Monthly Archives: June 2011

Galen on the Early Christians

Posted on June 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

All this recent talk of Rapture and Mormons leads me to wonder aloud: “What did non-Christians think of the early Christians in the Roman Empire? What was their rep?“

The Roman doctor and philosopher Galen coincided with these early years. Living in the late second century, he was surgeon to the gladiators and later personal physician to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, also a philosopher. Galen systematized medicine to such an extent that he was the single authority on human anatomy and diseases until the Renaissance.

Living in Rome in that period, he would have seen — and heard about — Christians. And he did. His medical writings make four references to this young sect, as well as a few to Jews.

On the negative tip, Galen thought Christians were too quick to accept ideas on faith rather than through reason and experiment, probably because they were not sufficiently smart and/or educated:

Most people are unable to follow any demonstrative argument consecutively, hence they need parables, and benefit from them, just as now we see the people called Christians drawing their faith from parables.

And yet, these Christians were not merely credulous. There was something admirable about the way they lived:

They include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all through their lives; and they also number individuals who, in self-discipline and self-control in matters of food and drink, and in their keen pursuit of justice, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers.

Am I the only one who thinks a good analogy to the way the Romans viewed early Christians is the way modern Americans view Mormons?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Early Christianity

Tagged , ,

Defining Dissonance Down

Posted on June 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Schweitzer: Not a Cryptographer

The recent rash of fringe-group Evangelicals who see the Bible as a decoder ring to the Rapture should not surprise us. Christianity itself is based on the premise that texts have a hidden meaning that is only gradually revealed in history.

We here at The God Project Dot Net don’t think it’s going too far to say the tenets of our own Christian creed can best be explained as: A creative attempt to resolve extreme cognitive dissonance by finding secret codes in inherited Jewish texts.

And we didn’t start this — our Jewish friends were there first. Any bro who can claim the ludicrously X-rated “Song of Solomon” as a chaste call to worship is clearly master of, um, clever interpretation.

First, the cognitive dissonance. This is a term in social psychology, defined by Stanford’s Leon Festinger in the 1950s. It refers to the observation that people who receive new information that contradicts a strong belief will resolve the tension.

Earliest Christians had a massive whack of dissonance when they perceived Jesus was the Jewish Messiah (Christ) — yet knew he was a crucified criminal. Paul raises this point directly in Galatians 3:13, quoting Deuteronomy 27:26: “Cursed is he who hangs upon a tree.”

Another problem was that the Jewish Scriptures nowhere explicitly talk about a Messiah who will suffer and die. To the extent they cared, Jews anticipated a heroic Messiah — one like Daniel, who might lead an army against Rome.

What’s an early Jew-for-Jesus to do?

Luckily, the TNK (Hebrew Bible) is marvelously flexible and welcomes acrobatic reinterpretation. Suddenly, passages in Isaiah 52 about a “suffering servant” (not “Messiah”) turn into Messianic prophecy. Psalms quoted by Jesus in the Gospels are now evidence of their own anticipation.

Problem solved. Albert Schweitzer once famously said people who are looking for the Historical Jesus seem always just to find themselves.

People who want to locate something hidden in the Scriptures inevitably find what they are looking for. But is it there?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Early Christianity

Tagged , , ,

Psst! Wanna Hear a Secret?

Posted on June 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

If the Da Vinci Code taught us anything — and it did, it taught us many, many things, most of them wrong — we say, if Dan Brown’s rollercoaster-iffic Da Vinci Code and its pre-clone Angels & Demons taught us anything, it’s that humans love solved codes. Love to feel they are (a) smarter than other people, and thus (b) have secret saving knowledge dumber people do not.

As we ponder the recent failed prophecies of Family Radio’s Harold Camping, we are reminded that this attraction to secrecy and special knowledge has been a part of Christianity (and Judaism) for centuries.

Orthodox Christianity was in some ways a reaction against this impulse, as apparently widely-held beliefs were declared “heresy” after the fact by Church Fathers like Irenaeus of Lyon. (Brown got this part right.)

Irenaeus’ special target was a loose group of sects known as the Gnostics. The Greek word “gnosis” means “knowledge,” and these groups were known to emphasize certain “secret teachings” (see the opening of the celebrated Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas“), which are highly coded and revealed only to the elect. In fact, it’s secret knowledge which saves, not anything so ordinary (orthodox) as faith or grace or going to your First Communion.

Gnosticism shares some family traits with Zoroastrianism, Jewish Kabbalah, Greek philosophy, even modern New Age spirituality. And — in its emphasis on being an insider, on knowing the Secret Truth — with modern Evangelicals like Hal Lindsay, Pat Roberts and, yes, our old, old, old friend Harold Camping. (Did we say old?)

Here’s how the Gnostic vibe is described by Fr. Brian Daley, S.J., in his groovy series of lectures on “Early Christianity and the First Christians” –

Gnosticism is, says Daley:

“Religion for the enlightened insider. Religion that is based on information and revelation that isn’t generally available to the wider population — but which comes from a group and from a founder and is communicated to those who seek it out.

“Gnostic religion is essentially revisionary thinking — the kind of thinking which enables … someone who learns the tradition to see that much of the ordinary concerns of their contemporaries are in fact based on illusion.”

Gnostics purposely oppose the mass market:

“Turning a good deal of it on its head, devaluing some of its practices and seeing that the core of a person’s welfare and salvation came from knowing things right, getting things right.”

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Early Christianity, Gnosticism, harold camping

Tagged , , , ,

No Man Knows the Day or the Hour (Except Me!)

Posted on June 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

Waiting for the Rapture?

Every tin-pot prophet who would predict the End of Days comes up against what would seem to be a highly problematic text:

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.“

Jesus — the Big Banana, Jr. himself — makes this statement about the coming of the Kingdom in identical language in Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32. (Such verbal identity, by the way, is used as evidence that Matthew had Mark in front of him when he wrote his Gospel.)

Since it comes from Jesus, Christian fortune-tellers who would like to predict the “day or hour” of the coming Kingdom need to explain it away.

And they do. But how?

Edgar Whisenant, author of the infamous bestseller “88 Reasons the Rapture Will Occur in 1988,” dealt with it directly. In fact, rebutting Jesus’ statement makes up Reasons #1 and #2.

Reason #1: There are 24 time zones on our planet and always “two days existing on the earth at the same time,” Whisenant points out. So any singular Rapture event will happen at 24 different times on two different days at once. But “the faithful,” he says, can know “the year, the month and the week of the Lord’s return.” Ah, of course. Jesus lets us know the week!

Reason #2: Quoting a Joe Civelli of Pensacola, Florida, Whisenant focuses on micro-parsing the Greek word “know,” which he and Joe claim has two different meanings. They convince themselves (if not us) that the passages use the word (“oida“) in such a way that “no one knows” actually means “no one knows easily but if you try hard you can know.” Thus is black, precisely understood, actually white.

Our old, old friend Harold Camping is less insulting, if rather more tortured. His free pamphlet “No Man Knows the Day or Hour?” takes this passage by the balls.

Camping takes the original position that, in fact, it was impossible for Christians to know the “day or hour” until the late 20th century. In Acts 1:8, Luke has Jesus say that “the Holy Ghost is coming upon you.” Camping takes this to mean that gradually, as the Kingdom nears, its dates emerge — but only to Camping and his followers.

His theology is complicated but essentially privileges his own sect. In fact, Camping believes the Church Age ended in 1988 and God stopped saving people. This fact is why he enrages so many other Evangelicals, whom he believes to be damned. (It does, however, confirm my theory that Millennials are Satanic.)

Sounding like any good 2nd century Gnostic or member of a Greco-Roman mystery cult, Camping concludes:

“It is the true believers who know the time (the hour) and much about Judgment Day (the day).” [!!!]

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Evangelicals, Inerrancy, Religion in America

Tagged , , ,

From Zero to Hero and Back

Posted on June 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Don't be a "Hero" -- have some!

John Cassian was a well-traveled monk who founded monasteries in France as the Roman Empire was imploding. He was a contemporary of Augustine. Benedict reaches back to Cassian frequently in his “Rule,” which is still the basic text of Western monasticism. Cassian’s “Conferences” are a very fun-to-read, conversational set of insights drawing the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers into Western Europe.

In his Conference 2:5, Cassian presents a cautionary tale of what it means to lose perspective — to think you are a spiritual gold medalist in a field of weekend warriors.

It concerns a monk named “Hero” who “was cast down from the heights to the lowest depths because of a diabolical delusion.” Although attached to a community of monks, Hero thought he was a special case. For 50 years he practiced extreme solitude, fasting and prayer “with a fervor marvelously greater than anyone else living there.”

Even at Easter, we’re told, he kept to his cell and refused to break his ultra-regimen because — so he thought — “by taking the tiniest share of the vegetables he might give the impression of having relaxed from what he had chosen to do.”

(Vegetables? An Easter treat?! Turns out chocolate was known only to Mayans and Aztecs until the time of Columbus. We forget what deprivations pre-moderns had to endure.)

One day, Hero threw himself into a well, believing that “on account of the merit of his virtues and of his works he could never come to any harm.”

Harm came. The brothers pulled Hero from the well. He died two days later.

Interestingly, he refused to believe he had been deluded:

“He was to cling firmly to his illusion,” says Cassian, “and the very experience of dying could not persuade him that he had been the sport of devilish skill [i.e., Satan].”

Sound familiar? Harold Camping refuses to admit the 5/21 Doomsday he’s been predicting for years and on which he spent $100 million didn’t happen. Religious obsession, taken far enough, splinters into alternate states.

However, mainstream religious like Cassian have always known this — and they warn us all: “Don’t be a Hero.”

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Desert Fathers

Tagged , , , ,