Identity for Me But Not for Thee

I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics.  Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.

This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.

But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare. 

So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore.  And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.

What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore.  It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.

This is wonderfully incoherent. I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality.  Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.

First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'.  Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard.  Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels.  Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.

Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter.  Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today.  As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air.  It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy.  But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.  That should be clear, if not obvious, from reading Paul's letters: they show him trying to impose his framework on his churches, and there's no reason to believe he succeeded.

McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate."  Of course.  We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups.  But "dogmatically"?  I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it.  The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.

Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul (along with other biblical writers) would have condemned "homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a discrete or separate thing.  In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).  

Apologists almost always do this, I've found (I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality.  Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own eye.

McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.

There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er.  McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it.  He seems to believe in progress.  The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore.  But who's "us" here?  The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance."  What will replace them?  Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values?  I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others.  All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints.  And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.

Providential Coincidences

At the public library recently I came across a book called Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time (HarperCollins, 2010) by Kristin Swenson, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.  I leafed through it and thought it looked like a convenient summary of current research and knowledge about the Bible for laypeople, so I checked it out.  It turned out to be a book I could recommend to people who wanted such a summary, and I was gratified to find that it had little information I didn't already know.

There was one thing I disagreed with strenuously, though.  In her discussion of Moses and the Exodus, Swenson tries to find a factual basis for the ten plagues that Yahweh sent to nudge Pharaoh into letting his people go.

Whether or not the plagues of Exodus] really happened is a question we cannot answer for certain. There is no reference to such events in Egyptian sources, and, as noted above, historical accuracy did not seem to be the biblical authors’ primary aim. Although two psalms also list the plagues, they do so in a different order and each includes only seven (probably reflecting a liturgical function), but not exactly the same seven.

One of the most convincing theories of how these events may have transpired presumes a seasonal situation gone bad. Flagellate organisms from Lake Tana worked their way into the Nile during the annual flooding period and sucked up all the oxygen, killing the fish. Frogs migrated out of the flooded river as they normally would but were infected by bacteria, Bacillus anthracis, possibly exacerbated by the decomposing fish.

The biting insects should probably be understood as mosquitoes – not “gnats,” as in many translations. They would have reached unbearable numbers as the high floodwaters receded. As for the flies, well, just imagine all those decomposing critters. It’s possible that at this point, the livestock, which had been safely secured some distance from the floodwaters, became infected with the same anthrax as the frogs. According to Greta Hort, it was transmitted by the fly Stomaxys calcitrans, which bites people and animals alike – perhaps explaining the boils. As for the storm, such weather isn’t common in Egypt, but it isn’t unheard of, either. Swarming locusts are more common, and the occasional khamsin (Arabic for an intense sandstorm) would have made the day seem dark as night. The most likely period for these events would have been August to May, a bit longer than the narrative suggests. The biblical story isn’t explicit about duration [192].

This is euhemerism, an ancient and popular critical tactic which tries to get rid of miracle stories by postulating that the events described actually happened, but were misunderstood or gradually enhanced with marvelous additions.  (Or that gods were originally human heroes whose exploits were exaggerated in the retelling.)

Euhemerism has been used to debunk mythology and to defend it.  James Barr wrote in Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1977) that euhemerism was common in conservative evangelical writing in the 1950s and 1960s, but it also turned up in conservative scholarship of the same period.  And, of course, euhemeristic explanations of the Star of Bethlehem circulate every year during Christmas season.  In his review of a respectable scholarly 1955 commentary on the gospel of Mark by Vincent Taylor, for example, Morton Smith criticized

T[aylor]'s insistence that the tale "has not yet attained the rounded form of a Miracle-story proper and stands nearer the testimony of eyewitnesses" (ib.) - who fundamentally misunderstood what happened. This objection applies to T.'s treatment of all the major miracle stories. As already noted, 'vivid details' lead him to conclude that every Markan story of Jesus' miracles (except the blasting of the figtree) is told from eye-witness tradition. At the same time, he will not admit that any of the major miracles happened: Jesus did not walk on the sea, but waded through the surf by the shore (p. 327) ; his apparent cure of the Syro-Phoenician's daughter (p. 348) and his apparent stilling of the storm (p. 273) were providential coincidences ('brilliant timing,' Moule, ib.) ; and so on. So Mk.'s 'narrative is everywhere credible' (p. 318) as to everything but what Mk. meant to narrate. Clearly, this position is the product, not of criticism, but of the conflict of two apologetic techniques - to defend Mk. directly by accepting his stories, and to defend him indirectly by getting rid of his miracles.*

The trouble with this strategy, as Smith indicated, is that it tends to rely on "providential coincidences" and "brilliant timing."  Moses just happened to dip his staff into the Nile at a time of year when it was going to run red anyway (and the credulous Egyptians, who'd observed such changes before, were taken completely by surprise), and the rest of the "plagues" were just a natural sequence of events that followed in their turn.  This sequence of plagues can't be used to verify or date the Exodus, then, since it would probably have occurred numerous times in Egyptian history.

This explanation also falters because, as Swenson admits,

If these nine plagues really did happen in a manner that can be explained as natural events, the tenth cannot.  Try as we might (and there are some imaginative theories out there), the tenth and final plague, the death of the firstborn, defies natural explanation.  In the story, God instructs the Hebrew people to slaughter a lamb and spread its blood on their doorways before roasting and eating it.  That would mark which households to spare as the LORD passed through Egypt, killing firstborn children and even firstborn animals… [192].

Her authority for this "convincing theory," the Danish scholar Greta Horst, seems to have been bolder.  I haven't read Hort's articles** completely yet, but I noticed that she did attempt to speculate on a "natural" explanation for the killing of Egypt's firstborn.  That should be interesting, because it would also have to explain why smearing blood on the doorframes of the Israelites' houses would protect them.  (The story also includes one of those charming revelations of Yahweh's moral character, for he "gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Furthermore, the man Moses himself was greatly esteemed in the land of Egypt, both in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people" [Exodus 11:3], but he "said to Moses, 'Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that My wonders will be multiplied in the land of Egypt.' Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh; yet the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go out of his land [Exodus 11:9-10]."  In other words, it wasn't Pharaoh's fault that he didn't free the Israelites -- Yahweh made him do it, in order to let him show off his power some more.)

Of course the plagues look like "natural events." If Yahweh or any other god (including Nature) sends epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, etc., then it's possible to describe those events in naturalistic terms.  The question for believers, however, is whether those events were literal acts of their gods, and if so, what message the acts were meant to convey.  Science can't answer that question; but believers disagree among themselves about the answers.

What I find odd is that although euhemeristic explanations have also been offered for some New Testament stories, as I've indicated, Kristin Swenson only resorts to the tactic in writing about the Exodus.  She must know that it's a dubious approach, largely discredited in scholarship about religion.  The nineteenth-century theologian David Strauss mounted a strong attack on it in his Life of Jesus [1835-36, translated into English by George Eliot*** in 1846], which provoked a shitstorm of condemnation from the orthodox.  (Another act of God, no doubt.)  Yet euhemerism moves.

* Morton Smith, "Comments on Taylor's commentary on Mark."  Harvard Theological Review 48: 21-64, page 36.
** Greta Hort, “The Plagues of Egypt,” in two articles published by Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 69(1-4) (1957): 84-103; and 70(1-2) (1958): 48-59.
*** Yes, that George Eliot.