The Measure of Our Minds

Last week I reviewed Cross Examined, Bob Seidensticker’s novel of ideas purporting to challenge popular intellectual arguments for Christianity.

In general, I like “novels of ideas,” and am all for examination of what we believe, and why.

Codex Schoyen 2650 Matthew's gospel

Unfortunately, as I wrote last week, I found the plot of Cross Examined thin, and the intellectual discussion even thinner. So much so, I find myself returning to some of the arguments, amazed at the superficial treatment presented as unassailable wisdom.

One parlor trick in particular both amused and annoyed me.

Reclusive atheist Jim proposes an experiment to see if the oral tradition of the gospels can be considered reliable.

He asserts that the time between Christ’s crucifixion and the writing of the first gospel is twenty or thirty years, and suggests that he’ll tell his sometime adversary, sometime protégé Paul a story, and see how well it’s remembered a few minutes later.

The story he tells is a rough summary of the tale of Circe from the Odyssey. He offers a page or so of detail, discusses some other issues, then asks Paul to retell the story as precisely as he can.

Ah, scientific reason at its finest. Paul omits details, confuses parts of the story, and voila, as we knew, oral tradition is discredited. What a surprise.

These are fictional characters, so any semblance of science is fictional, at best.

But how many contemporary critics discredit oral tradition because they measure the possibility against their own modern minds, with comparisons as flimsy as Paul’s retelling of the Circe story?

I didn’t grow up in an oral culture, yet my own experience of memorization points to the absurdity of Seidensticker’s supposed experiment.

The mind is a muscle, able to do what it’s trained to do, and our current forms of education barely scratch the surface of the mind’s retentive power. Paul, the lab rat of the imagined experiment, was no scholar, had no real interest in the story, heard it roughly summarized exactly once.

Even as a kid, I could have pointed out the flaws in logic.

When I was nine or ten, I found myself drawn to poetry, and began memorizing poems for the sheer joy of the language.

I started small: 

“I’m nobody.
Who are you?
Are you nobody too?” 

Soon, though, I had moved on to Longfellow: "The Wreck of the Hesperus", "The Village Blacksmith", "Paul Revere’s Ride". I started on "Hiawatha," then shifted to Poe. "The Raven" was my last thousand word poem.

My method was simple: tape the next stanza to the mirror in my bedroom and read it over while brushing my hair, or review it on my way down the hall to brush my teeth before bed.

Scripture caught my attention as well: in the few years of my memorization craze, I stashed away numerous psalms, chunks of James, my favorite chapters of John.

Then I started middle school, took up sports, joined some clubs, and my memorization abilities faded.

Now, decades later, I find it hard to keep even a few verses in my head.

What I know about memorization:

It’s easier to commit long things to memory after hearing them repeated.
It’s easier to memorize things you’ve chosen yourself, or things you care about.
The more one memorizes, the easier it gets.

How much can the human mind hold?

Here’s a recent post I stumbled on:   

In honor of the 11th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, the anniversary of the birth of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory, Chabad-Lubavitch students across the globe studied an entire tractate of the Talmud and memorized its text.
The tractate, Bava Basra, which is currently being taught in Chabadyeshivas, consists of 352 pages.

Yehoshua Heshel Mishulovin, a student in Montreal, Canada, and the son of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in Los Angeles, Calif., took on the additional challenge of memorizing the tractate's super-commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot.

So - 352 pages for an average student. Quite a bit more for one who excelled.

Nooma 008: Dust

Rob Bell has an interesting short video that talks about the rabbinic practice of memorization. As he points out, at the time of Christ, all Jewish boys from six to ten were expected to attend Bet Sefer (literally “house of the book”), where they would learn the Torah. As in  - memorize the Torah. That’s the first five books of Hebrew Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  79,847 Hebrew words (The words were counted, and numnber recorded, each time the text was copied, as one method of maintaining accuracy).

From ten to early adolescence, boys who showed promise would attend Bet Talmud (“house of learning”) where they would attempt to memorize the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures all the way to Malachi.

I remember as a teen reading Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and The Promise, and the sense of awe I felt when I realized that, even in the twentieth century, Hasidic boys studying to become rabbis were expected to memorize not only the entirety of what I knew as the Old Testament, but also the rabbinic discussion about large portions of text.

The men who followed Jesus, while none were training to become rabbis, had been trained in memorization in ways we can’t begin to understand, and were part of a faith tradition that took words seriously.

As observant Jews, they would have said the Shema twice a day, morning and evening, from the time they were small. They would have been taught to remember words, to teach them to their children, to bind them to themselves. To write them on their homes.

According to the “form criticism” of the late 19th and early 20th century, the oral traditions of the early Christian church were not historically reliable, for the following reasons (repeated in part by Seidensticker in his novel):

1. The early Christian movement was entirely illiterate and writing played no “regulative role” in the transmission of oral material about Jesus.
2. Oral traditions aren’t capable of passing on extended narratives with any level of exactitude.
3. Orally dominated communities have little interest in historical precision.
4. Communities, not individuals, pass on oral traditions, without reference to individual eyewitnesses who could serve as safeguards of the accuracy.

I'll be honest: I find form criticism either deliberately deceptive or stunningly, frighteningly clueless. It's hard to read far in either New or Old Testament without encountering a fierce commitment to the value of words, deep loyalty to historical event, sharp warnings against falsifying the record.

Whatever the motivation for learning Torah and Talmud, the first Christians' motivation for remembering the stories of Jesus would have been greater: they’d seen something so life changing, so earth shattering, so completely new, they were willing to leave the comfort and safety of their homes, the familiar networks, the known world, to share the story they carried with them.

For every scholar who discounts the accuracy of those follower's stories, or the reliability of the form in which they were passed on, there are others who consider the New Testament writings as the most reliably transmitted of ancient texts.

Sir William Ramsey, Scottish archaeologist who began with a strong anti-Bible bias, spent fifteen years trying to discount the gospel of Luke, and concluded: "Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."

Much more recently, St. Andrew's scholar Richard Bauckman noted,

"Most history rests mostly on testimony. In other words, it entails believing what witnesses say. We can assess whether we think witnesses are trustworthy, and we may be able to check parts of what they say by other evidence. But in the end we have to trust them. . .

Now in the case of the Gospels, I think we have exactly the kind of testimony historians in the ancient world valued: the eyewitness testimony of inolved participants who could speak of the meaning of events they had experienced from the inside." 

Clark Pinnock, McMaster University, considering the reliability of historic sources, concluded:

"There exists no document from the ancient world, witnessed by so excellent a set of textual and historical teestimonies ... Skepticism regarding the historical credentials of Christianity is based upon an irrational bias." (Set Forth Your Case, 58).

Yes, we all have biases. Some irrational. Some more considered.

We have assumptions and experiences of our own that shape our understanding of the past, our assessment of the present, our hopes for the future. Some scholars choose to doubt the holocaust. Some think slavery was a good thing for the slaves. We'll be debating global warming until every polar bear is gone and the arctic circle is an open ocean.

We have our own grids to test what's true - and our own ideas about how to decide what's possible.

As for me, I find the gospel narratives compelling.

I find the evidence for their veracity convincing.

I know no story of pre-modern time that has come to us with more force, or more authenticating detail.

Belief is still a matter of faith, a decision about whose testimony to trust.
.

But so is disbelief a matter of faith: faith in the smallness of our minds, the weakness of our memories, the narrowness of possibility.

I know which faith I choose.

Associates for Biblical Research: Textual Evidence

Cross Examined: A Speakeasy Review

How do you know what you know?

What would it take to change your mind?

What if what you believe turns out to be wrong?

Those questions surfaced with last week’s Synchroblog topic, exploring some "what ifs" about Christianity and scripture.

It emerged again in a novel I signed on to review for an on-line book review community called Speakeasy.

The book, Cross Examined, by Bob Seidensticker, is descrbed as “an unconventional spiritual journey,” one which “challenges the popular intellectual arguments for Christianity and invites the reader to shore them up . . . or discard them.”

The phrase “popular intellectual arguments for Christianity” suggests an intriguing oxymoron, which may be why I signed on to receive and review the book. I’ve read, taught, discussed arguments for Christianity, but never found them "popular". Individuals complacent in their faith are generally bored, annoyed, or offended by forays into apologetics, while those shaken by doubt are rarely comforted or persuaded by intellectual argument.

From what I’ve seen, doubt is rarely the result of deep intellectual inquiry. More often, it’s the byproduct of tragedy, loss, abandonment, betrayal.

The characters of Cross Examined are no different in that respect. The story begins in 1906 with a prophecy of the coming San Francisco earthquake, and follows two young adults through the aftermath of that tragedy.

The plot is structured around two formal debates, the first between Reverend Samuel Hargrove, formidable pastor of The First Church of God in L.A., and bookish, forgettable, Professor Putnam. The second debate, late in the book, is between Reverend Hargrove and his protégé, Paul Winston, the central character of the book.

Between those debates, the novel follows Paul Winston’s encounter and growing friendship with a reclusive atheist, Jim. Jim’s chessboard serves as a central image in the novel: an ongoing contest between Jim and an unseen, unidentified adversary, with directives arriving from afar, and chess pieces moving slowly across a span of seasons.

There’s also a fiancé, Athena, thought dead in the earthquake and subsequent fires, nursed back from a badly broken leg in a distant Buddhist monastery.

The narrative offers conventions of plot: a half-hearted love story, uncertain identity, mounting tension between rival mentors, a young man facing traumatic past and uncertain future.

Yet the plot, and the characters themselves, are little more than a framework for the interplay of ideas. Between the opening and closing debate, Jim shuttles between pastor and recluse, rebutting arguments from one, gathering ammunition from the other, an almost featureless pawn in the battle of belief.

The story suffers, but the ideas suffer as well. Arguments, both for and against belief, are flattened, misrepresented, treated as little more than markers in a competitive game that resembles poker more than chess: “I’ll meet your ontological arguments and raise you one Pascal’s wager.”

Comparative religion, arguments of design, anthropological understanding of oral tradition, all appear in a distorted, simplified format. As Reverend Hargrove becomes more and more visibly a bombastic bully, his arguments are more easily dismissed. As Jim takes on the role of benefactor and confidant, Paul aligns himself with the new arguments Jim offers, as simplified as those he abandons.

Jim, portrayed as the constant voice of reason, at one point suggests, “Rationalization starts with God’s existence: given Christianity, how can I square it with the facts? Reason starts with the facts and follows them where they lead.”

To comment well on those two sentences alone would take chapters, maybe volumes. What is reason? Where does it come from? What is its basis? Why should we trust it?

And who decides the “facts”? Don’t we all start from our own points of understanding, and rationalize “facts” to fit the framework of our assumptions?

Don’t we all, atheists and believers alike, see and interpret “facts” from our own small windows on the world around us?

Yes, there are arguments for and against the existence of God, the truth of scripture, the possibility of miracles. There are different ideas about how to weigh the validity of historic texts, about how to date ancient documents, about how to interpret manuscripts from cultures distant from our own.

Cross Examined introduces some of those complexities, but in a way that seems heavily weighted toward the author's own assumptions.  The novel does little to acknowledge the rich history of philosophical inquiry surrounding the questions raised, and, set as it is in 1906, it ignores the past century of careful research on matters like reliability of manuscripts, strength of oral tradition, archaeological evidence for scriptural accounts.

Jim tells Paul “faith is immune to facts. . . And that’s the biggest clue that Christianity is false: it’s built on faith. Believing something because it’s reasonable and rational requires no faith at all.” In the intellectual chess game Seidensticker has constructed, facts and logic are the highest values, sweeping all opposition from their path.  

At the same time, there’s an odd undercurrent to the novel’s slight narrative.

Jim, reclusive atheist, lives in such a place of distrust he is unable to leave his home, and has, by his own testimony, been trapped in one place since he left the church two decades before. As he invites Paul deeper into his logical agnosticism, he also invites Paul into a place of isolation and paralysis.

In the end, Paul seems required to choose between reasoned loneliness or an irrational acceptance of a  more productive and emotionally healthy community. 

Despite the hundreds of pages of formal and informal debate between the main characters of the novel, two side characters seem to offer the final word.

One, Virgil, friend from Paul’s old life on the seamier side of town, urges Paul to continue on with the church: “seems to me that using logic to take care of your spiritual needs is like slicing bread with a hammer.”

Compassionate widow Mrs. O’Brien offers similar advice: “the church is much more than arguments and debate – it’s community and heaven and forgiveness. All these years of Samuel’s debates have changed my mind not a jot either way. Even if I were to accept all those fancy arguments against religion, my faith would remain. That’s why it’s called ‘faith’.”

The unsatisfying, unexpected conclusion does little to explain any of the characters’ motivations, just as the flurry of arguments back and forth does little to build a deeper understanding of the interaction between faith and reason.

As I set the book down, I find myself thankful for writers and thinkers whose books have illuminated key questions in deep and satisfying ways.

And I find my distaste for apologetics as intellectual contest has deepened.

I’m reminded that humility is an important basis for real wisdom and understanding.

And I’m convinced, yet again, that when intellectual discourse is approached as a game of chess, everybody loses.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.