The Ark and The Dove

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I also see another reason why Albert must be inclined to like N.T. Wright - he is a serious, highly regarded Scripture scholar who does not favor the Q hypothesis.  His explanation is refreshingly different from most of the "synoptic problem" solutions you tend to hear and seems to me like very reasonable and historical because it thinks outside the box of narrowly modern textual criticism.  What I mean is that he critiques people who take it for granted that first-century peasants in a chiefly oral culture will think about collections sermons and sayings the same way that modern academics and scribes think about texts instead of how people think about sermons or lectures they hear.  It has the virtue that it is very reasonable and Occam's razor-s away why it should be a problem that the Beatitudes, Our Father, Sermon on the Mount/Plain are different in Matthew and Luke (and Mark), and explains why insular modern academic types (and those who receive their Scriptural formation from them) should think it is a "problem" but most people throughout most of history (including the people who decided on the canon of Scripture) are not worried by it.  In the extended post I quote a passage of about one page from Jesus and the Victory of God.

Essenes, for Bijoy

Hello, Bijoy.  Thank you for reading and commenting.  Blogs are the most fun when they are interactive.  I am glad you are enjoying our musings here.  I made this a post rather than a comment because I can, and because it's something interesting to think about.  By the way, I didn't get to read the article you referred to - either you forgot to paste the link into the comment or our blogging client doesn't let you do that.

The question is, do I think it is possible that Jesus was an Essene. 

From what I know, I think that if you asked a question like "is it possible that Jesus had contact with the Essenes at one point or another, or had certain sympathies with them," the answer would be yes, quite possibly.  N.T. Wright definitely sees this as a strong possibility; so do the footnotes in the New American Bible (the American-English Bible edition prepared for Americans by the American bishops), which also speak of similarities if not an actual relationship between John the Baptist and the Essenes.  Before you consider whether it is plausible if Jesus was an Essene, you should first ask yourself if Jesus was a Pharisee, because if the answer is no, then it would be senseless to call Him an Essene since according to the old Jewish Encyclopedia the Essenes were a particularly strict type of Pharisee.  To be sure, Jesus basically agreed with the Pharisees about the importance of the Torah and with their theological doctrine (notably belief in angels, spirits, and the resurrection of the dead, against the Sadducees) even if He harshly criticized their practice, and yet few would go so far as to say that He was merely a member of the Pharisee party.

The hypothesis that Jesus actually was specifically an Essene, or that Christianity developed basically from Essenism, or that Essenism actually was the primitive form of Christianity seems to have been a popular idea among Deists and Enlightenment Rationalists hundreds of years ago, and while it still turns up now and then, it seems that it is considered by almost everybody to have been tried and found wanting.  The Jewish Encyclopedia notes in its article on Essenes that while there were many similarities between the Essenes and early Christians (they say that John the Baptist "seems to have been one"), and that the sort of person who would be attracted to the Essenes was likely to be attracted to Christianity, they call Jesus positively anti-Essene.

Now, for the question of whether Jesus ever visit or perhaps even live with the Essenes at any time?  I don't know.  Could have been.  He didn't seem to mind living in half-gentilized Galilee and spending time with Samaritans, so why should He shun people who tried very hard to be authentic and pious Jews?    I am not aware of any evidence one way or the other on this.

But returning to the question of whether He was an Essene, and speaking more generally, while it may be that understanding the various Jewish movements of the time may be helpful in understanding various aspects of Jesus' life and ministry (because, after all, he was not in any way against Judaism or the Old Covenant itself), the assumption that Jesus can be defined purely or chiefly in terms of one sect or movement is probably doomed from the start.  At the time of Jesus there were many different movements, sects, and parties, all of whom were right in some ways and incomplete or wrong in others.  Thus you would expect to see more similarities than differences, because to the extent that they were right, they should look like Jesus.

I think it is a mistake to try fit Him too much into any preexisting category when the Gospels show Him going to such great lengths to make sure people do not press Him into the service of their party's agenda (e.g. Jn. 6:15), when He had such a deep and thorough understanding of the Law (Lk. 2:47), and when He did not feel bound to follow any tradition which He judged to be spurious or not belonging to His interpretation of the Law (Mt. 15:1-9), which He taught authoritatively (Mt. 7:29). 

There were many ideas about how best to keep the Covenant and what its fulfillment might be, and yet the people were "confused and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd."  Jesus did not come to arbitrate between them which sect or school was better, but to show what true and perfect obedience to the Old Covenant was and then to fulfill it in the New that He instituted in His own blood. 

Weird art in the weird news

Since we've established that any dang thing can be considered art depending on who's doing the interpreting, the real question is not "is it art or not," but "is the intellectual community that considers this to be worthwhile/significant/great art one worth belonging to?"

From Ananova's Quirkies:
Exhibit A: Roadkill is put in a frame, called art.
Exhibit B: Derelict building modified to have part of its facade rotate, called art
Exhibit C: Theater director pays £27,000 for abstract painting, then finds out it was made by two-year-olds.

Improve your mind by reading the classics

According to this article, 42% of college graduates will never read another book after college (not exactly sure how they counted that).  And of the ones that do, most will be reading mostly the latest bestsellers.  So if you are reading the collected best of what has been thought and written you will have quite an intellectual advantage over the majority of the population.  Including, paradoxically, fresh ideas.  Chesterton once observed (quite intelligently) that being a narrowmindedly a child of one's own age is a rather degrading sort of slavery.  As the writer notes, everyone you know is reading the same popular bestsellers, popular blogs, the same newspapers, etc. (and it's a little ironic that you're reading this on a blog).  Think outside the box and read something old and good.

Grail sighting?

No, not in silly tales like the Da Vinci Code.  Some archaeologists seem to think St. Lawrence was in possession of it.  Story from the Fathers blog.

Return of the King

One of the last chapters in the book is called Return of the King.  As you may well have done, on seeing the title, I thought of Lord of the Rings.  Then I realized that he may well have intended the cultural reference, or not.  Or he may have been aware of it and made it purposely ambiguous.  Because it could be referring to directly to the archetype that LOTR taps into - an archetype that itself comes from the Bible - Lord of the Rings being a very Catholic and Biblical epic.

So I got to thinking...returns of kings in Lord of the Rings...

The second Temple is like the return of the King Under the Mountain in The Hobbit; Jesus' coming is like Aragorn's return in the end of Lord of the Rings.

Think about it.  In The Hobbit, the people are expecting Thror's son to return and take his place as King Under the Mountain.  When he comes, they expect that the Dwarves will come and live there again and the greatness of the mythical days of old will be restored.  And moreover, the evil that keeps them in bondage (Smaug the dragon) will be defeated.  Thorin does manage to come back, and the people are expecting the river to run with gold and silver fountains and wealth and magic and everything.  But it's all so ordinary.  The dragon is defeated, and the Dwarves do restore their kingdom to some extent.  But it's not really like the olden times.  The requirements have sort of technically been met, but it's not the same.  Thror's son might be back, but his kingdom hasn't achieved the greatness of the old days.  The Dwarven King isn't the universal king of the land, anyway.  The dragon might be dead, but he wasn't the ultimate problem anyway.  Sauron is still lurking behind the scene and unleashing devastation on the people from which they can only temporarily free themselves.

Likewise, when the Second Temple is built, the exile is over...sort of.  The people are back in the same geographical place, and David's son (Zerubbabel) has built a Temple.  But did the Lord come to dwell with them, the way He did formerly?  There is no manifestation the way there was in Exodus 40, Leviticus 9, or I Kings 8.  No pillar of fire and cloud.  No theophany, or even a prophet proclaiming that everything is restored.  They couldn't even manage to build a new temple that was as grand as the old one.  Nor is there a dynasty universally accepted as the rightful king.  Moreover, they have not decisively defeated their enemies or been freed from them.  The pagans are still able to harass and dominate them and even to defile the Temple.

Aragorn's enthronement as king, though, is completely decisive.  Even though almost nobody was able to see him coming, even his own steward (Denethor), who had become accustomed to being in charge, settled into a comfortable rut of the king not returning, his coming meant the true restoration of the rightful order of Middle-Earth and the decisive and final defeat of evil.  You can draw the rest of the parallels yourself.

What it means to be a messiah

It's common knowledge that first-century Jews upon hearing someone called "son of God" would not necessarily assume that that person was the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity (as passing familiarity with the OT shows).

Wright talks about what people did expect from a messiah, though.  Jesus certainly fulfilled the OT messianic expectations in a way people were not expecting, but he didn't go against them.  He was, after all, the Messiah of Judaism, not of some made-up new religion - not abolishing the Covenant, but fulfilling it.

The point of having a Messiah is, then -

• The return from exile
• The defeat of evil
• The return of the presence of the LORD to His people

The thing about Jesus, though, is that unlike any of those who prefigured Him, He not only accomplished them in the most transcendent way possible, and He did not merely bring about or cause these things, He actually accomplished them in, through, and by means of Himself, and embodied them Himself.

N.T. Wright on the NT

So anyway, I just finished that book Albert gave me, so I'll talk about it a little bit. 

These are the main ideas of what I saw:

• The "quest for the historical Jesus," posited by so many influential Bible scholars, in which a "split" is posited between "The historical Jesus" and "The Jesus of faith" is misguided, un-factual, and unhistorical (this is on the same wavelength, I understand, as Pope Benedict's book [which I am about to read]). 
• The real way to be historical is not to seek to understand the texts according to the mindset of twentieth-century (or any other century) modern skeptical inquiry but according to first-century Jewish eschatology.
• In order to understand the historical sense of the Gospels one should understand what first-century Jews expected about the Scriptures and what it meant to be a messiah rather than anachronistically assuming they had all the developments of later Christian theology (much less modern ideologies and categories of thinking).

"The Cultural Illiteracy of the Easy Atheists"

"Best-selling atheist authors are capitalizing on a wave of ignorance and stupidity."

TechCentralStation has an article critiquing the latest popular pro-atheism writers like Christopher Hitchens on their cultural ignorance.  Pitting great Christian authors and artists against the Bible they loved and wrote about, they "must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky," authors who "dramatized the themes and stories of the holy book that Hitchens disparages."

Quality TV

Today I was watching that Mythbusters show and they investigated a myth about a brass player spicing up a performance (the 1812 Overture in their story) by concealing a firecracker inside his mute so as to go off in the middle of the song.  For a band geek it was very entertaining watching the mute be propelled from the trombone bell.  It turns out this works remarkably well (don't try at home).  It shot out quite forcefully even with a relatively small firecracker (enough to hit the conductor forcefully from back in the orchestra), and even with very large explosive charges (which of course they tried), the slide remained in place without being held while the mute rocketed from the bell.  Watching it in slow motion was especially hilarious.