Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Neill - The Emperor Jones and Where The Cross Is Made

Emperor Jones - Where The Cross Is Made 

 

The Theatre Guild On The Air
ABC - November 11, 1945

I assume this adaptation was made with O'Neill's permission maybe with his participation, he was at the height of his abilities as a writer when it was made, his best work came last.   These aren't the only O'Neill plays presented on the radio by The Theater Guild Of The Air. 

Where The Cross Is Made is one of those one-acts that I said would make a good focus for audio theater adaptations.  Apparently someone else had that idea a long time before I did.  I knew nothing about the play before finding this video.   It's clear that when it was first presented O'Neill was very involved with the production.

Here's an interesting account of the first production from the Province Town Playhouse. 

The adaptation of The Emperor Jones removed the original use of the "N" word, which was an issue with the various actors who played the title role from the first production.    I haven't studied the background of the play to see the extent to which O'Neill confirmed the claims that it was conceived as a criticism of imperialism in the tragic history of Haiti or if the flight through the rain forest was really inspired by O'Neill's experience in Central America.   I'd prefer to have posted the other play without this one with all it's problems.  Though the adaptation is more effective than the movie they made of it in the 1930s, the only production of it I ever saw. 

Considering the place that madness and delusions play in both plays it's rather natural that they'd have been produced together.  

Perhaps the most stunning feature of the recording is the message from the United States Steel Corporation president in which he boasts about the companies good labor relations.  That as well as them broadcasting O'Neill shows that it was a much different world.   I can't imagine a corporation doing anything like this now. 

Given All The Atheists Snarking About The Higgs Boson

with the announced death of Peter Higgs,  I think it's time to take a look at how the actual man was far less of a a bigoted atheist fundamentalist than the sci-rangers of the comment threads:

As public disagreements go, few can have boasted such heavy-hitting antagonists.

On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.

Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science.

Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the "fundamentalist" approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers.

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists," Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. "Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

He agreed with some of Dawkins' thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist's approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins' approach "embarrassing".

While I'd bet that Higgs didn't have the most nuanced view of unfortunate consequences from religious belief (you'd need an itemized list to judge the validity of that) he was hardly the jerk that those posing as his fan boys and gals can be. 

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Didn't Hear This Until

after I wrote some of my recent criticism of current academia.   I've got some disagreements with Sabine Hossenfelder about some things outside of her topic, but I have great respect for her.   What she says about the racket of academia could be said in many fields other than high-end physics, these days.

I'm Old Enough To Remember When People Wanted To Get Out Of 7th Grade

An article by Robert Ellesberg on the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton reminds me of the now long lost time when the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weren't dominated by JPII and Benedict XVI careerist right-wing hacks.

I first met Bishop Gumbleton in the late 1970s. I was the managing editor of the Catholic Worker and Bishop Gumbleton had invited me to Detroit to speak at a conference on peace. My assigned topic was "Youth and the Arms Race." For the first and last time in my life, I found myself the designated voice of my generation.

I don't remember what I said — I'm sure it was not very memorable. But what I remember was Bishop Gumbleton's humility and kindness, his deep commitment to peace, and his evidently genuine interest in listening to what this "youth" had to say.

I was not raised in the Catholic Church. My introduction to Catholicism at that point was largely by way of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. And, so, I assumed that Bishop Gumbleton was a pretty typical bishop! I had a lot to learn.

My confidence in Bishop Gumbleton and his fellow U.S. bishops was soon confirmed by their work on "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response," the historic 1983 pastoral letter on nuclear war, which for a short time encouraged speculation that the Catholic Church was on its way to being a "peace church." But, before long, that high-water mark of Catholic social teaching in this country was relegated to the past. The arms race continued unimpeded; the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists continued to tick closer to midnight.

Some of you knew my father, Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June 2023. He was greatly inspired by the peace pastoral, which he studied carefully — acknowledging its limitations, yet encouraged by hope that this would mark a start rather than an endpoint of the discussion.

Just a few years ago he asked me, "What are the odds that the bishops today could once again take up the question of nuclear war?" I said: zero. But that's a long story. 

The story of the long anti-pastoral papacies of those two most unfortunate Popes since the Second World War.  and what Richard McBrien used to regret as their generally mediocre appointments.  We still live with that

This passage gives me a lot to think about.

Yesterday, I was giving a talk about Dorothy Day and someone asked if I agreed with all her positions, all her choices. I said probably not. But I said the striking thing about Dorothy was not that she was necessarily correct in every choice or decision — she was not endowed with infallibility! But with every decision she examined her conscience, and she was guided by what she thought was right, what she believed was the way of Jesus, and there was no daylight between what she said, what she believed, and the way she lived. I believe the same is true of Bishop Gumbleton.

That is not to say he has always been right. If that were true, it would mean he was incapable of growth or conversion, and what is clear is that Bishop Gumbleton's whole life has been a long story of conversion, of always striving to go deeper in the call to be faithful.

The idea that you have to agree with everything someone says, that they have to always be right is one of the stupidest things proving that somewhere along the way adulthood in the modern world turned to jr. high.   Where it is still stuck.  

The Snobbery Of Credentialed Ignorance

HAVING BEEN TROLLED several times recently on the allegation that I've failed to write in "vernacular English" and -as you no doubt have guessed -  Simps having not taken up my advice to look up the actual meaning of the word, I figured I'd have a little fun with that feature of current vernacular English among the college-credentialed and consider why that particular phrase is so generally misused and why its misuse is a good example of what the problem with vernacular English can be if something like accuracy is your goal.

The dictionary use of the word as an adjective, according to Merriam Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the 1977 edition that I have on hand defines it

1 vernacular 1a: using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured or foreign language b: of, relating to, or being a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country c: of, relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language.
2: applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification 3: of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place or group; esp. of, relating to or being the common building style of a period or place.

My guess would be that easily nine out of ten times you'll hear the phrase "vernacular English" the adjective doesn't mean any of those meanings.  It's commonly used among the ignorant as a general signifier of virtue in the way that someone talks or writes when that's not the meaning of the word at all.  As I said to the Simp who acts as my tireless meter maid of language (he's got a rather sick fantasy life), there's no law that says you have to write in the vernacular and that there's no virtue in it unless you're trying to imitate vernacular speech.  I do, at times, do that but it's not the way I typically write seeing no virtue in it when vernacular English doesn't fit the topic or what I need to say about it.  

What's really funny about the current misuse of the term is that it copies the kind of language snobbery that I've got a feeling the phrase "vernacular English" would have expressed c. 1914 when used by the kind of People who knew what the adjective meant.  Only it wasn't considered a compliment to vernacular English users. 

What's so funny about using the vernacular as if it is some kind of sign of virtue in language use is that, as the way "vernacular English" is generally used, what it proves is that the user hasn't got more than a vague notion of what the adjective means.  It's a sign of what the 18th-19th century British radical William Cobbett said about giving out educational credentials to those who aren't really educated, it produces little more than snobbery, that is when it doesn't produce a snob who's too proud and vain to do anything that's actually productive.  There was a lot of that in the boom times for colleges in the early post-WWII period when they put too many people unprepared for college through it to get the money from they paying customers and didn't ask much of them.  I don't see much evidence that things are any better now when the price of a college education, or, in too many cases, credentialing is absurdly high.  It's come with an insane level of demanding college-credentials for way too many jobs that a. don't need that and b. the pay for which doesn't justify the expense and life-long debt of getting a rag with your name on it.  Among the most obvious of those is the idiotic "press" these days, filled with pretentious idiots and liars and dolts.  The kind of dolts who will hear someone say "that's hardly 'vernacular English'" and only take that it's a put down so "vernacular English" must be better than whatever's being put down.  There's nothing wrong with vernacular English at times but there's nothing wrong with other modes of speaking and writing English at other times.  It depends on what you're saying and what's a more effective way to say it.   And how you friggin' want to say it. 

Since those in control of the U. S. media are just such over-credentialed dolts who don't do much reading apart from fiction and gossipy scandal - and most of them only really watched the movie or show - an idiot can get away with that level of misuse of the language for an entire career without anyone much noticing.  Eventually that distorted use might become standard and find its way into a good dictionary but that's not what the word means now.  Alas, then we'll need a word to mean what it does now if you want that meaning to be clear.

I'm Sure Trump Can Get

 as fair a trial in NYC as the Central Park Five did, only he was in favor of railroading and killing them in the city he incited to find them guilty.   Have any ads calling for that appeared in the New York Times?  You know, like the one he paid for to be printed in that stinking rag.

An Evil Choice Destroys Freedom

AMERICANS TALK A HELL OF A LOT about freedom and liberty but so little thought goes into what they mean by those words that they have come to mean absolutely nothing most of the time they are mouthed or typed. When an American fascist, a white supremacist or their ilk use those words it's clear that the entire notion of them has reached the absolute nadir of decadent corruption.  The lousy cause of preserving slavery in the United States was dishonestly, immorally and irrationally presented in terms of freedom for the white enslavers even as it insisted on the totalitarian oppression and violent control of Black People.  That was the motive for the corrupt Taney Court in lying that the Constitution as written excluded Black People from those held to have rights and freedom under it in order for that corrupt slave owner and his fellow slave-holding "justices" to maintain the source of their personal wealth.  In doing that they joined a long line of such "justices" including, as I will never stop pointing out, the most august of them all, the corrupt John Marshall.  Courts and police and the culture right up to now considers that men should be free to practice a full range of harms against Women, LGBTQ+ People, the Corrupt (Roberts) Court is all-in on destroying any slight steps, an tendencies that the Congress or others have made to restrict that obscene kind of "freedom" which constitutes the most traditional holders of that kind of freedom, straight,white, males, especially those with wealth.  The most depraved members of that court, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, clearly have that as their goal.  

On the other hand, the scientistic-academic babble about it, often as not, declares that the idea free-will is nonsense because that has become so absolutely wedded to the monism that everything that is real is a result of material causation, the movements of objects and molecules, atoms and subatomic particles under the operation of randomness.  That is even though there has been absolutely no demonstration that their ideological framing of reality is, actually, real.  I have posed the problem for that assertion a number of times that if there is such a thing as free will or, so ironic in the context of the argument, free thought that it couldn't be under that ideologically asserted restriction because it would be something apart from their scheme of material causation and have qualities that physical objects are not known to have.  

So, it's clear that the old notions of freedom and liberty are in deep trouble.  I think one of the greatest defects in how Americans, and so many others around the world, think about freedom is that they consider it both an absurdly abstract entity, having no relation to the fullness of real life, or something so particular that is applies to any desired and ephemeral aspect of what the user wants at any given time.  That is the spoiled brat of a kid concept of freedom and liberty, such as reaches decaying senectitude in Donald Trump and as can be seen in comment treads, tweets, etc. online.  

I think it's essential to rethink, really think for the first time in most cases, exactly what freedom, what liberty means and why, when it is asserted to exist only as the right of a few or a large minority against Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+ the industrialist and investor class against workers, etc. AS THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION DID AS THE FRAMERS WROTE IT AND AS IT HAS EXISTED FOR MOST OF ITS EXISTENCE, a situation that certainly isn't unique in so-called democracies and certainly of all of the overt gangster governments in the world today, such "freedom" and the liberties that actually exist under those conditions are held to be a good instead of the very source of evils.

I hold that equality, not "liberty" or even "freedom" is the actual bedrock value of any real democracy as that word denotes something to be sought and desired, the only really legitimate government being such an egalitarian democracy.  All other kinds of government, from "liberal democracy" to the worst regimes in history, under Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim clique are degrees of government by gangster law.  I hold that the liberal democracy of the United States is one such government that, to the extent it is not equal and equally free it is not legitimate.  Legitimate government exists as a goal to be constantly sought and constantly struggled for and, against the irrational stupidity of the First Amendment, protected from all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies, forces, parties and movements.  It is the hugest of stupidities in the U.S. Constitution that it is not laid out as the fundamental principal right of Americans to live securely under an egalitarian democracy and that the government, FOREMOST OF ALL THE COURTS, HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO PROTECT EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY and that to the extent they do not do that they have forfeited any claim to legitimacy that they may wish to assert.  The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court, has been the least interested in protecting equality of all the branches, as bad as many presidents and Congresses have been, the Courts are the worst.  Which isn't a surprise because as constituted by the acts organizing the courts, they have been made the most remote from the reality of the actual lives of Americans, staffed by a profession which is best paid when it is working to protect the privileges and corruptly asserted "rights" of the wealthiest and most powerful.  

I have decided to type out and post the entire short essay by Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation on this topic, not because I am entirely comfortable with everything he says in it - the section that starts "You fool!" is a little too pre-Vatican II for my taste, though it sounds better if you read that "You dope!" and I'm sure there will be lots in it that many will object to on the basis of religion.  But I think it forces the question of exactly what's good about People having the "liberty" to do evil and damaging and harmful things to other People and animals and the land and to the entire biosphere?   It's certainly possible to have legitimate freedoms or "liberty," if you insist that is consistent with the equal good of all on the principle that "freedom and liberty" that harms others is not legitimate freedom.  Though the Framers of the U.S. Constitution knew very well they had no such intentions because they intended to have slaves, to murder Native Americans and steal their land, to hoard political power to their class against the interests of those who were unpropertied and they certainly had no intention of allowing Women to have equality, and so they wrote the Constitution against any possibility of anything like egalitarian democracy.  The fake reverence for that document, including the extremely dangerous and flawed First and Second Amendments is a major impediment to changing it and achieving even the possibility of egalitarian democracy on the basis of legitimate and equal representation in the government.  The matter of cleaning up the courts would require a total reworking of the court organization acts but it might, actually, be easier to do a lot towards cleaning up that cesspool.  Consider this a first strike in that effort.

Let me know if there are any typos, I had to rush this one. I have bolded a few lines that I think are especially worth considering. [Update: what I did to bold the bolded sections worked on one browser but not on another.  I've underlined those.]


What Is Liberty?

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about that is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil; only as an apparent good.  But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice.  When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief.  Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free.  

God, in Whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free.  In fact, He is Freedom.

Only the will of God is indefectible.  Every other freedom can fail and defeat itself by a false choice.  All true freedom comes as a supernatural gift of God, as a participation in His own essential Freedom by the Love He infuses into our souls, uniting them with Him first in perfect consent, then in a transforming union of wills. 

I will break in here and point out that every scheme of freedom that human beings come up with will be defective so that any law "granting liberty" is bound to be flawed, especially under the scheming and manipulation of lawyers and judges and, worst of all "justices."   Encoding those humanly imperfect schemes in permanent form are only safe in so far as those can effectively be changed under the influence of honest appraisal and good will.  Good will is absent in American politics to a serious extent.

The other freedom, the so-called freedom of our nature, which is indifference with respect to good and evil choices, is nothing more than a capacity, a potentiality waiting to be fulfilled by the grace, the will and the supernatural love of God.

All good, all perfection, all happiness, are found in the infinitely good and perfect and blessed will of God.  Since true freedom means the ability to desire and choose, always, without error, without defection, what is really good, then freedom can only be found in perfect union and submission to the will of God.  If our will travels with His, it will reach the same end, rest in the same peace, and be filled with the same infinite happiness that is HIs.

Therefore, the simplest definition of freedom is this; it means the ability to do the will of God.  To be able to resist His will is not to be free.  In sin there is no true freedom.

Surrounding sin there is certain goods - in sins of the flesh there are, for instance, pleasure of the flesh.  But it is not these pleasures that are evil.  They are good, and they are willed by God and even when someone takes those pleasures in a way that is not God's will, God still wills that those pleasures should be felt.  But though the pleasures in themselves are good, the direction of the will to them under circumstances that are against the will of God, become evil.  And because that direction of the will is evil it cannot reach the mark which the will intends.  Therefore it defeats itself.  And therefore there is ultimately no happiness in any act of sin.

You fool!  You have really done what you did not want to do!  God has left you with the pleasure, because the pleasure also was His will;  but you have neglected the happiness He wanted to give you along with the pleasure, or perhaps the greater happiness He intended for you without the pleasure and beyond it and above it!  You have eaten the rind and thrown away the orange.  You have kept the paper that was nothing but a wrapping and you have thrown away the case and the ring and the diamond.

And now that the pleasure - which has to end - is finished, you have nothing of the happiness that would have enriched you forever.  If you had taken (or forsaken) the pleasure in the way God willed for the sake of your happiness, you would still possess the pleasure in your happiness, and it would be with you always and follow you everywhere in God's will.  For it is impossible for the sane man to seriously regret an act that was consciously performed in union with God's will.

Liberty, then, is a talent given us by God, an instrument to work with.  It is the tool with which we build our own lives, our own happiness.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty must be defended with life itself for it's the most precious element in our being.  It is our liberty that makes us Persons, constituted in the divine image.  The supernatural society of the Church has, as one of its chief functions, the preservation of our spiritual liberty as sons of God.  How few people realize this!  

As I said, it's pre-Vatican II (1961) the later Merton probably wouldn't have said some of the same things the same way but it's the ideas that are important.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Eugene O'Neill - Abortion

 

 

The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House, presents a videotaped script-in-hand performance of "Abortion" by Eugene O'Neill. This production was recorded in the Old Barn at Tao House (Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site), in Danville, CA in August 2020.

I'd known that Eugene O'Neill had written a number of one act plays but the only one I ever saw a production of or read was the wonderful play Hughie.  I happened on this semi-staged production of the 1914 play "Abortion" which is about the son of a wealthy family having borrowed money from his father to pay for an abortion when his townie girlfriend became pregnant.  I'd expect that O'Neill realized that one of the unmentioned issues of the play was that the consequences are presented from the point of view of three men, the working class girl he impregnated and who had an abortion isn't much considered at all.  

The text of the play sounds kind of odd because few contractions are used,  it sounds like the kind of English that we were taught to use in grammar school sixty or more years ago.  If they took the liberty of updating that kind of thing it would sound a lot easier to modern ears without doing any damage to the intentions of O'Neill.  I was surprised at how good it was, considering it is part of an apparent project to do productions of the "forgotten" plays of O'Neill.  The more I become familiar with his work the more impressed I am with how good he was.   I'd like to see a really updated play on the theme that presented it from the point of view of Women.  

I think I'll try to post more of these, they'd be a good project for an audio theater group to do, they're pretty much all in public domain, now.  Apart from Hughie which is said to have been O'Neill's attempt to present a more upbeat play after the hauntingly gloomy The Iceman Cometh.  

Thoughts On First Monday After Easter Week

WHEN I BECAME aware of Luke Timothy Johnson's famous critique of the historical-critical method of studying Scriptures I had an unfavorable idea of him.  That may have been because his work was used by conservatives to knock the work of someone I was still very impressed with, John Dominic Crossan.  Then I read the book, The Real Jesus and I saw that he was a far deeper, far more honest scholar and thinker than Crossan or his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar.  As I mentioned, I had already become somewhat more disinclined to trust their work than I had been on first looking into it because I saw some discrepancies on my own, such as Crossan's entirely unevidenced, radically after-the-fact claims about what happened to the body of Jesus after his death.  He violated his own claimed standards of judging the reliability of the Scriptures, which had been written far closer to both the witness of the life and ministry of Jesus and his death or within the lifetime of those who had, and by those who had a cultural affinity more like that of Jesus than any late 20th century academic could possibly reproduce in their imagined reconstructions of that.

It's not that I think all of what the historical-critical oriented scholars have produced is bad or worthless, much of the background evidence that someone like Crossan constructs an imagination of life in the milieu in which Jesus lived is informative and, in some ways, convincing.  But a lot of even that seems to forget that most of the evidence they produce came from a very atypical population of the human beings living then, people who could read and, especially, write.  To say they tended to be outside of the class that Jesus was born into and grew up in would be to say very little about it.  Anything much that we find out from the class of the writing class of that time would be an outsider view of things.  For someone like Crossan to reconstruct a "typical" Jewish peasant from Galilee from the material he has available is likely to produce someone very unlike any particular such Jewish peasant, not to mention one whose life and person generated the greatest world-wide religious tradition that has lasted for about two thousand years at this point.  Whatever else can be said about Jesus, he was not "typical" of any type you could try to shoehorn him into.   You could point out that the canonical Gospels are written by those who aren't likely members of the class Jesus and his earliest followers were in, which is fair to point out.  But they weren't writing a history or a modern biography,  they were writing about a single person.  They weren't trying to make him seem plausible due to him being "typical" of the type, they were talking about someone experienced as and taken as extraordinary.   If they weren't writing a modern biography or a complete history, they were certainly not engaged in the modern pseudo-sciences of anthropology or sociology. 

But this is about the matter of cognition and, as I said, what I think is the inescapable conclusion that any being which is capable of cognition must be considered to be conscious.  No one has yet taken up my request to explain how the two can be separated.  It happens that when an objection was made to what I said, I remembered something that Luke Johnson said in regard to that and how much it angers opponents when you bring that topic into what they'd like to keep it out of.  Even when it is an inescapable, even vitally important issue under discussion.

Epistemology - the critical analysis of cognition - can become in irritant when it demands attention.  This is because human knowing seems to work best when the subject is something other than itself.  Aesthetic knowledge is better at discerning the beautiful in great art than it is in defining the nature of beauty and how the mind grasps it.  In the same way, historical knowing works best when it is puttering around with evidence  from the past, but becomes progressively fuzzier when asked about the nature of historical knowledge.  Fair enough.  Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism.  But a little bit of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties in any branch of knowledge.  

Which is wiser than just about anything I've ever read or heard related to that topic than anything I ever heard from a "cognitive scientist" or a "neuroscientist," or from just about anyone in the sciences apart from James Shapiro or Arthur Stanley Eddington or a few others I could name.  In many instances, perhaps, discussing matters of cognition or consciousness might be put off even for a very long time, but if you're going to pretend to be doing science, as physicists discovered in the early 20th century, you're going to have to address it eventually, if your goal is that level of confidence in what you're discussing.   The seeming efficiency of ignoring it is, ultimately, illusory.   I will add, just to annoy those who will be annoyed by it, that the science that has most carefully and habitually accounted for such matters is the scientific study of parapsychology, the one rigorous scientific endeavor which has been the subject of a full and concerted effort by those in and outside of science to end any scientific study of it, denying the extremely close following of the rules of science, the rigorous efforts to address their critics methodological criticisms - still coming up with results that are more robustly positive than that found in much other conventional science - and following the most careful and rigorous of quantitative measurements of their findings.

And that's far from the only nugget of perceptive brilliance you get from a close and careful reading of LTJ's work.  He goes on to say after that paragraph:

The best practitioners of critical historiography, therefore, are careful to make clear the character of their craft as a limited mode of knowledge, dependent on the frailties of the records of memory and the proclivities of self interest.  No serious historian, for example, would claim to render the "real" event or person, whether the event was Pearl Harbor or the person of Douglas MacArthur.  The "real" event in all its complex particularity happened only once and cannot be recovered by any means.  The serious historian recognizes that a "History of the Attack on Pearl Harbor" is a reconstruction by the historian out of the available pieces.

The "historical Jesus" is a figment of the imaginations of those who a. don't get that the available record which is most likely to give them something to go on is not something you can make an honest history out of.  Never mind a biography.  That record is the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, James (who may well have been the brother of the man, himself) the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, the other Epistles, and some few references in the ambient Jewish and pagan literature.  It  doesn't present a biography or something like a magazine article about someone living now or in the past who left enormous amounts of primary evidence.  Even in that case, as Johnson points out, there is nothing like a reproduction of the life of the person or events contained in the best history of the most recent subjects.  In the case of Jesus, or, indeed, anyone for whom that is the only record, no such historical-critical treatment can honestly be constructed, so the motives and assumptions and intentions of those doing it become ever more important in making our own critical judgements of their claims.  

And the results they come up with are a Jesus too bland and too safe to account for his execution or why anyone should have remembered him at all.  I think I remember coming to that conclusion reading what Crossan claimed his ministry was,  "open commensality" and an "unbrokered kingdom" that doesn't seem to have been much of a "kingdom" at all, considering Crossan doesn't seem to think God had much to do with any of it.  I think Walter Brueggemann was right that those who practice the "historical-critical" method end up with a Jesus which is much like themselves and much to their liking as late 20th century members of secular "enlightenment" addled academia instead of anything that is helpful to anyone.  In the end it was seeing nothing that would support any practical means of feeding the hungry, clothing and housing those without, visiting the sick and the prisoner in any of it.  It was a Jesus that was only a little better than the one that the worst of late 18th and early 19th century "enlightenment" Christianity came up with.  It wasn't even up to the later 19th century standards of the evangelical Social Gospel movement or Christian Socialists did.  There would be no reason for anyone to have bothered to keep up the memory of the Jesus of historical-critical invention or, for that matter, much. though not all, of what arose in the wake of the  age of scientism, the enlightenment.  

The temptation is to keep quoting from Johnson's book because it's all so good and I'd like you all to read it and consider it and to compare it to not only the claims of the members of the Jesus Seminar, from the top quality such as Crossan's work to the quickly arrived at bottom, such as that of Karen King (the one who fell for the forged "Jesus's wife" "scripture" a few years back) or the "fellow" the media huckster Paul Verhoeven,  But remembering the claims that get passed of as vastly oversold "historiography" or the incredibly inadequate thinking about cognition and consciousness that gets regularly passed off as science, these days.  His observation stands against "easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties of any branch of knowledge".  

I have said that I am impressed with the intellectual rigor of modern theology and the kind of scholarship that someone like Luke Timothy Johnson practices than I am in the regular quality of academic and even much of scientific scribblage, these days.  Even someone who wrote on a popular level, such as the late Richard McBrien did, is far more impressive in that way than most of the secular academicians and far more than those who prevent a conventional secular-popular level of it.  I am not nearly as impressed with those who trade in the historical-critical racket.  I wonder if Luke Timothy Johnson was ever on the Terri Gross show which is where I first heard of John Dominic Crossan, I somehow expect not.

I should come out and say, right off, that I'm ever more skeptical about the hypothetical "Q", or that if there was a "Q" it was probably not an independent Gospel but a common source of testimony, probably oral.   I certainly don't believe in the entirely unevidenced "Q" community of the early Jesus movement that some other members of that Seminar have made their bread and butter in inventing as a foil for the "establishment" responsible for the canonical Gospels.  There's entirely less to base such creations on than there is the Jesus of faith or even the "Jesus" of the historical-critical method.  If there's something I really loathe, it's the invention of such stuff as "communities" on the basis of no actual evidence of their existence, at all.  But such stuff can get you a PhD these days.  I am also entirely unconvinced that the "Secret Gospel of Mark" ever existed, I think it's likely either an ancient rumor or an early modern hoax based on what is purportedly an 18th century copy of an earlier manuscript which doesn't seem to have survived or ever been noticed by anyone else.  In modern translation it fits into about two paragraphs.  But not a little of the "historical Jesus" stuff cites it as if it's more credible than the Gospel of John for which a closely verbatim fragment survives as the so-far earliest manuscript of a Gospel.  

I'd written down a quote from an Anglican Priest of the 1940s who said that it was a wonder and mystery why anyone would have gone to the bother of crucifying the Jesus Christ of liberal Protestantism, though I've lost the slip of paper I made the note in.   It's a good question.  It's an even better question of why anyone would have remembered the Jesus of modern reconstruction through the historical-critical process.   I certainly can't believe in the Gospel of such a Jesus.