What did Mary know, and when did she know it?

 Among NT scholars who treat this as serious (and not silly), I have not seen anyone frame the question as a proper historical inquiry. What expectations did the historical Mary have about her infant son, if any? That is, as opposed to the annual holiday time debate, "Does the Michael English song line up with Luke's Magnificat?" 

 ((NB: In fairness to skeptics, I find it perfectly reasonable for those who accept no miraculous claims to then further assume the historical Mary had no reason at all to expect anything special from her baby's future life. In other words, everything that follows here below assumes debate among Christian scholars. That said, my skeptic friends are certainly welcome to play along, if they are willing to stipulate various faith-based positions for the sake of argument.))

 If I had time to engage the historical question properly myself, this would be my initial plan for the project. 

 First, after surveying significant contributions to the perennial debate, I would make special note of how many verdicts have settled on the basis of Luke's text alone, and yet were thereby declared a conclusion of historical fact. Among NT scholars who (a) happen to be Christian and (b) take this annual holiday song debate seriously, I predict nearly all would provide arguments based 100% in exegesis. Furthermore, among those answering in the affirmative (e.g., "Yes, Mary knew") I predict all of them would add nothing to that exegesis except a positive judgment about historicity (*cough* personal faith commitment *cough*). Likewise, among anyone answering in the negative (e.g., "The Magnificat is a Lukan construction and therefore Mary probably didn't know), I would predict similarly that all or nearly all would also conclude their inquiry after completing analysis of Luke's text, without proceeding to ask questions about the historical Mary and how she might have differed from Luke's Mary in some way or another. 

 Upon completing this survey, baring some delightful surprise, I expect my conclusion would be that this annual discussion of Mary's expectations about Jesus reveals yet another area in which NT scholars have failed to distinguish exegesis from historical inquiry. I would use the survey results to illustrate ways in which those who engaged this debate have demonstrably (1) engaged in exegesis of the text, and then (2) concluded with an implied judgment about historicity of that text. This procedure, often referred to as "historical criticism" by NT scholars, does not in fact reflect the ways that proper historians perform critical analysis of ancient texts *AND THEN* proceed from analyzing evidence ('stage one') to considering the possibilities of the past using historical imagination and constructing  multiple hypotheses about those possibilities before determining which, if any, seems most likely (all of which is 'stage two'). To be clear, NT scholars typically perform stage one and then stop altogether.

 Second, I would proceed to the question of Luke's authorial identity and purpose. Although this question is broadly disputed among scholars of Luke-Acts, our literary opinions about the Magnificat (and other Lukan material about Mary) should be carefully framed within our opinions about Luke's larger authorial construction. Generally, I find NT scholars do not take the trouble to frame the part within the whole in this way. Likewise, I have not seen such framing from NT scholars who engage the question of Mary's expectations about Jesus. That is, they can all give you their own studied views about Lukan authorship and his theological agenda, but they do not take the time to explain how or whether their view on those larger issues (let alone any competing views on those issues) might affect exegetical conclusions about Luke's Magnificat. I strongly differ on this methodology.

 For example, one pertinent question about the larger Lukan construction is political: how does Mary's song lyric about God pulling down kings from their thrones prepare us for the political subtext of other material in Luke-Acts. My own preferred authorship theory is the minority view that Luke is writing a defense of Paul before Nero, and I find this premise adds a layer of intrigue to any rhetoric that is anti-money or anti-power. In my view, Luke is shrewdly signaling to Nero's administration officials that this whole Jesus movement is not a threat. Jesus resists everyone influencing him towards the exertion of actual power and Paul and Silas are not remotely "turning the world upside down" as some overly worked up tattletales reportedly said to the Thessalonian politarchs. How, then, does Luke expect the Magnificat to read in a Roman courtroom? Perhaps as the hopeless daydream of peasants longing for justice vicariously? By the way, which mighty ones should Nero think God has brought down? And which lowly ones should Nero think God has raised? Are there any prominent candidates to make such claims concrete and specific? 

 Alternatively, engaging a different theory of authorial identity and purpose can provide a different way to exegete the passage. Again, lacking the time to work through them all, I merely here observe that a proper inquiry should consider various literary contexts; ergo, various readings of the Magnificat (and other Gospel material about Mary).

 Third, having weighed the available readings of Luke (broadly) and the Magnificat (in context of those broader readings),  I would proceed to comparative analysis of those possible readings. In how many views does this or that phrase imply X and not Y? How many interpretative decisions are shared commonly by the various readings? Do we have a core set of basic meaning(s) that most interpreters have consistently found being conveyed? Of the disputed meanings, which ones potentially render the most impact on the major question at hand? In all such comparisons, the central concern is to reconstruct whether Luke's Mary had any expectations about the future life of her infant son. Because we have different views on the broader issues for Luke-Acts, we may need to reconstruct several differing versions of "Luke's Mary" before then deciding which of these literary reconstructions (if any) deserves to be considered the most likely version intended by its original author, and also which reading/s (if any) were more or less plausible for the original audience/s. 

 Fourth, presuming we have narrowed down the above issues and arrived at one conclusion about Luke's Mary (or perhaps one predominant view of Luke's Mary with a few minor debates being kept in mind as alternative views), it is now finally time to proceed from literary analysis to historical inquiry. This final step is the most radical part of my proposal, though it should not be. What I have to say about this step should also be your main takeaway from this humble blogging exercise.

 In general, the custom among NT scholars is that "literary issues" are not engaged during "historical critical" analysis, and vice versa. That these sub-disciplines within Gospel studies are kept apart is one big reason why NT scholars continually fail to proceed from exegesis ('stage one') to historical inquiry ('stage two'). Because they programmatically engage *either* "literary" *or* "historical" questions, they cannot imagine doing one as preparation for the other. To be clear, authorship and genre are standard preliminary questions for historical critical reading, but only insofar as they impact our evaluation of historicity. The literary construction of meaning (i.e., interpretation) is not considered a preliminary context which might then inform a second type of engagement with the same text. Instead, historical-critical exegesis is considered one type of interpretation, whereas "literary readings" are only allowed to exist in their own separate bubble. This has been formally acknowledged (albeit with a vastly different spin) since the early 1980's and reflects a categorical failure that goes back to William Wrede... but I shall not elaborate further on that point today. Suffice it to say that I agree with Hans Frei's assessment of the problem (chapter one of his famous Eclipse), but I despise Frei's prescription for a Bartian cognitive dissonance about story and history. Instead of separating truth and meaning, we need to prioritize meaning AND THEN proceed to ask questions about truth. (To futher distinguish between reference and representation, see Ankersmit's 2012 opus). But that is more than enough throat clearing.

 In sum, the historical question differs from the literary question in multiple respects but the major distinction between what I propose and what NT scholars usually do is this: we cannot merely complete a critical exegesis of the text's meaning and then accept it as a virtual transcription of true history. We cannot simply (A) decide what the text says, and then (B) decide whether or not we believe it. That simplistic division of method is categorically NOT what I am talking about when I say there must be a stage one and a stage two. To do only so much is to let Luke answer the question instead of answering it ourselves. Thus, our distinction between the two stages must be that the literary reconstruction of Luke's Mary must remain its own conclusive work of exegesis, and that said work should then be allowed to inform a new kind of engagement with the original question. Is it plausible to suppose Mary had any specific expectations about Jesus's future life, and if so what were they? 

 Before interacting with exegetical conclusions, however, our 'stage two' engagement begins with standard questions about historical context. What can we say about Nazareth? What was Mary's place in her synagogue? What general knowledge can we ascribe to a Nazarene Jewish woman of her era? What would she have known of world rulers losing their power, either from current events or from regional histories? What occasions might have transpired to make her aware of lowly people being raised up? What examples from the Hebrew scriptures might answer those questions? How likely is it that Nazareth had a copy of those relevant scrolls? Without scrolls, which Jewish traditions were most commonly passed along orally? Are there any practical contexts for supposing a Nazarene woman had developed familiarity with the content of Samuel, Psalms and Isaiah, specifically? Are those contexts likely or do such scenarios stretch plausibility? Quite independently of these questions, what kind of scenario would be necessary to explain the indirect and longitudinal transmission, to Luke, of any song Mary herself might have actually composed? Alternatively, on the Thucidydean model of artistic license, what kernel of historical truth might have preceded the Lukan composition of the full blown Magnificat as we have it? Please observe that none of these questions thus far require us to assume or build upon any aspect of our interpretative view of Luke's text. These are merely related questions designed to establish a new baseline for this different type of engagement with the central inquiry.

 As Christian believers, attempting to think historically, we may also consider how other NT material about Mary might affect our baseline for considering the central inquiry. Rather than merely setting up the Magnificat as our only reference point for considering what Mary expected of Jesus's future, we can explore any other claims about Mary's experience. If we accept Gabriel's visit, to some extent or another (pending a thorough and preliminary 'step one' and 'step two' on the Gabriel story), what possible expectations would have been prudent and sensible for someone like Mary to infer? If we accept that Mary had some interaction with Elizabeth and Zechariah, and/or angels and shepherds, and/or Anna and Simeon (all still in Luke, all pending their own two step analysis), then what expectations might Mary have plausibly formed based on those interactions? Finally, we can also consider the Matthean infancy claims (again, each pending their own two step contextual prep work): did Mary form expectations based on anything like the experiences of the magi and their flight into Egypt? Please observe, once again, that even for Christian believers I lay down no expectation that any given analysis should answer any of these questions in one way or another. I am only saying two things. One: we have the right to ask all kinds of questions like these, and to consider their various possible answers. Two: we ought to do so with a robustly disciplined imagination, as proper historians do.

 Pursuing the main question along such lines of inquiry is merely a starting point. Without doing the work, I cannot guess where such questions might lead us, let alone what we might end up concluding. What I can offer now is the kinds of historical conclusions we might reach in stage two, and some major ways in which those conclusions can stand in specific contrast from the exegetical conclusions reached in stage one.

 The most important point in all this is distinction. Our reconstructions of Luke's Mary and the historical Mary cannot be identical. It might not be the case that one will contradict the other, but if the two reconstructions are identical then we have missed the point of differentiating between literary exegesis and historical inquiry. If Luke's Mary is your Mary then Luke has done your work for you. You have abdicated the task. So then, as a Christian believer, here are three general ways in which my reconstructed historical Mary might differ from Luke's Mary without contradiction per se. 

 First, there is extrapolation. Historians often infer from a text more than what is strictly claimed by that text. Second, there is interpolation. Historians draw into their own reconstruction whatever contextual details seem appropriate to their own stated inquiry, even when those details may be completely irrelevant to a given bit of text or its larger literary framing. Third, there is synthesis. Historians combine details from multiple sources and construct a new hypothesis to incorporate those details (while perhaps also constructing a hypothesis to explain how said details came to be attested in said sources, respectively). Altogether, therefore, while a Christian believer is free to reconstruct a historical Mary that does contradict Luke's literary Mary, and/or Matthew's for that matter, it should not be assumed that differentiation between literary and historical reconstructions will entail contradiction necessarily.

 In any or all of these ways, my view of Mary can be more comprehensive than Luke's literary construction. This is not by any means to suggest, however, that my view of Mary should therefore be offered as authoritative in a sense that supersedes Christian scripture.

 It is my humble opinion that faith in scripture should impel us to consider not only its meaning(s) but also its value as a representation of the past. As a Christian, I uphold the scripture as primary, but as a believer, I take up the challenge to consider more fully all that is therein implied. My devotion to scripture does not license me to be unintelligent in the way that I process its claims. 

 When I read "Jesus wept" I am free to consider the meanings and values implied by that phrase, for my own life as well as for Jesus's experience. I am also free to imagine concretely that Jesus actually wept. The historical Jesus showed emotion among his compatriots. He let himself appear to be vulnerable in that way. I can try to learn whether this was common or uncommon for Jewish men of his era, and I can try to imagine the scene, in some sense or another. The fact that I cannot pull up a video of Jesus reacting emotionally to the death of a friend, or to any similar tragedy, does not prevent me from trying to imagine the reasonable possibilities. 

 I imagine the real world of Jesus based on my reading of scripture. I do not thereby replace scripture with my imagining, but I also recognize that part of the value of scripture is to prompt me to exactly these kinds of reflections. Real human experience is always more valuable and more comprehensive than any story can tell with mere words. The stories in scripture, where and when they are true, point to such real experience but they do not encompass it.

 It is not always enough to believe that a story is true. We must often try to imagine the real world that a story attempted to represent. However, given that many people are wont to imagine things wildly, wilfully, and without intellectual rigor, it behooves those of us who can differentiate carefully to do so with regard to both stories and histories. Christian academics should set an example by applying the utmost of rigor, so that we may then offer some general guidelines for those who need help. As it stands, sadly, I see no Christian scholars who do any of this. Instead, institutional sponsorships typically foster those views that uphold denominational dogmas. The abundance of rigor required by differentiating between interpretation and historical inquiry is not remotely anathema to christian belief, as I have tried to illustrate here, but I cannot say with equal confidence that said abundance is conducive to religious agendas.

 In any case, I have now accomplished what I set out to do in this blogpost. Here is the sum of it. 

 "What does Mary's song imply as we have it in Luke's Gospel?" is one kind of question and "What did Mary know and when did she know it?" is another. 

 The fact that most Christian scholars know nothing about what I'm saying is a tragedy.

 I offer this so that they may do better.

 Anon...

Seeing Jesus Not-As-We-Are

 One reason that mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that people who get mystical also tend to get kooky, if not down right unstable. That sad trend is well documented. Another reason mysticism has been frowned upon by the church, historically, is that it threatens the clergy/laity arrangement. If each person claims their own profound sense of access to God, then who needs a priest or a preacher? 

 Personally, I have long considered myself a failed mystic. I gave it up long ago and I do not promote it. As for clergy, I have also loads of evidence that ditching formal hierarchy in the pews often leads to little more than informal domineering in a living room. The challenge of group dynamics is not solved by trusting everyone to stay well-attuned to their own imagination to God.

 As Christian historians of Jesus, however, neither institutional resistance nor personal failure nor fear of kooky chaos must ever prevent us from considering ways in which Jesus was not as we are. It may have been a long time since I personally felt a profound touch from the Lord, but that should not stop me from proclaiming that I think Jesus believed he was experiencing spiritual communion with God, probably everyday of his adult life. 

 As both Christians and historians, then, let us further suppose that Jesus did indeed experience deep and profound interaction with God on a regular basis, during his earthly life. If we do so suppose, then I would urge us to also weigh heavily the fact that Jesus spent his teens and twenties abstaining from public ministry. That is, if we agree Jesus was exceptionally spiritual during his public ministry, then let us also recognize that Jesus at age 12 had no such lock down on God's leading, and that intervening years provided him opportunities to grow. Alas, here's a third reason for religious systems to resist my construction of Jesus, because they're addicted to leveraging youthful enthusiasm and idealism in their leadership programs. More's the pity.

 At any rate, I am not a mystic but I think Jesus was a mystic. 

 Furthermore, as the above thought experiment illustrates, embracing the view that Jesus was NOT like me in some ways can be a prerequisite for extrapolating from there to achieve higher vistas. If we do not first embrace the view that fully-grown Jesus was super spiritual (although we are not), we cannot then proceed to consider that younger Jesus was not yet fully in tune. Perhaps it is only after surrendering our short-sighted need to promote a Jesus who is like us, and after ceasing to fear the promotion of a Jesus whom we cannot imitate, that we can then discover a higher paradigm.

 Perhaps Jesus grew. Perhaps spiritual maturity requires decades of growth. Perhaps evangelical leaders who teach newly baptized believers to declare confidence in God's direct leading, are simply perpetuating a tragic and desperately vainglorious pretense. And perhaps older Christian traditions are being too cautious. If we all embraced the simple historical inference that Jesus's own mysticism required thirty years of developing growth before he began making weighty pronouncements, then established authorities might be less worried about kooks, and grass roots ecclesias might be far less at risk of living room insta-gurus. 

 If spiritual weight was something we expect persons to acquire not without decades of devotion, that expectation might put a stop to all sorts of shenanigans. 

 Now, I said all this in part because I would love for you all to go read my 2011 draft of Jesus in Nazareth, if you haven't already. Heck, feel free to revise it for me. Thanks in advance!

 But the other point I wish to underscore is about courage and self-denial in historical method.

 We need to get away from the practice of building into the past only what we promote. I support the military and pay taxes. I'm not sure Jesus ever did either. I refuse to attend religious services. Jesus faithfully attended Synagogue gatherings. I have become an avowed feminist but no person in the first century was a feminist. The list could go on, but the point should be clear.

 We cannot see Jesus as he was if we continue using him to justify ourselves.

 And we cannot construct history in good faith if the ideological cart is pulling the analytical horse.

 Anon...

What Would "Acts as History" Mean?

 History may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. The authorial representation should therefore guide scholarly interpretation of the text. 

 Steve Mason's dissertation on the Pharisees in Josephus is a masterclass in narratological interpretation. Previous scholars had taken a single line of Josephus's autobiography (an odd phrasing which seemed to declare Pharisaic affiliation) as evidence for doubting all the passages in Josephus's narrative work which expressed criticism of Pharisees. Since that dissertation, scholarship in general has recognized Mason's superior exegesis of the one difficult line and henceforth overturned the previous dogma that Josephus identified as a Pharisee. Also since that dissertation, Josephus scholars have come around to the larger issue raised by Mason's methodology. Unfortunately, NT scholars have not. If you haven't sussed quite yet what that larger issue might be, please bear with me a bit longer.

 Frank Ankersmit has argued that a narrative text cannot be comprehended in the same way linguists exegete a single propositional statement. Let us examine the difference.

 When reading one sentence, we decode individual words while looking for grammatical cues and patterns of syntax. Piecing those things together is how one comprehends the proposition. The task is to build meaning from the bottom up. If a statement mentions "Elvis Presley" we might wonder whether that refers to Ed Sullivan Elvis or military service Elvis or Blue Hawaii Elvis or Las Vegas Elvis or the Elvis purportedly haunting Graceland today. As exegetes of a single reference, we must deduce which Elvis the author means us to recognize, and our initial deduction may be confirmed or corrected a few words later, or perhaps a few lines later, further down in the text. This is not necessarily the case with a large collection of sentences.

 The first distinction to recognize is that a narrative passage cannot "refer" in the same way as an individual word or a propositional statement. If you mention the name of my dog, you "refer" to one identifiable being. It is "picked out uniquely" by the label I use. Even if I may have given my dog a common name, we can easily clarify with further specification. "I mean the cocker spaniel Taffy who lived at Bill's childhood home until he was 13." The ideal one-to-one correspondence is at least achievable, even if our collective vocabulary (or "cultural repertoire") does not contain a single term to label each object on Earth. With enough added words, we can still pick out which dog I mean to describe.

 Narrative cannot do that. It simply cannot. A published story about the battle of Waterloo can only "refer" to its subject in general (what Ankersmit idiosyncratically calls "aboutness"). Of course I can cite a year to specify which Treaty of Paris or Ocean's Eleven I might have in mind, but that is not the point. The one and only battle of Waterloo can be identified with a single place and time but it cannot be identified by a single set of words. That is, we cannot select one verbal discourse as the proper description of that singular battle. It was unique, but words cannot designate it uniquely. If that were possible, then we should expect to find only one proper description of the battle, only one proper biography of Napoleon, only one acceptable version of any given event in Earth's history. Obviously, this is not the case. The one-to-one correspondence between words and things cannot be extended to words and events. This necessarily shifts our hermeneutic away from objective decoding of a linguistic construction and towards the subjective interpretation of an aesthetic construction. 

 Narrative is not reference. Narrative is representation. 

 The construction of meaning from narrative, therefore, cannot be treated exclusively as a bottom-up endeavor, in the same way we construct meaning from the propositional statement. Unlike the grammatical and syntactical bits of a sentence, the individual sentences within a larger narrative text create a whole which is not merely the sum of its parts. Thus, instead of piecing together the meaning of each text by tackling one sentence at a time, one must rather prioritize a determination about the overall meaning of an authorial representation IN ORDER TO have any chance at properly understanding each single statement within it. Although this prescription may seem paradoxical, because of course we must read the text one statement at a time, the point is that our hermeneutic spiral must build and build and built UNTIL we have reached the point where we can look back on each part and see how they all fit in the whole.

 Impressively, that is precisely how Mason engaged the corpus of Josephus's writings. Where other scholars had camped out on one troublesome sentence and erased several passages which appeared to contradict it, Mason argued that we should rather prioritize understanding Josephus's whole body of work before turning again to that difficult bit in his autobiography. When taken in context, Mason demonstrated conclusively, there was a different way to interpret the one bit. Josephus had not joined the Pharisees. He had merely studied them for a while. The single ambiguous statement was best understood in the context of Josephus's larger narratological construction. 

 I have argued the same thing about Luke and Quirinius: whatever else we think about that difficult bit of text, it cannot be taken as evidence that Luke thought Jesus was born in the year 6 CE. Rather, the larger story Luke tells obviously fits in a world where Judea and Galilee were being administered in a unified way. Rather, a reconstruction of Luke's esthetic vision must be prioritized. The author's view of the story he means to tell should be our first reconstruction, after which we can use that reconstruction as context for attempting to understand what Luke was trying to say about that odd proconsul Quirinius.

 I have argued the same thing about Matthew and Archelaus. Instead of getting stuck on one word ("basileuei") and declaring that to be inaccurate (because Archelaus was an ethnarch and not a king), we should rather go back several verses and prioritize Matthew's narratological context. Even if Jesus living in Egypt is pure fiction, Matthew's angel wakes Joseph precisely at Herod's death so that Matthew's readers can recognize the timeframe. Archelaus was indeed, just then, playing the king. He was literally "kinging" in Judea, in his father's position. Recognizing this temporal context lends dramatic irony and praises God's foresight, because Galilee was not yet safe from the dangerous princeling, but it would soon be once Augustus slapped down the upstart.

 I have argued the same thing for the book of Acts. Instead of treating each episode as more or less random, we must first reconstruct the authorial viewpoint. First, the author inserts himself into the story, aligns himself not just with the gentile mission and Paul but also with the narrative climax in Caesarea. The author, as character, appears to remain for two years with the Caesarean church as his base. That the apprehensions they feel for Jersualem have lingered is not anti-Jewish but anti-mother-church. Within that context, it cannot be coincidental that Luke's outstanding point of view characters for the early chapters - Stephen and Philip and Cornelius and Barnabas, the ones Luke goes out of his way to introduce and to follow - also happen to align with the gentile mission, with Antioch, and with Caesarea. Philip and Cornelius in particular signal an authorial focalization. These are not random characters with marginal stories Luke felt bound to include. They are some of his favorites. In terms of comprehending narrative to be representational, that authorial construction should be prioritized as the context for everything else in the text.

 As I said at the top of this post, history itself may be one thing after another but a literary history is the author's attempt to convey their own vision. One cannot merely analyze bits of narrative content and then think about them as truth claims, or potentially true. The exegetical analysis of any passage must root itself in a larger awareness of the "history" as a literary construction, an authorial representation. The individual truth claims are not merely tainted by authorial bias; they are painted with brushstrokes of meaning. As Josephus's overall view of the Pharisees elucidates a proper exegesis of each statement he makes about them, so should we apply Luke's overall disposition (against the heavy-handed Christians in Jersualem) to our exegetical analysis of each line and episode in the book.

 Narrative history is not simply a story, to be taken or left. It is not simply "narrative" because that's what we call this stuff. Narrative history is an authorial representation. Before we judge the potential veracity of a narrated claim, we must first be careful to understand the meaning of that claim, NOT with a bottom-up semiotic and linguistic approach, BUT with a top-down approach of narratology and literature.

 The authorial representation should guide scholarly interpretation of the text. After which, THEN AND ONLY THEN, historical critical judgment should absolutely proceed to have its field day by assessing the evidential value (or lack thereof) in each claim and action depicted. But those claims must be judged with a full awareness of their nature as brush strokes, rather than log entries.

 At any rate... I said all that to say this.

 If any NT scholar happens to be thinking about doing a project called "Acts as History" I dearly hope they pay attention to these important distinctions. 

 Anon...

 

Simplify AND THEN Complicate

 When critics frame simple stories versus complex reality as a binary choice, authoritarians thrive. So long as it's one or the other, the domineering "reality is what I say it is" leaders can simply assert "the stories we tell are NOT fictions." Polarization is not the result of such conflicts; it is their fertile ground.

 If I could wipe away that false binary and re-write critical dogma I would tell academia to assert that simple stories often are and can more often be a pathway to more complex understandings. Scientists know this. Where the university history professor takes an oppositional stance against stories their students have previously heard, the university physics professor affirms the basic concepts of high school teaching and adds, "now we're going to incorporate friction and wind resistance." Although not everyone can keep up with the math in that case, they gain a new appreciation for how simplified the earlier teaching had been.

 Imagine if politicians were culturally expected to share two versions of each story. First, tell me the short version. Next, expand on that with the complicated details. The liars and spin doctors who prefer that the public options for narrative rhetoric should remain binary, suddenly, would be unable to compete. Because they only have their one simplified version of lies, expanding upon which would require receipts. In contrast, the earnest and honest would no longer face an automatic competitive disadvantage. Rather, those who understand the complex version and wish to convey it completely would simply need to learn strategic methods for non-fiction storytelling as an introductory practice.

 The logic here reminds me of the twin gatekeepers in Labyrinth. One liar and one truthteller, one guarding safe passage and one trying to doom you; the trick is to ask both of them, "Which door would he tell me to take?" The liar points to doom, the honest one points to doom, and you pick the opposite door.

 It may be optimistic of me, but I suspect "Give me the simple version and then follow up with the long version" would upend lots of nonsense... especially if we could establish that every purveyor of claims should be expected to follow that custom.

 On a personal note, this whole suggestion developed in me because I wish biblical scholas would see the four Gospels in a similar way - not as simple claims to uphold or dismiss but as authorial representations which point the way to considering various complex possibilities about the real historical past.

 A simple story should invite us to ask questions about the more complex reality.

 The false binary only empowers those who thrive on such conflict.

 Anon...

Go Read Rosson on Staples

 Please direct your attention to Loren Rosson's extensive reviews of two recent books by Jason Staples. If you can read only one review, the second briefly synopsizes the first. Both books regard Paul's sense of what "Israel" meant in the first century. You can search for other positive reception of Jason's work. I recommend Rosson because he writes clearly and offers perspective illuminating for non-specialists.

 Go read those reviews to understand why this new work is important. My comments which follow are strictly personal.

 It was something like twenty-years ago that Jason made some common sense observations, framed by a genuinely fresh perspective, and it took him this long to contextualize those observations comprehensively and defensibly for academic reception. 

 After earning his Ph.D, Jason spent years supporting his family with jobs outside academia while doggedly pursuing his goal of completing his grand passion project. It took him two books. Both have been well received. I admire him greatly.

 Doing scholarship on one's own time is always costly, often thankless, and completing one's work does not guarantee that anybody will care. Although I cannot yet compare the caliber of my work to Jason's, I must say I find it vicariously thrilling to see his long-term project, triumphantly, finding its audience.

 Anon, then...