Month: May 2011

How Long Did It Take the Gospels to “Spread”? (Not as Long as Some Think!)

John_rylandsA couple of centuries ago it was becoming fashionable to date the gospels and other works of the New Testament very late, such as to the second half of the second century, more than a hundred years after the events they record.

This was due to an extreme skepticism regarding their reliability, coupled with various forms of flawed methodology.

As time has progressed, scholarship has pushed back the dates of the New Testament documents earlier and earlier, to the point that now almost all biblical scholars date them to the first century, with one or two possible exceptions (e.g., 2 Peter).

Some scholars, such as John A. T. Robinson date them to before A.D. 70—a view that I am inclined toward, personally.

Dates later in the first century, though, are still common. For example, it is common to date the Gospel of John to the A.D. 90s. This is quite a bit earlier than the older, more skeptical dating.

One of the things that pushed the dating back was the discovery of a small parchment fragment that is commonly called “the Rylands Papyrus” (pictured). It contains material from John 18, and based on the scribal penmanship it is written with, paleographers (experts in old writing) date it to the first half of the second century. More specifically, the penmanship the Rylands Papyrus uses most closely conforms to the styles that were in use during the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-138).

If we have a physical copy of part of the Gospel of John that dates to the first half of the second century then obviously it couldn’t have been written with one of the extravagantly late dates that used to be proposed for it.

But how early was it written?

One sometimes encounters an argument in this regard that I find particularly lame.

The idea is that the probable composition of the document was some years earlier because it took time for the work to “spread” to Egypt, where the papyrus fragment was discovered.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to see arguments for an early dating for John. In fact, I personally think it likely dates to between A.D. 64 and A.D. 70, but the “spread” argument is lame.

Why is that?

The Gospel of John is, obviously, attributed to an author named John, and it has been from the earliest records of it we have. There is some question about who this John was. Most have attributed it to St. John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee and the brother of James. However, there is an alternative view that links it to a different disciple of Jesus, not one of the Twelve, who was known as John the Elder or John the Presbyter. (Note: Pope Benedict links the Gospel of John with John the Elder in his book Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1.)

Whichever John is behind the gospel, there is a strong tradition linking the gospel and its author with the Roman province of Asia, which is in modern Turkey. Specifically: There is a tradition linking it with Ephesus, which is on the coast of Turkey, near the modern port of Kusadasi.

If the gospel was written at Ephesus, as many think likely, then it was composed at a port city on the northern coast near the east end of the Mediterranean Sea.

How might it get to Egypt?

The first large Christian community in Egypt was at Alexandria, which is a port city on the southern coast near the east end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Is it really hard to connect these dots?

All you have to do is sail down through the Greek islands and cross the Mediterranean, north-to-south (the short way). This is a journey of less than 500 miles, and at the time it took only 4-5 days by ship under favorable conditions.

In the first century there were well-established trade routes all over this part of the Mediterranean, with Ephesus and Alexandria both being major trade centers. So there were ships sailing in and out of the cities all the time.

They may not have had the Internet in the first century, but they did have the newly-built network of Roman roads, which allowed rapid over-land transportation as well. The Emperors were able to send and receive messages for and from distant parts of the empire and have them delivered in days.

Ordinary people used slaves or associated who were traveling to the desired locations and, though the process was slower in their case, they typically had their messages delivered in only a matter of days or weeks.

The idea that it would have taken years from an important Christian document to spread from one part of the eastern empire to another is just crazy.

We have rather striking proof of this in the New Testament itself: Paul’s letters.

When St. Paul wrote a letter from one community (say, Ephesus or Corinth) to another (say, Corinth or Rome), he would send it off and expect it to be received and read not in a period of years but of days or weeks.

The early Christians thus had the kind of communications infrastructure available to them to transport any document they wanted across the empire in a very short space of time. As St. Paul’s letters show, they could and did make use of this infrastructure.

The only question is: Would they want to in the case of a particular document?

One might argue that in the case of a letter written to a specific person or church, that this might indeed “spread” slowly through the Christian community. If it was addressed to a specific recipient, there might be only one copy of it, and it would be up to the recipient to decide whether to copy it further. It might then take time to spread broadly among Christians.

There is merit to this argument, as we have mentions in the writings of St. Paul of letters he wrote that at least appear to be lost (though there is some controversy about that). These could represent letters whose recipients either didn’t have them copied or didn’t have them copied widely enough that they became part of the canon.

On the other hand, there is also evidence in Paul’s epistles that he expected them—or some of them—to be read more broadly. For example, he tells the Colossians to get a copy of the letter he sent to the Laodiceans (a neighboring city with a Christian community) and to send the Laodiceans a copy of the letter he sent to them.

Whatever may have been the expectations for how broadly a Pauline letter was to be published, it can scarcely be imagined that a work like a gospel would be intended only for private use.

No disciple in the first century would have gone to the effort of writing a biography of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and intended for there to be only one copy of it. Such documents were too important, and they were clearly destined for public use in the churches. This is true even of St. Luke’s gospel, which appears to be dedicated to a single individual (who he calls Theophilus, though this may be a pseudonym to protect the dedicatee’s identity).

St. John’s gospel, in particular, is clearly intended for public use, with its passages stressing that it was composed so that the readers might believe based on the testimony of the eyewitness author.

One could suppose it would take years for a gospel to spread only if it were viewed as a private document intended by the author to only have a single copy or if it were viewed as an unimportant document that first century Christians wouldn’t care that much about and would take their time copying and circulating.

Neither of these is the case with a gospel.

Most likely, as soon as an evangelist finished a gospel, he would take it to a scribal service (the ancient equivalent of Kinko’s) and have multiple copies made. These would then be given to key individuals in the local church and sent to neighboring churches.

(In fact, it may be due to an accident at the scribal service that explains why the original ending of Mark’s gospel appears to be missing; only an accident with a very early edition could explain the omission if there was originally a longer ending.)

For something as important as a gospel, the recipients would almost certainly start making and distributing their own copies with zeal, and it is wholly unwarranted to suppose a period of years for a gospel to spread throughout the empire.

Sure, it could have taken years to get to some places, but jumping from one major Christian community (like Ephesus) to another (like Alexandria) could have been accomplished in mere days or weeks.

Rome’s New UGLY John Paul II Statue

Johnpauliistatue

Catholic News Service is running a piece about the new statue unveiled in Rome to commemorate Bl. John Paul II (statue pictured).

Wow is it ugly.

And inappropriate.

Even L’Osservatore Romano—the Vatican’s newspaper—has commented on how lame it is. (I guess that’s one fortunate thing about LOR‘s turn toward less anodyne commentary; if we’ve got to deal with with their less-than-helpful commentary about the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and The Simpsons, at least they now have the freedom to say when a pope statue is ugly.)

According to CNS:

Sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi intended to show the late pope with his cape billowing in the wind, as a symbolic image of welcome. The 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture was placed outside Rome’s main train station, where tens of thousands of visitors arrive daily.

But when unveiled May 18, it looked more like an open tent, or a sentry-box, or a bell, commented L’Osservatore Romano. The papal cape looks like it was split open by a bomb. More importantly, the newspaper said, it’s unrecognizable as John Paul II — the head is “excessively spherical.”

The newspaper credited the sculptor with trying to move beyond classic papal iconography and attempt something new and different.

“But overall, the result does not seem to have matched the intention, and in fact there has already been criticism,” it said.

In Rome newspaper polls, public opinion is running 9-1 against the statue.

Ya think?

The placement of the statue outside Rome’s main train station—the Termini—is particularly unfortunate, because it ensures a large number of people will see the thing. The Termini is a very important travel hub in Rome for locals and pilgrims alike.

I have to say that this statue is even worse than the one inside the entrance of the Vatican museums. That statue, titled “Varcare la soglia” (Crossing the Threshold), is a slab of marble with a bas relief of John Paul II on each side, apparently shoving a goofy-looking, modern, cell-phone clutching man out of the block of marble.

I was stunned when I first saw it.

Take a look see for yourself. Here’s one side of it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s the other:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Sorry; couldn’t find larger images. Trust me, it’s even more hideous when you see it up close and larger than life.)

MORE INFO HERE.

Some years ago, I visited a traveling exhibit of Vatican art treasures, with items spanning many centuries. I was struck by the quality of the older material and how the quality of the art suddenly fell off a cliff in the mid-20th century.

I can only imagine art historians in the year 2525 (if man is still alive; if woman can survive) looking back on this period and struggling to explain the sudden, appalling lack of taste and artistic sensibility.

Of course, neither the new JP2 statue or the “Crossing the Threshold” statue is the worst 20th century artistic atrocity passed off as something deeply spiritual, but I’ll tell you about that one another time.

In the meanwhile, what do you think the new statue of John Paul II looks like? A telephone booth? An agonizer booth? A bus stop?

What are your thoughts?

P.S. For extra points, how would you caption the photo of the new statue?

Harold Camping Beclowns Himself! In Public! All Over Again!

Scary_clown-3059Over the weekend while Harold Camping was hiding out after his failed prediction that the Rapture would occur on Saturday, May 21st, I was talking to a friend about what Camping was likely to do next.

I expressed the hope that Camping would make a public statement acknowledging his error and cease making end time predictions. I also expressed the fervent hope that Camping and his followers would not bring on their own personal end of the world through a suicide pact (a la Heaven’s Gate, the Order of the Solar Temple, and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple). I didn’t think that the probable outcome in this situation, though. Instead, I said that the most likely thing would be a modification of previous predictions.

My prediction was right!

On Monday Camping gave a press conference in which he said that he had been right about a major supernatural event occurring on Saturday, only it was of a different nature. Instead of a supernatural set of earthquakes and a rapture, it was an invisible, “spiritual” visitation of divine judgment on the earth—something undetectable by the senses and thus unfalsifiable. His remaining prediction—that the world itself would end on October 21st, he reaffirmed.

See for yourself!

Steven Greydanus—the friend to whom I was talking—has an excellent treatment of Camping’s new position and its problems, so be sure to check it out.

I must note that the prediction I made about what Camping was likely to do wasn’t due to any supernatural information. In fact, it was a safe prediction based on lots of prior experience.

Groups that have made false apocalyptic predictions have a long history of maintaining-with-variation when their predictions fail.

A famous example was the William Miller, who predicted the end of the world between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When the latter date passed, an adjustment was made based on the use of a different Jewish calendar (that of the Karaite Jews), suggesting April 18, 1844. That, too, passed, and Miller wrote a letter in which he told his followers (now known as Millerites) in words eerily parallel to Harold Camping’s:

“I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door.”

Later that year, one Millerite preacher—Samuel Snow—predicted another specific date for Christ’s return: October 22nd.

The Millerite sect was a notable one in 19th Century America, and thousands of people made preparations, including giving up their possessions.

When October 23rd came with no return of Christ, the event became labelled “the Great Disappointment.”

In the wake the the Great Disappointment, many continued to maintain some form of faith in the Millerite system, but with modifications.

Nineteenth-century America was a more rambunctious place, and the reaction to the Great Disappointment was startling by modern standards. Wikipedia notes:

There were also the instances of violence — a Millerite church burned in Ithaca and two vandalized in Dansville and Scottsville. In Loraine, a mob attacked the Millerite congregation with clubs and knives, while a group in Toronto was tarred and feathered. Shots were fired at another Canadian group meeting in a private house.

Many Millerites maintained their faith, however:

Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned. Responses varied: some continued to look daily for Christ’s return, others predicted different dates—among them April, July, and October 1845. Some theorized that the world had entered the seventh millennium — the “Great Sabbath,” and that therefore, the saved should not work. Others acted as children, basing their belief on Jesus’ words in Mark 10:15 “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Millerite O. J. D. Pickands used Revelation to teach that Christ was now sitting on a white cloud, and must be prayed down.

Others offered other interpretations, such as the idea that the offer of salvation to mankind had ended (a view already reported among Campingites), that Jesus had returned invisibly, and that Jesus had begun the judgment by cleansing the heavenly sanctuary.

The latter view led, in particular, to the formation of the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination.

Miller’s teachings also had an influence on the formation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who famously predicted (among other things) the return of Christ in 1914 and then, when this didn’t happen, reinterpreted it as a spiritual enthronement of Christ.

And there is a lamentable history of such prophecies and reinterpretations among them since.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to the Millerites, the Adventists, the JWs, and the Campingites, though. It’s broader than that. Non-Christians are subject to it, as well.

A famous case is recorded in the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger. Back in the 1950s, he and two other social scientists infiltrated a UFO sect that had doomsday beliefs and then watched what happened as the predicted doomsday failed to appear. Similar things happened.

(Incidentally, Festinger termed the clash of existing beliefs with new evidence against them “cognitive dissonance”—a now-popular term.)

The phenomenon appears concerning non-doomsdays, too. In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn points out that scientific change does not happen in the orderly, step-by-step, incremental way that they are often depicted. Instead, it tends to have violent revolutions, in which one model resists change with only minor modifications for a long time and then suddenly collapses when the weight of evidence against it becomes too great. Until that point, scientists only tweak their their preferred theories enough to account for new, incoming data.

So strong is the tendency to cling to old theories that it often requires one generation of scientists to die off to allow a new theory to take its place.

(Incidentally, Kuhn referred to this shift of beliefs as moving from one “paradigm” to another or as a “paradigm shift”—another now-popular term.)

But the phenomenon is even broader than science and religion. It’s part of basic human nature, and it applies everywhere, to every form of belief, opinion, or theory.

C. S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled On Obstinacy in Belief, in which he pointed out we have a form of mental inertia that tends to preserve us in our beliefs, that we tend to only tweak them when minor amounts of contrary evidence is presented, and that major shifts occur only when the amount of evidence becomes overwhelming.

He also points out that this is entirely natural and that we would be ill served if we were configured so that each new bit of data required us to call into question the entirety of our beliefs. It’s on-balance good that we’re obstinate in our beliefs, because the majority of them are correct and suspending our beliefs at the slightest provocation would cause us not only to squander an enormous amount of time and cognitive resources but would result in a literally fatal form of paralysis.

The trick is to make sure that we’re forming our beliefs in a reliable way, which Harold Camping definitely was not. Not only was he disconnected from the magisterium Christ established and operating all by his lonesome, he also was using demonstrably crazy methodology that was anything but sure to lead to a reliable conclusion.

But let’s not be too hard on Harold Camping.

Yes, he’s beclowned himself. In public. All over again. By predicting the end of the world on October 21st of this year. That has almost no chance of happening. But given the cognitive dissonance he’s been presented with, and the alternative interpretations available to him, it’s not surprising that he displayed obstinacy in belief and avoided a major paradigm shift.

And so my prediction came true.

It’ll be interesting to see what he does come October 22nd.

Anyone care to wager with me?

What do you think?

“It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us”

Council A reader writes:

"For it has 'seemed' good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and froom blood and fromw what is strangled and froum unchastity" (Acts 15: 28-29).

This is taken from the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Second Edition.

An older Bible I have says, "It IS the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us…"

My question is why has it been modified from "is" to "seems?" When it is translated "seems," I think that adds ammunition to Protestants who would say, "See, the Church is not infallible when it makes doctrines because it only "seems" to be good to them."

Do you share my concern here? Could you address this and why on earth this current translation exists instead of the older, and I believe, more accurate one?

I understand the reader's concern, but I don't think it's necessary.

In particular, we (all of us, Catholics and Protestants alike) need to guard against preferring a particular translation because it's more useful. "More apologetically useful" does not equal "more accurate."

Our approach should be to try to figure out what the most accurate understanding of the text is and then assess what apologetic value it has. (And that's when we're trying to do biblical apologetics. If that's not our task at the moment then we may assess it in other terms–e.g., what it says about God [theology proper] or what moral lesson it carries [moral theology] or what we can learn for our own spriritual lives [spiritual theology].)

So what about Acts 15:28?

In Greek the phrase "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" is edoksen gar tO pneumati tO hagiO kai hEmin. Broken out word by word, that's edoksen (it seemed good) gar (for) tO pneumati tO hagiO ([to] the Holy Spirit) kai (and) hEmin ([to] us).

The key word is thus edoksen, which is a form of the verb dokeO. Like most verbs, this one has several related meanings, and it does indeed mean things like "think, seem, seem good, appear, appear good, suppose, be of the opinion, judge, etc."

For a variety of reasons, the most logical literal translation is "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." I won't go into all the technical minutiae, but there is no noun there corresponding to "judgment." Edoksen is a verb with the implied subject "it" (it's 3rd person singular), and in context things like "it judged" make no sense (e.g., "It judged to the Holy Spirit and to us"?).

The proper literal translation would thus be something along the lines of "For it seemed/appeared good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

This is the way the Latin Vulgate takes the passage, too (since we're talking about older translations). In the Vulgate the phrase reads visum est enim Spiritui Sancto et nobis. This is a very straightforward translation of the Greek: visum est (it seemed good) enim (for) Spiritui Sancto ([to] the Holy Spirit] et (and) nobis ([to] us).

Visum est is a perfect passive form of the verb video, which (as you might guess) means "see" or "look at," but in the passive voice (which this is) means things like "seen," "seem," "seem good," "appear," and "appear good." Again, it has an implied subject of "it," and "it seemed good" or "it appeared good" is the most natural literal English translation.

(By the way, "the Holy Spirit and us" cannot be the subject of the verb in either Greek or Latin because the corresponding nouns are in a grammatical form known as the dative case, which prevents them from being subjects of the main verb; also, we'd have a compound subject which would lead one to expect the plural, and both verbs are singular; thus the correct subject of the verb is an implied "it.")

You'll note I've been saying that "it appeared/seemed good" is the most natural literal English translation, but one can use nonliteral ("dynamic") translations, which is what the reader's older Bible apparently does. I don't know what translation it is, but the thought that the Jerusalem Council is sending to the churches is that the decision of the Holy Spirit and the Jerusalem elders is that only minimal requirements should be made of Gentile converts for the sake of Church harmony.

If one is doing a free translation rather than a literal one, "It is the decision of" would be okay. It's just not what the Greek literally says.

The Greek also doesn't indicate any uncertainty about the resulting ruling, despite what "seem" or "appear" commonly connote in English. Instead, as a way of politely giving an order to the affected churches, the Jerusalem Council is using a literary form known as meiosis, which you deliberately understate something as a way of emphasizing it (e.g., calling the Atlantic Ocean "the Pond" when it is clearly vastly larger than a pond).

And less anybody reading the letter miss the point, the Holy Spirit is mentioned first in who the ruling seemed good to. The Holy Spirit is God, and thus omniscient and all-perfect, and anything that "seems good" to him may be taken as most definitively good.

Rather than timidity about the judgment, the way the letter is written stresses its authority, while using meiosis as a way of giving the order diplomatically.

With this understanding of the text we can now ask about its value for apologetics.

I wouldn't worry about the weaker-appearing verb "seemed" because it is the better literal translation, and it does not take away from the authority the letter had for the first century Church.

Further, even if this passage did express tentativeness, that would not disprove the Church's infallibility. There are lots of things the Church is tentative about. Some things that the first century Church was tentative about are mentioned in the Bible (e.g., when Paul expresses a personal judgment that he acknowledges he doesn't have a command from the Lord on).

But this passage isn't a tentative one. It's an emphatic one, and what it actually shows is that the Holy Spirit superintends certain kinds of Church councils and his authority backs them up.

That's a message that points in the direction of at least certain kinds of magisterial functions being infallible.

This doesn't give us a full-orbed theology of ecclesiastical infallibility, but it does point in the direction of that reality, and thus the passage has apologetic value even on the "weaker" (but more literal) understanding of what the letter said.

And, not coincidentally, the Acts 15 council is the paradigm for the ecumenical councils that have been held throughout Church history, so there is apologetic value there as well, with the Acts 15 council serving as precedent and model for them.

Hope this helps!

Who Would Jesus Whip?

MoneychangersA story caught my eye on Catholic News Agency, according to which:

Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans said that a local Catholic school must permanently ban corporal punishment for student misbehavior, even though many parents and alumni support the practice. …

Since 1951 teachers and administrators at the historically black all-boys school have used an 18-inch-long wooden paddle, known as “the board of education,” to administer punishment to students for tardiness, sloppy dress or other minor infractions.

However, Archbishop Aymond and Josephite superior general Fr. Edward Chiffriller, who heads the school’s board of trustees, ordered an end to the practice.

A town hall meeting assembled to discuss the change attracted an audience that numbered over 600 and included current students from grades six to 12, current and former parents, grandparents, benefactors and friends of the school.

“Board of education.” Heh. Definite points for that.

Personally, I do not have an opinion on whether corporal punishment should be administered at St. Augustine High School—the school in question. My own conviction is that the issue of corporal punishment is one for parents to decide. I have known some parents who have successfully raised children using it seldom or never. I also know there are parents who feel it is has played an important and needed role in raising their children. The fact is that children are different, and some respond to different things. To one child a time out may be far more agonizing (and motivating) than a paddling. To others just the reverse will be the case. Whether corporal punishment is to be used in the case of their own children—and how much and when—is something that I view as within the natural law rights of the parents.

Because of that, I can see why a school might choose not to have corporal punishment on campus, simply in respect of the rights of parents who do not wish it administered to their children (quite apart from issues of lawsuits and such). I can also see a school having a policy of allowing corporal punishment for those children whose parents do not object to it (such a policy could be a little tricky, but doable). And I can see a school saying, “It is our policy to use corporal punishment in disciplinary cases. If you have a problem with that policy, feel free to place your children with another school that has a different policy.”

So, I don’t have a problem with schools taking different policy positions on this, just as I don’t have a problem with parents doing so. I think reasonable people can have a legitimate diversity of opinion.

I also don’t have a problem with Archbishop Aymond deciding not to have corporal punishment at St. Augustine. As the local bishop, that’s within his purview.

I would, however, offer some thoughts on some of the claims made in the CNA story. I have to say that I wasn’t at the town hall meeting, and so I don’t know exactly what was said or in what context, but based on the coverage provided by CNA, several things leapt out at me:

Corporal punishment can cause unintended physical injury and studies indicate it can cause physical, emotional and psychological damage, including loss of self-esteem and increased hostility toward authority, the archbishop said.

I couldn’t blame the parents at the town hall meeting who may have questioned this kind of claim. While scientific studies can tell us many useful things, something like a third of them turn out to be wrong, and they can often be skewed by the agendas of the scientists who perform them. There have been all kinds of social science and psychological studies that have been “cooked” to support claims like abortion doesn’t leave lasting emotional damage, divorce doesn’t really hurt the children, homosexual couples are just as capable of being good parents, etc., etc. The anti-corporal-punishment movement intersects in a significant way with the same constellation of agendas that has cooked the studies just named. It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that anti-spanking studies have been similarly cooked.

That’s not to say that they’re automatically wrong. They could be right. This is an empirical question, and the solution cannot be decided in advance. If reliable studies have been or are in the future conducted that show a net detriment to moderate spanking—for all children in all American cultures and subcultures—then that’s an important finding that needs to be taken into account. But there is reason for caution here.

I’d be rather doubtful that such studies would find this as I, like many, was the recipient of moderate spanking as a child. I was even paddled in junior high school by one of the teacher/coaches, and I don’t perceive it to have done lasting damage to me. I suspect the experience of many—including many of the pro-paddling parents at St. Augustine’s—is similar.

Along related lines:

The archbishop explained that he believes that “hitting a young man does not build character.”

Phrased in those terms, the claim has the ring of plausibility. Hitting people is not generally recognized as a way to build character. But one could suggest that this is prejudicial language, because we are not talking about hitting, stripped of all context. There is a difference between giving someone a swat when they’ve behaved badly and to motivate them to be have better and just randomly hitting a person for no reason.

Further, this argument might prove too much. All forms of childhood discipline involve causing some kind of pain in order to motivate the child not to behave badly in the future. Spanking uses physical pain. Time outs, grounding, docking an allowance, deprivation of TV or Internet privileges, and adding chores use another form of pain. But couldn’t one just as easily say, “Inflicting pain on a young man does not build character”?—or even more provocatively, “Torturing a young man does not build character”? Despite their surface plausibility as phrased, we can recognize them as using prejudicial language. And surely we cannot infer from such claims that all forms of childhood discipline are wrong.

But if that’s the case, what makes the use of moderate physical pain different from the others? Why is it disallowed while the others aren’t? It doesn’t seem intrinsically worse than the others. I know I’d much rather have a couple of swats than, say, be grounded for a month, or even a week. A lot of children, I imagine, would feel the same way. So it doesn’t seem that corporal punishment is intrinsically cruel compared to other forms of punishment.

In any event, sacred Scripture takes a positive attitude toward childhood discipline, for the author of Hebrew writes:

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it [Heb. 12:11].

The author of Hebrews doesn’t specify that he’s talking about physical discipline, though he surely wasn’t excluding it. There simply was no anti-spanking ethic in ancient Hebrew culture. Indeed, Proverbs counsels:

He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him [Prov. 13:24].

That’s not to say that we must use these methods today, but it does show that they are not foreign to the Judeo-Christian tradition, including in the New Testament period in which the author of Hebrews was writing. And even if the author of Hebrews (very implausibly) didn’t have corporal punishment in mind, he clearly acknowledged the use of painful discipline to train towards proper conduct.

Archbishop Aymond also reported that he had received a letter from an activist who wrote from Ireland, which is suffering an abuse scandal. The writer singled out the continued corporal punishment at St. Augustine.

This apparently met with significant opposition from local parents:

A statement published at the school website reported that the community “overwhelmingly supports” the punishment. Attendees at the town hall expressed “outrage” that “persons from a different culture,” such as the activist from Ireland, were discussing St. Augustine’s policy and were “attempting to undermine” the school without significant input from those affected.

“Many expressed outrage that African American parents have to haggle with non-African Americans about how to raise their own sons,” the statement said.

I can’t blame the parents for feeling this way. I am sure that the archbishop meant to cite the Irish activist’s letter in a positive way, perhaps as an illustration of how the Church need to go the extra mile to prove it is not abusing children, in light of the current abuse scandals.

But I can easily see how local parents would be outraged at the idea of a foreign activist, a person of a different culture, getting the local bishop’s ear and then he announces a policy change without the input of the people most involved and affected. If I were a parent at the school, my natural response would be one of outrage. (Though I hope I’d be open to an alternative presentation of the facts if it could be shown that something else happened.)

Though I think I see what the bishop may have been getting at by citing the letter from the Irish activist, I am puzzled by something else he said:

“I do not believe the teachings of the Catholic Church, as we interpret them today in 2011, can possibly condone corporal punishment,” he explained to a Feb. 24 a town hall meeting at the Josephite-run St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. While parents have the authority to administer such punishment, he could not “possibly condone” the school doing so, the archdiocesan newspaper the Clarion Herald reports.

One of the sources of my confusion is the statement that “parents have the authority to administer such punishment” (the Clarion Herald adds, “in their homes to discipline their children”) followed by the claim that the bishop could not “possibly condone” the school doing so (“especially in a Catholic school,” the Clarion Herald adds).

Huh?

If a parents have the authority to do something in their own home for the benefit of their children then why can’t the delegate the authority to do the exact same thing to teachers? Isn’t that the whole principle on which non-home schools operate? Parents have a natural law right to train their offspring (including the right to discipline them—childhood discipline is part of the overall education of a child, regardless of whether it’s corporal punishment or something else) and then they delegate that function or some of those functions to the teachers and officials at schools where they enroll their children.

So I don’t get that.

Perhaps the archbishop meant that they have the authority to do this in their own homes in the sense of “I think what you’re doing is wrong, but I can’t stop you in your own homes,” but then why point this out to them? Wouldn’t saying that they have the authority to do this in their homes and leaving it at that undermine his message that this is wrong and give permission to parents to do something in their homes that he views as wrong?

So I remain puzzled by this.

I am even more puzzled by the statement that “I do not believe the teachings of the Catholic Church, as we interpret them today in 2011, can possibly condone corporal punishment.” Really? I must confess that I don’t know what the archbishop is thinking of here.

I am unaware of any statement in the Catechism, the Compendium of Social Doctrine, any papal encyclical, any curial document, or any other magisterial document whatsoever that says corporal punishment cannot be used as a method of childhood discipline.

A search of the Vatican web site turns up only a handful of references to corporal punishment, and only one of them appears to deal with the use of corporal punishment with children. That one reference is in a remark made in passing by a participant in a panel discussion on democracy hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the proceedings of which are expressly flagged as “although published by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, only represent the points of view of the participants and not those of the Academy.”

Of course, as a member of the magisterium, the archbishop could invoke his own teaching authority on the matter, in which case his own subjects would have to wrestle with the question showing the deference due to the local bishop’s individual teaching authority, but the archbishop appears not to have done this.

He did not say, “By virtue of my teaching authority as a successor of the apostles and as the shepherd of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, I declare my judgment that corporal punishment of children is wrong.” Instead, he appealed more generally to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” He further enhanced the communal appeal by referring to how “we” interpret them today.

I am unaware of any doctrinal development that has occurred on the part of the Church’s magisterium as expressed in its official documents concerning this point, so I am simply at a loss.

I can also imagine counter-questions that might be posed, such as, “If the Church acknowledges that physical force can be used to achieve the end of self-defense or the defense of others, why can’t moderate use of physical force be used to keep children away from dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations (e.g., swatting a four-year old on the rear to train him not to run out into a traffic-filled street)?” or “If other forms of painful discipline can be used to properly train a child, why can’t moderate physical discomfort be used if that is what this particular child responds to?”

Finally, there is this statement by the archbishop:

“My image of Jesus is that he said, ‘Let the children come to me.’ I cannot imagine Jesus paddling anyone.”

I can imagine parents having several responses to this statement.

First, although I am sure that the bishop didn’t intend it to come across this way, there is always a danger when using an “I can’t imagine Jesus doing X” argument that it will come across as playing a kind of trump card with the intention of shutting off further discussion. If it is said that Jesus wouldn’t do something, that strongly implies that we shouldn’t either. We shouldn’t even talk about doing something Jesus wouldn’t do, right?

Further, because the person making the argument puts himself on the side of Jesus and—by implication—implicitly suggests that those on the other side of the discussion are not with Jesus, it can unintentionally convey a holier-than-thou impression, as well as being a discussion stopper.

I’m sure the archbishop had no intention of conveying such impressions, but it would be human for parents at St. Augustine’s to take such impressions away from the discussion.

There is another reason I am generally uncomfortable with arguments of this form, which is that they are not very reliable.

Jesus is most certainly a crucial point of reference for us morally. He is the all-holy, infinitely holy Son of God incarnate. But not every moral dilemma can be settled by simply asking, “What Would Jesus Do?”

For one thing, Jesus as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind had a very different mission than our own personal vocations. His situation was quite different than ours. He had a different mission, different responsibilities, different resources, and different rights. He also lived in a different century and a different culture. This facts create major asymmetries between his situation and ours, making any straightforward application of WWJD problematic.

Further, we tend to read what Jesus would do in terms of our own preferences and aspirations. There is a famous saying in biblical circles (a saying quoted by Pope Benedict in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth), which is this: “By Their Lives of Christ Ye Shall Know Them.”

This is a reference to the fact that biblical scholars have a tendency to write biographies of Jesus (Lives of Christ) in which the portrait of Jesus that they end up painting just coincidentally happens to reflect their own personal ideology. If you want to know what a particular scholar’s personal ideology is, read his Life of Christ and see what portrait of Jesus he paints. This happens over and over again in biblical studies—so much so that it has become proverbial.

The same thing happens outside the scholarly community, in the ordinary world of pew-sitting believers. “I don’t think Jesus would do that!” has been used by many pious moralizers to object to all kinds of activity that is perfectly legitimate.

“I don’t think Jesus would watch television/go to a movie/attend a sporting event/read a secular book/etc. when he could be praying or reading the Bible.”

The ultimate end of that line of reasoning is Jansenism or scrupulosity—o r both.

Reading our own personal pious intuitions into what Jesus would do is simply not reliable. Jesus shocked the people of his own day by eating with prostitutes, sinners, and tax collectors. He could well shock us by watching TV, going to a movie, attending a sporting event, or reading a secular book. We just don’t know what he’d do in those situations.

Jesus is much less like our pious intuitions and much more like C. S. Lewis’s depiction of Aslan, who refused to be predictable or be boxed in by promises to behave in a predictable and harmless way. Like Aslan, you know that what Jesus would do would ultimately turn out to be good, but you don’t know what it’s going to be, and it may be quite surprising and even shocking.

Even if we knew exactly what Jesus would do in all circumstances, though, we still should not follow his example in all particular outcomes. It is not God’s will that we do this. It is not God’s will, for example, that we all follow Jesus’ example of being celibate in this life, or that we all try to walk on water, or perform miracles, or announce teachings on our own authority. We may (and must) look to Jesus for the fundamental principles that inform our life and conduct, but these cannot be applied in a simplistic WWJD manner.

So what about the claim that Jesus wouldn’t paddle anyone?

I don’t know that they had paddles in his day, but they did have comparable devices: belts, rods, and whips.

And we know that Jesus used at least one of those. According to St. John’s account of the clearing of the temple (quoted from the NAB):

He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” His disciples recalled the words of scripture, “Zeal for your house will consume me” [John 2:14-17].

These people presumably weren’t children, but they were behaving badly, and our Lord saw fit not only to spill their coins and overturn their tables (leading to a hopeless confusion and probable loss of income for the money-changes in question), he also saw fit to make a whip and start swinging it at people.

And note that he is swinging the whip at people. The text says that he “made a whip out of cords and drove them[i.e., those who sold … as well as the money-changers], with the sheep and oxen.” So he didn’t just use the whip on the animals. He swung it at the people, too.

It’s easy to say that it’s hard to imagine Jesus paddling someone, just as it’s easy to suppose that he wouldn’t splatter people’s money, overturn their property, and physically attack a group of businessmen. Surely the meek and mild Jesus would never do those things! Our God is a God of order, not chaos, after all. And violence never solves anything.

Yet here we have the Savior of mankind brandishing a whip.

It seems like Jesus might be willing to paddle quite a few people.

What do you think?

Before I go, two further notes. Catholic News Agency reports that the no-spanking policy may not be working out as hoped:

St. Augustine High School principal Don Boucree told the Clarion Herald that discipline at the school has suffered since the school stopped paddling five months ago. It has had to resort to a “zero tolerance” policy for unacceptable behavior.

“What has happened is that the infractions that would have stopped by now have continued to rise, causing the severity of the penalties to increase,” Boucree commented.

Fortunately, the parties may still find a mutually acceptable solution:

Fr. Chiffriller [head of the school board of trustees] said the decision would be revisited and discussed, while supporters of corporal punishment said that the discussion was not over.

Archbishop Aymond suggested prayer and dialogue as a way to determine God’s will and to resolve the issue.

Let’s pray for those on both sides of the discussion, that they may be openminded and charitable and together find the best policy for this school—whatever that may be.

Major Supernatural Event This Saturday!

Rapture

Yes! It’s true! A major supernatural event will be occurring *this* Saturday, May 21, 2011!

I’m *not* kidding!

Harold Camping—president of the Protestant radio outreach known as Family Radio—has been predicting for some time that the long-awaited Rapture will occur on May 21st of this year.

Of course, he’s made similar predictions before. He famously got his followers worked up back in 1994 about that being the year the world would end (or something) and, well … y’know.

But this time is different!

There really *is* a major supernatural event occurring this Saturday!

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the reasoning Camping uses to arrive at his conclusion is sound. In fact, it’s not.

If you go to Family Radio’s page explaining why the Rapture is supposed to happen this Saturday, the reasoning used is astronishingly weak. Even incoherent. Dig it:

God declared in 2 Peter 3:8:

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

God had written in the Holy Bible in Genesis 7:4:

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

God added in Genesis 7:10-11:

And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the Flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

The ark that Noah had built was the only place of safety from the destruction of the Flood. Likewise, God’s gracious mercy is the only place of safety from the destruction that is coming on the Day of Judgment.

In 2 Peter 3:8, which is quoted above, Holy God reminds us that one day is as 1,000 years. Therefore, with the correct understanding that the seven days referred to in Genesis 7:4 can be understood as 7,000 years, we learn that when God told Noah there were seven days to escape worldwide destruction, He was also telling the world there would be exactly 7,000 years (one day is as 1,000 years) to escape the wrath of God that would come when He destroys the world on Judgment Day. Because Holy Infinite God is all-knowing, He knows the end from the beginning. He knew how sinful the world would become.

Seven thousand years after 4990 B.C. (the year of the Flood) is the year 2011 A.D. (our calendar).

4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7,000
[One year must be subtracted in going from an Old Testament B.C. calendar date to a New Testament A.D. calendar date because the calendar does not have a year zero.]

Thus Holy God is showing us by the words of 2 Peter 3:8 that he wants us to know that exactly 7,000 years after he destroyed the world with water in Noah’s day, he plans to destroy the entire world forever. Because the year 2011 A.D. is exactly 7,000 years after 4990 B.C. when the flood began, the Bible has given us absolute proof that the year 2011 is the end of the world during the Day of Judgment, which will come on the last day of the Day of Judgment.

Got that?

Me neither.

So let’s employ a technique commonly used by philosophers when trying to analyze someone’s argument. Let’s try to put it in logical form. As near as I can tell, Camping’s argument has a form something like this:

1) Noah’s Flood occurred in 4990 B.C.
2) Noah was warned seven days before the Flood that it would occur, per Genesis 7.
3) A day with the Lord is like a thousand years, per 2 Peter 3.
4) Therefore, 7,000 years after Noah’s Flood some great, Flood-like judgment will occur.
5) 4990 B.C. + 7000 -1 = A.D. 2011.
6) Therefore, the end of the world will occur in 2011.

Camping has other arguments zeroing in on May 21st as the date for the Rapture and for October 21st for the final end of the world (if I understand correctly), but before messing with days, let’s first see if his argument concerning years holds water.

The first thing to be remarked about the argument as I’ve put it above is that it’s not in a logically valid form. The premises do not entail the conclusions. I could fix that by rephrasing and introducing some extra, hidden premises, but Camping’s logic is so obscure that I don’t want to go too far beyond what he explicitly says. So let’s simply look at the premises of the argument and see how likely they are to be true, remembering that if even one premise is false then the whole argument is unsound (and that’s if it had a valid form to begin).

Premise 1, that the Flood occurred in 4990 B.C. is an idiosyncratic claim on Camping’s part. You’ll note that this date is earlier than the conventional Protestant Ussher chronology, which had the world beginning in 4004 B.C. and had the Flood occurring around 2348 B.C. Camping rejects the Ussher dating, and I can’t fault him for that. I reject it myself, as do most Protestants these days, because it is based on unsound methodology and results in unlikely, unprovable, and over-precise dates.

Unfortunately, I have no more confidence in Camping’s dating, which also strikes me as unlikely, unprovable, and over-precise. I don’t know what house of cards he has supporting that date, but I view basing any argument regarding the end of the world on this date as extremely shaky.

Premise 2, that Genesis depicts Noah being told that the Flood was going to begin in seven days (this was after he’d been given an earlier warning and built the ark) is true.

Premise 3, that Peter states that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years is also true.

But can we infer from this that some Flood-like judgment would occur 7,000 years after the original Flood?

Not on your life.

For a start, why zero-in on the warning Noah got seven days before everything started happening? Why not focus instead on the earlier warning he got? Why not at some other time in this narrative? The proposed starting point is arbitrary.

For another thing, why suppose that there’s any kind of prophetic significance to this at all? There is nothing in the text telling us that these seven days, or any span of time mentioned in the narrative, is a scale-model prophecy of when the end of the world will take place relative to the Flood. This is sheer supposition.

What’s more, why should the scale be a thousand years to a day? This is a notorious bugaboo with predictions of the end of the world. Over and over different interpreters pick out some random mention of days in the Old Testament, multiply it by a thousand years, and then declare some prophesied even must occur on the corresponding date.

It’s true that 2 Peter says that a day is as a thousand years with the Lord, this doesn’t give us a license to take any mention of a day and interpret it as a thousand years. Quite the opposite! The exact same passage also says the reverse: That a thousand years is like a day with God (per Psalm 90:4). In other words, time is meaningless with God. He’s an eternal being who can find as much experience in a day as we would in a thousand years and who can encompass huge spans of time like a thousand years in what is only a moment for him. Rather than providing a license to multiply any reference to a day as code for a thousand year prophetic period, this verse is actually a warning against trying to determine God’s timetable for events. That timetable is unpredictable because we cannot know what temporal calculus God is applying to particular prophecies.

Camping’s use of this verse is thus not only over-precise but flatly contrary to the literal meaning of the verse!

And would be even if the seven days mentioned Genesis 7 were a prophetic scale model, which we have no reason to think.

And if those days were prophetic in some way, why treat them and only them in such a way? What God says is that in seven days he would start flooding for 40 days and 40 nights. Does that mean that once the judgment starts it will go on for 40,000 years?

Camping doesn’t think so. He’s got the final end coming in October. This only underscores the arbitrary nature of the figure he has picked out and multiplied. If the seven days mentioned must be literally multiplied by 1,000 years, why should the 40 days also mentioned in the same passage not be similarly multiplied?

Camping does, at least, avoid the trap of thinking that there’s a “year zero” on our timeline. There’s not. It jumps from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1, so he gets points for that. Not all end-time speculators have been so fortunate on that one.

But even if we were to grant all of the foregoing, even if there were some big Flood-like event scheduled to occur 7,000 years after a 4,990 B.C. Flood, why would it have to be the end of the world? Why not just Another Big Judgment?

Even that is giving him too much credit, however. The fact is that this whole prediction is a house of cards. It’s based on over-precise, unknowable dates, arbitrary starting points, arbitrary parallelisms, invalid logic, and a multiplication factor that is wrenched out of context and used in a way flatly contrary to the clear meaning of the text.

Given that his overall year calculation is so shot through with holes, we need not be detained by his more precise datings of the Rapture or the final end. (I should also note that Catholics do not typically use the term “Rapture,” though they do acknowledge the reality of the event St. Paul mentions in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, though it is seen as occurring at the Second Coming of Christ at the end of the world, not before an earthly millennium.)

The whole thing is comic—but it is also tragic, because many people have been misled by Camping, and some have been misled into spending vast sums of money in support of his advertising campaign, telling their friends and co-workers that the world is about to end, and generally bringing scorn on the cause of Christ.

As St. Paul wrote: “It is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Rom. 2:24).

You have to admire the courage of people like this gentleman who spent his life savings promoting these speculations, but not their wisdom.

God help everyone who bought into this come Sunday morning.

Of course, that’s not to say Christ couldn’t come back on Saturday. I don’t see the signs being right for that, but who am I to say it couldn’t happen?

Harold Camping is right, though, that a major supernatural event will be happening this Saturday.

One of my godsons is being confirmed!

Congratulations, James!

So … what do you think?

Tardiness & TARDISness

River_song Last week my home was invaded by bees–AGAIN! This was the third time. Apparently when my place was re-roofed recently, the anti-bee measures (netting blocking access to vents) that had been set up got disturbed, and the little varmints got in again.

Multiple people have been joking me that they keep returning because I'm so sweet. All I can say is, that's very . . . sweet . . . of you to say.

In any event, I was basically offline for several days as a result, and that made me rather tardy on blogging. Apologies.

In other news, as predicted, this week's episode of Doctor Who ("The Doctor's Wife," by Neil Gaiman) was way better than last week's. Nice creepiness, humor, and a poignant twist on classic Doctor Who mythology. Just what I would have expected from Gaiman.

It also addresses a timely issue: Even though the Doctor has been married before (and is a father; he's said so explicitly, and we met his granddaughter and first companion, Susan, who was the title character of Episode 1, "An Unearthly Child"), and regardless of what happens with River Song (strongly hinted to be his future wife), from the perspective of the series as a whole there is really one "character" who has an even greater title to the role of Doctor's wife. And thanks to Gaiman, he's now been properly introduced to her.

Now we've got the two-part "rebel flesh" story before we get back to River, the Silence, and the promised "game-changing" mid-season finale.

For those who have been paying attention to the clues about River Song's past (still in the Doctor's future), the title of the finale is ominous: "A Good Man Goes to War." I'm also anticipating that we're likely to return to the beach, this time with more information about who's inside the space suit. 

Thanks to Readers Who Helped!

I wanted to say thank you to readers who helped out recently by letting me know if they get email updates about the site or whether they access it through Feedburner, Google Reader, etc.

This information was very helpful and allowed me to track down a problem and get it corrected.

Based on what Feedburner was showing me, it appeared that there were zero subscribers, which didn't seem likely. Hearing from some who do subscribe allowed me to prove this wrong and get the problem fixed.

Turns out that there are a lot more subscribers than I suspected–around 7,000 at present!

I wanted to send each person who responded an individual thank you, but so many responded (not all 7,000, but a lot), that I thought I want to publicly thank them for taking the time to help out.

Much obliged, folks!