Christmas
There's an article at Slate about the illegitimacy tradition - that is, a sect or strain of Christianity that maintains that Jesus had an earthly father and the holy spirit only supplemented his birth. To me, this is as meaningless as the argument between monophysitism and chalcedonianism (which refers to the dual nature of Jesus as human and divine) and it is just as impossible to settle. The arguments come from interpretations of the available evidence, but there aren't real answers to these questions. All the same...
"In 1987, Schaberg, a biblical studies professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, published The Illegitimacy of Jesus. Her central argument was that Matthew and Luke's Gospels originally told of an illegitimate conception rather than a miraculous virgin one. University of Detroit Mercy, which is Catholic, publicly distanced itself from Schaberg's positions. She got hundreds of angry letters and a few death threats and one night awoke to discover that her car was in flames on the street outside her apartment."
It is two thousand years after these events first transpired. It is more than sixteen hundred years since the first Council of Nicea. Almost five hundred years since the Council of Trent. The idea that people still have such conviction for their magical beliefs, after the humanist Rennaissance and the industrial revolution, and that they are so insecure about those beliefs that they should respond to some insignificant scholar whose position undermines their own with death threats and by burning her car - the very idea makes me slightly ill.
I'm inclined to say that these are the same people who maintain, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the founders of our country were zealous Christians, not vaguely deistic intellectuals, and that the trappings of Christmas have always been Christian imagery and were never associated with pagan holidays, even though this is not true. If you are able to believe in things for which there is no strong evidence for or against (or for which there are approximately equal amounts of evidence on both sides) with the same amount of conviction as types of propositions which can be tested or deduced, then it is not that much of a leap to believing in things for which there is no evidence at all, but that you just want to be true.
"In 1987, Schaberg, a biblical studies professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, published The Illegitimacy of Jesus. Her central argument was that Matthew and Luke's Gospels originally told of an illegitimate conception rather than a miraculous virgin one. University of Detroit Mercy, which is Catholic, publicly distanced itself from Schaberg's positions. She got hundreds of angry letters and a few death threats and one night awoke to discover that her car was in flames on the street outside her apartment."
It is two thousand years after these events first transpired. It is more than sixteen hundred years since the first Council of Nicea. Almost five hundred years since the Council of Trent. The idea that people still have such conviction for their magical beliefs, after the humanist Rennaissance and the industrial revolution, and that they are so insecure about those beliefs that they should respond to some insignificant scholar whose position undermines their own with death threats and by burning her car - the very idea makes me slightly ill.
I'm inclined to say that these are the same people who maintain, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the founders of our country were zealous Christians, not vaguely deistic intellectuals, and that the trappings of Christmas have always been Christian imagery and were never associated with pagan holidays, even though this is not true. If you are able to believe in things for which there is no strong evidence for or against (or for which there are approximately equal amounts of evidence on both sides) with the same amount of conviction as types of propositions which can be tested or deduced, then it is not that much of a leap to believing in things for which there is no evidence at all, but that you just want to be true.
posted by Matthew at 3:08 PM
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