Author: Roger Pearse

The demise of the Methodist central halls

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I find an article on the BBC website about the way that the Methodist Church in Britain has sold off many of its central halls.  It’s not a hostile article, and displays awareness of how important the Methodists were to the working poor in the last century. 

 It was a Methodist central hall and, in stark contrast to its recent use as a nightclub, was designed largely to try to keep the urban working classes away from alcohol.

Around 100 were built in major towns and cities across Britain between 1886 and 1945.

At the peak of the central halls’ popularity, thousands of people would pack in on Saturday nights for cheap concerts, comedy shows and films, interspersed with hymns and prayers.

At the end of the evening, attendees were often encouraged to sign a vow not to drink alcohol.

But no longer.  Most have been sold off.

One of the central halls still controlled by the Methodist Church is at Westminster. It’s an impressive building that doesn’t look out of place alongside grand structures like Westminster Abbey, and was the site of the first meeting of the general assembly of the United Nations in 1946.

Now also used as a conference centre, there was reported to be some dissent among Methodists when, in 2005, the church applied for a licence to sell alcohol on the premises.

Reverend Stephen Hatcher says that decision is recognition that the Methodist Church has had to adapt to the modern world.

“We have to recognise the kind of world we live in, lots of people drink responsibly,” he says. “We have to look at it in a balanced way.”

And that is why the Methodist Church has had to sell its halls to become taverns.  It has been so busy “recognising” the world that it serves no heavenly or earthly purpose.

This summer I spent a week at the Treloyan Manor hotel in St Ives in Cornwall.  It too was once a Methodist establishment.  There I found copies of the Methodist Recorder, which I read with some curiosity and then disbelief.  It too evidenced an organisation without a soul, that had no reason to exist any longer.  I find the following “headlines” in this week’s issue:

  • CONCERN that the “Olympic Sunday” could become the norm, with longer Sunday shopping hours continued after the Olympic and Paralympic Games, have been expressed by Church, union, retail and campaign groups.
  • A BOYS’ Brigade delegation headed by BB president the Rev the Lord Griffiths has visited the Queen at Balmoral in honour of her Diamond Jubilee.
  • AN MHA (Methodist Homes for the Aged) housing sch­eme has celebrated its 25th anniversary with a visit from the Rev the Baroness Richardson.
  • A CHRISTIAN charity has demonstrated against unmanned aerial weapons or drones outside RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Those are the concerns of the Methodist Record in August 2012.  The first of these is a legitimate concern, although part of a wider issue.  The others display parochialism and foolish politicisation.  But where in all of this is God?  Where is the concern to save the lost?  Where are the initiatives to bring Christ to a godless nation, sunk in vice and drink?  The needs remain what they always were; but meanwhile the Methodist Record tells us, as a “headline”.

A CHRISTIAN charity has demonstrated against unmanned aerial weapons or drones outside RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Members of the SPEAK network for young Christian adults held up banners highlighting the risk of civilian deaths from the remotely-controlled weapons. This was followed by a peace vigil, naming civilians who had died in recent drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Following the demonstration, protesters took part in a sponsored cycle ride to Nottingham and gave a presentation on peacemaking during the service at Lenton Methodist church.

Whether we agree with the silly-left politics or not, the point is that this is not preaching the gospel to the world, but preaching the world to the church.

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What is bad scholarship?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just carried out a Google search asking, “What is bad scholarship”?  I got a total of ten results, most duplicating one blog entry that really is about something else.

That surprises me, I must say.  In view of the silence, I thought that I, in my amateur way, would make an effort to give a personal answer to the question.  My focus is on ancient history, of course; different sections of the humanities will doubtless have slightly different perspectives.

There’s one big (but vague) generalisation we can make.  First, let’s ask just why we are doing ancient history at all.  The answer surely is as follows:

We study ancient history in order to find out what we would have seen, at a given date at a given place, had we been there; insofar as we can recover this information from the remains left behind from that time and place, which themselves may be damaged, partial, corrupt, biased or non-existent.

That gives us our first criterion of bad scholarship:

1.  Bad scholarship doesn’t care what happened in the past (although it pretends it does).  Bad scholarship is determined to convince the present of something about the past, whether it happened or not.

Curiously there are “scholars” willing to say that they don’t believe that they can ever find out what happened in the past.  If so, they have nothing to contribute.  Such people need a spell flipping burgers at MacDonalds, rather than state-funded tenure.

But of course this criterion, although true, is not very useful to us in detecting bad scholarship.  It’s more like a conclusion from a process of investigation, than a way to reach a conclusion.

Sometimes you get people say things like, “A PhD thesis must have a thesis!”  This is true — you’re supposed to be producing a piece of research that tells us something that we did not know before.  But it sometimes seems as if it is understood to mean “You must invent some novel statement about what happened in the past and then see how far you can get with it by whatever tricks you can find.”   The latter is bad scholarship.

Our first criterion does give us our next question: How do we find out what happened in the  past?  The answer is that, either whatever happened left some traces somewhere that inform us, or else we know nothing about it.  The second point leads us to our second criterion.

2.  Bad scholarship loves a void.  If we know nothing about something, it is bad scholarship to pretend that we do, or to argue that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence”.

There is, unhappily, a further stage to this particular piece of bad scholarship.  It is a standard feature of polemic that it finds evidence an inconvenience, to be got over by accusations of bias, ad hominem arguments against the sources — “they only say that because they are Catholics!” — and the like.  Of course the evidence does need evaluation before anything much can be built on it.  But:

3.  Any scholarship that consists of debunking all the evidence and then arguing that the manufactured absence of evidence is evidence of absence is not merely bad scholarship but dishonest scholarship.

Every piece of useful scholarship starts by documenting all the relevant evidence on the point at issue.  If you are publishing data, publish it.  If you are asserting that the totality of the ancient data tells us a certain story, gather all that data together and let the reader see what it says.  The more discursive the book is, the more likely that some subterfuge is involved.  Why should the reader trawl through my book to find out what the corpus of data is?

4.  Any study that is alludes to the data rather than presenting it systematically, or discusses it discursively, or otherwise intentionally makes it difficult for the reader to see what all the relevant data is, is either very badly written and structured, or, more commonly, is bad scholarship.

Of course references and context are important.

5.  If the sources do not support the argument, when examined in context, if the references are wrong or misleading or partial, that is bad scholarship.

In a way, some of the best guides to bad scholarship are books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, or Chariots of the Gods, and such like.  Not that these are festooned with references and written in the sober prose that scholars affect.  But the failures are in some ways more obvious.

6.  Bad scholarship likes to take a possibility as a certainty.  When a writer suggests that the evidence might support an idea, and some pages later has taken it for granted that his hypothesis is true and certain and at least equal to any statement made by someone there at the time, that is bad scholarship.

An indelible footprint of bad scholarship is to appeal to authority in non-technical matters.  We may believe, with reasonable certainty, that, if all the scholars who study Coptic paleography of 4th century documentary texts date a tax return to the year 345 AD, then that authority is reasonable.  But if a scholar writes something about what “all scholars” think, proposing that we should accept their authority as grounds to believe that (e.g.) Marxist economics is not true; the earth is flat (or not); Roman Catholicism is true (or false); or any statement which has no practical difference from the above, then we must immediately be on our guard.  The consensus of scholars in every discipline in every period of history and every country in the world on every controversial subject bears an uncanny resemblance to the opinions of those non-scholars who control university appointments.  So:

7.  Bad scholarship upholds the controversial political or religious views congenial to the funding authorities of the state in the time and place when the scholarship is written.

And of course:

8.  Bad scholarship controverts the controversial political or religious views unwelcome to the funding authorities of the state in the time and place when the scholarship is written.

Because good scholarship allows for these urgencies and relies on some structured methodology, rather than on the “clamour of the age”.

Note that if you publish at a secular university and agree with its agenda, that does not automatically make your work bad scholarship; nor at a Catholic university and are a practising Catholic; nor any other variant thereof.

Likewise another sign of undue credulity is a tendency to treat a theory as equivalent to data.  Data is always data, even when we decide that it does not seem to be reliable (from examining other data, of course; not from speculation on our part).

9.  Bad scholarship treats the conclusions of modern speculation as at least equivalent to the statements of ancient writers.

I do not suppose that I have exhausted the possible signs of bad scholarship, of course.  But I thought that I would offer these as a first cut at the problem.  If you are writing an article, I hope that they will help you avoid some crass pitfalls.

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The Halkin “Life of Constantine” is now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 9th century Saint’s life of Constantine the Great, known after its discoverer as the Halkin ‘Life’, was translated into English by Mark Vermes, but never published.  The translator has kindly sent me a copy, and given permission for it to appear online.  Today I did the deed, and the translation is now here.

The work is entirely fictional, of course.  It derives in a very large part from an earlier work by Alexander the Monk, who himself made use of earlier sources.  Such “history” as it contains is very shaky indeed, and derives from common Byzantine sources.

Neverthless it is good to have it accessible on the web.  Thank you, Dr Vermes.

UPDATE (29th August 2012): I find that there is a copyright issue.  This evening I came across an email a year old, from Dr. Samuel Lieu, stating that he owns the translation, that his grant paid for the production of the work, and that he hopes to get it published formally (although he can’t find his own copy; I must send him one) and so would be reluctant to have it circulate electronically.  This is all understandable, and, while the matter is resolved, I have removed it from the web.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Updated versions of the translation of the Passio Petri and Passio Pauli from the Acts of ps.Linus have arrived.  I will need to read these tonight, but they must be nearly complete, which is good news.

I have been making enquiries about the supposed existence of a third volume of Maarten Vermaseren’s CIMRM collection of inscriptions and reliefs about Mithras.  The theory is that he had composed a third volume, to contain the literary testimonies; but this was unpublished at his death.  However I am informed that this is not true; and worse, that Vermaseren gave orders before his death for all his scholarly papers to be destroyed.  I am enquiring a little further, but I suspect that CIMRM III will have to be filed with the pseudo-biblia.

I’m also interested in exploring a little whether the CIMRM can be got online.  They are, admittedly, outdated.  Plans for a supplement never came to anything.  There are scholars interested in creating some new resource, but unable to get funding.  So, as the CIMRM volumes are out of print, I wonder whether Brill would allow them to appear online?  It probably depends on finding someone friendly at Brill to ask.

 I’m still reading some of the material at the Wikipediocracy forum.   There is a book in prospect about the history of Wikipedia.  One item in this will be details of the WorldTraveller incident.   WorldTraveller was a longstanding and valued contributor, who was forced out of Wikipedia by an admin who contributed nothing, and broke all the “rules” to do down his foe.  The details are sordid, and show clearly that Wikipedia’s policies do not work, even in very blatant cases.  As Peter Damian remarks:

So, a researcher at a top UK institution, later to become a professional astronomer, is blocked by an admin who knows nothing about astronomy, and whose contributions to Wikipedia include ‘paranormal’ topics, video games and comic books. I defy anyone to find a better example of admin abuse against content contributors than that.

The later block in March 2007 caused WT to pack his bags and leave for good.

Interestingly, the UK parliament has received representations about Wikipedia.   The hearings of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions from January 2012 are online in PDF form here.  On pages 483 to 493 is the testimony of Andreas Kolbe and Edward Buckner, itemising two problems, with specific examples:

  1. Wikipedia facilitates the publication of anonymous defamatory material, and has no practical mechanism for the victim to get it removed.
  2. Wikipedia publishes significant amounts of extreme porn, and some of those at the top of Wikimedia UK are involved in this.

The witnesses call for moves to make Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation more accountable.  Specifically they propose that the Charities Commission should oblige Wikipedia to fund a small but fully independent watchdog similar to the Press Complaints Committee, as a condition of its charitable status, to help enforce the controls which Wikipedia claims are in place but which the evidence shows is not. 

These modest proposals seem very sound to me.  The problems in Wikipedia administration run deep, but these two symptoms certainly need to be addressed. 

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve beaten the new PC into submission, and I am now engaged in the gruesome task of copying files and installing software.

Meanwhile, a thought has occurred to me.  How do I find out if someone in Germany was a member of the Nazi party?

Yes, alright, humour me.  But seriously … there ought to be membership lists.  And shouldn’t these be on the web somewhere?   It seems like a reasonable subject for historical enquiry.

Can’t find anything, all the same.

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Still trying to set up my Samsung RF711 laptop with an SSD

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent each weekend for a couple of weeks now trying to get my new Samsung RF711 laptop set up to use a solid-state drive (SSD).  It has been an experience of unmitigated pain.  Today is gone, and nothing to show for it.

Not that this is the fault of Samsung.  Their kit works well, and the easily accessible hard disk bays are wonderful.  It’s quite simply that setting up any hard disk to work with Windows and boot the Samsung Recovery Solution from the F4 menu is strictly for people with plenty of time.  Which is not me.  It’s strictly for people with day after day on their hands.

I’ve found a link here and here which helped.  The problem is getting the wretched Samsung recovery partition created correctly. 

My current approach has required a lot of disk swapping.  You also need to create an admin USB  key drive.  Unless yours is 32GB, tho, it won’t be big enough.

The best way to do this is to start with the original hard disk in its original bay, and the SSD in the spare bay.  If Paragon will create your recovery partition (it did the first time I used it, not today) then all you need to do is to remove the hard disk, restart with a USB stick and use it to fix the MBR on the SSD so that the recovery solution will run from your new recovery partition.  Restart and you are done.

What I had to do was create a partition at the end of the drive using normal tools, and format it and assign it a letter (G:).  Then boot from the stick, and copy the Z: drive using robocopy to the G: drive in the DOS box under the hidden menu.  Then reboot from the stick, and use the new menu to fix the MBR.  Then boot and check F4 takes you into the recovery; and then you can delete the other partitions (not your G: drive!) and do a complete restore, and reboot, and … you’re done.  Phew.

It’s brain-teasing stuff the first time you see it, really it is.

What I have decided to do is keep the original HDD in a bag somewhere, and instead just fit a new HDD as my data store.  So I can always go back to factory settings that way.

Mind you, having Windows on an SSD does mean that it boots incredibly fast.  Booting from the HDD was utterly turgid.

Manufacturers need to stop supplying HDD for Windows, and supply an SSD main drive with ancillary hard drive.

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Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours’…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On Thursday night I went on a trip by car to see some old friends.  On the way I stopped at a garage.  I decided to give my car a wash in their automated car wash.  So I went and unscrewed the aerial from the roof.  And … it wasn’t my aerial.

My aerial, you see, I have unscrewed many times.  It’s rather stiff, for some reason.  This one looked similar, but was bendy in the portion at the root.  It wasn’t that bendy in the past … was it?  I’m pretty sure it was not.

A memory struck me; I had parked next to a car of the same type earlier in the week.  The latter was a year older, and rather scruffy-looking, but the same type.

I can only conclude that the driver of the other car had seen my aerial, and had swapped it for his own! 

Mine was a factory-fitted original.  His, I found out later, was what the manufacturer offers as a replacement part.  Evidently he had forgotten to remove his aerial when going through a car wash, got the (inferior) replacement, but longed for the original.

Who on earth would do something that miserable and mean?!!!

Anyway, I set off again and ran into some rain, and turned on the windscreen wipers.  And … they made an odd sound, which they had not made earlier in the week.  So when I got to my destination I inspected them.  They looked OK; but had marks of sun-fading.  I had fitted new ones a few weeks ago. 

Again I am not quite certain, but it looks as if my light-fingered friend had also helped himself to my windscreen wipers!!!

I suppose I should be grateful that almost nothing else exterior to the car can be unscrewed.  And I shall make sure that I never park next to a car of the same type again, in case the owner sees my car as a free source for a set of replacement parts.

Well, it’s annoying, more than anything.  It’s not the end of the world.  I can’t get a proper replacement aerial.  The thief’s one works OK.  And I got some new wipers today, costing around $30. 

I pass this story along, simply because it is both incredible and true.  Make of it what you will!

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The fire of Cautopates

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On a Spanish site, I find the following photograph of Cautes and Cautopates, the twin side-kicks of Mithras.  It’s remarkable because the figure of Cautopates is still partly coloured!  And so, clearly, we can see that the objects that they carry are indeed lit torches.

Considering how universally this is assumed, it is nice to see some evidence of it.

The article itself is a general one, of no special interest, but handled rather well in the automatic translation by Google translate.  The images generally seem to be from the Mithraeum under the church of S. Clemente in Rome, and are rather good.

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Life of Mar Aba – chapters 25 and 26

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We’re now back to history.

It is never safe for oriental potentates to be away from the centre of power.  They tend to get overthrown.  Being away from court, Mar Aba was now vulnerable to court intrigues.

25.  After the saint had spent seven years in this way, without ever crossing the threshold of the house in which he lived, being constant in fasting, prayer, and writing letters excellent in every way, which he sent out in order to govern his subordinate provinces, Satan became full of envy and could not endure these magnificent things.

He caused a second Judas, unworthy of the name of  Petrus Gurganara, who from a spiritual pastor had become a ravening wolf, to deny Christ and embrace the error of magianism, because the purity and integrity of the church expelled him from its womb because of his many abominations and immoralities, like a splinter from the eye, and, with the traitor, his associates.

He went to the chief magian and at the command of the king obtained a order of apostasy[1], that any of the bishops, priests and deacons ordained by the blessed one who did not resign should be thrown into prison, and that no-one should refer to him[2] as Catholicos, because he only became a Christian in later life.

26.  When this command was broadcast by the machinations of the apostate and his associates, some fearful people were influenced, and all prayed to God that he would have mercy on his church and not deliver it into the hands of the destroyer.  But when the traitor got this order and took it to Azerbaijan and convinced the Mobed of the area to prosecute the disciples of the blessed one before him and, because of his murderous ambition,  to treat the blessed one in the same way as his disciples, the Lord did not fulfil his wicked desire.  Instead he inspired the Mobedan (Mobed) and the magians to call him[3] before them and to question him in the way he[4] wanted.  And the Mobed said, “I do not have the authority to question him.”[5]  Some of the magians mentioned said, however, “He shall come before us as we are very determined to see him.” 

And because he was persuaded to, he came before their assembly and they let him seat himself in great honour.”  And because they heard sound thinking from his mouth, they reviled and beat the apostate, so that he hid himself from them. 

When he saw his hopes come to nothing, he sought another way to kill the saint.  He hired some rascals and came with them to the place where the godly one lived, to murder him and give as an excuse that he[6] was escaping from custody. 

But God, who knew the thoughts of the traitor, did not allow it.  For when the traitor arrived secretly at night with his men, entered and searched for his disciples, he heard the voice of the blessed one, and from fright and shame became weak and trembly and could not lay a hand on him.[7]  The men of the house found out, and the people of the village, and they came, beat the apostates, and drove him away, together with the magians that he had brought with him.

The attempt to dispose of Mar Aba, first by legal and then  by direct means, was clearly very amateurish and failed.  But it was a wake-up call for Mar Aba.

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  1. [1]The writer seems to mean that the order itself indicated that the person brandishing it was an apostate.↩
  2. [2]Mar Aba.↩
  3. [3]Mar Aba.↩
  4. [4]Petrus Gurganara.↩
  5. [5]Is this “question” as in “being put to the question”, i.e. torture?↩
  6. [6]Mar Aba.↩
  7. [7]Not an experienced conspirator, it seems!↩

Life of Mar Aba – chapter 24

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here is another chapter of the hagiographical life of the East Syriac patriarch, Mar Aba I, who ruled in the Persian empire in the late 6th century.  For those who have not seen the earlier chapters, Aba is a Zoroastrian official who has converted, and become patriarch.  He is on good terms with the King of Kings, but currently under house arrest for political reasons in a remote area of Azerbaijan dominated by Zoroastrianism.

24.  He turned the house that he lived in into a church.  He set up there an altar of Christ,  and every day gave himself with his disciples to fasting and prayer.  What in the beginning was the dwelling of Satan became then a house of prayer to the true God.  From the provinces Metropolitans, bishops, priests, deacons and believing men and women came together there, in fact, to pray and to receive his blessing.  Some were standing at his door in sackcloth and ashes, for their sins, and received remission.  Some received the blessing of the spiritual dignity of the episcopate.  Some received the dignity of the priesthood, diaconate or other ecclesiastical ranks (τάξις).  All the houses of the persecutors and blasphemers became offices of the saints and houses of prayer and praise to God.  Crowds of bishops met and the sound was heard of their songs of the Holy Spirit.  A stream of priests came to the offices of their comrades and told each other of the great and wonderfuls that they had seen and heard.  The mountains and heights of Azerbaijan became like cities, wherever the feet of the Saint went.  Old men who came to see the Saint forgot their age and sprang up like deer, and those struck down by disease recovered when they were carried to him to seek his blessing.

None of this material seems very interesting, and it may simply be the imagination of the hagiographer.  It would be nice to return to something like the historical elements in the earlier chapters!  Fortunately in chapter 25 the historical narrative returns.

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