Some People Know Everything
I’ve done a bad bad thing. Reading the Bible seems like a culturally rewarding thing to do, like going to Shakespeare plays and listening to Bach. It doesn’t happen that often and it’s not always for fun, but I know I’m not going to come out the other side any more ignorant than I am already.
The twitch state starts with Bible Commentaries. Worse - New Testament bible commentaries. There should be a warning against reading books about the books of the bible, because New Testament Studies is not a field in which anyone can dabble. You’re either in or you’re a non swimmer, and not even everybody who’s in can swim.
The gospels are constructed using devices familiar from postmodernism. A ’frame’ in Mark describes his habit of starting one story, interrupting with another, and then returning to the climax of the first. This is partly why the gospels are open to so many interpretations – there’s a kind of unpredictable spark or molecular reaction in the unwritten gaps between two stories that taken separately are as simple as you like:
Be good to other people.
Matthew and Luke then take chunks of Mark , called pericopes, and move them about and make new versions of the same story. I think they’re trying to demystify the message:
Be good to other people.
If they weren’t so premodern they’d have known that demystification isn’t what’s coming next.
Seen like this, the gospel written second is already trying to save Jesus from the first gospel, and so on. Until eventually even Richard Dawkins wants to save Jesus from the Christians – he claims to own a T-shirt saying Atheists for Jesus.
A good slogan never dies and there’s now an A for J website.
There’s also a book on Amazon called The Postmodern Bible, but I haven’t had time to look at it yet. I’m buried under Bible Commentaries, and I’m sinking.
Good post. Jesus’s message is very simple. Be kind to other people and don’t be a hypocrite.
According to Philip Yansey, the word ‘hypocrite’ was coined by Jesus to describe the behaviour of the scribes and pharisses who obeyed the letter of the law and considered themselves to be above other people. The examples he used in the parables ‘the Samaritan’ the publican etc were all unpopular people. It is obvious that the message is that it is not who you are but what you do which is important.
Were Jesus alive today he would be telling stories about ‘The good gay man’ or the ‘good woman with a transsexual past’ who saw someone in need on the side of the road who had been ignored by an evangelical Christian, a rich lawyer and a doctor.
Or alternatively he would be telling stories about James Dingemans QC, who frequently represents the Christian Institute, sending me a lovely email inviting me to have a friendly chat and restoring my faith that sometimes the good guys win. When I was seven years old and read my first book ‘The Hobbit’ and later the Lord of the Rings, I wanted to believe that a hobbit could win against the forces of Mordor.
I have a photograph on my website of me with Hamish Rattray (1978) in chapel at Radley college. Hamish has had a very rough time and yet he has done a great deal for me. He says, ‘I didn’t really do anything, I just said I thought it was wrong and told the truth’.
Actually he did more than that, he mentioned me in a letter and put me back in touch with old friends. I have been corresponding with one and we should all be going to dinner in December to which I am looking forward.
Jesus’s message as far as hypocrisy is concerned is simple too. If you do one thing in private and another in public you will eventually be found out. The priest who betrayed me as a child told me on Mothers day this year that Luke 12 is ‘quite terrifying, really’ after I had been to church, looked at the kids and become even more passionate about preventing child abuse.
In a story I wrote a few years ago at university ‘Time out of Mind’, my protagonist, a vulnerable and disillusioned ex art student points out to her best friend’s husband, an arrogant ex public school boy that ‘enlightened self -interest is the major factor in all philosphies and religions’ according to Dale Carnegie. Being good to others tends to be rewarding in the long term and leads to a happy life. Screwing other people tends to come back on you as I am in the process of demonstrating. I shall be revealing the true theme of my story – ‘a kind of rape’ to the embarassment of the rapists in the department in due course! And will enjoy it!
How much better to be a ‘good shepherd’ and have people come back years later and say that you really helped them ? I have had this experience a few times and it makes life really wonderful when someone come up in the pub and tells you have had positive input into their life.
I am also studying bible commentaries. It will enable me to avoid the kind of mistake made by an English professor who thought a story entitled ‘The Passion’ was an elegantly literary rendition of Dido and Aeneas!
This is a particularly relevant piece of scripture which some commentaries seem to interpret in all kind of twisted ways. I think the obvious reading is, ‘Don’t mess around with kids under any circumstances and by implication anyone less powerful than oneself’. I see nothing in it about beginning Christians stumbling in their faith or the other commentaries I have read:
“Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believed in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6
Well done with ‘Becoming Drusilla’. I’ll do a review on my blog in due course. A V intelligent book – not that I would have expected less!
Hi,
Just a clarification: Atheists for Jesus(tm) has been around since 1989 (I didn’t copy Richard’s t-shirt [although I'm very happy to see him wearing one]).
Ken Schei
Founder: Atheists for Jesus
Ken – thanks for the clarification, which in itself is a marvellous demonstration of the problem. You set up a movement (some would say a religion). You may not even know it’s a religion when you start it. Then other people come along and misunderstand who started it, and where and why. The Apostle Richard Dawkins pinches some of your ideas. You have to spend time putting people right. and before you know it you’re writing a book to make the situation clear. Your story as written will be the gospel truth – send me a copy when it comes out!