You Think I'm Joking?

A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media.  I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness.  It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged.  Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.

First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about.  Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions.  Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.  

I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.

Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump.  Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters.  "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients.  No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now.  ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)

Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators.  Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard."  I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist.  A few years later, he was better prepared.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."  Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.

Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then.  No, I didn't.  This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here.  The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes.  Yeah, I know that one too.  I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.

So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.  

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

"Loser" is a nothingburger as an insult, though I admit it's better than "ret*rd," which is popular not only among MAGA but everywhere on the political spectrum. But then so is "loser." Don't be stupid, people. If that's the best you've got, it's better to keep silent than to remove all doubt about your vacuity.

 

Oh, it's okay because Trump uses it and you're just turning it back on him? Keep digging yourselves in deeper.

He Strictly Charged Them to Tell No One About Him

The discourse on race / ethnicity stinks to high heaven. 

A new movie version of Wuthering Heights will be released next month, and not for the first time there's controversy over the casting of Heathcliff.  It has been more than a decade since I last read the book, and I'm in no hurry to do it again, but as I remember, Heathcliff was a man of mystery, of ambiguous and unknown ancestry.  The discussion I saw on Twitter/X today agreed, but people were still trying to pin him down, while others tried to impose "modern" Foucauldianism on the story.  For example, dismissals of "people who interpret everything through contemporary American racial dynamics," or "But Heathcliff is supposed to be possibly-not-fully-white by the standards of late 18th C Yorkshire, which is not the same thing as being clearly nonwhite by modern standards... He isn't clearly described as nonwhite, but as someone who raises suspicions because of an ambiguous appearance and background."

Whose modern standards?  Which modern standards?  The new movie is a US-UK production.  British racial dynamics are different than US racial dynamics, and both sets are complex and incoherent, even leaving "mixed-race" people out of it.  Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliffe in this version, is Australian with a Basque father. Judging by this publicity photo, I think he looks suitably ambiguous by modern standards.

 

"White" and "non-white" aren't clear categories, and never have been. As I've pointed out before, in English usage "black" is applied to human beings along a continuum from black hair to being sub-Saharan African.  Here's how Heathcliff made his first appearance to the Earnshaw family:

We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.  

Children, even little blue-eyed blond-haired rosy-cheeked English children, were commonly called "it" in English well into the twentieth century, so this passage shouldn't be assumed to be racist.  Heathcliff is referred to as a "gipsy," a "a little Lascar [i.e. South Asian], or an American or Spanish castaway" by other characters in the novel.  Whatever the racial dynamics of late 18th-century Yorkshire were, they weren't clear.  Numerous people have pointed out that Liverpool was a terminus of the Atlantic slave trade, and speculated that Heathcliff might have been a slave or the child of a slave. It's less often noted that the reader has at best only Mr. Earnshaw's word for it that he found the boy in Liverpool; what was he going to say, though, "This is my son by a slave wench"?  I don't assume that Emily Bronte had a clear picture of Heathcliff's ancestry in mind, nor that she could have explained herself clearly if pressed. Intentionally or not, she gave an accurate picture of the racial dynamic in her day by showing that Yorkshire folk just threw around a salad of labels for the boy. They didn't care much what he was, only that he was Other.  (I couldn't resist thinking of the various answers the Twelve gave when Jesus asked "Who do men say that I am?" "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.")

On "gipsy," Roma are not a single "racial" group: see the 1993 musical / documentary Latcho Drom, which ranges from India across Europe to Spain.  If Heathcliff could have been "a Spanish castaway," he could have been Basque; he still wouldn't have been white. Complaints about the casting of Elordi that call him white are as inadvertently entertaining as the complaints that Neo in The Matrix was played by a white actor.  (Keanu Reeves is multiethnic, to put it gently.)  The gatekeepers are as ignorant as their opponents, and contribute little or nothing to improving the discourse.

Are Hispanics white?  Hey, remember the right-wing think-tanker who thought that Spanish speakers are a "race"? But he wants you to know that he's not a racist. Remember the liberal queer diversity educators who insisted that Sunni and Shi'a are ethnicities?  Jon Schwarz likes to remind us that Benjamin Franklin said that Germans are "swarthy," that is, dark-skinned:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. 

You see, it's okay for a Basque to play Heathcliff: they aren't white! And I remember that light-skinned African-Americans sometimes passed, or were mistaken for Mexicans or or Latins.

A similar casting dilemma affects Shakespeare's Othello. What is a Moor, in Elizabethan racial dynamics?  Othello is called "black" by some characters, and he might have been African, but probably not. Numerous commenters in those threads mentioned that in more recent adaptations, Othello has been played by black African actors.  Laurence Olivier (who also played Heathcliff in a film version of Wuthering Heights) played Othello in blackface in a 1965 movie performance. (My goodness, the whole thing is on YouTube.)  Like this:

 

Then there was Andrea Arnold's 2011 version of Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff was played by an Afro-British actor.  I found it uneven but interesting, partly because the dialogue included some F-bombs. Was that "authentic"? "Correct"?  Bronte couldn't have published the novel with such language, and I have no idea whether she knew the word, but probably she did, and the expletives were in character for Heathcliff.  The English were notorious for their foul language: Joan of Arc called them "goddens," or "goddamns."

I don't intend to see the new version; I'll see how the reviews are.  But I don't love the book, so why bother? The anxiety and confusion over the casting - there's also an actor in it with an Arabic name, and a Chinese as well - drew my attention to it, that's all.  Is there even any point in trying to sort out the tangled web of race / ethnic discourse?  I don't think it can be done.

You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from most of Ehrman's fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And there was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

 

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.

Down the Memory Hole

Ah, NPR's Scott Simon.  What a guy.

On Saturday morning, Simon interviewed Cardinal Blase Cupich to find out why three American cardinals, Cupich among them, had criticized Donald Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela, Greenland, and elsewhere.  

The interview was of little interest, but at one point Cupich sneezed, and Simon said "Gesundheit!" He then chortled at the crazy idea of him, a layman and a non-Catholic, saying "God bless you" to a Prince of the Catholic Church. Cupich accepted it graciously.

The trouble is, Gesundheit is German for "health," not "God bless you." I know, I know, it's the thought that counts, but NPR is supposed to be high-quality, fact-based journalism.  Not that Simon's smarmy combination of coziness and obsequiousness is either one.  But it jolted me awake, and I figured I had an easy blog post in hand, so I waited for the transcript to be posted.

A few hours later, I read the transcript, and the exchange wasn't there.  I listened to the sound file; it too had been edited.  I don't know why.  If Simon was embarrassed by his tiny error -- no, he seems incapable of embarrassment. This isn't a big thing, but it's emblematic of NPR.

Elsewhere in the interview, Simon asked:

What about the argument, for example, that 8 million Venezuelans have voted with their feet and left their own country. It's a quarter of the population. Hasn't removing Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for drug trafficking in the U.S. opened the door to change?

It's true that extensive emigration from Venezuela has taken place, but it predates Maduro's regime.  First, when Hugo Chavez became president, wealthy Venezuelans moved to Miami, which has long been a haven for right-wing Latin Americans. Then as the US moved to strangle the Venezuelan economy with sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, plus support for multiple military coups,.poorer Venezuelans joined the exodus.  Most stayed in the region; certainly the US didn't intend for them to come here. How much of this flight was due to political opposition to either Chavez or Maduro and how much was driven by economic need probably can't be distinguished.  But I don't think, in years of waking up to NPR's morning news programs, I've ever heard more than token acknowledgment of destructive US policy, and never of its role in driving emigration. Nor did Cupich say anything about it, for what that's worth.

In other faith-based news, CNN reported on Saturday that our new American Pope had issued a warning that

“As we scroll through our information feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings, bots, or virtual influencers,” Pope Leo wrote on Saturday.

“Because chatbots that are made overly ‘affectionate,’ in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people’s intimate spheres,” he added.

So true! That's the clergy's role.

(I'm also worried about many people's turning to AI constructs for emotional support, but there are good as well as bad reasons why they do it. Clergy in all sects have not distinguished themselves by their respect for boundaries with vulnerable believers, and their superiors (and even parents) have protected the abusive ones. I'm still concerned by people who turn to AI for interaction that is designed never to cross them, just as I'm concerned by people who turn to pets for it. The trouble isn't just that it's difficult to understand whether one is interacting with other human beings or with computer software, it's that many people prefer the software to actual human beings.  That chatbots can become abusive is worrisome too.  But this is too serious for what I meant to be a lighthearted post.)

Nobody's Perfect

Spoilers Ahead. 

I mentioned that there were other gay-themed projects aside from Heated Rivalry in recent release that I was interested in seeing.  Foremost among them was The History of Sound, which got very positive press after it screened at Cannes last year.  I watched it this weekend, and I was disappointed by it. It won't be available on home video until late March, so I'm nervous about giving away too much about it.  I'll keep my comments general for a paragraph or two.  If you want to see it without preconceptions, you should stop reading now.

The History of Sound is, I admit, very well produced and acted, as you can tell from the trailer I started off with here. It's the story of two young men who meet in 1915 and immediately fall in love over their shared love of traditional ballads. They spend three months traveling around Maine, seeking out people to collect songs from. They record these songs on wax cylinders, a cutting-edge recording technology of the period. Afterward they are separated by circumstances; one stays on to teach music, the other goes to Europe and becomes a choral performer.  They fall out of touch.  The one who went to Europe drifts from relationship to relationship, but returns to his home farm in Kentucky when his mother dies. They never reunite, but one becomes a famous ethnomusicologist and in 1980 is ultimately reunited with the long-lost wax cylinders he and his love collected so many years before.

That ending prevents The History of Sound from becoming the kind of breakout romance Heated Rivalry is now.  Mass audiences generally want happy endings for their love stories.  I do too, but I'm not rigid about it.  My objections to The History of Sound are about other aspects of the film.

I got the impression from the first publicity I encountered that The History of Sound was based on an actual, historical pair of song collectors. I soon found out that I was mistaken: it's based on short stories by one Ben Shattuck, who wrote the screenplay.  Fair enough; I'm always frustrated by movies that are "based on," or worse, "inspired by a true story," because I want to know what liberties were taken with the true story, and usually they negatively affect the result; so I didn't have to worry about that here.

Still, I was bothered by numerous things, not all of them strictly historical.  That song-collecting trip through Maine in winter, for one. There's no snow at all, the guys sleep outside in a tent.  For another, the Maine landscape looks exactly like the Kentucky landscape where the film begins. For yet another, the narrator, Lionel (played by Paul Mescal) tells us at the beginning that he has synesthesia - he not only hears but sees and tastes sound -- and perfect pitch. The synesthesia doesn't play a role in the rest of the movie, though there are a couple of random scenes where Lionel goes into a rapture when someone else plays music; at other times he has no such reaction.

The two young men don't seem to have any misgivings about their forbidden love, except for one flashback late in the story where David (Josh O'Connor) asks Lionel if he has any.  Lionel says no.  This doesn't strike me as anachronistic: sometimes same-sex lovers didn't feel bad about their love because they didn't realize they were Sodomites or Sapphists, or were just good at denial. Contrariwise, a good many same-sex lovers in our liberated times still feel paralyzing guilt.  O'Connor and Mescal turn in fine performances, the love scenes make it clear that Lionel and David are committing acts that in the day could have sent them to prison; my complaint is not about The History of Sound as queer cinema.

More important historically, I took for granted at first that David and Lionel, or at least the filmmakers, knew that they were only two of many song collectors. The research didn't begin with the invention of recording technology either.  But as the film went on, I got the impression that it was treating them as lone pioneers, culminating in the 1980 TV interview with Lionel at the very end, touting his book on the subject as some sort of towering revelation.  I grew up on the 1950s and 1960s "folk revival," not just the Weavers and the Kingston Trio or Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but Alan Lomax's big books of traditional songs and numerous old-time musicians like Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten who re-emerged in old age from obscurity to become stars of the folk festival circuit. My favorite account is Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard, 1997), but there are many others.

The film's focus on a few ballads seemed off to me as well.  If there were few black people in New England before WWI, other song collectors went after not only the next variant of "Barbara Allen" but "Negro" spirituals, work songs, and the like - not to mention dance music, shape-note hymns, and much more.  I don't think I believe that an experienced song collector like David (as a boy he'd traveled to England with his uncle to find songs) would not have known "Silver Dagger" in 1915; it was made famous by Joan Baez in the 1960s, but its origins - in England! - were well-known.  Someone, I think, was stretching for a meet-cute moment to bring Lionel and David together. It may work for many viewers of the film who don't know anything about folk ballads, but I thought it hung far too much on a slender thread.

As a result of that interview, Lionel receives the box of thirty-seven wax cylinders that he and David recorded so long before.  It seems anti-climactic to me.  I like low-key films, but it's possible to be too low-key.  The leads' performances sustain the film, but they're not enough to make it hold together.  I agreed with the Guardian's review, which I found only after I'd thought out this post:

This is a film about music as well as love, but the folk songs, for which Mescal and O’Connor gamely fabricate enthusiasm, sound like museum pieces kept under glass and the love story itself feels as if it is kept under glass. The accents and line-readings feel like painstaking expert reconstructions rather than the real thing and the love scenes are at half-throttle – as if they are there to be remembered sadly rather than experienced ecstatically in the here and now.

I repeat, I was disappointed by The History of Sound.  It's a labor of love by all concerned, but it falls flat for me. 

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. "John" was a common name at the time, like "Jesus" or "Mary." 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. 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.