How the Study of Early Christianity is Like the Beatles Writing Songs in Get Back

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Secret Alias
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How the Study of Early Christianity is Like the Beatles Writing Songs in Get Back

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I finished watching Get Back - even re-signing up for Disney+ after cancelling my subscription. While talking about the Beatles isn't directly relatable to Christian Texts and History I did notice one thing which might be relevant. Like Paul McCartney apparently I assumed that this 8 hour series would be like the 1970's Beatle documentary Let it Be. It uses the same material. In that documentary you basically get a picture of the Beatles fighting and having a bad time. The group had just broken up and there was a demand to apparently understand what caused the breakup. So the original editor edited the film in terms of clues for the break up. When we watch this much longer series something else emerges - the group actually had a lot of fun making the album. There are moments of genuine harmony.

I bet most of you are figuring I am going to write something about selective editing. And I think that's applicable also. But what I was struck by is the co-operative manner that the band members wrote material. We get to watch songs being created right in front of our eyes and whenever one of them had an idea the other band members were surprisingly helpful (except with Paul's slow pieces the Long and Winding Road and Let it Be). What this made me think of - is the manner in which scholarship similarly 'jams' (as it were) around a few basic premises (the 'acceptability' of the canon and the writings of the early Church). Various scholars come up with 'things they notice about this or that' ultimately developing a theory or a concept out of these developing observations. Academia is a co-operative just like Beatles songwriting.

The audience of course receives the material and if it is positive the resultant 'thing' goes on to define the culture. But it was interesting to get away from looking at the Beatles documentary from my perspective or my wife's perspective to that of my son's POV. He listens to Travis Scott and various rap artists. He's latched on to Quincy Jones's various statements about how shit the Beatles were - a story about a recording session with George Martin where Ringo was so incompetent that they secretly brought in another drummer while he went out drinking. From his point of view the Beatles are shit. Their music is awful. In short, what my wife and I took to be relevant cultural material had absolutely no effect on my son and presumably others of his generation.

Why? Maybe it's because my son is right. Maybe the Beatles weren't that great. Maybe we just heard these songs over and over again so that the hypnotic effect of repetitive exposure convinced my generation about the importance of this music. Maybe there is no truth. And maybe it's the same thing with scholarship in this field. We've just been engaged in a thousand year 'project' of developing an understanding about a certain collection of writings that were picked by an editor in antiquity. These documents weren't 'true.' They weren't the most accurate. They don't give us the best understanding of who Jesus was. We've just been hypnotized by repeat exposure and the opinions of our ancestors and are all engaged in the repeated process of engaging with a bunch of nonsense which only seems to have meaning because 'everyone else' has always thought it was so.

Just a thought.
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