Isn't the Bible self-contradictory? part 4

Letter to Fidel Labrador continued…

Where are we? Always a fine question when I am writing.  St James says one is not saved by faith alone, but by works also because faith without works is dead.  St. Paul says that one is not saved by works of the law.  What’s going on here? I have already explained my theory that St. James, the bishop of Jerusalem is writing a fund-raising letter for the hungry Jerusalem community. Jesus had taught that if we don’t feed the hungry and clothe the naked He will say to us on the judgment day, “…depart from me, I never knew you.” (Matt 7:21) 

I have labored mightily to show that St. Paul never says that good works are not necessary for salvation, just that works of the Law of Moses won’t save you. What was Paul driving at? On to the salacious Roman gossip.

The Roman emperor Claudius (ruled 41-54 AD) was the last man standing when Caligula, his nephew and most of the other members of the family of Julius and Augustus Caesar were dead. Claudius pretended he was an idiot and they never bothered to kill him. After the army assassins killed crazy depraved Caligula, the palace guard realized that without an emperor they were out of a job. They found crazy semi-depraved Uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor. The terrified senate went along with it and it turned out that Claudius was a pretty good emperor, except for his weakness for women of very little character.  Claudius had been quite close to a Jew, Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great (the baby killer of Bethlehem fame).  In fact, Agrippa was raised on the Palatine hill in Rome in the palace of the Caesars, not to be confused with Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The emperors had the habit of inviting the children of client kings to live with the imperial family in Rome. It was a good way to Romanize them and to keep their families on their best behavior, that is if they ever wanted to see Junior again, so Claudius, Caligula and Agrippa were all chums.

Caesarea Maritima

After Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, Agrippa seems to have helped Claudius have the senate and the palace guards agree on the accession of Claudius to the imperial purple. Claudius gave Agrippa control of most of his grandfather Herod the Great’s territory. He also gave part of Lebanon to Herod Agrippa’s brother Herod. (They weren’t real original in their choice of names.) Agrippa became one of the most powerful and consequently most dangerous kings in the Middle Eastern territory of the Roman Empire. Herod started fortifying places and making lots of new friends in the Middle East, which made his friend Emperor Claudius a bit nervous. Could it be that Herod Agrippa was fomenting rebellion and taking himself a little too seriously as a possible Jewish messiah? He was acclaimed as a god by the crowd in the amphitheater in Caesarea on the coast of the Holy Land. The Acts of the Apostles said for this sin of allowing himself to be hailed as a god, he was struck down by an angel and was dead only three years after receiving the enlarged kingdom.

What’s point of all this? Jews had started to make Emperor Claudius nervous. They were 10 percent of the population of the empire. There was a community of them in all the major cities of the empire, maybe a million around Alexandria Egypt and certainly a large number in Antioch, the third city of the empire and a sizable community in Rome. They were well positioned to make trouble. They did in fact revolt in the Holy Land in 66 AD and again in 132 AD, but more ominously they rose up in Cyprus and North Africa in 115 AD. They certainly made the emperors nervous and Claudius, despite what everyone thought, was certainly no fool. When, in 50AD (probably) there were riots among the Jews of Rome about a certain Chrestos, Claudius said, “Enough!” and expelled the Jews from Rome.

This fellow Chrestos was probably Christos, the Greek word for messiah. Christianity had reached Rome early and they were busy fighting over the whole issue of who was in the Church and who was out. Claudius seems to have sent the whole lot packing. Paul met the exilesPriscilla and Aquila from Rome in Corinth around 50 AD and they opened a tent making business together. From them Paul would have heard the sad story of the Church of Rome and I suspect this gave Paul a great idea. He would get his theological point of view in on the ground floor when things eventually opened for Jews in Rome. His opportunity was not long in coming. (More on this later.) Remember his point of view. God loved Greeks as well as Jews and a Greek didn’t have to become a Jew to become a Christian.

The synagogue was a new thing at the time of Christ. The synagogue is never mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament). It possibly developed in the Babylonian community of Jews a couple hundred years before Christ. The religion of Israel was a domestic religion that required three pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple per year if possible. The prayers and blessings and dietary laws that made up the practice of religion were up to the individual. The sacrifices necessary for purification etc. were performed in the Jerusalem temple, but beyond that, there were no place of religious assembly. The equation changed in Babylon. How could one maintain the religion of Israel without the temple? Pilgrimage was pretty much out of the question if you had to walk to Jerusalem from Babylon in Iraq. The answer? The synagogue! It was a place where one could be an Israelite with other Israelites -- a sort of community center.  Gradually the synagogue and the rabbis, religious teachers, came to supplant the temple in the daily life of Jews, especially those not living in the Holy Land. For a couple centuries the rabbis and the synagogue existed alongside the temple and the sacrificing priests, the cohenim, the descendants of Aaron and the tribe of Levi. When the temple was finally destroyed, all that was left was the synagogue. It became the de facto center of what was now truly “Jewish” life. 

There were a lot of gentiles (non-Jews) who attended synagogue. They were called the God-fearers. They had pretty much given up on the silly religions of the ancient world. Remember the Egyptian hippo-jackal-cow gods? The Roman and Greek gods looked more like people, but you had to hide your kid sister from them and sometimes your kid brother. They weren’t very nice gods. A lot of well-educated Romans and Greeks were fascinated by the Jewish religion which spoke of one God who was reasonable and actually interested in human beings, a reasonable moral code and a fairly reasonable set of writings. They weren’t going to jump into the deep end of the pool what with circumcision and no pork and temple sacrifices. They came to synagogue and prayed and studied but nothing more. They were Jewish wannabes, but couldn’t go the whole way, then along comes St. Paul…

Next week: More salacious ancient Roman gossip, I promise

RKIA Explains the Mass -- part 4

In this week’s installment, dear reader, I would like to let you know that you are wasting your time with this harangue. There is a wonderful app “The Mass Explained” by a fellow named Dan Gonzalez. It looks pretty good and Mike Aquilina is involved in it so it must be good, but it’s a bit pricey and, well this is free, so I guess you might as well keep reading. Still, if you really want to know about the Mass in depth, check out the “Mass Explained” app. (Aren’t you impressed that I can use trendy terms like “app”? Until just a few years ago I was still working with goose quill pens and carrier pigeons.)

I have already explained that the smells, bells, and strange clothing are borrowed from the temple and are a kind of souvenir of our entire history: Israelite, Greek, Roman, the whole schmeer. Much of our liturgical (fancy Greek word meaning “church service”) paraphernalia (fancy Greek word meaning “stuff”) is modeled on the temple in Jerusalem. “Why?” you ask. First, it’s in the Bible. And second, we claim to be legitimate, albeit adopted, children of Israel. Our Jewish friends have given up the temple liturgy since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and the subsequent banishment of Israel from Jerusalem in 132 AD. The first Christians claimed that Jesus had established a new temple, one not made with stone, and that temple is us, the church! So it’s only natural that we have candles and incense and holy water and bread and wine and vestments and sacrifice and oil and chanting and psalms and altars. We are the temple, and in this temple the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world is eternally sacrificed once and for all. My friend Rabbi Yehudah ben Yiddishkeit once told me, “You Catholics! You’re more Jewish than we are! You have altars and sacrifices and temples! We don’t do that anymore!”

 I would agree with the Rabbi, save for one point. We are not more Jewish. We are more Israelite. Judaism is Israel without the temple. We claim to still have the temple. In fact, we claim to be the temple.

On Mount Sinai, Moses was commanded to build a portable dwelling for the Lord. The Hebrew word for dwelling is “Mishkan” and it is usually translated by the Latin word “Tabernacle”, which in Latin literally means little hut or tent. Though there is dispute about this, it seems that the structure was also called the Tent of Meeting, the place where God would meet His people. It consisted of a large roofless enclosing which had an altar and behind this altar was a smaller roofed tent in which was kept the Ark of the Covenant.

When King David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital, he moved the Ark of the

Covenant to Jerusalem. His son Solomon built the temple which was really the Tabernacle/Tent of Meeting turned into a permanent stone structure. It was a set of courts each one smaller than the other. The largest court was open to all the Israelites, the next court to Israelite men, the next court, open only to priests and Levites, held the altar of sacrifice, and the innermost court, which held the Ark of the Covenant, was open only to the high priest, and then only once a year. It was there that God dwelt on the wings of the cherubs over the Ark of the Covenant, called the Aron in Hebrew.

Synagogues and traditional Catholic churches imitate this structure. The center piece of the synagogue is the Aron which holds the scrolls of the law. There is no altar, because in Judaism there can be no sacrifice since the destruction of the temple. The traditional Catholic church imitates the temple even more closely than does the synagogue. In a Catholic church, there is the nave or body of the church in which the congregation gathers, which is separated from the sanctuary by a communion rail just as the court of the priests was separated from the court of Israel. The Israelites would come to the edge of the court of priests carrying their offerings. In a Catholic church, the communion rail is the place where the faithful bring themselves, their offering, to the Lord and experience communion with the Lord. Beyond this place of encounter is the altar of sacrifice, and a small box, usually made of metal in which the consecrated communion wafers are kept. This box, or tabernacle, the same word that described the tent in the desert, is a focus for prayer; the sign of Christ’s abiding presence with His people.

So, in the traditional Catholic church you have hints of the structure of the temple in Jerusalem and the Tent of meeting in the desert, you have an outer court, a court for sacrifice and a small structure, and a tabernacle that serves as the dwelling place of God. This is the tradition. There was an aberrant period in the 20th century in which liturgists and architects decided that art was to be judged by its ability to shock and offend. Churches were built to look like spaceships from Planet Ugly. We are slowly recovering from that era and returning to the idea that symmetry is beautiful. In churches built in the era of ugly, you won’t find these elements that tie us to three thousand five hundred years of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but it is still there in a lot of older churches and even in some newer churches.

Next week: Finally, the Mass