logos redux

Earlier I rebutted the silly notion that the game of “Telephone” accurately represents what happens when historical events are passed on via oral tradition. Now I will briefly address the question of whether the game represents what happens when documents are copied over and over again in a long written tradition. I will specifically use the example of the Bible, since this is the particular document I have heard to be attacked in this way. But I think the principle is sound for any ancient document, depending of course upon the varying circumstances of its particular transmission history.

Is it possible that the Bible, copied over and over again during the course of two millennia, has suffered from inevitable distortion, like the message in the game of “Telephone”? Is that how history works?

Let’s think about what would have to happen in order for the “Telephone” comparison to be accurate. First, as previously noted, the message in the game of “Telephone” is allowed to be passed on by only one person at a time. This would mean that the Bible would be allowed to have only one copy in existence at all times. As soon as you successfully make a copy of the book, you would have to burn the old copy. Only one source of information is allowed. Continue Reading…

Dear Mr. Donathan:

Right now, as our nation faces its most serious economic crisis in decades, Congress and the President worked together in order to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This recovery package will energize and uplift our state’s economy, and I want to talk to you about the many exciting opportunities for Missourians: thousands of jobs for our state, improvements to our infrastructure, much needed aid for small businesses, help for our schools and neighborhoods, and assistance for homeowners, to name a few.

That’s why I will be hosting a Kitchen Table Talk in your area on Tuesday, April 7, 2009:

St. Charles County (9:00 AM – 10:00 AM)
Saint Charles County Community College
Gymnasium
4601 Mid Rivers Mall Drive
Cottleville, MO 63376

Franklin County (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM)
East Central College
Theater
1964 Prairie Dell Road
Union, MO 63084

Please join me for this important discussion. These events are free and open to everyone. You can RSVP from my website: http://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/kitchentable, as well as get more information. The attached press release explains additional details. If you have questions or concerns, please contact my Saint Louis Office at (314) 367-1364.

I look forward to seeing you there.

All best,
Senator Claire McCaskill

I’m tempted to go, although neither of these is really “in [my] area.” If I did I would go with a prepared question that would read something like this:

Senator McCaskill, I am a 26 year old graduate student with significant educational debt and a young family. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that the president and congress passed which you say will provide jobs, infrastructure and other benefits to Missourians will cost an estimated $816 BILLION according to the Congressional Budget Office. How does the president and congress, how do you Ma’am, justify borrowing and printing $816 billion dollars worth of debt that people like myself will be forced to service? Further, how do you expect me to be thankful for this borrowing on my credit line? What exactly am I to appreciate about congress and the president’s taking out of an enormous loan in my name and then “giving me” something that you purchased with a tiny fraction of it? Would you appreciate it if I took out a $2 million dollar loan in your name and then “gave you” a new car? What if it was for the children?

I will be among the first to endorse the primacy of authorial intent in the process of interpretation. Words mean what the original author intended them to mean, and not any particular meaning a reader decides to impose upon them.

However, I have been thinking recently about the limits of authorial intent. Authorial intent forms the parameters of what words can and cannot mean, but not the limit of what they may mean, or of how they may be applied. For example, when FDR spoke the words, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” in 1941, he had a certain people in mind for the word “we,” and particular fears in mind for the words “nothing to fear,” namely, fears of war, and death by the hands of Japanese and German war machines on foreign soils; loss of sons and husbands and fathers; poverty and hardship that come from wartime, etc. Yet his words have been quoted and re-applied over and over again since he spoke them, in new situations unforeseen by Roosevelt himself. Indeed, Roosevelt likely spoke those words for a particular political purpose at a particular moment, not having within his intent their re-application endless times over in future times and places which he himself could never conceive. They served a limited purpose for a moment. Yet those who have heard them since recognize that he instantiated an enduring principle, one which has continuing relevance in situation after situation to the present day. Therefore, his words have been re-applied. Continue Reading…

I can’t embed it but this video that my friend e-mailed me is hilarious.

The International Tap House, in Chesterfield, MO is now open for business. They have over 500 types of beer, 40 of which are on tap. From what I understand they don’t serve food, but they do provide menus from local restaurants that deliver and you can bring your own food in. A few friends went recently, and since I’m batching it for the next couple days I will hopefully be heading out tomorrow night with some friends and former roommates. The website describes the place thus:

500 Beers, 40 On Tap, 20 Countries, 1 Location. It’s not only a slogan, its a committment. The International Tap House, or iTAP as friends call it, is built by beer lovers for beer lovers and those who want to fall in love with brews. If you are thirsty for a drab domestic beer you can find that at any old drab corner bar. We are your place for something outside the box. An Abbey from Antwerp, an IPA from CA, a Pilsner from Prague will fill the shelves of our reach-in cooler and flow through the tubes of our top of the line keg system. Other than a small smattering of wine, beer is it. We want to do one thing and do it well, every beer is poured in the glass recommended by the brewer. Beer is boss and we want to serve it in a space that is classy, comfortable and NEVER corporate. Tattoos and ties, laborers and litigators, Rolling Stones and Radiohead all mingle together over world-class, award-winning and classic-craft beers. Whether you drink-in or take-out we promise to change minds, excite palates and most importantly make friends. Come and join the revolution, iTAP…Beer, Cooler.

Sounds like my kind of place. Cheers!

I find my delight in your statutes, I do not forget your words. –Ps 119. 16

Why is it that my thoughts so quickly wander away from God’s word and that the word I need is often not there when I need it? Do I ever forget to eat or drink or sleep? Why then do I forget God’s word? Because I am not yet able to say with the psalmist, “I will delight in your statutes.” I do not forget that in which I delight. Whether or not I forget something is (not) a matter (of my intellect but) of the whole person, a matter of the heart. That on which I depend, body and soul, is something I cannot forget. The more I begin to love God’s statutes written in creation and Scripture, the more they will be present to me in every moment. Only love keeps one from forgetting.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, quoted in Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God, pg 87

I’m currently reading Mark D. Roberts’ Can We Trust the Gospels?, and he has what I think is a vital insight for any student of history or even of current events.

In his discussion of the genre of the Gospels, he argues that the canonical Gospels are Hellenistic biographies: short digests of a key figure’s life with an eye toward moral instruction for the reader. This is itself a helpful insight, which I do not have space to expound upon here. But Roberts’ main point in the course of his discussion is not only to place the Gospels in their proper genre, but to instruct the modern reader in how to approach that genre. He is anxious to teach the modern reader not to impose contemporary, rather minute and peculiar, standards of “accuracy” in historical reporting upon ancient biographical literature. Specifically, he uses the example of the third person pronouns versus second person pronouns used by the Father at Jesus’ baptism in Matt. 3:17 and Mark 1:11. Here is an example of reported speech that is not verbatim, even though it is reported (with quotation marks in English) as from the mouth of the person in question. The Gospels do this a lot, Roberts notes. They report the same events or the same speeches in slightly different wording. By modern reporting standards, if a writer were to put quotes around something that did not represent verbatim what his source said, he would be accused of sloppy or even dishonest reporting.
Continue Reading…

One of the objections to the reliability of the Bible that really irks me is one that typically is stated like so:
“Don’t you think that as the Bible [or its contents] was passed on it got changed? Haven’t you ever played the game of ‘Telephone’? Don’t you see how a message gets distorted as it is passed on through time and many hearers?”

I have heard this silliness in response both to the entire history of Bible transmission [largely written] and in response to the early, oral tradition on which the Gospels are based. I will address the oral tradition first.

Is oral tradition just a game of “Telephone”?

Let’s think about it. The game of “Telephone” is rigged with rules that are intended to increase the likelihood of distortion in the message. After all, the whole fun of the game is predicated on how wildly you can get the message to change by the end. If the message is passed on accurately, then the game isn’t as fun. The conditions and rules of “Telephone” that are intended to interfere with accurate transmission are the following:

1. One and only one person is allowed to hear and transmit the message at a time. So there is no accountability, and this is on purpose. Accountability ensures accuracy. Multiple hearers and multiple speakers (who all hold the same information/experience in their minds) acts as a memory aid. People help each other remember. So this element must be removed in order for the game to be fun, in order for the chance of distortion to become significant.

2. The receiver of the message is allowed to hear it once and only once. He is not allowed to ask clarifying questions, which in normal life would be perfectly a reasonable, acceptable, and necessary step to ensure accuracy. The speaker is not allowed to repeat the message, which, again, would, in any other circumstance, be a very normal part of the relaying of information.

3. The message is transmitted in a medium that is deliberately prone to distortion (whispering), making the message difficult to discern. This, too, is artificial, for in real life, people speak in normal tones, make every effort to speak clearly and loudly enough, and when they fail, they are (once again) asked to repeat themselves until the message is clear.

So, in sum, people playing the game are forbidden from doing three very natural and important things that would assure accurate transmission. The conditions of the game are therefore artificial, and do not resemble real life transmission of information in an oral tradition.

1. The game invites people to deliberately distort the message, because this is part of the fun. In real life oral traditions, the motivation is usually the opposite: people are motivated to preserve the original, to pass it on accurately. If this information is thought to be important enough to pass on to others in the standard method of historical preservation available (orally), then people are generally motivated to preserve the integrity of the message, not to distort it. Real life is not a game; real life messages matter, unlike the game of “Telephone.”

There is a fifth factor at play here as well. As Mark D. Roberts points out in his book, Can We Trust the Gospels?, context improves memory. Living in such a visual culture as ours, in which everything can be written down (or programmed into a Blackberry), virtually no matter where you are, we have little need to rely on our memories. As a result, we do not memorize much. But imagine you live in a culture where all the information, both vital and trivial, that you receive every day is oral. Only the rich and the scholarly have access to paper (papyrus) and libraries. As a common person, you might go for weeks or months without ever setting eyes on a written document. Your brain would have to work a bit differently. You would process, store, and reproduce information all with your ears, memory, and mouth. You would think in terms of what you have heard, memorize things as a matter of routine, and pay much, much more attention to the spoken word than your modern counterpart. Today spoken words are treated as disposable—useful for a moment but then discarded a moment later. If we need to return to what was said, we’ll look it up on Google. Somebody will have recorded it or written it down somehow. But this way of processing information is foreign to first century folks. Information was not as abundant to them. They were not bombarded daily by a flood of information, most of it useless, which they had to filter out—indeed, we are required to forget most of what we hear and see, otherwise we would be overloaded with information in this day and age. Ancient people did not have this problem. Their minds were trained by habit to listen carefully, memorize, and repeat faithfully. They processed information much differently than we. Roberts concludes that they would be much better at the game of “Telephone” than we are, though playing with them wouldn’t be much fun.

Thus the game of “Telephone” is very unlike real life oral tradition. So the comparison is false, and the game is not a valid example of “what happens” when people rely on oral tradition (or written tradition, for that matter). Actual historical process is not at all like the game of “Telephone.”

Theologians (and others) often make the mistake of confusing the ideas of “imply” and “infer.” Distinguishing the two, however, is imperative. One is a human cognitive action, an epistemic move, the other is a feature of an object, or action. With regard to studying the Bible, or exegesis, texts imply and readers infer. The confusion comes in when a reader, or an interpretive community claims that a text implies something, when in reality the reader(s) have inferred something from the text. This occurs most frequently as a result of bringing un-stated or un-recognized presuppositions to a text. We all approach texts with presuppositions but when we don’t adequately recognize our presuppositions we are likely to see implication where inference is really at play. Thus we say, “This text implies X,” when really X can only be read out of the text if we read the text within a certain pre-conceived framework. Hence we have claimed implication when what is occurring is inference.

So what you may ask? Is this just semantics? No. You see, by claiming one’s inference as something implied in the text one shifts responsibility. It is no longer the reader who is responsible for the claim being made but the text. This is very dangerous indeed.

This danger then calls for a level of epistemic responsibility that is often neglected. How we read texts is a matter of ethics. It is unethical, indeed immoral to allow oneself to believe that Scripture has said what one has merely inferred and thus deflect responsibility for the claim. This often leads to a glib attitude about claims that are very hurtful or dangerous to others. If one can simply say, “Hey, it’s not my idea, it’s clearly implied here in Scripture,” one no longer has to wrestle with the appropriateness of one’s inference or whether such an inference is in keeping with the character of the text.

We are reminded once again, that epistemology, knowledge and what one understands to count as knowledge and why is an ethical endeavor. Thus, reading and interpreting, as means of gaining knowledge from a text are moral and ethical endeavors as well. It is not my intention to deny that Scripture implies things that are not stated, of course it does. Further, we will always struggle to recognize whether what we see in Scripture is implied or is a matter of inference from our own presuppositions. Even if we decide that it is an inference this does not make it wrong. It does mean however that we cannot simply deflect responsibility for believing and claim that we are simply saying what the text implies. Inference is a human action and thus always subject to critique and revision. We should be careful then to recognize our inferences and be always willing to subject them to question and modification, not confusing them (to the best of our ability) with the clear implications (something inherent in the text) of Scripture. This is indeed a difficult task, and one that will never be completed as we constantly read and re-read Scripture, but it is wise to remind ourselves of the nature of the task from time to time.