Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 219

a scholarly mystery

As far as I can tell, people are accusing a distinguished papyrologist named Dirk Obbink of selling, wittingly or unwittingly, papyri that actually belong to the Egypt Exploration Society. (I started to write here that Obbink is my also my colleague at Baylor, but he appears to have been removed from the webpages for the Institute for Studies of Religion and the Classics department.) But everything that I have read — and I’ve been reading a lot in the past few days — about this scandal-in-the-making is confusing. This narrative by Jerry Pattengale, which tells the story from an insider’s point of view, purports to make some of these matters clear but actually just confuses me more.

The beginning of the story is clear. In 2011, Pattengale and Scott Carroll, who were “founding scholars” for the not-yet-opened Museum of the Bible, were visiting Obbink in his office at Christ Church, Oxford, when he showed them “four papyrus pieces of New Testament Gospels identified as Matthew 3:7–10, 11–12; Mark 1:8–9, 16–18; Luke 13: 25–27, 28; and John 8:26–28, 33–35,” and told them that “three of the pieces dated from the second century” — but the fragment from Mark was “very likely first century,” which would make it the earliest fragment of the Gospels yet discovered.

From here on out things get confusing. I’m going to quote many passages from Pattengale’s article and ask the questions that they raise.

Eventually, all four pieces were purchased in 2013 for a considerable sum — though at a fraction of their value (even taking the later dates our researchers suggested).

Purchsed by the Museum of the Bible? Payment to Dirk Obbink? And who were “our researchers”? What dates did they assign to the fragments?

Remember when I said that the manuscripts were one of the greatest discoveries since Grenfell and Hunt had excavated the Oxyrhynchus papyri? Well, it turned out that they were part of the discovery that Grenfell and Hunt made. As news of a “First-Century Mark” surfaced, it eventually became obvious it was a piece in the Oxyrhynchus collection (P.Oxy. 83.5345; P137) — which, at the time, was under Obbink’s purview in Oxford.

How did it become obvious? What were the clues? And to whom did it become obvious? What does “under Obbink’s purview” mean?

The piece had been awaiting research for a century, and cryptically identified in the 1980s as early New Testament (though not as Mark).

Identified by whom?

When the Egyptian Exploration Society (EES), who owns this collection, discovered it was the same piece in the news, it logically thought the piece had never been for sale nor had it ever been out of its possession.

Presumably this sentence means something along these lines: “Until the EES saw news reports about the papyrus fragment of Mark, which they knew to be their own fragment, they did not know that anyone had taken it out of their collection.” I think?

Before the EES became aware of this particular case, that the “First-Century Mark” was actually its own, Obbink reported to Steve Green (chair of the Museum of the Bible’s board) and me that the EES gave him an ultimatum to sever all public ties with our museum or be fired. His name had started surfacing in connection with other rare pieces and our museum, like the Sappho manuscripts he published, and the contract with Brill Publishers for a series.

This is utterly baffling to me. For one thing, how is the second sentence — which is grammatically incoherent — related to the first? Is the second purportedly explanatory of the first? The EES didn’t like it that Obbink’s “name had surfaced in connection with other rare pieces”? If so, why not? How does a Sappho fragment relate here? (Sappho is not in the Bible, AFAIK.) What kind of “series” was Brill contracting to publish? Did the series relate to the Museum of the Bible in some way? Presumably the EES didn’t approve of the Museum of the Bible?

I confided in Peter Williams, warden of Tyndale House, Cambridge, and even discussed arranging a meeting with the eminent Kenneth Kitchen and his EES colleagues to understand more fully the situation. I put forth an internal proposal to fund a professorship in Kitchen’s name at Christ Church, should the progenitor agree, assuming that Dirk would not accept the EES’s conditions. But he did, and I was outvoted anyway in favor of a plan in Waco, Texas.

What did Pattengale confide to Peter Williams? And why? What involvement did Williams have? Pattengale “put forth an internal proposal” — internal to what? And how does the creation of a new chair relate to any of the issues being explained here? What the hell is a “progenitor”? “Outvoted” by whom? “A plan in Waco, Texas”??

While sitting with [Edwin] Yamauchi at the opening gala dinner at the Museum of the Bible, this whole affair began to unravel. Yamauchi asked a simple question of David Trobisch, then curator of the Museum’s collection: “Dr. Trobisch, Scott Carroll mentioned the first-century Mark fragment. When do you expect its publication?” Trobisch responded, “That fragment was never offered to us for sale, isn’t that correct, Jerry?” I about snorted coffee through my nose, then responded, “Some things are best discussed in other settings.” Then David continued, “A researcher in Oxford, I think a graduate student, discovered an image of it in a museum collection, and it has remained there. It was just a misunderstanding.” You could have hit me with a frozen salmon. Apparently Obbink, or his alleged collectors, were unaware of filmed evidence of this rare piece — dating to the 1980s and rediscovered in 2008! Or someone stole it and just thought the chances of going undetected were worth it.

Presumably “filmed evidence” refers to the “image of it” — the Markan fragment? — “in a museum collection” — but what museum? And what was a “misunderstanding,” and among what parties? Again: total incoherence.

And the next paragraph gets even weirder:

Last week, with enough evidence now to go public, Michael Holmes (noted for his edition of the Apostolic Fathers and my replacement several years ago at the museum over the research side), released a copy of the purchase agreement signed by Obbink. He also included Obbink’s handwritten list of the manuscripts, a folded paper that I carried for years in my wallet. As this goes to press, an Oxford scholar informed me he traced the unidentified picture Holmes released to my house in Indiana using iPhone metadata.

So how did Michael Holmes happen to have the “handwritten list of the manuscripts” that Pattengale carried for years in his wallet? (Why did Pattengale do that, anyway?) And if, as the previous paragraph says, the “filmed evidence” of the fragment’s existence goes back to the 1980s, how does “iPhone metadata” come in?

Near the end of his article Pattengale writes,

Yes, the “First-Century Mark” fragment “sale” was scandalous.

Why is “sale” in quotation marks? Near the beginning of the article Pattengale says it was sold, though in a passive construction that does not identify the buyer. Where are those four fragments now? Are they at the Museum of the Bible?

Let me be explicit about this: I don’t ask these questions because I think Pattengale did anything wrong. I ask these questions because his article makes no sense. It is simply very badly written, and I suspect, rushed into the public eye with minimal editing. I would just love to get a clearer picture of what happened — or at least of what people suspect may have happened.

ruin

Let’s agree, per argumentum, that the Boomers ruined everything. Why? According to the STBP (Standard Theory of Boomer Perfidy), because their sense of absolute entitlement led them to feather their own nests to the detriment of everyone who came after them.

But where did they get this sense of entitlement? From their parents, who had lived through the Great Depression, who knew through long years’ experience what it was like to live in deprivation and who therefore wanted their children to have everything they themselves had lacked.

So the Greatest Generation ruined everything.

But wait. If the Greatest Generation ruined everything because of their experience in the Depression, then we have to look at the causes of that, and … that’s complicated. According to one common theory, the chief cause of the depression was the concentration, in the 1920s, of too much money in the hands of a handful of plutocrats and their banks.

So Daddy Warbucks ruined everything.

Of course, others see the complicated and ultimately disastrous monetary situation of the 1920s as resulting from massive dislocations of the Western world’s economy that were among the aftereffects of the Great War.

So Gavrilo Princip ruined everything?

Someone needs to sort all this out, because I don’t see how we can proceed unless we have someone to point to and say, “You ruined everything.”

disobedience

Law professor David Skeel in the WSJ:

“I do think sim­ple dis­obe­di­ence may sometimes be the wiser course — de­clin­ing to fol­low the law and ac­cept­ing the le­gal pun­ish­ment for break­ing the law. One of the most com­pelling features of the civil-rights move­ment was Mar­tin Luther King’s will­ing­ness to bear the pun­ish­ment for the laws he vi­o­lated, even when he be­lieved the law was un­just. This made a pow­er­ful state­ment, both about respect for law and about his com­mit­ment to civil rights. There are costs for any­body who takes that route, ob­vi­ously. But I do think those who have religious objections to a law should ask them­selves if it’s im­por­tant enough to bear the con­se­quences for vi­o­lat­ing the law.”

This would be a good way for American Christians — myself very much included — to find out whether there’s a genuine fit between what we say we care about and what we actually care about. The results of the experiment might not be very comforting.

excerpts from my Sent folder: localism

More broadly, you should understand that I am a deeply committed localist and doubt the legitimacy of all nation-states and all ecclesiastical structures larger than the diocese (and ideally the old city-sized diocese, not the hypertrophied things we have today). I don’t think there should be any polis larger than McClennan County, and within that local structure I advocate a fruitful hybrid of distributism and anarcho-syndicalism. And yes, I’m serious.

I have sometimes said that future generations will refer to this period of history as the Late Roman Era, because church and state alike have borrowed their understanding of political action and political legitimacy from the Roman model. When the church decided that the Roman administrative structure was what it should imitate, it drank from a poisoned chalice. (Hodie venenum effusum est in ecclesiam Christi.) The church should have seen the Roman way of organizing and disciplining people across great distances as the antithesis of the ecclesia, not something to imitate.

In the first 200 years or so of the Way, the church at Rome considered itself bound to offer other churches prayer, encouragement, and sometimes money. It was first not in power but in service. Then its bishops increasingly began to demand obedience from other dioceses. That was the Original Ecclesial Sin from which we have never recovered.

Or so I think.

after the platforms

Ross Douthat:

Yes, it’s understandable for conservatives to worry that if Silicon Valley censors the likes of Molyneux, it will end up censoring them. It’s sensible for them to join parts in the left in worrying about the concentrated power over information that the stewards of social-media platforms enjoy. And it’s necessary for them to recognize that the influence of redpillers and white-identitarians reflects their own failure, across the decades of movement-conservative institution building, to create something that seems more compelling to fugitives from liberalism than the Spirit of the Reddit Thread.

With all that said, though, a humane conservatism should still be able to thrive in a world where white nationalists have trouble monetizing their extremism, in which YouTube algorithms are built to maximize something other than addiction.

I’m not sure what Ross means in the last sentence I’ve quoted by “should.” Does he mean that “humane conservatism” is likely to thrive, or that if the system is fair it ought to be able to do so? I doubt the first and doubt the conditional of the second.

Here’s the situation as I see it. First, as Alexis Madrigal has recently written, the big social media companies will from now on find it less likely to take refuge in the claim that they are “merely platforms”:

These companies are continuing to make their platform arguments, but every day brings more conflicts that they seem unprepared to resolve. The platform defense used to shut down the why questions: Why should YouTube host conspiracy content? Why should Facebook host provably false information? Facebook, YouTube, and their kin keep trying to answer, We’re platforms! But activists and legislators are now saying, So what? “I think they have proven — by not taking down something they know is false — that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election,” Nancy Pelosi said in the wake of the altered-video fracas.

If you can’t plead platform neutrality, what do you do? Well, these companies being what they are, they’ll write algorithms to try to filter content. But the algorithms will often fail — after all, they can’t tell the difference between sites that promote hatred and sites that seek to combat it.

Where does that leave you? As Will Oremus points out, it leaves you with mob rule:

What should be clear to both sides, by now, is the extent to which these massive corporations are making up the rules of online speech as they go along. In the absence of any independent standards or accountability, public opinion has become an essential part of the process by which their moderation policies evolve.

Sure, online platforms have policies and terms of service that run thousands of words, which they enforce on a mass scale via software and a bureaucratic review process. But those rules have been stitched together piecemeal and ad hoc over the years to serve the companies’ own needs — which is why they tend to collapse as soon as a high-profile controversy subjects them to public scrutiny. Caving to pressure is a bad look, but it’s an inevitable feature of a system with policies that weren’t designed to withstand pressure in the first place.

Whatever should happen to humane conservatism on the internet, I don’t know what will, but as a person who is somewhat conservative and who would like to be humane, I wish I knew. In light of all the above, one thing seems nearly certain to me: If I were on a major social media service and a vocal group of that site’s users started calling me homophobic or transphobic or a white supremacist and demanded that I be banned, I would be banned.

trying

A little less than a year ago I wrote a post about cultivating my blog as a kind of garden. I made reference there to something I heard about from Robin Sloan, the game designer Gunpei Yokoi’s idea of “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” — taking established and perhaps unsexy technologies and finding unexpected new uses for them.

Since I wrote that post I have started a newsletter, because a email newsletter is also a seasoned technology, and I wondered if I might be able to do some things with it that I can’t do with this blog. I’m still experimenting, still learning, still looking for what will make that project sing — but I am really enjoying it so far, and getting some lovely responses from people, and this morning I realized that one of the reasons I like doing the newsletter so much is that I have (quite unconsciously) understood it as a place not to do analysis or critique but to share things that give me delight.

What brought about that realization was reading the most recent edition of Warren Ellis’s newsletter, in which he writes this:

Here’s a thing that came up in an email conversation the other week, that I don’t think I’ve ever made explicit to you: herein, I only talk about the things I like.

This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days.

A thousand times yes.

I mentioned earlier that I learned about “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” (LTST) from Robin Sloan, and Robin with his Year of the Meteor project is doing just that, employing Risograph printing, the U.S. Postal Service, a print-and-mail service called Lob that’s typically used by businesses for mass mailings, and who knows what else in the future.

Similarly, for his Ridgeline project, Craig Mod, while on a long-distance walk in Japan, tried sending brief messages and photos to subscribers all over the world by plain old SMS. The project ended up having some bugs, but the idea is enormously generative. As Robin wrote about Craig’s project, “Craig is always making new tools, trying new things, like the SMS experiment. Like he is really TRYING. What if 10X more people were TRYING?” I want to be one of those people who is trying, too. Trying to share things I like in unexpected ways.

excerpts from my Sent folder: civility

I think the question [of whether civility is a Christian virtue] hinges on whether “civility” is a useful shorthand proxy for a series of traits that certainly are Christian virtues: patience, forbearance, kindness, generosity, turning the other cheek, blessing those who spitefully use you, etc.

responsible scholarship and the growth of Christianity

I’ve talked a bit lately about what Christians today might be able to learn from the early church. Let’s do that again.

Celsus was a second-century Greek philosopher who, around 175 A.D., wrote an extremely thorough critique of Christianity, which he believed to be a philosophical and moral abomination. Alas, no copies of it have survived. And yet we know in detail not just what Celsus argued but also the specific words in which he argued it. How?

Because 75 years later, when a Christian theologian named Origen wrote a book called Against Celsus, he quoted his opponent often and at great length — and in such a way that we can see that Celsus knew Jewish and Christian writings and history pretty thoroughly. That is, thanks to Origen’s scholarly integrity, it is possible for readers to follow the dispute and decide that Celsus got the better of it.

In short, Celsus was scrupulously fair to the person whose ideas he wanted desperately to refute. He did not take refuge in the kinds of phrases we see so often today, from Christian and non-Christian alike: “In other words, Celsus believes…” or “In effect, Celsus is saying….” Nor does he take up the evasive strategy of “some critics have claimed” — evasive, but tempting, because you can’t be accused of misreading someone when you won’t say who you’re responding to. Origen wasn’t trying to dunk on his enemies on social media. Instead, he said: (a) Here are Celsus’s words, (b) Here’s why I think he’s wrong.

A surprising large amount of the Christian theology and philosophy produced in the period between, say, Tertullian and Augustine was extremely vigorous: responsible but also bold and imaginative, and considerably more of all of that than the pagan thought of the period. Eric Osborn, in his book The Emergence of Christian Theology, claims that the power of Christian intellectual life was a kind of secret ingredient in the faith’s phenomenal growth throughout the third century. A word to the wise — and especially to the not-yet-wise.

Rusty Reno:Many of my friends find Donald Trump intoler...

Rusty Reno:

Many of my friends find Donald Trump intolerable. I tell them, “He is a symptom, not a cause, of what you dislike and fear.” It’s past time for leaders of the conservative movement to acknowledge that they’re part of the problem, promoting a right-leaning liberalism that is cruel, soulless, and lacking in civic nobility. It is time for religious and social conservatives to speak up and take the lead.

Amen! So let’s get out there and demonstrate our commitment to true leadership by … attacking David French!

the theater of concurrence

Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was one of the sensations of the nineteenth century because of its portrayal of Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who ultimately finds the confines of bourgeois life unbearable and leaves her family. Even the suggestion that Nora might be right to do so was outrageous at the time — so much so that one of Ibsen’s contemporaries said that the play “pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics.”

Indeed, when the play was first performed in Germany the famous actress playing Nora refused to perform the final scene: “I would never leave my children!” Since Ibsen had no copyright laws to protect his play, and anyone could change it in anyway they wished, he, with gritted teeth, wrote an alternative ending in which Nora, on the verge of departing her home, is forced to look into her children’s bedroom, whereupon she sinks to the floor in mute acknowledgment that she could never leave her children. Fade to black. Ibsen called this ending a “barbaric outrage” upon his play, but figured that changes made by other hands would have been even worse.

In 2017, a new play reached Broadway: A Doll’s House, Part 2, by Lucas Hnath, which revisits Nora and her family fifteen years after she walked out of the “doll’s house” in which she had been kept by her husband, slamming the door behind her. And in Hnath’s sequel Nora is very glad that she left her husband and children all those years ago.

To which the shrewd critic Terry Teachout said: Well of course. Can you imagine a play on Broadway in 2017 suggesting that Nora perhaps should have swallowed her frustrations and remained to raise her children?

The favorable reception of A Doll’s House, Part 2 was as much a foregone conclusion as is its ending, which is a quintessential example of what I call the “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything. The success of such plays is contingent on the exactitude with which the author tells his audience what it wants to hear, and Hnath obliges in every particular. Above all, the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.

I haven’t seen the play, but I have read it, and I don’t think Teachout is right about Hnath — though he might be right about the performance he saw. Reading Hnath’s play I found myself disliking Nora very much, especially the way she recasts her abandonment of her family in terms of heroic sacrifice. For instance, she tells the family’s servant Anne Marie about the great personal “discipline” she had to exercise in order to prevent herself from sending Christmas presents to the three children she left without a mother. How brave of you, Nora! (Later, whern Anne Marie tells Nora it was terrible for her to leave her children, Nora replies that it’s not a big deal, men leave their families all the time.)

And there’s a powerful moment when Nora meets her daughter Emmy — the daughter who doesn’t remember her because she was so young when Nora left. Emmy knows that Nora has written books denouncing the institution of marriage, and so is reluctant to tell Nora that she herself is engaged. “You think no one should get married,” she says, which Nora at first denies, but then goes into a lecture about how “Marriage is this binding contract, and love is — love has to be the opposite of a contract — love needs to be free.” And when Emmy resists this (I’m adjusting Hnath’s eccentric punctuation):

NORA: How much do you even know about marriage?

EMMY: Nothing.

NORA: Exactly.

EMMY: Because you left, I know nothing about what a marriage is and what it looks like. But I do know what the absence of it looks like, and what I want is the opposite of that.

And ultimately Emmy forces Nora to admit that the only reason Nora is speaking to her is to enlist her help in getting Torvald to give Nora a formal divorce.

This does not, to me, look like a situation in which “the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.” You could perhaps play it that way. You could do something to make Emmy unattractive — in fact, perhaps the only way to make Nora seem unquestionably right is to make every other character in the play seem unquestionably awful — but Hnath’s writing is not handing you that interpretation on a platter. (Very much the same is true of his earlier play The Christians.) If the director and cast of the performance Teachout saw managed to make the play’s meaning unambiguous, then that’s a sign of how desperately the performers as well as the viewers of plays can feel the need for a “theater of concurrence” — even when the playwright wants to deny them that comfort.