Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do You Promise Not to Tell?

Well, this is a mess. The advertised subject, "The Original Jesus Was Hidden in Mark" never turns up. Ehrman keeps getting distracted, but then I know from his podcasts that he's eminently distractable.  So is Derek the interviewer.  It makes for a toxic combination.

I've now watched a number of Bart Ehrman's podcast videos, and one or two interviews he's given other podcasters. Even on his own turf he is a poor speaker, badly organized, prone to fits of maniacal giggling. I wonder what he was like in the classroom, but the lecture he gave when he retired suggests that he can do better than he does in his podcasts. I would expect, however, based on my own experience speaking to college classes from the 1970s to the 2010s, that Erhman would have organized his thoughts on a basic and familiar topic that he must have covered in his undergraduate classes over decades. Instead he sounds as if this is all new to him and he's never talked about it before. The same applies to interviews.  Interviewers love to distract their subjects, if only because of their own ignorance, and someone who gives interviews regularly should learn how to push the discussion back in the direction he wants to go. With all due immodesty, I think I could do a better job on this topic than Ehrman did here.

But going with where Erhman let himself be led: I agree that the empty tomb is a legend; I figured that out soon after I began studying the New Testament and the scholarship in the early 1980s. I suspect that Mark invented the legend, though of course there's no evidence either way and we'll probably never know.

The stuff about "the Jews expected a military messiah and couldn't cope with Jesus being all peace-and-love-and-shit" motif was popular in mid-20th century New Testament scholarship, and I see it's still with us. It's not necessary to invoke it to explain the disciples' cognitive dissonance, though. Mark shows Jesus preaching the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, and most scholars agree that there's no reason to think he was at odds with the normal messianic expectations of his day, though it's not certain what those were.  There's a famous old article by Morton Smith, "What Is Implied by the Variety of Messianic Figures?" (Ehrman surely knows it),* which shows that a wild variety of contradictory messianic expectations were current and not grounds for serious dispute. That article is still often cited.  According to Mark and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive with violence and the punishment of poorly-defined evildoers. But the cognitive dissonance came from the fact that the Kingdom not only didn't arrive, its announcer was crucified. (Mark's stories about Jesus predicting his death are also probably legends, as I think Ehrman would agree.)

What I was expecting from this video was some discussion of Mark's theme of secrecy around Jesus and his mission, which has been much discussed, especially since Wilhelm Wrede's 1901 book The Messianic Secret,** though Wrede has frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented. His discussion is detailed and complicated, which helps to explain the misunderstandings.  For example, he often paraphrases other scholars' attempts to explain the problems he discusses, then refutes them, so I think some of his readers mistook the paraphrases for his own position.  I'm rereading it right now, so I was interested in Ehrman's take on secrecy in Mark.  Not enough to pay money for the lecture series, though, sorry. His endless cackling and preacher-style jokes are just too annoying.

Ehrman has written about Wrede and the messianic secret on his blog, I see. I think he got it wrong, partly because of the need to simplify for his non-academic fanbase; inder one of those posts, a commenter asks "Isn’t it your view that Jesus did think he was the messiah and only told his inner circle about this? So in a sense it is historical that he kept it a secret?" and Ehrman replies "Yup." I disagree, but neither of us knows for sure, because there's no reliable evidence about it.

Briefly, in Mark's gospel Jesus goes around exorcising demons and healing the sick and dying. The demons he drives out recognize him as the Son of God, and he tells them to shut up. Several though not all of his healing miracles are done privately, with only his inner group of disciples (Peter, James, John) present, and he then tells the people he's healed not to tell anyone about his work. Naturally, they tell everybody.  The more he tells them not to, the more they do it anyway.  And some of his miracles are done in public, so I don't know who he was trying to kid. The theme continues through Peter's recognition that Jesus is the messiah, which Jesus also orders to keep secret, until Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem just before his arrest and execution; but he still has some secrets, like the prediction the Temple would be destroyed and he would come on clouds of glory within a generation.  Because Matthew and Luke left out most of this secrecy, I suspect that most Bible readers just assume that Jesus did everything in public; but Mark said otherwise.  If this interests you, try reading the gospel of Mark yourself - it's not very long - and pay attention to its depiction of Jesus' secrecy.

Another motif Wrede discussed that I think is important is Mark's frequent alternation between Jesus teaching his disciples in private and Jesus teaching the crowds in public. No matter where he is - in town, by the sea, on a mountaintop - Jesus will suddenly interrupt himself and call the crowd to him, as though hundreds of people were waiting to be summoned and then dismissed.  As Wrede said, this is not plausible or possible, and it shows that Mark isn't writing history but a sort of drama.  My favorite example, though I don't remember if Wrede mentions it, is in Mark chapter 13.  Jesus has taken Peter and James and John and Andrew aside on the Mount of Olives and predicted the bad times to come. Mark (I suppose, but it could be Jesus, why not?) interjects "Let the reader understand" at 13:14 about "the abomination of desolation" that will be set up in the Temple, and finally warns in verse 37, "What I say to you I say to all: Watch."  The crowd is always there, out of earshot but ready to come running at a moment's notice.

The theme of secrecy is bigger than these details, though. Dramatic irony runs throughout Mark, and to some extent through all the gospels. That is, the reader knows from the beginning who Jesus is, and how the story will turn out; but the people, the disciples, the priests and the Pharisees and the scribes, don't know.  Think of Sophocles' Oedipus: the audience knows from the beginning of the play who Oedipus is, what he did and what it all means, but the characters in the play don't.  Mark tells the reader too (1:1, RSV): "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."  No surprises there!

In The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), Graham Shaw suggested (I think reasonably) that Mark's stress on secrecy may have reflected his own intention (p. 189): 

It was, for example, never intended to be printed, so that everyone might have a copy. The stress on the esoteric within the book suggests that access to the text may itself have been a privilege which the reader could not take for granted. Although it very quickly acquired a public use in the new Christian community, ... a much more private use may have been the original intention.  The injunction 'let the reader understand' (13.14) seems to envisage an individual rather than a colletive audience... The phrase in ch. 13 already quoted assumes that the reader will come to the text well furnished with a knowledge of Christian lore. 

I like this, but I'm not sure about it.  While Mark does stress the esoteric, he also is revealing those secrets, publicizing them, letting the reader into the privileged circle of them who know.  To this day people write similar books; the Amazon algorithm points me to them daily.  These secrets were hidden for thousands of years from everyone but the Elect, but now I am revealing them to you for the price of this book!  

Remember that the Greek word apokalypsis means "revelation," and that Mark includes some typically apocalyptic material.  I still think that Mark could be classified as an apocalyptic book like Daniel, Enoch, or the New Testament Revelation.  One of the things it has in common with Daniel and Enoch is the motif that these truths were kept hidden, secret, sealed until now, which explains why they weren't known before, but also implies that the End has arrived.  The New Testament book of Revelation is different on that: John is told not to seal up the book (Revelation 22:19, RSV): "And [the angel] said to me, 'Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.'"  Oops!  Well, nobody's perfect.

Matthew and Luke threw open the doors, which indicates a change in the knowledge ordinary Christians were allowed or expected to have. (And not only Christians: by the mid-second century, hostile educated pagans wrote attacks on Christianity based on some knowledge of Christian writings.)  If so, it happened fast, like other developments in early Christianity that we'll never be able to reconstruct now but which are visible in the New Testament writings. Paul, for example, also refers to esoterica in his letters.  Later on, the Gospel of Thomas would begin, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." As with Mark, we're entitled to ask how secret those teachings were by the time they were written down.  This is the sort of stuff I thought Ehrman would touch on in this interview.  No such luck.  But maybe only the truly worthy are given to know the original Jesus who's hidden in Mark.

No, wait: I don't really mean that. For one thing, I see no reason to believe that Mark knew anything about "the original Jesus", and Ehrman probably would agree, so the title is a misleading come-on. That's complicated by the fact that at times Mark, or some of his sources, show accurate information about first-century Judaism.  That's why this MythVision video is so frustrating: like Mark, Ehrman promises to reveal "the original Jesus hidden in Mark," but it's just a tease.

If, as most scholars think, the gospel of Mark was the first of the four to be written down, its success indicates that it found a market and an audience rather quickly.  Very soon afterward, the authors of Matthew and Luke produced new, improved gospels based on Mark's outline, which overtook it in popularity.  Mark was bumped down to second place, after Matthew, in the emerging canon.  More imitators followed, and "gospel" came to mean a particular kind of book about Jesus.  (Similarly, the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings made it the three-volume template for many imitators.)  I don't think the author of Mark foresaw that.

----

*Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (1959): 66-72. 

** English translation published by James Clarke & Co., 1971.

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 the 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.  

Frothers on Parade

Wins by democratic socialists in last week's primary elections inspired quite a frenzy among centrist Democrats as well as MAGA. The influence of Second Wave feminism makes me reluctant to call it hysteria, because of the word's etymology, but I think relatively few people know that anymore, so what the hell, I'm going with Merriam-Webster's simple definition: "a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way."

I thought much of the panic over Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City had subsided, though it still rages in comments on Twitter and other social media. he's a communist he's a radical islamist terrorist he was behind the 9/11 attacks he's an antisemite he's going to round up all the Jews and impose sharia law etc. it wasn't just Twitter or Facebook randos who lost it, it was also politicians and party leaders -- the kind of people who we're told are the adults in the room were squalling like toddlers.

When some candidates Mamdani endorsed won in the primaries last week the frothing broke out anew.  Mamdani had forced these communist third-worldists on the voters, as though the voters had no choice but to do his bidding. Mamdani is certainly popular in some circles, but he doesn't have the kind of clout Donald Trump, say, has. And he only endorsed three candidates.  Other lefty candidates won elsewhere without Mamdani's support, though I suppose his sinister third-world tentacles reached out to force them on the voters there too.

And, of course, these were primaries.  As some of the frothers pointed out correctly, turnout in New York City was around 9 percent. The general elections are in November.  I've also seen a lot of people celebrating prematurely, but that's normal. No one thinks they're the adults in the room. It seems likely that some of these candidates will win the general, since they're in safely blue districts, but it remains to be seen. One Dem jeered, "If Socialists want to impress Democrats, go to North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and flip some seats."  I liked the person who replied, "centrists love to be like 'when are you socialists going to win regions and states that we centrists currently also don’t win'".

One reason I make myself keep this blog going is that it's useful to be able to look back in time a little.  When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2018, establishment Democratic reaction was like what I saw last week: how dare she go after an incumbent, she's helping Trump, and so on.  But she won the general and is still in office eight years later despite Democrat-backed attempts to primary her. And then the same establishment, including Nancy Pelsoi, primaried Ed Markey a year later, apparently because he'd become too friendly with Ocasio-Cortez and the other insurgent lefties known as the Squad.

Then, today, the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's assault on birthright citizenship.  The MAGA right predictably went bonkers.  This hysteria isn't a partisan thing, and it's good to remember that.

P.S. Just after I posted this and before I went to bed last night, I saw that two more entrenched Democratic incumbents were defeated in Tuesday's Colorado primary by candidates to their left, apparently without help from Zohran Mamdani.  But another Colorado Democratic incumbent defeated a progressive challenger.  That's no surprise, there will be losses as well as victories.  But there are some satisfying moments to savor, as in an item I saw this afternoon.  One of those incumbents posted a video of herself berating a voter last March  ""If ... the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me"-- the issue being Israel's atrocities in Gaza.  Ah yes, that move worked so well for Kamala Harris in 2024.  

I wouldn't assume that Gaza was the only issue that voter cares about.  Last week a self-identified "liberal progressive" and best selling author posted: "As a liberal progressive, I would be fine with the party moving left if these wins were about Medicare for all, reproductive rights, universal childcare, taxing billionaires, and creating affordable housing, But they weren’t." The winners in question are mostly Democratic Socialists, so they have the same wish list this person said she has. Mamdani, for a prominent example, campaigned on much more than Gaza, but his position on Israel obsessed centrist Democrats and the corporate media. The same seems to be true of these other challengers.  But it's also true that unbending support for Israel's crimes and the suppression of dissent about them in the US, not to mention their dependency on AIPAC money, are hurting the incumbents. 

One senior Democrat, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said he would argue that Mamdani "is the leader of the Democratic Party right now."  I think that's obviously absurd at this moment, but "rising star" feels about right, and Mamdani isn't the only one.  I've been wondering who will fill Bernie Sanders's shoes when he leaves office; suddenly there seem to be contenders.

Moderation in the Age of Faith; or, So Many Heretics, So Few Inquisitors

When the historian Carlo Ginzburg died last week, I decided to look at his early book The Cheese and the Worms.  I'm not sure when I'll read the whole thing, but I was gobsmacked by something in the translators' foreword.

Furthermore, while moral justice was impossible in a context where the Catholic Church felt, together with virtually all other secular and religious authorities on both sides of the Alps, that it had the right, even the duty, to persecute those who differed in their religious beliefs, legal justice in sixteenth-century terms was dispensed by the Roman Inquisition. It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.

This didn't reassure me.  They conceded that moral justice was impossible in that historical and cultural context, but insisted that the persecution of those who differed in their religious beliefs could be done without capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, or abuse of human rights.  This was "an essentially moderate code of law" because people were persecuted uniformly. The Nazis made similar claims, with as much validity; or if that's too extreme for you, so did Dante for his Hell, or the architects of the US invasion of Vietnam.

Then, just a couple of paragraphs later, the translators added:

A permanent and indispensable member of every inquisitorial court was the notary (or a cleric deputized to assume this function), who transcribed in writing as the legal manuals required “not only all the defendant’s responses and any statements he might make, but also what he might utter during the torture, even his sighs, his cries, his laments and tears” (E. Masini, Sacro Arsenale [Genoa, 1621], p. 123).

"During the torture."  Well!  As long as the torture was transcribed by a notary or a properly deputized substitute, the procedure was "not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible."  This technocratic amorality is impressive, and what's more, I don't understand why the translators felt it necessary to write this apologia for it in the second half of the twentieth century.

I then opened my copy of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a revised edition published in 1970. The book is widely acclaimed and often cited. I read it long ago, in the 1980s, and I'd been meaning to find a passage that made a very strong impression on me back then. It's mainly about the Brothers of the Free Spirit, a movement that spread over much of Europe for more than a century despite the Inquisition's determined campaign to wipe it out.  I found the passage I wanted more easily than I expected:

Brussels continued to harbour Brethren of the Free Spirit. In 1410 the Bishop of Cambrai appointed two inquisitors to extirpate what was still called ‘Bloemardinne’s heresy’; but they found themselves helpless in the face of the popular enthusiasm. Songs were sung after them in the streets and attempts were even made upon their lives.

Songs were sung after them in the streets!  Attempts were even made on their lives!  This demonstrated to Cohn how wicked the Free Spirit were, and how gullible the masses were to fall for their evil teachings, which Cohn presented as the precursors of later Communism and Marxism. (As usual, he neglected to notice that those teachings had their origin in the New Testament.) When The Pursuit of the Millennium was first published in 1957, Nazism was still fresh in adults' memories, the Cold War was in full swing, and Cohn's contemporaries were sure that Elvis Presley's hips were sucking modern youth into the same mass insanity. What I thought when I read it was that it was entirely reasonable and to be expected that torturers and murderers whose methods would later be used by Stalin and the Third Reich would encounter popular resistance when they swaggered into town.  

This long section of Cohn's book consists largely of a litany of heretics who were burned alive by the Inquisition. Here are a couple of examples out of many.

During eighteen months’ imprisonment Marguerite steadfastly refused to purchase absolution by recantation. In 1310 her book was condemned by a committee of theologians; and she herself was excommunicated and sentenced to death by burning. This woman seems to have had many followers, for some months after her death Clement V was bidding the inquisition at Langres to proceed with vigour against the heretics who were multiplying there so rapidly that they were becoming a grave danger to the faith....

The heretics of Cologne had found a remarkable leader in a certain Walter, who came from Holland and who had already been active as a missionary at Mainz. This man was a preacher of great eloquence and persuasiveness; and he wrote various tracts in German which circulated secretly amongst his followers. In the end he was caught; and having refused under the worst tortures to betray his associates or to recant he was burnt. According to one source Walter was an apostate priest, and the head of a large secret group which was captured by a ruse in 1325 or 1327. As many as fifty Brethren of the Free Spirit are said to have been executed on that occasion, some by burning and some by drowning in the Rhine.

But not to worry, a notary or a deputized clerk was no doubt present to record everything Marguerite and Walter said under torture, so everything was done decently and in order.

One more anecdote. These heretics didn't just worry the Roman Catholics, the Protestants agreed that they must be eliminated. 

To counter these activities, the French Protestant community in Strasbourg sent one of their ministers to Tournai, where however he was caught by the Catholic authorities and burnt.

You see, the Inquisition didn't discriminate: all mortal threats to the Christian faith must be extirpated. And I imagine that if the Free Spirit had acquired enough institutional power, they'd have returned the favor.  It was out of this context, and the religious wars that followed, that freedom of religion became an ideal and a founding principle of the American republic. As Ginzburg's translators say, such freedom wasn't a virtue in Europe before that; Catholics and Protestants agreed that it was their duty to punish those who held different religious beliefs. At most each side wanted toleration for itself.

I suppose I should reread The Pursuit of the Millennium and, if possible, Cohn's 1975 book on the struggle against European witchcraft, Europe's Inner Demons.  As I recall, Cohn was as confused about that issue as most academics were at the time - were the witches mentally ill, or were they really worshipping the Devil? it didn't occur to them that if anyone was mentally ill, it might have been the Inquisitors. As far as I remember only the maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz made that suggestion.  Not that I think so either: the medicalization of evil is not an improvement on treating it as a sin. As Hugh Trevor-Roper said in his essay on the European witch-craze, the complex demonology that gave the witch-hunters an ideology for their campaign was a triumph of Reason comparable to Aquinas' philosophical work. (Remember: Garbage In, Gospel Out!)  But that's for another day.

The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

Alone and Palely Loitering

Before I start picking on Barry Walters's Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000 (Viking, 2026), I want to stress its virtues. Walters is a longtime music journalist, and he's actively covered most of the period he wrote about in his book, interviewing many of the artists and attending their performances. The book is long -- almost 500 pages total -- and will probably come as a revelation even to many gay people who lived through those years, let alone the young. I'm ten years older than Walters and began reading the pop/rock press in the late 60s, so I was familiar with most of the music and musicians in the book, though some details were new to me. That won't be true for most of its audience, and none of my criticisms here should dissuade anyone from reading Mighty Real. It's a good read, and you'll almost certainly learn a lot.

What bothered me was the book's overall tone.  Part of this is because of the era: there were almost no openly gay pop musicians in 1969, though some were almost out, such as Little Richard, and a lot of innuendo and code got past industry censors. Broadcast radio was the main outlet for recorded music in those days, and Walters does a good job with this aspect of his subject. Double entendre and innuendo were rampant, not only in radio but in TV and the movies. In addition to that, song lyrics contain a lot of ambiguity by their nature: if the singer addresses "you," the listener can identify himself or herself regardless of the songwriter's intention.  One example out of many Walters gives early on (xiv):

Some songs are unintentionally queer, like the Partridge Family’s 1970 smash “I Think I Love You.” Although it was released on a label run by a gay man, Bell Records’ president Larry Uttal, it launched a fictional family rock group designed for mass consumption via a TV sitcom. That show begat the early ’70s’ defining teen idol, David Cassidy. But once you consider “I Think I Love You” as an LGBTQ song, it’s hard to hear it any other way.... Against all odds, this bubblegum ditty sums up the first step to coming out in an accidental but oddly articulate nutshell, depicting both the angst and the elation of going public with private truths.

I see his point, but I think he has it backwards in a symptomatic way. Fear of rejection, confession of what might be unrequited love for fear of being mocked, the joy of finding out that one's affection is returned after all -- these aren't specifically LGBTQ feelings or experiences. Rather than symptoms of our difference, they're evidence that we're not so different from straight people after all - at least not for these reasons.  I admit that I was in my thirties myself before it dawned on me that when I suffered from failed love, it wasn't because I'm queer (I was actually over that by then) or a neurotic loser (I think I'm over it by now, I was participating in the human condition. I've pointed out before that alienation is a majority if not universal experience, especially among adolescents.

I'm not denying that gay kids are still isolated, alienated, or endangered. Of course they are. What I'm saying is that rather than glamorizing those experiences by treating them as inherent to the LGBTQ experience, we should universalize them, and try to find ways to make them less damaging and painful.  This is a theme that runs through Mighty Real, and it bothered me. If you read it, see what you think.

As time went on, some musicians tried to move beyond innuendo and coding to expressing themselves openly. They encountered a great deal of resistance, not just from bigoted fans but from the people who ran the music industry itself and from the music press - and also their own closeted selves. As a result, gay fans worked themselves into ecstasy over every real or imagined dropped hairpin (as queens of my generation called such hints). Walters traces numerous examples of these, acknowledging that the practice is now called "queer-baiting," dangling the possibility that a given star or wannabe might be That Way to excite the fans, then pulling it back. It's hard to say when it's a cynical strategy orchestrated by agents and PR people and when it's really testing the waters by a gay performer, but it becomes less and less tolerable as time goes on.  Walters is too generous to his icons and divas for my liking, tripping lightly over Madonna and Sandra Bernhard gamboling on late-night TV, dropping the name of a lesbian bar they'd gone to without explaining what was really going on.  Maybe he doesn't know; that's the point.

I'm certainly sympathetic to performers who fear hurting their careers by coming out, especially forty and fifty years ago. I'm less sympathetic as Walters's history moves toward the twenty-first century and numerous stars have come out successfully. I also think more credit, indeed celebration, should go to those performers who came out early on, and less to those who went public reluctantly and resentfully, attacking unnamed activists and extremists who supposedly pressured them to stop lying and hiding. There's less opprobrium directed at industry people, from record label bosses (some of them gay) to management and pop critics, who pushed performers to go on lying and hiding.  Ricky Martin said it well when he came out, and uniquely as far as I know:

Many people told me: "Ricky it's not important", "it's not worth it", "all the years you've worked and everything you've built will collapse", "many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature". Because all this advice came from people who I love dearly, I decided to move on with my life not sharing with the world my entire truth. Allowing myself to be seduced by fear and insecurity became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sabotage. Today I take full responsibility for my decisions and my actions.

This was in 2010, outside the official scope of Walters's history, though he jumps ahead from time to time. He doesn't mention Martin.

The most obnoxious example of queer-baiting Walters mentions to my mind, though he doesn't call it that, is Diana Ross's 1980 hit "I'm Coming Out."  I remember the gleeful squees that resounded in my local gay bar the first time the DJ played it. Walters describes the song's origin:

In recent years, [Nile] Rodgers revealed this indispensable hit’s inspiration. “One particular night I went to a club, the Gilded Grape, and I happened to notice at least six or seven Diana Ross impersonators. So I went outside to call Bernard and said, “You know, Diana Ross is revered by the gay community. If we wrote a song called ‘I’m Coming Out’ for Diana Ross, it would have the same power as James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.''

Wow, really?  I think a more accurate analogy would be if a white singer had recorded "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud."  And it gets worse.

Ross reportedly had no idea she was singing anything queer. To her, “I’m Coming Out” was about busting free from Motown’s formulaic confines. Miss Ross’s concert opener for the next several decades, it features a commanding yet funky horn fanfare befitting a Black queen. The song also functions as a women’s lib anthem. Even its unconventional vocal curves and melodic curls suggest bold yet nuanced feminine assertion. Because Rodgers understood that Ross had always disclosed emotions in her music that LGBTQ people couldn’t speak in the mainstream, he knew the singer could once again be a conduit for her audience’s aspirations. If they couldn’t come out in real life, they could get a taste of that emancipation on the dancefloor. 

Nah, I'm good. I don't think I ever encountered a gay person who believed that Ross was really coming out in that song; they were just excited that she had deigned to recognize their existence. And it turns out that nobody told her she was doing even that. Noblesse oblige has never done much for me. I don't want a taste of emancipation on the dance floor, I want emancipation outside and everywhere. Walters does too, but like many of us he's too grateful for any crumb of affirmation he can get, be it a song the singer doesn't even understand or a male singer's suggestive butt wiggle onstage.

“Dave Gahan has become an accomplished bum wiggler,” Neil Tennant once wrote before he and fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe made a thing out of standing still.

I'm not the only old gay person who misses the anger that drove Gay Liberation in the early 70s and Queer Nation in the 90s.  This weekend I finally got around to reading Armistead Maupin's memoir Logical Family, which among other things is a reminder of how human-hearted that anger can be. Walters pays tribute in Mighty Real to Vito Russo, the activist and chronicler of gay cinema whose righteous anger inspired me in the 70s and after. So Walters wasn't influenced by gay anger; everybody is different. But it's conspicuously absent from Mighty Real, and it bothers me that so many younger gay people are still more excited by straight allies and codes and double entendres than by openness.

What to do, though?  As I've said before, not all gay songs have to wear it on their sleeves.  Not all heterosexual songs do either, and as Walters admits, many song lyrics can be heard or understood as straight or gay.  I've been thinking about this while mulling over this post. The folk revivalists of the 50s and 60s and the old singers they learned from were often cavalier about song lyrics; singing a song from a woman's point of view was no big deal for male singers, and vice versa. Sometimes it mattered, sometimes it didn't.  But when I hear a song I like, such as Joni Mitchell's "Michael from Mountains," I want to sing it myself, and I see no reason why I should change the lyrics to heterosexualize it.  Sometimes, as with Peggy Seeger's "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," changing the narrator's sex would change the meaning of  the song, so I leave it as written.  I soon found out that many gay men really disliked it when I sang songs addressed to men.  I think that's one reason why they made a drag anthem, "I Am What I Am," a hit only when it was recorded by a disco diva; my fellow gay men may enjoy playing with gender in some prescribed ways, but in other ways they're as rigid as many straight men. That's their hangup, and fifty-odd years after Stonewall they can get over themselves.

Now that radio has lost its primacy for promoting pop music, and many musicians are less reliant on major labels to distribute it, there's less reason except maybe habit to keep LGBTQ music closeted. I'm out of touch with the industry, I admit. Maybe Walters or someone else will follow the story past 2000. One thing I find encouraging: musical theater isn't my thing, but YouTube has brought me numerous videos from Broadway fundraisers in which stage performers sing standards with the sexes ... adjusted.  Sometimes they're too campy for my taste, but then the whole genre is campy.  I enjoy them.  There is hope; do this more often, people.

The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.