Month: May 2014

Book Club: Ask Bart Ehrman Anything I

As the first Dish book club draws to a close, the author of How Jesus Became God was gracious enough to answer your questions about his book. Below is the first installment of his responses:

Has changing your mind about a major question, like when Christians believed Jesus to be divine, caused you to rethink any of your other positions about the historical Jesus or early Christianity?

My views of the historical Jesus have not changed at all. Ever since graduate school I have thought that Albert Schweitzer was basically right (though wrong in the details) in understanding Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in history in order to overthrow the forces of evil and bring in a good how-jesus-became-godkingdom on earth. That continues to be the most widely held view among critical scholars in Europe and North America. Understanding that Jesus was this kind of teacher/preacher is important for my book, since Jesus almost certainly did not teach his disciples that he was God, but that God’s kingdom was soon to arrive and they needed to prepare for it.

Where my views have changed involves the key question of what Jesus’ followers thought about him after his death. The view I held for many years was that the earliest Christians did not think of Jesus as truly God until late in the first century, when the Gospel of John portrays him as declaring himself to be divine. In doing my research for How Jesus Became God, I became convinced that this was absolutely wrong. The followers of Jesus declared that Jesus was God as soon as they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead. Already at that point they maintained that God had made him a divine being. And that was the beginning of Christology.

Eventually some Christians came to think that it was not at his resurrection that he had been made God, but at his baptism; some came to think that it was earlier, at his conception; and some then came to think that he had been a pre-existent divine being before coming into the world. But it all started not in later decades, but at the very beginning, in the belief that he had been raised from the dead.

You firmly put Jesus in his context as first century Jewish apocalyptic preacher, but are there any ways in which he was different from the other would-be messiahs most of us have never heard of?

Yes indeed! Jesus was certainly different from other ones, for no other reason than that all of us is different from everyone else. So he must, virtually by definition, have been different. His bookclub-beagle-troverarching message was not radically different from the one proclaimed by others (e.g., John the Baptist). But what made him especially different in my judgment is two things. First, he taught that he would be the king of the kingdom that was soon to come (John the Baptist never said any such thing about himself) and that those who followed his specific teachings would be the ones who would enter that kingdom. And second, unlike every other alleged messiah from antiquity, Jesus alone was thought by his disciples to have been raised from the dead. That changed everything, as I try to show in my book.

If the Gospels are as unreliable and contradictory as you make them out to be, why trust any parts of them for information about the historical Jesus?

In many respects the Gospels are like any other historical source for any historical event or person – whether a source from the 50s or the 1950s. Every source has problems, and historians when using sources have to determine what those problems are and how to get around them in order to use the sources to establish what most probably happened in the past. So I don’t believe in having any different approach to the Gospels from that which you would have to any other ancient source – for example, Plutarch, or Suetonius, or Philostratus, or … choose your author!

Scholars have methods for dealing with sources that are contradictory and filled with non-historical information. They are pretty much the methods you yourself use when trying to figure out what really happened when several people tell you different things and sometimes tell you versions of what happened that are obviously biased. You look for elements of their accounts that are consistent with each other (especially if they haven’t conferred to get their stories straight) and that do not reflect the biases they have and that are plausible given everything else you know about the events (general plausibility). That, in rough form, is what historians do when dealing with the Gospels. I should stress that the problem with the Gospels isn’t simply a problem that I have, and these methods for approaching the Gospels are not ones I came up with. All of this is standard material for anyone working in the field of New Testament studies.

Why does the Gospel writer refer to ‘the beloved disciple’ without mentioning his name? Is there a deeper meaning?

That’s been a very long-standing question. Some interpreters have argued that the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel is someone that we know of otherwise – e.g., John the son of Zebedee, or Lazarus, or Mary Magdalene, and so on. None of these identifications is overly persuasive. It is sometimes thought that he is a symbolic figure who is meant to stand over-against Peter in the Gospel (with whom he is often teamed). Others have thought that he is the source of the author’s information for the Gospel, a disciple known to the community in which the Gospel was written who knew Jesus and was the guarantor of the information found in the Gospel, who did not need to be named because he was well known and was simply called, by his own followers, “the one whom Jesus loved.” I’m not convinced by any of the proposals myself, but don’t have a better one to suggest.

Would it be worthwhile to compose a spare, modern “gospel,” focusing squarely on the historical Jesus, including only the best-attested material, and eliminating some of the more dubious content from the later synoptics?

Yes, that has been tried a number of times – most notably by Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Bible (still widely available) and, possibly less notably, and in a different way, by the modern-day Jesus seminar in its book The Five Gospels, which indicates the passages that, in the opinion of the scholars in the seminar, are more likely to be historically authentic.

Could some of the difficulties Islam is having right now be mitigated by textual criticism of Islamic scripture similar to the kind that you engage in?

I wish I knew the answer to that one! But I’m not an expert in Islam, I’m afraid.

What did you think of Reza Aslan’s Zealot, another book on the historical Jesus that’s been in the news?

Aslan is a professor of creative writing, and as a result, and as you would respect, he writes extremely well. Zealot is a real pleasure to read. Unfortunately, Aslan is not trained at the advanced level in the New Testament, classics, ancient history, the history of early Christianity, or any other field of relevance for discussing, authoritatively, the life and teachings of Jesus. And I’m afraid that this shows rather glaringly in his book, as he makes many, many mistakes both about historical detail (e.g, involving Roman history or the history of the early followers of Jesus) and about the Gospels of the New Testament and about Jesus himself. I give lots of examples on my blog in a series of posts that I gave in December (see one example here). The other thing to say is that his overarching thesis is not new, even though he more or less intimates it is. The first scholar of the Enlightenment to write about the historical Jesus (H. Reimarus) had a very similar thesis. I.e., it’s been around since the end of the 18th century and the vast majority of scholars have found in unconvincing, for reasons I lay out, again, at length in my blog.

The second part of his responses will be posted soon. Read the entire Book Club discussion on Ehrman’s book here.

Is Anti-Obamacare Fervor Waning?

Obamacare

Jed Lewison finds that Fox News’s coverage of Obamacare has ticked down:

I mean, I guess you could argue that the only reason that Republicans are talking about Benghazi and not Obamacare is that Benghazi is the biggest scandal in American history—but only if you’re delusional. If you’re grounded in reality, the real reason couldn’t be more obvious: Even the GOP understands that repealing health care coverage for millions of Americans is a terrible campaign message, and Benghazi is a shiny object with which to distract their gullible base.

Sargent reviews recent polling on the law:

A new CNN poll illustrates the situation nicely: It finds that far more Americans want to keep Obamacare than repeal it. At the same time, only majorities of Republicans want repeal and only majorities of Republicans think the law is already a failure.

The CNN poll finds that 49 percent of Americans want to keep the law with some changes, while another 12 percent want to keep it as is — a total of 61 percent. Meanwhile, only 18 percent want to repeal and replace the law, and another 20 percent want to repeal it, full stop — a total of 38 percent.  That’s 61-38 for keeping rather than repealing the law. Among independents, that’s 55-44.

Jaime Fuller examines the same poll:

There’s another question that was asked in the CNN poll that goes a long way in explaining in how complex and mercurial opinions in Obamacare can seem. When respondents were asked whether they thought the health-care law was a success or a failure, 49 percent said it was too soon to tell. Last November, 53 percent said it was too soon to definitively say how the Affordable Care Act will be written about in the history books.

Barefoot Running Hits A Wall

Vibram has settled a lawsuit over its barefoot shoes:

The company will put $3.75 million into an escrow account to pay out settlements to class vibrammembers and will remove all claims that its products either strengthen muscles or reduce injuries—unless it comes up with proof. … Whether running barefoot is actually superior to using normal running shoes has been increasingly called into question over the last few years. While early studies showed that the barefoot style could reduce impact in areas like knees that are prone to strain, later studies found that the strain simply shifted to other parts of the leg and foot. Barefoot running is not necessarily better—just different. In response, Valerie Bezdek filed her class-action suit against Vibram in Massachusetts in March 2012.

Sarah Kliff explains the science:

Vibram has attached a laundry list of health claims to its shoes, detailed in a February 2013 legal complaint:

(1) strengthen muscles in the feet and lower
legs, (2) improve range of motion in the ankles, feet, and toes,
(3) stimulate neural function important to balance and agility,
(4) eliminate heel lift to align the spine and improve posture,
and (5) allow the foot and body to move naturally. At various
times, defendants’ website added that wearing FiveFingers would
improve proprioception and body awareness, reduce lower back pain
and injury, and generally improve foot health.

Podiatrists beg to differ. The American Podiatric Medicine Association put out a policy statement back in November 2009 — which they still stand by today — saying that “research has not yet adequately shed light on the immediate and long-term effects of this practice.”

But Fallows won’t be claiming his refund:

[A]s I shifted to Vibram shoes, I also shifted to what has been (again miraculously) a multi-year stint of injury-free running. True, my change of footwear coincided with some other injury-buffering changes: Always taking at least a day off between runs. Opting for rubberized tracks rather than hard paved roads. Stopping as soon as something started to hurt, rather than “running through” the distress; and generally acting like a senior-status wimp.

All of these amounted to a blow to the pride, perhaps—one of many as the years roll on. But, for now, through the Vibram age nothing has gone physically wrong with my running infrastructure.

Nevertheless, Peter Vigneron thinks “the market for minimalist shoes has bottomed out”:

According to the Journal, sales in that category are down 47 percent this year even as the rest of the shoe industry has grown. What for several years looked like a trend with staying power now looks pretty clearly like a fad.

That’s unfortunate, because I’m mostly convinced that minimalist shoes are in fact better than normal shoes. Why? Even though the evidence for minimalism is weak and contradictory, it’s no weaker than the evidence for traditional shoes, which are probably over-cushioned and over-supported.

Fighting Cartels? There’s An App For That Too.

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Uri Friedman charts the rise of web applications that crowdsource crime reporting:

In the last three months, Guatemala has witnessed 356 homicides, 202 armed attacks, 44 illegal drug sales, 11 kidnappings, and six cases of “extortion by cell phone.” These numbers come courtesy not of Guatemalan law-enforcement but of Alertos.org, a new platform that recruits citizens to report crimes. And they’ve enlisted in the effort, using email, Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps, and text messaging to chronicle thousands of criminal activities since last year – in a country where a hobbled police force is struggling to address the fifth-highest murder rate in the world.

In recent years, police have courted cell phone-toting citizens as crime “sensors” everywhere from Washington, D.C. to the tiny Kenyan village of Lanet Umoja. But the practice has gained particular traction in Latin America, which, as the UN reported in April, has the highest rate of criminal violence on the planet (the region accounts for 8 percent of the world’s population and a third of its murders). The criminal syndicates and drug cartels behind this bloodshed have overwhelmed, crippled, and corrupted national police forces, resulting in the highest levels of impunity in the world as well. In these countries, criminals literally get away with murder, again and again. Amateur crime-mapping has emerged as a parallel law-enforcement mechanism – in part owing to the popularity of cell phones in the region.

(Screenshot of Uruguay’s new CityCop.org platform)

Quote For The Day II

“I hope you can see, dear Neil, that it isn’t just that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but also that there is more active, vigorous, interesting, and intellectually respectable philosophy to be explored than you and some of your colleagues have been able to dream of so far. Please, keep that in mind the next time someone asks you about it. Or ask them to give me a call,” – Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York, and a friend of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Joy To The World

Charles Kenny observes that global happiness – as measured by the most recent World Values Survey – is on the rise:

Among the global sample whose data goes back to the early 1980s, the proportion saying they are rather happy or very happy climbed from 71 percent to 84 percent. In the larger sample using data from the early 2000s, the global average reporting happiness i-dcb85296b3695e8ce6d1ae4d660cea30-Smiley-faceclimbed from 75 percent to 83 percent.

There are unsurprising exceptions: The percentage of Egyptians who reported themselves happy nosedived from 2001 to 2012 – from 89 percent to 26 percent – as the country descended into political chaos. But only six of the 28 countries experienced declines, and many emerging economies reported considerably increasing happiness. The proportion of Russians willing to acknowledge being rather happy or very happy climbed from 47 percent to 74 percent over the decade. Respondents in China, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Peru, and Zimbabwe all reported double-digit increases as well.

He points to possible reasons why:

There are lots of good reasons why there should be a general trend toward global happiness, especially in the developing world. Low and middle income economies as a group have experienced a climb in average incomes of 130 percent since 1981. The number of children who die before the age of five has halved worldwide since 1990. Violence appears to be declining, while democracy has been on the rise.

At the same time, the link between greater reported happiness and improvements in health, income or civil rights isn’t as strong as one might expect, even in poor countries. … Brookings Institution researcher Carol Graham surveyed Afghans about their happiness and found that – with the country near the bottom of rankings on most quality-of-life measures – Afghans in 2009 said they were happier than the average respondent in Latin America had reported in 2000.

Make Dark Money Darker?

Dylan Matthews proposes a counterintuitive solution to dark money:

Maybe the problem isn’t too little information about donors and donations, but too much. That’s the argument of Yale law professors Ian Ayres and Bruce Ackerman. They’ve been arguing for a decade that the key to fixing the campaign finance system isn’t to strengthen mandatory disclosure rules but to abandon them in favor of a system where all donations are secret — especially to the recipients.

It sounds batty until you realize the authors’ key insight: for a quid pro quo to work, the paid-off party doesn’t just have to receive a kickback. They have to know they’ve received a kickback. In the current system, where you donate to campaigns by giving them your name and credit card number, or sending them a check with your name and signature, that’s trivially easy to figure out. It only takes a few keystrokes for Barack Obama to find out that Hollywood producer and Democratic super-donor Jeffrey Katzenberg maxed out to him in the 2012 primary and general elections.

But if we were to make donations secret, that link would be broken. Katzenberg could tell Obama that he donated, but there’d be no way he could prove it.

Preserving Her Purity

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The Swedish photographer David Magnusson captures the emerging American tradition of “purity balls,” which he describes in the introduction to his new book, Purity:

A Purity Ball is a formal event where girls or young women and their fathers participate in a ceremony. The daughters dress up in ball gowns and the evening usually consists of dinner, a keynote speech, ballroom dancing, and a vow by fathers and daughters. The girls make a pledge to ‘remain pure and live pure lives before God,’ to stay sexually abstinent until marriage. Their fathers sign a commitment undertaking to protect their daughter’s purity.

Jessica Valenti praises the pictures but questions the practice:

The images … are beautiful, disturbing and tell a distinctly American story – a story wherein a girl’s virginity is held up as a moral ideal above all else, a story in which the most important characteristic of a young woman is whether or not she is sexually active.

This narrative of good girls and bad girls, pure girls and dirty girls, is one that follows young women throughout their lives. Purity balls simply lay that dichotomy bare. In a clip from a Nightline Prime episode on these disconcerting events, a father tells his braces-clad daughter, “You are married to the Lord, and your father is your boyfriend.”…

I have no doubt that families who participate in purity balls are doing what they think is best for their children – but that doesn’t make them any less wrong. When we teach girls that their virginity makes them special and valuable, we’re sending the simultaneous message that without their virginity they are tainted and damaged.

But Magnusson doesn’t want viewers to take away a particular message:

Though going into the project with one feeling about the balls, Magnusson felt something quite different after photographing many of the father-daughter pairs, whose poses were chosen by themselves and were not explicitly directed by Magnusson. What struck him “…when looking back at a year of photographing in the USA is how loving and responsible the fathers were. And at the same time, it is clear that the girls—in many cases, young women—are independent, strong, and insightful.” Ultimately, writes Magnusson, his “purpose hasn’t been either to belittle or glorify the ceremonies—the interpretation is all up to the eye of the viewer.”

Update from a reader:

I am getting so sick of artists taking this chickenshit out when presenting potentially controversial work: “I want the viewer to decide; I don’t have an opinion.”  This is transparent BS. They only got interested because they knew their audience would gape at this subculture with fascination and/or horror, and while they may have genuine empathy for their subjects, I don’t buy for a minute they aren’t judging their subjects or lack an opinion. Just because their view might be nuanced doesn’t make it likely it is this vapid and vague. They just don’t want to lose access to either their subjects or their audience (which expressing their real and honest opinions would likely lead to). We’re supposed to buy that an artist/journalist spent months working on this and doesn’t have a point of view? So why maintain this pretense?

Another reader:

Isn’t is striking that here’s no equivalent for young sons? Where’s the ritual that has father supporting their young sons promise to remain pure until marriage? After all, if boys were successfully supported in such pledge, girls would have a lot less to worry about.

But of course, a purity ball for fathers and sons is laughable on its face: first, because the force of male libido is not only assumed, but often (if tacitly) encouraged; and – more importantly, I think – purity balls are based on the assumption that male sexuality is inherently corrupting. This is doubtless based on the shame men feel over fighting so hard for (and, so often, winning so little) control over our sexual impulses: still, even though there’s no question that the virginity burden in every society falls more heavily in women than on men, I wonder why we don’t think more about the disgust for male sexuality that underlies the assumption that penetration is pollution.

(Photo by David Magnusson)