My Dream + Readings

I had a dream a few nights ago. Maybe you can help me. I was taking someone to a childhood favorite bakery of mine—not a real place, just in the dream—and I was very excited. However, no matter where I stood at the counter, the workers there would either ignore or heckle me while serving others. Eventually, even the other customers became frustrated that I was standing there even though I obviously wasn't welcome there. Some time passed, but then someone I understood to be the owner came out and apologized to me. He said that they might not have what I originally wanted—it was so busy and they were running out of goods, I remember in particular slices of cookie cake and a fried sheet cake which they iced like a donut and sliced into long rectangles, none of this making any sense—but that he was going to give me a box and I could pick out anything I wanted. I woke up and felt melancholy.

A dream is a dream, but I understood intuitively what my mind was trying to communicate through its choice of symbols. This project is good for me. I'm not an unwelcome reader, and in fact the text seems to invite me to read it. It delights me. And this blog is like an open diary. The reason why I blog instead of writing it down is because I want my thoughts to be registered in the Other even if I don't want to share them with anyone in particular (or in general). So, if you don't enjoy this little exploration, sorry? I've removed the "Anti-Gnosticism" title from these posts because I think this effort is a little broader than beefing with an ancient heretical category, even if it's proved (for me!) to be a useful lens through which to read the literature in order to criticize later interpretations and practices.

Any case, as Stefani Germanotta said, "Some of us just like to read." So I've read some more books lately, and I wanted to put down my thoughts. I need to emphasize that, coming out of evangelicalism, I am not an expert in any of these topics. I'm shooting from the hip. I'm taking it raw. And so on.

James D. Tabor’s Restoring Abrahamic Faith

Started off strong! Tabor, a critical scholar specializing in early Christianity as a particular sect of Second Temple Judaism, wrote what started off as (what sounds like) a semi-hefty printout zine and turned into an exploration at length of Abrahamic theological continuity from the composition of the Torah to the emergence of Jesus qua human prophet neither Messiah nor Yhvh. The first chapter is the strongest, focusing on the characterization of Gxd in terms of three core values: steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. Tabor argues that the project of Abrahamic faith is to save humanity and the cosmos from the former’s tendency towards idolatry and self-destruction. Yhvh Gxd is also not distant but an active participant in history motivated by love for all humanity. All’s well and good. I cried at the quotation from Genesis below, where Yhvh expresses regret at creating humanity:

Yhvh saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And Yhvh was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So Yhvh said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air—for I am sorry that I have made them.”

Genesis 6:5–7

How terrible is that? I’ve seen the passage more recently mocked for how it suggests that Gxd can't be omniscient if He could do something only to regret it later, but that’s besides the literary and rhetorical point of the passage, especially as a reframing of flood myths in the Ancient Near East. The Elohim (a phrase which Tabor interprets in its singular plurality the “force of forces”, which is fascinating and agreeable) are not destroying humanity just because they’re loud or annoying. It’s because the human condition (perhaps specifically in the context of civilization as a ‘post-garden’ enterprise) is so evil and destructive that it’s upsetting to anyone who cares, especially to the Creator. I’m reminded of a quote by Gillian Rose, a favorite of my friend Ènziramire, where she says: “Marxism has not failed; we have failed Marxism.” The Abrahamic story is that we have failed Gxd and yet He still tries to save us before we destroy ourselves absolutely.

But it gets weird real quick, as I suppose one might have figured by a work which claims to restore (not reconstruct!) a past faith. What’s the way of Gxd? Well, Jesus summarizes it pretty well in Mark that first you love Yhvh Gxd with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, then you love your neighbor as yourself. Remember how the Pharisee discussing with Jesus says, to paraphrase, “Wow, Rabbi, you’re so right! Why are we even doing any of these burned sacrifices? You’ve just boiled down Torah to its bare essentials.” Tabor agrees with that up until he doesn’t. You know, there’s also the Decalogue, can’t forget about that. And, of course, there’s the entire law encoded in the Torah, including the male homosexuality taboo. Ah. He cites Jesus in Matthew's Gospel on this overall position.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

Matthew 5:17–20

Maybe this is a controversial opinion—and I’m not an expert, so this is just based on my own interpretation—but I don’t think you can have it both ways. Mark and Matthew seem to disagree fundamentally about whether the laws enumerated in the Torah are essential to Jewish politeia, whether one participates as a Jew or gentile. Again, Jesus is talking to a Pharisee scribe in Mark after all, and proverbially they pat each other on the back! I feel like I would catch the author of Matthew, despite its reputation as a Jewish Christian work, dead before complimenting a Pharisee. I may disagree with certain scholars that James was written against Paul, but I think in this case Matthew was almost certainly writing against Mark. One Jesus says that the Torah is an imperfect attempt to elaborate upon fundamental moral principles (“Nothing that goes into you is impure because you’ve purified it by the time you’ve shit it out!”), and another Jesus says that the Pharisees aren’t taking the Law far enough. Maybe Matthew needs to be qualified or reframed—like, maybe Jesus is referring just to the Decalogue which his Sermon on the Mount is specifically about, and maybe fulfillment of the Law implies some supersession into a more fundamental Law—but it’s only in as much as Matthew seems to counter Mark that Tabor can deploy Jesus to advocate strict Torah observance for gentiles. If the Gospels are incomplete or unreliable accounts of Jesus’ teaching, that makes it very difficult to treat any part as authentic, especially when two of them are cited to unwittingly opposite effects in the same analysis.

Tangentially, I think it's more likely the historical Jesus preached supersession rather than fulfillment of the Mosaic Law, since our earliest textual sources in Paul and Mark imply supersession, and I don't think even James actually argues for strict observance (I'm pretty confident he just uses different Mosaic laws as examples of what it means to practice a Law in toto partially, as an analogy for what it means to practice the 'Law of Liberty' partially). I also don't think he would have proved such a controversial figure in his time if he just said that other Jews weren't going far enough, as opposed to them outright missing the forest for the trees, even if his discourse on the Decalogue was more-or-less authentic as received—although the author of Luke–Acts, who thinks they're compiling the true story out of what disparate sources they have, excludes that discourse from a seemingly equivalent sermon which otherwise includes the Beatitudes and an elaboration on loving your enemies and judging others (though maybe, as a gentile, they just didn't want to include what comes down to Jewish inside baseball; not their place, perhaps). On its own, in any case, I think the discourse on the Decalogue can be read either way but the author of Matthew frames it (as one does) according to their own view. Not that it matters what the historical Jesus said or didn't say. We receive him only as a semi-consistent literary character. Anyway.

And then Tabor mixes his correct analysis (as far as I can tell) of the messiah prophecy, as originally described by the Jewish prophets, with weird geopolitical commentary about the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of related prophecies (which are themselves more fundamental to Jewish eschatology than the messiah). It was at that point that I realized, wait a second, we’ve stopped pretending to meditate on some pre-institutional, historical-ideal, archetypal Abrahamic faith, and we’ve arrived at trying to be better Jews than actual Jews by virtue of acknowledging Jesus as a prophet—this being unfortunately not an uncommon destination for these types. I’m not upset that I read the book, and it’s given me good stuff to think about, but the way it quickly descends into a generalized Abrahamic fascism is nuts. Remember, comrades: there is no text or tradition which you are not actively in the process of interpreting.

Robyn F. Walsh’s The Origins of Early Christian Literature

How about something totally different? I often watch academic interviews with lunch or while I cycle, and of the various doctor-of-philosophy personalities that have consistently popped up, my favorite is Robyn Faith Walsh. In the first interview I’d watched with her, she kept angling her face towards the camera and I was like oh my god she’s real as fuck. Just like me for real for real. Etc. Every academic has a ‘thing’ or a ‘move’. My own move is, “You think you’re talking about X, but you’re really talking about a concept of X.” Adorno’s move is, “You think you’re talking about 1 thing, but you’re really talking about 2 things.” Walsh’s move is, “You think this literature is an expression of a community, but it’s really the expression of a specific position in the social matrix.” Specifically, she’s interested in how Roman society and culture shaped early Christianity—or even more specifically in this book’s case, how the Gospels slot neatly into the elite literary culture of their time (especially Mark and the other Synoptics by extension, though Matthew and Luke seem to integrate a sayings tradition into Mark’s narrative template, whether or not Q exists), and are less expressive of early Christian communities than of vicarious poverty tourism exploring the effects of Roman imperialism through lands and ideas exotic to the author. It’s a cross between “Spiritual white man moves to Thailand” (as my partner put it), and “Iraq War veteran is traumatized by killing brown people” (my first thought, but I prefer my partner’s half of the interpretation).

First, unrelatedly to any Jesus shit, Walsh has a chapter of meta-critique where she goes over the genealogy of the community-expression framework from the Brothers Grimm to the post-structuralist Death of the Author. The first was interesting because you realize how unfortunately intertwined the Brothers’ interests in anthropology and folklore were with nascent German nationalism centered on the Volk—uh oh!—and how that analytical framework directly informed the assumption that the Gospels were authentic expressions of early churches that were simply recorded by their most elite (hence literate) members. But her critique of the Death of the Author interested me. There’s a vulgar version of the idea related to the consumption of literature as commodity, which I won’t relitigate here. Then there’s a soft version, which is that you can’t rely upon an author’s stated intent or lived experience as ‘Word of God’ when interpreting literature; rather, you should take a given text on its own terms. Finally there’s a hard version, which Walsh criticizes, that an author is none other than the voice of a social context, and to speak of individual authors is both modern and a fetish-in-flesh. Walsh instead deploys Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, saying that social context is less important or intuitive than one’s position in that context, and that we can analyze texts as incarnations of intersections or nodes in a larger matrix which elucidate the writer’s position in their context (even if we don’t know their name!). That’s the framework through which Walsh reads the Gospels: not as religious texts, but as classical literary works like others contemporaneous with them.

I have very little to complain about this book! Walsh identifies literary parallels in Mark from the Satyricon, from Philo of Alexandria, from the Alexander Romance, from Socrates, and from the life story of Aesop. She thus demonstrates not only is there a known model of authorship from the Greco-Roman world as the one she hypothesizes best applies to the Gospels, but that many Gospel motifs (both authorial and narrative) have precedent: the special birth, the unjust trial, the missing body, the deificiation. This has said before, she clarifies, but is often explained away by reference to some oral tradition, rather than being literary motifs knowingly deployed by the author. This is not to say that Christianity was invented wholesale by Romans—obviously there is still Paul and Josephus’ account—but that if you want to verify the historicity of various episodes in Jesus’ life, you need to sift from the text what aspects are not justlifted from the ‘general intelligence’ of Roman literature. This all in turn casts those who take the Gospels as more authentic narratives of Jesus compared to what little we find in Paul in a silly light. Maybe Q is also untouched (which is supposed to have also lacked any narrative—most strikingly the Passion!), if it exists as something that isn't Matthew.

Fleeting Thoughts

Not related to any particular books, but just reflecting on my recent studies so far:

• I don’t think free will is a useful concept for reading the Bible. Very enlightenment. Very liberal. Shooting from the hip, it seems truer to form if we understand will as an external force which possesses and acts through us—whether divine, or otherwise. Divine will in fact is intuitive from Nature and incarnated in it, according to Paul, and I think there’s a reading that sinful will (even if it’s basically instilled at birth by virtue of being inundated in a sinful society) is not that of the individual but of idolatrous forces who inhabit the mind–body vessel. Perhaps this is better called pneuma, using the vocabulary of Paul and maybe Jesus, than will or volition.

• I don’t want to suggest that Paul does not believe in the existence of demons or evil spirits (pneumata), or ascribe to him a fully social theory of idolatry. I just have a bias: when I read Paul describing idols and demons, I can’t help but think of Lucretius and how on one hand he doesn’t deny the existence of gods with ‘fine bodies’ essentially made of the same pneuma as Paul describes demons, angels, or the ascended body—but on the other hand, it’s not because of those fine beings that humans do bad shit, but because humans attribute superstitions to them which justify their own actions. So I read those authors echoing each other.

• I improved my structural model of the pneumatic cosmos, and then realized that it resembles the cosmological model of West Asian Semitic cultures—you know, with the big fucking dome with the holes into which the sky god sends rain, and with the division between not just fresh water and salt water but between the earthly waters and the primordial deep. A question which doesn’t help anyone: is a sky god a useful analogy or basis for some transcendent ground of being, and an earth mother in turn a useful analogy for immanent being, and does that inform how increasingly abstract cosmological models emerge? Does that analogy by itself reify patriarchal relations or only if those relations are inscribed onto the model, e.g., by asserting the ontological primacy of transcendence or dependency of immanence?

Been fun!