Book Club – Page 3

Book Club: Montaigne As Your Mentor

Many readers are getting psyched about our latest Book Club selection, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. My full intro to the book selection is here. Buy the book through this link to support the Dish. One reader:

Just a note to say that I am delighted that your third book club discussion will be about Montaigne. If you haven’t read it, Mark Lillia’s very positive review of Bakewell is worth checking out. She misses Montaigne’s implied critique of Christianity, he argues. And M’s worldview leaves no space for transcendence, or our inescapable attraction to it.

To me, Montaigne cures us of that desire, though only temporarily. In that sense he is a proto-liberal: a skeptic, of course, and a thinker who put stability in politics before truth. I’ve been a lurker until now, but I look forward to a discussion about Montaigne on the Dish. How the ethos Montaigne recommends is challenged today by religion and by unworldly politics would be a great focus. And also the parallels and differences between The Essays and blogging.

That’s exactly why I chose this. It’s not just about life; it’s about politics, ideology, and fanaticism. Montaigne’s disposition is what we lack so much today – and need to reclaim. Another reader exclaims:

Woo Hoo! Montaigne next!

Why did I pick up How To Live last year at my public library? Probably because I saw it mentioned on the Dish or on Maria Popova’s website. I renewed it several times so I could take it with me on vacation … to France. I greatly enjoyed the format, mixing Montaigne’s biography with Sarah Bakewell’s commentary. And I learned so much about Montaigne’s life, his essays and 16th century French history to boot.

I live in the USA, but I am originally from the Bordeaux area of France, and I go home pretty much every year to visit family. So last summer, my one objective was to visit Montaigne’s estate, as it is less than an hour’s drive from my parents’ house. It felt like a pilgrimage. Walking up the stairs of the tower, standing in Montaigne’s library, looking up to decipher the inscriptions on the ceiling. Better than a trip to Lourdes!

I also used several sections of How To Live when I taught a survey of French literature to my Advanced French class this past school year. And the book is once again on my coffee table, so I can reread it this summer (along with my digital copy of Les Essais). So a big thank you (or should I say “mille mercis”!) to you, Andrew and the Dish, for introducing me to this wonderful book and for making me want to rediscover Montaigne’s essays. I am looking forward to reading what other book club participants will think about it.

Another nerds out even more:

You recommend the Frame translation of the essays, and I understand that translation is widely regarded as the most faithful in English. But I wonder if you’re aware that the New York Review of Books just a few months ago published selections from the 1603 Florio translation.

It’s titled Shakespeare’s Montaigne because Florio’s was apparently the translation Shakespeare read and was inspired by. Nothing against the Frame translation, but reading Florio’s translation has been for me like discovering the masterful poetry of the KJV bible after only reading the bland NIV.

Some groveling fan mail sentiment incoming: Founding member here and I’ve been reading you – pretty much every post – since late 2007. I’ve only written in once or twice, and you published the view from my window several years ago. Pardon the morbidity, but I often measure how strongly a feel about the people in my life by how I would feel if I lost them. When I think about how it would affect me if you were to die or stop writing, well, only the loss of a handful of immediate family members would be more devastating. I follow the output of other public figures as closely – a few songwriters and novelists – and feel I know them through their work. But I guess there is less artifice, more of your unfiltered self in what you do. The only other writer that even comes close in that respect is, in fact, Montaigne. So it doesn’t surprise me that you view him as a major influence.

Again, I really look forward to the July book club discussions.

Another primes the discussion further:

Not sure if you caught this on PBS several years ago, but they did a cool series on philosophers and the idea of happiness, and this was the portion they did on Montaigne:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjDttEtfGI

Question Of The Day

A reader asks:

What are you picking for Book Club #3? I’m super antsy … and July is here. Tell! Tell us! Tell us all! Or just respond so I may quietly read while everyone else is blowing shit up over the weekend.

Heh. Well, yes, it is July, and a major political book did not seem like the best way for me to read on the beach this summer. So I picked a book I’ve long wanted to read but never got around to – about an author who remains among my favorite non-fiction masters of all time and blogger avant la lettre: Montaigne.

The book is How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell.

It’s an innovative approach to biography – it’s really a series of meditations, based on Montaigne’s life and work, on some of life’s big questions. The “answers” to How To Live? come in many Montaigne-inspired recommendations: Survive Love and Loss; Question Everything; Live Temperately; Do A Good Job, But Not Too Good A Job; Give Up Control; among many others. It has an Amazon rating of 4.4 out of 5, and won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

Some reviews:

“Ms. Bakewell’s new book, How to Live, is a biography, but in the form of a delightful conversation across the centuries.” —The New York Times

“So artful is Bakewell’s account of [Montaigne] that even skeptical readers may well come to share her admiration.” —New York Times Book Review

“Extraordinary…a miracle of complex, revelatory organization, for as Bakewell moves along she provides a brilliant demonstration of the alchemy of historical viewpoint.” —Boston Globe

“Well, How to Live is a superb book, original, engaging, thorough, ambitious, and wise.” —Nick Hornby, in the November/December 2010 issue of The Believer

“In How to Live, an affectionate introduction to the author, Bakewell argues that, far from being a dusty old philosopher, Montaigne has never been more relevant—a 16th-century blogger, as she would have it—and so must be read, quite simply, ‘in order to live’…Bakewell is a wry and intelligent guide.” —The Daily Beast

I also have an ulterior motive. For me, Montaigne’s essays – first read in college – have long been a source of enthusiasm and inspiration. His constant curiosity, his openness to new ideas, his willingness to change his mind, his capacity for growth and humor, his staggering honesty, his wit and humaneness: all helped create and nurture the emergence of the modern individual in the West. Along with Shakespeare, he saw humanity in his day in its entirety, and, like Shakespeare, was somehow able to regard it with the perspective of the ages. As literature, he also pioneered the essay as a form, and the personal voice in writing in ways not seen since Augustine. If there were one powerful influence behind my approach to blogging, it would be Montaigne.

So dig in – and perhaps be inspired to go to the source material as well, as long as you get Donald Frame’s still-peerless translation. Sarah has agreed to join us in a few weeks to carry on the conversation. So let’s use this book to think about that simple question: how to live? It’s an area so ripe for reader anecdotes and stories and personal journeys that it seemed perfect for a summer discussion. Buy it here – and help give the Dish some affiliate income, and get yourself a deck-chair or a hammock.

And Happy Fourth!

Book Club: Sensing Too Much, Ctd

A reader responds to the email from the parent of two sons with sensory processing disorder:

As a well-functioning but diagnosed older person on the autism spectrum, taking a walk is an annoying and frustrating event. I friggin’ notice everything. I have to force myself not to read every word in every ad, identify the make and model of every car I pass by, peek around to see what that sound was – even though I know it was just a car door closing or a skateboarder in the distance. It doesn’t ever, ever stop.

That said, taking these walks with Alexandra Horowitz and her guests in On Looking got me out of my head. Getting out of my own head doesn’t happen enough, even when reading insightful books. Now, when I walk, I remember some of the wisdom of her experts’ knowledge and I look for those things. I think, What am I smelling? I look at the annoying signs and instead of repeating the words over and over until I see another annoying sign, I look at the typeface. I force myself to focus. On building materials, on rocks, on asphalt even.

In some small sense, I’ve become a better autistic. Or at least a calmer walker.

Maria Popova, who is hosting the Book Club, responds to the reader:

I love this. It reminds me of a favorite passage from the book:

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

The challenge this reader articulates, and a challenge for many on the autism spectrum, is that of being unable to turn off precisely those myriad external stimuli that the average person automatically misses. But what’s interesting is that over the past decade, growing bodies of research have shed light on the autistic mind as not lesser but different.

Perhaps one of its great advantages, and a key point of difference, is exactly this wide lens of attention coupled with narrow focus on each of the many things attended to – a fusion of what’s an either-or proposition for the nonautistic person. At its most acute, this advantage can manifest as anything from intricately detailed visual lists of everyday objects to mathematical genius. Autism advocate and pioneering animal behaviorist Temple Grandin has spoken about this beautifully in her TED talk and her introduction to the book Drawing Autism.

For the rest of us, though, missing “the vast majority of what is happening” is undoubtedly a survival strategy. I tried to imagine, biking through the city today, what it would be like if I paid attention to everything simultaneously – listened to every bird and every siren and every rushing executive yelling on her cell phone, looked at every storefront and every redhead and every fleeting reflection in a car window. I’d crash instantly – both literally and figuratively.

Follow the whole Book Club discussion here. Maria and Alexandra just recorded a short conversation over various aspects of On Looking, so stay tuned.

Book Club: Looking With New Eyes

What have you discovered in your daily routine since reading On Looking, our second Book Club selection? Our host, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, posed that question to Dish readers earlier this week:

Perhaps the greatest gift of a book club is that we get to share our private realities around a common point of interest – the book – and in the process enrich the collective experience. With that in mind, what is one facet of your day or aspect of your usual daily routine – your apartment, your commute, your dog walk route – that On Looking helped you see with new eyes?

Let us know by emailing bookclub@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll post the most interesting observations and photos. Buy the book here (or here for your Kindle) if you haven’t already. Karen Carlson was looking for “a quick, light, purely fun read” when she picked up the book last summer:

And it was a fun read, very much so – but it also sent me scurrying to google Clochan na bhFomharach, a volcanic formation in Northern Ireland consisting of thousands of columns of basalt pushed out of the ground. And that’s just in a footnote. … “Minerals and Biomass,” her walk with geologist Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is when I got curious about volcanic leftovers in Northern Ireland. …

What surprised me most was how enchanted I was by the second chapter: “Muchness,” guided by the expert eyes of Horowitz’ 19-month-old son. I’m fairly immune to the charms of children, but this was engaging and informative. Horowitz is trained in cognitive science and teaches animal behavior at Barnard, and here she weaves nuggets from developmental psychology in to explain her son’s adoption of a standpipe as a pet, and his reaction to shadows.

She adds, “This book was just the break I wanted: an almanac of captivating anecdotes which will stick with me – and who knows, maybe one day I’ll take a walk, myself.” That’s what we’re hoping some readers will do. And that’s just what Ambre Nicolson, also inspired by “Muchness,” decided to do with her own toddler. An excerpt from their sojourn around Cape Town:

14h00: “Beep beep!”

My son, like Alexandra’s, is head over heels for any form of wheeled transport. Within the first 30m of our journey he has pointed out a red bus, several taxis, a bicycle and a shiny black motorbike. Later in our journey he will be stopped, spellbound for almost 10 minutes, by the sight of a reversing garbage truck. While my son loves cars, it has been shown that spending too much time in one leaves kids without a healthy sense of connection to place. American urban researcher Bruce Appleyard has shown that kids who have a “windshield perspective” are less able to accurately draw a map of where they live, whereas kids who walked or biked could produce accurate and detailed maps of their communities.

15h00: A bench, a well and a pond

He stops only long enough to take off his shoes before continuing into the gardens to try and climb a tree, throw sticks into the pond, scale a bench and scurry under it in search of another squirrel. When I see he’s trying to climb onto the edge of the old well, the bottom of which is a long way down and strewn with evil smelling rubbish I am quick to intervene.

At the same time I remember a recent Atlantic article written by Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid”, in which she shows how harmful it is for children never to exercise their risk taking skills. I decide the least I can do is show him the hazard. He stares into the darkness of the well for a couple of seconds before solemnly throwing his stick into the depths. Not long after that his pace starts to slow, followed by him halting, mid-stride, and reaching both arms up to me. Universal toddler code for “This walk is now finished.”

Kim West, a teacher, also related to On Looking:

Everyday, when my dog and I go for a walk, we travel the same route. Because I already know the way, sometimes I’m impatient, mostly because I’m bored. After reading Horowitz’s book, I have learned to enjoy our walks by slowing down, and pausing in the ordinary. When caught up in the frame of mind of going from one destination to another (home to the park, then back home again) it was easy for me to forget that for my dog, every walk is an adventure with different smells along the way.

It made me realize that as a content expert, and a teacher with many years of experience, sometimes my lessons are just like my walks. I forget that because I already know the way, for my students learning can still be a new adventure. This reminds me to find the joy in the ordinary experience of learning: what did I first think and feel when I was introduced to this topic? Why does that matter? How can I make the experience that I once had as fulfilling and exhilarating for my students?

Now, when creating my road map, I don’t just think about the content. I think about what my students and I do and why that matters.

The book also inspired Belinda Farrell to slow down and open her eyes:

The specifics of the walks aren’t really important, but what this book made me think about was the quality of my own walking. Often I walk with a purpose: I am going somewhere. I walk up hills because I want the sense of achievement from reaching the top coupled with the reward of an amazing view. I walk to exercise, swiftly and with little care about where I’m going. I walk with earphones in my ear, listening to my own soundtrack and not the soundtrack of the world outside. Reading this book made me think of the pleasure of walking for the sake of walking, for the pleasure of the walk itself. I’d forgotten how much that could be a voyage of discovery.

Follow the whole Book Club discussion here.

Book Club: Sensing Too Much

A reader emailed prior to Maria’s intro today:

Afternoon! I am finding On Looking fascinating in so many ways! Two of my children were diagnosed with sensory processing disorder (along with Aspergers) and it is difficult for them not to notice everything. Hypersensitive to noise means they hear things that most of us have learned to filter out – same goes for light, touch, smell and taste. Like most people with SPD, their diagnosis came after years of extremely picky eating, complaints about scratchy clothing seams and tags and silky linings in coats, refusing to see movies at the theater and, in our case, having one of them bolt and get lost at an amusement park when he sensed the fireworks were about to start (even though we were on our way out of the park).

Living with my boys means that the rest of us are forced to take note of what we hadn’t. Often we realize just how much we are missing with our so-called properly functioning sensory system. True, they often find themselves with what can only be described as a traffic jam of sensory input in their brains (and that often leads to scenes that are not pretty), but they also notice first when the spring peeper frogs are awake, that the water system needs salt, that Daddy is home (in a Prius), and that the night-light bulbs are about to burn out.

We prefer the word “challenge” rather than “disorder” when talking about their Aspergers and sensory issues because while it can be overwhelming at times and even debilitating, it is who they are. And we kid that they can use their powers for good rather than evil! Their powers of sensory observation sometimes astound and add layers to the ordinary that would otherwise have been totally missed. Coupled with what I have read so far in On Looking, I can’t see any journey being ordinary again.

The Dish has covered sensory processing disorders before – here and here. By the way, a reminder of Maria’s appeal to readers earlier today:

Perhaps the greatest gift of a book club is that we get to share our private realities around a common point of interest – the book – and in the process enrich the collective experience. With that in mind, what is one facet of your day or aspect of your usual daily routine – your apartment, your commute, your dog walk route – that On Looking helped you see with new eyes?

Book Club: How Do You Look At Your World Differently Now?

Maria Popova, the host of our second Book Club, starts the discussion by posing a challenge to readers:

“Reality,” Philip K. Dick wrote, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” There are two reasons I chose Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes for the Dish book club. Besides being a masterwork of storytelling bridging science and everyday life, it also reminds us – subtly, elegantly, yet unequivocally – that what we call “reality” is a highly edited picture of the world, projected through the lens of our beliefs, our biases, our baggage, and our experientially conditioned selective attention. It’s a point especially poignant today as we go through our lives worshiping at the altar of productivity, often at the expense of presence. After all, as Annie Dillard put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And under the modern condition, we spend the overwhelming bulk of them in the trance of our routines, showing up for our daily lives but being, in a rather significant way, absent from them – the very tendency against which Alan Watts admonished half a century ago when he began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West.

What Horowitz does is peel back precisely those cognitive curtains that obscure from view the richness of our everyday reality. When I first wrote about On Looking last fall, I knew it was the kind of book that stays with you for a lifetime, but this awareness was rooted mostly in intellectual appreciation. I didn’t anticipate just how profoundly those eleven perspectives would change the way I experience and inhabit my day-to-day life, from the parallel-universe ecosystem of wildlife in my tiny backyard to the remarkable invisible choreography of swiftly navigating a crowded New York City sidewalk while a hundred strangers do just the same.

Perhaps the greatest gift of a book club is that we get to share our private realities around a common point of interest – the book – and in the process enrich the collective experience. With that in mind, what is one facet of your day or aspect of your usual daily routine – your apartment, your commute, your dog walk route – that On Looking helped you see with new eyes?

Email your personal observations – and photos when relevant – to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll pick the most interesting ones to post. And we’ll be discussing On Looking for up to the whole month of June, so you still have plenty of time to buy the book and join the conversation. Also, if you haven’t already, check out Maria’s inimitable blog, Brain Pickings, and subscribe to it here if you like what you read.

Book Club: Ask Bart Ehrman Anything II

Below is the second installment of Ehrman’s responses to Dish reader questions (the first part is here):

What do you make of the evangelical response to your book, How God Became Jesus?

For a somewhat fuller response, see my blog post. Here I can say that the five evangelical Christians who responded are all good scholars. The purpose of their book was to engage my historical claims at a number of points. Some of the responses I found to be interesting. I didn’t actually find any of them convincing, and on the whole I have to say that I was disappointed by the book. What I had hoped was that the book would provide a different historical narrative from the one that I laid out in How Jesus Became God. The respondents regularly accuse me of engaging in “bad” history, but they don’t themselves engage in any historical reconstruction at all. So how is one supposed to compare their views with mine?

The book really is little more than an attack on this point or the other in my discussion. I would love to see how they can imagine that their thesis, that God became Jesus, can be established on historical grounds, rather than theological or religious grounds . My view is that it is impossible for historians to demonstrate what God has done: that’s the province of theologians. If what they want to do is present a theological perspective that differs from my historical one, I have absolutely no problem at all with that. What I object to is their decision to embrace a theological perspective and claim that it is history.

What if anything might change your mind and cause you to again become a believer?

Hmmm … Good question!

I guess a revelation from the Almighty would do it! I’m actually, personally, prone more to belief than disbelief, and would prefer, at the end of the day, to be a believer. Maybe one day I’ll become one again, even though at this stage of my life, I doubt it. For it to happen, realistically, I would need to come to a more comprehensive, synthetic understanding of how this world makes sense if there is a God who is in some sense (any sense) active in it. For me, right now, that simply doesn’t seem to be the case. So many innocent people suffer unspeakable agony and horrific deaths each and every minute, hour, and day – ravaged by starvation, drought, epidemics, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, not to mention war and violence. I simply do not see the hand of God in any of this. I do know what the “answers” are that people give – I used to give them myself, all the time. I just can’t believe them anymore. Maybe at some point that won’t matter to me, although I do side more with Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov on this one, as I explain in my book God’s Problem….

Which religions, if any, deal better with the problem of evil and suffering than Christianity?

I’m not sure any of them deal with it in a way that I find intellectually satisfying, although since I wrote my book God’s Problem I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they have found Buddhism to be much better on just this issue.

Given your thesis that Jesus was not buried in a tomb, based on the evidence that the Romans would not have allowed it, what do you make of the archaeological evidence of crucifixion victims in tombs?

Great question! Unfortunately, we have only one piece of archaeological evidence to go on and it simply doesn’t tell us what we would like to know. In 1968 the remains of a crucified man, named Yehohanan, were discovered in Israel. His skeleton – ankle pierced with an iron stake from crucifixion – was decently buried in an ossuary. This shows, it is argued, that it is conceivable that something similar happened with Jesus. I would agree that this makes it conceivable. Unfortunately, as I have also pointed out, we do not have even the slightest bit of evidence to tell us what happened in Yehohanan’s case, and so we have no way of knowing if it is analogous to the case of Jesus.

Why was an exception made in Yehohanon’s case to place his body in a common tomb? Was his family well-connected? Was he an aristocrat? Was he crucified on the birthday of an emperor (Philo says that such persons were allowed burial)? Was he crucified for insurgency against the state (like Jesus) or for a lower crime (it makes a big difference!). Moreover – was he placed in a tomb the very day he was crucified? We have no way to know. Was his body left to decompose and be eaten by scavengers (the usual punishment) before being entombed? We don’t know. In other words, precisely what we would need to know in order to know if Yehohanan’s case was similar to that of Jesus we don’t know.

What we do know is that there is no evidence that Jesus was executed on the birthday of an emperor; he was not an influential person with high connections (he was not even known in Jerusalem before he appeared the week before); he did not have powerful family members who could intercede on his behalf; his own followers had fled from the scene; and he was not crucified for low-level crimes but on political charges of insurgency. Whatever was the reason that Yehohanan was given a decent burial, it is hard to think why an exception to normal Roman practice would have been made in the case of Jesus (especially given what we know about Pontius Pilate).

I should also say that other scholars have pointed out that since there were thousands of crucified victims in antiquity, and these are the only skeletal remains of a crucified victim to survive, it appears that Yehohanan’s case was highly exceptional, not typical.

What do you think of N.T. Wright’s work on the historical Jesus and early Christianity?

Tom Wright is incredibly prolific and is a brilliant spokesperson for traditional, conservative Christianity. He is also an erudite scholar of enormous breadth. But as it turns out, I disagree with him on almost everything! We have only had one real public debate, dealing with the problem of suffering and how it should affect one’s faith in God. We did not at all see eye to eye. Tom has a kind of global vision of Scripture where he makes the entire 66 books add up together to one grand narrative that he sees as a revelation from God. I see 66 different books written by different authors at different times for different reasons with different messages and different understandings of God, the world, the human condition, and so on. Tom and I simply aren’t on the same page.

It’s seems almost impossible, when writing a book like this, to keep personal biases out of the work. Can you describe how you thought about separating the two during the writing of the book?

My view is that everyone has biases, that there is no way to escape having biases, and that the people you need to look out for are the one who claim that they don’t have biases! Those are the people who want you to agree with them since, after all, they are simply being “objective.” But in fact, they have biases like everyone else, so that their claim is simply a rhetorical strategy.

At the same time, I think there are some biases that are more appropriate for some kinds of research than others. The biases of a historian – e.g., that the past did happen, that there is evidence that some things happened and other things didn’t, that some evidence is better than other evidence, and so on – are appropriate for doing history. On the other hand, the biases of a theologian – e.g. (depending on the theologian) that God both exists and is active in the world and has affected the course of historical events – can be very useful for doing theology, but they are not useful for doing history. And so my view is that a person with those theological views needs to keep those views in check when doing history, just as there are probably views of the critical historian that are not useful for those wanting to do theology.

When I wrote How Jesus Became God I tried to be careful not to make theological claims one way or the other. In the book I do not indicate whether Jesus really was / is God or not, whether he really was raised from the dead, whether he really is living today in heaven, and on on. Those are all theological claim. But my book is a historical account. My view is that Christians and non-Christians can agree with the history I lay out, even if they come to different theological conclusions. (I know that’s the case because before I sent the book into my publisher I gave it to four scholars to read for comments about how to improve it; all four were Christians; all four had no problems with its historical views)

Read the entire Book Club discussion of Ehrman’s book here.

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 kingdom 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 overarching 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.

Book Club: Can Modernity Survive Without Christianity?

A reader adds a final twist to the debate:

You started the Dish book club by asking if Christianity can survive modernity, and the discussion that ensued proves, I think, what a challenging – and open – question that remains. Ever since that first post of yours, however, I haven’t been able to shake a different question: can modernity survive without Christianity?

I’m no reactionary, and I have little patience for those who reject, wholesale, the scientific and technological advances of modern life. But glancing at the world around us can be incredibly dispiriting, from our destruction of nature to the rapaciousness of global capitalism to wars and rumors of wars. And that’s to say nothing of the lurking sense many of us have that finding meaning in contemporary life only is becoming more difficult, that there’s a soullessness at the heart of our modern way of life, a rotten center beneath the glittering surface of all our would-be achievements.

In a strange way, what I’ve just described makes me hopeful for the future of Christianity, because I can’t think of circumstances in which the message of Jesus and the core tenets of Christianity are more needed. They teach us that all our achievements have a dark side, that good and evil grow together in history, that our fallibility and fallenness touch everything we do, serving to warn us against unalloyed ambition and striving, and a facile optimism. It surely is no accident that two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian thinkers, Michael Oakeshott and Reinhold Niebuhr, thought the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel especially resonated with our times.

Even more, to borrow Oakeshott’s phrase, Christianity is the religion of non-achievement. Jesus taught us to consider the lilies of the field and take no thought for tomorrow. Could there be a more radical message for our age, an age that grows ever more frantic, ever more competitive, and in which wealth and power are ever more eagerly sought after?

Many of us are doubtful, I think, that we can continue on the path we are treading, that our unceasing more, more, more can be sustainable, or provide happiness. Jesus offers us a way of life that inverts these values, that shows us their futility. This non-instrumental approach to living is more timely than ever.

But most of all – and I know I risk sentimentality here – when reduced to its most basic idea, Christianity holds, and Jesus showed us, that God is love. Love and forgiveness and mercy are deeper than suffering and hate, they are what we are made for, our truest calling. Love is “the greatest of these,” and what Jesus told us to do when he summarized the entirety of the moral law. Man’s failure to love, of course, is a perennial sin. Yet the call to love takes on added resonance when the reach of our power and the consequences of our decisions impact ever more people. At no time in history has the question, “Who is my neighbor?” mattered more, or demanded a more expansive answer. We need to be reminded that the duties of love have no limits, that every human life is precious and fragile, and that “the least of these” particularly demand our attention and care.

Thinking about these matters, I come back again and again to this passage from Romano Guardini, a Jesuit priest, which Walker Percy chose as the epigraph to his novel The Last Gentleman:

We know that the modern world is coming to an end…At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies…Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another…The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

I’ve always thought that modern, Western moral and political thought was more dependent on Christianity than most realize. For a long time we’ve lived in a halfway house, where we want the “values” derived from Christianity – the dignity of the individual, equality, and compassion – without faith itself. As Nietzsche derisively put it, we’ve rejected the Church but not its poison. Maybe what we’re hurtling toward is a moment when having it both ways no longer is tenable. Maybe, as Guardini claims, our dangerous world, in which love is so strikingly absent, will force us to again turn our gaze toward the wandering preacher from Nazareth, whose words we finally will have ears to hear, as if for the first time.

Book Club: Ask Bart Ehrman Anything

As our first book club discussion winds down, Bart Ehrman has graciously agreed to answer your questions about the book. This book club has its Marshall McLuhan Woody Allen moment – we can summon the author to resolve any remaining issues. So have at it. What would you like to ask Bart? Submit your questions via the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here). We’ll email your best to Ehrman and await his responses. Avanti:

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