How to Explain Paul's Silence on Jesus?

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?

Scholars might reply in one of two ways:¹

• 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), "was descended from David according to the flesh" (Rom 1:3-4), 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.

Or:

• 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. 

Such arguments have merit, I think, and may even be sufficient to address the argument from silence 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.

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 super-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 Church² 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?

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)³. 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?

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.

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(1) - See for examples Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?"

(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!

(3) - "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2)

On Criticising Religion

"Suppose I live under a totalitarian regime that has indoctrinated
me to venerate its leaders and accept the state’s values. I might be happy,
yet inauthentically so: my happiness is not autonomous, for it depends on the
acceptance of values imposed on me through manipulative practices. This is a
problem. Is it a subjectivist problem? It is not a problem from the subjective
point of view: I wholeheartedly endorse my values and way of life. I see nothing
wrong with my circumstances. This affirmation may persist through reflection
and exposure to the facts. You might call my attention to my lack of autonomy,
the inauthenticity of my happiness. I might agree with you on this, but then say,
‘‘so what?’’ I do not value autonomy or authenticity. As far as I am concerned,
these are the decadent values of a pathologically individualistic society. Leave
me alone.
It is worth considering what is to be done with someone like me. Deprogramming
seems the only route to enlightenment."

- (Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, p. 207)

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.

There are at least two key problems with this homo economicus 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 "Ultimatum Game" 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.

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 do, 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?

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?

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.

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.

A key feature of religious fundamentalism (at least of the Abrahamic variety) lies in its exclusivism: 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.

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 haram, 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?

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.

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 agape, or generalised, fraternal love) but such religious proclivities are assuredly not 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.

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 a priori 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.

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, for its own sake". 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.

Religion and Archaic Language

One 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:

• The use of archaic forms of Arabic among radical Muslims.¹
• The persistence of Latin in the Catholic mass long after it had fallen into disuse in all other social arenas.
• The rendering of The Book of Mormon (a mid-19th century document) in 16th century English.
• The persistent presence of KJV-exclusivism in various modern Protestant sects.
• The persistence of Hebrew language as an entirely liturgical language from around the 2nd century until its rehabilitation in the late 19th century.

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.

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 "She holds it in her hand". Let us call the first sentence fully-propositional since its meaning is clear without any further elaboration, and let us call the last sentence semi-propositional,  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 ambiguity² and possess a determinate content that can be judged as being either true or false.³

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 this 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.

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.

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 meaningful. 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.

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 language⁴, 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.

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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." - The Blackwell Companion to the Quran, pp. 116-117.

(2) Of course, all language contains some 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.

(3) Not in any absolute senses of the terms, but rather in principle.

(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.

Why 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.

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 bios, 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 Homeric poems. 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.¹

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 a priori 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.

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 (pace 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 "Jesus-Mythicists") 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.²

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:

• 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.  

• 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.  

• 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).

• 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.  

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?

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 apologia 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"³. 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.⁴

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.

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.

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(1) See especially N.T. Wright below.

(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.

(3) The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1: Christian Origins and the Question of God), p 376.

(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.

The Psychopathology of Fundamentalism

One of the most difficult problems facing the critic of religious belief is to provide a convincing explanation for the emergence of religious fundamentalism. The are two predominant issues that render it difficult to provide such an explanation:

1) They evade explanations proferred by evolutionary psychology, as most fundamentalist religions do not appear to promote what we might term "evolutionary successful strategies". They frequently promote behaviour such as chastity, self-abasement, social isolation, time-consuming rituals and (in the most extreme cases) suicidal matyrdom that reduce significantly one's chances of reproduction and therefore any potential for the spread of congential dispositions towards religious fundamentalism.

and

2) Fundamentalist belief is often so grossly at odds with reality that it is difficult to see how a healthy human mind could assent to some of their more central tenets.

Some commentators even take issue with identifying what might be termed a "fundamentalist mindset" in the first place. The Muslim commentator and author Walid Aly, for instance, decries any attempt to describe radicalised Muslims (or the radicalised of any non-Christian faith, for that matter) as "fundamentalists" because he views this term as pertaining exclusively to the Protestant faith, specifically the periodic movements within it to return to a faith based entirely on such "fundamentals" as scriptural innerrancy and faith in Christ (perhaps best expressed in the form of Martin Luther's "Five Solas"). Others, such as Scott Atran, reject the claim that there is any substantive difference between the mind of the "fundamentalist" and any other human mind to begin with. He suggests:

"I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love," he says. "These people are very compassionate." Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements.

[...]

[D]espite the fact that fundamentalist thinking is often portrayed as simplistic, this... is not borne out by research. Measures of cognitive complexity, which describes how an individual combines, classifies and processes information, show that fundamentalists are no different from the wider population. In general they operate solid, logical and sophisticated chains of thinking, albeit thinking that is based on non-negotiable articles of faith.

While any treatment of fundamentalism has to take such observations seriously, I don't think either constitutes sufficient reason to abandon the search for features that are universal to what we might call a fundamentalist mindset. In the first place, while the term "fundamentalism" may well be tracable to specific movements within the Christian tradition, I think it can still be retained as a general term for extreme and inflexible forms of zealotry. For the "fundamentalist" (whether religious or secular - e.g. Marxists, Tea-Party zealots etc.) all experience is framed through the "fundamentals" of their doctrine of choice: such fundamentals form the foundation of their understanding of the world in a completely intractible sense. It is this exhaustive framing of the world through a narrow set of beliefs that distinguishes the "fundamentalist" from the rest of us.

In the second place, while it is almost certainly true that fundamentalists do not universally suffer from any sort of inherent cognitive impairment, that is not to say that there must not be any identifiable differences in the operation of the mind of the fundamentalist and that of the average person. I have no doubt that the fundamentalist is capable of scoring highly on tests which measure the capacity for cognitive complexity, but the more interesting (and important) question is whether they [i]employ[/i] such capacities as readily as the average person in their day-to-day lives. The most insidious forms of ignorance are often entirely willful.

And so my theory. In my opinion, the two most characteristic traits of the fundamentalist mind are:

1) A complete lack of a sense of humour.

and

2) A complete absense of imagination.

In some ways, the two are dependent on each other. The importance of novelty and perspicacity in humour (with respect to convention, timing etc.) mean that imagination is probably necessary for a well-developed sense of humour, and the playfulness and irreverent abandon of imaginative thought probably requires a levity that can only emerge in those of good humour.

Humour is important to the healthy human mind as it appears to be central to the way we relate to other human beings. As Henri Bergson put it:

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to. - Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, pp. 6-7

This relation of humour to one's disposition to other human beings can expose a lot about one's personality. We invariably find something discomforting or even obnoxious about one who cannot laugh at himself or absurd situations. Even more so when one finds oneself easily offended by the expression of humour. Such a disposition betrays, I think, a severe ill-ease with oneself and with the world more generally (see next post). If we can identify in the mind of the fundamentalist a severe mistrust or misapprehension of humour (and this does seem to be true, equally, of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Marxists, Far-Rightists etc.) then we can probably assume that there is some severe obstacle in their thought processes which prevents them from acknowledging the absurdity of the human condition in the relaxed, good-humoured manner it deserves. What is really happening here?

Put simply, an essential tennet of fundamentalist thought lies in a fundamental mistrust of humanity and its capacity to execute its agency freely. All fundamentalists view humanity as necessarily sick and depraved, naturally drawn to immoral excess in the absense of some controlling dogma. For the Christian, this immorality - or "sinfulness" - is an a priori condition of human existence: we are sinners before we even act. Such a disposition towards one's fellow man makes one necessarily "anti-human", at least to the extent that these other humans fail to share one's world-view. This manifests itself in the absurd, paranoid construction of "out-groups" whose powers (and unity) are invariably grossly exaggerated. This out-group can take the form of such nebulous entities as "secular society" (Christians), "the West" (Muslims), "the Bourgeoius" (Marxists) or "the Left" (Tea Party). Such groups are posited as unrelentingly undermining the strength of the "in-group" (in fact, that seems to be their only function) and whose influence, on occasion, appears almost omnipresent. The imagined construction of a powerful homosexual lobby in fundamentalist American thought is the probably the most wantonly absurd example of this manner of thinking.

Of course, when the entire world is sick, depraved and populated almost entirely with enemies who pose nothing less than a total existential threat to the well-being of the believer, the relaxed, self-depricating and fundamentally egalitarian disposition towards humanity necessary for the expression of, or appreciation for, humour is completely absent. It's difficult to laugh at something you have been taught to so viscerally hate.

The total absense of imagination is also not difficult to identify. When I use the word "imagination", I'm not talking about the capacity to invent or accept fictions: the fundamentalist mind is almost infinitely pliable in this regard. Rather I use the word in a more Romantic sense, to denote ones capacity to consider the world from another perspective, or to imagine that it may be different (and crippling and inexorable fatalism also appears to be common to most fundamentalist beliefs). Concepts like hell or some future utopia (in which one's in-group has finally and definitively prevailed) are not the product of an imaginative mind, but rather a desperately constrained mind, incapable of considering, for any length of time, the complexities of human existence. Do good people deserve to go to hell? Can we be happy in heaven if we have loved ones there? How would a society remade to our precise specifications look? How can we possibly imagine that all would be happy and content there? To such questions - which require us to acknowledge the presense of human minds beyond our own, the fundamentalist has no answer. Such questions are best left unasked.

This complete mistrust of the perspectives of others is most clearly manifest in the fundamentalist's treatment of art. No fundamentalism anywhere has ever tolerated art which deviates from - let alone undermines - its narrowly defined dogmas. The Taliban banned dancing, Stalin sent poets to the gulags and American Evangelicals rail endlessly against the depravity of Hollywood and secular music: what's the difference? Such censorship is nothing more than an extension of one's mistrust of the individuality of others into the political arena. If people are fundamentally sick, then an expression of their subjectivity cannot be tolerated. Such creative exuberance is an anthema to the fearful, humourless "piety" of the fundamentalist believer.

The solution? Never trust someone who lacks a sense of humour or a sense of imagination. Chances are they don't trust you either.

Class Warfare and the New Testament

Background:

In circa 30 CE, at the zenith of Jesus' ministry, the Judaean Province was a fairly unstable place politically. In the mid-second century BCE, the Jewish state won a fleeting independence from the Ptolemaic Hellenists, only to absorbed into the Roman empire in the mid 1st century BCE. While the state was allowed some degree of autonomy, resentment against the Roman rulers was constantly brought to the fore in the form of protest and occasionally revolution, right up until the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

Galilee, in the north of modern Israel, was at the time a largely rural province, populated almost entirely by small, agrarian communities. Although empire can be a cruel imposition on any population, there is evidence that it was these poorer, less politically influential communities who tended to suffer most at the hands of imperial policy. In general, Shauel Noah Einstadt writes, "the middle and lower peasant groups were the largest part of the rural population" in ancient agrarian empires and "the peasantry [also] carried the greatest burden of taxation" (Political Systems of Empires, p. 207). Land appropriation and increasingly burdensome taxation seemed to be a common feature of Roman policy within Galilee and much of the rest of the Near East at the time.

The incapacity of farmers to produce at surplus levels (as all surpluses tended to be appropriated by the state) produced what might be termed a permanent underclass of communities barely capable of sustaining themselves. "[T]he Roman Empire was an agrarian society, characterised by... marked social inequality", John Dominic Crossan writes. "Agricultural productivity increased, elite appropriation of peasant surpluses increased, and inequality between the producers and the takers increased" (The Birth of Christianity, p. 153). This meant that the Peasant Class, "that vast majority of the population, was held at (or close to) sustenance level so that their appropriated surplus could support elite conspicuous consumption. Those appropriations could reach, cumulatively, as high as two thirds of the total crop" (p. 155).

But if even those landed peasants - capable of self-sustenance at least at some fundamental level - were barely capable of supporting themselves, what can we possibly say for those who owned no such land at all? This "Expandable Class", writes Gerhard Lenski, "included a variety of types, ranging from pretty criminals and outlaws to beggars and underemployed itinerant workers, and numbered all those forced to live solely by their wits or by charity" (Power and Privilege, p. 281). This class existed, he continues, because "agrarian societies usually produced more people than the dominant classes found it profitable to employ... [H]igh death rates were usually offset by the steady stream of new recruits forced into [their] ranks from the classes immediately above [them]. These recruits were largely the sons and daughters of poor peasants and artisans who inherited little more than the shirts on their backs and a parental blessing" (pp. 281-283).

It is from these disenfranchised, impoverished classes of Galilee that Jesus and his early followers first emerged.

Jesus and Poverty:

When it comes to determining exactly who Jesus was and what his message consisted of, we have no choice but to abandon any pretense of talking about "facts" and enter instead the wonderful world of "probabilities". No account of Jesus' life or teachings exists from his day, the earliest surviving account dating to perhaps forty years after his death (presuming a 70 CE date of authorship for gMark). There are certain criteria that can and have been used to adduce what parts of the gospels report reliable history and which are the invention of the gospel authors (I explore J.P. Meier's criteria on here, for those interested) but this is scarcely a scientific process and not especially important if (as in the case of this post) we're not particularly concerned with distinguishing Jesus' message from that of his earliest followers.

From what we can tell, Jesus was the son of a manual labourer (tekton in Greek: can be translated as "carpenter", but not the sort of who produced fine furniture) who - based on his absence from the later gospel record (cf. Mk. 6:3) - may well have been dead or otherwise absent for much of Jesus' life. In any case, all the indications are that Jesus came from an impoverished family and grew up in a tiny, inconsequential Galilean community.

It is clear from the early sayings traditions preserved in gMark and the "Double Tradition" (i.e. those sayings common to gMatthew and gLuke but not to gMark, which a majority of scholars explain as having come from a hypothetical, now lost "Q" gospel) that concern with poverty was present in the philosophy of Jesus and the early Christian tradition from the very beginning. Only "concern with poverty" doesn't quite capture it: the tone is far more severe than that. But to understand we must first we digress into a brief discussion of "eschatology".

Eschatology and Judaism:

For the Jews of the ancient world - particularly those who lived pre-diaspora - there was usually little distinction made between the realms of theology and politics. All that happened to Israel (both from within and without) was a consequence of divine machination, a response to the piety (or lack thereof) of Israel's children. This can be seen most vividly in the books of the prophets, where the success of kings and the state are linked entirely to Yahweh's whim, which is itself determined by how faithfully the king and his subjects carried out Yahweh's commandments. Within this prophetic literature, though, existed a more specific genre called "the Apocalyptic", which involved not merely a theological explanation for contemporary events but a genre in which future events were "revealed" (the most accurate translation of the Greek word "apocalypse") to the prophets. These kinds of "prophecies" were particularly common during periods where the sovereignty of Israel was under threat from foreign powers, and people looked desperately to the prospect of future divine intervention for reassurance.

Note, then, that the apocalyptic genre was from the beginning an outlet for the weak and disenfranchised to imagine a future time in which the power imbalance would be righted. Israel may well be at the whim of foregin powers now, but at some point in the future the great power of Yahweh shall be revealed and all these presently powerful kings who have so tormented his children shall be made subject to him. Eventually, this idea of a future turning point in history (or, more accurately, an end to history as we know it) where God shall arrive and institute a quite literal kingdom on Earth, became a common feature of Jewish theology. This, naturally, gave rise to the belief that this future eschaton (lit. "the last") was close at hand, and that the adherence to certain standards of behaviour might either draw the eschaton nearer or, in the case of early Christians, offer one a means of salvation in the event that God (or one acting in his name - i.e. "the Son of Man") were to arrive in judgment, determining who exactly was worthy to live in his kingdom.

It is this concept of "ethical eschatology" (i.e. a future, definitive turning-point in history) that is at the centre of most early Christian beliefs.

Eschatology, Christianity and Power:

From the beginning, Christian theology has clearly been motivated by a belief in an imminent eschaton, the first step of which was marked by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Like many other Jewish eschatologies, there appeared to be a belief in a general resurrection of the dead at the "coming of the Lord" (see 1 Thess. 4:13-18 - the earliest surviving work of Christian literature, and also the passage that has inspired modern Christian visions of "the Rapture"). In 1 Cor. 15:20-23 Paul spells out his "Adam Christology", his belief that Jesus represents a kind of inverse Adam (where Adam tried to raise himself and inflicted death on mankind, Jesus lowered himself and brought life to mankind) and - more importantly - his belief that the resurrection of Christ marks only the "first fruits" of a more general eschatology, which involves the "resurrection of the dead".

But Christian eschatology was about more than just the promise of eternal life. Like other Jewish eschatologies, the Christian message was one of a coming "kingdom of God", where the oppressive rulers of the current age would be swept aside by God in a glorious inversion of power. Consider the passages that come immediately after the two quoted above:

1 Thess. 5:1-3:
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, "There is peace and security", then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labour pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!
1 Cor. 15:24-25:
Then comes the end, when [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

Note that we are not just talking about salvation in some distant, heavenly sense, we're talking about salvation on this Earth, here and now. Just like Yahweh coming down and smiting Israel's enemies in the prophetic OT literature, so to shall he arrive to deliver his children from the present day kingdoms (i.e. Rome) that oppress them. Like the earlier apocalyptic literature, we see the expectations of a future day where the powerful shall be toppled by the powerless in a divinely led revolution.

Even after Paul, during the 70s when Mark wrote, the eschatological belief that "the Kingdom of God has come near" (Mk. 1:15) was apparently still going strong. It's only towards the end of the second century, where several decades of expectation had ended in disappointment, that the belief in the parousia (i.e. the second coming of Christ) and coming eschaton were placed at some point in the indefinite (as opposed to immediate) future. But the eschaton was not just about inverting the power imbalance between competing societies, it was about inverting the power imbalances within societies themselves.

Eschatology, Christianity and Poverty:

The New Testament as we have received it was written by many different authors, living in vastly different parts of the world, over a period spanning many decades. It's important to recognise, therefore, that we cannot expect to find a unified theology or ethical system undergirding all the books that comprise it: different authors, put simply, are bound to have differing opinions. Although there is a unity of sorts in the way that the NT treats poverty (all its authors who breach the subject naturally regard it as a pressing ethical concern), there is no question that different authors treat the issue of poverty in different ways.

For instance, there is no shortage of passages instructing readers to simply show due ethical concern for the plight of the poor. When modern Christians consider their ethical responsibilities to the poor (excluding sola fide Protestants, of course, who don't actually care about the poor at all), these are probably the sort of passages they have in mind:

Luke 3:11:
And [John the Baptist] would answer and say to them, "Let the man with two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise."
1 Tim. 6:18:
Do good... be rich in good deeds, and... be generous and willing to share.
Mt. 6:2:
When therefore you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

Now it goes without saying that each of these injunctions are noble enough in their own right, but it also has to be said that they are otherwise quite pedestrian and unremarkable. Similar sentiments, I am sure, could be found in any other religious work which dwells on the issue of poverty: there is nothing particularly or uniquely "Christian" about any of them. Such injunctions to share if you can, to always be good and generous and to never boast about such deeds could scarcely be said to represent a bold or unique system of ethics.

The interesting thing about each of these passages, though, is that they can all be dated to late "strata" within the New Testament - special Lukan material ("L"), pseudo-Pauline Pastoral material and special Matthean material ("M") respectively, each of which date to the late first century at the earliest. As a general rule, we find that the later material in the NT often has a "softer" edge than the earlier material. Much of the early ethical injunctions concerning poverty in the New Testament have a distinctly unreasonable and polemical tone about them.

Consider some of the most famous ethical injunctions presented by Jesus:

Luke 6:29-30:
If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Luke 18:22:
When Jesus heard this, He said to him, "One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

A simple reading might tell us simply that Jesus is suggesting that it is good to give to the poor, but the unreasonableness of Jesus' expectations tells us that there is something deeper going on here. What kind of society can function with these counter-intuitive ethical norms of giving more to those who have stolen from you, or where having any possessions at all is a hindrance to future salvation? The answer is simple: a society who didn't expect that the world (as we know it) would last much longer. Recognise that Jesus was not the irenic hippy that we often imagine him to be, going round telling people to be nice to each other out of some general altruistic concern for mankind. He offered all these strict ethical injunctions, rather, because he believed that the world was about to end and that the coming judgement would require everyone to measure up to extremely particular ethical standards.

But again, his beliefs were even more strident than that. He believed not only that giving excessively to the poor was a necessary moral condition for salvation, he apparently believed that poverty in itself was virtuous and wealth, by extension, inherently sinful. Take this famous passage:

Matthew 19:24:
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The message is clear: wealth itself is an anathema to divine salvation. The reasoning behind this idea is that the world is inherently "evil" (for want of a better word) and so therefore those who have profited most here must be evil as well, and that those who have profited least must therefore be "good" - a situation that will be rectified, with each getting their just desserts, when the eschaton finally arrives. It is this belief in a complete reversal of fortunes that scholars refer to as an inversionary ethical eschatology.

The meaning of this is simple enough. It means that "the last shall be [made] first, and the first last" (Mt. 20:16) and that "the meek shall inherit the earth" (Mt. 5:5) when this future kingdom arrives. For this reason "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Lk. 6:20) and "woe to you who are rich, for you have [already] received your consolation" (Lk. 6:24). The author of the book of James has an especially blunt message for those who amass wealth:

James 5:1-6:
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.

And an eschatological consolation for the poor:

James 5:7-8:
Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.

Note that the word translated here as "poor" is the Greek word ptochos, which refers not merely to those who are struggling a bit for cash, but rather to the completely destitute: that expendable underclass I spoke of at the top of this post. This inversionary eschatology was both written by and directed to this permanent underclass, giving them the hope that the iniquities of the present ages would soon pass. Jesus, then, was a champion of this poor, a revolutionary who saw his battle as being played out on some future heavenly realm rather than in the present material world. His revolutionary zeal didn't manifest itself in the taking up of swords, but rather the adoption of counter-intuitive standards of ethical piety. The early Christians were also drawn from this underclass, uplifted by the prospect of a divinely inspired revolutionary reversal of fortunes that they - as a lowly and disenfranchised people - could never hope to realise of their own volition. The New Testament is by construction, then, a statement of class warfare.

So what went wrong?

As I have already said, the earlier strata of the New Testament seem to represent a much courser polemic than the later strata. Put simply, as Christianity spread and the plight of rural Galileans became less central to the Christian message, the polemic was necessarily toned down. We can already see this happening in the first century, as Matthew (writing in the cosmopolitan city of Antioch) tones down the invective from the passages he derives from the "Q" gospel (written several decades earlier in the less developed province of Judea). Take the beatitudes, for instance, that both Luke and Matthew have taken from Q:

Luke 6:20-21:
Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

Compare Luke's rendition of the beatitudes (most scholars believe that his rendering of Q is generally closer to the original wording the Matthew's rendition) to those in gMatthew:

Matthew 5:2-6:
Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Note that Matthew's beatitudes are no longer strictly about the poor and hungry, but (with the addition of the bolded words) are softened into more general, spiritual blessings, without class overtones. The later "woe to the rich" passage in gLuke is, not surprisingly, absent from gMatthew. Matthew, in fact, quite frequently seems to deliberately downplay the role of poverty in Jesus' life and message. Whereas in gLuke Jesus is born in a stable and visited by shepherds, in Matthew Jesus is visited by mighty kings from the east. Whereas in gLuke Jesus gives his sermon on a plain, in gMatthew he gives it atop a mountain. Whereas in gLuke Jesus is unequivocal in his denunciation of the rich, in gMatthew he fraternises with tax-collectors (the ultimate class-traitors: those drawn from local communities to procure funds on behalf of the empire). And that's just in gMatthew: by the time we get to gJohn (circa 95-100 CE) there is scarcely any mention of poverty at all.

And, unfortunately, that's the Christianity that we've been left with. A Christianity whose origins are to be found only in a few exposed roots among the surviving literature, otherwise completely obscured by a more dominant theology of vicarious atonement. The idea of salvation being delivered on the basis of need to groups, communities and nations has been supplanted - perhaps inevitably - by the more selfish concerns of personal salvation and "treasures in heaven". However, although the Christian message has been castrated by a church who preaches concern for the poor only in some abstract, pandering sense, it is important not to forget that at the centre of the church's canon lies a bold and revolutionary message: in one way or another, the poor will be delivered salvation at the expense of the rich.

On Christian Pessimism

As an atheist, one quickly has to get used to the idea being frequently charged with pessimism and nihilism by believers. If one does not accept the idea of a deity, so the logic goes, one's life becomes inherently meaningless, one's outlook necessarily lacking optimism. Many ministers have recently elected to use the occasion of the resurrection of the Lord of the universe to re-emphasise their feelings about what certain people just don't happen to believe in (I mean, what else could they possibly have to talk about at this time of the year?). Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen, for instance, attacked the "the secularist philosophy" for "invit[ing] us to invent our own lives and... undervalue commitment to other human beings" (link). From my own perspective though, I would argue the opposite is true.

I was reminded of this through a post recently made by Fred Clark on his slacktivist blog. Normally Clark is especially adept at avoiding the more egregious excesses of Christian thought (indeed, he's normally an extremely articulate denouncer of them) but the idea of the hopeless futility of the Godless life is apparently so ingrained in the Christian ethos that even its most reasonable and egalitarian adherents cannot help but reproduce it.

Clark begins with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

Now to most I'm sure that this triadic formula (to use the language of Biblical Scholarship) represents nothing more than a rather beautiful explication of the hopefulness of the Christian philosophy. For Niebuhr, the fragile obscurity of man is countenanced by the infinite and glorious power of the divine. In the face of our mortal limitations, we can rest assured that all that is worth acheiving can and will be acheived through the will of the immortal Lord. Surely no grander statement of optimism could be conceived?

Well, not really. My qualm rests in the almost reflexive dismissal of human potential inherent in Niebuhr's world-view. "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime" - what a horrible sentiment! Where does that leave us, then? Are we all to simply lapse into fatalistic despair? Perhaps Mandela might just as well have stayed in prison, or Rosa Parks might just as well have moved seats, or Neil Armstrong might just as well have stayed in the space capsule if "nothing worth doing" can be completed during the course of a human life? What does that say about the Christian philosophy's "commitment to other human beings", given our apparent incapacity to ever acheive anything worthwhile in our lives?

But the fatalistic despair grows: "Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history". While it is true that sometimes the grandeur of human acheivement can take time to be duly appreciated, that in no way means that it is impossible to immediately discern the "true", "beautiful" and "good" when and where it happens. Even if a philosophical case could be mounted for the impossibility of objectively discerning what is "true", "beautiful" and "good" (which I don't think Niebuhr was going for) to proceed as though such objective discernment were possible is probably a necessary basis for meaningful human action. I shudder to think what human action might look like if we dispose with any pretense of concern for that which is "true", "beautiful" or "good".

And finally: "Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone". In actual fact I have some sympathy for this passage: no man is an island, as that old cliche goes, so man necessarily requires the formation of community with other human beings to acheive anything at all. We are biologically social animals for whom, I suspect, all higher functions (consciousness, emotion, logic etc.) are entirely predicated on our capacity for interaction with others. However, I'm inclined to think that this impression of biologically determined sociality was not quite what Niebuhr was aiming for, and his intention was probably rather to simply engage in a crude assault on human individualism. His claim that "nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone" belies that fact that individuals throughout history have indeed acheieved great things as a consequence of their own, individual volition. Some such as Gallileo acheived what they did in spite of the interjection of the community around them, certainly not because of it.

Now while we mustn't overstate the representativeness of a single passage from a single author, it seems quite apparent to me that this almost general, almost casual disdain for humanity is indeed endemic to to Christian thought more generally. Neitzsche writes that "Christianity finds man sick so that it may offer him the cure"¹, continuing:

"It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds wall; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist'."²

In other words, it was once necessary for Christians to emphasise the "sickness" of man - how small, and fragile, and unworthy he is - in order to convince him of the need to accept the cure: namely, salvation through Jesus Christ³. While the proclamation of soteriological exclusivism has diminished in public Christian thought in recent times (all religions are, afterall, just different means to the same end - whether you believe in Jesus or Buddha, you'll still get to heaven) that fundamental belief in the sickness of man remains. This is the malaise that undergirds all in Christian philosophy that can be found to be abhorrent.

Now, though, it finds itself confronted with a newer philosophy: a philosophy which asserts the ethical trascendence of humankind over and above the cold, dead universe into which we are all born. To the Christians, of course, such a proclamation represents "a form of idolatry in which we worship ourselves", borne of our "resentment that we do not in fact rule the world" (link). But the humanists think nothing of the kind. The general, overarching philosophy of humanism can be expressed in a single line: all that is that is good in the universe both begins and ends with a human being. Simple, powerful and completely impervious to misinterpretation or corruption.

Perhaps, though, the Christians recognise the weakness of their own position and the strength of our own. Perhaps, as Sartre put it, they resent the humanists "not [for] our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism"⁴. A person optimistic about the human capacity for goodness and self-determination, of course, has less need for the salvational myths sold to them by those who hold a far dimmer view of humanity.

So I say leave the Christians alone with their delusions of a sick, deficient human species completely enslaved by the inexorable fate into which they were born. I, however, can only assert my belief in the potential in every human being for overwhelming acts of good, and the power of each of us to alter for the better the course of human history. If that makes me a pessimist, so be it.

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1 - I'm struggling to find a source for this, but I'm almost certain I didn't make it up. Perhaps my memory has twisted the words in my mind enough - while retaining the general sentiment of the passage - that it no longer resembles the original passage enough to be able to find it through Google. Perhaps, as an aside, this is a good analogy for how the sayings of Jesus were remembered and transmitted during the 40 years period prior to the penning of the gospels.

2 - From Human, All Too Human in Volume Two: The Wanderer and His Shadow, p. 329.

3 - As Jesus himself is reported to have said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." - Matthew 9:12.

4 - From Existentialism as a Humanism.