They Wrote Down The Other Story

Somebody asked her to state the other side and she found she could not do it.

It was a small thing. A course, a room of about fourteen, and an exercise: take the position you disagree with and put it as strongly as you can, the way somebody who holds it would put it.

She has led rooms for years. She was not worried.

And what came out of her, when it was her turn, was a version of the other explanation that nobody has actually held for about a century. It was sloppy. It had a hole in it that she then pointed out, which is the whole trick, and two people nodded.

And a woman near the end of the table, who is quiet and had said almost nothing all morning, said: I do not think anybody says it like that any more, do they?

She was not being difficult. She was correcting a detail.

And the room moved on and it was fine and nobody thought about it again except the woman leading it, who has thought about almost nothing else for five weeks.

Because she has been arguing with that version for eleven years. From the front. In conversations. With her own son.

And she has never once, in eleven years, read a serious statement of the other side written by somebody who actually holds it.

The account puts the counter-story on the page

Let me name the trick before anything else, because you performed it in that room and you know you did.

You built the weakest available version, and then you knocked it over, and two people nodded. That is not dishonesty in any deliberate sense. It is what happens when somebody has only ever encountered a position through the people arguing against it, and it happens to almost everybody about almost everything.

The woman at the end of the table did you a service and she probably has no idea.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a rebuke: the account you are defending does not do what you did. That is not my kind reading of five weeks, it is what stands written at the end of Matthew, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that room on the morning.

Read it. This is inside the resurrection account, in the middle of it.

When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, You are to say, His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.Matthew 28:12-15

Stop on the last line. This story has been widely circulated to this very day. That is what is written, inside the resurrection account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the rival version on the page.

The writer records that there is a competing explanation in circulation, states it, and acknowledges that it is what a great many people believe as he writes.

He answers it, obviously. He is not neutral. But he does not pretend it does not exist and he does not put a feeble version of it on the page.

So this is yours right now rather than pending eleven years of reading: you are inside a tradition that names the counter-explanation out loud, because the written word records the rival account and its currency in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept it there rather than letting it be quietly dropped.

And here is what five weeks has actually been about, which is not the exercise.

You have been arguing with your son.

For eleven years you have been answering a version of his position that he does not hold, and he has been listening to you knock over something that is not his, and he has stopped correcting you because it takes too long, and both of you have been calling that a conversation. What is written states the other side in its own terms, and the Holy Spirit has never needed a position weakened first.