We're all hiding something. Let's find the courage to open up.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
A Failure to be “Critical in the Right Way”
I consider it significant that I was not asked to document my reference to “threats made,” which I was prepared to do. However, my main objective was to demonstrate that the church’s fundamentalist position regarding what happened in the Garden of Eden, according to the second creation myth, does and ought to inspire fear and make its use legitimate theologically. But that’s not what we really believe, right?
In my opinion, Adventist theology has taken on a strong, officially supported flavor of fundamentalism under Ted Wilson’s leadership, and I believe it bodes ill for the church. I welcome your comments.
For Whom the Memo Tolls
by Andy Hanson
Author’s Note
This partially shredded conclusion to what appears to be an official memo was discovered along with other trash blown against a chain link fence behind a dumpster at GC headquarters. Who wrote it or received it is not known. Once again, the source is anonymous and the authenticity of this fragment cannot be verified.
Page two
TO CONCLUDE
And while you’re at it, inspire a little fear.
Remind them that they have been encouraged to share privately recorded conversations with church authorities and report heretical behaviors of other church members.
Remind Adventist university presidents that it’s only “biblical truth” that sets anyone free.
Remind those folks employed in our Department of Religious liberty that “religious liberty” is an oxymoron, particularly when it comes to defending the rights of those LGBT perverts.
Remind colleagues that if they have serious doubts about the Fundamental 28, they are in danger of forfeiting Eternal Life and are potential candidates for at least a moment or two in the Lake of Fire.
These “reminders” can be boiled down to the following warning: “Do what God tells you to do. He doesn’t mess around. He made it crystal clear that the inability of the first humans to follow orders condemned YOU and everyone you love to die by one of the following: drowning, starvation, war, disease, childbirth, fire, tsunami, infection, poison, genocide, infestation, persecution, gun violence, suicide, accident, and murder.” And if anyone isn’t sure how to obey God today and eventually get to Heaven where these things can be avoided, an Adventist theologian or some other church authority has the answer.
To be even more succinct, remind them to FEAR GOD and don’t forget, He’s insulted if you claim to be an Adventist simply on a profession of faith, or, in the millennium jargon of one reprobate, “doing your best to make Jesus proud of you.”
Appended handwritten note:
For your eyes only
Encourage Bill Knott to continue to “taint” Rachael Maddow but
lay off Hannity,* he and our new prophetic voice, Ben Carson, are buds.
*Assumed that this reference is to Bill Knott’s editorial, Tagged and Tainted, Adventist Review, February 13, 2014.
Synthetic voices, as unique as fingerprints
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Paper Beats Plastic? How To Rethink Environmental Folklore
Part XV- Matthew: Understanding the Sermon on the Mount: Conclusion
https://johnshelbyspong.com/
Jesus never preached the Sermon on the Mount! That needs to be said again and again until it is embraced as a fact. The Sermon on the Mount was composed by the author of Matthew’s gospel in order to fill out his interpretive portrait of Jesus, not only as the messiah, but also as the expected prophet of whom Moses spoke and even one who was thought to have relived the life of Moses. This suggestion will be startling to some, which is why I have been so deliberate in developing the background material. Biblical ignorance is not a virtue, especially when the background material that I have cited has been known in the world of biblical scholarship for at least the last 200 years.
The facts supporting these ideas are plentiful. Nowhere else in the New Testament was Jesus ever said to have preached the Sermon on the Mount. If, as Matthew suggests, it was such a climactic moment in Jesus’ life, does it not seem strange that this event did not make an indelible impression on anyone else in the developing Christian tradition? Paul, Mark, Luke and John never mention it. In fairness, let me say that some of the material included in Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount is also included in Luke as part of Jesus’ preaching on the plains, but it is not nearly so beautifully set forth or dramatic. Luke’s Beatitudes, for example, are shortened to four and are accompanied by a series of four woes, portraying neither the grandeur nor the depth of Matthew’s sermon. Indeed, it appears to be derivative.
Some scholars adhere to what is known as “the Q hypothesis.” They believe that both Luke and Matthew had an additional, now lost, common source other than Mark, which they have called “Quella,” the German word for “source,” which was quickly abbreviated to Q. Q, they argue, contained a number of the sayings of Jesus and is used to explain the similarities between Matthew and Luke that are not derived from Mark. Other scholars who deny the Q hypothesis, and I am increasingly one of them, argue that what has been called “the Q material” is really Matthew’s midrashic adaptations written on the text of Mark, and that Luke had both Mark and Matthew before him when he wrote his gospel. Thus Luke incorporated into his gospel some of Matthew’s adaptations and additions to Mark. This, rather than a speculative, now lost document, would account for the sometimes almost identical non-Marcan passages found in both Matthew and Luke. This would mean that Q is nothing but Matthew’s adaptations to Mark, which were then incorporated into Luke.
The Q hypothesis has been a standard assumption of New Testament scholars for at least the last 150 years, but I find a theory based on a lost document to be a rather weak argument and I am delighted to see confidence in the Q hypothesis begin to wane, although that waning is more obvious among scholars in the United Kingdom than it is among scholars in the United States. In the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly think tank made up primarily of American scripture scholars, the Q hypothesis has achieved the status of an almost unchallenged dogma. In that body I was a lonely voice of one, who was never convinced of the accuracy of the Q hypothesis despite the complete confidence of the Seminar’s other fellows in it.
My reasons for this skepticism are located in the Jewishness of the gospels in general and the Jewishness of Matthew’s gospel in particular. The Sermon on the Mount is the cornerstone of my dismissal of the Q hypothesis The more one understands that the organizing principle behind each of the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) is not the remembered life of Jesus, but the pattern of synagogue worship in which the Jesus story was told and retold during the first two to three generations of Christianity’s life, the less need one has for the existence of a lost source called Q. As we look at the Sermon on the Mount from a Jewish perspective, the more this Jewish liturgical background becomes both apparent and appealing. Indeed the relationship between the Sermon on the Mount and the festival observance of Shavuot is only the first of these connections, which I will set opposite one another as we walk through the rest of Matthew’s gospel. It is on these connections that in my mind the necessity for the Q hypothesis disappears.
What the Sermon on the Mount is to Shavuot the crucifixion will be to Passover, and between those two great celebrations Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, and Dedication will all be related to significant and appropriate Jesus stories. In this analysis, literalism as a viable way of reading the gospels will quite simply die and we will begin to see new dimensions in the Christ portrayal, which will enable us to lay a new claim on our faith story. To begin this process we must make sure that the connection between the Sermon on the Mount and the celebration of Shavuot is clear. If you notice that I am repeating some ideas from the column last week, be assured that it is on purpose. New ideas have to be repeated until they find permanent lodging in our minds.
Shavuot, as noted previously, is a festival coming 50 days after Passover and observed in the synagogue with a 24 hour vigil. For this vigil Psalm 119, the longest Psalm in the Psalter was specifically written. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount is modeled on that psalm. Psalm 119 provides a psalm reading for the eight segments of the 24 hour vigil. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount reflects this psalm in many ways. It too is divided into eight segments. In Matthew’s introduction to the Sermon on the Mount he frames eight verses in such a way that each begins with the word “Blessed,” causing these verses to be named “the Beatitudes.” In the introduction to Psalm 119 two of the eight verses begin with the word “Blessed.”
Matthew’s sermon is then made up of eight commentaries on each of the eight Beatitudes, but he will do these commentaries in reverse order; that is, his first commentary is on the eighth Beatitude and his last commentary is on the first Beatitude. Psalm 119 in its entirety is a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the Law, the Torah. Among its words are these: “Blessed are those who walk in the law (the Torah) of the Lord.” “Let me not wander from your commandments (your Torah).” “Blessed are thou, O Lord; teach me your statutes (your Torah).” “I am a sojourner on earth; hide not your commandments (your Torah) from me.” “I will run in the way of your commandments (Torah) when you enlarge my understanding.” We could continue this kind of quotation with many, many references out of that Psalm’s text.
Psalm 119 was clearly created to serve the liturgical needs of the synagogue during Shavuot’s 24 hour vigil. Both Matthew and his readers would know this and would recognize that the Sermon on the Mount was patterned after Psalm 119, the psalm of Shavuot.
It was not a foreign practice for the Jews at the great celebrations of their liturgical life to read the biblical passages that tell the story behind the celebration each year. Liturgy is, after all, the act of recalling the historical moments in a nation’s sacred history. The book of Esther had been written to be read at the Feast of Purim, to celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from genocide in the days of the Persians. The book of Lamentations had been written for the Ninth of Ab, the day when the Jews recalled the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Babylonians. The basis of the celebration of Shavuot would be the Sinai story from the book of Exodus in which the Torah was given to Moses, so this was the Torah lesson that was always read at this celebration.
Before we can understand the Sermon on the Mount we must understand its Jewish antecedents. The Torah began with the Ten Commandments and Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount touches on each of the Ten, some quite overtly, but not missing any of them. Matthew’s readers would also recognize how the Sermon on the Mount was modeled on Psalm 119, the Psalm of Shavuot. That was how they understood Matthew’s gospel. From about 150 CE on, however, the Christian Church became a Gentile movement, so the Jewish background to the gospel’s Jesus stories was unknown. More than that there was an active and virulent anti-Jewish prejudice that was operating in this Gentile Church. So it was that the Jewish meaning behind the gospel stories was lost. That meant that for the next 2000 or so years of Christian history the only people who read, studied, taught or wrote commentaries on the gospels were Gentiles who were ignorant of and prejudiced against their original Jewish frame of reference. In that process symbolic Jewish stories were read as if they were literal history.
Biblical literalism is at its heart a Gentile heresy, born in the ignorance of the Jewish background to the gospels. To recover the essential meaning of our own gospels we must learn to read them through a Jewish lens or with Jewish eyes. We must understand the Jewish context in which and for which the various segments of the synoptic gospels were written. We must be able to identify what I call the “Gentile Captivity of the Christian Story.” It was in the service of Gentile ignorance that Christians were taught first that the Bible must be understood literally; later it was the 4th century Christians were taught that the creeds had to be believed literally, and finally in the 13th century Christians were taught that worship forms were handed down from on high and were, therefore, not subject to change.
The future of Christianity depends on breaking this stranglehold of imposed literalism, based on Gentile ignorance of Christianity’s Jewish roots and origins. I seek to counter the ignorance of literalism week by week in this study of Matthew’s Gospel. It is the celebration of Shavuot that makes the Sermon on the Mount what it is– deeply true, but not literal history.
Stay tuned! The narrative becomes more and more exciting as its organizing secret is revealed.
Does the media have a "duty of care"?
Thursday, March 13, 2014
A new equation for intelligence
Part XIV Matthew – The Sermon on the Mount: Sinai Revisited
https://johnshelbyspong.com/
Matthew is portraying Jesus as the New Moses who went to the top of a new mountain to deliver a new interpretation of the Torah. He is not a reporter for a local newspaper covering an event that actually happened. Matthew is quite specific in his gospel that Jesus is not delivering a new Torah! He was far too deeply Jewish to think that way. Indeed, he has Jesus say that not one “jot or tittle,” not one comma or period in the Torah is to be set aside by his re-interpretation. For Matthew the Torah will find its ultimate meaning and its fulfillment in the life and teaching of Jesus; that is what he is claiming.
So, if the Sermon on the Mount is the time for Matthew to revisit Mt. Sinai and to understand Moses and the Torah in a new way, it behooves us to become familiar with the Exodus story in which the Torah was originally said to have been given. One can hardly understand Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the new Moses on a new mountain, if we do not know much less understand, the original story of Moses on Mount Sinai.
The Jewish method of keeping the great events in Jewish history alive in every generation was to bind these events into their liturgical year. In this way, the essential meaning of these events in history could be celebrated annually, the origins of the tradition re-read or retold and the understanding of the people newly refreshed as the past is liturgically incorporated into each successive generation. This is what both liturgy and liturgical calendars are designed to do. That is why worship almost always celebrates the crucial moments in the religious history of the worshiping people.
The first liturgical event in the Jewish year was Passover observed on the 14th and 15th days of the month of Nisan, the first month in the Jewish calendar according to Leviticus. Fifty days later, the second major celebration of the Jewish liturgical year arrived in their calendar and was observed. Some called this day “Pentecost,” which literally means 50 days, as in from Passover. It was also called “The Festival of Weeks,” because it was celebrated on the first day after the passing of 49 days or seven weeks. The Hebrew word for “weeks” is Shavuot, so that is also a name by which this day was known. Shavuot celebrated that biblical moment when the people of the Exodus, wandering in the wilderness somewhere between the Red Sea and the Jordan River, entered into a covenant relationship with the God who had delivered them from Egypt. This event took place at the foot of a mountain called Sinai. It marked the time when God was supposed to have given the Torah to the people through Moses.
This annual Shavuot celebration came to be observed liturgically with a twenty-four hour vigil, divided into eight three-hour segments. As part of this vigil, the Exodus story would be read in all its fullness. Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Psalter, was created to be used on this day. Its 176 verses were divided into an introduction and seven segments of three stanzas each, thus providing a reading from the Psalter for each of the eight parts of the 24 hour worship vigil. Two of the eight verses of the crucial introductory stanza of Psalm 119 began with a word that was translated by the word “blessed” or “happy.” The body of this Psalm was a hymn of praise to God for the beauty and the wonder of the law, the Torah. Thus it was that this annual celebration of Shavuot kept the Sinai experience current in every new Jewish generation.
There were other major feast and fast days in the liturgical year: Rash Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth and Dedication (or Hanukkah), all of which, we will learn later, shaped Matthew’s gospel, but it is Shavuot that forms the background for Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, our current focus. It was Matthew’s intention to portray Jesus in the role of the New Moses, the one who fulfills the Torah and the prophet that Moses promised would someday come. Before we can understand this connection fully, we must go back to the original Exodus story and fix the Sinai experience in our minds. When we do, Matthew’s Sermon will open up with a new intensity.
Moses and the children of Israel had arrived in their wilderness wanderings at the foot of Mt. Sinai in the land of Midian. There Moses was reunited with the members of his family, whom he had left at the call of God to lead the people of Israel out of slavery and into freedom. His wife Zipporah and his two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, came out to greet him. Perhaps even more important to this story is the account that Jethro, the priest of Midian and not coincidentally Moses’ father-in-law, was part of the welcoming party. Jethro was portrayed as being impressed with Moses’ successes. This was to be a meeting of two holy men – perhaps two distinct religious traditions – that needed to come together, but in this narrative, they already appear to overlap significantly. After a brief family reunion, Moses and Jethro entered into a long conversation. Moses recounted to Jethro all the things that “the Lord had accomplished.” The crossing of the Red Sea and the story of manna from heaven were clearly in the background. Jethro rejoiced in these achievements and “blessed the Lord.” Then in an act of mutual recognition, the two “holy men” proceeded to offer burnt offerings and sacrifices to God. Aaron, the high priest of Israel, joined Moses and Jethro and “all the elders” of Israel ate bread together with the two leaders. The religion of Israel and the religion of Midian were coming together.
The next day, Moses sat in the seat of judgment to hear all the disputes that had arisen among the people on this journey. It was his role as the tribal leader to render a decision in each dispute. The case load was so large that this “court” lasted from morning to evening. Jethro watched this process with increasing dis-ease. Later he shared his feelings about this process with Moses in private. Moses defended this process, saying that this was his way of teaching the people “the statutes of God.” Jethro countered by saying that one person cannot be the sole judge for an entire nation. Then he said to Moses: “You must teach them the statutes of God and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do.”
The way to do this, Jethro continued, was to divide the people into groups of 1000 and choose leaders for each group of 1000 from among those “who fear God and are trustworthy; people who hate a bribe.” Then, Jethro continued, you must further divide the groups of 1000 into groups of 100, then 50 and finally 10, with chosen leaders over each of these smaller units. Disputes that cannot be settled at the 10 level will be passed to the leader of the 50 level. If they cannot be settled at the 50 level, they will be passed to the leaders of 100 and then to the leaders of 1000. You, Moses, will then deal only with those issues that cannot be decided by the leaders of the units of a 1000. Moses agreed to this plan and this organization was set up.
There was still a problem, however. By what standards would these smaller unit judges make their decisions? Only Moses seemed to know what the law of God was. Is every judge to render decisions based on the opinion of that judge alone? How could the confusion of their interpretations be avoided when these judges made different decisions? A unified nation needs a unified body of law, an objective standard on the basis of which judgments are to be made. It was not enough that Moses talked to God alone to discuss the divine will; that will must be revealed to all the people and then codified for all to read and to learn. While it was clear that this need was apparent, there was still the political problem that unless the law of God flowed through Moses, the authority of Moses would be undercut. So Moses laid down the process by which the law of God could flow through Moses to the people. It was to be a dramatic scene of divine revelation.
Three new moons later, after the escaping former slave people were encamped at the foot of a mountain in the wilderness of Sinai, it was said that God called Moses to come up the mountain to confer. In that consultation, God offered a covenant or contract to the people: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will be my own possession.” I will turn you into “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation,” The people agreed that this was what they wanted. Moses then took their consent back to God. Then the plan was made whereby the will of God would be revealed to the people in a very dramatic, awe-inspiring moment. God was coming to speak through a cloud so that the people could hear the divine will for themselves.
The people consecrated themselves for two days by washing their garments and refraining from sex to make themselves ready for the divine Epiphany that was to occur on the third day. Boundaries were set around Mt. Sinai; people who transgressed these boundaries would do so on pain of death. All was in readiness.
When the third day arrived, the book of Exodus informs us that there was thunder and lightning and then a dark cloud covered the mountain. The people watched as the mountain was covered in smoke and fire and then the mountain quaked as the trumpets blew louder and louder. Next Moses called to God and God came down from the sky to the mountain. God instructed Moses to bring Aaron up. The high priest must also be validated. That was how the words of the Torah were said to have entered human history. In Shavuot the will of God became objective law, but Moses was the means of the revelation. Aaron and the priests were now in the loop of authority.
An objective standard had been created to which every one who judged could appeal for authority. The only way the law could be altered was for a new Moses to reveal a new insight into the law and in the process be validated by all the people as a new deepening of an old revelation. That was what Matthew was claiming when he portrayed Jesus as delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed Matthew created the Sermon on the Mount to validate the claim that Jesus was the New Moses. We will look at the Sermon in detail when this series resumes.
How Architectural Innovations Migrate Across Borders
Thursday, March 06, 2014
How wolves change rivers.
Finding Israel's First Camels
http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=19673
Tel Aviv University archaeologists pinpoint the date when domesticated camels arrived in Israel
Now Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the moment when domesticated camels arrived in the southern Levant, pushing the estimate from the 12th to the 9th century BCE. The findings, published recently in the journal Tel Aviv, further emphasize the disagreements between Biblical texts and verifiable history, and define a turning point in Israel's engagement with the rest of the world.
"The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development," said Dr. Ben-Yosef. "By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries."
Copper mining and camel riding
Archaeologists have established that camels were probably domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula for use as pack animals sometime towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In the southern Levant, where Israel is located, the oldest known domesticated camel bones are from the Aravah Valley, which runs along the Israeli-Jordanian border from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and was an ancient center of copper production. At a 2009 dig, Dr. Ben-Yosef dated an Aravah Valley copper smelting camp where the domesticated camel bones were found to the 11th to 9th century BCE. In 2013, he led another dig in the area.
To determine exactly when domesticated camels appeared in the southern Levant, Dr. Sapir-Hen and Dr. Ben-Yosef used radiocarbon dating and other techniques to analyze the findings of these digs as well as several others done in the valley. In all the digs, they found that camel bones were unearthed almost exclusively in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BCE or later — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible. The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think were in the southern Levant from the Neolithic period or even earlier. Notably, all the sites active in the 9th century in the Arava Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.
The appearance of domesticated camels in the Aravah Valley appears to coincide with dramatic changes in the local copper mining operation. Many of the mines and smelting sites were shut down; those that remained active began using more centralized labor and sophisticated technology, according to the archaeological evidence. The researchers say the ancient Egyptians may have imposed these changes — and brought in domesticated camels — after conquering the area in a military campaign mentioned in both biblical and Egyptian sources.
Humping it to India
The origin of the domesticated camel is probably the Arabian Peninsula, which borders the Aravah Valley and would have been a logical entry point for domesticated camels into the southern Levant. In fact, Dr. Ben-Yosef and Dr. Sapir-Hen say the first domesticated camels ever to leave the Arabian Peninsula may now be buried in the Aravah Valley.
The arrival of domesticated camels promoted trade between Israel and exotic locations unreachable before, according to the researchers; the camels can travel over much longer distances than the donkeys and mules that preceded them. By the seventh century BCE, trade routes like the Incense Road stretched all the way from Africa through Israel to India. Camels opened Israel up to the world beyond the vast deserts, researchers say, profoundly altering its economic and social history.
http://www.etsy.com/shop/nakedpastor?ref=l2-shopheader-name
Puppies! Now That I’ve Got Your Attention, Complexity Theory
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