Then there was this one.
Followed by:
And later by:
"Simplistic" isn't the word I'd use, but ...
Liberal Christians and secularists love to mock conservative Christians for taking the Bible literally. They're wrong about that, since conservatives believe the Bible to be inerrant, an illusion that requires a lot of non-literal interpretation to sustain. Ironically, perhaps, Julian Sanchez here takes the Bible literally: he assumes that the gospel of John is a literal, factual report of Jesus' interaction with Jewish elites. Anyone who has had any contact with New Testament scholarship will find that especially amusing, because the Fourth Gospel (as scholars often refer to it; it was probably not written by the disciple John) is known as the most "spiritual" gospel, even in Christian tradition. It doesn't match up with the other three in chronology, style, or its portrayal of Jesus. Yet, despite their dismissal of the Bible as the fantasies of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds and peasants, they frequently do as Sanchez did here, and take it as straight reportage. The commenters under his posts follow suit.
The great teacher who must contend with the foolishly literal-minded inquirer is a staple literary device of "spiritual" writing, from Plato's Socrates and the Buddha down to Zen masters and Carlos Castaneda's equally fictitious Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan. It's also common in any kind of propaganda, religious or political: of course the outsider or unbeliever is a foil, dumber than a box of rocks and existing only to be schooled, though it's probably a vain effort. The trope allows the teacher to hold forth at great length, and it doesn't hurt that the script is written so that the teacher gets all the gotcha lines, while the opponent can only gape helplessly and confess his stupidity. It's fun to chuckle at Nicodemus, as Sanchez does, but it's disturbing to realize that he thinks Nicodemus was really that dumb and Jesus was really that smart, and that he himself is very clever to have spotted it.
In one post Sanchez balks at taking John's anti-Jewish polemic at face value, but this is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel. I agree that "It’s [sic] seems awfully unlikely, e.g., that the historical disciples really went around talking about 'the Jews' like some foreign group," but I see no reason to take the rest of the gospel material as gospel either. Does he really believe that a writer who caricatured Jesus' opponents in this one respect would depict them accurately in others?
Another irony is that apologists like to claim that in olden days nobody took religious statements literally, that everybody from high priests on down knew better than that. This is probably false, but it's true that people in Jesus' time and region were given to elaborate interpretations of religious teachings. Not only the Hebrew Bible (the New Testament came along later) but the epics of Homer were treated as inerrant texts to be mined for hidden wisdom. It's said that the Sadducees, the Judean faction who controlled the Temple at the time, insisted on interpreting the Torah literally. That's unlikely in practice, even if it was their principle, but Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a sect very fond of non-literal readings of Scripture. The Dead Sea Sect also had secret spiritual teachings, and interpreted the Torah for their own ends. In all disputes, though, propagandists find it convenient to mock the literal absurdity of their opponents' beliefs and practices (the heathen believe that their graven idols can hear their prayers!).
The gospels do contain material that shows Jesus teaching in riddles so as to confound his hearers, not only those outside but his inner circle of disciples. The fourth chapter of Mark consists of the Parable of the Sower, the disciples asking what it means, and Jesus explaining the parable while declaring that he teaches in parables in order to prevent outsiders from understanding, repenting, and being saved. The parallel versions of the story in Matthew and Luke soften this as much as they can, but they retain the idea that no one could understand Jesus' teaching until after he died and was resurrected. Only then could the Scriptures be opened to their true meaning. But this idea isn't sustained throughout the gospels. Most of the time the crowds and Jesus' opponents understand his meaning entirely too well, for example in Mark 12:12 and parallels: "And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them."
I also think that Julian Sanchez gives Jesus far too much credit for profundity. Why should Nicodemus have understood Jesus' claim that one must be born again to see the kingdom of Heaven? His question about it, far from being stupidly literal-minded, is simply feeding Jesus a chance to explain himself -- which, as usual, Jesus takes, though his follow-up is as usual as clear as mud. Does Sanchez thinks he understands Jesus' pretentious bloviation about sin and salvation in the Fourth Gospel? He recognizes that "born again" is a pun in the original Greek -- it can also mean "born from above," which isn't self-explanatory either -- but still thinks it means something. Maybe it does, but what? I can understand a Christian apologist taking this stance, but why would a self-styled secularist do so? What does Sanchez thinks "the kingdom of Heaven" refers to? It's a Christian commonplace that Jesus' Jewish contemporaries had wrong ideas about the Messiah and the kingdom he would establish, but I don't agree that Jesus' ideas, whatever they were, were correct. Considering that the kingdom he promised did not arrive within a generation, as he promised, it's a safe bet that his ideas were wrong. (Trying to interpret his teaching to get around that basic stumbling block is a hallmark of fundamentalism, not of secularism.) The Christian churches have changed their understandings of Jesus' teaching over the millennia, and modern scholars disagree on just about everything aspect of it.
As an atheist, I am free not to think "the Kingdom of Heaven" has any real referent. Based on my experience with both modern scholarship and lay atheists' confused efforts to appropriate Jesus' teaching for their own purposes -- efforts which make no sense to me at all -- I don't think they know any more about it than Nicodemus did.
