Category: Apologetics

Is the Didache the Key to Understanding Paul’s Controversy with the Judaizers?

Didache-660x330The Didache (“Did-ah-KAY”) is a first century manual of Christian instruction, and it provides a fascinating view of life in the early Church. You can read it here.

British scholar Alan Garrow has done a lot of work on the Didache, and he has a fascinating hypothesis linking it to Paul’s controversy with the Judaizers in Acts and Galatians.

You can watch his video presenting the hypothesis here.

Key points of his hypothesis are as follows:

  1. The conference Paul has with the apostles in Galatians 2 is not the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. Instead, it took place during the famine relief visit of Acts 11.
  2. When the council of Acts 15 occurred, the apostles wrote a lengthy document which was the original version of the Didache (it was later supplemented to form the Didache as we have it today). Luke summarizes the original version as the letter sent to the churches in Acts 15:23-29.
  3. This version of the Didache (and the one we have today) contains ambiguous statements that could be taken as requiring Gentiles to be circumcised before their deaths if they are to be saved.
  4. After Paul evangelized the Galatians, Judaizers pointed to these statements as proof that both Paul and the Jerusalem apostles expected them to be circumcised.
  5. When Paul learned of this, he wrote the epistle to the Galatians and vigorously denounced this interpretation. However, he did not explicitly address the statements in the Didache because the document was too ambiguous and could undermine his case.

I very much enjoyed Garrow’s presentation, though ultimately I do not believe his hypothesis succeeds. Let’s take a brief look at the key points.

 

The Famine Relief Visit

Many recent scholars have been inclined to link the Galatians 2 conference with the famine relief visit of Acts 11 because of the list of Paul’s activities described in Galatians 1:13-2:10:

  • Paul’s former life in Judaism (1:13-14)
  • His conversion and call (1:15-16)
  • His sojourn to Arabia and Damascus (1:17)
  • His visit “after three years” to Peter in Jerusalem (1:18-20)
  • His sojourn in Syria and Cilicia (1:21-24)
  • His visit “after fourteen years” to Jerusalem where circumcision was discussed (2:1-10)

From this catalogue, it is inferred that the two Jerusalem visits Paul mentions here were the only visits he made during this time period.

If so, then the Galatians 2 conference can’t be the Acts 15 conference because of the record of Paul’s Jerusalem visits found in Acts:

  • After Paul’s stay in Damascus, Barnabas takes him to the apostles in Jerusalem (9:27-30)
  • He and Barnabas make the famine relief visit (11:29-30)
  • He and Barnabas go to Jerusalem for the Acts 15 council (15:1-29)

If Paul’s visit “after fourteen years” is his second visit to Jerusalem following his conversion then it must be the famine relief visit.

There is a lot that can be said about this, but it all hinges on the inference that Paul had only two visits to Jerusalem in this period, and this is not clear from Galatians.

Paul does not say that he visited Jerusalem only twice. He does indicate that he was not popularly known in the churches of Judea (Gal. 1:21-24), which implies that he did not spend a lot of time there, but it does not mean that he never made a brief visit.

This is clear from the fact that he had already made a visit lasting two weeks (Gal. 1:18-20) and this did not make him popularly known in Judea.

It’s therefore quite possible that he and Barnabas made an additional, brief visit (described in only a single verse: Acts 11:30) that he doesn’t mention in Galatians because it is not relevant to the subjects he is discussing—i.e., where he got his gospel and how circumcision is not necessary for salvation.

He thus jumps to the next major event that was relevant—the Jerusalem visit that occurred “after fourteen years.”

Identifying this event with the famine relief visit of Acts 11:30 creates multiple problems with the chronology of Acts, and one of them becomes clear beginning what Luke says next:

About that time Herod the king [i.e., Herod Agrippa I] laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword; and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter (Acts 12:1-3).

Luke then goes on to narrate Peter’s escape and Herod’s death (Acts 12:20-23).

According to Acts 12:1, the famine relief visit of 11:30 took place just before or in proximity to the events of Acts 12, which include Herod’s death.

Herod Agrippa I is commonly reckoned as having died in A.D. 44, though recent studies have indicated it was more probably in late A.D. 43 (see Daniel R. Schwartz, Agrippa I, 107-111).

Either way, this gives us an approximate time frame for the famine relief visit, and if it occurred “after fourteen years” from Paul’s conversion then Paul’s conversion (Acts 9) would have had to occur around A.D. 29 or 30.

This is too early, even on the view that the Crucifixion occurred in A.D. 30, and certainly too early on the better-established view that it took place in A.D. 33.

More could be said about the chronological problems with identifying the Galatians 2 conference with the famine relief visit, but this will suffice.

 

The Didache and the Acts 15 Letter

Garrow proposes that, after the Acts 15 council, the apostles wrote a lengthy document to be sent to the churches and that this document was the original version of the Didache.

On this view, the Didache is, in the most literal sense, what its title presents it as—“The teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the twelve apostles”—because the Jerusalem apostles wrote it.

Garrow points out that it would be unreasonable for Luke to repeat the whole of the Didache in his account of the Acts 15 council, so he argues that Luke summarized it as the letter found in Acts 15:23-29:

23b “The brethren, both the apostles and the elders, to the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting. 24 Since we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions, 25 it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 26 men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. 28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”

To support his proposal, Garrow notes several themes that this letter and the Didache have in common. He’s also certainly correct that Luke would not have interrupted his narrative to reproduce the whole of the original Didache if it was before him.

But how likely is that the Acts 15 council wrote it?

The Didache is such an early document that it’s not unreasonable to hold that its original edition dates to this time period, but if the controversy was about the role of circumcision—as both Acts and Galatians indicate—would the apostles really have written such a lengthy document in response? The matter could be settled much more concisely.

Further, the content of the proposed first edition of the Didache is basic Christian instruction. As reconstructed by Garrow, it contained treatments of basic Christian morality, sacramental practice, and eschatology. Is that what the Jerusalem authorities would have written in response to a controversy about circumcision?

As Garrow notes, the Didache never mentions circumcision. It’s one thing to see how a brief letter like the one in Acts could omit the word “circumcision,” saying merely, “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” and then not name circumcision as a requirement. However, it is very hard to imagine a document that goes on for chapter after chapter of basic Christian instruction without dealing in some clear way with circumcision, given that this was the issue that prompted the document to be written.

It seems much more likely that the Jerusalem authorities would write a more concise document that dealt directly with the issue at hand, which is what we find in Acts 15:23-29.

Lest modern readers of the New Testament be puzzled by the brevity of this letter, its length is entirely what we would expect. Letters in the ancient world—even by famous epistolary authors like Cicero—were typically written on a single sheet of papyrus (E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing; David Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection).

The most normal letters in the New Testament are 2 John, 3 John, and Jude—the very letters we tend to overlook because of their brevity.

By ancient standards, Paul’s letters are literary abnormalities. By comparison, they are enormous. And it seems that under Paul’s influence the other authors of the New Testament epistles were led to copy his practice of writing theological-pastoral treatises in letter form.

But this is not what we would expect at the time of the Acts 15 council (A.D. 49), before Paul’s literary career had taken off. Instead, we would expect exactly the kind of short letter that we find in Acts.

It was common, at the time, to write only a brief letter and then have the courier(s) orally fill in any necessary context for the readers, which is precisely what we have here (“We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth”).

Further, since Paul and Barnabas figured heavily in the controversy provoking the council (Acts 15:2), we would expect the letter to make mention of them to clarify their status in the eyes of the Jerusalem authorities, as it does (“it has seemed good to us, having come to one accord, to choose men and send them to you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ”).

Yet none of these things are in the Didache.

On Garrow’s proposal, Luke has boiled the entire original edition of the Didache down to just two verses—Acts 15:28-29—and freely composed everything else in the letter (five verses).

If Luke had taken such liberties with the apostolic decree, then he would have been subject to charges of falsification. The issue of circumcision remained a live one in Christian circles at this time (and, indeed, for several centuries in Jewish Christian circles), and it would have been much safer for him to simply summarize what the apostles said without casting it in the form of a fundamentally fictitious letter.

We are thus confronted with two hypotheses:

  1. The apostles responded to the Acts 15/Galatians 2 circumcision controversy by writing an astonishingly long treatise on basic Christian instruction that never directly addresses the controversy at hand or mentions the parties involved in it, and Luke summarized this in the form of a fundamentally fictitious letter, opening him to charges of falsification by those who favored circumcision.
  2. In keeping with the epistolary practices of the day, the apostles wrote a brief letter that addressed the central controversy, discussed the status of the participants, and sent couriers who could confirm its authenticity and supply needed context.

The latter is the more likely hypothesis.

 

The Didache’s Ambiguous Statements

Garrow points out that the Didache contains a pair of passages that could be misunderstood as implying that circumcision is necessary for salvation.

First, at the end of its section on basic moral instruction, it says:

For if you are able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect. But if you are not able, then do what you can.

Now concerning food, bear what you are able, but in any case keep strictly away from meat sacrificed to idols, for it involves the worship of dead gods (Did. 6:2-3).

Second, the end of the document gives an eschatological warning and says:

Gather together frequently, seeking the things that benefit your souls, for all the time you have believed will be of no use to you if you are not found perfect in the last time (Did. 16:2).

Garrow calls attention to the word “perfect” in these passages and argues that the first could be taken as indicating that to perfectly “bear the whole yoke of the Lord” one would need to be circumcised.

Failing to be circumcised might be acceptable at least temporarily, given the concession, “But if you are not able, then do what you can.” However, one could look at the second passage and conclude that, since one must be “found perfect in the last time” for the faith to profit you, one must be circumcised at some point.

It is not plausible to think that this is what the author(s) of the Didache meant the reader to understand. Circumcision has to be injected into the thought of the text at both points, for it is not mentioned in either of them or in their surrounding contexts.

However, Garrow does not claim that this is what the Didachist(s) meant, just that this is what the Judaizers made of the text.

 

Paul and the Judaizers

Garrow’s claim at this point is reasonable. If the Didache was in circulation prior to Galatians, Judaizers could, indeed, point to these passages in an attempt to bolster their claim that faith and baptism may be necessary but that one must go on to embrace circumcision if one wants to be ultimately saved.

They could further point to Paul’s circumcision of Timothy (Acts 16:3), which strikingly occurs in Acts just after the Jerusalem council and the delivery of its letter.

Timothy was from the Galatian city of Lystra and was well known in the neighboring city of Iconium (Acts 16:1-2), and his circumcision by Paul was publicly known. Paul performed the act so that Timothy could accompany him, “because of the Jews that were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek” (16:3).

It therefore would have been easy for the Judaizers to appeal to Paul’s circumcision of Timothy and claim that even the “apostle to the Gentiles” agreed with their view on the ultimate necessity of circumcision.

This would explain passages in Galatians that seem to indicate Paul was being portrayed as a preacher of circumcision:

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you [i.e., if we should preach a gospel of circumcision], let him be accursed (Gal. 1:8).

If I, brethren, still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? (Gal. 5:11)

Garrow’s hypothesis thus coheres very well at this point.

But do these passages provide positive evidence that the Judaizers were appealing to the Didache?

It does not seem so.

The passages we have just seen do suggest that the Judaizers were portraying Paul as acknowledging the necessity of circumcision, and they likely appealed to his circumcision of Timothy as evidence for this.

However, we don’t need to suppose that the Didache in particular was in circulation or that they appealed to it. All we need to suppose is that the idea was in the air that one needed to complete one’s conversion to Christ by circumcision, and we have good evidence that this idea was present, whether or not the Didache was in circulation.

 

Paul and the Acts 15 Letter

Paul was apoplectic when he learned what the Judaizers had been telling his Galatian converts, and he wrote his letter to them in a white hot fury.

In this epistle, Paul’s sharp elbows are at their sharpest, and he vigorously denounces the views of the Judaizers, including their own apparent misrepresentation of his own actions.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that he does not mention the document that the Acts 15 council wrote?

For Garrow, Paul does not do so because that document (the original edition of the Didache) was too ambiguous.

It’s true that the Didache contains passages the Judaizers could plausibly exploit. However, it’s not clear that a personality as forceful as Paul would refrain from taking those passages on.

After all, circumcision is nowhere mentioned in either context, and a careful exegesis of the Didache does not support the claim that it is necessary. In context, “the whole yoke of the Lord” for Gentiles is the material under discussion in chapters 1-6 of the document, and circumcision is not among the topics covered.

Paul easily could have pointed this out and insisted that his interpretation—bolstered by the other facts he mentions in Galatians—is the true one and that it authentically represents the view of the Jerusalem authorities.

Once again we must ask whether the Didache needed to be in circulation to explain why Paul doesn’t mention the document the council produced, and the answer again is negative.

If Galatians 2 does refer to Acts 15 (as the bulk of the evidence indicates) then Paul’s summary of it in the epistle makes all the essential points. He does not need to refer to the letter.

Further, he may not have had a copy of the letter with him. We know that Paul was sometimes separated from his personal library (2 Tim. 4:13), and he may have avoided discussing the letter if he couldn’t quote it exactly.

Even if he had the letter with him or was comfortable quoting it from memory, there are serious reasons why he might not want to, because the letter contained pastoral provisions as a concession to Jewish sensibilities. Specifically, it asked that Gentiles “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.”

While he may not have had a problem with (or a choice regarding) these items as pastoral concessions, Paul is on record stating that there is nothing wrong in principle with eating idol meat. He discusses this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 8, and he covers the same issue from another perspective in Romans 14.

It is highly probable that he would not have had a problem in principle with eating blood or strangled things in view of his comments regarding becoming all things to all men that he might win some (1 Cor. 9:22), and specifically regarding his comment that “To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . that I might win those outside the law” (1 Cor. 9:21).

This is further underscored by his declaration “let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink” (Col. 2:16), and by his excoriation of Peter for breaking table fellowship with Gentiles (Gal. 2:11-14).

Since the pastoral provisions of the Acts 15 letter were inconsistent with views Paul held and openly discussed with his converts, as the other letters just quoted indicate, he had ample reason not to call attention to the letter in his discussion here. Doing so would only raise the question of what status these pastoral provisions had: Were they matters of divine law that were binding on everyone or only accommodations made for the sake of harmony within the Church?

Delving into these concessions to Jewish sensibilities would have undercut Paul’s fundamental point that Gentiles only need to become Christians, not Jewish Christians, to be saved.

Further, raising the subject of the letter in his account of the council (Gal. 2:1-10) would undercut the argument he was about to make regarding Peter (Gal. 2:11-14), because the letter’s pastoral provisions would suggest to the readers that Peter might not have been wrong to withdraw from table fellowship with Gentiles.

Paul was thus incentivized to remain silent on the letter and focus instead on the points he makes about the council in verses 1-10.

 

Conclusion

Garrow has provided a fascinating discussion of the Didache and how it might have influenced first century discussions regarding the need for circumcision.

While it seems very unlikely that the Didache was produced by the Acts 15 council, it is quite possible that early versions of the document were in circulation in the mid-first century.

It also is possible, though not necessarily probable, that—either before Galatians was written or afterwards—Judaizers appealed to the document’s statements regarding perfection to bolster their argument that circumcision is necessary for salvation.

The Didache thus remains an important background document, and the light it may shed on the New Testament and its history needs to be further explored.

What’s the Point of All Saints Day?

saintsEvery December, the secular, cultural celebration of Christmas overshadows the religious holiday on which it is based.

Essentially the same thing happens at the end of October, when the way American culture celebrates Halloween overshadows All Saints Day.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with costumes and candy, but in the minds of most people Halloween has become so detached from its religious roots that they have no idea where it comes from.

The old-fashioned word Halloween contributes to this. People may have an inkling that it’s short for “All Hallows Eve,” but that doesn’t help much—because they don’t know what a hallow is or what it means to celebrate the eve of something.

English has an unusual double vocabulary, with many words based on Latin roots but others based on German roots. That’s why we have two words for so many things. One example is cat (derived from a German root) and feline (derived from a Latin root). The word hallow belongs to one of these German/Latin pairs. But it’s much less familiar to us than the parallel word from Latin: saint.

Hallow comes from the same root as holy, and a person who is hallowed is a saint—someone who has been sanctified or made holy. Thus in the Lord’s Prayer we say “Hallowed be thy name.” If we said that in using words derived from Latin, it would be something like, “Let your name be sanctified”—i.e., may people treat God’s name as something holy and thus honor the holiness of God himself.

The –een part of Halloween is similarly old-fashioned. “E’en” is a contraction of the word even, an older way of saying “evening.” Halloween is thus “All hallows e’en” or “the evening of All Saints Day,” and it came to be celebrated as an early anticipation of the day that followed, the same way people celebrate Christmas Eve in anticipation of Christmas Day.

But why celebrate All Saints Day in the first place? Some of our Protestant friends object to the Catholic custom of celebrating certain saints and giving them special attention. Aware that there are liturgical days commemorating individual saints, they want to know why there aren’t celebrations for all the other people in heaven.

After all, in Revelation John describes the population of heaven this way:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9-10).

Don’t all those other people deserve recognition, too?

The answer is that they do, and this is why we have All Saints Day. Since there are only 365 days in the year, not every person in heaven can have his own liturgical commemoration, but they all should be recognized for the way they cooperated with God’s grace. Thus All Saints Day was created to commemorate every last individual in heaven, even those who salvation is known to God alone.

So if your departed grandmother is in heaven, even though she’s never been canonized, on All Saints Day the Catholic Church commemorates her and the work God did in her life. She, too, has a place in the liturgical calendar, alongside the more famous saints.

Precisely when that day occurs will depend which liturgical calendar you are using.

In many Eastern Catholic Churches, the commemoration of all the saints is held on the Sunday after Pentecost, which has a certain logic since Pentecost was the event that led to the evangelization of the world and the salvation of so many souls.

In the West, November 1 became the date on which all the saints are commemorated. Sometimes people will try to tarnish this with pagan associations, claiming that it was based on the Gaelic holiday Samhain, as celebrated in the British Isles.

But All Saints Day didn’t originate in the British Isles. The reason November 1 was picked is that Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to all the saints and fixed its anniversary as November 1.

Later, Pope Gregory IV (827-844) extended this celebration to the whole of the Western Church. This led to the commemoration of the evening before as All Hallows Eve, and it led to the following day—November 2—being celebrated as All Souls Day, when we pray for all the souls who are still being purified on their way to heaven.

Though we disagree about various matters, both Catholics and Protestants say the Apostles’ Creed, and when we do so we profess belief in “the communion of saints.” The celebration of All Saints Day is one of the ways Catholics live out this profession.

All Saints Day came to be a very important liturgical day, and today it is a holy day of obligation, meaning that Catholics must observe it by going to Mass, as they do on Sundays.

This makes All Saints different than the commemorations of individual saints. None of the saints living after biblical times are commemorated with holy days of obligation. However famous saints like Augustine, Aquinas, and Thérèse of Lisieux may be, they don’t have such an important day on the liturgical calendar.

But the whole body of the saints in heaven—sainted grandmothers included—do. The Catholic Church thus not only remembers individual saints; it takes seriously it’s profession of the entire communion of saints.

Sexualizing the Eucharist?

Priest Holding Communion Wafer --- Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

A reader writes:

I am Orthodox and have been going to a Western Rite parish. But my son and I are pretty convinced about the role of the successor of St. Peter, so we’ve been attending Catholic Mass early in the morning before work and last night we went to an RCIA class.

The priest is a nice guy, but he said that receiving the Eucharist is like God making love to us. . . . What???

So . . . the Father likes to make love to his children? Is this the type of thinking that has led to pedophilia and rape among the ranks of the clergy?

Have you ever heard this before about the Eucharist? Can you help?

Thank you very much for writing! I think I can be of assistance.

I have heard of this concept before. Some have used language that employs a sexual metaphor for the Eucharist, though I am unaware of any document of the Church’s Magisterium that does so.

It sounds like, in this case, the concept was explained in a particularly unfortunate way that omitted important elements needed to properly understand the idea.

For those who use the metaphor, it is not meant to be homosexual in nature.

 

Christ and His Bride, the Church

Instead, the concept is based on the New Testament’s bridal imagery regarding Christ and his Church. This imagery is found in a number of New Testament books, and it is used in a particularly striking way in Ephesians, where St. Paul writes:

For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:25-32).

In this imagery, Christ is—naturally—seen as masculine and the Church as feminine.

As members of Christ’s Church, individual Christians can be seen as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to Christ and his masculine, active role.

The same principle can be used to envision every creature as functioning in a feminine, receptive role with respect to God our Creator and his masculine, active role.

This mode of thought is based on the fact that God (for all creatures) and Christ (for all Christians) displays masculine qualities by protecting, providing, and ruling, while we display the corresponding feminine qualities with respect to them.

The imagery is thus intrinsically heterosexual, regardless of the physical gender of an individual creature or Christian.

Concerning Christ and his bride, the Church, the question then arises whether there is a particular moment that could be considered analogous to the marital act.

 

New Birth in the New Testament

The answer may be surprising. St. Peter tells his readers:

You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:23).

This relies on the ancient way of speaking in which a husband’s “seed” (Greek, spora or sperma—from which we get the obvious corresponding English word) is implanted in the wife like a seed in a field to produce offspring.

Peter says we as Christians have been born anew not by “perishable/corruptible” (Greek, phthartos) seed—i.e., not through corruptible human reproduction—but by “imperishable/incorruptible” seed, which he identifies as “the living and abiding word of God.”

The word which converts believers to Christianity is thus envisioned as God’s imperishable seed which brings to birth new children for God.

The thought is paralleled in John’s Gospel, where we read:

To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-13).

Here again we have the Christian new birth compared to and contrasted with human sexual reproduction (“not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man”; other translations: “nor of the will of a husband”) and associated instead with God’s action.

On this passage, British scholar George R. Beasley-Murray observes:

The successive phrases contrast birth from God with human begetting, and emphasize the inability of men and women to reproduce it. The plural haimata (commonly = “drops of blood”) alludes to the blood of the parents who beget and give birth; the “will of the flesh” denotes sexual desire; the will of “a male” (andros) has in view the initiative generally ascribed to the male in sexual intercourse (Word Biblical Commentary on John 1:13).

Although Peter and John express it in different ways, both invoke human sexual reproduction in comparison with Christian new birth.

Both state that spiritual birth is not by human reproductive means, and Peter in particular compares the male seed to the word of God that brings people to conversion, allowing the new birth itself to take place in the sacrament of baptism (cf. 1 Peter 3:21, John 3:3-8).

The New Testament thus employs a sexual comparison for the beginning of the Christian life and the new birth it entails.

 

What About the Eucharist?

If it’s possible to employ a sexual metaphor for the beginning of the Christian life, is there an aspect of ongoing Christian life where one can be employed?

Advocates of a sexual understanding of the Eucharist propose that there is: Just as the marital act is an ongoing, intimate, lifegiving exchange between husband and wife, so the Eucharist is an ongoing, intimate, and (spiritually) lifegiving exchange between Christ and the members of his Church.

According to this view, Christ performs the masculine role by giving himself to us in the Eucharist, and we perform the feminine role by receiving him in the Eucharist.

So that’s the basis of the view.

Is it possible to use a metaphor like this? Well, it’s possible in the sense that you can always draw an analogy between two things as long as they have points of similarity of some kind.

Does that mean this metaphor will always be helpful? No. Every analogy has its limits, because two things are never exactly the same.

In particular, when we take the male/female image of Christ and his Church and try to cash it out in terms of Christ and the individual Christian, problems can ensue, for the obvious reason that not every individual Christian is female.

To put it forthrightly: I am a man, and I don’t find it helpful in receiving Communion to think, “Something like a sexual act is taking place right now with respect to me.”

Ugh!

I can imagine many women not finding it helpful at that moment, either, but in the case of a man it can be especially unhelpful, for exactly the reason that the reader pointed out when he first heard the idea.

So while one can make an analogy between any two things that have points of similarity, I personally don’t find this a helpful analogy, and I don’t employ it. It has too much potential to lead to confusion or even scandal, especially if explained only briefly.

I hope this helps!

Is It Okay to Listen to Non-Religious Music?

music guitarA reader writes:

Despite being a Protestant, I enjoy reading your blog. Since I see that you’ve answered other people’s questions before, I thought I’d ask you a question about a problem I’m having.

In my community, people often say that it’s wrong to listen to rock music and to secular music in general.

In addition to that, when I told an older lady I sometimes listen to Asian music (in particular Japanese rock), she told me to avoid all that “pagan stuff.” I didn’t know what to say to her.

Can you please tell me your opinion on this (perhaps giving some Biblical basis to them, so that they won’t be seen just as a Catholic opinion)?

I also wanted to ask you to also share your opinion, from a moral point of view, on EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and metal music

I’d appreciate it if you could write a public blog entry, so that I could share a link to that, instead of showing a private email.

No problem!

First, we need to establish a number of principles.

 

Devoting Attention to Things Other Than God

God gave mankind the gift of intelligence and skills so that we could glorify him by being creative. However, this does not mean that he wants us to be explicitly religious in every creative thing we do.

There are many situations in life where our human nature requires us not to explicitly think about God every moment.

It is enough that we orient our lives toward God in a general way, seeking to please him in whatever we do, even in those moments where we must devote attention to things other than him. St. Paul speaks of this general orientation of our lives to God when he writes:

Whatever your task, work heartily, as serving the Lord and not men (Col. 3:23).

When we are at work we must devote attention to our work duties rather than be thinking about God every second. When we are with family and friends we must think about them and their needs. Even when we are alone, we have to devote time and attention to our own needs.

While God gave us the ability to multi-task to a degree, it is a limited one, and human nature does not allow us to be thinking about God every single moment of our lives. Since God gave us our nature, this reveals that it is part of God’s plan for us to think about other things also.

Therefore, it is part of his plan for us to periodically re-orient ourselves and our thoughts toward him, asking him to guide and bless us and receive to his glory the work that we do, even when our attention is directed to it rather than to him explicitly.

 

Glorifying God Through Our Cultural Creations

All creation glorifies God by displaying aspects of his greatness. This includes the things humans make as part of culture.

A key aspect of culture is language, and we see how the gift of language glorifies God, even when it is directed to non-religious matters. For example, in Genesis we read:

So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name (Gen. 2:19).

Adam’s act of naming the animals brings glory to the Lord by using the God-given gift of language to produce words naming the animals.

Other applications of language—like creating speeches, stories, poems, and lyrics—also glorify God.

The same is true when our skills are used to produce other works of culture, such as music, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.

 

Misusing God’s Gifts

This is not to say that we can’t misuse God’s gifts. Of course we can. People misuse the skills God has given them in all kinds of ways.

Thus St. Paul writes:

But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth (Col. 3:8).

Note the misuse of language in several of St. Paul’s examples.

The reality of human sinfulness means that sometimes people do create works of art and literature that are marred by sin and that lead people toward sin.

 

Even Non-Christians Have Contributions to Make

Just because a work of art was not written by a Christian does not mean that it doesn’t have admirable qualities or that we as Christians can’t make use of it.

Several times in the New Testament, St. Paul quotes from pre-Christian Greek authors who wrote works of poetry that contained insights he found useful.

Thus when he was before the Areopagus in Athens, he said:

Yet [God] is not far from each one of us, for

“In him we live and move and have our being”;

as even some of your poets have said,

“For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:27-28).

The first quotation (“In him we live and move and have our being”) is from the Greek philosopher-poet Epimenides, and the second (“For we are indeed his offspring”) is from the poet Aratus.

Similarly, he writes the Corinthians:

Do not be deceived:

“Bad company ruins good morals.”

The quotation “Bad company ruins good morals” is from the comic playwright Menander.

Bear in mind that all of these men were pre-Christian pagans, yet Paul did not balk at using elements from their writings.

 

Sorting the Good from the Bad

Since Paul was aware of these quotations, he was obviously familiar with these pagan authors’ writings. They were part of his cultural education, even though he had been a strict Jew. He describes his background by saying that he was:

circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless (Phil. 3:5-6).

Because of his Jewish and later Christian beliefs, he by no means agreed with everything he read in pagan authors. Yet he did agree with genuine insights he found in them, and was willing to quote them, even to fellow Christians (as with the Corinthians).

He thus engaged in a process of sorting the good elements in them from the bad elements and employed a principle he recommends to his readers in another context:

Test everything; hold fast what is good (1 Thess. 5:21).

On this basis, he is elsewhere able to tell his readers:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things (Phil. 4:8).

 

Application to Music

If we take the principles from the preceding five sections and apply them to music, we can say the following:

  1. Not every piece of music we listen to has to be explicitly religious. Our lives must have a fundamental orientation to God, but that doesn’t mean we have to be explicitly thinking about him every moment. Thus not every poem, novel, movie, or song has to be explicitly about God.
  2. All of our cultural creations—including music, art, and literature—are based on skills that God gave us and that thus bring glory to him as long as we don’t mar them by sin.
  3. We do need to be on guard against cultural creations—including songs—that lead us toward sin (i.e., that tempt us personally to commit sin in some way).
  4. Just because a song or other work of art is of non-Christian or even pagan origin, that doesn’t mean it will be a temptation for us to commit sin or that it doesn’t have genuinely good points that are worth us knowing about or quoting, as St. Paul did with pagan Greek poets who had genuine insights.
  5. What we should do, therefore, is test every item of culture we encounter—whether it is music, art, or literature—hold fast to what is good, and recognize and appreciate what is good in it while rejecting what is bad.

Therefore, if a particular piece of music (or a particular movie, TV show, novel, or painting) would tempt you personally to sin, it needs to be avoided. However, if it doesn’t then it can be critically evaluated and appreciated the way St. Paul did with works of pre-Christian Greek literature.

This is a sketch of the principles I would apply to listening to (or performing) music. I don’t have feedback to offer on particular genres of music. No genre is categorically good or bad. It’s the individual songs in that genre that are good or bad.

However, I would caution against taking an overly harsh attitude in evaluating individual songs and their lyrics. For example, consider the following song lyrics:

O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!
For your love is better than wine.

O that [my beloved’s] left hand were under my head,
and that his right hand embraced me!

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Behold, you are beautiful, my love,
behold, you are beautiful!

Your lips distil nectar, my bride;
honey and milk are under your tongue

Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.
Your neck is like an ivory tower.

O loved one, delectable maiden!
You are stately as a palm tree,
and your breasts are like its clusters.
I say I will climb the palm tree
and lay hold of its branches.

Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
and the scent of your breath like apples,

and your kisses like the best wine
that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.

As you may have guessed, these lyrics are from a particularly famous song—the Song of Solomon (see Song. 1:2, 2:6, 10, 4:1, 11, 7:3-4, 6-9).

On the human level, the Song of Solomon is about the love of a man and a woman. It also has allegorical applications (e.g., to Christ and the Church), but on the literal level, it is a love song. We even have records of Jewish people in prior centuries who would sing it aloud.

This reveals to us, in a striking way, that God does not have a problem with love songs. It also reveals that he is not a prude. In this divinely inspired love song, we are asked to contemplate:

  • romantic kisses (“O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!”)
  • romantic embraces (“O that [my beloved’s] left hand were under my head,
    and that his right hand embraced me”)
  • romantic getaways (“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”)

We’re also asked to contemplate things like:

  • how beautiful the beloved’s breasts are (repeatedly! “Your two breasts are like two fawns,” “You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters; I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches,” “may your breasts be like clusters of the vine”)
  • how beautiful her neck is (“Your neck is like an ivory tower”)
  • how sweet her breath is (“the scent of your breath like apples”)
  • what it’s like to kiss her (“your kisses like the best wine
    that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth”)

All of this is in the context of married love, but a lot of people today would reject modern songs that invited us to think about the images and sensations described here, even in a marital context.

When a love song this vivid is found right in the pages of the Bible, we should be careful in how we evaluate other compositions.

As always, St. Paul’s principle prevails: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).

Pluck Out Your Eye?

 

Discern_vol4_no3_fb_if-your-right-eye-causes-you-to-sinSunday, September 30, is the Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Numbers 11:25-29, Psalm 19:8, 10, 12-13, 14, James 5:1-6, Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

* * *

This Sunday’s readings have two prominent themes. The first is that God can work outside of expected, formal situations.

We see this in the reading from Numbers, where God takes some of the spirit he gave to Moses and endows seventy elders with it. Two of the elders—Eldad and Medad—weren’t present for the ceremony, yet God gave them the spirit as well, and they prophesied. Upon learning this, Joshua asked Moses to stop them—perhaps implying that they were delinquent in not coming to the ceremony and therefore had no right to prophecy. But Moses took a more generous attitude and said he could wish all of God’s people were prophets.

Something similar happens in the Gospel, where the disciples report to Jesus that they told an exorcist to stop driving out demons in Jesus’ name because “he does not follow us.” Jesus, too, took a more generous attitude, telling them, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

This shows us that, out of his love, God can bestow his grace and work miracles, even outside of the situations you’d expect. It also shows us that, when he does so, we should take a generous attitude toward it—an important lesson for us and the ecumenical situation we face today.

The second theme deals with sin. St. James warns his readers—particularly rich ones who have exploited the poor—that their comeuppance will arrive. They have indeed, “stored up treasure for the last days,” but not in the way they thought! “Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud.” Exploitative landowners have actually accumulated a “wealth” of judgment.

To keep such judgment from happening to us, Jesus tells us we must deal decisively with sin. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off”; “and if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off”; “and if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” This is a classic example of hyperbole, or exaggeration to make a point. Jesus doesn’t intend us to literally make ourselves blind, lame, or handless. Doing those things wouldn’t actually deal with the problem, since—as he elsewhere says—sin actually proceeds from our hearts, our inner selves. Instead, his point is that we must do whatever it takes to deal effectively with sin.

Part of that effort is prayer. We need God’s help to overcome our innate, sinful tendencies. His grace is what allows us to conquer them. We will make mistakes, even unintentionally, without being aware of it. Thus the Psalmist praises God’s commandments and says, “though your servant is careful of them, very diligent in keeping them, yet who can detect failings? Cleanse me from my unknown faults!”

At the same time, God can empower us so that we avoid mortal sin. Thus the Psalmist also prays, “From wanton sin especially, restrain your servant; let it not rule over me. Then shall I be blameless and innocent of serious sin.” This should ever be our prayer, so we lay up real treasure for the last days.

The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

 

dead sea scrollsThe Dead Sea is a mysterious place. Its name invokes one of the greatest mysteries—death—and there is a good reason for that.

The waters of the Dead Sea are almost ten times as salty as the ocean, preventing fish, birds, and plants from living in it. That’s why it’s called “dead.”

It’s also so salty that you can float in it even if you don’t know how to swim.

Located at the south end of the Jordan River Valley, the Dead Sea is the lowest point on any of Earth’s landmasses—being more than 1,400 feet below sea level.

It is a valuable source of chemicals, including salt, potash (potassium chloride), and asphalt (bitumen). Because of the latter, it was known in the ancient world as Lake Asphaltites.

Several ancient sources reveal that a mysterious Jewish sect known as the Essenes lived near the Dead Sea.

 

The Dead Sea and the Essenes

The Roman author Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) is one of several ancient writers who discussed the wonders of the Dead Sea and the Essenes who lived nearby.

[The Jordan River flows] towards that gloomy lake, the Dead Sea, which ultimately swallows it up, its much-praised waters mingling with the pestilential waters of the lake. . . .

The only product of the Dead Sea is bitumen, the Greek word for which gives it its Greek name, Asphaltites. The bodies of animals do not sink in its waters, even bulls and camels floating; this has given rise to the report that nothing at all can sink in it. It is more than 100 miles long, and fully 75 miles broad at the broadest part but only 6 miles at the narrowest. On the east it is faced by Arabia of the Nomads. . . .

On the west side of the Dead Sea, but out of range of the noxious exhalations of the coast, is the solitary tribe of the Essenes, which . . . has only palm-trees for company (Natural History 5:15:71-73).

 

The Mystery Deepens

In the 1940s, the mystery surrounding the Dead Sea deepened when a teenage Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib went in search of a lost goat.

Details of exactly what happened are sketchy. It’s not even certain what year this happened, though it was sometime between 1945 and 1947.

In later accounts, edh-Dhib said that he thought the lost goat was in a cave, so he threw rocks in, hoping to startle the goat into making a noise or coming out of the cave.

Instead, he heard the sound of breaking pottery, and he decided to investigate and entered the cave and discovered clay jars containing ancient scrolls.

The local Bedouin often supplemented their income by illegally raiding archaeological sites, so the scrolls soon appeared in the local antiquities market, and in 1947 word of the scrolls began to spread among scholars.

 

The Story of the Scrolls

The Dead Sea scrolls have had a tumultuous history. In the first phase of this history, the investigation of the scrolls was hampered by events surrounding the founding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli hostilities of the time.

This led to colorful, cloak-and-dagger episodes, such as when—in late 1947—the Jewish scholar Eleazar Sukenik disguised himself as an Arab so he could safely travel from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to purchase some of the first scrolls, which were in the possession of a cobbler and part-time antiquities dealer nicknamed “Kando.”

In 1954, Sukenik’s son—the Israeli military general and scholar Yigael Yadin—had a similar transaction, in which he employed a secret intermediary using the false name “Mr. Green” (later revealed to be the American Jewish scholar Harry Orlinsky) to purchase several scrolls that had been advertised in the “miscellaneous for sale” section of the Wall Street Journal’s classified ads.

DSS_adAfter the Bedouin’s initial discovery, a survey was eventually undertaken, and scholars found ten more caves containing scrolls. Today they are numbered Caves 1 to 11.

Eventually a huge number of scrolls and scroll fragments—almost a thousand—were discovered. This number was so large that it led to the next troubled phase in the scrolls’ history.

The study of the scrolls was parceled out to a team of scholars, but some of the scholars did not process them in an efficient manner.

Although one could simply take photographs of the scrolls and publish the photographs, it was customary to allow scholars to translate, analyze, and prepare commentaries on the scrolls before publication.

For a variety of reasons—including the huge number of scrolls and fragments—some scholars didn’t do their work quickly, and decades went by without the full body of scrolls being published.

This led to rumors that the unpublished scrolls were being deliberately held back, and since some of the scholars analyzing them were Catholic, rumors began to circulate that the Vatican was suppressing the scrolls because they contained dangerous revelations that would threaten the Christian Faith.

This was one of the inspirations for the conspiracy novel The Da Vinci Code.

In a surprise twist, the impasse was finally broken in 1991 when rebel scholars frustrated with the situation made an unexpected move.

Although many of the scrolls had not been published, an exhaustive concordance of them had been. Like concordances of the Bible, this work listed each word in the scrolls, along with a snippet of its context.

The rebel scholars used a computer program to analyze the concordance and piece together the text of the unpublished scrolls by combining the concordance entries like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

In the wake of this, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California—which had a complete set of photographs of the scrolls—announced that it would allow scholars access to this material.

The embargo on the unpublished scrolls was now broken, and today all of the scrolls are available to the public. In fact, the Israeli Antiquities Authority has put them online, where they can be viewed for free at www.DeadSeaScrolls.org.il.

 

By the Numbers

Because of their fragmentary nature, statistics on the Dead Sea Scrolls have to be approximate, but it appears that the total number of texts is around 930.

The vast majority of the scrolls are parchment (animal skin prepared for writing), a small number are on papyrus (paper made from a reed that grows in Egypt), and one is inscribed on copper.

Breaking them down by the languages they are written in:

  • 790 (85%) are in Hebrew
  • 120 (13%) are in Aramaic
  • 20 (2%) are in Greek

Breaking them down by subject matter:

  • 230 (25%) are Jewish biblical texts
  • 250 (27%) are general Jewish texts
  • 350 (38%) are sectarian texts
  • 100 (11%) are unclassified

The biblical texts are books that belong to the Jewish Bible as it is understood today (i.e., the protocanonical books of Scripture).

The general Jewish texts are ones that aren’t included in the Jewish Bible, though they were read by a broad range of Jews. Examples include the deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Bible, as well as non-canonical works like Jubilees and 1 Enoch.

The sectarian writings are those that the Qumran sect produced itself and that reflect its unique views. Examples include the War Scroll, the Halakhic Letter, and the Community Rule.

The unclassified texts are ones that scholars aren’t sure about. They are not biblical texts, but it is hard to tell (often because they are too fragmentary) whether they are general Jewish texts or specifically sectarian ones.

 

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Near the caves where the scrolls were found is an archaeological ruin known as Qumran.

Most scholars have concluded that the scrolls were placed in the caves by the people who lived at or near Qumran. For this reason, the people who wrote the scrolls are often called “the Qumran sect,” although they called themselves the yakhad (Heb., “community”).

Because ancient sources including Josephus and Pliny the Elder report that there were Essenes living by the Dead Sea at approximately the location of Qumran, the majority view among scholars is that the Qumran sect were Essenes.

If this is correct, the scrolls give us new information about the history of the Essenes.

 

Naming the Scrolls

Scholars needed a way to keep track of the huge number of manuscripts and fragments, so they developed a numbering system.

A typical designation in this system is “4Q491.” The Q stands for Qumran, and the 4 that precedes it indicates that the text was discovered in Cave 4. The designation “4Q491” thus indicates manuscript 491 from Cave 4 at Qumran.

Every text in the Dead Sea Scrolls has a designation like this, but they often have additional names based on their content.

For example, an important text at Qumran is known as “the War Scroll,” which describes an apocalyptic battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. 4Q491 is a fragment of the War Scroll, but another, longer copy was found in Cave 1. That more complete copy is sometimes called 1QWarScroll.

Biblical manuscripts typically have content-based designations in addition to their numerical ones. For example, 4Q41 is also known as 4QDeutn because it is from a copy of Deuteronomy.

 

History of the Qumran Sect

The sect appears to have originated in the early second century B.C. It existed for twenty years before a man known as the Teacher of Righteousness became its leader.

The sectarians thought Teacher of Righteousness to be divinely inspired, and he appears to have been a high ranking priest from Jerusalem—perhaps a high priest who was deposed by Jonathan Maccabeus.

The Teacher was opposed by a figure known as the Wicked Priest (often thought to be Jonathan Maccabeus), who pursued him into the desert. He was also opposed—within the Qumran sect—by a dissenter known as the Man of Lies (or the Spouter of Lies) who rejected the Teacher’s interpretation of the Jewish Law.

The fact the scrolls do not identify these figures by name has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars.

Precisely how the Qumran sect fit into the world of ancient Israel is unclear. Their legal interpretations are strikingly similar to those of the Sadducees, leading some to suggest they were an offshoot of this sect.

However, they also held theological views (including belief in the afterlife and predestination) that were rejected by the Sadducees.

The Jewish historian Josephus records that the three major Jewish sects of the time were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes and that the last was the strictest of these sects.

This fits with the picture the scrolls give of their authors. They were a radical sect that looked down on the more relaxed attitude of the Pharisees (who they referred to as “seekers after smooth things”). They also believed that the Sadducees had allowed the Jerusalem temple to become polluted, and so they refused to worship there.

Like others in the period, the Qumran sectarians expected an imminent war between the forces of light and darkness. They expected God to give them victory in this war, leading to the destruction of their enemies and an age of perpetual peace.

Instead, when the Jewish War of A.D. 66-73 occurred, the Romans were victorious and the Qumran sect disappeared from history.

 

The Scrolls and the Bible

The Dead Sea Scrolls are significant because they are a thousand years older than the next earliest copies of the Hebrew scriptures that we have, which were made by Medieval Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes.

The scrolls’ discovery demonstrated the remarkably accurate preservation of these texts.

At the same time, they contain some readings that are different from the Medieval Hebrew copies.

Sometimes these alternative readings support those found in the Septuagint—the major Greek translation of the Old Testament—and sometimes they are unique to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Today Bible translators use the Masoretic texts, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls when trying to determine the original reading of biblical passages.

 

The Scrolls and the Canon

The Dead Sea Scrolls are important for the study of the canon of the Bible. They include copies of all of the protocanonical books of the Old Testament except for Esther, whose canonicity was disputed by some Jews.

The scrolls also include copies of deuterocanonical works like Tobit, Baruch, and Sirach.

It is unclear whether the Qumran sectarians had a closed list of books they regarded as canonical or precisely which books these were.

However, the scrolls do show that they thought more books counted as Scripture than the Sadducees and Samaritans (who accepted the first five books of the Bible) and the Pharisees (who accepted the protocanonical books, roughly speaking).

It appears, for example, that the Qumran sect regarded books such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Temple Scroll as divinely inspired.

 

Notable Scrolls

Some of the most notable works among the Dead Sea Scrolls include:

The Community Rule (1QS): A manual describing how the Qumran sect was to function, including information about initiation, communal meals, etc. It is the sect’s equivalent of a monastic rule like the Rule of St. Benedict.

The Temple Scroll (11QTempleScrolla): A lengthy work describing a version of the Jerusalem temple that was never built. Written in the form of a revelation from God to Moses, it describes the sect’s ideal temple and the ceremonies that should take place in it.

The Halakhic Letter (4QMMT): A letter written to the Jerusalem priests explaining the points of Jewish law (halakhoth) that the Qumran sectarians felt separated them from the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

The War Scroll (1QWarScroll): An apocalyptic prophecy of a battle between the “sons of light” (the Qumran sect) and the “sons of darkness” (everybody else, but led initially by the Romans). It includes the military tactics that the sons of light were expected to use.

The Copper Scroll (3Q15): Unique among the Dead Sea Scrolls, this document is inscribed on a roll made of copper. It contains a list of locations where vast sums of gold and silver are said to be buried. None of the sites have ever been found, leading some to suggest it is a work of fiction. However, it seems unlikely anyone would take the trouble to inscribe a work of fiction on a difficult medium like copper, suggesting it is real. If the treasures were real, they are so vast they could only have come from the treasury in the Jerusalem temple, presumably being hidden to keep them safe from the Romans in the Jewish War of A.D. 66-73.

 

Christian Connections?

When the scrolls were discovered, attention quickly focused on what light they might shed on early Christianity, and there are a number of similarities between the Qumran sectarians and early Christians.

Both groups had a focus on prophecy and personal holiness, both had some members who practiced celibacy, and both had leaders who were called “bishop” or “overseer” (Hebrew, mebaqqer, Greek, episkopos).

This led some crackpot authors to make fanciful proposals, such as that John the Baptist was the Teacher of Righteousness, Jesus was the Wicked Priest, and St. Paul was the Spouter of Lies.

None of these are possible. Carbon dating shows that scrolls mentioning these figures were written before the New Testament era, meaning that they are too old.

Also, the early Christian attitude toward Gentiles and the Jewish law was starkly opposed to the rigorist and exclusivist view of the Qumran sectarians.

The Dead Sea Scrolls thus do not tell us anything directly about early Christianity, though they do tell us a great deal about the world in which early Christianity emerged.

 

Other Finds

Because of the mystery surrounding them, the Dead Sea Scrolls represent the most famous find of ancient literature, but there have been other major finds. Two of these are the documents of the Cairo Genizah and the Nag Hammadi texts.

The Cairo Genizah: Traditional Jewish piety forbids throwing away a manuscript that contains the name of God (YHWH), and so it became customary for synagogues to have a special place to house worn out manuscripts containing the divine name.

This place is known as a genizah—from a Hebrew word meaning “to put away” or “to hide.” Manuscripts would be stored in genizoth and then later buried.

In the 1890s, the American rabbi Solomon Schechter realized the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt contained a vast trove of important manuscripts. These were written between about A.D. 870 and 1880, and the number of texts and fragments dwarfs those found at the Dead Sea. All told, around 300,000 fragments have been recovered from the Cairo genizah.

The Nag Hammadi Texts: In 1945, an Egyptian farmer near the town of Nag Hammadi discovered a buried pottery jar that contained twelve volumes of ancient writings.

These proved to be significant because among the writings was a large collection of Gnostic documents from the fourth century. Gnosticism was a heresy that flourished from the second to the fourth centuries, but before this point the only accounts of what the Gnostics believed were found in the writings of their opponents—the Church Fathers.

As a result of the Nag Hammadi texts, scholars now have direct access to the writings of the people the Church Fathers were reacting to, allowing us to better understand many things.

 

Learning More

There are many good resources you can use to learn more about the Dead Sea Scrolls. These include:

 

 

“Let’s Take Him Down a Peg”

 

Sunday, September 23, is the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Wisdom 2:12, 17-20, Psalm 54:3-6, 8, James 3:16-4:3, Mark 9:30-37

a-jesus-in-trial-before-the-roman-empire_0* * *

By God’s design, human beings are social rather than solitary creatures. We need to live in society with other humans, and that means we need to pay attention to our status and reputation, to make sure we have a safe and stable place in society.

Under the influence of sin, this natural need becomes distorted. It leads to envy, blind ambition, and conflict. Thus St. James warns us: “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice”; “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions?”

When we sense that someone is getting ahead of us, there can be a sinful desire to “take him down a peg,” to reduce his status as a way of elevating our own, so that we can feel better about ourselves. The author of Wisdom shows us this thought process playing out in the minds of the wicked as they consider the righteous: “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law.” That impulse can even lead the wicked to have murderous designs against the just one: “Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.”

This contains a Messianic prophecy, for precisely such envy would lead the authorities to plot Jesus’ death. Thus in this week’s Gospel, we find him again predicting: “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.”

Jesus’ disciples were perplexed and too afraid to ask him to explain this. What they didn’t realize is that they were falling into the same trap as the authorities. As they walked along the road, they argued about which among them was the greatest. Jesus had offered them secure, even honored places in God’s new society—but they weren’t content with these and petty place seeking began among the Twelve.

Jesus confronted them with their selfish ambition and taught them that “if anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” Rather than being built on ambition and narcissism, God’s new society would be built on humility, service, and love.

At points in our lives, all of us have been victims of people who want to humiliate us. All of us have been able to say, with the Psalmist, “O God, hear my prayer; hearken to the words of my mouth. For the haughty men have risen up against me.”

God knows our need to have a safe and stable place in society. He knows we need to be concerned about our reputations. But we must keep our sinful tendencies in check and not give in to pride. We must seek to serve others, and—above all—we must not seek to humiliate them just so we can think better of ourselves.

What Would Jesus Do?—Are You Sure?

 

wwjdSunday, September 16, is the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Isaiah 50:5-9, Psalm 116:1-6, 8-9, James 2:14-18, Mark 8:27-35

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We’ve all seen those bracelets that say, “What would Jesus do?” This question can be a helpful reminder of our need to use Jesus as a reference point and to follow the example of our Lord. That’s the theme of Thomas a Kempis’s spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ.

It’s also a welcome point of agreement with our separated brethren. In fact, “What would Jesus do?” has been particularly popular in the Protestant community, initially being popularized by the nineteenth century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon and the Congregationalist author Charles Sheldon and his novel In His Steps.

Though the subject of faith and works has long been contentious between Catholics and Protestants, both recognize—with St. James—the need to put our faith into practice: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works;” “Faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

While “What would Jesus do?” is an important question to ask, it comes with a huge caveat. There’s a well-known saying in biblical studies: “By their Lives of Christ ye shall know them.” What this means is that scholars tend to write biographies of Jesus that essentially remake him in the image that the author prefers. Marxist scholars envision a Marxist Jesus; politically conservative scholars see a politically conservative Jesus; etc.

There’s an example of just that phenomenon in this Sundays’ Gospel reading. When Jesus declares that he will be rejected by the authorities, killed, and rise on the third day, “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” The prince of the apostles couldn’t imagine such things happening to Jesus—who Peter had just, correctly, identified as God’s long awaited Messiah. The Life of Christ that Peter was envisioning would have had an entirely different ending!

Peter must have been shocked when Jesus, in full view of the other disciples, rebuked him in turn, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Indeed, Jesus was determined to perform a different mission than Peter and others had in mind for him. Rather than being a political deliverer who would expel the hated Romans from Israel, he would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah: “I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”

And yet Jesus would also emerge from the grave, fulfilling the prophecy of the Psalms: “For he has freed my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”

None of this was imaginable to Peter or his fellow disciples, and it reveals to us that—when we ask the question, “What would Jesus do?”—we need to ask follow-up questions: “How sure am I that I really understand what Jesus would do? Am I recasting him in my own image, just rationalizing what I want to do? Am I thinking like men rather than God?”

 

God’s Compassion for the Disadvantaged

 

compassionSunday, September 9, is the Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7, Psalm 146:6-10, James 2:1-5, Mark 7:31-37

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In this Sunday’s Gospel, we read the story of a deaf man. Because he couldn’t hear properly, he also couldn’t properly calibrate the way he spoke, and so he had a speech impediment and was hard to understand. Anyone in his situation would find the two conditions painfully frustrating and embarrassing, and though most of us are blessed with good hearing and speech, we’ve all faced the awkwardness and frustration of not understanding others and of not being understood.

Fortunately, Jesus had compassion on the man and healed both his hearing and his speech impediment. This was one of the signs of the Christ, for Isaiah had prophesied that in the Messiah’s day, the deaf would hear and the mute would speak. Not only that, the blind would see and the lame would regain their ability to walk—miracles that Jesus also performed.

The fact Jesus did these miracles reveals his identity as the Messiah, the Savior that God had promised centuries beforehand. The miracles also reveal something else: God’s compassion for the disadvantaged. God knows the pain and frustration of all who are disadvantaged—whether they are blind, deaf, mute, lame, or anything else. This is why the Psalms say that God “secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets captives free.”

God’s compassion extends to everyone, no matter what disadvantages they face. Thus he “raises up those who were bowed down” and “protects strangers”—those travelling in foreign lands, who face hostility and have no support network to sustain them. In the ancient world, many men died young, leaving their children and wives alone, but “the fatherless and the widow the Lord sustains.”

Few things are certain in life, and we must not presume that we will always have the advantages that we do now. Because we won’t. One day we all will face hardship—whether it’s due to the death of a loved one, an illness, an accident, or a financial reversal. One day all of us will be disadvantaged in some way.

We must share God’s compassion for the disadvantaged, for one day all of us will need it ourselves. Among other things, this means that we must not show favoritism. St. James warns us against giving preferential treatment to the rich and well-advantaged. In the first century church, that might mean telling a rich, finely dressed man, “Sit here, please,” while telling a poor, shabbily dressed man, “Stand there,” or “Sit at my feet.”

By doing these things, we would set ourselves up as judges who look only at temporary, outward appearances—at fortunate or unfortunate circumstances that frequently are beyond the control of the person who experiences them. But God has compassion on everyone, regardless of their circumstances, and we need to show a corresponding, universal compassion on everyone.

After all, difficult days are coming our way. All of us will face hardship in the future. All of us will need to be shown compassion by others. And all of us will be grateful when we receive it. Let us show it to others today.

Religion, Relationship, and Ritual

religion-relationshipSunday, September 2, is the Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B). Mass Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8, Psalms 15:2-5, James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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Sometimes we hear people running down the concept of religion. “Jesus didn’t come to bring us a religion,” they say, “but he wants to have a relationship with us.” Other times we hear people say they are “spiritual” but not “religious.” Both of these are based on an impoverished understanding of what religion is—as if it simply consisted of unimportant rituals or arbitrary doctrines.

But real religion involves neither of these. It doesn’t contain arbitrary doctrines but truths that have been revealed by God. It also involves genuine relationships with God, with Christ, and with our fellow human beings.

Thus St. James tells us that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Having a real relationship with God means not only loving him but loving our neighbors as well—especially our less fortunate neighbors.

Yet it is possible to become too focused on external rituals. This happened with Jesus’ critics, who faulted his disciples for not washing their hands before they ate, in violation of the custom of their day. But this custom was not based on God’s teaching. It isn’t found in the Mosaic Law. Jesus thus rebuked his critics for “teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

Like the prophets before him, Jesus made it clear that moral values take precedence over mere ritual observances: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.”

This is not to say that rituals are unimportant. Ritual appears in every culture, showing that it’s built into human nature. Thus God gave Israel rituals alongside moral commandments in the Old Testament Law. This Law was a model of wisdom for the people of the ancient near east, and by observing it the Israelites would show “wisdom and intelligence to the nations,
who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’”

God has ordained different rituals for us today, but ritual—together with the moral imperatives that flow from the ethic of love—is an important part of how we relate to God.

Rather than talking down religion, we should recognize and embrace the concept, for it is a biblical one. In doing so, we should embrace the impulse for ritual that God built into human nature, but we should also recognize the transcendent importance of love. This is taught in both the Old and the New Testaments. When Jesus identified the first and second great commandments as love of God and love of neighbor, he was quoting from the Law of Moses.

We thus should “be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” And we always should strive to be one who “walks blamelessly and does justice; who thinks the truth in his heart,” for “whoever does these things shall never be disturbed.”