Notes – Jimmy Akin

Internal Struggles Common to All

There is a famous (among philosphers) passage in Plato where there is a particularly good illustration of the kind of struggles we often fight with ourselves–the same kind we read about in the New Testament in passages like “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” and St. Paul’s description of his internal struggles in Romans 7:13-25.

I wanted to keep track of the passage in Plato for use in the future, because it shows that these struggles are common to all humans, even the pagan Greeks.

I hadn’t read it since grad school, so I looked it up where it is.

It’s found in Book 4 of The Republic, where Socrates is talking with Glaucon, where we read:

SOCRATES: Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying [to his eyes], “Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”

GLAUCON: I have heard the story myself, he said.

SOCRATES: The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things [SOURCE].

You can see why this is such a vivid illustration–both wanting and not wanting to look at dead bodies.

Creepy!

But exactly the kind of thing that we all find ourselves faced with on occasion.

When was Judas replaced?

I’ve been doing some work on biblical chronology–the study of precisely when in history various events recorded in the Bible took place–and I thought of something that I haven’t seen pointed out before.

In Acts 1, Peter prompts the Eleven to replace Judas Iscariot, and they do, with Matthias being selected to take his place.

When would this have occurred?

It’s bracketed in a very small window of time between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost.

The election of a new apostle would presuppose the presence of the Eleven, and the text indicates that those actually present included the full “hundred and twenty” (v. 15), indicating a major gathering of the full, embryonic Christian community.

This could only have occurred on the first Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) or on the first Lord’s Day (Sunday) following Ascension Thursday.

When would those days have been?

Based on previous chronological work I’ve done, I’ve determined that the most likely date for the Crucifixion is the traditional one: April 3, A.D. 33.

I don’t say that just because I’m a fan of tradition (though I am), but because when you sort through the mountain of data that pertains to the issue, that’s the date that emerges as the most probable.

Given that, Easter Sunday would be April 5th, and Ascension Thursday would be May 14.

Pentecost, on the Jewish way of reckoning it (seven weeks after Passover, not seven weeks after Easter Sunday), would have been Friday, May 22.

That gives us this schedule of days:

Thurs., May 14 (Ascension)
Fri., May 15
Sat., May 16
Sun., May 17
Mon., May 18
Tues., May 19
Wed., May 20
Thurs., May 21
Fri., May 22 (Pentecost)

So there you have it: Matthias was most likely chosen to be Judas’s successor on Saturday, May 16 or Sunday, May 17, A.D. 33.

A new kind of blog post for a new year?

Over the past year or so, I’ve being doing a particular type of blog post that tends to be longer, exclusively faith-based, and coordinated either with the liturgical year or the news.

It’s been a very successful effort!

Unfortunately, it’s been mostly done at my Register blog, with comparatively little totally fresh content here at JimmyAkin.com.

The fact is that I don’t have time to compose those longer, detailed posts both for the Register and for other outlets.

That means that JimmyAkin.com has largely been linking to content that I’ve been posting in its entirety elsewhere.

I’ve felt bad about that.

There are people who visit and subscribe to JimmyAkin.com despite that situation. In fact, there are over 1,000 people who have signed up to get email updates from the blog, but I’d like to serve them and others even better by having more exclusive content here that people can read without having to click through to another site.

But there’s still that lack of time problem.

So here’s what I’ve found myself thinking: I periodically have thoughts, make discoveries, etc., that are small enough I can write them down quickly, that wouldn’t take up one of the long-form blog posts.

Often, they are ideas or notes that I mean to incorporate into some later work (a blog post, a book, etc.) and I don’t want to lose track of them.

I’ve thought about writing them in a big Word document, but that would be messy, particularly with all these thoughts on different subjects in one file.
I thought about keeping a bunch of different files, but that’s awkward.
I thought about putting them on Facebook, but Facebook’s search features are terrible and it would be hard to find them later.

Finally, I thought, “I should just create a blog for these.” That way I’d have a searchable record of them, with the individual thoughts/discoveries as discreet items.

Then I thought: “You already have a blog, stupid. . . . And it needs more attention!”

So here’s what I’m going to do: Even though I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I’m going to experiment with doing short posts that capture interesting things I don’t want to lose track of.

I hope you’ll find them interesting, too!

Many (most?) of them will be religious. Some may not be.

The links to my other work in the blogosphere will also continue, so these new posts will be in addition to, not a replacement of, the kind of postings I’ve been doing this year.

Here we go!

P.S. Happy New Year, everyone!