tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43908968144771868412024-02-21T12:05:03.917+11:00Eschaton NowObsessing about the bible and other things so you don't have to.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-18172948153710578262021-12-30T03:47:00.000+11:002021-12-30T03:48:01.395+11:00A Review of 'Is Atheism Dead? By Eric Metaxas<p>I'll begin with an acknowledgement that this book was obviously not intended as a deep or academic exploration of atheism or religious belief, and that any attempt to pick it apart in detail (as I shall attempt to do shortly) is probably fated to come across as a little excessive and self-indulgent. Plainly this book was intended as a kind of spiritual bromide for people who already consider themselves to be Christians, and there is probably little that I or anyone else could say which is capable of undermining its effect in that regard. Neither this book nor this review is going to change anyone's mind about anything, and so I sympathise with anyone who comes to the conclusion that I'm wasting my time by attempting to engage with it at such length. Nonetheless, the fact that this book has received glowing reviews and plentiful across conservative media outlets, and the fact that it currently has an average rating of 4.57 on goodreads, was enough to motivate me to read it and to contribute, in my own small way, to a discussion which until now appears to be dominated by people who happened to join that site at around the same time this book was published.</p><p>To start with the obvious, this is not a good book. At its absolute best this book is bland and inoffensive, at its absolute worst it is mendacious to an extent that I can only describe as shocking, but for the most part it is most aptly described as shallow and lazy. Anyone who has been exposed to conservative, Evangelical apologetics will doubtless already be familiar with most of the arguments in this book, and Metaxas is not skilled enough as an author or nimble enough as a thinker to present or elaborate upon these arguments in any meaningful or interesting way. Rhetorically, Metaxas depends heavily on implicature and question-begging, assuming (perhaps correctly) that since the bulk of his readers already share his mindset, there is little reason to bring any of his arguments to full term, leaving the book littered with ideas that can most charitably be described as ill-formed and underdeveloped. This frequently takes the form of using rhetorical questions in lieu of any explicit argumentation, as exemplified by the following barrage addressed to his mental construct of Richard Dawkins in chapter 25:</p><p></p><blockquote>On the one hand he says we are essentially robots, amazingly constructed by chance through natural selection. On the other hand we are able to create and appreciate things of ineffable beauty and mystery. But if scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, how are we to appreciate the aforementioned artists? What is art that Dawkins should be mindful of it? And the creators of that art, that he should praise them? And what is Socrates’s much-vaunted ideal of “self-knowledge” but unscientific fluff borne to us by Zephyrus from the myth-filled world of pagan antiquity? And what is that invisible thing called “wisdom,” hailed by millennia of human beings, if not a mere hardware glitch yet to be naturally selected by some genetic Mengele for death? Shall not such things be reckoned worthless and disposable because they dare to exist beyond the gleaming palisades of “science”?"</blockquote><p></p><p>The tacit logic appears to be that these questions are so incisive that they can permit no coherent answer at all, but it speaks volumes to Metaxas' lack of intellectual curiosity that he does not appear at all interested in pursuing how atheists can and have addressed such topics throughout history, and to address himself to those specific claims instead. At no point does Metaxas exhibit even the most cursory knowledge of the ideas and philosophies that atheists have espoused over the centuries, much less does he attempt to seriously or sincerely engage with them. In fact, despite devoting long, indignant swathes of his book to "the New Atheists", he appears to be distinctly uninterested in what any of them have actually had to say. At no point, to my knowledge, does he ever directly reference any of the major works produced by the so-called "Four Horsemen" (<i>God is Not Great</i> by Christopher Hitchens, <i>The End of Faith</i> by Sam Harris, <i>The God Delusion</i> by Richard Dawkins, or <i>Breaking the Spell </i>by Daniel Dennett) and his chapter-long denouncement of Dawkins appears to be based entirely on a 14-page essay written by Dawkins in 2007. That is not to say that "the New Atheist" literature is particularly enlightening or challenging fare, nor that it should be taken as representative of atheistic thought, merely to say that if you're going to spend a third of a book explicitly attacking the ideas of certain people, you should at the very minimum be familiar with what those people have actually said. </p><p>Consequent to his lack of intellectual curiosity and egregious lack of research (which we will get into shortly), we should not be surprised to find that most of his arguments appear to be addressed to a vague and amorphous "they", a loose collective of ideological opponents who appear to lack any distinctive purposes or convictions. Across all three parts of the book, those authorities - archaeologists, scientists, philosophers etc. - who do not share Metaxas' view that there exists overwhelming evidence for the existence of God are conflated into a single hive-mind marching under the banner of 'New Atheism'. He, for instance, hand-waves away cosmological speculations about the existence of the multiverse as being motivated by the conviction that "the idea of a world fine-tuned by some Creator was simply too unpleasant to consider", resulting in "the New Atheists... [fleeing] into that realm of pseudo-philosophy we call wishful thinking" (chapter 3), as though string theory and brane cosmology were just invented by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris on a whim one day. </p><p>On the other hand, he predictably cites sympathetic authorities with unbounded credulity and an often deceptive lack of transparency about their credentials. Those 'authorities' whom he cites as brave, independently-thinking experts invariably turn out to be unqualified ideologues upon even the most cursory of examinations. For example, most of his arguments from Chapter 7 - which is focused primarily on the supposed 'impossibility' of non-theistic origins of life - are taken from the work of Dr. James Tour, a supposedly well-credentialed scientific authority on the subject. It should surprise none to find out that Dr. Tour is an Evangelical Christian who is intimately involved with the Discovery Institute (an organisation founded to advance the cause of creationism and its various offshoots), and whose scientific work - so far as I have been able to establish - has nothing to do with biology, or even with organic chemistry. </p><p>Similarly, in chapter 18 he presents the case for what he sees as the historic destruction of Sodom at the hands of God, with all of his evidence for this claim coming from the work of a single 'archaeologist', Dr. Steven Collins. What he of course fails to mention here is that his intrepid 'archaeologist' received his doctorate from an unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education, and that he is currently the dean of another unaccredited Evangelical institution of higher education. Metaxas also fails to mention that Collins' theories have won virtually no support from other archaeologists, and that he has been accused of a number of academic malpractices, including photoshopping images from the sites and operating without proper permits. My point is not to suggest that ideologically committed people cannot be right about anything ever, merely to highlight the double-standard that Metaxas repeatedly succumbs to: people who agree with him are all ideologically compromised sheep who only say what they do out of hatred God, whereas all of those who agree with him are unimpeachable, clear-thinking authorities who have been unfairly sidelined in scientific discourse. </p><p>The book itself is divided into three parts. The first part covers 'scientific' evidence for the existence of God (primarily devoted to so-called 'fine-tuning' arguments), the second part covers 'archaeological' evidence for the veracity of the Bible, and the third part is a grab-bag of resentment and innuendo directed loosely at 'atheists', where this book really begins to plumb the depths of sleaze. I will not attempt to 'debunk' the arguments he presents here (though some debunking is unavoidable), but rather attempt to restrict myself to critiquing the kinds of arguments and strategies that Metaxas employs. </p><p><b>Part I</b></p><p>The first part of the book, as we have said, attempts to marshal contemporary scientific evidence for the existence of the God, with most of the heavy-lifting being done by 'fine-tuning' arguments, which suggest that many of the fundamental values of the universe are so precisely configured to support the emergence of life (or, at least, those cosmic structures upon which life depends) that they could only the product of a divine creator. Or, at least that's what fine-tuning arguments <i>should</i> be about. In Metaxas' treatment of the issue, we don't have 'arguments' so much as we have a paean to Metaxas' own sense of incredulity and scandalisation over the low probabilities of certain universal values which are necessary for the emergence of life (let us say, the weight of a proton) being what they in fact are.</p><p>Without seeking to debunk 'fine-tuning' arguments more generally, I will start by saying that merely pointing to the 'improbability' of something happening does absolutely nothing, in itself, to strengthen the case for the existence of God (much less a specifically Christian conception of God). Overwhelmingly improbable things happen every day and we do not ordinarily view them as evidence for divine intervention. If you go to a random number generator and generate a 100 digit number, the odds of that <i>particular</i> number being generated are astronomically small (far smaller than most of the odds discussed in this part of the book), yet there does not appear to be anything about that number existing which demands a supernatural explanation. </p><p>Moreover, even if we do accept the central conceit of fine-tuning arguments (that the occurrence of a truly improbable event really does demand a supernatural explanation), there is still no <i>a priori</i> reason to assume that this 'ultimate explanation' must resemble traditional theistic conceptions of divinity. In fact, all we could really say about the 'supernatural force' necessitated by fine-tuning arguments is that this force just happens to be particularly good at creating universes like the one we live in for some reason: it tells us little else about what kind of properties this force might have. It might be a blind, dumb, impersonal supernatural force (e.g. something like 'karma' or the 'tao' might be sufficient to explain why our universe is the way it is, even though I don't think such concepts are typically employed in a cosmological context) or it might be even be totally a natural force (e.g. the multiverse theory appears to do a good job of accounting for universal 'fine-tuning' without resorting to the ostentatious metaphysics of theism). Of course, further arguments can be added to the fine-tuning arguments to show why a theistic explanation is superior to explanations which depend on karmic cycles or multiverses, but these arguments must actually be made, not merely implied. </p><p>Metaxas, predictably, doesn't bother supplying these arguments. Part I of this book is therefore little more than an extended tribute to 'the God of the Gaps', where scientific uncertainty and any putative gaps in scientific knowledge are presented as <i>de facto</i> proof for the existence of God. Metaxas does nothing here but cite his personal incredulity about the improbabilities of various facets of the physical world, with the understanding that the target audience will abduct to the inference that 'God' - according to their own idiosyncratic understandings of that floating signifier - must be responsible. But no attempt is ever made to define this being, nor does Metaxas ever explicitly spell out for the reader the kind of being that the 'evidence' purportedly demonstrates. This book exists purely to salve theistic consciences, not to change minds. </p><p>Consider chapter 6, where Metaxas subjects the famous Urey-Miller experiment on abiogenesis to scientific scrutiny. As he correctly point out, many of the assumptions undergirding this experiment (e.g. the kinds of elements which were present in the Earth's early atmosphere) proved to be mistaken, and there are therefore some doubts about how much it can tell us about how life may have first formed. However, Metaxas presents this 70 year-old study as the final and definitive word on abiogenesis, as though nothing else on the topic of abiogenesis has been published since. One more, the mere existence of scientific failure or scientific ignorance is just posited, without commentary or elaboration, as indirect proof for the claims of conservative Christianity. This deification of lacunae is not merely an impoverished view of science, but an impoverished view of divinity. </p><p>In some cases, the fetishisation of improbability and coincidence is taken to absurd extremes. Take in, if you can, this discussion of eclipses in chapter 3:</p><p></p><blockquote>"How is it that the sun and moon happen to fit over each other so very precisely during these eclipses? Why do they match up as though they were made to do that? When one knows the circumstances and details of all the other planets in our solar system, the whole thing seems even stranger. Nothing close to this happens on any other planet. So if one aspires to be a dedicatedly rational person, one can’t help suspect that perhaps this isn’t mere coincidence. It just seems too perfect and too strange. But there it is. Who can help but wonder whether these things are not accidental or coincidental? Can it be that this outlandish and happy oddity was actually intended—and just for us?"</blockquote><p></p><p>All of Metaxas' deficiencies as a writer and thinker are on display in this passage. Rhetorical questions, rather than explicit argumentation, do all the heavy-lifting. Personal incredulity is projected into the heavens and hypostastised as a fairly crude instance of divine agency. Arguments are half formed - the relative sizes of the sun and moon "are not accidental or coincidental", apparently, but how else Metaxas wishes us to understand these facts (as a divine sign of... something?) is never made clear. Only those who wish desperately to be impressed by this kind of argumentation could ever find themselves impressed by this kind of argumentation.</p><p><b>Part II</b></p><p>Part II is where this book is most consistently able to reach the dizzying heights of being bland and inoffensive. Metaxas here focuses on archaeological evidence for the Bible, with most of the text devoted to recounting stories of how certain archaeological discoveries were made. These accounts, so far as I can tell, are relatively unembellished and true to history, so if you're interested in knowing the stories behind the personalities who discovered the Dead Sea scrolls, or who first started excavating Hittite sites in the 19th century, then this part of the book is almost competent enough to serve that purpose. I will stress the word "almost" there, though, because most of the issues I've discussed which plague the rest of the book also crop up here.</p><p>Once more, Metaxas frames the field of Biblical archaeology as a Manichean theatre of struggle between mendacious, ideologically compromised skeptics, who are simply desperate to dismiss any evidence which might appear to suggest that any part of the Biblical text is true, and brave, plucky truth seekers, who have successfully revealed Earth-shattering truths to the world despite their ongoing oppression at the hands of snooty academics. It should not surprise anyone to learn that this is the exact opposite of the truth (it is only comparatively recently that Biblical archaeology has managed to graduate from being a branch of Jewish and Christian apologetics - with uncredentialed men running around the desert "with a trowel in one hand and a Bible the other" - into a serious discipline) but it is a fiction that Metaxas is required to maintain, here moreso than anywhere else in the book, for two main reasons.</p><p>The first reason is that most of the archaeological findings he 'reveals' here are relatively banal, lending credence only to obscure and peripheral aspects of the Biblical text, and do nothing to support any of its more extraordinary claims. As such, Metaxas is pressed into inventing a cabal of Biblical denialists who found themselves very much scandalised and embarrassed by the archaeological revelation that there was indeed a King Omri who reigned in the northern kingdom of Israel in the 9th century BCE, just as the book of 1 Kings said there was (see chapter 9). But for the vicarious little thrill he gives his more credulous readers at seeing imaginary opponents tripping up on their own hubris, most of the content of this part of the book is fated to come across as underwhelming at best, as pathetic and desperate at worst (such as Metaxas' crowing in chapter 17 about how the archaeological discovery of Ur shows us that the Bible is "an accurate historical record of the events, people, and places it depicts", based solely on fact that this city is referenced in the narrative of Abraham).</p><p>The second reason Metaxas needs to invent a narrative of 'snooty skeptic' versus 'intrepid truth seeker' is because otherwise he would have no way of explaining why some of his more extraordinary claims - such as his claim that we have discovered evidence of the city of Sodom meeting a fiery doom, or Jesus' house being unearthed - have not been accepted by mainstream archaeologists, or more widely publicised. We have already discussed the 'controversies' (to put it as euphemistically as possible) surrounding the 'discovery' of Sodom, but consider here how he frames the publication of the archaeological study which, in Metaxas' telling, succeed in excavating Jesus' house:</p><p></p><blockquote>An article about it appeared in Biblical Archaeology Review in 2015, although that itself was oddly tentative. Even so, nothing more was said on the subject since, as though the discovery of the actual home where the Holy Family lived wasn’t worth looking into or was a subject too embarrassing for serious archaeologists. Only in late 2020 did Dr. Dark publish the book containing the findings of his continued excavations since 2006, but the book cannot help but strike one as almost calculated to hide the discovered pearl of great price, instead bizarrely focusing on the nesting wooden boxes in which the superlative pearl had been found.(Chapter 16) </blockquote><p></p><p>Here, the fact that archaeologists working on excavations in Nazareth failed to claim that they had discovered Jesus' house is explained as a "calculated" bid to suppress an embarrassing finding, rather than as a consequence of the more obvious possibility that <i>the archaeologists didn't have any solid scientific reason to believe that they had discovered the home of Jesus in the first place</i>. As with most of his conservative brethren, when the facts of the matter don't line-up with his preconceptions, Metaxas simply casually declares the existence of some grand conspiracy and moves on as quickly as possible to the next talking-point before anyone is able to ask "how" or "why". </p><p>Elsewhere, he attempts to lean on the Biblical text itself as evidence for God, but his ignorance of Biblical scholarship ensures he once more falls flat on his face. He insists, for example, that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls validates the integrity of the Biblical text owing to the fact that "what we possess today as our own Bible is precisely the same as what existed then" (chapter 11). He predictably inflates the significance of this fact once more to a self-parodying degree:</p><p></p><blockquote>Never in human history has an observed absence of change so instantly and dramatically changed everything. This discovery within the larger discovery was the earth-shaking bombshell of the whole affair. Despite the unfounded but stubborn rumors that the Bible 'had been changed' over the centuries, this unexpected evidence at last proved the opposite. As anyone could see—and as clearly as anyone might have hoped—the ancient Hebrew Scriptures had been copied with a perfectly extraordinary faithfulness over the centuries.</blockquote><p></p><p>Firstly, it should not escape our attention that this is untrue: the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint#Dead_Sea_Scrolls">do differ from other textual traditions</a>. Secondly, the claims that the Bible "had been changed" over the centuries, is - unfortunately for Metaxas - more than just an "unfounded and stubborn rumor", and is in fact fairly well-known and easy to demonstrate. In the case of the OT, there exist two manuscript families referred to as the 'Masoretic Text' (MT) which has been preserved in the Hebrew language, and the 'Septuagint' (LXX) which has been preserved in the Greek language, and each of these manuscript traditions differ greatly at some points. What we have today as the Old Testament in English is essentially a compromise between the two traditions, in which scholars attempt to reconstruct what they believe the original text to have been by deciding, on an almost passage-by-passage basis, whether the MT or the LXX are more likely to have preserved the original tradition. In the case of the New Testament, the situation is probably worse. <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-manuscripts-good-news-and-bad-news/">Bart Ehrman notes</a> that we possess thousands of different manuscripts of books from the NT and that no two are identical, and that - in fact - there are probably more differences between the manuscripts than there are words in the NT. Contrary to Metaxas' considerable bluster, the Bible has actually changed <i>a lot</i>. </p><p>In other places, he attempts to defend the accuracy of the Bible by employing his dependable, fall-back tactic of appealing to his personal sense of incredulity and then just sort of abandoning the argument halfway through, as though he just got bored of the argument and wanted to move as quickly as possible onto something else. He, for example, suggests that Jesus'prophecy about the destruction of the Temple must be a genuine, divinely-inspired prediction of the future because "anyone who has read the gospels realizes that for many reasons they simply cannot have been written after the Destruction of Jerusalem" (chapter 11). Obviously, he never attempts to elaborate on what these "many reasons" are. In chapter 12, he suggests that the story in John 21 about Peter and Jesus capturing 153 fish must be true, because Metaxas can think of no reason why the author would have used the number 153 unless that was the exact number of fish that Peter and Jesus had actually caught that day. (Does he think Peter and Jesus sat there and counted them all, so that the true number could be reported in the Gospel of John 60 years later?) He then suggests that the enigmatic story of boy in linen fleeing naked from Mark 14:51-52 must be a reflection of eye-witness accounts because there is no other reason for Mark to have included this detail - I mean, what? </p><p><b>Part III</b></p><p>However, it's in the third part of the book (with its apropos title of "What is Truth?") that Metaxas' lazy flailing begins to lose all its charm, and starts to become offensive. </p><p>It starts off inconspicuously enough with a litany of routine apologetic fare. Chapter 19 is a cliched and unoriginal attack on 'new atheism' (or, rather, a cliched and unoriginal attack on Metaxas' imaginary conception of what 'new atheism' must be) in which all of the old, worn-out favourites are trotted out in print one more time. We learn that atheists promote "absolutely nothing... even nihilism"; that if the atheists are right and "there really is no God, then it surely follows that there is no order or meaning in the universe... what does any of it matter?"; and that "atheists are so unaccountably tortured by even the possibility that there might be a God that they cannot so much as admit the possibility". Ho hum.</p><p>In chapter 20 we finally get around to the argument that Nazism, communism etc. are evidence of the intrinsic evil of the atheistic worldview. "Once you get rid of God," he writes, "you get rid of the idea that human beings have any inherent dignity or worth. It’s unavoidable, and what happens in places where those ideas disappeared amounts to perhaps the most monstrous evil in all of human history." In a way, I almost admire his restraint in waiting 20 chapters to compare all atheists to Hitler and Stalin - but what about all of those religious people who have acted in deference to evil throughout history? "[T]hose acting in the name of religion at least ostensibly took human life so seriously that they rarely did the worst of what they did in the indiscriminate way that atheists did. Even the most evil actors 'in God’s name' were somehow restrained." I'm sure the victims of ISIS will be much reassured that their oppressors were "somehow restrained" while embarking on their spree of apocalyptic violence.</p><p>In chapter 24, we encounter the common apologetic technique of insisting that everything that cannot be exhaustively explained through a reductionist, scientific worldview must, <i>pro tanto</i>, be attributable to the existence of God. "[Dawkins] must realize 'beauty' and 'being moved to tears' can have no part in a life dedicated to a strict materialist atheistic philosophy," Metaxas writes. He never bothers to explain why he believes this to be the case, though, so I'm not sure it's worth my explaining why it certainly <i>isn't</i> the case. In chapter 26, he insists that "science as we know it arose only in Western Christendom in the late Middle Ages and flourished in the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in what we now call the Scientific Revolution." He, of course, fails here to explain why nothing particularly like the scientific method emerged in the first 1600 years of Western Christendom, or why proto-scientific thought emerged in Classical Greece, imperial China, the so-called "golden age" of Islam, or as far back as the ancient Babylonian astronomers and mathemeticians. I suppose that such a discussion might be too interesting for someone just needs to churn out a book as quickly and effortlessly as possible in order to make a quick buck.</p><p>It's in chapter 21 that the banality finally gives way to something more insidious, though, as Metaxas strives to show us that many so-called atheists actually repudiated their atheism and "found God" at some point in their lives, usually when they were on the verge of death. Firstly, I've always found this genre of narrative to be a very strange preoccupation of apologeticists. Even if people like Anthony Flew really did repudiate their atheism, how is that any more evidence for the existence of God than the millions of people who fall out of faith every year are evidence for atheism? Secondly, it should not surprise anyone to learn that most of the accounts here are blatantly untrue. I will especially focus here on his account of the renunciations of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, since these two men happen to be intellectual heroes of mine, and my interest was very much piqued when a read in an internet review that this book contained some startling revelations about the two existentialists' hidden faith. Might there have been some key aspect of their lives which I had either overlooked, or which all subsequent existentialist scholarship had suppressed out of embarrassment?</p><p>No. </p><p>His account of Albert Camus' journey into religious faith reads like the hackiest of hack fiction, as it more or less parallels the plot of "God's Not Dead". Camus, a life-long atheist, is presented as a man plagued by doubts, and as struggling to find meaning despite his public professions of the ultimate "absurdity" of our godless universe. During this time, he befriends a pastor and begins attending his sermons. Metaxas says that Camus explained himself to the priest as follows: </p><p></p><blockquote>"I’m almost on a pilgrimage—seeking something to fill the void that I am experiencing, and no one else knows. Certainly the public, and the readers of my novels, while they see that void, are not finding the answers in what they are reading. But deep down, you are right. I am searching for something that the world is not giving me…"</blockquote><p></p><p>By 1959, one year before Camus' untimely death (you can probably see where this is going), Camus apparently confided these thoughts in his new friend:</p><p></p><blockquote>"Since I have been reading the Bible I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life. I certainly don’t have it, but it is there. On Sunday mornings I hear that the answer is God…. You have made it very clear to me on Sunday mornings, Howard, that we are not the only ones in this world. There is something that is invisible. We may not hear the voice, but there is some way in which we can come aware that we are not the only ones in the world and that there is help for all of us."</blockquote><p></p><p> The two made provisional plans for Camus to be baptised, with Camus apparently insisting that "I want this. This is what I want to commit my life to," and "I am going to keep striving for the faith." Sadly, according to Metaxas:</p><p></p><blockquote>Camus would never be baptized nor have the time to write about what had transpired in his heart and mind, because only a few months later—on January 4, 1960—he was riding in the passenger seat of his publisher’s Facel Vega sportscar, speeding toward Paris... [when] on a long and wide stretch of road the car veered into a plane tree. He was killed instantly, at the age of forty-six.</blockquote><p></p><p>Now, all of this would be a pretty big deal if it were true (the religious stuff, I mean; not the car crash) so what sources can Metaxas provide to back-up this earth-shattering revelation? Just one: the memoirs of the pastor from the above narrative. The memoirs (entitled <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15689.Albert_Camus_the_Minister">Albert Camus & the Minister</a>) were written in the year 2000, some 40 years after these conversations had supposedly taken place, and when the pastor (whose name was Howard Mumma) was 90 years old. Not a single other person close to Camus ever reported on his supposed nascent faith, and there is no evidence to suggest that Mumma ever met Camus, much less that he had been successful in convincing him to be baptised. The book is shot through with basic inaccuracies about Camus' life and obviously there is absolutely no independent corroboration for any of the claims Mumma makes in the book. Of course, Metaxas never makes any of this dubiousness clear in his breathless and utterly credulous recounting of the narrative, for which he deserves to be condemned: to report such self-serving hearsay as bald fact is one step removed from lying.</p><p>Do not despair, though, for Metaxas takes that final step into unambiguous, bald-faced lying when recounting the "conversion" of Jean-Paul Sartre. According to Metaxas, in the last year of his life (1980), Sartre "found God", on his deathbed "confessed his sins and came into the Church", and declared fairly unequivocally to the world that:</p><p></p><blockquote>"I don’t feel I am the product of Chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being that could be here thanks only to a Creator. And this idea about a creator is referring to God."</blockquote><p></p><p> In an uncharacteristic bout of scholarly panache, Metaxas here provides us with <i>two</i> sources for Sartre's conversion. The first is an interview Sartre conducted with his assistant, a young Marxist by the name of Benny Lévy, and the second we will get to in a moment. With respect to the first source, that interview certainly happened, and it certainly was noteworthy for the fact that a then ailing, blind and tired Sartre, just weeks from death, appeared to relay some diffidence and even outright cynicism about his earlier political and philosophical commitments. Unfortunately for Metaxas, the interview almost never touches on the topic of religion (apart from Sartre making a brief aside about his admiration for the revolutionary zeal of Jewish apocalypticism) and certainly never repudiates his own atheism. In his recounting of this narrative, Metaxas slyly attempts to conflate the (real) scandal of Sartre's last interview with the (unreal) scandal of Sartre's finding God, but properly the two have nothing to do with one another. So where does the idea of Sartre "finding God" come from if not from his last interview?</p><p>I mentioned a second source, and this is where you'll probably need to take a seat. I want to remind you before I continue that this is a book that has been published by a real publisher, and which was presumably reviewed and edited before being committed to print, and that the publisher has an address which can presumably be readily found by lawyers representing the estate of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ready? Metaxas' sole source for the incredible conversion of one of history's most famous atheists to the Catholic faith - and which he proudly cites in one of his footnotes - is <i>a comment made on a random Catholic blog post from 11 years ago.</i> Not even a blog post, mind: a <i>comment</i> made on a blog post. Even by the low standards Metaxas has evinced throughout the rest of the book, that is fucking appallingly lazy and dishonest.</p><p>But it gets worse. The above quote in which Sartre says that he is "not the product of chance" appears to have been made up out of whole cloth by Metaxas himself. The footnote he appends to the quote suggests it comes from the above blog post, but it certainly doesn't appear anywhere there. A quick google search tells me that the quote, in fact, doesn't appear anywhere in the universe except in this book. He made it up. He lied. One of the most sensational, noteworthy aspects of his book and it's just total bullshit. What a clown.</p><p>And now that I've spent more time writing this review than Metaxas spent writing this book I'm finally done. I've had enough. All in all, this book sucks and I recommend it to no-one.</p>James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-45536238063494135632013-10-07T01:53:00.001+11:002013-10-07T01:53:35.533+11:00Did Jesus Really Exist? A Brief Defence of the "Historical Jesus" TheoryThe problem with studying ancient history is that the sources we have
for any given individual or event are invariably fragmentary, late (that
is, penned many years after the fact) and ideologically compromised.
This problem even exists in the ancient cultures that were relatively
meticulous record-keepers, including those of ancient Egypt and Rome.
The problem is even more exaggerated for the most part when studying the
events of Roman Palestine, since almost everything we know about it
comes from a single historian, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Josephus</a>,
whose major works date to the latter part of the first century.
Although Josephus does mention Jesus twice in passing (one of these
passages is contested in terms of its authenticity), this leaves us with
very little external, objective evidence with which to appraise the
origins of Christianity.<br />
<br />
As the "Jesus mythicists" will happily tell you (and I should emphasise
that such individuals lie very much outside the boundaries of mainstream
scholarship) this leaves us with only the gospels and other early
Christian writings to work with. Because such works are the products of a
particular theological mindset and for the most part lack even the
pretence of historical objectivity, this leaves us with virtually no
incontestable evidence for Jesus Christ or the early years of the
movement which bore his name. For the mythicists, this lack of evidence
proves decisive: if there is no unambiguous evidence for Jesus, then
epistemological prudence must push us to the position that either Jesus
did not exist, or - at best - that we cannot say he existed with any
confidence at all. While those claiming such a position are undoubtedly
correct about the paucity of quality evidence available to us (and you
would do well to keep this in mind every time Jesus is discussed in this
thread), I think the conclusion they have reached is a little extreme
and ultimately ends up raising more problems than it solves.<br />
<br />
In the first place, our demands for hard, incontrovertible evidence
cannot be as strict in the study of ancient history as they are in the
study of modern history. The reason, simply, is that - barring the
occasional chance archaeological find - hard evidence for the events of
the ancient world usually haven't been preserved down to the modern day.
Even events that have been meticulously documented by quality
historians - the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, for example - must be
treated with a skeptical eye, leaving us with comparatively little that
can be said with absolute certainty about events of even this magnitude.
The reason such accounts must be treated skeptically is because the
standards of modern historiography - with the need for meticulous
sourcing and the drive for objectivity - just weren't an active concern
for ancient historiographers. Thucydides, for example, would invent
speeches out of whole cloth for dramatic effect (we know this because he
tells us). Herodotus - the father of history - believed strongly in the
influence of the divine over the progress of history, and would
attribute the incidence of many events to the intervention of the gods.
In the Roman world, Tacitus was as much a moralist as a historian, happy
to engage in rumour and innuendo if it would better serve his ends.<br />
<br />
And
so on and so forth: no matter where you look, no matter how important
an ancient event was, we usually only know about it today through the
lens of an ideologically compromised ancient historian or two... and
that's if we're lucky. If paucity of evidence were enough to make
dubious the people and events of ancient history, we could probably
compress everything we know with absolute certainty about the ancient
world into a single book. If we can dismiss the existence of Jesus on
such grounds - a figure whose public life played out in perhaps the
space of a year or less, in an obscure, undocumented part of the world
in front of perhaps a few dozen followers - we should probably dismiss
the existence of Pythagoras, Socrates, Hannibal and whole host of other
ancient figures as well. <br />
<br />
With respect to Jesus, it is clear that virtually everything we know
about his life is to be found in the gospels. These books obviously
cannot be read with naive credulity, as though they were written with
the aim of faithfully transcribing actual historical events, but that is
not to say that they do not contain nuggets of reliable history that
can be mined from the text if we would only use the appropriate
methodological tools. Just as we can't dismiss everything Herodotus has
to say because he believes in divine intervention, or everything
Thucydides has to say because he has a penchant for making things up, we
shouldn't dismiss everything the gospels have to say simply because
their construction was heavily influenced by the theology of their
authors. I won't go into detail about the kind of historical-critical
tools we can use to distinguish fact from fiction in the gospels (<a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2010/04/five-criteria-for-assessing-historicity.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>
is something I wrote earlier if you want such detail), but it can be
admitted that we aren't left with much we can say about the historical
Jesus with any certainty once these methods have been applied. In my
opinion, we can say that Jesus was an itinerant prophet, preaching an
eschatological message in Palestine in the first century. He was likely
born in Galilee, was likely a disciple of John the Baptist, and he
likely ended his ministry in Jerusalem. Here he attracted notoriety
(perhaps due to his sacking of the Temple), was apprehended by the
Romans (possibly with the assistance of the Jewish authorities) and
sentenced to crucifixion by Pontius Pilate. For me, that is about all
that I would assert about the life of Jesus with any confidence:
everything else I have to say about the man comes with a big asterisk
next to it.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, it's still something. These facts go a long way to
explaining the shape and nature of early Christianity as preserved in
the writings of Paul and others. And this is the important fact I want
to emphasise to the mythicists, or those who find their arguments
compelling: it's all very well and good to assert that there is no
direct evidence for Jesus, but it cannot be denied that there was a
movement which existed in his name barely two decades after the putative
date of his death. If you wish to deny the existence of Jesus, then it
is surely incumbent upon you offer some coherent explanation for how
this body of belief and literature could have possibly grown up in his
name in such a short space of time. This is not an easy prospect, and
I'm yet to encounter any compelling alternative theories to the one that
Jesus of Nazareth existed as a flesh-and-blood human being.<br />
<br />
Now, at this point most mythicists will play the usual denialist game of
throwing up their hands and saying "hey man, just asking questions!",
but I think this tactic is a little intellecually dishonest. It's easy
to attack, with simply untethered skepticism, a historical theory that
is working with necessarily fragmentary evidence, but it's much more
difficult to posit alternative theories for the evidence available that
are more probable and less convoluted than the original theory. The
parallels here between Jesus mythicism and other denialist movements
like those of the "climate change skepticism" or 9/11 truthers are
pretty easy to identify, much as it may gall the mythicists. All
denialist movements are ultimately ideologically motivated, and all
involve the highly selective use (and criticism) of the available
evidence. More importantly, as valid as denialist criticisms of the
prevailing theory may occasionally be, their ability to present an
alternative theory - which better explains the evidence, with a minimum
of superfluous pluralities - is generally laughable. The mythicist case
is no different. <br />
<br />
Basically, regardless of the details, the rejection of a historical
Jesus necessitates the positing of some other historical origin for the
early Christian movement. This, for most mythicists, necessitates the
claim that Christianity was actually created by Paul, who by this logic
believed in a purely heavenly Jesus, and that the flesh-and-blood Jesus
of history was a mere literary contrivance of the four subsequent gospel
authors. Now I can't detail all the problems with this assumption,
because we'd be here all day, but a few difficulties off the top of my
head would include:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul class="bbc-list">
<li>What was Paul's motivation for creating these
beliefs? Where did he get the idea of a heavenly messiah, beaten and
crucified in heaven to atone for our sins, when such beliefs had no
precendents in either Jewish or Hellenic thought?<br />
</li>
<li>Why does the most natural reading of Paul appear to strongly
suggest that Jesus was someone who walked on the face of the Earth, with
not a single unambiguous indication anywhere in his letters of a belief
a pre-resurrection heavenly Jesus? <br />
</li>
<li>What happened to such beliefs as time passed? Why does not a
single Christian in the first two centuries of Christianity - or any
time since then - profess belief in a Jesus who never walked the face of
the Earth? How did Paul's theology get so thoroughly garbled and
misunderstood so quickly?<br />
</li>
<li>Where did the gospel authors get their historical details
concerning the life of Jesus from? Why would they have been motivated to
situate a heavenly redeemer on the Earth if they didn't believe that to
be the case? More to the point, if the gospel authors were merely
inventing historical details to furnish the theology started by Paul,
why (with the possible exception of Luke) do they show so little
awareness of Pauline thought?<br />
</li>
<li>Why did none of the early critics of Christianity - who left
almost no area of the faith immune from criticism - make no mention of
the idea that Jesus never existed? Surely this would have been a useful
polemic for them to use if it had ever existed in the cultural millieu
of the time?</li>
</ul>
<br />
Now note that these are entirely contrived problems, unique to the
theory of Jesus mythicism. The only inherent difficulty with the
historical Jesus theory I can find concerns the lack of solid evidence,
but the mythicist theory <i>also</i> has this problem (as I said, not a
shred of incontestible evidence that a single Christian ever believed in
the purely heavenly Jesus of the mythicist theory!) in addition to the
problems listed above. So really, I can only ask which seems more
plausible: the idea that there was an itinerant prophet called Jesus -
the man that the early Christians wrote about - or the contrived and
convoluted jumble of illogic found above? Even if we presume that the
evidence for both claims is equal (something that I would dispute),
which explanation is the most parsimonious, requiring the smallest
number of pluralities and presumptions to explain the data? Without
pre-empting your answer, I think it's telling that the mythicist
explanation requires so many more leaps in logic or unfounded
presumptions than the supposedly tenuous theory it seeks to replace. So,
when someone asks me why I believe that there was a historical Jesus,
this is the answer I give them: it's simply by far the most probable
explanation for the available evidence that we have. Perhaps the day
will come when a better alternative explanation offers itself, but until
then the "Jesus as historical figure" theory is the only one to explain
the data without resorting to fantastic assumptions or contorted chains
of logic. James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-5664364845969092182013-10-07T01:49:00.000+11:002013-10-07T01:49:09.439+11:00The History of the Bible: A Brief Overview<b>1500-1200 BC: Settlement</b><br />
<br />
In the second half of the second millennium BC, the land of Canaan (a
region comprising modern Israel, Palestine and parts of Syria, Lebanon
and Jordan) was comprised of a series of loosely affiliated city states,
distantly overseen by the Egyptian Empire. The culture was relatively
homogeneous, and closely related culturally to other ancient
near-Eastern polities. At some time in the 13th century BC, the entire
region was thrown into chaos by a series of migratory movements
originating (likely) somewhere to the north-west. Exactly what caused
this upheaval of population is not known for certain, but we know from
Egyptian records that a mass of immigrants (deemed "sea people" by the
Egyptians) landed periodically all around the Mediterranean coast
sometime in the 13th century BC, attacking many key Egyptian outposts -
as well as key centres of other empires - in the process. The on-going
battle between the Egyptians and the sea people needn't concern us
further, but the importance for Israel and the subsequent Biblical
narrative lies in what happened as a consequence on the modern day Gaza
strip.<br />
<br />
The "sea people" who landed here immediately embarked on a wave of
destruction and displacement, a pattern attested to today by the
archaeological record. This period marks a severe decline in the size
and strength of the greater empires in the region (especially
Mesopotamia and Egypt) and allowed for the emergence of smaller states.
The sea people came to settle the Gaza strip (and became known to
subsequent generations of Israelites as "Philistines") and the previous
settlers were forced off this relatively fertile land by the coast into
the more desolate, arid, mountainous region to the east. The land
appears to have been largely uninhabited prior to this, so the new
settlers - refugees from all over the Levant - were able to create
settlements with relative ease. At this early stage we can't yet
properly speak of an "Israel" (though we know from Egyptian records that
there existed a people called "Israel" by around 1200) because the
material culture of the region was still indistinguishable from the
wider Canaanite material culture. Well, indistinguishable it so happens
with one important difference: the almost total absence of pig bones in
the proto-Israelite sites. <br />
<br />
<b>1200-1000 BC: Tribes and Judges</b><br />
<br />
Little is known for sure about this part of the region's history. We
know that the Egyptians were forced to withdraw their influence from the
region due to their on-going battles with the "sea people", various
states and other internecine conflicts, so we can imagine that the loose
coalition of city states that existed in Canaan likely fragmented
during this time. According to the Biblical accounts, this was a period
of general lawlessness, violence, and competing tribal chiefs (or
"judges" in the Biblical terminology). Although the historicity of most
of the narratives in Judges have long been questioned by scholars, we
can probably say that the Biblical account probably has more than an
element of truth to it: as closely related as all the "tribes" in the
region were (in terms of religion, language and culture) there can be
little doubt that this was a period in which they jostled violently for
land and power in the vacuum of Egyptian influence.<br />
<br />
With respect to religion, we know that these proto-Israelites continued
to believe in at least aspects of the Canaanite pantheon of gods: namely
in El (the "head" god) and his 70 children. That El was integral to the
religious culture of the proto-Israelites can be determined by his
presence in theophoric titles (Isra-<i>el</i>, <i>El</i>-ijah etc.) and
that it continued to be the name of "God" in the northern kingdom for
centuries later. In the part of the Torah that is suspected to have been
penned in the northern kingdom (that is, the E Source"), "Elohim" is
the name used for God in the narrative until he reveals his name to be
"YHWH" in Exodus (in truth, this appears to be a later attempt to
conflate two different gods under the same name: even relatively late
Biblical texts appear to suggest that YHWH was originally a member of a
divine council of gods (<i>elyon</i>) - Dt. 32:8-9). In the south,
however, the use of theophoric titles involving the name YHWH from a
relatively early date suggests to us that YHWH was the patron god of
Judah from the very beginning.<br />
<br />
We are told that the land (or at least, it's northern part) was ruled by
a man named "Saul" in the later part of this period, though exactly
what territory he might have laid claim to is not clear. The Bible tells
us of the continued presense of foreign tribes in the land nominally
claimed by Saul, and we also know from Egyptian records that the land
was terrorised during this period by large, well-organised groups of
bandits known as "Hapiru". So, if the legitimacy of a state truly rests
in its capacity to impose a monopoly of violence in the region under its
control, we probably can't yet call the Israel of Saul a true state
just yet. Scholars once tried to make a etymological link between the
word "Hapiru" and the word "Hebrew" - which would raise the possibility
that the Hebrews entered the land originally as marauding bandits - but
this explanation seems to have fallen out of favour.<br />
<br />
<b>1000 BC - 930 BC: David and Solomon</b><br />
<br />
Sometime in the late 11th century BC, it appears that a tribal chief
named David achieved prominence in the southern regions, uniting enough
of the population to take over Jerusalem and to establish a state there
known as "Judah". According to the Biblical accounts, he was once in the
employ of Saul, and after Saul's death found himself in control of a
"united monarchy" - that is, both the northern and southern parts of the
region (or Israel and Judah). Exactly how seriously we can take these
Biblical accounts is unclear, and a matter of acrimonious debate among
scholars. At one end there are those who suggest the Biblical account is
almost entirely trustworthy, and the other end are those who would deny
David ever existed (although the latter are now in shorter supply after
the discovery of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Dan_Stele" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tel Dan Stele</a>).
I'm obviously not qualified to resolve this issue here, so I'll give
you the facts as I see them and let you make your own mind up.<br />
<br />
In the Biblical account, it has long been noted that David comes across
as a very flawed and (consequently) a very human figure. Despite the
reverence with which he was treated in later periods, the Biblical
accounts are scarcely unequivocally positive in their descriptions of
him. One potential explanation is that the material (in the Book of
Samuel anyway) comes from two different sources: one from the north and
one from the south, that were later redacted into a single narrative.
The southern account is predictably more positive, because this is where
David was based and where the majority of his support came from. The
northern account is rather less effusive in its praise because there may
have been a residual tendency to see David as something of a violent
usurper: he did, after all, apparently murder Saul's son to end the
northern monarchy and to stake his claim to the entire region. If this
interpretation of the Biblical texts is correct, then it would seem to
lend some support to the general historicity of the accounts because
they have been preserved down two independent sources. That this is the
case, though, is far from clear.<br />
<br />
What we do know is that David was remembered for (firstly) siding with
the Philistines against Saul and then fighting off and subduing the
Philistines. Again, there is no inherent reason to suspect the truth of
these accounts. Kings and states do not just appear from thin air:
generally in history, the rallying of a people around a central leader -
and their granting him the authority and resources to lead them -
doesn't happen for no reason. Frequently, such centralising tendencies
can occur in response to perceived threats, as happened in Greece, Rome,
China and doubtless many other places. The emergence of David as the
sole leader of once disparate groups of people may well have been a
response to the perceived threat which emanated firstly from the
northern kingdom of Saul and - subsequently - from the Philistines. That
David switched allegiances should also not be a surprise: this was a
frequent tactic employed by kings in the ancient world (to side with the
more powerful force, regardless of past relationships with other
powers) and it happened frequently in the subsequent history of Israel
and Judah. The Biblical account has the benefit of explaining the
emergence of a monarchy in the southern region and its subsequent
history, so again, I see no reason to doubt it.<br />
<br />
One question mark lies with just how "unified" the northern and southern
parts of the kingdom were under King David. In fact, many scholars will
deny (quite credibly) that there was ever a unified kingdom of Israel
at all. They would argue that it was merely a work of theologically
inspired propaganda created by later Judahites to justify their claims
to the northern lands after the fall of Samaria in 722 BC. This might be
taking it a little too far, but what can probably be said with
confidence is that the south simply didn't have the resources to bring
the north reliably under its control. Archaeologists put the population
in Judah at the time of David at perhaps no more than a few thousand,
and given the relatively poor agricultural conditions in the region it
seems difficult to believe that Judah could have produced the economic
surplus necessary to produce an army capable of subduing and occupying
the much larger, much wealthier region to the north. In other words,
whatever claims David might have had on the northern kingdom were surely
somewhat tenuous, and the idea of a unified kingdom may well have been
more an ideological claim than one realised in practice. That the
unified kingdom lasted no longer than 70 years (according to the
Biblical account) would surely be evidence of this.<br />
<br />
Solomon is another enigmatic figure. In the Bible he was remembered for
producing books of great wisdom (i.e. the Book of Proverbs) and
incredible building feats, but it now seems likely that he produced
neither. The Biblical wisdom literature probably dates (for the most
part) to the post-exilic period (that is, four centuries after Solomon
at the earliest) and the major building projects in the northern kingdom
that the Bible attributes to Solomon were likely built during the time
of the divided kingdom, when the the northern half was comparatively
rich and powerful. The possibility remains that Solomon constructed the
first Temple in Jerusalem (as tradition maintains), but the relevant
archaeological site currently lies under the Al-Aqsa mosque so it is not
possible to confirm for sure. What else we can say about Solomon with
any certainty is unclear, but what is apparent is that after his death
whatever fragile unity there was between the north and south fractured,
and the next period of history is one that of the "divided monarchy".<br />
<br />
<b>930-734 BC: The Age of Israel</b><br />
<br />
After the fracturing of the (potentially) once united kingdom of Israel,
the two kingdoms went down quite separate paths. The northern kingdom
(Israel) grew rapidly, developing a rich and relatively advanced
material culture, as well as developing strong military and economic
ties with neighbouring powers. Beginning perhaps with the great king
Omri in the early 9th century BC (foreign powers referred to the
northern kingdom as "the House of Omri"), the archaeological record
tells us that this was a period of exorbitant building projects and
extensive trade for Israel. We also know from the rather severe
admonitions of the prophets active at the time - such as Isaiah, Hosea
and Amos - that such plenitude also produced gross inequality and
economic exploitation in the kingdom. The influence of foreign trade and
diplomatic ties also brought the unwelcome (for these prophets)
influence of foreign religious practices. The accounts of the northern
kingdom in the Book of Kings (written by unsympathetic southern scribes
some centuries later) paints a picture of abject moral depravity in the
region at the time. Whatever the truth, the population in the north may
have been as much as 8 times greater than that in the south, and the
wealth of the regions are almost incomparable. <br />
<br />
In the south at the time, this marks a period of almost total obscurity
and lack of development. There is little evidence of literacy in the
region (which would be a sign of economic development and a strong
central state) and the land was likely populated almost exclusively by
small, marginal agriculturalists and nomads. Although it seems that
Judah was able to remain an independent state during this period - and
there is no indication that they were required to pay tribute to their
northern neighbours, despite the late attempt by the north to enforce
one - there is simply no doubt that Judah was the little brother in this
partnership. But for the intervention of foreign powers, it likely
would have stayed this way, and Judaism, Christianity and the Bible - at
least in any recognisable forms - would never have had to chance to
emerge.<br />
<br />
<b>734 - 592 BC: Assyria and The Fall of Israel</b><br />
<br />
At the peak of their strength, the Israelites made the ill-fated
decision to stand with the city of Damascus against the now powerful
Assyrian empire. The Assyrians - led by the infamous King
Tiglath-Pileser III - reacted swiftly in anger, invading Israel,
deposing the king and replacing him with a leader of their own choosing.
After the death of King Tiglath-Pileser III, Israel again rebelled,
hoping to use the resultant power vacuum as a chance to pursue their
freedom from the empire. Again, though, the Assyrian response was swift
and brutal. After a prolonged siege of the capital Samaria, Israel
finally fell in 722 BC. The royal house of Omri was completely
destroyed, and its population was either sent into exile or forced to
flee for safer territory in the face of the advancing Assyrian army. <br />
<br />
For many of those who took flight, Judah was the most logical
destination. They shared nearly identical cultures, afterall, and Judah -
under its king Ahaz - had signed a suzerain treaty with the Assyrians,
sparing them from direct conquest in exchange for the provision of
onerous tributes. (It's worth mentioning that in the decade or so before
the fall of Israel, this technically made Judah and Israel enemies at
war.) And the refugees did indeed flood into Judah in great numbers: the
archaeological record suggests that the population of Jerusalem may
have increased almost 12-fold in little less than a century. Quite apart
from the population boom in Judah that this migratory influx obviously
caused, there were a number of other important effects as well. Firstly,
the religious traditions of Israel and Judah - which had been diverging
for at least two centuries by this point - were brought back into
contact. This may well have been when the J/E conflation took place
(i.e. the penning of the majority of Genesis and Exodus) as religious
scholars sought to reconcile the sometimes minor differences between the
two mythical traditions. <br />
<br />
Another important effect was the rise of literacy in Judah during this
period, another fact attested by the archaeological record. Normally
literacy only enters a society once a certain level of economic
complexity has been reached, thus necessitating the creation of more
complex forms of accounting and record keeping (it does appear that the
majority of the earliest instances of written language performed exactly
this function). Judah, prior to this point, was an almost entirely
rural region, with very little (it seems) in terms of political
centralisation or urbanisation, and literacy therefore was not a
pressing need prior to the 8th century. Israel in the 8th century, by
contrast, was a large, heavily urbanised society that engaged routinely
in foreign trade, thus necessitating an institutionalised scribal
culture to keep track of trades, contracts, inventory and so on. After
the fall of Israel, these scribes - and other instruments of complex
government - were brought south to Judah and would have made possible
the creation of texts used in religion and government. In other words,
it is probably at around this time that we can finally imagine that the
material and intellectual resources necessary for the construction of
complex texts finally arrived to Judah, and it is probably around this
time that some of the Biblical texts we are familiar with today were
first penned.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most important development during this period was the
ascension of King Josiah, who - with the exception of King David - is
probably the most important king in the history of Judah and the
religious traditions it came to produce. He came to the throne as an 8
year old in 640 BC, and in approximately 622 BC introduced a serious of
religious and social reforms that would forever shape the nature of the
Hebrew religion. His most important move here was in the centralisation
of the religious faith, so that all religious practice would now be
centred on the Temple in Jerusalem, and all other outlets of religious
expression - the so called "altars" and "high places" - would be
destroyed, their priests slain and their practise forever suppressed. 2
Kings 23 gives us some great detail about just how thorough, violent and
wide-spread the enforcement of this edict needed to be. The shear scale
of the "abominable" religious practices present in Judah prior to
Josiah's reforms should, however, give us a clear indication of just how
pluralistic and variable Judahite religion was prior to Josiah, and
puts lie to the fact that the Hebrew religion was ever an inherently
monolithic / monotheistic one. <br />
<br />
Another important move made by Josiah during his reign was the
empowerment of the priestly caste (specifically the Levitical caste) and
the reduction in the power of the King. Penned some 1800 years before
the Magna Carta, the book of Deuteronomy represents an extraordinary
concession of power on behalf of the King of Judah, including the
promise to follow piously the "Laws" of scripture (i.e. the king was now
a follower of law rather than a prescriber of it) and to not "exalt
himself above other members of the community" (Dt. 17)! This diminishing
of the power of the king and the strengthening of the power of the
priests would have a number of important consequences in the post-exilic
period and future of the Hebrew religion.<br />
<br />
<b>592 BC - 539 BC: The Exile</b><br />
<br />
After the fall of the Assyrian empire at the hand of the Babylonians in
the late 7th century BC, Judah was faced with a problem. To the north
they now had the Babylonian Empire, one that was probably more
aggressive and expansionist than the Assyrian Empire they replaced. To
the south they had the still large (though perhaps declining) Egyptian
Empire. To make matters worse, the two empires were open enemies,
leaving Judah in the middle and needing to choose one side to protect it
from the other. For a period of two decades, it seems as though the
kings of Judah vacillated almost capriciously from one side to the
other, as the fortune of each empire grew and waned. Eventually, though,
after abandoning a recently-penned treaty with Babylon to side with the
Egyptians, the Judahites were left to face the full brunt of the
Babylonian army. They expected the support of the Egyptians, but the
Egyptians never arrived. In three successive waves of invasion,
concluding in 582 BC, Judah was smashed by the Babylonians: its cities
were destroyed, its population scattered and its elite members carried
off into exile.<br />
<br />
The human scale of this drama is preserved in unnerving detail in the
Bible. The siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC was, like all other military
sieges in history, a event which imposed almost imaginable strains on
endurance and suffering. With access to outside food sources closed off
by the Babylonian army, the people of Jerusalem were "pierced by
hunger", the "women... boiled their own children":<br />
<div class="bbc-block">
<blockquote>
Even the jackals offer the breast<br />
and nurse their young,<br />
but my people has become cruel,<br />
like the ostriches in the wilderness.<br />
<br />
The tongue of the infant sticks<br />
to the roof of its mouth for thirst;<br />
the children beg for food,<br />
but no one gives them anything.<br />
<br />
Those who feasted on delicacies<br />
perish in the streets;<br />
those who were brought up in purple<br />
cling to ash heaps.</blockquote>
</div>
<br />
In truth, the aftermath was little better for those who stayed behind.
Agricultural production ground to a halt, cities were abandoned and many
fled the land permanently, Egypt becoming a particularly popular
sanctuary. Those who were carried into exile (including the royal court,
the priests and members of the aristocracy) bemoaned their fates in
moving Psalmic elegies for their lost land, the most famous being that
of Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon..."). In truth, the conditions
faced by those exiled to Babylon (exact numbers are difficult to gauge
by the way, but 10% of the Judahite population would be as good a guess
as any) were perhaps not <i>so</i> bad: they were, after all, apparently
free - at least in certain cases - to continue their religious
practices, to perform trades and to marry into the local populations. In
addition to certain Psalms, important prophetic works such as Ezekiel,
Jeremiah and deutero-Isaiah were likely written (at least in part)
during the exile, the first two notable for their almost complete lack
of hostility towards the Babylonians, and their correlated disdain
towards those Judahites who remained in Judah or (much worse) who had
fled to Egypt.<br />
<br />
Theologically this marks an important time for the Hebrews, so much so
that many scholars use the terms "pre-exilic" and "post-exilic" theology
to denote the significant changes the forced exile imposed. Firstly,
the Jerusalem Temple - literally the dwelling place of their God - had
been destroyed, leaving serious questions about their proper mode of
worship and practice in its absence. Secondly, the unimaginable
suffering heaped on the Judahites so soon after the enactment of the
supposedly pious reforms of Josiah was difficult to explain: <i>why was God so angry at us</i>?
The first problem likely contributed to the growth of belief in a
universal deity (that is, a deity who could be with one even in a
foreign land) and - eventually - unequivocal monotheism (the first
unambiguously monotheistic Biblical passage was likely written during
this time: Isa. 44:6). It also contributed to the centrality of the Law
in the Hebrew religion, because it could still be followed even where
the possibility of worship and sacrifices - the central praxes of the
old religion - were no longer possible. The second problem was explained
by the reality of deferred judgement - that present-day generations
could be punished for the inequities of past generations. This was an
important development in the conception of sin, and would eventually
lead to the idea of "original sin" so important to later Christian
theologians. <br />
<br />
<b>539 BC - 323 BC: The Persian Period</b><br />
<br />
Following the over-running of the Babylonian Empire by the Persians, the
Judahites in exile were finally free to return to their homeland. For
his role in this - and his relatively tolerant and liberal attitude
towards the expression of religion - Cyrus was deemed to be a "Messiah"
by the author of deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 45:1). In truth the return to
Judah was little more than a slow trickle initially: the archaeological
record seems to indicate only a slow growth in population during the
century or so after the fall of Babylon. In reality, it's not difficult
to understand why: the majority of the Hebrews living in Babylon had
never seen Judah, had their own families and trades in Babylon, and
there was little to go back to in the now destitute and economically
backward hinterlands of Judah. But they did make their way back slowly. <br />
<br />
The first to come (including Zerubbabel, the governor and Haggai the
prophet) were shocked by the conditions they found there. The so-called
"people of the land" had fallen into a state of apparent moral
degradation, abandoning the religious practices instituted by Josiah
(and further refined by the Babylonian exiles), adopting gods and wives
from neighbouring tribes. The land was destitute and unproductive, the
cities lay in ruins, completely undeveloped from the time of the
Babylonian invasion more than four decades prior. The first task
involved the rebuilding of the Temple, a project that seems to have run
into many difficulties along the way. (These interruptions are blamed
partly on the Samaritans - refugees from the Assyrian invasion of the
northern Kingdom who had returned along with the Judahites. This enmity
between the Hebrews and the Samaritans would continue until the time of
Jesus, hence the "Good Samaritan" story.) It was eventually built,
though, and this period through to 70 AD is therefore referred to as the
"Second Temple Period". Strangely, while many facets of pre-exilic life
were resumed in Judah during this period, the re-establishment of the
monarchy doesn't seem to have been one of them. While members of the
royal court form part of the narrative in the earliest period of the
return, they henceforth disappear without explanation, with royal
titles, ceremonies and functions passed onto the high priest. The
Davidic monarchy was never to be restored, the powers of government now
resting for the majority of the Second Temple period with the priests
and governors appointed by foreign powers. <br />
<br />
It was during this period that the texts of the Hebrew Bible reached
essentially their modern form - few of the major texts from the Tanakh
can be dated reliably to after this period, though the texts themselves
did continue to evolve. The Torah and the Deueronomic histories (that
is, the first 9 books of the Bible) were likely edited / composed into
their definitive form during the 5th century BC (perhaps by the prophet
Ezra) and the theology of the time is perhaps best represented by the
"Priestly (or "P") Source" within the Torah. The theology of this source
evinces evidence of the universal god developed during the exile (in
contrast with the more parochial god of earlier texts) and the
centrality of assiduous priestly procedure to the religion, in keeping
with the realities of post-monarchical Judah.<br />
<br />
<b>323 BC - 63 BC: The Hellenistic Period</b><br />
<br />
This was an extremely complex time politically in the region, so it will
be difficult to do justice to it in just a few paragraphs. It started
with Alexander the Great's defeat of Persia, and the transfer of the
lands of Palestine into the hands of his armies. With Alexander's death
in 323 BC, however, the inheritance of his nascent empire was
fought-over by his generals, a squabble which took a long time to reach a
definitive conclusion. The land of Palestine was contested between
Ptolemy I and his neighbouring rival Seleucus, with the former
eventually laying definitive claim to the land in around 301 BC. Almost
immediately he set about Hellenizing the region, introducing a complex
governing bureaucracy and other cultural institutions in line with
Alexander's earlier desire to introduce <i>homonia</i> (that is, a universal Hellenistic culture) to the lands he brought under his control.<br />
<br />
As a consequence of Ptolemy's reforms (and those of his successors), the
period marks one of relative peace and prosperity in the region, as
evidenced by the growth in populations, agriculture and trade in the
region. It wasn't however, a happy period for everyone. Those in the
upper-classes tended to benefit more from Hellenism than the rural
classes did, so they tended to adapt to Greek thought and institutions
much more readily. As a consequence, an internal rupture emerged among
the Jews (and it is here that the word Jew first came into use: it was a
Greek title for the population of Judea) during the Greek and Roman
period. Generally, we can now speak of the privilaged classes
(merchants, priests, royalty etc.) supporting (or at least acquiescing
to) the occupiers and patronising their institutions (including <i>gymnasia</i>
and so on), with the less privileged classes rebelling against the
imperial forces and holding zealously to their religious traditions. The
latter would eventually become radicalised, and it is in such an
environment that the ministry of Jesus - and subsequent developments in
the history of Judaism must be understood.<br />
<br />
The Ptolemies eventually lost control of the region to the Seleucids in
223 BC, and this marks the beginning of a period of great instability.
The Seleucids were involved in ongoing conflicts with the growing Roman
empire, and needed to extract higher and higher tributes to support
their war efforts. This involved further exploitation of the already
disenfranchised rural poor and the raiding of the sacrosanct Jerusalem
Temple for its treasures. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (with the
help of his lackey high-priest) established an "abomination" (namely
Pagan worship) in the Jerusalem Temple in the year 167 BC, and outlawed
certain other Jewish practices, the impoverished population revolted
under a religious banner in an event known as the "Maccabean Revolt".
After 3 years of often gruelling guerilla warfare, the Maccabeans
emerged victorious and established an independent Jewish state for the
first time in over four centuries, an event celebrated down to the
modern day in the festival of Hannukah. This new Hasmonean dynasty
struggled to definitively secure a grip on power, however, due
predominantly to Roman influence and internecine conflicts, resulting in
a century of further relative instability. The independence of the
kingdom was officially ended when Pompey invaded in 63 BC and
established the territory as a Roman client Kingdom.<br />
<br />
The restlessness of this age gave rise to some relatively new ways of
thinking within Jewish circles. For the impoverished and
disenfranchised, the dismay they felt over their constant subjugation at
the hands of foreign powers was channelled into eschatological thought:
namely, the idea that God would shortly intervene to put an end to the
evils of the present age. This is most prominently displayed in the Book
of Daniel and the books of Enoch / Ezra. This is another important
indication of the influence that historical events can have over the
trajectory of theology. Many other people - particularly in the
upper-classes - were heavily influenced by Greek thought during this
period, as demonstrated in the Book of Ecclesiastes and other so-called
"Wisdom" literature. This also marks the first point at which we can
identify a belief in the afterlife (or resurrection, more specifically)
amongst some of the Jewish population. It seems to have emerged in
reaction to the perceived iniquity of the fact that those who died
gloriously during the Maccabean revolt would not live to see its
fruition. All of these new theological developments would be important
in the development of early Christian thought.<br />
<br />
<b>63 BC - 70 AD: The Early Roman Period</b><br />
<br />
The early periods of Roman rule were overshadowed by developments in
Rome, including the battles waged between Pompey and Caesar, and later
between Antony and Octavian. The Romans did stamp their authority on the
region, however, with the installation of Herod the Great as a puppet
king in 37 BC. Herod was a prolific builder - most prominently his
massive additions to the Temple complex - and enjoyed a close
relationship with the Romans, neither of which ingratiated him to the
local population. He is remembered as a brutal and capricious ruler by
later authors, though much of this reputation can probably be attributed
to the politically motivated polemic of his later detractors. Matthew's
claim that he killed every firstborn child in Judea (as the Romans
called it) can be safely dismissed as theologically-driven fiction.
Shortly after Herod's death, Judea went from being a client kingdom to
being absorbed as a Roman province.<br />
<br />
As in the earlier Greek period, the Jews of the Roman period found
themselves split between those who acquiesced to the Roman occupation
and those who actively opposed it. On the pro-Roman side, we have the
Sadducees, those of the ruling priestly caste who ran the Temple and
actively co-operated with their Roman overseers. On the other side we
have the Pharisees, a distinct priestly caste who were legal
traditionalists and enjoyed a much closer relationship with the Jewish
people. Finally we have the Essenes, a shadowy group about whom little
is known. It seems that they were originally a disaffected priestly
caste, who left (or were excluded from) their regular priestly duties at
some point in the Hellenistic period, perhaps due to disagreements with
the occupying powers. It seems they produced strange, almost
unclassifiable religious literature (including likely the Dead Sea
Scrolls) and lived an ascetic lifestyle at the fringes of society. <br />
<br />
Groups like the Essenes likely gave rise to movements such as those of
John the Baptist in the Roman period, who preached an eschatological
message and railed ceaselessly against the powers-that-be. Jesus, likely
originally a disciple of John, can be placed in the same category.
Although the Gospel authors tend to soften any potentially obvious
anti-Roman sentiments in their texts, Jesus is best understood in the
historical reality of Roman Judea: that is, one of imperialism and
social disenfranchisement. The Romans (and their backers among the
Jewish ruling classes) imposed often onerous taxes on the rural
population of Judea, and many of the latter were left destitute as a
consequence. Many could no longer turn to traditional religious sources
for consolation, because those who represented such sources (namely the
Sadducees) were seen as being complicit in the Roman occupation. Many
therefore turned to more exuberant and rebellious religious
alternatives, which generally promised liberation from the strife of the
present period in the form of some future cataclysmic act of divine
intervention, which would deliver the world from the hands of the
powerful into the hands of the downtrodden. Such eschatological beliefs
were the basis of Jesus' teachings.<br />
<br />
Others had different solutions to the problems of Roman occupation,
however, and organised themselves into militant groups. Most prominent
among these were the "Zealots", who could apparently count one of their
number among the disciples of Jesus. The Zealots aggressively targeted
Greek and Roman interests in Judea, using tactics that would probably be
described as "terrorism" in the modern parlance, including the
targeting of otherwise innocent Greek and Roman civilians. Perhaps even
more bold were the "Sicarii", named for the daggers they carried, who
terrorised those Jews who dared to co-operate with the Romans. Such
movements emerged, Josephus tells us, at least partly in response to the
tax reforms enacted by the Romans at the beginning of the 1st century,
though religious factors must surely have been a pertinent factor as
well. <br />
<br />
Such divisions were in some way mirrored in the early Christian sects.
The only surviving Christian texts we have from this period are those of
Paul, and much of his writing is devoted to attempting to bridge the
gap between the Jews, Gentiles and their various subgroups in the
nascent faith. The duties one faces to the empire, the concern for the
poor and the eschatology of marginal Jewish groups are also major
pre-occupations of Paul, which all serve to place early Christian
theology firmly as a continuation of late-Second Temple Judaism. Until
70 AD, Christianity was just one of its many branches. <br />
<br />
<b>After 70 AD: The Late Roman Period and Diaspora</b><br />
<br />
Eventually, the militant groups described in the previous section led a
fateful revolt against the Romans in 66 AD. The violence was initially <i>ad hoc</i>
and indiscriminate, before gradually escalating into a full-blown war
against the Roman Empire. After 4 years of fighting - including another
horrific siege of Jerusalem - the revolt was quashed and the Temple was
destroyed, creating a crisis within the Jewish faith. The Temple had for
so long stood at the centre of Jewish religious practice, and its
absence created the need to innovate new theological solutions to keep
the faith going. Essentially, from the first century onwards Judaism
became a faith centred around the Torah (that is, "the Law") and its
scholarly exegesis. With the Sadducees dislodged from power, the
opportunity fell to Pharisees (or, at least, their successors) to lead
this reinvigoration of the faith and they came to produce what is now
known as Talmudic Judaism (derived from the name given to the body of
scholarly interpretation produced by Rabbis), a critical step in the
development of the Judaism with which we are familiar today.<br />
<br />
Within Christianity, the fall of Jerusalem likely marked the first of
its many significant fractures with Judaism. To begin with, the
Jerusalem Church - hitherto probably the centre of the Christian
missionary movement - simply disappears from history. The apostles at
the head of this church - most notably James, "the brother of the Lord" -
were extremely important in maintaining the Jewish influence within the
early Christian movement, and insisted upon the continued observation
of dietary laws and circumcision. For this position they ran into
constant arguments with Paul and other early evangelists who insisted
that gentiles should not be required to observe these central
requirements of Judaism to be admitted into the faith. With the
destruction of the Jerusalem Church (or at least its inability to retain
its earlier influence) the gentile-friendly Christianity of Paul and
his successors became dominant, and would remain normative for the rest
of Christian history. While Jews previously tolerated the evangelising
of proto-Christians in synagogues, the crisis caused by the destruction
of the Temple created a rather less tolerant attitude and these
proto-Christians now found themselves excluded from synagogue services.
This situation is anachronistically depicted in the Gospel of John,
which - together with the anti-Jewish polemic in other NT texts -
suggests quite clearly that Judaism and Christianity were already
starting to go their separate ways by the end of the first century.<br />
<br />
The Judean province remained a politically restive region, however, and
after several periodic skirmishes the situation again boiled over into
full-blown war in 132 AD with the famous Bar Kokhba revolt. Under the
leadership of Simon bar Kokhba - a self-proclaimed Messiah - the Jewish
population rebelled against the Roman Empire and for a short period were
seemingly successful in establishing Israel as an independent state.
The Roman response was typically ruthless, however, and the revolt was
quashed in an orgy of violence by the year 135 AD. The majority of Jews
in the region were likely to have been killed, sold into slavery, or -
if they were lucky - sent into exile. Hadrian forbade them from entering
Jerusalem (except for specially sanctioned ceremonies) and this marks a
critical stage in the Jewish diaspora. The Jews would from this point
have no homeland until the creation of the modern state of Israel in
1947.
James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-83784313771901507492013-10-07T00:59:00.001+11:002013-10-07T01:00:56.557+11:00Eschatology in Early Christianity: A Response to Liberal CriticismsThere are few scholars involved in Biblical scholarship today who would be moved to deny the eschatological basis of early Christian beliefs. It's simply to difficult to make sense of the NT texts or the breathless urgency with which early Christian evangelising was carried out within its first few decades. In my experience, the objections to Jesus ever having preached an eschatological message
come primarily from those who tend towards the more "liberal" side of scholarship, probably best typified
by the outlook of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jesus Seminar</a>.
Such scholarship tends to view Jesus as a wandering sage, or a
(pacifistic) political provocateur and argues that the eschatological
material in the NT is a consequence of later generations retrojecting
their own eschatological beliefs into the mouth of Jesus (I don't think
any would dispute the claim that Jesus is at least <i>presented</i> as having eschatological ideas in the Gospels, for example). However, there are many problems with this view that I intend to explore here.<br />
<br />
Firstly it seems beyond doubt that Jesus spoke frequently of something
called "the Kingdom of God", as implied by the prominence of the phrase
in Mark and Q. According to the anti-apocalypticists, we should
interpret this term not as the expectation of some future eschatological
event (God literally imposing his Kingdom on Earth) but rather as a
kind of by-word for Jesus' power over evil spirits (cf. Mt. 12:28; Lk
11:20) and his pursuit of divine justice. According to this view, Jesus
believed that the Kingdom of God had already arrived, and that it
resided (metaphorically?) within those who followed his example (Lk
17:21). However, it is clear that the term is not used exclusively in this way in the gospels, and
such an interpetation appears to be too reliant on gnostic (and therefore later and
de-eschatologised) interpretations of "Kingdom of God" (e.g Gospel of
Thomas sayings 3 and 113). Given the inconsistency with which this term
is applied, it is undeniably difficult to say with certainty which of the divergent
meanings can be attributed to Jesus and which can be attributed to the
Evangelists, but I think we have to view "the Kingdom of God" as
referring to some future state that Jesus believed was already imminent.
The phrase "the Kingdom of God has drawn near" can be found in both
Mark and Q (Mk 1:15; Lk 10:9,11; Mt 10:7) and although the use of the
perfect tense ("<i>has</i> drawn near") tells us that this process has already begun, the use of "near" clearly implies that it is yet to fully arrive.<br />
<br />
Another example of imminent eschatological expectations within the early Christian community is that of the Lord's Prayer, which - by its distinctive use of the word <i>abba</i>
(as I discussed above) - few scholars doubt can be traced back to
Jesus. Here the exortation for God's Kingdom to "come" (Mt 6:10; Lk
11:2) again implies some future expectation, which Matthew further
elaborates as arriving "on Earth as it is in Heaven". The imposition of
divine will on Earth, with God arriving literally as a "King", is the
very essense of an eschatological belief, and clear parallels can be
drawn with the Jewish eschatologies of Jesus' time. Again, the
anti-apocalypticists may demure that we needn't read eschatological
beliefs into such passages and that in exhorting God's Kingdom to "come"
Jesus was merely praying for some kind of divine justice, but even then
it's difficult not to envisage this form of justice as necessitating
some great eschatological shift.<br />
<br />
For instance, Jesus is regularly portrayed as envisioning a future in
which "the last will be first, and the first last" (Mt 20:16), where
"the meek... shall inherit the earth" (Mt 5:5) and other similar
reversals of fortune. This feature of Jesus' teaching - where the order
of the current age is replaced with a new, completely inverted one as a
consequence of divine intervention - is the very definition of an
eschatological belief, hence the terminology given to such beliefs in
the parlance of Biblical scholarship - <i>inversionary ethical eschatology</i>.
Other elements of Jesus' ethics are so extreme ("if a man takes your
shirt, give him your cloak also"; "if you want to follow me, sell all
your possessions and leave your family" etc.) that its sometimes
suggested that they could only be considered workable if we presume that
Jesus thought they would only need to be followed for the short period
of time before the eschaton. In any case, it's simply impossible to make
sense of certain elements of Jesus' ethics without presuming some
eschatological corollary.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus is regularly depicted as talking about
"the Son of Man", an expression that is difficult to define precisely
(in part because it is used in many different ways, both in the OT and
the Gospels) but its use in the Gospels appears to be shaped by Daniel
7:13, an apocolyptic text. The term is used some 80 times in the
Gospels, though the Jesus Seminar voted literally every instance of its
use as either black or grey (meaning these sayings probably can't be
traced back to the historical Jesus). This glib dismissal of an
extremely well-attested tradition is based on the assumption that "the
Son of Man" motif was a Christological title retrojected into the
accounts by the Evangelists, who admittedly did frequently refer to the
LXX for passages that they could apply to Jesus as they composed their
Gospels. So, by this account, we should simply view the "Son of Man"
passages as a consequence of OT prophecy-mining undertaken by later
generations of Christians eager to find the most apt ways available to
describe Jesus' nature.<br />
<br />
But, of course, such explanations fail upon closer examination:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul class="bbc-list">
<li>Firstly, the "Son of Man" expressions are only
ever remembered as being spoken by Jesus and - therefore - were
presumably remembered as characteristic of his teaching. The "Son of
Man" does not appear anywhere else in the narratives of the Gospels. <br />
<br />
</li>
<li>In contrast to other Christological titles ("Lord", "Christ",
"Son of God" etc.) Jesus is never given the appelation of the "Son of
Man" either in the narratives or by other characters in the Gospels. If
it was intended as a Christological title, it's difficult to explain why
it is almost never used that way, either in the NT or in other early
Christian writings.<br />
<br />
</li>
<li>Although Jesus is depicted as conflating himself with the "Son
of Man" in the gospels (especially when prefiguring his future suffering
and other soteriological themes) in the earlier traditions (namely Mark
and Q) Jesus often seems to be clearly referencing this "Son of Man" as
a third person, invoking him in an eschatological context (see Mk.
8:38; 13:26; 14:62; Lk. 12:8,10,40). This is the inverse of what we
should expect to find if the "Son of Man" motif was a consequence of
later Christological theorising. (The anti-apocalyticists partially
attempt to explain this away by suggesting Q was composed in three
layers, with a sapiential layer being penned first and the apocalyptic
layer coming only later. Such a precise layering of a still hypothetical
document stretches the evidence too far, and is too dependent on
comparisons with the likely much later Gospel of Thomas.)<br />
<br />
</li>
<li>Possibly the most important bit of evidence against the idea
that the "Son of Man" motif was a retrojection into the tradition by
later Christians is that these later Christians seem almost completely
oblivious to it. The Gospel authors seem confused by its meaning (does
it refer to Jesus or some third person?) and the term appears just three
times in the NT outside of the Gospels-Acts complex (Heb 2:6; Rev;
1:13, 14:14), and even then only in an eschatological context recalling
Dan 7:13. If the "Son of Man" is the result of later Christian thought,
why doesn't it ever seem to appear in said later Christian thought?</li>
</ul>
<br />
Speaking of Christian thought, the prominence of eschatology from the
very first Christian writings is also very difficult to explain if it
cannot be traced back to Jesus. Paul writes expansively on explicitly
eschatological themes like the parousia, a generalised resurrection of
the dead, the coming of a "new age" (in contrast to the current "evil
age") and the arrival of God and his angels on Earth in future judgment
of the human race, and these themes are present from his earliest
writings, barely 20 years after the death of Jesus. What is more, it must be stressed that such ideas were comprised of<i> imminent</i> eschatological
expectations.<br />
<br />
The fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians makes it quite clear
that Paul expected the intervention of God in the affairs of
the world very soon, and that at this moment the faithful "will be caught up in
the clouds together... to meet the Lord in the air" (4:17). Similar
eschatological urgency can be noted in 1 Cor 7:29-31, and can be
inferred from other scattered passages throughout his epistles. The fact
that such predictions ultimately failed to manifest themselves can be
posited as one of the major motivations for later authors forging
epistles in Paul's name.The "contested" Pauline epistles
(2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians) all contain <i>aortist </i>subtexts
(that is, the belief that the eschatology had already been realised),
and relevant passages are not difficult to adduce (e.g. 2 Thess 2:2; Col
1:13, 2:12-13, 3:1; Eph 1:4; 2:5-6). In Paul's corpus as in the
gospels, then, it
seems relatively clear that the most urgent eschatological exhortations
come from the earlier material, with the more circumspect or
anti-eschatological material being composed later.<br />
<br />
So where could he have gotten such ideas from, if not from the tradition surrounding Jesus? The Pharisees (the Jewish sect of Paul prior to his conversion) didn't share
such eschatological beliefs, at least in the context of resurrection. Given that, it's difficult to see where Paul could have inherited his eschatology from if not from the early Christian community, and it's difficult to see where they could have got their eschatological beliefs from if not from Jesus. <br />
<br />
As noted above, the eschatological themes are strongest and most
urgent in the early gospel layers of Mark and Q - i.e. those dating closest to the life of Jesus. The urgency of the
situation was apparently such that Jesus is depicted as saying (at the
conclusion of the so-called "Little Apocalypse of Mark 13) that "this
generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place"
(Mk 13:30; cf. Mk 9:1) and in Q the eschatological situation is depicted
by Jesus as being so urgent that apparently a mourning son doesn't even
have time to bury his father (Mt 8:21-22; Lk 9:59-60)! After decades of
apparently unrealised eschatological expectations, why would the gospel
authors have been moved to place such expectations on Jesus' lips with
such embarrassing and unnecessary urgency if they cannot be traced back
to him? Note also that the truly late books of the NT (i.e. gJohn, the
Pastoral Epistles) contain almost no eschatological themes, further
evidence against such themes being a later Christian development.<br />
<br />
So if we can presume as well that John the Baptist had an eschatological
theology (as the Gospels indicate - Mt 3:2,7; Lk 3:3,7) then it seems
that Jesus is sandwiched on either side by strong eschatological
beliefs. The most natural fit for this data is that eschatological
teachings were a common feature of John's teachings, which Jesus
inherited and passed onto his own followers, who wrote about them at
length, before they were slowly softened or abandoned by later
generations of Christians as the expectations remained unrealised. It's
difficult to coherently explain this data if we assume that Jesus'
teachings were not in a large part defined by his eschatological
beliefs.
James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-21775703770488437592013-10-07T00:02:00.000+11:002013-10-07T00:11:44.817+11:00The Christology of Early Christianity: A Brief OverviewPut simply, Christology is the study of the titles that were attributed to Jesus both during his life and in the post-easter period. It basically begins with a study of the earliest Christian
texts (in the NT these include the authentic Pauline Epistles, the
Gospel of Mark and the "Q" segments of gMatthew and gLuke) to see what
titles were attributed to Jesus by the earliest Christians and what
their understanding of such titles might be. This may seem like a
simple task, but uncovering the specific understanding that a 1st
century Palestinian may have had of a term like "Son of God" is actually a rather difficult process. Where in modern Christian
theology such titles for Jesus are largely interchangeable and have
largely converged in meaning (it is of little theological importance,
for instance, whether I call Jesus my "Lord", my "Messiah" or my
"Saviour" - the theological claim I am making is in each case identical)
we cannot make the same presumptions for the earliest Christians. The
use of different titles for Jesus in the New Testament is telling, and
we can probably assume it to be of great significance what the earliest
Christians did or did not choose to call Jesus at different places at
different times.<br />
<br />
Of these various titles, the most widely-attested appellation for Jesus
is that of the "Christ" and we can therefore probably presume that it
was applied to Jesus almost immediately after his crucifixion, if not
before. The word "Christ" is derived from the Greek word <i>christos</i> which means "anointed one" and is a translation of the Hebrew word <i>mashiach</i> (anglicised as "messiah"),
which means the same thing. Now exactly how we should interpret this term in the context of early Christianity
is a matter for debate, in part because the meaning of the word (or at
least how it is used) seems to have changed throughout the history of
Judaism. In the Old Testament, the term is used almost exclusively in
relation to the divine appointment of kings and high-priests in Israel,
who were literally "anointed" with oil as part of a religious ritual.
David, for this reason, is seen as the first Messiah (see 1 Sam
16:12-13; 2 Sam 23:1), and it seems to have been used in this early period as a title to affirm the divine sanction of Judahite kings. Later, in the post-exile period when the royal house of David failed to be re-established, the term was applied more generally to other offices, including that of the high-priest (Zech. 4:14), prophets (Isa. 61:1) and even the Persian king Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1).
There are then signs in the prophetic OT literature that there was a
general expectation among the Israelites for the re-establishment of the
Davidic royal line at some point in the undefined future (a new
"Messiah"), but these expectations have of course not been realised. <br />
<br />
A re-emergence of interest in Messianic theology emerged in the 2nd and
1st centuries BCE, doubtless partly inspired by the first independent
(though non-Davidic) Jewish royal-line to emerge in Israel for over 400
years. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasmoneans" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hasmoneans</a>
ruled from 140-37 BCE and during this time (that we may crudely term the
"inter-testamental" period) Messianic
expectations of prophetic literature were revived, fueling a lasting belief that eventually one from the line of David would ascend to power in Israel and institute a golden age of peace and prosperity. This was also a period of enhanced eschatological speculation, which centred not merely on a historical epoch shift initiated by the Messianic claimant, but by the direct intervention of God. Although these themes would come to be woven together in early Christianity, it should be pointed out that Messianic expectations and eschatological expectations were largely kept separate in Judaism. However, we do find that many of the Jewish beliefs of this time appear to anticipate early
Christian theology, for instance the idea that the Messiah would be
killed as a preface to a general, universal resurrection of the dead (4
Enoch 7:28-34 and 2 Baruch 30:1) which is similar to the eschatology
advocated by Paul in his early letters (e.g. 1 Thess 4:13-16) and
elsewhere in the NT (e.g. Mt 27:52). Other Jewish literature from this
period perceives the Messiah as a powerful figure, coming to rule in judgement over Jew and Gentile alike (Psalms of Solomon 17:23-35),
perhaps sitting on a divine throne at the right-hand of God (see 1
Enoch, esp. 48:10 and 52:4) themes that also appear to have had some
influence on the trajectory of Christian thought.<br />
<br />
Such Messianic expectations took on a more practical importance during
the 1st century CE, when there were apparently several claimants to the
kingship during the first Jewish revolt (66-74 CE) and the second
revolt, where the military leader Bar Kochba was explicitly hailed as
the Davidic Messiah (132-135 CE). Luke even appears to suggest that the
Messiah question was alive during Jesus' lifetime and was being applied
to other individuals (Lk 3:15). Such facts tell us that the "Messiah"
question was alive and well both immediately before, during and after
the ministry of Jesus, though the earliest Christians appeared to
envisage a more eschatological Messiah (see the numerous "Son of Man"
passages in the gospels) than a political or military one. So anyway,
what can all this tell us about Jesus?<br />
<br />
In the first place, we must ask to what extent these Messianic
"expectations" in Judaism may have affected how the early Christians
viewed the significance of Jesus' ministry, and also - perhaps - how
Jesus himself may have viewed it. Most scholars now accept that we can't
draw a direct path from these heterogeneous Judaisms to the emergence
of Christianity, and would also accept that simply pointing to Jewish
Messianic expectations at the time of Jesus (as I have just done) tells
us little about what the first Christians thought specifically about
Jesus. Did they view him as a royal heir to David's throne, for
instance? From the desire of NT authors to place Jesus into the Davidic
genealogy (Rom 1:3; Mt 1:1-17; Lk 3:23-38) we can probably say yes. Such
a perception may also explain (presuming the gospels' reliability on
this point) the reason why Jesus was crucified under the ironic epithet
of "King of the Jews" (Mk 15:26 etc.). That is, Jesus may well have been hailed as a Messiah in the traditional mould (as one claiming a particular political office) and this may have been why he was viewed as such a threat by the Romans.<br />
<br />
But the traditional understanding of the word "Messiah" apparently does not exhaust the understanding the early
Christians had about the term, as whatever royal claims were made of Jesus during his life, they were plainly never realised by any
conventional meaning of the term. Nor were the hopes that the enemies of
the Israelites would be smashed, either through divine retribution upon
the death of the Messiah, or by the armies of the Messiah himself. However, we should
note that whatever hopes Jesus may have failed to realise, this
apparently was not cause for wide consternation among the early
Christians: that is, rarely in the early writings are these failed
expectations (or how they should be adjusted in view of this) ever
raised. They were able to adapt the meaning of the word "Christ" into something new, something better adapted to the circumstances they now faced.<br />
<br />
So within the first 20 years of Christianity Jesus had undoubtedly come
to be considered "the Messiah / Christ", though probably not the kind of Messiah
we can unambiguously identify in either the OT or the inter-testamental
literature. Whether or not Jesus would have personally accepted this
title during his own life is a little dubious: he is presented with many
opportunities to affirm his status as the Christ in the synoptic gospels, yet only once is he depicted as doing so (Mk 14:62). Even then this
account must be considered problematic from a historical perspective
because this affirmation was supposedly given in a private audience before the Jewish
high-priest (and who would have been present to witness such a
conversation?), the "I am" is used as a springboard for Jesus to relay
his "Son of Man" eschatology (which may be at odds with Messianic
claims?) and the parallel accounts in Luke and Matthew (Mt 26:64; Lk
22:70) have Jesus giving a much more ambiguous and cryptic response. So,
even by the testimony of the gospels, if Jesus was ever considered the
Messiah during his own life, it was apparently a title that he was not
keen to publicly embrace or advertise. In any case, we can probably
suggest that the idea that Jesus ever considered himself as heir to the
Davidic throne runs counter to our understanding of his teachings which
express (at best) a deep ambivalence towards institutional power, and
his eschatological beliefs that the powerful would suffer in the coming
Kingdom of God and that it was better, therefore, to approach the
kingdom like a child or a slave (that is to say, as one completely
devoid of power) rather than as a king.<br />
<br />
Other Christological titles are even more problematic. Probably the next
most common title applied to Jesus in the NT is that of "Son of God",
though again this is a phrase that can be interpreted in a number of ways. We know that such a title was used in Judiasm
under a variety of circumstances, as I have previously explored on this blog:<br />
<div class="bbc-block">
<br />
<blockquote>
Our understanding of
the phrase "son of god" is unfortunately clouded by its rather literal
use in gMatthew and gLuke, where Jesus' mother is impregnated by the
Holy Spirit (Mt. 1:18, Lk. 1:26-35) making Jesus quite literally "God's
son". However, this understanding of the phrase "son of god" occurs
nowhere else in the New Testament and so we should not assume that the
phrase means the same thing for Mark as it does for Matthew and Luke.
Indeed, although the phrase "son of god" is often used in the New
Testament as a unique title for Jesus (i.e. "the Son of God") it is a
phrase with a long history and a wide variety of meanings.<br />
<br />
In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, for instance, the
expression "sons of god" can be used to describe angels (or "heavenly
beings" as it is rendered in many English translations - see Gen. 6:1-4
and Job 1:6) or holy men blessed by god (i.e. priests and kings,
especially of the Davidic line – e.g. II Sam 7:14, Ps. 2:7; 89:26). The
Jewish author Philo, writing in the same century as Jesus, used the
expression "sons of God" in a very general way to refer to the entire
Jewish people. And the expression doesn't only have a history within the
Jewish faith: the Roman emperor Augustus (who was almost certainly
emperor during Jesus' lifetime), for instance, was also given the title
"Son of God" (from <i>divi filius</i> in Latin) during his long reign.</blockquote>
</div>
<br />
Yet even if we interpret this title as implying that Jesus was "[the
only-begotten] Son of God" rather than merely "[a] son of God", the
issue doesn't end there, as the exact nature of this "sonship" was a
matter of often quite vitriolic debate during the first few hundred
years of Christianity. The contemporary Christian understanding of Jesus
as the pre-existing, "only-begotten" Son of God, descended from heaven,
was of course the view that won out in the fallout from these debates,
but there were other competing claims, such as those held by the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptionism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">adoptionists</a>".
Such Christians held to the idea that Jesus only became God's son at
the moment of his baptism at the beginning of his ministry, as Paul (Rom 1:4) and the
Gospel of Mark (Mk
1:10-11, referencing Ps 2:7) may appear to imply. As for Jesus' own disposition to such a title - or whether he
may have accepted it for himself - it may be telling that he had an
apparently distinct and unusual of way of addressing God in prayer:
namely, his use of the Aramaic word <i>abba</i>. In most modern English
translations this is translated as "father", but it was actually a much
more intimate form of address than that. A more apt translation might be
"daddy" and such a degree of familiarity that apparently left its mark
in the memories of subsequent generations (and is retained even today in
the Lord's Prayer). So while Jesus may have considered himself (and his
disciples?) to be [a] "son of God" in some significant way, the
evidence that he considered himself the "only-begotten" Son of God is
almost completely absent from the synoptic gospels.<br />
<br />
Of the other Christological titles attributed to Jesus in the NT, their
historicity suffers from the fact that they are only sparsely attributed
in the NT and then largely absent from other early texts. It is
sometimes claimed that Paul may have conceived of a high-Christology -
based on possible allusions in his writings to Jesus' pre-existence (Gal
4:4) or divinity (Phillip 2:16-11; Col 1:15-20) - but these claims
probably stretch the available evidence too far. Paul was generally
explicit and repetitive in his enunciation of other Christological
themes, and if he genuinely conceived of such a high-Christology then
its presence in only a couple of ambiguous passages is difficult to
explain. That is, if Paul believed Jesus to be God incarnate, we might
be entitled to ask why he didn't say so more emphatically, given how
important such a claim would surely be to his wider theology.<br />
<br />
As for the undeniably "high" Christology of the gospel of John, again we must note that the language and titles the author uses are highly idiosyncratic (that is, to be found almost nowhere else in early Christian literature) and were likely confined only to the community from which the author wrote. In part this may be a consequence of normal Christological development (i.e. gJohn, as the last gospel to be written, was always going to have a more advanced view of Jesus' nature than the other gospels) but John's Christology seems unique not just within the NT, but among all early Christian literature. Of course John's Christology would come to play a disproportionately important role in the formation of later Christian theology, but this does nothing to ameliorate the fact that his writings (the gospel and the three epistles) were representative only of the beliefs of the somewhat ostracised sect from which he was writing, and cannot be considered at all normative within early Christianity. Other
Christologies - such as the Trinitarian formula - find literally no
support in the NT at all.<br />
<br />
So the evidence is complex, and difficult to summarise properly in one post, but if you want to ask me what <i>my</i>
opinion is of how Jesus viewed himself and his ministry then I think we
have to see that Jesus clearly viewed himself as having some
(uniquely?) special relationship with God and that he saw himself as an
important cog in some wider eschatological process, but beyond that it's
difficult to say with certainty. He was a preacher, likely a disciple
of John the Baptist, who continued to preach his mentor's message of
repentance in the face of the coming eschaton, but who pursued no
institutional aims or titles beyond his leadership over a small, but
committed group of disciples. As per the conclusion reached by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-New-Testament-Christology/dp/0809135167/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381064380&sr=8-1&keywords=raymond+brown+christology" target="_blank">Raymond Brown</a>, if he believed himself to be the Messiah then he likely had a rather different interpretation of that term as compared to the interpretations that came before him (in Judaism) or after him (in orthodox Christianity). If he believed himself to be anything else (e.g. the divine <i>logos </i>or God incarnate) he doesn't seem to have shared such beliefs with the world.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-32208149973504267592013-10-06T05:11:00.001+11:002013-10-06T05:11:44.826+11:00How Did Early Christians Conceive of the Afterlife?Finding meaningful answers as to what the early Christians believed about heaven
and hell is not easy. To put the problem in perspective, consider how difficult it is to even form an answer to the questions about what a <i>modern</i>
Christian believes about heaven and hell. The question depends on many factors, both doctrinal and personal. The doctrinal differences can include factors such as the denomination of the believer (Catholic, Protestant,
Orthodox etc.), whether they attend "liberal" or "conservative" leaning churches and so on. The personal factors are almost too difficult to mention, but include everything from upbringing, to what literature has been read, to the scope of one's imagination, to mere personal preference. It would be no great exaggeration to suggest that there are as many different conceptions of heaven and hell in Christianity as there are Christians, and the creation of a meaningful definition of these terms which would satisfy all believers would be literally impossible.<br />
<br />
Given that, imagine how much more difficult it is to probe the beliefs of early Christians. The ancient mind was as variable and as subject to individual circumstance as our own, and exactly the same kind of factionalism
existed between early Christian groups as exists presently between modern Christian denominations. The titular question is rendered even more difficult to answer because
systematic theology is largely absent from the earliest Christian
writings (Romans and Hebrews perhaps come the closest to being so), which means that our
understanding of the earliest beliefs must be deduced entirely from the passing
references to heaven and hell that exist in the surviving texts, which obviously leaves a lot
of room for ambiguity and guesswork. So, in addition to the kind of definitional problems that preclude us from answering the question about what <i>modern </i>Christians believe about heaven, we can't know for sure what the
first Christians believed about heaven and hell because they never actually bothered to tell us. (Although this realisation in itself may be significant: the
peripheral treatment of heaven and hell in the NT may tell us that it
was not an issue of great interest to the earliest Christians, at least
not in comparison to questions of the Law, eschatology, Christology and
so on.)<br />
<br />
Having said that, we can probably say with some certainty what the earliest Christians <i>didn't</i>
believe about heaven and hell and that might be the best place to
start. The modern idea that Christians go to heaven by
virtue of their faith in Christ is a Protestant idea that postdates
Christian origins by some 1500 years. It comes from Martin Luther's
concept of <i>sola fide</i> ("by faith alone"), which was a reaction to
the then prevailing Catholic view that entry to heaven was governed by
performance of the Sacraments, which themselves required the mediation of priests.
In modern times this concept of <i>sola fide</i> has been taken to a
particular extreme by certain Protestant fundamentalists who appear to
believe that entry into heaven depends solely on whether or not one
assents to the metaphysical claim of Jesus' divinity. I think the best
that we can possibly say about such a theology is that it's a lazy one,
but in any case it certainly isn't Biblical. In fact most of the ideas
affecting modern Christian views on heaven and hell are post-Biblical,
inspired largely by later systematic theology and the vivid medieval
imagery of Dante and others. The Biblical references are - as I have
already mentioned - sparse, inconsistent and often confusing.<br />
<br />
The first Christians were obviously influenced first and foremost by
Judaism. The Israelites of the OT period didn't really have a concept of
an afterlife, although they did, of
course, believe in a "heaven". This heaven, though, was literally God's
home - a great Kingdom existing above the firmament in the sky - which
he shared with the angels (and the other Gods?) in something resembling a
great city or palace. This was a place completely closed to human
entry, with the exception of the two prophets Elijah and Enoch, who
apparently ascended there without ever dying. There was also belief in a
shadowy netherworld referred to as "Sheol" that one may have found oneself in
after death, but it was apparently not seen (uniformly) as a place of
either reward or punishment, and nor is there any indication that
existence there would be a permanent or eternal one. In this respect, it shared a great deal in common with other near-Eastern views of the afterlife from the same period. So how did we get
from such beliefs about the finality of death to the apparently common
belief in the NT that one could - under certain conditions - enter God's
Kingdom and be granted eternal life?<br />
<br />
To answer this question, we need to look at the theological developments in Judaism
during the so-called "inter-testamental" period, roughly 200 BCE - 70 CE. For
reasons that aren't entirely clear (though it may be related to the
perceived "injustice" of the righteous dying during the Maccabean
revolution before their vision of a new Kingdom was realised), the Jewish belief in
the resurrection of the dead became common (though by no means
universal) during the inter-testamental period, and it is usually found
interwoven with the eschatologies that also became common during this
time. With the restoration of the New Jerusalem, the dead would be
raised to share in its glory, not in some higher spiritual plane (it
seems) but right here on Earth. More to the point, the dead would be <i>physically</i> raised - that is, they would be resurrected to walk the Earth in physical bodies much like their old ones. Did such beliefs concerning the afterlife carry-over into early Christianity, or did expectations change in the post-easter period?<br />
<br />
Responding to the Corinthians, who were
apparently concerned that the dead would not get to see the coming
Kingdom of God, Paul assures them:<br />
<br />
<div class="bbc-block">
<h4>
1 Corinthians 15:12-20:</h4>
<blockquote>
Now
if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you
say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of
the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been
raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been
in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is
true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then
Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is
futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in
Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we
are of all people most to be pitied. <br />
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.</blockquote>
</div>
<br />
Note firstly that this passage (and others in Paul's letters) refer to this
resurrection of the dead as a future event, as something that will
happen at a singular and definitive moment in history (namely when "the trumpet will
sound" 1 Cor 15:52), and also that such happenings were not yet current
at the time of writing (though the resurrection of Jesus was the sign
that such an event was imminent). The idea of a resurrected soul at the moment of death (which is what the current Christian understanding of the afterlife amounts to) has not yet entered the <i>zeitgeist</i> of Christianity, and won't for quite some time yet. In any case, quite how we should understand an
expression like "resurrection of the dead" in Paul's writings is open to debate, but he wrote extensively enough on the subject for us to hazard some timid assumptions. The first and most important is to explore what the nature of this "resurrection" really was, and if it differed in any substantial way from the Jewish beliefs that preceded it.<br />
<br />
Paul says to the Corinthians that the dead will be raised into "spiritual bodies" (1 Cor
15:42-44), but a contrast with Paul's other writings tells us that such a belief was not necessarily normative in Paul's writings, let alone among other early Christians. It is true that Paul believed the resurrected body would not be identical to the earthly body (i.e. it will be "transformed" at this moment - Phil. 3:21), but he also makes it quite clear that the resurrection will involve the "mortal body" (Rom 8:11). This is consistent with his wider belief that the resurrection of Jesus marked a fundamental turning point in history, and that everything to come would be fundamentally "renewed" through God's grace (e.g. 2 Cor 4:16-17). So although we repeatedly find tension in Paul's writings between "the spirit" (<i>pneuma</i>) and "the flesh" (<i>sarx</i>), we shouldn't assume that Paul held a kind of Platonic dualism, where the immortal "spirit" and the perishable "body" were held as strictly demarcated entities. Paul was moved to write the above passage in response to the skepticism of the Corinthians ("how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?") who shared more typically Greek conceptions of immortality - if Paul believed that Greek philosophy was right to scorn the prospect of bodily resurrection in favour of the immortality of "the spirit" then he would have indicated so here. That this passage exists is proof enough that Paul (and so, presumably, other early Christians) generally believed in a bodily resurrection and were motivated to defend it against the charges of its more stubbornly Hellenic adherents.<br />
<br />
This idea of a "physical" resurrection is more clearly demonstrated among the writing that would later become the New Testament corpus. The empty-tomb tradition and
the subsequent appearence of Jesus in his physical, still wounded body
(cf. Jn 20:25-28) seems to indicate as much, as well as other similar
scattered passages that clearly refer to the physical resurrection of
the dead in the NT (e.g. Mt 27:52-53). The upshot of all this is that while in late-2nd Temple
Judaism and early Christianity we have unequivocal signs of a belief in an
afterlife, it's still not one recognisable to modern Christian theology.
Souls aren't floating gently up to heaven in this scenario, rather the dead are
expected to literally be revived to once more walk the Earth. <br />
<br />
Connected to the belief in the resurrection of the dead
was the belief in some future involvement of God here on Earth that
would radically and eternally transform it to make such a development
possible. Such beliefs
can only be termed "eschatological" and it was such eschatological
beliefs that informed new understandings of heaven among the early
Christians. As I have said in earlier posts, Jesus (and his later
followers) seem to have believed in a future state where the Kingdom of
God would be literally implemented on Earth and it was in this future
reality (still part of the world, though a drastically transformed one)
that eternal life might be possible, though - again - the mechanics and
terminology of this event seem a little confused. Can we so easily
equate "Kingdom of God" with "Heaven" with "Kingdom of Heaven"? Will
heaven come down to us (the Synoptics?) or will we be raised to heaven
(Paul and Hebrews)? Such questions defy easy answers, and it makes it
difficult to talk about what the precise beliefs of the first Christians
were with respect to heaven and life after death with much confidence.<br />
<br />
A further confusing factor is the influence of Hellenistic philosophy
and how it may have influenced early beliefs over and against those of
Judaism. Paul, the earliest surviving Christian writer, seems to have
been influenced by Hellanistic philosophy on these matters to at least
some extent (e.g. his reference to a "third heaven" - 2 Cor 12:2 -
appears to be derived from Platonic schemata of the heavenly realm) but
it's not clear what significance we can draw from such observations. As mentioned earlier, Paul plainly doesn't subscribe to the wider Greek philosophy concerning the eternal nature of "the soul". One
important Hellanistic influence on early Christianity, however, seems
to be the notion of <i>hades</i> - the Greek underworld - most commonly
translated as "Hell". This, obviously, was a fiery place of torment
where the souls of the unrighteous were fated to go, though I'm not sure
if it's clear how or why such a concept was incorporated so early into
the Christian tradition (it is regularly mentioned in the Synoptic
Gospels though not - perhaps tellingly - in either Paul's letters or in
gJohn). Can such a belief be traced back to Jesus?<br />
<br />
Probably not directly. Familiarity with Hades and a willingness to
incorporate it into one's world-view would have required a familiarity
with Greek philosophy that probably would not have been accessible to a
marginal Jewish peasant like Jesus. Likely it was something invoked by
the Synoptic Gospel authors to better illustrate to their gentile
readers a concept that Jesus likely <i>did</i> talk about in his time - that of <i>Gehenna</i>
(e.g. Mk 9:43-48 etc.). Now exactly how this term was understood in
Jesus' day is still being debated, but it bears emphasising that it was a
real location, situated in a valley outside the boundaries of
Jerusalem, that was associated with Pagan sacrifice and the burning of
dead criminals (i.e. those who had died in sin). If we presume that
Jesus had similar understanding of this place, then we can (with some
caution) speculate that Jesus believed that this was the destination for
those who were <i>not</i> fit to inherit the Kindgom of God. In other
words when the Kindgom of God was to be implemented on Earth (in the
form of a "New Jerusalem"? cf. Rev 21:2) those who had lived up to God's
expectations would be admitted, but those who didn't would be consigned
to Gehenna to burn. However, even if such an interpretation portrays
accurately the beliefs of Jesus, we should note that Gehanna should be
treated as a different place to that of Hades, and that it is misleading
for modern English Bible translations to translate both terms as
"hell". Our current understanding of hell would almost certainly seem
foreign to Jesus and other Jews of his day.<br />
<br />
So, to recap, modern Christian understandings of heaven, hell and the
afterlife in general are predominantly later developments, though they
do have their seeds in the theology of the first century. The ambiguity
of terms, mixed expectations of the authors and paucity of references in
the NT, however, left plenty of flexibiltiy for later theologians to
both re-interpret and embellish these early accounts with some degree of
freedom, which they clearly have taken advantage of. If you want some clear insights into the nature of heaven, hell and
the afterlife, though, then the Bible probably won't help you much.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-56554652419846125932013-10-03T20:28:00.002+10:002013-10-03T20:47:30.366+10:00The Historicity and Significance of the "Cleansing of the Temple" EpisodeOne of the most curious episodes from Jesus' life as depicted in the gospels is that of the "Cleansing of the Temple". This is one of the few narratives and biographical details to occur in all four gospels (Mk. 11:15-19, 27-33; Mt. 21:12-17, 23-27; Lk. 19:45-48, 20:1-8; Jn. 2:13-16) and also one of the few to depict Jesus in a violent and aggressive light, making it all the more worthy of our attention.<br />
<br />
Though specifics of the incident differ between the gospels, the core of the story remains relatively consistent: Jesus and his followers travel to Jerusalem for Passover, enter the Temple (the centre of Jewish religious and commercial life at the time), accuse those present of being "thieves" and disrupt commercial activity by overturning the tables of merchants. For many, the story paints relatively simple moral message concerning the need to avoid the corrupting influence of money and to show due deference to that which is holy. For others - particularly in European churches since the middle-ages - the story could be set forth as an example of Jesus' denunciation of Jewish avarice and the gratuity of the old Jewish sacrificial system, rendered obsolete by Jesus' ultimate sacrifice. Both of these interpretations are a little anachronistic though, and both fail to cut to the likely historical context of the incident. Before we turn to that question, though, we must pose a more immediate one: did this episode actually occur?<br />
<br />
On the balance of probability I'd say this event was likely historical, even though I wouldn't be moved to place it among the most "certain" facts we have
concerning Jesus (his birth and early mission in Gallilee, his
crucifixion in Jerusalem etc.). Good cases have been made both for
and against its historicity.<br />
<br />
On the positive side:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul class="bbc-list">
<li>The event is attested by multiple sources,
including all four canonical gospels. There is also a strong tradition
both within the NT (gospels and Acts) and in external literature (Gospel
of Thomas etc.) linking Jesus to provocative sayings and deeds
concerning the Temple. Such a well-attested theme must have had begun
somewhere, and a memorable event like this would be as good a starting
point as any.<br />
</li>
<li>The event explains why Jesus may have been targeted by both Jewish
and Roman officials during his ministry, and why he eventually came to be
executed (the fifth of J.P. Meier's "<a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2010/04/five-criteria-for-assessing-historicity.html" target="_blank">Criteria for the Historicity of Jesus</a>". Trashing the Temple - the most sacred and important site in
Judaism at the time - would certainly have raised the ire of Jewish
officialdom and probably would have been viewed as valid grounds for the pacifying intervention of the Roman authorities. <br />
</li>
<li>The event could be seen as embarrassing or provocative to the
proto-Orthodox Christians, who were - remember - attempting to "convert"
(for want of a better word) Jews in the Palestinian area. The Gospels
were penned shortly after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE (a singularly traumatic event in the history of Judaism), and the
claim that Jesus was earlier involved in its ransacking would not have served as a terribly effective apologia. Similarly, the claim would not have done much to win the confidence of those who already viewed Christ's execution (and thus his criminality) as a "stumbling-block" or "foolishness" (1 Cor 1:23). The gospels go to great length at times to downplay Jesus' ultimate culpability in the crimes for which he was killed, and this episode (where Jesus clearly engages in "criminal" activity) does much to undermine this message. In short, there is no clear
motivation for the authors of the gospels to have "invented" this story
if there wasn't some clear memory of an actual historical event.</li>
</ul>
<br />
On the negative:<br />
<br />
<ul class="bbc-list">
<li>Although it is cited in all four gospels, the
details of the incident in the latter three gospels all appear to be
drawn almost entirely from the account in gMark. None of the later
gospels include any credible detail not mentioned by Mark, which
indicates that there were no "parallel" or external traditions for these
authors to draw on. In other words, what at first glance appears to be a
reliable, multiply attested tradition may in fact just a single
tradition derived almost entirely from gMark.<br />
</li>
<li>The episode may be recapitulating OT prophecy, and may
therefore have been created as a means of portraying Jesus as somehow
fulfilling said prophecy. In the text of gMark (and consequently
gMatthew and gLuke) Jesus cites Jeremiah 7:11 in denouncing the Temple
as having become a "den of theives" (Mk 11:17). Jeremiah is significant
in that it also depicts YHWH as driving his believers from the Temple
(Jer 7:15) which means the narrative follows the same trajectory as that
in gMark (Temple condemned as "den of theives", all are "cast out").
Jeremiah also contains allusions to "rotten figs" (Jer 24:3,8; 29:17
etc.) which must surely remind us of the peculiar fig-tree incident that
Mark prefigures the Temple cleaning event with (Mk 11:12-14). In other
words, could it be that Mark has just invented these events (the cursing
of the fig-tree and the Temple cleansing) to link Jesus with OT
prophecy?<br />
<br />
(The alternative explanation would be the Mark simply used OT prophecy to
whitewash, or contextualise, an otherwise unsavoury event in the
ministry of Jesus. It was clear that the gospel authors used OT prophecy
to explain events in Jesus life, even resorting (it seems) to inventing
prophecy where no suitable prophecy could be found (cf. Mt 2:23). John,
for instance, makes no reference to Jeremiah (neither the fig-tree nor
the "den of theives" line), so is it possible that an independent
tradition of the incident - one seemingly divorced from OT prophecy -
circulated, that would lend greater credence to its historicity? Or has
John just expurgated Mark's account to remove its "Jewishness", in
keeping with his theological interests elsewhere in his gospel? Such
competing ideas are difficult to assess reliably.)</li>
</ul>
<br />
So clearly the historicity of the Temple Cleansing incident is contested,
which makes it difficult to make definitive historical claims about it with
any confidence. If, however, we proceed with the assumption that it did
happen (as I take to be the most probable assumption) we can then ask the pressing question as to <i>why</i> it happened. What was Jesus' motivation here? What message was he trying to send and to whom? The chronology
presented in the Gospel of Mark - if it is accurate - may give us a
clue.<br />
<br />
Where the incident has been depicted in contemporary Christian film and
literature, it is usually presented as a hot-headed act of passion: an
otherwise placid and irenic man is driven to violence by the tragic
sight of his holy Temple overrun with avaricious merchants. The evidence
from gMark, however, points to something different. We are told that
Jesus actually entered the Temple the day before and "looked around at
everything" (Mk 11:11) before returning the next day to "overturn the
tables" (v.15) and "teach" (v.17). The fact that the act succeeded is also an indication that it must have taken some degree of planning or forethought. The Temple complex was a seat of Roman power as much as it was Jewish, and during the often febrile atmosphere of the Passover holiday it must have been crawling with Roman guards ready to intervene at the first sign of trouble. The ability to cause such a memorable raucous there would surely have required group co-ordination: an individual acting impulsively would surely not have had the time or the power necessary to "drive out" merchants (v. 15) or the carry out an embargo on goods being carried through the Temple (v. 16) (to say nothing of his "teaching" there!).<br />
<br />
Presuming this account contains kernels of genuinely remembered history, we cannot possibly classify the incident as an act of mere hot-headedness; a "crime of passion". We must - rather - view it as a <i>deliberate</i> and <i>pre-meditated</i> act: in short, as a <i>political statement</i>.
The gospel authors (and subsequent generations of Christians, for that
matter) were motivated to de-politicise the actions of Jesus in order
to make his ministry more palatable to Gentiles within the Roman Empire,
and - indeed - to avoid unwanted attention from the Empire itself,
which may explain why Mark is hesitant to avoid any implication that
Jesus had a wider political intention here. However, if this <i>was</i> a deliberate political statement, what could it mean? What was he protesting against?<br />
<br />
The most obvious solution - that he was simply angered by the presence
of merchants making a profit in a holy place - doesn't really square
with the facts. The merchants played an important role in the day-to-day
running of the Temple, by supplying pious pilgrims with the offerings
they wished to give there (the money lenders would exchange foreign
currency for the Hebrew shekels, the form of payment that all adult
males were required to make there). They were not in the Temple proper,
and there is little indication that their role was ever otherwise the
subject of moral scrutiny. As J.D. Crossan points out, Jesus' line about
"den of robbers" doesn't square particularly well with the idea that
Jesus was angered by their role in the Temple either, as he doesn't seem
to be accusing them of thieving at that moment: a "den of thieves" is
where thieves would retreat and hide, after all, not where they would do
the actual thieving! <br />
<br />
Given that - and this is now my speculation more than anything else -
Jesus was making a statement to the Jewish priestly class who were in
charge of the operation of the Temple (especially the Sadducees), who were closely allied with the
Romans and who abused this position of power to collaborate in the
dispossession of the already impoverished classes of Judea and its
surrounding areas. From the beginning, Jesus centred his ministry on
concern for the poor and regularly denounced the accumulation of wealth
("Blessed are you who are poor... But woe to you who are rich" - Lk
6:20,24) and the exploitation of the poor in the context of Temple
offerings (which were often exorbitant) would have been an issue in
keeping with his wider concerns. The ruling classes "hid" in their "den"
(the Temple) and - from behind this veil of piety - were able to
collude in the further disenfranchisement of an already marginal class.
This also explains the focus in the narrative on the "dove sellers (e.g. Mk. 11:15) - doves were offered as sacrificial animals to the poor who were unable to afford more substantive animals to offer up.<br />
<br />
It's difficult in providing such an explanation to avoid the impression that I'm retrojecting modern
left-wing politics into an ancient problem, but it is simply impossible
to read the message of Jesus in the gospels - moderated as it often is -
and come away with anything other than the conclusion that his primary
concern lay with the lot of the poor. Given that, in lieu of more obvious explanations, it makes sense to try
to fit otherwise troubling, inexplicable incidents like this into his
wider philosophy: the Temple incident was a political protest on behalf
of the poor and disenfranchised.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-5123761585286570202013-06-22T21:12:00.001+10:002013-06-22T21:12:21.249+10:00Justice and EschatologyThere is no religious tradition that I am familiar with - certainly among the so-called "literate" religious traditions - that have not been forced to confront, in one sense or another, the problem of justice. There is, to begin with, the intimate relationship that always pertained between gods and the provision of "laws" in the ancient world. Whatever power was vested in the king was invariably justified on the basis of his unique connection to the gods, and whatever laws he enacted were said to have been delivered, with his mediation, by the gods. The link between God and the authority of Law (or, more generally, morality itself) has persisted in the Abrahamic traditions down to this very day. <br />
<br />
More than simply acting as a legitimising conduit for legal authority, however, religions have also been forced to confront the problem of justice as it presents itself beyond the mere provision of laws. It has long been recognised, for example, that many evil people have prospered where good have suffered, thus originating the long-standing quandaries that exist at the heart of <i>theodicy</i>. The problem has been tackled in many different ways throughout history, though it must be said that modern resolutions to the problem of theodicy - which I will address shortly - took a long time to emerge. The earlier solutions were rather more "crude", if that is a fair judgement to impose, and reflect a vastly different view of humanity's relationship with the divine.<br />
<br />
In the ancient world, gods were heavily anthropomorphic and believed to have motivations and failings almost indistinguishable from those of human beings. Initially in all religious traditions, Ernst Cassirer argues, the "gods" represented nothing more than the instantiation of ephemeral - yet deeply affecting - moments of "spontaneous feeling", that can be encountered in "every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every hope that lures him [and] every danger that threatens him"<sup>1</sup>. In this there was no sensation - nor no physical object which may give rise to such a sensation - that could not have been treated as some manifestation of the divine. In such a way, as we find in the ancient Greek culture and many others, every feeling and every physical facet present within the human world could find itself deified. The next stage (Cassirer here is using <span class="st">Hermann<i> </i>Usener's tripartite scheme) involves the reification of these "momentary gods" into discrete, permanent entities, that are capable of persisting even in the absence of the phenomena which gave rise to them. It is in this stage that the gods were vested with (generally) human personalities, their essential characters furnished by rich sets of mythological histories and motivations. It is at this stage (that all literate religions traditions that I am familiar with have graduated to) that the gods could be worshipped and entreated as one might a king. </span><span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st"> </span><br />
<span class="st">If the gods at this level of religious development were heavily anthropomorphic, it should come as no surprise that their basic motivations and behaviours were - by modern standards at least - relatively base and capricious. The favour of the gods could generally be one with the provision of ritual sacrifices, which were not merely symbolic but rather genuine gifts to be consumed by the deity in question (even the OT God consumed the burnt sacrifices in the form of their "pleasing odour" - see Numbers 28 etc.). The gods, in their turn, could react to this human supplication by visiting various favours or abominations upon the worshippers depending on how well the rituals were performed. Note, though, that for all the caprice that could be shown by the ancient gods in their disposition towards human beings, it was invariably assumed that the visitation of divine intervention - for good or for bad - was somehow conditional on the behaviour of human beings. Proper conduct before the gods would deliver blessings, improper conduct would deliver curses. This rather prosaic formula was never questioned, certainly not in terms of the reasonableness or otherwise of the divine requests. If calamity struck, it must have - in some sense - been the fault of those in the community who had failed in their duty towards the relevant gods. </span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">This is brought into particularly sharp focus in the treatment of theodicy in the the early Old Testament texts. The theodicy of the Book of Kings for example - and other such Deuteronomic texts - was predicated entirely on the basis of Israel's faithfulness to Yahweh. Where they had approached him with due deference, and not provoked his jealousy through the worship of other gods, they prospered. Where they had abandoned this single, overriding duty, Yahweh in his wrath saw fit to use his power - via the intermediary of foreign powers - to visit wanton destruction on all the land. Even where the course of history failed to fit this rather simple pattern, the author(s) of Kings simply explained it in terms of deferred punishment for earlier crimes (e.g. 2 Kings 24:26). For the Judahites in the 7th century, then, the logic of divine justice was rather simple: obedience and unwavering deference to the will of Yahweh was the path to prosperity, all other paths led to ruin.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">This simple logic was, however, severely undermined by the Babylonian invasion of the early 6th century, less than three decades after Josiah first launched his religious reforms. If the Judahites had done everything within their power to abolish the shrines and places of worship devoted to other gods, then why had Yahweh seen fit to launch the armies of Babylon against them? What more could they have done? The questioning of divine justice appears prominently in the Biblical texts here for the first time, especially in the books of Ezekiel and Lamentations. There was the very real sense of anguish in these texts that Yahweh had acted in a distinctly <i>unjust </i>way, in plain contradistinction to the pliant and dutiful acceptance of divine whim in the earlier texts. For some authors (for example, the second Deuteronomist) the theology needn't be amended: as mentioned above, the horrors visited upon the Judahites were merely a sign of deferred punishment for the sins of earlier generations. For other authors, however, this explanation would not suffice and they were drawn increasingly to explanations outside of the Hebrew tradition to explain the otherwise gratuitous nature of the injustices they had suffered.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">It is the period after the Babylonian exile that gave us much of the so-called "Wisdom" literature in the Bible. Although much of this literature plainly sees itself as forming a continuum with earlier Yahwistic traditions (e.g. those of the Torah), it is also clear that the wider Wisdom tradition from which it emerged had a rather more international origin, and that Wisdom philosophies could be readily found in most near-Eastern cultures at the time. Rejecting - at least in part - the preceding cosmology of conflicting, parochial, anthropomorphic gods who were entirely constrained to very specific regions and / or duties, Wisdom philosophies took a rather more secular attitude towards the world. They searched for universal truths and rationales, largely detached from any specific theological premises. The rational order of the of the world - including the order of justice - could now be explored in ways obviating the need for officially sanctioned religious practice.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">It was this search for such truths - in the context of divine justice - that gave us, for example, the Book of Job, a fairly sophisticated and honest look at the problem of evil. In contrast to earlier texts - and the theologies that were previously typical to the near-East - Yahweh is no longer an anthropic figure who can be assuaged by mere ritual or sacrifice, but rather a transcendent and eternal figure, for whom the struggles of human existence are comparatively trivial. That is not to say that Yahweh existed entirely beyond or outside of the everyday struggles of humanity, but rather that the human relationship to the divine needed to be completely rethought. Yahweh, suddenly, existed on a plane of time and space which absented him from the possibility of direct and immediate entreaty (in the form of sacrifice etc.) and who must now be approached with rather a longer view in mind. Whatever misfortunes may befall you from day to day, the Book of Job seems to say, keep it in perspective: in terms of the eternally transcendent nature of the deity with whom you wish to maintain a relationship, your daily troubles do not count for much. It is at this point that we start to get a clear indication of a belief in the afterlife in Hebrew literature and the conterminous belief that one's relationship was Yahweh could extend beyond the limits of the here and now. That is, whatever injustices that might be meted out over human time scales could surely be rectified over divine time scales. Psalm 49:15 and Job 19:25-26 are good indications of this kind of belief first emerging.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">With time, these rather vague and half-formed intuitions of the afterlife became reified into something far more specific. In the context of Judaism, we can evince the emergence of two related kinds of belief in the Hellenistic period between around 332 and 63 BC: namely, the belief in an imminent eschatology and the belief in bodily resurrection. Both were intimately related to conceptions of justice. The former was, from the outset, linked with prophecy and revelation, generally penned in the name of ancient prophets. The Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch are good examples of this kind of genre. The eschatology in question was generally that of the imposition of a coming divine intervention that would effectively end (or cause a sharp break with) history. Sometimes this was imagined in purely heavenly terms, sometimes it was imagined as the definitive imposition of divine will on Earth. In either case, the eschaton would mark the cessation of the tyranny of the powerful on Earth: for the oppressed, the belief in a coming eschaton was essentially conceived as a future antidote to their powerlessness in the present. The evil of the powers that be would be finally and forever banished from the Earth, and those who remained would be granted the justice denied to them for so long.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">A conterminous belief was that of bodily resurrection, which seems to have been occasioned largely by the Maccabean revolt in 166 BC, and presented in the Books of Maccabees. Those who participated in the revolt noted acutely the injustice of the fact that the slain - though offering everything to the cause - had not lived to see their revolution to its final fruition. Passages such as 2 Mc. 7:11 and 14:46 give clear indication of the belief that the bodies of those who had perished might be resurrected in the future by Yahweh. Note that such passages constitute the belief in a <i>literal </i>bodily resurrection: to the extent that one's bones persisted, it was not beyond the power of Yahweh to cover them once more with flesh. More importantly, though, this belief - as with the belief in a coming eschaton - was predicated by a belief in the injustice of the present world that would be rectified by Yahweh in the world to come. The Jews ceased believing in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by intervening in history, and rather started to believe in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by <i>ending</i> history. </span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">While it's difficult to completely recapitulate the philosophy of Jesus with any confidence, it seems relatively clear that such eschatological beliefs - like John the Baptist before him - were central to his world view. The earliest Christian texts - the authentic letters of Paul, gMark and the putative Q Gospel - all have clearly identifiable eschatological emphases and it's difficult to make sense of the fervour of the early Christian community without the presence of the belief in a coming eschaton. For Jesus, it seems, the iniquities of his age (and there were a great many of those, to be sure) constituted the mere presaging of the coming "Kingdom of God". The current age was one dominated by evil, yet the future age would be one dominated by good. Hence, those who resisted the temptations of the current age (i.e. those who declined the trappings of wealth and power) would be those to profit most in the coming age. As Jesus himself was said to have put it, "</span><span class="st">who are first will be last, and the last will be first" (Mk. 10:31). In other words, the problems of injustice in the Kingdom of Man would soon be rectified in the coming Kingdom of God.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">Resurrection held a similarly important place in the beliefs of the earliest Christians. For them the resurrection of Jesus was not a sign of his divinity and his uniquely divine constitution, but rather the "first fruits" (as Paul put it) of a more general resurrection to come: that is, even those who had died in the age of injustice would still be present to enjoy the "fruits" of the age of justice to come. The horrors of the present age - including the ongoing travails of Roman imperialism - would come to an end at the moment of the <i>parousia, </i>and the dead and living alike would be resurrected to heaven (1 Thess 4:17). As a consequence, calls towards forceful rebellion against the forces of Rome seem to have been completely absent from early Christianity, in contradistinction to other Jewish movement of the 1st century which often took on a more militant edge. Jesus, for example, is depicted as advocating the dutiful payment of tax to the Roman empire (Mk 12:13-17) despite the fact that the onerous Roman system of taxation frequently rendered Palestinian agriculturalists of the first century destitute. Paul, for his part, advocates "subject[ion] to the governing authorities, </span><span class="text Rom-13-1">for there is no authority except that which God has established" (Rom 13:1), ignoring the disenfranchisement that God's chosen people were experiencing under the imperial yoke. Whatever prospects existed at the time for the provision of justice were now entirely out of the hands of ordinary people, and had become entirely vested in the eschatological return of Jesus. </span><br />
<span class="text Rom-13-1"><br /></span>
<span class="text Rom-13-1">As the <i>parousia </i>continued to be interminably delayed against all expectations, however, and the prophecies of the first generations of Christians predicting a return of the Lord before "</span>some who are standing here... taste death" (Mt. 23:36) failed to be realised, a different theological tact was required. Already by the time we reach the Gospel of John, we witness an almost total de-emphasis of eschatological expectations among the early Christian communities and a corresponding rise in the belief of "eternal life". Borrowing heavily from Hellenistic conceptions of the immortality of the soul and the persistence of one's spirit after death, Christians came to abandon the more Jewish conception of bodily resurrection at some definite period in the future, and came rather to embrace the idea of a spiritual resurrection at the moment of death. Justice remained the sole domain of God, but now the judgement of the good and the wicked had been entirely removed from the earthly realm. Whatever prospects existed for justice would no longer be realised here at some historical moment Earth, but rather in the timeless realm of heaven. Such beliefs were to remain normative in Christianity, and would also emerge in Islam, where eschatological expections (such that they are) are now entirely confined to speculations concerning the nature of heaven and hell: the concept justice in these faiths must now be considered to exist completely outside the earthly realm. <br />
<br />
Note, then, the progressive abstraction of justice in the history of the Abrahamic faiths. The theology which originated as a means of explaining earthly injustice has been entirely translated to idle speculations concerning the nature of alternative worlds. God's justice is no longer to be expected in this world, but rather at the moment of some timeless, dimensionless eschaton that we may only enter upon death. While this view in some ways delays the problems of theodicy (in the sense that apparent injustices will eventually be righted on a long enough time scale) it invokes a sense of justice that is far too attenuated to be of any value to us in this life, in this universe. Where injustice exists, the idea that such injustices will be addressed by God on some different metaphysical plain at some point in the indefinite, atemporal future can surely offer us little consolation. In any case, such eschatological beliefs overlook the very real fact that we can already construct the future direction of the universe and what will happen to us when we die, and that such constructions leave very little room for Gods or heavens.<br />
<br />
Upon death, of course, our body will decay. The elements in our body will be broken down and reused in other living organisms. We can expect such a process, such a recycling of the elements of life, to continue for at least a billion years after we leave this planet. By this time, the growing, slowly dying sun will be 10% hotter than at present, potentially triggering a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth and transforming it into a hellish sister planet of Venus. Whether or not life is capable of existing on Earth by then, within 5-7 billion years the sun will have ballooned into a red giant, engulfing Venus and Mercury and extending its diameter all the way to the orbit of the Earth. By the time it explodes, the sun will have already transformed the Earth into a barren, unimaginably hot world, drowning in molten metal. During this time, our galaxy will have collided with the nearby Andromeda galaxy, potentially banishing what is left of our solar system to the obscure fringes of our galaxy's mighty arms.<br />
<br />
Within one trillion years, the galaxies in our local super cluster will likely converge, forming in the process a super-galaxy. Within two trillion years, as the universe expands ever faster, all galaxies outside our local cluster will move away from us at ever faster speeds until the point they start to recede at such speeds that they become red-shifted beyond any possibility of detection. Ours will then be an island universe: any future observers will have no way of knowing that other galaxies exist beyond their own. For the next 100 trillion years, star formation will proceed as normal, until the point at which all the available stellar fuel is used up. The bigger, brighter, more spectacular stars will be the first to become absent from the universe, their cooling cores - the white dwarfs - the only remaining evidence of their existence. Eventually even the small, stable red dwarfs will dwindle out of existence, and nothing material will be left in our galaxy beyond the cold, black ashes of once brilliantly burning stars. Eventually even the ashes will decay, with atomic nuclei breaking apart and eventually even the protons themselves decaying into a weakly interacting soup of photons and leptons. About 10<sup>100</sup> years from now, no matter will exist in the universe at all, whatever energy is left will be entirely bound up in photons, neutrinos and leptons, all rushing past each other at the speed of light, completely oblivious to each other. Here the universe will reach heat death, with all signs that there was ever a universe of such beauty and complexity as the one we see around us today will be completely lost forever. We are bound to return to the formless void from which we sprang.<br />
<br />
It may sound grim, but this is the only future - the only eschaton - on which we can reliably pin our. For all the religious speculation on the topic, we now know through scientific investigation the fate to which we are all careering. In this bleak scenario, even concerns of justice reach their ultimate apotheosis. For here, in this cold, undifferentiated, inexorable soup - a fate which nothing and no-one can hope to escape - there exists no possibility of greatness or mediocrity, no possibility of good or evil. All shall forever be a single, undifferentiated unity and therein lies our prospects for eschatological justice: here, in the final equation, all shall be equal. <br />
<br />
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
1) <i>Language and Myth</i>, p. 18.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-74960351601266395742013-04-01T23:46:00.003+11:002013-04-01T23:46:43.952+11:00Is the Universe "Rational"?It is a curious, surely not insignificant observation that the universe appears (or <i>appears</i> to appear) to us in a comprehensible way. Children, for example, prior to any specific instruction, are capable of discerning emotions on faces, finding patterns in numbers and predicting with admirable precision the path that a ball makes through the air. As an adult living in the 21st century, we can be similarly amazed by the extent to which our universe seems to make itself understandable enough to us for its behaviour to be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is difficult not to be taken in by the elegant efficiency of Newtonian laws, for example, which compress the behaviour of physical phenomena into a few simple formulae, each containing just a handful of variables. With such examples in mind, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the universe is ordered according to a rational plan, designed to obey laws amenable to human understanding. <br />
<br />
It is this conclusion, certainly, that many theologians would like us to reach. With all other avenues of "natural theology" blocked off by the march of scientific progress, the role of God in nature has since been resigned to the above observation: that the universe is, and could only <i>ever </i>be, the way it is due to the premeditated design of some rational creator. Superficially, the argument doesn't appear to be without merit: even some non-theistic scientists have marvelled at the fact that the universe is comprehensible to us to the extent that it is. There is no inherent reason for the universe to have made itself comprehensible to us, so we are right to find something remarkable in the fact that we can explain certain facets of the universe with such extreme precision and, what is more, that these explanations appear to be true for all places at all times. Is this necessarily a sign that the universe is inherently <i>rational, </i>though?<br />
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One trouble with using the word "laws" to explain the behaviour of the universe is that we've inadvertently introduced an anthropic concept to explain otherwise inert, purposeless objects and events. A "law", of course, is something that is designed with forethought to control or modify the behaviour of people in a society. When we use "law" to describe physical phenomena, then, we inadvertently smuggle in a package of unintended theological implications. If there are "laws", afterall, and physical phenomena <i>obey </i>these "laws", then that immediately implies the existence of a law-maker who intended to control or modify the physical phenomena to facilitate the development of some teleological end. This a consequence of the poverty of the current terminology, and in lieu of replacing such terms with more teleologically neutral language, we must instead endeavour to explore why the "laws" of the universe are not the kind of "laws" that necessitate a law-maker.<br />
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The first observation to make is that all physical laws have necessarily been designed by human beings. The universe did not appear to us with any kind of comprehensible blueprint, so whatever regularities we observe in the universe have had to be mined from nature through years of dedicated observation and number-crunching. That is, if the "laws" of nature are presently clear, comprehensible and rational to us, they certainly weren't to the ancients, who were no less intelligent or perceptive than we are. So let us be clear on this: it is we who superimpose our "laws" onto the phenomena we observe in the universe, not the universe which imposes its inherently rational nature onto our consciousness. An example used by Stephen Hawking is to imagine the kind of laws a goldfish might create to explain his world from the confines of its bowl. It could (were it sufficiently clever) certainly invent some rules that were true from its vantage point (which would include the refraction of light as it hit the fishbowl, hence why the universe would appear to be inherently curved to the fish) but that these rules plainly wouldn't be universal for the simple reason that they probably would not be applicable to those who live beyond the confines of a fishbowl. Hawking uses this example to posit the idea that "<i>there is no theory-independent concept of reality".</i><sup>1 </sup> This is not to say that all attempts at an objective explanation of universal phenomena are futile, or that we should all collapse into solipsistic despair as prisoners of our own mind with no possibility of ever accessing "true" reality, but simply that all the physical "laws" we create are necessarily mere "approximations" of reality that constitute our attempts at imposing rationality upon nature, rather than the discernment of rationality in nature itself. This is why scientific theories can be supplanted despite never really being shown to be wrong (or definitively right): the latter theory simply constitutes a <i>better </i>approximation of reality than the one which preceded it.<br />
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Allow me to illustrate with an example, shamelessly cribbed from Isaac Asimov's Essay, <a href="http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm" target="_blank">The Relativity of Wrong</a>. For most people in the ancient world, it was accepted wisdom that the world was flat. For the first several thousand years of human existence, people had no way of knowing that they actually lived upon the surface of a three dimensional sphere. We may smirk now at their naivete, but in truth they weren't far wrong. At the human scale, the curvature of the earth is extremely slight, almost exactly zero. When building a house or undertaking a car journey we can safely disregard the curvature of the Earth entirely: that is to say, to treat it as though it were flat and two-dimensional. We know now that the Earth is not flat, of course, but for most human endeavours, if we proceed under the assumption that it is, then we will not be penalised for it. In a purely pragmatic sense, the flat Earth theory is correct enough to correctly guide us upon the undertaking of most everyday activities.<br />
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Next it was realised that the Earth was actually three-dimensional in shape, and that if one started walking in one direction that one would eventually return to the point at which one started, rather than falling of the edge of the Earth. It was therefore presumed that the Earth was spherical in shape, a misapprehension shared by most people down to this very day. For although it is true that the Earth closely resembles a sphere, due to the influence of centrifugal forces it is actually wider around the equator than it is from pole to pole. Thus, although the spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth which preceded it (more correct in the sense that it is able to make accurate predictions for a wider variety of phenomena) it still fails to accurately depict the state of nature so as to conform to our best, most precise observations. Though the story doesn't even end here: according to Asimov at least, there is actually slightly more mass in the Earth's southern hemisphere than in its northern hemisphere, thus making it ever so slightly pear-shaped. So note the progress here: each theory along the way has been correct on its own terms, in the sense that it can be used accurately as the basis for some action or prediction, though there is also a definite progression towards being more "correct. It is clear, for example, that spherical Earth theory is <i>more </i>correct than the flat Earth theory, the distended sphere theory is <i>more</i> correct than the sphere theory and so on. As our body of evidence grows and changes, earlier theories come to be displaced by theories that better fit the evidence.<br />
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Another example - perhaps more pertinent to the topic at hand - is the progression in our understanding of the movement of the planets. It is the elegant, almost metronomic order of planetary orbits that epitomise the theologians insistence that this rationally comprehensible universe could only be the product of some divine watchmaker. Indeed, the regularity of the planetary movements through the sky have long been used by religious authorities as evidence of divinity in the universe. For the ancients - including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and so on - the planets themselves were gods, their daily wandering across the sky associated with the personalities of the divine. Venus, for example, was commonly linked to gods of love and fertility in the ancient world. Again, it may be tempting to snigger at such naivete, but when we consider that the appearance cycle of Venus (the period during which it is visible in the night sky) occurs in periods of around 260 days - almost exactly the same period a human pregnancy takes - we can begin to see that the connection makes sense. In fact, doubtless the ancient Mayan theologians would have tried to tell us that the universe <i>must </i>be rationally ordered to some divine plan, because the simultaneity of the human reproduction cycle and the cycle of the fertility God in the sky is simply too perfect to be the result of mere chance or coincidence. Furthermore, the astrological tables drawn up by these ancient cultures could still be used today to predict the future positions of planets in the sky. Within the social context that they lived, the astrological "theories" the ancients proffered concerning the movement of the planets in the sky were perfectly rational and perfectly consistent with the data that they had so assiduously collated.<br />
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Next came the Greeks, who believed - for theological reasons as much as for scientific ones - that the universe must be ordered to according to perfect geometric principles, expressible in simple mathematical formulae. Ptolemy, rejecting the crass arbitrariness of astrological tables, took it upon himself to find some universal order in the movement of the planets during the sky, some pattern expressible in the perfect language of geometry. His solution was a geocentric model comprised of nested spheres and epicycles, based, he claimed, on over 800 years of observations. The model he proposed was in some sense an improvement on what came before it, and like the astrological tables of the ancients, we could still use Ptolemy's model today to predict the movement of planets relatively accurately for a period of at least some months or years (the accuracy of the more distant, slower moving planets would hold for longer than those of the inner planets, particularly Mercury, whose orbit wasn't well understood until the 20th century).<br />
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The next major development came with Nicolaus Copernicus who was the first to develop a heliocentric model of the solar system, and while again we can view it is an improvement over what came before it due to its correct placement of the sun at the centre of the solar system, it still contained a fatal inaccuracy that limited the long-term scope of its predictive powers. Like the Greeks before him, Copernicus believed that the universe must be order according to some perfect schema, namely one based on perfect circles. As the planets actually revolve along elliptic orbits, it wasn't until Isaac Newton elucidated his laws for the movement of the planets in his masterful <i>Principia Mathematica </i>that we had a relatively accurate depiction of our solar system that could be used to predict and explain the movement of the planets over a long period of time. In fact, Newton's theories proved to be so accurate that they are still used today to navigate spacecraft over a distance of millions of kilometres to within an astronomical hair's width of their intended target. In time, however, it was recognised that even Newton's theories fail under particularly extreme circumstances - e.g. in situations involving very high speeds or masses. Newtonian physics therefore came to be replaced by Einsteinian Relativity at the beginning of the 20th century, and even that may not mark the end of our story: the fundamental incompatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity (despite each proving to be powerfully accurate in their own fields of application) hints strongly at the need for the development of some newer theory, of which string theory is just one of the potential candidates.<br />
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So again note the development here: at each stage in the understanding of the shape of our planet or the behaviour of bodies in our solar system, human beings have been able to devise seemingly "rational" theories to explain the available observations, and all of the aforementioned were capable of making accurate predictions concerning future events. We must, however, be careful not to presume that our ability to express the patterns of physical behaviour in "rational" terms says anything about the inherent rationality of the universe. The ancient Babylonians could say, with some justification, that the universe <i>must </i>be inherently rational because the fertility god represented by the planet Venus was born and killed with such regularity (one which parallels the human reproductive cycle) that it could only be the work of a divine presence in the world. However, we moderns would be similarly justified in baulking at the suggestion that the explanation proffered by the Mayans could give us any genuine insight into the rational order (or lack thereof) of our universe, as we now know that any correlation between the heavenly cycles of Venus and the human reproductive cycle are entirely coincidental and share no causal relationship. Perhaps, then, our descendants will look back on our curious proclivity to try to explain such complex phenomena in the form of simple, rarefied mathematical language in the same disdainful way that we look back on the proclivity of the ancients to explain such complex phenomena in the form of dying and rising gods. That we are capable of making the universe rationally comprehensible to ourselves is indeed a remarkable achievement, without which our modern world would have proved unrealisable, but we must make sure that our wonder is directed at just that fact - that is, that we can <i>make </i>the universe rationally comprehensible, not that the universe is rational in and of itself.<br />
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On this latter point, again we might do well to return to Newton. The simple, elegant laws he devised were - after an initial period of resistance - eventually employed by theologians as evidence for the fact that the universe must be run like clockwork; so ordered and intricate in its construction that it would be literally impossible for it to have come into being without pre-ordained instruction from some all-powerful watchmaker. The argument continues to be used with great regularity among modern theologians, though the sense of awe has been expanded beyond the periodic movement of the planets to deeper cosmological facts (such as the value of the cosmological constant and other physical values) that, frankly, they are not qualified to ruminate upon quite so casually. In any case, the wonderment they express is entirely backwards: these "values" and their relationship to one another were not rationally programmed into the universe, just waiting for some perceptive scientist to reverse engineer them, but rather had to be created and elucidated by these same preceptive minds. Newton didn't simply discern some obvious mathematical relationship governing the movement of bodies in the solar system, he actually had to <i>invent </i>some new method by which he could <i>create </i>some laws. When the existing body of mathematical logic failed to help him in his quest to "uncover" the rational basis of the movement of heavenly bodies, he was actually forced to create an entirely new form of mathematics (calculus) in order to make this movement rationally expressible. In other words, there is nothing about the universe (at least in this case) that makes it inherently amenable to human logic. Where the universe <i>doesn't</i> make itself amenable to human reason in an immediately obvious way, we just happen to have been clever enough on occasion (or, rather, certain pre-eminent members of our species have been clever enough) to devise a new form of logic in which the observed relationships and regularities can be expressed.<br />
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And this is something that we are coming to appreciate ever more deeply: the universe does seem to be, in a very fundamental sense, operating on principles that are at best counter-intuitive to human beings, or - perhaps more accurately - deeply and inexorably <i>irrational </i>in nature. In one way, we should expect that world around us - that is, the everyday world, divorced from the loftier concerns of theology - be, in some sense, rationally comprehensible. Our "folk-physics" - our innate ability to predict the flight of a ball in the air, for example - and our ability to express these predictions logically, do seem to be in such a state of consonance with nature which must surely must transcend mere coincidence. Our ability to track a ball through the air, predict its path and then to catch it in our outstretched hands is a feat beyond even the most advanced robots we have been able to develop, and it would be tempting to discern a divine teleology at work in this regard: Earthly physics are so rational - and our minds so rationally attuned to them - that it could again only be the result of divine forethought. While it would be correct to note that there is nothing "coincidental" about the consonance of human rationality and the rationally discernible laws of Earthly physics, the explanation has nothing to do with the divine. We are the product of 4 billion years of evolution that has ruthlessly culled those whose understanding of their immediate environment was subpar: only those with a functional understanding of the physical world (e.g. that falling from a tall cliff would kill you) stood any chance of surviving to produce offspring. Our folk-physics have been slowly refined by this evolutionary process to help us navigate the world in which we live, each minor improvement in our innate understanding of the world being preserved down future generations. So yes there does seem to be a compatibility between our "logic" and the "logic" of physical events on Earth, but we needn't look for divine explanations: given our existence as physical beings and the relentless drive of evolutionary pressures, it simply could not have been any other way. <br />
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When we leave our immediate human world and begin to explore the nature of the universe on the smallest and largest scales, however, we find that our intuitive preconceptions about the nature of physical events very quickly cease to conform to reality. We expect the universe to adhere to certain "rules" concerning cause and effect (as Hume noted some three centuries ago) and for objects to adhere universally to rationally discernible principles. We now know, however, that the universe often fails to conform to our expectations in this regard. The most blatant examples can be drawn from the science of quantum physics, where the universe at the most fundamental level has shown itself to be irrational, indeterministic and completely irreconcilable with the expectations of our folk-physics. The completely random (and seemingly uncaused) appearance and disappearance of sub-atomic particles is not possible to square with the idea of a rationally apprehensible universe, as even a suitably well-informed observer (i.e. a god) would have no way of predicting exactly where or when a particle and it's anti-particle might come into existence. As a consequence, even the most mundane predictions concerning the behaviour of objects in the universe turn out to be mere probabilistic statements rather than inviolable natural laws. For example, we can take it for granted that I will not be able to walk through my wall were I to try, yet it turns out that this is merely a statement of probability: it actually isn't impossible for me to walk through my wall (i.e. it's not an inviolable "law" of the universe) it's just overwhelmingly unlikely.<sup>2</sup><br />
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Such randomness and indeterminacy on the quantum scales may still credibly be dismissed as irrelevant by the believer in the rational universe, however. They may, for example, argue that even if the universe is predicated upon random and indeterminate factors, that on bigger scales determinate laws can still be discerned. That is to say, even if the location of an electron is entirely indeterminate, the location of large groups of electrons (for example, those in my body) appear to behave collectively in ways that are roughly deterministic. In other words, I could try to walk through my wall every day until the end of the universe and could reasonably expect to get the same result every time, which if not strictly an "inviolable law" of the universe surely constitutes the next best thing. Such an argument is problematic, though, because it fails to address the reality that the universe was formed at least in part by completely random factors that even a hypothetical being blessed with omniscience could not have predicted. While it may be true that it is not necessary to take quantum factors into account when presently addressing the orbital path of a planet, say, the argument breaks down when we examine the early history of the universe: at the very beginning, a fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was still small enough for quantum effects to have a massive influence on the path that the evolution of the universe would take. We now know from our mapping of the early universe that these very early quantum jitters came to have a lasting influence on the shape of the universe, including (most likely) the distribution of matter that may have permitted the formation of galaxies. This prohibits the possibility of the current universe being created with genuine teleological foresight: there is no way that any being - omniscient or otherwise - could have predicted that the universe would emerge with the exact structure it presently has. If we rewound the clock to zero and started the universe again, we would end up with a universe very different from our present one, and this is due entirely to the influence of quantum randomness in the earliest fraction of a second of the universe's being. God may have rationally chosen to create a universe with quantum jitters, but he couldn't have rationally chosen to create a universe with human beings. <br />
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Even on bigger scales we find that probability plays a much higher role in the behaviour of matter than could have ever been envisaged by the classical, deterministic physics that the theologians seem to remain beholden to. The distribution of gas in a room, for example, can only really be probabilistically determined. We can take it is as something akin to a "law" that gas in an enclosed space (the air in a room, for example) will tend to distribute itself fairly evenly given enough time. That is, we should expect the air pressure and the distribution of molecules within such a space to be distributed relatively evenly from one cubic centimetre to the next. In actuality, though, there is no physical reason why the molecules of air couldn't find themselves confined only to one side of the room, for example, leaving the other half a complete vacuum. Such a bizarre eventuality wouldn't violate any physical principles, it would just be exceedingly unlikely (in the sense that there are far more ways for the air in a room to be evenly distributed than for the air in a room to be confined entirely to one half). So, even when we're talking about the behaviour of physical processes on scales far greater than that of the quantum level, we find that these process are often not governed by rationally discernible "laws" so much as they are governed by probabilities. Even on distinctly human scales, it seems that God enjoys playing dice.<br />
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But we can take such indeterminacy to even greater scales. When it comes to the belief of rationally discernible laws governing physical objects in the universe, there is surely no more elegant example than the aforementioned metronomic movement of planets around the sun. If nothing else in the universe could be said to obey rationally apprehensible laws, expressible in the elegant, efficient language of mathematics, then surely it could still at least be said about the "music of the spheres". In practice, however, when physicists attempt to quantify the gravitational relationship (and therefore the movement and periodicity of planetary orbits) between anything more than three bodies, the mathematics because ungainly and completely unworkable. This is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem" target="_blank">n-Body</a> problem, which remains unsolved. So even here, with something as simple as the orbit of a spacecraft around the Earth, we lack the ability to rationally express or predict with any sort of exactitude the path the spacecraft will take. We could of course get a good approximation by taking into account only the effect of the gravity of the Earth on the spacecraft (and if such approximations weren't pretty close to reality then satellite technology would be entirely impossible) but such a method would only be an approximation of reality, because we have failed to take into account the gravitational influence of the sun and the moon into the equation. And the gist of the n-Body problem is that calculating the orbital path of a spacecraft around the Earth is fundamentally impossible with such precision, because we don't have the mathematical tools to calculate fully the gravitational relationship between all 4 bodies simultaneously. <br />
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And so we return to the point I wished to make at the beginning of this post: even where the universe appears to be obeying rational laws, we find that these "laws" are little more than approximations of reality (albeit very good ones) that cannot be treated as reflections of some deeper logic governing the behaviour of physical events in our universe. We will continue to find patterns and regularity in the universe - to do so is part of our nature as a species - and we will continue to create physical "laws" that approximate reality with ever greater precision, but we shouldn't suffer under the conceit that we are therefore "discovering" the laws the were programmed into the universe into the universe from its very beginning. On almost any scale we probe, the universe frequently shows us that it is under no obligation to conform to the expectations of human rationality. Perhaps we should just accept that - certainly at the most fundamental levels - the universe is an impenetrably irrational place.<br />
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1) The Grand Design, Chapter 3.<br />
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2) This is a consequence of a phenomenon known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling" target="_blank">Quantum Tunnelling</a>. Essentially, the precise location of an electron around an atomic nucleus can never be determined with exact precision - this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work. As such the location of an electron can only be specified fuzzily - as a kind of "cloud" - governed by laws of probability. In principle, there is nothing preventing all of the electrons in your body to "jump", simultaneously, to a location on the other side of the wall, it would just take an unfathomable amount of time for such an event to occur.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-77360456845387747882012-11-14T23:54:00.000+11:002012-11-15T00:04:46.033+11:00"The Reason of Unreason" - José Ortega y Gasset and the Revolt of the MassesIn 1930, as Spain teetered on the cusp of fascism, José Ortega y Gasset penned one of his most famous works, <i>The Revolt of the Masses</i>. In approaching this work, we must be mindful of the historical context in which it was born. Spain, at this stage, was mired in an internal struggle for power that would culminate in civil war and the eventual triumph of fascist General Franco, who - with Nazi support - assumed power in 1939. When Ortega wrote this book, the horrors of Franco's regime still lay in the future, but the seeds of this regime - like all such fascisms, predicated on fear, ignorance and a rank form of nationalism - were already being sowed. The nation was crippled by divisions, with the population split into a wide plurality of irreconcilable factions. There were, on one side, the monarchists and Catholics. On the other, the socialists and communists. Many more were caught somewhere in the middle. I do not know for sure, but I imagine that the work in question was to a large extent a reaction to - and warning against - precisely these divisive, popularly led movements.<br />
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Reading the book now, we may be taken aback by the disdain Ortega heaps upon "masses", itself a term that even the most shamelessly haughty of us today would baulk at using. For Ortega, the "mass-man" emerges for the first time in the 20th century as a fulcrum of political power, and - as a consequence of his ignorance and his critical lack of preparedness to govern - threatens the very basis of civilization. This "mass-man" fails to understand the lessons of history - forever facing forwards, as he inevitably must, because he believes himself to be the apex of history - and he rejects the possibility of there existing an authority any higher than himself. The culmination of the mass-man's ascent to power lies in the emergence of what Ortega terms "hyperdemocracy", "in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure". Mass-man, however, lacks the competence to run a state - such a job is presumably best left with the "artisans", as Ortega puts it - and this was the source of Ortega's angst: how could civilization persist in such unworthy hands? <br />
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In the largely egalitarian democracies in which we live today ("one man, one vote") such thoughts must strike us as repugnantly conceited, if not outright dangerous. Such open disdain for quotidian folk (I struggle to find a better euphemism for "masses") runs against our modern democratic principles, and one might find it quite easy to draw a direct line from such disdainful views to the eugenic mania of various mid 20th century ideologies. If we start isolating swathes of the population as being somehow below our contempt, then what logical reason do we retain to defend them from persecution or extermination? However, I must defend this work against such charges, since in referring to the "masses" Ortega makes it clear that he has in mind no specific race, class or creed: the overwhelming majority of us comprise this gormless, faceless "mass", so I take Ortega's work predominantly as a warning against "falling in with the herd" (to invoke an unsuitably trite idiom) rather than as the disparaging identification of an inherently defective class of people. To the extent that Ortega has a specific group in mind, it appears to the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, a group - then as now - that scarcely requires our dolorous coddling. <br />
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Nonetheless, we exist in a political environment that - quite rightly, for the most part - discourages the gradation of human being into superior or inferior classes. That way, as the crimes of the 20th century still show us, leads to the greatest realisations of misery. The political <i>zeitgeist</i> of the current age is increasingly one of toleration, mutual respect and individual sovereignty - once again, we can count our blessings that it should be so. However, for all the unquestionable benefits of such politics, it also runs the risk of mistaking equality for crass undifferentiation: that, in a system where all should be granted equal political rights, that all political or social claims - and those who espouse them - deserve to be treated with completely undifferentiated and uncritical respect. Even in America - a supposed meritocracy of almost Darwinian degrees - the idea that every political opinion is as valid as the next one, has led to a kind of intellectual morass where the possibility of an honest, intellectual inquiry into the fitness of a given idea - particularly in the domain of mass media - has completely vanished.<br />
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Ortega puts it like this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different
is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."</blockquote>
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Now many Americans may baulk at the suggestion that "to be different is to be indecent" in the avowedly individualistic context of American politics, but I believe it rings true. The peculiarities of the US electoral system renders the possibility of a sizeable third-party presence completely moot, with the entire political dialogue in the country consequently entirely confined to that which is most electorally convenient to the two major parties. Issues that do not carry a clear electoral advantage to either of these parties are simply ignored or glossed over. I'm certainly not one to suggest that the two parties lack clear ideological differences as others might, but however unique they may be in constitution, the presence of only two major political voices clearly dilutes the potential for open and honest political dialogue.<br />
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In the first place, each party knows that it need only discredit the other party in order to win power - it needn't trouble itself selecting the best policies from a wide plurality of options, for example, which would be necessary if their primary objective were to govern effectively on behalf of the American people. Rather, it need only seek to scandalise the positions of the opposing party: if the other party finds itself discredited, the populace is left, after all, with only one alternative. The result is a ongoing process of acrimonious gainsaying, in which neither side is truly prepared to commit itself to any policies that might benefit the other electorally, completely irrespective of their merits. This process leads not to a confluence of positions between the two parties as many have suggested, but rather an increasing dichotomisation. For the first time, the most conservative Democratic congressman is more liberal than the most liberal Republican congressman, and this makes the possibility of compromise on any number of important issues increasingly low. There are several flow-on effects to this.<br />
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The first is that electoral politics is increasingly portrayed as a two-horse race, and that all media narratives must inevitably cohere to such a portrayal. This leads to an endless and evermore tedious cycle of promiscuous politicisation, where literally every event - no matter how insignificant - is pitched as yet another battle waged in the ongoing war between the blue and red teams. This leads us to further polarisation, where the supporters of each side believe quite sincerely that all the nation's woes can be attributed to the glaring sins of the opposite side. For their part, the media - fearful of losing 50% of their market - are increasingly apprehensive about reporting unambiguous facts that may be detrimental to one side, and therefore muddy every issue by unthinkingly - yet somehow meticulously - presenting the deliberately obfuscatory "spin" of both sides on <i>every </i>issue. The public are therefore starved of quality information, and - with the lack of any third party to keep the two major parties honest - the Republicans and Democrats find themselves receding further and further from reality into the safe, hermetically sealed discourse of partisan politics. <span id="hotword"><span id="hotword" name="hotword" style="color: #333333; cursor: default;"></span></span> <br />
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The increasing polarisation of American politics presents a second problem. With each party virtually guaranteed around 40% of the vote<sup>1</sup>, that leaves both with the need to target their message with increasing specificity to the remaining 20%. Now despite what they might like to think about themselves, these unaffiliated 20% are generally not independent-minded people, heroically guarding their vote until a full, rational analysis of the respective party platforms has been completed, but rather low-information dolts who are capable of being swung to one side or the other for the most trivial of reasons. Since these are the people who decide elections one way or another, the level of political discourse is severely downgraded and the micro-targeting strategies of each of the major parties lead us to policies which yield nothing beyond the most asinine, populist pap. Now populism in itself is not necessarily something that should concern us (sometimes the best ideas also happen to be the most popular), but when the entire political process tends inexorably towards rank populism (because neither party can win power without this middling 20%) then we start to have the kind of problems that Ortega has warned us about. <br />
<br />
Until now I have spoken as though both of the major parties deserve their share of blame for the current malaise in US political discourse, but I think such a portrayal would be disingenuous and just another example of the insidious need to render US politics as a two-horse race. Rather, when it comes to leading political discourse down into the sewers of rank, unthinking populism, the Republicans must clearly accept the lion's share of the blame. It has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352893042&sr=8-1&keywords=anti+intellectualism+in+american+life" target="_blank">long been recognised </a>that conservatives in the US have hitched their wagon to the forces of anti-intellectualism, forgoing open and honest policy debates in favour of the much more poisonous methods of the deliberately eristic and paranoid. Once you have completely abandoned the pretence of "facts" and "reason", your only justification now lies in the realm of the instinctive and the popular. To protect these justifications from the harsh light of reality, it becomes necessary to sacralise instinctive, populist politics by placing them beyond any possibility of rational reproach. This is achieved via the advancement of the notion that to reproach the political opinions of the "common man" on rational or empirical grounds is to engage in "elitism": the views of each man must be considered inherently valid and to dispute this claim is to violate the very basis of democracy. I think such a view - in and of itself - is rather cynical, but not necessarily pernicious. The trouble arises when "the masses" adopt it as a pseudo-religious mantra. <br />
<br />
What we have now in the American populace is the idea that to simply <i>have</i> a political opinion carries with it its own justification, and that it needn't be justified any further to anyone. To believe in something, in a principled way, is inherently meritorious and that no-one has the right to disabuse one of that notion. This process culminates with Ortega's notion that "the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will": namely, everyone has the obligation to respect the intrusion of my "commonplace" opinion, no matter how ignorant or inapt it may be. All views are inherently valid, every man a qualified authority on that which he happens to be passionate.<br />
<br />
Yet, to the extent he believes himself to lie beyond any possibility of reproach (what politician, after all, has ever won votes by telling him otherwise?), the "mass-man" can accept the authority of no-one beyond himself. The rejection of scientific and political authorities - under the banner of "freedom" - is a particular feature of modern Republicanism, though it happens to be one presaged by Ortega in the "mass-man" some 80 years ago:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...the modern mass finds complete freedom as its natural, established condition, without any special cause for it. Nothing from outside incites it to recognise limits to itself and, consequently, to refer at all times to other authorities higher than itself... He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is.
Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is... subject to many limitations..."
</blockquote>
<br />
This arrogance, obdurate certainty and complete disdain for authority beyond himself leads the "mass-man" to a sickening degree of self-congratulatory selfishness. To the extent that he has found himself born into a comfortable position, he sees no need to protect and maintain the kind of structures - including strong government - that allowed him to be born into such privilege in the first place. The plight of future generations - or present generations born into quite different circumstances - should be left entirely to chance. The government - or any other organisation which challenges the quite gratuitous autonomy of the "mass-man" - must be challenged and rejected at every step. Consequently, the "mass-man" is "incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation [namely, the civilised state] which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his
personality". Ortega continues:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"...the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens without our hoisting it up on our shoulders. No human being thanks another for the air he breathes, for no one has produced the air for him; it belongs to the sum-total of what "is there," of which we say "it is natural," because it never fails. And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organisation, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin., since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things."
</blockquote>
<br />
It is for this reason - the complete lack of respect for or appreciation of social structures that took centuries to erect - that Ortega feels the "mass-man" threatens civilisation. The Republicans would be his modern-day equivalent. The demure capitulation of at least one of the major US political parties to this new "mass-man" and his abhorrent politics has left the entire political system impoverished, with all discourse now conducted in thrall of the lowest common denominator. The possibility of sensible, rational debate has been completely exhausted by a climate in which the populace have been pandered to and indulged to such a degree that they no longer have the capacity to recognise the limits of their wisdom. A child who is not used to being told "no" will not grow-up into a mature, thoughtful and considerate adult and that is the dilemma facing us today. The genie of simply untethered freedom (i.e. that which has been granted without any corresponding responsibilities) and entitlement has been taken from the bottle, and we may find it difficult to replace him. How can a child who has grown up to respect no authority beyond itself ever be told otherwise?<br />
<br />
So, what to do? What lessons can we draw from Ortega? I think that the most sage advice we can take from <i>Revolt of the Masses</i> is the idea that there are such things as legitimate authority, and that we shouldn't be so hasty in sacrificing the need for such authority on the altar of democratic liberalism and tolerance. The events of the mid-20th century rightly made us wary of the dangers of unchecked political authority, but that doesn't mean we should race as far as possible in the other direction. There are people who understand the world far better than we, and we should have no qualms about ceding them at least some power to do what is right for us. If they are unsuccessful to this end, we retain the hard-won right to vote them out. <br />
<br />
Ultimately, mass populist movements, who respect no perspective beyond their own, need to be challenged, no matter how electorally inconvenient this might be. We need to abandon the idea that all opinions are equally valid and that all deserve to be listened to. We already do this when we marginalise those at the fringes of political discourse (the 9/11 Truthers, the Birthers etc.), we just need to be a little more discriminating. As far as the Republican Party is concerned, we can take some solace from the fact that the unthinking and unfeeling crassness of its electoral strategy is teetering, and has been rejected at the last two presidential elections. The reports of its impending death are surely exaggerated, though it is clear that they must start listening to the voices of a much more diverse electorate if they are to enjoy any future success. Perhaps they might start by reading this book, and recognising the inherent dangers of their current strategy of populist pandering and reactionary anti-statism.<br />
<br />
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
1) This partly has to do with brand recognition, and partly has to do with tribal politics. The "brand recognition" of the parties means, for instance, that the GOP is forever seen as the party of small government, despite all evidence to the contrary. So people will vote for the GOP as the small government party despite the massive debts run up by recent GOP administrations, their appalling records on civil liberties and so on. Petty tribalism is also a factor now. There are many people who will never vote for one of the parties - regardless of what policies they espouse - simply because they have been conditioned to hate that party in the current electoral climate. It is here that US politics, as much as anywhere else, begins to resemble a sport. James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-49474839393279094122012-11-02T01:15:00.000+11:002012-11-02T01:15:05.121+11:00Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 5 (609 BC - 538 BC)<b>The Babylonian Invasion</b><br />
<br />
After the death of King Josiah, Judah was thrown into a period of political chaos which culminated in its invasion at the hands of the Babylonians. At least as far as the Biblical record can be trusted, Josiah was able to oversee the complete centralisation of power in Judah, to institute the formation of a monolithic religion and to apparently unite the nation and its surrounding territories - violently, if necessary - under a single nationalist ideology.<b> </b>Upon his death, his immediate political project seems to have been undone in a hurry and the nation began to be torn apart, both from within and without.<br />
<br />
The spark for all these difficulties can be identified with the decline of Assyrian Empire and the resulting power vacuum it created. Initially, this spurred an assertion of independence in Judah: free from the Assyrian yoke, Josiah was able to implement his political program in Judah without interference and Judah stood - for perhaps the first time in its history - as a strong, dominant power in the region. In the shadows of the Assyrian empire, however, emerged two more empires: those of Babylonia (who delivered the final blow to the Assyrian empire in 605 BC) and Egypt (who had allied themselves with Assyria). Judah found itself trapped between these two powers - both geographically and politically - and the competing forces would eventually tear the nation apart. Like a planet passing between two suns, Judah found itself pulled towards two powerful spheres of influence simultaneously, and the internal strain generated would prove too much.<br />
<br />
Josiah, as we saw in the last post, allied himself with the Babylonians against the Assyrians and their Egyptian allies. After he was killed in battle by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, his son, Jehoahaz, was installed on the throne by "the people of the land" (i.e. the same coalition that had installed Josiah). The Egyptian military presence, which by this time had stretched its influence far into the Levant, ensured that a king without sympathies to the Egyptian empire would not last long. Indeed, Jehoahaz was deposed just three months into his reign by the Egyptian Pharaoh and sent into exile in Egypt. He was replaced by king Jehoiakim, who agreed to make Judah a vassal state and to pay an onerous tribute to the Egyptians. In order to do this, he "exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land" (2 Kings 24:35), another indication of the hardship placed on rural communities by imperial conquest. Signs of reprieve would fleetingly arrive in short time, though.<br />
<br />
In 605 BC, the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians decisively in a battle at Carchemish, and Jehoiakim used the opportunity to transfer allegiance to the Babylonians in return for their protection. Babylon agreed, and for the next three years Judah was a Babylonian vassal state. Here, though, his allegiance began flip-flopping periodically between the Egyptians and the Assyrians, which should give some indication of the confused political state in the region during his reign. With the war between the Egyptians and Babylonians continuing apace, he transferred his allegiance back to the Egyptians and ceased paying tribute to Babylon sometime shortly before 600 BC. The reasons behind his equivocation are not easy to elucidate with any certainty, but his switching of allegiances may reflect his judgement on the state of the war (i.e. which side appeared more likely to claim victory in the region) or - perhaps more likely - the divided loyalties that existed within Judah itself. As I shall explain in more detail below, there was apparently a genuine rift that existed in Judah at the time about where it's loyalties should be placed: with Egypt, with Babylon or with neither. Jehoiakim's dithering on the issue may simply be a reflection of the irreconcilable rifts that existed within his court.<br />
<br />
In any case, the Babylonian reaction to this transference of loyalty was predictably swift and harsh, and by 598 BC the Babylonians had come to occupy the majority of the land of Judah and were knocking on the gates of Jerusalem. It was in this year that Jehoiakim died without explanation. Some have averred that the Biblical text implies that he was killed by marauding bands of foreign warriors (cf. 2 Kings 24:2) but the Bible doesn't say so specifically, noting simply that Jehoiakim "slept with his ancestors" (v. 6). In any case, it's difficult to see how he might have been exposed directly to the presence of such foreign warriors when Jerusalem apparently stood strong for several more months after his death. The possibility of a domestic plot to end his life cannot be discounted, as there is Biblical precedent for the assassination of kings in siege situations: for instance, the murder of King Pekah in the Kingdom of Israel in the face of the Assyrian advance in 734 BC (see part 3). Jehoiakim had also apparently angered religious figures in the nation during his reign through his persecution of prophets (Uriah was killed, and Jeremiah put on trial for his life at the hands of the king), and the religious figures in Jerusalem must have held considerable political clout in the city since the reforms of Josiah. Whatever the case, the final defence of Jerusalem was left to Jehoiakim's son Jehoiachin, but he was capable of resisting the Babylonians for only 3 months. The fortified walls of Jerusalem were finally breached, and the Babylonian forces spilled into the city in 598 BC.<br />
<br />
Jehoiachin submitted voluntarily to the Babylonians, and was taken immediately into forced exile to live within the city of Babylon. He was joined by many other members of the Jerusalem elite, including Ezekiel (who we will discuss below) and other members of the Jerusalem priesthood. Jehoiachin's story shall be resumed shortly. For now, though, we will focus on the events within Judah following the first Babylonian invasion and the deposition of their king.<br />
<br />
<b>Rebellion and Exile</b><br />
<br />
<b> </b>After sending King Jehoiachin into exile, the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II installed a man by the name of Zedekiah onto the throne in his place. Predictably, Zedekiah was to act as a puppet-king to Nebuchadrezzar II and would be required to pay onerous tributes to the Babylonian empire. As was an all too common in the history of Israel and Judah, however, Zedekiah decided after just three years to turn away from the obligations he had towards his conquerors and to sow the seeds of rebellion.<br />
<br />
In 594 BC he hosted an international conference in Jerusalem, where leaders were summoned from the nearby regions to discuss (presumably) their relationship with the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king naturally viewed this activity as subversive, and requested that Zedekiah visit him in Babylon to explain his actions and to reaffirm his loyalty to the king. This apparently patched things up for a while, but the decisive break came when Zedekiah rebelled against the Babylonians and allied himself with the Egyptians in the year 589 BC. The Babylonians invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem for a second time, though this siege proved to be more gruesome and prolonged. In 587/586 BC, the Babylonians forces camped outside the walls of Jerusalem for months, preventing anyone (or anything) from entering or leaving. The horrors of such a city siege in the ancient world are difficult to overstate. Cities were so dependant on rural areas to supply it with provisions, that when such avenues of supply were cut-off the city was usually only able to sustain itself for a matter of weeks before starvation and disease began to run rampant. It is worth quoting the Biblical account of this siege (Lamentations 4) at length to convey the abject misery it entailed:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How the gold has grown dim,<br />
how the pure gold is changed!<br />
The sacred stones lie scattered<br />
at the head of every street. <br />
<br class="ii" />
The precious children of Zion,<br />
worth their weight in fine gold—<br />
how they are reckoned as earthen pots,<br />
the work of a potter’s hands! <br />
<br class="ii" />
Even the jackals offer the breast<br />
and nurse their young,<br />
but my people has become cruel,<br />
like the ostriches in the wilderness. <br />
<br class="ii" />
The tongue of the infant sticks<br />
to the roof of its mouth for thirst;<br />
the children beg for food,<br />
but no one gives them anything. <br />
<br class="ii" />
Those who feasted on delicacies<br />
perish in the streets;<br />
those who were brought up in purple<br />
cling to ash heaps.<br />
<br />
[...]<br />
<br />
Happier were those pierced by the sword<br />
than those pierced by hunger,<br />
whose life drains away, deprived<br />
of the produce of the field. <br />
<br class="ii" />
The hands of compassionate women<br />
have boiled their own children;<br />
they became their food<br />
in the destruction of my people. <br />
<br class="ii" />
The <span class="sc">Lord</span> gave full vent to his wrath;<br />
he poured out his hot anger,<br />
and kindled a fire in Zion<br />
that consumed its foundations. </blockquote>
<br />
The will of the king and his immediate entourage were soon broken by the conditions that had left such an indelible imprint on the mind of the author of Lamentations, and they attempted to flee the city through a hole that they had made in the wall. The Babylonians had the city completely surrounded, however, and Zedekiah was soon apprehended. For his role in the rebellion, he watched as his sons were" slaughtered... before his eyes", had these same eyes "put out" by the soldiers and was then carried away - blind, childless and "in fetters" - to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). His subsequent fate is not recorded, but he would prove to be the last ever king of Judah.<br />
<br />
The fate of those left behind in the city, however, was no less grim. The Babylonians immediately sacked the Temple - the last holy place remaining in Judah, and quite literally the earthly house of YHWH - breaking its "bronze pillars", taking away "the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the dishes for incense, and all the bronze vessels used in the temple service" as well as all "the gold, and what was made of silver" (v. 13-15). The Temple - along with the kings house and much of the rest of the city - were "burnt down" (v. 9) and the great walls around the city were also destroyed (v. 10). Much of the population - certainly all of the remaining elite - were carried away into exile in Babylon. According to the Biblical account, the only people who were left in Judah were "the poorest people of the land, to be vine-dressers and tillers of the soil" (v. 12). While some of these accounts might be viewed as somewhat embellished, the archaeological record does paint a picture of widespread destruction and a precipitous decline in population within Judah during the period of Babylonian exile. The economic aftermath of the exile will be explored more fully in part 6, but for now we need only note that Judah had been lain to waste and the last embers of its independence had been extinguished. Judah was now just another Babylonian province.<br />
<br />
<b>The Resistance</b> <br />
<br />
With the Temple and the king's residence destroyed, and with all the elite members of Jerusalem now deported, the royal Davidic lineage was at an end. In its place, the Babylonians elected a governor named Gedeliah, who was a member of a prominent Jerusalem family at the time. At this point, the society of Judah (or what remained of it) was divided between professing loyalty to Egypt, professing loyalty to Babylon and those who rejected loyalty to both. Those who believed that the loyalties of the Judahites should lie with Babylon could mostly be found among the exiled populations, and I'll address them in the next section. Here, though, it's important to demonstrate the political ambivalence that divided those who remained behind.<br />
<br />
We learn from the Book of Jeremiah (a prophet active at the time of the Babylonian exile, though we cannot be sure how much of the material in this book can be traced directly back to him) that immediately after assuming power, Gedeliah was viewed as a target for assassination by certain revolutionary Judahite groups (Jer 40:13-16). This is one crucial difference between the Babylonian occupation and the earlier Assyrian occupation: in this instance, the occupation does seem to have been met by an organised resistance, as compared with some hundred years of relative stability in the Assyrian case. According the the account in Jeremiah 41, one "Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama" went to eat bread with Gedeliah along with ten of his men in the year 582 BC - under what pretext, we cannot be sure. In any case, Ishmael and his men used the opportunity to "[strike] down Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan with the sword and [kill] him" (41:2), before laying waste to all the guards and the Judahite consort present as well. We must be clear what this act represents: a political assassination in protest against imperial designs. This kind of reactionary militarism was to become a regular occurrence in the history of Judah and Israel, and we shall explore similar instances in future posts. <br />
<br />
In the Biblical account, though, the actions of the assassin are rather unequivocally denounced. In order to emphasise the mindlessly violent disposition of the perpetrator, we get gory details about his future movements. In addition to murdering all the Judahites present in Gedeliah's court, Ishmael during his escape enconounters some eighty pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to leave offerings at the Temple. For seemingly no reason, he simply slaughters seventy of them, before crudely disposing of their bodies in a well (itself an unthinkably hostile gesture, given the rules which govern burial of the dead in Judaism). The remaining ten men are then kept as hostages, and remain with Ishmael as he attempts to flee. The polemical subtext of this account is rather clear: Ishmael (and presumably other would-be resisters) weren't really acting in the best interests of Judah, and were in fact little better than common thugs who did not hesitate to slaughter their own people. This appears to be the Biblical view, but it stands to reason that from an alternative perspective, these groups who violently opposed the Babylonian occupation probably saw themselves as freedom fighters, who would have deeply resented the pro-imperial overtures emanating from the exiled community in Babylon (and preserved in Biblical books like Ezekiel and Jeremiah). What we really have here, then, is yet another manifestation of the moral ambiguities inherent to political violence: one man's terrorist is always another man's freedom fighter.<br />
<br />
At this point Ishmael decides to flee for "the Ammonites" with his hostages, but is stopped on the way by a Judean militia headed by one "Johanan son of Kareah". Given that the king of Judah was in exile at this time - along with virtually all the other people of power in the region - it seems likely that this militia must have been a private, self-assembled one which operated with relative autonomy - though towards what aims we cannot be certain. The historicity of this specific scene needn't concern us especially, but what it does appear to show is a state of lawlessness and violence, where the normal structures of society had completely broken down, and competing militia groups had risen up to fill the power vacuum. This is partly speculation on my part, but it does seem to be borne out by the Biblical account.<br />
<br />
In any case, Johanan is unable to contain Ishmael at this encounter, and the latter flees. This leaves Johanan with a quandary: he knew that there would soon be a Babylonian reprisal for the assassination of their puppet leader and he knew that the Judahite people (including himself) would be left to bear the consequences. As a result, he attempts to organise for his group to flee to Egypt at the first opportunity. At this point, Jeremiah is depicted as delivering them (and other would-be runaways) a prophecy from God, an order to remain in the land of Judah. The prophet is rebuffed, though, and taken with the aspiring refugees into the land of Egypt. In the meantime, the Babylonians invade the land of Judah for a third and final time, quashing definitively whatever little resistance there remained to meet them. <br />
<br />
This account of the travails of Johanan and Jeremiah in the Bible may not have much basis in historical fact, but they almost certainly reflect the kind of situation the Judahites were faced with in their first decade and a half under Babylonian occupation. Firstly, the fact that the governor of Judah was assassinated and the fact that the Babylonians still had at least <i>some </i>militia forces to mop up in their final invasion in 582 BC indicates that there was violent resistance to their imperial designs within Judah that - in the absence of any government - must have been spontaneously organised. The reasons why the Babylonians may have been met with a degree of opposition that the Assyrians never seem to have faced are worth exploring briefly.<br />
<br />
Now it is certainly plausible enough that there was popular resistance
to the Assyrian occupation as well - the available historical sources
documenting this earlier period are far more sparse than those detailing the Babylonian occupation - but the reaction in the Babylonian case does seem to have been markedly more vehement and more sustained (the Assyrians, for example, were never required to seize the territory in three separate waves of military campaigning). In part, this may have
been a reaction to two different modes of empire. In the Assyrian case,
much time and effort was expended in its vassal states investing in
"nation-building" (to use the modern terminology), particularly so far as
governance and economic growth were concerned. It may have been borne of a rather paternalistic chauvanism, but the Assyrians took pride
in exporting their systems of writing, account-keeping and governance, and the
consequence was a rapid growth in urbanisation in many of the regions
under the Assyrian yoke (including Judah). Where their vassal states
experienced genuine economic growth, the benefit to Assyria came in the
form of increased tribute. In other words, the Assyrian model of empire
building had the capacity to benefit both the empire and the vassal
state economically (much in the same vein as the later Roman empire), which - at
least in the case of Judah - may have dampened popular resistance
towards the empire.<br />
<br />
<br />
The Babylonians, on the other hand, appear to have had a rather different <i>modus operandi, </i>at least in the Judahite case. Here, the ruling city of Jerusalem was looted for everything it was worth in the first invasion, and presumably little was left that might have been used for restimulating economic growth and international trade. In the second invasion, the power structure at the centre of the state was completely dismantled, and most of those capable of wielding political power over the territory (including most of the scribes, priests and statesmen) were sent into exile. The loss of such experience and skill from the centre of the Judahite society rendered any possibility of an ordered, productive society ever re-emerging from the glowing embers of the conquered state far less likely. Finally, after the third invasion, the Babylonians seem to have abandoned any pretence of governing the land of Judah at all. What happened in the 44 years between the final Babylonian invasion of 582 BC and the eventual liberation of Judah in 538 BC is almost completely unknown, but there is there is little evidence for the implementation of any kind of strong, centralised political structure. The "capital" of the state had been officially moved from Jerusalem to the northern city of Mizpah, but it is unclear what kind of government presided there. The fact that virtually no writings survive from Judah during this period - in addition to an archaeological record which evidences a precipitous population decline in the region - tells the story of a land laid almost completely to waste, one which the Babylonians never had any interest in ever developing economically. The exploitative nature of the Babylonian occupation may go some way to explaining the degree of resistance it faced - at least initially - within Judah during the early stages of the 6th century BC.<br />
<br />
<b>The Exile</b><br />
<br />
As we noted in the previous section, it seems that many Judahites fled the region in the aftermath of Gedeliah's assassination and in the lead-up to the final Babylonian invasion. The subsequent depressed economic state of the region probably led to further waves of emigration, as people left the stagnant region in search of better opportunities. Based on archaeological evidence (and the Biblical account itself) it seems that many of these refugees ended up in Egypt, which experienced a flourishing of Semitic communities at this time. The expulsion of the Hebrew people from their land (whether forced or voluntary) marks the first stages of the Jewish diaspora, which (as we shall see in future posts) would continue for many centuries to come. Some of the Jewish communities established in Egypt would remain there, as future Jewish communities continued to be established all around the Mediterranean in reaction to a seemingly endless succession of imperial occupations. <br />
<br />
The other half of the Babylonian enforced diaspora, however, found themselves living as captives in Babylon. It is this community that we know the most about, because their experiences are the virtually the only ones to have achieved a written expression that has survived to the modern day. As has already been noted, many - probably <i>most</i> - of these exiled Judahites were drawn from the "elite" segments of their society. Among them we find scribes, priests and even King Jehoiachin. The preservation of their culture - particularly its religious aspects - was taken seriously, and we can reasonably postulate that many of the Old Testament texts must have taken on a somewhat recognisable form during this time, or at least the period shortly succeeding it. This implies that the exiled Judahite community retained a degree of autonomy in their land of exile, and the Biblical material that can be most reliably dated to this period exhibits a conspicuous lack of anti-Babylonian sentiment. The question immediately presents itself: why should this be?<br />
<br />
Before answering this question, we must first concede that the experience of the exile was scarcely a pleasant one for those who found themselves in Babylon. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is Psalm 137, which expresses a genuine longing for the now distant land of Zion. The final verse - where the author fantasises about dashing the children of the Babylonians against rocks - is an indication of genuine anger and resentment, one often overlooked when scholars try to downplay the degree of suffering experienced by those in Babylonian exile. Similarly, the prophetic texts from this time (most notably Ezekiel and Jeremiah) do not attempt to downplay the misery of the Babylonian invasion, they merely couch it in theological terms which absolve the Babylonians from moral culpability (see next section). But perhaps that only makes the question more perplexing: if there was an undeniable degree of suffering involved in the exile, why do the Babylonians get off so lightly in the Biblical texts?<br />
<br />
Part of the answer surely lies with the on-going influence of King Jehoiachin. We know from the Bible and independent archaeological evidence that Jehoiachin was treated comparatively well by his Babylonian captors. In addition to being afforded (along with the other exiles) the relative luxury of continuing to practice his religion and to speak in his native tongue, he was also given relatively generous rations as compared to other captives. The production and preservation of sacred literature during this time also points to a degree of freedom which belies the language of "bonds" and "fetters" sometimes used in the Bible in connection with the exile. Given that he had surrendered to the Babylonians willingly (2 Kings 24:12), that he was treated favourably by them and that he was (presumably) involved in the literature penned at this time, can there be any surprise that the literature penned in and around this time was comparatively gentle in its depiction of the Babylonians?<br />
<br />
Ezekiel in this respect is particularly noteworthy: in forty-eight chapters, scarcely a single bad word is spoken against the Babylonians. In fact, the Babylonians are depicted as acting with YHWH's explicit help and support (e.g. 26:7-14). Perhaps even more noteworthy is Ezekiel's attitude towards Zedekiah, the man named king by the Babylonians in Jehoiachin's absence. Ezekiel denounces him as the "evil prince of Israel" (21:25) and condemns him for his rebellion against Babylon (2:3). Similar sentiments can be found in Jeremiah, who likens those who remained in Judah (including Zedekiah) to "bad figs" (24:16-17), councils those in exile to "seek the welfare of" (i.e. assist) Babylon (29:7) and to serve its king (27:17). What this all points to is the fact that the exiled community had gathered round Jehoiachin as the only legitimate king of Judah, and - at his instigation, or at least under his watchful eye - penned a whole host of texts that justified the legitimacy of his rule and denounced the illegitimacy of those who had stayed behind in Judah after the first wave of exile. The surprisingly pro-Babylonian tone of these texts can be seen as a way of strengthening the continuing political legitimacy of those in exile, over and against<i> </i>those who had fled to Egypt (which remained an enemy of Babylon at the time) and those unlucky few who remained in Judah. The full force of this argument, however, requires an understanding of the theology of the period, particularly in how it was influenced by the circumstances of the Babylonian invasion.<br />
<br />
<b>The Theology of the Exile</b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b></b><br />
<b><br /></b>If it is true - as the exiled authors claimed - that Jehoiachin was a good and legitimate king, then why was it that YHWH had decided to move against Israel? More to the point, why should he have moved against Israel so soon after the reforms of Josiah, which finally saw all the aberrant religious practices removed from the land of Israel? Disasters can provoke theological soul-searching at the best of times, but the issue facing the exiled Judahites seems to have been particularly pronounced. Given all that they had done to placate YHWH, why had he still seen fit to visit his wrath so vehemently against them? If the previous inequities which faced them were the consequence of wicked kings and an unfaithful population, why had the rectification of these facts done nothing to curb God's anger?<br />
<br />
The texts from this period exhibit a great deal of doubt and uncertainty, and clearly demonstrate to us that the theology crystalised during Josiah's time was not necessarily of any help or comfort. The author of Lamentations (2:20-22) almost appears to directly rebuke YHWH for what he had done to Judah:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Look, O <span class="sc">Lord</span>, and consider!<br /> To whom have you done this?<br class="kk" />Should women eat their offspring,<br /> the children they have borne?<br class="kk" />Should priest and prophet be killed<br /> in the sanctuary of the Lord? <br />
<br class="ii" /> The young and the old are lying<br /> on the ground in the streets;<br class="kk" />my young women and my young men<br /> have fallen by the sword;<br class="kk" />on the day of your anger you have killed them,<br /> slaughtering without mercy. <br />
<br class="ii" /> You invited my enemies from all around<br /> as if for a day of festival;<br class="kk" />and on the day of the anger of the <span class="sc">Lord</span><br /> no one escaped or survived;<br class="kk" />those whom I bore and reared<br /> my enemy has destroyed. </blockquote>
<br />
From this, the author goes on to conclude his work by asking YHWH "Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?" (5:20) and then speculating that "you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure" (5:22). These are not the confident ruminations of an individual who felt he understood his god with any confidence, but the mournful cries of a man whose theology that had been cast into a morass of utter confusion and despair. <br />
<br />
Nonetheless, the authors of this time clearly set themselves the task of providing an explanation for the events that wouldn't require the entire theological edifice they had created to be torn down. The first theological solution to the problem was to identify that the Babylonian invasion was indeed a sign of YHWH's <i>strength</i> rather than a sign of his weakness. In the ancient world, it was often assumed that a nation's strength was directly proportional to the strength of its god(s), which goes some way to explaining why the gods of powerful nations were worshipped with such alacrity in the region (including in Israel and Judah prior to Josiah's religious reforms). These gods could be absorbed into the polytheistic pantheon of a given nation without the need for much theological teeth-gnashing: many gods inhabited the world, so there was little sense in forgoing the opportunity to worship just one more who had already proven the efficacy of his powers. For the Judahites who lived in the shadow of Josiah, however, such hedging of ones theistic bets had ceased to be an option. The religion of Judah had become entirely centralised under a single god, whose power and pre-eminence (in the land of Judah at least) had been enforced by fiat with the destruction of the places of worship devoted to all the other gods. If Judah had been destroyed by foreign forces who worshipped foreign gods, this could have only been possible with the direct complicity of YHWH. And if YHWH had seen fit to inflict such violence on the people of Judah, then it stands to reason that they must have done something to anger him.<br />
<br />
But, again, why would YHWH have been so angry if the Judahites had finally turned away from centuries of polytheistic worship towards the monolatrous worship of YHWH? The theology of the Book of Kings made it quite clear that God's punishment (for instance the destruction of Israel and the Assyrian annexation of Judah) was a response to the "evil" of the people and the kings who oversaw them. So, if Josiah had truly "turned to the <span class="sc">Lord</span> with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might" (2 Kings 23:25) then what could have possibly driven YHWH to such anger? The solution to this problem first consisted of absolving Josiah and (to a lesser extent) subsequent kings for direct responsibility for what had happened. The text added to the Book of 2 Kings after the death of Josiah attempts to make it plain that YHWH still held a grudge for the gross "provocations" of king Manasseh (23:26-27; cf. Jer 15:4):<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Still the <span class="sc">Lord</span> did not turn from the fierceness
of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah,
because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. The <span class="sc">Lord</span> said, ‘I will
remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel; and I will
reject this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I
said, My name shall be there.’</blockquote>
<br />
In other words, the theology of the Book of Kings (and therefore of the centralised Judahite religion) was not challenged by the Babylonian invasion: it was merely a sign that a generation could be punished for the iniquities of their forebears (not so coincidentally a major theme in the Torah, which was likely completed in more or less its present form shortly after the period of exile). But a second problem arises: if YHWH, in a very literal sense, occupied the Jerusalem Temple, and if this temple was to be the central focus of all worship, what was to be done pursuant to its destruction? It's not entirely clear how the exiled Judahites responded to this problem, or what form their religious worship took (only that it persisted and that it remained entirely separate from the Babylonian religion), but we can perhaps piece together some speculations based on the fragmentary evidence we have in the Bible.<br />
<br />
Firstly we should note that many of the the hymns that were used in the Temple (in a liturgical context) prior to its destruction were collated and - if they weren't already - expressed in a written form. These would contribute to the Book of Psalms we have today, and we can presume that they continued to be sung (albeit mournfully) by the exiles in Babylon (Ps 137) outside of the Temple context. Secondly, the importance of God's law (i.e. the Torah, or the elements of it which had been penned by this time) was strongly emphasised in the writings from this nime. Notions here of sacrifices and other ritual forms of worship that would have been performed at the Temple are largely ignored, and the adherence to God's laws are now taken to be the central duty of the Judahites. This deviation from the law is also cited as a central reason for the wrath that has just been visited upon them (e.g. Jer 9:13; 32:23 etc.). Additionally, this notion of adherence to God's law is tied in with the Egyptian Exodus (and God's covenant with the Hebrews via the mediation of Moses), and explicit parallels are drawn between this event and the plight of the Judahites exiled in Babylon (e.g. Isaiah 40:3-5; 55:12–13). Although we can be relatively confident that the Exodus was an important event in the mythology of the Northern Kingdom, the Babylonian exile appears to have been the event that secured its place as one of the most defining events in the history of the Hebrew people as a whole. <br />
<br />
But perhaps the most important theological development here - particularly as it impacts on our modern world - is that by the end of the exile we find the very first unambiguous declaration of monotheism in the history of Israel and Judah. In the book of Deutero-Isaiah (i.e. Isa 40-55), penned at the very end of the exile period, are the words: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (44:6). In response to the trauma of being conquered, being thrown into exile and watching as the house of their God was destroyed by marauding foreigners, the exiled community developed a theory of their God which placed his reign of influence not merely beyond the Temple of the land of Israel and Judah, but as a universal and (perhaps?) all-powerful being who had literally no equal. The religion of Josiah, far from being destroyed by the conquering Babylonians, was taken and built into something far grander, and far more universal as a seemingly inevitable reaction to suffering they had undergone. I've been saying throughout these posts that the content of theology can often be explained as a reaction to the forces of history, and the development of monotheism in the religion of the Judahites serves as a perfect example. James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-23929164740050631032012-10-06T23:54:00.003+10:002012-10-07T00:02:22.978+10:00Mark 6:30-44 and 8:1-10: The Meaning of the Feeding of the MultitudesWhen examining the significance of the two accounts of the "Feeding of the Multitudes" in Mark's Gospel, a number of theories have been put forward regarding the significance of the events depicted. The first possibility is to deny that there is really any deeper significance at all: perhaps, according to one particularly naive theory, the multitude simply brought their own lunches when they came to hear Jesus speak, and the event simply became embellished with time. A more plausible alternative is that the two events are simply recollections of the <i>same </i>event with slightly different details, and that Mark elected to preserve both in his Gospel for the sake of thoroughness. Scholars advocating such a theory would dismiss the numbers of loaves, baskets and people present as being purely incidental to the narrative. The original story on this interpretation might have originally been an allegory of Elisha's feeding of the Hebrews (2 Kings 4:42-44) or of the significance of the Eucharist, which eventually became furnished with two different sets of numerical detail in its subsequent retelling. Such an approach may have its merits, but it ultimately fails to explain why Mark (and Matthew later) saw fit to include both accounts.<br />
<br />
Another approach views the numbers as holding a particular significance to the stories. Whatever the origin of these stories may have been, it seems clear that the numbers held some special significance to Mark in his Gospel. See, for example, verses 8:19-21:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets
full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ ‘And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?’ </blockquote>
<br />
This passage would make little sense if we were to presume that the numbers held no significance for Mark or Mark's Jesus. Given that, a more interesting question can be posed: what, exactly, are the numbers supposed to represent?<br />
<br />
We'll begin with the first incident, the one found in Mark 6:30-6:44. It runs as follows:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.
He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and
rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure
even to eat.
And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.
Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them.
As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them,
because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach
them many things.
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late;
send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’
But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’
And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’
Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass.
So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties.
Taking the <b>five loaves and the two fish</b>, he looked up to heaven, and
blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set
before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.
And all ate and were filled;
and <b>they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish.
Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.</b>
</blockquote>
<br />
Traditionally, scholars have attempted to trace the significance of these numbers back to their significance in Judaism. The twelve baskets, on such a reading, signify the twelve tribes of Israel, where the 5,000 and / or the five loaves denote the five books of the Pentateuch. Such a view is plausible, but I will shortly argue against it in favour of a different interpretation. For now, though, note merely here that the symbolism is a little contorted: as the Oxford Bible Commentary puts it, "surely 'twelve' would be better as parallel to the number of people, and 'five' to what they are fed with, if the above symbolism were in mind".<br />
<br />
Next in Mark's Gospel - that is, in chapter 7 - we have Jesus arguing with some Pharisees about dietary laws and purity (7:1-23) before a curious episode involving Jesus and a Phoenician woman:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice,
but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’
But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’
Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’
So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
</blockquote>
<br />
I'll return to the significance of this episode shortly.<br />
<br />
Next, we come to the second feeding of the multitude:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them,
‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.
If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.’
His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’
He asked them, ‘How many loaves do you have?’ They said, ‘Seven.’
Then he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; and <b>he took the
seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to his
disciples to distribute</b>; and they distributed them to the crowd.
They had also a few small fish; and after blessing them, he ordered that these too should be distributed.
They ate and were filled; and <b>they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.
Now there were about four thousand people.</b> And he sent them away.
And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha.</blockquote>
<br />
The first observation to make here is that this episode appears to take place in or near the Decapolis (cf. Mk. 7:31) a particularly Gentile part of the region. Although the story doesn't specifically identify the crowd as being Gentile, I believe that's the most reasonable inference for reasons I shall attempt to explain now. The numbers involved certainly hint at the fact that we are to treat this crowd as Gentile, though perhaps not for the reasons that many scholars suspect. For many scholars, the number 4,000 here represents the "four corners of the Earth" (a Hebrew idiom referring to the entire globe) and the number seven refers to "the seven nations of Canaan" - i.e. the Pagan nations that once bordered Israel (e.g. cf. Acts 13:19). Such an approach is plausible enough, but I believe there is an alternative explanation.<br />
<br />
First of all, I agree that these two "feeding" events as presented in Mark represent a deliberate juxtaposition of Jesus' ministry to the Jews and his (purported) ministry to the Gentiles. The numbers are one clue (which I shall elaborate more fully on below), but so is the kind of narrative framing Mark uses here and elsewhere in his Gospel. It has been long noted by scholars that Mark frequently interrupts his narrative in places to introduce a story that appears - <i>prima facie </i>- to be unrelated to the surrounding material. This A-B-A narrative format has been named by scholars as the "Markan Sandwich" technique. Although the two feeding events do not otherwise constitute a continuous narrative, and although the material placed between them is rather too expansive and diverse to be considered mere filling in a sandwich, I still believe that we can look to the structure of Mark's narrative as deliberate and meaningful, and therefore use this material as a clue on how to interpret the two "feeding" stories that surround it. <br />
<br />
As mentioned above, the bulk of the material in Mark 7 pertains to Jesus debating with the Pharisees over the interpretation of - and continuing applicability of - dietary and purity laws within the Torah. This may or may not have been a topic of debate during Jesus' ministry itself, but we do know that it was a burning question in the years following Jesus' death, up until the time that Mark's Gospel was written in around 70 AD. Essentially, the early Christians couldn't agree on exactly how relevant the old Jewish laws should be within their community, particularly when it came to Gentiles. It seems that it eventually became settled that Gentiles who converted to the faith would not be required to keep <i>kosher </i>or to circumcise themselves, but such a conclusion was only arrived at after much acrimonious debate. Paul, for example, suggests that those who advocate circumcision for Gentile converts should castrate themselves (Gal 5:12)! This episode in Mark touches on the same themes, and perhaps offers us the clue that the surrounding "feeding" episodes should similarly be interpreted in the context of the relationship between Gentile converts and Jewish converts and how Jesus might have mediated them.<br />
<br />
The next episode in Mark 7 is that of the Phoenician woman posted above. This has been a troubling passage for many Biblical scholars, for it appears to have Jesus comparing the Jews to children and the Gentiles to dogs! That is, salvation - in the form of the coming Kingdom of God - would be apportioned first to the Jews and then later the "scraps" of this salvation would be apportioned to the Gentiles. It seems like a fairly harsh soteriology, but it does seem to have been the common understanding. Paul too suggests that the gospel of salvation is given "to the Jew first, and [<i>then</i>] also to the Greek" (Rom. 1:16). This story might offer the clue for the given order that the "feeding" episodes are given in the Bible, and also for the curious emphasis placed on the collecting of "broken pieces" (i.e. scraps) after the meals were finished.<br />
<br />
If that is the case, then we can perhaps suggest that the episode in Mark 6:30-44 represents Jesus' mission to the Jews and that the second episode in Mark 8:1-10 represents his mission to the Gentiles: "to the Jews first, and [<i>then</i>] also to the Greek". When the other evidence is included (for instance, the situation of the second episode near the Decapolis, and the fact that a more Jewish word for basket is used in the first account and a more Greek word is used for the same object in the second account), I would say that the scholars have it got it mostly right on that point: the first audience we are to take as being Jewish and the second audience we are to take as Gentile. The numbers offer further evidence on this point, but perhaps not in the sense that many scholars have imagined. Here I'll offer a different take on the numbers to the ones given by scholars above.<br />
<br />
In the case of the first episode, perhaps "the twelve" here is not supposed to signify the twelve tribes of Israel, but rather the 12 disciples: a group of men who were apparently Jews selected by Jesus in Galilee and its surrounding regions, and who apparently never ventured far from Jerusalem after Jesus' death. Once the nascent movement was scattered from Jerusalem and became more of a Gentile faith, the role of the twelve shrinks accordingly. That is, we must presume that they were a Jewish collective who ministered only to a Jewish in and around Jerusalem. This may be why they are alluded to in the "Jewish" feeding episode.<br />
<br />
As for the "5,000" we must note that this number - or a very similar number - is well attested in the NT in connection with converts to the new movement immediately after the death of Jesus. Paul, for example, mentions Jesus' appearance to "the 500" in 1 Cor 15:6, which - compellingly - is included in what appears to be part of a pre-existing formula that Paul inherited which links "the twelve" (v.5) and "the 500" together in a single kerygmatic pericope. In the Book of Acts, Luke suggests that the amount of people "who believed... numbered about five thousand" (4:3). Again compellingly, this number must pertain only to the number of believers in Jerusalem (i.e. predominantly Jewish), since the action here is situated at the Jerusalem Temple, Peter has been addressing himself so far only to the "men of Judea" (2:14) and his "fellow Israelites" (vv. 22, 29) and the mission to the Gentiles is not taken up in Luke's account until chapter 6. In other words, there seems to be a tradition that existed - quite independently of Mark - numbering the early believers in Jerusalem at 500(0), who were overseen and ministered to by "the twelve". <br />
<br />
As for the second "feeding" episode, the numbers are rather more difficult to source, but again we might be best served by looking to the situation in the early Christian movement rather than the OT. In Acts 6, we learn that after a dispute between Gentile and Jewish believers over food (!), the twelve assent to the election of a council of seven whose responsibility would be closely linked to the needs of the growing number of Gentile believers (vv. 1-6). Could the seven baskets in the "Gentile" feeding episode represent this council of seven, just as the twelve baskets represent the twelve disciples in the "Jewish" feeding account? I think that would be a distinct possibility. The number 4,000 is rather more problematic, since it doesn't appear anywhere in the NT, but it could well have the same meaning as the 5,000 in the first episode: that is a tradition surrounding the number of (in this case, Gentile) believers that the new movement could boast. This can only be speculation, but it seems to me as well-supported a speculation as any other.<br />
<br />
The fact that Luke fails to mention these "4,000" may not necessarily count against this theory. In his Gospel, for example, Luke excises the bulk of the Markan material examined in this post. He includes the first "feeding of the multitudes" but everything else - all the material from Mark 6:45-8:13 - has simply been left out of Luke's account. His reasoning for this is uncertain, but it seems that he didn't want to indicate that any signs of debate or controversy existed concerning dietary laws until he presents Peter's "revelation" on the issue in Acts 11. This is part of a general desire on Luke's behalf to downplay or smooth over early divisions within the church, particularly those concerning divisions between Jews and Gentiles. As such, there seems to be a pretty compelling reason for Luke to have left out any mention of the second feeding account (as it appears to indicate a division between Jesus' ministry to the Jews and the Gentiles, with the first apparently given preferential treatment) as well as any reference to the "4,000" Gentile believers to which this episode may have been referring. Again I must confess that this is mostly speculative, but the idea that the numbers are referencing fixed contemporary situations that would have been recognisable to the first century reader seems more likely to me than the idea that they are referencing - in a particularly abstruse way - some aspects of earlier Judaism. <br />
<br />
So perhaps the 5,000 represents the traditionally given number of Jewish believers, the 4,000 represents the traditionally given number of Gentile believers, the twelve represents Jesus' immediate apostles and the seven represents the later established Gentile council of Acts 6: what about the fish and the loaves, though? The number of fish and loaves involved here may not be especially significant (Jesus gives them no weight in his later questioning in Mark 8:17-21, for example) but the substances themselves almost certainly do. Fish and bread were apparently used from very early on in the communal dinners that the early Christians held, and where the <i>eucharist </i>was performed. In this respect, they held a special spiritual significance within these Christian communities. The connection between the <i>eucharist </i>and this episode is made even more explicit in the version given in the Gospel of John, where the verb "eucharisteo" is actually used (John 6:11). In other words, the fish and the bread seem to either be directly representing the <i>eucharist</i> or - more abstractly - the soteriological elements that the <i>eucharist</i> itself entails.<br />
<br />
But what about the meaning of the passage as a whole? Even if my analysis is correct, it doesn't seem to make much sense: why are the Apostles, for example, receiving the scraps of the 5,000? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Not necessarily. The first thing to note is the pervasive sense of irony in Mark's Gospel, and even in the very teachings of Jesus himself. Both delight in turning the expected and the established order on its head: remember Jesus' claim that "the last will be first and the first will be last" (Mt. 20:16)? Mark also takes a rather dim view of Jesus' disciples in his Gospel, a feature that has been long noted by scholars. The disciples of Jesus are regularly depicted as dim and prone to missing the true meaning of Jesus' teachings, including at the conclusion of these two episodes (i.e. Mk. 8:21). Could it not be, then, that Mark - in his two episodes of the "feeding of the multitudes" - is here downplaying the privileged status of "the twelve" and the "council of seven" using subversive irony? That rather than occupying a privileged position in the context of Jesus' soteriology, they should rather view themselves as receiving the scraps of the spiritual nourishment that were apportioned first and foremost to the wider community?<br />
<br />
This is undoubtedly an ironic and counter-intuitive position to draw, but then doesn't "ironic" and "counter-intuitive" describe quite beautifully the nature of Jesus' ministry and Mark's Gospel?<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span>James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-16426367129289748102012-09-27T19:10:00.002+10:002012-09-27T19:21:25.285+10:00The Concept of "Rights" in American Political DiscourseIn his <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/09/14/transcript-video-paul-ryan-speaks-at-values-voter-summit/" target="_blank">recent speech to the Values Voters Summit</a>, Paul Ryan said the following:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So much of our history has been a constant striving to live up to the
ideals of our founding, about rights and their ultimate source. At [the Democratic] convention, a rowdy dispute broke out over the mere mention
of that source.<br />
For most of us, it was settled long ago that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.</blockquote>
<br />
In the increasingly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic" target="_blank">eristical dialectic</a> of American politics, it has become a general and inviolable law that, given enough time, the concept of "rights" will somehow eventually be introduced into every political dialogue one encounters. Usually they are gratuitously invoked as a kind of moral bludgeon - as a blunt and unequivocal way of demonstrating to one's opponent exactly where the boundaries of acceptable moral debate lie, and to demonstrate forcefully that these boundaries have just been transgressed. In my <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2012/09/cognitive-projectivism-and-religious.html" target="_blank">last post </a>I suggested that moral thoughts act as a means of terminating internal dialogues that might otherwise lead to socially damaging actions, and here I suggest that the concept of inalienable "rights" serve the same function in socio-political dialogues: that is, they set the inviolable limits beyond which no political discourse is ever permitted to transgress. They are cognitive "conversation-stoppers", only writ large and on a wider social context.<br />
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In this respect, "rights" might be viewed as little more than universalised moral judgements, supported and enforced by some legitimate authority (I will expand upon the nature of this authority shortly). Like moral judgements, they can be regarded as cognitive strategies wielded by the mind to set specific limits on the range of acceptable human actions. Unlike moral judgements, however, judgements concerning rights tend not to be quite so personal, nor quite so visceral in their origin. Although "human rights" can inspire great emotional reactions, it seems that there is quite a difference between saying "slavery is wrong" and "freedom from slavery is a fundamental human right". The former sentence concerns the kind of cognitive projectivism I discussed in my last post: that "wrongness" is an inherent, ontological feature of the institution of slavery. The second sentence, on the other hand, has abstracted, depersonalised and universalised the moral judgement involved, such that it no longer resembles a moral statement in many respects. The opposition to slavery no longer seems to be predicated on the kind of personal moral judgements I explored in my last post ("Slavery is repulsive" / "I am repulsed by slavery") but rather appears to have some external source, completely independent from the fickle caprice of individual human judgement. This sense of "externality" - of supra-human authority - is critical to the way that rights are processed and invoked in political discourse.<br />
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So what is this "supra-human" authority from which "human rights" are derived? From where are these declarations concerning the nature human rights derived, if not from the human mind? For many, the answer self-evidently lays with God: as the supreme authority and creator of human life, the boundaries of human rights could only be delineated by him. Indeed, the creators of the US Declaration of Independence held it to be "self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" (the use of the word "endowment" here implies the kind of external imposition mentioned above). For others, these rights have a natural origin: they are an inexorable aspect of the ontological facticity of human beings as forged by nature. In this respect no different from other aspects of human facticity - such as bipedalism - in the sense that they exist as <i>a priori </i>and essential aspects of "humanity". Still others are happy to have it both ways: human rights are both naturally and divinely ordained. Paul Ryan is apparently one of those people.<br />
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But let's examine this claim in the wider context of his speech. While it partly served as a means of hammering home the "godlessness" of the Democratic Party, it was also used as a means to stress the widely-held conservative belief in the superfluity of government: that is, that "our rights come from nature and nature’s God, <i>not from government</i>". There are several objections I can raise to this comment, and to this conservative American attitude to "rights" in general. The first can be found in the Declaration of Independence itself, which - shortly after emphasising the divine origin of "Rights" - goes on to suggest that "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". This explicates the important difference between the assertion of human rights and their actual enforcement. To simply assert that one possesses some right is completely futile if there is no authority to recognise or secure this assertion. It is - I am quite sure - of very little comfort to the adulteress stoned to death in Nigeria, or the political dissidents imprisoned in China to know that they have inherent and inalienable rights derived "from nature and nature’s God": rights simply have no practical meaning without some institution there to enforce them. The only institutions with the power to effectively enforce human rights are governments, or something closely resembling them. Ryan's tactless contempt aside, human rights have never been - nor could they ever be - present in the absence of human government. <br />
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The second objection comes from the observation that identifying the origin of human rights in nature or God is of no help to us in determining specifically what the content of these rights might be. For example, noting that human rights have a divine origin doesn't give us any clue as to what precisely it is that governments should be enforcing. Is healthcare a fundamental right, for example? How about education? Or food? It's not easy to say, and compelling arguments can be raised for and against each of these putative "rights". Even a right as self-evident as the freedom from slavery was violently resisted until 150 years ago and some might even argue that it still persists in some parts of the world today. The recognition that our concept of "rights" continually change with time - or that such a concept scarcely existed at all prior to the political philosophy of Locke and others - should indicate to us that however "natural" or "God-given" our rights may be, it is still entirely incumbent upon human beings to delineate their scope. <br />
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The above also leads me to my third objection: that, ultimately, human rights have an entirely human origin. There are ways of approaching the nature of human rights that preserve their transcendently authoritative nature, without the frankly superfluous metaphysical invocation of God or "Nature". William Downes, for example, notes that our conceptualisation of human rights might be best explained in the context of the "<i>authority of the species-mind</i>". That is, we can reach largely universal judgements about human rights due to the almost identical nature of human minds, and the similar things that are likely to make us happy or miserable. If human slavery creates a degree of misery that every human can empathise with, then it makes sense for all of us - collectively - to universally denounce such a practice. This explains the somewhat contingent nature of human rights and why we can expect them to change with time: if human rights are the consequence of a global, inter-subjective agreement that must necessarily shift with time as our subjective inclinations also change. This might make human rights seem unduly contingent, but that does seem to be their nature: what possible meaning could the claim to a universal human right have if the majority of human beings simply refuse to recognise it?<br />
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In any case, the recognition that human rights have an entirely human origin needn't necessarily blunt the moral force that they carry. It obviously becomes incumbent upon all of us to collectively agree upon what these rights might be, but - as I wrote above - exactly the same must be done even if we assume a divine or natural origin for these beliefs. Secondly, it is perfectly acceptable to process and enforce these rights as though they carried a "supra-human authority", only instead of appealing to the transcendent authority of "God" or "Nature" we are now appealing to the transcendent authority of "Humanity". Humanity, as a singular collective, is a metaphysical being whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, it is a being whose nature changes with its individual constituents: as we evolve individually, so does humanity. This both explains and justifies changes over time in what constitutes a "human right" in a manner that explanations invoking "God" and "Nature" simply cannot. "Crimes against Humanity" remain, for this reason, the most serious moral transgressions of our time.<br />
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So it is clear that although "rights" have a purely subjective construction they can still have a concrete, objective influence on the way we process moral judgements. Their origin is irrelevant - that they exist, and that they are upheld by common assent is the only authority we need appeal to in their defence. However, like the moral judgements I examined in my last post, there are some who approach the concept of rights in an entirely promiscuous way, introducing them into areas of consideration in which they have no rightful place. Just as it is possible to dull one's capacity for rational moral consideration by reacting with instinctive disapprobation to every action one opposes, and treating all such acts as equally grave moral transgressions (e.g. morally conflating abortion and the holocaust), it is also possible to view to invoke "rights" in such a way that all other moral concerns - concerns that should be central to the issue at hand - are swept away by a all-encompassing logic of petty legalism. In other words, while a moralist terminates all further consideration once she believes she has found the moral locus of the issue at hand, the "right-monger" (I can't think of a better expression) terminates all further consideration once she has found the legal locus. The only relevant question in her mind becomes "Does this conform with / infringe upon some 'right'?", and no other considerations - moral or otherwise - are taken into account.<br />
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This, it seems to me, is particularly prevalent in US political discourse, where discussions that should most properly be conducted on a moral or logical plane are instead conducted with regard only for the turgid expression of legal "rights". We have all been in an argument with someone who - when backed into a corner and with the argument long lost - will react against the evidence piling-up against them with the denouement that they are merely "expressing their opinion" and that they "have the right to voice it". The issue that should be central here - whether they have reality on their side - is completely ignored. Similarly, we have fundamentalist Christian groups who wield their "right to free speech" as a shield against the criticism they receive for demonising gays and Muslims. Again, the issue as to whether the speech they offer is any sense justified - or the potential concern that their speech might causing a great deal of harm and anguish - just doesn't figure in their thought. They have identified their personal "rights" in this regard, and further considerations - including their moral obligations to others - are simply ignored.<br />
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What inspired this particular post was Mitt Romney's now infamous comments to donors, secretly filmed (most likely) by a member of the "help":<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>There are 47% of the people who will vote for the President no matter
what... there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent on
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe government
has the responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled
to healthcare, to food, to housing.</i></blockquote>
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There is not much I can say here that hasn't already been said, only to point out that this is an prime example of the kind of "right-mongering" I mentioned above. For Mitt Romney, the primary consideration when faced with poverty - with people who are sick, starving and homeless - are what kind of "rights" they might be able to claim under the circumstances. For Mitt Romney, the issue isn't one of human suffering or basic human decency, but rather a legalistic inquiry into the constitutional status of the impoverished in the United States. In essence, he resents the poor for treating "healthcare... food... [and] housing" as entitlements; that is, inalienable rights that we are obliged to act upon. For Romney, the issue is clear-cut: such provisions are not god-given "rights", therefore our sphere of moral concern need not be penetrated by their futile bleating. We have no inherent legal obligation to assist those who are so poor as to not be able to afford food and they are wrong to impose their suffering on us in any way: such a recognition marks the terminus of our social dialogue. No-one has the "right to food", so all other considerations are secondary.<br />
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The genuine poverty (if you'll excuse the pun) of such thinking is that it entirely misses where our focus should be. Perhaps Romney is correct in saying that access to food is not a fundamental human right, and that no-one should be criminally sanctioned for eating a hearty meal while her neighbour goes without. I would disagree, to be honest, but that's scarcely the point. The question is not whether someone else has <i>the right </i>to demand something of me, but rather whether <i>I am right </i>to deny them this something. I am completely unaware of any sensible moral system on the planet which treats assisting the poor as anything but an unequivocal good. Indeed, unqualified compassion for those less fortunate exists at the centre of most religions that I am familiar with, including the religion of Jesus that Mitt Romney claims adherence to. In the petty legalism that Romney wields in lieu of a compassion-based morality, however, questions of being "good" are simply ignored. The only question that guides his conduct (and the conduct of his ideological brethren) centres around a set of negative rights - that is, rights that delineate moral behaviour solely on the basis of whether they negatively impact upon someone else - and the moral status of positive, proactive behaviour is treated as lying beyond our concern.<br />
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It is this fundamental mistake - confusing <i>having rights </i>with <i>being right</i> - that exists at the centre of all modern, right-wing American thought.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-48986111837774749142012-09-11T04:48:00.000+10:002012-09-14T19:05:50.986+10:00Cognitive Projectivism and Religious MoralityIn making sense of the world around us, the mind is not simply a passive gatherer of sensual data. In construing a given object or event, the mind has a vast array of tools to give sense and meaning to what it experiences. In Kantian philosophy, such inherent abilities are known as <i>synthetic a priori </i>judgements: that is, judgements that one can make about the world (consciously or otherwise) <i>before </i>any direct experience. The example Kant invokes is that of a man, blind from birth, who has just been given an operation to see. For those who have a longer familiarity with the sense of sight, our minds are able to process the sensory data delivered by the eyes and to recognise important concepts like depth, extension and so on that permit us to distinguish one discrete object from another. For the blind man in Kant's example, however, the mind simply has not learnt to process the data it receives, and the world is presented as an indistinguishable mess of light and colour. For Kant's blind man - and others who have undergone similar operations - it became more comfortable for them to close their eyes and to navigate their way around the world in darkness again, rather than having to undergo the mental strain of learning how to see.<br />
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Kant suggested that we have two primary <i>synthetic a priori </i>tools at our cognitive disposal: the capacity to understand space and the capacity to understand time, and that these capacities exist independently from - and prior to - sensual experience. In developing this theory of cognitivism, Kant was responding to the challenge laid down by David Hume, whose position was rather more skeptical. For Hume, the mind was a rather promiscuous imposer of order onto the world - for example, its inherent tendency towards belief in causality and the properties of objects (colour, shape etc.) - that did not actually exist in the world itself. To quote from his Treatise on Human Nature:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread
itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal
impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance
at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses. </blockquote>
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This philosophy itself was a reaction to the Cartesian epistemology which posed the question about how we know what we know. For Descartes, there was an ontological rift separating the world in itself from our perception of it: if our senses can - on occasion - be deceived, how can we be certain that they are not always deceived? How do we know that we are not living in a dream, or that we are not being perpetually mislead by some malevolent power? Hume's response to this was rather skeptical, suggesting in essence that this ontological rift could not be bridged, and that our sense of the world is entirely shaped by the mind's inexorable propensity to impose itself on the world without. We can, for this reason, never know things as they actually are, because it is simply impossible to stop the mind from projecting its own expectations onto the sensory data we gather. Kant's response to Hume was an attempt to rescue the veracity of our understanding of the world by positing that these <i>a priori </i>judgements we project are actually present in the world as well. <br />
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It is far beyond my capacity to comment on these philosophical ideas in much greater depth - much less to propose a compelling solution to them - but I do want to use them as a springboard to explore mental phenomena that are currently being explored by science. They concern the way we make <i>moral </i>judgements - rather than strictly epistemological ones - but the philosophy underpinning them is largely the same. With regards to morality, there is the question of what kind of ontological judgements are being made when we deem some action to be "immoral". Are we saying something about the event itself? Are we correct in thinking that there are some actions that are - in and of themselves - immoral? How exactly does the mind process judgements concerning morality, and what connection - if any - does this process have to the philosophies I briefly outlined above?<br />
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The first and most important question at this stage is what role reason plays in making moral judgements. If moral judgements are generally rational in construction, for instance, then it is clear that we are not making any ontological claims about a given action when we deem it "immoral". The action happens, we think it over (however briefly) and then we arrive at an appropriate reaction. The action<i> itself</i> isn't considered moral or immoral, rather we simply making a <i>post hoc </i>evaluation that needn't have been directly derived from our immediate, pre-rational experience of the event. Conversely, if moral actions are <i>not </i>predominantly informed by reason, then we must look for other causes for our sense of disapprobation - emotional causes, for instance - that might be traced more directly to our immediate, <i>ad hoc</i> experience of the event. That is, does the mind engage in <i>moral projectivism - </i>does it impose our moral reaction onto the events themselves, as though they were an inherent property of the events to begin with - or does it operate in a more rational, detached, <i>post hoc</i> manner?<br />
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Let me use a concrete example to illustrate what I mean. When I was younger - twenty or so - I witnessed two men kissing in a club for the first time. I'm not sure if I had a particularly sheltered upbringing, or whether the continuing disapproval of open homosexuality in our culture meant that there just simply aren't many opportunities to witness such an event, but yes - I was about twenty when I first saw two men kissing. My first reaction, I must admit, was an uncomfortable one, if not a feeling of outright repulsion. I don't know what the source of this reaction was - I certainly didn't have a problem with homosexuality at the time, nor was I ever taught to have such a reaction, nor do I believe that my reaction was somehow "natural" or "innate" - but it was there all the same. Immediately after this gut reaction, though, I stopped and thought: "Is it them with the problem, or me?" I recognised what they were doing was perfectly natural, and that I wouldn't have thought twice about it had it been a man and a woman in the same position. They were harming no-one - least of all me - and I realised that it was clearly incumbent upon me to be accepting of their presence, rather than incumbent upon them to pre-empt my sense of mild repulsion by taking themselves somewhere else.<br />
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So what we have here then is an initial reaction to the situation that was completely pre-rational and projective ("that is repulsive...") and then a rational reconsideration of the problem ("I felt repulsed by it, but I shouldn't have...") of the varieties I explained above. The grammar here is important. My initial reaction - had I vocalised it at the time - would have been expressed using an active tense, denoting - perhaps unconsciously - that the "repulsion" I felt was inherent to the event itself ("It <i>is</i> repulsive..."), rather than a mere product of my own thought process. My later reaction would be better expressed using a passive construction ("I felt repulsed <i>by it</i>") to properly explicate the distance between the event itself and my reaction to it. Instances of outright moral projectionism can thus be partly identified by the use of an active tense, which - deliberately or not - place the cause of our repulsion in the very act itself, whereas the passive tense conveys a less immediate causal relationship between the action and my (subsequent) reaction.<br />
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But wait: did I just conflate the feeling of repulsion with morality? Is it really correct to conflate a base emotional reaction with something so important and so complex<i> </i>as <i>morality</i>? Not always, of course, but I think there is a much stronger relationship between feelings of disgust and moral judgements than we would care to admit. To quote Richard Joyce<sup>1</sup>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In one study (Wheatley and Haidt 2005), highly hypnotizable participants were given a post-hypnotic suggestion to feel a pang of disgust whenever they read an arbitrary word (“often” or “take”). They were then asked to read a variety of fictional vignettes—some involving moral transgressions and others involving no transgression at all, some using the target word and others not using it. In cases where disgust was prompted, the subjects’ moral condemnation was heightened. Even in the non-transgression story, subjects who felt disgust were often inclined to follow up with a negative moral appraisal. This is striking when one considers that there was nothing in the story remotely to support such a judgment:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dan is a student council representative at his school. This semester he is in charge of scheduling discussions about academic issues. He [tries to take] 〈often picks〉 topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion.</blockquote>
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Disgusted subjects nevertheless reported that “it just seems like he’s up to something,” or “he’s a “popularity-seeking snob,” or “it just seems so weird and disgusting,” or “I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just is.” This is evidence that a great deal of the time it is our emotions that are driving our moral judgments, but it certainly doesn’t seem this way “from the inside.”</blockquote>
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We can see here how the feeling of disgust, no matter how preposterous its origin, can lead individuals to make projective moral judgements about the nature of the person in question. Note that even the later comments on the "reason" for their disgust are constructed in the active tense, showing quite clearly that the subjects of this study are not simply explicating their subjective reactions to the story but rather making deeper ontological statements about Dan's moral constitution ("he <i>is... </i>a snob", "“I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just <i>is</i>”). A second facet of this study is that moral reasoning appears to be guided by the initial emotional response to an unnerving degree. The moral reasoning exhibited by the subjects is little more than a <i>post hoc</i> rationalisation: no reconsideration of the appropriateness of the reaction appears to be taking place. This subservience of moral reasoning to instinctive gut-reactions has been well explored in the current psychological literature. Johnathon Haidt, for example, notes, in response to a study he conducted: <br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a <i>post hoc</i> search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made...<sup>2</sup></blockquote>
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And Howard Margolis notes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...human beings produce rationales they believe account for their [moral] judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.<sup>3</sup></blockquote>
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So there is then a clear body of evidence to suggest that moral judgements are frequently (if not necessarily <i>always</i>) formed instinctively in deference to one's initial emotional reaction, and that "moral reasoning" (such that it is) is just some piece of <i>post hoc </i>fluff invoked to rationalise the judgement to oneself and others. This particular explanation also implies a sense of moral projectivism, because - to quote Joyce again - moral judgements "would serve this purpose ["encouraging successful social behavior"] only if they seem like they are <i>depicting a realm of objective moral facts</i>"<sup>4</sup>. All this is not to say that it is not possible to arrive at moral positions thinkingly, or that our emotional responses cannot be over-ruled by the judicious use of reason (as in my own example above) but rather that we must be conscious of the kind of processes that lead us to make moral judgements under normal conditions. That is, the initial moral judgement must be followed by the thought "Why do I feel that way?", or - better yet - "<i>Should </i>I feel that way"? I'll expand on this shortly. For now, though, I want to apply this reasoning to religious conceptions of morality and explore what we might be able to learn about how the religious mind processes moral judgements.<br />
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Until now, I have been talking as though all moral judgements are one and the same in nature, but in truth they can be divided into at least two groups. The first concerns what we might call <i>deontic </i>moral judgements. These are the kind of moral judgements that concern absolute standards of right and wrong, and the belief that certain actions are <i>inherently</i> right or wrong independently of social expectations. These are the kind of moral judgements I've mostly had in mind until this point. The second category concerns what we might call <i>conventional </i>moral judgements and these moral judgements that are entirely contingent upon social context: i.e. the adherence to - or transgression of - social <i>conventions</i>. There is strong evidence that the human brain processes these claims in different ways, and that it is capable of doing so prior to cultural inculcation: children as young as three are able to distinguish between these two categories, for instance, quite independently from any specific instruction<sup>5</sup>. They can recognise that a pronouncement like "boys shouldn't wear dresses" is culturally contingent in a way that a pronouncement like "you shouldn't hit people" is not. Both kinds of moral judgements are present in the religious morality to which we now turn, the important question is how they might be teased apart in practice.<br />
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I'll focus here specifically on Biblical morality - and the Christian theology it has inspired - simply because this happens to be the tradition I'm most familiar with. In the Old Testament books of law, moral instructions are explicitly directed to the "Israelites" and - to my knowledge - it is never stated within the text that these instructions are expected to have a universal application. When dealing with the "abhorrent practices" of foreign nations, for example, the prohibitions seem to be specifically directed to the Israelites (those "among you") rather than as representing a generalised moral disapprobation (e.g. Dt. 18). These practices are depicted as being wrong because they are "abhorrent to the <span class="sc">Lord" rather than because they are inherently wrong in and of themselves. The Israelites who penned this text - and others - may have believed in the universality of these laws, but it doesn't carry through in the text. Paul apparently had a similar interpretation, arguing that the Law (<i>torah</i>) "speaks [only?] to those who are [already?] under the law" (Rom. 3:19) and that "all who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the
law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law" (Rom. 2:12). This implies that following the Jewish law was not a universal requirement and that it should not - therefore - be imposed on the Gentiles of his day. The second passage demonstrates a clear distinction between sin (<i>deontic </i>morality) and the transgression of the Law (<i>conventional </i>morality).</span><br />
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<span class="sc">Such distinctions are - as I have said - so comprehensible that even children are able to grasp them, even when they are framed in a specifically religious context. To again quote Joyce:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="sc">Larry Nucci... found that among Mennonite and Amish children and adolescents God’s authority does not determine moral wrongness. When asked whether it would be OK to work on a Sunday if God said so, 100 percent said “Yes”; when asked whether it would be OK to steal if God said so, over 80 percent said “No.” Such findings contribute to a compelling body of evidence that moral prescriptions and values are experienced as “objective” in the sense that they don’t seem to depend on us, or on any authoritative figure. </span></blockquote>
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<span class="sc">Both injunctions (against working on the Sabbath and against stealing) are present and active in the religious traditions into which the children were born and both can be<span class="sc"> found in the Bible, which at no point indicates explicitly that one should be given preference over the other<sup>7</sup>. In fact, there are far more Biblical passages explicating the sanctity of the Sabbath than there are explicating the wrongness of theft. Yet, despite this, the children are clearly capable of recognising that the first injunction is contingent in a way that the second is not - but contingent on what exactly?</span></span><br />
<span class="sc"><span class="sc"><br /></span></span>
<span class="sc"><span class="sc">As the above passage hints at, the concept of "authority" is a vital component of conventional morality, particularly in its religious guise. I touched on this concept briefly in <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2012/05/archaic-language-and-religious.html" target="_blank">this</a> post, but it deserves a fuller treatment here. The Bible - as I explained above - does contain the recognition that there is a distinction to be made between conventional morality (limited in scope) and deontic morality (universal in scope). So far as the former is concerned, the injunctions are conditional and frequently invoked in the context of divine judgement: that is, these injunctions are not valid in a deontic sense, but rather only in the context of a particular religious system. This immediately raises the question of the nature of divine authority: we must ask "whether the holy... is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods"<sup>8</sup>. In other words, can God (in Christian theology) make something "moral" purely by an act of divine fiat, or is there some more absolute standard of morality that God merely is merely sanctioning when he pronounces it to be good?</span></span><br />
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<span class="sc"><span class="sc">In my opinion, the question is a much neglected one in Christian theology, but it touches at the heart of this topic. As I mentioned above, children (and presumably a great many adults) are able to make the distinction with relative ease: an injunction like "rest on the Sabbath" is entirely contingent on God's will, and it carries no weight beyond this point. The injunction might just as easily have been "rest every 6th day" or "rest every 8th day", and such injunctions would have been followed just as assiduously. However, we also recognise that the commandment "thou shalt not steal" is of a different moral category: would stealing be moral if God said so?</span></span><br />
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<span class="sc"><span class="sc">For the children in the above study, the answer is no: stealing is wrong quite independently from divine pronouncements. But how would a Christian theologian approach the problem? For <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_command_theory#Robert_Adams" target="_blank">Robert Adams</a> - and most other theologians I've seen address the problem - it can be explained away by invoking the idea that God would never make such a pronouncement because he is omnibenevolent and that such a pronouncement would therefore go against his very nature. This argument, however, contains a hidden assumption about what it means to be "benevolent" which is itself a moral problem of the very kind we are supposed to be addressing. In practice, I think, the problem is insoluble: one must simply take it on faith that God is "good", that God's moral injunctions are "good" and that therefore how to be "good" can be inferred from these injunctions. This may be well and good in the disconnected world of academic theology, but what does such a perspective lead to so far as quotidian theology is concerned? What does a fundamentalist Christian believe with regard to the origin of morality?</span></span><br />
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<span class="sc"><span class="sc">Formally, the fundamentalist will not even consider the question to be worth asking: our morality is derived from God, and the only way to be moral is to follow his injunctions. It makes no sense to ask in what sense one might be said to precede the other. In practice, however, the fundamentalist does not get his laws from the Bible. The majority of Biblical injunctions are ignored with impunity, and usually on the flimsiest of pretexts. But if not the Bible, then where? What else could be the origin of the contorted, recklessly simplified moral compass of modern Christian fundamentalism? The answer, it may be no surprise, is the same as it is for the rest of us: emotions, and other pre-conscious impulses. </span></span><br />
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<span class="sc"> Consider, for example, the fundamentalist pre-occupation with homosexuality. It is true that the Bible is rather unequivocal in its denunciation of the practice, but no more unequivocal than in its denunciation of other practices. The extremely small percentage of text in the Bible devoted to homosexuality is completely dwarfed by other injunctions that are completely ignored: for instance, the laws concerning sacrifice and priestly behaviour, or the laws which counsel concern for the poor. Yet homosexuality remains intractably central to the moral concerns of many fundamentalist Christians, and I believe that the reason pertains to the reaction I had when I first saw two men kissing: it is born entirely of an otherwise unjustifiable sense of disgust. The subsequent appeals to Biblical doctrine are simply the <i>post hoc </i>rationalisations we addressed earlier. </span><br />
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<span class="sc">Note, though, that there are three main obstacles to the fundamentalist undergoing the same kind of self-realising epiphany I experienced. The first is the belief in the authority of the Biblical text (however poorly interpreted) and of church doctrine. They are taught, in this regard, to ignore the possibility of distinguishing conventional morality from deontic morality: morality is God's morality, and God's morality permits no degrees of nuance. In this respect - remarkably - they have succeeded in making themselves ignorant of something that a three year-old child can recognise effortlessly. Such a mindlessly inflexible conception of morality cannot make one arrive at abhorrent positions in and of itself, but it can make one feel entirely justified in holding such a position. This particular theological hermeneutic simply renders moral growth impossible, because all these pesky concerns that might otherwise occur to the believer are simply drowned by this blind appeal to the authority of God. If you adhere to such a theology, literally anything - no matter how obviously immoral it may seem to the rest of us - can justified.</span><br />
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<span class="sc">The second major obstacle concerns the role of moral judgements as mental "conversation stoppers", to borrow a term used by </span><span class="sc"><span class="sc">the philosopher Dan Dennett</span>. There is some evidence to suggest that the primary role of moral judgements (vis a vis other judgements) is to act as a kind of terminus to rational consideration: the point beyond which no more deliberation is considered necessary. This may have emerged in human cognition as a way to prevent deliberations like "Should I murder my brother?" or "Should I renege on my agreement with my neighbour?" that would prove to be socially harmful. They clearly demarcate, in our own minds, the boundaries of our potential choices: even the <i>thought</i> of committing such actions can fill us with the kind of moral disgust I discussed earlier, and the mind simply drops the matter right then, prior to the commencement of any serious deliberation. The value of such a cognitive block in every day life is obvious: would you trust or form any kind of relationship with a man who was seriously deliberating, in a cold and calculated way, whether or not he should murder his brother?</span><br />
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<span class="sc"> The trouble with morality as a "conversation stopper", however, emerges when the moral sense becomes indiscriminate or promiscuous - that is, when it starts to treat even prosaic choices within a moralistic framework. This is becoming particularly rife in US politics, where important policies such as health care or tax reform - issues that deserve genuine debate and rational analysis - are treated as inviolable moral norms. When a Republican hears the phrase "Universal Healthcare" she has been trained - in an almost Pavlovian way - to feel moral disgust at such a prospect, and the issue is immediately withdrawn from her mental conversation before any rational consideration is permitted to take place. Among religious fundamentalists, similar intransigence with regards to issues like abortion or stem-cell research are a consequence of the same process: that is, promiscuous moralising. Such positions are often euphemistically described as making one "principled" (and this is certainly how such moralisers would see it) but in fact it's little more than a rigidity of mind, borne of the propensity to treat every issue under consideration moralistically. Once one has consigned oneself to such a state of knee-jerk moralism, one has literally forfeited the capacity to think rationally: the mind simply pulls the issue in question off the table before any deliberative thought is allowed to take place.</span><br />
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<span class="sc"> The third obstacle which prevents the fundamentalist from recognising the poverty of their moral outlook concerns the notion of "sin" inherent to it. Notice from the beginning what such a concept like "sin" entails: it is an object, something of the world, and something which inheres to objects, events and people. Immorality conceived as sin is not simply an ephemeral judgement, constructed in the mind of an individual; it is rather something with a real ontological presence. Note, also, how similar this is to the moral projectivism we discussed earlier: we are attributing our moral objection (or, better, our "disgust") to the object, event or person in and of themselves, as though this "sin" were a categorical property no different to colour or shape. In Christian theology, this concept of "sin" reaches its most absurd apotheosis under the guise of "original sin": we are ontologically burdened with this sin prior to - or irrespective of - any particular action we might undertake. If one believes in such a conception of morality, where is the spur to become more discerning or reasonable in one's judgements going to come from?</span><br />
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<span class="sc"> </span>And that is my final point. We cannot control our intuitions, nor can we exercise very much control over the form they take. If our body compels us to be "disgusted" at something, there is very little we can do to instruct it otherwise. What we can do, however, is control how we deal with such intuitions. When we get the sense that something is morally wrong, we must seek to understand why and to ask in what sense such intuitions might be justified. We must not assume that the "disgust" we feel is an inherent property of the object, event or person under our judgement and must rather recognise that it is merely a cognitive reaction to some given stimulus. There are, indeed, some things that we have every right to feel morally disgusted about, but such an emotion should not be nourished with every little slight or inconvenience that befall us, but should rather be preserved for only the most egregious assaults on social well-being that we encounter. It is here, with its projective, hysterical outrage on the most innocuous of pretexts (for instance, the presence of homosexuality) that religious fundamentalism exposes itself for the impoverished moral system that it is. <br />
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1) - <i>The Evolution of Morality</i>, p. 130.<br />
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2) - <i>The Righteous Mind</i>, Chapter 2.<br />
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3) - <i>Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition</i>, p. 21.<span class="Apple-converted-space"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-converted-space"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-align: justify;"></span></span><br />
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4) - <i>The Evolution of Morality</i>, p. 131.<br />
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5) - <i>Ibid</i>., p. 136.<br />
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6) - <i>Ibid., </i>p. 129-130 <br />
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7) - The idea that the Ten Commandments exist in a special class over and above the other laws is largely a later invention that cannot be inferred from the Biblical text itself. The Bible never identifies these as being <i>the</i> "Ten Commandments" as such, and in fact the only place it uses this phrase is with reference to a completely separate set of commandments in Exodus 34. The commandments do not occupy a privileged place in Rabbinic Judaism either, which avers there are 613 commandments, none of which occupy an inherently pre-eminent place with respect to the rest. Rabbinic Judaism also asserts, to continue the theme of this post, that these commandments are <i>conventional</i> in the sense that they apply to Jews only, with "universal laws" - applicable to all of humanity - to be found in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noahide_Laws" target="_blank">seven Noahide Laws</a>.<br />
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8) - Plato, quoting Socrates, <i>Euthyphro </i>10a. James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-33196068385812705562012-08-20T19:38:00.000+10:002012-11-20T21:20:02.510+11:00The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 3 (734 BC - 640 BC)<b>The Fall of Israel</b><br />
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In 745 BC, at the conclusion of a bloody civil war, a young man by the name of Tiglath-Pileser III was crowned king of Assyria. Although the Assyrian state was already the dominant power in the region by this early date, the series of reforms and military conquests soon to be undertaken by this king would transform Assyria into one of the most powerful empires the world had yet seen. The irresistible might of the Assyrian army would forever shift the balance of power in the Levant and exert a huge influence on the development of the cultures that would give rise to the Bible.<br />
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As detailed in my previous post, in 734 BC Israel was a dominant power within its region, and particularly in its relationship with Judah. As the Assyrian empire spread, the Israelite king Pekah formed an ill-fated alliance with the king of Damascus to oppose the Assyrian's western advance. As a sign of the Israelite domination over their southern neighbour, Pekah demanded that the Judahite king Ahaz join the coalition too. When he refused, the Israelite army laid siege to Jerusalem with the intention of installing a more sympathetic king on the throne. The (much later) account in 2 Chronicles 28:1-15 describes scenes of slaughter and looting, but whatever the case it seems that Ahaz was somehow able to keep his throne. He appealed to the Assyrians for help, sent them a tribute, and - for all their cultural and religious similarities - this event marks a definitive split between the two kingdoms. They were now enemies at war. <br />
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In 734 BC, Tiglath-Pileser III - having just conquered huge swathes of Persia to the east - turned his attention back to the events in the Levant. While his reasons are not entirely clear (did Ahaz's appeals for help give him the pretext for intervention he needed?) it was here that he turned the full might of the Assyrian military machine against Samaria and Damascus. It didn't take long: in the space of two years, he had brought the entire region under his control. Recognising the futility of Pekah's rebellion, the Israelites assassinated him in desperation as the Assyrians laid siege to Samaria. The new king, Hoshea, immediately surrendered and pledged to pay tribute as a vassal state to Assyria. Although this decision staved off the final destruction of Israel for a few years, by 732 BC Israel was nothing more than a rump state, its cities and population ravaged beyond all repair. They wouldn't have to wait long for the final blow.<br />
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After the death of King Tiglath-Pileser III in 727 BC, Hoshea sensed the opportunity for liberation. Ancient empires were always weakened and thrown into confusion by the death of a monarch, and the vassal states under their control often used it as an opportunity to push for independence. Hoshea was no different, and shortly after the ascension of king Shalmeneser to the Assyrian throne, he announced that he was withdrawing tribute and forming a new military alliance with Egypt. To call this move ill-advised would be euphemistic in the extreme. Egypt was no longer the powerful military state that it had once been, and even if it had had the will or capacity to help Israel, its path was completely closed by the Assyrian occupation of the southern Levant. Shalmeneser moved against Hoshea swiftly and brutally and by 724 BC most of Israel had been retaken by the Assyrians. Hoshea was captured and taken prisoner. The now monarch-less Samarians defiantly held out for another two years as the Assyrians mounted a prolonged siege against them, but it too fell in 722 BC. And it is here, with the fall of Samaria, that the northern kingdom of Israel disappears forever from the historical record. Our story is now the story of Judah alone.<br />
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<b>The Contingency of History and the Creation of the Bible</b><br />
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<b> </b>It might be worth taking a brief break from our narrative here just to give me an opportunity to spell out my wider purpose in making these series of posts. Up to this point, you may well have noticed that very little discussion of the Biblical texts has taken place and there is a very good reason for this: it wasn't until the collapse of Israel in 722 BC that the penning of the Biblical books in anything resembling the form we presently have them was likely to have begun. There are some scholars who aver that we should place Biblical authorship even further ahead in history - perhaps as recently as the 3rd century BC - but here I will side with the majority view that it is most likely from around this time - the late 8th and the 7th centuries BC - that many of the current books of the Old Testament were first penned. This raises an obvious question: <i>why then</i>? Why not earlier or later? The answer, I think, lies only in a series of accidents of history. Had these events never taken place, the Bible - and the religions it came to inform - would look very different, if we can even presume that they would have come into being at all.<br />
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As I suggested in <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2012/08/perfectionism-myth-and-politics.html" target="_blank">this</a> post, history can be viewed as a series of contingencies that myths are invoked to try and smooth-out into a single, easy to understand narrative. There I argued that mythology can shape (or distort) our understanding of history, but I think that the reverse can be true as well: large events in history can have an uncomfortable habit of imposing themselves indelibly on the consciousness of a people, and must come, in time, to influence the shape of their mythology. In the case of the Bible, it is impossible to understand its mythology (or, more properly, its <i>mythologies</i>) without an appreciation for the historical circumstances that gave rise to them, and continued - over many centuries - to shape them. The fall of Israel, and the events subsequent to it, altered forever the course of Hebrew theology and these shocks can still be felt in the pages of our modern Bibles.<br />
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When Israel fell, the culture of the people who would give rise to Judaism came to be concentrated entirely in the hands of the Judahites, or - more specifically - the hands of the tiny number of Judahites who wielded political power. For the first time, their ideology was ascendant and could be asserted and imposed among the local populations with little wider resistance. Had Hoshea not moved against Assyria and had Israel survived to the fall of the Assyrian empire in the 7th century BC, the peculiarities of the Judahite culture might have remained nothing more than a historical curiosity, finding its voice forever drowned-out by the ideology of its more powerful northern neighbour. With the series of political miscalculations of just a few Israelite kings, though, and the political canniness of their southern counterpart, Israel was crushed by the forces of history and Judah was given space to find its own, distinct voice. It is this voice that we find preserved in the earliest texts of the Bible and that would echo all the way down to our own times.<br />
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Recognise, though, that none of this was inevitable. The Biblical authors, in their mythologised accounts of their history, would impose on the events a theological teleology that attempted to reduce an endless succession of historical contingencies into a few simple principles (e.g. the perceived faithfulness / faithlessness of the population with regards to YHWH). Inevitably, the principles invoked were those that best served the designs of the ruling elite, as I shall shortly explain (see again <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2012/08/perfectionism-myth-and-politics.html" target="_blank">this</a> post). For now, though, I only want to emphasise that the theology of the Bible was not thought up by detached theologians, free to ponder the timeless mysteries of existence, but was rather formed by kings and priests who were reacting to the overwhelming power of the contingencies of history among which they had found themselves cast. The Bible is far more a product of worldly forces than many modern theologians would care to admit.<br />
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Anyway, it is to these historical processes that we now return.<br />
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<b>A Merging of Two Cultures</b><br />
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<b> </b>The thoroughness of the destruction of Israel cannot be overstated. In addition to the obliteration of cities and other physical structures, the Assyrians sent huge numbers of the Israelite population into exile. Certain regions were almost entirely depopulated. Those who escaped this forced exile had only one option: to flee south to Judah. <br />
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This massive influx of refugees had a number of extremely important effects on the Judahite state. The first and most obvious (at least archaeologically) is the rapid growth in city size that we can observe in the region. The majority of those fleeing the wrath of the Assyrian military would likely have been urban in origin, as the agriculturalists and pastoralists were probably not targeted and - in any case - probably lacked the means to upend themselves and relocate. The most remarkable consequence was the growth of Jerusalem, which expanded from a population of perhaps 1,000 people to an estimated 12,000 people during this period. The effects of this population influx will be explored more fully below, but for now we can focus on the less tangible (but still important) cultural shifts took place as a consequence of this movement.<br />
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Having been heavily involved in international trade for at least a few hundred years by the time their nation fell, the people of Israel must have had a well-developed scribal system to record all the transactions they were involved with. In the ancient world, literacy was predominantly used for such commercial purposes, and generally the emergence of complex trade and the emergence of literacy go hand-in-hand. Before the 8th century BC, there is little evidence of literary production in the largely rural, backward and forgotten kingdom of Judah. By the 7th century, however, there is clear evidence of a literary flourishing in the region. The assimilation of Israelite scribes is perhaps the best way to account for this sudden shift.<br />
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With the literary culture of the Israelite refugees came also their unique religious traditions. Their mythology, although sharing much in common with the mythology of the south, contained many differences that have since been smoothed-over by later editorial redactors, but that can still be identified in the Bible today. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elohist" target="_blank">E Source</a> of the Pentateuch is strongly suspected to have been penned in the north, for instance, based on its pre-occupation with northern locations and figures, and its use of the name "El" for God (hence Isra<i>el</i>). It had a strong emphasis on the Exodus from Egypt (which may be a reflection of the Assyrian exodus these northerners had just suffered) that hadn't featured at all prominently in the southern mythology up to this point. In contrast, the southern mythology (as preserved in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahwist" target="_blank">J Source</a>) is more focussed on Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are associated more with the Mesopotamian region to the east, and who figure less frequently in the northern accounts. The eventual conflation of the two traditions into a single, continuous narrative (the so-called "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahwist-Elohist" target="_blank">J / E Redaction</a>") was an early - and extremely successful - attempt to reconcile the divergent traditions of the north and the south. And, apparently, this question as to how exactly the two cultures might come to be assimilated was a matter of pressing concern for the Judahites of the late 8th century BC.<br />
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For the southern prophets, the destruction of Israel was a moment of great vindication for their belief in the monolatrous worship of YHWH. Isaiah, for instance, crows:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Human pride will lower its eyes,<br />The arrogance of men will be humbled.<br />Yahweh alone shall be exalted,<br />On that day.<br />Yes, that will be the day of Yahweh of armies<br />Against all pride and arrogance,<br />Against all that is great to bring it down.</i></blockquote>
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The theological developments here are clear: Israel was punished for its arrogance in worshipping other gods than YHWH. More than that, we are witnessing the growing belief in the universal power of YHWH. No longer was a simply a patron God of a small nation, whose earthly presence was confined to the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem Temple, he is rather becoming a universal force with the power to bring down foreign nations. While it's a little disingenuous to try to identify a clear, linear trend in the universalisation of God throughout history (as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Evolution-Back-Readers-Pick/dp/031606744X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344593431&sr=8-1&keywords=wright+evolution+of+god" target="_blank">certain authors </a>have attempted) the clear contrast between the God of Isaiah and the God of earlier southern traditions (i.e. the God who wrestles with Jacob and loses, or the God who cannot find Adam in his own garden) must be noted.<br />
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Although it was apparent to the southern prophets (and a couple of the surviving northern ones as well) that Israel had been punished for its religious plurality, it is not clear that the northerners saw it that way. It seems clear, rather, that they brought their synrectistic faith with them on the journey south, which raised the ire of the prophet Micah:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I am filled with power, with the spirit of the <span class="sc">Lord</span>, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. <br class="plus-b" />
Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong!</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i> Its rulers give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the <span class="sc">Lord</span> and say, ‘Surely the <span class="sc">Lord</span> is with us! No harm shall come upon us.’ Therefore because of you Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height. </i></blockquote>
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There is also evidence to suggest that the Judahite king, Ahaz, did his best to accommodate the refugees to this end. The book of Kings decries his construction of "high places" around the country, which were apparently sites of popular pilgrimage. The denunciation of such "high places" was apparently a later development, reflecting a time when the king and priests were attempting to centralise worship in Jerusalem alone (see below), because the earlier Biblical mythology depicts many of these high places as having been established by the patriarchs (e.g. Abraham's shrine at Hebron), which implies they occupied a venerated position at an earlier date. Having said that, there is every possibility that Ahaz's deference to religious pluralism was widely opposed at the time as well, and the issue quickly came to a head as we will see shortly. Additionally, there was probably some hostility between the refugees and the native Judahite population, which may go some way to explaining the Biblical emphasis on treating foreigners with due respect and hospitality (see also part 6).<br />
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In time, the two cultures would come to be skilfully conflated by later Biblical authors who had distinct theological and political reasons to treat the cultures of Israel and Judah as largely conterminous. In practice, however, there are fragmented Biblical passages (such as the ones above) that point to the difficulties and conflicts that must have occurred when cultures that had been gone down largely separate paths for over 200 years were suddenly reunited. The cultural differences must have presented one problem, but perhaps the more immediate problem faced by King Ahaz was that of how to physically accommodate so many thousands of refugees into such an economically backward part of the world. <br />
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<b>Urbanisation and the Growth of Judah</b><br />
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In addition to changing the landscape of culture and religion in Judah, the influx of refugees also produced a number of important economic effects. As mentioned earlier, this can perhaps best be seen in the unprecedented scope of urban development in Judah, as emphasised by the 12-fold growth of Jerusalem over just a few decades. This came to have an important effect not just on those already settled in the cities, but on the rural populations as well, who prior to this were likely able to exist without much direct interference from the nearby cities. The problem stems from the facts that towns or cities beyond a certain size simply become incapable of sustaining themselves: there simply is not enough land in the immediate area to feed everybody. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for the city to feed itself by taking food from the surrounding rural areas. In other words, for certain cities beyond a certain size (e.g. Jerusalem in the late 8th century BC), they cease to become <i>productive </i>and rather become <i>extractive</i>.<br />
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This extraction of food from rural agriculturalists (perhaps in the form of a centrally enforced tax or tithe) can understandably draw resentment from those involved in its production. We know that rural-urban tensions had existed in Judah even prior to the fall of Israel. The Queen Athaliah, for instance, appears to have been assassinated in a politically orchestrated move that could only really be described as a popular revolution. Those responsible are identified as "people of the land" (<i>'am ha-aretz</i>) and the Biblical account rather dryly notes that "all the people of the land rejoiced; and the city was quiet after Athaliah had been killed with the sword at the king’s house" (2 Kings 11:20). Elsewhere in the Bible - particularly in later periods - the expression "people of the land" can be used in a pejorative sense to denote backwards and ignorant folk who failed to observe prescribed ritual. The tensions between cities and rural folk have a deep history, then, and it was this tension that would eventually bring King Josiah to the throne, a king who more than any other would come to shape the theology of the Bible. This was all to come in the future, however.<br />
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For now, the growing urbanisation of Judah - and the need to arrange the redistribution of food from rural areas to the cities - accelerated the development of literacy in the state. As mentioned earlier, the skills for writing would have been brought south from Israel with the refugees, and its use would have been primarily commercial. With the distribution of vast quantities of food and other goods, an accounting system becomes necessary to keep track of contracts, debts and a myriad of other functions related to commerce. Commercial literacy implies general literacy, and its true that it does seem to be in this period that we witness the first signs of widespread writing in Judah. It is also from around this time that many scholars suggest that Biblical mythology first began to assume its written form.<br />
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Another effect of urbanisation can be expressed in terms of a "division of labour", though here the expression might be a little euphemistic. Now that the people of the cities were not required to invest time in growing the food they ate (because they were extracting it from the rural folk), they were free to pursue other activities. This might include, again, learning literacy skills (you can hopefully see just how intertwined literacy and economic development are by now) but also the development of other crafts, such as masonry or pottery. Indeed, this appears to be a time where more elaborate forms of dwelling and pottery begin to emerge in Judah in the archaeological record. In short, despite the protestations of the later Deuteronomist(s), Judah under the rule of King Ahaz appears to have experienced a period of relatively secure growth and development in the shadow of fallen state of Israel. This burgeoning period of peace and prosperity, however, was to be short-lived.<br />
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<b>Hezekiah and the Assyrian Invasion</b><br />
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When Hezekiah succeeded his father Ahaz as king in the year 715 BC, he set about almost immediately to destroy the "high places" his father had built. The laudatory account of his reign in the Book of Kings attributes this to his piety and monolatrous devotion to YHWH, but a more cynical explanation immediately presents itself. In the first place, this represents an unambiguous assertion of centralised power that simply would not have been possible without the rapid growth of Jerusalem. In other words, what we're witnessing here is the emergence of a <i>state</i>: a central authority, holding a monopoly on power in the region, with both the will and the ability to enforce its "law" (if that is the appropriate term) over an entire population. It is at this stage of social development that the creation of a religious orthodoxy first becomes possible. While Hezekiah would ultimately fail in this pursuit, it apparently wasn't for want of trying.<br />
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In the second place, the centralisation of religious power here derived important benefits to both the king and those closely allied to him (i.e. the Jerusalem priests). Prescribing the conditions under which worship can be properly performed increases the power of these central forces, not just in the abstract sense of being able to enforce their ideology on the people, but also in the more immediate, material sense of economic gain. In the ancient world, temples and places of worship were not merely instrumental in their functions as "holy places", but they also served as important centres of commerce. An analogous situation would be the status of Mecca in the pre-Islamic world, where the situation of a number of pagan idols in the city attracted pilgrims from all over the Arabic peninsula to worship there. Many of these pilgrims were traders and merchants, and they made the periodic <i>Hajj</i> a time of great economic importance for the city. Muhammed understood this, which might go some way to explaining the importance that he and the earliest Muslims placed on the city, and why it would eventually become their seat of power.<br />
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Hezekiah's decision to centralise worship at the Temple may have had a similar effect on the economy of Jerusalem. We know in later times that the Temple served an important economic function in the city (providing animals for sacrifice, food storage, money exchanges and other mercantile functions) so there is no reason to think that Hezekiah wasn't attempting something similar at this early date. In any case, the effect must have surely been an increase in both political and economic power within the city. It continued to grow during Hezekiah's rule, and many important building projects in the city (including a large <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezekiah%27s_Tunnel" target="_blank">tunnel</a> - truly a great feat of engineering for the time) have been dated to the time of Hezekiah's rule.<br />
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In time, though, it all came unstuck. Since the fall of Israel, Judah had been paying the Assyrians tribute as a vassal state. We can presume that the tribute was onerous, but in return the Assyrians granted Judah a scope of political freedom and autonomy which permitted the kind of social developments I've been exploring in this post. This makes Hezekiah's eventual decision to rebel against the Assyrian empire all the more bewildering.<br />
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In a move that draws obvious parallels with the ill-fated machinations of the Israelite king Hoshea some 20 years earlier, Hezekiah announced that he would withdraw his tribute to the Assyrian empire upon learning of the death of its King Sargon - sensing the potential power vacuum as an opportunity for freedom - and then promptly signed a military agreement with the Egyptians. In part this may have been a move inspired by advice from his religious advisers, who apparently viewed their existence under the yoke of the Assyrians as an affront to YHWH: Isaiah, for example, apparently counciled Hezekiah with the assurance that YHWH would not permit Jerusalem to fall in the event of a military campaign (2 King 19:20-34). In a sense Isaiah was right, but there is little else to commend the course of action Hezekiah and his religious acolytes came to undertake.<br />
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When Sennacherib assumed power in Assyria, he moved immediately against the rebellious Judahites. The military campaign was brutally one-sided. By 701 BC - four years after Hezekiah's withdrawal of tribute - all of Judah and the surrounding lands had been taken by the Assyrians. As had happened to Hoshea twenty years earlier in Israel, when Hezekiah called on the Egyptians for military assistance they simply failed to show up. Most of the major cities in Judah were destroyed, or at best completely ravaged by looting. A surviving inscription made by Sennachrib boasts:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>As for Hezekiah of Judah, who did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and to the countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered them. . . . I drove out 200,150 people, young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle, beyond counting and considered them booty.</i></blockquote>
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The account is obviously hyperbolic, but it does give an indication of the severity of the rout. And by this point, the Assyrians were laying siege to Jerusalem itself.<br />
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To his credit, the king was apparently well-prepared for this siege. His tunnel, for example, was built to provide the city with access to water in the event of a siege, and he constructed a number of defensive structures as well (including the still surviving <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Wall_%28Jerusalem%29" target="_blank">Broad Wall</a>). The city held-out admirably for a long period of time and indeed never actually fell to the Assyrians. The reasons for this are not clear: the Biblical account triumphantly attributes the Assyrian withrawal to divine intervention, but a more prosaic explanation will probably suffice here. The Bible notes that Hezekiah offered the Assyrian king a massive indemnity (2 Kings 18:14-16) which was apparently rebuffed, but this may simply reflect a later sheen placed on the event by the ideological disposition of the later Biblical authors. Likely, Hezekiah was able to preserve his city (and his throne) by offering this tribute and by reaffirming his vassalship to the Assyrian king. Isaiah's prophecy was validated, but the king's policy was not. Judah, like Israel before it, had been laid almost entirely to waste by the might of the Assyrian army.<br />
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<b>Manasseh and the Rebuilding of Judah</b><br />
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There are few figures in the Bible that are the target of more sustained and unambiguous invective than that of Manasseh. Eighteen verses are devoted to his reign in the Book of Kings (2 Kings 21:1-18) and they positively drip with loathing and resentment. The account here is little more than a laundry list of his alleged "abominable practices" including doing "what was evil in the eyes of the Lord", overseeing the "spilling of much innocent blood" and provoking the Lord and his prophets "to anger". Such was the audacious scope of his evil projects that apparently the authors didn't have enough space to fit them all into this short passage: the reader is instructed to consult a separate text for "the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all that he did, and the sin that he committed" (v. 17). What happened here? What did he do to inspire such vitriol to spill from the pens of the Deuteronomist historians?<br />
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Manasseh, in short, inherited a mess. The Biblical chronology is a little confused here, but it's probable that he ascended to the throne just a few years after the Assyrian invasion, while he was still a young man. While Jerusalem had survived the onslaught, little else around it had. Archaeological evidence shows that the rural areas in Judah were thoroughly destroyed and depopulated in the aftermath of the invasion; Jerusalem stood, but it had no-one to feed it. Whatever power Jerusalem claimed to hold in the region was now exerted only over empty and unproductive lands. To make the scope of the economic devastation even more urgent, Judah was also now required to pay a more onerous tribute to the Assyrian king than ever before. Where to begin? What could Manasseh do to rebuild the local economy in the face of such overwhelming desolation?<br />
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Manasseh's first and most important act was to set about repopulating the rural areas and to resume agricultural production. In this aim it seems he was roundly successful: the archaeological record indicates a huge growth in the number of agricultural settlements from this time. He not only repopulated older agricultural regions, but forged new frontiers, overseeing agricultural production in previously barren and uncultivated regions. He achieved this by building dams and cisterns that were previously unknown in this part of the world. But could only part of the solution: who would actually man these farms? How to attract people back to these regions that had been so thoroughly depopulated?<br />
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The Bible seems to offer an important clue: "[Manasseh] rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he erected altars for Baal, made a sacred pole [<i>asherah</i>], as King Ahab of Israel had done, worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them" (2 Kings 21:3). Now in the polemic of this later Biblical author, these developments are (predictably) decried as unambiguously evil. Manasseh is depicted here as a faithless and depraved man, whose deeds were an affront to YHWH and which defiled the purity of Judah's monolatrous faith. But these, obviously, are the views of later authors who rejected the any policies that might have been directed at fostering religious pluralism. So what were Manasseh's <i>real</i> reasons? Why were these policies ultimately successful in rejuvenating the Judahite state?<br />
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As I mentioned earlier, in the ancient world there were frequently deep economic connections between places of worship and the surrounding economy. Places of worship (temples, "high places" etc.) could serve as beacons to attract both settled communities and itinerant merchants, and acted as central points in a landscape where business could be conducted. The cities fortunate enough to host a major place of worship (e.g. Mecca, the Parthenon, the Jerusalem Temple in later years etc.) were also significant hubs of economic activity. Although the relationship could run both ways (i.e. it is undoubtedly common that a place of worship could be made more important by the economic conditions around it) there is a simply undeniable connection between the centralisation of religious worship and economic centralisation. "If you build it they will come": Manasseh understood this well, and I think this the logic behind his erection of "high places", "altars" and "<i>asherah</i>" across the landscape of Judah.<br />
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Although the later Biblical authors decried these moves as a deviation from some timeless religious orthodoxy, it seems apparent that even at this late date - the mid-7th century BC - the concept of a YHWH-only religious cult remained a hard sell. Even if we can presume that the elite, literate core of Judahite society had settled definitively on a fixed and inviolable religious system, evidence abounds that those who existed beyond the inner-sanctum still engaged in far more more pluralistic practices. The building of these high-places under Manasseh's rule - and the great alacrity with which people were attracted to them - shows that demand for such religious practices existed, and indeed was capable of wielding an important influence over royal policy.<br />
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The Jerusalem priests, who had settled into positions of significant power and influence during the time of Hezekiah, were understandably annoyed by this development. The decentralisation of religious institutions would only serve to undermine their standing and legitimacy in Judahite society. These "high places" could be operated without the mediation of priests, which stands in stark contrast to the highly sanctified, exclusivist rituals of the Jerusalem Temple. It must be remembered here that the priests saw themselves as a social caste that stood both above and outside of normal Judahite society. They were not permitted to own land or engage in menial work, so the decentralisation of religious worship genuinely posed a threat to their only source of livelihood. That is not to say that they were motivated solely by self-interest in their opposition to Manasseh's reforms - perhaps we can take them at their word when they say they had deep theological concerns for the soul of Judah - but the social and economic marginalisation they suffered here must be remembered when we begin to explore the events that transpired after Manasseh's long rule. It must again be stated again: in the <i>longue durée<b> </b></i>of history, it is generally social and economic forces that shape the trajectory of theology, not the other way around.<br />
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And it is now that we can take stock of the social and religious situation in Judah in the middle of the 7th century. By the time of Manasseh's death in 643 BC, he had overseen a period of economic growth that was probably unmatched in the rest of Judahite history. He had taken a land ravaged by war - depopulated and unproductive - and transformed it into a vibrant economy, that came to develop for the first time strong trading links with the empires around it. Although it still existed under the yoke of the Assyrian empire, the archaeological evidence seems to indicate a time of great peace and prosperity in the region. Manasseh achieved this in part, however, by taking power from the priests in Jerusalem and divesting it into rival cults overseen by rival castes. By the end of his reign, trade had permitted those in the cities to amass great material wealth, often at the expense of the comparatively impoverished rural areas which apparently viewed themselves as the victims of exploitation.<br />
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It is these two forces - the scorned priesthood and the exploited poor - who would join forces to bring to the throne the most important king in Judahite history. He will be the topic of our next post.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-46489694197179347362012-08-09T19:24:00.001+10:002012-08-09T19:49:16.142+10:00Perfectionism, Myth and Politics<br />
In the evolution of mythology, there is a tendency over time towards what literary critic Kenneth Burke calls "Perfectionism"<sup>1</sup>. This is not a qualitative judgement, implying that myths become somehow "better" over time, but rather an observation that myths tend towards a kind of absolutism; a perfection of narrative in which particular symbols, themes and structures are given pre-eminence over particular details. Even where myths begin as historical events, their continual telling and re-telling strips them of all historical details, to the point where the purpose of the story can no longer be said to relate the details of a particular event but rather to "give counsel" in some way; that is, to provide a "moral", some "practical advice" or a "proverb or maxim".<sup>2</sup> It is this gradual tendency to place the story in an indefinite setting, outside of any known time or place, that constitutes the entelechial drift of the myth towards "Perfectionism".<br />
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Partly, this process may be an accidental consequence of human memory. Humans tend to perform relatively poorly when it comes to the recall of brute facts, but are generally much better when asked to recall structured or emotionally salient information. For this reason, many myths involve repetitive elements (the rule of three is particularly pertinent here) or draw on some of the more primal, deep-seated human emotions (which explains why sex and death feature so prominently in all mythologies). One possible test for the historicity of myths concerns the extent to which historical facts - as opposed to some more symbolic "moral" message - are central to the narrative, and the "pedigree" of a literary myth (i.e. how old it is) can be ascertained by examining how faithfully it could have been transmitted orally given the fallibility of human memory. As an example, the highly structured and repetitive parables of Jesus in the synoptic gospels (which were penned at least 40 years after his death) are generally seen as having a pedigree that can be traced back to Jesus himself (as they are memorable in structure, they promote counter-intuitive ethics and so on), where as the long-winded, largely aimless ramblings of John's Jesus are generally seen as unhistorical because they could not have been reliably transmitted via oral means for sixty years without significant deviation.<br />
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But in addition to this accidental shift, changes to the fundamental details of a myth may reflect the political inclinations of later authors / editors. This may be through the <i>deliberate</i> addition or omission of pertinent details (for instance, the kind of details the author(s) of Chronicles added to or omitted from of the Book of Kings that he was using as a source) or the <i>deliberate</i> introduction of a radically new hermeneutic, in order to change the way the mythology is understood at a fundamental level (for instance, the way that OT myths were approached by the earliest Christians). It has been suggested that the final form of certain myths - particularly where it has been dependent on literature - have been shaped and controlled by the elite of ancient societies, and that they were often used as tools to legitimise certain political policies to the wider population. In the Bible, the way that the D and P sources of the Pentateuch used older myths to legitimise the particular aspirations of their authors (a unified kingdom and the centrality of the priestly class respectively) serve as a good example of this phenomenon.<br />
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<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What the formation of such mythological legitimation serves to do is to <i>naturalise</i> certain political claims. In this world of myth, the rule of priests and kings is a natural, divinely-ordained state of the universe that simply cannot be resisted. The contingent, ephemeral nature of power is simply subsumed by the intractable timelessness of the mythological claim. To quote Roland Barthes, "[M]yth
has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification,
and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process
is exactly that of bourgeois ideology... A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance... <i>myth is depoliticized speech</i>"<sup>3</sup>. In other words, myth can be used by the ruling classes to downplay the historical contingency of their political claims and to instead express them in the timeless and teleological language of <i>mythic</i> history.</div>
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So, we might observe four basic claims at this stage:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1) Myths have a "perfectionist" tendency, where - over time - specific details (time, place, people etc.) are gradually lost in its retelling, leaving a skeleton narrative structure which renders it suitable for (infinitely pliable) moral messages.<br />
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2) This process can be accidental (a natural consequence of human memory and narrative construction) or it can be deliberate.<br />
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3) Where the process of change is deliberate, it is normally the social elite who are responsible.<br />
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4) Myth is wielded in this way to "naturalise" otherwise contingent political claims.</blockquote>
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Now the creation and utilisation of mythology is not something confined to the distant past. It's an ongoing process that continues to shape and inform our understanding of the world we inhabit. As narrative-seeking beings, the pull to explain complex historical events in the form of simple narratives underscored by vivid symbolism is sometimes too strong to resist. Many examples could be marshalled to support this claim - high among them, the importance of mythology to the formation of "imagined communities" in many modern theories of nationalism - but I'll choose to focus on just one for now: the pre-occupation among the American right with the events of the American revolution.<br />
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I spoke in a previous post about the "sacralisation" of the American constitution in modern American political thought, and in doing so hoped to highlight the similarities between the constitutional fetishism of American society and the similar textual fetishism inherent to the Abrahamic faiths. Here I want to show the relationship between religious mythology and the blinkered understanding of American history espoused by the American Right. <br />
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What distinguishes "religious" mythology from mythology in general is its infallibility and its universality, at least in the minds of those who adhere to this given religious tradition. What do I mean by this?<br />
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By "infallibility" I don't simply mean that these myths are perceived as being literally true (though the believer may assert this anyway) but rather that they are placed completely beyond any possibility of reproach. If they appear to be lending support to an idea or impulse that we find repulsive, the fault must lie with our exegesis rather than the moral message of the myth itself. There are many millions of people alive today, for example, who believe that a wholesome moral message can be derived from the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, or who believe that the Koran does not impel holy violence. Placing these texts in their appropriate historical context - a context in which extreme violence was an everyday occurrence - is apparently insufficient: we must assume, rather, that we have simply read the texts wrongly, because the timelessness of sacralised religious mythology permits no other analysis. <br />
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The universality of religious mythology, on the other hand, pertains not simply to their timelessness and "placelessness" but rather the ubiquity with which they can be utilised to explain almost anything. To a sufficiently skilled Abrahamic theologian, there is simply no moral quandary or historical eventuality that cannot be expressed in the mythical language of their chosen text. If we want to assert the (un-)righteousness of an event, the only necessary task is to identify an appropriate passage that can be used to justify the position we wished to assert from the very beginning. If the allegorical relationship between the passage and the event in question is oblique in the extreme, so much the better: a pleiotropy of meaning in religious texts is always to be encouraged. But back to the topic at hand.<br />
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Like the mythology of Judeo-Christianity or Ancient Greece, the mythology of the American Right has is both infallible and universal in its scope and application. For the average Republican, there are few events in everyday life in the United States that cannot be explained as part of the mythology of the American story. Even the most anodyne matters - shop clerks wishing "Happy Holidays" or the first lady encouraging healthy eating - are given an almost existential urgency by their placement in a far deeper narrative propelled almost entirely by politically charged symbols and meanings. The American story, according to the Right, is one long history of patriots defending "freedom" (an entirely symbolic word in this usage, denoting nothing of substance) against the creeping forces of "tyranny" (which is also only ever loosely defined). Placed in such an epic narrative, the shop clerk and the First Lady are both antagonistic characters who represent an omnipresent "threat" to the "American way of life". The first undermines Christian hegemony, the second undermines the sovereignty of the individual, both of which are presumed by the American Right to have been enshrined in culture from the very beginning.<br />
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Beyond contemporary events, there is also a necessity for the American Right to re-interpret historical events through narrow lens of their mythology. The "Boston Tea Party", for example, was the culmination of a series of disputes between the colonists and the crown over the (perceived) exploitative behaviour of the latter. Read through the lens of the 2012 GOP platform, however, all the complexity and contingency of historical reality is smoothed-out into a simple mythic narrative of rebellion against tyranny and (especially) taxation. The events of the Cold War, to use a more recent example, have similarly been stripped of all their historical complexity and have since been retold by the modern American Right as a simple, dichotomous moral message concerning the triumph of freedom over bondage, capitalism over communism, good over evil. Such an all-encompassing "dualism", by the way, is a common and persistent feature inherent to many mythologies. <br />
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Although the creeping lunacy of GOP policy represents a rather recent development - an "historical contingency" in every possible sense - its defenders imagine that it can be traced, in a continuous, uninterrupted line, to the views of the Founding Fathers. Their movement, in other words, represents the only unadulterated, orthodox politics within the nation. Their politics are not simply the contingent consequence of the historical forces into which they happened to be born (the Cold War and opposition to the civil rights movement are obvious places to situate the origin of these politics) but rather the fulfilment and final manifestation of the hopes and wishes of the increasingly deified Founding Fathers. Note how these politics are thus <i>naturalised</i>: laissez-faire capitalism, gun rights and Christianity represent the politics of this original "pristine" state. Any exceptions to this (such as the politics of the Democrats) are therefore wilful corruptions or deviations that must be resisted as heretical. Like any other religious mythology, the capacity for a plurality or heterodoxy of thought is simply denounced as a matter of course.<br />
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The maintenance of such a world-view isn't easy though. Recorded history - as opposed to the vague, mythological dreaminess of their remembered history - paints a different picture of the Founding Fathers. They didn't offer a unified view of politics, but were rather deeply divided on many important issues (hence the relatively limited scope of the constitution). They didn't found the US as a Christian nation, but rather as a secular one, and their surviving writings on this issue bear this out. They didn't intend for the US to be a free-market economy, but were rather interested in driving US industry with the involvement of government and the erection of trade protectionism<sup>4</sup>. Not that this stops right-wing ideologues from arguing otherwise, but it can only be observed that their mythology has been erected <i>against</i> history, not with it.<br />
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And it is this observation that should always be remembered: where myth, for all its uses, is in conflict with recorded history, it is the latter that should be given preference, not the former. When someone tries to argue that the US was founded on Christian principles or on principles of untrammelled individualism (as though the two were self-evidently compatible) it is incumbent upon the rest of us to make two observations: firstly, the claims are in error. Secondly, these erroneous claims have been fabricated by certain "elites" - perhaps deliberately in certain cases - to naturalise and legitimise a world-view that could not be adequately justified to the people without resorting to the emotionally-charged symbolism of mythology. Our resistance to having our capacity for rational, independent thought completely subsumed by an all-pervasive mythology is apparently no greater than that of the ancients; our myths are just more secular and more overtly political. <br />
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1) Laurence Coupe - Myth, p. 7<br />
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2) Walter Benjamin - Illuminations, p. 86<br />
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3) Mythologies, p. 142<br />
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4) Words such as "capitalism" or even "economy" were not yet in use. In fact, the first true explication of free-market ideology - <i>Wealth of Nations</i> - wasn't published until the same year as the declaration of independence.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-59915305096439507882012-07-25T03:06:00.002+10:002012-09-07T05:26:20.823+10:00The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 2 (1000 BC - 734 BC)<b>Before the Monarchy</b><br />
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As already described in my last post, the land which comprises the southern half of modern Israel was, before 1000 BC, likely a largely undeveloped and sparsely populated region, crippled by fractious political claims. Local chiefs ("judges" in the Bible) competed for the limited resources available and - for a long time - none emerged with any strong claim to authority over the region. The Bible tells us that the land then was divided amongst "the Twelve Tribes" (that is, descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob), but this is an explanation derived more from theology than remembered history. The names of these tribes are given 25 times in the Old Testament, but the lists are <a href="http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/History-12Tribes.htm" target="_blank">largely contradictory</a> and are not of much value in determining what kind of divisions may have existed among these proto-Israelites. In any case, it bears repeating that there is little to suggest that these factions differed in any culturally significant way: all were seemingly inheritors of the Canaanite tradition and represent a clear continuity with what preceded them. Whatever may have divided these earliest groups, it certainly cannot be attributed to any major ethnic, cultural or religious differences. <br />
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In any case, by around 1000 BC we can begin to discern the emergence of political stability and urban development in the northern part of the region, a period of time close to that which the Bible asserts for the beginning of the Davidic monarchy. The status of King David in the Bible and (therefore) in early Hebrew theology cannot be overstated. His emergence as king represented for the later Biblical authors a clear demonstration of the power of YHWH, a validation for his monolatrous worship and a continuing justification for the existence of the united kingdom of Israel. We shall see a particularly pronounced expression of Davidic mythology when we address the reign of King Josiah in part 4. Quite how this Biblical picture squares with history, however, is a topic of ongoing and rather acrimonious debate among scholars. On one side there are many who are still prepared to assert the full historicity of the Biblical account, suggesting that the available archaeological evidence squares with the Bible's account of the emergence of a strong and dominant political leader in the region in around 1000 BC. On the other side, there are those who would go so far as to say that King David never existed. Here, I'll be treading a rather more equivocal path: asserting the historicity of King David while also recognising the Biblical account has been shaped more by later political and theological concerns than by genuinely remembered history.<br />
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<b>David and the Establishment of Judean Monarchy</b><br />
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In 1000 BC, the land of Judah (in the southern region of modern Israel) was small and insignificant even by the modest standards of the surrounding region. Its major city, Jerusalem, had been a seat of power for one "Abdi-Heba" in the 14th century BC, but its small size up to the turn of the millennium indicates that it was not a city from which any greater power ever emanated. The majority of Judah's inhabitants (who may have numbered as little as 5000 at this time) were pastoralists and likely lived without much interference from whatever authority resided there. It was in this small and largely uninteresting region that a man named "David" came to claim kingship over.<br />
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Quite how or why David emerged as king of Judah remains an unsolved mystery. The Bible tells us that the prophet Samuel found the young David tending sheep, and invited him to the court of Saul, a self-proclaimed "king" in the northern part of modern Israel (henceforth simply "Israel"). After various intrigues and an attempted assassination, David and Saul found themselves leading armies against each other and the former prevailed. David found himself anointed as king over both Judah and Israel, uniting these regions for the first time in their history and - with his son Solomon - overseeing a period of unmatched wealth and prosperity. A famous and stirring account, no doubt, but how reliable is it?<br />
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The historicity of the Davidic saga, it has become increasingly clear, is rather dubious overall, but there may still be kernels of historical truth there. In the first place, we might note that there appear to be at least two different sources for this tale - one complimentary and one rather uncomplimentary. The possibility has been raised by some scholars that the complimentary account was penned by a sympathetic Judean scribe, who saw David as the rightful leader of the united kingdom, and the other penned by a rather more antagonistic northern scribe who felt that David had duplicitously murdered the rightful king of Israel in a naked power-grab. Such an account, if true, could therefore be said to be attested by two independent sources in two different regions, which would lend greater credence to its historicity. There are, however, compelling reasons to cast doubt on the literal Biblical account.<br />
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Firstly, given the low population and technological backwardness of the region, it is unlikely that anyone whose power was based in Judah at the turn of the first millennium BC could have raised an army of particularly formidable strength, which renders the likelihood of David mounting a successful campaign to depose a competing monarch rather small. This is heightened by archaeological evidence which suggests that the northern region of Israel at this time was far more densely settled than the south, and may have been home to a population of around 40,000 (that is, eight times bigger than David's Judah). In fairness, the Bible does suggest that David enlisted the help of the Philistines in this campaign, but there is no external evidence that the Philistines would have been any better placed to wage such a campaign so far from their coastal home.<br />
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Besides, even if we do accept the Biblical account it's difficult to explain why Israel remained a regional power that continued to dwarf that of the southern kingdom. Even if we can accept the Biblical claim that David was once the sole ruler of a united kingdom from the southern city of Jerusalem, it is clear that he could not have exercised any great control over the northern territories, rendering his claim to such territories tenuous at best. That is to say, whatever the historical realities of the Davidic monarchy, the Biblical claim that the territories of Israel and Judah were ever united in any meaningful way by a powerful king named David are mostly the mythical products of later monarchical claims. If there was a historical King David (as most scholars accept) his power was far more limited in scope. <br />
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In actuality, it seems far more plausible that David's most major success was the rather more modest (though still significant) pacification and unification of the "tribes" of Judah. In the power vacuum of competing strong-men, it seems likely that David was simply the most successful among them and the first to emerge in the region with legitimate and widespread authority. He centralised power in Jerusalem and successfully oversaw a period of relatively benign growth and development in the region (as evidenced in the archaeological record by the growth in city size in the region during the 10th century BC). His establishment of a centralised, increasingly urban Judean state under the auspices of kingship came to solidify forever the foundation of the culture that gave rise to Judaism and Christianity. His legacy will be explored further in subsequent posts, but for now it is time to turn to developments in the northern kingdom of Israel.<br />
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<b>Israel Ascendant</b><br />
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As mentioned earlier, the stature of southern kingdom of Judah was comprehensively dwarfed for the entire time period covered by this post by the stature of its northern neighbour, Israel. Israel was bigger, more densely populated, more heavily involved in international trade and - most certainly - more influential in the region. Judah and Israel shared a common cultural background (both clearly emerged from the wider culture of Canaan) though there were differences (particularly concerning religion and myth) which I shall explore more fully in my next post. For now, though, it's only important to note that for all they shared in common, Israel and Judah were separate nations (even according to the Biblical account) from very early on.<br />
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Leaving aside the question of the historicity of David and Saul, it is clear that in the 10th century BC Israel was a comparatively strong and advanced nation by regional standards. It had achieved such influence in the region that by 926 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh was incited to move against it as a legitimate competitor for power and influence in the region. Despite the fairly comprehensive nature of the Pharaoh's victory (archaeological evidence suggests a fairly steep decline in the size of urban settlements in this period) Israel soon re-emerged as a relatively powerful state.<br />
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The process by which it achieved such ascendency is difficult to uncover, because the only comprehensive records we have for the region at the time were penned by unsympathetic Judean writers hundreds of years later in the Biblical Book of Kings. These describe a decadent and unfaithful culture, beholden to foreign gods (which may simply be a reflection of Israel's international standing) and ruled by capricious, murderous claimants to an ephemeral throne that was shared among several competing "houses". Whether there is any historical truth to this portrait is difficult to say, but we do know that the state of Israel was ultimately consolidated - and subsequently underwent a great period of growth in power and influence - when King Omri took the throne in around 885 BC. He undertook massive building projects that were originally attributed to the King Solomon by the Judean authors of the Bible - but which most archaeologists now believe are better dated to the time of Omri - and he established the capital city at Samaria. He also undertook the first of a wave of conquests that eventually led to Israel claiming territory in Syria and other nearby regions. The Assyrians - whose influence in the region will be explored more fully in the next post - continued to refer to Israel as "the House of Omri" for well over 100 years after his death. He is the first Biblical character for whom we have unequivocal archaeological evidence and it would be no exaggeration to call Omri the first major king of Biblical history.<br />
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The rapid growth of Israel during this period presented also marked a period of increasing marginalisation for Judah, which seems to have been little more than a vassal state in the 9th century. The Judean king Jehoshaphat (who reigned from 870-846 BC) was apparently forced into providing men and horses for the wars of conquest being waged by Israel, and later his daughter was married off to an Israelite king. This marriage provided the grounds for a united kingdom of sorts, though it must be noted that the power balance here was incredibly asymmetric. This was unequivocally an Omridic Kingdom rather than a Davidic one. <br />
<br />
The ascendency of the Kingdom of Israel would only grow with time, arguably reaching its apex under the leadership of Jeroboam II. Eventually, though, it would be brought to heel by the simply irresistible might of the Assyrian empire in 722 BC. Yet even before then there were critics of the policy of Israel who suggested - rather presciently - that its pursuit of power and its (perceived) promiscuity concerning foreign gods would eventually lead to its downfall. It is to these critics that we turn to next.<br />
<br />
<b>The Rise of Prophecy and Religious Orthodoxy</b><br />
<br />
Prophecy was a common feature of most ancient near-Eastern religious traditions. Contrary to popular understanding, the main function of prophets was not to divine the future so much as to offer a religious critique of state policy. The future-looking aspects of prophecy were usually conditional: <i>if </i>you continue to pursue this policy, then God <i>will </i>do this. They were, in a very real sense, the world's first political commentators. <br />
<br />
One important fact is that by the 9th century both Israel and Judah were worshipping YHWH as their primary God. While I've been focussing on the differences of the two states up until now, I should properly emphasise the overwhelming cultural similarities that permitted many prophets to have successful careers (if that is the right word) in both kingdoms. Early prophets such as Hosea, Amos and Isaiah preached on both sides of the border and their proclamations were directed against both kingdoms. It's difficult to tell exactly what differences existed in the religious outlook of the two kingdoms, but it is apparent that the commonalities ran deep enough for "southern" prophets to have received a wide audience for their particular brand of doom-saying amongst the people of the north. And it is indeed true that the majority of their anger was directed against the northern elite and their perceived sinfulness. <br />
<br />
Common to each of these prophets was the belief that Israel (or - more specifically - its ruling class) had shunned YHWH by erecting shrines to foreign gods, by abandoning the plight of the poor, by forming alliances with foreign powers and generally disregarding their religious and political responsibilities. This seems as much a reaction to the growing cosmopolitanism of Israel as anything else. The stature of these early prophets cannot be reliably ascertained, but tradition generally paints them as rural folk called by God (reluctantly at times) to bring the powers-that-be into line. They, in a sense, represent the growing divide separating the rural, perhaps more traditional parts of the land with their urban rulers, a theme that has recurred throughout history and that I will explore more fully in my next post. For now, though, it need only be noted that the early prophets do genuinely seem to have been reactionary forces against the creeping decadence and internationalism of the ruling elite. The punishment for such intransigence would - the prophets assure us - be swift and brutal, a judgement borne out by subsequent history.<br />
<br />
At this time (8th century BC) we can probably safely assume that little of the Bible as we know it had been written down. Evidence for widespread literacy is extremely sparse for the region at the time, and even the books of these early prophets suggest a reliance on oral - not written - transmission. The prophets are generally commanded to speak the words of God rather than write them down, and there is evidence from within the books themselves that they were not to be collated textually (by the "disciples" of the prophets) until a later date (e.g. Isaiah 8:16. Isaiah 1:1 indicates the book was not written by Isaiah himself). The kind of social forces that both centralised and sacralised the status of the written text in ancient Israel (and which began to produce the texts of the Bible as we know it) wouldn't arrive until the 7th century BC. This, however, begs the question of what the Judean prophets were basing their substance of proclamations on, given the lack of some definitive text from which to derive a fixed theology.<br />
<br />
In truth, the idea that there was some pristine state of religious orthodoxy from which the northern kings had fallen (and that the early prophets were looking to reinstate) is plainly anachronistic and plainly more representative of the ideology of later Biblical authors than of lived history. We know from certain archaeological finds (for example, the graffiti at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khirbet_el-Qom" target="_blank">Khirbet el-Qom</a>) that the religious orthodoxy of later periods had yet to emerge by the 8th century BC. We can probably still assume widespread henotheistic practices at this time, so the early prophets - to the extent that the words attributed to them in the Bible were actually theirs and not the product of later redaction - might well have been in a minority position in their insistence on the monolatrous worship of YHWH. Whatever the case, the cosmopolitan nature of Israel - including the syncretisistic worship of foreign gods - may not have been a matter of widespread controversy among the populace at the time, and it's unfair to uncritically accept the judgements levelled by the prophets that the kings who oversaw such prosperity in the region at the time were in any way degenerate for drawing on foreign sources for religious inspiration. It would be similarly remiss to assume that the eventual fall of Israel can be traced to its faithlessness or - in the words of Hosea - its "whoredom" to foreign powers.<br />
<br />
It is to the fall of Israel - and its influence on the formation of the Bible - that we will look at in the next post.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-36505535769232949092012-07-11T00:22:00.000+10:002012-09-18T23:31:04.058+10:00The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 1 (Pre-1000 BC)<b>A New People:</b> <br />
<br />
Although the origins of ancient Israel remain obscure and have yet to be definitively settled by the science of archaeology, my own account of its history begins with a cataclysmic wave of migrations that changed forever the face of the Mediterranean. This event, known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse" target="_blank">Bronze Age</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse" target="_blank"> collapse</a>, saw cities and civilizations topple like dominoes under the massive influx of people displaced displaced by earlier, unknown events to the north and west of modern day Israel. Little is known about who these people were, where they came from or what caused them to move (though any number of environmental and political causes have been invoked), but what we do know is that they left in their wake a wave of destruction and political upheaval that forever changed the course of near-Eastern history.<br />
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The relevance to the history of Israel begins in around 1250 BC, when some of these refugees landed on the Gaza coast and began a slow - but thorough - military campaign of destruction. Virtually all major archaeological sites from this region at this time exhibit scars of violence, and many cities were subsequently left abandoned for centuries. Again, little is known about the origin of the people responsible, but lexicographical and archaeological evidence seems to suggest a Greek, Minoan or perhaps even Balkan origin. Whatever the case, the people who descended from these invaders and settled in the region came to be known to the Biblical authors as "Philistines", the origin of our modern name for the region, "Palestine". There were two major consequences so far as the history of Israel is concerned.<br />
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The first is that the tenuous Egyptian grip on the region was severely weakened by the incursions of these "Sea People" (as they were known to the Egyptians). The loose confederacy of city states (known as Canaan and overseen by the Egyptian state) was fractured and smaller states emerged in their wake. Among them was a people known as "Israel", which - according to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merneptah_Stele" target="_blank">Merneptah Steele</a> - was subsequently attacked and defeated by the Egyptian Pharaoh, along with the other rebelling states who had briefly formed an opportunistic coalition against him. This can be dated to around 1205 BC and is the first archaeological evidence we have for the existence of Israel as an independent people (and the grammar of the inscription makes it clear that we are talking about a people rather than a particular geographical region). The Egyptian influence in the region was never subsequently restored to its earlier zenith. <br />
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The second major consequence concerns how the people of Israel came to inhabit the specific region that they did. With the arrival of the Philistines on the Gaza coast, the previous inhabitants (known to historians as "Canaanites", though whether they would have self-identified as such is unclear) were displaced and made refugees themselves. They were forced east from the relatively fertile lands of the Gaza strip into the rather more desolate and sparsely inhabited highlands of modern-day Israel. Such people likely came from different (though highly-related) cultures and the pressing question of how they might peacefully co-inhabit these new lands must have raised itself with great urgency very early on. Monotheism has been posited as a potential explanation for the political unification of this loosely affiliated population, but - as we shall see in future posts - there is scant evidence for widespread monotheism in Israel until around the 6th century BC, so we must look elsewhere for a solution. It is to this question - of how these displaced refugees might have come to form a new, cohesive culture in the highlands of Israel - that I turn to next.<br />
<br />
<b>A New Community:</b><br />
<br />
The most important thing to note about the Israelite community from the time of its emergence in the 12th Century BC is not simply that it was derived from Canaanite culture, but that it <i>was </i>Canaanite culture. The archaeological sites from Israel at this time are almost completely indistinguishable from those of the wider cultural sphere. The pottery is the same, the dwellings are the same, the religious artifacts are the same... from the beginning, then, we must note that the earliest Israelites were distinguished from other nearby peoples in name only. What changed, then? How did the earliest Israelites come to differentiate themselves from the surrounding peoples? How did they come to be the Hebrews of the Old Testament?<br />
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This raises the wider question of what we might mean by "culture", and how it is that a new one comes into being. An important aspect of the emergence of any culture is the ability to distinguish it from others. To associate oneself with a certain culture is often, just as importantly, to distance oneself from a competing culture, and - as religious sectarianism has shown us - it is frequently those people with whom we share the most in common that we argue with most virulently. The tribalism of pre-monarchic Israel (see next post) gives fairly clear evidence of a struggle for self-definition in a region that was otherwise culturally homogeneous. To quote from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Construction-Community-Key-Ideas/dp/0415046165/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341927090&sr=8-1&keywords=symbolic+construction+of+community" target="_blank">this</a> book:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Boundaries are marked because communities interact in some
way or other with entities from which they are, or wish to be, distinguished
(see Barth, 1969). The manner in which they are marked depends entirely
upon the specific community in question. Some, like national or
administrative boundaries, may be statutory and enshrined in law. Some
may be physical, expressed, perhaps, by a mountain range or a sea. Some
may be racial or linguistic or religious. But not all boundaries, and not all
the components of any boundary, are so objectively apparent. They may be
thought of, rather, as existing in the minds of their beholders.
</blockquote>
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In contrast to many other religions of the ancient Near-East, the religion of the Israelites eventually became "exclusionary" - that is, one which asserted vehemently (as a central tenet of its practice, in fact) its independence from other religions, and which steadfastly refused to adopt the gods and customs of other peoples. This is in contrast to the religions of the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians etc., which were syncretistic and adopted foreign gods and customs with relative ease. At these very earliest stages of Israel, however, such exclusionary monotheism had yet to evolve, and archaeological evidence suggests a much more pluralistic form of religious practice existed for much of its early history (see next section). <br />
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One advantage that the early Israelites had in terms of the potential for cultural differentiation relates to the physical geography of their land. Its southern regions especially were comparatively isolated, inaccessible and infertile, which seemed to spare them from the need to directly resist - or assimilate - the neighbouring cultures that may have otherwise swamped them. That is, because the land of Israel was a comparatively unattractive prospect for migratory settlement, it was possible for there to exist the kind of uninterrupted social development necessary for the eventual emergence of a distinct culture. Once this distinct culture emerged, it was buttressed enough from the wider world for long enough for it to become ingrained. Beyond this point, the culture of the ancient Israelites was able to be preserved even after the land itself was lost. <br />
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On the other hand, the land of Israel also existed at the nexus of several important trade routes, where roads to and from Europe, Africa and the Middle East have long existed. For this reason, it was seen for most of its history as a strategically important expanse of land for the world's largest empires, who passed it between themselves as they rose and fall. From Egypt, to Assyria, to Babylon, to Macedonia to Rome: Israel was occupied by them all. In many respects, the progress of ancient Israelite history can be viewed as a series of reactions to imperial conquest, much of which remains ossified in our Bibles. It's simply impossible to understand Biblical theology - both in the Old and the New Testaments - without due appreciation for the way conquered populations react to their occupation. The question of collective identity - and how it might be sheltered and expressed in the face of such massive powers - recurs time and time again in our Biblical texts, and will be a central theme in these posts.<br />
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It's this quirk of geography - inaccessible enough to preserve indigenous culture, central enough to attract the interest of much larger states - that defines ancient Israel. In an otherwise tiny and vulnerable part of the world, periodically beset by the imperial designs of the states around them, a culture was able to emerge and preserve itself for 3,000 years and counting. This stands as a remarkable feat. Yet quite how or why it was that the early Israelites came to develop such a distinct culture - centred around the increasingly parochial worship of a local God - remains something of a mystery and one deserving of some consideration. Although it is now impossible to identify precisely what happened in the region that may have led to the formation of a distinct culture in ancient Israel, some educated guesses can be offered. <br />
<br />
For example, the uncertain and fractious political state of the region spurred the necessity of political centralisation - in the form of states - that hadn't really existed prior to the scaling back of Egyptian influence. The Bible, in the book of Judges, depicts this time as one of widespread lawlessness and petty warfare, overseen by men who might most adequately be described as tribal chieftains. While historical-critical scholarship has not been kind in its judgment of the historical accuracy of this book, what we can infer from the evidence of this period seems to paint a congruous picture of social and political fractiousness. Whatever states that existed in the region at the time were loose confederations centred around independent cities, and none has left us any signs of being particularly dominant in the region. In such an uncertain environment, one can assume that there came to be a growing necessity for the people of the land of Israel (as in other nearby regions) to coalesce around some central authority (priests, king etc.) so as to ensure social stability and protection from the chaos around them. With the centralisation of authority comes the establishment of prescribed sets of behaviours and conditions that the polity must follow. These, in turn, become reified as laws and rituals, which - in the process of differentiation from neighbouring cultures - begin to take on a unique and distinctive form.<br />
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The development of Biblical Law was a long process, however, and there is little evidence to suggest the existence of such a centralised legal system in the region prior to 1000 BC (the gradual emergence of Biblical Law will be explored in future posts). The creation and enforcement of law requires a strong, legitimised system of government, usually under the auspices of a king, and it seems unlikely that any of the pre-Israelite tribes possessed the sophistication of social organisation necessary to enforce anything but the most limited tribal laws. On there other hand, while there is an undeniable degree of continuity between the (much later) Biblical laws and other ancient near-Eastern legal systems, there was apparently the foreshadowing of some important boundaries between the Israelite population and the surrounding populations even at this early stage.<br />
<br />
The complete absence of pig bones in early Israelite sites, for example, seems to indicate the presence of a universal cultural taboo that might be adequately described (presuming it was centrally enforced) as a "law". Such a taboo may have emerged as a mere accident of history (did the conditions of the new land make it prohibitively difficult to raise pigs, for example?) but, over time, such relatively minor and arbitrary differences become sacralised as a culture seeks to define itself in opposition to others. There needn't have been any rational reason for the emergence of the prohibition on eating pork meat, but it did come - in time - to serve as an important "boundary" separating the Israelites from their neighbours. The subsequent addition of other stringent laws - and related religious observances - would also serve as important identity markers, denoting ever more clearly the boundaries between the Israelites and their neighbouring cultures. <br />
<br />
These Israelites were still ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable from the Canaanites, though, and neither the Hebrew language nor its people ever radically diverged from those of other Semitic populations. Given these similarities - and the absence of well-defined boundaries, such kings, laws or customs at this early stage - in what ways (beyond the taboo on consuming pig flesh) could the Israelites be said to represent an identifiably separate population in the region? One potentially unique aspect of early Israelite culture may be that of their religion. That is the topic of our next section.<br />
<br />
<b>A New Religion:</b><br />
<br />
Like all other Near-Eastern cultures, it seems that the early Israelites were (to a surprisingly recent date) polytheistic. While the exact form of this polytheism - and the kind of practices it might have entailed - are widely disputed, we know that even well into the mid-first millennium BC the Israelites retained a belief in the existence of the pantheon of gods.<br />
<br />
In Canaanite theology, the god "El" was the head of all the gods. He had 70 children, each of which was allotted his own land, and each of which represented the gods of different people. The earliest Israelites retained this mythology, and so the first patron god of Israel was El (as evidenced by their patronymic title Isra<i>el</i>). It seems evident that El's wife, Asherah, was also widely worshiped in Israel at this time, though the evidence in somewhat disputed (see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Early-History-God-Biblical/dp/080283972X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341927962&sr=8-1&keywords=mark+smith+god" target="_blank">here</a> for a thorough discussion). The existence of early Israelite names derived from the Babylonian God
"Baal", and the Bible's persistent denunciations of his shrines, would
seem to indicate that the worship of this God was also common, though perhaps not at such an early date. Similarly, we know from the Book of Kings (2 Kings 23) that a plethora of other gods - such as Molech, Astarte, Chemosh and Milcom - were being worshipped in and around Judah during the 7th century, and it would be unreasonable to assume that none of these practices originated in a much earlier period. In any case, the fact that the earliest Israelites worshiped a multitude of gods is not seriously in dispute. <br />
<br />
Out of such plurality, however, the worship of one god over all others began to emerge. It seems that Yahweh, one of El's 70 children, came to be adopted as the patron god of certain of these pre-monarchic tribes at a relatively early date, even if this remains a far cry from the more recognisable religious system of later centuries. Yahweh's origins as a "second-tier" god - one among a much wider pantheon - are still in evidence in the Bible, for example Ps 82:1 and especially Deut 32:8-9. The earliest Yahweh worshipers would probably best be described as "henotheistic" (believing in a pantheon of gods but with the preferential worship of just one), with the practice of monolatry (much less monotheism) almost certainly not coming into effect until much later. Over time, with the decline of the Northern Kingdom and the continuing assertion of Israelite independence from the wider religious culture of the region, Yahweh would come to absorb the qualities of other Gods (for instance, Baal's role as a storm God and slayer of sea monsters), until the ultimate conflation of El and Yahweh sometime in the early first millenium BC. But I'm getting ahead of myself.<br />
<br />
Not much more can be said about the earliest strains of the Israelite religion, but we will fill in the pieces as we progress forward in time. Nonetheless, we have here already the foundations of the religious beliefs that would - over the next millenia - give rise to Judaism, Jesus and the Bible: we have a relatively isolated culture, closely related to those around it, that slowly came to realise itself as a new and distinct people, overseen by an ever more narrowly defined coterie of gods. It is to the emergence of the Israelite monarchy, the split kingdoms and the mythologies they produced that I will turn to in my next post.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-9795644171519470072012-07-05T19:45:00.003+10:002012-07-05T19:45:49.617+10:00Constitutionalism and EisegesisWith the news that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the "Individual Mandate" centrepiece of Obama's Healthcare bill, political commentators on both sides of the aisle have suddenly found themselves transformed into expert constitutional scholars. Even Mitt Romney feels comfortable asserting the mandate "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/04/mitt-romney-individual-mandate_n_1649233.html" target="_blank">was unconstitutional</a>", despite - and in contrast with the president - having never formally studied law. What is going on? What makes so many people assume that they are qualified to make pronouncements on what is or is not constitutional?<br />
<br />
In part I think it can be traced back to the revered status that the US constitution and its authors hold in US public life. As I mentioned in a <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.cz/2012/05/archaic-language-and-religious.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>, religious traditions that produce a central canon of texts (and I'm thinking here especially of the Abrahamic traditions) come to treat this canon as an object of worship and reverence in and of itself, forming "a largely insuperable doctrine that all subsequent developments in the tradition must not find themselves to be in conflict with". Given the progressive mythologisation of the Founding Fathers and the events that led to the penning of the constitution in American political discourse, a similar process of sacralisation seems to be at work here. The US constitution is not merely seen as a foundational legal text, but rather an inviolable prescription forged and passed down by demi-gods, whose scope of wisdom and moral perspicacity remains completely beyond the possibility of reproach. None of this has anything to do with the mundane process of interpreting law (constitutionalism proper), but rather the incessant American drive to idealise and sacralise every aspect of American history that led them (in a distinctly teleological sense) to become "the greatest nation in the world".<br />
<br />
In practice, this makes the constitution the putative foundation and inescapable focus of every political ideology that exists in the US today. As the political ideologue imagines his beliefs to be unequivocally "good" and also imagines the life and works of the Founding Fathers to be unequivocally "good", then it stands to reason that his beliefs must be in perfect agreement with the text of the US constitution. Given this, those who adhere to a different ideology (let us say, the president) must hold beliefs that are inherently at odds with the text of the constitution, and therefore any legislation passed to further this ideology (let us say, healthcare reform) is viewed as an act deliberately conceived to assault the sanctity of the constitution. As such, the political ideologue feels a keen sense of offense at this act of blasphemy and feels justified in accusing his opponents of deliberately violating and undermining the central document of his Republic. Hence the current state of political rhetoric in the US, where every act of governance from Obama can be denounced as "unconstitutional" with a straight face.<br />
<br />
Is unclear whether the political ideologue actually believes in the truth of such denouncements or whether it is mere political rhetoric, but it's clear in either case that he has not derived his outrage from a clear and objective reading of the US constitution. Such a reading would require a process of honest constitutional exegesis, and the real problem is that truly impartial exegesis - of <i>any</i> text - is almost completely impossible, and can lead one to many different (but equally valid) conclusions depending on one's starting conditions. When we read the Bible, for instance, and want to know the "meaning" of a passage, there are many different approaches we can take and different exegetical approaches have led to a myriad of different interpretations of the text. With "profane" texts (that is, texts not considered to be inviolably sacred) the ambiguities of language and the attendant exegetical issues are not serious: small differences in meaning don't lead to radically different understandings of the texts. When one is dealing with a text that is highly esteemed and fetishised within a given community, however, the overwhelming desire of the members of this community to find their own beliefs articulated within this foundational text precludes any possibility of an objective, disinterested exegesis of the text. Rather, the beliefs of these members are read <i>into</i> (rather than derived <i>from</i>) the foundational text, and it becomes more proper to call this process one of textual <i>eis</i>egesis instead. <br />
<br />
In this way, it is firmly my belief that the progression and content of Christian theology, for example, is for the most part not shaped by the Biblical text. The sheer size of the combined texts and the irreducible plurality of views contained within (different authors from different places writing at different times...) makes any attempt to create a coherent theology that is not in conflict with <i>any </i>aspect of the text completely impossible. This is especially true where theology attempts to engage with more modern ethical concerns that the Biblical authors simply could not have foreseen. The conservative Christian may claim that his opposition to abortion, stem-cell research or gay marriage are based on Biblical injunctions, but it's plain for all to see that the Bible is completely silent on all these issues. The Christian here has plainly arrived at his conclusions for his own reasons (or lack thereof) and has then - <i>ex post facto </i>- gone in search of Biblical passages that might validate them. As an example, Jeremiah 1:4-5 is often cited as a Biblical injunction against abortion, though it is plain that the most natural reading of this passage bears no relation to abortion, as evidenced by the fact that it has never been interpreted in such a manner until recent times (i.e. when abortion became such a central political issue for American evangelicals). <br />
<br />
As it is true for the Bible, so it is also true for the constitution. As great as the authors of this text may have been, they were clearly not omniscient and plainly could not have foreseen every issue that the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on since the time they wrote it. There are different ways that the Supreme Court judges may interpret the constitution when forming their rulings, none of which are perfect or inherently superior to the alternatives. Some, for example, may claim to be strict constructionists or textualists, believing that they are taking into consideration nothing but the original wording of the text, though it's apparent that such a ideal is - in practice - completely unrealisable. The constitution only extremely rarely directly mentions any of the issues that are presented before the court, so when deciding on (for example) the constitutionality of Obamacare, in lieu of finding any direct injunctions for or against the provision of healthcare in the text of the constitution, at least some creativity or imagination will be required in its interpretation in order to provide a verdict. Abortion, yet again, serves as a clear example. The constitution has nothing to say about the issue of abortion, so Roe v. Wade was decided under the privacy clause of the 14th amendment, despite the fact that the right to privacy is plainly not the central moral or legal issue in question where abortion is concerned. <br />
<br />
Still others may claim that the constitution is a "living tree", that should be interpreted liberally in light of the development of public opinion, though such flexibility undermines the need for such a central, inviolable legal document in the first place. In practice, the brevity of the constitution vis-a-vis the complexity of the issues brought before the Supreme Court means that the judges will - consciously or otherwise - be forced to read their own prejudices and expectations into the text in order to arrive at a conclusion. <br />
<br />
However, even when allowing for the inherent and inescapable need for such judicial eisegesis, we must note that the political leanings of the Supreme Court justices directly influence the decisions they make to an unjustifiably high degree. In <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0027188" target="_blank">one study</a>, simply noting the affiliations of the judges allowed the researchers to correctly predict the rulings of the court in 83% of cases, far higher "than forecasts made by legal experts as well as those made by algorithms that take into consideration <i>the content of the cases</i>". When the affiliations of the judges are so strong as to render the "content of the cases" purely incidental, it's clear that we have a problem and cannot claim that the text of the constitution is decisive or unambiguous. In reality, the very fact that Supreme Court judges - who are appointed by congress - can be designated as either "liberal" or "conservative" makes a mockery of the concept of the separation of powers, and is a sad indictment on the American political system.<br />
<br />
So far from representing some clear, understandable foundation for all of American law, the American constitution has been reduced - by everyone from politicians to Supreme Court justices - into a mere blank-page, carrying neither authority nor meaning, onto which all of one's hopes, fears and prejudices may be penned without hindrance. Such is the danger - and the inevitable outcome - of sacralising a text borne of fallible human beings.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-85266050567383923052012-05-17T19:27:00.004+10:002012-05-17T19:45:26.836+10:00Justifying Republican Morality Through ScienceA common theme runs through the books written about the psychology of political beliefs, and it concerns their attempts to explain why some people possess "liberal" beliefs and why others possess "conservative" beliefs. Such a dichotomy, goes the prevailing explanation, is a consequence of innate differences (whether biological or cultural) between how the "liberal" mind and the "conservative" mind construct politico-moral judgments on any given issue. For <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Think-Elephant-Democrats-Progressives/dp/1931498822/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1337246990&sr=8-5" target="_blank">George Lakoff</a>, for instance, the difference is a consequence of "framing"; where liberals will frame issues in terms of care and compassion, conservatives will frame them in terms of responsibility and obligation. For <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Political-Brain-Emotion-Deciding/dp/1586485733/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337247032&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Drew Westen</a>, on the other hand, the difference between the two worldviews is best explained by the primacy of emotions in conservative politics as compared to the cool, rational, detached methods of the liberals (to the latter's great deficit). In the most recent book I've read on the subject, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337247069&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Jonathon Haidt</a> argues that there are six different foundational systems which constitute moral thought, all of which are relevant to conservative thought but only three of which are relevant to liberal thought.<br />
<br />
In each of these cases, the differences are portrayed as entirely natural, largely inexorable and - therefore - exculpatory. If the difference in worldview that separate liberals from conservatives are as truly pervasive and pre-rational as these authors argue, then we cannot look down on conservatives for having different moral beliefs. Such beliefs are merely an extension of the moral matrix they happen possess that is no more or less valid than that of liberals. When a conservative inveighs against homosexuals or Muslims, he is simply drawing on his more highly tuned "Loyalty foundation" that identifies and scandalises those who dissent from the norm; who are we, therefore, to judge?<br />
<br />
I am growing a little weary of such attempts to rationalise the existence damaging beliefs (in politics, religion etc.) by simply noting that they may have a natural origin. That they do have a natural origin must warn us against simply confronting or denigrating those who disagree with us - as such approaches will likely be futile or counter-productive - and it may also (rightly) encourage us to see a given issue from the perspective of the other side. Having said that, we must also be careful not to submit to the pretense of moral neutrality where our worldview is in conflict with those of other people. That something is natural, first of all, doesn't make it right. This is the naturalistic fallacy writ large: there may be good social or biological reasons for the persistence of conservative beliefs, that doesn't mean they make society a better place. The fact that people are capable of changing their minds on important issues should also indicate to us that these "moral matrices" are not so inflexible as we might otherwise imagine.<br />
<br />
A further difficulty is that each of these books are extremely American-centric. The American system is highly polarised<sup>1</sup>, so it makes sense to break moral-outlooks (and political beliefs) down into just two, largely non-overlapping groups. How accurate is this dichotomy, however, when applied to political systems (such as those in Europe) that are far more pluralistic? Furthermore, the analysis fails to take into account the <i>uniqueness</i> of American conservatism when applied to the political beliefs of conservatives elsewhere. In UK and Australia, for instance, the conservative parties - for all their faults - are still grounded and reasonable. Even where one doesn't agree with their policy, an honest and fair-minded person can at least see the rationale that might have led to its formation. Extending such generosity to the policies of Republicans, however, is far more difficult. The party has been shunted so far the the right that it fails to resemble any mainstream political ideology in any country that I am familiar with. Given that the parochial, highly anti-intellectual posturing of Republican politicians would have them laughed out of the room in any other country in the world<sup>2</sup>, regardless of how avowedly "conservative" that audience may claim to be, how can the analysts attempt to explain Republican positions purely in terms of some (universal?) psychological dichotomy?<br />
<br />
But it's the increasing gulf separating Republicans from reality that really makes a mockery of such disinterested political psychology. With regards to taxation, for instance, Haidt might be correct in suggesting that differences in policies advocated by Democrats and Republicans are simply reflections of different approaches to fairness in the "moral matrices" of the adherents of the two parties: for Democrats fairness rests with equality, for Republicans fairness rests with proportionality (i.e. people should be entitled to the fruits of their labour, and it is not fair to disproportionately tax our most productive citizens). So far so good. Such differences, however, fail to account for the popularly held belief amongst Republicans that Obama is a socialist who has greatly increased taxes when - objectively - this just isn't the case. The rabid and entirely dishonest attacks against Obama in this regard can't simply be rationalised away as some blameless difference in worldviews. These are views predicated on mindless, tribal antagonism and cannot be treated seriously. One must admit that there is room for informed disagreement on issues such as taxation, but that in no way legitimises obscenely disingenuous position presently espoused by Republicans.<br />
<br />
In fact, on virtually every issue the Republicans seem content on positioning themselves against objective reality. If political stances were entirely a matter of moral preferences then perhaps the difference between Democrats and Republicans could be explained as a phenomena derived from our inherently different psychological constitutions, in which case neither side could be truly "right" or "wrong", merely individuals with different (though equally moral) priorities. There are some political stances, however, that <i>can</i> be objectively evaluated - where the truth of the matter is clear and unequivocal - and on these stances the Republicans invariably take the wrong side. Look at their stance on evolution, climate change or virtually any other issue related to science, for instance. Look at their claim that "abstinence-only" education will lead to reduced teen pregnancies and STD rates, or that "socialised" health care in inherently less efficient. Look at their claim that the institution of marriage has remained static throughout history, or that the Founding Fathers established the US as a Christian nation. All clearly and demonstrably false, yet they are central planks of Republican thought.<sup>3</sup><br />
<br />
If would be difficult to neutrally explain such pathological indifference to facts through a mere "difference" in world-views. The present Republican insanity has a rather more contingent origin, and it stems from the proud American tradition of anti-intellectualism. If one accepts that one's intuitions about the world are not necessarily true, and undertakes an honest appraisal of one's views by actively seeking out objective facts to confirm or disconfirm one's views, then it becomes possible for one to discard incorrect assumptions for more accurate ones and - in doing so - come to reconcile one's beliefs with objective reality. If one believes that one's common sense and intuition is sufficient (or even morally superior) as an epistemological strategy, then one will resist science, facts and logic until one's dying breath. The consequences of such thinking are plain to see. While the former individual might never be able to claim to be in possession of "the truth", her method will (ideally) move her towards positions that are objectively true, as her baseless intuitions and prejudices come to be displaced by more considered positions. The latter can only reach "objectively true" positions by pure, dumb luck; that is, while one could never say that the positions of the "gut" thinker are inherently false, they could only have arrived at the truth by complete accident.<br />
<br />
This process can be seen clearly in the context of history, where the progressive causes - though usually fiercely resisted at the time - generally come to be accepted as the prevailing, unquestioned truth in subsequent generations. Causes like women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the general push towards democracy and individual liberty were - no matter how reconciled they may be with modern conservative thought - once considered dangerous and unduly progressive ideas that were strongly and sometimes violently opposed by the conservative thinkers of the day. That such progressive ideas, borne largely of facts and reason, came to win the day is no accident: they were thought upon, disseminated, tested and perfected over time until their truth became so obvious that even the most reactionary ideologue was forced to accept their validity. The opposition to these movements may well have been sincere and motivated by genuine moral concerns predicated on a certain psychological disposition, but that doesn't preclude us from making the judgment - admittedly with the benefit of hindsight - that such opposition was horribly and unequivocally on the wrong side of history. What grounds might we have for thinking that modern conservative movements will suffer a less ignominious fate, given their identically reactionary philosophy? <br />
<br />
But history aside, there really is something particularly and especially wrong with the modern Republican Party. Present-day Republicans have long since abandoned reality for the warm, safe world of partisan political acrimony. Their positions are unjustifiable in and of themselves, which leaves them only with the myth that every issue must have two sides and that both sides are therefore inherently worthy of consideration, respect and equal airing in a public forum. The implication made by these political psychologists, that there is any aspect of the Republican Party in its current guise that is capable of contributing anything of worth or value to the current political climate, is just plainly and dangerously wrong. Let's not make excuses for these people: they have the same capacity for reason and compassion that the rest of us have, so let's encourage them to use it. The solutions to a great many problems will not be found until the Republican Party joins the rest of us in this great, majestic expanse known as reality, so let us hasten their journey. <br />
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------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
(1) - At the risk of being seen to be indiscriminate in my criticism of the GOP, I think the blame for the current polarisation really does lie predominantly with Republican electoral strategies. The Republican Party is comprised of a number of ideological sub-factions who - left to their own devices - probably would have torn themselves apart long ago. What, for example, do the libertarians have in common with the social conservatives? The corporatists and the Evangelicals? The neo-cons and the isolationists? The simple answer is that they are all - to one extent or another - anti-liberal. Keeping all these groups together necessitates the construction of an enemy - one that doesn't really exist - to unite them in common hatred. This explains the irrationally hostile and adversarial nature of the American right, and the current strategy of the Republican congress to just say "no" to everything the Democrats deign to propose.<br />
<br />
(2) - With the possible exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.<br />
<br />
(3) - This is without even mentioning some of the more "fringe" theories, such as those concerning Obama's place of birth or religion.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-81672634102507110622012-05-03T01:05:00.002+10:002012-05-03T01:15:41.522+10:00Archaic Language and Religious AuthorityAs I have <a href="http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/2012/04/religion-and-archaic-language.html">previously posted</a>, the language of religion is often fundamentally different in nature to that of everyday language. Whereas everyday language encourages explicit and unambiguous expression (in <i>fully-propositional</i> forms), religious language is far more regularly composed using <i>semi-propositional</i> forms, which permit a greater multi-valency of meaning at the expense of specificity and exactness. I also suggested that this may partly explain the reason for the persistence of archaic language within religious traditions, as the incomprehensibility of the ancient language lends itself well to the fundamental ineffability of religious claims. There is, however, a second reason for the preservation of archaic language in religious expression, and it has to do with authority.<br />
<br />
Every literate religious tradition is fundamentally conservative with respect to its attitude to scripture. While it is possible for attitudes towards such literature to change over time, and even for certain texts to fall into disuse, as a general rule the amount of new, authoritative textual material added to religious traditions dwindles to nothing given enough time. As such, the scriptures themselves slowly come to be treated with a veneration that transcends what they merely say. They are "fetishised", for want of a better word, and the style of language they employ becomes frozen in the traditions and rituals of the religions themselves, even if this same language falls into general disuse. These texts come to form the foundation of subsequent theology (this is especially true within the Abrahamic traditions) and therefore constitute a kind of theological <i>constitution</i>; a largely insuperable doctrine that all subsequent developments in the tradition must not find themselves to be in conflict with.<sup>1</sup><br />
<br />
This progressive sacralisation of the texts presents its difficulties, however. For instance, why is it specifically <i>these</i> texts that we should treat as normative to the exclusion of all others? By what means can we assume these texts to be "true" (in a religious context) in a sense that other, later texts are not? For the latter question, we (or rather the believer) must rely on the legitimacy of revelation and prophecy, such that one must accept the premise that certain texts are just simply derived from the mouths of gods, or else some other similarly supernatural origin. Certain "prophets" (or oracles, or soothsayers, or witchdoctors...) are imagined to be particularly inspired in this regard and it is their proclamations that come to be regarded as especially authoritative over and against the proclamations of others (if this processes seems a little arbitrary, that may well be because it is). In literate religions, the effective preservation of ancient prophecies lend them an inherent and timeless authority over a long-enough period, one that slowly excludes the legitimacy of newer prophetic claimants. As such, to answer the former question, it is the ancient texts, produced by men whose prophetic legitimacy has grown to be unquestioned, that comes to form the normative textual basis of all literate religions.<sup>2</sup> <br />
<br />
This is possible within religious traditions because - as per my previous post - there is little in these "inspired" texts that can be treated as unambiguously true or false. That is the nature of most religious language. As such, the tests of the legitimacy of religious claims in literate religions often depend upon their longevity. The early Christians, for instance, are suspected to have preserved the Septuagint within their nascent canon as a means of establishing their link to much older traditions, in defence of the claim raised against them that they represented a new (and therefore perverse and dangerous) religious cult. The identification of ancient pedigree was apparently an important factor for the Romans in determining the legitimacy of the many religions that were practised within their empire and I'm sure they were not alone in this philosophy. If "ancientness" is truly an important prerequisite for the perceived legitimacy of a religious practice (in the absence of the possibility of any other kind of truth claim), then it is not difficult to see why the ancient languages that originally gave rise to these traditions are preserved conterminously. <br />
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(1) - In most cases the flexibility or indeterminacy of religious language makes this process quite easy. "Heaven", for instance, began as the literal kingdom of YHWH in Jewish thought, and progressed in later Christian thought to a destination for departed souls. Now, in modern Christian theology, we might expect to see it defined far more abstractly as a state of being in which one finds oneself in the presence of God. Although the "original" meaning of heaven has been lost, the inherent ambiguity of religious language allows the modern Christian reader to derive any number of equally salient (and valid) interpretations from a Biblical expression like "the Kingdom of Heaven dwells within you" that would possess little intersect with the interpretations of ancient Jewish readers. <br />
<br />
(2) - Even if the texts were not actually written by these "prophets" originally, their names are frequently attached to them <i>post hoc</i>. So Moses' name was attached to the Pentateuch, the apostle John's name was attached to the otherwise anonymous gospel and so on. A similar trend can be seen in the formation of the <i>ahadith</i> in Islam and the sutras in Buddhism, both of which can only be assumed to be traceable back to the "original" source if one treats the texts with extreme credulity. Sometimes outright fraud is evident in this quest for authority, such as the early Christians who wrote in Paul's name (i.e. the Pastoral Epistles) or the intertestamental Jews who wrote in the names of Enoch, Tobit and so on.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-3596418174916546882012-04-26T04:34:00.002+10:002012-04-26T04:59:43.843+10:00How to Explain Paul's Silence on Jesus?<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">One of the most central points generally raised by Jesus mythicists concerns the alleged silence surrounding the existence of Jesus in the Epistles of Paul. If Paul was genuinely familiar with Jesus as a historical being, how might one account for the lack of biographical information he provides about Jesus in his letters? Why are there no details concerning, for instance, Jesus' origins, his teachings or the circumstances surrounding his death? Surely these are not insignificant details, so why were they omitted?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Scholars might reply in one of two ways:<sup>1</sup></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<ul style="font-family: inherit;">
<li><span style="font-size: small;">In actual fact, Paul does on many occasions relate - albeit fleetingly - biographical details concerning the life of Jesus. He mentions, to give just a few examples, that Jesus was born of a woman (Gal 4:4), "</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">was descended from David according to the flesh" (Rom 1:3-4), </span><span style="font-size: small;">that he left instructions concerning divorce (1 Cor 7:10), that he had brothers (1 Cor 9:5) and that he "died" and "was buried" (1 Cor 15:3-4). Scarcely enlightening stuff, but enough to suggest that Paul understood Jesus as a human being rather than a purely heavenly one.</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Or:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<ul style="font-family: inherit;">
<li><span style="font-size: small;">As an occasional writer (meaning one who wrote only when the occasion required it), writing only to churches he had played some part in founding, there may have been no need or opportunity to go into great details concerning what he knew about the historical Jesus. Presumably the recipients of his letters already knew what he knew concerning this topic, so there was no cause for Paul to provide these details gratuitously. </span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Such arguments have merit, I think, and may even be sufficient to address the <i>argument from silence</i> by themselves. But there might be another reason for Paul's silence on the life of Jesus (and the lack of overlap with the Gospel material in his writings) that I don't often see addressed in relation to this problem. It concerns Paul's self-perception as an apostle.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Paul is frank in his writings that Jesus appeared to him "last of all, as to someone untimely born" (1 Cor 15:8) and that (for this reason?) he is "the least of the apostles" (v. 9). Although one might be struck by his humility in these verses, in other places he is rather more prickly and defensive concerning this subject. He, for instance, berates the Corinthians for being seduced by those who "proclaim another Jesus... or a different gospel" from the one he delivered to them, before going on to assert that he believes himself to be "not in the least inferior to these <i>super</i>-apostles" and is, in fact, a "better" minister of Christ than they (2 Cor 11:4-5; 12:11; 11:23). Quite who these "super-apostles" might be is not clear, but given the fact that they were apparently Jewish (2 Cor 11:22), is there not the possibility that they were allied with the Jerusalem Church<sup>2</sup> and therefore heirs to a tradition that might have begun with the historical Jesus? Could these close ties be the source of Paul's jealousy and sarcastic derision?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Speculation aside, it does seem clear from other passages that Paul was tetchy concerning the teachings of those who actually knew Jesus and what they might have to say about him. In the first place, Paul emphatically asserts that he "did not receive [the gospel] from a human source" but rather "received it through a revelation" (Gal 1:12) and that after his conversion he "did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me" (vv. 16-17). Even when he did make it to Jerusalem, he refused to "see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother" and Peter (vv 18-19) and on his second trip claimed that "those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders... contributed nothing to me" (Gal 2:6). His position here is rather unambiguous: what he knew about Jesus he knew only through divine revelation, and he had little interest in what the men who actually knew Jesus had to say about him (or what anybody else had to say, for that matter)<sup>3</sup>. Even if he had inherited material about the life of Jesus along the way, would it not be fair to presume that he might have been reluctant to include it in his letters for fear of privileging someone else's gospel over his own?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Could the reason that Paul didn't mention anything about the life of Jesus in his letters really be so petty? Did he really ignore the biographical material that eventually made its way into the Gospels for no reason more serious than the potential authority he felt it may have leant to James, Peter and the rest of the Jerusalem Church? It's difficult to muster conclusive evidence for this conclusion, but I certainly don't think it's a particularly outrageous thesis given the querulous tone he frequently adopts throughout his letters. In any case, along with the two other explanations I've give above, I think we seem to have a fairly convincing case for Paul's silence on Jesus. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">(1) - See for examples Bart Ehrman's "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Historical-Argument/dp/0062204602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335378800&sr=8-1">Did Jesus Exist?</a>"</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">(2) - We can see elsewhere what an acrimonious relationship Paul had with this
Jerusalem Church, especially in his account of the debates within the
early church concerning the role of Gentiles and the
applicability of the Jewish law. In this matter, Paul saw himself
plainly as an "an
Apostle to the Gentiles" (Rom 11:13) and it seems that he was "entrusted
with the gospel for the uncircumcised" (Gal 2:7) by common assent. As
such, Paul was keen to assert that it should not be necessary for
Gentiles newly inducted into the faith to observe Jewish requirements
such as circumcision and dietary laws, contrary to the
opinion of other Apostles in the early church. He saw his work with the
gentiles being undermined by those
"sent from James" (Gal 2:12), encouraging the practice of Jewish rites.
He then opposed Peter "to his face" when Peter went from dining with
gentiles
to apparently only dining with Jews again (Gal 2:11)(Paul himself
apparently was happy to "become as one outside the law" where the
occasion called for it - 1 Cor 9:21).Such
intrusions by James and his followers onto what Paul perceived as his
own territory sufficiently angered him to wish for those advocating
circumcision to "castrate themselves" (Gal 5:12) - this was apparently
not seen as a minor matter!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">(3) - "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2)</span></div>James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-2662524774664604132012-04-23T20:26:00.002+10:002012-04-23T20:33:28.952+10:00On Criticising Religion<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
"Suppose I live under a totalitarian regime that has indoctrinated<br />
me to venerate its leaders and accept the state’s values. I might be happy,<br />
yet inauthentically so: my happiness is not autonomous, for it depends on the<br />
acceptance of values imposed on me through manipulative practices. This is a<br />
problem. Is it a subjectivist problem? It is not a problem from the subjective<br />
point of view: I wholeheartedly endorse my values and way of life. I see nothing<br />
wrong with my circumstances. This affirmation may persist through reflection<br />
and exposure to the facts. You might call my attention to my lack of autonomy,<br />
the inauthenticity of my happiness. I might agree with you on this, but then say,<br />
‘‘so what?’’ I do not value autonomy or authenticity. As far as I am concerned,<br />
these are the decadent values of a pathologically individualistic society. Leave<br />
me alone.<br />
It is worth considering what is to be done with someone like me. Deprogramming<br />
seems the only route to enlightenment."</blockquote><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">- (Daniel Haybron, <i>The Pursuit of Unhappiness</i>, p. 207)</blockquote><br />
Few things are more difficult to objectively quantify than human happiness, but although any "hedonic calculus" will necessarily have its short-comings, the effort itself - to understand and measure happiness - remains a worthwhile one. In classical economic theory, one can measure human inclinations only in terms of material wants ("demand") and therefore define happiness purely in terms of fulfilling those wants. The rational agent, therefore, is one who maximises consumption.<br />
<br />
There are at least two key problems with this <i>homo economicus</i> model. The first is that humans are not inherently "rational", at least not in terms of their capacity to dispassionately assess what actions may be in their best interest, and can on occasion be shown to act in ways which objectively serve to make themselves worse-off. A simple example is an experiment know as the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game">Ultimatum Game</a>" which shows that people will reject the free provision of money on grounds as tendentious as "fairness", a proclivity that the "rational agent" approach to human nature cannot account for in its model.<br />
<br />
The second unrealistic assumption of the "rational agent" model is that people can be made happy (or at least be satisfied) simply by getting what they want. In the first place (and this is something that classical economic models <i>do</i>, to their credit, accurately reflect) human wants are infinite, resources are not: hence the foundation of economics. Secondly, it scarcely needs pointing out that "getting one's own way" (particularly exclusively in the context of material satisfaction) is scarcely sufficient (or even necessary) to the living of a happy life. Do the lives of wanton excess lived by wealthy celebrities frequently lead to deep and lasting happiness? <br />
<br />
Part of the reason for this misconception of human desire and happiness comes from the subjectivist account that people are ultimately capable of knowing what they want and that happiness emerges from the pursuit of that want. This is the basis of political and economic liberalism. People must be free to make decisions about their own lives, and it is not for us to make judgements about this: after all, how could we? Who are we to judge what is best for someone?<br />
<br />
While this approach may hold some superficial appeal, again we require only a few simple examples to show that we all have limits on how willing we are to support this approach as an accurate reflection of human intentionality. Surely not even the most committed subjectivist, for instance, will agree that a severely depressed or otherwise mentally affected patient can have a better idea of what is in his best interests than the doctor treating him? Would we not be remiss if - in the name of self-determination - we supported without judgement his decision to refuse all medical treatment? Or how about the wife who finds herself regularly beaten by her husband? Would we take seriously her denouements that her marriage is making her happy? Of course not. Such an example demonstrates that - at least in certain cases - we can make the objective judgement that certain decisions that people make are likely to lead to unhappiness, or at least constrain their capacity for self-actualisation in some significant way. We should not withhold the provision of advice to those suffering in cases such as these, and I believe that our realm of empathetic concern should be expanded even further.<br />
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Although the "beaten wife" serves as a provocative, perhaps extreme example, I believe that we can be similarly objective in our negative judgements concerning the effect of fundamentalist religions on the mental health of believers. As much as they may protest and insist that their beliefs make them happy, even a cursory examination of their lives betrays patterns of behaviour that severely impinge on their capacity to enjoy anything even approaching "happiness". An integral part of being happy (or at least a consequence of happiness), I think, lies in the ease with which one can socialise with one's fellow human beings. We can see intuitively that the social behaviour of happy person will consist in relaxed and broadly cheerful, egalitarian behaviour with others, where the behaviour of the unhappy person will probably be governed by mistrust, resentment and crippling awkwardness. It may be too easy here to simply point to the almost disconcerting lack of social skills common to religious fundamentalists, but there is also a darker, more serious side to their asocial tendencies. <br />
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A key feature of religious fundamentalism (at least of the Abrahamic variety) lies in its <i>exclusivism</i>: that is to say, that the dogmas of these faiths are not only true, but true to the exclusion of all others. This creates a clearly defined in and out group, where the syncretic consideration of ideas from the "out group" are to be fiercely resisted as a matter of course. Plainly, such an adversarial conception of the world is not condusive to healthy human relationships with those seen to be in the "out group", hence the proclivity to either recede from the world or to establish hysterical persecution fantasies in which the beleaguered believers must stand firm against a great (though nebulously defined) enemy. For fundamentalist Christians we need only look at the paranoid treatment of homosexuals (who, it is often believed, are united in some shadowy, pan-global conspiracy to undermine traditional Christian values for some reason) to witness how pathetically warped dispositions to outsiders can become under fundamentalist religion.<br />
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Another important cause of (or at least indication of) happiness lies in positive self-image; or, to put it more generally, "feeling comfortable within one's own skin". Highly negative self-appraisal will invariably lead to unhappiness in one's life, if it isn't already an indicator of outright depression. In fundamentalist religions, there are few functions of the human body that are not viewed with strict disapprobation if not complete disgust. Sex is an obvious place to begin, with normal human sexuality derided as sinful under all but a few prescribed conditions. In the stricter expressions of sharia Islam, disgust at the human body can manifest itself in an almost puerile obsession with almost all bodily functions, regardless of their necessity. Virtually all substances produced by the body render one <i>haram</i>, or unclean. How can one have a positive self-image when one sees even the most mundane functions of one's body as abominable in the eyes of the omniscient creator of the universe?<br />
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People may say that we should leave believers alone - that they have made their choice, that it makes them happy, and that that should be the boundary of our concern. In some ways, indeed, we must be prepared to acknowledge that the quest to confront religious beliefs is at best Quixotic and at worst unduly intrusive and obnoxious. However, we should also acknowledge that certain patterns of religious belief can be seen to constrain the believer's potential for an authentic, self-fulfilling life. To this extent, we would be doing her an injustice by not pointing out the damaging, self-constraining nature of her beliefs, much the same as if we were to ignore any other forms of self-harm.<br />
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Now there may be the objection that religious beliefs have the potential to expand (rather than contract) one's engagement with the world. Certainly such outcomes are possible (theological beliefs may, for example, serve to expand one's realm of concern under the guise of <i>agape</i>, or generalised, fraternal love) but such religious proclivities are assuredly <i>not</i> the ones targeted in this post. My point is not that religious beliefs should be targeted indiscriminately or irrespective of their content, but rather that religious beliefs which restrict free, happy and authentic behaviour should not be allowed to propagate without opposition. Whether or not they are likely to accept it at the time, the airing of such opposition can be shown to objectively help people. If we are capable of facing views that contradict our own without suffering unduly for it, it is surely the height of arrogance to presume that fundamentalist believers will react any differently. Let us not be patronising: we are all adults, capable of exercising the power of reason and changing our minds. There is literally no good reason to deny someone else this same opportunity for self-growth.<br />
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Perhaps a more pertinent and practical objection can be raised about the appropriateness of interjecting our opinions where they haven't been solicited. It is, I agree, a fine line which separates honest outspokenness from the kind of reverse proselytism that has unfortunately characterised much publicly-aired atheism in recent years. Clearly choosing the appropriate battles requires a degree of tact that may not easily be taught, but - as a broad rule - it seems that publicly broadcast beliefs are almost always fair game. If one wishes to enter one's beliefs into the public realm, one cannot claim to be offended when such beliefs are the subject of criticism from others. The right to be criticised (or offended!) is both the cost and the privilege of employing one's right to free-speech. It could be objected that religious beliefs occupy a private realm that critics have no business imposing themselves upon, but - by definition - a truly private belief could not be known to anyone else. It therefore behoves us not to engage in <i>a priori</i> attacks on one's religion before we are in possession of all the necessary facts, but public beliefs are not entitled to such protection. Once a belief is uttered publicly, one forfeits all claims to exclusive possession of this belief: it is now a part of the public sphere, for the rest of us to address as we wish. <br />
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It's not clear that such a approach will help to erode confidence in fundamentalist beliefs or rather simply further entrench the fundamentalists in their marginal positions, but I think such concerns are largely beyond our control. If a fundamentalist wishes to be offended, or to believe that she is being heroically persecuted for what she believes, then she will be able to do so quite independently of anything we might think to say. If they are going to claim persecution anyway, there is surely little we can say to make it worse. Besides, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, "argument [is] valuable, indeed essential, <i>for its own sake</i>". As a consequence of an argument, we can expect to find our beliefs either strengthened or exposed as folly by its end. For either eventuality, we should all find ourselves thankful.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-18239142389384394302012-04-17T03:24:00.001+10:002012-04-18T02:12:07.635+10:00Religion and Archaic LanguageOne curious feature of religious belief is its desire to protect (or even resurrect) archaic forms of language in its modern, everyday practice. Such examples are almost too numerous to mention, but include:<br />
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<ul><li>The use of archaic forms of Arabic among radical Muslims.<sup>1</sup></li>
<li>The persistence of Latin in the Catholic mass long after it had fallen into disuse in all other social arenas. </li>
<li>The rendering of The Book of Mormon (a mid-19th century document) in 16th century English.</li>
<li>The persistent presence of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement">KJV-exclusivism</a> in various modern Protestant sects.</li>
<li>The persistence of Hebrew language as an entirely liturgical language from around the 2nd century until its rehabilitation in the late 19th century.</li>
</ul><br />
Objectively, this feature of religious expression is difficult to account for. In almost every other situation that calls for the use of human language, the evocation of archaic forms would be detrimental to the clarity of the speaker's message. Why employ language that is no longer in wide-circulation if you want to be understood? What could possibly explain the drive to shroud one's message with such deliberately abstruse prose? The answer, predictably enough, is that religious language differs substantively from everyday language.<br />
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In most uses of language, the general inclination is to make ones position as explicit as possible by reducing any potential ambiguity in what one wishes to say. "Sarah Smith holds a rose in her hand", for instance, is less ambiguous than "Sarah holds a flower in her hand", though this latter sentence is itself less ambiguous than "<i>She</i> holds <i>it</i> in her hand". Let us call the first sentence <i>fully-propositional</i> since its meaning is clear without any further elaboration, and let us call the last sentence <i>semi-propositional</i>, as while it may take the same, general form (syntactically) as a fully-propositional statement, it cannot be properly understood without further refinement, elaboration or explicit contextual clues. In everyday communication, our language is generally composed of fully-prepositional forms; that is, forms that convey a meaning that is not entirely undermined by ambiguity<sup>2</sup> and possess a determinate content that can be judged as being either true or false.<sup>3</sup> <br />
<ul></ul>In religious language, however, ambiguity must not be seen as an inherently undesirable outcome of language use. In fact, as many atheists have fondly pointed-out over the years, religious language often has a decidedly slippery or woolly quality that seems to shield it from direct critique. The argument made by William Downes in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Religion-Journey-into-Human/dp/0521792231/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334594476&sr=8-1">this</a> book is that this is no mere accidental quality of religious language, but rather an integral part of it. More specifically, Downes sees the preponderance of semi-propositional forms as being a central and inexorable aspect in the formation (and success) of religious ideas.<br />
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Take, for instance, the rather unassuming sentence "God exists in heaven". It looks like a fully-prepositional statement in form, and the meaning - on a naive reading - may seem to be relatively clear, but the point is that such clarity is deceptive. Two people cannot agree on what is signified by the word "God" in the same way they may reach an agreement on what is signified by "Sarah Smith": one's definition of the former is shaped largely by subjective experience and cannot be anchored by anything that can be pointed to objectively. In this sense, "God" is an ambiguous and highly variable term that is scarcely more explicit in meaning than the pronoun "she". Heaven suffers from similar problems; again, given the impossibility of finding an objectively shared meaning of this word between any two people, we can scarcely say it is any less ambiguous than the word "it". Even the word exists is problematic, since it is obvious (according to most theological tenets) that God doesn't "exist" in the same sense that other objects in the universe "exist". In other words, even a mundane religious utterance like "God exists in heaven" renders itself completely immune to unambiguous explication and must therefore be recognised as semi-propositional in nature.<br />
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However - and this is the important part - simply because religious language is frequently semi-propositional in nature, that is not to say that it is not at all <i>meaningful</i>. In fact, the very ambiguity of language allows words like "God" to be used with a kind of free-wheeling multi-valency that simply isn't possible with words like "rose". Its inherent ambiguity allows religious language to produce an almost inexhaustible supply of meaningful inferences that can be applied to almost any situation encountered. To the extent that it doesn't over-reach and creep into domains better expressed using fully-propositional forms (we might call such domains the world of the "profane") religion can create a web of self-referential meaning that is almost infinitely pliable and profoundly salient within the mind of the believer. <br />
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With respect to the archaic forms of language I introduced at the beginning of this post, I hope it is becoming clear why such language forms are preserved in almost all religious traditions. The archaic language keeps it out of the "profane" domains of fully-propositional language<sup>4</sup>, and preserves it within its own hermetically-sealed domain of the "sacred". To the extent that archaic language is incomprehensible, so much the better for the inferential salience of religious concepts. This not the only reason for the use of such language within the praxis of religion, however, and I shall explore the other possibility - the importance of ancient authority in religions - in a subsequent post.<br />
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(1) "The fascination of [Islamic] fundamentalism is... bound up with language. Their leaders try to speak pure Arabic, untainted by dialects or foreign words... The Arabic spoken by modern fundamentalists is often appallingly trite, puritanical, conformist and, in fact, artificial. It is, however, perceived as pure and religious, mythical and, in a dull, banal sense, sublime. The mere code of the language becomes a tool used to legitimate their claim to the status of a sacred authority." - <i>The Blackwell Companion to the Quran</i>, pp. 116-117.<br />
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(2) Of course, all language contains <i>some</i> degree of ambiguity given the inherent poverty of language to adequately convey a concept from one mind to another, but I hope it is clear why the final of the three sentences can be said to be incomprehensibly ambiguous (in the absence of any context) in a manner that the first sentence is not. <br />
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(3) Not in any absolute senses of the terms, but rather in principle. <br />
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(4) I think this is why translations of the Bible which use contemporary English (usually for the edification of teenagers etc.) sound so campy: the "sacred" and "profane" domains are in conflict, which the brain struggles to reconcile in any way that doesn't utilise the release valve of laughter.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4390896814477186841.post-22064579238349692582012-04-16T20:13:00.008+10:002012-04-17T05:40:28.774+10:00Why Were the Gospels Written?When analysing an ancient religious text, one of the first tasks we must set ourselves is to identify which religious genre it aspires to. This is not merely a banal, intellectual exercise in literary taxonomy, but rather is integral to our framing of the text, and to shaping our understanding of it. To use concrete examples, we would be remiss to read the poetic Book of Job as belonging to the same religious genre as the Book of Kings, which aspires to be a work of history. In the New Testament, we plainly can't approach the apocalyptic work of Revelation in the same way we might approach the epistolary works of Paul (though there is some eschatological overlap in this case). Or, to use a more contemporary case, our attitude to a work will be plainly different depending on whether it claims to be a work of "science" or a work of "science-fiction". In all of these cases, our understanding of the genre of the texts will inexorably shape our disposition towards them before we have begun to read a single passage.<br />
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With regards to the gospels, the attempt to fit them into pre-existing genres has been met with failure, or - at best - controversy. Some scholars see the gospels as conforming to the structures of the ancient Greek genre of the <i>bios</i>, which we can roughly categorise as the fore-runner to our modern literary genre of "biography". In the Graeco-Roman world, this genre was largely hortatory: that is, the lives of great figures were invoked as examples of the "good life" and the "facts", such that they were, were generally of secondary importance to the ethics. Still others have attempted to link the gospels to other ancient genres, for instance that of tragedy, myth or - most interestingly - that of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Homeric-Epics-Gospel-Mark/dp/0300080123/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1334563562&sr=8-4">Homeric poems</a>. Perhaps more commonly, though, scholars are prone to see the gospels as works of "theologised history" or "historicised theology" (depending on their skeptical inclinations) emerging from the same religious tradition as the "historical" books of the Old Testament.<sup>1</sup><br />
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I'm not going to tackle such disputes here, but I am rather more interested in the categorisation of the gospels as "evangelical" works: that is to say, works constructed with the expressed purpose of spreading the "good news" about Jesus so as (presumably) to win over new converts into the faith. Sometimes this case is made implicitly, other times explicitly (e.g. the continuing designation of the authors of the gospels as the "evangelisers"), but such an assumption - and a largely unfounded one at that - can unfortunately serve to prejudice our readings of the texts by seducing us into believing certain things about the intentions of the authors that may have no basis in reality. For the non-Christian especially, the <i>a priori</i> assumption that the gospel authors are trying to deceive us into accepting a particular theological claim may lead us towards a degree of antipathy and skepticism towards the texts that frankly aren't warranted. <br />
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That is not to say that the gospel authors didn't have an agenda (or, rather, four largely separate agendas) that we must treat carefully when we read the texts. All authors, of course, present a necessarily subjective view of the world which shapes what they write, consciously or otherwise. In the gospel texts, we must recognise that they are primarily works of theology (<i>pace</i> our earlier discussion concerning the uncertainty of assigning the gospels to particular genres) that we cannot approach with the naive assumption that the authors are attempting to provide us with a dispassionate, factual history of events in first-century Palestine. Nonetheless, the kind of untethered skepticism levelled at the gospel texts by many non-believers (especially the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#21st_century">Jesus-Mythicists</a>") is rather an overcorrection and stems in part I think from the implicit assumption that the gospel authors, in their "evangelism", must have been necessarily duplicitous in what they had written so as to better appeal to potential followers.<sup>2</sup><br />
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It is this assumption of evangelism laying behind the gospels that I wish to address here. Specifically, I reject the idea of the gospels being composed for primarily evangelical purposes for the following reasons:<br />
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<ul><li>1) The evidence seems pretty clear (based on almost total lack of surviving manuscripts) that the gospels were not in wide-circulation until at least the 3rd century. That is, even if the gospels were written as evangelising tools (introducing the good news about Jesus to as wide a population as possible) they were certainly not utilised that way. </li>
</ul><ul><li>2) As a corollary to the first point, the gospels went almost completely uncited by early Christian authors until the late 2nd century. Even then, they appear to have been used primarily in a sectarian context as evidence for the (proto-)Orthodox position against more "heretical" forms of Christianity rather than as a proselytising tool for convincing those completely outside the faith. </li>
</ul><ul><li>3) Low literacy rates in the ancient world (perhaps as low as 2%) rendered the book as a tool for the wide dissemination of beliefs rather ineffective. If one wanted to understand the content of the gospels one would either need to be either wealthy and well-placed in society (and it does seem to be true that early Christianity was relatively successful within this demographic) or else be part of a community where it would be possible to hear the texts read aloud (i.e. already a member of a church). </li>
</ul><ul><li>4) The content of the gospels don't seem to have been constructed with a proselytising goal in mind. That is, much of their content must strike one as unusual or counter-productive if their primary intention was to convince outsiders of the veracity of Christian claims. </li>
</ul><br />
To elaborate on the final point, the Gospel of Mark (which serves as the archetype for the three latter gospels) contains a motif of secrecy that is difficult for even modern scholars of Christianity to make sense of. How would someone ignorant of (proto-)Christian theology in the ancient near-East have approached such claims? Why - if his goal was broad evangelism - did Mark leave so much of his theology implicit, including the resurrection of Christ? Who could have been won over by such an opaque text?<br />
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The other gospels present similar problems. For instance, given the prominence of Jewish themes and the reliance on the OT in the construction of its narrative, it is widely suspected that the Gospel of Matthew was created with the intent to evalgelise to a more Jewish audience. If that is so, the antipathy towards the Jews in this gospel is difficult to understand (e.g. the infamous "blood libel" verse at Mt. 27:25). The Gospel of Luke, often seen to have been written as a gospel for the "gentiles", is similarly difficult to comprehend as a primarily evangelical work. As N.T. Wright notes, "if one started off simply wanting to address an <i>apologia</i> for early Christianity to Roman authorities, one would not necessarily produce a work like Luke-Acts. There is far too much material which seems extraneous; comparison with the work of Aristides, Justin and the other second-century apologists reveals enormous differences". He adds in the footnotes the observation that "no Roman official would have waded through so much (to him) irrelevant material to reach so small an apologia"<sup>3</sup>. Additionally, Luke seems in his introduction to the gospel to be addressing his work to a specific individual, or - at best - individuals already initiated into the faith.<sup>4</sup><br />
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The Gospel of John seems like a better place to start if one wishes to make the case that the gospels were composed with an evangelical intent in mind given its pronouncement that "these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (Jn. 20:31), but even here there are problems. Firstly there are (as with gMark) secretive elements of the gospel that would appear to be counter-productive in a broader evangelical context. The rather abstruse imagery concerning various dualisms (light / dark etc.) must make for difficult work for the uninitiated, and its persistent use of the otherwise unnamed "beloved disciple" likewise betrays a certain assumption of pre-existing familiarity with the Johannine community. We can also infer from the gospel and the related epistles (i.e. 1-3 John) that this community was rather isolated from the Jewish community at large (based on passages in the gospel concerning expulsion from synagogues), had difficult relationships with other Christian communities (3 John 10) and imposed fairly strict conditions of membership within the community (1 John 2:19; 2 John 10). Put together, such evidence indicates a fairly bleak prospect of this community ever successfully producing a deliberately evangelical work.<br />
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So while I cannot for certain say what may have motivated the "evangelisers" to pen the gospels (though - for what it is worth - I lean towards the "historicised-theology" supposition touched on earlier) I certainly don't think that evangelism (at least in the sense of evangelising to a wide, uncommitted audience) can be posited as their primary motivation. If a solution to this problem is to be found, we must look for it elsewhere.<br />
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(1) See especially N.T. Wright below.<br />
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(2) Quite what their purpose might have been in collectively and nakedly lying to fulfil these ends is not clear. I suppose it might be assumed that with these lies about the resurrected Son of God they were reaching for power and influence over a progressively larger proportion of the population (a prime motivating force in modern proselytism, it must be said) but it certainly didn't help the early Christians, who were (with varying degrees of ferocity) marginalised and persecuted for their beliefs. That is, if one wants to suggest some fraudulent or conspiratorial explanation for the content of early Christian beliefs, one must also explain why it failed so miserably in a political context, at least until the 4th century. Or, to put it another way, why would they have been motivated to lie when it is plain that such mendacity didn't advance their position at all? It's easy enough to trace the trajectory of early Christian beliefs in terms of natural theological developments without needing to invoke malevolent intentions on behalf of its earliest practitioners.<br />
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(3) <i>The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1: Christian Origins and the Question of God)</i>, p 376.<br />
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(4) It's true that the "Theophilus" in Lk. 1:3 may be a general honorific (="god lover"), but even in this case it is clear that he is writing to individuals who "have been instructed" into the faith already (Lk. 1:4) and therefore scarcely in need of further convincing.James Prestonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01474869450770208484noreply@blogger.com0