Why would you ensure that the spread of the message requires translation from an Afro-Asiatic language to an Indo-European one?
One thing that periodically strikes me–when looking a the Hebrew scriptures–is how dependent we are on relatively late Jewish sources (well removed from the context of the original texts) not just for the textual transmission but for understanding the language itself; I mean, there are a remarkable number of hapax legoumena in the OT.
I wonder how Jesus’ mission and message would have fared on X, formerly known as Twitter?
I suppose today the message would be drowned out in the general cacophony. But in this post-literate world perhaps some thought would be given to some other medium? Can we imagine a divinely inspired film, for example? Or a divinely inspired YouTube Video?
One thing that periodically strikes me–when looking a the Hebrew scriptures–is how dependent we are on relatively late Jewish sources (well removed from the context of the original texts) not just for the textual transmission but for understanding the language itself; I mean, there are a remarkable number of hapax legoumena in the OT.
All these concerns seem to put paid to the concept of sola scriptura. But who really reads the Bible today anyway except for weirdos like us? My prophetic insight is that to survive mainstream Christianity will eventually retreat into liturgy, leaving the analysis of the text to specialists. It’s interesting to see a steady stream of Protestants seeking refuge in Orthodoxy, for example.
My prophetic insight is that to survive mainstream Christianity will eventually retreat into liturgy, leaving the analysis of the text to specialists. It’s interesting to see a steady stream of Protestants seeking refuge in Orthodoxy, for example.
I doubt it. I remember hearing somewhere that decadence is, by nature, only possible for one generation: you have to be raised and educated a certain way in order to be a decadent, and a decadent doesn’t doesn’t raise people that way.
I think classical Protestantism is a lot like that in one respect: It makes sense as the human reaction of people raised Catholic to a manifestly degenerate papacy. But it make little sense outside of that context. Yet it has lived on quite healthy for 500 years. No one reads Scripture and just says spontaneously, ahh these writings are patently the inspired, inerrant word of God. That belief–taken as axiomatic in Classical Protestantism–only comes from the Church whose authority they rejected.
I suppose my point is, religion is never entirely a matter of logical consistency and rational evaluation of evidence. One or more other factors drives people to embrace religion, and that something else is sufficient to hold it together for a large number of people in the face of a certain number of serious logical problems (like the obvious problems with sola scriptura). It has been doing it for centuries and I don’t see why it will stop any time soon.
We’ve known about both the textual and linguistic problems with ascertaining the original meaning of scripture for centuries, but fundamentalism is still healthy.
Following Robert’s lead with the title and his more recent posts, I’ll throw in my own 2 pence, especially as they relate to situating Mark as an author. These are really just scattered thoughts I haven’t had time to stitch together into something cohesive so give me some grace if I just throw out bullet points.
1) Even if you are not trying to mislead anyone, making a story effective, as a story, requires assisting your audience in suspending their disbelief. Think of the anecdotes we tell about historical figures (“Winston Churchill was once at dinner with Lady Aster . . .”) You have to deliver the story as though it is true, and this includes adding all sorts of insignificant passing details (like the name of the interlocutor or the specific location of the event), because those details make it feel like you are recounting real facts that you know. The line between misleading someone and assisting his suspension of disbelief–so he can enter into the story–disintegrates.
2) Making art lifelike requires filling in details. Think of paintings of historical scenes–the artist has to add in details from his imagination to make a vivid scene. Think of ancient historians composing speeches. Think of a battle reenactment–you don’t just have human figures holding cutouts vaguely suggestive of weapons; you want the weapons and armor to look as accurate as possible because that is part of the experience. Of course you see this in movies “based on true stories” all the time: I remember wondering as a kid watching the Sound of Music how we had transcripts of all the private conversations that appear in the film. Of course most of them were made up, but that was important to telling the true story.
3) Something particularly interesting about movies “based on” true events is that there is no standard for how closely the script hews to true events. We know, as an audience, that not every minute detail is historical, but we don’t know where the line is. Some such movies stick as closely as possible to the known facts, and deviate from history only in supplying what is necessary to make a coherent movie (like supplying the dialogue in private conversations, though trying to portray the character’s thoughts as accurately as possible given what we know about those characters). Others are only loosely inspired by true events and real characters but are really works of fiction, frequently contradicting known facts to make a better and more moving story that reinforces a narrative or moral that the scriptwriters happen to like.
If we want a modern model for what the evangelists were doing, I think a good place to start would be the “Chosen” TV series. The producer really–I think–believes in Jesus, and he really sincerely want to draw other people to believe in Jesus through his work. But he also is engaged in making a work of art–a fictional representation of a true character–and he is willing to take pretty significant artistic license to make the work he wants. He will make not only details, but entire periscopes up from whole cloth to give the experience he wants to give.
I don’t see any reason that the story-telling impulses that led to the Chosen weren’t around in the first century.
As to reception of such works: first, I think there is an inherent danger that the audience will not distinguishing fact from fiction in such works. Even in the age of wikipedia, where it is easy to look up the establish facts, many people don’t do their research after watching such movies. And even the people who know better, sometimes fall in love with the way the story was told. Once a compelling possibility is planted, it tends to take on a life of its own, whether there is evidence to support it or not. It’s not a perfect parallel, but look at something like the secret gospel of Mark–even if you know it is uncertain, it is really tempting to just start thinking about it as though it (and all its implications) is true. Another example of a similar phenomenon is when someone makes serious accusations against someone: even if you know full well the accusations haven’t been proven, and when asked you suspend judgement on their accuracy, there is a danger that (though you know the accusation hasn’t been proven) you will still tend to think of the person as though he is guilty.
I remember hearing somewhere that decadence is, by nature, only possible for one generation: you have to be raised and educated a certain way in order to be a decadent, and a decadent doesn’t doesn’t raise people that way.
Porphyry I must confess I’m not sure how your comment about decadence relates to my observation about Protestants leaving their historically mainstream churches to join more liturgically focused denominations. Back in the days when I was searching (instead of merely being lost) I flirted with such a path myself.
…fundamentalism is still healthy.
Actually these churches are now declining as well. The hardcore are always the last to go and will no doubt never completely disappear, but we are undergoing a real sea-change in public levels of religiosity.
As far as “story-telling impulses” go, if the writer of John is willing to change a significant data point like the day of Jesus’ crucifixion in order to make a theological point, then all bets are off it seems to me. Why assume Mark didn’t change whatever sources he had to do the same thing?
Robert wrote
Like translating, all reading is misreading.
If we cannot understand then maybe we can creatively misunderstand. This relates somewhat to the current furor over something called “misappropriation of culture”. I understand the impulse to protect and purify but it is nearly always fatal. If a culture is not “appropriated” in some way then it dies. (And appropriation is not synonymous with exploitation. Would we really prefer that all those teenage white guys in the 1960s had not slavishly copied old blues licks from records by obscure black southern blues musicians? Would we have preferred these blues musicians to have been forgotten?) That’s how culture works. It springs to life in a specific situation and anyone not in that situation muse learn it and make it their own.
All reading is misreading.
Do we really have the same problem with most books we read? Everyone I know seems to have the same idea about what Rowling is on about in her Potter series? As well, most keen readers will score highly on a test after reading a history book in school. The information is organized in a way to be understood by the pupil. So not all reading is misreading, is it?
The point was, I realize, both obscure and tangential. Let me try to sharpen it a bit: Classical Protestantism makes a certain amount of sense if you start by presupposing Catholicism as a base and then reject the more problematic aspect of Catholicism, and then systematize what is left. That is what you see happening among the reformers–they start Catholic, then they take a stand and reject one or two things, and as their careers proceed, the problems snowball and they become more and more radical in their re-imagining of Christianity, yet they never reject the foundations (say, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the inspiration of Scripture. To put a point on it: Sola Scriptura makes sense if you are a Catholic who has been driven to react against a magisterium that has patently lost the way. So it makes sense as a temporary transitional state. What we might expect is, given time, for the reaction to continue–we might expect the whole sweater to unravel and the whole house of cards to collapse.
This is the respect in which Protestantism is like decadence–it makes sense as a transitional state, but only as a transitional state because there is a fundamental tension in the system itself.
And yet, despite expectations, classical Protestantism seems to have become stable. The process of questioning and rejecting Catholic superstition went to a certain point and then, for classical Protestantism, it essentially stopped: you can question and reject traditional, institutional Christianity to this point and no further. (Not for all of course: you do get things like 19th cent. German liberalism or Unitarianism).
The lesson that I take from this is that adherence to religious dogma has far more to do with sociology than with strict logical rigor or empirical evidence. In this particular case, there has always been something incongruous in Classical Protestantism, yet it still survived well after its divines had ample time to realize those incongruities. Beyond that it survived the many discoveries made since the 16th cent. that have further cast its foundations into question.
The lesson I draw from this, is that dogmatic religion in general (and classical Protestantism in particular) is, I think, not principally driven by reason and evidence. It has shown itself resilient (as a movement) in the face of a constant stream of serious objections.
Thus, the facts like that we are deeply dependent on late Jewish sources, well removed from the actual authors of the Hebrew Scriptures and their context, for understanding even the plain meaning of the OT isn’t, I think, going to precipitate a collapse of mainstream Protestantism or a great retreat into pure liturgical orthopraxy from orthodoxy. We’ve had those problems, and others, for centuries, and the true believers have never been much affected by them. That goes with the nature of faith.
Christianity is slowly receding, but I think the more immediate driving forces behind this are sociological. Most Christians don’t even know what language the bible was written in, let alone do they worry about how we know that language.
Robert, you leave me with many questions:
How would the theory respond to the argument that, e.g., Matthew misuses Hosea 11:1, or that Luke misuses Isaiah 7:14? The prophets seem to have pretty clearly invested those lines with one meaning, while the evangelists (and billions of Christians) have taken them with an entirely different meaning.
More generally, on the one hand, I can see the argument that the author’s intent is ultimately his own and we have no immediate access to it–we can’t read his mind.
I can also understand that the historical significance of a text is generally determined by its reception–an historically important text is generally important because of how the readers understood it, regardless of what the author actually meant to say (this applies also to the text itself and not just the interpretation: widespread textual corruptions are, for many purposes, more important than the pristine autograph that no one actually read).
On the other hand though, it seems like we do have a fairly direct access to the author’s meaning, insofar as that is the whole point of the written text: Words have meanings, and authors write to communicate their thoughts, and people study languages to be able to access the the thoughts of the people who use those languages to express their thoughts. And though for some purposes (like studying the text’s historical influence) the author’s meaning isn’t the critical issue, it seems something has gone wrong if we conclude that the meaning that the author wrote the text to convey doesn’t still hold a certain pride of place in discussing the text itself for that meaning is quite literally the text’s raison d’etre.
And on that note, I’m not sure how to apply dialogue as a model for textual reception: Plato observed that one of the great weaknesses of a written text is precisely that it can’t make answer to defend itself if it is misunderstood or abused. The back-and-forth exchange characteristic of dialog is missing; the text can only ever repeat itself like a babbling idiot.
Now, none of this is to say an author can’t be deliberately vague and open-ended, intentionally leaving questions unanswered and inviting his audience to enter into the creative process themselves by imagining different possibilities. (Authors can do this with the plot itself, leaving the actual events unclear; they can do with characters–leaving people’s motives unclear; they can do it with morals–deliberately creating moral ambiguities that we are meant to wrestle with.) Something like this might be happening in Mark’s ending. But that is a special case; we can’t answer those questions by appeal to authorial intent because the author intends very precisely not to answer those questions. The fact an author sometimes intends not to answer questions doesn’t undermine the general idea that authorial intent is important to understanding the text; it rather presupposes that authorial intent is important, it is just that in this case the author’s intent is to be obscure.
Continuing my interrogation of Robert:
In the original thread that elicited your remark that “all reading is misreading” you had defended a specific reading as the correct reading. And you seemed (if I recall) to dismiss others as grammatically untenable.
I certainly don’t mean to pile on to tsiappoutas–God knows I’ve often made more elementary mistakes in reading a text, even in English–but I’m not sure how to understand your comment that all reading is misreading, that to insist one meaning of a text is uniquely correct is “to deprive it of it’s real meaning for the community, to silence the dialogue, to censor it, to burn books because we think we know what they mean and demean them”, with your defending a reading of a text as correct and arguing that another reading is grammatically untenable.
Surely, you’d agree it ends in absurdity, taking that sentiment to the limit.
So there are a lot of issues at play.
Intentionally vague and open ended is probably the most important here.
“misuse” of scripture.
Various interpretations.
Bob Dylan and many artists enjoy exploring hidden and/or multiple meanings. Again I recently read a commentary on Hebrews that encouraged taking both possible meanings meant by the author, and on more than one occasion. Its almost like singing polyphonic(ally?). Both meanings are intended.
“misuse of scripture applies to fundamentalist, literalist use of gospels. Understanding the gospels through Memesis, however, means those writers employed those verses to steer the reader to a certain goal. For example, if I were to analyze Mark as Memesis of OT literature, The use of Isaiah 40:3 could mena that Mark is implying this story has to do with a great savior like Cyrus was to Isaiah in his time. The conflation with a verse from Malachi has two possible intentions, and perhaps was meant to serve both. Malachi means messenger, and that is what we see John the Baptist doing in the wilderness. Malachi also speak about sending Elijah before the day of terror that is coming.
The point being that tese verses are not misused, in memesis they are signposts to alert the reader of what the gospel is about.
Various interpretations of Potter do exist, and some are rather odd. They seem to suppose a great amount that Rowling never seems to imply. But the vast majority of watchers seem to agree on what is going on in the movies.
We’ve got multiple conversations going on here so first, for Robert:
C S Lewis once commented that a sign of a successful translation was the impulse to throw it away and learn the original language. I learned Spanish and Russian for similar reasons, so I could read Cervantes and Tolstoy. Imagine my delight when I discovered the South American magical realists and the lesser known Russians. (An example of a writer whose charms don’t make the transition from one language to another is Gogol. I have given up on finding an English translation which captures his uniquely Russian appeal. So, Russian readers worship and alas, others scratch their heads.)
Porphyry I’m not going to quote you extensively to keep this from being the world’s longest post but this is a response to your post on 1/8, 10:21 pm. Re: decadence
I appreciate your Catholic point of view although I make no assumptions about your current relationship with Holy Mother Church. Let me make some qualifying points myself. To the crew I was raised by, and I think to most Evangelical Fundamentalists in the US, the Reformers are as alien as the Mass. The dominating assumption is that they are practicing the Pure Christianity of its Founder. Of course a completely ahistorical perspective but then they would not see this as a bad thing.
Over the centuries Christians desirous of change have frequently couched their efforts under the guise of “getting back to the way it was done in the NT”. Evangelical Fundamentalists simply take this assumption as their starting point. For them it is a simple question of authority. All they have is scripture and its interpretation.
Mainstream Protestantism has a higher historical consciousness. But it’s unforeseen problem is the desire to seem relevant to the larger intellectual culture. In other words if you believe in Sola Scriptura assenting to historical/critical method means subjecting your “authority” to close analysis and running the risk of undermining that very authority. I would claim this is exactly what has happened.
My description tends to over simplification but a devout believer who cannot reconcile their intellectual views with their spiritual impulses has only certain recourse. One choice is to investigate a tradition where textual analysis is secondary to praxis. Those who find their spiritual assumptions too distancing from the larger culture investigate traditions that seem to have reached some accommodation with the larger culture. The problem here is that this larger culture increasingly finds their spiritual impulses largely irrelevant.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert