Family Values

There's a lot of noise around about "family values," which seem to boil down to positions against abortion, drugs, and homosexuality that supposedly have Biblical foundations. There are explicit prohibitions against homosexuality; abortion is supposed to be covered under "Thou shalt not kill"; I'm not sure where the drugs come in. I am sometimes asked in my Literature of the Bible class whether Isaiah, or Ezekiel--especially Ezekial--were on some kind of mind-altering substance because of their really bizarre imagery.

But aside from all that, I almost always read The Ramayana (Buck translation) in my introduction to literature composition. At some point, I wonder out loud how the "family values" in The Ramayana compare with what we find in the bible. The students virtually always side with the Bible as the repository of values any moral person would want to live by.

But then, we go to specifics. In the Bible, in the first family, one brother murders the other. In The Ramayana, Rama's brother, Lakshamana, vows to accompany him into exile (though it is not necessary) and protect both Rama and his wife Sita, who, though Rama unselfishly tries to advise her against it, also vows to accompany him--on the grounds that she is his wife, and her place is by her husband. Eve is the instrument not only of Adam's ruin, but the ruin of all mankind; Sita is exemplary in her devotion to Rama, in her fidelity, and in every other way. Her only failure seems to be that she foolishly does not heed the good advice of her brother-in-law to leave a golden deer alone. The deer, unfortunately, is a Rakshasa in disguise, who has agreed (against his better judgment) to lure Rama away from Sita so the evil Ravana can kidnap her. Many examples can be brought in--I particularly like the father-son integrity of The Ramayana. One of Rama's father's wives is persuaded to force Rama's father into banishing his son from the kingdom. When Rama is advised to rebel, he refuses on the grounds that a son's duty to his father is absolute; and he cannot be angry with the wife who betrayed him. Compare that, for example, with Jacob's deception of his father, Isaac, who, though suspicious, is too old and blind to see through Jacob's claim to be Esau; Jacob thereby not only cheats his father but his brother as well, and is considered a hero for it.

And we haven't even started talking about the Hebrew Bible insistence that a rebellious son or a wife discovered not to be a virgin be stoned to death. Or the general agreement in the Bible, as in the ancient world generally, that slavery is perfectly acceptable.

The gods of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (the two grand Hindu epics--both wonderful, amazing, thrilling works of literature) seem much more like gods I could relate to than the God of the Hebrew/Christian bibles. He is too punitive, too angry, too insistent that he be worshipped. Among the charming things the narrator relates about Rama, a god who has come to earth to save mankind, is that he knows how to take a vacation, and he never has a harsh word for anyone. (I must say, one should read more than the Buck version--Buck has amazing imagery and some comical renditions of what the gods say to each other; there is another translation, I think by Narayana, that is less exuberant. But Buck is fun, and I'm all for that.)

I realized finally that, if religion has much point, I go for the religion that has the most charming stories. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata win hands down on that. They also have so much more--they deserve extended separate blogs.

Hit the Ground Running

When I was in college at UC Santa Barbara, I heard of the Bible as Lit. professor. He started each semester by throwing the Bible on the floor. "See?" he said, "It's just a book."

I didn't get around to taking his class, only because I didn't think I'd care for the theatrics, though many people took it and were impressed.

Instead, I've taught Bible as Literature for many years and had many students of many persuasions. The ones I've liked best have been the ones who were willing to listen to new ideas, or to respect "the other side," i.e., the critical, literary-interpretive side, as opposed to the faith side.

I was remarking to a class once that we have virtually no objective information about Jesus--what we think we know about the historical figure (if, indeed, he was a historical figure) we have to extrapolate from hints and cross-references gospel by gospel, keeping in mind that each gospel was written as an individual entity for its own audience, even when the writers of the gospels attributed to Luke and Matthew may have had the gospel attributed to Mark right in front of them to copy nearly word for word.

A woman, a Catholic who had learned her lessons well from a priest and who had insisted on the literal and historical truth of every word in every gospel (regardless of the inconsistencies), raised her hand and reminded me that scholars forget about Jesus' sacred mother, Mary, who was alive to provide the information conveyed by the gospel writers. I had to pause a moment to digest this.

I finally pointed out that there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the gospel writers consulted with Mary on their varied accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. (The student apparently didn't remember the passage where Jesus outright rejects his family, who have come to see him.)

And where had she gotten her information?

From her friend, the priest. Where had he gotten his? I would like to know.

And this reminds me of another story: a Hindu friend insisted once that the "missing years" in Jesus' life had been passed in India, where he learned the lessons of that culture and brought them back into his Jewish culture. I heard this before I had much knowledge of Biblical matters and found it tremendously exciting to think that, at its source, Christianity might be a blend of cultures that lie outside the Judeo-Christian realm.

As I began to teach the course, I kept my eye out for some scholarly work that would develop this aspect of Jesus' life. Finally, a student mentioned a book that told the history of Jesus in India, and I jumped at the chance to verify what I had heard from my Hindu friend. I bought the book and discovered, to my chagrin, that it was not a scholarly book at all, but an act of the creative imagination, a "what-if" poem of some kind, speculating about Jesus in India during those lost years.

Since then, I have run across another book--very interesting, but entirely circumstantial--about Jesus having been sent to Egypt (there is the gospel detail about Jesus' family fleeing with him to Egypt to avoid Herod's persecution), where he was trained as a Buddhist monk. What's interesting about the book is its documentation of the extent to which Buddhism had spread throughout the ancient near east by the time of Jesus. But, as I say, the "evidence" is all circumstantial. There is nothing definite that enables one to connect Jesus to Buddhism, whatever the books showing philosophic parallels might suggest.

Is there a final conclusion? Jesus was probably a historical figure, but we can't tell for certain what he said, and what writers with agendas related to their own historical circumstances scripted for him. The same with the Biblical God--God is a character in a narrative. He represents various political/ideological/philosophic propositions, depending on which book one reads. The God of Job, for example, is nothing like the God proposed to us in the gospels, or by Christian tradition. This is only one example, but it must suggest why so many Christian websites are perplexed about the place of the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") in Christian thinking. Many passages are plain embarrassments.

The Untold Day

The Bible says God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. This is one proof that not everything the Bible says can be true. All sites of magnificent natural beauty in the world--from Yosemite on--must have taken an eighth, ninth, even a tenth day. You can't, in just six days, do everything else (including the mosquito and the black widow) and also get in scenic wonders complete with tourist overlooks. And the architectural plans for the Taj Mahal? That's at least a day at the drafting desk right there. This is God at play, when he forgets about tormenting us with hurricanes, brush fires, earthquakes, rickets, pebbles in our sandals, root canals, and exceedingly hot peppers.

A Long Way from the Garden

Here we are, 6-10,000 years later if you think Adam and Eve really existed and Moses wrote the Torah. I've been reading some smart stuff at www.thejewishatheist.com, which I recommend.

Adam and Eve were kicked out into the world, and we're still struggling to figure out the book that recorded their story. Milton gave it a try and wrote Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to man." Why did Milton think God's ways needed justifying? Mark Twain hadn't even written Letters from the Earth yet. But someone had written the Book of Job, and it wasn't Moses--at least, no one has ever claimed that Moses was the author. Which is a good thing, since most dating I've seen puts the Job story in the fifth or sixth century BCE, and Moses, if he lived at all, probably dates to some seven or eight hundred years earlier.

You'd think if God had a clear plan for us all, he wouldn't have made it so easy to disagree about. I'm reminded of the Native Americans who rejected the arguments of Christian missionaries that they (the Native Americans) ought to accept a new religion. The Native Americans wanted to know why, if God so wanted everyone to believe in Him, He didn't provide them with a copy of the Bible. They had also observed that Christian belief had not made the Europeans any more kind, honest, or open-hearted.

This is just the beginning of the puzzles.

Milton felt he had to justify the ways of God to man, because on the face of it, to anyone who thought about the story, God's ways (the whole human history) could seem pretty a) far-fetched b) mind-boggling.

So, Milton came up with a long, long, long poem to explain a short, short, short story.