Clearly, in our culture the topic of Jesus is not handled the way that other topics are. In a culture which has been built around Jesus for 1600 years (ca AD 400 being the time in which public expressions of non-Christian worldview started to be severely curtailed), it should come as no surprise that the discussion of the historical Jesus does not resemble that of the historical Achilles or Arthur.
So, while I'm not telling you anything new when I say that Jesus has a unique place in our culture, I think it might be helpful to try to constantly keep this uniqueness in mind when we're talking about Jesus' historicity or lack of it. Habits of thought and speech which have accumulated over the course of thousands of years, and reinforced by deviations from acceptable expression being punished by torture and death, are not going to be shed so easily. Indeed, I doubt that it's yet possible even to be conscious of the extent of those habits.
And in addition to the effect that Christianity has had on our entire civilization, there is the added fact that for most of the past 1600 years, the Christian clergy held a a very tight monopoly on our educational institutions. For a large portion of the Middles Ages in Western Europe it was rather rare that someone who wasn't a member of the clergy could read. See how many Medieval works of history or science or philosophy you can find, let alone theology proper, which don't begin with a mention of Jesus. Investigate the relationships between the leaders of universities and the Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant witch hunts. This tight hold has relaxed somewhat, but we still don't find it odd -- if and when we pause to think about it at all, that is -- that very many of our leading universities in the US are run by churches, or how often private grammar and high schools run by religious institutions are still thought of as the best ones. In the Middle Ages Christian theology was called the Queen of the sciences, and theologians were the heads of the universities. Today theologians are only sometimes the presidents and chancellors of universities. But the line between Biblical scholars and theologians is still either very blurry or non-existent at most American universities.
What I'm saying is: OF COURSE there remains a great bias in favor of the assumption that Jesus existed and against any examination of that assumption. Of course the study of Jesus is dominated by a last-ditch defense of powers and authorities which used to come close to those of monarchs in many cases, and which exceeded those of monarchs in many others, besides those instances in which the local Prince and the local Bishop were one and the same. Of course many alliances between secular political power and Christian power and academic power remain, some plain to see and others decently shielded from the light of day. And of course tradition will be much more powerful in faculties of theology and Biblical studies than in some other faculties.
Where I came in was: the topic of Jesus is discussed differently than other topics. It receives many times more attention than the topic of whether Odysseus really existed. Or Paris and Helen. No one bats an eyes if you ask whether there really was a Helen. It's not a traumatic subject to anyone these days, with the possible exception of a few dozen especially-passionate Classical scholars. People react completely differently to the topic of Jesus. Of course they do. They very often lose their composure and, temporarily, a bit of their minds, whether in a pro- or anti-Christian way.
And I do think that there's a sort of traditionalist last stand going on in the very places which should be in charge of doing away with it: the places where academics specialize in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity and Jesus. I'd be lying if I told you that the reaction of the experts to doubts about Jesus' existence didn't seem different to me, not only from contemporary academia in general, but also the reactions of the very same Biblical scholars when the topic is anything else. Anything else at all: Abraham's existence, Moses' existence, David's existence, John the Baptist's existence, Jesus' actual words, his actual deeds -- every single imaginable topic except for the topic of Jesus' actual existence. Bring that up, and a lot of them go kind of nuts. And almost all the rest go completely nuts.
Showing posts with label bias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bias. Show all posts
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Monday, June 24, 2013
So You Think You've Got All The Answers?
That was a silly and deliberately provocative question. How many are "all the answers," anyway? I don't think very many people really think they have "all" of "the answers." Someone mentioned people ceasing to look once they felt they had all the answers. Let me try to tweak that proposition a bit and make it more precise: people stop looking once they have all the answers THEY WANT, ON A CERTAIN SUBJECT. Theologians and academics declined to look through Galileo's telescope because Aristotle and Church doctrine had already told them that either they wouldn't see what Galileo said they would see, or that Galileo was a trickster. Some Christian apologists today find it convenient to believe that critics of Christianity are ignorant of history, and so they claim that these critics have erroneously spread tales of Galileo being held for years by Church authorities in horrible dungeons, instead of a much more comfortable house arrest. I myself had never spread any such tales of Galileo confined in any dungeon, had never heard such a thing until very recently when I came across apologists refuting such tales, which they alleged were widespread. Of course, one need not be religious in order to be tempted to find convenient answers and then stop looking: I would be comfortable believing that the apologists are just as ignorant as the critics they denounce, and that those ignorant critics and the tales of Galileo confined in dungeons are figments of the apologists' imaginations. But I do not know for certain that no atheists have spread such tales. (Although I am still waiting for a reference to such an utterance by an atheist.)
If one is more comfortable with propagating the worst possible opinion of the Bible than with understanding it, then one tends to stop investigating things once one hears that the Biblical authors all thought of the Earth as flat, and that the Christian assertion that Jesus' virgin birth fulfilled Old Testament prophecy relies on the misunderstanding of an Old Testament text which refers not to a virgin, but simply a young woman giving birth. One may not want to hear that the passages in the Old and New Testaments which they say describe a flat Earth do not look like descriptions of a flat Earth to every single scholar who's read the bile in Hebrew and Greek; likewise, one may be quite uninterested in the argument that in many languages, one and the same term can mean either "young woman" or "virgin." In English, for example, there's the term "maiden."
I have to constantly remind myself that in such discussions, the overriding concern of very many disputants is actually not history or science or etymology at all, although those subjects may be the ostensible object of debate at a given moment. Rather, very often both the apologists and the atheists are concerned with theology, and not much else.
Well, I'm not concerned with theology, in the sense of wanting to debate theological subjects. As I've said before, I believe that debate was over long ago and the theologians lost. More than a few times some of my fellow atheists have mistaken me for a Bible-thumping Christian because I don't toe the entire party line: I'm not certain that the authors of the Bible believed the Earth was flat, I think that Isaiah probably was prophesying that a virgin would give birth to a savior, I'm absolutely certain that very few of the leading Christian scholars from late antiquity to the present believed that the Earth was flat. Such etymological and historical considerations do not shake my atheism in the slightest. I sometimes wonder whether some of those other atheists are quite shaky in their rejection of religious faith. Why else would they insist on bolstering their case for atheism with so many premature conclusions and flat-out mistakes? (Not to mention the very obvious consideration of how much such mistakes can weaken their case in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already agree with them.) They give the impression of being afraid of learning more about the history of religion, of considering information from outside of their (at best) half-educated echo chamber of approved sources.
Come to think of it, they resemble believers in some significant ways to me. Okay -- I hate to admit it, but some atheists really do resemble fundamentalists in the way in which they investigate things and process information. I hate to admit it because I really despise most of the people, mush-minded smirks with legs they are, and influential obstacles to learning and common sense, who use phrases like "fundamentalist atheists" most often, and of course because I object to the phrase being applied to me.
Of course, some Christian apologists are going to triumphantly point to my refusal to even debate the existence of God, and say that I am violating my own principal of not ceasing to investigate things once I've found an answer which I find convenient. They may be very impressed with themselves for making this point, but I will not be impressed until they've produced a convincing case that, say, Jesus' resurrection deserves more serious consideration and investigation and debate as a possible historical event than, say, the effect of disputes between Zeus and Hera on the course of the Trojan War, or the metallurgical composition of Thor's hammer. And of course pigs will be flying long before then. Not every silly proposition deserves serious debate.
If one is more comfortable with propagating the worst possible opinion of the Bible than with understanding it, then one tends to stop investigating things once one hears that the Biblical authors all thought of the Earth as flat, and that the Christian assertion that Jesus' virgin birth fulfilled Old Testament prophecy relies on the misunderstanding of an Old Testament text which refers not to a virgin, but simply a young woman giving birth. One may not want to hear that the passages in the Old and New Testaments which they say describe a flat Earth do not look like descriptions of a flat Earth to every single scholar who's read the bile in Hebrew and Greek; likewise, one may be quite uninterested in the argument that in many languages, one and the same term can mean either "young woman" or "virgin." In English, for example, there's the term "maiden."
I have to constantly remind myself that in such discussions, the overriding concern of very many disputants is actually not history or science or etymology at all, although those subjects may be the ostensible object of debate at a given moment. Rather, very often both the apologists and the atheists are concerned with theology, and not much else.
Well, I'm not concerned with theology, in the sense of wanting to debate theological subjects. As I've said before, I believe that debate was over long ago and the theologians lost. More than a few times some of my fellow atheists have mistaken me for a Bible-thumping Christian because I don't toe the entire party line: I'm not certain that the authors of the Bible believed the Earth was flat, I think that Isaiah probably was prophesying that a virgin would give birth to a savior, I'm absolutely certain that very few of the leading Christian scholars from late antiquity to the present believed that the Earth was flat. Such etymological and historical considerations do not shake my atheism in the slightest. I sometimes wonder whether some of those other atheists are quite shaky in their rejection of religious faith. Why else would they insist on bolstering their case for atheism with so many premature conclusions and flat-out mistakes? (Not to mention the very obvious consideration of how much such mistakes can weaken their case in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already agree with them.) They give the impression of being afraid of learning more about the history of religion, of considering information from outside of their (at best) half-educated echo chamber of approved sources.
Come to think of it, they resemble believers in some significant ways to me. Okay -- I hate to admit it, but some atheists really do resemble fundamentalists in the way in which they investigate things and process information. I hate to admit it because I really despise most of the people, mush-minded smirks with legs they are, and influential obstacles to learning and common sense, who use phrases like "fundamentalist atheists" most often, and of course because I object to the phrase being applied to me.
Of course, some Christian apologists are going to triumphantly point to my refusal to even debate the existence of God, and say that I am violating my own principal of not ceasing to investigate things once I've found an answer which I find convenient. They may be very impressed with themselves for making this point, but I will not be impressed until they've produced a convincing case that, say, Jesus' resurrection deserves more serious consideration and investigation and debate as a possible historical event than, say, the effect of disputes between Zeus and Hera on the course of the Trojan War, or the metallurgical composition of Thor's hammer. And of course pigs will be flying long before then. Not every silly proposition deserves serious debate.
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