A Diller, A Dollar, A Ten O'Clock Scholar

  

By Grabthar's Hammer, these two are insufferable.  But I see from the comments that many find them adorable.

I'll concede the necessity of providing a general background, but it takes Ehrman far too long to get to the ostensible subject of the video, and then he sort of dances around it in a way that will probably just confuse most of his audience.  If I were going to try to answer the question of whether Paul was an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus, I think I'd begin by explaining who Paul was, what he said about the resurrection, compare it to the accounts in Acts, and if there was time, maybe compare the gospels.

There is some useful information here, scattered among the giggling and smirking: the research on memory and eyewitnesses Ehrman refers to, especially, which he wrote about in Jesus Before the Gospels, one of his better books.  I find it hard to believe he spent two years boning up on it, it sounds like a pastor's exaggeration to me, and he's so disorganized that I wonder how many viewers will be able to follow what he's talking about.  (I encountered some of the literature on memory in the 1990s, in the wake of the Ritual Satanic Abuse scare, and much on the Jesus tradition before the gospels in the 1980s and afterward.)  

One thing that has long bugged me is the inexactness of "the resurrection" in Christian discussion of the subject.  It seems to me that it should refer specifically to the restoration of Jesus' body to life on the Sunday after his crucifixion, and by extension to his visits with his followers immediately afterward. In that sense there were no witnesses to the resurrection, at least according to the gospels. (Interestingly, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter depicts the disciple Simon Peter watching as Jesus or a symbolic avatar is carried out of the tomb.  That gospel is not recognized by any church today, and the only existing copy dates from several centuries after Jesus' death.  Some scholars speculate that it may draw on earlier traditions, but nobody knows.)  But after awhile I realized that Christians, including scholars, used "resurrection" to refer to the cosmic fact of Jesus' victory over death, in which his raising is almost incidental. The empty tomb is equated with the resurrection, though it's not the same thing. 

"Witness" has a similar vagueness.  It refers not only to someone who saw the risen Jesus but to anyone at any time afterward who testified that the resurrection had happened.  "Witness" and "testify" (not to mention the Greek martyr, which means "witness" and didn't originally denote someone who died for his or her beliefs) are basically synonyms.  Someone who testifies that he believes that Christ was raised is also a witness to the resurrection, even centuries later.

"Eyewitness" at least seems more exact, though again, no one actually was an eyewitness to Jesus getting up from the slab, shedding his grave wrappings, and emerging (nekkid?) from the tomb. They were eyewitnesses to the appearances (another interestingly vague word) of the risen Lord.  Although the gospels stress the fleshly, meaty substantiality of his risen body, the risen Jesus flits around the vicinity of Jerusalem, popping in and out of locked rooms, sometimes recognized by his followers and sometimes not. According to Paul in I Corinthians 15, however, the risen body was not and could not be of flesh, but of spirit.

So, what about Paul?  One frustrating thing about him is that in his letters he's very coy about his witness to the resurrected Jesus.  Maybe he said more when he was making converts and founding his churches.  In I Corinthians 15 he says he's reminding them of what he preached to them:

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 

When I first sat down and compared Paul with the resurrection stories in the gospels, I was startled by the differences.  He doesn't mention Mary Magdalene, and only Luke among the gospels mentions Jesus appearing to Peter ("Cephas" comes from the Aramaic for "rock," as "Peter" comes from the Greek, so most scholars believe that Paul is referring to Peter here).  That's odd if Mark's gospel was written from Peter's preaching, as tradition claims; maybe Peter was just too modest ever to mention it?

The Twelve can probably be harmonized with appearances to the Eleven in the gospels, since Judas was no longer with them, but this too is a strange lapse.  Didn't Paul know about Judas?  Some scholars think that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is a later legend, and I agree, but no one knows.  The appearance to "more than five hundred brothers at one time" has been getting some attention lately from fundamentalist YouTubers, but it's more of an embarrassment: why do none of the gospels mention it?  According to Acts, all of the brothers present after Jesus' ascension into Heaven numbered 120.  What happened to the other 380?

"James" is generally thought to be the brother of Jesus.  Again, this appearance isn't mentioned in any of the gospels or in Acts, though in Acts 15 this James is an authoritative figure in the Jerusalem church.  "All the apostles" is confusing, aside from the fact that it doesn't appear elsewhere either. How many apostles were there?

And then, Paul says, Jesus appeared to him.  As Ehrman asks rhetorically in the video, how did Paul know it was Jesus?  He could have asked the same question about Ananias of Damascus, to whom Jesus appeared "in a vision" in Acts 9 after he appeared to Paul. (So Paul wasn't "last of all" after all.)  Ehrman tosses out several possibilities, none of which seems plausible to me.  In Acts Jesus tells Paul who he is, and would Jesus lie?  (That sort of circularity is popular among apologists.)  Maybe more to the point, does a vision count as "eyewitness"?  Acts isn't a reliable source, but Paul is no help either.

Paul says he "received" the list of resurrection appearances.  Where, from whom, did he receive it?  Most scholars assume that he received it from Peter and James when he met them in Jerusalem.  There are several reasons why this isn't a good answer, such as how Paul preached this stuff during the long period after his conversion but before he went to Jerusalem.  Paul insists in Galatians that he received his gospel directly from Jesus, by revelation.  Even fundamentalists are reluctant to take him at his word, for some reason. Don't they believe that the risen Lord could instruct Paul personally?  I don't, but I'm an infidel.

Again, we'll never know.  I've noticed before that Paul says he "received" his version of the Eucharist, the Christian communion meal, from "the Lord," and again I take him at his word, that this is what he believed even if I don't.  Interestingly, though, his version agrees closely, almost word for word, with the versions in the synoptic gospels. (Mark, Luke, and Matthew.)  Maybe Paul and the gospel writers drew on the same branch of tradition.  If that's the case, then why are their accounts of the resurrection so wildly, impossibly different?  I've been wondering lately if the gospels based their accounts of the Eucharist on Paul's, but if so, why did they ignore his list of resurrection appearances?  I mean "ignore" deliberately: they knew it but didn't feel bound to follow it.  Oral tradition varies a great deal in how well it preserves material.  Sometimes a story will be passed along verbatim very accurately, while other stories are changed freely.  That might have happened here.

I also wonder why Ehrman in his videos seems to be talking about his topics almost for the first time, as if these issues wouldn't have come up often in the courses he taught for decades.  It seems to be his shtick, and I find it annoying. If I were new to biblical studies, I think I would find it confusing and unhelpful.  Judging by the comments, I'm not sure that many of his fans really follow him.  They're impressed by his credentials, which are certainly real enough, and by his opposition to fundamentalist Christianity, but they  seem to miss a lot of what he says, and miss that his positions are as much at odds with their liberal, feel-good vision of Christianity as they are with conservative evangelicals'.  Like C. S. Lewis's fans, they bask in the aura of his superior learning; it's not vital that they themselves learn.

What Can You Say About an Old Lady Who Died?

Dolly Parton died today at the age of eighty. Her nephew and security chief Bryan Seaver announced it in a moving video on behalf of her family.  He says Parton asked him to do it several years ago. That impressed me, because it suggests that Parton planned ahead, aware of her mortality before it really caught up with her.  Maybe she'd had some health scares even then? There were bursts of publicity in the past year when she had to cancel appearances, but she always minimized them in her public statements. Probably that was a good idea; she was always a canny manipulator of her image.

Many people, predictably, are going nuts. One old friend of mine, a highly educated and intelligent person in her sixties, wailed on Facebook that she'd believed Dolly would live forever, and said Willie Nelson should be wrapped in cellophane bubble-wrap to protect him.  To be fair, she's dealing better with her own mother's failing health, having just moved her to a closer care facility as her memory gets worse.  I suspect that people are more realistic about the people they are close to and must care for, while celebrities just aren't real to them and they can fantasize that they're immortal. I shudder to think what will happen to her when her idol Bruce Springsteen (age 76) buys the farm.

I've written before about this, how people refuse to let their heroes go, when I saw the mass tantrums over Nelson Mandela's long decline. 

For years before [his death], he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

Robin Williams was another morbid case.  I know people who are still obsessed with him. 

My friend is a Parton fan, and I'm not.  I like some of her music, but country has never done much for me.  What mattered to me was that Parton transcended her background, wandering beyond country as she pleased, while insisting that she was just a simple country girl all along. I will always wonder how much of that was a conscious act, though it doesn't really matter.  Her philanthropy is also important - as a reader I naturally admired her books for kids initiative, and will forever hate my state's governor, for cutting off funding to it. (I know, others did too.)  It didn't really affect the program, it was more a show of allegiance to Trump and his own MAGA base.  Parton's openness and humanity is her legacy.  I expect we'll see more of her planning in the days and years to come; she didn't let death take her by surprise. But like all of us, she was never going to live forever.  I'm seventy-five myself, my health is tolerably good, but I know my days are numbered.  I need to do some more planning myself.

In one of those meaningless coincidences that make life interesting, Parton's death was announced just as I was coming to end of David Lodge's 2008 novel Deaf Sentence.  Lodge died last year at the age of 90, which I didn't know until I looked him up just now.  The protagonist of Deaf Sentence is a retired professor of linguistics in his 60s. He's progressively losing his hearing and the novel is largely about his struggle to adjust.  But it's also about mortality and the meaning of life.  The protagonist encounters a young American graduate student who's studying the rhetoric of suicide notes.  His first marriage ended in his wife's death of cancer, and he's caring for his elderly father; he makes a lot of dad jokes about deafness, playing on the word's closeness to death, such as I had not known deaf had undone so many, and of course the novel's title. In many ways it's a dark, disturbing book, but it has Lodge's typical humanity and humor.  I was annoyed when I read a recent review of another novelist's survey of The Novel, who singled Lodge out as an especially bad novelist.  I disagree vehemently, but then I don't much care, and Deaf Sentence is a reason why, apart from the fact that I happened to read it at an appropriate time.

P.S.:

 

Vote DSA All the Way

This week's batch of primary elections had some promising outcomes.  I'll start with Missouri, a red state. Cori Bush was decisively defeated for the Democratic congressional nomination from St. Louis by Wesley Bell. It wasn't a rejection of a progressive, because Bell is also apparently progressive, but he had AIPAC support, so Bush's Israel-critical stance took a hit. 

More important, though, two proposed amendments to the state constitution were rejected by Missouri voters.  Amendment 4 would have made it much harder for citizen-based ballot initiatives to amend the state constitution; this was an effort by Republican elites to block initiatives they find distasteful - for example, to expand Medicaid or protect abortion rights in the state. Voters defeated it, roughly 82-17%. Amendment 5 would have abolished the state income tax; it too went down in flames, 83-16%.

MSNBC commentators, including the obnoxious Rachel Maddow, exulted over this result.  They were delighted that Missouri voters had slapped back at the Republican leadership and insisted on People Power.  Fair enough; I agree.  This was, however, on Tuesday night, when the results of another closely-watched primary were still uncertain, in Michigan.  Here too, party elites and special-interest money had played a major role with the aim of defeating Abdul El-Sayed, who was running against Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination.  El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he ran on a strongly progressive platform and is vehemently critical of Israel's war crimes and US support for them.  Stevens notoriously said "Israel comes to me in my dreams", is strongly supportive of Israel, and received massive campaign donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. She outspent Sayed by a factor of 9 to 1. Liberal Democrats supported her and attacked El-Sayed harshly as a communist, an anti-Semite and an Islamist. But he defeated Stevens anyway, though very narrowly, by one percentage point.  I don't know whether Rachel Maddow is as happy about this outcome as she was of the one in Missouri, but as a matter of principle she ought to be.

Progressives did well elsewhere in Michigan; there's a good discussion here.  The funniest upset involved a Trump-approved Republican who lost by double digits to a competitor who had stopped campaigning weeks ago.  The winner said he'll accept the nomination and run in the general election this November.

Mainstream Democratic celebrities have moved to pledge support to El-Sayed's campaign. Haley Stevens herself has taken the high road; good for her.  Kamala Harris even sent out a fund-raising letter to her list to try to piggy-back on his success.  "It is so important that Abdul enters the general election with a strong start," the letter says.  This is perhaps unfortunate rhetoric, given that Harris's 2024 campaign also had a strong start, with a huge war chest; I hope that El-Sayed will have learned from Harris's mistakes.

Harris's letter also mentions that Republican attacks on El-Sayed have "already begun."  True, but so have right-wing Democratic attacks from the usual scum.  CNN aired an attack interview with him. He calmly batted aside the purity-test questions. Comments under that post, ostensibly from Democrats, are the kind of bigoted froth that was aimed at Zohran Mamdani, and at El-Sayed himself during the campaign; "communist", "mandatory Quran classes in elementary school," "Russian agents but little investigation into it due to fear." Some are probably from MAGA and some are bots, but some are clearly from Democrats.

Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York complained: "All three of us who lost in NYC had very progressive records (including supporting Medicare for All) and we all had the overwhelming support of actual working families — labor unions, public housing residents and immigrant communities."  That's interesting, because I can remember when supporting Medicare for All marked you out as a radical Marxist, and reasonable Democrats pledged to block it.

It's true, supporting Israel is no longer a safe position for Democrats, and even Republicans are less enthusiastic than they used to be. Now we're going to see how firmly Democrats will hew to "Vote Blue No Matter Who."  Some of the terminally online are ready to jettison it and have been since Mamdani won his primary, though I don't know how representative they are.  But I've seen enough frenzied accusations that El-Sayed and Mamdani are communists from Democrats I know personally to feel sure that a significant number of them yearn to make common cause with MAGA. MAGA-adjacent? MAGA-lite?  MAGA-curious?  Whatever you call them, they're a blight in the party, and in the country.  Meanwhile, though I'm gratified by leftish victories, most of them are just primaries. The generals are yet to come.

Garbage In, Gospel Out

[I hope that the clip I've embedded here from Facebook shows up; I'm trying to find it on YouTube and will replace it if I can. Failing that, I'll transcribe it later.]

I don't think that Brian Cox, who appears to be Britain's moptop answer to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is fully responsible for this clip, at least not for the computer animations.  But the words appear to be his.

From one perspective I agree with him: he's addressing people who think that we live in an "advanced" society, and pointing out that compared to where human technology may go in a millennium, we're not all that.  But "advanced" is a relative term.  We are advanced compared to societies where human and sometimes other animals' muscles did all the work, where communication consisted of messages carried orally, or in one jump, in written form by human messengers. But what celebrant of Science doesn't know that, or hasn't imagined the far greater glories to come?  It's been a common trope of speculative fiction since the 19th century.

It's hilarious that so many of my fellow atheists jeer at the fantasies of Bronze Age goat herders that theists believe in, and then turn around and say "Look at this amazing imaginary civilization I made up, with computer animation to look real! I even have multiple categories of imaginary civilizations! This proves that I am smarter than Bronze Age goatherds with imaginary friends!" One way to get perspective on this is to look at scientific projections from 1900 or even 1950 of what the year 2000 would look like.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that other people who objected to Cox's spiel in comments under the clip, in the same terms I do. It wouldn't be as funny if Cox didn't talk about Type 3 Civilizations as if they exist. They don't, so he comes across like a Christian revivalist talking about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven that await those whom God loveth. You think the riches of this world are something special? Compared to the shining garments prepared for you in the world to come, your so-called riches are but filthy rags!  

The fantasy Cox explores here is known as the Kardashev scale, proposed by a Soviet astronomer in the 1960s but boosted by Carl Sagan in the 1970s. According to the Wikipedia article, Sagan "found that the differences between the types Kardashev identified were so great that they did not allow for the best possible modeling of the evolution of civilizations. Consequently, Sagan proposes a more refined classification, still based on Kardashev's types, but integrating intermediate levels using the following logarithmic interpolation formula."  It's probably not fair to theology to say this, but this is theology, like disputing the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.  But then, Modern Science emerged from religion and magic, and it's hasn't left its origins behind.

Ba-ba-ba, Bar-bar-i-Ann

I just read this book (published by St. Martin's Press, 2012) and found it very interesting, but thought it missed something. It follows the history of the idea of "the savage" from ancient Greece to the present-day West, and for one thing someone should look at ideas of foreign barbarians in the East; what stereotypes did the Chinese, for example, have of outsiders?

 

The Greeks were of two minds about barbarians, though. On the one hand they were dirty and violent and lawless and hairy; on the other hand they were clean and pure and much happier than so-called "civilized" Greeks. This contradiction runs through the idea's later history. 

 

"Idea" is important because the Greeks knew nothing about distant peoples and just made up what they thought they were like.  According to the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus,

The farther one moved from Greece toward the distant edges of the world, the more strange and different are the lands and life-forms encountered there. Thus, Greece, Herodotus confidently tells his audience, sits at the stable center of the world, with “far the best and most temperate climate.” The most distant lands, he says, will likely have those things the Greeks think the finest and the rarest. He follows this ancient mythic geographic schema of distance determining the degree of cultural and geographical divergence from the comforting Greek norm at the center of the world throughout the Histories. The most remote lands also are where the strangest and most primitive tribes of fierce and ennobled savages are found. Nearer at hand are barbaric peoples, the nomadic livestock breeders, like the Scythians to the north, who are less savage but still practice ritual forms of cannibalism typical of highly uncivilized barbarians. Closest to Greece are those barbarians who are more or less civilized like the Greeks, with more or less sophisticated customs and belief systems.

The Romans took over this schema verbatim, though they knew of distant civilizations like China.  It persisted through the Christianization of the Roman Empire. After the European invasion of the Americas, European thinkers simply carried over ancient stereotypes to the native peoples there. They were lawless and cruel, always at war, and had no conception of property, therefore European Christians were justified in killing them, enslaving them, and taking their land. This was at a time when European Christians were constantly at war with each other, torturing and executing offenders in public, and were busily trying to steal each other's land and property. Down to modernity, they also invaded other civilizations that had laws and property, from the Middle East to the Pacific Ocean. (Just as the Greeks and Romans had.)  By that time, when Europeans had explored the entire world, it was no longer plausible to fantasize one-eyed people who walked upside down, and the main criterion for conquest was that a country wasn't Christian - though again, this didn't stop Christian countries from invading each other.  What's going on here is projection: by describing the savage, the barbarian, we are describing ourselves.  

And the mentality is still with us:

Think of all the different ways twenty-first-century politicians, military generals, and talking heads on cable news programs draw on a language of savagery to describe the West’s violent, dangerously opposed enemies in the “primitive” mountain ranges and “tribally controlled” territories of Afghanistan or Pakistan. People over there are stuck in the “Stone Age”; they are possessed of a “medieval” mentality. A distinctively Westernized language of savagery, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their civilization-defining conflicts with the “barbarian” hordes of the Persian Empire, might have something to do with where these mental pictures in our heads originated.

I did some online searches, and it appears that the Chinese also had a concept that gets translated as "barbarians."  I doubt they got it from Herodotus. I don't believe "these mental pictures in our heads" originated with the Greeks, and I don't think they would have survived if people hadn't found them congenial.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're innate, but they're definitely ubiquitous, and probably older than the invention of writing; we just can't trace them farther back in time. It's probably useless to try to find an oridin of the idea in time; we reinvent it in every era.

Savage Anxieties is still a valuable work, though.  It goes well with Stefanos Geroulanos' The Invention of Prehistory (Norton, 2024), which shows European intellectuals and scientists similarly making up prehistoric humans based on fantasy, since they had no real evidence about their lives and cultures, in terms derived from Greek and Roman inventions about savages and barbarians.

Dad Always Liked You Best!

Recently another commenter under a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube told me irritably to read Henri Nouwen's book on the parable of the prodigal son. I don't know what he thought it would prove. The question, if I remember right, was whether Jesus thought that sin had to be atoned for through sacrifice. Ehrman thinks not, and that the material in the gospels which teaches atonement is a later accretion to Jesus' actual teaching. I'm not persuaded, for reasons I'll try to go into some other time, but I kept Nouwen in mind because a gay evangelical Christian article I read a couple of years ago mentioned him as a conciliatory voice on homosexuality and the church. I'd also picked up somewhere indications that Nouwen himself was gay, though closeted. Wikipedia assures us that he never did anything, though.

I didn't try to track down Nouwen's book right away, but one day I was rereading an article by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Dennis Nineham, rebutting a critique of his work by another scholar.

... Edwards accuses me of ignoring the parable of the prodigal son as evidence for the meaning of Jesus' teaching.  In arguing that the connotations of the word 'father' were different in the time of Jesus from what they are now - a contention with which he seems to agree in his essay on John Bowden - I have, he says, ignored the evidence of the parable.  He must know that a plausible case has recently been made out for questioning whether the parable goes back to Jesus. (See John Drury, The Parables of the Gospels, 1985, which also gives grounds whether the parable of the good Samaritan goes back to Jesus - a question relevant to [Edwards'] p. 194. This book was reviewed by Edwards.)  In any case this is of all parables one of the hardest to interpret; Professor C. F. Evans, for example, has listed a number of conflicting interpretations.  Even if the one Edwards seems implicitly to choose is the right one, it by no means follows that the 'glimpse of home life' it affords is 'typical', or that the teaching of the parable, so interpreted, is 'not untypical' of the teaching of Jesus.  These are simply ipse dixits.*

At this point, let me admit that a plausible case can be made for questioning whether any individual parable goes back to Jesus, though the reverse is also true. Since the person who commended Nouwen's book to me was commenting under a video by a critical scholar who doesn't assume that everything in the gospels goes back to Jesus, however, I think it's fair to bring up the question. Just pointing to one parable that only one of the four gospels contains doesn't settle anything.  That there are numerous conflicting interpretations is also normal in the field; I suspect the other commenter didn't know this and assumed that there could be no question about what the parable means.  Anyway, Nineham's remarks nudged me to find a copy of Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Sun and read it.

The parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:11-32.  Briefly, a wealthy man's younger son asked to be given his share of his inheritance so he could go and seek his fortune.  Granted his wish, he went away "to a distant country," where he fell into dissipation, drinking and partying with loose women. When his money ran out he had to work tending swine.  Finally he resolved to go home and beg his father to take him in. His father welcomed him and ordered a celebration. His older brother was working in the fields, and no one bothered to tell him of his brother's return.  When he came in he complained, and his father tried to reassure him: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."  The end.

Now on to Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest.  I didn't dig deeply into his biography, just looked over his Wikipedia page, so I don't know how he became a celebrity cleric.  He wrote numerous books and traveled widely, taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame. If you're curious, you can find YouTube videos of his rather overwrought preaching style.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, published in 1992, is an odd book. In particular Nouwen focuses more on Rembrandt's painting of that name than on Luke's text. Someone showed him a print of the painting and he became obsessed with it. Eventually in the 1980s he was able to travel to the Soviet Union and see the original in the Hermitage there. Ordinarily tourists weren't supposed to dawdle in front of the painting, but thanks to some personal connections he was allowed to spend several hours looking at it, even getting a chair to sit in.  At this point I began to get annoyed with Nouwen's poor-little-me shtick, as if he was just a nobody who got a special privilege because of his purity of spirit, which the Hermitage guards generously detected. In fact he was a celebrity with an avid support network. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It's a theme that runs through the book.  The Wikipedia article says that he "was known to suffer from loneliness and a need for interpersonal connection, which he wrote about openly."  Not surprising that it was "known," then, but most people need interpersonal connection.  At one point he writes, "I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found."  I can't take this very seriously, since he reports many people who gave him unconditional love. It seems to me that Nouwen was one of those people who suffer from what one wise writer called a spiritual vitamin deficiency, and who rebuff the kindness and love they are offered; but it's never enough. I sympathize with him, and recognize that his reactions were out of his conscious control, but the constant whining got tiresome as I read the book.**

Much of Nouwen's discussion of the parable centers around his struggle to make Luke's version agree with Rembrandt's. The painting shows the prodigal on his knees in his father's embrace, while a man who seems to be his brother looks on with displeasure. (There's ongoing debate among art historians and critics about who the different figures in the painting are supposed to represent. Is one woman who looks on impassively supposed to be the mother, for example?)  According to Luke, as I mentioned, the brother was at work in the fields when he showed up, and in fact the father saw the youth coming "while he was still far off," so he ran out to embrace and kiss him. Of course it's not unusual to shift things around when adapting a written story to a visual mode, but Nouwen seems very puzzled by it.  He seems to think that if he tries hard enough he can resolve the differences, but also that the painting takes precedence over Luke's original.

Nouwen seems determined to wring every drop of meaning he can from the parable, on every level, which is a traditional Catholic approach to Scripture.  The most obvious, I think, is the idea that Man has wandered wickedly away from his loving Father in order to wallow in sin, but God is waiting to welcome us back and kill the fatted calf for us if only we'll give up our selfish pride. The idea that God is actively looking for us, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, turns up elsewhere in the gospels. Nouwen seems much more interested in individual psychology, though: his obsession with finding unconditional love, his personal reluctance to be enfolded in the Father's embrace, and of course trying to join Luke's story with Rembrandt's painting. The most interesting part of The Return of the Prodigal Son for me was Nouwen's move from the prodigal's perspective to his father's to the elder brother's. I don't think Luke had that possibility in mind, but it's a fair approach.

The elder brother is the fly in the parable's ointment, not just for Nouwen but for most Christian interpreters.  If the point was just that God sits up waiting for us to return to him, it would be simple, but Luke complicates it.  It seems to me that the brother has a valid complaint: not only did his father take him for granted, not showing his love for him, but when the prodigal came home, the father forgot to tell him to hurry in and join the celebration: he let him go on working dutifully in the fields. (Nouwen only notices this as a discrepancy between Luke's version and Rembrandt's.) If he hadn't come back at all, would the father have noticed? Nouwen brushes aside the brother's complaint, as the father does. I don't think it's reading too much into the parable to guess that the prodigal was always the favorite.  In a human father, this would be all-too-human, but since the father represents God, he shouldn't get off as easily: he's neglecting those who love him for those who don't.  There's a parable in Matthew of a wealthy man hiring day laborers, who pays those who worked least the same as those who worked all day.  When those who worked more complain, the boss reminds them that he's the boss and he can do what he likes.  The first will be last, and the last will be first!  True enough, but it's not just or fair, and as even some Christian interpreters have pointed out, good luck with hiring workers tomorrow morning, buddy!

So one of the standard Christian readings of the parable of the prodigal son is that the elder brother represents Israel and the younger brother represents the gentiles who are being grafted into the Kingdom by Christ.  But this also implies that God has deliberately neglected his faithful people, fretting for centuries over the ones who got away. It fits with other of Jesus' reported teachings, such as that as a physician he was needed by the sick, not the healthy. But I thought that the Jews, far from being healthy, were the sickest, a bunch of wicked hypocrites, and therefore needed him at least as much. For Nouwen, as for Christian interpreters generally, it seems that the elder brother should have shut up and accepted his second-best status, grateful that his loving father didn't have him thrown onto the trash heap along with the other sinners.

The strangest of Nouwen's excursions is his claim that

I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God.

I have no idea where Nouwen got this "mystery."  Jesus in Christian mythology and theology was the willing agent of his Father, not a rebel. But this bit of wackery reminded me that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebellious son to his earthly parents. When, as a boy, he stayed behind in the Temple after Passover (Luke 2:41-52) and his parents found him discussing Torah with the "doctors," Mary told him "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."  He retorted that obviously he was "about my Father's business."  That was a slap in their faces.  According to the gospels he continued to reject those who'd raised this cuckoo in their nest, and to teach his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26).

Which makes me wonder how this theme relates to the prodigal son. I remember one Christian scholar who speculated that Jesus got his teaching about a loving Heavenly Father from the loving example of Joseph. I speculate that Jesus rejected his parents and invented a loving Heavenly Father who sighed to press him to his bosom and would make him feel as special as he wanted to feel. When he said to call no man father, only your father in heaven, I think he meant it.  Maybe his birth parents weren't so loving - we'll never know.  But sentimental fantasies about his upbringing just don't fit with the stories the gospels tell. (For what it's worth, Nouwen admits that his own earthly father was kind and supportive.)

To recap, the commenter who told me to read Nouwen did so under a Bart Ehrman video where Ehrman rejected the doctrine of atoning sacrifice and assumed that Jesus did too. The prodigal son was relevant because no sacrifice was required (what about the fatted calf, though?), just repentance. Ehrman has gone on to claim that Jesus "hated" atonement.  I wouldn't make too much of this myself.  After all, the gospels also show Jesus forgiving sins without demanding repentance (Mark 2:5ff), and some of the calls for repentance may well be later additions, just as the talk about atonement may be. While Nouwen's interpretations aren't without interest, they don't settle anything, especially since they spring from his personal hangups.

* David Edwards et al., Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 298. Ipse dixit, by the way, is Latin for "he said it himself," meaning "an assertion made but not proved."

** As another very wise man once said, "Perhaps what you need ... is a good facial."

Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

I still haven't seen the documentary 1946, and I think I'll have to, because it's clearly having an effect on gay Christians, whether or not they've seen it.  As I've mentioned before, the film is about the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the Bible and its translators' decision to use the word "homosexuals" in a list of sinners found in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It was the first time that word had appeared in an English translation of the Bible, and the filmmakers apparently present that decision as the cause of antigay bigotry in English-speaking Christendom forever after.  

It was changed in later editions, but it happens that I have a copy of the 1946 edition and can confirm that the word "homosexuals" is indeed there. The 1989 New Revised Standard Version replaced it with "male prostitutes [and] sodomites," which doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, not reassuring to young Homo-Americans anxious about their eternal destiny. In 2021 the Updated Edition chose "male prostitutes" and "men who engage in illicit sex," adding footnotes to both acknowledging that the meaning of the Greek is "uncertain." If you're wondering how one word ("homosexuals") became three or more, look for my discussion of Robin Scroggs's The New Testament and Homosexuality in this post.

Lately I've been seeing allusions to 1946 in video reels and comments on them on Facebook. I don't think the people involved have seen the movie or even know its name; what they know is that something momentous related to LBGTQ and the Bible happened in 1946. One commenter, for example, wrote that the word "abomination" wasn't even in the Bible until 1946. They evidently were thinking of Leviticus 18:22, which calls sex between males an abomination (that is, hateful) to Yahweh. That translation choice appears in the Authorized Version of 1611, known as the King James Version, so the RSV translators had nothing to do with it. One video maker remarked that all the biblical references to sex between males had been altered somehow in 1946. I'm not completely sure about this one, because some of that guy's videos are intended satirically, but I think he was serious that time.

So it looks like I'll be collecting more gay-Christian folklore clustering vaguely around the year 1946. It's another example of oral tradition and its effect on information -- misinformation, rather.  What's different from other cases I've encountered is that this is relatively new, springing up in the past year. I don't blame it on the Internet, because the tendency predates the Internet and social media by decades.