Some
time ago I challenged the incompetent Neil Godfrey (aka Vridar) to come over to
TheologyWeb and debate me on the issue of high vs low context. Quite wisely, he
has chosen to pretend that I do not exist, including in a posting of his in
late August on the same subject.
In that
post, Godfrey continues to display his usual lack of awareness of his own
ability to craft a non sequitur using the highest quality that can be achieved.
He quotes Casey:
This is one basic reason why Paul says so little about the life
and teaching of Jesus. To some extent, his Gentile Christians had been
taught about Jesus already, so he could take such knowledge for granted. He
therefore had no reason to mention places such as Nazareth, or the site of the
crucifixion, nor to remind his congregations that Jesus was crucified on earth
recently.
And replies:
According to this critique we can
conclude that Paul forgot to mention anything about the crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus – or even that Jesus Christ was exalted subsequently to a
heavenly role as our Saviour — to his Gentile converts since he clearly does
not take such knowledge for granted but repeats it scores of times throughout
his epistles.
Well, no. That’s not what
Casey is saying, or what “high context” means. Rather, it means, for example
(as I noted in my own work), that a word like “crucifixion” becomes an
effective code for all associated concepts which will NOT be explicitly
mentioned (such as the location at Calvary, one of Doherty’s peeve-points).
High context does not mean NO mention; it means minimally explicit and highly
coded references. I daresay that’s a subtlety too complex for Vridar to grasp.
Following
this, Vridar he offers an extended quote from Hall’s book culture (from which I
and others get chief quotes on the subject of high context) on the subject of
literature. Why he does this is hard to say, though I’d guess that it is done
in order to persuade his readers that he s actually saying something worthy of
notice. The quote is all about a
Japanese novel, and Vridar bolds two phrases (“in high-context situations, less is required
to release the message,” “how much we take for granted even in the most mundane
acts,”) for no noted
reason, and concludes:
It seems clear to me that the
high/low context question in literature is all about how we understand the
fullness of what IS said.
Um….well, not “all about” since
communication is a two-way street, a point which seems to have escaped Godfrey
completely. But “about to some extent” would be correct. He goes on:
It strikes me as a frightful and
hopelessly unlearned interpretation of E. T. Hall’s analysis to think that it
can salvage scholarly hypotheses of New Testament scholars that argue Buddha
never mentions anything to his Western readers about Jesus’ healings, miracles
and teachings of right religion and life eternal because he (Buddha) had taught
them all that stuff already.
Unfortunately, that one doesn’t get
past the level of supersize non sequitur with a side of fries. What little
Vridar bolds indicates the opposite of this conclusion, and he seems to be
under the delusion that literature and the spoken word somehow will have
different rules for “high context”. They don’t, and what he quotes from Hall
doesn’t indicate this either.
That ends Godfrey’s mumbling for
that phase; while we’re here we can also dig out what few worthy notes exist in
the comments from his fanbois, which is just about none of it. One denizen
says:
The weakness is, as you point out,
that using this principle we can no longer tell whether someone is ignorant of
something or well-versed in something as the ‘evidence’ is exactly the same: no
mention of it at all.
This is a “weakness”? No, it isn’t.
It’s a hard reality of high context. That people like this fellow are simply
too oblivious to figure out what is is their problem, not the problem of
members of high context cultures, nor of those like myself and Casey who
actually make the effort to discern the proper contextualization.
Another of Godfrey’s worshippers has
the temerity to suggest that we should reject high context explanations because
of Ockham’s Razor: It is “simpler” to suppose Jesus didn’t exist. I take this
to mean that it is “simpler” to them because high context makes the issues more
difficult for them to figure out with their limited mental horsepower.
More than one commenter (including
the famously obtuse Steven Carr) fall for the typical error of confusing Paul’s
letters with his missionary preaching, to wit: “Given Paul preached mostly in
places far away from Palestine, it might be safe to assume that the news of
Jesus had not yet reached that area.” Like Doherty, this Neanderthal fails to
appreciate that Paul’s letters were written at least 10 years after his
recipients were first preached to.
One particularly dense soul actually
gets it right without knowing it:
Every Sunday that I attended church
as a youth I was constantly being reminded of the many teachings and deeds of
Jesus. Apparently I was living in a “low context” culture all those years.
Um, yes….you were. You still are.
That’s the point.
Another sorrowful soul, similarly
bereft of comprehension, supposes that “apparently the gospels themselves were
written in low-context communities.” Well, no – they represent the written form
of what was preached; so that once again, this is someone failing to grasp the
difference noted above.
Back to Carr again, who submits yet another
oblivious comment as part of his effort to spread graffiti on blogs everywhere:
How come in such a ‘high context’
society, Jews had to continually tell each other why they were celebrating
Passover?
They aren’t. Here Carr fails to
grasp the distinction between the presentation of information and the enacting
of ritual. The parallel in the NT is 1 Cor. 11:23, which would be repeated not
to inform, but to reaffirm the core values of the ingroup.
It is of note to see Joe Wallack
chiming in, as he has still not gone any further on his “1000 New Testament
errors” since I started erasing them years ago.
Yet another poor soul bleats Doherty’s
refrain, “[Material from Jesus] surely could have settled some of the disputes.
Paul could have written that a particular side of the dispute was correct,
because of what Jesus did or said.”
Well, no. Not at all. Doherty made 200
efforts to show that this was the case, and failed 200 times to demonstrate it.
The poor soul himself only vaguely appeals to topics such as circumcision, but
for several paragraphs of blather doesn’t manage to provide a worthwhile
example, only offering the rather imaginative idea that the story of the
feeding of the 5000 would somehow have had an application is his dispute with
Peter over eating with Gentiles. It wouldn’t have; Paul’s issue had to do with
ritual purity, and that was never an issue at the feedings; the poor soul’s
ridiculous idea that “maybe there were some Gentiles in the crowd” (really? In rural
peasant Galilee?) notwithstanding.
The same ignorant soul says, “It
seems impossible that there never were any disputes about what Jesus did or
said — especially since the Gospels still had not been written.” Um – what
about oral transmission, folks? Like many graphocentrists, this one thinks it “has
to be in writing.”
And that’s all, other that repeat
bleats of the same errors from others. Our challenge to Vridar to put his neck
on the line at TWeb – or for any of his oblivious commenters to do so –
remains. Here’s where to go:
