Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

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Easter

Mar 27, 2016 | Uncategorized

An old college contemporary of mine, now a vicar, posted a sermon on his blog earlier which set me thinking. This is NOT a direct reply to Tony, just some thoughts occasioned by reading his words, which concerned the impact of the short ministry of Jesus compared to that of longer lived classical philosophers.

  • Our knowledge of Jesus and his teaching comes from the canonical New Testament, and thus contains assumptions about canonicity and authenticity of those documents as distinct from the Apocrypha.
  • There is a problem with isolating the words of Jesus as distinct from words attributed to Jesus.
  • We don’t know what Jesus was doing prior to the reported period of his ministry, or who he was associating with.
  • Even putting the best possible gloss on the sources and assuming some of Jesus’s original words have survived, the development of Christian thought from the earliest times has been influenced by other ideas in the societies of the time. This is evident even in the New Testament and the doctrinal positions adopted by Paul, a gentile convert, as distinct from the authors of the gospels, particularly John, and the Letter to the Hebrews, Let alone the bad trip of Revelations. Within the Gospels themselves we already see motifs known from other traditions cropping up–such as the Virgin Birth–and stories being presented in a way that consciously links to Old Testament sources. The New Testament itself is a collection of documents that adopt ideological and philosophical positions and that have been selected to be canonical. They bear no necessary relationship to what Jesus of Nazareth thought (and I am assuming that he existed).
  • There clearly is influence from Manicheanism (especially via St. Augustine), Gnosticism, Roman cultic and liturgical practices, and African and Asian philosophies as Christian thought develops.
  • Likewise an influence of classical philosophy via, for example, Aquinas, and Arabic thought via Averos, before we even get to the reformed tradition.
  • And Christian thought went through innumerable battles against so-called heresies and still remains divided: who can say what the relationship is between the various christian traditions and the thoughts and words of Jesus?

…and so on. And I haven’t mentioned the dating of Easter itself in the Western tradition, which was not a value-free choice (see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History regarding the Synod of Whitby, and get ready to celebrate Easter again in the Eastern tradition in about five weeks time.)

It also occurs to me that the active religious life of Muhammad (to the extent that we know about it) was relatively short, and yet his impact has been at least as great as that of Jesus if we take off our Western spectacles.

Thus, what is the impact of Jesus, as opposed to the impact of the malleable thing that is Christian thought?

Transferred From Time Into Eternity

Mar 12, 2016 | Writing

I should be writing; instead I got dragged into a research vortex looking at 19th century Scottish Broadside accounts of executions (find them here).

I should be writing

I should be writing

These have a morbid fascination, but also provide insight and detail into social attitudes and expectations, especially about the expectation that the condemned will exhibit a dignified mien on the scaffold. And the descriptions, which at first seem precise in a way that is alien to us now, also fall into clichéd turns of phrase to describe the moment of death of the accused:”launched into eternity” is frequent, although a copywriter excelled himself with “closed her eyes on sublunary objects.”

It is also clear that some hangmen were more skilled than others. As throwing the victims from a ladder gave way to a scaffold with a mechanical drop, it took a while for the skills to be developed to ensure a quick death. Some of the descriptions make it clear that not all of the condemned died quickly on the end of the rope, but struggled and convulsed until “the world closed upon the wretched man forever.”

One poor woman, Margaret Myles, executed in 1702 for incest with her brother (David, also executed) is excoriated because she “dyed obdurately and obstinately and gave little or no satisfaction to the spectators.” Good for her, I thought.

The difficulty with getting lost in the 19th century accounts is that my story is set in the 17th century.

The problem with 17th century, and early 18th century, accounts, is that they retain the capacity to cause upset when read, particularly the cases of Hellen Marishal (aged 19) and Jannet Shank, executed in 1720 and 1711 respectively, both in the Grass Mercat in Edinburgh. In both of these cases, I found myself oddly pleased to have read the accounts, not because they’re in any way pleasurable, but because by reading them these poor women are, in a small way, still remembered after 300 years.

Into the Unknown

Mar 11, 2016 | Dead Water, Writing

Remember I mentioned I’d submitted a short story to a call for “Respectable Horror”? The story was accepted.

More here.

I’m really quite pleased about this 🙂

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should be writing…