tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post4621717540551972385..comments2024-03-27T14:45:28.176-05:00Comments on Adventus: "He's a very naughty boy! Now, piss off!"Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-21208488992147322562017-04-06T21:59:13.925-05:002017-04-06T21:59:13.925-05:00You're right, Willie the Shake did write a pla...You're right, Willie the Shake did write a play about Henry VIII. But it was written and performed in 1613, 10 years after the death of Elizabeth. Like I say, he knew how to not attract trouble.<br /><br />I'm no more skeptical, actually, than any good Catholic Biblical scholar, like, say, Fr. Raymond Brown (I'm an admirer of his work on the nativity stories). I respect the scriptures too much as religious documents to distort them as historical ones; and reading them as if they were accounts from the New York Times of 1st century Palestine is such a distortion.<br /><br />Which is what Jacobovici and Wilson do.<br /><br />The PBS show ended with a credit to "The Lost Gospel." There's a link in my blather to a Daily Beast article about it, and yeah, it sounds like a real stinker. My complaint with the two is not what they want to do to Christianity (it's far too big for them to disrupt it), but what they do to Biblical scholarship. As I say, Jacobovici's quote about his "new eyes" would be considered arrant nonsense in most circles where special knowledge is admired. In Biblical scholarship, lay people are mostly ignorant (by "lay" I mean non-academics, not non-priestly class) of the field, and accept any nonsense as wisdom. It makes Donald Trump's of us all.<br /><br />I would not, for a moment, say my knowledge or understanding of God (i.e., my theology) is superior to yours, or anyone else's; and I don't foist it on you merely by explaining what I think and have learned. It is this errant and dangerous stupidity I rise to counter. If they want to play on that field, play by the rules of the game.<br /><br />This ain't Calvinball, after all.<br /><br />The Judas stuff I remember, vaguely, from some of Cross's work. I should know better than to cite things I haven't researched again, but close enough was good enough. The point is the scapegoating of the Jews (who weren't quite yet "Jews" then) in the gospels, which has echoed down to the present day.<br /><br />Oh, and my point about the gospels being polemical is not meant to be dismissive but, again, to understand why they were written. There's a reason John has no "acts of power" but instead, his "miracles" are "signs." And why his Lazarus is resurrected, rather than resting on the bosom of Abraham for eternity. Or why Jesus changes water to wine at the wedding in Cana, but not in the canonicals. Or why Luke insists Joseph was a carpenter (a man without a patron; one step up from a beggar, in 1st century Palestine), or why John is Jesus' cousin, etc. etc., etc. Knowing these things does not make me a skeptic, it makes me understand the gospels more deeply as human responses to the divine.<br /><br />And yeah, Jesus=Joshua; I'm getting old and forgetful.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-25582048571735287132017-04-06T21:37:29.739-05:002017-04-06T21:37:29.739-05:00It’s funny that you mention Shakespeare, since he ...<br />It’s funny that you mention Shakespeare, since he did write (or co-write) a play called “Henry VIII.” I’ve never read it, and assume it pretty much pulls its punches, but what interests me more is Shakespeare’s participation in “Sir Thomas More.” (I picked up the “Arden Shakespeare” version last year.) There he seems to be skating on thin ice choosing as his protagonist a man executed by Henry for treason. The play was heavily censored, and it may well not have ever been publicly performed, and, in any case, the manuscript as we have it has More executed without giving the audience a clue about why. “A very learned worthy gentleman/Seals error with his blood.” And yes, Shakespeare’s participation was very limited (and still contested by some), but I’ll give him some credit for going out on a limb.<br /><br />One other quibble:<br /> <br />“"Judas" was not a name in Judea ("Jesus" is the Greek version of "Joseph"), but it allowed another layer of blame to fall on: the Jews.”<br /><br />Wasn’t Judas Maccabeus the great hero of the Jewish revolt against the Hellenists? I think the name in the Septuagint is the same as the name in the Greek New Testament. And “Jesus” is the Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English of “Y’hoshua/Joshua,” not “Ioseph/Joseph.”<br /><br />But, quibbling aside, your point is well taken. These kinds of reconstructions basically seem put together to solve problems that a Christian doesn’t necessarily see as problems. <br /> <br />A few years back I read Michael Bulgakov’s "The Master and Margarita." It was written in Russia under Stalin, and set at that time, but it includes a subordinate story line involving the condemnation of Jesus by Pilate. It deviates rather significantly from the gospel accounts—I think Pilate ends up killing Judas himself. But it didn’t purport to be arguing that its account of events was the way things really were. In fact, the last time we see Pilate, he’s talking with Jesus while they’re both walking on a moonbeam. Not to be confused with History! Or a PBS documentary!<br />rick allenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-26462508137514071222017-04-06T21:37:14.886-05:002017-04-06T21:37:14.886-05:00I didn’t see this production; I was actually total...I didn’t see this production; I was actually totally unaware of its airing. But it seems to me that the main problem with it is that it basically takes as its premise the assumption that the Christian faith concerning Jesus is wrong, and that therefore there must somehow be some set of world-historical circumstances that caused the Christian faith to make a bigger splash than it should have.<br /><br />Not that they don’t have a perfect right to make such programs and hold such beliefs. It’s just that, if you happen to believe, as I do, that Jesus was the incarnate Word, all this speculation about Herod colluding with Sejanus seems a little extraneous.<br /><br />I’d never heard of Barri Wilson, but apparently in 2014 (thnak you, Google) he and Jacobovici published something called "The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene.” Not reassuring.<br /><br />Anyway, though I pretty much agree with everything you say about the implausibility of this account (including the approach so many “historical” revisions, seemingly arbitrarily dismissing some parts of the gospel accounts and accepting others as, well, “gospel truth”), it still seems to me that the main difference between you and these guys is that your skepticism is more mainstream.<br /><br /> “[L]et's not confuse history and the gospels. Toward the end of the documentary, the real Biblical scholars point out that the gospels were polemical in nature, not historical. They are described as recruitment literature, not as historical accounts a la Josephus, the Jewish historian for Rome.”<br /><br />The gospels are certainly not history in the sense of being the product of a 21st century academic history department. But of course neither was Josephus, who was writing with as much of a “non-historical” purpose as the Evangelists—to convince the Romans that Jews, after the revolt, could still be loyal citizens of the empire. Plutarch’s Lives, contemporary with the gospels, are not “history” in the exact modern sense either. Their aim is to convince their readers of a certain parallel between Greek and Roman greatness and to inculcate lessons addressing of political virtue.<br /><br />Nevertheless we are perfectly justified in looking to Josephus or Plutarch to figure out what was happening.<br />Neither do I think that we have confuse history and the gospels to conclude that the gospels are capable of giving us a good sense of what happened, or conveying the impression that Jesus’ words and actions left on his contemporaries.<br />rick allenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-67596969406106260262017-04-06T15:02:25.615-05:002017-04-06T15:02:25.615-05:00Jacobovici, PBS is really sucking the bottom of th...Jacobovici, PBS is really sucking the bottom of the barrel. Why didn't they just show The Life of Brian? The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.com