Transtradition Criticism

If you have been following my blog over the years, you know that one of my keen interests is becoming aware of how we read texts and the assumptions we make as biblical scholars. Although I think that postmodern critique has been useful in highlighting problems of authorial intent, monolithic hermeneutics, and the politics of power, we must bear in mind that these problems were known to scholars of modernity already. The difference that I see between the modern and the postmodern discourses is that the postmodern critique has moved the conversations out of historical time into disembodied discourse without attachment to the empirical. This has left us in the Middle of Nowhere. It is suffocating the Humanities more broadly. It is isolating biblical scholars more and more from history, while supporting the growth of contemporary theological readings instead.

It is this move that haunts us now, and requires us, in my opinion, to re-examine our old tools and refashion them, rather than abandon them. We are in a crisis. The moment to act is now. We must return to a more pragmatic approach that takes seriously the empirical. Theory comes and goes, but the manuscripts, stones and bones remain. There are texts and there are authors and there are readers. And we need to deal with them as realities.

I have no desire to create some new grand theory. What I want to do is return to the old tools and identify why they failed. I want to remodel them in such a way that they work in a transmodern academic discourse, a discourse that moves us beyond the postmodern suffocation and the Middle of Nowhere.

I am stepping out here by beginning to talk about refashioning Tradition Criticism. I have finally settled on a name for the updated approach: Transtradition Criticism.

Transtradition Criticism is an approach to texts, artifacts, and other cultural productions, which seeks to expose, explain and understand the production, meaning, use and transmission of t/Traditions within their historical fields of conversation. This approach is interested in investigating the dynamic interstitial spaces and networks between and across t/Traditions, exposing the politics of power and conceptions of the Other that support the structures of the t/Traditions. Transtradition Criticism is grounded in a pragmatic and embodied view of human beings as personal and social agents who actively and constantly (re)shape the t/Traditions to align with their experiences of themselves and their world. They are participants in personal and social conversations that support, create, modify and destroy t/Traditions.

I will post more as the remodeling continues.

Mellon Seminar Reflection 13: Embodiment and the Humanities

As we begin to prepare for the visit of Professor Mark Turner, a professor of Cognitive Science from Case Western Reserve, we have discussing the field of cognitive psychology. One book that particularly grabbed my attention this week is Edward Slingerland (PHOTO from his webpage HERE), What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (2008).

I can't imagine writing a more courageous book than this, especially as a professor of ancient Chinese religion which is where Slingerland's training is. I was taken by the book for many reasons (and I am still processing it), but what struck me immediately was fact that he sees some of the same problems with postmodern theory that I do, and responds in ways similar to my own responses, responses which I have been recording on this blog, as I go about trying to develop a new sort of historical approach to the study of my texts. What I have come to realize over the course of this year is that I refuse to-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water. What is happening in my mind and through my pen (yes I still write with a pen) is a major remodeling and rebuilding of Tradition Criticism, in light of its postmodern crucifixion. I am developing an approach I am calling Transtradition Criticism. I will post more about this development later.

To return to Slingerland. He argues that postmodern theory has swept through the Academy, leaving us suspicious of any truth-claim and with "a conviction that the distinguishing mark of sophisticated scholarship is an ability to engage with a prescribed pantheon of theorists" rather than serious study of primary texts. What was fun at first "has left us with an intellectual hangover" (2008, 1), luxuriating in language for language's sake.

I couldn't agree more. In my opinion, we are stranded in a place of nowhere, immobilized by disembodied discourses, authorless and textless, outside of history. With nothing empirical, with no sameness, we are lost in a jumble of difference. We are left to describe what we see as ours, with no power to interpret beyond this. Even these meager descriptions are left in an ethical vacuum to be siphoned off and co-opted to support nefarious purposes.

The Humanities are dying and we are the ones who are responsible to save them.

The big question is HOW? Slingerland offers a solid solution. He says that we need to get our act together and learn from scientists how human beings operate, particularly as embodied cognitive beings. He demonstrates how humanists operate within outdated models of anthropology, and need to come to terms with the fact that science has discovered fundamental things about the human being. That we need to take embodiment seriously or be doomed to spinning tales inside of tales.

In Slingerland's words: "The fact that these body-minds are, have always been, and will always continue to be part of the world of things effectively short-circuits the epistemological skepticism that permeates postmodern thinking. A nondualistic approach to the person promises no privileged access to eternal, objective truths, but is based upon the belief that commonalities of human embodiment in the world can result in a stable body of shared knowledge, verified (at least provisionally) by proofs based on common perceptual access. By breaching the mind-body divide - by bringing the human mind back into contact with a rich and meaningful world of things - this approach to the humanities starts from an embodied mind that is always in touch with the world, as well as a pragmatic mode of truth or verification that takes the body and the physical world seriously" (2008, 8).

Mellon Seminar Reflection 10: Medussa is Laughing

We opened the seminar this semester with Derrida and Deconstruction. I won't even try to summarize Derrida because it is "impossible" (smile!). What I got out of the readings and our discussion if that Derrida showed us how much we are trapped in language and our constructions of meaning. Deconstruction appears to me to be a mental process or approach that seeks to discover inherent contradictions in all of our cultural productions, which reveals to us that there is no essential meaning to words or other forms of expression. The complete meaning of anything is postponed or delayed; it is in flux and ever-changing. This makes it impossible to fully grasp.

I think that Deconstruction puts us into a liminal space, where either-or makes no sense anymore. Both-and reigns. An example of this for me is some of Derrida's work on ethics. What is ethical to one party in the relationship usually harms the other. If we choose to spend more time with our families (an ethical choice for our families), this means that we don't spend as much time at work (an unethical choice for our workplace).

The big question for us in the seminar (and maybe you have an answer to this and can share it) is to what extent does Deconstruction exploit the contradictions to the sacrifice of the commonalities of language? We do in fact use language to communicate meaning and most of the time our minds meet on the subject and we know what is being expressed. We don't live most of our lives not knowing what is being said. We don't live in language-meaning chaos. Of course there are moments when we are misunderstood or misread. Those of us who are authors certainly have experienced times when our works have been read in ways we never intended. But even given all these contradictions, there still seems to me to be something stable about language and meaning in a given context or community. Something agreed upon that makes language useful to communicate between us.

What really got me excited actually wasn't Derrida, but Helene Cixous who developed an experimental form of writing influenced by Deconstruction. The piece we read is her very famous "The Laugh of Medusa" trans. and published in Signs 1.4 (1976) 875-893. Not only couldn't I put it down, but I sat in shock afterward. Two thoughts were going through my head. First, when I die I want this read aloud at my service. Second, how could a French woman in 1976 express what I have been feeling for years as an American woman in 2011? It is like she was inside my head and my feelings.

I really don't know what else to say, my reaction was so visceral. Her piece is a call to women (yes it is written to women which makes me wonder how different my writing might be if I imagined an all-female audience) to take our bodies back, to reject the phallocentric perspective that has dominated and determined and confiscated us, and to WRITE. Write we must because it is in the act of writing that woman seizes the occasion to speak, it mobilizes her to enter history no longer as the suppressed. It allows her to become "at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process" (880). Women must break out of the silence that has imprisoned us and "shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem" (881). Famously she writes about men who have riveted us between the two horrific myths of Medusa and the abyss: "Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing" (885).

Did I mention that I finished my manuscript Sex and the Serpent: Why the Sexual and Gender Conflicts of the Early Church Still Matter?

Thinking more about Traditions and traditions

When I think about my scholarship and my teaching, I am realizing that I am a tradition-critic in every sense of the word. Yes I am fascinated at tracking and explaining the emergence and transmission of traditions, but I am also involved in understanding the development of The Christian Tradition, as it is reflected and safeguarded by the normative churches. So I am involved in both aspects of the study of (T)(t)radition.

This has led me to reflect upon another aspect of what my scholarship is about. Being in two religious studies departments over the last fifteen years, rather than theology or biblical departments, has made a difference for me. It has allowed me to grow in my critical examination and evaluation of The Tradition, rather than become immersed in a type of scholarship whose purpose (whether intentional or not) is to shore up and support The Tradition, to use biblical approaches to legitimate again the old normative story.

The more I reflect upon this, the more I realize that this is at the heart of the problem I see in biblical scholarship - whether or not we are willing to question The Tradition and its power of normation, whether we are willing or not to work the materials from the 'other' side, to see what is there and how what is there bears on the normative narrative and exegetical tradition that is centuries old.

My work is more than the retrieval of the 'other' side. It is an attempt to integrate the 'other' side into the story before and as the process of normation was underway. To do so means to cut into the story that The Tradition created, to see how it was put together in the fashion it was, and why. It has never been my experience that The Tradition is left intact. Yet, I have never felt that we are left with nothing. There is a new wholeness that emerges, although one that The Tradition may not (want) to recognize.

Thinking about Tradition v. tradition

Professor Kocku von Stuckrad from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands has been stranded in Houston due to the eruption of the volcano and the cancellation of his flight home after the Hidden God conference. So today he joined my seminar and discussed the methodology which he has been developing to analyze the history of Western Esotericism and published a few weeks ago in his new book Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

It was a pleasure to hear him discuss how he approaches the problem of pluralism in the ancient world and his constructive views. What struck me about our conversation was the difference in our usage of words. I don't know if this is because he was trained in Europe and I in the States, but it has caused me to pause again and consider again that even though we may be using the same words in our analyses, we do not necessarily mean the same thing.

Part of our discussion centered on the word 'tradition' which von Stuckrad has set aside in favor of another concept, 'discursive field'. He does so because 'tradition' means for him 'the' centrist religions and is not able to handle the material 'outside' 'the' tradition except on 'the' tradition's own terms. Discursive field, however, allows him to talk about any field of knowledge (like 'journeys to heaven') without being bound to 'the' tradition's perspective of it.

I identify as a tradition-critic. But my understanding and use of the word 'tradition' is not the same as von Stuckrad's. I don't use it to mean 'the' tradition or the Tradition, as a referent to the centrist religion and its normation. I use it in the sense of 'tradition' with a little 't': as those ideological holdings and practices belonging to a group and transmitted by them over time. I think that I am using the term 'tradition' in the same way that von Stuckrad is using 'discursive field'.

So this afternoon was enlightening for me, reminding me how careful I need to be to define the terms I am using in my academic writing, and never to assume that my colleagues, especially across the Atlantic, are using them in the same manner.

Self-perservation and the Gospel of John

I haven't been blogging too much lately because I have been up to my neck in research on the Gospel of John as I am preparing for the upcoming Hidden God, Hidden Histories conference. This research has been both enlightening and depressing, a sort of high and low of my academic journey.

I have known for a long time that traditions are conservative and self-interested, but what is coming home for me in a very real way is just how much the traditions are safe-guarded by the dominant group - be it the mainstream churches or the academy - and how far the dominant group will go to protect them. The interests and preservation of those interests often become the end-all, even at the expense of historical truth. The rationalizations, the apologies, the 'buts', the tortured exegesis, the negative labeling, the side-stepping, the illogical claims accumulate until they create an insurmountable wall that preserves both church and academy, which remain (uncomfortably so for me) symbiotic.

The entrenchment of the academy is particularly worrisome for me. Scholars' works are often spun by other scholars, not to really engage in authentic critical debate or review, but to cast the works in such a way that they can be dismissed (if they don't support the entrenchment) or engaged (if they do). In other words, fair reproduction of the author's position and engagement with it does not seem to me to be the top priority. The quest for historical knowledge does not appear to me to be the major concern. It usually plays back seat to other issues including the self-preservation of the ideas and traditions of the dominant parties - those who control the churches, and the academy with its long history of alliance with the churches.

I already know that what I have to say about the critical history of the Gospel of John and the origins of Christianity is going to be countered with the full force of the church and academic tradition that has built up around the fourth gospel a secure armor of 'correct' and 'permitted' interpretation, an exegetical tradition as old as the Johannine epistles that has worked to normalize, to deradicalize, to tame the beast. What I have to say is 'not allowed' speech, 'can't be' talk.

Even so I continue to study and write, to speak the unspeakable in my quest to remain fully engaged with the critical investigation of Christian history.

A call to dialogue between postmodernists and historical critics

I am so glad that John van Seters published his response (Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9.26 [2009]) to Aichelle, Miscall, and Walsh's call for dialogue between historical critics and postmodernists (JBL 128.2 [2009] 383-404). I came across Seters article via the Dunedin School blog.

It will be no surprise that I hold very similar criticisms to Aichelle, Miscall, and Walsh's position. I have been wanting to take a moment to respond on my blog to this 'call' for dialogue since I read it last summer. So now appears to be a great opportunity to do so.

1. It has become evident to me especially in the last year that postmodernism is not a method, and should not be confused with a method, and is not a substitute for empirical research. It does not move us "beyond" the rigors of historical criticism. Rather Postmodernism is a set of critiques and attitudes toward texts and their interpretation that are largely dependent on modernism and historical criticism's own hermeneutic of suspicion.

2. The historian relies on empirical data gathered by using a critical, rational, contextual approach to the materials being studied. In Europe this is called "the scientific" approach to the study of religion rather than the "theological approach".

3. The postmodern approach, which divorces literature from historical context and questing for 'authorial' intent, is more amenable to churched traditions and theological readings which have been at odds with historical methods for 200 years. It claims that texts have a diversity of meanings that are located in the point of view of those reading it and the intertextual associations that those readers make. Thus many postmodernists want to conclude from this that historical interpretation is no more meaningful or valuable than any other. It is as 'ideological' and 'mythic' as the next. This conclusion is very dangerous and very inaccurate for some of the reasons that I outline in #4.

4. The historian is no idiot. Every generation of historians has critiqued its outcomes, well aware that personal biases affect the interpretation or assemblage of the data. In fact, this is a point that I first learned when I was an undergraduate in college in a history class. My professor called it "our colored glasses", and how it was necessary for us to be aware of them because they would affect our interpretation of the data. The fact that we all have biases that affect the interpretative process does not suggest that the historical critical method does not work or that it is 'mythic' or equivalent in validity with any other interpretation. On the contrary! The historian's own hermeneutic of suspicion and agreement to employ a critical or scientific approach to understanding our past demonstrates that the historical method works and that over time, as more and more historical interpretations and critiques of these interpretations are generated, we get a better and better grasp of our past and what was going on.

That's all I have time for today. I need to get back to cleaning and organizing my office, but at least it is a start to the 'dialogue' called for by Aichelle, Miscall and Walsh.

Empirical research

This month I have been thinking about our graduate program at Rice, and the biblical field and its direction of research. I have written many posts on my concern that the field's infatuation with theory is causing many universities to produce a generation of new scholars who have become more and more detached from the texts and history and the hard work of empirical research.

When I attended a humanities fellows luncheon at Rice a few weeks ago, a historian of French literature spoke directly to the point in her field. When we do not do the empirical research, but privilege theory and method, we are at a disadvantage, because theory and method are trends that shift and change and go away. But the empirical data does not, and so we need to be the best linguists, the best philologists, the best textual scholars we can be.

Although it is to our advantage to employ a variety of approaches and nuance our approach to history, there is no substitute for the hard work of facing the text at the manuscript level, checking decisions made by editors of critical editions we rely on, being immersed in the literature and culture of the era we are studying, and being attuned to the metaphysical and practical landscape of the text under analysis. None of this is "sexy" or "innovative," and it is not quick in terms of ease of publication. But without it, we are left with theory which is here today and gone tomorrow.

What is it about biblioblogging...?

What is it about biblioblogging that invites misreading, mischaracterizations and negative assessments of other bloggers' posts? Is it the speed by which a post is 'read' or the desire to sensationalize everything written or the wish to inflame readers and spread fear among them or the easiness of stereotyping and plugging every argument into an either-this-or-that category when in fact the argument is complex?

What did I say yesterday? I said that as a historian I find the combination of historical-criticism, literary criticism and social-scientific approach to be the most advantageous. I said that I felt that nothing can replace historical-criticism and if we are going to recover history this is not going to be done via literary criticism alone. We must continue to train our students rigorously in historical-criticism even though post-modern interpretation is sweeping the academy.

I laid out the principles of historical criticism as I use them, so that all can see the assumptions I start with. I do this in every book I write too, because I want my readers to know what my approach is and what my presumptions are. There is no neutral text, and there is no neutral interpretation as I have said countless times (so often in fact that I am getting tired of needing to continue to write it, but I guess I do because other bloggers keep criticizing me for missing this very point?!). However, this does NOT make all interpretations equally valuable for the historical endeavor. This is where I draw the line on theological interpretation and confessional perspectives. They are fine for certain discussions, as long as they are not being paraded out as historical or confused with the historical.

As for the historical-critical approach and feminism. There is nothing anti-feminist about the historical approach in and of itself. What is anti-feminist is its application which has been controlled by white (mainly European) males since only recently. So the kind of history that has been recovered and written has been the history of the dominant group, and it is the history that justifies and sustains that group. Here again we are talking about white males who are in power and who wish to remain so. When our histories, whether religious or social or political, have been written and put into text books and taught to our children, it is the history of the dominant group - their master commemorative narrative - that we are disseminating. Now this is not new news. It is ho-hum by now and I imagine you are yawning.

So what have we done about this now that we have recognized it because feminist scholarship and literary critical methods have brought this to our attention? We have gone back and added a paragraph about important women in our textbooks and we have minted coins with Anthony's face on it, coins that we never use! But we haven't rewritten our histories to reflect what we are learning about the hidden histories and the marginalized past nor have we commemorated it as a society (this is especially true of our religious histories - which is why I am writing Sex and the Serpent). Why not add a paper dollar to those we use already, and put Anthony on it? Why not make a government holiday commemorating the Suffrage movement? Why not rename important boulevards with the names of women we wish to commemorate? Etc.

So the biggest "new" piece to the historical-critical puzzle which I included yesterday in my ten principles, is that the historical-critical method I use has been opened up to be aware of the marginalized histories, that - as my mom used to say - there are always two-sides to a story. As a historical-critic, I recognized a long time ago that the dominant story we are told in most of our texts is not the way things were (or for that matter 'are').

This is the call of our generation - to understand our past more fully and appreciate the variety and complexity of it. We need to give proper credit to the marginalized histories for their own sake, but also with the recognition that the dominant stories would not be what they are if those it marginalized had not lived.

Choosing your method

Today I want to address the issue of methodology which any reader of my blog knows is on my mind frequently. I see my generation of scholars in a precarious situation in terms of method because so many have left the hard work of historical criticism to pursue the post-modern literary trends that are of interest to so many in the academy, especially those scholars who are confessional or interested in contemporary theological interests. Literary criticism can provide the means to disengage with history while still leaving the impression that what has been done is a historical investigation.

I have nothing against literary criticism. In fact, various literary methods inform my research. But as I have argued in my publications and on this blog, literary methods alone are not a replacement for historical criticism, because they do not operate by the same assumptions and they do not seek to answer the same questions. I have discovered that the best methodological approach seeks to bring three fields together : historical criticism, literary criticism, and social-scientific criticism.

But nothing can replace historical criticism, and training in it is the best thing that we can give our students whether they know that or not. Without it, we run the risk of falling into the erotics of the text itself or apologetics, and confusing history with story (or worse theology) and de/re-contextualizing its conversation. So you have to choose. There isn't a middle ground. You can't research and write from a semi-historical method. There is no such thing. If you do this, you are allowing your confessional stance to influence your history. It is like being pregnant. Either you are or you aren't. Either you are a historian operating by the critical perspective, or you are not.

These are the 10 'commandments' or 'operating principles' for the historical-critical interpretation of ancient texts which inform my research:

1. There is no such thing as a neutral text. There is always power and persuasion involved.

2. The author always has a viewpoint and that viewpoint is always engaging another viewpoint (hidden or open) whether to polemicize against it or to develop it or to interpret it or to pass it on.

3. When the text is read against the grain (not for its intended purpose of persuasion to its own viewpoint and its own 'history'), the social dynamics of the text become visible and voices that are hidden by the author begin to emerge. It is the job of the historian to not only concentrate on recovering the dominant voice(s) in the text, but the submerged and oft-silenced voices too.

4. The text is not reporting history, it is reporting theology and it is using story to do so. This makes recovering history extremely difficult because all is not as it seems. We need to ask questions such as why is the author reporting his history and his theology this way? What other histories and theologies does the author know about? What traditions has the author received? How has the author shaped those traditions? Why has he shaped them in the manner that he has? Who has something to gain by this view of history and theology? Who has something to lose by this view of history and theology? What are the author's assumptions and how do these impact the author's narrative? How is the author's narrative related to other narratives? How is the author's narrative related to history? Etc.

5. There is always something before, during and after the text. The traditions it yields are part of a dynamic ideological, social, and religious network with strong geographical semblance. This geographical semblance developed along the roads, trade routes, sea routes, that connected the major cities and the various intellectual schools in those cities.

6. There is rarely (perhaps never) an either-or solution to our texts. We must not expect things to fit nicely in two boxes. The real historical situation is complex and complicated, and any solution we develop must be willing to pull things out of the boxes and allow them to get messy.

7. There is no such thing as 'background' to a text or a tradition. The text or tradition is fully immersed and fully engaged in the dynamics of ancient culture written and performed and transmitted from the minds of ancient people. The author isn't grabbing this idea from here and that idea from there, and so forth, and accurately representing them. The author is a person of his time and culture in which he is immersed in the richness and dynamics of his world where things are not laid out in neat columns, but are mixed up, and often confused. He may know bits and pieces of things due to his cultural exposure, but those bits and pieces may or may not be accurate representations of the ideas. Most often they have been arranged into some kind of pattern that makes sense to the author, but doesn't necessarily represent the bits and pieces accurately. For instance, if he were living in Alexandria, he likely is exposed to Hermetism. But this doesn't mean that what he knows about Hermetism is actually what the Hermetics were practicing in their lodge meetings. And his mixed up versions of things may become foundational for later people.

8. To understand the texts historically, it is necessary to figure out the ancient mindset the best we can, mapping its assumptions and expectations, and allow those to inform our reading of the text. This can only be garnered through a cautious cross-cultural study of the ancient peoples who lived around the Mediterranean, reading from medical literature, studying archaeological remains, shifting through documentary evidence, engaging the whole range.

9. There is nothing new under the sun. The perspectives transmitted in these texts are part of a social memory dynamic that constantly shuffles received traditions to align them with the present experiences of the individuals and groups.

10. The historian must remain skeptical of what the author of the text claims to be true or false.

What do I mean by 'confessional'?

I can't seem to find a satisfying word to describe religiously-invested scholars whose contributions are apologetic in orientation. When I used 'apologetic' people objected. When I used 'conservative-progressive' people objected. When I used 'theological' people objected. Maybe people just want to object? If someone has a better descriptor, I'd be happy to entertain it.

My point in using confessional (or any of the other descriptors I have tried out on this blog) is that scholars who are so invested theologically in a religious tradition and its maintenance are willing to suspend what we know to be factual about our world in order to read their scriptures as fact. These scholars confuse their confessional tradition with history and justify it as history, when in fact what they are justifying is actually theology.

Can a Christian be a historian of Christianity? Of course. But I would qualify this: only if that Christian is not invested in maintaining Christian theology as history in their academic contributions. That Christian must first and foremost be operating critical of the religion, and must be unwilling to cave in to the pressure of making theological claims historical knowledge. So training in historical-critical method is essential, as is vigilance in maintaining this orientation.

The never-ending confusion about perspective

As many of my readers know, I have written many posts already on the historical-critical method and how essential it is for scholars in biblical studies to make the choice between confessional scholarship and historical scholarship. As Jesus said, "It is impossible to serve two masters, or one will be honored and the other insulted."

There is a big difference between confessional scholarship and its working assumptions and historical-critical scholarship and its working assumptions, and we must never confuse the two. Confessional scholarship is willing to compromise and apologize in order to keep 'history' aligned with the faith tradition. It is willing to understand theology as history and write about knowledge in these terms. Historical-critical scholarship is built on the presuppositions of the scientific search for knowledge. It is unwilling to allow theology to be history.

If you are at all uncertain about this distinction, it is easiest to see it when you look at a religion that is not your own and the claims to truth that religion makes. Think about claims that are made about Mohammad, Buddha, or any religion that has "historical" founders or scriptures. Its views on their founders are theology historicized. They are religious truth claims that have been accepted as fact by believers from that tradition, and scholars who work in that tradition. Those outside that tradition recognize this easily.

The easiest example of this in Christianity (which I have also discussed on numerous occasions previously) is the physical resurrection of Jesus. Confessional scholars are willing (some even feel compelled) to allow for the physical resurrection of Jesus to be historical fact. Of course it is not. Dead bodies don't come back to life. And Jesus' body did not come back to life. This is a theological doctrine that was historicized in the literature of the early believers. Those outside of Christianity, and non-confessional academics in another field (like science) see this immediately.

The virgin birth story is another example. Confessional scholars are willing to allow for Jesus' birth from a virgin. This is theology that they have confused with history. Of course Jesus had a human father -whether it was Joseph or someone else. Children aren't born without an egg fertilized by a sperm. If you really want to get silly about this, in the case of Jesus, since he was male, he had to get his Y chromosome from somewhere. Since dads are the only transmitters of the Y chromosome, he had to have a dad. And it wasn't the holy spirit. Even the Valentinians laughed at that logic since everyone knew the holy spirit was Jesus' mom. She was a female!

Humor aside, this is a very serious issue for our field, and now that post-modernism is gripping the academy, we see the abuse of philosophy in order to bolster the positions of confessional scholars who want to continue to make the argument that their theology (and their scripture) is history. They confuse the idea that since all positions are subjective, the scientific position has no better claim to truth than their own.

Of course there is a difference, and in the case of the scientific approach is does a more accurate job recovering history than a theological approach because these approaches have different sets of assumptions they begin with. The scientific approach does not allow you to mistake theology for history, nor does it allow you to mistake the doctrines that developed in the religious tradition to be the history that the tradition says they are. The scientific approach knows that this is the way that the religion justifies its doctrines; it is no history. But confessional scholars are willing to excuse its religious doctrine for history and even bolster this justification by (mis)using philosophy, literary criticism and the social sciences to try and argue that there is nothing we can know for certain because there is no objective truth, so their truth is as historical as any other.

I can't write more today because I am home with a sick five year old (as I was yesterday). But I hope in the next few days to continue my train of thought, because I think this is the MOST IMPORTANT discussion of my generation - whether we are willing or not to abandon our field to confessional claims to knowledge and truth in the post-modern age.

Book Report: The Historiographical Jesus (Le Donne)

Today a package arrived in my mailbox. What's this? I thought as I opened it. As I tore the package open and the name of the book emerged "The Historiographical Jesus" by Anthony Le Donne, I thought, "My gosh, a perfect title!" Simultaneously I thought (in regards to historical Jesus research) - "it is about time!"

Of course I haven't had time to read and digest all that Le Donne has to say yet. But I can see already that this book is a "must" read. It is pioneering, taking seriously the study of social memory and applying it to what Le Donne thinks we can and can't say the Jesus traditions.

Refreshingly he establishes himself as an historian who is not trying to get back to "unrefracted memory" (that is, what actually happened), but to account for the earliest memory refractions in Jesus' story. So "authenticity" and "historicity" are redefined to point to earliest memories of Jesus and Le Donne maps out the criteria that he uses to pick up this information.

Le Donne works with the concept of memory refraction in the Jesus tradition and analyzes how the stories and saying of Jesus were distorted as they were handed down and consciously and unconsciously reframed. Anthony argues that the analysis of memory refraction allows historians to escape the problems between memory and typology and recover the earliest memories of Jesus.

Creating Jesus 6: Unfulfilled expectations

There is one more impulse toward Christology that appears to me to be behind all of this. When the formation of new religious movements is studied from a sociological and psychological perspective, it is the case in prophetic movements that the death of the leader puts the community in crisis. There is a liminal period in which the movement has to reassess and if it is going to go on it has to choose new leadership and/or new direction.

Now I am not one to psychologize Jesus. I have no idea who he actually thought he was. But I do know that his close followers thought he was some kind of Messiah - be it a prophet, a king, or a priest. The question in scholarship has always been whether this perception of Jesus originated before or after his death, and much of the literature since Wrede's Messianic Secret has leaned toward after his death.

I'm not convinced. The way I reason through this problem is this: the criminal death of Jesus was a serious obstacle to the proof of his Messiahship. The Christians spend a lot of time explaining in their writings how it is that the Messiah would suffer and would be killed in the worse way possible, a death cursed by the law. And by in large their explanations did not convince very many Jews. So to develop Jesus into a Messiah figure after his criminal death doesn't make as much sense to me as trying to reinterpret the traditional Messianic expectations to fit new historical circumstances. This is what we would expect, in fact, given what we know about social memory formations. They take previously held expectations that are not fulfilled and shift them in such a way to make them conform to the historical reality and experiences of the community.

So I think it is very reasonable to think that a third impulse to create the Christology that the first Christians did was that their original expectations of Jesus while he was alive were not met in his death. In other words, the expectation of the Jesus movement prior to his death appear to have been that of a more traditional Messiah - likely some type of prophet-king - and when he did not fulfill that role, but was executed instead, they literally had to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure their thinking about who Jesus was in order for their movement to continue.

They did this by returning to their scriptures. But more on this in the next post.

Creating Jesus 5: Why did the Christians "create" Jesus?

After laying down the ground rules, the first thing that I think we need to tackle is why the early Christians began to construct the picture(s) of Jesus they did? In other words, what inspired them to form their first christologies? What impulse(s) caused them to want to understand Jesus in "divine" categories beyond their memories of him as their Jewish teacher and leader?

These are not easy questions for sure, and it is necessary to keep in mind that a complex of impulses worked in conjunction with each other to form Christology. As Christianity mobilized and became geographically more and more diverse, the Christological formulations will also diversify. My study of the literature has revealed three major Christological paradigms that are connected with different geographical locales. So I will discuss diversity very shortly.

For now, let's just consider impulse. Why develop Christological schema at all?

One of the strongest impulses I have been able to recover from the literature is the need for the early Christians to attach some meaning or value to the troubling death of Jesus. Allusions and interpretations of his death are across the literature, deeply engrained from the very beginning of Christianity. Yes, even in Q, and even in Thomas. Both know Jesus died, and both offer meaning to that death. Now our different sources know or offer different meanings for his death, but know about it they do.

Why was it so troubling? Because he died as a Roman criminal. His criminal death was a problem that I cannot overemphasize. It was good for nothing in terms of theology. It was not good for trying to convert Romans, and it was not good for trying to convert Jews. It in fact was a liability that the Christians apologize for and explain over and over and over again in their literature.

But we can imagine from the explanations they provide for Jesus' death that some of their first questions following Jesus' death were likely along these lines:

Why was our leader killed as a criminal?
Why did God allow this to happen?
Where was Jesus now?
What would happen next?
What are we supposed to do now?

A second impulse that I think we have to take very seriously, again because it is all over the various layers of traditions (age and geography), were the followers' claims to visions of Jesus after his death. They claimed to have apocalypses of Jesus, to see him or talk to him after he died. Although we might see these as only their stories, it is clear from their writings that they understood these visions to be significant religiously. And because of this, their religiously interpreted experiences influenced sharply the development of Christology.

Creating Jesus 4: Religiously Interpreted Experiences

Our sources are filled with claims of visions of the divine, hearing the voice of God, where the person says that he or she encounters God immediately and directly (what we call mysticism). It is not necessary for the historian to make decisions about whether or not the people in the stories really and truly saw God or heard his voice and move to explain this as hallucinations or madness. These internal or private "events" are similar to miracles. They are interpreted and given a very particular religious value. Whatever was experienced by the person (which I have no way of verifying or not, since it is an internal event) is understood by the person or those who transmit his or her story as authentic religious experiences (or in some cases like Simon Magus, inauthentic - remember the religious community holds the hermeneutical keys). Whatever may have happened in actuality becomes a religiously interpreted experience in our source.

Like miracles (which also may represent human experiences that have become religiously interpreted as miraculous), mystical experiences are very interesting to the historian because they tell us how the seer understands a number of things about his or her world. His or her religiously interpreted experience (particularly if the person is a founder of a tradition) can impact significantly the orientation and growth of the religion.

So although I won't say as an historian that a religion started when "God so-and-so appeared to Mr. so-and-so" and commissioned him (thereby making a religious claim historical fact), I can and should say that "one of the significant impacts on the origin of religion such-and-such is Mr. so-and-so's vision in which he understood God so-and-so to have commissioned him" (thereby understanding the religious claim as a hermeneutic that impacted the history of the religion).

The same is true of miracles. Although I won't say that Jesus walked on water (thereby making a religious claim historical fact), I can and should say that it is evident from the nature miracle stories that some of the first Christians understood Jesus in highly exalted categories, capable of doing what is not normally done by humans, like walking on water or multiplying food or walking through closed doors. These are actions that readers then and now would have attributed to divine men and gods, not your average Joe (thereby understanding the miracle claim as a hermeneutic that tells us something about early Christian theology rather than history).

Creating Jesus 3: we must say "no" to the miraculous

There is always a negative reaction to any serious discussion of miracles that I have in the classroom (virtual or real). The gut reaction that people have is: who is to tell me that miracles don't happen or couldn't have happened. And behind this lurks the claim that God can do anything God wants to do. Let's unpack this even though it makes people so uncomfortable (and as a warning, there will probably be a lot of things I am going to say in this long series of posts that will make for discomfort).

The claim to the miraculous is not the same as the claim to the unexplainable. Something might happen to me that I can't explain (in fact things happen to me quite often that I don't have a ready explanation for), but it doesn't become a miracle until I make it a miracle, a manifestation of the supernatural, by my interpretation of the event.

This is a very important distinction to make. Humans experience events all the time that have no ready explanation for them. But it is only our move to interpret those events as "miracles" and then as "religious miracles" and then as "religious miracles of a particular religious kind" that make the event supernatural and grant it miraculous meaning.

This is why I emphasized in so many of my ground rules that our sources are humanly-authored and reflect human experience and very particular interpretations of those experiences. We are NOT to assume what is said by these authors is what actually happened, could have happened, might have happened, or should have happened. Our sources are records of how the Christians came to understand their experiences and frame them religiously and yes, miraculously, in very very particular and even peculiar ways.

Traditional Greek Icon: Jesus Walks on Water

Let's take the example of Jesus walking on water. What are reasoned (or critical) explanations for the story?

1. The Christians made it up whole cloth to make a theological statement about Jesus: that what he could do was so miraculous that he could walk on water which no normal human being could do. This proves his divinity. Only gods walk on water.

OR

2. There was an event that was remembered and interpreted as miraculous. This sort of miraculous embellishment happens all the time in storytelling. Need I remind us of a very recent event in which Eilan Gonzalez, the five-year old boy who survived a sea journey from Cuba on a homemade raft, became "The Miracle Child" over the course of a couple of days. His story became a story about dolphins protecting him from sharks so that he was in perfect condition when he got to Florida (they forgot to mention that his mom had wrapped him in her coat, tied him to an inner tube and gave him a bottle of water which allowed him to survive the elements). Then the Santerian priests began to embellish the "miracle" by saying that Eilan had been saved by "angels at sea." Although this is a religious miraculous interpretation, apparently it had developed from the five-year old's "eyewitness" testimony that he thought an angel kept him company at night. Finally his story was keyed to Catholic interpretation: Castro became Herod, Clinton became Pilot, and Elian became the Messiah. This is an example of a modern miracle during an age when we can document what actually happened and interview the eyewitnesses. I hope you can see from this the problems with eyewitness testimony even a few days after the event.

If the story of Jesus walking on water was completely fabricated or had its roots in some historical event, we can never know. We can conjecture all we want about a terrible storm in which Jesus and his disciples were caught on a boat and Peter almost drowned and Jesus was able to rescue him against all odds, but the fact remains that Jesus' walk on water is an interpretation that makes it a miracle. The miracle is framed in such a way that Jesus does something a normal human can't do. This works to prove to the audience that Jesus is a god.

So the ground rule remains the same: we must say "no" to the miraculous as history. The move to the miraculous is interpretative and theological. So while miracles might interest us as historians because they will tell us a lot about how Jesus was interpreted by the early Christians, they are not historical events - not in Christianity, not in Judaism, not in Islam, not in Buddhism, not in Hinduism, not in any religion.

Creating Jesus 2: Ground rules

Before we start on the adventure of determining how a Jewish rabbi became God, we need to establish the ground rules (our method and assumptions).

1. This is a critical venture, not an apologetic one. This is perhaps the most important ground rule we can put into place, and stick by at all costs. What the theologians back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries realized is that for the study of religion to be an academic enterprise comparable to the study of history or literature or the arts, it cannot be apologetic. If we want to understand how any religion comes into existence and grows, we cannot be invested in the promotion or rescue of that particular religion. We have to leave our own theological interests at the door.

2. We cannot grant special privileges to the religion we are studying. This means that we cannot allow for God to perform miracles when it is convenient for our explanations. We cannot suspend what we know to be scientifically true about our world and grant a religion special treatment or supernatural explanations. The critical study of religion is not about proving or defending one's own religious beliefs or the special claims of a particular religious community. It isn't about disproving them either. The critical study of religion does not amount to outsiders attacking what should not be attacked. It is about dealing fair and square with religion in an objective scientific manner using reason that relies on verifiable research, and not allowing for special knowledge of God, revelations, or privileges to be granted to the religion. For those people who want to use the post-modern avoidance strategy and argue that there is no objective truth but only pluralisms, well you need to go back and reread your philosophy and your science. Although the historical enterprise is recognizably subjective, this does not mean that it is unscientific or that it does not result in research that is as objective as possible.

3. We must suspend canonical thinking and boundaries. We must deal equitably with all of our ancient sources, having no preconceived judgments about them based on whether they are in or out of the bible, whether they support or deny traditional theological or christological formulations, and whether they were written by the winners or the losers in the battle over Christianity. There are no heretics or heretical literature, except in terms of how various historical groups may have perceived each other.

4. We begin with the assumption that Christianity did not fall out of the sky one day, but it originated on earth among human beings and developed in complex social, political, and religious environments.

5. The sources that have been left behind were written by human beings and reflect the complexity of the growth of Christianity.

6. Our sources are not neutral. They were not written to report objective factual history. They were written for a variety of reasons including apology and polemic and propaganda. They often reflect a communal interest, and thus do not necessarily tell us what happened but what the community wanted to happen, thought should happen, or wanted remembered about them.

7. Our sources are dependent on the human being, physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, socially. The stories they relate are the consequence of human experience and human memory which itself is a constructive process with many implications. Eyewitness testimony (even in those cases where we might have it in our sources) does not guarantee the "reliability" or "authenticity" of anything reported. Not only is intentional lying a possibility that we cannot simply set aside, but human memory (because it is a social constructive process) has been proven to distort. Social memory likewise.

With these ground rules in place, we will be ready to begin trying to figure out how Jesus became God.

Gerd Lüdemann writes about the History of Religions School

Professor Lüdemann just sent me a copy of his latest article which is the lead article in the Toronto Journal of Theology 24/2 (2008) pp. 171-181. He has posted this on his website. It is the first item in his "immediate interest" bibliography. [But it looks like the PDF link in the next paragraph will bring the article to you immediately. I didn't realize if I cut and paste a PDF link that it would actually work on my blog. This will open up new possibilities!]

Toronto Journal of Theology 24/2, 2008, pp. 171–181: The Relationship of Biblical Studies to the History of Religions School, with Reference to the Scientific Study of Religion PDF

The History of Religions School of the 19th/20th century was VERY important for the development of historical critical studies. Lüdemann hopes that the piece will raise awareness among students of this highly influential school of thought.

I am happy that he wrote this piece because I have been concerned for several years about the obsession with post-modern trends that, in my opinion, are ravishing the academy and its ability to function in the next generation of scholars in terms of philology, linguistics, and historical hermeneutics.

Tearing down the myth

If you have any wonders about how social memory works, and how it can even be a conscious project, I invite you to listen to a recent Fresh Air interview with author Will Bunch who has just written a book about how Ronald Reagan's legacy is being created by the Washington conservatives in order for the Republicans to have a hero. Wade heard it this week and told me, "This is what you have been talking about on your blog." When I listened to it, I smiled.

Regardless of one's politics, it is a fascinating interview because it shows the process of the construction of a hero-myth in the modern day, which can be documented. Bunch argues that certain aspects of Reagan's career have been marginalized and eliminated, others twisted, in order to construct a hero-myth of a popular republican president whose conservative policies worked. This myth is simply taken to be truth by the generations that weren't around at the time - the second generation and beyond - while those of us who lived through it remember, if nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal, an arms scandal so big that it almost brought the White House down and nearly impeached Reagan. As for those tax cuts, well, yes we got them the first year. And when it turned out to be too much of a cut, we got taxed again.

Will Bunch's book is called Tear Down this Myth.