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A7B My Times Are in Thy Hands 1924–1926 Chicago was much as he had left it. Yet more and more black people had come there from the valleys through its western and southern gates. Still the factories thrummed, and the bosses were paying. And still it was a city in which black people came and settled and labored and sang as strangers in a strange land. The University of Chicago grew no less steadily in the eyes of the white man, but it remained a place where black folk were strangers. As before, Mays joined other dark students in their orchestrated demonstrations—sitting deliberately by white men at table in the cafeteria, speaking with studied friendliness to white professors on the campus footpaths, sitting up bolt upright in classroom while reciting lessons proudly learned and stating opinions proudly reached. This resistance did not receive any help from the dark Asian students who came to Chicago to study. In fact the Indian students soon picked up and employed the Chicago way of segregation, presuming the black people must be the American version of the untouchable caste and thus were to be shunned. For his part Mays and his fellow dark university students presumed that the Indian students wore their turbans not for religious reasons or for cultural traditions , but strictly in order to appear exotic and the opposite of African Americans . In a city of man where there were many kinds of peoples, the dark folk of the South were at the bottom of all the peoples at the university, and they were pointedly kept there even and especially by the most recently arrived newcomers from Asia. Yet the attitudes of all the peoples who were not black stiffened the resolve of Mays and his dark brothers and sisters.1 Mostly though he studied. Dr. Shirley Case and the other men of learning were finding out more and more about the actual lives of the men and women of the New Testament. Mays rejoined the graduate team of Dr. Case and his scholars, and all of them, master and apprentices, did research on “pagan survivals in 112 My Times Are in Thy Hands Christianity.” When Jesus walked and talked, there was interaction among the disciples who walked with Jesus and the men who did not walk with him—and indeed there was interaction among the disciples and men of the era who never even heard of Jesus. After Jesus ascended, there was interaction among surviving disciples and other men and women who had never seen or heard the Jesus. And when most of the disciples were dead and gone, there was interaction among those who wrote down the New Testament records and still others who never saw or heard or even knew of Jesus. Hebrew law and Hebrew prophets were there before the Coming and were still there after the Ascension. These laws and prophets were well documented. But so too were pagan laws and pagan seers, some Roman, some Arab, some north African, some Greek, and perhaps even some Indian. These were less well recorded, but they were there, and traces of their footsteps and echoes of their voices were all through the recorded New Testament if only a person knew where and how to look for and listen to them.2 As Mays conducted his own research and as he outlined his master’s thesis, he accepted Dr. Case’s category in which Jews too were pagans. To consider the Hebrews as some sort of proto-Christians was unfair to a great religion of the ancient and modern world, and indeed it was unfair to the religion that Jesus professed. Judaism is separate and distinct from Christianity, and the great ancient religion continued on, following its own course. At the same time other religions followed their own courses, and these too had their own identities separate and distinct from Christianity. For Dr. Case, Judaism was more than Christians often made of it, since it was not part of Christianity but was sui generis. On the other hand, it was also less than Christianity because, as he defined it, it was non-Christian and thus pagan.3 All that was debatable, but Mays accepted it for purposes of thesis writing and proceeded to isolate pagan practices connected to Christian belief as recorded in the Bible and as recorded by early Christian fathers. Vital to the whole organizing scheme was Dr. Case’s central theme, played and replayed by master...

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