Correspondence

Shakespearean Travesty

SIR: Three cheers for Michael Connor’s review (November 2012) of the Bell Shakespeare production of its version of Moliere’s School for Wives and more generally, the output of Bell Shakespeare itself.

My wife and I watched in disbelief Bell Shakespeare’s much touted production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Never had we seen Shakespeare so badly presented: the text was murdered, the set was ludicrous, the production and direction were a mystery and the acting was below high school standards. But it was politically correct, which was never a Shakespearean vision.

That Bell Shakespeare is heavily subsidised and is presented at schools as “relevant” Shakespeare is a travesty of theatre and literature.

Andrew Green
via e-mail

Consistency in the Gospels

SIR: It is obvious that Samuel Beaux in his criticism of Peter Barclay (Letters, September and November 2012) has not read fully the New Testament. With reference to the words spoken by the Angel to the three women in Mark’s Gospel, he said “they would see Christ in Galilee just as He had told them just before He died” (Matthew 28). Jesus then appeared to the Apostles in Jerusalem and told them to preach the good news to everyone. The Apostles then journeyed to Galilee and He appeared at the edge of the Sea of Galilee when they were fishing just offshore (Luke 24) and thereafter many times over the next forty days to about 500 people (1 Corinthians 15:1–8). There is no contradiction between the different accounts and the matter of 100 kilometres between Jerusalem and Galilee if you read the whole carefully. The Apostles and their followers walked to and fro from Jerusalem to Bethany and many villages and the Galilee area. In those days people walked long distances and no doubt were not as obese as our generation.

As to Mr Beaux’s opinion of Peter Barclay’s religious propaganda and lack of real evidence, I suggest he read the life story of Dr Alexis Carrel, who was responsible for the basic research necessary for today’s heart bypass operations. He journeyed to Lourdes to prove the falsehoods of reported miracles but found to his dismay two immediate cures, which he tried to attribute to some quality in the water in which the sick were bathed. Only on his deathbed did he convert to Christianity. Or perhaps Mr Beaux should read the press reports of 1917 of the incredible happenings at Fatima in Portugal seen by nearly 100,000 people.

Peter Couttie
Portland, Vic

SIR: Peter Barclay is obviously entitled to hold whatever beliefs he chooses. He cannot expect to go unchallenged, however, when he uses articles in and letters to a magazine such as Quadrant to make false claims in support of those beliefs.

In his latest letter (December 2012) he claims that Mark did not say that the risen Jesus would first appear to the disciples in Galilee. Barclay is right, but only to the extent that those very words were not used. The actual wording of the author of Mark was that the young man/angel at the empty tomb told the women they should tell the disciples that “He [the risen Jesus] is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”

Apparently Barclay believes this message is consistent with the claim made by the author of Luke that the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples that very night in Jerusalem and told them not to leave the city until the coming of the Holy Spirit (approximately fifty days later).

The inconsistency is even more striking if one reads the Gospel of Matthew. Its author claims that the disciples did go to Galilee, and saw the risen Jesus “on the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. There they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

Surely the imagined High Court of Sir Edward Clarke would have trouble reconciling all these accounts even if Barclay himself does not. Did Jesus really tell the disciples to go to Galilee and to stay in Jerusalem? Did the disciples see the risen Jesus both in Jerusalem and on the mountain and some still doubt?

The truth is that the gospel accounts are contradictory, even on such important details as the first appearance of the risen Jesus. They reflect different versions of the Jesus story which were passed on orally and in writing during the decades after Jesus’s death. This is the way legends are formed, not necessarily the way accurate history is written. 

Samuel Beaux
Neutral Bay, NSW

The Personhood Case

SIR: The personhood case used to justify infanticide and to determine a conjectured starting point for persons worthy of being treated as equivalent to an adult person is fallacious in my view. At its core there is a serious flaw that is rather obvious if one looks at the argument from a different point of view.

As Andrew Errington (Decem­ber 2012) says, “The implication of Giubilini and Minera’s position … is that it is indeed true that a someone emerges out of something, and returns to a something after a certain point.” When one changes the perspective with which one looks at this and thinks of it from our adult perspective and applies this situation to ourselves as adults then the implication is that “I” did not come into existence at conception, “I” came into existence when I attained the property of personhood. Following on from the quote, “I” can also become something else again in old age or at some point along the way to death. My concrete existence is tenuous, even non-existent. My singularity, my unity is destroyed, my existence is uncertain because at one point I do not exist (yet my body does exist!) and at another point I do, and yet I may change again and not exist. I think a further consequence of the position is that I cannot know whether I really exist with certainty. I can know my body has an unbroken existence from conception to death but the “psyche” is uncertain. That seems a logical consequence of the position. The psyche is a fleeting something connected to nothing in particular. This is referred to by Errington: “If you become ‘someone’ from ‘something’ then the moral significance of ‘someone-ness’ (personhood) is annulled.” So the argument from personhood results in an absurd position, I cannot be sure of my existence.

For Christians there is another reason why the personhood debate cannot be accepted. Christ was conceived in Mary’s womb. Following the logic of the personhood debate, the real Jesus did not come into existence at that point, it was only later when he could meet the criteria for personhood. But a fundamental doctrine of the Church is that Christ was both God and man, he embodied a Divine Nature and a Human Nature. In the early church it was much debated as to whether he assumed or adopted his Divine Nature at some stage in his growth to adulthood. If the personhood argument is accepted then the blob of cells in Mary’s womb at some point became fully human and fully divine by adoption of that blob of cells. But in reality his divine nature was present in that transformed egg in Mary’s womb, fully human and fully divine, in that conceptus, and it was not just a cell that was neither human nor divine.

In the debate over personhood the bioethicists are saying we adopted our bodies as well.

Desmond K. O’Toole
Rous Mill, NSW