Christ Church

“Wist ye not?”

“Did you not know?” Jesus asks Mary, his anxious mother, in what is the only story in the Christian New Testament about the childhood of Jesus. He is twelve years old. He is found in the Temple at Jerusalem among the doctors of the Law “listening and asking questions”, and “all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers”.

It is an epiphany, a making known of the idea that there are things that are wanted to be known. It is captured wonderfully in this somewhat rhetorical question by Jesus. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” or as the King James version wonderfully puts it, following Tyndale, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” The Old English word, “wist” echoes the Germanic influences on English (gewissen) and remains with us in such words as wit, wise, and wisdom. In the Christian understanding, the story reveals Jesus as the Divine Teacher and the Human Student. In other words, this story is an essential feature of the epiphany and shows us the radical idea of epiphany as education. It is about our response to what is presented to us to be known.

We are in this story as teachers and students, as learners all really. Teachers are not teachers if they are not also learners. Something profound is being shown to us about our humanity and in intriguing ways and which ultimately pertains to education. Education is about the making known of certain ideas which we only grasp by the activity of knowing in us. “Knowledge is intermediate between the knower and the known, because it is the activity of the knowner concerning the known”, as was anciently understood. I want to emphasize the idea of learning as activity and I want to focus on the necessity of education.

For thousands of years of human civilisation, once you learned to speak you entered into the adult world as a little adult. No longer an infant, one who is unable to speak, you were part of the adult world through speech. What this story reminds us of is another development at once ancient and also modern. It is the idea of another intermediary stage of human development through learning, specifically through learning how to read. In this case, reading is about reading the Law, the Torah. This story is about the transition from childhood to adulthood in the spiritual culture of Israel. In Jewish terms it correlates with the traditions of bar mitzvah signalling that transition to adult duties and responsibilities as grounded in an understanding of the Law given to Israel by God through Moses. It marks maturity, a growing up through learning and accepting responsibility with respect to what you know.

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Rachel weeping for her children

The aggressive atheist and neo-Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, claims that the God of the Old Testament is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction” and goes on to list a whole raft of vituperative adjectives that are most unpleasant. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks replied, much to Dawkins discomfort, “Ah, I see you are a Christian atheist.” The Old Testament, in reference to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, is a Christian term.

Dawkins’ view is not new and belongs to a common misconception of the relation between the Old and New Testament which overstates the contrast. This is seen, for instance, in the idea of Law versus Grace, forgetting that the Law as given by God is therefore also grace; or the similar idea of justice versus mercy or love, forgetting that mercy is just as intrinsic to the Hebrew Scriptures as it is to the New Testament. Overstating the contrasts between the two testaments belongs to a conflict narrative which pits Jew against Christian. In turn, the aggressive and naive atheism of Dawkins assumes the same conflict narrative between modern science and religion. Such is a profound distortion and misconception.

Dawkins has his precursors, ranging from Marcion in the 2nd century to Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. Marcion could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and so conveniently edited out large swaths of the Old Testament and as well great chunks of the New Testament. For him the contrast was between love and judgement. In the case of the third President of America, Thomas Jefferson, the concern was about reason versus revelation, particularly the miracle stories of the Christian Gospels. Jefferson took his scissors to the New Testament to excise all such things leaving merely the husk of a kind of moralizing Jesus accommodated to the precepts (and presumptions) of human reason.

Such things reveal an attitude and a set of assumptions about God and human good. But surely, Dawkins could just have easily found the ‘Christian’ God of the New Testament equally “unpleasant” simply in terms of this disturbing and disquieting story that belongs to the mystery of Christmas. It is the shocking story of the slaughter of the little ones of Bethlehem. It challenges our sentimental views of Christmas.

It is shocking and while there are many shocking stories in the Scriptures, the real question is what are these stories doing? Why are they part of these Scriptures? In other words, what do they teach? It is easy to piece together a packet of awful stories in both Scriptures that contribute to the idea of a vengeful, hateful God who arbitrarily chooses some and rejects others. This ignores the interpretative traditions which have wrestled with these passages for centuries and the simple point that these stories are always an indictment of some aspect or other of the human condition in its fallenness and evil.

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