History

Suspension of Disbelief and Research

According to Friedel, the historian, scientists rely on the stubborn conviction that an obvious obstacle can be overcome. “There is a degree of suspension of disbelief that a lot of good research has to engage in,” he said. “Part of the art—and it is art—comes from knowing just when it makes sense to entertain that suspension of disbelief, at least momentarily, and when it’s just sheer fantasy.” Lord Kelvin, famous for installing telegraph cables on the Atlantic seabed, was clearly capable of overlooking obstacles. But not always. “Before his death, in 1907, Lord Kelvin carefully, carefully calculated that a heavier-than-air flying machine would never be possible,” Friedel says. “So we always have to have some humility. A couple of bicycle mechanics could come along and prove us wrong.”

John Colapinto, ‘Material Question’, The New Yorker, 22 December, 2014

The Past is Strange

For several decades in the later nineteenth century, the favorite spectator sport in America was watching people walk in circles inside big buildings.

The story Algeo tells begins in 1860, at the start of the Civil War, when a New Englander named Edward Payson Weston made a facetious bet with a friend that, if Lincoln won the Presidential election, he would walk all the way from the State House in Boston to the unfinished Capitol, in Washington, in ten days. Lincoln won, and, ten days before the inaugural, Weston set off. Though he didn’t get there quite in time, his progress, chronicled by the newspapers, enthralled a nation in need of some small fun, and he became an improbable American hero, a kind of Lindbergh of the corns and calluses. Liking his new celebrity, and the money it brought, Weston decided to keep a good thing going and, when the war ended, began to engage in competitive, six-day (never on Sunday) walking marathons in Chicago, New York, and, eventually, London.

For the next two decades, while baseball burbled around the amateur edges and boxing went on in the shadows, walking really was the dominant spectator sport in America, and Weston its central figure. He had the brains to adopt a singular and consistent costume, a gentleman’s gear of hunting trousers, boots, and riding crop. In time, a poor Irish immigrant to America, Daniel O’Leary, emerged as his opposite in style, and so his great rival; together, they staged walking races, symbolic class contests, immigrant vs. native, over several long sessions in several big towns. O’Leary was, in a Jackie Robinson-like way, perceived as a credit to his race, restoring the honor of the Irish, stained most recently, in Chicago, by the episode of another O’Leary and her cow. Working-class enthusiasm for the contests was so keen that indoor stadiums were needed. In New York, P. T. Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome, in the East Twenties, got covered, first by a tent and then, soon afterward, by a real roof, in part to contain and show off the walking marathons. (Eventually, that Hippodrome evolved into the original, sadly lost Madison Square Garden, where walkers walked, and where, in 1879, Weston, freshly returned from his London exploits, was given a hero’s welcome.)

Adam Gopnik, ‘Heaven’s Gaits’, The New Yorker, 1 Sept, 2014

Adele Reinhartz on the dilemma of the ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’ debates

Mason is surely correct that ioudaios was a complex term that carried ethnic,
political, cultic, and many other dimensions, even if the jury is still out on the
existence or non-existence of religion in antiquity (see Shaye Cohen, Cynthia
Baker, Seth Schwartz, and Daniel R. Schwartz, who have more nuanced
positions on the matter). But why broaden the referent of Judean from its primary
geographical meaning when there is a perfectly good English word — Jew —
ready to hand? As the Pew Report and many previous surveys and sociological
studies have shown, Jewish identity includes the same elements — including
ethnic, political, cultural, genealogical, and, yes, geographical — that, in
Mason’s view, are conveyed by the Greek terminology. To define Jew solely or
even primarily in religious terms is simply wrong. Further, erasing Jews from
Jewish antiquity, while presumably solving one historical problem, creates
another historical dilemma: how to account for the sudden appearance of Jews
in late antiquity as a fully-formed ethnic and religious group that saw itself —
and was seen by others — as continuous with the ioudaioi of the Greco-Roman
era? Scholars of the Greco-Roman period may not feel called upon to answer
such questions, but the dilemma cannot be ignored.

Adele Reinhartz, ‘The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity’, MRB, 24 June 2014

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is just how much the socio-religious phenomenon we call ‘Judaism’ was itself a matter of intense debate and negotiation in the first century CE. As Reinhartz goes on to emphasize in her response to Reed, a certain anachronism is perhaps inevitable in historical work, yet I wonder if some approaches don’t risk more distortion than others. In other words, the risks of ‘atomizing’ linguistics, ‘parallelomania’, and anachronistic ‘imposition’ of frameworks are well-known, but I wonder if the shape and scope of certain types of scholarly theses and monographs increases rather than attenuates exposure to these risks.

Annette Yoshiko Reed on atomizing approaches to language

The recent Jew and Judean Forum at Marginalia Review of Books is worth careful consideration for anyone interested in ancient Judaism and Christian Origins. Also, thanks to the editor Timothy Michael Law, you can read the posts here or download them in handy ebook format or pdf.

I found the two paragraphs below by Annette Yoshiko Reed in her contribution “Ioudaios before and after ‘Religion'” particularly helpful.

The focus on word-level translation reflects a longstanding tendency in Biblical Studies to treat the etymologies and histories of specific words as direct windows onto ancient thought — with the first known occurrence of a word in writing too often conflated with the birth of a concept. [See Malcolm Lowe’s essay in the forum.] If such approaches feel natural, even despite their bizarre atomization of language, it is in part because modern scholars of ancient ioudaioi have long delighted in quests for the “origins” or “invention” of concepts now common in the West. Teleology, of course, makes for poor history, and presentism courts anachronism. Yet their enduring power may help to explain the appeal of reducing the meaning of ioudaios to a question of when. To assert a moment before which a word bore a now-familiar meaning, after all, is also to evoke the point after which we might confidently presume what it means to us today.

For the limits of such approaches, we need look no further than to the use of the English term “Jew.” Those who prefer to translate first-century uses of ioudaios as “Judean” argue that “Jew” is a religious affiliation and therefore anachronistic prior to the Christian invention of “religion” in the third or fourth centuries. But this line of reasoning, as Reinhartz notes, presumes that “Jew” denotes a religious affiliation for “us” — an assumption not all English speakers who self-identify as Jews today share, as 2013 Pew polls made dramatically clear. The persistence of multiple meanings can be seen even in the scholarly debate about ioudaioi. If anything, the debate demonstrates how the term “Jew” can seem self-evidently religious to some people from the very same time and culture (and even the same profession and similar education) as others who understand it as self-evidently ethnic, political, cultural, or otherwise not or not just religious. It is not simply that the history of the meaning of ioudaios might be told differently if we chose a different end-point, such as the modern equivalents in Hebrew or Japanese or German. Even the English term “Jew” resists reduction to a single meaning at the end of a single story.

Adam Gopnik on the Place of Geography in Historiography

“Yet there’s a difference between humility and fatalism. The continuities of geography are striking. But the discontinuities produced by thought are more striking still. The fruited plain did little for the idea of brotherhood until brotherhood took things into its own hands. Once, the sight of a Viking prow coming down a river was as terrifying a sight as any European could imagine. Now the Scandinavian countries are perhaps the most pacific in the world. Whatever changed, it wasn’t the shape of Scandinavia. Those Viking ships turned around, and the Vikings eventually became do-gooding Danes, because sense prevailed in the snows. England certainly is an island, and it was water, as much as will, that stopped Hitler. But the transformation there from the gang ethics that dominate human history to democratic reformist ones can hardly be accounted for by mere insularity. Tyranny flourished in the British Isles; and, when it ended, England had not drifted any closer to the Continent. Good ideas matter, as does the creation of the prosperity that good ideas need in order to flourish. Conversation shapes us more than mountains and monsoons can. Human history, like human love, is still made most distinctly face to face.”

Adam Gopnik, “Faces, Places, Spaces” in The New Yorker, October 29th & November 5th 2012

Robbie Griggs

Teacher | Pastor | theologian