Why Imagination Is Underrated in Scholarship

I wish scholars could simply get out their caves and realize that whatever it is that they are working on it is only ONE PIECE in the over all puzzle to make sense of the development of earliest Christianity. Let me give a personal example. When I was fifteen I honestly thought that pleasing a woman in bed was 'all there was' to making a woman happy. Seriously.

Of course I took the task of womanizing very seriously, indeed more seriously than anything else in my life before or since. And now that I am a million years old I laugh at my ignorance. I can't think of anything that is in fact LESS important for a successful marriage. Now that my father is dead I have learned all about my mother's dissatisfaction with my father. They were married for over fifty years. I am sure when I die my wife will tell my son how horrible it was to be stuck with me. Yet my wife and I have been together for what seems like an eternity.

The point is that the reason I had such stupid ideas in my head when I was eighteen was because I WAS EIGHTEEN. I can't even imagine what it must have been like having all that virility running through my system. If I was to ever cheat on my wife it would be impossible for me to claim that I was in the throws of 'uncontrolled passion' because I have no longer have any passion. I have attained perfect apatheia (most likely as a result of prolonged exhaustion and overwork).

What I am trying to get at is the fact that I think that most scholars have a similar naivety when it comes to their own research. I always imagine the universities to be something like a beehive with all these little workers plodding away at their little projects. The problem is of course that there is very little synthesizing going on or it if it is it always starts with those moronic inherited presuppositions that we took over from our ignorant ancestors.

That's why I have always liked the work of Birger Pearson so much. The first time I ever came across his name was with his involvement in the translation of the so-called Testimony of Truth, in my opinion one of the most important work in the whole Nag Hammadi corpus.

I know it sounds stupid but when I take the time to admit in his introduction to the James M Robinson collection that text MIGHT ALSO HAVE been called 'aletheias logos' I just became a big fan and read everything ever written by him. I thought to myself, this is how a good scholar goes about his work considering all possibilities.

Of course many of my loyal readers will inevitably point out that Pearson eventually came down on the side of the forgery proposition. This is supposed to mean, I guess, that 'I shouldn't like him' or something.

The point of this post though is to say that I think that scholars make too big a deal about being right all the time. Seriously. The reality is that EVERYONE OF US is wrong about SO MANY THINGS that we have written about. If there was to be a big discovery of some secret cache of Biblical manuscripts and Patristic writings, I think ALL OF ACADEMIA would be utterly embarrassed.

Just look at how many scholars took Carlson at his word that he was employing the highest quality images to determine that there was a 'forger's tremor' present. Yes, Birger Pearson was one of those scholars but the point is that when faced with the evidence he told me yes, the mistake raises serious questions about Carlson's conclusion.

Compare that to emails I saw from Larry Hurtado and Craig Evans and you see what a great man Pearson is.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even the best scholar in the field is probably right only fifty percent of the time AT BEST. I think von Campenhausen's first instinct regarding the parallels between the Pastoral Letters and the Letter of Polycarp was the correct analysis (he subsequently changed his mind). In my opinion Pearson's first instincts about the Mar Saba document were correct. I also think that the document which is called the Testimony of Truth was actually called aletheias logos and was known to Celsus of Rome.

I might be wrong on about half of these suppositions but that should in no way impact how I am regarded as a scholar.

Most of us in the field are completely wrong about everything we write.

So what makes someone like Pearson better than ninety five percent of the rest of the scholars that are out there? I think that he asks the right questions. This is the whole point of scholarship in my mind. The reason why you want to read every book that Pearson ever wrote, or David Trobisch or Tjitze Baarda or Robert McQueen Grant is NOT ONLY that they have an unparalleled familiarity with the primary sources in the field BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY that they have a critical mind, that they ask the right questions and MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL that they have a good imagination.

Seriously.

There is all this information out there. Yes, you need a good memory to recall all the details but it takes imagination above all else to see the parallels and the connections BETWEEN the material.

I just cited Pearson's work on the location of the Church of St. Mark in the Boucolia in a previous post. Do you know how many idiotic scholars couldn't even agree about the location of the #$#^^ church? It is amazing. This is not imagination but simply being able to read what is written on the page of the Acts of Mark and comparing them to the Passio Petri Sancti.

But what makes Pearson such a great scholar is that he HINTS at something - which will be subject of my next post. Namely that there is a FURTHER parallel which others might not have noticed because they were unable to see that the location of the Church of St. Mark is consistent between the accounts of the death of Mark and Peter the seventeenth patriarch.

What confirms Pearson at the upper echelons of academics is that he correctly opens the possibility that the Church of St. Mark is located in the very place where Philo identifies as the location of a massive synagogue which severed the Jewish community in the region. Pearson writes:

One site mentioned in the Acts of Mark "the so-called Angeloi" where the mob tried to burn [the evangelist's] body. If there was such a place, it can be assumed that it was located near Boukolou. But the Bollandist editors of the Acts of Mark are likely correct in their suggestion that the Greek text is corrupt at this point. The text reads, in both recensions - the corruption goes back to a common source used by both - eis tous kaloumenous aggelous. The reading suggestion by the editors is eis tous aigialous (to the seashore). I tentatively suggest instead eis tous aigialous the plural form (which essentially means the same) corresponding more closely to the plural occurring in the corrupted text of the Acts of Mark. The corruption in the transmission of the text would have taken place under the influence of the name given to a sixth century church in Alexandria, the Angelion, and probably under the influence of the reference in the text to the worship of Sarapis. The mistake would have had to be made by someone who was ignorant of the geography of fourth century Alexandria. The Angelion church, dedicated to John the Baptist, was built on the site of the great Serapeum (sacked by a mob led by Theophilus in 391) in the Rhakotis district of Alexandria, in the southwest part of the city.

The place name Angeloi having disappeared from our text, we read instead that the mob ignited a fire 'on the beaches' near Boukolou and there attempted to burn the martyr's body. By coincidence the same phrase eis (tous) aigialous occurs in an important passage in an important passage in Philo's treatise Against Flaccus in the context of a report on a vicious pogrom perpetrated by the Alexandrian Greeks against the Jews of Alexandria in 37 - 38 CE. The passage in Philo is also of great interest because it incidentally gives us information on the centers of Jewish population in the city during the first century:

The city has five quarters named after the first five letters of the alphabet, two of them are called Jewish because most of the Jews inhabit them, though in the rest there are not a few Jews scattered about. So then what did they do? From the four letters they ejected the Jews and drove them to herd in a very small part of one. The Jews were so numerous that out over the beaches [eis aigialous], dunghills and tombs, robbed of their belongings [Against Flaccus 55-6]

I suggest that the quarter in which the Alexandrian Jews were gathered was in the eastern part of the city, that is, the mainly Jewish quarter in antiquity where the Jews first settled during the Ptolemaic period. This area is described by Josephus as follows: 'By a sea, without a harbour, close beside the spot where the waves break on the beach,' Alexandria's 'finest residential quarter,' located 'near the palaces' (Josephus Against Apion, 2,33 - 36). The beach in question corresponds to modern Shatby Beach, just east of the promontory Silsileh (ancient Lochias).

I suggest further, that the beach(es) referred to by Philo and by the Acts of Mark are the very same location. That is to say, the place referred to in the fourth century as Boukolou, then situated outside the city, was in the first century the very heart of the most prominent Jewish neighborhood in Alexandria, which Josephus describes in such glowing terms. The topographical reference in the Acts of Mark reflects, in my judgement, a continuity of tradition between the first century and the fourth century of Christian activity in that place. Its first century location situates the earliest Christians of Alexandria within the Jewish community of that time, and, in effect, corroborates the intuitive observation of Eusebius regarding the 'apostolic men' of the earliest Christian presence in Alexandria. They 'were it appears, of Hebrew origin, and thus still preserved most of the ancient customs in a strictly Jewish manner' (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 2.17.2). The earliest Christians of Alexandria were thus an integral part of the larger Jewish community there. [Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt pp 108 - 110]

Pearson's judgement represents the limits of what we can say with any degree of certainty regarding the development of Alexandrian Christianity out of Alexandrian Judaism. I will attempt to go one step further - namely that the massive synagogue mentioned by Philo might well have been taken over by the first Christians and developed into what is known to have been the first and only Church in Egypt for the first three centuries of the religion.