Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (iii)
from anthropologist Philip Taylor and Vietnamese studies
Hebrew scripture begins with 2 distinct accounts of creation. Either 1 may be true. How we would know? Both cannot be true.
2 of the 4 gospels begin with an account of the birth of Jesus. Both cannot be true. A third mashes up 1 of them.
None of the 3 fits with what we know from a preponderance of better-attested sources throughout the historical record. The fourth gospel leaves out the Christmas pageant.
The author may have known Jesus personally. He knew those who did. His account of the life and death and life is an historical argument based on witness.
Certainly, many have seen and talked with Jesus in every generation since his death. The man and his mom are all over the place, for 5 or 6 centuries in what is now southern Viet Nam, a little longer than in North Carolina by my count, although the scripture of his church of Latter-Day Saints puts him here on our continent an age before.
Those saints themselves only arrived in the Republic of Viet Nam with the occupation by the United States of America, in 1966. But since Mormons convert their ancestors, Christians may now well have arrived in Viet Nam centuries before Jesus. How can you not love this stuff?
Philip Taylor reports respectfully and thoughtfully in The Ethnicity of Efficacy, second chapter of his ethnography, Goddess on the Rise, on his conversations with locals about the Lady of the Realm. Which lady? What realm?
Imagine the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, the Spanish Inquisition, run by a Unitarian Universalist from Vietnamese studies in Australia. Philip hears people out, he talks back, he collates and sifts. How do you study silly bullshit?
Watch and learn.