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 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.