Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  but also to a kind of studied bewilderment at the utter illogic of American racism, the refusal to come to terms with the level of devastation that it had heaped upon Black people, and the deep investments of white people in maintaining white supremacy despite the progress of African Americans. Moreover, according to Williams, the Peculiar Institution and the peculiar forms of Americanism that it spawned had created a peculiar experience for Black women. “Though there is much that is sorrowful,” she maintained, “and much that is wonderfully heroic, and much that is romantic in a peculiar way in their history, none of it has as yet been told as evidence of what is possible for these women.” 49 Black women’s peculiarity within the American body politic, coupled with a blind allegiance on the part of the white public to the gospel of American exceptionalism, had rendered Black female experience and personhood illegible within the American public: “The American people have always been impatient of ignorance and poverty. They believe with Emerson that ‘America is another word for opportunity,’ and for that reason success is a virtue and poverty and ignorance are inexcusable. This may account for the fact that our women have excited no general sympathy in the struggle to emancipate themselves from the demoralization of slavery.” 50 Williams’s words point out that the great irony of the American system was that Americans’ deeply held disdain for inequality was outmatched only by their deep disdain for those who were unequal. Consequently, American exceptionalism had to be contested, not only in terms of its political implications, but also in terms of its epistemological implications. Failure to do so meant that Black female progress, and thus Black women’s lives, would continue to go intellectually unrecognized within the larger American body politic. Race and Public Opinion Reshaping the public discourse about Black women topped the NACW’s list of racial priorities. Challenging recalcitrant public opinion was necessary for Black women to move from being the “least known” group of women to a group of civically knowable persons. Figuring out how to name the proper terms upon which Black women know the world, and to create the proper terms upon which Black women can be known, constitutes a perennial and enduring epistemological crisis among Black women intellectuals and Black feminist theorists.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  identity by an allegiance to Blackness, Murray writes, “I had chosen to affirm my identity by anchoring myself firmly in the immediate American past, which had produced my mixed racial origins. ... ‘Black is beautiful’ had no personal meaning for me. I had come to appreciate the beauty of American Negroes in all their rich variety of features, hair texture, and skin tone ... revealing the harmonious genetic blending of several races.” 35 Moreover, Murray writes: My strong individualism worked against tendencies toward a too strong alliance with a racial group to the exclusion of others not so identified. ... To thrive, I need a society hospitable to all comers—Black as well as white, women as well as men, “the lame, the halt, the blind,” the browns and yellows and reds—a society in which individuals were free to express their multiple origins and to share their variety of cultural strains without being forced into a categorical mold. 36 Although they might have appreciated her ideals, Murray’s students resented her choice to “anchor herself firmly in the American past,” and they treated her like the relic that she unwittingly proclaimed herself to be. One student even kept a tally during Murray’s lectures of how often she used “Negro” versus “Black.” Her insistence on integrationism, as the tides among Black youth turned toward nationalist aims, made Murray summarily ineffective at negotiating the increasingly hostile racial campus climate at Brandeis in 1969. One of her prized pupils, a senior honors student named Patricia Hill, boldly walked out of class, yelling “Black solidarity,” as the campus erupted into widespread protest over the battle to adopt a Black studies curriculum in 1969. 37 In Murray’s view, this “new phase of the struggle ... confused and distorted the earlier goals” that “had been more universal, emphasizing the international solidarity of the working classes, the racial component of which had been a fire burning underground with only an occasional spurt of smoke and flame becoming visible.” 38 In 1942, Murray had written a passionate article entitled “Negro Youth’s Dilemma” that captured all the angst and anger that characterized the young upstarts of her generation. In it she asked, “Am I to forget the festering sores of racial intolerance, injustice, brutality and humiliation eating at the core of my national allegiance?” In response to the critics who felt that Black people should “fight a white man’s war” (WWII), Murray riposted, “[P]erhaps we are foolish in not realizing that Hitlerism would destroy us utterly while our fellow citizens in Sikeston, Missouri, would merely burn a few of us each year. But men who confront death and women who see the frustrations of their youth cannot be expected to distinguish between brutalities.” 39 Murray had been attuned to the “the impatience of young people, the desire for action, whether or not they are informed and trained.” 40 But she became increasingly bewildered, intimidated, and angered by this youthful impatience during its second iteration in the 1960s and ’70s.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In this way, her strategies of negotiation and survival constitute a form of disidentification with the dominant gender norms she encountered during the 1930s and 1940s. Because scientific thinking about transgender identity would not fully emerge until the 1950s, Murray turned to feminism to help her think more critically about what it meant to be both female and a woman. Though the biological fact of her femaleness indexed a range of problems related to her personal identity construction, feminism helped her to articulate concretely, if partially, some of the oppressions that she experienced as a female-bodied person. Though it could not, at the time, provide an adequate framework for negotiating her own emergent—and perhaps arrested—transgender identity, feminism did allow Murray to think productively about being a femalebodied person, since an overt male gender-queer performance would not be an option in the circles of racial leadership. Jane Crow is also one of the earliest articulations of intersectional theory within Black feminist thought. When she served on one of the subcommittees of President Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Murray wrote a memorandum and personally walked it around to key senators on Capitol Hill, whose votes were necessary to make sure the word sex remained in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She was responding to several different groups of critics. Some groups opposed the inclusion of the word because they thought it would eliminate special legal protections for women, in much the same way that those who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment thought. Some liberal critics believed that racism was Black women’s primary problem and could not see how sexism affected Black women as well. One woman, on the other hand, supported the amendment because the inclusion of the word sex would somehow inexplicably “protect” white women from Black women’s economic competition. Murray exposed the obvious flaw in her thinking by pointing out that Black women experienced sex discrimination as well, and that frankly “it was exceedingly difficult for a Negro woman to determine whether or not she is being discriminated against because of race or sex.” 42 As Julie Gallagher notes, “[T]hese forms of discrimination were deeply interconnected, a reality ‘that Negro women are uniquely qualified to affirm.’” 43 Not only did Murray’s advocacy on behalf of the Civil Rights Act help ensure the inclusion of legal protections against sex discrimination, but she also laid the legal scaffolding for Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectional arguments about Black women’s status as a protected legal class a quarter-century later. Moreover, Murray’s assertion that Black women were “uniquely qualified to affirm” the interconnectedness of race and sex discrimination echoed the same assertions from her race women forebears like Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell. In so doing, her legal theorizing concerning black women and race and sex discrimination is the most direct precursor to the emergence of intersectional thinking within the law and within Critical Race Theory two decades later. Murray also pioneered the use of the race-sex analogy in her thinking.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Nothing is more peculiar in the great Epistles than the almost complete omission of the twin Rabbinic ideas of repentance and for- giveness (p. 7 5; cf. pp. 60, 66, 127 ). Paul, Montefiore argued, could not 'have ignored the very keynote' of the Palestinian (or Rabbinic) Jewish position ifhe had known it (p. 76; c( p. 66). Therefore he knew some other kind of Judaism. Montefiore's effort was a serious attempt to solve a real problem. Scholars who found in Weber's description of Rabbinic Judaism (often equated simply with Judaism) a convincing depiction of the Judaism which Paul is likely to have known had no problem. The Judaism which Paul attacked is the same as that which emerges from Weber's study.1° Jewish scholars and Christian scholars more knowledgeable about Rabbinic Judaism, however, found an incongruity between what Paul criticized and the Judaism which they knew. Five years before Montefiore wrote, Schechter had put the problem thus: 10 Note Montefiore's criticism of relying, in a polemical situation, on one who shares one's own biases for knowledge of the other position; ibid., pp. 7-9. 6 Introduction Either the theology of the Rabbis must be wrong, its conception of God debasing, its leading motives materialistic and coarse, and its teachers lacking in enthusiasm and spirituality, or the Apostle to the Gentiles is quite unintelligible.11 Schechter, of course, took the second view. Paul's critique of Judaism was not to the point: therefore Paul could not be understood. In 1936 Parkes took something of the same view: We have further to admit, on any basis of intellectual honesty, that we know sufficient of the Pharisees and of Rabbinic Judaism of his [Paul's] period to be compelled to ·allow that if it is Rabbinic Judaism which he is attacking, then to a large extent his charges against the Law are unjustified. Judaism can be attacked from various points of view, and much in it can be criticized, but if Paul was really attacking 'Rabbinic Judaism,' then much of his argument is irrelevant, his abuse unmerited, and his conception of that which he was attacking inaccurate. 12 Like Montefiore, Parkes found the solution in Paul's having imbibed the Hellenistic spirit (p. 123). Paul attacked not Rabbinic Judaism, but Diaspora Judaism (p. 124). The problem was more perceptively handled by George Foot Moore. In agreement with Montefiore, he posed it thus: How a Jew of Paul's antecedents could ignore, and by implication deny, the great prophetic doctrine of repentance, which, individualized and interiorized, was a cardinal doctrine of Judaism, namely, that God, out of love, freely forgives the sincerely penitent sinner and restores him to his favor - that seems from the Jewish point of view inexplicable. 13 Moore did not find the answer in supposing that Paul was attacking some other form of Judaism, however. Rather, he granted that Paul's position, from the point of view of Judaism, was inexplicable.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Her insistence on integrationism, as the tides among Black youth turned toward nationalist aims, made Murray summarily ineffective at negotiating the increasingly hostile racial campus climate at Brandeis in 1969. One of her prized pupils, a senior honors student named Patricia Hill, boldly walked out of class, yelling “Black solidarity,” as the campus erupted into widespread protest over the battle to adopt a Black studies curriculum in 1969.37 In Murray’s view, this “new phase of the struggle … confused and distorted the earlier goals” that “had been more universal, emphasizing the international solidarity of the working classes, the racial component of which had been a fire burning underground with only an occasional spurt of smoke and flame becoming visible.”38 In 1942, Murray had written a passionate article entitled “Negro Youth’s Dilemma” that captured all the angst and anger that characterized the young upstarts of her generation. In it she asked, “Am I to forget the festering sores of racial intolerance, injustice, brutality and humiliation eating at the core of my national allegiance?” In response to the critics who felt that Black people should “fight a white man’s war” (WWII), Murray riposted, “[P]erhaps we are foolish in not realizing that Hitlerism would destroy us utterly while our fellow citizens in Sikeston, Missouri, would merely burn a few of us each year. But men who confront death and women who see the frustrations of their youth cannot be expected to distinguish between brutalities.”39 Murray had been attuned to the “the impatience of young people, the desire for action, whether or not they are informed and trained.”40 But she became increasingly bewildered, intimidated, and angered by this youthful impatience during its second iteration in the 1960s and ’70s. Not only did the separatist rhetoric of Black Power “grate upon [her] sensibilities,” she wrote, but she literally felt that she was “living in a world turned upside down [with] a complete reversal of the goals that had fired her own student activism.”41 Murray’s narrative of Black female subjectivity and her political allegiances were predicated upon a very particular notion of Negro or Black racial identity, which foregrounded the mixed racial heritage and American values and aspirations of people of color. In this respect, her more assimilationist values found her embracing and reinscribing the politics of respectability for a later generation, rather than resisting it, as she had done earlier. At the bottom of a copy of “Negro Youth’s Dilemma,” Murray mused during her time at Brandeis on her generation’s response to a new generation of discontented youth, wondering what, if anything, they could say to young people when conditions had changed so little.42

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  Ignatius that had been wrongly accepted as authentic throughout the Middle Ages. Isn’t that a bit odd, that it is precisely into that particular book that someone copied a letter that may well itself be forged instead of authentic? On the facing page, the last printed page of this book of Ignatius, the editor is discussing a textual problem, in which he points out that later scribes have incorrectly modi(cid:191) ed the original text and added considerable dribble that confuses the true historical sense of the text. Isn’t that an odd counterpart to this alleged letter? Finally, it is interesting to note how Smith himself dedicated the popular account of his book on the secret gospel. It is dedicated “To the One Who Knows.” Who is the one who knows? And what does he know? In conclusion, it is dif(cid:191) cult to say whether this account represents an authentic discovery or a modern forgery. If it is an authentic letter, it may provide us with some valuable information about Christianity in second- century Alexandria during the time of Clement and give us some interesting possibilities for understanding Mark’s gospel and the historical Jesus. If it is forged, it provides us with no authentic historical information, but may be of one of the most amazing feats of scholarship, in this case forged scholarship, of modern times. (cid:374) Essential Reading J. K. Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 148–150. Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel of Mark. Supplementary Reading John Dominic Crossan, Four Other Gospels. Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. 55 56 kraM fo lepsoG terceS ehT :21 erutceL Questions to Consider 1. Assume for a moment that the letter was actually penned by Clement and that there really was another edition of Mark available to the church in Alexandria. Is there any way that this other edition was in fact the (cid:191) rst edition of Mark and that later, certain passages came to be omitted by scribes copying it, possibly because the passages were considered offensive? 2. Assume that someone forged this document. What might have been his or her reasons for doing so?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Everyone grew silent and uncomfortable. The newcomer spoke rapidly in a maddening whine; I couldn’t pick out a word in her dialect. After half an hour she stood and left, nodding at Kay and one of the men and ignoring the rest of us. “She’s a sort of princess. That’s Fukienese she’s speaking,” Kay said. Our party, discouraged, broke up. One of the men walked me partway home and said, “That woman doesn’t like Americans and she hates speaking English. She teaches Old High German—” “What!” “Yes, at Cornell, and she takes a bus all day and night just to come here to speak Fukienese to Kay for four hours. Then she turns around and goes back. She writes Kay and me. I’ll show you her letters. They’re very beautiful and literary. She’ll be watching college boys racing around the track and in three words she’ll make an allusion to a Han fu about swans skimming the old palace pond.… She lives in a mental China still. She arrives without warning.” “Was she upset to see me at the party?” “Maybe.” He smiled. “What a dialect! We say she speaks five languages, all with a Fukienese accent.” For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast between my happy Chinese friends, the plentiful table, the laughter and harvest-moon faces—and then the perfect stillness of everyone’s eyes lowered under the bright ceiling lamp while the visitor nattered on and on, half her royal face concealed behind sunglasses, hand cutting the air. Her rank or distress had intimidated everyone except Kay, who seemed proud to be singled out. Maybe I was studying Chinese in order to have precisely these fleeting contacts with even a remnant of a society so different from my fragmented and compartmentalized life. My university had twenty thousand students, which makes a big school but a small town. Despite the smallness, I was able to keep several different lives separate from one another—I hid the Chinese from my fraternity brothers, the brothers from the bohemians I was mingling with in the middle room of the student-union cafeteria, and all three from those hairy legs and hard penises I was meeting under cold thick marble partitions or thin metal ones. When Kay or Betty would flirt with me I’d blush, and that became a new joke with them: I was nicknamed “Your Holiness” and teased for being a puritan. “We’ve heard about the American puritans,” Kay said unsmilingly. “Thoreau,” she said, pronouncing the name as though she meant the Hebrew holy book, the Torah. Since I’d read so many books about heterosexual sex and was specially well informed about the mysteries of the clitoris, my frat brothers thought I was a secret cocksman. Their stories were all about getting so drunk they were sick on their dates; girls were seen as good sports who held their heads over toilets and murmured, “It’ll be okay, honey.” The fraternity house was an Edwardian mansion.

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  52 Lecture 12: The Secret Gospel of Mark The Secret Gospel of Mark Lecture 12 One of the most controversial “discoveries” of modern times occurred in 1958 at the Mar Saba library near Jerusalem, when Morton Smith came upon the fragment of a letter, which indicates there existed a second edition of Mark’s gospel. T o this point in our course, we have seen a number of gospels that were known from ancient sources or discovered only in recent times. In this lecture, we will consider one of the most intriguing and controversial discoveries of modern times, a fragmentary account of a secret gospel allegedly written by Mark. Mark is the oldest and shortest gospel. It was not used extensively in the early church. Most of Mark’s stories are also found in Matthew and Luke, leading early Christians to believe that, perhaps, it was a condensed version of Matthew. According to the second- century heresiologist Irenaeus, the Gospel of Mark was used by Gnostics who separated the Jesus from the Christ. Mark begins with Jesus at his baptism, where the spirit of God comes into him. At the end of his life, Jesus on the cross cries out to God, “Why have you left me behind?” The proto-orthodox Christians accepted Mark as a bona¿ de canonical gospel. Was there a second version of Mark? A good deal of intrigue surrounds the circumstances of the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark. It was discovered by Morton Smith, one of the most erudite scholars of Christian antiquity of the twentieth century. In 1941, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, Smith spent time in Israel and visited the monastery of Mar Saba, southeast of Jerusalem. Years later, as a tenured professor at Columbia, Smith decided to spend a sabbatical there, to bring order to its library. While cataloguing the Greek and Latin manuscripts and printed books of the library, he made a remarkable discovery. In the ¿ nal blank pages of a seventeenth-century edition of the writings of Ignatius (an important second-century church father), he came across a handwritten copy

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [It is all over, it is all accomplished, it has come.]” 18 And there were flashes of lightning and loud rumblings and peals of thunder; and there was a massive earthquake—nothing like it has ever occurred since mankind originated on the earth, so severe and far-reaching was that earthquake. [Ex 19:16–18 ; Dan 12:1 ] 19 The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And God kept in mind Babylon the great, to give her the cup of the wine of His fierce and furious wrath. 20 Then every island fled away, and no mountains could be found. 21 And giant hailstones, as heavy as a f talent, fell from the sky on the people; and people reviled and spoke abusively of God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so very great. [Ex 9:22–25 ] Revelation 17 The Doom of Babylon 1 T HEN ONE of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, “Come here, I will show you the judgment and doom of the great a prostitute who is seated b on many waters [influencing nations], [Jer 51:13 ] 2 she with whom the kings of the earth have c committed acts of immorality, and the inhabitants of the earth have become intoxicated with the wine of her immorality.” [Jer 25:15 , 16 ] 3 And the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was d entirely covered with blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns. [Acts 10:10 , 11 ] 4 The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold, precious stones and pearls, [and she was] holding in her hand a gold cup full of the abominations and the filth of her [sexual] immorality. [Jer 51:7 ] 5 And on her forehead a name was written, a mystery: “BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES (false religions, heresies) AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” 6 I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints (God’s people), and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus [who were martyred]. When I saw her, I wondered in amazement. 7 But the angel said to me, “Why do you wonder? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and ten horns. 8 “The beast that you saw was [once], but [now] is not, and he is about to come up out of the abyss (the bottomless pit, the dwelling place of demons) and go to destruction (perdition). And the inhabitants of the earth, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world, will be astonished when they see the beast, because he was and is not and is yet to come [to earth].

• From Another Country (1962)

  Rufus’ eyes had trouble adjusting to the yellow light, the smoke, the movement. The place seemed terribly strange to him, as though he remembered it from a dream. He recognized faces, gestures, voices—from this same dream; and, as in a dream, no one looked his way, no one seemed to remember him. Just next to him, at a table, sat a girl he had balled once or twice, whose name was Belle. She was talking to her boy friend, Lorenzo. She brushed her long black hair out of her eyes and looked directly at him for a moment, but she did not seem to recognize him. A voice spoke at his ear: “Hey! Rufus! When did they let you out, man?” He turned to face a grinning chocolate face, topped by processed hair casually falling forward. He could not remember the name which went with the face. He could not remember what his connection with the face had been. He said, “Yeah, I’m straight, how you been making it?” “Oh, I’m scuffling, man, got to keep scuffling, you know”—eyes seeming to press forward like two malevolent insects, hair flying, lips and forehead wet. The voice dropped to a whisper. “I was kind of strung out there for awhile, but I’m straight now. I heard you got busted, man.” “Busted? No, I’ve just been making the uptown scene.” “Yeah? Well, crazy.” He jerked his head around to the door in response to a summons Rufus had not heard. “I got to split, my boy’s waiting for me. See you around, man.” Cold air swept into the bar for a moment, then steam and smoke settled again over everything. Then, while they stood there, not yet having been able to order anything to drink and undecided as to whether or not they would stay, Cass appeared out of the gloom and noise. She was very elegant, in black, her golden hair pulled carefully back and up. She held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and looked at once like the rather weary matron she actually was and the mischievous girl she once had been. “What are you doing here?” asked Vivaldo. “And all dressed up, too. What’s happening?” “I’m tired of my husband. I’m looking for a new man. But I guess I came to the wrong store.” “You may have to wait for a fire sale,” said Vivaldo. Cass turned to Rufus and put her hand on his arm. “It’s nice to have you back,” she said. Her large brown eyes looked directly into his. “Are you all right? We’ve all missed you.” He shrank involuntarily from her touch and her tone. He wanted to thank her; he said, nodding and trying to smile, “I’m fine, Cass.” And then: “It’s kind of nice to be back.”

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  54 Lecture 12: The Secret Gospel of Mark conformed closely with Clement’s writing style and vocabulary. Experts on the Gospel of Mark by and large agreed that the quotations from “secret Mark” conformed to the style and vocabulary of Mark. Smith produced two books on the discovery, one for popular audiences and one for scholars, presenting his ¿ nd and giving his interpretation of it. Most controversial was his interpretation: He argued that the narrative was not pure ¿ ction but related to the life of the historical Jesus. He concluded that the man had come to Jesus at night to engage in a secret nocturnal baptismal ritual, one that involved a naked baptism that united the person with Jesus in an ecstatic experience of the Kingdom of God. This account, needless to say, had very strong homoerotic overtones. Not all scholars were convinced. And now, some thirty years after these books were published, some scholars have their doubts about the text itself. Could the whole thing have been forged? Possibly even by Smith himself? Few scholars have been bold enough to say so. If Smith did forge it, it is one of the most brilliant works of scholarship in the twentieth century! But there are some intriguing issues. For one thing, no one else has actually seen the manuscript—even though many have tried. The manuscript has evidently been removed to a library in Jerusalem. The monks have not allowed anyone else access to the manuscript. This has raised considerable suspicions. The only way to know if the letter was actually copied into this book of Ignatius in the eighteenth century is to do a full chemical analysis of the ink. But it is unavailable. In addition, some scholars who have explored the matter further have argued that the letter is in fact more like Clement’s writings than any of Clement’s other writings, as if someone were carefully trying to emulate his writing style but went overboard. There are several other curious considerations, possibly making the whole thing too good to be false. The book of Ignatius that the letter was copied into was a famous 1646 edition, which was the ¿ rst edition ever that printed only the authentic letters of Ignatius and excluded the forged letters of Could the whole thing have been forged? Possibly even by Smith himself?

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I sat in a corner outside of the circle and recall being fascinated by the idea of a group of people discussing their feelings toward each other. What an extraordinary concept! But it fell flat. There were long silences and everyone seemed uncomfortable, while the leader, Dr. Day, just sat there. Why? I could not understand. Why didn’t he break the ice or in some way help the members open up? Later I attended one of Dr. Day’s clinical conferences and was greatly impressed by his acumen and articulateness. But that made it even more baffling. Why wouldn’t he help the floundering group? Little did I know that I would be wrestling with this question for many years of my professional life.

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  of a letter allegedly by Clement of Alexandria, another important church father from near the end of the second century. The letter is a remarkable document. It is allegedly written to an otherwise unknown Theodore. In it, Clement addresses a question Theodore had raised about the existence of a second version of the Gospel of Mark. Clement indicates that Mark had, in fact, produced two versions of his gospel, the one popularly known (that is in our New Testament) and a second more secret one intended only for the spiritual elite. But members of a heretical gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians, notorious for their wild and licentious activities, had gotten hold of this secret version of the gospel and falsi(cid:191) ed it for their own purposes. Clement then goes on to narrate two passages found in Mark’s secret gospel. One is an account of Jesus raising a young man from the dead who then is said to have loved Jesus and come to him later at night “wearing nothing but a linen robe over his nakedness.” Jesus is said to have spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The other account is a shorter and more bland account of Jesus refusing to see several women who had come to see him. The questions surrounding the text were numerous and momentous: When was the letter copied into this book of Ignatius? Could it have been a forgery? Did the letter actually go back to Clement of Alexandria? If so, was there really a second version of Mark? And if that was so, was Clement right that it was a secret version? Or could it have been the original version of Mark that got changed because of its possibly offensive overtones? If it did go back to Mark, what does that tell us about the practices and activities of the historical Jesus? Smith was obviously ecstatic about this once-in-a-lifetime discovery. He photographed the relevant pages and spent the next (cid:191) fteen years of his life analyzing them, getting expert opinions on different aspects of the problem. Companion palaeographers (experts in ancient handwriting) agreed that the letter did, in fact, represent an eighteenth-century style of handwriting. Experts in Clement of Alexandria by and large agreed that the letter 53

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  54 kraM fo lepsoG terceS ehT :21 erutceL conformed closely with Clement’s writing style and vocabulary. Experts on the Gospel of Mark by and large agreed that the quotations from “secret Mark” conformed to the style and vocabulary of Mark. Smith produced two books on the discovery, one for popular audiences and one for scholars, presenting his (cid:191) nd and giving his interpretation of it. Most controversial was his interpretation: He argued that the narrative was not pure (cid:191) ction but related to the life of the historical Jesus. He concluded that the man had come to Jesus at night to engage in a secret nocturnal baptismal ritual, one that involved a naked baptism that united the person with Jesus in an ecstatic experience of the Kingdom of God. This account, needless to say, had very strong homoerotic overtones. Not all scholars were convinced. And now, some thirty years after these books were published, some scholars have their doubts about the text itself. Could the whole thing have been forged? Could the whole thing have been forged? Possibly even by Possibly even by Smith himself? Few scholars Smith himself? have been bold enough to say so. If Smith did forge it, it is one of the most brilliant works of scholarship in the twentieth century! But there are some intriguing issues. For one thing, no one else has actually seen the manuscript—even though many have tried. The manuscript has evidently been removed to a library in Jerusalem. The monks have not allowed anyone else access to the manuscript. This has raised considerable suspicions. The only way to know if the letter was actually copied into this book of Ignatius in the eighteenth century is to do a full chemical analysis of the ink. But it is unavailable. In addition, some scholars who have explored the matter further have argued that the letter is in fact more like Clement’s writings than any of Clement’s other writings, as if someone were carefully trying to emulate his writing style but went overboard. There are several other curious considerations, possibly making the whole thing too good to be false. The book of Ignatius that the letter was copied into was a famous 1646 edition, which was the (cid:191) rst edition ever that printed only the authentic letters of Ignatius and excluded the forged letters of

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  (5.29). The answer is again enigmatic, but somewhat more reassuring. God really loves Israel (5.33), but how that love is given effect is beyond 'Ezra's' comprehension (5.40). After a description of the end, the angel does give some assurance. Whoever survives the end-time tribulations 12 These dialogues are analysed below. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha [III will see salvation (6.25). It is still not known who these are. Evil will be blotted out (6.27), but the question is, who will the individuals be who will profit from it. After the problem of Israel has been put by the seer one more time (6.38-59), the gap between present reality and God's intention in creation (the world was created for Israel's sake, 6.55) and in the election of Israel is finally responded to by the angel. The world was, to be sure, created for Israel. But unfortunately Adam sinned, so that the world is difficult. The future world provides salvation, but only for those individuals who can make it through the difficulties of this world (7.11-14). 'Ezra' seizes the point immediately: it is the righteous who will have the comfort of the coming world, while the wicked will perish ( 7. 17f. ). The angel agrees: Yea, rather, let the many that now are perish than that the law of God which is set before them be despised! For God did surely command them that came (into the world), when they came, what they should do to live, and what they should observe to avoid punishment. Nevertheless they were disobedient, and spake against him .... (7.20-22) This is the rigorous position which the angel will maintain throughout. Ezra launches several appeals. It is all very well to say that those who keep the commandments will live, but mankind is afflicted with an evil heart and is estranged from God. Mankind as it is walks the path of death, and that applies to 'well nigh all that have been created' (7.45-48). The angel agrees: 'I will rejoice over the few that shall be saved', 'and I will not grieve over the multitude of them that perish' (7.6of.). The seer reiterates the evil plight of man, which is so bad that not being born would be better (7.62-69), and again the angel agrees. God has been long-suffering, but now the time for justice has come, and sinners will be dealt with as they deserve (7.70-74). The angel favours 'Ezra' with a description of the fate of the souls of the wicked and the righteous, but the operative definition of the latter is that they 'painfully served the Most High, and were in jeopardy every hour, that they might observe the Law of the lawgiver perfectly' (7.89). Perhaps, proposes the seer, the righteous can intercede for the ungodly at the judgment (7.102). The angel replies, in short, no. Only individual righteousness will count (7.104-15).

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Sometimes, in recent years, I have started lectures by acknowledging the size of the audience and saying, “I’m aware that, as I age, audiences grow larger and larger. And of course that is wonderfully affirming. But if I put on my existential spectacles I see a darker side and I wonder, why such a rush to see me?”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Some of it is the same. When I think about that I think, why is it the same? When girls are so much more empowered, when they are so much more vocal—why have things changed so much in the public life and not in the private life? I think all of those things that have grown more intense in an age when the culture has grown so visual and so focused and even more saturated in sexuality. You have a hookup culture where sex precedes intimacy rather than the other way around. And that’s not saying, “only have sex in relationships,” because that’s not true. It’s not a moral judgment. We’re not saying, “Oh heavens!” We’re saying, what are you getting out of your sexual experiences? What do you want to get from those experiences? What are you entitled to, and how do you get there? What I wanted to do is say, this is what it looks like. This is what you’ll probably get out of it. This is what you won’t get out of it. Once you know all that, you make your informed choices. Otherwise, the choices are just presented by the media and it’s like, we rip off half our clothes, we have intercourse with nothing preceding it. We both have orgasms in three seconds and it’s great. Then real girls go into real encounters and think, “What’s wrong with me?” When you have not even had your first kiss, nobody says to you, “It’s a symbolic repression that if acted out isn’t going to feel particularly good for women.” That’s part of trying to normalize conversations around sex. It’s not about “the talk” when we’ve never told them they have a vagina and now we’re going to tell them about reproduction. It’s about talking about these ideas, about rights and entitlement in sexual relationships. You make it clear that kids who have an abstinence-only education are going to have sex pretty much at around the same time their peers are, and they’re going to do with less protection. So what can we learn from religious conservatives about what they’re doing right? I went to a purity ball in Louisiana. I feel like it would be really easy to go to one of those things and just slam them, because the idea behind them is completely wrong. Kids are not going to abstain. We know that maybe they delay sex a little longer. But they have greater rates of pregnancy, they have way higher rates of disease. The boys are six times more likely to engage in anal sex, and both boys and girls are more likely to engage in oral sex and not see that as compromising their virginity. So we know that that’s really crap.

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  53 of a letter allegedly by Clement of Alexandria, another important church father from near the end of the second century. The letter is a remarkable document. It is allegedly written to an otherwise unknown Theodore. In it, Clement addresses a question Theodore had raised about the existence of a second version of the Gospel of Mark. Clement indicates that Mark had, in fact, produced two versions of his gospel, the one popularly known (that is in our New Testament) and a second more secret one intended only for the spiritual elite. But members of a heretical gnostic sect known as the Carpocratians, notorious for their wild and licentious activities, had gotten hold of this secret version of the gospel and falsi ¿ ed it for their own purposes. Clement then goes on to narrate two passages found in Mark’s secret gospel. One is an account of Jesus raising a young man from the dead who then is said to have loved Jesus and come to him later at night “wearing nothing but a linen robe over his nakedness.” Jesus is said to have spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. The other account is a shorter and more bland account of Jesus refusing to see several women who had come to see him. The questions surrounding the text were numerous and momentous: When was the letter copied into this book of Ignatius? Could it have been a forgery? Did the letter actually go back to Clement of Alexandria? If so, was there really a second version of Mark? And if that was so, was Clement right that it was a secret version? Or could it have been the original version of Mark that got changed because of its possibly offensive overtones? If it did go back to Mark, what does that tell us about the practices and activities of the historical Jesus? Smith was obviously ecstatic about this once-in-a-lifetime discovery. He photographed the relevant pages and spent the next ¿ fteen years of his life analyzing them, getting expert opinions on different aspects of the problem. Companion palaeographers (experts in ancient handwriting) agreed that the letter did, in fact, represent an eighteenth-century style of handwriting. Experts in Clement of Alexandria by and large agreed that the letter

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Does this mean that the less of it we breathe in words, the more we are at liberty to swell our thoughts with it? For it is amusing that the words which are least used, least written, and most hushed up, should be the best known and the most generally understood. There is no person of any age or morals but knows them as well as he knows the word bread… .” It is my honest conviction that the fear and dread which the obscene inspires, particularly in modern times, spring from the language employed rather than the thought. It is very much as if we were dealing here with primitive taboos. That certain words, certain expressions, usually though not always connected with sex, have come to be thought of as “forbidden” is, at bottom, absolutely mystifying. Those who are shocked, pained, wounded or horrified by these written symbols are not unfamiliar with them in speech. We all hear these “foul,” “coarse,” “ugly” expressions daily, from the cradle to the grave. How is it, why is it, that we have not become immune to them? What magic do they possess against which we have no protection? Notice that it is particularly against their use in literature that the righteous ones object. But why should literature be more sacrosanct than speech? Is not writing another form of speech? Is youth being corrupted— that is the venerable term we are always trotting out—by obscene language alone? The corrupters of youth have been indicted throughout the ages on so many counts, such varied counts, that it is difficult to imagine how the list of “evils” might be amplified. And always it is against the life spirit itself that these indictments are aimed. Life, however, as is demonstrated again and again, refuses to be restricted or diminished by moral codes, by laws or ukases of any sort. What rules life is spirit, and the spirit of man, which is in essence divine, remains unassailable. As illustrative of a sound point of view, even if it be an exceptional one, I should like to cite a passage or two from the book called Hieroglyphics by the Welsh writer, Arthur Machen. He is referring to the Pantagruel of Rabelais…. “It is not in the least a ‘pleasant,’ or a ‘life-like,’ or even an ‘interesting’ book; I think that when one knows of the key—or rather of the keys—one opens the pages almost with a sensation of dread.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  15 3. Genesis: Creation and the Flood is historically accurate, then the other can’t be. But they’re both in the Bible, so how to choose? Moreover, these chapters offer two different views on important questions. Was the natural world created and blessed before humans even existed, or does it exist only for humans’ own entertainment? Gender equality is also obviously at stake: Are women and men created equally in the image of God, or are women created only for man’s pleasure? Distinguishing the J and P Stories Genesis 3 is obviously the continuation of the J story in Genesis 2. It occurs in the garden, it’s all about Adam and Eve’s decision to eat from the tree that was forbidden in Genesis 2, and it’s got the banishment from Eden. The story is still all taking place in a dry, dusty, difficult terrain. God says the ground is cursed on account of Adam’s actions, and now, all sorts of labor is required to bring forth food from it. Genesis 4 contains the Cain and Abel story, but it begins with Adam knowing “his wife Eve”—which places it pretty squarely in continuity with the J story, which is the only place Eve exists. After he’s killed Abel, God tells Cain that he is more cursed than the ground, referencing the curse in Genesis 3. After the Cain and Abel story, the text gives a genealogy of Cain’s descendants, who are the first to build cities, be shepherds, play musical instruments, or do metalworking. Genesis 5 also introduces more confusion. It says, “When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God; male and female he created them, and he blessed them.” This line is a direct reference not to the J story but back to the P creation story of Genesis 1. Then, the chapter gives a list of Adam’s descendants, which is strangely familiar yet different. Comparing the genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5, there are two Enochs in the middles and two Lemechs at the ends. Even the names that aren’t the same are the same—Irad in chapter 4 and Jared in chapter 5; Methushael in one chapter and Methuselah in the next. It seems like each creation story came with its own version of the genealogy of humans from the first generations down to Lemech, the father of Noah.