One of the most puzzling feature of Christ in Egypt is that it presents an apparently rigorous critique of Christian origins and context, but somehow fails to attract the attention of contemporary philosophy and theology. In this thread I want to explore the philosophical dimension of Murdock’s argument that Christianity emerged as a variant of older mythology, in order to argue that this material has wide ramifications that deserve to be a part of mainstream cultural dialogue.
Part of the problem of contemporary scholarship is that different disciplines and schools of thought have formed into camps which do not engage with each other. This problem is noted in Christ in Egypt, which is a very interdisciplinary work, straddling theology, archaeology, philosophy, astronomy and history, each of which now inhabits one or more separate academic silos. Just within philosophy, we have the materialist school of Anglo-American logical analysis, grounded in the eighteenth century empiricist tradition of which David Hume is an exemplar. Scientific atheism, such as the work of Richard Dawkins, stands within this tradition. There is also another big school known as Continental philosophy, whose roots are more in the textual analytic methods of scholastic theology, but generally rejecting dogma in favour of a method called phenomenology, after the motto of Edmund Husserl ‘to the things themselves.’
Murdock’s approach, I will argue here, draws primarily from the Continental textual method, but in a way that is not made explicit. Exploring these philosophical foundations can, I hope, help to show the coherence and importance of the argument in Christ in Egypt.
Continental philosophy today is closely associated with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, with his method known as ‘deconstruction’. The wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction presents a very good summary of this philosophy. The quotes here are taken from this page, with my comments using it as a reference to draw out the logical vision of Christ in Egypt.
As a preliminary though, I would like to mention a problem that I have had with reading Derrida, apart from his often florid obscurity. This is the problem of cultural relativism, the idea that ideas are validated by their cultural tradition, so that contradictory claims can both be true when they sit within rival narrative frameworks. I am enough of a fan of David Hume to find cultural relativism logically incoherent, and I don’t think Derrida himself was relativist in any strong sense, although many of his postmodern followers are. The challenge posed is for a respect for textual diversity to also respect the unity of truth as understood by science.
‘Abbau’, literally ‘unbuild’, means to look at the narrative of a tradition and analyse how that tradition embeds delusory fantasies. Heidegger used it to deconstruct the history of philosophy, claiming there is a dominant theory, especially seen in Descartes, that has built up a theory of truth that equates truth to concept rather than actuality. Heidegger sought to deconstruct Cartesian logic by showing that the method of the cogito, ‘I think therefore I am’, is incompatible with knowledge of the world and human existence.Deconstruction is a term introduced in 1967 by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His purpose was to translate and adapt Martin Heidegger's German word Destruktion or Abbau to his own ends.
'Historicising the tradition' is precisely what Murdock attempts to do with Christianity. To ‘historicize’ means to place in context, to attempt to understand the ideas of a tradition against the historical evidence of the situation in which it emerged. The massive parallels and proximity between Christian and Egyptian myth justify the hypothesis that Christianity primarily evolved as a mutation of Egyptian ideas. The deconstructive method looks at how a tradition blocks our access to the reality of its origins, which science tells us are always evolutionary rather than magical. For example, Christianity practiced such 'blocking' by burning all pagan texts, demolishing pagan institutions, building and art, and outlawing critical ideas as heresy and blasphemy. Murdock suggests that a primary motive for this conduct was to conceal the truth of Christian origins in myth.Heidegger's word was used in the sense of historicize the tradition, its categories and concepts, overcoming its blocks to our access to its primordial 'sources'.
Here the French floridity comes out, and I must apologize to readers who find this insufferably obscure. If I can try to translate into simpler terms, Derrida says that cultural traditions grow by a process akin to geological sedimentation, with new layers continually piling up over the course of time. The implication is that a tradition acquires its own internal logic, what Derrida terms ‘logos’, and what we could call a rationalization for its beliefs. He argues that metaphysics is inseparable from such rationalization.The first book in which Derrida talks about deconstruction is Of Grammatology (1967). The first passage ever mentioning it says another word for it is "de-sedimentation," particularly in an historical sense. It reads: The "rationality" [...] which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, [defining writing as all that gives rise to an inscription in general, including pictorial, musical, sculptural "writing"] no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God's infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense.
But the rationality of deconstruction ‘no longer issues from a logos’, in that it seeks an objective understanding of cultural formation, looking at cultural sediments just as geologists look at physical sediments to understand the age of the earth and its processes of formation. It remains to be seen whether such objective rationality is possible in the cultural sphere, or if we are inevitably caught within the sediments of tradition. Taking such rational deconstruction as an ideal goal of philosophy, it seems Murdock makes a big step along the path of examining Christianity outside the constraints of its own logos by questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ and showing how the doctrine of Christ grew in sedimentary fashion.
This idea of the genealogy of concepts, asserting that ideas have an evolving lineage just as parents and children do, also requires that 'family secrets' be revealed, that hidden taboos be explored in order to deconstruct the real motives and incentives within the tradition, as distinct from the stated motives that the tradition has constructed for its own purposes. Derrida’s observation that tradition tends to conceal and forbid things that reveal its nature is central to the hypothesis of Christ in Egypt regarding conventional Christianity.In 1972 Derrida remarked the historical aspect of deconstruction: To "deconstruct" philosophy [...] would be to think – in the most faithful, interior way – the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine – from a certain exterior [...] – what this history has been able to conceal or forbid.
This idea of the abyss, taken from Heidegger, is essential to deconstruction. Traditional rationalisation finds the idea that life is ultimately meaningless to be abhorrent, and so imagines a vision of divine purpose that provides simple comforting answers. For Christianity, the idea that ‘Jesus saves’ is a source of immense reassurance that faith connects us to an absolute reality. Indeed, absolution means becoming absolutely reconciled and forgiven through ritual.Derrida: I tried to work out - in particular in the three works published in 1967 - what was in no way meant to be a system but rather a sort of strategic device, opening its own abyss, an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing.
However, as Murdock shows, there is no evidence that Jesus lived, so the traditional idea of Christ as an incarnation of God is absolute fantasy. This recognition that Christianity is baseless leaves us with the bleak abyss of a meaningless universe, unless the deconstruction of the Christian narrative is able to provide a new and bigger sense of meaning that is somehow grounded in objective observation. Recognising the very longstanding presence of Christian ideas within mythology can be a start on this process of rescuing us from the abyss.
Does modern society devalue writing? I think so. In Christ in Egypt, we read of how dogmatic Christianity engaged in furious elimination of texts that challenged its simple myth. Rather than its asserted ground in the word of Christ, Christianity found its ground in the institutional power of the priesthood, in ritual authority. As such, Christianity was able to ruthlessly suppress older ideas that relied on writing for their life. What we see is that once a dogmatic conformity takes hold, it is proof against all logic.Derrida said the devaluation of writing is an ancestral bias that was born with Western civilization itself, and remains crucial in modern culture, including science. In fact, the unmasking of the "devaluation of writing" (and the way in which it has "sedimented" in our culture in the course of history), was a key topic in Derrida's work, that proved fruitful not only in the deconstruction of classics of philosophy and the "socio-historical totality" of our civilization, but also for the deconstruction of texts of the most modern social sciences (linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis), and even contemporary texts alleged to be scientific. Everywhere in these texts, the devaluation of writing showed to be "insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive," and "the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees."
What Derrida calls an "insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive” sign of long-standing constraints can readily be seen in the hostile critical reception by apologists to Murdock’s work. Christian apologists are not interested in logic or evidence because the authority of their tradition is of key emotional importance.
Dogmatism is the denial of context, the refusal to analyse how Christianity emerged from prior religious concepts. Deconstructing Christianity means placing it in its real historical context. Considering the vigorous censorship exercised towards all ideas that challenged the incarnational monotheism of the Christian trinity, it becomes very apparent that comparing Christianity to Egyptian religion is a fertile method to contextualise, and therefore deconstruct, contemporary Christian faith.Derrida: One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.