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Author: C .T.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychology

A Christian troll

Usually I don’t respond to trolling. But these days I got a terrible toothache and lost my patience. So here we go.

In my previous post a native German speaker (see how he uses quotation marks below), Thomas Fink, said in a comment that I didn’t allow to pass:

I checked occasionally into Chechar when I came across him on his journey from Larry Auster into eternity. He had a lot of conversions and recently he converted from the „jewish problem“ to the „Christian problem“.

“Conversion” is the wrong word here. I knew that there was a big Christian Problem since, as a young boy, my father’s doctrine of eternal damnation caused havoc in my worldview, and by 1976 I read Nietzsche for the first time in my life. Hardly can such an old critique of Christianity that gradually matured in my mind be called a sudden “conversion.”

As to the Jewish Problem, “conversion” is the wrong word too. A few years ago I didn’t know that the Jew Yagoda and his Jewish henchmen killed more innocent Whites than the millions of slaughtered Jews attributed to Himmler by orthodox historians. Awakening up to the facts of history—the Bolshevik Jews, not the Germans, started the genocide—is no “conversion,” but an awakening from the matrix of political correctness.

Fink’s trolling continues:

He is obviously a psychologically very troubled person, who was himself quite frank about this.

One of the reasons that I didn’t let Fink’s comment appear in the thread where it was posted, but instead added it as a whole new entry here, is because this is the second time that an angry Christian insults me in the last few days with sentences similar to the above: a perfect inversion of reality.

Why is this is a perfect inversion of reality? Because those who were abused in their childhood or adolescence and speak out vehemently about the abuse as adults are the sanest humans in the world.

Fink should know better, since a native German speaker, the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, devoted her entire literary career to demonstrate why those who speak out about the abuse are infinitely saner than those who, following the accepted norms of conduct, repress their traumas. I wrote a book on the subject, the third of my Hojas Susurrantes, and cannot discuss this complex subject here (but you can take a look at my other blog, Fallen Leaves).

The Christian troll continues:

I do not think that it is ad hominem to link his anti Christianity with his upbringing as a Catholic and psychologically not resolved problems [my emphasis] with his Catholic parents, documented by himself.

This is an obvious lie. Fink simply has not read my Hojas Susurrantes. He doesn’t know, therefore, how “resolved” or “unresolved” my inner psyche might be.

Fink’s implicit commandment, Thou Shalt Not Talk About Your Abusive Parents, is the flawed implicit commandment of millions upon millions of psychologically dissociated humans: If you publicly talk about your traumatizing childhood or adolescence you must be a dissociated adult. In other words, our society only allows the victim of parental abuse to keep absolutely quiet about his or her life, or perhaps speak only in the privacy of a so-called therapist office. This is exactly why many neuroses and most psychoses cannot be healed by psychotherapy (besides Alice Miller’s work see also Jeffrey Masson’s).

The troll continues:

If someone works in the field of pure logic it is possible to detach the results of his work from his way of living but in the field of religion and social science your personal conduct [Chechar’s], who you are and where you came from is important, even if you can citate [sic] [Karlheinz] Deschner and write coherent sentences in a seemingly detached manner.

You see? Zero arguments.

Fink seems to be saying that because like Deschner—the German scholar who authored the multivolume Criminal History of Christianity—I feel passionate about Christianity, I must be emotionally unbalanced. In other words: I am not allowed to emotionally rebel openly and publicly against, say, the doctrine of eternal torture that my father used against me when I was a little boy.

Nope! You just cannot rebel publicly! Go to the therapist’s office instead! Otherwise that would be “personal conduct” reflecting “unresolved” emotional issues.

This grotesque line of reasoning is like asking Solzhenitsyn to write a “detached” Gulag Archipelago with no mention of any of Solzhenitsyn’s personal suffering he endured in the Gulag System. According to Fink’s logic, should we also call Solzhenitsyn “obviously a psychologically very troubled person” because he dared to speak out publicly using his own life experiences?

Let’s continue with the troll’s comment:

So it is of significance that Chechar and most of the anti Christian right circle around the thinking of a compulsive masturbator who went certifiably mad, that is Nietzsche.

In the last few days, because of his tragic death, I did a little research into the life of another Nietzsche fan, that is Jonathan Bowden. He was a great orator, but he was also a very troubled person, I could sense this on the spot. This is, by the way an ability I have. There is a lot of talk now, that Jonathan only was so great, because he was always on the edge. Maybe. But by definition, everyone who is „on the edge“ is troubled by unresolved sin. And I will never be part of a movement which is dominated by people like this. And this definition of troubled persons includes by the way also many persons who call themselves Christian.

I cannot speak of Bowden’s life, but I have read thick volumes by German authors about the life of Nietzsche, and neither Curt Paul Janz nor Werner Ross ever used the word “sin” against the poor philosopher.

Yes, Nietzsche went mad after his cataclysmic breakdown of  January 3, 1889, and never recovered his powerful intellect. A tragedy. But I remember my High School lesson of logic so well! It is a classic ad hominem to dismiss all of Nietzsche’s work prior to 1889 because of what happened to the poor man in and after that year.

Listen to the troll:

In fact this whole anti Christianity boils down to a graffiti on a wall near the Catholic Church in my small German town, which translates as: „Get the bible out of my head!“ which translates as: Get the law of nature out of my head! And that is what Nietzsche found out the hard way: you cannot redefine sin as virtue and live a happy life thereafter. It is not possible, because Gods [sic] law is natures [sic] law, and every unresolved sin will rot in you and make your life miserable.

What a personal and fallacious way of dismissing our arguments! I won’t speak of Nietzsche here, but can speak of me.

Fink simply does not address any of the arguments I have presented so far critical of Christianity. Not a single one. He reminds me of Fjordman, who got mad at another blogger, Tanstaafl, and me when we dared to point out to some philo-Semitic counter-jihadists that besides the Muslim Problem we have a Jewish Problem throughout the West. Half-Jew Fjordman never advanced any argument whatsoever in his many “replies” in the commentariat section of the counter-jihad site. Instead, he insulted Tanstaafl and lied about me.

Fink’s ad hominem stance is so self-defeating that, instead of indulging myself with the last word, I better reproduce his last sentence and leave his comment hanging:

For the non believer the only way out of this dilemma is suicide which now becomes fashionable as antinatalism or the way of the Marquis the Sade which is open rebellion against God by the way of torture and murder.

Categories
Christendom Literature New Testament Old Testament St Paul

Gospel Fictions, 1


 
Below, excerpts of Randel Helms’ Gospel Fictions’ first chapter, “The Art of the Gospels: Theology as Fictional Narrative” (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):


I shall use the word “fiction” rather than “myth” to refer to the study, contained in this book, of the fictional aspects of the four canonical Gospels.

I write as literary critic, not as debunker. The Gospels are, it must be said with gratitude, works of art, the supreme fictions in our culture. Literary artists use their imaginations to produce poetry and fiction, works open to the methods of literary criticism. This literature was oral before it was written and began with the memories of those who knew Jesus personally.

Their memories and teachings were passed on as oral tradition for some forty years or so before achieving written form for the first time in a self-conscious literary work, so far as we know, in the Gospel of Mark, within a few years of 70 A.D.

Luke was obviously writing during a time when literature about Jesus was flowering. Paul was an ecstatic visionary who experienced, for what seems to be a period of nearly thirty years after the death of Jesus, visions of a heavenly being he called “Christ” and “the Lord,” and the fact is that neither Paul nor any other first-century Christian felt a need to distinguish between the heavenly being and the “historical Jesus.”

What is surprising is the great differences among the stories, even though they share, for the most part, similar sources. For example, according to Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” According to Luke, Jesus’ dying words were “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” But according to John, they were, “It is accomplished.” To put it another way, we cannot know what the dying words of Jesus were, or even whether he uttered any. It is not that we have too little information, but that we have too much. Each narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional. In this case at least, it is inappropriate to ask of the Gospels what “actually” happened; they may pretend to be telling us, but the effort remains a pretense, a fiction.

We are, with these scenes, in the literary realm known as fiction, in which narratives exist less to describe the past than to affect the present. In De Quincy’s phrase, the Gospels are not so much literature of knowledge as literature of power. As in the case mentioned above, the content of the Gospels is frequently not “Jesus” but “what certain persons in the first century wanted us to think about Jesus.” In the language of the Fourth Gospel, “Those [narratives] here written have been recorded in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

The Gospels are Hellenistic religious narratives in the tradition of the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which constituted the “Scriptures” to those Greek-speaking Christians who wrote the four canonical Gospels and who appealed to it, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every paragraph they wrote. A simple example is the case of the last words of Christ. Mark presents these words in self-consciously realistic fashion, shifting from his usual Greek into the Aramaic of Jesus, transliterated into Greek letters Eloi eloi lama sabachthanei (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?—Mark 15:34). Mark gives us no hint that Jesus is “quoting” Psalm 22:1; we are clearly to believe that we are hearing the grieving outcry of a dying man.

But the author of Matthew, who used Mark as one of his major written sources, is self-consciously “literary” in both this and yet another way. Though using Mark as his major source for the passion story, Matthew is fully aware that Mark’s crucifixion narrative is based largely on the Twenty-second Psalm, fully aware, that is, that Mark’s Gospel is part of a literary tradition (this description would not be Matthew’s vocabulary, but his method is nonetheless literary).

Aware of the tradition, Matthew concerned himself with another kind of “realism” or verisimilitude. When the bystanders heard Jesus crying, according to Mark, to “Eloi,” they assumed that “he is calling Elijah [Eleian]” (Mark 15:35). But Matthew knew that no Aramaic speaker present at the Cross would mistake a cry to God (Eloi) for one to Elijah—the words are too dissimilar. So Matthew self-consciously evoked yet another literary tradition in the service both of verisimilitude and of greater faithfulness to the Scriptures: not the Aramaic of Psalm 22:1 but the Hebrew, which he too transliterated into Greek—Eli Eli (Matt. 27:46)—a cry which could more realistically be confused with “Eleian.”

Luke is even more self-conscious literary and fictive than Matthew in his crucifixion scene. Though, as I have said, he knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words of Jesus, he created new ones more suitable to his understanding of what the death of Jesus meant—an act with at least two critical implications. First, that he has thus implicitly declared Mark’s account a fiction; second, that he self-consciously presents his own as a fiction. For like Matthew, Luke 23:46 deliberately placed his own work in the literary tradition by quoting Psalm 30 (31):5 in the Septuagint as the dying speech of Jesus: “Into your hands I will commit my spirit” (eis cheiras sou parathsomai to pneuma mou), changing the verb from future to present (paratihemai) to suit the circumstances and leaving the rest of the quotation exact.

This is self-conscious creation of literary fiction, creation of part of a narrative scene for religious and moral rather than historical purposes. Luke knew perfectly well, I would venture to assert, that he was not describing what happened in the past; he was instead creating an ideal model of Christian death, authorized both by doctrine and by literary precedent.

First-century Christians believed that the career of Jesus, even down to minor details, was predicted in their sacred writings. By a remarkably creative fiat of interpretation, the Jewish scriptures (especially in Greek translation) became a book that had never existed before, the Old Testament, a book no longer about Israel but about Israel’s hope, the Messiah, Jesus. Northrop Frye nicely sums up this self-reflexive aspect of the two Testaments as early Christians saw them:

How do we know that the Gospel story is true? Because it confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true? Because they are confirmed by the Gospel story. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball; and no other evidence is given us. The two testaments form a double mirror, each reflecting the other but neither the world outside.

A voice, for example, in the (now) “Old” Testament became by interpretative fiat the voice of Jesus. When the psalmist wrote “My flesh shall rest in hope: because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption” (Psalms 15 [16]:9-10 LXX), it was in fact not “really” the psalmist speaking, but Jesus, a thousand years before his birth. As Luke has Peter say, in interpreting these verses to the crowd at Pentecost:

Let me tell you plainly, my friends, that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this very day. It is clear therefore that he spoke as a prophet… and when he said he was not abandoned to death, and his flesh never suffered corruption, he spoke with foreknowledge of the resurrection of the Messiah (Acts 2:29-31).

By fiat of interpretation, a psalm becomes a prophecy. David becomes Jesus.

We see a two-stage creative process here: first, the psalm is turned into a prophetic minidrama; then the interpretation of the psalm becomes another dramatic scene: Peter explaining it to the multitude. That the fictive creative act is Luke’s, and not Peter’s, is clear from the Greek of the scene: Luke has Peter quote, fairly loosely, as if from memory, the Septuagint Greek text of Psalms (though the historical Peter spoke Aramaic and needed, Christian tradition tells us, a Greek interpreter). The point of Luke’s interpretation depends on the Greek texts of the verse, not on the Hebrew. The Hebrew text of Psalm 16:10b has something like: “nor suffer thy faithful servant to see the pit,” which stands in simple parallelism to the first line of the distich, “Thou will not abandon me to Sheol” —that is, you will not allow me to die. The Greek text could, however, be taken to mean “You will not let me remain in the grave, nor will you let me rot.”

Peter’s speech is an effective work of dramatic fiction, the culmination of a complex two-stage creative process. Luke, as we shall see, creates the same kinds of dramatic fictions in his Gospel, the first half of the Christian history that includes his Acts of the Apostles.

Invention of that kind is the subject of this book.

Categories
Axiology Christendom Demography

Christian axiology: the enemy within

I didn’t comply with what I said in a previous post: that I would ignore further discussion with White Nationalist Christians (WNCs) at The Occidental Observer and refrain myself to offer my views in this blog, because I continued to discuss there a little bit more.

Although the author of the article in question has studied the Bible in formal courses, he and the WNCs of the ongoing debate seem to be ignorant of the devastating results arrived by New Testament scholarship.

In the next entry I will reproduce excerpts from the first chapter of Randel Helm’s Gospel Fictions and, hopefully, in the subsequent entries I will reproduce passages of the rest of Helm’s book.

Presently I don’t have internet connection at home. I am writing this entry in my bedroom and will post it tonight in the nearest internet café that’s still open on this Mexican holiday of May 5th. But before doing it I’d would like to respond here to what a WNC commenter told me in the above-mentioned thread. Without connection I can’t quote him (and I hate to do any serious writing with the browns beside me in the café), but he criticized me by claiming that my Nazi stance was just Judaism in reverse, and that good Christians ought not to be that racist.

Well, I live in Mexico City, a metropolis with more than 20 million people, most of them of brown skin color. And this day I am dismayed to see that the Mexican celebration of 5 of May is now almost official in Obama’s America. Taking into account that you will be a persecuted minority in your own nation, wouldn’t something like the Nuremberg Laws have been good for Americans had you allowed Germany to defeat the Bolsheviks?

The reason that in the next entries I’ll take the trouble of typing excerpts of Helm’s Gospel Fictions is simple: I believe that Christianity must be debunked. I believe that Christian axiology is to blame for the creation of such a depressing sea of Untertmenschen here in the Big City and elsewhere in the Third World.

While WNCs concur with counter-jihadists that non-white immigration into the West is the main symptom of the elites’ treason toward our people, their diagnosis is epidermal. Beneath the skin rash of treason lies a metastasis that has been eating the organs of people of European origin for centuries. That infection has been comprehensibly explained in a long entry reproduced in this blog, “The Red Giant” where a Swede criticized Christianity:

People here at Gates of Vienna focus on the immigration problem. But mass immigration is just the local projection of this much larger and more fundamental problem of which I’m talking of here, that is, the planetary population explosion and our attitudes towards it (which also caused it). It won’t help to address the immigration problem without addressing this global problem. That is, it won’t help to be a lonely, purely Polish, if surrounded by Arabs, Pakistanis and Africans all along the border.

What is happening across the world is the large-scale version of what is happening within our countries. Our relative numbers are diminishing by theirs increasing exponentially, in both cases.

But Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. They cannot keep their fingers away.

For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors [abortion and] infanticide, it causes the population explosion in the world. It’s a deeply held doctrine within Christian ethics that every single human life across the planet must be saved if possible. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet [through Western medicine, vaccinations, hygienic advances imported from the West, etc.]. But the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only for us but also for them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.

At this point it wouldn’t help putting back god and Christ into the equation. Instead we need to leave Christian ethics.

My fellow WNCs:

You better start leaving Christian ethics altogether and let the brown babies, without further help from the First World, start dying like flies as infant mortality rates were so common before the deranged altruists arrived from the Eastern coast. Otherwise the swarm of Neanderthals that I am about to suffer when I step outside my home’s entry door en route to the café will reach, and eventually conquer, the rest of your lands at the north of Río Grande…

Categories
Christendom Jesus

White nationalist Christians—in a nutshell

“Yes, I understand that you’re an anti-Semite who worships a Jew.”

—Fender


Categories
Jesus New Testament Theology

The Platonic fallacy

This is Joseph Hoffmann’s response to the Jesus
Seminar & the quest of the historical Jesus:
 

Crouching somewhere between esthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo’s famous statement about sculpture. “The job of the sculptor,” Vasari attributes to il Divino,” is to set free the forms that are within the stone.” It’s a lovely thought—poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that “Moses” and “David” were encased in stone, yearning to be released—as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation. You will however be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo’s skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable first millennium BC heroes—in form, stature, skin-tone, and body type—than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the second millennia BC, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn’t know very much about history at all. And what’s more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or to his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have (once or twice) called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits us to understand the origins of Christianity. It’s the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed only gnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary curiosities and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard-pressed to say anything other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant a la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemus, a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl, or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first year divinity students of a certain generation and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that “no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources”), I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting—fascinating even—in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alterative visions (maybe the closest analogues are in constitutional history), but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.

So, how do we approach the New Testament? What kind of rock is it? We know (to stay with the metaphor) that it’s “metamorphic”—made of bits and pieces formed under pressure—in the case of the New Testament, doctrinal and political pressure to define the difference between majority and minority views and impressions, once but now unfashionably called “orthodoxy” and “heresy.”

Whatever the root-causes of canon-formation, canon we have. The Platonic Fallacy comes into play when New Testament scholarship labors under assumptions that emanated from the literary praxis of Renaissance humanists and then (in methodized form) fueled the theological faculties of Germany well into the twentieth century (before a staggering retreat from “higher criticism” by neo-orthodox, and then existentialist, postmodern, and correctness theologians).

The sequence of Jesus-quests that began before Schweitzer (who thought he was writing a retrospective!)—and the succession of theories they produced were honest in their understanding of the metamorphic nature of the canon and the textual complexity of the individual books that composed it. The legacy, at least a legacy of method, of the early quests was a healthy skepticism that sometimes spilled over into Hegelianism, as with F. C. Baur, or mischievous ingenuity, as with Bruno Bauer. But what Left and Right Hegelians and their successors—from Harnack to Bultmann to the most radical of their pupils—had in common was a strong disposition to approach the canon with a chisel, assuming that if the historical accretions, misrepresentations, and conscious embellishment could be stripped away, beneath it all lay the figure of a comprehensible Galilean prophet whose life and message could be used to understand the “essence” (the nineteenth-century buzzword) of Christianity.

Whether the program was demythologizing or structuralist exegesis, the methods seemed to chase forgone conclusions about what the Gospels were and what the protagonist must “really” have been like. Judged by the standards of the chisel-bearers of the Tübingen school, Schweitzer’s caution that the Jesus of history would remain a mystery (“He comes to us as one unknown…”) was both prophetic and merely an interlude in the effort to excavate the historical Jesus. If it was meant to be dissuasive, it was instead a battle cry for better chisels and more theorists. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it has involved a demand for more sources as well—not to mention cycles of translations, each purporting to be “definitive” and thus able to shed light on a historical puzzle that the previous translation did not touch or failed to express. Judas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene have achieved a star-status far out of proportion to anything they can tell us about the historical Jesus, let alone consideration of literary merit or influence on tradition. When I say this, I am not asking modern scholarship to embrace the opinions of “dead orthodox bishops” or “winners,” but to get behind the choices the church’s first intellectuals made and their reasons for making them. The politicization of sources, the uninformative vivisection of historically important theological disputes into a discussion of outcomes (winners, losers) may make great stuff for the Discovery channel or the Easter edition of Time, but it is shamelessly Hollywood and depends on a culture of like-minded footnotes and a troubling disingenuousness with regard to what scholars know to be true and what they claim to be true.

Moreover, it is one of the reasons (I’m loathe to say) why a hundred years after the heyday of the “Radical School” of New Testament scholarship—which certainly had its warts—the questions of “total spuriousness” (as of Paul’s letters) and the “non-historicity of Jesus” are still considered risible or taboo. They are taboo because of the working postulate that has dominated New Testament scholarship for two centuries and more: that conclusions depend on the uncovering of a kernel of truth at the center of a religious movement, a historical center, and, desirably, a historical person resembling, if not in every detail, the protagonist described in the Gospels. This working postulate is formed by scholars perfectly aware that no similar imperative exists to corroborate the existence (or sayings) of the “historical” Adam, the historical Abraham, or Moses, or David—or indeed the prophets—or any equivalent effort to explain the evolution of Judaism on the basis of such inquiry.

The Platonic Fallacy depends on the “true story” being revealed through the disaggregation of traditions: dismantle the canon, factor and multiply the sources of the Gospels, marginalize the orthodox settlement as one among dozens of possible outcomes affecting the growth of the church, incorporate all the materials the church fathers sent to the bin or caused to be hidden away. Now we’re getting somewhere. It shuns the possibility that the aggregation of traditions begins with something historical, but not with a historical individual—which even if it turns out to be false, is a real possibility. Even the most ardent historicists of the twentieth century anticipated a “revelation” available through historical research; thus Harnack could dismiss most of the miracles of the Gospels, argue for absolute freedom of inquiry in gospels-research (a theme Bultmann would take up), insist that “historical knowledge is necessary for every Christian and not just for the historian,” all however in order to winnow “the timeless nucleus of Christianity from its various time bound trappings.”

The Jesus Seminar was perhaps the last gasp of the Platonic Fallacy in action. Formed to “get at” the authentic sayings of Jesus, it suffered from the conventional hammer and chisel approach to the sources that has characterized every similar venture since the nineteenth century, missing only the idealistic and theological motives for sweeping up afterward. It will remain famous primarily for its eccentricity, its claim to be a kind of Jesus-vetting jury and to establish through a consensus (never reached) what has evaded lonelier scholarship for centuries.

The Seminar was happy with a miracle-free Jesus, a fictional resurrection, a Jesus whose sayings were as remarkable as “And how are you today, Mrs. Jones?” It used and disused standard forms of biblical criticism selectively and often inexplicably to offer readers a “Jesus they never knew,” a Galilean peasant, a cynic, a de-eschatologized prophet, a craftsman whose dad was a day-laborer in nearby Sepphoris (never mind the Nazareth issue, or the Joseph issue). These purportedly “historical” Jesuses were meant to be more plausible than the Jesus whose DNA lived on in the fantasies of Dan Brown and Nikos Kazantzakis. But, in fact, they began to blur. It betimes took sources too literally and not literally enough, and when it became clear that the star system it evoked was resulting in something like a Catherine Wheel rather than a conclusion, it changed the subject. As long ago as 1993, it became clear that the Jesus Seminar was yet another attempt to break open the tomb where once Jesus lay—I’m reminded of a student’s gospel paraphrase of Luke 24.5, with 24.42 [“They gave him a piece of cooked fish…”] in view—to find a note that read “Gone Fishing,” in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. It was then that I commented in a popular journal that “The Jesus of the Westar Project is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.” I was anticipated in this by none other than John Dominic Crossan (a Seminar founder) who wrote in 1991, having produced his own minority opinion concerning Jesus, “It seems we can have as many Jesuses as there are exegetes… exhibiting a stunning diversity that is an academic embarrassment.” And Crossan’s caveat had been expressed more trenchantly a hundred years before by the German scholar Martin Kaehler: “The entire life of the Jesus movement,” he argued, was based on misperceptions “and is bound to end in a blind alley… Christian faith and the history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water.”

If we add these to the work of the Jesus Seminar, the “extra-Seminar Jesuses,” magicians, insurgents, bandits [the author is probably referring to the work of Morton Smith and Hyam Maccoby], we end up with a multiplicity that “makes the prospect that Jesus never existed a welcome relief.”

Bruce Chilton is one of a number of scholars who comes away from the Jesus Seminar sadder but wiser and hopes that the Jesus Project will not be another stuttering attempt to break rocks and piece them back together to create plausible Jesuses, as Michelangelo created a plausible Moses for the Italians of the sixteenth century. His challenge to the Project is fair enough. In fact, one of the benefits we inherit from the Seminar is a record of success and failure. It raised the question of methodology in a way that can no longer be ignored, without however providing a map for further study. Its legacy is primarily a cautionary tale concerning the limits of “doing” history collectively, and sometimes theologically, and the Jesus Project must take this seriously.

Let me add to this commentary a special concern as I watch the Project unfold. Jesus-research—biblical research in general—through the end of the twentieth century was exciting stuff. The death of one of the great Albright students last year, and a former boss of mine at the University of Michigan, David Noel Freedman, reminds us that we may be at the end of the road. Albright’s careful scholarship and research, and his general refusal to shy away from the “results” of archaeology, were accompanied by a certain optimism in terms of how archaeology could be used to “prove” the Bible. In its general outline, the Bible was true; there was no reason (for example) to doubt the essential biographical details of the story of Abraham in Genesis. Albright’s pupils were less confident of the biblical record as William Dever observed in a classic 1995 article in The Biblical Archaeologist. His central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum. The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer “secular” archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not “Biblical archaeology.” New Testament archaeology is a different house, built with different stones. To be perfectly fair, the biblical appendix lacks the geographical markers and vivid information that suffuse the Hebrew Bible. If the Old Testament landscape is real geography populated by mythical heroes, the New Testament trends in the opposite direction. For that reason, New Testament scholars in my opinion have tried to develop an ersatz- “archaeology of sources” to match the more impressive gains in Old Testament studies.

The reasons for the “new sources” trend in New Testament research are multiple, but the one I fear the most is Jesus-fatigue. There is a sense that prior to 1980 New Testament scholarship was stuck in the mire of post-Bultmannian ennui. Jesus Seminars and Jesus Projects have been in part a response to a particular historical situation. Five gospels are better than four. The more sources we have the more we know about Jesus. Source “Q” (a) did exist, (b) did not exist, or (c) is far more layered and interesting than used to be thought. Judas was actually the primary apostle. No, it was Mary Magdalene.

When we considered developing the Jesus Project, it was not out of any malignant attempt to “prove” that Jesus did not exist. (The press releases have done an immeasurable disservice by harping on this as the agenda). As a Christian origins scholar by training, I am not even sure how one would go about such a task, or be taken seriously if it were undertaken. Yet the possibility that Christianity arose from causes that have little to do with a historical founder is one among many other questions the Project should take seriously. Inevitably, scholars and critics (if not always the same people) will ask, And just how do you go about doing that?, and neither the answer “Differently” or “Better” will suffice. The demon crouching at the door, however, is not criticism of its intent nor skepticism about its outcome, but the sense that biblical scholarship in the twentieth century will not be greeted with the same excitement as it was in Albright’s day. Outside America, where the landscape is also changing, fewer people have any interest in the outcomes of biblical research, whether it involves Jericho or Jesus. The secularization of world culture, which will eventually reach even into the Muslim heartlands, encourages us to value what matters here and now. As one of our members, Arthur Droge (Toronto) mentioned at the recent meeting of the Project in Amherst, NY, most of us were trained in a generation “that believed certain questions were inherently interesting.” But fewer and fewer people do. Jesus-fatigue—the sort of despair that can only be compared to a police investigation gone cold—is the result of a certain resignation to the unimportance of historical conclusions.

Reaching for the stars and reaching back into history have in common the fact that their objects are distant and sometimes unimaginably hard to see. What I personally hope the Project will achieve is to eschew breaking rocks, and instead learning to train our lens in the right direction. Part of that process is to respond to Droge’s challenge: Why is this important? And I have the sense that in trying to answer that question, we will be answering bigger questions as well.

Categories
Judeo-reductionism Liberalism

Quoting myself…

“The Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values.”

Categories
Final solution

An open letter to Larry Auster

Note of November 3, 2014: I wrote the below entry in April 2012 and presently am more open, though not a hundred percent convinced, of Linder's final solution but by then I did not subscribe such views


I have ignored you since you started to say that I share Alex Linder’s “exterminationist anti-Semitic” sentiments. But in recent posts of yours you keep claiming it, for example here, where one of your commenters said:

The blogger Chechar (a Mexican) has written extensively about this aspect of Mexican culture, but as he also has strongly negative opinions of Jews, I expect you will not want to read him. (He also writes at great length, even when I was reading him regularly, I tended to skim a lot.) [Larry Auster replies: Chechar, a.k.a. Cesar Tort, is an exterminationist anti-Semite.]

Where the hell did you get that idea Larry? Just because in a post I gathered Linder’s hilarious rants from other blogsites? Or because, with my typical black humor that has baffled so many bloggers, in a post I said, “I would name Alex Linder my Reichsführer-SS” (a post about Breivik, not about Jews)?

Don’t you have a black sense of humor, Larry? What you say about me is libelous: and an old Jewess friend—not a friend of mine but a music colleague of my family—that the other day hit one of your above links is now very confused. You simply cannot quote me saying that Jews must be exterminated, can you?

Gosh! I am starting to understand why you guys have become the intellectual target of white nationalist sites such as Age of Treason! Have you had the decency of reading at least some of my posts where I blame more Christianity than Judaism for the current Western malaise? Does this mean that I now want to exterminate all Christians, even when one of my posts has the provocative title “A final solution to the Christian problem”?

You better cite what I now say in this entry every time you mention me again in your View From the Right site!

Categories
Demography Energy / peak oil Eschatology Justice / revenge Liberalism Videos

Peak Liberalism

In the comments section of that YouTube video you can read “Google Chechar The Red Giant for an enlightening read on peak liberalism.”

Categories
Literature

On Harold

Whether Covington is a problematic character or not is a completely separate issue from the quality of his creative work. He is a powerful novelist and myth maker, as well as a capable radio host. The reality is that Covington has put out more inspiring and creative work in the last decade than anybody else.

—Trainspotter

Categories
Quotable quotes Swastika

The specter of Nazism

eagle-and-swastika-reichadler-und-hakenkreuz-national-socialist-posters-third-reich-deutschland

People who wet their beds at the specter of Nazis and the KKK are just too shallow in their understanding of the forces arrayed against us, and too beholden to the enemy’s moral outlook and status system, to be of any use in our struggle.

—Greg Johnson