Its hard (but a pure joy, sure) raising twins. The shift from REM sleep to consecutive naps isn’t easy.  But its worth it.

A long-standing practice I’ve tried to uphold is the office of daily prayer, or some form of daily prayer, scripture reading (often with reading from our denomination’s book of confessions (pdf)) and silent meditation. For the past six years or so I’ve used the Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer as guidance, and followed the two year Daily Lectionary cycle. I fail to do it daily, but most often I hit four or five times a week. Its been a real gift in the midst of a hectic life, and even more so now with newborns.

Today’s evening Psalm is a wonderful expression of thanksgiving to God for God’s good gifts. I offer it today from paraphrased The Message version:

Psalm 138:1-8 (The Message)

A David Psalm

1-3 Thank you! Everything in me says “Thank you!”

Angels listen as I sing my thanks.
I kneel in worship facing your holy temple
and say it again: “Thank you!”
Thank you for your love,
thank you for your faithfulness;
Most holy is your name,
most holy is your Word.
The moment I called out, you stepped in;
you made my life large with strength.

4-6 When they hear what you have to say, God,
all earth’s kings will say “Thank you.”
They’ll sing of what you’ve done:
“How great the glory of God!”
And here’s why: God, high above, sees far below;
no matter the distance, he knows everything about us.

7-8 When I walk into the thick of trouble,
keep me alive in the angry turmoil.
With one hand
strike my foes,
With your other hand
save me.
Finish what you started in me, God.
Your love is eternal—don’t quit on me now.

On the heels of my last post, I see that Neil has found out that there is a liberty Bible (CEV), complete with a bold American flag and the Statue of Liberty on its cover. Its ghastly.

Boy, does this feel like it hits home:

(Bible Duel by Dave Walker at CartoonChurch.com, The Cartoon Blog, used under the conditions posted here.)

Does anyone think that this is what the bible is intended to be about? I sure don’t.

Kellen has a delightfully thoughtful post over at fear & trembling about the recent Gospel of Judas phenomenon. There he offers some explanation over the recent news, or fuss, about this early text:

So why all the fuss over the document?

One: I have my suspicions about a movie that’s coming out this summer.  Timing is everything.

Two: What did your mother always tell you?  Read the fine print.

Buried deep within the National Geographic’s FAQ section on their website for this “new” Gospel is the answer to a question about how the text came into the hands of those who now possess it. Again, with the way the NYT headlined it (“‘Gospel of Judas’ Surfaces After 1,700 Years”), you’d think that some dude in Egypt stumped his toe on it just last week.  So when was it discovered?

“The Gospel of Judas was first discovered more than 30 years ago in Egypt.”

That’s right folks.  At least thirty years ago.  Not yesterday.  Not five years ago.  Thirty years ago.  The NYT doesn’t report this, of course, until the SECOND page of the article: “Discovered in the 1970′s in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States.”

…

Just seems like an all-too-well timed publicity stunt to me.

Then today, the most recent installment of Sightings came into my inbox, with the commentary of Margaret M. Mitchell, an erstwhile NT professor of mine at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Mitchell links the recent “fuss” to a need to market some new religious news at Easter. They do this around Christmas too, FWIW. Look for it in your Newsweek, US News, and TIME editions around the first week of December.

As with Marty’s comments last time, these seem worthwhile to post in full. Look below the fold for the rest. Enjoy…

What Is Truth in Recent Claims about Christian Origins?

– Margaret M. Mitchell

Before noon last Friday, April 7, we were presented with a trinity of mass media stories about ancient Christianity: a “lost gospel” of Judas appeared on the front page of the New York Times; a British court decided Dan Brown did not plagiarize from Baigent and Leigh’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail; and James Tabor appeared on “Good Morning America” to reveal that he may have new information about the family tomb of Jesus.  Yes, it is the run up to Easter, 2006.

When I gave my lecture on “The Historical Jesus: What Do We Know and Why Do We Care?” to my Intro to New Testament class in early March, I warned the students that, with the ironic regularity of the liturgical calendar, the major newsweeklies would somehow find a way to put “Who Was Jesus? — New Revelations” on the cover.  And I said that as far as I knew, there was nothing new since last year, or the year before.

Despite the fury of these recent disclosures, I still think I was right.

The “Gospel of Judas” is a third- or fourth-century Coptic version of a second-century Greek text that apparently presumes and draws upon the Synoptic Gospels and probably John — along with considerable religious imagination — to reframe Judas as an intermediary of secret truths.  The work is most interesting for the study of Gnostic communities in Egypt in the second through fourth centuries, and for that it constitutes a real find for scholarship.  Indeed, it is always a banner day when I get to cross one more book off the list of “Lost Books of Early Christian Literature” in my copy of Edgar J. Goodspeed’s A History of Early Christian Literature.  This newly published codex does seem to be the genuine article to which Irenaeus was referring in his adversus haereses 1.31 (ca. 180).  (See the marvelous website providing images, Coptic transcription, and English translation.)But it does not give us new historical information about the actual events ca. 30 CE, when Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Roman order. The “Gospel of Judas” (which is not “The Gospel According to Judas”), like another Gnostic gospel, the “Dialogue of the Savior,” shows Judas in a neutral or even positive light as a conversation partner of Jesus.  The focus in the new text on Judas can be seen as part of a continuation of early Christian rewritings of the Judas story, which we can sight even within the canonical gospels themselves, for instance, when Matthew adds scriptural embellishment to Mark’s story of Judas’ receipt of payment for handing over Jesus.

But the fresh material in the new Gnostic gospel is not narrated actions, but primarily cosmological speculations in dialogue form. The sensational emphasis on Judas shifting from “betrayer” to “friend” in the recent disclosures appears disproportionate, based as it is on one ambiguous line, the context of which cannot be fully reconstructed, because the papyrus is damaged. Gnostic texts like this revel in the “secret” “special” teachings of the Savior, made known only to an elite few who in turn repeat them to only an elite few.  They are based on a theology that is a kind of intentional divine conspiracy theory (indeed — pssst — even the creator God of the Old Testament is not really God!).

Dan Brown’s book is a novel.  Now we know.  (Haven’t we always known?)  Like the author of the Gospel of Judas, he drew upon earlier sources (the book by Baigent and Leigh, which Brown even acknowledges with his clever anagram of their names in his protagonist, Leigh Teabing), but also rewrote them with an artistry that has captured many.  Why?  Probably because he knew even better than they did how to hitch a mix of historical facts and fictions to a conspiracy theory engine, and he found in the Vatican his perfect embodiment of human malevolence.

James Tabor, in excerpts from his forthcoming book, The Jesus Dynasty, in breathless prose brings the reader along into two first-century Jerusalemite family tombs, including such “you had to be there” tales as late-night discoveries of “shroud” material in a looted tomb, and mini-cams lowered into excavations of a tomb complex now encased below a modern apartment building.  He pronounces the “James Ossuary” authentic (disputing the tests done by the Israeli Antiquities Authority) and passionately calls for DNA testing of bone fragments to see if the family line of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and James can be recovered (which the IAA refused to do).

But after this “Indiana Jones meets Michael Crichton” prelude, we find the following admission: “The gripping story of the Jesus dynasty that follows in no way depends on the authenticity of the James Ossuary inscription, nor whether either of these two tombs was indeed the Jesus family tomb .Š  There is something about a tomb of this type, with the ossuaries, preserved bones, and the inscribed names so familiar to us after two thousand years, that brings chills up the spine as we try to imagine and connect with the past.  And what is most exciting is that we never know what new evidence might emerge at any point to allow us to put more pieces of our story together” (my emphasis).Here Prof. Tabor has given honest expression to precisely the hermeneutical underpinnings of the Easter media frenzy: “connection with the past” should be tactile, spine-tingling, and will inevitably — while offering some previously lost artifact (preferably lost through some combination of malevolent “orthodoxy” and criminality) — leave the audience on the edge of its seat, awaiting the next piece of “new evidence.”  There’s always next year.

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate poses to Jesus in John 18:38.  The popular presentation of these three events is based upon a paradoxical combination of historical positivism and Gnosticism.  The former is the assumption that the real “truth” about Jesus is to be locked down by some newly discovered “data” about Jesus, whether dialogues with Judas, pillow-talk with Mary Magdalene, or his DNA.  The latter is founded on the belief that cosmic truths (not historical ones!) are what matter, and they can only be found through mediated revelation to an elite few (who read the right books), for they are deliberately occluded from all the rest.  Ironically, what both hold in common is a deep suspicion of the reliability of the sources of religious knowledge upon which the Easter season itself rests — scripture, tradition, and liturgy.

A clandestine codex, a court case, and a cemetery raid.  Easter, 2006.

Margaret M. Mitchell is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and coeditor (with Frances Young) of The Cambridge
History of Christianity, vol. 1: Origins to Constantine.

Hmm. Anyone know where one could go to substantiate this quote in a Washington Post article on Immigration?

“We think our national boundaries should be respected. That’s a biblical principle also,” said Christian Coalition lobbyist Jim Backlin.

I’m not entirely sure myself, except the ‘law and order’ render unto Caesar sections, or maybe Romans 13.

Regardless, it is interesting how this is splintering the evangelical part of the Republican base. More from this article:

Many larger groups, such as James C. Dobson’s Colorado-based Focus on the Family, have not taken a stand on the issue. Rodriguez, of the Hispanic Christian conference, said his group wants to know why.

“We need to know from white evangelical leaders why did they not support comprehensive immigration reform, why they came down in favor exclusively of enforcement, without any mention of the compassionate side, without any mention of the Christian moral imperatives,” he said.

“So down the road, when the white evangelical community calls us and says, ‘We want to partner with you on marriage, we want to partner on family issues,’ my first question will be: ‘Where were you when 12 million of our brothers and sisters were about to be deported and 12 million
families disenfranchised?’ “

Keep an eye on this… Our esteemed elected representatives are now claiming a “Breakthrough” deal. I’ll believe it when I see it, but I want to learn more about it first…

Kellen cogitates about the recent Ehrman media blitz. Ehrman is the NT scholar who went from Conservative Believer to Agnostic through his study of scripture. (He was on the Daily Show recently. I have him on the DVR but havn’t been able to see it yet…)

In the comments, Plax ends up where I end up, and summarizes nicely what I think is the core of the Reformed tradition:

The Bible is a compilation of books written by human beings. It speaks of God as he revealed himself in the person Jesus Christ, a Jew from Nazareth. Jesus is the revelation of which you and I speak. The Bible is the witness to the revelation.

We don’t worship a book. We worship God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Compare the PCUSA Confession of 1967, in the Book of Confessions (9.27, 9.29):

The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel. …

The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God’s work of reconcilation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect the views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture.

Ehrman is symptomatic of many who come from a rigid view of scripture and then, when digging down into it, come away with nothing but tatters. It doesn’t have to be that way….

…millinerd offers some interesting comments too.

…and be sure to read through Ben Witherington’s post “Misanalyzing Text Criticsm,” which is helpful, though just because someone has an ax to grind doesn’t for that reason make them wrong (but it is important to think about). (hat tip Kruse).