Sources for the Pentateuch

I was looking for a summary, rather than narrative, account of the J, E, D, and P, sources. And on turning (where else?) to Wikipedia, I got the impression that the discussion in the EFM material might not be quite up to date. So here are the Wikipedia articles on each source. Enjoy!

        Jahwist (J) Source
        Elohist (E) Source
        Deuteronomist (D) Source
        Priestly (P) Source











































Linguistic contributions that we have received from Rome

The fact that modern English contains Latin, Norman-French, and Greek elements in addition to its base Germanic?















































The advent of cities causing a different awareness of time

This could well be true, but, as Wikipedia often says, it needs citations. Actually as I think of my life as a retired person, I sometimes have to think twice or three times about what day of the week it is.

Personally I think the invention of writing and of laws is much more important. Not to mention sanitary plumbing, which some of these early cultures were ssurprisingly good at.















































The Philistines came from Crete?

Well, maybe. Pretty conjectural, actually.















































Barbarians

A very important meditation on how on how words change their meaning.

Originally, a "babarian" was just someone whose language you couldn't understand. Someone whose talk sounded like "bar bar bar." In fact, a foreigner, with no pejorative overtones. It wasn't until much later, likely in Roman times, when Northern tribes outside the empire were seen as culturally less sophisticated, and were indeed very warlike, that the term "barbarian" began to acquire its modern connotation of "savage."












































Lex Talionis

A Latin term. Talio simply means retribution. More at Wikipedia.














































Crisis when Jesus didn't come back?

Well, in the nature of things the New Testament wouldn't directly mention such a crisis among early believers, would it?

But it's only reasonable to assume that there was such a crisis, as time passed, the people who had known Jesus (or even been contemporary with him), began to die off, and still he didn't come back. And he was expected (cf. Matthew 24:34.) It has been speculated that the earliest Christians' practical communism was partly a result of their belief that Jesus' return was imminent. Certainly the church was a very different organization two or three generations later.

As we know, many cults have predicted a date certain for the end of things - with sometimes disastrous consequences for their believers when nothing happened. Matthew 24:36 specifically rejects a date certain. A cynic might even wonder if Matthew 24:36 wasn't a shot fired in a controversy about the non-return.

I think the EFM authors may deprecate Dodd because he thinks of the Kingdom of God as a present rather than a future state.















































Failure to understand

I can't inagine how failing to understand each another might "bring us together," unless in some comic performance, at which we might all laugh.

And confusion of languages - worse, different understanding of the same word in what's supposed to be the same language, can be disastrous. A common language is all we've got. So - please excuse the rant - it upsets me when people who should know better redefine a word in common use to suit their own local purpose. One frequent example: truth. At best this is intellectual laziness. At worst, it is somthing much worse than that.













































Are rules really more important than time-sense?

I wonder if, more than a different perception of time, the big change brought by city life was, as the passage implies, a more defined approach to life's rules. Laws.









































Alternative endings to Mark's gospel

The EFM text doesn't address the problem of Mark's possibly truncated ending, and the attempts (with snakes) to fix it. But your New Oxford Annotated Bible has a good discussion.









































Disasters and our own faith

We might like to think (or might not like to think) about the kind of disaster that could put a strain on our own faith. A global environmental collapse, and still Jesus didn't come back? Some holocaust survivors want nothing to do with the idea of God, and who can blame them?









































Lucretius and the problem of God's omnipotence

Lucretius was a militant Epicurean, therefore an atheist. So he would be likely to relish the omnipotence problem. (A modern, if sophomoric version: could God make a piece of unbreakable glass?)

Epicureanism presented itself as a philosophy for the ordinary person who has no use for high-flying intellectual niceties. Hence the source, perhaps, of some of Lucretius's contempt. That said, the EFM writers do seem to have a bit of a down on him. Perhaps because he writes such viciously difficult Latin!









































True and false religious experiences

Deciding which is which may be, literally, the most important decision that one ever has to make.

If there's no esthetic sense that something is wrong about the experience, my only suggestion is fervent prayer. If I thought that God was prepared to lie to me, I'd be doing something else on Sunday afternoons. Also probably on Sunday mornings.


















































Women and the economic system

See also many of Randall's sermons!


















































ta logia

This is an unusual term, only found in koine and later Greek. It's the neuter plural of the adjective logios from the noun logos - word. So logia = "wordy things?" Perhaps not, though in later Greek the noun logios can mean "scholar." So perhaps "scholarly things," or "archives," or even possibly "oracles" isn't so far off the mark.
















































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"In order to fulfill"

If you think about it, there's a close logical connection between the ideas of "in order to" (purpose) and "so that" (result). Consider an English sentence such as, "This occurred so that the prophecy was fulfilled..." Is the primary emphasis here on purpose or result? It's not easy to tell. The two Greek words in question are hina (in order to) and hōs (so that).

In these cases Greek language and thought tended to favor result over purpose. So it's worth noting that Matthew 1:22 says of Jesus' birth that "all these things happened in order to fulfill (hina) the prophecy..." Definitely design not accident.
















































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"notorious as a harsh, cruel governor"

Get behind the sources, and you may well conclude that Pilate's reputation for harshness and cruelty isn't completely deserved. Not the best among Roman governors, but certainly not the worst. Also with an everlasting bad reputation for reasons known to all.
















































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"the proper status of the human creature"

I once knew an exceedingly lapsed man of the cloth who felt that this story showed Abraham failing a test, not passing one. When God told him to kill his son, he should have said, "I will do no such wicked thing." Then God would have said, "Congratulations, Abraham!" and they would have gone off to lunch. And all humanity with them.

It may be a mistake to impose this very contemporary idea on an ancient story, but I've thought about it over the years. And notice that Abraham doesn't push back against the destruction that God proposes, as he does in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah.


















































Religious circumcision

Possibly a sensitive subject to discuss. Here's Wikipedia.


















































What is Truth? Redefining and misusing words

It seems to me that Screwtape's Linguistic Arm of Hell is doing a bang-up job, confusing the meanings of words. Words are what we use to think with. A confused understanding of the meaning of a word makes it very difficult to think clearly about the whatever the word is about. Yes, I've ranted about this before, but it's worth another mention. Any time you see the word truth inside quotation marks, assume until proven otherwise that the writer is too lazy to find the right word, and picks on one that will sort of do.

Firmly I believe and truly (sorry) that 1 = true, 0 = false. There's no such thing as "true for me." Instead of saying. "It's true for me" you need to say something like, "I find it interesting that..." or "It's relevant to my concerns that...."

And notice that I've used the adjective true, not the noun truth. The fallacy of reification is one of the great curses on discourse in English. Just because you can make an abstract noun out of an adjective doesn't mean that there's anything about the noun that's worth studying. Perhaps that's what Pilate (no doubt a philosophically educated Roman) meant by "What is truth?"









































Chrestus

That Suetonius was referring to Jesus is no more than a 50-50 chance. He lived approximately 69 - 122 AD, so he should have been somewhat familiar with Christianity, enough to know whether the riots involved Christians or not. "Chrestus" is Greek for "good" or "worthy," and might have been anyone's name.












































The Lot Motif

If Wagner has written an opera cycle about Abraham, what do you think he might have called a musical theme which appeared every time you were supposed to think of Lot?










































Pliny, Trajan, and the Christians

Pliny was actually the governor of Bithynia, a good administrator evidently sent out by Trajan to take care of a problem. We have a small volume of his correspondence with the emperor. He asks for advice, receives Trajan's answers, and seems not inclined to decide much on his own initiative. Indeed Trajan sometimes politely says "this is really something that you could decide for yourself."

The exchange of letters about Christianity is famous, and may have been the basis of later precedent in Roman law.

This moderate emperor's policy is, in effect, "Don't ask, don't tell." But note that being a Christian was beyond doubt a capital offense, for reasons which we could discuss.










































Textual criticism

Some people take textual criticism of the New Testament very seriously indeed. A good introduction is Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus.