TODAY'S GOSPEL READING AGAIN is one of the most well know stories including Jesus, from John's Gospel, The Woman Taken In Adultery. I looked up in my archive and found I've written on it more often than I remembered, largely because it's something Christian-haters love to claim was a fabrication because the earliest manuscript of John's Gospel doesn't contain it. I'm tempted to go into the problem of coming to such a conclusion based on even the earliest surviving manuscript didn't have it because we have no idea if that manuscript is typical of those which didn't survive - something there is no possibility of determining in the absence of those, presumably, destroyed or decayed and unavailable pieces of evidence necessary to make such a case on.
I'm also tempted to go into how academics are always tempted to turn what might be a very weak argument into boldly definitive statements due to the political economy of ideas in the modern university-publishing system and, especially in the area of religion, especially the monotheistic religions, the desire to make a big splash in the media distorts things. Remember, it wasn't that long ago the media and scribblers and the Xian-bashers online were obsessed over the claims that a tiny fragment of manuscript mentioned Jesus having a wife? Only the piece of papyrus was soon after proven to be a rather obvious forgery whose provenance would have caused a careful scholar more interested in the truth than getting into the news to have checked and concluded it was bull shit.
In the absence of other, contemporary or older manuscripts to check, for all we know the one that has survived is an outlier among many which contained the story. In which case, no doubt, all manner of scholarly speculation as to why that scribe left it out would become a minor avenue of scholarly hucksterism, even as speculations as to why it was allegedly inserted have been peddled. But not one that would get the media splash that the "Jesus's wife" forgery led to.
The other claim made about it, that it was inserted into the Gospel of John by later hands because it depicted Jesus as being literate, tells us more about the snobbery of educated People than it does about the authenticity of the story. I've said before that if Paul was illiterate, as modern scholars claim, something that is rather remarkable as Paul, himself, said he was not only a Jew but a Pharisee, one zealous for the law, that I'd be ever more impressed at him being able to compose Romans without resort to a number of drafts.
I've come to share the skepticism of the modern historical-critical method of Scripture study because I think it adds layers of imagining about what is there without admitting that that's what it inevitably does. Not a single one of us has any of the original material in our experience except by reading or hearing it and what we create out of that in our imaginations. When you imagine the lives, practices and circumstances of the scribes who copied or who first wrote down the Gospels, you are reconstructing them and their times and their work in additional acts of imagination. And in that, unless you are extremely careful to question yourself and your conclusions based on your own motives, you will inevitably do what Walter Brueggemann criticized some members of the Jesus Seminar of fading memory, that they constructed a Jesus who was a lot more like them than they would have admitted.
I choose to believe the story of The Woman Taken in Adultery because I think what Jesus taught in it was true and one of the Gospel's most valuable lessons in the moral necessity of real and effective humility in human judgement of other people - among the harder of the hard lessons that are not only throughout the Gospel of Jesus, one which is actually not very popular among People. It is the hard teachings, the ones which are so contrary to seeming human nature that lead me to believe the Gospels tell a lot of what happened, if not it would have been smoothed over and simplified and packaged for easier sale to the least common denominator, which I think is a better measurement of authenticity than the speculations of scholars based on manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts and scholarly traditions of that. If anything, I'd imagine that getting it straight from Jesus would have been far more radical than they dared to write down.
I have asked, and ask again, why anyone who believes themselves to be liberal would want to throw out this story, powerful and of a potential influence for the better that nothing in secular liberal scribbling has any potential of ever being. The story puts good will and charity and humility in judgement over even the letter of The Law. It is anti-patriarchal, the violence meted out to Women who transgress their role as men's property being as intrinsic to patriarchal oppression as the violence that is always an intrinsic part of holding people in chattel slavery. It's clear that the animosity to Christianity that is endemic to modernistic academic culture is what those people - not a few of them who make their living off of scribbling and babbling about the Scriptures - truly value more than they do what Jesus says and does and its effect on the lynch mob in the story.
I find that far more credible than the scene in To Kill A Mocking Bird in which Scout standing by the cartoon hero of Atticus dispels the lynch mob, something I'm sure they love to believe in all their heart, though I'd really like to know if any such thing ever happened in the history of American lynch law. The attempt to finally outlaw it on a federal level is still not a done deal, though President Biden was signed it into law AFTER MORE THAN A CENTURY OF IT BEING INTRODUCED FOR LEGISLATION MORE THAN 200 TIMES. It took a lot more than an imaginary little girl to stop it. But I'll bet the clever Jesus haters of the blogs would believe that bit of juvenile fiction as authentic truth with all their childish hearts.
----------------------------
And speaking of the malignant potential of the Supreme Court, whose whim the Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Act could overturn by a simple majority, the passage from Thomas H. Benton I posted on Friday contained this:
. And where it otherwise - was Congress to look to judicial interpretation of its powers - it would soon cease to have any fixed rules to go by: and the Constitution itself, like the Holy Scriptures, in the hands of councils and commentators, would soon cease to be what its framers made it.
By sheer chance, while I was on Youtube a video appeared on the side that tried to explain the difference between what we usually consider the Orthodox churches from the "Oriental Orthodox" churches, their long and separate histories being founded on whether or not they accepted the conclusions of Councils called by late Roman emperors in the 4th and 5th centuries, and a few later ones. Councils that split over questions of the most esoteric distinctions about things which the Scriptures are, I would suggest, not even vaguely concerned, things about the mystery of the physical nature of Jesus - which is obvious in the Gospels and his association or identity with God - about which, obviously, those who study the Scriptures and the enormous literature about such things can disagree with. I would bet that if you asked most of the adherents to the various Orthodox traditions anything about those questions and they would likely not even be aware of them being questions. Such things are of more importance to hierarchs protecting their turf and theologians protecting their imaginary turf.
I doubt anyone who Jesus said was saved in the very Scriptures being made that use of would have had any idea what the theologians and bishops and patriarchs were talking about. Clearly it's not necessary for salvation, if you claim to believe that Jesus spoke with authority NOT THAT EVEN THAT STORY KEPT YE OLDE CHRISTIAN MONARCHS AND THEIR GOVERNMENTS FROM DOING EXACTLY WHAT JESUS SAID YOU HAD TO BE WITHOUT SIN TO DO. Them and modern, secular democracies. Clearly, if the claim to believe Jesus spoke with the authority of God had so little influence, anything short of that kind of authority is even less likely to get the job done.
The video noted that there have been recent attempts of reconciliation among the different Orthodox Churches on the basis of good will and charity with the certain backlash of those with a vested interest in the divisions that outweighs any good will or charity they seem to also disdain. As someone brought up in Catholicism in the reaction against the best council ever conducted by the Catholic Church, Vatican II, that sounds all too familiar. Vatican II was too much justice, too much good will and charity for the Catholic right, much of it astro-turf funded by big money and other powers of this world. Same as what stole the Court.
No comments:
Post a Comment