It’s that time again for EOY and “best of” lists. I happened to stumble upon ** you do not have permission to see this link ** YouTube video. The criteria for selection was acknowledged classics that have stood the test of time but that in the selector’s opinion have done the greatest damage to the Faith. Not simply bad or stupid books of which there are a’plenty.
You will notice immediately that the guy has an agenda and that frankly, most of the books are chosen simply because they do not agree with his sect, his doctrine, his previously arrived at dogma. A couple I can certainly agree with. Bernard of Clairvaux’s In Praise of the New Knighthood provided the imprimatur for the spread of the Faith by military conquest although he hardly invented the idea. This book was the orthodox justification for the Crusades.
The infamous Malleus Malificarum by Heinrich Kramer started the Witch Hunt craze resulting in the deaths of by even conservative estimates, tens of thousands of innocent victims. The book was also one of the foundational documents for the Inquisition. How many folks did they torture and/or kill?
Now I am not going to provide you with my own list of ten because I hate lists and I’m much too lazy. However, there are some books that I think meet the original criteria, acknowledged classics that have done the most damage, that I would like to highlight.
1. The First Letter of Timothy
This document internalized the more or less standard view of the place of women in Western culture for damn near two thousand years. In ancient cultures women were more or less property. There were moments here and there where the vise loosened a bit. In our sources it seems both Jesus and Paul included women among their intimates in the new Faith. This was hardly what we would call feminism however. The Jewish Apocalyptic view was that class, sex, ethnicity would disappear in the Kingdom and the task for the Jesus community was to live by Kingdom values until the Kingdom came which was expected very shortly. But what happened is that as the Parousia was delayed and the first generation of believers died off, the values of the larger culture began to seep back into the community of the faithful. Timothy was a forgery intended to provide the authority of Paul for the subjugation of women into standard social roles. Hardly any scholar now thinks Paul actually wrote the Pastoral Epistles, but alas, the damage is done.
2. The Letter to the Ephesians
One of the most hilarious claims I’ve ever heard is that the New Testament lies behind the Abolitionist Movement and the Civil Rights Movement in the US. While I honor the efforts of clergymen and believers in these social movements they can hardly claim, as I once heard said, that the Abolitionist Movement was the greatest “Faith Based” project in our civilization. What this ignores is the 1700 year old history of justifying slavery by recourse to the scriptures. Just as with women’s social roles the earliest believers seem to have been more comfortable with ignoring class differences in anticipation of the imminent Kingdom. But NOWHERE does Jesus or Paul criticize the institution. In fact it is a perfectly valid interpretation of the ending of the letter to Philemon, genuinely Pauline, that Paul is asking Philemon to give Onesimus to him as his own slave! As the Parousia became ever more distant, dominant social values seeped back into the community.
Women, slaves, know your place! Look here, Paul said so!
3. The Gospel of John
What? Surely not! As hard as it might be to accept, the roots of the rancid vine of antisemitism, “Jew hatred”, blooming here and there throughout the centuries, and attaining its full flowering at Auschwitz and Dachau, sprang from the rich soil of the New Testament. While the Christian community was a subsect of a subsect it could do little harm. But when it became the ruling ideology of the West, the values expressed by the writer of John were internalized and spread. Even Islam sucked deeply of the poison juices.
But wait, I can here someone say, historically we know of other instances where Jews were persecuted. But the historical empires that attacked and/or destroyed Israel weren’t doing so because they hated the Jews, as Jews, but because the Israelites were a rebellious nation. The Romans treated Jerusalem the same way they treated every other rebellious state. Even Antiochus IV Epiphanes was intervening in an ongoing civil war, preferring one side over the other.
The concept of antisemitism, “Jew Hatred”, hating Jews because they are Jews, is a Christian invention.
4. Mere Christianity by C S Lewis
Let me preface my remarks by saying that I am a huge admirer of Prof Lewis’ scholarly and fictional works. His last scholarly work, The Discarded Image is a personal favorite and his last novel Till We Have Faces, is a desert island novel for me. But as far as his influence on modern Christianity he was at best a lay apologist. Not a theologian. Lewis spent his life formulating a theoretical underpinning to justify his religious belief. But he knew absolutely nothing about modern historical criticism and theology except to view them with suspicion, as a compromise with modernity.
Very few of his admirers read his scholarly work, alas, but his writings on the Christian faith are pervasive. I don’t how many times I’ve heard his ideas parroted by other apologists. He is quoted and referred to as almost a modern Apostle Paul. But, sigh, his arguments are truly awful. The Argument for God’s existence from Reason. From Morality. From Desire. Lewis’ infamous Trilemma. Jesus is either “Liar, Lunatic, Lord”. Sorry, yall, look this stuff up if you’re interested. I don’t have the strength left.
Something tells me that my short list would not be looked on with favor the by the guy who submitted the video. For me these are all historical issues. I don’t prefer one flavor of Christianity over another because I don’t accept the truth claims of any of them.
So friends, got a book (or two) to add to the list? Remember the criteria, an acknowledged classic that in your opinion has done much harm.
Since you are including canonical works, my addition would be the Book of Revelation. This brutal eschatology still sets the terms for many Christians. In fact, one could argue that the desire for this brutal end is getting stronger in the US. Particularly as reworked by John Nelson Darby and his successors, it has had a tremendous impact on British and US foreign policy, which supports Israel primarily because prophecy is seen to require the rebuilding of the Temple to usher in The End. The Jews and Israel are just pawns in the long game.
I would strongly object to including Malleus maleficarum on such a list:
First off it’s not a classic by most people’s definition. It is, of course, infamous, but really no one reads it–aside from scholars trying to understand the perception of witches or weirdo wannabe warlocks trying to figure out the role they are trying to cosplay.
Second, it did not give rise to the Inquisition or otherwise have quite the direct influence people are apt to imagine it did. Two notes here: First, the Spanish Inquisition (est. 1478) antedates its publication (1486). Second, the book was quickly disavowed and condemned by the theology Faculty at Cologne (1490), and in general, it wasn’t well received by educated or influential Catholics.
If we are looking to books on witchcraft that had a wide and bad influence, I think a case could be made that James IV of Scotland’s book Daemonologie from a century later was considerably more harmful, as one can draw a direct line from it to witch-hunters and trials that cost many innocent lives.
Porphyry thanks for your historical correction.
Heinrich Kramer is one of those authors whose work is so transparent that you can see the snakes writhing in his brain. I was somewhat shocked aand surprised when I read Robert Alter’s translation of the book of Ezekiel. Before that I had mostly concentrated on the cool hallucinogenic visions and nothing else. Ezekiel possesed some of those same phobias. His loathing and fear and contempt for the feminine oozes out of the text. Alter even speculates that Ezekiel might have been mentally ill. This goes way past sexism into full blown misogyny. It seems to me that this is a useful distinction to retain. Many men are prejudiced against or discriminate against women. Very few men fear and loathe them. To fling around the accusation of misogyny blunts it’s real pathology. I once had a boss who didn’t think women should supervise men in the workplace. He was a sexist. Jack the Ripper was a misogynist.
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