What is a woman?

Several weeks ago I wrote about a YouTube interview with Kathleen Stock.  It inspired me to request Stock's book, Material Girls, from the library.

I got an email from the library this morning -- finally it's my turn.  I'll aim to pick up the book in the next few days.

Meanwhile, to get me in a certain frame of mind I watched Abigail Thorn's video:

As I suggested in my earlier post, I want to try to get clearer in my head why we might choose to use one definition of the word "woman" over another.  Why does Stock choose to use the "adult human female" definition over the others?  And how does choosing that linguistic/conceptual framework then logically (and socially) carve up our world?  Is this a better way of carving up our world than some other way?  And better for whom?

To put it in the context of Thorne's video, to what extent is Stock engaging in Earth 2 thinking, and to what extent is her definition of woman like the Earth 2 definition of schmite (is that how it's spelt?!)?

Why I am not a Christian

At 2am on Monday, Bart Ehrman talked for five hours on why he's not a Christian.

In his part of the world it was Sunday, but for me it was 2am, so I didn't listen to him live.  But I did watch him over the next few days while eating meals.  It's here.

Over the five hours Ehrman gave a mix of his personal life history, academic scholarship on the Bible and Christianity, and observations of the world in which we live.  In all aspects it was a brief overview, but it was a pretty good summary of how things are.

In my opinion Ehrman is both sensitive and sensible, and I mostly agree with what he says.  Highly recommended to watch.

If you've watched it, here are a few of my quick thoughts:

1.  Ehrman grew up as a Christian, and as a teen he had a born again experience in which he converted to evangelical Christianity.  He studied the Bible and Christianity as an evangelical believer in the inerrancy of the Bible.  But over time through his studies he began to see the discrepancies, so came to see the Bible as written by people for people. He still believed that God was active in the world, but that the Bible wasn't God's perfect word.  However, some time after that, as he looked at the world around us, he could not see God's active participation.  The world contains too much suffering, and the self-evidence of that doesn't fit with an all-powerful loving God who actively helps His people.  For Ehrman, a memorable point was when he was saying the Nicene Creed in church, and found that all he could honestly say truthfully was that Jesus was crucified under Pilate and suffered and was buried.  He thought it would be dishonest of him to continue participating in church.

I have a great deal of respect for Ehrman on that, and I think it's an honorable response to take.  However, it's not the only possible response.

I have heard and read of a number of Christians in that same situation, who have nonetheless consciously decided to continue as Christians in the church.  Their thinking is that language and belief is not purely propositional.  That is, when we speak we are not always intending to make statements about the world that are either true or false.  Language has lots of other purposes.  Just because we don't believe the statements are literally true doesn't mean that they don't have other value in saying them.  One purpose is a social one, to create and enhance loving community bonds.  For these Christians, saying the Nicene Creed in church is not about merely stating facts about the world.  It is about joining together with other people in a loving, shared community.  Saying the Creed together helps form relationships, which helps others, and makes the world a better place.

Some of these Christians are non-realists, or fictionalists.  They believe that God does not really exist, but that the church is a wonderful, human, place to create and enhance a good community.  Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering have written about this.  Others of these Christians still think that God exists, but think that God is really not like what most/many Christians think he is.  John Bishop (my graduate advisor back at university) suggested that God is literally love (a relation that come into existence in ideal communities).  All of these approaches treat Christianity as a tradition, not a single doctrine, and as such it's possible to take inspiration and think differently while still staying within it.

I assume Ehrman, as an academic, is aware of this approach.  But he does not mention it at all.  I wonder why he chose not to personally do things that way.

2.  As I understand it, Ehrman's main reason for leaving Christianity was that he was convinced by the Argument from Evil.  I agree with him on this.  And I completely agree with him that it's important to genuinely acknowledge the real horrors of suffering, in real life situations, and not try to theorise it away with abstractions.  Clearly he's read and thought a lot about this, and he wrote a book on the various ways the Bible writers responded to suffering (I've read his book, God's Problem, and I highly recommend it).

However: back in the day at university I did a graduate course on the Argument from Evil, where we looked at some of the detailed back and forth on the replies and counter-replies.  I don't consider myself an expert on this, but in all of what I have heard and read of Ehrman on this, he has never shown that he is aware of much of what we covered in that course.  Maybe he doesn't feel the need to mention it, but sometimes I wonder why he didn't present (and reply to) certain responses to his arguments.  There is definitely much more back and forth to the issue than he shows.  Consequently, so far I've felt that his discussions of the argument are, while essentially correct, a little light.

3.  Similar to the Argument from Evil, I think Ehrman is also a little light on metaethics, when he discusses how it's possible to have morality without God.  I think he's mostly right, but I don't think he presented the issue of objectivity in ethics as precisely as it could have been presented.  As I understood him, he seemed to grant too quickly that if we reject the existence of God (and especially the Divine Command theory of ethics), then we are left with an ethics that is not objective (but that's okay).  Contrary to this, there are lots of ways of understanding ethics in an objective way that are not connected with God.

4.  Mostly I agree with Ehrman's practical ethics.  He says he's a humanist, and I think he rightly focuses a lot on helping other humans.  I think his outlook in this respect is admirable, and he has done a lot of good in the world.  As far as I understand it, I think Ehrman grounds this human-centred ethics on the observation that humans have evolved in certain ways to have certain dispositions and values, including social values of helping each other.

However, I am with Peter Singer in thinking that this approach is "speciesist".  I agree with Singer that a better way of grounding our ethics is to consider suffering in general, by all beings, and not merely human suffering.  So, while I agree with Ehrman that an essential part of living in this world is about helping other humans, I think we could and should extend this help to non-humans who also suffer.

Book review: Jesus Before the Gospels

Last month I wrote that lately I've been reading about the history of Christianity.

In particular, I reviewed a book which examines the physical texts that we have of the New Testament, and how, through copies of copies of copies, they changed over the centuries.  With this question we were looking at the period of time between when the original authors first wrote their texts and when the copies that we have today were written.  It's a question of the extent to which the Bible as we know it today is different from what was originally written by the original authors.  

The answer is both fascinating and complicated.

There is, however, a prior question to this.

This is a question of what happened during the time gap between when the historical events of Jesus took place and when the original authors first wrote their texts.  It's about the oral history before the written history.

I've just finished reading Bart Ehrman's 2016 book on this, Jesus before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed and Invented their Stories of the Savior.

The New Testament is a collection of 27 books written by many different authors over several decades.  The mainstream view is that the earliest of these (Paul's seven letters) were written some 20+ years after the death of Jesus.  The four Gospels in the Bible are anonymous (and almost certainly not really written by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John).  Likely, Mark was written about 40 years after Jesus' death, while Matthew and Luke-Acts were 15 or so years after Mark, and John was several years later again.  These four Gospels are our earliest written records of the life of Jesus.  (Paul's letters are earlier, but don't contain a lot of information about Jesus' life.)  We also have other texts about Jesus outside of the Bible, including many other Gospels, however these were written later and have more differences, suggesting further divergence from the historical events over time.

The question is how historically accurate are these earliest texts (written about 40 to 65 years after the events took place).  In particular, do they accurately describe Jesus' life?  Which parts (if any) really happened, and which parts (if any) were misremembered or made up?

There are two parts to answering this question.  One is to look at the texts themselves -- how the Gospel accounts differ from each other, and how they are the same.  The differences tell us that different Christian communities likely had different oral traditions and local circumstances leading up to eventually writing the texts.  The similarities suggest a common origin (possibly, though not necessarily, back to Jesus).

The other part that Ehrman addresses is the empirical work that informs us of the psychology and anthropology of both memory and oral cultural traditions.  By understanding how memory works in humans, and how people orally pass on knowledge to later generations, we can have a better understanding of what likely happened in the decades after the events as people told others what they had seen and heard.

The first part first.

When we look at how the Gospels each describe certain happenings, and when we list out the events in order point by point, we come across significant differences.  These are not merely differences of perspective; some differences contain logical or physical impossibilities.  Here and elsewhere Ehrman discusses these Biblical contradictions.  This means that clearly, at least in some respects, some of the Gospel writers misremembered things, or made up things, or heard different stories than each other.  They can't all be historically accurate.

Matthew and Luke both contain some word-for-word identical sections to Mark, suggesting that the authors of Matthew and Luke both had a copy of Mark on hand when they wrote their Gospels.  They also have word-for-word identical sections that are not in Mark, suggesting that they both had on hand another written source that we have now lost (scholars call this Q).  They may have separately had other writings on hand, too (called M and L).  So, in all probability these Gospel writers were not writing entirely from memory but were relying in part on some other earlier writings (much of which we have now lost).

We might also look at the language of the Gospel stories.  Apparently some parts only work in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, while others only work in Greek, the language of the writers -- that is, certain points being made rely on the particular meanings of words that occur in one but not the other language.  This tells us that the Greek ones were later additions in the oral tradition, and not authentic to Jesus, while the Aramaic ones are closer to Jesus (potentially, but not necessarily, from Jesus).

At some point we have earliest writers who wrote entirely from memory.  There was a gap of several years or decades when the stories of Jesus were passed down entirely orally, from eyewitnesses to friends, family and acquaintances.  Over the years these stories changed languages from Aramaic to Greek.  And similarly there was geographic movement, from Jesus' home in Galilee to other regions and to where the Greek-speaking writers lived.

There is a big scholarship on this.  Jesus Before the Gospels is for non-scholars, and Ehrman emphasises that he is just scratching the surface.  The extensive bibliography is a good place to start for further readings.

The main focus of the book, however, is the empirical work in memory and oral cultural traditions.  Ehrman points out that Biblical scholars generally don't address this interdisciplinary issue.  He says most are naively optimistic about the abilities of the early eyewitnesses and followers to accurately remember and pass on what really happened.  They assume, without much argument, that the earliest writings we have are accurate eyewitness accounts of what really happened.

But Ehrman argues that the empirical studies don't support this optimism.  The main point of his book is to link these two scholarly fields together, to show how one informs the other.

Firstly, the psychology of memory.  (One of my university undergraduate majors was psychology, and so what Ehrman discusses is mostly familiar to me.  I completed my studies 25 years ago so I may misremember (!), but I think he summarises it accurately.)

The quick main point is that studies show that people are not that great at being eyewitnesses.  When asked to report back on events we often get things wrong, and not even realise it.  In many ways memory is just as much creation as it is reflecting real events.  In the act of remembering we often create the narrative then remember that creation, rather than remember what actually happened.  Ehrman goes through some of the well-known empirical studies on this.

A common response to this is that while this may be true of us modern, literate, folk, this may not be true of people in other cultures, including the oral culture of first century Palestine.

This thought is that the eyewitnesses and those who they told their stories to had better memories than we do today, because, of necessity, those living in oral societies without writing have to be better at remembering things.  They were trained, either consciously or through everyday necessity, to remember things accurately.  And we're not.

Ehrman addresses this in two ways.

First, he overviews anthropological studies of memory in oral cultures.  And it turns out that they are no better than the rest of us.  Studies of storytelling in oral cultures show that their oral stories change over time, with significant differences between each retelling, and even when they say that they are telling the same story.  Moreover, it's possible that oral cultures don't treat truth the same way that we do.  In a literate culture we can easily see how one text matches another text, and so we often care about how similar they are to each other.  But in an oral culture each retelling is its own unique event, appropriate to its own situation, and there's no need for it to say the same thing.  They don't worry so much about the changes or being accurate to the origins.  The idea that co-eyewitnesses will confirm and corroborate the original true story just doesn't seem to apply.

Secondly, looking at the historical evidence of first century Palestine, Ehrman shows that the people in Jesus' day were no different.  In the historical records and in what we know of the culture of the day, there is no evidence to suggest that the eyewitnesses to Jesus and those they told were any different such that they remembered the events more accurately.

What this all tells us is that in the 40+ years after Jesus' death the stories of him likely changed over time with each retelling.  People added or removed aspects as they told others what they had heard, and, like Chinese whispers, likely what eventually got written down was somewhat different from what started.  Different Christian communities in different regions would have passed on different stories, and their storytelling would have reflected the unique issues that they were dealing with, and responding to, in their local areas.

Likely (but not necessarily), as with most oral storytelling, a gist would have remained.  So, the task for scholars is to try to extract the historical gist from the later storytelling.  Ehrman suggests the following historical gist of Jesus' life and death:

Of course there is much more to it than this.  I highly recommend Jesus before the Gospels as a good starter.  (And I hope that I mostly accurately remembered, and wrote down here, what I read.  But almost certainly my retelling here has changed the story, in some way, from what Ehrman told.  That's the nature of being human.)