Words appearing in bold are not mine.

This week's required reading in World Civ was a book written by my professor, not even in print yet. A lot of it deals with obscure historical issues, not terribly essential information, and as a whole it could have benefitted greatly from a kind but incisive editor's red pen. Nevertheless, I found the following passages insightful and encouraging.

From Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin by Rick Kennedy:

Today only twenty or so people in succession separate us from the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. Wendell Berry, in his novel Jayber Crow (2000), has Jayber, an aging village barber, reminisce:

"History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room."

Our modern schools do much to undermine the closeness of history. Our history textbooks encourage us to think of ourselves as separated from the past. We are taught to assume the past to be a foreign and exotic place. A vast distance is supposed to exist between us and the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Trusting the reported events in the New Testament is considered a “leap” of faith, something risky, possibly unreasonable. But Jayber Crow is right. A small room of people is all that is needed to link us personally to the eyewitnesses. No leap is necessary.

Eyewitnesses were the first rememberers. The gospel and letter writers were either eyewitnesses or early hearers of eyewitness reports who wisely created a strong bond between oral and written testimony that could pass across deserts and seas and on into the future. Confident knowledge of the event of the resurrection could pass through time and space by human links of people trusting each other's memories with the additional support of the New Testament as a memory aid. A testimonial succession of rememberers could reach through the centuries to us. To reach us only twenty or so trustworthy and non-gullible people are all that is needed...

...The nice thing about Jayber Crow’s historical insight in Wendell Berry’s novel is that it bridges the gap between both The Port-Royal Logic and John Locke’s Essay. Even if you agree with Locke and think historical credibility diminishes in proportion to the number of people it passes through, Jayber Crow points out that the story of Jesus only has to pass through twenty or so people to get to you and me. Credibility can’t have diminished that much even by this time. On the other hand, if you think of twenty or so people who have attested like a notary to the basic facts of the written gospel story, we can claim, at minimum, the confidence of a real estate deed coming down to us through time.

My grandmother a few years ago gave me a Griswold #8 frying pan when she was packing to move into a place where she would not have to cook. She told me that my grandfather gave that frying pan to her on their first Christmas together. She was born in 1911 and the pan would have been given in 1931. I am forty-four years old now and my kids not yet in high school. If I pass that frying pan and story on to a future grandchild, that pan and true story could easily still be passed on almost two centuries after the fact having only gone through two people: me and my grandchild. A good and true story can be easily carried over hundreds of years by just a few people who want to tell a true story. To help my memory, my grandmother also wrote down the story. Even if my memory of the story gets fuzzy, I can attest to her written testimony as what she had initially told me. As Christians founded upon the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus, we only need twenty or so conscientious people linked through time to give us the confidence of listening to the eyewitnesses. And to give us greater confidence, we have written attestations that have been passed along to keep the testimony on track.

Jayber Crow is not offering a Christian apologetic; rather, he is simply meditating on how history is so close and personal. Our schools want to make history too hard. They want us to over-think it by half. Jayber is not promoting gullibility; rather, he stands in the Classical tradition of knowing history, that history is linked to us by humans. John who stood at the base of the cross calls to us in his first letter to trust him as a testifier to what he has seen, heard, and touched so that we can have fellowship with him. He calls not from long ago and far away, but only from across a small room of friends and family...

...Christianity’s intellectual foundation—the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection—is weak at universities. It is weak in the way ancient human history is a weak academic discipline. Both depend on social methods of knowledge. Being weak, however, does not mean wrong. There is a story of Peter in the sixth chapter of John where some of the disciples desert Jesus because of hard teachings. Other disciples are grumbling, and Jesus upbraids them: “Does this offend you?” He then turned to his core twelve and asks “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Peter answered “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter’s answer is not full of triumph; rather, it recognizes that our hope is in weakness; the weakness of words from one who, himself, became weak...

...Ancient history has no hope in academic rationalism. Where else can it go but to cling to reasonableness? Ancient history accepts the reality of paradox, inconsistency, and human weakness. History recognizes that truths can be unsuccessful, that tragedy and irony often prevail, that what is quirky and odd can be more influential than what is respected and normal.

Natural history is rational. It is powerful. But should its confidence wash over into history negating the quirky fact that we have strong eyewitness and hearsay testimony that Jesus rose from the dead? Is natural history so powerful with its inferences drawn from observation that it has veto power over facts learned from ancient sources?

***

There is a rational argument that destroys our historical knowledge of Jesus. I have an academic friend who grants that eyewitnesses experienced the resurrected Jesus, but then he says that seeing the resurrected Jesus doesn’t mean they actually saw the resurrected Jesus. “The critical issue,” he wrote me in an email “is whether credibility extends to the truth of their claims or only to the truth of their reports.” I grant him his point. It’s a tricky point: Seeing Jesus doesn’t mean Jesus is being seen. By extension: when Peter, on top of the mountain, heard God tell him to listen to Jesus, Peter may actually have been listening to himself tell himself to listen to himself.

It is a tricky argument, and Greekish academic traditions always allow for the truth of the tricky. At its core, the argument undermines human perception of anything. Can any of us know anything? Can any of us get outside of our own minds to know anything outside of our brains? Is it possible for a creator God to actually communicate or act in a way we humans could confidently assert as true? What is a scientist observing when he observes something? His or her own mind?

Ancient Greeks enjoyed conundrums and circular reasoning such as “All that I know is that I know nothing.” Our minds can tie us in knots. Greek rationalism is wise to always allow for the tricky. Greek reasonableness is also wise to encourage people not to get bogged down in the tricky. All university disciplines can collapse into a toilet swirl if we allow our minds to play the rationality games that our minds are capable of. Nobody can convince an obstinate skeptic of anything, even the existence of the world around us. All I can say is that I stand in a long Aristotelian and university tradition of optimistic and social reasonableness that offers alternative, practical, maybe-not-fully-persuasive methods of creating credibility for assertions about things we perceive and we believe other people perceive too, now, in the past, and probably into at least the near future. Darwin and I stand together in this tradition.

***

I follow Peter who listened when God told him to listen to Jesus. Like Peter, my reply to the question of abandoning Jesus is "to whom shall I go?" Peter recognized that he has to cling to someone or something. There is no personal, independent truth in himself strong enough to save him. Like Peter, I see no hope for me in myself. Like Peter, I cling to words—words communicated with all the limits and frailties of human communication. Worse! Peter at least got to cling to words straight from Jesus. I have to cling to words translated, words written down in Greek, words passed from eyewitnesses through hearsay. Jesus looks at me and asks if I want to leave him like so many others. My answer is that I cling to him through his words as recorded.

I cling to his words in two ways: a church way and a university way. Among the fellowship of believers, I share the tradition and collective experience of two thousand years of believers who, at the core of Christian orthodoxy, believe in the Holy Spirit’s oversight over the writing of the whole Bible and that when its authors declare themselves bearing communications from God I must listen as carefully and conscientiously as if Jesus stood with his hand on the shoulder of every author. The Bible is an extension of the incarnation, the stooping down of Truth into mere words. God communicates, but God humbles himself to communicate through chosen authors and helps us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to read and listen. I believe this in a church way, sharing in a fellowship of prayer and belief. On the other hand, in universities, where the traditional standards of academic disciplines rub against each other, I cling to Jesus’ words and deeds as history, as well-attested reports.

History departments, by tradition and common practice, pride themselves in “practical realism” and recognize their “post-heroic situation.” We, by traditional rights, have a role in universities as the discipline most oriented to studying human words reporting past events and people. Modern archeology and the social sciences have been developed to avoid the weaknesses of words; however, traditional history is a social study not a social science. The stronger university disciplines strive to discover things that are independent of the frailties of people. History departments, however, are mired in people, especially the words of dead people.

My dad was a weatherman, a type of natural historian. Everybody laughs at the errors of weathermen. But when my dad predicted the future, a fleet of warships immediately changed course. Dad was using history in the form of past measurements to look for patterns that could be turned into probabilities of future events. Meteorology is a field of natural history strong enough to persuade admirals that disbelief is too big a risk. I teach ancient history, a job more laughable than a weatherman’s. My job is rooted in, with, and through people. Eighteen-year old students dismiss my analyses. I can’t imagine having the power of argument capable of convincing an admiral to change the course of a fleet...