Hearing more voices
Explaining what this is about
As part of my continuing attempt to help people think more clearly about how readers and writers connect with each other by means of texts (it's not a matter of moving information from one brain to another) I want to invite you to look at how, when writers bring other people's ideas, and words, into their texts, they can let the reader know why they're doing it, and how they expect the reader to respond to the ideas and words. (Prompt #15)We spent some time looking at how writers working on texts like Inquiry Reports might import the voices of others into their writing, and how they might signal to readers that that is what they're doing. When I read Thom's last prompt, I remembered that Elaine Pagels is a writer whose skill at that I have respected for a long time, and it occurred to me that taking a second look at her writing might be a way of helping people see more clearly some of the ways that can be done.
I asked you to find "a passage in which a report quotes or paraphrases from an external source (or where it seems that what's happening is that the report is quoting or paraphrasing, though it may not say so explicitly)." I explained that "One of the important issues writers face, especially when doing serious writing (academic or otherwise), is how to make sure a reader knows when she's hearing the writer's voice, and when it's someone else. This matters, because texts aren't boxes of information; they are always conveying something about whatever information they're using. A writer who doesn't know that writes ineffectively: a reader who doesn't know that misses the point."
Pagels does quite a lot of this sort of thing in this chapter. One of the main things she does -- twice -- is paraphrase or summarize the Book of Revelation. When she's doing that she's not just helping you understand what it says: she's selecting and phrasing in order that you'll be more likely to agree with what she wants you to believe about the text. She ends her first summary this way:
Then Jesus judges the whole world, and all who have worshipped other gods or committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire, while God's faithful are invitedWhat she has done is create a summary that emphasizes not just the strangeness, but foregrounds specifics like the grounds for damnation: "worshipped other gods or committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts." That's a particular list of sins, and Pagels wants us to notice how it serves a particular agenda: John wants us, she's implying, to single out certain kinds of sins as particularly bad. But in fact if you reread chapters 20-22, you really don't see that list: it's implied earlier, but Pagels wants us to move toward accepting her view that John is pointing at specific people in the world around him -- Roman emperors, pagans, etc. Her "summary" is really an interpretation. They always are.
to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends frorn heaven and where Christ and his people reign in triumph for a thousand years.
Anyone hearing these prophecies might well wonder: What kinds of visions are these, and what kind of man was writing them?
I was struck by four passages from people's responses to Pagels, on
the RELS forum. Just because I think they're worth thinking about, here
they are:
| Seeing that there was a war going on during the time that he was alive, and all of the prophecies he had heard before hand that Jesus had told his followers, it starts to make a little bit more sense where his ideas and dreams/nightmares (or prophecy) was coming from. | . . . what’s her frame? She makes many heavy claims,
and the thing that I’ve learned that surprised me the most was how many
versions of the bible there are.
|
“A close reader of the Hebrew Scriptures would see that John was invoking prophetic images to interpret the conflicts of his own time” pg 24. So is this stating that things that had already happened during his lifetime were replayed as apocalyptic dreams? | it states that “Martin Luther wanted to throw the book of Revelation out of the canon saying “there is no Christ in it,” until he realized how he could use it as powerful imagery against the Catholic Church.” . . . This surprised me because I thought that this was in the bible and Christians follow the bible. |
What we'll do
There are many ways in which Pagels lets us see what needs to be assumed in order to follow what she's saying. I've picked four passages from Pagels' text and transcribed them. Everybody will get one to read, and write a short inkshed in response to. Folks with the same passage will read and mark other people's inksheds, in groups, and I'll invite each group to give us their consensus about the passage.
What we'll do then
Have a great, productive and restorative spring break.