tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8596147005306852072024-03-12T21:05:49.374-07:00Liberal ArtistryA blog dedicated to reading from and responding to Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World series as well as writing about issues related to education and literacy.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.comBlogger89125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-85159902907307546572009-12-31T15:18:00.000-08:002009-12-31T15:43:06.126-08:00Great Books: Augustine's Confessions Books 1-8 (Part 4)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zCcoCy-I/AAAAAAAAAco/1z2dUKNshO0/s1600-h/Augustinelast_Simone_Martini.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 182px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421545643560848354" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zCcoCy-I/AAAAAAAAAco/1z2dUKNshO0/s320/Augustinelast_Simone_Martini.jpg" /></a>Augustine spends very little time in Rome as he is also disheartened by the lackluster dedication of the students he had come to teach. However, his ambition for his career as a teacher of literature and rhetoric and his continued love for his concubine were to be major obstacles to his ultimate conversion to the Christian faith. During his time in Rome he meets Ambrose who was a major Christian player in Milan. It would ultimately be Ambrose who baptizes Augustine in Christ's name. As mentioned in our last segment, Augustine had begun to move away from the Manicheans' philosophy and yet used their connections to better his career. In 384, and entirely due to these very same connections, he won a highly prestigious position in Milan as the professor of rhetoric for the imperial court.<br /><br />He was joined in Milan by his mother who continued to pressure him into a conversion to the Christian faith. But, unable to release his lustful desires and his need for female companionship, he sends his long-loved concubine back to Carthage (Augustine's son would remain with him) and allows his mother to arrange an appropriate Christian marriage to a girl of thirteen years. He would have to wait two whole years until the marriage could be official so he takes yet another concubine instead during this waiting period. It is interesting to note again that Augustine speaks of very few people with any kind of love outside his mother and his newly growing group of Christian fellows yet he speaks always of his first concubine with respect and sincere devotion. But, she is not important enough to ever be named, perhaps because Augustine feels such intense shame over what he perceives to be only lustful desires.<br /><br />Augustine's conversion is full of dramatic theatre and overwhelming physical machinations. Book VIII deals solely with his conversion and what Augustine learns about the Great Idea of Will. Separating himself further and further away from Manichees who viewed all soulful creatures as having two conflicting wills, one based in evil and the other based in good, Augustine finds himself staring at the Truth of which he had so long sought.<br /><br /><em>For there is no means whatsoever by which corruption can injure our God, whether by an act of will, by necessity, or by chance. This is because he is God and what he wills is good and he is himself that same good: whereas to be corrupted is not good. And you are never compelled, my God, to do or suffer anything against your will, because your will is not greater than your own power. It would be greater only if you were greater than yourself, for the will and power of God are God himself.</em> (VII, 4)<br /><br />Yet still, Augustine suffers immensely within himself because despite this Truth he had finally come to fully believe, he could not will himself to make a final and full conversion as he saw it which was to completely turn away from the seductions of the material world. In many ways, the language Augustine uses about himself tell the story of an addict whose will is perverse and who "was now its reluctant victim rather than its willing tool." Augustine states that, "For the rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its will, yet deservedly, because it fell in the habit of its own accord." (VIII, 5) Augustine becomes, "a house divided against itself" (VIII, 8) whose wants and desires can no longer be placed before the Truth for which his soul craves.<br /><br />Augustine and his friend Alypius are visited by an old friend named Ponticianus from Africa whose spiritual father was also the Christian monk Ambrose. Ponticianus was quite surprised to find Paul's Epistles to the Romans sitting atop a table in Augustine's home and begins in earnest to share with Augustine and his friend the story of his own (almost) conversion. He begins to recount the story of the illiterate Egyptian monk Antony who entered into a Christian church, heard a passage of scripture and took it to be words spoken only for him. These words led Antony to lead a strict ascetic life in the deserts of Egypt. But, it was not only the story of Antony that lead to Augustine's final, excruciating dark night of the soul, but the story of Ponticianus' own experience when he had heard the story of this famed monk the first time for himself. Ponticianus was still a member of the Emperor's royal guard and he had witnessed two of his friends readily and instantly giving up their lives in service to the Emperor in order to follow the words of Christ. These men left the material world and ventured into lives dedicated solely to the pursuit of Truth in the name of Christ. Ponticianus himself could not take that leap, despite his joy for his friends and his heart's desire to do so.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zNZ8H8dI/AAAAAAAAAcw/kxICGiGoGSQ/s1600-h/StAnthony.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 162px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421545831818326482" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zNZ8H8dI/AAAAAAAAAcw/kxICGiGoGSQ/s320/StAnthony.jpg" /></a><br /><br />Augustine, obviously, felt that this story was meant solely for him when he states, "While he was speaking, O Lord, you were turning me around to look at myself." (VIII, 7) Augustine laments that twelve years had passed since reading Cicero's Hortensuis which had lead him to Platonic thought and ultimately to the teachings of Paul. And yet, in all that time, he had been totally unable to accomplish what even unschooled men had the courage to do: to enter willingly into the service of God.<br /><br /><em>What is the matter with us? </em>Augustine asks Alypius,<em> What is the meaning of this story? These men have not had our schooling, yet they stand up and storm the gates of heaven while we, for all our learning, lie here grovelling in this world of flesh and blood! Is it because they have led the way that we are ashamed to follow? Is it not worse to hold back?</em> (VIII, 8)<br /><br />At this point, Augustine is set upon by "madness that would bring me sanity." (VIII, 8) He flees to the community garden of his home and throws himself down upon the ground, beating his fists against himself, tearing at his hair, and basically, commences to test his Will against that of God. Augustine finds himself staring at yet another Truth when he realizes that "The mind gives an order to the body and it obeys, but when it gives an order to itself, it is resisted." (VIII, 9) Augustine is confused and aghast at himself for his shame that his will has only the power to control the limbs of his body and nothing more. At last, his dueling wills exhausted, he collapses under a fig tree in tears where he is visited by an image of Continence and many men and woman and children. In this visitation, she extends her arms to him and asks him a simple set of questions:<br /><br /><em>Can you not do what these men and women do? Do you think they find the strength to do it in themselves and not in the Lord their God? It was the Lord their God who gave me to them. Why do you try to stand in your own strength and fail? Cast yourself upon God and have no fear. He will not shrink away and let you fall. Cast yourself upon him without fear, for he will welcome you and cure you of your ills. </em>(VIII, 11)<br /><br />Even this visage did little to quell Augustine's tormented soul. Somehow though, through the sounds of his weeping, he did hear a small child's voice telling him to "Take it and read it" in a sing song fashion. At last he remembered the story of Antony and managed to get himself up off the ground and find his way back to Paul's Epistles to the Romans where he read, <em>Not revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites.</em> Rom. 13. 13-14. After reading this passage, Augustine was finally able to conjure the strength and courage to relinquish all his desires for ambition and for the love women (except the love of his mother, of course, since she is still the instrument through which God's love had been shared with Augustine). He tells his friend Alypius of his discoveries and he is also converted on the spot with Augustine. The last lines of Book VIII tell of the joy experienced by his mother upon hearing of her son's conversion. His mother rejoices, "far fuller than her dearest wish, far sweeter and more chaste than any she had hoped to find in children begotten of my flesh." (VIII, 12) Thus, did God also rejoice as his wayward sheep had finally come back to the flock.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zjPHxkDI/AAAAAAAAAc4/MB1IjCTtMjk/s1600-h/TolleLegeconversion.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 187px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421546206871523378" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sz0zjPHxkDI/AAAAAAAAAc4/MB1IjCTtMjk/s320/TolleLegeconversion.jpg" /></a>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-84345032796173876402009-12-29T12:16:00.000-08:002009-12-29T14:19:28.252-08:00Great Books: Augustine's Confessions Books 1-8 (Part Three)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Szp_M8SbJ9I/AAAAAAAAAcQ/kH85BS4-qnY/s1600-h/Truth+Augustine.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 252px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420784961812375506" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Szp_M8SbJ9I/AAAAAAAAAcQ/kH85BS4-qnY/s320/Truth+Augustine.jpg" /></a>Augustine continues his exploration of the nuances of sin throughout his Confessions, however, as he ventures to Carthage for the continuation of his studies, a tangible shift occurs in his search for Truth. It is a new stage in his life in which he shifts his focus to the Great Ideas of Good and Evil which compel and elude him as he continues his spiritual autobiography. Also in play is Augustine’s themed continuation of his own life as a parable. He becomes the Prodigal Son or the wayward sheep that strays from the herd with God the ever present herdsman. Augustine states that, "Yet all the while, far above, your mercy hovered faithfully about me." (III, 3) Alas, Augustine had no eyes to see that God was with him throughout his life and, due to his own misperceptions, God seemed totally absent during his years as a young adult in Carthage and beyond.<br /><br />Augustine describes Carthage as an, "hissing cauldron of lust" (III, 1) where he became addicted to the pursuit of love or, as he later came to know it, lust. He fell in love with the theatre, poets, philosophers and astrologers (sensualists) who he credits with leading him further and further away from the Truth of God.<br /><br /><em>Truth! Truth! How the very marrow of my soul within me yearned for it as they dinned it in my ears over and over again. To them it was no more than a name to be voiced or a word to be read in their libraries of huge books...while my hunger was for you, for Truth itself, they served me up the sun and the moon...not you yourself nor even the greatest of your created things.</em> (III, 6)<br /><br />Augustine describes himself locked in a world starved of anything real or true and yet he also finds companionship with friends and with a concubine who bore him a son. It is interesting to note that Augustine claims to have been totally faithful to his concubine (for more than ten years) and that he was with her only due to his own lustful nature. Augustine never names this woman and scholars will probably never know more than what Augustine shares about her in his Confessions. Yet, he was faithful to her and to the son she bore him and after he decides to abandon her he speaks of her with words of respect and love.<br /><br />During his time at Carthage, his father dies (which he barely mentions) and he abandons his study of law, turning instead to the study of literature and public speaking. He finds himself inspired by the words of Cicero. He would eventually also enjoy the works of Plato who would lead him back to Paul of Tarsus. It would be Paul who inspired him to begin studying the scriptures for pure novelty's sake. His mother continued to support him financially after his father's death and she also continued with her prayers that he would find his way back to Christ. As mentioned in our previous segment, Augustine's relationship with his mother begins to mirror that of his relationship with God. Turning his back on his mother and her stalwart prayers for him becomes equivalent to turning his back on God. After completing his studies at Carthage, Augustine journeyed home to Thagaste where he began teaching literature and public speaking. However, he lamented the lack of discipline his students showed in Thagaste and so took a job teaching in Rome. The correlation between the relationships he had with his mother and with God became very apparent in a literal sense when he lies to his mother and leaves her weeping on the banks of Thageste after he sneaks away in the middle of the night for his journey to Rome.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Szp_ajqdFZI/AAAAAAAAAcY/H7tN2IgrYWo/s1600-h/AugustineVittore_Carpaccio.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 262px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420785195720447378" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Szp_ajqdFZI/AAAAAAAAAcY/H7tN2IgrYWo/s320/AugustineVittore_Carpaccio.jpg" /></a>The polarity through which Augustine views himself is absolute and finds its manifestation no place more apparent than during the many years he spent as a part of the Manichean cult. Augustine says, "I was trying to find the origin of evil, but I was quite blind to the evil in my own method of research". (VII, 5) The Manicheans believed in the concepts of Good and Evil as separate and disparate entities who lived and clashed with each other within every human soul.<br /><br /><em>For this same reason</em>, Augustine states, <em>I believed that evil, too, was some similar kind of substance, a shapeless, hideous mass, which might be solid or air..This they imagine as a kind of evil mind filtering through the substance they call earth. And because such little piety as I had compelled me to believe that God, who is good, could not have created an evil nature, I imagined that there were two antagonistic masses, both of which were infinite, yet the evil in a lesser and the good in a greater degree.</em> (V, 10)<br /><br />The Manicheans claimed to resolve questions of religion with that of science and visa versa. This claim was alluring to Augustine for many reasons as during his studies he had become quite fond of the sciences and, quite apparently, continued to struggle within himself over all things religious. Slowly, however, Augustine began to turn his back upon the Manicheans who he found to make grandiose claims about astrology, God, Christ, Good and Evil that were not backed up by the sciences of the day and they also made claims about theology which had no direct correlation to his studies or his experiences. Yet, he did not break ties with them completely as they were useful to him during his short time in Rome.<br /><br />Augustine fell ill almost immediately upon reaching Rome coming once again close to death. But, he believed he was saved by God despite their prolonged separation because God was ever watchful of him. It is at this point we begin to see changes in Augustine, his continued struggle with his own ideas of Good and Evil and, most importantly, his relationship with God.<br /><br /><em>It was made clear to me also that even those things which are subject to decay are good. If they were of the supreme order of goodness, they could not be corrupt; but neither could they become corrupt unless they were in some way good,</em> (VII, 12) Augustine states he did not know that, <em>Evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains," (III, 7) and "So, we must conclude that if things are deprived of all good, they cease to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good.</em> (VII, 12)<br /><br />This realization helps Augustine to understand that despite his corruptible nature, or actually, because of it, he can be redeemed in the Truth and light of God. Yet, his true conversion to the Christian God would be made manifest through a heavy grief through which Augustine was unsure of his ability to endure.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SzqANbn2DaI/AAAAAAAAAcg/ncZbYwoy6-U/s1600-h/Rogier_van_der_Weyden-Mourning_Woman%3B_detail.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SzqANbn2DaI/AAAAAAAAAcg/ncZbYwoy6-U/s320/Rogier_van_der_Weyden-Mourning_Woman%3B_detail.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420786069735345570" /></a>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-3844602002549759812009-11-17T13:11:00.000-08:002009-11-17T19:33:08.644-08:00Great Books: Augustine's Confessions Books 1-8 (Part Two)<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMVgWmSHvI/AAAAAAAAAbI/buvUsHo1pyc/s1600/devilaugustine.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 279px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5405187623340875506" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMVgWmSHvI/AAAAAAAAAbI/buvUsHo1pyc/s320/devilaugustine.jpg" /></a>Denied his Baptism in Christ, Augustine began to cope with the polarity between his mother and father, caught between their personal systems of belief. This resulted in a tangle of juicy psychology as Augustine links his feelings about God to his feelings about his mother, Monica. She, as God’s instrument, agreed to deny him his baptism. Yet, as he writes, if it weren’t for:<br /><br /><em>she (who) did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he. In this you helped her to turn the scales against her husband, whom she always obeyed because by obeying him she obeyed your law, thereby showing greater virtue than he did.</em> (I, 2)<br /><br />This dichotomous statement is intriguing and sheds light upon Augustine’s view of a virtuous sin committed by his mother, which seems to be in direct conflict with what we have already learned about his views of sin. How can it be that all sins are equal in the eyes of the Lord, even an infant’s cries, but it is somehow virtuous for a woman to “turn the scales against her husband”? He witnessed his mother walking a theologically fine line as she thwarted his paternal father’s influence while somehow still abiding in God’s Law. She never disobeyed her husband except through her enduring piety to the Christian God and her prayers for her son. Augustine credits his mother's piety as the one constant in his life which lead to his ultimate salvation and, in so doing, he estabilshes a repeating pattern in his early life which involved turning his back on his mother and God alike.<br /><br />Augustine continued his studies, having been sent to Madaura, where he found that he disliked Greek and preferred Latin writers over his other studies. He found himself lost in the stories, another example that he gives of turning away from God and into a world of falsehood and fiction; “a ferment of wickedness.” (II, 2) Coming upon his adolescent years, Augustine began to yearn for the sin of lust which, he claims, would continue to haunt him until his conversion. His studies of literature and public speaking were interrupted when:<br /><br /><em>my father, a modest citizen of Thagaste whose determination was greater than his means, saved up the money to send me farther afield to Carthage…no one had anything but praise for my father who, despite his slender resources, was ready to provide his son with all that was needed to enable him to travel so far for the purpose of study..Yet this same father of mine took no trouble at all to see how I was growing in your sight or whether I was chaste or not..Both my parents were unduly eager for me to learn…my mother because she thought that the usual course of study certainly would not hinder me.</em> (II,3)<br /><br />This is how Augustine “construe[d] the character of his parents” and there is conflict in this belief. He describes himself as spoiled and self entitled, both bitter about his parent’s desire for his education and unequal in his forgiveness of one of them despite their equal roles. In a feat of impressive mental contortion, he recognizes his mother’s part in this stage of his development as God’s hand in his life and yet he offers no such accolades to his father because he is pagan and not a believer.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMUsSDhl-I/AAAAAAAAAa4/YGOHSzB02UY/s1600/momaugustinepartII.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 166px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5405186728768149474" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMUsSDhl-I/AAAAAAAAAa4/YGOHSzB02UY/s320/momaugustinepartII.jpg" /></a> All of this is but a preamble to the parable about sin to come. While waiting for his journey to Carthage, at the age of 16, he had free time to spend with unruly friends. Augustine claimed that he fell prey to peer pressure and gave in to the grievous sin of theft. He and his buddies had a habit of engaging in games out of doors after dark and these games involved committing anything that might be forbidden, such as stealing pears from a tree near a local vineyard. Augustine took these pears not because of need and cannot recall if they ate more than a few. He stole them for the sake of committing a theft and fed most of the pears to the pigs. What some might consider a simple adolescent prank, Augustine elevates to such a degree that it might be better interpreted as a symbol for original sin. For “if any one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.” (II,6) It can be assumed that there were other pranks committed by these “ruffians” but Augustine chooses specifically to tell us his story of stealing fruit from a forbidden tree.<br /><br />Augustine’s inner reflections about the reasons he commits his version of original sin are quite innovative and compelling. He attempts to converse with his crime of theft as if it “were a living thing” (II,6) in order to gain a greater understanding of that which he considers to be the plight of all descendents of Adam and Eve. Augustine believes the source of all sin can be boiled down to three states of the human condition: anger, fear and grief and that sin translates or is “hatched” by a “lust for power, gratifications of the eye and gratifications of a corrupt nature.” (III,8) He goes on to converse with this disembodied sinful part of himself in an attempt to reason through the process of sin. This dialogue regarding the nature of sin suggests that he (and all of us who sin) continuously experience all the human corruptions that lead to the first sin in every act of sin committed since our removal from Eden; whether cruelty, lustfulness, inquisitiveness, ignorance and stupidity, sloth, extravagance, and envy, to name but a few.<br /><br /><em>And now, O Lord of my God, now that I ask what pleasure I had in that theft, I find that it had no beauty to attract me. I do not mean beauty of the sort that justice and prudence possess, nor the beauty that is in man’s mind and in his memory and in the life that animates him…It did not even have the shadowy, deceptive beauty which makes vice attractive-pride, for instance, which is a pretense of superiority, imitating yours, for you alone are God, supreme over all; or ambition, which is only a craving for honour or glory, when you alone are to be honoured before all and you alone are glorious for ever.</em>(II, 6)<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMUhB8d8kI/AAAAAAAAAaw/SWgn_sancbE/s1600/AugustinuspartII.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 235px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5405186535465022018" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SwMUhB8d8kI/AAAAAAAAAaw/SWgn_sancbE/s320/AugustinuspartII.jpg" /></a>Ultimately, however, Augustine uses this mental exercise as a means of discovering that the reasons for sin are of no consequence, writing that if “it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin.” (II,8) He, like Adam, was lured by others to commit his grave act of eating the forbidden fruit and thus “wandered away, too far from your sustaining hand, and created of myself a barren waste.” (II,10)R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-19795297139436855342009-11-12T20:10:00.000-08:002009-11-12T20:39:51.202-08:00Great Books: Augustine's Confession Books 1-8 (Part One)<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzfFiucePI/AAAAAAAAAZw/hc8nCX36LxQ/s1600-h/Abrotha"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 215px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5403438939251702002" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzfFiucePI/AAAAAAAAAZw/hc8nCX36LxQ/s320/Abrotha" /></a>This essay uses the Great Books edition of Augustine's Confessions, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. As this translation is still under copyright, a translation by Albert C. Outler can be found <a href="http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.toc.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Augustine’s Confessions were written in the year 397 CE during his early 40’s and is somewhat inaccurately considered to be one of the West’s first autobiographical accounts despite the fact that there are many other classical writers who worked in the same medium previously. It is not a complete autobiography, obviously, since he would live to the ripe age of seventy-six. However, it does represent the most detailed account of any individual living in the 4th and 5th centuries. Augustine’s life stands upon the precipice between dramatically shifting times in human thought and in many ways both his life and his Confessions can be seen as products of this transition between historical ages. It has been suggested that Augustine is both the last Classical thinker as well as the first Medieval writer.<br /><br />Undoubtedly, his autobiography was highly influential on writers during the Medieval period. Augustine’s Confessions take the reader on his spiritual journey from a state of sinfulness to his salvation in Jesus Christ. The intentional structure of his autobiography allows for Augustine to pick and chose personal events from his life that illustrate an archetypal spiritual journey.<br /><br />Augustine utilizes an innovative structure within his Confessions that involves personal and sometimes brutal self-admonition interspersed with direct quotations from the Bible and lyrical passages in praise of God. The personal sins he discusses seem, on the surface, to be of little consequence, in comparison to, for example, murderers, and yet his descriptions of those sins are offered in caricature, as if he had literally sold his soul to the devil. At first reading, it can be interpreted simply that all sins are equal in the eyes of God; however, this juxtaposition also raises questions within the reader’s mind and encourages a deeper reading of the text where we ultimately see his life and his conversion as a teaching story or parable in itself. This metaphorical writing style is used repeatedly throughout the Confessions, revealing Augustine’s background in Platonic thought, the writings of Paul of Tarsus and his own deep studies of scripture.<br /><br />This analysis will cover only the first eight books of the Confessions which takes us from his infancy to the moment of crisis that pushes Augustine to make a full conversion to the Christian faith. As mentioned in his <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/11/author-sketch-augustine-of-hippo.html">Author Sketch</a>, Augustine would be profoundly influenced by his mother Monica and his writings illustrate quite clearly his feelings of being torn between the pagan beliefs and morals of his father and the Christian beliefs and actions of his mother. This is, perhaps, the reason he begins his story with a very dualistic worldview that is not reconciled until the moment he finds his peace in Christ. Augustine touches upon many great ideas throughout the Confessions but we will be focusing on his discussions of Sin, Good and Evil, and Will.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzfQmTmxKI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/JAdNy06ReYU/s1600-h/775px-Simone_Martini_073+1-2.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 247px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5403439129191433378" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzfQmTmxKI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/JAdNy06ReYU/s320/775px-Simone_Martini_073+1-2.jpg" /></a>Books I and II of the Confessions deal specifically with Augustine’s infancy and his early childhood. He offers an interesting perspective on infants and their capacity for sin as he attempts to recall this distant time in his life. “And if my wishes were not carried out," he writes, "I would get cross with elders, who were not at my beck and call, and with people who were not my servants, simply because they did not attend to my wishes; and I would take my revenge by bursting into tears. By watching babies I have learnt how they behave... and know that I behaved in just the same way myself.” (1:6) This passage illustrates Augustine’s belief that we are all, as descendants of Adam, born of sin and that “if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.” (1:6) It is striking that his opinions on the sinful nature of babies are so strong considering that he spends so little time defending his ideas about a period that he admits he cannot truly recall. He does take the time to lament as he contemplates his infancy, “I ask you, Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?” (1:7)<br /><br />His early childhood is dealt with briefly, in much the same way, but with intuitive observations about the hypocrisy of small boys being punished for playing games instead of attending to their studies by the same masters whose livelihood depended upon even more sinful games. He terms this period of his life as one of suffering and humiliation. Yet, he views this natural tendency of young boys to enjoy playing games quite straightforwardly as further indications of inherent sin.<br /><br /><em>And yet I sinned, O Lord of my God, creator and arbiter of all natural things, but arbiter only, not creator, of sin. I sinned, O Lord, by disobeying my parents and the masters of whom I have spoken…I was disobedient, not because I chose something better than they proposed to me, but simply from the love of games.</em> (1:10)<br /><br />During this period of Augustine’s life, it is important to note that he was attending Christian schools and was as close to the faith as he would be for many years to come. It was also during this time that he developed a grave stomach illness (the first of many) which left him close to death. There is much consternation in these next passages as he describes his conflicting feelings of being passed over for his baptism when, instead of dying, he quickly recovered.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzgHVomU5I/AAAAAAAAAaI/Ra_jzZeAGno/s1600-h/Baptism"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 285px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5403440069608887186" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SvzgHVomU5I/AAAAAAAAAaI/Ra_jzZeAGno/s320/Baptism" /></a><em>You, my God, were my guardian even then, and you saw the fervor and strength of my faith as I appealed to the piety of my own mother and to the mother of us all, your Church, to give me the baptism of Christ your Son, who is my God and my Master…So my washing in the waters of baptism was postponed, in the surmise that, if I continued to live, I should defile myself again with sin and, after baptism, the guilt of pollution would be greater and more dangerous.</em> (1:11)<br /><br />Even when Augustine wrote the Confessions at the age of forty-three, he had yet to reconcile what contour his life might have followed if he had been baptized in his early boyhood. This incident seems to set Augustine upon his spiritual quest and his search for truth. As we will see, Augustine searches for this truth in many ways but, firstly, by engaging in sin for sin’s sake.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-84837337871695588212009-11-05T14:47:00.000-08:002009-11-05T20:41:58.792-08:00Author Sketch: Augustine of Hippo<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5cf-N_aNBp0/SvOfoJBhUbI/AAAAAAAAADo/6ZDwJRsidOc/s1600-h/augustine1.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 258px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400835890113237426" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5cf-N_aNBp0/SvOfoJBhUbI/AAAAAAAAADo/6ZDwJRsidOc/s400/augustine1.jpg" /></a>Augustine of Hippo (also known as Saint Augustine, Augustinus, St. Augustine the Blessed)<br /><div><div>Born 354 CE in Tageste, Numidia</div><div>Died 430 CE as a retired Bishop of Hippo</div><div> </div><div>Works under consideration: <em>The Confessions</em></div><div></div><div></div><div><br />Events that occurred during Augustine’s life:</div><div><br />Pics and Scots cross Hadrian’s Wall and attack Britain<br />Roman Legions begin to evacuate Britain<br />The Huns invade Europe<br />Accession of Theodosius the Great – the last Emperor of a united Roman empire<br />Scrolls begin to be replaced with books<br />Hymn singing is introduced by St. Ambrose of Milan and “Hallelujah” is born<br />The first written records of Japanese history<br />Alchemy begins with the search for the Philosopher’s stone and the Elixir of Life<br /><br />Saint Augustine was born in the small village of Tageste on November 13, 354. Tageste was located in the North African Roman Provence of Numidia, present day Souk Ahras, on the eastern border of Algeria. Both of his parents were of Roman descent with possible Numidian genetic lines and Augustine is thought to have been a native Punic speaker. His father, Patricius, was a Roman administrator of Tageste but due to the village’s small size was only able to provide modestly for his family. Augustine’s mother, Monica, was a devout Christian and a constant influence on Augustine’s life. He was highly educated in the liberal arts and ultimately became not only a transitional literary and theological figure in his time but was also torn between dueling cultural belief systems caricaturized by his pagan father and his devoutly Catholic mother. Christian schools framed the beginnings of his educational influences; however, Augustine was not baptized during his early childhood. Perhaps it was the stress of living between two ideologies or the fact that, as he later believed, God allowed him to anguish upon a path of sin in order to show him the true faith, the ardent search for truth became Augustine’s life-long pursuit.</div><div></div></div><div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5cf-N_aNBp0/SvOgoKYsF8I/AAAAAAAAADw/3m-wr9DJw5k/s1600-h/Sainte_Monique.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 180px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 233px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400836989990475714" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5cf-N_aNBp0/SvOgoKYsF8I/AAAAAAAAADw/3m-wr9DJw5k/s400/Sainte_Monique.jpg" /></a><br />At the age of 11 or 12, Augustine journeyed 20 miles south from his birth place to Madaura where he began his study of grammar and literature. He excelled in his studies, especially Latin, and his father was so inspired by his son’s aptitude and his own hopes that Augustine would become a lawyer that he endeavored to gather the necessary funds for Augustine to continue his education. Ultimately, a local benefactor named Romanianus sponsored Augustine to study rhetoric at Carthage. During this time, Augustine read Cicero’s <em>Hortensius</em> which he described as the foundation upon which he built his life-long interest in philosophy. At Carthage, he became a member of the Manichean cult whose claim to “reconcile religion with philosophy” must have been very appealing to a young man of 17, caught between a mother who despaired for the salvation of his soul and his own youthful appetites, both of the body and the mind. He shared a relationship with a concubine for ten years who bore him a son named Adeodatus. By all accounts, he loved this woman deeply though they would never marry. During and after his studies at Carthage he lived his life as an “intellectual pagan” and a teacher of rhetoric.<br /><br />Lamenting the lack of discipline of his students in Tageste, Augustine spent a year in Rome where he began to formally break from the Manicheans and embrace neo-Platonist concepts. He was also introduced to St. Ambrose who later performed Augustine's long awaited baptism into the Christian faith. His full conversion occurred in 386 and, after the death of his mother, he journeyed back to Africa with Adeodatus and other pupils to lead a monastic life. However, a skilled orator and prolific writer would not long live an isolated life. Also, around 391, he assumed what he called the “burden of the episcopate” when he was made a priest of Hippo. He would later hold the title of Bishop for thirty five years. He died of natural causes at Hippo in 430, in the midst of a Vandal invasion.<br /><br />It is speculated that Augustine wrote over 232 separate titles not including personal letters and sermons. <em>The Confessions</em> and <em>The City of God </em>are two of his most known works but the totality of his written contribution to the western canon is quite impressive. He would later inspire such scholars as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin among others.</div>Kendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12520415175346097395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-52981097964578584492009-11-01T21:57:00.000-08:002009-11-01T22:07:54.571-08:00Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part Three)<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51MBJpGMI/AAAAAAAAAYg/rHegXfJ4BWQ/s1600-h/Paul+mosaic.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399381852591560898" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51MBJpGMI/AAAAAAAAAYg/rHegXfJ4BWQ/s320/Paul+mosaic.jpg" border="0" /></a> The first two portions of this essay can be found in the archive to the right under October 2009.<br /><br />Intertwined into Paul’s discourse on the nature of sin and the judgment that must accompany it is the difficult question of how redemption under the Law (for Jews) and redemption through Faith (for non-Jews) can be reconciled. The early Christian congregations were largely composed of what Luke repeatedly refers to as God-fearing pagans. As Jews, and thus the worship of the One God, spread throughout the Mediterranean, peoples who prided themselves on being universally religious (and universally tolerant) saw little reason to exclude the Jewish God from the potential options of gods to be acknowledged and, under certain circumstances, worshipped.<br /><br />The unique covenant between the Jews and their God, however, made it impossible for non-Jews to fully participate in worship and the process of going from Gentile to Jew was a perilous journey, especially for adult men. What Paul was providing, through his Gospel, was an opportunity for those God-fearers not only to participate fully and more easily in the worship of the Jewish God but also to do so in a manner that he puts forward as inherently superior to the original model. None may hope to fully obey the law but all who would believe can receive baptism and salvation in the name of Jesus Christ.<br /><br />Still, it would be both impolitic and a little ridiculous for him to assert that the Law was always an inadequate tool for salvation. After all, Jesus himself was a Jew who observed the Law as were all of Paul’s ancestors. Consequently, he must create a model that both embraces and repudiates the Law. He begins, writing that:<br /><br /><em>All who sin apart from the law will perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.</em> [Acts 2:12,13]<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51SPkgbqI/AAAAAAAAAYo/r8kDr2-T4Fg/s1600-h/The+Law.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399381959541550754" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 214px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51SPkgbqI/AAAAAAAAAYo/r8kDr2-T4Fg/s320/The+Law.jpg" border="0" /></a>Despite his assertion here that there is an equal dispensation of grace for those who follow the law as those who might, instead, become righteous through a belief in Jesus, he continues later to suggest that the law was only given by God so that humanity might understand that it was sinful. It did not free anyone from their sinful nature as Paul laments that though “I delight in God’s law…I see another law at work…waging war against the law of the mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my members” [7:22,33]. As long as the mind remains trapped in the body of sin, it, at best, remains in a constant stalemate with impure urges. Righteousness achieved through belief in Jesus, however, yields something different and, by Paul’s reckoning, better.<br /><br /><em>Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.</em> [8:1-4]<br /><br />The last of Paul’s central themes in his Epistle to the Romans is Love. Paul’s first examination of love focuses God’s love for humanity. God’s wrath is directed at the sin, though his judgment upon it is meted out upon the sinner. His love, however, is saved for his obedient creations and, Paul writes, that God “has poured out his love into our hearts” [5:5] and that He “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” [5:8]. It is because we are beloved by God that He has slowly unfolded a plan for our redemption, despite Adam’s disobedience that allowed sin and death to reign in His stead.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51j2JsdVI/AAAAAAAAAYw/PJUmaJfAAsg/s1600-h/Holy+Spirit+Dove.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399382261955851602" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su51j2JsdVI/AAAAAAAAAYw/PJUmaJfAAsg/s320/Holy+Spirit+Dove.jpg" border="0" /></a>Paul’s primary concerns about love, however, reside in his assertion that believers should espouse and manifest it as evidence of their transformation through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. “Love,” he insists, “must be sincere” [12:9] and the believer should:<br /><br /><em>…let no debt remain standing, except for the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law…whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.</em> [13:8-10]<br /><div><br /><div>Love, for Paul then, is not only an expression of the Holy Spirit at work inside of an otherwise turbulent human nature but is a pathway to peace. This stands in ideological opposition to the prevailing Roman ideology that Peace might only be obtained through Victory. As such, Christianity is offered not only as an alternative to a half-righteousness through a half-observance of the law but also to a world seemingly consumed by never-ending war in search of a peace that never comes.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su52N5KnYEI/AAAAAAAAAZA/xSpuErBYgUU/s1600-h/HolySpiritByMurillo.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399382984319524930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 285px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Su52N5KnYEI/AAAAAAAAAZA/xSpuErBYgUU/s400/HolySpiritByMurillo.jpg" border="0" /></a></div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-7628666708008316072009-10-26T12:39:00.000-07:002009-10-26T12:51:43.369-07:00Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part Two)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX7fHwXLyI/AAAAAAAAAX4/PIRwFrxi61Y/s1600-h/Pauldurer.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396996240549818146" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 220px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX7fHwXLyI/AAAAAAAAAX4/PIRwFrxi61Y/s320/Pauldurer.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first part of this essay can be accessed in the archives under October 2009.<br /><br />Having defined sin as turning away from God, Paul creates a causal relationship between sin and death by offering Adam’s mortality as precedent and every death since as proof of sin’s universality. The “wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity” [1:29] that one normally associates with sinful behavior is presented more as a symptom of death than sins in and of themselves. By the reasoning, Paul writes, that “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command” [5:14].<br /><br />It is during this first period that Paul finds the inspiration for his own gospel of salvation for the Gentiles. Though no Law yet existed, Abraham was able to attain righteousness (or cleansing of sin) through his faith in the existence and omnipotence of God. This justification (literally, to be made just) through faith serves as Paul’s model for non-Jewish salvation as he notes that “Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness” [4:9] As Abraham exhibited that faith before he entered into the covenant with God, outwardly manifested through circumcision, “he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them” [4:11].<br /><br />As for the Law, Paul argues that it serves only to make one aware of sin, while doing nothing to compensate for humanity’s inherently sinful nature. In fact, The Law made being human (or at least being Jewish) more intolerable as it defined precisely what actions were sinful so that those who broke it (ie everyone) could understand why they were being punished with death. For Paul, that is what law does. It defines negative behavior and then assigns the appropriate punishment for it. Deprived of the option of being truly cleansed of sin, humanity is/was lost to a spiral of unmet expectations.<br /><br /><em>We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living with me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my spiritual nature. For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out.</em> [7:14-18]<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX7m0NY2-I/AAAAAAAAAYA/xMVghngGkrw/s1600-h/Triumph_of_Faith_over_Idolatry.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396996372741807074" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 273px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX7m0NY2-I/AAAAAAAAAYA/xMVghngGkrw/s320/Triumph_of_Faith_over_Idolatry.jpg" border="0" /></a>The only solution, by this arrangement is in becoming a slave to something other than sin; a new possibility created by God in the resurrection of Jesus. Just as Abraham’s righteousness was “credited to him” by virtue of his faith in God and exhibited outwardly through circumcision, so may the believer, then, have righteousness credited to them by virtue of their faith in Jesus the Christ, as exhibited through a baptism in his name. Now while we can easily understand while the ritual pruning of a man’s foreskin might impress the sincerity of his faith upon an otherwise skeptical God, what is it about baptism specifically that conveys righteousness upon its recipients?<br /><br />The key, for Paul, is remarkably simple in its construction. Death is the sentence for sin which itself is universal to the human condition. In dying, Jesus paid the literal price for his own sins (death) but, in resurrection, is now free from humanity’s sinful nature. Baptism in his name, then, is a baptism “into his death” [6:3], creating a new state of righteousness wherein one’s “old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—as anyone who has died has been freed from sin” [6:6,7].<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX73Gnwk1I/AAAAAAAAAYI/MccIc-Paq9o/s1600-h/7+Deadly+Sins+Bosch.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396996652562158418" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 316px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX73Gnwk1I/AAAAAAAAAYI/MccIc-Paq9o/s320/7+Deadly+Sins+Bosch.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first half of that argument is so easily answered by common sense that it is hardly an argument at all for no reasonable person, whatever their belief, could argue that the dead might be capable of continuing to sin past the end of their life. This argument only remains ironclad, however, if one does not suppose that a person might be raised from the dead because, as far as anyone could really tell, it had never happened. That is what makes the belief in Christ’s resurrection so critical to the foundation of Christian belief. If one can believe that God made a special exception in raising Jesus from the dead and allowed him to ascend into heaven with his now-sinless nature intact, then it is just as reasonable to assume that He did so in order that humanity might be baptized into that death that they might escape their hitherto inescapable sinful nature as well. In that belief, the believer dies to their old self and is reborn, with Jesus’s sinless nature indwelt within them, into a new condition by which they are no longer a slave to sin but a slave to righteousness.<br /><br />In one sense, sin carries out its own form of Judgment in that it is the root cause of death. Salvation from sin, according to Paul, goes beyond merely freeing the believer from their naturally sinful state. If justice can be said to exist, then it must exist in its highest form within any God responsible for creating all things. This means that in addition to death, which is caused by sin, sinners must also undergo a separate judgment by God whereby they are again punished for their sins. Those with clearly formed pictures of fiery lakes and eternal damnation may be surprised to find how vague Paul is, at least in his Epistle to the Romans, about when that judgment will take place and what form it will take.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX8HHQ6_II/AAAAAAAAAYQ/k65sVjDDSm8/s1600-h/Last+Judgement.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396996927612714114" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 253px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX8HHQ6_II/AAAAAAAAAYQ/k65sVjDDSm8/s320/Last+Judgement.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the opening chapter, Paul underscores the urgency of his gospel by proclaiming that the “wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” [1:18]. Initially, it appears that this wrath is the catalyst for all the forms of evil and depravity that humans naturally embrace, with the final judgment being death itself, the “wages” of all sin. Later, though, Paul adds on a second component when he speaks of “the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” [2:5]. He reveals no details about when this day of judgment is due to occur, only saying that there “will be great trouble and distress for every human being who does evil” [2:9] on this day when “’God will give to each person according to what he has done’” [2:6].<br /><br />The foundation of Paul’s theology is that everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, has committed sin and, because of that sin, is condemned to die. Paul believes that Jesus will return to usher in a new era of divine peace on Earth and that, in so doing, would reunite the living and the dead for judgment under God’s authority. While evidence outside of the Epistle to the Romans also suggests that Paul believed this would happen within his lifetime, he is vague about that aspect of Jesus’s return saying only that it would “take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ as my gospel declares” [2:16].<br /><div><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX8Tcl_T1I/AAAAAAAAAYY/FIBEKsZ3eic/s1600-h/Judgment+Lochner.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5396997139496652626" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 230px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SuX8Tcl_T1I/AAAAAAAAAYY/FIBEKsZ3eic/s320/Judgment+Lochner.jpg" border="0" /></a>Thus when Paul declares the necessity of salvation, he is essentially arguing on two different fronts simultaneously. Humanity must be saved from its own sinful nature because the effect of sin is death and death, as we all know, is bad. Humanity must also be saved from God’s judgment by being justified into righteousness through baptism into Jesus’s death. As Jesus became sinless and righteous in transcending death, so must each believer embrace the atonement that his death represents in order to shield them from God’s holy judgment. Without the resurrection, none may hope to become righteous enough in God’s eyes to avoid punishment but, in seeking righteousness through Christ, all may hope to receive “glory, honor and peace” [2:10].</div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-24067141830285038092009-10-21T22:00:00.000-07:002009-10-21T22:17:00.226-07:00Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part One)<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nT0-lGhI/AAAAAAAAAIo/AIlHP9hQfwc/s1600-h/Vatican_StPaul_Statue.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395285206437796370" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nT0-lGhI/AAAAAAAAAIo/AIlHP9hQfwc/s320/Vatican_StPaul_Statue.jpg" border="0" /></a>Epistle to the Romans by Paul of Tarsus<br />Time: Written in the middle of the first century of the Common Era.<br />Location: Most probably Corinth.<br />Great Ideas: Sin, Judgment, and Love<br /><br />This essay will quote from the New International Version of Romans which can be found in its entirety online <a href="http://www.biblica.com/niv/#">here</a>.<br /><br />Paul’s contributions to the New Testament are so tantalizing because he represents the first time that a shaper of the gospel of Christ is allowed to speak to us directly. This is not to say that no one had written on or about Christ before Paul fired up his amanuensis and became, in the literary sense, himself immortal. There is evidence that a variety of documents (a “Sayings” Gospel, a “Miracles” gospel, a “Cross” gospel) were produced by the early fold of believers who emerged on the other side of Jesus’s crucifixion and proclaimed his resurrection. Those writings, however, were eventually synthesized, redacted, and expanded upon by writers who were approaching the topic decades after the fact; each with their own brand of theology to promote and set of narratives to which they attended. The Gospels, in this sense, represent work by committee even if the final product was penned and shaped by one man or woman’s hand.<br /><br />More treacherously, from a critical analysis standpoint, not every Epistle attributed to Paul is inarguably his own work. An examination of the merits of the various sides of that particular argument is in order if one seeks to fully appreciate who Paul was and what his message means. That discussion is only necessary, however, if one is writing on the whole of Paul’s work or writing about an Epistle whose authorship might be worthy of some scrutiny. Gratefully, no doubt for writer and reader alike, we are not.<br /><br />Paul’s Epistle to the Romans must be appreciated as one of the cornerstones of Christian theology, if not <em>the</em> document that defines what Christianity is and how it differs from the Jewish and Hellenic traditions that Paul synthesizes even while repudiating them. It captures a tectonic moment in the development of human thought in a manner that is passionate and unimpeachably sincere; sometimes breathtaking in its concise but elegantly structured arguments. It bears the voice of a mind possessed by genius which, if Romans' historical bonafides weren’t already impeccable, might be the most compelling argument for its attribution to as an actual work of Paul’s.<br /><br />It is a work that serves many functions. It is a declaration of Paul’s intention to assert his theological influence on the congregation of believers who lived in Rome. It is an introduction to the basic principles of his unique gospel (or “good news”) for those who would hear it. It includes pragmatic advice on how to deal with different tensions that might arise within the church. It deals directly with the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and Paul draws heavily from the Torah to legitimize his claim that Judaism should cede to The Way described in his gospel of baptism in the death of the resurrected Jesus Christ. While all of these goals shape and contribute to the Epistle to the Romans, three Great Ideas adequately house most of Paul’s themes and provide us with adequate structure to examine the work thematically rather than in a more limited linear fashion. To this end, we’ll examine Paul’s writings in Romans on the topics of Sin, Judgment, and Love.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nhspQP9I/AAAAAAAAAIw/EDNiWz0zAK0/s1600-h/Lady+Sins.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395285444719034322" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nhspQP9I/AAAAAAAAAIw/EDNiWz0zAK0/s320/Lady+Sins.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first task that a writer (whether physicist, theologian, or philosopher) must face in dealing in abstractions is to define, with as much precision as language might allow, the parameters of their interpretation of a given term. Paul’s gospel hinges its urgency upon the idea that every human being is sinful and is in need of redemption through Jesus in order to escape God’s judgment. To accept even the premise of the argument, the onus is on Paul to first explain what sin is and why salvation from might be necessary before we might consider the efficacy of the solution that he provides to its inexhaustible influence.<br /><br />Though his descriptions of behaviors that arise from sin are more eye-popping on the page (and thus more likely to distract the reader from the simplicity of his message), Paul lays a definition on the line in the very first chapter, writing that:<br /><br /><em>For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men were without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…</em>{1:20-25]<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nqHyVTXI/AAAAAAAAAI4/YA0u6dl22mc/s1600-h/Adam+and+Eve.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395285589443825010" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 139px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nqHyVTXI/AAAAAAAAAI4/YA0u6dl22mc/s320/Adam+and+Eve.jpg" border="0" /></a>Those hoping for an Aristotelian clarity that might read like, “Sin is the product of X,Y, and Z” will, of course, be disappointed by the layers that must be parsed in order to get at Paul’s meaning. Recall, however, that he is a Hellenic Jew writing to an audience of Greek, Jewish and Roman Christians. Not all of them accept as fact, as Paul certainly did, the indisputable literality of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, yet all must be able to accept the salvation equation as applicable to their own worldview.<br /><br /><div><div>To a converted Jew, like Paul, the equation is most simple. Though Adam had “clearly seen” God’s “eternal power and divine nature,” he chose to exchange “the truth of God for a lie” by eating from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” [Genesis 2:17] from which God had forbidden him. Paul reinforces this idea of sin entering the world through Adam’s disobedience later when he remarks that it “entered the world through one man” [5;12]. Interpreted more radically, Adam did not sin against God in his act of disobedience for sin did not yet exist and, by Paul’s reckoning, only God may create something from nothing. In committing an act from which he was forbidden, Adam placed his own interest above that of God’s, serving at the behest of “created things rather than the Creator” with the “created things” in question being himself. In so doing, he exchanged “the truth of God for a lie” and thus, sin was born in the fundament of human nature.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nzpzmksI/AAAAAAAAAJA/yPEc36zVtWk/s1600-h/Greek+Pantheon.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395285753194779330" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 211px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_nzpzmksI/AAAAAAAAAJA/yPEc36zVtWk/s320/Greek+Pantheon.jpg" border="0" /></a>To a converted Greek, the task was more complex. For in the ascent and decline of classical Greek culture, a god’s position in the grand scheme of things was subject to constant revision. Though Zeus was acknowledged as the king of the gods, he was eclipsed in public acclaim by many others, including Athena, Apollo, and later Dionysus. Many philosophers questioned openly the existence of the gods and, while their worship remained an important part of Greek culture, reason became a god of its own, producing irrefutable knowledge that, in many cases, supplanted what could only before be believed. As Greek political influence waned, however, so went the assuredness that knowledge was a better ally than gods, imaginary or otherwise, whose power could not be resisted. Luke puts this very idea into Paul’s mouth in the Acts of the Apostles as he visits Athens and entreats its philosophers and believers alike to join him in worshiping the Unknown God who:<br /><br /><em>…made the world and everything in it [and who] is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.</em> [Acts 17:24]<br /><br />By the same logic, Paul suggests that since the creation of humanity, all nations have been able to see “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature” but have allowed that vision to become distorted into images derived from nature, from animals and from humanity itself. Without the Law, given solely to the Hebrews as part of their unique covenant with God, Greeks were left to do the best they could with the information they had and things didn’t turn out too well. Now, their gods had been subsumed into Roman ones along with the rest of their once-dominant culture. Turning away from a supposed innate human understanding of God’s eternal qualities in favor of the gods’ more mercurial ones would, by this interpretation, be the source of sin.<br /><br />It bears mentioning that something fundamentally new had been emerging in the Mediterranean culture in the century surrounding the time in which Jesus and Paul both lived, taught, and died. While the Persian and Egyptian cultures, long before the time of Alexander, had embraced the idea of mortals actually achieving godhood while they yet lived, the Mediterranean culture (excluding Egypt) had shown great resilience to the idea. Greek and Roman culture alike preferred elevating only the rarest of mortals to the status of divinity and usually conferred upon their death, rather than as justification for the authority of their reign. Every would-be conqueror from Thrace to Rome might claim divine parentage but men were men and gods, for the most part, remained gods.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_oDVuc68I/AAAAAAAAAJI/-RgphvXMExQ/s1600-h/Deification+of+Caesar.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395286022682373058" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 214px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/St_oDVuc68I/AAAAAAAAAJI/-RgphvXMExQ/s320/Deification+of+Caesar.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the span of one long lifetime (or two average ones), the lure of divine authority as a tool of governance had proven too tempting to endure and the Romans began incrementally importing these ideas into the Roman culture and all the places that it touched. Moreover, even as their claim to living divinity became more strident, the Julio-Claudian Caesars became more depraved in their abuse of common decency in the governance of their people. How difficult an argument was it for Paul to make to Greek or Roman alike that if this was their people’s conception of a god, then it was tragically deviant from the “eternal power and divine nature” that were inherent in “God’s invisible qualities?”</div><div> </div></div>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-89413942904118193702009-10-12T21:22:00.000-07:002009-10-12T21:29:04.501-07:00Author Sketch: Paul of Tarsus<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/StQBNzjymwI/AAAAAAAAAXw/AQVu-NQKlM0/s1600-h/Paul6.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5391935990559578882" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 234px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/StQBNzjymwI/AAAAAAAAAXw/AQVu-NQKlM0/s320/Paul6.jpg" border="0" /></a>Paul (the Apostle, also known as Saint Paul)<br />Born in Tarsus sometime shortly before or after the beginning of the Common Era<br />Died between 62-65 CE in Rome<br />Work under Consideration: Epistle to the Romans.<br /><br />Other things that happened in Paul’s lifetime:<br /><br />Herod Archelaus is deposed as ethnarch of Judaea and the territory, annexed by Rome.<br />London is founded.<br />Caesar Augustus dies and is succeeded by Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.<br />Buddhism introduced to China by the Emperor, Ming-Ti.<br /><br /><br />The writer known as Paul is one of the more elusive figures of history. Unlike our two previous New Testament writers (Matthew and Luke), there is absolutely no doubt that a man named Paul once existed and was responsible for at least some of the works credited to him as an author. Though he never met Jesus, the man who walked the Earth, Paul was instrumental in moving the gospel of his resurrection beyond its Jewish sectarian roots and into the free market of ideas wherein it eventually spread like wildfire from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.<br /><br />Also unlike Jesus, Paul, as a writer, operated on the periphery of history—our image of him a composite formed from autobiography, demi-hagiography, anthropology, and good old fashioned guessing. He was born in Tarsus sometime just before or after the beginning of the Common Era. It was already an ancient city when Saul (or Paul as he would later be known) was born, with roots stretching back at least seven hundred years that had been molded by nearly every ascendant empire along the way, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman alike. It was known, in Paul’s time, as a center of learning, attracting philosophers and rhetoricians to schools that flourished against its metropolitan backdrop.<br /><br />Of the many disharmonious “facts” assumed about Paul by various writers, there is little dissent on the fact that he was, indeed, Jewish, probably born into the tribe of Benjamin. Assuming that his father was a practicing Jew, we can also assume that Paul was educated in written Hebrew and, quite possibly, spoken Aramaic. He describes himself in the Epistle to the Galatians as “advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age” and “extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” [Gal. 1:14, NIV]. At some point fairly early in his life, Paul left Tarsus and came to Jerusalem, presumably to be closer to the temple to further his studies. By all accounts, including his own, he became involved in the persecution of the Nazarene sect, also referred to as The Way, which proclaimed the forgiveness of sins through the resurrection and name of Jesus the Christ. Luke suggests in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul had authority given to him by the temple to imprison followers of the Way and, is shown, at one point to be part of a mob that stoned the believer, Stephen, to death.<br /><br />On a journey to Damascus to persecute followers of the Way, Paul claimed to have had an auditory hallucination wherein Jesus commanded him to go and preach his gospel to non-Jews. Paul preached the gospel of the resurrection in Christ’s name, by his own account, for three years, before returning to Jerusalem and meeting with the heads of the church there. Eventually, Paul entered into a missionary partnership with Barnabas, an elder from the Judean church, to begin spreading the gospel outside of the Jewish homeland. They found their greatest success together in Antioch where, in time, a church of sufficient size and influence to rival the original movement was founded and cultivated. Using Antioch as a base of operations, Barnabas and Paul spread the gospel through Syria and Asia Minor, creating seed churches wherever they could convert believers.<br /><br />Later, Paul headed a mission of his own that spread the gospel further into Greece until he was able to establish a strong church at Ephesus. The exact details of how Paul wound up in Rome, only to be made into a scapegoat by Nero for the great fire in 64 CE and executed, are unclear. While Luke claimed that Paul was a Roman citizen, little extracanonical evidence has surfaced to support this claim. By whatever means, it is widely accepted that Paul was a part of the Roman church if not its sole and proprietary founder.<br /><br />Though some of his writings are still with us today, Paul is something of a cipher onto which the reader is able to project his or her own ideas about Christianity. Some read in his writing an obviously rabbinical understanding of the Torah and cite his teachings as the clear link of continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Others, perhaps less invested in his identity as a Jew, see his mission to preach among the Gentiles as a rejection of Judaism, both as a religion and as a culture. Classicists find in his work writings an obvious synthesis of Jewish religion and Greek philosophy. It is perhaps this stereoscopic quality to his writing that has contributed to its endurance among the canon of Western thought for nearly two thousand years since his passing.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-40995931251311449152009-10-08T21:56:00.000-07:002009-10-08T22:09:59.104-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Twelve)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7C_NeeVNI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/cWN3qu6j6VI/s1600-h/The+Ecstacy+of+Saint+Paul.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390460195214087378" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 248px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7C_NeeVNI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/cWN3qu6j6VI/s320/The+Ecstacy+of+Saint+Paul.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first nine sections of this essay can be found in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009. Parts Ten and Eleven can be found in October 2009.<br /><br /><div>Eventually, Felix was replaced by a new governor, Festus whom Luke initially portrays as especially sympathetic to the Jewish interests coming out of Jerusalem. By his account, the first matter of business that the temple brought up with Festus was that of Paul and gave the new governor an opportunity to passively allow them to kill him without bloodying his own hands. If, they suggested, Festus could convince Paul to have his trial moved to Jerusalem then they would finally be able to kill him either on route or on site, thus reinforcing yet again the idea that it was Roman authority that was keeping Paul alive. When Festus presented this option to Paul, our intrepid hero was, of course, too clever by half to fall for such chicanery, insisting that:<br /><br /><em>“I am now standing before Caesar’s court, where I ought to be tried. I have no done any wrong to the Jews, as you yourself know very well. If, however, I am guilty of doing anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die. But, if these charges brought against me by these Jews are not true, no one has the right to hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar!”</em> [25:10].<br /><br />Once Festus recognized Paul’s right as a Roman citizen to be tried in Rome under Roman law, there was no more talk about the angry Jerusalem faction trying to murder him. Instead, we are treated to a curious interlude in which Paul was brought before Festus and two of his guests, King Agrippa and his sister Bernice to again state his case and, in the process, re-tell the story of his conversion and mission. Agrippa was the king of Chalcis and the last of the rulers spawned from Herod the Great to preside over any portion of Judea. Though his kingdom was small, he had also received from Nero the right to administer the temple and appoint its high priests, including Ananias who had been trying to have Paul killed since his arrival in Jerusalem.<br /><br />Though Luke invests considerable detail into his description of the meeting between Paul, Agrippa, and Festus, the text here does little to advance what Paul has already told other, perhaps less sympathetic audiences. The purpose of this section appears to be giving Paul the opportunity to convince the man responsible for administrating the temple of the unblemished Jewish-ness of his mission. Though Festus cut Paul’s testimony off, proclaiming that his “great learning is driving you insane” [26:24], Agrippa later comments that “’this man is not doing anything that deserves death or imprisonment” [26:31] before grimly remarking that “this man could have been set free, if he had not appealed to Caesar.’” [26:32].<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7DXtup5WI/AAAAAAAAAXY/Lt8-q_QNbtY/s1600-h/Paul9.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390460616188749154" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 185px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7DXtup5WI/AAAAAAAAAXY/Lt8-q_QNbtY/s320/Paul9.jpg" border="0" /></a>As we noted before entering into this last seven-chapter section of the Acts of the Apostles, how the text is interpreted rests almost solely on the historicity of Paul’s supposed Roman citizenship. Nowhere in the text is this schism illustrated more clearly than in this passage. Beginning from the position that the claim was and is true, Paul played an elaborate game of legal chess in order to ensure that his mission and his message will eventually reach Rome. The reality that he was eventually executed by the state in 64 AD (though inarguably for reasons that had nothing to do with the nature of his teachings or beliefs) is secondary to the fact that, along the journey, he is brought before great men of ascending importance and was able proclaim the gospel of Jesus the Christ to them without being disproven or recanting his belief.<br /><br />From the other side, one can argue that the final portion of the Acts is a fiction designed to create the impression that Paul’s inevitable march towards his own death in Rome at Nero’s hands was one of God’s own design and Paul’s own choosing. Just as Jesus refused to call down a legion of angels to lift him from the cross and spare him the suffering required of the final sacrifice, so did Paul refuse to capitulate, bribe, or otherwise wrangle his way out of the sequence of events that eventually led to his martyrdom. Those searching for clear evidence for Luke’s tampering with the narrative to bolster his own themes need only recognize that he includes many details to which none inside the order, including Paul himself, would have been privy. In the passage that closes out chapter twenty-six, Luke writes:<br /><br /><em>The king rose, and with him the governor and Bernice and those sitting with them. They <strong>left the room</strong>, and while talking with one another, they said, “This man is not doing anything that deserves death or imprisonment.” Agrippa said to Festus, “This man could have been set free, if he had not appealed to Caesar.”</em> [26:30].<br /><br />While it is, of course, imminently convenient for King Agrippa to have made this observation out loud, this passage shows a clearly omnipresent narrator that does not harmonize well with the third-person narration that most of this section otherwise assumes. One could argue that if God is omniscient, then He would have been able to tell future believers of this exchange. The New Testament is, however, not typically shy about telling us when the heavens speak to humanity, not to mention which element of the Trinity was cited for authority and to whom precisely it was spoken. So, either God/Jesus/Holy Spirit eavesdropped in on this conversation, delivered it, verbatim to Luke (or some tradition from which he derived his history) and then was not credited later on for this miracle or this section, if not the entire story (if not the entire final seven chapters of the Acts) rests on remarkably shaky historical ground, undermined by literary license being exercised by its mortal author.<br /><br />Once Paul finally left Caesarea for Rome, the Acts of the Apostles makes its last, and perhaps strangest, tonal shift. Dropping deeply back into his “we” voice, Luke details the journey from Judea to Rome with a nearly compulsive attention to detail—including the names of every city that Paul visited as a prisoner along the way. From the outset, the voyage by sea is fraught with difficulty, as if to show that though God intends to allow Paul to complete his destiny, He must still show that the ship which bears him towards it is under His authority. Paul managed to survive numerous storms, a shipwreck and a lethal snake bite while cheerfully making his way towards his own doom. By the time he arrived, it is difficult to tell that he is under arrest at all as Luke informs us that at Puteoli (the last stop before Rome), “we found some brothers who invited us to spend a week with them” [28:14]. In fact, though no mention of a mission to Rome had been previously mentioned, Luke notes that “the brothers there [Rome] had heard that we were coming, and they traveled as far as the Forum of Appias and the Three Taverns to meet us” [28:15].<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7DmgMBYhI/AAAAAAAAAXg/NzZVDU180AU/s1600-h/Paul10.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390460870251864594" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7DmgMBYhI/AAAAAAAAAXg/NzZVDU180AU/s320/Paul10.jpg" border="0" /></a>Upon his arrival, Paul called together “the leaders of the Jews” [28:17] and, again, defended the legality (from a Jewish perspective of his teachings). Surprisingly, the elders of the Jewish church expressed surprise at his treatment at the hands of the temple in Jerusalem, telling him that “’we have not received any letters from Judea concerning you, and none of the brothers who has come from there has reported or said anything bad about you” [28:21]. While some are shown to accept his message, others, as their Judean brethren before him, rejected it when Paul proclaimed that “’I want you to know that God’s salvation has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will listen!’” [28:28]<br /><br /><div><div>By Luke’s account, Paul spent two years in Rome, preaching to open-minded Jews and Gentiles alike while living under house arrest. Though Luke spends enormous amounts of time in the Acts of the Apostles pointing to the inevitability of Paul’s eventual execution, no mention of it is made within the book itself—closing only with the statement that “boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ” [28:31].</div><br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7D487BuqI/AAAAAAAAAXo/4oiFkKbnfvU/s1600-h/Martyrdom.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390461187202857634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Ss7D487BuqI/AAAAAAAAAXo/4oiFkKbnfvU/s400/Martyrdom.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /><div></div></div></div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-39871596754048591482009-10-05T22:15:00.000-07:002009-10-05T22:25:15.349-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Eleven)<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsrTWW3_pKI/AAAAAAAAAXI/5rJH3fqktmg/s1600-h/Paul8.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389352285153240226" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 252px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsrTWW3_pKI/AAAAAAAAAXI/5rJH3fqktmg/s320/Paul8.jpg" border="0" /></a>Parts One through Nine of this essay can be found to the right of the screen in the archive under September 2009 and Part Ten in October 2009.<br /><div></div><br /><div>The last seven chapters of the Acts of the Apostles are the most difficult to analyze from a truly objective standpoint. Much like the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the subject of Jesus’s resurrection, there’s no good middle ground to occupy as one reads it because the answer to the question of whether or not Paul was actually a Roman citizen is ultimately an unknowable one. Entire books, in fact, have been written, both for and against, on this very topic and yet, slightly less than two thousand years later, there is no incontrovertible proof for either case. Many, however, on both sides of the argument, take what evidence they have, add a smidgen of belief or disbelief and come away with the sense that they do, in fact, have incontrovertible proof. If, for example, one believes that every word in the Bible, by virtue of its inclusion in the Bible, is absolute truth, then there is only one interpretation available. In contrast, if one believes that every word in any book must be examined from a number of perspectives (historical, contextual, literary, etc) to determine its meaning, as opposed to its literal veracity, then the question becomes more difficult (as in, nigh impossible) to resolve.<br /><br />In recounting the details of Paul’s journey from Miletus to Jerusalem and all that happened after, Luke reverts back to the “we” voice in describing the ordeal, often including almost insignificant details that give it that “You were there” quality. Luke includes the name of every city that Paul visited on the journey, like mini-shout outs to the Christian communities along the way, until, in the eighth verse of chapter twenty-one, Paul finally arrived in Caesarea. All along the way, believers begged Paul not continue on to Jerusalem, increasing that sense that something bad awaited him at the end of the road. Just in case this theme might be lost on less diligent readers, Luke recounts a meeting with the prophet Agabus that spells it right out.<br /><br /><em>Coming to us he [Agabus] took Paul’s girdle and bound his own feet and hands, and said, “Thus says the Holy Spirit, ‘So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this girdle and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.’” </em>[21:11]<br /><br />When Paul eventually arrived at Jerusalem, we are told that he was “received warmly by the brethren” but, curiously, only James is mentioned by name among them. Paul shared with them, first hand, stories of his ministerial success and, by Luke’s account, they “glorified God” [21:20]. This celebration was short-lived, however, as, they responded to Paul with a dire warning about his reputation among the Jews of Jerusalem.<br /><br /><em>“You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law, and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.”</em> [21:21, 22].<br /><br />While the prophesy from Agabus might lead the reader to believe that it is the unconverted Jews who pose Paul the greatest threat, a careful reading of that passage suggests that it is the converted who, in fact, are the danger. They suggested to Paul that he, along with four of the brethren, should engage in a week-long ritual of purification, including sacrifice at the temple, in order to exhibit his deference to the Law in a public way. Though Paul followed through on their suggestion, it was to no avail as “Jews from Asia” incited the crowd against him and, as it had so many times before, a riot broke out and Paul was nearly killed. In line with Luke’s thematic development for the second half of Acts, it was Roman authority that stepped in and prevented Paul from being murdered by the mob. Not able to make any sense of why the mob was trying to kill Paul, the tribune removed him from the temple and tried to get a sense of what was going on from him. Paul replied only that he was “a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city” [21:39] before asking that he be allowed to address the crowd that had just tried to murder him moments earlier.<br /><br />We have already analyzed the largest portion of Paul’s defense before the people in an <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-books-acts-of-apostles-part-four.html">earlier section of this essay</a>, as it recounts the story of his conversion on the road to Damascus. The people took little interest in Paul’s story, insisting that he be killed until their ruckus compelled the tribune to again remove Paul and, this time, to be “examined by scourging, to find out why they shouted thus against him” [22:24]. Just as the soldiers were about to torture the “truth” out of Paul, he, once again, dropped the bomb upon which the plausibility of much of the rest of the book rests.<br /><br /><em>“Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizen, and uncondemned?” When the centurion heard that, he went to the tribune and said to him, “What are you about to do? For this man is a Roman citizen.” So the tribune came and said to him, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” And he said, “Yes.” The tribune answered, “I bought this citizenship for a large sum.” Paul said, “But I was born a citizen.” So those who were about to examine him withdrew from him instantly; and the tribune also was afraid, for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and that he had bound him.</em> [22:25-29].<br /><br />Believing, at least according to Luke’s account, that he had inadvertently imprisoned and nearly beaten a Roman citizen without due process, the tribune called together “the chief priests and all the council” to meet with Paul and, one presumes, bring this tumultuous disagreement to an end. This meeting, while hardly bringing the controversy to a close, does reveal some interesting things not only about Paul (or what Luke wishes us to believe about Paul) but also the fault lines along which the factions of the temple were arrayed. Paul astutely observed that as some of those who stood in judgment over him were Pharisees while others were Sadducees and exploited the differences between them to break up the united front that they all once represented against him. With the council unable to reach a decision in concord in regards to Paul’s claims, the tribune again orders Paul back to the barracks where he could be protected by Roman authority. Luke also writes that Paul received a message from the Lord, saying “’Take courage for as you have testified about me at Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also at Rome’” [23:11]. Though Luke (and presumably Paul before him) attributes this message to the Lord, it is not included among those words of Christ printed in red to indicate the divinity of their source.<br /><br />With the religious authority at Jerusalem effectively deadlocked, a plot arose among the Jews to kill Paul. Paul’s nephew caught wind of this plot and, once again, Roman authority intervenes to remove Paul from Jerusalem to Caesarea, the Roman seat of governance, in order to protect his life. With this move, Paul’s fate passes from the hands of the unnamed tribune into those of the governor, Felix who, in turn, summoned those who would accuse Paul to a special session at Caesarea to determine his guilt or innocence. This time, Paul’s accusers are named as Ananias, the high priest, along with “some elders and a spokesman, one Tertullus” [24:1]. After having dispensed with the formal niceties of sucking up to Roman law, they laid out an arguably weak case against Paul, accusing him of being “an agitator among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” [24:5] and of having profaned the temple. Rather than offering evidence of these claims, they insisted that “by examining him yourself you will be able to learn from him about everything of which we accuse him” [24:8].<br /><br />Though it is clear from Luke’s writing that Paul considered himself and other Christians to be believers in something distinct from traditional Judaism, he played the part of the innocent shrewdly in his own defense.<br /><br /><em>This I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing in everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets, having a hope in God which these themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust…Now after some years, I came to bring to my nation alms and offerings. As I was doing this, they found me purified in the temple, without any crowd or tumult. But some Jews from Asia—they ought to be here before you and to make an accusation, if they have anything against me. Or else let these men themselves say what wrongdoing they found when I stood before the council, except this one thing which I cried out while standing among them, ‘With respect to the resurrection of the dead I am on trial before you this day</em>.<em>’”</em> [24:14-21]</div><br /><div>Felix, unlike the tribune before him, is said to have “a rather accurate knowledge of the Way” [24:22] and, rather than settling the matter at once, had Paul put under what might be called loose arrest. While waiting for a tribune named Lysias to arrive, Felix is said to have summoned Paul a second time to plead his case in private. Luke also suggests that this was Felix’s not-so-subtle way of letting Paul know that if he would but bribe him adequately, that this whole matter might disappear overnight. In the course of just a few verses, two years pass and Felix was replaced by another governor, Festus, while Paul languished in legal limbo.</div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-79457053542264363762009-10-01T21:36:00.000-07:002009-10-01T21:43:01.817-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Ten)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsWEGsU-ZiI/AAAAAAAAAXA/rpknJLVkxek/s1600-h/Paul_of_Tarsus.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387857779731883554" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 239px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsWEGsU-ZiI/AAAAAAAAAXA/rpknJLVkxek/s320/Paul_of_Tarsus.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>Parts 1-9 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>In some ways, Paul’s ministry at Ephesus followed the all-too familiar contour of beginning in the synagogue where he angered the devout Jews and peeled off followers from among the God-fearing Gentiles until he (symbolically or not) abandoned the Jewish audiences and taught only among the Gentiles. However, Luke also offers stark contrasts between Paul’s mission and that he shared before with Barnabas. First, as he had before at Corinth, Paul spends a good deal of time (over two years) in Ephesus. The early strategy of raising a ruckus, establishing a seedling church, and then get beat up or run out of town is replaced by another; namely, preaching in the synagogues until resistance reaches a certain level and then moving the ministry in the home of well-placed citizens in the city that can provide legal and social protection while deeply planting the teaching of the church into those followers over a longer period of time.<br /><br />Luke emphasizes a more supernatural side of Paul’s ministry during his time in Ephesus. While this trend continues to surface as Paul’s ministry moves on from Ephesus, Luke’s description of some of his time there offers a tantalizing glimpse at the effect of Paul’s residence there over a longer period of time.<br /><br /><em>God did extraordinary miracles through Paul. Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon possessed…The evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know and Paul I know about, but who are you?” Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor.</em> [19:11-13,15-17]<br /><br />Neither of these stories highlight Paul’s own supernatural agency but more how people’s impression of him opened up the possibility of miracles through faith. The simplest explanation for this is that Paul’s reputation, in some cases, may have exceeded the reach of his own teachings and encouraged people on the outer ring of the circle of believers to project their own ideas and beliefs on to him. This could be and was only possible because Paul spent a considerable amount of time among the people of Ephesus and built up a certain cult of personality that had been lacking in his early missionary efforts.<br /><br />After his successes at Ephesus, Paul decided that it was time to head back to Jerusalem, by way of Macedonia and Achaia. Before his departure, the obligatory riot against the believers there had to erupt but this time, the disturbance was instigated not by unconverted Jews but by the idols makers of the city who saw Paul’s teachings as dangerous to the future durability of the vocation. The details that Luke includes in the story are notable in their departure from nearly every other act of mob violence that had occurred up to that point. Paul’s disciples are dragged into the public theater and threatened. But, as Luke writes:<br /><br /><em>Paul wanted to appear before the crowd but his disciples would not let him. Even some of officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater.</em> [19:30,31]<br /><br />Most notably, Paul is increasingly shown as having friends in high places who can protect him from these mobs. In the end, it was not Paul but “the city clerk” [19:35] who calmed the Ephesians and not by the authority of God, but by the authority of Law, specifically Roman law.<br /><br /><em>"If then, Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open and there are proconsuls…As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today’s events, In that case we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it."</em> [19:38,40]<br /><br />Thus, indirectly, Paul is shown to be under the protection of Roman law and, more importantly, the Gentiles are portrayed as being intrinsically more reasonable than the “Jews” who mobbed up on Paul every chance they got.<br /><br />After leaving Ephesus, Paul returned to Macedonia (Philippi) and, after spending some time “speaking many words of encouragement to the people” [20:2], he then moved on to Greece. His plans to sail to Syria were stifled “because the Jews made a plot against him” and so he returned to Macedonia again, this time collecting disciples to join him in his journey and, in time, they all met in Troas.<br /><br />It is at this point that Luke resurrects the “we” voice in discussing their travels and, as before, the story of Paul’s journey makes an uncharacteristic shift towards the supernatural with Paul as the agent rather than merely the inspiration. Luke tells the story of Eutychus, a young believer in Troas, who, while listening to Paul’s teaching, fell asleep and, inconveniently, out of a third story window to the ground below. Though Eutychus “was picked up dead,” Paul rushed to him and, embracing the young man, cried out, “’Don’t be alarmed…he’s alive!’” [20:10]. While less dramatic than Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after having been buried for some period of time, this is the first time that Paul is shown to raise the dead and, factual or not, strengthens the narrative ties that link Paul’s march toward Jerusalem with that of Jesus before him.<br /><br />When Paul left Troas, he made a meandering journey from there to Miletus and then summoned the elders of the church at Ephesus to join him for a final meeting before he left for Jerusalem. This meeting is momentous in the Acts of the Apostles as it draws the book’s second act, as it were, to a close. Pragmatically, it is notable that Paul called for the elders of Ephesus as it shows that this was the congregation he considered to be his own or, more generously, the congregation of which he thought of himself most a member. His message to them can, itself, be broken into three parts: a declaration of his works among them, a prophecy of his impending arrest and eventual execution, and a moving recognition that this would likely be the last time they were see one another. The details of these speeches reveal not only a great deal about Paul’s ministry but also what elements of it Luke wants us to remember as the book moves into its final section.<br /><br /><em>I served the Lord with great humility and with tears, although I was severely tested by the plots of the Jews...I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.</em> [20:19,21]<br /><br /><em>And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me.</em> [20:22,23]<br /><br /><em>Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom will ever see me again…Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.</em> [20:25,34]</div><br /><div><br />These passages bear all the hallmarks of a transition from one period into the next, careful recapitulating the important themes of Paul’s second mission while heightening the reader’s anticipation of what comes next. It should come as little surprise that the chapters following exhibit a marked shift in tone with the establishment of new formulas and altered perspectives and voices from which the story is narrated.</div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-27750051367800213842009-09-28T22:31:00.000-07:002009-09-28T22:49:07.405-07:00Great Books: Acts of the Apostles (Part Nine)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGcYFBTrgI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/QtsfzAC0chg/s1600-h/Paul7.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386758566790278658" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 240px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGcYFBTrgI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/QtsfzAC0chg/s320/Paul7.jpg" border="0" /></a>Parts 1-8 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009.<br /><br />After leaving Philippi, Paul and Silas traveled to Thessalonica where Luke tells us that “there was a Jewish synagogue” [17:1] in contrast with Philippi where there was none. The sequence of events upon their arrival is so familiar to us by now that the scant specifics that Luke shares about Paul’s message to the Thessalonians is of more interest than the eventual “Jewish” mob that forms and chases them out of town by threat of violence. They quickly moved on to Berea where Luke tells us that the people “were of more noble character than the Thessalonians” [17:11] and were more receptive to, at least, debating with Paul over the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity. Like Derbe before it (on Barnabas and Paul’s initial mission trip), violence is only shown to erupt when “Jews in Thessalonica heard that Paul was preaching the word of God at Berea” [17:13] and again turned “the crowds” against him. While no specific act of violence is described (again in contrast to previous and similar episodes), the outcome is novel enough to bear examination.<br /><br />We’ll set up this analysis with the observation that after Paul and Silas are forcibly ejected from Philippi, Luke drops the “we” phrasing of Paul’s movements that began after the mission into Macedonia.<br /><br /><em>After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.</em> [16:10]<br /><br /><em>When they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue.</em> [17:1]<br /><br />If we are to place some meaning in Luke’s specific usage of both voices, then it is reasonable to wonder if “Luke” wasn’t left behind in Philippi, perhaps as a teacher to help grow the church seeded there. This casts inevitable doubt on the absolute historicity of those events upon which he is reporting but is not a primary witness. The predictable sequence of events in each new place that Paul visits (right down to the variations on the basic theme that occurs first in Derbe and then reenacted at Berea) is suggestive that Luke is more interested in forming an archetype that journalistic reportage anyway. Moreover, as we will see once Paul begins his inexorable journey towards Rome, when Luke does include himself by the usage of the “we” voice, the story does not become more plausible but, in fact, more laden with the patina of myth-making as already evidenced by Silas and Paul’s miraculous non-escape from prison and declaration of Roman citizenship at Philippi.<br /><br />It is with this spirit of genial skepticism about historicity that we then re-engage Luke’s narrative. After the unruly Thessalonian Jews had riled up the Bereans against Paul’s teaching, Luke writes that, “the brothers immediately sent Paul to the coast, but Silas and Timothy stayed at Berea. The men who accompanied Paul brought him to Athens and then left with instructions for Silas and Timothy to join him as soon as possible” [17:14,15]. With no other information about who these “brothers” might have been, the simplest explanation is that it was the newly converted at Berea who, in fact, paid for Paul’s passage to the coast. This might also explain why Silas and Timothy are left behind and told only to join him in Athens as soon as they could. With no specific act of violence described to propel Paul from the city, we might even imagine him frustrated with the slow progress of this mission (in contrast to that he shared with Barnabas) and, perhaps, his relative lack of financing. How severe was the schism that arose between Paul and Barnabas? Did it effect his ability to count upon the church at Antioch to bankroll both his and Barnabas’s mission to Cyprus (of which we hear absolutely nothing) with equal vigor?<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdAvf47eI/AAAAAAAAAWg/NT74zFPpe1Q/s1600-h/Paul_Preaching_in_Athens.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386759265387605474" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 249px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdAvf47eI/AAAAAAAAAWg/NT74zFPpe1Q/s320/Paul_Preaching_in_Athens.jpg" border="0" /></a>Upon Paul’s arrival in Athens, we run into a story unit that is strangely asymmetrical in comparison to most others in the Acts. Unsurprisingly, Paul was “distressed to see that the city was full of idols” [17:16] but his usual act of preaching the gospel in the synagogues is met is not met by the usual histrionic hostility that accompanies nearly every other mission story. In fact, Luke ignores Paul’s mission to the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles altogether and focuses, instead, on Paul’s debates with philosophers in the marketplace and, ultimately, in the Areopagus in Athens. The Areopagus was, in fact, a court for trying certain kinds of legal cases in the city, but at no point does Luke suggest that Paul is on trial for anything. The dialogue between Paul and the sages of Athens is presented as more of an exchange of information between equals as Luke writes that:<br /><br /><em>Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas)</em> [17:21]<br /><br />In Paul’s response, though embroidered with some sharp writing, there is exactly one idea that would have represented any meaningful departure from what Jews had been saying in Athens for a long time prior to Paul’s visit. At the end of a speech about the nature of God, Paul adds that, “He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead” [17:31] though he only refers to the object of this resurrection only as “the man he has appointed” to “judge the world with justice” [17:31]. Though Luke does name a few believers gained from this trip, no mention is made about seeding a church or any meaningful outbreak of violence. More importantly, Paul leaves Athens before Silas and Timothy’s arrival, begging the question of whether (in a city of Athens’ size, jammed to the walls with philosophers, magicians, Jews, atheists, and every other imaginable variety of believers in something), Paul found little ground on which to plant the faith and elected to move on to more fertile soil.<br /><br />Now separated from his traveling companions, Paul made his way to Corinth where he threw his lot in with a Jewish couple named Aquila and Priscilla who had recently emigrated to the region from Rome. If we had any doubts about the solvency of Paul’s missionary efforts at this point, Luke essentially confirms it in the opening verses of chapter eighteen when he writes that “Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them” [18:2,3]. This is the first time in the Acts of the Apostles that we hear of Paul engaging in manual labor to earn his keep though it is feasible he was making tents in Tarsus when Barnabas brought him back into the ministry. After an unspecified amount of time, Silas and Timothy finally arrived to join him, Paul is said to have “devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” [18:5]. Luke indicates that Silas and Timothy came to Paul from Macedonia, not Berea where he left them. Perhaps their delay in joining Paul was due to a trip to the church at Philippi to secure fresh funding for their mission?<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdNzcxyyI/AAAAAAAAAWo/oR9BmL6Sx3A/s1600-h/Paul-proconsul_corinth.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386759489786596130" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 244px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdNzcxyyI/AAAAAAAAAWo/oR9BmL6Sx3A/s320/Paul-proconsul_corinth.jpg" border="0" /></a>At first, the course of events in Corinth follow the standard Pauline form. Paul began preaching in the synagogue. The unconverted Jews grew angry until Paul disavowed them, declaring that their “blood be on your own heads! I am clear of my responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles’” [18:6]. Allied with a Gentile named Titius Justus (notice the conspicuously Roman name), Paul established a long-term church in Corinth, spending over a year and a half, by Luke’s account, teaching there. At some point, the inevitable Jewish uprising against him landed him in the court of proconsul Gallio on a charge of “persuading people to worship God in ways contrary to the law,” by which we can presume they meant the law of Rome and not the law of the temple. But, before Paul can even defend himself, Gallio dismissed the case as frivolous. In a rare reversal of fortunes, it is the ruler of the synagogue, Sosthenes, who is taken out in front of the court and beaten. Whatever the actual course of events may have been, it is probably not without reason that Luke chooses Corinth to indicate Paul vindication by Roman authority against the Jews that perpetually harassed him.<br /><br />With this victory under his belt after a longish string of disappointments, Paul sailed, along with Aquila and Priscilla to Ephesus. Though he entered the synagogue there for his usual round of debates, he abruptly left Aquila and Priscilla behind there in Ephesus and sailed, himself, on to Caesarea. Luke is very cagey in the details on this visit, saying only that he “went up and greeted the church, and then he went down to Antioch” [18:22]. By the church it is unclear if Luke means a church at Caesarea or, more likely, the elders in Jerusalem. No other detail is given. Nor does Paul’s visit to Antioch, an auspicious occasion in returning to the place from whence his mission set sail, earn more than a mention before he is off again, “strengthening” the churches in Galatia and Phrygia (from his first mission with Barnabus).<br /><br />Back in Ephesus, Aquila and Priscilla must have been doing some church building of their own for Luke writes that “a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus” who “had been instructed in the way of the Lord” [18:24,25]. This sudden appearance of a charismatic teacher, schooled outside of Barnabas and Paul’s sphere of influence but not necessarily that of the Judean sect, provides some unexpected details about the contrast between these two early strains of Christian orthodoxy.<br /><br /><em>He spoke with a great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.</em> [18:25,26]<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGcsmoLK_I/AAAAAAAAAWY/JDAdcdQBiJc/s1600-h/Paul+teaching.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386758919409052658" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 204px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGcsmoLK_I/AAAAAAAAAWY/JDAdcdQBiJc/s320/Paul+teaching.jpg" border="0" /></a>The obvious question is, how might a ministry based on the “baptism of John” have differed from the strain of Christianity that the new church at Corinth was embracing? Luke is kind enough to illustrate this difference in the opening verses of the following chapter as Paul returned to the Ephesus, only to find new believers, presumably won over to the faith by Apollos, in need of further instruction.<br /><br /><em>He found some disciples and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?” “John’s baptism,” the replied. Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.</em> [19:1-7] <div><div><br /></div><div>This account makes it sound like that there was an apocalyptic messianic tradition centered on John the Baptist that survived his death and had spread, perhaps in tandem with that of Jesus of Nazareth. It is one of the few instances where Paul is shown as a baptizer into the faith as opposed to a teacher of the gospel and, likewise, one of the only accounts of Paul presiding over the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, though the early Judean church had been very specific about the two-tiered initiation of baptism and then indwelling, Luke seems to indicate that the baptism itself was the catalyst for the Holy Spirit to fill these well-meaning disciples.</div></div><div></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Paul's Second Mission</span></strong><br /></div><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdtTr68VI/AAAAAAAAAW4/EkGmhh-wtoI/s1600-h/Mission2map.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386760031015989586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 337px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SsGdtTr68VI/AAAAAAAAAW4/EkGmhh-wtoI/s400/Mission2map.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Click to enlarge</span></strong><br /></div><div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-79722782616252285832009-09-24T22:47:00.000-07:002009-09-24T22:59:26.972-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Eight)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxZ4hUqU-I/AAAAAAAAAGM/psoUGcEKoDw/s1600-h/Paul6.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385278081980847074" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 234px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxZ4hUqU-I/AAAAAAAAAGM/psoUGcEKoDw/s320/Paul6.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Parts 1-7 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September 2009.<br /><br />With the prickly circumcision issue resolved, Paul and Barnabas’s presence was not so urgently required at the church in Antioch. Even as Paul and Barnabas began planning a trip to revisit the churches they had seeded previously, a schism suddenly appeared between them. Barnabas insisted they take his cousin, John Mark (who had bailed on them in Perga the first time) but Paul wasn’t having any part of it. So, with no other explanation, they “parted company” with Barnabas returning to Cyprus with John Mark and Paul taking Silas along with him on a tour of the new churches.<br /><br />At Lystra, Paul was introduced to another young disciple, Timothy who was, likewise, selected to continue on with him and Silas. Luke adds in a confusing detail here that Timothy was born of a Jewish mother but a Greek father and, as such, was not circumcised. Before he is allowed to join the wandering ministry, Timothy was circumcised by Paul. This seems odd based on all the energy that Paul had expended to justify the faith of uncircumcised Gentiles and now, he insisted on Timothy’s adherence to the Law. Perhaps his motive was simply pragmatic. He needed Jews to convert Gentiles away from attending the synagogue. Uncircumcised, Timothy was a converted Gentile. Circumcised, he was a converted Jew.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxaZwTlJlI/AAAAAAAAAGc/sE_jE3CkqJs/s1600-h/Timothy.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385278652938528338" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 236px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxaZwTlJlI/AAAAAAAAAGc/sE_jE3CkqJs/s320/Timothy.jpg" border="0" /></a>About six verses into the sixteenth chapter, strange things start happening in the Acts of the Apostles in both a narrative and structural sense. Before moving ahead to describe the extent of these changes, it will be valuable to briefly reconsider what types of information it has delivered up to this point. The book opens with Jesus and the apostles in the forty day period after the Resurrection but prior to the Ascension. For several chapters after, it is a story about the early church in Jerusalem and the persecution that they eventually suffered at the hands of the temple authorities. With Stephen’s death, the church decentralizes with only the Twelve Witnesses remaining in Jerusalem while the elect among the converted fanning out through Judea, Galilee, Samaria and Syria to spread the message. Eventually, even Peter leaves Jerusalem to shore up support for the Nazarene sect in the outlying areas of its influence. In so doing, he sets a precedent for converting Gentiles into the tradition.<br /><br />As early as Stephen’s murder, Saul (Paul) is introduced as a character and, for the first half of the book, functions as a supporting actor rather than a principal player. After being threatened with murder by pretty much anyone he spoke to after his conversion, Paul is sent to Tarsus with no recognizable orders beyond, “Don’t come back.” Later, it is Barnabas who goes to Tarsus, retrieves Paul from his exile and, together, they found a church in Antioch. One can reasonably extract from the subtext that it is the financial intervention of that church (which has yet to undergo any of the persecutions that have plagued the Jerusalem church almost since its inception) that saves Peter from execution at Herod’s hands. Whether the balance of power within the church truly did so or not, the focus of the Acts of the Apostles undoubtedly shifts to Antioch from that point forward. It details the Acts of Paul and Barnabas with almost no interest for what may or may not be happening in Judea until someone from the “old school” shows up and starts condemning folk. As long as Barnabas and Paul were working together (with Barnabas shown if begrudgingly in the text as the dominant partner), there was still a continuity tying the old church and the younger ones together. After their schism, Paul takes Silas, also from the original sect but positioned far lower in the hierarchy than Barnabas, on as a traveling companion but there is no longer any doubt about who is in charge. In short, Acts has gone from being a story about the early church after Jesus’s ascension to a narrative about what Paul did.<br /><br />Nowhere is this transition made more clear than in the early portion of chapter nine where Luke writes that:<br /><br /><em>Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia to help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.</em> [16:6-10]<br /><br />Buried within that very matter-of-factly written passage is no less than three miracles of a grand order by the standards of the early chapters of Acts. First, the Holy Spirit “kept” them from moving the ministry into Asia. Second, the spirit of Jesus wouldn’t let them go into Bithynia and lastly, Paul had a clairvoyant vision of needy souls in Macedonia. Luke, however, provides no tactile details about these miracles (in stark contrast to Peter’s vision about the Gentiles for example) but speaks as if things of this nature were happening everyday and, thus, not worth cataloguing in any depth.<br /><br />More importantly to the contour of the narrative, Luke strikes that unmistakable “we” in the final line and it sticks for long portions of the book up through its end. While some have argued that this was a convention of travelogues of the period, his use of the first-person plural is so pervasive as to seem deliberate which, in itself, raises new questions. Who is we? While wandering around from Asia Minor, did Paul come in contact with Luke, the supposed author of this history? If so, are we to suppose that what follows is more accurate than what came before as Luke was en eyewitness rather than a collator of historical traditions? The answer (which will likely never be known) becomes urgent as the historical plausibility of what unfolded next becomes more strained.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxamhT5PHI/AAAAAAAAAGk/TEN-z6Aldl0/s1600-h/Baptismal+at+Philippi.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385278872251612274" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_yyB5uiPaoLs/SrxamhT5PHI/AAAAAAAAAGk/TEN-z6Aldl0/s320/Baptismal+at+Philippi.jpg" border="0" /></a>The journey from Asia Minor to an area north of the mainland of Greece began more calmly than most of Paul’s missionary jaunts. Entering the city of Philippi, Paul and his followers executed Jesus’s original mission strategy to the letter, locating one friendly ear (in this case “a woman named Lydia…who was a worshipper of God” [16:14]) and setting up shop in her house to reach out to potential converts. Luke is careful to note that, on the Sabbath, Paul and the companions do not go to the Synagogue (which Philippi lacked) to preach but, instead, “outside the city gate to a river, where we expected to find a place of prayer” [16:13].<br /><br />Nonetheless, on the way to the river, Paul was confronted numerous times by “a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future” who insisted on following behind them, proclaiming that, “’These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.’” [16:16,17]. Luke tells us that Paul “became so troubled” that he turned around and exorcised the demon of prophesy from her in the name of Christ. Before we get to the ramifications of his actions, let’s consider for a moment what Luke is already telling us. Paul is trying to keep a low profile and is not, as he had in Asia Minor, storming into the strongholds of Jewish authority and declaring them all unclean sinners. Is Paul troubled because there is a demon inside the woman or because she is broadcasting information that he would prefer to transmit from person-to-person?<br /><br />After the spirit had been exorcised from the young girl, her owners dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace, presumably to extract compensation for the loss of revenue her “cleansing” would represent to them. Predictably enough, “the crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them stripped and beaten” [16:22]. That night, as the pair sang hymns to the Lord in their cells, a great earthquake is said to have struck and the door to freedom popped open even as their chains were miraculously removed. When their jailer saw that the jail could no longer hold them, he began to commit suicide at the loss of his prisoners. Before he could, however, Paul told him they were all still there, to which the jailor responded by falling to his knees and asking them, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” [16:30].<br /><br />Again, it is fruitless to argue with miracles. Whether factually accurate or merely suggestive of less-overt levers of power being manipulated, this is, in fact, the third jail break in the Acts of the Apostles and, by this point, if someone had suggested that there was now an angel with the full time position of pulling these jobs, no one would have batted an eye. The response from the authorities the following day, however, does suggest that in the interim something beyond a jail break that never actually went down had softened their position against the disciples.<br /><br /><em>When it was daylight, the magistrates sent their officers to the jailer with the order: “Release those men.” The jailer told Paul, “The magistrates have ordered that you and Silas be released. Now you can leave. Go in peace.”</em> [16:35]<br /><br />In light of Paul’s track record preaching among the unconverted, his treatment at Philippi was mild. He got a flogging and spent half the night in stocks but it is not merely the relative timidity of the indignities he suffered that makes his response to those magistrates so jaw-droppingly game-changing.<br /><br /><em>Paul said to the officers, “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”</em> [16:37]<br /><br />Paul, a Roman citizen? To drop that into the story, some twelve chapters after his character’s introduction is the narrative equivalent of Jesus neglecting to mention he was Jew until he was about set to travel into Jerusalem. As so much of what unfolds from this point forward hinges on the question of Paul’s claim to be a Roman citizen, it actually skews one’s interpretation of the rest of the Acts of the Apostles along three lines of critical inquiry: Did Paul ever really claim to be a Roman citizen or was that a later invention? If Paul did claim to be a Roman citizen, was it true? If Paul was a Roman citizen, why did he wait until Philippi to mention it?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-63048140044193306892009-09-22T23:25:00.000-07:002009-09-22T23:50:01.996-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Seven)<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnAOemockI/AAAAAAAAAVY/U6HtLFo6evc/s1600-h/Paul5.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384546184463938114" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 231px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnAOemockI/AAAAAAAAAVY/U6HtLFo6evc/s320/Paul5.jpg" border="0" /></a> Parts 1-6 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009.<br /><br />After their early success at Paphos, Paul and Barnabas sailed northward to Perga, a coastal city in the region of Pamphylia. Here, the disciple John (known as Mark) mysteriously drops out of the mission and returns to Jerusalem. Luke spends only one dependent clause on the event but it figures so prominently later in the book, that it offers cause to pause and wonder why. Perhaps he was sent by the church in Judea to report on the Gentile mission as it unfolded and what he had seen in Antioch and Paphos had given him some unspecified cause for concern? Maybe he didn’t do well with sea travel?<br /><br />Whatever the reason, Paul and Barnabas traveled northward from Perga to Pisidian Antioch (not to be confused with the other Antioch where the home church remained). Upon their arrival, their mission seemed at first quite peaceful. Attending the Synagogue on the Sabbath, they were invited to offer a “message of encouragement for the people” [13:15]. It is notably Paul, not Barnabas who stands to proclaim the name of Christ. Opening with a historical narrative about the Jewish people that would have been well familiar to the “Men of Israel and Gentiles who worship God” [13:16] that were his audience, Paul then unveiled his good news about Jesus.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnAkQ6wiiI/AAAAAAAAAVg/JMNNTnaNSM4/s1600-h/Paul+Preaching2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384546558747380258" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 194px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnAkQ6wiiI/AAAAAAAAAVg/JMNNTnaNSM4/s320/Paul+Preaching2.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>Brothers, children of Abraham, and you God-fearing Gentiles, it is to us that the message of salvation had been sent. The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath…We tell you the good news: What God has promised our fathers he has fulfilled for us, their children by raising up Jesus…Therefore my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses.</em> [13:26,27,32,38,39]<br /><br />According to Luke’s account, the sermon as a big hit and they were invited back the following week to speak again on the redemption from sin offered through Jesus’s name. When the Sabbath rolled around, Luke tells us that “when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and talked abusively against what Paul and Barnabas were saying.” [13:45]. Just a few verses earlier, we are told that “many of the Jews and devout converts to Judaism” were inspired by Paul’s message but, by verse forty-five, it is the “Jews” (from which we may infer, Jews who didn’t think the Law was in need of an update) who rejected them.<br /><br />To these critics, Paul fired back that “we had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.” [13:46]. While the Gentiles are described as “glad and honored” [13:48] to have received this less-exacting invitation into the faith than the more orthodox Jews offered, the unconverted appealed to the “God-fearing women of high standing and the leading men in the city” [13:50] to expel Paul and Barnabas from the city. Echoing Jesus’s instruction to the disciples, the duo “shook the dust from their feet in protest against them” [13:51] and left. It bears mentioning that when Jesus spoke of shaking the dust from one’s shoes in the Gospel According to Matthew, it had a very specific purpose and meaning.<br /><br /><em>If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off of your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment that for that town.</em> [Matthew, 10:14,15].<br /><br />By this tradition, Pisidian Antioch should have become a villa non grata so it is curious to note that, near the end of their mission together, Paul and Barnabas are listed as having swung through again to strengthen “the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to “the faith” [Acts 14:21].<br /><br />Regardless, upon leaving the city, the pair traveled southeast to the city of Iconium where a truncated version of the events in Antioch before it unfolded. They arrived, preached the gospel, won some believers until “a plot afoot among the Gentiles and Jews…to mistreat them and stone them” [14:5] became known and they were, again, forced to flee. Continuing along the same southeasterly vector, they arrived at the city of Lystra where entirely different but equally catastrophic occurred.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnA3RgID0I/AAAAAAAAAVo/xz9ki0IdAto/s1600-h/Paul_and_Barnabas_at_Lystra.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384546885321625410" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 267px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnA3RgID0I/AAAAAAAAAVo/xz9ki0IdAto/s320/Paul_and_Barnabas_at_Lystra.jpg" border="0" /></a>As Paul was teaching (we presume in the Synagogue as before), he became aware of a man in the audience who was unable to walk that he “saw had the faith to be healed” [14:9]. Paul cried out to him, “’Stand up on your feet!’ At that, the man jumped up and began to walk” [14:10]. Now this got the folks in Lystra all worked up and their newfound interest in Judaism of whatever type was momentarily forgotten as they decided amongst themselves that Zeus and Hermes (Barnabas and Paul respectively) had come to visit them in human form. It is noteworthy that while Barnabas hasn’t been quoted as saying anything of merit beyond recommending Paul as a disciple to the church immediately after his conversion, he is portrayed inadvertently here as still being Paul’s superior.<br /><br />While the duo react in horror to this crowd of God-fearing Gentiles trying to sacrifice to them, a group of Jews, now massing from places to which the mission had already been like Pisidian Antioch and Iconium came in and turned an even larger crowd against Paul and Barnabus. Their fortune reversed instantly as that crowd, “stoned Paul and dragged him outside of the city thinking he was dead” [14:19]. Fortunately for Paul and his companions, he was only mostly dead and eventually he got up and returned to the city, presumably in secret, before leaving for the city of Derbe where Luke reports that they “preached the good news…and won a large number of disciples.” [14:21].<br /><br />Luke writes that, after Derbe, Paul and Barnabus then retraced their steps back through the very cities in which they had nearly been killed. Their mission this time, though, seems to be quite different than before as they “appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord in whom they had put their trust” [14:23]. These visits were no doubt enacted quietly and without the public ruckuses that had characterized their first contact with each new city. Luke makes no mention of synagogues in this passage and uses the word, ‘church’ for the first time in conjunction with some place other than Antioch. After seeding these new churches, the weary duo turned themselves back towards Antioch, their home away from Jerusalem.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnBHy64g5I/AAAAAAAAAVw/q5RwLEr3bnI/s1600-h/Antioch2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384547169170129810" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 251px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnBHy64g5I/AAAAAAAAAVw/q5RwLEr3bnI/s320/Antioch2.jpg" border="0" /></a>While they were gone from Antioch, elders had been dispatched from Jerusalem to bring the church in line with the teachings of the original sect in Judea and Galilee and the news was anything but good. In order to be considered fully converted, the Gentiles of Antioch were told that “’Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved’” [15:1]. One can only imagine Paul and Barnabus’s horror in returning from converting a huge mass of Gentiles to the faith to hear their own followers quaking at the idea that they had to be circumcised. That one dictate of the Law is no doubt what kept so many of those God-fearing Gentiles now eager to become Christians instead from becoming Jews in the first place. No doubt concerned for the validity of those new churches they had risked life and limb to establish, they headed to Jerusalem to settle this dispute with the central authority of the church.<br /><br />While we must assume that some large faction of the Judean church was objecting to the conversion of uncircumcised Gentiles, what debate Luke records at the Council in Jerusalem is mostly sympathetic to Paul and Barnabas. Only one mention is made of “some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees” [15:5] who argued against them. This description is interesting though because it supports the idea that the Pharisaic opposition to Jesus’s mission was based largely in the fact that his message appealed to its traditional base and he was, in effect, splintering their power among the people to the benefit of their oppositional party, the Sadducees. Now, maybe ten years later, we see the Nazarene sect intermingled with those same elements, suggesting that at least some of the original believers still considered themselves to be law-abiding Jews first and disciples of Jesus the Resurrected Christ second.<br /><br />Based on Peter’s vision regarding the conversion of Gentiles and the support of key members of the inner circle, the Council resolved the circumcision question with a surprising and simple mandate for potential believers to follow. Captured in letter form within the Acts of the Apostles, their message for the Antioch church read:<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnBnXe0ceI/AAAAAAAAAV4/X9914hdjyf0/s1600-h/Paul+Preaching.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384547711560479202" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnBnXe0ceI/AAAAAAAAAV4/X9914hdjyf0/s320/Paul+Preaching.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friend Barnabas and Paul—men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.</em> [15:24-29]<br /><br /><div>There should be little doubt that this came as no small relief to the body of believers already deeply invested into the church at Antioch and, we are told, “the people read it and were glad for its encouraging message” [15:31]. Judas and Silas remained for an unspecified period of time and then “were sent off by the brothers with the blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them” [15:33] though Silas, we’ll soon discover, was likely not among those who returned. Perhaps it is too cynical to assume that “the blessing of peace” might be a metaphor for “a big wad of cash” not unlike the one that they had sent when prophesies of famine had inspired a similar love offering. Perhaps it was also the promise of this “blessing” that settled the circumcision issue so quickly in the Gentiles favor.</div><div><br /><strong></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong>Barnabas and Paul's Mission (click to enlarge)</strong></div><br /><p align="left"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnCDKvyf2I/AAAAAAAAAWI/_2hmGuv1s9Y/s1600-h/Pauls+Mission.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384548189178330978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 337px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrnCDKvyf2I/AAAAAAAAAWI/_2hmGuv1s9Y/s400/Pauls+Mission.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />1. Jerusalem</p><p align="left">2. Tarsus, Paul's home.</p><p align="left">3. Antioch, site of the first Christian church.</p><p align="left">4. Paphos of Cyprus, Barnabas's home.</p><p align="left">5. Perga, important port city in the region of Pamphylia. John Mark returns to Jerusalem.</p><p align="left">6. Pisidian Antioch</p><p align="left">7. Iconium</p><p align="left">8. Lystra and Derbe.</p>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-15520500251916282652009-09-20T21:56:00.000-07:002009-09-22T22:57:48.406-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Six)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcIGyOnHhI/AAAAAAAAAUw/dQ-RYZ4Hjvs/s1600-h/PeterPaul.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383780792200011282" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 241px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcIGyOnHhI/AAAAAAAAAUw/dQ-RYZ4Hjvs/s320/PeterPaul.jpg" border="0" /></a> Parts 1-5 of this essay can be accessed from the archive on the right of the screen under September 2009.<br /><br />As Saul and Barnabas returned to Judea with the love offering from the church at Antioch, Herod Antipas began seizing members of the sect for imprisonment and eventual execution. It is worth noting that the last few times we’ve seen Peter, it’s been back in Galilee. While he has escaped the persecution of the temple in Judea, that places him directly back in Antipas’ kingdom and, in some ways, subject to more danger than the temple might present as they had to work in concert with Roman authority. After executing James, Antipas was soundly praised by the non-converted Jews and, in response, he had Peter arrested as well. Luke is uncharacteristically vague about the exact timeline here. By placing Peter's arrest directly after the story about Saul and Barnabas bringing the money to Judea, his implication seems to be that the events with Peter unfolded well after their arrival. He ambiguously opens that section though, writing that, “it was about this same time” [12:1] that Herod began his arrests. Is it possible that Agabus’s prophesy that brought them running with money collected from the Antioch church was a veiled plea for money to help James and, perhaps, Peter himself?<br /><br />According the Luke’s account, of course, it turns out that Peter didn’t need any help escaping from prison. Despite the heavy guard placed to watch Peter (who already had a reputation for miraculous escapes from jail), he is nonetheless visited on the day before his trial (and likely execution) by an angel of the Lord who helps him make his escape.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcIkgC-g1I/AAAAAAAAAU4/3zCTSJZYWgU/s1600-h/St__Peter_Being_Freed_from_Prison.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383781302715450194" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 170px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcIkgC-g1I/AAAAAAAAAU4/3zCTSJZYWgU/s320/St__Peter_Being_Freed_from_Prison.jpg" border="0" /></a>The purpose of our analyzing the Acts of the Apostles is not to go through and disprove every miracle as inauthentic. It is possible (and, indeed, many believe) that the facts it lays out are, by their very nature, beyond reproach and accept each miracle in turn as indisputable facts by virtue of their inclusion in the New Testament. However, the two passages that follow Peter’s escape from prison do suggest some interesting sub-textual readings worth at least investigating even while recognizing them as essentially speculation.<br /><br />After Peter escaped from prison, Luke writes that:<br /><br /><em>He went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!” “You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.” But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, there were astonished. Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison. “Tell James and the brothers about this,” he said, and then he left for another place.</em> [12:12-17]<br /><br />One can’t help but notice the paralls between this story about Peter and those surrounding Christ’s own, post-resurrection. Both are identified as being alive by a woman, who rushes to tell others who, in turn, do not believe her story. Notice also the ambiguity with which Luke glosses over where exactly Peter fled to or in whose company he might have traveled after his appearance among the disciples. More ominously, Peter is only mentioned once again in the Acts of the Apostles. Traditional church doctrine adheres to the idea that Peter eventually traveled with Paul to found the Roman church and was later executed by Nero, like Paul, for his crimes against the state. Though there is little means by which to prove this didn’t happen, the event itself, like Paul’s death is not contained within the Acts of the Apostles.<br /><br />Yet, there is an event directly juxtaposed against Peter’s escape from prison about which we can know something. Herod, in some kind of political dispute with the people of Tyre and Sidon, called a diplomatic summit to resolve these differences. Upon addressing “the people” (though not clear whether Luke is referring to the people summoned to his court or just, you know, the people), someone in the crowd shouted that Herod spoke with the voice of God. Because he did not refute the man’s claim (and thus show deference to God), Herod was stricken down by the Lord for his lack of humility and “was eaten by worms and died” [9:23].<br /><br />The problem is, history is pretty clear about the eventual fate of Herod Antipas and it was not death-by-angel-smiting. Instead, he was eventually found guilty of treason by Caligula and, around 39 CE, was stripped of his authority, his money, and exiled to Gaul where he died a few years later. One could make the argument that this fate might be the metaphoric equivalent of “an angel of the Lord struck him down” but then that indulgence just leads us back to questioning whether these inclusions of the “angel of the Lord” into various jailbreaks and auditory visions might not also be allegorical rather than objective in their inclusion into the story. Luke also finishes up the chapter after discussing Herod’s fate by recording that “When Barnabus and Saul had finished their mission, they returned from Jerusalem, taking with them John, also called Mark” [12:25], suggesting again that Herod’s death had already occurred before they left though his death actually occurred some years later and well-outside of the radar of history. The historical accountability of Herod’s removal does give us a framework to state with some certainty that the events described up to this point probably occurred within six years or so of Jesus’s crucifixion.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcI4ZPCeLI/AAAAAAAAAVA/_sAjAusDQLM/s1600-h/Barnabas.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383781644484376754" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 219px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcI4ZPCeLI/AAAAAAAAAVA/_sAjAusDQLM/s320/Barnabas.jpg" border="0" /></a>All but one section of the remaining fifteen chapters of Acts deals with Saul’s missions to recruit believers to the newly-dubbed Christian religion. It is valuable to note that, at this point in Saul’s ministry, his role is, in some ways, subordinate to that of Barnabas. Barnabas, unlike Saul, was from the original Twelve Witnesses and was one of the direct recipients of the tongue of fire via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and, by older Church protocols, one of the few authorized to oversee the two-fold initiation process of baptism and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Strangely, though, this formula is evoked with decreasing frequency once the narrative of the ministry leaves Judea.<br /><br />The evangelizing duo made their first post-Antioch ministry in Cyprus, the island upon which Barnabas was born, where they had to get past another Jewish sorcerer named Elymas. In the description of this passage, we are treated to the first usage of the name by which Saul of Tarsus would eventually be best known, Paul, and given some insights into the nature of Paul and Barnabas’s partnership.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcJP8q8s1I/AAAAAAAAAVQ/JpavZbu5zsk/s1600-h/Elymas.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383782049133671250" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 256px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrcJP8q8s1I/AAAAAAAAAVQ/JpavZbu5zsk/s320/Elymas.bmp" border="0" /></a><em>The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind, and for a time you will be unable to see the light of the sun.” Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord.</em> [13:8-12]<br /><br />Notice that Barnabas is listed first in their partnership but it is Saul who takes things to the next level and directly calls out Elymas. Elymas’s punishment also mirrors Paul’s own experience on the road to Damascus and is one of only a few examples in the New Testament of God causing blindness, rather than healing it.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-78287603845922016952009-09-17T22:36:00.000-07:002009-09-22T22:01:19.833-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Five)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdEDfC9oI/AAAAAAAAAT4/Y6DUdE6hMqQ/s1600-h/Apostles5.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382677935130080898" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 288px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdEDfC9oI/AAAAAAAAAT4/Y6DUdE6hMqQ/s320/Apostles5.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first four parts of this essay can be accessed from the archive on the right side of the screen under September of 2009.<br /><br /><div></div><div>Up to the conversion of Saul, the ministry of the early church was, in many ways, an extension of Jesus’s own ministry as they continued to baptize, heal, and teach among the Jews to fill a populist vacuum created by the temple’s complicity with Roman authority. Taking the Gospels and the Acts at face value, the church had taken on essentially three innovations since Jesus’s ascension; performing their miracles and teaching in Jesus’s name, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with the spiritual gifts that came with it, and the creation of a community that lived, worked, and, perhaps, dwelt apart from the Jewish society as a whole. With Saul’s conversion and acceptance into the fold, the very nature of the ministry changed though Luke places the initiative for that alteration in the hands of the leader of the early church, Simon who is called Peter.<br /><br />After raising Tabitha from the dead, Peter remained in Joppa, a city not far from Lydda where he performed the miracle and, from all indicators, began seeding a new church there. Meanwhile, in Caesarea, a man named Cornelius had a peculiar vision that the voice of God was commanding him to seek out Peter in Joppa. Luke includes some interesting details about Cornelius that makes the passage worth investigating.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdb58babI/AAAAAAAAAUA/63jeXJ4cKdw/s1600-h/Peter1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382678344885823922" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 155px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdb58babI/AAAAAAAAAUA/63jeXJ4cKdw/s320/Peter1.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly.</em> [10:1,2].<br /><br />Three important details about Cornelius jump out immediately. First, he is given a name, unlike the anonymous centurion who impressed Jesus with his faith from Matthew’s gospel. Second, he is not only a centurion from the Italian regiment, meaning that, in all likelihood, he was actually Roman and not just a member of the Roman army. Finally, he is described as being “god-fearing” (a term that shows up with increasing regularity as the New Testament proceeds along), meaning that though he was not Jewish, he exhibited great sensitivity to and even longing for the uniquely personal relationship that the Jewish God promised above and beyond the impersonal worship of the “pagan” gods. These facts are important not because they may or may not be factual, but because this is what Luke wants us to know about the man who would set a remarkable precedent within the early church. These qualities, in a sense, are also his qualifications.<br /><br />After receiving his command from above, Cornelius sends to of his men to Joppa to fetch Peter. Peter, as it turned out was having a vision of his own. Praying on the roof of a believer’s house while he waited for a meal to be prepared, Peter had one of the most detailed visions contained within the Acts of the Apostles—a vision concerning the future of the church.<br /><br /><em>He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.</em> [10:11-16]<br /><br />It is important to note that neither God nor Jesus are explicitly identified as the source of this vision. In fact, unlike Jesus’s words to Paul in the auditory vision that led to his conversion, these words are not given the red-ink treatment, indicating words of the divine. As the soldiers arrived at the house asking for him, Peter heard the voice again, this time identified by Luke as “The Spirit” [10:19], urging him to go with the men for they were sent, at least indirectly, by the source of his vision. When Peter arrived at Cornelius’s house, he found not only an open-minded centurion but “his relatives and close-friends” [10:24] who were, no doubt, also mostly not Jewish. The Jewish faith, of which Peter was certainly once considered a lawful and observant member, did not allow for him to meet with, let alone eat with, non-Jews. Nonetheless, Peter said:<br /><br /><em>“You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean…I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.”</em> [10:28,34,35]<br /><br />With this one rhetorical flourish, Luke would have us believe, Peter, as directed by the Holy Spirit, changed the course of not only the early church but of human history. Peter told those in the house that God had given to the people Israel a message of “the good news of peace through Jesus Christ” [10:35]. He offered a short timeline of Jesus’s ministry on Earth, including specifically that his ministry began in Galilee, spread throughout Judea, and followed that of John the Baptist. He suggests that God had “anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit” and that Jesus had used that power to “do good and healing…because God was with him” [10:38]. He asserted that “we are witnesses of everything he did” (meaning, the Twelve are the witnesses) but leaves the identity of Jesus’s murderers conspicuously vague, saying only that “they killed him by hanging him on a tree” [10:39].<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdql9B4zI/AAAAAAAAAUI/vcosuznoYBI/s1600-h/Baptism_of_cornelius.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382678597217674034" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 202px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMdql9B4zI/AAAAAAAAAUI/vcosuznoYBI/s320/Baptism_of_cornelius.jpg" border="0" /></a>As Peter delivered this first sermon to the Gentiles, a most surprising thing happened:<br /><br /><em>While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.</em> [10:44-48]<br /><br />Now, there is no disputing the idea that (before Saul) only the Twelve had the power to facilitate the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, there are two interpretations that might be taken away from this passage. Either Peter, through his somewhat privileged connection to God, was able to extend this blessing upon them by virtue of his own will or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within these Gentiles was a completely unexpected side-effect of their being exposed to the “good news,” the literal translation of the word, gospel. Again, as with the conversion of Saul, baptism occurs only after the spontaneous indwelling of the Holy Spirit and almost as an act of decorum rather than necessity. Of course, this innovation to the ministry was the cause of great concern to the “circumcised believers” and Peter was compelled to return to Jerusalem to recount the story of what had happened and, no doubt, defend his own involvement in something that was clearly not Jewish and clearly not in observance of the Law. What was remarkable and clearly new about what he had done was that he had not converted Gentiles to Judaism. He had converted them to something quite different and this may have been the moment (though Luke explicitly places it elsewhere) that the church stopped thinking of themselves as a sect of Judaism and started thinking of themselves as Christians.<br /><br />This notion is reinforced in the following section which again shifts our attention away from Peter and the Judean church and outwards into areas occupied by a great many peoples from many different backgrounds and worldviews. Luke writes that those who had been forced out of Jerusalem by the backlash from Stephen’s ministry had spread into many different lands including Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch but is careful to note that they shared the good news “only with Jews” [11:19]. Some of those converted, however, began preaching the message to Greeks living in Antioch and from among these “god-fearing” pagans, a new church began to emerge. Note that Luke never suggests that, because of what Peter did, disciples were authorized to make this transition. Instead, it is presented as almost an inevitable outgrowth of the ministry as it spread among believers separated by great distances.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMeZXBbthI/AAAAAAAAAUg/0WpbBSBpnMk/s1600-h/Antioch.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382679400663463442" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 269px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMeZXBbthI/AAAAAAAAAUg/0WpbBSBpnMk/s400/Antioch.jpg" border="0" /></a>When news of the somewhat unorthodox church that had developed at Antioch got back to the Twelve in Jerusalem, they sent Barnabas to investigate the validity of their faith. Heartened, we may assume, by this strange outcropping of predominantly non-Jewish believers, Barnabas went looking for the one man with a similarly unconventional conversion who might help forge a bridge between these two cultures—none other than Saul of Tarsus.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMeA_X1azI/AAAAAAAAAUQ/xuA2QPTAygE/s1600-h/Barnabus.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382678981998111538" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMeA_X1azI/AAAAAAAAAUQ/xuA2QPTAygE/s320/Barnabus.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch.</em> [11:25,26].<br /><br />One wonders what exactly Saul was doing in Tarsus when Barnabas arrived to bring him into the ministry. No mention is made of a fledgling church at Tarsus so it is tempting to assume that Saul had merely spent the time wondering what the purpose of his conversion was if his fate, for the moment, was to sit hundreds of miles away from where his new-found faith might matter. Now, with Barnabas to mentor him in the orthodoxy of the Jerusalem sect, Saul was finally able to channel some of that unspent energy into teaching new believers. In the curious mixture of Jews and Gentiles converted to believers by the “good news,” guided in the tradition by Barnabus and steered into uncharted waters by Saul, something truly new emerged.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMesPNQvFI/AAAAAAAAAUo/4ohw-Mm4Io8/s1600-h/Paul4.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382679724983106642" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 267px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SrMesPNQvFI/AAAAAAAAAUo/4ohw-Mm4Io8/s320/Paul4.jpg" border="0" /></a>Chapter eleven closes with yet another curious addendum (Luke loves those), reporting that:<br /><br /><em>During this time prophets some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.) The disciples, each according to his ability, decided to provide help to the brothers living in Judea. This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.</em> [11:27-29] <div><div><div><br /><div>While a community of believers spread all over the world could not live communally as Peter and the others had done immediately after Jesus’s ascension, an early precedent was set that enrollment in the church still carried certain monetary obligations. We may accept the gift of the Antioch church as the goodwill gesture described by Luke without dismissing the pragmatic subtext that this generous gift, delivered by Barnabas (Saul’s original sponsor) and Saul to the elders in Jerusalem probably went a long way towards legitimizing Saul’s usefulness if not authority within that body.</div></div></div></div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-83350496222412540222009-09-14T21:48:00.000-07:002009-09-22T22:00:38.772-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Four)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eGwKOFyI/AAAAAAAAATY/juOWyQ7D3kQ/s1600-h/JesusPeterPaul.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381553181086848802" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 213px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eGwKOFyI/AAAAAAAAATY/juOWyQ7D3kQ/s320/JesusPeterPaul.jpg" border="0" /></a>The earlier portions of this essay can be accessed from the archive on the right side of the screen under September of 2009.<br /><div></div><br /><div>[<strong>This essay will reference the New International Version until otherwise noted. Seriously, my cat ate my homework.</strong>]</div><br /><div></div><div>As Saul languished, a disciple in Damascus named Ananias had a vision in which the Lord told him to seek out Saul in order to lay hands on him and heal his blindness. Ananias, already knowing Saul’s reputation as a persecutor, overcame his fear of the Lord long enough to make sure they were talking about the same Saul before being assured that “This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles” [9:15]. Thus reassured, Ananias went and “placing his hands on Saul” told him that, “the Lord—Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit” [9:17]. His sight was immediately restored and, we are told, Saul rose and was baptized before finally partaking of food and drink again.<br /><br />Before analyzing that section, let’s skip back to the twenty-second chapter again where Paul recounts this event:<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eUN-e0OI/AAAAAAAAATg/itFa5XdejkE/s1600-h/Ananiassaul.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381553412428976354" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 256px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eUN-e0OI/AAAAAAAAATg/itFa5XdejkE/s320/Ananiassaul.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>A man named Ananias came to see me. He was a devout observer of the law and highly respected by all the Jews living there. He stood beside me and said, “Brother Saul, receive your sight!” And at that very moment I was able to see him. Then he said, “The God of our father has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard.”</em> [22:12-15]<br /><br />In the first version of this story, the voice of the Lord came to Ananias, just as it had to Paul to give him instruction. Moreover, Ananias is identified as “a disciple” who, in addition to being given dispensation to cure Paul’s blindness, also facilitated his receiving of the Holy Spirit. It was only after he had been filled with the Holy Spirit that Paul “got up and was baptized” [9:16]. This is a complete reversal of every conversion up to this point. By convention and sometimes the threat of damnation, only the Twelve had the authority to facilitate the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and, then, only after baptism. The second version glosses over Jesus’s visitation to Ananias altogether and leaves the reader with the impression that he was less a devoted Nazarene and more an independent actor on God’s behalf. No mention is made of the Holy Spirit though Ananias does exhort him to “get up, be baptized, and wash your sins away, calling on his name” [22:16] while giving no clue as to who might have performed that baptism, if not Paul himself.<br /><br />In contrasting Paul’s conversion with other disciples of the Christ, it would not be difficult to understand why his acceptance into the order might have been troubled from the outset. When coupled with his reportedly bloody history with the believers, it comes as no surprise that troubled quickly turned to murderous as he entered the synagogues of Damascus and began to preach that “Jesus is the Son of God” [9:20]. Note, however, the ambiguity as to the identity of his detractors as he begins his ministry.<br /><br /><em>All those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ. </em>[9:21,22]<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eoYznDKI/AAAAAAAAATo/If_Kvhee4xw/s1600-h/Paulbasket.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381553758933552290" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 193px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8eoYznDKI/AAAAAAAAATo/If_Kvhee4xw/s320/Paulbasket.jpg" border="0" /></a>From reading that passage, one is left with the impression that it was, in fact, non-converted Jews who were the most angered by Saul’s conversion. Yet, as evidenced by the fluidity with which Ananias was transformed from a “disciple” in the first story to a “devout observer of the law” in the second, one can’t help but wonder if Saul’s detractors might not have also been from among the converted in Damascus. Typically, outspoken Nazarenes were persecuted by the temple authority but, Luke writes that, “after many days had gone by, the Jews conspired to kill him” [9:23]. This threat was real enough that, according to legend, Saul had to be smuggled out of the city by being lowered in basket through the wall that he might escape. In Stephen, we have seen the temple incite a mob in order to effect a murder. In Ananias and Sapphira, we saw people killed (presumably by God) in order to maintain discipline among the sect. Of these two groups, who had the greatest motivation to kill Saul whether for his blasphemy or his apparent hypocrisy?<br /><br />After being run out of Damascus, Paul went to Jerusalem but, Luke tells us, “they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was really a disciple” [9:26]. Only through the intercession of Barnabas, one of the converted elect, was Paul first introduced to the Apostles and then, brought into the fold of believers. This arrangement, unconventional as it was, does not appear to have been a tenable one as Saul “moved freely about Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord” [9:28]. Since the murder of Stephen, there is no mention in the Acts of preaching or miracles being performed in Jerusalem. The strategy, as Luke would have us see it, appears to have been to blend in and act like the law-observing Jews that they largely still were.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8e7A-yDfI/AAAAAAAAATw/4LxhF6zBdPo/s1600-h/Peter+and+Paul.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381554078955474418" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 273px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq8e7A-yDfI/AAAAAAAAATw/4LxhF6zBdPo/s320/Peter+and+Paul.jpg" border="0" /></a>Saul, perhaps emulating Stephen who had been killed in his presence, did not do this and, a verse later, we are told that “he talked and debated with the Grecian Jews, but they wanted to kill him” [9:29]. It leads one to wonder what it was about Saul that made everyone he came in contact with want to kill him (a condition that did not diminish with age). Perhaps unwilling at this time to undergo another major persecution, the Apostles “took him down to Caesaria and sent him off to Tarsus” [9:30] with no mention of a mission or a purpose for his voyage except to get back to where he once belonged. The church, Luke writes, “enjoyed a time of peace. It was strengthened; and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it grew in numbers in the fear of the Lord” [9:31]. <div><div><br /><div>Though Saul’s departure from Jerusalem and resultant peace sounds like a resolution to the first act of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke sticks a curious addendum on to the ninth chapter regarding Peter that sets up the next period in the Church’s tumultuous history. In it, Peter performed two miracles; one in Lydda where he healed a paralytic man and then, to Joppa, where he raised a woman named Tabitha from the dead. While it is probably notable that this is the first resurrection in the New Testament since that of Jesus himself, Luke’s purpose here seems to be to show Peter in motion himself away from Jerusalem. It also suggests, as Luke often does, an interest in showing women of the faith as part of the tapestry of believers. Lastly, it places Luke in a very particular place from which the next, improbable segment of the church’s history could evolve.</div></div></div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-4000912896224909042009-09-13T22:50:00.000-07:002009-09-13T23:13:24.931-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Three)<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3aQ0TD5OI/AAAAAAAAASg/NekR61Hzkf4/s1600-h/Apostles3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381197112228963554" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 295px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3aQ0TD5OI/AAAAAAAAASg/NekR61Hzkf4/s320/Apostles3.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first two installments of this essay can be read <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-books-acts-of-apostles-part-one.html">here</a> (part 1) and <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-books-acts-of-apostles-part-two.html">here</a> (part 2).<br /><br /><br />After Stephen’s martyrdom, Luke indicates that a new level of persecution fell upon the church. In response, the believers were sent away with only the Twelve witnesses/disciples left behind to maintain a presence in Jerusalem. The narrative then switches to Phillip, one of the seven elected to teach from among the converted, who goes to Samaria and finds success spreading the gospel. It is curious that Samaria is listed as the first outreach center as the Samaritans are so widely impugned in the Gospels that one has only to put the word Good” in front of Samaritan to know precisely which Samaritan we mean. Could it be that the Nazarene sect’s persecution in Jerusalem won them sympathetic ears among those who might otherwise be foes?<br /><br />Luke makes no mention of this irony, writing only that, “the multitudes with one accord gave heed to what was said by Phillip, when they heard him and saw the signs which he did” [8:6]. Even this little information gives us a pretty good idea of what Phillip’s ministry would have looked like; beginning with an exhortation to repent and be baptized in Jesus’s name, followed by the baptism and indoctrination of the new believers. It is not certain if Phillip continued the communal model of the first Jerusalem congregation though the conspicuous absence of any mention of food or bread breaking suggests that he did not.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3alHpkyyI/AAAAAAAAASo/vz-ndaYTYkk/s1600-h/Phillip+the+Apostle.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381197461021051682" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 252px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3alHpkyyI/AAAAAAAAASo/vz-ndaYTYkk/s320/Phillip+the+Apostle.jpg" border="0" /></a>While in Samaria, Phillip met “a man named Simon who had previously practiced magic in the city” [8:9] and not only converted him but took him on as a disciple. This relationship is interesting for a couple of different reasons. First, it reiterates, if not confirms, the idea that there was a whole social/vocational class of people who performed miracles among the sick and the poor that we might associate more specifically with the authority of the Christ. When Phillip arrives preaching and performing miracles, there was already an expectation among the people for what he was and what he could do for Simon, “had amazed the nation of Samaria” and “they all gave heed to him, from the least to the greatest, saying ‘This man is that power of God which is called Great’” [8:10]. A somewhat skeptical reading of this passage might even suggest that Phillip brought Simon over to his cause first and, by so doing, was able to make a deep impression on the people through his conversion.<br /><br />After the body of believers there reached a certain threshold, Peter and John came down from Jerusalem to facilitate in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit among them. This indicates at least a two-step initiation into the fold, first baptism in the name of Jesus and then, a meeting with the higher ups to confirm membership and receive the indwelling of the Hold Spirit through the laying on of hands. This passage makes it abundantly clear that while Phillip (and we presume Simon) had the authority to preach, heal, and perform other miracles in Jesus’s name, only one of the twelve witnesses (ie someone who had received instruction from Jesus after his resurrection) could oversee the commission of the Holy Spirit to a new believer. One can understand Simon’s motivation for the pragmatic offer that follows but Peter’s response is especially telling.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3bFwdW86I/AAAAAAAAAS4/V3525Txt59g/s1600-h/SimonMagus.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381198021731480482" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 309px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3bFwdW86I/AAAAAAAAAS4/V3525Txt59g/s320/SimonMagus.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>Now when Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, “Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” But Peter said to him, “Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money! You have neither part nor lot it in this matter, for your heart is not right with God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.”</em> [8:20-22]<br /><br />Simon, a career magician with an excellent reputation among the Samaritans, treats the laying on of hands to impart the Holy Spirit like a new craft in his trade and is, quite reasonably, willing to pay the originators for the right to use it. The text is ambiguous about who exactly had the authority to baptize in Jesus’s name; perhaps, only the seven elected from the converted, but probably more. The ability to bestow the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was given, initially, only upon the Twelve. Setting aside the theological concerns for a moment, Peter’s response indicated that the Twelve saw their unique role in the two-part initiation process as fundamental to maintaining control over the faith as it spread beyond Jerusalem. Luke spends the rest of the eighth chapter on another anecdote regarding Phillip’s conversion of an Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza that offers little in the way of new information.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3buhQzY3I/AAAAAAAAATA/n7RtOnX1Bvg/s1600-h/Paul3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381198722026922866" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 267px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3buhQzY3I/AAAAAAAAATA/n7RtOnX1Bvg/s320/Paul3.jpg" border="0" /></a>Chapter nine, however, is a pivotal one in the Acts of the Apostles as it shifts the narrative away from the Twelve or their disciples and on to a man named Saul. Luke actually references Saul twice in Acts before this chapter, identifying him in passing, first, as present at Stephen’s martyrdom [7:58] and then as an actor in the persecution of the church at Jersualem [8:3]. In fact, it is Saul’s actions against the church that provides the clearest picture that Luke is willing to give us as to what forms that persecution took. Saul, he writes, “laid waste to the church, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” [8:3].<br /><br />One of two things is true about these attestations. Either the temple could convey the authority to punish (by beating, imprisonment, etc) those who strayed from orthodoxy or they could not, with mounds of evidence supporting both positions. Whole truth and nothing but the truth or not, Luke states this outright, insisting that:<br /><br /><em>Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.</em> [9:1,2]<br /><br />Stephen’s stoning had seemed like a spontaneous event, though it began in a formal interrogation/trial setting. He was not stoned in the temple but dragged from it and stoned by an anonymous angry mob. The Gospels reiterate over and over that Jews lacked the authority to have a man put to death without Roman involvement. Yet, nowhere is Rome mentioned or implicated in this persecution. Now, we are invited to believe, the temple has the authority to beat and/or imprison whomever they like and can commission others to do this work for them.<br /><br />Whatever his commission or motive, Saul set famously out on the road to Damascus where he had a very unexpected experience. Saul’s conversion on the road is so central to the Acts of the Apostles overall that the story is told twice, first in chapter nine and second, from Paul’s own lips in the twenty-second chapter. For the purpose of better understanding Luke’s vision of Paul, we’ll look at the two versions side-by-side, watching for additions or subtractions from the story.<br />In chapter nine, Luke writes:<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3b9_F0JNI/AAAAAAAAATI/kQAheLAG1sU/s1600-h/Paul1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381198987731936466" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 238px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3b9_F0JNI/AAAAAAAAATI/kQAheLAG1sU/s320/Paul1.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and, suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city and you will be told what to do.” The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And, for three days, he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.</em> [9:3-9]<br /><br />There are five important elements to the story here: the light, the falling down, the voice, the acknowledgement of patronage, and the blindness. Note also that the men accompanying him positively hear the voice, positively do not see Jesus himself (or anyone else for that matter), but ambiguously do not see the light that blinds Paul.<br /><br />In chapter twenty-two, Paul recounts his story to a group of Jews who, mere verses earlier, were trying to kill him.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3cW-nfrjI/AAAAAAAAATQ/5k-9Dxjh_SU/s1600-h/Paul2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381199417101495858" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 234px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sq3cW-nfrjI/AAAAAAAAATQ/5k-9Dxjh_SU/s320/Paul2.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>“As I made my journey and drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. And I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ And I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. And I said, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’ And the Lord said unto me, ‘Rise, and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all that is appointed for you to do.’ And when I could not see because of the brightness of the light, I was led by the hand by those who were with me, and came into Damascus.”</em> [22:6-11]<br /><br />All five of the fundamental story elements are perfectly intact from above and delivered in the same order. Light, falling down, voice, acknowledgement of patronage, blindness. But this time, the voice is now not perceived by those who traveled with Paul. Ideologically, this makes more sense because if men also commissioned to persecute Nazarene Jews heard an omniscient voice tell their boss to stop and go await further instructions, they would likely have either made a similarly famous conversion or just knifed him on the spot and gone on with their duties. The difference is subtle but important. In the first account, Paul’s experience with Jesus is a public one. While he alone is spoken to and blinded, all present hear what is said. In the account taken, presumably, from Paul’s own lips, that public miracle becomes a more private one, making his role in it second only to Jesus and, more importantly, making it difficult to prove or disprove since no one but Paul himself heard anything at all.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-49054320729835074562009-09-09T23:12:00.001-07:002009-09-09T23:24:07.216-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Two)<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZN2YcadI/AAAAAAAAAR4/KXcXQXRpaKI/s1600-h/Apostles2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5379718218109446610" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZN2YcadI/AAAAAAAAAR4/KXcXQXRpaKI/s320/Apostles2.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first portion of this essay can be read <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-books-acts-of-apostles-part-one.html">here</a>.<br /><br /><div></div><div>After the account of Peter and John’s first interrogation by the temple, the Acts of the Apostles offers a second glimpse into the early organizational structure of the early church. Luke, by this point, has already alluded once to the communal nature of the church, with members selling all of their worldly possessions and placing the proceeds into a pool to meet the needs of all who proclaimed the faith. If that point was already made, however, the urgency by which that arrangement was kept is clearly illustrated in the contrasting stories of Joseph and Ananias and Sapphira.<br /><br />Joseph, a Cypriot from the tribe of Levi, is offered as an example of one who “sold a field which belonged to him, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet” [4:37] and received, in return, the full support of the community and a fancy new nickname proclaiming his dedication. The fifth chapter of Acts, however, presents a darker side of this arrangement as, we are told, a believer named Ananias sold a piece of property and lied about the selling price in order to keep some of the money for himself. Peter was not amused.<br /><br /><em>Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died.</em> [5:1-5]<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZikPg5iI/AAAAAAAAASI/nw0VL1rvKFw/s1600-h/The_Death_of_Ananias.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5379718574017406498" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 246px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZikPg5iI/AAAAAAAAASI/nw0VL1rvKFw/s400/The_Death_of_Ananias.jpg" border="0" /></a>A few hours later, his wife, Sapphira is called in (not yet knowing her husband was already dead), repeats the lie and is similarly killed on the spot by God for her complicity. Luke does not shy away from the horror of the story as he describes Peter telling her, “Hark, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out” [5:9] in the moment before she dies. Read even within a confined context of just the book of the Acts, this represents a serious departure from nearly every miracle performed by Jesus, the Apostles or, in fact, any disciple in the remainder of the New Testament. It seems to imply that Peter, in addition to the power of healing, offering the forgiveness of sin, and facilitating the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (all in Jesus’s name) now possesses the ability to kill someone instantly, though, notably it is not Jesus but God and the Holy Spirit who are evoked in the act. Whatever Luke’s purpose for including this story in his Acts of the Apostles (be it even the fact that it happened exactly the way he describes), he can not be far from the truth when he writes at the end of the story that “great fear came upon the church and upon all who heard of these things” [5:12].<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZzHM8uUI/AAAAAAAAASQ/Vm2nP9C8QrY/s1600-h/702px-Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_Peter_and_John_at_the_Gate_of_the_Temple.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5379718858279795010" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 273px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiZzHM8uUI/AAAAAAAAASQ/Vm2nP9C8QrY/s320/702px-Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_Peter_and_John_at_the_Gate_of_the_Temple.jpg" border="0" /></a>Peter and John continued their public ministry, gathering in Solomon’s Portico near the entrance of the temple and performing conspicuous miracles so, we are told, people began lining the sick up along the path so “that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them” [5:15]. Their fame among the people became too great for the temple authorities to ignore and so they were seized and thrown into prison. It is notable that Luke identifies in this passage (for the second time in the Acts of the Apostles), the Sadducees as responsible for the church’s persecution whereas the Pharisees had played the role of antagonist against Jesus. Their plans to frighten Peter and John with a stint in the pokey goes sour when “an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and brought them out” [5:19], proclaiming that they should go into the temple and teach. This indignation set off a second informal trial against Peter and John wherein they were accused of intending “to bring this man’s blood upon us” [5:28] through their teaching. Peter and John are portrayed as resolutely refusing to discontinue their ministry as they “must obey God rather than men” which infuriated the council. Luke writes that a Pharisee named Gamaliel, however, urged caution to the council in dealing with them and, in so doing, inadvertently reveals something important about the historical context in which the Nazarene sect existed.<br /><br /><em>And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you do with these men. For before these days, Theudas arose, giving himself out to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred joined him; but he was slain and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean arose in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him; he also perished and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; for if this plan or undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!”</em> [5:35-39]<br /><br />While the relative merits of Jesus’s ministry on earth may be debated in contrast to that of Theudas or Judas of Galilee, what makes the early Christian movement unique, at least in Luke’s eyes, is its staying power beyond the removal (whether by death or by ascension) of its prime mover. In that sense, Jesus was indisputably (if metaphorically) resurrected as his message continued to harangue the temple authorities long after his disappearance from the city and, indeed, the Earth. Gamaliel’s argument for leniency also suggests to us that Jesus’s ministry of healing the sick and casting out demons was not created in a vacuum but was considered, at least by his critics, as belonging to a tradition of unregulated prophets who had always existed in the Jewish culture as a counterbalance to the legitimized corridors of religious and political authority. Swayed by Gamaliel’s warning, the council sufficed itself with giving the dynamic duo a vigorous beating and then released them again with the same warning to desist preaching and healing in Jesus’s name.<br /><br />After this second visit to the council, the church underwent something of a transformation as the Twelve created a new hierarchy of disciples elected from the body of followers who had been converted since Jesus’s ascension. On the surface, this decision appears to have been motivated by sheer necessity as the Apostles complain that it “is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables” but what happens immediately after suggests that the church was drawing more attention (and thus more persecution) from the temple authorities and its leaders knew that they would have to abandon Jerusalem as the epicenter for their movement if they were to continue growing at the rate they had enjoyed thus far.<br /><br />Among these elected “deacons” was Stephen, a man described in the Acts as “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit” who, in time began to work “great wonders and signs among the people” [6:5,8]. In response to Stephen’s growing fame, a number of the church’s detractors began a whisper campaign against Stephen until he was brought before the council for teaching that “Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place [the temple], and will change the customs which Moses delivered us” [6:14]. Stephen’s self-defense was radically different from Jesus’s as he delivers a short synopsis of the history of the Jewish people from the time of Abraham up through Solomon. Though renounced by Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, this passage lays the groundwork for a theological idea known as progressive revelation wherein it is suggested that God revealed his plan for humanity in stages; stages of which orthodox Judaism (as practiced in the 1st century) was nothing but a vestigial hold-over and Christianity, the most recent and presumably final iteration. Through most of his defense, Stephen embedded this idea into a conversation about the physical temple and its evolution from a tent in the wildness to the architectural wonder produced during Solomon’s reign, noting at the end that “the Most High does not dwell in houses made of hands” [7:48]. Then, he ditched the metaphor and went, instead, for the jugular.<br /><br /><em>You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your father’s persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.</em> [7:51-53]<br /><div><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiaDVvI1qI/AAAAAAAAASY/niMbIBOLMTc/s1600-h/Stephenmartyr.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5379719137059198626" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 230px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqiaDVvI1qI/AAAAAAAAASY/niMbIBOLMTc/s320/Stephenmartyr.jpg" border="0" /></a>As the council members seethed at the implication of his defense, Stephen took that moment to look upward and announce that he could see, at that moment, Jesus standing at the right hand of God. That, by Luke’s account, was all the abuse they could stand and “they cast him out of the city and stoned him” [7:58]. Considering what a big deal the council had made about not having the authority to sentence Jesus to death, we might assume that this stoning was implemented by extra-legal means by a mob not directly traceable back to the temple. One can also consider the possibility that executing a lesser-known man like Stephen may have presented less of a threat to their reputation among the people of the Jerusalem than silencing a recognized prophet and miracle worker.</div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-76617837177359099692009-09-07T21:52:00.000-07:002009-09-07T22:11:59.247-07:00Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part One)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXjsPiUs4I/AAAAAAAAARQ/NE1GDfyN7-o/s1600-h/Jesus+and+the+Apostles.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378955679188169602" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 218px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXjsPiUs4I/AAAAAAAAARQ/NE1GDfyN7-o/s320/Jesus+and+the+Apostles.jpg" border="0" /></a>Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles<br />Author: Attributed to <a href="http://liberalartistry.blogspot.com/2009/09/author-sketch-luke.html">“Luke”</a><br /><br />Place: City of origin difficult to absolutely pinpoint but touches on most of the Eastern Mediterranean at one point or another<br /><br />Date written- Placed by different scholars in a period ranging from circa 60 CE to early in the 2nd century.<br /><br />This essay will reference from the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament.<br /><br />It’s cruel, in a way, to read the Acts of the Apostles apart from the Gospel According to Luke to which it is usually tethered by virtue of sharing an author. The historical elements at the beginning of the Book of Acts line up more cleanly with the ending of Luke’s Gospel while the book, as a whole, continues building on themes that are uniquely Lukan and is richer for the connection. Still, if the work stands the test of time then it must do so on its own merits and, through the excavation of those singular qualities that belong to Acts alone, we may better appreciate the contribution that the author commonly thought of as Luke made to the canon of early Christian writing.<br /><br />Jesus’s death, resurrection and ascension left early church fathers with something of a dilemma and the opening chapter of Acts addresses its two major components with startling precision. After his resurrection, Jesus spent forty days with his disciples in Jerusalem (unlike the Galilean setting that concludes the book of Matthew) in which, it is said, that he taught them about the kingdom of God that was to come. The common wisdom among Jews of the time was that the Messiah would come to unify them both culturally and militarily and, from that platform, they would retake their homeland that had been overseen by others for over four hundred years. How then, if Jesus had ascended to heaven, could he be the Messiah? Moreover, if Jesus’s intention was to show his divinity to the people of Israel, why did he leave the dissemination of his message in the hands of his followers instead of just taking it to the people himself, as he had done in his earthly ministry?<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378955892520826354" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 186px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXj4qQytfI/AAAAAAAAARY/1DEqgTSfx_c/s320/Ascension.jpg" border="0" />Luke’s author supplies both questions and most of the answers when he writes:<br /><br /><em>So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses…And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”</em> [1:6-11]<br /><br />The kingdom of heaven, then, was to arrive upon Jesus’s next return to Earth and, echoing Jesus’s preaching on the kingdom of heaven towards the end of the Gospel According to Matthew, the onus fell upon the believers to remain vigilant while accepting that not one among them might truly predict the hour of his return. The kingdom of heaven (or kingdom of God, as Luke prefers) was something more profound than just the re-establishment of this dynasty or that dynasty to rule in the stead of the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans or whomever. His reasons for leaving this leg of the ministry in the hands of his “witnesses” rather than carrying the message himself remains somewhat hidden, though perhaps covered under the banner of the plan unfolding on God’s time rather than that of mortals.<br /><br />Before carrying that ministry to the people in Jesus’s name (rather than his physical presence), the disciples drew lots to fill the position in the organization left open by Judas’s suicide, choosing Matthias who had “accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us” and could serve like the others as “a witness to his resurrection” [1:21,22]. While this may seem like mundane housekeeping before the dinner party, the Jews had, when still in possession of their own political sovereignty, chosen their leader by lots. By specifying this method for the selection of a new peer, Luke seems to suggest that the Apostles were taking it back to the old school in defiance of monarchical or imperial methods of rule that had taken root in their culture.<br /><br />Luke makes note of two basic promises that Jesus made before his ascension; first, that he would return and, second, in his absence, they would receive power from the Holy Spirit. They must have been impressed at the speed with which the second promise was fulfilled, for at the festival of Shavuot (celebrated forty-nine days after Passover to commemorate Moses’s reception of the Torah from God and also tied into harvesting traditions), they were made aware and then filled by the Holy Spirit. This momentous day in the history of the early church, known in the Christian tradition as Pentecost (translated literally, “the fiftieth day”) begins with a private miracle and concludes with a public one.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXkKg9wfWI/AAAAAAAAARg/f_LiYc613P4/s1600-h/Pentecost2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378956199262715234" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 185px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXkKg9wfWI/AAAAAAAAARg/f_LiYc613P4/s320/Pentecost2.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.</em> [2:2-4]<br /><br />Luke’s goes on to tell us that “devout men from every nation under heaven” lived in Jerusalem at that time and they all heard what the Apostles were saying in the own native tongue. In listing the nations of those who heard (Parthia, Medes, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Romans, Crete, and Arabia), Luke reveals something about the world these men occupied that is rarely discussed in the Gospels where the only three ethnic players mentioned are Jews, Romans, and Samaritans. In contrast, the disciples’ newfound ability to speak to men (and occasionally women) of many nations, whether fact or metaphor, foreshadows the universal nature of Christianity’s appeal.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXkhyYW7LI/AAAAAAAAARo/Ub3Pl--bUxs/s1600-h/Baptism.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378956599074679986" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 238px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXkhyYW7LI/AAAAAAAAARo/Ub3Pl--bUxs/s320/Baptism.jpg" border="0" /></a>Peter used this platform to outline clearly the first precepts of the early church. After proclaiming Jesus as the Christ as predicted by scripture, he bluntly stated that, “Let all the house of Israel know that assuredly God has made him [Jesus] both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you have crucified” [2:26]. So when Peter exhorted people to repent of their sins and ask forgiveness, at least in this context, it wasn’t penance for some nebulous original sin related to the Garden of Eden. It was for having crucified the very person God had sent to free them from slavery, both mental and physical. The only remedy, as far as Peter was concerned, was to “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” [2:28]. Though this baptism is the only prerequisite for salvation that Luke enunciates at the point in the book, a curious addendum on the end of chapter two provides a clearer glimpse after what happened after.<br /><br /><em>And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.</em> [2:44-47]<br /><br />This, in effect, was an amplification of Jesus’s own ministry except it remained in Jerusalem and, if Luke is to be taken at his word, soon resulted in a whole tribe of communally-nested followers of Christ who would attend the Temple en masse, perhaps to discourage discrimination from other sectarians. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that Peter and the others should run up against many of the same political factions that saw to Jesus’s crucifixion.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXk2POachI/AAAAAAAAARw/arjvWj-au10/s1600-h/PeterPreaching.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378956950414979602" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 251px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqXk2POachI/AAAAAAAAARw/arjvWj-au10/s320/PeterPreaching.jpg" border="0" /></a>After Peter and John perform a conspicuous healing outside of the temple, they are brought before the religious authorities residing there to justify upon whose authority they were able to bring about this miracle. This is exactly the same concerns they had about Jesus, a magician of sorts who healed the sick and offered the forgiveness of sins outside of the brokered sacrifice and prayer for which the temple was responsible. Peter was obviously not trying to placate them when he proclaimed that, “this man has been healed…by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead” [4:10].<br /><br /><div><div><div>Faced with a miracle that they could not refute, The temple authorities were forced to let the Apostles go with a stern warning to “not speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus” [4:18]. This commandment was, of course, ignored and only added to their zeal in spreading the message among, by Luke’s own account, men and women of every country who dwelt in Jerusalem.</div></div></div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-47024474111552991792009-09-07T10:26:00.000-07:002009-09-07T10:33:28.176-07:00Author Sketch: "Luke"<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqVCr_RenZI/AAAAAAAAARI/BE90iqeslLU/s1600-h/ASLuke.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378778653450476946" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 252px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SqVCr_RenZI/AAAAAAAAARI/BE90iqeslLU/s320/ASLuke.jpg" border="0" /></a>Author Sketch: “Luke”<br />Work Under Consideration: The Acts of the Apostles<br />Place: Unknown though likely suspects include Rome, Antioch, and Ephesus<br />Time: widely disputed, likely coordinates include before 60 CE, after 70 CE, and the 2nd century CE<br /><br />Imagine, if you will, a continuum of authorial identity among early Christian writers that begins with Matthew and Mark, about whom we know very little, stretching through to Paul, about whom we know a great deal. Smack dab in the middle of that line is the author commonly known as Luke.<br /><br />What we can absolutely verify about Luke is scant and derived from the texts that he (or she) left behind. Though our interest in Luke is focused on the Acts of the Apostles, it is widely assumed even among skeptics that the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the same person. Both books open with a direct address to someone named Theophilus (literally, “God-lover”) and share a number of unique theological concerns including the emergence of the Holy Spirit, the universal appeal of Jesus’s message of salvation beyond the borders of Palestine and the relationship of the early church to those on the social margins of the Roman imperial culture.<br /><br />Early biblical apologists usually associated the author of Luke with Luke the Physician, a companion of Paul who is mentioned explicitly in at least three passages of the New Testament. Acts, in particular, dabbles with curious modulations between the first-person, the first-person plural and third-person reportage that gives the impression, at least, that what we are reading is an eye-witness account. If true, that would clearly date the book as having been written before 60 CE when it is accepted that Paul was taken to Rome for trial. Acts’ failure to report on either Paul’s summary execution or the destruction of the temple and, indeed, Jerusalem itself are given as secondary evidence to support this position. If Luke the Physician is, in fact, the same as Luke the Author, we still know almost nothing about him as the passages wherein he is mentioned identify him only as a companion to Paul who occupied some higher echelon in the early Gentile church.<br /><br /><div>Others, though, have noted Luke and Acts’ reliance on other historical works of the time (namely by the Roman Jewish writer Josephus) as evidence that they was written considerably later and that Acts, in particular, purposefully omits those two key events in history as a means of obscuring the date of its own creation. Both the Gospel of Luke and Acts seem to grapple with nuances surrounding Jesus’s divinity that were of greater concern to the Church after Paul’s death than during his life. The Acts of the Apostles also becomes decreasingly concerned with the Nazarene sect of Judaism (primarily composed of Jesus’s actual Apostles) and more concerned with Christianity as it spread beyond the borders of Palestine. This makes a strong argument for both Luke and Acts as documents generated by the Gentile church after the destruction of Jerusalem as a means of textually strengthening their direct connection to the source of the tradition.</div>R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-69932240843160901382009-08-30T22:26:00.001-07:002009-08-30T23:02:00.566-07:00Great Books: The Gospel According to Matthew (Part 7)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptfeh0o41I/AAAAAAAAAQI/omKLet04ZBg/s1600-h/Jesus7.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375995558276686674" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 260px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptfeh0o41I/AAAAAAAAAQI/omKLet04ZBg/s320/Jesus7.jpg" border="0" /></a> The first six parts of this essay can be accessed in the archive on the right side of the screen under August 2009.<br /><br />The Gospel According to Matthew recounts two events happening directly before the momentum of Jesus’s trial, crucifixion and resurrection sweep the story towards its end. The first is offered so haphazardly and without comment that it is easy to miss in the shadow of the second, which consumes all but the entirety of two chapters. Matthew writes:<br /><br /><em>Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.</em> [24:1,2]<br /><br />It is impossible as a discerning modern reader to ignore the probability that the Gospel of Matthew was most likely written after not just the temple but the entire city of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. It is just one leap of logic from there to discounting this passage as a wholly fabricated attribution rather than one that existed within the Jesus tradition prior to its writing. However, a passage from later in the Gospel serves to put a question mark at the end of our inquiry as Matthew writes that:<br /><br /><em>The chief priests and the whole council sought false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last, two came forward and said, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and build it in three days’”</em> [26:59-61]<br /><br />Unlike the first passage, which reads like retroactive prophecy, this statement is more consistent with Jesus’s rhetorical strategy of questioning the idea of what was possible in the minds of his listeners. It also resonates with his frequent pronouncements that he would be killed in Jerusalem and, on the third day, be resurrected. If that were to happen, the temple’s authority (if not the physical structure itself) would be destroyed and rebuilt as no Jew (or Greek or Roman for that matter) would be able to deny the hand of God at work in the life and resurrection of Jesus, the prophet from Galilee. For this reason, we may be inclined to see Matthew’s inclusion of this prophecy as less of an attempt to corrupt or add to the record of Jesus’s ministry while on Earth and more of a rhetorical flourish that was grounded in extent elements of the pre-existing oral tradition while playing to the Jewish peoples, perhaps shaken in their faith, that were now dispersed all over the Roman empire.<br /><br />The rest of Chapters Twenty-four and Twenty-five are given over to a long and tonally unique sermon/teaching that Jesus delivers to his disciples. In the early portion of his ministry (as John had before him), Jesus had warned any who might listen to repent as the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Now, with prophesies of not only his imminent demise but that of the temple as well hanging like a dark cloud over the disciples, Matthew suggests that they came to Jesus looking for some clarity on the matter, asking him “when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?” [24:3]. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s response is a dense mixture of exhortation, prophesy and theological teaching that can be distilled down to a basic message of continued vigilance but, again, there are elements that smack of historical revisionism as Jesus describes elements of the Jewish experience that would have been all too familiar not only to the displaced Jewish communities at the end of the First century of the Common Era but also to early Christians suffering persecution at the hands of Imperial Rome.<br /><br /><em>Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another, and hate one another….But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end is come…And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as had not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.</em> [24:9,10,17-21]<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptf5Ko2g1I/AAAAAAAAAQQ/hxhMwHozcNQ/s1600-h/Last+Supper.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375996015909700434" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 308px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptf5Ko2g1I/AAAAAAAAAQQ/hxhMwHozcNQ/s320/Last+Supper.jpg" border="0" /></a>Having completed his teachings to the disciples, Jesus announced that he planned to observe Passover in Jerusalem, after which “the Son of man will be delivered up to be crucified” [26:2]. While Jesus lingered in Bethany before Passover, one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot was said to have met in secret with the Pharisees who sought to arrest Jesus when he was far from the crowds that too often surrounded him. Matthew’s account of the Last Supper actually begins with Jesus calling Judas out as his betrayer before moving on to the textual basis for the transmutation of the bread and the wine as the blood and body of Christ in Christian Worship.<br /><br />After the dinner, Jesus and the disciples went first to Mount Olive and then to the garden of Gesthemane. Just as he had done during the Transfiguration, Jesus pulled Peter, John and James apart from the other disciples and asked them to pray with him until the moment of his arrest should come. Unlike the first time, when they were given a privileged glimpse at Jesus’s divine status, the disciples fall asleep not once but three times until Jesus finally wakes them, saying, “Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand” [26:45,46].<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SptgpuRK6KI/AAAAAAAAAQg/reTpMuTbKiM/s1600-h/Judaskiss.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375996850107771042" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 227px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SptgpuRK6KI/AAAAAAAAAQg/reTpMuTbKiM/s320/Judaskiss.jpg" border="0" /></a>Even as Jesus spoke the words, Matthew tells us that Judas arrived with the Pharisees and identified his master with a kiss upon greeting. After token resistance from the disciples, Jesus commanded them to allow him to be taken so that “the scripture be fulfilled” and, with that, Jesus was taken into custody. Jesus is first interrogated by the Pharisees but Matthew’s Gospel is ambiguous about the location of this interrogation, saying only that they “led him to Caiaphas the high priest where the scribes and elders had gathered” [26:57].<br /><br />Matthew stipulates that Peter (alone among the disciples) had followed the lynching party in secret and therefore might have been able to deliver a first-hand account of what was said there, thus adding to the veracity of this portion of the story that would have otherwise taken place out of sight of those with the greatest investment in the outcome. Though Jesus refused to answer any of their charges, the priests and elders were reportedly able to extract enough blasphemous teaching from him to justify their want of his murder and, by morning, he was marched before Pontius Pilate, a Roman who governed the province of Judea. Here, Matthew’s gospel makes its final diversion away from Jesus before his death to disclose Judas’s final fate, committing suicide upon hearing the news of Jesus’s condemnation.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptg7b2VKzI/AAAAAAAAAQo/AMSz-Vf8NpE/s1600-h/Pilate.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375997154401004338" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 265px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/Sptg7b2VKzI/AAAAAAAAAQo/AMSz-Vf8NpE/s320/Pilate.jpg" border="0" /></a>In Matthew’s account of the story, Jesus is brought before Pilate only once and Herod Antipas does not figure into the story. Pilate asked of Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews” [27:11], suggesting that the crime he was being tried for was not blasphemy but treason against Roman authority. Jesus, as before, refuses to answer his accusers. Matthew’s Gospel (consistent with the other gospels) tries its level best to exonerate Pilate of any guilt in Jesus’s murder, going so far at the close of the trial to note that Pilate “took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” [27:24]. The Jews, on the other hand, do not fare as well as they gleefully proclaim that “His blood shall be on us and our children!” [27:25], laying groundwork for the idea that God had turned its back on Jerusalem later for their complicity in Jesus’s execution, resulting in the destruction, as prophesied, not only of the temple but of the very city itself at Roman hands.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthJK3ItjI/AAAAAAAAAQw/PIRHgI0sU9o/s1600-h/HimCrucified.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375997390359148082" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 260px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthJK3ItjI/AAAAAAAAAQw/PIRHgI0sU9o/s320/HimCrucified.jpg" border="0" /></a>After being scourged, Jesus was first mocked by the Roman legions (who dressed him up in a scarlet robe and made to wear a crown of thorns), then stripped and marched to Golgotha where, we are told, he was crucified. Once again, the issue of the destruction of the Temple is raised by a passerby who mocks Jesus saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself!” It is also worthy of note that, of all of Jesus’s followers, only “many women…among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” are specifically mentioned as having borne direct witness to Jesus’s death.<br /><br />After Jesus dies, Matthew’s gospel tells us that a rich man named Joseph goes to Pilate and is allowed to receive Jesus’s body from the Romans. The body was prepared according to tradition and then placed into a “new tomb,” which Joseph then “rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb” [27:60]. The Pharisees, for their part, brought it to Pilate’s attention that if the disciples stole Jesus’s body and then claimed he was resurrected, it might be worse than having just left him alone. Pilate then commanded that a group of soldiers should go and secure the entrance, both by sealing the rock and posting a guard.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthXx-RhFI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/dOtHfkktelE/s1600-h/ManyMarys.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375997641376236626" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 306px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthXx-RhFI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/dOtHfkktelE/s320/ManyMarys.jpg" border="0" /></a>Yet, the next day, the two Mary’s went to see the tomb and were surprised to find “an angel of the Lord” who, in the form of a great earthquake, had “rolled back the stone, and sat upon it” [28:2]. Though the soldiers guarding the tomb were said have “trembled and become like dead men,” the angel told the two women not to fear for “I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said” [28:5,6]. Given instructions to inform the disciples of his resurrection, the women departed at once but were met by Jesus on their way who tells them to have the disciples meet him in Galilee. After implicating the Jews in covering up the truth of Jesus’s resurrection, Matthew’s Gospel closes with the following passage:<br /><br /><em>Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”</em> [28:16-20]<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthkGKSWII/AAAAAAAAARA/bD__txhy1Mk/s1600-h/HimRisen.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375997852953761922" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpthkGKSWII/AAAAAAAAARA/bD__txhy1Mk/s320/HimRisen.jpg" border="0" /></a>This passage, perhaps more than any other in the Gospel According to Matthew, underscores the nature of the audience to whom this book was directed. It assumes that the question of Gentile conversion (still a hot topic for debate in Paul’s time) as one already settled. It assumes the concept of the Trinity, though the Holy Spirit is barely mentioned in the Gospel itself. In attaching the word “always” to “the close of the age,” it also assumes that that “close” has been moved from Jesus’s earlier proclamation that “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” [16:28] to some undisclosed date in the future. For these reasons, among many others, it seems most likely that the Gospel According to Matthew was written after the destruction of the Jerusalem and was directed towards existing Christian communities as well as sympathetic pagans who had just enough knowledge and respect for the Jewish tradition to appreciate the idea that it had not been lost in the wars but, like Jesus himself, had risen from the grave and become something new and transformative in nature.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-75509798106713706642009-08-26T12:23:00.000-07:002009-08-26T12:42:10.256-07:00Great Books: The Gospel According to Matthew (Part 6)<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWM72nDv9I/AAAAAAAAAPI/pdy2u2tziVA/s1600-h/Jesus6.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374356690236063698" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWM72nDv9I/AAAAAAAAAPI/pdy2u2tziVA/s320/Jesus6.jpg" border="0" /></a> The first five segments of this essay can be accessed at the right of the screen, archived under August of 2009.<br /><br />Following the Transfiguration, Jesus moved his ministry, by Matthew’s account, forcefully towards his detractors and enemies. By the end of the seventeenth chapter, Matthew has Jesus back in Galilee with his disciples where he re-iterates the formula of his final and greatest miracle, saying that “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day” [17:23]. Mere verses later, they are in Capernaum where Jesus delivered a new set of teachings on the kingdom of heaven to the disciples, mixing parables with more power inversion metaphors (“Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” [18:4]) so that his disciples might better understand his vision.<br /><br />Assuming that Jesus traveled to Caesarea Phillipi to avoid the direct scrutiny of Herod Antipas and the Pharisees in Galilee, his return would not have gone unnoticed. In declaring, while abroad, that he would soon be murdered in Jerusalem, one can almost sense that Jesus, offered the choice of exile in Phillipi or persecution in Galilee, chose a third, more radical option to take his ministry to the geographic heart of the Jewish faith, Jerusalem. Given the vehement response of the Galilean Pharisees, he could only have assumed that his arrival at Jerusalem would not be well-received by those most deeply invested in the continued orthodoxy of the Law. Upon completing his teachings in Galilee, Jesus “went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan; and large crowds followed him there” [19:1]<br /><br />The Jordan, in this story, is like the Rubicon in that of Julius Caesar’s before him. John baptized at the river but there is no suggestion in the text that he sought to move his ministry from the wilderness into the city. Once Jesus moved beyond it, there was no turning back but through the abandonment of his teaching and probably foreign exile for he was truly surrounded by his enemies with no place for easy retreat. Immediately upon his arrival, the Pharisees are shown to plague him with questions about the kingdom of heaven and the role of the Law in it. Interestingly and in contrast with his earlier missions in Galilee, these protestations are not preceded by miracles or healing. These doctrinal disputes supersede Jesus’s mission of healing the sick and teaching to the people for nearly all of chapter nineteen and twenty. Matthew manages to squeeze in the anecdotal healing of two blind men at Jericho while achieving the bonus goal of showing Jesus’s ministry still in motion towards the capital.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWNLzcZV-I/AAAAAAAAAPQ/XcRVPWgDc-A/s1600-h/JesusPharisees.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374356964263942114" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 313px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWNLzcZV-I/AAAAAAAAAPQ/XcRVPWgDc-A/s400/JesusPharisees.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first of those arguments adroitly reveals the politics that underscored their otherwise religious differences.<br /><br /><em>And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother to be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder”</em> [19:3-6]<br /><br />By the time Jesus arrived in Judea, it under direct Roman control, having been taken out of the hands of Herod Archelaus when he was deposed in 6 CE. Though the seat of Roman authority was in the costal city of Caesarea, the religious authority was invested into the Temple at Jerusalem in Judea. It is not hard to imagine that the Pharisees invested their own interest into Herod Antipas, tetrarch of neighboring Galilee as the real king of the Jews; especially when one considers that Herod Archelaus had, in part, been removed from his position of authority after a particular brutal persecution of the sect of the Pharisees. As the above-cited passage was the very first question that Matthew portrays the Pharisees as presenting to Jesus upon his arrival, it gives the impression that the theological battle begins on the same turf that they fought (and won) against John years earlier.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWOLCdQABI/AAAAAAAAAPo/AKCMMc0GjLk/s1600-h/JesusintoJerusalem.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374358050625814546" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 223px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWOLCdQABI/AAAAAAAAAPo/AKCMMc0GjLk/s400/JesusintoJerusalem.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the twenty-first chapter, Jesus and the disciples “drew near to Jerusalem” [21:1] and Jesus sent two disciples ahead to procure a foal and a donkey for his dramatic arrival at the cultural center of the country. Depending on one’s viewpoint, his careful navigation of historical prophecy regarding the coming of the Christ can be seen as divinely inspired and/or very shrewd. The scene that Matthew paints of his arrival would have been one difficult for anyone, let alone those in authority at the Temple, to ignore.<br /><br /><em>The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon. Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.”</em> [21:6-11]<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWPqZdq5EI/AAAAAAAAAQA/GAPWNV167BQ/s1600-h/Jesusmoneylenders.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374359688889164866" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 288px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWPqZdq5EI/AAAAAAAAAQA/GAPWNV167BQ/s400/Jesusmoneylenders.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Even with a riotous entrance as this, Jesus did not allow himself to be upstaged by the theatrics of his followers as in the following passage, Matthew tells us that Jesus entered the Temple and, now famously, “overturned the tables of the money-lenders and the seats of those who sold pigeons” [21:12]. Now, it is possible that Jesus did exactly what that passage suggests; namely, that he entered the Temple and went on a one-man vandalism spree. But had he actually perpetuated such a visceral and visual display in the public eye, surely it would have been an actionable crime that would have given the Pharisees all the ammunition they needed to bring him before the Romans. A second interpretation might consider, that in his teachings in the Temple that follow, Jesus’s disdain for the business of religion would have been perceived as a threat to those two groups (money-lenders and pigeon-sellers) in precisely the same way that Paul’s exhortations to the god-fearing Pagans in Greece decades later might have threatened the idol-crafting business to the point that a mob would form and nearly beat him to death. Preaching against the need for the blood-sacrifice of the Temple would have overturned the tables and seats of those who stood to profit just as assuredly as someone coming in and physically upending their stalls and tables.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWOapis00I/AAAAAAAAAPw/8ZtKZhrMXyQ/s1600-h/JesusPharisees2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374358318815695682" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 262px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpWOapis00I/AAAAAAAAAPw/8ZtKZhrMXyQ/s320/JesusPharisees2.jpg" border="0" /></a>Afterwards, Jesus remained in the Temple and engaged in his more typical ministerial duties of healing the sick but left Jerusalem for the city of Bethany (or Bethabara) which was near the Jordan river. The next few sections lead us to believe that Jesus would travel to and from Jerusalem but rarely stayed overnight there, perhaps due to issues of personal security. There is also the implicit suggestion that Jesus was practicing two ministries, one near the river that drew from the common people who had followed John and a second in the Temple, teaching and debating with the Pharisees. Matthew offers two parables delivered in the Temple and directed specifically at the Pharisees but, in chapter twenty-three, he is noted as saying “to the crowds and to his disciples” that “[t]he scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach but do not practice” [23:1-3]. The invective during this section is particularly venomous and though the passage often veers into direct address to the Pharisees, it is at best ambiguous whether it is being delivered in Temple or at one of his mass meetings down by the river. Given that every passage previous that was clearly set in the Temple was joined by some kind of rebuttal, it lends credence to the idea that Jesus was reaching out to one audience by day and quite another by night.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-859614700530685207.post-17192269623417351092009-08-23T22:03:00.000-07:002009-08-23T22:15:15.439-07:00Great Books: The Gospel According to Matthew (Part 5)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIgmcGVmHI/AAAAAAAAAOo/rN8LhyLzN3k/s1600-h/Jesus5.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373393150156314738" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIgmcGVmHI/AAAAAAAAAOo/rN8LhyLzN3k/s320/Jesus5.jpg" border="0" /></a> The first four parts of this essay can be found archived on the right of the screen from August of 2009.<br /><br />Matthew next breaks up a longish section of familiar sermons and miracles with a little history, filling us in on the death of John the Baptist at Herod’s hands. Though neither Jesus nor John are captured in the historical record during their time on Earth, a great deal is known about Herod Antipas and, from this data, we can gain nuance in our understanding of this account. Herod Antipas was the son of Herod the Great (the Herod from the wise men story earlier in the gospel) and was proclaimed ruler of the territory of Galilee among others. While in Rome petitioning for Augustus to honor his father’s will that would grant him authority over these regions, Antipas developed a relationship with Herodias, his brother’s wife and they decided to divorce their spouses and marry. John, while preaching in Galilee, decried this marriage as against Jewish law, implying that Antipas’s values were Roman (where this sort of thing happened as a matter of politics all the time) and not appropriate for a man who might otherwise have called himself king of at least some of the Jews. Herod Antipas had John imprisoned for it and, eventually, had him executed.<br /><br />Matthew’s account adds some spice to the story by portraying Antipas as reluctant to have John killed (presumably from a vague fear of divine retribution) but is coerced by his wife’s daughter, Salome to deliver John’s head to her on a platter as a reward for some sexy dancing. Perhaps, then, motivated by his guilty conscience, “Herod the tetrarch heard about the fame of Jesus; and he said to his servants, ‘This is John the Baptist, he has been raised from the dead; that is why these powers are at work in him’” [14:1,2]. While we can spend any amount of time allotted debating the historicity of Matthew’s account here, two elements of this story resonate as thematic rather than strictly narrative. First, Jesus had, to some extent, co-opted John’s ministry in his absence (clearly evidenced in Chapter 11) and now Herod is shown as seeing Jesus as the resurrection of John. This, though more subtle than Jesus’s reference to Jonah in the whale’s belly for three days, foreshadows Christ’s own resurrection later in the gospel.<br />Second, Herod’s unwitting participation in John’s murder parallels that of Pontius Pilate in regards to Jesus’s crucifixion. Both are essentially seduced by players with ulterior motives into capitulating rather than ordering the respective executions by the dictates of their own will and conscience.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIg0Uk1K8I/AAAAAAAAAOw/5aMGyaEGVlA/s1600-h/Jesus+water.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373393388654898114" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 194px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIg0Uk1K8I/AAAAAAAAAOw/5aMGyaEGVlA/s400/Jesus+water.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Returning his story, then to Jesus, Matthew unveils a new miracle, the feeding of many from almost nothing. Like the story of Jesus commanding the sea (which is recycled later, adding the feat of Jesus walking on the water instead of just rebuking it), this miracle seems tonally different from the leper-cleansing and demon-casting that makes up his daily routine wherever he travels. Matthew ties its first appearance into the death of John the Baptist, writing that<br /><br /><em>…when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there [Nazareth?] in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. As he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and healed their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a lonely place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to the heaven, and blessed, and broke, and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.</em> [14:13-21]<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIhIyWeMrI/AAAAAAAAAO4/jOw4_VsCoBE/s1600-h/Jesus+feeding.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373393740245119666" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 274px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIhIyWeMrI/AAAAAAAAAO4/jOw4_VsCoBE/s320/Jesus+feeding.jpg" border="0" /></a>A mere chapter later, we get this:<br /><br /><em>Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat; and I an unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.” And the disciples said to him, “Where are we to get bread enough in the desert to feed so great a crowd?” And Jesus said, “How many loaves have you?” They said, “Seven and a few small fish.” And commanding the crowd to sit on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied; and they took up seven baskets full of the broken pieces left over. Those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children.</em> [15:32-38]<br /><br />It is possible to accept those two stories as literal accounts of what happened on two completely different occasions but only as a matter of faith. In restricting our analysis solely to the text, however, it is impossible to ignore parallel phrases used in both passages that suggest that this story may have stemmed from the same event. Moreover, the precision with which numbers are used in this passage (two fishes, five loaves, twelve baskets, seven loaves, seven baskets) makes us wonder how Hebrew numerology (wound inextricably into the Torah of which Matthew’s author shows a great knowledge through this gospel) would slant a reading of this passage by a converted Jew even one hundred years after Jesus’s death. Unlike other miracles, where Matthew is precise about the details, these two events are less clear. Though it implies that Jesus somehow multiplied the amount of food available, it never comes right out and says that, only that the people were satisfied and that a portion larger than the one they began with remained. This ambiguity is consistent in both accounts and, again, can leave the reader with the perception that the story may have been more important in its symbolic meaning than in its actual occurence during Jesus’s ministry.<br /><br />The gospel shifts back into a more simplified journalistic mode about midway through chapter sixteen as Jesus is placed back into a physical context, coming “into the district of Caesarea Phillipi” [16:13] where he begins teaching a healing for a new, more metropolitan audience. While Matthew omits this detail, this move actually took Jesus out of Galilee and, more importantly, out from under Herod Antipas’s authority. This lends credence to the idea that Jesus, seen as the heir to John’s ministry, was coming under Herod’s scrutiny for likewise condemning his divorce and re-marriage (as expressed during the Sermon on the Mount) as sinful and un-Jewish.<br /><br />Upon arriving at Caesarea Phillipi, Matthew tells us that:<br /><br /><em>[Jesus] asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him saying, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven”...Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day, be raised.</em> [16:13-17,20,21]<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIhYNq3teI/AAAAAAAAAPA/teW3m_hPBnM/s1600-h/Transfiguration.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373394005276472802" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 249px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cYqg88CgxLY/SpIhYNq3teI/AAAAAAAAAPA/teW3m_hPBnM/s320/Transfiguration.jpg" border="0" /></a>After this revelation, Jesus took three disciples, Peter, John and James up to a mountain top where they experienced an event often referred to as the Transfiguration. Upon their arrival, Jesus underwent a transformation where he was bathed in light and was joined by Moses and Elijah with whom he spoke. Then, “a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him’…And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, ‘Tell no one of this vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead’” [17:5,9]. The words heard by all four men (not including Moses and Elijah) are, in fact, identical to the words that Jesus alone heard upon his baptism with only the addition of the command to “listen to him” added to the account. Jesus’s command for them to keep his secret meant that, while this particular miracle had made a transformation from an internal to an external one, it did not make it from a private to a public one. Put more bluntly, had Jesus chosen to be seen as transfigured before the same crowds he fed with however many loaves and fishes, the question of Jesus’s truly divine status, at least among the people, would no longer have been in question.R and Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12480766483935731373noreply@blogger.com0