Graduation approaches

Hebrew started this week, so I think blog posts (assuming I remember to write them) are moving to Thursday.

As the title says, graduation doth approach, which means I am starting to feel kind of stressed out about my thesis.  Since I am, I'll write about that today.  It turns out that I did indeed decide to build my thesis on top of my good paper from last semester.  I'm just adjusting it slightly so that it's not a paper about 4QMMT anymore, but about a sociological analysis of Second Temple Jewish groups.

It's generally accepted now that during the Second Temple period, Judaism was moderately diverse and divided into different groups or sects and even to speak of "Judaisms."  Most analysis of these follows standard sociological constructs, in the vein of Max Weber or and Ernst Troeltsch. These scholars both built generally applicable sociological models to explain groups or sects in any human society.

One aspect of the Second Temple sects that I think has been overlooked is the importance that halakhah played in these groups' various self-definitions and also as a cause for sect formation in the first place.  I am using "halakhah" (הלכה) to refer not to the Torah itself, but to its interpretation and specifically practical interpretation.  The discovery of the documents known as 4QMMT at Qumran and the apparent attestation to a halakhic debate that also appears in the Mishnah invigorated study of the Qumran sect and their possible provenance, but I still think even Jewish scholars overlooked the importance of halakhah itself.

I am arguing that halakhah was in some cases the cause of group/sect formation (as in the case of 4QMMT) and definitely one of the primary characteristics of self-definition.  Josephus tries to explain the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes to his Gentile audience by making them look like Greek philosophical schools, but he cannot hide that many of the disagreements between the groups were halakhic in nature.  Even, I am arguing, the Jesus movement cared about halakhah, recorded their group's halakhic decisions, and cast Jesus as their group's halakhic authority.

What crisis in theology?

It is common to say that the Holocaust caused a crisis in theology.  What kind of god would allow the systematic and mechanized murder of millions of human beings?  But it also caused a deep crisis for many Christians who had to stare at the rhetoric of the church's history and its use by the abhorrent Deutsche Christen of the Nazis as well as the general acquiescence to anti-Semitism by European and white American Christians.  Not only God, but the church itself had to undergo redefinition.

Earlier this week, I was reading a very insightful article on Donald Trump.  The author argues cogently

Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no radical.

We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape.  ...

For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. (emphasis original)

This "shock" is the loss of white power and loss of the white perspective as normative.  And I think this is the same shock that Christian theology is undergoing in the century after the Holocaust.  It is not so much that Christianity was wrong as it was centuries of white male theology culminated in something so horrific.  That the "historical-critical method" could be brought to bear on the wholesale slaughter of human beings.

However, for anyone who was paying attention, this should not be surprising.  Many of the scholars who pioneered the historical-critical method were openly anti-Semitic, because the Christian church had been for centuries.  From the constant expulsions and denial of citizenship to the slaughter of Jews during Passion Week to the forced conversions of the Inquisition to the pogroms of eastern Europe, the church had been arguing, in many of its myriad Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, that Jews were members of a decadent, dead religion, abandoned by their God, and deserving of death.  The famous documentary hypothesis of Welhausen rests implicitly on these assumptions (e.g. P must be late, because the Law was a corruption of God's original religion).

And so, with a weekend's reflection, I am going to say that there should be no crisis of theology or faith for Christians because of the Holocaust, but only a crisis of unexamined, un-self-conscious assumption of white supremacy.  White Europeans are not special, and have no more intellectual capacity and insight than anyone else, and the Holocaust proves they can sometimes get it catastrophically, barbarously wrong.

Same sex marriage and category errors.

I've been on here before stating that many of the arguments against same sex marriage fail because they attribute characteristics to different sex marriage that don't exist or are historically implausible.  Today I'm going to attack another: the idea that if we legitimize any "alternative" to 1-male-1-female marriage, we open the door to all of them.

This stance is not only very common, but is unfortunately helped by the "love is love" argument, which I have made here myself.  I'm going to call that a category error because marriage is not 100% about whom you are attracted to.  The similarities between two people of the same sex getting married are far greater to two people of different sexes than they are to any of the ridiculously suggested "slippery slopes" like human-animal, child, or incestuous marriages.

Validating same sex marriage is not validating any and all variants of human sexual attraction.  This is the argument, and it is false.  Two men or women who wish to commit their lives to each other and form a household as consenting adults are pretty much equivalent to a man and a woman who wish to do the same thing.  They are adults.  They are both capable of fully informed consent.  Both couples are capable of raising and providing for children which will not, from the conception, be genetically disadvantaged.  All of these things are impossible for the "alternative" marriages described above.

The other question that comes up, especially in regards to child marriage, is one of cultural norms.  If, as was common throughout human history, children or young adolescents entering marriage is a cultural norm, shouldn't we tolerate it?  In this case, I think the answer is still no, because we have decided that, generally, children and young adolescents are not capable of making those kinds of decisions.  The frontal cortex is not fully formed until the late teens or twenties, and this development has significant impacts on a person's decision-making capabilities.  The other factor is that child marriage is much more often the girl or young woman being married to a much older man. which initiates not only an impressive power imbalance, but also pairs someone who may or may not be capable of consent with someone who is able to force a decision.  In this case, the woman is undervalued from the start, and this is simply not what we should be striving for.

I've avoided the word "biblical" several times here because there are examples in the Bible of all kinds of marriages, including ones today we would find abhorrent (e.g. children, rape, slaves).  However, what is described in the biblical text and what God has established as ideal for God's people are not the same thing.  I think the biblical text is pretty clear that the ideal marriage in God's kingdom is monogamous and equal and based on love.  These characteristics are easily matched by both same and different sex marriages.  They are not by any other "scary" alternative.