The issue I had wanted to explore was the difficulty of reconstructing anything about Jesus himself or about the early church.
OK. The difficulties are well attested, but I think there's a tendency to generalise on that point and assume
everything is inaccessible and
nothing is knowlable is just not the case.
I think we kid ourselves that we're somehow an evolutionarily different species to man of Antiquity. It's a glamour. At heart, which is all that matters, we have not really changed that much at all, we've just surrounded ourselves with technology which gives us the gloss of 'civilisation'.
So to the mind, the gulf is chasmic; to the heart, it's nothing.
So much effort and energy is expended on an over-arching empiricism which is itself part of the West's 'problem'. So much
forensic examination. So much
analysis. So little
insight.
If the same time was spent meditating on the text, rather than trying to determine the shoe size of the author, we might well have a lot more insight into what matters, as opposed to what doesn't.
The Daoist texts are far further removed from us than Biblical Scripture, so are the Buddhist texts, so are the Hindu ... do we write them off?
And their provenance! OK, we've got a copy of the
Tao Te Ching dating from 200 years after it was supposedly composed, but that's long enough for the skeptics and cynics here to assert it's most likely nothing at all like the original document. Give it to the Jesus Seminar and watch them dismantle it according to the limits of their own scant credulity.
And the Buddha! Heck, nothing was written down there until 400 years later! So all that lot goes in the bin.
I just don't see Daoists or Buddhists arguing whether Lao Tze or Siddhārtha Gautama Shakyamuni ever existed, or what their agendas were, or whether or not their chroniclers were sitting round the fire making it all up ... maybe they do, but I've never come across it.
In other words, the biblical materials and related classics have come down to us from multiple traditions and a lengthy redaction process.
Again, the Upanishads, the Lotus Sutra ... same deal, but not the same skeptical and cynical dismissal. I don't see anyone here railing on about how unreliable, untrustworthy, etc., those scribes were.
Well you're talking of 'you' now ...
I think we underestimate the vast gulf of knowledge and culture that separates us from the worlds of 2000 years ago, and that if given time machines, neither we nor they would easily recognize things seen in a trip to the other’s lands.
I think we overestimate 'knowledge' and 'culture' – it's all dressing.
Underneath it all, we're the same people.
And I'd recognise the Liturgy. And not because of the words. But then 'modern Christianity' tends to be non-Liturgical, so I suppose it's true that if Jesus came back ...
What I will agree with is that, with our intent focus on the material letter, the forensic detail, etc., we've lost access to a huge element of language, which is symbol. There, I would agree, much has been occluded, and the content of ancient texts is generally beyond us.
Compared to Antiquity we are 'intellectually narrow-minded' and are becoming increasingly more so as we determine the world according to ourselves.
To the Ancients, the veil between this world and other words was diaphanous. Today we are so focussed on the material, the the veil is concrete.
