Robert Crotty's Three Revolutions: A Review (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 02:53 (407 days ago)
edited by James, Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 03:08

Robert Crotty entered a Passionist novitiate when he was 17, after a classical Catholic upbringing, which, Patrick White noted, had such a strong effect, that even those who had long since given Catholicism away, continued to luxuriate in it.

The Passionists were a very severe religious order, founded by an 18th century Christian mystic, Paul of the Cross. Physical and sensual deprivation was part of the “purification” process towards holiness. Crotty describes his days in this novitiate and then in the seminary, training to be a priest as happy. This was no ordinary life, but one destined for great things, the saving of souls from eternal perdition.

Crotty was obviously a young man of academic bent who became very curious about the history of Christianity and its reliance on its sacred book, the Bible. He was growing up at a time when the biblical texts were being subject to the same literary tools that were being used to study other ancient texts, like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita.

The problem was that these same tools were casting serious doubt on the truths with which he had been brought up – that the Bible was a history, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that Jesus really did perform miracles, that the world really was created in 6 days etc.

He describes the three revolutions in his thinking as both challenging and painful. For anyone whose knowledge of these issues is vague, Crotty’s book is a fascinating read. The Dead Sea Scrolls were seen by some within his Order as a direct threat to sound Christian doctrine. They, like the sacred text itself, tended to indicate that the Bible was no longer this book dictated by God, but a very human document, and like any other, was capable of literary analysis. Much of this caused apoplexy amongst the hierarchy. The Vatican seemed to be jumping around on a biblical trampoline, at one moment encouraging biblical studies and at another, denouncing their findings as “Modernist”.

Crotty describes the change that took place in him during his seminary training in what he calls his “first revolution”.

“At this point of time, I felt that I had accomplished a rather difficult intellectual feat. I had lived for over six years through a drastic change – from firmly believing in the Bible as an historical document to being able to decipher between history and other literary forms, such as myth, poetry and legend in that Bible.”

What surprised him was that this revolution did not end there. It led on to a “second revolution”. In 1963, Crotty went to Rome to further his studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, and there he studied Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac. The situation in Rome was tense, because open warfare appeared to have broken out between biblical scholars on the one hand, and dogmatic theologians on the other. One of them dubbed Catholic biblical scholars, “a whole swarm of termites, working away incessantly in the shadows”, and that they were undermining the genuine and historical truth of the Holy Scriptures.

At the end of his studies, Crotty became convinced that the stories in the Old Testament were nothing but stories that transmitted religious truths. Not only was there no evidence that they occurred, but the archaeological evidence was fairly clear that they did not occur as they were described in the Bible.

Crotty then went to study at the famous Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, hoping that the anomalies in the sacred texts could be explained somehow. But it seems that the more he looked into it, the worse it became.

“I had travelled from naïve acceptance of the text as historical, through a first revolution in which I believed that I could harmonise text and archaeological findings to form a ‘history’ that was only partly literal. But now I was confronted by a growing number of anomalies….there was not even a modicum of history that could sustain the origins of ancient Israel or Judaism. There might not even have been an Exodus out of Egypt! Whatever faith might be based on, it was not history. The Hebrew Scriptures were wonderful literature. But that was precisely what they were.”

As he became more immersed in the New Testament, he could see the same pattern emerging, even in relation to events such as the Last Supper. The Greek texts did not seem to have anything much in common with each other,

“There was a variety in the order of events, variety in the interpretation of events, even a difference of opinion as to when the meal had taken place. Which of them was the more original, the more historically likely…Perhaps someone in the early Christian community had invented the idea of a final meal between Jesus and his close disciples on the event of his death. The invention would have served to explain the Christian meaning of Jesus’s death. By the time of Paul, this construction could already have been accepted as an actual event.”

He found this very unsettling,

“I felt that I had lost my moorings and that my life in a religious setting had very little meaning…if the Last Supper could be put aside, I could hold virtually nothing in the Jesus story as historically sound and inviolable. Was this historical vacuum sufficient to base one’s life on? Did an appreciation of the Bible as Literature give a firm enough foundation for a life of poverty, chastity and obedience in the Catholic Church?”

Crotty deals with problems that were raised by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi, and how he had to sit for examinations set by the Biblical Commission. He had come to the conclusion that

“Each gospel had its own internal logic; no gospel had a historically reliable sequence. The gospels revealed what the early Christians considered important teachings; they did not reveal what had actually happened in the life of Jesus.”

He confided his doubts to the famous biblical scholar, Pierre Benoit, who told him that there was no need to tell the Commission everything he knew. He passed the exams and returned to Australia.

Like with so many other Catholic scholars, 1968 and the publication of Humanae Vitae were critical.

“It was a rehash of out-dated theological thinking, based on the Natural Law thesis, and it demonstrated that, despite the brave words of Vatican II, there had not been any real progress in Vatican thinking.”

When Crotty heard the news, he knew that “my tenure in an ecclesiastical teaching position would be short lived.” His older brother, Michael, also a Passionist priest and academic in the field of ethics, went public with a series of articles in The Australian newspaper.

“In these articles, he wrote unambiguously that the Pope’s encyclical was based on outmoded theology and flawed logic. His Church faculties were immediately removed. He was no longer able to act as a priest or teach under Church auspices. He went to America and taught there for several years, after which he resigned from the priesthood.”

However, Crotty continued to teach in a seminary, but he was careful to be “restrained and judicious”.

“I was always mindful of Pierre Benoit’s admonition that it was not necessary to tell them all that I was thinking.”

But he did think that as an educator, his role was to challenge people and lead them to new ways of thinking. He soon realized that after the publication of Humanae Vitae, he was a marked person, being monitored by the Temple Police.

In 1970, he was formally charged with heresy on the complaint of a priest who was shocked by the advances in biblical scholarship. He fully expected to be convicted by Cardinal Knox and his tribunal, and was going to announce his resignation from the priesthood when it occurred. However, he was somewhat surprised to be acquitted. Knox and his colleagues did not have enough evidence. He later wrote to Knox and said that he was really guilty as charged. But there was little point in his continuing on to encourage people to look at the evidence if they were determined not to. At the age of 35, he resigned from the priesthood and returned to secular life, “with very little money, no job and no permanent roof over my head.”

Crotty managed to obtain a position at Melbourne University and then do a Masters degree and a Doctorate. His third revolution in thinking was in applying the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn to the social sciences, and in the course of this, he studied Islam and Buddhism,

“I saw religion, whether in the past or in the present from an entirely new vantage point. Judaism and Christianity were instances of the plurality of religion across space and time. ..It is natural for people to consider their own particular culture to be the “true” culture, to think that their way of living is really real; it comes as a shock for them to realize that there are other humans who regard their own cultures as equally valid.”

Religion, he says, is just a particular type of culture, and its necessity arises when secular or everyday culture is not coping, in trying to provide meaning and explanations. Crotty says that one of the most important things about religion is not so much the doctrine or the rituals, but the religious experience. He points out that Muhammed experienced a feeling of order in his life by submitting to Allah, and myth and ritual then take over to recreate this experience of the religion’s founder. And the same is true of Christianity.

Central to all religions are myth and ritual, guiding people on how life should be led. But ritual also brings into the present the religion’s founder’s own experience of the divine. So, the Jew re-enact the Exodus, Christians the last supper etc.

“Religions are built on a founding ‘event’ that dictates the symbols that will enable later believers to undergo a similar religious experience to that discovered at the beginning of the religion.”

Crotty says that during his Catholic days, other religions were seen as poor imitations of Christianity, but he soon came to realise, that it was no better or worse than the others. After further study of religion in general and many religions other than ancient Judiaism and Christianity, he concluded,

“I saw too many anomalies in privileging the literatures of these two religions. Their writings needed to be seen as a phenomenon in the whole religious process.”

Crotty had gone beyond seeing the Bible simply as literature, and saw it as well as all the other sacred writings as part of an anthropological phenomenon. He accepted that there was an historical Israel from about the beginning of the Iron Age around 1200 BC, but was sure that it was largely beyond the skills of the modern historian to reconstruct it. There was no evidence that there was a vast Kingdom under David and Solomon. This only existed in the “literary Israel”. Likewise, the sojourn in Mesopotamia only exists in “literary Israel”. There is no evidence that it ever happened.

What is true is that around the time when the Hebrews were said to have “returned” is that the population increased by about 25% and created new towns. This itself suggested that the people who “returned” did not come from there. It was the policy of the Mesopotamian governments to push people into other lands where there were population pressures, in much the same way as the Indonesian government has done in West Irian.

The reason for the story about the exile and return was so that the newcomers would be accepted as part of the local people. But in doing so, they brought their own stories with them and these included the Adam and Eve stories, Cain and Abel, the Flood, Tower of Babel etc. This explains the striking similarities in the stories from this whole geographical area. There was a factual history behind the construction of Literary Israel, but it was not the history described in the books themselves.

The purpose of this “history” was not to describe the past, but “to give a social identity to a burgeoning group in power in the present.”

Crotty says that this literature was not primarily religious, but one designed to create the tradition of a cultural heritage. It was both religious and secular at a time when these two dimensions were not as divided as they are today.

“Judaism offers a way of life, one which can be described from the conglomeration of literature and which could be experienced by means of the sacred story of Literary Israel and its attendant ritual. This religion has provided fulfilment in its religious experience for many people in the past and continues to do so in the present…verified by the Hebrew Scriptures. That is their purpose. There is no more to be said.”

Crotty concludes that Christianity is no different.

“The Literary Jesus is the story of a Jesus as it is contained in the Christian Scriptures. The Biblical Jesus is the insertion of the Historical Jesus into the Literary Jesus or vice versa. It has produced a hybrid that never existed and has no purpose.”

The problem is, as Crotty points out, that scholars have come up with about ten different versions of the historical Jesus. The Gospels are full of the same sorts of contradictions that plague the Old Testament. The need to explain the involvement of the Jews in the death of Jesus arose from the needs of Christians to exonerate Jesus from any suggestion that he was involved in any form of civil insurrection if they were to convince the gentiles. But in fact, the Romans were in complete control of who was crucified. This was the sad commencement of Christian anti-Semitism.

“I would think that the Gospel writers knew virtually nothing of the circumstances of the actual death of Jesus apart from the brute fact of his crucifixion. The words spoken from the cross, his being offered vinegar, the division of his garments by lot, his mockery by the Jewish authorities; the words spoken at his death are theological statements and not historical recollections.”

Crotty’s studies in anthropology had convinced him that in the establishment of a religious tradition, succession was of utmost importance. There needed to be some way by which the religious experience could be replicated. That often required the nomination of a successor. Crotty has no doubt that there was a historical Jesus, but it is impossible to get anything more than a general and conjectural outline.

“The gospels are not primarily historical documents contributing to this historical search; they have been manipulated…It is the Literary Jesus that is of importance to Christian believers in the first instance. This is the figure that challenges them, determines their faith, that controls their belief. The Literary Jesus never existed, but this construction of a mediator is common practice for all religion. Christian believers, from their leaders to the people in the pews, must give up the conviction that their religion relies on history. It has no historical foundation. It is based on a story, a very clever story. Importantly, the sacred story will only work if its basis is accepted as a story and not mined for history. But further, Christian believers must give up the claim that their religion is exclusively valid. It is one religion among many among the peoples of the world”.

In short, Crotty’s studies have led him to the conclusion that the Biblical stories are no different from the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories or the Bhagavad Gita. They perform the same function, as they are just as historically accurate as these other religious stories.

Crotty’s final chapter is on the existence of God, and he says that

“..as far as religion is concerned, it does not matter if there is a God in reality or not. It is the actual idea of ‘God’ that is important. It is whether God (or any other symbol representing ultimate meaning) is there in the mind of the human, not whether there really is a God out there.”

The whole purpose of religion is to find meaning in life and the different religions all provide this in their own way. He even says that humanism does this

“The Humanist who has strong beliefs about humanness and the environment in which the human lives and achieves, who see ultimacy through the focus of the Ideal Human, also finds meaning in life.”

What this essentially means is that religion is nothing more than personal preference in the way we seek meaning. If people find it in a particular religion or in atheism or humanism, there is nothing further to be said. So, there is no point in religious wars whether between religions as we know them or between the religious and atheists. But whatever conclusion one comes to, there are two problems that none of them can answer: the problem of evil and what happens after death. We are still faced with these mysteries, and no belief or non-belief adequately explains them.

Having been away from biblical studies for over 40 years, I found this book fascinating. However, I’m not in a position to comment on the accuracy or otherwise of his conclusions, other than to say that his position is well argued and convincing. The book reminded me of both Paul Crittenden’s “Changing Orders” and John Burnheim’s “To Reason Why”, two memoirs by former priests who left not only the priesthood, but the Church as well, after travelling down the philosophical path and becoming University academics. Crotty came to the same conclusion, but by treading a different road through biblical scholarship and anthropology. Like the other two books, it is well written, easy to read and avoids the ever present temptation of academics to wallow in jargon. Like those other two books, we don’t get much of the personal history, other than that Crotty describes this journey on which he travelled, as “painful”.

This review inevitably had to be by way of summary, rather than a critical analysis. I would be interested to hear what herbie or Ian Elmer has to say about it. I do recall discussions many moons ago where Ian said that the big difference between the Mithras, Krishna, and other legends is that they were based on myth, whereas the Jesus story was based on a historical figure. But if what Crotty says is true, the only bit of history is that there was a man named Jesus who had followers and was crucified by the Romans. It doesn't seem much to hang a belief hat on.

More information about the book including link to an hour-long radio conversation between Robert Crotty and Richard Fidler on ABC radio:
www.catholica.com.au/marketplace/promo/Miscellaneous.php#9781921817489