Painting Fakes

Here's a little something that Crossan and Reed's Excavating Jesus has got me thinking about.  They open their book with a discussion of an artefact called the "James Ossuary" - a bone box inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus".  Their analysis of this relic, sold in the antiquities market with no indication of its origin, is fascinating.  Apparently even if the inscription is genuine there is only a one in 20 chance it actually contains the bones of James, the brother of Jesus Christ as worshipped by Christians.  All three names were incredibly common in first century Palestine. Be that as it may, it leads them into a reflection on the role of James in the early church, and the origin of Christianity as a Jewish reform movement.  Here is my version of it, inspired by theirs but a little different. James the brother of Jesus (as opposed to James the son of Zebedee, brother of John) is only mentioned once by name in the gospel

So Roo said to me that after reading Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain I should read Jonah Lehrer's The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind.   I always aim to please and I did enjoy Shermer. Lehrer is one of those annoying people who seem good at lots of things.  He has a degree in neuroscience, studied literature and theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and writes for a number of different publications.  Where Shermer is a scientist who writes, Lehrer appears to be a writer who does science.  He is less technical than Shermer, more journalistic and accessible. The Decisive Moment  (apparently marketed in some countries as How We Decide ) covers a lot of the same territory as The Believing Brain , including reporting many of the same experiments.  However, Lehrer asks a different question to Shermer and so of course he gets a different answer.  Shermer is interested in belief, and his conclusion is that we should reject the emotional, unconscious part

William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."  Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail. I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things , a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient.  Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence.  The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology.  What it is about our brains, S

Some of my rellies, along with various other people, are currently involved in an attempt to break the world record for the longest Facebook thread.  The subject is, of course, abortion.  The thread is currently up to 380 comments plus various likes and dislikes.  They would have broken the record by now except that the host deleted the original thread in a valiant attempt to enforce some minimum standards of courtesy. I've carefully refrained from participating.  I've previously tried to bring some ethical nuance to this debate, but I've found it doesn't help much because no-one is listening.  So my latest idea is that we should dramatise the abortion debate as a kind of Flash Mob event, like this one  in a food court, with people popping up from opposite ends of the room to advocate their positions.  In my head it sounds a little like the third section of Bohemian Rhapsody . Pro-lifer 1: Don't kill babies! Pro-choicer 1: They're just collections of c

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about a facebook discussion I was part of a while ago over Divided , an American documentary film which argues that "modern youth ministry is contrary to Scripture".  The argument got a little heated (not from me, I was polite).  This morning I woke up thinking about the broader context for it. The message of Divided is that youth ministry, as in having a youth group as part of your church, is wrong because it divides families.  Proper ministry is ministry to the whole family, together.  Various Bible verses are quoted out of context to support this view and selective stories about youth groups are used to show they corrupt young people and lead to poor outcomes. So from my description you can already see what I think.  My parents had grown up going to church and had no interest in going back.  At the age of 14 my school friend invited me to a church youth group and I was introduced to both Christianity and to a group of lov

Yesterday's Weekend Australian contains a detailed interview with former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating and a short extract from his new book.  In it, he laments the narrowness of our current political culture, the inability of our politicians (especially his successors in the Labor Party) to tell an overarching story about Australia, where we are heading and our place in the world.  Part of the problem, he says, is that they are too focused on logic and pragmatics at the expense of vision and aesthetics. Friedrich Schiller, the German philosopher, said: "If man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom."    Romantic and idealistic as that view may seem to some, the thought is revelatory of the fact that the greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately generated passio

So, after John Carroll's existential midrash on the life of Jesus, we return to a more typical type of contemporary midrash , the historical reconstruction.  Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L Reed represents a detailed forensic examination of historical evidence in the tradition of the Jesus Seminar , of which Crossan was co-chair for a decade.  Crossan is perhaps the more famous of this pair of authors, known for his New Testament scholarship and his reconstructions of Jesus' life and the first century church.  Reed, while lower profile, appears to be just as distinguished in academic terms and specialises in Palestinian archaeology. Within the dual focus of their sub-title, the division of labour seems clear - Reed deals with stones, Crossan with texts. It is the combination of the two which provides the power and fascination of this book.  The archaeology of first century Palestine can't tell us much in par

So, a few weeks ago I wrote a letter to Julia Gillard , with copies to Chris Bowen and my local member Graham Perrett, outlining the reasons they should not only abandon overseas processing of boat arrivals but the whole mandatory detention system.  I'm still waiting for the reply, aside from a brief acknowledgement from a member of Perrett's staff thanking me for saying what I think.  But blow me down if they haven't gone and done something quite like what I suggested .  All arrivals will be processed in Australia, with those deemed likely to be granted refugee status given bridging visas and allowed to live in the community after basic health and security checks.  At last, a move in a more humane direction! It would be nice to think they listened to me and the thousands of other people advocating a more humane solution.  Sadly, it seems that it's just a stuff up.  The media is even talking about it as the "failure of migration policy".  Both Liberal and La

To keep the Australian theme going here is another Australian Life of Jesus , The Existential Jesus by John Carroll.  However, this is where the resemblance to  John Dickson ends .   Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is not an active church member or a biblical scholar.  Instead, he approaches the story of Jesus through a secular reading group he convenes at the University, which has twice read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety.  He has found the story profoundly affecting and life changing, and this book is the result. Nor is Carroll greatly interested in the Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is scornful of both the idea of Jesus as eschatologocal prophet , and of the Jesus Seminar with their colour-coded sayings.  Not that he doesn't make use of historical research - he leans particularly heavily on Catholic scholar Raymond E Brown - but his intention is quite different from theirs.  This is what he says. The Christian churches h

As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of King David.   It was a part of the Bible I read over and over again.   Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most human character in the Bible, even including Jesus.   D espite his flaws and his repeated failures he keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success.   Plus, there’s lots of action, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex. At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignment about King David’s role in Israelite history.   However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance of the Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources. To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s most historians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samuel and 1 Kings.   Not that I knew anything about it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories as reaching back to two narratives written close to the time of David himself –

It's always good to step outside your normal environment and be exposed to something new.  That's how you learn.  So I let myself be persuaded to go to last night's TWIST (The Word in Song Together) conference.  This is part of a series of events organised by Emu Music , an Australian organisation best known for recording and publishing new worship music but which also runs frequent training events for church music leaders.  That's me, so off I went. The event went for about two hours, split pretty evenly between singing and listening to the featured speaker, Bob Kauflin, a songwriter and worship leader from Sovereign Grace Ministries in the USA.  As you'd expect from a room full of 500 musicians the singing was good, led by a polished (and loud!) pop-rock ensemble.  The songs, and the talk, certainly made me think, but I probably wasn't thinking what the organisers wanted me to think.  I rarely do. The talk was pretty simple, although I may have lost the

Christians have a recurring problem over suffering.  Apart from the fact that they actually suffer, which is a problem everyone has, the Christian-specific problem is this: Christians traditionally believe in three things. God is all-powerful, both knowing and being in control of everything that happens in the universe. God is perfectly loving, desiring nothing but good for his/her children and creation. Humans have free will and are able to decide the direction of their own lives, including being able to reject God and to make mistakes. The problem is that these things are logically incompatible, and nothing brings this incompatibility into focus more than suffering.  If God is both loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering in the world?  There are two common answers.  One is that the suffering is a result of our misuse of our freewill.  This, however, calls into question either God's power (could God not have designed things so that our freewill need not lead to