Bashing This Week's New Yorker
"We're still not done with Jesus" is a terrible article.
I’m a big fan of the New Yorker magazine. They are one of the premier publishers of short fiction. They have awesome cartoons and their articles are usually well-researched and thought provoking. Not this one. “We’re still not done with Jesus” is an all time low.
Now, the New Yorker doesn’t claim to be a scholarly publication and this article is a hodgepodge of book reviews, so I’m not sure who to blame for this egregious misrepresentation of the gospels. Still, this piece by Adam Gopnikl is ridiculous and someone needs to set the record straight. It might as well be me.
I’m just starting at the top of the piece and moving down.
The subtitle of the article starts with, “Scholars debate whether the Gospel stories preserve ancient memories or are just Greek literature in disguise.” That is a lot like saying that scientists are debating whether humans have any impact on climate change. Sure, you can find climate-change-denying scientists but that doesn’t mean there is a real debate. Climate change is real. A man named Jesus of Galilee lived, taught, and was crucified. Some of his followers died believing they had encountered him in a resurrected state. There is simply no other credible explanation for the documented existence of the early church.
GopnikI starts by discussing Elaine Pagels new book, “Miracles and Wonder.” He writes, “Pagels is working within a tradition of historical-Jesus studies that took shape in earnest more than two centuries ago.” News Flash: the question for the historical Jesus ended twenty years ago. The Jesus Project was the last major effort to nail down the Jesus of history. It was abandoned in 2009 because the team realized that there simply aren’t enough early sources to come to a firm conclusion. The founder, R. Joseph Hoffman wrote, “Whether the New Testament runs from Christ to Jesus or Jesus to Christ is not a question we can answer," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Project).
That doesn’t mean the Jesus of history didn’t exist. It means that he is lost to us. And that is okay because Jesus still lives with us.
Gopnikl spends a few paragraphs bashing the stories of Jesus’ birth. Yawn.
With respect to the disciples’ experiences of encountering the risen Christ, he writes, “Elvis, for one, was seen by many in the years following his death, with a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo at least as reliable as the spotty accounts shared by fervent believers two millennia ago.” News Flash: No one willingly went to their death because they believed Elvis had been resurrected. Also, equating these two claims without regard to the 2,000 years that separated them is … well … just silly.
He follows that by writing, “And [the Apostle] Paul depicts his own explicitly visionary encounters with a long-dead Jesus as equivalent to the earlier encounters reported by the apostles.” Paul argues for an equivalence of importance and authority, not for an equivalence of events.
In the very next sentence, he claims, “Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time.” Sure, mice are like elephants, too. Both have DNA. But the dissimilarities far outweigh the similarities.
At the end of that same paragraph, he says that Jesus was “available for inner light and intercession” for Paul. Has he read Paul? For Paul, Jesus was the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the name at which every knee shall bow, not some inner light.
He writes, “A scholarly paradigm that has shone in recent years shifts the focus: the Gospels are now seen as literary constructions from the start. There were no rips in the fabric of memory, in this view, because there were no memories to mend—no foundational oral tradition beneath the narratives, only a lattice of tropes.” And humans aren’t contributing to global warming.
The author quotes RC Miller: The early Christian gospels show “no visible weighing of sources, no apology for the all-too-common occurrence of the supernatural, no endeavor to distinguish such accounts and conventions from analogous fictive narratives in classical literature.” Duh! Does the phrase pre-Enlightenment mean anything to him? Of course there is “nothing deserving of the genus ‘historiography.’” The term hadn’t even been invented. This is like blaming pharaohs for premature deaths because they didn’t use chemo.
He then cites Robyn Faith Walsh. “The Gospels, whatever else they may be, are, first and foremost, Greek literature. Their closest affinities, she [Walsh] contends, are not with Jewish folklore or communal memory but with the miraculous novels and excitable bioi, or lives, that filled the Hellenistic world—stories often centered on wonder-workers from a humble social caste.” First, ancient biographies, like the ones written today, are nonfiction. They typically focused on important, historical people such as philosophers, poets, generals and statesmen. Real people. Who did real things. So yes, this is the genre to which gospels most closely align. However, the gospels are fundamentally different in that they are proclaiming a life-changing message. And that message has been changing lives for two thousand years.
Continuing to reference Wash, she writes, “But Walsh argues that no direct evidence supports the idea that the Gospels emerged from such a process [of an oral tradition]. Instead, the Gospels seem to have more in common with the self-consciously crafted storytelling of Hans Christian Andersen—imaginative narratives shaped by skilled authors to fit a particular vision.” Of course there is no “direct evidence.” It happened 2000 years ago on the margins of society. But there is plenty of indirect evidence. Paul writes about information he “received”. It conforms in large part to the gospels that were subsequently written. So no, nobody just sat down and made up the gospels. Besides, that is an insult to Hans Christian Anderson. No decent fiction writer would come up with a story like Jesus’. It would be terrible fiction.
I won’t honor his discussion of “independent scholar” and “YouTube intellectual” Richard Carrier with a rebuttal.
His comparison of the historicity of the gospels to Spike Lee’s “Malcom X” isn’t bad: a story about an actual person of import told in a way a contemporary audience can understand.
He then takes some pot-shots at the analogy of sacrificial atonement, the Christ event as divine child abuse. Yes, there are plenty of Christians who think being saved means believing in a literal sacrificial transaction and yes, there are problems with that approach. I’m in the process of writing a book about that. It deserves a more respectful treatment than this article provides.
He says the success of Christianity is the result of a “lucky break” and then states, “People seek faith, and faith, by its nature, demands the embrace of what reason resists.” Faith does not demand by its nature an embrace of what reason resists. Yesterday I submitted my manuscript titled, “Not Everyone Who Believes in God is Crazy,” where I devote 40,000 words to showing that faith in a certain understanding of God is, in fact, reasonable. Please pray with me that a publisher accepts it.
He quotes a writer for “The Economist” who insists that Christianity “largely invented religious intolerance and the persecution of dissenters.” Hello? The Romans persecuted Christians for refusing to worship Caesar. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonians threw Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar. In the Book of Esther, Mordecai is marked for death for refusing to bow down to Haman, an advisor to the Persian king. So, no, Christians didn’t invent religious persecution.
As is so often the case, the kicker comes at the end. Adam Gopnik declares what he calls a core truth: “The world is material and values are made by us.” I won’t take the time right now to describe the existential abyss that we would have to face if this were indeed “a core truth.” What I want to know is, who the hell is Adam Gopnik to tell us what “truth” is?