[June 2003 journal entry]
The ‘scrapheap’ Job and the Ecclesiastes monologue are my windows into Jewish scripture and Christian scripture. I draw back from texts/writers that/who add nothing re imagining the missing character in the story/play Job (i.e., a character who can be with the ‘scrapheap’ Job without harming him) and instead endorse the story/play’s fairytale epilogue. And ‘Jesus’? The Gospel writers (in spite of themselves, I suspect) permit imagining ‘Jesus’ as someone who sees ‘from below’ or ‘from the scrapheap’. His death is ‘innocent’, but is most immediately associated with social suffering (i.e., caught in a power struggle). Note that the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm casts his death as divinely willed, leaving as insignificant such considerations as a power struggle. An additional hermeneutic effort/step is required to associate his death with chronic illness victims.