ext_309920 ([identity profile] chimpstop.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] sophiaserpentia 2006-04-07 08:18 pm (UTC)

Tangentally, there's an old Borges' story about Judas being the actual messiah/savior/died for our sins kinda guy:

"In “Three Versions of Judas,” Borges logically proves Judas to be the Son of God as a hyperbolic way to debunk dogmatic adherence to accepted interpretations of the Gospel Story. Whereas “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” examines storytelling as it relates to literature and history, “Three Versions of Judas” addresses the relationship between storytelling and interpretation in Scripture. The story’s narrator, Nils Runeberg, begins with a parochial and fundamentalist principle in assuming that “to suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world.” This statement places Runeberg in a twentieth century religious context, where many faiths condemn slight digression from doctrine as heresy. By the logic of “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” such blind faith in the infallibility of a narrative referred to as “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” signals an immediate refusal to read Biblical history skeptically. However, Borges sets Runeberg against his time period, citing it as a mere turn of fate that “God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund.” Whereas Runeberg’s contemporaries fail to see Scripture in the light of Kilpatrick’s fictional/factual biographies, Runeberg works within the restrictions of his faith-based belief system to find alternative interpretations supported by textual evidence. Initially, Runeberg’s subscription to the notion of the malleability of textual analyses appears to supercede his reliance on religious doctrine. However, his interpretation of Scripture proceeds from the accepted doctrines of Christ’s humanity, Christ’s sacrifice and the idea that God created Christ and Man in His image. Therefore, Runeberg employs sound reason in paralleling Judas’s spiritual descent into Hell and Jesus’s physical sacrifice on the cross. By assuming that God “could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history,” Runeberg’s logic implies that God could have chosen all destinies, including Alexander, Pythagoras, Rurik, Jesus and Judas. Runeberg, however, never reaches this final step. Instead, he commits a fatal error by essentially producing an interpretation of the Gospel Story that is as rigid and incontrovertible as the one from which he proceeded."

From:

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_papers_mcgrath.html

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