16 January 2024 Mark 2:23-28
Arguments are often won by the person who gets off the best line.
American politicians have known this for some time.
“I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.” -- Abraham Lincoln
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -- FDR
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” -- John F. Kennedy
People have cherished these lines for a long time, in part because their sentiments are clearly noble and popular – charity, patriotism, generosity, courage. It is also, however, because of the elegant arrangement of the phrases that makes them balanced and memorable. All of these examples use a rhetorical device called chiasmus, a kind of parallel structure in which the second part of the line repeats in reverse order the first – ABBA. “Winners (A) never quit (B), and quitters (B) never win (A).” “Never let a fool (A) kiss you (B), or a kiss (B) fool you (A).” Chiasmus works because this kind of elegant parallelism is pleasing to the eye and the ear, and it makes lines easy to remember.
Arguments are often won by the person who gets off the best line.
A striking feature of the New Testament is that it uses chiasmus, too.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” -- Mark 2:27
“The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” -- Matthew 20:16
“Whoever who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” -- Matthew 23:12
“Love one another as I have loved you.” – John 13:34
What is striking about this is that Christianity did not begin with people who understood a thing about chiasmus. Most of them, in all probability, could neither read nor write. The New Testament, however, reached its final form within 50-60 years of the crucifixion of Jesus, and in that time it had attracted people who could not only write, but were familiar and skilled with rhetorical devices like chiasmus, and many more. Before the end of the first Christian century the church had attracted writers who could make very sophisticated arguments to people in the Roman Empire when it was at its height. By the fourth century Christianity had created St. Augustine, who along with St. Benedict largely created the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages, which created universities, which became the foundation of the Renaissance.
Over the years it has become popular at various times to belittle Christianity as unsophisticated foolishness, most recently in the early 21st century. All those times have eventually faded, and the durability of Christianity has been reaffirmed. Historian Tom Holland’s magisterial Dominion (2019) shows once again how things like universities, modern science and medicine, liberal democracy and the abolition of slavery are unthinkable apart from the thought world of Christianity: “The more years I spent in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it…. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with…were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature,’ but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past.”
Well said.
Arguments are often won by the person who gets off the best line.
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