🚀 go-pugleaf

--- Forwarded from mailing list.  Reply to uus-l@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu ---

On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Tom Tadfor Little wrote:

> The problem is that the impossibility of miracles is rather frequently
> used as a criterion in separating the historical Jesus from the Christ
> of Faith.  The gospels depict a Jesus who anticipates the crucifixion,
> resurrection, and destruction of Jerusalem, for example. JS discounts
> the authenticity of these passages, not for text-critical reasons, but
> because "Jesus could not have known that..."

OK, touche. If they used it as a text-sieve criterion, they built their
world-view into their Jesus in detail. Perhaps the re-reconstructionists
you project for the future will re-introduce miraculism (is that a word?
oh, well, now it is) and have another go at it.

> I don't in the least fault them for doing this; but their reason for
> doing so is an implicit acceptance of the modernist worldview and an
> implicit rejection of the miraculous worldview. For someone who believes
> in an omniscient God who entered the world as Jesus, the JS reasoning
> will certainly appear circular.

But not irreligious. After all the "Bible is the Word of God because it
says so in the Bible" circularity is fundamental to Western culture.

> But would Trapp (or you) attribute dishonesty to humanist academics who
> teach college courses on the Bible or comparative religion and do not
> let the class in on the possibility of Christianity being God's revealed
> religion?

Hardly a critical omission; it is an assumption of the cultural back-
ground, and even student from, eg, Hindu culture will have heard of it.

Humanist academics who disparage Paganism or Goddess spirituality without
knowing what they are talking about -- or, worse, *with* knowing what they
are talking about -- I would (and, in the instance, do) classify as highly
dishonest. They are collaborating in a slur with a background culture to
which on other issues they take deep exception.

> >I fail to see how application of the best scholarly tools to sort out the
> >reliability of sayings attributed to Jesus, can fail to touch the religi-
> >ous meaning of Jesus. If the core texts and the redacted texts do not
> >conflict, this might be properly called an academic exercise. But where
> >they do conflict, a difference is created between those who find they have
> >been following a Christianity rooted in Christ and those following a
> >Christianity rooted in early Christians. The latter may properly be seen
> >as having entered a religious crisis. Far be it from us to deny it to
> >them; some of these chickens have been waiting almost 2,000 years to come
> >home to roost.
>
> I guess I see Jesus as *primarily* a cultural construction of the early
> Christian community, based in part on what we now call "the historical
> Jesus". Some time back, Doug Muder made an analogy with King Arthur. King
> Arthur *is* the legend, regardless of whether or not parts of the legend
> have historical precursors. If we discover that the "historical Arthur" was
> a completely unremarkable Saxon warlord or Roman general, do we then
> rewrite Malory and say "here is the real story, use this instead"? No, the
> historical reconstruction will be of interest to scholars, and will make
> only a minor perturbation in the cultural understanding of the legend.

But, apart from a few SCAers, nobody makes King Arthur the center of their
spiritual life. Everyone acknowledges Arthur to be a myth of the Britons
in the basic sense -- embodying the virtues and flaws of British character
and culture in a story whose truth is much larger than its factual
content.

To draw another analogy, there are plenty of atheistic Jews who would not
give you a rap for the literal factuality of the Hebrew Bible, but still
observe the holidays and even the major dietary laws out of solidarity
with their people and in a conscious effort to extend the remarkable
durability of that people one more generation.

At the core of Christianity is something different -- an insistence that
the myth *is also fact.* This produces a terrible vulnerability, and lipid
smoke has risen from hundreds of thousands of stakes as the last trace of
human beings caught in the middle of that vulnerability.

> Of course, as you note, there is a problem here for those many who
> believe that the Jesus of the gospels *is* the historical Jesus, and
> take that belief as important or even crucial. But this is just the
> familiar problem of being a religious person in a modernist culture.

No. It is a unique fetish of Christianity that the myth must also be the
historical truth.

> A few people who have a deep intellectual commitment to pulling the
> rival worldviews together in some coherent way may make good use of the
> Jesus Seminar work. But the Jesus who loomed over western culture for
> nearly twenty centuries is the Jesus of the gospels, and he's the one we
> have to come to terms with in our various relationships with
> Christianity.

You are supposing that this was the same Jesus for twenty centuries.
You're giving far too much away! The Jesus of the martyrs who got fed to
the lions was *not* the Jesus whose cross decorated the shields of the
Crusaders!

> >Out of a community number-
> >ing in the hundreds at least, the writers of the early Christian scrip-
> >tures might have fit comfortably into one transcontinental bus. It can be
> >seriously questioned if any of them were eyewitnesses, and at least one of
> >them was a know bureaucrat and spinmeister. Surely they were inspired by
> >the total community, but did they represent it?
>
> It doesn't matter. Did Malory represent his English readers? His French
> sources?

IIRC the French stuff came afterward -- court of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

> The Arthur of history?

Of course not. He was only found in this century.

> The writers of the gospels defined Jesus for the subsequent centuries.

Again, you give far too much away. Everyone from Augustine to Swedenborg
to Joseph Smith to Mary Baker Eddy tweaked Jesus for their own sectarian
purposes. The writers of the gospels did not give us a complete picture as
much as a broad sketch whose details others have filled in over the
centuries.

> Some other people might have delivered us a different Jesus, but they
> didn't.

As I'm interrupting you every other line to demonstrate, they *did.*

OK, Tom, how serious is this? Are you as completely captive to Gospel
historicity as you seem to be? Or have you just not run your mind down
this path before?

> Historical Jesus research might succeed in shifting the center of
> gravity of our images of Jesus back toward an Arian or Unitarian view.

Which you cite for the purpose of dismissing it? JESUS! (to coin a
phrase). I've had clergy of mainstream faiths quietly assure me that their
churches are becoming Unitarian in all but name, a process they hope not
to live to seen completed but anticipate firmly.

> If so, then perhaps future generations will be reconstructing us. What
> will there reaction be? "Wow! We've been reading the gospel according to
> Funk in our churches for generations; but now we discover that we have
> original documents from two generations after Jesus, so let's go back to
> them, instead of using this weird 20th-century redaction that reflects
> the modernist anxiety over "historicity" and "objectivity" instead of
> the real message of Jesus!"

The "gospel according to Funk" has no meaning without the parallel preser-
vation of the other five gospels, so that particular rediscovery cannot
happen. Of course, some reconstruction will take place. Once the last
Humanists disciple of James Randi is dead, and science has been allowed to
investigate paranormal phenomena with the same respect for context that
quantum mechanics was granted, and the possibility of foreseeing events
is acknowledged, someone will recapitulate the JS with the possibility of
"miraculous" foreknowledged left intact, and we will see a new paradigm
emerge. (Well, *we* won't see it, but you know what I mean.) It will even
be hailed as a "final" synthesis of religion, dogmatic 20th century near-
science, and the true science of the [Name] age where [Name] is whoever
integrates dousing, hands-on healing and Tarot reading with quantum
mechanics and general relativity at least as well as the latter two are
already integrated <smirk>.

> I do think the historical reconstruction will be quite useful to a
> number of people as a kind of counterpoint in contemplating the image of
> Jesus.  But I don't think the Jesus of historical reconstruction
> inspired a world religion; the Jesus who did that was the Jesus of Paul
> and the evangelists.

No less than the Jesus of Pope Urban and the Crusaders.

> One can be honest to history, or honest to the myth. Joseph Campbell
> would remind us that the latter option may represent a deeper truth. I
> tend to think that the historical reconstruction simply could not ever
> have the signficance of the myth, because it touches nothing
> particularly deep in human religious life. So what if some guy 2000
> years ago spouted deliciously clever social wisdom and pissed of the
> political authorities?  Why should anyone but an obsessive historian
> care? The culture has already consigned thousands of such individuals to
> oblivion. To the extent that the historical image of Jesus supplants the
> mythic one, the significance of Jesus himself will evaporate.

So? Run into any Mithra-ists lately?

It is not an historical inevitability that Christianity will be a dominant
thread in human religion forever. (Maybe this is where you and I part
company.) The fat little female figurine found at Willendorf was probably
venerated five times as long as Jesus has been, and where is she now? In a
museum, plus in the personal iconography of a few wierdo's like me.

> I think there is some virtue is using the history to inform and enrich
> the myth. But using history to usurp the myth (which seems to be Funk's
> agenda)  seems quite ironic. If it succeeds, it becomes an irrelevant
> project!  People are fascinated by the Jesus Seminar's results. Why?
> Because of the aura of importance surrounding Jesus. Why is that aura
> there? Because of the myth!

Again: So? The myth does not have an eternal copyright. It will last as
long as it is a "true myth" -- ie, as long as the truth it embodies is
larger than its factual content. This particular myth is terribly fragile
inasmuch as its primary conveyors insist that the truth it embodies *is*
its factual content. That, I will grant, has been the overarching asser-
tion of twenty centuries.

To paraphrase myself supra: Run into any Ptolemaic astronomers lately?

Actually, I suspect the myth of Jesus will outlast the historicity of
Jesus, but in nowhere near the command role it has held heretofore. This
is the most religious country of the Western world, and more than half the
people don't go to church; they believe in God, but they don't go to
church. Over in Western Europe the belief level is abysmal and the
churches are hollow, state-run museums. There's plenty of room for some
sorting-out before this show is over.

(If they offer you a chance to write a message to the Christians of 2100
in a time capsule, I suggest you compose it in New World Spanish.)

Blessed be,
Dave Burwasser