I will not hide the fact that I met Bill and Hilary (once at the White House and another time at the New York State Fair) and admired both immensely. I might even post my picture with Bill if I find the time to scan it. Hilary was actually a lot more attractive in person than you might think on TV. There should be no doubt that I did not share the belief of members of the conservative mindset that lying about adultery necessarily proved that someone was unfit to lead the United States of America. I generally stay away from politics at this blog but I see uncanny parallels between the line of reasoning used against Bill Clinton and the current obsession with the apparent disappearance of the long form of Barack Obama's original birth certificate. The bottom line is that 'conservatives' will only accept a president of the United States who is a Republican. The arguments which justify not accepting the authority of Democratic presidents don't have to make sense.
I can't help but think that the disappearance of the Obama birth certificate and the Mar Saba document serve the 'right wing conspiracy' well. This doesn't mean that I think things happened that way. I just remember working at an insurance company during my time in university and there was this crazy Korean guy who claimed to have taken all the information from the medical files of celebrities. He just went down in the vault and emptied their files. I don't know what he did with the stuff or even if it was true. The point is that this sort of thing must happen all the time - otherwise shows like TMZ wouldn't be able to exist.
Getting back to the original point of this post, unless you live here in the United States those living outside the borders can't possibly fathom the politics. There is a large segment of the population - white, affluent and powerful - who feel that 'things are slipping away' from them. Things must have been like this in the United Kingdom in the late sixties. Whatever the case there is what is called a 'conservative' movement, which is really conservative in name only which is really nothing like the America that I came to know growing up. Paranoid, angry and seething with resentment, it wages war on anything which might be deemed 'progressive.'
In the realm of religious studies this 'conservativism' essentially ammounts to placing a limit on knowledge - a mistrust that we can truly know anything better than by merely accepting the received texts at face value. So it is that when Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton write about the Pharisees they essentially harmonize what Jewish and Christian texts tell us about the Pharisees. But how do you harmonize texts that are essentially at odds with one another? It is here that Chilton has learned what John Poirier called 'the art of ventriloquism' from his master.
Poirier makes his point quite clear when he notes that "Neusner's works on the Mish- nah have not provided us with exegesis but rather ventriloquism. his long list of commentaries and studies on the Mishnah, we con- tinually hear Neusner's voice recast in the guise of 'the Mishnah's philosophy.'" I have already told my readers that it is not just Neusner's analysis which suffers from this his translation of the Targum is often invented out of thin air (Lieberman says the same thing about his translation of the Palestinian Talmud). Chilton does much the same thing with his idiotic notion of the 'Jewish Jesus.'
The point of course is that neither Neusner nor Chilton are conservatives in the sense of 'preserving the ancient traditions of Judaism and Christianity.' Indeed it is impossible to reconcile the canonical Christian understanding of Jesus the Son of God with the canonical Jewish notion of Jesus the sodomized writhing in hell in a vat of boiling hot shit. A truly 'conservative' Jewish rabbi couldn't simply push aside the canonical authority of the Talmud. My ancestors did but they were deemed heretics.
The point of course is that all the nonsense that these people write about may be interesting, inventive, provocative and whatever else their publishers want to call it - yet it is not 'conservative.' None of this nosense represents 'conserving a tradition.' There isn't a single Jew who embraced yimmach shemo vezikhro in the way that Neusner does, nor a single Christian who develops the idea of 'rabbi Jesus' before Chilton's inventive masterpieces. They are new works filled with new, never before heard ideas and interepretations which makes them the furthest thing from 'conservative works.'
So why are these radical new interpretations embraced by a great number of people who call themselves 'conservatives'? The answer is simple. When I was back in the university in my younger years I had a deep love of existential philosophy and Nietzsche especially. I remember hearing the professor (who happened to be a French Jew who like my mother survived the war through wit and guile) ramble on about Sartre's interest in 'nihilism.' I stood up in the class and half-jokingly said, what could someone sit in a coffee shop in Paris understand about nihilism - come to a truck stop along Interstate 20 at 4:00 am and then you'll see that French nihilism on acid.
The point here is that Neusner and Chilton's many collaborations represent little more than attempts at establishing some new understanding about 'Jesus the Jew' which might be used as the cultural foundation for the rise of the West. The logic of these conservatives is surprisingly simple - it was all good in days gone by, long before people like Morton Smith and the Jesus Seminar started mucking around with our cherished ideals. Yet how do you get back to Eden? This is a question which has been the subject of countless books and movies. If Winnie the Pooh couldn't figure it out for Christopher Robin, why should we trust a psychotic rabbi and his mendacious disciple?
Whatever Jesus was or wasn't will ultimately be left in the pages of unwrittten history. The Western Empire rose to greatness with a wholly imperfect understanding of who Jesus was. Our understanding of Jesus, the New Testament and Patristic writings has certainly improved over what was known at the time of Charlesmagne. The discovery of the Mar Saba document was one of many great finds of Patristic texts in the twentieth century. Our knowledge of who and what Jesus and Christianity were continues to improve with every new find, however the inevitable slide of Western civilization unfortunately happened to have occurred alongside of these great discoveries.
What are these men suggesting when new finds come to light in the future? That we should only believe them if they confirm the very things we already know about Christianity in order to be 'authenticated'? Yet what is the purpose of engaging in any new research or attempting to find new and hitherto undiscovered texts? It is a most baffling circular bit of logic which only disguises the reality of intellectual life in many religious universities - these people have less of an interest in uncovering the truth than in religious 'myth making.'
In order for a Republican president to get elected in this country one has to find a way to consolidate all the so-called 'conservative' religious minded voices in America to support him/her. Indeed attacking homosexuals and homosexuality has always been a sure-fire way of doing just that given the prohibition is common to all three monotheistic religions. This meant that someone who published a book at Baylor University Press in 2005 came up with a brilliant idea - let's misrepresent Morton Smith's discovery of a manuscript written inside of a book at the Mar Saba library as the absolute embodiment of the hostile encroachment of East Coast Ivy League 'liberalism' into the lives of the faithful Americans.
Indeed, there were more than one authors who published books at the Baptist press that year who shared that sentiment. Some times the obvious choice is the wrong choice.
Baylor University Press wasnt' just another academic publisher. It was part of a 'vast right wing' conspiracy to develop a new kind of 'tier one' univeristy - one that affirmed what was called 'traditional conservative values.' The recent choice of Kenneth Starr as its president is only a watershed for what was going on there in the twelve preceding years. Indeed I stumbled across a most interesting book that supposedly delved deep into the unholy alliance of religion and politics at Baylor University now called 'the Baylor Project' which Baylor University Press had originally agreed to publish but later changed their minds and ultimately decided to destroy all copies of the work. Here is a little background I pulled off the internet:
[T]he earlier and much-anticipated version [of this book], entitled Baylor Beyond the Crossroads: An Interpretive History, 1985–2005, was in the printing process when its publication was cancelled. The first several hundred copies of the book were then destroyed. The earlier version was cancelled because the new administration at Baylor believed the publication of the book under the Baylor name would unnecessarily involve it, the administration, in the prolonged controversy that had enveloped Baylor at least since the 2001 adoption of Baylor 2012 – Baylor’s sweeping vision to be a Christian research university.
The authors here are hardly members of the liberal elite. They probably watch Fox News eating their 'freedom fries' along with the rest of the faculty at the university. We shouldn't expect the work to condemn the attempt to reconcile faith and politics. Instead they might only have innocently reported the truth of a very ugly situation which ultimately led to the maligning of Morton Smith and his important discovery at Mar Saba.
I have just sent emails to the two authors of the original work in order to determine how high up the recruitment of books and authors which demonized 'progressive' research into the origins of Christianity went. There is a very big story here which could be layered on top of all our research so far. More to follow ...
