The Difference between Ancient and Modern Remembering - Le Donne

Journalist Joshua Foer gives a short lecture on his
journey into the arena of memory competition

The interest in memory studies among Gospel scholars is still in its infancy.  I continue to see the common mistake of folks using memory as a synonym for "tradition" and/or assuming that "eye-witnesses" provide a firm foundation for discussions of accuracy. We still lack clear descriptions of the relationships between communicative, cultural, collective, and autobiographical memory.  Finally, we betray our novice understanding of memory studies by assuming that modern vehicles for memory (what we call mnemotechniques) are analogous to ancient vehicles for memory.

This lecture (about 20 minutes) is a great introduction to the differences between ancient and modern remembering. Lucky for us, the human mind is still capable of duplicating what the ancients employed with regularity.  If you are even marginally interested in memory studies, watch this.  Do yourself a favor and don't turn it off after the first 45 seconds. It gets better.

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do.html

Radical Orthodoxy (online journal)

This is for all of you theology nerds:

http://journal.radicalorthodoxy.org/index.php/ROTTP

you're welcome.
-anthony

Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics

This is a new online journal dedicated to the discussion of the proposition that credally orthodox Christianity is the most transformative of all cultural phenomena and that it remains the ineliminable core of the Middle-Eastern and European-originated civilisational project. It freely invites contributions both from those who agree with this proposition – in whatever sense – and those who reject it.

The journal intends uniquely to combine the academic and the current; the intellectual and the popular. To this end it intends to publish both pieces longer and shorter than those carried by the typical academic journal, as well as some of the usual length: taking full advantage of the flexibility offered by the online format.

‘Theology’ is taken to include theologies of all kinds, besides a predominant concern with the implications of orthodox Christian theology in particular. ‘Philosophy’ is intended in the most ample possible sense, to include all the various schools, Eastern and Western, Ancient, Medieval and Modern, Continental and Analytic. It is also taken to extend to all branches of aesthetics, including literary, art and music criticism, besides the philosophy of science. ‘Politics’ is taken to include both political theory in the past and the present, and political practice, especially in the present. More widely, it is intended to indicate the entire practical branch of philosophy, and so to cover also ethical, social, economic and cultural theory.

The journal will normally be published four times a year and each of the four issues will have a distinctive purpose; There will be: 1. A General issue which will publish a diverse range of submitted articles; 2. A Special issue which will be devoted to a specific topic and will include both commissioned pieces and uncommissioned ones subject to peer review; 3. A Reviews issue which will seek to discuss some of the most important books published within a 12 month period in both short notices and review-articles; 4. A Current Affairs issue which will seek to mediate between academic and media analysis of contemporary events and cultural conditions. In this issue especially, but also in all the issues, we hope to include articles by both academics (established and emerging) and those engaged in other modes of writing and activity.

All articles will be peer-reviewed, because a further aim of the journal is to combine relevance with rigour, as well as rigour with relevance.

How Popular Culture Can Influence Scholarship

Goodacre on the Mary and Jesus marriage hypothesis.

http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/myths-of-mary-and-married-jesus.html

Worth a look.

In Defense of Revisionist History (Part IV): Fifty Shades of Grey - Le Donne

My first three posts on this topic can be found here, here, and here.

The old way of doing business was to (1) create an almost unassailable core of historical facts about Jesus, (2) add to those facts a handful of reasonably coherent episodes, and (3) bracket out all other claims about Jesus and leave those for the theologians.  It is not uncommon to read biblical commentaries from the 1950s that simply note that a verse is "redactional" and say no more about it. (The reverse has become true in recent years, but that is a post for another time.)

In this method, the Fourth Gospel was bracketed out, redactional material was bracketed out, the infancy narratives were bracketed out, etc.  One of the chief virtues of Dale Allison's program is the recognition that hagiography can be a vehicle for historical data. I say something similar about Matthew's redaction in this book.  Allison cites this work a number of times, but not on this particular point.

What an Odd Field This Is

We're just pumping out one fraud after the next these days.

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/dead-sea-scrolls-scholar%E2%80%99s-son-off-to-jail/

I really feel for Larry who has been dragged into this bizarre drama.

-anthony

from the pen of Emily Dickinson

There came a Day at Summer's full,
Entirely for me --
I thought that such were for the Saints,
Where Resurrections -- be --

The Sun, as common, went abroad,
The flowers, accustomed, blew,
As if no soul the solstice passed
That maketh all things new --

The time was scarce profaned, by speech --
The symbol of a word
Was needless, as at Sacrament,
The Wardrobe -- of our Lord --

Each was to each The Sealed Church,
Permitted to commune this -- time --
Lest we too awkward show
At Supper of the Lamb.

The Hours slid fast -- as Hours will,
Clutched tight, by greedy hands --
So faces on two Decks, look back,
Bound to opposing lands --

And so when all the time had leaked,
Without external sound
Each bound the Other's Crucifix --
We gave no other Bond --

Sufficient troth, that we shall rise --
Deposed -- at length, the Grave --
To that new Marriage,
Justified -- through Calvaries of Love --

_______________

...my thanks to the incomparable Michael Thomson for this.

-anthony

Jesus of the Apocalypse - Le Donne

Observation: the portrayal of Jesus in the Book of Revelation is one of our earliest.


Question: why is there so little use of this portrayal in historical Jesus study?

The Top Ten Things I Learned about Blogging from Blogging – Le Donne

To celebrate the Jesus Blog’s 100,000th page view, I thought I’d reflect on my five-month career as a blogger.

10) Blogging about Jesus is what Jesus would do (well, at least the Johannine Jesus).

9) Auto-correct wants to render the name “Crossley” cross-eyed.

8) The page view to comment ratio is absurd. The average post here gets over 4000 views and about three comments. It’s sort of like visiting a monastery wherein all of the monks have taken a vow of silence… but they keep looking at you with their unreadable, monkish eyeballs.

7) You get more flies with honey than with vinegar… and even more with a dead carcass.

6) “Blogging” still isn’t recognized as a legit scrabble play.

5) Some are trolls because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced common courtesy because of the kingdom of heaven.

4) Chris Keith’s first name is “Chris” and not “Keith” – I was almost sure it was Keith… wait, is it?

3) Ten years ago, N.T. Wrong tore Mark Goodacre limb from limb and scattered his remains throughout cyberspace. These tiny bits of Mark exist in the hearts of all biblio-bloggers. Those who disavow Q and love Doctor Who are the special few who can find mysterious union with each other beyond the evil dominion of the demiurge.

2) Being holier-than-thou gets a bad rap; it’s so much better than the alternative.

And the most important thing I learned about blogging from blogging:

1) What Jim West does really isn’t as difficult as he makes it look.

More about Marriage in Antiquity - Le Donne

In my previous post, most honorable Theophilus, I wrote a bit about some helpful distinctions drawn by Michael Satlow. Christian asks:

Would you be willing to share some of those distinctions in a separate post?

Christian, here are a couple examples.

One distinction that I found helpful was the dissonance between the Bavli rabbis and the Yerushalmi rabbis on the impetus for marriage. In other words, why marry?  It seems that the earlier Judean voices promote marriage because it helps to establish men as civic entities. Familial, financial, and social well-being flows from the institution of marriage. The later Babylonian voices are not as certain that marriage is entirely positive. Perhaps it might take an otherwise pious man away from religious study.  However, most of these rabbis argue that marriage provides an outlet for a man's sexual appetites.  This second position is somewhat similar to Paul's stance.  Satlow notes that there is no attempt by the rabbis to convince women to marry; it is just assumed that they don't need convincing.  This is one of those times when the historian is negligent if s/he doesn't offer an argument from silence: the social pressures on fathers to find a match for their daughters were enormous.  Moreover - and this is my observation, not Satlow's - a single woman was seen as a problem to be solved, not a person to be celebrated.

Another distinction that I found helpful was between ideals and normalcy.  For example, the Babylonian voices are adamant that marriage around the time of puberty is best.  This stance works alongside their fear of sexual urges.  So you find some rabbis saying things like this:

“A man of twenty who has not married spends all his days in sin.” … “Up to twenty years, the Holy One—blessed be He—sits and watches for a man, when he should marry a wife. When his twentieth year arrives and he has still not married, He says, ‘Let him rot!’” … “I desired more than my colleagues to marry at sixteen. Had I married at fourteen I could have said to Satan, ‘An arrow in your eye!’” (B. Qid. 29b-30a)

Here you see a few ideals for marriage. Yet other texts demonstrate that these ideals were often difficult to live up to.  The Bavli rabbis strongly urge a range of 14-20 as the window for righteous marriage, but ideals and reality are two different things.

-anthony

Verbatim Theatre and Historiography—Chris Keith

Last Monday night I attended the inaugural lecture of Prof Trevor Walker, my colleague here at St Mary’s University College.  Prof Walker is a drama professor and his lecture was, by far, the best public lecture I’ve ever attended.  It involved skits, (fake) gunshots, and an impersonator lecturing for Prof Walker.  His topic was verbatim theatre, which he has pioneered, its relationship to reality, and the manners in which the public at large perceives these things.  Verbatim theatre is where the actors dramatize transcripts of actual events; in other words, they act out scenes from the transcripts using the words from the transcripts.  So, for example, one of Prof Walker’s most famous plays is “Cancer Tales,” a dramatization of real interviews with cancer victims, survivors, and their families.

What grabbed my attention was Prof Walker’s questions concerning whether the dramatization of these events, and thus the re-narrativization of the transcripts, obscures the “reality” of them or clarifies that “reality.”  In short, does putting these peoples’ words on stage make them any less real?  Indeed, does it, to the contrary, make them more real?  At one point, I was wondering also—Is it more real than, say, a documentary, a genre that tends to bill itself as the closest to reality?  Alternatively, is it actually a form of documentary?

These questions relate to the topic of this blog because of the discussion concerning the application of social memory theory to Jesus studies centers on this matter of historiography—the relationship between the “real” past and portrayals of it.  Memory distorts, of course, but some people think that’s a good thing and some people think it’s a bad thing.  Does distortion make it less historical?  To the contrary, does the distortion of memory actually render it historical?  The first question assumes a disjunction between memory and history; the second question assumes that memory and history are essentially the same thing.  I think Anthony and I would both land here with the second question, as would many others.

There’s another interesting issue that Prof Walker’s lecture raised for me, though.  Jan and Aleida Assmann have much discussed the transition of memory from the collective memory of eyewitnesses and the immediately subsequent generation to the cultural memory wherein memory becomes firmly rooted in cultural consciousness.  The transition essentially entails memory’s ultimate transcendence of autobiographical memory.  In personal correspondence with Alan Kirk, I have mentioned that I’m skeptical that it takes as long for commemorations to enter into cultural memory as the Assmans think it does.  (They put it at around 40 years.)  Alan said he too was skeptical.  I wondered if part of the issue in debates over verbatim theatre hinges precisely on this issue.  The re-narrativization of these transcripts in a genre of art that is publicly shared launches what are essentially private memories about their ordeal with cancer into the cultural sphere.  Does it seem more real if the reader or audience believes it to be transcript versus being a play?  Prof Walker mentioned how one playwright had thrown a monkey wrench into the system by writing a fictional verbatim theatre play.  Some of the members of the audience were really upset when they found out they were watching true fiction.  Again here, the issue is audience expectation.

Congratulations to Prof Walker on an excellent and thought-provoking inaugural lecture.

Authenticity Criteria and R.E. Brown

Chris Skinner reflects on what Brown has to say about the use of authenticity criteria in Jesus research.

http://pejeiesous.com/2013/01/25/raymond-brown-on-the-jesus-criteria/

-anthony

Satlow's Jewish Marriage in Antiquity

It only took me a decade to get to it, but I'm reading Michael L. Satlow's Jewish Marriage in Antiquity. I'm realizing how very little I know of the differences between the Yerushalmi and the Bavli voices.  Also, when you get to overhear conversations about something as fundamental to social identity as marriage, you hear parenthetical comments that betray the differences between between ideals and normalcy. I.e. the rabbis give you both "what life should be like" and "what life is like".  You don't get nearly as much of these insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls or apocalyptic literature.  Satlow's book draws out these distinctions brilliantly.

-anthony

What Does it Mean to Say that Jesus Was Jewish? (Part 3) – Le Donne

In my first two posts in this series (found here and here) I problematized a few common caricatures of Second Temple Judaism. In other words, there was a wide spectrum of Jewish beliefs and lifestyles. Of course, the folks at Qumran would have questioned the Jewishness of reversing one’s circumcision to compete in athletic events—please don’t ask me how they accomplished this—yikes! One’s view of “insiders” and “outsiders” is relative. Moreover, the closer one stands to the borders between the insiders and the outsiders, the more heated the debate will be.

I hope you’ll forgive a little René Girard here: it’s when you can’t tell if someone is part of the clan that they become the most dangerous. In Zimbabwe, you’re fine if you’re black and you’re fine if you’re white (just don’t vote against Mugabe). But if you’re “colored”—what Zimbabweans call mixed-race folk—you’re in trouble. Of course, African Americans are acceptable to Zimbabweans because they are decidedly outsiders to the culture; thus hospitality is possible.  In short, as long as the society knows that you have a home somewhere else, that society will be quite happy to have you visit.  You have to belong somewhere.