Book review of "Paul" by N. T. Wright.
Biography of the Apostle St Paul.
Bravo for loads of historical research, and calling to our attention some very important things that might get missed by we "moderns" 2000 years later, like that "Son of God" was a very loaded term right then because Rome's Caesars were just starting to call themselves that. Bravo for really highlighting the ways that Jesus' teaching can be seen as a fulfillment of the Jewish law, and not a new religion. This is always difficult to convey, since for a long time Christianity has been a new religion. But Mr Wright does a good job of putting us into 30 A.D. and seeing the ways that Jesus is the fulfillment - - which is exactly what Jesus said anyway.
The book falls short in several ways.
The first is pretending to NOT be doing psychoanalysis of Paul & all the other characters. I get the distinct impression that for Mr Wright and his academic peers, they want to pretend there is a HUGE difference between speculating about a person's inner motivations and doing psychological analysis. Call it what you will. I was often cringing while the author went on and on about what Paul must have been feeling and thinking. This is difficult enough for us to do with our peers, people who live and work with us. This becomes hubris when applied to Paul, who is not at all my or the author's peer. This leads to the second shortcoming -
The painting of Paul's motivations/thoughts/feelings is done in strokes that are too mundane. This leaves a giant gap between the explanations and what we know historically happened. What happened cannot be explained by the mundane. The speculations are wasted. I wish instead the author would start with what did happen ( like whole newly organized communities springing up in months) and attempt to deduce what are the properties of this super-mundane force that so clearly was at work that could create these surprising results. As a scientist, when I see a totally surprising result, like a bar magnet being pushed away by an electric current, I study this real result and try to understand the laws of electromagnetism. The laws of electromagnetism are wholly different from the laws of billiard balls flying about on the pool table. N.T. Wright is ignoring the properties and laws of spiritual phenomena. For example, one of the properties of this super-mundane force is that it can align the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of people, basically instantaneously. It can also achieve this alignment across time. In other words, the laws of the spirit are not bound by the same laws of time that we usually live in. By many first-hand accounts of the time, the spirit of Jesus entered into people directly, personally. This is very different from our usual experience of, say, inflammatory news stories sent out over radio, TV, social media which turn us all into mindless parroting lunatics and deprive us of a direct personal understanding.
Another shortcoming was the author's claiming that notion of the resurrection of the Christ-God was a totally new idea that had never occurred to anyone before. Granted perhaps the average person in the Roman empire in 30 A.D. did not think this way. But I doubt the average person ever thinks this way. When the Greek or Egyptian mystery schools taught that divine sons/daughters of the living God were sent to Earth to help us reestablish a connection between heaven and earth, both inside ourselves and in society, I am certain that 99% of the populace had no concern for this, nor any motivation for learning how to actually achieve that. Resurrection, transcendence, inviting the conception of God into oneself has always been at the root of human civilization, and has also always been only the concern of very few people in that civilization, just as if you map out all the minutes in my day, only for very few of those minutes am I actually concerned with such notions. It would be a different, and more useful argument, to examine in what ways Jesus was so much more successful than other instances we know about. For example, St Paul and St John write clearly about how Jesus-Christ was able to pierce through time and become someone "through whom all things were made, through all the cycles of time." That is a pretty amazing statement. Is this one of the laws of the spirit, that causality can be rearranged?
If causality can be rearranged, then we might take this fact into our thoughts about the end of time, spoken of so often in early Christian writing. I am not looking at this as a religious person, nor as a religious scholar, but more as a scientist. Emmanuel Swedenborg, who knows a thing or two about dimensions of space and time, says that in the spiritual world there was a major change that took place in the mid 1700's - or at least in what corresponds to that in our line of time - once we start examining other dimensions of time the English language pretty much falls apart, so a clear description of any such event must await some scientist who will develop the language of the various dimensions of Time. Then, pressing ahead with our muddled notions and language, and borrowing from the very useful descriptions of dimensions found in the book "Flatland", our time on Earth is like a line of time. Our contemporary physics sees all cause and effect happening ONLY on this line. But, borrowing from Flatland, the fullness of all reality is much larger than our one line. Any line only exists as part of a plane, a two dimensional surface. And that plane only exists as part of a solid. The full measure of reality is more like a solid of time through which our one personal line of "time on Earth" passes.
If Flatland, Swedenborg, and St John are all correct, who is to say that in the larger three-dimensional world of Time there could not be some major change, of which our line of time on Earth is only a small part. Maybe Time on Earth has ended several times. Maybe all things have been made new several times. The line of time on Earth will keep going or not, but now within an entirely new "solid" of time. This could in part explain the feeling of disconnection most of us feel from long-past civilizations. Most people, myself included, who stand among the ruins of Egyptian ruins, or pre-Egyptian ruins like the Osirion, feel there is some gulf we cannot personally cross that lies between our time and their time.
As a metaphor - imagine a seed of flowering plant, and imagine that we are small parts of that seed, like molecules of fat and sugar and protein in the seed. When the seed begins to sprout, are not all things made new? As the young shoot grows, the molecules inside might find "ruins" of past civilizations from the seed. Did not the entire world of the seed truly end? As the plant matures there will be a new flower. Imagine being molecules in that flower. They are part of a totally new world. They came out of the green plant, but they are above and beyond the green leaves. They might hear stories about that long ago previous civilization, but that was so long ago, everything was so completely different back then. See, now, all things have been made new. And when the flower is pollinated, requiring the intervention of something truly "out of this world", and the old plant dies, dropping the seed on the ground, what would be said about that, what words could possibly express this to our poor one-dimensional molecules? Did everything end, or have all things have been made new, when that next young shoot appears. The scholar-molecules inside this new shoot might look back confused at the texts that have survived. Why do those previous folks talk about an end of time? How could time have ended when clearly we are here, now, in this beautiful young green plant?
Comments
No posts