[Dialogue] Arundhati Roy

[Mary D'Souza]

This was sent to me by Molly Kurtz.

Roy is putting together an initial agenda for the OWS. Interested in your
comments.
Mary

Arundhati Roy: We Are All Occupiers | Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/17-0

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Ellie Stock <elliestock at aol.com> wrote:

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>        Studying Christian Art in Florence Italy
> The Florence Museum, known in Italy as the Musei Firenze, is best known
> for the massive marble statue of the youthful King David sculpted by
> Michelangelo.  Housed in the section of the museum known as the Galleria
> dell’Accademia, this magnificent work of rare genius was accomplished with
> meticulous detail designed to reveal the beauty and splendor of the human
> body.  The David statue draws thousands to the Galleria daily.  This
> museum, however, also houses some of the world’s best known religious
> paintings.  My wife Christine and I spent a day there in early October and
> I could not fail to note, as I have done before, that these masterpieces of
> religious art have played a significant role in the literalizing way that
> most people read the gospel narratives.  Most of these well known paintings
> were commissioned originally to hang in churches during the time we call
> the early middle ages up to the 18th century.  Since most people in that
> era could neither read nor write they gained much of their knowledge of the
> biblical story by looking at art.  It never occurred to them to think that
> art was an interpretive idiom and not a literal one.  They thus tended to
> see these paintings more like photographs that supposedly captured reality
> rather than as pieces of art that interpreted reality.
>  That is also why what we call the “Stations of the Cross” were developed
> and became an almost universal mark of pre-reformation Christian churches.
> People could literally follow the final events of Jesus’ life as they
> walked past the scenes depicted in the paintings or wood carvings on the
> church walls.  There was no such thing as critical biblical scholarship in
> those days.  God was assumed to be the ultimate author of the scriptures.
> The people were not allowed to embrace the differences or the
> contradictions found in the various gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.
> So Christian art portrayed the mother of Jesus, frequently dressed in the
> garb of a nun, as present at the foot of the cross, even cradling the
> deceased body of her son. When Mel Gibson made his blockbuster movie, *The
> Passion of Christ* in 2004, this late developing image (and non-biblical
> without a gargantuan stretch) formed a central theme in his story.
>  A search of the four gospels, however, will reveal that the mother of
> Jesus was nowhere near the cross in the earlier writings of Mark, Matthew
> or Luke, which were the first three gospels to appear.  She makes her first
> appearance at the cross only in the Fourth Gospel, which is generally dated
> between the years 95-100.  Her purpose in this appearance was so that Jesus
> could commend her to a figure who also is unknown outside the Gospel of
> John, the enigmatic figure referred to as “the Beloved Disciple.” He then,
> we are told takes the mother of Jesus to “his own home,” so she is not at
> the cross when Jesus dies.  For those who study the Fourth Gospel seriously
> there is debate about whether this author intended to suggest in this
> episode that the mother of Jesus was to be understood as a literal person
> of history or as a symbol for Judaism, the mother of Christianity, and
> consequently, whether the Beloved Disciple was himself a person of history
> or a literary creation to represent the move of Christianity beyond the
> boundaries of Judaism into being a new entity.  By commending his mother to
> the Beloved Disciple, Jesus was saying that the movement he was starting
> had to carry Judaism faithfully into a universal vocation.  To support this
> symbolic conclusion, with which Rudolf Bultmann, who is probably the
> leading New Testament scholar of the 20th century, is identified, we note
> that only in this gospel is Jesus made to say, “Other sheep have I that are
> not of this fold.  Them also I must bring until there is one flock and one
> shepherd.”  None of those interpretative nuances, however, appeared in any
> of the art work that I saw in the Florence Museum.  Literalism was the only
> visible or viable interpretation, the only way to “read” the painting.
>  I also saw three paintings, all dated in the first ten years of the 16thcentury that depicted not only Mary and the infant or youthful Jesus, but
> also, and always slightly larger, the youthful John the Baptist.   These
> boys are portrayed in these paintings as closely associated in childhood,
> even growing up together.  One of these paintings was by Bogliadini, one by
> Francesco Foschi and the third by Francesco de Ros.  They had all painted
> the common myth that asserted a physical kinship between Jesus and John the
> Baptist.  This kinship was defined by John Wycliffe in the early 14th
> century to be that of first cousins, his assumption being that Mary, Jesus’
> mother, and Elizabeth, John’s mother, were sisters. There is only a tiny
> fragment in the Bible that will support such a conclusion and this single
> word does not appear in the tradition until the late 9th or early 10thdecades. It is found in Luke alone, who is also the only writer to give us
> an account of the birth of John the Baptist. Typically, however, Luke
> compares John’s birth to the birth of Jesus, with John the Baptist always
> coming in less fantastic and less supernatural.  It was as if Luke were
> saying that anything John could do, Jesus could do better.  John was born
> to post-menopausal parents says Luke.  That is pretty impressive, even
> though we now believe that this story was based on the Old Testament story
> of the birth of Isaac to his post-menopausal parents, Abraham and Sarah.
> Most scholars even doubt the historicity of the names attributed to John’s
> parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, finding Old Testament antecedents for
> both.  When John was born, said Luke, the neighbors all gathered to rejoice
> and his father Zechariah’s inability to speak was broken as he sings:
> “Blessed be the Lord God of our Fathers for he has visited and redeemed his
> people.” Jesus, however, was said to have been born of a virgin, setting
> him apart from every other human life and, when he was born, it was not the
> neighbors who gathered to rejoice, but a host of angels who invaded the
> midnight sky to sing to shepherds.
>  Luke’s tales of the biological origins of both John and Jesus were
> designed to bring the story of these two infants into proximity.  He then
> embellishes this conclusion by having Mary, expectant with Jesus, go to
> visit Elizabeth, described as her “kinswoman,” (that is the single word)
> who was expectant with John. This visit, we are told, took place “in the
> hill country of Judea.”  Even in this episode the purpose of the story is
> still to affirm Jesus’ superiority to John, for we are told the fetus of
> John the Baptist in the womb of Elizabeth leaps to salute the fetus of
> Jesus in Mary’s womb and that Elizabeth acknowledges the superiority of
> Mary’s child to her own.  That is, I might add, a quite unusual thing for a
> Jewish mother to do!
>  No one that I know of regards this episode as literal history.  It is
> based to some degree on the story of Esau and Jacob contending together in
> the womb of Rebekah in the book of Genesis.  The facts are historically
> that at first the Jesus movement and the John movement were related in that
> Jesus was originally a disciple of John and was baptized by John.  Jesus’
> first disciples were formerly disciples of John.  Second, there is much
> evidence in the book of Acts and in the Fourth Gospel that there was a deep
> competition between the two movements with the followers of Jesus hard put
> to explain why Jesus had been baptized by John.  By the time we get to the
> Fourth Gospel, written near the turn of the century, John does not baptize
> Jesus at all, but simply becomes a witness to him as messiah.  Surely
> revisionist history is at work here.
>  No hint of anything but objective history, however, is present in these
> famous paintings. They show Jesus and John as infants and as small children
> playing under the care of Jesus’ mother who was supposedly John’s Aunt
> Mary.  Biblical scholarship was simply unavailable to the artists and was
> considered unnecessary by the people for whom they painted.
>  Finally, there were many generic portraits of the crucifixion. I noted
> that every one of them portrayed Jesus bleeding from his side as well as
> from the nail prints in his hands and feet. The wound in his side was once
> more, however, a late addition to the crucifixion story, not making its
> appearance until the Fourth Gospel, written somewhere between 95 to100.  In
> this gospel alone John says that a soldier went to hasten Jesus’ death by
> breaking his legs, but, finding him already dead, he hurled a lance or a
> spear into his side as a kind of coup de grace.
>  The first three gospels know nothing of this spear wound.  John adds it,
> he says, to show that it was the fulfillment of a text found in Zechariah
> (12:10): “They looked upon him whom they pierced and mourned for him as one
> mourns for an only son.”  To portray Jesus as the fulfillment of the
> scriptures was a major theme in the early Christian movement and the memory
> of Jesus was frequently bent to portray that fulfillment.  Indeed biblical
> scholars now even see the first description of the crucifixion, written by
> Mark in the early 70’s, not as the account of an eye witness at all, but as
> an interpretive piece of writing designed to portray the death of Jesus as
> the fulfillment of the scriptures.  Mark’s account, we now recognize is not
> based on an eye witness, but primarily on Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
>  So what we have in the great works of medieval art is not scholarship,
> but an uninformed biblical ignorance designed to undergird the traditional
> version of the Christ story.  Those images imprinted on our minds by this
> art have helped to squelch biblical scholarship through the ages and to
> teach us that any deviation from literalism is actually a deviation from
> “the true faith.”  So in the life of the church scholarship was undermined
> as an act of unfaithfulness and even of heresy and those who dared to think
> outside the box were destined in that earlier era to be burned at the
> stake.  In our day they are only destined to be marginalized as “trouble
> makers.”
>  If one wonders why institutional Christianity is declining, perhaps even
> dying, in the modern world, one has only to look at how the art of the ages
> was used to support the literalism that turned the Bible itself into an
> idol.  In the battle for the soul of Christianity and for the soul of the
> Christian Church in the 21st century, we must rescue the Bible from
> fundamentalism.  A visit to any great museum to view the Christian art of
> the past makes this abundantly clear.
>  ~John Shelby Spong
>  Read the essay online here<http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=b6745991b8&e=db34daa597>
> .
>  ------------------------------
>
> <http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=d9a27f31b5&e=db34daa597> New Book Now Available!
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> *  John Shelby Spong presents *Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious
> World*, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic
> debate about the Bible.
>
> A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from
> a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both
> a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
>
> Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his
> readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
>
> Order your copy now on amazon.com<http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=7343327040&e=db34daa597>or
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> !
> ------------------------------
>
>     Question & Answer
> Reuel from Kennesaw, Georgia, writes:
>  Question:
> Please comment on war.  Probably we all hate war and no one hates it more
> than those who must fight in it, but what must we do when invaded by a
> Hitler or when Japan bombs a Pearl Harbor?
>  Answer:
> Dear Reuel,
>  The battle over whether war is ever just or right has raged in the
> Christian Church for hundreds of years.  War is always interpreted in terms
> of the world view of the nation affected.  Yes, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
> and our own survival forced us to take up arms to defend ourselves.  We
> know now, however, from data that was released later, that six months
> before Pearl Harbor, Churchill and Roosevelt cut off Japan’s oil lifeline
> so they responded out of their need to survive.  Hitler was himself the
> product of the humiliating and ill-advised treaty of Versailles, which kept
> the German people in poverty long after World War I, which in turn was
> exacerbated by a world wide depression.  That does not excuse Hitler’s
> behavior, but it does help us to understand it.  War is an instrument of
> foreign policy and in my opinion it always represents a failure on the part
> of a government, which believes it has no other option.
>  Were the two Iraq wars justified?  How about Korea? Vietnam? Afghanistan?
> Grenada?  We could debate them all.  The driving desire in every human life
> is to survive.  When survival is threatened, war is inevitable.  In a world
> in which seven nations are known nuclear powers and one nation is probably
> a secret nuclear power, the price that war brings may prove to be too
> destructive to measure.  I think we Christians must be peace makers, but I
> doubt if we have the power to prevent war!
>  ~John Shelby Spong
>  ------------------------------
>
> <http://tcpc.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=85d24a847a&e=db34daa597> New Book Now Available!
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> *
>    John Shelby Spong presents *Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious
> World*, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic
> debate about the Bible.
>
> A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from
> a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both
> a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.
>
> Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his
> readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.
>
> Order your copy now on amazon.com<http://tcpc.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=11adb68ebf&e=db34daa597>or
> barnesandnoble.com<http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=74d87bd938&e=db34daa597>
> !
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