Representative Reasoning regarding Our Ability to Picture the Historical Christ Is Consistently Absurd — Wishful Thinking Dominates a Potentially More Useful Ability to Tolerate Ignorance and Ambiguity

© 2014 Peter Free

 

21 April 2014

 

 

It frequently strikes me how often people elaborately make things up, rather than admit that we don’t know

 

Take the following representative premise from Reza Aslan (author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth) regarding our ability to reconstruct an accurate historical portrait of Jesus Christ:

 

 

Michael Schulson:

 

How do you separate this historical person from “the Christ of faith”?

 

Reza Aslan:

 

[T]he thing is while we do know very little about him, we know a lot about the world in which he lived.

 

So if we take the little bit that we know about him and we place it firmly in his world and allow his world to define him, then we can create a fairly accurate portrait of who the man was.

 

© 2014 Michael Schulson, “You want people like that to hate you”: Reza Aslan on Glenn Beck, that Fox News interview, and who gets to speak for Jesus, Salon (20 April 2014)

 

 

This is like maintaining that, if we understand 2014’s context across the various geographical and cultural subsets of the globe, we can build accurate character portraits of each of the 7 billion people who lived on the planet at the time.

 

This is the same silly premise that Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard implicitly used in their book, Killing Jesus.

 

 

Analytical absurdity revealed in one phrase

 

Reza Aslan’s premise would require that knowing a few tidbits about anyone’s life, at any time, would allow historians (and presumably psychologists) to generate accurate character portraits of that person because we mechanistically “allow his world to define him.”

 

If that is true, the few tidbits we might know about anyone are character-defining enough to allow us to infer how time and culture would have molded the rest of his and her character — as well as predict how that person would react in any given situation.

 

Clearly, this is a stupid idea — given how differently most of us act (when compared to one another) under identical or similar circumstances.

 

Indeed, no competent neuroscientist, psychologist, or psychiatrist would hold that we can accurately project character and future (situation-specific) behavior based on only a handful of historical tidbits taken from various incidents during a lifetime.

 

So, why do so many people think or act as if it such an interpretive mechanism is valid?

 

 

The moral? — Human vacuity demands answers, even when there are none

 

Vacuity of brain prevents us from filling our psyche’s prickly voids in reasonably accurate ways.

 

Our childish need for certainty, even in the face of the obviously unknown, leads to conflict between the stories we make up.  Battling myths.

 

If we were a little less sure of our rectitude(s), we might be a little more open to, and able to cope with, what is actually real.  We might (then) predominantly dwell in a state of spiritual maturity.