Category: Bible

Marriage, Sex, New Heaven, New Earth

Heaven A reader writes:

If the new earth is a restoration of the original Creation plan by God and God affirmed marriage or the role of a spouse in Gen 2:18, how do you deal with the Mark 12:25 passage of people will neither marry nor be given in marriage? Is marriage and procreation a result of sin to be burned away in the refinement of passing over? Was it intended to be a temporary blessing only viable for the first stage of existence not long term?

These are very good questions. I think the key to understanding them involves Our Lord's statement in the gospels that we will be like the angels of heaven, neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and St. Paul's statement in Romans 7 that death ends marriage, so that spouses who remarry after being widowed are not committing adultery. These statements directly address the situation of death and the next age, and so they provide the framework within which to understand the Genesis mandate to procreate.

Undergirding both Genesis, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the whole rest of the Bible is a moral vision that understands sex and procreation–for humans–to be something that must occur within marriage. The affirmation that we will not be married in the next world thus implies the absence of sex and procreation, making us like "the angels of heaven" in that regard.

If that is our reference point then it sheds light on the original Genesis mandate, as well as on God's intent in the renewal of the world–the appearance of the New Heaven and the New Earth.

If life in the next age is as Jesus describes it then it would seem that the renewal of the world is not meant to be simply a restoration of his original plan for creation. It is similar in many ways to a restoration of the original plan (e.g., an environment in which man lives in harmony with God, in which there is no sin; Revelation even depicts the New Jerusalem as being planted with the tree of life from the Garden of Eden).

But it appears to go beyond a simple restoration. If it were the latter then it might well involve an ongoing place for human marriage, sex, and procreation.

Or maybe not. It also could be that the original plan was to have these play a role only for a time–until a certain number of humans were in existence–and then they would pass away.

One strand in the history of theology is the idea that God created our first parents in a probationary state. They were subject to a moral test ("Thou shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"), and had they passed this test then they would have been confirmed in holiness rather than losing it.

One could hypothesize that, had the human race stayed faithful to God, it one day would have been granted the kind of glorified state that does away with the need for marriage and procreation.

Presumably there would have been some limit to the number of humans needed. Unless God were to radically restructure the world, the earth–or even the whole physical universe–could not contain an infinite supply of them.

What would that maximum number be? We don't know. We are in a realm of pure speculation. However, one speculation that has found a place in the history of theology is that the total number of humans God wished to create is equal to a third of the number of angels.

Why? Because in Revelation 12 the dragon (the devil) is depicted sweeping away a third of the stars in the sky. This has been commonly interpreted (though it is not certain) as a reference to the fall of angels, and if a third of the angels fell then it could make sense for God to create that many humans as new, rational beings to take their place.

Only humans are not the same as angels. We may both be rational beings,but humans incorporate matter in a way angels don't, and angels appear much more powerful than us (as well as being different in other ways–like that non-procreation business, for example).

If humans are meant (and again, this is pure speculation) as a repair effort for God's original plan for the angels then it would seem God often repairs things in a way that go beyond the original plan–just like the New Heaven and New Earth seem to go beyond God's original plan for the present world.

It thus may be that marriage and procreation may have been intended–even in the original plan for this world–to be of finite duration and later to be superceded. Or it may be that God's restoration plan involves an upgrade to the human condition that is different than what the original plan called for.

Either way, it appears from Our Lord's statement that God has deemed there will be enough humans in the next world that there won't be a need for more (at least by marriage and sexual procreation).

Though we can't be sure of all the details, this seems linked to the fact that we will be immortal (meaning incapable of being killed or dying, in this sense of the term) in the next life. Thus there will not be an ongoing need to replace humans who have died.

An additional way that the next world appears to be different than what the original plan involves the role of Christ. Had man never fallen then it is possible Christ would never have become incarnate as a human, never died on the Cross, and never incorporated us as Christians into his mystical body, the Church.

One strand of theology has proposed that he might have become incarnate anyway, but this is speculative. At least it would not seem that there was a need for him to do so if mankind were not in need of redemption.

Because the incarnation and death of Christ seem to be motivated by our need of redemption, and because our being incorporated into his mystical body is based on us becoming partakers in the redemption he supplied, it seems that God has become more intimately involved in the universe, and we more intimately involved in him, than might have been the case had we never fallen.

The fall thus may have opened up a door to a new and more glorious situation between the Creator, the created world, as us as his creatures. For this reason St. Augustine, and later a line in the liturgy for Easter Vigil, refers to the fall of man–paradoxically and ironically–as a felix culpa or "blessed fault." On this view it was a fault that brought about a more blessed state of affairs than what would have been the case otherwise.

Or so we may speculate.

To pick up one last thread from the initial question, it by no means appears that marriage, sex, and procreation were a product of sin. Marriage is created, and procreation is implied, all the way back in Genesis 1, which does not envision the fall at all. The fall does not come along until Genesis 3, and sex is at no point implied to be a moral violation. In Genesis 2, God may make a rule against eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but he does not make a rule against Adam and Eve having sex and procreating children. Indeed, he seems to expect them to.

This still leaves us with questions, of course, about what the end of marriage and procreation will mean for us.

The reader continues:

I have a hard time believing that the procreation will stop in the New Earth or that God does not delight in the fulfillment of Gen 1:28 of his children. Or that when Jesus comes again it marks the immediate end of the relationships with my wife. I know in my head that heaven and new Earth the Church becomes the bride and Jesus the bridegroom fulfilling the original plan, but did not Adam have a special relationship with Eve as much as they both had with God?

It does indeed please God that his children be fruitful and multiply–per Genesis 1:28–but presumably only to a point. Unless the does some really interesting things (which actually would be awesome cool) then the physical world will only hold a finite number of humans, and so procreation would not seem to go on indefinitely. The question is when, and Jesus seems to indicate it will not continue in the next world.

In terms of our own personal experience, St. Paul builds on what Jesus says by indicating our marriages are brought to an end with death. Otherwise it would be adultery for widows and widowers to remarry, which St. Paul indicates it is not.

This leaves us with an existential question regarding our own spouses. How could it be that we could cease to have a special relationship with them? How could it be that sex simply stop? Wouldn't that interfere with the joy of heaven?

As the reader writes, Adam and Eve had a special relationship with each other as well as with God. Surely this special relationship would find a place in the next life.

The answer, I think, is that it does. We will still have special relationships with those who have been close to us in this life, including our spouses. Death will not end that. In fact, in the purified, glorified state that we will then exist in, these relationships will actually be more intimate and the ties between us more powerful than they were in this life.

In the glorified state we will be able to love each other more purely, more intensely than we ever could in this life–and without distraction or weakness or contrary temptation. We won't be our irritable, flawed, exasperating, flawed selves. We will be both more loving and more lovable.

And so we should not face the prospect of the next world as a life without love but as a life with more and more intense and more pure love than we have ever known in this world.

It is to be a life without sex, and this confuses us as in this life the sexual act seems incredibly powerful, but we must recognize that the sexual act offers only a glimmer of the love and intimacy of heaven. It is not heaven itself. Heaven is the real good toward which sex–and all earthly goods–point.

The situation was once addressed by C. S. Lewis. In one of his writings he considered the difficulty that we will not have sex in heaven and how that seems like a diminution rather than an increase of joy. He acknowledged this and compared it to the situation of a little boy and his perception of joy. The boy might think that the greatest joy is eating chocolates, and he might have a hard time understanding how a married couple having sex might have a higher joy that didn't involve eating chocolates at the same time. In this way, adults in the present life may recognize sex as a supreme form of joy and have trouble understanding how in the next life there could be an even higher joy that does not involve sex.

What we do know, again per St. Paul, is that the things we must forego (either in this life or the next) do not compare to the weight of glory that will be revealed to us. If the next life does not involve sex, that's okay. God's got something better in store. And something so much better that it will make sex seem like a pale shadow. It will be the thing that sex and all earthly goods ultimately pointed toward–and thus something that dwarfs them with the power of its reality.

Finally, the reader addresses a particular point of practical living in this life:

I am fully cognizant that I may at times place my relationship with my wife more at the forefront in my mind than my relationship to God. I can only hope that by serving or honoring her that I am serving Him at the same time.

I think this is exactly the right way to look at it. God created us with finite mental resources. This includes a finite amount of attention that we can devote to things and a correspondingly finite amount of emotional energy with can devote to them.

Because of these limitations, we are in a situation to which the science of economic applies–economics being the study of how to manage limited resources that have alterantive uses. We've only got so much intellectual and emotional wherewithal, and we can spend it on different things. So how does God want us to spend it?

We know that he must be our ultimate reference point. He is of infinite value, and anything in this universe that has value is only a reflection of him, the source from which all value–all good things–comes. This is what is meant by the command to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

But he does not expect us to devote all our intellectual and emotional resources to him directly. Otherwise there would be no room left over for the command to love our neighbor as ourself.

Or even loving ourself!

God does not even expect cloistered monks and nuns to think exclusively of him 24/7. That kind of singlemindedness is simply not possible. And anyone who tried it would not only fail but starve to death in the attempt.

We therefore see that God wants us to devote our direct attention to things other than himself, to created realities, including our own personal needs and those of the humans around us–most especially our families and friends, the ones we are closest to.

By serving them, we serve God. As long as we have in the back of our minds the fact that God is the source of all goodness and that we wish to serve him by acknowledging and caring for the created goods he has made, we approach life with a fundamental orientation toward God.

It is thus okay–and even mandated by God–for our relationship with our spouse to sometimes occupy the front place in our mind. The virtual intention (as theologians call it) to serve God by serving others suffices to bring this relationship into alignment with God.

And so we do, indeed, server God by serving others, including our loved ones, who he wishes us to care for in a special way.

Abba: The Case of the Missing “B”

Over on Facebook, a reader writes:

Mr. Akin, could you possibly post "Abba" in Aramaic fully pointed. Why is the Beta repeated?~Thanks again

First let's look at "Abba" in Greek, which is displays the issue that the reader is wondering about. Here is how the word appears in Greek (cf. Mark 14:36 in a typical Greek New Testament):

Abba3

As you can see, the term is spelled alpha-beta-beta-alpha. The reader asks why the beta is repeated, and the answer is that this is how they said it, with a reduplicated "b" sound separating the two vowel sounds. The Greek is giving us a fuller phonetic explanation of the word (how it sounds)–at least in this respect. (The Greek, like the English, does not record the invisible consonant on the front of the word.)

Now here's how the same word looks in Hebrew/Aramaic block script (which is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet, though it is most familiar to us as the script used to write modern Hebrew):

Abba2

It's spelled aleph-beth-aleph, which prompts the reader's question: Why only one letter corresponding to "b" in this version?

The answer is that the original Semitic scripts were unpointed, meaning that they only included consonants (aleph is a consonant, believe it or not, though it later came to serve as a kind of vowel marker, making it a mater lectionis). Also, because of the way syllabification works in Semitic languages, their scripts often do not (or in unpointed versions do not) mark reduplicated consonants.

Thus even though you said the word "ABBA," you'd spell it "ABA." In an unpointed script, if you spelled it "ABBA" then the second "B" would suggest an extra syllable: "a-ba-ba" or something like that.

This reflects a fact that is also true of English (and even moreso French!): the script for the language is not fully phonetic. It is assumed that you already know the words you are reading and just need enough visual information to help you identify the word. You don't need how it's actually said spelled out in detail. That's what allowed the ancient Semites to get away without using VWLS N TH FRST PLC.

Eventually, they did come up with ways of indicating vowels–and other things–using a system of "points," which are small marks placed above, below, or within the letters. In the block script version of the word above, the marks under the first two letters (reading from right-to-left) are vowels–two different versions of the "a" sound.

The dot in the middle of the middle letter (beth), however, is not a vowel. It's a mark known as a dagesh forte (borrowing from Latin, meaning a "strong" dagesh). The dagesh forte (also called a dagesh hazak) tells you "double this consonant."

Thus even if you don't know the word "Abba," you could figure out how to say it using the modern, pointed version, because the dagesh forte tells you to say it "ABBA" rather than "ABA."

There are a variety of other Aramaic scripts that the word can be written in, and they have their own unique pointing rules, but the same basic issue applies.

Hope this clarifies the case of the missing "B"!

Should You Read Non-Catholic Materials?

A correspondent writes:

I am presently attending a Bible study.  During our small group discussion, a question arose from someone in our group.We would like to know if it is wrong for us to read and examine other books and Bibles that are not Catholic-based to see what they have information-wise pertaining to spiritual matters.  For example, we both have Life Application Study Bibles and enjoy reading the associated study footnotes.

My opinion is that the Holy Spirit guides us with discernment especially when we pray before reading or delving into other Christian denomination books and Bibles.  I guard myself (my heart, mind and spirit) so that I’m not influenced in any way that could conflict with Catholic beliefs.  If I’m not sure or confused about an issue (e.g., Why do we believe this and they that?”), I said I then will go to a religious authoritative person to have any questions or issues addressed or I check Internet sites like www.Catholic.com.  I believe I am exercising my ‘child-like faith’ with wanting to know and love more, which draws me closer to Him and to others, while using my adult judgment. I also believe that, when we know more about other religions and philosophies (Christian, Jewish, Eastern, scientific, etc.), it helps us to practice love, respect others, and establish a common ground for our relationship and possible future discussions for witnessing for Catholicism. If I didn’t understand or have knowledge of what they believe, I may not be able to convey my Catholic beliefs and doctrines as accurately.

The other person in our small discussion group is concerned that when we read, we can be swayed / influenced to turn from our Catholic beliefs and choose another path.  Are we able to guard ourselves enough (with the Holy Spirit’s assistance), spiritually and mentally, to protect our Catholic faith or is avoidance of other doctrines the answer?  Is it a matter where it differs per individual and how strong their faith is (figuratively, those who are nursing vs. those eating solid food)?

Please share your opinion and feel free to correct me where I’m wrong.  Thank you!

I think that you and the other person in your Bible study have valid points. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer on this one.

On the one hand, there is a great deal to be learned from non-Catholic sources, including non-Catholic religious and philosophical ones. St. Thomas Aquinas did an enormous service for the Church by showing how Christian faith can be related to the thought of non-Christian thinkers, such as (and especially) the pre-Christian philosopher Aristotle. Aquinas’s attitude was that all truth is God’s truth, and so if you find truth in a non-Christian source it not only will not contradict the Christian faith but it also will be of use to Christians. The more truth, the better!

His attitude was thus to exercise critical thinking in reading materials from non-Catholic sources (and from Catholic ones, for that matter!). Although St. Paul said it in a different context, the idea also applies here:

 

Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22)

This philosophy has also carried down to our day. In fact, in the books he is writing on the life of Jesus, Pope Benedict regularly interacts with the ideas of the American Rabbi Jacob Neusner, whose perspective on Jesus he finds to have value, even though he doesn’t agree with everything. (And he’s willing to reference Neusner in public—and thus implicitly encourage others to see what Neusner has to say.)

If you have a good grounding in your Catholic faith and can exercise critical thinking in what you read then there is nothing to fear in non-Catholic writings, and there is much to be learned from them! Though we have the fullness of religious truth, we do not have a monopoly on truth, and the perspectives of others can help bring out things that we as Catholics may not have known or may not have fully worked out yet.

In my own work, I use non-Catholic materials all the time. In fact, my favorite commentaries on the book of Genesis are by Jewish authors (Rashi and Nahum Sarna), there are Evangelical commentaries on certain books of the Bible that I learn a great deal from (the writings of N. T. Wright and James Dunn come to mind), and there are things to be learned even from folks who do not have any faith.

The key to being able to sift through this material and find what is good in it, though, involves more than praying to the Holy Spirit, and here is where I think your friend has a good point. One must also have a firm knowledge of your own faith in order to be able to think critically about material presented from other perspectives.

While one certainly should and must rely on the Holy Spirit for guidance, the Holy Spirit does not promise to protect us from coming to mistaken conclusions just because we pray to him. He also wants us to study, internalize, and thoroughly know our own faith. And then, with his guidance, we can approach materials from other perspectives profitably and with confidence.

Because everybody in our culture is taught to regard himself as an expert on religion from the time of birth, it is easy—often far too easy—for us to imagine that we have the kind of knowledge of our own faith that is needed to accurately identify beliefs that conflict with it. Indeed, we’d often feel insulted if someone suggested that we don’t! “What do you mean I don’t know my Catholic faith well enough to know what contradicts it!”

Yet there are a great many people who, in fact, don’t have a good grasp on the Church’s teaching even though they think they do.

And then there are people who, while they know the teaching of the Church well, may be experiencing an emotional crisis or a crisis of faith of some sort, and this would interfere with their ability to productively and serenely interact with materials from non-Catholic authors.

Certainly the safest course is to stick with Catholic materials, and as a general matter this is advisable, particularly for those who are less educated in their faith or who are going through difficult patches in their lives, but if you are well educated in your faith and able to exercise the critical thinking necessary to profitably sift what you are reading, there is nothing to fear from doing so.

There is thus no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on each individual and where that person is in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journeys.

In terms of the group—since people may be at different stages of those journeys—I would recommend erring on the side of caution (a flock travels at the speed of its slowest member), and if you use non-Catholic materials (or less-reliable Catholic ones, which can even be more insidious since they may have been written by wolves in sheep’s clothing), point out their limitations and strongly caution people against using them uncritically.

I hope this helps, and best of luck!

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is it? (Pt. 2)

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let’s look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I’d like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term anti-Semite. This is a misnomer. It is used to refer to hatred of Jews, though the category “Semite” properly includes people who aren’t Jews. Nevertheless, that is how the term is used. I suggest that we not fight about the word and just note that it is a misnomer that is in popular use and move on.

Now: What claims besides revelation might one appeal to in support of the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory of Israel?

1) The legal argument: This would involve asserting that some entity or entities that had legal title to this territory in the 20th century lawfully gave it to the present Israeli governing entity as a Jewish homeland. And, in fact, many people do make this claim.

While it would be an interesting legal debate to thrash this out, we’re not going to do that on this blog. I am not an expert on the law, especially as it pertains to this question, and it would exceed the capacity of a multi-issue blog like this to review all the relevant information and arrive at a firm conclusion. Therefore, aware that there is more than one side to this argument, I would suppose that reasonable people could take different views on the issue.

Further, regardless of whether civil (or international or whatever) law supports does not deal directly with the question of what is ethical. Human law can support all kind of wicked and unjust things, and so even if human law supports something, that isn’t itself decisive for the question of whether the thing is moral (which is the kind of question this blog is more interested in).

So let’s look at other grounds.

2) The ancestral argument: Some in the combox have asserted that the Jewish people have a right to the land of Israel based on the fact that their ancestors lived there a long time ago.

This strikes me as the least convincing argument on this issue. The fact is that human populations move all over the place during history. Often they are forced out of one land, and at some point any claim they have to it lapses. That fact that modern Jews’ ancestors had title to the property 1900 years ago doesn’t mean that they presently do any more than I have title to where my ancestors lived 1900 years ago.

In view of the historical memory of the Land and in view of the biblical promise regarding it, it is understandable—especially after the Holocaust—that there would be a desire to immigrate there and create a Jewish haven state there, but this is a natural desire—not a moral right to do so. Based on our individual and corporate histories, there are all kinds of desires we might naturally have about the way we’d like the world to be, but that doesn’t give us the moral right to go out and try to bring them about. Whether we have a moral right to take action regarding a wish or desire is a separate question than whether is it natural for us to wish it.

Human migration is so extensive in history that all of our ancestors have been kicked out of lots of places at various stages. In fact, if the Out of Africa theory is true, all non-Africans’ ancestors at one point must have gone through the very territory currently occupied by Israel. That doesn’t give all non-Africans title to this plot of land, either.

So . . . where your distant ancestors lived doesn’t mean that you get to reclaim the place today.

(Unless God has said you can, but that’s a different ground. It’s the revelation claim, not a “we used to live here” claim.)

3) Right of conquest: Historically a lot of people have felt that if you conquer a land, it’s yours. The fact you conquered it gives you a right to it.

One problem for using this argument in the case of Israel is that it works contrary to the legal argument that many wish to use. If the land was given to the Israelis legally then it wasn’t obtained by conquest—at least in the traditional sense (we’ll get to an untraditional one, below).

The conquest claim might, however, be used for territory like the West Bank since that was obtained in war.

But the right of conquest isn’t generally acknowledged today. The fact you conquered something may have given you title to it in the middle ages (or even more recently), but it doesn’t today. America conquered Iraq, but that doesn’t mean we own it. In fact, there is a widespread sentiment that America should get out of Iraq as soon as practical.

Today if you want to claim moral title to a land, you need something more than “We militarily defeated the people who were living there.”

4) Right of self-determination: The argument here would be something like: Since the legitimacy of government depends on the consent of the governed, the majority of people who actually live in a land get to determine how it is governed and by whom. Therefore, since the majority of people currently living in the territory of Israel are Israelis and, it would seem, support the existence of Israel, they have title to the land.

You might also call this the right of present possession and, as the old saying goes, “possession is nine tenths of the law.”

This is a more persuasive argument than the ones we have considered thus far in this post. Some version of the right of self-determination in conjunction with the present possession of a territory must underly the moral right that every nation state has to its territory. Whether Israel’s case is justified is a question that has to be answered, but at least this argument presents us with a potentially successful argument.

Note, however, that it only addresses the question of whether the Israelis now have moral title to the land, not whether they did so in the past or whether they will in the future.

If we consider the past, it is quickly recognized that in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries there was a massive migration of Jewish people into the territory of Palestine—with an eye to potentially founding a Jewish state or haven state there, which would mean displacing or making some other arrangement with the people who were already living there.

The desirability of creating a Jewish haven and the understandability of wanting to creating it here doesn’t mean that it was automatically moral to do so. What this amounts to is a non-military invasion of the territory with an eye to claiming it for yourself—the nontraditional form of conquest mentioned earlier.

Certainly one can see how the then-present inhabitants of the territory would object to this project, just as Native Americans could reasonably object to the mass migrations of European colonists with the same designs . . . or the way Mexicans might have viewed with suspicion the immigration of lots of potentially rebellious Anglos into Texas in the early 1800s . . . or the way Americans in the modern Southwest might view with suspicion the Reconquista sentiments expressed by some recent immigrants.

I don’t say that to pass judgment on any of these groups. It’s just a fact of history that immigrants can overwhelm and eventually take control of the lands to which they migrate. Whether they were justified in doing so is a complex moral question to which there is no automatically right or wrong answer. People do need places to live, and sometimes they need to migrate. When they migrate, some places are more rational to migrate to than others. And if enough of them migrate, over time it will have a natural impact on the governance of the region.

Because there is a natural tendency for everyone to identify their own interests with what is morally right, those who are doing the migrating have a natural tendency to think that it is morally right for them to do so, and those whose territory is being migrated to have a natural tendency to view the situation with concern or alarm and to think that it is morally wrong.

So it is reasonable for Jewish immigrants to the territory of modern Israel to view the migration as justified (or even necessary), and it is natural for Palestinians (then and now)  to view it as unnecessary and unjustified.

In other words: People can have different views on this subject.

There does come a point, if a migration is big enough, where a new governing situation becomes rational or even obligatory. The situation of a tiny nativist group holding all governing authority in the face of a disenfranchised majority class is going to lead to really bad situations (think: Apartheid, only with the natives being the rulers and the immigrants being the disenfranchised). The immigrant class must have its say in determining the governance of the region, and if it is big enough, it’s going to end up exercising that governance itself.

When that happens, a new civil order has been achieved. Hopefully it will be a just order (often it is not). Hopefully it will be achieved bloodlessly (often it is not). But the immigrant class will be the new rulers, and legitimately so.

One can hold, then, that this is the situation that applies in modern Israel, and that the common good is best secured by allowing the state to continue to exist. This would mean that the Israelis have a moral right to the territory (or at least some of the territory) now, regardless of whether they achieved this by legitimate means.

Or one can deny this and argue that the presence of modern Israel is a destabilizing element that will ultimately harm the common good of the parties involved—or that is presently harming the common good of the parties—and that it would be better to peacefully dismantle it.

I don’t see that as happening any time in the near future. A more likely scenario to my mind is that nuclear proliferation in Muslim states may at some point lead to the destruction of Israel.

That’s not at all something I wish for, but it is an eminently possible occurrence in the imminent future.

One could thus argue that, while Israel for a time held the land legitimately, it could cease to do so in the future, should the situation grow more unstable and the presence of Israel lead to great harm to the common good of the parties involved.

So just as this theory does not mean Israel achieved its title to the land through moral means, it also does not mean that it necessarily will keep its title in the future.

All of these are positions one could entertain legitimately. I’m not going to tell you which you should believe. I’m just trying to point out the scope that exists for diversity of opinion.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is It Anyway? (Pt. 1)

Recently we were discussing the Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism ipso facto makes one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply not true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

Just to eliminate potential confusion at the outset, let’s define our terms. I will be using the term “Zionism” in two senses: (1) The belief that the modern state of Israel should have been founded and (2) the belief that the modern state of Israel should continue to exist. There are other ways in which the term can be and historically has been used, but these are the two ideas that we will interact with here.

Note that one can be a Zionist in one sense but not the other. One could be a Zionist in sense (2) only and hold that, while the modern state of Israel should not have been created, now that it has been, it has a right to defend itself and to continue to exist. On the other hand, one could be a Zionist in sense (1) only and hold—for example—that, while it was right to create the modern state of Israel, that state has morally forfeited its right to exist due to human rights violations or that while it may have been right to found the state of Israel in the 20th century, if unstable Arab states start getting nukes and a regional nuclear war is about to start then the best thing for the welfare of the Jewish people would be to leave the region.

Many Jewish people today are Zionists in both sense (1) and sense (2), though not all. There are quite a number who are sense (2) only Zionists, and an even-more-nuclear-future could give rise to a significant number of sense (1) only Zionists.

Some Jewish people are Zionists in neither sense (1) nor sense (2). This is the case, for example, with the gentlemen pictured, who are members of Neturei Karta, who hold a view that was quite common among Orthodox Jews prior to the founding of Israel.

This view is that the Jewish people should not try to control the land of Palestine on their own and that they should regain statehood there only through the coming and the actions of the Messiah. Trying to take control of Palestine prior to that point, on this view, constitutes a usurpation of God’s plan and is viewed as a violation of the three oaths held to regulate relations between the Jewish people and the nations during the present age.

Neturei Karta is by no means the only Jewish group holding this view, BTW.

These people are not anti-Semites. They don’t even deny that the Jewish people have a special title to the land of Palestine. They simply see the legitimate control of this land as an eschatological reality that should not be confused with contemporary Zionist aspirations.

I thus hope that the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a little more clear and that we can discuss the issue without people wanting to automatically play the anti-Semitism card.

That said: Who owns the land?

There are two main perspectives from which this question needs to be evaluated: the prophetic and the ethical. In this post we’ll look at the prophetic perspective.

Many here in America have reflexively treated the prophetic aspect of the question as unambiguous and definitive: God promised Israel the land in the Old Testament, and so it’s theirs. Case closed.

But prophesy often is not so straightforward in its interpretation or application. God also made it clear that, if Israel committed certain sins—or sins of a certain character and magnitude—that it would be dispossessed of its land, at least for periods of time. And there are passages warning the Jewish people to submit to their conquerors and that they will not be restored to the land for a set time and things like that.

There is also the question of the way in which many Old Testament prophesies have found fulfillment through Christ in ways that would not have been expected previously. The impact that this phenomenon has on the promises regarding the land is something that cannot be ignored.

For its part, the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Jewish people still have a special role in God’s plan. That’s something I’ve written about before. But the Church does not teach that the Jewish people have a right to possess the land of the modern state of Israel in the present day by divine promise. In fact, the Holy See has studiously avoided saying that.

It has even gone so far, in its 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, to state:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that, owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders [art. 11:2].

In its specific application, this passage is referring to disputed territories like the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the territory of Israel as a whole, but the same principle applies in general. The Holy See treats the question of what people have title to what territory as a temporal affair and thus something that goes beyond the Church’s purview. The Church can certainly raise moral objections to various courses of action, like trying to forcibly kick out the people who currently have title to a territory. But the question of who has title is treated as a temporal rather than theological issue. The Church does not hold that any particular people has an immutable divine right to a particular territory.

This is not to say that a Catholic could not hold that Israel does have a right to the land in the present day due to God’s promise. That is an opinion within the realm of permitted theological speculation. But it is not something the Church has signed off on. The Church has remained conspicuously neutral on that theological question as it applies in our age.

One could thus hold the opinion that the Jewish people have a right to that land in our day, that they have a right to the land but not in our day (perhaps at the Second Coming or near it, if we are not now near it), or that they no longer have a special right to the land. Each view is permitted.

This deals with the subject from the prophetic perspective. What about the ethical one?

That will be the subject of our next post.

In the meantime: What are your thoughts?

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

Five Loaves And Two Fish


Loaves-fishes-tilapia002 Right now in the Sunday liturgy we're working our way through John 6, which contains the feeding of the 5,000 (John's version of it) and the Bread of Life discourse.

Last Sunday contained the feeding of the 5,000, and I was annoyed when the priest at the Mass I was attending emphasized a perceived "sharing" aspect of the passage. 

He didn't go so far as to fully subvert the miracle. That is, he didn't say that it was a "miracle of sharing" where people's hearts were moved to share what they had rather than hording it for themselves–a repudiation of the physical miracle that occurred.

But he seemed to be skirting the edge of that idea, without saying anything that would explicity mandate this interpretation.

What he did do was emphasize the idea of sharing, and particularly the generosity of the little boy with the five loaves and two fishes.

This Sunday there was a new priest, and he did the same thing. He didn't spend as much time on feeding (that was last week's reading, natch), but he did stress the generosity of the little boy sharing his lunch.

He also misinterpreted the loaves as probably like rolls instead of probably like pitas or tortillas in form, though we can let that pass.

What I find annoying is all the confident talk about how the miracle occurred because the little boy was selflessly willing to share his lunch.

Not only does that make it sound like God's omnipotence would have been hamstrung if the little boy had said no, and thus giving the little boy's action way too much credit in an ontological sense, it's also giving the little boy undeserved credit in the generosity department.

First of all, who says this was the little boy's lunch–or dinner for that matter?

Five loaves of bread, even if they aren't as big as what you'd buy in a modern supermarket, and two fish, even if they're relatively small, is way too much food for a little boy in that time and culture to have for a single meal. It was too much for a full grown adult to have for a single meal. (When was the last time you had five pitas and two fish for lunch?)

Of course, the boy might have brought food for more than one meal, not knowing how long he'd be at the event, but is there another, better explanation that might be suggested by the text?

Let's look at it. Here is the text in the squishy NAB (so there can be no argument I'm pulling something out of the text that shouldn't have been obvious to the priests just from reading the lectionary version):

When Jesus raised his eyes
and saw that a large crowd was coming to him,
he said to Philip,
“Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”

He said this to test him,
because he himself knew what he was going to do.

Philip answered him,
“Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough
for each of them to have a little.”

One of his disciples,
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish;
but what good are these for so many?” 

This isn't exegetical rocket science.

The topic that Our Lord has introduced is where can they buy enough food for the crowd, not how they can get people to share or how they can find somebody who has a little bit of food to share. The topic is buying food.

If you look at the Greek, the verb is agorazo, which means things like "attend market," "do business," "buy or sell," etc. It's a specifically commercial, marketplace term, not a more general one like "get" or "find." So the NAB gets it right with rendering it "buy."

The theme of buying is thus carried on in the conversation, with Philip and Andrew pointing out problems for the proposal.

First, Philip points out the huge expense of feeding the crowd–presumably because the disciples don't have that much money in the purse.

Andrew then carries the theme forward by pointing out a source where food can be bought–the little boy–but that the source doesn't have enough food for the crowd. (Incidentally, he may have started with more but have already sold the rest of what he had.)

It makes much more sense, given the context and the flow of the conversation, to see the little boy not as a local who happened to pack an extraordinarily large amount of food for him to eat at the day's event but as an enterprising young salesman who brought food to where he knew there would be a lot of people spending the day and he could sell it.

Like the kids who swarm over Israel's holy sites to this day trying to sell trinkets or snacks or bottled water to the pilgrims who have shown up for religious reasons.

Jesus' crowds were bound to attract such kids, and Andrew happened to spot one.

Presumably, then, before the miracle of the feeding the disciples paid the little boy for his five loaves and two fishes.

That's not a dead certainty. Of course, I'm sure that they didn't steal them from the little boy, and while it's possible that he was overcome by religious feeling and simply donated them (or decided not to charge once he saw them being multiplied), given that his interest in bringing them to the site was probably commercial, it's not unreasonable to infer that he was paid for them.

We're not told one way or the other, but given the clear buying and selling theme in the text, preachers ought not be rhapsodizing about the generosity of the little boy or how he was willing to share with others or how without his act of sharing the miracle might not have occurred.

If anything, the miracle might have had to start with another source of food if the little boy hadn't been paid for his wares.

Of course, the above doesn't amount to a proof. It could be that the little boy had brought a surprisingly large amount of food for himself and then, for unknown reasons, mentioned this to Andrew and then generously shared it with Jesus and the disciples.

But this isn't the way the text reads.

And it's just annoying when preachers get so wrapped up in a sickly sweet, Hallmark card spirituality that they go off rhapsodizing about human sharing and generosity in a way that flies in the face of the text.

The point here is that God did a miracle through Jesus, not that a little boy was generous.

Sheesh!

UPDATE: MORE FROM STEVE RAY.

“Jesus Family Tomb” Scholars Backtrack

TombI meant to blog about this last week (CHT to the reader who sent the link reminding me!), but some of the individuals connected with the "Jesus family tomb" nonsensamentary that the Dicovery Channel aired have been backtracking on their claims–or otherwise clarifying them in ways not supportive of the filmmakers’ thesis.

THE JERUSALEM POST HAS THE STORY.

EXCERPTS IN BLUE:

The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together.

That’s a significant alteration since–if you’ve got 600 tombs with names laying around–you’d expect there to be at least one random cluster with this group of names, and that’s assuming that the math is even right, which I have major questions about. Among the reasons are those pointed out by Frank Moore Cross:

In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film’s claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.

"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. – that is, variants of ‘Mary.’ So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying.

And then there’s this:

The paper also notes that DNA scientist Dr. Carney Matheson, who supervised DNA testing carried out for the film from the supposed Jesus and Mary Magdalene ossuaries, and who said in the documentary that "these two individuals, if they were unrelated, would most likely be husband and wife,"

Let me interrupt the excerpt to point out that this statement is TOTALLY LUDICROUS. If you’ve got a family tomb with 30 or more burial slots in it (ten ossuaries, each of which can hold the bones of 3 or more people) and you’ve got one lebelled "X son of Y" and another with the feminine name Z on it then it is COMPLETELY UNREASONABLE to infer from a DNA test that if they weren’t related that they are most likely husband and wife.

In a tomb containing multiple family members spanning several generations they could be any number of things: brother-in-law and sister-in-law OR nephew and non-biological aunt OR brother and adopted sister OR father and daughter-in-law OR grandfather and granddaughter-in-law OR great aunt and grand nephew–AND THAT’S ASSUMING THAT THEY’RE NOT RELATED BY *EITHER* THE MALE OR THE FEMALE LINE. If, on the other hand, you’ve only done a DNA test that shows that they don’t have a recent common *maternal* ancestor then it opens up even more possibilities of how they could be related (brother and step-sister, for example), so you’d better hurry quick to get it on the record that

[he] later said that "the only conclusions we made were that these two sets were not maternally related. To me, it sounds like absolutely nothing."

And then there’s this bit of dynamite:

Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene – one of the filmmakers’ critical arguments – issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.

Pfann has already argued that the controversial inscription does not read "Mariamne" at all.

How ’bout them apples?