Does The Media Give Islam A Pass?
Jeffrey Goldberg spies a double-standard:
I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.
Really? I don’t recall George Tiller’s killing—or Eric Rudolf’s before him—as having touched-off some kind of widespread social or intellectual attack on American Christianity. Indeed, the United States Conference of Bishops responded to the Tiller murder in a manner that, had it been used by CAIR, would have prompted cries of moral equivalence:
“Our bishops’ conference and all its members have repeatedly and publicly denounced all forms of violence in our society, including abortion as well as the misguided resort to violence by anyone opposed to abortion,” Cardinal Rigali said. “Such killing is the opposite of everything we stand for, and everything we want our culture to stand for: respect for the life of each and every human being from its beginning to its natural end. We pray for Dr. Tiller and his family.”
And, I dunno, it is what it is. After all, what are you really supposed to say about religion. After all, not only is the bishops’ statement kind of inadequate, but the central premise of Christian religion (the whole Jesus thing) is—according to me and to Jeff Goldberg too—totally false. Islam too! And yet at the same time we all need to coexist. And fortunately the vast majority of people professing every faith, along with the vast majority of those professing no faith, are rejecting violence and not killing people.
97 Responses to “Does The Media Give Islam A Pass?”
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November 9th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office
So anti-abortion Christian is to Planned Parenthood clinic as Muslim US soldier is to US Army Base? The equivalence here is way off. Obviously there is some complexity Hasan’s relationship to the US military that is not there in an anti-abortion activists relationship with Planned Parenthood.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
The Christian is the Jew of liberal Islamism.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
See, Matt, the Center/Left needs to use less reasoned argument and more “shut the fuck up” in dealing with this kind of thing.
I mean, the media today made an old establishmentarian quasi-liberal Cronkite look like Khruschev’s tv buddy.
Which is demonstrates how absolutely out of whack everything is.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
You’re too young to remember it, Matt, but Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 was the turning point that took the wind out of the sails of Newt Gingrich after his 1994 victory, and began Bill Clinton’s comeback.
Was that fair?
As a conservative, I’d have to say: “Yeah, it probably was fair.”
November 9th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Pony Goldberg just can’t help himself.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
A better comparison would be:
Nidal Hasan to Timothy McVeigh.
Weird Islamism to reactionary right anti-governmentism
November 9th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Wasn’t fair to the 168 people McVeigh murdered.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Re “the whole Jesus thing is according to me … totally false”:
I wanna see Matt on Bloggingheads debate this!
November 9th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
ORLY?
November 9th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Goldberg is, of course, a total douche, but I was surprised to see his “The PC media is hiding the TRUTH about Islam” post the other day. Next up it will be, “I’ll tell you who the real victims of discrimination are: White People!” It’s the kind of shit you get from the dumber Cornerites. What a dick Goldberg is.
And fuck Andrew Sullivan too for his recent “Teabaggers are just like anti-Iraq war protesters!” post this past weekend. You did well to get out of there, Matthew.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Uh. Expand on that thought, please…
Luckily for Newt, the purience and self-righteousness of the American people allowed him and Ken Starr to put things back on track in time for the 2000 election.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
So in this bizarre analogy, the devout Cristian is working in the abortion clinic for about 20 years before he shoots the place up?
He was about to be sent to Afghanistan. If he wanted to cause trouble for the US, he would have had ample opportunity to do more there, covertly, without getting shot up. This was probably a case of a guy going nuts in the workplace. It’s a Many of the things that motivate Muslim terrorists may have contributed to driving him nuts, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a terrorist.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I always get amused that Goldberg shills for a group of people who would, even today in the 21st Century, still consider lynching him.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
“I always get amused that Goldberg shills for a group of people who would, even today in the 21st Century, still consider lynching him.”
And what do you base this bigoted slander on?
November 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I’ll be the horrible person today. They say that Palestinian Muslim militants have a saying, “After Saturday, then Sunday”. That is, “Once we defeat the Jews, we’ll get the Christians”.
That’s pretty moot, but “After Friday, then Saturday” wouldn’t be. There’s no particular guarantee that an American pogrom would stop with the Muslims. Most bat-shit Americans are philo-Semitic at the moment, for bat-shit Armageddon reasons, but the bat-shit community is extremely volatile.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
No, for Goldberg’s analogy to work, Tiller would have had to have worked for Planned Parenthood for 20 years, Planned Parenthood would have had to have put him through college, Tiller would have been a happy employee of Planned Parenthood, where he counseled women with post-partum depression, until about 1998 when his father was retroactively aborted, at which point Tiller would have become much more abortiocentric, not to mention angry that he could not find a woman who wore the ultrasound and had five abortions a day, only to be mocked by fellow employees for not having been aborted as a fetus, until Tiller found he was about to be mobilized to Abortistan, whereupon he aborted twenty fellow employees while screaming “everybaby wants to get born,” until he was strangled with an umbilicus by some chick on a Segue™.
As you can see, this is central to his point.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack?
It wouldn’t if said Christian worked for Planned Parenthood and was about to send him out to a foreign country to abort babies against his will, while all of his requests to stop the transfer were rejected, meaning that he was about to be coerced into leaving.
You could still rightly say his religion was responsible for his views on abortion, but religion here is clearly a second order motivation.
His primary motivation is to avoid having to go abort babies.
Which, like Hasan, would make him a hypocrite if his solution is run around murdering people, instead of accepting the possibility of imprisonment for his beliefs.
The latter, unlike murdering, is pretty well-respected; or, at least, we have to pay lip service to the idea that it’s respected whenever we mention MLK.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
And JM said it better than me.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
And what do you base this bigoted slander on?
Sad to say, the past and even not so past history of, as well as expressions of intent from, a very large number of my co-religionists.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
What was “Lone domestic terrorist” Christopher Montfort’s religion? Was it Christianity?
I don’t know but it would be irresponsible not to speculate!
November 9th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
@18: Except for the minor fact that Tiller was the *victim* of that assassination, not the perpetrator.
Well, not so minor, really.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Yes, he did, but he got the names wrong. Tiller was the guy killed. But JM still gets to the central idiocy of Goldberg’s argument. I’d have thought MY would pick up on this, especially given his hatred of analogies.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
The overarching question here is what to do about what happened at Fort Hood (or any other mass shooting). Did Hasan say Allah Akbar? Sure, ok, witnesses say he did. And George Tiller probably said something along the way about Jesus and the little babies. Why did they say this? Maybe they went nuts (as in clinically insane) and thought God told them to do what they did, or maybe they are totally sane but sociopathic and did it for twisted religious purposes totally out of whack with most people’s religious beliefs (as opposed to brain chemistry imbalance purposes). This is a topic for phychologists and legal professors that I don’t find particularly interesting.
Was it terrorism? Well, the victims were most likely terrified, so maybe, although you could say the same about pretty much any crime, so maybe not. This is an uninteresting semantics debate to me. More importantly, did they do it as part of a larger conspiracy? What I’ve heard so far is that Hasan acted alone (although he used to go to a somewhat shady mosque), and that Tiller also acted alone (although he seems to have extensive connections with Operation Rescue folks). This is worth looking into and I’m sure FBI, Army investigators, or whoever else are looking/have looked into it. If there are/were others involved they should be arrested and charged.
But again the real question is what happens next? With Tiller we were fine to write it off as some wingnut, although I suspect Operation Rescue now has a few more FBIers watching what they do. I’m not aware of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, or the President of the United States, being asked if Christianity glorifies violence. With Hasan, every media provider in the country has asked the nearest Muslim they can find what they have to say about it and demanded that they all renounce violence (which they all have). Then you have Leiberman, Peretz, and the rest of the neocon gang, along with Limbaugh and the straight-out racist gang, teeming up to darkly suggest that we need to keep an eye on all Muslims. Along with yahoos saying stuff along the lines of “This is why we are fighting them!” As if Hasan flipping out is a reason to invade Iran.
Also, the VERY NEXT DAY after a Muslim shot up Fort Hood, a Christian shot up an office in Florida and I haven’t heard anything about Congressional investigations into Christianity, or local churches being asked if they denounce the shooting, or suggestions that Christians not be allowed into workplaces without extra scrutiny.
I would say the media absolutely does not give Islam a pass. For anything. Even stuff that all Muslims in the country/world except Hasan have nothing to do with. I’d say the media has been acting pretty shamefully racist about this.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
“Muslims get a free pass.” This canard is more often than not disseminated by neocon or neocon-sympathizing Jews. I heard Bernie Goldberg say it to his quartermaster O’Reilly on FOX the other day. Goldberg, Goldfarb, they all say it, it’s their constant refrain. Of course, au contraire, the reverse is the case. It’s Israel-first Jews who get the free pass. Has anyone in the MSM ever asked Joe Lieberman why he was so gung-ho about invading Iraq, his twisted and distorted if not traitorous views on Iran, Syria, Hamas, War with Russia, ties to the Insurance Industry, ad nauseum. When former AIPAC man Wolf Blitzer convenes a CNN panel discussion on anything related to the Middle East – does anyone ever say: “Oh, Wolf, weren’t you a big cheese at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee?” Was Paul Wolfowitz ever queried on his ties to Israel? ZOG and Zionist Occupied MSM – it goes on and on and on. Yet, the story is – it’s those damn Muslims who are the pampered and protected class, who get to slide on everything. Pure ugly Zio-nazi bullshit.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
The answer might be for people to stop believing total nonsense of all kinds, but not killing people is good.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
God dammit, Tiller was the guy killed not the killer. It’s late.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
You may be too young to remember it, Mr. Sailer, but Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war agasint the United States in 1941 totally discredited your views on race, and just about every thing else.
“Yeah, it probably was fair.”
November 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
You seem to be a little confused about who George Tiller was.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
My apologies to Scott Roeder.
In my defense, well, indictment actually, I originally had “Tillman,” which adds a completely new layer of WTF.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I would say the media absolutely does not give Islam a pass.
See, if you’re a wingnut, anything less than total condemnation of Islam, and Muslims, IS giving it a pass.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
It’s really amazing how this issue has changed. And the only reason it changed is that the IRA stopped planting bombs. When I was a kid, Irish Catholic churches were openly financing the IRA terrorists. They weren’t just funneling money, they were publicly saying that they were doing it. And nobody thought there was anything wrong with it. And back then, it was perfectly okay to say you were in the IRA. My mom used to have her foreign students over for dinner. One time an Irish student of hers announced that he wasn’t coming back next semester. My mom said: “why? you’re such a good student.” And he replied: “The IRA is calling me home, I have to fight.” And none of us were really surprised. I even gave him ten dollars and wished him luck. And we all knew he was going to kill innocent people. But imagine if he were Lebanese and was going home to fight for Hezbollah. It would have been very different. We’d have called the police. We do have a double standard, but it’s certainly not that we let Islam off the hook.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
That guy who abducted and raped Jaycee Dugard was a bat-shit crazy, devout Christian. And you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Catholic priest balls deep into an altar boy.
Guess we have to keep the kids away from all Christians now. Never know which one is a pedophile.
/wingnut logic.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Matt’s peeved because he and the rest of the mainstream media ended up with egg all over their face. The NYT and the rest pushed hard the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder theory (running a five part discussion on it!) to divert attention away from the obvious: the guy is a Palestinian Muslim terrorist.
The epistemological core of today’s conventional wisdom is that Good People Are Oblivious to the Obvious. The more obvious, the more ethical/cultural status superiority brownie points you pile up by claiming to be oblivious. Only evil people point out what’s in front of everyone’s noses.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
This was probably a case of a guy going nuts in the workplace.
And there ain’t nothing more American than that.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
In the nick of time, SS arrives to save me from having the dumbest post on the thread.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
The epistemological core of today’s conventional wisdom is that Good People Are Oblivious to the Obvious.
When Popeye wakes up every morning, he thinks to himself “just what kind of cod-scientific bullshit am I going to come up with today to match my prejudices?”
Take away his copy of Excel, and chances are he’d be shooting up the nearest fast-food joint. Small mercies.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
“And there ain’t nothing more American than that.”
Amen, brother.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Am I the only one who has to mention that the press generally gives all religions a pass?
I would love to finally see a headline “Religious Extremism Strikes Again!”
November 9th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
fostert makes an excellent point @31, as does everyone else arguing that Muslims clearly do not get a break in media coverage.
However, if this seems underreported (which I doubt it actually is) it’s more likely a function of the military trying to minimize image damage and circling the wagons. If he was an extremist it calls into question the Army’s ability to screen for ideologically extreme individuals. If he wasn’t an extremist but was just plain crazy it calls into question the Army’s ability to screen for insane people. Better to just threaten to close out anyone not willing to play by whatever ground rules are set, answer as few questions as possible, pass out some Support our Troops stickers, and hope the whole thing blows over.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Is there even the slightest evidence, beyond the fact that Hasan was Muslim and that yelled the Arabic-language version of “Geronimo!” when he started shooting, to suggest that he had a political motive?
I’m asking seriously. I read he didn’t have any political stuff on his computer, that he didn’t seem to be involved with any radical groups, and that he had no ties with any foreign organizations.
Less seriously: why is it that people who hold themselves out as experts on Islam think that “Allahu Akbar!” is primarily a statement of solidarity with political Islam? I yell all sorts of variants of the Son of God’s name when I’m in extremis, but that doesn’t make me a Christian Reconstructionist.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Average American, I think you make a good point as well. But it’s important to consider that our military is very overloaded now with mental health issues. And it’s not easy for them to attract the professional talent they need to deal with it. We now know that people really were concerned about Dr Hasan. But when you’re having trouble hiring people with these skills, it’s really hard to fire someone. I’d like to say the military should have seen this coming, but what can they do? With the mental health professionals they have, they can’t even come close to dealing with the problems they face. They are simply overwhelmed. And it’s not really anyone’s fault.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
If he was an extremist it calls into question the Army’s ability to screen for ideologically extreme individuals. If he wasn’t an extremist but was just plain crazy it calls into question the Army’s ability to screen for insane people.
And if he was neither, it demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iraq and Afghanistan have ripped the heart out of the Army.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
the guy is a Palestinian Muslim terrorist.
I don’t think you could say he was a terrorist, Sailer. It isn’t clear to me that he meant to link up with any larger message, or meant for his actions to terrorize the larger community. But his religion certainly played some part, and I assume that angle will be investigated. Does anyone doubt it?
I want to know when the media starts warning us about Southern conservatives. You know, the guys at the other end of the US’s last existential war? Like violence as a means of effecting political ends?
November 9th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
The best response to Goldberg is call his bluff: if he wants us to agree that the shooting has a “larger meaning” connected to Hasan’s religion, let’s do it. But let’s also ask him to tell us what that larger meaning is. Is he prepared to argue publicly that there’s just something unique about Islam that ensures that its adherents will engage in violence in a way that the adherents of other religions won’t? Maybe he has a more enlightened view, but we can’t know until he tells us.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I think it might be broadly true that we tend to go softer on religion than on other human institutions, practices, beliefs, etc, such as political ideologies, businesses/corporations, governments, etc. No one would say that Franco wasn’t really a Falangist, but only implementing a twisted interpretation of Falangism which distorted an otherwise good thing. (There are claims of the sort “George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative” and “Kim Jong Il isn’t a real communist,” but I don’t think these are as broadly accepted as statements of the form “Fred Phelps isn’t a real Christian.” Then again, I could be wrong.
In general, conservatives think that a standard which claims religion is never responsible for anything bad is great, except when they feel like a bit of Islam-baiting.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
“Is there even the slightest evidence, beyond the fact that Hasan was Muslim and that yelled the Arabic-language version of “Geronimo!” when he started shooting, to suggest that he had a political motive?”
Political motive? Probably not. But religious motive? Apparently so:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120162816
Put your point about “Allahu Akbar” is spot on. I’ve said it many times, and I’m no Muslim terrorist. My only connections to terrorism are using petroleum products and giving ten dollars to someone in the IRA.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
What a different place the internet would be today if Steve Sailer had been born with a larger penis.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
I imagine somewhere someone is at work on a Philip K. Dick-like alternate history of the internet starting with just such a premise.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
“My only connections to terrorism are using petroleum products and giving ten dollars to someone in the IRA.”
Oops, I forgot about buying a kilo of Lebanese hash with a Hezbollah stamp on it twenty years ago. That really was supporting terrorism. But it was mainly about getting high. And hey, I supported the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan too, just like St Ronald asked me to do. Although I’m guessing Mr Reagan didn’t mean it quite that way.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
From The Telegraph:
Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut
By Nick Allen in Fort Hood
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America’s Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.
He also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.
Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe.
It was the latest in a series of “red flags” about his state of mind that have emerged since the massacre at Fort Hood, America’s largest military installation, on Thursday. …
Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a “Muslim first and American second.”
One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints. [Emphasis added]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6526030/Fort-Hood-gunman-had-told-US-military-colleagues-that-infidels-should-have-their-throats-cut.html
November 9th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Re: the central premise of Christian religion (the whole Jesus thing) is—according to me and to Jeff Goldberg too—totally false
I should be interested, then, to know just what Mr. Yglesias thinks Jesus was. You can argue that he was a megalomaniacal yahoo, or you may argue that he was a vile heretic, or you may argue that He was the Incarnate Word, but to say that he was just a nice guy, as Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and Muhammed all said, will not stand up to scrutiny. As Anselm said, aut Deus aut homo malus.
Greg,
I think evangelical Protestantism is a largely intellectually incoherent enterprise which strips many fundamental truths out of Christian liturgy, faith and morals, and I have little sympathy with it. That said, I don’t think it has much of a history of anti-Semitism (as compared with the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Lutheran, and most other types of Christianity, which do of course have an abysmal record of anti-Semitism). An America run by evangelical Protestant conservatives would not be a very nice place, but I doubt it would be anti-Semitic.
Parenthetically, a joke. What’s the difference between Hermann Goering and Steve Sailer? Goering had a bigger c*ck.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
“But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. ”
This is seriously one of the most delusional statements I’ve ever read. I’ve been going back and forth on the “liberal” news networks all afternoon and the Muslim angle is virtually all they’ve been talking about in regard to this story.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
This is seriously one of the most delusional statements I’ve ever read. I’ve been going back and forth on the “liberal” news networks all afternoon and the Muslim angle is virtually all they’ve been talking about in regard to this story.
But that’s not what they talked about for the first 24 to 36 hours. Here, for example, is a November 6th five-part series on NYTimes.com on “Combat Stress and the Fort Hood Gunman.”
By this point, the mainstream media can’t pull the wool over the public’s eyes anymore, but they sure tried.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Re: Is there even the slightest evidence, beyond the fact that Hasan was Muslim and that yelled the Arabic-language version of “Geronimo!” when he started shooting, to suggest that he had a political motive?
Correct mne if I’m wrong, but it’s more the Muslim equivalent of “Lord, have mercy”, as I understand it. Which no one, outside perhaps of some particularly irascible Hindu fundamentalists or Hitchensian agnostics, would understand as a war-cry.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
In 2002, I interviewed a guy from California, who had played little league baseball there (which was our get-acquainted small talk, since I had just started coaching), named Anwar al-Awlaki, who was then the imam of the largest mosque in the greater DC area, in Falls Church, Virginia. Several of the 9-11 hijackers had attended his mosque, and presumably heard him preach — we talked a bit about that, although our main subject was what I was calling “the Americanization of Islam”*.
One of the things we talked about was whether it was possible to be an American AND a Muslim — I noted, for example, the impressive percentage of American Muslims in the Marine Corps, and I contrasted what al-Awlaki told me with the views of Jamil Diab and W. Deen Muhammad, who led the largest mass conversion in US history when the Nation of Islam was abolished in 1975. (What Farrakhan leads is something smaller and much less significant.)
A few months later, al-Awlaki took it on the lam to Yemen, where he remains today: the FBI’s interest in him had grown a bit too energetic.
There are reports that Nidal Malik Hasan, who had lived in the DC area for awhile, was a fan of al-Awlaki. This is what al-Awlaki had to say today, AFTER the massacre:
“Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam.” http://www.anwar-alawlaki.com
*Researching that piece is why I coined the webname “theAmericanist”, btw — I had asked a professor at Brandeis, an expert on Americanization, who I should be talking to about Islam in America. He immediately explained (naturally, being a professor at Brandeis) that it was remarkably like “the Americanist heresy” in the Catholic Church, the only heresy that originated in the US to have been condemned by a Pope — Leo XIII, in 1899. The essence of the Americanist heresy is what MattY is groping for in his post — the idea that civics has a moral value in itself, and I realized — hey, that’s me. A series of Popes had specifically condemned that idea, along with freedom of religion and speech, and the separation of Church and State, as being wholly incompatible with Catholicism. It was my friend from Brandeis insight that what happened with Roman Catholicism in America, is what is happening with Islam…
Except, perhaps, for that ex-little leaguer from California.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Spamming unsourced guff from the Telegraph really doesn’t help you out here, Popeye. It feeds your well-established prejudices, which is tediously familiar to us al;.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
In other words, don’t bother us with facts, we’ve got our fingers plugged in our ears, nyah-nyah-we-can’t-hear-you!
November 9th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Something about this Ft. Hood terrorist massacre story doesn’t smell right. Maybe, Steve Sailor wins the macaroon for being semi-right, who knows? But, there’s a kind of reductio ad absurdum aspect to all the threatening postures attributed to Hasan. I’m not suggesting that he might’ve been some kind of Mossad Manchurian Candidate. Only that the whole mishmash sounds like some bad TV script penned by Joe Lieberman, Jr.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
In the first 24 hours I learned from mainstream outlets that he was Muslim, giving away Korans, associated with webpostings sympathetic to suicide bombings, and other facts. So aside from being as utterly delusional as Goldberg, you’re right.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
In other words, Popeye, why should we assume you’re doing anything different from the thing that’s established you as America’s Top Professional Racist?
November 9th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
“Correct mne if I’m wrong, but it’s more the Muslim equivalent of “Lord, have mercy”, as I understand it.”
I’d say you’re pretty damn close. When it’s used in normal conversation, I’d translate it as “God is great enough to bless us all.” The only real difference here is that “Lord have mercy” asks God for mercy, and the Muslims assume that God will provide mercy. They aren’t asking, they are merely stating that God will provide. As someone who doesn’t believe in God, I find it a little disconcerting. If I’m on a train in Turkey, I don’t want Allah to keep it on the tracks, I want everyone who designed and built the system to do that. But in Islam, that is the same thing. Everyone who built the system was guided by Allah. Allah works through people. When Charlie Wilson gave Stingers to the Mujahadeen, they interpreted that as coming from Allah, and Charlie Wilson was Allah’s way of providing.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
“but to say that he was just a nice guy, as Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and Muhammed all said, will not stand up to scrutiny.”
Umm, why? Are you saying he was an asshole? Or are you saying that mere mortals can’t come up with good ideas? Was Einstein the Son of God, or was he wrong? That seems to be the only two possibilities that you are willing to entertain. Can you maybe explain this further? And I’ll stipulate up front that I think Jesus was a mortal who had valuable insights to offer. Just like the Buddha, but shorter lived. Had he lived longer, he would have offered us more. But when you directly confront both the religious and political authorities, your life will be short.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
The epistemological core of today’s conventional wisdom is that Good People Are Oblivious to the Obvious. The more obvious, the more ethical/cultural status superiority brownie points you pile up by claiming to be oblivious. Only evil people point out what’s in front of everyone’s noses.
If we’re going to psychoanalyze Steve Sailer, I would say this rather than racial animus, per se, is what motivates him. An adolescent, romanticized, almost Randian contrarianism. Only Steve and his fellow travelers have the strength and moral courage to stand up for the truth in the face of society’s efforts to silence them. It’s counterculture for squares.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Fostert,
The problem with your thesis is that Jesus made explicit claims to divinity and divine prerogatives. If he was not who He claimed to be, then he was a megalomaniacal yahoo not too different from the late and unlamented Hong Xiuquan who claimed to be His younger brother.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
“The problem with your thesis is that Jesus made explicit claims to divinity and divine prerogatives.”
Did he? The Bible itself is not conclusive on that. And the stories of Jesus were written well after his death and surely contain exaggerations. Any quote from Jesus comes from decades after he said it. So we really don’t know if Jesus ever claimed to be divine. It’s just hearsay. With the Buddha, he was quoted while he was still alive. The Buddha apparently did claim divine birth (Lotus born), but he never claimed divine existence. And though he was of the Brahmin caste, he insisted that the Brahmins were equal to the Dalits and that all people were equal. And we know this because his teachings were recorded during his lifetime. With Jesus, that is not the case. What he said is hearsay and then it was scrubbed from there by Constantine.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut
Well, he was TRYING to get out of the military. I suppose he might have said all kinds of things to get that accomplished. Notice he didn’t actually cut anyone’s throat. He was pissed at the army so he attacked the army. If he really wanted to do a terrorist act he could have attacked a nice soft target like a synagogue or the J-street conference.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
The problem with your thesis is that Jesus made explicit claims to divinity and divine prerogatives
Atman is Brahman…
November 9th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Ahh, but it is good to be arguing with Hector again. It was a little freaky when we were agreeing all the time. Bless you, Hector.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
And I’ll stipulate up front that I think Jesus was a mortal who had valuable insights to offer. Just like the Buddha, but shorter lived.
I strongly agree with that statement as applied to the Buddha. I think it makes perfect sense that some adherents to other faiths or agnostics gravitate toward that belief as to Jesus. While such a formulation makes no sense to Christians who take the New Testament more or less as historical fact (I’m not even going to get into those who accept the OT as historical fact), non-Christians have no real reason to accept that Jesus made a claim to divinity. The only problem with that is that inevitably, they’re picking and choosing what they think Jesus really said, since their belief that he was a wise teacher with some valuable insight is also necessarily based on statements attributed to him in the Bible, no?
November 9th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I don’t know why Goldberg brought up the example he did. As has been pointed out above a much better analogue is McVeigh. A lonely, unbalanced, angry and alienated guy. And this is a key part of the story. But not the only part. He became immersed in a culture, had conversations, and his alienation and anger were stoked by speaking and listening to angry rhetoric. We all understand this. Those who gave social validation to his journey bear some responsibility. That social validation gave him permission to act out.
Hasan is still an open question. He wasn’t a terrorist in the sense of being part of a political conspiracy. McVeigh was part of a conspiracy but it was very small — him and one other guy maybe. Was he a terrorist? Unclear. I don’t know that that’s the relevant question.
What does need to be understood is this: what community, virtual and otherwise, was Hassan engaged with, and what conversations did he have, and did any of these engagements and conversations contribute to his alienation, did they stoke his anger, did they contribute to making this act seem normal, even morally necessary? Because if so they gave him permission as McVeigh was given permission.
We all understand this too.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
“The only problem with that is that inevitably, they’re picking and choosing what they think Jesus really said”
In fairness, that’s true of all religions. There has always been an editor for every religious text. Christianity has the issue of having a prophet who didn’t live very long. The body of work isn’t big enough to get a definitive picture of what he was really saying. With Muhammad, it’s more clear. With the Buddha, it’s prolific but confusing.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
We have no Jesus except (in descending order of putative historical proximity) the one in the Pauline material, the canonical Gospels, and the non-canonical Gospels. There is no basis to ascribe any traits at all to this character outside of these texts, so to say that Jesus claimed divinity for himself makes sense in that context.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
The McVeigh-Hasan comparison by larry birnbaum above sounds about right. The Clinton administration used the McVeigh bombing for their political benefit, blaming Republicans. Maybe that wasn’t fair but at least the Clintons got the arrow pointing in the right direction: McVeigh was a right wing extremist.
In contrast, JFK was assassinated by an extreme leftist, but initial media chatter blamed right wing Republicans in Dallas, and his assassination proved a huge boon to the left.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
“The problem with your thesis is that Jesus made explicit claims to divinity and divine prerogatives. If he was not who He claimed to be, then he was a megalomaniacal yahoo…”
The reason this doesn’t make sense—and it didn’t make sense when C.S. Lewis, possibly the most facile moral reasoner of the twentieth century, said it either—is that in Jesus’s context saying “I am the son of God” or “I am a prophet” was just not as uncommon/unusual/unbelievable as it is today. It was possible to hold that belief without being *insane,* just like someone who today believes they were Joan of Arc in a past life isn’t insane, just a little on the kooky/eccentric side.
A parallel to Lewis’s argument would be that you can’t believe that Aristotle was a good philosopher who made some useful observations, because he was so wrong about so many of his scientific claims. Most people can see through an argument like that, but Hector never met an argument for divinity that he didn’t like.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Of course there’s a less controversial way to read this (although I don’t know enough about Goldberg to know if it’s fair). Much of the commentary seems to assume he’s calling for the old essentialist game of “Person belonging to X group did this awful thing; this shows X group is BAD.”
But at the same time it seems clear that Malik’s faith — and the difficulty he had in reconciling it with his surroundings — was at least a contributing factor to his violent snap. That is at least worth thinking about, particularly since this country has done a very good job in recent years of AVOIDING the kind of Islamic alienation that’s plagued much of Europe.
Likewise, it should be troubling to us that so many of the recent terror plots interrupted by the Obama Admin have involved American-born Muslims, or people with long histories here. This is a very different class of possible terrorist than the 9/11 hijackers; that means something. The right wing will say it means something about Islam, but it’s equally likely that it means something about the state of religious discourse and pluralism in America. Most likely both, but it’s a question we need to wrap our heads around quite quickly — a country with such a strong legal tradition of religious liberty can’t afford a violently alienated minority faith.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
There’s an inevitable conflict in terms of domestic terrorism blowback between the two dominant grand strategies of the Bush-Obama Era: “Invade the World” and “Invite the World.”
Teddy Kennedy sponsored the 1965 immigration expansion act three years before Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian immigrant angry about Bobby’s promise to send 50 fighters to Israel.
The Kennedys grew up in an era of restricted immigration, so it’s understandable that they didn’t grasp the inverse relationship between “Invite” and “Invade”.
But the current neocons / neolibs have less excuse.
The Invite / Invade tradeoff is simple. If you want to run an ambitious foreign policy, such as Britain did in the 19th Century, then it’s prudent to keep out the foreigners you have aggrieved, as Victorian England sensibly did. In contrast, if you let in millions of immigrants, as 19th Century America did, it’s wisest to run an isolationist foreign policy, so that immigrants aren’t angry at you. America mostly did this in the century after George Washington advised it.
Or, most prudently of all, our country could refrain from pestering foreigners while not letting them pester us.
Of course, the one alternative out of four that’s self-evidently self-defeating—Invite / Invade—is considered the only respectable one. In the eyes of, say, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, all the alternatives to Invite / Invade are simply unthinkable.
Thus, our country’s grand strategies are, literally, thoughtless. We must bomb foreigners overseas until they start liking us more. Meanwhile, at home we aren’t allowed to notice that some of their co-religionists in the United States are liking us less. Discerning is discriminating. Discriminating is bad. Our thoughts must be utterly indiscriminate!
November 9th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I can’t believe I’m reading a thread where Steve Sailer is making the sane arguments.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
The top story in the New York Times is “U.S. Knew of Fort Hood Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric” so the premise is false.
I never really bought the PTSD angle but I’m not going to blame the press for undersensationalizing the story before all the facts were in. What exactly would it have accomplished? It’s not like his religion or political views were a secret. Playing up the “Muslims are Evil!” line could have serious consequnces, anyway. Are we to conclude that the fourth estate is failing if it refrains from inciting race riots?
November 10th, 2009 at 2:12 am
joe from Lowell Says:
Besides the fact that Hasan attended the same anti-American mosque as two of the 9/11 terrorists?
Besides the fact that Hasan was a devoted follower of a jihadist imam?
Besides the fact the Hasan attempted contact with Al Queda?
Not to mention the fact that your cowardly ass doesn’t show up at Reason.com anymore?
November 10th, 2009 at 2:22 am
Hector-
Definitely!
That’s why the last words Daniel Pearl heard were “Allah Akbar”… the Muslims wanted God to show mercy on the dude whose throat they had just sliced open.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Hector,
The CS Lewis, insane, a liar, or divine argument, which I was disappointed to see he actually slipped into the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when reading that to my kids, is a really bad argument.
We don’t have direct records of what Jesus said. We have people writing a couple of generations after he died. And those people were writing for different audiences which is why their versions of what he said disagree in focus.
We don’t know that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, we know that his followers some time after his death, and as they were attempting to expand the religion from the Jewish audience to a Pagan one, claimed that he said he was the Son of God. And the Gospels indicate that Jesus was fond of speaking in parables, maybe one can’t trust the Gospels as a source of how he spoke, but if one can’t then the argument falls apart anyway.
To a Jewish audience the claim to be the Son of God is incoherent. To a Pagan audience it could be a big draw. So Lewis’ argument leaves out what may be the most likely possibilities, Jesus did not make that claim, it was attributed to him by later followers, or Jesus meant the claim in a metaphoric way given that he was speaking to an audience for whom the idea that God had a son would be a violation of their first commandment.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:16 am
What exactly is Sailer’s point supposed to be with McVeigh? Or is it a mistake to expect his posts to have coherent points?
The media has been all over the muslim angle. His point seems to be that before the information was in there was not a rush to judgement.
I am old enough to remember the McVeigh bombings. The early speculation was that it was a muslim. It certainly is an odd take on history to think that the country turned against Gingrich because McVeigh was a Christian. In fact McVeigh being Christian doesn’t seem to have played a big part of the coverage of the event at all. After the false alarms about muslim terrorists, the focus was accurately on the isolationist militant angle.
It also isn’t clear whether his view is that before pursuing civil liberties we should have some how exiled all of the rednecks in the country to get rid of James Earl Ray in advance. In a country of immigrants, our acts of violence seem to be a mix of recent immigrants, children of immigrants, and people whose families have been in the country for long periods of time. But that is what our country is made up of, so that is hardly surprising. It is true that if one limits ones focus to only one of those groups it looks like that group is a real problem. But I suspect there is something wrong with that as an argument technique.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Only if you’re a conservative.
The fact that Hasan only attacked once it was his ass that was on the line seems to escape them. Or maybe it doesn’t, and they really really really need that race riot.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I think he was a mortal whose followers gained valuable insights long after he died. In all likelihood, Jesus was probably much like the the 300 or so messiahs the Romans crucified – violent, parochial and unrealistic in his goals.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Oy…
To correct a couple errors: First, my own — I misremembered what al-Awlaki told me. He was from New Mexico, not California.
Second — will you guys stop bragging about your ignorance? F’r instance, “We don’t have direct records of what Jesus said. We have people writing a couple of generations after he died. And those people were writing for different audiences which is why their versions of what he said disagree in focus.”
Um, not quite.
What are called the “synoptic” Gospels (not the “canonical” ones, that’s a different distinction) are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, followed by John, the ones that tell eyewitness stories of Christ’s birth, career, execution, and resurrection. They are four different versions of the same narrative, and (along with the Old Testament and the rest of the New) are part of arguably the most thoroughly edited text in history.
The general consensus of the synoptics as history are that Mark was written first, followed by Matthew, then Luke and John. The older tradition was different, that Matthew was first, then Luke, and Mark was a mix of the two — but most historians now agree that Mark came first (before the boffo ending was added), and that there must have been an original text, known as “Q”, which both Matthew and Mark used.
ALL of which were widely circulated within living memory of Christ’s death — that is, some scholars think that Mark was written down as early as the 50s (that is, within 25 years or so of the Crucifixion, or closer to his lifetime than 2009 is to Duran Duran), and in any case had to have been written around 70AD, when Jerusalem was destroyed. If you buy into the Q thesis, that would put a written text being circulated describing Christ’s life into the decade after he died.
Bear in mind, most communication in the First Century CE was chain storytelling by trained communicators; there was written material (particularly financial accounts in Latin and Greek), but basically people communicated FROM a text, whenever something became important enough to have a commonly-accepted, authoritative statement of whatever it was.
So the idea that the synoptic gospels were written down “generations” after Christ’s death is simply not supported by any evidence. The ACTUAL evidence supports that there was an original textual outline laying out the basics of his life within a decade, which became the first authoritative text perhaps as early as 10 years after that, and certainly by the time the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE.
Nor it is true that they were all written for different audiences. The Epistles, to be sure, were written for particular audiences — they’re LETTERS, fercryinoutloud, send to folks in Corinth or Galatia. But the actual story of Christ’s life set out in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is clearly grounded in eyewitness accounts circulated during the lives of the eyewitnesses. (One of the odder but vivid pieces of evidence is that, very late, the guy who got his ear severed and restored in Gethsemene is NAMED: Malchus, in John.)
It is important to note the distinction between “generations” and “living memory” — we are at least four generations past WW2, but there are still a handful of people for whom the war is a living memory. Eisenhower and Churchill died in the 60s, of course (much the way Christ was gone by 33 CE), but the guy who was drafted at 18 in 1944 could easily have lived with his memory sharp as ever into the 1990s and beyond.
Just so with the evangelists, certainly with Mark, Matthew and Luke, whose texts were all done in roughly that order. (If you really wanted to play fair in complaining about how the synoptics change the story, the original text of Mark stops at the empty tomb: but the Resurrection wasn’t added “generations” later — more like a decade.)
And the real key to understanding the evolution of Christianity is John, the last of the Four Gospels to be written, and the only one evidently written ENTIRELY after the fall of the Temple. This is the one that refers generically to “the Jews”, where the others refer to “Pharisees” and “Sadducees”, and was thus many generations later the foundation of Christian anti-Semitism.
But it makes perfect sense in context, when you realize that the New Testament was entirely written (and circulated and edited) under Roman oppression. Somebody pointed out that the text reads like the Diary of Anne Frank, only without the Nazis. It is important to remember that ALL the Apostles, and Christ himself, apparently considered themselves to be Jews, and they certainly acted that way — but there were vivid splits within Judaism on the meaning of the Messiah under Roman occupation, the role of the Temple (built by the arch-collaborator Herod), the quisling character of the Sanhedrin, and so on. That points to a connection between the driving the moneychangers from the (collaborationist) Temple and Christ’s prompt execution.
So there is plenty to work with in the New Testament without misrepresenting “generations”.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:07 am
I’d say Jesus is as much a historical figure as Thor or Zeus.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:46 am
@85: To say that the gospels are “grounded in eyewitness accounts” doesn’t support the accuracy of any particular part of them. Even if some parts are very old, even contemporary with the events, it’s very difficult to know *which* parts without unearthing a lost copy of the Q text (which might never have been written down at all — it could have been composed and circulated in an oral tradition before being written down separately in two versions) or something like that.
Furthermore, even a contemporary account might have been embellished or outright falsified for the purposes of those writing it (this is likely both for professional storytellers — who have to keep the audience interested — and for people promoting a new religion). And even later edits are unlikely to leave fingerprints unless a pre-edit text is discovered.
Accordingly, accepting the whole melange of original text and later modifications as gospel (so to speak) would be highly foolish.
Therefore, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions about Jesus with any definiteness — even the idea that he lived and was crucified is questionable, never mind divine origin or miracles or resurrection.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Probably not the Son of God, since Matt is Jewish and all, you know. It’s like Hector has no idea that substantial number of people exist who have heard all about Christianity and its half-assed apologetics and just don’t find it compelling. How did you think this would go, Hector? Matt would say “jesus who?” and you’d say “Jesus, the son of God, who died for our sins” and Matt would say “oh shit! Never heard of that guy, but that’s awesome! I’m totally a Christian now!”
Christian apologetics must, by necessity, begin with a validation of the Bible. Even the infamous CS Lewis trilemma assumes the historicity of the Bible. Unfortunately the Bible gives every indication of being an error-prone book of Middle Eastern myths, not a divinely-authored revelation. It’s not even particularly moral.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Re: ALL of which were widely circulated within living memory of Christ’s death — that is, some scholars think that Mark was written down as early as the 50s (that is, within 25 years or so of the Crucifixion, or closer to his lifetime than 2009 is to Duran Duran), and in any case had to have been written around 70AD, when Jerusalem was destroyed. If you buy into the Q thesis, that would put a written text being circulated describing Christ’s life into the decade after he died.
Americanist,
I think that the Gospels all had to have been written prior to AD 70. As John A.T. Robinson said, if any of the four had been written after 70 AD, they would have made explicit references to the destruction of the Second Temple as fulfilment of Christ’s prophecies (in the same way as the Old Testament referred to the destruction of the First Temple, and as St. John’s Gospel referred to the martyrdom of Peter in John 21:18-19).
As for Christ, it isn’t true that ‘he considered himself a Jew’. He was a Jew culturally and (almost certainly) by maternal descent, but not theologically. Jews do not believe in the concepts of a Trinitarian God or Incarnation. Christ on the other hand certainly knew that He was in some sense divine, and that God was a Trinity (e.g. Matthew 28:19).
Hugo, great point. If someone is going to deny that the Gospels are accurate in the sayings in which He claims divinity (or by the same token the other ‘hard sayings’ like the ones on remarriage after divorce), then on what ground to they accept the nice, warm & fuzzy sayings? Either the Gospels are historically accurate or they aren’t, and if they aren’t there is no reason to believe Jesus was anything but a figment of someone’s imagination.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Re: Christ on the other hand certainly knew that He was in some sense divine, and that God was a Trinity
To what _extent_ he knew his own divinity is an interesting question- I tend to subscribe to Bishop Charles Gore’s views on the kenotic theory of the incarnation, which suggest that there was a lot that was hidden from him during his 30-odd years on earth, and that he suffered human limitations including the limitation of ignorance. If Jesus had known everything, including the full reality of His own divinity, then he could not have had the virtue of faith, and would not have been perfect in his human nature. Nevertheless, he still clearly _believed_ that he was in some sense divine, even if he didn’t really understand it or know to what extent.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Re: In all likelihood, Jesus was probably much like the the 300 or so messiahs the Romans crucified – violent, parochial and unrealistic in his goal.
To paraphrase Elijah vs. the prophets of Baal, where are those other 300 messiahs now?
November 10th, 2009 at 11:56 am
To paraphrase Elijah vs. the prophets of Baal, where are those other 300 messiahs now
I agree: accidents of history are fascinating.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
“where are those other 300 messiahs now?”
Their stories and teachings were all amalgamated together into a single figure, possibly historical but possibly not, and had a number of elements from Greco-Roman and Egyptian mythologies mixed in, such as virgin births, being the son of a god, and death and resurrection. You’re worshiping them.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Beware of projecting a contemporary view into history.
1) “it’s difficult to draw any conclusions about Jesus with any definiteness — even the idea that he lived …” This is just about as anti-historical a statement as possible.
If you refuse to draw the conclusion that there was somebody named Jesus who fits the general facts of the story, that’s not because you have high standards for historical evidence. It’s because you have no standards at all.
Beware of opinions that you want to protect backwards, rationalizing regardless of the evidence: we DO have written accounts from well within the 1st century, which refer back to earlier written accounts of which we have later evidence (f’r instance, the one on your bookshelf). If you’re resisting the idea that this guy existed, it’s because you’re foolishly eager to believe that he did not — for which, of course, there is no evidence whatsoever. (And not because it’s hard to prove a negative — cuz in this case, you’d be proving the positive of a vast conspiracy to concoct the Christ story from scratch, contrary to all the evidence.)
2) “and was crucified…” This is just silly: do you DOUBT the Romans would have crucified this guy? The records say they crucified 4,000 Zealots in Galilee alone during the year 4 BCE. What, are you imagining that they made an exception for this guy? Why on earth would they do that?
3) Hector reads without thinking: “if any of the four had been written after 70 AD, they would have made explicit references to the destruction of the Second Temple…”
Um — and just why would they do something so foolish?
You cite a theologian pretending to be an historian arguing that they’d have bragged about fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy — but you’ve sorta forgotten the kinda significant fact that the ROMANS had just destroyed the Temple for rather clear reasons of their own, and might have had an emphatic opinion about a Jewish sect that was trying to read some other meaning into it.
4) More precisely, the issue isn’t the clash between force and theology, why they would have done something so foolish as to claim Rome’s destruction of Israel as the fulfillment of a prophecy, as it is the simple history of it: why did Rome allow (if they didn’t encourage) Herod to rebuild the Temple in the first place? If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand what it meant when they destroyed it.
The whole point of “the Chosen People” (note, in none of this am I arguing my personal beliefs — except that I believe pretty strongly that folks ought to know how faiths are structured in THEMSELVES, instead of this constant projection) is the Covenant: keep the faith, God will be on your side, and you get to keep the Promised Land. It is pretty hard to reconcile that with Roman occupation.
So there was a major force within Judaism that insisted the Covenant was as it had been for Joshua (which happens to have been the name Mary called Jesus): keep the faith, and God will kick the Romans out.
But Herod (the whole family, in fact) were collaborators, if not puppets. So they devised an alternative focus for being Jewish in the 1st century — not the land, but the Temple. The Sanhedrin were essentially a quisling court.
The actual historical context for the Christ story is murky in detail, but bright with clear edges in context: the Romans were keeping an eye on the Jews in Palestine, trying first the ancient method of buying off a local king (Herod), with a tolerable symbol for lost freedom and religious liberty (the Temple), while various folks like Pharisees and this Christ character were wandering around making alarming if ultimately doomed noises. It is reasonably clear that there was a direct connection between Christ driving the moneychangers out of the Temple and his execution, since that is precisely when the Sanhedrin (including named priests, another sign of historic validity) went to Pilate (more evidence it wasn’t a madeup story: real people acting reasonably).
But, search as you may, there is NO anti-Roman feeling in the New Testament, anywhere. This might be proof of the crock that somebody argued upthread, that the story was changed by later generations, e.g., the converson of Constantine — except, in fact, ALL of the evidence is that the story had no anti-Roman sentiment from the very beginning precisely because that’s the only way the story could have been circulated.
There is even an out and out trick, when the Pharisee tries to get Christ to say something seditious — about, oddly enough, the same issue that was involved with the moneychangers at the Temple: Roman coinage. Christ’s response is “Render unto Caesar…” A finely threaded needle, that — and entirely contemporary in its meaning and feel.
But the Zealots decide on a doomed rebellion, and the Roman response sweeps away not only the rebels, but the Temple, and throws the Jews out of the Promised Land — not the kind of event one could spin in an anti-Roman manner for a religious text passed around among slaves and women, and get away with: not in the 1st century.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Re: You cite a theologian pretending to be an historian arguing that they’d have bragged about fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy
Americanist,
John A.T. Robinson held concervative views on the dating of the Gospels, but he was ultra-liberal theologically. Needless to say, I disagree with his theology, but think his arguments on dating the New Testament are sound.
In point of fact, your argument is baseless. Christians did cite the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as the fulfilment of many prophecies of Christ: this is and has been since very early times, the traditional interpretation of those sayings in which Christ foretells the destruction of Jerusalem. See Eusebius, “Church History” book 2, chapter 7 for example. So the question is, why didn’t the Gospel writers make the same argument? St. John has Christ foretell that St. Peter will be crucified, for example, and then adds parenthetically that this prophecy was fulfilled (John 12:18-19). If he knew about the destruction of the Second Temple, he would have done the same for that.
Re: But, search as you may, there is NO anti-Roman feeling in the New Testament, anywhere.
What? Have you read the Revelation to St. John? Who do you think “Babylon the Great, mother of whores” is supposed to represent? What do you think the seven-headed beast represents? St. John’s Revelation sees pagan Rome as the ultimate enemy, and as fundamentally evil in the same way that old Babylon was evil, and foretells its destruction (which was also, of course, fulfilled in the fifth century).
November 10th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hector: one of the first skills an historian learns is keeping chronology straight.
1) Eusebius wrote in the 4th century. You might as well claim that Scalia wrote the Declaration of Independence.
2) “Who do you think “Babylon the Great, mother of whores” is supposed to represent? ”
Last I looked, the gnomes of Zurich.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
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