I just finished a recent post with a line from the Bible, and I got to thinking that Christians might find it offensive, even if, as I believe, I used the quote in the sense in which it was intended. The title of this post is actually from Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, I believe, but I could be wrong), referring to Jesus's (possibly rhetorical) dialogue with the Devil while fasting in the wilderness.
Everyone is aware that the Bible was put together by a committee in the early years of the Christian church, from writings that had come to exist many years before. (This is frequently the case with holy books; they're assembled from existing texts, and then sanctified by the religious authority.) Over the centuries, subsequently, the Church in Rome, and the various other churches that have sprung up, have retained a sort of loose control over the use of the Bible. At first, ordinary people were forbidden to read it (since, presumably, they could misunderstand what they read, and interpret it in ways that conflicted with the official interpretation). Eventually that proscription was lifted, but there still remains a general understanding that non-Christians and atheists should not be quoting the Bible, unless the quotes are used in precisely the same context as they were used in the Bible.
Of course, what Christians understand among themselves, and what people can do are entirely different things. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Christians out there who were moderately liberal in their attitudes towards recycling thought and writing in the books that now find themselves, willy nilly, in the Bible.
This restriction on the use of the Bible —or of any holy book, for that matter— puts us in an awkward position. The books, which of course existed long before they were sanctified for sacred use, were simply books, and contained the thinking of people who were just people, before they were canonized as deities, or saints, or prophets. If we allow the "holy authorities" some authority to regulate the use of these books, that regulation has to be on the lines of copyright, which is commonly understood to expire after a time, when the work goes into the so-called Public Domain. The Bible is most eminenently in the Public Domain; in fact, most churches would prefer that, since it would be extremely inconvenient to clear copyright for every use of "Scripture".
I, for one, consider Jesus of Nazareth one of the wisest and most influential men of the first century era. Because of ecclesiastical and political reasons, many first-century records of his life and sayings have been suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church. There is, as I have said often, a fair amount of evidence that the most useful and the most accurate accounts of Jesus's life and thinking have been carefully obliterated, because the Roman Church, and the Emperor Constantine, found them to be problematical. (Wikilists provides a partial list of them, probably the least objectionable to the modern church, if they exist at all. A larger list is provided here.) It is important to acknowledge that Jesus was not the only thinker who encouraged the thinking that might is not right, poverty is not weakness, all people are family, and similar thinking that is the basis of liberal ideology today. He was the first, great educator, and he phrased his axioms, if I may be allowed that use of the word, in terms of "god", which ultimately led to the belief in some quarters that he was literally a manifestation of god. (Theologians have probably appropriated the word "manifestation" to mean some technical thing different from the sense in which I'm using it; a pox on theologians, anyhow, and the horses they rode in on.) My personal belief (if the theologians allow me to use that word my way, hah) is that Jesus would say "god wants me to do such and such," to mean "I want to do such and such, though I have no rational explanation why it is in my interest to do so." Nowadays, of course, we are a little more comfortable about making statements like the latter, because we have more sophisticated words for describing our motivations. Jesus, of course, had to use the rhetorical tools he inherited.
The particular quotation to which I referred is, obviously paraphrased,
It is like children in the marketplace, calling to each other, saying, we sang a wedding song, but you would not dance; we sang a funeral dirge, but you would not mourn.
Jesus was addressing the fact that John the Baptist, an ascetic, spoke to the people, but they would not listen. Jesus himself, who was not an ascetic, was not listened to either, precisely because he ate and drank freely. The meaning of the quote (here I'm quoting Matthew, who's quoting Jesus, and Jesus is possibly quoting a common saying of those days, about children playing together, and having problems with cooperation, or maybe even a simple responsive game) is that nothing anyone does suits you. I myself used it in the sense that we give you reasoned arguments, but you do not appreciate them. Admittedly, I'm using the quote slightly differently from how Jesus uses it, but if the children gathered in the marketplace today and played, just as they did 2,000 years ago, and if we imagined one half of them complaining that the other half wasn't interested in dancing when they (the first half) sang, it makes complete sense. (The sad thing is that such a brilliant line is buried in the Bible, and few —normal— people know about it.)
The Bible is full of wonderful sayings and ideas, but since the Christians have misappropriated it for their own special purposes, it has been taken out of the common literary pool from which we take our resources. This is ironic, because for centuries, it was the pre-eminent source of quotations. But that was when everyone had to claim to be a Christian in order not to be ostracized from society. Nowadays, I defy society to ostracize me. If it did, I'd just tell it to go straight to hell. And the horse it rode in on.
Arch, feeling slightly cranky.
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