Category: Bible
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
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
I 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?
Discovery Moves To Bury Tomb
Well, the Discovery Channel, seems to be waking up to the blunder it made in getting behind James Cameron’s titanic fiasco about Jesus’ family tomb.
EXCERPTS:
Discovery Channel’s controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.
Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn’t tout its big
ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that
harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat
of "Tomb.""This is not one where you necessarily beat the
drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of
corporate communications at Discovery. "It’s not necessarily about
making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office
building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more
important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights."Although Mr. Leavy said the network stands by the documentary "100
percent," the company took several unusual steps in the wake of the
controversy that could be seen as distancing itself from the content.Last
week, Discovery abruptly scheduled a panel debate to air after the
documentary, moderated by Discovery newsman Ted Koppel. Discovery’s
announcement of the panel emphasized that Mr. Koppel "has no connection
to the production of ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’" and that "the panel will
explore the filmmakers’ profound assertions and challenge their
assumptions and suggested conclusions."When the panel discussion aired, guests criticized the documentary as "archaeo-porn" that played fast and loose with the facts.
The
day after the March 4 airing, Discovery yanked a planned repeat of
"Tomb" from its more hard-news-branded Discovery Times Channel.When
the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers –
Discovery’s largest audience since September 2005 – the network
declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be
standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season
premiere of Discovery Channel’s "Future Weapons," for instance, earned
a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network
representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury
"Tomb."
The Discovery official issues a lot of spin trying to save face for the network, and they still haven’t done all they need to to distance themselves from this stinkburger, but the overall message is clear: They screwed up and they know it. Now they’re trying to avoid getting more egg on their collective face.
OH, AND I WONDER IF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.
They just got a new CEO two months ago, and the Jesus tomb thing was certainly in motion before then. If his new broom is sweeping clean, some of the execs who signed off on Cameron’s nonsense may want not to be swept away along with it.
Meanwhile . . .
Tomb Of Jesus Nonsense
Many people on the Internet are ably demolishing James Cameron’s opportunistic documentary regarding his ostensible discovery of Jesus’ tomb.
There’s so much material out there that it’s difficult to process it all (at least in the time I have available), but I said that I’d offer some thoughts of my own on the subject, and so I’ll do so. I’ll also provide links to work being done by others.
Let’s start with some principles that should be widely agreed upon, even by those who do not believe in the Resurrection.
1) Jesus was a Galilean.
2) Jesus’ family was poor (as illustrated by the kind of offering they gave at the Temple at Jesus’ birth).
3) Jesus was crucified by the Romans.
4) There were significant tensions between the early Christian community and the Jewish community (as illustrated by the executions of St. Stephen and St. James the Just and by St. Paul’s own admitted persecution of the Church).
5) Early Christians made a big deal out of the claimed Resurrection of Christ.
6) In a first century Jewish context, that would mean that his tomb was empty.
7) Early Christians also made a big deal about the claimed Ascension of Christ.
8) Early Christians made a big deal about the Church as the mystical/metaphorical Bride of Christ.
9) Nothing remotely like the story envisioned by James Cameron and his colleagues is recorded in early Christian or Jewish or pagan literature about the early Church.
If we accept these premises, how likely is it that Jesus had a wife and a son and was buried in a middle class tomb in Jerusalem with multiple other family members spanning several generations?
Not very.
Let’s watch the dominos fall:
The first domino to go over is the fact that Jesus was a Galilean. He was Jesus of Nazareth. His family’s home was in the north, in Galilee. Why would they have a family tomb in Jerusalem? An individual might be buried there if he happened to die there (as with Jesus being [temporarily] interred in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb or when James the Just was martyred in Jerusalem). That would be expected since they buried people the same day, and there wouldn’t be time to get a body down to Galilee. But the family’s tomb would be in Galilee, since that’s where most members of the family would die.So it’s implausible to begin with that Jesus’ family would have a tomb in Jerusalem.
Now the second domino falls: They were dirt poor. They just didn’t have money. The lower-class status of the family is attested to both inside and outside of Scripture (including later records about kinsmen who demonstrated that they had never been anything other than working men by displaying the callouses on their hands). So how could they afford a middle or upper-middle class tomb even if they had a tomb in Jerusalem?
In particular, why would they build an ornate one? See the picture at the top of this post? Notice the geometric designs above the door of the tomb? That’s ornamentation, and it takes money to have rock carving like that done. Again, this isn’t the kind of tomb poor people would have.
The ornamentation also calls attention to the tomb, causing dominos three through six to keel over. The early Christian community and its claims about a Resurrected Messiah were very annoying to the local non-Christian communities, both Jewish and Roman. To non-Christian Jews, the Christian message was a betrayal of the faith as they understood it. It was heresy. It was something to be stamped out.
To the Romans, and increasingly with time, the Christian community was also troublesome. Partly it was troublesome because it stirred up contention within the Jewish community (which itself was headache enough for the Romans at the time). Partly it was troublesome because it came to be perceived as a treasonous group that did not honor the state religion nor form part of the tolerated religion of Judaism. And if you buy the theories common in liberal critical circles that the authors of the New Testament tried to shift the blame for Jesus’ death from Roman leaders to Jewish leaders then there’s an extra reason for the Romans to be annoyed with the early Christian community. Even if you don’t (as I don’t) buy the idea of blame transferrence, put yourself in the position of a Roman governor and ask: "Do I really want a local cult worshipping as a god a man who we Romans put to death?" For the Romans too, there was motive to undermine Christian claims.
So when Christians are running around saying that Jesus’ tomb is empty and that he’s been raised from the dead and that this only proves that he’s the Son of God, if you’re a non-Christian Roman or Jew then you’re going to have a powerful incentive to say, "Wait a minute! Jesus’ tomb is RIGHT OVER THERE in what will become the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem! And look, his bones are right here in this ossuary conveniently labeled ‘Jesus son of Joseph’ in this conveniently-ornamented-and-thus-advertised tomb that the rest of his family is using!"
Matthew 28:11-15 is also noteworthy in this regard:
[S]ome of the guard [over Jesus’ tomb] went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place.And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sum of money to the soldiers and said, "Tell people, `His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.
To the ears of any sensitive reader, but especially to an apologist, the nature of this passage is immediately apparent: It’s counter-apologetics. Matthew is pre-emptively doing apologetics against a claim that was current among non-Christian Jews in his day. It doesn’t matter if you believe that Matthew was right, or even if you believe that Matthew was Matthew (rather than a "Matthean community"). What’s happening here is that the leading non-Christian explanation for the empty tomb is being debunked.
As an apologist for the Christian position–like Matthew–you don’t want to raise alternatives to the Christian explanation in the reader’s mind if you don’t have to. Thus you don’t raise the idea of Jesus’ disciples stealing his body unless you’ve got a real, live objection out there that you need to offer a counter-explanation for (i.e., the chief priests bribed the soldiers to say this). You don’t even want the reader’s mind moving in that direction if you can avoid it.
So the fact that Matthew (or the "Matthean community") takes the trouble to raise and then debunk the idea of the disciples stealing the body shows that this was the leading explanation in the non-Christian Jewish community of why the tomb was empty. (And why Matthew–rather than Mark or Luke or John–deals with this, since Matthew’s gospel was most clearly written for a Jewish audience: This was the audience in which this explanation was common.)
But there would be no reason to concoct this explanation if Jesus’ bones were, in fact, lying in a clearly labelled ossuary in a publicly marked tomb that was in multigenerational use by members of his family in Jerusalem. If you’ve got the body then you don’t need to make up the story about his disciples stealing it.
Domino seven–the early Christian preaching of the Ascension–also tips over against James Cameron’s case. It provides the Christian explanation for where Jesus’ body is: It ain’t on earth! It’s up in heaven! He’s been exalted to the right hand of God in accord with his status as Messiah and Son of God. So if you’ve got that oh-so-conveniently-identifiable tomb right there in Jerusalem, why don’t you use this to dethrone the Ascension claim by pointing out (in excellent Latin if you’re a Roman) Habeas corpus!–"That you have the body!" Right there! In that ossuary!
And then there’s domino #8: The Church as the Bride of Christ. This image would never have arisen if there was a Mrs. Jesus living right there in Jerusalem. Look at what happened in other religions where the founder was married. Do we know about their wives? Well, let’s see . . . Moses was married to Tsipporah and then later to an Ethiopian woman. Muhammad was married to Khadijah and then later to Aisha and Sawda and Zaynab and . . . well, let’s just say that he was very enthusiastic about marrying women. Joseph Smith Jr. was married to Emma Hale and Lucinda Pendleton and Louisa Beaman and . . . uh . . . let’s just say he was enthusiastic about marrying women, too.
We know about these women because they were honored figures as wives of The Founder, and if Jesus had a wife then (a) we would know about it and (b) the whole Church-as-the-Bride-of-Christ metaphor would never have come into existence.
And then there’s the fruit of marriage: offspring.
Now, Dan Brown wants to sneak a forgotten daughter of Jesus by us, but we tend to know about even the daughters of religious founders. Muhammad’s daughter Fatima comes to mind.
It would be much harder to sneak a forgotten son by the eyes of history. For example, Moses had Gershom and Joseph Smith Jr. had Joseph Smith III.
It’s not just hard to sneak sons past because patriarchal cultures focus more on sons, it’s also because of this: In traditional societies, the son is looked on as the father’s natural successor.
The son may not end up as successor, but we still tend to know about sons because of their role as potential successors. If a son dies before he can assume office, it’s viewed as a great blow to the community because it destabilizes the leadership and triggers a struggle for succession. That struggle gets recorded. Or, if the son doesn’t die, a succession struggle may break out anyway, and it, too, gets recorded. Thus when Joseph Smith Jr. was killed after shooting at the people who had come to lynch him (no passive martyr he), there was a succession struggle in the early Mormon community after which Joseph Smith III ended up out of power (later forming the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ) while Brigham Young ended up in charge of the main Mormon establishment.
And we know about this because succession struggles are the things history is made of and so they get recorded.
So if Jesus had a son named Judah (or anything else), we’d know about it. We know a lot about the politics of the early Church, and we’d certainly know about a succession fight involving the son of Jesus. We’d have all the arguments of the winning side about why their side was right and the son of Jesus was not his legitimate successor.
This is especially the case when you realize that Jesus’ surviving male family members were active in the leadership of the Church, like James the Just, who became bishop of Jerusalem. But it was his "brothers" who played these leadership roles, not his son.
Thus the ninth domino falls: The fact that nothing like Cameron’s version was recorded by anybody–including those hostile to the Church who would want to discredit it–underscores the utter implausibility of the whole idea.
Then there are the specific arguments brought forth by Cameron and his crew in favor of their hypothesis, but those have been ably rebutted by others.
AND HERE.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed the last!)