Category: +Religion

My parish has been having visiting priests recently, and two of them have had the unfortunate habit of addressing the congregation by saying, “My sisters and brothers . . . “

To my mind, this is just sad.

It comes off something like a parent being overly chummy with the young ‘uns by trying (and failing) to use the latest teen-lingo and sounding out of touch instead.

Let’s talk about the alternatives.

1) “Brethren” – This has been the standard way of addressing mix-gender religious congregations in English for the last several million years.

It sounds formal, but natural—which is what you want. Something elevated in tone in keeping with the religious nature of the gathering, but not something that’s going to pop out to the listener as an unnatural or forced expression, which would cause the listener to pop out of the worship experience and start thinking about how you are using language rather than what you are using language to say.

While “brethren” did originally mean “brothers” (not like that’s a bad thing), the term is no longer in colloquial use and people don’t parse it to mean “brothers.” They know without having to stop to think about it that everybody is included.

2) “Brothers” – This is the contemporary equivalent of “brethren.” It sounds less formal, but the term is more likely to be taken as exclusive of women. In some Christian churches they use this word without any problem, but in the contemporary Catholic parish there is likely to be enough political correctness to make an alternative desirable.

3) “My brothers and sisters” – This is the common alternative that gets used. It even gets used by the pope. Given the gender-sensitivities that exist these days, I can deal with this one, although it’s a shame that people have given up so quickly on the virtually ideal term “brethren.”

The one place I absolutely hate “my brothers and sisters,” though, is in Scripture readings. I’m sorry, but Greek had a way to say “sisters,” and St. Paul could have effortlessly written his epistles saying “adelphoi kai adelphai” if he wanted to. To translate “adelphoi” as “brothers and sisters” is inaccurate. Further, it allows political correctness to intrude upon and “correct” the word of God.

Any of these, though, are preferable to “my sisters and brothers.”

Why?

Because communities use conventional modes of expression for a reason: They let people to focus on meaning rather than having to pause to ponder the mode of expression. Further, using the community’s norms of speech signals an acceptance of the community’s values and beliefs.

To take phrase like “brothers and sisters” and deliberately invert it signals a rejection, on some level, of the community’s traditional way of handling gender issues.

No doubt priests who do this are trying to show sensitivity and inclusiveness to women, but what they actually do tickle the ears of certain people (of both genders) while sending an “I reject your values” message to everybody else (of both genders).

They also force worshippers to pop out of the worship experience and focus on the words being used rather than the message being conveyed. And they needlessly intrude gender politics on the act of worship.

That’s just sad.

Previously in Hello World, I discussed Pope Benedict’s homily in which he pointed out that the last 200 years has seen a great deal of theological and biblical scholarship that, while it has uncovered interesting things, fundamentally misses the point.

Much of this scholarship has been devoted to a skeptical reading of the Scriptures with an intent to discredit them—for example, by arguing that they were written long after the events they record and therefore are unreliable.

Both the books of the Old Testament and the New Testament were assigned late dates to facilitate this claim, but discoveries in the last century have pushed the dates earlier than the skeptics proposed, back toward more traditional dates.

Now comes a story at Fox News and Haaretz concerning a small inscription said to overturn a key plank in the late dating of the Old Testament.

Haaretz reports:

“Did the writing of the Bible begin as far back as the 10th century B.C.E., during the time of King David? That is four centuries earlier than Biblical scholars currently believe – but an inscription recently deciphered by a scholar at Haifa University indicates that for at least some books of the Bible, the answer may be yes. . . .

“[Prof. Gershon] Galil said this discovery disproves the current theory, which holds that the Bible could not have been written before the 6th century B.C.E., because Hebrew writing did not exist until then.

“Moreover, he added, the inscription was found in what was then a minor, outlying community – so if scribes existed even there, Hebrew writing was probably sufficiently well developed to handle a complex text like the Bible.”

So now religious conservatives can take comfort that archaeology has once again thwarted the foes of Scripture.

Not exactly.

Something very bizarre is going on with this story. The first sentences are every bit as problematic as a piece opening: “Is the Pope Catholic? Current scholars believe he is the head of the Baptist church, but new evidence points in a Catholic direction.”

Scholarly consensus, even among liberal scholars, does not hold that “the writing of the Bible beg[a]n” in the sixth century B.C. Many may hold that certain books did not reach their present form until that time, or that particular books were not written until then, but the consensus is not that nothing had been written before then.

Much less is it claimed that the Bible couldn’t have been written prior to that time because of the supposed non-existence of Hebrew writing. The Ancient Near East had lots of writing systems, and sometimes people from one culture borrowed the writing system of another. In fact, that’s how the Hebrew alphabet arose.

The discovery of a Hebrew inscription from the tenth century B.C. also isn’t revolutionary, because we already have Hebrew writing from that period, such as the Gezer Calendar.

Either the newspapers are getting it wrong or Prof. Galil is miscommunicating or—since we’re dealing with an ink on clay inscription—there might be archaeological fraud in play.

This is a non-news story, either on grounds of it being hopelessly garbled or on grounds that we already knew of tenth century Hebrew writing.

FOX VERSION.

HAARETZ VERSION.