KAREN ARMSTRONG V. URSULA LEGUIN

Karen Armstrong

This is a “compare and contrast” exercise between two women who approach “religion” in quite different ways.  One is Karen Armstrong, an Irish woman who began as a nun and through scholarship about the world’s “great” religions has reached “success” as a speaker and historian of religion.  She is explicitly a promoter of compassion and peace who has organized a “non-profit” called “Charter for Compassion” whose symbol is the sign for infinity that is fraying on one end.  I don’t quite get it.

Anyway, this is the definition of a charter:  “a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power, by which an institution such as a company, college, or city is created and its rights and privileges defined.  Synonyms:  authority, authorization, sanction, dispensation, consent, permission.”  It looks to me as though you can take the girl out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the girl.  There’s gonna be a pope in here someplace and I can only hope his name is Francis.

There are all kinds of dimensions, meetings, sub-organizations, and even a store where you can buy t-shirts.  To join, one simply signs up, as though for any other non-profit newsletter (which will be the mailing list for request for money, like the Humane Society of the United States, another compassion-based organization) or for a Unitarian Universalist fellowship or church, though that sign-up will be in a book.  Lists are the basis of organizations — even nations.  This is why the churches have always been willing to keep the lists of who’s born, who marries, who dies.  Religious institutions are founded on organization.  They are sales franchises.  The dogma is just a sales pitch.

http://www.charterforcompassion.org/index.php/component/k2/item/298-the-charter-for-compassion-market-place-opening-nov-2015

Ursula LeGuin

If you think religion is organized and structured, justified by theology, kept effective by hierarchical management and money, then you will not think the other woman I want to talk about is even religious.  Her specialty has been iconoclasm.  Ursula LeGuin is a self-described anarchist and pacifist — so the two women both want peace.  But LeGuin plays with structure, knows that it is rooted in the environment’s requirements for survival, and understands that everything is always subject to unpredictable consequences.  She plays with the core ordering concept of sex and gender roles.  Her characters (fiction) change genders, are intra-gender, just as they are flexible about “races”, sometimes treated as almost different species — so what if they were?

Ishi

Behind the figure of LeGuin is not the Pope, but the phantom of Ishi, the last of his indigenous tribe, who was rescued by LeGuin’s father and written about by her mother.  She herself was born too late to have met him.  I do not travel in the rarefied circles of Karen Armstrong who received a prize for her work — not from Templeton but TED.  But I used to run into LeGuin every now and then when I lived in Portland.  I lived a couple blocks from a feminist bookstore on NE Broadway and she was in and out of there.  She even sold homemade stapled booklets from their shelves, one of which I regret giving away:  it was a gentle mockery of liturgy that included the directions for doing the schottische if you’re a scottie dog, with the usual little diagrams for where to put your paws — er, feet.

When people in general think of “religion” they think of Karen Armstrong’s world.  The anonymous Wikipedia says:  “In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a television documentary on the life of St. Paul, The First Christian, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience" that defied her prior assumptions and provided the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work. In A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism.”  They have to be “great” as in “great big” and they have to be bureaucratic.

The contrast in terms of LeGuin is Dao/Tao.  (Do you say “saddle” or “sattle”?)  “Taoism is not a religion, nor a philosophy. It is a "Way" of life. It is a River. The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living and sentient object, as well as through the entire universe.”  (Ellie Crystal)  The most recent scientific work on “deep time” and “big history” is very much along these lines and pulling those who work with the concepts into a kind of mystical regard for existence that will probably form itself into an influence on governance and boundaries.  Not by signing everyone up and making them pay taxes, but from a kind of ethical point of view that understands symbiosis and does not think profit justifies death by neglect — neither humans nor landscapes.

It’s telling that the British Channel Four considers St. Paul the first Christian.  I know what they mean: Jesus was a Jew boy.  Only when there was an organization were there "Christians."  But surely there is something ironic about Jesus Christ not being the first Christian.  Was it Gandhi or some other wry commentator who was asked what he thought of Christianity and said, “It sounds like a good idea.  I think they should try it.”  

Forgiveness, lunching with whores, going fishing with brothers, overturning the tables of money-changers, telling stories.  That’s Jesus.  Writing endless letters to little congregations to get them to grow, that’s Paul.  (The latest thing in seminaries is preparing ministers for a congregationless, denominationless world.  It’s been tried before, usually because the franchises are shrinking and are suddenly inspired to throw in together.)  Paul is a good manager trying to improve performance.  It would be more honest to call Christians “Paulists.”  Of course, real Paulists send women back to the kitchen.

LeGuin writes fiction and poetry, not rules and dogma.  She says, “In my own mind I’ve moved on quite far from the utopia of The Dispossessed to the semi-utopia of Always Coming Home, where I did try to make it simply a lifestyle. There was no political basis at all, in the sense of European or large nation politics, therefore people think that I was trying to idolize the American Indians or something. What I took from the Indians was, essentially, running your lives without a central government and using consensus as the basic mode, which you can’t do in a big society, it’s a matter of numbers. But I wanted to think out what it might be like.”

We need a word for “way of life” that’s not “lifestyle” which implies buying a lot of stuff for your house, clothes closet, and kitchen.  More emphasis on what one does, what one produces, how one relates to everything else.  “Commodification” and national boundaries are about exhausted except in the Third World.  So here’s what LeGuin is thinking about now:

“Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) founded one of the major philosophies of ancient Greece, helping to lay the intellectual foundations for modern science and for secular individualism. Many aspects of his thought are still highly relevant some twenty-three centuries after they were first taught in his school in Athens, called “the Garden.”  “Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation. His practical insights into human psychology, as well as his science-friendly world-view, gives Epicureanism great contemporary significance as well as a venerable role in the intellectual development of Western Civilization.”  www.epicurus.net  

"FIGHT CHURCH": Comments on a movie

You want church porn?  I’ll give you church porn.  And it won’t be naked ladies pretending to be angels, either.  Carnal?  Oh, yeah.  Knowledge -- well, they say so but it’s only of a certain kind.  It works within a particular circle of people.  I suppose I can’t get off the hook -- I like rodeo.  I’d be interested to know how rodeo and cage-fighting compare in attendance in Great Falls -- both of them much promoted and popular.  The cowboys and football players are also claiming Jesus, mixing competition with Christianity.  It’s pervasive.  God, the coach.

Here’s the link for the movie:  “Fight Church.”  Not Brad Pitt stuff.  Documentary.

http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=80005196&trkid=13641907&tctx=0%2C0%2C6985a579-783f-46b4-878f-cd6963ee0f79-106189961&evType=EV7

They have a little legal prob with the NY state legislature -- which was refusing to legalize MMA, the fight organization.  Therefore this problem is about Sin, not Evil.  Sociologically, they are NOT on the same wavelength as a bunch of legislators, who are likely to be lawyers.  Check out the fans.  I don’t think that anyone on the scene is really aware that the phenomenon of empathy means that when the combatants go after each other, a faint reproduction of the fight is happening in the nerves and muscles of every person there.  Watch them flinch and weave in their seats.  It’s more powerful than playing computer combat games.

Like boxing, MMA devolves into black against blonde.  

Racism IS Evil.

One pastor says,  “This gives a level of excitement beyond any other sport.”  Soon he’s wondering whether kicking someone in the face is, um, “spiritual.”  Isn’t it more like the Roman gladiators?  But we love the emotion of it -- Russell Crowe surviving tigers.  In fact, we love emotion in a pornographic way, feeling it secondhand. How is all this fighting different from jihad?  Consider just about the most addictive drug there is: adrenaline.  Nero knew.

I’m not out of touch with reality enough to think that boys don’t “grapple.”  But then these guys move on to big guns.  Do you really want a five-year-old, a twelve-year-old, trying to control an assault weapon?  Do you want him to think that if he can’t, he’s an (ick) girl, a coward?  A warrior ethic is taught by a huge dad who smacks a little kid for not being tough?  Brass casings from a gun pelting the kid in the face because his protective goggles are up?  What about his eyes?  Where’s dad?  If the kid goes blind, will he just throw the weeping boy out on the street?  Probably.  The kid believes that.

An accident.

What about the dynamics between a kid who’s traumatized and crying and the father who MUST have a winning kid?  What about small towns where local high school athletes are pushed to extreme fighting in back alleys so adult men can bet on the outcome?  And maybe a few drunks and certainly a lot of alcohol will be involved.  What they THINK they are doing is not at all what these “fighting pastors” are doing, though I don’t know what that really is either.  Esp. when it’s girls getting bloodied by girls -- domestic violence anyone? 

How does it go?  Let the little children suffer?

These guys are really into the porn of the Demon -- the Gates of Hell.  Here’s where the Devil comes "into" his own:  bedtime wrestling, tickling, controlling.  You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it.  It turns sexual so gradually that no one can quite believe that it has slid into rape.  That’s not love.  

Trash talk is trash talk, even if you mention Jesus.   “We don’t use trash talk,” says the fighting pastor wearing a windbreaker with an acronym on it:  “P.I.M.P.”  Using Peter as a justification for a sword completely ignores Peter as the guy who blunders, who can’t walk on water, who DENIES Jesus because he’s afraid.  These fight guys hop all around, picking up phrases.  They are ORAL thinkers, not print folks.  In fact, they are physical strategists, a useful skill but not for theology.

So then the movie turns to a conflict -- “disrespect,” “insulting my wife,” so one of these fighting pastors goes on crusade.  The difference from a street fight is that “I have trained responses.”  Privilege, status, “I’m better than you.”  It was the wife-insulter who won the fight.  Hmmmmm.

Both guys got kicked in the testicles in spite of wearing cups.

What about "go forth and multiply?"

Nice to see these families bring their little kids to see Daddy get beat up.  If the worst happens and Dad drops dead, at least they were there.  Oh, yeah, the kids will like the flashy near-naked ladies, too.  And seeing Daddy almost kill his opponent.  So the next day, the pastor says,  “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”  Right.

They’re doing it for the institution: the church, their pastorate.  It’s show-biz, a power base.  And an income.  And in the case of some of these guys, an inherited pass-along, Game of Thrones style.  (Hey, I’m the one who complains about denominations turning “pink,” not Commie pinko but mommie pink, girly pink.  Soft.)  Increasingly this is mocked in the larger culture, drowned in the constant stream of suffering so vivid on the media.

Jesus wept.

But hard can be mocked as well.  (Game of Thrones again.)  Sooner or later someone brings a knife to the fistfight, a gun to the knife fight, a dragon to the gunfight and the A-Bomb nukes the dragon.  And anyway, we’re all discovering that a tiny smoked bat on a stick can kill more efficiently and cost more than any guerrilla king in the jungle, all the while mixing sex with violence.  The blood oozes out your eyes without even a wound.

The people gathered into “fight churches” do not belong to mainstream denominations.  They’re rather pentecostal in the generic sense, a little like snake-handlers, hooked on adrenaline.  There are vulnerabilities built into every religious system and in Christianity many of them have to do with the old patriarchal impulse re-surfacing, displacing Jesus’  compassion, consolation, and healing.  They are “Old Testament” Christians.  What holds them together is the fact of family: the basic attached mom-and-dad pair plus child.  With this as its core, “Christianity” can travel anywhere there are traditional families.  Systems based on a landscape or a specific ecology can’t do that.

Pastor Paul is accused of sexual misbehavior.

That's a family buster.

No wonder they are so terrified of any departure from that Trinity of mom/dad/child: same sex marriage, childless marriage, single parent marriage, daughters instead of sons, people who never marry.  In a poverty-limited place the mother -- who is assigned the role of the family “Jesus” in terms of compassion and forgiveness -- may be a drunk or just gets into the car and drives off.  (Mama Absconditus.)  Or maybe it is the father who can’t earn money, beats his kids instead of using his strength to make things, and destroys even the saintly mother.  

I read something the other day that suggested in a world without fathers, it’s easy to imagine God is dead.  But then what do you do with the Mother, since she’s supposed to be the Mother of God.  Must she simply grieve forever?  There are places where that’s exactly what the mothers are doing -- grieving for the men and boys.  Are there Christian congregations for them?  Ask Pope Francis, who constantly confronts the women of South America who hold up photographs of their disappeared loved ones.

Plaza de Mayo

Congregations are open to the culture and draw like-to-like.  These tattooed, Mohawked, bleached, and belligerent men with guns tucked into the back of their belts were there already.  To draw them into a group that uses Christian metaphors for the Great Mystery is to at least give them a handhold in a whirling world.  But advocating rage and violence, even caged, is a deadend.  They are neither fish nor fowl.  Neither swim nor fly.

The larger culture will tolerate them until they begin to look like a threat, or the women among them say, “No more.”  Then they will either have to give up the Christianity or the combat because it threatens the family, which is Evil because it threatens the survival of the species.  Threatening one part of society or even threatening one religious system is merely sinful, maybe illegal.  But they did finally legalize MMA in New York.

SHOULD WE START A CHURCH?

Confronting Rothko from http://www.socialhistoryofart.com/

"The Conversion of Saul"

I quip that Pope Francis is trying to return Paul’s church to Jesus.  I hope he has better luck than Buddha did.  (The latter never quite succeeded in convincing people they should not worship HIM.)  What I’m saying in code is that Jesus was not “religious” in terms of institutions -- he had no institutions nor interest in starting one.  But Saul, who had a great transfiguration and was then Paul, kept more of the twisty stuff of institutions (chromosomes, if you like) and pushed what he knew from his previous life as a formal leader.  People who know the relevant documents and evidence will make fun of me, but I believe that it was Peter who was supposed to be the Rock on which to found a church.  It was Peter who tried to walk on water, who denied Jesus, etc. etc.  A much more human sort of guy.  This is all barnacles on the great ship of faith. It’s fun but I don’t take it seriously because it’s not the heart, the key, the root of being human.

For a little while I was in the business of founding and growing congregations.  It’s not very hard if you have a message that people really want and need.  If you don’t, nothing will work for very long.  

The next step, the building of networks among congregations until there’s a denomination -- a system big enough to have a name (nom) -- begins to feel a lot like advertising and corporations.  There must be a headquarters, a logo, and then someone issues formal materials, and no matter how democratic the elections, the leaders begin to think like Paul and tell all the little congregations what to do.  They might be right but piles of letters to this and that community takes the leadership out of the hands of locals and away from on-the-ground experience.  Once you get past the Gospels, that’s about all the New Testament is: letters from headquarters.  With a horror story (Revelations) tacked onto the end.  This is just the Middle Eastern kind of religion.  There have been dozens, not just three.

After all, I’m not very interested in religion.  I’m interested in human beings and their experience of the world and by world I mean something more like cosmic galaxies than like the United Nations.  It’s the “experience” part that I’ve been reading about in order to understand better how being human can be exuberant, creative, and thoughtful in a sharing way.  If a group comes together to be those kinds of things together, that’s fine.  If you want to call it “spiritual” or “worship”  or “ceremonial” and if you can resist Robert’s Rules of Order, then I am interested.  But I will maintain my solitude.

The Inter-Faith Chapel at the University of Nome by Robert Baldwin

Despite the necessity of the raw world and the cultivation of experiences contacted through exploration, some things are teddy bears -- familiar links to comfort.  But I wouldn’t want to attend a church where the pews are full of teddy bears.  Well, maybe once to see what it was like.  At the other extreme, I would avoid a church full of grizzly bears out of self-preservation.  The question is “what does it mean to attend a church full of humans?”  Or “what does it mean to attend a church at all?”  When is a theatre a church?  When is a circle of Blackfeet sitting on the ground, singing about the lives of familiar animals, actually a church?  

So is the definition of church in the content, the procedure, the nature of the attenders, the ecology of the community and the land where it is situated, the formal account the leaders can give of what’s happening, what a trained observer (anthropologist) might write about it -- ???   Jesus, Francis and Buddha might say it all depends on whether “God” is present.  So what makes the circle holy?  

I suggest three things:  1) Does it guide the people’s life-decisions?  2) Does it unite a community? and 3) Does it give life meaning?

Can a school be a church/can a church be a school?   Can a studio be a church/can a church be a studio?  I say yes, yes, yes.  Quoting Molly Bloom that way always made the older UU ministers (all male) laugh because to them it meant sex.  Can sex be a church/can a church be sex?  Yup.  (Molly Bloom as a cowgirl who gets the blues.)

MY BOOK HAS MORE BOOKMARKS THAN PAGES…RESEARCH BLOG BY CIARA MADIGAN, 

MASTERS STUDENT IN ENGLISH: MODERNITIES AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK

And you see what I just did?  Linked to a literary canon, both citations a little bit scandalous.  Can church be a scandal?  Can a scandal be guiding, uniting, meaningful?  Yup.  Can a group of people holding candles in the snow around the site of a murder, whether a beaten child, an unarmed black man, an historical massacre of indigenous people, be a church?  Of course.  The holiness is not in the event, but in the response.  Candles and singing are not enough, but only the beginning.  Did it show empathy?  Did it prompt giving of time and energy to the future?  Could you feel the meaning?

I’m going to spend the rest of the day building a bibliography for those interested in what I’ve been reading and as a reminder for myself, because I need to reread some of this.  prairiemarybibliographies.blogspot.com.  Not much there yet.

Gabor Maté, the MD who works with hard-core addicts in Vancouver, B.C., tries hard not to be arrogant or controlling.  In the interest of showing his vulnerability, he confesses that he is obsessive/compulsive.  (OCD or whatever) Luckily, his fetish is not chemically addictive in any obviously destructive way: it’s classical music, which he buys in complete sets of works, never satisfied, and not even listening to all of it because there’s not enough time in any day, though he performs his medical work, buys his CD’s, and then short-sheets his family despite their pleas and his promises to "pay" more attention to them.  By now he seems to have a bit more control over his obsession which he achieved by paying a fine to his wife and/or employer for each failure.  Money.  Hmmmm.  Merde.  Fertile if you have seeds.

Maté’s past is Jewish, haunted by WWII holocaust, and also affected by his relatively small size.  His first year was uncertain and chaotic, but then things got better.  (That infant is still in there somewhere.)  It seems clear that to him classical music is 1) civilization in the European style of mastery of intricate patterns, 2) high-brow, a sign of sophistication, 3) a sign that he is wealthy (superior) since he runs up bills in the thousands but doesn’t go into debt, 4) something that is just “his” -- not even anything to share with the family so long as he uses headphones, though his son said that as a kid he got tired of the blasting symphonies, 5) something that can go everywhere with him via iPods and car speakers, 6) basically a teddy bear, or speaking more formally, a “transitional object” that helps him maintain identity and safety in a world that constantly challenges all that.  It comforts him, distracts him, rewards him, which he needs given what he battles daily.  He was slow to realize that it was also an avoidance and hurting his family, but as soon as he saw that, he had the power to stand outside himself, make a diagnosis, and devise a cure -- the same as he would for anyone else.

In the end, that turns out to be what the rest of us should do as well.  It’s part of the Great Tango that is human life, an erotic dance with Hungry Ghosts and teddy bears. 

STRANGERS IN OUR MIDST

The following story is an example of a genre I occasionally venture into: rewrites of Biblical tales so as to restore their shock value.   I started doing it in seminary.  If such ideas upset you, watch out for this week’s posts.

JESUS, ONCE AGAIN  (Hebrews 13.2)

God (the anthropomorphized version) was feeling adventurous and contemporary.  He’d been watching the planet called Earth and saw that it needed another good jolt.  They’d just about worn the Biblical Jesus the Christ into little tatters and most of the meaning had leaked out of Him.  God thought about sending a woman this time, but it had been done.  There was even a t-shirt.  (“This time God is sending his Daughter and She is pissed.”)  What hadn’t been done?  What would make these goofy humans rethink again?  Maybe even feel something?  Jesus as a gay man had been tried.  It was sort of lame since the version of Jesus many accepted already had long hair and wore a dress.  Jesus the super-virile SuperChrist rock-star had also been done.  Jesus as hippie, Jesus as black man.  Jesus as lover.  Wait now . . .

He noticed that everyone was very pre-occupied with the idea of same sex marriage -- why not move the idea of a gay Jesus to his parents:  two gay men.  It was a little problematic, but then, so was a virgin accepting the fertilization of a God (unless you’d been hanging around with those Greeks and Romans whose gods were always doing that).  None of the gay guys had ovums waiting to bud into usefulness by pairing chromosomes with a sperm, but that wasn’t a problem for God.  He just used a standard guy cell and added the super-genetic stuff on a third set of chromosomes.  After all, the extra stuff wasn’t about glowing in the dark or levitating -- it was mostly spiritual, which is not the same as parlor tricks.

Even Jesus can’t really overcome a bad start at birth, so God sent this infant to Joseph and Markie.  Joseph was a little old, but he was a protective man with a lot of resources.  Markie was a man of joy.  He got up every morning welcoming every sunrise, even in the winter rain.  Even when he gave birth in a rathole motel on the California coast, a place no one would ever consider sacred.  It wasn’t easy, since the baby had to come out his asshole.

Of course, the baby was gay but Joseph and Markie would have accepted a straight baby.  They didn’t ask any questions -- just cuddled and fed and gazed into that baby’s blue eyes.  Well, on the days the baby's eyes were blue -- they changed a lot.  Sometimes they had a feeling they were looking into the eyes of the universe, but all loving parents feel that way.

So then one day the big census started and they lit out for Mexico in an old rackety van because Joseph couldn’t get his money out of the ATM without revealing where they were.  They knew that being atypical was dangerous in the United States where the majority rules.  Mexico is a religious country, a Catholic country, but their religion taught them that nothing was more sacred than family.  It was not like the United States.

But Joseph and Markie were killed in the drug wars.  By then Jesus was maybe eight years old.  He didn’t know what to do.  Then a man came and wanted the boy to go with him.  Jesus was about to find out what it meant to have a body (corpus) that was vulnerable to earthly events.  It was painful and there was blood.  He didn’t need drugs afterwards because of his third chromosomes, which took him to a spiritual place during this act of invasion.  It also infected the trick, but not with anything bad from God’s point of view.  It was Heavenly Inspiration Dedication Syndrome, which made him want to help street boys everywhere.  God got the idea from this little worm that gets into rat brains and makes them love cats.  (You could look it up.)

After that, Jesus was also a street boy, starving and sometimes beaten up or cut.  The only advantage he had was that he didn’t need drugs -- he just spaced out -- and when tricks infected him with AIDS, he just infected them right back with his own AIDS.

Finally one day in a major city in the US of A, the authorities captured Jesus along with other street boys.  They knew he was a street boy because he was filthy, bruised, hungry, and shivering.  This meant to them that he was bad and no one cared about him.  If they had fucked him, they would have been infected with his AIDS, but they didn’t even check him for the earthly version because then they would have to pay money for the drugs to treat it.  Well, they would if anyone figured out they weren’t doing it, because they were supposed to take care of the people in their custody.  Money meant much more to them than sex.  Sex was common, everyone had sex, you didn’t have to pay for it, you just took it.  Sex is just a hole.  Money is everything.

So Jesus was loaded into a bus and transported to the middle of Mexico and just dumped there.  No one knows what happened to him after that.  Some think that he has come back to America but there have been very few new cases of Heavenly Inspiration Dedication Syndrome.  It’s just not very contagious because greed kills it and there’s a lot of greed around.  

But some people say that he’s on the streets again and he might be the very next ragged, dirty, starving, shivering boy you run across.  This is the reason that the believers will kiss such a boy on the mouth and buy him a meal.  Because you never know which one of them is a carrier.  People might not believe in miracles anymore, but they’d damn well better believe in epidemics.  Sooner or later.  It’s a kind of crucifixion, which means "open arms."

WHO IS THIS JESUS?

Biblical Archeology Review is a popular magazine (on newsstands) that so impressed my seminary classmate Annie that she wanted to buy subscriptions for everyone. I never did subscribe to Biblical Archeology Review, though I enjoy reading it. But I subscribe to a daily aggregator of articles called “Art Daily” which defines art rather broadly, often listing rather peripheral materials. They supply a photo, a first paragraph or so, and then a link to the actual online article. Today they linked to an article about the academic study of Jesus. Here’s the link:

http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=6&ArticleID=4

Someone was so threatened by it that they hacked the link so it sends the inquirer to a website about wine. Since liberals (however much they are fond of wine) would support the scientific study of Jesus, I presume that the hacker was from the religious right wing and is committed to the idea that one must not question any theological assumptions. That’s fine, but they’re in the wrong pew. This article is at a kind of meta-level, talking about how the various disciplines that research the period of Jesus differ, and what entering the same subject in different ways can reveal.

The various disciplines include history (the record of events in writing), literary (the style and use of the writing), archeology (the study of the places and buildings by looking at their traces), and theology (the doctrines that have been handed down in institutions as matters of faith). The study of Biblical materials (perhaps including writing from the same period that didn’t get included in the canon we read today) is focused on the content rather than which discipline, but has in the last decades become increasingly literary, for instance, analyzing the four gospels as different genres of writing. This is partly a shift in the analysis of subtext, partly a growing understanding of ancient languages (maybe with the help of computers), and partly the expansion of scientific capacities like analysis of the actual paper and ink of the original documents.

This hacked-link article, entitled “Jesus of History vs. Jesus of Tradition” is an interview with Sean Freyne, “director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, as well as emeritus professor of theology, at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the integration of literary and archaeological sources for understanding the social and religious world of Galilee in Hellenistic and Roman times.” Basically, he thinks that the figure of Jesus arises from the paradigm shift caused when the more ancient context of Jewish culture is challenged by an increasing influence from Hellenistic Rome. There are plenty of people who would go farther and say that a mythic Jesus draws on a host of messianic savior figures whose names begin with J, including John the Baptist and Joshua, and that elements are well-mixed with what we call “Greek mythology.” An editor of the magazine, Herschel Shanks, is asking the questions.

You are an expert in historical Jesus studies. I have always wondered about that name. Are there nonhistorical Jesus studies, or unhistorical Jesus studies?

[Laughing] That’s a good question. Some people confuse the notion of the historical Jesus with the notion of the actual or the real Jesus. I think the historical Jesus is a construct, a theological construct, really. It’s the figure of Jesus as he is represented in the documents of Christian faith as a historical person.

I thought it was just the opposite, that the historical Jesus was opposed to the theological Jesus.

What we’re trying to do, I think, in this quest for the historical Jesus is to find the figure who stands behind the gospel narratives as a historical figure. If we look at the Gospels, all we have, in the case of the Synoptics [Matthew, Mark and Luke], is one year of his public ministry. If we include John, we make it three years. It’s a bird’s-eye view of this figure who walked the roads of Galilee. We have no record whatever of Jesus’ early life. We have the infancy gospel stories, which of course are highly theological and highly literary, made up later. So we really can’t build anything historical on those narratives.


So this scholar is trying to find the actual historical Jesus who may very well exist, but can’t be proven by theological materials. The Christian theologians who interpret these materials are afraid and opposed to this search for a real person, because they think it will take away the “magic.” They believe that familiarity breeds contempt.

By now those who read what I write know that I often sneak around to a radical shift. Here it is: modern journalists (and many voters) have developed a kind of Satanic assumption, that all politicians are corrupt and should be revealed. It’s the opposite of the theological assumption that Jesus was a divine or near-divine man and should be left unknown in any other way, because disillusionment will mean broken faith. These guys think they SHOULD break all faiths. This new “take” is that the journalist should be a Judas, who reveals to all the mere humanity of people who sleep around, take bribes, hire illegal immigrants and neglect their children. And there is a particular animus towards fathers, old guys with power, as well as a kind of pride in aspiring to iconoclasm and disillusionment. They are "wised up," in a sophomoric way.

There are two other ideas that Sean Freyne proposes. One is that in the time of Jesus the group was more important than the individual. Jesus did embody (incarnate) something, but he did it on behalf of the whole group, the inclusive society. The other is that Freyne resists the idea that there was a clash between Jewish culture and Hellenistic culture, resulting in crucifixion. He proposes that the Jewish culture was elastic enough to accommodate the ideas of Hellenism, even to integrate them and benefit from them. Both of these ideas are presently very much submerged in contemporary American culture. We want crucifixions.

These ideas Freyne suggests are sources of peace: to include and integrate in a time of surging populations and changing relationships between nations. These ideas move from “last man standing” attempts to prevail by killing/discrediting all competitors to Jesus’ (theological) assertion that “whosoever cares for the least of us also cares for me.” Freyne says, “The Jesus movement is thus a renewal group built around the figure of the servant of God, as depicted in Isaiah, who is not militantly opposed to foreigners.”

How about that, religious control-freak monoculture hackers?

JOSEPH, JESUS' STEP-FATHER

I’ve been asked to ponder Joseph, the step-father of Jesus, as a figure capable of restoring qualities of fatherhood that would help us in our scrambled times. The rules of work and relationship seem to have gotten into a new juxtaposition that is destructive to us all. We are confused about who is and who is not a father, what a father is supposed to do, how we should think about good and bad fathers.

Joseph is a figure of the Gospels, which are the enunciation of a new religion focused on resurrection. The Ultimate Father for the first time promises to restore life after death to everyone who believes in His Son. The Old Testament is patriarchal at a particular point in history. The patriarch who had been the head of the tribe (think Afghanistan) was just at that period transitioning into being the head of a family and the mayor of a town (think Tony Blair -- oh, all right, think Corleone). A man’s duty was changing from hunting and fighting to accumulating and managing. Sacrifices were changing from blood (even sons) to bread and wine from the field and vineyard.

In the New Testament Jesus tries to get these men to have compassion on the weak, the poor, the dispossessed, the outsiders. Otherwise the fathers may get so focused on protecting their crops, their homes and their walled cities that they become corrupt. Yet to survive as agriculturalists, they must be hoarders. They must save enough seeds for the next crop (resurrecting the plants) and they must teach and protect their sons because that’s how the life of the family is continued (resurrected generation by generation). This pattern continues today in Valier. I don’t get so much the feeling that individuals yearn to be immortal or resurrected, as they seem to want their family and their land to continue on into the future. And yet prosperity appears to demand that the sons must become educated and that means leaving for the city. Not just one new lifetime job but a sequence in order to follow the job market. Their lives will be full of trade-offs and adaptations, always moving -- hopefully up. Probably in intimate relationships as well as work.

In order to certify Jesus as the Redeemer who was predicted in the Old Testament, his provenance had to be stipulated begat by begat, because he had to descend from Joseph. His father, of course, was God, but Jewish heritage is traced through the mother. Yet she had to be married and the tradition of Gods is that they don’t bother with weddings. So it is probable that Joseph the husband of Mary who stood by her through her pregnancy, delivery and at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life, was largely developed in retrospect. Our understanding of the figure mostly responds to three crucial aspects of fathers: their family roots and locations (Jesus had to collect on all the predictions of a coming savior), their conferral of legitimacy (otherwise Mary would have been stoned to death for having a baby out of wedlock), and their economic viability. Joseph is described as a “tekton.” A technician or craftsman. This is usually translated as an artisan, a carpenter rather than a peasant or a prince.

He’s pictured as an old man, a widower, so that we’d not think about him going to bed with the mother of Jesus, though Jesus is described as having brothers that might not have been metaphorical, maybe from Joseph having an earlier marriage. The rather lovely story about how Joseph was chosen to be Mary’s husband has the walking staffs of all the widowers collected and laid out together. To indicate God’s choice, Joseph’s walking stick burst into flower, another sign of dead wood being resurrected. (Of course, an artist might like to think of resurrecting wood in a carving, but no one suggests that Joseph was an artist.)

It occurs to me that not all men are suited to being townsmen or even carpenters, though my agriculturalist grandparents were also carpenters, one of them capable of paneling a finely-finished library for a modest mansion in South Dakota and the other a contractor whose family built the big Dutch barns of the Washington dairy country that have now collapsed of old age. My sculptor ex-husband did a lot of building but in the end his heart was out hunting. I mean, I think a lot of men never really made the transition from hunting to farming and towns, never accepted having a patriarch boss them around to make them into images of their fathers. Maybe these are the men who can teach today’s youngsters who must leave the ag world (some call it God’s country) to become techies roaming the globe from contract to contract, free-lancing as hunters did, like artists, writers, musicians inventing survival all over again. We know that Jesus would approve -- it was, after all, his lifestyle. But what would Joseph tell these people?

It appears that Joseph is no longer on the scene by the time Jesus is crucified. A different Joseph (of Arimathea) has to supply His burial tomb so He could be Resurrected out of it. Every wandering artist needs a patron. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent one’s patron from being one’s father. But in the end maybe the figure of Joseph is more of a comfort for the patron than for the dead prophet. The trouble with many charities is that they become all about the patrons: we multiply the image of Mother Theresa instead of looking at the dying paupers. And we are distracted from analyzing the social conditions that create dying paupers in the first place. There are societies for the veneration of Joseph.

It’s interesting and even useful to look at the humanness of Jesus through our own lives of relationships and to see the relevance to us. But in the end perhaps we would be more true to the issues if we observed the Islamic prohibition on images, which always lead to the problem of misplaced concreteness, taking metaphor as real and insisting that real-ness means what WE know and not what the other guy lives through. The consequence is quarrels about what race, how tall, what gender. We must not reduce Joseph to a little figure in a dimestore creche. Or anyone else either.