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 literacy in the middle ages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literacy in the middle ages. Show all posts
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Thursday, April 25, 2013
This Business About Thanking The Monks
A somewhat confused and silly person accused me of not knowing what an analogy is, because I objected to the analogy: "The printing press was the Internet of the 16th century." He concluded a report on the dissemination via printing press of the Bible in the 16th century with the non-sequitor, "If you can read, thank a monk."
I have nothing at all against the individual monks who copied, for instance, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," an ancient Latin poem I like quite a lot. On the contrary, I suspect that some of those monks may have stuck their necks out a bit, or possibly even risked punishment, by disobeying orders in order to make manuscripts of the "Metamorphoses" instead of something more strictly Christian. Or the copyists may have been reluctant in certain cases, and it may have been their superiors, abbots or bishops, who were the enthusiastic Classicists and ordered the copies of Ovid's great poem to be made. Either way, as an enthusiastic (amateur) Classicist myself, I naturally appreciate the efforts of Western Medieval Classicists. All of whom were clergypeople.
But to thank a monk for the survival of classical literature -- let alone for my ability to read at all -- that is, to thank any monk for it -- every monk -- is beyond the beyond, as Pete Townshend would say. That would be, in effect, to thank Christianity for having preserved civilization. I already told Sir Kenneth Clark in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post what he could do with that notion. Apart from my objection to the extremely narrow and xenophobic definition of culture put forward by Clark, and also by some Catholic apologists who really seem to believe that the Middle Ages were a glorious time, when I am thankful to those individual Medieval Classicists who made copies of the works of Ovid and Sallust and Horace and the other pre-Christian writers I love, I do not feel that I am thanking them for doing something inherently Christian. On the contrary, I think I'm thanking them for having gone against the grain of Christianity, and having prevented Christianity from completely destroying all traces of Classical Greek and Rome, instead of only destroying most traces as it did.
I'm going to make an analogy here, to demonstrate that I do too know what an analogy is, and also to refute this absurd notion that if you can read, you should thank a monk. On the one hand, part of me thinks that the notion is much, much too absurd to need refuting; on the other hand, such notions have been advanced by people like Sir Kenneth Clark, who besides his cushy day job advising the British royal family on matters of art was allowed to make a public-television series whose format was comparable to the series of Carl Sagan and Dr Bleedin' Bronowski, as if his ideas were on a par with theirs, and by other people who often can not only, so it seems, dress themselves and walk about more or less upright on their hind limbs, but are also full professors and successful authors, in short: it seems to need refuting.
Imagine if between 1741 and 1993, in all of the lands of the British Commonwealth and in the US, only WASP's had been allowed to operate printing presses or websites or own bookstores or otherwise sell or distribute printed works. In this imaginary analogous past, other ethnicities were allowed to write, but if they were going to write for a public, all of the stages of publishing and dissemination of their works were going to be controlled by WASP's. Imagine if someone today in that alternate universe told you that if you can read you should thank a WASP, because of those 252 years when WASP's had a tight monopoly upon the printed word in certain countries. Thanking a monk for being able to read is no less ridiculous, no less insulting to the world outside of the party which for a certain time and in a certain area was allowed to tightly, rigidly control literacy. Literacy began long before there were Christian monks, it thrived all over the world in regions which until recently had never heard of Jesus. It's hard to know for sure about such things, but it seems clear that literacy rates within the Roman Empire declined sharply after the Christian takeover. Apologists blame the illiterate hordes from Northern Europe and Asia; I blame the Christians, who demonized all non-Christian writing and discouraged the masses from reading even the Bible. I think it's quite obvious where the blame belongs, if people will inform themselves about what happened, and if they are able to consider events without absolutely qrotesque levels of prejudice.
I have nothing at all against the individual monks who copied, for instance, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," an ancient Latin poem I like quite a lot. On the contrary, I suspect that some of those monks may have stuck their necks out a bit, or possibly even risked punishment, by disobeying orders in order to make manuscripts of the "Metamorphoses" instead of something more strictly Christian. Or the copyists may have been reluctant in certain cases, and it may have been their superiors, abbots or bishops, who were the enthusiastic Classicists and ordered the copies of Ovid's great poem to be made. Either way, as an enthusiastic (amateur) Classicist myself, I naturally appreciate the efforts of Western Medieval Classicists. All of whom were clergypeople.
But to thank a monk for the survival of classical literature -- let alone for my ability to read at all -- that is, to thank any monk for it -- every monk -- is beyond the beyond, as Pete Townshend would say. That would be, in effect, to thank Christianity for having preserved civilization. I already told Sir Kenneth Clark in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post what he could do with that notion. Apart from my objection to the extremely narrow and xenophobic definition of culture put forward by Clark, and also by some Catholic apologists who really seem to believe that the Middle Ages were a glorious time, when I am thankful to those individual Medieval Classicists who made copies of the works of Ovid and Sallust and Horace and the other pre-Christian writers I love, I do not feel that I am thanking them for doing something inherently Christian. On the contrary, I think I'm thanking them for having gone against the grain of Christianity, and having prevented Christianity from completely destroying all traces of Classical Greek and Rome, instead of only destroying most traces as it did.
I'm going to make an analogy here, to demonstrate that I do too know what an analogy is, and also to refute this absurd notion that if you can read, you should thank a monk. On the one hand, part of me thinks that the notion is much, much too absurd to need refuting; on the other hand, such notions have been advanced by people like Sir Kenneth Clark, who besides his cushy day job advising the British royal family on matters of art was allowed to make a public-television series whose format was comparable to the series of Carl Sagan and Dr Bleedin' Bronowski, as if his ideas were on a par with theirs, and by other people who often can not only, so it seems, dress themselves and walk about more or less upright on their hind limbs, but are also full professors and successful authors, in short: it seems to need refuting.
Imagine if between 1741 and 1993, in all of the lands of the British Commonwealth and in the US, only WASP's had been allowed to operate printing presses or websites or own bookstores or otherwise sell or distribute printed works. In this imaginary analogous past, other ethnicities were allowed to write, but if they were going to write for a public, all of the stages of publishing and dissemination of their works were going to be controlled by WASP's. Imagine if someone today in that alternate universe told you that if you can read you should thank a WASP, because of those 252 years when WASP's had a tight monopoly upon the printed word in certain countries. Thanking a monk for being able to read is no less ridiculous, no less insulting to the world outside of the party which for a certain time and in a certain area was allowed to tightly, rigidly control literacy. Literacy began long before there were Christian monks, it thrived all over the world in regions which until recently had never heard of Jesus. It's hard to know for sure about such things, but it seems clear that literacy rates within the Roman Empire declined sharply after the Christian takeover. Apologists blame the illiterate hordes from Northern Europe and Asia; I blame the Christians, who demonized all non-Christian writing and discouraged the masses from reading even the Bible. I think it's quite obvious where the blame belongs, if people will inform themselves about what happened, and if they are able to consider events without absolutely qrotesque levels of prejudice.
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