Fun with the New Testament

[jducoeur]

One of my long-time joys is courses from The Teaching Company. For those who haven't heard my raves about them, they produce audio and sometimes video college-level courses available for sale. I have many of their courses, and recommend them highly.

My current in-car project is The New Testament. I confess, it's a subject I've never known terribly well -- my ethnic background is Jewish, and my upbringing largely secular, so it just wasn't too relevant. But it's important enough in the world to be worth learning a bit about, and this course is a real hoot. I suspect that none of this would be surprising to someone who had real religion studies, but it's quite an eye-opener for me.

The professor takes the subject quite seriously, and strikes a fine middle-ground approach: neither credulous nor debunking, but taking the book seriously on its own terms and exploring it as a piece of history, literature and theology. He particularly tends towards the history, examining the milieu that Jesus and his followers lived in, what we can learn about the man himself, and how the church evolved after his death.

Several aspects have particularly struck me so far. One is the difference between the accounts of Jesus' life. He spends a full lecture on each of the official gospels, as well as on the apocryphal ones (especially the Gospel of Thomas) -- basically, he covers everything written in the first hundred years after his death, explicitly discounting anything later as pretty much worthless from a serious historical perspective. He explores the way the story is subject to a large-scale game of telephone, describes the critical tools used to unpack it, and then applies those tools.

Most interestingly, he focuses on the agenda of each gospel, and the way that each is trying to sell a particular viewpoint, none of them quite alike. I was very struck by the way that everything I respect about Christianity seems to come from the book of Mark (the earliest of the gospels) and most of what repels me about it comes from John (the latest). As the story evolves from a very modest messiah to a very overt one, I get progressively more uncomfortable with the whole thing.

The second half of the course is spent on the post-Christ early evolution -- the 20-some books of the Bible that are talking about aftermath and theology, rather than the life of the man. In particular, he spends quite a while describing Paul and his theology, and the way that Paul starts from a few fairly straightforward assumptions (mainly that Christ was the selfless and utterly good son of God, who was executed, and that the end times are coming soon), and proceeds to derive more or less all of Christian theology from them in a remarkably convoluted chain of reasoning. You can really believe that this guy was a Jewish scholar before his conversion: the whole thing comes out sounding downright Talmudic at times.

My favorite section, though, has to be the background of the Epistles.

Before going into the details of each letter, he describes what was going on to cause the letters to be written. He describes these early churches, that Paul has founded and then moved on from, that have written to him for help over their internal conflicts: people taking all the food from the communal dinner board before others get to eat, or people speaking in tongues over each other, each trying to out-shout the other in petty internal power games, leading the rest to write to Paul for help.

And my immediate, instinctive reaction was, "My god -- it's a dysfunctional shire, complaining to the King".

Really, this shouldn't surprise me: intellectually, I know that the problems of organizations are largely consequences of human nature, and are pretty universal. But it's never been driven home to me quite so viscerally before. One thinks of the church as so big and long-established that it just never occurred to me that, in the early days, it would have had all the problems endemic to young clubs that are full of weirdoes.

Anyway: fun course, and really quite an interesting topic. Hearing it taken apart from a historical perspective does much to demystify the whole institution, and shows how the apparently contradictory messages of Christianity evolved from a common origin...

Comments

[vairavi.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds awesome. I might like to borrow the Old Testament CDs from you at some point. I was raised in an atheist/agnostic household and as a result know almost nothing about the religions of the Book.

[jducoeur]

Sher -- they're available for loan, so let's find a time that makes sense to lend them out. (The Old Testament course is also quite good, although rather different...)

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

That actually sounds extremely interesting.

I had a philosophy professor who once told me if you really want to understand Christianity, get one of those copies that has all of Jesus' spoken words in red. Read only the red bits. Then go back and try to figure out the spin of the reporter and how it jives with what was said. Particularly, of course, which words are chosen and emphasized.

It is a curious mash up of views. One has to wonder if the very disparity of it has allowed for it's success, with different perspectives being focused on at different points in history.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"One has to wonder if the very disparity of it has allowed for it's success, with different perspectives being focused on at different points in history."

I expect so. I have a not-fully-formed idea along those lines, about a philosophical system being "human-complete" if it contains enough symbolic complexity to describe all (or at last a workable majority) of human experience. The holy book(s) of pretty much any successful religion qualify. One of the smaller such entities I'm aware of is the Tarot.

[aneirin-awenyd.livejournal.com]

Slightly OT, but I appreciate hearing your endorsement of The Teaching Company. We have two banana-boxes full of their videos, gifted to us by one of Seamus' coworkers, and we're just waiting for a working TV/VCR to find its way into our living room so we can enjoy them.

I don't know how long it would take for us to get through them, or if we'll want to keep vs. declutter them, but if we decide they need a new home should I let you know?

[jducoeur]

Truth to tell, there's a fair chance that I wouldn't get around to them. Any time that I can do video, I'm usually doing something else; I've specialized in their audio courses because I can do them in the car.

I can't say it's not tempting -- there are some video-only courses that sound interesting -- but there may be better candidates to receive them...

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

You might want to check out a book titled "Born of a Woman" by John Shelby Spong. I read it several years ago. It's an interesting analysis of the four gospels, written by an Episcopal bishop. He discusses when the various gospels were written (based on current historical theory), and their various target audiences. He suggests that the differences between them are probably due to the fact that they were written for different cultural audiences, and therefore used different images to convey the message, and that thus they should be interpreted in that light, not literally. This has upset quite a number of fundamentalists.

[jducoeur]

Sounds similar to some of the stuff mentioned in the course. He describes how, for example, this gospel is focused on Jesus as a specifically Jewish messiah, whereas that one is aimed at emphasizing the universality of the church. But the book does sound interesting...

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Oh, Spong is the best!! (Nice guy, too.) I would recommend everything of his, really.

[siderea]

I just got a catalog -- in print! through the USnail! -- from them[*]. This is creepily precient because I borrowed a couple disks of "Understanding the Brain" (Norden) from a professor last semester. How do they do that? The Norden lectures are on deep sale, too.

[* The name "The Teaching Company" was completely buried in it; they seem to be trying to rebrand themselves as "The Great Courses".]

[jducoeur]

I just got a catalog -- in print! through the USnail! -- from them

They put out an *astonishing* number of catalogs. I get one from them something like every other week. One of these days, I may write to them and tell them to chill -- I usually shop tactically, buying some things that happen to be on sale online when I'm running low. But since I tend to buy a couple hundred bucks' worth at a time, they sell pretty hard to me.

they seem to be trying to rebrand themselves as "The Great Courses"

Actually, the dual branding's always been there (at least for most of the past ten years) -- The Teaching Company is the name of the company, The Great Courses [on Tape] is the name of the product. Of course, they really only seem to have one product, which makes the dual identity a bit overkill. I haven't quite figured out the logic behind when they emphasize which...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

You may find this page interesting:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cs.htm

It's sort of an overview of thought and historical scholarship on the New Testament. Buried in there are charts with quotes and how they are interpreted by very conservative churches vs. very liberal, or very scholarly people. These are often 180 degrees apart; I find it all fascinating.

Here's one example: examination of the "men should not lie with men" line:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibx.htm

[jducoeur]

Interesting; I'll have to check that out. I have to say, one of my major realizations from the course has been that churches pretty much *have* to choose which bits to emphasize and which to downplay.

(And my respect for the fundamentalist movement has fallen further, now that it's becoming clearer that the book is moderately self-contradictory -- asserting that the whole thing is absolute truth requires more suspension of logic than I'm willing to grant even on grounds of faith...)

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

*****
And my immediate, instinctive reaction was, "My god -- it's a dysfunctional shire, complaining to the King".
*****

There has to be a way to work this up as a Silverwing's Law.

;)

[quantumkitty.livejournal.com]

I was very struck by the way that everything I respect about Christianity seems to come from the book of Mark (the earliest of the gospels) and most of what repels me about it comes from John (the latest).

Hmmm. I've always found John to be the prettiest. But I can see how people like what the Synoptics say better.

[jducoeur]

In a way, it's not surprising that John is prettiest -- it had years longer to percolate and refine the message into something that really rings nicely. But the description of Mark comes across as -- I dunno, more sincere. This may partly be my Laurel background: Mark sounds more *authentic*, and that matters greatly to me.

Of course, now I'm going to have to find some time to actually read the bloody thing myself, so I can check these second-hand impressions and see if they bear up first-hand...

[cellio]

That does sound interesting. Most discussion of religion is rather more cursory, but when you can actually get into a course (or at least a decent-sized lecture series), lots of neat stuff can come out.

Historicity?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Does it get into the question of whether Christ existed? What I've read is that the earliest Christian writings date to the 1st or 2nd century BCE, and deal with the Christ as Yahweh's agent, which he would send down into the world to do his will. Christians of the time were Jewish occultists who decided to try influencing the Christ to do what they wanted, instead of petitioning Yahweh directly. The first recorded reference to Christ being a man dates to 140 CE.

I thought of that in part because it means Paul really was a Jewish scholar, with no conversion involved.

Re: Historicity?

[jducoeur]

Does it get into the question of whether Christ existed? What I've read is that the earliest Christian writings date to the 1st or 2nd century BCE, and deal with the Christ as Yahweh's agent, which he would send down into the world to do his will. Christians of the time were Jewish occultists who decided to try influencing the Christ to do what they wanted, instead of petitioning Yahweh directly.

That's -- really different from anything I've ever heard, and I confess I'm skeptical. I'll be frank: it sounds like tinfoil-hat nonsense, and no, the course doesn't say anything of the sort. (And given that the course *does* implicitly call the validity of much of the Bible into doubt, it doesn't seem to be the Christian-apologist sort.)

The first recorded reference to Christ being a man dates to 140 CE.

Excuse me? According to common scholarship, the Gospels were all written before then, so I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

I thought of that in part because it means Paul really was a Jewish scholar, with no conversion involved.

I'm not quite clear on what you mean here. I mean, yes -- he *was* a Jewish scholar (and indeed, a self-professed persecutor of the Christians), before his on-the-road vision that led to everything else...

Re: Historicity?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

The support for Jesus really existing is fairly thin. On the other hand, this is not surprising.

Here is an overview:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcno.htm

An excerpt:
Liberal and mainline theologians generally believe that Mark was the first gospel written, and that it was composed about 70 CE. Matthew and Luke were authored up to 15 years later. John was written after Luke. None of the authors identities are known. If these dates are correct, then it is unlikely that any of the authors were eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry. In spite of their claims, they were relying on secondary or tertiary sources, and accumulated church tradition.

The page has quotes from a number of non-biblical sources which may or may not related to Jesus, or be later inclusions or forgeries.

Re: Historicity?

[jducoeur]

The evidence for *most* of ancient history is thin. But everything I've seen on the subject indicates that the "Jesus didn't exist" argument is probably wishful thinking.

In particular, it suffers from one serious problem: the fact that the original Christian sources *are* so ridiculously inconsistent. If this was the result of someone trying to advance an agenda, I honestly think they would have done a better job of getting their story straight. I mean, while the various Christian sects downplay it, the theology of the Bible is *highly* inconsistent -- indeed, the course I'm taking spends most of a lecture on the fact that Paul's theology (which became more or less Christian orthodoxy) doesn't seem to match what Jesus actually preached according to the Gospels.

And frankly, it requires an implausible level of conspiracy, as well as timelines that don't add up. While it's true that Mark wasn't written until somewhere in the 60-70 AD range, the letters of Paul (at least, the authentic ones) were well before then. Paul wasn't there, but says that he spent time with people who *did* know Jesus. So the "Jesus didn't exist" argument requires either that Paul was flat-out lying, or there was a big conspiracy to deceive him.

And frankly, neither of those arguments holds up well, because of the subsequent inconsistency. Mark was written well *after* Paul, and seems to contradict his account badly. So if Paul made the whole thing up, it's very strange that the earliest accounts differ from him so much; if there was a big conspiracy to defraud him, it's again strange that it would have led to so much inconsistency.

No -- IMO, Occam's Razor says that this line of reasoning is, as I said, wishful thinking on the part of people who would prefer to rubbish the whole thing back to its roots. Frankly, it's grounded in a "*prove* that he wasn't unreal" sort of thought that I find deeply distasteful. There is fine reason to believe that the Bible is full of inaccuracy, but there is little reason to believe that there is *nothing* behind it; the demands for proof seem entirely unreasonable to me.

[cont'd]

Re: Historicity?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

The evidence for *most* of ancient history is thin.

That is my point; I suppose I should have included that, but it seemed redundant given the knowledge of the sort of folks who read your LJ.

Re: Historicity?

[jducoeur]

[continuing]

Based on what I've heard so far, I would say that it is rather more plausible (based on the way oral communication typically works) that the real story (assuming that Jesus was not *actually* the Messiah) went something like this:

Jesus was a fairly ordinary guy in a little village until he got sucked into the then-common Jewish Apocalyptic movement. He started preaching, loudly, about how the End Times were coming and that everyone who didn't adhere strictly to the Jewish Law wouldn't be saved. He specifically talked about how the Jewish Messiah (the so-called "Son of Man" in the Gospels) would come and redeem the good. He may have engaged in a bunch of random prophecy. None of this was particularly unusual at the time, but he proved a pretty good charismatic preacher, and drew a decent number of disciples. There's no especially good evidence that he claimed to *be* the Messiah himself; indeed, Mark indicates that he didn't.

However, he was a trouble-maker, albeit a minor one, so the powers that be decided to get rid of him. So he was grabbed, tried in a pretty perfunctory way, and crucified. None of this so far was unusual: as far as those in power were concerned, he wasn't very important, just a minor rabble-rouser.

And at that point *something* happened. It's conceivable that someone intentionally made up the resurrection story, but it seems more likely that somebody simply saw him in an ecstatic dream (not all that unusual among cultists), and declared that they had seen him risen from the dead.

*That* started a predictable chain of confusion. Others had similar dreams (again, not all that weird among credulous people who want to believe something), and rumors began to fly. People started coming to his inner circle to hear the truth, and they told the stories as best they remembered them. Of course, the stories varied a bit, and grew in the telling, with everyone deciding, in retrospect, that Jesus obviously *was* the Messiah. The prophecies that appeared to have come true were remembered, the ones that didn't were forgotten. Possibly (as the website's author suggests) other stories got mixed in with those about Jesus himself, adding to the confusion. People who wanted some kind of message of redemption started going around and preaching, and the movement started. All of this was oral tradition at this point, and nothing got written down because it was mostly illiterate peasants spreading it around.

Then comes Paul, who has his own vision of Jesus. Based on that, he decides that it's clearly true that Jesus *has* been resurrected, and from that he weaves together a whole complex theology, far more sophisticated and nuanced than the common one. That theology doesn't match the stories of Jesus and his teachings very well, but he doesn't *know* the stories very well. This had started as a lower-class movement, and here is a well-educated man who doesn't even speak the same language coming in from the outside -- he's picking up what he can, but he spends only a modest amount of time with the disciples who knew Jesus personally, and he glosses over the bits that don't agree with his interpretation.

For several decades, then, we have several strands of Christianity basically duking it out in the marketplace of ideas. The inconsistency of the Gospels reflects that. Eventually, the common stories begin to merge with Paul's increasingly-dominant theology, resulting in the Book of John. At this point, the mob of assorted cults are turning into a unified Church.

That's a guess, anyway, based on my casual understanding of the terrain. Probably wrong in some details, but it has the sort of messiness that tends to match reality, and it matches the evidence as I understand it fairly well...

Re: Historicity?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Probably wrong in some details, but it has the sort of messiness that tends to match reality, and it matches the evidence as I understand it fairly well...

It's not too far off what I think happened, if that matters.

Re: Historicity?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I'll be frank: it sounds like tinfoil-hat nonsense

Understandable—that's part of why I asked, because I would like to have more information. Unfortunately, the last time I went looking for the site where I read this, I was unable to find it.

The first recorded reference to Christ being a man dates to 140 CE.

Excuse me? According to common scholarship, the Gospels were all written before then, so I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

The site I read said that major parts of the Gospels are earlier, but that the bits that say Christ was a man were grafted on later, mostly imported from myths about Horus.

In particular, it claimed, the Epistles of Paul never mention Christ's humanity; they're written from the mystic viewpoint. (The page cvirtue just linked to mentions this, too.)

I thought of that in part because it means Paul really was a Jewish scholar, with no conversion involved.

I'm not quite clear on what you mean here. I mean, yes -- he *was* a Jewish scholar (and indeed, a self-professed persecutor of the Christians), before his on-the-road vision that led to everything else...

Ah—abuse of terminology problem (on my part). Yes, he converted to Christianity, but that didn't mean converting away from Judaism; at the time, they were compatible.

Re: Historicity?

[jducoeur]

The site I read said that major parts of the Gospels are earlier, but that the bits that say Christ was a man were grafted on later, mostly imported from myths about Horus.

See my long response to Cynthia above. It doesn't feel plausible to me: the *kinds* of similarities and inconsistencies we see in the stories feel more like a real story that's been through a massive game of telephone, rather than a deliberate conflation of multiple myths. IMO, it's more likely that Jesus really existed, although his story grew considerably in the telling.

Yes, he converted to Christianity, but that didn't mean converting away from Judaism; at the time, they were compatible.

Yaas -- indeed, the big argument of the day seems to have been whether Christianity was a strict *subset* of Judaism. I gather from the course that Paul was influential in convincing people that you didn't have to convert to Judaism *first*, before you could become Christian. (The debate about whether Christians had to be circumcised was apparently raging at the time. I do find myself wondering how much Paul was a skilled operator, who recognized that this was too high a barrier to entry for the big church he was building...)

Re: Historicity?

[cellio]

I do find myself wondering how much Paul was a skilled operator, who recognized that this was too high a barrier to entry for the big church he was building...)

I have suspected that for years.

(By the way, it doesn't take all that long to read the gospels; most of the bulk is elsewhere.)

Re: Historicity?

[jducoeur]

Oh, and:

In particular, it claimed, the Epistles of Paul never mention Christ's humanity; they're written from the mystic viewpoint. (The page [info]cvirtue just linked to mentions this, too.)

I don't really see that in the linked page. Certainly it doesn't match the course material, which makes the point that the material on Jesus' life in the Epistles is quite *thin*, but there is certainly some there in outline.

Why wasn't there more about his life? The course makes two main points there: 1) these were scattered letters, mainly focused on the problems of the moment, written to people who were supposed to already know the framework, and 2) it is fairly likely that Paul's knowledge of Jesus' life was kind of sketchy to begin with, since it probably mainly came from his brief stay with the disciples, which was probably mostly focused on planning church strategy.

And frankly, my suspicion is that Paul just didn't *care* about Jesus' life all that much: his theology was grounded mainly in the notion that Jesus' *death* was the important bit...