A Fresh Look at History
18/06/13 05:12
I think that one of the hardest things for people to understand is how their life fits into a bigger picture. We each carry our own memories and experiences and the things that we have known first hand by experiencing them seem more real and connected to us than the things we have learned by hearing or reading the stories of others. The result is that we often define the world in our own terms. We begin to believe that our perspective is somehow more valid than that of someone else.
There are thousands of examples from politics to religion to popular culture where people re-interpret historic events from their own perspective. The past is described as if it supports a particular point of view. I suppose that there is no way to avoid interpretations as we tell the stories of events from another time, but when we put our own “spin” on history, we often stray from the truth. People have always been complex. Our motives are always a bit mixed. There is more than one way to interpret events of the past.
One example of this phenomenon is the contemporary Tea Party movement in the United States. The have laid claim to a particular event in the history of our nation and claim that the people who participated in that event shared their contemporary political beliefs. They imagine that the people who participated in the original event shared their political perspective, were motivated by the same things that animate the contemporary claimants of the title. From another point of view, it seems highly unlikely that the predominantly Congregationalist Massachusetts Bay Colonists had much in common with the contemporary anti-tax, anti-government movement that is using big money, primarily from corporate sources, to influence primaries and elections to elect candidates who vote against regulations on corporate growth.
The original Tea Party protestors were protesting government support of big business, not taking money from big business to urge government to decrease regulation of business. They protested an import tax on tea that not only was unpopular in the colonies, but also unpopular in Great Britain. The illegal import of Dutch teas, which were not taxed at the same level was common and the Townshed duty was an attempt to help the East India Company better compete for the tea trade in the colonies. The resulting increase in the price of tea was cause for protest.
Contemporary members of the Tea Party Movement, however, prefer their own version of the Boston Tea Party – namely that it was a protest against all taxes and government regulations.
The truth, however, is that we are shaped by all of history whether or not we are aware of it. However, we often tell the story of our past as if it was simple and the people who came before us were all in agreement.
Sometimes a group of people will take one piece of history as if it were the whole story.
I have often been amused at people who have recently “discovered” Christianity. Recent converts or people who have recently returned to the church often take a small piece of Christianity as if it were the whole story. They discover some passage of scripture that is meaningful and proclaim it is if their interpretation were the whole truth. It is very common to take a sentence or two from the Bible and claim that it contains the whole truth without even considering its place in the text, the historical context of the scripture or even other passages of scripture that interpret that text. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard one sentence from Leviticus proclaimed by someone who doesn’t know all of the other legal rules listed in that book and who doesn’t acknowledge the active debate about the role of law and legalism that dominates Jesus’ encounters with Pharisees and Levites in the New Testament and Paul’s conversion to Christianity.
So it seems to me that the recent attention being paid to “A New New Testament, edited by Hal Taussig” is a bit overblown. The book is interesting and I have purchased a copy. Hall Taussig convened a panel of scholars and ministers to compare and contrast documents from the Nag Hammadi collection with existing books of the New Testament. They selected ten of the Nag Hammadi documents and present them with the existing books of the New Testament to be read together for a different perspective on the Christian Faith.
What surprises me is the claim to the title “New.” The Nag Hammadi collection consists of over fifty texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. It contains a number of “Gnostic Gospels.” These texts circulated in the early church and were once thought to have been destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define “orthodoxy.” The creation of the New Testament was intensely political and there was much disagreement among early church leaders. As some texts became more popular among church leaders, others were suppressed. The texts that were retained were often edited and altered. It took a long time for the New Testament to be developed and the books we now take as scripture to be accepted by the majority of the church.
The discovery of the ancient texts back in the 1940’s gave a fresh understanding on history that some in the church had tried to ignore. By the early 1970’s all of these texts were available in English translation. Seminary students who pursued an academic study of Christianity were given opportunities to read the texts and compare them with the texts embraced by mainstream Christianity. This was a part of my education. There is nothing “new” in conversations about early Christian writings that are not a part of the New Testament for me. But it is a conversation that is worthy of continuation in a wider community. “A New New Testament” provides a vehicle for such conversations and a group in our congregation will be discussing the book this fall.
Human beings are complex. Human institutions are also complex. There are many different perspectives. This has been true from the beginning. Those who claim that there is only one way to understand faith or history are simply uninformed.
It is, however, fun to see debates that have been mostly held among scholars to be opened to the participation of laypersons. It is always good to widen the circle of conversation. How much of the conversation will be “new” remains to be seen.
There are thousands of examples from politics to religion to popular culture where people re-interpret historic events from their own perspective. The past is described as if it supports a particular point of view. I suppose that there is no way to avoid interpretations as we tell the stories of events from another time, but when we put our own “spin” on history, we often stray from the truth. People have always been complex. Our motives are always a bit mixed. There is more than one way to interpret events of the past.
One example of this phenomenon is the contemporary Tea Party movement in the United States. The have laid claim to a particular event in the history of our nation and claim that the people who participated in that event shared their contemporary political beliefs. They imagine that the people who participated in the original event shared their political perspective, were motivated by the same things that animate the contemporary claimants of the title. From another point of view, it seems highly unlikely that the predominantly Congregationalist Massachusetts Bay Colonists had much in common with the contemporary anti-tax, anti-government movement that is using big money, primarily from corporate sources, to influence primaries and elections to elect candidates who vote against regulations on corporate growth.
The original Tea Party protestors were protesting government support of big business, not taking money from big business to urge government to decrease regulation of business. They protested an import tax on tea that not only was unpopular in the colonies, but also unpopular in Great Britain. The illegal import of Dutch teas, which were not taxed at the same level was common and the Townshed duty was an attempt to help the East India Company better compete for the tea trade in the colonies. The resulting increase in the price of tea was cause for protest.
Contemporary members of the Tea Party Movement, however, prefer their own version of the Boston Tea Party – namely that it was a protest against all taxes and government regulations.
The truth, however, is that we are shaped by all of history whether or not we are aware of it. However, we often tell the story of our past as if it was simple and the people who came before us were all in agreement.
Sometimes a group of people will take one piece of history as if it were the whole story.
I have often been amused at people who have recently “discovered” Christianity. Recent converts or people who have recently returned to the church often take a small piece of Christianity as if it were the whole story. They discover some passage of scripture that is meaningful and proclaim it is if their interpretation were the whole truth. It is very common to take a sentence or two from the Bible and claim that it contains the whole truth without even considering its place in the text, the historical context of the scripture or even other passages of scripture that interpret that text. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard one sentence from Leviticus proclaimed by someone who doesn’t know all of the other legal rules listed in that book and who doesn’t acknowledge the active debate about the role of law and legalism that dominates Jesus’ encounters with Pharisees and Levites in the New Testament and Paul’s conversion to Christianity.
So it seems to me that the recent attention being paid to “A New New Testament, edited by Hal Taussig” is a bit overblown. The book is interesting and I have purchased a copy. Hall Taussig convened a panel of scholars and ministers to compare and contrast documents from the Nag Hammadi collection with existing books of the New Testament. They selected ten of the Nag Hammadi documents and present them with the existing books of the New Testament to be read together for a different perspective on the Christian Faith.
The discovery of the ancient texts back in the 1940’s gave a fresh understanding on history that some in the church had tried to ignore. By the early 1970’s all of these texts were available in English translation. Seminary students who pursued an academic study of Christianity were given opportunities to read the texts and compare them with the texts embraced by mainstream Christianity. This was a part of my education. There is nothing “new” in conversations about early Christian writings that are not a part of the New Testament for me. But it is a conversation that is worthy of continuation in a wider community. “A New New Testament” provides a vehicle for such conversations and a group in our congregation will be discussing the book this fall.
Human beings are complex. Human institutions are also complex. There are many different perspectives. This has been true from the beginning. Those who claim that there is only one way to understand faith or history are simply uninformed.
It is, however, fun to see debates that have been mostly held among scholars to be opened to the participation of laypersons. It is always good to widen the circle of conversation. How much of the conversation will be “new” remains to be seen.