Vale Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1950-2009

I heard today the very sad news that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died on 12 April, one of the pioneers of queer theory. As Duke University Press says

More than just a Duke author, Sedgwick helped to define the Press as we went through major editorial changes in the 1990s. In 1992, along with Michèle Aina Barale, Michael Moon, and Jonathan Goldberg, she founded the influential Series Q, helping to found the discipline of queer theory. Under her guidance, Duke Press has become a leader in that field; Series Q now includes 42 books.

Sedgwick was a very important theorist for my dissertation, especially her Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies. The insights in both these books were an important guide for me navigating the many texts generated by Sodom and Gomorrah. I even suggested her as a possible examiner for my dissertation. I'm not certain if, in the end, she was approached or was unable but she was not to be one of my examiners. She was definitely a scholar I would have liked to have met. I suppose I have through her books and I plan to buy another when I get Mr Rudd's stimulus.

Vale Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Requiescat in Pacem. Eternal life grant unto her, Most High, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May she always shine in the perpetual light of your presence. May her name always be a blessing.

UPDATE Simon Scholfield has a page on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, which includes her birth chart, over at Astroqueer here.

O Happy Fault, O Necessary Sin of Adam

So it is sung in the Paschal Proclamation, the Exultet, on this night in the Easter/Paschal Vigil of the Western rite.

O Happy Fault, O Necessary Sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!

Of this night scripture says:
"The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy."

The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.

Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and humanity is reconciled with God!

So Happy Pascha! Happy Easter!

As the Greeks and Russians and other Eastern Christians will be saying next weekend, which is the Orthodox Pascha:

Christos Aneste, Alithos Aneste! Christos Voskrese, Voistinu Voskrese! Krishhti Unjall, Vertet Unjall! Kristos Tenestwal! Bergit Tenestwal! El Messieh Kahm, Kakken Kahm! Christos harjav i merelotz, Orhniale harutjun Christosi! Christos T’ensah Em’ Muhtan, Exai’ Ab-her Eokala! Pchristos aftooun, Alethos aftooun! Christos Ten-si-OU, Ba-Ha-ke Ten-si-OU! Kriste aghsdga, Cheshmaritad aghsdga! Hristus A Inviat! Adeverat a Inviat! Meshiha qam! Bashrira qam!

That selection of some of the languages of Eastern Christendom translates the standard Paschal/Easter greeting of the East: Christ is Risen, Indeed, He is truly Risen!

Good Pascha to you all!

On the Roman Catholic Apocrypha

Biblically literate Protestants might nod and say "a post on Tobit, Judith, the Books of Maccabees etc" to which I say, no not at all. These books, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Sirach, 1 & 2 Maccabees, might be termed deutero-canonical by Roman Catholics but they are, nevertheless, counted as part of the Old Testament. They are not considered Apocrypha. On the other hand, even biblically literate Roman Catholics might shake their heads and mutter "Roman Catholic Apocrypha? What's he on about?".

And I would probably have done the same as them not many years ago. And even when I stumbled across the Roman Catholic Apocrypha it took me a while to recognise just what they were. I first became aware of them when I was given a copy of the Latin Vulgate Bible. I was intrigued to discover that following the New Testament there was an appendix. In this appendix were the following texts/books: Prayer of Manasseh, 3 Ezra (1 Esdras), 4 Ezra (2 Esdras), Psalm 151, and the Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans (about which I plan to write at a later date). Apparently the books were placed here by Pope Clement VIII in 1592 "lest they utterly perish". By his time, of course, the Roman Catholic Old Testament canon had been set by the Council of Trent; the Council had made no space in the canon for these four books/texts.

What intrigued me further was that I had a copy of the Douay-Rheims Challoner English Bible, a translation from the Vulgate, that had been pretty much the normative English language Roman Catholic Bible from the 18th to 20th centuries. But this Bible did not include the Vulgate Appendix. More recent Roman Catholic English language bibles, translating from the Greek and Hebrew texts rather than the Vulgate, have likewise not bothered to reproduce the Vulgate Appendix.

However I very recently discovered that the original Douay-Rheims Bible did translate the Vulgate Appendix (with the exception of Laodiceans). It was printed as an Appendix in the 2 Volume Douay-Rheims Old Testement. The Appendix was in volume 2 following the Wisdom and Prophetical books. Curiously the Appendix stands in the same relationship to the Douay-Rheims Bible as a whole as the Apocrypha does in both the King James and Luther's German Bibles. And, of course, while much smaller than the Lutheran and Anglican Apocrypha, the same books are found in all 3 collections.

It set me wondering about the Bible of medieval Western Christendom but with a bit of searching I was able to ascertain that its Old Testament contained the deutero-canonicals of the modern Roman Catholic Old Testament but also these four texts of the Vulgate Appendix and Protestant Apocrypha. All these texts were part of the Old Testament of the Gutenberg Bible of 1452/3. So it would appear that the Bible of Western Christendom was 'pruned' by both Roman Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century.

Interesting, too, that, with the exception of 4 Ezra, all of these texts are in the Old Testament of the Greek Church and all of the texts are part of the Old Testament of other eastern churches. In other words then, medieval Christians of east and west were in greater biblical harmony or concordance than modern Christians. Why, I wonder, did Rome go to bat so strongly to preserve the canonical status of the deuterocanonicals but not these four texts? Did anyone speak up for any or all of these texts? I would dearly love to know.

So Roman Catholics, effectively, have Old Testament Apocrypha, except that they don't know about them and no Roman Catholic bibles bother to include them. Furthermore, and as I said I plan to write more on Laodiceans later, Clement VIII saw fit to also include Laodiceans in the Appendix to the Vulgate. Therefore, as well as an Old Testament Apocrypha collection, Roman Catholics have a New Testament Apocrypha as well, again never included in any Roman Catholic bible translation. Maybe it's about time that Roman Catholics become more biblically literate and rediscover their own Apocrypha and obviously for that to happen it's necessary for Roman Catholic bibles to include all the texts of the Roman Bible, canonical and apocryphal.

Krister Stendahl on Religious Pluralism

Via Exploring our Matrix I came across this, From God's Perspective We Are All Minorities, by the late Krister Stendahl, Swedish biblical scholar (New Testament) and former Bishop of Stockholm. He was also a Professor at Harvard. It's quite a marvellous piece on the interrelatonship of Christianity (or really one should say, Christianities) with other religions. It's in the Pluralism Sunday blog. I wont say anymore but urge you to check it out. Jjust to tempt you, I've provided a sample below - Stendahl is reflecting here on 1 Corintians 15:

It is the day of consummation and the whole world is gathered and there we are, we Christians. Now as we look up there is God and Christ on God’s right hand exactly as we have been told. So we turn around and see that there are also all the others. We see a sort of pan‑religious and ecumenical representation and we turn around with a Christian smile which says: “You see, it is just as we said and isn’t it wonderful that our God is so generous that you can all be here!” When we turn back towards God there is no Christ to be seen on God’s right side because Christ will never be present to feed into the smugness of his believers; or, as the text says: ‘And so when the end comes, Christ will lay it all down before the Father and God will become panta en pasin, all in all.’ That is another way of witnessing to the mystery ‑- lest I be conceited.

Important Text Discovery - Fragments of a Coptic version of 2 Enoch

I had been planning to write something on the Roman Catholic Apocrypha (not to be confused the deutero-canonicals in the Roman Catholic Old Testament) however I saw something quite important over at PaleoJudaica. Apparently some manuscript fragments have been found in Upper Egypt. It turns out they are from a Coptic version of 2 Enoch, a text so far only known in Slavonic. I'll quote some of the material posted at PaleoJudaica:

During his work preparing the publication of Coptic manuscripts from Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, Joost Hagen, doctoral student at Leiden University, The Netherlands, very recently came across some fragments he could identify as part of the text of the so-called ‘Slavonic Enoch’ (2 Enoch), the first time a non-Slavonic manuscript of this intriguing text has been found.

The fragments were discovered at Qasr Ibrim, one of the capital cities of Christian-period Nubia (southern Egypt, northern Sudan, 5th-15th cent. AD), during excavations by the British Egypt Exploration Society (EES) which started in 1963 and have brought to light an astonishing number of finds, textual and other. Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the literary languages used in the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

The ‘Slavonic Enoch’ fragments, found in 1972, are four in number, most probably remnants of four consecutive leaves of a parchment codex. The fourth fragment is rather small and not yet placed with certainty, also because there is as yet no photograph of it available, only the transcription of its text by one of the excavators. For the other three fragments, both this transcription and two sets of photographs are available. The present location of the pieces themselves is not known, but most probably they are in one of the museums or magazines of the Antiquities Organization in Egypt.

The fragments contain chapters 36-42 of 2 Enoch, probably one of the most interesting parts of the work one could wish for, with the transition between two of its three main parts: Enoch’s heavenly tour and his brief return to earth before the assuming of his task back in heaven. Moreover, they clearly represent a text of the short recension, with chapter 38 and some other parts of the long recension ‘missing’ and chapters 37 and 39 in the order 39 then 37. On top of that, it contains the ‘extra’ material at the end of chapter 36 that is present only in the oldest Slavonic manuscript of the work, U (15th cent.), and in manuscript A (16th cent.), which is closely related to U. For most Coptic texts, a translation from a Greek original is taken for granted and the existence of this Coptic version might well confirm the idea of an original of the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Greek from Egypt, probably Alexandria...

Archeologically it seems likely that the Coptic manuscript is part of the remains of a church library from before the year 1172, possibly even from before 969, two important dates in the history of Qasr Ibrim; a tentative first look at palaeographical criterea seems to suggest a date in the eighth to ninth, maybe tenth centuries, during Nubia’s early medieval period. This would mean that the fragments predate the accepted date of the translation of 2 Enoch into Slavonic (11th, 12th cent.) and that they are some several hundred years older than the earliest Slavonic witness, a text with extracts of the ethical passages (14th cent.).

2 Enoch was a text that I became acquainted with during my PhD. The Slavonic vesions occur in two recensions, a longer and shorter. In the longer version only there occurs one of the most explicitly homophobic references to Sodom and Gomorrah in all the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. But the oldest Slavonic manuscripts of 2 Enoch date from the 14th century. These finds in Egypt date back several centuries earlier. That they come from a church library also demonstrate how important the pseudepigrapha were for Christianity.

2 Enoch, also known as the Secrets of Enoch, is a really fascinating text, which the scholarly consensus places in the first century. Leaving aside the homophobic Sodom reference, most likely a much later Christian addition, 2 Enoch is noteworthy for its narrative account of the miraculous conception of Melchizedek who here is a heavenly being. It is definitely a non-sexual conception but given that the mother, Nir, is married at the time to the brother of Noah it can't really be said to be virginal. But it shows that there were groups of 1st century Jews for whom miraculous, non-sexual conception was an acceptable notion. The other fascinating thing about the book is that it relates how at the last judgment all the animals will be called to give account of how they have been treated by humans. You can find out more about 2 Enoch over at Andrei Orlov's 2 (Slavonic) Enoch website.

Good Friday

It's Good Friday and here in Brisbane everything shuts down. It's one of two days in the year when even all licensed premises are closed, the other being Christmas Day. But unlike Christmas, Good Friday is not a day of festive frenzy, just quiet and peaceful; the whole system grinds to a halt. And I like that. I think it's good to have at least one day in the year when nothing much goes on, when everyone just takes a breather. Of course being a 4 day long weekend, many people have gone away, either to the north or south coast or up country to camp in the bush. And the autumnal weather actually makes the being outdoors pleasant, unlike in the full heat of summer.

In Brisbane, even the local paper takes a holiday today but it would appear not so in Melbourne. The Age has a Good Friday edition, at least online. And browsing today's Age I came across this piece, A Symbol of the Noblest Traditions, by Dr John Dickson of the Centre for Public Christianity at Macquarie University in Sydney. In it Dickson reflects on sacrifice and atonement, in particular responding to Richard Dawkins who charges that the notion of Jesus dying "for the sins of the world" is "vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent". Dickson responds:

First, he is wrong to say Paul invented the idea. Sacrificial atonement was central to Judaism right up until AD70, when the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple. Jesus' statement at the Last Supper, widely accepted as one of the most reliably preserved statements in earliest Christianity, reflects this sacrificial theme: "This is my body given for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you." The evidence suggests that Jesus himself thought of his impending death as a sacrifice for sins.

Was Jesus "barking mad"? Why indeed doesn't God simply forgive sins without atonement? The answer of the first Christians is clear. It is for the same reason that we would be outraged if a judge let a convicted criminal off the hook simply because it turned out he was his friend. Love and justice both matter in the Christian conception of God. And lest we think of this as some kind of cosmic child abuse — a father punishing a son for someone else's wrongs — we should remember that from the beginning Christians insisted that Jesus was not a third party at all; he was in fact God.

We may not like this idea either, but if we're going to dismiss the Christian idea of atonement, we should do so on its own terms, as an entire package. The first Christians said that God, the wronged party, entered the world and himself bore the punishment wrong-doers deserve. It was as if the judge paid the fine that was another's due. There is nothing "sadomasochistic" about this. The idea belongs to the noble tradition of self-sacrifice for the good of others.

He then goes on to provide a contemporary account of self-sacrifice (thankfully not a military one) to underscore the nobility of Jesus' death on the cross. However, I have problems with this account myself and I don't think that Dickson has adequately dealt with Dawkins' ethical concerns about the standard Christian account of the death of Jesus. Indeed, the whole notion of the substitutionary atonement is riddled with ethical issues inherent to the propitiatory, juridical, penal dynamics of this atonement model. Dickson tries to avoid it by taking a pseudo-unitarian appraoch by saying "God, the wronged party, entered the world and himself bore the punishment wrong-doers deserve." However, it's not just God but Jesus who, according to trinitarian theology, is God the Son who is the main protagonist here, in obedience to his Father. Thus a dynamic is established that is imbued with abusive dynamics of parent-child relationships and other broader sacrificial motifs of the worst kind.

Now Dickson is right to say that from its beginnings atonement has been the lens by which Christians have understood the execution of Jesus. He is also right when he says that atonement was central to Judaism up to the detruction of the Temple in 70. The Temple could even be construed as a type of atonement machine. And there was one day of the year when this atonement machine operated in full force, Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. But I want to qualify what he means by sacrificial atonement.

We don't know much about the Day of Atonement, despite its centrality to the whole Temple cult. Atonement wasn't even unique to Judaism. Purgatory and propitiatory rituals of atonement were a standard part of the ancient Middle eastern relgious world. Judaism shared these rituals with its neighbours and the cosmology that framed them. I mean here the understanding of the earth being in dynamic relationship to the heavenly realm, as above so below, and the place of the temple as the mediating or cross over point between those two worlds. Like their neighbours, Jews believed that the Temple was a piece of heaven of earth in which dwelt their God, in a complex relationship to the heavenly court, the heavenly Temple above. The rituals of the earthly Temple were instances of the rituals of this heavenly Temple. Indeed, the Temple itself was seen as a microcosm of the universe itself. The Temple was a holographic representation of the universe.

As I said we don't know much about the rituals of Atonement in the Jewish Temple(s). We have a very basic account in Leviticus 16. Further information is found in the Temple Scroll, in the Mishnah, in the Epistle of Barnabas. There are further clues in Hebrews and in the Enoch literature and in Zechariah. But if we take the bare outline from Leviticus 16 the ritual involves two goats - a bull too, but the goats are central. The High Priest slaughters the bull. Then he casts lots over the goats to determine which shall be "for the LORD (YHWH) " and which "for Azazel". It is from this second goat that we get the term scapegoat. The goat for the LORD is then slaughtered. In very abbreviated form, what follows is that the High Priest takes the blood of slaughtered goat, mixed with the blood of the bull, enters the Holy of Holies sprinkling the blood and then comes out of the Holy of Holies sprinkling and smearing the blood on the horns of the altar. These actions are described as making atonement. Then the High Priest goes to the other goat, lays his hands on it and confesses the sins of Israel over it. This goat is then sent out into the wilderness.

There has been much debate about the meaning of this ritual and especially about the identity of Azazel (I wont be going into that issue here). Margaret Barker has argued that Hebrew translated "for the LORD/Azazel" can also be translated "as the LORD/Azazel"and cites Origen who states that the second goat was called Azazel. In other words, the goats represent the LORD/YHWH and Azazel, respectively. The interesting point is that the High Priest's role in the Temple is as representative of YHWH. The High Priest wears the Name on his brow and his robes are the same multi-colours as the Veil of the Holy of Holies. The Veil in its four colours represents the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Crispin Fletcher-Lewis has argued that the reason for the ban on images of the deity in biblical/Israelite religion is because only humans can function as an image of God, and one human in particular, the High Priest (I think in his "The High Priest as Divine Mediator in the Hebrew Bible: Dan 7.13 as a Test Case" SBL 1997 Seminar Papers). Indeed on the Day of Atonement the High Priest is the representative of YHWH, par excellence. It's the one and only day of the year that the High Priest can even enter the Holy of Holies (a place no one else can ever enter) and when he emerges he comes out as YHWH incarnate (taking flesh through the Veil of the four elements) amongst his people making atonement for his people and, as ther Temple represents the cosmos, the entire creation.

He does so with blood and blood, in biblical religion, is life. There are a whole suite of taboos around blood, especially the eating of blood, precisely because of this belief. So the High Priest makes atonement, healing the macrocosmic universe via the microsomic Temple, with blood, life force. Who's blood? If Barker is correct and we should read the first goat as representing YHWH then the blood/life force of the goat represents the blood/life force of YHWH him(her)self. In other words both goat and High Priest represent YHWH. In the heavenly ritual YHWH makes atonement/healing by the use of YHWH's own life force. In the earthly ritual, the blood of the goat serves as a substitute for the blood/life force of the High Priest. The goat is killed in place of the High Priest, giving the ritual a sacrificial appearance but in fact the Day of Atonement is not a a ritual of sacrifice at all; there is no propitation involved at all. The slaughter of the goat (and the bull) serves ritual but not sacrificial purposes. The other goat, the Azazel goat, as Mary Douglas points out, is simply turnd loose in the wilderness.

Now there are two interesting things about this ritual. Firstly, it works on a twofold pattern whereby one dies and the other is sent out. This pattern repeats itself through a suite of biblical narratives. Cain and Abel is an obvious example. David and Jonathan is another. If we allow for near or metaphorical death then we find Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau. The Book of Jubilees 34.18 links the ritual to the story in Genesis of Joseph and his brothers in which Joseph is both the one sent out but is also one who dies or at least is assumed to have died (a goat is slaughtered in his place). And there is a suite of other biblical narratives in which this dynamic can be identified, one very pertinent one I will come to shortly.

The other thing about the Day of Atonement is that it is part of the New Year rituals taking place at the autumnal equinox in the seventh month of the Jewish calendar. The calendar starts at the spring equinox in the first month, Nisan. The big festival at this time is Pesach/Passover, the time when Jesus is crucified. Now we don't know the origins of Pesach. Presumably it is an old agricultural feast related to the spring equinox. It has been biblically reconfigured and given a new myth, that of the Exodus. The Exodus is not history but story. There's no evidence of anything like these events in the archeological record. However in the story of the Exodus these atonement elements can also be identified. Moses himself is both one who is both sent out and is also threatened with death - not once but at least twice. Most importantly the Israelites themselves are sent out while the first-born of the Egyptians are slaughtered (and notice the fate of first born in so many biblical narratives). There are many other traces of atonement rituals in the Exodus stories but, in a sense, Pesach itself works as a kind of mini-atonement.

So when Jesus is executed at Pesach it's perhaps easy for his followers to make those connections. But then maybe Jesus had made them himself. Crispin Fletcher-Lewis ("Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah" Parts 1 & 2, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4.2 2006, 5.1 2007) has also argued that Jesus messianic understanding was based upon the High Priestly role. It was as a royal high priestly that the messiah came to Israel. Jesus was the true High Priest as opposed to the corrupt collaborationist establishment in Jerusalem. The role of the High Priest was to make atonement to heal the cosmos with his life force, as YHWH does in the heavenly realm.

This is not a propitiatory process but a healing process. It is analogous to the maternal, as a mother gives her life (but not normally at the cost of her life) to the nurturing of her child both before and after birth. And YHWH is both Wisdom, Lady Wisdom, as well as Word. The only reason for the death of the goat in the atonement rituals is the need for blood as the life force - if not the goat then the HIgh Priest must die, or at least shed a large amount of blood. But in the heavenly realm, YHWH the heavenly High Priest does not die. But, as Wisdom, YHWH feeds, nurtures.

In her book, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice, Cleo McNelly Kearns highlights the twofold dimension of sacrifice made by scholars. The first, strong sacrifice, is propitatiory, substitutionary. It is also very much a male affair. It can be understood as appropriating the maternal by the patriarchal order so as to suppress the maternal body, as Irigaray would say, and thus assuming maternal power into the male domain. The second, weak sacrifice, resembles the strong but is very strongly egalitarian and alimentary while, at the same time, allowing women as well as men to play relatively (at least) equal roles. Feeding is a central part of weak sacrifice and it can be seen as not appropriating the maternal but approximating it.

I would argue, then, that the Day of Atonement fits the weak sacrifice mode. Indeed from other ancient Jewish and Christian sources it appears there was, on occasion, some sort of communion involved with Yom Kippur. Certain, at least, of the priests would, on some occasions, eat the flesh of the slaughtered goat, raw and washed with vinegar.

Turning to Christian atonement, if Jesus saw himself as the heavenly High Priest or at least took the royal High Priest as his messiainc model then atonement becomes central to his messianic project. In first century, Palestine any messianic project was likely to end in tears. It would appear from the Gospels that Jesus was not interested in any military dimension to his messianic project. Perhaps he expected some sort of heavenly intervention. But perhaps he saw that there was only one endpoint for the trajectory on which he had embarked - a cross. But the High Priestly role of making atonement gave such likely death a whole new significance. In the Temple a goat must die in substitute for the High Priest but Jesus as the true High Priest will fully instantiate the Heavenly order and so bring the corrupt earthly one to an end. Heaven and earth meet finally on that cross as YHWH gives his life force to heal and sustain and nurture the cosmos and all life, presiding, arms outstretched, as Dame Wisdom at her feast, the great eschatological banquet open to all.

By doing so he brings to an end the established order, the structures of strong sacrifice, victimisation and oppression, the processes that require scapegoats, as well as the associated forms of propitiatory, substitutionary and penal atonement. The processes responsible for, but in no way justification for, his death.

Biblical Studies Carnival XL

The Biblical Studies Carnival is a monthly "is a monthly carnival showcasing the best of weblog posts in the area of academic biblical studies." According to the main Carnival Page at Codex:

The goal of the Biblical Studies Carnival is to showcase the best of weblog posts in the area of academic biblical studies. By "academic biblical studies" we mean:

• Academic: Posts must represent an academic approach to the discipline of biblical studies rather than, for instance, a devotional approach. This does not mean that posts have to be written by an academic, PhD, or professor -- amateurs are more than welcome! Nor does it mean that posts must take a historical critical approach -- methodological variety is also encouraged.
• Biblical Studies: Broadly focused on discipline of biblical studies and cognate disciplines, including Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Christian Origins/New Testament, Intertestamental/Second Temple literature (e.g., LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc.), Patristics, Biblical Criticisms and Hermeneutics, Biblical Studies and popular culture, among other things.

In addition, the Biblical Studies Carnival also serves to highlight a variety of blogs -- from well known to lesser known. All blogs are welcome to submit relevant posts to the Carnival. In this way a Carnival is an excellent way to let others know about a blog you frequent or gain new readership to your own blog.

This month the XL Biblical Studies Carnival is happening over at James Gregory's blog. There's a whole lot of interesting stuff there under the headings

A) Linguistics, Text and Translation

B) Hebrew and Judaic Studies

C) New Testament and Early Church

D) Biblical Theology

E) Books and Resources

F) Miscellaneous

And lo and behold, under section B, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, two items from this blog are listed, two posts on the Book of Esther I put up last month. Needless to say I'm quite chuffed. Thank you, James, for including me. So check it out. He's put up heaps of interesting stuff, And he's also got a dazzlingly gorgeous smile. What a shame he's a husband.

And then checking back from the Codex carnival mainpage I find that Jottings gets a reference on the Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIX over at Dr Platypus, Darrell Pursifull's blog. As befits the Carnival there's heaps of good stuff there too, so be sure to check it out. But no photos of Darrell, I'm afraid, so, alas, there'll be no dazzling smiles to distract you on that site.

Gay Holy Week

It's Holy Week, for Christians the week that commemorates the final week of Jesus' life leading up to his execution by the Romans and the Jerusalem Temple authorities and then following that his resurrection the first Easter or as most non-Anglophone Christians know the day, Pascha (Paska, Paques, Pasqua etc). Over at the Jesus in Love blog, Kittredge Cherry is running a queer version of Jesus' Passion in daily instalments from Palm Sunday to Easter/Pascha Sunday. Each instalment includes an excerpt from her novel, Jesus in Love, with a "queer-Christian" painting by different artists. I am very impressed by most of the paintings she's included so far and I'm glad to be able to read extracts from her novel - I've yet to get a copy for myself. It's definitely worth checking out. Indeed you can check out each instalment individually almost like a queer Stations of the Cross:

Palm Sunday

Monday of Holy Week

Tuesday of Holy Week

Wednesday of Holy Week

Holy/Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Easter Sunday/Pascha

I'll update the links above as Kitt adds each instalment to her blog.

And to add to the Stations of the Cross feel, why not check out Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin's Ecce Homo, a very moving queer photographic rendition of the Jesus story.

UPDATE A very appreciative piece on Kitt's site by Steve W over at the Care2 website has generated some rather vituperative commentary from many conservative Christians. You need to be signed up at the site to leave a comment. I am but had mixed up my password etc and so had a complicated log in which meant that my comment seems to have been lost.

Further Update There is a very definite queer Stations of the Cross over here at I'm Christian. I'm Gay. Deal With It!

Chag Sameach Pesach!!!

Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish feast of Pesach, also known as Passover. Jewish days begin at sunset and so tonight, Wednesday 8 April, is the first night of Pesach which runs to Thursday 16 April in the Diaspora and Wednesday 15 within Israel itself. As the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, the Gregorian dates for Pesach change each year. Next year it will start sunset Monday March 29.

You can find out more about Pesach, its significance and meaning, how it's celebrated, its traditons and special foods for Pesach here at the Orthodox Union or at this Passover/Pesach site where there's lots of good stuff.

So

Chag Sameach Pesach!!!

Happy Festival of Pesach/Passover!!!

More Christian Biblical Imperialism

The case of The Inclusive Bible is really a case of the unintended consequences of good intentions, albeit good intentions framed by a certain biblical illiteracy. The biblical illiteracy arises from the discourses of the 'Bible is God's Word' variety which promote the fiction that there is only one Bible now and for all time. The reality is completely different. Not only is there not one Bible now and always and not only are Jewish and Christian Bibles different but there is not even a uniform Christian bible now or over time. Not ever. But, of course, people believing that there is only one ever Bible, who don't understand that the Jewish Bible is a different creature to the Christian Old Testament (in all its varieties) can make a well-meaning, dare I say, 'inclusive' gesture to use the Tanakh as the template for the Old Testament of a Bible that aims to be inclusive.

However not so in this case, which I discovered at the Open Source Bible. Apparently it's from a site BiblicalTraining.org and it's from an online lecture by DR Miles van Pelt who is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

The following Biblical books shows the structural unity of the canon. The layout is derived from the Lectures on Old Testament Theology given by Dr. Miles Van Pelt

Covenant Prologue	The Law	The Prophets	The Writings	Covenant Epilogue
	Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy	Joshua Judges Samuel Kings Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel The 12 Minor Prophets	Psalms Job Proverbs Ruth Song of Songs Ecclesiastes Lamentations Esther Daniel Ezra Nehemiah Chronicles
Genesis				Revelation
	Matthew Mark Luke John	Acts of the Apostles	Paul's Epistles Hebrews James 1,2 Peter 1,2,3 John Jude
	Covenant	Covenant History	Covenant Life

As you can see, Van Pelt is setting up a common structural pattern of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament using the order of the Tanakh and the New Testament that is standard across most (but not all) Christian denominations today. But he does some strange things. Genesis which has always been the first book of the Torah (which he terms Law) is separated out and given a category of its own: Prologue to the (presumably) unified Bible. Likewise, Revelation is taken out from the New Testament and given its own status of Epilogue. He then marries up the 4 gospels with the remaining 4 books of the Torah under the category of Covenant. His next category is Covenant History under which he marries the Acts of the Apostles with all of the books included in the Prophets section of the Tanakh, Finally he sets up the category of Covenant Life under which he marries up the Tanakh's final section of the Writings with the Epistles of the New Testament. All very neat, all very logical, and no doubt designed to impress his audience with a sense of the underlying unity, rationality and harmony of 'God's Word' as found, of course, in the standard Protestant Bible.

But this structure is an imperialist, supersessionist fraud for several reasons. The most obvious is that, with the exception of The Inclusive Bible, there is no Christian Old Testament that has ever been structured according to the Tanakh. All Christian Old Testaments follow a rough pattern of Law/Pentateuch, Historical books, Wisdom books and, finally, Prophetic books. As far back as we can go with canon lists and ancient codices this has been the consistent shape of the collections called Old Testament. There are some variations from the pattern but none have ever matched the pattern of the Tanakh. Furthermore this Old Testament pattern of Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets was what was assumed by the shapers of the New Testament canons too (yes, there's more than one of those too) to be the structure of the scriptures of Israel that was to be completed by the New Testament.

Indeed, the Old Testament(s) of Christianity were themselves being shaped at the same time as the New Testament(s) in the first few centuries of the Christian Era (CE) and it was also in that same period that the Tanakh of Judaism was likewise achieving its final form. At the time of Jesus there was neither Tanakh nor Old Testament only scriptures in which an authority and priority was accorded to the books of Moses or Torah. The Torah was a Pentateuch, although at Qumran the Temple Scroll represented a 6th book of Moses, meaning for some Jews in Jesus' day the Torah was a Hexateuch. Not only were the Tanakh and the Old and New Testaments shaped contemporaneously but also to a certain extent in reaction to each other. Christians regard Daniel as a prophet and in many ancient collections/lists Daniel is the last book of both the Prophets and the Old Testament as it is in my contemporary Orthodox Study Bible. In the Tanakh, though, Daniel is not a prophet and the book is included in the third division, the Writings. Given how important Daniel was for Christian messianic theologies, it's hard not to think that its placement in the Tanakh amongst the Writings is designed to downplay it and the apocalyptic theologies it represented. The ordering of the Tanakh, furthermore, gives priority to the Torah - all the other books of Prophets and Writings being understood as commentary on Torah. Christian Old Testaments look forward to the New and hence the Prophets are generally the final Old Testament division, heralding the Christ event.

Finally, the New Testament of today is not and has never been the only canonical New Testament structure. It took a long time for the Eastern churches to accept Revelation. It is still not part of the New Testament of the Church of the East (Assyrian Orthodox) and while it might be part of the Greek Orthodox bible there are no readings from it included in the lectionary of the Greek Orthodox church. Furthermore, the Ethiopian Bible includes a number of additional books in its New Testament, which are placed after Revelation. In the first millennium, there were also several different orderings of the New Testament. A quite common pattern was gospels, epistles, Acts and Revelation. The Cheltenham canon, hailing from North Africa, has the ordering: gospels, Pauline epistles, Acts, Revelation, Johannine and Petrine epistles. The Apostolic canons give this ordering for the New Testament:

Our own books, that is, those of the New Testament, are: the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; fourteen Epistles of Paul; two Epistles of Peter; three of John; one of James, and one of Jude. Two Epistles of Clement, and the Constitutions of me Clement, addressed to you Bishops, in eight books, which are not to be published to all on account of the mystical things in them. And the Acts of us the Apostles.

No sign of Revelation but ending with Acts. According to the Muratorian Fragment, which probably belongs in the fourth century, the New Testament structure is as follows: gospels, Johannine epistles, Acts, Paul's epistles, Jude, 2 epistles of John, Wisdom of Solomon, Revelation and Apocalypse of Peter. Indeed a number of ancient New Testament lists include either Wisdom of Solomon and/or Sirach. A list included in the 6th century Codex Claromontanus renders the New Testament thus - gospels, Pauline epistles, Petrine epistles, James, Johannine epsitles, Jude, Barnabas, Revelation, Acts and then Shepherd of Hermas, Acts of Paul, to conclude with Apocalypse of Peter. Finally the New Testament according to the Codex Sinaiticus is ordered as follows: gospels, Pauline epistles, Acts, James, Petrine epistles, Johannine epsitles, Jude, Revelation, Barnabas to conclude with Shepherd of Hermas.

In other words, there were many variant forms of the New Testament at the time the Tanakh was being shaped. None of these New Testament forms influenced the shaping of the Tanakh and none, including the modern standard variant, were influenced by the Tanakh. To try, as Van Pelt does, to affirm an underlying unity of structure to both collections and that this structuring unity is a sign of the overall harmony of the Christian (Protestant) bible seriously misrepresents, distorts the facts. It is a falsehood. Furthermore it is an act of biblical imperialism and supersessionism. It usurps the Tanakh of Judaism as Christian scripture, something it has never been throughout its history. It then uses this Tanakh authority to thus assert a supersessionist claim for the modern standard Protestant bible, not only over the Tanakh of Judaism but also over the other Christian bibles, past and present. Van Pelt's biblical theology is nothing more than biblical imperialism.

A Case of Christian Biblical Imperialism

The other day I had some time to kill in town before my bus out to Uni and so I went browsing in bookshops, as you do. In my browsings I discovered the The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation. It's put out by Priests for Equality and appears to draw on the use of scriptures in the actual worship of LGBT people who are part of Dignity in the USA:

The project began in 1988, when Priests for Equality received permission to use inclusive language texts developed by Dignity, San Francisco. We distributed them to our constituency; their feedback spurred us to revise the texts significantly--revisions that reflected their actual use in the very settings they were being used: college campuses, parishes, chapels, houses of formation, convents, religious communities and living rooms.

Priests for Equality went on to create a two-volume set of daily lectionary readings, and again revised its three-year Sunday lectionaries, to much acclaim. But the demand for an inclusive language version of the complete New Testament began to grow, and we happily undertook the project. In all, The Inclusive New Testament took seven years and the work of many dedicated individuals to complete, and was published in 1994.

So this Bible seems to be a grassroots queer-shaped Catholic Bible and one I will add to my collection. At the same time, this Bible, no doubt well-intentioned set off alarm bells for me as I examined the Table of Contents. Instead of the usual Old Testament and New Testament demarcation it coined the term Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures were then subdivided into Torah, Prophets and Writings. In other words the Old Testament was set out according to the ordering and divisions of the Jewish Bible or TaNaKh. TaNaKh stands for the three divisions of the Jewish Bible: Torah (the 5 books of Moses), Nebiim or Prophets (which includes Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, plus the prophetic books Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve), and Kethubim or Writings which includes the rest of the Hebrew canon ordered from Psalms to Chronicles and including Ruth, Daniel and Esther (without the Greek material added to these books but included in both the Gereek and Latin bibles). Furthermore, the Inclusive Bible adds to the Writings a subsection titled Apocryphal Writings, which includes the deutero-canonical works: Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach/Ecclesiasticus. There didn't seem to be any sign of (1) Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah.

So what are my concerns? Most importantly, this bible has engaged in a classic case of supersessionism or Christian biblical imperialism. The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible of Judaism is not and never has been the Old Testament of Christianity and to represent it as such, especially incorporating the deutero-canonical books as a subsection of the Writings, is no more than a pious and inclusive fraud and treats Judaism with gross disrespect. I repeat, the Tanakh has never been the Old Testament of Christianity, least of all Catholic Christianities. The Old Testament has always been structured as Torah/Pentateuch, Historical books, Wisdom books and Prophetic books (which includes Daniel). Some Roman Catholic bibles put 1 & 2 Maccabees after the Prophets, others include them in the Historical books, which is where my Orthodox Study Bible puts them. Both the King James bible and Luther's German bible restrict the Old Testament to the books of the Hebrew bible but with the Christian ordering above and locate the Roman deuterocanonical books in a separate collection called the Apocrypha ,which also includes texts from the Greek and Slavonic bibles such as 1 & 2 Esdras (4 Ezra), Psalm 151, Prayer of Manasseh (none of which are part of The Inclusive Bible's Apocrypha). So this Inclusive Bible is very much a hybrid, if not a dog's breakfast.

It is also supersessionist because it reinscribes the Bible of Judaism as the Old Testament of Christianity, the natural companion to the New Testament. However the New Testament is more companion to the Greek bible which is the canon that has shaped all Christian Old Testaments, east and west. If there is a companion volume to the Tanakh it is more likely the Mishnah. The Midrashim might also be seen as more a companion to the Tanakh than the New Testament and certainly the Zohar. No doubt the terminology and ordering deployed for the Old Testament in The Inclusive Bible were meant with the best of intentions and as a mark of respect for Judaism but it, in effect, is an act of biblical imperialism.

It is also an act of biblical imperialism vis a vis other forms of Christianity as well as an act of collective memory loss by Roman Catholic communities. The so-called Hebrew scriptures of The Inclusive Bible represent no more or less than the standard Roman Catholic Old Testament. However this terminology and ordering obscure that fact and distort the real history of the Old Testament in the Roman Church and Western Christendom as well as continuing to effectively sever the relationship with the Greek Bible which furthermore remains normative for the Eastern Churches. The Inclusive Bible, by claiming a Hebrew priority for its Old Testament, thus exists in an imperialistic relationship to the other Churches of Christendom. There is an irony, of course, here. The standard Protestant Old Testament makes the same imperialistic and supersessionist claim especially when the Apocrypha are removed leaving it to stand with just the New Testament. This has been the norm for most English (derived) Protestant bibles for over two centuries. The US is the Protestant society par excellence. That The Inclusive Bible is a product of US Roman Catholicism attests to the success of Protestant biblical imperialism, a success that has generated a new and imitative imperialism in reverse.

April Showers

It's April and the rain has been falling and flooding many parts of S.E. Queensland and much more rain is forecast for the coming week. It's a nice change from the many years of drought but there have been some personal costs for many.

For me life has been busy. I had hoped to put up a post yesterday but just didn't have time. I'm also conscious that last month there was little biblioblogging as opposed to other topics and that the state election dominated things somewhat. This month I plan to focus on biblioblogging and, as we are now in Holy Week, it seems an appropriate focus for the month. But for now I want to point you in the direction of some recent postings on a couple of other blogs.

First off Rollan McCleary, looks at the latest manifestation of that peculiarly American religious phenomenon of prophetic preachers announcing gloom and doom and, in the latest pronouncement from David Wilkerson, the penchant for visions of burning cities. As Rollan observes:

American films and culture thrive on disaster scenarios. It may have something to do with the role of the apocalyptic in American religion or the feeling engendered by the competitive atmosphere of American capitalism that life itself is one big crisis.

Wilkerson, of The Cross and the Switchblade fame, has a long track record of foreseeing US cities in flames. Perhaps the US inner city riots in the late '60s left an indelible impression on Wilkerson. Anyway, last month Wilkerson issued yet another urgent prophecy on his blog. In the American and David Wilkerson Disaster Syndrome, Rollan examines Wilkerson's latest prophecy against his previous record. Rollan then draws on some insights from astrology to further explore Wilkerson's visions of cities on fire.

Meanwhile don't forget to check out the Left Behind Fridays series on Slacktivist. When I first found this site he was reading and deconstructing the first of the Left Behind books, a reading that extended for many years. His readings were not only incisive but side splittingly funny as well. This year he has started on the second book of the series, Tribulation Force. His readings are still sharp and incisive but now there is little to laugh about. Perhaps it's because in the first book the main characters were still working out what was happening and were in the process of 'getting saved'. However in Tribulation Force they are now officially 'saved':

here the malice and contempt is premeditated and intentional. Buck Williams' despicable behavior toward Verna Zee -- and toward Alice, actually -- is not merely weak and obtuse and fearful, but careful and deliberate.And the authors celebrate this painstaking viciousness. It is our first glimpse of the newly saved and sanctified Buck Williams and the authors thus suggest that this is how godly, real, true Christian men ought to behave toward women or anyone else they regard as their inferiors.

The fruit of the Spirit, St. Paul writes, "is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."If you sat down and tried to write a scene in which a character displayed the opposite of all of those characteristics, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In urging the Galatian Christians to live up to these fruits of the Spirit, Paul warns them of the alternative. "Let us not become conceited," he writes, "provoking and envying each other." And again, if you sat down to write a scene in which a conceited character was driven to provoke others out of envy, you'd come up with something like Buck's actions in the first 20 pages of Tribulation Force.

In John's epistles, he gives a name to this behavior, this antithesis of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He calls it "the spirit of antichrist."That is, again, the only place in the Bible where the word "antichrist" appears.

The really horrifying aspect of this subplot is the way it's driven by a gleeful misogyny.

Read it all on T.F.: Not Funny

UPDATE: Rollan has more on Wilkerson and his holy homophobia (as well as a swipe at Oz news media for it's handling of Rudd's reported spat over being served wrong type of meal in flight) over at his blog with Kevin Rudd's Dinner Dispute and David Wilkerson's Fireworks.