AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | More Reckoning: A Response

I want to start by expressing my immense gratitude to all of you for being here—to the audience members who made it to the end of the conference in one piece and got here this morning, to the organizing committees for the two program units that sponsored this session (in SBL, the Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity unity, and in AAR, the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence unit), and especially to the panelists, these starfire women who have taken the time to read my work and engage with it so thoughtfully—quite possibly the most generous gift you can give a writer. A few years ago, Andrew Jacobs and Annette Yoshiko Reed came to Ann Arbor to workshop an earlier version of the book, and when we got to the end of the workshop, I said their generosity made me feel like it was my birthday. Well, I feel like it’s my birthday all over again this morning, and thank you for coming to the party.

Let’s start with Professor Junior’s response. First, though she was trained as an expert in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism, do not let her humility fool you: she is one of the most wide-ranging intellectuals I know; her work on biblical topics is matched by books, multiple books, on modern American culture and the reception of biblical characters. You may have already come across her book from this year, Reimagining Hagar, but also keep an eye out for the next one, on the reception of Samson, which engages critical issues of race and disability in American culture.

The primary portable argument of my book is that the specific things we anticipate in the future, for ourselves and for others, shape the way we act, for ourselves and for others. The years during which I wrote this book were years when – thanks to better phones with good cameras and the broad reach of social media – the police violence that Black people had long experienced and testified to became widely visible for consumption in video evidence. Still and moving images of Black people being harassed, assaulted, and murdered by the police made it very hard for non-Black audiences to continue their pattern of discounting Black experience. The mass of video evidence also makes the foundation of the problem obvious: so much of police violence is based on an anticipatory imagination. By that I mean both the spectacular, in the moment imagination which allows a police officer to tell himself that instead of a person he is seeing a threat, a giant, a hulk, a demon, and the more creative imagination that comes afterward, often for exculpatory purposes. “I feared for my life” seems to be the magic phrase. That process of imagining Black people as threatening, and its hard disconnect from reality, are underscored by the widespread documentation of Black death—a realization that comes at the cost of replaying those deaths, sometimes over and over again, in the media, which ends up reinforcing another kind of anticipation: the fear and terror that Black people rightly feel at the prospect of an encounter with the police, itself a violence, occurring long before any encounter has happened.

Professor Junior’s response highlights how Black people are both aware of that violence and also work to subvert it, to control and minimize its effects in advance. This is a far more active kind of anticipation than even I could track in my book. As she points out, Black people thinking about their future deaths at the hands of the police are “not concerned about how they will be judged by God in the afterlife, but by the media.” The hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown renders this problem starkly: posters show two pictures of themselves to point out how the images usually chosen to represent victims of police violence work, as if to show some kind of threat present throughout the victim’s life. But, when you go to the hashtag and scroll through the pictures, the supposedly threating pictures reveal something else: you see people hanging out, having a good time, partying, posing to look cool or look tough, wearing comfortable and stylish clothes, hamming it up, even in costume. The point of the hashtag is to compare these pictures with others of the same people: in uniform, at church or school or work. That comparison demonstrates a failure of the imagination, not on the part of the people who post the images, but on the part of the media and its audience, its white audience, who usually consume them. We can see a man in a suit, red-faced, emotional, yelling and at times crying, and still assume that he has an important future, one we should all entrust with a great deal of power; we can watch as a young blond woman yells and screams and attacks a car, watch as she shaves all that blond hair from her head, and we quickly parse it as a mental health issue (after we gossip a bit about it).

But Britney and Brett are not Michael and Trayvon and Sandra and Eric. They are white, and images of even their most harrowing moments inspire white audiences to think of their futures, their potential, and their need for protection, care, and redress. The fact that even the most pedestrian photographs of Black people are understood as somehow pre-proving their supposed criminality, the rightness of their treatment at the hands of the police, is a result of the future that white culture has trained the police, the media, and yes, us, to anticipate for them. That trajectory of anticipation is what I see artist Joel Thompson attempting to alter with his project. By taking the last words of men killed by the police and putting them into the template of the Seven Last Words of Jesus, he is telling us that these were men with a future. Which is to say Thompson is granting them their full humanity by associating them with the divinity of Christ. That should never have been necessary, but it is, and here we are, reframing the precious last words of men who did not deserve to die.

Constance Furey also treated the power of last words in her response to my book. Professor Furey actually helped me with some of my first words; she was one of my early graduate school teachers and I believe the first person for whom I wrote a real piece of research, an analysis of an untranslated memoir of sorts from an early modern Italian woman. And, Professor Furey was among the first to help me understand the role of rhetoric in written historical sources—namely, that the sources that survive are often as much about the business of creating a portrait of their author or some character in them than they are about immediate documentation of an event or agent. So, it is a special gift to have her take the insights of the first chapter of my book and look through them at the “record” created of Martin Luther’s death. Written after the fact, that record confirms what one might expect, that the man who invested so much power in words was recorded as saying the appropriate words during his last hours. Justas Jonas’s account can be taken as a realistic representation, but realism is not a guarantee of the real. Indeed, the value we have placed on the nature of a person’s death has bent the vessel of the death report, such that none should see a document reporting a predictably appropriate death as anything more than a literary exposition. It could have happened that way, but such a text survives because it was supposed to happen that way. Luther’s death, as reported, did what many important men’s death accounts have done: it passed on a patrimony that confirmed his particular vision of the world. In this register, we are on a very, very different plane from the last words of contemporary Black men captured in the moment and memorialized in Joel Thompson’s art. In fact, those last words work to the opposite effect, as they show just how devalued, rather than valued, those men were, stripped of their dignity and their patrimony, going unrecognized as human beings.

Professor Furey draws attention to how I describe the individual conceptualized in this trend of early Christian culture, namely, as “generic.” I chose that word because I wanted to be clear: I don’t think I can access any individual Christians from antiquity, or what they may have experienced. I wanted to signal that I was speaking of a construction, rather than some person in reality, because that construction may have shaped how lives were lived, but definitely shaped how power was exercised. The prospect that the generic individual was genre-related did not occur to me in the writing of the book, but now that I look back, I realize that of course it is. What Christians writers imagined a person to be was determined, in many ways, by the stories and forms in which they had been trained. So, that is a happy coincidence, and it’s a vein that in fact I am working in my current project: a series of essays that survey the intersection between late ancient formal epistemology and poetics. The essays will explore the multiple ways that late ancient people were not quite recognized as what they were, when people were not what they seemed.

I’m grateful to Laura Nasrallah for drawing attention to the epigram for the book, because it highlights that there is more than one story that could be told, and that we make the choice to tell the one we do. The largest part of history writing is making the choice of the narrative that we offer. When Hayden White said that, it was a limit and a loss; I mean it here as freedom. We can choose to prioritize the questions we want to answer and the sources we want to explore. To me, the historical record from the time period we study is so limited, so narrow, that anything that survives is a precious resource; any late ancient source is a source about late antiquity. That is the motivating factor for a consistent part of my scholarship: my choices about whom to include and whom to relegate to a side role. I do it because it is what I choose, but I also do it so that you, too, can choose, in what you are writing.

Professor Nasrallah asked, among her final questions, how the focus on the generic individual’s death came about in so many places at the same time in the fourth and fifth centuries. The answer is, at heart, political. After the legitimization of Christianity and the imperial support that followed, men of a certain background were leading churches and coming into a new situation of rhetorical performance: they were speaking on topics, a lot, and they were doing it on a schedule. Scholarship about the format of the sermon in early Christianity often draws a continuous line between the earliest centuries of the movement and later antiquity, and of course, men in the first few centuries of Christianity did speak on topics. But the homily or sermon as a public event was an institution of the landed and imperially supported church, and thus it is different in kind and in number from whatever texts we might locate in that genre that were written before the fourth century. The sermon is a post-legitimization phenomenon, and who was performing the sermon? Men who had learned and been trained for speaking. These men did approach death in other ways, surely, even in their sermons; you can see this in the dossier of sermons on the topic of the good death, or in the advice preachers gave about how to think about a better life after this one. But, when these men wanted their discussions of death to be striking, to be moving, they returned to their training, in which they had practiced manipulating perspective and voice to make dire and terrifying situations realistic, memorable, and personal. The larger point here is that the way we are trained really matters; it is what we return to under pressure. If you have kids and have done anything at all to get them into a “good” school, a “good” teacher’s classroom, into lessons they weren’t interested in—you agree. It was the training in composition that all these men relied on that brought them to a common approach to death. That’s a strange thing to say: that a large part of the Christian imaginary about death, and thus Christian theology, was determined by the patterns of a composition exercise, but that is the argument in the book.

Professor Nasrallah says that the primary theoretical interlocutors in the book are Foucault and Hadot. Let me put a finer point on that: Foucault and Hadot are among the men that I am correcting. Their perspective on the anticipation of death among Christians was artificially narrow, relying almost exclusively on what elite men assigned themselves to practice when they arrived at the pinnacle of the education system reserved for them. Thus, what they say about practices like preparing for death represents only one part of the late ancient world, and since I have a wider grasp of both the diversity within the tradition and the full range of the evidence in its record, I have a wider perspective. Their work, though, reiterates in a strange way my earlier point: in focusing just on a few texts of high philosophical culture and asceticism, on the “classics,” both Foucault and Hadot reveal the stamp of their earlier training. Like many theorists we rely on and feel responsible to address, they dip into a few texts of early Christianity because they have been taught those texts are part of a procession that led to “Western culture,” which is what they are aiming to explain. The actual interlocutors for the book are much closer to the ancient world: talking with Mira Balberg as I wrote this book and she worked on her book on sacrifice texts in rabbinic literature helped me see the importance of looking at texts and genres that have been dismissed as frivolous or unofficial; reading both Heidi Marx and Heidi Wendt on the creation of knowledge and the sustenance of the power that comes with expertise was a very good thing to do while I thought through the issues in this book, though I was working in an entirely different area. Knowing the work of these scholars makes me both grateful for what I have learned from them and at the same time optimistic about taking on new projects, because I am sure to find similarly excellent and inventive readers as I go down new paths.

Ellen Muehlberger is professor of Christianity in late antiquity in the departments of Middle East Studies and History at the University of Michigan.