Norm and Anomaly in the Jewish Life of Jesus (Toledot Yeshu)

The Toledoth Yeshu, the “Generation,” or “Life of Jesus,” have been described as an anti-Gospel, or a parody of the Gospel. This protean tradition, witnessed in more than hundred manuscripts and printed editions, offers a “counter-history” of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. According to this mischievous narrative Jesus was an illegitimate child turned charlatan, and his disciples a bunch of violent and senseless rogues who continued to stir up trouble in Israel even following their leader’s shameful hanging. The Toledoth Yeshu is the story of an anomaly (Jesus and the birth of Christianity). It is also a story about confusion: marital confusion, social confusion, and religious confusion. As an exercise in “historical imagination,” the Toledoth Yeshu offers a narrative of religions compared, and a reflection on social and religious borders, on their instability and fragility, and ultimately on their necessity. The present paper will explore the normative dimension of the Toledoth Yeshu tradition: the way the “disorder of things” the narrative relates also conveys a powerful discourse on social and religious norms. We will also seek to map this tradition in the broader context of medieval Jewish discussions on Jesus (particularly Maimonides) as a “case” in the religious history of mankind, addressing issues of false prophecy, religious deviation, transgression, and heresy.

The direct-democratic challenge to evidence-based policy making: Questioning the governmental PISA narrative in Swiss school policy

The democratic deficit of evidence-based policymaking and the little attention the approach pays to values and norms have repeatedly been criticized. This article argues that direct-democratic campaigns may provide an arena for citizens and stakeholders to debate the belief systems inherent to evidence. The study is based on a narrative analysis of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports, as well as of newspaper coverage and governmental information referring to PISA in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns on a variety of school policy issues. The findings show that PISA reports are discursive instruments rather than ‘objective evidence’. The reports promote a narrative of economic progress through educational evidence that is adopted without scrutiny by governmental coalitions in direct-democratic campaigns to justify school policy reforms. Yet, the dominant PISA narrative is contested in two counter-narratives, one endorsed by numerous citizens, the other by a group of experts. These counter-narratives question how PISA is used by an ‘expertocracy’ to prescribe reforms, as well as the performance ideology inherent to. Overall, these findings suggest that direct-democratic campaigns may make more transparent how evidence is produced and used according to existing belief systems. Evidence, on the other hand, may be a stimulus for democratic discourse by feeding the debate with potential policy problems and solution. Thus, direct-democratic debates may reconcile normative positions of citizens with the desire to base decisions on empirical evidence.

The Almost Person: Myth, Narrative and The Doctor

Paul Ricœur describes selfhood as the product of a communal narrative. Communal narratives structured as symbolic myths provide a narrative identity and an ethic of selfhood. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, for instance, places the source of such a narrative identity in the family, where ‘canonical stories’ are formed. ‘Home’ becomes a mode of discourse, a way of recognizing ourselves in the narratives given to us by others. This paper will draw on these concepts of narrative identity in order to investigate the problems to selfhood which face the character of The Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who. I will identify The Doctor as a character who acts within a self-constructed narrative vacuum, reading the character by contrasting two types of personal myth-making, one ‘real’, as in a lived narrative, and one ‘counterfeit’; a conjured myth to replace and obscure the lived self. The paper will pay particular attention to the twenty-first century reincarnations of Doctor Who. I will argue that the writing of Russell T. Davis and later Steven Moffat in particular directly address this tension of myth and selfhood, as The Doctor struggles between his self-imposed role as a modern Prometheus and the insistent haunting and return of his own story. In these incarnations, his companions become mirrors to The Doctor, bringing with them their own narrative and ethical identities. In turn, it is through his companions that The Doctor is able to build his own lived narrative of sorts, which challenges his self-created ‘mythology’. In contrast to the weeping angels, whose horrific agency manifests only when not apprehended, the Doctor’s story continues to become more real the more he is ‘perceived’, both by the human race and by the viewer.