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Doubt, our modern Crown of Thorns
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2016
Abstract
This essay uses T. E. Lawrence's characterization of doubt as ‘our modern crown of thorns’, as an entrée into thinking through the coincidence of doubt and faith in the four canonical gospels. However much each of the gospels may wish to induce faith, it leaves its readers with the distinct impression that doubt, understood differently in each, cannot be fully dispelled. The gospels thereby testify to a lively, ancient appreciation for the irrepressibility of doubt. This essay then turns to the problem of scepticism in modern philosophy. In his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell suggests that scepticism is a ‘condition’ of knowledge, both in the sense of something from which we suffer as if from a chronic illness, and in the sense of that which makes knowledge possible at all. The reader is invited to think of the dialectics of doubt and faith in a similar way, of doubt as the very condition of faith.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 437 - 455
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016
Footnotes
I wish to thank Michael Ennis for his indispensable research assistance at the very beginning and end of my writing this essay. I should also like to thank the editors of Studies in Church History and the anonymous reviewers for their keen and critical comments, which I have tried to answer and incorporate.
References
1 Charles M. Stang, ‘Doubting Thomas, Restaged: Between Athens and Berlin’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2013, 41–50.
2 The so-called ‘Oxford Text’, completed in 1922, and recently made available in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The Complete 1922 Text, ed. Jeremy Wilson (Salisbury, 2003).
3 The so-called ‘Subscribers’ Edition’, published as a private edition in 1926 by the George Doran Publishing Company, and then again more widely by Cape, Jonathan in 1935: Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London, 1935), 38Google Scholar.
4 Ibid.
5 <http://www.history.ac.uk/ehsoc/event/2014–15-conferences-doubting-christianity-church-and-doubt>, accessed 27 July 2015.
6 Historia from historeō, meaning ‘to inquire’: see Benardete, Seth, Herodotean Inquiries (The Hague, 1969)Google Scholar. I should also acknowledge that I have quite intentionally not buttressed my inquiry into doubt with notes and citations from the vast deposit of secondary literature on New Testament resurrection narratives or on the problem of scepticism in modern philosophy.
7 The acronym title ‘INRI’ appears only in the Gospel of John; Jesus is crowned with thorns in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, but not in the Gospel of Mark.
8 I recognize that each of the four canonical gospels has a different interpretation of the passion, crucifixion, glorification and resurrection of Christ. When I write, ‘For the canonical gospels’, I might be accused of obscuring those differences. But here I am taking up a retrospective, harmonizing perspective on the four different narratives – the sort of harmonizing perspective I think Lawrence is also taking up.
9 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the New Testament follow the Revised Standard Version.
10 For a judicious summary, see Marcus, Joel, Mark 8–16 (New Haven, CT, 2009), 1088–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Most, Glenn, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have found Most's readings of all four gospels fresh and insightful, and his influence can be seen in my own approach in this essay.
12 Ibid. 26.
13 Ibid. 26–7.
14 Ibid. 26.
15 See footnote 27.
16 Compare with Luke 24: 38–43: ‘And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.’ The question here is whether the risen Jesus is showing his hands and feet so as to show the wounds from his crucifixion (but curiously, not the side wound), or whether he is offering up his body as proof of his corporeality. François Bovon favours the former interpretation: ‘In the episode of the doubting Thomas, the fourth evangelist dots the “i”. By looking and touching, the disciple wants to find the print of the nails (John 20: 25). Without explicitly saying so, Luke wants to achieve the same result. The feet and hands must bear the marks that reveal an identity’: Bovon, , Luke, 3: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 19: 28 – 24: 53 (Minneapolis, MN, 2012), 391Google Scholar.
17 See Stang, ‘Doubting Thomas, Restaged', 42–4; also Most, Doubting Thomas, 51–73.
18 Most addresses this question in the second half of his book, although he does not give due consideration to the Reformers’ fairly consistent refusal of the patristic and thereafter Roman Catholic interpretation that Thomas did in fact touch Jesus.
19 Stang, ‘Doubting Thomas, Restaged', 43.
20 This is in fact a pattern already well established in the Gospel of John, chs 1 and 4, in Jesus's exchanges with Nathanael and the Samaritan woman, respectively.
21 Some translations treat this as a statement rather than a question. There is no way to be certain either way from the Greek itself, without the interrogative particle ara or the existence of a question mark (which was not introduced into the manuscript tradition until much later). The predominant tradition treats it as a question, based largely on medieval manuscripts. My interpretation requires that we understand it as a question, because the only answer that makes sense, from Thomas's perspective at least, is ‘no’: he has believed not because he has seen and known, but because he has been seen and known. For a discussion of this verse as a statement or a question, see Barrett, C. K., The Gospel according to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (London, 1955), 573Google Scholar.
22 As it more or less states in the next two verses: ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name’ (20: 30–1).
23 See the first of Descartes’ six Meditationes de prima philosophia, first published in 1641.
24 Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York, 1979), 7, 140Google Scholar.
25 Ibid.
26 ‘When philosophers use a word—“knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?— What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, transl. G. E. M. Anscombe (2nd edn, Oxford, 1958), §116Google Scholar.
27 As cited in Cavell, Stanley, Must we Mean what we Say? (Cambridge, 1976), xxGoogle Scholar.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. xxi.
30 I have borrowed this phrase from Cavell's book on Shakespeare and scepticism, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987).
31 The quote is from Emerson's essay ‘Experience’, and serves as the epigraph to Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago, IL, 1990).
32 Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ed. Wilson, 18.
33 Lawrence, T. E., ‘The Mint’ and later Writings about Service Life (Salisbury, 2009), xxxGoogle Scholar.