Goines On: A Jessica experiment

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The day after remembering the Jesus experiment, Goines thought of a corollary, or reverse experiment, one that would seek to establish whether a stand-in for Jesus could elicit the same sort of experience. If so, then that would suggest that it wasn’t the nature of Jesus (or of his stand-in) that produced the Jesus-experience phenomenon, but something about people’s psychology.

Goines On: The Jesus experiment

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Inside the McDowell book Goines’ nephew had placed a cordial handwritten note that suggested Goines might “start with the table of contents and go to the chapters that pique your interest.” That didn’t sound too daunting, and Goines was bound to try it.

Interview with Sandi Dalton, on a long Christian journey

Interviewed by Moristotle

I was delighted to meet Sandi Dalton sometime last year when I visited Chef Benjamin Messaoui’s French Corner Bakery (in Durham, North Carolina). There she was behind the counter, greeting customers Bon jour! I was happy for Benjamin to have Sandi at the counter, and happy for Sandi to be countering in so fine a bakery. (Benjamin’s interview was published on April 15.)
    Over the course of many returns to Chef Benjamin’s bakery, I learned enough about his new assistant to want to learn more, and to realize that our readers deserved to know Sandi too. So, I asked her if she would be willing to answer some questions, which are included here in italics.

Sunday Review: How Jesus Became God (book)

It all started with his supposed resurrection

By Morris Dean

The Nicene creed includes the affirmation that

I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds...one in Being with the Father.

That is, Jesus is believed to have always been God. There is some irony, then, in the title of Bart D. Ehrman's 2014 book, How Jesus Became God, which refers not to the fact of Jesus's being God, but to the belief. How did that belief come about?

Beatings will continue

Beatings will continue
until morale improves

I heard a good one yesterday: The theology of the Old Testament, like a cartoon, can be accurately captioned as the corporate dictum: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."
    I "heard" this from Bart D. Ehrman's 2008 book, which I'm currently reading, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He's surveying the so-called "major" and "minor" prophets of the Old Testament (the designations mean nothing more than the relative word counts of their prophetic books) to show how they tried to explain why the God of the ancient Israelites was treating them so horribly. That is, it was the prophets' answer to that "most important question."
    By the way, it's because the Bible fails to answer the question to Ehrman's satisfaction that he recanted his devout Christian faith and became an agnostic. He went to Moody Bible College in his teens, then to evangelical Wheaton College, and on to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he decided to become a Biblical scholar. He's now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    Ehrman points out that those "prophecies" applied only to the times in which they were written, and to the people to whom they were written, so the jehovahs (as I familiarly term Jehovah's Witnesses), and everyone else, for that matter, have no basis for claiming that the Bible foretells what is happening today.
    Nevertheless, "the beatings will continue" made me think of the Holocaust. The Jews took quite a beating from the Nazis (and from many hypocrites around the world who silently approved the Nazis' attitude and actions to kill Jews). Is the Jews' God still trying to improve their morale by helping Muslim jihadists to wipe Israel off the map?

Of course not. But this does raise the question in my mind whether there might be something else going on to explain why the Jews have been persecuted continually down through the ages (besides their having been tagged Christ-killers, which I don't think explains why the Muslims hate them so much).
    It occurred to me to wonder whether it might be the fact that they invented monotheism? (Some credit Moses with the invention.)
    Sure, orthodox Christians and Muslims are proud to believe in the "one, true God," but consider that they might be proud only in the part of their mind that they're conscious of. A twentieth-century Jew by the name of Sigmund Freud taught us that our unconscious can be quite out of step with our conscious.
    The unconscious of a devout believer can have as many misgivings about a God who allows us to suffer (and may even cause us to suffer, to punish us or try to get us to shape up) as the conscious mind of Bart D. Ehrman can.
    What if even devout believers, in their unconscious, are sick at heart that they even believe in God in the first place? Might they not seek a scapegoat on whom to unleash their anger and otherwise self-disgust (all the while preserving their conscious belief, in which they're too invested to join Ehrman in recanting)?

An amusing conjecture, at any rate.

A fundamentalist assumption examined

As I've already mentioned, one of my special pleasures in reading Christopher Hitchens's latest book is his mentions of authors and issues that I'm already familiar with. Reading God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything tends to confirm some of my own understandings about religion:

Many years after C. S. Lewis had gone to his reward, a very serious young man named Barton Ehrman began to examine his own fundamentalist assumptions. He had attended the two most eminent Christian fundamentalist academies in the United States¹, and was considered by the faithful to be among their champions. Fluent in Greek and Hebrew (he is now holder of a chair in religious studies [in Chapel Hill]), he eventually could not quite reconcile his faith with his scholarship. He was astonished to find that some of the best-known Jesus stories were scribbled into the canon long after the fact, and that this was true of perhaps the best-known of them all.
      This story is the celebrated one about the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3-11). Who has not heard or read of how the Jewish Pharisees, skilled in casuistry, dragged this poor woman before Jesus and demanded to know if he agreed with the Mosaic punishment of stoning her to death? If he did not, he violated the law. If he did, he made nonsense of his own preachings. One easily pictures the squalid zeal with which they pounced upon the woman. And the calm reply...—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"—has entered our literature and our consciousness.
      ...Long before I read Ehrman², I had some questions of my own. If the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the Pentateuch to be undermined? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the killing of witches may seem brutish and stupid, but if only non-sinners have the right to punish, then how could an imperfect society ever determine how to prosecute offenders? We should all be hypocrites. And what authority did Jesus have to "forgive"? Presumably, at least one wife or husband somewhere in the city felt cheated and outraged. Is Christianity, then, sheer sexual permissiveness? If so, it has been gravely misunderstood ever since...Furthermore, the story says that after the Pharisees and the crowd had melted away (presumably from embarrassment), nobody was left except Jesus and the woman. In that case, who is the narrator of what he said to her? For all that, I thought it a fine enough story.
      Professor Ehrman goes further. He asks some more obvious questions. If the woman was "taken in adultery," which means in flagrante delicto, then where is her male partner? Mosaic law, adumbrated in Leviticus, makes it clear that both must undergo the stoning. I suddenly realized that the core of the story's charm is that of the shivering lonely girl, hissed at and dragged away by a crowd of sex-starved fanatics, and finally encountering a friendly face....
      Overarching all this is the shocking fact that, as Ehrman concedes:

The story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable; this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

      I have again [after selecting C. S. Lewis] selected my source on the basis of "evidence against interest"; in other words from someone whose original scholarly and intellectual journey was not at all intended to challenge holy writ. The case for biblical consistency or authenticity or "inspiration" has been in tatters for some time, and the rents and tears only become more obvious with better research, and thus no "revelation" can be derived from that quarter. So, then, let the advocates and partisans of religion rely on faith alone, and let them be brave enough to admit that this is what they are doing.

____________________

1. The Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College.
2. Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, from which I quoted in my post of April 30.

Why are there four Gospels?

Near the end of the second century C.E., Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (modern France), had an explanation for why there are (and should be) precisely four Gospels in the New Testament:

Irenaeus says that...heretics had mistakenly assumed that only one or another of the Gospels was to be accepted as scripture: Jewish Christians who held to the ongoing validity of the Law used only Matthew; certain groups who argued that Jesus was not really the Christ accepted only the Gospel of Mark; Marcion and his followers accepted only (a form of) Luke; and a group of Gnostics called the Valentinians accepted only John. All these groups were in error, however, because [argued Irenaeus]

it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since, there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel...it is fitting that she should have four pillars...(Against Heresies 3.11.7)

In other words, four corners of the earth, four winds, four pillars—and necessarily, then, four Gospels. [from Bart D. Ehrman's estimable book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, HarperSanFrancisco, 2005, p. 35]

Ah, wondrous the human ways in which the book believed by many to be "the Word of God" took its canonical form....