RKIA Explains the Mass -- part 5

The Mass explained. Letter to Churchill Lafemme continued)
Now on to the Mass!

The Mass usually begins with a verse from the Psalms, or a hymn (optional). Hymn is just a Greek word for “song of praise.” Psalms are ancient Hebrew Songs of Praise called “Tehillim” in Hebrew, in Greek “Psalmoi”, meaning “instrumental music” or “song lyrics.” There are 150 psalms in the Bible, some of which were possibly written by King David three thousand years ago. The traditional chant melodies by which these songs are sung are very ancient, some of them actually seem to go back to the melodies by which they were sung in the temple.

Then we have the greeting. We begin with the sign of the cross saying, “In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” We are here not in our own name, but in the name of - for the sake of - by the authority of - GOD, and not for our own purposes. Then the priest greets us by saying, “The Lord be with you” or some variant of that. We always respond “and with your Spirit.” The word “Spirit” has already been mentioned twice and we’ve hardly begun. This is to remind us that we are entering into something that is real but can’t be seen with the eyes of the body alone. We are entering the spiritual world by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are going back to the timeless sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and forward to the great Marriage Banquet of heaven.

1. Next we admit our sins, and ask the Lord for mercy. There are a few variations of this part of the Mass.

2. Then we sing hymn of praise called the “Gloria.” This is sung or said on Sundays and important feast days except during Lent and Advent. It is a sort of “private” psalm that doesn’t come from the Bible but was composed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Christ. It was originally part of the morning prayer services. In the West it became part of the Mass. The western version of the song is usually attributed to St. Hilary of Poitiers, who lived around 350 AD. It starts with the song of the Angels at the birth of Christ and then moves on to the praise of the Holy Trinity.

3. From there we move on to the first prayer of the Mass, usually called the “Collect.” It also called the opening prayer. It is called the Collect (accent first syllable), because it gathers the people and all their prayers into one voice. It was probably the original opening to Mass in the first centuries, the confession of sin and the Gloria being a sort of preparation for Mass. The collect is not a spontaneous prayer. It is mandated in the Missal and it is a beautiful thing that one billion people throughout the world are lifting their voices to God in the same words. Humanity is collected, gathered together in way that no political organization can come close to matching.

4. Then we move on to Bible study. On Sundays and important feast days there are two readings, usually one from the Old Testament, then a psalm and then one from the New Testament other than the Gospels. This is followed by another verse from a psalm. Last, a section of one of the Gospels is read. On weekdays there is just one non-Gospel reading — Old or New Testament — a psalm, then psalm verse followed by a Gospel reading. The readings all come from a fairly strict calendar of readings, thought there may be some variance. No reading is allowed at Mass except for those taken from the Bible. In fact, the Bible was probably formed from those books read at Mass by the early Christians. 

The Mass is, in a certain sense, the mother of the Bible! If you go to Mass for three years running you will hear most of the Bible read out loud. (Tell that to someone who says the Catholic Church doesn’t read the Bible!) The readings are usually followed by a homily or sermon. Homily is a Greek word for “comparison.” Sermon is a Latin word for “a speech.” So here you have the “Liturgy of the Word.”

a) Old Testament reading

b) Psalm and response

c) New Testament reading

d) Psalm verse and response

e) Gospel

f) Homily

— Six parts or less to the Liturgy of the Word. Easy Peasy!

5. After this we move on to the Creed. Before we move into “second gear” we make sure that we all agree with each other on the basic points of the faith, especially that Jesus is both God and man, that He became flesh in the womb of the blessed Virgin and that He died and rose from the dead for our salvation, because in a few minutes that flesh, born of the virgin Mary, will become present on the altar in the form of bread and wine and we will be transported back to His crucifixion and His resurrection in the timeless spiritual realm. 

6. After this we offer bread and wine to the Lord. This section of the Mass usually begins with a psalm verse or a hymn and if there is a collection taken up it is usually taken up here. The Mass was modernized in the 1960's and this is the part of the Mass that changed most. The prayers now used are essentially the same ancient prayers that Jews still use for the blessing of bread and wine. This takes us way back, 4,000 years ago. The high priest Melchizedek offered bread and wine to the Lord when Abraham, the ancestor of Jesus and our spiritual ancestor, defeated his enemies. This offering of bread and wine has never stopped since then. Often incense is burned during this part of the Mass as was done in the Temple in Jerusalem. This part of the Mass ends with a prayer prayed by the priest.

7. After the sacrifice of bread and wine, the priest again greets the people and invites them to “lift up their hearts” to the Lord. There is a prayer called the Preface. It is a variable introduction to the most important parts of the Mass. The congregation responds by singing or saying a very ancient prayer that comes to us from the temple liturgy. The first part of the Sanctus comes from Isaiah 6:3. It is the song of the six-winged, fiery angels (seraphim) who stand before the throne of God. It is similar to the vision of angels in the Apocalypse (4:8). In synagogues, a similar prayer is said during the Kedusha, (sanctification prayer) which is a part of the Amidah (18 Blessings or the “standing prayer”). We repeat the words of the angels because we are about to enter into their presence and stand in the court of God in heaven. So, fasten your seat belts you are about to be rocketed beyond space and time.

(To be continued)

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 12

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 12

ROLL OUT THE BIBLE, or THE SOLA SCRIPTURA POLKA

I have been saying for months now that the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library. When someone asks me for the best translation of the Bible, the assumption behind the question is that there is an original Bible somewhere that can be translated. There is no such thing. This is a very difficult idea to wrap one’s mind around. In this present age, we can go to a text and look at the printed page and look at the author’s forward and look at the copyright, the date of printing, which edition our particular copy is and probably, if we were really worried about the whole thing we could ask to see the original author’s manuscript just to make sure our copy is the real deal. Then we would be pretty sure that we had the original version of the book.

There is no original Bible sitting on a dusty shelf in the Vatican basement. There are bits and pieces of sheepskin, copper, silver, stone and papyrus found in caves and tombs and ancient garbage dumps in the desert. As far as we know, we have not one piece of paper that was written on by Mark or Luke or Moses or anyone in that crowd. What we have are handwritten scrolls or pieces of scrolls that are copies of copies of copies of handwritten scrolls.

Let your imagination take you back to an age before junk mail or faxes or e-mail or newspapers or those annoying bits of paper stuck in your windshield wipers while in the store buying stuff wrapped in cheap paper. In the western world there were only two sources of flexible writing material. There was sheepskin, but a book might take a few dozen sheep, and that’s gonna cost ya. Less expensive, there was papyrus which came only from a weed growing in the swamps of northern Egypt. There were bits of broken pottery which the ancients used like post-it notes and there were tablets in wooden frames that were joined together like little books. They could be scraped clean and reused, but had only two small pages of writing space. There was stone, hard to write on and much harder to carry around in the fold of your toga.

For things that mattered papyrus (from which we get the word paper) was the cheapest, best way to record things. It didn’t last forever except in a desert climate, so for really important things, calf or sheepskin vellum was the way to go (expensive, but long lasting). The Jews used vellum for the scrolls on which they wrote their sacred texts and they still do. When the “books” of the Bible were written, no books, such as we know them, even existed. There were only scrolls, usually written on only one side. They were large and clumsy.

The scroll of Esther of which Luther said “I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist” is sometimes called the whole Megillah (reciting) because its whole scroll is read out loud in synagogues on the feast of Purim. I have heard the Torah, the five books of Moses, called the big megillah, because it is, well, big. If the first five books of the Bible were such a big, unwieldy scroll, imagine what it would have been like to put all 73 books of the Bible on one scroll. You would need a fork lift just to get it off the shelf.

Another problem is that the people didn’t read. They listened. Sacred books, in fact all books were publicly read. In the early Church there were ordained lectors whose job was to make sure the sacred scrolls were publicly read. Books were too Expensive for just anyone to own. These days, a Torah scroll costs between 25 and 60 thousand dollars. And we have lots of sheep and cows. Only the very richest could own their own personal scrolls.

Lets do the math. At say $40,000 for five books, we don’t want the most expensive, but we don’t want the cheapest either, what would the neighbors say? At $40,000 for five books, a Bible of 73 books would cost around six hundred thousand dollars!!!! Yes that’s $600,000!!! (A Protestant Bible would only cost $536,0000, so you might want to be a Baptist in this situation.) Do you get my point? When the Bible was written, THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS A BIBLE!!!!

So, how did we get the Bible as we now have it? Remember the wax tablet in the two wooden frames? Somebody got the bright idea around 50-100AD to put papyrus or animal skin sheets in the frames instead of the wax. You could fit a lot of papyrus or even vellum between two boards and it was easier to schlepp around than a scroll and easier to find where you left off, you didn’t have to unroll things. And thus the book as we know it was born. It was called a codex, from the Latin word for a block of wood. That’s because it looked like a block of wood.

The codex was a big hit, especially with Christians who moved around a lot. Remember apostle means missionary. We read of St. Paul asking for his winter coat and his animal skins. “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas and my scrolls, especially the parchments.” (2) Tim. 4:13 Note that he says “especially the parchments,” not just the cheap papyrus scrolls. The codex made things easier and cheaper. You could write on both sides of the pages thus saving paper, and it was small and could be stuffed into the fold of your toga or your traveling bag. Still, the scroll remained the standard until around 300 AD.

Then a couple of big things happened. Constantine became emperor and a made Christianity legal. He commissioned a giant codex containing all the books of the Bible and had fifty of them made. Remember, this had to be done by hand, by bored drowsy professional scribes from the imperial bureaucracy writing on animal skins. That’s fifty large books!! At $600,000 a pop, that comes to about $30,000,000 (thirty million dollars)!

Pope Damasus in Rome seems to have done something similar at around the same time, but the idea of the Bible in book form as we know it seems to originate with Constantine in 331. We have two copies of the Bible from that time, one of which may be one of the original Constantinian editions. These are the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus. They don’t quite agree. There are different spellings and varying texts between the two most ancient “Bibles” , the Sinaiticus has four books of Maccabees, and the Vaticanus has no Maccabees at all. I ask you , is that any way to run a business?

The first two Bibles don’t even agree with each other! The Codex Sinaiticus was discovered on a dusty shelf in a monastery in the Sinai desert where the Greek Orthodox monks were using bits of old scrolls as fuel to cook their lunches. The Codex Vaticanus actually was found on dusty old shelf somewhere in the Vatican sometime in the 1500's. No one knows where it came from. Thank heavens, old rectories, convents and religious houses tend not to throw old stuff out.

So what does this all mean? If you are looking for an original copy of the Bible there is no such thing. If you believe in Sola Scriptura ― Bible alone ― I would like you to tell me which Scriptura you believe in and why! Thank God I am a Catholic and that I know the Gospel has been personally and faithfully transmitted by the community of the Church and that the minor variations in an ancient text don’t change the truth at all. I, unlike the Sola Scriptura crowd don’t have to depend on some medieval monk or some imperial Roman bureaucrat falling asleep in the middle of copying a sentence in a dark cold scriptorium sometime in the dark ages. I have a living tradition to sustain me and not a dead letter.

Principle #12, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE ORIGINAL BIBLE

PS You’ll notice that in the Catholic Church, when we read from the text of Scripture we say “A reading from the Gospel of...” We don’t mention chapter and verse. That’s because we have been doing this since the days when we used scrolls in church. We have never gotten used to this new-fangled business of chapter and verse. Chapters didn’t happen until a few centuries after Christ and verses didn’t come into use until 1560. Give me that old time religion!

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 11

THE PERENNIAL QUESTION: WHY DID CATHOLICS ADD 7 BOOKS TO THE BIBLE? Part 11

Simple answer: the CATHOLICS added nothing ­─ the truth is that the Protestants took seven books away.

Complicated answer: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, whom you might know as St. Jerome was born in 347 AD in Slovenia (then called Dalmatia, in the future, now former Yugoslavia. Figure that out.) In 378 he was ordained for the diocese of (Greek speaking) Antioch in Syria. In 382 he went to Rome and started working for Pope Damasus. At the pope’s urging, he decided to update the old Latin version of the Bible into a “more modern, easy to read version in today’s Latin.” (Today being 382 AD) It was called the Vulgate or the “Bible for the Common Man.”

First he translated the Greek New Testament. Then he updated the version of the psalms contained in the Septuagint. (The Septuagint was the widely read Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, completed in Egypt in 132BC. At the time, all Christians accepted the Septuagint as THE Bible.) Jerome went on to translate the rest of the Old Testament from the Hebrew and Aramaic sources of the Septuagint. It turned out to be a project that took years. It contained all the books in the Bible by the first Christians, but there were always questions, so....

Pope Damasus I, St. Jerome’s patron, assembled the first list of books of the Bible at the Council of Rome (382AD). The process continued in North Africa. A series of Synods (meetings of bishops) were held in North Africa beginning in Hippo in 393, and ending with the Council of Carthage(419). The meetings took up the question of what were the inspired books and what were not. There was a basic agreement on the texts, but even then, 400 years after Christ, there was still a need to make a definitive list. The pope and the North African bishops drew up their list from those books then in use by the Church, particularly those read at Mass. Finally, the list was submitted to Pope Boniface (Damasus’ successor) and the other bishops for confirmation. The list is as follows:

“It was also decided that, apart from the Canonical Scriptures, nothing else is to be read in the Church, in the name of divine Scriptures. Canonical Scriptures are therefore the following:… Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, of Kings the four books, of Chronicles the two books, Job, Psalms, of Solomon five books, of the Prophets twelve books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, of Ezdra two books. Of the New Testament: Gospels four, Acts of the Apostles one book, fourteen epistles by Apostle Paul, two by Apostle Peter, three by Apostle John, one by Apostle Jacob (James), one by Apostle Judas, one Book of Revelations by John.

These were the 73 books that St. Jerome translated and called the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate Bible was the definitive text of Scripture in Europe for 1,130 years. As the Roman Empire collapsed, the Catholic Church maintained what was left of the unity and culture of the Roman Christian world. Europe fractured into a bedlam of languages, a sort of tower of babble, but the Church maintained a common language, a common culture, a common law and a common Bible, the Vulgate, that was both source and guide. The Church insisted that the Latin Vulgate be regarded as the official version, not to hide the Bible from the masses, but to make it available to the whole world. Everyone who could read, read Latin. It was the universal language of literate people. Books were as rare as Elvis sightings and people who could read were not much more common. In order to make the Bible available, it had to be in the closest thing to a common language that the western world then had ─ Latin. Even Constantinople the capital of the Greek speaking East spoke Latin as an official language until 610AD. So the Vulgate and its 73 books were accepted by all Christians as the canon of Scriptures, the big book on the coffee table, the Bible!!! Until.......

Fr. Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Many assume that the Church hid the Bible in an obscure ancient language and that Luther was the first to translate it into the common language. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There were perhaps 17 translations of the Bible into German before Luther. The question was which German? The little town whence came my ancestors had a version of German that is incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t grow up in that particular town. And the rest of us who speak standard German are utterly bewildered by a Bavarian who has had a beer or two. These early German translations were based on the Latin Vulgate, which in turn was based on reliable ancient manuscripts.

Luther may have published in the most standard central German, thereby creating modern high German, and he may have gone to Greek and Hebrew texts, but he went with later, less reliable manuscripts like the Textus Receptus. Jerome was only 300 years after the fact. He had access to the most ancient manuscripts. Luther had no such access.

Still worse, Luther didn’t really translate the Bible. He paraphrased and poeticized it. In John 11:35 we read in Greek “edakrusen ho Iesous” (in English “Jesus wept.”) Luther didn’t translate it that way. He wrote “Und Jesus gingen die Augen über,” “And Jesus' eyes overflowed." Poetic. Lovely. Heartfelt. A Really Bad Translation. Luther claimed he was just expressing things in the way that people really spoke.

Maybe they really spoke that way in 16^th Century central Germany. We Germans love kitsch and schmalz. (German words that mean gaudy and greasy.) We like cute art like Hummels. I own one or two myself. And shmalz? That means we like to lay it on thick. Like butter. Or even goose grease on rye bread. Yum. So Luther gave the folks what he thought they wanted. It was certainly what he wanted.

The most egregious example of his failure to translate is Romans 3:28. Luther translated it “We hold, then, that man is justified without the works of the law but by faith alone.” The word "alone" does not appear in the Biblical text, but Luther insisted that the word "alone" was necessary in German and that was what Paul meant anyway. This German doesn’t need the word and if Paul had intended it he would have written it. Luther both needed it and intended it if his strange and novel theology were going to claim Biblical inspiration. Luther didn’t use the Vulgate in his efforts to translate the Bible, he went straight to the Greek and Hebrew texts then in use. It didn’t occur to him that things might have changed in the course of a thousand years.

He looked at the Masoretic text still used by Jews today and there he found seven books fewer than the Vulgate had. He made the assumption that they weren’t in the Hebrew Bible because they weren’t authentic. It never occurred to Fr. Luther that perhaps those of the House of Israel who did not accept Jesus as Messiah, might have left out books that were very popular with the first Christians. These books were certainly in common use at the time of Christ. In other words, Luther claimed that 16^th century Jews were more inspired than 1^st century Christians. That was just about the last compliment Luther paid the Jews. Luther rejected the Christian Scriptures of 419AD in favor of the Jewish text which was not finalized until around 900AD. Well done Martin! To it he added his own flair for the dramatic and his curious beliefs in faith alone and predestination.

Fr. Luther had a low view of the books of Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. He called the Epistle of James “an epistle of straw,” “finding little in it that pointed to Christ and His saving work.” He also disliked the book of Revelation, saying that he could “in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”

During the Protestant Reformation, Luther and his friends experimented with different lists of Bible books. In the end, the New Testament books stayed the same despite Luther’s attempts to downgrade James, Jude, and Revelation. He particularly disliked James. I suspect that the only appearance of the phrase “faith alone” appears in James. “A person is made righteous by works and NOT by faith alone.” (James 2:24) On this point Luther and St. James had differing opinions.

The Old Testament, however, was fair game. There were certain books included in the Septuagint, and thus in the first list of canonical books and the Vulgate, which were not included in the Jewish Bible. Protestants call them the Apocrypha, or hidden books, well named since Luther hid them from the world. He put them in between the Old and New Testaments saying, “These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read."

So there you have it. Luther’s translation of both Testaments was finally printed in 1534, turning seven books of the Old Testament into a footnote so unimportant that Protestantism eventually dropped them altogether. He put disclaimers in the New Testament that warned the reader that James and Revelation probably weren’t inspired. In the book of Revelation we read “For I testify to every man who hears the words of the prophecy of this book that anyone who adds to these things God will add the plagues that are written in this book on to him. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” (Rev. 22:18-19 ) Let’s hope for Fr. Luther’s sake that God doesn’t apply this text to the addition of “alone” to Romans 3:28 or the convenient removal of seven books of the Old Testament.

Next Week, THE BIG MEGILLAH, or ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 9

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 9

THE HOUSE OF DAVID, or FAMILIES; EVERYBODY’S GOT ONE

Back in episode 7, I mentioned the brothers of the Lord and who they might have been. Whoever they were, they seem to have been very important in the early Church and rather difficult. Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and took the surviving members of the royal House of David into exile. When the Persians conquered Babylon a few years later, they let the Jews go back to Judea. A few members of the royal family of David returned to Jerusalem. Zerubabel, a prince of the house of David, (Haggai 1:1) who was the grandson of king Jehoiachin of Judah was appointed governor of Judea by the Persians. He led the first group of 42,000 Jews back to Judea from Babylon around 530 BC. He also laid the foundation of the Second Temple in Jerusalem not long after.

It seems that much of the family of David stayed in Babylon, preferring not to return to the dangerous pile of rocks that Jerusalem had become. Some of the family of David who had returned to the Holy Land skedaddled back to Babylon when the Maccabees took over around 160 BC. The Judean community had become settled and prosperous in Babylon, which was in effect, the New York of its time, though I suppose you still couldn’t get good “deli” there. Pastrami had not even been invented!

Life was good in Babylon. A descendant of the royal House of David was always formally installed as “exilarch” which means “leader of the exiles.” In fact, there was always an exilarch in charge of the sizable Jewish community of Babylon until perhaps 1000 years (yes, one thousand) AFTER Christ!! They knew a good gig when they found one. After 2,550 years in Babylon, (the ruins of which are in modern Iraq) the Jews have finally been driven out and most emigrated to the state of Israel. There are now about 7 or 8 Babylonian Jews still living in Iraq. Thus the Babylonian exile is over, almost.

Things started getting even more interesting around 150BC when groups like the Essenes rejected the Maccabees' claims to the monarchy and the high priesthood. The Essenes and those like them started to fume about the coming of the Messiah, how he would straighten everything out and purify the priesthood and the monarchy and the temple and put those Maccabees and their Roman and Greek friends in their place. This meant something to the Davidic family still in exile in Babylon: job opportunities!

Along with the Messiah, born of the royal House of David, the opportunities for boodle, as they call it in Chicago, would be numerous! It seems that some of the family of David returned to two little towns Little Shoot (Nazareth in Hebrew/Aramaic) and Star-ville (Kochaba in Hebrew/Aramaic) the first on the west side of the Jordan and the other on the east. The names seem to refer to Messianic prophecies, “a shoot will spring form Jesse” (Is.11:1) and “a star will rise from Judah” (Numbers 24.17)

Little Shoot wasn’t much to write home about. It was a town of about 200 threadbare aristocrats, who lived mostly in caves, (cool in summer warm in winter, really very nice). This is why Nathaniel, when told about Jesus said “What good can come out of Little Shoot (Nazareth)!?!” (John, 1:46) Joseph of the House of David and his wife Mary, also of the royal House of David seem to have settled down there after spending time abroad. And there, among his many cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws etc., they raised their boy, Yeshu, (spelled “Jesus” in Greek) and an amazing child He most certainly was.

He was an odd one. He never married; there were after all certain questions about His suitability, and then at the age of thirty He left home and started hanging around with odd people, like that cousin, Yochanan the Baptist down near the Dead Sea. Soon He was back and had left the family construction business. He was working as a rabbi and had accumulated some followers. There was a buzz in town about him possibly being the Messiah. Why not? He was, after all, a member of the family and most certainly descended from David on both sides. There was even talk of miracles! I imagine his relatives were thinking about government jobs after the revolution. That upstart Herod and his clan! They would have to go! Not descendants of David, not even really Jewish!

There is an interesting document called the Gospel to the Hebrews. It is very ancient, and was respected by many early authors, though it didn’t become part of the canon of Scriptures. It talks about the brothers of the Lord, “Behold, the mother of the Lord and his brothers were saying to him: John the Baptist is baptizing for the remission of sins. Let us also be baptized by him. But he said to them: How have I sinned, that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless perchance this that I have just said is ignorance.” Why, pray tell, would Jesus’ relatives have wanted Him to go get baptized? There is another interesting verse in the canonical Gospel according to John, the seventh chapter. Jesus’ brothers are urging him to go down to the feast of Booths saying, “Show Yourself to the world.” (John 7:4) I suspect they were anxious for the revolution. Jesus had a different revolution in mind.

At first they seemed to be big backers of Jesus and his messiah-ship. But, as it became clear that He is not about to declare their kind of revolution, they seemed less anxious for Him to be traveling about embarrassing them. “Then He went home and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When His family heard it, they went out to restrain Him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of His mind.’” (Mark 3:20-21)

Jesus' kindred seemed a little ambivalent about Him. In St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the risen Jesus appears first to the Twelve, among whom there was a James, or perhaps two, and then to his kinsman (brother?) James. Seeing cousin Jesus risen from the dead seems to have convinced James and the rest of the family because James eventually became the first bishop of Jerusalem. He was finally stoned to death around 63AD.

After his death, Simeon, son of Cleophas also called the brother of the Lord in Matthew 13:55), succeeded him. He was bishop at the time of the Roman siege but escaped with the rest of the Jewish Christian community to Pella east of the Jordan river, having been warned by the Lord (Luke 21:20)and by people in the Church who had the prophetic gifts. Bishop Simeon was crucified by the Romans around 106AD and was apparently succeeded by relatives of Jesus until Bishop Judah Kyriacos, a name which means “Judah, who belongs to the Lord” was killed during a riot in Jerusalem, in 133. That was toward the beginning of the Bar Kochba revolt which declared Simon Bar Kochba Messiah.

Any one who claimed Jesus as the Messiah was killed or expelled from the territory held by the rebels. The revolt ended with the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem until our own times. With the death of Judah Kyriacos, the line of bishops descended from the House of David ended as did the Jewish Church of Jerusalem. From that point on, it was clear that Christianity was not a movement among the Jews, but a universal Church claiming to be the true and spiritual Jerusalem, led by the spiritual heirs of Peter and the Twelve.

But before then, it seems that there was a role played by those who claimed kinship to the Lord, and there seems perhaps to have been some question about who should be running things, Jesus relatives or His disciples. I suspect that’s why St. Paul has issues with “apostles” (1Cor. 9:1)and with those who “came from James” (Gal.:12), but never with Peter and the others of the Twelve. (Gal.2:9) The “Brothers of the Lord" were a very distinct group called the “Desposyni” (a Greek word, as I’m sure you guessed, meaning, the family of the master). It seems that they traveled accompanied by their wives and managed to make their presence known. (1Cor.9:5)

What seems to be a dispute between Peter and Paul really is nothing more than Paul urging Peter to be the authority that Jesus had called him to be. It’s as if Paul is telling Peter that he, not James had been given charge of the Church throughout the world. Jesus had established a universal summons to all humanity, not just a sect to be controlled by the family of the founder.

I really think that this fundamental dispute regarding the nature of the Church is the problem that created the New Testament Canon. Paul’s letter for the most part and even the Gospels, were written against the backdrop of a Davidic family feud. Also, wouldn’t Zerubabel be a fine name for a new-born?

So here is Bible reading principle # 10 THE BIBLE IS ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT PLASTER SAINTS.

Next Week: IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME, AND I DON’T READ GREEK

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 8

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 8

“GO MAKE WHAT OUT OF WHO?”

Don’t assume you know what a word means in English. English is a very complicated language. Still, English speakers are always telling everyone in the world what things mean, even if we don’t know that we don’t know what our own language means. “Why,” you may ask “is this at all important in understanding the Bible?” Since around 1600 when all those swashbuckling heroes like Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Pocahontas and Errol Flynn sailed throughout the world making the world English, the English language has been the language of evangelization. Wherever an Englishman buckled his swash, it seems he left a copy of the King James Bible in his hotel room. Thus, the assumptions and errors of English speaking people have become the errors and assumptions of much of the Christian world.

The English language belongs to the Anglo-Frisian sub-group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. If it were just Anglo-Frisian that would be fine, but it seems that at one time everyone in the neighborhood wanted to invade England. I suppose it had something to do with the lovely climate and the wonderful cuisine. The Celts lived there at the time of Christ, and then came the Romans, then those pesky Anglo-Frisians, after them came the Norwegian and Danish speaking Vikings. Then more Latin came with Christian missionaries and then more Vikings who spoke French and finally a smidgen of Greek during the Renaissance. Finally, in the USA we have such all-American words as taco, pizza, canoe, rodeo, boondocks and schmooze. English never met a language that it didn’t want to absorb.

We have grafted words from everywhere onto our Anglo-Frisian grammar, so that everything has five different names, as seen above: cuisine, a fancy-schmantzy French word for food. Because English is so malleable (a fancy-schmantzy Latin word for changeable) the meanings of words change constantly. When I was a boy in a former century, “cool” had to do with the weather and “gay” referred to Paris in the 1890's. Who knows what they will mean in another 20 or 30 years? The mind boggles. This is why I want to fall on the floor howling with laughter when someone asks me for the best translation of the Bible.

The big words in Catholicism are still in Greek: Eucharist, Baptism, Pentecost, Liturgy, Canon, Ecclessial, Bishop, Priest, Deacon, Chrism, Monk, Martyr, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Apocalypse and almost all the other names of books in the Bible. Bible, too, for that matter. They are all Greek words.

For instance we all know what the Bible is, right? As mentioned, it’s that big book on the coffee table. Nope. It’s a Greek word that means “Books.” Apocalypse. We all know what that means. It’s the Beast and Armageddon and the rapture and people running around screaming and lots of cheap made for TV movies, right? Nope. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling” and for Greek speaking Jews it often referred to a wedding. (Certainly, I have known some marriages that were apocalyptic in the modern sense, with the running around and the screaming, but that is not what is meant here.) We assume that we know what words mean and we don’t. We know what we use them for now, not what they meant in their historical context. Reading an ancient text as if it were a TV Guide is called “anachronism.” You guessed it, a Greek word meaning “up (or out) of proper time.”

There are three words that you need to know in Greek in order to even begin to make sense out of the New Testament. One is “apostle” which we have never bothered to translate from Greek, “The Twelve” an Anglo-Frisian phrase (in Greek “hoi Dodeka”) and the third “disciple,” a Latin word. We assume that all three have the same meaning, The Twelve, Apostles, Disciples, it’s all the same thing, right? Nope. Three different words, three different meanings, three different groups of people, which overlapped.

By the by, you need to know that Greek did the same thing that English does. It makes verbs (action words) into nouns (persons, places and things). We bus people in a bus to a school where we school them in the English language. Don’t pretend to be confused. You actually talk this way if you speak English.

Back to apostle. In Greek, it is both a verb and a noun. It means missionary, or better still delegate, or in Anglo-Frisian, “someone sent out with the right to tell you how to do things.” The noun apostle (a delegate, or one sent out) appears about 80 times in the New Testament. As a verb (“to delegate” or to “send out”) it appears about 125 times. The word disciple means “student” and it appears about 216 times. The phrase “the twelve” appears around 24 times, but "twelve apostles" appears only four times and "twelve disciples" appears only twice. (BOY, THIS IS SURE BORING AND POINTLESS!!!) Hold on a minute! It’s not boring if you really want to understand the Bible.

Disciples, Apostles and The Twelve were not all the same people. The three words denote increasingly exclusive categories. Jesus had lots of disciples. The Bible talks of his appearing to “more than 500 of the brethren at one time.” (1Cor:15,6) So Jesus had lots of students. He sent some of them out. (In Greek, He “apostled” them) “And when it was day he called His disciples to Himself and chose twelve whom also he named apostles.” (Luke 6:13)

There were also a lot more apostles than just twelve. “After these things the Lord appointed seventy others and sent (“apostled” or “delegated” same word in Greek) them in pairs before Him into every city and place where He Himself would come.” (Luke 10:1)

So, you have hundreds of disciples, but maybe less than 100 delegated missionaries and among them an inner circle of twelve, appropriately called “The Twelve.” By the way, Twelve was an important number in Hebrew, it denoted the governing authority. Twelve tribes, twelve patriarchs, twelve judges etc. So you have a governing nucleus of twelve in the Bible. This is important because it clears up a lot of problems. Everybody talks about the “twelve apostles.” The Bible almost never called them the “twelve apostles” it just calls them “The Twelve.” There were lots of apostles, but only twelve of The Twelve.

It’s clear that Jesus established leadership and structure in the Church. Have you ever wondered how Paul got to be an apostle? He was not one of the original twelve. It’s simple. He was an apostle because Jesus delegated him on the Damascus road. He wasn’t one of the Twelve, but he was an apostle. If you don’t understand this you might end up thinking that Paul and the leadership of the Church didn’t get along. He always seems to be at odds with the apostles, especially James. He had no problem with Peter and John and the other members of the Twelve, but he certainly took issue with self appointed delegates, and the James he is at odds with is not the Apostle James who died in 44AD, but James the Brother of the Lord, who seems to have been the leader of the Jerusalem Church and its very kosher conservative adherents.

When you understand who’s who you begin to realize that the books and letters of the New Testament were written in a very human context, a struggle about the nature of the Church and her leadership. God did amazing things with a crew of schlubs who are not unlike us.

You also have another group, a much more irritating group, called the “Desposyne.” You don’t hear much about them and with good reason. We’ll talk about them later.

So, Principle #9: AS YOU READ THE BIBLE DON’T ASSUME YOU KNOW WHAT A WORD MEANS UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.

Next Week: YOU CAN PICK YOUR FRIENDS, YOU CAN PICK YOUR BRAINS, YOU CAN EVEN PICK YOUR TOES, BUT YOU CAN’T PICK YOUR RELATIVES

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 5

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 5

“KEEPING IT ALL IN THE FAMILY or CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME”

So now I come to the moment, dear Eve, of actually answering your question. Whom did the children of Adam and Eve marry? There are a number of theories.

(Genesis 5:4) “The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years; and he had other sons and daughters.” Adam and Eve had bunches of kids, of both genders, so we are presented with the most obvious answer, to which I can hear you responding “Yuuuuuck......”

The Jewish Sages are very creative about the whole thing. According to the always useful “32 rules of Rabbi Eliezer”: The particles "et"(direct object marker that has absolutely no translatable meaning”), "gam"(literally “also”), and "af" (“even” and a hundred other possible things), indicate that something not mentioned is included in a given text. The great commentator Rashi looks at the “gam”s, “et”s and “af”s in the story“ of Genesis to mean that Cain had a twin sister and Abel had two twin sisters. If that doesn’t confuse you nothing will (Merci bien, mon ami Pierre!) Isn’t this wonderfully obscure?

Let us look at other possible answers. Perhaps God created spouses for the children of Adam and Eve, but no one I know who espouses this theory because Genesis says that Eve was the mother of all the living. There are some commentators who claim that the children of Adam and Eve married other kinds of beings, but again that would be problematic since Eve is the mother of all the living and what kinds of creatures could they have married? That could really increase the yuck factor.

The other and most usual answer is that they married, you guessed it, their siblings!!! But I thought that wasn’t allowed. It is forbidden in the book of Leviticus, but it is clear that before the Exodus and the law of Moses there were some interesting incidents of sibling marriages, such as Abraham and Sarah, who were half siblings! In Genesis 20:12 we read that Abraham’s wife Sarah is also his half-sister, on his father's side. In the rabbinic literature, Sarah is only considered his niece. (Once again, yuuuuck!)

The whole topic is very disturbing. I will never forget once, when my mother was reading the Bible, and found the story of Lot and his daughters. She called me to ask if I was aware of what was in this book!!! This is my point! The Bible is the great narrative of real people whom God loves. I personally don’t find many of them that appealing. They do some really outrageous things. I can hear you say , “If it was alright for Abraham or Lot, it must be alright for me.” Not so fast. God is always smiting people in the Bible, and if you read the fine print you realize that they deserved a good smiting now and then. The Bible relates stories of dishonesty and violence and other goings on that we won’t mention in a family column. That’s because the Bible really is history about real people. And those real people are sometimes their own worst enemies. The bible points out their foibles, not for our imitation, but for our instruction.

It is interesting to look at modern genetic studies of the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. They seem to indicate that between all humans now living had common ancestors between 100,00 and 45,000 years ago. This in no way corroborates the story as told in Genesis, but it does agree with some of the important points of Genesis. We are all descended from one man and one woman. Geneticists don’t say this man and this woman necessarily lived at the same time, though the Bible and the Church say they did. Still, this refutes the pseudo science of the racists of the nineteenth century who claimed that there were inferior races of human beings. We are all one race; the human race. I may look pretty odd to you, but I am still your cousin. The Bible taught this long before scientists caught up with the Church.

Another point on which geneticist and the Bible agree, is that we are descended from a remarkably small group of people who live not so very long ago, perhaps as recently as 5000 years ago. “All humans alive today share a surprisingly recent common ancestor, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents.” (Rohde, DL; Olson, S; Chang, JT, Nature, September 2004, "Modeling the recent common ancestry of all living humans") I figure I had better footnote that point.

Do not think for a minute that genetic science is corroborating Bishop Ussher, but my point in referring to genetic research is that Genesis and genetics agree that there must have been some really close family ties, if you catch my drift. Abel and Cain and Seth couldn’t marry the girl next door, because there was no next door. Which theory is right? Scientists are absolutely sure of something until they change their mind upon receiving new information. And then they are absolutely convinced until a new theory comes along. University comes from a very ancient Latin word meaning “Fog bound scholars arguing with each other.” It’s true. I know because I actually taught in a university for a very long time. The Bible is interested in teaching the principles of the Kingdom of God. Science is mostly interested in getting grant money. (I’m only kidding. Scientists are interested in truth. In order to argue with each other, which is their means for arriving at truth, they need buckets of grant money.)

So, carefully analyzing the Scriptural texts and the current scientific data, I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THE SONS OF ADAM MARRIED BECAUSE THE HOLY SPIRIT DID NOT DECIDE TO TELL ME EITHER THROUGH THE TEXT OF SCRIPTURE NOR THE TRADITION OF THE FAITH!!!!!

Jesus once said to the disciples, “No one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself. Only the Father knows.” (Matthew 24:36) Jesus, the Son of God, was content to remain ignorant about certain things because His perfection as the Son of god consisted in trusting and loving His Fatter completely. I however have to know everything right know.

He also said, “I have much to tell you that you cannot bear now.” (John 16:12) Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) was a Dutch woman who helped Jews escape the Nazis during World War II and was eventually imprisoned herself. In 1970, she wrote her autobiography, The Hiding Place, a book that believe is a “must read” for every serious Christian. She tells a story from her childhood that relates to our present problem. When she was a little girl, she would accompany her father, Kaspar, on his trips to the big city when he went to buy supplies for his watch repair business. On one of these train rides, she asked her father what “sex” was. She had heard some older girls discussing it on the playground at school. Her father looked at her and then looked out the window and said nothing. When the train stopped, he asked the little girl to pick up his tool bag. Corrie tried and couldn’t. She said, “Papa it’s too heavy.” Then Kaspar said, “There are some things that are too heavy for you to carry right now. When you are older I will tell you what sex is. Until then you are going to have to trust me.” So it is with our heavenly Father. He wants us to trust Him.

The Holy Spirit also tells us that, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) In other words the Bible doesn’t exist to tell us everything we want to know.

So here is Biblical principle #6:

THE BIBLE DOESN’T EXIST TO TELL US THE FUTURE, OR GIVE US STOCK TIPS OR SATISFY OUR SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY. IT EXISTS TO EQUIP US WITH THOSE THINGS NECESSARY FOR OUR SALVATION AND REDEMPTION.

Whoever Cain and Abel and Seth and the rest of them married, I am sure that they were lovely brides, though they probably came from a disreputable family: the human family.

Next week: GIVE US THIS DAY OUR WHOLE WHEAT, LOW FAT, GLUTEN FREE BREAD.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 3

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S “GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE.” Part 3

COULDN’T ST. MATTHEW ADD? I THOUGHT HE WORKED FOR THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE BEFORE JESUS RECRUITED HIM.

In the Gospel of Matthew 1st chapter, 17th verse we read: “Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ.”

Wait a minute -- In verse 6, King David is counted twice! That’s cheating, and if you compare the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew to that in Luke, something is screwy . In Luke, Levi is Joseph’s great grandfather, Matthat his grandfather and Heli his father. In the Gospel of Matthew it’s Eleazar, Matthan and Jacob who comprise the generations preceding Joseph. They can’t both be right!

If you are treating the Bible like a high school text book written for 21st century illiterates, well, I guess the bible is wrong. If however you understand that the Bible is a collection of books written in the idiom of a middle eastern people over the course of two thousand years, and removed from us by yet another two thousand years, maybe they can both be right after all. As for the three sets of fourteen generations, there is a symbolic meaning involved. Ancient Israel had no numbers. The used letters, a=1, b=2, g=3 and so on. Numbers had word meanings. 14 is a special number. It is twice 7, which is the number that stands for perfection and for covenant oaths. It is written as “y-d” (14). If you read it as four and ten (d and y) it means fulfillment. Jesus is the fulfillment of the three epochs of the history of Israel, the law, the prophets and the writings. The Gospel of Matthew is constantly talking about thing done to fulfill a prophecy. That’s point of that Gospel. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise. When you see numbers in the Bible, they have a lot more than numerical value.

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink over the problem of the divergent genealogies of Jesus. Some insist that Luke really gives us the blessed Mother’s genealogy. I don’t see how this can be since the genealogies themselves both clearly say that they are Joseph’s lineage. My personal opinion is that Sextus Julius Africanus got it right. He was a Christian historian born around 160 AD, probably in the area of Jerusalem. He asked some of the same questions that we ask and living where Jesus had lived a little more than a century before, Africanus was able to ask the answers from the descendants of Jesus’ relatives. He tells us that Joseph was descended from a number of Levirate marriages, in which a man married the widow of his relative, if the relative died childless. That way, no family line in Israel would be extinguished.

The royal family of David probably intermarried regularly and Eusebius of Caesarea, who quotes Africanus regarding the genealogies of Jesus, goes on to say that Mary was a close relative of Joseph as was the custom, and still is in much of the Middle East, so their genealogies are essentially the same. This may be the answer to that particular question. It may not be.

My point is this: THE BIBLE IS NOT A SELF INTERPRETING BOOK. Remember, it isn’t a book at all, it is a library. One needs a competent authority if one is going to find their way around it. There are other discrepancies in the Bible and rather than detract from the trustworthiness of the Bible, they add to it.

The Church is always accused of trying to cover things up or smooth things over. No one smoothed out the Gospels. They were kept just as they were received because they contain eye witness accounts. The apparent contradictions only make this more clearly true. For instance, Matthew and Mark seem to say there is only one angel at Jesus’ empty tomb. Luke and John seem to mention two. As for where Jesus met the disciples after the resurrection in Matthew, He seems to meet them in Galilee. In Mark, Luke and John, He seems to appear first in Jerusalem. In John, He meets them at different times in both places. I suspect that He met them in both places. The accounts in Matthew and Mark seem to be summaries. I often talk about my grandfather when I really mean great-grandfather, but in telling family stories, the great grandfather-ness would only confuse my hearers and I do that enough already. Unless you are getting a doctorate in history, one may sometimes leave out extraneous detail for the sake of the point, and as for the angels at the tomb, I have never seen an angel, but people who have say the experience is quite overwhelming and you are not counting or taking names and addresses. Again, my point here is not to reconcile the Scriptures but to point out that the Books of the Bible are true to the principle of the Incarnation. They contain historical facts, but are not meant to be histories, their authors used details that they had seen in order to make their point about their faith. The Holy Spirit filled their words with what was necessary for our growth in the knowledge of God’s love for us. Nothing more and nothing less.

Most Christians say they believe in the Incarnation, the idea that Jesus is both fully God and fully man, but most of us really have a hard time with the concept. We find it hard to believe that, if Jesus was really God, eternal and equal to the Father, how could he say something like, “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), or “the time is known to the Father alone.” (Matt 24:36 and Mark 13:32). Read a little further in St. Paul’s letter to the Phillipians 2:5-7 “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave.” It is as if Jesus took off the powers of His divinity and without ceasing to be that perfect love which is God, left the heavenly throne for love of us.

That means that the word of God learned to speak Aramaic and Hebrew and probably some Greek in the carpenter’s shop. The hand that shaped the galaxies learned how to make tables and chairs from Joseph. He was a little boy who ran to his mother when frightened or hurt. Because He had submitted Himself to our human limitations, He knew only what His Heavenly Father was pleased to tell Him by means of their Holy Spirit, and the day and the hour were not among these things. In this sense, the Father was greater than Jesus, but Jesus was no less divine, no less eternal and no less perfect in that reality which constitutes divinity: perfect Love.

We who believe He was truly God, have a hard time believing that God could be humble, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifyet He was. It is perhaps the most amazing thing about our faith that we say the All-powerful became powerless for love of sinners like you and me. It is a very hard thing to believe, and there are principally two ways not to believe. One is Arianism, the other is Monophysitism.

An Alexandrian priest named Arius (250–336) denied that Jesus could be fully God. One, after all, is not three. The Arian concept of Christ is that the Son of God did not always exist, but was created by God the Father and though adopted and divinized, by the Father, He was less than the Father. It seems that the Emperor Constantine favored Arainism, (Roman emperors liked things tidy and tended to favor Arian Christianity) but when he convened the Council of Nicea, the bishops told him “Nope. We’ve always believed that God is a trinity Father, Son and Holy spirit. The oneness of God is the unity of Love; solidarity, not solitude.” Constantine, the most powerful man in the world at them time said “Oh well, I guess I’m wrong. I’m just the emperor. You guys are the pope and the bishops.”

Despite what you may have heard, Constantine believed that the state shouldn’t control the Church. Some of his successors thought otherwise and ever since then the Church has struggled to maintain her independence from the state. The Church has struggled with emperors and kings and currently is struggling with the ruler of the United States: King Popular Opinion (as interpreted by the Mediacracy) this is a government of, by and for the people. Shouldn’t the people, whose voice is "Entertainment Tonight" and whose art is "Dancing With the Stars", shouldn’t the sovereign people run the Church in America? I digress. Governments, whether popular or monarchical, are much more comfortable with a Christ who is slightly less than divine, because after all, the state, whether popular or monarchical, really should be god. Those who humanize Jesus excessively have an odd tendency to divinize the power of the world. Arianism has devolved in our times into the belief among many that Jesus was just a really nice guy.

Monophysitism is the reaction to Arianism. Many Christians, especially in Egypt and Syria, two of the three centers of the Christian world, the other being Rome, reacted to Arius by going to the other extreme, denying that Jesus was one person as did Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople (for whom Nestorianism is named) or by saying He had no human nature, or at least humanity being so much less than divinity was "dissolved like a drop of honey in the sea" as Eutyches, an Archimandrate in Constantinople insisted. So, Monophysitism is the belief that either there was no human nature in Jesus or it was so inconsequential as to be unimportant. The Bishop of Rome firmly maintained what today is the position of most Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox Christians, the Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine, and as I have said, this a hard thing to get your mind around, but it is the truth. And we call it the Incarnation.

I think the doctrine has further implications. Just as Jesus was God in the flesh, so too we are incarnate spirits, not just spirits trapped in flesh. That is why Jesus promises us resurrection. Going to heaven when we die isn’t enough. God promises to raise us from the dead because our bodies are really us. I would stretch it even farther to say that just as our Lord was truly God and man, so too, I am really spirit and flesh. Similarly, the Bible is fully human and completely inspired.

Orthodox Jews believe the Torah is not simply the inspired word of God. It is God’s verbatim dictation. In the same way Muslims believe that the Qur’an is word for word written by God. We believe that the entire Bible is written by the Holy Spirit of God, using human beings to do it. In other words there’s a lot of human-ness in the Bible. The stories and prophecies and visions and poetry and laws of the Bible are “God-breathed” though written as seen by human eyes, heard by human ears and touched by human hands. It speaks in words that humans can hear. It’s meaning is made clear by those to whom Jesus gave authority, but it is wonderfully human as well as perfectly divine. It is as hard to believe this as it is to believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man. We want the Bible to be only divine, but it tells the amazing story of the meeting of God and humanity. It is full of sin and sainthood, weakness and strength, all sometimes in the same people.

So here is principle number #4: THE BIBLE IS NOT A SELF INTERPRETING HISTORY BOOK. IT IS A COLLECTION OF BOOKS WRITTEN BY GOD FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO HELP US TO KNOW, LOVE AND SERVE GOD IN THIS WORLD AND TO BE HAPPY WITH HIM FOREVER.

Next week: MORE ABOUT THOSE PESKY NUMBERS.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 1

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Who did the sons of Adam and Eve marry?

Patiently yours,
Eve Anne Gellikal

Dear Eve,

They married their wives.

Sincerely,
the Rev. Know it all

PS I imagine you would like a more detailed answer than that. This will take some time, and so I have to decide to answer your question with a long harangue of which this is the first installment.

THE REV. KNOW IT ALL’S GUIDE TO READING THE BIBLE, THAT BIG BOOK ON THE COFFEE TABLE. Part 1

Let me begin by quoting my favorite theologian, the Rev. Billy Bob. “God hates method. He loves principle.” Do not misread the preceding. God hates method, not Methodists. God loves Methodists very much. No one can put on a church supper like Methodists.

What is the Rev. Billy Bob trying to say? An example: You go to the Thursday prayer meeting and that Thursday you are in charge of the prayer ministry. You are wearing your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. Before you sit, an afflicted soul who has come for healing prayer with the worst case of athlete’s foot in medical history enters the room. You anoint him with holy water, praying in tongues all the while with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. And much to your shock he is instantly healed!

You now know how to heal the sick. You wear your favorite bowling shirt, your red feedlot cap and your St. Christopher medal. You anoint with holy water, praying in tongues with the laying on of hands and conclude with three Hail Mary’s. So you do the same thing next week, now that you have the gift of healing, and nothing happens. The minute you think you’ve got God down to a method He does things a different way. God hates method. He loves principle.

This is the point that St. Paul is trying to make when he talks about works of the law. “...a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ...” Galatians 2:16. There is only one place other than the New Testament in all of ancient literature where the phrase “works of the law” appears. It is in the Dead Sea Scroll 4QMMT: “Miqtsat Ma’asei ha Torah” (“Precepts of the Works of the Law”). It seems to be written by Essenes to Pharisees about ritual purity. In the scroll 4QMMT we read in ruling 16 “Concerning streams of liquid; we have determined that they are not intrinsically pure. Indeed, streams of liquid do not form a barrier between the pure and the impure for the liquid that is in the stream and that in its receptacle become as one liquid.” So there! Take that, you loose and liberal Pharisees!

(What the heck is this guy talking about????)Simply this: If a clay bowl is unclean and you pour water from a clay pitcher into the bowl, the uncleanness leaps up the stream of water and pollutes the pitcher and both must broken! Surely you remember this from you reading of Leviticus? The scroll ends with “Now we have written you some of the works of the law which we determined would be beneficial to you.”

When Paul talks about works of the law, he is saying that we are not saved by this ritual nonsense, but by conversion of heart and mind. 500 years ago Luther decided that Paul was saying that we don’t have to do anything to go to heaven. Paul would have been a bit surprised at that conclusion (Romans 2:24), as would Jesus (Matt7:23) In fact, St. James says that it is clear we are not saved by faith alone, but by works also (James 2:24)

If Luther had understood that the phrase “works of the law” was about ritual purity and not about kindness and mercy, and that Paul simply wanted to explain that these external rituals of kosher law don’t save, he would have spared the world a lot of trouble. It is always intriguing to me that people who talk loudly about dead works and salvation by faith alone constantly try to get people who were baptized as infants by the pouring of water to be re-baptized by a very specific formula as adults and only by immersion. They believe in method, not in principle. Whether they admit it or not they are professing salvation by a work of law.

We want to reduce the Bible to a set of rules. It is a book of principles, the principles of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is not to say that rules are unimportant. On the Contrary! For children, good rules are essential and we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we are like little children. These rules however, depend on love and trust and a desire to obey the Father who loves us. They are rules that teach the principles of the Kingdom. They are not rules that we can get around, rules that enable us to do as little as possible. They are instructions in the very character of God.

The prayer of the pagan is “God, give me what I want.” the prayer of the Christian is “Lord, teach me your ways.” (Psalm 25:4, 86:11,27,11 and the whole rest of the Bible.) The Bible is not a science text, it is not a history text, it is not a rule book. It has all these things in it, but it is primarily a collection of books that deal with the way God has loved us since the beginning of time.

So here is principle #1 THE BIBLE EXISTS TO TEACH US GOD’S WAY OF DOING THINGS, HIS CHARACTER, HIS PRINCIPLES AND HIS PROMISES.

Next week: the Bible is not a book