Month: December 2018

From Hell’s bookshelf: the official 1930 history of the Student Christian Movement

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some books are fun to read.  Some are worth reading, fun or not.  Some are not worth reading.  And finally some are worse than that.

Last weekend I was reading Oliver Barclay’s From Cambridge to the World, a fine description of the work of God through student ministry in Britain over the last 120 years.  I was myself a member of the Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union (OICCU) when I was a student, so it is a world that is familiar to me.  It’s not a long book, but it is full of interest.

I noticed that the author used extracts from the official Story of the Student Christian Movement by Tissington Tatlow, published in 1933, and this reminded me that I wanted to read this.  Now the SCM was an early attempt by the Cambridge intercollegiate CU (CICCU) to create an inter-university link for the Christian Unions, but it went badly off the rails into heresy, ran into trouble after WW1, and collapsed more or less finally – I think it still exists in name – during the 1960s.   Tissington Tatlow was the secretary of The Movement – they spoke of it in capitals, curiously – for much of its life, so his book has an official character.  Anyway I found a copy for sale for a few dollars, and ordered it.

I was leaving my house this morning, and to my surprise the postman called to me from up the road that he had a parcel for me.  So he did; and inside a thin plastic wrapper was Tatlow’s opus.  It’s almost a thousand pages long and three inches thick.

But the content!  Oh my goodness.  Even after a lifetime of reading corporate communications, the prose style is impenetrable.  Did anyone ever read this?  The author seems to feel that his work must glorify The Movement at all costs, and any hint of dissent or difficulty might scare people away.  But of course this means that most of the interesting episodes of the history of the SCM are omitted. That leaves only paper-shuffling.  It is the work of a bureaucrat.

A characteristic passage occurs early on, as early as page seven.  Dwight L. Moody ran a mission in the 1890s at Cambridge, which met violent opposition.  There were many striking scenes, of the highest interest to any reader.  Barclay tells the story at some length.  Tatlow, however, dismisses it in half-a-sentence; that “the first meeting was broken up”.  It’s not a good moment for the reader. That’s when he discovers that anything interesting is not likely to be described.

It’s not a very honest Story either, in that it misleads the reader.  The basic facts are that the SCM was created by men from the CICCU.  Over time the SCM drifted away from these roots into the theological liberalism prevalent in the Edwardian period.  The CICCU found it difficult to remain part of an organisation that believed in a different God and a different religion, and – not without great heart-burnings – disaffiliated.  But Tatlow conceals the role of the CICCU in founding the SCM.  The SCM just happens to arise at Cambridge, in his account.

In fact less than a dozen pages mention the CICCU throughout the thousand pages of his work, which is astonishing.  What on earth does he fill up the pages with?  For most of that time the CICCU was the Cambridge representative of the SCM, as well as its founder.  He does describe a mission at Cambridge which Barclay also describes.  Tatlow does not mention that only one of the missioners was backed by the CICCU, or that the CICCU thought the mission a failure.  Instead he tells us that the mission “shook the university to the core”.  A striking phrase; but what this means in concrete terms is not stated.  Instead he moves on.  Barclay’s much briefer account tells us rather more, including the salient fact that the mission meetings were well-attended, but produced no conversions.

Tatlow likewise misrepresents the break with the CICCU before WW1, somewhere around page three hundred and something.  Five pages are devoted to this episode, nor is there a lack of criticism of the CICCU for refusing to change as the SCM had changed.  But there is nothing to tell the reader that the SCM was sawing off its own roots by forcing its founding organisation to leave.  The description is quite bitter enough, however, to explain that the CICCU were very right to leave.  Sadly, within forty pages, Tatlow is telling us how the members of the movement no longer knew what truth was, and started having inward-looking meetings to try to find out!  One suspects that these efforts were unsuccessful.

The book is really very hard to read.  There is not a trace of Christian conviction within it.  Like everything else about the SCM, it was intended to give a message to adults rather than for students.  But the overwhelming impression is of a little man toadying to bishops and senior ecclesiastics.

It may be relevant that Tatlow himself was not of high social status, at a time when Cambridge was the preserve of the upper class.  He was merely the son of an Irish land-agent, who managed the estates of Lord Kingston. Perhaps he always felt the need to doff his cap?  His ecclesiastical career was not exciting.  For all of his efforts he did not obtain any real preferment in the Church of England, becoming only a canon of Canterbury.  But his real achievement was to lead a gospel movement onto the rocks.  He died as late as 1957, by which time the SCM was far gone in decay.  I wonder if there are obituaries around?  They might be interesting to read.  There is a rather dishonest Wikipedia article on the SCM; Tatlow himself has no such page, and is clearly a forgotten figure.

The size and shape of the book is redolent of the late Victorian era.  I found myself wondering if he was ordered to write it by some imperious Barchester-type bishop, in order to fill a gap of that size and shape in his lordship’s palace library; and the bishop telling him firmly to “leave out the religious nonsense”.  It reads a bit like that!  There are some interesting photographs in it, however, which I have not seen elsewhere.

I really ought to make sure that Tatlow is online.  It is unlikely that anybody will consider it worth scanning otherwise.  There is no drearier sight than the “religion” section of a second-hand bookshop, full of rubbish, and Tatlow certainly belongs there.  But it is still data, with all its faults.  Even when Tatlow is wrong, or foolish, the fact that he thought so – that the secretary of The Movement thought in this way – is itself evidence.

Let us all hope that we use our lives more productively than he did.  Let us make absolutely certain that we do not write books like this.  The world does not need litanies of pointless self-congratulation, masking utter failure.  Only Hell enjoys such books; but one suspects they still go unread.

Edit: the CICCU split with SCM was before WW1, not after it, although there was an attempt at reunion in 1919.

Update: (Sept 2019).  The book itself is at Archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/TheStoryOfTheStudentChristianMovement/page/n6

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There will be stars: the life and death of Robert H. Schmidt

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ancient technical texts are very hard to work with.  Not merely do you need the usual Greek and Latin language skills, and a feel for the customs of the ancient world.  You also need a specialised understanding of the discipline in question.  Not many of us have knowledge of alchemy, or farming methods, or architecture.  So the manuals on these subjects tend to be understudied and few are translated into modern languages.

I’ve written a couple of posts about Project Hindsight.  This is a project undertaken by people interested in astrology in modern times, but consists of translations of ancient astrological texts.  Such an enterprise can only be valuable, and the collection of translations deserves to be more widely known.  Most are out-of-print but can be obtained as PDFs.

But this week I learned that the principal translator, Robert H. Schmidt, has died.  He was only 67.  He was an independent scholar, and he did the sort of things we do here, so it is very much appropriate for us to commemorate him.

He dedicated his life to ancient astrology, and especially hellenistic astrology; to understand what it was, and translating the primary sources so that others could work.  In most cases he prepared the first ever translation of the sources into a modern language.  He self-published his translations, which inevitably means that they did not find their way into academic research libraries.  This is unfortunate, and it means that they remain obscure.

The funeral home has a web-page with an obituary here, written by Bill Johnston, who also supplied me with some additional information.

Born on December 22, 1950, Robert H. Schmidt obtained a scholarship to study mathematical physics at M.I.T. But he chose instead to go to St John’s College in Annapolis as part of their “Great Books” programme to read philosophy.  There he was a student of Jacob Klein, one of Heidegger’s students.  But he also learned the importance of reading primary texts in the original language and “discovered his love of the Greek verb”.  Instead of pursuing an academic career, he chose to become an independent scholar, and to translate ancient astrological texts.

He settled in Cumberland, in Maryland.  To support himself he initially worked as a printer, and in a range of other blue-collar jobs, but by middle age he was well-enough known to support himself through his publications and recordings of lectures and seminars – presumably on the subject of astrology, although Mr Johnston does not say so.

A draft of one of his papers, The Problem of Astrology (2000), may be found online here. It repays reading by those seeking to understand what he did intellectually.  At one point he says something which perhaps explains how a university-trained philosopher came to be interested in astrology. He asks what we actually mean by the word “astrology”?

Why the title “Metaphysics of Metaphysics?” [as a description of astrology] Now I chose that title very deliberately because, in my mind, metaphysics has two completely different meanings. My background being in the study of ancient and modern philosophy, when I heard the word metaphysics, I always understood it to mean the study of Being, as it was for the Greeks. It was a great surprise to me when I first went into a bookstore and looked for the metaphysical section expecting to find some new books on Aristotle, and found instead books on crystals, out-of-body experiences, meditation, occultism, and astrology. This was long before I was involved in the astrological world, by the way.

…  There is a statement by a Neo-Platonist philosopher named Iamblichus in a strange book called On The Mysteries. In this book another neo-Platonist Porphyry is directing a number of questions about the Egyptian religion to an Egyptian priest.

In the course of the answering of these questions the priest says that the men who translated the Egyptian sacred writings into Greek — and these sacred writings included the their magical, alchemical, and astrological writings, all generally attributed to one of their sages names Hermes — the men who translated these sacred writings into Greek were men who were trained in Greek philosophy, presumably the philosophies of the Athenian Greeks Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Now, this is a very astonishing statement and it made a great impression on me.

Such are the chances of life.

Another article is here.  More materials can be found on his website, Project Hindsight.

Robert H. Schmidt died on December 6th, 2018. Mr Johnston writes:

A GoFundMe site has been set up on Ellen’s behalf to help with medical bills and funeral expenses at https://www.gofundme.com/support-robert-schmidt039s-medical-costs. We would like to give our sincere thanks to the many people who have contributed so far, and for the outpouring of condolences and expressions of appreciation for Bob and his invaluable contributions to the art and science of astrology through his remarkable research over the last two decades.

Few of us would find it possible to read an ancient astrological text with any enjoyment.  Yet he evidently did.  Most people who read such a text would find themselves baffled by the technical language.  But he was not baffled.  I do not myself possess any overview of the subject of Hellenistic Astrology; and evidently Mr Schmidt found the same, for he composed one.  He made all these translations, and did so from hard, granite-like material in Greek and Latin.  The world owes him a debt for so doing.  Few professional academics have ever even attempted such a  thing.  He did not receive recognition or honour for what he did.  But I suspect that little that has been written on astrology in the universities in the last 30 years will be half as useful or well-informed as his little series of self-published books.

Thank you, Mr Schmidt, for all your efforts.  You sought truth in the heavens.  May you find mercy and the real source of all heavenly truth on the Last Day.  Requiescat in pace.

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Ancient Greek / Latin translator available for hire

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A gentleman wrote to me enquiring if I knew anybody who could use someone with knowledge of ancient Greek or Latin, primarily patristic.  He’s a PhD student who is already doing some work as a volunteer.

Now I’ve not seen his work, and at the moment I can’t offer him some work myself. But if you would like to offer him some paid translation work, drop me a line and I will put you in contact.

I’d recommend that any such work starts with a  page or two, and see how that goes, before committing to a large project.  I generally find that I have to guide my translators a bit in matters of style!

Here are some excerpts (with his permission) from his letter.  I certainly will get him doing some Ephraem Graecus once things settle down here!

 I am very happy to see that you have turned your attention to Ephraem Graecus, since translating, producing critical editions of, and ascertaining the authenticity, authorship, dating, and doctrinal content of these works is a career goal of mine (an overwhelming task, I know).

In October 2017… I was asked by a philosophy professor at Christendom to deliver the first ever extracurricular, academic student lecture in the college’s history, which I did on the topic of Mary as Mediatrix of all graces in the previously untranslated hymns of Ephraem Graecus (the last time a major study was conducted on that topic was by J.M. Bover in 1926!).

Moreover, in May 2018, my college awarded me the William H. Marshner Award for Outstanding Senior Thesis, in exchange for my 146-page thesis on the cult of Mary and the saints, which included 295 citations from the Fathers which I personally translated from the Latin and Greek. A large amount of the research was in the area of Ephraem Graecus (42 citations of the 295).

…I am a volunteer Greek translator for Oxford University’s Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity Project. … I’d like to find a paid job in the area of Patristic translation/research.  … Would you happen to know of any scholars/professors in need of a translator or assistant?

I would add that … I am fluent in both Classical and Ecclesiastical Latin. Accordingly, the “ad” should probably say “Greek and/or Latin Patristics.” In fact, I am more than comfortable doing translations of any Latin texts from any time period – I have experience translating Classical, Patristic, Medieval, and Early Modern works -, though Christian texts would be preferable to me.

Contact him via my form here.

Update (March 2019): The gentleman has now gone silent, so I’m guessing that he is otherwise engaged.

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Memories of the polemical and literary activity of Earl Doherty

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Few today will have heard the name of Earl Doherty.  But in the late 90s and early 2000s, if you were one of those posting online in the religion groups in Usenet news, you would inevitably encounter some atheist gleefully parotting his theories.

Doherty was a Canadian atheist, who used the nascent internet to push the claim that Jesus never existed.  Doubtless he found this in long-forgotten intellectually disreputable atheist literature.  But the popularity of the claim among online teenage atheists is entirely his work.  Others would come later, but he was the first.

Doherty has faded from the internet in the last decade.  His Wikipedia page gives his date of birth as 1941, which would make him very elderly now.  So my own memories of his activity are therefore historical data now.

He started with a website, jesuspuzzle.org.  This contained his theory, in the form of a series of pages or essays, all of them written with the utmost certainty.  The original versions could be pretty crude.  The Christian apologist J.P.Holding attacked them fiercely.  His essay on Minucius Felix, reflecting very outdated views on his priority to Tertullian, came to my notice through postings on usenet.  I felt obliged to add a page to my site debunking them.

Doherty’s response to these attacks was always the same.  He would use the material supplied by his critics to improve his material.  He never changed his mind, or withdrew his claim, but instead he would edit or reword parts of the essay to blunt the criticism or make the objection irrelevant.  In the meantime he would trade angry responses with critics in the online forums, often resorting to ad hominem arguments or insults.

I remember watching this process in progress.  It came to me then that, rather than achieving anything, J.P. Holding was effectively acting as an editor, helping Doherty make his book more convincing.  I had no desire to do the same, so I did not engage much with Doherty.

At the end of this, he worked up his material into a book, The Jesus Puzzle: Challenging the existence of an historical Jesus.  This has a copyright of 1999, and doubtless appeared at that time.

The book was very well received by those at whom it was aimed.  The prose was immensely convincing.  I remember reading it, and I had to step back in one passage, put the claim made into my own words – rhetoric is a means of persuasion, I was reminded – and sanity-check it.  The song of the words lulled and convinced many.

Doherty continued to work.  But somehow he became less important.  Newer peddlars of the same idea such as Acharya S gained notoriety, and publicised themselves.  The claim itself was nonsense, but it enjoyed quite a vogue.  Doherty published a revised version of his book in the mid-2000s, but nobody noticed.  Other publications likewise failed to attract attention.  He was, by this time, yesterday’s man.  His task was done. I believe he last published in 2009.  I have not seen him online since before that.

He did some real harm.  Online atheists were always noxious, but few believed that Jesus never existed until he came along.  He helped to add nonsense and misinformation to the internet.

His influence on history online, insofar as lay with him, was entirely baleful.  The book’s influence on the lives of others was also pernicious.  Even atheists such as Richard Carrier, who held an ancient history degree, might have remained sane longer were this theory not around to lead them into nonsense.  I would imagine that a few teenagers were induced to abandon a good upbringing and indulge in the horrid vices of our period under the influence of his claims.

On the positive side, the whole school of “Jesus myth” that he founded doubtless stirred many of us to look at the data, and think out clearly how we know what we know about antiquity.

The school seems to be  fading in influence now; searches on Twitter for atheism show a raggle-taggle lot.  No doubt some other craze will arise.

Yesterday I found a copy of his book on my shelves.  I bought it for reference on the 16th May 2002, from a bookseller in this country.  Atheists like Doherty or Acharya S often cynically responded to critics with “you haven’t read my book”.  In those days there no PDFs around, so I thought that it would be useful to have on-hand.  But, unknown to me, it was already fading in influence.  I don’t think that I ever used it.  So for 16 years it has occupied space in my house.  No longer: I converted it to a PDF last night.

Sic transit gloria mundi.  So too passes every nonsense of fashion, to become dust, merely material for the musings of antiquarians.

    *    *    *    *

Let us also remember this man in his old age, forgotten as he now is.  His life work was nothing or worse.  In the end he was only a tool for the enemy of all mankind.  May he find God, and find mercy.  Amen.

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