Remembrance and Significance

This article, from Science Daily, about the difference between adults and children and the accuracy of their memories of negative events, prompted a few thoughts in light of my post on the Gospel of John and Hurtado's essay on reflective remembrance.

From the article:

The researchers previously demonstrated that adults attach far more meaning to events than children do. But leading memory theories embraced by the legal system claim that adults remember negative events better than children and have fewer false memories about them. Brainerd and Reyna's data show these theories are not accurate.

I wonder if the inaccuracy in adults is a result of the more complicated and sophisticated understanding that adults have of negative events and their consequences. A child has a much smaller emotional matrix in which to process all the bad things that happen to them. Often, young children in abusive or negligent homes aren't even aware of how abusive and negligent their homes are. It isn't until a child begins to mature and have enough experiences with other people, and the world at large, that they can begin to understand the scope of what's happening to them.

I can think of several things in my life, bad experiences, or even lurking danger that I was too unsophisticated to truly understand. It's only now that I am older that I apprehend the significance of what happened, or could have happened.

One particular episode comes to mind. I remember being about 10 and playing by myself with my Barbies in the yard when the teenage boy across the street came over and started to play with me. He began engaging my Barbies in flirtatious, naughty behavior and I sort of played along. He stayed for a long time, and I remember him asking me some questions that I didn't quite understand. My brother eventually came out of the house and the teenager said he had to go and went back home. Obviously, there was a sense of discomfort that I must have felt, otherwise I wouldn't even remember this. Yet, it isn't until I was older that I had the ability to look back and understand what was going on and process that I might have missed a bullet that day.

The emotional significance of what could have happened, and what the emotional outcome could have been for me is something that I would never have guessed at in my 10-year-old mind. If asked what happened, I would have said that the neighbor boy came over to play Barbies with me. I wouldn't have said that the neighbor boy was a pervert who had bad designs on me. I could see how bringing in the emotion of that assessment, even if true, might color my memories and make them less accurate.

Religion is not simply a recitation of facts and rules for good living. Religion is an emotional response to what we see as the true nature of things.

I don't like the idea that the Gospel of John might not record history as history. It makes me uncomfortable because I want to be certain. I want to be confident. I want to be able to tell people that my beliefs are true. I, personally, want to know the truth.

So, I don't like the idea that John, or whoever wrote John, superimposed memories onto Jesus and presented them as His words. However, I do find myself doing that sort of thing all the time, looking back on an event and appreciating some aspect of it that I hadn't previously understood. This happens in both negative and positive ways for me.

I had this happen when dealing with my deceased father's house and finding out that he knew about the termite infestation before he ever bought the house. Finding that out shed light on several things that I couldn't have known while he was alive, and that he never actually told me.

I understand, now, why he was thinking about renting out his house in Florida once he retired and moved to Alabama. I'm convinced that was a concession to the fact that he knew he couldn't sell his house the way that it was. A termite inspection would have revealed the infestation almost immediately.

The danger in reconstructing motives for people and events in the past is that we are prone to being wrong sometimes, or stating our case too confidently.

As such, I can still love the Gospel of John, but my method of reading it has changed....and that's what I really want to get to in a future post.

Starting From Square One

continuing from yesterday's post....

It became very clear to me that most of what I thought I knew about the gospels was very different from what most scholars thought they knew about the gospels.

I had encountered scholarly ideas about the Historical Jesus before, but only in passing. My immediate reaction to these ideas was to reject them as corruptions of the faith. When I first heard of the Jesus Seminar and its quest to figure out what Jesus really said, I scoffed at what seemed like a foolish and heretical undertaking. How could one use the gospels as a source to discredit large parts of the gospels? How could a group of people imagine that they could scan through Jesus' words and pick out what they liked, or approved of, and reject the rest?

It didn't make sense to me. It couldn't make sense to me. I didn't know enough of the whys and hows that drove such an enterprise.

The tables have turned for me. I do understand, now, why scholars would even attempt such a thing. I don't necessarily endorse all of the conclusions, but I have learned enough to realize that the issue of pinning down the gospels is much more complex than I had previously thought.

When I, a simple, amateur, 21st century person with no ability to read Greek/Aramaic, can piece together that the gospel writers are tinkering with things in order to encourage the early Christian community, then we have a serious issue that needs to be addressed. At least, it needs to be addressed if you are coming from an evangelical, inerrancy-based faith, because all of a sudden the texts are not foolproof and the basis for your faith has disappeared from right under your feet.

Because we are taught to trust the texts implicitly, discovering that the texts contradict themselves, not in insignificant ways, but in ways that change the spiritual message of the text, is quite disorienting. The fundamental difference between earthly rewards in the present age versus future rewards in a completely new age is vast. The general theme is the same; sacrificial acts for God will bring future rewards. However, the mode of operation and expectation for a particular believer is extremely different.

It isn't hard to see the dilemma. A believer reads the passage in Mark and places their faith in seeing a tangible reward from God in this current life. We have prosperity teachers, or even faith healers, who have no difficulty finding passages to back them up. Conservative Christians are quick to label them heretics and point out how wrong a theology of wealth and prosperity, or procuring healing by simply believing for it is, but all prosperity teachers are doing is taking real passages from the actual texts that we have and trying to work up a path that gets them through life.

That grates against an evangelical sense of certainty and the concept that we can figure out God, Life and the Meaning of the Universe if we just study the texts a little harder. The feeling is that it's all in there if we just look hard enough.

Back to the Gospel of John and my love for it.

I realize, now, why I have always liked it so much. It addresses all the things that the other gospels don't deal with, or leave hanging. It brings together all of the theological developments and thrusts of the early Christians and formulates them into a grand story line with theological explanations of key issues for the early church. It fleshes out the nature of Christ's human and divine natures, the Eucharist, and salvation by faith. It is a polished narrative instead of a collection of miscellaneous teachings and parables.

However, I've been left with a thorn in my side. How to take the Gospel of John? Because most of it is original material unto itself, it presents a problem. Because it is attempting to address theological questions that have arisen after Jesus is no longer around, how much of it is historical?

Coincidentally, NT Scholar Larry Hurtado has just posted an essay that explains the Gospel of John in terms of "remembrance and revelation" . He writes:

I propose that the author consciously used what he regarded as the greater insight into Jesus’ significance that he ascribed to the Holy Spirit (or in GJohn’s terms “Paraclete”) after Jesus’ death/departure. I also propose that the author tells readers that he’s doing this, that he expected his readers to see it and appreciate it.

For simple historical-Jesus inquiry (a sort of, “just the facts, Jack” assumption), this will be judged anachronism, of course. If we were to explain to the author of GJohn modern historical-Jesus interests, he’d probably be puzzled or maybe amused, and might quickly agree that this isn’t his agenda. Instead, he wants to say that the historical figure was all along the embodiment of divine glory, but it wasn’t really till after Jesus’ death and resurrection that this became fully apparent.

John knows he's not writing "history" in the sense that we think of it. He, instead, is writing what he feels the Holy Spirit has revealed to Christians after the resurrection, mainly through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, Jesus didn't say X, Y, Z in a literal sense, but once he was resurrected and believers practiced their faith through the Holy Spirit, things fell into place. Teachings took on new meanings, meanings that John believes were always there but were not cognitively accessible and understandable to the disciples at the immediate moment they were taught.

I'll continue more of what I think this means for me, personally, later on.