Today I want to talk to you about Elephantine Papyri but first allow me to share with you this rather lengthy introductory parable.
Imagine you are a member of an extended family. In your family you have a shared family story handed down from generation to generation and part of this lore is also an old photo album. It is called “The Album”.
You remember sitting with your grannie paging with her through all those old pictures and stories, naming people, remembering memories; here is uncle so and so, and this is great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War, this is a grandfather’s maternal cousin whose farm burned down to ground, and this is a great uncle who was a supreme court judge in some European country, this distant aunt married to a builder of a famous viaduct, and here is paternal nephew, he was a clergy and became famous missionary. All well documented in ancient sepia pictures and labeled with names and dates, organized into an easy flowing and persuasive family narrative.
You even received your own copy of The Album when coming of age. It is a true family heirloom. The Album records occasional trauma, but nothing really troubling, mostly it is a real source of family pride. Few minor glitches can be blamed on history, times and customs were different. All in all The Album shows and teaches deep and generally commendable family roots.
But then, while cleaning an attic of a family residence a large box of ancient correspondence and documents surfaced. Those ancient documents were written in difficult cursives and in several languages. It took some efforts to decipher and even years later it is still not fully finished.
First you noticed names, events and dates you knew from The Album, but then things started to become ever more complicated. Not everything can be put together neatly and there is no easy and simple narrative anymore. Family history is turning into something substantially different and so complicated! You realize that The Album, your family album is largely just storytelling. Some events clearly happened quite differently and some might not even have taken place at all.
You also realize that the storytelling hiccups and gaps in The Album can be often explained with the documents from the box, just like some of the palpable tensions around this or that uncle and many of those annoying family taboos and strange behaviours can also now be explained.
Reaction among the wider circle of relatives was quite diverse and divided. Some relatives threw the entire photo album into the recycling bin stating they always thought grannie was making things up and that it is all just babbling of a senile old woman irrelevant for their modern lives.
Other relatives, on the other hand, became all agitated. They made the album into a real shibboleth. In their part of the family children still memorize The Album and are made to swear on the veracity of every single picture and name. In their family branch everything is measured by The Album and its assumed lessons. The Album, thus divorced from any history and reality, is used to push some extreme agendas.
And you are in the middle of it. You love the old Album. You respect your grannie and her story as much as you are now aware that much of it was just fabulation. There are lessons to be learned from grannie’s Album just as there are lessons to be learned from the documents which surfaced in the attic.
Even more importantly, there are truly deep insights to be learned on the intersection between The Album and the archive, deep insights and appreciation for the family history and for grannie with all her complexes, great insights for your own self-understanding and understanding of the world.
I can imagine you can relate to this parable. We all know different aspects and parts from our own families. But I wrote this parable about the Bible (the Album) the church (the grannie-representation of institutionalized religious memory) and about documents uncovered by archeologists, anthropologists and theologians in the last one hundred years or so. Sholars found many old archives and archeological records which are complicating the shared lore. Today we will talk specifically about Elephantine Papyri ....
Imagine you are a member of an extended family. In your family you have a shared family story handed down from generation to generation and part of this lore is also an old photo album. It is called “The Album”.
You remember sitting with your grannie paging with her through all those old pictures and stories, naming people, remembering memories; here is uncle so and so, and this is great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War, this is a grandfather’s maternal cousin whose farm burned down to ground, and this is a great uncle who was a supreme court judge in some European country, this distant aunt married to a builder of a famous viaduct, and here is paternal nephew, he was a clergy and became famous missionary. All well documented in ancient sepia pictures and labeled with names and dates, organized into an easy flowing and persuasive family narrative.
You even received your own copy of The Album when coming of age. It is a true family heirloom. The Album records occasional trauma, but nothing really troubling, mostly it is a real source of family pride. Few minor glitches can be blamed on history, times and customs were different. All in all The Album shows and teaches deep and generally commendable family roots.
But then, while cleaning an attic of a family residence a large box of ancient correspondence and documents surfaced. Those ancient documents were written in difficult cursives and in several languages. It took some efforts to decipher and even years later it is still not fully finished.
First you noticed names, events and dates you knew from The Album, but then things started to become ever more complicated. Not everything can be put together neatly and there is no easy and simple narrative anymore. Family history is turning into something substantially different and so complicated! You realize that The Album, your family album is largely just storytelling. Some events clearly happened quite differently and some might not even have taken place at all.
You also realize that the storytelling hiccups and gaps in The Album can be often explained with the documents from the box, just like some of the palpable tensions around this or that uncle and many of those annoying family taboos and strange behaviours can also now be explained.
Reaction among the wider circle of relatives was quite diverse and divided. Some relatives threw the entire photo album into the recycling bin stating they always thought grannie was making things up and that it is all just babbling of a senile old woman irrelevant for their modern lives.
Other relatives, on the other hand, became all agitated. They made the album into a real shibboleth. In their part of the family children still memorize The Album and are made to swear on the veracity of every single picture and name. In their family branch everything is measured by The Album and its assumed lessons. The Album, thus divorced from any history and reality, is used to push some extreme agendas.
And you are in the middle of it. You love the old Album. You respect your grannie and her story as much as you are now aware that much of it was just fabulation. There are lessons to be learned from grannie’s Album just as there are lessons to be learned from the documents which surfaced in the attic.
Even more importantly, there are truly deep insights to be learned on the intersection between The Album and the archive, deep insights and appreciation for the family history and for grannie with all her complexes, great insights for your own self-understanding and understanding of the world.
I can imagine you can relate to this parable. We all know different aspects and parts from our own families. But I wrote this parable about the Bible (the Album) the church (the grannie-representation of institutionalized religious memory) and about documents uncovered by archeologists, anthropologists and theologians in the last one hundred years or so. Sholars found many old archives and archeological records which are complicating the shared lore. Today we will talk specifically about Elephantine Papyri ....
 |
| Picture of today's village on Elephantine Island. |
No comments:
Post a Comment