Resurrection and the Bride of Christ - Le Donne

James McGrath asks of the theological significance of this ancient Greek wedding gesture:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2013/02/the-resurrection-in-orthodox-iconography-and-the-marriage-gesture-of-cheir-epi-karpo.html

This interests me greatly. I will be checking in on the comments to see what sort of conversation emerges.

-anthony

On Being Unintelligent in an Undignified Way - Le Donne

Look, we can't all be William Horbury. Most of us have to choose to become selectively intelligent. In becoming a scholar, one chooses a thing and becomes an expert in that thing. Higher education is an experience of unfolding realization.  It is impossible to become an expert in one narrow slice of the pie without coming to some realization that it would take a long lifetime to become an expert in several slices.  Because you have learned the difficulty of becoming an expert in one thing, you gain an appreciation for how little you know about other fields of research.  Upon this realization, one is faced with two choices: lack intelligence in a dignified way or lack intelligence in an undignified way.

If a scholar can manage to lack intelligence in a dignified way, said scholar is generally given greater latitude when s/he chimes in on an issue within the realm of her/his expertise. This is not always the case; there are prickly personalities in every field.  But, in general, professionals know that they exist within a world of relationships.  They are not anonymous defenders of truth in cyberspace.  They are not hermit-gurus living beyond the borders of society.  They have to mill around conference book rooms wearing name tags.  Academia is a relatively small village so we learn to defer to others with more expertise much of the time. And we don't say things like this:

Your friend, Dr. Paul needs to meet Jesus, develop a healed and forgiven relationship with Him and then choose something more profitable to do with his mind.
I fear that, "Get away from Me. I never knew you," is looming large in the good Dr.'s future.

This is comment that was posted on Mike Bird's blog a few days ago.  It is one of hundreds of examples of banal arrogance that comes with the territory of theologically oriented blogging.  The ability to be unintelligent in a dignified way, to my mind, represents a discernible difference between professionals and your standard armchair theologian.  But isn't basic human decency a Christian virtue?

There seems to be a common myth (in the sense of falsehood) in the ether that education breeds elitism.  I have found the opposite to be true much of the time.

-anthony

Libraries: Brick, Mortar, and Commemoration - Le Donne

So I was watching a TED talk by a lexicographist recently on my fancy Roku streaming device. (That sentence alienates most of our Pennsylvania Dutch demographic.) It wasn't a great lecture so I won't recommend it with a link, but one interesting thing that she said concerned the loss of serendipity with online media. She was making a strong case for online and open-source dictionaries but acknowledged that something might be lost in the move past bound dictionaries. Have you ever had the experience of flipping through a bound dictionary, looking for a word, and finding a different word that you've never seen before?  Serendipity, baby!

I feel the same way about brick and mortar libraries.  I can get almost everything I need online these days.  I live about an hour from the nearest theological library, so I am quite thankful for this.  But I have felt a particular loss of serendipity with my dot com explorations. Case in point: this book caught my eye while I was in the Durham University library once upon a time and it changed my life. (By the way, there is a newer edition of that book out now.)  If I had not found the brilliant work of Fentress and Wickham I would have been tempted to mirror my PhD supervisor's contributions to the field.  I remember thinking that Dunn's Jesus Remembered (not yet published at the time) was the best book about Jesus I had ever read.  I was thrilled to  be working with him and lamenting that he had got to the intersection of memory/ historiography/ Jesus first.  The work of Fentress and Wickham was a revelation to me and allowed Dunn to become a devil's advocate to my thesis.  He's quite good in that role.

Paul Foster’s Provocative JSHJ Article—Chris Keith

The application of social memory in the Gospels has picked up steam in recent years.  As such, it was inevitable that critical assessments of it would emerge on the heels of critical applications of it.  Paul Foster has recently published a largely negative assessment of it in his essay “Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research,” JSHJ 10 (2012): 191–227.  As many know, Foster is an immensely productive New Testament scholar as well as one of the genuinely nicest people you’ll meet.  I have great respect for him and like to think that I enjoy his friendship.  This essay is provocative, as I suspect it was designed to be, and as such gets some things right and some things wrong.  I’ll concentrate here just on the first section, which treats memory.  Regardless of your thoughts on this issue, you really do need to read the article.  Foster is never one to ignore.

Foster’s chief complaint is that memory theory is being used “as a means of validating the historical authenticity of the Gospels” (191).  He refers to it as a “trendy” way of “claiming the community memories of early believers provide reliable access to the historical Jesus” (193).  This point about “reliable access” and similar assertions is important to his complaint because he repeats it throughout this section (191, 193, 198, 202).  For Foster, memory theorists really aren’t doing anything that the form critics weren’t doing (202), despite the fact that they disparage the form critics (198).

Richard III Illegally Parked for Over Half a Millennium

And then there's this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882

My thanks to my sister for digging this up for me.
-anthony

Paul Foster Calls Three Recent Advances in Jesus Research "Dead Ends" - Le Donne

I have known that an essay by Paul Foster on the topic of "memory" in Jesus research has been coming down the pike for several months now. This morning I received two emails and a facebook tag telling me that the piece is in circulation. Dr. Foster wrote this piece for the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (vol 10). Mike Bird writes about it here.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Foster last summer in Edinburgh. It was a very brief meeting but he was terribly kind.  Prof. Keith, of course, has had more opportunities to interact with him.  I imagine that one of us will rejoin this conversation after we have a chance to read the piece closely.  Here is the abstract:

A Very Interesting Example of Memory Refraction - Le Donne

This piece is really worth a read. You may be interested to know that Daniel Schacter, whom is cited in this piece, is a major player in social memory studies and "memory distortion" specifically. Notice that a very dynamic mnemonic frame is established in the first story about the bomb. Notice that the "false" memory of the second bombing recounts an event that was witnessed by a family member. So, ironically, the "false" memory conveys a historical event quite well.

Interesting examples here of cryptomnesia too including a great example of narrativized typology.

Here are the last few paragraphs:

There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as “creating,” and remembering as “recreating” or “recategorizing.”) Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable. 

We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information. 

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

...absolutely love this stuff.
-anthony

Superbowl, Jesus!

I've been looking for a way to use one of these Vintage21 sketches.  Superbowl Sunday provides the perfect occasion for this one.

My favorite, however, is this one.

-anthony

Happy Groundhog Day!

If only I were closer to Punxsutawney this fine day.

-anthony

Quarterly Quote of the Month about Jesus for this Week

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

             ~George Eliot

Cultural Memory and Secondhand Interpretation - Le Donne

In reply to this post, Bill asks:

1. Isn't "tradition" (the oral transmission of Gospel material) a *form* of social or collective memory? What's the crucial distinction here?
2. I agree that eyewitnesses are rarely perfect, and thus hardly proof of accuracy, but do you agree or disagree that first hand memory is generally more accurate than second or third hand information?
3. Same question as 2, but I want to say, "first hand journalism" instead of memory. Just for hypothetical grins.

The short answer to number one is that "tradition" is the default way to think about what we might call cultural memory. But this default position is a concept that is far too rigid to communicate how cultural memory functions within a society (or as it intersects with autobiographical memories). At the risk of oversimplifying, tradition (how biblical scholars use this concept) is a calcified and surface-level aspect of cultural memory. Tradition might not render explicit the standard ways of interpreting a culturally defining episode, for example. The concept of cultural memory allows much more fluidity and creativity into the discussion. Werner Kelber has suggested that we should just stop using the word "tradition" when it comes to the Gospels.  I'd like to keep it around a while longer, but point out the differences between tradition and cultural memory... as I kind of just did.

On Bill's second point, firsthand memory is very valuable and can have an authoritative affect within the sphere of communicative memory (Aleida Assmann suggests that communicative memory is one to three generations of "living" memory). But firsthand memory is not always better than secondhand memory. Sometimes, a secondhand interpreter can have a more compelling and more plausible understanding of a figure/event. For example, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes knows what to select from an eyewitness testimony and interpret it "better". Yes, fictional... but totally awesome. If you'd like real examples, one might point to reinterpretations of black soldiery in the civil war. It took generations for historians to do a passable job with this data.  Within the Gospels, Matthew sometimes renders an event more plausibly than Mark because he understands contemporary Jewish categories better (e.g. Jesus' procession into Jerusalem). Just a few examples.

-anthony

The City - Le Donne

As a Bay Area native and SF Giants fanatic, I am obligated to bring this to your attention. It has something to do with Jesus if you contort your brain a bit... let me know what you come up with.

http://nearemmaus.com/2013/02/01/san-francisco-is-in-the-national-spotlight-so-stupid-generalizations-abound/

-anthony

Zwinglius Speaks!

The wait is over. Have a look at the sideshow:



http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/the-premier-2013-biblical-studies-carnival-containing-everything-thats-good-and-nothing-that-isnt/



-anthony