Courtney McGrailOnline chatter about the Republican National Convention has focused less on the coronation of Donald Trump than on his wife Melania’s speech.
For some, the speech was notable for its so-far unexplained nod to 1980s singer Rick Astley, with Mrs Trump declaring of her husband that: “He will never, ever, give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down.”
The apparent allusion to 1987’s 'Never Gonna Give You Up' has, however, drawn less attention than the fact that part of the speech seemed to draw quite conspicuously from Michelle Obama’s analogous speech in the 2008 Democratic Convention.
For James McGrath, who writes at patheos.com/blogs/religionprof, it beggars belief that such an obvious bit of plagiarism should have been flaunted so brazenly at a Republican convention.
“But as a religion professor, for me the biggest irony is that a great many Republicans claim that the Bible is important to them,” he writes, continuing, “and you can’t study the Bible in any serious fashion without learning about the Synoptic Problem, the issue of what the relationship is between the extensively-overlapping Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
“And so if you have studied the Bible, even in just one course at university, you should know that plagiarism is easy to spot, and you will be caught by the professor who teaches New Testament, even if other professors may not have spotted your academic dishonesty.”
Ben Stanhope runs with this idea on benstanhope.blogspot.com, playing on how scholars have often addressed the so-called ‘Synoptic Problem’ of how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are so similar and yet so different by postulating a source known as ‘Q’.
“Since James McGrath first noted the Melania Trump and Michelle Obama synoptic problem,” he writes, “scholarship has greatly emphasised the possibility of discovering a third source from which both Obama and Melania draw. However, a new 20-second Google search to be published later this week on Yahoo Answers has marked such a hypothesis unlikely.”
Onwards he goes, playing on conventional arguments about the kind of ideas that would have been common in 1st-Century religious writing, the likelihood of Galilean fishermen being able to write fluid Greek prose, and apparent differences between New Testament writers over the nature of Jesus’ divinity.
European baptisms
Links between past and present are central to ‘All the East is Moving’, Tom Holland’s marvellous essay at firstthings.com, which details how in 955 AD Otto the Great defeated the invading Hungarians at the Battle of the Lech, becoming the first Holy Roman Emperor soon afterwards while the Hungarians embraced Christianity within a few decades.
Examining how Europe has come to forget the reality of its past, Holland notes how the crucible of Europe that was medieval Christendom is now denied or scorned, most famously in the willingness of the framers of the rejected European Constitution to acknowledge the Enlightenment and Europe’s classical antiquity, but not the many Christian centuries that linked the two.
In doing so, he wonders whether modern Europe may be denying itself its best hope for integrating its own newcomers.
Meanwhile, at abc.net.au/religion, the Anglican philosopher John Milbank considers the theological roots of the Brexit vote, noting that “a fully incarnational and sacramental Christianity is bound to be concerned for Europe and her fate”. For Milbank, the European Union is “a very imperfect attempt to heal the damage” that has been the division and decline of European Christendom, and “a vital step towards global pacification”.
Drawing on the thought of both Christopher Dawson and G.K. Chesterton, just as Holland draws in his piece from the works of their fellow Catholic writer J.R.R. Tolkien, Milbank rejects any notion that the EU should be seen as an aggressively imperial exercise, reading it as “a tempering of globalisation” and warning against “the unlimited sovereignty of the nation state and accompanying international anarchy”.
Milbank and Holland are both essential reading in times as fraught as ours.