recent reading: from the maccabees to the mishnah

Okay, let's see. Well, I've actually read two books on ancient Judaism lately, and one of them is chronologically earlier than the other, but I read them in reverse chronological order. Not by design -- it was reading the chronologically later one that inspired me to go looking for the other one, which I'd read in college and didn't realize had since been released in a revised edition.

Let's start by writing about the chronologically later one and see how this goes.

As I have taken pains to explain but am going to keep pointing out when it's relevant, if you're a westerner and you didn't grow up in a religious but non-Christian household, your conception of religion is a Christian one. This is one of the fundamental problems with the New Atheism -- it grapples with religion in Christian definitions, and virtually denies the existence of religions that don't fit those definitions. Just the fact that modern Americans describe their approach to religion in terms of atheism, agnosticism, or theism is itself a Christian framework, since there are plenty of religions that welcome non-theists and doubters with open arms and even more that consider it strange to lead with this question -- it's Christianity that treats religion as defined by its beliefs, not Buddhism, not Hinduism, and emphatically not Judaism. Christianity is what's sometimes called a creedal religion -- the creed functions as a purity test, a sorting hat: if you believe this, this, and that, then you're one of us, otherwise you're out of the circle. Again: this is not the default model of religion. (It's worth pointing out that Islam is also a creedal religion; the reasons for that are an interesting thing I intend to explore in my reading and, consequently, my posts here.)

Judaism and its antecedents -- and the ancient polytheistic religions Christianity grew up around -- have always treated religion not as a set of beliefs but as a set of practices and observances. This was largely true of the first two centuries of Christianity as well -- the first five, six, maybe seven or eight centuries in some parts of the world -- where Christian communities defined themselves by whether or not they continued Jewish observances, by their baptism rituals, by their community meals, and so on. The beginnings of "Christianity defined by belief" are in the church councils and the search for universal orthodoxy, while growing out of the fact that the disputes between early Christian communities were both practice- and theology-based -- but that's a whole nother series of posts.

The point is that even if you're not a Christian, as long as you're not specifically anything else, learning about any non-Christian religion involves a lot of unlearning along the way. Otherwise a lot of stuff bounces off you like water off a duck, and you hear a lot of facts wrong. I've seen people in graduate programs who had fundamentally misunderstood a lot of what they had "learned," because it all got filtered through the way they insisted on understanding things, and deep down, a lot of people, Christians and unbelievers alike, really want to treat non-Christian religions as "somebody else's Christianity."

Like I said in my intellectual autobiography post, it was ancient history and the Ancient Near East that first got me into religious studies. So it was great picking up Shaye Cohen's From The Maccabees to the Mishnah, which covers Jewish history from the Maccabees' revolt against the Romans through the development of rabbinic Judaism, a period that includes the life of Jesus, the early development of Christianity, and the necessity of the Christians and Jews deciding what to make of one another. It's great because although this is my area, this is the first book I've read that has exactly this scope: I've read close to a dozen books on Second Temple Judaism, for instance, which is a much smaller slice of time than this; at least as many books on the life of Jesus; and 25-30 books that deal with some or all of the first three centuries of Christians. But this fits pieces and contexts together more easily, and even material that was review for me sometimes clicked in a different way as a result.

It's just straight-up a well-written book, too. Cohen is very good.

Histories and religions

People tend to think of a religion, any religion, as arriving in the world more or less fully formed. Sure, we know that there are many Protestant denominations now and that the Catholic and Orthodox churches experienced their split, but there's a tendency to assume that apart from those things, for instance, Christianity was cobbled together pretty quickly.

The next level of realization is that of the more gradual process of construction -- in Christianity's case, this means realizing that a process of enforcing orthodoxy took place over centuries, and that theological thought and Christian self-definition largely served that process.

When you start to really get into it, though, you realize that in many cases you can, and maybe need to, speak of a succession of religions. Jesus's religion was not Christianity. There is an extent to which even traditional conservative Christians acknowledge this, but saying "Jesus was a Jew" is not as enlightening an explanation as it could be. More to the point, some of the important aspects of what I mean by saying "Jesus's religion was not Christianity" are lost in saying "Jesus was a Jew": specifically that in Jesus's religion as he taught it, as it was practiced by his followers in his lifetime, there were no priests, no sacraments, no churches, and arguably no clear creed -- things that became central to Christian self-definition in the generations after his death. Further, saying he was a Jew tells most people very little -- certainly he was not raised in the Jewish religion as it exists today, and neither was his religion a mainstream Jewish sect of its time.

Most or all of the religious movements of Jesus's disciples were not the religion of Jesus; and the Catholic Church, in turn, was not the religion of the disciples. These things are incontrovertibly true, they just don't often come into focus -- again, in part because of declining religious literacy, and in part because of the Church's historical desire to downplay the variety of Christian faiths active in the early centuries. Histories of early Christianity are as often written as histories of the inevitability of Catholicism -- with the non Catholic mists leapt over quickly -- as histories of the European settlement of North America are written as histories of the inevitability of the United States.

Judaism is a little more honest or explicit about being, in essence, a series of religions (or about there being a series of Jewish religions, of which Judaism is the most recent) practiced by the Jewish people. To be fair, in Judaism's case you have two periods in which worship is officially centered around the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in the year 70. It would be sort of difficult to pretend that everything that came after remained fundamentally the same religion.

But there is more to it than that. While the New Testament had to be assembled, and while there were Christian communities before and during the writing of the various books of the New Testament, you're still looking at no more than probably a hundred and fifty years between Jesus's death and the writing of the latest book in the New Testament. The construction of the Bible took much longer than that -- it was centuries before the final form was settled, in fact -- but the point is that, as much as I find that period of early Christianity historically interesting, compared to the overall history of Christianity it is a pretty small slice.

In the Jewish religion, on the other hand, the books of Jewish scripture were, first of all, written across a much longer period of time; second, they were in circulation (alongside other books, not all of which we still possess copies of) for a much longer period of time before any kind of process took place that "canonized" them as the official "Jewish scriptures"; third, the Jewish religion was already a mature and robust religion when the latest books of what became Jewish scripture (the Tanak, or the Old Testament) were written.

Even apart from that, you have some significant amount of Jewish history -- either the official Biblical account of Jewish history beginning with Abraham and the patriarchs, or some alternate construction -- in which a Jewish religion was practiced but no scripture had yet been written, and this too is explicitly acknowledged in Jewish scripture. In contrast, at least some Christian communities became scribal religions almost immediately after Jesus's death, in part because of the importance of scribes in Jewish culture at the time.

Cohen, a Jewish writer, refers to both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism as successors of the earlier Jewish religion, and this is probably the best way to understand it: as different as Christianity is from its Jewish origins, rabbinic Judaism is almost as radical at first glance.

Rabbinic Judaism, briefly, is the current dominant and mainstream form of Judaism, and has been since a few centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism, those are all branches of Rabbinic Judaism, the basic premise of which is that the Torah must be understood with reference to the "Oral Torah" -- collections of laws and commentaries compiled between the end of the Second Temple period and the beginnings of the rabbinic period. There is strong circumstantial evidence that rabbinic Judaism may descend from the Pharisees of Jesus's time.

So, Jewish history. Nevermind Abraham and the patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus, etc. for now. Skip ahead to the exile period in the 6th century BCE, one of the most formative events in early Jewish history, when Babylon conquered Judah, laying waste to Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon. Citizens of Judah, mainly Jerusalem and especially the royal court and wealthy families, were deported to Babylon in waves. When Persia conquered Babylon about fifty years later and took control of Judah, Jews were permitted to return home, and waves of repatriation began, and construction of the Second Temple began.

That fifty years and the Persian period that followed (until Alexander the Great conquered Persia a couple hundred years later) was a huge disruption and a hugely productive time in Jewish thought. The prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, Haggai, and Zechariah all date from the exile period. Ezra and Nehemiah come from the Persian period -- religious reformers whose efforts to essentially remove foreign influences from their peoples' culture after generations spent in Babylon were critical in defining what exactly Jewish religion and culture were. Ezra was critical in establishing the importance of the Torah, for instance, which we take for granted as synonymous with Jewishness now, but calling Jews a "people of the Book" during the first Temple period would have confused anyone overhearing you.

The exile raised a lot of questions that had to be addressed in Jewish religious culture and identity: if the Jews were God's chosen people and Jerusalem their promised land, how had it come to pass that Jerusalem had been laid to waste, the Temple built by Solomon destroyed, and many of the Jews themselves forced to live in a foreign land under foreign rule? One of the common solutions -- that the people of Judah had strayed from the path and had to be punished -- seems obvious in retrospect only because of the sheer weight of Biblical text and Judeo-Christian culture

Alexander's 4th century BCE conquest of Persia and its territories began the Hellenistic period, which in cultural terms persisted for centuries -- more than a millennium, really, until the area came until Muslim Arab control in the 7th century CE. Politically, though, the Hellenistic period of Judea -- the region formerly known as the Kingdom of Judah -- ends with the Maccabean revolt, where Cohen's book picks up:

Throughout the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the Jews maintained a quiescent attitude toward their rulers. There is no indication of any serious uprising by the Jews against the empires that ruled them. This changed dramatically in the 160s BCE. In 168-167 BCE, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid king of Syria [who controlled Judea after Alexander's death], profaned the temple and persecuted Judaism. In the temple he erected an altar to Zeus, and everywhere he attempted to compel the Jews to violate the laws of the Torah. Various groups of Jews rebelled against the king, the most prominent of them being the clan of Mattathias the Hasmonean and his son Judah the Maccabee (hence the entire dynasty is often called Maccabean or Hasmonean). In 164 BCE the Maccabees reconquered and purified the temple; the end of Seleucid rule followed twenty years later.

... These centuries witnessed the growth of the Diaspora, the "scattering" of the Jews throughout the world; the beginnings of the canonization of Scripture; the writing of the earliest nonbiblical works that have been preserved; the gradual transformation of prophecy into apocalypse; the emergence of a class of scribes, laypeople learned in the sacred traditions. Some books of the Bible were written during this period, all of them anonymous, but they are impressive in both number and importance (e.g., Jonah and Job). The latest [Old Testament] book in the Bible, Daniel, was written at the very end of the Hellenistic period, during the dark days of the Antiochian persecution.

Is it any wonder I'm fascinated by this period of history? So much happens! This is kind of a trend for my historic interests, actually. In American history I've tended to be most interested in what Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, the idea that the Progressive period -- from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I or the Great Depression (depending on where you want to draw the line) -- is an intense period of organization, redefinition, and soul-searching in American culture: that's when the American frontier closes, that's when nation-wide professional organizations become commonplace, that's when national media chains become the norm, that's when people by default begin to identify as Americans first and New Yorkers or Virginians second, rather than the other way around. It's not a coincidence that Christian fundamentalism dates from that period, that we've had the same two political parties since that period, and so on, but that's a whole nother set of posts. My point is just that I tend to be drawn to these periods of history marked by intense cultural activity or prevailing anomie.

The Maccabean period lasted a century, from the victory of 164 BCE to the entrance of the Romans into Jerusalem in 63 BCE ... [the many Jews who opposed Maccabean rule] were not "hellenizers" and "lawless" Jews who supported Antiochus's attempt to destroy Judaism, but loyal Jews who had had enough of the Maccabeans' autocratic ways. 

... At first, while the Seleucid Empire was still strong, the Romans accepted a treaty of alliance with the Maccabees ... as Seleucid power waned and Maccabean power increased, it was no longer to their advantage to support the Judean state since the Maccabees had become as much a threat to Roman interests as the Seleucids had been. After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE, they realized that the Maccabees were a nationalist element that could not be combined easily with their own mperial vision, so the Maccabees were pushed aside and a new dynasty was created.

The new dynasty owed everything to the Romans and therefore supported them wholeheartedly. The founder of the dynasty was Herod the Great (37-4 BCE).

Hey, we've all heard of him!

He tried to be the king over all his subjects, not just the Jews. Herod benefacted pagan cities and temples as well as Jewish cities and the temple of Jerusalem. He also built numerous fortresses, the most famous of which was Masada. To pay for all these projects, he imposed heavy taxes, and because he felt insecure in his rule, he killed numerous members of the aristocracy whose claims to prestige and status within the Jewish community were stronger than his own.

Later Cohen backs up and provides some background on earlier Jewish religion:

How does Israelite religion differ from Judaism? In many respects, of course, it doesn't. The two are linked by a common belief in the one supreme God, who created the world, chose the Israelites/Jews to be his people, and entered into a covenantal relationship with them; by a shared attachment to the Holy Land of Israel, the holy city of Jerusalem, and the holy temple; and by the same sacred calendar and many of the same religious observances. Even more important than these commonalities is the fact that the Jews of all times have always seen themselves not merely as the successors to, but also as the continuators of, the legacy of preexilic Israel. Christianity claimed (and to some extent, still claims) to be the true Israel, but this claim was accompanied by an assertion of newness. Premodern Judaism never developed this sense of newness, and it is this sense of continuity that more than anything else connects Second Temple Judaism to preexilic Israel, in spite of numerous changes and enormous upheavals.

Preexilic Israel was a tribal society living on its ancestral land. Membership in a tribe, and consequently the rights of citizenship, depended exclusively on birth. There was no established process by which a foreigner could be absorbed into the Israelite polity. Second Temple Judaism, in contrast, was not a tribal society. When the Jews returned from Babylonia, they returned not as tribes but as clans. The entire tribal structure had been destroyed. Many Jews did not return to the land of Israel but remained in Babylonia; later, many Jews left the land of Israel to live throughout the Mediterranean basin. As a result of these changes, Judaism gradually defined itself more as a religion than as a nationality. It created the institution of conversion, which allowed foreigners to be admitted into "citizenship." As a religion, Judaism prohibited all marriages between Jews and non-Jews, a prohibition unknown to preexilic Israel.

Preexilic Israel worshiped in the temple through the slaughter and roasting of animals. A good part of the actual service was performed not by lay Israelites but by the priests, since only priests were permitted entrance into the inner precincts of the temple. Prayer was not a standard part of worship.

Second Temple Judaism also developed a regimen of private worship unknown to preexilic Israel. The word of God was to be the object of constant study and meditation, not only because this activity would teach the conduct that God expected, but also because the very act of study was deemed an act of worship. In addition to study, daily prayer became part of the piety practiced by the religious elite.

The piety of preexilic Israel centered on the group (the people of Israel or the family), while the piety of Second Temple Israel centered on both the group and the individual.

Preexilic Israel and Second Temple Judaism also differed in their understanding of theodicy, God's administration of justice ... Preexilic Israel believed that God administered justice in this world. The righteous and the wicked were not always the direct recipients of God's attentions, because God could reward or punish their offspring in their stead (emphasis on the collective). Second Temple Judaism insisted that God punishes or rewards only those who deserve it and that the conduct of one's ancestors is irrelevant (emphasis on the individual). Since God does not always seem to set matters right in this world, he must do so in the next. Second Temple Judaism therefore elaborated complex schemes of reward and punishment after death or at the end of time. Some of these schemes included the resurrection of the dead.

Prophets no longer enjoyed the prestige and authority that had been theirs in preexilic times. In Second Temple Judaism, prophets became apocalyptic seers, mystics, healers, and holy men. A new type of authority figure emerged to replace the classical prophet: the scribe, whose authority derived not from his pedigree and institutional setting (like the priest), not from his charismatic personality and direct contact with God (like the prophet), but from his erudition in the sacred Scriptures and traditions. Various sects as well claimed authority on the basis of their superior erudition.

Now some remarks on hellenization -- that is to say, the influence of Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) culture on the Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Some of this ties in to my opening remarks about practice vs. theology, as well as with the preceding paragraphs about the differences between preexilic and Second Temple Judaism.

All the Jews of antiquity were hellenized to some degree... but usually the term "hellenization" involves more than just pots, pans, and language. It also involves a way of thought and a way of life. ... Some Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora sought to obliterate all distinctions between themselves and the gentiles. These Jews are usually called "apostates" (rebels). Their reasons were diverse. Some, hoping to make a career in the civil service, felt that their Judaism was an obstacle in their path ... Some apostates were motivated by the desire to partake fully of the delights of Hellenistic civilization... they wanted to "belong." Others were "uprooted intellectuals" who could accept the truths of Greek philosophy but had difficulty accepting the truths of Judaism. In a polytheistic world they could not believe in monotheism, in a society that revered philosophy they could not accept revelation, and in a universal culture they could not accept distinctiveness. 

A group of Jews known to modern scholarship as "the extreme hellenizers" tried to remove the distinctive characteristics of Judaism in order to make it indistinguishable from other forms of Semitic-Hellenistic polytheism... whether they were motivated primarily by social, economic, political, or religious desires is difficult to determine. The supporters of the Maccabees had no doubt, however, that these Jews were sinners and rebels. 

Universalistic trends had always existed in Judaism, even in preexilic times, especially in intellectual circles. The Wisdom literature of the Bible (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes) completely ignores the distinctive elements of Israelite cult, history, and theology; freely draws on the wisdom literature of the ancient East, especially Egypt; and emphasizes the common morality and ethics applicable to all peoples. ... But the universalism of these apostates was different ... because these apostates ... surrendered their Jewish identity. For the vast majority of Jews, this was not an acceptable response to the challenges of the Hellenistic world.

Many scholars have noted that the religions and philosophies of the Hellenistic period share a concern for the individual, whereas the religions and philosophies of [the earlier period of] classical Greece centered more on the polis, the collective. The same development can be seen in the Judaism of the Hellenistic period.

Another innovation of the Hellenistic period was the phenomenon of non-Jews converting to Judaism or adopting Jewish practices without conversion -- not because they had married a Jew or joined a Jewish community, but simply because they coexisted in the larger world with the Jews, a world in which practices tended to pass back and forth like this. Traditions for conversion had to be developed, which were later recorded in documents of rabbinic law -- though those date from a later period than what we're talking about, and might not be wholly accurate.

According to rabbinic law, a convert must also be immersed in water (in Christian terminology, be baptized) and must offer a sacrifice at the temple. Yet the same rabbinic authorities insist that the convert's inability to bring a sacrifice after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE does not impair the acquired Jewishness. The convert merely incurs an obligation that will need to be satisfied in the messianic future. According to rabbinic law, then, in the Second Temple period the ritual requirements for conversion were three: circumcision [for men], immersion, and sacrifice.

The major problem raised by this rabbinic tradition is that no text from the Second Temple period knows of immersion and sacrifice as rituals of conversion. The baptism that figures so prominently in certain portions of the New Testament obviously bears some relationship to the immersion for converts, but the precise nature of that relationship has been endlessly debated by scholars. The fact that gentile converts to Christianity were baptized is the strongest argument for the view that converts to Judaism must have been baptized already in the first century.

Even more numerous than converts were those gentiles who accepted certain aspects of Judaism but did not convert to it. In polytheistic fashion, they added the God of Israel to their pantheon and did not deny the pagan gods. Throughout the Roman Empire, various practices of Judaism found favor with large segments of the populace. In the city of Rome, many gentiles observed the Sabbath, the fasts, and the food laws; in Asia Minor, many gentiles attended synagogue on the Sabbath. ... they did not see themselves as Jews and were not seen by others as Jews.

Later, when the gentiles adopting Jewish practices were Christians -- especially in the second to fifth centuries -- scholars refer to them as "Judaizers."

Let's revisit what I was saying at the start about many religions being defined as much or more by practice and observance than by belief. "Apostates" like the "extreme hellenizers" aren't those who have "abandoned the Jewish faith," to use a Christian construction -- Josephus, for instance, condemns them not for rejecting Jewish beliefs but for abandoning ancient customs like circumcision. Judaizers, similarly, don't necessarily understand Christian theology differently than other Christians do as a result of their embrace of Jewish practice -- it is the practice itself that sets them apart.

I have to wonder if Catholics have an easier time understanding this, given that Catholicism is far more practice-and-observance-oriented than Protestantism -- that said, I studied in both heavily Catholic New Orleans and the very Protestant Midwest and didn't notice a particular difference among my classmates.

Through Christianity, they [the Judaizers] learned the Hebrew Scriptures and became familiar with Jewish observances. Many Christian groups, for example, insisted that Easter must coincide with the Jewish Passover and that it be celebrated with rites similar to those of the Jewish Passover. In Antioch in the late fourth century, John Chrystostom was shocked that many Christians were doing what pagan God-fearers had been doing in other parts of the empire three centuries previously: they were attending synagogues and observing the Jewish festivals.

The pervasive influence of Christianity on our thinking makes us equate "religion" with theology or faith. This ... is false not only for ancient polytheism but also for the Judaism of antiquity. Both Jews and gentiles recognized that the Jews denied the gods of the nations and claimed that their God alone was the true God, the Lord of the universe. Yet for both Jews and gentiles, the boundary line between Judaism and polytheism was determined more by Jewish observances than by Jewish theology. 

Practices, not theology, also determined the boundaries within the Jewish community. The debates between sectarians and nascent Christian "orthodoxy" of antiquity centered on theological matters ... but for the most part the debates among Jewish sects centered on matters of law. The Jews of Qumran criticized not the theology of their coreligionists but their way of life, especially their calendar, their purity rules, and their administration of the temple. The library of books assembled by the Jews of Qumran contains a bewildering variety of theological ideas and eschatological scenarios. Sometimes a single text juxtaposes several different eschatological or messianic theories. Not a single tractate of either the Mishnah or the Talmud is devoted to a "theological" topic. 

Okay, I'm going to digress on gnosticism after all, something I try to put off.

I get that gnosticism is one of the things people find interesting and appealing about ancient religion, but it is, in essence, a myth. Not a myth exactly, but a modern construct used as an umbrella term for ancient beliefs, practices, and groups that might well be surprised to find themselves grouped together. The "ism" of it all is misleading. To wit:

1: No group or individual identified themselves as gnostic.

2: The term comes from the early Church Fathers who used it as an accusation. There are many problems with drawing conclusions about the groups they accused of being gnostics, much less deriving from their descriptions a "gnosticism." Consider the diverse groups and politicians that American conservatives call "socialists," many of whom -- like the Clintons -- hold positions that are clearly conservative, and who in any case have little to nothing to do with the political ideology of socialism.

This is not an accidental comparison I'm making. When you adopt one extreme position, accusing your opponents of occupying the other extreme is common practice. While we can easily untangle what it says about someone when they call a centrist a "socialist," this is because we understand the spectrum, the issues, and the language. We don't have that knowledge when it comes to the religious scene of developing Christianity, because:

2a) Most of the texts didn't survive,

2b) Most of the texts that did survive represent the Church Fathers' positions, because they're the ones who preserved the texts,

2c) Even though the Nag Hammadi documents -- which include many early non-orthodox Christian writings as well as various Jewish writings -- were recovered in the 20th century, we know very little about the demographics of the groups who produced them,

2d) We're still debating serious issues about the Gospel of Mark, a much better understood document with much more supporting material -- in comparison, it's been much harder to even start the conversation about the Nag Hammadi finds,

2e) Moderns tend to lose sight of the fact that although text finds like this are very valuable, with religious communities of this era, written texts are the smallest part of the puzzle. It is very likely that there were at least as many Christian communities that produced zero written texts as those that produced some; further, those that produced some used them in addition to their oral "texts," not as the sole source of their traditions, practices, faith, what have you. The texts will never tell the whole of the story.

3) As Qumran and other communities attest, possession of a text does not necessarily indicate subscription to that text's creed. In Qumran's case, a strong theory is that the Qumran community used as its main texts both a text written by its founder and at least one text written by an earlier group -- and in the latter case, very likely interpreted that text differently than the source had done, just as Christians interpret the Jewish scriptures differently than Jews do. Without possession of commentaries, we have no idea what to say about the possession of a text that a group didn't create.

Now, point #3 is one of the things that gets lost when we talk about which groups "were gnostic" and what gnosticism means. There is a good book called Rethinking "Gnosticism" that addresses some of the problems most scholarship on gnosticism, as typically exemplified by Elaine Pagels, the best known scholar on gnostics, both in the academic community and, especially, with the general public. One of the key problems is the way so much work on gnosticism relies on association:

Group 1 is gnostic for reason such-and-such.

Group 1 produced or possessed Text A: Text A is therefore gnostic.

Group 2 possessed Text A: Group 2 is gnostic.

Group 2 produced Text B: Text B is gnostic.

Group 3 possessed Text B: Group 3 is gnostic.

Worst yet: Text B contains Idea I: Idea I is gnostic. Text C contains Idea I: Text X is gnostic.

Eventually there is very little that you can't write a book about the gnosticism thereof, but what have you accomplished?

Meanwhile, while we know that the Church Fathers found value in accusing groups of being gnostic in the same way that American politicians find value in accusing opponents of socialism, the more groups we want to include in the umbrella, the more broadly we have to define "gnostic" for it to fit the few things that we know for sure. Otherwise we wind up ascribing beliefs and practices to groups simply because of their imagined associations with other groups and texts on the basis of this awful math.

I should add that although I am regularly critical of Pagels, it isn't that her work is entirely wrong. She has made a lot of good points about early Christianity and brought a lot of important elements to light. Popularity is a tricky thing in scholarship -- Publish or Perish is one thing, but once you find a popular audience, there's a pressure to continue publishing more books along similar lines, regardless of whether you have the material or conclusions to justify doing so. The biggest problems with Pagels are the shadow she casts and the "everything is gnostic if you squint enough" effect that her popularity has caused, by turning "gnostic" into a marketable brand name for the layman.

Moving on. One of the things Christians are often unaware of is the way that Jewish religion underwent significant change every few centuries, and specifically the fact that in the time of Jesus, the Jewish religion was very much in flux. In the generations immediately prior to Jesus's birth, many of the elements Christians take for granted as part of the "Judeo" half of their Judeo-Christian heritage were only just falling into place, brand new and shiny.

In the early third and second centuries BCE, the Jewish conception of God became more majestic, and the angels who served him became more delineated. Greek-speaking Jews developed the idea of the Logos -- translated in the Christian world as the "Word" of God, but according to Cohen better understood as "speech" or "reason," the angel who interacts with the material world on God's behalf.

In the early Second Temple period, the term "the accuser" (ha satan) began to refer to a member of the heavenly court who, while still subservient to God, was able to exercise some initiative on his own (Job 1-2, Zech. 3:1-2). "Satan" was not yet a proper name. The third and second centuries BCE, however, witnessed the emergence of Satan as a clearly defined being. Sometimes called Mastema or Belial or other names, he was the supernatural leader of the forces of evil. He was an enemy both of God and of the righteous and was blamed for most of the maladies that befall humanity. 

The existence of Satan actually underscored God's majesty, because his existence was used to solve the free will issue: according to the view that was prevalent in late Second Temple Judaism, God has foreseen everything (and certain sects, such as the Essences, consider themselves the divinely predetermined elect who will be resurrected at the end of time as discussed below) but humans have free will. This doesn't make God responsible for human sinfulness, but neither does it mean that sinful actions represent the ability to thwart the will of God; rather, Satan is the source of evil and of sin, and Satan is a creation of God. Christianity developed the shit out of this idea too, sometimes to such a degree that it actually trips over itself and conflicts with other doctrines of sin.

It's really not until Maimonides in the Middle Ages that we have a Jewish source espousing pure, unadulerated monotheism -- Maimonides argued that angels and other apparent divine beings were just attributes of God, sort of ways for people to understand God, but had no existence independent from Him. This is emphatically not the way Jews understood monotheism in the premodern world, and a religion that originated in polytheism constantly struggled with deciding exactly what it meant by what we now call monotheism -- or at least, so it appears in retrospect from a modern viewpoint. The truth is that so long as people weren't worshipping foreign gods, there doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of tension or "struggle" here, just a lot of expression of belief that we now have trouble feeling comfortable categorizing as "monotheistic."

But that became Christianity's problem. It's Christianity that's the creedal religion, not Judaism. Judaism doesn't tear itself into pieces over theological quandaries, it's more legalistic in scope. Christianity inherited a worldview that included a supposedly strict monotheism but also innumerable divine beings who existed independently of God, including the angels, Satan, demons who were responsible for causing illness, and eventually, Jesus. No wonder it took them most of a thousand years to sort out what exactly they believed in, when those were the parameters.

Another recent introduction:

For the first time, in the third and second centuries BCE we also hear of immortality and resurrection as the rewards that await the righteous and of eternal punishments that await the wicked. In the preexilic portions of the Bible, Sheol is the ultimate destination for the disembodied soils of everyone, righteous and wicked alike ... there is no judgment and no reward. 

Since neither the righteous nor the wicked receives their due in either life or death, what is the incentive to be righteous? Where is God's justice? These are the taunts that the righteous hear in the book of Enoch, in Wisdom of Solomon, and in many other works, including rabbinic literature. Since the present is inexplicable, the answer must be the future. Death does not mark the end; the righteous -- and perhaps the wicked too -- must receive their due in the hereafter. 

... A clearer account is provided by Daniel 12:2-3, a description of the events of the end time:

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky; and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever."

Keep in mind a few key differences here between the Jewish Daniel conception of the afterlife and the modern Christian view of the afterlife: first, that it seems to involve a specifically bodily resurrection rather than the departure of the soul from the body; second, that not everyone is so resurrected; and third, that it doesn't even occur until the end of time, and does so collectively, rather than everyone entering the afterlife at the moment of their individual death. Forget about any ideas about your dead grandparents watching you from Heaven, much less the intercession of saints.

Those differences are important, but equally important to the initial development of Christianity -- or perhaps more to the point, to the development of Jesus's thought and teachings -- is the fact that these notions of resurrection and supernatural reward were major themes in Jewish religious thought in his era. This is also something to keep in mind when evaluating the various theories that Jesus's ideas were partially or largely influenced by Eastern schools of philosophy, Buddhism specifically, etc. -- theories I have never seen any meaningful support for, and which are nearly always advocated by people with little familiarity with Jewish antiquity.

Cohen on the shift in the seat of political and religious power in this era:

By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (mid-fifth century BCE), the royal family had disappeared, and the high priest was emerging as the leading political figure ... by the fourth century BCE at the latest, the high priest was the uncontested head of the Jews, not merely the head of the temple. In Hellenistic times, the office was filled by an appointee of the king. "Civil" and "religious" power were combined in one person. The wars of the Maccabees in large measure revolved around this office.

As the focal point of the religion, the temple was the central communal institution not just for the Jews of the land of Israel but also for those of the Diaspora. The annual half-shekel contribution and the festival pilgrimages bound together the entire Jewish community. The ideology of the temple also served as a binding force: it represented oneness and exclusivity ... during the Second Temple period, at least three other temples were erected, but none of them competed effectively with the temple of Jerusalem.

The Sanhedrin were a supreme court chaired by the high priest and composed of members drawn from various groups (Sadducees, Pharisees, priests). It had authority to try cases that involved serious violations of religious law.

Beyond that, things get unsure -- Josephus refers to the Sanhedrin as a temporary court assembled by the high priest on an as-needed basis, but rabbinical tradition says otherwise and further attributes legislative power as well as judicial to the Sanhedrin. Complicating things, we know both Josephus and rabbinical tradition to be in error about other matters, so it's a whole big conversation when it comes to which source to weigh more heavily. What is clear, though, is that Rome allowed the Jewish community considerable autonomy when it came to ruling on internal matters.

It seems likely that, if nothing else, the Sanhedrin was present frequently, so if it was ad-hoc, then it was assembled an awful lot. The development of the rabbinical tradition seems to have occurred in no small part because after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the loss of the supporting infrastructure left the Jewish community with specific needs unfilled, and the early rabbis -- very likely the sect referred to in both the New Testament and early rabbinical texts as the Pharisees -- assumed a judicial-like leadership role.

Cohen on the development of the institution of the synagogue:

The synagogue is a tripartite institution: A place of prayer, a place of study, and a place of meeting. In all likelihood, each of these parts was once a separate institution, each with its own history, and only after a long and complicated process were the three combined. ... The synagogue is an amalgamation of a prayerhouse, which apparently originated in the Diaspora in early Hellenistic times; a study house or school, which apparently originated in Israel also in early Hellenistic times; and a meetinghouse, which served the different needs of the Jewries of the Diaspora and the land of Israel. By the first century CE, these diverse elements had not yet united to form a single type. In fact ... our sources from the third to the seventh centuries CE present radically different portraits of the synagogue.

When we say rabbinical Judaism and Christianity developed alongside each other, we really mean it: they both took seven or eight centuries to really come into focus.

On sectarianism in Jewish antiquity:

A sect separates itself from society ... the members of the sect might flee to the desert or some other isolated place. Or they might live among, but not with, their nonsectarian coreligionists [by creating] taboos that inhibit normal social intercourse between the members of the group (the "pure," "righteous," "elect") and nonmembers (the "impure," "wicked," "damned"). No matter what form the separation takes, it is generally caused by a sense of alienation from the rest of society, especially from society's central institutions. 

A sect asserts that it alone embodies the ideals of the larger group. In Jewish terms, this means that a sect sees itself as the true Israel. At best, all other Jews are sinners; at worst, they hardly deserve the name "Israel" at all.

The cutting edge of ancient Jewish sectarianism was not theology but law. Of course, sects often advocated peculiar doctrinal views, but these did not play the formative role that the legal positions did. Abundant evidence makes this point clear: the protosectarianism of the Persian period; the critique of Jewish society contained in [the documents of the Qumran community; [etc.] All this material emphasizes the legal character of the debates among the sects and ignores or slights philosophical and theological matters.

In Second Temple times, the biblical canon was very fluid. All Jews regarded the Torah as authoritative, and all Jews except the Samaritans regarded the prophetic books as authoritative. But the nature and degree of the authority that was ascribed to these books, and the identity of the other books that also were to be regarded as authoritative, varied greatly from community to community. The Essenes of Qumran criticized the religious behavior of their fellow Jews, but failure to respect the Essene writings is not among their complaints. No ancient source implies that the constitution of the canon was a focal point of sectarian dispute. There is no evidence that any central body (e.g. the temple priesthood) tried to impose on the population a unified canon.

Early Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect when it ceased to observe Jewish practices. It abolished circumcision and became a religious movement overwhelmingly gentile in composition and character. This process was accompanied by the elevation of Jesus far higher and more significant than that occupied by any intermediary figure in Judaism; even those Jews who, like Philo, used their belief in God's Logos to explain how a transcendent and unknowable God could create the world and interact with it did not worship the Logos or pray to it. For Christians, Christ the Logos was the primary focus of worship. With its practices no longer those of the Jews, its theology no longer that of the Jews, its membership no longer Jewish, and its political institutions no longer those of the Jews -- the Christianity of the early second century CE was no longer a Jewish phenomenon but a separate religion. Small groups of Jewish Christians (more accurately, Christian Jews) persisted through the first five or six centuries CE, but they were regarded as sects by both the Jews and the Christians.

On Samaritans specifically:

The name "Samaritan" has two distinct meanings: an inhabitant of the district of Samaria or a member of a religious community centered at Shechem and Mount Gerizim. The people who concern us here are not [the former] but the community that dwelt (and still dwells) in Shechem and venerated (and still venerates) Mount Gerizim. ... archaeological evidence suggests that the former inhabitants of Samaria fled to Shechem [in the fourth century BCE]. In all likelihood, the temple on Mount Gerizim was now built to serve the new temple ... not [to] signal a break with the Jews of Judea. The alphabet used by the Samaritans and the text form of their Torah were widespread in Judea in the second century BCE. The decrees of Epiphanes applied to the Samaritans as well as to the Judeans, a fact confirming that both groups were Jews in the eyes of the state. Unlike the Jews of Judea, however, the Samaritans accepted the king's program and dedicated their temple to Zeus. Perhaps in revenge for this act, John Hyrcanus destroyed the Gerizim temple in 129 BCE and the city of Shechem in 109 BCE. This caused undying tension between the communities.

The Samaritans created their own biblical canon (including only the Torah), developed rituals and practices that in many areas agreed, and in many areas disagreed, with those of their fellow Jews, and elaborated their own eschatology (including the restoration of their temple on Mount Gerizim). 

Were the Samaritans a sect? On the one hand, they have many sectarian features. As long as their temple stood on Mount Gerizim, they seem to have regarded themselves as part of the larger community ... but after their temple was destroyed, they argued that the Jerusalem temple was completely unacceptable to God ... [and] looked upon themselves as the true Israel. On the other hand, the Samaritans have many features that are decidedly nonsectarian: their mixed origins, their ethnic ties to Shechem and Mount Gerizim, and their widespread Diaspora, which has been estimated by some scholars to rival that of the Jews.

On the status of Jewish scriptural genres:

Prophecy of the biblical sort ceased; seers continued to see visions and hearers continued to hear voices, but their methods, messages, and settings were different from those of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Instead of consulting prophets, people eager to hear the word of the Lord would study the collected words of those who had once spoken with God.

The status of the Torah as the sole literary expression of the revelation of God was still subject to challenge as late as the second century BCE. Some Jews believed that they still had the option of reformulating the narratives and laws attributed to Moses. These Jews wrote the Temple Scroll and the book of Jubilees. The former, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, is either a very early work of the Qumran Jews, perhaps of their founder, or is a work inherited by them from some earlier group or school (perhaps third century BCE). The Temple Scroll rewrites the laws of the Torah, rearranges them, reformulates them, expands on them, and even adds new laws not found in the original. But the Temple Scroll is no mere paraphrase of the Torah. It presents itself as THE Torah. In the Torah now in our Bibles, some anonymous narrator tells us that God spoke to Moses, but in the Temple Scroll God speaks to Moses directly. Laws that refer to God in the third person in the Torah are cast as referring to God in the first person in the Temple Scroll.

The book of Jubilees, written in the 160s BCE, rewrites the narrative portion of the Torah from Genesis through Exodus 12 (precisely the point at which the Temple Scroll began). The work greatly expands on the Torah and tries to prove the authenticity of the solar calendar and the pre-Sinatic origin of the commandments. The alleged author of the work is an angel who reveals to Moses the content of various heavenly tablets.

Their goal is not to supplement Scripture but to supplant it.

For some Jews, especially in the land of Israel, the second part of the Bible was now closed. It consisted of the historical books Joshua through Kings, which were a preface to the prophetic books (or an epilogue to the Torah), and the prophetic books themselves. Additions to the canon were incorporated in a third section that ultimately became known simply as "the Writings." When the book of Daniel, written in the 160s BCE [the same time as the book of Jubilees], came to be canonized, it was included not in the Prophets, a section already complete, but in the Writings. 

Many textbooks still claim that the rabbinic "synod" at Yavneh finalized the canonization of the Hebrew Bible around 100 CE. The rabbis were motivated, we are told, by a desire to exclude Christianity from the fol, and to exclude Christian and apocalyptic books from the canon. These views have lost favor in recent years, primarily for lack of evidence. [This is putting it lightly.] The rabbis in the third and fourth centuries CE were still debating the sanctity of various books. Esther in particular had to fight for its place in the canon. The Jews of Qumran did not read Esther; it is missing from the earliest extant Christian list of biblical books, from the second half of the second century CE; and the rabbis still were not sure about the book a century or two later.

The Writings are a motley assortment of books ... books of wisdom ... hymns, histories, and novellas ... the Song of Songs, a collection of secular love songs.

Thus the tripartite canon was born: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. This canon was accepted by many Jews in both the land of Israel and the Diaspora. Some ... preferred not to define a canon at all; some, like the author of 4 Ezra, had a canon of 24 books, yet an additional collection of apocalyptic works besides; others ... looked on the Torah as a work in a category of its own and otherwise were content to preserve [separately] a collection of literature that did not distinguish between Prophets and Writings, between the divinely inspired and the uninspired, between the eternally valid and the transient.

The Tanak [Jewish Scriptures, or "the Old Testament"] itself refers to several works that are now lost. These include, for example, the Book of Yashar, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. Why did no one care to preserve them? Why weren't these books canonized? Centuries later, why weren't Tobit, Ben Sira, and Judith canonized? We do not know.

The canonization of the Tanak was accompanied by the growth of the ideal of scriptural study and the emergence of people who claimed political and religious authority on the basis of their scriptural expertise. The study of Scripture led to the creation of three new literary genres: scriptural translation, paraphrase, and commentary... However, even as the Jews declared their loyalty to Scripture, they liberated themselves from it. Many of the scriptural translations, paraphrases, and commentaries, from both Second Temple and rabbinic times, are remarkably fanciful and capricious, and even those that claim to be accurate interpretations of the original often do not live up to their claims. The emergence of canonized texts allowed the Jews great freedom in interpreting their sacred traditions, a freedom denied them when the traditions circulated in fluid form. When the original itself was still susceptible to change, the distinction between text and interpretation was not clear, and the custodians of the originals would be wary of capricious modifications.

[That said, it is clear that the originals were modified numerous times, but that is a separate conversation.]

By the second century BCE, classical prophecy had ceased; seers who saw visions and hearers who heard voices instead wrote apocalypses ... a literary work that has an angel or some inspired worthy revealing a secret or unraveling a mystery. ... Apocalyptic literature never lost its interest in cosmology, but in response to the profanation of the temple and the persecution of Judaism, it shifted its attention to the secrets of history and eschatology. This type of apocalypse, whose best-known representative is the book of Daniel, marks the final evolution of classical prophecy. ... Christians were very interested in apocalypses; they preserved many Jewish apocalypses and wrote new apocalypses themselves.

Midrash and exegesis:

The Hebrew word "midrash" literally means "research" or "investigation," but through rabbinic usage the term has come to mean "the investigation of Scripture." A commentary on Scripture, a piece of scriptural exegesis, a veiled allusion to a scriptural passage, a retelling of scriptural material -- all these are called midrash. 

The essence of exegesis is the notion "X = Y." When Scripture says X, it really means Y. In some instances, the formula can be represented as "X + Y," where the exegesis adds Y to the X of scripture. ... Demetrius asks how the Israelites, who fled Egypt unarmed, managed to obtain weapons for their various battles. His answer (they obtained arms by stripping them from the Egyptian corpses at the Red Sea) is a good illustration of the X + Y method, in which the exegete adds important information omitted by Scripture.

... The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution but of course routinely interprets it in a manner that would have amazed the Founding Fathers. No matter. Historians must try to find out what the Constitution meant in its eighteenth-century context, but the Supreme Court must determine what it means for contemporary society. 

Linked by their common education, vocabulary, values, and culture, the rabbis clearly constitute a unified group ... but these facts do not mean that rabbinic literature really is seamless or that all rabbis of antiquity thought and behaved in identical fashion. 

The Mishnah ("repetition" or "teaching") is the first rabbinic book, written in Hebrew and edited around 200 CE. ... it contains primarily material of a legal character: anonymous rulings, rulings ascribed to names sages, and debates between sages. The Mishnah also contains anecdotes, maxims, exhortations, scriptural exegesis, and descriptions of the rituals of the Jerusalem temple. ... it is full of legal material but is not a law code, rather, it is a digest or anthology.

The rabbis of the second century debated among themselves the number and identity of [the Noahide laws ... laws revealed to Noah and his descendants, which were to be observed by all mankind, i.e. the laws which Jews should find it reasonable to expect non-Jews to obey, and which later influenced the ideas of international law and natural law in the West]. The usual number was seven. ... The very idea of Noahide laws shows a remarkable tendency toward recognizing the validity of cultures other than one's own and of affirming the common bond of all civilized peoples.

Okay! Not a lot of comment from me on the last few chapters there, but I think the excerpts also speak for themselves. And this is a long entry. The other book related to this is on the development of monotheism, which gets into extremely interesting material. I am off to Boston for Easter.

some more quick autobiographical background

This started as the lead-up to a "recent reading" post, but that post became long and I'm not done with it yet, and because another book I've read covers chronologically-earlier related material, I'll probably post about that one first - so I'm going to pull the intro from the aforementioned post and just shove it out here on its own.

The two books are on ancient Jewish religion, which was one of the first things I studied in religious studies, and which became one of my primary focuses once religious studies officially became my field, so I initially began that post by asking:

So how did I get into religious studies?

As I was reminded recently, I gave up on education, in the sense of sitting in a classroom with teachers educating me, pretty fucking early. In fourth grade, I'd been placed in a small accelerated reading program -- this was separate from and in addition to the "gifted and talented" program (which wasn't called that in my school, but you understand what I mean by it) -- which grouped a couple of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders together in a very small class to write essays and do other projects. It was harder work than anything I would do again until ... college.

That really isn't an exaggeration. The learning curve was ridiculous: that first year, my mother had to sit with me when I wrote some of these essays, not writing them for me but asking me, okay now what, what do you want to say next, just forcing me to do it, like pulling teeth. There was no hand-holding here -- nothing about the "I read a book about Fudge, I liked the part where his dad said 'eat it or wear it'" experience of third grade prepares you to suddenly write a structured essay that actually takes a position on something, and if you weren't ready to write the essay, well, no big deal, the class wasn't mandatory. Feel free to go back to gen pop.

As hard as it was, though, here's the thing: it wasn't merely difficult. Writing essays, talking about books like The Plague Dogs, talking about Copernicus and Galileo because we were reading The Trumpeter of Krakow, this was qualitatively different work than I would have been doing in fourth and fifth grade otherwise -- grades where we still had show and tell, for Christ's sake. I was learning differently, I was being taught differently. As a result, my expectations were really raised. Everything from leaving that program until college consistently failed to meet those expectations.

Everything from then on made it very clear that the system knew only one way to deal with gifted and talented students, or the larger category of honors students, or "the college track," or whatever category you like: quantitatively different work. Work that was merely difficult at best (and rarely even that), "busy work" at worst. I didn't mind this as much in my math work, where it just meant I got to algebra quicker, got sent to the high school to take courses, eventually was in sight of the math credits I would need to graduate high school and so intentionally slowed down. Math classes, at that level, lend themselves to this approach.

But teaching "smarter" kids by just giving them more work, more books to read, than the other kids, instead of trying harder to teach them, teaching them better, teaching them differently ... well, after this early experience in elementary school, I wasn't satisfied with the quantitative approach. I especially suffered from whiplash -- I was just talking about this yesterday to a fellow classmate of the same program who went through the same thing -- because although this was a small town, the junior high was administered by a separate school board (presumably because it serves two towns instead of one), and had no comparable program, no gifted and talented services at all. So we went from this very small, very advanced class to suddenly being dropped back and doing work more primitive than we had done for the previous three years. Three years is a long time for a seventh grader. It's very, very difficult to care about your academic performance in a circumstance like that.

(Here's the thing: I get that devoting extra resources to a small number of possibly gifted kids is maybe not the best use of public funds and human capital. Education of supposedly smarter children is a dicey game anyway: very often childhood intelligence is like childhood height, in that Jack may hit his growth spurt before James does, and may go through a few years of being ridiculously better at basketball as a result, but by the time they're in college everything's balanced out -- James is just as likely to be the same height or taller. The difference is that we can see height, and Jack doesn't walk around thinking of himself as taller than everyone else if he's five nine, but we all know a lot of smart kids who grew up to be ordinary adults who feel entitled to be correct all the time. How many is it worth putting up with in return for the genius geneticist who would've slipped through the cracks otherwise? I have no idea. So as an adult I can acknowledge both my own experience of malaise as a smart kid and my recognition that the system didn't necessarily owe me anything different.)

So I went through the usual teenage malaise fuck-all-these-grades-anyway stuff a couple years early, and by the time I got to high school two years later -- which seemed to take forever -- the only thing I cared about was getting to the other end of the tunnel as fast as possible. I dropped out of all the honors classes in order to reduce my workload to a per-credit-hour minimum, and loaded up electives in lieu of study hall and gym in order to maximize my credits, to increase the odds of my being able to graduate by the time I turned 18, which would happen the summer after my junior year.

The thing I might need to underscore is that what I had given up on here was the idea of other people teaching me. I had no particular sense that the school system knew how to do so in any way other than giving me more to do than other students, or that more than a handful of its employees felt any differently. The school seemed primarily concerned with managing me, which had begun immediately in junior high. Meanwhile, I was doing ample reading on my own, which is one way I was in fact able to graduate.

Originally I didn't have any particular intention of going to college. I wanted to be a writer, and had sold my first pieces in high school, and had been dumb enough to turn down a possible book deal at an embarrassingly young age for reasons that made sense at the time. None of the jobs that required a college degree interested me as a backup, and the experience of going to college sounded like a waste of time -- more to the point, it sounded like a continuation of high school. I agreed to check out some college campuses with my father, but this was mostly because it was a fun excuse for a road trip to Maine (Bates, Colby, I forget where else) and a trip to Boston (Harvard and MIT). Trips to Boston were like gold to me as a teenager, because they meant stops on Newbury Street, which meant Newbury Comics, records, maybe Doc Martens.

But! What changed my mind about college was hearing about Hampshire College -- famous for its lack of grades (my grades had been borderline for years and I stopped opening report cards after a while), its lack of majors, its lack of required courses -- from a guidance counselor whose daughter had gone there. Hampshire was the opposite of my high school experience -- moreso than I realized, since although it requires very little of the students, if you do opt to participate, the level of work, engagement, and investment is very very high. (Hampshire had the same effect on my expectations of college that the aforementioned reading program had on my expectations of education -- I've taken college courses at six schools not counting my current online classes and only a handful of graduate classes came close to what Hampshire expects of you. Everything else, including 90% of my graduate experience in two different programs, fell far short. I should note, though, that everything I say about Hampshire pertains to the Hampshire of the early to mid 90s, given that things have changed since.)

So I jumped at Hampshire. I applied early ... early something, whatever the term is for "please let me in without graduating high school," but because of my total disdain for academic performance, studying, and attendance, my math grade was barely passing. I was accepted to Hampshire -- not for the spring semester I had applied for, but for the following fall semester, contingent on either a high school diploma or bringing that math grade up. (Hampshire doesn't even offer math classes, so it never occurred to me the math grade would matter!)

I panicked for about a day, and then I just got mad. Not at Hampshire, at the stupid fucking school, for being so stupid. I went into the guidance office and I said, look, I need to graduate by the end of the year, but I don't want to take any classes, really. We need to make this happen or everybody's just going to look ridiculous. Well, I was already stuck with physics and math because those were year-long classes, but by getting credit for the advanced classes I'd taken, and this thing here and that thing there, and gym credit for an Outward Bound program (which wound up canceled, which is a whole nother story), it pretty much worked out. It worked out the rest of the way thanks to a teacher who was willing to do some independent studies for me because I was skipping her classes -- purely because of my own burn-out and unwillingness to come to school, nothing against her at all. Those independent studies were a) the missing ingredient that racked up the credits I needed to graduate high school on a schedule acceptable to me without actually, well, continuing to attend high school, b) for the first time since fifth fucking grade, the first really interesting reading I did in a school environment (Kerouac and the Beats, Toni Morrison, The Color Purple, Scott Momaday, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I forget what else), c) an excuse to buy a bunch of books at the newly opened Barnes and Noble.

And this brings us forward to the religious studies issue.

Hampshire is the only undergraduate college I interviewed with, and when they asked me the standard "what are you interested in?" question, I said "human sexuality and American Indian studies." I didn't really know why I was interested in either of those things, except that this Barnes and Noble was a big deal. A big bookstore, not just the mall bookstore or the library, meant whole bookstore sections that were new to me -- like exactly those, American Indian studies and human sexuality, and I had picked up random books in both sections just because they existed to be read. As part of the independent studies I went on from there, picking up books on BDSM and queer studies and shamanism and witchcraft and my first Paglia book -- like being a college kid, or at least a pre-internet college kid, just grabbing all this stuff that was outside the canon of what had been handed to me to date.

The intersection of this meant reading about berdachism and talking about that in my college interview, and my interviewer correctly pointed out that if you want to do serious study of American Indians, you are best off going to a college that is located somewhere where American Indians actually live in appreciable numbers. And furthermore, that they were getting tired of white people fascinated by berdachism wanting to come hang out on the reservation to learn about gender.

But it was a very productive conversation in which we talked about why I was interested in what I was interested in, and the interviewer pointed out that a lot of the things I found interesting made it sound like I would also enjoy comparative religion.

That was my introduction to the field -- the existence of the field, I mean.

Now, at Hampshire I actually wound up a pop culture "major" (like I said, Hampshire doesn't have majors, but it's not worth getting into the specifics), when I wrote a paper on Batman and discovered the Journal of Popular Culture and the joys of writing about things like comic books and so on. In the meantime I took a few classes here and there. Some religion, some philosophy, some history. The idea of actually "majoring" in religion didn't appeal to me -- I was at that stage where I had forcefully rejected the Christianity I had grown up with and was reading Drawing Down the Moon and stuff like that.

I dropped out of college, I dropped back into college.

They made me a "drama and communications major" at the University of New Orleans, because they didn't know what to do with "pop culture major." They classified all of my Hampshire classes as nonspecific "elective credits," which I didn't discover at first. Going from an experimental private liberal arts college to a public university was a bigger culture shock than high school to college had been, in a lot of ways. It took me a while to figure out what I was expected to be doing, what I actually could do, what I wanted to do.

Eventually, as I've recently explained, I wound up with an English degree, which was nearly a double-major in English and philosophy. The reason for the English degree was largely because so many of my Hampshire credits, once I sat down with the undergraduate adviser and we pressured the right people into classifying them as something more specific (so that I could get graduation-relevant credit for them), either transferred as English credits or transferred as something relevant to the requirements of an English degree (humanities classes). So once I was done with that process, I was some science and math classes and a few specific literature classes away from completing the English degree's requirement.

(One of the crazy things about the math requirement, about the way "required courses" work in general whenever these things come up, is that although you had to do X credits of math courses beyond Math 10XX -- I forget what it was, probably a certain number of classes excluding developmental math or something -- they didn't give a shit if they happened to be courses you'd already taken, so to speed up the process I just took the same fucking classes I'd taken in junior high, because that meant I didn't have to show up for class or study or anything, I just came in when it was time for tests. Who was served by this, really?)

But what I really enjoyed by then was history.

I moved to New Orleans on short notice: the university couldn't notify me of my acceptance as a transfer student until they could enter into the computer how many credits I had and therefore what class I was in, because these were issues that affected which classes I was eligible for and how I registered for classes -- issues that were foreign to me coming from Hampshire, where we still stood in line all day to register for classes in person, and where "classes" in the sense of freshman, sophomore, etc., didn't exist. I was accepted only a few weeks before the summer semester began, and wanted to move right away -- UNO is not normally a residential campus, but there's a token dormitory that's sort of horrible.

The summer semester is extremely constricted -- the dining commons isn't even open for dinner, so they just offer a handful of classes, presumably aimed at people who are a few credits short of graduation. But it only took two classes to be considered full-time in the summer, if I remember right, which for me meant The Philosophy of Sex and Love and The Bible as Literature -- the latter a low-level English class that, as it turns me out, did me no good in terms of moving me closer to graduation, but at the time I didn't know that. I just reasoned that I knew the material already, since I'd read the Bible several times, so it would be a good lightweight course while I was getting my feet wet and looking for an apartment.

What I didn't know was Biblical criticism, and while that class didn't get serious about it, it did introduce me to it. Meanwhile, the philosophy class included some Catholic theology. The groundwork was starting to be laid, and when I took some history classes with the university's resident Egyptologist on the ancient Near East -- and later most of the other classes he taught, but notably the ones on early Christianity and on ancient Egypt -- I became hooked on ancient history, and especially on ancient Israel and early Christianity. (An attempt to learn Greek was foiled by the fact that the class was aimed at students who already knew Latin, though that wasn't technically a prerequisite.) UNO didn't have a religious studies department, so I just took all the relevant history classes -- most of the ancient history classes, a lot of European history, the two-semester Religion in America survey -- and almost everything in the Philosophy department, along with some Anthro. (I remained at UNO as a grad student in the history program, and later entered another graduate program in Indiana.)

So it was a long road to get to religious studies, and although my interests in religion and history originated separately, when I first really became interested in religious studies at the college level, it was in an ancient history class -- which is why those interests have been intertwined since, and why I have tended to approach religion as a historian.

The original questions that interested me in religious studies were historical -- was there a United Monarchy period in ancient Israel, what were the earliest Christian communities like and what were the characteristics of their faith, what was John the Baptist's movement all about and to what extent and in what form did it survive him -- though like everybody I found Big Ideas like the Axial Age and the Great Awakenings intriguing. There was a lot of "what was it like" work going on in the field at the time -- the Jesus Seminar's core publications came out in the mid and late 90s, just before I started grad school and joined the Westar Institute (host of the Jesus Seminar) as an associate member, and the Seminar for all intents and purposes disbanded after the death of founded Robert Funk in 2005, the same year I finished grad school.

In the meantime, the public became aware of and briefly fascinated by "Jesus totally did it ... with a LADY" theories first popularized in the 1970s by conspiracy books like Holy Blood Holy Grail and immortalized by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Between that and the rediscovery and publication of the Gospel of Judas, all of a sudden a lot of the popular attention on early Christianity was centered on gnosticism, a thing that always makes me grit my teeth in frustration -- that's a long topic in of itself, but the waters are muddied there, and it's dangerous to refer to an "ism" where there really isn't one. The works of Elaine Pagels, far and away the most prominent on gnostic groups in antiquity, have left a lot of people with a lot of misconceptions that tend to be exploited by those conspiracy books.

The biggest change in the field since I finished grad school is the loud, saloon-door-kicking, "I can lick any son of a bitch in the house" arrival of New Atheism and the redirection of energies toward addressing it, in no small part because this is an easy way to get a book or paper published, which is how academia works. (There has also been an important trend in the neurology of religion, such as it is, though not as important as some headlines have made out.) It's unfortunate in that it directs efforts away from actual scholarship -- anthropologists don't spend a lot of their time justifying the existence of anthropology or arguing about the contents of their field with non-anthropologists. But like I said, when Publish or Perish reigns, people under its aegis have to follow the money. Or the reward, in any event.

Okay, I think I've bulked this entry up enough at the top and bottom that it no longer counts as an intro to the other post. But I will finish that one up soon.

easter, part 1: this whole business about dying for your sins

So it's Lent, which means Easter is coming up, and with that in mind, there's a few Easter-centric things to talk about. NUMBER ONE:

If anyone has tried to sell you on the benefits of Christianity -- whether trying to convert you or explaining their own love of it -- one of the strategies they are likely to have used is to tell you that "Jesus died for your sins."

Whether you're a Christian or not, and whatever you think of the sales pitch, it's worth talking about the fact that this is actually a relatively recent Christian teaching. It's not as recent a development as fundamentalism or anything (the full-fledged form of it was articulated by Aquinas in the 13th century and became the main Catholic view of atonement over the next century or two: that may sound like a long time ago, but relative to the scale of Christian history it's as though we're talking about the 1940s vis-a-vis American history), but it doesn't come from the New Testament, from the first Christians or the Church Fathers. It's called a substitutionary theory of atonement, and variants are found in both Catholic and Protestant theologies.

This whole thing is part of the same narrative I'm always laying out for you: the way that in the first millennium of Christian history, the emphasis of the religion shifted from Jesus (teacher, role model, miracle worker) to Christ (deity, supernatural intercessor).

If you believe Jesus died for your sins -- if you're a Christian and this is the version of atonement you subscribe to -- I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I don't believe there's only one valid theology. I do want you to consider several crucial points:

1: This isn't the only or original theory of atonement. You don't have to think this way to be a Christian. It's very likely that you think that you do, since this phrase has become synonymous with Christianity in many peoples' minds.

2: Even if this theory of atonement is true, when you embrace it as the core of Christianity, it casts the actual teachings of Jesus into such shadow as to subvert his message. Jesus's teachings were grounded in love for one's neighbor, open commensality, and an absolute rejection of societal shaming. A sin-centric Christianity is a shame-based religion. Beyond that, it is one that focuses more on Jesus's magical power to get you into Heaven, rather than anything he said about what you should actually, you know, do with your fucking life.

When I say this school of thought is "relatively recent," that isn't to condemn the teaching, as such. It's partly to point out that although religious conservatives condemn liberal "innovation" in Christianity, their own beliefs are dependent on such innovations and many liberal beliefs -- such as a non-substitutionary theory of atonement I will also talk about -- are simply older beliefs that have fallen out of favor. It's also to point out that there are other ways of seeing Jesus, other ways of seeing the appeal of Christianity.

When I talk about the Church Fathers below, I'm referring to a large group of key theologians, bishops, and other church leaders, who guided (and argued about) Christian doctrine in both the West and the East in the 4th through 7th centuries, after the church became organized. When I talk about "early Christians" I am generally talking about the Christians of the generations preceding the Church Fathers. I'm not really going to get into specific enough detail that the distinction is important, but just FYI. And as always, "orthodox" with a "little o" doesn't mean the Orthodox Church but rather an idea, school of thought, or group associated with mainstream Christianity -- meaning the Eastern (that is, Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) Churches in the early days, and Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism later. It's a habit because I'm so often talking about Christian ideas before there really was a Catholic Church.

As I've said before, I think it's ridiculous and harmful that Christianity regularly frames itself in sin-obsessed terms -- and while that sin obsession clearly plays an enormous role in the history of Christianity, its primary sources and core teachings do not make that obsession inevitable. That is, removing the obsession with sin from Christianity is not like removing an obsession with dharma from Buddhism. It's a grit that's been accumulated after leaving the factory.

Really, "Jesus died for your sins" contains several claims:

1: A claim about the meaning and purpose of Jesus's death: that it is the vehicle for atonement.

2: A claim about how atonement is achieved.

3: A claim about sin. The idea that Jesus died for humanity's collective sins is often coupled with ideas about original sin.

Atonement refers to the reconciliation of God and humanity, which requires believing that there is a breach. Believing that humans are not perfect does not necessitate believing that there is such a breach between God and humanity -- like I keep saying, theories of atonement have tended to rise in importance in Christianity as the ideas of original sin and shame have become important.

One thing to keep in mind about early Christian thought is this: after the first generation of Christians, Christianity seems to have rapidly become predominantly gentile (that is, non-Jewish), and certainly this is the case by the second century. Christianity's relationship with Jewish scripture and Jewish thought was a subject of considerable discussion, but: because the Jewish canon itself was not yet assembled, and because rabbinical Judaism developed alongside Christianity and therefore its commentaries on Jewish scripture were written outside of even the earliest Christians' sight, all that Christians took with them from Jewish writing was the "Old Testament" itself.

If this does not seem immediately significant, it's because you were raised in a predominantly Christian culture.

Pound for pound, the Hebrew Bible is easily outweighed by the Talmud -- the central text of rabbinical Judaism, consisting of commentaries on the Bible from antiquity which serving as clarifications, expansions, etc. Think of it as having a similar relationship to the Bible that the body of case law has to the Constitution. The Constitution alone provides a foundation, but once put into play, it immediately raises questions which are resolved in the courts and recorded in judicial decisions.

The Church Fathers not only lacked the Talmud -- which the Jews who preceded them had lacked as well, since as I say, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity developed in tandem -- they lacked the oral tradition of Biblical interpretation to fall back on. Which is not to say that no one brought knowledge of Jewish Biblical interpretation into the mix, but when it came time to interpret the Jewish scriptures in a Christian context, more often than not contemporary perspectives were dominant -- that is, Hellenistic perspectives, the perspectives of philosophers and theologians versed in Greek philosophy and Roman mystery religions -- rather than older Jewish modes of thought.

This is an important frame for understanding Christian thought, really: the reinterpretation of the Old Testament from a new cultural context, one lacking its ancestral Jewish contexts, with Greco-Roman thought and christology rushing in to fill the gaps. That's not so much "another story for another time" as it is something that will keep coming up.

Like I've talked about before, early theological discussion in Christianity -- the first eight or nine centuries, really -- is largely focused on christology, i.e. figuring out the nature of Jesus Christ. That tunnel vision (which, don't get me wrong, was not complete tunnel vision by any means, but still shouldn't be understated) is pretty important to the history of theology for a number of reasons -- not only because it meant that the Medieval theologians generated a flurry of work to address all these previously poorly explored areas of theology, but because the fact that the most mature area of theology (and the area with the most well-developed consensus) dealt with the nature of Christ shaped everyone's thinking in other areas of theology. It sort of guided everyone's arguments.

So that's the main reason that the atonement theories you associate with Christianity have such a late birthday; and that early christological obsession contributes to why later atonement theories are so deeply invested in the supernatural powers of Christ.

But what did early Christians think? What were the early theories of atonement that were displaced by the more supernatural ones?

Honestly, it's pretty fucking simple.

Early Christians, when they talked about atonement at all, from the early generations up through the Church Fathers, subscribed to what historians call the moral influence theory of atonement or the educational view: Jesus didn't die for your sins, and Jesus doesn't reconcile you with God through his death. Jesus brings you back to God through his teachings, which is why he spent all that time in the Gospels being a fucking teacher, before that bit at the very end where he died.

I mean, it's weird that this needs to be pointed out these days.

Really, this is only barely a theory of atonement, because it doesn't necessarily assume a deep breach between God and humanity; the terminology here is ours, the moderns', and we refer to it as the moral influence theory "of atonement" to contrast it with later theories of atonement that displaced it.

For centuries, this was considered obvious: Jesus was the perfect moral teacher. That's why there was a Christianity in the first place; everything else came later. You can certainly bring supernaturalism into this. You don't need to deny him being the Son of God. This is not about reducing Jesus's importance or denying his divinity. But Jesus's divinity should never be more important than his teachings, or you've missed the whole fucking point.

Reconciliation with God is found by following Jesus's teachings, as revealed through both his words and his example. This is far from an easy thing, of course. That's a whole nother matter. Figuring out what exactly Jesus meant half the time is ... well, good luck with those bracelets.

Have you ever fucked up really badly, and gone to someone for forgiveness, and heard, "I don't want to hear another 'I'm sorry,' I just want you to stop doing this?" That's the point of the educational view: not that Jesus's crucifixion wounds open up portals to infinite Golden Tickets of I-forgive-you, but that he taught you to stop fucking up in the first place.

The educational view is found as early as the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas in the early second century. The New Testament itself doesn't really address atonement as such; obviously there are Biblical verses used in support of later theories of atonement, but some of them come from the Old Testament and require the assumption that they were prophetic writings written with the intention of being read in reference to Jesus (and being a Christian does not obligate you to rewrite the Old Testament as a prequel to Jesus), while others are taken out of context or written in the apocalyptic fervor of the first generation of Christians, some of whom expected the Second Coming to occur in their lifetime. The very existence of the Gospels can, in one sense, be read as support for the educational view.

As the idea of the afterlife became more common and more integral, in part as a response to the fact that the world did not end in those early Christians' lifetimes -- and I'll talk another time about the fact that Heaven as the afterlife (rather than God's home) is not an inherent, inevitable belief within Christianity, but one that developed over time, post-Jesus -- Jesus's role was solidified as the one who ensures passage to that afterlife. Specifics vary. The paradigm you're familiar with now -- die and immediately go somewhere, whether Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, depending on your denomination and status of sinfulness -- took a long time to develop and be accepted, which is why some early Christians talk about their own afterlife as a sort of echo of Christ's own resurrection: they envisioned not the transfer of their soul from their dead body to some far off plane of Heaven at the moment of their death, but rather the resurrection and continued inhabitation of their dead bodies at some point in the future, with a period of nonexistence (well, non-consciousness, let's say) in between. The idea that death causes the soul to depart from the body and enter the afterlife trickles into Christianity (and occasionally Hellenistic Jewish thought) via Greek and Roman mythology and especially the popularity of Homer's Odyssey, which provided vivid descriptions of a Greek view of the afterlife that permeated the popular imagination in the same way Dante's descriptions of a late Medieval Christian view of the afterlife have done. (Even those early Christians who write about the soul departing in this way from the body don't write about Heaven in the sense that we depict it now; while it's notable that their Heaven isn't a below-ground underworld, it's basically a waiting room near God where the souls of the dead wait for the time of their bodily resurrection, which is still the endgame.)

I don't really want to get into the way that Heaven was itself increasingly supernaturalized and paradis...ized..?, except insofar as to say that it was part of the same trend in changing thinking which altered Jesus's role. The afterlife became a complicated place, with all those circles of Hell and seven heavens and all of Aquinas's granularities of sin frittering away the hit points of your soul.

The "physical theory" of atonement, of Church Father Athanasius, comes in quite early, in the 4th century, and is certainly more mystical than the educational view that otherwise prevailed both then and for several centuries afterward. "Jesus became human that we might become divine," Athanasius said, which sums it up best -- but while this sounds a little like "Jesus died for your sins," there are some key differences from what became orthodox (little-o) Christian thought. First, Athanasius's emphasis is on the incarnation, not the crucifixion -- that is, not just Jesus's death but the fact that he became human at all and had to suffer any mortal indignities, since Athie is writing early enough that he's still arguing with people who believe that Christ was fully divine and never experienced mortality. Second, he had a very extreme view of humanity's fall from grace, one that doesn't comport either with orthodox Christian thought or most Jewish thought -- for him, Adam himself was a divine being before the fall, an idea with no real Biblical support apart from the notion that, because he was made by God rather than being born, Adam is, like Jesus, the "son of God."

For the physical theory, then, the mechanism is not so much Jesus's death-event wiping out the stain of sin but Jesus's mortality -- which includes the inevitability of death -- restoring a divine birthright to the descendants of Adam as a sort of equilibrium. Different and more involved than the educational view, absolutely! Christ-obsessed, yes. But not as shaming and sin-centric as "Jesus died for your sins."

Substitution theories of atonement develop around the idea that humanity deserves to die for its sins, but Jesus's death on the cross transpires instead. We still die individual deaths, of course, but we have the opportunity to be resurrected in Heaven. See what I mean about how all these strains of thought need to develop alongside each other -- this model of atonement kind of needs a well-developed reward-based Heaven in place. Anyway: there are various forms of the substitution theory. One of the early ones is the ransom theory, which says that Satan has dominion over humankind because they're sinful, but Jesus's death pays the ransom price. This was displaced by the satisfaction theory, which is basically the dominant substitution theory today, and which says that wait no, the price isn't owed to Satan, but to God, and that Christ's death is the sacrifice offered by God to God to pay humanity's debt to Himself. Basically. It's the satisfaction theory (of Anselm) that Aquinas modifies and codifies in his Summa Theologiae, a mammoth work of Catholic theology that comes to dominate Catholic thought, especially in the Thomist revival of the 16th and 17th centuries, when everyone was sort of newly able to appreciate his intellectual rigor.

If you've ever read a web page proving the Hollow Earth theory, you know that impressively detailed arguments don't actually make you right.

There are a lot of reasons the substitution theory succeeded in becoming dominant. Many of them have to do with the scaffolding surrounding it -- that is, it's consistent with all the other developments in theology that were going on. The moral influence model just looks dowdy and ordinary compared to the glittery supernaturalism of Medieval theology, with all its different kinds of angels and all that shit.

But part of it has to do with one of the central facts of earliest Christianity:

Jesus died on the cross.

I mean, that's obvious, you know that. But one reason that even the historians who want to whittle the "definite facts" about Jesus down to the barest minimum keep that one in the mix is because there is no way you would tell people your religious leader had been crucified unless you knew that everybody knew about it already and there was nothing you could do except to get ahead of the story. The earliest form of that is just the Eminem 8 Mile version: yeah he was crucified, tell these people something they don't know about me. You just own the thing and act like it doesn't embarrass you so your enemies can't use it against you. A later version, a much later version? Make it the source of your guy's superpowers. Oh that? That's not kryptonite, that's a fucking ray gun.

The Fall and Original Sin

The Old Testament, the New Testament (mainly Paul), and the Church Fathers all talk about the Fall of Man, that is, Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. Quotes referring to the Fall are often used in later writings talking about the doctrine of original sin.

Here's the problem (or rather, the good news). These two concepts are not the same. In contemporary Christian discourse, "original sin" refers specifically to the idea of ancestral or inherited sin. This too is a sneaky conflation: the term "original sin" in the sense of "the first sin committed" sometimes appears in Jewish literature, but mainstream Jewish teaching does not include the idea of inherited sin.

Which means the Christians who developed the doctrine of original sin were not simply carrying over the Jewish interpretation of the Fall -- although often the way the Bible is taught by Christians today, this is implied -- but were once again introducing innovation to their interpretation of the Jewish scripture, by marrying classical Greco-Roman ideas like ancestral fault, Biblical tropes like collective retribution, and orthodox Christianity's growing emphasis on shame.

The idea of inherited sin is very different from the idea -- common to most religions or, really, most systems of belief, period -- that most people, even well-meaning good-natured people, will fuck up from time to time. Even the idea of "sin" in the sense of a weight on your soul impacting your post-death fate as the result of your adhering to received moral rules, well, that's different too, but you can buy into the idea of individual sin without buying the idea of inherited sin that exists independently of the individual's actions.

In the early Christian writings on the Fall, the consequences of the Fall are not a permanent taint of inherited sin that is borne by every future human, but rather the consequences actually described and detailed in Genesis: mortality and the need to labor for one's daily survival. In ancient Jewish thought, Genesis 3 is not even the enormous trauma that Christians turn it into.

Once you starting leaning on this original sin business, this idea that everybody is born with two strikes, the educational view of atonement doesn't seem to cut it anymore. What good is Jesus if all he does is teach us how to be awesome people? Being awesome people isn't going to wipe this magical sin taint off of us! We need to fight this magic with other magic. Give us some Jesus magic. Thus, Jesus dying for your sins.

Of course, the development of the doctrine of original sin (which begins with the Church Fathers -- Augustine, bless his fucked up little heart -- but wasn't fully developed until quite a bit later) and its use to subsequently justify and develop substitutionary theories of atonement resulted in a framework in which it was difficult for Christians to imagine salvation for non-Christians (or unbaptized dead babies, etc). Fast-forward that a couple centuries and subtract a lot of religious literacy and you wind up with a lot of sort-of Christians or half-atheists figuring every other religion is just so-and-so's map to atonement, which isn't true either.

Next up on Easter talk, probably some stuff about how being obsessed with the end of the world and your entrance into a Heavenly paradise leads to a life of being an irresponsible dick who doesn't care about the future or the planet.

Have a Creme egg.

self-judgment and self-compassion

This is actually expanding from a Facebook post, but going into new territory for this blog, insofar as I haven't previously discussed being in therapy here, I don't think. I don't think that's something I can go into a lot of detail about too often or anything, but I do think this particular concept is useful to talk about.

What I'm working on lately in therapy is self-compassion. Words like self-compassion are why therapy can sound like a lot of hug-yourself rigmarole, I know, and that's one reason it took so long for me to find a therapist I was comfortable with (and admit the need for therapy), but bear with me here.

The broad strokes of the backstory that you need to understand are that I was abused as a kid, intermittently over a period of years in a series of instances involving multiple abusers (only one abuser at a time, to be clear, none of them relatives; so many books aimed at child abuse survivors, especially male ones, are aimed at survivors of incest, because it's so commonly the case). As is typically the case with male victims, I didn't begin really dealing with this until my late thirties -- I didn't "forget," these aren't recovered memories, I just didn't deal with it.

The effects of abuse are not always the obvious ones. I have all kinds of jumpiness tics -- I have trouble sitting with my back to the door, if someone wakes me up I wake up fast and violently, I have what they call an exaggerated startle response. These are things you might start to think of if you were to make a list predicting the adult-onset effects of childhood trauma. Other things I think are less predictable unless you have experience in this area, like my habit of self-judgment.

In therapy, we keep coming back to one of the examples that I used when I first brought up the problem I was having: the awesome pan Caitlin got me. So let me use that to explain.

Caitlin got me this awesome pan. It was a non-stick pan with high sides, big enough to cook a couple burgers or chops on, high enough to cook tomato sauce or curry in ... basically, I found out quickly that I could use it for almost anything, and it was such a joy to cook with that I cooked everything in it. Sure, it aged a little like all pans do, especially since I was using it multiple times a day, but it held up remarkably well.

Until I braised beef shanks in it.

One of the things you aren't supposed to do is cook bones in it, especially if you're braising, where the bones can move around. The bones scrape the nonstick coating. When they're braising, and moving around, they scrape it a lot.

That one meal ended the pan. And this is the nature of nonstick pans (especially the good ones): they don't go from "great non-stick pans" to "decent non-stick pans" to "eh, decent pans." They go from "non-stick pans" to "very very sticky pans." Once you ruin a non-stick pan, it doesn't become as mediocre as your other pans, it becomes worse than them. The pan was unusable except to boil water -- and even then, pasta would stick to the bottom if I cooked too much of it.

It took me a long time to throw that pan out.

When I finally did, I felt horribly guilty. I had felt guilty about ruining it anyway -- ruining a gift! -- but I felt worse for throwing it away, even though I couldn't use it and it was taking up space in our tiny kitchen which we had just put considerable effort into rearranging -- we had just bought new furniture, relocated the liquor cabinet to a different room, moved the appliances and changed what went in which cabinet ... all to maximize the little bit of space in there ... and yet I couldn't bring myself to throw out the largest pan in the kitchen, or even to put it in the loft for storage, even though I never used it and never would. And I waited until she wasn't home to throw it out!

Caitlin did not feel bad about me throwing it away at all. She was not at any time mad at me for ruining the pan, and pointed out that I had used it so much that I had gotten more value out of it than a lot of other kitchen things we own.

But I felt terribly guilty and ashamed for ruining this pan. I still feel bad when I think about it.

There are many mechanisms feeding into this. The one that ties the most directly into self-compassion is this: it is very difficult for me to feel sadness.

That sounds crazy.

I know it sounds ridiculous, especially when I say I didn't really realize it until I was 40, but the sort of "sadness algorithm" for me has worked like this:

* SADNESS EVENT occurs.

* SADNESS begins.

* SADNESS truncated, as SELF-JUDGMENT kicks in, flooding the system with SHAME, GUILT, or sometimes ANGER.

So, something that causes sadness occurs, I feel negative emotions, and I think "well, I'm feeling sad about this," but it's not actual sadness I'm feeling. Even typing this, it sounds nuts, or it sounds like something that should have been obvious. But you feel bad, so maybe you need a third party to point out that it's not the context-appropriate flavor of bad.

To underscore the point here: I don't just feel disproportionate shame or guilt in response to shame- or guilt-provoking events; I also feel shame or guilt instead of most other negative emotions. (Anger is easier to feel than sadness, but it's also easy to direct back on myself.)

Self-judgment is the, like, engine that powers the machines doing all of this. I don't wallow in problems and feel like I'm the only one they happen to, but I do over-identify with them and feel like they are the result of my choices, character, or inaction, rather than bad luck or the actions of other agents.

Self-compassion, then, is the alternative, or the healthy thing that is supposed to be happening instead. Self-compassion is the ability to respond to ruining the pan by saying "oh shit, my favorite pan, now I can't cook with my favorite pan anymore, this fucking sucks," and feeling sad about it, instead of getting angry at myself for it. This is the thing I need to work on. Without talking too much about my history of abuse here, it is true that I have not, historically, done a very good job about letting myself feel sad about it having happened, as opposed to angry with myself for not having prevented it. So there are a lot of seeds there. And I won't lie, even typing that, the angry part of me is nodding and saying, well yes, you should be angry. This is something I'm working on, not something I have fixed. It's something I'm still only now learning to see.

When I posted about this on Facebook, thinking this was some crazy thing nobody else has trouble with, enough other people responded with "oh yeah, I talk about that in therapy too" that I thought I would post something more expansive, because who knows, maybe this is a problem for somebody else too, and you've just never heard it articulated.

bernie, ron paul, that asshole who doesn't vote

There's a lot that I like about Bernie Sanders. It's increasingly difficult to stomach many of his supporters.

My beat's religion, not politics, so I'll be brief, but there are a handful of things bothering me.

The attacks on Clinton by Sanders supporters, especially over her centrism or that of Bill's presidency, feel like the latest example in decades of infighting within the Democratic Party that have consistently contributed to its weakness. The Republican Party somehow succeeds in creating a big tent for both war hawks and isolationists, and for all the talk that the Religious Right, the Tea Party, and the moderates are going to destroy the party in their efforts to tear each other apart, they keep sticking together out of fear of effective Democratic leadership. Even after facing the most obstructionist Congress in history, Democrats can't manage to see the big picture in the same way. This is not new. This keeps happening.

What Sanders supporters keep reminding me of is Ron Paul supporters. Paul and Sanders both present platforms that are simple to digest -- big statements, no dithering, four color palette. For perhaps this reason, they both attract supporters who have not been happy with the mainstream of their respective parties -- parties "tainted" by the necessity of compromise and the limits of what can actually be accomplished. In both cases, I keep seeing supporters -- not all, in Bernie's case, but certainly too many -- who are hostile both to "compromised" candidates like Clinton and, really, to the very idea of pragmatism. From this, it is not a hard leap to conspiracy.

Like with Ron Paul, Sanders attracts a share of supporters who are not usually passionate about candidates, which contributes to the frequency of conspiracy claims, both because of their naivete and perhaps because they feel so strongly that they don't understand how their candidate could perform badly except as the result of interference.

Maybe it's because I've both lived in New Hampshire and spent plenty of time online, and so have had ample opportunity to listen to Ron Paul supporters in many previous election years -- I just see so many comments from Bernie supporters that could be copy and pasted word for word from disgruntled Ron Paul acolytes of the past, and that should be bothering them. Christ, the fact that any of us know who Ron Paul is should be bothering all of us, but that's a whole nother thing.

There's another bothersome subset, too, of course, the "I haven't found a candidate I've felt comfortable voting for in umpteen years, so Bernie is the first one I'm voting for" guy (it's usually a guy). This is the lowest form of voter, inexcusable in anyone past college age: the voter who thinks his vote is supposed to be a form of self-expression.

Fuck you, self-expression guy.

We need to be more clear about this as a society, I think. We so often emphasize voting as a privilege, and that's important, but it's a responsibility as well. Part of voting as a responsibility is understanding that the office will be filled and that real, consequence-bearing actions will transpire whether you deign to participate in them or not. Lack of participation is still participation. Your responsibility is not to find the manner of voting that best expresses to us who you are as a voter. It's to spend your vote in the way that achieves the best results. I've read a million screeds justifying the power of not voting, because yes, I'm in my 40s and I fucking remember fanzines too, but they're all horseshit, lazy ridiculous Know Nothing horseshit.

The idea of sitting at home and avoiding most of the elections because you're waiting for your ideal candidate to come along, the one worth of your vote? Fuck -- oh, I said this already, fuck you, self-expression guy. It's worth saying more than once, because you know what? Here it comes again. Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck your favorite TV show, I hope it gets remade by someone really fucking shitty.

The idea of your vote as this precious thing that can only get spent on something that perfectly reflects who you are deep deep down inside, that is just so fucking shitty and ridiculous and unfortunately way too common. My reflex is to call it immoral. My gut feeling is that you are fucking us over, you are letting the rest of us down. You are dropping your corner of the couch while waiting to carry the couch that better reflects your needs and qualities as a furniture mover, which may make you feel good in the short-term, but leaves the rest of us with more to carry and doesn't change a fucking thing about how the room looks.

Because I have such disdain, such contempt, such moral disgust for this "I will wear this purity ring until I find the candidate worth of deflowering my vote" horseshit, my hackles instinctively go up when a candidate draws these particular flies.

Moving on from the discomfort I have with some of the outliers among Bernie's supporters, I have to say that the candidate himself isn't perfect either. Now, this doesn't bother me especially. What candidate is, obviously. But the "Clinton, tainted insider compromiser poopy head" vs "Sanders, progressive Democratic Socialist superhero" narrative, ridiculous enough in the first place, is only tenable if Sanders is a credible progressive superhero, and the first problems I ever had with Sanders remain the biggest ones: he just isn't progressive enough, he's more of a white-appealing class-focused populist. He certainly isn't progressive enough to be held up as a progressive ideal.

Look at Sanders' pie in the sky, a goose-that-lays-a-golden-egg in every pot, plans for half the issues in his platform, and then compare that ambition to what he says about climate change, which in the end is ... very little. The only reason he even sounds liberal about climate change, much less progressive, is because the United States is batshit fucking crazy when it comes to climate change, and we still have climate change deniers walking amongst us like they're regular fucking people. His plans, such as they are, are essentially conservative ones.

Worse, consider Sanders on racial justice. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the succinct and damning point here (and expanded here): given that none of Bernie's plans for anything are practical and none of them come with an explanation for how he plans to get them past a rigidly obstructionist Congress, why are reparations singled out as the issue he dismisses as impractical, without further discussion? If you really consider yourself a progressive, this should bother you. Coupled with how little Sanders' supporters seem to care about his lack of support among non-whites, it should bother you a lot.