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.)

Kathleen Stock

I really enjoyed listening to this conversation.

One and a half hours of calm, relaxing, quiet, slow, careful and nuanced discussion of a topic that almost everywhere else is unpleasantly confrontational and argumentative.

For those still not sure what I'm talking about, it's the issue of trans rights versus women's rights.  And it's a discussion with Kathleen Stock.

In my opinion, this is exactly the way a civilised discussion should go, regardless of one's opinions on the various matters discussed.

I see this as essential viewing, and after watching it I've requested Stock's book, Material Girls, from the library.

There are a few things I'd like to read more details on:

1. Stock's analysis of the various ways that the words "woman" and "man" are defined and used.  I know that the words are ambiguous, and commonly used in several different ways (with people consequently often talking past each other).  So I'm curious why Stock, after analysing the terms, chooses to use the words one way rather than another.

That is, as I understand it, Stock consciously and knowingly chooses to use the words with minimal social/psychological content.  That is, for Stock a woman is an adult human female and a man is an adult human male.  These particular definitions of the words are both common and useful, as in society it is useful to distinguish between immature and mature people -- boy and man or girl and woman.

Nonetheless, some definitions of the words also include various social or psychological features, such as social norms/roles or self identification.  And in the context of social issues, is it also important to use language (clearly and appropriately, of course) that also includes those features?

I don't know.  So, I want to read more and think more about which definition of the words I should choose to use.

2. I was also interested in Stock's use of fictionalism.  Given the definition of woman/man above, this sort of explanation seems necessary for how to understand the common wider use of the words.  But one downside of this understanding is that it seems to require that some users of the words are perhaps not self-aware that they are engaging in fiction.  And is this a problem?

3. Then beyond language use there's also the practical social implications -- sport, prisons, changing rooms, women's refuges, etc, etc.  As in any social issue it's rare to satisfy all, so it's about balancing out competing rights, harms, preferences, opportunities, etc.  Case by case, what are some compromise practical solutions?

Book review: Misquoting Jesus

Right now I've got a stack of books on my bedside table on the history of early Christianity, which I'm steadily working my way through.  Just for fun, nothing serious.

But one book needs to go back to the library today (luckily I've finished it), so I'd better write down a few of my half-baked thoughts on it.

It's Bart Ehrman's 2005 book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

I've said here before that I grew up as a sincere Christian, but started to question it as a teenager.

Twenty and more years ago, at university, I looked into the more philosophical aspects of Christianity.  The reasons for and against belief, the nature of faith, the concept of God, etc, etc.  I did a big chunk of my graduate studies in the area, and tutored undergraduates.  (So I guess I'm moderately well-read, but far from an expert.)

My academic studies were the tail end of my steady de-conversion, and after completing my dissertation I settled into my own views as a happy atheist/agnostic.  Over the years I've continued to casually check the discussions, and overall not much has changed.

But the history of Christianity is a whole other topic, and one I don't know in as much detail.

Even though the church that I grew up in was quite Bible-based, and I was pretty familiar with many of the Bible stories, I don't recall much emphasis on the history.

Reading historians on the subject now, I see several historical issues that I don't recall ever hearing in church.  From what I read, I understand that these are standard topics discussed in many theology courses that church leaders graduate from.  However, it seems maybe they don't often pass this information on to their congregations?

Issue One: What are the physical texts?

One thing that jumps out at me is that I don't remember hearing in church about the physical texts and their origins.

I'll try to summarise my understanding of my readings; happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable.

It's still an open question when many of the books of the New Testament were written, but the mainstream view seems to be that the first were written about 20 years after Jesus' death.  These are the seven letters that Paul wrote, with the earliest around 50 CE.  The Gospel of Mark was likely written around 70 CE, Matthew and Luke-Acts maybe 15-ish years later, and John several years after that.  The final New Testament books seem to have been written around 100 CE or soon after.

However, we don't have any of the original texts.  Instead what we have is copies.  Or rather, copies of copies of copies, etc.

Our earliest copy is a credit card sized piece containing parts of the Gospel of John (Papyrus 52).  It's dated to around 150 CE.

The earliest complete books of the New Testament are dated to around 200 CE (Paul's letters in Papyrus 46, and John's Gospel in Papyrus 66).  The earliest complete Bible we have is from around 350 CE.

The New Testament that we have today is, as I understand it, a pretty close reconstruction of what was being read and copied in the third century CE.  But it's not what was originally written or what was originally copied and passed around, as we have lost those.

Nonetheless our modern translations are closer to the originals than the King James Version, as it was based on a twelfth century manuscript that is now seen as one of the worst available to us.  (The King James Version is beautiful literature, but not so accurate to what the original writers likely wrote.)

Issue Two: The manuscripts are different from each other

But does it matter that we don't have the originals?

It turns out that, at the very least, it's an issue.

The thing is, copying manuscripts by hand is quite different from printing them.  It is very hard to copy accurately, word for word, anything by hand.  Mistakes creep in.

To put a number on it, apparently there are more differences between our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.  That is, between the approximately 5700 Greek manuscripts we have of the New Testament, there are maybe 300,000 or more differences.

So, if we want to read the Bible, which manuscript do we use, and which difference do we choose over the other?

Fortunately most of these differences are trivial.  There are spelling mistakes, or missed words, lines or even pages.  The scribes copying the manuscripts are just like us when copying -- their eyes sometimes jumped or misread things, and mostly it's easy for us to correct for that and reconstruct things.

But some of these differences are not trivial.  There are a significant number of passages that are importantly different from each other, and sometimes it's hard to know which was the original and which was a later change made by a scribe.

And this is not just accidental changes.  There are plenty of passages where it's clear that scribes intentionally made changes to the texts.  On purpose they made additions, changed words, took things out, etc.  We know whole sections have been added by later scribes, likely to give authority to their particular theological/political beliefs and to combat competing ideas.  We also know that, more subtly, occasional words were changed to better suit their views.

What all this means is that we have manuscripts in which there are important differences and we don't always know which was closer to the original and which was the later scribal change.

Consequently, a big part of historical scholarship is textual analysis to find reasons for choosing one difference over another.  In a significant number of cases there are still open questions and scholarly disagreements on which way to go.

Issue Three: Known unknowns and unknown unknowns

So, scholars know they have got manuscripts that differ from each other.  We know that scribes changed the texts, as we have got the physical evidence.  And we know that sometimes we don't know which manuscripts contain the original texts and which were later scribal changes.

We also know that the earliest manuscripts we have are many generations removed from the original writings.

Those earliest scribes probably changed things as much as the later ones we know about, both accidentally and intentionally.

So, we can infer that there were almost certainly scribal changes between the original texts and our earliest copies.  The earliest copies that we have are almost certainly different from what the original writers wrote.

But how much, which parts, and in which ways?

We simply don't know.

Issue Four: Historical methods for reconstruction

Fortunately, despite the limits of the texts we physically have, scholars can make some educated, reasoned guesses about which manuscript versions are more likely to be closer to the original and which are more likely to be later scribal changes.  But these are only ever best guesses, and not certainty.  And it's still hard to jump the gap between our earliest manuscripts and the original writers.

Historians have developed a list of criteria which they can apply to unclear cases.  It's not infallible, but it's good to have reasons to help with the educated guesses.  An ongoing issue is which criteria to use in various specific cases, and their relative weighting.

For example, an initially counterintuitive criterion, which makes sense on closer inspection, is that the more difficult reading is more likely to be the original one.  Scribes, when they make changes, are more likely to make a reading easier rather than harder.  So, all things being equal, the more unusual wording or uncomfortable concept is more likely to have been written by the original author, and the less challenging one was more probably a later scribe trying to "correct" things.

To me, it has been fascinating to read specific textual examples of where known manuscripts significantly differ, and then work through the ways that historians might apply different criteria for deciding which was closer to the original and which was the later scribal change.

Issue Five: Inerrant scriptures or historical documents

A theological puzzle for Christians who say that the Bible is the inspired word of God, or that it is inerrant, is that historical scholarship seems to show that at best we are one step away from the original writings.  Even if the original writings were so inspired or inerrant, that's not what we have today.  And surely it seems odd if God were to inspire the original writings, but then not make sure that they were accurately preserved for later readers.

It seems to me that looking at the textual history of the Bible opens up the possibility of relaxing the need to see the Bible as always internally consistent or accurate in all respects.  Perhaps more plausibly we ought treat the Bible as written by fallible historical people in their own time and to their own audience.  Arguably smart, insightful, and often accurate, but without that sense of necessary textual infallibility that we often hear from believers.  A slight reduction in textual authority is okay, and surely Christianity can live with that.

---

So, the book is now back at the library, and other books on my bedside table await reading.

Overall I'm not enough of a textual scholar to comment on the accuracy of the information in Ehrman's book.  But what I can say is that it's very clearly presented and the reasoning is strong. For now I'm persuaded.

Recorder and cello

Since Mulan's recorder performance a couple of months ago, we've enjoyed a few more music concerts.

On the 12th of May the Westlake schools' orchestras, bands and choirs performed at their Music of the Lake concert.  The school wrote about it here.

Mulan played her cello in both the symphony orchestra and the chamber orchestra (and you can just see her in one of the photos in the school article!).

Then on the 28th Mulan joined her recorder teacher and a few other musicians playing at a retirement village (and getting paid for her performance).

Here's Mulan's first piece, Benedetto Marcello's Sonata No. 4 for Recorder:

Her second piece, Kevin Kim's Cabbage Trio

And they finished off with an unplanned, sight-read piece:

Finally, last night the Westlake schools' choirs performed at their Choir Concert.  (The school wrote about it here, and we can just see Mulan in one of the photos.)

Mulan doesn't sing, but the Cigno Voce choir asked her to play her cello during one of their songs.

And here it is:

Miya's maths: Khan Academy 7th Grade

13 months ago I wrote that Miya had finished Khan Academy 6th Grade maths.  Today she finished 7th Grade.

She'll start 8th Grade maths tomorrow.  (If she was in the US she'd be starting as a young 8th Grader in September.)

We're almost certain that Miya will finish homeschooling and start secondary school (Year 9) at the beginning of next year.  We're not expecting that she'll finish 8th Grade maths by that time, but our attitude is that the further she gets through it the easier it will be for her as she adapts to school life.