****************************************************************************** This week's theme: Easter The annual celebration of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ after his violent passion and death. A while back I ran across some excellent lectures on "Patristic Studies" on YouTube. That is the study of "The Early Christian Fathers" (from the Latin "Pater"/"Father"). For most Protestant Christians, everything stopped when the last line of the New Testament was written. But for Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, a great value is put on the writings of these "Early Church Fathers" - roughly to the mid 8th century A.D. Basically, these early Christian leaders were well trained in Plato and Greek philosophy. They felt he was a genius who had carried things as far as anyone could without the divine revelation given us by Jesus Christ and so they sought to explain / understand Christianity in Platonic terms - to sort of complete Plato's work. Some might find these lectures a little "too Catholic" but if you can get past that, I'm sure you'll find he has a lot of very interesting history about the early church and these early fathers and that he is a very good speaker. I recommend these lectures very highly. Check him out on YouTube at: The Church Fathers from St. Paul to St. John of Damascus - Charles H. Craigmile http://catholicbs.blogspot.com/2014/08/church-fathers-spaul-to-john-damascus-charles-craigmile.html ********************** When I was in High School I became very interested in modern Biblical studies ("Biblical criticism"). I even thought seriously about going into that as a career. But, as is common in life, "stuff happens" and I didn't. Anyway, it has always appealed to me, as a techie kind of guy, to apply scientific methodologies to the study and interpretation of the Bible. The main problem in Biblical studies is the extreme limit of available information. We have the four Gospels about Jesus Christ, but three of them probably draw from the same underlying sources (and maybe even the fourth one too). Contrast that with the hundreds, if not thousands, of historical documents available about Abraham Lincoln. Instead we have wiggle and jiggle what little we have and see what comes out. Little is certain and minor changes can cause significantly different conclusions. ------- There are different branches in modern Biblical studies, textual criticism, which tries to recover the original text; philological criticism, which tries to understand the ancient Biblical languages better in order to translate them more accurately; literary criticism, which tries to determine the date, authorship, and original purpose of the texts; tradition criticism, which attempts to recover any oral tradition that may have preceded the written texts and form criticism which studies the structure of the texts, such as poems, parables, sayings, legends, etc. We have no original copies of any of the books of the Bible, only copies of copies of copies usually from centuries after they were originally written. As a result errors have crept into the text - most are minor - some significant. You should find them in the footnotes of most modern translations. Textual criticism tries to figure out what the original text actually was. That's tougher than you might think. There are no native speakers of the ancient languages, while a great effort has been made to learn them, there are numerous words whose meanings are still disputed. For example the word translated as "daily" in the Lord's prayer ("our daily bread") is actually completely unknown. It appears nowhere else in the Bible or in any other ancient Greek text. The translation to "daily" is just a guess based on the preceding phrase "give us this day", scholars don't actually know what it should be. ------- The average modern adult typically knows about 20,000 words, but only draws from the same few hundred repeatedly when they write or speak. As a result an individual's vocabulary "fingerprint" can sometimes be discerned by simple word counting and style in different texts ("stylometry"). (I know I, myself, tend to over use the word "anyway" :-) Anyway, these techniques were demonstrated a few years back when a news reporter anonymously wrote a book called "Primary Colors" based on the Clinton presidency. Vassar professor Donald Foster, using these techniques, was able to determine it was written by columnist Joe Klein. When these techniques are applied to the 13 epistles of St. Paul, 6 are found to track closely together as being by one author, while the other 7 are at various degrees of "unlikely" with Ephesians being the most unique. This is problematic as each epistle specifically states it is by St. Paul. This method isn't fool proof but it is interesting. What I liked about this was that it seems "scientific" rather than "theological". Unfortunately, interpreting the results isn't completely scientific, it is still a judgment call. ------- If I wrote a book condemning slavery, no one would read it. After all, who am I? But if I say I found that book up in the attic and I say it was written by Abraham Lincoln, people would be much more interested. To us, that would be just an out right fraud, but evidently it was common practice in the ancient world and we shouldn't try to impose our standards retroactively on them. We just need to understand it. The technical term for this is "Pseudepigrapha" ("falsely attributed writings"). ------- One of the issues in the early church, which wasn't really resolved, was whether Christianity was just a new and improved form of Judaism or a completely new, separate religion completely free from Judaism. An indicator to me of multiple authorship in the Pauline epistles is that about half of them quote Old Testament texts and themes profusely while the other half virtually never do and even contain phrases like "beware of the dogs [i.e. the Judaizers]" (Philippians 3:2). The epistles seem to be on both sides of the issue which doesn't make sense if they're all by the same person. ------- In the 19th century German scholars talked about "Sitz in Leben" or "setting in life", that is, the cultural and historical context of a text. If, for example, we knew more about, say, sheep herding practices in ancient Palestine, it might help us understand better what Jesus meant in sayings like "I am the good shepherd" (John 10:11). There is a similar theory, that if we knew more about what the ancient Jews were thinking in the first and earlier centuries B.C. and also what the early Christians were thinking in the second and later centuries A.D., we might be able to extrapolate between them and trace the trajectories of different ideas and beliefs through the first century time of Jesus. Since the late 1940s, the discoveries of the Dead Sea scrolls has given us a lot more information about the Jews in the first century B.C. Also the so called "Gnostic Gospels" discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, together with the "early Christian fathers" gives us a great deal of information about the early Christians. That was my original rationale to study Patristics. But actually, I found it to be very interesting history in it's own right. ------- Some modern Christians have scoured the Bible and worked out in great detail what to expect regarding the second coming of Christ. The Apocalypse, the Rapture, the Beast and his mark, and so on and so forth. In the same way one section of Jews in the first century had scoured the Old Testament and worked out what to expect the Christ would be like when he showed up. St. Paul seems to have been in this group. Let's call them the "Christ Cult". Similarly, in Jerusalem, there is another group centered around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Let's call them the "Jesus Cult". Jesus appears to have organized a revolt against the Roman occupation in Palestine. He marches into Jerusalem with his followers on Palm Sunday, goes to the Temple, takes it over, throws the money changers out and then is crushed by the Roman authorities and put to death. "Miracle happens here." Unexpectedly, Jesus is resurrected from the dead and this leads ultimately to the formation of the world's greatest religion. In the New Testament, there is a great deal of ink spent on John the Baptist even though he was not a Christian and probably had no idea who Jesus even was. It seems likely that after John's demise the Jesus Cult tried to appeal to his followers by saying the guy he had been predicting was our guy, Jesus, come and join up with us. In the same way, the Jesus Cult later appealed to the Christ Cult with the same argument. The guy you're looking for is our guy, Jesus, come and join up with us. ------- Before you decide to burn me at the stake as a heretic, I might say that this sort of Biblical study is sort of like performing an autopsy. An autopsy can tell you a great deal about a person; hair color, eye color, skin color, weight, height, age, whether the person drank or smoked, had any particular diseases and so on. But it can't tell you much at all about what most people would consider is really important about a person. Were they a nice person or jerk? Who did they love and who loved them? Were they happy in life? Were they a Democrat or a Republican or neither. What were they interested in? What were their passions in life? Did they enjoy listening to old 78 rpm phonograph records? You know - the really important things :-) Basically, an autopsy can't tell you very much if anything about their personality. In the same way, this type of Biblical studies looks at the mechanics of the Bible and seeks after the "Jesus of history". But it can't say very much at all about the "Jesus of faith". You'll have to figure that out for yourself. I think everybody has their own unique experiences in life, their own unique moral dilemmas and spiritual experiences. Mine have reinforced my Christian upbringing and have strengthened my Christian faith, but I would never presume to tell anyone else what they should or shouldn't believe, I can only say what works for me. Anyway, Don't eat to many chocolate bunnies this weekend - that's my job :-) Happy Easter and Stay Jazzed! --Tom Swezey //////