Uncanonical unease - a further response to April DeConick
I’d like to thank April DeConick for responding to this post. As a result I want to clarify a couple of issues.
I note that recently she used her blog to correct what she saw as serious misrepresentations by Nick Perrin of what she had written. Like all authors, she has an investment not only in expressing herself with historical accuracy, but with clarity, and she does not wish to be misrepresented.
It is with misrepresentation, wilful and accidental, that I am fundamentally concerned, and that brings with it not, as she implies, adjusting one’s work to suit the audience, but being very careful with the presentation of one’s work, in order to minimize misuse by audiences. This applies as much to those who work with the canonical gospels as the non-canonicals.
What I am arguing is that the media-led culture we live in is historically gullible, and does not readily distinguish between first, second and third century, or the diverse reconstructions historians make. This media culture is also prone to conspiracy theories, in which something recently discovered is assumed to be more true than something “everyone knows”. Scholars write, then, in a context where the phrase “early Christian views” is heard indiscriminately, and where people have a predisposition to believe the non-official. So I think people will use DeConick’s work (among others) to say things she is not saying. I note, for example, that one of her regular commenters believes that the key to early Christianity was revealed with the help of a UFO, and seems to think (from his comments) that her work can help support such a theory. I would expect this level of misrepresentation to concern any scholar, even if they ultimately have no control over it.
What I am arguing for is that scholars need to write in awareness of the uses to which their work is put, and not least in awareness of the “temptation” that accounts that “unmask the truth” of Christian origins by presenting “an alternative Jesus” will gain better publicity by the way in which they fit easily into the modern media’s “controversy” and “conspiracy” narratives.
in part, I think this is what accounts for the ways in which some more conservative scholars have negatively engaged April DeConick’s work, and that of others who write on the non-canonical scriptures, and creates the impression of unease. Their own views – “NT account of Jesus largely reliable” are not news, and get no attention outside the church, if anywhere. They perceive media power to lie with those advancing alternative constructions, and so they ratchet up the rhetoric as a result of their perceived powerlessness to attract media attention.
July 4th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Hi Doug,
I think you raise some really interesting issues in this post, particularly how much scholars are responsible for managing (to the extent they can) how their work is used. It’s a tough one. My sense is that we simply have to accept that people are going to misunderstand and misuse our work, especially when the issues are hot. I think there are a few things we can do in our writing to ameliorate this: (a) Write clearly and concisely. (b) Make our arguments, while clear and easy to understand, complex and nuanced so that they are difficult to “oversimplify” without obviously mangling what was said. (c) Avoid fanning the flames of controversy by participating in it, but instead write to make people think.
While I think we can do some things to influence the tenor of the discussion by how we write and present arguments, beyond that we just have to accept that we will sometimes be misunderstood by people whose preconceptions are a thick filter for anything they read or hear. And sometimes deliberately misrepresented by those who find our views offensive. (Maximalist/minimalist controversy, anyone?) On a certain level that’s life. I feel that, if one has done one’s best to put out a good, clear, nuanced argument and this still happens, well, you still go to bed knowing you did the right thing.
July 4th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Yes, I agree overall. I think I’m just drawing attention to the particular context in which people need to make themselves as clear as possible, and to write with as much awareness as possible of some of the most likely distortions people may make.