Flash! Jesus Has A Wife!

The latest “big news” in the world of religion is a fragment of papyrus that contains the phrase said to be uttered by Jesus: “my wife.” Another sentence mentions of Mary Magdalene that “she will be able to be my disciple.” There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the historicity of these statements and I’ll name a few in a minute. But first, let me introduce you to some of the on line reader comments of the NY Times article making the announcement. Each tends to show some important gaps in logic. Each is followed by my comment.

“The first mistake is that Jesus wrote and spoke Aramaic, not Coptic. Jesus did not write this.”

It is very likely that Jesus spoke Aramaic. We don’t know if he knew how to write anything. More important for this debate, nobody claims Jesus wrote the words on this fragment.

“It sounds as if Jesus accepted a female as a disciple, therefore equal to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.”

“Disciple” means “learner” or “follower.” Jesus had lots of women in this category. “Apostle” is the term referring to the inner circle of twelve. So no big deal. Oh, Luke isn’t an Apostle. He was apparently a traveling companion of Paul, makes no claim to have known Jesus, and is instead one of the four Evangelists.

“This is old news…when they cleaned Da Vinci’s last supper it became clear that sitting at the right hand of Jesus…was not a man but a very beautiful woman.”

“It became clear” to Dan Brown and others, but is not even close to being agreed upon by art or historical scholars. Even if it was so, think: when did Leonardo paint this and what “secret” reference material did he have?

“Of course he was married. Everyone was back then; it was not optional.”

This is a statement with not a shred of historical fact. Not everyone was married, in fact, though marriage was an expectation of a Jewish male, there were exceptions.

“[Jesus] was a rabbi and they were expected to be married.”

Because Jesus was called Rabbi by a follower did not make him an “official” rabbi. He never claims to be one and doesn’t seem to function as one.

Having read dozens and dozens of comments to the article, it seemed clear that many of those commenting had not read the article very well. Even those who may have read it, seemed to have suspended a good portion of their critical thinking ability—perhaps because they don’t understand historical skeptic. Incidentally, Dr. King, who announced the existence of the fragment never said it was proof Jesus was married. In fact, according to the Times, “She repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said.”

When it was written is an open question. The papyrus is too small to be carbon dated without destroying a big piece and too much ink would need to be scraped off to date it. However, she intends to have it dated using spectroscopy. Another problem is the provenance of the fragment. The owner is unknown, how it was obtained is unknown, and from where and under what circumstances is unknown. All these are issues to be resolved. What they won’t tell us is whether or not Jesus was married—only that some believes, sometime long after he died, where thinking about it.

Be careful when reading novels and new accounts about such things.

Jerry

Good Enough

In a novel I’m writing, one of the characters describes herself by saying, “I’m a good enough Christian.” I know why I wrote it; over the years I’ve heard people say it. But, after I wrote it, I started thinking about what it actually means. If I say, “I’m a good enough tennis player,” what does that mean? Does it mean I’m good enough to play with players who are just learning the game or does it mean I wouldn’t embarrass myself in the club tournament? If I say, “I’m a good enough golfer,” does it mean I’m good enough to play with any amateur player or that I could hold my own with any of the tour’s top ten?

What if I say, “I’m a good enough spouse.” Does that mean since my spouse is not very demanding and pretty much has his/her own life anyway, I’ll be kept around? Or does it mean, if you’re looking for someone who is willing to listen and care about what’s going on in your life, and who’s willing to share in our parenting and other responsibilities, I’m good enough for that?

Which brings me to what does “good enough” Christian mean? Could it mean:

·      I pledge but I don’t tithe,

·      I go to worship most Sundays, unless something comes up,

·      I don’t volunteer for committees because I assume if they want me they’ll ask, plus, I’m pretty busy,

·      I don’t cheat on my taxes, (well no more than most people)

·      I rarely really curse and never take the Lord’s name in vain

·      I don’t go out of my way to hurt someone and I’d never murder anybody

I could go on, but you get my point. Or, does it mean something else? I’m opting for, “it means something else.” But, who knows? It’d just be my opinion.

Peace, Jerry

Paradox

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” [James 2: 14-17]

Verses such as these in the Epistle of James (the Epistle for Sunday) nearly kept James from making the canon of Scripture in the early days of Christianity.  During the Reformation, Martin Luther called James “a right strawy epistle,” that is, a nearly useless book, and wanted to ban it from the canon. Luther believed it taught what is called “works righteousness,” that is, that one can “work” oneself into God’s grace or heaven. He rejected that idea, but not initially.

Luther said of himself, “I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work.” 

His religious ethic was driven by his awareness of his own imperfections in being the pure person he thought God required and the need to continuously work on that. He was known to rise from receiving absolution after confessing his sins, and immediately return to the confessional to begin again, so profound was his sense of sinfulness and unworthiness. He hoped if he kept each “jot and tiddle” he could find salvation and a sense of peace. But not until his study of other work, such as Paul’s letter to the Galatians introduced him to the idea of salvation by grace alone, did he realize he had been on the wrong path. He read there, “But no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, the just shall live by faith.” Consequently, Luther became opposed to anything he interrupted as teaching that the doing the proper works could produce salvation.

Luther struggled with the paradox he found between verses such as those in James and Romans which says, “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” Even today, it is difficult to explain these apparently very different ideas. As a pastor, I encountered any number of parishioners who would state emphatically they believed in salvation by grace. But almost in the next breath, they would be telling me they didn’t take Communion because they didn’t feel worthy, that is, “not good enough.” Sorry, Charlie, that idea is clearly one that yells “works righteousness.” Such thinking is a good example of the disconnect between what is sometimes described as the “theology of the pulpit” and the “theology of the pew,” where the first is well developed and orthodox (generally speaking!) and the second is sometimes something of a mishmash of ideas garnered here and there.

The usual “final solution” for works/grace paradox is that grace through faith saves us, but being saved, we would naturally act rightly. “By their fruits you will know them,” in other words. It’s workable, but it is also a little too facile. We might do better to just admit that everything religious, spiritual and/or Christian is not as clear as we might wish it to be.

Peace, Jerry

Being A Hypocrite

In Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus is taken to task by some religious leaders who have gone to some trouble to find him. They don’t like it one little bit that Jesus’ band of disciples don’t follow the traditional purity regulations that require washing one’s hands before eating. Mark provides a short list for his readers of some of the rules related to food, including washing food purchased at the market and cleaning pots and pans. [BTW: this is some evidence that Mark wasn’t writing to a Jewish congregation, but a Gentile one who didn’t know the customs.]

We normally think of Jesus as pretty laid back when criticized, but I think this isn’t one of those times. He calls his critics hypocrites and cites Isaiah as prophesying about such behavior. “The people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” The he adds, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human traditions.” Ouch.

We do love rules, don’t we. The Church has been creating them since the earliest days of Christianity. One of the characteristics of the Roman Empire was the breadth and detail of its legal system. The men who led the Church were Romanized, no matter what part of the world they called home. It was only natural that the Church leadership would adopt Roman practices of spelling out everything. Just one tiny illustration: the vestments clergy wear when leading worship are based on early Roman garb, the garb of civil servants. Soon the Church began to focus more on order and having rights beliefs and standards and doing things the right way so they could be the same throughout the Empire. 

There’s nothing wrong with standards and order per se. I think even Jesus would agree with that. The problem arises, Jesus pointed out, when these rule take on the power of doctrine--or even dogma. Soon it’s easy to focus on keeping the rules rather than applying the Gospel. In Jesus’ commentary on Isaiah he says, “You abandon the commandment” singular “of God...” What did he mean; what commandment?

In another place, Jesus is asked what is the most important of the 615 Jewish laws and he says to love God and to love neighbor. While that sounds like two commandments, the way he puts it is “...and the second is like the first...” The sense of this is that the two are inseparable. You can’t do one without also doing the other. I think this is what he’s reminding the “hypocrites” about.

I’m not an anarchist. I don’t want to abandon rules and order or tradition. I would like it very much if we could see beyond rules to focus on love and grace more. Especially as we try to be the Church and try to follow Jesus.

Just sayin’

Jerry

Fading Morality

You need a little info about me to fully appreciate what I’m talking about in this post. I was a small boy during WWII. Both my brothers were in the Army and one of them saw extensive combat. My father had been in WWI and more than once, proudly showed me his uniform. He was also in combat. When I was a kid, war was glorified. We were told we were fighting for a holy cause: freedom from tyranny. And, of course, to protect the American Way of Life. 

The other boys in my neighborhood and I played with small plastic or metal soldiers. We had little trucks and tanks and plane--implements of war. We built model warplanes and ships. We each owned at least one cap pistol and a toy rifle and we played on the battlefields of the neighborhood. I even had a dummy hand grenade and bazooka shell. When I went to the local movie on Saturday, I saw war movies and westerns. Guns blazing away in both. Bad guys falling left and right and the homestead saved for the damsel; the Pacific island taken for our side.

When I started high school, ROTC was required. I would have taken it anyway. When it became optional in the third year, I enrolled as a cadet officer. I could field strip a M-1 rifle, not quite blindfolded, but pretty quickly. For two years I was on the rifle team, including the year we won the city championship. I was on the drill team and was the commander the year we won the state competition.

When college came, ROTC was still a requirement, but again, I would have taken it anyway. I wanted to be an officer and only a non-threatening health problem ended that dream. The first year I was on our rifle team and didn’t continue the second year only because I had to work to pay for school.

During Vietnam, I was in college and seminary, and because I had a history of kidney stones was classified 4-F: women and children, then me. War didn’t seem as glamorous when we were in Vietnam as it had in Europe, the Pacific and Korea. Campuses rioted, protests were everywhere, the age of the Peacenik had dawned with Aquarius. I had two boys by then. Some of my friends vowed not to buy their sons toy guns. I have photos of both my boys with cowboy outfits and toy pistols slung low on their hips.

My point so far is: I not an anti-gun guy. At the same time, I find the slogan, “Guns don’t kill; people do,” far to simplistic and naive. But, as much as I don’t like it, there is an important chunk of truth that is a matter for our consideration. First, there is of course some difference between killing in warfare and murder. [Perhaps a topic for another day. For now, just humor me.] For a long time in this country, guns have been used in robbery and mayhem of other kinds, and still are. A few very good people have been killed, murdered by guns: Lennon, King,  and Kennedy, to name three. We’ve had people who massacred many, a few in the news recently.

But, when I see on TV or read in the paper a story where a fired employee shoots his boss, I’m more deeply troubled than in the other cases. Or when I hear stories from our own community in which people are shot or killed over a parking place, a scratch on a car, or a dice game I have to ask a very fundamental question: where have we as a culture and we as a Church failed in our mission to teach morality to our children? How did we let them grow up believing that deadly force is the solution when they are angry with someone? I’ve owned guns. It has never occurred to me to settle a dispute with someone by loading up. With all the cultural indoctrination I’ve had about the place of armed violence in the world, it never included permitting deadly force because someone dissed me or did me some real or imagined harm. 

What was I taught that isn’t being effectively taught today? People with guns kill because their moral compass is not pointing toward a meaningful true north. Their morality is way out of whack, and somehow, we as a people, as a Church, have contributed to that. At the very least, we have done too little to provide a context in which they could learn the morality most of learned.

I don’t like it. I’m even a little frightened. And I’m a lot confused about the way forward.

Peace, Jerry

Biblical Ignorance

Each year, Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, publishes a list that is amusing and wildly popular. This year’s describes the background in which those entering college as first year students this fall grew up with. You can read the entire list at  ww.beloit.edu/mindset/2016

While I have a serious reason I’ll get to in a minute, here are a couple of items from the list that are just fun. 

No. 12  For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.

No. 20  Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.

No. 27  Outdated icons with images of floppy discs for “save,” a telephone for “phone,” and a snail mail envelope for “mail” have oddly decorated their tablets and smart phone screens.

No. 75  The Sistine Chapel ceiling has always been brighter and cleaner.

A sidebar in the Tuesday’s addition of the Commercial Appeal highlighted two I think are of particular importance for Christians. The first is a comment about Number 12 above. When they were born, Madeline Albright was the first female US Secretary of State. Women have held that position for most of the first year college students’ lives. That is contrasted with the long time Hollywood depiction of blondes as stupid, the Judy Holliday kind of character. That image, to some degree, has given way to men as the dumb ones. One of the exercises I give students when I teach a human sexuality class is to notice how many men in TV commercials are depicted as inept and less than the sharpest knife in the drawer. I get that “dumb and dumber” are meant to be funny, but what are we teaching the kids who watch these commercials about gender roles and adulthood? Hardly seems to be the message we as Christians would want to teach. 

However, the far more troublesome thing mentioned in the sidebar was a comment by one of the people who compiles the list. Tom McBride is an English professor at Beloit. He points out that incoming first year students are much less likely than in the past to identify with a specific religion. “When I teach Shakespeare or Milton there are a lot of Biblical allusions, and I have to explain them all.” Where has this generation gone? Not to “Sunday School.” 

According to the Barna Group, a group that studies religion in the US, the average number of adults in Protestant churches per Sunday is about 90. In the South, it’s closer to 100. With only about 20% of the US population in church each week, it’s easy to see why the level of Biblical knowledge is low. While good numbers are hard to come by, let’s be generous and say 20% of the people who attend church also attend Christian formation.  That means in an average southern church, 20 are present, while 80 are not. Theoretically, Christian formation is the best place to learn about the Bible, our Faith, and more. How likely is it for a child to attend if the parents don’t. Not very. Not much of surprise then, that incoming college students are biblically ignorant.

Me? I find all this worrisome.

Peace, Jerry

Did She or Didn't She?

Today is the  feast day of Jesus’ mother, Mary. From very early in the life of the Church, Mary has been called “virgin.” How that happened is a long story for another day. It includes reading history backwards, translations from one language to another, and more.

This day is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church as the Feast of the Assumption, (which I’ll come back to) and in the Anglican Tradition, as simply the Feast Day of St. Mary the Virgin. Mary has at least six other feast days, not all of which are celebrated in Anglicanism. Here are the six principal ones:

The Purification of Mary (2/2), Annunciation (3/25), Visitation (5/31), Nativity of Mary (9/8), Immaculate Conception (12/8), and Our Lady of Guadalupe (12/12). But, the Feast of the Assumption is the principal day in the U.S. So, what does it celebrate?

The Assumption is a belief held by the Romans, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and most Anglo-Catholics in Anglicanism that says at the end of her life, Mary was bodily taken directly to heaven. Catholics leave open whether or not she died before being taken; Eastern Orthodox teach she died first. 

The Roman Church teaches that there are certain dogmatic beliefs of the Church, i.e., things all must believe. All but one of these have been the result of actions of Church Councils. In 1870, the first Vatican Council declared the pope to be infallible when he teaches ex cathedra, literally from his chair or throne under special circumstances. Not every thing the pope says is infallible; only those teachings that he declares to be so. (Perhaps that’s another posting saved for another day.)  The first time, and so far, only time a pope has proclaimed an infallible teaching after this became a dogma was in 1950 when Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary as being an article of faith for Catholics. What does “article of faith” mean?

Here’s what Pius said: “Hence, if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or call into doubt that which We have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.”

In other words, there is no more room for debate, disagreement or dissention. The matter is closed, and if you don’t accept this teaching, you are not Catholic. That, of course, is an excommunicating act and, hence a damning act. His declaration of this dogma was not his invention. Many in the Church had long believed and taught that Mary had been assumed at the end of her life. Pius just formalized it.

So, what about you, must you hold this belief to be a good Anglican? In a word, no. You may believe it, that is, our faith and practice permits you to believe it, but does not compel you to believe it. Why then do we celebrate it as a feast day? Like many of our feast days, it’s a hold over from our pre-Reformation practices. However, note well, we don’t call it the Assumption. It just becomes another special day to honor Mary as Jesus’ mother. 

Peace,  Jerry