GCB

I watched part of ABC’s GCB last night.  GCB is based on the book Good Christian Bitches.  There are Christians who are screaming “persecution” in response to this show.  Some have glibly stated that there would be an outcry if there were a program called GMB, with the “M” standing for Muslim.  In this post, I’ll list some thoughts:

1.  I don’t think that Christians should only be portrayed positively in stories and media.  The impression I get from folks on the religious right is that any negative depiction of Christians amounts to persecution.  In my opinion, though, religious hypocrisy is fair game when it comes to stories.  We’d have to eliminate a lot of literature if we could only accept the stories that depict Christianity or religion positively.  George Elliott’s Middlemarch had a religious hypocrite, Bulstrode.  There was the cold guy in Jane Eyre who told young Jane that she was going to hell.  There’s Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  There’s the Bible!  Then, going to the evangelical realm, there are Christian movies that depict one or more Christian character negatively.  I think of the movie Hidden Secrets.

2.  I do like to see some positive portrayal of religion in stories and in media.  One reason is that many Christians are good folks, and their religion inspires them to do positive things.  Another reason is that faith and the search for meaning are a part of our (and many other) cultures, and so stories that talk about the big questions can be quite powerful, when they are well-written.  Overall, I feel that television, the movies, and books are positive when it comes to their depiction of religion and spirituality.  I think of such programs as Six Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Dexter, LOST, and a host of others.  I did not watch all of GCB last night, for it did not particularly draw me in.  But I hope that it’s about much more than bashing Christians, and that there will be something deep and reflective about it (but I’m not optimistic).  The movie Saved! also lampooned the evangelical sub-culture, but I liked it because it had positive things to say about faith—-where it is right, where it can go wrong (in the author’s opinion), etc.

3.  I can somewhat sympathize with my evangelical friends who feel that society is tolerant of everyone and everything—-except for them.  What would the reaction be to a show that depicted Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, or African-Americans in a negative light?  Shouldn’t we refrain from condemning all groups, including evangelical Christians?

I do not have a good answer to this question.  I think that, on some level, evangelical Christianity is fair game because of its prominence in American society (though, of course, many evangelicals would claim that they are marginalized in the United States).  I myself am not against acknowledging that people may have problems with elements of Islam or Judaism.  The West Wing, for example, talks about Islamic extremists, but (in contrast to Islamophobes) it does not apply that label to all Muslims.  So I’m not sure where I land on this question of depicting groups.  I’m against stigmatizing entire groups of people, but I also realize that stories reflect reality, on some level, and there are times when people use their religion in evil ways.  In my mind, it’s acceptable to highlight that.

Terra Nova Season Finale Tonight

Today, I’ll take a break from writing about David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man, and instead I will write about Terra Nova, a show that is on Monday nights, on Fox.  The two-hour season finale of Terra Nova is on tonight!

I have liked some episodes better then others and have found the romantic dialogue to be hokey and cheesy, to say the least.  Also, I am not incredibly attracted to most of the characters (in contrast to, say, LOST).  But I have enjoyed this series overall, and there are a variety of reasons for this.  First, I like the character of Commander Nathaniel Taylor (played by Stephen Lang) because he is melodramatic and takes himself too seriously, somewhat like General Hammond on Stargate SG-1, and yet Commander Taylor sometimes demonstrates a softer side.  Second, I enjoy shows and stories that have such elements as conflicts between powerful personalities, mystery, and redemption.  And, third, remember the movie, The Fugitive, where we admire and like Tommy Lee Jones as the cop who is pursuing Dr. Richard Kendall (played by Harrison Ford), and yet we are still rooting for Kendall to escape because he’s an innocent man who was framed?  I really liked it when Tommy Lee Jones finally found out that Dr. Kendall did not kill his wife and became his ally rather than his pursuer.  Well, Terra Nova had a theme like this in last week’s episode.

I’ll give some information here about the plot and characters of the series, but I don’t want to get overly bogged down in details, such that writing this post becomes a chore.  Essentially, Terra Nova is about people from a futuristic earth going back to the dinosaur times (in an alternate timeline, so as not to affect the future) in order to provide humanity with a fresh start, since the futuristic earth is plagued with problems such as overpopulation and pollution.  There is the Terra Nova colony, which is led by Commander Taylor.  And there are Sixers, another colony, which is led by Mira.  There is tension between these two groups.  For a while, we wonder if we can really trust Commander Taylor, and if Mira is actually one of the good people, but what we have learned is that Mira is on the side of Taylor’s estranged son, who is developing another portal to allow developers from the future to come back to the dinosaur period and to plunder the land.  Mira and the Sixers are not exactly evil, though, for Mira is a mother who wants to see her daughter again.  Like the Others in LOST, the Sixers appear to be enemies, but they are actually complex people, with complex motives, like many of us.

Throughout the series, Taylor is aware that someone is spying for the Sixers, and we are wondering who that spy is.  It turns out that the spy is Skye, a teenaged girl to whom Taylor is a sort of father figure, since she has supposedly lost her parents.  But Skye is not a spy out of sinister motives, for she is spying for the Sixers because they have her sick mother.  What reminded me of The Fugitive was that Terra Nova’s security chief, Jim Shannon, figured out that Skye was spying for the Sixers against her own will, for she wasn’t giving the Sixers any information that could actually harm Terra Nova.  Commander Taylor was ready to hang her (figuratively speaking), but Shannon was a moderating influence.

The theme of redemption has occurred in this series a couple of times.  There is Shannon’s son, Josh, who wants to bring his girlfriend from the future back to Terra Nova, and he has secretly cooperated with the Sixers in an attempt to bring this about.  But his father found out, and Josh learned his lesson.  There is a guy who killed a man in Terra Nova, and Taylor expelled him from the colony.  At one point, Taylor gave a dramatic speech about how the colony is humanity trying to start afresh, and how things like murder is what people came to Terra Nova to escape—-even though we learn that Taylor himself has killed important people in his own attempt to protect the colony from future developers (or so he tells us).   But the expelled murderer ends up redeeming himself when he spies on the Sixers and brings Skye’s mother safely to the Terra Nova colony.  Taylor tells Jim Shannon that it’s good when someone has a chance to redeem himself, as he reflects on his own mistakes, which led to his alienation from his son.

I’m looking forward to the season finale tonight, and it would be nice if the show could be renewed for a second season.  Lately, I’ve looked forward to watching it on Monday nights!

I Missed That

I’m still reading Stephen King’s Lisey Story, but there’s a good chance that I will finish it tonight or tomorrow.

I’m finding that there area few holes in my understanding of the plot.  For instance, what is Scott Landon’s “long boy” that he so often mentions?  In my reading last night, I learned that it was a creature in Boo’ya Moon, an alternative reality that Scott visits, where Scott finds healing and inspiration.  When Scott was dying (the doctors identified his disease as pneumonia, but Lisey reflects that it could have easily been something that Scott picked up at Boo’ya Moon), he was unable to access the healing pool because his “long boy” was blocking his path.  But the long boy did manage to help out Lisey.  When a psychopathic fan of Scott Landon, James Dooley, was after Lisey so he could take her late husband’s manuscripts and give them to a professor who wanted them, Lisey and her sister Amanda take Dooley to the Boo’ya Moon, and there Scott’s long boy kills him, or absorbs Dooley into himself.

On page 449, Lisey reflects that the long boy was “the living embodiment of what Scott had been talking about when he talked about the bad-gunky.”  The bad gunky was a sort of madness or depression that ran through Scott’s family, and the long boy is somehow an embodiment of that.  There is some depth or symbolism that may inhabit this book, therefore, even though Lisey takes a whack at literary criticism on pages 415-416:

“Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo’s Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now…and probably was.  She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here.  Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives.  Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other’s abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool’s gold for decades on end.  But all the real horses were out of the barn.  The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers—-people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sunporch—-all that stuff had been published.  The Secret Pearl, published a month after his death, had been the last.”

This reminds me of a passage in Stephen King’s IT, in which the narrator talks about Bill Denbrough’s frustration with literary critics who try to find some complex sexual or political symbolism in stories, rather than simply enjoying them as good stories.  Stephen King writes a good story, but, at the same time, notwithstanding the mockery of literary criticism that comes out in some of his books, he does use symbolism.  Here is an article that comments on that issue, referencing the LOST episode in which Juliet was leading a group discussion about Stephen King, while responding to someone in the group who did not think that King wrote serious work.

As far as Scott’s “long boy” goes, I suppose that I could go through the book again and read every single reference to it in order to understand better what it is.  I think that I missed it in reading the book this first time around because the book has a lot of silly language that I do not understand, language that was a part of the repertoire between Scott and Lisey in their relationship, and I thought that “long boy” was just another example of that—-silly language that was non-essential to the plot.  I don’t plan to reread the book anytime soon, though.  To be honest, I’m eager to leave this book behind and to go on to something else.  I would probably appreciate the book better were it made into a movie, since then I could follow it better.  I may reread the book in the distant future, though, because, although I did not fall in love with it this first time around, it is a good book, and I could probably appreciate it the second time around, after gaining a degree of distance from it.  I could then return to the book knowing what to expect and to look for, and I’d appreciate it more.

Authority

On page 325 of Stephen King’s The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, Fran thinks the following:

“If the system of authority had temporarily broken down, they would just have to find the scattered others and re-form it.  It didn’t occur to her to wonder why ‘authority’ seemed to be such a necessary thing to have, any more than it occurred to her to wonder why she had automatically felt responsible for Harold.  It just was.  Structure was a necessary thing.”

I can somewhat identify with Fran here on authority.  While I like to read about people who challenge authority, I like for someone to be in charge because there are then structures in place that can help me.  As Jack said on LOST, “Live together, or die alone.”  But a fear of chaos and anarchy is why there are people who have preferred or tolerated strong dictators: a strong leader is better than chaos, in the eyes of some.

But what if one disagrees out of principle with what an authority is doing?  Even that could lead to chaos, unless there are people who are willing to replace the oppressive authority with an alternative government, one that is able to gain acceptance and legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of people.  This was the case with the American Revolution.

Plato’s Socrates in Crito, Henry David Thoreau, and others resolved to disobey laws that they deemed unjust, and yet they agreed to suffer legal punishment because the authority structure needed to be maintained for the common good.  (Or I can say that about Plato’s Socrates, but I have not read much of Thoreau.)  They had a way to challenge authority with a higher law, while acknowledging the necessity of the authority structure.

UPDATE: See Looney’s comments here. I may be reading civil disobedience into Crito. It’s been a while since I read it.

Ruether on Matthew Fox (Not Jack from LOST)

In my reading today of Gaia and God, Rosemary Ruether talks about the view that cultures long ago were matriarchal, until a patriarchal horde came in and imposed patriarchy.  Ruether, a feminist, actually doesn’t find the evidence for that tale to be all that convincing.  She does talk about tribes, however, in which women are valued—tribes that see more importance in sharing than in acquisition.  But I won’t go into detail about that in this post.

Something that I like about Ruether’s book is her summary of different theological positions—whether she’s looking at the Bible, or Origen, or Augustine.  One summary of hers that I read today was that of Matthew Fox, who, in this case, is not the guy who played Jack on Lost, but rather a Dominican theologian.  Or, actually, he was a Dominican theologian, but now he’s an Episcopalian.

I first heard of Fox at DePauw University.  I knew two religion students who were writing their thesis on him.  One lady told me, “You wouldn’t like him,” since she realized that I was conservative.  Nowadays, who knows?  Maybe I would like him.

For Fox, the essential goodness of creation is more important than its fallenness or evil.  After all, he notes, the cosmos is fourteen billion years older than humanity, and so “original blessing” is older than human sin.  But, according to Ruether, Fox traces sin to the rise of patriarchy “some four thousand to six thousand years ago” (page 146).  So does he believe in the narrative that Ruether critiques—the narrative that society was matriarchal, and fell to become patriarchal?

For Fox, the Christian theology about Fall and redemption promotes alienation, and the West’s imposition of this idea on other cultures has been sad, especially because these other cultures highlighted the importance of harmony with nature before the West colonized them.  According to Ruether, “Fox’s creation spirituality stresses forms of meditation, liturgy, and therapy designed to free us from cultures of alienation and restore our harmony with the original blessing that remains the true ‘nature’ of things” (page 146).

I may take a look at Fox’s book, Original Blessing, sometime in the future.  Personally, I find that seeing people (even myself) and things as “bad” alienates me from them.  I’m not saying that I’m “good,” per se, but, yes, there is good within me, and I’d like to do a better job of acknowledging the goodness of others, even those I do not like.  Saying “well, we’re all sinners” doesn’t give me all that much of a warm feeling towards others, even when I’m acknowledging that I’m no better than they are.  I think that many of us respond better to encouragement rather than to being put down—even when it’s a collective put-down of “us.”

But evil should not be swept under the rug, either.  It should be addressed.

Alan Segal

I learned from James McGrath’s site that Alan Segal has passed on.  I had Professor Segal for a seminar when I was a student at Jewish Theological Seminary.  It was on the history of interpretation of the akedah—the binding of Isaac—and it was co-facilitated by David Carr from Union Theological Seminary.  It was a rather intimidating class, since it had a number of Columbia students, at both the undergraduate and the graduate level.  Actually, being in that seminar was a suitable precursor for a Ph.D. program, since it entailed being around articulate walking encyclopedias!

But, back to my topic, I enjoyed learning from Professor Segal, whether he was talking about the Bible, or his experience with pop culture.  If I recall correctly, he was an adviser for the Gospel of John movie—which starred the guy who played Desmond on LOST, before he became Desmond on LOST.  In the Gospel of John, Desmond played Jesus.  Professor Segal talked about meeting actors and actresses in his experience with that project, plus he showed us some excerpts from the movie.

As far as his scholarly works are concerned, I’ve read huge chunks of Two Powers in Heaven.  I needed to do that for my rabbinics comp, since the “two powers” concept appears in rabbinic literature.  I also read pieces of Paul the Convert—I especially remember his acknowledgments, where he said that writing a book is often a community project.

I didn’t interact with Alan Segal long, nor did I know him as well as others writing about him did.  But I’ll remember his humor and his interesting perspective on biblical issues.

R.I.P. Alan Segal.

Patricia Neal

Actress Patricia Neal passed away.  Her first movie was with Ronald Reagan.  She was also in Face in the Crowd, alongside Andy Griffith and Martin Landau.  (One line I vaguely remember from that, from a conservative politician whom Andy Griffith was teaching to be “woodsy”: “Daniel Boone didn’t need no Social Security.  All he needed was his ax!”)  She was also in the movie of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, looking at Howard Roark’s bulging, individualist muscles. 

But I most appreciate her from an episode of Little House on the Prairie, in which she played the dying mother of three children, whom Mr. Edwards and his wife, Grace, adopted.   Sawyer watched that particular episode on an episode of Lost this last season, in the flash sideways. 

R.I.P., Patricia Neal.

Staci’s Take on LOST

This is a good post on LOST because it addresses what the light was and why the Dharma Initiative wanted to study it.  I wish it had gone into more detail about why the characters did what they did in the flash sideways, and how that was significant to the overall plot.  But I’m understanding LOST by drawing from different sources.

Here it is: My Take On LOST.

God Uses (Not Causes) Tragedies; Rich (Bummer!); Long Impression; Rabbinic Cessationism; Blowing Off Steam; Noth on DtrH; Good LOST Articles

1. William P. Young, The Shack, page 185:

“Mack, just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies.  Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes…Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.”

2. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, page 273:

“…Captain, you obviously don’t know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is.  It is not a fat purse and time to spend it.  Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth.  He becomes suspicious of honest friendship—indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to be mistaken for one…”

That reminds me of an episode of Highway to Heaven that I watched today, “Lucky Man”, which is from Season 3 (which I finally got for a low price off of Amazon, after waiting for years!).  Mark wins five million dollars at a burger joint, and he wants to give it all to build a new gymnasium for at-risk youths.  But some swindlers on the run from creditors are trying to get his money.  One is a beautiful woman, who’s posing as a wealthy socialite.  She pretends to be deeply in love with Mark, so she can marry and then divorce him, taking his money.

For me, the lesson of this episode is how some of us can allow our fantasies to blind us.  Mark thought that his dreams were coming true—that a beautiful woman was falling in love with him.  But they weren’t.  Far from it.

3. Terence Collins, The Mantel of Elijah, page 147.

Isaiah 20 says that King Sargon of Assyrian captured the Philistine city of Ashdod.  This occurred in 711 B.C.E., when Sargon punished Ashdod for rebellion and its encouragement of other kings to rebel.  The chapter then goes on to say that Isaiah is to walk around naked and barefoot for three years, as a sign that Assyria will take Egyptians and Ethiopians captive.  That should teach the Israelites not to trust in Egypt for deliverance, when they should be looking to God!

Collins doesn’t think that certain things add up.  He points out that the Assyrians invaded Egypt forty years later.  He also wonders why Ashdod is even mentioned, and he says that the warning to Israel not to trust Egypt would make most sense in 701 B.C.E., “when Sennacherib easily repulsed an Egyptian attempt to intervene” (Isaiah 37:9).  Collins maintains that elements of Isaiah 20 have undergone revision, as older oracles were applied to new situations.  And he contends that Jeremiah 37:11 applies Isaiah’s prophecy against Egypt to his own day, when Egyptian intervention didn’t help the Judahites during the invasion of their nation by the Babylonians.

I don’t entirely understand Collins’ point.  Couldn’t a prophet point to the Assyrian defeat of Ashdod to argue that human attempts to fight Assyria will come to naught, which is why the Judahites were going the path of futility in trusting Egypt for deliverance? Sure, Egyptian assistance would come to naught ten years later, and the Assyrians would invade Egypt forty years later.  But couldn’t the prophet have foreseen these events when the Assyrians defeated Ashdod?

How much is Collins motivated by naturalism in this case—naturalism here being the view that a prophet can’t predict the future?  Why would the prophet need to see Egypt getting pounced to predict it, whether there’s a God giving him the message or not?  Remember that there are scholars who have made the case that prophets got some things wrong when it came to Egypt: Jeremiah and Ezekiel said that Babylon would conquer Egypt, which didn’t happen (or so scholars contend).  Why are the prophecies that come true dismissed as current events written into the past, whereas prophecies that aren’t fulfilled are just, well, prophecies that aren’t fulfilled?

Collins may have a point in the area of timeliness, however.  Why did Isaiah walk naked for three years, communicating a prophecy that wouldn’t happen until forty years later? Did he expect the Israelites to remember his walk of nakedness about forty years before, once they saw Egypt get pounced?  Well, maybe Isaiah walking naked would leave an impression on them!

4. Alberdina Houtmann, Mishnah and Tosefta, page 74:

In T 6.7b, there is again a sudden shift to a new subject, vain prayer.  According to this tradition, it is vain to pray for a miraculous multiplication of produce.

But Elijah and Jesus multiplied food!  Well, the rabbis didn’t believe in Jesus.  And were they cessationists when it came to the sorts of miracles that were performed in the Hebrew Bible?  There are indications of such—statements that prophecy ceased at a certain point in time, or the view that Israel doing the right thing without seeing a miracle was a sign of her maturity.  But I can’t be absolute on this and claim that the rabbis denied the existence of miracles.  Maybe they just believed that they were improbable, so why be frivolous by praying for certain ones?  Ordinarily, God didn’t multiply produce!

5. John Van Seters, “Prophetic Orality in the Context of the Ancient Near East”, in Writings and Speech in Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, page 84.

Crenshaw seems to place his emphasis on the oral nature of both delivery and transmission, based on the limits of literacy in ancient Israel.  Davies argues that prophecy as a whole is a literary activity regardless of biblical suggestions to the contrary.  Cullen focuses primarily on performance and its relationship to audience.

This is a summary of what came before in the book, which I appreciate.  But Davies had some jewels.  He acted as if some of the scribes were writing prophecies against social injustice and foreign nations in order to blow off steam, while attributing the prophecies to ancient prophets!

6. Martin Noth, “The Central Theological Ideas”, in Reconsidering Israel and Judah.

Noth dates the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH)—Joshua-Kings—to the exile.  He notes that DtrH doesn’t talk much about sacrifice, preferring instead to focus on prayer.  For Noth, that would make sense in the exile, when all Israel had was prayer, since she was without a temple!  And Noth also doesn’t think that DtrH believed that the Jews would be restored, for it doesn’t mention that possibility.  So is Noth saying that they would continue to worship God without hope?  Or that maybe they can continue to hope, but redemption isn’t likely, considering how bad they were?

Here’s another interesting point that Noth made: DtrH believed that Israel should only sacrifice to God in the central sanctuary, Jerusalem.  But there are exceptions to that.  For example, Elijah sacrifices to God on Mount Carmel.  According to Noth, DtrH believes this is acceptable because a true prophet is conducting the sacrifice.

7.  Here are some good links on the finale for LOST, which I’m posting here for my access.

‘Lost’ finale recap, part one: And In The End… | Totally ‘Lost …

‘Lost’ finale recap, part two: Step into the light

I like these articles for two reasons: (1.) The first one connects Jacob’s mission to keep the Man in Black on the island, with his mission to protect the island’s light, which upholds the world.  To get off the island, the Man in Black needs to destroy it.  The island is keeping the Man in Black from leaving—as long as the Man in Black is the Smoke Monster.  To leave the island, the Man in Black needs to become a mere mortal, which occurs only when he destroys the island.  And how do you destroy the island?  You turn off its light, which upholds the world.  And so the Man in Black leaving the island would coincide with the island’s light going out, and that would bring hell and destruction to the world. (2.) The second article explained the significance of Jack’s flash sideways: Jack healed from his daddy issues by becoming a good father himself.  And I guess it also explained Ben’s flash sideways: Ben had evolved to the point of doing the right thing, which was good for Ben.  I wish the article similarly explained the significance of the other characters’ flash sideways.

Free Will Defense; Small; Astronomical Metaphor; Computer Rabbis; Living Traditions; God, not Pharaoh; LOST Fatigue

1. William P. Young, The Shack, page 164:

Mack asks an angel (or whatever she is) why God didn’t stop the murder of his daughter, Missy.  The angel responds:

“[God] doesn’t stop a lot of things that cause him pain.  Your world is severely broken.  You demanded your independence, and now you are angry with the one who loved you enough to give it to you.  Nothing is as it should be, as Papa desires it to be, and as it will be one day.  Right now your world is lost in darkness and chaos, and horrible things happen to those that he is especially fond of.”

This is the free-will defense.  To me, it sounds like a cop-out.  But I wouldn’t dismiss it completely.  And, if I were a victim of an evil person’s free-will, I may use that defense to try to hold on to my faith.

2. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, page 252:

Jubal had considered having Mike remain seated while Douglas came in, but had rejected the idea; he was not trying to place Mike a notch higher than Douglas but merely to establish that the meeting was between equals.

This reminds me of one of my thesis defenses.  My chair was lower than that of the professors interrogating me!  Or so I remember.  I did feel small during that ordeal!

3. Raphael Loewe, “The Medieval History of the Latin Vulgate”, Cambridge History of the Bible, volume 2, pages 153-154:

It may be helpful to visualize the history of the Latin bible with the help of a sustained astronomical metaphor, Hebrew and Jewish monotheism being pictured as the center of a solar system.  Around it moves a planet, the Hebrew bible, possessing its own moon, the Greek translation.  Under the impact of Jesus and Paul the central object erupted, to throw off Christianity as a second planet, charged with sufficient energy to generate its own atmosphere of patristic tradition, and possessed of sufficient gravitational pull to attract the Greek bible—the ‘moon’ of the Hebrew bible—into orbit round itself.  Christianity also acquired a second satellite in the shape of the Latin bible, compounded as it were out of the interplanetary dust of the Latin-speaking world.  The Latin bible—which, down to at least the age of Charlemagne, often amounted for practical purposes to the Gospels, with perhaps the Pauline epistles and the Psalms—has from time to time been exposed to the gravitational pull of other objects that form part of the cluster that includes Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy and European humanism; and the outcome has been sundry attempts at improving its language by Roman classicism or by Hebraic realism in diction.  Yet the patristic tradition that had nurtured the specialized vocabulary of early Latin Christianity has enveloped the Latin bible with an air that Christians could breathe: so that waves of hebraization, or of classicism, that have affected the atmosphere of the Church have given it but a transient negative charge.  Thus it has come about that the Vulgate has always been held fast to its own orbit, whereas some of its own vernacular and other satellites have been captured, especially in the countries of the Reformation, by the gravitational pull of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, and the Greek of the New.

I usually try to post paragraphs that summarize a piece, for my own benefit, even if the summary contains astronomical metaphors that confuse me near the end.

4. Alberdina Houtmann, Mishnah and Tosefta, page 51:

From Abot de Rabbi Nathan:

…Rabbi Aqiba he [Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi] called ‘A well-stocked storehouse’.  To what might Rabbi Aqiba be likened?  To a labourer who took his basket and went forth.  When he found wheat he put some in the basket; when he found barley, he put that in; spelt, he put that in; lentils, he put them in.  Upon returning home he sorted out the wheat by itself, the barley by itself, the beans by themselves, the lentils by themselves.  This is how Rabbi Aqiba acted, and he arranged the whole Torah in rings.  Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah he called a ‘spice-peddler’s basket’.  For to what might Rabbi Eleazar be likened?  To a spice peddler who takes up his basket and comes into a city; when the people of the city come up and ask him: “Have you good oil with you?  Have you ointment with you?  Have you balsam with you?” they find he has everything with him.  Such was Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah when scholars came to him…

Houtmann ties this to computers, which he is somehow bringing into his work.  But is the point of this passage that these rabbis were always ready to give an answer?

5. Robert Culley, “Orality and Writtenness in the Prophetic Texts”, in Writings and Speech in Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, page 55:

From Werner Kelber:

In the end I venture the suggestion that the gospel composition is unthinkable without the notion of cultural memory which serves ultimately not the preservation of remembrances per se but the preservation of the group, its social identity and self image.

This could explain why Gospels felt free to expand upon or clarify their sources—the Gospel of Mark, Q (if you believe in Q): their agenda concerned the identity of their community, which is what the Gospels were addressing, not so much the “preservation of remembrances”.  Yet, Luke says in Luke 1 that he composed an orderly account of what Jesus did and teach, so I wouldn’t rule out the Gospel authors’ concern for historicity.  But they were trying to apply that history to the situation of their community, so the Gospels may not be a mere transcript of past events.  Rather, they’re applying the past to the present, by adding clarification to their sources.  And there are scholars who maintain that some of this “clarification” may be rooted in the ideology of the Gospel author and/or his community.   

6.  From James Sanders’ review of Brevard Childs’ commentary, The Book of Exodus:

The signs, constantly rejected, were God’s judgment on Egypt, such judgment that Pharoah would not listen (p. 153). Even so, one fails to find in Childs the next, obvious statement of the whole: Pharaoh shall not share in the freeing of God’s people. (Compare the case of Cyrus and the problems which arose from that.) One feels that, if Childs had probed even more deeply, canonically, into Exod 10:12; 11:10; 1 Sam 6:6; 1 Kings 22; Isaiah 6 and 28-29 (cf. Rom 9:1-10:16), he would have seen the further point that if God had not hardened Pharaoh’s heart there would have been no Torah, in the full sense. The slaves would have been grateful to Pharaoh’s “emancipation” of them and not to God. All of these instances of God’s hardening the heart testify to a basic and intrinsic shape of the Bible: canonically the Bible is a monotheizing literature.

This is an interesting take on why God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  It reminds me of the Ten Commandments: Moses could have played his cards right and become Pharaoh, after which he’d treat the Hebrew slaves kindly or free them.  But then the Hebrews would praise Moses, not God.  They were already saying that they didn’t need the deliverer because they had Moses.  And they called the Sabbath “the day of Moses”.  There was Mosesolatry going on here!  If the Pharaoh’s heart had not been hardened, would the Israelites have been grateful to the Pharaoh for delivering them, rather than to God?  God didn’t take that chance. 

7.  I’m suffering from LOST fatigue!  I wish that I were more inspired by the last episode, and that things were clearer, while simultaneously maintaining a sense of depth.  Instead, things are unclear, which was why I spent last night and this morning doing what I did throughout the series: theorizing about LOST!  That can build community, but I feel so incomplete.  A final episode is supposed to give a sense of completion, right?  But I don’t feel that.

I’m not in the mood right now to re-watch LOST episodes, since LOST brings things up that later are not addressed.  And I’m not just talking about polar bears and what not: LOST killed off the Man in Black too early in last night’s episode, in my opinion!  And we didn’t hear much about the debate on human nature (good or evil?).  Plus, the episode took the easy way out by sending the main characters to heaven.

I wish that I knew how the flash sideways functioned as a purgatory.  Why did we have to watch the characters’ stories in the flash sideways?  Was it to get to know the characters better—which was what LOST chose to emphasize?  I won’t rule out that there are answers, but I’ll wait until they are in an accessible place.  I’m not sure I’m in the mood right now to plough through comments on blog posts for that jewel that answers my question, as insightful as those comments might be.

I may watch the entire series again in the future.  There are movies and episodes of shows that I disliked the first time I saw them, but I appreciated them more in my subsequent viewings.  That may be true with LOST.  But, right now, I have LOST fatigue.  And yet, I feel empty because there are no new LOST episodes for me to watch on Tuesday nights!