Painting Fakes

Sunnybank State School had a large collection of Readers Digest magazines.  They seemed to me to be already old by the time I read them in the early 1970s.  I was one of the most advanced readers in my class, so I spent plenty of time immersed in their pages while other classmates were still struggling with basic reading tasks like distinguishing was from saw . It was a strange world to inhabit and I still carry little bits of it around with me.  Many of the stories were childhood memoirs, written in the 1950s and 1960s about a time which seemed both harder and more innocent.  Children lived idyllic lives in small town America.  Their fathers went to work while their mothers stayed home and baked johnnycakes.  We never knew exactly what a johnnycake* was but this didn't prevent my friends from calling me "Cake" in the latter years of primary school. I suppose the stories were meant to strengthen our moral fibre, and God knows we needed it....

After the heady intellectualism of Schweitzer and Robinson , it is almost a relief to review something as plainly absurd as Barbara Thiering's Jesus the Man. Barbara Thiering is an Australian biblical scholar whose speciality is the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  For those who have spent the past 50 years in isolation, the Scrolls (discovered in the 1950s) are the large and intensely fascinating library of a strict Jewish Essene religious community based at Qumran on the banks of the Dead Sea.  As well as manuscripts of various Old Testament books, the documents include unique and previously unknown writings of the community itself, many referring to a struggle between a character called the Teacher of Righteousness (the community's leader/hero) and his opponent dubbed the Wicked Priest or Man of a Lie. Thiering's idea is that the events of the Gospels and the life of Jesus describe the other side of this conflict, and that Jesus is the Man of a Lie.  To arrive...

I've previously mentioned my enjoyment of Richard Beck's Experimental Theology blog.  His latest post deals with the idea of "theological worlds" which he takes from Paul Jones.  I haven't read Jones' book, but I love the idea.  To summarise his summary, each person has their own obsessio, the question that drives their life and keeps them awake at night, the core problem that they need to solve.  They also have (or at least need) their own epiphania, the revelation or source of hope that helps them answer their obsessio .  Each person's obsessio is their own and they need to find their own epiphania to answer it.  The interplay of these two creates their "theological world".  In traditional Protestantism, the dominant obsessio is about guilt and sin, and hence the dominant epiphania  is the experience of God's grace and forgiveness, expressed through Jesus' sacrifice for us.  This is the dominant theological world of our Prote...

James M Robinson's A New Quest of the Historical Jesus is not so much a life of Jesus as an essay about the possibility of writing such a life.  It is also a serious scholarly work, which means I am completely unqualified to make any judgement on it.  However, because it is a reflection on the possibility of the Quest, and because it was written in 1959, 50 years after Schweitzer's work and before the more populist Lives I will review from here on, it provides a useful bridge between these works. Robinson is an American bible scholar but recieved part of his theological education in Germany and at the time of writing this book was immersed in German theology.  His starting point is that Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus marked the end of a stream of historical research.  This stream was based on a Enlightenment view of history as an objective pursuit of "what really happened".  While Schweitzer critiqued the various attempts at this task...

The explosion of "new folk" music is definitely a Good Thing.  My latest love along this line is Noah and the Whale's The First Days of Spring.  The album is a little on the gloomy side, being (what else?) a series of songs about lost love and the associated despair.  Cue lots of slow songs about loneliness and depression, before the final song climbs out to a kind of acceptance and hope. But now I'm free, Now I'm free, Now I'm free from all your pain. Well you have only let me down you have only, let me down but my door is always open yeah my door is always open. Like the album title says, the first days of spring.  At first listen the whole thing seems gloomy and a tad boring.  Repeated listens get you cued into the clever arrangements, the lush orchestration and memorable hooks, as well as the lyrical movement from despair towards hope. What's really got me buzzing, though, is that in the dead centre of this gloom and despair is an abso...

We moved back home on Friday, power reconnected.  Phone has been restored this afternoon along with our internet service and so except for an incredibly clean and empty downstairs to our house, we are close to being back to what passes for normal around here.  Our street, though, is eerily quiet.  The moderately loud neighbours on the upside haven't returned - perhaps they never will, being tenants.  The same with the tenants next to us on the down side with their young children and the dad with chronic sinus problems - they lost almost all their possessions and they're tenants too.  The man with the dogs next to them has lived here all his life and went through the 1974 flood here, so I guess he'll be back eventually but he had water almost to his roof.  The family over the road are having problems with their insurance company which is delaying their electrical repairs.  The shopping centre is still closed.  I'm guessing it could be months befo...

A flood makes you see your suburb in a new way.  I always thought of Fairfield as a flat place, and particularly of my street as a flat street.  The hill started on the other side of the railway line, where the streets climb quickly up to the top of the ridge.  Down on the floodplain the land appears to run evenly from the bottom of the ridge to the river. Now I know differently.  Our street dips, then rises again.  Because we are half way up the rise, we got half flooded.  Our neighbours at the top were high and dry.  Those down in the dip were submerged.  Those two metres make all the difference. When the floods first receded the mud painted a physical contour line on the street - below was brown, above was black.  Then as people started to clean up the mud line got blurred because cars and boots carried mud all over, and hoses swept much of it into the stormwater drains.  A new line emerged, of broken furnitu...

We interrupt normal programing to bring you this update from damp and muddy Brisbane. Brisbane's paradigmatic flood occurred in January 1974, when I was 12.  A rain depression in the Brisbane River catchment combined with a king tide to inundate large areas of Brisbane.  I remember going with my scout group to Rocklea in the days after it subsided and helping people clear out houses which had been completely submerged.  The mud and the stench was terrible. Our house in Fairfield stood in about 2.5 metres of water in 1974, filling the downstairs part of the house and covering the floorboards upstairs.  Our neighbours in low set houses were completely submerged.  We didn't live there then, of course.  When we bought the house in 1994 we checked out flood levels and were told that the building of Wivenhoe Dam lowered them by about 2 metres. Fast forward to 2010-11.  The La Nina weather pattern dumped huge amounts of rain on Queensland and town after...

Do you ever get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you've just gone down the slope of the roller coaster except that you know you're sitting still?  I've been getting it a lot lately.  I get it whenever I'm reminded that the lifestyle I enjoy, and the feeling of security I have, is based on a global system that is profoundly unsustainable. I got it again last week.  At the same time I was reading Albert Schweitzer's description of Jesus as a harbinger of the end of civilisation as he knew it, I was also reading Richard Ellis' s The Empty Ocean.   Each chapter of this book is a variation on the one theme.  Not too long ago, the ocean teemed with huge populations of cod, tuna, albatross, seal, whale, dolphin, herring, etc etc.  Then within a few decades humans exploited the species to the point of extinction.  Some species are rebuilding after strong conservation efforts, others are not.  Undeterred, we plough on with our exploitation ...

Albert Schweitzer is the interpreter of all the " lives of Jesus " which came before him, and godfather of all that came after.  His book The Quest of the Historical Jesus , written in German in 1906 and first translated into English in 1910, not only gave its name to a whole genre of theological writing, but  set the terms in which the subject would be approached.  Any "life of Jesus" you pick up today has its counterpart in the works reviewed by Schweitzer, or in his own views.  Reviewing such a work is like humming a Beethoven symphony. Schweitzer was 30 years old when the Quest was published, already working as the Principal of the theological college of St Thomas in Strasbourg.  This is a scholarly book, but warm and lucid as hot coffee. In approaching the task Schweitzer makes use of the idea of the distinction between "the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith".  The core historical problem is that virtually all the records of Jesus...

I thought it would be interesting to write a series of reviews on some of the "lives of Jesus" that I've read over the last few years.  One of the reasons I thought it would be interesting is because there are so many.  This photo is only the ones on my shelf.  There's more in the local library plus a couple on my computer.  Another reason is that they all say something different - often radically different.  Why that's interesting is that they're all looking at the same evidence.  There are essentially three sources for a "life of Jesus".  There are the written gospels, including the four in the Bible plus a number of non-canonical versions of the story.  There are the references to Jesus and to early Christians in contemporary Roman and Jewish sources.  And finally, there is contextual information - documentary and archaeological information about life in Palestine in the first century which can throw light on the written materials....

Happy New Year, everyone. I've been thinking for a while now about something that happened in school when I was about nine or ten.  One of my classmates was having some problems with his writing, and our teacher decided that he wasn't trying hard enough and a bit of public humiliation might sharpen him up.  So he stood him up and read out one of his essays to the class in a tone of biting sarcasm.  The rest of us squirmed in embarassment, torn between feeling sorry for him and being glad it wasn't us.  He may have cried, I can't remember that detail.  Nor can I remember the actual content of the essay but I clearly remember the problem.  It went something like this. "I walked down the street and there I was a red car.  I saw very excited to see it." You will imediately understand what was going on.  My classmate had dyslexia.  He mixed up his was and saw because he couldn't tell the difference.  It wouldn't matter h...