Month: October 2022

By David Madison 

06/29/2019

By Robert Conner, with interpolations by David Madison[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]

Here’s the link to this article.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

In the era in which Christianity appeared, a clear majority accepted visions and the appearance of ghosts as real events, and lived in the expectation of omens, prophetic dreams, and other close encounters of the supernatural kind. Like many people of the present, they were primed for self-delusion, expecting the inexplicable, accepting the uncanny. Given the mass of contradictions and implausibility in the resurrection stories, who bears the greater burden of proof, the apologist who claims the gospels record eyewitness history or the skeptic who can point to modern “sightings” such as apparitions of the Virgin Mary?



The first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes, not from the gospels, but from a letter written decades before by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the historical Jesus, Jesus “according to the flesh.” “Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no more.” (2 Corinthians 5:16) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, not even the raising of Lazarus or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy. Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,” (1 Corinthians 15:4) but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days.

After his visionary conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never describes in his letters—Paul didn’t immediately hie himself to Jerusalem to meet with Jesus’ family, retrace Jesus’ steps, or sit at the feet of Jesus’ apostles. Au contraire, “I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went to Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” (Galatians 1:17) When, after a number of years, Paul decided he’d been born to preach Jesus, he says in no uncertain terms, “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12, NIV) In short, like other early Christian writers, Paul appears to have had a casual relationship at best with historical details. That said, here is Paul’s summary of Jesus’ resurrection: “I passed on to you as of primary importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the Twelve, then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, the greater number of whom remain until now, but some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me, as to one born before his time.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)

Paul makes no mention of the empty tomb, no women witnesses, no Men in White. Instead “more than five hundred brothers”—who do not appear in the gospels—see Jesus “at one time.” Apologists have cranked out a veritable mountain of verbiage attempting to paper over the various cracks in this narrative and to harmonize it with the gospels, but the opinion of George Riley summarizes the conclusion of mainstream scholarship: “a simple comparison of the Gospels and 1 Corinthians 15 shows the two traditions cannot be reconciled.” (Resurrection Reconsidered, 89.) Even apologetic writers are forced to admit, “Paul’s list of appearances in 1 Corinthians and the resurrection narratives in the gospels are remarkably—and puzzlingly—ill-matched.” (Richard Bauckham, The Laing Lecture at London Bible College, 2.)

That the folks in the pews can be impressed by I Corinthians 15—“then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time”—is evidence enough that critical thinking has been suspended. Who would believe a neighbor who came back from a church healing service bragging that five hundred people had witnessed the preacher restore an amputated arm? Our polite reply might be, “Oh, that’s nice,” while thinking, “What a load of rubbish.” Yet Paul’s report is taken at face value, although we suspect that he was passing along cult folklore. Moreover, anybody who knows the gospel accounts of Jesus’ betrayal—which Paul obviously didn’t—should wonder why Paul reports that Jesus appeared “to the Twelve.” Hmmm….hadn’t Judas dropped out? Or was Paul copying a formula?

The core of the 1 Corinthians passage—“that Christ died…that he was buried…that he was raised…that he appeared”—is almost certainly a piece of early liturgy like a similar passage falsely attributed to Paul: “[Jesus] was manifest in the flesh, vindicated by the spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on by the world, taken up in glory.” (1 Timothy 3:16)

The phrasing of the text in 1 Corinthians raises several questions. First, did Paul even write it? Citing “tensions” between the passage and its context, Hans Conzelmann concluded the “language is not Paul’s.” (Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 20 (1966), 22.) Scholars have proposed as many as seven instances of interpolated text in 1 Corinthians—a forged passage planted in a genuine text, or a marginal note included in the text due to careless copying. (Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981), 582-589.) Robert Price has identified several reasons for regarding the 1 Corinthians passage with suspicion, among them Paul’s dependence on “revelation” rather than historical sources, the absence of the five hundred witnesses in the gospels, and the speculative and unconvincing efforts by apologists to harmonize Paul’s account with the gospel material. (The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, 69-104.)

The inconclusive debate over what, if any, part of the five-hundred-witness story can be traced back to Paul raises the possibility that none of it was written by Paul and that it’s an interpolation, a pious forgery inserted into a genuine letter to bolster belief in the resurrection. As Peter Kearney observed, the mention that “some have died” means the letter was addressed to “a community moving toward an expectation of fulfillment, but already marked by death.” (Novum Testamentum 22 (1980), 282.) First Corinthians 15 may address acute anxiety provoked by the death of believers who expected an imminent Parousia in their own lifetime as a comparison with a similar passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 suggests.

There is no way to guarantee that the texts of the New Testament reliably represent what the authors—whoever they were—originally wrote. Eldon Epp, a noted textual scholar, calls the surviving form of the New Testament text the “interpretive text-form,” noting that “it was used in the life, worship, and teaching of the church” and therefore subject to “reformulations motivated by theological, liturgical, ideological, historical, stylistic, or other factors.” (Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999), 277.) Anyone who doubts this was the case can take a gospel parallel in hand and compare how Matthew and Luke alter Mark, adding, subtracting, and editing Mark’s text to suit their whim even while preserving much of Mark’s original wording and timeline.

This raises a second question: assuming Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, was he making a theological claim or a historical claim? Samuel Brandon, in “The Historical Element in Primitive Christianity,” concluded, “the Eucharist, as set forth by Paul, in effect lifts the historical event of the death of Jesus completely out of its setting in time and space and confers upon it that transcendent significance that characterizes…the various mystery cults.” (Numen 2 (1955), 167.) That Paul was writing theology, not history, is clear and the verdict of historian Robert Grant remains secure: “No word in this account [1 Corinthians 15:3-8] suggests that the appearances of Jesus were other than ‘spiritual’: it was not the ‘flesh and blood’ of Jesus which the witnesses saw…what [Paul] saw, and what he believes other Christians saw was the ‘spiritual body’ of Jesus.” (Journal of Religion 28 (1948), 125.) Except for the level of sophistication, what is the difference between a “spiritual body” and a ghost, or is it a distinction without a difference?

It’s a good bet that Christians today want an honest-to-goodness physical body that walked out of the tomb: a body that came to life—breathing resumed, blood started pumping again—and this revived Jesus invited Thomas to poke his finger in the sword-wound in his side, John 20). Laypeople may find Paul’s poetry lovely, i.e., in I Corinthians,

“… we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”

And indeed everyone who hopes to go to heaven assumes that their twinkling souls, not their bodies, are heaven-bound. But the Risen Jesus himself had better not have been a soul, ghost, phantom, apparition—or, god forbid, a product of Paul’s temporal lobe epilepsy. The body missing from the tomb assures precisely that. But it is so commonly overlooked that this also cancels the reality of a physical resurrection: What do you do with the body once it’s up and walking around again? The Book of Acts has a simple answer: after forty days Jesus ascended to heaven; he vanished into the clouds. Which means that the New Testament is guilty of a cover-up.

We can be one hundred percent certain that the body of Jesus never left planet earth; those who protest “Oh yes, it did happen,” have to be okay with Jesus remaining in orbit to this day. “It’s a symbol or metaphor” doesn’t work either, unless resurrection itself is a symbol or metaphor. Christianity is caught in a terrible bind here: if Jesus did indeed come back to life, then he must have died again, and was buried again. So what exactly did resurrection accomplish? Paul’s Risen Jesus didn’t stay Risen all that long. But Jesus was alive in Paul’s visions, hence he had no use for the story of the Empty Tomb, which probably hadn’t been invented yet at the time he wrote his letters. He would have deemed it a worthless tale.

But what a jumble the gospel stories are. How can we explain the bald contradictions? Are the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee after the resurrection (Matthew 26:32; 28:17) or stay in Jerusalem? (Luke 24:49) Why does Mark say Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss (Mark 14:44) while John has Jesus repeatedly identify himself while Judas stands by? (John 18:6, 8) There is a broad consensus that the gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, forty to seventy years after, and that they contain no direct eyewitness testimony. Several key figures from the New Testament, James, the brother of Jesus, Peter, and Paul, were all long dead before the first gospel was written.

The average pew sitter may assume that following Jesus’ death, life in Palestine chugged along just as before, but that was not the case. Increasing unrest and confrontations with Roman authorities finally exploded in the First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE). Remarkable both for its savagery and for atrocities committed by both sides, the conflict began when the Roman army invaded Jesus’ home province of Galilee and moved south toward Jerusalem, culminating in the destruction of the city and its environs in 70 CE. By some estimates, over a million people died during the war, nearly 100,000 were taken captive, and many thousands more became refugees. The original community of Jesus’ disciples, like the Jewish sect of the Sadducees, was a likely casualty of the war, its members dead, scattered, or enslaved. The gospels were not even composed in Palestine where the events they purport to relate took place.

Inconsistent and internally contradictory, the resurrection accounts are by turns hallucinatory and almost comically improbable, reading more like folklore and ad hoc invention than history. The original “witness” of the women at the tomb, unmentioned by Paul, potentially our earliest source, is disbelieved and dismissed. Jesus suddenly appears and disappears, yet is palpable to the touch. The disciples mistake Jesus for someone else, but even when they recognize him they continue to doubt and react with fear. Jesus repeatedly and clearly foretells his resurrection, but the disciples have to be reminded of his prediction, and when confronted with the evidence, they don’t know what to make of it. If this potpourri of contradiction is really the sine qua non of the Christian faith, we must ask if Jesus’ current disciples are as befuddled as Peter was, faux naïve, or just not paying attention.


Robert Conner’s most recent book is Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library© is here.

By David Madison

[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]

06/28/2019

Here’s the link to this article.

Part 1 is here.

If you still have questions, that’s understandable. For starters, if a hoard of dead men proved Jesus had risen, why didn’t Jesus His Own Damn Self just show up in Jerusalem? What could have been more convincing than Jesus Himself back from the dead, clothed in shining raiment, appearing to the Jewish and Roman leaders? After all, when the high priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?” didn’t Jesus finally break silence and tell the court, “I am! And you (plural) will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven!” (Mark 14:61-62) Whatever happened to all that I’ll-show-you-and-then-you’ll-be-sorry blow and jive from Jesus’ trial? Why didn’t Jesus appear post mortem to his persecutors and settle the question of his resurrection then and there, once and for all, as he promised at his trial?

There can be no doubt whatever that even Christians cringe when they stumble upon the holy zombies episode in Matthew 27:50-53—and stumble they do, since these bizarre verses are rarely read from the pulpit. They’re just too embarrassing, as if the intent had been to merge Easter with Halloween. Matthew missed his calling by about 2,000 years: he would have done well writing for supermarket tabloids. Imagine his headline: “Hundreds of Dead People Sighted Wandering the City.” We can see the comical aspect of it all, but, in fact, this text by itself scuttles all attempts to take resurrection seriously.

Good Christian folk may give it a wink—“Well, of course, that’s a tall tale”—but that only begs the question: why isn’t every resurrection story a tall tale? These three verses cancel the possibility of taking resurrection seriously. And the case for resurrection is not helped by the ‘more respectable’ raising of Lazarus described in John 11. Shrewd Bible students suspect that this scene is John’s recasting of Luke’s parable of Dives and Lazarus (chapter 16:19-31), in which Dives begs Abraham to bring the poor beggar Lazarus back to life, to warn his relatives about the torments of Hades. John’s extravagant talent for invention is well known, and he is at his best here. He needed this stunt to provide occasion for Jesus to say, “I am the resurrection and the life.

” Lazarus rising after four days could be taken at face value because people coming back from the dead was part of the superstition of the time. Why would the resurrection of Jesus be an exception? And yet a major world religion hangs on it. The details of the Jesus Resurrection Event serve only to undermine the concept further.

Even when Jesus Himself does appear, believers initially mistake him for someone else! Mary Magdalene thinks he’s the gardener, (John 20:14-15) Peter and his buddies don’t recognize him at first in Galilee, (John 21:1-13) and the disciples on the road to Emmaus think he’s just another traveler. (Luke 22:13-21) And when Jesus Himself appears on a hill in Galilee to give his eleven remaining apostles their mission to convert the world, we’re told, “when they saw him, they fell to their knees before him, but some doubted.” (Matthew 28:17) If you don’t think the “some doubted” part still has Christian heads spinning like tops, just Google it: when I did I got 17,800,000 hits, which seems like a lot of Jesusplaining over something Christians are supposed to be absolutely certain about.

By the time Matthew wrote his moonbat revision of Mark, Jewish opponents of Christianity had apparently already proposed the “stolen body hypothesis” to explain the resurrection, hence Matthew’s inclusion of this narrative gem:

The next day, which is after Preparation, the high priests and the Pharisees assembled before Pilate and they said, “Sir, we remember that fraudster said while still alive, ‘After three days I will be raised.’ Therefore order the tomb be made secure for three days so his disciples won’t come and steal his body and tell the people he’s been raised from the dead. This final deception will be worse than the first.”

Pilate told them, “Take a guard and go make the tomb as secure as you know how.” So they left and secured the tomb by sealing the stone and posting a guard.

…While [the women] were on their way, some of the guard went to the city and reported everything that had happened to the high priests. After meeting with the elders, they hatched a plan to give the soldiers a sum of money, telling them, “Say his disciples came by night and stole him while we were sleeping and if this gets back to the governor, we’ll cover for you so you won’t have to worry.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were told and this story spread among the Jews up till now. (Matthew 27:62-64; 28:11-15)

There is at least one glaring problem with this story: Matthew has already established that the stone covering the entrance to the tomb was so heavy it required an able-bodied man or even an angel to move it. So who would believe the soldiers managed to stay asleep while a gaggle of Galilean hillbillies removed the seals from the stone in the dead of night, rolled it aside, and made off with the body the soldiers were guarding, all without awakening a single soldier? And if the Jewish elders paid the soldiers to keep quiet, how did the story ever get out?

Another problem that would have occurred to any literate person in the Roman era concerns the identity of the soldiers. Although the Temple had a police force under the command of the High Priest, the force described by Matthew ultimately answered to Pilate, the Roman governor. The soldiers—the Greek text uses stratiōtēs, the usual term for soldier—formed a picket, a guard placed around the tomb. The gospel uses a Latin loanword, koustōdia, from the Latin custodia, a “military guard,” and since the term is derived from Latin, logically a Roman military guard.

Would a Roman military detachment really have reported back to a Jewish priest? And what fate would have awaited a Roman soldier who reported to his commander that he’d been asleep on watch? After all, the Roman army practiced decimation as a punishment for insubordination and dereliction of duty—his fellow soldiers killed every tenth man in a unit selected for the punishment of decimation. Given the stringent discipline of Roman forces, stationed in a hostile province, what are the odds a detachment of Roman soldiers would lie to their commanding officer, and by extension to the governor of the province, in return for a bribe if discovery would result in summary execution? Clearly, as pointed out by Roman critics, the gospels were written for the edification of credulous yokels eager to be titillated by pious fairy tales. And Matthew delivered.

Back in 2005, while researching material for a book on magic in the career of Jesus, Robert read Daniel Ogden’s sourcebook, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, surprised by how closely ghost stories from the era resemble the post mortem appearances in the gospels of Luke and John. His initial search of the New Testament studies literature turned up nothing that specifically addressed the similarities, but nevertheless convinced of the parallels, he included a chapter, “The Resurrection as Ghost Story,” in his survey, Jesus the Sorcerer: Exorcist and Prophet of the Apocalypse, released in 2006.

Why would elements of ghost stories end up in the gospels? What could possibly motivate the author of a resurrection story to compose a narrative that sounds like a ghost story? As it turns out, there are several reasons.

First of all, people of the first century took the existence of ghosts for granted:

Shortly before dawn, Jesus went out to them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they said, and cried out in fear. (Matthew 14:25-26)

Besides the belief in ghosts, the people of the era accepted the fantastic at face value. In fact, they expected it. Even Jesus complained, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will never believe.” (John 4:48) For most ancient listeners, sexing up a story with elements of the supernatural made it more believable, not less. Besides, who wants to read a ho-hum Bible story in which nothing incredible happens?

In addition, decades passed between the events of Jesus’ life and the writing of the gospels and there is little evidence the gospels contain direct eyewitness testimony. For reasons we will touch on later, the institutional memory of the early church appears to have been patchy at best or completely missing—all the more reason for the gospel writers to simply make up stories using the cultural elements available to them. As everyone knows, the gospels quote frequently, freely—and often inaccurately—from the Old Testament, but the writers evidently borrowed supernatural elements from the wider culture as well, features of stories of figures who came back from the dead, namely ghosts.

Eventually Robert decided the topic of ghost belief in the New Testament warranted book-length treatment, the first ever to the best of his knowledge, so after doing more extensive research, he found a publisher and Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story appeared. But if anyone thinks he was the first to notice the uncanny similarities between ghost stories and the resurrection stories, it turns out they’d be off by eighteen centuries. The first writer to compare Jesus’ post resurrection appearances to spectral visitations was a Greek philosopher and critic of Christianity named Celsus who wrote a lengthy work, Alēthēs Logos, or True Doctrine, that refuted aspects of the Christian cult. Noticing the phantasmal quality of the resurrection appearances, Celsus said that Jesus manifested to his disciples “like a ghost hovering before their perception.” (Contra Celsum, VII, 35)—his vocabulary suggests something insubstantial drifting before one’s vision. As historian J. D. Crossan would later remark, “apparitions of Jesus do not constitute resurrection. They constitute apparitions, no more and no less.” (Neotestamentica 37 (2003, 47.)

What specific features of the resurrection stories read like ghost stories? As it happens, there are several—then, as now, ghosts often suddenly appeared and disappeared: “[Jesus] became invisible to them.” (Luke 24:31) Lucian turned the sudden disappearance of a ghost to comic effect when the household dog frightens off Eucrates’ wife, returned from the grave to reclaim a golden sandal: “she vanished because of the barking.” (Lover of Lies, 27)

Paradoxically, ghosts could also assume solid, tactile form, momentarily indistinguishable from the living:

While they were talking about these things, [Jesus] stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” But they were alarmed and afraid, thinking they were seeing a spirit. He said to them, “Why are you terrified and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Touch me and see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” And after saying this, he showed them his hands and feet.

But even in their joy they did not believe him, and while they were wondering, he said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of fish and he took it and ate it in front of them. (Luke 24:36-43)

The disciples responded to Jesus’ appearance just as they responded earlier when they thought they’d seen a ghost walking on the Sea of Galilee: they were terrified.

That ancient ghosts could appear from nowhere, eat, and then disappear is conspicuously proven by Phlegon’s gruesome tale of the ghost of Polykritos, a man who returns from the dead after the ill-omened birth of his hermaphroditic child.

The people had gathered together and were arguing about the portent when the ghost took hold of the child, forced most of the men back, hastily tore the child limb from limb, and began to devour him…he consumed the entire body of the boy except his head and then suddenly disappeared. (William Hansen, Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels, 30-31, RC’s translation.)

Ghosts easily pass through barriers the living can’t breach, a recurring theme in ghost lore. Jesus’ nighttime manifestations in the gospel of John—“in the evening of the first day of the week” (John 20:19)—occur even though “the doors were locked.” (John 20:19, 26) The Greek text uses kleiō, “to lock,” from kleis, “key,” to convey the astounding fact that despite the doors being locked, “Jesus came and stood in their midst.” Ancient Mediterranean cultures regarded doorways with a high degree of anxiety; the Romans had no fewer than three minor deities associated with doors, Cardea, the goddess of hinges, Forculus, the good of the door itself, and Limentinus, god of the threshold. A tomb is also a doorway of sorts: “because of the presence of these spirits of the dead, the threshold, like the cross-roads, was a spot particularly adapted to the performance of magic rites, just as such rites were often performed on graves.” (Marbury Ogle, American Journal of Philology 32 (1911), 270.)

The timing of Jesus’ appearances and disappearances are also reminiscent of ghost stories. He tends to appear at night or in the evening, (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:29; John 21:4) a time particularly associated with hauntings. Liminal times and places, doorways, rivers, crossroads, dawn, dusk, as well as the transition from sleep to waking, are suited to the manifestation of ghosts. Given our differing cultural assumptions, Westerners living in the 21st century read the New Testament rather differently from Mediterranean people living in the 1st century. Appreciating why Celsus and his contemporaries read the resurrection accounts like ghost stories requires that we step back into the mindset of their era and read the gospels in the light of their cultural expectations, not of ours.

Interestingly, Celsus had another insight that anticipated modern thinking on apparitions by many centuries. Besides being the first to comment on the spectral qualities of the resurrection accounts, Celsus appears to be the first to advance a psychological explanation for Jesus’ apparitions.

“While [Jesus] was alive he did not help himself, but after death he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment and how his hands had been pierced. But who says this? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery, who either dreamt in a certain state of mind and through wishful thinking had a hallucination due to some mistaken notion (an experience which has happened to thousands), or, which is more likely, wanted to impress the others by telling this fantastic tale, and so by this cock-and-bull story to provide a chance for other beggars.” (Henry Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, 109.)

Historian Robin Lane Fox notes the likelihood that “women were a clear majority” in the early church, and of the writing of pagan critics, observes, “It was a well-established theme…that strange teachings appealed to leisured women who had just enough culture to admire it and not enough education to exclude it.” (Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 310) Classical scholar Catherine Kroeger approaches the issue from the point of view of “the socio-religious world of [Greco-Roman] women” that addresses the social strata of Christian women specifically: “Neither is it surprising that women who lacked any sort of formal education flocked to the cults that were despised by the intellectuals.” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 30 (1987), 25-26, 28.)

According to Luke, the male disciples who went to the tomb “did not see Jesus.” (Luke 24:24) The tactile Jesus who later appears to them is apparently an attempt to “counter the idea that the risen Jesus was some type of ghost or phantasm.” (Gregory Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered, 53.) So who or what, exactly, did the women see? From the standpoint of the wider pagan culture and from ours as well, the ambiguous nature of Jesus’ manifestations, the fact that no male disciples are initially reported to have seen them, and that subsequent appearances are met with fear and doubt, are major points of narrative weakness. Christian women in the ancient world “were expressly targeted as unreliable witnesses, possessed, fanatical, sexual libertines, domineering of or rebellious toward their husbands,” (Wayne Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 141) and by the end of the first century Christian estimation of women was little better: “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man…[Younger women] get into the habit of being idle and gadding about from house to house. Not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not.” (1 Timothy 2:12, 5:13) In Paul’s list of resurrection witnesses, which predates the gospels by decades, women are notable for their absence. (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)

Celsus’ suggestion that at least some early “witnesses” were imagining the experience or actively hallucinating has modern support. Seeing or otherwise sensing the presence of the recently dead is surprisingly common. In one study, fifty percent of widowers and forty-six percent of widows “reported hallucinatory experiences of their dead spouses in a clearly waking state” and in several instances another person shared the bereaved individual’s experience. (Haraldsson Erlandur, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 19 (1988-1989), 104, 111.) In one study of modern mystical experiences that specifically addressed Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances as examples of “after-death communication,” the survey found “2.5% [of apparitions] involved multiple witnesses.” (Ken Vincent, Journal of Near-Death Studies 30 (2012), 142.)

While doing background research on Apparitions of Jesus, Conner discovered an extensive and rapidly growing literature on the connections between religion and mental aberration, delusional belief based on mere proximity to a religious site—commonly known as “Jerusalem syndrome”—and “visionary” experiences as a symptom of temporal lobe micro-seizures without overt physical components such as facial tics or convulsions. Hallucinatory experience and delusion is predictably determined by culture and situation: evangelicals touring holy sites identify with John the Baptist, Portuguese schoolgirls see the Virgin Mary, British soldiers in the trenches see visions of Saint George or the archers of Agincourt, indigenous people see spirits compatible with their cultures, and the women at the tomb saw Men in White as well as Jesus. In short, hallucinations and delusions are downstream from previous cultural conditioning.

To be continued…

Robert Conner’s most recent book is Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library© is here.

By David Madison

By Robert Conner, with Interpolations by David Madison[Note from David Madison: This article was written by Robert Conner, who asked me to review it and add whatever comments I wanted. I contributed about 15 percent of what you’re about to read.]

06/27/2019

Here’s the link to this article.

Chronologically speaking, the first person in history to mention a certain Joshua from Nazareth is Paul of Tarsus. These days Joshua of Nazareth is better know as Jesus—Jesus is the Latinized form of Iēsous, the Greek rendering of Yehoshua, Joshua, meaning “Yahweh delivers.” Joshua, the hero of the conquest of Canaan, embodied the hope that Gentile overlords would be overthrown, so Joshua was understandably a popular name among the Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine. In point of fact, archaeologists have discovered over 70 occurrences of the name Joshua/Jesus in Judean burials.

The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead was the basis of Paul’s belief, the essential element upon which all other claims rested, as Paul himself made clear: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (1 Cor. 15:14, NIV) For Paul, the resurrection was the pivotal event of all time, the hinge on which history turned, the source of humanity’s eternal salvation: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Rom. 10:9, ESV) Indeed, according to Paul, Jesus “was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” (Rom. 1:4, NIV)

In a sense, we’re fortunate that Paul drops enough clues for us to see what was going on in his head. Galatians 1:11-12 is an important text—and we’ll return to it later for other insights—but it should give pause to those who so sure that Paul can be trusted: “I want you to know, brethren, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”

Think on this: Paul’s message was not of human origin; he didn’t receive it from any man and wasn’t taught it. He didn’t think it was important—at all—to talk to the disciples who knew Jesus. He got all that he needed to know about Jesus through his visions of this dead man. Of course, his visions were a guarantee that Jesus wasn’t dead at all. Why do believers take Paul’s word for it? Cult fanatics have made similar claims forever.

The science behind this is known. Dr. David E. Comings (MD) has stated: “Temporal lobe epilepsy and its spiritual manifestations may have played a major role in the religious conversions of many historical figures and in the origin of several religions.” And: “If the role of TLE in Paul’s conversion is correct, it could be argued that without TLE Christianity would never have become the dominant religion of the Western world.” (Did Man Create God? Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain?, pp. 366 & 364) So, epilepsy or contact with the spirit world? This is not a tough call for those who don’t put much store in séances. However, to have any hope of convincing believers that resurrection is an aspect of fantasy literature, it’s best not to breathe the word “science.” The Bible itself, in fact, provides all the evidence we need to abandon the idea.

Given the crucial importance of the resurrection, the most important act of God since creation as well as the cornerstone of salvation, one would expect—at a bare minimum—multiple attestations from contemporaries and a clear and internally coherent account consistent with other sources. In the pages that follow we’ll be examining the resurrection accounts to see if they meet these criteria.

According to Mark, Jesus repeatedly foretold his humiliation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

He began to teach them that it was necessary for the son of man to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the high priests and the experts in the law and be killed and rise [from the dead] after three days. (Mark 8:31)*

He taught his disciples, telling them, “The son of man is to be delivered into men’s hands and they will kill him and three days after being killed, he will rise. (Mark 9:31)

He again began to say to the Twelve, “The son of man will be handed over to the chief priests and the experts in the law and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Romans. They will ridicule him and spit on him and flog him and kill him and after three days he will rise.” (Mark 10:32b-34)

The apostles witness the very public resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain, (Luke 7:11-17) the more private raising of Jairus’ daughter, (Luke 8:49-57) the dramatic resurrection of Lazarus after three days in the tomb, (John 11:1-44) as well as the crowds that subsequently gathered as a result, hoping to see Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead. (John 12:9) Jesus even declares, “I am the resurrection and the life.” (John 11:25) Yet in spite of all these predictions and all this alleged first-hand experience, the apostles remain the Twelve Stooges, thicker than two short planks, the dumbest yokels in all of yokeldom—they can’t understand what Jesus means by ‘rising from the dead’ (Mark 9:32) even after the Master calls them aside and Jesusplains it all. (Mark 10:32)

Peter is an example of this terminal cluelessness. Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, (Mark 1:29-31) Peter witnesses Jesus’ glorious transfiguration, (Mark 9:2) and Peter even walks with Jesus on water. (Matthew 14:22-33) Peter sees Jesus miraculously multiply loaves and fishes to feed a multitude, cast out demons, calm a storm, heal the lame and blind, and Peter declares of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) So when the women—not the apostles—discover Jesus’ tomb is empty and Peter runs to see it for himself, (John 20:3-4) you’ll never guess what Peter and his pals do next:

“I’m going fishing,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” (John 21:3)

Because what else would you do after the long-anticipated appearance of God’s Very Own Messiah who heals your mother-in-law, performs miracles galore right before your very eyes, gets transfigured along with Moses and Elijah as God’s voice speaks out of a cloud, predicts his own resurrection, and three days later, sure enough, you find the tomb empty? Well, go fishing apparently. And so begins a series of mind-boggling non-sequiturs, contradictory reports, unlikely scenarios, and “proofs” that read suspiciously like thinly disguised folklore.

Given the crucial role of Jesus’ resurrection, wouldn’t we expect plenty of witnesses—at least as many as witnessed the raising of Lazarus or the Transfiguration? Well then, we have bad news and even worse news. Let’s start with the worse news: according to the canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—no one actually sees Jesus rise from the dead. Cook on that for a minute. Despite the repeated predictions that he will rise from the dead after three days, (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:32-34) not a single one of his apostles shows up to see it happen. Let’s hear that again, just to be sure: No. One. Sees. Jesus. Leave. The. Tomb.

If you think that’s already about as bad as it can get, brace yourself. When some of the women who followed Jesus visited the tomb and discovered it empty, Mark, the earliest gospel, tells us, “And they left the tomb running, for they were trembling and beside themselves, and they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8) And for whatever reason, that’s how the first gospel account left matters—with no prior belief, stated or implied, that his disciples expected to find Jesus had risen from the dead. Now clearly Matthew, Luke, and John couldn’t let the story end that way, but when they buffed it up theologically they just introduced even more incoherence, confusion, and contradiction.

First, let’s go back to the women who found the empty tomb. Recall that Jesus taught “plainly,” “openly”—the word Mark uses is parrhēsia, which mean “unambiguously” (Mark 8: 32)—that he would die and rise from the dead after three days and when Peter tries to tell him that’s nonsense, Jesus rebukes Peter in the strongest possible terms, the famous “Get behind me, Satan!” logion. (Matthew 16:23) But when John retells the resurrection tale, the women propose a natural—not a supernatural—explanation for the missing corpse: “They’ve taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they’ve put him!” (John 20:13) So in short, the iconic “empty tomb,” Men in White notwithstanding, was not proof that Jesus had risen from the dead; according to Mark and John it’s instead a source of confusion and fear.

Much has been written, mostly by feminists, about the women “witnessing” the resurrection, but as we’ve already noted, no one saw the resurrection according to the canonical gospels. Moreover, the men, who “have left everything” to follow Jesus, (Mark 10:28) weren’t impressed with the women’s “witness.” According to Luke, the Eleven Amigos were having none of it: “After returning from the tomb they reported all these things to the eleven and all the others. The women were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told the apostles these things. But their words seemed like nonsense to them and they didn’t believe the women. However Peter stood up and ran to the tomb, and stooping down, he saw only the linen binding cloth, and he left, wondering what had happened.” (Luke 24:9-12) Wondering what had happened?! Just how dumb is this guy Peter?

If Jesus taught emphatically that he’d be back among the living three days after his crucifixion, to say nothing of having raised others as proof that he was “the resurrection and the life,” (John 11:25) why didn’t the disciples gather at Jesus’ tomb in expectation of his resurrection? And why, given the witness of the women and the discovery of the empty tomb, were they still not convinced? What if Jesus’ predictions of his death and resurrection are apologetic back-formations designed to account for an unexpected event, his execution?

According to the gospel of John, this is what happened immediately after Jesus expired:

“Later, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a secret disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate if he might take Jesus’ body and Pilate consented, so he came and took his body. Nicodemus, who earlier had come to see Jesus by night, brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, around seventy-five pounds. Then they took Jesus’ body and wrapped it in linen cloth together with the spices, as is the Jewish burial custom. There was a garden in the place he was crucified and in the garden was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish Preparation Day, and because the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.” (John 19:38-42)

Several features of this brief account are either improbable, flatly contradict the version of events in other gospels, or raise even more questions. We might as well start with Joseph of Arimathea who Mark describes as a respected bouleutēs, or “council member,” (Mark 15:43) a voting member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court that condemned Jesus for blasphemy. (Mark 14:64) According to Mark, the vote to hand Jesus over to the Romans, essentially a death sentence, was unanimous as required by Jewish law: “they all judged him deserving of death.” (Mark 14:64) So did Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the court, vote to condemn Jesus to death despite being a secret disciple?

And if, as John claims, Joseph and Nicodemus wrapped Jesus’ corpse in linen on the Jewish day of Preparation, the day before Passover, then their contact with a dead body made them ceremonially unclean, disqualified from celebrating Passover—“But some of them could not celebrate the Passover on that day because they were ceremonially unclean on account of a dead body.” (Numbers 9:6, NIV) For that matter, how likely is it Joseph would enter Pilate’s praetorium, the judgment hall, to ask for Jesus’ body if contact with a Gentile would also make him ceremonially unclean and prevent him from participating in a major Jewish festival? (John 18:28) If the gospel accounts are accurate, Joseph was doubly disqualified from celebrating Passover. How probable is it a prominent Jewish figure, a member of the Sanhedrin, would disregard an Old Testament command? “[Passover] is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord—a lasting ordinance.” (Exodus 12:14, NIV)

John’s resurrection story introduces a further problem, a glaring calendar discrepancy. If Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified before Passover began—the trial occurred on “the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon” (John 19:14)—then it was clearly impossible for Jesus to eat Passover with his disciples as described by Mark: “The disciples left, went to the city, and found everything just as Jesus had told them, and they prepared the Passover meal.” (Mark 14:16) Jesus may have worked miracles, but he can’t have died the day before Passover and still have celebrated Passover—dead in one version of the story but still alive in another.

Scholars who have examined these accounts in the light of Roman and Jewish law have identified additional problems: Rome “typically denied burial to victims of crucifixion” and “Rabbinic law specifies that criminals may not be buried in tombs.” (Jeffery Lowder, Journal of Higher Criticism 8 (2001), 254-255) For whatever it’s worth, despite historical records claiming many thousands were executed in Judea by crucifixion, archaeologists have unearthed a single example of the burial of a crucified man, a heel bone pierced by a nail, physical evidence that suggests the crucified were denied burial and were tossed into mass graves or their bodies left hanging to rot and be picked over by carrion birds.

An additional discordant note is heard when comparing the story as Luke tells it with Matthew’s account. In Luke’s resurrection story the Men in White have to remind the noodle-brained women of Jesus’ prediction: “Remember, as he said to you when he was in Galilee, the son of man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day be raised.” (Luke 24:6-7) Oddly enough, the “sinners” who crucified Jesus easily recall his prediction without being reminded by the Men in White: “Sir, we remember that fraudster said while still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore order the tomb be made secure so his disciples don’t come and steal him and tell the people he’s risen.” (Matthew 27:63-64) Why do Jesus’ enemies recall his predictions better than his own disciples?

Which brings us around yet again to the women who came to the tomb. Mark informs us the women came to the tomb, now three days after Jesus’ death, “to anoint Jesus’ body.” (Mark 16:1) But according to John’s account, Joseph and Nicodemus had already embalmed Jesus’ body and wrapped it in linen in compliance with Jewish burial custom. (John 19:40) Within a similar time frame Lazarus’ body had started to stink. (John 11:39) Were the women really intending to unwrap Jesus’ bloating corpse and smear ointment on it? After all, Jesus’ body was in the ground, in Palestine, in the springtime, not in a refrigerated morgue supervised by a medical examiner.

In Matthew, ancient Christianity’s favorite gospel, the author abandons all pretense of historical reportage, crashes through the guardrail, and takes his readers off-roading through the wild and wooly wilderness of the imagination. Who the author of this high-on-Jesus joy ride really was is unknown, but for convenience we’ll follow convention and call him “Matthew.” A hint of how crazy this is about to get is provided by Matthew’s reworking of Mark’s story of the women at the tomb—Matthew uses Mark as a primary source, quoting or paraphrasing around 95% of Mark. Here’s Mark’s description of the women at the tomb: “They began saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb for us?’” (Mark 16:3)

Here’s Matthew’s solution to the women’s doorman dilemma:

Behold! A great earthquake occurred because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and approaching them, he rolled the stone away and sat on it. His appearance was like lightening and his clothing as white as snow. (Matthew 28:12-13)

Matthew’s moment of Jesus’ death is no less dramatic:

After crying out once more, he gave up his spirit. And behold! The curtain in the Temple was torn in half from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split, and the tombs were opened, and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised, and when they came out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and were seen by many. (Matthew 27:50-53)

Did you behold all that? Included among the seismic prodigies that accompanied Jesus’ final moments on Friday, the tombs opened up and “the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised,” but they obligingly hung out in their tombs until Sunday, “after his resurrection,” before walking into Jerusalem where they “were seen by many.” Oddly enough, this electrifying event, holy zombies no less, is unmentioned either by the other gospels or by any histories of the era.

* Unless otherwise noted, all New Testament citations are my own translation (RC).

To be continued….


Robert Conner’s most recent book is The Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library© is here.

Here’s the link to this article. It’s a must read.

Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.

BY MARIA POPOVA

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart from my native Bulgaria, still baffled by the foreignness of fitted sheets, brunch, and “How are you?” as a greeting rather than a question. I was also living through my first episode of severe depression and weaving, without knowing it, my own lifeline to survival out of what remains the best material I know: wonder.

Once a week, I dispatched my ledger of curiosity — a brief digest of interesting, inspiring, or plainly wondrous things I had encountered on the internet, at the library, or in the city, from exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese woodblocks to a fascinating new neuroscience study to arresting graffiti on the side of a warehouse.

It was sweet, at first, when my friends kept asking to add their girlfriends or parents to the list, who in turn asked to add their own friends, until it exceeded the time I had for such administration.

I had the obvious idea to make a website of it, so that anyone who wanted to read could just visit it without any demands on my time. The only trouble was that I didn’t know how to make a website. (Blogging platforms as we now know them were not a thing, and even the rudimentary options that existed required some HTML proficiency.) We have a way of not always knowing whether the hard way is the easiest way or vice versa. In addition to my full college course load and the four jobs I was working to pay for it, I decided to take a night class and learn to code — it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance. I calculated that if I replaced two meals a day with canned tuna and oatmeal — the white label brand from the local grocery store in West Philly — in a few weeks I could pay for the coding class. And so I did. A crude website was born, ugly as a newborn aardvark.

Eventually, when email newsletter delivery services became available and affordable to my bootstrapped budget, the website got a newsletter, coming full circle. To this day, it goes out weekly, carrying into a far vaster digital universe a spare selection of the writings I publish on the website throughout the week.

In those early years, working my banal day jobs hostage to my visa and the demands of my metabolism, not once did it occur to me that this labor of love would become both the pulse-beat of my life and the sole source of my livelihood. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance — the anthropocentric term for which is luck — the seven friends somehow became several million readers without much effort on my behalf beyond the daily habit of showing up for the blank page. (There is, of course, nothing singular or surprising about this — Earth carves canyons into rock with nothing more than a steadfast stream. Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself.)

Several years in, I thought it would be a good exercise to reflect on what I was learning about life in the course of composing The Marginalian, which was always a form of composing myself. Starting at year seven, I began a sort of public diary of learnings — never revising those of the previous years, only adding some newly gleaned understanding with each completed orbit, the way our present selves are always a Russian nesting doll containing and growing out of the irrevisible selves we have been.

And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.