Culture Wars, Old and New (Was: I Am Homophobic)

>>>>> "michael" == Michael Zara <[email protected]> writes:

  michael> Better than that, the Bible claims that the Lord supports
  michael> and demands genocide.  Kill all those Canaanites and take
  michael> their land.  Right on!  (As long as you don't swish into
  michael> battle in a 50/50 set of fatigues, that is... ;-)

Heh, right on, Mike!

Yr message gave me a laugh as it's a blast from the past (mine and
ancient).

Many of the great heresiarchs from the patristic period (the 4 or 500
years of the Common Era), including very early ones, like Marcion,
became heresiarchs precisely because (what won out as) the orthodox
camp insisted on a kind of unity with the Hebrew scriptures, which the
heresiarchs opposed *precisely* for the reasons you point out here.

In other words, part of the formative period of (what came to be)
orthodox Christian doctrine was a big fight about which texts -- and
there were so bloody *many* to choose from (and lots of really
interesting ones didn't make the cut, like the Gospel of Thomas, which
has lots of neat stuff about Jesus the Teenager) -- would become
canonical (which, more often than not, and in *precisely* the same way
as *our* culture-and-canon wars, were just fights about reading
strategies and which ones were canonical, which heretical, and the
like. Every fight about a canon of texts is always already a fight
about how to read. I wonder if Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner and Maya
Angelou would (or do) take comfort from knowing (what I bet Morrison
and Angelou do know) that they are keeping company with the
communities of writers which produced the Gospels, the Pauline and
Johannine literatures, and the like?).

Lots of folks thought the depictions of God in the Hebrew scriptures
was, well, *terrible* and, as Origen put it, "unbefitting". Origen
picked up Philo's allegorical method for reading texts in large part
because it gave him a reading strategy by which he could excise or
ignore or -- as the Francophiles have it these days -- "read
otherwise" the bits where God is telling his favorite group of Semites
to kill (utterly) a less favored group of Semites.

Philo through Origen is largely responsible for there being an
allegorical method of reading texts in Western culture thereafter, all
because Origen couldn't imagine saying God endorsed, much less
commanded (what we call) genocide. Origen was one of the first and
earliest Christian thinkers (and he was *very* early, like 150 years
after the Easter event) to have a general, normative theological
principle, which he called "befittingness", what we might call a
"moral" criterion. That is, you just *don't* attribute things to God
that, attributed to humans, makes you think they are beastly little
shits. He works this out in intricate ways and it's all great fun in
his "On first things" (De principis), for which, for a time, he was a
kind of semi-heresiarch.

Marcion's solution was a bit different (but still a competing reading
strategy): rather than taking the unbefitting things the Hebrew
scriptures attributed of God as *allegorical*, Marcion just decided
they were talking about some other God (=character) altogether; i.e.,
he refused to read the two (sets of) texts as a prequel-sequel. In
other words, it came down to a genre judgment, as these things often
do. Two sets of texts, two (radically incompatible) patterns of
actions and properties attributed to two different Gods. Clever. And
redolent of nothing as much as the recent big fight between a
first-time African American woman novelist and the literary estate of
Margaret Mitchell about who represents and what they can say about the
characters in Gone With the Wind. If they sound like the same
characters, they may (must?) be. If they sound radically different,
they can't be.

Marcion was (rather literally) the Toni Morrison of his day (though he
lost out in the end and it looks like Toni is gonna be okay). That is,
he had bestsellers of his own, about which many fights were had as to
the literary (=theological) value, the canonicity, and the like. Just
like Morrison is taken to be some kind of threat to Shakespeare,
Marcion was taken to be a threat to the very earliest stratums of the
(theological) canon of his day. His "The Gospel of the Lord" -- in 21
chapters, which he "preserved in the original Greek" -- made a bid to
be canonized, and why not? It contains chunks of thematic and
narrative overlap with the (eventually) canonized gospels (just as
Morrison, far from being a threat to Shakespeare, is a competitor only
in the sense that all fellow-workers and friendly competitors are
"threats"):

  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
  [Pontius Pilatus being the Governor of Judaea,] Jesus came down to
  Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching on the sabbath days:
  and they were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was in
  authority. And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit
  of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, Saying,
  "let us alone ; what have we to do with thee, Jesus? art thou come
  to destroy us? I know thee who thou art: the Holy One of God." And
  Jesus rebuked him, saying "Hold thy peace, and come out of him." And
  when the demon had thrown him into the midst, he came out of him,
  having done no hurt. And amazement came upon all, and they spake
  together saying to one another, what is this word? For in authority
  and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out. And
  a rumour of him went out into every place of the country round
  about, And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into the house
  of Simon.

Tertullian wrote books against Marcion's bestseller, criticizing it
for being "nonliterary" (=heretical). Tertullian was the one who said,
"credo quia absurdum", i.e,. "I believe *because* it is absurd", or to
put it geographically, "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem"? Call
him the William Bennett or Allan Bloom or E.D. Hirsch of his day and
the picture is complete.

Sorry, but you unwittingly pushed one of my old buttons and the dying
impulse dies hard! :>

Best,
Kendall