Scribal Terror

Nothing new under the sun

Ethan Bronner of the New York Times reports on an interesting archaeological find:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

Then he sticks his foot in it  by implying that Christians would somehow find this shocking:

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

Do religion writers even bother to study the religions they report on any more? The New Testament (and Christian tradition in general) is full of prophecies and prefigurations. The whole freaking book of Isaiah for example. Or Hosea. As Michael Barber explains (via Curt Jester):

the idea of a resurrection on the third day flows from Hosea 6:2: "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up,that we may live before him."

Indeed, Jesus explains to the disciples that his resurrection on the third day would take place in order to fulfill Scripture.

"Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead" (Luke 24:46).

In fact, the New Testament is clear that Jesus came to fulfill the hopes of ancient Israel.

Yet, the New York Times story seems to suggest that this tablet will somehow raise questions about the truth of Christianity. Somehow, for them, the discovery that some ancient Jews expected the messiah to suffer and rise on the third day is problematic for Christianity.

This isn't a question of whether the prophecies and prefigurations are right or not. It's a simple matter of fact that they have always been an integral part of Christian writings. There is no conceivable reason why another one surfacing on a stone tablet would be greeted any differently than all the others.

From factum through techne to faciendum

In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger characterizes the evolution of the modern world view through the use of a careful distinction between emphasis on "what we have made" -- factum -- to "what we can make" -- faciendum -- by means of the human ability to make -- techne. Factum is the historical approach, the understanding of who and what we are by the understanding of how we got here, essentially the evolutionary approach. Our ability to manipulate what we are is the faciendum, what we might call the transhumanist or cybernetic approach, which takes the evolutionary approach as a given and looks beyond it. (To illustrate, he quotes Marx: "So far philosophers have contemplated the world; now they must set about changing it.")

It might be a little disorienting to think of factum as "what we have  made" rather than simply as "fact." What he means is not so much our artifacts as our ability to perceive, define, and make sense out of the world in the process of manipulating it.

 

Belief is an act of will

I've been reading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, an illuminating look into the meaning of belief, which tries to dip underneath the surface of "ecclesiastical language" to make the mysteries of faith stand clearly before us, but not to simplify or "de-mystify" them.

In the beginning of the book, Ratzinger talks about the reality behind the phrase "I believe" in a way that I find very directly speaks to me as a person who every day decides to believe despite the obviousness of any and all arguments to the contrary, and despite the immediate visibility of the abyss beneath my feet on even the best of days.

 

In defense of Moses' horns

A nicely argued defense of Jerome's much-maligned translation of Exodus 34:29-35 at The Lion and the Cardinal:

The Hebrew word - keren - that Saint Jerome translated into the Latin as "grew horns" means, literally, "grew horns". His supposed mistake was not knowing that the word also has an idiomatic meaning of "emitted rays of light". Modern scholars, looking [at] two possible translations for the word, think: Of course! His face began to radiate! How silly that nobody realized this sooner!

Lady Day

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day, which is the Church's celebration of the announcement to Mary of her chosen role as the mother of Jesus. Her response:

Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. (Luke  1:38)

In secular terms, Lady Day is also the "first of the four traditional Irish and English quarter days," the "four dates in each year on which servants were hired, and rents and rates were due." The other quarter days are Midsummer Day (June 24), Michaelmas (September 29), and Christmas (December 25).

I think the Botticelli Annunciation (above) is particularly effective because of the sweeping line from the angel Gabriel, clearly making obeisance, up to the Virgin, who is bending forward regally, as a queen would to a kneeling subject. Too often Mary is portrayed as a passive recipient of the Holy Ghost. Here she is gracious, confident, welcoming, and Gabriel, rather than looming over her as he does in many portrayals, is clearly the one who is in awe. As in the Anglican hymn "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones," she is seen to be

higher than the cherubim,
More glorious than the seraphim.

I am also rather fond this modern Annunciation by John Collier. The idea of Mary in Oxfords getting what looks to be an angelic floral delivery in the middle of suburbia pleases me no end.

The Harrowing of Hell

The only time most modern Christians refer to the Harrowing of Hell is when they recite the Apostles' Creed: "and descended into Hell," where Christ was believed to have wrested the souls of good people such as Abraham and Isaac from the clutches of the devil on Holy Saturday and released them to Heaven. (Calvin called this a childish fable, by the way, and most Catholics just don't mention it anymore.)

We talk about having a harrowing day, and presumably the Prince of Darkness would have had one of those on that first Holy Saturday. In a Middle English play from the Towneley or Wakefield Cycle called "The Deliverance of Souls," the first response of a demon called Ribald to the appearance of Christ in the underworld is:

Sen fyrst that hell was mayde / And I was put therin,
Sich sorow neuer ere I had, / nor hard I sich a dyn;
My hart begynnys to brade / my wytt waxys thyn,
I drede we can not be glad / thise saules mon fro vs twyn.
how, belsabub! bynde thise boys, / sich harow was neuer hard in hell.

Since hell was first made and I was put therein
Such sorrow never have I had, nor heard I such a din.
My courage begins to weaken, my wits wax thin
I fear we cannot be glad, these souls will be taken from us
Bind these boys, Beelzebub! Such "harrow" never was heard in Hell.

And later he cries, "out, harro, out!" And Satan exclaims:

Besegyd aboute! whi, who durst be so bold,
for drede to make on vs a fray?

Besieged about! Why who dares be so bold to attack us?

If your Middle English is up to the challenge, you can read the whole play here. Or you can download James Halliwell's 1840 translation of the Middle English "The Harrowing of Hell" (with the original on facing pages) here.

But what does it mean "to harrow"?

Harrow comes from Old English hergian, the same root as the word harry. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary,   hergian meant to "make war, lay waste, ravage, plunder, [it was] the word used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for what the Vikings did to England." In other words, harrow means to rip loose and tear things up, although artistic and poetic renderings of the Holy Saturday harrowing tend to take a rather more distinguished tone. In the noun form it also refers to a type of plow which "rips up" the ground, and in verb form it means "plowing up."

The simplicity of God

According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical.  Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes. God is thus in a sense requiring clarification identical to each of his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one. God is omniscient, then, not in virtue of instantiating or exemplifying omniscience — which would imply a real distinction between God and the property of omniscience — but by being omniscience. And the same holds for each of the divine omni-attributes: God is what he has.  As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature.  And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is to be understood as an affirmation of God's absolute transcendence of creatures. God is not only radically non-anthropomorphic, but radically non-creaturomorphic, not only in respect of the properties he possesses, but in his manner of possessing them. God, we could say, differs in his very ontology from any and all created beings. -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Think about this idea of absolute simplicity for a second. If God is absolutely simple in nature, can He think? No. Can He speak? No. Because thinking and speaking both involve a separation of attributes. According to this classical view of divinity, then, God is completely unlike any cultural representations of Him. (And remember, this is a basic principle of Christian doctrine.) He is not a "He." He doesn't "sit on a throne" somewhere. He has no "where" or "when" or "what." He doesn't exist in any sense we can understand -- and here I agree wholeheartedly with my atheist friends -- because does doesn't apply to perfect simplicity. It implies a separation between actor and act. Where we differ is that I say that while He doesn't do, He is is.

Empty holy water fonts?

Do the little bowls of holy water dry up during Lent at your neighborhood Catholic church? If you're not a Catholic, you probably don't care, but if you are you might experience a little frisson of annoyance every time you try to bless yourself. Father Zuhlsdorf has a rant just for you.

Holy crap

Proof positive that the Vatican has no immediate shortage of nitwits. The Register reports:

A senior member of the Vatican is upgrading a handful of lesser celestial bugaboos into what now will effectively destroy the grace of God within the heart of the sinner.

The Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, interviewed senior cleric Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary (basically, the bureau of sin and absolution), who listed drug trafficking, pollution, social injustice and genetic manipulation as the new bleeding edge of mortal sins.

"If yesterday, sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that's especially social, rather than individual," the Associated Press translates from Girotti. . .

Girotti abominated "certain violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulations". He also added drugs to God's peeves, which Girotti said "weaken the mind and obscure intelligence". The Holy Trinity is also reportedly unhappy about pollution, and the widening social and economic differences between the rich and poor.

The snarky tone of the Register report may be puerile, but the implied opprobrium is well deserved. The man is a theological idiot, and I sincerely hope Benedict smacks him down very smartly. The idea that sin is no longer an "individual" matter but a "social" one undermines the entire foundation of the Christian concept of salvation, namely the uniqueness of each immortal soul and its absolute primacy  in all moral considerations. He's one step away from utilitarianism, and that's a slippery theological slope. For instance, if pollution is a mortal sin, how about overpopulation? When do we get to start weeding out the useless eaters for the greater good?

Not Anglicans, but Anglo-Saxons

The post title is a play on Pope Gregory's remark when he saw Angles for the first time (in an Italian slave market). Impressed by the beauty of their blond hair and fair skin, he said they were non angli sed angeli (not Angles, but angels).

But back to business.

24-Hour Museum reports that 3,000 11th-century Anglo-Saxon skeletons, which had been unearthed and used for research, are to be reinterred in a special ossuary. Their graves will be reconsecrated on March 7 in a ceremony that will include the Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon. The service will be "based in part on the Eucharist in the first English prayer book from 1549." What's so special about the 1549 version? Why not go back to the kind of service that would have been celebrated in Anglo-Saxon times? Well, that would have been in Latin and would require the services of a Roman Catholic priest. The 1549 BCP, on the other hand, is the first truly Protestant English prayer book.

Upon its publication, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer was forcibly imposed on all English and Welsh churches by the Act of Uniformity.

In the 1540s the government of Edward VI introduced a range of legislative measures as an extension of the Reformation in England and Wales , the primary aim being to remove certain practices and change the theology of the Chruch of England, which were perceived as being too Roman Catholic. In 1549, the Book of Common Prayer, reflecting the theology of the English Reformation, but keeping much of the appearance of the old rites, although the offertory which in the Sarum rite had taken place during the gradual was abolished, in English , replaced the four old liturgical books in Latin . The change was unpopular amongst religious conservatives — particularly in areas of traditionally Roman Catholic religious loyalty. Wikipedia

The immediate result of the imposition was the Prayer Book Rebellion:

In Cornwall, an army gathered under the leadership of the mayor. On instructions from the Lord Protector Duke of Somerset, an army composed mainly of German and Italian mercenaries was sent to impose a military solution. . . .

On 5 August, the final engagement came; the rebels were outmanoeuvered and surrounded. Lord Grey reported himself that he never in all the wars that he had been did he know the like. A group of Devon men went north up the valley of the Exe, where they were overtaken by Sir Gawen Carew, who left the corpses of their leaders hanging on gibbets from Dunster to Bath.

The Cornishmen under Arundell along with a number of the surviving Devon rebels re-formed and took position back at Sampford ourtenay, the village some fifteen miles north west of Exeter where the rebellion had started. Russell advanced with his troops, now reinforced with a strong contingent of Welshmen. After a desperate fight stormed the village on the evening of 17 August, the rebels were broken. . . .

1,300 died at Sampford Courtenay, 300 at Fenny Bridges, over 1000 were either shot or burned to death in Clyst St. Mary, 900 bound and gagged prisoners had their throats slit (in 10 minutes) on Clyst Heath, 2000 died the next day at the battle of Clyst Heath. In total over 5,500 people lost their lives in the rebellion. Further orders were issued on behalf of the king by the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Under Sir Anthony Kingston, English and mercenary forces then moved throughout Devon  and into Cornwall and executed or killed many people before the bloodshed finally ceased.

All this is by way of saying that, considering the anti-Catholic fervor with which the 1549 BCP was produced and imposed upon Catholic loyalists (and conservative-to-moderate Anglicans), those 3,000 Anglo-Saxons, who were after all Roman Catholics, not Anglicans, will probably spend eternity spinning in their special ossuary drawers. Couldn't they just have given them a mass?