The Ark and The Dove

Herod's Temple, and what I've been reading

So I had always kind of assumed that Jesus came at the time He did relative to the Temple because finally things were back in shape enough ritually and cultically speaking that people would understand the Paschal dimensions of what He was doing.  Yes and no, it seems, and more no than yes.  On the one hand yes, I suppose it wouldn't have been nearly so evident if the Passover rites had been lost for time out of mind.  But on the other hand, I didn't have a clear mental timeline of what was going on with the second Temple.

The Temple in Jerusalem in Jesus' time, you know, was the third time a temple had been built on that spot.  The Temple was built by Solomon.  Then came the Babylonian Exile and the Temple was destroyed.  After the Babylonian Exile the Temple was rebuilt by Zerubbabel (remember the part with Cyrus?).  Even if you've read Chronicles a few times, if you're like me, you're knowledge of this era is a bit shadowy.  I went and looked this up today, and it seems that the second Temple stood for something like 500 years before it was destroyed in 68 BC by Pompey.  If Jesus wanted to come while the Temple was in good working order, it seems he had plenty of chances.

Even when there was a temple standing there again, it seems that people still felt like they hadn't really ever returned from the Exile.  The second Temple wasn't quite as nice as Solomon's, but more problematically there was still this problem with domination by pagans.  Antiochus Epiphanes defiled the temple, and even after the Maccabean revolt led to its cleansing and rededication, Israel still had to submit to domination by Rome.  A temple was built, more splendid than ever, but it was Herod's temple.

I always wondered about this, because it didn't seem quite kosher, so to speak.  The Temple is supposed to be built by David's son.  Solomon was the prototype.  Zerubbabel was a legitimate candidate because he was a son of David.  Herod, though, wasn't even a Jew.  A lot of the Jews had a problem with this.  The Essenes went so far as to refuse to have anything to do with this temple. 

Wright points out that King of the Jews, Temple Builder, and Messiah, are all intimately bound up with one another.  Not that I had never heard these mentioned together before, but I hadn't really put it together in my mind.  Remember that in Israel kings aren't crowned, they're anointed.  When Jesus is crucified - for saying that he is the Messiah and acting like it, the placard above the cross says that He is the King of the Jews, which means about the same thing.  He is a threat because he is 'in the way' of Herod, who wanted to be the King of the Jews.  Remember that when Jesus was born Herod heard that the king of the Jews had been born and immediately tried to eliminate the competition.  Herod tried to legitimate himself by building the Temple, but not everyone was buying it.  The true king and builder of the Temple would free Israel from pagan domination, but Herod actually is the agent of pagan domination.  The priests who are ministering in the Temple maybe are trying to obey the prescribed rites and make sure they happen as the Lord commanded, but they are only there because they have cooperated with the pagan rulers, so they are problematic as well.

It isn't so simple as I thought.  There's a temple there, but it's not totally legitimate.  Mary and Joseph go there, so they can't have regarded it as totally illegitimate.  Most of the Jews go there.  But something's still wrong.

Improved reading skills

This is how my reading of the Gospels has been improving lately - how the books I have been reading and other things have helped me to become aware of or change bad or lazy habits of reading.

1.) Improved appreciation of the big-picture story told in each of the four Gospels.

I don't know about you, but most of the time when I read the Bible, it's in short bits.  And then because I'm forgetful, I don't pick up next time at the place where I left off, but start somewhere else.  As a result, I know the pieces a lot better than I know how they fit together into the larger narrative picture.  Also I blame the format of a lot of the Bibles I have.  The New American Bible is one of the worst offenders here.  I hate those bold headings at the top of every paragraph - they make the Gospels look and feel like collections of loosely connected vignettes.  Lately, though, I have been listening in the car to cds I have of a book-on-tape of the New Testament.  When I turn off the car, the cd player stops and when I start again it picks up where I left off.  And I have been having to spend a lot of time in the car lately.  Have you ever thought about why each story or event occurs in the order it occurs in?  I know I didn't all that much.  I think I am getting a better appreciation of the shape of the story arc, and of how the presentation of the Four Gospels differ from one another.

Also, Wright (whom I've been reading) insists that you should not view Jesus' parables and teaching simply as "timeless truths," by which he means that you should not view Jesus merely as some wise teacher like the Buddha or Confucius or somebody who could have come along at any time to say things that would be equally appropriate or comprehensible at any time in history (which would raise the question of why bother to have Jesus do what some prophet or inspired Wisdom book could have done?).  Not that this idea is really how we think of him - but it is ingrained enough in the culture that it probably affects you to some degree.  "What time is it?" is a very important question for Wright.  When Jesus comes, he is the Messiah, and he comes to not only to announce but also to bring about the End Times - the establishment of the Reign of God.  Therefore when you look at His stories and teaching you should keep in mind how they are timely and appropriate for ushering in the Kingdom of God.

2.) Historical context - why people do the things they do

It's not as though I had no idea that Jesus was a different sort of Messiah than what people were expecting.  Being a Christian with lots of history between then and now gives the advantage of lots of good theological reflection and development (everything is clearer with hindsight, you know).  But it's easy to take that for granted anyway, and to read the OT only noticing spiritual interpretations that apply to us that, while valid, weren't obvious to people then, and forgetting about the things that were foremost in their minds.

Maybe in another post I'll talk about what N.T. Wright got me thinking about about the relationship between the Temple and Jesus, and His actions and the OT prophets.  Hint: read Zechariah, Daniel, and Jeremiah.

More recent reading

Albert gave me some books by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright.  He is an Anglican bishop, but if the books are any indication, he might come to full communion with the Church before too long.  The point of the books is to attempt to provide insight into the historical and cultural context of the Gospels.  If you know me, you know I sit really loose to modern historical-critical type scripture scholars no matter where you come from.  If you're like me, you wonder what these people think they're doing.  To the ordinary (even really pretty well-read) layman-in-the-pew, these people sound crazy and of little or no help at all to the Christian life.  To read many of them, it's like they think that in order to be properly historical and scholarly they have to start out from the assumption that Jesus wasn't God and come up with explanations that demonstrate this.

So I have come to become very cautious if not cynical about them.  But I have enjoyed reading Wright's books so far.  It felt odd at first that he takes so seriously the Scripture scholars I complained about in the beginning, which for me could have been dismissed with the observation that their conclusions are false (defective or flat-out false Christological doctrine), therefore either their premises or reasoning is faulty, but I'm glad I didn't just skip over those parts because he takes them seriously in order to critique and refute them - like the Catholic Church he is confident that real and accurate history will vindicate the traditional Christian beliefs about Jesus.  One reason why this is valuable to me is that he is giving an explanation that even a Protestant or other non-Catholic can understand for why the Enlightenment era and 19th- and 20th-century liberal Protestant notions of Jesus' life and mission (notions which have had no small influence on our culture) are incorrect.

Georgia on my mind?

This is pretty random, but now that everyone's talking about Hillary Clinton's Sopranos spoof, I remember an ad I saw that I thought was pretty amusing: Georgia's (the country's) advertisement for investing there.  It looks and feels rather like a sports talk/commentary show like you'd see on ESPN and uses the right music, except that they talk about what a neat place Georgia is.  It was a hundred times better (in my opinion - though I am not exactly their target audience, not having any money to invest overseas) than those so-serious, so-earnest ads-for-countries you sometimes see.  It gave me a really positive opinion of their country, not so much because of the business data they presented but because of how they did it - it showed that they understand enough about us to (or to hire people who) parody our pop culture in a clever and amusing way, without patronizing us, insulting us, or making themselves look silly.  They deftly prevented confusion due the fact that we have a state called Georgia which is our default when we hear the name and that most of us don't know offhand where Georgia is.  So anyway, good job, Georgia, you caught this American's attention for longer than the thirty seconds it took to watch the ad.

Recent reading

The first time I looked at an edition of the sayings of Confucius, I confess to being a bit disappointed: to begin with, I was comparing it (because of the format and genre) to the Wisdom books of the Old Testament that I had grown up on, and it's not really a fair comparison to hold one man or even a tradition working only with man's natural intellect up to one that has the benefit of revealed religion and divine inspiration as well as natural wisdom; also, because of the hype surrounding the name of the sage I had unrealistic expectations.

But more recently I ran across the book again and looked at it perhaps from a more realistic perspective, expecting something more along the lines of if there was a book of sayings of Socrates or Aristotle. 

Anyway, from the brief look I have had at it, he must have been a very wise and prudent man.  The teaching reminds me quite a bit of Aristotle and of the Stoic tradition.  For instance, virtue-based ethics and emphasis on the Golden mean.  I bring the Stoics into it because he seems to take it for granted that public service is the most noble calling.  You would expect that if two philosophers from different cultures make accurate statements about human nature that they would have a great deal in common even if they vary in the details.

Here are some of the ones I liked:

• "Sky begat the excellence in me.  How can Hsiang Tu'i harm me?" (Compare to Socrates' claim that no harm of any consequence can come to a good man.  n.b. The translator has "Sky" for "Tien" rather than "heaven.")
• 'Chung Yu inquired about the proper treatment of spirits and divinities.  "You cannot treat spirits and divinities properly before you are able to treat your fellow-men properly."' (Compare to I John 4:20.)
• 'Tuan-mu Tz'u inquired which was of the higher caliber, Chuan-sun Shih or Pu Shang.  "The former is excessive; the latter, deficient."  "In that case, Chuan-sun Shih is of higher caliber."  "Excess and deficiency are equally at fault."' (The Golden Mean.  n.b. the three parts in quotes are an exchange between the master and the student)
• "I would describe Manhood-at-its-best like this: What it desires as its own role, it assigns to others.  The success it desires for itself it causes its fellow-men to attain." (Compare to Aristotle's notion of telea philia, perfected friendship, where the friends produce virtue in each other.)

Hi

I've been in a position where I didn't have convenient access to a computer.  But now I'll blog some more.

Something Big-Eyed in the State of Denmark

To be added to the list of things I wish I had come up with is Manga Hamlet.
Isabel had mentioned a manga Shakespeare series to me a while ago, but it only just started showing up in the things that Amazon tries to sell me.

Art and iconography

I went to the Smithsonian art gallery the other day.  I thought Sebastian might like this one painting in particular that I saw while I was there.  Great paintings are really so much better in person than on a screen (and I remember this one as having life-size people in it).

URL
While we're at it, the site where I found this is one big St. Sebastian-a-palooza.

Virtual tour of ancient Rome

Cool modern tech meets ancient world -

After ten years of work, UVA is unveiling a computer model of ancient Rome.  I heard of it from this Yahoo news item.  You can visit their "virtual time machine" at this website here.

The simulation, which depicts the Rome of the Constantine era, reportedly features 7,000 buildings and detailed interiors of about thirty major buildings.

I'm away from my home base where I have fast internet, so for near future you'll have to go look yourself (link above) and see how much they let you see on the public website and leave some comments to tell me about it.

Gullible Travels

I just finished part three of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. It's political-social-scatological satire has convinced me that South Park will probably be one of the most studied television programs in three hundred years...but that's beside my immediate point.
While the whole book has much to offer contemporary politics, part three had an uncanny resonance for me. First, Gulliver goes at length to describe how the Laputans, the dwellers of the floating city, spend all of their time focused on nothing but mathematical principles...they are so monomaniacal, that they will discuss nothing that can't be reduced to math. As Gulliver points out, this leads them to be unhealthily preoccupied with astronomy...an unhealthy preoccupation because it leads them to conjecture the various means by which the Earth might be destroyed. He says they perpetually lose sleep over the issue, which reminded me of a Drudge headline a few weeks ago about children having nightmares about global warming. Lagoda, a land below Laputa, does not fare much better...