The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

The premise of this book is flawed. 

A Seasoned Journalist Chases Down the Biggest Story in History

Is there credible evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God?

Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge, Princeton, and Brandeis who are recognized authorities in their own fields.

Strobel challenges them with questions like “How reliable is the New Testament?” “Does evidence for Jesus exist outside the Bible?” “Is there any reason to believe the resurrection was an actual event?”

Strobel’s tough, point-blank questions make this Gold Medallion-winning book read like a captivating, fast-paced novel. But it’s not fiction. It’s a riveting quest for the truth about history’s most compelling figure.

What will your verdict be in “The Case for Christ”?

That’s from the back cover. It makes it sound like the author takes a skeptical and even-handed approach to the evidence and the witnesses that provide it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite his claims to the contrary, Strobel is neither a skeptic, nor am I convinced that he was ever actually an atheist. From his own introduction:

For much of my life I was a skeptic. In fact, I considered myself an atheist. To me, there was far too much evidence that God was merely a product of wishful thinking, of ancient mythology, of primitive superstition. How could there be a loving God if he consigned people to hell just for not believing in him? How could miracles contravene the basic laws of nature? Didn’t evolution satisfactorily explain how life originated? Doesn’t scientific reasoning dispel belief in the supernatural?

As for Jesus, didn’t you know that he never claimed to be God? He was a revolutionary, a sage, an iconoclastic Jew -- but God? No, that thought never occurred to him! I could point you to plenty of university professors who said so -- and certainly they could be trusted, couldn’t they? Let’s face it: even a cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates convincingly that Jesus had only been a human being just like you and me, although with unusual gifts of kindness and wisdom.

But that’s all I had ever really given the evidence: a cursory look. I had read just enough philosophy and history to find support for my skepticism -- a fact here, a scientific theory there, a pithy quote, a clever argument. Sure, I could see some gaps and inconsistencies, but I had a strong motivation to ignore them: a self-serving and immoral lifestyle that I would be compelled to abandon if I were ever to change my views and become a follower of Jesus.

This is manipulation, pure and simple. And the giveaway is the “fear” of having to give up a self-serving and immoral lifestyle. That’s his Christian ethos poking through. Strobel isn’t talking about himself in this section. He’s talking about you, dear reader. And you, dear reader, aren’t a skeptical atheist, because skeptical atheists don’t pick up The Case For Christ except on a lark. His audience, his serious audience is the casual Christian, and his goal to convert you into a committed one.

Okay? Are we on the same page? Good. Let’s dig in.

The Rhetorical Two-Step

The arguments in this book fall into a couple of obvious categories, many of them faulty. Here’s an example of a category that I came to call the rhetorical two-step.

“Tell me this,” I said with an edge of challenge in my voice, “is it really possible to be an intelligent, critically thinking person and still believe that the four gospels were written by the people whose names have been attached to them?”

Blomberg set his cup of coffee on the edge of his desk and looked intently at me. “The answer is yes,” he said with conviction.

He sat back and continued. “It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous.”

Strobel will do this two-step again and again in his “narrative.” Using his interviewees as his mouthpiece, he will have them say one thing unequivocally, and then have them say the exact opposite in a supporting paragraph that follows. Was the Gospel of Matthew written by Matthew? Yes, absolutely. Wait, I mean, strictly speaking, no.

Want another example?

“Rabbis became famous for having the entire Old Testament committed to memory. So it would have been well within the capacity of Jesus’ disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together -- and to have passed it along accurately.”

“Wait a second,” I interjected. “Frankly, that kind of memorization seems incredible. How is that possible?”

“Yes, it is difficult for us to imagine today,” he conceded, “but this was an oral culture, in which there was great emphasis placed on memorization. And remember that eighty to ninety percent of Jesus’ words were originally in poetic form. This does not mean stuff that rhymes, but it has a meter, balanced lines, parallelism, and so forth -- and this would have created a great memory help.

“The other thing that needs to be said is that the definition of memorization was more flexible back then. In studies of cultures with oral traditions, there was freedom to vary how much of the story was told on any given occasion -- what was included, what was left out, what was paraphrased, what was explained, and so forth.

“One study suggested that in the ancient Middle East, anywhere from ten to forty percent of any given retelling of sacred tradition could vary from one occasion to the next.”

Did you catch the rhetorical two-step? Are the gospels an accurate description of what actually happened? Yes, absolutely. Wait, I mean, strictly speaking, no. Maybe 60% came from Jesus, the other 40% came from the storyteller, who had the freedom to vary the story as circumstances dictated. From that I would assume that whatever discrepancies there were in the four gospels would come from the 40% that are being added by the storyteller, and which could be eliminated as inaccurate. I mean, if they’re disagreeing, then how do you know which one is right?

And what’s that about Jesus speaking in poetic form? He spoke that way? Or people wrote his sayings down that way so they would be easier to memorize? Seems like we should have some greater clarity on that one.

The Early Church 

Another common crutch Strobel can’t seem to do without is the early church and how, evidently, we can safely assume that everything it purported to be true is actually true. Remember that rhetorical two-step about who wrote the gospels? Strobel’s interviewee went on to say this:

“But the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician,’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.”

“How uniform was the belief that they were the authors?” I asked. 

“There are no known competitors for these three gospels,” he said. “Apparently, it was just not in dispute.”

So there you go. The early church believed it. Must be true! I mean, it’s not like they got anything else wrong.

Frankly, it’s a little surprising how much of his house of cards is built on this foundation of what the early church believed. Acknowledging that there were a lot of writings and a lot of books floating around in those early years, Strobel appears rational when he asks:

“How did the early church leaders determine which books would be considered authoritative and which would be discarded?” I asked. “What criteria did they use in determining which documents would be included in the New Testament?”

“Basically, the early church had three criteria,” he said. “First, the books must have apstolic authority -- that is, they must have been written either by apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles. So, in the case of Mark and Luke, while they weren’t among the twelve disciples, early tradition has it that Mark was the helper of Peter, and Luke was an associate of Paul.

Sorry. Got to interrupt there. Early tradition says Mark was written by Mark, and early tradition says Mark was a helper of Peter, and early tradition said Peter was one of the twelve disciples. Any evidence other than “early tradition” in that tenuous chain? Back to the except:

“Second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith. That is, was the document congruent with the basic Chirstian tradition that the church recognized as normative? And third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.”

There’s a lot of words there. But if you boil them down, I’m pretty sure they are saying that the early church decided certain books were true because they said what they wanted them to say. That’s the standard I should put my “faith” in? The storyteller likes the story?

And that’s evidently a sword that cut both ways. Because not only do they keep what they like, they evidently also reject what they don’t.

I asked, “What about the charge that [the Gospel of] Thomas was purposefully excluded by church councils in some sort of conspiracy to silence it?”

“That’s just not historically accurate,” came Metzger’s response. “What the synods and councils did in the fifth century and following was to ratify what already had been accepted by high and low Christians alike. It is not right to say that the Gospel of Thomas was excluded by some fiat on the part of a council; the right way to put it is, the Gospel of Thomas excluded itself! It did not harmonize with other testimony about Jesus that early Christians accepted as trustworthy.”

Confirmation bias, anyone? Any evidence that runs counter to my narrative will be rejected, not because I can show that it is inaccurate, but because it runs counter to my narrative. 

Building on a Shaky Foundation

Getting Strobel’s foundation solid is important because his whole book is structured in such a way that one argument builds on the conclusions of the one previous. But when the one previous leaves the reader feeling sketchy, not solid, it causes all the subsequent conclusions to be questionable. For example:

[The Character Test] looks at whether it was in the character of these writers to be truthful. Was there any evidence of dishonesty or immorality that might taint their ability or willingness to transmit history accurately?

Blomberg shook his head. “We simply do not have any reasonable evidence to suggest they were anything but people of great integrity,” he said.

This one is referring to the gospel writers. Forget that we don’t have any evidence that the men for whom they are named actually wrote them, let’s just take that as given so we can now focus on how much integrity they had. 

Interpolation? What Interpolation?

Again and again throughout Strobel’s narrative, I found myself underlying passages and dog-earing pages whenever he knit Bible verses together in such a way as to make a particularly irrefutable point. I mean, once he convinces me that the Bible is accurate, then anything the Bible says must be true, right?

Except Strobel fails to mention that there are many passages in the Bible which are interpolations -- little snippets that weren’t present when the book in question was originally written, but which were added later, typically by scribes, believers, or early church fathers, who wanted to help harmonize one part of the Bible with another. How many of Strobel’s Bible clinchers, I wondered, were or were disputed to be interpolations? 

Turns out, quite a few of them are. The first I came across was 1 Corinthians 15, which Strobel uses to clinch two arguments: one, that the oral tradition that most Bible writers used could be relied on for an accurate transmission of facts, and two, that Jesus was crucified sometime around A.D. 30. Here’s the relevant section:

“But perhaps the most important creed in terms of the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul uses technical language to indicate that he was passing along this oral tradition in relatively fixed form.”

Blomberg located the passage in his Bible and read it to me.

‘For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.’

“And here’s the point,” Blomberg said. “If the Crucifixion was as early as A.D. 30, Paul’s conversion was about 32. Immediately Paul was ushered into Damascus, where he met with a Christian named Ananias and some other disciples. His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem would have been about A.D. 35. At some point along there, Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church.

“Now, here you have the key facts about Jesus’ death for our sins, plus a detailed list of those to whom he appeared in resurrected form -- all dating back to within two to five years of the events themselves!”

Wow. Very convincing. Except, of course, 1 Corinthians 15 is disputed by Bible historians as likely containing an interpolation. The earliest manuscript copy we have of 1 Corinthians dates to about A.D. 200, so there’s no telling what an “original” version of 1 Corinthians would look like and what parts of it were added as interpolations. But 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 is suspected because it contains information not contemporaneous with other writings of its supposed period, and it makes unsubstantiated claims (like Jesus appearing after death to more than 500 people) that not even the gospel writers thought important enough to include in their works.

What’s even more surprising is that even when one of Strobel’s experts acknowledges that something is an interpolation -- they still use the text as proof that what it says about Jesus is true (interpolation and all). Here’s the remarkable section where Strobel and his puppet discuss that famous passage by Josephus.

“But today there’s a remarkable consensus among both Jewish and Christian scholars that the passage as a whole is authentic, although there may be some interpolations.”

That’s a curious turn of phrase. The passage as a whole is authentic. What, exactly, does that mean? But Strobel doesn’t get hung up there. He asks a different question.

I raised an eyebrow. “Interpolations -- would you define what you mean by that?”

That means early Christian copyists inserted some phrases that a Jewish writer like Josephus would not have written,” Yamauchi said.

He pointed to a sentence in the book. “For instance, the first line says, ‘About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man.’ That phrase is not normally used of Jesus by Christians, so it seems authentic for Josephus. But the next phrase says, ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man.’ This implies Jesus was more than human, which appears to be an interpolation.”

I nodded to let him know I was following him so far.

“It goes on to say, ‘For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.’ That seems to be quite in accord with the vocabulary Josephus uses elsewhere, and it’s generally considered authentic.

But then there’s this unambiguous statement, ‘He was the Christ.’ That seems to be an interpolation--”

“Because,” I interrupted, “Josephus says in his reference to James that Jesus was ‘called the Christ.’”

“That’s right,” said Yamauchi. “It’s unlikely Josephus would have flatly said Jesus was the Messiah here, when elsewhere he merely said he was considered to be the Messiah by his followers.

“The next part of the passage -- which talks about Jesus’ trial and crucifixion and the fact that his followers still loved him -- is unexceptional and considered genuine. Then there’s this phrase: ‘On the third day he appeared to them restored to life.’

“Again, this is a clear declaration of belief in the Resurrection, and thus it’s unlikely that Josephus wrote it. So these three elements seem to have been interpolations.”

“What’s the bottom line?” I asked.

“That the passage in Josephus probably was originally written about Jesus, although without those three points I mentioned. But even so, Josephus corroborates important information about Jesus: that he was the martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and that he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilate at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders.”

So, in other words, the passage as a whole isn’t authentic, since only some of it was actually written by its original author. And those bits that weren’t written by him? Why, what do you know, they are the ones that support the narrative that Jesus was more than a man, was the Jewish Messiah, and was resurrected from the dead.

But it’s still evidence for all that somehow because, you know, the whole passage is authentic.

It’s True BECAUSE It’s Unbelievable

This one really makes my head hurt. Time and again, when something seems out of place or unbelievable in the Jesus narrative, Strobel and his stable of experts don’t view that as evidence against their contention. In fact, they view it as evidence FOR the contention.

“Jesus’ baptism is another example. You can explain why Jesus, who was without sin, allowed himself to be baptized, but why not make things easier by leaving it out altogether? On the cross Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I would have been in the self-interest of the writers to omit that because it raises too many questions.”

And therefore they must be true. What other explanation could there be? I mean, after all, if they were concocting a story, why would they include such obviously troubling information?

Here’s another example, in response to the fact that many other ancient rabbis were reported to have worked miracles -- performing exorcisms and praying successfully for rain. Isn’t it possible that Jesus was “merely another example of a Jewish wonder worker”?

“...the radical nature of [Jesus’s] miracles distinguishes him. It didn’t just rain when he prayed for it; we’re talking about blindness, deafness, leprosy, and scoliosis being healed, storms being stopped, bread and fish being multiplied, sons and daughters being raised from the dead. This is beyond any parallels.”

See. It’s true because the claims are miraculous. How could such stories possibly be made up?

Here may be the stupidest one of them all.

First, I asked Lapides whether it’s possible that Jesus merely fulfilled the prophecies by accident. Maybe he’s just one of many throughout history who have coincidentally fit the prophetic fingerprint.

“Not a chance,” came his response. “The odds are so astronomical that they rule that out. Someone did the math and figured out that the probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled is one chance in one hundred million billion. That number is millions of times greater than the total number of people who’ve ever walked the planet!”

Wow. Impressive. But Strobel can go one better.

I had studied this same statistical analysis by mathematician Peter W. Stoner when I was investigating the messianic prophecies for myself. Stoner also computed that the probability of fulfilling forty-eight prophecies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!

Our minds can’t comprehend a number that big. This is a staggering statistic that’s equal to the number of minuscule atoms in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the size of our universe!

“The odds alone say it would be impossible for anyone to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies,” Lapides concluded. “Yet Jesus -- and only Jesus throughout all of history -- managed to do it.”

So in other words -- it’s impossible, yet it happened. And, of course, it happened because it’s impossible.

And speaking of the impossible.

“I would argue that the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead is not at all improbable. In fact, based on the evidence, it’s the best explanation for what happened. What is improbable is the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the dead. That, I would agree, is outlandish. Any hypothesis would be more probable than saying the corpse of Jesus spontaneously came back to life.

“But the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead doesn’t contradict science or any known facts of experience. All it requires is the hypothesis that God exists, and I think there are good independent reasons for believing that he does.”

With that Craig added this clincher: “As long as the existence of God is even possible, it’s possible that he acted in history by raising Jesus from the dead.”

With that Craig added this clincher: “As long as I say the impossible is possible, I can make up any explanation I want.”

Don’t Be Silly

Here’s the other end of that spectrum. When the miraculous supports what we want they must be true, but when it runs counter to our preferred narrative, then please, be serious.

Crossan also gives credence to what he calls the Cross Gospel. “Does that fare any better?” I asked.

“No, most scholars don’t give it credibility, because it includes such outlandishly legendary material. For instance, Jesus comes out of his tomb and he’s huge -- he goes up beyond the sky -- and the cross comes out of the tomb and actually talks! Obviously, the much more sober gospels are more reliable than anything found in this account.”

Yeah, those sober gospels. You know, the ones where Jesus simply raises people from the dead and walks on water.

Here’s another take on this theme:

I pointed out that Ian Wilson, in suggesting that Jesus may have used hypnosis to cure people who only believed they were possessed, said dismissively that no “realistic individual” would explain a state of possession “as the work of real demons.”

“To some degree, you find what you set out to find,” Collins said in response. “People who deny the existence of the supernatural will find some way, no matter how far-fetched, to explain a situation apart from the demonic.”

Yes, those who only believe the things that actual evidence supports (what Collins calls denying the existence of the supernatural) come up with all kinds of far-fetched ways to explain the phenomena around them. Because remember, proposing causes that align with evidence is far-fetched. Demons are not. 

A Vessel For His Holy Will

“Jesus thought he was the person appointed by God to bring in the climactic saving act of God in human history. He believed he was the agent of God to carry that out -- that he had been authorized by God, empowered by God, he spoke for God, and he was directed by God to do this task. So what Jesus said, God said. What Jesus did was the work of God.”

Strobel spends an entire chapter on this assertion -- that Jesus believed he was an agent of God. I’m not sure why, since history is replete with people who believed they were an agent of God who even Strobel would go out of his way to say were mistaken. Muhammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, etc.

But Strobel will spend another chapter making sure the argument is made that Jesus couldn’t possibly be deluded or crazy (or, I guess, reviewing that list above, a con-man).

“Other deluded people will have misperceptions,” he added. “They think people are watching them or trying to get them when they’re not. They’re out of contact with reality. They misperceive the actions of other people and accuse them of doing things they have no intention of ever doing. Again, we don’t see this in Jesus. He was obviously in contact with reality. He wasn’t paranoid, although he rightfully understood that there were some very real dangers around him. 

“Or people with psychological difficulties may have thinking disorders -- they can’t carry on a logical conversation, they’ll jump to faulty conclusions, they’re irrational. We don’t see this in Jesus. He spoke clearly, powerfully, and eloquently. He was brilliant and had absolutely amazing insights into human nature.”

Yeah. So did Hamlet. And that’s kind of my point. The evidence points more logically to a fictional character embodied with this kind of clarity, power, and eloquence. And how can you say with a straight face that Jesus both believed he was an agent of God and that he was “in contact with reality”?

If It Ain’t In the Book, It Didn’t Happen

This one is maybe the most insidious of them all. 

“Of course,” he quickly added, “that doesn’t explain all of Jesus’ healings. Often a psychosomatic healing takes time; Jesus’ healings were spontaneous. Many times people who are healed psychologically have their symptoms return a few days later, but we don’t see any evidence of this. And Jesus healed conditions like lifelong blindness and leprosy, for which a psychosomatic explanation isn’t very likely.

We’re deep into Strobel’s rabbit hole by this point -- and he believes he has already put to rest any question about whether or not we can trust the veracity of the things written in the New Testament. If it’s in the book, it happened.

But this one goes even farther than that. But we don’t see any evidence of this. Meaning, I guess, that if something isn’t in the book, that we can now say that it did not happen. Obviously everyone Jesus healed stayed healed, right? I mean, if the healing didn’t stick for someone, certainly they would have documented that in the book. Cause, you know, the author is an unbiased reporter of everything that happened.

Apologetics

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Strobel’s book decays into pure apologetics -- making up convoluted answers to get around really simple philosophical challenges to God’s benevolence or existence.

Hell

“Having said that, hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe the right stuff. They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe.”

Really? Please explain to me the difference between someone not believing the right stuff and someone who is defying his Maker. If he’s pretty good bloke who doesn’t believe God is real, doesn’t that mean he’s defying his Maker?

“Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out. It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.”

Is it? How did you determine that? And if true, does that mean that if I repent after being tortured with God’s red hot poker that He’ll let me out of hell? And that there are therefore people still in hell who still “want” to defy God after being tortured with His red hot poker?

“What is God to do?”

Yes, what is God to do? I can see how hard it must be for the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe to have his hands tied like this by all these pesky humans.

“If he says it doesn’t matter to him, God is no longer a God to be admired. He’s either amoral or positively creepy. For him to act in any other way in the face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God himself.”

I love it when the apologist comes so close to the inescapable conclusion but still can’t leap across that final distance. Yes, such a situation would reduce God completely out of existence, wouldn’t it?

Slavery

How can Jesus’ failure to push for the abolition of slavery be squared with God’s love for all people?

Since when does God love all people? Read the Old Testament.

“Why didn’t Jesus stand up and shout, ‘Slavery is wrong’?” I asked. “Was he morally deficient for not working to dismantle an institution the demeaned people who were made in the image of God?”

Carson straightened up in his chair. “I really think that people who raise that objection are missing the point,” he said. “If you’ll permit me, I’ll set the stage by talking about slavery, ancient and modern, because in our culture the issue is understandably charged with overtones that it didn’t have in the ancient world.”

Overtones. Carson is about to argue that biblical slavery wasn’t as bad as the slavery of the American South, but before he does that, let me plant this flag. Wouldn’t Jesus know that the worse form of slavery was coming? Isn’t it kind of like letting the burning house that will spread to burn down the whole neighborhood continue to burn because, you know, one house burned down isn’t as big a deal as a whole neighborhood? Someone with the knowledge that the whole neighborhood is at risk, and who has the means to put the original housefire out, and who does not act is, oh, what the phrase? Either amoral or positively creepy?

I gestured for him to continue. “Please go ahead,” I said.

“In his book Race and Culture, African-American scholar Thomas Sowell points out that every major world culture until the modern period, without exception, has had slavery,” Carson explained.

Really. Huh. If only there was a God that could’ve put an end to all of that.

“While it could be tied to military conquests, usually slavery served an economic function. They didn’t have bankruptcy laws, so if you got yourself into terrible hock, you sold yourself and/or your family into slavery. As it was discharging a debt, slavery was also providing work. It wasn’t necessarily all bad; at least it was an option for survival.”

It wasn’t necessarily all bad. Does that mean good? Or still bad? It's kind of hard to tell from all the shade you’re throwing over it. I mean, if slavery serves an economic function, and provides work, how bad could it be? Right?

“Please understand me: I’m not trying to romanticize slavery in any way. However, in Roman times there were menial laborers who were slaves, and there were also others who were the equivalent of distinguished Ph.D.’s who were teaching families.”

Okay, good. Glad we cleared that up. So as long as your slave is well educated and is teaching your family, then it’s okay to own him. Right?

“In American slavery, though, all blacks and only blacks were slaves. That was one of the peculiar horrors of it, and it generated an unfair sense of black inferiority that many of us continue to fight to this day.

“Now let’s look at the Bible. In Jewish society, under the Law everyone was to be freed every Jubilee. In other words, there was a slavery liberation every seventh year. Whether or not things actually worked out that way, this was nevertheless what God said, and this was the framework in which Jesus was brought up.”

There go those pesky humans again. God wanted all the slaves freed every seventh year, but those damn humans just wouldn’t do it! 

And what’s that thing at the end about Jesus being “brought up”? Was he not God? Did he not have an understanding of the universe that transcended the specific cultural milieu of his century and geography?

“But you have to keep your eye on Jesus’ mission. Essentially, he did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins. And here’s my point: what his message does is transform people so they begin to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally, that has an impact on the idea of slavery.

No, I guess not. But then again, He wasn’t God, and Strobel is more or less admitting that here. He -- like us all -- was a product of his century and geography.

Three Days and Three Nights

I wanted to ask about one other commonly cited discrepancy. “Jesus said in Matthew 12:40, ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’ However, the gospels report that Jesus was really in the tomb one full day, two full nights, and part of two days. Isn’t this an example of Jesus being wrong in not fulfilling his own prophecy?”

“Some well-meaning Christians have used this verse to suggest Jesus was crucified on Wednesday rather than on Friday, in order to get the full time in there!” Craig said. “But most scholars recognize that according to early Jewish time-reckoning, any part of a day counted as a full day. Jesus was in the tomb Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, and on Sunday morning -- under the way the Jews conceptualized time back then, this would have counted as three days.

Uh huh. But still not three nights, right? Unless by “early Jewish time-reckoning” Friday nights count as two nights.

“Again,” he concluded, “that’s just another example of how many of these discrepancies can be explained or minimized with some background knowledge or just by thinking them through with an open mind.”

The Jesus Seminar

I think the most laughable part of Strobel’s book is when he attempts to address the criticisms of The Jesus Seminar.

Now that I had heard powerfully convincing and well-reasoned evidence from the scholars I questioned for this book, I needed to turn my attention to the decidedly contrary opinions of a small group of academics who have been the subject of a whirlwind of news coverage.

Strobel then goes on the describe The Jesus Seminar, which he calls a “self-selected group that represents a miniscule percentage of New Testament scholars,” which set out to determine which quotes attributed to Jesus in the New Testament could be supported with evidence that a man named Jesus had actually said them. 

In the end they concluded Jesus did not say 82 percent of what the gospels attribute to him. Most of the remaining 18 percent was considered somewhat doubtful, with only 2 percent of Jesus’ sayings confidently determined to be authentic.

But Strobel is a journalist, remember? He’s going to ruthlessly cross-examine the witnesses and let only the truth emerge.

I needed to know if there was any credible rebuttal evidence to refute these troubling and widely publicized opinions. Were the Jesus Seminar’s findings solidly based on unbiased scholarly research, or were they like Passeri’s ill-fated testimony: well meaning but ultimately unsupported?

Passeri is a witness in one of the legal proceedings Strobel covered as a court reporter -- a pastiche he uses throughout the book to support his contention that he is tackling this Jesus question with the same kind of rigor and scrutiny. Except…

For answers, I made the six-hour drive to St. Paul, Minnesota, to confer with Dr. Gregory Boyd, the Ivy League-educated theology professor whose books and articles have challenged the Jesus Seminar head-on.

That’s right. Rather than interview someone from the Jesus Seminar, in order to determine if the Jesus Seminar assertions were true, Strobel decided to interview someone who thinks they are not.

I frankly should have stopped reading right there.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 72 (DRAFT)

When I got back to the office my next steps seemed clear.

“Hey, Ruthie, you got a minute?”

Two minutes later Ruthie and I were walking into Mary’s office, Ruthie closing the door behind us. Mary was just getting back from a business lunch herself. She plunked her car keys down on her desk and looked at us suspiciously as she began pulling her laptop out of her Coach handbag, beige like the pant suit she was wearing.

“What’s up?” she asked.

I told her as succinctly as I could what Gerald was planning. As I recall, I got it all into one sentence.

“Gerald just offered me a job at the company he’s started to steal your biggest client away from you.”

The words more or less froze Mary in her tracks, but the look on her face told me that they barely registered with her.

“Say that again,” she said.

I exchanged a cautious look with Ruthie and she gave me a motherly nod.

“I said, ‘Gerald just offered me a job at the company he’s started to steal our biggest client away from us.’”

Mary’s next reaction surprised even me. She laughed. Her eyes and her arms gave an appeal to the merciful God in Heaven and she laughed, not loudly and not with relish, but with a strange kind of satisfied resignation.

“Have a seat,” she said, motioning me to one of her visitor chairs. And then, “Ruthie, ask Don to come down here and make sure we are not disturbed.”

I took the chair she had indicated and watched her continue and complete the process of docking her laptop in its station and powering it up.

“Mary--”

“No,” she said, holding the palm of one hand up to me and using the fingers of the other to type in her password. “No, Alan, Wait for Don to get here. Please.”

She didn’t sound angry, but she did sound serious. I didn’t know what she thought was going to happen when Don got there, but it wasn’t going to be fun and games. Not knowing what else to say, I sat there silently and watched Mary go to work on her computer. Her screen was at a difficult angle, and I didn’t want to crane my neck, but from what I could see it looked like she was accessing personnel records of some kind.

Don appeared long before I would’ve expected him. He must have been in the neighborhood, not all the way on the other side of the office in his Enormous Pod, or the conference room that adjoined it.

“What’s up?” he asked, shutting Mary’s door behind him.

Mary spun in her chair, very much like the boss had just arrived. “Have a seat, Don. Alan, tell Don what you just told me.”

I watched as Don eased his bulk into the second visitor chair, the bolts that held it together straining but holding firm against his mass. He turned and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes and I repeated what I had now said two times before.

At first, Don seemed to have no reaction to my words at all. He gave Mary a sidelong glance and I saw Mary return a knowing nod, and then, quite unexpectedly, Don began to interrogate me.

I’m not sure what else to call it. There was a sudden barrage of questions, digging into every aspect of my conversation with Gerald. Where we were, what was said, who was around us, what might’ve been overheard. A crime had been committed, Don was the police investigator, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. Under the withering assault, I told Don how Gerald had first approached me in the office this morning, laying out his plan, and then inviting me out to lunch to discuss the details.

“And why did you choose to go to lunch with him?”

I was ready for that line of questioning. Don and Mary, both, were the kind of people who jealously protected what they had, and saw enemies and plots around every corner. 

“To get more information,” I replied quickly, pitching the tone of my voice to convey my unwavering loyalty to them and their company. “I wanted to see who else he had been talking to. To find out how far this betrayal went. I hoped it didn’t go any further than Gerald and Paul Webster, but if it did, I needed to know so I could warn you.”

I was the first one to mention Paul Webster’s name, and from the look on Don’s face you would’ve thought I had let off a stink bomb under his chair. His wide nose wrinkled on his fleshy face, and it looked like he might vomit.

“Yes,” Mary said. “Paul Webster. Don, we’re going to have to give Mister Webster a call.”

Don nodded, swallowing back his gorge and getting himself under control. His questions began again, as fast and furious as before. It began to feel very much like he was trying to catch me in a trap. I did the best I could to avoid them, which wasn’t too hard because I was essentially telling them the truth. The only thing from the whole episode that I held back was the phone call I had made to my wife, seeking her advice and what I should do. They must never know that I had even halfway seriously considered Gerald’s offer. That, I knew, would spell my doom as much as Gerald’s.

Eventually, the interrogation ended. Don fell into an uncomfortable silence, his pudgy fingers gripping the arms of his chair.

“Okay, Alan,” Mary said. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. That will be all.”

I looked at her. While I had been sweating under Don’s bright lights she had been busy typing on her keyboard, printing a handful of documents, and paper clipping them together into a pair of identical and unlabelled folders.

“Ummm, okay,” I said. “What happens now?”

“Go back to your office,” she told me gently, the way a parent might speak to a child they intended to spare from something grown-up and grisly. “Don’t speak to anyone. Go back to your office, close your door, and don’t come out until I come to get you.”

Next to me, Don was lifting himself out of his chair. When the difficult maneuver was completed he stood beside me, evidently willing to serve as my escort if necessary.

“What are you going to do?” I asked Mary, rising to my own feet. “Are you going to fire Gerald?”

Mary remained seated behind her desk, looking up at me with her best poker face. “We’ll discuss it when I come to meet you in your office. Now go.”

I looked at Don and he gave me a stern look, extending an arm to begin the process of directing me towards the door. 

Not knowing what else to do I complied, leaving Mary’s office by the same door I had entered. Whatever confidence I had brought in there with me, I was taking none of it back out. Everything that had happened had felt wrong, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

“Ruthie,” Don said as he shut Mary’s door behind us. “Will you make sure Alan makes it back to his office and stays there?”

“Yes,” Ruthie said, springing suddenly to her feet and extending a hand to me like I was lost on an elementary school field trip.

I looked at her hand, the latest ring Desmond had given her sparkling on one of her fingers.

“I can find my own way,” I said, defiantly, and walked away.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Candide by Voltaire

I wish I had gotten more out of this volume than I did. I picked it up thinking it was a philosophical novel, and was disappointed to find that it is little more than a philosophical fable. 

The philosophy is revealed by the title -- both of the book and of its central character -- Candide, meaning, if I understand it correctly, a kind of naïve optimism in Voltaire’s native French. And it is an attack on the philosophic fashion of its time, that one should approach all calamities in one’s life with an understanding that it could not have been any other way, that one is living in the best of all possible worlds.

From the book’s introduction:

The reasons for Candide’s immediate and enduring success with readers are many. It is a supremely wrought tragicomedy that slyly and irresistibly induces us to laugh at and simultaneously reflect upon the most dreadful events that befall humankind. It appeals to us today because, nearly 250 years after its publication, it has lost none of its relevance or satirical sting. It is particularly modern and pertinent because its dark comic vision is essentially in keeping with our own awareness of what separates our need for order, clarity, and rationality from the brutal reality of a chaotic world.

The fiercely relentless attack Candide unleashes against the evils of religious fanaticism, war, colonialism, slavery, and mass atrocities is more relevant that ever. The naive, young hero of the tale obstinately seeks personal happiness in a world beleaguered by all kinds of catastrophes wrought by the blind, unleashed forces of nature -- such as earthquakes and epidemic diseases -- as well as by violent, destructive human passions.

This is indeed the book I read, but it is, I think, the most optimistic of interpretations. Somewhere else in the introduction, it supposes that Voltaire himself would “probably have been both pleasantly surprised as well as bemused by the exceptional and enduring popularity of Candide, which he viewed as one of his minor works, unworthy to vie with his tragedies, historical essays, and epic and philosophical poems, on which he staked his posthumous reputation.”

Bemused is a good word for my reaction as well. I found this work to be little more than a sketch, a kind of rough first draft that should have been fleshed out into a full narrative if its author wanted it to have its full effect. Don’t get me wrong, stuff happens in this short novel, almost too much stuff, but who are these people that this stuff is happening to? I don’t really know, and characters come on and off the stage too rapidly for me to develop any kind of rooting interest in any of them.

But that’s okay, I guess, because it’s a fable, not a novel. The characters in it are not supposed to be people, they’re supposed to simply represent ideas or archetypes. The story isn’t the stuff that happens. The story is the clash of these archetypal ideas. In that regard it reminds me a little of Don Quixote, but Cervantes pulls off something transcendent that I’m not sure Voltaire had the time or interest to develop.

Here’s the closing paragraph, in which at least the moral of the tale is well represented. After years of wandering and trouble, Candide and his small band of companions have found a kind of peace on a tiny plot of land that they all share.

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable scheme, and each began to exercise his talents. The little piece of ground yielded a plentiful crop. Cunegonde indeed was very ugly, but she became excellent at pastry-work. Pacquette embroidered, the old woman took care of the linen. Everyone, down to Brother Giroflee, did some service. He was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss sometimes would say to Candide: “All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunegonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” “Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.”

We must cultivate our garden. In other words, rather than blindly suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune, we must act and try to improve our situation. Yes, calamity will befall us all, but those who seek will always find more than those who cower in place.

That’s fine, but the deepest wisdom I found didn’t come from Candide but from the “old woman” he picks up along the way. She is one of the many beaten and tortured creatures that Candide meets in his beaten and tortured journeys. And after describing the specific toils and abuses that have comprised her life, she says this to Candide and his love Cunegonde on a sea voyage they take together:

In the different countries in which it has been my fate to wander, and the many inns where I have been a servant, I have observed a prodigious number of people who held their existence in abhorrence, and yet I never knew more than twelve who voluntarily put an end to the misery: namely, three negroes, four Englishmen, four Genoese, and a German professor named Robek. My last place was with the Jew, Don Issachar, who attached me to your service, my fair lady; to whose destinies I have attached myself, and have been more concerned with your misfortunes than with my own. I would never have even mentioned the matter to you, if you had not irked me a little bit; and it was not customary to tell stories on board a ship in order to pass away the time. In short, my dear miss, I have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the world; therefore, take my advice -- divert yourself, and ask each passenger to tell his story, and of these is one of them all who has not curses his existence many times, said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.

“This ridiculous weakness,” the old woman reminds us, “is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he had gnawed into our hearts?”

Yes, cultivate your garden. But while you’re cultivating, remember that life is and always will be a serpent gnawing into your heart. There is no other remedy. Carry the burden, since the burden is your existence.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 71 (DRAFT)

In order to meet with Gerald, I had to cancel my lunch date with Bethany.

“Hey,” I said into the phone after calling her extension. “Can we take a raincheck on lunch today?”

“Sure, I guess,” she said. “Is something up?”

“Not sure, yet.”

Gerald and I didn’t go to the basement. There was a little bistro down the street that Gerald thought would be much more appropriate to our needs. It was part of a strange urban bed and breakfast and had only six or seven tables, none of them large enough for even the two people that were expected to sit at each. It had a French theme and was completely overgrown with houseplants, any one of which clearly received more water than any of the paying guests.

Getting settled, reviewing the menu, hearing the specials, placing our orders, waiting for the food to arrive -- through it all Gerald kept the conversation light and friendly. Had Jenny and I ever spent a night at this bed and breakfast? He had once, with his wife, before his divorce, and it was nice, a kind of get away. They felt like tourists in their home city, going to the art museum, having dinner at one of those ritzy places overlooking the lake, taking breakfast in bed the following morning. It was almost like a second honeymoon, but God knows it wasn’t enough to save the marriage. He and Kate probably shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, but at least there were no children to worry about. They still saw each other from time to time, that was the funny part, usually for a play or a concert or something they could both agree on. But never a movie. God no, he and Kate had completely opposite tastes when it came to movies.

It was more information than I wanted to know, but I smiled and nodded politely, wondering only when he was going to shift to what we had come here to discuss. Eventually, the waitress returned with two oversized plates, one in each hand, and placed them down in front of each of us -- mine a few pillowy ravioli looking abandoned in their cream sauce; Gerald’s a towering pile of salad with more Bibb lettuce than anything else. 

“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waitress asked us. She was older than my mother, with her hair dyed blue and enormous discs in her earlobes.

“No, thank you,” Gerald said for both of us.

She disappeared and Gerald and I sat staring at each other.

“Dig in,” Gerald told me, picking up his fork and knife and beginning to shred his lettuce into a thousand smaller pieces.

I had the first ravioli in my mouth, cradling it on my tongue, while sucking in some air in an attempt to cool it down, when Gerald shifted gears.

“I have a message for you.”

I grabbed my water and poured some into my mouth. “You do?” I said, when enough had been cleared to allow me to speak.

“Yes. From Paul Webster. I called him this morning, and told him we were having lunch today.”

Having lunch today. Three innocent words. People had lunch all the time, didn’t they? Every day, as a matter of fact.

“And?” I said around an ice cube.

“He wants you to give him a call this afternoon.”

“He does?”

“He does. I’m going to give you all the particulars, and hopefully that'll be enough for you, but he wants to encourage you directly. Wants you to know that he is fully on board with this, and that he’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Taken care of?” I asked, suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

So Gerald began to tell me. He told me we would each resign in the coming weeks, him first, and then me a few weeks later. Not so close together that it would raise any suspicion. He had already filed the incorporation papers and he already had his business ID, so for all legal intents and purposes, his new firm, Kreiger and Associates, was already alive and kicking, albeit it wouldn’t have any clients or cash flow until Paul severed Mary’s contract and pivoted to us. It might take a month or two before either one of us would start getting paid, but when it started, Gerald had already negotiated a package that represented a big bump for the both of us. Mine would be thirty percent more than I was currently making. What did I think of that?

What did I think of that? I wanted to know how he knew what I was currently making, that’s what I thought of that.

“Paul told me,” Gerald said simply, as if the subject of my salary was a common topic of discussion between the two of them.

That rubbed me the wrong way. Paul was a Board member, so he had access to the organization’s finances, but he wasn’t supposed to know what individual staff people were being paid. From the client’s point of view, they paid a flat fee to Mary’s company for all the services we provided, and how Mary decided to carve that up among the rest of us was her business. But Board members were notoriously nosy about those kinds of things, especially with what they often erroneously thought to be highly compensated staff, and it wasn’t unusual for such numbers to get passed around on the backs of envelopes.

“What’s your bump going to be?” I asked.

Gerald smiled. “Bigger than yours,” he said unapologetically. “But it’s my company. You’ll be working for me.”

He said those words like they were the most attractive part of the offer he was making, but that’s not how I heard them. In fact, the thought of reporting to Gerald Kreiger almost made me choke on my pasta. I tried to hide my reaction by coughing into my fist.

Gerald went on. He talked about how the company would be structured, and who we would lure out of Mary’s company in order to fill many of the positions. He talked about how he would be the lead on the client and how I would serve as his deputy, but how different that would be compared to the box Mary had painted me in. He would initially focus on the transition and the turnaround -- he was good at that kind of thing -- but once the client organization was up and running on all cylinders, he would turn its operation over to me so that he could focus on new client acquisition. That’s the only way to grow in this business, he assured me, gobbling up as many clients as you can and staffing them as thinly as possible. Once he pivoted in that direction, the day-to-day would be all mine, and I could start doing all the things Mary would never let me do now.

I’ll be honest. The more he talked the less appealing the offer became to me. I’ve told you about Gerald. He was a pompous ass, and that side of him was on full display as he laid out all of his half-baked plans. There were a thousand holes in what he was planning, some of them big enough to drive a monster truck through, and every time I pointed one of them out to him he dismissed it with a wave of class-ringed hand. 

“Oh, we’ll figure that out,” he would say, his confidence in his use of the word “we” indicative of his delusion that he was effectively selling me. “We can’t write everything in advance. But we’ll tackle that, better than Mary would ever dream of.”

His animosity against Mary was also on full display. He hated her -- even more than I did, it seemed. She was small-minded and in-over-her-head and an idiot. Sure, I could go along with those ideas, but with Gerald the anger seemed to go deeper than that. It wasn’t just that she was a clown, somehow she was a clown that was making her audience laugh at Gerald’s expense. As if her incompetence was somehow a direct threat to Gerald’s competence, that by working under her he was admitting that he was as much of a fraud as she was.

“She won’t know what hit her,” he said more than once during that lunch conversation, a devilish twinkle always coming into his eye. “When I take her client away from her, she just won’t know what hit her.”

And that seemed to be the only thing Gerald was really clear about. Everything else was fuzzy, something to be worked out later, after we had both quit our jobs and sat waiting for Paul Webster to make his move. By the time we were done with our meals I had more or less decided that I wasn’t going to follow Gerald on his mad quest, even regardless of what Paul Webster had to say, should I ever even call him. Calling him, I knew, would make me complicit in this conspiracy, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do. If I was going to turn State’s witness on Gerald, I would need to keep my nose clean.

“So, what do you think?” Gerald asked me near the end, most of the tiny bits of lettuce cleaned off his plate and only one stuck in his teeth. 

“I’ll need to think about it,” I said casually. “Talk to my wife.”

“Of course,” Gerald said easily. “Take a day. Or even two. And give Paul Webster a call. If you’ve got any doubts, he’ll remove them. The future is going to be so much brighter. For both of us.”

“You gentleman need anything else?” It was our blue-haired waitress.

“We’re good,” Gerald said confidently. “Just the check, please.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is a novel with a lot of layers to it. And I’m not sure I can really do justice to it. Frankly, there were times when I had some difficulty understanding who was who and what was going on. All I think I can do now is share my reactions to the words that are there, and try to pull them together into something universal, something we can all understand.

And, that, I think I can do.

Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver’s interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made -- getting away from Sweet Home -- went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.

Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in her arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Beloved, it turns out, is a novelized version of real events, and it centers on a slave woman, called Sethe in the novel, living in northern Kentucky in the 1850s. Sethe wants to flee to the freedom of the Ohio River and the Underground Railroad, but is held in place by her relationships with her children and the men who have and have not fathered them.

In this early passage we get a glimpse of what her life -- and the lives of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicated her novel -- was really like. It was an aborted life, absent the luxury of planning, the ability to hope for the future, to even count on the permanence of the present.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.

But despite this oppressive reality, Sethe does love, does love her children more than she probably should, knowing that they, like everything around her and everything given to her, were owned not by her nor by her heart, but by someone and something else; her master, yes, but also the whole of the society in which she helplessly swam.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

In this world, white and black are inexorably linked, linked not just by ownership, but by blood as well, because, of course there is miscegenation, and some of Sethe’s children are the products of these recognized and unrecognized acts.

And when the truth is against the wall, when Sethe has fled to Ohio with her children, and when she has been cornered in a dark place waiting for those with kind hearts to save her while those with dark hearts closed in, she does what might seem unthinkable, but was in fact the only thing she could do, the only path that existed in the dark, tangled jungle of the white people’s creation. She begins to murder her children, taking from them a lifetime of pain and taking from her owner the value that they represent, openly in the market, and, guardedly, within his heart.

These are the facts of the case on which the novel is based, but the novel uses them primarily as its launching pad -- in fact, obscuring this truth until deep within the narrative. The bulk of the novel focuses not as much on these facts, but on Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child that reappears and competes for Sethe’s love and attention with Denver, Sethe’s living child. 

Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning -- that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant -- what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life -- Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that -- far worse -- was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And in this respect, Morrison, I think, is helping us understand that this pain and this love is eternal -- this pain of not having what one loves, and this love that surpasses even that limitation -- that not even the passage of time can erase it from Sethe’s being, just as not even the eventual passage of emancipation and reform can erase it from our consciousness and our understanding of who and what we are.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 70 (DRAFT)

Gerald left my office door standing open. He hadn’t been gone more than ten seconds before I went over and closed it. First I looked out into the larger office. It was still early, but more than half of the pods were already occupied, people blowing on their coffee cups as they waited for their computers to boot up.

I looked right, down where Don’s Enormous Pod was situated. Given the angles and the heights of the intervening pod walls I couldn’t tell if Don was there or not. I looked left and saw Ruthie’s empty desk guarding Mary’s open door. It looked very much like the lights in her office were still off.

I shut my door and sat down again at my desk. I looked at my computer screen for a few moments, the characters of the email message I had been working on as meaningless to me as Sanskrit.

I picked up my phone and dialed my home number.

“Hello?” Jenny said guardedly.

“Hi,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “What are you doing?”

“I’m feeding Jacob his breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”

Ouch. “I thought you might be sticking pins in that voodoo doll of me you keep under our bed.”

“I’ll do that later,” she said.

“Look, I know you’re still mad at me, but I need that incredible brain of yours right now. Can we call a truce for the next 10 minutes or so?”

“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get this plate of fruit out to Jacob, first.”

I waited patiently, hearing the knife hit the cutting board a few times and then her footsteps moving away. Here you go, honey, I heard faintly, and then footsteps coming back.

“What’s up?”

Her tone had shifted, and I was glad to hear it. Prior to her pregnancies, Jenny had been a public relations professional, and had been in and out of more companies that I had. In times like this I looked to her as a kind of business coach, and she knew it.

I told her everything that had happened so far that morning, skipping over my encounter with Bethany and going right to the discussion with Gerald. I told her that he was planning to quit, planning to take the client and start his own business, that he wanted me to go with him, and that Paul Webster had said there would be no deal without me.

“Whoa,” she said.

“I know, right? What do you think?”

There was a pause on the line. I imagined Jenny standing in our kitchen in her bathrobe and disheveled hair, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other holding the phone against her ear. In the background I heard Jacob call out for more blueberries.

“Just a minute, honey,” Jenny said to him, and then aimed her voice back into the phone. “I think you should call Paul Webster.”

That came out of left field. “What? Why would I do that?”

“Mommy! I want more blueberries!”

“How do you know Gerald is telling you the truth?”

“Why would he lie about that?”

“Because he’s a shifty asshole. You know that.”

“MOMMY!”

“Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute, Alan.”

While she was gone I turned things over in my mind. Jenny, of course, was right. Gerald was a shifty asshole, but even so, I didn’t see how a lie about Paul Webster wanting me to be part of the deal made any sense. If that wasn’t true, why would Gerald even bring me into the loop? Despite his protestations, he didn’t think highly of me. If Paul wasn’t compelling my inclusion, what other reason would Gerald have for approaching me? I mean, with this kind of information, I had him over a barrel. One word to Mary and Gerald and his secret deal would both be dead. 

I told Jenny as much when she returned to the phone.

“Yes, I guess that might be true,” she admitted. “But I don’t trust Gerald and you probably shouldn’t either. He’s asking you to quit your job, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He says we have to both be clear of the company before Paul orchestrates the vote to cancel Mary’s contract at the Board meeting.”

“That’s a pretty big risk, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You guess? Quit your job and our only source of income on nothing more than the word of Gerald Kreiger?”

Okay, I acknowledged, it was a pretty big risk. No guessing about it. I told Jenny about the lunch appointment Gerald had made with me, about how he promised to fill me in on more of the details and make the formal offer of employment that I deserved.

“Uh huh,” Jenny said, less than impressed. “I would still call Paul Webster. If not before lunch then definitely after. You absolutely shouldn’t make any commitment to Gerald without talking to Paul and verifying the story.”

I told her not to worry, that under no circumstances was I accepting or quitting any jobs today. I would gather what information I could and then we could talk about it over dinner tonight.

“Okay, Alan. Sounds good.”

“Thanks, Jenny. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Bye.”

And then she was gone, back to whatever obstacles Jacob planned to put in her path today. Our parting words of affection had felt perfunctory but genuine, and I took that to be a good sign.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Brain Cuttings by Carl Zimmer

I must’ve heard about this book and its author on Radiolab. 

Say that reminds me, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Radiolab, which I listen to as a podcast, and which I will therefore treat as a podcast moving forward. Every time I think I’m done, every time I’ve had it “up to here” with their gap-mouthed Millennial wonder about things that happened before 1980, every time they transparently let Jad’s sound design muffle what would otherwise be a clear-eyed approach to scientific inquiry, they wind up posting an episode that captures both my heart and my attention -- and those episodes usually have something to do with the human brain.

It was probably one of those brain episodes that either mentioned or featured Carl Zimmer, a “popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.” His Brain Cuttings is a collection of fifteen fairly short essays, each on some subject related to neuroscience. They, like most collections of essays I’ve read, left me fairly flat. The most interesting thing about the collection, I think, is how Radiolab-ish they are -- in the sense that none of them dive very deeply into their subject, each skipping along across the surface with some genuine wonder, but with a disappointing lack of precision.

Here are the handful of things that caught enough of my attention to make note of them in the margin.

Blushing Is Shame

In the first essay, “Does Shame Excite a Blush?”, Zimmer explores the neuroscience behind facial expressions and the emotions that give them rise. Or is it the other way around, the facial expressions that give rise to the emotions? Turns out it’s not always so easy to tell, because the two things, your emotions and your facial expressions, are inexplicably connected. 

In other words, you don’t just make a sad face when you’re feeling sad. Making a sad face is an essential part of feeling sad. Take away the ability to make a sad face and you take away the ability to feel sad.

It’s another blow to our belief that we are thinking agents with premeditated volition. If one were to paralyze one’s face -- like through the use of Botox, a new craze at the time Zimmer was writing -- one would seriously limit one’s ability to feel emotions of any kind.

The Extended Mind

In “The Googled Mind,” Zimmer explores the concept of the extended mind, first posited by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In a short essay they published in 1998, they…

...asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

Clark and Chalmers argued that Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmbers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

It’s a provocative idea to many, but needlessly so, in my mind (extended or not). Because, like a lot of pop-science, the provocation rests on the choice of words, not on the actual concept. People freak out because Clark and Chalmers called it the “extended mind,” and then went on to claim all kinds of logical interpolations based solely on that phraseology.

They argue that Inga’s brain and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same thing. But are they? They both allow a person to record and access information, so they are similar in that regard, but does that make them “fundamentally the same thing?” What if Otto is only visiting New York and he left his notebook at home in San Francisco? Or if he gets mugged and his notebook is stolen and he no longer even knows where it is? Is the notebook still part of his extended mind?

The vernacular trick is that phrase itself. The extended mind. Nobody would view it as controversial if Clark and Chalmers called Otto’s notebook an “information storage device,” even though that wouldn’t change any of their argument’s conclusions. But which essay are you going to publish? “The Extended Mind”? Or “Information Storage Devices”?

The Sloppiness of Time

In “The Music of Time,” Zimmer explores the everyday phenomenon of time seeming to pass at different rates based on our emotional condition. There’s some real neuroscience going on when we have this perception (obviously), but here Zimmer seems more focused on dispelling myths that don’t exist.

We don’t need drugs for our feeling of time to change, however. When we experience a moment of terror -- falling from a tree, for example, or watching a car veer out of control and come towards us -- time seems to slow down. In 2007, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues set out to probe how this feeling arises. They found some hardy volunteers who were willing to climb a 46-meter tower and fall backwards down into a net. After the fall, Eagleman asked the volunteers how long it took to fall. Their guesses were 36% longer on average than the actual 2.5 seconds it took for them to hit the net. Time did indeed slow down.

Wait. What? Time did indeed slow down? It did? Is time what the mind perceives it to be? Or an external construct of the universe? Why is the language here so sloppy?

But let’s get back to my essential point. In the essay’s conclusion, Zimmer makes this comment.

The old notion that our brains are governed by a single, simple clock is gone for good.

Yeah, okay. But does anyone think otherwise? No, sorry, my brain contains a unalterable time piece, with the precision of an atomic clock, and everything I perceive is meted out by its regular and constant progression of clicks. Why is Zimmer arguing against something that no one believes is true? Next he’ll be telling us that our memory isn’t exactly like a movie camera recording everything we see and hear.

The Spectrum

Let’s end with this one. In “They Imprint Your Genes, Your Mum and Dad,” Zimmer makes this interesting comment.

One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.

Is schizophrenia on the autism spectrum? I don’t think so. Zimmer is simply making a connection here. And in that regard, it’s probably important to point out that seeing such connections puts Zimmer decidedly on the schizophrenic side of that non-existent spectrum.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.