15:15:00.000-05:00

I've started debating with Earl Doherty. He recently rejoined the IIDB forums, where apparently he had been part of a debate a few years ago. The thread we've been arguing in is called "Minucius Felix etc", after the Church Father of that name [who wrote near the turn of the 2nd/3rd century]. I don't know very much about the Fathers, other than some dim recollections from college and graduate school, and a few things I've read recently. So I had not planned to enter the thread at all, but I guess Doherty's presence motivated me. I entered on page 4 and left the debate on page 8, after growing frustrated with Doherty's refusal to answer my questions and challenges directly.

I received compliments from Doherty's supporters of the kind that I would not have expected from friend or foe in any debate, least of all from people holding views so different from my own. And I think they performed well -- much better, IMO, than Doherty. I saw things in his own performance that surprised me. I've seen him debate on his website within an essay format, and he has a tendency to answer everything. Perhaps I expected a similar commitment from him on the boards, and in our debate he spoke about his commitment to meet opposing arguments. I began by writing a lot, in my usual style. At first he said he did not have the time to respond to everything, and I told him that was okay, given my tendency to go on and on. But he kept responding to my weakest arguments, as I expected, and turning away my strongest arguments rather than trying to slam them or even addressing them; this was a surprise.

My first post was a 1,500-word textual analysis of Felix's arguments, and it included specific questions for Doherty; his response did not answer my questions, but involved a nearly 5,000-word description of how the various forms of Christianity could ignore one another quite easily in Felix's time. I later found out that this was Doherty's way of saying that Felix could very well speak for all Christians, as he appears to do, and call himself a Christian, yet be a kind of Christian who did not worship or venerate Christ -- as Doherty claims. I pointed out that Doherty had not tackled anything specific in my post. His reply was that too many challengers were arrayed against him (there were two or three active challengers at any given point in the debate, and he had two supporters), and that I was complaining about his not being able to cover everything in my opening post.

I presented 3 possible disproofs of his contention that Felix rejected the worship of a crucified being. I dropped my first one before very long. Doherty responded to some things in the second one, but not to revisions I made which were directed most closely at his statements in the debate. I gave him the number of the revised post by email, but he proceeded to give what would be his only response, to the unedited post.

These disproofs, incidentally, had been about 1,500 words each. I made my final one just 350 words long, and put it in the form of a step-by-step logical argument concerning just one point, almost like a mathematical equation. I posted it just after he had started saying that my arguments were long, convoluted and speculative. I asked him to comment on it, and presented it as my final disproof. Instead he said that the debate was spinning its wheels, and he presented his own 5,000-word challenge to the group of us who had been arguing for the traditional readings of Felix. I said to him that he could not do this without first finishing with my challenge. He said he had no time. So I proceeded, and gave his challenge a point-by-point, 3,000-word reply. He got replies from everyone actively participating in the argument against his reading.

I opened my reply with two short questions that I presented as hitting the heart of the matter, concerning the division between what was explicit in Felix's text and what needed to be inferred. He said it was a trick question, and said he couldn't answer it. He said moreover that I did not have the ability to understand sophisticated arguments. He repeated the charge that I was too literal concerning his analogies (he calls himself an analogy junkie). And he said again that my own arguments were unclear. I never was told these things by any of his supporters, though: quite the opposite.

So I got fed up, and realized I was wasting my time. I left the debate, quite indignant, but not before listing for his benefit the excuses he had given me over the course of the debate. And not before telling him that these things in his performance genuinely surprised me -- which is true.

As I think of my own mistakes, I ask myself whether it was correct to start debating him by attempting aggressively to disprove his reading. In the course of doing so, I did manage to hit what I thought was the dividing line between what was explicitly in the text and what needed to be inferred from it, so I don't say that my disproofs were a waste of time. But proofs and disproofs are difficult to pull off; and they can make an opponent, especially a new opponent, feel defensive and leery rather than inclined to dialogue. I did my best to be respectful, and never said that he was close-minded or incapable of understanding sophisticated arguments. I agreed with him twice about secondary matters, thanked him for his feedback concerning my writing, and so forth. By contrast, he never agreed with anything secondary in my arguments, though he said once that I was capable of seeing a particular subtlety in his argument. But later he said that the problem with me in particular was that I was mentally locked into the orthodox model -- even though I disagreed with debaters on my side three times about places in Felix's text where I thought Christ could not be located.

As for other mistakes on my part, I also see that it's best not to try too much when your knowledge is limited. I had recently been looking at ancient Greek texts and matching the words up with their English translations, so I did the same with Felix's Latin; and it was quite wonderful getting even a dumb, tiny glance at another language and another way of speaking about the world. I presented Felix's Latin phrases, and said that I suspected them not to support Doherty's argument. I asked for clarification from people who did know Latin, but I should have just asked for clarification without trying any kind of argument.

In the same way, I said that if Doherty and others started making claims about other second-century writers, I would have to leave their statements unchallenged, since I just didn't know enough about the period. But one of my arguments was that Doherty violates Occam's Razor by multiplying the entities of Christianity without necessity, when he claims without explicit evidence that Felix was a new kind of Christian who did not participate in Christ-worship. My challenge certainly was right: if someone says that a new kind of Christian existed, or that this new kind did not center on Christ, it has to be challenged. I noted that Felix had been presented by Doherty as the "smoking gun" among all the second-century Fathers, from which I inferred that Doherty's evidence concerning other writers was probably circumstantial at best (and someone supporting him in the debate admitted that Felix's smoking gun was ambiguous). He and others then proceeded to make claims about other ancient Christians not worshipping or hearing of Christ -- claims that I'd seen recently in Doherty's book and on his website. But true to my word, and level of knowledge, I had to leave these statements unchallenged, except to say that such claims were no more convincing than the claim that Paul never heard of a human Christ.

In fact, they are less convincing, since per Doherty's own theory, the human Christ was starting to be heard of by the turn of the first and second centuries. Tacitus had heard of a human Christ around 115, yet someone claimed in this debate that Theophilus, the Christian patriarch in Antioch who was appointed to his post over a half-century after Tacitus wrote his work, had never heard of a man called Christ. The evidence is that Theophilus' brief work doesn't refer to Christ as a man.

It's times like that when I wonder why I am debating such models at all. I was asked specifically about Theophilus, and after looking up his work, I said exactly this: that it was hard for me to take the claims seriously.

So as far as I'm concerned, Doherty is presenting his own unproven and problematic new entities, when he speaks of people who all called themselves Christians but either did not worship Christ (i.e., Felix) or did not hear of Christ (i.e., Theophilus).

If Doherty is continuing the debate, I don't know. I've stopped checking the site, and I find myself relieved, after 11 intense days, that it's over. I found out many things I had not expected about Doherty, and I'm sure that his first postings to the Secular Web, as was the case with mine, will not be his best.

Another good thing to come out of the debate was that I got to read a work by Felix that turns out to be quite wonderful. Check out the Octavius of Felix. The Latin original is here.

The source of Paul's gospel

2005-10-29T02:37:00.000-04:00

One of Earl Doherty's main tactics for challenging the historicity of Christ is to argue that when Paul offers what seems to be historical information, he offers it as something he received in a vision. The two Pauline passages which give the most historical information and bear the greatest resemblance to the Gospels are in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In both passages he uses a word, paralambano ("received") that can mean either human or divine transmission. He says in 1 Cor 11: 23-37 that he "received" what today we would call the basic outlines of the Last Supper; and in 15: 1-8 he says he "received" the basic outlines of what today we would call the Christian creed concerning Christ's death, burial, resurrection, and appearances to certain disciples.

In Galatians 1:12 he also says, of his own gospel or message, that he "did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Six verses later he says that he went to "visit" Peter (Cephas) and James, the Lord's brother, in Jerusalem at least three years after his own conversion. He adds in Gal 2:6 that the second time he met with the apostles, at least 14 years after his conversion, they "added nothing to me" -- that is, to his gospel. Galatians is the letter in which Paul, at his most polemical, describes his fights with the original apostles; but his statements in this letter are very important for Doherty, in order to present Paul as a man who got everything he knew from visions and from his own reading of scripture.

Yet Doherty has made a plain logical error in treating this subject, the second basic error I have found in his book, The Jesus Puzzle. On p. 44, Doherty states that when Paul uses the word “received” in 1 Cor 15, he "must mean" visionary transmission as he meant in Galatians, where Paul says that he did not receive his "central message" (Doherty's phrase) from any man. Yet barring divine intervention, which Doherty does not accept, Paul cannot have stumbled upon the basic Christian message and rituals without human contact. Moreover, when he discounts Paul's gospel, Doherty treats the idea of revelation as if it were a solitary experience that never happened in communion or in consultation with others, which is not true of either visions or scriptural readings.

In Corinthians, when Paul uses the word "received" he speaks of visions, scriptural insights, and rituals that he says he had in common with the prior apostles; they distrusted him for his former persecution of them, but came to accept him; he practiced and preached the same things that they did. Some of them, Paul says, preached to the Corinthians with success (1 Cor 1:12). And when he delivers what later became the basic creed of Christianity, he adds, “whether it be I or they, so we preach” (1 Cor 15:11). When he delivers the details of the Lord's Supper, he is emphasizing the central cultic meal of the movement -- something that he could scarcely have provided the prior apostles with, or disagreed with them about. No sign of basic disagreements exists in Paul's letters, though Paul is not shy about airing what they do disagree about (namely circumcision and Jewish dietary law). Besides affirming that his gospel was so complete that the prior apostles did not add anything to it, Paul says that he received what he must have hoped to receive, namely their blessings upon his mission to bring the message of Christ to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9).

In short, Paul cannot have received the creed and rituals entirely, or first, through his own vision or scriptural insights. He did have visions which taught or confirmed for him the truth of some of these things; or he learned from his own visions and insights some of the details of Christ's story, details which do not seem to have caused a disagreement worth mentioning.

Let me leave aside the Last Supper for now and lay out Paul's delivery of the creed, so we can see what he can and what he cannot be saying that he discovered through a personal vision or scriptural insight.

The Creed

1 Corinthians 15:

3 For I delivered to you, as of prime importance, what also I received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,

4 and that he was buried, and that he has been raised on the third day according to the scriptures,

5 and that he was seen (ophthe) by Cephas, then by the twelve;

6 afterward he was seen by over 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep;

7 afterward he was seen by James, then by all the apostles;

8 last of all, as to one abnormally born, he was seen by me as well.

[translation provided by Doherty; the parenthetical comment is his own]

Doherty says that "according to the scriptures" should not be read as "in fulfillment of the scriptures." He says instead that it can be translated, "as we learn from the scriptures." By this logic, Paul is saying at the top of the passage,

I LEARNED SOMETHING THAT I PASSED ON TO YOU: I LEARNED THAT THE SCRIPTURES TELL US THAT CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS.

It's hard to know why he would say this. But let's go with Doherty's interpretation for the sake of argument: Paul is invoking God's authority; he has it from God that Christ died for our sins. We still do not see Paul saying that Christ actually died and that we know it from God's authority or from scripture. That is strange in the mythicist case, because the crucifixion in the heavens was not reported to be seen by anyone: it was one of the central points of the faith, but it was unseen. If Paul taught that Christ died, and it was one of the things he first told the Corinthians, he should repeat now the authority behind this tenet of the faith. He should say,

I WAS TOLD IN A VISION THAT THE SCRIPTURES REVEAL THAT GOD'S HEAVENLY SON IN FACT DIED, AND THAT HE DIED FOR OUR SINS, AS THE SCRIPTURES TELL US.

In fact he does not say this. He makes one point, and refers only that point to the scriptures. Indeed this makes sense if he is making a theological point about what Christ's death was for: it was for ours sins, a fact that only God or scripture could reveal. Then for the first time Paul uses the phrase, AND THAT (kai oti), to introduce the second tenet of the faith: the burial. This event is not attributed to the scriptures but presumed on other grounds (an overlooked argument in all these debates). Paul then moves on, with another AND THAT, to a resurrection after three days, and attributes it to the scriptures. This too makes sense, because no one, in either the historicist or the mythicist case, claims to have seen both the crucifixion and the actual resurrection, so no one could know on their own authority that the resurrection had occurred at a particular time and not on some other day; but the fact of resurrection is itself presumed because Christ was later seen. So with one more AND THAT, Paul introduces the appearances to Peter and the Twelve. These events are logically included in the creed, as witness of Christ's resurrection, and probably as a statement that the old covenant with the Twelve tribes of Israel had become the new convenant.

Then for the first time Paul uses a different word, AFTERWARD (epeita wfqh), to introduce the other appearances and the appearance to himself. Here Paul has started to speak in his own voice, adding commentary. We know this from the construction of his sentences and from the fact that AFTERWARD introduces appearances which are recorded nowhere outside of Paul's letters.

The phrases in bold font are no different in the original Greek, and Doherty uses them in an online essay, The Source of Paul's Gospel. But it's a testament to the strength of this whole passage that Doherty mentions only the last instance of AND THAT, in verse 5, and ignores the previous instances, to separate what Paul got in a vision and what is Paul's own commentary. He insists on a separation at that verse, instead of using the AFTERWARD in verse 6, and speculates that the epistle contains sloppily expressed thoughts because Paul probably dictated it in haste -- perhaps while bathing. Doherty concedes that this is "idle speculation", but nevertheless repeats the charge of sloppiness.

Yet if Doherty's treatment of the passage is both cavalier and weak, we still don't know when Paul received the central claims and believed them to be true. As noted above, Paul could only learn through human transmission of a claim that Peter had seen the Lord. But when would Paul be convinced that Peter's vision was of something authentic? Would he have begun to suspect the possibility of some genuine vision by Peter when he was persecuting the early Christian movement and its claims to have received visions? When Paul first saw Christ for himself, would he have been instantly convinced that Peter had seen the same Christ? Would that certainty have come only when he went, in his own words, to "confer with" Peter (Galatians 1:16)? None of this is easy to say. I would guess that when Paul saw Christ for the first time, he was converted to all the Christian claims that he knew about; but I don't think we can be sure of that. Paul takes three years before he even visits a prior apostle in Jerusalem, and we just don't know the reasons for either the interlude or the visit.

In sum, Paul certainly heard of Christian visions and scriptural claims through his environment, almost surely at the time he was persecuting Christians, unless he was actually uninterested in what he says he persecuted zealously. He would have been convinced of the truth of the claims in increments that we cannot know exactly, short of getting into his head. It is unlikely that he would have been entirely unconvinced of them one moment and entirely convinced of them and all their meanings after a sudden conversion experience; that experience may have been brief, but perhaps not as brief as the New Testament paints; it also certainly did not teach him everything that he was to learn about Christ or Christianity. Whatever the case, he cannot have first learned of others' visions and scriptural claims through his own visions and insights, and when meeting with others he certainly learned more about their visions and scriptural readings.

The whole Corinthians creed is permeated with human transmission. It was a collective pronouncement that Paul shared and was converted to through a combination of visions, scriptural reading, and personal relationships. Whatever Paul saw or felt in a personal vision such as the first one referrred to in Galatians – namely that Christ was alive, and that God had sent him for humanity's salvation– merely corresponded to what Paul had heard from human contact.

The Lord's Supper

The same principles apply. Paul did not invent the cultic meal and give it to the prior apostles. But here we have possible confusion, because Paul speaks of receiving something from the Lord. I think he is simply specifying a further authority for the teaching that he is about to go over with the Corinthians again, since human authority, as Doherty acknowledges in his online essay, was usually understood in the word paralambano. But let's look at the passage.

1 Corinthians 11:

23: For I received (paralambano) from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread,

24: and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

25: In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."

26: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

27: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.

(Revised Standard Version)

Paul says that he received something from the Lord which he "also delivered" (o kai paredτka), to the Corinthians. If he had said simply that he received from the Lord what he "delivered" (paredτka), Doherty's case would be stronger, for Paul would then seem to be saying that the source for what he told the Corinthians was none other than the Lord. But that would still make no sense, because we then need to imagine Paul invoking human authority originally (against the mythicist argument) and later changing his statements without explanation. And if from the beginning Paul invoked only the Lord's authority, we come back to the question of why Paul needs to specify the Lord's authority now, especially if all Christian knowledge came in visions.

Yet in English it may not seem obvious that Paul is including two authorities, divine and human. It may still seem like Paul is referring to a literal passing on of tradition, in the way that knowledge gets passed on once to somebody and once more, by that person, to someone else. It is the literal sense which Doherty is forcing, perhaps to great confusion. The English word "receive" does not easily carry the connotation of something which one person can learn first in one way and then in another way, while another set of minds is perhaps going through a similar process. If we think that when Paul speaks of receiving something from the Lord, he is referring only to the things themselves and not at all to the experience of transmission, we have not understood the world of prayer and visions. In his online essay, Doherty lays out the meanings of paralambano: to receive, take over, learn or acknowledge. Paul is not saying, as seems non-sensical to us, "I discovered information from the Lord which I discovered from human beings." He's saying, "I experienced with the Lord what I originally learned from human beings."

Let's ask now what Paul is laying on dual authority.

In the last verse when Paul speaks of eating in an unworthy manner, he is referring to the habit among the Corinthians, in their common meal, of eating in separate cliques, not waiting for one another, and getting drunk (verse 21). He goes on in verse 33 to tell them to wait for one another when eating as a church.

So it seems to me most likely that Paul is reminding the Corinthians particularly of Christ's words, "Do this in remembrance of me." He is saying,

I PASSED ON TO YOU THAT THE LORD JESUS ON THE NIGHT HE WAS BETRAYED TOOK BREAD AND SAID, "DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME."

This is all one point. If the events referred to were seen only by Paul, he should affirm each of them to the Corinthians, for them to understand that their own meals recall one in which there was a solemn mood and in which Christ identified bread and wine as his own body and blood. Again Paul has failed to say the following, or any variation thereof:

I LEARNED THAT THE LORD JESUS HAD A SUPPER ON THE NIGHT HE WAS BETRAYED, AND THAT HE TOOK BREAD AND BLESSED IT, AND THAT HE SAID "DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME."

Such is his style with the creedal beliefs four chapters later. But in the passage about the Lord's Supper, the original Greek does not contain the phrase, AND THAT, only several instances of the word AND (kai). Paul, in short, states that Christ sat down to eat AND said something critical. He wants to say to the Corinthians that Christ's command to emulate him was explicit. So he reminds them that Christ said, "Do this in remembrance of me," after blessing and sharing the bread. Paul gets pointed about this when discussing the wine, probably to disabuse the notion that drunkenness could ever be honorable: "Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." Then his own voice in v. 26 seems to stamp home the point that every meal is sacred: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." In short, every meal till the Second Coming, without exception, must honor the Lord.

The words, "do this in remembrance of me," are absent from very similar accounts of the Last Supper in Mark 14: 22-26 and Matthew 26: 26-30, and in some ancient manuscripts of Luke 22: 14-20. (John has a very different account of the meal, in which the eating is not described). Some manuscripts of Luke do contain the command, which suggests that either the author or a later interpolater wanted this gospel to include Paul's words. Whatever the case, "Do this in remembrance of me" does seem to be attested by Paul alone.

Is it probable that Paul taught this phrasing, while the other apostles did not, or that the latter did so after accepting it from Paul? In the historicist model, if Jesus had a last supper with his disciples, they would not accept from a latecomer who had never met Christ something important like a command.

What seems most plausible to me is that "do this in remembrance of me" is like the block of events that follows "Afterward" in the creed: it is attested by Paul because he wants to speak about it, but it is not attested as strongly elsewhere. Only Christ's appearance to Paul, but not his appearances to the 500 and James and "all the apostles", is attested outside of Paul's letters: by the author of Luke-Acts. The same pattern appears with the command to remembrance: it appears only in Paul and in some manuscripts of Luke. In short, we have no reason to doubt the common tradition of the command just because Mark and Matthew choose not to include it, anymore than we need to doubt a pre-Pauline tradition about appearances to 500 brothers and to James. The reliability of the tradition of a command rests simply on the fact that Paul knew that the Corinthians, resistant to changing their habits, could have consulted other apostles who would tell them if Christ had never given a command.

Doherty argues on p. 45 of The Jesus Puzzle that Paul "received" the Lord's Supper in a vision, and he says correctly that such a conclusion is "crucial to the argument of the myth theory." But how can Paul have anticipated or handed over to prior apostles the contents of Christianity's meal of remembrance? Paul and Peter fell out over whom to eat with (Gal 2:11), not over Paul's claim that everyone should eat in a way that honored what the Lord did and commanded. Instead, Paul says that Christ is not divided, and that one cannot belong to Peter while not belonging to Paul (1 Cor 1:13). Certainly a significant difference in the cultic meal would constitute a break in brotherhood.

Does it not seem overwhelmingly likely that those who called themselves brothers in Christ shared the same meals (as Paul says was the case until Peter stopped eating with Gentiles), and were united in the central rituals of remembrance, because some disciples established the cultic meal first and Paul accepted it later? If Paul had a vision of the Lord's Supper, it matched what he had already learned and was already honoring himself at table.

I think it's inevitable that Paul learned something of the cultic meal when he was persecuting Christians. The eating of Christ's body was probably one of the claims which was found to be most blasphemous. Certainly pagans who knew little about Christianity were likely nevertheless to hear rumours of Christians eating flesh at their cultic meal.

Paul must have heard of the Lord's Supper again in the three years between his conversion and his first meeting with Peter. I'm sure that in those three years he did much meditation -- including meditation on the Lord's Supper -- but it cannot be that he spent 3 years in absolute seclusion without hearing of Christian claims. It's nearly certain that he met other Christians (as Acts is explicit about). He says he went to "Arabia" and then back to Damascus. That he would not have wanted to meet any other Christians, or to learn anything more about Christianity, for three entire years seems implausible to me. Possibly he heard things which were at variance with each other and went to consult with Peter.

So the other apostles were not the first people from whom he heard of Christianity's central cultic meal. He would not appeal to the unnamed persons, or anonymous information, that he received while in Arabia, because that would not constitute any kind of authority with the Corinthians. He would not appeal to major apostles when admonishing his audience, either, because the Corinthians would already know what the other apostles were saying.

And the latter appeal, Paul thinks, would compromise his authority. Nowhere in his letters does Paul admit to receiving anything from Peter, even though he surely did receive things from him, such as Peter's opinions and experiences concerning Christ, when the two men met and got to know each other.

But he does need to appeal directly to Christ, if he's going to quote Christ's words to any real effect. The Corinthians have flouted these words already, so he needs to interpret the words explicitly and lay them on more than human authority. He could do that because he must have meditated on the Lord's Supper, and had visions of it, from the time of his own conversion.

In closing it's worth noting Doherty's argument that Paul was not referring to a vision of a historical scene but rather to a revelation about a heavenly event. The objection here also applies to the crucifixion and the burial: how does Paul envision a meal in the lower heavens? Who was Christ speaking to when he said, "Do this in remembrance of me"? It was not a human being -- but then why does Paul not explain the reason that such a command should apply to the Corinthians?

At the discussion board for the Internet Infidels I have opened a debate concerning the Lord's Supper, though it has not received any replies; and I've opened another one concerning the creed.

Earl Doherty on the corporeality of gods

2005-10-26T14:45:00.000-04:00

I’m going to lay out a serious contradiction in Earl Doherty’s thesis of the mythical Christ. I posted the following in a rougher draft form at the Secular Web's discussion board, in the same thread that I began by reconstructing a life of the celestial Christ.

On p. 98 of The Jesus Puzzle Doherty says,

In this higher world, the myths of the mystery cults and of earliest Christianity were placed. Here the savior god Attis had been castrated, here Mithras had slain the bull, here Osiris had been dismembered. (For more sophisticated thinkers like the first century Plutarch ... such mythical stories were not literal, but merely symbolic of timeless processes which the human mind had difficulty grasping.)

In support Doherty adds this on p. 104:

These [philosophers] saw the stories of the Greek salvation cults as "eternal meanings clothed in myths." They were allegorical interpretations only, even if the minds of 'ordinary men' might see them as more literal.

And on p. 103:

The lowest level of the spirit realm was the air, or “firmament,” between the earth and the moon. This was the domain of the demon spirits – in Jewish parlance, of Satan and his evil angels – and it was regarded as closely connected to the earthly sphere. The demonic spiritual powers belonged to the realm of flesh and were thought of as in some way corporeal, though they possessed ‘heavenly’ versions of earthly bodies.

And on p. 105:

... no Christian writer or hymnist expresses the view that the Christ myth is allegorical or symbolic. Paul seems to have very much believed in the divine Jesus' literal suffering at the hands of the demon spirits.

By contrast with all this, he says on p. 122:

The Greek salvation myths ... spin stories about their deities, born in caves, slain by other gods, sleeping and dining and speaking. None of these activities were regarded as taking place in history or on earth itself. The bull dispatched by Mithras was not historical; the blood it spilled which vitalized the earth was metaphysical. No one searched the soil of Asia Minor hoping to unearth the genitals severed from the Great Mother's consort Attis.

He says that these events were not regarded as taking place in history. What does this mean? That they were not regarded as acts which human beings committed? Of course: Zeus and Hera were not regarded as human. That cannot be what Doherty means. If we hold to the plain meaning of his statements, then these events were not a part of what humans would have regarded as their history, or the history of the material world. And I’m sure the ancients would have regarded at least some of the things in the firmament between the earth and the moon as taking place within the history of the material world that they lived in. They would have considered birds to be a part of that history, and would have also included, for instance, a rock that fell from space, or the rain that fell from the sky. So when Doherty says that the events of the salvation myths were not regarded as “taking place in history or on earth itself,” the only thing clearly stated is that these events did not touch the ground of earth. They certainly could have been a part of human history. Zeus copulated with human women. He took on a human form, even if he was not restricted to it, and could therefore be regarded as in some sense corporeal. By sight and by touch, and possibly other senses, he was in human form.

But what does it mean to say that such a deity’s doings were not thought to be a part of history? Perhaps Doherty is saying that commoners may have retained a traditional view in which the doings of the gods occurred in a distant primordial past, and therefore not in a way that anyone could regard as taking place in his own age and in the sky above his own home. He does allude to that possibility. But Doherty has never argued that Paul taught of Christ's death as belonging to the distant past: no form of Christianity has ever taught that.

Perhaps Doherty means that commoners regarded the gods as continually dying and rising with each yearly cycle. This ancient belief is attested. But again, Doherty has not argued this, because Christianity has never argued it. Paul says that Christ's sacrifice was a onetime event.

Doherty seems to be saying in one place that these doings were thought of as being corporeal, which seems to me correct, especially given that the genitals of a god could interact with the genitals of a human; in the last quote he is saying that these things were regarded as so insubstantial that no one associated them at all with human history and no one would have dreamed of looking for the genitals of a castrated god. If some people, as Doherty speculates, believed these things to have occurred long before their own time, then that is the reason they did not look. But Doherty cannot argue that all commoners thought this way, because he does not know. I see no reason why commoners would believe that supernatural powers had stopped acting in the world: look at the exorcisms in the gospels. Certainly the ancients believed that world events were under the present control of gods.

In that context, Doherty’s last quote actually implies that the bull’s blood was not corporeal, for if it had been, some people would have thought that it was possible to search for it. The ancients, per Doherty, did not think it possible to apprehend any past or present remains of divinities. So for them, a thing like the bull's blood could not be seen, tasted, smell, touched, or heard in its splashing on the earth. It was invisible, colorless, tasteless, soundless, untouchable. Certainly, “metaphysical” is the right word for it. But “in some way corporeal” is not at all the right phrase for it. This blood, per Doherty’s last quoted statement above, was in no way corporeal.

If you can conceive of metaphysics, then the blood from the bull, while not having any material properties, had a mysterious effect on matter such as the earth. This can certainly be believed. By moderns, or by ancient philosophers. But what ancient commoner would have been able to conceive things this way? They thought the blood, as I put it, was corporeal, but filled with mysterious powers that could not, themselves, be apprehended by humans. They thought the blood fell, which suggests the pull of gravity and does not suggest metaphysical blood. Doherty argues that the firmament was closely connected to the earth, and that the demons belonged to the realm of flesh: all of this would suggest to commoners a proximity or similarity between themselves, other material creatures living on the ground or flying through the firmament, and the other denizens of the firmament.

Now I don’t object if someone says that ancient commoners regarded certain denizens of the firmaments as having some corporeal qualities but not others. That has been believed of the resurrected Christ, and it was believed of the pagan gods: they appeared in material form, and could interact with matter or flesh (like Zeus impregnating women), but they had supernatural powers. A close analogy we might use is Superman.

What I do object to is flipping back and forth between arguments, letting one completely forget the other one, for whatever purpose happens to be at play. You can’t say in one place that commoners believed things literally or that they took them to be corporeal in some sense, and in another place that they did not regard the blood as having any material properties that human senses could apprehend. If a human can’t apprehend it in any way, then it would never be regarded as corporeal in any way.

Doherty makes the first of the quoted statements, as noted, on p. 98. He has just finished arguing that “the time and place of mythical happenings had, in the minds of the philosophers at least, been shifted from the distant primordial past to a higher world of spiritual realities". Sophisticated thinkers, Doherty says, did not believe these spiritual realities to have any literal reality, so commoners believed these things to be corporeal and possessed of great power beyond the human. If this is all true, Christ can be seen as one more myth of the kind that the ancients moved to the firmament. Jewish salvation history, instead of looking to Abraham or Moses, looked into the air between the earth and the moon. Commoners, who looked to this air, bought the myth of the Christ literally; they regarded these events as having some corporeal properties that humans could perceive. Doherty has been challenged on all points of this account, but at least it is intelligible.

Now what if Doherty did not use this argument here? What if he used instead his statement from p. 122? Instead of saying that myth had shifted from the past to the heavens, and saying, In this realm, the gods played, he would say his peace about myth shifting to the heavens through the insights of philosophers and follow with, “None of these activities were regarded as taking place in history or on earth itself. The bull dispatched by Mithras was not historical; the blood it spilled which vitalized the earth was metaphysical. No one searched the soil of Asia Minor hoping to unearth the genitals severed from the Great Mother's consort Attis.”

The problem then would be: did commoners really buy Christ in this incorporeal manner? Did they really think of Christ as descending to the heavens and taking on a form that, as Paul says, was like our own form, and yet was completely a formless spirit? How is that possible? Human likeness, to be regarded as a likeness, needs to be apprehended somehow: through the human senses. Doherty can suggest that commoners bought Christ more easily if he relates Christ to the pagan stories, which were literal to the commoners, and corporeal in some way, because Christ’s story is about a spirit that took on human likeness and came down toward earth. The ancients depicted him crucified: plainly a scene of the kind that many senses could apprehend. Doherty cannot suggest his mythicist theory with any ease if he says that the commoners did not search for the bull’s blood because it just didn’t have any likeness to matter, and because while it may have impacted history it clearly did not belong to the history of material objects between earth and moon. That just doesn’t lead into a story about the Son taking on human likeness in such a way that he can be crucified in a fleshly realm. The mythicist case could not really get off the ground like that. So Doherty places Christ in the fleshly realm and says that the commoners bought this picture, instead of saying that the commoners just weren’t thinking of flesh at all and were thinking about formless spirits that they could never look for.

On p. 122 he does make the statements implying formlessness, and concludes that no one believed these things to occur within the history of material objects between the earth and moon. These statements support his purpose there, which is to describe the epistle to the Hebrews as presenting a purely immaterial portrait of Christ. This he uses to interpret all the Pauline references to “blood,” as if to say, none of the blood in the New Testmanet, outside the Gospels, was regarded as material. The mythicist case flies much better this way than if Paul is referring to blood that is in any way corporeal. All the meanings of “corporeal” that I know of refer to things that can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, or tasted.

But what if on p. 122 he did not use the statements implying incorporeality, but instead used his statements from p. 98 and p. 103? Instead of arguing what he does about Hebrews and the Pauline references to blood and saying that no one on earth could possibly think of apprehending blood from a god, he makes the arguments about Hebrews and Paul and follows with, “In this higher world [that Hebrews and Paul speak about], the myths of … earliest Christianity [like the shedding of Christ’s blood] were placed. Here the savior god Attis had been castrated, here Mithras had slain the bull, here Osiris had been dismembered … For more sophisticated thinkers like the first century Plutarch ... such mythical stories were not literal….[but commoners did think that such stories about the blood of the bull and the blood of Christ were literal].” Then both Paul and Hebrews seem like they’re talking about literal stories in which corporeal blood was spilled somewhere. Hebrews might be reporting a literal blood-spilling or referring back to such a scene with its own metaphor, but in either case it would be referring in some way to corporeal-like blood. And so would Paul. They would both be referring to a story that was in some way regarded as corporeal (in some way able to apprehended by the senses) if Doherty uses his statements from p. 98 and p. 103.

The mythicist model can live with this, if the phrase, in some way, means that the blood could, perhaps, be seen but not touched: it is therefore a spiritual thing, in the visible form of corporeality, but no more. But in some way opens up the door to other forms of corporeality; and commoners who see things tend not to stop themselves from believing that their other senses have also apprehended what they saw; so it’s better for the mythicist model if Paul and Hebrews are referring to stories that no one in the ancient world took literally.

To support his model, Doherty is switching between incompatible statements. He uses the first set of arguments to get his theory flying, and the second to keep it flying. I wonder what would happen to his mythicist model if he switched between compatible statements, or better yet, kept to a consistent, synthesized picture throughout.

A Life of the Celestial Christ

2005-10-23T18:48:00.000-04:00

He was born of an unnamed celestial woman and lived with his Father in heaven. He was in some sense from the line of King David. He was also subject to the Jewish Law in some way. God then sent him into the lower heavens to become a minister to the Jews, and to bring redemption from sin. On a certain “night” in these spheres, he took bread, broke it, said that it was his body, asked someone to do the same in remembrance of him, and was, literally, “handed over” or “delivered up”. In these lower heavens he was crucified by the demons who ruled over the earth. He shed blood, which presumably fell to earth. He was buried in these lower heavens. He rose on the third day according to the scriptures, though he spent enough time in the lower heavens, after his rising, to be seen by Paul, as well as men whom Paul met, and hundreds of others. He is, by the time of Paul’s letters, seated at the right hand of the Father. Probably after his ascension, he gave Paul at least one explicit command about how to make a living, and communicated with Paul and others in visions of a different kind.

That much is given to us in Paul's authentic letters. Writers other than Paul added scenes, which Paul may or may not have believed in prior to their writings. In the letter to the Colossians, God or Christ (depending on the translation) cancelled the “bond which stood against us in its legal demands”, sometimes translated as "the Law," by nailing it to the cross -- and on the cross either Father or Son took the evil powers captive and led them in a procession. The letter to the Ephesians transmits a saying, "When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men." The letter to the Hebrews adds a great deal about Jesus Christ as a heavenly priest who enters a sanctuary and sacrifices himself there; it speaks of Jesus as coming from the tribe of Judah, and as someone who suffered outside a gate. The Book of Revelation adds a future history for Christ. Etcetera.

Recently I decided to spell out what Christ's life must have been, according to the New Testament epistles, if Earl Doherty is right that Christ was preached to be a heavenly being who never came down to earth. A theory with a positive description can be tested far better than one that is merely suggested by challenges to the traditional evidence for Christ's historicity. There is no such reconstruction that I know of in Doherty's work, so I constructed the one you see above and posted it at Internet Infidels. After a little prodding, it started a debate which has gone very well, though that's all I'm going to say about it for now.

I also posted questions that might be used to challenge Doherty's thesis. In other words, would this picture of Christ make sense to the ancients? Here is an expanded list of the questions:

How can a cross be staked in the air? How can a man be buried there? If the tops of mountains are meant, there is no evidence for such a scenario in the Bible. If a floor of another kind is meant, it would surely be regarded as blocking the sun, or else invisible. Where is the evidence that the ancients believed such things to occupy the lower heavens? Are there any pagan stories that speak of crosses or burials or meals in the air? There is evidence in the Bible of followers and detractors doubting the plausibility of Christ's resurrection, but where are the objections to the plausibility of a cross staked in the heavens and a crucifixion victim buried in the heavens?

Why is it that when the epistles do speak explicitly of the "power of the air" or the spiritual "principalities" with which Christians are at war, no mention is made that these powers, specifically, crucified the Lord?

Why does Paul not reflect on why a crucifixion in the lower realms was much more "spiritual" and powerful than any cross could have been on earth?

Where does Paul believe the Last Supper took place? On mountaintops? Is that the place where a command could be given to a person that would be followed at earthly meals? Maybe, but where is the evidence from the Bible? And if the air is meant as the setting, are the lower heavens, open as they are, really capable of allowing any entity enough time to have an apparently mournful and private meal? How do you hide from demons who are powerful enough to kill you, in the sky where there's no place to hide?

Who was with Christ at this meal? The Bible says that Christ was sent by God, and mentions no one else being sent. Was Christ speaking to angels? Why is this not mentioned in the epistles? Why do angels need to take his body and blood? In what sense can these be for them? (Would no one in the Christian audience think to ask this question?) Why are angels being asked to do this in remembrance of him, when Paul clearly thinks that the Last Supper must be imitated by the Corinthians?

Who delivered him up to his crucifixion that night? Angels? Demons? God? Does even the latter choice fit the theology of the New Testament adequately?

Why does Paul use words which imply "delivered up" if Christ was in fact sent downward? Perhaps the words convey the meaning of "handed over," but why use ambiguous or possibly confusing words without giving an explanation?

Why does no Christian say something to the effect that though Christ was killed in the lower heavens, his precious blood did in fact make contact with the earth, or so may be the hope, when it dropped? Why were no shrines erected at the places where Christ's blood was thought to have fallen?

How was he thought to be buried in this realm? Did he go directly to the underworld of Sheol, bypassing the world of mortal flesh at the surface of the earth?

He rose from the dead on the third day, but seems to have spent enough time afterwards in the lower heavens to be seen by a long procession of people, including someone who was "late" to the party, Paul. Why did Christ linger in the lower heavens after his rising? Paul says that in his time, the demons were still passing away, which suggests that when Christ was raised, he was still in their realm. Apparently Christ had enough power after being raised to stay safe long enough to be seen from earth's surface, but not enough power to destroy the demons and claim the lower heavens for himself and for God. Is this what Christians believed, from what their scriptures tell us?

If Christ was buried in this realm, then why does Colossians say that his victory over the demons took place right on the cross? Is this a "metaphor" for events that are already celestial and unseen? Both the actual crucifixion in the heavens and its "metaphors" are unseen?

If the victory took place right at the cross, and the demons were led away in a triumphal procession, why does Paul say that the "rulers of the age" (which can mean both demons and earthly rulers) have still not passed away in his own time?

Why does Hebrews present the crucifixion as a priest entering a sanctuary, with various other details incompatible with a crucifixion? Is this another "metaphor" of events that themselves were unseen?

And why does Colossians say that God or Christ nailed the "the Law" to the cross? Christ would not be said to do any nailing at his own crucifixion, though Doherty seems to have "Christ" in mind for that passage. It makes no sense. If we mean God, though, then God is seen as descending himself to the lower realms. Why did he send Christ, then? This option also seems to reject a fundamental of the Christian faith as described in all models: namely that God sent his own Son to die alone. Rather, God sent him and followed him, and took part in the nailing of the "Law" to the cross. On this last point, if God descended to the crucifixion, would not the demons have fled in terror? Why does God not destroy the demons right there? Does he nail the Law and then abandon Christ? Why do the epistles not speak of these elements of the drama more explicitly?

In the historicist model, all these things make sense. Christ was a lowly carpenter who could be delivered up to higher earthly powers. The earth provides many places of temporary and private sanctuary for a meal. Christ could be nailed to the cross by earthly powers, and could be buried dead, while in heaven his spirit is in fact leading a procession of defeated powers -- but rulers on earth are still plainly in sight, not yet passed away. Because God's realm was not claimed to be physically seen, Christians could actually offer many suggestions, including the heavenly priest's story, as a way to suggest what happened near God: there would be none of the suggestions of the mythicist model that Jesus was believed to do mostly corporeal things that no one had claimed to see, in the air right above the earth. In fact most events in the historicist model were believed because people claimed to have witnessed them on earth, whereas in the mythicist model nothing is witnessed by human beings until the risen Christ is seen.

Edit 10/25/05: A thread has been started at the IIDB which concerns the cosmology of the ancients who lived in Paul's time.

Jesus recently deceased (addendum)

2005-10-14T22:42:00.000-04:00

A few posts back I wrote about finding an error that Earl Doherty made on his website in an essay which was originally published in 1997. I've started reading the book he published in 1999, The Jesus Puzzle, in which he lays out his most comprehensive case that Jesus Christ never lived. I found one modification there, but the error remained. I'd like to highlight what is wrong with his argument, and to start by comparing it with a similar but far better argument made by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa in a new book about Hiroshima, Racing the Enemy.

First Doherty's argument. The charge that the early Christians were not thinking of a recent human life is central to the nonexistence theory. Doherty repeats the charge seven times in the opening 15 pages of The Jesus Puzzle. Here are the last three instances, with bold emphasis added to mark off what I'm calling "blanket phrases" (see pp. 14-15):

Is it feasible that ... nowhere would anyone ... happen to use words which would identify the divine Son and Christ they are all talking about with his recent incarnation[?]

The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived.

Thus, we are left with an entire corpus of early Christian correspondence which gives us no indication that the divine Christ these writers look to for salvation is to be identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth whom the Gospels place in the early first century -- or, indeed, with any man in their recent past.

In three sentences, Doherty has used 6 blanket phrases without qualification. Now Hasegawa's argument (pp. 297-98):

Richard Frank, who argues that the atomic bombings had a greater impact on Japan's decision to surrender than Soviet involvement in the war, relies exclusively on contemporary sources and discounts postwar testimonies.... This methodology, though admirable, does not support Frank's conclusion. Hirohito's reference to the atomic bomb at the imperial conference comes from Takeshita's diary, which must be based on hearsay. None of the participants who actually attended the imperial conference remembers the emperor's referring to the atomic bomb.

Hasegawa then mentions each of the remaining references to the bomb and to the Soviet attack. And he gives us a summary:

In contemporary records from August 6 to August 15 two sources ... refer only to the impact of the atomic bomb, three sources only to Soviet entry ... and seven sources both to the atomic bomb and Soviet involvement. Contemporary evidence does not support Frank's contention.

There's a certain thrill in reading historical writing of this kind: it's careful all the way to the end, judicious but thorough in its conclusion, desirous of dialogue with the best arguments of others (which are taken seriously), tolerant of uncertainty, and still firm.

Doherty lumps into one category, which he then dismisses as myth, all the times that Paul speaks of Christ's cross, crucifixion, death, killing, sacrifice, blood, body, flesh, and birth. He says that three "apparent exceptions" remain to his charge that Christ was not referred to as a recent historical person, and he lays them out between the second and third quotes above. He includes two which also appeared in his 1997 essay -- and he now includes 1 Timothy 6:13, where Jesus is said to make a confession before Pontius Pilate, who had ruled only a few years before Paul wrote. He argues one by one why they are merely "apparent" exceptions.

His method here is to lay out possible exceptions in the middle of an argument, but not to mention them in the conclusion. I can imagine Hasegawa or any responsible historian laying out the exceptions and concluding, "Thus, with two exceptions, and by a slim margin, the texts point away from the atomic bomb as a cause of surrender." Doherty takes the exceptions and dismisses them, which is his prerogative. But having dismissed them he then offers conclusions unburdened by them -- from which he then builds the next step in his argument. He builds, in short, from a foundation that he has already cleared of possible stumbling blocks to make it look firmer than it is.

And the conclusions themselves are far more sweeping than anything in Hasegawa's book, or indeed in almost any book of history I have read. Hiroshima is a modern and well-documented subject. By contrast, historians of antiquity repeat constantly that a fundamental practice of their work is living with uncertainty, because the record is so thin. None of the respected works of biblical scholarship have such statements as Doherty's. What is worse, two of Doherty's three statements above are negatives. The remaining one is a loaded question.

If a historian is trying to prove a negative, that's well and good in itself. But the method has to cover everything. It has to cover every significant bit of data as well as every possibility that we can reasonably foresee. Doherty has in one form or another noted the lack of respect for his theory, and though it's true that his opponents can shut their minds to his central thesis without considering it, no one can hope to earn scholarly consideration if the method is unrigorous. Doherty dismisses 3 passages. He misses entirely Paul's claim that he had met "James, the brother of the Lord" (Galatians 1.19). Here is a possible or apparent exception -- the fourth explicit one, if we're counting -- to Doherty's rule that the earliest Christians were not thinking of a recent life. Yet he doesn't think of it, as I argued on this blog, because he had dismissed the James statement as an argument for Christ's humanity before tackling the question of when Christ lived.

His method was at fault. I'm guessing that when first exploring the idea of Christ's nonexistence, he noted the apparent exceptions to the rule that Christ was not human, and these included the James passage. He then carried the data in its "conclusion" form to the next question: but Doherty writes out his conclusions, as noted, without reference to the exceptions. So when he got around to the question of time, the James passage was settled in his mind. It was not carried with the rest of the data.

This guess about Doherty's internal process could be flat-out wrong. But my estimation of his general method is not. He is trying to overthrow longstanding Biblical models by proving negatives, but his method allows him to forget a passage which he himself had seen many times. And all this, he compares in his book to the Copernican revolution (p. 125).

If he were to revise the opening pages of his book according to my critiques, he would drop the two apparent exceptions from his 1997 essay (since Paul does not root the Last Supper, or the killing of Christ by the Jews, in time); keep 1 Timothy, and add the James passage. He probably should also add 1 John 1:1-2, where Christians speak of seeing and laying hands on a life which somehow also went back to the beginning of time. Doherty would then still have three "apparent" exceptions, as he does now in his book. A future edition of his book might make these changes, so that no one could see the original flaw in the method. I'm interested particularly in what the James passage might do to his argument, but there is perhaps something more important to highlight: the way Doherty comes to his conclusions. He came to his radical conclusion about Jesus long before correcting this particular error -- if he does correct it.

As for what the James passage does to his argument, well, it may be that he forgot it because of its particular power. Uniquely among passages in the New Testament, it has the potential to disprove both of the arms of Doherty's thesis discussed here: the opening one, about a recent life; and the central one, about a human life. If Doherty's right about the passage, and Paul meant to say that he met with a man regarded as a brother in the spiritual sense, Jesus Christ still lives. Mythicists can win many arguments and still lose their central one about Jesus' existence. But if they lose only one of their constituent arguments, the central one begins to fold. In this case, the central one cannot be mounted, at least not in the way that Doherty has done, for then the earliest Christian correspondent, Paul, would believe that he's met a biological brother of Christ. Suddenly everything in Paul's writing would take on a meaning contrary to what Doherty has explicated: he would lose not just his opening 15 pages, but entire reams of what he's written about Paul's statements. Additionally, the remaining Christian correspondents would have to be re-evaluated, unless it was satisfactorily explained why they contradicted Paul. Some compromise could be worked out, perhaps, but the blanket statements would have to be thrown out (although they should not be made even now, so I can't be sure of this).

The James passage thus becomes one of the negatives that must be proved: "Paul definitely did not mean to include the biological meaning of brother." He may have meant to include the spiritual connotation, but that positive claim is not enough to show: he also cannot have meant to include a biological connotation. Paul gives no clarifying statement -- indeed nowhere does he say that his Christ should not be confused with the (very common) idea of an earthly Messiah. Paul uses the word for "brother" dozens of times, almost always in reference to Christian brotherhood. Doherty is saying that Paul almost never uses the word with a biological kinship implied along with the spiritual kinship, and that he definitely does not use it that way in the James passage. Doherty needs, in short, for Paul to use a single meaning, which always excludes biological kinship, almost all the way down the line, and certainly whenever Christ is the subject.

Doherty devotes exactly 1 page in his book, out of nearly 400, to the James passage (see p. 57). He fails to take it seriously again at his website, in a section from November 2003 devoted to responding to readers:

"James, the Brother of the Lord"—Again

I have to confess to being, by this time, somewhat amused by all the fuss which opponents of the mythicist case ... create over this phrase in Galatians 1:19. These five words, despite their ambiguous meaning, are regularly offered as a secure hook on which to hang the existence position. Let's test them to see how much weight they can bear.

He has thrown the burden of proof off his shoulders by insisting that the opposing argument hangs on this hook -- and by implication, falls from it. That works better as a description of his own case. There is no need to insist on any interpretation of the passage, unless you're a mythicist; and historicists do not insist on a strictly biological interpretation here. They say only that in all of Paul's correspondence, at least this one time seems to include a biological connotation.

I'll let Doherty lay out the issue of connations. All emphases are his:

1 - The word "brother" itself. As I have said in my Sound of Silence Appendix (it bears repeating): "Paul uses the term "brother" a total of about 30 times, and the plural form "brothers" or "brethren" (as some translations render it) many more dozens of times. A minority are in the context of ethical teaching, Paul admonishing his audience about how to treat one's "brother." In most of these (if not all), the term means a fellow believer, not a blood sibling. In all of the other cases but one—leaving aside the passage under consideration here—the term can only refer to a Christian believer [....] IN NOT A SINGLE INSTANCE CAN THE TERM BE IDENTIFIED AS MEANING SIBLING.... And yet so many traditionalists confidently claim that in this case, "brother" means sibling.
...
3 - It is claimed to be critical that nowhere else does Paul use the singular phrase, "brother of the Lord." At the same time, the plural "brothers of the Lord" in 1 Cor. 9:5 is similarly claimed to refer to Jesus' siblings (as in Mark). However, we read in Philippians 1:14 the phrase "brothers in the Lord." Here we have an identical phrase, in the plural, with a change of preposition. Here, "brothers" is acknowledged to be understandable only in the sense of "brethren," members of a brotherhood or group of fellow believers. Throughout the epistles, we are clearly in the presence of a group centered in Jerusalem and devoted to a "Lord," a group of which James seems to be the head, a group of which 500 members underwent some "seeing" of the Christ. And yet when the word "brother" becomes singular in Galatians 1:19, it reputedly switches to the meaning "sibling." When the group of brethren changes its preposition from "in" to "of", certain members of that group automatically become relatives of a recent human man.

Doherty concedes that "the brother of the Lord" is the correct translation and that the phrase is unique -- different from Paul's common references to brothers in the Lord. He makes much of the idea that a large shift in meaning cannot hang on a preposition -- as if the size of a word corresponded to its linguistic power.

The remaining arguments in his book are brief.

One, he says that "the Lord" probably refers to God and not to Jesus. Yet Paul has opened the letter with this greeting: "Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ" (1. 3). Doherty, admittedly no expert in ancient Greek, does offer some of his own translations throughout his book, but not here.

Two, he says that the letters of James and Jude do not identify their authors as brothers of the Lord (Jude identifies himself as a brother of James; the "brothers" of Jesus, named in Mark 6:3, include James and one Judas). Doherty says this is significant because these authors, if they had really been biological brothers of the Lord, would not have passed up the chance to say so and augment their authority. Others writing in their names, Doherty says, would be sure also to mention the kinship. But the same would be true about men who had a spiritual bond with Christ: that would have to be mentioned. The Gospels report that Jesus' family did not believe in him (Mark 3.21, 3.31). That would be the only thing that James and Jude would be highlighting by pointing out their biological tie. Leave the Gospels out entirely, and it's still hard to see how biological kinship augments your authority. A son of a wise man can claim something from a mere blood tie, if he has not dishonored his father. But a mere brother, who did not honor the blood bond while the man in question was alive and in need of help? No, the "silence" of James and Jude is clearly a burden for the mythicist case, where "spiritual" kinship should be mentioned, if Doherty's standard is correct. More likely, his standard is just too pointed. These authors were probably not brothers of Jesus; or perhaps they were uncertain about attributing letters explicitly to brothers of Jesus.

Paul certainly does not see the James whom he met as having any authority because of a blood tie. Paul does not need to be using "the brother of the Lord" as a title for James, the way that later Christians used it. When he says "I saw none of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord", he probably just means "James, the one related to the Lord" -- to differentiate him from James the apostle.

Doherty consistently fails to imagine how the earthly and the spiritual connotations might mix together in the minds of the early Christians. He insists again and again, "This is the spiritual Christ, not the human Jesus." This tendency to insist that an issue must fall into one of two extremes which do not mix may be the greatest flaw in his argument. Perhaps it takes a skeptic, who divides the world dualistically into what is natural and what is supernatural (or unreal), to impose such a strict rule on ancient texts. It seems like a mistake, really a blunder, to insist on spiritual connotations straight down the line for a world where both Gentiles and Jews spoke of divinity and humanity mixing.

Hard peace and soft peace

2005-10-08T21:40:00.000-04:00

I'm in the middle of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy, and I'm reading about a fascinating split within the U.S. government during the last year of World War II.

The Roosevelt administration was demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally. The same demand had been made of Hitler's Germany, as a way to ensure that Nazism would be completely destroyed and, it follows, fully discredited. Everyone wanted to avoid what had happened in the aftermath of the First World War, when Germany surrendered long before being actually defeated on the battlefield, and a lie took hold which said that Germany had surrendered because of a "stab in the back" by traitorous elements on the home front; it was a lie that Hitler used to great effect in his rise to power. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to be sure that if Germany surrendered, the Allies could destroy Nazism without conditions; and that if Hitler chose to fight to the last rather than surrender unconditionally, then his regime would be fully destroyed on the battlefield.

The identical thought process was applied to the war against Japan, even though Imperial Japan was not Nazi Germany. Most members of the Roosevelt administration stood by the call for the unconditional surrender of Japan, and Hasegawa terms these the advocates of "hard peace." They believed that Japan's militarism could only be destroyed for good by eliminating Japan's emperor system, trying Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal, and imposing a democratic, republican system on Japan.

Hasegawa writes that those members of the Roosevelt administration who were most knowledgeable about Japan shared the desire to eradicate Japan's militarism, but rejected the above means.

Inspired by the idealism of the Atlantic Charter, but dismayed by the unconditional surrender demand declared by Roosevelt, the Japan specialists attempted to craft a policy whereby Japan would be able to return to the international community as a peaceful, constructive member after the war.... They insisted that a political system, even democracy, would not be easily grafted onto a country whose political, cultural and religious traditions were so different from those of the United States. Their knowledge of Japanese history taught them that the emperor system had little to do with the resurgence of Japanese militarism and that the symbiotic relationship between the emperor system and militarism as expressed in the kokutai had only a recent pedigree. Emperor worship had profound religious and emotional roots among the Japanese ... Proponents of soft peace argued that America's interest would be best served if Japan were turned into a peaceful, constructive power. To that end, preservation of the monarchy was crucial. This view also gained a spokesman in Joseph Grew, who became a lightning rod for the attack from the New Deal liberals, who assailed him as "an appeaser" and "an apologist of Hirohito" (p. 22).

The first thing that leaps out in this excerpt is the irony of New Deal Democrats as war hawks. Times do change. Hasegawa notes that President Roosevelt himself favored a punitive peace. This does not bode well for anyone who wishes to speculate that Hiroshima would not have occurred if FDR had lived.

But what I wanted to highlight was the attack on the Japanese religion. People who did not know Japan identified its religion as the chief source of violence, and saw fit to destroy it by the same means which were applied to Nazism -- the ideology which did in fact preach power and worship violence.

Hiroshima might well have been avoided had the advocates of soft peace prevailed upon the U.S. administration to demand surrender with only one condition granted: a guarantee for the Emperor's throne. Hasegawa's book does a very good job of describing a similar split in the Japanese government, wherein the civilian leaders hoped that they could achieve an end to the war and still save the Emperor, while the military could not contemplate surrendering without a guarantee that Japan would also disarm itself, suffer no occupation, and try its own war criminals. The Japanese military, like Hitler, spoke of Japan going down in a final battle to utter destruction, and some Japanese officers saw honor in this; but Japan's government was not fully controlled by the military, unlike the situation in Germany. Neither the civilians nor the militarists could overcome one another. And there was one figure at the top, treated like a figurehead, who nonetheless commanded grave respect and potential power -- and this man chose to surrender before the future of his house was irretrievably jeopardized. This house saw no glory in dying suicidally.

All this suggests strongly that the hardliners on both sides of the Pacific War were wrong. The fact that Japan has become a peaceful, constructive nation, many years after a surrender which took place because the Emperor was guaranteed, vindicates the vision of the advocates for soft peace. Japan's religion is much older than its militarism, and it has survived the latter. A war to destroy the former would have been immeasurably longer; after Hiroshima would probably have come the atomic destruction of Kyoto, the city which Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed as the primary target for the atomic bomb because it was a sacred center of Japan's culture and religion.

I might add here that the advocates of soft peace, in light of Iraq, were also right in their warnings about how difficult it would be to impose democracy on a very foreign nation. Unlike in Nazi Germany, there is a vibrant and traditional religion in Iraq. And I'm not sure the United States has recognized or respected its power very well.

Like Japan's emperor system, like its indigenous Buddhism and Shintoism -- and like Christianity -- Islam has fueled or given its blessings to violence. All these have sought glory through warfare. But like all these, Islam is far older, and more subtle, than the violent men within who seek an apocalyptic battle. I'm not sure that the United States can see the distinction clearly enough to do something peaceful about it. It's not that the United States attacks Islam by going after the mosques and the religious leaders or banning them; these have stayed off the target list in the sense that Kyoto did. But Hiroshima was still bombed, and unconditional surrender was not modified until after the Manhattan Project had fulfilled its aim -- until after the destruction was done. None of this can bode well for Iraq.

Internet Infidels

2005-10-04T17:27:00.000-04:00

Recently I registered to post on the discussion board of the Internet Infidels, also known as the Secular Web. I have not posted there much more than I have at other sites, but I have found the place fascinating. Strangely, I have found the amateur skeptics at Internet Infidels to be more knowledgeable, and harder to debunk, than the well-known champions of mythicism. Even Earl Doherty, the best of the formal mythicist authors, is easier to catch in a mistake or an inconsistency than are some of the skeptics who post on the IIDB (as the discussion board of the Internet Infidels is known). If you have some knowledge of modern Biblical scholarship, there is rarely anything so easy as reading a famous mythicist and finding flaws in the argument; debating at the Secular Web is harder.

There are many reasons for this. First, you get replies at the IIDB. Your antagonists are there to push back. Also, the skeptics on the discussion boards are finely honed debaters; they debate all the time. Some debating skill lights the path to knowledge; a lot of it is just the art of rhetoric (though I do give the Secular Web credit for discouraging outright mudslinging). Furthermore, skeptics outnumber traditional theists on the boards. All things being equal, one person simply will not produce as many arguments as a group of two or more will, and is likely sooner to tire or grow discouraged; he's also likelier to actually lose an argument along the way, since he will likely fail to produce his own best responses unless he focuses on one challenger and ignores the rest. Even then, a visitor will take some time getting to know the culture of the place, so it will be likely that he will communicate ineffectively.

I think all these factors would be telling even for someone who chose to take on a whole board of Holocaust deniers or Moon Hoaxers; even such open-and-shut cases can be very difficult to navigate for someone with a traditional view, and Michael Shermer has described in his book, Denying History, the ways that a Holocaust denier can typically make a Holocaust believer look very bad. There is an art to shredding someone's arguments, throwing the person off balance, and generally making them look weak (an appearance which deepens, unfortunately, when those who have the better arguments concede their mistakes, as they can afford to do). Worse, in these places where debaters tend to be all men, you might ended up looking emotionally flustered, or actually becoming flustered. It happens all the time when traditionalist views are being questioned -- though I have seen heavy emotionalism on both sides.

But there is still another reason, which I think is central. The formal authors of mythicism have put their arguments on the table, which allows you readily to oppose them. This is less true of their disciples, who tend to push authors and worldviews more than they produce original ideas. Of course, skeptics at the Secular Web do come out with positions. But often you'll just find people who have a lot of skeptical questions. They inquire about ideas, or embrace them; and occasionally they backtrack reasonably. At other times they steadfastly stick to their ideas, with or without evidence, but always by employing all the arts of debate. In other words, they will say that they have the better ideas and that yours are wrong; they will complain that their position is misrepresented; they will highlight evidence in their favor and not engage the rest. Such is the nature of debate, on both sides, and I hope the debates continue; they're valuable.

But I think everyone would agree that there's a distinction between debates and scholarship. At the Secular Web, a lot is made of the genuinely positive link between free inquiry and discussion on the one hand and knowledge on the other. The link is highlighted so often that you could come away with the impression that debates and science are practically synonymous. This is not true, and actually quite far from the truth: debates are too similar to law trials. We are speaking of a contest of persuasion, even intellectual bullying. Debates are not exactly the place to let the mind wander freely to ask questions, make connections, and build paradigms. True scholarship entails making mistakes and admitting them, but this is precisely a very hard thing to do in the debating arena; they're trying to kill you there. Debate and discussion, if healthy, help the process of learning, building, revising, and teaching; they are not synonymous with that process. Learning requires the desire to listen and study rather than to kill or debunk; and it requires disciplined training.

Most mythicists lack training, so when they do attempt to take positions, even an amateur like me can find it easy to debunk them. However, G.A. Wells and Earl Doherty, the two most respected "giants" of latter-day mythicism, are masters at revising their arguments with qualifiers and removing pointed statements. And this means that to some extent, the little respect they've won is well earned: they've listened to criticisms and modified their work. But I have found both Doherty and Wells to be modifying mainly their language (I am referring to Wells' work while he was a mythicist). They have crafted their statements in such a way as to avoid getting caught in outright errors, while retaining the substance of their charge. As Roger Pearse put it in a recent debate at IIDB:

One of the problems I have with Doherty's book is that, when you look for a short statement of some particular proposition he advances, it is not to be found. So one is obliged to summarise his position, in order to discuss it. Having done this, I have found that some of his disciples do then assert that he is being misrepresented. This is tedious for everyone.

A few posts back I described how Doherty's language makes a strong impression without offering falsifiable statements -- how he uses qualifiers to focus on some of the data but not all of it, then speaks about the problems in the selected portion of the data as if they were weighty enough to indict the whole.

This is generally the problem at the Secular Web, too: the skeptics there see problems everywhere in the data, and they see no way to resolve the problems except to be a skeptic. For a trained scientist, skepticism is a tool, or a method; for those at the Secular Web, it is the answer. If something about the data is unclear to their untrained eyes, then no answer will suffice: the only answer is that the former answers are invalid, and that the truths of the old world are false. Those who live at the Secular Web seem often to be diligent students of the Bible, and I admit that this surprised me; but they are not learned in a thorough (discplined) way; they know what they know, and they can bring it to bear hard on traditional answers; but they don't know what they don't know; and they do not know how to accept, modify or construct from scratch a model of positive knowledge. They push technically negative models: they say that such and such did not happen in history, that the only events behind Christianity took place in the minds of the believers -- a place where the proposition of the theorists cannot be tested, unfortunately. Human minds can be said to have been thinking thoughts in almost any specific pattern that someone chooses to devise. Skeptics and mythicists rarely propose material events taking place unless those events can be detected in a trustworthy manner, and this is a laudable attitude on their part; but then they go speculating hugely about what occurred in human minds in such and such a historical pattern.

I hope this is clear: I don't mean that skeptics simply and reasonably observe the fertitility of the religious imagination; I mean that they try to prove that nothing but imagination took place. The whole culture involves proving negatives.

Carl Sagan said it was necessary to have equal parts skepticism and imagination. He said that if you're only skeptical, no new ideas will get through to you; and that if you have only imagination, you won't be able to tell the good ideas from the bad ones. I have always regarded mythicism as an astoundingly bad idea, and I have lumped mythicists in with UFO advocates and the like; but I've changed my mind about this, largely from what I've seen at the Secular Web. Most strands of mythicism -- and I do not speak of the garrish propositions of someone like Acharya S -- belong to the skeptical tradition. Mythicists are skeptics. They propose rejecting new ideas.

How can I say that, when they adopt Doherty's new thesis and congratulate themselves for exploring an exciting new idea that opens up new horizons? Well, technically Doherty's thesis is a new idea; but it's an idea about how a whole lot of other ideas are false. It is not a new idea in the sense that Sagan might have meant when talking about Biblical studies: a new proposition with positive descriptions of who Jesus Christ was, when and how he lived, what his impact was. There are many such propositions out there, and fundamentalists as well as skeptics tend to reject them, which is just as well as far as I'm concerned, given the wild speculations in the field of Biblical studies. But most of these latter ideas, about Jesus being a Cynic philosopher or a political revolutionary or the like, retain much of the old Christian values; in fact each one of the latter models just tends to embrace a subset of Christian values, while challenging other subsets. Doherty's model challenges everything: his model says that a fictionalizing process produced all of Christianity, and that Christianity sets itself on a bed of fiction while calling itself fact. The charge is so radical that freethinkers, skeptics and mythicists naturally regard Doherty's idea with excitement. It is this excitement, I think, which makes them be what they would not ordinarily be -- imaginative, speculative, lax, even credulous. But Doherty's thesis is not, in the main, a positive idea or proposition.

I have no doubt, of course, that his thesis gives some people a sense of freedom from ideas which they have experienced as stifling. But the skeptics in question regard those other ideas as merely old ones; any new modification of the history of Christianity, though it may be built upon new methods and knowledge (as all new historical models must be), gets blasted down as "more of the same." They simply tag the name of "apologetics" upon all new scholarship that modifies or revises, and does not reject, outdated models. The discipline called "history," as I implied above, is building-and-revision; but many skeptics do not accept revision; what they want is revision that allows rejection. It's rejection of new ideas that their skepticism desires, and if revision allows that, then they accept it.

Even as I write this it seems to have a touch of outlandishness. After all, we all think of those who reject new ideas as dogmatists and traditionalists. Surely skeptics are different creatures. Well, I'm not the first to compare skeptics with fundamentalists; they have their own sort of fundamentalism, though I would concede that actually calling them fundamentalists is liable to confuse rather than illuminate the issue. All I mean to highlight is the kind of hard, close-minded skepticism that Sagan was in a position to know about; he may very well have seen such a tendency in himself (sitting next to his great imaginative powers). Science has its own close-mindedness, and not just to new biblical scholarship: just look at the resistance among the scientific community to all kinds of ideas. Every field of science is characterized by two or more positions who often do not work together or even hear each other very well. One of my favorite books, The Big Splat, describes the deep and longstanding resistance offered by the scientific community to the ideas that the basins on the moon could be impact craters, that the moon itself might be due to a giant impact on the Earth, and that life on our planet could be largely defined by a history of impacts. I would wager that models of knowledge from Newton to Darwin and Einstein also had their scientist detractors.

I am aware that theists are capable of accepting only those products of historical revision -- only those new ideas -- that confirm the products of religious imagination. Theological fundamentalism is often characterized by this attitude. Opposite the fundamentalists, but appearing as a strange mirror, are the wholesale skeptics.

The Vatican and gay priests

2005-09-25T22:15:00.000-04:00

Word is filtering out that the Vatican plans to bar gay men from ordination as priests. This news grieves me, but that is not all. Vatican officials say they are doing this as a way to prevent sexual abuse of young boys. Thus Rome has joined what would normally be two potent issues on the minds of young and future Catholics. If there was any doubt that homosexuality will be a touchstone issue for the future of the Church, it has now been joined to a controversy that must count as the single greatest wound to the Church in recent decades. People who care in the deepest fashion about the Church, or are considering entering into a relationship with her, now have been asked to think at the same time about homosexuality, with all of its attendant controversies and potent emotions. It would be enough to note that combining any two potent issues can cause emotional arguments to reach the boiling point, among other dangers; but in this case we've joined two issues that should properly be kept separate. They have nothing to do with one another. Homosexuals have no more proclivity than heterosexuals to abuse children, and are actually underepresented slightly among pedophiles. Gays are being scapegoated for a terrible crime. And as I say, discrimination for any reason would grieve me, as it has up to now; but here we have discrimination that obscures reason and inflames emotions when a deep wound is crying out for true solutions. A genuine tragedy has been compounded.

I hope and pray that people will reject this link. I believe they will. In fact, to my sadness I expect that the Church will lose credibility with people because of this link, and because of the concrete act, the ban on gays. This is a position that my Church cannot hold successfully. Indeed I wonder what forces are driving the enactment of this ban. What is it? A frustration with the great problem of pedophilia in the Church? A fear of homosexuality? A despair with being rounded about by a culture that worships sexuality and rejects celibacy? Deep fear that the shortage of priests cannot be made up? What is it?

I have posted before on gays and the Church. I do not view homosexuality as disordered; but I have always noted the difference between the outright condemnation of gays in Protestant fundamentalism and the teaching of the Roman Catholic church, which distinguishes between inner orientation and external behavior. The former, per the catechism, is not a sin; engagement in homosexual sex is a sin -- a distancing from God.

Now my Church is proposing the abolition of this distinction. I believe that it was wrong to condemn homosexual behavior, and that people were thus driven into secrecy, which debases everyone involved; but it borders on Orwellian to ferret out or ban thoughts. What could possibly be driving the Vatican to such extremes?

Seminarians and candidates for the seminary will be judged not, as they formerly were, according to how well they can be celibate, but according to what desires they feel. Surely they will either stay away or lie -- and neither result is good for the Church, to put it mildly. Why can't a successfully celibate gay man be accepted into the Church? The Church seems to have lost confidence that its priests will be celibate -- and perhaps this is understandable considering how vows have been repeatedly and disgustingly thrown aside by pedophiles, but I wonder if Rome understands how this ban seems to telegraph to the world a lack of confidence in her own priests to meet even their basic vows. Or perhaps the Church simply lacks confidence that gay men can be celibate -- even though such men have grown up in intimate situations with other men (such as locker rooms and the like) and have adapted to their desires; I do not look forward to seeing my Church try to defend the position that gay men cannot be celibate, if that is the position.

This road cannot be healthy, and can only be damaging, for the Church and everyone else. I pray especially for those priests, servants of the Church, who are ailing and sick at heart over this latest proposal. But I worry and pray for everybody.

Jesus recently deceased

2005-09-23T01:44:00.000-04:00

Recently in a debate at the Internet Infidels discussion board, I was challenged to find anything in St. Paul's letters which referred to Jesus Christ as a recently deceased figure. The most prominent of the living Jesus mythicists, G.A. Wells, has argued that Paul's letters refer many times to Christ, but always without historical markers -- and that from this we could deduce that Paul regarded Christ as someone who died as far back as the early first century B.C. The more recent and radical case by Earl Doherty argues that Paul regarded Christ to be a supernatural figure living in the heavens, and that Paul's text does not show any true indication of a recent human life. But I did find a clear reference to a recent life, and it was not hard to find.

In my debate I was actually arguing that to date Paul's letters, we could begin by dating the death of Paul's Christ, via Josephus; I suggested that we could refine Paul's date further by searching the letters closely for signs that Paul regarded Christ as a recent figure. I did not plan to do such a close search for a result as small as refining the date of Paul's letters, especially when better dating techniques existed; and I knew that Paul's letters were not going to provide much along the suggested lines anyway. I offered it as a possible route, though. This is the challenge I got from a mythicist who embraces Doherty's theory:

I can assure you that scholars have combed Paul's letters for any indication that his vision was of a recently deceased figure, and have not found anything.

I reassured my challenger that I'd just been suggesting a route, not making positive claims that such indications existed in Paul's text. So the challenge was repeated:

Paul doesn't give us a clue about how long ago Jesus died. (That is why Ellegard can argue that Jesus might have lived 100 BC, and the sightings were a long time after his death.) If you find anything in Paul's letters that indicates Jesus died only a few years or decades ago, you will have found something that has eluded a lot of people.

Doherty -- and probably my challenger as well -- is more nuanced on the separate question of whether signs can be found in Paul's letters of a human Jesus. Doherty says that the signs which do exist have a traditional reading, and a mythicist reading. That is, in letters regarded by both historicists and mythicists to have been written originally by Paul, when we read of a Christ who came from the line of King David, broke bread with his disciples, was crucified, was born of a woman, had a brother, shed his blood, was buried, and was proclaimed to rise from the dead in such a way that Paul's own audience denies the idea of the dead rising, we can take these passages to express Paul's conception of a human man, or we can take them to express Paul's conception of a supernatural being who "experienced" or "did" these things in a heavenly realm.

Doherty thinks, however, that none of these passages in Paul's authentic letters, or anything else in them, can be read to indicate a recent life. This is excerpted from Doherty's website, from Item #1 in his own summary of his theory:

The one clear placement of Christ in recent times, the accusation in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 that Jews in Judea had killed the Lord Jesus, has been rejected as an interpolation by most of today’s liberal scholars, while the one Gospel episode Paul seems to allude to, Jesus’ words over the bread and wine at what he calls "the Lord’s Supper" in 1 Corinthians 11:23f, can be interpreted as a mythical scene Paul has himself developed through perceived revelation (see Piece No. 5). Otherwise, no non-Gospel writer of the first century makes any statement which would link the divine spiritual Son and Christ they all worship and look to for salvation, with a man who had recently walked the sands of Palestine, taught and prophecied and performed miracles, a man executed by Pontius Pilate on Good Friday outside Jerusalem, to rise from a nearby tomb on Easter Sunday morning. This "conspiracy of silence" is as pervasive as it is astonishing.

Thessalonians does not actually place Christ in recent times, though Doherty ironically thinks it does. And as I noted, he misses the one passage that does refer to Christ as a recent figure -- a passage with which he is well acquainted, since it's in the above list of things that Paul says about Christ.

First let's deal with Thessalonians. I don't challenge Doherty's claim that the passage is interpolated, since he may mean that parts or all of the letter were written by someone other than Paul; this view probably carries some truth. But what does the passage say? It speaks of "the Jews" killing both the Lord Jesus and the prophets of the past. The problem is that the killing of Jesus could have taken place at any time in the past, for all we can say from the passage and its surrounding context. The passage does say that Christians have suffered at the hands of Jews in "Judaea," a territory named as such by the Romans not long before Paul lived. But the text speaks of "the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men." In sum, the passage is referring to Jews throughout history: recent ones, who drove Paul out; and others who killed nameless prophets in the presumably distant past. Christ could have met his end at any time, per this passage. Inexplicably, Doherty has missed a chance to see a mythological Christ here; he even goes so far as to say that this placement of Christ in recent times is the clearest in Paul's writings, indeed the only clear one.

And Doherty misses the one passage that can genuinely be used as a "proof text" for Christ as a recent figure: Paul's meeting with the "brother of the Lord," as reported in Paul's letter to the Galatians. If Paul was referring to a biological brother, of course Jesus could not have lived in the distant past; for all that we know from the passage, Jesus might even still be alive in Paul's time. "But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:19).

Of course, Doherty knows that this passage can be read as referring to a biological brother. Elsewhere in his writings, he acknowledges that the Greek word for brother, adelphos, can indicate either a biological or a spiritual relationship. He works hard to disprove the former meaning, and thus to overthrow this particular passage as a proof text for Christ's existence as a human. But he forgets this passage entirely, and misses its full implications, when discussing Christ's placement in time. He says that apart from the passages in Thessalonians and Corinthians, the first-century letters offer an astonishing silence on all the things recorded in Mark, Matthew, Luke and John: that no other links can be made to a Christ who recently walked the earth, performed miracles, died by order of Pontius Pilate, etc. But the James passage is such a link -- James appears in the Gospels, as just one member of Jesus' family (see Mark 3.21, 3.31 and 6.3). More pointedly, this link comes from one of the earliest of the first-century letters, Galatians.

That letter also happens to tell of Jesus being born of a woman (Gal 4.4); another letter conceded to be authentic tells us that he is biologically from the line of David (Romans 1.3). But Doherty does not mention these famous elements of the Gospel story, so that he can say that nothing in Paul links to anything in the Gospels. And one more passage intrudes on his argument: 1 Timothy 6:13 refers to Pontius Pilate. No one knows when this passage was written, but Doherty dogmatically excludes it from the category he has defined, first-century correspondence; so again he can assert, "No link."

Doherty's language is effective in other ways. The reference to the Lord's brother can have two meanings, as everyone acknowledges, so it is not an undisputed, clear reference to biological kinship. Thus Doherty can get away with saying that Thessalonians is the only clear reference to recent years (except, of course, that a recent prophet is not clearly referred to in Thessalonians, if you read the passage). And though we can say that Paul's passage about James offers a human Christ who walked the earth recently, Doherty is on rhetorically strong ground when he claims that no other Pauline passage can link to a Christ who wandered, taught, healed, died and rose in recent Judaea. No single passage anywhere in the Bible attests to all these things, so we can safely assume that this is not Doherty's claim -- but then what does he mean by "link"? Does he mean linking the figures in Paul and the Gospels, or does he mean linking the events reported in these texts? He might have explored whether Paul's Jesus did one of the listed things, for instance walking on earth, or dying. But he doesn't use the word "or", for that would leave an opening against his case. Nor does he use the word "and," which would leave him more clearly making a silly statement that no single passage speaks of all these things. What he does say is that Jesus as we find him in Paul's letters does not do the things he does in the Gospels. To put this in technical terms, the Jesus of Paul's letters does not amount to the Gospel Jesus. That's an obvious description of the data that no one disagrees with. The bone of contention, and the true question, is whether Paul's data can be linked to the Gospel data. Can these two figures, both called Jesus, be linked?

As noted, Doherty uses the word "link," but he avoids the obvious principle that to link figures attested by different authors, you don't have to produce correspondences on all the claims; you only have to link some of the claims, plausibly; then you can say that you're looking at two accounts with different information about the same man. Doherty creates instead a specious set of all possible references to recent years; and he scores rhetorical points by noting how small Paul's data about a historical Christ looks when compared to historical data in the Gospels, rather than asking whether Paul's data as a whole can refer to the same subject treated in the Gospel data as a whole. One would think that letters and gospels are vastly different genres, and therefore likely to speak of the same things in radically different ways; but Doherty seems extremely uninterested in this question. His silence on this question, you could say, is deafening.

I'm going to guess that when Doherty conceived of Paul as preaching a supernatural Jesus, he dealt with the "brother of the Lord" passage early on, by insisting that Paul must have been referring to spiritual brotherhood; and thus Doherty overthrew the passage to his satisfaction as a proof text for Christ's humanity. So when he came around to the question of whether recent years could be referred to in Paul's passages about Christ, the James passage just slipped his mind. (As it probably did to my challenger, who did not concede that scholars have read the James passage for 2,000 years as an indication that Paul was thinking of a recent life). More accurately, it had already been decided in his mind; and he did not revisit the question, or concede it for the sake of argument, when discussing the question of time. He makes the question of time one of his opening arguments, and attempts to answer it with a full analysis covering all possibilities, but he does not even refer to this possibility, because the question has been decided beforehand. Casually he picks at Thessalonians and Corinthians -- extremely weak indicators of recent years -- as if nothing more challenging could be found.

This was a small point to make, but I do regard such blind spots in a theory to be revealing -- especially when they're found in the opening arguments. I'm working on other posts about larger questions than this particular one about recent years in Paul.

Racing the Enemy

2005-09-11T22:48:00.000-04:00

A month ago we observed the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I saved some articles and started recently to look them over. Most of the articles express the opinion that the longstanding controversy over Hiroshima has finally been resolved by a new book entitled Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. The author, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that the atom bomb contributed little to Japan's defeat and may have actually encouraged Japan to continue fighting.

This is such an important issue that I'd like to review some of the newest findings on both sides of the controversy, briefly -- and that is the best I can offer, not yet having read Hasegawa's book. But I will also offer my own perspective. It's worth saying right off the bat that I regard the U.S. as having committed a war crime in Japan 60 years ago -- but I also want to say that leaving it at that would miss much of what was wrong about the whole story of Japan's defeat.

Hasegawa wins much of my confidence because he is Japanese-American, and because his book seems to be the first large work to make great use of the Soviet archives. This is, in short, the most internationalist perspective we've yet had. But let's leave these general considerations: Hiroshima was also a specific event, and Hasegawa builds his conclusion from specific data. His book is called a nearly hour-by-hour account, and such a narrative is likely to deliver a precise picture of what the Japanese leaders were talking about among themselves and in external communication, which in turns allows us some entry into how and when they formed their thoughts or changed their decisions. Hasegawa finds little evidence that the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945 changed very much at the top levels of the Japanese government. He finds that the Soviet attack on Japanese forces two days later did bring about an urgency among Japan's leaders to consider surrender. It did not change their minds, strictly speaking. The top six leaders were still evenly divided, even after the Nagasaki bomb on August 9th, over the question of how many conditions they would demand that the Allies accept along with Japan's surrender. But upon learning of the Soviet attack, they did call a special session to review surrender options, with one faction now urgently fighting for a surrender that placed only one condition upon the Allies, namely that the Emperor be allowed to remain on his throne. It was the new crisis, and the inability of the leadership to resolve it, that prompted Emperor Hirohito to make an unprecedented intervention in the affairs of state. He chose surrender.

This general picture has long been known: Hasegawa's great contribution is said to be his study of the Soviet archives. Hasegawa emphasizes two things: the extent to which Japan had placed its remaining hopes on gaining Soviet diplomatic mediation; and the fear that the Japanese had of Soviet occupation. It's never been a secret that Japan sought Soviet help in winning more lenient surrender terms from the U.S., but Soviet archives would tell us more about the extent to which Japanese leaders counted on this dialogue and did or did not retain other hopes. The Soviet declaration of war upon Japan was, in this context, a devastating crisis to Japan's leaders. It eliminated the hope of Soviet mediation, crippled the military's hope of facing and repelling an invasion by America alone, and threatened all of Japan with communist occupation (or the possibility of an internal rebellion).

One of the few articles I have which defend the Hiroshima decision is Richard B. Frank's "Why Truman Dropped the Bomb", from the August 8th issue of The Weekly Standard. A few years ago Frank wrote an excellent book, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, and I would offer his arguments as the best remaining ones for the traditional understanding that the atomic bombs were a necessary evil which ended a still larger evil -- and by the latter he means the war, but particularly Japan's continued occupation of Asia. Frank, too, makes significant use of newly opened archives, in this case from Japan and the U.S. His work reveals many of the things wrong with the most critical views of the Hiroshima decision.

One example concerns what American leaders said in the years after the war about the decision to drop the Bomb. Critics correctly noted that the postwar testimonies by Truman and other wartime leaders involved in the Manhattan Project were incomplete, but Frank notes that these men were all sworn not to publicly discuss the secret intelligence that they had received, or the conclusions that they'd derived specifically from that intelligence. In fact much of what they kept to themselves would have argued in their favor. From newly declassified documents we now know that Japan's buildup of troops on the main islands, in anticipation of an Allied invasion, was much larger than the Hiroshima debate has yet imagined: critics have long wanted to emphasize that Japan was essentially defeated before the Bomb, while the mainstream histories have been working without the benefit of the newly opened archives. The build-up was so large that a numerical advantage to the attackers -- necessary for any successful invasion -- could not be guaranteed, and thus the invasion plan had lost critical support within the U.S. military by July 1945. In Frank's view the invasion would never have taken place; it had become unthinkable. So the traditional view that Hiroshima saved countless American boys from perishing in an invasion is wrong -- but the new information means that Truman and the men around him saw themselves as having few options.

Frank also emphasizes that newly opened Japanese files indicating Japan's determination not to negotiate altogether outnumber the few documents, opened decades ago, which indicate a willingness to consider surrender. To my mind, the best argument against Hasegawa's view that the Soviet attack prompted surrender is that the top six leaders were still deadlocked after Nagasaki: the war ended when the Emperor intervened. The Bomb was the excuse given by Hirohito when he ordered the recalcitrant military to surrender immediately on whatever terms could be had; and it was the excuse they accepted. As Frank argues, it saved them face to know, or to say, that they'd been beaten by science and not due to any lack of martial prowess or spiritual vigor.

The chief problem with Frank's recent article, however, is that he does not mention Hasegawa's book or its findings concerning the Soviet archives. An argument must do more than stand on its own; it must also deal satisfactorily with the best counter-arguments. Frank's article does not do this.

When I think of Hiroshima, I cannot help reflecting on a passage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which deals with just war teaching:

Item 2314
Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.

For most of my life I have held the traditional view that the Bomb ended a just war. Without getting into the question of whether the war against Japan was a just one, I can say that there's little question in my mind that the U.S. was racing the Soviet Union to the occupation of Japan and to a dominance in atomic weapons. This is part of what Hasegawa means by the phrase, "Racing the Enemy," and I see no reason to disagree. It is widely acknowledged that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. competed with each other over the spoils of war in Europe; they did so again after the Soviet attack on Japanese forces, with American and Russian soldiers meeting in the heart of Korea, to terrible effect in later years.

Newly opened Soviet archives reveal that Stalin moved up the date of his planned attack on Japan when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, for fear that Japan would surrender too quickly. Enough documents from the American side suggest a similar anxiety among the leaders in Washington. To all appearances, the U.S. and the Soviet Union both pounced on an essentially defeated enemy. And both committed war crimes in the process.

It's here that the articles praising Hasegawa's book have failed to give perspective. Hasegawa does: he emphasizes what has tended to be ignored, namely that the Soviet Union continued fighting Japan up to 23 days after the surrender. This is plainly unjustified aggression, and the destruction it brought about was vast. Frank reports in Downfall that Stalin’s brief incursion into Japanese-occupied China and Korea resulted in mass imprisonment and the eventual deaths of 347,000 people, two-thirds of them civilians. I would add that Stalin installed a repressive regime in North Korea and gave the go-ahead to Kim Il Sung's invasion of South Korea, from which 3 million deaths resulted. Even sticking with Frank's figure, we're talking about a loss of life somewhat larger than what the atom bombs exacted.

Downfall tries also to account for the deaths under Japanese occupation: by one estimate, 100,000 people were dying per month by the end of the war. With this accounted for, finally, we can say we have a truly international perspective. (And probably Hasegawa comes closest). To understand Hiroshima it is necessary to argue that Japan, in relation to the U.S., was essentially already defeated before the Bomb. But the U.S., U.S.S.R. and Japan all were committing war crimes at the conclusion of World War II. Perhaps saying so takes the sting out of any indictment of the Hiroshima bomb: but this would only happen if such a complete perspective were allowed to degenerate into the view that, "Well, everybody was doing it, so what's the big deal?" If we can avoid that sort of thinking, a complete accounting of the crimes and suffering is desirable, indeed necessary.

A final note: the best movie I've seen about this issue is a 3-hour Canadian-Japanese film that was produced for HBO in time for the 50th anniversary, when I first saw it, and simply entitled Hiroshima. (I have a review of it at Amazon). Dess and I saw it last week, and it prompted a very good discussion -- without our old fights. I seem to have changed in my views of war over the last few years, and I don't doubt that my marriage to Dess has much to do with it. But that, as well as my treatments of the Just War doctrine and what it can tell us about certain famous wars, will have to wait for later posts.

A new blog

2005-09-07T02:55:00.000-04:00

I have a new blog, Catching the Sky. This one is going to be for photos instead of essays, and there will be a lot of astronomy photos.