Microsoft, please update your pseudepigraphal vocabulary

***Updated at the end***

I'm writing on 1 Enoch at the moment and Word is not being helpful.

Maccabean: suggest replacing with Macarena
Pseudepigrapha: no suggestions
pseudepigraphal: no suggestions
pseudepigraphon: no suggestions
intertestamental: no suggestions
Intertestamental: no suggestions
rabbinics: suggest replacing with rabbinic
pericope: suggest replacing with periscope
unfallen: suggest replacing with ungallant

Enochic: (the clear winner despite Macarena for Maccabean) suggest replacing with gnocchi, anarchic, or erotic.

If you like Dante and you like Tolkien you should read 1 Enoch. I suspect that maybe Tolkien did.


***Update***
Hasmoneans: suggest replacing with Tasmanians, Houstonians, Harmoniums. Really, what good is a spell checker that can't keep Hasmonians straight from Harmoniums?

May we burn her?

When I was an undergraduate one of our favorite bad questions was "Is it acceptable to torment the damned?"

This was the sort of loaded bad question you could drop on zealous underclassmen who would emerge three hours later with some vague notion they needed to break up with their girlfriends and spend more time praying. (Though, to be fair, these were the default conclusions of underclassmen after any real discussion) Our very favorite bad question was "If God created a rock so big he couldn't lift it, would it make him insecure?" Once I asked it on a discussion board as a joke. Dozens of posts later earnest people were asking me for the true answer.

The bad question in question has bad premises, assumes badly that we could know, and uses the word "damned" which must be bad if you go to an evangelical protestant liberal arts college. And probably most times I asked the bad question it was with a supercilious air of torment with little concern for the immortal state of my targets. I am concerned that some day I shall have my reward in full. Still, the question came to mind today in consideration of Christian violence/non-violence.

Jesus models non-violence and exhorts us in almost every circumstance to do likewise, right? I think so. What do we make of Jesus inciting violence against himself? For he surely did. He incited individuals, mobs, establishments, and even governments against himself with the ultimate violent end. If violence is bad then how can this be a good thing? Was this spurring non-believers on to unrighteous acts? If you're Jesus is it acceptable to torment the damned?

Divine Justice is a tricky thing. Lord have mercy on those who may or must weild it.

Eucharist in Genesis 40

In the Joseph novella of Genesis Jesus makes a cameo.

Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharoah's cupbearer and baker. After 3 days the cupbearer is restored to the right hand of his lord. The baker is hanged on a tree.

This is eucharistic symbolism with christological implications. Bread is body and for body, sustenance for this life. Cup is blood and for spirit, sustenance unto life eternal. In Genesis.

I maintain you can read an awful lot of the Bible in such lights. This is perhaps the earliest unmistakable eucharistic instantiation. In fact I'd be thrilled to know if there's an earlier one that I haven't found.

IT LIVES!!! John Scott and St. Paul's win 5 hedons

Today at la House an honorary D.Mus was conferred on John Scott, the Organist and Director of Music at St. Thomas 5th Ave.




Dr. Scott mentioned in passing conversation that while he was organist at St. Paul's London they undertook the recording of THE ENTIRE COVERDALE PSALTER IN ANGLICAN CHANT.





I haven't heard the recording yet but I hereby grant it a pre-emptive 5 hedons* solely for the nature of the project.



And the recording is available at Amazon no less! I'm in the middle of a project on the psalter so the recording came right out of my book "budget". Hurrah.

Run out and get this in order to support Coverdale, Anglican Chant, St. Paul's, John Scott, and Your Immortal Soul.


*The hedonometer has lapsed as of late. For those who do not recall, I reserve the inalienable right to review animals, minerals, and vegetables and assign a score ranging from -5 to 5. To score a 5 usually means you wrote a poem and your last name is Alighieri.

Playing in the dirt.

I've made a connection that I can't recall ever hearing.

Jesus, confronted in John 8 with the woman caught in adultery, stoops and draws in the dirt.

Well, the word usually translated "wrote" is from the root grapho. Usually it means to write. There is an Attic sense of the word as meaning "to indict." That's interesting. But it gets better. Grapho can also mean "to draw."

The word translated "dirt" is "ge". And, you guessed it, ge can mean dirt. And land. And earth.

Jesus drew in the earth.

Peeking at the Septuagint, Genesis 2:7 says God made (plasso, too bad it wasn't grapho) man from the dust (xous) of the earth (ge).

Everyone I've heard fixates on what Jesus wrote in the dirt. We don't know, not that that keeps most people from guessing. I think the gesture is entirely symbolic and meant to be understood as such. Jesus, confronted with snarky tempters, gives the harshest response possible: By playing in the dirt he says, "I created you." I'm tempted to read into it, "I created you and this is the hardest test for me you can think of?" We might also throw in an overtone of "To dust you shall return."

Jesus' tempters don't get it and he lowers himself to make a response that is just as neutralizing but less profound.

Increasingly I think that symbolism is the key to understanding the Bible. Dig the symbols and understand them and you understand the Bible.

Time to go see if I can find any commentaries that associate Gen 2:7 with John 8:6.

Corporate/Individual Piety and Language

I was taught many moons ago that we must not think too individually about worship. The worry is becoming too self-centered in worship and thus displacing the proper focus, who is God.

Fair enough. Certainly our cultural predisposition is self-centeredness and we should fight against it.

But. Worshippers historic have often used emphatically 1st person singular language in worship, even in corporate worship contexts. 3 suggestions for why this could be come to mind:
1. Self-centeredness wasn't a problem for them. I think this false.
2. Their 1S language is an inadequacy they didn't consider. I think this uncharitable to them.

or 3. 1S worship language has a proper place if we understand it.

This morning I was reading from the rockin' Anglican Breviary (old posts here and here) where Psalms 43 and 67 are juxtaposed for Tuesday Lauds 1. My hypothesis is that the Psalmists, and all good liturgists since, used the singular to emphasize penitence and the plural to emphasize blessing.

To me that makes sense. I don't know if it's true. If it's true it does ironically comment on those who exhorted me to discard the 1st person in worship. They would have me think more about myself in a communal context lest I become too self-focused. The converse danger is failure to adequately examine myself in confession and contrition, thereby short-changing what blessing should come corporately to collective penitents.

By inference, and also I intuit by gross common practice, corporate penitence and individual blessing are borderline wicked. Or at least irresponsible.

The Dope on 153

Tomorrow's Gospel, featuring prominently in a sermon near you, contains 153 fish. Oh, BTW it's John 21.

Why 153? I don't know. John isn't too keen on numbers usually. Nobody else seems to really know either although plenty are inclined to speculate.

So on a whim I did what anyone like me would do, I put 153 in Google. The first hit is the Wikipedia page for 153 and it's a doozy. Click here to have your mind and your Johanine theology boggled. I still have no idea what it means but 153 might be my new favorite number.

Just a few reasons:

• 1*1*1 + 5*5*5 + 3*3*3 = 153


• 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17 = 153


• 1*1 + 2*1 + 3*2*1 + 4*3*2*1 + 5*4*3*2*1 = 153 (Just the factorials, ma'am).


• 153 in binary: 10011001


• 153 is a triangular number. Wicked diagram here. 17 rows is 17 points on a side and 153 points total.


• 153 is a hexagonal number. Wicked diagram here. It would be nine hexagons with sides made of equidistant points.

The moral is that I have no idea what John is doing but it's pretty dang cool that there are 153 fish, and that's just for mathematical reasons.

The clip art comes from the W'pedia entry on 153 fish. It's a bit wild itself, but the Pythagorean diagram is cool.

KJV Don't Preach

I have been exhorted to not preach from The King James Version.

This is something of which I am totally guilty. And, I must reasonably admit, the critique is a fair one.

I read the KJV for a few reasons:

1. It's good English even if the translation has weaknesses. More accurate translations are forgettable English.
2. The good English is understandable but not comfortable. Many phrases that I gloss over in a 20th century version stick in the 17th C English and must be digested. That's helpful to someone who has surface familiarity with the Bible.
3. The KJV is idiomatic, and those idioms are in my experience close renderings of the Greek idioms. Greek is very idiomatic; having an honest idiomatic English is instructive even if it's harder to read.
4. The KJV is an English benchmark and the better you understand it the better you understand all English since.

I'm not a KJV lunatic. I won't study it isolated from other texts. I won't spend time creating web sites and Amazon reviews about the primacy of the KJV (search those out for entertaining reading). I will raise my kids on the KJV and use it devotionally.

Not preaching the KJV is a hard one for me. I'm a proponent of not selling an audience short. Pitching a sermon high but approachable for all is a real challenge and I'm not good at it but I would like to be. The dilemma of the text might be somewhat situational. But I am convinced, to my sorrow, of the need to err towards something like the ESV.

But I'll wager nickels to quarters that in 100 years today's best translations will be out-moded and obsolete but the KJV will still be in print.

Interestingly, I recently heard the BJO opposed the KJV because the English is formal and high and thus a bad representation of koinea's vulgar quality. Touche. I think the text is now worth reading for the reasons given above but this is the best critique I've ever heard, and if a more-desirable alternative existed I'd pick it up.