Category: Christianity

The curse of too much reading

Posted on by Roger Pearse

JPS points us to a post by Kevin Edgcomb:

I curse my studies. Sometimes, anyway. What good is it to be following a Bible reading plan for the faithful when half of what is going on during my reading is (Lord, have mercy!) a critique of the translation, a mental retroversion to the Hebrew and/or Greek involved, mental notes on historical illumination and literary parallels, and all manner of distractions. The wonder is often gone. I hate that.

The same experience can afflict the classicist, who can no longer sail with Telemachus in a black ship across the wine-dark sea to see fair-haired Menelaus, for all the scholarly footnotes that howl in his head. 

Is there much practical difference between this and being unable any longer to read the book in question?  Is a textual scholar — let us say one with perfect command of Homeric Greek, who has memorised the scholia and knows every volume of important scholarship published in the last millennium — perhaps the least able, of all men, to read the Odyssey any more?

Kevin rightly observes the problems in bible reading for those with too much head knowledge.  It has been many years since the ordinary off-the-shelf bible-reading guides have been of much service to me.  They are aimed at some common average, of sympathies and intellect and attitude; and perhaps few of those inclined to study, even as amateurs, will fall into that group.

I say this with regret, not pride.  I am the loser, not the gainer thereby.  I have not gained in knowledge of God; I have merely become unable to learn from some who know more than me on every important point, except in matters of manuscript studies.

How easy it is for the less perceptive to suppose that they have “risen above” this sort of guide, when in truth they have merely become  unable to read it and profit from it, for all intents and purposes.

What shall it profit a man, if he knows every footnote in Nestle-Aland, and loses his soul?  In my time of dying, which may be very much sooner than I suppose, how much of that to which I have devoted my life will seem other than dry and dusty shreds of paper?

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Evidence for Allectus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The ever-interesting Adrian Murdoch draws attention to the PLRE life of the Usurper Emperor-of-Britain Allectus, which he gives as follows:

Allectus: Augustus (in Britain) 293-296. Rationalis summae rei of Carausius 293: qui (Allectus) cum eius (Carausii) permissu summae rei praeesset Aur. Vict. Caes. 39.41. After Carausius had ruled for seven years Allectus murdered him and took his place, but three years later was defeated and killed by the PPO Asclepiodotus 3 serving under Constantius Aur. Vict. Caes. 39-40-2, Eutrop. IX22, Oros. VIII 25.6, cf Pan. Lat IV 12.15-16.

The list of authorities for our knowledge of a man who ruled part of the Roman Empire for 3 years, between 293-296 AD caught my eye.  We have:

  • Aurelius Victor
  • Eutropius
  • Orosius

and maybe a reference in the Panegryrici Latini.  That’s it; three references, a century later, and all probably based on a single now lost source.  There are coins as well, of course.

I have remarked before on the readiness with which the naive tend to expect contemporary evidence for ancient events.  This is an example of what we really can expect.

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Thorns from Jesus’ crown available on eBay!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via this link.  Relics available include:

OF THE SWADDLING CLOTHES OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
OF A THORN OF THE CROWN OF THORNS OF JESUS CHRIST
OF THE BELT OF OUR LADY, THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
OF THE VEIL OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
OF THE MANTLE OF OUR LADY
OF THE COAT OF ST. JOSEPH, SPOUSE OF OUR LADY

Thanks to Antonio Lombatti for the link.

Those of us who encounter atheists know that these toss the word “superstition” around unthinkingly, applying it to any Christian belief held by anyone, however scientific and rational.  Naturally this makes the educated man somewhat cynical, especially on observing the lack of self-criticism endemic in such folk. 

So it comes as something of a shock to encounter real superstition, medieval-style, alive and well today; and still more, the commercial exploitation of it, of the kind that was an excuse for the Reformation.  Such activity is, of course, blasphemous in the most literal sense.

Antonio mistakenly describes this business as faith-driven.  But I think that it is money-driven.  Those manufacturing the things cannot believe in their authenticity.  On the contrary, they must be hard-faced atheists to engage in such blasphemy.  They intend to dupe the faithful; and it seems hard to blame the victim of the swindle.  What Jesus thought about those who turned the Temple into a chance for a profit we all know, of course.

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Coptic monastic revival

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While I was in Egypt, I was interested to learn that the Coptic church has been undergoing a quiet revival over the last few decades.  This has centred on their monasteries, from which the Coptic Patriarch is always chosen.  By 1960, one of the most important monasteries, that of St. Macarius in the Wadi al-Natrun (the Nitrian Desert, or Scete) had only six frail old monks, and the building was in considerable disrepair.  Today it has 130.

Much of the credit belongs to the late Fr. Matta el-Meskeen.  He had created an independent monastic community in the Wadi al-Rayan during the 60’s.  In 1967 he and his dozen monks were ordered by the then Patriarch, Cyril VI – today widely considered a saint – to go to St. Macarius.  They did so, and Fr. Matta then revitalised the community, and began the current revival.  Monasteries are filling up with monks; men who have completed their military training, had a professional education, but have been drawn to the monastic life.  Abandoned monasteries are being reopened, although this has sometimes led to land disputes.  New monasteries are being built.

Books by Fr. Matta have been translated into several languages, and are available from the monastery here.

Fr. Matta was not always able to avoid politics.  As a senior monk in the church he was a natural candidate for patriarch, twice nominated and twice passed over.  As an important copt he was one of those consulted by President Sadat at the time when the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was sent into internal exile.  His closeness to Sadat meant that he was able to enjoy state protection, and to add land for cultivation to the St. Macarius monastery.  But the same factors meant that Shenouda’s supporters regarded him with suspicion, and attempts were made to find theological heresy in his books.  Such communal struggles are inevitable in this life, and should not detract from the immensity of his achievement.  He was able to find a way for Copts to reconnect with God in the modern world, and was the Lord’s implement to renew his people in a Moslem land. 

I have been unable to locate any English biography of him.  The Wikipedia article has several links which are helpful.

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Legends about what the Chronicon Pascale says

Posted on by Roger Pearse

After Eusebius invented the idea of the “Chronicle of World History”, subsequent writers produced considerable numbers of these.  As a rule these start with Adam, using the Bible and Eusebius to cover stuff up to Constantine, and then whatever continuations and paraphrases were available.

The Chronicon Pascale is an example of this genre.  It’s a Greek World Chronicle, composed around 630 AD in the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Heraclius, just half a dozen years before the Arabs charge out of the desert and find no-one in any shape to resist them.  No translation of the whole thing exists, apart from the renaissance Latin version printed in the Patrologia Graeca 92.  Whitby and Whitby made an English translation of the portion from 284 AD onwards.

Bill Thayer of Lacus Curtius forwarded me an email in which someone raised an interesting query:

…in “The Story of Religious Controversy”, a book written in 1929 by Joseph McCabe. In the chapter entitled “Morals in Ancient Egypt,” he is speaking of the son of the goddess Isis–Horus–and says: “An early Christian work, the ‘Paschal Chronicle’ (Migne ed. xcii. col 385), tells us that every year the temples of Horus presented to worshippers, in mid-winter (or about December 25th), a scenic model of the birth of Horus. He was represented as a babe born in a stable, his mother Isis standing by.”

I hope we all know better than to believe the crude falsehoods about Christian origins circulated by bitter atheists online.  But does the CP say any such thing?  I went off to look.

Skimming over the Latin side , I find a discussion of Jeremiah’s prediction of Christ, starting in col. 383, “De Jeremia”.  This starts with one of the messianic passages, mirrored in Matthew – which he quotes – and then says is also in Hebrews.  Then he goes on (my own rough translation of key points):

“Jeremiah was from Anathoth, and was killed in Taphais in Egypt by being stoned by the people, and sleeps in the place where Pharaoh’s palace is, (..because he was very respected..) because when they were infested with the aquatic animals, called Menephoth in Egyptian and crocodiles in Greek. Even today those faithful to God who take some of the dust of that place can drive crocodiles away”

One may hope that no-one actually experimented with live crocodiles to verify this.

Then follows a story that Alexander, when he came to Egypt, and heard about the “arcana” which he had predicted, removed the prophet’s relics to Alexandria, for some other similar magic which I can’t quite make out.  It then continues:

“This sign Jeremiah gave to the priests of Aegypt, predicting the future, that their idols would be destroyed and ? by a boy saviour born of a virgin, and laid in a manger.” 

It goes on:

“Quapropter etiamvero ut deam colunt virginem puerperam, et infantem in praesepi adorant.

For which reason (?) they honour a pregnant virgin goddess and worship an infant in a manger.

When king Ptolemy asked why, they told him that they received this secret from the holy prophet handed down by their fathers. The same prophet Jeremiah, before the destruction of the temple, …”  (more stuff about prophecy).

Migne quotes a note by DuCange (25) which says that this bit about a virgin comes from Epiphanius and Simon Logothetes (who?).  No reference is given, unfortunately, and I was unable to find it in the Panarion.

This last bit is probably the kernel of the story that we see in highly embroidered form above.

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In whom is our salvation…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some excellent posts for Christians at Spirit-filled Puritan about the current crises.  The ones that struck me all had to do with placing our trust in God, not in a particular outcome of the economy.  I have been unable to find blogs online where God is at the centre, rather than religion – even if it sounds like ‘our’ religion.  Isn’t that strange?

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Erich von Daniken rides again!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jim Davila of Paleojudaica tells us that the old man is back on the road and still asking, “Was God an astronaut?”  The answer was always ‘no’, of course; but he made quite a bit of money asking it.  Compared to all those dreary “God is dead but I’m going to stay a bishop anyway” books of the same period, he was a breath of fresh air.  And the artwork was better too…

There are any number of people trying to sell books falsifying Christian origins.  Most are forgettable.  They have their day in the sun, attract some dimwitted disciples, and then perish utterly. 

I suppose that most of them are just chancers in it for a quick buck.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, if you think it’s all rubbish.  Indeed I remember many years ago getting a CD of a couple of UK newspapers, and doing a search for “Jesus”.  What I got was book reviews; one after another, each peddling “the real Jesus”.  Each and every one of them used the same method; find excuses to ignore what the historical record says, then invent some story which is agreeable to comfortable people in the period in which they were writing.  Of course the final fairy-stories varied wildly.  But each was solemnly reviewed, apparently without the reviewers ever saying to themselves, “Hang on.  Didn’t we have another one of these last month?  And the month before?  They can’t ALL be true!”

Then there are the haters, drearily whining about how evil the Christians are, repeating the same old “Well look at the crusades” tosh.  These tend to be less literate than the conmen, and less readable, and less honest.  Hate is a bad guide to anything.  There’s some absurd ex-priest in Canada peddling some whopping lies.  Apparently he was once an episcopalian, but found even that lax organisation was too principled for him.  A couple of writers stopped writing sex books and started writing “Jesus was really Osiris” books.  I’d have thought too many people knew about ancient Egypt for that to sell, but apparently I’m wrong.  There used to be some guy who called himself Roman Piso and asserted that Jesus was actually one of the Calpurnius Piso’s.  Another one says Jesus was Julius Caesar.  Yet another claims that Christianity was made up in the 4th century.  Another one prefers some indefinite date in the late 1st century.  Not all have published, but all have tried!

Yet Erich was different.  He wasn’t a hater, but an enthusiast.  It has always been quite possible to believe in his sincerity, if not entirely so.  Let’s face it, he’s made too much money to listen very hard to his critics. Yet his books are fun!  Tosh, but fun. 

Apparently the Old Testament Apocrypha have now attracted his attention.  Well, I bet the contents are probably about as valuable as a good deal of the low-grade throwaway scholarly work on them.  Hey, I’m waiting to see the cover art.  It’s got to be better than Clarendon Press version of the Revised Standard Version, with hard covers.

Von Daniken asks if the gods are aliens.  Maybe we can get him to ask if certain biblical scholars are aliens.  We’d have to conduct test-tube experiments, repeatable trials.  We want to be scientific, right?

Let’s see if we can get Bart Ehrman in a test-tube, and add some water and see if he turns blue.  If he does, he must be a witch!

The power of nonsense is great, but every fraud gets found out in the end.

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How dare the Christians defend themselves!?!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The excellent Tony Chartrand-Burke of Apocryphicity, is doing some very useful work on obscure apocrypha in Old Slavonic.  Indeed I look in from time to time, in the hope that he’s posted more! I learn that he has written an article Heresy hunting in the New Millennium, attacking Christians who criticise the gnostics and their modern propagandists.  I’m sorry to see this; it’s not constructive to get involved in modern religious controversy like this, surely?

I’ve read the article, but it reads a bit as if Tony is repeating stuff from somewhere, by someone rather accustomed to religious polemic.  There’s a paragraph that pretends that Christians are being unreasonable for seeing themselves attacked by the Jesus Seminar and its roadshows in the bible belt, Bart Ehrman’s numerous books attacking the bible, and the Da Vinci Code’s misrepresentation of early history.  No sensible person could take that view; and Tony is certainly a sensible and honest person.  But isn’t pretending the other person is the aggressor a very old trick for disarming a foe before you stick it to him?  After all, we all know that WW2 was started by the Poles invading Germany… if we believe German news sources of the time!  Likewise we’re told that Elaine Pagels is misrepresented; but we’re not told why or how, only that we mustn’t criticise her.

Another old trick used in these sorts of debates is to claim that your opponents aren’t up-to-date with the latest scholarship.  But of course the same irrelevant claim could be said in any religious debate.  Whether the gnostic gospels are from the apostolic circle or not does not depend on some paper published in some journal 20 minutes ago!  But the intention is the same; to stifle criticism by any means, to position your foe as ignorant, while continuing to advance claims which are contradicted by the historical record in order to knife contemporary religious foes.

I enjoyed particularly the complaints that the *Christians* are demonising the gnostics, while demonising all the rest of us as “heresy hunters.”  Hey, Tony, I haven’t burned anyone at the stake, honestly I haven’t!  (Perhaps someone asked him out for “steak” or something, and misunderstanding occurred).  But I do belong to a group that has been demonised and banned from a university campus, tho, by people chanting similar-sounding slogans, with the connivance of the university authorities.  Christians have no power; it’s all we can do to keep off people determined to hijack us.  Again, we have the victim being accused of being the aggressor.

Can anyone really believe that Christians are not entitled to self-definition, of who is or is not a believer, which beliefs do and do not form part of the apostolic teaching?  If not, then all this use of terms like “heresy hunting” — which smells of the inquisition — is merely demonisation.

These sorts of arguments all smell of the faggot, of the sort of debate where the object is to prevent your opponent being heard.  This is why I presume they have been borrowed.  It’s nasty stuff, tho.

Please, please, let’s stop this.  Study of the apocrypha does not benefit from alienating the Christians.  On the contrary, it is suicide for those interested in it.  Already we see that the public misuse of these texts, the pretence that they are somehow equivalent to the canonical gospels — by people like Elaine Pagels –, is causing a reaction, is causing Christians to consider that academics are being dishonest and peddling hate under cover of scholarship.   No doubt the Christian haters love that.  But the rest of us must be appalled.  Which is most important to us — studying the apocrypha or knifing the Christians?

If I were to lecture on textual criticism to a bunch of Moslems, I would not start by telling them that TC proves Islam is untrue and that the Koran is like any other text.  I believe both of those propositions; but nevertheless, I would be there to teach them textual criticism, not to insult their religion.  If I was so foolish, I would lead them to reject both TC and me.  If I care about learning, the last thing I am going to do is to poison the well, to cause people to reject it.  Still less would I teach some fabricated set of lies about Koranic origins as fact!

Let’s stop baiting the Christians.  Let’s stop pretending that scholarship teaches us that Christianity is untrue.  Let’s stop trying to present scholarship as the enemy of faith, and start presenting it as interesting for itself.

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The martyrs of Orissa

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The media has been very quiet about the systematic violence against Christians in India.  The BBC, bless them, even ran articles about “Hindu-Christian violence”; although they couldn’t discover any Christian violence.  The violence is defended by some on the basis that “missionaries are causing it.”  The same appalling excuse was trotted out when the same sort of people burned an Australian missionary and his family to death as they slept in their Landrover. 

Today the Times publishes a forthright leader on the subject, “India’s shame”, which lays out the brutal facts pretty simply.

We need to pray for the modern martyrs and confessors for Christ, and for change in India.

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Feeling the crunch

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have a number of projects on the go to create English translations of material never previously translated or — in some cases — not even edited.  The economic news here is now becoming so bad that it is starting to affect ordinary individuals.  As a freelance, my income is a little uncertain anyway; 2009 may involve rather a lot of “non-earning” time, which is quite stressful.  Rather worse news for me is that most of my “rainy day” savings were in the collapsed bank Icesave.  (If about 1,000 readers would care to buy my CDROM of the Fathers, that would be very welcome right now!).

So I’m going to have to cut back somewhat.  I was in the process of commissioning a translation of the Coptic fragments of Eusebius Quaestiones.  This I will now postpone.  I think that I can still afford the other three items I have on the go; the Greek of Eusebius, Cyril of Alexandria’s Apologeticus Ad Imperatorem and Al-Majdalus Commentary on the Nicene Creed.  I shall feel relieved when these complete, though!  Other ideas that I’ve had in mind will now be put on hold until times improve.

As might be expected, all of this has led me to some reflections on the impermanence of life.  I tend to place quite a bit of my faith in my savings, my ability to earn a living, and my confidence that my way of life will continue unchanged in a comfortable way.  In the last couple of days, all this has looked like an illusion.  But… is this not life?  Wouldn’t the ascetic fathers simply smile and nod their heads?

I learn from the news reports that politicians are having to change every assumption, and think originally and inventively to deal with the crisis.  Policies pursued for years suddenly turn out to be irrelevant, expensive luxuries.  Events like these bring us to ourselves.  They strip away the illusions in which we can so easily lose sight of what is going on.  In this sense, they are God’s anti-septic.  After all, all our money will mean nothing to us on the day we die.

At lunchtime today I was in a newsagent to buy a paper and a coke.  I stood behind someone, whom I gradually realised must be mentally disabled in some way.  But he stood there, forcing his reluctant body and mind to go through the process of buying some little purchase, of counting out money from his wallet.  Clearly he found it hard to keep in mind how much a few dollars was; or what change he should expect.

Stood behind him, I felt a little more reality creep into my mind.  My problem didn’t look so serious: one can always get more money, somehow.  We’re all very fortunate, very blessed, that we don’t have disabilities that will never go away, as that man did. 

Let’s keep our feet on the ground.  Here we have no abiding city, and all our projects, efforts and dreams will end with the grave.  Let’s make sure we cherish each day, and consider how we stand when we come before God.

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