Harry Baird wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 6:30 amI see it differently but very simply:
Simplicity, reduction, attempting to define things in reference to fundamentals -- this is a useful exercise. I think I well understand the attraction, and indeed the usefulness & fruitfulness of returning to fundamentals. And there could certainly be great benefit and a great deal of interest in dedicating oneself strictly to research about the *real Jesus* within that specific historical period.
The first question is, did the man Jesus of Nazareth live approximately 2,000 years ago, or is his existence a myth? I think the mythicist case fails, and I understand that so do you, so we agree that he is a real historical person.
In fact I think it is rather obviously both. There definitely seems to have been a real man named Jesus who as you say had a profound effect on those around him. And at the same time there is certainly a 'mythical' figure, a figure who was extremely mythologized. I would say that it is impossible to separate the two. Not at this point.
But let's cut to the chase here so we don't get dragged into useless territory. To speak about American Evangelical Christianity is to speak about a social and cultural phenomenon that has nothing to do with that historical frame in Judea 2,000 years ago. And in fact every manifestation of Christianity, in every locale, can only realistically be examined by examining it separately from the Biblical time as well as from the perspective of the Story (the enveloping sense that one gets when one reads the Gospels).
Apologists argue that the "confusion" of which you speak was simply due to the promulgation of false testimonies, but that the true testimony was sensibly selected and compiled into the Bible as the New Testament.
No, I think you have misunderstood my term 'confusion of ideas' and 'confusion of peoples'. The first centuries were times of tremendous mixing of peoples and mixing of ideas. Everyone who would encounter the idea of a divine avatar (though they would not have used the term avatar: a descent of God into the material, phenomenal world) would have had no choice but to receive the idea, to imagine the notion, within the existing structure of their 'worldview'. So a clear example can be cited when the Hebrew *world* encountered the Greek *world*. The philosophical Greeks had a very different location and let's say 'mental process' and orientation when compared to the Hebrews. But in the encounter the *idea* of a savior, or the fact of the arrival of a savior, had to be (necessarily) *translated* into terms of ideation that could be made sense of.
I have another strong example which is well expressed in an interesting book:
The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.)
This study is an interpretation and appreciation of the art of the Heliand, the 9th century Saxon epic poem in which the Christian Gospel of the four evangelists is translated in Germanic terms. Murphy examines in detail the ingenious and sensitive poetic analogies through which familiar texts--the Nativity, the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, the Passion and Resurrection--are transformed into Germanic settings and concepts. The first book in English on The Heliand, this study offers a new socio-political explanation of the possible motives of the unknown author in undertaking this enormous and brilliantly realized poetic task.
No matter who confronts the larger sense of concept that is communicated in the Gospels, and we might well reference those Johannine texts that have recently been quoted, the ideas have to be confronted by a specific individual within a specific context.
So allow me to mention an anecdote from my own experience: years ago I traveled in extremely rural Oaxaca way up in the Sierra Mazateca. I wound up through a strange accident (bad directions) in a very remote Indian village which never got any tourism. I was traveling with a German friend and we decided to stay there for a while.
In that village there was an American Evangelical family, and the father of the family was there to translate the Gospels into Mazateca. You probably have never read Peter Matthiessen's
At Play in the Fields of the Lord but our encounter with this American Evangelical in this extremely remote village of Indians who had very little conception of the *outside world*, reminded my of scenes from Matthiessen's book. There was also a rather colorful but doctrinaire Catholic priest who lived there and managed the small Catholic church. And a doctor from Mexico City doing his public service before he would be granted his license to practice. And the Evangelical preacher had two very attractive teenaged daughters who were, despite themselves and the control of their parents, very curious about the two of us. (And they were raised there and spoke fluent Mazateca).
But anyway one day my friend and I explored a mountainside just outside of the village and we had to trudge for a long while through the forest. Everything that we did became the talk of the village since no sense could be made of why we were there. My friend slipped and strained his ankle and this too became the talk of the village. And I learned that the locals understood that the reason why this happened was because up there on that mountain there lived somewhat malicious spirits that the locals, when they were told about the malicious Jews who thwarted Jesus's mission and put him to death, associated
the Jews with these devilish mountain spirits. See? They had to receive an idea, a notion, and an image, and translate it as best they could into terms that made sense to them in
their world.
The true Christianity as determined by the words, deeds, and life of Jesus Christ, whatever those actually were.
You are dealing in a sort of imitation of mathematical logic, aren't you? Yes Harry, in that sense you have a point. But the real facts of the matter is that whatever *Christianity* is can only be understood by examining it in specific contexts, by those who receive it, interpret it, and mould their lives in respect to their interpretations and conceptions.
Sure, there have been treatises, commentaries, debates, books, theological arguments, theodicies, etc, etc - and, to the extent that all of that is compatible with the body of teachings of Christ, it's probably fine to consider it a part of Christianity - but my point remains, that the essence of Christianity is determined by the body of teachings (etc) of Christ. I don't see how it can be argued otherwise for the religion bearing his very name!
Yes yes yes, Harry. You will at the end of this win a substantial prize for your searing logic! Not only does your point remain I may even carve it into a giant block of marble so that it can be immortalized for all time!
Excuse the bit of sarcastic humor . . .
I am much more interested in what is going on within the contemporary social, political and economic scene (my focus is obviously American society) and the radical upset in the way that people *define their world*. We are in a time that could be said to correspond to the *confusion of peoples* and the *confusion of ideas* that was so prevalent in that early Roman imperial period. One of the most strange and really bizarre events is the entire Trump phenomenon and the radical divisions that have arisen which certainly seem to spread out from there to the rest of the world. The American Evangelical support for (whatever it is that they see when they contemplate) Donald Trump, and the backdrop of an utterly strange *Christian conception* that dovetails into vast conspiratorial, somewhat hallucinated, projections onto a *world* that many of them (it seems) do not know how to interpret, causes me not to care so much for strict doctrinal theology, but rather to observe and try to understand what people do with this.
Now where is Jesus of Nazareth in this do you suppose? Surely he is up there in that heaven-realm twisting & turning as his chosen vehicles down on the Earth are preparing his Kingdom! And then -- soon? -- he will come thundering back on flaming phosphorescent clouds to incinerate His enemies and, while he is at it, cart your sorry confused ass off to hellish prison since you never did, and you likely never will, bend your knee to the Lord! And now you tell me that you will be walkin' on the darkened sides of the street meditatin' of black (greasy?) phallus with quirky Henry.
What am I to think Harry?!?
I actually really strongly suggest -- for all concerned -- that we stop dealing in bizarre hallucinations and projections of imagined content and begin to think, if we are going to think at all, is somewhat more
realistic terms.
Just for fun some quotes:
“It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies.”
“Holding his breath, swaying drunkenly beneath a bulb which illumined little more than grime and moisture, Moon stared awhile at the cement wall; it took just such a hopeless international latrine in the early hours of a morning, when a man was weak in the knees, short in the breath, numb in the forehead and rotten in the gut, to make him wonder where he was, how he got there, where he was going; he realized that he did not know and never would. He had confronted this same latrine on every continent and not once had it come up with an answer; or rather, it always came up with the same answer, a suck and gurgle of unspeakable vileness, a sort of self-satisfied low chuckling: Go to it, man, you’re pissing your life away.”
― Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord
