In the Corner of Brian’s Mind

February 18, 2015

Note: This essay is cross-posted at Skepticality, where it appears in easy-to-swallow podcast form.

On the Virtual Skeptics this past week, I had a good long grump about the media and how it was treating NBC news anchor Brian Williams. The short version of the story, at an event sponsored by NBC Williams gave a speech about a retiring helicopter pilot who had flown Williams while Williams was a correspondent in during the Iraq War. It sounded like that they had been through some pretty hairy stuff, because, Williams said, their helicopter was forced down by a rocket propelled grenade. Veterans who were a part of that mission disputed Williams’ version of events on social media, and soon, Williams was on the air apologizing for making misstatements.

Now as the media went back to look for more instances of Williams’ misstatements, I was all in a huff. I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to educate people about the fallibility of memory. As I was considering this, I was rather dismayed to see so many people online going on about what a liar Williams was. And these were skeptics. I didn’t think that they had any more information than I did, and surely they must have seen how we self-appointed skeptical purists were going on about how memories are unreliable. But they kept insisting that you’d remember if you were shot down or not. My sense is maybe not. I’ve had a World War II veteran who was in a unit stationed in Italy tell me that he was in the Battle of the Bulge, an impossibility.

There is the illusion of course that highly meaningful and important events are more firmly etched into our memories, but the truth of the matter is that so-called flashbulb memories, like every other memory, is subject to the same processes of change over time. But the perception, the misperception, that is, that highly significant memories are durable likely explains a general defaulting to believing the veterans like Lance Reynolds, who flew that mission and took Williams along. On facebook, Reynolds challenged Williams’ account:

hehe

Certainly, goes the logic, this event where Reynolds had just been shot at and was in harm’s way would have been more significant to him than it would be to someone on a more or less passive journalistic assignment, and therefore Reynolds would remember it. He has no incentive to lie. But Williams filed a report about this particular mission. In the online clip of that report, Tom Brokaw introduces the segment by saying that Williams had “A close call in the skies over Iraq”. He was in a Chinook helicopter. There were stories among the air crew that iraqis dressed as civilians had been shooting, and this is mentioned in the context of looking down at civilians as the Chinooks fly over their heads. We hear a radio broadcast about a helicopter that has taken fire while Williams’ group is in the air: “We took fire on the way in. We currently are NOT under fire, NOT under fire.” Williams’ Chinook is ordered down and not told why. The Chinook “ahead of them” (how far ahead is not said) has been grazed by an RPG fired from the back of a pickup truck, they realize. The crew of the helicopter did not grant an interview. The helicopters are forced to hunker down for 2 days, as there is a sandstorm. There was an armored unit there from the 3rd infantry, who coincidentally, confirm of the image of the fighters, irregulars fighting from the back of pickup trucks. Williams credits 3rd ID for looking after the perimeter. After 2 nights they leave. At the end of the report, Williams explains on their first night, they heard machine gun fire, a group of Iraqi irregulars with an RPG were stopped at the perimeter, presumably trying to get into position to shoot at the helicopters, one of which Williams was sleeping in. Ultimately a 6-hour mission became something like a 50-hour mission.

This story is NOT that different from the one that he told the crowd at Madison Square Garden. All the elements are there–only their relationship to one another is altered. Heck, he even gets the bit about the 3d ID that Reynolds apparently doesn’t remember (though you don’t see people noting the veterans’ memories are wrong too). And even Brokaw, in the introduction to the original segment, seems to dramatize what has happened a bit, maybe. But initially Williams doesn’t take any credit for anything special. The reporting seems OK. In my opinion one need not invoke deceit to explain what happened, and if you are willing to defer to what Ray Hyman called the “principle of charity,” I thought that perhaps we should not jump on him so badly. It was reasonable to think that he was guilty of nothing more than having a completely normal human brain.

So that’s kind of what I was thinking when NBC decided to slap a 6 month suspension on Williams, saying in a memo:

“By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate.”

At this announcement I was indignant. I thought, how could we waste such a brilliant opportunity to educate people about how fallible memory is? That the really interesting thing about this non-story was how normal it was? And I imagined that the people who were happily dancing around the Williams sacrificial pyre smugly confident that their memories were intact and reliable, and I was annoyed some more. My hard won skeptical superpowers had paid off. I enjoyed the most satisfying and aggravating emotion: righteous indignation. It’s so good to be right. I could just bathe in that creamy feeling all day.

Aaaand then the next day I read an article in New York Magazine suggesting that there may well be a host of other incidents where Williams’ may have exaggerated his role in stories. And at least one of them is of a type that, if it turns out to be a fabrication, will be less easily explainable. I can see his meeting the Pope at Catholic University becoming less accurate over time. I can even see him inadvertently slightly nudging himself ever closer to the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin wall as reasonable. Both accounts are questioned by the magazine, but the one that really seems like it could be his undoing is his claim about a SEAL Team 6 during the Iraq war, making friends with the SEALs and then this, according to the magazine:

He also claimed that, nearly a decade after this supposed embed, a member of SEAL Team 6 sent him a souvenir from the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. “I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned,” Williams said during […] a Late Show appearance. “And in it was a piece of the fuselage of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. Sent to me by one of my friends.”

It seems improbable that the Williams would have been with a group of SEALs flying into Baghdad 3 days into the war, when US forces did not reach Baghdad until the 10th of April, about 20 days after the ground invasion began. But, unlike the way SEAL Team 6 members describe Williams as being “embedded” Williams never uses that word in the clip with Letterman. So, maybe he’s misremembering the date of his flight to Bagdhad? Like maybe it was like 3 days after the coalition reached Baghdad? But it seems super weird that one of the people he befriended sent him a piece of fuselage of the (still classified) helicopter that crashed in Bin Laden’s compound….for some reason committing what, god, has to be a major security violation. And that’s the bit that I think may well get him in trouble, because there is apparently some tangible evidence that could be checked, though the provenance is in Williams’ account to Lettermen is obscure…

BUT THERE I GO AGAIN. Pretending that I could possibly figure out what was happening among special forces 12 years ago in Iraq! On what basis? Listen, when a story appears in the media, I try to understand, and all I have to go on are narratives. I’m constantly reminding myself that these narratives are reconstructions based on memories and evidence put next to each other and assembled into something transmissible–a story. But inherent to storytelling, and I don’t think that I am equivocating on the meaning of “storytelling” here, are characters and plots, and some of these characters and plots are more transmissible in the media than others. It’s easier for a headline to say that Williams’s story is “false” than it is to say it is “inaccurate in a number of ways but perhaps understandable with a good understanding of the workings of memory”  It’s easier for someone on the air to say that X journalist is a liar than it is to bring on memory experts and give the public a lesson in the weird, clever wrongness of memory and then ask the audience to filter the story through that model of memory to come up with a complicated and nuanced view of Williams as partially both engineer of his own demise and victim of human imperfection. The public wants a story; the media needs a story. And with the story comes villains and heroes, and what is Williams? I honestly have no idea.

Following this story is a frustrating exercise in humility, that just drives home hard learned lessons that I easily forget. That I have to be willing to be confused. I have to be patient. Ultimately I need to be willing to admit when I just don’t know and that that is sometimes the best, only correct answer. In the case of Brian Williams’ wartime exploits, I have a lot of information that may or may not be relevant to whether or not he is telling the truth. Currently I have no way of determining what is relevant and what is not. And I’m just going to have to be ok with that for the time being.

Links:

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Bob

Virtual Skeptics, Episode 11 (24 Oct 2011)

October 25, 2012

Gais! Gais! OMGOMGOMG! A new episode of the Virtual Skeptics is up and you HAVE to see it!

See? I told you!

RJB

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Bob

Jesus H. Christ (Mrs.)

September 27, 2012

Adapted from my segment on Virtual Skeptics. That’s Virtual Skeptics, available now for all your skeptical needs on YouTube or virtualskeptics.com.

Last week, Karen L. King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, dropped a bombshell at the tenth annual International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome: she had found Mrs Jesus.

Specifically, she had studied a small, roughly rectangular scrap of papyrus that contains a Sahidic Coptic text. The fragment is torn on the top, bottom, left and right, so it is difficult if not impossible to get a good idea of the entire context of the passage. The one thing that got people’s attention, though, is the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…'” Jesus also says that a woman, possibly the wife, will be able to be his disciple. He also mentions his mother and a woman named Mary, although it is not entirely clear if “Mary” refers to the wife, his mother or another woman. Although it is common in Christian texts to refer to the Church as Jesus’ wife, the personal context of the passage makes a literal interpretation of “my wife” more likely.  According to King, “The meaning…’my wife’ is unequivocal; the word can only have this meaning. Given that Jesus is the speaker, the possessive article indicates that he is speaking of his wife” (King 18).*

Oh. My. Married. God! The Da Vinci Code was right!

Hang on a sec. First, The Da Vinci Code was not right. Not in any world. Jesus and Mrs. Jesus, YHWH and Asherah, Buddha and Buddhessa, the Vishnus,  Zeus and Hera, Odin and Frigg could all come down from on high and proclaim in a variety of languages that The Da Vinci Code was right, but that still wouldn’t make it right: it would just prove that those gods are fallible and unworthy of worship. Such a declaration would immediately remove a god from the God Stakes.

More importantly, while King, who is not herself a papyrologist or Coptic linguist,** admits that “Coptic paleography is notoriously difficult to date” (8), she places the handwriting of the papyrus in the second half of the fourth century and suggests that the original (in Greek, presumably) was probably written in the second half of the second century (based on similarities to the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of the Egyptians. So, assuming the fragment is authentic and assuming these dates are correct, the fragment is relatively late, and there is no particular reason to assume that it represents The Truth.™

King calls the fragment The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, even though she admits that there is no clear evidence that the work is a gospel (not enough text survives to determine genre); there is no indication that Mrs. Jesus is the putative or pseudonymous author; and there is no evidence that she is even the primary subject of the work. King also uses the words “recto” and “verso” in a way that strikes me as nonstandard. Usually those terms  indicate (respecitively) the front and back of a leaf from a codex. Here it is not even clear that the work comes from a codex, and even if it does, the paucity of text and the damage to one side makes it impossible to determine which side comes first. For King, “recto” means “along the fibers” and “verso” means “against the fibers.”

The provenance of the fragment is murky at best. The owner has chosen to remain anonymous, although he or she apparently also owns a 2nd- to 4th-century fragment of the Gospel of John in Coptic. This fragment came from the same batch of Coptic and Greek papyri as the “Take my wife” fragment (King 2). Where these fragments came from originally, no one knows. The anonymity of the owner and the murkiness of the provenance raise concerns that the fragment could have come from the illicit antiquities trade.

King makes several arguments in favor of the fragment’s authenticity. She notes that the papyrus seems to be genuinely old but admits that it is possible to acquire blank scraps of ancient papyrus. However, she believes that the condition of the ink argues for authenticity: it is badly worn and in some places illegible. The “verso” is particularly badly damaged, with only a few recoverable words. There are also minute traces of ink at the edges of the fragment, suggesting that the text was cut off from a larger original. Where the papyrus is damaged, the ink has faded or disappeared. King argues that if the fragment were a modern forgery on old papyrus, we would expect to see the damaged areas filled with ink.

The ink will be subjected to non-destructive tests. These will not provide a definitive date but should show if the ink is consistent with that of other ancient papyri. A more definitive test, such as Carbon 14, cannot be used because that would destroy too much of the tiny fragment.

On the other hand, the references to “my wife,” “Mary” and a female apostle seem almost too good to be true. It’s not just Da Vinci Code fans who are hungry for this kind of evidence. Perfectly normal, literate people have become interested in the gnostic gospels that suggest the crucial role women played in some sects of the early church. References to an intimate if not necessarily sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary have sparked a great deal of interest among feminist bible scholars and Christian women. And, boy howdy! this tiny, tiny fragment hits all the sweet spots, without containing a single complete sentence.*** Several other religious artifacts that seemed to good to be true, such as the James ossuary and the Jordan lead codices, were rather quickly declared likely forgeries.

The Gosple of Jesus’s Old Lady appears to be headed in the same direction. In the peer review of King’s article, two of the three readers questioned the fragment’s authenticity, and King’s article shows that there are anomalies, such as non-standard grammatical forms. King defends these by reference to the Gospel of Thomas, but its similarity to that text may be problematic. Within days of the momentous announcement, New Testament scholar Francis B. Watson of Durham University argued that the Gospel of Jesus’s Main Squeeze was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. While he makes a compelling case, it is difficult to judge, without knowing Coptic, whether the similarities result from a modern forger lifting scraps from Thomas, or whether, perhaps, the two works merely share verbal parallels.

Many of the scholars at the Coptic conference where King revealed the fragment have also questioned its authenticity, suggesting that neither the handwriting nor the grammar looks right. Indeed, the backlash has been so immediate and so widespread that the Harvard Theological Review has walked back its commitment to publish the article in the January edition.  On Friday, one of the co-editors said that they had only “provisionally” accepted the article for publication, pending the results of scientific tests and “further reports from Coptic papyrologists and grammarians.”

So, it seems King’s announcement may have been premature, but she notes that she was looking for comment and criticism. In the draft of her article, she freely mentions the reservations of her readers. The media reaction to her announcement, however, has been predictable. Headlines scream that there is new evidence that Jesus had a wife or that King claims Jesus was married. Neither of these statements is true. It is well-known that early Christians held widely diverse views, even about Jesus’s nature (was he fully divine, fully human, or both?). The fragment doesn’t provide evidence that Jesus had a wife; if it is authentic, it merely provides evidence that some early Christians thought he had a wife, a view that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to scholars who study the early church.

A minority of Christians has reacted predictably as well, declaring the fragment inauthentic simply because they don’t like what it says. A commenter on a post called “Christian Scholars Not Fazed by ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife ‘” somewhat ironically declares:

This fragment is little more than another attempt to discredit Jesus and hence Christianity. Any impeachment upon Jesus’ character would be fuel to the devil which if this parchment were true would have been evident by now the devil would not have let an opportunity like that go begging. You [another commenter] blaspheme when you say that He was “kissing on Mary all the time” not  only is that not scriptural but it defames His character. For Jesus to have a  wife is to suggest that there was a passion within His nature which His Deity  could not overcome thus diminishing His ability to overcome for the world. He  would not have had the desires of a human in this regard because He came to do  the will of the Father which was to live a pure and sinless life and die as  God’s sacrifice for sin to atone for the sins of the world.

This is for you, “An Evangelist”:

References:

King, Karen L., with AnneMarie Luijendiik. “‘Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…”‘: A New Coptic Gospel Papyrus.” Draft. http://news.hds.harvard.edu/files/King_JesusSaidToThem_draft_0917.pdf

Watson, Francis. The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake gospel fragment was composed.” Revised. http://markgoodacre.org/Watson.pdf

*The Coptic word can mean either “woman” or “wife;” the use of the possessive suggests that “wife” is the more appropriate reading.

**Stop laughing, Brian and Bob. You’re adult men with beards–it’s not that funny.

***This isn’t entirely fair. There are a couple of complete independent clauses (e.g., “Mary is [or is not] worthy of it”). They may or may not be complete sentences, but they aren’t complete thoughts.

11 Comments | academia, language/linguistics, theology, Virtual Skeptics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Eve

The Virtual Skeptics (29 Aug 2012)

August 29, 2012

A new episode of the Virtual Skeptics is up! Dragons, Sphinxes, Black Helicopters, and Bigfootses.

RJB

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Bob