Apocalypse Not

Wow, this video totally BLEW MY MIND!!!!  It revealed that underneath Dan McClellan's dour, take-no-prisoners, data-over-dogma exterior, there beats the heart of a wishy-washy liberal cafeteria Christian.

Everybody's entitled to their opinions, of course.  Mine is that, if asked, I would reject the question.  I go with (I think) Helmut Thielicke, who wrote decades ago that scholars, at least, should abandon reliance on a canon.  As the late Edmund White liked to say about the literary canon, people who really love reading aren't interested in canons; they (we) want more and more books.  Canons are for people who don't like to read, and want to limit radically the number of books they "have" to read. Scholars of early Christianity should be interested in as much literature from the period as they can get at, because they know that the canon didn't exist then anyway.  Deciding which book one would remove from the canon is like constructing your own Dream Team of elite athletes, a useless if briefly entertaining exercise.

On top of that, McClellan's reasons are extremely poor.  If the Revelation wasn't written by the traditionally ascribed author, neither was most of the New Testament.  There's no reason to think that "John" intended to be confused with the author of the Fourth Gospel, who wasn't named John anyway. "John" was a common name at the time, like "Jesus" or "Mary."  Unlike the other three gospels, the Fourth Gospel singles out one of its characters as the author, but never by name.  The people who constructed the eventual canon were wrong about most of their decisions anyway, so why cite them as authorities?   If McClellan objects to the Revelation because of authorship, he should throw out most of the canonical New Testament too.

The bit about the Revelation being about a Jesus who wasn't the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is hilarious.  The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is a Gehenna and damnation preacher - cut off your hand if it leads you to sin, or be cast into eternal fire!  (Matthew 5:29-30, Dan. You know it as well as I do.)  It's not surprising that lay Christians and village atheists skip over those parts, but McClellan is, as he likes to remind us, a scholar of the Bible.  He knows better.  The Revelation develops themes that are everywhere in the New Testament and early Christianity, they aren't at odds with it except possibly in degree.  First take the beam out of your own eye, Dan.

McClellan goes on to say: 

And [the Revelation] was widely accepted precisely because of leaders saying, "Well, we have to include it." And primarily because it allowed them to structure power and values and boundaries over against the Christians that they didn't like.

To the limited extent that this is true, it's true of the rest of the New Testament. Most of those writings contain denunciations of false teachers, prophets and brethren among Christians. My favorites are the short letters ascribed to John -- the same John to whom the Fourth Gospel was eventually ascribed, though probably not by him either -- in which the author orders his followers to withhold fellowship from his opponents, and then he complains because fellowship has been withheld from him.  It happened to the Apostle Paul, as he reports in Galatians. That's how these things go; you could call it karma. 

These passages, and there are a lot of them, allowed leaders "to structure power and values and boundaries," but they could be and were turned against the leaders. I think that the Revelation has more often been used by those at the bottom of their communities to justify overthrowing those at the top, and that's why it's unpopular with the learned and privileged. For examples, see Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957).  I recall one episode Cohn recounted in which the Inquisition came to some city to root out rebellious troublemakers but had to flee when they met violent resistance from the populace.  Cohn was indignant about this; he seems to have been somewhat confused about power and values and boundaries.

The early Christians rejected the power structures of their time, but they wanted to upend them, not eliminate them.  Jesus taught that the last would be first and the first would be last; no more than his followers could he imagine an end to hierarchies, nor did he want to.  He expected that when the rich and mighty were brought down, he and his followers would be raised up.  He would ride into town at the right hand of power, and all authority in heaven and earth would be his.  Vengeance would be terrible - for the bad guys, but they deserved it. The earth would be cleansed of their defilements in blood. 

It happens that this video went up just as I began reading 1 Enoch, in McClellan's recommended Hermeneia version.  Enoch, as McClellan knows, strongly influenced Jesus' milieu and likely Jesus himself.  The same fantasies of divine vengeance and heavenly armies slaughtering the ungodly run through 1 Enoch.  Here's an example from chapter 10:

And to Michael [the Most High] said, “Go, Michael, bind Shemihazah and the others with him, who have mated with the daughters of men, so that they were defiled by them in their uncleanness.  And when their sons perish and they see the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the everlasting judgment is consummated. Then they will be led away to the fiery abyss, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined forever. And everyone who is condemned and destroyed henceforth will be bound together with them until the consummation of their generation. <And at the time of the judgment, which I shall judge, they will perish for all generations.>" 

It's a common trope in apocalyptic writing, and as McClellan knows, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who thought only a few would be saved.  What would happen to the majority?  Shhhhh, it wouldn't do to talk about that.  As I've said before, those who'd like to get rid of the Revelation forget or never realize that its bad points are everywhere in the New Testament, especially in Jesus' teachings.

Thinking about all this led me to reread James Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Westminster, 1983). Barr was theologically conservative, but in this book he basically deconstructed (I'm using the word accurately here, I think) the whole idea of the canon. For example, the people who lived in biblical times and are featured in the Bible didn't have the Bible.  Yes, the first Christians had the Tanakh, aka the Old Testament, but they didn't have the New Testament. Nor is the biblical canon specified in the Bible (23-4):

It was impossible to provide scriptural proof for this most central of questions,namely, which precisely were the books which had been divinely inspired.  No passage in either Old or New Testament gave a list, nor indeed, as we shall shortly see, did any passage give any indication that they cared seriously about the question. The List of Contents prefaced to the Bible, though it was all-important for the total shape of what lay within, was not part of the inspired text of the Bible itself. For evidence about what was within the canon, one had to go outside the canon itself.

This is also true of other parts of Christian apologetic, such as the claim that all twelve of Jesus' original followers were martyred; maybe so, probably not, but the evidence for most of them comes from outside the Bible. Barr lays out the contradictions in orthodox, traditional accounts of the canon and how the idea has been used.  The book is densely written, but if you could follow the quotation above and have access to a university library, it's worth tracking down and reading. Video scholars like Dan McClellan, Bart Ehrman, and others can introduce you to the subject, but sooner or later it's vital to do some reading - not only of their books but of others.  Barr wrote several books for a general audience, as did other scholars I learned a lot from.  I also read the work of scholars I disagreed with, including conservatives and fundamentalists, and I learned from the experience.  As Rabbi Hillel told a doubter, go and learn.

He's Sure the Boy I Love

So: Heated Rivalry.  

I haven't seen the show and probably won't until it is released on home video; maybe not even then.  I did read the book, though.  I found it sitting there, readily available, as an e-book through my public library, and it wasn't bad.  But it wasn't good enough to make me want to read the others in the series or to subscribe to stream it.

I have watched a lot of promotional videos about it on YouTube, and I was impressed by the young leads.  They're poised, smart, and funny, dealing well with their sudden fame. I especially enjoyed some network anchor type (Rachel Roberts, I think?) interviewing Hudson Williams before the Golden Globes. She said something about how much we've seen of him and Connor Storrie in the media, and Williams said cheerfully that of course everybody has seen all of them -- referring to the nudity in the series. The interviewer was taken aback, I suppose because he'd said the quiet part out loud, and completely without shame or prurience. It's normal in pretty much all media to giggle like adolescents about sexual content, and I doubt these supposed adults will never outgrow it.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable a lot of older media people were with the fact of a gay love story becoming immensely popular.  It's as it should be. There's no reason why heterosexuals shouldn't be able to identify with gay characters.  Heated Rivalry was written by a straight woman for straight women, and the series was written and directed by a gay man, but when the elderly Al Roker is gushing about how romantic it is, I think we've come a long way. This is good news because by all accounts the series puts its many sex scenes in the viewer's face, so to speak. There's no way to deny that these male characters are having sex repeatedly over a long period, it's important to them, they aren't just homosocial.

While Heated Rivalry is probably unprecedented in degree, for film or for television, it's not new in kind. A few people have mentioned Brokeback Mountain, also written by a straight woman for a straight audience though produced by heterosexual filmmakers. It wasn't nearly as sexually explicit as Heated Rivalry, but it was much better than, say, Philadelphia.  But it did end with Gay Doom, and Heated Rivalry doesn't.  That's some kind of progress.

But let me dredge up the past a bit more.  Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner was published in 1973.  I remember seeing copies displayed in a mall bookstore, and somehow I knew it was about gay men.  Indeed, it was about gay athletes: not just the title long-distance runner and his coach, but other gay athletes were prominent characters.  The sex scenes were explicit enough to upset some squeamish male reviewers, but even better, the gay characters weren't struggling to Identify As Gay.  The young runners were politically conscious, even militant - a stance notably absent from Heated Rivalry.  The book had a tragic ending but with resolve that life and love would go on, and Warren later produced a sequel or two.  There was ongoing buzz about a possible film version - supposedly Paul Newman had bought the film rights and wanted to play the coach, but it never happened.  Warren herself was lesbian, and continued to deal with gay themes in her later novels.

Then there were Mary Renault's historical novels, especially the ones about Alexander the Great.  The Persian Boy, about Alexander's second love Bagoas but also featuring his long relationship with Hephaistion, was a best-seller.  Again, rumors circulated about a movie, but it never happened.  Ancient Greece has inspired gay fiction, from the ambitious to the dire. (I'm thinking especially of Felice Picano's An Asian Minor: The True Story of Ganymede in the latter category.)  Anne Rice wrote some interesting historical fiction this vein, such as A Cry to Heaven about Italian castrati; and of course her vampire novels are famous examples of the straight woman identifying with her gay(ish) male heroes.  Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, a young-adult story of Achilles and Patroclus, made some gay men angry for some reason; I thought it was fine.

But as I've said here before, there's a lot of LGBTQ fiction around these days, and quite a few movies too.  I'm not sure why Heated Rivalry has taken off, though I'm glad it has. There will be a second series going into production soon, with the same leads carrying their characters' story forward.  I expect there will be knockoffs, imitations, that won't do as well because they aren't as good. Sturgeon's Law always applies.  I don't care, because I don't have to watch them or read them.

The thing is, I'm not all that interested in formulaic romance stories, and Heated Rivalry is formulaic.  The hockey angle, which excites a lot of people, is just window-dressing.  The core of the story is the characters' struggle to overcome the obstacles in the way of their love -- obstacles which are internal as much as they are external.  Rachel Reid handles this plot well, but it's old hat and she has nothing to add to it. A lot of the trouble, I admit, is that I'm old and I've seen it all before; besides, everybody knows how a romance is going to turn out.  Her guys' angst is understandable in its pro-sports setting, but even that is required by the romance plot.  Heterosexual romances also have to set up barriers for the lovers to overcome, but the reader knows that they will be overcome.  Romance novels nowadays are marketed by subgenre, and Heated Rivalry is always described as "enemies/rivals to lovers." I don't find that very interesting, just because it's a formula.  A lot of people like it, though; fine.

One thing I've been focusing on in the publicity is the fans. One genre of promotional YouTube video is "celebrities react to thirst tweets," those being social media posts where the writers talk about what they'd like to do in bed with the celebrities. It's often impossible to tell whether the posters are serious or are just trying to be obnoxious. Williams and Storrie handled this assignment with good humor, and it's just part of the publicity machine, but I still thought it was creepy. It's of a piece with the popular tendency of us ordinary shlubs to take for granted that we are the special one that the star would want if we could only meet him or her; or more generally, to assume that if I'm attracted to someone, it's because he wants me and is sending out sex rays to pull me in. This isn't a guy thing or a straight thing, it seems widespread among both sexes and all sexual persuasions. But as I've been wondering for many years now, if you pretend that your desire for another person is a positive thing ("love"), why do so many adults believe that the way to win the other over is to be as obnoxious as possible?  Williams and Storrie have joked often about their butts and their workout secrets to pump up their glutes, which as Williams said, everybody has seen by now.  Many of the fans reciprocate by showing their asses on social media.

There's also excited speculation about the stars' personal sex lives, about which they have been reticent.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, we should be past the era when one's sexual orientation is a dread secret: it's a public fact about any person.  But on the other, no person is obliged to share the details of one's love life, or sex life, with the world.  That's especially true among gay men, many of whom obsess about who's a top and who's a bottom, again with the seeming assumption that they will ever get near enough to act these roles out with the celebrities.  I still remember that after Boy George had come out publicly in the mid-1980s, a presumably straight interviewer for the rock press assumed that the public fact entitled him to press George for intimate details.  Boy George properly drew the line there, but many people still can't tell the difference.  The fantasies about Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie will go on being spun, but the fantasists need to get a grip on themselves; it's as much as they're going to get.  You know what I'm talking about.

Another reason I'm not champing at the bit to watch the series is that as comfortable as Williams and Storrie evidently are about their sex scenes, I can't help empathizing with actors of any sex simulating sexual acts on the screen or onstage. The more the envelope is pushed, the "steamier" the scenes become, the more many viewers will want and demand, and the more they'll believe that they could bed the actors if they met, the more entitled they feel to show their asses on social media and in real life. As it happens, I first heard of the series in a clip on YouTube, of the two men sitting across a space from each other and sweatily radiating sexual tension and nervousness. The chemistry was impressive, and piqued my interest. I think this sort of thing is better conveyed in prose than in visuals, though. It seems to me that at the same time that liberal folk are becoming more panicky about nudity and sexual activity in real life, they also want more skin and simulated sex on film. (Or on stage.)  Maybe as a substitute?  Another thing I like about Williams and Storrie is their comfort with, even celebration of, physical affection with each other.  Not only many straight men but many gay men see hugs and cuddling only as preludes to penetration, even as they may lament that everybody else sees hugs and cuddling only as preludes to penetration. 

I wish Williams and Storrie well. I hope they have long interesting acting careers, with opportunities to be more than eye candy.  I'll also be interested to see what effect Heated Rivalry has on TV and cinema's treatment of gay subjects.  There seem to be some other intriguing projects in recent release, for that matter.

My Top 15 Plus 1 for 2025

I'm pre-dating this post because I started work on it more than a week ago and should have finished it then.

I was fairly productive last year, and got more traffic than I deserved.  Here are the posts that got the most attention.

15. Coulda Woulda Shoulda (159). We told her so, but she didn't listen; she preferred to lose.

14. Scribble Scribble Scribble (165).  The first of several posts on the current state of gay male fiction.

13. Your Call Is Very Important to Us (172).  Elon Musk inadvertently reminded the Internet how bad the private sector is at serving the public, compared to government agencies.

12. Let Jesus Sort Them Out  (173).  Once again, conservative Christians showed how little value they put on children's lives.

11. If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You! (185)  The Blame Game, 2024 Elections edition.

10. That Is What Fiction Means (196).  I understand and feel the appeal of punitive fantasies, the more hateful the better.  But it doesn't make the world any better, or solve any problems.

9. Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine (236). I also understand the appeal of fantasizing about saving a lucky few from horrible fates we ourselves created.  Still not a good idea.

8. All I Really Want to Do (323). To boycott Joanne Rowling, or not to boycott her?

7. Whole Lotta ... Somethin' (323). Swept off my feet by every inch of Robert Plant's love.

6. My Father's House Has Many Cafes, Crafts Vendors, Etc. (399). Returning to the site of an antigay church / cafe / vendor mall, and finding only ruins and the cries of the birds.  Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

5. That's My Noem, Don't Wear It Out (406).  The limitations of Snopes.

4. Go Ask Joanne (419).  Rowling again.  You're adults, pick out your own damn books!

3. The Trouble With Sydney -- Born That Way?  (441). Actress and blue jeans pimp Sydney Sweeney stirred up a fuss last summer.  It soon blew over...

2. All Your Genes Are Belong to Her (690) ... but not before I wrote a second consecutive post about it.

1. I Will Follow Him (702).  Richard Dawkins is still in idiotic hawker mode. What would I do without him?

Bonus: Who Is My Neighbor? or, I Don't Really Care, Do U (8658). This was a strange one.  One of the sites I use to monitor traffic announced that bots were responsible for much of the views some blogs were getting, and that they would no longer count those views.  I'd like to think that this post earned that absurd number, but I don't think it really did.  Pundit Matthew Yglesias declared it "sus" that American college students cared, or thought they cared, about faraway, foreign Palestine. He didn't feel the same way about Americans who cared, or thought they cared about faraway, foreign Israel. When challenged, he didn't explain why the two cases were different.  An interesting self-revelation, I thought.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2025

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio links to them.  Have a look, and see what you think. 

Excuse Me, What Planet Are We On?

I've seen this post from the ACLU on Facebook a couple of times recently.  Today I looked at it more closely, and it really pissed me off.

Of course little Logan should have been allowed to grow his hair long.  It has nothing to do with "tribal culture."  Boys who aren't part of that culture should also be allowed to grow their hair long - or not, as they wish. I thought that little matter had been more less settled after the Sixties; evidently not.  

According to the Facebook version of the post, "after Logan and his family pushed back, the school updated its rules to allow for long hair on boys. Native students have the right to honor their heritage in their expression."  Again, all students have that right: MAGA students, white Christian students, students wearing Confederate emblems. And how about child betrothal? That's a heritage that's at least a thousand years old. (As a wise person wrote sarcastically long ago: "I'm a white heterosexual male; oppression and exploitation are part of my culture." We shouldn't hate people for who they are!) The ACLU has had to intervene in schools that tried to block such expressions.

A few months ago Hemant Mehta, aka the Friendly Atheist, posted a video about a high school that gives seniors reserved parking spaces that the students are allowed to decorate, though they have to clear their designs with the administration. A Christian girl submitted a very tame Christian design, which the administration vetoed; she submitted another, tamer design, and in the end the school reluctantly allowed it.  This was the right thing to do, as Mehta says in the video.  But some of his commenters disagreed, some vehemently.  One wrote that it "risk[ed] causing a religious war on the school ground". Another wrote "I don't know tho, 'no religious symbols' feels like a fair rule. Yes, it should have been included in the guidlines, but it's not a crazy ask".  Another: "I went to a Catholic high school in the 1980s and there's no way on Earth ANY of us would've chosen some sort of religious theme to decorate a personalized parking space. America has lost its marbles."  (Religious - that is, private - schools have more leeway to suppress freedom of expression than public schools. It seems odd to me that religious imagery would have been disallowed at a Catholic school - were students allowed to wear scapulars?)

This person went further:

I'm gonna dissent here. If I was a student with religious trauma (I got some trauma, but not a student now), and I saw a 'God is Love' parking space on my way in every day, I would feel like my struggle had been minimized. I would feel attacked. When I was in high school I had to push back a few times against Christian encroachment into the neutral learning space. It ***sucked***, because their response is never 'we understand your problem' but instead 'why don't you like love?'

I wrote a reply:

Gee, that's too bad.  I understand your problem, but it is not the business of the state or public institutions to spare you discomfort - indeed, the Bill of Rights effectively guarantees your right to be uncomfortable.  You are not entitled to silence others because of your trauma.  I would say the same thing to a conservative Christian who 'feels attacked' by competing religions or no religions at all - and you do know they use that rhetoric.

I speak, by the way, as a lifelong atheist and gay man who grew up in the rural midwest in harsher times. I've encountered plenty of Christian and other encroachment in my time; I do not demand that the state protect me from it.  That way lies the same kind of authoritarianism I'm rejecting here, and I speak from decades of experience in a public Big Ten university.  The culture of therapy is nominally secular, but it's as much of a threat to freedom as any religion. 

I've written about this before (and before that).  An alarming number of people find it very threatening that other people are allowed not only to hold beliefs but to try to persuade others to hold them.  They cloak this in therapeutic language or other covers, in the name of liberalism and inclusiveness, but they are authoritarians and censors at heart.  I may sympathize with their discomfort, but not with their wish to silence everyone else.  I fully support helping kids (and adults) learn to defend themselves against religious and other encroachment, though of course most of it will come from their own parents.  But I'm in a minority: the Culture of Therapy wants compassionate professionals to "protect" us from the bad guys, because we are too fragile to deal with hostility, criticism, or any difference of opinion at all. 

Worse, Mehta in the video defends a hypothetical atheist decoration on the grounds that it wouldn't be "offensive," and supports school censorship of students' speech that is "offensive."  Who gets to decide what is offensive?  (If offense were a criterion, he'd have to reject statues of Baphomet in public spaces - but he thinks they're cool. They aren't, but they are protected by the First Amendment.)  And many people would be offended by atheist decorations; Mehta can hardly be unaware of that.  

If you want a society with freedom of religion and speech, you'd better get used to being offended.  The First Amendment guarantees your right to be offended.  High school is the latest that students of all opinions should start learning that basic truth, and how to deal with it; such education should start sooner.  My objection as an atheist to officially sanctioned prayers in public schools is not that they're offensive - I'm not offended by them - but that they are encroachments against the establishment clause of the First Amendment.  Life in a free society is not always comfortable.  

Back to Logan Lomboy.  To repeat, I support his right to wear his hair long, not because it's a thousand-year-old tribal heritage but because all people should have the right to determine their appearance as much as possible.  I can't help but wonder, though, what will happen if he decides he doesn't want to wear it long a few years down the road?  Will his mother celebrate his decision?  Traditional societies aren't generally big on individual choice.  After all, he's awfully young, too young to make important decisions like that. His little brain hasn't matured enough ... I'm being sarcastic, mind you: I don't consider it an important decision.  What is important, and needs to be protected because it's always under threat, is people's freedom to choose to be different.

The One That Got Away

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a youth pastor who bragged on video about recommending the Bible to a middle-school girl and then scampering away.  ("And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know," mic drop.)  An atheist podcaster / blogger was upset about it; I wondered how much of the glorious tale was true.

Then the Internet forced this story down my throat: a MAGA-adjacent TikTok pastor / therapist named Stuart Knechtle bragged to another "faith-based podcaster" that he had brought 19-year-old Barron Trump to the very brink of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  Or maybe not: "And he’s very close to putting his faith in Christ. Very close." (I almost had that 100-pound marlin in the boat, that 12-point buck was in my sights!)

The whole story was dodgy.  Why was this guy on the phone to a teenager, let alone a president's son, at 12:30 a.m.?  Who called whom?  Numerous commenters on the Daily Beast story were upset about Knechtle's talking publicly about his missionary activity, but bragging about hooking high-profile converts is as old as Christianity: the New Testament contains numerous such stories.  One can question the ethics of publicizing a phone conversation, but without knowing the circumstances of the call I can't say.  Besides, this guy is a MAGA Christian: what has he to do with ethics?  I expect both of Barron's parents have staff whose job it is to monitor media about him, and if I were Stuart Knechtle I'd watch my back.

Anyone who's been exposed to missionary propaganda will recognize the form of these stories, though usually they end with the target joyously giving himself or herself to Jesus; the conversio interruptus these guys recount is, I admit, less familiar to me.  But this all reminded me of a book I read a couple of years ago, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition by Eric Eve (Fortress Press, 2014).  As I've written before, biblical scholars have long been interested in the ways the early Christians preserved teaching by and about Jesus in the period before the gospels were written.  "Oral tradition" is a catch-all term for the practices supposedly used, but not much was known about how they worked, and Eve's book is a good introduction to the present state of scholarship.

I was particularly interested in chapter 5, where Eve discusses some recent work, which draws on accounts of a 19th-century Christian missionary, John Hogg, as reported by his daughter.  Hogg worked in Egypt, building Christian communities there.  (Although Egypt is primarily Muslim, it was a hotbed of early Christianity and still has a significant Christian minority that long predates John Hogg.)  The discussion is too long to detail here, but briefly, as a late 20th century scholar named Kenneth Bailey tells one of the stories:

Before the first World War John Hogg’s daughter dipped into this same oral tradition and in her biography of him told of how he was waylaid at night by a band of robbers who demanded valuables. He quickly surrendered a gold watch and his money but indicated that he had a treasure worth far more. They were curious. He pulled a small book from his pocket and spent the entire night telling them of the treasures it contained. By morning the band, convicted of the evil of their ways, sought to return his watch and money and pledged themselves to give up highway robbery. Hogg took the watch but insisted that they keep his money, and indeed then financed the gang personally until they could establish themselves in legal employment. [quoted in Eve, p. 69]

This is the familiar come-to-Jesus story.  But Eric Eve looked at the daughter's biography of her father and found that she had another version of the encounter.  She dismisses the version Bailey used as a "romantic tale," and gives a much longer and "rather more mundane" one without the edifying conversion (pp. 70ff.).  Rena Hogg, the daughter, "regarded the discrepant versions of this tale as evidence of how 'fact and fancy mingled in lore'.  A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that the discrepant versions show how fact is transmuted into legend" (p. 72).  Eve points out that the polished, edifying version was preserved more or less intact for several decades, and it's easy to see why.  Kenneth Bailey hoped to establish that such preservation was involved in the early churches and supports the reliability of the gospels and Acts.  What it seems to show is that considerable editing may have been applied to the material the churches passed along, to make it suitable for preaching and proselytizing, and it sounds to me like the processes assumed a century ago by form-criticism, as passé as it's commonly said to be.

In the case of the stories told by Friendly Atheist's youth pastor and Stuart Knechtle, we aren't even looking at supposedly inerrant Bible stories, just self-aggrandizing tall tales told by would-be fishers of men.  It's not only appropriate but necessary to be skeptical of them, especially when they fit such a recognizable pattern.  If you're at all interested in this subject, I urge you to read Behind the Gospels.  If it seems too scholarly, another recent book, Elijah Wald's Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (Da Capo Press, 2024), shows oral tradition at work in the development of the blues in the late  1800s to early 1900s.  Be aware that, as its title suggests, it's often pretty raunchy, but if you're reading this blog that shouldn't be a barrier; and remember that, according to Friendly Atheist, the Bible itself is full of filth and nastiness.  In reading Jelly Roll Blues I saw a lot of parallels to the development of early Christian tradition, but it's fascinating in its own right.

Woman Enough to Wield a Riding Crop

(Spoilers Galore in what follows)

I just bought the Criterion Collection DVD of Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film My Brilliant Career.  It's one of my all-time favorite movies, and although I already own the 2005 Blue Underground DVD, I thought a Criterion edition with their supplementary material would be a good investment. The Criterion includes a couple of new interviews and Armstrong's student short film One Hundred a Day, which brought her to the attention of the producer Margaret Fink and soon led to the making of My Brilliant Career.

An interview with Fink on the Blue Underground DVD informed me that the first major financial backer of the project was very nervous about Sybylla the main character's refusal to marry a wealthy, eligible, and swoonworthy suitor.  He changed his mind when he saw the final cut, but how interesting that a commercially-minded male industry type would agree with two radical gay male writers on that point, though their opinion was formed after they'd seen the film.  Years later, Fink and Armstrong were still a bit nervous about it, protesting that it wasn't a feminist decision. I think it is, but then I don't think that counts against it.  (As Rita Mae Brown wrote in a note in her second novel, To the non-feminist reader: What's wrong with you?)  

Armstrong says that such an ending would be more acceptable today, but I'm not so sure of that.  What would, I think, be acceptable would be for Sybylla to marry Harry, live comfortably in his mansion with a room of her own, numerous babies (tended by the help), as the camera pans over a row of her books visible and she writes in her workroom.  For her to end up as she does in Armstrong's film, single, writing at night in her parents' rundown farmhouse in the outback, is less so.  I think it's the difference between a woman's movie and a feminist movie. The former is okay, but there is a difference.

I am ambivalent about the Criterion Collection, which I think is somewhat overrated, partly as a result of all the "Criterion Closet" YouTube videos I've watched.  In these, industry-connected people are turned loose with a bag in a big closet of Criterion videos.  They gush over this cornucopia of great cinema, though the movies they choose tend to be pedestrian and predictable, and while I think it would be fun to have my pick of their products too, there are many great movies that aren't in the Collection and I want them too.  While Criterion video transfers are excellent and the supplements are generally good, a Criterion edition means that older releases of the same movies often become unavailable, and Criterion editions cost more, often a lot more.  (I know -- I can and often do buy used copies of the other versions.)  Criterion editions are usually only in one language, unlike mainstream releases which may have several, and that can be valuable, as can subtitles in more than one language. But that's just me; I doubt many people notice or care about this.

Criterion editions also feature printed essays by prominent critics, though these tend to be of uneven quality.  My Brilliant Career has one by Carrie Rickey, a critic I used to read in the Village Voice if memory serves. Rickey's essay is all right, but I quibble with one of her takes: "And while there is a fabulous kiss in My Brilliant Career, the first time Harry leans in to buss Sybylla, she hits him upside the head with a riding crop."

This is technically true, but I think it misreads the scene.  Context: It takes place during a big party on Sybylla's maternal grandmother's estate.  Sybylla has sneaked out of the upper-class ball in the big house to party with the workers in the barn.  Class is an issue that I haven't seen addressed in discussions of My Brilliant Career.  Sybylla's mother comes from bluebloods, her father is the salt of the earth. Thanks to childhood visits to her mother's mother, she knows her way around a formal dinner, but she also loves working people.  (Miles Franklin, the author of the 1901 novel, eventually became a labor organizer in the United States.)  Her suitor Harry Beecham drags her by the arm away from the barn and brusquely proposes marriage.  She taunts him, which understandably makes him angry; he grabs her in a classic movie move and pulls her roughly to him.  It's at that point that she hits him upside the head with a riding crop. I think Rickey plays down Harry's aggression in the scene.  (I also don't agree that their eventual kiss is fabulous, but decide for yourself.)

But anyway, if you have never seen My Brilliant Career, you should. It holds up very well after forty years, and it looks great for a relatively low-budget movie, as lush as a Merchant-Ivory prestige production.  Despite my reservations about Criterion, this edition shows off its visuals, and the English subtitles enabled me to understand some mumbled dialogue I'd missed before.  For that matter, read the book.