(no subject)

Yesterday was the Feast of Saint Thomas the Empiricist (a.k.a. Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic), although many church traditions have moved his feast day to a season less bound up with the Incarnation.

Which is unfortunate, since the foundation story of Thomas has to do with the nature of the resurrection body, and thereby with the body itself, and thereby with consciousness. You know, Michael Murphy Esalen Institute kind of stuff.

Every year I find myself returning at this season to a 1976 book by Geoffrey Ashe titled The Virgin and finding myself astonished by the questions one can ask if one simply suggests that the texts reflect some actual happening on which people have hung their best guesses as to what it was that happened. Ashe insists that oddly disturbing questions arise if we start from the empirical evidence of what was said about the Virgin Mary in successive generations, much more so than if we start from the easy supposition that someone made up something out of no evidence whatsoever for anything. He eventually argues that forces within the Church were constantly going against the Church’s express logic to the point that it took quite a while to bring these disruptive energies into line, but that isn’t where he starts; he starts with the question of whether we can know anything about the historical Mary by taking seriously the idea that mainline scholars would dismiss out of hand, the notion that the most mythic-sounding elements of the Gospels reflect different fragmentary strands of reports of real events that happened to real people in real places.

Ashe’s just-so story to make sense of this hypothesis, which he never claims to be more than his own must-have-been narrative to put alongside the must-have-been narratives that later gave rise to Marian doctrine, makes an interesting moiré pattern when overlaid on a just-so story like James Tabor’s over-the-top opposing hypothesis in The Jesus Dynasty (Tabor has quite a lot of fun with his discovery of the existence of a Roman soldier named Pantera who served in the province of Syria at the right time to be the Pantera whom Jewish polemicists identified in the fourth century as the real father of Jesus, while Ashe finds it curious that it took four centuries for a calumny to come to light that should have put paid to the birth narratives straightaway—but both writers hang their opposing hypotheses on the prospect that there was some peculiar sense of expectation surrounding Jesus’ family lineage that makes sense of why a peculiarly well-versed intellectual from a nowhere mountain village would have been taken seriously in some quarters, even though as the Gospels themselves assert, others scoffed that nothing good ever came out of a dusty little burg like Nazareth and still others of Jesus’ close associates thought he was completely insane.)

In the end, Ashe and Tabor have to be placed as opposite outliers in the competition to establish the historical Jesus (and thereby the historical Mary), but it is intriguing that Bart Ehrman, skeptic among skeptics, is slowly coming round to the notion that something strange must have sparked the conviction of the bodily resurrection, so that the story of Christianity is from the beginning a story of disruptions in ordinary consciousness, albeit also involving competing interpretations of those disruptions.

This seems to be a rising hypothesis in religious studies at present, and it is good to see scholars puzzling over the possibility that there are real experiences encoded even in those present-day new religions that were expressly made up by their founders to bamboozle the credulous. (But those religions tend to be litigious about such assertions by outsiders, whereas the ones I find most intriguing are the ones that assert the reality of the experiences and that the credulous need to learn to be less naively credulous.)

Charles Williams, about whose foundational flaws we have learned a great deal more in recent decades, wrote that such poorly explored realms of altered consciousness were quite real, and prone to misinterpretation by those who encountered them and came back “windy with a graph or a gospel,” and also that the Church ought to find room within its boundaries for a Society of Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic.

The society seems to have formed on the ill-defined meeting ground of neuroscience and the humanities rather than in the heart of a Church ever less inclined to intellectual speculation, but it seems appropriate to remember this long-ago declaration by a singularly speculating Anglican layman, even if I post it on the birthday of Kenneth Rexroth rather than the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle.