Jason's high school buddy (and road trip partner, and wedding usher, etc.) has a book coming out next month!
http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=18&pid=28962
It's called The Temporal Mechanics of the Fourth Gospel, and it's an ungodly expensive textbook, so I wouldn't suggest any of my readers actually buy the thing ... but it's awesome that he's gotten his dissertation published as a real book. Way to go, Douglas!
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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9 comments:
Would Jason's friend provide a basic lay-person's summary of the book? I've read the description, but I don't think that I understand. There seems to be assumed knowledge that I'm missing, and I don't think that is just because I'm unfamiliar with the gospels.
The textbook seems to be different from my engineeering texts and his dissertation seems to be more interesting than mine. I'd love to know more.
- MLF
MLF,
Hey, this is Douglas, the author of the book and Jason's friend. Thanks for your interest.
The purpose of the book is to expose assumptions that we modern people make about time when we read ancient documents such as the Bible (Hebrew Bible and New Testament). These assumptions often become a problem because we base our conclusions about those ancient books on those assumptions. Let me give you an example, relevant to my book.
The NT contains 4 gospels; three that are laid out very similarly (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and one that is laid out very differently (John). These differences mostly have to do with the chronology of the events in the Gospels: for example, Matt, Mark and Luke portray Jesus clearing the Temple at the end of his public ministry, while John seems to place this event at the beginning of Jesus' public ministry; or the fact that Matt, Mark and Luke portray a public ministry of a little over a year, and John arguably describes a ministry that (to modern people) would seem to last for three years. For the first 1600 years of these gospels existence, most people, with a few exceptions, didn't really care so much about those temporal differences. Since the advent of the Enlightenment, the clock, etc., people have become far more 'precise' when it comes to things like time. As a result, our values have shifted so that we expect everything else - the people we know and the books we read - to be 'on time' in our modern sense of the word.
So, one of the big 'arguments' in the modern study of the Gospels is why John has a different time structure than Matthew, Mark, or Luke. People who tend to be critical of the Bible are quick to argue that this means John is wrong--erroneous, useless. If John is therefore wrong, it become much easier to argue that Jesus was just a peasant rabble-rouser than something more. However, if John is deemed accurate, then we have to include his viewpoint when we try to discover who exactly Jesus was.
So, in writing my book, I went in the opposite direction of most scholars - instead of trying to reconstruct an ancient view of time-which I believe is impossible-I decided to take a completely different paradigm for time and apply that version of time (instead of the assumed 'modern' version) to the Gospel of John. The goal was to see whether or not alot of the anti-John arguments hinge on modern views of time. In order to do this, I created a paradigm for time based on the time in relativity. This was due to the fact that like Jason and Gretchen, was a chemist for a short time in a former life.
Of course, going into the project, I suspected this was the case, but I didn't know how strong the evidence would be. It ended up, I believe, being very strong. I argue that almost all of the structural problems with John are non-existent when compared to other ancient historiographical works such as Thucydides, Herodotus, etc., and when the modern temporal bias is eliminated.
To conclude, then, the book basically does 3 things: a) it develops a theory of the way time functions in narrative based not on the clock or philosophy but on time as espoused by relativity, b) it applies that temporality to the Gospel of John in order to bring out the essence and theology of the gospel in what we may call a temporally-invariant environment, with copious examples of how it also works with other ancient historical documents, and c) it exposes alot of the anti-John arguments as being true only if we hold an ancient gospel up to a modern clock.
Finally, one of my PhD examiners from Oxford felt that many of my arguments would work for other ancient documents - especially those from the Hebrew Bible, NT and even some of the Greek histories.
Please feel free to email or ask further questions. Thanks again the interest!
Okay, so are you speaking metaphorically when you talk about applying "relativity" to the time line of the Gospel? In one way of reading, I think that you are not applying Einstein's temporal mechanics where perceptions of time are skewed by whether you are traveling close to the speed of light. Your use of relativity is not Einstein's theory of General Relativity but rather the sense that time is much more relative if you don't have clocks or written calendar records. Things are relative because memories are imprecise.
Then again, I re-read your description and re-read the table of contents, and I think that you actually are referring to time travel through Special Relativity and General Relativity. Relativity shows that your perception of time is different depending on how fast you are traveling and on gravity. For example, the atomic clocks on GPS satellites go measureably slower because the satellites are moving quickly and they also go measureably faster because the satellites experience reduced gravity. If I remember correctly, then the gravity effects are more significant than the speed effects.
But time only moves forward. The moving finger writes and moves on. We can't go back in time unless you are willing give someone an imaginary mass (imaginary as in square root of minus one). Backwards time travel is theoretically possible if you travel faster than the speed of light, but the relativistic mass in the equations of Relativity becomes imaginary. I doubt that most folks would like to think of Jesus as being imaginary.
Or am I missing the big picture by trying to apply a scientific understanding to what is inherently an article of faith? As my rabbi says, "it is religion, Michael, not science." Judaism teaches that the Bible speaks through allegory. The Talmud (traditional commentary on Bible) teaches that the deeper meaning of the text is often directly opposite to the literal meaning of the text.
And, a final question, am I giving you more grief than the members of your doctoral committee? Sorry about that.
- MLF
MLF,
Let me take your questions in reverse order.
First, yes, you are giving me more grief than my examiners (in Europe, there is not a committee but a blind review process) gave me ... my committee actually loved it and awarded me my degree on the spot. (Whew!) But it's okay, because as I was going through the publication process, I found that a lot of people have a lot of opinions when you get inter-disciplinary, some in fact hate it in principle, and so the more I explain it and re-explain it, the more it helps me, too. So it's all good; I'm happy to chat about it.
Second, sorry, but I believe you are missing the big picture to some degree in the sense that, as you said in your first post, that there is some assumed knowledge you are missing. For example, the rabbinic-Talmudic interpretation of Scripture that you mention, is not generally the approach taken by Biblical higher criticism, especially on the Christian side. On the Christian side of the discussion, the 'face-value' interpretation is generally the one most discussed. Note that 'face-value' does not mean literal. If the text is allegorical, then treat it allegorical; if prescriptive, treat it prescriptive, etc etc. For the Christian gospels, which are the texts I am working with, there is--for all intents and purposes--no allegory outside of Jesus' speaking (parables). Therefore, if you were to approach these texts allegorically, my study wouldn't be useful or make much sense. (Note that there are some scholars who do this, even on the Christian side, but this is a very small minority). So, to summarize, I am looking at the document as narrative.
Now, narrative theory is itself a huge field, and it is one that my work is fully immersed in as well. The gist here is that I am looking at the nature of the narrative ... is it historical? is it fictional? and specifically, what truth does it convey? Now, by "truth", there is an assumption in Biblical higher criticism - truth in this field is not ever really meant as "truth for life" (ie value) or "metaphysical truth" (ie meaning), but rational or empirical truth, such as we might find in the classic correspondence theory of truth ("facts") for example. Now, yes, limiting truth to empirical and rational models is a big problem, if you are a person of faith like me ... but it is probably the only way the field of religious studies can operate since you have to have some common ground, and empiricism allows for that to a (very imprecise) degree.
To get back to the book, the idea then is to discover the meaning of the narrative, to highlight truth as we can find it, but the problem is that, as you know, things like the correspondence theory is very limited in what it can tell us about life, value and meaning. How can you take the view/belief/debate of Jesus as prophet and messiah and turn it into mere "facts"? You can't, and so the more tools you have to express truth, the more likely you are to be able to explain truth ... like having more colors to work with to paint a painting. Therefore, I used the Einstein's view of temporality as a 'new tool' to get at some narrative truth.
Third, my use of the Theory of Relativity is 'metaphorical' in the sense of using truth from one field as a paradigm for explaining truth in another field. What I am not doing at all is using the populist "everything is relative" or that kind of thing, but neither am I at all making a claim about Jesus travels at the speed of light either. What I am doing is taking the Theory's view of time, working it through the field of narrative theory first, then applying this lens for truth to the Gospel. So, you and I are on the same page when it comes to Relativity, but it is the application of it that is subtle in my work.
If you are interested, send Gretchen your email, and ask her to send it to me, and I would be more than happy to send you the abstract and some blurbs that go with the book; that way you will be able to quickly fill in some of the missing blanks.
Blessings,
Douglas
Cool. Thanks. I think that I get it now.
On the weekends, I teach 7th grade in the religious school at my synagogue. I think that this is beyond where my students are located. Gee, I'm just trying to get them beyond the simplistic "puppet master" view of God and to understand Spinoza's pantheism or Kaplan's naturalism.
I also agree that it appears that the emphasis of the religions are different. Although there are narrative-based evaluations in Judaism, that is not the main emphasis. At my synagogue, what happens in the text matters less than how can we apply the text. More emphasis is on the ethics rather than to the mythic tales.
Again, thank you for your explanations. Also, I am glad that your committee was able to quickly "grok" the core of the contribution. At my PhD defense, I had tenured faculty denouncing my dissertation (because it disagreed with their student's work).
One last question... do you think that there is something that could be applied to a 7th grade class?
Again, thank you.
- MLF
Does this count as the most number of inches of comments for this blog?
MLF,
Thanks. To answer your question, mostly no. I tried hard to write the book on an upper undergraduate level, but there is still a great deal of ideas and discussion that would probably be beyond a 7th grader. That having been said, it is very much written to be an example of a postmodern hermeneutic, and in my opinion, that is something worthwhile for every young person to understand. What I mean by that, for example, is that under modernism, everything is reduced to binary oppositions and similar positivistic mentalities. Faith, aesthetics, etc., is seen as reduced to its lowest common denominator, as a evolutionary abberation. Humanity is the sum of its biological parts.
Postmodernity, on the other hand, while having problems of its own, does serve as a much-needed corrective to these very limited expressions of truth-types, specifically the aforementioned positivism. Ideas like faith, aesthetics, etc can stand on their own again without excuse. In this regard, my book builds the plan for this in small way in one area of our world.
Douglas
Doug - I went to high school with you. I don't understand how you got this much smarter than me. I thought we were on a pretty even keel back then.
Seriously though, don't get too overconfident. I'd whoop you if we got into a discussion on paint brush formulation or transferring refinish paint to Europe.
Jason
Jason,
You'd also whoop me if we got into a discussion of kitty-cat scratches, hep-b, and driving into ditches with pedable cars. I recognize my inferiorities.
Douglas
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