The Little Red Blog

Meeting Paul Again for the First Time

{This being the second installment in my discussion of Paul, “The First Christian”. It seems best to post on this topic once a week; for now, then, Monday is "Paul Day" at this blog.}

"See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!" (Paul, Galatians)

A further preliminary to a discussion of Paul: when we read the New Testament as it has been traditionally arranged, we are reading it wrong—that is, we are reading it out of chronological order. In doing so, we are likely to acquire some mistaken ideas about the development of Christian beliefs and about where and how Paul fits into that process.

The New Testament presents its writings in this sequence: four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John); Acts (or “Acts of the Apostles”), credited to the author of Luke’s gospel; Paul’s letters (seven considered to be genuine) and a scattering of pseudo-Pauline and other letters; and, finally, Revelation (credited to “John” but with little certainty about who “John” was), an early Christian apocalypse. That is the familiar and comfortable pattern to which Christians have become accustomed: the New Testament puts Jesus’ life in the foreground, followed by Acts and its narrative of the early Church (with Paul in the starring role), and only then the writings of Paul himself.

Modern scholars agree that none of the New Testament was written during Jesus’ lifetime. They also agree that Paul’s letters are the earliest documents we have regarding Jesus of Nazareth, written 20-30 years after Jesus’ death. They were also written decades (20-50 years) before the gospels and the other books in the Christian canon. While dating of the New Testament books remains both contentious and imprecise, scholars do not question the primacy of the Pauline writings over the gospels, over Acts, and over the rest of the New Testament. Simply put, Paul indisputably came first; his letters are therefore the logical starting place for a study of the nascent Christian movement.

Unfortunately, due to the placement of Paul’s writings in the New Testament— where they come after the four gospels and Acts—by the time we (that is, most readers) get to them, we have already formed a picture of Jesus and of his followers. We inevitably read Paul with that picture in mind; the gospels, especially the three synoptic gospels, create a lens through which everything that follows is seen. Since Paul, in his letters, makes almost no reference to the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, we tend to use the gospels to fill in the blanks; we also tend to assume that Paul knows all (or most of, or many of) the stories about Jesus contained in the gospels. ¹

So, too, when considering Paul’s accounts of early Christian practices and beliefs, the reader unconsciously harmonizes Paul’s statements with Acts, despite numerous discrepancies in the accounts. When it comes to Acts, placed as it is between the gospels and Paul’s letters, we also need to employ what scholars refer to as a “hermeneutic of suspicion”. While scholars agree that Acts was written by the same author who wrote the Gospel According to Luke, they disagree as to whether Luke, whoever he was, knew Paul or traveled with him (as Acts would lead us to believe). Even though most of what we “know” about Paul’s pre-Christian background comes from Acts, very little of what Acts tells us is verified by Paul himself: e.g. Paul does not say he was born in Tarsus, nor does he say he studied in Jerusalem under the Pharisee Gamaliel—those details are found only in Acts and we have no way of knowing if they are accurate.

Moreover, the picture Luke gives us of the early Christian movement consistently downplays internal conflicts in the movement (conflicts presented very differently by Paul). The details that Acts provides about Paul do not always match what Paul says in his letters, and the book offers three versions of Paul’s “conversion” experience, all of which go far beyond Paul’s only account (in his Letter to the Galatians).

Acts gives us some of the more memorable claims about Paul; despite their dubious authenticity, they have helped form the Pauline legend. For one thing, Acts says that Paul was present, as a young Jewish man named “Saul,” at the stoning of Stephen, a disciple of Jesus. In describing the scene, Luke tells us that “the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul” and that “Saul was there, giving approval to [Stephen’s] death.” Paul, who freely admits to having originally opposed the Jesus movement, does not mention this incident in his letters; it is of questionable historicity.

Not long after, we are told that Saul “was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples,” until, on his way to Damascus, he had a blinding vision of Jesus. In Damascus, according to Acts, Paul was healed by a follower of Jesus named Ananias; he was also baptized at that time. The “murderous threats” have little if any historical credibility. As for the vision on the way to Damascus, Paul provides only a cursory reference to (but no description of) the experience itself, nor does he mention Ananias or, for that matter, having been baptized by anyone. In short, Paul’s account does nothing to confirm the narrative in Acts.

These discrepancies (and others) between Acts and Paul’s letters have provided the grist for centuries of exegetical mills, and they continue to be vigorously disputed; this is yet one more reason why a study of Paul needs to be based on his own writings, understood in the context of what we know of first-century Judaism in the Roman Empire. 

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¹ Paul acknowledges, in his Letter to the Galatians, that he had been a zealous persecutor of Jesus' early followers. We know, therefore, that prior to his life-changing revelation he had heard something about Jesus--if nothing else, he had heard the messianic claims that the disciples were making, claims that included Jesus' having been raised from the dead. Nothing in Paul's letters, however, suggest that he knew or cared about the Jesus we know from the gospels.

Sunday Sermon

Thomas Merton (from "No Man Is an Island"):

No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning. That, indeed, is one reason why man tends to rebel against himself. If he could without effort see what the meaning of life is, and if he could fulfill his ultimate purpose without trouble, he would never question the fact that life is well worth living. Or if he saw at once that life had no purpose and no meaning, the question would never arise. In either case, man would not be capable of finding himself so much of a problem. Our life, as individual persons and as members of a perplexed and struggling race, provokes us with the evidence that it must have meaning. Part of the meaning still escapes us. Yet our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for. The process of living, of growing up, and becoming a person, is precisely the gradually increasing awareness of what that something is…

Although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you "rho you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within…

An optimistic view of life is not necessarily always a virtuous thing. In a time like ours, only the coarse grained still have enough resistance to preserve their fair-weather principles unclouded by anxiety. Such optimism may be comfortable: but is it safe? In a world where every lie has currency, is not anxiety the more real and the more human reaction? Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions-because they might turn out to have no answer.

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. Then I mean something of the fulfillment of his own God-given powers, in the love of others and of God. I mean also the discovery that he cannot find himself in himself alone, but that he must find himself in and through others…

This matter of "salvation" is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.

Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot Ieve others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love of ourselves is something we owe to others. This truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others. The modern world is beginning to discover, more and more, that the quality and vitality of a man's life depend on his own secret will to go on living. There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the "death instinct." It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed.

It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be "as gods." We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and "one body," will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another's achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time.

Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind…What I do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me. But each one of us remains responsible for his own share in the life of the whole body. Charity cannot be what it is supposed to be as long as I do not see that my life represents my own allotment in the life of a whole supernatural organism to which I belong. Only when this truth is absolutely central do other doctrines fit into their proper context.

Solitude, humility, self-denial, action and contemplation, the sacraments, the monastic life, the family, war and peace—none of these make sense except in relation to the central reality…Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."

Blinks Again, Naturally

Writing at Aeon, the philosopher David Papineau argues that “knowledge” is an outmoded concept:

For those philosophers who work in epistemology (the ‘theory of knowledge’), the holy grail is to pin down the nature of knowledge and explain why it matters. But despite thousands upon thousands of articles devoted to the topic, the philosophers haven’t been able to come up with a good story. I say that’s because they’re barking up the wrong tree. The notion of knowledge doesn’t in fact pick out anything important. It’s a crude concept we have inherited from our prehistoric ancestors, and it positively handicaps us in our dealings with the modern world…yet somehow the archaic concept of knowledge keeps us in its grip, like an old lover we can’t get out of our system. It messes us up in so many ways. We really need to forget about knowledge.

Papineau contrasts our willingness to accept eyewitness evidence, despite its proven fallibility, with our unwillingness to accept hard data in the form of statistics; which may only go to show either our widespread innumeracy or our instinctive sense that Mark Twain had it right when he mentioned “lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

https://aeon.co/essays/knowledge-is-a-stone-age-concept-were-better-off-without-it

At the New Yorker, Masha Gessen confesses her teenage crush on the late Ayn Rand. Reviewing Lisa Duggan’s MEAN GIRL: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, Gessen writes:

In a dark corner of my house, where a built-in bookshelf curves out of sight and out of reach, near the ceiling, I keep a couple dozen books that I haven’t brought myself to get rid of but don’t want anyone to see. It’s a connoisseur’s collection of the writing of Ayn Rand and her disciples, assembled by teen-age me a long, long time ago. My first girlfriend, an older woman in her early twenties, introduced me to Rand. I had recently immigrated to the United States from Russia, come out, and dropped out of high school, and somehow Rand’s writing spoke to me, made the world appear simple and conquerable. My Rand phase was relatively brief, but, before it ended, I bluffed my way into my first job in publishing by talking Rand with my future boss, a trailblazing gay publisher who was similarly obsessed with her.

According to Gessen, Ms. Duggan gets at the heart of Rand’s appeal as a novelist:

Rand’s novels promised to liberate the reader from everything that he had been taught was right and good. She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious, physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were. Duggan calls the mood of the books “optimistic cruelty.” They are mean, and they have a happy ending—that is, the superior beings are happy in the end. The novels reverse morality. In them, there is no duty to God or one’s fellow-man, only to self. Sex is plentiful, free of consequence, and rough. Money and other good things come to those who take them. Rand’s plots legitimize the worst effects of capitalism, creating what Duggan calls “a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.”

It was Whittaker Chambers who famously said of Ayn Rand’s work that its subliminal message was “To the gas chambers, go.” It would be unfair to compare ATLAS SHRUGGED to MEIN KAMPF—but then, as Rand herself would have agreed, life isn’t fair.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-persistent-ghost-of-ayn-rand-the-forebear-of-zombie-neoliberalism

Finally, John Goodman (no, not that one), writing at Quadrant, reviews a book titled THE MEMORY ILLUSION:

Julia Shaw’s book The Memory Illusion is a breakthrough in the jurisprudence of memory: the main question posed is not whether our memory is wrong on any given occasion but how wrong. It is thus essential reading for police, lawyers, judges, juries, insurance assessors, journalists … and anyone else who wants to understand why everybody else in the family “remembers” details of your family’s past differently from you. Her book discloses what modern brain science shows about how human memory functions, and where and how it is fallible. The title chosen for the German-language translation of her book—The Treacherous Memory—perhaps sums it all up best.

In his brief review, Goodman claims that Shaw’s book:

shows that police, lawyers, courts and judges universally have little or no idea of how the memory function works inside the human brain, or of the physical and psychological weaknesses to which it is heir. To be fair, until the discoveries of modern brain science, no one else had a fair idea either, although some insights have long come down to us from humanist writers, among them historians, early psychologists and novelists…But modern brain science now puts things on a scientific basis, difficult or impossible to ignore.

How very helpful of modern brain science to undermine our memories! Perhaps David Papineau (above) could provide us with a statistical measurement of the accuracy of the human memory; or perhaps, since we’ve disqualified observation, knowledge, and memory, we should just let AI take over. In the words of Bob Dylan, “We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/speak-memory/

Josh Hawley and the Age of Pelagius

“Harmony and understanding / Sympathy and trust abounding / No more falsehoods or derisions / Golden living dreams of visions / Mystic crystal revelation / And the mind's true liberation / This is the dawning of the Age of Pelagius, the Age of Pelagius, Pelagius, Pelagius…”

At last there is someone in American public life who speaks my language! Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is the newest darling on the Right, and for good reason: he has put his finger on what ails our culture. The ailment in question, according to Hawley, is the dreaded Christian heresy of Pelagianism, with its false promises of “liberty” and “perfection”. As Hawley explains:

For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice.

It is a philosophy that has defined our age, though it is far from new. In fact, its most influential proponent lived 1,700 years ago: a British monk who eventually settled in Rome named Pelagius. So thoroughly have his teachings informed our recent past and precipitated our present crisis that we might refer to this era as the Age of Pelagius.

How this ancient, discredited doctrine insinuated itself into our present-day lives, Hawley does not say, but he makes it clear that Pelagianism, for all its superficial allure, is a Bad Thing:

But here is the irony. Though the Pelagian vision celebrates the individual, it leads to hierarchy. Though it preaches merit, it produces elitism. Though it proclaims liberty, it destroys the life that makes liberty possible. Replacing it and repairing the profound harm it has caused is one of the great challenges of our day.

Senator Hawley, who is a graduate of Stanford and of Yale Law School, is smart as a whip, though his oversimplified and tendentious distortion of Pelagianism may annoy certain effete intellectual snobs with an irrational animus against Augustine (Pelagius’ theological nemesis). Nonetheless, what Hawley wants us to understand is that Pelagian “freedom” is just another word for “wealthy elite with power and privilege”:

Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary statement of Pelagian freedom appears in an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, in a passage written by former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 1992, in a case called Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, he wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

 

It’s the Pelagian vision. Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self. Indeed, this notion of freedom says you can emancipate yourself not just from God but from society, family, and tradition.

 

The Pelagian view says the individual is most free when he is most alone, able to choose his own way without interference. Family and tradition, neighborhood and church—these things get in the way of uninhibited free choice. And this Pelagian idea of freedom is one our cultural leaders have embraced for decades now.

 

But here’s the paradox. For all the big talk about individual freedom, Pelagian philosophy has made American society more hierarchical, and it has made it more elitist. This is no accident. Pelagius himself was most popular with the old senatorial families of Rome—the wealthy, the well-connected. The aristocrats. They were his patrons. And why? He validated their privilege and their power.

Unlike most conservatives, Hawley sees the connection, in a society based on the cash nexus, between money and liberty:

If freedom means choice among options, then the people with the most choices are the most free. And that means the rich. And if salvation is about achievement, then those with the most accolades are righteous, and that means the elite and the strong. A Pelagian society is one that celebrates the wealthy, prioritizes the powerful, rewards the privileged. And for too long now, that has described modern America.

Theology aside, Hawley sometimes sounds an awful lot like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders:  

In the last five decades, our society has become hierarchical. Consider: If you are wealthy or well-educated, your life prospects are bright. College graduates and those with advanced degrees enjoy markedly higher wages. They rarely divorce. They have higher life expectancy. They enjoy better access to better healthcare. Their children attend better schools and score better on achievement tests. They have more opportunities for civic involvement and participation.

But if you don’t have family wealth and don’t have a four-year degree—and that’s 70 percent of Americans—well, the future is far less glowing. These Americans haven’t seen a real wage increase in 30 years. These Americans are fighting to hold their families together, as divorce rates surge. For these Americans, healthcare is unaffordable. Drug addiction is growing. And too many of their local communities, especially rural ones, have been gutted as industry consolidates and ships jobs away.

A society divided by class, where one class enjoys all the advantages, is a society gripped by hierarchy. It is also a society defined by elitism. Of course, our elites don’t use that word. They say their privileged position comes from merit and achievement. They point to their SAT scores and prestigious degrees. They talk about economic efficiency…The truth is, the people at the top of our society have built a culture and an economy that work mainly for themselves.

What, then, is the solution to our Pelagian woes? Do we need to articulate a broad program for social justice? Ought we to institute a guaranteed annual income? Should we eliminate college tuition? Can we at least provide universal healthcare?

Senator Hawley, alas, is a conservative Republican, and he is unlikely to support any such measures. Instead, his energies are devoted to banning abortion, to overturning Obamacare, and to supporting President Trump’s treatment of families seeking asylum at the southern border. In his spare time, he likes to denounce the Sixties’ “sexual revolution” and to advocate  “a Christian vision for Kingdom politics,” based on the idea that “Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present.”  ¹ Hawley insists that “theocracy” is the last thing on his mind; all he wants is a restoration of Mosaic law (in principle, not in sectarian detail) and for Christians to “immanentize the eschaton” (bring about God’s Kingdom) “winsomely, creatively, [and] heartily.”

Not yet forty, with ties to the Federalist Society and having clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Josh Hawley exemplifies modern conservatism’s long, deliberate march through American institutions; whether his intention is to undermine those institutions or to strengthen and reinvigorate them depends, I suppose, on your attitude towards Pelagianism.

One thing is for sure, though: Senator Hawley bears watching.

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https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/june-web-only/age-of-pelagius-joshua-hawley.html

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/10/26/christian-vision-for-kingdom-politics/

¹ For what it's worth, I don't disagree with Senator Hawley on this point, though the devil lurks in the details.

The First Christian

"Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?"                          (Paul, 1 Corinthians)

Speaking only for myself, but paraphrasing Robert Haas: All the new thinking is about Paul. In this it resembles all the old thinking.

To grapple with Original Sin, as I have repeatedly done, is to grapple with Paul; to grapple with Augustine, as I have also done, is to grapple with Paul; to grapple at all with Christianity is, inevitably, to grapple with Paul. Paul is the heart of the New Testament artichoke, the core of the Christian apple and the apple of the Christian eye; he has been the sine qua non of Western thought ever since the demise of Rome, the man James Tabor has called “the most influential person in human history, [having] shaped practically all we think about everything.” ¹

It is time, then, for me to grapple directly with Paul. Please make yourselves comfortable; this may take some time.

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On such a weighty topic, one needs to begin with some preliminary throat-clearing.

For one thing, what David Bentley Hart says about the New Testament as a whole unquestionably applies to Paul, whose thinking “emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities (conquered by Christ but powerful to the end) and torn between spirit and flesh (the one, according to Paul, longing for God, the other opposing him utterly). There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgment that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent…” The fact is, Paul fervently believed and took with the utmost seriousness all sorts of things that would strike us today as sheer lunacy; should he be magically transported from his time to ours, there is no way he would escape the clutches of the DSM. ² The same, of course, could as easily be said of Jesus. Christianity is built on a foundation of bizarre notions and failed eschatological expectations; on the other hand, it’s lasted two thousand years, so we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it.

When reading Paul, then, it is wise to remember that what seems to us to be either metaphor or hyperbole, Paul frequently meant literally; e.g. his description to the Thessalonians of the impending return of Jesus: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God , and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”  Paul was emphatically not being fanciful; what he wrote was exactly what he believed would take place, and (according to him) he had it on good authority.

Readers of Paul should also expect to find plenty of contradictions, sometimes within the self-same document. In his Letter to the Romans, for instance, Paul says (2:13) “Those who obey the law will be declared righteous”; however, one chapter later (3:20), he declares, “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in [God’s] sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” Paul tangled himself in knots, at times, attempting to prove the superiority of faith (in Jesus) over dutiful observance of the law, while seeking simultaneously not to jettison the law entirely. Similarly, his exuberant proclamations of freedom for those who believed in Jesus gave way to cautions regarding the ends to which that freedom was to be put.

The documents we have from Paul are all letters, not carefully prepared tracts; they were sometimes written in haste, probably not subjected to much editing or revising, and were presumably dictated to scribes who may not have bothered pointing out contradictions to Paul. We ought to keep in mind that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and that, like Walt Whitman, Paul was large; he contained multitudes.

Of the writing of books about Paul, there is no end, just as there is no shortage of opinions about him. Fierce academic arguments (and actual wars!) have been fought over almost every jot and tittle of the Pauline literary corpus. His letters were all written in Greek, and no self-respecting Pauline scholar would presume to assess them without having read them in the original—English translations will simply not do (and are also notoriously diverse in their interpretations). Since I am not a scholar, I will be forced to rely on the kindness of strangers who are scholars; which means that, despite my lack of credentials, I will also be forced to choose among their conflicting views: was Paul a loyal Jew, faithful to Jewish law, or was he an apostate, a traitor to his religion? Did Paul teach a gospel of his own devising or did he accurately transmit the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth (whom he never met) and of Jesus’ closest disciples? What did Paul even know about Jesus? ³ What did Paul teach about the Eucharist, about the End Times, about the resurrection, or about the anti-Christ?

Inquiring minds want to know all the above, and more. In planning for my doubtless idiosyncratic inquiry, I have gathered some sources (there will be others, I’m sure):

Ronald Goetz, “Cosmic Groanings”

Kirster Stendahl, “Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West”

James Tabor, PAUL & JESUS

Stephen Westerholm, ISRAEL’S LAW & THE CHURCH’S FAITH

Elaine Pagels, THE GNOSTIC PAUL

Alan Segal, PAUL THE CONVERT

David Bentley Hart (translator), NEW TESTAMENT

A.N. Wilson, PAUL: The Mind of an Apostle

Garry Wills, WHAT PAUL MEANT

John Dominic Crossan, IN SEARCH OF PAUL

F.F. Bruce, PAUL: The Apostle of the Heart Set Free

Michael Grant, SAINT PAUL

N.T. Wright, PAUL

Bruce Chilton, RABBI PAUL

Hyam Maccoby: THE MYTHMAKER: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

Barrie Wilson, HOW JESUS BECAME CHRISTIAN

Calvin Roetzel, PAUL: A Jew on the Margins

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, PAUL: A Critical Life

Paula Fredriksen, PAUL: Apostle to the Pagans

Magnus Zetterholm, APPROACHES TO PAUL

Gentle reader, let not your heart be troubled; I will not be blogging about Paul on any regular basis. He will, however, be occupying my thoughts and my reading time for the foreseeable future (renting space, as it were, in my head); although one thing we learn from Paul is our inability to foresee the future, no matter how convinced we may be otherwise.    

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¹ Tabor immediately acknowledges that his claim employs “extravagant language,” but he stands by it, and I for one find it defensible.

² “DSM” is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals for the purpose of diagnosing their patients. At a minimum, I suspect Paul would be given Seroquel and Prozac; even then, I would keep the restraints handy.

³ Whatever information Paul may have had about Jesus, and from whomever he received it, he forthrightly pledged that in his ministry he would “know nothing except Christ, and him crucified.” Would it be unfair to compare that to a self-styled “expert” on Abraham Lincoln promising to “know nothing except President Lincoln, and him assassinated”? Neither the Sermon on the Mount nor the Gettysburg Address would survive such a narrow focus.

Sunday Sermon

Jacques Ellul (from THE NEW DEMONS, 1973):

All that is left of Christianity is morality, a bourgeois morality with which everyone is familiar, and a few conventional ideas (the clergy have a role to play in society; the cathedrals are an attractive element of the civic scene). Post-Christian society, therefore, is simply a society…which is no longer Christian, a society that has had the experience of Christianity, is the heir of the Christian past, and believes it has full knowledge of the Christian religion because it retains vague memories of it and sees remnants of it all around. Nothing new, surprising, or unexpected, above all nothing relevant to modern man can come from Christianity; the church and the faith are simply vestiges from the past.

[Accordingly, we may speak] of a change in the basic convictions of contemporary man, a change in the very context in which all their thinking takes place. We are speaking of an ideology that is unquestioningly adopted, a spontaneously accepted frame of reference, something that usually implicit and rarely is consciously adverted to. It is the basis for a vision of the world that all accept and for a common language and a norm by which behavior is judged. It shows through in the newspapers and advertising, in our approach to contemporary society, in the content of radio broadcasting, film, and political speeches, and in the platforms of all groups whether leftist or rightist.

The ideological content of this attitude can be summed up, I think, as follows. First of all, man is the measure of all things. Henceforth nothing is to be judged in relation to an absolute or a revelation or a transcendent reality. Everything is to be judged by its relation to man and is therefore as relative as man himself. He is both judge and criterion for judgment. In judging and making decisions he is thrown back on his own resources, and the basis on which he can build is his own accomplishments. He knows of no higher court of appeals and no source of pardon, for he is alone on earth and is alone responsible for all that happens.

Whatever happens, happens within earthly time, for man's existence stretches only from his birth to his death. His life bears no relation to anything higher than himself, since there is neither transcendent reality nor any other world. Consequently his life in this world becomes unconditionally important; to live is the supreme value, for at his death the game is over and lost. The adventures that make up the story of his life are the really serious matter, since in the short time he has he must accomplish whatever he is to accomplish. The greatest of crimes, therefore, is the attack on man's physical life. A man has to be given time to make a success of his life; if he doesn't succeed in that he is a total failure and there is no way of making up for the loss.

At the same time, however, man's life must contain its meaning. But man himself, being the measure of all things, cannot give meaning to his own life: that would be totally artificial. The only alternative, then, is for life to be lived to the full; in other words, happiness is what gives meaning to a man's life. There can be no other meaning, for happiness alone is something objective even though experienced subjectively.

A second principle follows from the first: man is autonomous. The law that is to govern him resides within himself, or rather, he determines that law for himself; he acknowledges no limitation, value, or law imposed from without. He is responsible only to himself and need not obey any objective, "eternal," or "natural" law or render an account of his life before any supreme tribunal. His decision is the only thing that counts. In the last analysis he decides what morality is to be, just as at an earlier time he determined the content of positive law.

Man himself, then, decides what is or is not to be allowed. Nothing obliges him to decide one way or another, and therefore what is not possible or permitted today may well be possible or permitted tomorrow. If that happens, we can only say that there has been an evolution in the manners and customs of men, but not that any absolute imperative has directed or inflected the development. All experiences and experiments will sooner or later be accepted as legitimate; morality could hardly take any other course in a constantly changing technological society. Even when man tries to look outside himself for something to relate to, or when he looks for some overarching meaning for his life, anything he finds and any frame of reference will have its origins in man himself (history, for example). The choice of such a source of meaning is an explicit choice. It must be so, since man's life has no meaning in itself: it goes nowhere but is simply carried along by the river of history; it is a dimensionless point in a line, and nothing more.

Autonomy is a burdensome dignity, for it means that man is entirely alone as he confronts reality. Wretchedness, suffering, anxiety, injustice, death: they are all around him and he must face them alone. He must take a position and act, without anything to fall back on, without any source of hope. In atheistic humanism, then, man adopts a very lofty conception of his own fate, but the price for it is high: his own existential anxiety. A high value is set on man. Man is the subject of all discourse, and this leads either to a lightheaded idealism that refuses to face facts, or to a bottomless anxiety and despair which those who experience it are constantly trying to escape. In short, the concern for man, the desire to emancipate him on all fronts, and the determination to make him the sole and final court of appeal-all these set him on a pinnacle, but they also put him in a very dangerous situation.

There is a third conviction in the ideology of atheistic humanism: man is a rational being. But here again people are caught between what ought to be and what really is. Everything should follow the dictates of reason. There is a tendency to reject what is not rationally proved: religion, morality, metaphysical laws, tradition, and even political convictions not based on rational principle (for example, monarchy). Men are therefore tempted to build a rational society and a rational political entity (democracy), and socialism is the usual result. In this area, however, atheistic humanism has been undermined during the past half century by the recognition of the irrational within man and by the resurgence of "obscure forces." Examples of these forces would be developments within communism, the phenomenon of Nazism, and the contemporary explosion of movements that exalt the irrational as such. All this has been a serious setback for atheistic humanism. The contradiction between his well-established and reassuring convictions and the actual behavior of twentieth-century men is a source of deep distress for contemporary Western man.

A final element in the ideology of atheistic humanism is that man is good or at least free to choose good or evil and that, barring error, ignorance, or passion (which resists rational analysis), he chooses the good. Man has to be regarded as good, since he is the measure of everything, is his own master, and takes it on himself to direct everything else (technology, for example). How could we live in a world in which man has such power, if he were himself evil? It would drive us to madness if he were the measure of all things and the measure were itself deceiving. Such a state of affairs is simply not possible. Even the theater of the absurd or existentialism…is but a dialectical counterpoint to this basic conviction. Tell Beckett or Genet that man is evil, and he will be horrified. It is precisely because man is presumed to be infallibly good that we can put up with all the grimness and all the shameful reality: all that is not man but the negation of man, and negation does not have its source in man!

This deeply rooted conviction of our contemporaries leads to two further principles. The first is that if evil exists—and obviously does—it is not the fault of man. Institutions, society, education, the economic system (capitalism), the division of society into classes, bureaucracy—any or all of these are to blame, but not man. Put man into a situation that is free and fosters liberty or that is just and fosters equality, and everything will be fine, because man is good. The second principle is that whatever is "normal" is also good and moral. "Normal" means whatever a majority of individuals or whatever a group accepts as a self-evident opinion or attitude. This means that in the last analysis everything can be permitted. We must add, of course, that atheistic humanism both rests on and legitimizes unlimited growth of power, technology, and economy. The higher the living standard and the greater the productivity, the more intelligent, artistic, cultivated, just, and good man will become.

On the basis of these convictions concerning man which are spontaneously held and taken for granted today and which everyone shares, a further doctrine has been developed: the doctrine that modern man has come of age…"come of age" means that modern man in concrete reality and in this society in which we live is in fact able to take charge of his own life; he has no further need of a guardian, a fatherly hand, or indeed any external guidance…he is now free and must exercise choice and authority. The disappearance of God and the Father [means that] now man does exist.

Hell on Earth

Ed Simon’s “In the Hands of Angry Gods” (at The Baffler) makes an intriguing case for the utiilty, if not the reality, of Hell. Meditating on the traditional notion (and language) of hell, Simon finds it particularly relevant to our time:

The rhetoric of hell is charged and powerful for metaphorically conveying the full impact of climate change, the language of burning and thirst, immolation and consumption, a tangible reminder of what’s existentially at stake. Such rhetoric also has an important moral dimension to it. Hell is not just a symbolic representation of an unpleasant place to which you would not want to go, it’s also explicitly a location of punishment. Obscene when fundamentalist preachers claim that this or that natural disaster is the result of individual sin, but in one sense climate change is the logical conclusion of our society’s rapacious greed, slothfulness, and gluttony. Love of the automobile, air conditioning, eating meat, cheap airplane flights, and consumer goods transported thousands of miles around the world have all contributed to the dire predicament in which humanity now finds itself. Romans 6:23 claims that the “wages of sin is death;” I know not whether that’s metaphysically true, but there is a disquieting resonance when it comes to the effect that oil companies and their consumers have all had on the future of our planet.

Simon recognizes the ways in which belief in Hell has been used to browbeat and terrorize the faithful: “There is something abusive,” he writes, “in convincing a child that they’re bound for the torments of eternal fire. To defend the rhetoric of hell while ignoring the reality that such beliefs have caused psychological trauma to millions of people throughout history would be dishonest, and it’s understandable why the 14 percent of Americans who’ve embraced a heaven without its opposite take part in a venerable, and compassionate, theology which rejects the idea of hell.”

Still, cautions Simon, we might not want to throw the baby out with the hellfire:

It’s important to avoid the fallacy which assumes that just because literal belief in hell may not be as popular, that it’s no longer worth taking seriously…who among us hasn’t thought that hell might be worthy as a punishment for those who do evil? We’d be forgiven for missing hell a bit. More generally, when we pretend that an ideology of “pure” materialism, “pure” scientism, “pure” secularity is even possible, we simply serve to ignore the traces of the transcendent and the relics of religion which are evident in ostensibly “modern” ideologies. That’s why, secular though I may feel that I am, I can’t escape the heat of hell. We’re still haunted by the demons who are imprisoned there.

Returning to the issue of global warming, Simon notes that those likely to suffer the most from its consequences will be the world’s poor who contributed the least to the problem. This inequity, he points out, is nothing new under the sun:

Scriptural precedent, from Job to the prophets, grapples with the reality that suffering is not always equal, that injustice is often a function of human affairs, and that there is call for humanity to correct its own sinful ways. Meghan O’Gieblyn, in an essay from her recent collection Interior States, which reflects both on her evangelical youth and this new trendiness in ignoring hell…writes that hell “remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us.” Hell might make us feel terrible, but it provides a warning and a corrective to the hubris that threatens the world. She writes that “it’s precisely this acknowledgment of collective guilt that makes it possible for a community to observe the core virtues of the faith: mercy, forgiveness, grace.”

At the very least, says Simon, religious language, including the language of hell, is poetry, challenging and profound; its metaphors “should only be abandoned warily and for good reason…” He concludes:

Hell is a concept by which we can evaluate our iniquities, our capability for evil, the ruin we enact on our world, and maybe the ways in which we can rectify those sins. Faith is a window, but not a clear one, that looks unhampered out onto a world of discernable and measurable reality; it exists not to give us a scientific perspective but rather as an expression of how we wish reality would look. Damnation’s reality may not frighten me, but I cannot be but terrified by its language. There is wisdom in understanding that we may approach heaven, but only after we’ve harrowed hell on earth.

Historically, humans have been far more successful creating hell on earth than creating heaven, immanentizing the eschaton in all the wrong ways. What this says about human nature, I don't claim to know, but knowing our past should at least temper our more grandiose ambitions: the devil, remember, is always in the details, and (as Neil Young put it) he fools with the best laid plans.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/in-the-hands-of-angry-gods-simon

Friday Blinks

Great news: Johnson & Johnson, the company that brought us Band Aids, No More Tears, Tylenol,  Listerine, and so many other beloved products, has just received FDA approval to market the world’s first antidepressant nasal spray, made from genuine ketamine, the world’s favorite horse tranquilizer/hallucinogenic! According to Julia Belluz (at Vox):

For now, esketamine is only approved for adults with “treatment-resistant depression,” who are supposed to take esketamine in conjunction with another oral antidepressant. And because it can sedate patients and bring on out-of-body experiences, the FDA is only making it available through certified clinics, where patients are to be monitored for at least two hours after taking the drug.

“Out-of-body experiences” are only one of many possible side effects that might be caused by Spravato: “dissociation, dizziness, nausea, sedation, anxiety, a lack of energy, increased blood pressure, vomiting, and feeling drunk” may also occur.

Still, the National Institute on Mental Health is giddy about this development, according to this tweet from NIMH Director Joshua Gordon: “Amazing news from the FDA today: esketamine, the first truly novel antidepressant in decades and first to target treatment-resistant patients has been approved. @NIMHgov research led the way.

Full disclosure: I know only one person who has tried the ketamine treatment (by injection, not by nasal spray) and it didn’t alleviate her depression at all—which, I suppose, is why such individuals are referred to as having “treatment-resistant” depression. Nasal spray seems a better option than, say, bloodletting, insulin coma therapy, or undergoing an icepick lobotomy; time will tell whether it really works.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/6/18253041/ketamine-johnson-johnson-spravato

At Aeon, Mariana Alessandri objects to the Boy Scout oath and (in particular) to its injunction on cheerfulness:

The Boy Scouts of America associate cheerfulness with positivity: a Scout should ‘look for the bright side of life. Cheerfully do tasks that come your way. Try to help others be happy.’ Instead of grumbling while he toils, a cheerful Boy Scout will cultivate a joyful attitude. He will ‘jump at opportunities’ that others won’t, and is more likely to find difficult tasks more enjoyable than others. Finally, a good Boy Scout believes that cheerfulness is infectious and can spread to those around him.

Ms. Alessandri insists that cheerfulness is not a virtue, and she bolsters her case with quotations from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Moreover, as she points out:

If you have to tell someone to be cheerful, they aren’t feeling it. Cheerfulness spontaneously felt and freely given is brilliant, but it is no more virtuous than acting courageously when one isn’t scared.

Alessandri returns to berating the Boy Scouts and its founder, Robert Baden-Powell:

Baden-Powell knew this, and in 1908 he reminded his Boy Scouts that, when something annoying happens:

“You should force yourself to smile at once and then whistle a tune, and you will be all right. A scout goes about with a smile on and whistling. It cheers him and cheers other people, especially in time of danger, for he keeps it up then all the same.”

Baden-Powell’s words had the power to coerce a generation of boys to pretend that life is good when it isn’t. Cheerfulness advocates still find virtue in this charade. America’s unchecked faith in cheer abounds in our proverbs: ‘You catch more flies with honey,’ ‘Think happy thoughts,’ ‘Life is good,’ ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ and ‘Laughter is the best medicine’ are all cheer-filled variations on Baden-Powell’s theme of forced bright-sidedness.

In the end, Ms. Alessandri is absolutely serious, aiming at things deeper than cheerfulness:

Profound human connection and communion – in other words, love – has no use for forced cheer, and is often sabotaged by false faces. If we want to love better and seek true happiness and friendship, it’s time to cultivate honesty instead of cheer.

https://aeon.co/essays/cheerfulness-cannot-be-compulsory-whatever-the-t-shirts-say

Finally, Rachel Lu (at The American Conservative) suggests a radical redesign of higher education, based on something called the “Thales Model”:

According to the Thales Model, students would complete a serious classical curriculum with a strong emphasis on writing and textual analysis. Depending on the size of the faculty and student body, it might make sense to have a single Great Books-oriented curriculum for everyone, or there might be room for a stronger disciplinary focus in the later years.

At the same time, all students would receive extended instruction in carpentry, gardening, the culinary arts, and other practical pursuits. The goal would be to spend roughly half of the day reading books and the other half working with one’s hands. By the time they graduated, students would have a solid grounding in the Western canon, but they would also be able to build tables, grow tomatoes, and make decent French omelets.

Life skills! How quaint.

By learning practical skills, students may open doors to realistic careers, perhaps uncovering talents they didn’t know they had. With more and more young people spending their twenties (and beyond) in a kind of perpetual adolescence, it would be good to develop stronger expectations that young adults emerge from college prepared to earn money and potentially support families. It’s also important to acknowledge that most people are not going to spend their lives as scholars.

Looking beyond the practicalities, though, we should keep in mind that education ought to be more than mere job preparation. It should be soulcraft, enabling the student to realize his human potential, and preparing him to embrace the true, beautiful, and good (both in this world and the next). From that standpoint, the Thales Model would offer a fairly unique set of advantages, allowing for intellectual growth while also familiarizing students with the joy of building and making. Minds should be trained around the truth, while hands became familiar with real things: wood, soil, wheat, wine.

Education as “soulcraft” makes perfect sense, except in a culture that doesn’t believe in the soul.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rebuilding-the-modern-university-around-soulcraft/

Gone Baby Gone

Ground control to Major Tom / Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong… [David Bowie, “Space Oddity”]

Why do you stand looking up into the sky? [ Luke’s Book of Acts]

Today (May 30) is the Feast of the Ascension, the day on which Christians recall the departure of the risen Jesus from this veil of tears.

While the resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian faith and at the center of the Christian calendar, his ascension into heaven, some forty days after Easter, gets surprising little attention. An event every bit as miraculous as the resurrection, Jesus’ ascension was witnessed by his disciples (or so Mark and Luke reported), and it marked the last moment that the Son of God—to our knowledge—ever set foot on this earth; since that day, apart from the occasional alleged cameo  appearance, Jesus has been sitting at the right hand of his Father in Heaven, patiently awaiting (as are we all) his encore, the Parousia (the second coming of the Lord).

Christians have been imploring Maranatha! (“Come, Lord!”) for two thousand years, to no avail. There is no point speculating as to why the Parousia has been so interminably delayed, or on why the risen Jesus chose not to remain on earth and inaugurate the kingdom whose imminent coming he had preached with such urgency: an urgency echoed by Paul and by members of the earliest Christian communities, none of whom thought that worldly business as usual would last beyond their lifetime. “The time is short,” Paul warned, but it turned out to be much longer than anyone, perhaps including Jesus himself, anticipated.

In any case, and to reiterate, between the hoopla over the resurrection and the anticipation of the Parousia, Jesus’ ascension has been all but ignored. According to Scripture, Jesus vanished from the face of the earth as magically and as abruptly as Santa disappearing up a chimney; but, for Jesus, reappearing as promised has thus far been a problem. The ascended Jesus is like unto an astronaut eternally stranded in orbit, wanting to come home but (we might speculate) lacking the heatshield necessary to survive re-entry. Sadly, we in turn lack the technology to launch a rescue—all we can do is look hopefully to the sky and, on the clearest of nights, tell ourselves that we can spot Jesus passing overhead. 

The ascension—the lift-off, as it were, of the risen Christ—is recorded in only two of the four gospels (those of Mark and of Luke) and in Luke’s Acts (aka “Acts of the Apostles” or the “Book of Acts”); since Luke’s two accounts differ from one another, we have what amounts to three accounts. Mark’s is characteristically terse, recounting how, at some unspecified time after the resurrection, “After the Lord Jesus had spoken to [the disciples], he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God.” ¹

That’s it. The lack of detail here (especially compared, as we shall see, to Luke’s later account) leaves a Skeptical Exegete to suspect that “he was taken up into heaven” is a euphemism for “he died”: right there in front of the Eleven (a replacement for Judas not having been appointed), Jesus breathed his last,  this time for real. 

It was left to Luke to compose a more fitting denouement. In Luke’s gospel, following a series of post-resurrection appearances, all of which seem to take place on Easter Sunday, Jesus delivers a final discourse to his gathered disciples, after which: “When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.”  

While Luke has added some context to Mark’s tale, the narrative still ends mysteriously. Again, “He left them and was taken up into heaven” seems little more than an effort to avoid saying “he died”: the very same day he rose from the dead, Jesus unceremoniously shuffled off this mortal coil.

Luke himself must have become dissatisfied with both the chronology and the pedestrian conclusion to his gospel, because he rewrote his account for the beginning of Acts. In that latter book, Luke claims that, after Easter, Jesus “gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.” ² Also, Jesus “appeared to [the disciples] over a period of forty days,” which is quite a shift from the earlier time frame where all post-resurrection events  seemed to take place on Easter. ³ At the close of the forty days, “On one occasion, while he was eating with them,” Jesus informed the disciples that they would soon be receiving a visit from the Holy Spirit. They asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel,”  to which he gave an evasive non-answer (“It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set”); then, “After he had said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.”

Finally, we get an actual ascension! We also get two angels suddenly on the scene (perhaps the same angels who appeared on Easter at the empty tomb?): “The disciples were looking intently up into the sky as [Jesus] was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” ⁴

Although Luke’s picturesque description captures the reader's imagination, the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia cautions against reading it too literally:

The language used by the Evangelists to describe the Ascension must be interpreted according to usage. To say that He was taken up or that He ascended, does not necessarily imply that they locate heaven directly above the earth; no more than the words "sitteth on the right hand of God" mean that this is His actual posture. In disappearing from their view "He was raised up and a cloud received Him out of their sight" (Acts 1:9), and entering into glory He dwells with the Father in the honour and power denoted by the scripture phrase.

In other words, we should accept that Jesus was literally “raised up” into a cloud, and we should accept the literal presence of angels; we just shouldn’t hold Luke to a belief that heaven is located, literally, “directly above the earth”.  So be it: but still, wherever heaven might be, Jesus was (and is) heaven-bound.

Adopting again the stance of a Skeptical Exegete, we may suspect that, when it came to the ascension, Mark and Luke were not objective reporters; their claims regarding the alleged event were made for a specific purpose. The question is, why would they have constructed (and, in Luke’s case, embellished) such stories?

For the answer, turn to the second chapter of Acts, set after Jesus’ earthly departure and immediately after the disciples received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The ensuing pandemonium (“They began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them”) attracted irreverent ridicule from bystanders (“They have had too much wine”), leading Peter to address the assembled crowd:

“Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through him…this man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”

Now, if any Skeptical Exegetes had been in that crowd and had heard Peter’s claim, they would have immediately asked, “If Jesus has been raised from the dead, where is he?” Acts does not record such a challenge, but it’s hard to believe the question wasn't asked, if not amidst the tumult of Pentecost, certainly sometime thereafter.

It is that obvious, uncomfortable, but unavoidable post-Easter question—“Where is he?”—that the first Christians had to answer. Having proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection, they were faced with a three-pronged dilemma: (a) produce the man Jesus himself, alive and well; (b) account somehow for his absence; or (c) be derided as liars, frauds, or lunatics. Impassioned testimonies by supposed witnesses notwithstanding, the best proof—the only real proof—of Jesus’ resurrection would have been his public appearance, which was not, alas, forthcoming. If Peter, at Pentecost or any time thereafter, could have pointed to a living, breathing Jesus and repeated the words of Pilate, “Ecce homo” (“Behold the man”), he would surely have done so; since he could not, some explanation had to be given.

Ergo, the Ascension, cursorily tacked on to Mark’s gospel, elaborated in Luke’s gospel, and splendidly embellished in Acts: “Why do you stand here looking into the sky?” Jesus is just gone, baby, gone;  two thousand years later, unable (or unwilling) to re-enter our reality, he continues to orbit the vast space of our imaginations--or, perhaps more accurately, we continue to orbit his memory.

_______________________________________________________

¹ This ascension account may not even be Mark’s, appearing as it does in the disputed final chapter of Mark’s gospel, a chapter missing from the earliest available Markan manuscripts.

² Sadly, Luke does not specify his “proofs”; it would be nice to know what they were.

³ Paul, who never met Jesus in the (earthly) flesh, would later say that Jesus had “appeared to five hundred of the brethren at one time”; he provides no further detail, and no evangelist mentions any such appearance, leaving us to wonder, not for the first time, where Paul got his (mis)information.

⁴ The angel forgot to add, “When he’s good and ready…”

Digging for Worms

In case you thought that Robert Mueller’s brief, measured statement to the press was something of a letdown, check out the reaction to it from some of President Trump’s most loyal defenders. The following quotes are all from the good folks at Media Matters, and they probably only scratch the surface of right-wing hysteria.

Sebastian Gorka:

Please understand the enormity of what we witnessed in 8 minutes earlier today. In the United States of America, a man who was formerly the director of the FBI, who had been granted by the acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the incredible, almost limitless powers of an independent counsel or special prosecutor -- displayed for the world his utter contempt for the fundamentals of our legal system.

That's who Robert Mueller is. When he says that we could find no proof that a crime was not committed, he has upturned hundreds, if not thousands of years of Judeo-Christian principles of how we judge other people and the power of the state and what it takes to denude us of our rights. You do not get to pronounce -- ever -- in the United States, on the innocence, or the lack of innocence of an individual who is uncharged. I'm using the technical terms of the Department of Justice's own regulations, and the ABA.

You are a disgrace to the uniform you once wore, the badge you once had, and the credentials you once carried. I hope you have been escorted out of the main DOJ building, because Robert Mueller, you should not be allowed to park cars.

Sean Hannity:

You've had two years of lies and hoaxes and conspiracy theories pedaled every second of every minute of every hour of every day. And it's just one more round of lying tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, Trump bashing over a narrative that is totally dead and buried. Because tonight, well the fact remains, there was no Trump-Russia collusion. There was no obstruction, nothing has changed. Mueller has spent $25 plus million investigating a hoax and now for the fourth time we have a conclusion. No collusion, no conspiracy. Today he officially resigned from the Office of Special Counsel but not before showing the world, of course, what we already knew on this program, his partisan hackery true colors if you will. You have a career bureaucrat, nothing more than a Trump hating partisan, who is now all but cheering for impeachment based on nothing. And we were right the entire time…Mr. Mueller doesn't know the law, he's basically full of crap.   

Tucker Carlson:

You know the saddest thing about this moment is all the people you sort of admire from afar and then the more you learn it turns out that they are sleazy and dishonest. And I hate to say Robert Mueller winds up in that category. And it pains me to say that. 

Lou Dobbs:

Let's be clear, the Mueller special counsel knew, knew long before the 2018 midterms, that there was no conspiracy, no collusion of any sort however you want to characterize it with the Russians on the part of the Trump campaign or the Trump presidency. Yet he persisted, and he persisted in the obvious -- for the obvious partisan purpose of stealing, permitting the Democrats to steal that election. 

Laura Ingraham:

I think that we all as Americans have to pause in the media maelstorm, and Joe you've made this point before but it's worth repeating, of how serious it is when in a political season the gears of our legal and political establishment are turned by those with a political motivation. Politically motivated to either prevent the election win of an individual, the true meddling in the election which is what they were trying to do with their insurance policy and surveillance of Trump campaign officials, Carter Page etc. And then afterward with the Comey leak of the memo to the New York Times to get the thing published, to roll out the investigation, to spur the special counsel. I mean this was all the old establishment rearing up and trying to take down Trump during the campaign and after the campaign. And if they can do it to a populist conservative like Trump, why couldn't they do it to a liberal if they decided there was a liberal person who was a threat -- so I mean how do liberals think they're safe here? That's what I don't understand. 

Dan Bongino:

Mueller has said you can't charge a president with a crime. Why is he saying that? He's saying that because he wants the liberals and the talking heads, which you'll see tonight, I guarantee it, you'll see tonight on TV. He wants the liberals to go out and say, "Look, the president clearly committed a crime Mueller laid it out and the only reason he didn't charge him is because he was the president." You may say, "Well, Dan, that is what Mueller said, what's the comeback to that?"  The comeback is very easy--that is not what Bob Mueller told Bill Barr....

Either Mueller is lying or Barr is lying. And I will bet you my right arm and I will throw in my left as a bonus, that Bob Mueller just lied to the American people, about a conversation he had with Bill Barr because he was losing the narrative. He is lying. One-hundred percent. 

Joe diGenova: 

We're in a civil war in this country…let me tell you something, we are. And we're watching it. And Bob Mueller is right in the middle of it. And what he did today was a disgrace to the rule of law. No matter what anyone says…This was an amazing assault on an incoming President of the United States. And I will tell you, if they go to impeachment, you are going to see a roiling of this country like you have never seen before. Because what they are doing is, they never liked this result, they wanted her to be president, she didn't win because she was a lousy candidate, and now they want to strip him of his presidency. If they go down this route to impeachment, there is going to be a reaction in this country which the Democrats will regret. This is going to get very ugly, it's going to become just beyond anything that I can think of right now. Except that the anger is going to increase and increase and increase. There is only so long that a person and a system can take this type of assault. This is an illegitimate assault on a presidency. 

These folks all appear even more unhinged than usual; something Mueller said, or didn’t say, must have gotten under their remarkably thin skin. I'm not saying they're snowflakes, but I'm also not saying they're not; if I could conclusively rule it out, I would, but I can't.

For the record: impeachment, should the Democrats in fact “go down [that] route,” is a legal remedy called for and spelled out in the Constitution (and one last used by Republicans), which makes Mr. diGenova’s assertion of “civil war” hard to fathom. Moreover, the Republican Senate is guaranteed to acquit Trump of any charges that the Democratic House might file—Mitch McConnell has already said so, without even seeing the charges or examining the evidence--so what’s the big deal?

Are Trump loyalists afraid that if Democrats continue to pursue this can of worms, they’ll find lots more worms than Mueller already dug up? Maybe even Russian worms? They’re afraid of something, that’s for sure. My advice to the Democrats: keep digging.

https://www.mediamatters.org/