Birth of Lewis Carroll

Today is the birthday of Charles Dodgson (Jan. 27, 1832) better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll.  He authored several books, many on mathematical topics as a Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.  He is best known, however, for Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Dodgson has two connections of interest for theological studies.  First, as is evident from the photograph of his grave (which I snapped in 1985), he was Reverend Charles Dodgson.  Rarely do people note the fact he was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church.  He declined, however, to be ordained a priest.  Second, the story of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland is often connected to a young girl by the name of Alice Liddell.  She and her family were good friends of Dodgson.   Her father was Henry Liddell, Dean at Christ Church.  He is best known for his work with Robert Scott on the Greek-English Lexicon.  While the focus of this lexicon is related to classical Greek, it is extremely helpful for the non-biblical background of NT words.  One can access a later edition (1940 unabridged edition)  via the Persus Project:  Liddell and Scott.

A Tonic for Biblical Scurvy

Since I teach in Kansas, I pay attentions to issues that pop up in Kansas.  Here is an example of the abuse of the Bible and what I call the disease of biblical scurvy.  The Kansas House Speaker, Mike O’Neal, forwarded an email to his Republican colleagues related to a “Prayer for Obama” based on Psalm 109:8, “May his days be few; may another seize his position” (NRSV).  O’Neal added to the email, “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”  See a fuller description here:  Prayer for Obama.

The biblical scurvy of the Speaker is that he passed along one isolated verse out of context.  The next verse, 109:9, (this is Hebrew parallelism where the next verse helps clarify and explain the previous statement) says, “May his children be orphans, and his wife be a widow” (NRSV).  The entire section (vv. 6-20) is the longest and most severe curse in all the Hebrew Scripture.  The curse ends with these words, “May he be clothed in a curse like a garment; may it enter his body like water, his bones like oil.  Let it be like the cloak he wraps around him, like the belt he always wears” (Tanakh Translation, 109:18-19).  Politicians use the Bible politically and not theologically.

I do not know who Speaker O’Neal’s pastor is, but I would encourage him or her to make an effort to visit with him and provide some enlightenment about the use and abuse of the Bible.  If anyone is the caretaker, preserver, and teacher of the Bible, it should be the pastor. He or she has the moral authority, and sacred responsibility, to let the Speaker know this is misusing Bible.  Of course, some will say that is easy for me to write these words because I do not have the Speaker in my congregation.  However, I understand the situation of proof texting and picking and choosing verses all too well. Under another distant administration, I was asked to read in a very important public venue a section of Scripture that represented a similar situation of cutting and pasting a passage together so that its original point was totally lost.  I asked not to read the passage in its current eclectic form but to read the passage’s whole context.  I was told to forget about reading, and they would get someone else to read it.  Later I was called into a private meeting with the powers that be and upbraided for not being a “team player” and for being “an elitist.”  I said I would not model in public what I teach my students not to do in their own ministry.

Ministers with politicians in their congregations should think about how to hold them accountable when they begin to display symptoms of biblical scurvy.  Provide them some tonic, or as Paul the Apostle suggested to the Galatians, “My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.”  Paul thoughtfully adds in the same verse, “Take care that you yourselves are not tempted” (Gal 6:1).

Magi, Messiahs, Mithradates

The lectionary reading last week (Matthew 2:1-12) contained the reference to the μαγοι απο ανατολων, “the magi from the rising [East].”  The word μαγοι is most frequently translated as “wise men” (NET, NJB, NLT, NRSV, RSV, ASV, ESV, CEV, and KJV).  The KJV has probably influenced this continued usage.  A few translations transliterate μαγοι simply as “magi” (NIV, NAS, and CEB).  The last one, the Common English Bible, is a little ironic since the term magi is not common English as far as I know.  For a more colloquial translation, I might suggest “star gazers from the East” or perhaps “astrologer-priests from the East.” The latter captures better the essence of the μαγοι and their role.  Goodspeed’s translation is one of the few that uses “astrologers.”  As an aside, a good article on magi is “Note XIV. Paul and the Magus,” by Arthur Darby Nock (pp. 164-82) in The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I:  The Acts of the Apostles, Volume 5, ed. F. J. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake (New York:  Macmillian, 1933).  This volume can be found at the Internet Archive which is an outstanding online resource.  One can find this book, plus others, in PDF, Epub, or various other formats.  One can even listen to this book being read aloud.  It is quite humorous to hear the computer-generated voice attempting to pronounce the frequently cited Greek words and phrases.  Nock was writing in a day and age when knowing Greek was just an expectation for an educated person so he peppers this essay with Greek.

While the μαγοι brought gold, frankincense and myrrh, what is sometimes missed is also the cultural and historical baggage they brought into the city of Jerusalem.  A powerful kingly image from the East that they must have carried in their tradition was Mithradates VI.  Rarely is the background of Mithradates noted when considering the magi.  A good recent book on Mithradates is by Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King:  The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010).  Mithradates was from the East; his center of rule was near Pontus and the Black Sea.  He was born around 135 BC and died in 63 BC.  While his death was sixty years before Jesus’ birth, he made a significant impact on Rome, Greece, Asia, and vast parts of the Mediterranean world; his influence was still felt even into the first century.  Mithradates own birth, according to legend, was heralded by a comet, he assumed the title “King of Kings,” and was the one ruler in the Mediterranean world that offered the most violent resistance to Rome and its growing power.

This coin illustrates on the obverse the portrait of Mithradates with a diadem. On the reverse is the winged-horse Pegasus grazing and a star-in-crescent.  It was minted in Pergamon around 89 BC.

Exploring the life of Mithradates could be helpful in examining Matthew 2.  Perhaps the author of Matthew is setting King Jesus in contrast not to Herod (who was only a puppet of Rome) but to Mithradates, King of Kings, whose legend continued to permeate and percolate through the East.  Here were two kings born under starry consequences who both opposed Rome, but in startling different ways.

Hook, Line and Sinker

 

As noted in my last post, religion and politics are intimately connected.         An excellent (and sad) illustration of this point is the Theology faculty at the University of Jena in Germany in the 1930s.  Bernard M. Levinson in, “Reading the Bible in Nazi Germany: Gerhard von Rad’s Attempt to Reclaim the Old Testament for the Church.” Interpretation 62, no. 3 (2008): 238-254, illustrates how the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971) stood up against his theology faculty colleagues who swallowed Nazi propaganda hook, line and sinker.  The Jena faculty, with the lone exception of von Rad, was more than willing to support and undergird the Nazi movement and anti-Semitic policies.  As Levinson notes, the theology faculty “. . . took a leadership role in transforming the discipline into an organ for National Socialist and German Christian ideology” (p. 240). They were fanatical to such an extent that they canceled the teaching of the Hebrew language, and they editing Hebrew words and Hebrew Bible citations out of the hymnals, the NT, and catechisms (p. 245).  It did not help that they added to the theology faculty a radio preacher (Wolfgang Meyer) whose only qualification was unqualified support of Hitler and his policies. Von Rad was a lone voice in a very dangerous wilderness resisting this Nazification of the theology faculty at Jena.

How could a divinity school, religion department, seminary faculty or thinking church folks identify so closely with a political party that was clearly the antithesis of biblical texts about compassion and love?  Of course this question is the same one we need to ask when we observe religious folks who swallow hook, line and sinker the policies and rhetoric of American political parties.

Where Is the Religious Context?

I have finished reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts:  Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (New York:  Crown, 2011).  Its focus was mainly upon the years 1933 and 1934 as seen through the eyes of the newly installed American ambassador, William Dodd, and his daughter Martha.  Larson’s book provides a different angle by which to see the rise of the Nazi state in Germany.   One of the areas, however, that struck me the most was his almost total lack of religious context for understanding these years.  I understand, of course, that an author cannot cover all issues; however, he did include some very trivial social matters in providing the milieu of the time.  Wouldn’t religion have helped set the environment and context of the era?  For example, did the Dodd family not attend church or make any reference to religious topics in their letters or diaries?  In 1934 the Barmen Declaration was penned by the Confessing Church which opposed the Nazi –supported German Christian movement.  This omission in the book seems odd.  Or did this declaration mean nothing in the political circles of power 1934? One of the individuals frequently mentioned in the book is Arvid Harnack and his wife Mildred.  It seems relatively easily to have included a note that he was the nephew of the well-known religious scholar Adolf von Harnack.  The author notes on the “Night of the Long Knives” (June 30, 1934): “A prominent leader in the Catholic Church had been murdered in his office ” (p. 311). But he never gives the reader (even in an endnote) his name.  (I believe the individual was Fritz Gerlich). The author has a form of docetic writing that divorces the religious spirit from the body politic.  One of my favorite teachers of history back in college in the late 1970s, Dr. Bill Fleming, would say, “In politics you are never far from religion and in religion you are never far from politics.”  This point is certainly evident as we enter the election cycle of 2012.

Why I Give Writing Assignments

I have just completed grading eight sets of papers.  As I often do at this season, when others are focused on sugar plum fairies, candy canes, or hopefully the Advent of Christ, I reflect on a semester’s worth of papers.  Having graded papers for twenty-seven years, my observation is that most students do not like writing papers.  This insight is not revolutionary.  Students probably consider it some type of strange academic hazing to endure in order to complete a particular course.  Occasionally I encounter a student who loves the experience of writing a paper, and I relish reading a work crafted by such a student.  Because so many students struggle with papers, some professors find other creative ways to gauge student progress and development.  I applaud this approach and have attempted to infuse creative assignments on occasion into my syllabi.  I still believe, however, that the written work of a student provides one of the best judgments and clearest indicators of a student’s progress.  The written work of a student is like a blood test.

One might not enjoy being stuck by a needle but a blood test provides an array of helpful insights into the health of the body.  A paper, likewise, gives data about a student’s abilities at a particular moment on a particular subject.  A blood test reveals triglycerides, HDL, LDL, glucose and a myriad of other medical observations.  A writing assignment reveals how a student organizes thoughts, integrates material, is conscientious (separate is not spelled seperate—and that red line underneath means a spelling mistake), has explored resources, and generally reflected upon issues.  I spend a great deal of time providing feedback on papers.  Like a doctor going over the numbers on a blood test with a patient, I want students to know all the areas of concern (high LDL) but also the areas of excellence (high HDL).  Of course, students may only glance at the grade and never read a single comment.  Yet the paper stands, like a blood test, as a baseline.  A student can take a graded paper and use it as a template for papers to come.  They can get better as writers—with practice; one’s cholesterol will go down—with exercise. 

Just as a blood test is often predictive of a patient’s future health so is a paper for a person’s future.  If a student spends too little time on a paper, turns it in late, is not careful with sources and spelling, and misuses concepts, he or she might reduplicate these attitudes and behaviors in other vocational areas.  Of course exceptions exist.  Some student might struggle with writing and not do well on papers; yet they excel in other areas.  Even blood tests are not always good predictors. Individuals with LDL levels well over 200 who eat bacon, fried chicken, and all other manner of “bad foods” often thrive and live well into their 90s. A written assignment is not the definitive assessment.  A well-conceived writing assignment, however, can provide one basic evaluation for gauging understanding and for helping a student move to a new level of competence and comprehension.

Students, professors, and all who work with words need to appreciate that writing is a form of askesis or self-discipline.  Like prayer, meditation, charity, chastity, or any other religious discipline, writing has a religious dimension.  One of my favorite quotes is from Thomas Merton: “We who say we love God:  why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service to God?  If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because, we are not writing for God after all.  In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well” (The Sign of Jonas, pp. 56-57).   One of the great truths about the discipline of writing is that no one is trapped into being a poor writer.   A person can learn, study, practice, and get better.  

So for the foreseeable future, the next fourteen years, I will continue to assign, grade, complain about, and rejoice over writing assignments.    

The Afterlife

On Monday, June 27, I was a guest on the Religion Roundtable which focused around the “afterlife.”   The Religion Roundtable is an occasional special feature on  the daily “Up to Date” radio show (11:00-12:00) on KCUR 89.3 FM in Kansas City.  The show was hosted by Brian Ellison and included Rabbi Mark Levin and Lama Chuck Stanford.  The picture below shows us in the studio just before going on air.  It was an enjoyable hour of conversation among ourselves and several call-in listeners.  If you are interested in hear the conversation, you can go to this link and listen:  Up to Date.

Left to right:   me, Lama Chuck Stanford, and Rabbi Mark Levin

Latest Issue of Review & Expositor: The Economy and the Kingdom of God

The latest issue of Review & Expositor, Vol. 107, No. 4, fall 2010, is now available.

The focus of the issue is “The Economy and the Kingdom of God.”  I highlight this issue because it seems particularly relevant and timely.  I should also note that I was the issue editor for this volume, so I am bias about it.   The major essays are “Amos Economics” by Robert Ellis, “Ancient Economics–Modern Interpreters:  The World of Jesus” by David May, “Pastoral Care During Economic Crisis” by Ruth Lofgren Rosell, “Left Behind:  The American Dream and the Hispanic Dilemma” by Miguel De La Torre, and “‘Jesus Was a Low Wage Work’:  Reading the Bible in the Living Wage Movement” by Tina Pippin.  An excellent expository article is by Andre Resner, “Widow’s Mite or Widow’s Plight:  On Exegetical Abuse, Textual Harassment and Learning Prophetic Exegesis.”  There is something for everyone in this particular issue.  Hope some of you might have an opportunity to check out a few of the essays.

Common English Bible: A Brief Assessment

I received in the mail a few days ago a complimentary copy of the Common English Bible (CEB) of the New Testament. You can access the website of this translation here:  CEB.  I am always appreciative of complimentary copies of books (since so many are being published and my budget is limited).  I have only had a brief chance to look at this translation, but I decided to examine the usage of the Greek term anthropos as found in the Gospel Mark.  The translators used a variety of words to translate both the singular and plural.  The breakdown is as follows: you (1x), earthly (1x), human beings (3x), someone (3x), humans (4x), people (6x), person (7x), man (10x), and human (18x).

The most frequent usage is when human (18x) is used to render the typical translation “the Son of God” (ho huios tou theou) as “the Human One.”  The translators are consistent in this usage.  It is not clear when and why the plural of anthropos is translated as people, humans or human beings.  One criterion translators used was clarity.  Yet humans and human beings sound awkward versus people. Which is better English and clearer?

“I assure you that human beings will be forgiven for everything . . . (3:28a).” [CEB]

“I assure you that people will be forgiven for everything . . . (3:28a).”

“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans . . . (8:8).” [CEB]

“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by people . . . (8:8).”

I am not certain what is gained by using humans and human beings instead of people.

If the CEB is attempting to be sensitive to masculine language, it actually includes “man” in some places where it is not found in the Greek text.  For example, in Mark 14:69, the woman servant sees Peter and says, “This man is one of them (CEB).”  Anthropos is not used in the verse, and the verse could easily be translated as “This person is one of them” or “This one is one of them.”  Perhaps the CEB translators are attempting to provide parallelism with 14:71 when Peter claims, “I don’t know this man (anthropon) you’re talking about” (CEB).

One of the clever translations of anthropos is found in 11:32.  Jesus has put a riddle to the chief priest, scribes and elders about the origin of John the Baptist’s authority.  The CEB translates the internal debate among the groups about John’s authority as “But we can’t say, ‘It’s of earthly origin.’”  Many translations use “from men/man.” Some use “of human origin” or “merely human.” The “earthly” is a nice parallel with verse 31 that speaks of John’s authority as being from heaven or heavenly.  In the parallels to this narrative in Matthew 21:25 and Luke 20:6, however, the translators use “humans” and “human origins” respectively.  Especially since Matthew and Mark have almost verbatim Greek here, why not keep the parallelism with the use of earthly?

These are just a few observations on the use of anthropos.  I have quickly scanned a few other areas.  For example, I am not certain I like all the contractions used throughout the translation.  For today’s folks, however, it is what they hear in everyday conversation.  I do not like the translation of the Beatitudes as “Happy are . . . .” This translation misses the cultural and social meaning behind and within the text-segment.  Plus, it sounds trite.

It is always good to see and hear a new translation, and I am sure the CEB will find some receptive readers.  We may, however, be reaching a saturation point of “new” translations.  What does one more English translation add?  Of course we could do away with all translations of the New Testament if everyone would learn Greek.  But I’m not holding my breath.

It’s Greek to Me

I have been without Internet connections for the last few days (both a blessing and a curse).  So I have not posted recently.  In the time away from this blog, I have been to Ephesus, Patmos, Santorini, and Crete, Athens, and Delphi.  I though in this blog I would reflect upon one particular artifact I have seen frequently over the last few days:  inscriptions.  These inscriptions remind me once again of the importance of the Greek language for the ancient world (and the New Testament).  At almost every archaeological excavation, Greek inscriptions come to light.  These inscriptions are on columns, altars, pottery shards, and a variety of other mediums.  As the examples below illustrate, some inscriptions are written with beautiful lettering; they are pieces of artwork unto themselves.  The inscriptions frequently reveal to contemporary interpreters the perspectives and outlooks of the elites.  Often these inscriptions mention memorials established for the emperor or some high city or provincial official.  Honor in the ancient world needed to be public and permanent.  Of course what is missing in a fuller knowledge of the ancient world is access to the thoughts of the common folk.  They did not leave behind inscriptions (perhaps an exception being the graffiti that can sometimes be found).   The common folk represent the little tradition, the oral society which left little behind when it comes to written material.  However, the inscriptions that are unearthed are fascinating time capsules into the ancient world.