“We are like dwarfs,” said Bernard, “seated on the shoulders of giants. We see more things than the Ancients and things more distant, but it is due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of our stature, it is simply because they have lent us their own.”

 Gilson lamented the loss of this “proud modesty”:

 It is a sad old age that loses all its memories. It if were true, as some have said that St. Thomas was a child and Descartes a man, we, for our part, must be very near decrepitude.

 I don’t mention this to ask whether we tread (or even trample) on the shoulders of dwarfs. Both Bernard and Gilson demonstrate the cognitive importance of narrative. These differing modes of relation to the past – Bernard’s modest pride in development and Gilson’s gibing lament over loss – are not simply glosses to the real business of understanding the past but are inextricable constituents of such understandings.

The Open Society starts with an altogether different image.  For Popper, ours is a civilisation “still in its infancy…which continues to grow in spite of the fact that is has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind”, a civilisation still “in the shock of its birth” from, as one political philosopher has put it, “the cosy womb-like certainties of Gemeinschaft” [roughly, community where individuals’ association is, in important ways, directed to the greater whole rather than to self-interest]. This does not preclude possibilities for a developmental narrative; our society is “still in its infancy”. But this fledgling development occurs within the open society. The transition from closed to open society, by contrast, is difficult to grasp as a form of development or evolution given Popper’s broader scheme.

This scheme is well-known. History – in no pre-ordained way of course – testifies to the conflict between the closed and open society, between, on the one hand, a tribalism in thrall to magical forces and a primitive desire to live in solidarity and, on the other, a critical rationalism, which unfetters man’s capacity to reason. Notice two features. First – and I don’t wish to sound like an inquisitor – there is something Manichaean about the constellation of ideas associated with the closed and open societies. A series of binary opposites distinguish these ideal types: collectivism and individualism; passionate violence and rationality; taboo and law; ‘utopian’ and ‘piecemeal’ social engineering; liberation and slavishness; essentialism and nominalism; totalitarianism and democracy. We are invited to see something comprehensively coherent in these constellations.

Second, some attributes of these ideal types are far from unambiguous. Perhaps historicism – the idea that development laws govern history, laws on which historical prophecy can be grounded – is the classic example. In his critical review of The Poverty of Historicism, the philosopher Charles Taylor began, “It is not easy to see what kind of doctrine Professor Popper is trying to pillory under the title ‘historicism’”. (Taylor concluded that what the various thinkers whom Popper impugns as historicists share in common is that they are frequently the “whipping boys” for a certain kind of liberal thought). But even a more sympathetic reader of The Open Society, the medievalist-philosopher Peter Munz, a former pupil of Popper’s, was as baffled by the insistence on rooting the closed society in historicism as he was enthused by Popper’s sociological and ethical insights. My point here is to stress a curious tension in reading Popper. Despite his insistence, at least some of the ideas within the constellation of associations have confused rather than clarified his general scheme. Readers like Munz suggest that we can remove some of these associations without dealing a death-blow to the broader scheme. (This raises a question: how far can we go on abandoning parts before we have to abandon the whole?).  

Incidentally, a curious feature of discussion of historicism – even in critiques of Popper’s interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Hegel as historicists – is the assumption that religious narratives yield far more obvious examples of historicism.  Popper himself suggests that the conception of a chosen people was a tribalist precursor of modern collectivism. Of course, any student of medieval history will be familiar with the multiple ways in which Edenic aboriginality, salvation history and eschatological speculation served as nodal points in medieval thought. They are central to Augustinian thought, a notable absence in The Open Society. (The absence is glaring given the overwhelming importance of Augustine not only to medieval thought but also to Reformation thought).  We may wish to question whether and precisely how these narratives might be understood as historicist in Popper’s terms.  

 How do the Middle Ages function in Popper’s scheme? Largely, it must be said, as an intermittent spectre. Sporadic invocations of medieval totalitarianism, especially the Inquisition, serve as a kind of apotropaic charm upon which the rationalist humanitarian can call without embarrassment. But he also advances a substantial historical thesis: the constellation apparent in Aristotelian and, especially, Platonic thought found their stifling fruition, we are told, in medieval societies. We read, at the end of volume one, that Plato ultimately failed to arrest social change: “Only much later, in the dark ages, was it arrested by the magic-spell of Platonic-Aristotelian essentialism”.

Popper does not develop this in detail. But at the beginning of the second volume, he briefly speculates upon the broader picture between Aristotle and Hegel – between ancient and modern – albeit in a different way. This period might be interpreted, he suggests, not simply as the consummation of totalitarianism, but as one of conflict between the open and the closed society, in which the latter ultimately prevailed. I do not wish to subject this self-consciously speculative passage to uncharitably exacting scrutiny – Popper was not writing as a historian and medieval history, especially early medieval history, has changed dramatically since he wrote – though, even with these concessions, there are some distinctly odd points of interpretation (e.g. the idea that late fourth century church structures – and Popper seems to have such things as social action for the poor in mind – were “after the model of Julian the Apostate’s Neo-Platonic Anti-Church” is odd: the direction of influence was almost certainly in the opposite direction, as Julian himself makes clear in some of his correspondence).

In broad outline, Popper couches the conflict in the following way. The anti-idealising spirit of the “Great Generation of Greeks” was embodied in the Cynics and, later, early Christians. Martyrs died, Popper writes, for the same cause as Socrates. But the fourth-century saw a dramatic shift, hinging around Constantine, one which Popper casts as an “ingenious political move” to break the “tremendous moral influence of an equalitarian religion”. Hereafter, “the Church followed in the wake of Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” from Justinian’s sixth-century persecutions right through to the Inquisition.

Popper intensifies this outline in his rejection of voguish, Romantic eulogising of the Middle Ages (he quotes – and pours scorn on – Toynbee for mounting a sort of rehabilitating argument from the beauty of medieval cathedrals).  For Popper, such eulogies are premised upon historicist notions of “the essential Character of Western Civilisation”. That’s to say a Platonising way of doing history desensitises the historian to the baleful influence of Platonism in history. The rationalist interpretation of history, by contrast, connects this pre-Constantinian thread to the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into modern science. At this juncture, it is tempting to raise the question of the construction of the Middle Ages, the origins and repercussions of this inherently relational form of periodisation. But I’ll leave that for another day.

Instead, I’m interested in what happens to what this thread quickly passes over. At first glance, it is perfectly intelligible that medieval societies were, in Popper’s terms, closed societies. In fact, I don’t wish to argue otherwise. The question is: does his scheme offer sufficient conceptual resources for understanding them? (There are many things which could be said of medieval societies which are both far from false and far from illuminating). And does his scheme offer any conceptual resources for understanding how the closed society of medieval Christendom could have become the fledgling open society of modernity?

There are historical problems. To put it bluntly: we know Plato and Aristotle far more directly than a large number of the medieval purveyors of “Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” did. Engagement with Aristotle was limited until the re-entry of texts in translation from the 12^thcentury or so. As for Plato, in practical terms, Western readership was mainly limited to the Timaeus until 15^th century translations of his corpus. This does not altogether dismantle Popper’s outline. There were other conduits for Platonic and Aristotelian thought. But combined with a student of early medieval history’s admittedly slender grasp of later medieval philosophy, not least its self-conscious transcendence of ancient roots – dwarfs and giants – and the peculiar scholastic emphasis on observation (or, being wary of anachronism, peculiar empiricism), Popper’s narrative is decidedly shaky.

Far more importantly, Popper’s understanding of the closed society is, if anything, excessively coherent. Not only persecution, but even pestilence is taken to be the hallmark of medieval society; and, as hallmarks, both persecution and pestilence are rendered explicable by the confluence of ideas, by that constellation of associations inextricable from the closed society: magic and taboo – and theistic historicism (“Men believed God to rule the world”) – impeded responsibility; essentialism arrested the desire for social change; and so on.  Terror, wretchedness, hardship, oppression, plagues, and even dancing manias all flowed from this cohesive ideological font, Popper declares.

Returning to my early medieval comfort zone, does Popper’s constellation of ideas help or hinder our reading of social change? Even to put the question in this way suggests a problem. Popper’s scheme appears to be largely uninterested in change within closed societies. The most notable exception is his hypothetical – and interesting – typology of changing configurations of natural and normative law, from tribal naïve monism (where nature and norms are not distinguished) to critical dualism (which separates nature and norms). But even these types are framed in terms of their relation to the critical rationalist’s demarcation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, of facts and decisions (or values): they are progressive, even if not historically inevitable. But, otherwise, there is little sense of how closed societies can change or develop, or of how medieval society did.

It is beyond my aim here to give an account of trends in early medieval historiography. But a brief foray may explain my fraught encounter with The Open Society. Post-Roman societies can no longer be viewed solely through the prism of decline and stasis, following the illumination of late antique and early medieval cultural innovation, most astoundingly and famously in the work of Peter Brown. One fundamental problem, of course, is that our material tempts us into thinking otherwise. The programme of reform attempted in a late eighth and ninth-century Carolingian context – and the morass of material produced – idealised traditionalism and corporate uniformity.  But its products – from forged papal documents to John Scotus Eriugena’s dizzying onto-theology – are best read in the context of a series of innovative social changes. There was no question of attempting to arrest social change and, if anything, it was the messy realities of enactment which arrested change.

Likewise, the broader dynamics of ‘christianisation’ and the interplay between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religious practice problematise an overly static view of early medieval thought and social practice. Alongside the mutable constructions of ‘paganism’ as a strategy of distinction, with sometimes violent consequences, there were bursts of more self-conscious thought on the shifting boundaries of acculturation. That exceptionally influential early medieval pope, Gregory the Great, was not unusual in writing self-consciously about cultural adaptation and interchange in his widely read letter to Anglo-Saxon missionaries (which, incidentally, incorporated a discussion of prevailing taboos which was at once critical and sympathetic). For Gregory, some ‘pagan’ customs could be fruitfully absorbed or ‘baptised’ rather than eradicated.  Indeed, from Augustine to Alcuin, thinking about both missionary and pastoral activity presupposed a certain awareness of the modalities of cultural exchange. As Alexander Murray once put it, “the entire history of medieval religion is a commentary on Gregory’s letter”.

In the encounter not just with Charlemagne’s violent expansion into Saxony, but also with the multiple responses of Saxon converts and Frankish churchmen in subsequent generations, the constellation of ideas associated with closed societies – and their coherence – begins to disintegrate. This impression is consolidated when one considers later medieval developments – for example, the rebirth of the state and an increasing centralisation of power, the development of a specialised – and sophisticated – political discourse and even the multi-faceted flourishing of scholasticism. The longue duree histories of hagiography, theology and even medicine or – to put it another way – the changing dynamics of utopianism, essentialism, tribalism, magicalism and so on across this vast span all militate against the security of this constellation.

 The fundamental issue here is not primarily with Popper’s historical outline, nor am I undertaking medievalist apologetics. The key point is that the developments and energies of medieval societies, whether seen in subtly complex cultural processes or inescapably horrific atrocities, cannot be adequately grasped in the ideological terms of the closed society.

            Why should this be so? The intellectual and political context in which Popper was writing may offer some light: perhaps his work  is most fruitfully read as a historical document.  But another reason may stem from Popper’s philosophy of science. (At various points, Popper seems to identify the open society as a society which lives out falsification across the board: whether this is a strangely unPopperian form of utopian thinking – utopia, in the old pun, is also a no-where – is surely open to debate). I can only scratch the surface here. Popper’s justification and description of scientific practice focuses on the revolutions and ruptures wrought by falsification of theories. The famous Kuhnian response is to try to focus instead upon how the epistemological crises which lead to such revolutions might come about and also upon the stretches of theoretical stability between such crises. In terms of Kuhn’s critique, Popper’s thesis is ill-equipped to grasp how the epistemological crises which prompt such revolutions are experienced, and the nature of the relationship between a novel theory and the context from which it emerged. One consequent blind-spot is the nature of the context before theoretical revolution. And if I have understood Popper’s notion of the closed society correctly, it is perhaps for similar reasons that his historical perspectives and conceptual resources are ill-equipped to grasp medieval societies, and their relationship to modernity. This is, in part, the problem of identity. It is unclear how a closed society can turn into an open one and retain any identity given the characterisation of both. More concretely, the medieval can only relate to the modern through rupture and yet how such a rupture might have come about is difficult to comprehend on his terms.

Was Gilson completely mistaken in his lament over “a sad old age that loses all its memories”? This brings to light the possibility of a subtle omission in terms of Popper’s explicit notion of the ‘open society’. After all, are modes of relation to the past, are narratives not central to the self-understanding of ‘open societies’? Does the open society, as Popper understands it, necessitate a narrative of rupture, revolution and emancipation from the closed? Or, to adapt Gilson’s terms, does it require a kind of historical forgetting?

This book seeks to sift the evidence from the New Testament, Jewish scripture, contemporary Jewish beliefs, other near contemporary writers and what we know of Jewish society at the time to create some possible scenarios for why the Resurrection became such a central belief, firstly for the Jewish Jesus movement and then for the early church. He then examines each of these in some detail before identifying the most likely sequence of events which provided the basis for it. He dismisses the two extreme positions of the non-existence of the historical Jesus (which, he says, creates more problems than it solves) and the supernatural explanation of Christians that the Resurrection and Ascension actually occurred.

The book begins by examining the development of Jewish post-death beliefs through a critical analysis of the Torah, later scriptural writings in the Old Testament, other biblical period sources, and later (post-biblical) rabbinical texts. Judaism has little to say about an afterlife until the rise of the Pharisees in late biblical times. Almost all biblical literature was concerned with living a good and pious life on earth. Vermes does, however, acknowledge the tensions that this caused as some impious wrongdoers prospered whilst good people suffered. This, ‘Injustice,’ is starkly illustrated in the book of Job. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the author of Ecclesiates and one or two others highlight and rail against this seeming anomaly.

By the time of Jesus there were (at least) three distinct traditions of Jewish religious thought: The Sadducees (orthodox); Essenes (an ascetic sect that had largely withdrawn from the world and whose writings are contained within the Dead Sea scrolls); and the Pharisees. Pharisees were thought to number about 6,000 at the time of Jesus and were mainly confined to urban areas, particularly towns in Judea. Their distinctive beliefs included a conviction that the good would be rewarded in the afterlife. It is unlikely that there were Pharisees preaching in Galilee at the time of Jesus.

The author then turns his attention to resurrection references in the Bible and post-biblical literature. He includes here references to resuscitations performed by Jesus and his disciples. There are some examples of restoring people to life prior to Jesus such as those credited to the prophets Elijah and Elisha but full blown resurrection and ascension was confined to Enoch and Elijah, with Jewish tradition adding Moses and Isaiah to the list.

The idea of resurrection began to take hold during the mid 2^nd century BC in the Book of Daniel (160BC) and 1 and 2 Maccabees (100BC). This followed the massacre and displacement of Jews, and the suppression of Judaism by the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, in 168 BC. The resurrection belief took two forms; Palestinian Jews thought that bodily resurrection would take place and those in the Greek speaking Diaspora leaned more towards the Platonic concept of immortality of the soul once it had been liberated from its corruptible body. Martyrdom became common at this time: many devout Jews would rather suffer death than deny their religion. Josephus claims that Essenes believed in spiritual resurrection, although there is scant evidence for this in the Dead Sea scrolls. So, at the time of Jesus there are three views on the afterlife: the aristocratic and orthodox Sadducees thought that bodily and spiritual expiration happened at the time of death; the Pharisaic belief of bodily resurrection and the immortality of the soul supported by most (but not all) Jews of the Diaspora.

The second part of the book deals with accounts of resurrection and the afterlife in the New Testament, concluding with some possible scenarios explaining the Resurrection of Jesus. Jesus himself refers to the afterlife hardly at all in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and those few turn out to be inauthentic. There are more references in John but some of those are clearly post hoc such as 6:24 which invites his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood – a nauseating thought for a first century Palestinian Jew. If the search is widened to include references to eternal life the synoptics still provide few examples. John, on the other hand, contains 25 references attributed to Jesus. The synoptics (not John) have Jesus repeatedly referring to his own resurrection, which makes it so odd that the disciples were taken aback by the event when it occurred.

Vermes then sets out in some detail the varying accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus in each of the Gospels. Whichever way one interprets these they are irreconcilable and some are flatly contradictory. The author’s view is that the afterlife did not figure largely in the words of Jesus because he fully expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. When it did not occur the Gospel writers had a problem of how to explain the cross and the belief of Jesus as Messiah, which is why there is such a diversity of explanations. It must not be forgotten that the Gospels were written between 40 and 70 years after the death of Jesus.

It was Paul (writing in the mid 50s AD, 20 odd years after the events) who made the Resurrection of Jesus the centrepiece of Christianity. He does not dwell on the events but just states it as fact. It is the author’s contention that the references in Paul’s letters arose from debates within the Jesus movement on the forthcoming Parousia (the return of Christ). A lot of the debate centred around what would happen to believers who had died before He returned. Paul reassured them that they also would be revived. There is little reference to the Resurrection in other parts of the New Testament.

He ends the book with six theories that might explain the events at the end of the life of Jesus. These are:

The body was removed from the tomb by somebody unconnected with Jesus. Objection: those who buried Jesus were well known and could have easily furnished an explanation as to why the body had been moved.

The body was stolen by his disciples. Objection: his followers did not expect Him to reappear, so why would they pretend that he had? The author suggests that this was a rumour spread by the Jewish religious hierarchy to discredit the incipient Jesus movement.

The empty tomb was not the tomb of Jesus. This is possible but unlikely given that everybody involved knew where it was.

Buried alive, Jesus later left the tomb. Objection: what happened to Him afterwards?

The migrant Jesus – he revived from his coma and left Judea. Objection: a lack of evidence.

Spiritual, rather than bodily resurrection. He only appeared to his adherents after death and so it is possible that a vision came to one or more of His followers (not an uncommon phenomenon in a more credulous age) and that became the basis of the story. Again, the objection is that there is no tangible evidence that this is what occurred.

This leaves us with an Epilogue where he speculates that without Jesus the movement must die and so He lived on in the hearts of His followers. This wish then might have become father to the thought and the tale then became one of actual (rather than metaphorical) resurrection. It was Paul who first latched on to this and made it the focal point of the teachings of the early church.

My own view is that this explanation seems to be in the right area. There might also have been some guilt, anger and grief mixed in with desire to preserve the memory of their leader. We can see today how people will strive to preserve the memory of departed loved ones as vividly as they can and how often devotees will fervently continue to believe that their hero is not really dead, despite the evidence.

The texts assembled, edited and expanded during the reign of Josiah and taken into exile in Babylon did not yet have the status of Scripture. But with the loss of the first temple and the homeland they gained added importance, and they were re-edited to account for the disaster of the Babylonian conquest and to suit the circumstances of the exiles. The Priestly (P) document, a revision of the E (Northern) and J (Southern) narratives, was added at this time, together with Numbers and Leviticus. The writings of Isaiah II, also of this date, contain the first unequivocal statement of monotheism and of the exclusiveness of the Israelites as a people.

Following the return from exile it was Ezra, sent by the Persian king with a mandate to establish the Mosaic Law as the law of the land, who was to establish the texts as Scripture and who, as a scholar and exegete, began to craft a spiritual discipline based on the sacred texts. His reading of the Torah marks the beginning of classical Judaism, seeing revelation through study of the scriptures as an on-going process. During this period other writings were added to the existing scriptural categories of the Torah and the Prophets, including Chronicles, which was essentially a commentary on the Deuteronomic texts omitting the polemic against the Northern kingdom, and the ‘Wisdom’ writings (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Job).

The Greek conquest of the Persian empire in 333 BCE introduced Hellenism to the Near East. Some Jews were drawn to Greek ideas, but a more conservative element was opposed, leading to the revolt of the Maccabees and the establishment of an independent Jewish state under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Book of Daniel, which was written during the Maccabean war, is a work of exegesis, reinterpreting the established texts in order to speak to the present. The study of the Torah was now becoming a prophetic discipline, and it is significant that the writer found inspiration in study of the texts, in contrast to Isaiah and Ezekiel who were seen as having received their prophetic initiation in the Temple.

By the end of the second century BCE, as a result of disillusion with the Hasmonean kings, people were searching for a new direction. Judaism split into a multiplicity of sects, including the Pharisees, Sadducees, the Essenes and, eventually, the Christians, and many new texts were being written, incorporating novel ideas of Jewishness and eschatological visions in which God would intervene to establish a new age of justice and purity. The library of the Essenes at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls) is indicative of the diversity of new scriptures being produced. At the same time Hellenised Jews such as Philo of Alexandria, influenced by Platonism and finding much in the Bible which seemed crude and incomprehensible to the Greek-trained mind, used the allegorical method to find a deeper spiritual significance in the texts.

Only two sects survived the disaster of the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple (70 CE), one of them being the Jesus movement. The earliest Christians remained devout Jews, and Paul and the writers of the Gospels reinterpreted the scriptures using a form of exegesis known as pesher (deciphering), reading them as a kind of code containing references which foreshadowed the events of their own day and the coming of Christ. The Christian scriptures, though written at different times for different audiences, share a set of symbols drawn from the Law, the Prophets and Second Temple period texts and combined in a new synthesis. The Gospels are, in fact, so thoroughly works of exegesis that it is difficult to disentangle the facts.

The Pharisees were well placed to preserve and continue the traditions of main-stream Judaism, since their spirituality was not focused solely on the Temple, and they developed an imaginative form of exegesis termed midrash. According to this the scriptures were capable of yielding endless new meanings, and the exegete had to apply the Torah to each particular situation and make it speak to the needs and condition of the community of the time. The original historical context and meaning of the texts was irrelevant.

The early Christian fathers tended to see the Old Testament as a single book, the whole of which (rather than selected passages) carried a unified message – a subtext which referred forward to the life and death of Jesus and revealed the secrets of the cosmos. The Christians of Alexandria, following the hermeneutic tradition of Philo, developed the art of what they called spiritual interpretation. Like the rabbis, they saw the Bible as capable of yielding endless meanings and their methods were in some ways similar to rabbinical midrash. The Antiochenes (e.g. John Chrysostom) were, on the other hand, wary of allegory, and preferred to look for moral lessons in the plain sense of the texts. For Augustine of Hippo, as a Platonist, it was natural to elevate the spiritual over the literal meaning, but he also had a strong sense of history which enabled him to steer a middle course. For him, what was important was to seek a charitable explanation, and if a passage was not conducive to this it must be interpreted figuratively.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe, only the monasteries provided the conditions necessary for study of the Bible. Within the monastic tradition the ‘lectio divina’ (sacred study) was developed as a kind of meditative discipline. Monks were encouraged to enter the texts imaginatively in order to reach a spiritual understanding; the literal meaning was of little importance.

By the 11^th century CE Christians studying with Muslim scholars in Spain were beginning to rediscover the classical culture which had been lost to western Europe. The works of Aristotle were translated from Arabic into Latin, and Aristotle’s philosophy encouraged Western scholars to use their reasoning power in ways which affected the study of the Bible. Early in the 12^th century French scholars, beginning with Anselm of Laon, put together a standard commentary on the Vulgate (the Latin Bible), providing an explanation of each verse in the form of notes in the margins or between the lines, and this became a basic classroom text. The master would read the glossed text and the students would then ask questions and engage in discussion using Aristotelian logic and dialectic. As a result the cathedral schools and universities, interested in the new learning and objective biblical criticism, diverged from the monastic tradition in which the ‘lectio divina’ still prevailed.

At the same time there was a growing interest in the literal sense of the Bible. In Northern France Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhak, a philologist, studied the meanings of individual words and the ways in which they threw light on the text. He saw this literal exegesis as complementary to midrash, although some of his successors were more radical. Some Christian scholars began to consult local Rabbis and learn Hebrew, thinking that a correct literal understanding of the Bible was essential before allegorical interpretation was possible.

In the 13^th century the Dominicans aimed to adapt Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity and, while not abandoning the ‘lectio divina’, gave serious attention to the literal sense of the texts. For them the spirit of scripture was to be found in the literal and historical meaning, and Thomas Aquinas took the view that this spiritual meaning could be discerned in the events, which God had orchestrated to prefigure the redemptive work of Christ.

Jews living in the Islamic world had also attempted to apply Greek rationalism to the Bible, but found it difficult. Maimonides (1135-1204) tried to reconcile the Aristotelian view with the Bible, although he thought that religious experience and intuitive knowledge of the prophets was of a higher order than knowledge acquired by reason. Philosophical rationalism prompted a reaction which, in the 13^th century, produced the Kabbalah – a scripturally based mysticism which revived the mythical element in ancient Israelite tradition, and as life for the Jews in Europe became more difficult, this movement gained a wide following. In the 16^th century a Sephardic Jew, Isaac Luria developed an elaborate kabbalistic mythology which addressed their feelings of living in an unjust and evil world. According to this mythology a primal disaster had resulted in a cosmos where sparks of divine light were trapped in matter, yearning to be reunited with the infinite and unknowable godhead which existed outside the world. The literal meaning of the Bible, in which God appears as masculine and often cruel, was seen as symptomatic of this catastrophe, because in the world God could not be fully apprehended.

The Christians, in the meantime, were moving in the opposite direction, with increasing emphasis on plain exegesis and the importance of scholars reading the Bible in the original languages. The philosophers and humanists of the Renaissance were critical of medieval scholastic theology and wanted to go back to the Bible and the early Christian fathers. Taught by Byzantine refugees from the fall of Constantinople, many Western scholars were able for the first time to read the New Testament in the language in which it had been written, and the invention of printing meant that the edition of the Greek text which Erasmus published in 1519 was immediately and widely available. Reading the Bible in the original languages made people more aware of it as a collection of diverse books, and of the authors as individuals with different styles and points of view.

The authors of the Reformation, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, introduced the principle of ‘sola scriptura’, giving the scriptures primacy over creeds, the liturgy and the pronouncements of the Church. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular meant that it became accessible by everyone, although it was still felt that guidance was necessary from scholars acquainted with all forms of exegesis. The new sciences were not, at this time, seen as undermining the authority of scripture. For Calvin the Old Testament demonstrated an evolutionary process, whereby God’s truth had been revealed in stages according to the needs and limitations of the people of the time. Allegorical interpretations were unnecessary, but it was also absurd to expect scripture to teach scientific facts.

In practice, ‘sola scriptura’ meant that everyone could interpret the Bible as they chose. but the problem with this was that the Bible could be used to justify opposing positions, and by the 17^th century people were beginning to realise that it was a very confusing book.

The ethos of the Enlightenment further affected the way in which the Bible was read. If, as Francis Bacon argued, the only reliable information was that which could be demonstrated empirically, mysticism, mythology and scriptural revelation were irrelevant. Some deists virtually ignored the Bible; others discounted what they considered the irrational elements. Spinoza (1632-77), a Sephardic Jew, concluded that the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it was not of divine origin, and in his objective study of it he pioneered the historical-critical method which was later to be known as the Higher Criticism.

Judaism in the 18^th century branched into three main movements. Some, embracing the Enlightenment, came to see it as a rational faith, concerned principally with ethics based on the Law, and they accepted the authority of the Torah only insofar as they could be convinced of the rationality of its claims. It was these rationalists who were eventually to found Reform Judaism. In Eastern Europe the Hasidim followed a form of mysticism developed out of Luria’s kabbalistic mythology, but for them, reading the Bible was an exercise similar in principle to the medieval ‘lectio divina’, the object being to achieve a state of enhanced consciousness through which they could encounter the spiritual truth underlying the literal sense. Orthodox Jews maintained a middle way, giving priority to the scholarly study of the Torah, but seeking also, through intense study, to achieve a mystical communion with God

By the early 19^th century. German scholars led the way in Biblical studies, taking Spinoza’s historical-critical methods to new lengths. Their analyses identified the various different authorial hands in the Old Testament and worked out the sequence of writing. ‘Essays and Reviews’, published by seven Anglican Clergy in 1861, made this Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader, and the upset which this caused among religious conservatives led to a reaction which was the origin of modern Fundamentalism. In the USA Bible Colleges were founded to promote a literal reading of the texts which went further than any interpreters had done before. Some in the past had favoured the study of the literal sense, but none had believed that every word was factually true.

While Reform Jews were becoming assimilated into mainstream society, the Orthodox also felt themselves embattled and on the defensive, and the Yeshivoth which they founded for the intensive and rigorous study of the Torah and the Talmud were the equivalent of the American Bible Colleges. The Hasidim eventually joined forces with them against the perceived threat of the Jewish Enlightenment. The Yeshivoth which were founded in Israel after 1948 fostered an even more stringent form of Bible-based orthodoxy.

The interpretation of the Bible has always been affected by historical conditions, and Jews, Christians and Muslims have developed scripturally based ideologies which are imbued with the violent ethos manifest in the events of ithe 20^th century. American fundamentalists see in current events the approaching fulfilment of the apocalyptic vision of John Nelson Darby (1800-82), whose literal reading of Revelations had convinced him that God was about to end this period of history with an unprecedented disaster. In Israel a reductionist reading of the Bible provides the rationale for extreme religious Zionism.

Other scholars of the 20^th century, both Jewish and Christian, have tried to revive traditional Biblical spirituality, exploring various new ways of reading and deconstructing the texts to show how they may speak to the hopes and expectations of the modern world, while avoiding facile interpretations. In their view it is impossible to extract definitive ‘fundamentals’ of divine revelation from the many, complex and contesting visions in the Bible. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard, stressed the importance of understanding the Bible historically – what it has meant to Jews and Christians at different times in their history, and how their experience has coloured their exegesis; but to concentrate on what the original authors meant is to distort its significance.

Elephantschild

Here’s that promised piece on Kolbe. I must confess to finding it incredibly
frustrating to articulate and translate my thoughts into words on a screen.
But, for better or for worse, here it is (and apologies for the unseemly
length).

Maximilian Kolbe, 1894-1941 (and Charles)

A dear college friend once told me about Maximilian Kolbe in the midst of a
seemingly interminable late night discussion that flitted between morality,
religion and cooking Thai curries. In retrospect, my points in this particular
discussion – one of many I fondly recall – were not particularly compelling.  I
remember resorting to ‘that’s just your opinion’ rather too often, and my one
good point – about how wonderful galangel is when making Thai (or, rather,
vaguely South East Asian) food – was rather a meagre one. Anyhow, I remember
being quite taken by the story she narrated about Kolbe, and that was despite,
I confess, almost not wanting to be taken by it.

I won’t mention much about his life as a whole, though it is hardly
uninteresting. The aspect which continues to fascinate me is his death. I
cannot write much about the various sources with which this has been pieced
together, though I understand that it is based on the testimonies of various
inmates and camp wardens.  This does not trouble me at all: so much of what we
know about the concentration camps is based on such testimonies (as opposed to
administrative sources) and our knowledge is all the richer for it. The
writings of a Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi are far more compelling – and I mean
that including in the sense of writing history – than, say, a secretary’s log
(even if such a log is vital source material too). It does mean that there are
some things I will not be able to answer if quizzed: for instance, the account
below of Kolbe’s brief dialogue with an Auschwitz commandant doubtless glosses
over the fact of interpretation (I mean in the sense of language barriers).

In February 1941, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Warsaw.
(He had been involved in various print and radio undertakings before the Nazis’
arrival and, I understand, his arrest was related to this). In May, he was
transferred to Auschwitz. Though he would be dead a few months later, there are
some testimonies about his time there (for instance, by a doctor who treated
him: Kolbe had earlier in the year suffered an inflammation of the lungs).

Now, there was some sort of rule at Auschwitz that if a man escaped, ten men
would be killed as punishment. And, the story goes, in July, a man from Kolbe’s
block escaped. The men from the block were led out in front of the commandant,
Karl Fritsch.  It was understood that the punishment would be the starvation
bunker: at the height of summer, this meant an agonising death, usually in
days, without food or water. Ten men were selected. One of these, Franciszek
Gajowniczek, had been imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He
instinctively exclaimed: ‘My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?’.

At this point, Kolbe stepped forward, took off his cap and offered himself: “I
am a Catholic priest,” he explained to the commandant, “Let me take his place.
I am old. He has a wife and children.”

Interestingly, the commandant came to agree to this. Gajowniczek stepped back
into file and Kolbe joined the wretched nine in their grim fate. In the bunker,
things soon became terrible. Some men would drink their own urine. According to
a janitor (if my memory serves me correctly), however, there were no screams or
even the sounds of the desperate one might have expected. Kolbe is said to have
led these men in hushed prayers and hymns. A fortnight in, four men remained,
including Kolbe. Needing the cell (for more conspicuous punishment?), the camp
executioner came in to inject each man’s arm with a dose of lethal carbolic
acid. At his turn, Kolbe, kneeling down, is said to have raised up and offered
his arm to the executioner. He died on 14th August 1941. For what it is worth,
I should add that Kolbe was beatified in 1970 and canonised in 1982.
Gajowniczek, I believe, was present at both ceremonies. And, apparently, there
is also one more detail: the man whose alleged escape precipitated the whole
episode was, apparently, found dead in a latrine not long after. It appears
that he had fallen in by mistake.

Now, let me be clear. I do not think that Kolbe’s being Catholic – or even being
a priest – is separable from his story, from his very identity. But, I don’t at
all wish to recall this in a triumphalistic way. (My sister’s ex-boyfriend is a
quarter Polish. His maternal grandmother was an inmate at Auschwitz for several
years and he said that the greatest perversities – he did not specify – in
Auschwitz were perpetrated by Catholic priests).

Rather, I find it interesting – particular the exchange, the literal redemption
of Gajowniczek – for several reasons, albeit ones which are not easy to
articulate. First off, I am struck by, for want of a better phrase, the sheer
goodness of such a deed.  This begs all sorts of questions. What were his
duties? Was this a ‘supererogatory’ act? What were his motives? Do the
consequences matter? For instance, to a strict consequentialist – I mean the
devious kind who is not averse to torturing philosophy students with devilish
scenarios featuring fat pot-holers and narrow cave entrances – upon hearing of
the bare bones of the exchange, it might or might not be good.

Perhaps there is something awry when we can even speak in the language of
consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics etc in immediately
responding to this kind of deed. I’m certainly glad that my immediate reaction
was one which I can only imperfectly articulate as that sense of sheer
goodness. (It’s worth pointing out that this would still be my reaction, I
imagine, even if the commandant had decided to make Kolbe an eleventh damned
man). It is the kind of sheer goodness that animates and relieves so many of
the stories in the Holocaust. There is another one in Primo Levi’s If This Is
Man, and I think it’s worth quoting. The incident takes place during the last
weeks at Auschwitz, when Russian artillery was audible and liberation felt
tantalisingly close:

“That night held ugly surprises.
Ladmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was (or had
been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in
bed for three months; I have no idea how he had managed to survive the
selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time
a serious cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered with
bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach. Despite all
this, he had a ferocious appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him…In the middle of the night, he groaned and then threw himself
from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the
ground crying and shouting loudly.
Charles lit the lamp…and we were able to ascertain the gravity of the situation.
The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly
becoming insupportable…And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a
terrible source of infection, while he could certainly not be left all night to
groan and shiver in the cold in the middle of the filth.
Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp,
he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a
knife. He lifted Ladmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother,
cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted
him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate fellow
could lie, He scraped the floor with a scrap of tin plate, diluted a little
chloramines and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.”

I imagine that upon reading this sort of thing, we marvel at something. One
interesting, additional point, in both cases, lies with what might, from a
particular perspective, be the futility of these acts (though I do not think
that this is quite what we marvel at). Ladmaker will most probably die. Kolbe
might just end up getting both himself and Gajowniczek killed. Even at his
execution – the symbolic gesture of offering one’s arm, of accepting death, of
dying well – is futile, in a sense. And yet these are also symbolically
powerful acts. And something of their power, inevitably, lies in imagining
oneself in such a position. I must confess that, as much as I would like to
think otherwise, I could not vouch that I would act in such a way.

Second, even if our responses to these stories are emotional – and why should
they not be? – I am not so easily convinced that they can be easily interpreted
(and, rather summarily, dismissed) as ‘just’ emotive responses, as if the truly
objective/scientific/rational (delete as appropriate) response would be: Kolbe,
male, bearded, approximately 6”1, member of block x; at 1403hrs, Kolbe speaks
etc. The responses turn upon understanding what is enacted (and, to add another
layer, we might be responding both to Charles’ tenderness and Levi’s recognition
of this tenderness). The actions of a Kolbe or a Charles are intelligible to us.
This does not mean we can possibly know the precise intentions, though we might
imagine them and this imagining has certain limits. At the very least, is there
something about the enactments in such stories, about their very much
intelligible actions, which elicits such a response?

Third, these have to be stories. They are narratives. And I am quite taken by
the idea that, in all sorts of ways, narratives are central to our
understanding of all manner of things. To reiterate, even something like the
Kolbe story or anecdotes in Levi is both completely singular and yet wholly
informative for the light it sheds on the possibilities for human (inter)action
in somewhere like Auschwitz. And it offers the kind of illumination of being at
somewhere like Auschwitz that an entire textbook on the excavation of Auschwitz
could not.

These are scattered – and hopefully – not too trite thoughts. I think that I am
probably right in thinking that most people are moved by such stories and
respond to them with something akin to what I called a sense of sheer goodness
(whatever terms others might use). Let’s say as a general rule that most
people, roughly speaking, do respond in such a way.

Here are two possible questions to consider: what of those who do not respond in
such a way? Suppose someone were to say, ‘Well, Kolbe didn’t save any of the
other nine’, or ‘Charles was being stupid, he should have left that guy to
reduce his own chances of contracting typhus’: are our reactions ‘just emotive’
to the point that I cannot reasonably question the propriety – moral,
intellectual – of such a response?

There were many Jewish boys at my school, and I remember that we always had a
memorial for the Shoah each year. (Jewish assembly – religious assembly was on
Thursday, with various options, from Sikh to Catholic, and a non-religious one
too – was possibly the most popular: you would see boys with turbans listening
to a Rabbi sing on his guitar about kosher food). One time, I remember that we
finished and filed out. There had been readings animated by silent documentary
footage from various concentration camps, including those seemingly familiar
photographs of emaciated inmates. I still remember a boy (Jewish, as it
happens) make a joke, as we treaded out, about their being anorexics and all he
got were silent glares. My long-winded point is this: there is – or, I want
there to be – something more meet, more adequate about the solemn response
almost all of us quite naturally enacted rather than that of the boy who
quipped. It seems to me that our responses were more ‘adequate’ to what we had
seen and heard depicted, they grappled more with what was understood. Or, at
least, our reactions differed not just in terms of emotion, but in our
understandings of the gravity of what we had witnessed.

And, second, if I am right that most people do marvel at such stories, their
marvelling is undoubtedly real: that is, they really do marvel. But are they
just projecting a wholly subjective sense of the marvellous, of ‘sheer
goodness’, onto a Charles or a Kolbe? Or is it truly worthy of marvelling to
offer one’s life for or cradle a fellow inmate with “the tenderness of a
mother”?

Their conclusions are as follows:

The timescales in the OT are wildly incorrect.

Some of the scriptures were probably based on orally transmitted myths and folk traditions predating the period of the two kingdoms.

The stories of the Patriarchs appear to have been based on such legends and hero tales. The most that can be said of them is that the archaeological evidence suggests circumstances in which they might have originated. For example, there seems to be a recurrent pattern in which some of the people of the region shifted back and forth from a nomadic and pastoral way of life in times of political stability and prosperity, to agricultural subsistence when things were more unsettled.

The captivity in Egypt did not occur as described, nor did the Exodus; and the details given in the account are anachronistic, but Semitic peoples from Canaan did periodically move into the region of the Nile Delta and settle there, the most notable instance being the immigration which led to the Hyksos establishing a ruling dynasty in Egypt c.1670 BCE (later accounts depict this as a violent invasion, but the archaeology suggests otherwise). The Hyksos were eventually defeated and driven back into Canaan.

There is no evidence for Joshua’s conquest of Canaan as depicted in the biblical account; in fact the Israelites were Canaanites. There was widespread destruction of Canaanite cities during the 13^th century BCE, but this is more properly understood in the context of a general upheaval and political crisis throughout the eastern Mediterranean region.

There is, however, evidence to suggest that there was a common culture in Palestine, which might loosely be termed Israelite, from about 13^th century BCE onward (there is, for example, an absence of pig bones in certain sites), but this cannot be seen as intrusive.

There was no united monarchy and the accounts of the ‘empire’ of David and Solomon have no historical basis. The north and south kingdoms were always separate and, of the two, the north kingdom (Israel) was the wealthier and more populous. If David and Solomon existed at all they were likely to have been local tribal chieftains from the hill country of Judah, ruling over very small populations. There is, nevertheless, some independent evidence that the rulers of Judah traced their descent from David, namely the inscription from Tel Dan, in which Hazael of Syria boasts of his defeat of Jehoram, king of the House of David c.835 BCE. The authors also note the correspondence between the tales of David as chief of an outlaw band and the 14th century BCE and Egyptian accounts of the Apiru as a class of brigands on the fringes of Canaanite society.

The first scriptures (The Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges and Kings) were compiled during the final days of the monarchy in Judah during the reign of Josiah (7^th century BCE); incorporating records from both kingdoms, although there were further redactions and additions during and just after the Babylonian exile (6^th century BC).

The monotheistic cult of YHWH only rose to prominence during this time – 7th and 6^th centuries BCE.

Much of the motivation for the writings was to demonstrate the superiority of Judah and, in particular, its king Josiah.. The northern kingdom had already been destroyed by the Assyrians, which is the reason it gets a bad press in the OT – history is written by the victors, or at least the survivors. The authors stress what they see as the religious as well as political motives of Josiah – the wish to establish the cult of YHWH as the sole religion of the people of Judah.

Manasseh was a successful monarch presiding over a long period of peace for Judah (and not as depicted in the OT), whereas Josiah is more likely to have precipitated the events leading to the destruction of the kingdom through his overt ambition, which was seen as a threat to the Babylonian empire.

The Authors: Israel Finkelstein is director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. Neil Asher Silberman is director of historical interpretation for the Ename Centre for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium.

Summary of, ‘Who Wrote the Bible,’ by Richard Elliott Friedman.

There are four main sources for the OT books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. There is also a redactor (R) who put them together.

The earliest two versions of the Torah (Pentateuch), except Deuteronomy and Leviticus were written at about the same time before (probably just before) the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 BC. These are called J, where God is referred to throughout as YHWH (or Yahweh) and E, derived from His name, Elohim (which just means ‘God’ in ancient Hebrew). J was composed in Judah and E in the north. E was brought south after the fall of the northern kingdom by its custodians (probably Shilohite priests). These were from the Mushite (Moses) succession of priests.

Somebody in Judah (we don’t know who) combined them to produce a reasonably coherent narrative. The reason why both versions needed to be represented is because there were lots of refugees from the northern kingdom in Judah and if the southern account only had been proposed as the true version there might well have been trouble. This is why there are so many repetitions, inconsistencies and contradictions – two schools representing two different interests.

Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were written by one person mainly during the reign of Josiah in Judah (late 7th or early 6^th century BC) but partly after its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BC. That author was Jeremiah (with help from his scribe, Baruch), who fled to Egypt after the Babylonian invasion. He deliberately wrote from a Mushite perspective and emphasising Josiah as the Davidic successor and an example of a good king. This bit is accepted almost in its entirety by Finkelstein and Silberman

The fourth element is termed the priestly (P) source and was responsible for most of the Torah as we have it now, including all of Leviticus. It was written from an Aaronid (the line of Aaron) perspective and composed during the reign of Hezekiah (7^th century BC) – Josiah’s grandfather.

There were two priestly traditions – those who traced their ancestry to Moses and those to Aaron – and both of their writings were combined to produce what we now know as the Torah and histories by a redactor. This redactor was Ezra and it was all put together by him after the building of the second temple following the release of the Jews from their Babylonian exile. He was an Aaronid priest.

Friedman takes as read that the Egyptian captivity happened and that Moses and Aaron were real people. He also seems to believe that David and Solomon reigned over a united kingdom. He does not go so far as to suggest that the Patriarchs existed. His brief is not an archaeological history of the Bible lands but a textual critique of certain bits of the OT.

Summary of Bart Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus.’

Ehrman is an expert on New Testament biblical textual analysis and chairs the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. His personal spiritual journey is interesting. He grew up an average church-going child whose parents were religious but more by custom than conviction. In his later teens he joined a group who took the bible literally as the perfect and unadulterated word of God. Gradually, through his theological studies at university, he began to have doubts. These doubts grew as he detected more and more inconsistencies and contradictions. It was then that his interest in textual criticism really took flight as he tried to understand what the underlying message might be and how these variations arose. He is now agnostic.

The earliest fragment we have of anything from the New Testament is dated early second century AD and anything more substantial dates from the third century onwards.

There have been a huge number of alterations over the years for a number of reasons:

- Copyist error (the most common cause);
- Correcting what was thought to be an earlier error;
- Deliberate manipulation of the text to suit the scribe’s views; and
- Organised changes to make the document conform to the theological views of the group commissioning the copy.

Errors of the first kind were more prevalent during the early years before the advent of professional scribes. Most of the copies then were written by barely literate Christians, literate slaves and/or by dictation.

All scribes were prone to amending text to say what they thought the document should have said.

As most scribes were Christian many were tempted to alter text to suit their own views and prejudices, and to conform to the mores of their own era.

The last form of textual corruption was a consequence of the power struggle between various sects and doctrines. As the victors write the history, what we are left with is the proto-orthodox version.

Ehrman details various techniques used to sort the sheep from the goats and attempts to reconstruct what the original authors might have written.

He also points out that the earliest extant texts are not necessarily the most reliable and that most English translations, including the King James, are not to be relied upon. The best, in his view, is the NRSV – but it is still no substitute for reading the original Greek.

What we are left with are copies of copies of copies of copies etc, each with their myriad errors, compounding one on the other; and then poor translations of these.

Most of the errors are trivial but some are of fundamental importance to Christian beliefs. He cites many examples:

- The last 14 verses of Mark are later additions;
- The woman taken in adultery in John was added later;
- The only reference to the Trinity is fake; and
- Many of Paul’s letters were amended to reduce the importance and role of women in the early church.

He does not, however, try to identify the historical character of Jesus, who provided the inspiration for the letters of Paul and the Gospels. His email response to the question, ‘Why not?’ was that he was concerned solely with establishing the likely authenticity of the text and not the historical events that the NT depicts. He agreed, however, with our view that Geza Vermes is an expert on the subject who is well worth reading.

Elephantschild and Boltonian

His thought is so extraordinary because of its attempt to deal with what he terms ‘a world come of age’ in which religion in general and Christianity in particular has been forced out into the margins through developments in secular thought from psychotherapy to physics, sociology to jurisprudence.  Much of his thought remains undeveloped (he was in prison after all) but it still retains a brilliance and a relevance for our times possibly because of the context of his writing.  One wonders what he would make of the CiF debates on science, religion and the meaning of life.

A phrase that is often deployed in his letters on the world come of age is a Latin quotation from the Dutch jurist Grotius, ‘etsi deus non daretur‘ which can be translated as, ‘even if there were no God.’  Allow me to quote at length from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated July 16th 1944.

“God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics or science has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!).  For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible, eliminated.  A scientist or physician who sets out to edify is a hybrid.”

“…we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur.  And this is just what we do recognize – before God!  God himself compels us to recognize it.  So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) ['My God! My God!  Why have you forsaken me?'] The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand constantly.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of  the world onto the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world and that is the only way in which he is with us and helps us.  Matthew 8:17  makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.”

The extent to which it is possible to construct a religionless approach to Christianity will inevitably be debated by believers and non-believers alike but Bonhoeffer’s story and his striving for intellectual honesty have a resonance that will survive for many years to come.

Your thoughts and observations are , of course, most welcome.

P.S. You can read longer extracts from this letter of Bonhoeffer’s by following this link: July 16th 1944

I feel a certain affinity for Alfred having been born and bred in what was once Wessex, and having lived for a while in the place of his birth, Wantage, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). There is a statue of him in Wantage that I used to walk past on my way to work. There is also a statue of him in Winchester, which I see every fortnight when I drive there on some business (not financial) that is indelibly linked to the time when I lived in Wantage.  It would be nice to think that he watches over me, looks out for me and guides me, for an excellent guide he would make.
 
We call him “The Great” but he wasn’t known by this title until a long time after his reign from 871-99. The earliest records which refer to him in this way are from 16th century historians. He definitely wasn’t a legend in his own lifetime, his greatness only being appreciated from a distance. As soon as he came to power (which he had to wait for, being the youngest child) he faced a tough time of it. A Viking army had invaded further north in 865. Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia (the middle bit of England) had all resorted to paying them off to stop them inflicting any further damage, and the Vikings had settled camps in these areas. Nearly the whole of Alfred’s reign was blighted by the Vikings who could not be trusted to keep to the oaths that they made and would regularly display what we would today call “challenging behaviour” and  “pushing the boudaries” ; ie they just wouldn’t bloody behave! Alfred himself paid them off to keep them sweet, but even exchanging hostages did not prevent the Vikings from going back on their promise. At one point the Vikings took over Thorney island (very near to where I live)  and were held under siege there until they agreed to leave. They were one monstrous pain in the backside who took up time and resources and cost the lives of a lot of Alfred’s men.
 
Alfred somehow managed to find the time to devote to his own education. He was “ignorant of letters” in his youth so had a lot of catching up to do. He was not only concerned with his own learning, but that of others too. He set up a school for his own children and those of the court.
 
Asser, who wrote his biography of Alfred in 893, was a monk from St David’s in Wales. He was one of several learned men that Alfred brought to his court to facilitate his own learning. Alfred learnt Latin which enabled him to translate a number of books which he felt were “most necessary for all men to know” . These were “Pastoral Care” by Pope Gregory, “Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius and the Psalter (he managed the first 50 psalms before his death). Alfred didn’t feel the need to stick to a straight translation of these texts and often included very revealing aspects his own concerns, thoughts and history.  The translations were distributed widely so that people would benefit from their wisdom.
 
In addition to Asser’s work and Alfred’s translations we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a contemporary source, as well as Alfred’s will and some charters, laws and letters. From these it is obvious that Alfred was a very just man, always concerned for the welfare and development of his subjects.
 
He suffered from a mysterious illness for much of his life which would cause him considerable pain. It is not clear from the desription what this would have been, but from my reading it sounds a bit like kidney stone trouble. It didn’t stop him marrying or having children.
 
The story of “Alfred and the cakes” is probably legend as it does not appear in any contemporary sources. There are several versions, each showing Alfred in a different light according to the intention of the writer.
 
One thing that I read which was unexpected was that Alfred twice travelled to Rome as a child. At only four years of age he accompanied his father on a visit, and two years later he went again. I dread to think how long that would have taken, and how uncomfortable it would have been.
 
Lastly, I smiled when I read the genealogy of Alfred, which of course went all the way back to Adam. The name of Alfred’s ancestor 23 generations back is the one that I choose for my own son.