Archive for June, 2012

Several readers have suggested that this kind of post should be available on the blog for everyone, not just members.  I think they’re right!

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The next two weeks are going to be highly intense for me, and I’m a bit worried about how I will be able to fit in my “blog time.”   The reason: I will be throwing myself day and night into writing my next book.

Background Part One:  As I think I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I try to write three different kinds of books for three different audiences.  This keeps life interesting and varied for me.   First, I write books for scholars, in which I try to advance serious scholarship, speaking the language that works with my colleagues who have PhD’s in the field and who are deeply conversant with all the ancient and modern languages and with all the major critical and historical issues.  My most recent work of this kind is due out in October: Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in the Early Christian Tradition.  It will be a long and complex treatment of the subject – over 600 pages; a real contrast to my popular book Forged, written on the same subject but to a different audience.

Second, I write popular books (called “trade books” for some reason) for general audiences.  These are ones in which I attempt to communicate what scholars have uncovered for popular audiences, for the “Barnes and  Noble Crowd” (among whom I proudly number myself, for books outside my area of expertise).  These are the books that I am best known for, since they reach the widest audience.  I try to space these out, so that I write one every two years.  My next one will be on How Jesus Became God, which I hope to write this coming Spring, so it will be published, if all goes well, in Spring 2014.

Third, I write textbooks for college-level courses, mainly in New Testament and early Christianity.  I have two separate textbooks on the New Testament that get used widely throughout the country, and several anthologies of readers – collections of ancient texts in translation which get used in a variety of courses in the field.

The book I am going to start writing tomorrow (tomorrow!) is the third type of book, a college textbook, not, however, on the New Testament alone, but on the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, for colleges that offer a one semester course that covers the whole shooting match.  I am not in favor of this kind of course, but about half the colleges in the country teach it, if they teach Bible at all.   And I think there needs to be a better textbook for it.

Background Part Two: When I write – that is, when I no longer am doing the research for a project but am sitting down to write the actual words/pages/chapters/book – life gets very intense for me.   One of the things that I happen to be able to do very well, thank the gods, is focus.  And my writing is very focused.  It is hard to express or explain, but it feels like I have a large amount of energy walled up inside of me, and when I write, I let it go.

Normally I will write (that is, type out the words/pages/chapters) for six or seven intense hours a day, starting in the early morning until I finish.   For my trade books (and a bit less so for my college textbooks; this doesn’t apply to my scholarship which is much harder to put into writing) I can normally write 14,000 to 16,000 words a day, with this kind of schedule.  It is exhilarating.  I don’t answer my phone, I shut the door to my study, I put on my headphones, and I write intensely, pounding away at the key board as fast as my fingers will fly, for hours.  I will usually take a 20 minute lunch break, and then get back to it, and keep going either until I finish the chapter I’m working on, or until I’m brain dead and can’t do it anymore.

Then I go to my basement exercise room, work out for a couple of hours, take a steam bath (I had an old, small bathroom in my basement converted into a steam room!), eat a nice dinner, have some nice wine, vegetate in the evening, and get a solid night’s sleep, and the next day, do it again.

With this kind of system, I can normally write a trade book in two weeks.   I then need to edit it, polish it, mop up loose ends, and so forth.  But the writing is the hard part, and I do it with bursts of intensity.

So, my next book, starting tomorrow, is my Bible textbook.  I have two weeks, and I won’t have it all written by then, as it will be much longer than one of my tradebooks.  My goal is to have the entire Old Testament section written before I go to England to join up with my beloved Sarah, who is already there for a program she’s teaching for Duke students.   (We have a flat in London – Sarah’s a Brit – and spend a good chunk of the summer there every year.)  That means I will have the house to myself, with almost no distractions, and I can work like a wild man. 

Which I plan to do.   My goal is to have all eight of the chapters on the Old Testament written before I fly the friendly skies.   If I don’t meet the goal – it’s highly ambitious – that will be OK.  In London I’ll have a month while Sarah is still teaching her class (it’s on theater; they discuss a play in class in the morning, and go see it performed that night!  A great program.) and will be able to work every day there.  It won’t be as intense, as it won’t be my home study.  But it’ll be enough to finish the OT section of the book and to make serious inroads into the NT. 

My goal is to have the entire thing finished by the end of September.  I want to get onto the next project, doing my research for How Jesus Became God.  More than anything else this is what drives me to write fast – wanting to get to the next project, which always sounds even more interesting than the current one![/private]

Q.   In what way is the Jewish notion of a resurrection a different idea than either the fertility crop cycle idea, or what is sometimes said about pagan deities that either disappear or die?

A.   One of the reasons for thinking that the belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection is not exactly like what you can find in pagan myths about their gods is that it is solidly rooted in Jewish apocalyptic beliefs of the first century.  This should come as no surprise, since Jesus and his followers were not pagans with pagan views of the divine realm, but first-century apocalyptically minded Jews.   In some pagan circles, there was a belief in fertility gods, who would spend some time in the underworld and some time in this world, alternating year after year….

FOR THE REST OF MY RESPONSE, go to the Members Site.  If you don’t yet belong, JOIN NOW!!

As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have had three debates with Dinesh D’Souza, an extremely smart, articulate, and conservative fellow, on the Problem of Suffering.  The debates were not about whether there is a problem (yes there is!), but about whether the problem is, or should be, insurmountable for faith.  For many people (like me) it is insurmountable.  But I don’t think it necessarily is for everyone.  Dinesh does not think it should be for anyone (including me).

In one of the debates Dinesh argued – I don’t know why, as I don’t recall the context – that contrary to what you might think, it is precisely conservative Christian believers who are more prone to give to charity than liberal non-religious people.   To back up his point, he referenced a study Who Really Cares, by Arthur C. Brooks, who also seems to be an extremely smart, articulate, and conservative fellow.  Brooks claims, apparently, that it is not the bleeding heart liberals but the anti-welfare conservatives who give more money to social causes.   Really?  UGH!!

I haven’t brought my self to read the book yet.  It sounds like a recipe for depression, and how can we read everything we want?  I’m so inundated (apart from my reading for work, which I do all day long most days) with fiction that I’m desperate to read (just been reading Virginia Wolf for, I’m ashamed to say, the first time; amazing.  I have piles of Anthony Trollope I want to read [to my shame, once more, never done it]; and some Victor Hugo [Les Miserables – now *that’s* a big book!-- was one of my favorites in grad school, but I’ve never read Hunchback.  And on and on and on) that I simply can’t seem to find time to read non-fiction, even though I should.

Anyway, I have no reason to doubt that Dinesh misconstrued what Brooks has to say, and I do need to look into it.  Because I find it disturbing.  Why is it that Christians give more money to charity (not just to their churches, apparently) than non-believers?  It should be just the *opposite*!  Those of us who are liberal humanists who are committed to living life to the fullest and to helping others do the same should be giving MORE than the believers who think it’s all going to be worked out one way or another in the cosmic end (OK, for the theologically astute: I realize I’m over-simplifying).   We (I) think this life is all there is.  We (I) should be putting our believing brothers and sisters to shame when it comes to charity and to helping out our fellow man and woman.   But apparently we are not.

I would love to know more ways to raise money for good causes.  (As if I’m looking for something to do with all my spare time…  Still, I would love to).  For now I’m doing this blog.  As I’ve tried to make clear, I’m not committing myself to this (and it *is* a real commitment of time and resources) simply because I think the world needs more of me and I’m desperate to share my pearls of wisdom with all takers.  I do want to share my thoughts, but what is driving me is the charity.  I want to raise money for the hungry and homeless.  That simple.

We are doing pretty well on the blog.  Over the course of a couple of months we have raised over $8000.  But it’s not enough, and I’d like to do more.  I’m not sure how much more I can do in terms of quantity, but if I can do more by way of quality, I’m open to suggestions!

This is where you come in.   If you feel moved to donate more money independently of your subscription – feel free!   Every penny goes to the charities I’ve discussed.   But also: if you have suggestions about how to attract more members to the blog, let me know.  We are currently getting about two new members a day.   That may not sound like much, but at $24.95 a pop, over the course of a year – well, you do the math.  But I’d like more.   A lot more.   But how?  Feel free to email me to let me know what we can do to improve things and draw more people in.  You will earn my special once-in-a-lifetime blessing if your suggestion does not require a huge expenditure of TIME! :)

Apart from all that, I want to thank all of you who have joined the blog.  The interactions have been terrific, and even though I sometimes begrudge the time (I’m always begrudging time; I’ll blog about that sometime; my wife [rightly] thinks that my obsession with time is a bit of an imbalance :) ), I have enjoyed writing these posts and hearing and responding to your interactions.  But mainly I’ve enjoyed seeing the money come in to fight, in a very tangible way, causes that I – and you – believe in.

Friends, Fans, and Others,

I am heading outta here for a few days, taking my 85-year-old mom trout fishing!   We will be in a remote part of the Missouri Ozarks, where there is no Internet connection.   I have prepared a couple of posts for when I’m away, which my trusty website and technology support, Steven Ray, will put up on the blog while I’m gone.   But I will not be able to respond to comments, until I get back at the end of the week.   Just so you know: I’m not meaning to ignore you!

QUESTION:

Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the OT’s construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it?

RESPONSE:

Right!  The Old Testament (for Christians; otherwise: the Jewish Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible; the Tanakh – these are all more or less synonyms.)   

It’s been on my mind a lot lately.  Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation.   This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this way, rather than having Hebrew Bible in one semester and New Testament another.   And, in my judgment, the textbooks currently available for the course are not as good as they should be.   So my publisher, some years ago, urged me to write one myself…..

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Q. It appears that mythicists have not read Jonathan Z. Smith, and do not realize that there is no unambiguous evidence for the historical argument that ancients believed in dying and rising gods before the time of Jesus, and that therefore the story of Jesus is just a historicized version of that myth.   Why do you think this theory of dying and rising gods became so popular in the 20th century, and what caused its scholarly demise?  Was there new evidence that Smith and others unearthed, or just closer reasoning about the existing evidence?  

A.   Yes, for a long time it was widely thought that dying and rising gods were a constant staple of ancient pagan religions, so that when Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they were simply borrowing a common “motif” from pagan religions.   This view was first popularized by Sir James George Frazer at the beginning of the twentieth century….

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In my previous post I talked about the “Eusebian model” for understanding the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in earliest Christianity, and then about the counter-view set forth by Walter Bauer in his important study of 1934.   What do scholars think today?

Only the most conservative scholars (fundamentalists and extremely conservative evangelical Christian scholars) still hold to a Eusebian view.   For them, not only was Eusebius’s form of orthodoxy taught by Jesus (who told his disciples that he was fully God and fully man, etc.), but their *own* view of the faith was taught by both Jesus and all his disciples.   No one else thinks so.  Jesus did not teach his disciples the Nicene Creed!

Bauer’s view has been enormously influential on critical scholarship, although no one today accepts the details of Bauer’s very detailed exposition.  And everyone recognizes that there are major problems with the case that Bauer built…..

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QUESTION: 

What I have been wondering lately is “why” did Christianity win out. There seemed to be much competition in the ancient world between the pagan polytheisms and monotheistic religions. Competition not only between the Jewish religion and Christian religion but within Christianity.

I would be interested in why you think the current version of Christianity won out. Was it purely a matter of cultural evolution and this form of Christianity seemed to benefit people the most, easiest to adhere to, most flexible.

RESPONSE:

In my previous post I tried to deal (briefly!) with the first part of this question: why did Christianity succeed in the first place, so that it eventually became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.  In this post I will deal (briefly again!) with the second question: why did a certain form of Christianity – widely labeled “orthodox” – end up triumphing within Christianity, when there were so many other forms of Christianity that were competing for dominance?

This too is not at all an easy question, and I have dealt with it at greater length in one of my earlier books, Lost Christianities.  Among other things, in that book I talk about the problems we have with terms and their definitions.   When we talk about “orthodoxy” and “heresy” – what do we mean?…..

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Q. Robert Price’s argument that the stories of Jesus are a giant midrash on OT stories about Moses and others, and so are completely fiction seems to ignore the fact that midrash is a hermeneutical technique used for contemporizing pre-existing stories.  Talk briefly about the difference between how stories are shaped in the Gospels and whether they have any historical substance or core or not.   (N.B. It appears that Crossan has recently made the same kind of category mistake arguing that since there are parables in the Gospels, that whole stories about Jesus may be parables,  pure literary fictions).

A.  In Did Jesus Exist? I try to make a major methodological point that there is a very big difference between saying that a story has been shaped in a certain (non-historical) way and saying that the story is completely non-historical.   I make this point because authors like Robert Price have claimed that all the stories about Jesus in the Gospels are midrashes on stories found in the OT.  By that he means, roughly, that the story of Jesus is shaped in such a way as to reflect a kind of retelling or exposition of stories about persons and events in the Old Testament. 

It is true that a number of stories about Jesus in the Gospels (not all of them though!) have been shaped as a kind of midrash on the OT.   But the key point to make is that there is a difference between shaping a story and inventing a story.   As I argue in my book ….

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In my last post I was discussing why / how Christianity succeeded in taking over the Empire, and a number of readers have pointed out that the conversion of Constantine had something to do with it.  Yes indeed!!  Constantine had EVERYTHING to do with it.  If he/that hadn’t happened, there’s no telling what would have been.   Constantine was the real game-changer.  But my post (I wasn’t clear about this: my mistake) wasn’t dealing with the cataclysmic events of the fourth century; I was trying to talk about what was going on *before* the game changed.  

The question I had and have is how Christianity managed to grow exponentially from the time of the apostles up to the early fourth century, when everything took a radical turn with the conversion of the emperor (which led, before century’s end, to Christianity becoming the state religion!).   If we assume that the New Testament is basically right, just for the sake of the argument (and in this it cannot be wrong by much, any way you look at it) that sometime after Jesus’ death around the year 30 there were, say, 20 followers who believed that he had been raised from the dead and was exalted to heaven as the Lord, how is it that by the time of Constantine, less than 300 years later, these 20 had managed to grow to make up 5% of the Empire or so – that is, 3 *MILLION* Christian (if the empire is 60 million people, as most historians guess, and Christians at that point were about 1/20 of the total, again, as good historians guess, for a variety of reasons).  

How do you get from 20 to 3,000,000, in just under three centuries?  That’s the question I was trying to address.   And the more I think about it, the more interesting the problem becomes.  What exactly were these Christians saying (or doing) that was so compelling?  I know what conservative theologians and believers would say, but my question is what historians (whether believers or not) would say.  Let me stress, this is a matter of ongoing interest among scholars: I mentioned three of the important books in my previous post, and there are others!   But none, in my opinion, quite nails it.