I was listening to a Robert Price and Frank Zindler on Point of Inquiry recently. Price mentioned that the existence of Q had come into doubt and he referenced Mark Goodacre’s The Case Against Q. That was surprising to me, because I thought that Q was an established fact. But I suspect that you are scratching your head wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

Q is a theoretical document that was supposedly filled with the sayings of Jesus. If it ever existed, it is now lost to us. It’s existence is inferred based upon the Synoptic Gospels: Mark, Matthew, and Luke. And it is really interesting. What you need to know is that Mark was the first Gospel written, at around 40 years after Jesus is thought to have died. Matthew and Luke came about ten years later. They are based largely on Mark, as you can see from this great figure from Wikipedia:

The first thing to note here is that roughly half of Matthew and Luke come from Mark. In saying this, I really mean it: plagiarized. Looking at the original Greek text, it is often copied word for word in the later Gospels. This really does destroy the idea that many Christians have that God was speaking through these men[1]. Would he really have created this kind of overlapping text? Again, we aren’t talking overlapping story; we are talking overlapping words, phrases, and sentences.[2]

The existence of Q comes out of the “double tradition” overlap between Matthew and Luke. This material is almost all Jesus’ sayings, like the parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Again, much of this is word for word. Thus: just like with Mark, they plagiarized Q. Or so the theory goes.

A question obviously comes to mind: why not assume that Luke just used Mark and Matthew, given that it was written after both of them. As far as I can tell, proponents of Q claim that if Luke were based upon Matthew, there would be more agreement between the two Gospels in the material from Mark. Critics, Mark Goodacre for example, claim that there are such “minor agreements.” Having seen these minor agreements, I must say that I’m not convinced. Just the same, I’m not that convinced by the primary arguments in favor of Q.

Goodacre spends a good deal of time going over all of this material. If you really want to know this stuff, The Case Against Q is a good place to look. Personally, I found his arguments kind of thin. But the book was really helpful in demonstrating that the arguments on both sides are kind of thin. There are lots of alternatives that just aren’t discussed. On top of this, my belief in entropy convinces me that with such old documents and the incentives of the early Christians to redact the texts for individual and Church purposes it, there is no truly satisfying resolution. These documents are what the Church is based upon. Anyway, there is most likely no there there.

Update

Mark Goodacre has a nice website supporting The Case Against Q. In particular, for those wanting to know more but not interested in reading what is a pretty technical book, he provides Ten Reasons to Question Q. I’ve provided the points below; if you go to this site, he gives a paragraph or so explanation of each.

[1] Just so you know, these books were not written by any of the 12 Apostles. For one thing, these men were almost certainly dead by the time Mark was written. For another, it is hard to imagine that illiterate fishermen and carpenters would suddenly learn to write what all experts agree is sophisticated Greek.

[2] Again from Wikipedia, here is a comparison of a verse from Matthew and Luke with the text in red being identical:

I watched The Big Lebowski last night. It is a film that grows on you. I know that it suffered at the time of its release because it came right after Fargo, and everyone wanted to see Fargo II. But there are more important reasons to not like the film. Most notable is that it just seems loose—like they really needed another run at the screenplay.

It makes me happy that the the Coen Brothers don’t discuss what their films are about. For example, when asked what the ending of Barton Fink meant, one of them said something to the effect that the lead character was sitting on a beach (from the painting in his room) with a woman’s head in a box. And that is probably as much as they know. The truth is, that like most great art, Barton Fink just works and it is kind of hard to say exactly why. But the fact that the Coen Brothers don’t try to say any more than is up on the screen (note the lack of “director’s commentaries” for their films) allows people like me to say whatever we want.

The Big Lebowski is far more obvious than Barton Fink. The tumbleweed is the perfect symbol for The Dude. And bowling is the perfect game: the pins just set there waiting for the bowler who doesn’t even need to throw the ball because the lane is downhill. Other than The Dude (and perhaps Donny—the biggest problem with the script), all of the characters in the film play parts. This is seen in The Big Lebowski himself, who is every bit the leach he castigates The Dude for being; and Walter, whose status as Vietnam vet, Jew, and intellectual, are all questionable; and The Stranger, who is some kind of Hollywood cowboy monstrosity. The Dude, despite having many annoying character traits, is likable because he is authentic. What you see is all there is.

William Goldman complained in Which Lie Did I Tell, that The Big Lebowski did not work because there was no final bowling tournament. This badly misunderstands the intent of the film. Just the same, the Coen Brothers seem somewhat confused on this point. All the talk about the bowling tournament is not leading anywhere, they clearly understand this. But The Dude’s investigation of the kidnapping of Bunny Lebowski is also not leading anywhere. Yet, they feel the need to resolve it without really resolving it. We learn that The Big Lebowski was just scamming the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers out of a million bucks and framing The Dude for it. We learn this 20 minutes from the end of the film. But this remaining time is not used to tie up the large number of loose ends. We don’t learn what becomes of the Lebowski’s relationship, or the PI sent to retrieve Bunny, or if Maude Lebowski will get her father to return the million dollars he stole. We don’t learn any of this and much more because the film is no more interested in that than it is in what happens in the bowling tournament.

Instead, the film meanders on for another 20 minutes about what it had been meandering on about for the first 100 minutes: The Dude abiding. A tumbleweed tumbles on, despite strange men urinating on your carpet, rich men framing you, and friends dying. “Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”

The Dude abides.

This is the first video from a long video series called Excavating The Empty Tomb (beyond a reasonable doubt). It was either this or a two and a half hour debate between Richard Carrier and William Lane Craig.

I want to put in my prediction of how the Supreme Court will rule on the individual mandate of the ACA.

Rube Goldberg Law

For the record, I’m not fond of this piece of legislation. It is a huge giveaway to the insurance industry that adds nothing to the system. In the name of getting bipartisan support that it never got, it is overly complicated—a Rube Goldberg[1] monstrosity designed to provide votes more than provide healthcare. But on balance, it seems that we are better with it than we are without it. If it didn’t mean great pain and suffering for tens of millions of people, I would like to see it overturned. It would be interesting to see what the Republicans would do. The truth is that the ACA was the Republican healthcare plan. It is the “free market” solution to our problem of skyrocketing healthcare costs. (I don’t think the Republicans see the uninsured as a problem.) When they decided that the individual mandate was unacceptable, they effectively cut their own throats. Now the only thing I’ve heard them suggest is to let people in one state buy insurance from another. This would help our healthcare problems, but only very little; it effectively leaves the Republicans with nothing to replace the ACA with. (Remember all the Republicans claiming that they wanted to “repeal and replace Obamacare”?) So in the long run, we are left with some kind of single payer health insurance. The problem is that this is likely to take a long time—enough so that I will already be in the Medicare system (assuming the Republicans don’t destroy it first—or the Democrats who seem inclined to do this in the name of being “serious”).

The Moderates

I do not know how the Supreme Court will rule on the individual mandate. I am certain that the four moderate justices (commonly, although erroneous, called “liberal”) will vote to uphold the law. This is because they are not primarily political actors; they still behave the way judges traditionally have; this is not to say they are above politics, but they are not motivated by them in a fundamental way. How the conservative justices will rule is less certain. Scalia, Thomas, and Alito will almost certainly rule against the law; they are not only extremely political in their rulings, they seem to be uninterested in how corrupt they appear.

Roberts Against

As is the case so much these days, the fate of the ACA will depend upon Justice Kennedy. Even if he votes to strike the individual mandate, he may vote to uphold the rest of the ACA. I don’t want to get into that issue, however. What I think is important is that Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling will depend upon Kennedy’s. He will vote whichever way Kennedy votes. If Kennedy votes to strike, Roberts will do so because he wants the law destroyed. This is not, of course, because he is against the law. If a conservative were in the White House, none of the conservatives would vote against the ACA. The vote against it is a vote against the President. This is a way to slap down Obama and perhaps deprive him of a second term.

Roberts For

If Kennedy votes to uphold the ACA, Roberts will concur. He will do this because unlike Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, Roberts does care about how the Court is perceived. He will vote to uphold the ACA so that he can better make the case that the conservatives on the court are not simply political hacks. A ruling to uphold the ACA will make the rulings on Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission appear less political. But having the Court appear less political is not as important as embarrassing the President. To Roberts, voting to uphold the ACA is just a way of making a bad situation a little better.

Final Ruling

So the final ruling will be 4-5 if the Court rules against the ACA and 6-3 if the Court rules for. Regardless, the decision will be political. Of course, we already knew that when Scalia brought up broccoli—a common example from Fox News and conservative media. I’ve never thought that the Court was above politics, but since Bush v. Gore, it has lost any pretense. I feel sorry for the moderates on the Court, because they really do try. And still I hear people claim that the Court is polarized when this isn’t the case; there are four moderate and (as much as possible) apolitical justices and four conservative ideologues. Kennedy is just the one conservative who remembers the way the court used to be. Of course, even he wasn’t reasonable enough to rule that all the votes in Florida should be counted in 2000. Electing the next President of the United States was just too exciting to resist. Who knows if he’ll feel the same way this year.

Update

Republicans see the Supreme Court as a political institution. You can see this by how they appoint justices who are very old. Other than Elena Kagan (whose nomination may indicate that the Democrats have decided that they should start playing the same game), all of the Republican nominations have been younger. Here is the list with the age of the justice during the year they were placed on the Court:

And this situation has been in place farther back. Rehnquist (48), Sandra Day O’Connor (51), and David Souter (51)—a Bush Sr. nominee, even though he turned out to be a moderate—were all younger than John Paul Stevens (55). Before the Reagan appointments onward, conservatives went for experienced thinkers rather than political ideologues. The three Nixon appointees were all old and moderate: Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (65), Harry Blackmun (62), and Warren E. Burger (62). You have to go back to Eisenhower’s recess appointment of Potter Stewart (43) in 1958 to find someone as young as Thomas nominated to the Court. Stewart’s career shows that one does not have to be old to be a brilliant justice. Thomas’ career does much harm to the reputation of young justices. The point here is not that young justices cannot be good, but rather that Republicans have specifically nominated young justices so as to maximize their political power. Political power is more important than good governance to Republicans. But then, we already knew that.

[1] I found this delightful video about Rube Goldberg from the group Rocket Boom. They are very good. I’m surprised more people don’t watch their stuff. They are well worth checking out:

I’m sort of on vacation, so just a quick note here. Exxon-Mobile is an evil corporation and Artis Brown, supposedly an engineer, is an evil apologist. In the most recent add, he repeats the widely discredited talking point that the oil sands pipeline could create more than half a million jobs. Why stop there? It could create 5 billion jobs. In fact, the Keystone Pipeline is estimated to create as few as 500 temporary jobs, but surely not more than 6,000 jobs.

This is the add running on “liberal” media source MSNBC:

I am working on a number of articles:

1. Michael Erard’s wonderful Um…
2. Lope de Vega’s Fuent Ovejuna
3. Synoptic Gospels and The Case Against Q

But until I get to them, here is That Mitchell and Web Look deconstructing Scooby-Doo:

Who is that nephew? Lucky you have me to keep you informed about the important things in life: Scrappy-Doo.

Recently, I have noticed that The Nation really is a better magazine than The Progressive. For one thing, it comes out weekly and so is able to better keep up on what is happening. However, I don’t think The Nation is that great.

This morning, I got an email message from Victor Navasky and Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation. This was not unusual, as I get something from them every week. But this message was different.

They were inviting me on a cruise.

Really:

A liberal cruise?! How I wish this were a joke. I like John Nichols; in fact, I am about to read The S Word. But I don’t want to go on a cruise with him. What kind of freaks would go on this cruise?

Atrios (Duncan Bowen Black) normally writes far too little. He is kind of like Daily KOS, providing an outlet for others to rant. But this morning, he wrote something that made me feel marginally better during a month that has been pretty much all bad. Can We End That Era:

Of course, I would note that Democrats no longer believe in doing anything. They only believe in incentives. The new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. The new Republican Party is, well, the old Nazi Party. Heil Romney!

People often ask me what postmodernism is, give that I refer to it a lot. This is an uncomfortable question because I use the term because I think it is largely meaningless, except as it is that thing that came after modernism. In general, I think those in the field mean to imply a lack of any absolute truth. Postmodernists would say that all the facts of the universe are just culturally agreed upon beliefs: the heliocentric model of the solar system is as much a construct as Jesus dying for our sins. I don’t accept this view of the universe.

It seems to me that facts can be judged based upon their utility. With all due respect to that great religion, Christianity is useless. It doesn’t predict anything. It is not internally consistent. And it is used by its practitioners to justify anything and everything. It could be replaced with the Cult of Aqua Buddha, and nothing would change. There would still be those who think homosexuality is a moral outrage and those who think it is part of the wonderful diversity of the universe.

On the other hand, the heliocentric model of the solar system is useful. It works better than the earth-center model (as long as we assume elliptical planetary orbits). I still can’t get over the fact that fundamentalist Christians don’t except Natural Selection but they do accept electricity. It is part of the same paradigm and one is no more proven than the other.

I’m more interested in postmodern art. To me, this is much more clear and interesting. It is illustrative to compare Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Godot is a serious play about the search for meaning and our blindness to the prosaic (but profound) meaning that surrounds us. RGAD is a facetious play about the arbitrary meaning of life: you can construct your own meaning but don’t fool yourself that it’s real. Postmodern art does not have a single perspective.

This is most often manifested in meta content: self-conscious awareness that the work of art is a work of art. For example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead gets lost in its references to itself. The first time I was aware of this approach to art was watching Albert Brooks with his ventriloquist act. It is not funny if you don’t know ventriloquist acts. Brooks makes this point as more postmodern comedy in the movie Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World where he does the routine for a group without this context. Here is the original routine from The Flip Wilson Show:

No effort is made to maintain the illusion that is so important to any ventriloquist act. The poster of this video even described it in postmodern terms, “Albert Brooks deconstructing a dummy.”

I just discovered an even more postmodern ventriloquist act by Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler. Here the audience is expecting comedy that never really comes. There are some actual jokes, like Braunohler being the college ventriloquist of the year for 15 straight years. But even this seems to fly over the audience. The main gag is that Schaal is even more awkward than an actual ventriloquist dummy. But the presentation is really two comedians playing the part of two comedians.

There is a clear trend going from Brooks through Andy Kaufman to Schaal and Braunohler, and probably many other young comedians. It is all incredibly self-serving, of course. The performances seem designed more to amuse the performers than the audience. If you get it, it’s hysterical. If you don’t, you probably want your money back. Regardless, it is what it is. And as such, it is perfectly that.