Stranger Things Have Happened

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity (1891)

All sorts of strange coincidences, plannings, cross-purposes, and wonderful chains of events working through generations to achieve the most outre results are surely going on in this random city.

And so 2016 draws to a close, and a great sigh of relief ripples across vast swathes of the globe like a Mexican wave chasing the instant of midnight from each time zone to the next. The consensus is clear: this has been one topsy-turvy trip round the sun, and one the world at large is glad to see the back of. There’s been one political shock after another, an endless torrent of celebrity deaths, and I understand one or two unexpected things happened in the world of sport as well (though frankly that entire realm of culture is extremely obscure to me) – not to mention that business about Harambe the gorilla that seemed to provoke a good (one might tentatively suggest disproportionate?) deal of agitation.

If I come across a tad disinterested, that’s probably because, as I frequently mention when the surprising and on some counts distressing extraordinariness of the past year’s events arises in conversation, the primary reaction to said events with which my brain likes to amuse itself is the notion that this is all going to make an extremely interesting history textbook in fifty or a hundred years. Will 2016 be seen as a blip or a genuine turning point? How will posterity’s judgement of our times differ from our own? Will anyone even believe that so many beloved celebrities really did all depart this life within the same twelve-month period?

That last question might not be as silly as it sounds. Excuse me while I lapse into all-out Classicist mode, but I am somewhat reminded of Tacitus’ Annals, the fourth book of which I had to read for my Latin class in my second year at university. In the Annals, Tacitus narrates the history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, and he does it – the clue’s in the title – on an annual basis, recounting each event according to the year in which it occurred rather than its significance in any longer storyline. This approach, like any, has its pros and cons. I certainly wasn’t too pleased with it when I embarked upon translating an interesting and actually quite moving story of a guy called Sabinus being framed and executed for dissent, only to find Tacitus quite consciously leaving aside the matter of his accusers’ fates to tell a distinctly less thrilling tale pertaining to the taxing of ox-hides in Germany.¹ Still, it does at least mean we can be sure of the year in which any given event occurred – although we often can’t be much more precise than that, because it isn’t totally clear whether the author sticks to arranging his material in chronological order within each year, or not. For example, Tacitus displays a clear if not overwhelming propensity for recording a year’s celebrity deaths towards the end of his account of that year.² Is that because the end seemed as good a place as any to slip them in, regardless of when within the year they actually occurred? Or is it because people were genuinely more likely to die towards the end of the year?³ Perhaps because it was cold and they were old. (Real academic theory.⁴)

My point, then, is this: if we today look at what Tacitus recorded and think, well, it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of early Imperial Rome were especially prone to expiring near the end of each calendar year – that just seems too unlikely – why shouldn’t some future historian carefully scrutinising our own times conclude that it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of the modern west were especially prone to expiring within one specific calendar year, namely 2016? That just seems too unlikely. It’s certainly caught us all by surprise, who are actually living through it. If someone had sat down at the start of last January and written a list of predictions for the coming year that had included even half of the events that have been busy shaking the world these past three hundred and sixty-five days, he or she would surely have been dismissed as a lunatic, an imbecile, or possibly some sort of extreme pessimist.⁵ And yet here we are.

Our hypothetical future historian will probably, of course, have access to much, much better evidence against which to test his or her theories than any scholar of the early Roman Empire does today, but suppose otherwise. Suppose there is some disaster and the historians of two thousand years hence are left trying to piece together the events of 2016 from a few written accounts of uncertain reliability. Might they not start to suggest that such accounts were arranged for emphasis, not accuracy; that the writers shoved in more shocking events than really occurred to make some point or other; that it all just looks too implausible and we should see it all as a mythologised retelling shaped by the author’s personal biases?

2016 shows that Sherlock Holmes was right: reality is, very often, more unbelievable than the fiction that purports to imitate it.⁶ Perhaps it’s a little strange, then, that we are so sceptical of the abnormal. I’m not by any means advocating gullibility – believing anything regardless of evidence is as unacceptable as believing nothing regardless of evidence – but the events of the past year have surely cast at least a little doubt over the capabilities of human rational faculties to determine which occurrences are or are not plausible. Scepticism about almost any unlikely-sounding claim can be readily met with a declaration that stranger things have happened.

Good job, Sherlock. Now tell me, from where do you buy your lovely hats?

Plus, that’s just in the sphere of stuff that actually conforms to the known laws of physics and nature. What about when we slide the possibility of divine intervention into the picture?

Now, there are lots of good reasons to trust what God says as recorded in the multi-author, multi-genre anthology we like to call the Bible; an apologetic effort to that effect is not the purpose of this post. Rather, my point is that it seems a little odd that, even as Christians, we often approach the Bible wearing the exact same human-rational-faculties glasses that make us doubt the chronology of Tacitus’ Annals. We have to make concerted efforts to counteract their effects: it doesn’t seem terribly likely that a man survived in the belly of a giant fish for three days,⁷ or that the sun once stood still in the sky to enable a battle to finish,⁸ or that the universe was created in six days,⁹ but we’re aware that this is God’s word and both deserves and demands our full credence and trust, so we tie ourselves in knots trying to reconcile it to what we understand about the way reality works. And we land in all sorts of places: such-and-such is a fable, or a poetic metaphor; such-and-such makes sense if only one surrounds it with the correct historical context, or construes this or that Hebrew word in a sense different to the traditional one; such-and-such is beyond our understanding but happened in a totally literal sense and everyone should shut up and get over it.

I think we’re missing the point a bit. If our own perception of what’s plausible is confounded even by the surprising events of 2016 – which, despite the vitriol and despair in your Facebook newsfeed yelling the contrary, don’t actually break any physical or natural laws of how the universe works – why should we trust it to scrutinise the supernaturally-effected occurrences described in the Bible? If the simple happenstances of natural, explicable reality can yield such unlikely-seeming results, shouldn’t we anticipate that the direct, explicit, exceptional actions of a God almighty over the whole of that reality should yield even unlikelier-seeming ones? Would it not, in fact, be more of a surprise to us if they didn’t? The grounds for our interpretation of any particular passage should have nothing to do with whether we think the events it describes sound likely or not; indeed, if they do, it surely reveals that we are sinfully privileging our own rationality over God’s trustworthiness. If you read Genesis 1 with an awareness of God’s omnipotence and the severe limitations of our human rational faculties and still conclude that it’s a fable or a poetic metaphor, that’s another matter, but I don’t see that there’s any ground, as a Christian, to resort to such explanations just because a six-day creation doesn’t strike you as particularly plausible.

Stranger things have happened.

A man rose from the dead, for instance.

Footnotes

¹ Sabinus’ story starts in the sixty-eighth chapter of the book, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D68, and is probably the most interesting bit of it, even including the tale of the senator who threw his wife out of a window.

² In, for example, 4.15 (new year starts 4.17) 4.44 (new year begins 4.46), 4.61 (new year begins 4.62). Remember, of course, that the chapter divisions were added later, but hopefully they give some sense of how close the death-records tend to be to the beginning of the account of a new year.

³ For the record, I’d consider the first theory more likely, but for slightly different reasons to those I discuss here. In any case, that doesn’t impinge on the point of this post.

⁴ Though I’m not going to cite it, because this isn’t an academic piece and you can’t make me. Just take my Latin lecturer’s word for it, OK?

⁵ I’m thinking primarily of the deaths here. Not a political comment.

⁶ Don’t you just love it when copyright law doesn’t apply? The whole of the short story from which my opening quotation is taken, as well as lots of other Sherlock Holmes tales, is freely available online: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/CaseIden.shtml.

⁷ That’s from the book of Jonah, in case you never went to Sunday school: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jonah+1&version=ESVUK.

⁸ As recorded in the book of Joshua: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+10&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Aw, come on, you know this one. That’s right, it’s Genesis 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=ESVUK.