Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, I wouldn’t say that. She appears more in the Holy Quran than she does in the Bible, of course, but that is clearly the influences on the creation of this book, which are probably forms of Christianity. Miaph is like Christianity in what is now the Arabian Peninsula. Yes, she’s there and she is named, unlike, I think, any other woman in the Quran. The relationship is therefore complex and interesting, but so is that of Jesus to the other prophets within Islam. He is given a place of great honor, and naturally, also his mother gets it. Mary’s position in Christianity is, as you know, complex. It is a construction of the later church on extremely scanty evidence in the New Testament. The picture of Mary in the Gospels is not entirely positive. The picture of Jesus’s relationship with his family, with his brothers and sisters is not entirely positive. On one occasion in the Gospels, they turned up to say, “Hi, we want to see him.” Jesus looks around and says, “Well, actually, these people are my brothers and sisters.” Implication: you’re second class. One’s got to deal with that. The church ignored it as it created an increasingly central place for Mary as Queen of Heaven, the linchpin of salvation. It ignored the fact that the foundations in the New Testament are scanty. It took the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, actually, to look at the Bible and look back at that and gleefully, in some cases, see that Jesus could be quite offhand with his mother and his family. Now, one needs to ask, why does the New Testament treat family members like this? I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament is written by the winners in a very particular conflict, and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church after Jesus. Is it going to be the family? Is this going to be a dynastic religion? James, the brother of the Lord, is one of the first people who are powerful within the church. Or is it people who, like Paul of Tarsus, never actually met in his earthly life Jesus? The balance in that conflict is eventually won by the general number of disciples, not the family. So, you would expect the text created by that side of the battle to be somewhat dismissive of Jesus’s family. The same thing is true of Islam, of course, between who is going to be in charge of the faith in future. Sunni Islam against Shia Islam have two different answers to that question. It’s not dissimilar to what happened within Islam. If I think of the 12th and 13th centuries in England and France, parts of Spain, there are so many just incredible cathedrals or religious structures built, many of them still with us. What accounts for so many marvelous creations in what, in a sense, is a relatively narrow window of time? You’re right. Scholars from the James brothers onwards have talked about this, the age of the cathedrals. It’s really quite difficult to account for it in any way. You’ve got to realize also that such wonderful, magnificent buildings, one of which I was speaking in last night, Gloucester Cathedral in western England, were there alongside monasteries. In fact, Gloucester Cathedral was a great abbey before it was a cathedral. What are these saying? They’re saying one thing: that the church in the West now had a very strong, tight organization by bishops and dioceses, in which the mother church of the dioceses was a building of very great charisma and importance, and had a set of clergy attached to it — canons, who were as much a corporation as the corporation of monks within an abbey — and they benefited from this industry of prayer about which we were speaking earlier, that the elites of Western Europe needed prayer. They needed people to pray for their souls. The laity, generally, also wanted prayer because the Western church was developing a particular view of the afterlife in which it is no longer that simple binary. It is not just heaven and hell. There is a state in the middle, purgatory, which is a wonderfully useful way to characterize the afterlife because purgatory is where you can go on being purged of your sins. You do that with the help of your friends and the clergy in their prayers, particularly in the Mass. Purgatory is a big thing here. Cathedrals are full of altars, just like abbey churches. Look around them, and you see the innumerable side chapels there. These are factories of prayer, and that is worth spending money on. And hurrah, they did because we are left with this amazing legacy of wonderful buildings.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.