We’ve all had that experience when we’ve been watching a nunsploitation film and wondered, “What collision between a religious conscience and libertinism does this genre represent? How does it relate to the individual and collective conscience about sex, and what does it have to do with the fact that this allegedly medieval nun is wearing nail-polish and sporting a navel-piercing?”
Reflections on the nunsploitation genre, sex, Catholicism, guilt, French literature, Freud, and conscience. ]]>
I’m a dead-beat grader, with books like James Reston, Jr.’s Defenders of the Faith: Christianity and Islam Battle For The Soul of Europe, 1520-1536 hanging around…
]]>
Testimonium Flava Flavium: Credo ut Hiphoppam. Not to be confused with Josephus.A reader asks about whether the texts can be trusted. Did Jesus even exist? What’s the critical mind say about the gospels as history? About Josephus and his “Testimonium Flavianum” that apparently offers objective evidence of Jesus’ existence? Does Jesus resemble other literary messiahs?
We get our historical-literary fingernails dirty in this Sunday’s edition of Riparian Church.
Summary and money quote:
I think it’s overreaching on the evidence: what the evidence does not imply is that there was no Jesus. What it strongly implies is that certain factions in Judaism were strongly disposed to write accounts of that man in literary patterns that were meaningful to their audiences. And once again we see why it’s so freaking important that Christians have chosen at their peril to assume that a simplistic gospels-as-historical-fact reading serves their best interests. It leaves them vulnerable at every turn, not just to misunderstanding their own texts, but to weird charges, like “Jesus never existed.”]]>