I have been re-hashing some of my lecture notes from my class on the Reformation last semester lately. Here are five things I learned, in no particular order of importance.

1) Theology in the Catholic Church was incredibly diverse and tolerant before the Council of Trent… for in house disputes Before Trent, the Catholic Church’s theology was incredibly diverse. As a moderately educated protestant, I had always assumed/heard that the Catholic Church always had a strict, uniform theology and that was one of the things that Luther was rebelling against. Hardly the case. Luther got most of his theology from other Catholics; as a matter of fact, one of Luther’s most trusted mentors was a Catholic through and through. The Augustinian Order maintained a very similar theology as Luther did, but they never made the dispute a public matter. The Catholic Church was a watershed of differing theologies. There were constant, fierce debates on major theological issues. All of the theological differences were, of course, in house disputes, much like the Calvinism/Arminianism debates of today. As long as these disputes were kept “in house” then there were no charges of heresy. It was only when a disputed theological position was taken to the uneducated people, whom were not able to deal with the nuanced arguments and therefore were susceptible to being snatched away by the devil, was a person and idea considered heretical. Trent changed all of this. The council decided that one of the things to blame for what happened in the 1500’s was the lack of enforced unified doctrine. So they corrected this flaw in their system. Some people call Trent the end of “Catholic Reform,” the universalization of doctrine and practice ending the methods of traditional Catholic reform.

2) Man is born in filth, lives in filth, and dies in filth. Actually, filth is too much of a euphemization, properly stated, filthh should be sh!t. While I hesitate to use that more accurate word because I am afraid some will bypass the content and only glare at the cultural taboo, I include it because that is the closest word we have to how they characterized it. As crude as this sounds, there was a weird preoccupation with fecal matter, to euphemize the term even further. It was the predominate metaphor for the human condition. Sanitation systems were non-existent compared to today’s standards. Humans lived in filth. They used this term and the ideas connected with it to describe the human condition. Just about every writer, Luther, Erasmus, etc used this term constantly.

3) Human behavior, for Luther, could not be improved Luther thought that humans were so morally corrupted by the “sh!t of sin” that they could never become clean in the world. Justification was another matter, but when it came to morally lived lives, it was impossible. There was absolutely no possibility for an improvement of human behavior for Luther. As such, there should be no onus on the person, church, and governments to mold human behavior. Just keep the peace. This was a sticking issue with some of the other reformers, such as the hard-line Zwingli and Calvin. they believed that holiness could be successfully pursued… at least it should be. Hence, churches and governments should make people to live sinlessly.

4) For Luther, the only thing worse than a Catholic was a literalist Luther, along with Augustine, thought that biblical literalism was one of the worst ways to interpret the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I don’t know their views on Israel’s history, but I do know that both of them thought that only the foolish thought that Genesis should be taken literally. This goes for the six day creation and perhaps the flood, but I am unsure on that last point. What is funny, is that it is often the literalists that hold up Luther and Augustine as heroes of the faith even though these heroes would berate them for certain cherished positions. This is not a polemic against literalists, after all I am half of one, but more of a lesson on how divergent people can be in their views of scripture and still be Christians.

5) The Catholic Church before and during the Reformation was full of preaching One of the polemics that the Reformers leveled against the Catholic Church was its lack of preaching in the vernacular. They were so successful in this polemic that for centuries it was assumed to be true by the “winners” of the Reformation struggle, the West, the Protestants. It was only until recently that scholarship realized that this charge was polemical. Ironically, it was one of the after-effects of Trent that allowed for this discovery. With the standardization of doctrine after Trent came censures. The effect of this was the redaction of thousands of documents, including sermons. When the Vatican opened some of its vaults 10-20 years ago, they invited scholars to help categorize and index their contents. The scholars found thousands of redacted sermons that were given by Catholic priests leading up to and throughout the Reformation period. Contrary to popular conception, the Catholic parish priests, not just Bishops, were vigorously preaching in the vernacular. The Mass may have been in Latin and incomprehensible to the laity, but the sermon after the Mass was given in German, French, and Spanish. For the priesthood, it did not really matter what language the Mass was given in, for it was a ritual between the priests and God on behalf of the laity.

Resistance within and by the Edessan Christian community 150-250 CE

Introduction

The apothegm, “Dead men don’t tell tales,” is especially relevant in the study of vanished peoples. The purpose of this paper is to construct a method to uncover the lived religion in the everyday lives of a people-group located in the past, specifically, the people-group behind both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas. One only knows this group from the text that was left behind. However, this in and of itself is a lucky break. The text at least alerts us about this group. Otherwise, their voices would be completely lost. A surface-level, or prime facie analysis of the text only reveals the beliefs and ideas utilized by the groups, or more specifically, about the leader or teacher’s beliefs and ideas. One cannot imagine that the texts were built with the consensus of the community as a whole. They are what James C. Scott called “official transcripts” of the community.

I am approaching this people-group and texts from a great distance, spatially, temporally, and culturally. Without further inquiry and qualification, the risk of importing my culture and beliefs onto the texts and as an extension, the people-group, is insurmountable. In the absence of intimate or first-hand knowledge of their culture, one must take great pains to reconstruct it from the ground up before analyzing the texts. It is also paramount to note that every people-group is located in a specific space at a specific time, even if the people-group persists through the before mentioned spaces and times. At every moment, their culture is being negotiated and transformed. Each text represents one such attempt at negotiation of the group’s values, beliefs practices, morale, and so forth. Thus, while a text can tell us about an instance of the negotiation process and as an extension, the phases before and after the text, one cannot assume that the text merely represents a static reconstruction of the community. It is also a record of an instance of the creative process of culture formation. It is with this attitude that texts will be approached.

Both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas originated from the same community, Edessa, located in ancient Syria. (Klijn, p. 70) (Bernard, p. 161) The Gospel of Thomas date from the second half of the second century and the Acts of Thomas originate around 60-100 years later. Because of their proximity in both space and time, the two texts provide an excellent opportunity to look at snapshots of the same community in two periods of time. However, the question still remains of how to go about analyzing these texts. I will draw heavily on the theory of James C. Scott and the method of Burton Mack with the hope of obtaining an accurate comparative look at each community in their specific time period.

The paper will begin with an opening discussion of the theory of James C. Scott, moving on to an evaluation of Burton Mack’s attempt to reconstruct a lost community. Then a brief background on the historical record of the Christian Church at Edessa during the first two hundred and fifty years will be given. Both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas will be analyzed in search of their hidden and public transcripts. The two sets of transcripts will then be compared to see the choices each community faced and the path they ended up taking. I will show how the Edessan Christian community not only created a space for itself in opposition to the surrounding culture, but also institutionalized rapidly. This created room for a hidden transcript within their hidden transcript that were protests against the institutionalization. Continued…

It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts.¹

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek.² It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…”³ This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look - Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions.⁴ The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy.⁵

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. ⁶

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories:⁷

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem.⁸

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

Luther and the Evangelicals made excellent use of propaganda. Two examples of this propaganda are woodcuts entitled Two Kinds of Sermons and Christ in the Sheep Shed. Propaganda is not meant in its common negative sense, but in the sense that the woodcuts were effective at communicating the Evangelical’s message. Woodcuts were meant to be hung in public places, such as a tavern. Woodcuts had two primary features, the image and accompanying text. These woodcuts were primarily directed towards illiterate peasants, most of whom would only base their judgment solely off of the image portion of the woodcut. The text below the image was based around one or more Bible verses and was meant to be read out loud to crowds. This only happened on certain occasions, however, most people would have seen it in passing and not during a reading.

Continued…

Without Sin is an attempt by the late Spencer Klaw to chart the development and downfall of the Oneida community in northern New York. The book, published in 1993 succeeds in several respects. The book follows the life and times of John Noyes, charting out his spiritual journey and that of the communities he founded. Klaw drew off of many sources for his book. In the afterword, he discusses the sources he used. He focused primarily on the primary sources that the Oneida community left behind. However, he also considered resent scholarship on the community. Written for a more popular level and containing no footnotes, the work by Columbia University’s professor of journalism, engages its readers and challenges them to figure out what was going on in Oneida without resorting to sensationalism.

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Nancy F. Cott in The Bonds of Womanhood tries to develop a picture of Puritan femininity in New England at the end of the 18^th and beginning of the 19^th centuries. The Women’s Sphere was the idea that the domestic side of life was meant to be run by women. This was the sole place for women in a functioning society. It is her contention that the development of the “Woman’s Sphere” was a necessary part of “shattering the hierarchy of sex.” (200) This is a contentious claim because the development of the Women’s Sphere is often considered to be a reincarnation of prior formations of sexual hierarchy. While on the surface, this criticism seems to be valid, it neglects to take into account a proper grounding and understanding of the Women’s Sphere. The work is invaluable because of this nuanced look at the development of external and internal views of women during this period. This nuanced stance has lead to its importance in feminine scholarship.

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The origins of the Mormon religion are a topic of great interest. On one hand, Mormonism is an outworking of the democratization thesis in its purest form, hence, the designation as the quintessential American Religion. On the other, many Mormon beliefs are completely different from its immediate predecessors. There have been a number of works that have explained the social origin of Mormonism, but not its unique theological development. (xv) Stepping into this void, John L. Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 attempts to account for the development of core Mormon beliefs that substantially differentiate it from mainstream Protestantism. Among these beliefs are the celestial marriage, equality of matter and spirit, and the ultimate goal of godhood amongst believers. For Brooke, these beliefs originated from traditions of alchemy and hermeticism. Brooke locates this trajectory as originating in the traditions of the Radical Reformation. Despite the prime facie connections made by Brooke, there remain questions that significantly question his thesis.

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In dishonor of the God Debate between Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron vs. Brian Sapient and “Kelly,” read the following debate: Fr. Copleston vs. Bertrand Russell: The Famous 1948 BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God.

It is a classic and shows the civility and good reasoning that should be employed in any debate. Favorite Russell quote:

C: Take the proposition “if there is a contingent being then there is a necessary being.” I consider that that proposition hypothetically expressed is a necessary proposition. If you are going to call every necessary proposition an analytic proposition, then — in order to avoid a dispute in terminology — I would agree to call it analytic, though I don’t consider it a tautological proposition. But the proposition is a necessary proposition only on the supposition that there is a contingent being. That there is a contingent being actually existing has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition that there is a contingent being is certainly not an analytic proposition, though once you know, I should maintain, that there is a contingent being, it follows of necessity that there is a necessary being.

R: The difficulty of this argument is that I don’t admit the idea of a necessary being and I don’t admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings “contingent.” These phrases don’t for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject.

While I am a Christian, I have never bought the argument from necessity.

Unspun has a list of the best Biblical Studies Blogs according to user voting. There are some gems in there, check it out.

UnSpun by Amazon: Best Blogs about Biblical Studies

H/T: April DeConick at The Forbidden Gospels Blog

I finally picked a thesis topic. It is harder than one might think. You have to think of a relevant topic where you think you can say something new. In the field of New Testament / Early Christianities, that is pretty difficult to find.

After much hand-wringing, I have decided to do a socio-historical analysis of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Most of the studies of the document have been thematic, or narrative criticism, trying to get at the theological points the author wanted to convey. I’ll try to take this a step further and look at the social and historical location of both the author and the community he wrote to in the Gospel of Thomas. Specifically, I’ll look at connections and departures from a the Lucan community and the connection to the second Zeno school.

Anyway, I fell a million times better having a concrete direction to go in.